"But then most things in Des Moines in the 1950s were the best of their type."

Wrote Bill Bryson in his memoir "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid":

We had the smoothest, most mouth-pleasing banana cream pie at the Toddle House.... We had the most vividly delicious neon-colored ice creams at Reed’s, a parlor of cool opulence near Ashworth Swimming Pool (itself the handsomest, most elegant public swimming pool in the world, with the slimmest, tannest female lifeguards) in Greenwood Park (best tennis courts, most decorous lagoon, comeliest drives). Driving home from Ashworth Pool through Greenwood Park, under a flying canopy of green leaves, nicely basted in chlorine and knowing that you would shortly be plunging your face into three gooey scoops of Reed’s ice cream is the finest feeling of well-being a human can have.


We had the tastiest baked goods at Barbara’s Bake Shoppe; the meatiest, most face-smearing ribs and crispiest fried chicken at a restaurant called the Country Gentleman; the best junk food at a drive-in called George the Chilli King. (And the best farts afterward; a George’s chilli burger was gone in minutes, but the farts, it was said, went on forever.) We had our own department stores, restaurants, clothing stores, supermarkets, drugstores, florists, hardware stores, movie theaters, hamburger joints, you name it—every one of them the best of its kind. Well, actually, who could say if they were the best of their kind? To know that, you’d have had to visit thousands of other towns and cities across the nation and tasted all their ice cream and chocolate pie and so on because every place was different then. That was the glory of living in a world that was still largely free of global chains. Every community was special and nowhere was like everywhere else.

I've read this book many times, mostly in the audiobook version. (It's my favorite falling-asleep book.) I'm searching the Kindle version today, looking for the most intense tributes to Des Moines, a city where we sojourned for 2 hours yesterday. It's not the 1950s anymore — Bill Bryson, like me, was born in 1951 — but, still, if you were looking for the best of America, could you find another place?

"Check out this 'solution' to the obesity epidemic, a contraption called the 'Slow Bite.'"

"It limits the degree to which users can open their mouths while eating, so they consume less. But if you have enough self-control to wire your jaw nearly shut every time you eat, don’t you also have enough self-control to not eat more than you should?"

Althousian free association goes from that to this — published on the same day, in the same place (the NYT) — from the obituary of Mickey Rose, who co-wrote "Bananas" and "Take the Money and Run" the 2 movies that "established [Woody Allen] as a filmmaker" and made him "popular enough to continue to do whatever he wanted to do," according to Eric Lax, who wrote “Woody Allen: A Biography."

In a remembrance e-mailed to Mr. Lax, Mr. Allen recalled what Mr. Rose had told him was the inescapable meaning of death: “No more malteds.”

Key word: Malteds.

Anagram: Sad Melt.

Purchase of the day.

Yesterday, February 7: Poulenc: Les Mamelles de Tiresias (Duval, Cluytens) / Bal Masque (Pretre) F. Poulenc (Artist) | Format: Audio CD (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $0.98) Poulenc Plaque. 

Honorable mentions: SSwix F4 Combi Brush felt/nylonby Swix (Earnings to Althouse blog = $0.98) 

Zeroll Original Ice Cream Scoop (Earnings to Althouse blog = $0.90)

13 purchases under the category "Camera" (Earnings to Althouse blog = $111.26)

And 61 other items.

Thanks for showing your appreciation for a blog called Althouse!

All over the world, women are self-comforting...

... grasping their skirt hems and rolling, rolling them upward, absent-mindedly.

Meanwhile, women eat cupcakes, cupcakes, which were ranked among the 10 most overrated things in the world, which made me say:

The only reason cupcakes are popular is because people have forgotten actual cake, which is moist and tender. Cupcakes have way too much edge... and that fluting doubles the already-too-much edge. But if you never eat real cake, you don't notice. It's like how good crackers are if you never have bread or how good a popsicle is if you never get a nice big dish of ice cream.

But people won't go back to cake, because you can't get a slice of cake and carry it around with you on the street. How would it be presented? It can't be sliced and left out on the shelves like cupcakes. You'd need some saran wrap or something to keep it from getting dried out.

So here, lonely ladies of America, here's your pre-dried-out cake: cupcake.

It sounds like something an old-fashioned guy would call you if he thinks you're pretty, so maybe you're thinking about him as you walk down the street licking icing and choking down dry cake... and tears.