Orts #953

keeping young in Queens
https://nyti.ms/2C4lllt
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H.L Mencken, in the Baltimore Sun in 1920, describes the incomparable view from the top of a hill in San Francisco:

Ahead is the wide sweep of the bay, with the two great shoulders of the Golden Gate running down. Behind is the long curtain of California mountains. And below is the town itself—great splashes of white, pink, and yellow houses climbing the lesser hills—houses half concealed in brilliant green—houses often sprawling and ramshackle but nevertheless grouping themselves into lovely pictures, strange and charming. No other American town looks like that.


And here he is on some other American cities:

Baltimore [his native  city]: mile after mile of identical houses, all inhabited by persons who regard Douglas Fairbanks as a greater man than Beethoven. (What zoologist, without a blood count and a lumbar puncture, could distinguish one Baltimorean from another?) Philadelphia: an intellectual and cultural slum. Newark: a worse one. New York: a wholesale district with an annex for entertaining the visiting trade. New Haven and Hartford: blanks. Boston: a potter’s field, a dissecting room. Mental decay in all its forms, but one symptom there is in common: the uneasy fear of ideas, the hot yearning to be correct at all costs, the thirst to be well esteemed by cads. 

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succinic, fumaric, malic and tartaric acids for all!
https://cosmosmagazine.com/archaeology/early-celts-believed-wine-should-be-for-all

the world’s oldest unopened bottle of wine
"drinking it probably wouldn’t kill you — but it would taste terrible"

https://bit.ly/2Or0j63