(In the above post, I meant to post a Ghanaian movie poster – you know them; I’ve posted them before – of Falling Down but the image got cropped when I saved it from Facebook and I have no way of finding the original. I won’t bother to look it up; just the comic OTT violence and gore typical of the genre, even for light comedies.)

You woke a dormant memory in me, like Alan unlocked a hidden memory in Sharon’s subconscious through hypnosis on The Young and the Restless. The storyline runs roughly thus: for months, Sharon has been having mental breakdowns from the anniversary of the death of her daughter, who was killed in a drunk driving accident with one Michael. In the current day, Sharon decides to kill Michael to get back at him, procures poison, and breaks into Michael’s apartment. She poisons his whiskey bottle so his drinking would be the death of him as it was to her daughter, but loses her nerve and dumps out the whiskey. When she was leaving the apartment, Michael’s wife comes home and confronts Sharon. In the ensuing altercation, Michael’s wife is killed and Sharon dumps her body into the river. She then plants evidence in Michael’s apartment that gets him arrested. This sets off like three or four fucking months of slowly developing and interweaving into other storylines and the Byzantine relations between members of three families, and Sharon confesses and is arrested. But, and I’m leaving out a ton of detail, it turns out that Sharon’s bipolar meds had been tainted with PCP as part of a plot by the evil Aunt Jordan and Ian Ward, who have escaped from prison. Both of them harbor grudges against the Newman family that Sharon is a part of by marriage; their plot was to have her, beloved of Nick Newman, framed and the family’s life upheaved. Sharon’s psychologist friend Alan hypnotizes her and she remembered the circumstances behind Michael’s wife’s death, and it turns out Sharon had fainted on the couch before the wife was killed, so she couldn’t have done it. There was a figure in black wearing gloves – and that brings us to Friday. I’d say tune in this week weekdays 12:30pm EST on your local CBS affiliate, but it’s a slow week viewership-wise (it’s kind of sad if you pay much attention to the soaps Christmas week) so it’ll be light, “yule-log” programming to spend the holidays with your favorite soap-opera families.

np: Belinda Carlisle - Heaven is a Place on Earth (she has an unflattering name, but she’s smoking hot in the video. The longer we get from it, the ’90s trend of giant breasts seems to have been an aberration, maybe an outbreak of animal spirits after the general availability of implants. Even at the time I thought it was grotesque, but this is all to say that Belinda Carlisle was decidedly not stacked.)

So yeah, I bought that apple soda when it came out. There are a couple bottles of soda in my fridge containing the undrunk parts of sodas I haven’t liked. which I throw out when I go through the fridge. Beetlejuice soda is a half-drunk-in-thr-refrigerator kind of soda.

I was, however, intrigued by a return of an apple soda to the market. There’s the import Sidral Mundet and that’s it. There’s an unserved market for non-alcoholic fizzy cider a mile wide for anyone trying to get into the market, like whole-body deodorant (seest-thou what thou hast wrought, Frau Doktorin Klingman?). Do you remember Jolly Rancher sodas, the brightly-colored ones that would turn an ox diabetic, one of which being green apple? I think that was the last one on the wide market. It’s funny because apple was an original flavor of Slice.

Is Night Moves related to the Bob Seger song of the same name? I’ve actually never heard jt and I may never hear it until Musicman comes back to give us his Force Awakens thoughts. Hearing jt before then would be like reading the last three M.R. James stories, written after the compiling of Collected Ghost Stories. It’s not worth getting the scholarly, clothbound, acid-free paper edition to find, though that book is really nice to have.

J’m just saying this because Musicman once talked about what a great song “Night Moves” is to drive around the wilds of North Carolina by moonlight. Rock on, my brother. Rock over London, rock on, Chicago; roses are red and ready for plucking, girls out of high school are ready for college (maybe it comes off better out loud.)