Recently we had a Henry’s Farmers Market open nearby and today I decided to check it out. Here’s what I found:  Lots of fresh produce at low prices, and a store layout only slightly less confusing than the exit strategy for Afghanistan. The western end of the store runs left to right and seems to be divided between “organic” home remedies and, well, gussied-up candy and snacks; the left middle of the store features traditional supermarket shelving running back to front; the very middle of the store is populated with free-standing carts of produce and barrels of nuts, grains, and more candy;and the eastern wall is tracked by an expansive seafood section, a tiny deli around which eight or ten people jockeyed for position in front of a two-person counter area, more racks and cabinets, and what looked like another pullcart, this one hauling roasted chickens. Less than a farmers market, the store looks like a gypsy caravan broke down and stayed. Henry’s is a less bohemian Trader Joe’s, with airs:  decorated in that country chic style that certain social strivers overpay for.

Everyone working there was very courteous. I hadn’t really thought about the relative friendliness of the local Albertson’s , my usual supermarket — I’m not trying to strike up lasting friendships, I’m just trying to get my groceries and get out — but now that the people three miles away are treating me better and charging me less, it’s hard not to notice. On Sundays, I tend to cook seafood (to the delight of my son and the chagrin of his sister, which just delights him more), and I either buy wild-caught salmon or I don’t buy salmon. I don’t want color added to it, and I prefer the taste and the nutritional quality of wild-caught. I don’t know what farm-raised (and color-injected) salmon goes for, but around here, wild-caught salmon is usually $14-$16 a pound. (At that price, it must be a truly wild time catching it.)  Henry’s had it at $10.99 a poud. I bought it.

I had in my cart two bottles of Chianti at $6.99 each. I don’t know why I’m buying Chianti lately instead of Shiraz, but I am. Supposedly, your body craves food that contains nutrients or minerals you lack at that moment; according to this theory, when you “have” to have that glass of orange juice, it’s because you’re low on vitamin C. I guess I’ve recently met my minimum daily requirement of Shiraz but am suddenly low on Chianti, because now it’s this perceptually low-grade Italian restaurant table wine I have to have. It’s like going from reading Rilke to slugging your way through Mickey Spillane. I had just rounded the corner of one of those bizarre freestanding units that Henry’s seems to have picked up at an out-of-business rustic swap meet when I came across this entire end cap display for Crane Lake wine. I had never heard of Crane Lake wine. But at $2.99 a bottle and with a name that wasn’t Charles Shaw, I figured I’d try it. The helpful guy carefully stacking all the numerous varietals suggested something he apologized for not being able to pronounce:

“I hear the San… San… Sanjo — I can’t even say it.”

“Sangiovese?” I asked.

“Yeah, sorry, that’s it,” he said. “I hear that’s good.”

So I bought two bottles of the San-San-Sanjo and a bottle of the cabernet and two of the chardonnay, each at $2.99, and put back the two bottles of chianti at $6.99, and also the two bottles of Robert Mondavi chardonnay that I’m even embarrassed to say here that I was going to buy because, let’s be honest, it tastes like Robert Mondavi fell into it and never got back out.

Now I’m eating my reduced-price “gourmet” popcorn and drinking my San-San-Sanjo while writing this, and you know what, it’s all actually pretty good. Here’s one review I found of the Crane Lake Sangiovese, and here’s another one.  Here’s my favorite line:  “As for the Sangiovese? Eh, not bad, nothing to get excited about. Certainly preferable to really cheap Chianti.” I feel vindicated. Even if, as this reviewer claimes, Crane Lake is just, wait for it, the alter ego of Charles Shaw.

Ten years ago I was working out at the Burbank YMCA when I got to talking to one of my wife’s friends, who was using the machine next to mine. When she asked how my wife was, I said she wasn’t feeling well, that lately she’d had persistent stomach upset.

“She should come see me,” the friend, Donna, said.

“Why?”

“I can make it go away.”

“Really? How?”

She said, “I’m an acupuncturist.”

Now, I knew Donna only slightly, and I knew her as the blonde bombshell mother of one of my son’s grade school classmates (and therefore someone who knew my wife). I didn’t know her as someone who stuck pins in people for medical reasons. But I was about to.

“Can you really make it go away?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Then… can I come see you?”

I had had persistent acid reflux for about 15 years. Lately it had been worse. I had been to every doctor in my group and tried all sorts of remedies prescribed, including one that killed all the flora and fauna in my system and made me so ill that I wanted to die, and one that put all sorts of new flora and fauna in my system and made me so ill that I wanted to die.  I tried not eating many different types of food, and then eating only those types of food, and then eating no types of food at all for a week at a time. Nothing worked. I figured I had nothing to lose by trying out Donna, the attractive housewife formerly from New Jersey, who now wanted to stick pins in me. The pins couldn’t be any more uncomfortable than the acid reflux.

The next week I found myself in her office.  She asked me questions quite different than any of the doctors I had been to. For one thing, she asked me what it tasted like. No one had cared to ask that before. “It tastes like there’s a dead mouse stuck in my throat.” She thought that was pretty descriptive. Then she had me take off my shirt and my pants and my socks and lie down, and then she started to stick pins in me. And almost instantly the dead mouse was gone. I had spent countless hours circulating among doctors with theories, and five minutes of acupuncture cured me.

I make this point because the current Senate version of the health-care legislation now crawling its  way through Congress seeks to allow treatment plans to include “alternative therapies.” This story from the LA Times shares the medical establishment’s take on this, as summed up by  someone at Yale School of Medicine:  “These provisions are anti-science and anti-consumer.” A spokeswoman for the California Medical Association is quoted as saying, “They raise red flags because they could potentially open the door to practitioners with less training and expertise, which could endanger patient safety.”

But, y’know what? Acupuncture never endangered my life. Meanwhile, many years ago when I couldn’t keep any fluids down, a Western doctor  prescribed compazine — a muscle tightener — that came within 20 minutes of killing me. (I was very lucky that the right ER doctor, one who had once before seen someone’s head twisting all the way around behind his back,  happened to be on duty.) I haven’t known any acupuncturist to mistakenly take out someone’s gall bladder (as a surgeon did with my wife), or to recommend that my father-in-law have his voicebox removed (when later it turned out he just had a sore throat).

The people advocating for “alternative therapies” in this story are derided as “lobbyists.” And I guess they are. But so are the people agitating against these treatments getting covered by national health insurance. One way or another, they’re part of the American Medical Association.  There are many fine doctors in the nation, and if I’m struck by a car, please don’t take me to see an acupuncturist. I don’t deny the value of skilled surgeons or orthopedists or optometrists. What I don’t like is the ongoing agitation against other therapies with long traditions of effective healing.

My friend Mark Evanier raves about the Jay Johnson show I so loved.

I took my daughter to see “Jay Johnson: The Two and Only” tonight at the Colony Theatre in Burbank. Whether or not you think you want to see “a ventriloquism act,” you should see this one if at all possible. Johnson is “a ventriloquist” the way Michelangelo was a painter. It’s an astonishing show. Johnson can make voices, noises, sound effects, singing, echoes, and every other sort of sound imaginable arrive seemingly anywhere on the stage. What Ricky Jay can do with cards, Jay Johnson can do with his voice.

But the show is more than that. Johnson gives us a history of ventriloquism that stretches back to the dawn of mankind, illuminating the connections between the Oracle at Delphi, seance mediums, village exorcists, and nightclub performers (all of whom practiced ventriloquism). The history that is even more revealing, though, is his own, as he takes us through a boyhood in Texas spent talking to himself in his room, to countless adolescent performances in his small hometown after getting hooked by the first laugh he got from an audience, to a chance telephone meeting with the much older man who will prove to be his mentor, to his eventual great success on television and the stage. It’s the story of someone who finds his own voice by throwing it into so many different objects. He’s a consummate writer and performer, and a very funny one.

Here’s where to get tickets. (It runs for just ten more performances.) And while, sadly, I can’t embed the trailer to the show, here’s the link so you can watch it.

Imagine my surprise in learning that the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is considering reopening the Hall of Justice. Judging by what I was reading just the other night, the place seems to be haunted by people coming back from the dead.

The man who wrote “The Hokey Pokey” has died.

He was 104. Which is a millennium in hokey pokey  years.

The song was written in 1944. And we’ve all been living with it ever since.

A baby called my friend the playwright Max Sparber today. The baby didn’t have much to say, but you can listen to it here.

Two months ago I wrote about Brian Eno’s work with music and art generated randomly by computers. At that time, “Bloom,” his iPhone app that allows one to do similar work on a small scale (and on a smaller screen:  your iPhone), had been out for a while and was a hot download from the App Store. Eno mentioned that the next iteration, “Trope,” had been released on iTunes that weekend, but what he failed to mention (or did not know) was that it was available on the U.K. iTunes, but not on the U.S.

At some point since then, it’s been released here. And so, here’s a brief video that shows the application in action. I haven’t downloaded this yet, but I probably will. How much iPhone “Risk” can one play before needing something new to play with? Moreover, I remain mesmerized with Eno’s work all of which, to credit Rich Roesberg with the point, descends from John Cage.

What’s remarkable here is the degree to which smartphones are revolutionizing our work, our play, and our lives. This tiny device smaller than my hand has most of the technological power I so desperately craved when I was 12: the power to write, or draw, or record, and then distribute that artistic creation freely anywhere in the world. No one younger than 40 can imagine what it was like for homegrown artists 35 years ago to have to choose between the bad options of hand copying, mimeograph, carbon paper, or 25-cents-a-page Xerox copying. None of them was suitable.

Twenty years ago and more, I was a dead shot with most firearms:  shotgun, rifle, revolver, automatic handgun, and, yes, those pump-action air rifles (commonly called “BB guns”). This came from years of steady practice, as well as having eyes and arms that were 20 years younger.  I could ask a companion out in the field to load two clay pigeons onto the thrower, stand with my back to it with my shotgun broken open, yell “pull,” casually load the gun, snap it shut, turn, and pick off both of the skeet before they hit the ground. At that point in my life I probably could have shot the eyelashes off a chipmunk and left the animal alive.

This summer I went shooting again out in a field for the first time in far too long. To say that my skills have dipped is an understatement. I don’t think I could have hit Rush Limbaugh at five paces with a howitzer.  I did get better as the day unfolded, though, shooting the crotch off the assailant marked on a target (I was aiming for the head), and picking off one of the dozen or two skeet my brother-in-law gamely pitched into the air for me. But clearly I need practice, and lasix.

Today that same brother-in-law emailed me the video below, which depicts exciting new technological advances in the sport of shooting. In his email, he said, “You know you want one.” And he’s right. I do. You’ll see why.