Crucial Track for October 16, 2026
"Eddy Went to Spain" by Kate Jacobs
What's a song you discovered in an unusual way? Eddy Went to Spain by Kate Jacobs
A couple of years before his death, Senator John McCain wrote an admiring obituary for an American communist who fought for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. This sent me down a rabbit hole and one of the things I discovered was this song about the great-uncle of this songwriter, who also left the US to fight fascism.
Crucial Track for September 23, 2026
"Hearts on Fire" by Gram Parsons
What’s a song you’ve had on repeat recently? Hearts on Fire by Gram Parsons
If by recently, if you mean for the last twenty years.
Six Free Utilities, Zero Subscriptions
TL;DR: Five free Mac utilities worth a look this week: a menu-bar fix for notification banners landing on the wrong monitor, a drag-and-drop media compressor, a keyboard-backlight scheduler, an unusually hard-to-skip screen-break app, a notch utility with AI-agent alerts, and a local-only document search tool that cites its sources.
The apps I have been testing this week include a couple of entries from someone whose Mac was doing X when they wanted it to do Y, so they built an app to make it do what they wanted. I wish I had those chops, although with AI, the days of being locked in to someone else's UI choices isn't the limiting factor it once was.
Make Banners Appear Where You Want Them
BannerHither — free. A small menu-bar utility solving one specific multi-monitor annoyance: macOS always shows notification banners on the "main" display, which in many multi-monitor setups isn't the screen the user is actually looking at. BannerHither redirects banners to the display in use.
Drag And Drop File Compression
Kompakt — free, open source (MIT). A compact Mac menu bar app for compressing and converting images (PNG/JPG/WebP/GIF/SVG) and video (MP4/MOV/M4V) by drag-and-drop — no file pickers or export dialogs, it appears the moment you drag media in. Distributed as a signed DMG off GitHub Releases.
Turn Off Keyboard Backlight on Demand
Nocturne — free, donationware (Buy Me a Coffee). A small menu-bar app that turns off the built-in keyboard backlight when you don't need it — all day, on a schedule, or from sunrise to sunset based on location — and hands it back untouched when done.
A Hard-to-Dismiss Screen Break Announcement
Screen Break — free. A menu-bar break-reminder app that opens a full-screen guided rest on every display when it's time to step away, deliberately designed to be hard to dismiss meaninglessly: a passcode unlocks an early rest, and manual restarts and temporary quits are limited. Configurable 30–50 minute work sessions with 5-minute rests, smart idle reset (doesn't count time already spent away from the computer), and busy auto-defer (detects media playback, calls, presentations, or full-screen work and holds off). Localized in seven languages. Distributed as a direct download.
A Free Multi-Featured Notch App Aimed at Devs
Notchly — free, open source (MIT). A macOS utility that turns the MacBook notch into an interactive "Dynamic Island"-style space: music controls (Apple Music/Spotify, including lock-screen controls), battery/charging status, volume/brightness indicators, swipe gestures, and focus-mode animations. Its standout feature is "Codex Alerts" — AI coding-agent notifications (Codex, and by extension tools like Cursor) that surface approval requests or completed-task alerts directly in the notch via a local Stop hook, aimed at developers who want passive status visibility without app-switching. Built natively in Swift/SwiftUI, signed and notarized, actively maintained.
Search Local Documents, Get Citations
Minna — free, open source. A local-first search index plus an AI assistant restricted to answering only from the user's own indexed documents on their Mac, with citations to a specific document for every claim. The developer describes it as a student's own answer to the "LLM makes things up" problem.
Crucial Track for September 20, 2026
"The Weight" by The Band
Which song would you use to introduce yourself to someone new? - The Weight by The Band
After pulling into Nazareth, the son's narrator get's no relief from people who keep passing the load but in the end, the whole town shares the weight. This is a song about community and its importance.
Crucial Track for September 14, 2026
"Graceland" by Paul Simon
Share a song that got you through a difficult time - Graceland by Paul Simon
Losing love is like a window in your heart, everybody sees you're blown apart. - The album on repeat at the end of my first marriage.
That Sticky-Icky
I entered adolescence in the disco era. I gotta admit, out of all the songs that they could play at the roller skating rink, you could do a lot worse. It was still the post-Woodstock decade and many attitudes weren't far removed from the ones that people ordinarily associate with the 60s. Cocaine was consumed openly at Studio 54 and the prevailing attitude was "rich people, what can you do?" The devil's lettuce was everywhere.
That's how, at the age of 12 I found myself all of a sudden on the way to smoke my first joint with a new, more street-wise friend from our apartment complex. We found a nearby construction site. He pulled a fat but loosely rolled joint from his sock. It was damp with sweat and hard to light. I did not catch the slightest buzz from half a doobie of sweat-soaked, low-quality, Mexican ditch weed. And that was that. I did not immediately seek out more. In fact, I waited another couple of years.
We'd moved to another city, all the way across the state. It took a while, but I eventually got invited to light up again and this time, it worked. I have a distinct memory of standing in the kitchen of my benefactor, sharing a jar of maraschino cherries and giggling. I definitely wanted more. I'm not a moocher by nature, so I asked about buying my own supply. I had no idea how that even worked. As it turned out, one could purchase individual hand-rolled joints on the junior high school market for $1.
That's how I bought my very first joint. I was so excited that I tried to light it up in the five-minute break between classes, but I only had three matches and it was a windy day. As I returned to the building, a teacher, and undercover teenage dope-fiend detector, had used the skill called "looking out the window" to see me trying to spark up my purchase. She grabbed me and asked to see what I had in my hands, whereupon I threw the barely singed joint onto the floor. She picked it up. She took me to the principal, a man who knew me very well. He sent me home with instructions not to return for two weeks.
My home life wasn't pleasant. My mom was married to an abusive (in more ways than one) narcissist who didn't like me any more as a teenager than he had as the first-grader I was when he entered our lives. Getting busted was the last straw. The way to keep the peace turned out to be me leaving home for good. I moved to my uncle's farm, where the adventure continued.
If I'd just learned to be cool with weed and rested on my laurels, my life would have been much different. Instead, I ended up wrestling with demon rum until I eventually had to turn from abstinence from everything in order to have the kind of life I wanted. That was in 2008.
Without romanticizing it, I have interesting cultural memories of the way cannabis was used in the 70s and 80s. As mentioned, you could buy single joints at school. Hell, my school still had a student's smoking area, a built-in marketplace. The nickel bag era was gone, but a dime bag, $10 worth of the green, netted you 1/4 ounce of a product that would indeed get you high, if you smoked enough of it.
Smoking it usually involved joints using the rolling paper that you thought the cool kids used. For me, that was J&B 1.5s. Not using a double wide signified that I had been rolling long enough that I didn't need all that extra paper. People these days talk about having an everyday carry pen or knife. For me in those years, it was a packet of rolling papers. We also occasionally managed to get our hands on pipes (bowls) from head shops. Most potheads of my era could make an emergency pipe with a toilet paper roll, some tinfoil and a safety pin.
Looking back now at how my fellow smoke hounds turned out reveals that no one's life was ruined by reefer madness. My fellow partakers are today a senior military leader, the head of HR at one of the county's largest employers, a physician, a retired cop and an ordained minister. I have no idea if any of them still puff, I doubt it, but I wouldn't judge them if they did.
These days we know that most of the harm attributed to cannabis is the stuff of myths, while the claimed health benefits for pain control, anxiety, nausea and appetite stimulation are true. Rather than a life-ruining addictive and noxious weed, the sticky-icky is an herb with thousands of years of medicinal use in its background.
It's not for everyone, but I am 100% certain that you know someone who would be a lot cooler if they would just burn one once in a while.
Weed never got its hooks in me. The bottle did. That's the one that almost took me down, and the one that made me give up everything as a trade for not killing me.
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McKinley: The SF Symbols Editor Apple Never Built
The Apple-created graphics that appear on your folders are called SF Symbols. There are thousands of them, and they're designed to stay legible in multiple sizes and weights, from tiny up to headline-sized. Apple allows you to create your own, in a process that turns out to be pretty complicated when done correctly. You're drawing potentially nine weights (Ultralight through Black) at three scales, making sure the strokes stay visually consistent at every combination, making sure the whole thing still reads as the same symbol from thin to bold, and doing it all in a way Xcode will accept without silently failing. Most people who've tried this by hand in Illustrator or Sketch will tell you it's tedious, error-prone, and genuinely difficult to keep consistent.
McKinley is a dedicated app built to solve exactly that problem. It's a vector drawing tool, but unlike a general-purpose one, it already understands the SF Symbols format: the weight system, the scale system, the export rules Xcode expects. You draw a shape once, and McKinley handles generating and keeping consistent the different weights and sizes that shape needs to become a real, working custom symbol, rather than you manually redrawing (and re-aligning) it nine times. It can start from an SVG you already have or from a blank canvas, it live-previews your symbol using Apple's actual rendering engine, so what you see is what will really show up in an app, and when you're done it exports straight into a format Xcode can use. It launched September 7, 2026, runs on macOS 15 and up, and it's made by one developer, Amy Worrall, under the name Double & Thrice Ltd.
I don't have many developer chops, so this isn't going to end up in my daily driver stack, but I was intrigued because John Gruber, from Daring Fireball, raved about McKinley as "a remarkable 1.0." Double & Thrice provided me with a reviewer's license, and I installed and tested it.
Several things were impressive. The documentation, including a list of the app's limitations, is well done. When the app encounters an issue, the error messages are descriptive and helpful. To my eyes, the symbols it creates are indistinguishable from the ones in Apple's built-in set.
The kicker is the pricing. Gruber called McKinley a serious professional tool for dev shops and graphics pros. £55 / €65 / $60, one-time. There's a 15% launch discount (down to roughly £46.75 / €55.25 / $51) through September 14, 2026, and a free 14-day trial that's described as fully functional, not a crippled demo. For a solo-developer niche tool, that's a reasonable way to let it prove itself before you pay.
Normally, I list alternatives to apps when I review them, but there doesn't seem to be anyone else making anything that does what McKinley does. That kind of original thinking is rare, so hats off to the dev.
Crucial Track for September 8, 2026
"Get Back" by The Beatles
Pick a song from an artist or band that’s had the biggest impact on your life. - Get Back by The Beatles
I count myself lucky that Beatles records found themselves stacked on my parents' record player during my childhood. John Lennon's death hit hard when I was in the 10th grade. I am so glad that Paul and Ringo are are in decent health,
Enjoying the Ride
Moving from the only home we'd known in our married life this spring required us to downsize in ways that once would have caused me oceans of anxiety. Certain material goods were so intertwined with my self-identity.
As avid, life-long readers, our bookshelves were overflowing, although our reading has mostly been on a screen for years. We bagged up hundreds of books and spent hours driving around stocking every Little Free Library we could find.
The remnants of my passion for road cycling took up a disproportionate amount of room, an entire closet of spandex and lycra, more extra wheels than a grown man could hold in both hands. And of course, n+1 bikes that I hadn't ridden in an embarrassingly long time. My local bike shop sold everything for me inside of a week on consignment, netting me a laughably small check.
As it turns out, living without being surrounded by dead trees isn't bad. The shelves that once held every Stephen King book ever written now are filled with framed pictures of the grandkids and I think that's a better use. I read just as much as I ever have. That is to say, constantly.
Last week, Wonder Woman and I retreated to one of our favorite places, Damascus, Virginia, a town in Southwest Virginia where the Appalachian Trail follows the sidewalk down the main street and where one of the world's premier rail trails is being reconstructed after extensive damage from Hurricane Helene.
I'm aging less gracefully than my bride. She still runs ultramarathons, kayaks, paddle boards and cycles. I have two artificial knees and a long list of predictable but boring Generation X turns 60 bingo squares filled in. Still, our relationship formed out of a love of doing things together outdoors, so we are forever on the lookout for anything that can accommodate both of us.
The one luxury that she sprung for after selling our house was a new gravel bike. She brought that on our trip and rented an e-bike for me from a local shop. I'd never ridden one before and had no idea what to expect. Our test ride was a 17-mile jaunt along Laurel Creek, from town, along the Creeper Trail to the bridge over the Holston River. Instead of embarrassment or shame (screw that), I felt pure joy being back on a bike. The battery-assisted pedaling still requires one to pedal, so I couldn't just sit there. I was able to get my heart pumping without feeling like it was a near death experience.
By the time I returned the bike to the rental shop, I'd already priced one online. After a couple more days doing research, I ordered a Lectric XPress2 high step commuter with an adjustable fork. When we moved, I contemplated writing about the feeling of not owning a bike for the first time in 25 years. I'm glad I didn't. Writing this celebratory piece feels much better.
There's a certain breed of cyclist who's 100% asshole. Personally, I never got above 90% myself. I judged every bike I saw by the pedals, and on group rides, I would make fun of people who still had the store-installed reflectors stuck in their wheels. My saving grace was that I enjoyed helping new cyclists develop and dedicated a lot of time to helping people train for and complete their first 100 mile rides.
When my new bike gets here today, I will leave the stock pedals installed and I doubt I'll remove any reflectors stuck in my wheels. My yearly mileage output on my bike used to equate to nearly 4 coast to coast trips across the US. That was in another lifetime. The version of me that gets to ride my new bike is a bit heavier with whiter hair and a lot more medical bills. The only thing I can brag about these days is that I still have the ability to get on a damned bicycle, but that's OK. Period. This version of me intends to enjoy the ride, just as much as that old version ever did.
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Crucial Track for September 1, 2026
"Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards" by Billy Bragg
What's your favorite song about moving forward? - Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards by Billy Bragg
Bragg's version of it isn't naive optimism, it's someone clear-eyed about how slow and disappointing progress actually is, choosing to keep pushing anyway ("just because you're going forwards doesn't mean I'm going backwards"). That's a more honest read of "moving forward" than most songs manage.
Five Free Apps With No Telemetry & No Accounts That Do One Thing Well: TetherShot, Folder Forge, Image Fuel, doktor, and Kompakt
TL;DR: Five free, mostly open-source, no-telemetry Mac utilities from this week's testing: docktor (dock widgets + hover previews), Kompakt (drag-and-drop image/video compression), TetherShot (live iPhone screen capture over USB/Wi-Fi), FolderForge (rule-based folder icon styling), and ImageFuel (import-free folder browsing with RAW support). Each gets a free alternative below if you want to compare before committing.
Removing Irritation
My app testing time this week was spent on free apps, most of them open source and all privacy-respecting. No accounts needed. No telemetry. I've been looking for original, niche apps that do one thing well.
docktor calls itself the dock you deserve. It's free, notarized, requires no account, and comes from a solo dev who regularly responds to users with new features and bug fixes. The app fills the unused side space on either end of the Dock with customizable widgets (music, calendar, weather, system stats) and adds hover previews of a running app's open windows without clicking. If you're a widget person, this gives you a few new options.
Alternative: HyperDock has done Dock hover previews for years and is worth a look if that's the one feature you actually want, though it doesn't fill unused Dock space with widgets the way docktor does -- check current macOS compatibility before buying, since I haven't tested it myself on this release.
Kompakt is a native Mac menu bar app for compressing and converting images and video with a drag-and-drop interface that pops up automatically the moment you drop a file. Images cover PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF, and SVG; video is limited to MP4, MOV, and M4V. Free and open source under MIT, distributed as a signed DMG off GitHub Releases. The dev's roadmap includes watched folders, Finder actions, and Shortcuts support. I can see setting up some helpful shortcuts using this.
Alternative: ImageOptim is the longtime free, open-source, drag-and-drop standard for image compression on Mac. It doesn't touch video, so if Kompakt's video side is what sold you, ImageOptim isn't a full swap.
TetherShot is a proper Mac utility, not just a menu bar toy. It captures a live display, not a simulation: your connected iPhone's actual screen over USB or Wi-Fi, saved as a pixel-perfect screenshot. Free and open source, no account, no analytics, no cloud relay. Take all the screenshots you want without syncing or AirDropping anything.
Alternative: QuickTime Player already does this for free and it's built in -- connect your iPhone by cable, pick it as the camera source under File > New Movie Recording, and you can record or grab a frame of the live screen. It's a recording-first workflow rather than a one-tap screenshot, and it needs the cable; TetherShot's Wi-Fi option and one-hotkey capture are the actual time-savers if you do this often.
Apps that customize folder appearance in Finder have been around for a while, and they're fine for the primary folders in your home directory. If you want smart folders and reusable presets that apply by name, contents, or marker files using recursive styling, FolderForge fits the bill -- it applies a visual system across an entire folder tree. Runs locally, no account, no telemetry. MIT-licensed on GitHub; v1.0.8 is signed and notarized by Apple.
Alternative: Rainbow Folder -- Icon changer is a simple App Store option for changing individual folder colors and icons. It's manual, one folder at a time -- it doesn't have FolderForge's rule-based, apply-to-a-whole-tree automation, so it's a fit only if you don't need the bulk styling.
Point the app at any folder, or several, and instantly see every image and video in a clean, scrollable grid. No importing. No library to manage. No waiting. It reads files where they already live, including JPEG, PNG, video, and RAW. It loads quickly and makes browsing photos easy.
- Search by filename or path with a fast, keyboard-friendly search modal (Cmd+F)
- Filter to images only, videos only, or everything
- Sort by date, name, or a custom order you drag yourself; each folder remembers its own sort
- Browse RAW files from Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax, and DNG
- Open any file in a fullscreen lightbox
- Crop images with live pixel dimensions
- Apply color filters to one image or an entire batch
- Inspect and strip metadata
- Rename files in bulk
- Create subfolders from the sidebar
- Send deleted files to the Trash or a folder you choose
Alternative: XnViewMP is the free, cross-platform standard for exactly this job -- instant folder-based browsing with real RAW support, no import step. It's a dated interface next to ImageFuel's cleaner grid, and it doesn't have ImageFuel's crop/metadata/batch-rename tools built into the same window, but it's the closest thing to a direct, feature-for-feature comparison if you want to try before committing to either.
Remove an Irritation
None of this is life-changing software, and none of it asks to be. Every one of these five does one narrow job, does it for free, and stays out of your way otherwise: no accounts, no telemetry, no subscription creeping in later. That's the actual differentiator this week, not any single feature. If you only try one, make it whichever solves a problem you already have -- docktor if you stare at your Dock all day, ImageFuel if you're sick of importing photos just to look at them, TetherShot if you've ever emailed yourself an iPhone screenshot. The rest can wait.
Unless otherwise noted, the alternatives mentioned above are based on research and not individual testing.
Crucial Track for August 28, 2026
"Desperados Waiting for a Train" by Guy Clark
What's your favorite song about patience?- Desperados Waiting for a Train by Guy Clark
I'll keep going back to the Texas singer-songwriter well forever when the subject is some aspect of the human condition. This is a tune about the patience of an old man waiting and watching as a boy grows up.
Crucial Track for August 27, 2026
"Something More Than Free" by Jason Isbell
Share a song that captures the feeling of being proud - Something More Than Free by Jason Isbell
It's a working-man's song about quiet pride in honest labor: "I don't think about you, I think about who's gonna do this work / When my back gives out."
Five Free and Low Cost Apps: Holeberry, Dock Party, Neon Vision Editor, MojiBar and Snick
Here are the best apps I tested this weekend. Two will save you time, two are fun ways to waste it on UI tweaks, and one's for a certain psychological profile. I'm sure you can figure out which one.
Holeberry - A native Swift 6 app for macOS 14 and up, built by developer Pedro Vieira, Holeberry puts the Pi-hole controls you actually use right in your menu bar. See real-time blocking status and query stats without keeping a dashboard tab open. You can disable blocking for five minutes, an hour, or indefinitely, giving you the same toggle as Pi-hole's own web UI, just one click closer. The feature that actually earns the download is per-tab unblocking. Holeberry reads the active tab in Safari, Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, or Zen, and when a site is broken because Pi-hole blocked something on the page, it can identify and allowlist that domain without making you dig through the query log yourself. That's a workflow improvement, not a cosmetic shortcut, and it's the reason to care about this app at all. (FOSS)
Dock Party - Dock Party watches Spotify or Apple Music via system audio and turns that into a light bar running along the edge of the Dock. Track name, artist, and album art appear beside it, a progress bar runs along the Dock's edge, and playback controls sit right there without requiring you to switch apps. It also adds Amplitude, Pitch, and Waveform visualizer modes, so the light bar moves with the music instead of just sitting there. ($4.99)
Neon Vision Editor - It's a text and code editor for macOS, iPhone, and iPad aimed at developers, writers, and sysadmins who value speed and a small footprint over a massive plugin ecosystem. Syntax highlighting covers Swift, Python, JS/TS, Go, Rust, SQL, Markdown, and more. There's a recursive project sidebar, Quick Open, Find in Files, a code minimap, and Git tooling for status, history, and diffs. A CSV/TSV table mode and Mac-hosted SSH remote editing round things out, and Vim keybindings are there if you want them. AI code completion exists but is opt-in, limited to minimal cursor-context text, and sent only to a provider you choose yourself. Leave it off, and the app makes no network calls at all. (Free/$4.99)
Mojibar - Mojibar replaces your Dock icon and menu bar icon with any of 3,600-plus emoji. Make sure you use this link to find the app because there's more than one out there with the same name. ($0.99)
Snick - Snick turns your trackpad into a ratchet, complete with sound and haptic feedback. That's it. That's the app. Strangely enough, it got on my radar through enthusiastic reviews. Some people need feedback from their devices. They're the ones leading the mechanical keyboard movement, using Thock for the sound effects, and they're the audience for this app.
Crucial Track for August 22, 2026
"Faithless Street" by Whiskeytown
What's a song you associate with your biggest mistake? - Faithless Street by Whiskeytown
No, I'm not telling that story on the Internet.
Crucial Track for August 21, 2026
"New Madrid" by Uncle Tupelo
**What song makes you want to write poetry? - New Madrid by Uncle Tupelo"
I love how this song conveys so much with so few words.
Legendary Meals from the 70s
My siblings and I are retired or close to it, but we still have conversations that start with "Do you remember when Mom made X?" Thus commences a discussion of Old El Paso taco kits, Chef Boyardee pizzas, waffle irons, liver, English peas and frequently, bread burgers, a 70s-era delicacy, that sounds a bit awful now, but actually wasn't that bad.
The grocery stores of my youth were a lot different than what we now have. They sold one kind of lettuce, iceberg, and two kinds of apples, Red Delicious and Golden Delicious. In the south, where I'm from, the stores considered bagels to be a Northern affectation and didn't sell them. I was in high school before I learned such a thing existed.
The other factor from the 70s that played a part in food choices was the horrible economy. It was a decade of inflation, scarcity and interest rates in the stratosphere. Times were lean and feeding five people on a budget was a challenge.
Enter the bread burger. Then, as now, hamburger came in 1 pound packages. That's not a lot when divided into fifths, but back in the disco era, we had a solution.
"The practice of adding bread or breadcrumbs to ground beef was a common culinary technique in the 1970s, often referred to as 'stretching' the meat to make it more economical for larger families. This method not only increased the yield but also helped retain moisture, resulting in a softer, juicier patty."
Ok, that AI-generated description is accurate up to a point. The way they were made in our house involved shredding several slices of loaf bread, soaking that in milk and seasoning with salt, pepper, garlic, and Worcestershire sauce. This was folded into the hamburger, which was then formed into patties and cooked in a skillet. The result was dinner.
Over time, that mildly weird meal has evolved, undeservedly, into something vile. This actually brings me comfort.
Flash forward a couple of decades, and now I'm the parent trying to stretch the grocery budget. For a time, my whole family didn't eat meat at home. I was the family cook, and this made constructing filling dinners more complicated than I liked. One dish I made frequently involved mixing black beans, corn, lettuce, cheese and seasonings with a bottle of Catalina salad dressing. I didn't dare call it taco salad because of the missing meat, so I christened it bean mixture, and I have never heard the end of it.
My 40-ish kids make it sound like bean mixture was something you were sentenced to, not served for dinner. The fact that they grew into robust, athletic adults is, I think, a testament to my obvious dedication to their nutritional development.
When you have grandchildren, you get to pay your own kids back for mocking you. In my house, grandchildren can have anything they want to eat whenever they want it, and if I don't have it in the cabinet, I'll go to the store and buy it for them. You only live once. My mom, a retired nurse and walking health encyclopedia, infamously serves ice cream for breakfast to her grandchildren upon request. It takes some mental energy to understand that Nana Ice Cream and Mother Eat All Your Peas is the same person.
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A Grits Explainer
I eat grits. I always have and I always will. Because they're delicious, that's why. Grits are a simple dish: ground corn, salt and a little butter, the traditional way. Sometimes folks get a little fancy and start adding cheese, chopped sausage or bacon and other delicacies. Grits are a savory dish. They are not oatmeal or cream of wheat. Keep the sugar and milk away from them.
People who aren't from the parts of the south where grits are commonly served are often suspicious of the dish. After all, the name suggests something you'd spit out rather than swallow. Because of all the other well-earned baggage being a southerner entails, I've never been one to join the battle of Grits Mountain to defend our dietary choices. Don't like grits? Fine. More for me. You don't know what you're missing. Never tried grits? Don't be close-minded.
Just because you are in a place surrounded by Southern accents, don't think that you have a guarantee that grits will be on the menu. I was laughed at in the mountains of Virginia for trying to order them at a gas station cafe located just off the Appalachian Trail. Conversely, don't automatically despair when traveling. I have seen them on menus as far north as Maine.
Grits rank right up with rice and beans as good food for lean times. They're cheap, filling and nutritious. The method of processing corn prior to grinding it for some varieties of grits exposes a form of Vitamin B that prevents pellagra, a particularly foul variation on malnutrition. Because they are light, and often sold in a pre-seasoned portable instant form, grits are much loved by backpackers.
They aren't a plebeian dish, though. Plenty of restaurants with linen tablecloths offer shrimp and grits, using the stone-ground variety for better flavor and adding butter, garlic, onion, peppers, celery, cheese and sometimes a splash of lemon or a little Cajun seasoning.
Don't go so far towards haute-cuisine that you convince yourself that ordering polenta in an Italian place is the moral equivalent of grits consumption, because it isn't. Polenta uses a different type corn and it isn't processed in a way that exposes the vitamins in grits. Polenta is a poor substitute for the real thing and you lose bonus points for trying to be sophisticated.
To all of the people reacting in horror or making gagging sounds at the prospect of eating…corn. Grow up. If you want to mock the south, mock our per-pupil spending or our lack of unions. Leave our food out of it.
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Crucial Track for August 19, 2026
"Into the Mystic" by Van Morrison
What's a song you'd want to hear while watching the sunrise? - Into the Mystic by Van Morrison
The song is built for exactly that moment; foghorns, tide turning, "let your soul and spirit fly" is dawn imagery even though it's technically about a boat coming into harbor.
AppAddict Records 1,000,000th View
When I wrote and published my first software review in 2024, I had no idea I'd still be going strong after 500+ reviews. Thank you to all of my fellow App Addicts and all the developers out there who keep writing high quality Mac software.