Expecting Rain or Spicy & Salty

“I will comment on his receiving the Nobel Prize, which to me is like pinning a medal on Mount Everest for being the highest mountain.” (Leonard Cohen on Bob Dylan receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature)

If you are seriously interested in art, you have to go to the Louvre in Paris. You have to go there, you belong there, it’s like a home for art lovers. Period.

You can’t avoid Picasso, Charlie Chaplin and Bob Dylan if you’re talking about the 20th century and you’re interested in art, film and music.

The three of them are like Sergio Ramos, Jérôme Boateng and Giorgio Chiellini in soccer at their best, hardly anyone could get past them.


If you are seriously interested in Bob Dylan and his music and the whole shebang, you have to visit Expecting Rain, which is the Louvre for Bob Dylan on the Internet.

The site is updated daily with information and links to current Dylan content on sites around the world. It’s the Dylan fan’s home away from home when they turn off the music. I’ve been a member for 20 years and I check it every week, maybe twice.

It’s a bit like my family doctor now, when I was a smoker.

He used to ask me how many cigarettes I smoked a day. What do they say now?

In the past, when I was stressed, it was definitely more than half a pack. So 10 on average.

When I go to the doctor, I halve it and say „5, sometimes a few more“.

Every smoker tells the doctor less than they really smoke, everybody. It’s a secret, unspoken agreement. The doctor isn’t stupid, of course, he always doubles the number of cigarettes in his head and draws his conclusions for the examination.

You see, you can’t be honest, because if I said „10 to 15,“ he’d think I smoked up to 30, because all smokers lie. And I’d get the whole package for the exam, which I don’t even need.

It’s similar with Expecting Rain, when I say I watch it twice a week.

I haven’t been on the forums for 20 years, I probably haven’t posted 100 messages, probably just short comments, unnecessary, nobody knew me there.

But in the last two months I’ve posted 50 times! I should stop that soon, then everyone will feel more comfortable there again.

The problem is that I said the soup was too salty. Sometimes it slips out of my mouth when my sewer has been full for a long, long time and a drain valve opens to relieve the pressure.

An illustrative example, so that I don’t have to explain the ER problem in a technically complicated and long-winded way:

In our neighborhood there is an elderly cook who used to be the cook in a very famous house, she cooked excellently, she was very well known. Once a year she invites 15 people to her home for soup and drinks. You don’t have to double that now.

I’ve been invited there for 20 years, my wife is always there, Anja sits across from me, whom we know even better than the cook, and unfortunately the soups have always been over-seasoned for me for 20 years.

I have to cough if something is too spicy or too salty. Of course, I’ve never said that, the chef is very self-confident and extremely sure of herself. It’s clear that she has a history of great recognition.

The soup always gets a lot of praise, „Great, what you’ve served again, really excellent, fantastic“.

Then my wife hisses at me, „Take a little less, drink more water, it’ll be fine, it’s not that bad“.

Sometimes the cook comes back and I get another plate, which is worse. I used to go outside for 10 minutes to smoke, which saved me a second plate.

The other neighbor, Anja, across from me, doesn’t really like it either, she grins and drinks beer after beer. The other 12 really like it, they are really enthusiastic, they love it so tasty and spicy. But I don’t know them personally, only from the big group.

And then two months ago, at the annual meeting, I politely said that the soup was „a little too spicy“ for me, I said that quietly. The cook gave me a dirty look and the others shook their heads slightly.

„No, it’s not too spicy,“ one of them said.

So I took the third beer, which didn’t agree with me at all. Unfortunately, after the third one, I used the word „salty“.

I’m no longer invited there, the 12 neighbors and the cook no longer greet me, my wife said in the dark before falling asleep, „That wasn’t necessary,“ but we’re not divorced yet.

Other couples in the group haven’t been together for a long time. I don’t know if that has anything to do with the soup.

The mistake was that maybe I should have said that about the salty soup 20 years ago with a laugh, then maybe the others would have made a joke and the next year we would have had a plate of cheese and bread. Unfortunately, it was too late. And those who are late in life are punished.

Of course the soup story never happened, it was just an illustration.

With Expecting Rain it was *exactly* like that, I dared to say in the discussion forum that some live recordings are very loud, that it sounds much better without this processing that is responsible for it.

That’s another way of saying „too much salt in the soup“.

This is a discussion forum, so I thought it would be okay to discuss and compare soups.

With Expecting Rain, you can choose whether you want the soup with a lot of salt or with a little salt.

Unfortunately, sometimes you have to take the very spicy soup, which is too salty for me personally, which I find terrible, if only because of my cough, although in the case of ER it’s more from the ear.

Unfortunately, the chef there often only offers the very spicy, salty version, and he does it on purpose.

Theoretically, he could stuff something for the others before adding the salt. A presumptuous idea? Sure, I don’t have to spoon up his soup.

The fact that there was often only this salty, very spicy, hot version was ultimately also the reason why I made a public issue of this high salt intake in the first place, otherwise I would have continued to swallow it.

The years before that I was fine. I’m probably a bit of a mimic, I admit.

The chef there at ER has posted 25,000 times on Expecting Rain in the last few years and has been very eloquent about his soups, he probably has a thousand people who like to follow him and eat his soup three times a week.

So I guess they just order the soups and freeze them at home.

People don’t usually eat that much soup. You can’t eat it often, it’s hard on your ears, but that’s just my personal perception.

A lot of people listen to the soup in the car or on their cell phones, so you don’t hear that it’s heavily seasoned.

The cook in the ER is not a boss or anything, but you can’t escape him, maybe you know the phenomenon from forums.

Short comments and a lot of self-praise are screaming at you everywhere. No matter what I write, it’s commented on, logically, I said „too salty, too spicy“.

There is no contradiction from others, you want to remain polite and avoid the threat of trouble with the chef.

He really is very sensitive to criticism. If he only listened to his disciples‘ praise and didn’t care about my criticism, it wouldn’t be a problem.

Hey, one against a thousand, it’s ridiculous to make such a big deal out of it. And just because of the question of whether a soup is too salty or not.

But I guess the soup at Expecting Rain doesn’t really taste good to a silent majority either. Many people have written to me privately that they don’t like soups that are too salty and too spicy, but they don’t want to say so in public.

It’s a bit like the USA.

I love this site, but I’m on the verge of renaming it „Expecting Rain, Spicy & Salty“ when all I get is this spicy, salty shot soup in some cases.

The other 1000 will probably vote for „Expecting Courtesy„.

This soup is really too salty! Do I really have to apologize for my public opinion that it’s way too salty for me?