Five?

A person who has never steered me wrong just directed me to a recipe from a book from 1909, the Up-to-Date Sandwich Book. The Popcorn Sandwich is basically popcorn on buttered toast with the addition of “five boned sardines, a dash of Worcestershire, and enough tomato catsup to form a paste.” That combination sounds like something you'd only ever taste on its way up. Just because they needed recipes for the book doesn’t mean anybody ever actually prepared such a sandwich, much less tried to eat it. However, “1909 Popcorn Sandwich” would be a great name for a bubblegum band.

seafood?

The thing about artificial flavorings is that they can have a taste that is not even vaguely reminiscent of the food for which they are named. It’s usually not a big deal because there’s no situation in which you would (for instance) wash down a mouthful of cherries with a swig of cherry Kool-Aid, and because we’ve gotten accustomed to identifying isoamyl acetate (for instance) as “banana flavor.” However.  I’m sitting here reading a package of Blue Gummi Sharks. It says they are artificially flavored. And what I’m wondering is, what would be the natural flavor of Blue Gummi Sharks?

1,000 year rant

Okay this will get posted on Monday morning but I’m planning on traveling so I’m writing it in advance which is tough because maybe things will have changed in unexpected ways in the intervening interval however although I’m actually composing this last week from your perspective by projecting what I’m currently seeing forward and from all the prevailing evidence I can predict that by the time you read this I’m pretty sure he will have decided that his fanatically loyal masked secret police would be cooler if they all wore matching shirts and my only question is black or brown?

Gartenwiesel

When you don’t have an umlaut the convention is to add a lowercase e after the vowel, like Heinrich Böll becomes Heinrich Boell. Or Moetley Cruee. The Garden Weasel was invented by a German guy named Gerhard Gütschow (Gerhardt Guetschow) who may very well be the actor Gert Gütschow who was featured in a 1988 film called “Einer trage des anderen Last” although that was an East German movie and the Garden Weasel was shown at a Cologne (Köln) trade show in 1974 and I’m not sure how permeable the border between the two Germanies was to spiky garden gadgets.

Bunny Ears

They keep trying to come up with a better technology than shoelaces for footwear closure and they keep failing and reverting to the method that we can observe on the earliest preserved prehistoric examples such as those leathery bog people. You got rubbery cords and velcro and buckles and buttons and whatever you call those weird slotted doohickies on galoshes and they all work worse than string. But what I really wanted to point out is how most people when they eat a Milky Way bar peel it and throw away the wrapper. But that’s where all the vitamins are.

Me? I'm sticking with chinchillas.

“Cracking the Code: Unveiling Strategies for Consistent Powerball Success." "LOTTERY SECRETS - They Don't Want You To Know About." "Secrets of Winning Powerball." I didn’t make these titles up. You could, hypothetically, buy one of these books. But that presupposes that you could read, that you believe there are secret methods that a shadowy “they” are keeping from you that if you only knew them you’d be rolling in dough, and most important that you accept that somebody who knows the secrets to winning billions of dollars would opt to share those secrets with any jamoke with $7.99 to spend.

plink plank plunk

Just as there are people who intentionally eat Velveeta cheese, watch Gilligan’s Island reruns, or jump out of perfectly good airplanes for fun, there are people who enjoy hearing the sound of the banjo. Not me. It’s like chewing ice cubes. It’s like stubbing your toe or a grapefruit that squirts in your eye. I admit there are talented and creative banjoists producing wonderful music. They do so in spite of the instrument. Some say the banjo was brought here from Africa but that is a vile slander and I’m tired of seeing Black people getting the blame for everything.