Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Surely a candidate for next year's igNobel prize


A team of intrepid doctors swallowed Lego heads for science.



Matt Damon, always needing to be rescued


Friday, November 23, 2018

You have been warned!

 
Subject: Status Update for RO #28833 [2012 SUBA IMPREZA].

Your vehicle is now getting prepped for paint. Next stop, the paint booth.

PRIVILEGE AND CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This e-mail is confidential and should not be used by anyone who is not the original intended recipient. It should not be photocopied, transmitted via walkie-talkie, CB radio, satellite dish, cable TV, overhead projector, smoke signal, Morse code, pig Latin, sign language, short hand, or any other means. This e-mail is under no circumstances to be translated into French. This e-mail is not to be ridiculed, mocked, judged in a competition, or read aloud in funny accents while wearing fake mustaches and/or hats of any sort including, but not limited to, bandanas. Do not taunt or provoke this e-mail. People taking certain prescription medications may experience nausea, dizziness, hysteria, vomiting, and temporary loss of short term memory while reading this e-mail. Please consult your physician before reading this e-mail. All vehicle models depicted in this email are 18 years old or older...or not. If you have received this e-mail in error, it's probably because I am so consumed by self-importance that I wasn't paying any attention to whom I addressed it.

Wednesday, November 21, 2018

Thanksgiving: Give Thanks for Eels and Spam


This Thanksgiving, millions of Americans will sit down to a traditional meal in celebration of all that the New World has given us.

In memory of our ancestors —or the ancestors of the people who bought our ancestors, or the ancestors of the people who decided our ancestors didn't really deserve land if they weren't going to properly exploit it, or the ancestors of the people who resented our ancestors for coming over here and taking all the jobs they didn't want —we'll sit down to a table loaded with the same traditional foods they had at the first Thanksgiving.

First, Mother will bring out the eels and cod. Who doesn't have fond memories of seeing a huge plate of grilled eels and cod set down on the dinner table? Make sure Grandpa gets the eyes! Of course, nobody would expect to eat just one type of seafood on Thanksgiving. Mussels and clams are in abundance, although some poor families make do with lobster.

Naturally, the centerpiece of any Thanksgiving meal is the birds. Turkey is a popular choice, but to many people Thanksgiving just wouldn't be Thanksgiving without at least a couple roasted ducks and a swan or two.

The kids would just as soon eat nothing but birds and shellfish, and maybe a few wild berries, but the grown-ups are there to make sure they eat their vegetables. No dessert until you eat your dried corn, beetroot and beans.

Yeah, OK, swan and eel are pretty much off the Thanksgiving menu these days. Instead we eat various traditional foods that weren't at what's widely considered the ur-Thanksgiving, at least in the United States.

Candied yams —actually sweet potatoes, but "yam" is a fun word —wouldn't be invented for almost 200 years. If anyone thought to mash potatoes with butter and milk before the 1700s, they kept it to themselves. And as for green beans with fried onions and condensed cream of mushroom soup … I'll let you ponder that one.

Tuesday, November 20, 2018

... the real story of the first Thanksgiving

 
Calvin Trillin's Campaign to Make Spaghetti Carbonara the National Dish for Thanksgiving
 
... the real story of the first Thanksgiving

[The following has been shamelessly excerpted from "Third Helpings," by Calvin Trillin]:

I have been campaigning to have the national Thanksgiving dish changed from turkey to spaghetti carbonara.

It does not take much historical research to uncover the fact that nobody knows if the Pilgrims really ate turkey at the first Thanksgiving dinner. The only thing we know for sure about what the Pilgrims ate is that it couldn't have tasted very good. Even today, well brought-up English girls are taught by their mothers to boil all veggies for at least a month and a half, just in case one of the dinner guests turns up without his teeth... 

It would also not require much digging to discover that Christopher Columbus, the man who may have brought linguine with clam sauce to this continent, was from Genoa, and obviously would have sooner acknowledged that the world was shaped like an isosceles triangle than to have eaten the sort of things that the English Puritans ate. Righting an ancient wrong against Columbus, a great man who certainly did not come all this way only to have a city in Ohio named after him, would be a serious historical contribution. Also, I happen to love spaghetti carbonara.

[In our family]...Thanksgiving has often been celebrated away from home. It was at other people's Thanksgiving tables that I first began to articulate my spaghetti carbonara campaign--although, since we were usually served turkey, I naturally did not mention that the campaign had been inspired partly by my belief that turkey is basically something college dormitories use to punish students for hanging around on Sunday... I reminded everyone how refreshing it would be to hear sports announcers call some annual tussle the Spaghetti Carbonara Day Classic.

I even had a ready answer to the occasional turkey fancier at those meals who insist that spaghetti carbonara was almost certainly not what our forebears ate at the first Thanksgiving dinner. As it happens, one of the things I give thanks for every year is that those people in the Plymouth Colony were not my forebears. Who wants forebears who put people in the stocks for playing the harpsichord on the Sabbath or having an innocent little game of pinch and giggle?

Finally there came a year when nobody invited us to Thanksgiving dinner. Alice's theory was that the word had got around town that I always made a pest out of myself berating the hostess for serving turkey instead of spaghetti carbonara...

However it came about, I was delighted at the opportunity we had been given to practice what I had been preaching--to sit down to a Thanksgiving dinner of spaghetti carbonara.

Naturally, the entire family went over to Rafetto's pasta store on Houston Street to see the spaghetti cut . I got the cheese at Joe's dairy, on Sullivan, a place that would have made Columbus feel right at home--there are plenty of Genoese on Sullivan, no Pilgrims--and then headed for the pork store on Carmine Street for the bacon and ham. Alice made the spaghetti carbonara. It was perfection. I love spaghetti carbonara. Then I began to tell the children the story of the first Thanksgiving:

In England, along time ago, there were people called Pilgrims who were very strict about making everyone observe the Sabbath and cooked food without any flavor and that sort of thing, and they decided to go to America, where they could enjoy Freedom to Nag. The other people in England said, "Glad to see the back of them." In America, the Pilgrims tried farming, but they couldn't get much done because they were always putting their best farmers in the stocks for crimes like Suspicion of Cheerfulness. The Indians took pity on the Pilgrims and helped them with their farming, even though the Indians thought that the Pilgrims were about as much fun as teenage circumcision. The Pilgrims were so grateful that at the end of their first year in America they invited the Indians over for a Thanksgiving meal.
 
The Indians, having had some experience with Pilgrim cuisine during the year, took the precaution of taking along one dish of their own. They brought a dish that their ancestors had learned from none other than Christopher Columbus, who was known to the Indians as "the big Italian fellow." The dish was spaghetti carbonara--made with pancetta bacon and fontina and the best imported prosciutto. The Pilgrims hated it. They said it was "heretically tasty" and "the work of the devil" and "the sort of thing foreigners eat." The Indians were so disgusted that on the way back to their village after dinner one of them made a remark about the Pilgrims that was repeated down through the years and unfortunately caused confusion among historians about the first Thanksgiving meal. He said, "What a bunch of turkeys!"

.

Bob

Friday, November 16, 2018

Not the best and the brightest in the produce department


Wednesday, November 14, 2018



Bob

Tuesday, November 06, 2018

Pittsburgh Penguins honor the shooting victims