Stupid Facebook thing on what writers eat, but I like the illustrations. God I wish I could draw or paint, or something, which is why I muck around with images so much. Good night.
Wednesday, July 2, 2014
Tuesday, July 1, 2014
DAM IT ALL: beavers kick polar bear ass!
(To celebrate July 1, I'm going to goof off and eat those cheese thingies and stuff like that. In other words, I don't want to work. But here's a nice piece, so old it's new, almost! Enjoy it, folks, and remember to respect your beaver friends, or they will gnaw down a tree that will pound you into the ground like a tent peg. Happy Canada Day!)
Adrian Humphreys, National Post
Oct 28, 2011 – 7:00 AM ET | Last Updated: Oct 28, 2011 12:55 PM ET
Polar bear should replace 'dentally defective rat' - the beaver - as Canada's national emblem: Senator
Oct 28, 2011 – 7:00 AM ET | Last Updated: Oct 28, 2011 12:55 PM ET
Polar bear should replace 'dentally defective rat' - the beaver - as Canada's national emblem: Senator
A Canadian senator has called for a national “emblem makeover” by replacing a vegetarian rodent that defends its territory with urine with the world’s largest walking carnivore that thrives in the cold.
Referring to the beaver as a “dentally defective rat,” Nicole Eaton called on Ottawa to replace the critter as the national emblem with the polar bear, an animal she hails as strong, majestic and brave.
“It is high time that the beaver step aside as a Canadian emblem or, at the least, share the honour with the stately polar bear,” Ms. Eaton said in the Senate Thursday.
“A country’s symbols are not constant and can change over time as long as they reflect the ethos of the people and the spirit of the nation.”
The Department of Canadian Heritage has the beaver as the only animal on its list of “national emblems,” a tally that includes the maple tree, the maple leaf and maple leaf tartan.
The beaver is certainly deeply entwined in Canada’s history.
The trade of beaver pelts during European colonization was so lucrative the venerable Hudson’s Bay Company put the beaver on its coat of arms in 1678, four of them, in fact. That same year, the governor of New France suggested the beaver as a suitable emblem for the colony.
When designing the first Canadian postage, they . . . awww, screw the rest!
WE HAVE THE BEST!
Didja ever see a beaver makin' lodges in the lake
And the way he chews on tree bark
It can can make your tummy ache
For beavers are so busy,
busy, busy all the way
You can keep your goddamn polar bears
Coz beavers rule the day!
(Chorus) Beavers, beavers, beavers, beavers,
Beavers rule the day!
Now a beaver never ate someone
But bears eat kids all day
Their breath it stinks from all that fish
We know it's not OK
But beavers only eat the trees
And chop the maples down
And swamp the fields and wreck the roads
and flood the whole damn town!
(EVERYBODY!)
Beavers, beavers, beavers. . . OK, you get the idea, eh?
Now the beaver once was very big
Just like a buffalo
And cave men kept him as their pets
They loved his flat tail so
So you shouldn't say he's boring
You shouldn't say he's small
Cuz when the earth began, he was
The meanest rat of all!
(Patriotic interlude) Where would our country be without the beaver? Maybe people wouldn't make fun of us so much for having a rodent as our national emblem. But hey, he made good fur, didn't he? I mean for those, like, fur hats for Hudson's Bay or something? He's busy all the time eating wood and chopping down the trees. Bears lie around and do squat all day, almost as bad as those eagles. Who needs trees anyway? There are way too many of them. But there can never be too many beavers. Eh?
Beavers! Beavers! Beavers!
We really think they're fine
We really think they're fine
We love him more than stinky bears
He's yours, he's ours, he's mine
He's part of our, like, history
He sacrificed his pelts
Let's hear it for the BEAVER:
We don't want no one eltse!
We don't want no one eltse!
"You had me at hello"
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Sunday, June 29, 2014
This is only a test
(From Ask MetaFilter):
An old memory of color TV? Color on a black and white TV? What?! (1950s filter).
My dad was born in 1952. Recently, we went out to lunch. The conversation covered a variety of topics. At one point, he recalled a tale from his youth...
Essentially, this: He grew up outside of Detroit, and he positively recalls that his family owned a black and white television set. He says that periodically the television network or local broadcast partners would attempt to deploy new technologies that might transmit a color signal to a black and white set, and that these attempts would be prefaced with an on air announcement. Essentially, "We will be trying to send color to your black and white TV sets. If anyone sees color, please call us and let us know."
I find many aspects of this story super strange, and also potentially fascinating. However, parts of it also don't add up. Like... what!? Does this ring a bell to anyone? Perhaps there's a kernel of truth buried inside a story that has otherwise "grown" a little bit over time?
(From Some Science Forum Thingie)
Order The Glass Character from:
Thistledown Press
Amazon.com
Chapters/Indigo.ca
Friday, June 27, 2014
How Jell-o saved the free world
How great it is to live in the age of the internet, so that you no longer have to go out and buy books of vintage recipe ads. They just keep popping up on Facebook, unbidden. An astounding number of them feature Jell-o. This Lime Cheese Salad has some sort of indescribable brown stuff inside the mold. Most of these recipes call for at least one cup of mayonnaise.
This thing just frightens me. It's a huge bell of sorts, full of "stuff" like a strange quivering aquarium. You'd never get it to stay up. And how would you ever serve it? Stick a spoon in this, and it'd explode.
There are no details of the ingredients here, so we must use our imaginations. Macerated ham, perhaps? Some sort of bread with the crusts cut off, or (shudder) cake? A layer of Cheez Whiz to form a sort of glue? I do love the clever touch of the olive in the centre, a sort of cyclops effect.
Combining the two deadliest foods in the world in one dish has a certain mad genius about it. That way you can get it all over with at once.
The candle on the right is really a banana. Perhaps it also vibrates.
This astonishing scene features a sort of igloo jammed to the rafters with a solid brown material. It is topped by a thick layer of what looks like molten Velveeta. No Inuit or any other human being could ever live there. In the background there appears to be yet another jell-o mold, making one wonder if anyone ever ate a meal back then without one. There is a blob of white stuff (mayonnaise?) on top of it. The red dessert material appears to be more Jell-o.
YES - I want to be happy when company comes. So bring on the Hellman's! Bring on a rectangular brick of overprocessed meat with a cubic green filling of unknown origin!
My feeling is that this is post-war stuff and people still had a rationing mentality. My own mother frequently served creamed chipped beef on toast, the chipped beef coming in a JAR and having the consistency of thin, stretchy leather. She did frequently make jell-o molds, though not monstrosities like these. Creamed salmon. Fried bread n' gravy. Corned beef and boiled cabbage. These were the foods I was raised on. They had a sort of primitive glory to them.
This makes me shudder, because it is an ad for beef suet. I thought beef suet was the stuff my mother asked for at the butcher shop, which she was given for free because she was such a good customer, and which she threw out on the snow for the birds to eat to get through the winter. It was white, crumbly, hard as rock, and unfit for human consumption. "Atora" is called The Good Beef Suet. I can't imagine what The Bad Beef Suet would be like.
You know that crazy guy who did the paintings of cats, the ones with the staring eyes and bristling fur? I think I've said enough.
This was once, apparently, a salmon, but it suffered a bad fate, its gob crammed with parsley, an olive for an eye (and olives seemed to be one of the four food groups back then), surrounded by masses of brussels sprouts (another food I gagged on). There are brown 'n serve rolls back there, and on either side, two boatlike structures full of - oh God, I can't go on any more.
And yet, I could not resist doing a blow-up (or is that throw-up?) of this rectangular-meat thingie to try to figure out what it is. Let's see if the other half of it is legible. . .
Transcription: SUPPER FOR SIX
Cream of Tomato Soup
Celery
Crackers
SUPER SALAD LOAF
Corn Sticks
Nucoa
Fresh Pineapple Mint Cup
Ginger Cookies
Coffee
Recipe: SUPER SALAD LOAF
Scoop out center of a 1 1/2 pound piece of bologna, leaving a shell. Soak 1 tbsp. plain gelatin in 2 tbsp. cold water and dissolve over hot water. Mix 1 1/4 cups cooked mashed peas with 1 tbsp. Real Mayonnaise, 2 tsp. minced onion, 1/2 tsp. salt, 1/4 tsp. pepper. Add dissolved gelatine and pack into bologna shell. Chill thoroughly. Place on platter on salad greens. Heap with Real Mayonnaise. Garnish with radish roses, parsley and onion rings, as illustrated. *NOTE: Use left-over bologna in sandwich fillings for next day's lunches.
But hist! What's this I see at the bottom, in that little white box?
Grow More in '44 FOOD (with an odd little symbol that looks like a hand carrying a wicker basket.) It also says, I think, "fights" and something else. A reference to war rationing, undoubtedly. It may pertain to maintaining a victory garden to help the cause.
And part of the blurb about Hellmann's Real Mayonnaise reads:
Real Nutrition! This Real Mayonnaise is rich in food energy. . . provides almost exactly the same amount, spoonful for spoonful, as vitaminized margarine, or butter. Good for many of the same uses, too - to help you keep wartime rationed menus up to your own proud "taste good" standard.
So now I get it. There's a war on, we can't manage much more than a rectangle of bologna for supper, so let's hollow out the middle and fill it with gelatinized mashed peas to dress it up, then call it a "salad". Not only that: bologna and mashed peas was a special "company's coming" dinner, not just an everyday meal. It seems sad to us, but it's what they had to do.
As for the actual product, the mayonnaise, all that emphasis on "real" must reflect the abundance of fake products, such as off-grade margarine and lard disguised as butter, and anxiety about the family not getting enough calories and nutrition to grow and thrive. Kids in wartime Britain often grew up runty and unhealthy, and never did achieve a normal stature.
Sad, but they did get through, didn't they?
Order The Glass Character from:
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Amazon.com
Chapters/Indigo.ca
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