Lamb Bites

The history of eating little lambs for dinner is long and complicated, especially among the ovine community.

Some sources state that lamb is the least popular red meat sold in the United States--although I have a funny feeling that really that distinction belongs to things like the muskrat or the porcupine which are considered red meat on the basis of their being mammals but aren't always terribly nice to eat. And, no I have no idea how rabbits got to be white meat.

(Right... and left Spam through the ages. Images copyrighted by Hormel. Use of low
resolution images may qualifiy under fair use as they do not imapct the market value of the product or substantially impinge on current trademarks.)

In any event, little lambs get eaten for dinner, particularly in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisine, which is one reason why the famed M*A*S*H "Spam lamb" came from Greece. Check out the Spam web site...but be careful--it's loud! Personally, I like a nice lamb dinner from time to time, and I was enjoying a yummy lamb saute from a local Pocono establishment just last night when one of my fellow diners began to talk about how cute and fuzzy and cuddly lambs are.

And they are. But I felt guilty. Because eating cute fuzzy cuddly things is pretty mean...even polar bears eat relatively uncute animals, and, as Sarah Palin warned us, polar bears can be bad news. Just take a gander at Lost. Once the polar bears were removed form their fish-biscuit puzzle cages, they went pretty hog wild and adopted some really troublesome behaviors, like eating airline passengers and possibly suitcases. Those fish biscuits must have had calming qualities. (Above--fish biscuit from a really cool blog by Kung Foodie )

So, I invoked the food lamb. (Not to be comfused with Harriet Lamb, who could also be considered a food lamb). The food lamb is a bad-tempered, fanged creature that bites its keepers and generally deserves to be made into burgers, sautes, and chops. Food lambs are bad news, boy.

My fellow diners felt that the food lamb idea was somehow ... "silly." Personally, I was shocked at their attitude.

As it turns out, one of my friends has been "keeping company" with a nice (and fairly buff) farmer. I was a bit surprised to learn that, although they have been seeing each other socially for over a month, she had no idea whether he had ever been bitten by a food lamb. I was alarmed, because those bites can be nasty. Luckily, her friend is a vegetable farmer, an added benefit of which is that his farm is not a possible vector for pandemic influenza mutations, since he does not have chickens, pigs, or other poultry, none of which is, according to him, a vegetable.

whew!

Now I just have to check the food pyramid for replacement vegetables.... (left--flu vector. Public domain image.)

Psycho Panda Psychic Incident

In the earliest version of the fairy tale "Snow White," the evil queen is not a stepmother but the little princess's own mother, which is pretty creepy when you consider that the whole reason Snow White was so very fetching was that she was her mother's daughter. Those Brothers Grimm were not terribly cheerful guys, methinks. Of course, they lived in a different time and perhaps didn't get out much, which may have been depressing for them. And I suppose that their stories do clean up nicely for Disney films.

Above. Evil Queen.

Illustration from Snow White (Mjallhvít) from an 1852 icelandic translation of the Grimm-version fairytale. Landsbókasafn Íslands w:Project Gutenberg eText 16846 Drawing believed to be by Theodor Hosemann. Image is in the public domain because it was published over 100 years ago.

For me, the idea that the evil queen was able to detect her daughter's whereabouts only through the agency of the magic mirror bears some examination. Would a real mother really need a magic mirror to detect her daughter or might they have a psychic link that the Brothers Grimm changed into a magic mirror for purposes of marketing and suchlike? Perhaps a simple 19th century marketing decision led to the development of the evil stepmother.

(Left) This image is a screenshot made from a public domain movie trailer. Trailers for movies released before 1964 are in the Public Domain because they were never separately copyrighted.

Case in point: The Incident of the Psycho Panda.

This Thanksgiving, while my family and I were eating lamb with my sister-in-law's parents (who are really super nice), my mother suddenly related with the story of a crazed panda that grabbed some guy's jacket and ripped it off. Interestingly enough, only days before, I had posted a link to the video of the panda incident in this very blog. Coincidence?

Maybe.

Perhaps, however, it's evidence of psychic connections.

But it's just possible that Snow White's mom was really just a bad cook and a lousy dressmaker. What if Snow White's mother came to her senses and was trying to make amends with some really cool magic combs and a tasty beauty apple and just mixed up the recipe? Sure, it could have still been subliminal murder activity, and it would detract from the Disney movie (although I think the dwarves would carry it without Snow White), but maybe the first queen wasn't quite as bad as she's made out to be.

Thankslambing

This Thanksgiving, my brother made a lamb for dinner. It was the first time he made dinner for a family holiday, and his wife made the Yorkshire pudding to go with the lamb. The food was yummy in general, and the lamb was yummy in particular. Yum.

When I got back to school after the holiday, I was informed that the consumption of Thanksgiving lamb was yet another example of my lack of conformity to usual practices.

I wondered if it was really fair to note that I was being nonconformist. After all, I always make a turkey when I host Thanksgiving. Can I help it if my family is full of renegades?

(left) Lamb. Image by Peter Shanks from Lithgow, Australia. This work was licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Of course, I could have pretended that I had really only had turkey, which may have been the point....

The Squirrel Man of Throgs Neck

Robert Stroud, the "Bird Man of Alcatraz," was well known for raising and selling canaries, an activity that led to the idea that state penitentiaries could be used for rehabilitation instead of punishment (Ok, I know, Bentham thought of it , too...) in the United States (and yes, I know that there is an actual panopticon in Philadelphia). Stroud got so famous, that he was depicted by Burt Lancaster in a film called, unsurprisingly, The Bird Man of Alcatraz. Oddly, some people liked Burt Lancaster so much, that they wanted Robert Stroud to be freed, which was deemed to be a bad idea, given Stroud's activities when he was not yet in prison (like the ones that got him into prison in the first place).


Robert Stroud, public domain image taken by a federal employee in the course of business.

So, this seems like a rather sinister little tale, the charms of Burt Lancaster notwithstanding. OK, the considerable charms of Burt Lancaster, especially at that period, notwithstanding, hubba hubba.

The problem with the story of the Bird Man from Alcatraz, in my own humble opinion, is that it then casts a sort of sinister light on other people who seem to have a special connection with the animals. Take, for example, the nice man who was feeding the squirrels when I got lost on the Bronx the other day.

(left) A squirrel eating a nut. Image by Aaron Logan, from http://www.lightmatter.net/gallery/albums.php. Used under Creative Commons license.

Now, I know I should probably not be driving in the Bronx with Out-of-state plates on the car. It's still not terribly certain why I was even in the Bronx--probably I wasn't paying attention and missed the exit for the Cross Westchester Expressway.

Be that as it may, I wound up in a neighborhood of those little Levitt mini-Cape Cods that were rather popular after WWII. Outside one, which had a picture of a rather vicious dog on the gate, was a man feeding a couple of dozen squirrels and pigeons. His pockets bulging with nuts, he told me that I was in the "trahg's neck" section of "da branx," which I interpreted to mean that I was close to the Throg's Neck bridge and not the Tappan Zee bridge or even the George Washington bridge as I had hoped. He then helpfully went into the house and pulled out a map, while continually feeding squirrels and pigeons, and sent me on my way.

(Right) An original Cape Cod (some of the Levitt versions were smaller). Public domain image published in 1920.

The whole scene put me in mind of the nice man who left out a bag of nuts for the squirrels in Joy in the Morning, a much less successful novel by the author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Obama-Nation

In the Hollywood film National Security, government agents engage in wacky high jinks qua "police work" that ends favorably when the protagonists overcome personal prejudice, racism, crime, and ineptitude to become contributing members of society. It's heartwarming, or at least reminiscent of those old Disney movies with the bumbling FBI agents, like That Darn Cat. Apparently, the FBI did not take kindly to Disney's representation--as indicated in a fairly lengthy repository of information.

Hayley Mills in That Darn Cat.
It is believed that the use of a limited number of web-resolution screenshots for critical commentary and discussion of the film and its contents qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law.

I generally think that national security is a great reason to vote for a president. After all, it seems good, in a certain way, to have a country within which to debate the social and political issues that are near and dear to my liberal-leaning heart.

In the recent presidential election (ie, the one that ended yesterday with a new president), I began to think about national security in a new way. Instead of thinking about how the Democratic candidate liked trees or cared about education, I found myself thinking about how the nation may actually be a safer place today because President-elect (then-Senator) Obama and his campaign encouraged all of us to reengage in the political process.

The Grain that Built a Hemisphere

In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan describes the dominant supermarket culture in the United States as creating a nation of corn koalas (that'd be us). Apparently, eating only one type of food makes you a koala...or maybe a panda...they only eat one thing, don't they? Of course, koala and corn both start with the same sound, thus producing a more alliterative quality than the corn panda, which actually sounds a little weird. Plus koalas are slightly cuter, although pandas are pretty cute as well.

(left) Koala and baby...look how cute...public domain image by Brian Dell.

Hmm...the panda and the koala do have a lot in common:

1. both are "bears" (while not really being bears)
2. they each have a limited, plant-based diet
3. neither is native to the United States
4. both are depicted as cuddly toys
5. both appear in action movies

Now, my understanding of the koala is that it's one of those "harmless plant eaters" that, once again like the panda, has an unexpected nasty streak. According to Wikipedia, koalas get violent when they're disturbed and should be left to sleep for at least 16 hours a day, preferably in a nice eucalyptus tree where they're free to nosh if they wake up. You would never know this from popular depictions of the koala as in Jackie Chan's First Strike, in which he hugs a koala, then dons some really interesting-looking koala underpants before (or maybe after) going out on a snowmobile without a coat. Which makes me wonder "Would Sarah Palin approve?" And what about the practical impact of underpants (check this out).

But I digress... The point is that Jackie Chan snugs up with a koala which is just hanging out placidly in his hotel room, when in fact a real koala would be very cranky and probably draw blood if anyone even suggested checking it into the Best Western.

And pandas aren't always that much better. Just look at this panda, attacking some guy to get his jacket. A kinder interpretation might be that the poor panda was bored and didn't have any money to get to the Gap and buy its own jacket, which presents quite the mental picture. Even Kung Fu Panda, while cute, seems to get a bit testy as times.

Which brings me back to my own personal identity as a corn koala. Sure I like action films and I have a limited diet, rich in corn and other plants. But I, unlike the koala, come from a species that is rather clever in its application of corn.

Image by Sam Fentress, used under the GNU Free Documentation License,^[1] Version 1.2 or later, and the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license version 2.0.^[2]. Attribution is required.

Take, for example, high explosives. In my travels, I came across a lovely little propaganda film called "The Grain that Built a Hemisphere" that explains, for the more ignorant among us, how corn caused the rise of the Americas and can be used for various applications such as feeding pigs, making flapjacks, justifying widespread human sacrifice ...oh, and blowing up Axis tanks. Pollan didn't mention this particular use for corn in his book, although he does mention ethanol, but I think it's important. Just think--no koala is going to blow us up with a eucalyptus bomb.

The no show

In “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” John Denver warbles movingly about the evils of being an internationally-acclaimed musician whose main squeeze is much less mobile. As with all John Denver songs, “Leaving on a Jet Plane” is subject to various spoofing issues (although Peter, Paul, and Mary did an OK job with it), as in the highly amusing scene in Armageddon in which the drill crew qua astronauts do an a capella rendition before boarding space shuttles, thus demonstrating their lack of aerospace knowledge. In fact, one character remarks that the safety of the world is in the hands of a bunch of men he wouldn’t trust with a potato gun.

(Right) An early jet. Probably not ever boarded by John Denver. Image by WyrdLight http://www.wyrdlight.com and distributed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License.

…which got me to thinkin’… who would I trust with my safety—or a potato gun?

Not Surly Airline Lady, an unfortunate (and no doubt underpaid) person who tried very hard to leave me stranded in Florida at the site of the Giant Cockroach and the Closet Lizards.

Why, you may ask, should I have been stranded? The answer is simple—two airline tickets had been paid for on my behalf.

To my mind, if you buy an airline ticket for a flight and then your company (or other sponsoring organization) buys you another ticket, you call the airline and they reassign one ticket. That sounds simple. So, I called, and Nice (but possibly not terribly computer savvy) Airline Man said everything would be great, and it was, but then I had to change the return date. This reactivated all the tickets. Normally, the airline people should tell you when you have two seats, but they just crossed out the duplicate name and sold the seat again.

Oopsies!!

(Left) Toy Potato Gun. Image by Richard Wheeler 2007. Used under gnu license (link below).

Then, because I did not show up for my flight to Florida—although technically I was on the flight because of the other ticket—when I tried to check in via phone the day of my return flight, Surly Airline Lady told me that I was a “no show” so I would have to buy a third ticket costing as much as the first two tickets combined in order to get home.

Needless to say, I was unhappy. I pointed out that this policy seemed ridiculously advantageous to the airline, particularly since I had been on the outgoing flight and she was withholding my return on a technicality. Wasn’t it illegal to sell two tickets to the same person for the same flight? Let alone to demand payment a third time?

Surly Airline Lady was having none of my so-called “logic” or "business ethics” chat. Who did I think I was, a paying customer? Yeesh! I was a "no show," which is apparently a category of people somewhat less trustworthy than Ghengis Khan, the Unibomber and Jeffrey Dahmer.

Luckily, someone at the hotel told me to show up at the airport with the tickets and they would have to put me on a plane. If not, I was supposed to cry.

(Image of an airline ticket or "flugschein" by Matthias Sebulke, released into the public domain)

The airport people, who had already had a terrible day, put me on the next plane before I could even sniffle. The gate area was full of extremely surly (if not aggressive) people who had been delayed for 7 to 14 hours because of weather—people flying back to certain major metropolitan areas from Florida are not pleasant in their reactions to delay. In fact, despite my high level of crankiness, I was actually nicer than the other passengers and the airport people looked in the computer and told me the correct secret code words to use to get my old ticket back.

The next day, I called the airline to explain. They seemed unmoved until I pointed out that I felt a bit distrustful of my personal safety among a group of people who couldn't figure out how to handle a duplicate ticket. How would she feel?

I got back a flight and double sky miles.

...which brings me back to trusting someone with a potato gun....how's about this baby?

(image of potato gun by Scott VanPala used under GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2)

Booger cookies

In the first Harry Potter book, Albus Dumbledore laments his poor luck with Bernie Bott's every flavor beans, before tasting a bean that proves to be ear wax-flavored. Harry is amused, but grateful that he avoided both the ear-wax bean and the booger-flavored one that Fred and George once found, at least according to the possibly too-gullible Ron Weasley. I still feel a mild thrill of horror when I see the Bernie Boots blend of Jelly-Belly gourmet beans featuring those flavors. After all, don’t parents spend a lot of time acculturating their children not to eat these substances?

(left) Bernie Bott's "every flavor beans" Picture by Coolmallu. Used under Gnu License.

I prevented a friend from eating what I termed a “booger cookie” in public the other day. Perhaps this was unfair, but cookies do have empty calories and the aforementioned cookies were out in public in close proximity to children who potentially had boogers on their hands.

Don’t get me wrong....

Children can be quite cute, especially other people’s children when they are all dressed up cutely for purposes of travel and fun. And there is no better place to see cute children dressed for travel and fun than in the lounge/breakfast area of a Best Western or Hampton Inn or other similar type of hotel chain after a big event, like a wedding. Often these chains do fun special things, like give candy to children who are checking out that day, or leave cookies and coffee out in the lobby all day and night for the occasional snacker.

(Right) Plateful of cookies. Image by meniscus (is that not the coolest personal moniker?). Image used under Gnu license.

Personally, I think this is a nice touch. It gives a homey feeling and shows the guest that the hotel chain cares. And then the guest is less fussy about things like the accidental dirty towel left in the bathroom or the mildew on the soap dish—this is almost impossible to keep up with in the dead heat of summer in older buildings despite strong evidence of continual cleaning and really frequent regrouting. So, at least one hapless soul is going to see a teeny bit of mildew on a soap dish at some point before the regrouting people have a chance to get in and fix the problem.

And I found the cookies working for me the other night when I checked into a hotel chain place in one of the red states and found not only a dirty towel but also a spot of mildew on the soap dish in the shower. Instead of thinking “eew, gross,” the way I may have, I thought “at least it isn’t a giant killer roach,” and I know it was as a result of the cookies and coffee.

Not that I would actually eat the cookies. I’ve seen children looking really really cute in their outfits in public places and then forgetting that the nose is not to be cleaned in public (at least according to authorities like their Moms), and then reaching into the cookie bin without a napkin. And then, some of then also forget not to touch every single cookie before making a selection. Yuck.

Land Shrimp

My friend Dave has the only land shrimp business in the US.

No, I'm not kidding.

According to Dave, who recently ate a land shrimp on the Colbert Report. Colbert did not want to eat a land shrimp, or "bug" as he called it, but decided to try and make a writer eat one.

No, I'm not kidding. Look at the video. And, no, it isn't funny.

(Left) Abigail Adams, a writer, not eating a bug in this picture. Painting by Benjamin Blythe, 1766, is in the public domain due to copyright expiry.

As a writer, I wondered whether Colbert fell into the common colloquial trap of using the term "bug" to refer to all insects. MightyIsis once had a grade school science teacher who was especially ferocious on this point.

Let's find out....

According to that font of all internet knowledge, wikipedia, the "true bugs" or "hemiptera" actually include cicadas, incidentally, the precise type of insect that Dave ate on the Colbert Report.

Not bad.

MightyIsis is impressed.



Cicada. One of the "true bugs." Not the exact one eaten, which was probably toastier. Image by Bruce Marlin, distributed under the Creative Commons ShareAlike 2.5 license.

Old Friends

Simon and Garfunkel described old friends as sitting on a park bench "like bookends" in their song, "Old Friends." Luckily (perhaps) MightyIsis is not yet sitting on a park bench with old men, letting newspapers blow on her shoes. That's rather a depressing image, actually, when I think about it. Sitting on a bench with my old friend, and having garbage blow on us. Yuck.


(above right) Park bench. Image by JF Perry. (below) New York Times, a newspaper. Hopefully, not crumpled up on anyone. Public domain image (copyright expired in the US due to age).

In fact, this puts me in mind of the continual barrage of garbage on video monitors in the American Museum of Natural History. They have a lot of footage of landfill being bulldozed, which appears in films about evolution to show how we're killing species by smothering them with our old pop-tops and candy wrappers.

(right) Phylogenic tree of items we are probably killing with leftover plastic bags and motor oil, even as I write this. Public domain image by Tim Vickers. At least they no longer have to deal with pull tabs.

Remember pull tabs? They're a pre pop-top thing. No, really.

(left--pull tab. Image by Gam3.)

They used to litter the landscape, when they weren't being made into funky fashion accessories. As a child, I was particularly taken with the pull-tab vest. Although they are now making clothes out of pop-tops, the little doohickies that replaced the pull-tab. Yes, you can buy a pull-tab belt or bag. (No, I'm not kidding, but I'm not sure whether it's permitted after Labor Day.)

But I digress. This post is about old friends, and not just my oldest friend, who is an expert on recycling, and in fact, prevents me from throwing out trash during car trips until recycling centers are available. I'll bet she agrees with the Museum of Natural History staff that biodiversity is being limited by our trash. I agree with them also. We are limiting diversity by creating so much habitat that is fit mainly for things like roaches and rats, and not really great for other things like butterflies and songbirds. Not that roaches and rats aren't great in their own way, but how many piles of garbage does on planet really need?.

(right) Four of Darwin's finches. An example of biodiversity--note the differing beaks. Public domain image (copyright expired) by Charles Darwin.

In any event, some old friends have gotten back in touch, and now I may get to see them. Which should be fun, as long as we avoid talking about trash, but not pop-tops.

Chili peppers

Jamie Oliver, aka The Naked Chef, is, even as I type, cooking chili peppers on his show about home cooking. Right now, he's making pork and chili peppers...yum! OK--actually they are bell peppers, which are sweeter and less pointy.

Bell peppers--Image by Aldipower (used under Gnu documentation license)

It's ironic that Oliver, who is British...or at least made his debut on BBC...is using a food generally regarded for it's 'hotness' when the local cuisine, like bubble and squeak, is generally regarded as cabbage or potato-based, boiled, and rather bland. Of course, he is using words like "wodge" to describe this Hungarian-based dish, so perhaps it is rather more British than I thought.

Cubanelle peppers--large, relatively sweet chilis. Public domain photo from the US Department of Agriculture.

What on earth is a "wodge" anyway ....

{Skip to Hermione-Granger-esque scene of MightyIsis surrounded by cookbooks and the OED}

..."chunk, lump, or amount"? Hmmph.

(Right) Spot the "wodge"-- no, not the tater tots (yum). Public domain photo from the US Department of Agriculture.

In any event, a wodge of chili peppers, particularly a big one, most often evokes Mexican, Southwestern, or other spicy cooking. Just think about the Morimoto-Love Iron Chef battle--chili-o-rama, and Love, a Texan chef, won. Not that Asian cuisine doesn't use a lot of chilis...maybe my North American biases are coming out here.

And I love curry. It's really yummy, and there's this great Indian restaurant nearby, in a train. A pink train, with green trim (no, it's not really preppy at all...) . But they do have great food, and a full bar, and a pool table (no, really, a pool table).

(left) John Bull--an early locomotive. Public domain photo (copyright is expired). This train is not pink.

Anyway...

Chili peppers also have another function--the hotness evaluation in Rate My Professor. MightyIsis is "hot" on the chili pepper scale (why, I don't know), as indicated by a red chili pepper.

But isn't it ironic that students use the red chili pepper for this function when they don't probably listen to the Red Hot Chili Peppers?

I think so. ...no, they're not a vegetable, they're a band.

No-ahleans

At least, that's how I think you're supposed to say it, really, if you're from here. I'm not, so I enunciate and the locals look at me pityingly as if to say..."poor white lady clad in black from head to toe (NB: this is bad because it's too hot here to wear black from head to toe, which means I can't dress myself) who can't even talk right." It's a sad statement on my adaptability that I can blend in Brussels but not here.


The first (and last) time I was here it was 2001 and people were still pretty freaked out about September 11th. Now it seems worse, like Katrina was so bad that no one's bothered to be freaked out because they're just too tired. But maybe I'm projecting what I think I would feel and am just being uppity (and talking wrong).


I'm here, in New Orleans (as we northerners say), at a lovely conference full of smart people. They're also nice, which is good because I don't have the emotional stamina to deal with mean smart people while I'm badly dressed and talking funny.

Yesterday, I made a ven diagram.

Fun.

Food of the Gods

Recent commercials for Ferrero Rocher indicate that it is a food of the gods fallen from the heavenly heights to the profane depths of your local supermarket, where it is now available for daily consumption.

How nice.

Unfortunately, the phrase "food of the gods" brings up other images for those of us old enough to catch "Giant Animal Week" on the 4:30 movie. In fact, "food of the gods" like "Frankenstein" has a sort of "don't mess with that-there" cache shared by items like thermonuclear devices, angry skunks, and manhole covers with black goo oozing up out of them.

In fact, a truly weird movie called Food of the Gods (1976) demonstrated that all manner of bad stuff could happen by tampering with nature. A bad sceintist, who was not interested in nuclear weapons decided to make a master race by feeding a mysterious substance called "food of the gods" to experimental animals, like rats. Among other nasty things, the rats got REALLY big...like bigger than the ones you could see in New York City in the bad neighborhoods c. 1985, and some of those were bigger than a house cat. The movie poster shows rats with red glowing eyes who are generally up to no good.


(Left) Zucker Rat by Joanna Servaes (Gnu licensee)...this rat is overweight and appears kindly, so probably was not eating food of the gods.

The kicker in this film is that at the end of the movie, when all the monster rats are killed and the evil scientists who was bent on creating a master race have been vanquished or imprisoned or what have you, the extra food of the gods falls into a river where it gets drunk by some cows who give milk that is then served in a day care.

Rachel Carson would have been very upset. She tended not to like environmental evils like pollution and PCBs and stuff.

Cow photo by Daniel Schwen. Used by Gnu licence.

The taste of love

I am afraid of the cookies in the lunch room.

It's a sad statement, but true.  The cookies are just plain weird-looking...not all the cookies, mind you, but the dark chocolate ones with the pink candy buttons.  That cotton-candy pink color.  It makes the cookies look like they escaped from a poodle-skirt wearing June Cleaver Wannabe woman who got sick of making corn flake winkies some time in 1954.

But that's just me.

One of my colleagues, who seemed somewhat nicer to me before he made this statement, told me that the cookies tasted like "love."  Which is also scary, given the tastes I associate with love:

• tuna
  
• asparagus
• beef and tortillas with cheese and grilled onions
• eggs with vegetables in them
• dark russet potato chips
• gingerbread 
• m&m's
• goldfish crackers
• slightly burned fish
• thin-crust pizza with sausage
• fried ravioli
• sweet tarts
• pixy stix
• american cheese sandwiches
• Italian wedding soup
• artichokes
• olive oil

These are not good cookie flavors, by the way. 

Valentine's Day Love...and stuff

Where did Valentine's Day come from? Well, the world will never know, because these events are shrouded in the deepest recesses of history. However, there is some substantiation for a few things:

• there was a Roman Saint named Valentine


• he possibly sent some letters to a lover


• Chaucer wrote: "For this was sent on Seynt Valentyne's day
  Whan every foul cometh ther to choose his mate."
  in Parliament of Foules

• the British Museum owns the oldest Valentine (from the middle ages)


• Valentine's day became popular in England hundreds of years ago


• people today feel a lot of pressure to deliver a good Valentine's Day experience to new romantic partners

Just as a side note, because MightyIsis is fond of digressions, the top 10 British treasures seem to contain a lot of hoards.

Judging from the last point, there is a lot of room for bad things to happen on Valentine's Day. A lot of room.

However, MightyIsis had the very best Valentine's Day ever. Fancy breakfast, fancy dinner, flowers, candy, and mint chip ice cream...yum!

Images are in the public domain because they are not copyrighted.

Mission Impossisquirrel?

I found this gem on a friend's web site. It shows the lengths to which squirrels will go to get acorns or candy bars.


(right) Picture of a squirrel by Diliff. Used under terms of gnu license.

I find myself asking, however, if this means that all candy machines can get squirrels in them?



(left) Candy buttons by Gila Brand, with, unaccountably, a jelly bean in the middle. Used under gnu license.

Who's got the point?

When MightyIsis was a child, her father would sing, "button, button, who's got the button?" whenever something got lost. Being an earnest child, she did not find this behavior very amusing, especially when she was trying to look for something. However, nostalgia being what it is, she now thinks of the button song with fondness.

(left) A button. Public domain image taken by NickGorton. (below, right) More buttons. Photo by Richard Wheeler (Zephyris) 2007, used under gnu license.


Ah, the healing power of time, even when there are no wounds.


In any event...MightyIsis finds herself asking "point, point, who's got the point?" in response to her "stealth thumb" post.

Stealth thumb is supposed to be ridiculous, which is what makes it such an effective strategy. But certain commenters seem to have missed this...shall we say "point" in a discussion of rules and regulations, which....

[pause]

[other pause]

...is obviously a trick!

HA ha!

Killer Putti

In an earlier post (see "fairy flower children," below), MightyIsis extolled the virtues of the putti...or at least comments that they were pretty darn cute, and cuter even than cherubs.


Putti in a 1750 paiting by François Boucher, "Birth of Venus." (Venus is the big one--the little ones are the putti.) Image is in the public domain.

...well, not all putti, apparently. In Magnetic Rose, a couple of evil, or at least highly violent and poorly socialized, putti try to kill the protagonists...or at least one of them. (It's about a minute and a half into the youtube clip.)

And MightyIsis asks..."is this fair to putti?" Could Magnetic Rose be a misrepresentation of all putti? And, given that putti are, in fact, imaginitive works, closely related to cupids
and angels, doesn't this mean that they can't defend themselves?

Poor putti.



Tree O' putti (not the name Dore would have used). Detail from an illustration of Orlando Furioso by Gustav Dore. Image is in the public domain.

Whodathunkit?

Briareos has pointed out that the preceding post might advocate activities that are, in fact, illegal in tournament or competition thumb wrestling.

So, although MightyIsis is a bit flummoxed at the idea that there was such a thing as international tournament thumb wrestling in the first place, subsequent research has shown the following.

• There is a lovely program, hosted by thumbs, that depicts thumb wrestling. It seems very WWF-inspired. http://www.thumbwrestlingfederation.com
• There are also some less official-looking pages. http://www.gameskidsplay.net/GAMES/other_games/thumb_wrestling.htm
• Wikipedia's article cites no sources. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thumb_wrestling Ok...I know, Hermione Granger would not approve of this as a source...

Suitably chastened, Isis concedes, and clarifies: "stealth thumb is for home use only." However, stealth thumb is not technically "cheating" according to these sites, because it only involves use of the thumb.

Stealth thumb

In the film version of Tank Girl, Tank Girl(Lori Petty) and Jet Girl (some dark-haired woman...OMG! It's Naomi Watts!) are trapped by a group of superkangaroo killer/soldiers and imprisoned in a very uncomfortable-looking room full of bowling balls.

Public domain image by S Chua.

Most people might whine about this treatment, but not Tank Girl. She settles down into a nice thumb wrestling match... fun.

Did you ever thumb wrestle? Probably. I mean, who hasn't? Anyone with a thumb can do it...if they understand the rules.


Enos the space chimp, who, like most primates, had four thumbs. Probably he was too busy doing astronaut things to thumb wrestle. Public domain in the United States (US) because was made by the US Federal Government under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the US Code.

Of course, the question then becomes, "how do I win against a larger and stronger opponent?

The answer:

"Stealth thumb"

Stealth thumb works by "cloaking" the thumb, rather like a Romulan "warbird" or the Klingon "bird of prey."

[mandatory digressio] Hmmm...perhaps this whole "bird" thing explains why the Federation ships are not cloakable...they're all like "DC class cruiser" and not named after an animal at all.

Getting back to "stealth thumb;" however, you simply cloak the thumb, by "sneaking" it down and around the other thumb. This causes your opponent to laugh at your ridiculousness because cloaking isn't real. Then, when his/his guard is down, you strike... ha HA!

Yes, you have to say "ha HA!"

This is a procedure, after all.

The honey lamb

In Terms of Endearment, we see that very contentious relationships between family members (and, for some reason, astronauts) can be, in fact, quite endearing. It's a bit surprising that such small items as neck ties and convertible tops can cause such emotional upheaval and connectedness. But, of course, that's a movie, and movies are not like real life.

....or are they?

When I think about the old days at my grad school dorm, which had once been a convent building, it does seem that that little things are more memorable than the big ones. I don't remember my classes with much clarity, or my grades, but I do remember the evening that my friend informed that that girls were stupid because I made fun of his radishes.



Turnips--closely related to the radish. Photo by Peter Presslein, used under Gnu license.


No, they were real radishes. With salt. And quite nice looking for radishes, which are a vegetable that I don't really care for, although they are usually better than salsify, which looks a bit scary before it's peeled.

...but I digress...

Terms of endearment can, in fact, be rather, well...endearing.

Take for example the honey lamb. What a sweet term of endearment, and that's even without the honey bear...which is also pretty cute, even after it's empty.


Sheep, with lambs, grazing on the south lawn of the White House c. 1918 Public domain image.

A good friend and expert in AI and endearing behavior told me that the empty honey bears lead the good recycling to a happy place.


A honey bear by Aaron Siirila (not the plastic kind). published under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike License v. 2.5:http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-sa/2.5/


I wonder what the honey lambs do?