Tag: tang

I didn’t have any trouble finding plague jokes on the internet; in fact, there were (in my opinion) far too many sites dedicated to them. The problem was that they were uniformly awful—racist allusions to “black” plague or “yellow” fever, juvenile tortured puns on body parts à la boob-onic plague, and even worse. Who knew the concept of the plague would be so unfunny? In all that morass, I only found one joke that I’m even willing to repeat, and that one’s not even funny:

Q. Why were the Egyptians optimistic after the Nile turned to blood?
A. Because it was "B-Positive"

(During my brief research, I discovered that the Bubonic Plague had largely spared the Norwegians in the 14th century, until a trader ship carrying wool out of England came down with the plague, killing everyone on board. The “Ghost Ship” eventually ran aground near Bergen, some of the rats escaped to the mainland, and brought the plague with them. Creepy stuff!) (Source)

II. Discomfort Food
Upon noticing my own diet’s tendency to drift towards certain kinds of “comfort foods” during this forced isolation, I tried performing some gastronomic calculus to discover the perfect comfort food. I researched the four basic comfort food groups: (1) fats, (2) carbs, (3) sugar, (4) salt, and the comfort-enhancing additives (or “comfort vitamins”, if you will):

   COMFORT VITAMINS

Vitamin            As found in
C1 = cocoa         chocolate
C2 = caffeine      coffee
C3 = capsaicin     chili peppers
C4 = creosote      anything charcoal-broiled

I thought a complete comfort food might be: macaroni and cheese made with home-made Cheetos pasta, cooked into waffles, then made into an ice cream sandwich with chocolate covered salted-caramel coffee ice cream inside.

I was going to try making this to test my hypothesis, but I was unsuccessful—I just couldn’t make Cheetos pasta. Every time I bought a bag of Cheetos (which took several days because of curbside pickup), I would eat them before I got around to making spaghetti.

(Cheetos pasta is makable, by stouter hearts than me. See here.) Any report on my own further experiments will have to wait until I get faster ingredient delivery, or stronger will power.

III. T.G.I.C.
I thought there might be some mileage in a “Thank God It’s Covid” post, playing off my old “Glad Game“ skills to expound on the up side of a global pandemic that especially preys on old people and the poor. Maybe new technologies developed, or new insights into the human condition, or new heights of human compassion and cooperation, could compensate for the huge suffering and loss.

Nope, in the light of day, this idea seemed pretty much dead on arrival. The benefits of intro­ducing the possi­bility of eating bats to the world (outside of Palau, who already knew) wasn’t even close to, say, the invest­ment of $288 billion by the NASA moon program that ultimately led to the development of Tang.

Many people have shown heroism on the front lines, but that heroism has been in a battle that could have been so much less dangerous if our political leaders had stepped up, instead of reacting in a way that displayed their moral cowardice, political avarice, and abdication of critical reasoning skills.

Huh. I don’t think I’m currently in the proper place to play the Glad Game.

Thanks for letting me post things that I admit aren’t good enough to post,
Dorn
7/01/2020