CSotD: Polite, meaningless phrases
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Retail tries to ruin my mood, but the coffeeshop down the road already has their pumpkin-spice latte sign out, so my mood was pre-ruined for the season.
I really like pumpkin pie. I like sweet potato pie more, because it tends to have more texture, but it's also considerably more elusive, I guess because it's a black thing and I don't live in a particularly diverse area.
I first had sweet potato pie at a Mahalia Jackson's Fried Chicken place in South Bend when I lived in a neighborhood that was also not particularly diverse, but going the other direction.
Mahalia's went out of business and Popeye's in the closest chain I've found, but I only see Popeyes on the Interstate and in major airports, where they don't bother to make their sweet potato pie available.
Besides, Popeye's offers "Cajun Rice" instead of "dirty rice" and no greens at all, so, as a soul food outlet goes, you can't expect much.
In any case, I like that combination of spices whether it's mixed into pumpkin or sweet potato but I don't want it mixed into my coffee fergawdsake or most of the other stuff it gets mixed into this time of year.
I also like maple syrup and I don't want that in my coffee and I also like baba ganoush and I like green curry paste, which ditto and ditto.
As Cooper suggests, the whole "pumpkin spice" thing is out of control, and I guess what surprises me is that it keeps coming back, year after year.
Smart marketing on the part of the Pumpkin Spice Cartel. If teramisu and creme brulee had been limited to seasonal releases, we'd probably still hear people rhapsodizing over those foodie fads.
While sipping Cosmos.
Speaking of Popeye …
Thimble Theater has been starting up a new storyline and it's pretty clear that Popeye is taking over the place. He and Castor and Olive each got a major payout after their last adventure, and Popeye wants to give his away by establishing a "One Way Bank" where people can take out money without putting any in.
At this stage (1931), Segar is still playing with Popeye as a tough guy and also a nitwit, with Castor Oyl as his straightman. In the last adventure, Olive turned into a pretty tough moll, and I want to see how that plays out, because I previously only knew her as a quintessential damsel in distress.
I enjoy all the Vintage Strips, some, like Rip Kirby, for adventure and good art, others, like Radio Patrol, for their camp value, but watching the evolution of this classic is in a category of its own.
Speaking of restaurants …
Mr. Boffo jokes of eating where it wouldn't cost management a lot to comp you on your meal, because "There ya go" is pure diner talk.
If you want to step things up a little and try for a more expensive free meal, find a place where they offer this deal if the waitress fails to say "Enjoy." I've been ordered to enjoy meals that cost up to $50 per each. ("per each" being a free bonus gratuitous add-on)
I worked for a time at a place where we served roast beef au jus, and one of the tasks we were regularly assigned was to make the au jus, which sounds Irish or possibly involving citrus fruit but mostly consisted of bouillion powder because it was bouillion or, if we didn't add enough water, consomme.
I was a cook there and so have no idea whether people were told "there ya go" or ordered to enjoy. And, being a cook, I didn't really care.
Even at that level of restauranteurization, that's how cooks are.
Come back here in the kitchen and ask for pumpkin spice. Go ahead.
Wet enough for ya?
Matt Davies notes that weather has become a little more complex in recent years, and I'd add, not all that recent.
I knew a guy who was a meteorologist in the Army Air Force during WWII, when the highest of tech involved sending up weather balloons. He said they noticed that the balloons went up to a certain height and then would suddenly take off laterally at a relatively high speed.
They theorized that, as the pressure decreased, tiny holes opened up in the expanding balloon and pushed it off. Then they developed airplanes that could reach that altitude and discovered the jet stream.
It's also starkly, grimly relevant to note that, when Galveston was all but destroyed by a hurricane in 1900, predicting weather was largely a matter of taking barometric readings and getting telegraphs from other cities. Since there was no ship-to-shore radio yet, weather coming in from the ocean was largely (literally) uncharted.
Galveston's weather bureau relied on information from ships that came into port and some communication from Cuba, and they did well to only lose 6,000 lives in a city of 35,000. That link is chilling, though fascinating, stuff, as is this one.
Those old days set the public up with an acceptance that the weatherman is only guessing and is rarely right, which persists mostly, I think, because people take note of the misses without marking the hits, and also fail to listen to the disclaimers offered.
And, as John Branch notes, are quite willing to disbelieve what they don't want to hear in the first place.
As noted a few days ago, people persist in thinking that a 100 year flood only happens once in a century, which is a good reason to offer percentages of likelihood rather than misleading terms like "100 year flood."
Though I'm not sure there's much point in giving your audience percentages of likelihood either, given how much they piss away trying to win impossibly improbable lotteries.
Those are billions of dollars spent in 2014.
Or, to use the technical term, flushed down a rat hole.
Now here's your moment of historical zen:
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