Strength in numbers

“Planning to eat at Finnigan’s Wake on a recent Tuesday night, Albert DiPietro took a six-mile detour from the North Side restaurant’s front door to his table. He’s among some 50 people who gather at a Pittsburgh area restaurant each week to first run and then sit down for dinner. The group, People Who Run Downtown, never goes to any place more than once a year. The group visits 52 restaurants a year and has been to more than 230 restaurants over the years.”

Now, at this point I’m sure you’re all thinking, “Wow, I can’t believe he eats that stuff.” Plenty of people already have. But let me tell you, I’m eating better than I ever have before. These emergency rations are great. I get a main course, some fruit, dessert, and some crackers. It really is a whole meal. Compare that to what I make when left to my own devices, which is pretty much, “Find something that looks like it hasn’t gone bad yet. Boil. Eat.”

Every time I open an emergency ration I think, “This is so much more complicated than anything I would’ve made for myself.” I’m not kidding here. They sometimes use two, even three vegetables to make the main course. Novel! Now let me make it clear that this is in addition to pasta or rice. And putting crackers and some jelly on the side for later? Gods, if only I had such culinary ambition. I would be like a cook among men. Now if only they could make one with fried chicken and French fries. Or maybe hash browns. That’d be pretty good.

I’m going to be sorry when that tornado with my name on it finally comes around. I’ll probably die of starvation, or maybe I’ll just run out of electrolytes without this drink to keep me going. But until then, it beats getting scurvy.

• YouTube - MENU FOODS WILL GET AWAY WITH POISONING MY KITTY CAT
  “MENU FOODS & IAMS KNOWINGLY DISTRIBUTED POISONED FOOD & KILLED MY KITTY CAT. IT WAS BETTER TO MAKE MONEY AND KILL OFF A FEW ANIMALS (WITH AN APOLOGY),THAN DESTROY THE CONTAMINATED FOOD.”
  (tags: menufoods recall poison cat iams)
• YouTube - Menu Foods killed my cat
  “Last few days of my cat’s life. Sorry, audio capture did not work. You can see how I had to give her water. On the last day I put her outside so she could enjoy the day, and that’s when she started Cheyne-Stokes (that’s when they only take a breath a few
  (tags: menufoods cat poison)
• YouTube - Pet Food Recall Bella Getting Fluids poison cat food
  “Bella has suffered kidney damage (proven through blood tests) due to the poisoned pet food that is being recalled. We have to give her subcutaneous fluids every day for a week, and then have more blood work to see how bad the damage is.”
  (tags: cat menufoods poison)
• YouTube - Pet Food Recall and my cat Mao
  “I had my cat Mao put to sleep on 02/28/07 because of kidney failure. I had been feeding him Iams Select Bites in Gravy daily. I learned of the Menu Foods recall three weeks later. Iams was one of the recalled foods.”
  (tags: cat poison menufoods iams)
• Pet Food Recalls | List of Foods | 2007
  (tags: pet food recall menufoods)
• YouTube - Pet Food Recall
  “Here it is my Baby I dont know how long he is going to stay with us… vet gave us only 5% of chance to him to survive it I miss him! I need him! He is my Baby! Some people dont realize how important they are in ours life.”
  (tags: dog menufoods poison)

Who invented noodles? No, seriously, think about this for a second. Somebody at the dawn of time said, “Okay, we’ve got this wheat. Which is good. I like the wheat. But it would be better if we ground it up, added some kind of binding agent, and then formed it into long strings.”

It worked out pretty well, in my opinion. I wonder what that person would have invented if he or she were alive today? I think curly fries are perhaps one logical extension of the technology, but we already figured that one out.

It’s a conundrum.

One of my friends told me about the closing of a restaurant in Pittsburgh affectionately known as The O. I meant to blog about it at the time, but put it off because I didn’t quite know what to say. There’s never a good time to say these things, or an easy way to say them, so I’ll just go ahead and speak my mind.

I don’t know if anybody who reads this blog has ever been to The O. I only went once, over a year ago. It was a hot dog place to end all hot dog places. They served hot dogs, hamburgers, assorted sausages, pizza… The list went on and on. It was a operating monument to greasy food. And the fries. Oh, the fries. Plentiful doesn’t begin to describe it. You all probably remember the old McDonald’s Super-Size. Maybe you think it’s pretty big, possibly even too big. But believe me when I tell you that the regular large, not even the X-tra large, dwarfed the Super Size. I hesitate to even compare them. The scale of The O’s large defies description. You really had to see it to believe it. Imagine a regular restaurant’s big basket of fries. Got that in your head? Good. Now take that, and pile fries in it until you’ve got a good six inches. That’s the ballpark I’m talking about here. I sorely doubt any single person could have comfortably eaten it, and isn’t that how much a "large" size should really supply?

Unfortunately, I don’t live anywhere near Pittsburgh. I always knew that my chances of ever getting the chance to go back to The O were slim to nil. But you know, that was okay. I felt better just knowing that it was out there, that bastion of grease and boiling oil holding steady against the salad-mongers who invade our grocery stores by the day.

Alas! I shall miss The O. What could ever replace it?

I’ve noticed some of the blogs I read getting excited about Coke Blak. It’s a coffee-infused soda that Coca-Cola will be bringing to various markets in 2006. People are talking about it like it’s a new thing that nobody’s tried. They’re wrong. Those of us who lived in the Philly area between 1994 and 1996 remember Pepsi Kona. To geeks, for whom soda and coffee are staple foods and caffeine is a vitamin, it seemed like the greatest idea since sliced bread. Boy were we wrong. It was disgusting. Revolting. Putrid. If Coke Blak sucks, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Update 10/18/06:I tried Blak a couple months ago. It’s drinkable, but certainly not good enough to justify the high price, especially when it comes in dinky 8 oz. bottles.

I know I blogged about this ages ago, but it’s worth revisiting. After all the red stave versus blue state shenanigans, it’s nice to fight over something that really matters - soda versus pop. (Thanks, Jimmy Akin)

Thou shalt say “soda”, not “pop”. Thus saith the Funky One. Here endeth the lesson.

This is an interesting article about how geological conditions affect the chemistry of beer-making. At first, I thought it might be a joke, since the author’s last name is Maltman.

I have a night class on Tuesdays that is infinitely more bearable when I have some coffee in me right before the class starts. I noted with pleasure that Bruegger’s Bagels is now using only fair trade coffee at their stores now.

Traditionally, coffee beans are bought from farmers at a dirt-cheap price, and then undergo a formidable mark-up on their pilgrimage to Starbucks or Folgers. Fair trade beans gives the farmers more of that mark-up, and a share in one of the world’s most profitable cash crops.

Some good news we all could share, regardless of our party affiliation at the moment!