Content-Type: text/shitpost

A while back I wrote about the time I didn't eat the gizzards:

At some point I passed by a little restaurant in the middle of nowhere away from everything else, and since it was dinner time, I went in.

The special that day was chicken gizzards, which I've never had. But I wimped out and ordered a hamburger. Dammit. I was having an adventure, and when the adventure offered up a plot twist I said “No thanks, I've had enough.”

It would have been easy enough to get gizzards since then, they do sell them in stores. But the opportunity I'd missed was to have serendipitous gizzards: unexpectedly end up somewhere I'd never been, and have the gizzards be offered without any need for me to seek them out.

One nice thing about getting older has been to finish some of those projects I didn't complete when I was young. Well, it's taken decades, but the hand of fate offered me more gizzards, and this time I took them.

Last Saturday Lorrie was busy, and Toph wanted a midnight pickup from a party, so I decided to kill a couple of hours by taking the car for an unplanned later dinner somewhere before I picked her up. I ended up at Rudy's Tavern in Upper Darby. I've probably driven past Rudy's a hundred times, but I'd never been in.

Rudy's was hopping, clearly in the early throes of a big night. There was a DJ, folks playing pool, couples sitting at the bar, some people thinking baout dancing. Food at Rudy's is supplied by an elderly Chinese couple at a takeout window in the back. The offered dishes included the usual bar fare, some Chinese dishes, and various battered fried things… one of which was deep-fried chicken gizzards. And this time I did not wimp out.

Gizzards are tough and cartilaginous, fun to chew. Battered and fried, they were pretty good, accompanied well by cold Yuengling.

I thought about the time I'd been in the yakitori pub in Tokyo and had gotten batter balls with chicken joint cartilage at the center. This was better than that. If I were offered them again in a similar situation, I might order them again, especially if they were cheap and I was not very hungry.

Sounds like something a cartoon farmer would yell if they saw their cows getting out.

According to the New York MetrOpOlitan Museum of Art:

The pigeon-breasted silhouette favored in the first decade of the twentieth century was called the monobosom.

The orthography of “monobosom” is very curious. Its spelling, mOnObOsOm, strongly suggests space between at least two pairs of breasts — possibly even three — and cleavage is the very thing the monobosom was intended to eliminate.

For this reason, I prOpOse that from now on the monobosom should be referred to as a moonboom.

Last night I was making a frittata after midnight, and midnight brain suggested to me that I should make a pie of partidges and parsnips, seasoned with parsley.

I probably won't. And I'm not sure where to get the partridges anyway.

I want to ask Claude's advice about this, just to see what it will say. But I'm not going to, first because Claude does not have a butthole, and mainly because asking would probably get onto some list that nobody wants to be on.

…in order of suitability as designs for novelty butt plugs.

I think the bishop would be best, or at least the least awful.

Then pawn, queen, and rook in that order.

I'm not sure how to rank the king and the knight, they're both terrible for different reasons.

Your momma's a dispersion of Ugly colloidally suspended in a continuous lipid phase.

Q: Why is ‘Z’ the least common letter in English?

A: Because Polish got first choice.

It's not fair that there are people who want big bags under their eyes who can't have them because Philip Glass is monopolizing the entire supply.

I've annoyed a lot of people in my life, but here's something I said once that I think really stands out.

Someone said to me once “You know, you're not as smart as you think you are.”

I replied “I disagree. I think I'm exactly as smart as I think I am.”

If the Mormons don't want me to call them “Mormons” then they should come up with a name for themselves that doesn't require me to acknowledge that they are “saints”.

Me and the family have been on the road recently, and yesterday we saw a food-grade tanker truck in the next lane. I amused myself for a while speculating about what might be in it: Pudding? Cottage cheese? Guacamole? Hummus? Blueberry yogurt, with the fruit on the bottom? (That one got a laugh from Ms. 17.)

Well, probably not, but on looking it up I found some probably reliable lists of what does get shipped that way. From Kan-Haul's bulk liquid transport FAQ:

• Dairy products ( pasteurized milk, and cream)
• Alcohol products (gin, vodka, and wine)
• Juices (fruit juice and vegetable juice)
• Vegetable oils (canola oil and coconut oil)
• Syrups and other sweeteners (corn syrup, honey, and molasses)
• Sugar alcohols (mannitol and sorbitol)
• Vinegar (apple cider vinegar and distilled vinegar)
• Citrus products (citric acid solution and citrus fruit terpenes)
• Non-food products (essential oils and mineral oil)
• Additives and preservatives (beverage bases, caramel color, and natural and artificial colors)

I think the most amusing item on that list is the molasses. Or perhaps the honey. "There's been a crash on route 202! Send a truckful of graham crackers!" But a tomato juice spill could also be amusing. Amusing, rather than just horrible. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near after a canola oil mishap.

Still I guess the really interesting items are the ones not on the list because they are less commonly shipped. I was tempted to write to one of these shipping firms to ask for weird stories, but they have work to do. Still I can dream that maybe there is a tanker truck out there somewhere carrying 11,000 gallons of butterscotch pudding.

Aha, someone in this Quora thread mentioned hauling processed pumpkin pie filling. I am completely satisfied.

Are Salisbury and Salzburg sister cities? And if not, why not?

“In a signal handler, can I…”

“No.”

“You didn't let me finish the question!”

“The answer is still ‘no’.”

In Blue Highways, author William Least Heat-Moon states that that the town with the silliest name in the U.S. is Intercourse, Pennsylvania.

I disagree. My own nominee is French Lick, Indiana.

This article about finding drowned bodies with quicksilver-filled bread says:

A loaf of bread was then filled with “over two ounces of quicksilver,” then thrown into the water

I was annoyed that the original source said this, because I found it unclear. Is that two ounces by weight or by volume? If it were water it wouldn't matter, but quicksilver is 13.6 times as dense, and two fluid ounces weighs nearly a pound. Conversely, a two-ounce weight of quicksilver is only a few milliliters.

I guess it must be the second, smaller amount, because bread stuffed with a pound of quicksilver would sink quickly, and you need it to float to where the body is. Also quicksilver costs money.

Today I'm feeling happy about the phrase "all up in my grill". I think it means the same as "all up in my face" but substituting "grill" (cosmetic dental work) for "face" is more pungent and flavorsome.

I wrote a while back about the hilarious phrase "too dumb to pour piss out of a boot" which I feel is funny for a similar reason.

Specific is almost always funnier than generic. I wonder, is "all up in my grill" funnier if the person actually has a grill, or if they don't? Maybe both.

What if there were a Jehovah's Witness splindere sect that took the Tolkien legendarium as literally true?
Wouldn't that be something?

People like to have fainting fits to show off how horrified they are about pineapple pizza, or Hawai‘ian pizza (pineapple plus ham) but I think it's pretty good and those people need to get a grip or find a less silly hobby.

Today I was thinking, prosciutto is good with orange cantaloupe. Why not put them on pizza?

Not sure what you'd call it though. I think it needs a name that it catchier than “prosciutto and melon pizza”.

Reminder: Anyone can edit Wikipedia and make it better...

Well, anyone can try.

What famous actors have the oddest names?

Offhand, I think maybe Meryl Streep and Humphrey Bogart.

I just realized the parallel between the John Birch Society (“who the heck is John Birch?”) and the Horst Wessel song (“who the heck is Horst Wessel?”)

In both cases it's nobody in particular, and the more you look into why they canonized their particular guy, the less interesting it gets.

Is this a common pattern of fringe political groups? Right-wing fringe political groups?

I think I would write more thorough, more interesting annotations than most of the people who write annotated works of literature.

(Exception: Martin Gardner's annotated Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are better than I could do.)

A while back I suggested the following aphorism:

It's not enough to make the coffee, you also have to drink it.

I'm not sure what I had in mind at the time — maybe just that it seemed like it might be applicable to many situations — but I think a couple of good programming-related examples are:

1. It's not enough to write the automated tests, you also have to run them

and

1. It's not enough to have a disaster recovery plan, you also have to try it out