"I have a perfect record step-wise, and am not about to break it for a raging pandemic. I can’t! If I’m out after midnight when the streets are deserted, I fail to see how I’m hurting anyone. It’s definitely creepy though, the emptiness. If I were driving through the city, looking for someone to rob, I’d definitely choose myself — who wouldn’t? I’m small. I’m alone. I’m maybe fast for a 63-year-old but that’s not saying much. A loris in a full body cast is fast for a 63-year-old. That’s why I decided a few weeks back to leave my wallet at home, and just take a twenty. That way I can be robbed, but not of my hard-to-replace identity card with a picture of a weary tortoise on it."
Anyway, I wanted to read this so much that I subscribed to the London Times — just for this one thing. Now, I'm exploring the London Times, and it's going to be one of my regular stops.
We’re proud to celebrate inclusivity for all gender identities and expressions. In partnership with NCTE, we’re giving away special edition Pronoun Packs and encouraging everybody to share their pronouns with #Pride today and every day. pic.twitter.com/z91M2ubQ3k
ADDED: The #1 thing you know about Oreos is that they are objects given to children that will cause children to discover how to transcend convention and proceed in that direction and to prefer it and never go back. They twist the chocolate discs, break the bond between them, and go right at the sweet cream center. They lick the broken apart cookie and thereafter resist the constrained biting the intact 3-tiered arrangement. This has been known and observed for decades. This is and has always been The Story of Oreo. As such, this new development is consistent with a long-term narrative.
But correction fluids are not only surviving—they appear to be thriving, with Wite-Out sales climbing nearly 10 percent in 2017, according to the most recent public numbers. It’s a mystery of the digital age....
Yeah, Mike Nesmith's mother... Liquid Paper... We needn't go back into that history. I'll just say Wite-Out is to Liquid Paper as Oreo is to Hydrox. Back to the question at hand: Why are people still buying a lot of correction fluid?
Even as paper sales dip, up-market stationery is one sub-segment that is expected to grow, thanks to a Millennial affection for personalized stationery. Tia Frapolli, president of NPD’s office-supplies practice, pointed to bullet-journaling and hand-lettering as paper-based trends that could breathe some life into correction fluids....
[T]he attraction to the material is the same as any other hand-made or small-batch product: The physical act of covering up a mistake is imperfect but more satisfying than simply hitting backspace. There’s also a poignancy to a screwed generation gravitating toward Wite-Out.
You can’t erase the past anymore than you can erase a printed typo or written error—but you can paper it over and pretend it didn’t happen.
That's interestingly written. I should name the author: David A. Graham.
It should be noted that correction fluid is useful aside from the written word. It's a standard art supply for those who use pen on paper — especially if you don't begin with a pencil draft (to be erased after it's inked in) and if the work will be distributed as a reproduction (such as a comic strip).
Wite out is the horrible, foul smelling goop made by Bic for making small corrections to typing and letters. It's not archival, isn't terribly opaque, bleeds and isn't easy to draw over.
WHITE-out is another word we cartoonists use for what is really a specialized guache for correcting ink drawings. It's super-opaque, has very high quality pigment, is archival, and when applied at the right thickness can be drawn over almost (though not quite) as well as paper....
Here — you can buy the recommended Deleter White-Out. At Amazon, where it looks like this:
That was the one cookie we always had at my house when I was a child — because these were the cookies my father liked. There were other cookies — Hydrox, Oreo, Vanilla Wafers, Pecan Sandies, Scooter Pies — but the king of all cookies was the Devil's Food Square.
And I love the outdoor ethos of the commercial. These were clearly boys' cookies. Boys and grizzly bears' cookies.
And I have to give this my "logos" tag for that Nabisco logo (which turns into a cowboy on a horse and gallops off).
[I]t’s not like I didn’t know there were Oreo stouts. But I didn’t know there was going to be a packaged Oreo stout. It’s not the kind of thing to which Oreo’s parent company, Mondelez, would typically give its imprimatur. It’s the kind of beer a brewery would do as a taproom or event one-off, like The Bruery did with its Pure Oreo Black Tuesday variant back in 2014. You run it through a Randall infusion kit; you don’t run it by TTB for label approval.... Now, I’m no lawyer. I can’t say if it’s kosher with Mondelez that Prairie used the word “Oreo” on the label....
The first impression of Double Dunk was that the body of this beer was pastry stout legit, oily thick and rich. The second impression was that the 11.9% alcohol by volume was not shy.... And the third impression was that holy cow, this was actually a competently-made imperial stout that just happened to have a bunch of Oreos thrown into it....
The first page, breakfast at a café, knowing this is the day, March 19th, seems like a normal day, but do you remember knowing, this is it, this is the day....
The second page, while eating, lunch at Chin's, which had TVs on the news, and the fortune cookie said, "Those who laugh loud also cry hard":
The third page, I'm home, watching the television as the President informs us of what millions of Americans are doing, quietly, inside our head:
The fourth page, I'm still watching TV, and the President inspires readiness....
"... how to handle marijuana-adjacent sales as more states have legalized the drug. Girls who wheel carts full of cookies are generally free to travel where they please with their parents, even if that path takes them past marijuana shops, but there are often stricter rules around where to set up booths or stands. There are no nationwide policies related to marijuana dispensaries. Each local organization sets its own policies."
Should the marijuana business be allowed to appropriate the wholesomeness of Girl Scouts for its own self-promotion? But I'd like to talk about how the cookie business has appropriated the Girl Scout brand all these years. It's not as though cookies are good for you.
Feel free to give me a present via PayPal — click here — or give yourself a present via Amazon and use the Althouse Portal.
And thanks to all who've supported this blog over the past year, both with direct PayPal contributions and Amazon shopping.
And this is an open thread, so talk about anything that's not already covered in the recent posts. No need to chat about cookies or discuss my birthday. Birthdays are actually pretty boring once you're not a child anymore and if you're on Facebook and are continually prompted to notice birthdays. I observe that I am older, ever older, as usual, for everybody and everything. It's rather dull! I'm more interested in my Bloggiversary, which comes up in 2 days. The blog is a teenager.
And please use this link — which is also always in the sidebar — if you feel the urge to shop at Amazon. Here are some cookie cutters in different sizes, for making "gingerbread children" and "gingerbread parents."
... we've made the adjustment to reality (after the Fake Monochrome Café yesterday). Thanks to the reader who believed me that the shirt was really brown (not blue) and manipulated the photograph into the truth.
And also true is that it's "Cyber Monday" — just another cyber Monday — and you might be shopping, so I want to nudge you to use The Althouse Amazon Portal. Your humbly brown-clad blogger will now return to the eating of cookies.
It took a while before a note recipient took it seriously. Unsurprisingly, several ATM users regarded it as a joke and did nothing. But a man really was trapped inside (for hours). (NYT.)
It's like the ancient joke of getting a fortune cookie with the message "Help! I'm trapped in a fortune cookie factory."
“Help I’m Trapped in a Factory” is a phrasal template used in satirical pleas for help claiming to be stuck inside a factory that produces the object containing the message.... The exact origin of the phrasal template is unknown.
I think it's the fortune cookie joke.
Since the mid 1950s, the bubble gum brand Bazooka Joe produced gum wrappers with messages written on the inside, some of which purportedly contained the message “Help! I’m trapped in a bubble gum factory!”
"I think it tests our ability to not want to numb out. There’s so many things that are hard to hear every day that you do want to have some Oreos. Like people say, what do you invest in during the Trump era? I feel like, Hostess Cakes. Most of us are just scared and eating ice cream."
Said Judd Apatow. He was talking Maureen Dowd, whom he treated to a meal of "spinach omelets with hash browns and hot sauce that he has picked up after dropping off his daughter at school."
I extract these details from the column because:
1. It's a somewhat charming, self-effacing confession that anyone might make: What's happening in politics seems horrible to me, so I comfort myself with the sweet, creamy foods of childhood.
2. Apatow is a big old powerful movie maker, so why is he being such a big baby? My guess is that his success lies in channeling the mundane reactions of young and powerless people, so it serves him well to relax into immature thinking patterns. It's creative, lucrative work for him. Easy work! What a lucky guy!
4. What kind of rich man entertains his NYT interviewer by serving her a take-out spinach omelet with hash browns and hot sauce? Take-out is bad enough, but a take-out omelet? I think an omelet is something you get out of the pan and onto the table in seconds or you just don't serve it at all. And then to make it spinach? What the hell are you trying to say? It would make more sense to serve Oreos and ice cream.
5. Has Maureen Dowd ever indicated her amenability to omelets? Back in February 2010, she forefronted an omelet served to her in a restaurant — so presumably she ordered it — in the presence of Harold Ford Jr. — or maybe it's only what he's eating — and she connected said eggs to the grossness of Harold Ford's feet:
Between bites of an egg-white garden omelet at a bistro in his Union Square neighborhood, Harold Ford Jr. defended himself on pedicures and flip-flops.
“I either run or try to play basketball every day,” he said. “I have severe athlete’s foot — feet. I get a foot scrub out of respect for my wife because getting into bed with what I have when I take my socks off isn’t respectful to anybody.”
I'm not reading that as an OK on omelets. I'm reading that as wafting methanethiol. And that was a high-tone, fresh-cooked, designed-for-a-lady egg-white garden omelet, not something that would be dumped into a styrofoam container to be called back to life with hot sauce.
He was doing an interview with Mumsnet — a website for British mothers — and the what's-your-favorite-cookie question is routine. Past answers include:
David Cameron was ("Oatcakes with butter and cheese"). Gordon Brown was ("Anything with a bit of chocolate"). As were Ed Miliband ("Jaffa Cake"), Nicola Sturgeon ("Tunnock's Caramel Wafer") and Nick Clegg ("Rich Tea if dunked. Hob Nobs if not").
You see the gentle, mum-friendly style other politicians have used. Corbyn said:.
"I'm totally anti-sugar on health grounds, so eat very few biscuits... But if forced to accept one, it's always a pleasure to have a shortbread."
The mums were displeased:
"That's the most miserable response to the biscuit question I've ever read," sighed one. "Forced to eat a biscuit you're politically opposed to."
Now it’s time (again) for the Family Circle Magazine Presidential Cookie Poll, a head-to-head cookie-baking challenge that has become a fixture of US presidential campaigns, even as some rail against it, characterizing it as a calcified indicator of lingering sexism in American politics.
The competition—in which the contender for Republican first lady pits her cookie recipe against one submitted to the magazine by the potential Democratic first lady, for readers to bake, taste, and vote upon—began as a response to an off-the-cuff remark Clinton made in 1992....
"I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life."
"Fulfill my profession" is such a funny way to put it. When someone speaks uses an expression that unnatural, you should ask what's the normal thing to say there, and that may show you why the unnatural expression happened. Here, "fulfill my profession" takes the place of "fulfill my ambition" or "fulfill myself."
AND: It's the spouse that offers the cookie recipe, so it should be Melania Trump versus Bill Clinton. But the Clinton campaign just submitted the same one that beat Barbara Bush's recipe in 1992 and they're not calling it Bill's recipe but "Clinton Family's Chocolate Chip Cookies." The Trump campaign submitted "Melania Trump's Star Cookies." Whether Melania bakes cookies, I don't know.
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