"First introduced in 1962, the Peanut Butter Floor (Pindakaasvloer) is a conceptual artwork covered with a thick layer of peanut butter."

"The humorous, absurd nature of the work raises questions like 'is this art?' and 'am I allowed to find this beautiful?,' reflecting [the late Dutch artist and comedian Wim T.] Schippers’ belief that art does not necessarily have to be logical or useful, it may as well 'be absurd – just like life itself – and that is precisely what makes it worthwhile.' Rather than exhibiting the preserved floor from 1962, the installation is recreated each time according to the artist’s precise instructions.... 'it requires 15.6 kilos of smooth peanut butter (not chunky) per square meter, no one should stand or lie on the peanut butter floor, the peanut butter should be applied as smoothly and monotonously as possible, and the work should not be approached with any educational purpose.'..."

From "390kg of peanut butter cover rotterdam gallery floor, celebrating humor and absurdity" (designboom).

Here's the Wikipedia page for Wim T. Schippers, who died last month at the age of 83. Excerpt: " During the 1960s, he worked mostly as a visual artist, associated with the international Fluxus-movement. As a television writer, director, and actor he was responsible for some of the most notable and controversial shows on Dutch televisions from the 1960s to the 1990s, creating a number of lasting characters and creating terms and expressions which entered wide usage. In addition, he voiced the characters of Ernie and Kermit the Frog on Sesamstraat, the Dutch version of Sesame Street."

And: "Schippers' art work is praised for its sense of humor; when a dozen journalists stood pensively around the peanut butter platform, Schippers cried out, 'Isn't this fantastic! We're all watching peanut butter!'"

"In 2011 the museum had problems with a 4-14m installation called Peanut Butter Platform by Wim T Schippers."

"Unsuspecting visitors stepped in the thick layer of peanut butter smeared on the gallery floor at least three times. They were given a clean-up bill."

From "Child damages €50m Rothko in ‘unguarded moment’ at museum/The abstract painting will undergo restoration works after it was scratched at the Boijmans Van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam" (London Times).

If the peanut butter people had to pay for peanut butter "clean-up," does that mean the parents will pay for the restoration needed after this "number of visible scratches in the unvarnished paint layer... caused by a child who scratched the underside of the work in an unguarded moment"?

"Scratched the underside"... I'm trying to picture that. I'm guessing the child did not scratch the front surface or the back of the painting, but the bottom edge of what was an unframed painting.

I ask Grok: "Did Rothko leave paintings unframed and paint the edges (the part 90° from the surface plane)?"

Answer: "Yes, Mark Rothko often left his paintings unframed and painted the edges of the canvas (the sides at 90° from the surface). He typically wrapped the paint around the edges to create a seamless, immersive experience, emphasizing the painting as an object rather than a framed window. This approach complemented his large-scale, abstract works, where the edges were integral to the viewer's encounter with the color fields. However, practices varied slightly depending on the piece and period, with some works later framed for exhibition or preservation purposes."

Perhaps the child was fascinated by the seamless, immersive experience and became a tad too immersed.

AND: Astoundingly, Rothko painted a peanut butter sandwich!

Peanut butter is a liquid.

I'm reading "Don’t Try to Board a Plane with Peanut Butter/Sticky and solid as it may seem, the spread is technically a liquid" (The Atlantic).

The author, Ted Heindel, a mechanical engineer who studies fluid flows, explains why it made sense for the TSA to subject a jar of Jif to the 3.4-ounce rule about "liquids." It may seem wrong, but how much do you really know about what is a liquid?

"[Matthew] Perry describes carrying his top teeth to the dentist in a baggie in his jeans pocket."

"(He bit into a slice of peanut butter toast and they fell out, he writes: 'Yes, all of them.')... He recalls the time Jennifer Aniston came to his trailer and said, 'in a kind of weird but loving way,' that the group knew he was drinking again. 'We can smell it,' she said — and, he writes, 'the plural "we" hits me like a sledgehammer.' Another time, the cast confronted him in his dressing room. Perry also drops a sad bombshell about his onscreen wedding: 'I married Monica and got driven back to the treatment center — at the height of my highest point in "Friends," the highest point in my career, the iconic moment on the iconic show — in a pickup truck helmed by a sober technician."'"

From "The One Where Matthew Perry Writes an Addiction Memoir/In 'Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,' the actor gets serious about sobriety, mortality, colostomy bags and pickleball" (NYT).

"Her daughter, Mary Clementine, who moved in to help as the disease progressed, said she and her brother laughed out loud when their mother told them she was working on a cookbook."

"'It will have four pages: P. B. And. J.,' she said. Peanut butter sandwiches with jelly or honey were such a mainstay when she was touring that Neil Young, whom she opened for in the 1970s, still teases her about it by sending texts that just say 'peanut butter.'"

From "For Her Swan Song, Linda Ronstadt Turns to Recipes/In 'Feels Like Home,' the singer, her voice taken by a form of Parkinson’s, tells her story through the border dishes of her Arizona youth" (NYT).

Some very touching photographs at the link.

"The most prosaic of routines can now deliver delight. Like a bona fide night of restful sleep. Or a prolonged moment of enriching silence. Or, say, the leather chair..."

"... that Al Jirikowic, 68, an art critic and former Adams Morgan bar owner, now sits in five hours a day because there’s nowhere to go. The Churchill, as his throne is known, is where Jirikowic meditates, contemplates the end of civilization and figures out what to eat for lunch. Whatever the case, he’s comfortable. 'I’m thankful I can sit here and space out,' he said. 'You learn to like your solitude. If you don’t, you go nuts.'" 

From "A comfy chair, a locked door, an old record. Covid Thanksgiving inspires new reasons for gratitude" by Paul Schwartzman (WaPo). 

I love the photo of Jirikowic, sitting in "The Churchill," with all his junk strewn about, especially...

Peanut butter with a spoon. When you not only resist masking up and venturing out to the store but you don't even want to hoist yourself out of the chair and trudge to the refrigerator. You don't even want to spread the pasty goo on crackers. You just spoon it right into your mouth. Don't you?

Peanut butter's important. It's got its own tag on this blog. Here's a post with that tag from almost exactly 8 years ago that has some good resonance in the aftermath of the election. It's about a WaPo article titled "A detached Romney tends wounds in seclusion after failed White House bid." From the article:

Gone are the minute-by-minute schedules and the swarm of Secret Service agents. There’s no aide to make his peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches. Romney hangs around the house, sometimes alone, pecking away at his iPad....

At least Trump gets to hang around the White House, and if he's lonely and tending his wounds, he could peck away at his iPad and wield the power that's still the greatest in the world. Is he despondent and detached? Or does he have hope — the audacity of hope?

Political betting markets still give Trump a >10% chance, both nationally and in several states where *results have been certified*. As I've said before, it's a bit alarming there are so many delusional people out there that the market equilibrium is this detached from reality. pic.twitter.com/SiKXccMvE8

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 26, 2020

What's a secret ingredient for chili that most people wouldn't think of?

I just thought of: peanut butter.

I googled my question and found "7 Ingredients You Wouldn’t Think to Put In Your Chili, But Definitely Should," and damned if peanut butter isn't one of the 7 things.

Got to get more creative!

AND: Here's "10 Secret & Bizarre Chili Ingredients—Here's the Best" and, again, peanut butter is one of them.

Outrageously inaccurate headline at The Washington Post: "'It’s embarrassing to the kids': Students who owe lunch money will only get a cold jelly sandwich, district says."

I talked about this headline with Meade for about 10 minutes before I read the text of the article. I was saying things like... What do you think a school should do about kids who are not qualified for free lunch but just don't have any money to pay for lunch? They  show up and say they're hungry. What if you just give them a jelly sandwich? After much talk, I took the position that it needs to be a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Just a jelly sandwich is kind of mean — though it's not that bad if they also get milk — so make it peanut butter and jelly and it's fine. Meade considered letting them go hungry — they'll learn something — and I was proposing that schools just give free lunch to everyone — that's how we skew here at Meadhouse — but we both agreed that a peanut butter and jelly sandwich would be an unassailable solution.

Now, I'm reading the actual text of the article:

When students in Warwick, R.I., line up in the cafeteria next week, they’ll have no shortage of lunch options. Do they want a chicken Parmesan melt? Hummus and fresh vegetables with tortilla crisps? Pizza? Sweet potato tater tots? A burger? Something from the deli bar? Or, in the popular all-day-breakfast category, pancakes with a cheese omelet and a side of bacon?

But for some, making a decision won’t be necessary. Starting on Monday, any student with unpaid lunch debt will be automatically given a sunflower seed butter and jelly sandwich instead of hot food, the city’s school district announced on Sunday. Officials told the Providence Journal that the policy is necessary because the district is owed tens of thousands of dollars in lunch money, on top of contending with a budget deficit in the millions.

What?!! A sunflower seed butter and jelly sandwich instead of hot food! It was never a jelly sandwich at all. It was one-up on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich: a sunflower seed butter and jelly sandwich! Well, what is the problem??!

But critics argue that since children have no control over their parents’ finances, they shouldn’t be penalized or potentially subjected to public humiliation because of their inability to pay.

“I just don’t think it’s fair to hold the kids responsible,” Heather Vale, who has two children attending a middle school in the district, told WLNE. “I think it’s embarrassing to the kids because now everyone’s going to know why these children are receiving the lunch that they are.”

It's not that it's a bad lunch, it's that it's a stigmatizing lunch. Having a sandwich for lunch is humiliating, embarrassing? A sandwich is the classic American lunch. A sandwich is what I had for lunch at school every day throughout childhood. I brought it from home, like nearly every kid in the school. But in the framework of Heather Vale, it's embarrassing because the child is deprived of choices that were available to other kids. It seems to me, every kid is eating one lunch and the lunch a child is seen eating doesn't scream out this child is eating this lunch because he had no other choice. So how can it be embarrassing?

Here's an idea for the deep empaths of the Vale variety. Make a nut butter and jelly sandwich for your child, wrap it up and put it in a bag, and send the little darling to school with it. If the kids with conscientious parents are eating sandwiches too, they'll provide camouflage for the the kids with school-imposed sandwiches. And here's another idea for you empathetic parents: Pool the money that you're saving by not buying school lunch, and see if you can accumulate the amount that will eliminate the tens of thousands of dollars in shortfall, and then donate it to your lovely city of Warwick, which has been patient with your deadbeat neighbors so long and has been charitably handing free lunches to kids who are not even low-income enough to get in the free-lunch program.

Anyway, I'm irked about the headline. I spent a lot of time thinking about how bad it was to offer a child a mere jelly sandwich as a lunch, but that was not the case at all. There's so much difference between a jelly sandwich and a sunflower seed butter and jelly sandwich. Fake news!

ALSO: It's funny to say "cold jelly sandwich." No one wants a hot jelly sandwich. There's just this idea of "hot lunch." You see that in the phrase "a sunflower seed butter and jelly sandwich instead of hot food." But what is important about hot food for lunch — or for any meal, really? This is a separate issue, the emotional meaning of hot food. I'll just gesture at it for now.

IN THE COMMENTS: I am informed that I am out of step with the times: You can't have peanut butter in school anymore. Of course, that's why it's sunflower seed butter. And note that I did say, "Make a nut butter and jelly sandwich." Make a nut butter sandwich that's not the dreaded peanut.

Is Trump's "Harvest Box" program serious or is he trolling us?

I can't believe this! Look, it's Glenn Thrush — remember him?¹ — at the NYT:

Under a proposal in the president’s budget many participants in the program would be given half their benefits in the form of a “Harvest Box” full of food preselected for nutritional value and economic benefit to American farmers. The cache of cheaper peanut butter, canned goods, pasta, cereal, “shelf stable” milk and other products would now be selected by the federal government, not by the people actually eating it.

Peanut butter?! Isn't that the tell? If there's one thing some people can't eat, it's peanuts. But Thrush isn't quoting from the proposal. He may have come up with the idea of leading the list with peanut butter — cheaper peanut butter — as a way to nudge us to think the idea is — figuratively and literally — nuts.²

Democrats claimed the plan shackled the poor while business groups, led by big food retailers, would stand to lose billions of dollars in lost SNAP business. ...

In reality, administration officials on Tuesday admitted that the food-box plan — which the president’s budget director Mick Mulvaney compared to the Blue Apron grocery delivery service — had virtually no chance of being implemented anytime soon....

You've got to give them some credit for thinking outside the box and coming up with the idea of a box. There's something charming about that.

And I kind of love the optimism in thinking you could solve all the logistical problems: who's allergic to what, who's on a weight-loss diet, who's lactose intolerant, who's incapable of cooking, what to do when people are away from home (or homeless), how to teach people to go through the steps of cooking oatmeal or beans.

Can't computers be programmed to know what everyone needs and wants? Can people be programmed to want and need what the government puts in boxes? Will the Russians hack the computers? Who needs the Russians when our own government is this creepy?

Creepy?! No! It's wholesome as hell! It's like some 19th century charity mission, like: Beth quietly... filled her basket with odds and ends for the poor children, and went out into the chilly air with a heavy head and a grieved look in her patient eyes....

“I don’t think there’s really any support for their box plan. And, I worry that it’s a distraction from the budget’s proposal to cut SNAP by some 30 percent. That’s the real battle,” said Stacy Dean, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive Washington think tank. “The dangers are these other proposals to cut benefits. But all anyone is talking about today are the boxes.”

It is distracting! He knows how to flummox with a box...

_________________

¹ As The Hill reported last month: "Former New York Times White House correspondent Glenn Thrush on Tuesday will return to the newspaper after a two-month suspension... to cover 'the social safety net in the age of Trump'.... Thrush, 50, was suspended as the Times investigated allegations of sexual misconduct by four women as young as 23, including claims of groping and kissing."

² Yeah, I know. Legumes. So, what do you want — to ding me for misusing "literally"? You annoying pedant. You belong in Footnote 2.

"This is hilarious. I also love how divisive this video is. Someone really should just make a show with overly complicated foodhacks no one wants."

A top-rated comment on this (ludicrous) video:



I got there via Metafilter, where gloriouslyincandescent says "I'm just going to be sad for this lady when kraft PB singles come out, sell like hotcakes, and she makes nothing off it" and 41swans says "It has already happened, gloriouslyincandescent," linking here....

The Metafilter post got it from The New Yorker, "Lessons from the Worst Food Hack of 2017," and I've got to give the writer Hannah Goldfield credit for taking this sticky glob of internet goo and rolling it out into a form that may or many not be more aesthetically pleasing in the consumption phase....

There is reason to be skeptical, in general, of the food “hack,” with its dystopian Silicon Valley associations: the idea that we must constantly be driving toward making time to get more done, flawlessly, as if we’re not doing enough already. Having said that, I have a confession to make: I’m a glutton for kitchen tricks, kitchen gadgets—kitchen hacks, if you must call them that—whose appeal is older than humans themselves. After all, Jane Goodall launched her career by observing that chimps were doing something amazing in the proverbial kitchen, poking twigs into the openings of termite mounds, then pulling them out covered in insects, which they sucked off like chunks of grilled meat on a kebab. As for Homo sapiens, both Charles Darwin and the Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham have argued that the human ability to make fire and use it to cook is one of our fundamental attributes. What is the act of feeding ourselves in general, really, if not a series of hacks?

A texted conversation about comedy that got me looking up what jokes people told about Hitler during the Nazi Era.

Meade was off on a couple of errands. 1. To Whole Foods, for provisions and to return an off-tasting vat of freshly ground peanut butter, and 2. To Batteries + Bulbs — there is such a place — to get the weird battery that fits in the strange AT&T Uverse device that started screaming at us this morning. We'll join this texted conversation in the middle of things:

Meade: The checkout guy at WF was very nice to me

Althouse: About the p nut butter?

Meade: Asked if I had any plans for the day

Althouse: What did you say?

Meade: Fix a battery

Althouse: Did he use your straight line to make a good wisecrack

Meade:

N
Too nice to make wisecrack
Only the gals are allowed
Guys have to be nice
And smile
Wisecracks for guys might = rape

Althouse:

I remember when guys were able to be funny.
Now, “it’s not funny” has become an article of faith

This made me research the question what jokes were made about Hitler in Nazi Germany. I found this article in Spiegel from 2006 about a book by Rudolph Herzog called "Heil Hitler, The Pig is Dead" (published in English as "Dead Funny: Telling Jokes in Hitler's Germany"). From the article:

Hitler visits a lunatic asylum. The patients give the Hitler salute. As he passes down the line he comes across a man who isn't saluting. 'Why aren't you saluting like the others?' Hitler barks. '“Mein Führer, I'm the nurse,' comes the answer. 'I'm not crazy!'

That joke may not be a screamer, but it was told quite openly along with many others about Hitler and his henchmen in the early years of the Third Reich, according to a new book on humor under the Nazis.

But by the end of the war, a joke could get you killed. A Berlin munitions worker, identified only as Marianne Elise K., was convicted of undermining the war effort 'through spiteful remarks' and executed in 1944 for telling this one:

Hitler and Göring are standing on top of Berlin's radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to cheer up the people of Berlin. 'Why don't you just jump?' suggests Göring.

Meade: When Trump starts executing people for telling bad jokes, we'll know he's literally Hitler.

"... a Reese’s peanut butter cup gave her such a rush that it was... 'like an orgasm of pleasure in my brain.' Now... 'It’s just peanut butter and chocolate. What’s the big deal?'"

A bariatric surgeon tells us about one of his patients, in a NYT article (by Gina Kolata) that takes the position that the weight loss after the surgery is not due simply to the reduction in the size of the stomach. We're told that "scientists have discovered that it actually causes profound changes in patients’ physiology, altering the activity of thousands of genes in the human body as well as the complex hormonal signaling from the gut to the brain."

I can't help feeling skeptical. "Scientists" — what scientists? There's a huge financial interest in performing all this surgery, and there's a lot of pressure to reduce medical spending. Doesn't that skew the research?

It's a long article, but the actual science part is minimized. Here's the most technical part addressing my skepticism:

"Federal court officers have recommended a sentence of life in prison for a peanut company executive convicted of selling salmonella-tainted food..."

"... a move that attorneys on both sides called 'unprecedented' for a food-poisoning case."

"That recommendation is truly absurd," said Ken Hodges, an attorney on [Stewart] Parnell's defense team. "We hope the judge will see that Stewart Parnell never meant to hurt anyone. He ate the peanut butter himself. He fed it to his children and to his grandchildren."...

Parnell and his co-defendants were never charged with sickening or killing anybody. Instead prosecutors used the seven-week trial to lay out a paper trail of emails, lab results and billing records to show Parnell's company defrauded customers by using falsified test results to cover up lab screenings that showed batches of peanut butter contained salmonella....

Time to read "The Great Gatsby"!

"The jelly looked like pus, the peanut butter like God knows what and the bread was hard as a rock..."

So says Frank Hannibal, describing the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches in jail, where he was sent after he joked about his expensive peanut butter. When the TSA agent at LaGuardia Airport opened the jar, Hannibal said "They’re looking to confiscate my explosives."

What idiot doesn't know not to joke about bombs in the airport security line? Now, this guy is suing for $5 million.

This lawsuit looks like pus. There. Whatever judge gets stuck with it is welcome to use my joke against this phenomenally stupid man who purports to be a connoisseur of humor and peanut butter. Hannibal should have to reimburse the taxpayers for all the public money he's consumed and will continue to consume.

Ridiculous WaPo headline + photo combination.

"A detached Romney tends wounds in seclusion after failed White House bid"?

He doesn't look detached or wounded and he's obviously not in seclusion while riding a roller coaster. The text emotes:

Gone are the minute-by-minute schedules and the swarm of Secret Service agents. There’s no aide to make his peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches. Romney hangs around the house, sometimes alone, pecking away at his iPad and e-mailing his CEO buddies who have been swooping in and out of La Jolla to visit. He wrote to one who’s having a liver transplant soon: “I’ll change your bedpan, take you back and forth to treatment.”

The media never got Romney, did they? WaPo is presenting "I’ll change your bedpan" as abject and pathetic. Are they only pretending not to understand or does it truly escape them?

"Are peanut butter and jelly sandwiches racist?"

"A bizarre question, to say the least, but one that at least one school administrator is asking out in Portland, Oregon. Verenice Gutierrez, principal at Harvey Scott K-8 School, seems to believe that there are racial connotations associated with the common lunch-time meal."

"My grandmother believed in wearing a uniform. She would go to work every day wearing a very similar type of outfit."

"It might have been a very cropped cashmere sweater, a pair of pants – she always had a certain look to her...."

She really believed that we all have style and that we needed to find that. She didn’t talk a lot about herself, her legacy or how people will think about her, that wasn’t really her approach....

She would invite me sometimes to have lunch with her. And she’d set up a card table in the middle of the office and the two of us would sit down and have our lunch. She always had a peanut butter and marmalade sandwich and a long shot of scotch and we would always have ice-cream afterwards.

The grandmother was Diana Vreeland.

ADDED: What does your idealized grandma wear to work and eat for lunch?

"Two [University of Wisconsin—Stevens Point] students trapped in the New Zealand wilderness by a snowstorm survived for nine days..."

"... by rationing their supplies of peanut butter and rice - and warming themselves in hot springs."

A Meadhouse refrigeratorscape.

(Enlarge.)

ADDED: The longer view:



(Enlarge.)