TheSnackHound

This is an embarrassing story, but I thought you would enjoy reading it.

Once I had a little fall.  There was a medflight waiting when the ambulance came.  Only, 911 misunderstood exactly what the emergency was.  They thought I was hit by a car and was trapped beneath it.  In reality, I was the one who hit the unassuming car.  With my head.   The car wasn’t moving.  It was parked, minding its own business.  I ended up falling under the car after it happened.   I was okay.   The ambulance and all that really wasn’t needed, but they told me they rather come and not be needed rather than not coming and someone dies.  An innocent bystander who only saw this all happen out of the corner of their eye was the one who alerted the authorities.

I was a little embarrassed knowing that the helicopter was waiting on the pad to burst into action if the opposite had actually been true. It was in another town, but could have gotten there in moments. I was unaware that there is actually a private air ambulance service that can be hired privately and doesn’t take away from the emergency stuff. In fact, they use it to transport patients for transplant surgeries, and to transfer patients between hospitals when an ambulance ride just isn’t practical. Afterall, sometimes there are rare conditions where one has to go to a regional hospital.   I would imagine a charity could have a fundraiser to fund a flight for someone in need whose condition their cause is about too.  Air Ambulance One is company that runs air flights.

Hmm….I wonder what the inflight menu choices are. If you are well enough to think about that, you probably don’t need to be airlifted. On the contrary, since the flights are more of less planned if you use the service and aren’t just scooped off your butt in a parking lot like I almost was, you will get catering! It only applies if, of course, your flight time runs over the normal time one would eat a meal. In otherwords, don’t consider it a theme restaurant.

At any rate, I am very glad that my little incident did not prevent someone who was in a life or death situation getting the help they needed! (And by the way, the person who owned the car never knew what happened. I didn’t make a dent!)

Marriage and Beyond is a pleasant blog about a couple in the Phillipines who are Reverand and Reverand’s wife at a church in Makati.  They have a sweet little 30 month old boy as well.  However, when I stumbled by the blog today, I found something very disturbing!  Go to Marriage and Beyond to check out what I am talking about.  I don’t want to spoil it.   The photo, that you will see there sort of brings up my curiosity of why the people at marketing companies think it is natural behavior for anthropomorphic food to appear to find the suggestion of eating others of their kind normal.  We had the M&M eating M&M’s, but at least I believe that the other M&M’s pointed this out to the one with the problem.  

Let’s not forget the Sproutwells.  I don’t understand why they apparently ordered salad, etc, and were veggies themselves.  I thought they would just consume minerals and water.  Than again, maybe their is a hierarchy to the vegetable food chain and some vegetables eat other vegetables just like some insects or mammals eat others that are in their phylum.   I wonder what vegans would think about that one.  

Of course, I would be remiss in all of the veggie vs veggie vs sausage man discourse to not to mention that sometimes plants (such as the Venus FlyTrap) eat insects.  To me, that is like plants getting their revenge against the insect kingdom.   They just decided they had enough with being stepped on, landed on and eaten.   Okay, I don’t think so, but it would appear a plausible theory.

“Over the years I got to be quite a connoisseur of soap. Though my personal preference was for Lux, I found that Palmolive had a nice, piquant after-dinner flavor – heavy, but with a touch of mellow smoothness. Life Buoy, on the other hand… YECCHH!”

-Ralphie Parker, A Christmas Story

One of my favorite holiday movies is A Christmas Story. One of my cousin’s children didn’t think that it was very credible, as who would wash someone’s mouth out with soap?  Of course, I was more than happy to inform them that I am quite knowledge about the subject, and it was known to exist into at least the late 70s and early 80s. It is nothing that you want to write in to the food column, that is for sure. Indeed, I think I said the “F” word and I think I would have been about five years old. My aunt cleaned out my mouth with Dial.

The taste doesn’t quite linger in my mind, but then that would probably be a good thing.  Of course, the act was merely symbolic, and the cruel concrete solution to a figure of speech.  It was like someone going to a chiropractor to look at their neck when their neighbor was being an idiot.   Dirty words didn’t hang out in one’s mouth, just waiting to come out, and in the meantime causing the mouth’s owner to have a very dirty one.  Soap was the sorbet of the mind, as the experience was supposed to be a palate cleanser giving you a clean slate.  On the contrary, dirty words hang out in the brain waiting for dispatch.  If you think about it, it would be technically more effective to send a little suds up one’s nose in hoping it would reach the brain.

After that, I don’t think I dared say it ever again, at least in front of my aunt.  In fact, I think that this particular incident was what made me into a little bit of a language prude.  I was the type of person that didn’t care what you said, but sure as heck didn’t swear.  That lasted until the second year in college when I just started letting it rip loose again.   Well, I was just using the language of the natives.  I was fitting in with my surroundings!

Perhaps the incident is why I gravitated towards the most bland and unadventurous diet during my childhood and early teen years.  Maybe it is not because I wasn’t exposed to many kinds of foods, but it was because my taste buds had been completely scrubbed off or damaged in some way by the soap incident.  Maybe I never ate sushi back then, not because it didn’t exist, but because I thought it all looked like little decorative soaps? Just maybe, like people can get clogged pores on their face, my tastebuds just got clogged with Dial.  Because my aunt had the sense to use white Dial soap because it went with more of the decor of her bathroom and didn’t leave a yellow mess like gold Dial soap, people thought the clogs were just spots of saliva or that I had frothed at the mouth versus looking like I had eaten crayons.

Maybe I should stop trying to pinpoint my strange childhood eating habits on a trauma and just admit that some foods are not particularly tasty to young kids, or that our family just wasn’t on the international culinary scene, but the working class midwestern cuisine scene.   I recall going to Denny’s and ordering toast with butter on the side, or ordering plain spaghetti with parmesan cheese, while the rest of the family ate all sorts of things that were colors other than white or beige or slightly yellow.

By the way, I didn’t like bananas except in banana bread.  The shade of yellow was just too colorful I guess.  I should have clarified and classified my food as “various shades of off-white unless it came to KoolAid, popsicles, oranges, or chocolate.”  I ate apples a lot, too, which you may argue are a definite hue (usually red, but green for Granny Smith), but you cannot argue that once sliced open the inside is….off-white!  You may say, depending on the species, it has a slightly green, pink, or yellow cast, but the story remains the same!

To wrap it up, I am glad that most people don’t seem to consider washing one’s mouth out with soap a reasonable nor effective means of punishment these days.  Perhaps that is why that when you go to the store today, you do not see bar soaps, dishwashing liquid, and then the other option being “soap on a rope.”  Now, the bars are still there, but many of them have been replaced by all sorts of pumps, bottles, and squeeze bottles of liquid soap.  THIS IS NOT THE SAME AS DISHWASHING LIQUID.  Now, that is in another aisle altogether.   My point being, it is not just the marketing geniuses convincing you that you must have various kinds of soap in the same bathroom or kitchen for the discerning guest, but that the need for soaps and soaps on a rope for cleaning peoples mouths out have dwindled.   If you had to use it for mouths too, the soap would be used twice as quickly, but is now going the way of the DoDo bird.Well, I was just thinking….maybe there is something to this afterall that affects not just the soap industry.

I have noticed since the soap incident that I have heard more F bombs on cable OR on live news shows where they only have a three second lag to bleep it out, and more of the lesser of the 7 Forbidden Words, and more peoples rear ends on Network TV than ever.  Well, maybe not “ever.”  Things are tamer than they were in the past.  In fact, remember NYPD Blue?  The real name of the show was “Whose Butt are we Going to See Naked This Week?” until that got old and they started getting back to business, except poor David Caruso who totally miscalculated his career just like the gal who played Tasha Yar for only one year on Star Trek.  But now he has had his own show, but he was hurting for more than a decade.  Alas, I digress.

But what if ceasing cleaning mouths out with soap really caused this whole thing, and the world would have never seen Dennis Franz’ butt, or no one would have seen Gordon Ramsey have his words bleeped out, but you could CLEARLY know what he said as he mouthed it very clearly.   I wonder what people who are deaf or partially deaf and read lips think about him…because to them nothing is bleeped out, unless you have something on a more family oriented show like Funniest Home Videos where they also put a black box in front of their mouth or blur the screen around their mouth so people who read lips wouldn’t know what the swear word was either, unless the context was so obvious.

I guess I have no point.  But, oh I do.  There is no way to know what the world would be like if parents were encouraged to clean children’s mouths out with soap.  Would the world be a cleaner place, or would be in the same boat we are now in polite society, but have a lot of people saying that there really is soap poisoning, and it causes birth defects.  Isn’t that what Ralphie Parker daydreamed about, that he went blind from soap poisioning as he grew up?  I guess that is one for the people who believe in alternative realities to figure out.  Maybe in a parallel time, where Bizarro Superman lives, it actually happens….

It was only a matter of time.  In fact, I don’t know why they didn’t think of it thirty years ago.  But Spam is like that.  Spam is a bit slow on the take.  It hasn’t changed since World War II.  Maybe it has never changed.

At any rate, you would think there was a natural promotional vehicle or tie in when the Spam skit ran on Monty Python’s Flying Circus.  Spam missed out on a prime opportunity.  Now, there is an official SPAM Spamalot game on the Spam website to tie in with Monty Python’s Spamalot, the stage production that is touring the world in various forms.  I am sure it was not Spam’s way to suggest this, but the folks behind the show.  It is clear that the relationship improves Spam’s position in the world.  The show can stand on its own.

I must worn you though, when you go to the Official SPAM site, you will be immediately assaulted by this guy, his dazed wife, and his goofy, but harmless enough son:

A picture may not harm you, but you will be immediately be assualted with a SONG on the site about SPAM. I scrambled to turn the sound off and you will too. Unfortunately, you have to get through this family to get to the game.  Then finally you do.  It is not really about SPAM, but SPAM needs all the help it can get.  The game involves catapulting cows over to the other side, whether you decide to be English or French.   Mindless Entertainment.  Much better than SPAM!