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Items to fit into your overhead compartment |
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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| Yes, it's St. Patrick's Day. No, I won't be doing anything special. It, like New Year's Eve, Cinco de Mayo, and other drinking holidays, are Amateur Days. Okay, I might make my green Star Trek-inspired cocktail later, at home, but that's about it. Here it is: "It's Green"  You know what else is green? Most salads. From Atlas Obscura's Gastro Obscura: Midcentury America’s Most Scandalous Salad According to Betty Crocker, Candle Salad was even “better than a real candle.” Now, look. It's a huge pain in the ass to embed pics from other webpages here. It's far, far easier to implore you to click on the link in the above headline. Because that's the only way you can see a picture (actually several pictures) of this "Candle Salad" in all its proud glory. So, do that. Seriously, go click on it right now. You can even read the article; I'll only comment on a little bit of it here. But definitely look at the pictures. In 2014, around Thanksgiving, talk-show host Ellen Degeneres showed her audience a photo of a mid-century American dish. “There’s something called a ‘Candle Salad.’ This is real,” she said, while the studio audience howled with laughter. “It is made with banana and pineapple … and mistakes. I tried it once. It was not my thing.” Say what you will about Degeneres, but that's comedy gold, right there. It consists of a lone banana held upright with either a pineapple base or a ring of Jell-O. Jell-O recipes were everywhere in that era. Very successful marketing. Personally, I think it could benefit from added kiwi fruits. Or maybe one, split in half lengthwise, and nestled at the base. There’s a maraschino cherry on top, along with a dribble of whipped cream or mayonnaise down the side. If you use your imagination, it could be said to resemble a candle—but I bet that’s not where your brain went first. Humans are rather predictable. According to Aldrich, there was a pragmatic reason why this snack showed up in kid’s cookbooks. “It was a very simple recipe. Children didn’t have to worry about using a knife or burning their hands on the stove,” she says. Yeah... I'm going to call bullshit on that. There's gotta be a huge number of "very simple recipes" that are suitable for kids of varying ages, and the overwhelming majority of those recipes aren't hentai. Well, like I said, I'm not going to comment on the whole article, which gets into the history of thing-shaped foods (but not always that "thing"), and even provides a handy recipe so you can troll your family and/or friends yourself. |
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