Wednesday, November 21, 2012

The Twinkie Is Dead


The Twinkie is dead.  The Hostess corporation, with manufactured the Twinkie, has gone bankrupt due to a labor dispute.  I used to enjoy the occasional Twinkie in my youth,  but I probably haven't eaten one in twenty years. The Twinkie likely isn't truly dead, though.  Some other company may well acquire the rights to produce them, possibly a company in Mexico, where sugar is cheaper than in the United States, where tariffs keep the price artificially high.  

There are links for all this information, but I don't feel like going to the trouble of adding them.  Well, okay, there aren't any links about the fact that I haven't eaten a Twinkie in twenty years.  

But what is really important is that I tried to draw a Twinkie on my computer.  



I did not include a picture of a slug in this post because combining slugs and foodstuffs would be considered unsavory.

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Now November Is Half Over and There Is a Slug


It seems as if I was just writing about how it was September and fall was more than one-sixth over, and now it is November and fall is more than five-sixths over.  And it is almost Thanksgiving, but it seems as if Halloween was only a week or so ago.  (Thanksgiving is on the earliest possible date this year, so there really are only about three weeks between the two holidays.)  Time passing way too quickly is a recurring theme at this point in my life.  

I notice that in my last post, I had a terrible time using AppleWorks to draw the pictures of jars, but the slugs worked out pretty well.  Maybe I should put drawings of slugs in all my blog entries.



Wednesday, November 14, 2012

A Helpful Hint: How to Remove a Slug from Your Home


Perhaps there will come a day when you will find a slug on the floor of a building.  If you are like most people, you will want to remove the slug.  And also if you are like most people, you won't want to touch the slug or otherwise interact with it.  Here is a simple method for removing the slug without making contact with it. 

1) Place an empty jar or other open-mouthed container over the slug.

2) Wait a half an hour to an hour, and the slug will slide up the inside surface of the jar.  

3) Pick up the jar and place it on the ground outside.  

4) In another hour or so, the slug will have slid back out of the jar and into the surrounding environment. 

(Needless to say, the container used for this should be one which you wouldn't mind coming into contact with a slug and its associated slime.)  

In case anyone is unclear on how this method works, I have included two low-quality computer drawings illustrating a slug moving from the floor to the inside of a jar, viewed from the side. 




I came up with this method by accident many years ago, when I found a slug on the floor.  I didn't know what to do about it, so I put a jar over the slug to keep it from going anywhere, and then went away, intending to figure out how to deal with it later.  (I have a tendency to put off dealing with my problems, which usually makes them worse.) When I came back, I found to my surprise that the slug had gone up inside the jar.  

Monday, November 5, 2012

Our Abnormal Halloween Season


  Much has happened in the past week that feels catastrophic, if not outright apocalyptic: Hurricane Sandy, the lead-up to the presidential election, the sale of the Star Wars franchise to Disney . . .  In a recent blog post, I said that I wanted something cool to happen for Halloween.  Instead, a hurricane merged with a cold front to form a powerful hybrid storm that devastated the northeastern coastline and left millions without power.  It makes me want to shout "Uncool!", but that would leave me feeling too much like Joey from Friends.  

(By the way, in my last blog post, I used the redundant phrase "unexpected surprise", which was due to sloppy editing resulting from me trying to get the post up before the hurricane hit.)

In light of the destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy, Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey issued an executive order postponing Halloween in his state until today.  I  am surprised that a governor or any other elected official would have the power to reschedule Halloween.  I would think that Halloween would be controlled by some special Halloween Committee, at least three members of which would be required by law to have pumpkins for heads.  

Another, perhaps final, Halloween observation is that today I saw that a lot of people have left the Halloween decorations up on the outside of their houses, even though it is almost a week after Halloween.  Was this practice common in the past, but I never noticed?  Or is it part of a recent societal trend?  Or is there a specific desire this year to extend the Halloween season longer than usual to make up for Halloween being overshadowed by the hurricane?