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November 29, 2001
Peeps: A Bad Candy For All Seasons
Mr. Stelter, our late, sainted chemistry teacher from high school, was known for his "discrepant events" -- flamboyant demonstrations where he would, say, take a cattle prod to his belt buckle to explain properties of electricity. One day, to demonstrate something about high-heat reactions which I have since completely forgotten, he set up a reaction that would melt iron before our eyes.
He put all the necessary chemicals and raw iron in a heavy ceramic crucible on a ring stand, positioned the ring stand over a trash basket filled with water, and then, because it was around Easter, he placed a Marshmallow Peep on the chemicals, and ignited them.
There was a huge plume of flame. The crucible broke. The iron sizzled through the water, melting through the bottom of the wastebasket.
Throughout all of this, THE PEEP DID NOT BURN. Didn't even catch fire. Didn't even swell, like a normal marshmallow.
I've always been fond of the little buggers despite this saddening demonstration that my digestive tract is probably not up to the fight. Peeps combine two of the best states of sugar into a fun-to-behead chicken-shaped dollop. But as we age, we must all eventually come to reckoning on the Peeps question: they're evil, no avoiding it.
They just got more evil. Today, while looking for my other favorite extruded food (Combos) in a Duane Reade, I discovered that Peeps are trying to make headway into a market that is not theirs by birthright. Witness:
The name "Peeps Cutouts" suggests that there may have been trouble with standards of accurate labelling. Calling them "Peeps Gingerbread Men" would not only be gender-inaccurate (gingerbread women hold up half of the cellophane-packaged sky, here, with garish Red #3 mouths) but also contradict the "Holiday Cookie Flavored, Artificially Flavored" label indicating there's no cookies in 'em. "Cookie Cutters" would be even further from the truth, and "Gingerbread Shapes" would still be wrong for terrible reasons, not immediately obvious, which I'm about to explain.
I'm not sure what part of "Flavored" didn't register. I should have turned back right then; instead, I took a package home.
The odor that hit me as I opened the package set off a whole new set of warning bells. Instead of the pleasant spice-and-molasses smell suggested by the gingerbread-man theme, they smelled salty and greasy.
I played with the color balance of these shots for fifteen minutes, but the pictures here just don't do justice to the horrible jaundiced cafe-au-lait color they've dyed these things. Even in the centers -- there's no angel-white center to these Peeps, like there are in the bunnies'n'chickens.
They do, however, present gruesome siamese-twin-separation opportunities that normal Peeps don't.
After a few minutes of chewing, it became clear exactly what JustBorn company had pulled. Making overtures about gingerbread and possibly coffee turned out to be the flavor equivalent of accosting my senses, stuffing them in a bag, spinning them around until dizzy, driving them around the streets of Boston and ultimately leaving them on a dark smelly wharf beside a fish cannery.
No ginger. No molasses. No coffee. Only a nauseating artificial homage to butter cookies, laced with nasty spikes of Red #3. It was like gnawing a Strawberry Shortcake doll. It was like belching after gagging down a bag of Butter Popcorn Jelly Bellys. It was unspeakably awful, so overdone as to completely ruin the furtive glee of pure sugar consumption that is the sole attraction of Peeps.
The lesson here: Don't succumb to the lure of Holiday Peeps. In fact, there's a broader lesson: never give in to a company's attempts to get you to buy hip, daring new products in their line, whether you have loyalty to them or not. it's all artificial cookie flavoring and propaganda.
well, naw. the real lesson is it's fun to make faces at your digital camera.
Posted by me at 10:09 PM | Comments (1)
November 12, 2001
Fries and Propaganda, Redux: Empty Threats and Fred
Diner named for some Cypriot or Greek chick, Chelsea, NYC
Jen: These are quite reviewable fries.
Gus: It's like a baked potato inside a French fry.
Jen: Inside a baked potato.
Elderly man sitting behind Jen: I don't want fried, and I don't want anything in a rich cream sauce. There's chicken in that, right?
Solicitous waiter: It's tomato sauce, with sundried tomato.
Elderly man: OK, that's -- no, that's with cheese -- that would qualify, also. God, there's too many choices.
Gus: That one tasted like a Triscuit.
Jen: The uncheesy fries are really being neglected.
Gus: They're not very good. They taste like Triscuits.
(pause)
Gus: Who's going to eat the little black fry that nobody loves?
Jen: (picks it up, turns it over, decides to eat it)
Gus: I'll eat the salt. (does so.) Have you ever had a Saltito?
Mayrose Diner, Chelsea, NYC
Gus: So what do we have to say about the fries?
Jen: What, the fries at the dirty diner?
Gus: It wasn't dirty.
Jen: My memory of it was conclusively dirty. It was definitely dirty. Don't give me two Ns, there. You can't say that. It won't make sense.
Gus: He hates me.
Jen: (dies laughing) He doesn't hate you. He just doesn't understand you.
Gus: I was too busy with my soup. The fries were wet.
Jen: That soup looked meaty.
Gus: It was definitely full of beef. So was he. He hates me. And he's too well dressed.
Jen: I think I only had one of your soggy little fries. Too well dressed? I think we're talking about different people.
(silence)
Pimpin' Action Ernie: It feels good to lay down.
Gus: I'm sure it do.
Jen: He's looking not so great. He's in several pieces on the floor. Gus, what did you do with his phallus?
Gus: Dude, I didn't SEE his phallus, he was entirely dressed in a women's black leather catsuit!
Jen: You are full of beef.
Gus: Any last words?
Jen: I can find ANYTHING in Manhattan now!
Pimpin' Action Ernie: I feel GREAT! (thrusts)
Posted by me at 11:33 PM | Comments (1)
November 10, 2001
Americorps: ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US
No joke. Not only has John McCain endorsed a huge, semi-militarized, FIVE-FOLD expansion of AmeriCorps, as Jen pointed out, but the President has already initiated an expansion of the program into the hands of the new Office of Homeland Security. This may have been made independently of McCain's bill, or not; I asked the press flack at the White House in the course of a whole bunch of other questions, and he didn't answer that one. From personal experience, I can tell you that AmeriCorps has a hard enough time making good use of the volunteers it already has. Expansion could be disastrous. I can't imagine that the volunteers of its early days, many of whom chose VISTA because they detested the Vietnam War but still wanted to serve their country, are happy about this. AmeriCorps, by contrast, seems perfectly peppy about the arrangement. Further news as I learn more; I'm trying to write an article about it for City Limits. For now, I'm keeping my VERY DISAPPROVING opinions to myself. (oops, did I slip?)
Posted by me at 8:03 PM | Comments (0)
November 6, 2001
Sooooooop Of The Eeeeeevening, Beyoooootiful Soooooop
Meet the (new) fam. That's LT on the right, looking cute, and FD on the left, pretending to be a black smudge. The picture doesn't show it well, but they're only slightly larger than a gold Saccy. I liberated them from Canal Street today. It's too lonely in this house without the birds and crabs and fish. Plus it was my last day working south of Canal (we're moving tomorrow) and I'd promised myself I'd save some of these guys from the foot-level bowls that just about every store on the strip has. These ones were in a store about the size of a closet, run by a sun-dried woman who got the word "box" but didn't really understand anything else I said.
So they live on my desk so the computer can keep them warm, and they're not into the piece of reconstituted seaweed I fished out of my dried miso to give them. Supposedly, until they get older they'll be looking to give me salmonella. Right now they keep me amused by standing on their hind legs and then falling over.
Yes, LT and FD. They're turtles, all right? I'm saving "Trotsky" for the horse. Besides, it's not like I named one of them RT. Gotta keep up my left cred somehow.
Posted by me at 12:05 AM | Comments (0)
November 4, 2001
SATs, GREs, And Other Standardized Tests: I Got Nothin But Hate For You, Yo
I'll confess: Testing was very low on the list of things I was trying to escape by going to Hampshire. I was always pretty good at tests, so proud of how I did on them that I still remember the one answer I got wrong on the phonics test which got me into Poly at age five. (And that one wasn't a misunderstanding; it was a mis-generalization which I might not have made if I wasn't so confident with my alphabet skills.)
I started practicing for the GREs today. Not the best day to do it; I just found out a job I was certain I'd get was offered to someone else who was "perfect" for it; and then I went and took a look at some journalism jobs and realized how unqualified I am for them. So my self-esteem is hanging out in some low circle of hell today, one with lots of demons wielding hot pokers. But I started working on the analogy section anyway, and for the first time in my life I'm finding tests to be sheer unadulterated agony.
Performance anxiety is part of it. I haven't taken a test in years, and my SAT verbal scores are a hard act to follow. There were one or two words on the test whose definitions I didn't know. I panicked. My SAT verbal scores were in the 99th percentile; I write for magazines; I won a scholarship to Bread Loaf; I still don't know what the hell "stygian" means, and I feel like a pretender.
These are the times when my Hampshire goggles kick in and, thank god, I get a clearer reading. I'm a writer, and I love words, and I don't know these ones -- how on earth is the other 99.99% of the world who didn't go to a school like mine EVER going to gain access to higher education when they have to claw their way through a wall of analogies which begin "prediction: augury?" How will they even bring themselves to sit down for yet another test which tells them what a an unworthy piece of sh!t they are?
I'm infuriated by these tests as a writer, too. Kids who get frog-marched through the vocabulary regimen that prepares you for the SAT come out believing that if they want to look smart they should actually use those words. The resulting prose is like sticking your head in a cage full of agitated pigeons. It's fscking unreadable. They never recover, either; look what I've written here. Most people in this country couldn't follow the complexity of my sentences. May my mouth be forcibly sealed and my hands chopped off if I ever use the word "stygian" when I am actually trying to get an idea across to another person!
The University of California can't stop relying on standardized tests soon enough. If I had realized what a crock the GREs were before I laid out a hundred dollars to take them, I would have refused and told the departments where I'm applying my rationale. I'm lucky any anthropology department where I'd feel comfortable working would agree with me.
coda: Conversely, taking the math and analytical sections of the GREs makes me feel super-confident, because I never was good at it and not getting every question wrong makes me feel productive. I stop thinking about the social ramifications of the test. so much for my sense of social justice. Or is math simply less socially mediated? I suppose it's not when it comes to gender. My boys in aftaschoo tended to feel great about themselves when it came to math, regardless of how nonstandard their English was, while the girls presumed they were getting the answers wrong even if they were performing flawlessly.
Posted by me at 11:40 PM | Comments (0)
November 1, 2001
From The Vaults: Remembrance of Martín Espada's Class
...one time we were sitting in class and we hear this dreadful cheer from some not-far-distant football game and Martin looks to us wryly and says, a la stenography instructor, "Yes, young people, this is fascism" then, in his normal "I'd-read-for-PBS-pledge-breaks-but-I'm-just-too-cool" voice: "You know they'd do anything they were asked right now... Yes, kill the Latino poetry class!"
We're trying to kidnap him and get him to teach here [at Hampshire] instead of @ UMass. ;)
--to mom, 11/12/96
Posted by me at 8:54 PM | Comments (0)