Bullets

Well, there was going to be a blog about what bullets taste like, and it was going to start with a mock complaint:

Thank you fascists, blocking scientific progress yet again

and a rant about how the local authorities had stopped us testing bullets because of so-called safety concerns, and a whinge about the nanny-state, and how regulation forces bullet tasting underground.  Bullets would turn out to be crunchy and bit peppery, because they add spice to life.

My poor attempts at satire are inappropriate, yet again, in wake of another peace-time massacre.  Its not my country, perhaps not my place to say anything, and what do these few words read by even less people mean in the face of so much suffering.

I live in a country that has many failings.  We are a capitalist, mixed economy, which is muddling along, and has weathered the various incarnations of the GFC pretty well.  If an American was to visit, and of course many do, I doubt that they would feel that we were much in danger of being overtaken by either communists or fascists, or that the populace was particularly oppressed.  We have a good standard of living, low inflation, low unemployment, clean-ish air, and a whole lot of things we could do better.  We also have what they would probably call socialized medicine, and strict gun controls.  Those two things make our lives better, not worse, and are not sending us on the way to being North Korea.  I know its not something I can convince anyone of, but if you lived it, you would see that it was true.  The gun fetish in particular can only be described as weird, to outside observers.

Guns don’t kill people.  Mostly, its the bullets.

Recycling

Forgive me please, I have tried.  I try to be good.  I want to save the planet, the trees, the whales.  I believe in conservation, I really do.  I am a nice shade of light green.  However, no matter how hard I try, I cannot eat recycled food.  If food has already been digested by someone else, I just can’t eat it.  I know it’s the future, I know it is necessary, but I cannot do it.

 

What is wrong with me?  Does this make me a bad person?

Eyes

Never put other people’s eyes in your mouth, you never know where they’ve seen.

…

Hey, I’m a manly man*.  I know its cool to suck on eyeballs and then crunch down and pop them so gunk flows out, but I confess, I just can’t do it.  I can’t eat something that something else has been looking out.  Except perhaps a window.  But that’s for another post.

(However, it is ok to lick the blind.  But not a window blind.  Ironic?  No, just stupid.)

*says me.

Balloon Animals

Those of you who have been subscribing to the analytical reports of the Chip Laboratories since ancient times know of our well founded efforts to ethicise (ha! take that, dictionary) omnivorism.  We are trying folks, we really are.  We have put all of this week’s grant money into considering balloon animals.

Some of you maybe scoffing, as you associate these creatures with parlour games and carnivals.  However, I am not talking about simple domesticated balloon animals.   I am talking about great sweeping herds of massive fortean creatures, blocking the sun on their nomadic trek as passenger pigeons once did sweeping across America.  And no, there would be no reliance on foul, poisonous oxygen.  These are great helium or methane filled beasts, nodding and swaying as they are blown by the currents of wind, just as giant jelly fish are swept across oceans.  Picture them now in your mind, see them billowing and filling the sky.  Tremendous storms of them.  The wondrous sight of them as they rail against the elements, indeed as they rail against their own ridiculous existence.  Observing them as over time they are pitted by hail, scarred by lightning.  And the wonder of them is that their pseudo life is no life at all, it is a mere impersonation.  Brave balloon bound hunters shall pursue them without ethical quandary, intrepid mountaineers shall stalk them to their winter homes, small children and we here at the laboratory shall wonder at them.

O!  If only we could get some nutrition into their skins!  Some flavour into the rubber.  Some texture into their form.  And find some way to stop giant sea turtles from choking on them in their thousands when they critters deflate and drop into the sea.  Perhaps it is impossible.  But is not the dream as important as any mere actuality?  At least this dream can unite us all, omnivores, carnivores, vegetarians, vegans, fruitarians, lacto-vegetarians, lacto-ovo-vegetarians, pescetarians, pollotarians, and pollo-pescetarians, the dream of the hunt of the giant pseudo-beasts in the sky that can sustain us all without troubling our consciences.

Until then, at least we have salad.

[“Life’s Solution” by Simon Conway Morris, p112 ‘Fortean bladders’]

Wombats

Wombats are big furry buggers that look like a giant crawling teddy bear and the unsuspecting say “oh cute, so cute” until they turn and outrun your wife and trip her over and you keep running you coward because you have soiled yourself you are so scared, they just keep running and you hear your wife scream because its stopped now, only a fallen victim will stop it, and you hear it, you hear her flesh being torn, it makes a ripping sound, and you cannot ever forgive yourself but you also hate her a little bit forever, because she cannot forgive you, and it is no consolation that the wombat does not eat the flesh, it tears and nuzzles for a moment then returns to its business, it does not eat her because it is a herbivore, but it rips her because it is a nasty big furry bugger, and it could answer the question if it could speak, it could tell you if your wife tastes like chicken, because it has tasted both even though it does not swallow, but even if it spoke, you would be too chicken shit to ask, you gutless wonder.  The relief you felt when she fell.

Not to be confused with the cryptid womb-bats.

Salad

Sorry, I see that I have been doing this all wrong.  Don’t say I don’t learn.  I have now read every other food blog and I see what I should be doing.  Lets start again.

I made a salad.

First I took an iceberg lettuce.  I broke it up, washing the fragments, carefully removing slugs and returning them to the wild.  (Tip – don’t use soap.)

 

 

 

 

I sliced some carrots with my knife.  It hurt them more than it hurt me.

I cut up some capsicums.

I sliced some lebanese cucumbers.

I mixed them together.  (Technical term – tossed.)

I threw in some coloured cocktail onions  (mmm, food dye), just for a change.

I made my own dressing with lemon and vinegar and the blood of a third world child*.  (*No I didn’t but I don’t have any of the exotic herbs everyone else refers to and I felt left out.)

I opened a tin of sliced beetroot and served it separately.

I took lots of pictures of my shitty salad but they did not turn out well.  However, that would not stop me adding them if I knew how.

 

I drank half a bottle of vodka later and vomited everywhere*.  That is the picture I really wanted to add.  (*No I didn’t.  I have never drunk vodka again since a fateful night with a very large Russian when I was young and hadn’t learned I was not invincible.  I learned otherwise two hours later.)

Bugger, I didn’t use macaroni.  Everybody else uses macaroni.

Yummo, it was nearly as good as germ sausages, and it tasted just like chicken.  (Must check microbes – see “Aboot”.)

Isn’t the internet wonderful?

********

“your writing isn’t nearly as “creative” as you think it is”

is that better?

Coming soon – spaghetti from a tin – ON TOAST!!

Allusion

Tears of a Clown, no longer easily obtained at my local bottle shop, does not taste like chicken.  Other products tested this week which do not taste like chicken include:

• Cup of gall (also, cup of bitter gall)
• Cup of bile
• Vale of tears
• Knuckle thanwich
• Revenge (served hot or cold)
• Heart of my enemy (bloody tough, and bloody)
• Heart in my throat
• Heart of stone (tasted like stone)
• Blood, sweat and tears (lots of crying here in Glossolalia recently, apparently)
• Total war
• War on Terror
• War on drugs
• Class War (separate report is here.)
• War on Poverty (I doubt this has really been tested)
• Ebony and Ivory living together in perfect harmony (tasted like piano and ham)
• None of your beeswax (tasted nothing like beeswax)
• Gigantor (tastes like space age robot)

Unfortunately, separate reports are only available where indicated.

Next time, we shall look at salad.  Doesn’t that sound interesting?

Insects

No don’t be disgusting, I am not advocating that you eat insects, that would be gross and it is not what your mate my mate Joe Chip is about.

We have all of course at one time or another wished that we were insects.  Who has not wanted to be a cockroach with the ability to run under the fridge, or to be a fly mindlessly belting time and again against a window?  A slater rolled in a ball, a moth struggling in a web.  It is only human nature to desire such a thing.

Given this overwhelming urge to become a six legged invertebrate, why not take it that one step further and adopt the insect diet.  It is more insectophile than insectivore.  No diet could be more ethical, than to eat what is just lying around and going to waste anyway.  It is only our prissiness holding us back.  Don’t be square.  Throw off your bourgeois shackles, your antiquated “oh I won’t eat that its rotting and it stinks” mindset, your 1950s Victorian hangups.  This is (almost) the last taboo, and it has to go.  Our children are getting sick because they are not exposed to enough dirt.  Asthma and allergies abound because we have cocooned our kids in protective cradles that crush the creation of their immune systems.

Come on, billions of animals cannot be wrong.  Reduce your carbon footprint to zero.  Embrace excrement.  Desire decomposition.  Revere rot.  Gratify yourself with garbage.  Move over mealworms.  Begone beetles.  Buzz-off bees.  Move on mosquitoes.  Take off termites.  Aroint thee ants.  There is a new biological break down agent in town, and its us.  If an insect eats it, its good for you, and good for the environment.  Devolve now, avoid the rush.

…

http://nottrevor.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/not-gregor-samsa/

Rat candy

Gentle Readers, today I cheat, but you will see why:

“In 1849, hungry gold miners crossing the Nevada desert noticed some glistening balls of a candy-like substance on a cliff, licked or ate the balls, and discovered them to be sweet-tasting, but then they developed nausea.  Eventually it was realized that the balls were hardened deposits made by small rodents, called packrats … Not being toilet trained, the rats urinate in their nests, and sugar and other substances crystallize from their urine as it dries out … In effect, the hungry gold miners were eating dried rat urine laced with rat feces and rat garbage.”

 – Collapse by Jared Diamond

And this is why wise parents do not give their children rat candy, no matter how much they beg.

O frabjous day!  I knew you would understand.  And in return for your understanding, I have added mymatejoechip’s guide to healthy living part 1, diet, under the heading, “The story so far”.