Month: June 2026

Not Raw

Food & Drink

This pic reminded me of something:

It reminded me that I don’t like eating raw vegetables.  In fact, if I think of it, the only ones I don’t mind eating raw are tomatoes and cabbage (i.e. as cole slaw, with Marzetti’s dressing).  All other vegetables are only palatable if cooked.  (Cabbage gets a special mention, here.  I only eat it raw because cooked cabbage makes my stomach turn, violently — by both smell and taste, thank you boarding school.)

Even pickled vegetables get the stinkeye from me, except jalapeño peppers.  And don’t even think of sauerkraut, ugh.  (No wonder the Germans were once so aggressive, if that was a feature of their daily diet.  Ditto the Irish and boiled cabbage.)

Needless to say, this attitude does not endear me to the salad-eaters, who can’t stop rabbitting on about the joys of said foul stuff.  Nope.  Lettuce has no taste, and is really just a water-delivery vehicle, as is cucumber;  cauliflower is tasteless (cooked or raw), and as any baby will tell you, carrots are foul in any manifestation:  cooked, raw or pureed.

And raw broccoli has a special place in hell because not only is it bland-tasting, it leaves those little buds lodged in between the teeth for future discomfort and smile-disfigurement.  I can just barely tolerate it cooked.

Yeah, I’m mostly a meat-and-potatoes/rice man.  Surprise, surprise.

Okay, plus eggs:

And if we’re going to go all exotic on the meat thing:

And if I’m forced (at gunpoint) to become a vegetarian:

I think I need to pay a visit to my kitchen now.  And my apologies if this post has created a similar urge among y’all.

Chewsday Challenge

Guy Stuff, Toys

Following on from Saturday’s post about beautiful watches, here’s today’s challenge:

You’re given a large gift certificate worth $75,000 which can only be redeemed at a store which sells watches.  The conditions attached to the certificate are:  only three watches (price is limited to $25,000 each, or less), but all three must come from a single brand (Tudor, Tissot, Longines, Citizen, whatever).  It’s a “use it or lose it” kind of thing:  if you can only find three desirable watches whose total value is $5,000, then that’s what you get.

Which brand would you go with?  (If you want to explore your options, here’s Chrono24.  You can get new or used watches, to beat the “cap”.)

My choice will appear tomorrow.

And once again:  I don’t care if you’re only interested in wearing one Casio digital for the rest of your life.  If that’s your bag, don’t bother to play the game, and please spare us your opinion about how silly this all is.

Cutting Fat & Fraud

Budgets

Over among the Big Brains at American Thinker, Rhys Read offers these ideas for cutting back government spending and getting our spending deficit under control:

First, eliminate the fraud in the system, which is estimated at between $200 billion and $500 billion per year.

Second, end the subsidies and government control regimes implemented to “combat climate change.”   Total spending on these programs total about $300 billion per year.

Third, moving to individual health accounts would reduce much of the middle-man expenses and regulatory expenses imbedded in the Affordable Care Act.  Eliminating these unnecessary bureaucratic expense and bloated health care costs would save about $300 billion per year.

Then we need to tackle the big expense: the cost of the bloated bureaucracy.  A one-third reduction in staffing plus a one-third reduction in average total compensation would save about $600 billion per year.

As for getting additional moolah into the system:

I propose increasing the Medicare tax from 1.45 percent to 2 percent and the Social Security tax from 6.2 percent to 6.5 percent. In addition, I propose tripling the FICA maximum, currently at $184,750, with a new 7.5-percent crediting rate to preserve the defined benefit nature of the payouts. Implementing these increases would generate about $300 billion per year.

And so on.  As the man once said (adjusted for inflation):  a (hundred) billion here, a (hundred) billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about serious money.

How much of this has any chance of ever happening?

Yeah, right.

Amazing Find

Men & Women

Here we go:

My old friend Richard Dorman* once described this wondrous female feature to me thus:

“Way I see it, old man, my job is to insert my tallywocker into the aperture provided, and commence the rocking movement for the next few minutes until the load is delivered.  Job done.  If she needs to activate her little switch to reach her own Special Moment, then it’s up to her to activate it.”

Try as I may, I can find no fault with his logic, cold as it may be.

And where would we be without !SCIENCE!, I ask.

*Dicky was an old colleague of mine back at the Great Big Research Company (Seffrican division).  He deserves, and will one day get, his own entry [sic]  on these pages.

Comparative Dressing

Food & Drink

This little thing made the meme-rounds over the weekend:

My first reaction was:  Huh? because I don’t much care for ranch dressing myself, so at first I couldn’t understand the excitement among the Euros and Brits over the stuff.  Then I remembered what these guys generally put on their salad:

…which is easily the most vile cream-like substance anyone has ever put in their mouth.  (And that includes the output [sic]  of the porno movies made in the 1970s.)

So when we Murkins wonder why all the excitement about ranch dressing, you need to consider the (coff, coff)  competition.

Quite understandable, really.