Intelligent design in my soup

I was listening to Shirley Temple sing about these and thougth I'd do a search on Flickr. Seems to me that someone should have a line of animal crackers including dinosaurs, trilobites, etc., to appeal to those arguing for a young Earth. And don't forget the Serpent!

Have you no sense of decency, sirs?

Mmmmmmmmm!,
originally uploaded by urtica.

On our recent Christmas break, I was disappointed to find that among the sundae toppings available at the Friendly's Ice Cream, butterscotch was not listed. Butterscotch! When I was a kid, sundaes came in only three varieties: chocolate, strawberry, and butterscotch. Now, there are a dozen and a half kinds of toppings you can put on your sundae, but when I asked about butterscotch, the waitress suggested only the substitution of caramel.

Which is not the same thing at all, of course, being only composed of sugar and water, no butter at all. What a travesty! How is this to be endured?

This is not the first time I have run into this. Last summer at Baskin-Robbins back here in New Jersey, I inquired about butterscotch and the fellow behind the counter looked at me as if I were crazy. Not only did they not have it, he'd never heard of it, and seemed to suspect that I was making it up. Cold Stone Creamery lists ed to suspect that I was making it up. Cold Stone Creamery lists Fat-Free Butterscotch, which seems to me to be an abomination. I am pessimistic that the local Carvel's would be any more likely to come up with the goods either.

Perhaps I'll have to take another trip to New England and sample the hot penuche at Herrell's.

The novelty eyewear crisis of 2010

We have had a decade now of years with the digits 00 in the middle, providing a boon to manufacturers of novelty eyeglasses as they provide a convenient place to put the eye holes to peer through. No more! The next several decades all have a numeral in the tens digit shaped to stymie any attempts to see through it. What will a reveler be able to do in the way of ridiculously topical fake spectacles this time next year? In order of increasing outlandishness (which, in this context, is not construed as a bad thing):

• Go off-center. Make novelty eyeglasses which use the two zeroes for the eye holes, with the "1" falling roughly over the bridge of the nose. Perhaps one could tack an exclamation point on the end to balance out the "2" on the other end.
• Cyclopeanism. Maybe one could concoct a novelty monocle using just one of the zeroes.
• Classical antiquity. The Roman numerals "MMX" are even less hole-y than the conventional ones, but their angularity is always nice looking. Maybe they can sit up atop the top of the frame, looking like a set of spiky glittery eyebrows. Or if you stack them vertically, the "X" could work well as the nosepiece in a futuristic design.
• Throw technology at the problem. Forget about making actual physical numerals altogether and mount a scrolling LED marquee atop a sturdy set of specs. It could be pricey, but it is to be hoped that we shall all have pockets stuffed with cash by that time anyway.

I pose this question now so that designers can have a good twelve months to look at the looming crisis and implement the best solution (possible with Federal funding), assuring that confidence will not be shaken among the fashionable/silly New Year's reveler segment of our citizenry, both human and other.

Update: Various stratagems came to the rescue.

Keep out of reach of children, and adults

I am not one for sugary sweet drinks, especially not those of the alcoholic sort (more of a Scotch whisky type, really). For those of you of different tastes, consider this rainbow-colored hootch made by mixing vodka with Skittles. I doubt that the two days of steeping added much to the color depth, so perhaps one could accelerate the process and mix up a batch in an afternoon, I don't know. Make sure you're not too close to a flame, by the way.

Probably one could achieve similar results substituting Jolly Rancher hard candy. I think it might eliminate the need for filtration, perhaps. Until I did a search, I had not appreciated the fact that this would not make it the first Jolly Rancher alcoholic drink concoction, nor even the second.

Notes for a State of the Union Address

This little piece seems as if it would work pretty well next month.

We had a bad banking situation. Some of our bankers had shown themselves either incompetent or dishonest in their handling of the people's funds. They had used the money entrusted to them in speculations and unwise loans. This was of course not true in the vast majority of our banks but it was true in enough of them to shock the people for a time into a sense of insecurity and to put them into a frame of mind where they did not differentiate, but seemed to assume that the acts of a comparative few had tainted them all. It was the Government's job to straighten out this situation and do it as quickly as possible—and the job is being performed.

Delivered by the President of the United States, March 12, 1933.