CSotD: Friday Funnies

Ben betrays his Canadian roots by talking snowbirds so close to Canadian Thanksgiving.

When I lived by the highway between Montreal and warmer climes, we’d see the Quebecers heading south about now, having completed their holiday festivities, and it does fit with the time the geese also go to visit golf courses and public parks further south …

 

… as noted by Frazz, and it’s worth pointing out that one factor in climate change is that the geese don’t have to fly so far south to find hospitable weather anymore.

Also worth noting that some communities have deputized border collies to run the geese off, which is the sort of job — vertical herding, you might call it — that the dogs enjoy and that doesn’t harm the geese, since catching them is not the point.

Though they are edible, by the way, unlike snow geese, the recipes for which I think are dreamt up by the Field & Stream equivalent of the Mother Earth News writers who assure readers that goats do not stink.

Anyway, I suspect there would be higher employment among border collies if you didn’t have a vocal group that objects to such things and who should be sent out to collect the goose poop each morning, a policy I call “Pick up or shut up.”

But getting back to the snowbirds, a lot of the retired folks I knew on our side of the border would similarly time their departure for just after Thanksgiving, which is a month later but, again, gave them a nice family gathering before they disappeared to warmer climes.

True, they might see some snow before they left, but they’d lived through entire winters before they hit retirement age and a small sample wasn’t gonna do them much damage.

However, my neighbor across the street would leave each year the week before Halloween, which I thought was pretty damn chintzy.

If you an afford a second home in Florida, you can surely afford a couple of bags of fun-size bars, ya grumpy old fart.

 

While we’re on the topic of seasonal humor, Brewster Rockit is confronting a crisis in that an alien space ship has stolen all the pumpkin spice from the R.U. Sirius.

Which, I would point out, makes this not only seasonal humor but seasonal humor as well.

I would also point out that “pumpkin spice” doesn’t contain any pumpkin anyway, which is why it can so readily be added to so many things that ought not to taste like that.

Just as most recipes for snow geese would work equally well on leather boots, so, too, most pumpkin spice delights seem to be able to use anything as a base.

As it happens, I prefer sweet potato pie to pumpkin pie because it has a more substantial texture, more like a fruit pie than a custard. However, you generally have to find a soul food place to get sweet potato pie, which I first encountered at a Mahalia Jackson’s Fried Chicken place in South Bend.

Mahalia Jackson’s was a pre-cursor to Popeye’s in that it served surprisingly good versions of soul food, but went out of business (well, sort of, and don’t miss the video).

Popeye’s, I think, has succeeded because they serve “Cajun rice” instead of “dirty rice,” which is pretty much the same thing but You-Know-Who won’t eat something called “dirty rice.”

Last time I stopped at a Popeye’s was in an airport and I ordered sweet potato pie, but they told me it’s on the menu but they don’t actually have it there.

Maybe if they called it “Cajun pie,” You-Know-Who would order it in sufficient numbers at airports to make it practical.

 

Anyway, I like pumpkin spice in pumpkin pie or sweet potato pie or with butter in an acorn squash or in Indian pudding, but, man, I sure do get tired of hearing people yammer on about it.

 

Speaking of debatable taste,  Adam@Home has a freelance gig writing ad copy for a company that makes stink-pretty, and that’s not what the client calls it. Therein lies the challenge.

A major advantage of shifting from advertising to business journalism was that now I only had to find neutral ways to describe things; I no longer had to search for ways to praise them.

I took a Chamber of Commerce tour of a place once that repackaged knock-off aftershaves, and they gave us samples. I made the mistake of opening the aftershave and then pouring it down the sink instead of putting the stopper back in and burying it in the backyard.

It was two weeks before the overpowering stench was out of my bathroom, which made me wonder who on earth would buy this stuff until a few years later, when I had a publisher who evidently did, thinking we would mistake it for the real thing.

Just as he probably thought we would mistake that thing on his head for hair.

If he’d stuck a tail on it, we might have mistaken him for Davy Crockett.

Incidentally, guys, I heard an interview on CBC Radio when Harlequin Romances began publishing R-rated novels, in which an editor there said that, while their books are written by many people under a few pseudonyms, you can tell the male ghostwriters from the female ghostwriters because, when describing sex, women include smell and men don’t.

Take a damn shower before you come to bed. Seriously.

 

However, Pardon My Planet raises an issue in which men are right and women are wrong.

Raising the seat, of course, prevents soiling it with near-misses, and anyone who has cleaned around the toilet knows the lack of precision we’re dealing with.

But leaving it up also prevents spiders and mice from walking around on it. It’s an issue of hygiene and of personal safety.

We’re doing this for you, because, while we look before we sit and would notice a spider or a mouse on the seat, you obviously don’t, or else you wouldn’t keep accidentally sitting on cold porcelain.

(BTW, do y’all accidentally sit on the lid sometimes, too?)