Oh, the humanity!
Uncle B asked me if there was anything special I wanted to eat for Christmas (he’s at the beginning of the annual ordeal that is the Christmas cake). I thought of this. Probably my favorite cake in the whole wide world and I haven’t had it in I don’t know how long.
Did you have this growing up? Nabisco first published the recipe in 1929 as the Chocolate Wafer Icebox Cake. Sorry for the fuzzy picture, but this one looks most like the version my mother always made.
Here’s a recipe, but you don’t really need a recipe. You take one packet of Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers and smother them in whipped cream. Leave overnight in the fridge.
I know that doesn’t sound special, but oh my lord! The cream softens the wafers and the wafers stiffen the cream and for someone like me who thinks texture is about the most important component of food, it is a thing other worldly.
I can get specialty American foods like graham crackers or chocolate wafers here, if I’m willing to pay the price. So I went looking and OH MY GOD NABISCO HAS STOPPED MAKING THEM!!!
About a year ago. After 95 years. Nobody knows why. There’s been a petition and a Facebook group (people really love this thing), but so far Nabisco hasn’t responded.
Fortunately, the article about it also includes a recipe for home-made chocolate wafers.
I can get the ingredients for it. But do I have it in me?
November 12, 2024 — 5:28 pm
Comments: 4
They’re stealing the cheese!
Luxury cheese heists are apparently a thing now.
Where’s it going? Russia. Because of sanctions, Russians can’t get decent cheese from abroad and they prefer it over domestic cheese. Or Belarus, which has legal trade with Russia.
Cheese is enormously expensive, and the black market food trade (other kinds of luxury food gets lifted) has much lesser penalties than the drug trade, if your ass gets caught.
There are people with more money than sense out there. Behold, the £6,000 Christmas food hamper!
I ain’t going to lie – I’m still over here bingeing liberal tears videos all day.
p.s. both “binging” and “bingeing” are correct, but binging looks stupid.
p.p.s. image is what happens when you give AI “stolen cheese” as a prompt. Over and over, artguru.ai just gave me pictures of cheese with ‘tarded machine language versions of “stolen cheese” on the label. Cheese itself isn’t bad, but the wedges are all weird.
November 11, 2024 — 6:56 pm
Comments: 11
I’m’a have milk and cookies
A gift from Uncle B. He dared me to take it into work. Nuh-uh. I am so stealth it ain’t funny.
You know, I’m actually kind of worried. Kamala Harris was easily the worst presidential candidate of my lifetime. She was parachuted in three months before election day without winning a single vote. I’ve never known anyone – forget politicians, anyone – with less ability to sit in front of an interviewer and bullshit. You could snag the first person you found on the street and ask them about their hypothetical economic policy and they could probably fart and tapdance for five minutes, credibly.
And oh god that brain melting laugh.
Then there’s Trump. I know a lot of people hate him, but we’ll probably never run a slicker candidate. He’s been performing in front of cameras for decades. He’s got plenty of his own money, so he doesn’t have to crawl to the Chamber of Commerce. He pulled off dozens of gigantic rock-star sized rallies.
Just look at that PR picture up there. It’s so perfect, no wonder loony lefties think he orchestrated the whole thing somehow.
Then there’s the gigantic fuckup at the border that finally got the Hispanics voting Republican.
We will never see an election choice quite this stark again.
And we only won it 47% to 51%.
Don’t think too much about it. Have a good weekend instead.
November 8, 2024 — 6:03 pm
Comments: 14
Just hanging out with my chicken, smoking a cigar
Last time I bought a cigar was about five years ago. It cost the same and I swear it was twice as big.
I walked into work this morning. I do that sometimes when the weather is okay, and when I do, I stop at a little coffee shop for a sit-down espresso. The woman behind the counter said, “you’re American. How do you feel about the election?”
I said, “please don’t worry. Everything will be fine. He’s not the monster they make him out to be.”
And she said, “oh, I know. I listened to JD Vance on Rogan the other day and he sounds like a good man.”
That was unexpected!
Have you enjoyed X as much as I have today? Life doesn’t hand us nearly enough gloating opportunities.
p.s. Why yes, that’s a rake handle propping up the end of the chicken house. You can take the girl out of Tennessee…
November 7, 2024 — 5:47 pm
Comments: 6
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Her name is Jessica Starr. After her famous scream at the 2017 inauguration, she seems to have dropped off the planet. I’m not the only one to go looking for her, either. The trail is confused by the sad story of a meteorologist of the same name who hanged herself when her lasik surgery went bad.
Oh, man, I am so relieved. I thought for sure we’d be dealing with weeks of court fights and ‘found’ ballots. I told everybody it would be a while before we knew for sure. This is almost a letdown.
I’ll take it! I’ll take it!
November 6, 2024 — 4:31 pm
Comments: 21
I wasn’t looking for that skeleton, I was looking for THIS skeleton
There was a headline in New Scientist about a curious skeleton found in a Roman graveyard in Belgium. It seemed unremarkable, until they tested the bones:
Laid to rest on the right side with tucked-up legs, the remains feature long bones from seven unrelated Stone Age men and women – of varying ages and separated by several centuries – and the skull of a Roman woman who died…
Unfortunately, New Scientist is behind a paywall and that’s where the article cut off. I was sure I could find the same info at an archaeology site, but I have been unsuccessful. In the course of Googling, I ran across yesterday’s skeleton – and lot of others beside. Dear me there are a lot of bones in Europe.
Local councils end up with boxes of the things. They’re required to have an archaeologist on construction sites to collect anything interesting. Bones end up in storage and seldom get revisited. On the rare occasion they are, odd things come to light.
There was one report I read that turned up a similar skeleton made up from the ancient bones of multiple individuals – except all the bones had tiny holes drilled in them. The obvious purpose being to string them together and hang them up.
I doubt it’s ancestor worship, if they couldn’t be bothered to keep the bones of various ancestors separate. To scare the kids on Halloween? And why would you Frankenstein together a skeleton from eight different people and then bury it?
Our ancestors baffle me.
November 5, 2024 — 8:15 pm
Comments: 4
The ancestors were weird
YAVB (yet another vampire burial). This one had a sickle buried over her throat business side down so she’d decapitate herself if she sat up. Spoiler: she didn’t.
Also, she had a padlock around her big toe. There’s a bit of vampire lore I didn’t know.
She was eighteen. She had a wonky front tooth, which might have contributed to her identification as a blood sucker. She also had a tumor under her breast bone that might have caused her to look weird, faint a lot and bleed randomly, which couldn’t have helped her reputation. Probably killed her.
She was found in a Polish graveyard but she was Scandihoovian. This was during a 17th C war between Poland and Sweden, so maybe that had something to do with it. It was also the century of Peak Vampire.
She was in a graveyard with 100 unmarked burials, 30 of which had bodies restrained in some way. This is now called the Field of Vampires, because Sky History is doing a two-part special and it sounds sexy.
I had to take minutes for two meetings today and I’m feeling crispy and put-upon.
November 4, 2024 — 6:18 pm
Comments: 11
I’m sure that wasn’t there when I left this morning
When the roofers began to take the tiles off the outside of the kitchen roof, the innards came tumbling down. It wasn’t entirely unexpected – the interior walls will have to be replaced anyway – but coming home to a couple of inches of ancient crud on the stove was not the happy Friday I was looking for.
Uncle B had it worse. Not only did he put up with the banging and crashing all day, but he stuck his hand in a gardening glove and something inside stung him horribly.
Marvelous how the sunlight sparkles on the cobwebs, yes?
Soon, gin will make it all better. Have a better weekend, everyone!
November 1, 2024 — 7:01 pm
Comments: 8
My pumpkin this year is meh
By which I mean the “meh” emoji. Yes, I really am that lazy.
I wanted a small but perfect pumpkin this year, so I took one off a display I’m pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to touch. Yes, I’m that much of a weasel. I did pay for it, though.
We’ve found ourselves a cache of awful old horror movies. Happy Halloween!
October 31, 2024 — 6:15 pm
Comments: 13
A visit to my pumpkin dealer
Brits don’t really do Halloween, except this one guy. This is a local farmer. We buy potatoes from him in the summer.
In October – well, by the time October rolls around – he’s grown thousands of pumpkins for sale. And he’s always super busy selling them. Mostly families with young children buying wheelbarrows full of them. Lord knows what they’re doing with them.
He must have hundreds and hundreds left over, but he also keeps pigs, so problem solved.
Authorities are warning us not to dump our pumpkins in the woods. Apparently, pumpkin gives hedgehogs diarrhea.
Do I believe this? Well, the expert quoted suggests we make the flesh into delicious pumpkin soup instead, thereby proving she knows fuck all about ornamental pumpkins. I cooked one up one year and it was nasty.
Speaking of woodland, go watch this hilarious ad.
October 30, 2024 — 7:01 pm
Comments: 9