Rollins quoting his Cairene cab driver:
Driving in Cairo is like a video game: When you make a crash, do not worry. Put in another quarter, and keep driving
First off, I am not really an avid consumer of potato chips, neither am I in the habit of making random observations on food, but this is more of a by-product of my increased consumption of a particular variety of sandwich I’ve been ordering rather frequently from a local cafe/eatery as of late. The sandwich is delectable, but they throw in this sorry excuse for a bag of chips. Now, I am neither a picky eater, nor a complete health nut (but I am still not fond of putting crap into my body), and I can hear you say “Just throw it in the trash, duh!”...but this being me – and as a general rule of many bullshit rules I go by - if it is food, it must be eaten (if not by me, then by someone, or something else, much to the misery of visiting friends and the delight of my dogs). I just don’t throw out food except when a certain amount of visible fungi/mold/bacteria colonies can be observed by the naked eye on the surface of said food (now something is feeding on it, then it’s okay to throw it away. bacteria can still eat in the trash). But I digress…
The brand is called “Lion” made by Leader Foods. The bag includes an average of 12 sodium-marinated, overcooked chips (yes, I’ve made multiple counts and took an average. Commentary on crappy stuff must still be properly documented).
To eliminate any qualms about any gastronomic misjudgment I might have made on this questionable potatoesque substance, and in the interest of eliminating potential criticism of my opinion on grounds of taste-bud bias, I decided to run the “dog test”. You know how people sometimes say that something is so bad that you wouldn’t even feed it to your dog? Well, lets test out the degree of crapyness as measured by a dog’s undiscriminating palate.
To perform said test, I enlisted the help of Stella, my 14-month old German Shepherd. Stella’s eating behavior can be likened to a high-volume vacuum cleaner. Nothing edible -or inedible for that matter – is spared the wrath; lettuce, cabbage, meatballs, dog food and small timber panels are all one and the same in her quest to totally devour whatever is in her immediate vicinity. Hence my amazement to see Stella’s reaction to the open bag of Lion presented to her.
She ate the bag and left the chips. Yeah, this stuff is so bad you wouldn’t even feed it to your dog.
It’s moving season. My university is moving campus and I am moving house. My office, apartment and car are all full of boxes of various sizes. A sense of temporariness is infused into familiar spaces, and there is an urgency to just move and get it over with. Nevertheless, it is refreshing. The inevitability of change feels surprisingly good. Granted, the warmness afforded to us by familiar spaces is to be appreciated. However, I find that staying too long in such spaces (my apartment, room, office, etc) cloys my mind into a subtle state of dullness resembling some form of conscious hibernation (how’s that for a great line of bull!). The intellect is lulled into what I would term as a state of “environment-induced hypnosis” due a lack of mental stimulation by what have become an overly familiar and intimate environment.
It might be a right-brain thing, or it might be just me. The fact remains that moving shakes thing up a bit, at least for a while, until the surroundings become excruciatingly familiar again.
On a differnt note, I am just glad that I will finally be able to find a parking spot on my street.
This a reply that I made to a mailing list discussion on the Wikimania 2008 conference I attended recently. I do realize that not having the entire thread would take it out of context, but the archives to the relevant threads are here. While this is something specific to post-confernece commentary and discussions, I decided to also post it here since it pretty much sums up my thoughts on the subject.