#1023 Corndog Culture

In a new book about the end of overeating, the author says the reason we overeat is that we’re addicted to some of the things we eat. He proposes we can’t just diet, we have to rehab our whole digestive tract. Actually we have to deprive our bodies of the rush we get from three main drugs—sugar, salt, and fat.
If you’re like me, you’ve cut down on one or the other. But American food purveyors and creators have made an effort to combine those ingredients in every popular food. That’s why they’re popular.
Think of the great food we love this time of year, fair food. Fair food is the summer equivalent of the groaning tables of indoor food we have during the winter holiday season.
Except in summer, we don’t carve a turkey breast. We heft a deep-fried turkey leg. Forget the pumpkin and pecan pies. It’s time for scones and elephant ears. How about those Jello marshmallow dishes? Strawberry shortcake. Mashed potatoes and gravy? Potato skin nachos.
Gravy and melted cheese sauce both enjoy the benefits of lots of salt and smooth finger-licking runniness.
Summertime also gives us the one food that is the epitome of American culinary culture. The corndog. Think of it as the pure heroin of the fast food hard drug spectrum.
First you take ground up bits of meat products you wouldn’t otherwise eat—lips, sphincters, ligaments, tendons, and nameless organs. Mix it all up and add lots of spices, salt, and sugar. Add chemicals, nitrates, nitrites, and various preservatives. Then stuff the meat into an intestinal tube.
Then you dip it in batter. The batter contains some arguably healthy ground up corn. Corn, the grain that masquerades as a vegetable. Add more sugar and salt to the batter and a little cholesterolly milk and egg to bind it to the corn meal.
Then deep-fry it in a hot bubbly vat of fat.
And the coop de grease, and American ingenuity at its best, put a stick in it to make it easy to gobble with one hand.
So your other hand can hold that salty, sweet, nut-topped, chocolate waffle cone.
Drugs anyone?
America, ya gotta love it.

#1022 Trick Finger

Works can be tricky. Especially when you mess with their spelling. Recently I wrote about Ben-Gay, the analgesic cream the relieves pain, and I learned that it is now called Bengay, with one word and the “G” in gay not capitalized. It also lost its hyphen somewhere in the process of joining with Ben.
So I wonder why they felt it necessary to minimize the gay in Ben-Gay. Was it simply because it was hard to spell? Did it sell less well in red states to the older clientele that was its main target? Or in the end, were they trying to slip in a more nefarious agenda?
Maybe they were simply trying to minimize confusion.
“I’m your day orderly at the eldercare home, Mr. Johnson. Do you like your new room? What’s that you’re rubbing on your joint?”
“Ben-Gay.”
“That’s okay with me. Is that something for your arthritis?”
“Ben-Gay.”
“Look, here at the assisted care facility, we don’t care what you used to be, Mr. Johnson, but we do care about what creams, analgesics, or medications you’re taking. So what is it?”
“Ben-Gay.”
“Oh never mind, you old coot...I’m going to check on your roommate Mr. Dover...”
The other tricky thing about words is when you have a trick finger like I do. Sometimes when I’m tapping my keyboard the darn thing gets out of sync. It’s like I have dyslexic fingers or something.
When I intend to type in “for” I almost always type in “fro.” It makes fro an interesting read if I fail to catch it. Conversely, I type in “form” when I need to type “from.” But the other day I really almost blew it. I was writing an email inviting a person to attend a Lion’s Club charity event and I dyslexified the vowels in lions.
I ended up inviting her to come see the loins.
Yeah, and there will be a circus where they’ll have loin tricks. Not a good mistake. Thank goodness I wasn’t inviting her to see that Disney cartoon.
An invitation to join me at a special showing of the Loin King may have sent the wrong message.
America, ya gotta love it.

#1021 Vitamin Y

I’ve joked before about the changes brought about by post-middle age. You can learn a lot about what’s ahead at your health club. It’s easy to tell the mean age of a group of guys in the locker room.
A sure sign of pre-seniors is the discussion doesn’t center around sex so much as fiber.
Viagra briefly changed all that, but most of the guys went off that binge relatively quickly. Perhaps it was the light-headedness. Perhaps it was the hassle. Sex interfered with their golf.
Perhaps it was the other aches and pains they developed from too much exercise in that area. There’s no machine in the health club that isolates the pelvic muscle group. And throwing out a hip is no fun. Especially if it’s artificial to start with.
There’s this old guy in the locker room that got a new hip joint and now boasts to all his cronies he has an excuse to do everything half-assed.
This other guy felt like he was getting no effect from Viagra so why fork out the money. He was worried that his Viagra might be negatively interacting with his Lipitor. “Lipitor,” he said, “was supposed to eliminate the hardening of my arteries and...” then our looks of rapt curiosity made him trail off in his explanation.
Which is another subject of discussion. Do you want things that boost your testosterone, increase your sex drive and help you burn fat and lose weight? Or do you want to avoid testosterone precursors because too much testosterone causes hair loss and prostate enlargement?
The other big question seems to be, at what point are you supposed to get Men’s Formula One-a-Day vitamins or Senior Formula One-a-Day vitamins?
You also hear a lot of talk about various vitamin and mineral supplements. Most of the old guys could care less about creatine, it’s hard enough to move around, being muscle bound would make things worse. No, these guys would much rather discuss the relative merits of glucosamine. These ageing children of the sixties have gone from smoking joints to swollen joints.
The only drug they want is Ben-Gay.
America, ya gotta love it.