Fred's Book Club: None the Wurst.

Welcome to Wednesday! That means it's Hump Day, and time for another entry in our Humpback Writers feature. Sometimes they are Humpback Artists as well, but in either case they don't actually have hunched backs. Well, not in today's case, although I am certain our featured writer drew camels at some point. Close enough! 

Wallace Tripp's Wurst Seller is a book of cartoons by Mr. Tripp, who left us in 2018 at the tender age of 78. He's probably best remembered as an illustrator of children's books, including some of the very popular Amelia Bedelia books by Peggy Parish. The above paperback, a brief compendium of art, sketches, fuzzy animals, silly jokes, and horrible puns, was published by Sparhawk Books in 1981. 

I was not surprised to find out that Tripp had lived and worked in England for a time, because there is something English about his sense of humor and his meticulous animal drawings. I hope his estate will not mind my posting some work from this book; how else is one to excerpt it? 

Note that while the term "When you call me that, smile!" does come from the novel The Virginian, the actual author was Owen Wister. Tripp is knowledgeable and expects his audience to be as well. 

I certainly was not, when I came into possession of Wurst Seller. I just loved the gags. This, for example, I enjoyed, but I didn't get the reference: 

It was still funny to me without knowing that the Colombe mentioned at the bottom was Michel Colombe, whose bas relief of St. George was in the Louvre:

And I certainly had no idea that Sandro Botticelli's Primavera, about classical characters and the lust of spring...

... was the inspiration for the bittersweet Tripp "Primavera 1942":

But I should have known something about it, as a sweet aged female relative had told me about being in high school when all the boys had gone off to war. You even see an animal Douglas MacArthur in a jeep on the bottom right, with a trailer of flowers and a sign with the Villon quote, "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" (And you see an upside down bunny rabbit on the top left, which -- why not?)

What I mostly liked in the book back then were the silly drawings that pepper the pages, generally featuring animals:

So I thank you, Mr. Tripp, for a very entertaining book, and I hope you will be remembered. It's funny that authors of children's books are often better known than the illustrators, even though the pictures are what usually draw children in. But let us tip the topper to Tripp today, for a job well done.

P.S.: While Wurst Seller has many animals (snakes, skunks, tigers, etc.) and even two Sopwith Camels, there are no camels. Pity -- that would have been as close as we've gotten so far to an actual Humpback Writer. 

When push comes to shovel.

As I write this Monday evening, it has been snowing for almost 24 hours. It may continue for another 24 hours. I just shoveled the walkway for the second time. The snow was more than two feet deep.

Been a while since we had a real roof crusher in these parts. Haven't missed it, either. But, bad back and all, I braved the weather to do my bit to keep things clear. In fact, I even wrote a song about it. A ballad. The Ballad of Me.

❆❅💪👨❆❄

Oh, Frederick Key was a mighty man
And a mighty man was he
He strode outside to fight the storm
With great integrity

Frederick took his mighty blade
A shovel scoop of yellow
And went to work upon that snow
Like a mighty, manly fellow

He shoveled here and shoveled there
Flinging snowflakes like a nitwit
He made it to his parking pad
Thirty-five steps on his FitBit 

Then Frederick took his mighty phone
And with his great know-how
He called a man most manfully
To come and bring his plow

Then Frederick took himself inside
Having made his mighty call
And took with mighty manliness 
Some mighty Tylenol

☃🌨⛇

I think schoolkids will be singing this one some day, don't you? 

NOW it's four a.m. on Tuesday and I just shoveled the walk for the... fifth time? I've lost count. The bulk of the storm is over but it looks like we'll have some flakes around here for the remainder of the day, self included. The dogs, who woke me up at three, are sleeping peacefully in the hall. I'm going to put my head on the table and blarg. Blarg.

It's true and you know it.

 

Eat it.

Quite a few years ago my wife and I were honored to be invited to a colleague's wedding in Chinatown. We were very touched to be included, along with some other people I knew, and were looking forward to it. It was a beautiful ceremony, a gorgeous blend of Chinese tradition, Christian church, and no fewer than three outstanding dresses for the bride at different parts of the evening.

We were also promised an amazing feast of many courses. I was a little wary, knowing that this was not going to be the takeout that Americans normally think of as Chinese food. But we had recently started to frequent a wonderful Indian restaurant and were all in on that cuisine, so we figured this might be a similar situation.

As you might guess, it was not.

To my uncultured Ugly American palette, what we faced was just dish after dish of weird things from the sea, stuff you would throw back, stuff that might make you give up fishing forever if it landed in your net. Everything seemed runny, gummy, wobbly, gushy, weird. We and the other white folks at the table were fighting over the rice as the meal progressed. Also, we of some Irish extraction drank all the beer before the reception was half over. (Meanwhile, the groom, who did not like to drink, was borne by tradition to toast every table of the large extended family with Chivas Regal.)

I bring this up as an example of why I think it's perfectly natural to resist unfamiliar food, and the more unfamiliar the stronger the resistance. My wife has lately taken to watching the show Monsters Inside Me, and if you are trying to lose weight this new year, I advise putting it on during dinner. 

Monsters Inside Me details the real-life horrors of people who at some point contracted a terrifying disease, most often caused by parasites. Doctors are unhelpful, because early symptoms and signs are confused with more common complaints -- but eventually the effects turn hellacious, and usually life-threatening. If that's not enough, the show provides gruesome magnified animations of the "monsters" at play in the body, munching, bursting, oozing, and multiplying. My wife turned it on once and the narrator was saying something like "When the fungus finishes eating the natural bacteria on the eyeball, it can adapt to eat the tissue of the eye itself." I called out from the kitchen, "That is the most typical piece of dialogue you can imagine from the show." Every episode I've seen includes little talks from Dr. Daniel Riskin, explaining why these creatures are so deadly and how many people they kill. He's lots of fun at parties. 

No offense to our wedding hosts, and I can promise you no one got sick there, unless it was from too much Chivas Regal. The only reason I bring it up is that there are consequences to eating unknown foods in strange places, especially things that have not had the hell cooked out of them, and we seem to have a natural urge to avoid foreign things if we can. Evolutionary biologists might say it comes from millennia of watching Og or Thunk so hungry that him eat weird thing raw and then him turn green and devoured from inside out. Our natural reaction to new food, thus, ranges from caution to spurning to horror. 

Heck, what's more anodyne than American peanut butter to those without food allergies? And yet I'm told many people from foreign lands think it's weird and won't touch it. 

It's not a bad idea to be cautious when sojourning outside the country. As the CDC says, "International travelers can be at risk for a variety of infectious and non-infectious diseases. Travelers may acquire parasitic illnesses: through ingestion of contaminated food or water, by vector-borne transmission, or through person-to-person contact. Contaminated food and drink are common sources for the introduction of infection into the body." I think Monsters Inside Me has turned my wife off sushi permanently.

It's not bad enough that eating raw crabs or something can infect you with a parasite that will kill you. It's that the parasite may also make you want to kill yourself. You may have heard that the common cat-related Toxoplasma gondii parasite is linked with depression, but so too is Ascaris lumbricoides, which may be ingested if good hygiene is not observed.

Which got me to think of chef and author Anthony Bourdain, largely remembered for traveling around the world and eating weird foods on shows like No Reservations. Well, now I have reservations -- I wonder if his mental state had been wrecked by some ingested parasite. If the autopsy did not look for it, we'll never know; Bourdain was cremated. 

I'll add a note too to Andrew Zimmern, host of various Bizarre Foods shows: Bring a microscope with you when you dine out. Or Dr. Daniel Riskin.

He never said "tropical."

Remember: A resentment is an expectation that has been mugged.

Updates and downdates.

Today I have some brief updates to items we've posted on this blog. In a way it's that old standby of the newspaper columnist, the Brief Observations, but in another way, it's not -- it's partly a Return to the Well. But some things do need updates, especially when an apology is in order. Thus we start with:

1) Apology to Chinese hand sanitizer

Last month I trashed a bottle of hand sanitizer I bought at Target, the "Scentfull" Winter Wonderland stuff. I thought it smelled like "some cheap 70's cologne with Tabasco mixed in". Well, as time went on and I was obliged to use it to fend off Chinese Death Virus, I came to appreciate its balsam scent. It actually does smell like a pine tree -- an artificial version of a pine tree from some weird planet that's like Earth but not exactly the same, but a pine tree nonetheless. So I don't hate it anymore. Sorry, hand sanitizer from China. But I still hate the government under which you were made. Anyway, speaking of health:

2) FitBit

I'm having much better luck with the FitBit I got for Christmas, the one that gave me a nasty rash on my wrist. I tried it again when the rash cleared up, only I wore it a lot looser and switched arms at night for sleep monitoring. This way I didn't have plastic tight on my wrist all day long. So I have been rash-free for the last couple of weeks. At first the thrill of getting 10,000 steps a day was a good motivator to keep moving, but then it started to wane, and now the software itself doesn't make a big deal about 10K steps. Seriously, I was getting fireworks on the little screen and everything. Now I'm mainly wearing it as a watch and to find out how poorly I slept last night. Maybe it will help with fitness in the long run. Except for...

3) Pork rinds

My wife was a pork-rind fan in college, because smoking and drinking were not unhealthy enough on their own (just kidding, honey!) (not really!). But I had never tried them. I remembered they were supposedly a guilty pleasure of George H.W. Bush, but I knew little else. Well, the delightful Mrs. K got me to try them, and I thought they were great -- the consistency of shrimp chips with a great bacon flavor. Just what I needed -- to like another snack with 90 calories in a half-ounce serving, along with 2g saturated fat and 12% of my daily sodium. Why can't I ever get that excited about a vegetable? Especially since all this lard can lead to...

4) Back pain

Had a scare this week following something that happened last week. I was taking down some Christmas stuff (believe me, it's still not all put away) when I decided, as we manly men will, to reach over a wing back chair to get a stocking hung at the top of the window rather than pick my way around the chair to get it. At that moment I felt something pull in a muscle on my left side. More than a week later the Back Revenge set in (a.k.a. Pay BACK Time), and I woke up feeling like I'd been questioned by the Inquisition. Well, I didn't expect that! Fortunately it seems to be fading, but for a day there I thought I was going to have to crawl back to the hospital, after I finally finished paying that little vacation off. Of course, I might wind up there anyway for frostbite, because it is:

5) Freezing cold

Ten degrees and breezy this morning; with windchill, -7. As I write it is colder here than in Anchorage, Oslo, Moscow, Helsinki, or Reykjavik. Which means it is time to take out... the Porta-Igloo, the Huge Lands' End Coat That Walks Like a Man.

I've had this thing for at least eighteen years and it hardly shows any wear. Why? Because it's so warm and well-insulated that I only wear it maybe three or four days a year. Today is one of those days. When I would commute to the city it was a major help, but I was always nervous about wearing a light-colored coat on the subway. Still, it was a matter of survival. And it never got all messed up. I think people believed I was the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man and kept their distance. 

Off I go with the crazy dogs! Keep warm and Chinese-virus-free, my friends!

The meaning is clear.

PROFESSOR DECLARES SNOW "CLEAR"
Cites "Accuracy" and "Hegemony"

Duckfoot Ridge, CO (1/28/21) -- Dr. Edwina Raige, professor of Meteorological Phenomena and Related Grievances at Duckfoot Ridge College, has announced demands to the weather community, media, and public at large that snow no longer be referred to as "white," but rather "clear." 

"Any scientist knows that snowflakes are made of frozen water, and thus are not white, but clear," said the professor at a conference today. "Only anti-science idiots and people with a vested interest in White Supremacy call snow 'white.' Today I demand that all references to snow be changed to describe it as clear rather than white."

Dr. Raige provided reporters with a list of "stupid, prejudicial, anti-science, patriarchal, pro-White, anti-BIPOC examples of the idea of white snow in Western culture," with preferred, pro-human pro-science replacements, including:

Whiteout weather warnings

Clearout weather warnings

 Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow

Mary had a small quadrupedal, ruminant mammal whose fleece was clear as snow 

Ivory Snow detergent

Elephant Bony Tissue Frozen Water detergent

"White Christmas"

"Clear Eurocentric Historically Problematical Annual Event"

Snow White and the Seven Dwarves  

Snow Clear and the Seven Persons of Small Stature 

"Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow" 

"4.572 Meters of Crystalline Clear Frozen Water"

"Removing the toxic whiteness from our idea of snow will remove toxic whiteness from a primary part of our vocabulary and thought," said Dr. Raige. "It not only is a blow for scientific accuracy, it is also a blow against the white cisgender supremacist hegemony." 

The Weather Channel was among the first to agree to use Dr. Raige's new formulation, citing "her impeccable credentials" and "her living in Colorado where they get a lot of the whi-- uh, cold stuff." MSNBC and CNN concurred. All three were then soundly thrashed on social media for assuming Dr. Raige's gender.