Face it.

Forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit at 7:30 this morning. 

Only one house in the neighborhood has refused to cover its swimming pool. 

We are all about to die!

I am not panicking about Hurricane Joaquin, which appears to be on a trajectory to head away from us. Why would I worry about something like that when the entire PLANET is about to be DESTROYED?!

It's true and I know it's true, because Cablevision, my cable company, told me. Jim Dolan would never lie. I know he loves us, too; we get the cable bill first, ahead of all the other bills, every single month, and unlike our other utilities we have to pay prior to consumption of services. That's devotion. They're just scared that we'll leave them!

But we may all be leaving soon. Here's what the e-mail says:

Between October 4 and October 13 you might notice a very brief interruption in TV service due to sun outages. 

Holy crap! The SUN is going OUT?

Screw the TV service -- if there's a sun outage, there will be a permanent interruption in US! 

So if the sun goes out, how long until we all die? We would have a grace period of about eight and a half minutes before the light stops coming to us, and apparently that would include the heat as well. I don't know if we'd get any data that tells us the sun went out in that time. If we did, it might give us just seconds for NASA to instruct us to kiss our butts good-bye. Then WHAM! Frozen ice ball.

Now, it may seem a bit odd for a guy who endorsed the SMOD 2016 campaign to fret over a thing like the sun going out, but if the sun is just going to puff out like a candle, there won't be a lot of time to prepare for the end. With SMOD, at least we'll have some warning. 

Anyway, I went back to the e-mail from Cablevision to see if I could pinpoint when the sun was supposed to go out. 

As the sun’s path across the sky gets lower each day, there are times when it goes directly behind a TV satellite and its radiation overpowers the satellite’s signal. This results in what is called a sun outage. 

Oh. 

Damn.

I guess I have to pay my cable bill after all. 

Another story from the bargain bin.

This is an interesting soap product.

Yes, it is a hand soap meant for children, and is by Kandoo. It popped up a basket of sales at the grocery store. My mission: Make an uneducated guess as to why.

I can say a couple of things in its favor right off. First, there's no dadblasted Disney character present. Although the turtle on the label looks like a bit like a cartoony Teenage Mutant Ninja type to me.* The bottle, a friendly shade of green, is shaped like a happy frog, so they have all your amphibian needs covered. The spout and the soap itself are purple, the soap being a lighter colored foam. Essentially they came up with an eye-catching kids' product that used just purple, green, and white instead of the usual panoply of colors that looks like clown barf.

The base of the bottle is wide and thick, which is very helpful for the tykes. Those who have to reach up high to get to the top of the sink, and approach the bottle at a bad angle, are as likely to send the bottle flying off the vanity as they are to get some soap out of it. This makes it as easy as could be hoped for a kiddie pump bottle.

I'm sure they product-tested the squirt soap on the little squirts, but I find the scent rather odd and hard to place. Sort of like Miscellaneous Berry. It supposedly contains fruit extracts, so that's exactly what it might be. When I wanted extra cleanliness and mixed a handful with some Purell, the combined scent was powerfully reminiscent of beer wort from fruity homebrews. Haven't smelled that in maybe fifteen years, but it took me right back.

It is an odd soap in other ways. I find that the color stays on the towel if you don't rinse off properly, but that's not a bug, it's a feature---the idea is to teach the kids how to wash their hands. I guess I need some rinse reminders myself. The color comes right off in the wash, so don't worry about staining the good guest towels.

I think it may have wound up in the bargain bin just as a sale, to drum up interest in the product, and I hope so. Hoover's says the parent company, Nehemiah Manufacturing of Cincinnati, is a smallish outfit of $27.3 million in annual sales---a plucky David compared to the self-care Goliaths that fill our supermarket shelves. So if you have little kids, or even if you don't, try the Kandoo soap and see if you like it too. And if you are a homebrewer, try the Purell thing and let me know if I'm right.

---

*As it turns out, it's Captain Clean, a super-strong frog.

Muppet fruit!

No, this has no post bearing on the theoretical breeding ability of Fozzie Bear. I am merely referring to this:

Yes, look at those puffy, fuzzy green fruits---whatever could they be? Well, let's just pick one and have a AAAAIIIIIEEEEOWWWWCH!!!!

You all are way ahead of me here, I'm sure; that's no fruit, that's the extremely prickly outer coating of the chestnut!

Secret toy surprise!

This is the only chestnut tree I've seen in these environs, and it's right outside a house, so it may have been planted there generations ago. No one seems to be harvesting the nuts, though.

I was surprised to see that the American Chestnut Foundation says that the chestnut has been smited by blight here in Eastern woodlands. The blight is a fungus that came in on Asian chestnut trees (bastards!) planted in New York (sorry!) and just plain murders the American chestnut. Looks like this is my week to find out about tree perils.

The ACF has been working on a blight-resistant American chestnut, and it would appear they are in beta testing. If you're interested in helping out, the Web site gives you plenty of information on how to do so. Be aware, though, that the ACF failed to meet Better Business Bureau standards by its failure to divulge budget information.

Personally, I hope the American chestnut makes a roaring comeback. I like trees, and I love the smell of roasting chestnuts. I've never eaten a chestnut, but they sure smell good. Of course, maybe it's only the Asian ones I've been smelling. Maybe the domestic ones smell different.

The Agricultural Marketing Resource Center notes that many chestnuts sold in American grocery stores come from China. Does this mean that when we sing of chestnuts roasting on an open fire at Christmas, we're talking about Chinese food?

Sue Swanson says: Everyone loves chicken salads.

Here's another awesome pamphlet that was handed down from me in Mom's cookbook, from the Swanson chicken people:

Sunshine salads! From the C.A. Swanson & Sons company! Coincidentally, all of these happen to contain poultry. Did the cartoon quisling chicken give it  away?

Something weird about that illustrated salad bowl, though. There's nothing in it except the serving utensils, which look as if they are submerged in some kind of clear salad soup. The celery leaves seem to have grown up around the bowl like a bowl mane. Bizarre.

We know that everyone loves chicken salads---delicious, meaty salads!---because Sue Swanson says so, and she wouldn't lie about something that important:

Who was Sue Swanson? Was she a member of the Swanson family (others being Carl A. and sons) or a phony baloney mascot* like Betty Crocker and Ann Page?

Martin Jones, in his 2007 book Feast: Why Humans Share Food, says that in 1950s TV, "While a real Lucille Ball buzzed hectically and humorously through through a fictional family life, so a make-belief Sue Swanson (dreamed up by the advertising people) reassured real-life housewives that they need not feel guilty about not cooking home-made meals for their families." Sue looks matronly and a little icy. You might think that the ad boys would have made Sue prettier if she was fictional, but then, housewives might have responded poorly to some young, overpainted hussy.

There's no date on this booklet, but we can fix it to no earlier than the mid-1950s, I think; also, since the Swanson address has no zip code, it must be older than 1963.

The product on the bottom left of the page is a Swanson TV dinner. The Swansons, inspired by tray meals served on airplanes, invented the TV dinner in 1952, and Swanson TV dinners were available from then until 2009. The Swanson company didn't last that long; there's no company HQ at 1202 Douglas Street in Omaha anymore. The company was bought up in pieces, and those pieces have been rebranded over time. The only Swanson that exists anymore are canned poultry and broth products, owned by Campbell's. Chick Transit Gloria Mundi, I guess.

As for the brief "Sunshine Salads" booklet, the recipes were pretty commonplace for the most part, merely using cooked frozen or canned poultry instead of buying fresh and cooking it, then cooling it. If anything, these salads would be more popular now than they were at the time, salads having come into their own. Of course, I had to look for the most repellent recipe in the booklet to scan, and that was easy:

Savory Chicken Loaf made with unflavored gelatin, mayo, canned chicken, French dressing, and so on, chilled in a loaf pan.

There may come a day when these kind of meat/gelatin loaf foods will begin appearing in small hipster restaurants, and some will dig it ironically, and some jaded palettes will thrill to something unfamiliar, and there will be gelatin-based cold meat recipes on Food Network, and in magazines, and then we'll be stuck with this kind of thing again.

That day may come. But it is not today.

------

*Not that I have anything against advertising mascots. Hell, I wrote a whole novel about advertising mascots come to life, as you can see on the right.

Naughty, by nature.

A while back I wrote about the evil pokeberry, a poisonous fruit that masquerades as a wild blueberry. The pokeweed may be even more wicked than I thought. On the weekend, marching through the underbrush with Tralfaz, I came upon this:

This would appear to be a pokeweed strangling the life out of an innocent evergreen.

I'm as far from being a naturalist as you might expect to get---a great indoorsman am I, a kind of antinaturalist---but I had read that the pokeweed grows like a small tree. Well, not here, buster. The one I saw a couple of weeks ago was crawling on a chain link fence, and this one grew up like a serpent on the tree it is murdering. Below you see the dying tree trunk, and on the left the anti-umbilical cord of the vine, bringing not life but death:

The vine is snaked around the tree, its pokeberry vines snarling every branch, cutting life off to the needles and replacing it with its poisonous fruit.

Now, it is wise to say that nature is neither good nor bad, but our judgment about what is useful, dangerous, ugly, or beautiful causes us to give values to what we experience in it. And yet many of the same philosophers who would insist the pokeweed (or yellow jacket, or poison ivy, or mosquito, or virus, etc.) has no moral value would gaze upon a glorious valley view and feel that it is a good thing and ought to be preserved. In other words, assign a moral value to something in nature. It may be an emotional reaction, but it would appear to indicate that the issue is much more complicated than the Twain jibe that "Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to."

St. Augustine argues that Nature is good, but not as good as its Creator, for it can be corrupted and diminished, which is evil. I am not saying that plants are motivated actors of good or ill, but that the wickedness of corruption may lead to what would indeed look like evil.

Well, the next time I go that way I am bringing a saw and cutting the damn wooden serpent off at the root. It may be too late to save the tree, but it's worth a try.

PSA from the dog #3.

Hello, friends. It's me, coming to you once again: the dog.

Friends, I would like to talk to you about a disturbing trend that has come up recently. I am, of course, referring to the popularity of the video that has been making the rounds on your Internet. The one of the rat carrying off a slice of pizza.

Those of you with sensitive stomachs may want to look away:

Isn't that revolting? And yet this has been seen by millions of people. Counting you just now, millions + 1!

People seem to think it is cute. It is not cute. Rats are just squirrels with skinny tails and worse habits. Do not be fooled!

Friends, rather than watching this unhygienic spectacle of a rat stealing cheese, why not keep your cheese safe by giving it to your dog? It doesn't have to be on a pizza, although that might be okay, especially with bacon. Your doggie will be so happy, and he will only eat as much as you give him. He will not drag a whole pizza to some hidey hole and share it with cockroaches. He will eat it all. Because your cheerful little chum loves cheese.

Some people will say that cheese is bad for dogs, especially in large amounts. Some people say it is even dangerous. We dogs say: Shut up! How would you know what is good for dogs? You are not dogs. You do not understand us! Go stick cheese in your ear, Mr. Busybody! Cheese is good!

Cheese, in fact, builds better pup bodies 8 ways. There's calcium, and protein, and... And some more. I forget. I can't count that high. I'm a dog!

But I do know that rats are evil and gross, and dogs are sweet and cute. Therefore take your cheese away from the rats and give it to the dogs.

Thank you for listening, friends! And remember:

Don't give food to icky rats
Puppy loves the tasty treat that's
Cheese.

This has been a public service announcement from the dog.