Thieving elves?

I think those Keebler elves are up to something. 

This packaging has a kind of flair that makes me think of two of the Girl Scouts' most popular cookies.

To be fair, the packaging may be new, but the Keebler varieties are not. Keebler, which has a history dating back to 1853 and is now owned by Ferrero SpA (after being a Kellogg company for 19 years), has been making its fudge-based cookies for some time. But more to the point, Keebler was actually the first commercial bakery to make cookies for the Girl Scouts to sell. Keebler is still involved with the Girl Scouts, actually; its Little Brownie Bakery subsidiary is one of two companies that bake the cookies for the GS gang. (The other is ABC Smart Cookies.)

But are these knockoffs of the Girl Scout brands? I can't prove a connection, although Lifehacker says they are. The Fudge Mint Delights (formerly known as Grasshoppers) are indeed a type of Thin Mint, and the Coconut Dreams match up to the Caramel deLites (a.k.a. Samoas, depending where you live in the United States). But they are not identical. For example, the BusyBee blog did a taste test of the mint cookies a few years ago and found the Thin Mint slightly superior to the Keebler mint cookie. 

What does this all mean? I don't know. My wife was the Thin Mint fan in the family -- in the days B.F. (Before Fred) she and her roommate each bought two boxes of Thin Mints from people at work, not knowing the other was doing the same, and sat down to feast on four boxes. (Not all at once! or so she says.) But my wife thinks that Thin Mints just aren't as good as they once were, that something has changed, or got cheaper, and she won't bother with them anymore. And she thinks all Keebler cookies are poor. She much prefers the Back to Nature brand of mint fudge cookies, now owned by giant pasta company Barilla.

So let's hear your reviews in comments. 

I understand that the Girl Scouts have been distancing themselves from controversy in the last couple of years, and good for them, but frankly, I still think they are a lousy organization, if not completely woke then woke-adjacent. Why would girls want to join the Boy Scouts except that the Girl Scouts suck? The Boy Scouts got driven to bankruptcy, decided to let girls in, changed the name to BSA, then to Scouting, and now they suck even more than the Girl Scouts. The son of a friend of mine has had enough and quit -- and this kid was an ace away from Eagle Scout. He thinks it's a waste of time. The local Scoutmaster is a dummy, and the troops are disbanding one after another. It's pretty sad. 

Scouting may be dead, alas -- but as long as the Girl Scouts of America can make an excuse to do it, they'll keep raking in cookie money. I foresee a future when both organizations are as forgotten as the American Benevolent Legion, but people still buy Girl Scout branded cookies, not even knowing what a Girl Scout once was. 

🍪🍪🍪🍫🍫🍫🐛🐛🐛

P.S.: If, like me, you're curious how a mint-chocolate cookie got to be called a grasshopper, it may have gotten the name from the green cocktail of crème de menthe, crème de cacao, and cream, which dates back to 1919 (according to Eater). The cocktail was popular in the fifties and sixties, so the cookie likely borrowed the name. By now the drink is not so well known, so the word GRASSHOPPER does not immediately signify mint and chocolate. No wonder Keebler changed the name of the cookie. 

The monster returns.

Strangest things happen around here. Last year I noted that my new duck boot had been partly eaten in the middle of the night by some critter. Now, this.

What you see here is a long tether, made up of two tethers, that permits baby dog Izzy to run around like a loon in the backyard without leaving the property. At some point in the dark of night, some critter literally chewed both of them to pieces. 

This is very peculiar. The tethers were made out of cotton, so I suppose they could have provided sustenance to some creatures, or maybe they got hungry enough to think it would. But cotton is actually not good for any mammal, as far as I've been able to determine. And whatever cut these six-foot tethers into small pieces was very determined and must have stayed at it a long while. What could it be?

Before you ask, let me say that baby dog Izzy has an alibi. 

Besides, we've had three dogs on these things, and sometimes they've tried to chew them but never got far. They're tough. I'm sure any of the dogs could have chewed through in time, but look at those cuts! Neat and clean. Like they got run over by some farm machine. 

So again, what could have done this? If someone wanted to pull a prank on us, there are much worse and easier things to do so than cutting our tethers up. Even with hedge clippers, this would have been a good amount of work. Critter-wise, we have deer, groundhogs, rabbits, turtles, ducks, geese, small birds, chipmunks, snakes, squirrels, skunks, foxes, an occasional coyote, and a very occasional bobcat or bear. It's been a very mild winter, and none of them should be desperate for food, and some of them should be on vacation. 

I don't even know what could do this, or would bother. 

I never did earn my Critter Badge in Cub Scouts, so if any of you have any ideas, please drop a line in comments. I'll be sticking with petroleum-based tethers from now on.

Lost art, but not dead yet.

Many years ago my wife gave me a sweatshirt that I still have. It is very beaten-up these days, but I won't part with it yet. I think it has an important message about the human condition, especially the agnate half of the human condition.  

Why don't men want to ask for directions? 

I realize that's an exceptionally broad sweep, but within every truism is some truth. My dad did not like to ask directions and neither do I, nor do most guys I know. It's not like we sat down at the lodge meeting and voted on it -- "All right, boys, remember, from this point in, no asking directions." I think it's just instinctive to the male side of the species. When you're a stranger and you're lost, you are in a position of weakness, and asking directions is akin to admitting weakness to someone you don't know in a place with which you're unfamiliar. When we look at it that way, it's no surprise that the situation sets off alarm bells deep in our psyche. 

In fact, it's not surprising at all that men don't want to ask for directions. It's much more surprising that women do—even when they don't have a guy with them that they can force to ask for directions. I think prudence enters the conversation then, saying that getting more lost is even worse than admitting being lost. This is another sweeping generalization, but I think by and large women are stronger in the virtue of prudence than men are. 

The reason I bring this all up is that a friend of mine is taking his son to West Point today. Despite all the wokeness that has descended on BSA (please, don't call it Boy Scouts anymore), and the fact that they're allowing icky girls in because all Girl Scouts do is sell cookies, some boys are still working on their achievements. Today these scouts are going to work with actual soldiers on their orienteering merit badge. 

When my pal mentioned this, I thought he meant cartography, but no. In fact, much to my surprise, the BSA has never had a merit badge for cartography or mapmaking, according to Steve Henning's research-filled page on the topic. There I was, thinking that Orienteering is just another wussy, watered-down skill that replaced the more demanding cartography, as General Science replaced Zoology, but no. What it did replace was Pathfinding, which had been discontinued anyway in 1952; Orienteering came on the scene in 1973 and has remained a badge ever since. Furthermore, the Orienteering badge has a 10-page workbook with all the stuff you have to do; it made me tired just looking at it. No wonder I never got past the blue uniform.

So I've decided Orienteering really is useful. In the age of GPS we usually don't need it; nor do we need to ask directions as much as we used to. However, if it helps these boys grow into men who don't have to ever ask for directions, then I'm all for it. They're fulfilling the First Rule of Manhood, and making us old guys proud.

The BS part is no longer for Boy Scouts.

Well, if you put money on Fred being right, you won!

Unfortunately.

Back on April 21, you may recall, I posted:

I fully expect that the Boy Scouts of America, who have stomped on the key word in that name -- Boy -- by allowing people other than boys to join, will become just "BSA" in the next decade or so.

And yesterday, in the Chicago Tribune:

For 108 years, the Boy Scouts of America's flagship program has been known simply as the Boy Scouts. With girls soon entering the ranks, the group says that iconic name will change. The organization on Wednesday announced a new name for its Boy Scouts program: Scouts BSA. The change will take effect in February.

So it happened a lot faster than I expected. These people cannot wait to ruin everything for boys as fast and as brutally as possible. I wrote to them, I really did, to tell them of my dissatisfaction, and they referred me to their happy rah-rah Web page, which says,

By welcoming both girls and boys into the program, even more youth will have access to the character development and values-based leadership that Scouting promises. 

That's the opposite effect it will have; by catering to a wider audience the focus will be lost, if it isn't already.

Were they having trouble getting boys to join? Is this a Hail Mary (or a "Hey, Mary! Sign up here!")? I guess they never heard Kingsley Amis's dictum that "More will mean worse." Well, guess what, BSA? Boys will stop joining entirely unless they are forced to, and it will become essentially the Cookieless Girl Scouts. Why should boys join a co-ed activities group doing dumb co-ed things? They already belong to one and it's called "school." They've just once again proven to boys that they are second-class citizens, deserving of nothing of their own.

But completely driving boys away will take a little time. Meanwhile, they will keep hold of the initialism BSA, exactly as I predicted. Why? Let's check with our old friend Iowahawk:

What will the "BSA" ruin next? Well, this oath has to go:

On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.

"Honor" is of course an outdated and dangerous male idea. "Honor" brought us World War I, right? So that's out. "Duty" is an entrapping idea, antithetical to freedom, as is "obey," and knowing that, this "Law" thing is out as well. "God" -- the less said the better. "My country" -- please! What is this, the 20th century? "Physically strong" -- more maleness -- strength is just one sign of physical fitness, you know. "Mentally awake" -- who even knows what that means, amiright? "Morally straight" -- you have GOT to be KIDDING me, people.

So, we have:

On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.

Edited down, we get:

I will do my best to help other people at all times.

That's an oath for toddlers, unworthy of an older child. Just ditch the whole thing. 

You know what we need? We need a scouting organization with actual guts. The girls can have their own wing, but the boys need to have a place where they can be boys. (It seems like every other group of people in the world is supposed to be able to hang out with their own kind, but never males, except in stupid Zac Efron-movie yo-brah ways.) I want a return to wildlife-loving, forged in battle scouts, someplace where boys can learn honor and dignity, and actually have to perform difficult tasks to get merit badges, not namby-pamby stuff.

We've said for more than a century that boys need things to make them into men, and what we're seeing around now--shootings, drug overdose, family abandonment--is not the horrific effects of too much manliness, but rather of boys in men's bodies. Taking manly things away from boys isn't turning them into sweet little girls; it's turning them into wild animals. 

Thanks, "BSA." Let me know when you decide to have a cookie drive.

Girl Scout yogurt.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Say, Fred, how about those Girl Scout Cookie yogurts by Yoplait? As a reviewer of Girl Scout Cookie cereals, and sometimes even Girl Scout Cookies themselves, you must have an opinion."

By gum, of course I do! I'm an amateur pundit, so I have opinions on all kinds of things. Lack of knowledge is no bar to punditry, you know. But in this case I actually went out and bought the three flavors of Yoplait, licensed by the Girl Scouts of America, since branding is all they ever do:

What we have here is a Caramel Coconut yogurt in the Yoplait original line, inspired by the Samoa cookie (also known as the Caramel deLites), in the center. On the sides are two yogurts in the Yoplait Whips! line, a Peanut Butter Chocolate, based on the Peanut Butter Patties (also called Tagalongs), and the Thin Mints, based on the Thin Mints (also called... Thin Mints). Anyone hoping for a shortbread-flavored yogurt is out of luck.

If you aren't familiar with it, the Yoplait Whips! yogurts are light, airy yogurts that have been whipped to fluffiness. Do not write to me about your thoughts of Girl Scouts and whips. That is not what this is about, and you should hang your head in shame.

See? Fluffy.

Despite the fact that the Girl Scouts are so lame as a scouting organization that thousands of girls have forced their way into the Boy Scouts (why, yes, I'm still furious about that, can you tell?), I was willing to try these as a public service to you, the reader. And because I like yogurt and I love cookies.

First up was the Peanut Butter Chocolate. There's no way to sugarcoat this: It was weird and unpleasant. Peanut butter yogurt is bizarre. PB is not bad in ice cream, but the tang of yogurt just doesn't work with it, not to me. The chocolate is all right, and in fact Yoplait makes a chocolate yogurt in the Whips! line that I like, but the peanut butter just ruins everything. It's as lame as... well, as the Girl Scouts.

Next came Caramel Coconut. It's all right, but nothing like a Caramel deLite or Samoa, my favorite of the Girl Scouts' confections. The cookie has coconut and caramel, but also chocolate to tie the flavors together. This yogurt has no chocolate, and thus no richness of flavor. I don't think I would have known it was supposed to be caramel flavored if it were not on the label. Disappointing.

Finally I tried the Thin Mints. Easily the most successful of the three. The chocolate is good, the mint is strong but not too strong. Tastes most like the cookie. Good job on that one, Yoplait.

Interestingly, each of these yogurt cups is 160 calories. That's equal to four Thin Mints, or slightly more than two Samoas (150) or two Peanut Butter Patties (130). How is a low-fat yogurt more caloric than a serving of cookies? Perplexing. I mean, when you eat a yogurt, especially a non-Greek yogurt, you don't feel like you've put anything in your stomach, but you might with a simple serving of cookies. Which is really worth the calories? Is that why we're really all so fat -- we're shoveling down yogurt? Would we be better off skipping yogurt and eating cookies?

Maybe. I'm eating both. No wonder my pants hate me.

Go to hell, boys.

We saw Cars 3 over the weekend. The last two animated movies we saw were Leap! and Despicable Me 3, and I wanted to see one that didn't end with a dance fight.

Cars 3 was fine. There's always something to enjoy in a Pixar film, if nothing else the art. Cars 2 had wonderful ocean animation (notoriously hard to do) and breathtaking city scapes. Cars 3 had racetracks, including an old abandoned one, that looked so completely real it was almost a shock when talking cars with eyes rolled onto them.

I have some gripes that were shared by others. For one thing, the gang from Radiator Springs has virtually nothing to do in this movie, just enough to ensure sales of the toys continue. I don't think poor old Lizzie had a single line of dialogue.

Suffice it to say it's the story of an aging star athlete who has to face the end of his career; not usually the stuff of kids' movies. Then again, the end of a loving relationship was the heart of Toy Story 3, and I don't even want to talk about Up. Is Pixar making movies for old people or children?

There is a serious plot point I want to address here, though, but to do so I will first have to issue a

Okay, here we go.

Disney can be proud of itself, I suppose, that like other great organizations such as the Boy Scouts, they're able to tell boys, go cram it, kids, no one needs you.

The plot of the movie has Lightning McQueen being outraced by a new breed of racecar; to get back in shape following an accident and get in racing trim he gets trained by Cruz Ramirez, a female sports car who -- surprise! -- wanted to be a racer but lacked the confidence.

Because if there's one thing all personal trainers who work for billion-dollar training facilities have in common, it's lack of confidence.

In the end, Lightning pulls out of a big race in the middle and, with the most bizarre use of rules you will ever see in a movie, gets Cruz into the race wearing his number 95 to finish. She had not even run a time trial, had never been entered as a contender in this race or a competitor on the circuit.  Lightning hadn't even crashed at that point, he just gave up.

The precedent this sets is ridiculous. As this is allowed, it will mean that every race team from that point will have four or five spare cars ready to go with the same number, cars with secret technological edges. If a squad starts a guy and he's having a bad day, they can freely substitute other cars as desired under this rule. It was stone-cold stupid.

But, okay, fine. By sharing the win with Cruz, Lightning gets to keep racing if he wants to. He is also going to mentor her the way Doc Hudson mentored him (although he was already a star by the time he met Doc Hudson in the first picture). And now Cruz Ramirez is the star if the Cars world.

And what's your problem with that, you big sexist bastard? you may ask.

My problem isn't really about the setup. Auto racing is one of few sports where women and men are able to compete against one another. I think it's safe to say that Danica Patrick, going by her record, wouldn't be a big star if she looked like a horse's patootie instead of the assistant DA on a Dick Wolf show. Never mind; we can certainly suppose that a woman can and eventually will win the biggest races.

My problem is just that the Cars world had been particularly special to boys. Ten years ago or so when Disney had princesses out the bazooty but was unable to make a successful film for boys (Meet the Robinsons: too creepy, Mars Needs Moms: don't ask), they had Cars. Whenever you saw Princess-themed Disney stuff, you saw Cars-themed Disney stuff too. They might as well have written "For Boys" on the Cars toothpaste, sheets, PJs, and so on. And now they've turned the wheel over to a female character.

It doesn't stop there, of course. They bought the Star Wars universe so that they'd have something boys would want to see -- and turned that over to a female character, too.

If they'd gotten involved with Marvel ten years later than they did, the first joint picture wouldn't have been Iron Man, it would have been Black Widow or Girl Thor or something.

And there's no reciprocity on this. In the girls' movies Disney has been making, men are shrinking to insignificance. Let's put 2010's Tangled and its Flynn Rider aside as an outlier (Disney was desperate to get boys to like the movie, which is why the title was changed from Rapunzel). In The Princess and the Frog, the prince is a numbskull; Ray the firefly is more useful and he's a comic-relief bug. All the men in Brave are total idiots. The two young dudes in Frozen are a two-faced usurper and a ludicrous nonentity. And in Mary Sue -- sorry, Moana -- the male lead is a god and still plays second fiddle to the spunky kid who is always right.

Non-Disney properties like Harry Potter and sort-of Disney property Percy Jackson do star boys, but make it painfully clear that their female friends (Hermoine, Annabeth) are the real brains of the operation. Annabeth insults Percy regularly in a way that would get a boy thrown out of school if he did that to a girl -- and the school would be right to do so.

The point is, by wanting to be progressive, Disney is stomping on the audience they were targeting in the first place. It's exactly what's been happening in Marvel comics: as Instapundit says, Get Woke, Go Broke. But Disney's properties have a lot of ruin in them; they can insult and ignore boys for decades without seeing a direct line to loss of revenue, and even then they'd probably still keep at it. Toxic masculinity is the crisis of the day to the intelligentsia. A woman I used to respect reposted this last week:

Now that's inclusivity -- she includes her beloved dad, the man she married, her male friends; all of us think a man who rapes is better than a woman who has sex. Every goddamn one of us. Because now it's fine to stereotype and stuff.

And this is why it's okay when boys are informed that they are nothing special, that girls are really better, just as they are being told in schools. When they let girls into the Boy Scouts last fall, I said that boys had nothing left they could call their own; everything had been taken from them. Now I see that Cars has been taken too.

I suggest rather that boys need good, manly role models; the Harvey Weinsteins of the world are not men of honor and dignity. But our broken families and our sick culture are incapable of doing this. It's a mystery to many why boys are failing to launch, not marrying, not becoming fathers, and adapting to life as losers -- except to Dr. Helen Smith, who explained in Men on Strike that this is a logical response to being shamed, overlooked, neglected.

The more militant may say Good, it's time the men got a taste of their own medicine. Well, these are their own sons, boys who came into the world not having subjugated anything, the boys who are supposed to be role models for the generation after them. Do they really think this is going to work out for society in the long run?

As Lewis wrote, "We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst." Get ready for more.

Disease trees.

Can one of you please tell me what the heckin' heck this is?

A big halo of leaves on this tree have turned partially brown on the south side, and I have no idea why. It's a well-established tree of at least 17 years' standing. I've tried to get the answer from Google, but all I see is leaf scorch. Believe me, we have not have drought conditions. You could pick up the town and wring it, we've had so much rain. Maybe some kind of disease?

I don't know -- I don't even know what kind of tree it is. As longtime readers know, despite my Cub Scout experience in the urban elementary school I attended, I never learned real Scout stuff. Pinewood derby and macrame are what I remember, and I may be wrong about the macrame. I never earned the tree identification badge. Or would have if there were such a thing. And there's no tree surgery or naturopathy or tree disease treatment badge, either.

What bothers me is that the idiot next door cut off most of the limbs of one of his trees, leaving essentially a large stick in the ground. Did it have some kind of disease? I don't know; he's too stupid to tell me. The stick is sprouting leaves again, so it may turn back into a real tree in 30 or 40 years. I hope if it was a disease it's not anymore contagious than idiocy is.

I'm not stupid, just ignorant. So if you know anything about trees, please drop me a line in comments or write me at frederick_key at yahoo dot com. Help save my tree!

Good Scout.

[NB: Another Fred "Classic" from the old blog, but updated. --FK]

I was a Webelo until the pack dissolved.

I liked Cub Scouts. It was fun, and parents were directly involved, so kids were better behaved than at school. Plus, as we all know, chicks dig a man in uniform. With my blue cap and outfit and yellow scarf, I was a third-grade hottie. It was a little tough to be called a "We-Blow" by some jackasses in my city school, but I have no regrets.

Okay, well, I regret that we didn't sell these.

Anyway, the pack didn't survive being kicked out of the school--long story, not our fault, I swear!--and so I never made Boy Scout. Still, I always try to Be Prepared, following the Scouting motto. Moreover, even as a Cub Scout I considered myself bound by the Scout Oath and the Scout Law:

Scout Oath
On my honor I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country
and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong,
mentally awake, and morally straight.

Scout Law
A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.

So I thought it was time I had a look at myself to see how I was doing on these things. Five-arrow scale.

On my honor I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country

Actually better at these things than I was when I was a kid. Regular church monkey, I am now, but not then. When I was a li'l Bobcat, enthusiasm for America was low everywhere. What the hell did I know? Now I would say that I have to do my duty even if my mood about it is low. That's very tough for a kid. My rating: ↗↗↗↗

and to obey the Scout Law;

We'll get to that.

To help other people at all times;

Hmm... Does that mean every moment I can, or just when they ask? And I guess that wouldn't include cursing people out behind the wheel and stuff, would it? Oy. ↗↗

To keep myself physically strong,

I don't want to talk about it. ↗

mentally awake,

Zzzz... Huh? You say something? ↗↗

and morally straight.

Uhh-- Guilty with an explanation? I mean, I'm better now, but a couple of decades back-- Never mind. I'll go by now. There are advantages to getting old and feeble. ↗↗↗

Now the law exam:

A Scout is trustworthy, ↗↗↗↗
loyal, ↗↗↗↗
helpful, ↗↗↗
friendly, ↗↗
courteous, [except when driving] ↗↗↗ 
kind, ↗↗↗↗
obedient, ↗↗
cheerful, ↗↗↗↗
thrifty, 
brave, ↗
clean, [hygiene good; house less so] ↗↗
and reverent. ↗↗↗↗

Oh, boy. Not a single 5-pointer among them. I'm glad my scoutmaster is not alive to see this. I'd be drummed out for sure.

[More on Girl Scout cookies tomorrow. Those Girl Scouts get all the good stuff.]