Fervent fireplugs for the Fourth.

One of the most charming outpourings of civic and national pride at the 1976 United States Bicentennial was ... fire hydrants. 

I don't think anyone is certain where the practice began, but in the leadup to July 1976, people in many communities across the fruited plains started giving the local fireplugs a makeover. 

My favorites were the ones done up like Minutemen -- such as this old soldier. 

I had kind of hoped that we might see this sort of thing return for the big 250, despite the fact that about vocal minority of the country seems to hate America beyond reason. I don't think anyone's hatred of the country or the president or whatever matters here, though. After all, how many people does it take to paint a fire hydrant?

Granted, there's something less impressive about 50-year celebrations. 100? YAY! 150? Yay. 200? YAY! 250? Yay. It just doesn't have enough zeroes to put it over the top. 

Also, there is an issue with painting fireplugs that may not have been a problem in 1976: color coding. Franklin, Tennessee, provides an explanation of the significance of different colors of its fireplugs:

The same code is not used throughout the United States; for one thing, most areas don't have yellow-barreled hydrants. But I have noted the difference among bonnets here in New York, and the difference between regular hydrants and those only used to flush the system. You see, though, why this would preempt celebratory hydrant painting. You wouldn't want the firemen to ignore the working hydrant just because it had been made to look like George Washington with a black bonnet in place of his trusty tricornered hat. 

Well, it's understandable, but it's a shame. I would have loved a patriotic excuse to give this hydrant a refresh:

Hmm -- does that orange top mean it spews up to 999 gallons a minute? And will the department know that when the paint flakes down to the iron? 

Let's hope they don't need to use it, anyway. We live here! 

Just ask my dog.

Bad poems.

I know two things that should prevent me from writing this blog entry:

1) I have written plenty of bad poetry -- some unintentionally; and 

2) People are out there, trying to do their best for their loved ones, and shouldn't be ridiculed for it.

But part of my Saturday afternoon was spent on the porch with baby dog Izzy, and the music from a birthday party half a mile away was as loud as if it was on a speaker next to us. During a pause in the entertainment -- the musicians were good, the singer, well, not so much -- a family member got up and read a poem to the birthday person. Thanks to the miracle of modern loudspeakers, everyone within a mile got to hear it. 

Woof. 

"This'll wow 'em!"

I'm not saying people should write poems for birthday parties like Robert Frost. Robert Frost would have written terrible poems for birthday parties. Fights would have broken out. People would have left, angry. What I'm saying is, if you want to say something nice about the guest of honor, just say it. Don't be cute and rhyme it in some approximation of poetic meter, and then read it aloud with the da-da-da enthusiasm of a fourth-grader on mandatory speech day.

The writer always has to mention everyone, lest they offend anyone by leaving them out. What do I mean? I mean they all sound like this:

Arnold, we love ya

Your friends are all here

We’re happy to toast ya

With whiskey and beer

Remember those days

Growing up in the Heights

Block parties and girls

A few switchblade fights

We had so much fun 

In the high school you know

You won your diploma

When you promised to go

One day you met Joanie

Her hair then was red

Your first gal who didn’t have

To put a bag over her head

And soon came the little ones

Jill, Pete, and Joe

Pete’s up for parole now

In six months or so

The family was growing

And you said what the hells

I guess we’ll get hitched

Out rang wedding bells

You worked for the city

The union’s great pride

Doing God only knows

Running bets on the side

You’re old and your fat now

And so you’re retired

You’re leaving for Florida

On account it’s required

So we say happy birthday

And we raise up a toast

To Arnold, our brother

Who we love the utmost

(Drunken cheers)

Actually, that party might be fun. Just leave before the fight breaks out and everything would be fine.

Dog has his day.

So baby dog Izzy is turning two -- or is he? Maybe he's fourteen? Or maybe twenty-four? 

For many years people have used the 1:7 ratio for dog years, assuming for instance that when the dog turns three he is the equivalent of a twenty-one-year-old human. As it turns out, that's not a bad rule of thumb, but it depends on the dog. 

I have long suggested that, thanks to humans, there is more variety among the canines than any other species. Take two perfectly healthy dogs -- a chihuahua, for example, and a Leonberger -- and you're looking at adult weights of 4.5 pounds and 170 pounds. One is almost 38 times the size of the other, and yet you could probably make a crossbreed between them -- presumably in a laboratory -- because they are the same species. Does any other mammal species have as much variety as C. familiaris?

We know that the bigger the dog, the shorter the lifespan tends to be. It's brutal for those of us who love the big galoots, and it's something prospective owners of said galoots are warned about going in. I was interested to get this chart via email from a local animal hospital, which gives a better estimate of a dog's age dependent upon its size.

 

Izzy's a large dog, so by this reckoning he is turning twenty-four. It makes sense; on a recent visit the vet said that he was fully grown now, and any further weight he gains will probably be fat (as she gave me the side eye). But no, he still can't drive the car. Get a job, Izzy!

What makes this sad, though, is the thought that our other guys didn't make it to what could be considered a ripe old age for big dogs. Fazzy was a giant, and almost made it to nine years old; that would have put him at seventy-one, six years under the US human male life expectancy. And Nipper, a large breed, was only four when cancer got him -- just a kid in his thirties. 

However old Izzy is, though, we count by trips around the sun, and we celebrate his birthday. He was the most frustrating of the puppies, though. I saw my wife get more insane over his behavior one time than she's ever gotten over mine, or that of her crazy family, and trust me when I say that's a strong statement. And yet he has turned into the most affectionate dog of them all, a total cuddle muffin. I hope he has a long and happy life with us. 

Happy birthday, Iz.

Everyone says they're so pretty!

 

Break me off a piece of that birthday cake.

As you may know, I've become something of an expert on things that taste like birthday cake that are not actually birthday cake. A few of my investigations can be found here, here, here, and here.

This week brings a new one, in the guise of Kit Kat -- and I mean the candy bar, not the cabaret:

The cashier had not seen the display for this product in the store, and was very excited about it when she saw it in my order.

The Kit Kat bar has an interesting history, especially in the United States, as summed up nicely by the History of Candy site at Penn State. It was invented in 1935 by the British chocolatier Rowntree’s. Says the History site, "The name of this delicious candy comes from the Kit Kat club, which is named after  Christopher Catling. Catling would hold a famous political and literary club in his London pie shop in the 17th century." But the weird thing is that while Kit Kat is sold everywhere else as a Nestlé product, in the United States it is a Hershey product. Rowntree's licensed the trademarks for the U.S. market to Hershey beginning in 1970, a license that did not lapse when Nestlé bought Rowntree's in 1988, per our old pal Wikipedia. It's one reason that the primary Kit Kat bar is different in the United States than in other countries. Then again, Nestlé isn't even Nestlé anymore in the U.S., since the Swiss company sold its American candy business to Italian candy king Ferraro in 2018.

Also, Hershey gotta Hershey; anyone familiar with the history of the company and its founder, Milton Snavely Hershey, knows how he was so sore when the Swiss wouldn't show him how to make milk chocolate that he went and invented it all over again himself -- in a distinctive type and flavor. That said, the chocolate in a regular American Kit Kat has never tasted like Hershey's typical chocolate to me. But I do believe that the company fooled around with the Kit Kat formula to try to make it more appealing to the American palette.

Enough of this schlep down memory lane; how does the new limited edition Birthday Cake Kit Kat taste?

Pretty darn good!

Despite white chocolate replacing the milk chocolate, it is not insanely sweet. The cake-flavored wafers seem to keep it in check. It has more birthday-cake flavor (meaning yellow cake with vanilla frosting) than any of the other birthday products I've tried. And yet it has that nice, light Kit Kat candy mouthfeel and crunch. Really good job on this one, Hershey.

I see online that other countries have a ridiculous variety of Kit Kats; Japan has ten unique flavors ranging from must-try (Strawberry Cheesecake, Grape, Choco Banana) to crazy-rich-Asian (Apple Vinegar, Sweet Potato, Wasabi). I don't think Hershey is willing to push the brand that far, but you never know. We live in wacky times. Why not an American version of Japan's Sweet Corn Kit Kat?

Release the Caken!

Not a lot to say today -- yesterday went completely nuts on me. Busy at work, dog needed grooming, shopping, company coming, making food... and at the end of the day, baking a cake. Yes, we have a birthday celebrant as a guest, so it was placed on my shoulders to bake a cake from scratch, with filling from scratch, and icing from scratch. Three recipes I'd never tried before.

Three recipes... for disaster.

And if you want to see real recipes for disaster, then you ought to be familiar with the site CakeWrecks.com, home of the worst supermarket cakes available.

"I... am Mister Ded!"

The site's take on the song "The Christmas Shoes," with accompanying cake photos, was so touching that it made my wife sob, weep, cry, helpless with laughter.

Needless to say, there are also books.

My cake was not that bad, although I had trouble getting the filling to set properly. Stayed up late working on it. It got there, but it was driving me to distraction. Seriously distracted -- I had been gnawing on some extra chocolate chips, and decided to take some chewable Advil for the pain in my stiff neck. The problem is, there is no chewable Advil, only Advil Liquid Gels, which should never be chewed. And I found out why. Ibuprofen, Stewart Adams's wonderful invention, A) Tastes like iodine; B) Burns your mouth with some kind of mild chemical action; and C) Renders your taste buds inert for a period of time.

I hope our friend likes the cake. It came out looking great, thanks to the guidance and participation of the Mrs. during assembly. But the proof of the cake is in the eatin'.

Your takeaway from all this? Learn from Fred's mistakes. That's more than I usually do.

Birthday bar.

One hundred and seventy-five years ago, Alexandre Dumas's classic adventure novel, The Three Musketeers, was being serialized in France. Eighty-eight years after that, the 3 Musketeers candy bar was introduced in America.

That doesn't have much to do with anything, except that I got this. 

Isn't that nice? And it wasn't even my birthday.

I always thought that the Milky Way bar, with its three ingredients (chocolate, nougat, and caramel) should have been named the 3 Musketeers, and that the 3 Musketeers bar, with its creamy nougat and no caramel, should have been the Milky Way. But I wasn't born yet and no one asked me. Besides, as it turns out, the 3 Musketeers got its name from the fact that the bar was originally three bars in one wrapper, each a different flavor, Neapolitan style: strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla. Andrew F. Smith, in the Encyclopedia of Junk Food and Fast Food, wrote that "When the price of strawberries rose, the company dropped them as an ingredient in the candy bar." He doesn't say what happened to the vanilla. 

I think we suffer from a distinct lack of variety in our candy in this culture. 

The one you see above is supposedly a "birthday cake" themed confection. Longtime friends of this site (your checks are in the mail!) will note that I have a history with "birthday cake" confections, including M&M's, Perry's Ice Cream, bad gummy bears, Oreos, Dunkin' Donuts, and Robert Irvine protein bars. Even actual birthday cake. The popularity of birthday-cake flavored things may be waning, but it's still around. 

The question is, is there anything birthday-cakey about this 3 Musketeers bar? And the answer is: No.

I expected that the filling would have that birthday-cake flavor, but that was my faulty assumption. The wrapper says that the filling is vanilla, not ... whatever it is normally? Which is what, vanilla? And while the wrapper seems to indicate that the nougat has colorful sprinkles mixed in, the reality is, they are very hard to see.

In a way it is festive, as indeed all candy is or ought to be festive, but it's virtually identical to the regular 3 Musketeers bar. I don't really see the point. The wrapper encourages us to #throwshine --rather than our usual #throwshade? -- but that's just part of the brand campaign, not specific to birthdays. I'm just lost in a sea of empty calories.

I wonder what Dumas would have thought of the 3 Musketeers bar. He was kinda fat, so I suspect had a sweet tooth. He might have liked it. I think he would have been surprised that his story of the Three Musketeers had become a children's favorite by 1932, which Smith says is one of the reasons the name was used for the candy bar. If you've ever read the Dumas novel, you know it was not meant for kiddies, what with the complex international situation, the torrid love affairs, the wife-hanging, and whatnot. Nevertheless, the popularity of the bowdlerized versions continues to the present time; Hanna-Barbera even had an animated version on the old Banana Splits show.

I wonder what Milady de Winter would have said about that! 

Ink vote!

A friend of mine -- and he knows who he is -- has been threatening to get a tattoo on his upcoming fiftieth birthday. I can't talk him out of it, despite the fact that he's going to think it was stupid by the time he turns fifty-one. But he clearly has no idea what he wants to get. We, his dear friends, have narrowed down his possible choices to a manageable list, and we're planning to vote on which to inflict on him. And you can vote too! Just leave your thoughts in comments.

□ Flaming Skull  💀	□  "Mom" and Heart 💗
□ Popeye Anchor⚓	□ Chain Link Fence (Rather Than Barbed Wire)
□ Jesus	□ Entire Ceiling of Sistine Chapel
□ Spider  !	□ Bloody Dagger 🗡
□ “My Daughter’s Heart & Debts Belong to Daddy”	□ Knuckle tats that say "LOVE" and "SOFA"
□ Devil	□ Life-size Cross V
□ Evil Clown 🤡	□ Unicorn 🦄
□ Twinkie the Kid	□ 401(k) Management Company Logo
□ Hula Girl	□ Viagra Logo
□ Copy of His Mortgage	□ Skull and Crossbones N
□ PC :	□ Metallica Logo
□ Cheese 🧀	□ Barry Manilow
□ Smiley Face J	□ Remote Control on Arm; TV on Butt 📺
□ Nickel Slots	□ “Disco King” 👑
□ “Don’t Tread On My Lawn” Flag	□ Evil Clowns Coming Out of Tiny Mausoleum
□ Copy of His Business Card	□ "Mom" and Bloody Dagger

Now, some of these are classic tattoos; a few are peculiar to him, and indicate his Catholicism or career; but most are understandable when you think of the average American male reaching that milestone age of fifty. So what do you think would be the best tattoo? Or do you have a brilliant idea we forgot? 

Happy birthday, Mr. Lincoln.

Abraham Lincoln  was born on this day in 1809, into poverty of a kind we only see in the United States in the immediate aftermath of some kind of disaster. For his family, that was life. We can hardly imagine anyone rising from such humble beginnings to the presidency, partly because our prosperity has erased for most of us the memory of such a thing.

Part of what makes Lincoln so fascinating are his various contradictions. He was a religious doubter who became devout in the crucible of the Civil War; he was a man of action who suffered from painful and sometimes debilitating depression; he was a failure who became our president during the nation's greatest crisis and led us through it. Above all, he was a humble man who still harbored burning ambition -- no man rises to the presidency without it. (Not even Gerald Ford.)

Because of his stature in our history, as well as his actual stature (still our tallest president, still the guy with a beard but no 'stache), and his famous stovepipe hat, he is the easiest president to depict. Look, here's a Lincoln now:

As of this morning, IMDb lists no fewer than 422 portrayals of Lincoln, not counting stage, video games, or automobile advertisements. For contrast, there are only 233 Hamlets. Henry Fonda, Hans Conried, Dennis Weaver, Hal Holbrook, Gregory Peck, Jason Robards, Tom Hanks, Sam Waterston, Raymond Massey, and Daniel Day-Lewis all played Lincoln. Some actors, like Frank McGlynn Sr., basically made a career of it.

Massey in Abe Lincoln in Illinois

And then there's Gottfried.

Lincoln was the first president from a new party since Jefferson, the first president killed in office (or anytime else), the only president (to date -- hi, California!) to deal with a civil war; he was a genuine hater of slavery, a believer in the principles of our nation's founding; he was a slow mover but a fast thinker, a man of great physical strength and mental strength to match; a man who grew up in both North and South; a man with a dopey military career who was president during our deadliest military contest; an autodidact and, amazingly, an honest lawyer. Unless we have a president who single-handedly repels an invasion by Martians, it's hard to think of how a president could ever top Mr. Lincoln.

A tip of the stovepipe to you, Mr. Lincoln; thank you for all you did for our nation.

Butter believe it.

Today we have another amazing recipe pamphlet from the collection I inherited, mostly from manufacturers or their organizations promoting their wares (such as eggs, beer, booze, blenders, pasta, woks, cola, chicken, more booze). Today it's butter, baby, and you'd better believe it!

This almost doesn't count as a pamphlet. It's a 3x5 fold up, which may very well have come in a box of butter. But in that little pamphlet are no fewer than four different recipes for cakes (chocolate, spice, pound, and birthday) and five different recipes for frosting (vanilla, chocolate cream, chocolate fluff, butter marshmallow, and browned butter), none of them weird -- no Rum Cake Flambe here -- and all made from scratch.

I know it's hard to believe, in an era when cakes are bought or come out of a box mix, but there was a time when people had to make cakes from scratch. Why, if these were any more scratch, you'd be churning the butter yourself.

But what exact time was this? The front tells us it comes from the American Dairy Association, which copyright I find is owned by the Dairy Management Inc. and goes back to 1941. But this must be newer than that. For one thing, the name "American Dairy Association" is in all lowercased letters, which associations and companies did not do in the 1940's. This comes from a less serious time. The boys are wearing cowboy party hats, but those kinds of things were popular from the thirties to the seventies. And I don't know from girls' haircuts, but that looks early 1960's to me. My wife says it looks like the hairstyle that Patty Duke wore in The Patty Duke Show (1963-1966), so I think I am right. You actually could buy boxed cake mixes as far back as the Great Depression (says Wikipedia), but there was a lot more resistance to that kind of shortcut back then than we would ever see today.

Does it promote butter? You bet! Here, along with two recipes, is "The Butter Bonus":

You may wonder why anyone would have to push the butter; didn't Americans always drink butter and bacon grease with their coffee in those unenlightened days? Actually production of margarine, which was much cheaper, overtook butter in 1958 in the U.S., according to The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink. So what we have here is Big Butter fighting back.

Returning to the question of the date on this un-copyrighted publication, I draw your attention again to that cover art, specifically the platter upon which the birthday cake sits. It turns out that it turns, and plays "Happy Birthday," and you could buy it:

Tops off the gayety of a birthday party!

So I did a search, and found a photo of the platter in this ad from the Detroit Free Press, February 16, 1964:

So we can see that the plate also had a fairly cute clown on it. And the offer expires February 28, 1965.

There's been a lot of birthday cakes over the clown since then, as they say. A baby who celebrated his first birthday with that brand-new revolving clown platter would be at least 51 today. I did a search to see if any of those platters wound up on eBay, but couldn't find any.

Anyway, there's no expiration date on delicious cake recipes, which I've given you. If you want the frosting recipes, drop me a line at the usual place (frederick_key AT yahoo.com) and soon you'll be making cake and frosting from scratch too! I have no information on churning butter, though.

Monday's child is full of face.

We all know that poem, usually called "Monday's Child":

Monday's child is fair of face
Tuesday's child is full of grace

And on like that. Ultimately a child born on each day of the week gets some trait prophesied:

Monday: fair face
Tuesday: packed with grace
Wednesday: chock full o' woe
Thursday: long schlep
Friday: loving, giving
Saturday: works hard
Sunday: bonny, blithe, good, gay

So unfair to Wednesday. Thursday kids are not much better; "far to go" could mean "will go far," or it may mean "will run all over the place like Billy from Family Circus and take eight times as long to go half the distance." Saturday's kid working hard for a living might mean he is industrious, or it could be that he devotes his life to working harder, not smarter.

Some people will automatically spout that stuff when you have a baby; they want to tell you what to expect based on the day of the week the kid arrived. Like it's an accurate predictor. Compared to this poem, astrology is Newtonian physics.

I thought about the people in my circle whose birth dates I know, wondering whether their lives had played out as the poem predicts. In a word: No. In fact, based on the anecdotal experience of my acquaintances, I'd say:

Monday’s child is goofy and weird
Tuesday’s child has a big hairy beard
Wednesday’s child pays a great cost
Thursday’s child always gets lost
Friday’s child works hard for a goal
Saturday’s child goes on the dole
Sunday’s child could be worse
And unlike others, not under a curse

 

But, as they say, your mileage may vary. 

A piece of cake.

More strangeness from M&M's.

Birthday cake flavored M&M's candies. 

What in hell is going on at Mars?

The Impulsive Buy site gave these candies a favorable review, unlike some of the other variations of M&M's we've seen lately. ("I was disappointed by Pumpkin Spice, puzzled by Gingerbread, and grossed out by Red Velvet.")

I'm not sure when birthday cake became a flavor, anyway. I first saw it in Birthday Bash, a flavor of Perry's Ice Cream, at the ice cream stand. "Birthday Bash?" I asked the girl, reading from the menu. "What's that taste like?"

"It's SOOOO good!" she said, with a sincerity one usually only finds at football games. 

"But what does it taste like?"

"It's SOOO GOOD!"

I could therefore deduce that the flavor is: A) birthday, and B) good. So it might be like licking high-quality gift wrap? As you can imagine, my curiosity forced me to buy some. 

Well, it was so good. And it tasted like a vanilla cake with icing. Not necessarily birthday cake, but the kind of cake generally served on such occasions. "Wedding Bash" would have been dry cake with blah fondant. 

Even though we know the associations, "birthday" is not a flavor, and things that are not cake ought not to be flavored "cake." And yet, I knew exactly what the Birthday Oreos would taste like before I ate one, so I can't say there's no data connected to the descriptors. But what weird chemicals compose the flavor "cake"?

As for the M&M's, each candy is a larger than normal M&M, and they only come in three bright colors: yellow, blue, and red. I guess the chocolate does have some kind of cakey flavor, and the candy shell is a little more icing-like than normal. But they're not going to make me switch my chocolate habits. They'd be useful as a fast way to decorate a birthday cake or birthday cupcakes,  though.

My prediction for the next variant: Girl Scout Cookie M&M's. They didn't save Crumbs Bake Shop, but they would sure move a lot of M&M's.