Mallow mood.

I haven't done a "Thing I Shouldn't Eat" post in a while, but don't think that's because I've eaten only health food. Perish the thought! I've had my share of junk, but no interesting junk. 

This is kind of interesting. 

Smash Mallow is a Sonoma Brands company from California with Monument Valley-style graphics. It makes gourmet marshmallows for sale through retail shops, in bags as seen here. This is risky, because gourmet marshmallows are not considered stable enough to store for a significant length of time. Store brands last six to eight months unopened, two to four months after opening. Gourmet marshmallows? Three weeks, tops. I'm serious. I worked on a marshmallow cookbook (nope, not kidding), and the author, who owns a marshmallow shop, says to store your homemade marshmallows for no more than three weeks. That would barely be enough time to get onto supermarket shelves.

Smash Mallow is willing to take that chance.

I don't know if their products would be considered artisanal level, like the ones by that cookbook author. But I really don't know why store-bought marshmallows last more than three weeks. They contain tetrasodium pyrophosphate, which is not a preservative but a "whipping agent." Smash Mallow's mallows don't, nor do they have any other alphabet-soup names. How do they stay fresh? Maybe their thick airtight package. I don't know if they have the same shelf life as your basic Campfire or Jet-Puffed chewball, but perhaps not.

But what they miss in shelf life they make up with flavors! These include Candy Cane, Strawberries & Cream, Pumpkin Pie, Root Beer Float, Cookie Dough, Coconut Pineapple, Sugar Cookie, and Mint Chocolate Chip, shown here.

It was quite the tasty marshmallow, nice mint flavor, good chocolate chips. I did not get the feeling it would be improved by dangling it over a campfire until blackened, but I suppose someone could try. I would not melt them over the sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving. I would recommend Smash Mallow's Cinnamon Churro for that. (In fact, their brief Recipes page has instructions for Sweet Potato Fries & Cinnamon Churro Dip. Elsewhere they recommend Coconut Pineapple on your yams.) I did try the Cinnamon Churro and liked it, but not as much as the clean taste of the Mint Chocolate Chip.

A marshmallow is simply sugar and gelatin, and seldom gets any respect. Yes, marshmallows are bad for our teeth and our waistlines, but they are a low-fat, low-calorie sweet snack compared to everything else out there.

I am glad that we are entering the era of the artisanal marshmallow, because why not? It's a sign of economic vitality. When things get bad, as the old economists say, the artisanal marshmallows are the first thing to go. (NOTE: No old economists say that.) So much of what we do these days is fighting and complaining, when really everything is pretty good. We need more cohesion, and marshmallows may just be sticky enough to help.

(But not the vegetarians and vegans -- Smash Mallow uses bovine gelatin, i.e., cow bones and such. I guess we have to start fighting again....)

Send in the clowns, again.

I don't know if I really want to revisit the whole clown thing. I addressed it pretty thoroughly last year when Ringling Brothers popped the tents for the last time. And yet I can't help wondering how it all went to hell so fast for our greasepainted bretheren.

Think of it: Within living memory, a clown named Clarabell was one of the most beloved personalities on television. Buffalo Bob would never have had a clown on Howdy Doody if he thought it would terrorize children. That's not what clowns did. They were fun-loving masters of goofiness, living cartoons, silly men who could act like children.

And now they're this.

I think a lot of kids now have never even known a time when clowns were fun. They've always been a source of grinning, inhuman, hellish evil.

How did this happen so fast?

Well, popular entertainment tends to turn things upside down for dramatic and ironic effect. The rock-ribbed lawmen of early movies became corrupt weasels or hypocrites or useless or out-and-out villains of later movies purely because that's was what we had been trained to not expect -- until we got to the point where the moment a sheriff shows up on film you can start booing. Tiny women were common victims, and now if you are a movie thug and enter a room with eight of your thug buddies to capture the tiny woman, you can expect her to kick your collective ass in under a minute of screen time. Clowns were innocent fun for children, which is exactly why they had to be turned into the most terrifying creatures in our culture. (They've tried to do it to Santa Claus too, but he has a better lobby.)

To be fair, though, the clowns did a bit of that in their own day. They turned plenty of totems of dignity into targets for derision. One well-known example is what they did to Czech composer Julius Fučík's best-known composition. His march known as "Entrance of the Gladiators" was named because of his interest in Roman history, and was imagined as music to which the mighty death-dealing fighters would be summoned for the crowd. The circus chose it because it was pompous, not silly, and now no one can hear that "Deet deet deedle deedle deet deet deet deet" without thinking: Clowns.

Which reminds me that the history of clowning was not all just good clean fun. In fact, if this article in the Smithsonian on the history of clowns is accurate, and theirs usually are, it's amazing they got sanitized into children's entertainment at any period. I sum up what happened in the same way that fairy tales became fodder for children's books, and later, Disney movies. As J. R. R. Tolkien explained:

Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the “nursery,” as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused. It is not the choice of the children which decides this. Children as a class—except in a common lack of experience they are not one—neither like fairy-stories more, nor understand them better than adults do; and no more than they like many other things. They are young and growing, and normally have keen appetites, so the fairy-stories as a rule go down well enough. But in fact only some children, and some adults, have any special taste for them; and when they have it, it is not exclusive, nor even necessarily dominant.

I think exactly the same thing happened with clowns. Adults found them to be old-fashioned and unsophisticated in an era that liked to fancy itself modern and smart, so clowning was downgraded to children's entertainment, even though children's love of clowns was probably overrated. And, like the dark movie versions of fairy tales we're seeing now, the clowns came back as mature entertainment in the only non-sexual adult way we seem to understand anymore -- violent and gory.

So in a way I guess what goes around comes around, or something.

Meh. The problem is that nothing is allowed to be fun anymore, let alone innocent.

Poor clowns. Makes me want to hit someone with a pie.

Secret Service names.

As everyone knows, at least thanks to Wikipedia, the Secret Service uses code names for U.S. presidents and their families, assigned by the White House Communications Agency. The agency provides a list, and the president can make the choice among them. (President Obama chose "Renegade," because there's nothing more anti-establishment than the President of the United States, I guess. I think Trump may be "Le Grand Orange," since that's available now.) Seems silly that code names would be publicized, but apparently there's no real secrecy need for them anymore--they are useful as shorthand and for the sake of tradition.

The practice started with Truman, who was "General." Ike, who had been an actual general, was stuck with "Scorecard." Kennedy had the appropriate name "Lancer." Reagan's was also appropriate: "Rawhide." Curious that Clinton's was "Eagle" and not, maybe, "Pants."

Secret Service protection for the president dates back to the assassination of McKinley in 1901. But you have to wonder what some of our other presidents would have had as their code names, were the practice of guarding and naming older than they are. Hmm... perhaps something like...

Abraham Lincoln: Stretch

Franklin Pierce: Cipher

Rutherford B. Hayes: Fuzz

William Taft: Lumpy

John Quincy Adams: Littlejohn

George Washington: Optimus Prime

William Henry Harrison: Sneezy

James Madison: Half-Pint

James Monroe: Pint

Andrew Jackson: Quart

Ulysses S. Grant: Gallon

Calvin Coolidge: Hush

(First term) Grover Cleveland: Rocks

(Second term) Grover Cleveland: Redux

Theodore Roosevelt: Chaps

Franklin D. Roosevelt: Specs

Thomas Jefferson: Ploughman

Woodrow Wilson: Nag

Martin Van Buren: Baldy

James Buchanan: Freebird

Chester A. Arthur: Buddy

C'mon, doesn't he look like a Buddy to you? 

Keep your head.

Canadian duplicity.

I first heard about ketchup potato chips a few years ago when editing a novel. The author had a character who was obsessed with ketchup-flavored potato chips. I scowled -- was there such a thing? I looked online and discovered that, sure enough, these were very big -- in Canada. The author, as it happened, is Canadian.

Since then, I wondered if Canada was holding out on us, and why. Surely it's common knowledge that Americans love ketchup, even if it is now only our second- or possibly third-favorite condiment. And Canada makes a lot of prepared foods that America loves, like candy. Or at least they have been; perhaps NAFTA 2.0 will quash some of that off-shore manufacturing.

But I suspect that Canada, or as that brilliant theologian Fr. Jim Chern calls it, Fake America, has been holding out on us. I think they somehow embargoed ketchup potato chips for years, secretly laughing in their chip-crumb-covered wickedness, at how they pulled one over on us. But somehow Lays has managed to get some bags to the consumer in the U.S.of A., at least for a limited time, and I scored one.

I asked my friends about it, and a buddy posted on Facebook about it and asked his friends. One person he found the idea disgusting but he had seen ketchup chips in France. Figures, the Quebecois would ship chips to their mother country and not to Real America. Another guy had tried them, liked them. Others were unethused by the idea. "Betcha can eat just one" was my favorite reply. Still, some were more philosophical: "Hey, it's still a potato chip."

So I tried them. And... they taste like barbecue potato chips. I can hardly tell the difference. Not surprising, since ketchup forms the basis for many or even most of our favorite BBQ sauces. These chips are fine if you like that. Otherwise, it was not worth the fight with the snowbacks to the north and their PM Zoolander.

If we want to go to war with Fake America, I suppose we can still find a reason. Here's one. I'm still mad about compromising over 54" 40° or Fight. If the Mexicans can demand the original borders of Mexico back, I say we need to demand the original Oregon Country back.

Come on, gang! Vancouver or bust! Let's go! Let's do it for Polk! Win one for the Polkster! What do you say?

Local brand makes good.

Sometimes it seems like there are no local brands anymore. 

And then, sometimes, I'll see something like Marcal and have to buy it. 

For those of you not in the New Jersey/New York area, Marcal is a product of Soundview Paper Company and has been around since 1932. Their HQ is in Elmwood Park, NJ, and I don't think their distribution goes farther than Maryland. It's seen in Philly, but not in Pittsburgh. It's available in my Hudson Valley town, in one store, and I found it elbowing in between the Brawny and Bounty and Viva. Marcal is a leader in post-consumer paper recycling. 

Like a lot of local brands, Marcal used to have cheesy ads on local TV stations. Haven't seen or heard them in years, but the brand somehow hangs in there. My local market just carries the paper towels (toallas de papel!), but they also make napkins and toilet paper. 

You might think Marcal is a cheap brand like Sparkle, for the economy-minded consumer who doesn't worry about absorption or softness. And indeed, it's not an expensive towel; nor is it an attractive paper towel, with seasonal designs or licensed characters. It actually looks kind of lumpy. 

And it feels very rough. But that's the key. The Marcal towel feels like paper that has been dried of every bit of moisture it had ever encountered from the time it was a tree. It is exceptionally absorbent for its weight. It's a fine paper towel. I wouldn't want to use it as emergency TP, which would be a bad idea since you should never flush paper towels anyway. But as a paper towel, it is very handy. I'm not 100% sure I would enjoy using their toilet paper.

In a world where Yoo-Hoo is owned by Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Nathan's Hot Dogs are made by Midwest meat king John Morrell, and Dr. Brown's sodas are bottled by Pepsi, I'm glad there are some local brands that are still local, managing to find a way onto our shelves and into our hearts. The big national brands are fine, but the little guys keep 'em honest.

The October country.

And so it begins -- ever slightly, but begins.

OCTOBER COUNTRY...
...that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain...

--Ray Bradbury, The October Country

No point in fighting it; October is here. Let us not panic as I normally do with thoughts of how we are going to pay the Christmas bills -- yes, it will be tree-trimming time before we know it. But let's try to remember what October was like when we were kids. It was one of the loooooongest months of the year, because Halloween was at the end of it and Halloween was awesome. Also, the initial thrill of a new school year was long gone by now, and the days would drag on and on.

Now everything rushes forward -- the days may be long but the months are short. Can't we apply the brakes a little?

October was always my favorite month as a kid. I know some people always prefer the summer, and that's understandable if they have fun summer plans. I liked not being in school, of course, but I hated the heat and humidity, which usually get in New York City in spades. We did not have air conditioning. I know some people really enjoy the hot and humid weather of July and August, and yet these people are allowed to walk about free like normal people.

Ray Bradbury was the poet of October. He is -- wrongly, I think -- remembered as a science fiction writer. Mostly he wrote scary stories, travel stories, mystery stories, magical stories. He wrote the screenplay for John Huston's 1956 film Moby Dick. He wrote a lot of SF stories, yes, but he was not capable of writing hard science fiction, the way Robert Heinlein did. Heinlein had an engineer's soul and could do math. I get the feeling that Bradbury couldn't balance his checkbook. But who cares? He wrote like an October angel.

A friend of mine growing up would always be willing to trade his "left nut" for something of inestimable value -- "I'd give my left nut to have a date with her" "I'd give my left nut to play like Hendrix" "I'd give my left nut to drive a Testarossa" -- etc. I don't know what the going rate for testicles was supposed to be, but clearly he thought it was very high. If it still is, I'd like to make a deal regarding Bradbury's writing ability. My friend never found a taker for his nut, though, so I suppose there's no deal to be made.

I was thinking yesterday, on a bright, sunlit morning, that it was interesting that Bradbury chose October. November is far darker and more dank; December has the fire of Christmas to keep it lit, but January and February are desolate. But he was right. The turning of the leaves is more interesting than their absence. The dwindling of the sunlight is more dramatic than the dark. Those attics, cellars, and closets hide more secrets than the woods.

Slow down your October. Enjoy it. Listen for the rain on the empty walks, and wonder where the October people are going.