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Showing posts from July, 2015

Label lore: a fascinating game of mystery, puzzlement and sheer idiocy to help you while away those boring shopping trips to the supermarket.

Aisle one. Seen on a can of pineapple: Naturally Low in Fat . Spent the next two aisles looking for sugar labelled Naturally Low in Salt , spring water labelled Naturally Low in Caffeine and legs of lamb labelled Naturally Low in Fish . Didn't find any, but the shopping trip was a quarter over, and I found myself in ... Aisle five. Seen on a can of tomato soup: Made from responsibly grown Australian tomatoes . Now this was a hard one, and provided enough entertainment to get me through the next four aisles (which also made me forget two items on the shopping list). To start with, since grammar went out with old telephones, people throw words into sentences in any order. Was the adverb 'responsibly' even intended to modify 'grown'? And if so, how do you define responsibly grown tomatoes? Or irresponsibly grown ones? Left out in the rain? Letting cockatoos eat them before they ripen? Or did the manufacturer really mean that all Australian tomatoes are resp

Happy birthday, Martin.

Tried to call you yesterday and you've obviously ditched the landline, like I did last year. Hope you had a good one. *Rest of the world thinks: WHAT! No Facebook, no Twitter? These guys try to TELEPHONE greetings to each other? Nuts!*

Wake up and smell the onions.

John Lennon never wrote a song called 'Looking Through a Glass Parsnip'. No-one ever wrote a book titled Chokos in the Stew . "He knows his carrots" was never a figure of speech. There was never an online satirical magazine called The Potato . Booker T. and the M.Gs never recorded Green Beans . There is a reason for this. The reason is that the onion is not just a vegetable. It is a cultural artefact. The onion underpins more recipes than any other ingredient. It stars in its own right. It makes grown men cry. If there were no onion, it would be necessary to invent one. The onion is the only vegetable in existence that can literally stop people in their tracks. I have proven this several times, when working on the Bunnings kindergarten fund-raising sausage stall. For some reason I always got to be the cook while the others handled the money or served the customers. This meant I was able to stand behind the grill turning onions and sausages, while gazing out ove