More idiots at the party

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You know, I’ve never really gotten into watching auto racing. For that matter, I don’t really love to watch any kind of racing, be it by machines, horses or humans. I’m more of a team-sport fan.

In fact, I’m ashamed to admit I’ve always held a somewhat unfair, stereotypical prejudice against NASCAR. For many years, it brought to my mind images of mullet-wearing rednecks swilling Budweiser, spittin’ and chewin’ around the TV set, situated beneath a huge Confederate flag serving as drapery for the picture win-da, with hound dogs under the porch and about six cars littering the front yard in various stages of decomposition.

So you can certainly imagine my sarcasmo surprise when I read this morning that NASCAR suspended two “officials” indefinitely, pending an investigation. Seems that another NASCAR employee — a Mauricia Grant — filed a $225 million lawsuit…

…alleging 23 specific incidents of sexual harassment and 34 specific incidents of racial and gender discrimination during her time as a technical inspector for NASCAR’s second-tier Nationwide Series.” (espn.com)

Ok, that does no favors for the NASCAR stereotype, especially when the racial slurs against this black woman referred to her as a “nappy-headed Mo” working on “colored people time.” Of course the defendants are firing back at the allegations, saying she was a “willing participant” in the shenanigans.

Do you find it odd that one of the defendants happens to be named David Duke? Bizarre. There’s a name for that kind of coincidence. I just can’t think of it.

I’m reading some wild blog reactions. Take this one, from blackvoices.com:

I am a (white [female]) media member, and was invited behind the scenes to attend one of the races last year. I brought a gorgeous black friend as my guest for the day, and she wasn’t openly harassed, but she was basically ignored. Then I was grabbed by one of the drivers, who thought it was totally funny until I threatened to report the incident to his sponsor, and only then did I finally get an apology. Every NASCAR fan I told the story to afterward said, ‘What do you expect? It’s NASCAR!’ Needless to say, I never accepted another race invite, and then I came across research about the ‘sport’s’ horrible environmental record, and I felt even more strongly about not supporting this organization. I cannot understand how anyone who is female, black, or who cares about the environment can support NASCAR, given their appalling record on all these issues. And the best way to get any change is to complain to the sponsors…obviously doing the right thing is not enough for NASCAR to change, but maybe hitting their bottom line will be a wake-up call.”

Yowza.

Well, no matter. Money will be paid, hushing will take place, and it’ll have been a tempest in a teapot. Someone on some blog this morning said that “NA$CAR is not a sport. It’s a business.” Well they’re in good company. They can sit down next to the $NBA$, the $NFL$, and $MLB$. The hubris and utter excess of these organizations must surely someday bring about their undoing.

Or not.

TTFN.

FO.

PS – Nobody’s won the contest yet. Here’s a hint: what was the theme of yesterday’s post?

J. H. Kellogg – the flake of the family

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RtB Contest #4!

Big fat ol’ Hershey bar (either in person or through the mail) goes to the winner! Ready?

Who is this?

As usual, sorry Mavis…you ain’t allowed to participate. :-)

Send your answer by email: ratfink at finkweb . org

=============================

If you’ve ever seen the movie The Road to Wellville (and I’m not sure I’d recommend it; it’s one of the more bizarre films I’ve seen), you know it’s a send-up of the Kellogg family — namely, John Harvey Kellogg and his wife — and their health spa in Battle Creek, Michigan in the early 1900s.

Now if you’re thinking that John was the cereal guy, you’d be partly correct. He experimented with grains, making them into edible breakfast foods for his patients at the spa. Then his brother, Will Keith Kellogg, went to work for John as a bookkeeper — until a huge tiff sent Will packing.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Strange story regarding how Corn Flakes came about…

Dr. John ran the Battle Creek Sanitarium, where he practiced his beliefs that whole grains and other nutritious foods (not meat, however) would make for a better life. So far, so good. When younger brother Will went to work for him, he (Will) began to experiment in the kitchens for a digestible substitute for bread. According to the W. K. Kellogg Foundation website, here’s what happened:

By accident, he let stand [overnight] a batch of boiled wheat. When he returned the next day, the “tempered” wheat had turned into flakes. From this discovery came Corn Flakes…”

Eureka. They eventually substituted corn for the wheat, and a new food was born. The feud started when Will, seeing dollar signs and marketing campaigns, told his older brother that the new flaking process should be kept secret. John, on the other hand, wouldn’t hear of it, and allowed anyone and everyone to wander through the kitchens to watch the cereal being made.

Big mistake.

Why? Because one of the wanderers was a guy named C. W. Post. He was amazed at the process, went off on his own and copied it, and founded the Post Cereal Company, which stood for decades as Kellogg’s main competitor. Yikes.

Will got so steamed that he packed his bags and left his brother’s employ. He later went on to form his own cereal company, and the rest is history. Launching out on his own also gave him the freedom to make the other change his brother would never consent to: putting sugar in the corn flakes recipe.

Surely that idea would never work….

But let’s get back to Johnny.

Being strict Seventh Day Adventists, and adhering to the religion’s ideals about optimum health, John and his wife were vegetarians. No problem there. Whatever gets you through the night. But John took things a bit further. He believed:

  1. The coupling of a man and a woman was “the sewer drain of a healthy body,” and should only be entered into when children were the intended result. He was married to his wife for over forty years, and never once did they….you know.
  2. Enemas cured everything. (That’s all I’m going to say about that.)
  3. Eugenics (controversial movement devoted to creating a better world by improving the human gene pool) was a necessary ingredient to maintain the purity of the American race. Immigrants and non-whites polluted the gene pool. He told the National Conference of Race Betterment in 1915, “The world needs a new aristocracy — a real aristocracy made up of Apollos and Venuses and their fortunate progeny” (New York Times archive)
  4. Intense, invasive hydrotherapy (I’m thinking that’s colonics on steroids, friend) and electric shock did a body good.

That said, he did do some good work, too. His biggest push was for government control of tobacco, which he claimed, in 1922, would bring about “the physiological, pathological, nutritional, eugenic, moral, and economic devastation” of the country. His efforts went all the way to Washington, where anti-tobacco legislation was introduced. Obviously, he was unsuccessful in convincing Congress to outlaw cigarettes.

So anyway…next time you’re munching on your Corn Flakes, Frosted Flakes, Apple Jacks, Special K, All Bran, Frosted Mini Wheats, Froot Loops, Cocoa Krispies, Rice Krispies, or Raisin Bran (the “two scoops of raisins” variety), think of the corny flake who started the whole crazy business.

Fink out (to get some Shredded Wheat).

Schmenglish IV

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Why? Why do Americans insist on adding syllables to English words, or twisting around existing syllables? Why do people add letters where there should be no added letters? Whatever happened to checking to see if you’re saying something correctly? Have we become so grammatically careless as a nation that it is now acceptable to simply make up the language as we go along? (Rhetorical, please. I’m afraid I already know the answer.)

Ugh. Anyway.

Here, for your listening and dancing pleasure:

Nasties for Which Folks Should Get Mandatory (Grammar) Jail Time

  1. It’s realtor (two syllables). Not real-a-tor.
  2. Mischievous has THREE syllables: MIS’-chie-vous. Miss Cheevius was your 4th grade teacher, and she did not have a sense of humor or a proclivity for pulling silly pranks.
  3. Someone who builds brick structures for a living (or, as in Adam R’s case, someone belonging to a secret society of satanic axe murderers posing as upstanding pillars of the community) is a mason. Masons practice masonry. May. Son. Ree. Mason-ary is not a word. Embrace that truth.
  4. Your voice box — the organ in your neck that houses your vocal cords — is called your larynx. Lare-inks. Lare-inks. NOT lare-i-nicks. Two syllables, friends. Only two. And watch out for the “ynx” and “nyx” confusion.
  5. Et cetera is a Latin phrase meaning “and other things.” Notice it is two words. Excetera is, well…wrong.
  6. Ku Klux Klan. This clan of idiots reportedly derived their name from the Greek kyklos, meaning “circle.” Notice there is no “L” in the first word, so please resist the uniquely American temptation to add stuff to make it sound cooler. So when you speak of them with repugnance (which you should always do when you speak of them at all), get a clue; don’t say “Klu.”
  7. This is a case of subtracting a syllable, which is equally as offensive as adding one. The word referring to a group or series of elements which are ranked is called a hierarchy. Not high-arky, but higher-arky. Let’s get the height of our arkies straight, shall we?
  8. Interpret. Not in-ter’-pet. There’s an extra “R” in there, sweety.
  9. If you say acrost one more time, I am going to slap you across your face with a trout.
  10. Sandwich, people. It’s sandwich, named after the Earl of Sandwich, John Montagu, who was said to be “an inveterate gambler who ate slices of cold meat between bread at the gaming table during marathon sessions rather than get up for a proper meal” (Online Etymology Dictionary). It’s not samwich or the even more ridiculous sandridge.

So there’s the list for today. Trust me, I got a million of ’em, so the above does not indicate the final Schmenglish post. I just wonder where we went wrong, you know? You never hear of a Mexican or Puerto Rican person butchering Spanish, or a Parisian speaking French all wrong. Maybe it’s because English is such an international language that there are undoubtedly more chances for people to abuse it. But why is it abused so badly in our own country?

I’m all for informal writing. A cursory perusal of this very site will reveal a metric ton of slang. (See?) It’s in the everyday usage department that we seem to not care about falling off the grammar wagon. This is war, friends. Somebody hep me, because lest we forget:

Fink out.

Picky, picky, picky

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Sometimes, I really do hate being such a picky eater. I like all the wrong things, and hate many of the right ones. Why is that?

My mother always cooked balanced meals. I mean, they were probably heavy on the starches, as that is what most down-home, Midwestern girls raised on farms were taught to cook, but we usually had a meat, a veggie, some kind of potato or noodle or other starch, and bread if we wanted it. There were lots of casseroles. And iced tea. Always iced tea, 365 days a year.

I also don’t know why my sister likes vegetables and I don’t. I know it’s personal preference and all that, but we were subjected to the same foods growing up. Why does she like cauliflower and broccoli, and I do not? Some veggies are ok. I’ll eat the basics: green beans, peas, corn, celery, carrots, lettuce. [Bizarre side note: I can make a meal out of cold, pickled beets.] But everything else…all the trendy, “you have to like these” vegetables, I can’t stand.

Not that I abhor all healthy foods, mind you. I do love the fruit experience, although much of it is high in sugar.

And the weird thing is that growing up, we hardly ever had dessert. Super strange, because my mother was a sugar addict until the day she died, and my sister and I have been for decades. It’s no wonder my mom was Type II diabetic, and Mavis and I are both hypoglycemic.

How did I get this affinity for sweets? There are several theories which I won’t bother reciting, but suffice it to say that when I was a child, sweets were sacred, awe-inspiring, more-valuable-than-gold rewards. If we were good at the market while Mother was doing her grocery shopping, she’d buy us a candy bar or some ice cream from the Treasure Island snack bar.

If we were delightful little girls at the department store when Mother needed to shop for clothes or a wedding gift, she would reward us by stopping at the Woolworth’s candy counter. We always got the same thing. I think Mavis chose M & Ms, and I got the chocolate stars. A quarter-pound, and that was all. But it was heaven; something to work towards.

And there was no “saving for later,” either, dear heart. Every last piece of candy was gone before we got home, as if it was going to somehow disintegrate in our hands when we walked through the door.

It wasn’t Mother’s fault. She grew up on a post-Depression farm with next to nothing. She almost single-handedly raised her eight younger siblings, and I’m sure sweet treats for the entire family were basically non-existent. A box of decadent chocolates or a selection from the candy counter was totally beyond her reach until she married my dad.

Speaking of decadent: My favorite sweet treat of all time….

Cake! I’ll take any type, in almost any flavor. As long as it has that fluffy, springy, cake-y texture and lots and lots (and lots) of icing, I’ll take it. The more of it, the better.

Of course, I also like these, which is about the equivalent of pouring a half a cup of table sugar into a bowl and spooning it down the hatch. But they’re not near as much fun as cake.

Somebody bake me a cake, ok? Ok? Ok? Please? Today. Right now. Go.

Fink out.

Go ahead. Drink the Kool-Aid.

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I know some people (intelligent, nice, loving people) who say things like:

“I don’t do email; I want the human contact experience.”

“The Internet is an addiction. People need to get away from their computers and experience life.”

“Don’t email me; I won’t answer. If you want to talk to me, call me or talk to me in person.”

And the best one…

“I hate the Internet and email and all that. I don’t even know how to check my email.”

That’s right, sweety. Hate it because you don’t know anything about it. What gets me about these folks (and have I mentioned that they’re nice, intelligent people?) is that they are equating using the web with inactivity, laziness, and aversion to “getting out and breathing the air.”

I couldn’t disagree more. But then, you probably knew that.

Never before in human history has the acquisition of knowledge been so readily available. Stuff on the web begs to be known; discovered. Since when is discovery a bad thing? And why can’t “getting out and breathing the air” coincide with discovery?

Listen to the Fink. Go ahead. Drink the Kool-Aid. Use the web inside your daily “human” activities. You’ll like it, I promise. For instinks…

  • While you’re on your daily run, snap a photo of a gorgeous flower or tree or cute animal and email it to your mom. Perfect example: my friend Kay, who lives in Slovenia, has a blog. She takes pictures on her walks and bike rides. Check it out.
  • While at a family gathering or out with friends, instead of arguing about who was the first Browns player to be enshrined in the Hall of Fame, or how many M & Ms it would take to fill a Volkswagen Beetle, use ChaCha.com. You don’t even need a computer (only a cell phone), and it’s free.
  • Use 800.GOOG.411 from your phone if you need quick directions, a phone number, an address or business hours. Of course, this service by Google is free.
  • If you want to make sure you remember to do a thing when you get back from your power walk, use your cell phone and dial 866.JOTT.123 and speak the reminder into the phone. Jott.com will automatically send you an email message with the exact text of the reminder. Again — free service, easy, and purposeful.

So don’t hate me for my webby-ness. Really. I’m just trying to help my fellow humanoid. And I do get up from the computer, honest. Girlfriend has to make the coffee, ya know.

Fink out.