Todd Stadler's blog

[untitled #497]

I think I have found the most boring TV show ever.

While home sick, I was surfing around on our new Dish network setup, when I came across EWTN's "The Holy Rosary with Mother Angelica and the Nuns of our Lady of the Angels Monastery".

Yes, thirty riveting minutes of watching nuns pray the rosary. Fifty-three "Hail Marys". Six "Our Fathers". And so on.

One benefit: no commercials.

[untitled #496]

I don't get yesterday's Wizard of Id cartoon.

A knight in a suit of armor walks into a telegraph office to issue a challenge to a duel and asks that it be in Swahili, because the telegraphist doesn't know that language.

Is it "make up your own convenient history" time over at the Parker/Hart offices?

[untitled #495]

I am continually amazed at the domain names used by legions of crappy would-be e-commerce sites. campusbooks4less.com. electronics2you.com. accessories-store.com. cheap-affordable-low-cost-web-hosting-service.com.

I mean, have these people not paid attention to the names of popular Web sites? yahoo.com, amazon.com, ebay.com, monster.com.

It could be argued that some of those names make sense at some level, but for the most part, they're short and rather nonsensical. And yet they sound so much more professional than more explanatory domain names.

All of this to say that cockahoop.com was clearly a really good choice. Yay me.

[untitled #494]

You know what? There's factories where they make batteries. I don't know why, but that blows my mind. I can understand making cars, but it's the manufacturing of an energy source that makes me ponderous.

the flotsam of my life

While digging through the piles of paper that have come to define my living quarters, I found one piece of paper that has caused me concern.

Sure, most of the paper is taken up with what appears to be mathematical calculations related to a Web page design.

But in the upper-left corner is the following list:

• Kitties flash song
• walker marathon (2)
• sprint to train
• wedgie fix
• everybody dance now
• "did that hurt" hat pierce

It appears to be a list of things I intended to write about on Cock-a-hoop at some point.

I remember some of the items in the list. The "Kitties flash" bit refers to the strangely compelling Flash videos of cats lip-syncing to White Stripes songs and fake British pub band covers of Destiny's Child tunes.

I have no idea what "wedgie fix" or "hat pierce" might refer to, although they sound more like scribblings from a dream than the apparently coherent thoughts of a man in search of scratch paper to jot ideas onto.

And while I've had to sprint to catch the train on several mornings, I can't imagine that I'd actually bother to write an entire article on it.

Oh, who am I kidding? In this topsy-turvy world that blogs have created, I might even venture to write an entire article about a piece of paper I found on my dresser.

a quick one while he's away

My housemate Beeman got the following e-mail from a mailing list at work that's supposed to be for recent college graduates.

Please note the subject line.

Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2003 10:49:52 -0700
From: [Xxxxxx Xxxxx] <xxxxx@xxxxxx.xxx>
To: [Xxxxxx Xxxxx] <xxxxx@xxxxxx.xxx>
Subject: For Sale: one night stand

I have one night stand for sale. I got it from Target around 4 years ago and have been using it as a TV stand. It has one drawer. I used the drawer to store video tapes. The shelf fit the VCR plus other video tapes. I think I spent around 60 dollars on it originally.

Asking $15 or best offer.

Oh the humor to be found in poorly composed subject lines!

Oh, the stuff I post because I just haven't felt like writing much lately!

finally, sausages

Finally, though I don't have much to say about them, I found the following links (tee hee) while doing research on food for the previous articles:

First, there is this very informative but ultimately frightening page of processed meat product definitions. I can honestly say I've never thought so much about emulsions or "identifiable pieces of meat".

Next up is this nice recipe for a "vienna hedgehog" which, while possibly not utterly vomitous (vanilla, sugar, cheese, and sausages, all in the same "cake"?!) will likely now serve as the face of evil which I previously had trouble visualizing.

Finally, as proof that one should always run one's copy by a ten-year-old to make sure that nothing potentially puerile slips by, I present to you the Enterprise Foods games page, which features such diversions as "Polony Ping-Pong" and "Hide the Sausage". I mean, for heaven's sake, is Enterprise's South Africa somehow completely innuendo-free that such things are bandied about without any snickering?

labelling your problems

I recently saw that Heinz had a contest to change the text on their stalwort ketchup bottle label, and while I'm clearly late to the game, I'd like to offer my submissions anyhow:

• Hey, Gen-Xers! Ketchup is now ironically cool! Awesome!
• Tabasco for the truly sensitive
• Blood-ish substance for your cheap slasher movie production
• Hey, you weren't gonna eat gourmet anyhow, right?
• Ketchup. And why not?
• Only freaks spell it "catsup"
• Salsa for the dispassionate
• A mediocre condiment for a mediocre punchline
• Somehow worse than just tomato sauce
• Many have mustered the ability to relish this
• Turns a regular hamburger into a ketchupburger!
• The American cheese or white bread of condiments
• Try it on fruits! (Hey, tomatoes are fruits)
• Served by America's top bacon cheeseburger chefs
• It's still here; try some!
• With a name like Heinz, it's gotta be ketchup!
• In spite of the label, contains no pickles
• Forgive us, this also comes in pink

Full disclosure: gads, I hate ketchup. I eventually came around on mustard, at least the good stuff, but I don't think there's even such a thing as gourmet ketchup (and please don't lie to me about "fancy ketchup"). Ack. I don't want to think about it any more ...

queso rah! hurrah!

I've been trying to wrap my head around Pizza Hut's Stuffed Crust Gold pizza for some time now.

Not literally, of course. I wouldn't touch that stuff unless every other pizza place in Portland shut down.

But it's this issue of the cheese arms race that confuses me.

When I was a boy, most people ordered regular pizzas, and the occasional "crazy cheese guy" would order extra cheese on his pie.

More recently, Pizza Hut decided to listen to the plea of Americans that they simply weren't getting enough cheese on each pizza.

With the traditional pizza payload area already saturated with cheese (at least on an extra cheese pizza), the engineers at Yum! Brands (formerly known as Tricon Global Restaurants; whyever did they change their name?) came up with the ingenius idea to stuff more cheese into the crust, which had previously only held largely unsaturated bread products.

It was a bold move, and it quieted the threats of civil unrest from cheese-crazy citizens who needed a higher cheese-per-bite quotient.

Until recently, that is, when the collective stomach of America rumbled that there simply wasn't enough cheese lying around in the collective bowels of America.

Once again, Pizza Hut scientists responded with even more cheese, but their offering was fairly nominal — a mere sprinkling of additional cheese on top of the cheese-filled crust.

Clearly, the bold vision that enabled the stuffed crust pizza is gone. And yet the demand for more cheese on our pizzas has never been higher.

Forthwith, some suggestions from me and my friends on how to deal with this dilemma.

• Toppings made of cheese. At the very least, completely cheese-free (and fat-free — what's up with that?) toppings like jalapeños could be replaced with their closest cheesy equivalent, such as jalapeño poppers. Similarly, meats like italian sausage and pepperoni could be replaced with some fromage-filled frankfurter like a cheese dog.

  But these are baby steps, at best. Any real cheese whiz knows that such solutions aren't maximizing the cheese-per-unit-volume potential! Why not just toss on a nice assortment of cheese cubes? Or, for variety, cheese slices!

• While it's hard to top toppings when it comes to variety and a near-limitless ability to add more cheese, there are many other components of the pizza that have been ignored in the quest for ultimate cheese density. Accordingly, I recommend that we not overlook the simple possibility offered by exchanging the traditional tomato-based pizza sauce for a liquidy, pasteurized process cheese sauce as manufactured by Kraft, et al. Frankly, I doubt many cheese lovers will miss what little flavor was contributed by a thin layer of tomato sauce and spices.

• Finally, but most technically difficult, we must find a way to make the crust itself out of cheese. Science may not be capable of such a feat right now, but American consumers will ultimately demand it, and if we do not begin researching this important question now, then the horrible nightmare I keep having of the Cheese Riots of 2015 may come true.

  Would we first start out with a cheese/grain crust mixture? Would it be stable? Could we then move on to a 100% cheese crust-like substance, perhaps something like a crust-pressboard made out of Kraft parmesan cheese?

These would be by no means trivial accomplishments, but they are clearly necessary to allow for the human race to continue its evolution into a race of completely cheese-based lifeforms.

[untitled #493]

Atlantic Monthly editor-at-large and Washington Post columnist Michael Kelly has been killed in Iraq. I will miss his intelligent conservative commentary.