February 6, 2004
I hate to keep harping on low-carb diets, but the anti-starch movement has finally gone too far. I’m an open-minded kind of guy. If you want to go to a restaurant and say to the waiter, "I’d like a baked potato with butter, sour cream, bacon, and shredded cheese, please hold the potato" that’s fine by me. I’m not going to stand in anyone else’s way of losing weight, or, for that matter, losing muscle, bone density, and proper liver and kidney functioning. About ten years ago low fat, less fat, reduced fat, and "a fraction of the fat" (with fine print that said, "fat reduced by one-twentieth, which is a fraction") was all the rage. And people got even fatter. I can only imagine what freakish forms the people on low-carbohydrate diets will have achieved in ten years or so when the next diet fad – the all-aspirin diet maybe – comes along, but that doesn’t really matter. If you want to do that, please be my guest. But keep your sallow, webby, paper-skinned hands off of pizza. I can accept that a lot of foods – from cookies to potato chips to coffee – are beginning to spawn low-carb children in an effort to keep their places on the market shelves, but when the amylosophobics went after pizza, demanding a low-carb version that prompted one company to make – I’m not kidding – "pizza in a bucket" – they went too far. Fried chicken comes in a bucket. Popcorn comes in a bucket. Paint, coal, grain, and bilge-water go in a bucket. Pizza is supposed to come in a box that’s kept inside another box with thermal insulation. Warm pizza and cold beer is the adult equivalent of milk and cookies, but you shouldn’t be able to drink the pizza as well as the beer. It’s acceptable to eat really hot pizza with a fork, but it’s never acceptable to eat pizza with a spoon.
Pizza is the ultimate universal food. When aliens finally land we should take them out for pizza. The round shape will remind them of their spaceships, and the round disks of pepperoni simmering and slightly crisp in the oily mozarella with tiny geysers of tomato sauce will remind them of the night sky over Xapquatnl-Znev, whereas if we took them out for chimichangas they would recoil in horror, thinking we were eating their pupating children. Pizza has a long and proud history. Treaties have been written over pizza. King Arthur’s Round Table was designed that way to make sure everyone would have an equal chance to grab a slice of pizza. In the Old West people regularly shot each other over poker, but did you ever hear of a shootout at high noon over the last slice of pizza? Here’s an idea: if you want a low-carb pizza…don’t eat pizza.
Enjoy this week’s offerings.
Gardening Rule: When weeding, the best way to make sure you are removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it. If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant.
The easiest way to find something lost around the house is to buy a replacement.
Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway.
There are two kinds of pedestrians – the quick and the dead.
Life is sexually transmitted.
An unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys.
If quitters never win, and winners never quit, then who is the fool who said, "Quit while you’re ahead?"
Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.
The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.
Get the last word in: Apologize.
Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach that person to use the Internet and they won’t bother you for weeks.
Some people are like Slinkies . . . not really good for anything, but you still can’t help but smile when you see one tumble down the stairs.
Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.
Have you noticed since everyone has a camcorder these days no one talks about seeing UFOs like they use to?
Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again.
All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism.
In the 60’s, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.
Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
How is it one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
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