Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Monthly Archives: February 2009

• Yodels, Ho Ho’s and Lip Smackin’

  Posted at 1:01 am by kayewer, on February 22, 2009

  It’s strange to go to the junk food aisle and see two similar products from the same company.  Drake’s Yodels and Hostess Ho Ho’s are both products of Interstate Bakeries Corporation, but no two rolled up creamy chocolate enrobed cakes are the same, which is why both products wind up on the same shelf in the store.  Snack cakes apparently are as polarizing to society as religion, so neither product can be discontinued without causing an uprising.

  I am a Yodel fan, and I realized that the reason for my loyalty must lie in the added calorie content compared to the Ho Ho’s.  There is no getting around the tastiness of the stuff, even if it winds up in my midsection.  I’ve tried the Ho Ho’s and they just don’t fulfill that sweet need.  I find Ho Ho’s to be blander than Yodels, but the dieter in me likes the individual servings offered by the competition compared to the Yodel two-pack.  Has anybody ever actually gotten away with folding up and stowing that second Yodel back in the box?  I can’t do it.

  There is also a difference in the ritualistic peeling away of the chocolate enrobing:  points come off the Ho Ho’s for the tendency to come off in chips while the Yodel’s sheathe  slides away in a curlicue of delectable delight that can be saved for after the cake is gone.

  I know that dieting is not supposed to include such guilty pleasures, but I find it hard to deny those temptations that come in my human wiring.  The occasional Yodel is a must.  If I need a fix and the Drake’s cake aisle is lacking, I’d settle for a Ho Ho just to keep me jolly (in attitude, not in weight).

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• The Anti-Valentine’s Day Post

  Posted at 12:39 am by kayewer, on February 15, 2009

  Eh, so it’s Valentine’s Day.  Yes I’m one of those eternally single people who spend this day alone as always, but really I don’t want to carp too much about it.  After all, this is supposed to be a day for love in all forms, not just pairs in the throes of passion (or just “in like” with one another).

  However, I look at all these high profile consumeristic holidays and wonder why we do this to ourselves:  hanker for things we don’t need and spend too much money on (the flowers and candy and private hotel rooms with champagne glass shaped bathtubs), yearn for it when we can’t get it (out of candy and the rooms are all booked, and boy will my honey be teed off about it) and get depressed when it doesn’t seem to extend to us (all the Charlie Browns out there are sighing right now).  When majority rules, the minority can’t just leave the planet while they all celebrate, so where do we all go while the others are cavorting around?  In my household it’s called Homeside Park, where the food is reasonably priced and guaranteed to please and the bed is comfortable and hasn’t been slept in by 50 million strangers before.  So the tub is round:  I’ve got bubble bath.

  I have some wonderful people in my life, including a circle of friends, my family and God.  Nothing would be nicer, though, than to have a nice warm hug or some pleasant words from a stranger, if only to acknowledge that I was seen as an existing member of this planet, and nobody passed out as a result of viewing my visage.  I guess I’m feeling a bit dejected because yesterday a baby turned away from me in disgust but giggled gleefully at the office manager who warned the tike’s mom “I tend to make babies cry.”  Go figure babies these days.  Unpredictable.

  Let’s face it:  some things are just because they are, and there is not much that can be done about it.  So I’ll spend another Valentine’s Day alone, but not exactly lonely.  I mentioned in an earlier post that my avatar in Second Life gets hit on while its owner doesn’t, so I’ll just log in there and have some fun by proxy.  By tomorrow this holiday too will all be over and I can look forward to Easter, which has the same overpriced candy but less of the emotional baggage.

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• HFCS: The Enemy of the Market

  Posted at 11:56 pm by kayewer, on February 7, 2009

  High fructose corn syrup:  more deadly than nuclear war, more insidious than a Dark Lord of the Sith and the blood supply of every grocery chain CEO vampire in the world.

  If you haven’t been reading about all the funky gunk inside our food, you’ve either been chowing down on chips and couldn’t hear the television, or you’re in denial.  HFCS and the digital television conversion are both life changing things, but the latter will just affect your TV viewing while the former can kill you.

  HFCS, for all intents and purposes, is a sugar product designed to make foods taste irresistable.  Studies are linking it to obesity, and it isn’t surprising since it appears in your ketchup bottle, your orange juice, your diet soda and even in some things you normally wouldn’t put suger in, such as soup.  Seriously, would you drop a spoonful of sugar into your soup?

  Sugar and salt have a common effect:  as you consume it, you find the need to consume more of it as its ability to stimulate your taste wears off.  Think of the cigarette habit:  people start at one or two and move up to a pack a day.  Alcoholism makes drinkers up their intake.  So it is with these two partners in seasoning or sweetening.

  I went cold turkey on salt once, and it took about 48 hours for foods to start tasting good again, but I can tell you that I actually tasted the salt naturally present in the food after I stopped shooping the table salt on everything.  The same thing can happen with sugar:  cutting back or out can affect the taste of foods for a bit, but then your body adjusts and sugar in its natural form can be tasted more readily.

  I don’t know how difficult it may be to lessen the amount of HFCS in my grocery shopping, but I’m taking a shot at it.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

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• The British are Groaning

  Posted at 12:54 am by kayewer, on February 1, 2009

  I was unsure which part of the British invasion to talk about this week:  the decision in Britain to drop the use of apostrophes on street signs, or the total ignoramus on ABC’s latest installment of Wife Swap whose rhetoric curdled the milk in my tea.  Then I decided that either way the poor Brits, for whom I do have a high degree of respect, didn’t need my spleen-venting at all to feel bad this week in light of both of these disasters.

  First, just because people have issues about where apostrophes go in grammar usage, why remove them?  Can’t we just get along with them and fix them when they’re put in the wrong place?  We need tolerance, not grammatical exile.

  Second, just because a Brit becomes a US citizen doesn’t mean he can’t appear on television and totally alienate the whole country if not his family and friends if he wants to.

  I’ve never been to England (I will confess that the snobby Brit is right in that I am one of those Americans who have no passport), but I thank God for the knowledge that 99% of Brits are not like that fellow (everybody like Jo Frost on Supernanny makes up for those like him any day).

  Britain gave us Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Hammer Films.  Britain gave us a monarch any country can admire (she’s still at it and going strong).  They gave us Dr. Who and Monty Python, Dickens’ “Christmas Carol” (note that I got the apostrophe right) and another definition of the word “bangers.”  What’s right about Britain far eclipses anything wrong.

  So I won’t go off on these matters any longer.  Pass the clotted cream.

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  Posted in Commentary | 0 Comments | Tagged apostrophe, wife swap brit

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