Juicy Fruit, the way it's supposed to look (left), and the way the screwed-up stuff looks now (right).
Tim doesn’t like to eat broccoli stems. He gingerly nibbles at the green heads until all that’s left is a hard stump. “Why don’t you eat the stem?” I asked him at supper the other day. “You’re missing out on a lot of protein. That’s where the worms are.” He grimaced, showing a row of teeth green from broccoli, and glared down at the half-eaten head in his hand. “WORMS?” he asked, alarmed. He just about threw up.
Juicy Fruit, the way it's supposed to look (left), and the way the screwed-up stuff looks now (right).
I bought a pack of Juicy Fruit gum out of the snack locker the other day, and got a rude shock: They changed the package.
I don’t want to go on one of those old-fogey rants. It's true, I’m happiest when most things stay the way I like to remember them, but I know that, in order for the world to move forward, it has to change. I accept that. I do. I believe that ...
Oh, screw it. This is wrong! There are some things that remain constant: Grass is green, the sky is blue, and Wrigley's should not mess with the package on their chewing gum. It's always been yellow with the little pointy red arrows in either side of "Juicy Fruit," not some gaudy Peter Max hallucination with gloppy splashes of ... what the hell is that, anyway? Fruit wedges? No! It's the Cheshire smiles of Wrigley's executives laughing at stodgy old curmudgeons like me who like to know that, when they drop fifty cents in the candy machine for a stick of gum, they like to see the calming, familiar yellow wrapper that grandma used to brighten the day up with.
And what's with that NOW LONGER LASTING drek? Chewing gum is already longer-lasting than non-conventional warfare. That kind of advertising hook for the shallow and gullible consumer belongs on soap and cigarettes; get it off the Juicy Fruit label.
Listen up, Wrigley's! Mess with your employees, but not your customers! Fix this now, or I'll never chew again
There. That ought to straighten things out.
“WASHINGTON, March 11 - The Air Force today successfully tested in Florida the largest conventional bomb in the American arsenal, a munition so massive that its 18,000 pounds of high explosives must be dropped from the rear of a cargo plane, officials said. The entire weapon weighs 21,500 pounds, and is carried aloft aboard an MC-130, a cargo plane flown by Air Force Special Operations Forces. The bomb rolls out the rear cargo door of the plane on a pallet, and a parachute yanks it free of the aircraft. The weapon is officially called the Massive Ordnance Air Blast, but the initials have already been recast to name it the Mother of All Bombs.”
This news story brought to mind two questions: Where can I get one? And: If you found yourself lucky enough to have a toy called a Massive Ordnance Air Blast, why would you call it anything else?
My oldest son is a little distressed at my boyish enthusiasm for an explosive device. When I was stationed in Berlin, I was a member of the 15,000-Pound-Bomb Club. There was one other member, Chris. He and I were drafted into the Security Police during the Gulf War, and we spent countless hours in a warehouse watching television. Don’t even ask how that was supposed to secure the site.
CNN gave us our first look at the 15,000-pound bomb. Chris and I would oooh and ahhh every time they showed a cargo plane dumping one of these monsters on the enemy, which looks sort of like a Greyhound bus driving out the back end of the plane. Reporters refered to the bomb as the Daisy Cutter, but we never called it that. We had a lot more fun saying “15,000-pound bomb” in over-exaggerated, scary tones.
It doesn’t make sense to explain why we liked them so much. If you don’t ooooh and ahhh when fireworks go boom, you won’t ever understand the appeal of a 15,000-pound bomb, no matter how much time I take to explain it.
My youngest son understood completely. He and I are now members of the Massive Ordnance Air Blast Club.
Donald Rumsfeld, always the silver-tongued wordmeister, said of the MOAB, “this is not small.” No, Rummy, it’s Massive.
[additional input from Pete Okonski:]
I love the timing of this test, don’t you?
300,000 thousand troops massing on the borders of Iraq, about 75% agreement at the UN that force is about right and oh, don’t mind us, we’re just testing this huge, non-nuclear bomb over here, just a second.....
...and I also heard this interesting story on NPR the other day that CIA or FBI or somebody is calling up Iraqi officers and encouraging them to not fight in the event of war. Calling them up! Jangling them up on cell phones! This is psy-ops like we never dreamed of. I can just see some beat-down Iraqi tank commander buying cigarettes on his way to move chemical weapons in the middle of the night when his cell phone rings and he pulls it out and stares at the caller ID...
“Say, Yaki, this is Bob over at Langely. Listen, I was just wanting to touch base with you on this whole Bagdad over-run thing. Is that something you’ve heard about? 300,000 troops with state of the art weaponry on your borders and they’ve been there for a few months so they are really pissed off. Anyhow, I’ve worked the phones a little and I think I can get you a deal if you’ll just not fight at all. Just raise your hands up like last time and we’ll just put you on a bus to safe-land while on our way through to cream Mr. Sadam and then later you can get a nice job tending a water treatment plant or something. Does that sound nice? And listen, the flip side on this deal is that you’ll freakin’ die. Raise your gun, direct a tank, call a fire mission and we’ll just squash you like the joke of a military man that you are. Okay? Hey, I really have to run, but I’ll have my people touch base with you in a few days or so....”
I made eggs for dinner tonight, and breaking them made me think of last weekend, when I happened to walk through the kitchen while Sean was making eggs for dinner. We’ve asked the boys to make dinner on the weekends, on the assumption that if they prepare a meal once in a while, instead of waiting for the magic dinner fairy to make it appear - poof! - on the table at supper time, then when they leave the house to live on their own, they’ll have no excuse to live on frozen waffles until they get married. We’re hoping that, if they prepare a few meals here, they’ll learn the kind of useful kitchen skills that boys everywhere can completely ignore after they move into a frat house.
Not that they’ll have a lot of skills to ignore, when it comes to that. Though Barb and I do everything in our power to shower what little cooking skill we have on them, occasionally volunteering our help, or stepping in for a moment to jeer and ridicule, as the case may be, it sometimes seems as though they shed any advice we put their way. They’ve got to learn everything for themselves.
Case in point: Sean was breaking eggs open by tapping the narrow end against the rim of a bowl until he’d shattered a spot about the size of a dime. Then, carefully picking away the flecks with a fingernail, he opened the hole until it was maybe as large as a nickel, upended the egg, and poked his finger in the hole to break the yoke so that it oozed through the hole. I offered him a quick demonstration of how to crack shells in half, but he considered his way superior. “It’s so I don’t get shell bits in the scrambled eggs,” he explained to me. Well, of course.