Shake & Bake

Hello World, Happy (belated) Columbus Day weekend! Of course, we have all long since realized that poor old Christopher Columbus is the veritable poster child for the "What-have-you-done-for-us-lately" school of thought nowadays, heaven knows, and unceremoniously relegated to the scrap heap of history for the most part - and that's when he's not being reviled for even worse crimes against humanity, by revisionist historians everywhere. In fact, the day is not even recognized throughout the entire states of Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon, and South Dakota as it is, and the way things are going, probably even more yet to follow, I shouldn't wonder. If any further proof was needed, one need only glance at the AOL Welcome screen to find more of the Great Northwest jumping on the Columbus-bashing bandwagon, joining numerous other localities in continuing to observe the day as a holiday, but renaming it "Indigenous Peoples Day" in honor of the native populations already living there in 1492. This was a wildly popular move according to Fawn Sharp, president of the Quinault Nation, a tribe on the Olympic Peninsula, who is also president of the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians. "Nobody discovered Seattle, Washington," she said to a round of applause. In these politically correct days, when just wishing someone a "Merry Christmas" is considered a radical act of civil disobedience, the dinosaurs and I flatly refuse to go down quietly with the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria, and firmly stand by the beleaguered and abandoned explorer, right or wrong, in defiance of the consequences. After all, things could have been possibly even much worse, as we might have been discovered instead by extra-terrestrial space aliens, and we'd all be speaking Klingon today, I dare say. In other news (or rather, just the opposite) our local newspaper had the following blurb on the top of their front page last week, ostensibly to entice us to delve deeper into their interior pages: =============================== USA Today Sports: Junior Discusses Future Plans See Page 5D =============================== I said to Bill that not only do we have no idea who this mysterious "junior" might be, but we don't even know what sport this personage might possibly be associated with - or even their potential scholastic, amateur, or professional status that purports to make the discussion noteworthy in the first place. This is a classic example of what the lost and lamented editors of yore would describe as a "non-story," where someone has gone to all the trouble to string together a bunch of words, all in acceptable English, that utterly fails to say anything at all, and explains nothing in any way that would be of use to the reader. Heck, they could have just gone ahead and sold that space to a local car dealership, and at least had something on the front page that made some sense, and not just a load of gobbledygook, for heaven's sake. Speaking of sports, it was bad enough when the baseball playoffs got underway without any representation from The Big Apple, thanks not, as both the Mets and Yankees failed to make a run for it in September. Now even the teams that are still playing in football and hockey can't help but make a person wonder if that isn't more of a mixed blessing than otherwise. Both the Jets and Rangers managed to win their first game, then went straight down the tubes from there, and only the Giants can lay claim to any semblance of respectability at this point. This is certainly not the direction that anybody wants to be going in, and I suppose the only good news is that the Knicks haven't even started playing regular season games yet, so they haven't added to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that are confounding the local fans on all sides. One can only hope for a rapid improvement all around, with much better numbers, and by that I mean, better numbers for the hometown fans to cheer about for a change, and not just the bookies and odds-makers, for pity's sake. And speaking of numbers, a normally observant person couldn't help but notice that on the college football scene, the Big 10 conference actually has 14 teams, not ten. Just between you and me and the doorpost, you'd think they'd be able to count better than that, by the time they get to college and everything. Honestly, you can't make this stuff up. Other stuff you can't make up (in fact, now you don't have to, because they already did) and these days it seems impossible to get away from all of the commercials and pop-up ads for the new Nestle Delightfulls, which (believe it or not) are filled Toll House morsels for all of your baking exploits, and whatever other indulgences may apply. (Eating them straight out of the bag has been known to happen by various and sundry individuals around here, who shall remain nameless, but look suspiciously like me, I have to admit.) Of course, everyone who hasn't been living under a rock for the past century is familiar with the iconic Nestle chocolate morsels from their famous Toll House chocolate chip cookies, which have been thrilling cookie monsters the world over for untold generations, and with good reason. These new stuffed treats come in dark chocolate and milk chocolate varieties, with caramel, cherry, mint, and peanut butter fillings to make all of your baked delicacies literally explode with even more gooey goodness than ever before. The idea of baking them into brownies, cookies, pies or - heaven help us - pancakes, makes me woozy with confectionery overload, and since I couldn't bake my way out of a paper bag, I can only imagine what real cooks must be thinking right about now. (Personally, I would probably just pour them in a bowl, toss them in the microwave, and eat them out of hand, because it's a well-known fact that I am such a menace to the culinary arts that I have been banned from more kitchens than Agent Orange.) At our house, we file this kind of extravagance under the category of "This Is Why The Terrorists Hate Us," and I can't say that I blame them all that much, frankly speaking. Heck, we might have been better off with the Klingons after all. Elle