The (Supposed) Joys of Jell-O

Judging by the style, "Joys of Jell-O" comes from the late sixties-early seventies. The years have not improved things, unfortunately. It’s still more corporate insecurity. Just as the Merita Bread people felt compelled to come up with new uses for bread, the fine folks behind Jell-O were so afraid that the cool people won't let them sit at the cool table during lunch that they're determined to scare up various and sundry recipes that show just how versatile their product is.

Attention, Jell-O magnates: We love your product. Really, we do. Generations of Southern grandmothers raised us on a diet that was 95% red Jell-O with a can of Del Monte Fruit Cocktail in it, so we've loved your product ever since we first spied the jiggly stuff. And since our grandmothers were astute enough to regularly render that concoction, we all know that Jell-O should be embellished with nothing more than fruit cocktail, with maybe some Coo Whip on top if you're feeling particularly sassy. So there's no need to come up with mutant dishes that combine Jell-O with weird foods, creating truly stomach-inverting foods that should never, ever exist outside Alton Brown's nightmare journal. When you come up with stuff like the "Joys of Jell-O" book, you're like the kid who tries so hard to make everybody like him that nobody ends up being able to stand him, except that one girl who's so sweet that she'll treat anybody with respect.

Make your product, rest secure in your product, and don't try so hard. We like you.

As for the book itself. In addition to chilled madness in the photos, the book also has lots of laughable copy. From the “Salads” chapter, we read, “Prepare these recipes; then defy someone to say that you're not ready for anything. “Yeah, you’ll be ready for anything after you’ve sunk cabbage and radishes into Jell-O—a mental institution, marriage counselors’ office, etc.

“You see, you can serve them as desserts, as salads, or as snacks for the troops when they come in and demand something at the drop of a hat.”

If one were to really try serving this stuff, your own troops would frag you into a bloody mist, and not a military tribunal in the world would find them guilty.

“When you serve them as desserts, garnish with prepared whipped topping or whipped cream. As salads, unmold them on crisp greens and top with mayonnaise or salad dressing.”

That’s not a typo. They really suggested putting mayonnaise or salad dressing on Jell-O. Hanging is too good for these people.

“Fruit mixtures, whether served as desserts or salads, spring to even more delicious, vivid life if you top them with mixtures of whipped cream and mayonnaise or sour cream and cream cheese. Aren't you kind of hungry, even now?”

I’m kind of anything but hungry right now. Maybe Jell-O should have marketed this copy as a dieting aid.

But enough of the copy. Let’s get to the good old-fashioned mockery of the pictures. That’s what you paid your admission for, right?

Food as revenge

"Get in there and make me a dessert," he says. "The boss is coming, and I need to impress him," he says. Well, here's your dessert, Buster, and it's got cabbage and celery and green pepper and pimiento. Hope the boss likes some heartburn with his Jell-O.

Because that Thanksgiving cranberry sauce is so artful

Yep, you're supposed to make this stuff in a can. No creative touches here, Mr. Newfangled Ideas about Food Preparation. I don't care what they filled your head with when you were off at college, but around here, food is can-shaped.

A sunburst never looked goopier

Just what I like in a pastry. A layer of algae on top, slowly osmosing itself through the cake's molecular lattice, eventually resulting in a texture best described as "slurry."

Diana Ross, call your lawyer

"Supreme Dessert, so called because everyone agrees it's truly supreme." Or you could just call it flavored boiled cow hooves in a fancy glass.

Is it a dessert or a stripper name?

"Appearing for the first time here at the Arctic Circle Gentlemen's Club, let's make welcome Miss Frosty Melons!"

Maybe you'll get lucky and the mercury in the tuna will kill you quickly

Again, they're trying to merge a main course with a dessert, and that's madness. Nobody ever served "Sirloins in Sherbet" or "Poultry in Pudding."

"Mayonnaise makes it creamy." Which will also make it easier on your esophagus when you spew it.

I'd rather eat Bullwinkle

Chicken mousse. Oh, the inhumanity. You take a truly wonderful food like potato salad and adulterate it by plopping it in the center of this hellish vortex. Remember, when it comes to making a hearty meal, chicken and gelatin go together like sodium and water.

Serve this with the Devil's Tower O' Glop if you really want to make it to the Emergency Room Hall of Fame.

Barbecruel

"Barbecue cubes accent a tossed salad of greens, shrimp, grapefruit." And warm Pekingese vomit accents a Berber rug, but that doesn't mean it's a good thing.

The recipe calles for lemon, orange or orange-pineapple gelatin, tomato sauce, vinegar, and suggest using onion juice, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco sauce, or prepared horse-radish. I'm serious as a heart attack that causes a train wreck that burns down an orphanage in the middle of an earthquake. Somebody's fingers really typed that.

You were never really our favorite child

The first sign that Mother just doesn't care any more is when she's too lazy to get a decorated cake for your birthday, and just slaps ice cream (it's probably ice milk) in a Jell-O ring.

Evidently, the copy for this dish was cut off. I'm pretty sure that the sentence "A shimmering, colorful ring of gelatin filled with ice cream can replace the traditional cake" originally ended with the phrase "if you really hate your children and want them to be taunted with the epithet 'Jell-O Cake, Jell-O Cake, we threw your presents in the lake" until they finally snap and end up in a bell tower."

Avocadon'ts

Talk about giving your kids emotional whiplash.

Mother: "Hey, kids, we're having pie!"

Kids: "Yay for Mom! Never before has this earth held such a towering accumulation of Mom-ish goodness! Truly we are most blessed among children for experiencing the nirvana that of your parenting skills. What kind of pie is it, pray tell?"

Mom: "It's avocado pie, with a layer of slime added!"

Kids: "Um, you know, just never mind. We'll just sit here and practice for the day we can become surly teenagers and tell our therapist about the time you ruined our childhood with one little dish. I'm off to start on my alcoholism."

Left the "n" off of "never"

The copy says that this dish is "ever-popular." With whom, I ask? Gastroenterologists looking to drum up some dysentery business? Food socialogists studying the decline of American taste buds?

Looks like a cross between tofu, cream cheese, and linoleum bits from 1960.

The cubic zirconia of desserts

Behold, the wellspring from whence comest 1970s design. Sherwood Schwartz had this dish at the ABC commisary one day, then promptly went to his office and designed all the "Brady Bunch" furniture.

The title of this mung is "Crown Jewel Dessert," which is yet another example of the well-known saying I just made up: The more pretentious a food's title, the more likely it is to be a handy replacement for Ipecac.

Not up on our slang, are we?

"Ring around the Fruit." Snort. Giggle. Titter.

Ring around the what?

Beavis and Butt-head's brains just fissioned.

What did peaches ever do to you?

A little history for my younger readers: During the seventies, cottage cheese was required by international law to be the cornerstone of any diet efforts. Dieters believed that extra-fatty yak tripe in a molasses glaze could be transmogrified into a positively bulimic health food by the simple addition of a scoop of cottage cheese. (Historians now refer to this period as The Great Delirium.) This dish illustrates that belief. One shudders at the evil mind that decided to combine the heavenly perfection of peaches with the Stygian specter of cottage cheese, aka, "the stuff that makes you throw out an out-of-date jug of milk."

Mr. Sandman, please, for the love of humanity, don't bring me this dream

"Anyway, like I was sayin', shrimp is the fruit of the sea. You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, saute it. Dey's uh, shrimp-kabobs, shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo. Pan fried, deep fried, stir-fried. There's pineapple shrimp, lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, shrimp soup, shrimp stew, shrimp salad, shrimp and potatoes, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich. That- that's about it. You just can't put it in Jell-O."

I still maintain that carrot cake was created on a dare. Carrots in Jell-O was probably created at gunpoint.

And that tasty Vegetable Trio includes vinegar, carrots, cabbage, chives, and spinach.

Surprise, you're gonna hurl

If "Sea Dream" just has shrimp sitting on Jell-O, "Shrimp Surprise," which has the shrimp cunningly inserted in cubes of Jell-O that were already corrupted by mayonnaise, is a full-fledged Sea Night Terror worthy of a Rod Serling voiceover.

It's not fish, it's foul

Behold, the congealed wretchedness that is the Apple Tuna Mold. This is the culinary analog to the actor-singer. Whenever you see someone describe himself as an actor-singer, you know that he neither sings nor acts very well. This creation isn't apple-y enough to be tasty, not tuna-y enough to be hearty. Plus, it's got "Mold" right there in the title. Unless you're working at a penicillin factory or an industrial abatement company, "mold" shouldn't have positive connotations.

More mediocrity upcoming

I had a rather busy weekend, what with racin' and concert reviewin'. (I'm still so busy I don't have time to put g's on the end of my gerunds.) But I'll have some new supposedly funny stuff up in a little bit. I'll slap Jell-O around for amusement. Here's a tease: This installment will include the phrase "Ring Around the Fruit."

Bread's midlife crisis

(I’m still pretty busy this week, but I have a little downtime, and I think posting these will actually help relax me. Famous last words, I know, but I’ve never been one to let experience and good judgement get in the way of rash decisions. As far as the move to Typepad, it’s still under consideration.)

This section of strange, nauseating or otherwise notable pictures comes from a 1948 book published by the Merita Bread Company. It promotes creative uses of bread, something that seems as useless and strained as promoting creative uses of screwdrivers. “Besides twisting and untwisting screws, today’s screwdriver is equally at home serving as a building material! Just superglue a few thousand together, spackle up the gaps between them, and you’ve got ready-made construction panels you can use to expand that rumpus room!”

In general, screwdrivers should be used as screwdrivers, and bread should be what holds up sandwich contents. The Merita company should have stopped trying so hard to drum up new bread applications and just rested secure in the knowledge that bread is the essential staff of life, not the outdated watchfob of life.

The book reminds me of a bit from the late, great Mitch Hedberg, which I’ve somewhat quoted here.

I had a box of Ritz crackers and on the back of the box of Ritz crackers it had all these suggestions as to what to put on top of the Ritz. It said, "Try it with turkey and cheese." "Try it with peanut butter." Oh, c'mon man, they're crackers. That's why I got 'em — I like crackers. You have to have confidence in your product. ‘Put a Ritz on top of a Ritz.’ I didn't buy 'em 'cuz they're little edible plates.”

Basically, convenience, not taste, is what has made sandwiches more universal than the superfluous overuse of the word “basically.” The bread is a little organizing envelope for your food, and that's all it is, and that's all it needs to be to make us buy it by the ton. But somebody at the Merita company got tasked with drumming up alternative uses for bread so that Merita could Microsoft up the bread market, and this book was created. Fifty-eight years later, I get to snark it up at that poor person’s heartfelt efforts.

Enjoy.

Merita gets molecular on some bread dough

Somebody worked really hard on coming up with these three bullet points, and the first casualty of that hard work was common sense.

1. Merita’s technology is supposed to divide each “food cell” into tiny particles. I’m no physicist, but I’m fairly sure that there’s no such thing as food cells, and if there were, dividing them into tiny particles would require the use of tools more advanced than even the Merita labs.

And not to sound like the emperor of Grammar Nazi-land, but I think the phrase they were looking for was “velvety texture,” not “velvet texture.” Unless they really were making bread with fuzzy little cilia on it.

2. This has “gotta make the deadline” written all over it. You can practically see the copywriter slumping over his Smith-Corona typewriter as he sleepwalks through this point’s creation. “Bread is good…it’s smooth or something…it’s, like, something you're supposed to eat…hey, look! I can spell things with a hyphen between each letter! Cool!”

3. In the seventies, we had a harvest-mellow kitchen.

The bread of tomorrow, courtesy of Merita

This also reminds me of MST3K, especially when they were riffing on those industrial shorts. The short would show trucks pulling into a chicken farm, and one of the bots would say, in a big, old-fashioned movie narrator voice, “The farmer of today, working to create the chicken of tomorrow!”

I can't read the copy without reverting into that narrator voice. “Tender-Blending, developed in the Merita laboratory!”

Charlotte's Web. Of Doom!

True mystery meat. It’s not a goose or turkey or chicken, it’s just “fowl.” Stuffed fowl, with piercings.

They call that creation in the bottom right “Apple Charlotte.” I call it “Stonehenge.”

The sacred sandwich scrolls of Antioch

And lo, Jedediah didst taketh the sandwich scrolls, and didst unroll them in the midst of the multitude. And Jedediah didst spake unto the multitude, saying unto them, “Whosoever maketh sandwich scrolls shalt be anathema, for they art too cutest for their own good.” And the people didst hear the word of Jedediah, and they didst rejoice, for that hadst just about had a bellyfull of this cute lunch crap.

Bottom picture: Look! It’s neapolitan sandwiches!

Poodles and clowns and drek, oh my!

Forget the corned beef hash, which actually looks pretty appetizing. Just wrap your retro sensibilities around that poodle and clown on the right side. I hope and pray that the little dots that represent the poodle’s whiskers are actually where the salt or pepper came out. The clown doesn’t appear to have any real useful purpose other than serving as nightmare fuel. In other words, it’s just like a real-life clown.

And what’s that in the bottom right? Why, it’s yet another case of banana abuse, this time in the form of bacon-banana sandwiches. (The book doesn’t state if Bruce Dunbar was related to Elvis.)

A little food math: Bacon = goodness. Bananas = goodness. Bacon + bananas = aggregated vomit bait.

When it absolutely, positively, has to be impossible to make

You won't find a busier, more retina-scorching display this side of a paisley convention. And I’m pretty sure that tongue is a nasty enough food that it comes pre-deviled.

From the kitchen of Martha Stewart's grandmother

Look, it’s widdle sandwiches cut in the shape of spades and hearts and such! Isn't that just the cutest thing? Makes you want to pick ’em up and put ’em in your pocket. Either that or have the creator committed to the State Home for the Terminally Twee.

Tonight on Fox: When snotty people brunch!

I don’t doubt that, in certain circles, people (or the people’s servants) actually go to enough trouble that these pictures accurately represent an afternoon tableload. I also don’t doubt that if you met these people, resisting the urge to slap them on general principles would be enough to cause an aneurysm.

More beans, Mr. Taggart?

This is so completely a joke. A bean sandwich? You're yanking my chain pretty violently there. Why not go the whole way and have an iced tea or corn syrup sandwich and really ratchet up the messiness quotient?

People who eat beans straight out of the can aren't people who make radish flowers.

That garden sandwich isn’t so much a sandwich as it is decoration. Just because you put bread around a food’s perimeter doesn’t mean you're making a sandwich.

It ain't barbecue, and it shouldn't be a sandwich

Another exercise in overwrought sandwichmaking. The barbecue pork chop recipe, which contains a pork chop that is no more barbecued than it is radioactive, requires a total of 40 minutes of preparation. And there's another requirement of strength-sapping liquid, although not as generously as the barbecue sauce one. The turkey a la king sandwich takes less time, but requires a whole pantryfull of ingredients. Then you have to get out the bevel gauge and chalkline to make sure everything the bread slices line up and are equally positioned in order to slurp up that liquid centerpiece.

Hey, there's a human on this jaw!

Bruce Dunbar, the supposed brains behind this book, is dang glad to meet you.

Looking at that carefully affected smile and the overall smoove look of old Bruce, I’m reminded of the time that “Mystery Science Theater 3000” made fun of the continent-jawed stud bagel who starred “12 to the Moon.” They called him:

Captain Cliff Beefpile

Sledge Riprock

Tank Concrete

Bronc Drywall

Stump Hugelarge

Chunk Pylon

Chunk Manmusk.

Captain Ron Codpiece

Sledge Fisthammer.

Clint Stompheader.

Captain Chuck Hardslab

Chunk Ironchest

How to ruin your sandwich in one easy step!

“Main dish” sandwiches are a contradiction in terms. If something’s a dish, it’s not a sandwich, and vice versa, e pluribus unum, ipso facto. Not only that, but look at the ridiculous instructions. For the roast beef sandwich, you’re supposed to pour a generous amount of gravy over it. Liquid, as we all know, does wonders for the structural integrity of a sandwich. You’d be better off just dumping the roast beef and gravy on a plate and using the bread to sop it with.

The sliced chicken instructions aren't much less ludicrous. If you're going to all that trouble of preparing and gussying up a sandwich, you might as well just cook something. The difference in the number of steps necessary for this concoction and a seven-course dinner can't be more than three or four.

Just ignore this

If it weren't for bad luck,

I'd have no luck at all.

As I mentioned below, I'm trying out Typepad as a blog host instead of Blogger, since Blogger is less reliable than an Albanian train schedule. So I go to experiment a little with my Typepad, and I get a "Service Temporarily Unavailable" page on Typepad.

I'm beginning to wonder if the internet is just a figment of my imagination, and nobody ever really stays on these gossamer threads of ether.

In other words, maybe I'm switching to Typepad, maybe I'm not. It's about 60/40, depending on the ratio.

But wherever I go, I won't be posting much in the next few days. I've got concerts to review, races to cover, and the various and sundry things life has a way of throwing at you. So blogging will be light until at least Monday. (Not that anybody sets their schedule by when I blog or anything. I just wanted to save you some clicking time.)

This blog is no more! It has ceased to be! This is an ex-blog

Probably. It's probably an ex-blog.

I started this because I wanted a cyberhobby. Nothing more, nothing less. Just something to occupy my time every now and then, a place to indulge my weirdness. But I've pretty much had a belly-full of Blogger. Once again, I can't post a picture, which, for a picture-intensive person like me, ain't a good thing. When your hobby is causing more blood pressure spikes than your job, something's amiss with your hobby. So I'm trying out Typepad, which is supposedly much more robust. The bad thing with Typepad is that it costs a little (not much; even I can afford $5 a month for two gigs of bandwidth), whereas Blogger is free. But I have a free one-month trial, so I'm gonna see what happens.

I've also changed the name. Discontented Cookies was too long, and I figure most folks don't know the derivation of the name (from Morris's soliloquoy in "Sling Blade") and don't care. And I don't blame them. It's just clunky and dumb.

Jimdunn.typepad.com, on the other hand, is a little too forgettable, so I went for Exile Couch. The exile couch was the couch that Ahmet, Jugdish, Sidney and Clayton, the four non-worthy pledges besides "Lonny" and "Kent," were sitting on in "Animal House," in case you're wondering. Plus, "couch" has a homey feel. I hope.

Here's a link to the new site. There are only a few posts (this is a direct link to the one new post), and it's quite possible I'll smush around the layout, etc., but you can check it out a rough
draft. I'll leave everything up here, and I'll probably try to move everything over to Typepad eventually, just so there's a backup.

Welcome to the couch.

Summer Short Shorts

I loves me some Homestar Runner.

Cool Whip Cookbook, aka a literary oxymoron

When you're going with a psychedelic theme, commit to that theme! Sell out, man, because if they can't get their heads around your scene, you don’t want them around your kitchen. So lose all that white space, between the groovy art and the title, okay? Peace, brother.

As the great cooking expert James Beard once said (as far as you know), "If you're spreading something from a plastic tub, you ain't cooking. " Which renders this 1969 volume of "recipes" from the Cool Whip people not so much a cookbook as a stand-up ad. (You really can stand up the book with the built-in easel. Because you need both hands when you're spreading processed diary-ish goop onto the end-product of a Betty Crocker white cake mix.)

I saw this while scrounging through my local antique mall this weekend. An antique mall, in case you're not familiar with them, is a big, sprawling place that makes discarded items more expensive. But being the sucker that I am, I ponied up the $5 for this thing that was no doubt given away back in the late sixties and early seventies. It's a prime example of the tragic result of Middle America trying to turn itself into Haight-Ashbury. Scary, in other words.

Here's the cover, and you can scroll down for the most egregious examples from the book. Enjoy.

Vicious color cycle

Again, nothing especially nauseous about this picture. It’s just a sample of the pseudo-cool look everything sported back then. For some reason, this reminds me of the colored writing paper my cousins used to buy. Yep, I said colored writing paper. What’s more, I was jealous of the colored writing paper. I’m not proud of it, but I’ve come to embrace my loserliness.

And look at that next-to-last topping. How disgusting can you g--wait. It says "chocolate shot." Never mind.

Strawberry feels forever

Notice the cursive text: “The Queen of Hearts would have loved these tarts.” Think some copywriter liked Grace Slick?

Put down the Jefferson Airplane album and back away from the Rabbit Hole.

Psychedelic Pshortcakes

Same as the Richelieu post. Pretty good-looking food, but the walls are decorated with Janis Joplin’s stomach contents.

Who can turn the world off with a smile?

The dessert actually looks pretty good, but then the photographer had to go booger it up with that angular backdrop. Mary Tyler Moore served this in her sunken living room.

It's food, it's art, it's fart!

I’m fairly sure my sister had a poster of this on her wall in 1972. It was right next to the one with the kitten on a limb that said “Hang on, baby, Friday’s coming.”

How mod I am

Some photographer went with the Zen look for this. “Are the jelly bean flowers jelly beans, or flowers, or both? Is it all just a similacrum or what, Brotherman?”

The kicky kupkake lady is skaring me

My second-favorite image. Go on, try and tell me that this wasn’t the result of a screamingly bad LSD trip. Just try.

Basic rule of thumb: When your bellbottoms are almost as wide as your freakishly large head, it’s time to scale back on the clothing.

For the culinarily challenged

See how doped up people were back then? Not only were they actually trying to decipher “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” they were so baked that they needed help with basic kitchen utensil usage. That first section should be read in the same voice you’d use to teach a kindergartener how to fingerpaint, emphasizing every syllable. "Moonbeam, to spread things on food, you use a spat-u-la. Isn’t that wonderful?”

In the third panel, the phrase “emergency pastry tube” makes me smile.

In the spirit of Dave Barry, it would also be a good name for a rock band. “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage Emergency Pastry Tube!!!!!!!”

Happy, happy raise, we hope you have a happy raise!

Besides the petrified cheese of the graphics, note that cake in the bottom right corner. It says “Happy Raise.” Which is stupider than the get well song from “Seinfeld.” “Milton, don’t you want a piece of Bill’s Happy Raise cake? Or are you still bloated from the ‘Joyous Accurate Memo Copying’ frolic?”

“What If Peter Max Opened a Baskin-Robbins?”

Note to anybody who really does love the seventies: We thought this cup design was cool. Everything we bought—even otherwise wholesome products purchased in Alabama or Iowa—came slathered in graphics like this. Still want to go back?

Meditate with Cool Whip

Come with me, children, and repeat the Cool Whip mantra—Flower shower, flower shower, flower shower…

It’s spicy because it’s steeped in bile!

Anybody, male or female, who ever went to the trouble of cooking this fickle heart is no doubt also a bunny-boiler.

Christmas decorating as punishment

There’s nothing intrinsically funny about this, other than the fact that no one, not even Martha Stewart’s overachieving perfectionist sister, ever made a dessert this festooned with filligree. This isn’t dessert, it’s the culinary school equivalent of a night in the box.

Ride the apple parfait wave

The 1840s meets the 1960s. Archaic language meets pop art. “For unexpected drop-ins”? Don’t you mean “people making the scene at your pad”? “Don’t dismay”? Don’t you mean “Keep on smoothly trucking”?

It’s obvious that Cool-Whip saw this as a way for the ladies of the Ridgecrest Manor Bridge Club to experience vicarious cool. It’s doubtful any flower children dug their vibe.

Blame Gmail

I picked up some more cheesy cookbooks and old magazines, and even got quite a few of them scanned this weekend. But I emailed them to my Gmail account (you know, so they'd be available anywhere, any time), and Gmail is down now. So it's not Blogger's fault, it's corporate sister Gmail that's holding me back.

Once Gmail decides to allow me back in, I'll post some purdy pitchers, with accompanying snark. I promise. Might even be funny.

Hurry, hurry, hurry and see the juggling otter!

Absolutely the best juggling otter video you'll see today.

The Imaginary World

No, not the one inside my head. Besides, I prefer to call that world "Jimtopia," wherein I'm emperor-for-life, wear a Mayor McCheese-like outfit accented with a powder blue tuxedo shirt, and insist everyone call me The Big Cheesehuna.

No, this one has to do with old food ads, old foodstuffs, and other assorted useless junk like this picture of June Cleaver shopping for the family victuals. Which upon further review does have a lot to do with the goings-on inside my head. So disregard that first paragraph and click here.

SOP for Disney's Haunted Mansion

Ever wanted an inside peek at the inner workings of Disney's Haunted Mansion, circa 1975? Sure, we all have. And now you can indulge your Disney voyeur instincts to your nosy little heart's content, courtesy of this blog post.

Scientology: It's not just for suckers--wait, scratch that, it really is just for suckers

I'm sure plenty of you have already read this Rolling Stone article about Scientology, but just in case, here's a look at the rabid mongooses running loose inside the heads of Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Beck, among other Hollywood types. And doesn't "Scientology" mean "the science of science"?

...walks into a bar

And some other assorted humor. If you're not too particular about how you define "humor."

A dyslexic man walks into a rab.

Two hydrogen atoms walk into a bar. One says, "I've lost my electron." The other says, "Are you sure?" The first replies, "Yes, I'm positive..."

You knit what?

Seriously, I'm asking. Because this is making me want to lobby Congress for knitting needle control.

Vintage coolness

I can't really generate any snark about this picture. With the stylized steam coming off the biscuits, the dopey look on the husband's face, and the ever so happy expression on the missus' face, it's just so retro-cool that I posted it so you could admire it.

So easy, you only need 19 utensils

Seriously. Only 19 separate utensils are necessary to avail yourself of the world of ease that only Spry can deliver.

In the second column, there's my favorite new foodstuff name: tartrate. Tartrate. Tartrate. You can't say it just once.