I’m sure most have already seen this… um… interesting example of soy sauce marketing, but for those who haven’t yet: Kikkoman.
(Thanks, Matt, for the link.)
Hey look, I’m famous!
According to Rick of Rick’s Miscellany, this website was mentioned in a newspaper article recently. Allan Hewitson of the Northern Sentinel (the newspaper of Kitimat, BC) had this to say about [Cubicle Dweller]:
Cubicle Dweller is a Steveston book editor who who writes a running blog in which he recently waxed creative about some name changes he suggests for Canada, after reading that french fries had been renamed freedom fries in Washington.
He thinks California rolls should become Canuck rolls, Texas toast should be maple leaf toast and any beer should be renamed liquid Canada. What would that be on the French side of the label?
I don’t mean to complain, but it would have been nice if Allan Hewitson had checked his facts before publishing. For example, I don’t live in Steveston and I’m not a book editor either. I mean, just look at my grammar and spelling. No Stevestonite would spell this poorly.
All the same, I’m happy that the word will be spread about Canuck Rolls and Maple Leaf Toast. As for the French side freedom side of the beer label, I’ll have to do some research on the subject (extensive experimental beer research). At this early stage, I’d guess that it would say “bière”.
Small, Medium, Large
As I’ve mentioned before, our coffee vending machine delivers a disappointing cup of coffee. It’s often acrid and watery, which can only be fixed by disguising it with plenty of cream and sugar. That in itself is annoying if, like me, you prefer to drink your coffee black.
Curiously, the machine has an interesting idea of the relative sizes of the small, medium, and large coffees. On discovering that selecting “large” fills my mug just past the halfway point, I wondered if I could then top up my mug by adding a “small” to it. A fellow cubicle dweller and I performed a little ad hoc experiment to determine the ratios.
With a fresh mug under the spout, I dialled up the French roast… er… freedom roast… and selected a “large”. I repeated that again with the “small” setting. As it turned out, adding the small coffee to the large made my mug overflow slightly. Logically, then, the small coffee is at about half a mug. The medium coffee, we assume, would be halfway between that and the large. The difference between the sizes must be only a few millilitres.
We will have to approach this more scientifically in the future, using a graduated cylinder to accurately measure the amount dispensed with each size. This of course, will have to wait until tomorrow, when I’m down from this extreme coffee buzz and I stop giggling uncontrollably.
Veni. Vidi. Vici.
It’s a rare thing to see candies in my cubicle. I don’t have a sweet tooth. If I snack, I prefer something salty and crunchy. Miss Vicky’s sea salt and malt vinegar chips, if possible. Crunchy little dried fishies will do in a pinch.
Today, I broke my habit and brought a bag of jelly beans. Some people are jelly bean snobs and go for the designer jelly beans with flavours like blueberry and piña colada. I’m a jelly bean traditionalist: cherry red, minty green, lemony yellow, orangy orange, bubble gum pink, licorice black, and the unidentifiable white. What is white? It’s not vanilla, is it?
Here’s the thing, though: as I dig deeper into the bag, it seems as if the bitter licorice ones drift to the top. I like the licorice ones too, but in large quantities, they can anesthetize your tongue. And when that wears off, you realize that your mouth has been shredded raw by the sugar.
Why is it that when I try to reach for an orange or yellow one, the black ones form a defensive barrier, which forces me to eat my way through it to get to the good ones? Finally, I’ll break through, but by that point my tongue is too numb to taste the tangy orange. The struggle was in vain.
I’ll even shake up the bag a little to confuse their ranks, but they soon regroup to repel my advances.
I’m looking at my bag of jelly beans and I think it’s looking back at me and mocking my feeble attacks. But in the end, I’ll be the victor — holding a bag of licorice jelly beans.
Appetizers
On the weekend I visited Granville Island Market. At Duso’s, they had some delicious-looking little appetizers — squid stuffed with crab and shrimp. Aren’t the best foods are made by stuffing one animal with another animal?
I think tonight I’ll have chicken stuffed with beef, pork, squab, and goat.