Fancy a Piece of Sea Pork?

Florida sea pork

Image by Andrea Westmoreland

Continuing on, however tenuously, with our "pork" theme from yesterday's church sign featuring the apparently quite delectable pastor Ressler of Saint Louis, I present you with "Sea Pork," the plague of South Carolina beaches. In fact, they invade beaches all up and down the eastern seaboard and into the Gulf, surprising hapless swimming children and wandering beachcombers by their self-defense technique of imitating a large pile of mucus or discarded squid intestines.

Tempting as that may sound, you probably should curb your desire to throw some fresh sea pork on the grill, although various fish, skates, and sharks favor them. Supposedly they got their name because people thought they looked like a piece of fatback, perhaps washed up from some sunken sea kitchen. I certainly never would have thought of that, but they say that the sea can play tricks on a man's mind...

The lovely blue sea squirt

Image by Nick Hobgood

Deliciously (?) enough, the little amorphous masses are also known as 'Sea Liver.'

In reality they aren't pig livers or hearty gobs of snot sneezed into the ocean by some salty sailor who's a bit under the weather. Instead they are members of the happy-go-lucky tunicate sub-phylum, which includes much prettier, but still not delicious, looking creatures, such as the Blue Sea Squirts. Many tunicates live together in colonies, and when sea pork floats onto your foot it's usually a dead colony that floated to the surface as corpses tend to do and was washed ashore by a storm.

Another reason not to toss it in your frying pan to have with your morning eggs that.

A New Taste Treat!

I just discovered that steak with pineapple on it is delicious!

Edison: History's greatest humanitarian!

It's little known today but famous inventor Thomas Edison was actually the greatest humanitarian who ever lived. Sure, we're all used to hearing of Edison the jerk, Edison the man who battled Westinghouse up one side and down the other to block much more efficient Alternating Current, Edison who crushed the dreams and buried the vision of Nikola Tesla, Edison the elephant electrocuter, Edison the... well, you get the picture.

But when you weigh all that against his magnificent invention of 1878, it's no contest. Edison ranks right up there with Mother Teresa and the entire Doctors Without Boarders organization. Because Thomas Edison, with a single stroke, eliminated hunger from the Earth.

It happened like this.

One day, Edison was riding through the streets of New York in his gold-plated carriage with J P Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and several Rothschilds discussing how there were simply too many ragged street urchins clinging to their vehicle begging for money. The Great Inventor took the opportunity to demonstrate one of his latest inventions, running 50,000 volts through the skin of the carriage, thereby efficiently dislodging the grubby, starving children. As they watched smoldering little beggers dropping like over-ripe fruit into the street, Edison commented triumphantly, "I call that my 'Poverty Eliminator.'"

The Plutocrats chuckled and drove on.

Later, as they sat down to a posh but impromptu dinner at Edison's home, one of his butlers sheepishly informed him that there weren't enough Delmonico steaks to go around.

"What?! Not enough steak?? I'll soon fix that!"

When Edison returned from his basement lab 2 hours later the wondering tycoons stared in amazement at his "Food Creator," a portable, easy-to-use device capable of transmuting any type of matter into any food imaginable.

The wealthy magnates sat down to the best steaks they'd ever eaten and the Daily Graphic spread the happy news throughout the land on that joyous first day of April:

Huzzah! A new age dawns!

For more information about this wonder, click on the headline!

Meanwhile, the French invent something wonderful!

French science hard at work!

Photo by la Nouvelle République

The french are geniuses! While we slave away on space ships and robot cars, they've created the marvel of the modern age: The steak and sausage machine!  Hopefully, there will soon be one on every street corner as part of our long-promised Jetsons-like future.

But in case you're wondering, France does have its share of epic outer space adventures that have never been equaled.

Don't let a mess happen in your lap!

Ever been just about to bite into a juicy, delectable Whopper or one of those Carl's Jr. 1/2 lb $6 Thickburgers, especially the messy ones ones with bacon and guacamole, when all of a sudden most of the good stuff slides out from between the buns and fills your lap with a steaming heap of beef, cheese, and catsup??

Spare yourself from this heartrending despair in the future by learning forthwith the proper technique:

Helpful diagram by the Art of Manliness, although women need this skill just as much!

Don't Mess With Floridians

Florida guard dog

Photo courtesy of Ianaré Sévi

Where I live, in the not-takin'-nuthin'-offa'-nobody (that's our official motto, I think) state of Texas, we think we're pretty tough. It's not just the people, either; the whole place is hostile to its inhabitants. The wildlife is plain angry, bugs are huge, especially the stinging ones, and the weather tries to kill us all the time.

To stand a chance the citizens have developed a larger-than-life hostility of their own. Nobody but nobody transgresses on a Texan's property, and if they do they're quite likely to meet a herd of huge of dogs who are as angry as the rest of the animals.

But as it turns out, we're small potatoes compared to Florida. They guard their homes with alligators. Hungry ones.

Michigan Under Seige! Is No Meat Safe??

"Now where's that freezerrrrrrrr..."

Deep in the fog-shroudded Ypsilanti night a dark figure slithered through the quiet neighborhood. Spying an open window he or she slid inside, ready to silently relieve the inhabitants of their most valuable possessions...

Which turned out to be "frozen meats and a chain saw."

Never captured nor even sighted, the dreaded "Frozen Meat & Chain Saw Monster" still stalks the nights of eastern central Michigan -- and the nightmares of her people. Who knows what frozen meats he will desire next? What brand chain saw will he purloin?

It is conjectured that the fiend may have watched this very video before embarking on his crime wave: