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Vile Foods

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It would seem that anyone who has known me for more than thirty seconds knows my least favorite food: canned peas.  Of course my hatred of this concoction goes far beyond I-don’t-care-for-it and into I’d-rather-eat-the-can-they-came-in territory.

Same look, taste, and smell as rabbit poo

Last year my mom gave me some excess protein powders that she had and one of them tasted like dirt and I still had a (slightly) easier time choking it down than canned peas (it goes without saying what one of the ingredients was).

This is low hanging fruit though because lots of people hate canned peas, maybe not quite as much as myself, but still.  Why do you think that ‘veg-all’ is a fan favorite for pantry cleaning canned food drives?  Because it has been contaminated with nasty little green orbs and now just tastes like a multi-colored can of peas.  Beyond that I’m not a picky eater (unfortunately) but some acquaintances do wonder if even have any other food hang-ups.  A few come to mind:

  • Canned lima beans come in second to canned peas, but they still sport much of that nasty taste because their delicate sugars have been nuked into some horrible amino acid stew by the heat of the canning process.
  • Dinner dishes that have fruit in them (especially raisins which always cook up like something that comes out of my cat).  I can get past pineapple somewhat for short periods of time, kind of like if your buddy is listening country music in the car for a fifteen minute drive.  But cherries on chicken?  Raspberry gravy?  Disgusting.
  • On a related note, I’ll include Indian curry dishes that have coconut milk in them (which would be most of them); nasty.  Tastes like someone was making you a piña colada and accidentally dropped a day-old, over-spiced chicken into the blender.
  • For fast food the McRib is pretty nasty, but I can choke one down before remembering how bad they are.  The McDonald’s fish sandwiches though?  That’s like some hate crime against us Catholics.
  • Any piece of chicken that has even the faintest feather still sticking out from the skin.  I can’t relate the number of times I’ve almost lost my cookies at a bar when I’ve been sober enough to notice this on chicken wings.  (I don’t know if that counts since it’s not even a taste/texture thing as my solution is to just not look).
  • Banana ‘flavored’ stuff, such as banana fry pies, taffy, etc.  Inevitably tastes like banana juice that’s been aged in a can of WD-40.
  • Those assorted ‘chocolates’ with any filling that isn’t brown colored or coconut.  You know the ones I’m talking about: those nasty, cheap chocolates full of some florescent pink or yellow colored goop.  Chocolate-fruit combos generally aren’t a big thing for me, but that stuff, well, everyone hates that stuff I guess.
  • This one might surprise: tea.  Yes I drink one glass every day for (real) health reasons, but I think it’s nasty.  It’s kind of like if you were given to chew tobacco but you decided to make juice out of your slobber.  I’ve conditioned myself to drink it, but if I didn’t have to I wouldn’t, ever again.
Then there are those things that many people hate that I don’t have an issue with:
  • Anything with too much vinegar in it.  Pickles, sauces, etc.  Hot sauce is a beverage, not a condiment.  (However, the dinner/fruit rule must be obeyed.  I once had a jar of Indian picked limes which was it’s own special sort of horror; I’d still have them over canned peas though).
  • Peanut butter and anything, or even better yet, just peanut butter.  (Note though that the fruit/dinner rule again comes into play here.  If someone goes all peanut happy on some Thai dish then it starts to taste like some peanut butter and shrimp sandwich).
  • Cottage cheese.  Like peanut butter, I can eat a tub of this fatty product fairly easily if I’m not careful.
  • Buttermilk.  A coworker was amazed that I drink the stuff as she always pitches it after she uses what she needs for a recipe.
  • Unflavored soy milk, which is a challenge to find at times.
  • Fruitcake, which I avoid like the plague because each tablespoon has enough calories to keep a man alive for a week and I can eat a whole one in one sitting just like that woman eating a block of cheese.
  • Past due goods.  What a crock, tasting is believing.
Not in either list are alcoholic products, such as Jägermeister.  If you think they taste bad, that means that you haven’t drank the proper quantity yet (but there are exceptions to even this rule).

Invaders from Space!

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One of the best things ever posted on the Internet is this bit posted by one Nick Bostrom.  In it he posits that we may be alone in the whole universe based upon what he calls ‘The Great Filter’, which is basically a series of high hurdles that molecules on some rock in space most overcome in order to advance to the point of being able to launch a rocket into space:

You start with billions and billions of potential germination points for life, and you end up with a sum total of zero extraterrestrial civilizations that we can observe. The Great Filter must therefore be sufficiently powerful–which is to say, passing the critical points must be sufficiently improbable–that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals. At least, none that we can detect in our neck of the woods.

In the book Sphere, Michael Crichton’s character Harry (played by Samuel L. Jackson in the dreadful movie adaptation) also voices extreme skepticism, pointing out that the Drake equation used by alien cheerleaders could be rendered moot if any of their assumptions weren’t greater than zero:

“What it means,” Harry Adams said, “is that the probability, p, that intelligent life will evolve in any star system is a function of the probability that the star will have planets, the number of habitable planets, the probability that simple life will evolve on a habitable planet, the probability that intelligent life will evolve from simple life, and the probability that intelligent life will attempt interstellar communication within five billion years. That’s all the equation says.”
…
“But the point is that we have no facts,” Harry said. “We must guess at every single one of these probabilities. And it’s quite easy to guess one way, as Ted does, and conclude there are probably thousands of intelligent civilizations. It’s equally easy to guess, as I do, that there is probably only one civilization. Ours.”

I bring this up as Glenn Reynolds has an affinity for posting alien invasion/contact stuff, the latest linking to an article by Gregg Easterbrook that argues that any aliens would probably tend to be aggressive just due to natural selection:

James Trefil, of George Mason University, has cautioned that if evolution functions approximately the same way on other worlds that it has functioned here — conferring survival upon the fittest — advanced extraterrestrials might still be aggressive, territorial, and quick to reach for the sword. In that case, counting on poor alien marksmanship might not be prudent.

This is cherry picking on his part though.  At first I had the article pegged as a rehash of the Nick Bostrom article that I cited earlier, but it turns out to be the other way around as the  Easterbrook piece was written 20 years (1988) before the Bostrom piece (2008), and only a year after Sphere wherein Crichton’s character derides the same Drake equation that is poked at in the Easterbrook article.  All come to the same conclusion: interstellar life is exceedingly rare, perhaps to the point that it only exists here.

Maybe it’s not that bad though.  What’s rarely brought up in these articles is the matter of life as it is on Earth.  For how long was the Earth ruled over by creatures that couldn’t even rub two sticks together?  It can also be argued that were it not for quirks of geography and culture (and race?) that formed Western European thought, that mankind would still be living under some sort of backwards Northeast Asian / Ottoman Empire style feudalism, possibly in perpetuity.  Tribes in places like Papau New Guinea, where people can practically sit under a tree and have it feed them, can scarcely be bothered to build a boat to go to a nearby island, let alone build a rocket the moon.

And those are the easy barriers to overcome.  Researchers have said that one reason that New World tribes were held back in being able to advance was their lack of a draft animal along the lines of an ox or horse.  What if a planet never had those?  Maybe didn’t have fossil fuels?  Or perhaps didn’t have any minerals of any worth close to the surface?  The more barriers thrown up, the more zeros that come after the decimal point for cheerleaders of advanced alien civilizations.

Life is indeed rare, but maybe not to the extent that skeptics would have.  But what of intelligent life?
That’s certainly nearly non-existent.

Beer Self Esteem

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[2020 addendum: I later found a tip to soak the bottles in water mixed with Oxiclean.  When doing this the labels of all but the most stubborn bottles just fall off.]

A friend linked to these dissolvable labels and it got me thinking about some beer labels that I had to remove.  For my latest four gallon batch of home brewed beer, I needed to clean up the many used beer bottles that I had sitting around.  Being occasionally extra anal, I also wanted the labels off the beer so that there would be no doubt that the product therein was my own.  It was interesting though how the different breweries affixed their labels and there seemed to be, in my mind, a correlation between the difficulty of the removal of the label, and the brewery’s self esteem (or lack thereof).  First I soaked all the bottles in a tub of water and then went to remove the labels.  From highest self esteem to least:

  1. Russian beer: the fine Russian breweries obviously know that their stuff sells itself as the labels fell off the bottle when I removed them from the water.  These are mild flavored beers with roughly the same alcohol content as wine.
  2. Oregon micro-brews: these beers had great taste and a desire to recycle as their labels scraped off with minimum effort.
  3. Sam Adams: A bit of work with the plastic scraper was need to get the labels off of these bottles of somewhat drinkable beer.
  4. Dos Equis: Starting a trend in Mexican beer that desires never to be forgotten, the Dos Equis labels were like the Sam Adams labels with twice the glue.
  5. Modelo: kindly donated to my cause by my brother-in-law, these beers must have been intolerably awful as they had gold foil glued to the neck and a front and back label adhered with some sort of epoxy resin.  I gave up on the plastic scraper and used a razor blade.
  6. Corona:  The label cannot be removed as it is painted on.  This is done so that someone will not mistakenly think that they were double charged for their Bud Light.