Meat

Not that kind of meat. Get you mind out of the gutter.

I’m talking about meat that you’d buy in a grocery store in the frozen food department. Shrink wrapped, bloody, injected with CO₂ and priced by the pound. That kind of meat.

What about it? Well, I was reading an email that Yelp sent out regarding foods that aren’t exactly popular in the US. Like coagulated blood balls and cooked duck embryo. That kind of stuff. One of the items mentioned was kangaroo burgers. Which got me thinking…

Kangaroos are cute, right? Sure they are!

So could I eat one? Probably. I’ve eaten venison (deer meat, for those of you that don’t get out much) and it’s pretty good. Kangaroo seems a bit exotic…the word itself brings about the idea of sweet-and-sour sauces, tangy fruit, etc. On the flip side, it’s Australia, and Australian foods are very hearty in nature (not very Asian-y). So I suppose I would definitely eat Kangaroo.

Now if my mom were here, she would be the one to say, “Awwwww…how could you eat such a cute little thing? Moreover, how could you kill such a cute thing?” Well, first off, click on that picture I linked to earlier and cover up the face. You’re left with a ball of smelly, dingy, unkempt fur and nasty flesh. Could I shoot one? I don’t know…I’ve never shot a “real” gun. Could I do it if I knew how (as in “had aimed and shot a gun properly before”)? Yeah, sure. Would I be a little sad when I did it? Maybe the first couple times. Have you ever seen the movie Kangaroo Jack? That kangaroo was an ass. I doubt I’d be sad about it.

Then there comes the whole “you don’t want to know how the sausage is made” deal. Would I be able to convert a.) dead kangaroo into b.) delicious kangaroo sandwich? Sure, that one’s a given. I could probably do it on the first show without any help, either. How, you might ask? Funny story there…

So back in the ninth grade, I had a biology teacher who was an avid hunter. So much so that he made videos of his hunting escapades. Hardcore videos. And he’d show them to us in class. Hardcore-like. I sat next to a girl who was a year older than me, her name was Jill Baun. The last time I heard from her, she was deployed in Iraq (I think). She kind of reminded me of Anna Torv (the actor that plays Agent Dunham in Fringe). Anyhow, we both sat in the front row (alphabetical order, yes?) and suffered through multiple iterations of videos of my bio teacher showing the proper methods for gutting a deer. All the little tips and tricks, you know? How to extract the meat from the various muscle groups, how to remove the anus without contaminating the meat, etc. etc. It was an experience. We must have watched those videos twenty times. Especially towards the end of the year after we’d finished the book and had nothing left to do. Then it was deer-gutting time.

So do I know “how to make the sausage?” I sure do. No, not that sausage you freakin perv. It’s an expres…oh never mind.

How ridiculous…

Has anybody ever actually pondered how ridiculous the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty is? Let’s analyze this in pieces:

• The story is about a man sitting on a wall.
• The man is an egg. Like a chicken egg. He came out of the bottom of a chicken.
• He falls off the wall.
• The egg man’s name is Humpty Dumpty.
• A “King” clearly has some invested interest in Humpty. Otherwise, he couldn’t give two farts about whether some dumbass fell off the wall and just so happened to smash into a jillion pieces.
• The man is an egg.
• The king’s men cannot reassemble Humpty. Nor can the king’s horses.
• The king orders his horses to help put Humpty back together.
• The man is a god damned egg

Because Humpty isn’t reassembled, he is presumably left in pieces. This is nursery-rhyme code for “THEY LEFT HUMPTY FOR DEAD”

Did I mention that the main character is an egg man? I think I did.

So there are some alternate theories. Some say that it refers to King Richard III of England, who was hacked to pieces after he was deserted by his supporters. Which is absolutely wonderful to be making a nursery rhyme about, though it could be worse.

So that’s all I have to say about that.

I never thought I’d see the day

Many of you remember my BFF Carrie from a while ago. Well, I never thought I’d see the day, but she now has a Twitter. And we have a black president. Who would have ever seen this coming? Get it? See it coming? COMING? LOL.

One more thing

Last night was the September Lehigh Valley AITP meeting. It was held at DeSales because the usual meeting place is now unavailable. A company did a product demo on a social media application that they’ve been developing. Granted, it wasn’t anything special (and was woefully inadequate for the market they’re attempting to appease), but it nonetheless provided an interesting opportunity to mingle with some professionals in the area.

The idea behind the app was to create a social media aggregator merged with a social publishing API. It was kind of bland, but (somewhat) interesting.

One gentleman (whose name shall not be written) sat at the table adjacent to mine during the demo. About halfway through the QA session afterward, he raised his hand and proceeded to say something along these lines:

I can imagine that this feed, once you’ve added a bunch of people to it, starts filling up pretty quickly with people posting all the time. You get a couple thousand people posting and it’s going to be going pretty fast. What do you do when you’ve got this scrolling like a roll of toilet paper and posts are shooting past you?

I lost it. I think maybe four or five people might have given me dirty looks because I cracked up in my seat. Scrolling like a roll of toilet paper. That’s the best way to describe something of the sort that I have EVER HEARD IN MY LIFE.

For reference, I want “Matt Basta: 1990-20?? / His widgets were ‘scrolling like a roll of toilet paper’” carved on my headstone. Pretty please?

How cool is this?

Now I hate to turn my blog into a place that I rarely post save to brag about my stuff, but I think this is noteworthy enough to post.

Anyhow, I was checking my server logs, and it seems that FRINGE Laboratory (the Fringe equivalent of The Lost Podcast) has started using my Google Audio Widget to push out their content. THIS IS SO COOL! I love Fringe so much. You should all start watching it.

Speaking of Fringe, I want to note that I think it’s hilarious that when I turned the TV on to watch Episode 2 of this season, it was already on the right station because the last time the TV was on was last week for Episode 1. These are the things that make me enjoy having a Chem major for a roommate.