Dear reader, life is too short for crap books.

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Wholly Unrelated to Literature

We're saving up all the good stuff for the Blogathon this weekend, so I'm stretching a bit for topics here...okay, I'm stretching a lot...but what the heck. When thanks are in order, thanks are in order.

1. Thank you, little boll weevil, for decimating the cotton crop in Alabama so often. In gratitude, we gave you this statue.

2. Thank you, George Washington Carver, for suggesting peanuts as a spiffy, useful, and tasty alternative to cotton. You were apparently invited to speak at the dedication of the statue in 1919, but were delayed because rain had washed out the tracks. I'm guessing you didn't miss much. It is, after all, a statue of a lady holding a giant bug.

3. Thank you, Mary, for bringing home raw peanuts from the farmer's market yesterday and helping me boil them in a salty, salty brine for five hours.

Nothing makes a final editorial pass at a manuscript before sending it back for its second review more pleasant and less soul-killing than a big ol' pile of boiled peanuts, is all I'm sayin. I bet if the editors and translators of The Protestant Ethic had procured a bag of boiled peanuts, they wouldn't have flubbed the "shell as hard as steel" bit and substituted "iron cage" like they did.

See how I did that? Brought it back to books.

Man, I'm good.

3 comments:

Gwen said...

I discovered boiled peanuts when Jess Gilbert and I drove from Baton Rouge to Tuskegee once. Oh, man, them's good eatin'.

notarysojack said...

Now how are you two fortifying yourselves for the blogathon? Surely you don't plan on a strict diet of boiled peanuts. No matter how tasty, etc.

mary_m said...

I'm planning to go easy on the coffee, and heavy on the fresh fruit and veggies. Also, a new Indian restaurant just went in down the street from us, and all the reviews say it is "adequate."

Works for me.