Into every media dieter's life, a little rain must fall. There are bumps on the forks in the road, nights dark and stormy, tall winters with dark and handsome anchormen luring you away from your patchwork quilt. Sometimes I doubt myself. Should I go on? Will I go on? Must I go on? Can I go on? On and on and on?
Into these dark days I wallow until, like a little light flipping on above me with one of those little metal toggle switches -swit!- to light up the foreground desk, the vastness of its blotter, a glint from the vintage Swingline, good ol' H. L. Mencken bobblehead gently nodding towards my numismatic
... where the streets are paved with butter
collection . . . and all at once, like a gray squirrel falling from a overhead bough, past your head, and hitting the pavement with a sickening crunch only to bounce back again and scurry away after a timeless second of stunned pause, I am renewed. My media dieter's resolve rises from the ashes of hours of informative langour. My life is once more given purpose.
Today was exactly that. I turned on the radio and everybody is talking about the obesisty epidemic. I glance up at the TV monitor in the shop window and I see Breaking News! - a nationwide recall of Angus beef. I open the paper to an above the fold photo of yesterday's butter flood. Story goes: sometime late Wednesday night the Associated Milk Producer's butter-packaging plant caught fire, an important melted butter containment hull was breached, and three milllion pounds of melted butter flooded the streets of New Ulm, flowing like panic through the streets. Imagine begin woken up in mid-night-What's that smell?-to crack open the curtain and see a dirty river of melted butter heading your way.
It was all predicted by the right reverend Billy J. Bird, summarily expelled from of the Temple of the Holy Temple of the Second Birth of Greater Oshkosh, notorious for his food-riddled prophecy: "the streets will run with hot melted butter… popcorn will burst in the skies… cheese shall boil from deep within the Earth… the milk will curdle the very hearts of the undead as the seven gates of heaven accept those who have eaten cholesterol-rich foods into the warm, sticky arms of the Lord." And lord knows Billy thought for a second there his dreams had come true.
Is this walleye?
The pictures continued predicatably. Cracked frozen melted butter looking like the dried up rivers of the Mojave . . . firefighters cleaning sicky butter-dirt-snow goo off their fireman's boots . . . the story continuing on page A16 with caption, "Firefighters drag their hoses through butter." The town must have been cooking, lucky to miss that sudden heat wave that would have sauteed Main Street to a delicate golden-brown.
Is this walleye?
Further down, the corner of the front page, lies an article about fish swapping, restaruants throughout the Metro heretically serving Eastern European Zander mislabelled as our beloved Walleye, the official State Fish. Unknowing diners ordering following dutifully their patriotic stomach shocked to witness the local news expose, a scoop of a muckraking operation.. smells fishy... gasp.
Over on the right, our state ranks fourth in the per capita SUV competition, to nobody's surprise Jason Giambi admits to eating steroids throughout his MVP years, rubbing steroid cream all over his body every night like some Hindu lingam. And hiding on the other side of the front page, bottom right hand corner, pork barrel spending is rampant in DC, the lastest case being the omibus appropriantion bill that passed just before the congress flew home for Thanksgiving dinners. Voting on the bill a scant hour after it had been thunked onto their desks, its 50 pages of legal-ese daunting even eager young law interns, passing the bill, no questions asked. Surprisingly, it surprsed each one of the Minnesota delegation that the government earmarked money for a thorough remodeling of the Warren Burger building in downtown St. Paul.
The great FDA scandals, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle winning the pulitizer, and the butter flood of '04. It's days like this that give a man hope.
