Random Stuff LXXVIII
A high-school classmate posted a picture to Facebook of a rather strange garden utility, imported from Japan. It’s a kind of meshwork with vertical prongs of metal, designed to keep cats from wandering around on your garden. You set it down over your seedlings, and the plants grow through the holes in the mesh. The prongs aren’t sharp enough to cause injury-if they were, they’d be called spikes-but are closely spaced enough that cats would have a hard time placing their paws between them, even if they’re trying to be careful. That seems like an unusual length to go to, just to keep cats out of one’s garden.
But what really kills me about this product is its name-one of the funniest bits of mangled English I’ve ever seen: Don’t Cat.
The drawing of the kawaii kitten with sore paws is just too precious. Here’s a closer look (ganked from somewhere on the Web; will attribute if I can find the source again; click for large version):
The product name in Japanese is just transliterated English. Oddly, the word Don’t is translated into hiragana characters, which aren’t usually used for foreign words. The Actual Japanese for cat only appears in one place on the label-in fine print just below and to the left of the crying cat’s leading paw, next to the French for “cat repellent.”
Next time I’m at Home Depot, I’ll be sure to drop by the gardening section and ask whether I could score a couple hectares of Don’t Cat.
Science Daily recently reported, via National Geographic, a series of simple experiments suggesting that paper wasps of the genus Polistes can identify each other by sight, even within a single colony, through face recognition. I was more impressed, however, by the illustration at the top of the article:
The first thing I thought was “Now there’s a handsome family portrait.” Having recently watched Monty Python’s Life of Brian, I was compelled to improve it:
(If you don’t know the reference, this’ll help.)
I’ve been having lots of fun on Tuesday evenings with a group of board-game enthusiasts. We meet at a local Panera, which unfortunately closes at 9:00 PM, so most of us can’t reasonably get more than three hours of games in before we’re dismissed. (One of the managers is cool enough to let us play until 9:30 while they clean up the kitchen, but she only works about half of Tuesdays, sigh.) We’ve taken to moving the operation next door to a Qdoba that’s open ‘til 11. Though usually we’ve all had dinner by 9, we feel obliged to order something to reciprocate for taking up their space; so we usually score a couple plates of nachos and chips with guacamole. On our first visit to Qdoba we bought the Nachos with “3-Cheese Queso Sauce.” (Anything that sounds that desperate to convince you it’s cheese is almost certainly uncontaminated by cheese.) Our server (who, for reasons not clear to any of us, had just waived the cost of my Dr. Pepper) went nuts with the 3-Cheese Queso Sauce ladle; our nachos came out looking like something consumed after losing a bet in a porno flick. They tasted okay, but ye gads, the consistency-the sauce quickly saturated the chips and created an oily, disgusting mess. We dubbed them pornachos, after we discovered that we’d all immediately made the connection between 3-Cheese Queso Sauce and pure, voluminous semen.
We later discovered that pornachos are actually pretty good when doused with the standard amount of cheese sauce.
Last week I singlehandedly consumed an entire order of pornachos after forgetting to eat dinner (and not noticing until after 9:00, when I suddenly became ravenous). Afterward, I was curious about how much evil was lurking in an order of pornachos. Mexican fast food is usually touted as more healthy than American, and I suppose that’s true overall; but healthy fast food doesn’t usually glisten in the same way these nachos do. Most fast food chains, including Qdoba, now have nutrition information on line, and some, like Qdoba’s, allow you to specify all the optional ingredients.
Holy shit. When configured as we usually get them, a regulation order of pornachos contains a whopping 1265 kcal. The details are no less appalling. Fat, 67 g. Saturated fat, 27 g, or 135% of the recommended daily maximum. Sodium, 1,640 mg. On the other hand, 23 g fiber, which explains a few things about the state of my intestinal tract when I got home Tuesday after singlehandedly demolishing an order.
Can we get even more disgusting? I do believe we can. Warning: do not click link if you react poorly to stories of revolting modes of disease transmission.
But what really kills me about this product is its name-one of the funniest bits of mangled English I’ve ever seen: Don’t Cat.
The drawing of the kawaii kitten with sore paws is just too precious. Here’s a closer look (ganked from somewhere on the Web; will attribute if I can find the source again; click for large version):
The product name in Japanese is just transliterated English. Oddly, the word Don’t is translated into hiragana characters, which aren’t usually used for foreign words. The Actual Japanese for cat only appears in one place on the label-in fine print just below and to the left of the crying cat’s leading paw, next to the French for “cat repellent.”
Next time I’m at Home Depot, I’ll be sure to drop by the gardening section and ask whether I could score a couple hectares of Don’t Cat.
Science Daily recently reported, via National Geographic, a series of simple experiments suggesting that paper wasps of the genus Polistes can identify each other by sight, even within a single colony, through face recognition. I was more impressed, however, by the illustration at the top of the article:
The first thing I thought was “Now there’s a handsome family portrait.” Having recently watched Monty Python’s Life of Brian, I was compelled to improve it:
(If you don’t know the reference, this’ll help.)
I’ve been having lots of fun on Tuesday evenings with a group of board-game enthusiasts. We meet at a local Panera, which unfortunately closes at 9:00 PM, so most of us can’t reasonably get more than three hours of games in before we’re dismissed. (One of the managers is cool enough to let us play until 9:30 while they clean up the kitchen, but she only works about half of Tuesdays, sigh.) We’ve taken to moving the operation next door to a Qdoba that’s open ‘til 11. Though usually we’ve all had dinner by 9, we feel obliged to order something to reciprocate for taking up their space; so we usually score a couple plates of nachos and chips with guacamole. On our first visit to Qdoba we bought the Nachos with “3-Cheese Queso Sauce.” (Anything that sounds that desperate to convince you it’s cheese is almost certainly uncontaminated by cheese.) Our server (who, for reasons not clear to any of us, had just waived the cost of my Dr. Pepper) went nuts with the 3-Cheese Queso Sauce ladle; our nachos came out looking like something consumed after losing a bet in a porno flick. They tasted okay, but ye gads, the consistency-the sauce quickly saturated the chips and created an oily, disgusting mess. We dubbed them pornachos, after we discovered that we’d all immediately made the connection between 3-Cheese Queso Sauce and pure, voluminous semen.
We later discovered that pornachos are actually pretty good when doused with the standard amount of cheese sauce.
Last week I singlehandedly consumed an entire order of pornachos after forgetting to eat dinner (and not noticing until after 9:00, when I suddenly became ravenous). Afterward, I was curious about how much evil was lurking in an order of pornachos. Mexican fast food is usually touted as more healthy than American, and I suppose that’s true overall; but healthy fast food doesn’t usually glisten in the same way these nachos do. Most fast food chains, including Qdoba, now have nutrition information on line, and some, like Qdoba’s, allow you to specify all the optional ingredients.
Holy shit. When configured as we usually get them, a regulation order of pornachos contains a whopping 1265 kcal. The details are no less appalling. Fat, 67 g. Saturated fat, 27 g, or 135% of the recommended daily maximum. Sodium, 1,640 mg. On the other hand, 23 g fiber, which explains a few things about the state of my intestinal tract when I got home Tuesday after singlehandedly demolishing an order.
Can we get even more disgusting? I do believe we can. Warning: do not click link if you react poorly to stories of revolting modes of disease transmission.