The Funny Section

Originally, cookbooks didn’t give precise measurements for recipes - they just told readers to use a “pinch” of this, a “heaping spoonful” of that, and a “handful” of something else.  Fannie Merrit Farmer, a domestic servant in the late 1850’s, had no trouble following such recipes herself - but she found it almost impossible to give instructions to the young girl who helped her in the home where she worked.  So she began rewriting the family’s recipes using more precise measurements.

Forty years later, she had become the assistant principal of the prestigious Boston Cooking School.  In 1896 she decided to publish her first book of “scientific” recipes, The Fannie Farmer Cookbook.  Her publisher was so worried it wouldn’t sell that he forced Farmer to pay for printing costs herself.  She did.  It sold four million copies and permanently changed the way cookbooks are written.

From the San Francisco Chronicle,

“Someone fired a .45 caliber bullet into Ava Donner’s kitchen.  Luckily, she was holding a spoon.  Donner was stirring a pot of macaroni and cheese when a bullet hit the stem on the stainless steel spoon, ricocheted off the refrigerator and landed on the kitchen counter . . . ‘If it had been an inch either way, it would have been in her chest,’ said Donner’s husband.  Police suspect the shot was fired by youths target shooting in a nearby vacant lot.”

In 1995, a 30-ton boulder fell 500 feet off a cliff, crashed through a mobile home roof and killed Jackie Johnson, 19, of Adams Beach, Kentucky, while he was watching TV on the couch.  The man’s grandmother, who had been watching TV beside him, had just gotten up to let her dog in.  His grandfather, who was also sitting on the couch, was thrown up in the air and got a broken shoulder.

The Sighting: A 35-foot-high image of the Virgin Mary on the side of a building in Clearwater, Florida

Revelation: In 1996 workers chopped down a palm tree in front of the Seminole Finance Company building.  Not long afterward, a customer noticed a discoloration in the building’s tinted windows that resembled Madonna.  The discovery was reported on the afternoon news.  By the end of the week, and estimated 100,000 people visited the site . . . including a Baptist minister who was ejected after he “condemned the crowed for worshipping an image on glass.”

Impact: The city set up a “Miracle Management Task Force” to install portable toilets at the site, arrange police patrols, and erect a pedestrian walkway over the adjacent road (Route 19) to stop the faithful from dodging in and out of traffic.  “That’s the busiest highway in Florida,” one policeman told reporters.  “You want to know the real miracle?  Half a million people have crossed that intersection and nobody’s been injured or killed.”

People started drinking coffee and tea in the morning not because they were pleasant, but because they were hot, dark, and mysterious.  Until the 17th century, it was common for Europeans to start their day with alcohol.  Queen Elizabeth, for exampale, had a pot of beer and a pound of beefsteak for breakfast every day.  Scottish breakfasts routinely included a dram of whiskey.  Coffee, tea, and sugar had the same illicit appeal as alcohol when they reached Euorope in the 1600s - so they became suitable substitues for booze.

• Women have a keener sense of smell than men.
• By simply smelling a piece of clothing, most people can tell if it was worn by a woman or man.
• Each of us has an odor that is, like our fingerprints, unique.  One result, researchers say: Much of the thrill of kissing comes from smelling the unique odors of another’s face.
• Smells stimulate learning.  Students given olfactory stimulation along with a word list retain much more information and remember longer.
• Many smells are heavier than air and can be smelled only at ground level.
• We smell best if we take several short sniffs rather than a long one.

From the Sci-Fi movie Humanoids From The Deep,

Scientist: “They took five death row inmates and injected them with a genetic code of sorts, taken from different species of fish, prmarily salmon. It essentially fuses with the genetic material already existing.”

Astonished Listener: “Fish-men?”

Scientist: “You could say that.  The goal was to create an amphibious soldier, but . . . something went wrong.”