Four Random Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. At some point, the cold I am recovering from piqued my curiosity about the saying, Feed a fever, starve a cold -- or is it Starve a fever, feed a cold?

More curious about the order than anything else, I looked it up and found a nice list of medical myths, many of which I remember receiving as unsolicited advice when my kids were infants -- albeit usually in a much friendlier way than this person's silliness about cold weather...

Regarding the saying, the order doesn't matter because the starving part is bad advice, anyway.

2. Not so long ago, apple lovers were celebrating the end of the death-grip of the Red Delicious variety on the American market.

Now, with many varieties available, people are starting to notice that it's getting hard to find a good Honeycrisp.

An article at Serious Eats takes a deep dive into the no one thing answer, which I'd say mainly boils down to They're popular, but seasonal and don't do well in storage.

My hot take: Go for less popular varieties or hold off on Honeycrisps unless they're in season.

3. Fun, silly site of the week: Net Elevation. Find out the difference in elevation between a famous person's birth and death places.

4. I suspect that fellow fans of the magazine will enjoy "The MAD Files," a short history by David Mikics at Tablet.

I certainly did, but I was flabbergasted at a missed punchline from a satire I remember well:

The history of magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman goes much further back than that of the magazine. This very similar image appeared on a calendar in 1908. (Image by unknown artist, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)

A much easier target was Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. In "201 Min. of Space Idiocy," by Drucker and DeBartolo, Dr. Haywire, using the video phone from the space station, catches his wife and the milkman in flagrante delicto. Unruffled, she asks him, "On the way home from the moon, will you pick up a loaf of bread, Dear?" On the Jupiter mission the astronauts treat themselves to a glass of steak and a glass of potatoes, followed by a glass of pie. Best of all are the apes dancing around the monolith. Is it "a Prehistoric Handball Court," they wonder? The massive monolith orbiting Jupiter resembles "the box the United Nations building came in." So much for Kubrickian sublimity.

The astronauts chased their liquid pie down with a piece of coffee.

With that out of my system, I heartily recommend reading the whole thing.

-- CAV