The headlines have been marinating, let’s throw them on the barbecue:
•”Memorial weekend marathon roundup”: Sure sounds like a compendium where one could find places to run a 26.2-mile race over the weekend. Wrong!
The article turns out to be from TV Guide and begins thusly: “Forget fresh air!” And continues, “There’s no better way to celebrate Memorial Day Weekend than logging some serious quality-viewing time on the sofa watching endless hours of TV. But what to watch? Check out a selection of the many holiday-weekend marathons the networks have planned.”
So come Tuesday, you can brag to co-workers, “Oh, yeah, I completed a couple of marathons this weekend.” Nobody needs to know it was 26.2 hours of “Bridezilla” or 50 hours of “NCIS.” Don’t forget to hydrate during that much couch time.
•”Where are you most likely to get a speeding ticket?”: What’s the saying?
Wherever you go, there you are.
•”Is the Seattle School Board dysfunctional? U.S. Chamber of Commerce thinks so”: And yet they have never even engaged in so much as a physical scuffle.
”Census undercounts minorities by 1.5 million”: On the other hand, the findings show the 2010 census over-counted the total U.S. population by 36,000 people, or 0.01 percent, “due mostly to duplicate counts of affluent whites owning multiple homes.”
Doh! Some might argue that in terms of influence, the 0.01 percent do, in fact, count twice as much as the rest of us.
•”The most comma mistakes”: Remember the “Peanuts” strip when Charlie Brown wrote to his pencil pal, “Today, we, learned, how, to, use, commas.”?
”Thunder win 106-90, eliminate Lakers”: Yes, yes, Oklahoma City is home to the stolen Sonics, so the Thunder are not popular ‘round these parts. But hey, they beat the Lakers. That’s got to be worth something.
”The making of the term ‘pink slime’”: In an article about the microbiologist who coined the term for filler used in hamburger, the Associated Press notes: “… beef filler had been used for decades before the nickname came about. But most Americans didn’t know — or care — about it before Gerald Zirnstein’s vivid moniker was quoted in a 2009 article by The New York Times on the safety of meat processing methods.”
It is indeed difficult to care about something when one doesn’t know about it. That’s a little like saying people smoked for years, and didn’t care, until they learned what was in those things.
It’s the industry name “lean finely textured beef” that is truly misleading.
Whatever you call it, it’s still fatty bits of beef that are heated and treated with ammonium to kill bacteria. Yum.
Happy grilling.
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