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Showing posts from February, 2015

Heat Index

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My first experience with spicy food came when I was a youngster. I was a latch key kid, and that included lunch. My grade school was literally across the street from the house, more or less. So I would let myself in and prepare my own lunch, as early as age 11. This was circa 1974-75. Nobody reported my mother to Child Protective Services. I managed to not burn the house down. I'd fix my lunch, eat it, and be back in class on time. Somehow along the way I have lost that efficiency in my life, but that's another blog post entirely. The point being, my first encounter with spicy foods came in the form of those Vlasic hot pepper rings in a jar. Again, I was 11 and I started nibbling on those tangy, vinegar-encased yellow rings, usually combining them with a sandwich of some sort. That was some 40 years ago, and it was way before I discovered Szechuan Chinese food, Indian cuisine and Thai delights. It was also way before fast food joints and snack manufacturers discov

The Justified Bully

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In the 1980s, HBO presented a comedy series called "Not Necessarily the News." In it, pretend anchors used real news clips but altered them for laughs. Cleverly inserted shots that the HBO show produced, interspersed with the actual clips, would be used for gags. Of course, the notion of fake news on TV was hardly new at that time. "Saturday Night Live" began the trend in earnest with its signature Weekend Update segment not long after "SNL" debuted in 1975. While "NNTN" was playful and Weekend Update was very sarcastic, always delivered with a wink and a smirk, there was still further to go in the fake news genre. Enter Comedy Central's "The Daily Show." Where "NNTN" was produced sporadically and Weekend Update was weekly (during the "SNL" season), "The Daily Show" was exactly that---daily. But that's hardly where the delineation ended. "TDS"'s Jon Stewart was not part o