this, that, and the third

THIS: For part of his upcoming book, food author Michael Pollan has been asking readers to submit their personal "food rules", pithy nuggets of wisdom about what and how to eat. Reading over the ones Pollan posted online, I tried to remember if I'd been raised with any such advice. Unfortunately my parents didn't cultivate much of a food culture; I once embarrassed my mom by declaring, at a school assembly in front of all my classmates' parents, that her best homemade meal was Rice-A-Roni.

So instead of remembering any food rules, I remembered an embarrassing moment of my own from when I was in college. A friend was cleaning up after dinner, and I told her she didn't need to put the butter back in the fridge. She looked concerned, and noted tentatively that dairy products tend to go bad if they're not refrigerated. I told her that my family kept the butter out all the time, so it would be easier to spread, and it never went bad or made us sick.

I can't remember how that incident ended, but later I double-checked my advice and learned, obviously, that I was wrong. The root of the problem was that my family saw no cause for distinguishing between butter and margarine; we called everything butter. Thus, when we took science's shitty advice and switched to margarine, we kept right on saying butter. I'm not sure I knew the difference until I was 19 years old.

THAT: Have you ever noticed how people only say "that's not funny" after they hear an offensive joke? Like if you make fun of retards (or whatever), someone'll say "dude, that's not funny". But what about when something just isn't funny? Nobody ever says "that's not funny" in response to a shitty but inoffensive joke. Maybe this is why Dane Cook is still popular.

THE THIRD: Game 2 of the World Series is this Thursday at 8:00 eastern, televised by Fox. Like it or not, I'm blogging it. If you're available to follow me in real time, I'd be flattered if you did.