I'm very tired for some reason. I've had one of those zombie days today, having slept badly last night. Anyway, I wrote my WW post, then had big second thoughts. All of this seems eerily familiar, as if I've already done a post about tins. I did have a look through my past offerings, but didn't find it. So apologies if you've heard all this before...
Preservation
Tracy asked me what tinned chicken curry was the other day, and I would have had some tonight so that I could take a picture of it in its full appetising glory, only there was a ham tagliatelle ready meal in the fridge with an expiry date of today, so I'm having that instead.
But it got me thinking about the humble tin, and what a wonderful invention it was. Food keeps for years, making them great for saving up for emergencies, or stocking up your nuclear bunker. If Wiki is to be believed, they didn't think up the tin opener for at least 30 years, instead relying on stones.
Although I'm not a great fan of marketing and stuff, they wouldn't make this sort of mistake nowadays. They would have tried out the new fangled tins on a focus group of consumers, who would have pointed out the obvious problem with having food you can't open.
Apparently the French army used their bayonets, which presumably hadn't been disinfected the last time they'd speared their opponents on them. I dread to think where else they stuck them, but they were clearly not suitable kitchen utensils. If they'd had Health and Saftey regulations back then this never would have happened, either.
Now the Powers That Be seem to have decided that tin openers are a bad thing, and that we need ring pulls instead. I hate them. I once cut myself, so now I wear oven gloves. It's obvious why they're doing this, though. Our great leaders would feel pretty stupid cooped up in their WWIII bunkers and starving because they couldn't find a tin opener.
They must have to recycle the tins in the bunkers as well, otherwise they'd go out of date. With no working infrastructure, they'd have chemical toilets, so they really wouldn't want to get dodgy tummies.
Bad Taste
I didn't participate in Bee's photofest. One reason is that I didn't find the time or energy at the weekend to take some stupid photos, and the other is because I don't tend to withhold pictures from publication on the grounds of quality. However, I couldn't ignore the challenge raised (lowered?) by Dan's crapping dog, so here is a photo of mine that I did use ages ago on my blog, before many of you were reading it. The post in question was referring to an artist who made a fortune by canning his own shit:
Have a good evening, and enjoy your dinner!
16 comments:
FIRST
Loved this post Brian. something about it just grabbed me.
I was a faithful reader when you posted about canned shit.
wiki's gotta be wrong about the opener coming 30 years later.
Jean Knee:
I seem to remember that you were particularly interested by reports that some of the tins had exploded due to a build-up of gases.
I've been struggling to work out how you'd open a tin with stones...
haaa anyone who buys a can of shit deserves to have it blow up on them. hee hee
Gruhosss!! I seem to remember begging you to do another post so that I didn’t have to look at the crap-in-a-can.
Yuck.
Dan’s is bad too.
I have about 20 bazzillion pictures I’ve taken with the intent of doing a post on them but I never seem to so I thought it was a good idea. You, on the other hand, are too practical to go around snapping picture after picture of things.
I found some pictures I took of meals I made for Andy. Those were just in case my mom didn’t believe I cooked for him when she was gone.
She likes Andy better than she likes Dan.
Oh, I also wanted to say that my family in Mexico are always losing the can opener. The use a knife and it works well for them because once you get the first hole, you just push up the knife along the edges of the can.
Zombies eat brains, but would they eat what I can only hope is canned chili down there?
Okay, okay, that's nice, that. Real nice.
Oh Brian, you crack me up. The French...I mean that is an interesting thought that never occured to me but hey that shit canning artist..please tell me that was a joke.
Bee:
I'm sure I'd lose some appendages trying to open cans with knives...
FADKOG:
The picture is actually tinned beef curry that has been altered to make the colour more... suggestive.
Chris:
;-)
Kat:
Here's a LINK to a news story about it. Basically this guy allegedly canned his own "merda" years ago, then died young. Since then they have been changing hands for large sums of money - The Tate Modern paid more for a tin than it's weight in gold would be worth. And then a friend of the artist claimed it was a hoax...
Behold, for I am ELEVENTH!!!
Brian Dear, there are just some things that one should keep to ones self.
The can of shit is one of those things.
And how in the world did he make a fortune doing that? Who would buy some strangers poo?
I always knew that some artists were strange but painting with their own make and urine and blood? That's a whole other level than strange.
Although, I just remembered that once I had started a new job on an Alzheimers unit of a nursing home (ahhh, the days of working as a nurse and being paid to clean up poo and what not) I was walking around to the different rooms to put a face with each patients name.
One room I walked in to, there was this "painting" on the wall, done by the patient, of horses running in a field and mountains, it was pretty in a way, but one thing I noticed was that everything was done in brown.
I went and asked my boss why they wouldn't give this person any other colors than brown.
She then informed me that it wasn't paint, it was the patients poo that they were painting with.
I wondered why the room smelled so funny!
And I do not suggest that anyone try to open a can with a knife.
Lord knows, if I tried it, I would cut off atleast two or three of my fingers and never even puncture the can!
That is so totally canned crap!
Tracy:
Thankyou for that insight into your salad days. You can at least take comfort for the fact that even though you're not being paid to clean up any more, at least you're not having to clean shit off walls...
Rusty:
:-)
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