QUARANTINE BLOG # 114

July 22, 2020

Prayer request: Dr. Jay Aikens, music director at St. Mark UMC, is having triple bypass surgery today.  Please be in prayer for him and his wife, Becky, and for the entire surgical team.

Praise report: Karen Utsch went home the afternoon of her successful knee surgery.  She is now hard at work with physical therapy.

👉  July is National Hot Dog Month and just in case you don’t want to celebrate for 31 days, today is National Hot Dog Day.  The day is celebrated with the Annual Hot Dog Lunch at Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. (Sarcastic me wants to comment about hot dogs eating hot dogs, but I won’t).  NHDM started in the 1950s; NHDD in 1991.  Hot dogs are technically a type of sausage – wiener (Vienna sausage) or frankfurter (Frankfurter Würstchen) – culturally imported from Germany.  They became a working-class street food sold at stands and carts, and evolved into a ballpark staple.

At the ballpark, hot dogs may properly be garnished with ketchup, mustard, and relish (the only time, according to your favorite blogger, that mustard is acceptable on a hot dog).  The hosts of Wheel of Fortune, Vanna White and Pat Sajak admit that the only argument they’ve had in 37 years on the Wheel is about the proper condiment for the hotdog.  Pat says mustard.  Vanna is correct with ketchup. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK06dz3MaNQ Chili sauce is also acceptable, as is chili sauce and coleslaw.  Please share your favorite toppings in the comments section below.

Also associated with National Hot Dog Day (and Month) is the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile (Oscar Mayer is the preferred hot dog of this blog – and here is the Oscar Mayer jingle sung barber shop quartet style https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeFCZ8n6MVU).  The first version of the Wienermobile was created in 1936 by Oscar Mayer’s nephew, Carl G. Mayer, and today there are 11, accompanied the WienerCycle, WeinerRover and WienerDrone.  Each year 2,000 graduating college seniors are interviewed for 11 spots in the driver’s seat of the Wienermobiles.

Warning!  Rabbit hole!  I am a fan of SPEBSQSA (pronounced speb-squaw) the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America.  Watch this clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19AZc9cIDFI for another Oscar Mayer jingle, bologna this time, by Julien Neel.

👉  Among those arriving in the world on this day are Shawn Michaels 1965, Alex Trebek 1940, Bob Dole 1923, and Selena Gomez 1992.  Those exiting on July 22 were John Dillinger 1934, Ann Landers 2002, Carl Sandburg 1967, and George Crum 1914.

👉  You read the list of folks who died on July 22, and you recognized a gangster, an advice columnist, and a Pulitzer Prize winning writer.  “But who,” you ask, “is George Crum?”  Well, unless you were on a cruise where I did talks from my Edible History series and heard the potato talk, you may not know.  So I will tell you (it is more fun onboard ship).

Tradition has it that George Crum, born George Speck, was the first to fry thin potato slices into ultra-crispy potato chips. One of the regular customers at Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga, NY, where George worked, was Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt.  Although he enjoyed the food, the Commodore could never seem to remember Speck’s name.  On one occasion, he called a waiter over to ask for “Crum.”  Rather than take offense, Speck decided to embrace the nickname, figuring that, “A crumb is bigger than a speck.”

Anyway, one day in 1853, when Crum was busy in the kitchen at Moon’s, so the story goes, a diner sent word to the chef to cut his French-fried potatoes thinner.  In a spirit of righteous sarcasm, Crum shaved off a wafer thin slice of potato and dropped it into the deep hot fat of the frying pan.  Pleased by the taste, he experimented with several more wafer-thin slices and offered them to Mrs. Moon for her menu and the rest is history.

👉  Speaking of potatoes, in 1952 a novel plaything, Mr. Potato Head, arrived on the market.  It was a set of prong-backed, cartoonish plastic facial features (eyes, ears, noses, mouths, eyebrows and moustaches), and arms and legs that were intended be stuck into a real potato to create a man (like Eve, Mrs. Potato Head came along later).

The use of a real potato as a plaything was seen as wasteful, and it ran against the maternal injunction not to play with your food.  So in 1964 a plastic potato became part of the Mr. Potato Head kit, and the pleasure of randomly sticking those funny features into a knobby, bulbous, real potato was gone for good.

Since then, potato heads have survived and thrived in a variety of new dimensions.  Cashing in on Star Wars, there is Darth Tater, Spudtrooper, and Luke Frywalker (for your greater enjoyment, check out this video I made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prIbajixPfs).

👉  Still speaking of potatoes, one day Mrs. Potato was going about her housework as usual when her daughter came home from school and announced, “Mom, I know who I am going to marry?”

“That’s nice, dear,” said Mom indulgently.  “Who is it?”

“Mom,” she said, “I am going to marry David Brinkley!”  And Mom fainted.

Minutes later when she came to, Mom expressed her horror at her daughter’s choice for a husband and said, parentally, “You just wait until your Father gets home!”

When Potato Papa arrived, the scene was repeated, except for fainting.  Dad spouted steam as though he had been baked.  Recovering he said, “You have no idea the shame you are bringing on your family by wanting to marry David Brinkley!  You are shaming the lineage of greatness which is yours.  Your great grandfather was mashed into vodka by Catherine the Great.  Your great uncle was guillotined into fries by the French Revolution.  Your grandfather was scalloped by the Indians.  You cannot marry David Brinkley.  Royal starch flows through you veins, and David Brinkley is just a commentator.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRs0OqV4uSc

👉  What are you facing today that you wouldn’t be facing if you were in control?  What are you required to deal with that you really wish you could avoid?  Where have your plans dripped like sand through your fingers?  Where would you like to take back choices and redo decisions?  Where do you feel troubled, inadequate, weak, defeated, overwhelmed, alienated, or alone?

If you’re not experiencing one of those moments, you will be someday, or you are close to someone who is.  Life in this fallen world is often very hard.  Brokenness will enter your door and somehow alter the trajectory of your life.  You have no idea of what might be lurking around the corner.  It all seems impossible and scary.

But God’s Word declares something to us that is the opposite of the way we tend to think.  It tells us that when we face difficulties, and chaos greets us, there is One who is in complete control.  Paul says in Ephesians 1:22, “And God put all things under Christ’s feet and gave Him as head over all things to the church.”

So no matter how it looks to you at street level, your world is not out of control.  You need to know that right now, Jesus rules over all things for the sake of His children.  This is where you can find peace.

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