Tetherd Cow Ahead

Spam Observations #4

Landon Flanagan took the trouble to write today, to tell me of what I can only presume to be a new invention that his father and sister intend to patent:

Good evening

Our parents have been married for twenty years.

They tried everyting in their relations and thought that nothing could awake their interest.

But one day father made unusual thing with my sister and then they told about it our mom and me.

Thank you, your
Landon Flanagan

This has such a wonderful Edward Gorey flavour about it that I thought I would use the opportunity to recommend that all readers of Tetherd Cow Ahead (both of you) should have a copy of Gorey’s The Curious Sofa: A Pornographic Work in their library. Go buy it NOW:

The Curious Sofa at Amazon.

If anyone would care to provide an illustration of what they think The Unusual Thing might look like, send it to me and I will post it on The Cow with full credit.

Well, I were curious weren’t I? How did salt water taffy get its name? Seems no-one knows. The National Candy Association puts forward this probably apocryphal story:

Many manufacturers claim a shopkeeper by the name of David Bradley was one of the first sellers of the candy. In 1883, a huge storm hit Atlantic City and flooded the boardwalk. Bradley’s store was flooded and the ocean water soaked his entire stock of taffy. In one account, a young girl asked if the store still had taffy for sale. Bradley jokingly told the girl to grab some ‘salt water taffy’. This is believed to be the first reference to salt water taffy.

Read more about it!

I looked in the tin 1 minute before and 1 minute after, but there was no observable change in the curry. Since then, a mild aura of suspicion has intruded upon my reality, as I wonder exactly what it is that happened at 12:45 on that otherwise unremarkable day of April 23, 2003.

A couple of years ago I was working in California, just North of San Francisco and on a day off I visited a place called Bodega Bay which is where Alfred Hitchcock shot the exteriors for The Birds.

Bodega Bay is an unprepossessing little place with not a lot to recommend it save for a great little Mexican diner and the possibility of experiencing weird cold fogs that roll off the ocean in the middle of summer.

Just outside the town I stopped at a roadside shed that promised ‘Salt Water Taffy’ which is something I’d never heard of. Maybe taffy made with the age-old tradition of hand collected sea water, I thought, one of those quaint things that sounds bizarre but actually tastes quite nice, the recipe having been lovingly handed down over generations by laconic elderly candy-makers with laugh wrinkles and plenty of time for a cheeky wisecrack at a young whippersnapper like myself. I went inside and marvelled at the hundreds of different flavours, and, savouring the possibility of banter with the locals asked the girl at the counter why it was called ‘salt water’ taffy.

She looked at me like I’d said “Klatuu barada nicto”, chewed her gum once and said: “Because it’s made near the ocean.”

I bought a bag of the candy, went out and sat near the water and unwrapped what was essentially a chewy glob of sugar saturated with some incandescent alien ‘apple’ flavour. It was truly sick-making. Experimentally I threw one to the seagulls, wondering how many it would take to turn them into a hyperactive flock of murderous killers.

Demolition of a building up on King St, in Newtown where I live, revealed this sign which must date around the 1940s. Green Coupons were a redeemable ration system used in WW2 in Australia. A new construction has now obscured the sign again, for another fifty years, perhaps.

Nurse Myra and I were having a discussion recently about the words that are used to denote an unfixed but still quantative indication of the numbers of certain things where you don’t wish (or are unable) to be too specific. Those are words like a few, several, some, a variety of etc. I don’t know whether there is an actual word for these kinds of pliable quantities, but there really should be. I’m calling them ‘Diffuse Quantity Descriptors’ until someone sets me straight.

Let me elaborate: we agreed that a few choices on the menu is more than two and possibly less than five. Several choices would be more than a few but possibly not as many as six or seven. A variety of choices might be as many as several, but possibly a a few more.

Curiously, when talking about time, these quantaties seem to shrink or expand according to actual purpose. “I’ll be gone for a few minutes” would possibly be five or six, or maybe even ten minutes whilst “I’ll be gone for a few hours” seems like it might reasonably encompass three or four hours. Several hours seems rather longer, but several minutes could be just a few.

I might ruminate on this for a few days, and you can be sure there will be several other posts on a variety of similar anomalies.