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By Carl LaFong & the Spunk Holler Boys. From the YouTube page:
Not knowing the real lyrics to the song, Carl wrote his own and as a result debased a timeless traditional folk classic.
Warning: listening to this song may raise your cholesterol level. -Thanks, Steve Cloutier!
… a local YMCA had the advertisement they wanted. In order to promote healthier living (and the use of YMCA athletic facilities), they filmed a young woman consuming a stick of butter while watching television, to the accompaniment of Patsy Kline’s “You Made Me Love You.”
Edwards was allowed to spit the butter in her mouth into a plastic bucket between takes and was fed bottles of Coke to wash away the aftertaste. But by the end of the day she estimates she ingested the equivalent of two butter sticks.
The advertisement, produced for a total of less than $5,000 has won a national award in the “low budget” category of the Association of Independent Commercial Producers.
Link.
We know that a piece of toast, if dropped, will fall butter-side down. We also know that a cat, if dropped, will land on its feet. What happens when you strap a piece of buttered toast to a cat’s back and drop them both is called the Buttered Cat Paradox, and there’s an extensive amount of research on the internet devoted to just this conundrum. Find out more about it at mental_floss, including possible uses for the energy produced from such a venture, and ways it could go wrong. Link
Image credit: Flickr user francesca!!
Got milk? Well, you wouldn’t if it weren’t for these world-churning events.
MILK
You can’t spell “milk production” without g-o-a-t-s. Well, technically you could, ..but not historically. Goats were most likely the first dairy animals ever domesticated. Archeological evidence suggests that ancient peoples in what is now Iran and Iraq were selectively breeding these four-legged eating machines as far back as 8,000-9,000 B.C.E. And, while they may not look like much to us modern Americans, the logic behind goat keeping is impeccable. Small, sturdy, and able to eat just about anything you put in front of them, they’re easier creatures to keep healthy, happy, and milk-producing (particularly in cool, mountainous climates) than their larger relatives like cows and sheep. Several breeds have hair that can be shorn and used for clothing. And, like all milk animals, they’re an excellence nutritional value for what you have to put in.
Ruminants, the class of animals from which humans get all their dairy products, have a gigantic four-chambered stomach that allows them to happily digest dry stalks, fibrous vines, and leaves that other animals (humans included) write off as inedible. Their secret: lots and lots of chewing, in addition to partial digestion and regurgitation, then more chewing, followed by a healthy dose of specialized tummy bacteria. Unlike, say, pigs, which eat basically the same food as people and are only useful as meat, ruminants don’t compete with their owners for sustenance. Further, the milk they produce over several years provides far more nutrition than the meat a single animal could ever hope to put out. In fact, it only takes a couple of goats to keep a whole family of people fed for a year.
The extinct auroch.
As the concept of domesticating and milking animals spread from the Middle East, farmers adopted local beasts as their milk-giving ruminant of choice. Depending on things like climate, geography, and population, various regions favored yaks, buffalo, cows, and sheep. All have their own special adaptations that make them better for certain environments and needs. Cows, for instance, were domesticated from long-horned wild aurochs around the same time and place as goats. Since at least 3,000 B.C.E. they’ve been bred primarily for their milk, which is richer than goats’ and due to their size, more abundant. However, as heavy eaters with a grass diet, cows really work best in temperate climates. Modern European cows are much smaller than their auroch ancestors, primarily because in captivity, the winter food supply was far less abundant. There is one notable exception to the ruminant rule, however: the camel. The only milkable domesticated animal that isn’t a ruminant, camels were particularly adapted to arid, desert regions, and as such, their milk has been a staple food in parts of Africa since 2500 B.C.E.
more …
Margarine is a substitute for butter, which makes it a fighting word for the dairy industry. Butter producers and margarine producers battled back and forth for the better part of a century to capture the market for spreading our bread.
Butter was big business, and the notion that a cheaper substitute, even one made in part with milk, might storm the market terrified dairy farmers. They didn’t take the threat lying down, though, and convinced legislators to tax margarine at a rate of two cents per pound—no small sum in the late 19th century. Dairy farmers also successfully lobbied for restrictions that banned the use of yellow dyes to make margarine look more appetizing. By 1900, artificially colored butter was contraband in 30 U.S. states.
Several states took even more extreme measures to turn consumers away from margarine—they required the product to be dyed an unappealing pink color.
The margarine industry fought back, however. Read the whole sordid story at mental_floss. Link
Butter … is there anything it can’t do? Add this to the long list of the awesome things butter can do: in China, they use it to prevent suicides!
Government officials in south-east China have ordered workers to cover a 1,000 ft long steel bridge in butter to prevent citizens from using it to attempt suicide.
All the climbable surfaces on the structure in Guangzhou have been covered in greasy fat to put an end to the spate of people threatening to jump from it, The Sun reports.
Government spokesman Shiu Liang said: "We tried employing guards at both ends but that didn’t work – and we put up special fences and notices asking people not to commit suicide here.
"None of it worked – and so now we have put butter over the bridge and it has worked very well. Nobody can get up there and nobody who tries ever falls."
An oak barrel of butter has been found in a bog near Gilltown, Ireland. Two workers, John Fitzharris and Martin Lane, noticed a white streak in the peat and uncovered the barrel, estimated to be 3,000 years old. Pádraig Clancy and Carol Smith of the National Museum of Ireland took charge of the barrel.
“It’s rare to find a barrel as intact as that,” Mr. Clancy explained, “especially with the lid intact, and attached. It’s a really fine example.”
He estimates that the barrel is approximately 3,000 years old, from the Iron Age.
At the moment it is being dried out by staff at the Conservation Department. Once dry it will be soaked in a wax-like solution which preserves it.
“At 35ks, it’s a pretty big one,” Ms. Smith explained. Other examples of bog butter they showed tended to be less intact and much smaller.
Link -via Unique Daily
