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Posted on 08.07.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 8:36 am
A couple of weeks ago, our 5-year-old daughter opened a lemonade stand for a day at Mamaw’s house in my hometown. She probably broke a local ordinance when she did, but Paden City, W.Va., doesn’t have a Lemonade Police Unit. Portland, Ore., apparently does:
A county official later apologized for the actions of a health inspector on a power trip. “I just feel like we have to be able to distinguish between a 7-year-old who is selling lemonade and trying to learn about business and someone who actually has a business,” Jeff Cogen said. Ya think? Filed under: Business and Family and Food and Government and News & Politics and West Virginia Comments: None |
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Posted on 07.16.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 12:32 pm
You can specialize in Persian cuisine and still be a redneck. The proof is in this Falls Church, Va., restaurant’s simple yet descriptively eloquent name: And if you eat Persian food, as I do occasionally, that makes you an enlightened redneck. Ironically, Meat In A Box isn’t far from my first home in the Washington, D.C., area. I may have to make a trek to the old neighborhood to give it a try. I need more hummus in my diet. Filed under: Business and Food and Rednecks Comments: 1 Comment |
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Posted on 07.07.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 10:53 pm
When I hit the hills every October, I had one goal in mind: Fill my game pouch with the daily limit of six squirrels. The only thing I hated more than squirrels were chipmunks. Their incessant chirping and scampering spooked the squirrels. Absence from the oaks and hickories didn’t make my heart grow fonder of squirrels. I grew to detest them even more when my career path forced me to go urban. Squirrels own the big city and its suburbs, and they aren’t lovable like Rocky of “Rocky and Bullwinkle” fame. Squirrels destroyed the corn we planted in our garden one year — even after we bought squirrel feeders just for them. They dug up all of my wife’s daffodil bulbs and replanted them in the neighbor’s yard. They ate through the top and bottom of our plastic garbage cans and to this day still string trash all over our driveway and lawn. I was thrilled when our two dogs, Shelby and Peanut, successfully plotted to kill the squirrels that dared come into the yard at our old house. Shelby would go to one side of the yard and Peanut to the other. Shelby chased the squirrels to Peanut, who was part rat terrier, and she dispatched them more consistently than any shotgun I ever fired. A few years ago at Thanksgiving, my wife put the pies on our screened back porch to keep them cool. It wasn’t long before one of the local squirrels got a whiff. My son and I shot him with water pistols all morning and finally thought we had scared him off. But a few hours later, just before the feast, we heard my mother-in-law yell, “Ahhh, there’s a squirrel on the pie!” I wanted to cut out the part with squirrel footprints and eat the rest of my favorite chocolate pie, but my wife reminded me that squirrels are disgusting, disease-ridden squirrels. My favorite Thanksgiving dessert was ruined, and it now has a new name for the family cookbook — Squirrel Pie. All of those bad squirrel memories rushed to mind today when I read this New York Times piece celebrating the wonders of the squirrel:
The article is full of fascinating information about the squirrel that I never knew. But as I read it, I just kept thinking of how tasty they are — yes, they taste like chicken — and how much I’d love to kill six a day for the rest of my life. Squirrels have their moments. The little guy in the photo above is the resident mooch at the L’Enfant Plaza train station. He introduced himself my first week of commuting by Virginia Railway Express, letting me hover my iPhone a couple of feet above his head to snap the photo. Even I couldn’t resist that photogenic rodent face. But at the end of the day, he and all his kin are still rodents and they deserve to die, just like the sewer rats who roam the city streets at night. Filed under: Food and Hunting & Guns and West Virginia and Wildlife Comments: None |
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Posted on 03.11.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 12:11 pm
You gotta love a grandma who will go the extra mile — or, in this case, the extra two days — to get her grandson a memorable ice-cream treat:
It reminds me of the good ol’ days when my wife camped in the streets of our nation’s capital to get our kids tickets to the annual White House Easter Egg Roll, which is just weeks away. Alas, President Obama killed that family tradition last year. But the local ice-cream shop just opened, so I’m taking the family there for a treat today — after we scarf some Costco pizza for lunch. Filed under: Family and Food and Human Interest Comments: None |
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Posted on 02.26.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 7:43 pm
So our public schools are stuffing kids full of sugar- and fat-laced snacks but apparently not teaching them capitalization, punctuation and other basic rules of grammar. Parents might as well send their kids to a candy store for classes — which may be their best chance for employment if they don’t start learning how to write. It’s enough to make an enlightened redneck journalist like me scream. (Read previous “Why We Home-School” lessons.) Filed under: Culture and Food and Grammar and News & Politics and Why We Home-School Comments: 1 Comment |
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Posted on 01.14.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 10:34 am
Politicians — and apparently their wives, too — just can’t help themselves. They don’t know how to be genuine. When even their food is fake, you know everything is phony. So it was with first lady Michelle Obama and her appearance on “Iron Chef of America,” a supposed “reality” series on the Food Network:
OK, to be fair, Michelle Obama isn’t to blame for this episode of phoniness. All vegetable decisions were made by the network to fit its schedule. But the revelation (via Michelle Malkin) doesn’t make the first lady look good. Filed under: Entertainment and Food and Human Interest and People Comments: None |
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Posted on 01.08.10 by K. Daniel Glover @ 10:58 am
I’m not a fan of oats, National brand or otherwise, unless they are in cookies. But I managed to fulfill National Oats’ goal of becoming a “husky” kid just the same. That’s a good thing, right? (Hat tip to Instapundit) Filed under: Advertising and Culture and Food Comments: None |
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Posted on 12.24.09 by K. Daniel Glover @ 1:28 pm
That’s what Angela Sims-Quinty started doing a few years ago, and continues to do on a regular basis to eat Krystal burgers now that the chain opened a restaurant near her home in Houston. Her passion earned her a spot in the Krystal Lovers Hall of Fame — and her image and story on Krystal burger boxes everywhere for a month. “You know you’re a redneck when your sister’s picture is on a Krystal’s burger box,” her brother said. Filed under: Advertising and Business and Food and Human Interest Comments: None |
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Posted on 12.19.09 by K. Daniel Glover @ 11:51 am
“It’s really a neat way to do business,” Tom Klebe told the Herald & Review in Decatur, Ill. He and his wife, Darla, have been selling the snack baskets online since 2004 and have new mixes planned for after the holidays. “The challenge we are running into is all of the different shipping options.” The store has arrangements for hunters (lots of jerky and other meaty morsels), fisherman (Goldfish crackers and other aquatic-themed snacks), soldiers (everything your favorite military man, or woman, could want while away from home) and more. The biggest basket, “Bubba’s Little Brother,” sells for about $130. And right now all 10 versions of the redneck basket, which actually come in metal tubs, are “stimulus priced”! Filed under: Business and Fishing and Food and Hunting & Guns and Rednecks Comments: None |
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Posted on 12.16.09 by K. Daniel Glover @ 9:02 pm
I almost had my wife take me to the emergency room for fear of a heart attack, but the pain suddenly stopped after about three minutes. I decided to wait a day and call my cardiologist’s office for an opinion on what to do next. The nurse practitioner, who only a few weeks earlier had given me a thumbs-up at my annual check-up, didn’t seem worried because I didn’t have any shortness of breath or other symptoms, but she scheduled a precautionary nuclear stress test today. I had a stress test once before, so I was surprised to learn I couldn’t eat anything after midnight the night before. When I got to the office, I learned why — a nuclear stress test is different from the standard treadmill stress test. The doctor’s aide shot radioactive blood into my veins, which then traveled to my heart so they could get pictures of it. After the first set of pictures, I had to run on the treadmill until I felt like I was going to collapse (it didn’t take long for an out-of-shape, work-at-home journalist). Then I got to eat a snack before one more round of radioactive photography. That brings me to the Oreos I mentioned in the headline. When I returned to the waiting room to get the aforementioned snack, I was surprised to see snack-sized packages of Oreos as an option. I woke up Sunday morning thinking I was having a heart attack, and three days later, my cardiologist offered me fat- and sugar-laden cookies as a snack. Tell me how that makes sense. I ate Cheez-Its instead. They aren’t much healthier, but it just felt wrong to this enlightened redneck to eat Oreos at a heart-checking station. As for my heart, the aging kicker appears to be in good shape. I’ll have a follow-up appointment with my cardiologist next week, but I was told a doctor would be reviewing my heart snapshots today, and if anything required immediate attention, I would get a call. I never did. Filed under: Family and Food and Technology Comments: None |
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Posted on 12.15.09 by K. Daniel Glover @ 6:40 pm
Here is a touching holiday story from a Philadelphia-area diner: The City of Brotherly Love indeed. I suspect the mystery couple that started it all were rednecks because they appreciate simple but meaningful gestures. Filed under: Food and Holidays and Human Interest and Video Comments: None |
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Posted on 12.11.09 by K. Daniel Glover @ 9:45 am
We don’t want our children put on a government-approved diet of “spent hens” and other menu items that don’t even pass muster with the fast-food industry. The good news is that some unlucky members of Congress and their aides will be served a heaping helping of school lunches one day next week — ironically enough because the Agriculture Department thinks it is doing a great job feeding America’s schoolchildren. We’ll keep serving our kids lunches from Costco. The food there is a safer health bet. Filed under: Food and Government and Parenting and Why We Home-School Comments: None |
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Posted on 11.26.09 by K. Daniel Glover @ 4:39 pm
What Melissa said: “The ad wraps up the left’s disgust with America. Crappy tradition, crappy white family, crappy Thanksgiving, hypocritical Christians and, of course, animal hatred. Basically, the ad captures everything they hate about America in one ad.” I can’t wait to scarf down some leftover turkey inside one of Mom’s homemade rolls for a snack this evening. I’ll enjoy it even more after watching that ad. And for entertainment, maybe I’ll watch MSNBC’s lame attempt to embarrass enlightened redneck Sarah Palin during her appearance at a turkey farm last year. Filed under: Advertising and Culture and Family and Food and Holidays and Video Comments: None |
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Posted on 11.07.09 by K. Daniel Glover @ 3:31 pm
I’m watching the West Virginia-Louisville football game and just saw this Allstate commercial: “Uh, but hold the tartar sauce” — sounds like something I would say in a fancy restaurant. I love steak and am always tempted to order steak tartare until my wife reminds me that it’s beyond rare. It’s raw. Filed under: Advertising and Food and Just For Laughs and Sports and Video and West Virginia Comments: None |
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Posted on 10.31.09 by K. Daniel Glover @ 10:15 am
What a great name for a redneck restaurant! I’m going to have to find a good reason to drive West Virginia Route 2 between Point Pleasant and Huntington just so I can visit. Let me revise that statement: Visiting Hillbilly Hot Dogs is all the reason I need for the trip. Go to the blog of Charleston, W.Va.-based photographer Rick Lee for the rest of the photos, inside and outside the beautiful dive. (Hat tip to Don Surber) Filed under: Business and Food and Human Interest and People and Photography and Rednecks and Travel and West Virginia Comments: None |
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