I am currently trying to convince somebody that it was created in the 1950s, originally intended to be stocked in fallout shelters where it would provide enough calories to allow people to exist for the twenty-odd years until it was safe to come out.
I haven’t heard about any revival of tossing rice at weddings.
larK: Interesting take. I thought the article pretty much aligned with what Andréa was saying, since the bottom line is “Don’t go to the park and feed the birds a bunch of bread. It’s not good for them, and will fill them up without providing much nutrition.”
(Full disclosure: I actually looked up the article yesterday, after reading Andréa’s comment, since I was a little dubious about what she was saying. It doesn’t match up 100% with what she said, but I thought the basic bottom line was pretty much the same.)
Mitch4: It’s important not to throw rice at weddings because Little Mikey from that Life commercial will eat it, and it’s not good for him to eat food off the ground.
@ WW – There is a very funny set of instructions about “How to Pill a Cat”, which starts off with “insert pill into the cat’s mouth”, and escalates through a dozen or so steps, including things like “retrieve pill from under couch”, or “apply iodine and bandaids to scratches”. The version I remembered finished off with a single step about “How to Pill a Dog” (“wrap pill in bologna and throw in the general vicinity of the dog’s head”), but when I described the list to my mom, she responded with a “real world” solution that some friends had used for “How to Pill a Baby” (“leave pill on the floor, two feet in front of the crawling baby”).
Kilby: Thanks, even knowing the general idea ahead of time, “How to Pill a Cat” was pretty good!
larK I notice the “Connoisseur” nameplate in the middle Peanuts. It brings back an animated cartoon character who enjoyed saying that word but struggled to pronounce it . I can’t quite pin down who it was, but do think it was a big-cat species. Could it be the Pink Panther itself? If not, what other leopard or panther would that be?
Probably Snagglepuss.
@ Mitch4 – It definitely wasn’t the Pink Panther. There are only a very few cartoons in which he speaks, and in those he has a fairly “high class” British accent. A mispronunciation gag would not fit with that at all.
Oh thanks, Snagglepuss sounds right!
Exit, stage left!
The “Smithsonian Magazine” just re-released an article about candy corn in their e-mail newsletter.
“It was invented in the 1880s by a man named George Renninger . . .”
I will remember that for the rest of my life, as my last name is Denninger ‘-)
“Well, I like me.”
WAY-AFTER-HALLOWEEN CANDY CORN COMIC . . .

Is it too late (or too early) for a pumpkin [pie] spice joke? No? Good, ’cause here ’tis . . .
