Category / CIDU altho there is no joke to get just bits to identify or explain

by zbicyclist

Something Fishy

JMcAndrew sends this in: “I don’t ever eat them myself but is this an actual problem that people who do eat sardines encounter? Sardines have tiny bones so I don’t think people are using them for sandwiches either.”

Your editor remembers his father-in-law, of Norwegian ancestry, eating sardines on toast regularly. He lived to be 95 years old, so perhaps the calcium from all those sardine bones kept his bones strong. But I don’t recall problems with the sardines sliding out.

This also leads to a consideration of what can go well in a peanut butter sandwich. Jellies and jams for sure. Marmalade and honey are close relatives. Raisins are also a sweet touch. Peanut butter and dill pickle chips, or peanut butter and sauerkraut are good for a savory change of pace. I’ve never tried a peanut butter and sardine sandwich. Any other nominees?

by EditorM

Cat and Girl and Shoes and Plums

Cat and Girl have picked two nice and juicy little literary targets to bedevil!

Or actually, one literary target and one literary-adjacent (and probably apocryphal) anecdote. It’s probably fun, if not precisely funny, that our characters are not directly challenging the truth or the reputed depth of the anecdote, nor directly mocking it, but blithely misunderstanding it and spinning their own absurd background explanations. Which maybe does the job of a take-down without showing attitude!

What do our readers think of these two iconic stories? (Oh, of course first someone must identify them.)

Below the break, some prior responses to one of them! And the quick Snopes link for the fake. (I’m not sure the Page Break tool will work as intended. If not, don’t panic, the additional content is still there and we will just pop it out if needed.) (Update: using the Details tool instead. This seems to work better. But the “Don’t Panic” advice still holds, of course.)

Open for spoiler-ish notes!

The Hemingway authorship of the baby shoes “six-word story” is debunked at Snopes.

Here at Poets.org is the plain text of the William Carlos Williams notorious plums poem, “This is Just to Say”.

Probably the best-known response by an established poet is “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams” by Kenneth Koch. Here is a personal blog post (responding to a This American Life episode), giving the original, the Koch, and another variation, written by a sixth-grader.


Here from New York Magazine (Intelligencer), an article “This Is Just to Say I Have Written a Blog Post Explaining the Icebox-Plum Meme” , showing a series of responses or variations in the form of Tweets, from when that was a thing.