There’s Some Lovely Filth Down Here!

This is going to be a weird day.

It already started out weird. I got a comment from a guy claiming to work for King Arthur Flour. Apparently they have a very limited sense of humor about their marketing approach. They sent me a junk email advertising a recipe for “doughnuts without frying,” and I wrote a short post saying what a disgraceful and disturbing idea that was. The comment I received was sincerely defensive. I think maybe somebody needs a little time away from the mill.

It’s a bad sign when an executive runs around defending his company in blog comments. Especially when he defends the company from humor instead of serious criticism.

To [probably] misquote Steve Martin in My Blue Heaven, “Everybody thinks they have a sense of humor, but they don’t, really.” A person who laughs when he sees other people fall down thinks he has a sense of humor. But if he can’t take or even detect a joke, he really doesn’t. A person who has a sense of humor laughs when he, himself, falls down.

It’s a wonderful thing. Humor takes the most miserable moments in life and turns them into causes for celebration. It’s bizarre, if you think about it. Think about all those home videos of ruined weddings. The cake falls over. A bird poops on the bride. Whatever. If the people in the video have a sense of humor, they break up. It’s the greatest thing they’ve ever seen. They all want a copy of the video. If they have no sense of humor, it’s a horror that will be relived for 50 years. And as long as she lives, the bride will use it to make life hell for those around her. It will form the basis for her permanent vendetta against fate. It will be her excuse for distributing misery like a runaway manure spreader. A lot of women would give anything for an excuse like that.

For what it’s worth, I use King Arthur flour. If I didn’t think they made good products, I would not be on their junk email list. They make a strange pizza blend which is pretty good, but it’s unavailable except at mail-order prices, so I only bought one bag. It’s long gone. I don’t know if their bread flour is any better than anyone else’s. I have made tons of pizzas for test purposes, and I have not noticed a difference I could put my finger on, but I got in the habit of buying King Arthur for the reputation, so I still have it in the kitchen. I made Texas toast with it last week, and Mike says he’s still in withdrawal. My favorite pizza flour, however, is all-purpose biscuit flour from Gold Medal or Pillsbury. Whatever is cheapest. Anything low in protein, with no leavening. I bought 00 flour, but I used it so rarely, the bugs got it.

Baked doughnuts are an abomination, like soy milk. I stand by that. A baked doughnut is a cupcake with a hole. Okay, sure, I have probably eaten baked doughnuts. I’m pretty sure Entenmann’s faux-chocolate doughnuts are baked. I’ve eaten them, but I have no illusions about what I’m getting. Frying rocks. Especially when you use a particularly tasty fat, like coconut oil.

And–this will make the King Arthur people even madder–the best doughnuts are full of potato starch, which cuts way down on the flour content. Oh well.

The concept of baking things like doughnuts in order to make them healthier is fairly ludicrous. The fat is the least harmful thing in a doughnut. The huge pile of refined carbs that shoot into your bloodstream as glucose ten minutes after you eat…that’s the problem. That and the calorie load. If I had to choose between giving up refined carbs and giving up healthy, versatile, delicious saturated fats, I’d drop the carbs in a heartbeat. Out of fear, more than anything else. You can’t jam yourself full of flour, rice, potatoes, and sugar all the time and expect to be healthy. If you take those things out of your diet, the fats pretty much cease to be harmful. Look up homocysteine.

That reminds me; I have to get to McDonald’s soon so I can get my weekly McBiscuit, dripping with salty grease.

The other weird thing about today is that I have to run down to the warehouse, put a new padlock on it, and figure out what to do with all the junk. If I’m going to have a Craigslist sale, I have to find out what I have and make a list. And I need to make sure that sweet Genie Superlift is safe.

I should take more photos. What do you do with a light globe two feet across? Surely someone will want it. It would be a great planter.

What am I going to do with a ten-foot-long workbench? Even if I get it out of the warehouse, it’s not the kind of thing you can just throw out. Maybe I can bust it up with a crowbar.

Dang, the deadline is drawing near. I better hit the drive-through.