@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @@@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 08/27/99 -- Vol. 18, No. 9
Table of Contents
Chair/Librarian: Mark Leeper, 732-817-5619, mleeper@lucent.com Factotum: Evelyn Leeper, 732-332-6218, eleeper@lucent.com Distinguished Heinlein Apologist: Rob Mitchell, robmitchell@lucent.com HO Chair Emeritus: John Jetzt, jetzt@lucent.com HO Librarian Emeritus: Nick Sauer, njs@lucent.com Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper. All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
Last week I was talking about sausaging, the grinding up and form fitting of materials to make them a substitute for the real thing. Meatloaf is another example. Here you have a piece of meat fitted to a baking pan. Real meat does not come in bricks. Someone in my college got sick eating the dining commons meatloaf. She had no problems with meat she knew of, but she was allergic to peanut butter. It turns out the staff put a lot of peanut butter as extender into the meatloaf without telling anybody. This poor woman was one of the first victims of rampant sausaging in America.
That last hot dog you ate might have been made of the finest cuts of meat. Or it could have pig snouts. Hot dogs often are made with pig snouts and feet. Do you really want to eat that? But you can make 10,000 hot dogs, all almost identical. That is true of any sausage.
Then there is the related issue of sharing. We get nice loaves of bread at our local warehouse store, but they have one problem. They have only one end slice. The company saves money by making a double-length loaf. They then cut it down the middle and sell it as two loaves. On the outset there seems to be no problem with this until you realize you have no control over with whom you are sharing your loaf of bread. Some strangers are eating the other half of YOUR loaf. Who knows if they are even taking care of it? They could spit on it for all you know. This is not sausaging, per se, but sausaging only exacerbates the problem. Who knows how many people it introduces into the equation.
Orange juice is a problem. We like to get the orange juice with lots of pulp. The same company sells orange juice with no pulp. What I demand to know is whether the pulp that comes with my orange juice really from the right oranges. Am I getting somebody else's pulp that they just did not want? I want pulp in my juice, but I want my own pulp, not someone else's.
Did you know they grind up real cheese to make processed cheese? What does that tell you?
Now a lot of you think I am talking about only food, but that just is not so. Wood is a continuous product. If you want a really large and wide sheet you have to join several pieces together, turning a continuous product into one that is partially sausaged. But plastic is sausage from the beginning. It is made in vats. It is poured to form it. Of course particleboard is sausage material from the very beginning also.
So where is all this going? Well, I will explain that in the conclusion next week. [-mrl]
Mark Leeper
HO 1K-644 732-817-5619
mleeper@lucent.com
Democracy is a process by which the people are free
to choose who will get the blame.
-- Laurence J. Peter