Not On My Christmas List

Seeing red this Christmas?

According to recent headlines, it’s not because we’re already envisioning a chimney-impeding (red), jolly jelly-belly suit-bursting (red), toy-filled-sack-overflowing (red) Santa, but rather because we’re angry.

A recent study blames the Internet for why you sometimes go ballistic. 

Nineteen-year-old James Reynolds, on the other hand, in explaining why he and two others took metal baseball bats to the windows and mirrors of 89 vehicles in Puyallup, Washington he told police “it’s a good stress reliever,” according to court documents.

The “lookout” for the trio said Reynolds “has a lot of anger.”

Perhaps it’s hereditary.

“Captive great apes often exhibit behavioral signs of boredom, frustration and stress," says Fay Clark from the Royal Veterinary College's Centre for Animal Welfare.

A video clip, prepared by researchers from Duke University, show a chimp named Timi which, having lost a game for which Timi receives “a bland piece of cucumber rather than a preferred piece of banana,” reacts with what looks very much like the ape equivalent of a tantrum.”

Makes you wonder what would have happened had Timi received a chicken nugget instead of a cucumber slice.

Wonder no longer.

Kareem, 28, not necessarily related to Timi unless the latter is a pre-pre-pre-etc. relative, was accused by his 25-year-old sister this past week of eating her chicken nuggets without permission, which landed Kareem in jail for having kareemed (the Urban Dictionary says ‘kareemed’ is a horrible misspelling, evidently for careened) into his four-month-pregnant sibling causing her to fall to the floor, hitting the nightstand on the way.

The greater concern here of course in this food fight - or fight over food – is whether chicken nuggets actually qualify as food, much less food worth fighting over.

A couple of taste-testers, otherwise known as doctors at the University of Mississippi, were much in the news lately for having dissected two chicken nuggets and what they found under a microscope was not chicken, at least not predominantly. 

A cross-section of their findings is hyperlinked here but a nugget worth of parental advice before clucking, er clicking, to see what they found: don’t.

Here’s another food-don’t:

What first comes to mind when you hear ‘peanut butter’?

‘Jelly’ right?

It’s a kids’ song after all.  The chunky spread without fruit preserves is like Thanksgiving without apple pie; a biscuit without gravy; pork sans the beans. 

Peanut butter without jelly is simply un-American. 

And therein lays the problem.

A teacher in a Portland, Oregon school has suggested that eating or talking about peanut butter and jelly is probably racist.

A school that “is terrible academically” but is making news for sandwiches that inappropriately contain peanut butter and jelly would be viewed by most in academia as so much baloney.    

But elementary teacher Verenice Gutierrez is serious.

Think of “the Hispanic students, who might not eat sandwiches?” Gutierrez asked. “Another way would be to say: ‘Americans eat peanut butter and jelly, do you have anything like that?’ Let them tell you. Maybe they eat torta. Or pita.”

Or a burrito.

A bomb squad in Oklahoma City just days ago x-rayed a suspicious looking foil-wrapped package delivered to the station and found it to be but a taco de harina, or burrito, the wheat flour tortilla folded into a cylindrical (evidently bomb-like) shape to completely enclose a filling. 

What kind of filling was not disclosed.  Also not known was whether the meat slurry was turned over to the chicken nugget investigators for further microscopic tests as to determine whether the contents were reconstituted meat, emulsified meat, liquefied meat, or even if it was meat at all.

Here’s food for thought.  Rather than people stressing out over food contents, or taking out their anger on windshields, how ‘bout folks just chill?

Chill out is what a group of federal officials did this chilly month of November.  While you’re shaking here because of rage, anger, or you’re just plain cold, your taxpayer’s dollars are funding a trip for government-types to skip out to “the Virgin Islands in the name of protecting the world’s coral reef.”

While studying the underwater flora and fauna, the feds will be “surrounded by a lush green golf course and (staying in) rooms with rates that begin at $323 a night.”

The $74 meal per diem is not anticipated to include chicken nuggets and most certainly not peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  This is the Caribbean after all.

It’s enough to warm your heart.

Speaking of incensed, which comes from incendere, a relative of incinerate - “to set on fire” – that’s what pot activists (think incense) in Seattle will get to do on the first anniversary of legalizing weed in Washington.  The Seattle City Council “will permit a big pot party on the site of Seattle Center’s old Fun Forest amusement park.”

Maybe pot promoters can persuade the queen of pop – pot-smokin’ Lady Gaga – to donate some of her pee-perfume to help offset the permit pee, er fee. 

In any event, whether you’re pissed off, up in arms, down-right angry, hot under the collar, about to blow a gasket, just plain incensed, or otherwise seeing red, some advice in an article entitled “Wouldn’t it be nice to get a break from negativity?” by Bart Chilton:

“Let’s take a collective chill pill.”

Just settle down – ma in her kerchief, you in your cap – to a long winter’s nap which nap, by the way, a recent study reveals eliminates toxic wasted in mice and therefore crankiness in men.

There, the children nestled all snug in their beds, visions of sugar plums and the big fat guy in the red suit will fill your head - you know, the one with a list he’s checkin’ twice; the one who once again failed his weight-loss goals; the one thus stuck in the chimney which is why the smoke is pouring into the newly painted living room.

That’ll get your dander up.