Posted on 02/26/2011 1:38:34 PM PST by Squawk 8888
I’m not the wiener peeler, I’m the wiener peeler’s son, And I’m only peeling wieners, ‘Til the wiener peeler comes.
I apologize to pheasant pluckers’ sons everywhere for stealing their tongue-twister.
But who can resist when my Internet fairy, Irene, drops this job ad on my desk? “Get out your resume,” she purrs.
I pause in processing Moonlight Lady submissions, and take a boo.
“Full-time Wiener Peeler,” says the ad.
Wazzat? I ask. A red-hot stripper?
“No. As in weenie. It’s got you written all over it, ” says Irene, and she flutters off.
Well, I’m getting sick of grinding out daily columns like hamburger. So I read on.
“Opportunity. Excitement. Teamwork. Respect.
“At Maple Leaf Foods we are committed to attracting, rewarding and retaining talented people who are passionate about making a positive impact in their professional and personal lives every day.”
A noble mission. What better way to pursue it than as a bona fide full-time professional wiener peeler. The opening is at Maple Leafs’ hotdog plant in Hamilton.
Imagine the awe when you tell fellow partiers your occupation.
Picture the lineup of schools recruiting for career days.
The teachers may giggle, but the kids will scream for free samples.
You’re on Price Is Right and Drew Carey says, “What d’ya do for a living up in Canada, Mikey?”
I peel wieners, Drew.
“Good for you. Wiener peeler. Hmmm. reminds me, folks, get your pets spayed or neutered.”
Anyway, I check around and find yet another job opening at Maple Leaf. Wiener stuffer. Hit it ...
I’m not the wiener stuffer
I’m the wiener stuffer’s son
I’m only stuffing ...
(Ed. note: Stop that, you hotdogger, or we’ll make you pose for a picture like Gilles Duceppe in the silly hairnet.)
NO! Not that! I’ll do anything, boss.
The photo of Duceppe in a cheese factory was a body blow to the Bloc. He looked like a weenie. Un chien chaud. Un hotdog.
I wonder. How do wiener peelers and stuffers look? All dressed?
I call Linda Smith at Maple Leaf Foods and ask: What company wit came up with those job titles?
“They’re in the union contract,” she says. “They’re really a kind of food-processing operator.”
So machines do the actual stuffing and peeling. Thank God. I can’t imagine sitting there all day, fingers numb, going, “hundred thousand and one weenies, hundred thousand and two weenies, hundred thousand and ...”
The wiener stuffer fills the tubular collagen casings with hot dog sludge. Since you asked, the ooze typically comprises mechanically separated chicken, pork, beef, water, wheat gluten, salt, sodium phosphate, spice, dextrose, corn syrup solids, sodium erythorbate, garlic powder, onion powder, sodium nitrite and smoke.
If you need to ask what mechanically separated chicken is, don’t.
Or go eat a veggie burger.
Once the dogs have been divided and smoked and solidified, the wiener peeler removes the casings.
The stuffer and peeler look like hazmat officials or Apollo astronauts.
They wear blue rubber and plastic head to toe, with hairnet, hardhats and mask. Plus earmuffs. Yes. All those dogs barking.
The hirings, says Smith, are to gear up for summer, when 60% of wieners are sold.
What a great job, eh?
I assume you get to take home any bent, twisted or otherwise defective wieners.
And you’d be in the pantheon of careers with chicken sexer, pet food tester, bounty hunter, odor reader, fortune cookie writer, golf ball diver and newspaper hack.
Plus, you’re wrapped in a soft, warm union. The Brotherhood of Bun Fillers (BBF), or whatever it’s called.
I can picture the negotiations:
“We want a raise, a longer lunch, three weeks holiday, dental coverage and pension improvements.
“But hold the mustard.”
My kid thought something bad was going to happen on the 11th. He attributed the oddness of being right to Darksheare, not to his fine nully genes...
Thanks!
You have a treat in store.
Dr. Robert Bussard, (the originator of the Bussard Fusion Ram-Jet concept), gave a presentation at Google on the concept of electro-static (as opposed to electromagnetic or inertial) confinement of fusion products in a reactor based on Philo Farnsworth's "Fusor" reactor of the late 'fifties.
Yeah, that's right.
Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of electronic television, was producing fusion in a modified electronic tube in the late fifties.
Bussard's innovation was to replace the electrical grid components with magnetic ones, so that electrons could be induced to stay in the circuit.
He gives a good description of why electromagnetic confinement has been a chimera, forever eluding our grasp. It seeks to confine plasma with magnetic fields, but the plasma is drawn to the walls of the vessel.
In electrostatic confinement, a virtual cage of electrons is built to house loose positive ions such as protons and boron eleven ions that oscillate back and forth inside the cage, occasionally colliding.
If the collision is head-on enough, and energetic enough, fusion results.
Energy can be captured from the flying helium ions by magnetic fields, and the potential for a compact and energetic reactor is enormous.
Bussard thought that we could make space ships fly with it!
NnBob, you're losing me here. The vacuum tube as we knew it (I still have a 1960s design manual for many dozens if not hundreds of such, and have designed circuits with it) is an electrostatic device. I can understand using the same "production" technology to create an electromagnetic device, as hinted in "Bussard's invention," but then the focus reverts to electrostatic techniques.
My best guess it that "Bussard's invention" is a combination, no?
First, forget about “temperature” in regard to fusing ions. It’s all about collision speed.
One way to talk about how fast ions move about is to describe their “temperature”. But it’s illusory.
More realistic is to think about how you can contain fast moving ions and make them collide. They respond to electrical and magnetic fields, don’t they?
So build a big electronic tube. A vacuum tube. Because it has a vacuum inside, see?
But make it, oh, two meters in diagonal measure. Now, no one has made one that big yet, but I have no idea why not.
Dr. Bussard has calculated that the power scales with the seventh power of the dimensions, so if his small “wiffle-ball” contraptions were producing neutrons, a big reactor should work even better.
I guess it’s the expense. You need a good vacuum, and he was working with superconducting magnets, and then you need ion injectors and measuring instruments and geeky scientists that need to be fed and all that. So I guess it’s expensive.
But it is an elegant design!
A cloud of electrons forms inside the magnetic grid of the spherical tube. Then positive ions are injected into the center of that cloud, where electrostatic forces keep them trapped.
With me so far?
Oscillations will build up, as the ions move around inside the trap. After all, they are technically a plasma, (with a tremendously high “temperature”).
The positive ions will collide with each other, and bounce apart. Then they’ll collide again, and again.
If we can build a big enough prison, they’ll definitely go stir crazy, and will get agitated enough to do the one thing that will get them out — change!
They’ll fuse, releasing incredible energy, and rocketing past the puny electrostatic barriers, they’ll impinge upon the walls of the vessel or get mired in its magnetic traps, and surrender their great energy.
To make electricity. Maybe directly, through cutting across magnetic coils.
Bussard said, when they fly out, you could just let them continue on into free space outside your rocket ship, propelling it with very little loss of mass.
Your vacuum tube needs vacuum, you know. Outer space is full of it.
I wonder why they spell vacuum with two u. I thought that is why they invented the w. Kinda like that double s thing in German. ß
It’s a word that never got finished spelling.
It just started out “V A C U um ...”, when the guy forgot the rest of it.
A, e, i , o, u and sometimes y and double u...
But if you spell it VACWM, then it’s Welsh instead of Latin.
Joining cwm and crwth as English words using w as a vowel.
Now name two more English words with uu in ‘em...
gwagfa
I can only think of “muu-muu”, the Hawaiian style of dress.
You mean like my head, after too much time without sleep?
WOW! You’ve added one to my list!
Continuum
Vacuum
Residuum
(Everything, nothing and anything left over)...
“Frank”s are often like that. Lord only knows what happens to them if they eat too many hot dogs.
Reminds me of the concise restatement of the Laws of Thermodynamics; " 1. You can't win. 2. You can't break even. 3. You can't get out of the game."
!
8<)
If Franks eat too many wieners, they throw up.
arruugah
the official US Marine Corps cheer (The Washington Post, 5 June 1986);
congruum
A mathematical term. Consider the pair of equations to be solved for integers (x,y,z,k):
x2 + k = y2
x2 - k = z2
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