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.”
No. And I can’t tell them, even if they are directly involved.
I can appreciate Mr. ColdOne’s wishes. I think I would feel the same way.
I couldn’t.
I nervously laughed it off as the deliriums of a wandering mind.
Fevered musings, wild imagination, excetera.
If time travel were possible, I would go back and change that day regardless of the consequences to myself.
Ouch, yes.
If you can, it may be possible to melt the snow and thaw the ground using kerosene or diesel, whichever is cheaper.
But you need to thaw a wider area than you will be digging.
But the flipside is that it takes forever to do without having flaming floating liquid flow through the yard.
[MAPP gas burns-o-matic cylinders help, but are impractical as they are small and expensive.]
Well then, what’s the use of it?
If it's creepy I don't want to see it. But I have recovered (somewhat) scanned faded materials using the GIMP (think Photoshop) and use of brightness curves.
Darn nuisance in my experience.
There’s a fair chance that beneath all that snow the earth has been warming a bit. Snow is a good insulator.
Consider doing a test dig to check the soil conditions.
Another possibility, after setting up a temporary morgue in the garage or shed, is to make a “cold frame” as one would for setting out plants.
With any sunshine at all, the glass and insulated temporary structure will warm the soil enough to get the job done. I have a lot of pets keeping long watch on the hillside.
If you have a color scanner that is big enough for the sketch, you can tinker with the color palette after a scan, to minimize the discolorations.
I managed to salvage a document with a terrible ink-stain in that manner.
The scanner needs some help.
I’ll have to use the missus scanner and her laptop if she’ll let me.
Dunno. I didn’t ask for it. But you can imagine how painful it is for me to know and be helpless. Worse yet, when it happens, I fall into a very deep sleep. No matter where I am. I’ve even done it behind the wheel of a vehicle.
If I knew something dire would happen to you, would you want me to tell you? Knowing it was inevitable?
Off to bed.
G’night den!
Pleasant dreams, may no gakthraggit bother you while you dream.
A neighbor called said she would help in the morning. So the plan is to try to bury her tomorrow. Thanks for the melting idea. We snow blow our yard and the sun hits it every morning the area we have picked out. No power or septic lines either.
If you do use the melt method, keep in mind you will have burned dirt that won’t grow grass worth beans for awhile unless ou mix in some stuff from a garden shop.
The melt will burn the nutrients off and leave sterilized bits behind.
So come spring you’ll have to mix in various stuff and reseed the grass, but at this point with frozen ground you’ll be doing the reseeding in spring anyway after digging no matter what.
Not certain the ground composition near you, so you’d have ot check with the garden shop for what you’d need.
Thanks. No lawn.
Ah, you don’t have to worry about burned dirt then.
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