Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Priests On Fire, Chip Huts, and Cheese Boxes

There's a guy in our office who is the standard-bearer for ultra-conservative politics. I walked past his office today and saw that his feet were up on his desk and he was sound asleep.

Thirty minutes later, I went back by and he was still asleep.

I assume he's hibernating until the neo-cons come back into power.

I don't know if it's possible to digress right from the begining of a post, but I just did.

The reason that my job tends to be so interesting on a daily basis is because I have conversations with my boss that are so outside the normal realm of discussion. For this planet.

Today, he posed an ethical question, which I extended until we got here: if a priest who was a known serial child molester (and had managed to go unpunished) moved in next door, and a propane tank exploded in his front yard and set him on fire, and you saw, what would you do?

Would you rush ouside with a fire extinguisher? Would you dial 911 to summon the fire department?

Or, perhaps, would you do nothing?

Since this is a hypothetical, you're given 100% certainty that the priest is, in fact, a serial child molester.

Here's an even stickier variation: you see a man beating the priest with a baseball bat in the front yard, and you recognize the man as the father of one of the children the priest molested.

Again, what do you do? Do you go to the priest's aid and try to stop the attack? Do you call 911?

Or do you make popcorn?

How those questions are answered says all kinds of things about who we are and what we believe.

I also found out about chip huts today from someone who grew up in Canada.

Why has no one ever told me about these things?

If you're from the South or West and haven't heard of a chip hut, it's basically a mobile french fry truck. That's all they sell, and they offer a wide varity of condiments to go with the fries, including white vinegar (um, yuck), which is very popular in Canada.

We have snack trucks down here that have frying equipment and go to construction sites at break and lunch time, but they offer a wide variety of foods. We do not have trucks solely dedicated to french fries. And that seems wrong.

Sick and wrong.

Yesterday, Eli 5.8 and I went to lunch with a friend of mine, and she said something you don't hear every day: "He invented a cheese box."

What?

Cheese boxes.

Cheese gets shipped in boxes that hold 800 lb. blocks, apparently.

Yes, I know. You just bought one at Costco last week.

These containers are not reusable, so they generate a tremendous amount of both cost and waste.

Except someone she knows invented a reusable cheese box. All they have to do is go through the equivalent of an industrial-sized dishwasher and they're good to go.

This container is patented, but I am forbidden (by her) to give you any of the arcane technical details of its construction.

In the rarified world of cheese boxes, though, it has apparently been certified as "bad ass."

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