Josh Bell Loves Pete’s Pride Pink Ribbon Pork Fritters

Okay, not really.  I mean, Josh would probably like them, but there is no such thing.  Dang it.  Pete’s Pride is totally missing out on some mad marketing AND alliteration opportunities.

As you guys surely know by now, I’m a big nerd who gets a whole lot of amusement out of perusing the search engine terms people have used to find this blog.  Some things are to be expected, especially since we’re nearing October, like the current top three for the past 30 days: “pink ribbon cake pan”, “pink ribbon cake”, and “pink ribbon”.  But the 4^th item on the list is a little puzzling to me—Richard Simmons.  Really?  Is October Richard Simmons Awareness Month, too?  Wonder what color the ribbon is for that one.  Is sequined a color?  Richard Simmons beat out the perpetual favorite “bald girlfriend” (I’m pretty sure that I really, really don’t want to know the motivation behind that one) and the believe it or not “pork fritter” is way down the list at number 8.  Pork fritter fans need not worry, however, because in the all time search engine term standings, the humble pork fritter holds 3 of the top 5 slots.

And speaking of pork fritter fans…if you’ve been keeping up on the comments, you know that our friend Nanine is a transplanted Hoosier, living in Texas, who has been searching for Pete’s Pride Pork Fritters to no avail.  Of course, since we ARE pretty high on the google results, she ended up here, and asked if I knew who makes Pete’s Pride.  I didn’t, but I do now.  I don’t know why I was even at all surprised to learn that Pete’s Pride Pork Fritters are manufactured by Al Pete Meats (recently acquired by Monogram Foods) in none other than Muncie, Indiana.   Why of course they are!  Where else?  So, Nanine, I hope this helps you in your quest.  Keep us posted—we love having an excuse to write about pork fritters. (We also love referring to ourselves in the first person plural.)

Now back to those searches.  It gives me a chuckle every time someone gets here from googling “Josh Bell poet” or some other variation.  If you recall, my old friend Josh has the distinct misfortune of sharing his name with another extremely famous Josh from Indiana.  Hence, folks looking for my friend must include poetry/poem/poet in their search.  However, like other violin-toting super villains, the fantastically famous Joshua Bell will stop at nothing in his quest to squash my dear Josh like a bug—going so far as to title one of his albums “Poeme”.  Really, can there be any other explanation for this?  So, it was especially amusing to me when some obviously determined fan of my Josh recently got here by searching “josh bell poetry or poem or poet not violinist”.   Take that, you fancy fiddler.

This weekend is the local Race for the Cure.  Yes, I’m going.  No, I’m probably not doing the survivor parade.  Wearing the pink shirt is about as much as you can expect from me.  And Thursday is the first day of October, so get those Pink Ribbon Overload pictures to me.  I’ll be starting off the month with one of my own finds and the story of how it came into my possession.  That’s right, I actually own this one, but even that’s not the whole story, so check back with me on Thursday afternoon to get the scoop.

Breath Cancer

As you guys know, I like to keep tabs on the Google search engine terms that land people on my blog.  It’s not that I’m all about the marketing or anything like that.  I’m not sitting around trying to figure out what keywords to use in order to generate the maximum amount of traffic.  Although, I do get immense pleasure out of being high up on the search results for Pete’s Pride Pork Fritters, and have been known to work a pork fritter reference randomly into just about any post.  This serves a dual purpose, by both bolstering my Pete’s Pride position on Google, and allowing an atrocious amount of alliteration.  Heh heh.  I am nothing if not and incorrigible word nerd.  But at least as amusing to me as the Pete’s Pride Pork Fritter thing, (score!  I just snuck in another one!) are some of the bizarre phrases that people Google in order to end up here. 

 Included on the list of recent searches was one for “breath cancer black rollerskates”.  Breath.  Cancer.  Now I’m not sure if this was merely a typo, or perhaps this person has a speech impediment.  I figure, I write like I talk, so why shouldn’t they, right?  Ah, but I suppose in that case they would have searched for “breath canther black roller thkates”.  So, okay, maybe that’s not what was going on with this one.  Maybe they really were searching for breath cancer roller skates (in black, please, because if breath cancer could be seen, it would most certainly be black or at least very very dark green).

 I’ve never heard of breath cancer before, but I’m by no means an expert on such things.  And, if it exists, why it sure would explain the halitosis some folks have.  Oh, snap, do you think my dog has breath cancer?  I bet there’s a special day for that, too.  National Canine Breath Cancer Survivors Day—a holiday that’s as much for those of us who have survived an encounter with our dog’s breath, as it is for the furry survivors themselves. You know, I seem to remember seeing breast cancer awareness kitty litter—how ironic would it be if that were Canine Breath Cancer awareness kitty litter?  Huh? That’d be a whole lot like lung cancer awareness Marlboros.  Maybe that’s why I’ve never seen it.

I Fed Josh Bell and He Liked It—the Taste of Raspberry Pastry.

Some people went to school with somebody who later became famous.  Or they have famous ancestors like John Hancock or Jesse James.  Options like that for me have pretty much been limited to the fact that Alfalfa from the Little Rascals was my grandma’s cousin.  And according to my grandma, after he became famous, he came to visit and tore up the family bicycle riding it on the railroad tracks.  Yeah, that’s pretty much the whole story.  Wow.  Aren’t you glad you know me? You want my autograph, don’t ya?

 But, folks I’m happy to report that I no longer have to rely on good ol’ Alfalfa to fulfill my famous-person-knowing needs.  That’s because one of my old friends is officially famous now.  In fact you may have even heard of him.  His name is Josh Bell.  Uh, no.  Not the violinist.  Yeah, I know, that would be very cool, too. Especially since I’ve harbored a secret crush on Joshua Bell the violinist since the time that I met him when he played with the Terre Haute Symphony Orchestra in approximately 1985.

That whole violinist thing has long plagued my friend.  Yes, much to his chagrin, they share even their middle name.  Hard to make a name for yourself when somebody else has already made a name for themselves with your name.

 However, in spite of such adversity, my Josh Bell has still managed to make a name for himself.  In the realm of poetry.  Indeed he’s a published author.  You’re impressed, aren’t you?  Is that better than Alfalfa or what?  And get this—he’s so stinkin’ fancy that he lives in New York City.  (All together now: NEEW YOORK CITY!!) And teaches at Columbia University.  You’d think that would make my Josh Bell-The-Poet too good to come home to visit, or that he’d be so busy buying black turtlenecks, and pipe tobacco and just generally being a cliché that he wouldn’t have time to hang with The Little People anymore.  (The Little People being me, not midgets, but I’m sure that he still manages to have time for both of us.  Generous as he is.)  Fortunately for me and my need to have a name to drop, however, that’s not the case.

 In fact, this past weekend I had the pleasure of spending some quality time with Not-the-violinist-Josh Bell when he came out for dinner.  And I told him, that just as my blog is number two on the google results when you search for Pete’s Pride Pork Fritters, so too, it would soon be one of the top destinations for folks searching for Josh Bell-The-Poet.  And he said, “Great!  I love pork fritters!”  (I know, it’s like every word from his poetic lips is the very nectar of the gods, huh?  Amazing.)  

So, while I’m sure this post won’t do much to promote whatever mystique Josh Bell: The Poet may be cultivating, I hope the fact that I make a killer black raspberry pie will guarantee that he doesn’t dump me to hang out with the midgets.  Or come back to break my bicycle.

Cup Holders

In response to my last post, reader Pam suggested that instead of avoiding holding anything in my hand that might be a danger to The Noob, perhaps I should just own the situation, so to speak. Specifically, Pam suggested that I get a cup holder for my noob. That’s great, Pam! Because you have hit upon one of the things that I love the most—cup holders.

Yes, as a chronic consumer of beverages, I think cup holders are great. They’re right up there with mayonnaise, and pork fritters, and roller skates, and canoes. So, you can imagine how excited I was when, on a recent trip to Gander Mountain (it’s an outdoors store, for those of you who may not know) I found a canoe WITH CUP HOLDERS! I’m pretty sure that this thing must have been contructed by God, in heaven, just for me.  But, unfortuately, Gander Mountain thinks I need to give them money for it.  Believe it or not, they want more for it than Panera wants for the infamous Breast Cancer Bagel.  No, really, they do.  So, I did not bring the cup holder canoe home. 

Also more expensive than the Breast Cancer Bagel was the Breast Cancer Kayak at Gander.  Seriously.  I saw two of these things.  And they are totally, and completely PINK.  Now, as much as I like to avoid all the pink ribbon stuff, a thought occurred to me.  How many kayaking breast cancer survivors can there possibly be in The Haute?  Yeah, I’m thinking not too many.  So, I can potentially see a future where the Breast Cancer Kayak is on clearance. 

Uh-oh. 

At what point does my love of a bargain overcome my loathing of the pink?  I’m thinking no less than 50% off.  Yeah, I’m pretty sure Komen could buy my kayaking soul for that amount.  Who knows, I might even take it up to Geist and take on the dragon boat racers.

Tasty Thursday: You Don’t Know Fat

It’s always amusing to me when the government decides to tell us something about ourselves that we already know.  This condescension usually follows some expensive study or precedes some expensive program, paid for by our tax dollars.  So, today I saw the following headline, and I couldn’t help but share it with you: Massachusetts Proposes Weighing, Measuring Students.  It seems the state government there is concerned about rising obesity, and part of their plan to combat this “includes height and weight measurements for all public school first-, fourth-, seventh-, and 10th-graders, to determine whether they are overweight. Results would be sent home to parents along with diet and exercise recommendations.”

 Oh. Heck. No.  Couple of thoughts here.

 Okay, first of all, in this strained economy, can I get a show of hands from those who think that this is something we need to be spending money on?  I mean, come on, who doesn’t know if their kid is fat?  Myrtle doesn’t need the school weighing and measuring her little Bubba Jack—she’s the one who has to keep his portly behind suited up in husky sizes.  Second of all, while this might be welcomed with open arms in Massachusetts, I guarantee you it would never fly in Terre Haute, Indiana, where the motto is “If you want my breaded tenderloin, you’ll have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands.”   In The Haute, parents would be like, “Ain’t nobody gonna tell me what to feed MY kid!  Why, if Pete’s Pride pork fritters and RC Cola were good enough for me, then doggone it, they’re good enough for—hey, you gonna eat that?” Thirdly, this type of thing would only serve as something for kids to rebel against.  And can you imagine the peer pressure? “Come on, Harvey, all the cool kids are eating cheese fries.”  Poor healthy Harvey’d be gettin’ his butt kicked on the playground for packin’ rice cakes in his lunch.  How sad is that?

 Besides, I have a hard time believing that those east coast kids are really all that chunky anyway.  At least compared to the kids here in the Midwest.  While New England kids are growing up on seafood, and, well, whatever else it is they eat over there, young Hoosiers are busy giving the Chinese buffet a run for its money.  In fact, I bet if Massachusetts compared their fat kids to our fat kids, they’d find that they are sorely lacking in the cellulite department. 

 Amateurs.  Crying wolf over there with your “fat” kids.  We’ll show you some fat kids—just as soon as we get done eatin’.

Looking for Hair Tongs in All the Wrong Places

And now it’s time for another look at those crazy search engine terms.  You know, the ones people are apparently googling that somehow cause them to end up here.  I wasn’t planning to write about them again so soon, but they’ve just been so doggone funny lately, that I had made a mental note to write about it in the near future.  But not quite yet.

That is, until I glanced at them this morning.  And when I saw that someone had gotten to my blog by searching the phrase “how to blow dry hair after mastectomy” I thought to myself, “Okay, that’s it, I’ve got to blog this today.  Pray tell, o searcher of this phrase, are you wondering how to go about blow drying your copious chest hair?  Has Tom Selleck had a recent mastectomy? Just curious.

And then there’s this gem: “does richard simmons have breast implant”  Gee, I know I’ve got Richard Simmons hair, but I never realized I was going to have a boob just like his, too.  Yay me.  I draw the line at sequined tank tops and stripey short-shorts, however.  So, if you ever see me looking like this, it’s time for an intervention.

Believe it or not, we haven’t had a pork fritter search in about 5 days.  We have, however, had a search for the Spelterville Inn, which is almost the same thing since, as everyone knows, it’s home of the tenderloin the size of Rhode Island.

Then there are the cryptic phrases, “bald people doomed” and “tiny hair tongs”.  Gee, I don’t even know what to say about those two, except to wonder if the tongs are for grasping tiny hair, or if they are actually made of hair.  Are the tongs tiny, or are they normal sized but constructed from tiny hairs.  And finally, was the author really searching for tweezers?  Perhaps she has chemo brain and can’t remember what they’re called.  “What are those things that you use to pluck your eyebrows?  I can’t think of what they’re called, but they look like tiny tongs…” 

Of course, on any given day, some lame-o ends up here after searching for things like “swim suite show boob no top” or “bathing suit boobs” or “little boobs water park”.  Okay, first of all, you pervs, the least you could do is learn to freakin’ spell suit.  As in swim SUIT.  Not suite.  Which is an entirely different thing altogether.  Second of all, I bet you were about 31 flavors of disappointed when you got here and saw that the closest thing I had to a boob shot was a picture of a fake boob with a face.  Serves you right.  I hope your search for water park boobs landed you right smack on this entry, where the sight of Gertrude and Margaret in mastectomy suits left you blinded, and scarred for life.

Pork Fritter Popularity

It’s always interesting, and sometimes downright disturbing, to me to see the search engine terms folks have used to find this blog.  As I’ve mentioned before, more people have come here after searching for pork fritters than anything else.  In fact, the top three search phrases leading readers here are Pete’s Pride pork fritters (29 hits), pork fritters (14 hits), and pork fritter (9 hits).  There have been a total of 65 hits resulting from pork fritter searchers.  I mentioned this to Hubster the other day, so he googled Pete’s Pride pork fritters.  This blog was the second listing to come up—beaten out only by Sam’s Club, which is probably paying to be number one. 

 I laughed pretty hard when I heard that. How on earth did I get so high on the list?  Is it perhaps because of posts like this where I mention pork fritters, like, seven times in the first paragraph?  Because, hey, I’m all attention starved, you know, and once I find out pork fritters are a portal to internet popularity, well, there’s just no telling how many times I’ll talk about Pete’s Pride pork fritters. 

 Interestingly, almost no one gets here by searching for breast cancer.  Seriously. Like three people have found me that way.  Do I just not talk about it enough to rank high on google?  Or is it just that there’s way more info out there about breast cancer than there is about pork fritters?  Or maybe it’s both.

 Still, sometimes people do find me by searching for things like “breast cancer bald school”.  Shoot!  I didn’t know there was a school for learning to be bald and cancery!  Why didn’t I think of that?  I can just picture those late-night commercials with Sally Struthers saying, “At In The Pink Breast Cancer Bald School, you can get your degree in TV/VCR repair, chemotherapy, basket weaving, radiation burns, ditto machine operations, or breast cancer baldness.” 

 And other times, I get hits from searches like “high waist open bottom girdle”.  Now, I’m not really sure why that brought up my blog, but even more confusing to me is that the person felt like they needed to specify that the girdle be open at the bottom.  Presumably, a girdle would at the very least be open at the leg holes.  Unless you’re needing a girdle for your weeble, which might even be more of a specialty item than the “aunt girdle swimsuit” that someone else was apparently looking for. 

 Not sure how I feel about people googling girdles and having my blog come up as a possible place to find them.  There are no girdles here.  Only pork fritters.  Lots and lots of pork fritters.

Tasty Thursday – Pork Fritter Pig-Out

Ugh.  It never fails.  Whenever Hubster has to go out of town for work—which doesn’t happen very often—I take the opportunity to avoid actually cooking, and indulge my inner junk foodie. 

 You guys know I really do love to cook good food. Those of you who know me well know that most of the time you won’t find anything pre-fabricated in my fridge or cupboard.   But there’s something about having a night with just me & Mini Me that just screams for Mister Fritters and fries, with an apple turnover chaser. 

 I guarantee that we would not be eating like this if Hubster were home.  First of all, if he *were* to decide to eat pork fritters, you can bet he’d ONLY eat the Pete’s Pride pork fritters.  Hubster’s all high falutin’ like that.  That’s the only kind his family ate when he was coming up, and that makes them, therefore, superior.  Born with a silver fritter in his mouth, he was.  Quite obviously, coming from such an affluent background (one where money was no object, and the Pete’s Pride was abundant) he has no appreciation for what us poor folks ate.  Hence his disgust at the mere mention of Mister Fritters.  And don’t even think about Spam.

 Secondly, Hubster is so doggone spoiled by being married to me, that he thinks he’s too good for pork fritters these days.  He thinks because he gets actual FOOD for supper 364 days a year, that someone OWES him real food on that rare day when someone might just want to fry up some pork fritters. 

 And so it is that whenever Hubster leaves town, Mini Me and I go off the deep end.  Last time, I was really hungry by the time I got the fritters fried and scarfed one down, then thought, “Hmmm, I’m still hungry…I think I’ll eat another one.”  Yeah.  That’s what happens when you eat too fast—your stomach doesn’t have a chance to tell your brain that it’s full.  So, I about made myself sick eating another half fritter before I realized that the second helping wasn’t such a good idea.  Oh sure, a self-controlled, rational person might have just thought, “Is a second pork fritter EVER a good idea?  Nah.”  But I’m neither self-controlled, nor rational most of the time.  I’m pretty much still the same little girl who ate Cornies ‘til she puked hunter orange all over the avocado green carpet back in 1975.

 Of course, I want to eat healthy, so I got a loaf of Flavorite wheat bread to put our fritters on.  And, you know, ketchup is almost like a vegetable.  I’m pretty sure that cancels out any of the bad attributes of the fritters.

 Hubster will probably read this and be like, “No wonder every time I come back from a trip your face is greasy, you’ve gained 5 pounds, and the house smells like the Spelterville Inn.”  Now you know, Honey.

Rejected

A while back I submitted an entry for the Under Armour Undeniable Survivor contest.  According to the website, they were looking for three BC survivors to become representatives for the 2008 UA Power in Pink Campaign.  So, I thought what the heck, I’ll submit an entry.  After all, writing is kind of my thing, right?  Problem was, they wanted me to write my “story” in 1000 words or less. Oh yeah, and it was supposed to “illustrate why a physically active lifestyle is so vital to a healthy life with or without cancer.”  And, they were looking for examples of “undeniable courage”.

First of all, you know how word limits chafe me.  After all, it was the 4000 character limit that drove me from my former blog home.  Secondly, who are we kidding?  I’m no super fitty.  Not to mention that I could either write my BC story, or write about the physically active lifestyle thing, but 1000 words did not give me enough space to write about either of those well.  I did try to weave it all together in 1000 words—I even mentioned my blog.  But undeniable courage?  Not so much.  I guess I just have a hard time saying “Look how undeniably courageous I am” when the truth is, being told how brave & courageous I am totally makes me squirm.

Yesterday I received my official rejection letter.  As rejection letters go, it was a good one.  The lady even told me how funny the dragon boat entry was.  I guess they weren’t looking for undeniably funny, though, since I didn’t make the cut.  (And really. how ironic would it have been if I’d become “the face” of somebody’s promotional pink-o-rama?  You’d probably all be posting comments telling me what a sell-out I was.) 

It’s just as well, because I don’t know that I qualify as having “undeniable courage”.  It’s not like I killed a gator with my bare hands, dyed its hide Komen pink and made a set of luggage out of it.  I’m just, you know, living.  Nothing exotic.  No undeniable courage goin’ on.  I did open up the fridge the other day and smell some undeniable spoilage, though. 

Does Arm & Hammer have a contest I can enter?