Daily Archives: June 23, 2013

Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

I doubt I’ve ever mentioned it, but I’ve always been a sardine lover.  Quit buying them when the price went high back there sometime and partly justified quitting because it drove the cats nuts when I opened a can.  Had to sneak around or I’d end up having to share.

So recently I was in the Dollar Tree store and noticed they had a lot of cans of sardines stacked on the shelves at a buck per can.  Big cans of a sort I haven’t seen in a number of decades, takes a can opener to get in there.

As you know, I a suspicious person, so I carefully got out my pocket magnifier and examined the label.   Well!  I’ll be damned!  Chinese!  Chin-freaking-ese sardines!

Well, heck.  What can sardine packing plants do wrong with sardines, thinks I.  You pack them in brine, or oil, or mustard sauce, or tomato sauce, put a lid and label on, and nobody’s going to know they aren’t Scandahoovian sardines.

Bought 20 cans of them, by golly, a lot just packed in brine because I thought I might use a few coaxing Tabby out of being anti-social.

Well, friends and neighbors, it’s entirely possible to screw up sardines.  I’m not sure how they did it, but they just don’t taste right.  And while the cats love the ones packed in oil or brine, they ain’t touching the ones packed in mustard nor those in tomato sauce.

I’m going to have to gut it out and eat those anyway.

How in the world can an ethnic group invent gunpowder and be the first to invent carbon steel, and not be able to can sardines worth eating?

[Hmmm.  To be fair, it’s generally believed the steel thing was an accident.  Slave either fell, or was thrown into a vat of molten iron and someone noted the quality of the product improved.  So a lot of slaves made their way into a lot of vats of molten iron before it was discovered there were other ways of getting the job done.]

But even so, sardines can’t be that tough.  The Scandahoovians don’t even have slaves, haven’t had them since, since, since, sometime back there before canning was invented.

Old Jules

Afterthought:  When you think about it, Chinese steel’s nothing to brag about these days, either.  Maybe they ought to be tossing all those sardines into vats of molten iron instead of canning them.