A Fresh Start

The leaves overhead, crisp and brown like a well baked pizza crust, wait to meander lazily towards lawns The lawns themselves, tired of endless mowings, yearn for snow cover. Children nervously waiting for school buses, excited to see old friends and overburdened with expensive textbooks..... and a Dad watches at the front door. He too is tired of endless mowings, overburdened by expensive textbooks and yearns not for snow cover but for pizza. (cheese and pepperoni cover ideally)

In Montreal the coming of autumn means that another winter has finally ended and yet another is just around the corner. It's a period of reflection and here at The Blob it's a chance for a fresh start after a lengthy and not easily explained hiatus.

How to begin though? Maybe it would be best to do so humbly, without bravura and fireworks (the naked lesbian nuns in prison video will have to wait for another day) and what could be more humble than the lowly yet exalted potato.


This past July marked a watershed moment in the history of snack food of which many of us on this side of the pond are scarcely aware. Procter and Gamble was forced to argue in a British court of law that it's Pringles Brand Potato Chips were in fact NOT potato chips in order to avoid a value added tax that would have cost them many millions of dollars. A year earlier they had succeeded in convincing a lower court judge that at only 42% potato content they should be exempt, but here....read:


http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2009/may/21/pringles-vat-tax-crisps-snacks?commentpage=1sps-snacks?commentpage=1

As a side note please scan through the comments attached to the article for stuff like this:

Never mind, are pork scratchings still zero-rated?
Pringles are yesterday's snack anyway. The foreseeable future is those jumbo bags of "artisan" crisps with laughably specific "flavours" in weird combinations like Old Spot bacon and Wensleydale.



A nice upshot of the trial is that the word "potato-ness" was coined by a Procter and Gamble lawyer and may very well end up being Blob word of the year. Bottom line: P&G tried to convince a court that Pringles were actually shit but the judge ruled that if it looks and tastes like chip it IS a chip and that Pringles did indeed posess enough of that elusive and ephemeral quality of potato-ness to to be taxed.


You weekend gardeners, toiling away at your potato patches, were too busy to notice. Glad to have been of service.