On December 11, 1944 the Life Magazine published an article: Teen-Age Girls – They Live In A Wonderful Wold Of Their Own.

There is a time in life of every American girl when the most important thing in the world is to be one of the crowd of the other girls and to act an speak and dress exactly as they do. This is the teen age.

Some 6,000,000 U.S. teen-age girls live in a world of their own – a lovely, gay, enthusiastic, funny and blissful society almost untouched by the war. It is a world of sweaters and skirts and bobby sox and loafers, if hair worn long, of eye-glass rims painted red with nail polish, of high-school boys not yet gone to war. It is a world still devoted to parents who are pals even if they use telephone too much. It is a world of Vergil’s Aeneid, second-year French and plane geometry, of class plays, field hockey, “moron” jokes and put-on accent. It is a world of slumber parties and the Hit Parade, of peanut butter and popcorn and the endless collecting of menus and match covers and little stuffed animals.

Yes, maybe some things have changed – no one wears shetland sweaters; many teenage girls today haven’t seen a corded phone or read Virgil; “moron” jokes are considered not politically correct and no one paints eyeglasses with nail polish. But now, that I have a bona fide teenage girl in my house, I could replicate most of these photos today.

The singer “was a virtual skeleton – barely eating and with only pills in his stomach at the time he died”, the paper said.

Imagine you are a coroner, crappy profession that it already is, your days are filled with horrible, bloody, disgustingly smelling, disfigured things that no one in the right state of mind would even want to be in the same building with, and instead of enjoying a nice sunny LA day you have to dissect a skeleton-looking, hairless, needle-ridden body of a weird celebrity. Not only do you have to chisel off the layers of plaster and artificial prosthetic parts, you for some ungodly reason have to cut his stomach open to see what he was eating before he croaked. It’s in the times like this that you must feel that you should’ve picked another specialty like a podiatrist or a proctologist, albeit their worldview is somewhat constricted.

That’s why I think every person should carry a card at all times with the contents of their stomach for the past 48 hours as a way to make the job of forensic pathologists just a little bit easier.

Let’s see, today my stomach contains:

• a cup of coffee
• cheese and turkey sandwich
• a orange/apricot jelly (from Bermuda) and toast
• cherries
• persimmon
• apple
• some frozen yogurt from Yummo (mix of 3 flavors) because they don’t sell Korean tacos on Monday
• chicken patty
• a piece of dried banana
• salad (Caesar dressing)
• cheese quesadilla
• corn
• some lemonade
• a piece of Tippins coconut-creme pie

I think that’s it. There maybe some leftovers of this cinnamon roll from Barb’s Kolache Bakery in Shawnee from a couple of days ago
and just a little bit of the cherry kolache ( I gave the other ones away)

but that’s just being too thorough.

See this is not so hard.
Maybe your coroner will be grateful for not having to dig through your rotting guts and will not “leak” embarrassing details of your autopsy to the media. In my book, that’s just paying it forward.

JJSinKCK asked me how Stalin was portrayed in the Soviet history books.  Instead of a thoughtful answer I picked out and translated some of the propaganda posters, commonly displayed during the Stalin era.

Recently State of Missouri made an announcement about repealing some old ban on “yellow-tinted imitation butter and the other restrictions imposed on the sale, possession or shipment of substitute sandwich spread that is a different hue”. The question is why would anyone want to eat this crap in the first place. I understand that the law was written for different reasons but I wouldn’t mind them actually enforcing it to get fake products out of our grocery stores. And while they are at it, they might as well get rid of

• disgusting turkey bacon
• any food that has the word “flavored” in it’s name
• products that have ingredients that can’t be explained
• things that have artificial coloring (I wonder what their real color is)
• fruits and vegetables possessing some unnatural characteristics such as crunchy tomatoes and strawberries
• breads that can be compressed to 1/10 of original volume
• anything in green packaging, green doesn’t mean healthy, it’s just a color
• no-fat sour cream
• rename rice- and soy-milk into rice- and soy-juice or whatever; it’s not milk even if it’s white
• non-dairy dairy products
• artificial powdered coffee creamer, WTF is that made of anyway
• cheese in a can and powdered cheese
• stop McRib comebacks

I am not a believer in things that are “good for you”, or “locavores”, or “slow foods”, or whatever else is in fashion right now. I do believe that if you want butter, you should eat butter, not some yellow crap in a tub. If you are unable to eat some foods due to health reasons, just enjoy something else, don’t eat fake chemical concoction designed in the lab to fool your senses.

In these times when most of our activities had been replaced by imaginary and virtual things, maybe we should draw the line at fake foods. Homey don’t eat that crap!

UPDATE: How could I forget the scam that  is organic food. Thanks, L.L.!

Recent IKEA meatball news hit me hard. I’ve been a fan since the first time I’ve tried them years ago. And even though I stopped buying IKEA meatballs when my kid decided to stop eating pork, it’s still pretty sad. Not that I care about eating horse meat,  I am sure I unknowingly ate it more than once during my lifetime. If anything, this proves my long-held belief that we get too much information about the food we eat, with all the ingredient lists and nutrition tables. What we don’t know doesn’t hurt us.

This caricature is by Sergei Yelkin – a Russian cartoonist whose blog I’ve been following for years. I just translated the labels to share with the English-speaking audience. If you would like to see the original Russian version, please click here.