I was at the grocery store before work, and I saw something unusual. I should preface this by saying that I'm not a big fan of the grocery store, so I try to make my trips infrequent. As such, I usually buy a lot of groceries on any given trip. This time I was stocking up on spaghetti sauce, soup, cereal, and frozen dinners, as well as picking up a few others assorted things. Although I'm not fond of the grocery store, I do enjoy picking out what spaghetti sauce to buy. So because I enjoy that, and because I was stocking up on it, I devoted some time to poring over the available sauces. Of course I got some Ragu and Prego, because that's mostly what they have. But I like to check out the other brands and see if maybe there's some unknown sauce the taste of which causes instant nirvana. I haven't had that happen yet, but I have found some good sauces this way. Anyway, tonight I went to a different grocery store than normal, so of course everything was a little bit different. The milk and orange juice were on the wrong side of the store, the aisles were laid out differently, etc. Also, the spaghetti sauces were not arranged contiguously. There was the main spaghetti sauce area, and the smaller, secondary spaghetti sauce area. At first I only knew about the main one, so I spent some time there, and was pretty disappointed at the selection. But then I saw the other area, and it had a bunch of exciting sauces...and one strange sauce, the subject of this overlong paragraph. It was made by this TV chef named Emeril. He had a line of sauces, most of which sounded good. This one, though, was called Vodka Sauce. Now I like vodka, and I like spaghetti sauce...and I can even see that alcohol plus spaghetti sauce can be good, such as adding red wine to a sauce. But vodka? If your sauce isn't harsh enough, you can add vodka to get just that right level of bite? I dunno. It disturbed me, and I did not purchase it. I would like someone to try it and give me a review, though.
Once again I amaze myself by writing at length about a relatively dull topic. Maybe I should write a book and title it "Writing At Length About Relatively Dull Topics". I'm sure it would fly off the shelves.
A while ago at lunch (back when I worked during the day) I came up with the idea of having a chess league or a checkers league or something like that. We'd meet once a week and play. "That sounds boring." I can hear you saying. But wait, there's more. In order to make it more interesting, it would be drunk chess, or drunk checkers, etc. Each player would take a fixed number of drinks prior to the match (or perhaps a fixed amount of alcohol per unit of mass of the player), then wait a little while, and then play the match. Ideally I'd want to keep track of how effectively each player played at varying levels of drunkenness. At this point it seemed that maybe I could come up with an entire research project. I'd study how effectively people play chess/checkers when I'd vary the amount of alcohol and the type of alcohol. I'd like to award a prize to the best player while drunk on gin, best player while drunk on vodka, etc. Maybe one person would be good when drunk on whiskey, but would not be as good when drunk on tequila. Who knows? This project hasn't gotten off the ground due to lack of interest and general laziness. If I could get a government grant, maybe I could pursue it.