Ice Cream for Breakfast

 It’s gonna hit 91ºF with 87% humidity here in Valhalla today. It’s September and this is New England, fer fuck’s sake. I WANT TO SPEAK TO THE MANAGER NOW!!!

In order to prepare myself for this onslaught of blazing, bullshit weather, I’ve had a wee bowl of chocolate chip ice cream for breakfast. No, not with cake (but def with Cake). Apparently we’re all out of carrot cake which is WRONG and quite possibly a CRIME. Once more, I WANT TO SPEAK TO THE MANAGER NOW!!!

Yes, now that you mention it, I did in fact wake of the asshole side of the bed this morning.

In order to lift my mood (AKA unasshole-ize myself) I eschewed the news in favor of weird-shit-scrolling.

Here are a few things that I did NOT know:

Uno—It’s early spring in Australia right now. Up on Blue Cow Mountain in New South Wales, temps are in the upper 20s and it’s snowing. SNOWING!

It snows in Australia. I had no idea.

You (not I) can even ski in the Snowy Mountains of NSW. Snowy Mountains—that’s the ultra, mega imaginative name given to the peaks by Paweł Edmund Strzelecki, a 19th century Polish explorer, geologist and humanitarian.

Just one of the original, indigenous names for the NSW range is Kunama Namadji. 

“It’s been Kunama Namadgi for 4,000 years, since we’ve been on country, until the white man came in the early 1800s and that’s when they changed it.”

He suggested there could be as many as 20 different Indigenous names for the mountain, but said not all were Ngarigo names. (source)

 Honestly, is Kunama Namadgi not a significantly superior name for a mountain range? Imagine if Death Valley was known by the name its original inhabitants, the Timbisha Shoshone, gave it—Tüpippüh. Less bikey/more poetically evocative.

Like California, it only snows in Australia at the higher elevations. The country gets a whopping average total snowfall per year of around 4 inches. About the same as Arkansas. I didn’t know that Arkansas gets snow either.

Dos—Did you know that German chocolate cake is NOT from a recipe originating in Germany? Nope. I sure didn’t. The recipe, devised in 1957 by a woman in Dallas, Texas, used a type of sweet baking chocolate called German's Sweet Chocolate. This was named for the inventor, Samuel German.

 What is German Chocolate Cake? It’s a lighter hued, mild cake (zzzzzzzzzzzz), covered with coconut-pecan frosting.

Meh. I wouldn’t turn down a slice but, given a choice, I’ll take carrot cake every single damn time.

Tres—McDonald’s once made bubblegum-flavored broccoli.

McDonald’s and a green vegetable? I simply can NOT imagine this. Was it deep fried too? Bubblegum flavored? Pardon me, I gotta go hurl. Seriously.

Here’s an unsurprising McDonald’s factoid—There are more golden arched Mac Shacks than hospitals in the U.S. of A. One-and-half times more in fact.

Cuatro—Dude platypuses are venomous. They have sharp stingers on the heels of their rear feet and use them to deliver a strong toxic jab to their antagonist.

Also, they’re not as big as I thought. Head to tail tip, is only around 20 inches and they weigh a measly three pounds. Fuck man, I’ve had platform shoes with more heft.

There, don’t you feel enlightened and a metric fuck-ton less gloomy now? I know I do.