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National Ice Cream Sandwich Day 2023
Strangely suitable to a midsummer’s day, it’s National Ice Cream Sandwich Day and I’m fresh out of them.
Yes, 🍦🍪 You Can!
I still eat my ice cream if I want to. I like dessert, of course. ~Georges St-Pierre
If you don’t know who Georges St-Pierre is, he’s an epic UFC fighter who was tapped to play the role of one of Marvel comics’ most farcical recurring villains.
If you take note of the characterization in the animated excerpt below, Batroc the Leaper was an outrageously flamboyant French jewel thief and practitioner of the uniquely French martial art known as Savate.
The MCU took this generally silly, throwaway villain and gave him to one of the most badass professional fighters to play. Batroc stopped being a silly goon and became an insidious international menace who was more than capable of giving Captain America a run for his money.
That is one of the most amazing recasts ever. When you’re an unbeatable badass, you can redeem even the silliest of cartoon goons.
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Look at the build of that guy! And he eats ice cream because he wants to. If you do the work, you can get away with the occasional treat.
🍦🍪 And Here I Thought It Was 🧝🏻🧝♂️ In A Refrigerated Tree 🧊🌳
Ice Cream Sandwiches | How It’s Made
I’ve had the opportunity to enjoy some training at work recently. Some of it involves industry-related videos that help to put actual real world images to some of the jargon that’s used during calls with customers. Drums (not the musical kind), chemicals, packaging, batch manufacturing, storage tanks and so forth.
Having seen all kinds of factory layouts recently, the video above caught my eye. It’s amazing to think that not only does that kind of machinery crank out zillions of ice cream sandwiches day in and day out, but it’s even more amazing to think that there’s a whole school of study involved in laying these things out.
Somebody came up with the giant domino setup of all these different machines end to end to make this scrumptious product. Somebody invented the machines that execute every step. Somebody came up with the routines for cleaning, maintaining and programming these machines. Somebody came up with the software that makes it all run smoothly.
That’s absolutely bananas.
What’s even more bananas is that they aren’t showing this stuff to kids in school. If you showed these things to kids, they would be fascinated by the prospect of this kind of automation. They’d be intrigued by the idea of learning how to put all that together to make stuff. They’d be inspired to seek good-paying, worthwhile jobs that produce actual consumer goods.
Who needs to be a social media influencer when you can be the person cranking out ice cream sandwiches, cardboard boxes, pencils or juice pouches?
I think we need to retool the education system to help kids identify their aptitudes, point them in the direction of careers that suit their capabilities and connect them with employers nationwide who need their energy, creativity and enthusiasm to grow their businesses.
Let’s stop offshoring jobs and start building America again. Perhaps there’d be less despair among young adults if they had more to look forward to than flipping burgers, serving lattes or gluing themselves to roadways.
Vitawax
I’m trying to write books that taste like ice cream but have the nutrition of vegetables. ~Dan Brown
A long time ago, I was participating in a text-based RPG with some friends. I made a character, Oogie the Chim-Chim. He was a hexapodal baboonoid who was a serial entrepreneur and self-made Chim-Chim. One of his many inventions was a product called Vitawax. It was an innocuous substance containing all the daily nutrients for most sapient species. It could take the form and flavor of anything the consumer desired. If you wanted a vegetable stir-fry, a steak dinner or a vat of ice cream, Vitawax ensured it would have the same nutritional value.
So, this quote from Dan Brown reminded me of Vitawax. It’d like to have the same effect with my books.
Tastes like ice cream but has the nutrition of vegetables is a good thing to aspire to. On the other hand, maybe ice cream can just be ice cream.
I’m not Aesop. I don’t know that everything needs to teach a lesson. There is such a thing as straight up entertainment. Mind candy is an option.
Obviously, you shouldn’t gorge on mind candy any more than you should overdue it on actual candy.
Maybe, if you’re planning to write a lot of books, you might think about them in terms of a multiple course meal. You’ve got your salad, your soup, the bread sticks, the entree, the sides, dessert and whatever else goes into a massive feast.
I tend to think that some of the heavy hitters of classic literature had the advantage of being what we would now refer to as trust fund kids. Do you think that if your mother was literally a princess and you were ferried around among 19th Century aristocratic estates, you might have the time and freedom to write War and Peace? Check out Tolstoy’s estate. This guy didn’t need to worry about paying the rent. With that lack of stress, it’s obvious that you would have adequate leisure to write a weighty, thoughtful, sweeping epic.
It also didn’t hurt that TV hadn’t been invented yet. People were dying for a good book to read. There was no binge-watching. There was no decades-deep catalog of shows to browse. There were no blogs, vlogs or podcasts to suck up your day. It was another time.
Now, there are distractions. There are plenty of writers to compete with for someone’s attention and nowadays, a lot of them want to write stuff that’s deep and meaningful.
That’s kind of the problem. Everybody expects there to be a moral to the story. I don’t know that they necessarily need one.
Maybe a story can just be a story.
Certainly, theme and message are part of the tapestry of a well-constructed story, but we’re so bombarded with messaging anymore. Maybe storytellers can just get off of their stupid soapboxes and tell an interesting story.
Maybe, if you tell a story worth hearing, people can draw their own conclusions about its meaning and impact. Maybe some stories can simply be a cathartic emotional roller coaster.
I do want my Sentinels series to be more than good guys trouncing bad guys and doing a lot of incidental property damage in the process. I’m not necessarily aiming for pure mind candy.
Perhaps I can “let them eat cake“. Cake is kind of like bread and bread is nutritious, therefore cake is good for you. 🤣 Okay, probably not, but it’s still better than a cup of sugar right in your mouth.
So, who knows? Maybe I’ll get there. A theme may occur at some point, either deliberately or subconsciously. It’s not currently a priority.
I’m actually so sick of being preached to by TV and movies that I can’t bring myself to do it to someone else.
Here? Sure. I’ll rant my face off if something hacks me off, but I don’t want to be one of these preachy wankers who feels like going all SJW or Moral Majority in their fiction.
Fuck that. Just tell a damn story. If it’s halfway good, people will dissect the crap out of it and find things you didn’t even intend to put there. Who cares? Just write the story.
That’s all for today. I hope you’re enjoying your week and a tasty ice cream sandwich, too.