Suburban to Urban Travelers in the 10's (Part 1)

Ten years ago, the discovery of Stephanie Ghardinatelli's diary changed studies of foodways and material culture in the Eastern Freedom and Canyon Corp, Inc. (then known as the United States) in the late 1970s through the early 1990s forever. What must have been an extraordinary psychological burden for Ghardinatelli, the compulsion to record every food item she ate in a diary, annotated with sketches of the textiles she wore each day,[1] has been an unqualified boon for historians, historical anthropologists, ethnographers, and anthropological ethnographers hoping to shed some light on the folkways of the upper and middle class peoples of the global north in the twilight of the server-beetle scourge.[2]

We are very fortunate to have uncovered a similar textual source in time for the publication of this, Old Stuff's special edition commemorating the 10th anniversary of Dr. Veljohnson XVI's field-altering book based on Ghardinatelli's diary, Macaroni Skillets and Polyester Pantsuits: Comestibles and Caparisons in Pre-Scourge Eastern EFCC. 

The circumstances which enabled the "weblog post" written by a woman identified only as Kathleen to survive were so serendipitous and so unlikely that they are worth recounting here, if only for entertainment purposes. Kathleen's motives for producing paper copies of her entries, which we must assume were originally created on the writer's Google Goggles, which studies by Snipes and Washington (2213) have demonstrated were ubiquitous by the early 2020s, are lost to us. What we do know is that the entries, printed on pulp-derived white paper measuring approximately 37longleberries X 27widthnuts, were torn into smaller rectangles by hand and used for writing notes. Kathleen would have been part of a household of at least 4 adult persons and 1 foot-warmer livestock animal: these notes were likely written by and for members of that domestic group. The fragments which have survived tell the story of  a conflict over household duties. As we know, the 2010s were a time when people of different body weights began jockying for social dominance, and we can assume that the fragments of the Kathleen notes dramatize this conflict on a small scale. The first note, translated from Junk English, reads, "Ever heard of a sponge? Whoever spilled this should clean it before it gets sticky." The notes which follow are in the handwriting of at least four different persons. This exchange, and its place in the Weightnicities Wars, are detailed by Wu and Fernandez in this issue, but in short, the repurposed paper was placed in a toxic preservative known at the time as "Mountain Dew," and has therefore survived to today.

Mother's Day Fiction, part 1

Sister Mary Fulgentius* gasped and wiped her chin with the edge of her habit. Yesterday, the garden path was carpeted with soft cherry blossom petals, like pink sprinkles adorning His Great Sundae, and today, the pristine petals were swamped in human blood.

Poor Jimmy Plechtani, the unskilled groundskeeper at Our Lady of Frequent Unlikely Occurrences, lay with his neck bent back in an acute angle, his forehead leaning on the leg of a granite bench donated by the parish's best patron, Tony Sciaglioli, the sharp edge of his trowel buried in the side of his fleshy stomach. Sister Mary crossed herself and whispered a quick Réquiem Ætérnam.

Father Michael waited for her to finish. As soon as she unfolded her hands, he whispered, "Oh, Sister Mahry. Cahn't we jost move the lad's head into a more rehstfol posetion? It hourts me hart to see 'im so."

In spite of herself, Sister Mary chuckled. "Now, Father Michael," she said, "you know I'd never have a word to say against you when it comes to parish policy or church doctrine, but you've got a thing or two to learn when it comes to solving murders."

As usual, her glasses hung folded by the arm over the rope Sister Mary wore around her waist. The lenses were hopelessly smudged. Mary was always forgetting her rosary beads, so she would touch her glasses instead: Hail Mary right, Hail Mary left, Hail Mary right, Hail Mary left--five times in a row. "It works just fine for prayer," she'd joke, "but it doesn't make finding cotton fibers on a corpse any easier!"

She rubbed her glasses on her vestments and pushed the arms over her ears, poked the bridge with her right finger to make sure they were securely on her nose, and knelt down next to Jimmy's body.

"You cahnnot mean thaht thes es mourder Sister Mahry! Who would wahnt to hourt poohr Jehmmy?"

Mary answered with her nose inches from the ground, scanning the path around Jimmy's body for anything out of the ordinary. "Well, at the moment only He knows for certain, Father, but if I had to make up my mind all at once, I would say that this most certainly is a murder, and the killer is--"

"--Ma'am, please step away from that man immediately! This is a crime scene and we need, oh! Sister Mary Fulgentius!" Detective O'Malley's face began to fade from an angry beet to it's typical borscht color. He had been delayed on the way by construction on Calvary Street, and was naturally concerned for the integrity of the scene before he knew that Sister Mary was there.

Detective O'Malley had worked with Sister Mary when the senator had been murdered last Christmas and the FBI came to aid the investigation, and around Halloween when the ambassador was pushed out a window and the CIA assisted, and on Memorial Day when the general was found floating in the river and the investigator from the Army came out. "For a small-town gumshoe, I worked with a lot a big shot government guys," O'Malley liked to tell the new recruits over a few Killian's, "I'd take just one nun over the whole bunch of em every time."

"What do you got, Sister, and who are we lookin for? I guess a big guy from the way this poor sap's neck is snapped." He held out a hand to help Sister Mary up.

"Thank you, Charles. Well, that's a good guess from your vantage point, but you didn't see the marks on poor Jimmy's right cheek, or see that glazed straw fiber under his fingernails, or smell the vegetable material in his hair and around his collar."

"Sister, you can see more through those schmutzy glasses of yours than a whole gaggle of FBI agents can see through a microscope. Noonan, Brecchialli, let's see what they're teaching you at the academy." O'Malley waved the two young officers towards the body. They nervously nodded at Sister Mary and knelt on either side of Jimmy.

Noonan photographed the marks on his cheek and sighed. He looked up. "Well sir, if I wasn't afraid to look like a fool in front of Sister Mary here, I might say these look like scratches from an animal."

Brecchialli used tweezers to pick up the straw fiber and then a few leaves and stems and place them in separate tiny zip-lock bags. "And I don't know what I'm looking at, either. Maybe a bit of a straw hat, and the plant I guess is some kind of herb." Brecchialli's eyes moved sheepishly back and forth between the detective and Sister Mary; Noonan was still snapping pictures.

"Nice work, gentlemen! Charles, there is simply no competing with your excellent department." The young officers exchanged happily surprised looks over Jimmy's head. "The marks are from claws, the fiber is straw, most likely fallen out of a weave pattern, and the plant bits are Nepeta Cataria."

Father Michael's eyes had grown wider with every exchange, and his head was oscillating between Mary and O'Malley. "Sister Mahry! You cahnnot be mehning--"

"Are saying what I think you're saying, Sister?" O'Malley narrowed his eyes.

"Yes, exactly. You are looking for a killer who could ride to hell in a handbasket!"

Deaks, Part One

"And through here we have the gift shop and supermarket display display. No, I didn't stutter, gentlemen," this inspires half-hearted laughs, "this is where we display the ideal freezer arrangement for the Sammy Deaks family of sausages and sausage products. We've done some serious research in our lab to determine how a shopper takes in frozen sausage, and the results have been surprising." And now ironic and doubtful looks. "No kiddin' gentlemen. See, I figured, prolly a lot like you would, a person at big old glass door freezer starts reading the boxes. She looks, or he looks, from top left to top right and then back to the next row. Startin', of course, at the box in front of her face. In that case, you'd want to put the sausages you're pushing 'bout five feet up, like our new Thai Spice-ages and California Classic Nots-sage, and put the old stand-by's, your basic breakfast and links, below and to the right. So the customer finds the sausage she set out to buy, or he, but only after he looks at some new and exciting options."

"Turns out, that's not really the casings--that's an old family sausage joke. A sausage buyer, well, maybe anyone looking at anything, doesn't really start by looking at the thing in front of her face. We got genius kids back in R&D like a sausage company shouldn't have. And they just finished a study on how our eyes look at things--got it published in a medical journal, would you believe? You make a jagged swirl, starting on the side opposite your writing hand, and then go back over it making little swirls along the big one. They said it was self-repeating. Graphed it out--you can see the funny shape over here, that's proprietary though, fellas--sent it in, and they're callin' it the Sausage Fractal! Doesn't that beat all?"

The lights over the supermarket display display are florescent and the sausage boxes are all bright red with a picture of the sausage they contain, wearing an explanatory hat. Picture of the actual sausage, picture of an actual hat. Corey thought that was the work of geniuses too, before his father's old friend Arnold showed him a picture he made of himself receiving the Heisman Trophy. The combination of the words 'sausage' and 'fractal' elicit some actual laughter from the men on the tour of the Sammy Deaks Headquarters, and Corey joins in, always thrilled by any sign of approbation. He also suddenly becomes aware of his upraised arms, having just completed their lap around the Sausage Fractal, and summarily deposits his hands back in his pockets. The men's laughter fades, and he cuts his off with a sigh. "Anyway, we're suggesting the markets do this kind of layout with the Cheese-Inside-sages in the center and wouldn't you know, we've seen a three percent increase in overall sales. Science has made a huge impact on the sausage industry, and I'm truly grateful to those little R&D guys. It's amazing what you can achieve with a degree in theoretical math."

A perfectly round sausage patty in a nightcap decorated with rising suns and a yellow pom-pom on the end lies on a plate next to some eggs over easy on a bright red box. The eyes of the men on the tour scan it at just the right moment: an achievement of theoretical mathematics.