Moorezilla

hi-fi tmi

Andrew Moore

Toykle Two!

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I rescued a snapping turtle in 6th grade. Things didn’t go so well. I put it in a large cardboard box with a bunch of sand, a buried bowl with water for swimming, and I fed it Italian cold cuts. I was surprised at how little the turtle moved, but hey… it was turtle… and everyone knows that turtles move slowly. Unfortunately, sometimes little movement is actually no movement, and Toykle (as he/she was known) was an eyeless corpse before any intervention took place.

Having learned my lesson, I managed a quick turnaround from rescue to release when Abigail, Jackson, and I noticed a baby snapping turtle headed the wrong way up Maverick Street. Down Maverick leads to the swamp; up Maverick leads to certain death at the library intersection. Turtle chose poorly, but we cheated Darwin and delivered him/her to the swamp.

Rescued from road
Rescued from road… has eyes!
Released in the wild!
Released in the wild… still has eyes!

Amazon thinks I should eat bugs

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We DO buy quite a bit from Amazon, so I understand it might be difficult to determine our consumer pattern, but how did it come to this?

Hello, Andrew… Amazon has some recommendations for you:

Well… I wasn’t interested in these particular items… but it did get me thinking about what else is available in the world of entomophagy. It must be marginally popular if it’s turning up in Amazon suggestion lists. Turns out that there is quite a bit available, and much of it looks practical, inexpensive, and… of course… good for you. Apparently eating bugs (and crickets in particular) is one of the easiest ways to ingest solid protein.

Banana peanut bug bites for the Rhodesian Ridgeback?

hoganBugBitesLike every new food, however, it must first pass the “Hogan survived eating it” test. Rhodesian Ridgebacks are the perfect food tasters; when they lost their job chasing lions, they were used as poison detectors for South African kings. Like most dogs, Ridgebacks will readily eat anything, but our Ridgeback carries the canine curse of a weak stomach, so he’s an excellent gauge of a food’s toxicity. Hogan’s now awaiting a package of Banana Peanut Bug Bites.

If Hogan survives, I think I’ll spring for some cricket flour. It can be baked into banana or other quick breads. There are a ton of recipes for this stuff. Here’s the banana bread recipe from Entomo Farms:

Ingredients

1/3 cup (35 g) Entomo Protein 2050 cricket powder (cricket flour)
1 ¼ cups all purpose flour
1 ¼ tsp baking soda
¾ tsp baking powder
¾ cup organic granulated sugar
1 egg
1 egg white
¼ cup plain or vanilla yogurt
3 TBSP coconut oil
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup mashed bananas (approx 2 to 3 medium)

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 350F, 9×5 loaf pan-buttered
  2. In a bowl sift together cricket powder, flour, baking soda and baking powder. Set aside.
  3. In a large mixing bowl blend sugar, egg, egg white, yogurt, oil and vanilla.   Blend in the bananas. Add the dry ingredients and mix until just combined. Do not over mix.
  4. Pour batter into a prepared loaf pan. Bake in preheated oven for 50 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.
  5. Remove from oven and let cool in pan for 5 minutes before removing.

The most annoying sound in the world kumate

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Less than a year ago Jackson discovered Walking with Monsters and Walking with Dinosaurs, two Kenneth Branagh-voiced cgi series chronicling the rise and fall of dinosaurs and other ancient creatures. Score! We witnessed the rise and fall of the croc-like postosuchus, the four flippered liopleurodon, and the comet-chased Tyrannosaurus Rex. Sure, they’re a little bloody for little kids and as interesting as they are, these shows did become a bit stale after the 429th viewing, but now that we have entered the post-Branagh-monster world of child-chosen YouTube programming, I know that I have enjoyed and lost the golden age of shared parent/child programming. TV Rome is burning and I can’t seem to stop it. Give me back the dinosaurs and giant scorpions, for what has replaced them is far more frightening (and nearly unwatchable!) for anyone over the age of 12.

The new age is dominated by YouTube stars CookieSwirlC, and stampylonghead (or just Stampy). I do not understand the allure of these brilliant bastards, but I caution anyone brazen enough to come between a 4-12 year old child and these fingernail down chalkboard voiced super stars. Their hypnotically crappy shows are kid nip and YouTube’s nefarious autoplay feature ensures that one will auto blend into another if you’re not ready to intervene and chop off the stream when one ends.

Pick your poison… pick the tagline to torture your brain like a Ceti eel larva:

  • “Cookie Swirl C… hee hee hee!”
  • Guuuuud Byyyyyeeee! Heh heh heh!

Need to get an annoying song out of your head. These will take care of that for you… but at what price? Need to lay siege to some upstart militia or new age Davidian Compound? Don’t blast them with rock music; blast them with CookieSwirlC. Surrender is assured… well… unless they’re between the ages of 4 and 12.

But perhaps hope lies in the lessons learned from walking with both the monsters and the dinosaurs. Our furry mammal ancestors were once the prohibitive underdogs; they had no chance battling the terrible lizards head on. Instead they needed wile and guile, a network of tunnels… and a giant comet to smash into the Gulf of Mexico. Short a comet, though, if only we could get CookieSwirl to battle Stampy… like Mega Godzilla taking on Rubberized Godzilla.

Wow… what’s in this toy egg? Is this a taunting Minecraft note from Stampy? Who took your wolf pets? Some lady with a high-pitched voice just ran by the squid. Make it happen. When one titan destroys the other, we can team up on the weakened victor, destroy it on the beach like a washed up monster liopleurodon.