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A former supermarket shelf-stacker in the UK has been sentenced to two months in prison after, well, mostly after being a dumbass, basically, but amongst the number of stupid things he did at work was licking a raw chicken and putting it back on the shelf.

This reminds me of the old joke which the internet has made new again, and which I stole from here:

A young man is walking through a small village one day and decides to stop by a bar and have a beer. He walks into a bar, and sees a grizzled old man, crying into his beer. Curious, the young man sits down and says, “Hey old timer, why the long face?”
The old man looks at him and points out the window, “See that dock out there? I built that dock with my own two hands, plank by plank, nail by nail, but do they call me McGregor the dockbuilder? No, no.”
The old man continued, “And see that ship out there? I’ve been fishing these waters for my village for 35 years! But do they call me McGregor the fisherman? No, no.”
The old man continued, “And see all the crops in the farms out there? I planted and have been farming those crops for my village for nearly 45 years! But do they call me McGregor the farmer? No, no.”
The old man starts to cry again, “But you screw one goat…”

My point? YES! Being a vegan dumbass is WAY better than being an omnivore dumbass because this guy’s going to be a chicken licker for the REST OF HIS LIFE. Plus, way less risk of contracting salmonella or campylobacter, which Consumer Reports recently reported finding on two thirds of the chickens in the US.

The tragic paradox, of course, is that dumbasses are the least likely demographic to adopt a plant-based diet. Outreach groups, are you working on this one?

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OK, forget that vegan strip club in Portland (which appears to still be in business, in case you ignore, nay, belay that last order.) The next big thing is going to be strip clubs for goats.

That’s right, goats, or at least one goat, who I shall name Stripgoat Zero and whom will assign the gender of male, both because the article I’m about to reference used the always regrettable “it” to refer to an animal and also because the “desert’s online news leader” couldn’t figure out how apostrophes on possessive pronouns work, and I don’t want to be reminded of this any further, and oh yeah, I’ve turned into that guy.

So, as the joke goes, a goat breaks into a strip bar. Of course he does, he’s a goat, and that’s how goats get through glass doors. Duh. Sadly, the establishment has recently been purchased and hasn’t opened for business yet, so the goat must do as one must, sadly, do in these circumstances, and he spends the next while staring at himself in the mirror until someone chases him away. He’s cut himself breaking the glass doors, and nobody knows where he is, but I believe that not only is he OK, but he’s like the modern age’s Littlest Hobo, heeding that voice that just keeps calling him.

Fly, Stripgoat Zero, fly.

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Inspired by the walrus post, I’ve got this idea of a new theme, which I am calling Species Sex Study Saturday, or S4 for short. The point of it is that we as a society know more about how to cook animals than how they get it on, and I think there’s a portion of the population, possibly a very small portion, who would be less likely to eat animals if they realized that doing so reduces the number of orgasms in the world.

With that, I give you the video Dagda provided in a recent comment:

This reminds me that I really, really, really need to add the “Submit a Story” button to this site. Contact me if you have any similar videos, and we’ll see how many Saturdays we can fill.

(Plus, my current posting schedule means that whenever the Taste Better Newsletter goes out, people might click to VP and see one of these, and this amuses me in unfortunate ways. I will craft the appropriate disclaimers, as I cannot be blamed for the only days starting with S being on the weekend.)

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I was chatting with PonderingWillow the other day while going through the dating survey results from the last Taste Better Newsletter, and the vegan gender gap really jumped out at me.

I don’t have any official data, but the vast majority of vegans I’m in touch with are women, and the ratio of interactions, newsletter signups, survey responses, etc all seem to point to a ratio of at least 3 women for every vegan man.

With that in mind, are things like the “I’d rather go naked than…” campaigns, “lettuce ladies,” etc all missing the mark? Or are (straight) vegan women just really willing to try anything to bridge this gender gap?

If everyone worked together, in a year or two activism campaigns could be redirected to men again, but the message would be more of an ultimatum: “Go Vegan. We have all your women.”

Thoughts?

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Proof that I can turn any otherwise time-wasting activity into “research”:

(original, easier to read version here.)

That came from volume 4 of Penny Arcade’s book series, and let’s not try to figure out if the very title (Birds Are Weird) was a trigger designed to trap vegan pornographers like myself. If it was, I salute their marketing team whilst simultaneously miming a bullet ricochet off of my impervious chest; I got the book from the local library.

I’ve got to say, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the book – I’ve been reading the comic online for years but rarely read the writeups. While I enjoyed the writing style online they were usually too long and talked about stuff I didn’t care much about, but the book just had little summaries about the background for each strip, and they were pretty witty. It reminded me of a style I used to write a lot more in, and I’m trying to capture that again.

Anyway, this isn’t an anti-McDonald’s cartoon lure to a thinly veiled affiliate link (well, not just that) – my point here is that inspiration isn’t always found in the usual literature. What about you? Is there a book on your shelf that drives you to be a better vegan, activist, or overall person that’s such a stretch that someone just passing by would never guess the connection?

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I can’t stand aquariums, but part of me hopes that they can at least lead people down the path of veganism. There are a zillion animals in the world and even now after years and years of being vegan, I know more about how they taste than anything else about most of them.

Part of me wonders if we as a society knew more about animals, maybe we’d eat less of them. For instance, while I’ve never, to my knowledge, eaten walrus, who knew they could auto-fellate so easily?

So anyway, there’s an answer for you the next time the fish question comes up. Walrus aren’t fish, of course, but fish aren’t vegetables, so your conversation should go unimpeded.

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OK, I was skimming through a Vegan Represent thread about books and ganymeder mentioned the book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies [affiliate link].

I haven’t read the work, but as far as I understand it (a distance which, while not great, will be easily extended through your help in the comments) the original book is old enough that copyright doesn’t apply blah blah blah and someone can make a remix without dealing with lawyers.

So, and I realize that the image for this post gave it away, what about other versions of the classics, but a little more… vegan?

• The Old Man and the Soy
• Gulliver’s Travels to the vegan grocery store
• A Farewell to Barns
• Great Expectations…Which Were Dashed When I Looked at the Menu for My Company Christmas Lunch
• Hamless

Someone’s got to be better at this than me… Comments?

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Many years ago, but not so many that I wasn’t vegan, I was dating a vegetarian girl. The usual veg-related small talk followed, including the usual “why veg” stuff, and I thought I’d been around the block a few times (in discussing veganism, not so much the dating, you gutter minded people) but her answer surprised me: she just didn’t like the taste of meat.

I thought that was odd, but little did I know at the time it was a warning sign that I was dating a panda.

Apparently panda bears don’t have the ability to taste meat, and that’s why they eat bamboo. The distinction comes about by way of a genetic mutation, which means Panda Boy is the suckiest X-Man ever, but as vegans we feel compelled to root for him.

I don’t know if this has any practical approach to activism, but as with many things here at VP, it manages to ride the edge of irrelevance while at the same time being too random not to share.

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So one of the advantages of living in a city with a large Chinatown is the range of grocery store products available to you. From time to time we grab a can of gluten to add something to a stir fry, and this week we found something new:

(Incidentally, the “E&B” stands for “Easy & Busy” which by itself would have warranted the purchase.)

Now, in Canada, we’ve got some kind of rule about labels being in both English and French, which gets screwed up on a lot of imports – quite often it ends up being French only and you’ve got to decipher a French ingredients list which is on a sticker applied right on top of the English one, for example.

It’s a bit of a pastime growing up, where the packaging is English on one side and French on the other, so a lot of us speak cereal box French, for example, but most products don’t end up with this on the reverse:

If you couldn’t guess, “Gluten Français” means “French Gluten.” E&B has a whole range of products made from gluten, but surprisingly they’re all called the same thing in French.

Chinese mock meat products came under fire this year for not being so mock, what are the odds it was a case of the English labels being similarly messed up?

(Incidentally, I pretty much limit myself to canned gluten when it comes to Asian mock meat products – I don’t know if it’s necessarily any “safer” but the stuff we get doesn’t taste or look like meat, it’s just globs of dough. The duck we I just bought because it was funny, no idea if it’ll ever get opened or simply sit in the trophy case.)

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