Author: Buffet o' Blog

Laughing is good for you. So this blog is a buffet of randomness and humor. Most of the content here is original and thus exclusive to this site. I encourage everyone to participate in the comments section -- it makes it more fun for everyone.

Caption Contest, boy dumping water from roof

Welcome to another caption contest! It’s been a while, so let’s go over the “rules”. (Don’t worry, there’s no legalese / fine print here.)

1) Say something funny and/or random about the picture.
2) Keep it clean and family-friendly.

That’s it!

Here are some tips: What are the people thinking (before or after)? What might they say? Why did this happen? What might happen after this? Also remember that you can create circumstances however you want. You could also speak from the point-of-view of a narrator or anyone else you think up. It doesn’t have to be realistic, either — you could imagine it as part of a movie. Basically, anything goes as long as it’s funny and clean. Have fun!

Let me also add that comments continue to get added, so check back occasionally. There’s a Recent Comments section in the sidebar, or you can also subscribe to the comments for a post to receive them by e-mail if you prefer.

(To see our other caption contests, click on the “Say What?” category in the sidebar.)

soap, the bubbly barbarian

You’ve probably heard much talk this year about washing your hands with soap. Perhaps you’ve heard that soap is better at removing the COVID-19 coronavirus than hand sanitizer. (There is a myth out there that hand sanitizer is better, perhaps because it’s not “old-school” like soap.) But do you know why soap is better?

If you haven’t thought much about it, you might assume that soap helps wash away the germs on your hands. It probably does help with it. However, its effectiveness against COVID-19 (and other sickness-causing germs) is much darker than you would imagine: Soap is not just washing it away — it’s ripping it apart, destroying it violently. If you want to read how and why it does that, read this: How soap absolutely annihilates the coronavirus. If you don’t have time to read/watch it, here’s important info you should know: Just washing your hands with water does not wash away the coronavirus or other similar germs. Also, you need to have soap on your hands for 20 seconds for it to do its thing. That’s not just a made-up number (like the suggestion to brush your teeth for two minutes) — it actually takes 20 seconds.

The next time you’re washing your hands with soap and have them lathered up really good and are waiting 20 seconds before rinsing, take a look at the soap bubbles on your hands and think of how they are single-handedly destroying COVID-19 germs. (Oops, that was almost a pun… there’s probably one you could make by changing a word or two, but I’m not going there.)

Don’t call it a comeback…

I’ve been here for years. 🙂 And the blog has been here. There just hasn’t been much interaction in a while. But that’s changing. I’ve missed writing, and I often have ideas that I jot down to write on sometime in the future. Well, the future is here! 🙂

If you’re curious what happened, I had children and free time approached zero, so quite a few optional activities were cut back. Life is still busy, but I’m going to allocate some time for sharing randomness and humor. The world certainly needs to laugh more these days!

So what have you missed? Well, not much in terms of new content being posted, which is unfortunate. However, the blog surpassed ONE MILLION page views, which is quite the accomplishment considering there has never been any paid advertising for it. (I suppose this is my 15 megabytes of fame.) 🙂

There’s something else that was missed around here, and that’s the community. It wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun without the witty comments (and I’ll acknowledge the bad puns, too). There were a lot of “inside jokes” that were funny on their own but even better for the regulars here. And the cast of recurring characters who appeared in the comment section were definitely unique. (I wonder if that “Important Evil Genius” is still around… obviously he hasn’t taken over the world yet.)

I also recently remembered the free-for-all stories and re-read them, and there is nothing else like that. Most other stories are somewhat predictable, but these are not in any way predictable! Even the people writing on it had no idea what was going to happen in the next paragraph beyond theirs. 🙂 If you haven’t read them, it’s a good time.

Memes have become quite popular, which are somewhat like the caption contests we used to have here (filed under “Say What?”), except memes have the joke/humor printed on the picture instead of in the comments. I always enjoyed the caption contests because someone else seeing the exact same picture would think of something hilarious that I never would’ve thought of, and sometimes one funny comment would lead to another. Plus there were sometimes references to the “inside jokes” I mentioned earlier with recurring characters and stories.

Hopefully all of you subscribers will stay for the show and participate in the comments. The upcoming posts will be along the lines of what was here before — although, the theme is “randomness”, so it could be anything, but that’s the fun of it, right?

Who invented cheese dip?

cheese dip with chips
Photo by Valeria Boltneva on Pexels.com

Have you ever wondered who invented cheese dip? And when? I don’t always ponder these things, but I did wonder why the World Cheese Dip Championship was held in Arkansas. So I looked it up.

Apparently cheese dip was invented in Hot Springs, Arkansas in 1935 by the owner of Mexico Chiquito restaurants. It seems hard to believe, I suppose because it’s so common now (around here, anyway), and it’s the type of dish you just assume always existed.

Let me back up, though, because I realize not everyone knows what cheese dip is (and you should know!). It’s basically melted cheese with spices that you eat by dipping chips into it. It’s important to get the consistency just right so it sticks to the chip while being thin enough to dip into and staying that way throughout the meal. In its most simple form, you can make it with a pound of Velveeta cheese and a can of Rotel diced tomatoes and green chilies. There are countless variations on this, adding various cheeses, spices, meats, chili, etc. The most common chips used are tortilla chips, like Tostitos, or Fritos Scoops. (Doritos works well, too.) Adding lots of spices and seasonings tends to lead to diminishing returns, where it becomes considerably more work while producing marginal gains (if any). At the World Cheese Dip Competition, there are many variations, usually mostly good, but when they try too hard it sometimes doesn’t work well.

At the World Cheese Dip Championship website, there is a video about the history of cheese dip. It is very much amateur in production, but it’s somewhat interesting if you’re interested in such things. (See what I did there?) It’s 19 minutes long, so below are a few highlights if you aren’t going to watch it.

In the video, you meet a chef who trained under Emeril Lagasse and opened a restaurant in central Arkansas after Hurricane Katrina. He said he never even thought of offering cheese dip on the menu because, in his words, “I just don’t even think of it as an actual dish.” Then he started to notice it on menus all over the place, and all his workers started asking about it, so in a staff meeting he asked, “Is there something I need to know about cheese dip?”, and everyone was dumbfounded that he had no clue, because all the regulars here took it for granted. But later on, the chef said he still doesn’t consider cheese dip a “thing”, that it’s just part of nachos. The film director exposed the chef’s ignorance, stating that nachos were invented in 1943 by Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya. (Side note: So it took people 8 years to pour the cheese dip over the chips and consider it a dish?) The story of how nachos were invented is at 14:20 in the video. Nachos aren’t the same thing, even if the ingredients are similar. If you also don’t “get it”, I encourage you to try it. It sounds simple (and it is), but it is awesome. And it complements many other foods well. (And by many, I literally mean many — that’s why most restaurants in Arkansas offer cheese dip.)

The editor-in-chief at the Arkansas Times said, “Cheese dip is the national food of Arkansas.” (Don’t think too hard about that… it just means it’s a big deal.) He also said the uniqueness of cheese dip in Arkansas is its ubiquity. (That’s an unusual way to put it.) Later he talked about which chip he prefers for dipping, based on the tensile strength for scooping up payloads of cheese dip (and chunks in some varieties). It does matter, and I have to agree that Fritos Scoops are my preferred choice, though many options are great (like Tostitos and Doritos).

Regarding the nutritional value of cheese dip, well, it doesn’t matter! 🙂 It’s one of those foods worth eating “right” even if you have to eat it less often than you’d like to. 🙂 Actually, you might be surprised to realize it has some healthy qualities to it. Rotel is basically a can of chopped up vegetables. Of course there’s cheese, but some nutritionists are saying the saturated fat in milk products is not as unhealthy as saturated fat in red meat. And if you use Fritos or Tostitos, those are vegetables. I know, no one believes me, but look at the ingredient list for yourself, and you’ll find: corn, corn oil, and salt. (In a discussion on this someone pointed out that corn can be a vegetable, fruit, or grain depending on what state it’s in, but that’s beyond the scope of this article.) So frame it from this angle and you’re dipping veggie chips into a cheesy veggie dip. (That doesn’t sound good at all, but remember we’re talking about cheese dip. I’m just trying to help you rationalize it in case you’re trying to lose weight and eat healthy, like me.)

I saw a website that lists a “cheese dip trail through Arkansas” that features several restaurants which are “famous” for their cheese dip. I haven’t tried all of these yet, so it sounds like a great idea to do someday.

There are even annual awards for the best cheese dip in the state, and every year that category receives more votes than any other category. It’s a big deal, even though we might take it for granted here.

I’d like to hear your thoughts about it. Are you familiar with cheese dip? Do you eat it regularly? If not, are you going to try it? What state/area/country are you from?