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• How <i>The Simpsons</i> Keeps Predicting The Future
• The Round Hot Dog
• The Most Awkward Funeral Home Encounter Ever
• Middle Earthenware: One Family's Quest to Reclaim Its Place in British Pottery History

How <i>The Simpsons</i> Keeps Predicting The Future Posted: 29 Jun 2021 09:03 PM PDT How many times has something happened that made national news, and someone said "Simpsons did it!" immediately? It's uncanny how The Simpsons made so many gags that ended up happening in the real world years later. Were the writers so in tune with trends that they could predict the future? Is it all coincidence? Is this phenomenon an illusion of our perception? Or are they time travelers? Maybe our world is turning into a sitcom! Buzzfeed Unsolved goes through these theories, and then takes a look at what's really happening. -via Digg

The Round Hot Dog Posted: 29 Jun 2021 09:02 PM PDT ive just been informed that round hot dog burgers exist and i am LOSING IT pic.twitter.com/mQHXZO6nEv — maria yagoda (@mariayagoda) June 15, 2021 Have you ever bought the wrong buns and then wished that you could make hot dogs fit on the hamburger buns you bought by mistake? This product wouldn't help with that, since it's mail order, but you get the idea. And calling it a round hot dog is a little confusing, because hot dogs are already round. This is more of a flat hot dog. Rastelli's sells their round hot dogs at eight for $18 plus shipping. But wait- isn't a round hot dog the same as a slice of boloney?    Listen. There are key differences between round dogs and thick-cut slabs of bologna. While hot dogs and bologna are often made of the same stuff, squished into different forms (and different types of casing), there can be more qualities that differentiate them besides their shape. I spoke to a Rastelli's spokesperson who refuted claims that their round dogs are just "thicc bologna," as one tweeter put it to me. In a patented process, Rastelli's chops black angus beef and premium pork, rather than fully emulsifying or liquifying the mixture like what's done for many traditional bolognas. "We then wrap our meat mixture in a collagen casing, followed by a netting to help hold shape," a spokesperson told me. "The product is then smoked, similar to an Old World-style hot dog, with a proprietary blend of woods, such as chicory, and later finished in the oven. Before slicing into rounds, we remove the casing." They remove the casing so the meat becomes more permeable, allowing the flavor of the condiments to "really sink into the round dog," and to help reduce the chances of choking. This still sounds like baloney, just high-quality baloney. Anyway, Food & Wine gave it a try, and posted a good review of the results. The argument about whether round dogs are baloney will continue, as will the argument over whether a hot dog is a sandwich. Either way, it appears that a round hot dog is a sandwich. -via Metafilter

The Most Awkward Funeral Home Encounter Ever Posted: 29 Jun 2021 09:02 PM PDT   Every author has at least one awkward story of getting asked to perform an authorly duty at an opportune time. This is mine: pic.twitter.com/siQsSbn7Ik — Jarrett J. Krosoczka (@StudioJJK) June 29, 2021 Jarrett J. Krosoczka is a children's book author and illustrator. He's most famous for his Lunch Lady series. Perhaps he's a bit too famous, as he learned when he went to a funeral home to pick up the cremated remains of his late mother. Krosoczka tells the story and tells it masterfully. Be sure to stay for the punchline. -via Aaron Starmer

Middle Earthenware: One Family's Quest to Reclaim Its Place in British Pottery History Posted: 29 Jun 2021 06:54 PM PDT It's one thing to collect a particular kind of pottery, but quite another when those pottery pieces were manufactured by one's own ancestors. Tony Patterson's brother discovered that their great-great-grandfather made pottery in the north of England. In fact, there were quite a few Pattersons involved in the business in the 18th and 19th centuries. But those pottery pieces were hard to find and/or hard to identify. They weren't mentioned in Geoffrey A. Godden's An Illustrated Encyclopedia of British Pottery and Porcelain, so the family pottery must have been a cottage industry. Or was it? Further research revealed that the Pattersons had rather large pottery manufacturing operations. For a while, there were plenty of "capital clay pits" to keep the Gateshead area potteries supplied with the raw materials needed for their exports to Norway and customers in the British Isles. Eventually, though, business was good enough for the extended Patterson family that clay had to be brought in from Cornwall, which had been supplying Staffordshire potteries with white clay for porcelain since the end of the 18th century. "In the course of my research," Patterson says, "I found a bill for clay that was transported from Cornwall up to Gateshead." A second piece of evidence indicating the size of the Gateshead ceramics industry was a newspaper advertisement placed by George Patterson, in which he expressed his interest in purchasing 200 tons of clay to keep the 60 men, 26 women, 32 boys, and 15 girls working at his earthenware pottery on Sheriff Hill productively occupied. The potteries in and around Gateshead, then, represented far more than a minor cottage industry. Geography aside, how could the Geoffrey Goddens of the ceramics world have missed them? In the end, it may have been nothing more than a routine case of ingrown conventional wisdom. "I wrote Godden when I was beginning my research," Patterson says. In his book, Patterson describes Godden's response as "far from enthusiastic." "It motivated me to prove him wrong," Patterson says. "Perhaps if he'd let me down in a gentler fashion, I might not have proceeded." Tony Patterson wrote his own book, 19th Century Patterson Potters and Pottery, to chronicle his family's surprisingly prominent place in England's pottery manufacturing history. Read how all that came about at Collectors Weekly.

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