The Chicken Cold

Color me lucky. I'm now a survivor of the 2006 influenza virus. You all can stop wearing the rubbery bracelets.

And yes, it was the flu. Not some cold or other wimpy virus. The flu. I can't think of any other malaise that we refer to in the singular like we do the influenza virus. No one sniffles, "I've got the cold." The doctor even warned me to be careful while I'm recovering from "the flu", because my immune system is weak, and I'm susceptible to catching "a pneumonia."

As a side: We're living in a world of technology that allows people to reshape their eyes with lasers, access the cordless internet in McDonalds, and buy seats on space shuttles, but our flu test is still painfully ramming a long Q-tip into a patient's nose before the nurse makes the patient fully aware what's about to happen?

Monday and Tuesday are a feverish blur to me. Luckily, I didn't empty my stomach as often as I remember doing in my childhood bouts with the flu. I was mainly just so tired and weak that I just wanted to sleep, but too achey and fevered to be comfortable enough to doze. I was essentially in a 24-hour toss-and-turn(-and-sweat-and-cough).

I also had a rough cough and lots of congestion. Two things I don't remember being linked with the flu. One of my clients decided today that I had a bad strain of the "chicken cold". I laughed and nodded, secretly uncertain what that meant. Later he clarified to someone else that didn't nod that, "the chicken flu was a bad version of the flu, so he has the chicken cold".

The chicken cold.

Spicy Chicken Parts

There are some foods in the world that have a mysterious popularity. Some of this mystery can be ascribed to cultural differences, taste preferences, or supply, but there are others that fall outside of these simple categories. I'd like to analyze one of these food mysteries today. The sports-fan and guy-who-goes-to-Hooters-but-just-for-the-food favorite: buffalo wings.

A short research on the buffalo wing has at least explained that "buffalo" refers to the city, not the animal. "Three links in one sentence means I'm a real blog now, by the way," said the blog.

I like boneless buffalo/chicken wings, because I like chicken meat slathered with spicy sauce that I can dip in ranch or bleu cheese. I'm not a huge fan of sucking meat off of a bone. Especially when the object I'm "eating" is more bone than meat. This thought birthed the explanatory epic that follows:

The head honchos over at Tyson one day were examining the efficiency of the "Poultry Dismemberment and Mutiliation Facility" when they were shocked how long it was taking the workers and worker-bots to extrapolate meat in the "various small parts" department. They decided that the relatively small amount of meat they were getting was not worth the inordinate amount of time invested.

What would they now do with these too-small chicken parts?

Many consultants were queried and thinktanks formed to answer this troublesome question. Some preferred tossing the parts. Some responded with research of smaller workers and worker-bots to better handle the small chicken-parts. Some recommended a study to find out where these small chickens or large chickens with small parts are coming from.

The answer that stuck was the simplest: convince the consumer to suck the meat off themselves.

"Preposterous!" the executives cried. "People will never buy a package of bones with the tiniest slivers of meat hanging from them!"

"We will develop a tasty sauce, with the spicy kick to make them forget they resemble a hyena gnawing at a wildebeest already picked clean save the small scraps the well-fed lions looked over," the consultants rejoined.

"The rest", they say, "is culinary history".