Crying Fowl: Double Anthropomorphism All The Way!

X isn't responding to my text messages (he's no doubt hung over and/or dead). In that text, I was proposing that Mondays at Said Panties be a sort of Free Write. Where we just go ahead and tippa-tappa-type whatever we damn well please.

Why? Because blogs usually have their worst traffic on Mondays. It's proven by metrics everywhere, people!

Think about it: you can barely drag yourself out of your bed (or that stranger's bed). You crawl into work hungover. No one wants to work. Only a few people are actually working. Your head is banging. Your body hurts (or is still drunk, and will start hurting in a few hours).

So why should we endeavor to subscribe to a theme or concept when half of you are probably passed out and/or vomiting on your keyboards as you try desperately to read what we're writing? Exactly: we shouldn't.

So today I want to talk about this picture.

It came to me in an email this morning advertising weekly deals for Big Daddy's: a chain diner in Manhattan with three current locations near Union Square, on the Upper West Side, and the Upper East Side. They are famous for serving Tater Tots, which makes me laugh because everyone has a shit fit when they end up somewhere that serves Tater Tots. They get all nostalgic and excited.

"Oh my God! Tater Tots! We HAVE to get them!"

You'd think that Tater Tots were ONLY available at Big Daddy's and not at, say, any supermarket anywhere in the United States. People get this way about Big Daddy's "Alphabet Soup" too. Which, when last I checked, is also available just about anywhere.

Anyway. I was particularly arrested (which sounds like a description of being jailed by clowns) by this overjoyed fried chicken drumstick. Namely because it is invoking anthropomorphism which is defined by some dictionary as:

"The attribution of human form or behaviour to a deity, animal, et"

The "ou" in behaviour makes it classier, btw.

But it's not standard anthropomorphism, which I am used to. No, much like the rare Double Rainbow All The Way that the entire Internet got hard for, this is a rare use of Double Anthropomorphism All The Way.

Because we're taking a drumstick - which is a fried portion of a full chicken, and then giving it a shit-eating grin and turning it into a completely separate being- now entirely divorced from its initial source. Now we are twice-removed from the ugly, feathered creature that was raised until it was too heavy to stand on its legs, captured in the night, electrocuted, hung upside down, and dragged across a saw blade.

Man, now I'm hungry.

But seriously! This is a smart move in the food industry. The standard behavior when we anthropomorphize our food has been to deal with the source material. There is a website that deals with this already, called Suicide Food. This is a term for depictions of animals experiencing mania because they will be brutally killed in due time so that we may eat them. In fact, much of the time, they are happily eating or killing themselves.

Disturbing? You bet your rump roast it is.

But I ask you, how disturbing is happy Mr. Drumstick? Not disturbing at all. Because he has been turned from a part of a living thing into a lumpy, caveman-club-like sock puppet in an upside down chef's hat that is so ecstatic to be available for half-price on Fridays.

I mean, sure, if you then re-attach the drumstick to its original source, you have yourself a two-faced fowl that would fit perfectly in some horror movie.

But that would require too much work to imagine, especially on a Monday morning.

- J.