Further Anger

Pancakes

I am, at my core, a simple and straightforward man. I hold firm in my belief that words should generally mean what they say. For example, when I hear the word cake, I think of this:

(photo credit Eric Savage)

Note the properties that make this a cake. It is a baked good, made of a sugary dough with some kind of additional flavor (usually chocolate or vanilla) and topped with icing. In order for it to be a cake, it must fulfill these properties. Other words containing cake must also follow this principle; for example, a cupcake still fulfills all of the requirements for a cake and differs only in shape, size, and method of presentation from an average cake.

What, then, would you expect a pancake to be? Perhaps a cake that this exact size and shape of a skillet? No. That would be too easy. A pancake is fried bread. Other than eggs, milk, and flour, it shares nothing in common with cake. Imagine how many people have been disappointed over the years, expecting cake but instead receiving this pathetic breakfast food.

This wouldn't be a problem if pancakes were inherently tasty. If I was expecting cake and got baklava, I would not be disappointed. Unfortunately that is not the case.

You might protest, of course, that you have eaten and enjoyed pancakes many times in the past. That, however, is because pancakes are not generally eaten in a vacuum but usually have other, good tasting foods stuck inside of them and ludicrous amounts of syrup and butter added on top. I defy you to find any food that doesn't taste good after it has been drowned in pure, distilled sugar and fat.

Alone, the pancake is pathetic. It's just bread. In fact, it's flavorless bread. If I wanted to eat pure bread, there are plenty of breads that taste good on their own, but I would get better taste and probably more nutrition out of stale Wonderbread than a pancake on its own. Pancakes are terrible. They are truly the worst food. Don't even get me started on

Rain

I'm a big believer in the golden rule. If I wouldn't want something done to me, I don't do it to anyone else. I've found that most people seem to agree that this is a good idea. Even among the animal kingdom this kind of basic respect is easy to find (even rattlesnakes will often leave you alone).

Evidently that logic does not apply to the sky. What does that have to do with the rain, you might ask? Well, ask yourself this: when's the last time you evaporated some water, condensed it, and then threw it into the sky for hours on end? Imagine how inconvenienced the sky would be.

And yet the sky does exactly the same thing to us. Does it stop to think of what the consequences are? No. Does it consider how we feel? No. It just decides on a whim to drench us without cause. It's the rudest of all  natural phenomena and I personally can't stand it. It's the worst. Don't even get me started on