https://www.wsj.com/articles/man-bites-dog-thats-a-mistake-11574634718
A short business week provides time to think. Here’s what I’ve figured out so far:
Why I don’t eat hot dogs. My wife had an uncle in the vending/food-service business. A friend of his asked him to bid on a contract to provide hot dogs for their corporate cafeteria. He bid 75 cents a hot dog. A competitor bid 50 cents and won the contract.
Months later the uncle ran into his friend, who apologized but said: “I don’t understand. We’ve known each other for a lot of years, and I thought you would cut me a good price, but the other guy came in so much lower, I didn’t have a choice.” My wife’s uncle responded, “I don’t normally bid on hot dogs. You tell me how much you’re willing to pay, and I’ll provide them at that price.” He meant he could supply hot dogs at almost any price point by varying the ratio of meat to byproducts.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture says hot dogs can have beef, pork, chicken and turkey from “raw skeletal muscle meat” and meat derived from “advanced meat/bone separation machines.” Do hoofs have muscles? It also allows “mechanically separated meat,” which is basically paste from a high-pressure machine that removes meat without grinding the bone—a source of calcium nonetheless. And don’t forget those “meat byproducts” like heart, kidney or liver. Mmm mmm good.
I used to enjoy what we called “dirty water dogs” at ballparks—the kind that come out of the mysterious hot-water tank and get slapped onto a bun at your seat. No more. And I’m certainly wary of “dollar dog night” anywhere. Final word: I don’t normally quote Snoop Dogg, but here we agree: “Every time I see a mother— at a barbecue with a plate with a hot dog on it, I’m knockin’ that [expletive] out his hands.”
Why I stop for cars that honk at me. While in grad school in cosmopolitan Champaign, Ill., I met someone from St. Louis who shared my fanatical fandom of Cardinals baseball. On a beautiful spring day, we drove down for a game. He knew where to park free, and on the walk to Busch Stadium we stopped at every location that sold glasses of cold Anheuser-Busch products.