[TheForge] [OT] [RANT RE: ] Just in time for Xmas

[Mike]

> *http://tinyurl.com/yn33qg

Yow! I have seen the light!

We used the blender we inherited from Peggy's grandfather until circa
1985, when a part broke.  I fixed it and it lasted another few
years. When it broke again, we bought a nice new one. 

Only the new one began to emit smoke and and make melty noises on the
second batch of pesto.  Our nice hardware-store people replaced it
with another make.  But oy, weh, a plastic part routinely breaks,
requiring that I buy and store extras.  And it whines and complains
and threatens to start smoking at any moment, too.

Now when I was in school, I worked as a lab tech at the dairy science
department.  They did nutritional studies of various feeds: fed the
stuff to rats and then did "total body lipids" measurements.  How do
you do this?  Put the whole rat (after skinning, because rathide
doesn't blend worth doodly-squat) into a blender with water and blend
it to a froth, then extract the fats by shaking up with a
water-immiscible solvent.  Hah! That required a Real Blender,
all-stainless and powerful.  A search reveals that 40 years later, the
blender makers have descended to marketing crappy blenders to
consumers and are now charging $700 and up for a Real,
Whole-Rat-Capable Blender.

Feh!

So I fixed the inherited, now 50 year old blender again and it's still
cranking along.


The only blender I ever saw that was better than that rat blender was
one in a paper mill.  Six or eight feet in diameter, 12' or so deep,
lined with ceramic tile, a blade suitable for use as a screw on a
medium-sized ship and a motor the size of a domestic washing machine.
Even I will concede that such would be overkill for making a couple of
gallons of pesto, some black-bean paste and the occasional milkshake.

Jeez, if I could get just the canister and drive-coupling parts for
that gas-powered one...


- Mike

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^