Let My Boxcutter Be My Guide

One of the bizarre things that interests me is the symbols printed on boxes. In various jobs I've had, I've spent a good deal of time staring at the underside of boxes. There's a lot more information there than one would think. Such as crush weight parameters. How about that?

There are also some esoteric symbols printed onto various cartons, for the purpose of telling warehouse personnel how to treat the boxes, given the contents. Some of these are obvious, others are not. Some of my favorites are the stacking diagrams--drawings of how to palletize the boxes for maximum strength, product capacity, and all while keeping the product safe.

For those of you interested in "architectural fiction", and such things, we might think of these as visual-commodity-infrastructure-planning-geometries. Or, for those of you interested in "architectural fantasy", these are packgnosis-mobiscriptural-palletamulet-mandalas.

Materials handling to Third Bardo, man!

I believe these is the old packaging of digital printer developer. Most of these are from digital printing supplies of some sort. Even from looking at the box, I have no idea what this is supposed to symbolize, other than not to stack more than ten layers deep.


Toner, I think. The far left means stack no more than 25 high. The far right means the toner's holy halo will be visible when glorified with rays of the one true god.


Boxes of bottles of fuser oil. Also, the blueprints for "the endless staircase of holy knowledge."


This is also from the fuser oil box. To me, it evokes twisted intestines, and the dark voids that lie within us all.


More from the toner cartridge box. The cartridges come two to a box; and somehow, in the way they fit, they easily slide out of the box, but when they are empty and I am ready to take them out to the trash, I can never fit two back in the box. Maybe I don't pay enough attention in the first place. Or maybe, just maybe, this diagram depicts the boxes shrinking once the cartridges are removed.


This is actually from a box of instant Thai soups. Which is a printing supply to me, in an abstract way. Note, first of all, the mystic hand symbol on the left, which I'm sure I saw in one of the seizure-inducing gnosis scenes in Lawnmower Man. You might also notice how they managed to fit "protect from rain and sun" into one symbol, which is more efficient than another example above. Then, although I can easily figure out that the far right symbol means, "this soup is not for peasants who still use archaic and symbolic tools," I am at a complete lost as to what the bottle means. I thought the whole point of these things was to symbolize a message understandable in any language! Does it mean, "do not consume with pure whiskey?" Or, "Made with 100% Not Holy Water?" Maybe, "Only serve in Eylermeyer Flasks?"

Anybody who speaks Thai is more than invited to ellucidate in the comments.

Put This in Your Rice Cooker, and, well... cook it.

Another in my, now a series, of dehydrated noodle posts.



This is the specimen I am sampling today, and I pause to make mention of it because it is delicious. Not are the flavorings exquisite and the noodles superb, but there is real, hydrated stewed fish in a foil packet, which one squeezes into the soup when it is done steeping.

I realize this may be a deal-breaker for many. My mouth, unlike the majority of English-speaking palates, particularly delights in the oceanic, fishy flavors of many Asian foods such as dried squid and cuttlefish, various mollusk liquids and derivatives, and the all-tasty prawn powder. I also savor similar delicacies from around the globe. I love the Ashkanazi and Eastern European flavors of my favorite Gefilte fish, herring in wine sauce from the North Sea, the thousands of cephalopod variations from the Mediterranean, and anchovies, sardines and other small fry packaged and prepared in fashions from around the world. The other day I started salivating upon hearing a description of an oyster shucking competition in Sweden. I have even purchased food items with packaging printed in other languages, unaware of what the contents may actually be, simply because of a friendly-looking seafood character who looked delicious (like many of these dried soups). Recently I bought a snack-food looking bag, to discover it contained whole sardines, deep-fried to the crispiness of chips. They were good with beer, though I admit I couldn't eat the whole bag in one sitting like Doritos.

This habits often place me at odds with others over culinary choices; but of course, as the proverb reads, "more for me."

I am told from the ingredient list on this particular soup that the fish I am eating is basa fish. Basa fish is a type of catfish from Vietnam and Thailand, from the Mekong Delta and Charo Phraya basin (the packaging in in Vietnamese).

Wikipedia provides these interesting facts:

In 2002, the United States accused Vietnam of dumping catfish, namely Pangasius bocourti and Pangasius hypophthalmus, on the American market, charging the Vietnamese importers who are subsidized by Vietnam's government of unfair competition.^[4][5] With pressures from the U.S. catfish industry, the United States Congress passed a law in 2003 preventing the imported fish from being labelled as catfish, as well as imposing additional tariffs on the imported fish.^[6] Under the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ruling, only species from the family Ictaluridae can be sold as true catfish.^[7] As a result, the Vietnamese exporters of this fish now label their products sold in the U.S. as basa fish or bocourti.^[8][9]

At the height of the "catfish war," U.S. catfish farmers and others were describing the imported catfish as an inferior product. However, researchers at the Mississippi State University show that in their experiment, imported basa were preferred in a taste test 3-to-1.^[10]

I find it quite delicious. It's texture, at least in this packaged, pre-stewed form, is a bit denser than the American catfish I'm used to, but it works well in a dehydrated soup in which the other ingredients are light and soft in their re-consitituted form. I suppose I would have to do a deep-fry comparison to really compare to catfish.

This company makes the same soup in rice porridge form. If you have never had rice porridge, it's just soup with rice rather than noodles. This particular rice porridge inspired me to experiment with rice porridge on my own. We have a deluxe rice cooker, so it comes with rice porridge settings, but all one really needs is to wash the rice first, and add an extra cupful of water, and slowly simmer the rice rather than bring it to a raging bowl. When the rice is the right consistency, add ingredients, and you're good to go. Last night I added tofu, shittake, basil and parsley, and a bit of ginger and dry mustard and chile. Delicious!

Soup, out.

Sicks

Home with a cold today. Right now it's in the sore throat stage, I'm sure we'll be well on to the stuffiness head cold stage tomorrow. I went out this morning and bought four cans of soup, a loaf of bread, a stack of american cheese, a stick of margarine, and two gallons of orange juice with pulp. Gotta have pulp. There are alot of people who are anti-pulp, but in my opinion, they might as well drink Tang. The pulp is part of the orange, without it you might as well be drinking water without the hydrogen. A woman at the grocery store with no teeth asked me if I am vegetarian (I think she asked because I had bought the two kinds of soup available at the grocery store that didn't have ground beef in them) and then suggested I go to Whole Foods because they have a better selection. I agreed, but said that Whole Foods was too far away.

Now it is soup and grilled cheese time. Unfortunately, TNT seems to be on the blink, so I cannot watch Law & Order, which was my one chance for a miraculous cure. Also unfortunately, I cannot get either the Campell's or the Progressive soup commercials out of my head, and this makes me want to put my forehead in the frying pan.

I had a good topic for a post today, but I seem to have forgotten it in all this excitement. Maybe I'll remember later while I'm doing my taxes.

Until then, here is a link to a creepy but very entertaining article by Sarah Aswell, who went to my college. She is a good writer. The article gives me a post-modern mystical "ghost in the machine" feeling about the internet, similar to some of Chuck Palahniuk's better stuff. But I hate Palahniuk. Lately, I've been hating every writer that I like that is successful because I am not.