Road Kill Candy and a Fishy Story

I came across two items in the paper a while ago that caught my attention. The first was about some local fishermen.

It seems they had gone out fishing and while they were killing some time had decided to fillet a few for supper. Now when I go fishing if I catch a few big enough to eat, my practice is to clean them on the spot. I gave up years ago of thinking that my wife would be impressed with my hunter gatherer prowess if I brought home a nice big uncleaned fish for supper. I know this to be true because on the few occaisions I did just that, there was no reward for me. I quickly learned that women want their fish in a package, all washed and ready for the oven. They won't clean them, and if you do it at your sink you end up with fishy smell on the counter and a nice pile of guts that you don't know what to do with.

Thats where cleaning them where you caught them comes in, catch them clean them, put them in a bag. No mess, no smell, no slimy kitchen top, no disposal problems and you are contributing to a healthy environment by returning a portion of what came from the sea to the bottom where crabs and scupins will make short work of your offering.

Doesn't sound like much of a story, well it isn't until you get DFO involved. Apparently these fishermen, commercial fishermen they were, decided to clean a few for supper. I guess the wives of these fellows had also gotten the message across about women not being been impressed with a nice fresh fish carcass in their sinks. Along pulls up a DFO fisheries boat alongside and they come aboard. This is just a guess, but I think that commercial fishermen know the rules of their trade so they were probably pretty surprised when a fisheries officer held up a few fillets and said to them, OK boys, the jigs up, its off to the hoosegow for you.

The crime, they filleted some fish on board the boat, and as a result the officer couldn't tell what kind they were or how big the original fish has been. Doesn't it make you proud that these boys are around to protect us from ourselves. When I see write ups about fishermens meetings and they are going on about DFO this, and DFO that and DFO being a bunch of fuckheads I think, these guys should calm down and reason with the fisheries department and I am sure a rational approach to management will evolve.

Well I just changed my mind, any enforcement agency that arrests and charges some fishermen who clean a few fish for supper while out at sea have been pegged right, they are a bunch of fuckheads.

Its not often that two candidates for nitwit of the month appear on the same page of the paper but there it was, the second nominee, some guy from the SPCA challenging for the Golden Nut Award.

There was an entrepreneur who made candy, and trying to increase sales he came up with a recipe like what gummy bears are made of. It tastes prety good those gummy things, in fact my grandchildren love them. Especially some that are in every store called worms. Thats right, worms. They mould the candy, which has a soft feel to it into the shape of a worm and the kids get a great kick out of dangling them above their mouths as if they were a little bird baby and someone was feeding them. Pretty icky when you think about it, but the kids love it. Actually these things have been around for twenty years or so, I know because I can remember my own kids eating them.

As near as I can tell none of them were scarred by the experience, none of them graduated from the fantasy world of kids eating candy shaped worms to an adulthood where dinner is produced by 10 minutes effort with a spade in the garden. I can only deduce my kids were smart enough to recognize the difference between a candy worm and the real thing.

Well the SPCA guy didn't think like that. It seems that this entrepreneur made a mould for his gummies and he even had a name for them "Road Kill Candy". The moulds were of the things we see on the roads all the time, squirrels and skunks and coons. Except these critters all had a set of tire tracks across their middles. This offended the SPCA mightly and this bird proclaimed that these eaters of Road Kill Candy would be turned into animal hating drivers, who when they grew up would certainly cruise around looking to relive the days of their youth by crushing every animal they could get in their sights. The worst that could be said would be, its in bad taste, but so were the worms, lighten up, kids like this stuff. Drum roll please.

The Golden Nut Award for today goes to them both, lets have a big cheer for those protectors of the seas and the nations roads DFO and the SPCA.