Questions… October 22, 2010
Posted by ourfriendben in wit and wisdom.Tags: best way to slice bread, bread knives, size of TV audiences
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Often, Silence Dogood and our friend Ben read, see, or hear things that bring up questions. And sadly, the answers to these questions never seem to be in whatever it is that prompted them, or anywhere else, as far as we can tell. So we’re turning to all of you with two that occurred to us today. Answers, please!
Our friend Ben was reading an article via Yahoo! News about TV shows that seemed likely to fail and be pulled (it’s from TV Guide and is called “10 Bubble Shows,” for reasons that are unclear to me). Mind you, we don’t even get TV reception here at Hawk’s Haven, so I have no clue whether these shows are good or bad. But a sentence in the slideshow presentation stopped me cold. It announced that a mere 9.5 million viewers per show were far from enough to keep the show on the air.
Only 9.5 million viewers?!! Let’s just say that Silence, our friend Ben, and Richard Saunders would be extremely pleased if we had 9.5 million visits a day here at Poor Richard’s Almanac. So my question is, how could 9.5 million people not be enough to keep a show on the air? What on earth sort of numbers does it take for a show to be viable? Sheesh.
Silence Dogood here. My question is decidedly more practical than OFB’s. I was reading a book about bread-baking this morning, and it reminded readers to always use a serrated bread knife to cut freshly made loaves of bread, or you’d tear the crumb and make an unholy, ugly-looking mess out of your beautiful homemade loaf.
So I thought, well, what about using one of those serrated plastic knives they sell for cutting lettuce? Isn’t that the whole point of those lettuce knives, that they’re super-gentle and don’t tear the leaves? Seems to me that they might work even better than a steel blade when cutting a warm-from-the-oven loaf. Anybody out there tried this?
So there you have it. And we’d be happy to answer your questions in return, though admittedly, our answers might be a bit off-base…
Silence, personally my favorite way to break into a new loaf of bread is by ripping a piece off.
Ha! Thanks, Daphne! I’d do the same if I could just get away with it…
“Bubble Show” comes from the figure of speech “on the bubble,” which itself derives from stock car racing, though I’d always associated it with the bubbles in levels that show whether a line is even with the ground or not.
Q.v.
Thanks, Mr. S.! I knew you of all people would be able to give me a definitive answer…
Lettuce knives? Are you making that up? And surely not in a self respecting Luddite household ;>)
I’m afraid so, Diana. You would not believe the number of gadgets sold here in the U.S. of A., many proudly bearing an “As Seen on TV” label like some flashback to the Fifties. My friend Delilah, who’s far more knowledgeable about kitchenware than I, told me the purpose of the serrated plastic lettuce knife was to keep the cut edges of the lettuce from browning, so at least I learned something!