This originally ran in Sunday editions of The Times and The News-Star at Thanksgiving time 2010…

These are the times that try men’s … colons?

Even the most casual eater, wandering aimlessly thought The Land of the Leftover, has got to be heads up in these post-Thanksgiving days. Cheese dip here. Sausage ball there. Week-old giblets, ripe for the taking.

Food jitters.

For some reason, we are robotically drawn to seasonal foods, even though there are plenty of holiday experiences available that should cause us to lose our appetites. If you can’t relate, then you’ve never been hugged right before a holiday meal by a great aunt. With a goatee. Who’s dipping snuff.

Welcome to my world.

(A have a friend who once lost 15 pounds during December. She didn’t mean to. But right before one Thanksgiving dinner, her uncle said to her, table-side, “Honey, I wonder why God took all the hair off my head and put it on my back?” She was able to eat solid food again, but not until somewhere around Valentine’s Day.)

Another dietary issue this time of year: stadium food. Close to Football Bowl season. Pressure’s on. So we eat either to relieve the stress of a stretch run or because we’re bored stiff because our team IS a stiff.  I have yet another friend who shared with me his digestive system misgivings after Saturday’s joyous time in a football stadium occupied by a team that’s more up and down than a prairie dog. “My most painful lesson from the weekend,” he said, “was that pre-prandial and post-prandial reflections on a stadium corn dog are two very different realities.”

Prandial means “of or relating to a meal.” It’s from the Latin “prandium,” meaning, “I should not have ate that.” As you have surmised, to use those kinds of high-dollar words, my friend is pretty smart – but not smart enough to call time out in the corn dog line. You do not toy with a mass-produced corn dog in a competitive atmosphere far, far from your home locker room. You don’t do it.

Let this be a lesson to us all: your digestive system doesn’t know you have a high IQ. Faulty plumbing due to pilot error puts us all – the prince and the pauper, the duke (excuse my French) and the serf —  right there on the same page.

FOURTH AND LONG

The corn dog on a stick I ate was more than just inviting.

Too bad I didn’t think that later it would do the biting.

Food jits. It’s a real thing.

If our own lack of self control and the overpowering temptations of the season weren’t enough, the food world and Mother Nature herself might be conspiring against us. My own personal mother, of all people, alerted me to this tragedy.

The Nature Conservation Research Council, which sounds like an important thing, forecasts a chocolate shortage. Because African farmers are ditching their cocoa farms for other easier-to-grow crops, chocolate might either disappear or increase drastically in price. This means that in 20 years, a Baby Ruth could well be out of my price range. My mother’s grandchildren call her “Sweeter,” so you can imagine how this is affecting my family. Let’s hold hands and …

CHOCOLATE LAMENTATIONS

No Twix? No Bliss? No Hershey’s Kiss,

No chocolate dip fondue?

The question we must pray is

“What would Willie Wonka do?”

-30-

In 1494 — which sometimes seems like just the other day until I think, ‘No, that was 1495 I’m thinking about, not 1494,’ but who among us hasn’t made THAT mistake, right? – on this very day, this very date I mean, in 1494, “Piero the Unfortunate of the de’ Medici family, ruler of Florence, loses his power and flees the state.” I am copying that from a history website and now I am frantically looking up Piero the Unfortunate because, with a nickname like that, I have to.

Pierro the Unfortunate… 

Was he, like me, a Baltimore Orioles fan?

Was he just clumsy?

Did he look funny in a hat?

Did a ball go through his legs during Game 6 of the 1493 World Series? (And what a Game 6 it was! Madrid won Game 7 with ease but, I mean, after Game 6, was there ever really any doubt?

Was he not named ‘the Unfortunate’ until AFTER he lost power?

And why did he lose power? Did a storm come through and knock a light pole down? Did somebody intentionally sabotage his home? Did the de’ Medici family, notorious for not paying their cable bill on time, ignore their Swepco of Italy bill too?

Turns out he was simply an unfit ruler, young and arrogant, so they ran him out of Tuscany and told him not to let the door hit him in the you-know-what on the way out. Which it did, unfortunately.

Why I bring this up I don’t know because I went back through the microfilm and this didn’t even make the “A” section of next day’s paper on Nov. 10, 1494. Chris Columbus was still getting ALL the ink! Discover a new world and the story gets legs…Chris Columbus the Fortunate.

-30-