Rebellious!

I don’t know what came over me, but today I decided to

1. Break the law
2. Be otherwise bad

As for the first item, I was looking for a different vessel to hold my morning shot of OJ. Hey, we have some old ceramic Hires Root Beer mugs up on top of the cupboard that haven’t been used in decades! They’re so cool—older than dirt (covered with same) and interesting looking. So I got them down and washed them.

When I turned them upside-down, I noticed some type on the bottom: USE AS CONTAINER EXCEPT FOR HIRES IS ILLEGAL. If I fill them with OJ I will be a law breaker!

Hires Root Beer is one of the two oldest continuously made American soft drinks. Introduced in 1876 by Charles E Hires in Philadelphia (he was a pharmacist)*, it has been in continuous production and is now owned by Cadbury/Schwepps/Dr Pepper/Snapple/etcetera. I wonder if the new owners will enforce the law or maybe they’ll leave it to the local prosecutor. We could draw the blinds and unplug the phone during breakfast and no one will be the wiser. Kinda gives you a chill knowing that the act of sipping OJ just might get you packed off to the pokey if you’re caught. Puts a little tingle in the dull old bowl of oatmeal, if you get my meaning.

As for item #2, we have a little tabletop dispenser for soy sauce. We’ve used it for at least a couple of decades, and it’s been refilled countless times. Oddly, the soy sauce leaves a brown residue inside the bottle, so today I scrubbed it out. While doing so, I noticed something printed above the UPC symbol:

REFILL ONLY WITH KIKKOMAN. Omigosh! This will be a day of rebellion! All these years I had ignored the warning, using who knows how many brands of soy sauce to top it off. In fact, the only reason I got that little bottle out of the cupboard was to refill it with about a dozen unused packets of soy sauce we had saved from numerous sushi purchases. NONE of which were KIKKOMAN!

The whole reason for this blog entry is to warn my sister and loyal reader Pat, who I know has kept and refilled a bottle of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce that she has used since getting married mid-last century. It is so old it has a glass stopper! Definitely worth keeping, but Pat, protect yourself and check the bottle for any warnings of misuse! It’s too late in life to spend the rest of it using a heavy sledge hammer to smash large rocks while wearing horizontal stripes for gosh sakes!

*Here is an example of a pharmacist promoting sugary drink. Kind of like physicians in later years promoting cigarettes for their mildness and calming effect. What does this say about American medicine? Don’t get me started.