I used a random five-dollar bill to provide the numbers by dividing the first six digits of the serial number into three two-digit pairs. As promised, here is a scan of the bill showing the numbers:
You can see the numbers to be matched were 25, 42, and 33. Our winners are:Jack Dunn, who nailed it with his guess of 42 on the first day for entries
Ruth Hanschka, who guessed 23 (-2 off)
Elizabeth St.Clair, who guessed 27 (+2 off)
Congratulations to all three winners, who are being contacted via email for prize delivery.
THANK YOU to everyone who entered, and to McDonald's of Connecticut and Western Massachusetts, who made the prizes available for giveaway.
Late last week, I got a heads-up from Steve Wood, who writes Connecticut Museum Quest, a top-notch Connecticut blog that is about so much more than just museums. He alerted me to a new product at Ocean State Job Lot: Farmer's Pride Snack Bologna (which just so happened to be featured in OSJL's "internet coupon" selection.)
That is one nasty-ass piece of tubesteak right there. Check out the gradations of coloring, from a kind of brownish-grey at the ends to rather pinkish in the middle. I swear I used no filtering or image manipulation to change those colors - that is exactly how they come out of the jar. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to capture the true beauty of the grey lines that run from tip to tip on the wieners, especially where the meat was in contact with the sides of the jar. These things are truly ghastly to look at.
At least when we cut into the wiener we found that the grey color doesn't go all the way through - once you get a little way into the surface, everything kind of turns pink again. I guess that means that they're okay to eat. Honestly, eyeballs are all we have to go by for safety, because there are absolutely no olfactory cues here. No scent of spices, no aroma of meat - nothing at all except the pungency of strong vinegar stabbing at our nostrils like fleets of aromatic daggers. The manufacturer (Monogram Meat Snacks LLC, USDA EST 795) could not possibly have made the brine any more unpleasantly sharp.
As with so many other oddball snacks we've tried over the years, Farmer's Pride Snack Bologna proved to be pretty popular with the dogs, though I didn't dare give them all they wanted due to the acidity of the pickle (the last thing I want to do is spend an afternoon scrubbing dog puke out of the dining room rug.)
Maryanne starts every work day with a light breakfast of toast and coffee. Her favorites are flavored breads, like raisin or cinnamon swirl. She saw an ad for Pepperidge Farm's new Swirl Bread and immediately requested that I pick up a loaf on my next trip to the supermarket.
The pale- and incredibly foul-looking cylinders of evil pictured above are the contents of a can of Senora Verde Beef Tamales, directly as emptied onto a paper plate. Some of them retained their paper sleeves as the can was tipped, others slipped from them like vile giant larvae shedding their outgrown skin. They were supposedly packed in "sauce," but that proved to be merely a watery tomato-flavored bile with a thick film of bright red grease floating on top. The "sauce" was easily disposed of, but globs of the grease stuck sort of randomly to everything else (including the plate, my fingers, and the walls of the microwave when I heated up this mess at work.)
