furiousBlog

Many of those who read my Thanksgiving post had questions about the odd relationship that exists between the king of gelatin, Jell-O, and Mormons. So, to better illuminate this strange culture quirk, I've compiled the following trail. Sadly, I wasn't able to find much history like how it started, why it became so popular, etc.

The United Plates of America

Utahns may remember comedian Bill Cosby's visit in 2001, to lobby legislators to make Jell-O Utah's official snack. In 1997, Jell-O officials confirmed that Utah had the highest per-capita consumption of fruit-flavored gelatin in the country. When Utah's Jell-O sales slipped and Iowa took over that distinction in 1999, it sparked a local campaign (with a lot of support from the Jell-O folks) to "Take Back the Title," recounted in past Deseret Morning News articles. After Utah was once again on top of the heap, the legislature humored Jell-O spokesman Cosby and passed a resolution recognizing the jiggly dessert.

Wikipedia entry for Jell-O

Jell-O is the official state snack food of Utah, which is reported to have the highest per capita sales of green gelatin dessert of any US state. Over-fondness of Jell-O is often considered a cliché trait of Mormons even in other areas.

Wikipedia entry for Jell-O Belt

The Jello Belt is a colloquial term in American English that refers to the parts of the Western United States with large populations of "Mormons" (properly called Latter-Day Saints).

Desert dessert? Jell-O seeks to mold Utah opinion

In fact, the Salt Lake Olympic Committee designed and issued pins for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games featuring a bowl of the quivering green food. They quickly sold out and remain collector's items.

Note: Typically, Jell-O is considered a desert. In Mormon culture, however, it is often considered a salad. The next entry is an example of this. Lagoon is a (the?) amusement park in Utah.

Lagoon Salad List

Potato Salad
Pistachio Salad
Baked Beans (Groups of 1000 & under)
BBQ Beans
Frosted Jello
Pasta Salad

Utah's Famous Green Jell-O

1 cup water
1 package (6 ounces) lime Jell-O
1/2 cup sugar
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice (optional)
1 cup canned crushed pineapple, undrained
2 cups whipping cream

Ok, I got sick of the new theme after about a day. So, now I'm on another new theme. Hopefully, this one will last...

I've gotten a little tired of my old theme. It was nice and simple, but it's time for a change. And just in time, I saw this post on the Serendipity blog announcing a couple new themes. So, I'm now using Carl Blue. What do you think?

Update 12/9 5:50: I've moved a few of the sidebar items around so that the columns are a little more logically grouped. I've also added a title to the photo thumbnail so that all the top red lines match up.

Update 12/11 3:25: I've made several more changes. They include removing all the red lines, dropping the two-column sidebar, putting the comments back to how they were on the old theme, and making the whole thing a little thinner.

The most beautiful thing I've read all day:

Fill Your Pockets With Glitter And Confetti And Then Step In Front Of A Speeding Bus Day!

p.s. that site is pretty funny in general, so read some more of his stuff. Every day's a new day!

I wrote this entry just to make the lame geeky triumvirate of posts complete.

I saw this entry linked from Planet Debian (an aggregation of a bunch of Debian developers' blogs):

pure64

It's short, so I'm almost all of it below:

My workstation is now on pure amd64, after a bit of an odd cross-install-via-chroot procedure preserving all my packages and other files (basically: debootstrap into an amd64 chroot, deinstall everything, mv everything over, boot). I still count it as the same installation, though, so it's still technically on the same 1997 installation...

So, the last time he installed his operating system was 1997. Since then, it's just been upgrades. Now, it seems as if this last upgrade kind of stretched the definition of upgrade since it seems like it took more effort than just installing Debian from scratch, but it shows that it can be done. Even switching to a completely new architecture (x86 to amd64), Debian made a successful upgrade possible. Maybe I'll try that for my switch from x86 to my mac PowerPC G4 (just kidding).

I've read that Debian has always tried very hard to make upgrades from one major version to the next painless, but this is pretty incredible.