Also, once you're out of crackers, is it permissible to simply lick orange cheese off the thingamabob?

A cheeze trowel?

It's called a cheese spreader. Who'da thunk, eh?

Spreader? (giggles)

Yes, permissible.

yes, it is called a cheez trowel.

Maybe that's the official name, fris, but it deserves a better one just like 'spork.'

I love that thing.

We used to get these for snacks on long car trips. The best part is when your crackers are gone, and you eat the cheez right off the little knifearooni.

It's called "the murderizer"

The technical name is "sprue".

Maybe that's the official name, fris, but it deserves a better one just like 'spork.'

Gah! Sorry, kid, my creativity-on-demand skills are primarily limited to situations that involve a monetary exchange or bitching. Preferably, both at the same time. I'm useless in this context.

*tiptoes out of thread*

Dunno what they're called, they're awfully handi™ though.

oh, frisbee, come back...

(I seem to channeling a Californian cousin of Charlie Drake..)

I'd call it a cheez niff. You know, like knife, only niff.

If the cheez has solidified, I'd question the act of consuming it. The crackers can't be too tasty either.

Jonmc: in grade school we used to spend hours trying to sharpen the cheez-spreader thingies into useless little shivs on the school blacktop.

I don't know how we got that idea, it's not like we even knew anything about prisons out there in suburbiaville, except that you probably shouldn't drop any soap for some strange reason.

Spick. You know, spreader + stick.

Maybe not.

*starts niff fight in the alley with Marshmallow Man*

Also, all moring there's been this orange traffic pylon in one of the elevators. It has 'Wet Floor,' magic markered on it, but the elevator floor is dry as a bone. And 'Con Edison' is stenciled on it, too, so the landlord must not own it. I think it knows someone in the bulding, but since pylons don't have limbs, it's helpless to get off. Still, nobody dares move it for fear of ripping an uncloseable hole in space time.

This is the Existensial Conundrum Of The Orange Pylon.

Jonmc: in grade school we used to spend hours trying to sharpen the cheez-spreader thingies into useless little shivs on the school blacktop.

Well, schools and prisons are very similar; nobody wants to be there, there's lots of drugs, bells and whistles rule your day, everyone moves in packs, and there's secret relationships nobody talks about.

Lunchroom pranks improve at the high school level though. Our lunchroom had a little salad station with a big bowl of iceberg lettuce which some buncha loons threw several unwrapped lubricated Trojans in once.

The story of the pylon on the elevator is making me a little teary. The Little Lost Pylon.

The Husband is currently a High School Teacher. He says the safest place to be during a food fight is behind the potato bar cart (yes they have such a thing). The lunch ladies have been known to lob foil wrapped potatoes from behind there in self defense.

Wait, the cheese is orange, the pylon is orange. I think this is the key here...

Once, my friend and co-worker Letty down in Miami was wearing sandals to work and she had painted her toenails blaze orange. She must've been deer hunting in the stockroom.

Jon: Not only permissible to lick cheese off the cheese spreader, but that can be the best part. : )

If one considers an article of manufacture as, for example, a Handi Snack Cheese Spreader — one sees that it has been made by an artisan who had a conception of it; and he has paid attention, equally, to the conception of a Handi Snack Cheese Spreader and to the pre-existent technique of production which is a part of that conception and is, at bottom, a formula. Thus the Handi Snack Cheese Spreader is at the same time an article producible in a certain manner and one which, on the other hand, serves a definite purpose, for one cannot suppose that a man would produce a Handi Snack Cheese Spreader without knowing what it was for. Let us say, then, of the Handi Snack Cheese Spreader that its essence that is to say the sum of the formulae and the qualities which made its production and its definition possible — precedes its existence. The presence of such — and — such a Handi Snack Cheese Spreader is thus determined before my eyes. Here, then, we are viewing the world from a technical standpoint, and we can say that production precedes existence.

Otis, the Handi Snack Cheese Spreader is not manufactured, it is grown.

Like this?

well, it took a long time (and the lives of several horrid mutations) to get that far, Otis...