Wiener arithmetic from the lowest common denominator

It’s been sixteen years since Steve Martin made his daring exposé of the wiener industry in the movie “Father of the Bride,” but still we’ve made alarmingly little progress in our wiener-related pursuits since. My wife Kara and I were doing our Memorial Day duties last weekend by buying hot dogs, which come in packs of ten, and buns, which, infuriatingly to those of us who have little to no perspective on what’s actually worth getting angry about in life, come in packs of eight.

Steve Martin’s famous grocery store tirade went like this: “I'll tell you what I'm doing. I want to buy eight hot dogs and eight hot dog buns to go with them. But no one sells eight hot dog buns. They only sell twelve hot dog buns. So I end up paying for four buns I don't need. So I am removing the superfluous buns. Yeah. And you want to know why? Because some big-shot over at the wiener company got together with some big-shot over at the bun company and decided to rip off the American public.”

This scene came out way back in the time when gas was cheap and rock stars were androgynous, but we’re still being ripped off. In the interim, the bun makers have apparently acquiesced, removing the four superfluous buns, but in a cruel twist, the hot dogs folks added two more dogs. All this bun-and-wiener shuffling accomplished was raising the least common multiple of wieners and buns from 24 to 40. Also, I hope my third grade math teacher reads this. I think she’d be proud that I took a break from rolling booger balls out of rubber cement long enough to retain something she taught us other than “rulers are meant for measuring, not swashbuckling,” though I still think she was looking at me just a little too much during the unit on lowest common denominators.

Kara and I have enough trouble feeding ourselves without food companies making us remember our multiplication tables. Every night, we sit around at dinnertime staring at each other, seeing who will crack first and just pour a bowl of cereal. Kara will invariably say something like this: “We should just go and buy stuff to make a salad.” How this addresses the issue of dinner is still rather unclear.

My buddy Gimp eats steamed vegetables and rice for dinner every single night. I’m not sure how he has enough strength left to answer the phone when I call, but the point is that he never deviates from the one meal he likes to cook. Actually, most of my guy friends eat the same thing every single day, just like I did before Kara came along and started rocking the culinary boat until Mama Celeste fell overboard.

It’s against the natural order of the world to eat different things every day. Cavemen, back before they started selling insurance and going all metrosexual, didn’t complain about not having a varied menu to eat every day.

I bet you’d never hear a caveman say, “Aw, man, gazelle again?”

It probably went more like this: “Sweet merciful heavens -- gazelle again! I can’t believe our good fortune to have something to eat day after day. I hope we never run out of gazelle. Also, I hope someone invents toilet paper soon.”

I’m lucky I don’t have to catch my food out in the wild. Here’s how good my instincts are: when I’m walking around the house in the dark and I see a shape on the floor that is either a leaf or a “present” from our ferret, I poke it to find out which it is. Someone who does that could probably find a way to get eaten by a woodchuck.

You can tell Mike Todd that a salad is a meal online at mikectodd@gmail.com.