Wednesday, August 17, 2011

On the Origin of Popcorn

I wish I could've been there for the discovery of popcorn. That must have been a fun evening. Since it's not like potato chips, where we know the whole hilarious story of the discovery, I like to come up with all kinds of reasons why somebody would attempt to light a whole bunch of corn on fire to see if it would explode. Personally, I think it was one of those wacky mix-up situations, like a terrible sitcom inexplicably set in ancient South America. Like maybe everyone had had a little bit too much to drink, and they still needed to make dinner. So they got a whole bunch of corn and put it into...whatever the hell you would fry things in in those days* instead of...whatever you normally cook corn in.** And then it started popping and they were all "OH CRAP!" except not in English because that wouldn't make any sense. Then again, this is a pretty awful sitcom, so maybe they're also inexplicably speaking English. I don't know, I'm not the producer.

So then the corn is all popped. And there's always that one guy who says he's "adventurous", but he's really just kind of stupid and not very good at quantifying danger, so he decides to try some. Then he burns the inside of his mouth, stumbles backwards, trips on a rock, and plummets off a cliff. So everyone else decides to wait about while the corn cools off, discussing how much they hated that guy. Then they all ate the popcorn, had heart attacks, and died, because foods that taste good are always bad for you.

Fortunately, a band of scavengers came along later that day and looted through their stuff. They found the popcorn, and being an entire group of people who were "that guy", they decided to eat some. Luckily, they were also members of the local fitness club, so their metabolisms were able to survive. They opened up a popcorn restaurant, made millions in...ancient South American currency, and retired to Jamaica. The end.

*Don't tell me. I don't care.
**Ditto.

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