The Cow And I

How am I meant to reconcile these two images? The big plate and the little bowl, miraculously containing the exact same amount of meat! The coffee cup dwarfing the meat in this image doesn't help your case, you know.

If you do manage to somehow wrangle a sponsorship, you should arrange for a tour of their facilities. Who knows? It might just turn you off of meat for good!

Also, I can't help but notice that we may never know how beef saved your life and what connection that could possibly have to you purchase of a banjo. The first installment of that saga seems to have mysteriously vanished.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Regarding your obvious, unfounded, and quite neurotic suspicion about the image, please be advised that this, as you will recall from the entry "Brown is Beautiful", is the remainder of the previous night's meal. As the total weight of the meat meal the night before was 12.9 ounces, and I only ate roughly half of it and consumed the rest the following morning, the numbers are self-explanatory. And as this was a top view, the quite tall cup of coffee (rising a full six inches off of the table) should be viewed accordingly. Much like your picture showing a meat package in the foreground and Kepler, smaller in the image, in the background, this is an issue of perspective. Your lithium prescription appears to have run out.

Regarding your concern about the factory conditions at the Laura's Lean Beef (TM) ranch, I resent your ill-mannered attempt to ruin their good name. Laura's Lean Beef (TM) is quite simply the best large-scale beef operation in the Country, as far as I'm aware, and I stand behind my preferred product with both feet firmly planted. Sir, I will not budge.

Regarding the deleted entry "How Beef Saved My Life", you are correct. It has disappeared. Upon closer review of the material, I noticed a number of classified facts. More (from the planned second half) would have further compromised the cloak of secrecy around this protected information. Another version, redacted heavily to protect the innocent, may be released in the future, at my discretion. Don't bother trying to remember the details. You've already forgotten.

All I can say is that I showed Sarah both pics and asked her if they contained roughly the same amount of meat. "Of course not," she said. When I asked her if I could quote her, she replied, "I said it didn't I?" I took that as a yes.

Please allow me to explain my reasoning. I weighed the WHOLE post-cooked amount the night before with the scale and then, knowing that I'd eat the WHOLE thing between dinner and breakfast, didn't bother weighing the leftover portion right after dinner. I mean, I was full, I had to head to banjo practice, and it just didn't occur to me that you would be so outraged by my error, egregious though it was.

But here's my excuse, for what it's worth: There were four cutlets before dinner. There were two cutlets remaining after. Two is, I believe, roughly half of four. 6.5 and 6.4 are each roughly half of 12.9. After both meals, the cumulative result is the same. If it makes you feel any better, consider it one extended entry with two sequential, time-elapsed pictures, each beautiful enough to restore eyesight to the blind.

But my fuzzy math is obviously, at best, a blatant falsehood of Orwellian proportions. And so, I stand before you, my head bowed, deep in shame. Wallowing in my own filth is too good for me. Only one thing makes me feel worse: that Sarah saw me for who I really am, a slithering serpent in the guise of a man.

Woe is me.

That's right! You slithering snake, you!

and yet again the refrigerator rule comes into question.

Build that into your experiment, would you?

The refrigerator rule. Hmmm. No. I refuse to be taken in by this hair-splitting theory of evaporation. Particularly since I use plastic wrap, and most of the moisture from the meat that somehow makes its way to the plastic underside rejoins the meat mass when it's shaken and removed. So, if you're going to make this an issue, you'd better appeal to Max for a ruling, because I am not particularly keen on wasting my time lining up angels on this pin of yours.

I ask Sarah for her opinion on this issue. She, and Samina, are perhaps more objective than we b/c they have no great amount of emotional investment in the outcome of the contest. If she actually believes this refrigerator water loss is a significant concern, I would take that into consideration.

I would also point out that, since you're eating all of your cooked meat in one sitting, with nary a scrap of leftovers remaining, this rule would disproportionately affect me. How convenient.

It has nothing to do with convenience. I would call it convenient for you that you have a stable kitchen in which to conduct your nefarious business with beef.

No, this is about one simple question: what does the meat you eat weigh. Not what it did weigh some hours before consumption, but what it weighs when you eat it. That's what this contest is all about, isn't it?

As far as I am aware the moisture that makes it onto the plastic wrap in your fridge is much the same as the moisture that ran down the inside of our windows in our old London home. I assumed that this moisture was H2O (I may be wrong of course) -- had it been beef I think I may have noticed. Indeed it may have freaked me out a little and had me reaching for my handy bedside exorcism crucifix. And so I would hazard a guess that most people would never mistake beef for water or water for beef. Jesus aside.

I don't know what kind of weather you have in London, but meat collects on my windows all the time. Hell, that's the only way I can afford to stay in this contest. That and (as Guy would have it) the free water I keep adding to my beef every sneaky chance I get.