It's wordy, but there's food at the end

“No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.” — Robin Williams

Words and ideas are the stock in trade in Pamville this week.

• Let’s start with the Environmental Protection Association vs. words. The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, a group of scientists and academics who track changes to about 25,000 federal government webpages in their nerdy free time, reported Tuesday that the EPA’s Office of Science and Technology Policy no longer lists “science” in its description of what it does.

In fact OST is no longer in charge of “developing sound, science-based” anything anymore, neither is it working “to develop the scientific and technological foundations” to achieve their goals.

Now the OST, along with its stakeholders, like states, tribes and “others,” “develops national economically and technologically achievable performance standards.”

My recommendation is for the organization to change its name to Office of Economics and Technology to reflect its new mission, which no longer requires EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt to worry his pretty little head about no science-y facty stuffs. He just has to look at an environmentally affected corporation’s profit and loss graph to make a decisions at the Environmental Payout Agency.

Those words have a ring to them.

• Not to be upstaged, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson speaking Monday to department employees said, “There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships — worked even longer, even harder for less.”

Carson, who was a notable neurosurgeon before entering the political arena where he found ample opportunity to speak slowly and monotonously to put audiences to sleep across the U.S., probably has numerous volumes of texts on medical terminology, which might have made it impossible to find a little ol’, pedantic Merriam-Webster dictionary.

By definition an immigrant is “a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence.” Slaves were not considered people, in the day, and they did not “come” to America so much as get forced here against there will. And the “less” they worked for was nothing.

In fairness to Carson, though, then-President Barack Obama called slaves immigrants first during a naturalization ceremony at the National Archives in December 2015: “Certainly it wasn’t easy for those of African heritage who had not come here voluntarily, and yet in their own way (pause to consider the word he was about to speak) were (still trying to figure out how not to say it) immigrants themselves.” Yep, he said it. For reals.

The irony will be that moment when someone accuses Carson of plagiarizing that slaves-as-immigrants idea off Obama.

• As for my part in this word/idea discussion, I’m bringing food to the discussion. Which surprises nobody.

I discovered that Jimmy Dean the food producer makes this breakfast item that looks like a corn dog, but it’s a sausage link on a stick, dipped in pancake batter and deep-fat fried.

Jimmy Dean calls them “Pancakes & Sausage On a Stick!” which is possibly the most ridiculously boring branding of a delicious food. Ever. Even with their exclamation point. Whoever came up with the food idea should be offered a sainthood. Whoever came up with the name should be exiled from the food industry and made to dine on tofu and water.

Words matter.

My thought is to make a play off of the local fair-food-junkie favorite corn dog, the Pronto Pup, and call it a Pronto Pig. Get it? Instead of a hot dog, it has a hot pork sausage, a pig. Right? Yeah.

Now if anybody wants to start serving these at the local fairs and farmers markets, I hereby give you permission to use the name Pronto Pig, so long as those piggies in pancake keep rolling out fresh.

And if that idea can’t change the world, I don’t know what can.

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Idiot is such a harsh word. I prefer to think of myself as an alternative thinker at [email protected].