Foobonia and Points West.

As we all know, the reason John looks forward to Marian's visits is that the woman can do something Elly never quite mastered and cook edible food. What's more, he has no problem letting Elly know this because he's a self-absorbed and insensitive clod who can never wrap his tiny mind around the fact that other people's feelings matter to them as much as his feelings do to him. Never does it occur to him that Elly isn't going to lighten up and laugh at something that makes her feel anxious. The most he can do is not complain audibly about the awful slop that results from her idiotic experimentation and reliance on the sort of cook-book Lileks pillories.


The reason that I mention this is that some point, Elly went from being a poor cook to having her cooking praised to the skies as being the most delicious thing ever. As by way of example, her home cooking was so good, Jim ate himself to death in order to bathe in the deliciousness. This sort of thing, though, gets me to thinking something I've thought before. The thing is that Jim's ability to taste things must have declined over the years to the point where he could have eaten shredded paper and been delighted with the flavor. If so, it could well be that Elly's cooking is the same old indigestible, nauseating slop that it's always been; the difference is that her family has been subjected to the fate that Hawkeye Pierce feared would happen to him after eating a river of liver and an ocean of fish in that their taste buds have been murdered. If this is the case, they can no longer tell her sludge from real food and thus think they're eating better than they are.