14 December 2005

Filet O'Fish

Nowadays it's called "Filet-O-Fish," like "Bass-o-matic," but when I was a kid it was "Filet O'Fish." Not "Filet o' Fish" like "Barrel o' Monkeys," but "Filet O'Fish," like "Feeney O'Flannery."

Considering that back then, nobody but the Irish ate these things,* did Ronald McDonald read Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal," get the sarcasm, but still think it was a cool idea?

Before you scoff, remember, this is the same Ronald McDonald (as Scottish Presbyterian as a man could be without being named Robert**) who dressed up in whiteface and a red frightwig and a red nose to signify drunkenness as a hideous parody of the Irish for the delight of the normal beef-eating children.

Of course they're still made today despite the Irish being able to eat hamburgers,*** but they spend their allotted hours under the heat lamp in vain hope that a Scotsman will wander in, lost on his way to H. Salt or Long John Silvers or Canada, and order a fish sandwich.****

Footnotes follow:

* For those who don't get what the Irish have to do with fried cod: Until the 60's, Catholics weren't allowed to eat meat on Fridays, so they ate fish. Even after they dropped that rule, there were a number of kids--for some reason mostly Irish--with alcoholic fathers and dead grandfathers who ended up being taken care of by crotchety old grandmothers who refused to listen to that blasted new Pope. Fortunately, the last 6 escaped into legal adulthood, the hobo underground, or the sweet embrace of death somewhere around 1986, and modern Irish kids eat double quarter-pounders and supersize fries and are, as a consequence, just as fat as the rest of us Americans.

** ... or Bruce, or Mel Gibson

*** You read * above, right?

**** Scotsmen are required to eat fried cod, of any quality, whenever offered, or the English will stop letting them call themselves British. It's sort of a hazing ritual for being the new crown in Great Britain. Lucky for Northern Ireland there's no adjective "United Kingdomish."

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