A vulnerable central island
Feel free to feel called out by Lottie’s butter/spread habits assessment. I await a comment from the purist who insists on real butter, stored in a butter dish, never placed in the fridge. If you’re a yellow soft spread paper-keeper-onner I am going to cut you short shrift so nail your tin hat on.
The initials could refer to a certain former president of the US, but I won’t say who.
Desmond Tishman?
…and somewhere deep in the bowels of Hollywood, above the head of an especially depraved reality TV producer, a lightbulb flickers on.
Chester D. Tarthur?
Djohn Tyler. (Th ‘D’ is silent.) Either him or Dwigh Teisenhower.
I leave the paper wrappers on my sticks of butter, because I mostly use it for baking, and the wrapper has measurements marked on it.
With those convenient little measuring lines going all the way across making it easier to cut straight, too. Not that I still somehow botch that or anything.
The butterish island gives structural integrity bonuses to the butterish carton. You can put heavier things on top of the box because of the central load-bearing butterish bulge. Are we about to meet Bole Hill’s Mad Terry?
As someone who uses Olivani I have no dog in this fight
It’s me, the purist with the butter dish! I don’t know why you all want your butter to be hard to spread, but it sure as hell ain’t my scene.
Seconded
Trebled! Soft and salty is the way to go.
Quadrupled
uh, isn’t this a logistics thing? The stick of butter you’re currently using for spread goes in the covered butter dish?
My family has always done this … it seems obvious
(You can’t do it if you don’t have A/C in the summer)
You can in Scotland, for 9 months of the year and living in an old stone house anyway! The other 3 months just stick it in the fridge for a few hours if it’s a particularly hot day.
I don’t have AC — it feels unhealthy to me — and I am a butter dish purist. I live in the general Washington DC USA area. The butter gets very soft but retains its shape.
Beats me why some dudes suck.
DT also seems to have initialed the miso and, somehow, Glenn’s sound effect.
And me! Two kinds of real cultured butter in butter dishes on the countertop, salted and unsalted. Always ready to spread and thank goodness our indoor air conditioning (by way of evaporative cooling here in the desert) is strong enough to keep them from being liquid in the summer heat. And a jar of bacon fat in the refrigerator.
For food safety reasons, butter in my house, especially if unsalted, stays in the fridge during the summer months. It’s one of the few things I dislike about summer. Once cooler weather arrives, the butter dish lives on the counter.
Paper-keeper-onner here! Stops it from oxidising as much.
I’m with you! I’m a bizarre hybrid. Real butter – you know the LIDL kind? With the huge chunks of sea salt? But then you leave the paper wrapper on and keep as much of it in contact with the butter as you can, at all times, because what lunatic likes the bright yellow stuff that tastes like a cat’s licked it? Not me, that’s who. Not me.
Obviously you keep paper on butter where that is its protective membrane. I’m talking about the troubled souls who buy an airtight tub of “Utterly Butter-like” and leave the grease-proof paper insert in there to the very end.
I literally drew what I’m talking about, I’m crying here, crying into a tub of I Cannot Believe It Is Not Some Butter
That’s what I mean! I do keep the paper on the real butter too 🙂
Not that I’m claiming to be a troubled soul 😲
I keep butter in its wrapper and in the fridge because if not it will not “taste like a cat licked it”, it will be actually licked by cats.
And the idea of leaving it in a dish on the kitchen counter is just an invitation to find said dish shattered on the floor as the cats found that to be the most expedient way to reach the butter inside.
But I will insist on real butter made from real milk from real cows that ate real grass from a real pasture. I will be a purist on that point.
Cat-having vegan here to confirm that (some!) cats will gladly put their faces in the refrigerated-tub-of-butter-substitute (that is often found open yet, inexplicably, with its plasticky safety seal clinging onto one side) (until I rip it off); whether freshly cold from the fridge or spread on a hot piece of toast, its oily siren song lures the little fat-demons in.
I usually keep my butter in a dish on the counter, but it’s in the fridge right now because I live in the part of the world where central A/C was an unnecessary luxury when the house was built, and the forecast for the next couple of days is in the 90s. I like my butter spreadable, but usually not drinkable. Though it does save time with popcorn when you can just pour the butter dish over it.
I don’t currently have cats. In possibly related news, I do sometimes have a mouse problem. Normally the heavy cut-glass top of the butter dish suffices to keep them out, but there was one morning I came out into the kitchen to find that during the night, the mice had gotten the top, which outweighs any one of them, off the dish, apparently by using the butter spreader as a lever, and the quarter-stick of butter that had been in there the previous night was totally gone (wrapper and all) and the dish had been licked clean.
I’m going to guess that the butter island has a similar function in the Bobbinsverse as the Black Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
More like the mound of mashed potatoes in Close Encounters, I think (that was mashed potatoes, right? It’s been a while).
I think about those mashed potatoes at least once a week, and I saw the movie more than 30 years ago.
It means something…
“You’re building a Sea Parks out of mashed potatoes!”
I thought of those mashed potatoes a couple of days ago when I was at Devil’s Tower.
I always think of Closet Cases of the Nerd Kind.
“It’s Butterish!” From the makers of “Seriously, What Did You Put In This Spread? I Have Food Allergies!”
Ah, it should be fine. It’s made of almond milk and peanut oil, with wheat gluten for binder.
Not my brand. I’m a Near-Butter kind of guy.
Also “I Guess Technically It’s Food” and “Gee Your Hair Smells Like… Something”
That’s really a weird thing to do. DT must be an interesting and possibly problematic person. Someone you don’t want to live next to you and has a lot of annoying quirks. Or maybe is actually a shy person who doesn’t want to get noticed.
this makes sense, I just know it
I’ve been wondering whatever became of ole DT.
If you’re creating an island, because the spread softens first around the outside edges…
Well, that just explains it all, doesn’t it?
There is no disparity in spread consistency. Trench diggers are a dangerous faction. Island makers are trouble.
Even if it were the case that the spread softens unevenly as it warms, heat conducts rather poorly through air, so the island formers are self-sabotaging. (convection, on the other hand… but the enclosure inhibits exterior-to-interior airflow) Same principle that makes double-paned windows better insulators than single-paned.
I’m troubled that as guardians of the building, there are other residents? Why do we never see them? Why has there been no mention of them until now? ARE THEY PHANTASMS?
John mentioned them in his text bit underneath the July 26 page. “Glenn and Lottie are not the only residents of this Bole Hill bolthole. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until the next episode of Solver to find out who else dwells within.” https://badmachinery.com/comic/will-this-do/
Lottie putting the BOMP in.
How dare you call me a superconnector? It’s not my fault I have low standards! I mean, I’m working on it. Me and my ex that I had to train to do the washing up, the volunteer group who I manage because nobody else will, and the homeless guy to whom I gave my phone number are working on it, I mean…
Could it be Dean Thompson, Esther’s former roommate/archenemy?
Yes! Well spotted! This reeks of Dean Thompson!
(And of rancid butter, of course, if they leave the fridge open too long in the current weather.)
That women really awesome. But… poor Lottie and Glenn!! What an annoying person to live next to!
In my head canon Lottie’s cup is still hovering above the table, too terrified to come back down.
Wait, how many people are in this guardianship property?
https://badmachinery.com/comic/a-vulnerable-central-island/#comment-8446
I hoard leftover butter whenever I order a scone and let it sit in the fridge for weeks, gradually yellowing in its greasy paper prison. Judge me.
Butter, butter, something, something, butter. Interesting comments section today.
Do I want a long shrift instead? I am not shrift knowledgeable. I learn a lot from here, I must say, sayings-wise. Its a treasure trove.
I keep my butter where God intended: in a samovar atop the medicine cabinet in the downstairs bathroom.
I buy real butter which comes in quarter-pound sticks, 4 to a box, each stick wrapped in slimy paper. As I use a stick, I just wrap the slimy paper around it to contain it and stick it in the top shelf of my fridge door.
Now you know all there really is to know about me.
Is the remainder of what Gleen’s typing “dah dah dah dit dit dit”?
This strip answers a longstanding musical question.
It was Lottie who put the bomp in the bomp ba bomp ba bomp!
Now all we have to do is figure out who put the ram in the rama lama ding dong.