August 6, 2013

The carrots tag.

Meade read the previous post — which ends with the old University of Michigan "cooked carrots" test — out loud, helping me proofread, and said, "Carrots! We know what carrots mean to Althouse," and I said, "Yeah, the carrots tag. There's a lot of great stuff under the carrots tag."

I was scrolling through the taggage, looking for the thing Meade was referring to, and I found this guy...

Untitled

Here's another reference to the cooked carrots test, which "purported to place everyone on a spectrum from very masculine to very feminine, and perhaps the authorities imagined that they could identify the homosexuals."

What were the questions? — you may wonder. Famously, one question was do you prefer cooked or raw carrots. In my family, we only ate raw carrots, so I'd always regarded cooked carrots as gross. I suppose that made the University regard me as more of a lesbian. I seem to remember a question that asked what would you rather do, where one option was to take apart a clock and then put it back together again. I don't know what the other choice was, but I suspect that clock project skewed a lot of the boys gay.
I wonder what these sexuality authorities would have thought of Jeff Bezos's grandiose clock inside a mountain that ticks once every year for 10,000 years. Most macho man ever?

Here's what Meade was referring to, my analysis of a Hillary Clinton ad:
Bill says "No onion rings?" and Hillary responds "I'm looking out for ya." Now, the script says onion rings, because that's what the Sopranos were eating in that final scene, but I doubt if any blogger will disagree with my assertion that, coming from Bill Clinton, the "O" of an onion ring is a vagina symbol. Hillary says no to that, driving the symbolism home. She's "looking out" all right, vigilant over her husband, denying him the sustenance he craves. What does she have for him? Carrot sticks! The one closest to the camera has a rather disgusting greasy sheen to it. Here, Bill, in retaliation for all of your excessive "O" consumption, you may have a large bowl of phallic symbols! When we hear him say "No onion rings?," the camera is on her, and Bill is off-screen, but at the bottom of the screen we see the carrot/phallus he's holding toward her. Oh, yes, I know that Hillary supplying carrots is supposed to remind that Hillary will provide us with health care, that she's "looking out for" us, but come on, they're carrots! Everyone knows carrots are phallic symbols. But they're cut up into little carrot sticks, you say? Just listen to yourself! I'm not going to point out everything.
Some cranks chided me, but I doubled down with "Let's take a closer look at Bill's carrot and Hillary's onion ring."

6 comments:

Sam L. said...

I like carrots raw, but cooked are sweeter. My first run-in with cooked carrots was some story I read in grade school--a girl was going slowly blind, and mistook what her mother was cooking as sausages, not carrots.

SteveR said...

The Carrot Tag is one of the best, obviously second (thanks Jessica!), but a very good one.

Big Mike said...

Joke from Vietnam days.

Post commander to mess hall sergeant: You're throwing away too much edible food. Figure out a way to reuse the leftovers. Take cooked carrots. What can you do with leftover cooked carros?

[dead silence]

Post commander: Well you can turn 'em into carrot pie, can't you?

Mess sergeant: Yessir, I sure can. But what should I do with leftover carrot pie?

Seeing Red said...

I'm not a fan of cooked carrots, either, but one had them glazed in ginger and something else and they were delicious.

raf said...

As a kid, I detested cooked carrots, only ate them raw. Somewhere along the way, I started tolerating them, then appreciating them. This confirms to me just how astute I was as a kid; carrots ARE old-people food.

barry's blog said...

I had always called it the "raw carrots test" perhaps reflecting my bias. I have always wondered what the heck that test was about. I took it as an intake for a program at the University of Michigan. Any additional info is much appreciated.