[Sca-cooks] Okay, it's "Very Stupid Question" time...

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Hullo, the list!

I've been tossing and turning all night with a knotty philosophical  
question, and I figured the collective foodies from all over the world  
as represented on this list have a better chance of helping me out  
than any other gathering of 300 people I could choose...

Okay. Bear in mind I warned you this was a stupid question...

The deal is, I was reading an account on a blog connected with The  
Fortean Times magazine. Charles Fort was an American archivist and  
researcher who spent much of his career debunking, whenever possible,  
reports of paranormal phenomena, and even more vigorously assailing  
bad science of the type that dismisses accounts of said phemonena  
without even reading them... he was a skeptic in the truest sense of  
the word, in that he gave no more, and no less, credence to statements  
beginning with the words, "Scientists say that...", than he did to  
statements like, "I was Bigfoot's love slave," if both are presented  
without proper supporting evidence. His writings are full of accounts  
of mental telepathy, teleportation, The Hollow Earth Theory, lots of  
stuff about Atlantis, rains of toads, frogs, fish and even beef, not  
because he was promoting the alleged reality of such things, but  
because they provided a test for exposing lazy and sloppy science.  As  
silly and as entertaining as Fort's work can be, along with various  
Fortean topics such as the snippet to follow, it's a pretty good tool  
for disciplining the mind. Of course, there are also some people who  
follow all this very closely because, as they will explain at any  
opportunity, they are in fact alien abductees, or Bigfoot's love  
slave, or whatever, who are perhaps missing the point, but it's all  
pretty entertaining, anyway.

Well, there's this guy posting to the Fortean Times website that he  
was sitting with his family of five, watching the news on television,  
immediately after having finished a dinner of "pork chips, mashed  
potatoes, and peas", apparently having left the uneaten food on the  
dining table in the next room. He says for no known reason, all five  
people suddenly found it necessary to turn their heads and look behind  
themselves into the dining room, at which point a pork chip flew off a  
plate, struck the refrigerator in the adjoining kitchen, and slid down  
to the floor.

Now I, of course, being a true skeptic myself, immediately began  
asking questions about this. The more I thought about it, the greater  
the possibilities that presented themselves. My mind became a seething  
mass of questions, ideas, and hypotheses, yearning for additional  
data, tantalized by this brief account. I just know there'll be no  
sleep for me tonight unless some points are clarified.

So here's what I really, really need to know -- the most tantalizing  
question of the many that this topic raises:

What is a pork chip?

I tried Google, and most of the hits simply appeared to be typos (i.e.  
recipes and other references to pork chops), but the poster used the  
term three or four times, so it seems likely that he really intended  
to call them that. Could this be an example of some sort of regional  
cuisine, or some dialect I'm not familiar with? I am assuming they are  
no relation to buffalo chips.

Has anyone, of the great multitude of worthy and knowledgeable list  
subscribers, ever dined on pork chips, flying _or_ stationary?

My REM-sleep thanks you all for any information...

Adamantius




"Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people's souls,  
when we all ought to worry about our own souls, and other people's  
bellies."
			-- Rabbi Israel Salanter