Curious as to why something like that would have a use-by date? I bet you could leave one in a petri-dish (like the burgers at the end of 'Supersize Me') and come back to it 12 months later and it would still be... um, I was going to say edible but I'm not convinced it's starting out that way. Eewww.

yech!

in addittion to being freaked out by the ingredient list, i am also totally offended by the spelling of the word 'through' as 'thru'. it is an annoying pet peeve of mine. i also take issue with night/'nite' and light/'lite'. i mean, i could understand and even applaud if someone came up with a shorter spelling for 'sarcophagus' or 'onomatopoeia', or if we could put some of our great minds to work on getting æ on a keyboard--and what about bringing the ¢ back??--but giving up and writing 'lite' and 'nite' and 'brite' etc. is just further evidence of our civilization's sloppy, untucked decline into mediocrity.

A lot of the mass-market chorizo sausages feature "lymph node" on the ingredients list. Yikes. I cannot bring myself to eat even veggie chorizo sausage because of that.

"Thru," "nite," and "lite" were introduced by Noah Webster in his first dictionary, along with many other simplified spellings. Most of them took (check instead of cheque, color instead of colour, center instead of centre) but others like "thru" never were fully accepted by the public (which would be spelled "publick" if not for Webster). Still other spellings, such as "tung" instead of "tongue" were outright rejected.

The thing about a word like "night" is that its spelling was determined back during the Middle English period, and the word actually sounded like that -- as if you're coughing up phlegm. Likewise, the "k" and the "e" in "knife" were not silent. People actually pronounced it "kuh-nee-fuh." But no one has pronounced these words this way in hundreds of years.

Even though I also cringe at words like "nite," I think that doing so is elitist. We went through all the difficulty of learning the stupid rules of English spelling, which are horrendously stupid and needlessly complicated. Having learned them, we are disgusted by those who either haven't learned them or otherwise shrug them off. We feel this way because we've done the work when they haven't.

But that doesn't change the fact that these rules are inherently dum.

I read Chaucer, in the Middle English style, in college. Learning how to decipher that jibberish was among the biggest wastes of time I've ever know (next to Solitaire).

Someone will probably step up and say, "Yeah, but ..." Pre-emptively: Whatever.

Since no one stepped up, I will. "The Miller's Tale" is hilarious.

A creepy old guy marries a young hottie. Of course, she ends up hooking up with a young dude. There's sex jokes and fart jokes and literal ass-kissing, and so much more. The best part is that the Miller is utterly drunk when he's telling the story, and that he keeps insisting that he's NOT RESPONSIBLE for its rude content. He repeatedly encourages anyone with any morals to STOP LISTENING. Then he goes on about asses and farts and screwing.

When you read it in the original Middle English, it takes a few seconds for the meaning of each line to sink in. There's that moment of "Holy shit ... did he just say ..." and then "Oh, my God! He did! He said that."

For a perpetually juvenile language geek like me, this is as good as it gets.