So, in his comments on a recent guest strip, PVP's Scott Kurtz said "during my unwanted bout with the flu."

Aren't all bouts with the flu unwanted? Who has a wanted bout with the flu?

While at a local diner where I ordered corned beef hash and eggs and got canned corned beef hash (such a disappointment), some snippet of conversation from another table about a "whole cow" (those are the only words I really heard) took my mind in a very strange direction.

I thought about how one might cook a whole cow, and for some reason, my thought went to Turducken. If you're not familiar with Turducken, it's a turkey, stuffed with a duck, that's stuffed with a chicken. I thought if you started with a cow, where would you go from there? Most likely you'd stuff a pig inside the cow, then stuff a lamb inside the pig.

But how would you cook it? Where would you find an oven big enough? You couldn't spit roast it because by the time the lamb cooked, the cow would be beef jerky. I realized that pit roasting (dig a pit, line it with hot rocks, put the animal in, cover it, then bury it, then dig it up 8-12 hours later) it would be the only way. Low and slow from sunup to sundown, with the right aromatics strategically placed in and around the animals.

It could work. I'm not the man for the job. Just no expertise in pit roasting a single animal, much less three. I think the closest I might come would be to make a meat loaf of ground beef and lamb, then wrap it in bacon. That wouldn't be too bad.

Hmmmm....

Today, an online friend of mine posted an update to his Facebook page, saying: "Mark Tapio Kines is, as per annual tradition, not going to Comic-Con."

Wow... I didn't know you could use a negative as a tradition. In that case, I've got millions of traditions. Anything I've never done before, I've traditionally never done before. When people ask me why I haven't been to Kansas, I can say "it's a family tradition. Every year since I can remember, we didn't go to Kansas."

While new tobacco taxes keep getting passed on a smaller and smaller base of smokers (due to people quitting and dying), smokers bring up a good point: why aren't we taxing other health hazards like fatty foods?

I decided to do some math on how much a french fry tax might raise. For a back-of-envelope calculation, I found an article from 2002 that put annual per-capita consumption of french fries in the United States at 28 pounds, with 90% of that being at fast food restaurants.

So that makes 25.2 pounds of french fries eaten at fast food restaurants per person per year. A large fries at McDonalds is approximately 1/3 of a pound. So that makes 75.6 orders of fries per person per year, or a little less than 1.5 per week. At a "quarter per order," that means $18.90 per person in taxes.

Now, that's a "per capita" figure which is an average among all people, from babies to senior citizens. So if the average person ate 75.6 orders of fries and paid $18.90 in "quarter per order" taxes on them, a population of 300 million would generate $5,670,000,000 in new taxes.

Now, $5.6 billion is just a drop in the bucket considering our national debt and all the other things we're facing, but it's a start. Consider California's budget crisis. They have 10% of the population. If they did "quarter an order" on french fries, they could conceivably generate over a half-billion in new tax revenues, and in a state that has been so welcoming of sin taxes on tobacco, when heart disease and obesity related illnesses are such huge health issues, why wouldn't the taxpayers welcome a sin tax on french fries?

I eat fries, though not nearly as much as I used to. But I'd welcome a quarter per order tax in Washington rather than a gasoline tax or a sales tax increase. If I don't want to pay the tax, I can have a salad or some fruit or sliced veggies.

'Course, if they try to tax bacon, there's gona be a revolt up in this motherf... but I digress. If we're going to tax cigarettes, we might as well tax french fries. It's only fair, and right now state governments need to find revenues where they can. "Quarter per order." It's an idea whose time has come.