You Learn Something New Everyday

One of the great advantages of being married to Earl is that he's like an encylopedia of random information. Long before you could ask Jeeves, you could ask Earl.

Today, for example, Oliver crawled up on the table and was hitting the squeezy bottle of mustard with a butter knife. (When you're sixteen months old, this is high entertainment.) Earl was eating lunch and called the rest of us over and we watched to see if, in fact, Oliver could cut the mustard. Alas, he could not.

So I asked Earl where the expression came from. I didn't ask him if he knew, because I was pretty sure he did and since I have only recently stopped being pissed off by his bottomless knowledge, I skipped the part where he apologetically tells me that, yes, he does know the answer. Earl switched into Professor Mode (it's what he was going to do if he wasn't a dairy farmer) and replied, "It's an agricultural idiom, owing to the strength of the mustard stem." I asked him if the mustard that we just mowed (because the fucking crows ate almost all of the corn seed and mustard came up instead) had dulled the mower blades and he said yes, but that they had been very sharp before he mowed those fields. If your blades aren't very sharp, you won't cut the mustard.

So there you go. Perhaps when a hay mower was a person with curved knife (like in the Van Gogh painting), mustard was part of the job interview.

That's my new thing I learned today. Maybe everyone else already knew about mustard cutting, but I didn't. It does me not a lick of good--the crows still ate the corn and the nearly-worthless mustard still took over the field and the expensive mower blades are still needing to be replaced. But like a good consolation prize, I do feel a little bit better.

Maybe next year I'll learn to shoot a moving target from 100 yds. and I'll take care of our crow problem. Maybe I'll make them into pie. Come to think of it, I'll bet that's the origin of that nursery rhyme. If I had four and twenty dead blackbirds, I would likely have my sixpence (or $800 in corn seed anyway) and a pocketful of rye (a favorite of crows of yore). I'd be singing and my husband would feel like a king. Like all the best times in a farmer's life, this would be the celebration of a crisis averted.