Chris Baldwin (the guy who draws Little Dee) has really been on a roll lately (at least as far as me relating to the strip is concerned.)

In today's strip, Blake is attempting to do something I used to be able to do. Back in grad school - when I took more time for lunch and when I was more worried about pesticides in fruit - I used to carry a little pocket knife and peel my apples. And I always tried to do it in one long spiral.

My officemates always had comments about that.

One, who was a bit older than me, claimed that there was an episode of the Andy Griffith show where a "city slicker" type couldn't understand the slow pace of Mayberry, where people would take the time to peel an apple in one long strip. Apparently, by the end of the episode, he was in tune enough with the town to want to sit on the general-store porch and try to peel apples in one long strip.

And another office mate who knew a bit about folklore brought up the old (Pennsylvania Dutch?) custom where if an unmarried girl (sigh...chronologically I still qualified as a "girl" in those days) could peel an apple in one long strip, she then could throw the strip backwards over her shoulder and supposedly the letter it appeared to form on the floor was the initial of the man she'd eventually marry.

Well, I concluded that I'd either wind up not marrying (probably a safe bet at this point), or my future husband would be someone who had changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol à la Prince.

As I said, I don't peel apples any more. Either I buy organic apples, or I buy conventionally-farmed apples and figure that I'm probably exposed to worse in the labs where I work.