Home » Nailing jello to the wall

Comments

Nailing jello to the wall — 18 Comments

  1. Cappy: I can’t take the credit. Follow the link to the website of the person who actually did it.

  2. Neo-neocon: I can only bow in awe before this latest advance in science and human achievement. I am so thankful that I have lived long enough to see this day. “That’s one small step for gelatin, one giant leap for mankind!” I am looking forward to all of the practical uses for this discovery. I imagine our daily lives will never be the same. Such an exciting time in which to live!

  3. Oh, dear. I’ve got an earworm. Cast your minds back (those of us who are old enough) to 1966 and the Statler Brothers’ enduring hit, “Countin’ Flowers on the Wall.”

    Nailing Jello to the wall. Got the earworm now? You’re welcome!

  4. Thanks for the Jello break after the political looniness of this past week, in particular!

    But is it technically still Jello if one is adding Knox gelatin and creating an entirely new medium (concoction?)?

    (I know, a little persnickety, but if people have taken to spending time figuring out how to nail jello to the wall….)

    For what it’s worth, I’ll save all my jello kudos for Liz Hickok’s shimmering constructions of San Francisco (Neoneocon, June 3, 2008) Such beautiful shining cities on the hills…..
    Those are accomplishments! Those are Art with a capital “A.”

  5. If you make the jello using only about a quarter of the water called for on the box, you can nail it to the wall and no contaminating alien forms of gelatin are involved. The question of whether or not this “super jello” is allowed in the Olympics, I will leave to wiser judges.

    In a minor but culturally significant variation, my sons once coated a wall with corn syrup and corn starch, then stuck thin sheets of the concentrated jello to the wall without even using nails.

    Tragedy in the form of marauding neighborhood toddlers was narrowly averted. However, warming temperatures the following morning caused ominous slumping followed by a total cascade failure.

    An encore performance involving the marriage of mashed potatoes and lime jello was blessedly unrecorded for posterity, although it was noted for the record that a significant cleaning effect accrued to the wall.

    Names have been omitted to protect the sanity of the survivors.

  6. askmom,

    Sounds like you have pretty creative boys. I hope you can direct them to someplace like MIT where they can work on nanostructures and materials research. They may end up saving the planet.

  7. I suspect that one could successfully nail regular, unadulterated Jelloâ„¢ to a wall…if only they’d freeze it first. It isn’t as though it would stay nailed to the wall indefinitely, in any event… 😉

  8. askmom: Actually, the question of using additives to create a “super jello” was, I believe, addressed in the 1932 Olympics, the last year in which competitive team Jello Nailing was part of the men’s sports division. As described, I think, in Wikipedia, or on YouTube somewhere, the Albanian Men’s Jello Nailing Team, captained by the legendary Hort Moxha, a/k/a “Gelatinus,” had to forfeit their gold medal during the 1932 games when it was discovered that they had added “moongha,” an obscure Balkan plaster of paris mix, to their “Orange Jello with Shredded Carrots” entry. At that time, it was seen as the Olympic equivalent of the American “Black Sox” scandal of 1919. Of course, as history records, amatuer Jello Nailing was dropped from the Olympics in Berlin in 1936 after the Olympic Committee shamelessly caved in to Hitler’s demand that “this Jewish-invented alleged sport” be eliminated from that year’s games, a move some historians attribute to Hitler’s desire to cover-up a severe jello shortage in Nazi Germany. There was some movement to reinstate the sport after WWII, but, to date, nothing has been done. A quaint legend, which if it isn’t true should be, is that the colors of the rings in the Olympic symbol were meant to stand for various flavors of jello. As Casey Stengel once said, “You can look it up.”

  9. Pingback:QA Hates You » Blog Archive » A Metaphor For Modern Development

  10. Don,

    In Germany there are only two colors of jello (aka wackel pudding): green, which is flavored with sweet woodruff, and red, which is some sort of berry/cherry flavor. Maybe Hitler didn’t like the other flavors.

  11. expat: The country of Beethoven, Bach, Goethe, Einstein, Adenauer and ShamWow only has TWO flavors of jello?? Kinda makes one wonder if that vaunted German efficiency is all it is cracked up to be! Of course, it does solve a family mystery as to why my sister-in-law, Barbara, who was born in Munich, wept tears of joy when she first encountered the jello section at the local SuperSaver years ago. Thanks for the tip!

  12. Thanks for the complements on my creative sons, Expat. They truly had remarkable childhoods, not only achieving gustatory insanities but also performing many marvels of engineering outdoors. The classic potato gun was improved upon using the disconnected exhaust system of a 1953 Chevy, black powder and hairspray, a recently deceased badger and, eventually, local police and firefighters.

    Three sets of clothing were accidently burned in the commission of this crime, and three more sets had to be deliberately burned after the remains of the badger were reluctantly gathered together and disposed of.

    After their backsides recovered from this triumph, a grove of young alders and vine maple were mowed down using an older model Chrysler minivan, a bumper-mounted chainsaw and a roof rack mounted navigation/chainsaw control system. A septic drainfield was moderately damaged and several random holes in the floor of the minivan had to be patched up before carpooling could resume, but a good time was had by all. The boys earned enough to replace the shredded tires by time the summer was over.

    We hope that someday the scar from the chainsaw will fade from #2 son’s leg.

    We won’t even discuss the tire swing and Tarzan-inspired jungle rope system that overhung a nearby stream and earned the boys some negative attention from the fish and game department over a silly eagle’s nest and an endangered run of sockeye salmon.

    It was not completely their fault that when all three of them simultaneously attempted to flush the heads of every Barbie doll in the neighborhood down our three toilets, their sister would run screaming from the scene, alerting the authorites and stopping the experiment almost, but not quite, before a three-way stoppage and septic tank pump burn-out that left the family without drainage for 13 days.

    They really loved the bulldozer that had to come dig up the tank and pump. The bulldozer operator tried to teach them to smoke, but failed due to mysterious interference from crabby, spoilsport local grown-ups.

    These characters are now a firefighter, a major construction surveyor and a steel plant quality control engineer. There are (so far) six baby boys in the next generation; random and expensive entertainment for my retirement years is guaranteed.

  13. askmom,

    I truly love the exuberence of boys. Your comment made my day. You should write a book. After “the Dangerous Book for Boys,” the world could probably use a mom’s manual for surving dangerous boys.

  14. Pingback:House of Eratosthenes

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>