Damn Distractions

Written by Alan Bellows on 09 March 2007

Pemmican in progressIn the North American fur-trading days, many trappers came to rely on a high-calorie, long-endurance foodstuff known as pemmican, a recipe which was borrowed from the native peoples. Pemmican was produced by using rocks to smash fat and berries into thin strips of dried meat, fusing them together into a primitive meaty-and-fruity power bar. A more modern version of this chewy chow can be found here at Damn Interesting, as we smash sweet excuse-berries into thin strips of dried-out articles for your masticating pleasure.

We hope you won’t mind a handful of classic articles as we make some book-related preparations. We need a few more days to finish planting the art-related bush that we were beating around in our book announcement, and there are a number of other exciting additions afoot. We’ll keep you abreast of our progress in the days ahead.

On a related note, the very attractive Damn Interesting magnets have arrived, and they will shortly be sent out to all who donated $15 or more to the book effort. Exclamation point.

On an unrelated note, if you like to print the articles from Damn Interesting, you’ll find that the paper presentation of our pages has been much improved. It was previously pretty poor.

Links:
Wikipedia: Pemmican (thanks ke4roh!)
The Damn Interesting Book
Enjoy a random article from our archive

Alan Bellows is the founder, designer, and managing editor of DamnInteresting.com, and he is perpetually behind schedule.


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#1 fromeout11 09 March 2007 at 11:41 am

Whoo!!

#2 lostindustrial 09 March 2007 at 11:47 am

I LOL’d

#3 Teeny 09 March 2007 at 12:02 pm

and here I thought we were get a brand spanking new article, its all right guys, take your time and write us something damn interesting to read!

#4 kingbenny 09 March 2007 at 02:11 pm

…Masticating pleasure…

Ummm ummm… ohhh.. chewing.

#5 ke4roh 09 March 2007 at 02:36 pm

Fifth!

Here’s another related and interesting link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pemmican

#6 Tink 10 March 2007 at 12:38 am

Too Cool! Am sitting on pins and needles!

(OUCH! Oh damn, I meant to put that thing back in the sewing box! :)

#7 CptPicard 10 March 2007 at 04:56 pm

I love the site so please take this piece of criticism as constructive… reheating old stuff as classics just makes it seem like you’re desperate to get something on top of the list on the front page. You’re doing a whole lot of it recently, too. I’d understand such behaviour if you were interested in not losing regular readership due to needing to keep ad impressions up, but this motivation doesn’t exist here as far as I can tell. You’re just increasing your bandwidth bill by generating pseudo-activity. :-)

If you want to give people something to do while waiting for the next article, you can point them to the archives — that’s what they’re there for, and I suspect people are able to make use of them. I had a lot of fun reading through all your prior material, and I’m more than willing to wait until you have new stuff up… the RSS feed is there to tell me when I should be visiting.

#8 Tink 10 March 2007 at 08:49 pm

A quick note, tonight Satuday March 10 is the start of daylight savings time.

Yeah it is early this year, they have to fix that small rift in the date/time continuem that we messed up in the time machine…So, dont forget to move those clocks up. You know spring forward into the future! 8:)=

#9 Alan Bellows 12 March 2007 at 03:09 am

CptPicard said: “I had a lot of fun reading through all your prior material…”

Thanks!

“…and I’m more than willing to wait until you have new stuff up… the RSS feed is there to tell me when I should be visiting.”

True enough… but there are many readers who have not yet explored our entire archive, so for some it may be preferable to see reanimated classics rather than extended silence. In any case, I hope to resume normality very soon; the book-related side tasks are now mere centimeters from completion.

#10 rev.felix 12 March 2007 at 06:29 pm

Ohhh… Masticating. I thought you said, um, well, never mind.

#11 Farley_Llewellyn 13 March 2007 at 02:51 pm

I’d argue that Pemmican is anything but primitive…

#12 emilyelle 19 March 2007 at 07:28 pm

The only things I remembered from middle school history were what Martin Luther did, and also pemmican.

#13 Charlene 24 March 2007 at 04:58 pm

“In the North American fur-trading days”? Pemmican dates from at least 7,000 years before the white man showed up. Archaeological evidence at various buffalo jumps (including Head-Smashed-In) show that pemmican making may have begun as early as 5,000 BC.

#14 sulkykid 26 March 2007 at 09:27 am

Charlene said: “”In the North American fur-trading days”? Pemmican dates from at least 7,000 years before the white man showed up. Archaeological evidence at various buffalo jumps (including Head-Smashed-In) show that pemmican making may have begun as early as 5,000 BC.”

I would wager that food preservation methods like pemmican date back to the dawn of human history.

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Damn Distractions