Too big to wrap? Just can it.

For those doing last minute wrapping, or those just enjoying a few days off, here's a thought.

Look up at the moon. What do you see? A future site for human settlement? A reminder of human ingenuity? One more bit of evidence that human experience has barely grazed one nook of the universe?

Or maybe you see a big ball of cheese, just begging to be canned:

"Cut all the tin plate used annually to make the tin cans of America into a strip one foot wide and you can wind that strip around the earth fourteen times. Or, to visualize it another way, take the five billion odd square feet of tin plate into which we put our fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, beer, paint, oil, candy, cheese and tobacco each year and it would be a simple matter to can the moon. You'd have the biggest cheese can ever made, and still have a lot of tin plate left over."

(From: "Romance of the Tin Can" in Modern Mechanix, 1937, via Anna Zeide, who at this moment may be contemplating her recently launched project on the history of canned food in America.)

Have a fun vignette from a project you've been working on? Send it my way: dbouk *at* colgate #dot# edu.