Welcome to Wednesday, good people. Thanks for getting your day started with The County Line. Don’t look now, but the week is already halfway over.
Today should be National Orange Day. It should be, but it is not. Instead, today is both National Orange Juice Day and National Candied Orange Peel Day. It’s as if the orange lobby agreed that a perfectly good and fine orange was not enough to warrant its own faux holiday, but the decision makers could not agree on which route to take from there. Their only common ground, apparently, was that the orange-themed holiday should be needlessly labor-intensive.
“Let’s take perfectly good and fine oranges, but for this day we’ll require people to squeeze them with all their might,” someone on the juice side surely said. “They’ll finally drain every drop of juice for their orange, and then realize they only have a swig. We’ll have them do this five, maybe even six times just to pour a glass of juice.”
“Nonsense,” an arguer for the candied orange peels undoubtedly replied. “Let’s take perfectly good and fine oranges, but for this day we’ll require people to peel them, but get this, they’re not even halfway done. Thenthey must get a pot and mix in a ton of sugar and some water and boil for days. When they’re all done, they’ll have roughly four grams of barely edible ‘candy’ to show for all their hard work.”
Okay, so in addition to being unnecessarily labor intensive, I guess there is one other thing the orange lobby agreed on: The meat of the orange is basically useless and should be thrown away. Research for this column revealed that the inside, edible part of an orange is called the “endocarp” but I think “meat” gets the point across better, and certainly sounds more appetizing. Either way, if you observe either of today’s holidays, you’re throwing away the best part.
I guess we’ve spent enough time talking about oranges and their growers’ inability to united behind a single fake holiday, but at least they share May 4 and aren’t taking up more than one day out of the year with this nonsense.
Let’s move on and check in with the intern for today’s weather report:
At 6 a.m., it’s 56 degrees at The County Line’s headquarters in Russell Springs. Intern correspondents in Jamestown and Columbia report current local temperatures of 56 and 55 degrees, respectively. Today will be mostly cloudy but dry and otherwise pleasant, with a high topping out around 70 degrees.
We’re wishing a special “happy anniversary” to John and Lila Ford today. We wish the Fords nothing but the best on this special day, and hopefully many more anniversaries to celebrate.
Thanks for joining us this morning and check back with us for more content headed your way throughout the day, including a new installment of the Mental Health Check-In with Shayla & Burgess.
