A digression from today’s intended posting, “The groaning phallic board”, the final chapter in the story of a raunchy appetizer board, which began in my 10/20 posting “The Funny Aperitif Board”. One of the photos of this appetizer board:
A Facebook ad for a wooden appetizer board in the outline shape of the male genitals (head with frenulum and urinary cleft), gently bent shaft, and testicles — highly stylized, highly schematic, but with these crucial details; shown here with the compartments filled with appetizers of various sorts, and with accompanying bowls of other appetizers
The story continued in my posting yesterday, “Appetizer boards”, about two conceptual categories — the foodstuff category to which appetizers belong (call it SMALL-START-FOOD); and the implement category to which food-service boards and platters belong (call it FOOD-SERVER-THING) — and the accompanying lexical fields of appetizer vocabulary and appetizer-board vocabulary.
I then went to collect some more images of the raunchy appetizer board and similar objects, only to discover some really fishy stuff (which is what this posting is about). And then I was struck down for the rest of the day by overwhelming exhaustion and deep, unpleasant sleep. So this my Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting for the day.
The intended posting, “The groaning phallic board”, is still to come, and it has lots of surprising neat stuff in it that turned up in my searches for appetizer-board images. Just not today.
The thing is, the board above, or a duplicate of it, appears in a number of Facebook ads and in a whole pile of offerings from various (different) Etsy suppliers. The Etsy offerings make it clear that though the board is described as an appetizer board, it’s being marketed as as a gag gift, suitable for bachelorette parties and the like.
And then I came to reviews of one of these offerings. Really pissed-off reviews, with specifics: the board was tiny, really a toy, too small to display any significant amount of food; the board was made of thin, flimsy wood; the wood wasn’t sealed, so it would be unsuitable for the display of food. One began to suspect shoddy stuff cobbled together in China; such items always look wonderful in the photos, but are just crap on delivery. (I have a number of stories of this sort, from friends and acquaintances who’ve been burned.)
Now, it might be that some people have copied the raunchy appetizer board in better materials and made a handsome, useful, and entertaining object that Dr. Phallicity — Alex Adams, the Woo(l)ly Mammoth, by another name — would happily add to his collection, if it weren’t too expensive. Certainly, I have now stumbled on a world of fine woods, hand-crafted into appetizer boards that are objects of beauty and whimsy. And I’ll post about those.
But I suspect that the photo above is a scam come-on. Caveat emptor.
And now, another chapter of Stunned Into Sleep.
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