Phantasm Vegables

Our garden produced its first crop of vegables last weekend, though they're Phantasm vegables. Phantasm vegables, not phantasm vegables, savvy?

Ever seen the movie Phantasm, in particular the part where the kid almost gets sucked through the Ominously Whirring Tuning Fork and sees troll dolls laboring in the mine or whatever it was? Turns out they were full-size people at some point, but were scrunched down into miniature troll dolls so they could withstand the higher gravity or something. Yeah, whatever. The point is that these troll dolls still have all the foibles of full-size people - all the bad ideas, all the foolish intentions, all the superficial preoccupations - but they occupy a quarter of the volume. Such a deal, a full gallon of venality in a handy pint-sized package!

(Unless the scrunching process squeezes the evil out of them, in which case they'd have a problem disposing of the dark, oily evil essence that Rachael Ray might well refer to as "EEPO", or Extra-Evil People Oil - rub a little of it on the Dalai Lama's gums and suddenly he breaks out in oily, hairy moles and starts shrieking about lebensraum.)

But back to the vegables. The garden produced about five squash and a similar number of green beans that were similarly scrunched down. Perfectly formed, but very small. Little tiny squash that were perfectly recognizable as squash, but no bigger than my little finger, and little tiny bean pods that were perfectly recognizable at bean pods, but about the size of matchsticks (you've heard of shoestring potatoes? These are matchstick beans). But in recompense they had all the flavor of their full-size cousins in a tiny fraction of their volume, so biting into them was like summer carrying out a full-scale assault on one's taste buds. "Wow, now that's a mumble-frotz squash," one couldn't help saying as the little tiny baby squash released full-size squash flavor.

Back in the old days, when I was prone to watching the GI Joe cartoon on TV, they advertised some bubble gum in this way: a kid would chaw into a hunk of said gum, there would be a terrible rumbling, and suddenly his native guide (go figure) would shout "Flavormundo!" as gouts of sticky magenta flavor fluid erupted from the bowels of the earth. "Flavormundo" not being a standard English word, the commercial supplied subtitles, which read "It's a tidal wave of flavor!" But I actually think that "flavormundo" should have been subtitled "a world of flavor" or, even more interestingly, "flavor world". I love the idea of Flavor World, a Big Lots-style store where unsuccessful flavors are liquidated in large lots to shoppers who aren't terribly choosy. Flavors like split bee soup, the infamous MST3K crotch-flavored popcorn, pretzels made with genuine Buna-S rubber, Sweaty Sock brand cheese, and maraconi'n'liverwurst. And would it not be ironic to find Flavor Flav himself working at Flavor World? Word!

I digress.