Snail Talk

And other tips for readers, eaters, and counterfeiters.

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Q. Why is it that the French eat snails? — Ron Hawley, Woodside, Calif.

A. Just the other day my kid told me I was a good cook. Not wanting to lie by omission, I explained, “Honey, I don’t cook. I take a frozen thing out of the freezer, put it in the oven, and it melts.” Which makes it all the more unbelievable that Julia Child took my call.

I didn’t mince words. “Why do the French eat snails?”

“Because they’re delicious,” she replied, in that Julia Child lilt. She added that when you’re starving you’ll eat anything edible, and in the Middle Ages the people in France did just that.

Julia enthusiastically encouraged me to try them. “You really eat them for the butter and garlic,” she explained. “There’s an instrument that takes the snail out. You put it on French bread, pour butter and garlic over it — it’s divine.”

I chose not to mention that almost the exact same thing could be said about butter lathered on brown sugar and cinnamon Pop-Tarts.

I also wondered how the French ever thought up deep-frying potato sticks and frying bread coated with eggs and milk. But I didn’t ask.

Julia had already indicated a certain blind faith in French culinary skills: “I’ve never eaten a cow’s udder before, but if a French chef prepared it, I imagine it would be delicious,” she told me.

Julia Child is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Q. I say Albert Einstein said the following, but my friend says you said: “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute, and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.” Who’s right? — Andy Markley, Sacramento, Calif.

A. Although your friend is wrong, he is not alone. Many people get Albert Einstein and me mixed up, mostly because of our hair, but there are those who mistakenly credit me with Einstein’s quotes.

For example, many people attribute to me: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” In fact, these were the words of Albert Einstein.

I said: “Nothing occurs in life that cannot be explained by referring to a Mary Tyler Moore, Dick Van Dyke, or Monty Python episode.” Given the similarities, it’s an understandable mistake.

Likewise, Einstein wrote: “Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.”

It is a common error for this, too, to be attributed to me. In fact, what I said was, “There must be something more to life than cleaning up cat vomit.”

I wish I could offer a list of identifying characteristics to help your friend distinguish my thoughts from those of Einstein, but there are none. We’ll just have to handle the confusion about each quote individually.

Q. Recently, I found myself in possession of a $100 bill. A co-worker told me that I should hold it up to the light to reveal a second portrait of Ben Franklin. The bill revealed someone who was clearly not Ben Franklin. In fact, I’d swear it was Walt Whitman! Is there someone different on every $100 bill? — Molly McManus, Columbia, S.C.

A. Gee, your bill may have been counterfeit. I happen to have a $100 bill myself. (I’ve been wrapping pennies religiously.) The second portrait of Ben Franklin in my bill looks nothing like Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman had a big furry beard and mustache and penetrating eyes, remember?

I called the U.S. Mint to inquire as to the identity of the second figure on the $100 bill. It is Ben! However, the guy at the mint directed me to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing because the mint only makes coins.

There, Claudia Dickens told me the second Ben Franklin is identical to the first. It’s called a watermark and is used as an anti-counterfeit identification device manufactured into the paper by Crane & Co. Inc.

I used the opportunity to seek validation on something Ms. Bramson told my fifth-grade class at General John Nixon School in Sudbury, Massachusetts. She said men couldn’t work in the mint because they’d go insane. That seems believable to me, but Claudia assured me the workers don’t go insane. She said even though all of those dead presidents are at first a sight to see, eventually you come to regard them as dirty paper that gets all over your hands.

We also had sex education in the fifth grade. I shudder to think what else Ms. Bramson got wrong.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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