Wizard of Id Classics by Parker and Hart for September 14, 2023

Oat no!

Gives new meaning to “getting your oats”……….

Break out the brown sugar and cinammon.

What, the heck, is an oat gun?

I think the Fink will be feeling his oats today

Would have guessed 200 sacks delivered by catapult.

Remember, the cereal shot from guns? Quaker puffed wheat and rice.

Look on the bright side – you’ll be getting the oats back for nothing!

After consuming the residue from this barrage, they can send the waste back to the Huns using their butt cannons. You may fire when ready, Gridley!

So, literal backfire?

Oat guns? But very much like the deal the Ukrainians recently had with the Russians.

“Gun” is a cereal-industry term for an industrial-sized pressure cooker that is loaded with grain and a bit of water that is then heated to the boiling point. When the steam has had time to permeate the grain, the “gun” is suddenly opened, and it goes BOOM! The grain is suddenly puffed up. It’s the same principle as popcorn, but popcorn needs only the natural water and the relatively hard shell of the kernel, and does not need the “gun” mechanism.

A later development was making dough and letting it harden in small shapes, and then using the result as artificial “grain”. Cheerios, for example, are made into tiny, hard little O’s, and then are puffed up to serving size (and edible density) in a “gun”. Most cereals (I believe offhand) are made this way. Look at Trix, for example.

Quaker talked most about the “guns”, but everybody in the business had them. I wonder whether Quaker made a point of it because of the old American expression, “Quaker gun”, meaning a dummy gun (usually made of wood) used to discourage enemies from attacking.