Square Hot Dogs and Rectangle Sausages

There's a song from the musical Chess that includes the lyrics "One night in Bangkok and the world's your oyster." But what happens if you spend two nights in Bangkok? Two night in Bangkok and hot dogs stop being sausages. (It doesn't quite fit the meter of the original.)

We are in Bangkok as just a transit point. Originally, we were planning to spend only one night in Bangkok. But the airline we were supposed to fly canceled our flight and said they had conveniently booked us on an different flight two days later. That was no good for two reasons.

1. It would mean we would overstay our allowed time in Kazakhstan.
2. We would arrive in Bangkok about six hours after our flight out of Bangkok left.

So we found a different flight on a different airline and left Kazakhstan one day earlier than we had originally intended. So we had two nights in Bangkok. And let me tell you, there are few better places to have to get stuck for a bit longer.

For one thing, hotels in Bangkok are quite affordable. I will get back to talking about the hotel in a moment. Second, if you said, "Erich, you are just going to have to eat authentic Thai food for a couple days," my reply would be "Great!" I love the food here. Last night I had Tom Kha Kai, a chicken soup in a coconut milk broth made with galangal. What an amazing food! Perhaps my favorite soup in the world. Though, I do have some pretty happy memories of my mother's beef and barley soup.

I was saying to Alrica that I figured a person's favorite food of various categories probably always came either from something you loved in your childhood or something that was completely unknown to you in your childhood and that you discovered someplace else. She disagreed and told me her favorite soup is the Chicken and Dumplings soup that I make. Awwww! What a sweet wife. That's a point in her favor. Good thing too, because she's about to get a strike against her.

We get breakfast at the hotel each day. It's a very good buffet with lots of choices, including some that we don't traditionally think of as breakfast foods. This morning, there was fettucine alfredo and Alrica pointed out that it was very good, but not a usual breakfast food. I put a sausage on my fork and said, "If I call this a sausage, it is breakfast food. But if I call it a hot dog, it isn't."

That's when Alrica made the crazy argument, "A hot dog is not a sausage." What? I was flabbergasted! Not a sausage? Isn't it ground up meat stuffed inside an edible tube? Naturally, I went to the internet and the internet assured me that a hot dog is a type of sausage. Just as a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle may not be a square, a hot dog is a sausage, though a sausage may not be a hot dog.

To this Alrica explained that she grew up in the south, and to any good connoisseur of southern cuisine, a hot dog is not a sausage.

I pointed out that this is a No True Scotsman fallacy. A No True Scotsman fallacy goes something like this:
Person A: No Scotsman drinks his beer cold. They only drink it warm.
Person B: My uncle is a Scotsman and he loves drinking cold beer.
Person A: No true Scotsman drinks his beer cold.

This is also called "moving the goal posts." Sure, if Alrica gets to change the definition of sausage however she would like, I guess she's right and I'm wrong. But I am then just as allowed to use the actual definition of sausage, and so I am right too. This becomes one of those agree to disagree moments. (Except this is agree to disagree and in my heart I know I'm right.)

Naturally, I am going to get a very stern look when Alrica reads this blog post. But what kind of man would I be if I didn't defend the hot dog's legitimate placement in the sausage umbrella? One who was unworthy of a hot dog. And I wouldn't ever want to be that.