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[Sandwich Monday note: Gillian is our resident British Person.]

Americans often look upon British food as bland and stodgy, so for this week's Sandwich Monday, I decided to prove everyone wrong with my offer of Hunger Breaks All Day Breakfast: a can of baked beans, sausage, bacon and "egg nuggets." After a trip across the Atlantic, we blitzed our meal in the microwave, then poured it back into the can for the complete experience. A cup of strong tea and drizzle are optional.

Miles: If we had two of these and a bit of string, we could make the world's most revolting telephone.

Gillian: Oh, it tastes like home!

Mike: Did you grow up in a boxcar?

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Ian detects egg nugget. NPR hide caption

itoggle caption NPR

Ian detects egg nugget.

NPR

Miles: What came first, the egg nugget or the chicken nugget?

Ann: I found this to be "quite lovely," actually. That's British slang for "wouldn't mind eating this if I was in prison."

Peter: It's got everything you need for a classic British breakfast. Except for fried bread. And tea. And scones. And plates and cups. And any sense of hope.

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Ann is shocked by the mind-blowing flavor of egg nugget. NPR hide caption

itoggle caption NPR

Ann is shocked by the mind-blowing flavor of egg nugget.

NPR

Robert: It says "all day breakfast" but really, what are the chances of this being consumed any other time than 3 A.M.?

Eva: Make sure and stick your pinky out while eating from the can.

Ian: If you want to scare someone, tell them snakes are about to jump out of the can and then it's this.

[The verdict: not bad. It has a bit of that Chef Boyardee or Campbell's microwave lunch flavor. That's probably not a good flavor, but it carries with it enough nostalgia to make it work.]

Sandwich Monday is a satirical feature from the humorists at Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me!

sandwich monday

One of the central conceits of the first season of HBO's Veep was the carnival of humiliations suffered by Selina Meyer, played so brilliantly by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, in her capacity as vice president. She battled for relevance while waiting for the phone to ring, surrounded by a staff even more determinedly clinging to shreds of power and significance than she was. Later, Selina wound up battling primary opponents in her own bid to become president — a path that proved to have its own endless frustrations.

Thus, it was risky as the third season ended last summer to abruptly accelerate Selina's career trajectory by having the president resign with less than a year remaining in his term, leaving her to continue her struggling campaign while simultaneously serving, for now, as the first female president.

In theory, what Selina has wanted for the last three seasons, she suddenly has: she is president. She is relevant. People take her calls. This is a fundamental upending of the series if you assume that her real goal has been the presidency. Indeed, her discovery that she would become president not only thrilled her, but led to the moment in which she and her super-devoted personal aide, Gary (Tony Hale), wound up laughing hysterically together in a bathroom as she rummaged through the contents of what they call The Bag, which he carries at all times so as to be of help to her whatever she may need. For a sometimes brutal satire, the show is capable of moments of jarring, unanticipated warmth, but to its credit, it keeps them vanishingly rare and forgets them instantly.

The fourth-season opener on Sunday night began with a gambit that could, in less sure hands, seem like a gimmick: we found Selina at the podium, speaking to Congress, suddenly abandoned by her teleprompter. Then we flashed back, 24 hours earlier. This is a structural ploy that's been used so often in television in recent years that it could stiffen viewers if all it meant was "Wait for the disasters that brought this on!"

In fact, though, what they were getting at was the real heart of the show's bite: the disasters weren't as patently incompetent as they might have seemed. Rather than just being the result of a technical glitch or a dodo incapable of doing his or her job, the teleprompter disaster originated with a cascade of people trying to do their jobs. Even Selina.

The easy way to make political satire is to make all the people venal monsters, selfish and shallow, uninterested in doing anything good, incompetent in every way. That's the most comfortable kind of political satire as well, since it reassures everyone watching that the problem is the monsters we elect and the monsters they employ, and if we could only sweep those people out, we would suddenly be in the warm embrace of a system humming along to our shared benefit.

But Veep is more politically savvy than that. What sets off the teleprompter screw-up is Selina's meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in which she's shocked to hear them offer up an obsolete submarine program she can get rid of — saving $50 billion that she can allocate in her budget. They assure her that it's an old weapon they no longer need, and that they, the ones you'd expect to be first to defend it if it had any merit and the ones she expects to give her the hardest time about defense cuts, are okay with losing it. When they're gone, she and her staff celebrate having apparently found $50 billion in free money. Money that was basically lying around. Money nobody will miss. And so she has her staff — led by her director of communications, Mike, played by Matt Walsh, and a new speechwriter she inherited from the resigned president who's played by Zak Orth — write the cut into her address to Congress.

As she's minutes from delivering the speech, her staff gets a visit from Congressman Furlong (and men he introduces as "the military-industrial complex"), who explains to her that while the military may not need the submarine for submarine purposes, its manufacture employs people in many states, all of which have members of Congress who cannot just go along with a substantial loss of local jobs. And thus, if she pushes for the elimination of the submarine, they will take it out on her precious Families First Act.

There are two ways to look at this, of course. One is that it's outrageous to want to make an obsolete weapon simply because you're paying people to make it and you don't want to stop paying them. But the other is that this is what representatives do: they try to make sure their people back home are getting their share. The people who voted for them expect them to keep an eye out for their jobs and their money and their economic interests. It's more complicated than anybody being a monster.

What Selina and her staff learn here is simply that there's no such thing as $50 billion lying around that nobody is going to miss; that was a fantasy. Getting money is going to be as hard as always, for the same reasons as always: the money that's being spent means something to somebody.

She needs the speech rewritten on the fly, so she has to vamp on her way up the aisle to buy time. Of course, if you're greeting her in those moments, you don't think she's buying time, you just think she's an idiot. And maybe later, you tell that to the press, and now other people think she's an idiot, because they don't know that she was trying to give her staff time to rewrite a speech.

Mike tries to get her back to an earlier draft, but he's editing while she's taking the podium, and eventually, she finds herself confronted with that blinking cursor. (It's actually more like a command prompt, I think; I'm not sure how likely that is, but: bygones.) She can't read from a printed copy, because Gary, trying to help preserve the line of her suit, swiped her glasses. And when Mike does get her the earlier version of the speech, his inability to keep up with his one obsessive saving and labeling scheme means she winds up with the wrong one. It's one that contains the placeholder text "FUTURE WHATEVER."

Admirably, Selina neither triumphs nor entirely crashes when she's forced to improvise — sometimes she does okay and sometimes she sounds like a fool. But she winds up reading a wrong version of the speech that doubles down by adding $10 million to the program she wanted to abolish. It's absurd, it's wasteful, and none of it is the result of people who aren't, at some level, trying to function.

The theme that so often emerges from Veep — where Selina is sometimes the villain and sometimes the hero, quite a feat of nuance — is that these characters don't inhabit a great system that happens to be full of terrible people. They inhabit a system that provides perverse incentives that perpetuate dysfunction. It's a braver way to cut into political culture than it would be if that teleprompter had ended up going on the fritz because some political enemy, rubbing his hands together, had cut the wires.

The male milk-giving goat of Gaza has been turned into meat.

Owner Jaser Abu Said sold the goat for the 400 Jordanian dinar (close to $600) that he and his business partner spent on it. He found a buyer willing to slaughter the goat for meat. And he stuck around to witness the goat's demise personally, along with representatives from the Gaza government.

Goats and Soda

A Hermaphrodite Goat Could Be The Ultimate Scapegoat

Why government officials at a goat slaughtering — which happens pretty frequently in Gaza?

The goat appeared to be a hermaphrodite. It looked like a male, with a large build and visible male sex organs. But it also had udders. And gave milk.

Officials got involved when they heard that some people wanted the goat's milk, believing it could help fertility or cure ailments.

Worried that people could be deceived, the deputy minister of agriculture for Gaza's southern region ordered the animal killed.

The execution order said the goat had been used to violate the public health, which "may cause severe damage to civilians."

Owner Abu Said first said he'd do it himself, but on the appointed day, he hid the goat instead. Police came by, and after an hour at the station, he said he agreed to let the government test the milk.

His business partner, Abdel Rahman, said if the goat was to be slaughtered, at least they should be paid.

And so they were, not by the government but the buyer willing to slaughter it immediately. And the goat was killed even before results of tests on the milk were in. Dr. Zakharia Kafarna, director of veterinary services for the Ministry of Agriculture, says he wanted it that way.

He said that even if the goat's milk had tested normal, people who believed that milk from a male animal had curative powers could be deceived if the goat fell into the wrong hands. "People would believe the milk can heal them," he said. "We don't want people to be fooled."

Tests of the milk found nothing curative — or dangerous. Just "a few milk cells" a male goat "is not supposed to have," Kafarna said. He thought perhaps it was a case of a simple hormone disorder, not a true hermaphrodite goat.

The milk — and meat — Kafarna deemed safe to consume.

If another such goat crosses his path, he'll order it slaughtered too.

hermaphrodite

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Novelist Gunter Grass, the winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature who is perhaps best known for his novel The Tin Drum and who shocked his country when he revealed in 2006 that he had been a member of the Waffen SS in the last months of World War II, has died. Grass was 87.

The news was announced by his publisher, Steidl Verlag, in a statement on its website. The publisher said Grass died at a clinic in the town of Luebeck. It did not provide a cause of death.

Grass emerged as one of Germany's leading public intellectuals after World War II – a man whom his biographer Michael Juergs described in a 2006 interview with NPR as a "moral icon." The Tin Drum, an anti-Nazi novel, propelled him to literary stardom. The New York Times adds:

"Critics hailed the audacious sweep of his literary imagination. A severed horse's head swarming with hungry eels, a criminal hiding beneath a peasant woman's layered skirts, and a child who shatters windows with his high-pitched voice are among the memorable images that made The Tin Drum a worldwide triumph."

While announcing his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, the Nobel committee said the publication of the novel made it seem "as if German literature had been granted a new beginning after decades of linguistic and moral destruction."

Grass was an often controversial figure – and he touched on his aspect of his reputation in his speech while accepting the Nobel Prize.

"The publication of my first two novels, The Tin Drumand Dog Years, and the novella I stuck between them, Cat and Mouse, taught me early on, as a relatively young writer, that books can cause offence, stir up fury, even hatred, that what is undertaken out of love for one's country can be taken as soiling one's nest," he said. "From then on I have been controversial."

The BBC adds:

"Born in what was then Danzig, Grass served in the German military in World War Two and published his breakthrough anti-Nazi novel, The Tin Drum, in 1959.

"Later in life he became a vocal opponent of German reunification in 1990, and argued afterwards that it had been carried out too hastily.

"Grass's home town became the Polish city of Gdansk after the war; he spent much of his later life living near Luebeck."

"Many of his writings focused on the Nazi era, the horrors of the war, and the destruction and guilt that remained after Germany's defeat."

Grass shocked the world in 2006 when he acknowledged in his autobiography, Peeling Onions, that he had been drafted into the Waffen SS, the military branch of the Nazi Party, in the final months of World War II. Juergs, his biographer, said in that same 2006 interview with NPR that the controversy would reduce Grass' stature in Germans' eyes.

"There's a lot of people who don't care, of course, because we are not an intellectual country at all," he said. "That's not the point, but in the literary scene and the political scene and in the scene of my generation - and they say OK, Gunter Grass, we will read your books. Everything is OK, you can write and so on and so on, but please don't talk about moral anymore."

gunter grass

Germany