Big Ketchup Energy
During the height of the pandemic, when we were all Zooming, I got into the habit of tracking down somewhat unusual backgrounds.
One of my favorites is/was the World’s Largest Catsup Bottle:
The tricky thing about finding a good Zoom background is that, most of the time, one’s head and shoulders are blocking the center of the picture, so you need to find images where the focal points are to the side. This image met those criteria nicely.
What you can’t tell very well from this picture is that the brand is actually Brooks Catsup (“Rich and Tangy!”), and what you wouldn’t know at all is that this bottle is located in Collinsville, IL. So even though I’ve never seen it in person, of course I feel a serendipitous affinity for it.
Imagine my surprise to read Sarah Kendzior talking about it this week, in more detail than I’ll excerpt here:
My family finds all of this less fascinating than I do. But I know an American icon when I see one. I hope The World’s Largest Catsup Bottle lasts forever. I hope if we get conquered, no one knows what to do with it, because it’s too special and too stupid to be understood, just like America itself.
The World’s Largest Catsup Bottle makes me think of the Guinness Book of World Records, a phenomenon that felt much more present to me as a youngster than it does today, although it’s still around. More recently, it puts me in mind of Atlas Obscura, which is kind of the inverse of AirB&B (despite the latter’s attempt to rebrand itself via its quirkiest properties). Roadside attractions are gloriously pointless, which might explain why I have several of them in my library of Zoom backgrounds (and why I always took a little time on road trips to visit them when I could).
Back when social media was fun, I created a Twitter bot called Botsville, which would periodically tweet out a combinatorially-generated postcard message from a fictional town, home of the something-est something. The bot has long since ceased working, but it’s still up on Twitter, and I do visit from time to time.
You get the idea, I’m sure. The account only has a few followers left, and three of them are me, but at its “peak,” it sparked joy in me much like the roadside attractions that it generated/parodied. Even now, the idea of a town celebrating passive verbs—or I guess that should be “the idea of passive verbs being celebrated by a town”—makes me smile in a way that the cleverest deployment of ChatGPT does not.
