What?  You don’t like Spam™?  What’s wrong with you?  Spam™ is the single greatest food-type item that has ever been created in the history of the world!  The world!!! Not convinced?  Then you have to – absolutely must – go to the Spam™ Museum in Austin, Minnesota! 

Spam™ is important enough to have a whole museum dedicated to its greatness: are you?  Well I haven’t been to yours but I have been to the one for Spam™ and let me tell you I am convinced about Spam™.  The All Good and All Giving Hormel company that is responsible for making Spam™ has its headquarters here in Austin, and the sweet smell of Spam™ begins to call out to you the moment you turn onto the street.  All streets should smell like Spam™!

Once inside the museum, you are greeting by two unbelievably friendly boosters of the product of Spam™. These two senior citizen cheerleaders for Spam™ bring you inside a wide, open corridor filled with images of Spam™ in cans (complete with an entire wall of 3500 cans of Spam™ called their Spam™ Wall).  You are welcomed with open arms, given a map of the museum, and invited to play one of the interactive Spam™ games just behind where you are now.  Wander and enjoy is the theme of the attraction. And how could we not enjoy this?!? (you too can play the interactive games on their website  http://www.spam.com/)

As we made our way around this intoxicating celebration of squared, pink pig flesh in a can, we dressed as Spam™ factory workers and pretended to make Spam™ (Spam™ is actually cooked in its own can! Fascinating!!!)

A conveyor belt of cans of Spam™ revolves overhead as you play a mock game show designed to show-off your knowledge of Spam™, and also as you read the displays showing the history of Spam™.  Spam™.  They even have a TV set up which plays the Monty Python Spam™ skit on continual loop. There is so much Spam™ here, it’s akin to Disney World™, but about Spam™. And admission is free! Take that, Disney™!

At the end of the tour you are in the gift shop where you can buy Spam™ in different flavo(u)rs (like hickory smoked, garlic, cheese, and REAL BACON), and we did buy lots of Spam™ and bumper stickers and shot glasses and I almost bought a hoodie and…

It takes about 15 minutes of driving away from the Cult of Spam™ before you start to realize: what the hell are we going to do with all this Spam™? 

Deprogramming and re-assimilation into non-Spam™ society will be hard, but worth it. A few knocks to the head and a salad should just about do it.

It’s not about Santa. Not everything is about Santa. Santa gets enough attention. He certainly doesn’t need mine; and in the middle of August, no less. Stick it, Santa. I’m talking about the other jolly Ho ho ho-er we all know and love. This one gives us nature’s gifts of peas and corn all year round. You all know who I’m talking about. He’s big, and green, and jolly and 55 feet tall in Blue Earth, Minnesota. Can’t figure it out? The Jolly Green Giant ring any bells?

First of all, Blue Earth? Awesome name for a town. Located off of Interstate 90 in Minnesota, Blue Earth was home to a canning plant for Green Giant peas and corn. In the 1970s, a local DJ used to interview visitors to the town, giving them the parting ‘gift’ of a can of peas or corn. What these visitors really wanted, however, was to see the Jolly Green Giant. If you really think about that, it’s kinda crazy. I mean, the Jolly Green Giant isn’t real. How did they expect to see him? But, like with all crazy ideas, someone stepped forward to make it happen. So, in 1978, the 55ft fibreglass statue was erected. The Jolly Green Giant had finally found a home. In Minnesota. Take that, Santa!!!