Weird Dinner by L. L. Heberlein

Four slices of lunch meat, two each. The last two water crackers in the package, stale. A can of lukewarm Sprite—poured into two bright green juice glasses. One chicken nugget divided carefully down the middle, then again, to create quarters, which we choose playground-style. His. Mine. His. Mine. We take turns so it’s ‘fairsies.’

The microwave beeps long and loud, letting us know that the leftover black beans and rice are warmed and irradiated. “That’s a reassuring sound,” he says. Ten more seconds, just to hear the beep again.
Elation to find the can of Kraft Easy Cheese, until we remember the crackers are gone, and we have nothing but each other’s tongues to squeeze it on. He finds a can of black olives, pitted, and proceeds to fill each one with a squirt of cheese.

A tiny can of tomato paste. Not sauce. Paste. But it doesn’t matter because we’re out of pasta,

He discovers if you eat the black olives with the tomato paste it kind of tastes like lasagna. We divvy the remainder of the can down to the last odd olive. He offers it to me. Gentleman. I offer to split it with him. “Fairsies.”

The earth rumbles. Then the emergency power cuts, and the rest of the lights go out. Alarms blare, long and loud, in the distance. We share our last olive in the dark

Answer this question

1. Why were the two guys in the story having this “weird dinner” together?

Excerpted from "the children's hour" by henry wadsworth longfellow a whisper, and then a silence: yet i know by their merry eyes they are plotting and planning together to take me by surprise. a sudden rush from the stairway, a sudden raid from the hall! by three doors left unguarded they enter my castle wall! look carefully at the lines above. a poem with this particular rhyme scheme is best read a. line by line. b. with long pauses. c. phrase by phrase. d. with a strong rhythm.

Which correctly identifies the underlined words in the sentence below? marta walked into the room and saw her friends waiting to congratulate her. a. a clause that is describing a noun b. a phrase that is describing a verb c. a clause that is describing a verb d. a phrase that is describing a noun2b2t

Read the passage, then answer the question that follows. no one could have seen it at the time, but the invention of beet sugar was not just a challenge to cane. it was a hint—just a glimpse, like a twist that comes about two thirds of the way through a movie—that the end of the age of sugar was in sight. for beet sugar showed that in order to create that perfect sweetness you did not need slaves, you did not need plantations, in fact you did not even need cane. beet sugar was a foreshadowing of what we have today: the age of science, in which sweetness is a product of chemistry, not whips. in 1854 only 11 percent of world sugar production came from beets. by 1899 the percentage had risen to about 65 percent. and beet sugar was just the first challenge to cane. by 1879 chemists discovered saccharine—a laboratory-created substance that is several hundred times sweeter than natural sugar. today the sweeteners used in the foods you eat may come from corn (high-fructose corn syrup), from fruit (fructose), or directly from the lab (for example, aspartame, invented in 1965, or sucralose—splenda—created in 1976). brazil is the land that imported more africans than any other to work on sugar plantations, and in brazil the soil is still perfect for sugar. cane grows in brazil today, but not always for sugar. instead, cane is often used to create ethanol, much as corn farmers in america now convert their harvest into fuel. –sugar changed the world, marc aronson and marina budhos how does this passage support the claim that sugar was tied to the struggle for freedom? it shows that the invention of beet sugar created competition for cane sugar. it shows that technology had a role in changing how we sweeten our foods. it shows that the beet sugar trade provided jobs for formerly enslaved workers. it shows that sweeteners did not need to be the product of sugar plantations and slavery.