The cheese that goes...

There is an apocryphal story of my youth that immediately after I had my tonsils removed, I asked for not ice cream, which is the standard request, but Cheetos, which are not soft nor smooth.  I liked Cheetos as a kid more than I do now, but if I'm line for a catered sub lunch, I'll reach for the Cheetos probably more often than I'd reach for anything else since nobody seems to go for sour cream and onion anymore.  I guess onion breath is more offensive than orange teeth.

A couple of years ago, Cheetos sort of rebooted Chester from a sort of loser who thinks he is the coolest cat on the block who spends the commercials trying (unsuccessfully) to get his paws on some delicious Cheetos into a weird kind of jerk who uses Cheetos not for food, really, but more as props primarily to embarrass some of the people around the human characters (usually friends or family) in the commercial.  (I tried to find more samples on YouTube, but searching for Cheetos is mostly crowded out by videos like this about getting Irish people to try American things.  I must admit, I was amused.)

As an example, two recent ones have a child firing Cheetos out of a catapult at her father (I think?) for stealing the remote or something.  Another has a child making a Cheeto bikini for her sleeping father so that when he wakes up, he'll have bikini tan lines.  In none of these are there anything about the Cheeto dust that gets on everything.  It's not as bad as Dorito dust or glitter, but it's in the conversation.

There are a number of baffling aspects of these commercials.  First, none of the people seem to be fazed by the fact that there is a cartoon Cheetah telling them what to do, which, now that I think about it, is reasonably consistent with the commercial universe.  But really, why not show case the snack as being desirable?  The earlier incarnation was not Geico Cavemen or anything as far as commercial quality goes, but it was clear that the snacks were so good that Chester was willing to endure physical pain.  In the new versions, I'm not really sure that the effects would be any different if they replaced the Cheetos with a bag of bread crusts cut off from little kids' sandwiches..

They've made more of these commercials that Darrell Hammond got to make Colonel Sanders commercials, so there must be something to it.  But to me, it makes me sad.  I cannot imagine 3 year old me wanting to ask for Cheetos with a mascot like this after a tonsilectomy.  I guess it really isn't easy being cheesy.

Monkeys bore me

When I was in middle school, I watched Star Trek: TNG. (That's The Next Generation for you non-nerds out there. [Who am I kidding? If you read this, you already knew that.]) I was a little more receptive to science fiction then because, key words, I was in middle school. I have no shame admitting that I enjoyed First Contact and rather recently watched The Undiscovered County, but I still contend that is a good stand alone movie. I have a variety of other embarrassing things that I liked when I was younger, like Magic the Gathering, for instance, but I'm sure your VHS tapes of Jem are not embarrassing at all.

I don't have any particular affinity towards Mark Wahlberg, or Marky Mark, as I was introduced to him initially. I thought he did a good job in The Departed, liked his cameo on SNL with Andy Samberg, and enjoyed I Heart Huckabees (I guess). I also saw his remake of Planet of the Apes, which I thought would be good if for no other reason Tim Burton's directorship. He's not my favorite director, but he did direct my favorite movie (Big Fish) and is responsible for the move that gave us both the lines, "Where does he get such wonderful toys?" and "This city needs an enema," so good on him.

Here's the thing: it was terrible. Beyond awful. I have had more entertaining haircuts. In the interest of full disclosure, though, I have never seen the originals. (I have seen the Simpsons Episode where Troy McClure gets a role in a PotA musical, though -- classic.) I have never seen Charleton Heston say, "Get your paws off me, you damned dirty apes!" I have seen Soylent Green though, which gave me everything I wanted as far as Heston one-liners go.

All this PotA talk is all well and good, but they've made another one. Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I know it's summer, and dumb, blockbuster movies come out in the summer, but I just didn't realize anybody liked this one enough to make a sequel. It is ten years later, I guess, but still.

Am I missing something? Is this movie series so good that modern remakes are worthwhile? Are the PotA originals worth my time? My time, after all is precious; I could be catching up with Jerrica Benton.

Where's the third ring?

I'm pretty sure I'm not crazy on this one: I don't understand the Family Circus. I don't mean that it looks like Greek letters and alien shapes, I recognize that it's a comic composed of images and dialogue intended to portray a scene or story, but I can't figure out what the Family Circus's motivation or appeal is. It's not really a story. Is it because I don't have children? Is that why it seems like a waste of newspaper ink to me?

Let me clarify, though, that the Family Circus is not as maddeningly offensive as, say, Frank and Earnest. It's just confusing. Why is this comic so universally popular? Am I on crazy pills? Let me cite an example that I found on the family circus website, which if this blog ever gets readership I will probably have to take down or risk being sued:


When I say I don't understand it, it's not that I don't know what it's saying, even though for a Floridian the concept of icy sidewalks is about as familiar as tse tse flies biting Bengal Tigers while aborigines watch while playing the accordion. I have conceptual understanding that ice forms in the winter on sidewalks and it's slippery, increasing the risk of falling, or sliding, if you will. I get the "joke." Only, it's not a joke. This is a bad pun dressed up as cute because a child (presumably his?) said it. Aww, adorable. No. This is a newspaper. There is no room for adorable, Trixie Flagston aside.

I want to know who it is that looks for this everyday. I want to know if having children will make this comic seem less like something only boring people enjoy to something I look for all the time. If enjoying Family Circus is what I have to look forward to in parenthood, I am going to never stop drinking Mountain Dew.

Part of a complete breakfast

I used to be skeptical of cereal. I mean that in more recent times; before that I used to think that cereal could do no wrong. Cocoa Puffs, Lucky Charms, Froot Loops, you name it. If there would have been a civil suit between Sonny the Cocoa Puffs bird and some other non-cereal related cartoon character when I was 8, I probably would have sided with Sonny because he was involved with such a delicious cereal, even if part of the evidence provided by the other cartoon was a tape recording of "I'm cuckoo for tortious interference!" That is, assuming that's what the lawsuit was about and the other cartoon character was not a Ninja Turtle. I'm pretty sure they would have trumped everybody when I was 8.

That all changed, though, when I started buying my own food. Cereal is expensive, particularly the ones I mentioned. And if you have big bowls, they don't last for very long. It's also so easy to skip breakfast, so paying $5 a box for chocolate favored grains that are mostly air anyway is an easy excuse. It's a shame, really, because all we keep hearing about is how important breakfast is. I'm really a little surprised that the FDA or whoever else is responsible for PSAs hasn't tried this sort of ad campaign with Law & Order. That would reach a lot of people. The Saturday morning angle is nice, but that's only half the puzzle. The kids are key, yes, but half the time you tell an adult that you want something that has a childish name and they screw it up. Like, for example, my dad made reference to "MyTube" the other day. He meant Facebook. Adults need to be bombarded with terminology, and Law & Order is the way to do it. Dun dun.

But I've had a cereal renaissance lately. It started when I just got tired of not eating breakfast. I also found that Crispix, probably one of my Top 5 cereals is considerably cheaper than Lucky Charms, which is a natural top choice since I share a cultural heritage with that particular cereal. Crispix also seems like it's a good choice health-wise, since the it's ingredients are boring things like corn and rice and the sugar content isn't measured in pounds. Although at this point I don't really know exactly how to determine if a given food is all that good for you anymore, since one of my friends is a doctor and occasionally laughs at me for suggesting that something might be good for you. The reaction was akin to somebody suggesting to me that they did their own calculations for the buildings in their house by the statics formula F=ma^2. (Which is fundamentally false.)

At any rate, I'm going to keep eating Crispix as long as it's cheap enough to not offend my sensibilities. Also, Shrek is on the front of the box and he's almost as good as Sonny.

Setting things right

I need to do something that I have allowed to go unfinished for far too long. I need to tell you, if you don't already know, which webcomic is the best one of them all. I have only sampled maybe ten, but my search is over. Before I reveal the answer at the end, I will explain to you the ones I have looked at and why this one is better than all those other pieces of digital crap.

There are a few that I try to keep up with on a regular basis (in addition to the best one), and they're not bad. Questionable Content isn't bad, and I read it everyday. This one and GPF-Comics which actually kind of sucks, both fall into the category of "I started with them and at this point I might as well keep up with them." Particularly the second one. If you go there, and leave me a comment saying, "Why do you read this? I enjoyed your writing until I found out that this is the sort of thing that you read," don't, because I acknowledge that I hate it. I just can't escape. Penny-Arcade is actually pretty funny, but I don't keep up with it as well because I don't actually know how often they update. It's a comic for nerds though. I only get about 70% of them because I don't really play nerd games anymore. I tried to grow out of that sophomore year of college. Now I only play tough games. Like poker with grenades instead of chips and Russian roulette.

I have tried to read Achewood once upon a time, but couldn't get into it. I also tried to read Sam and Fuzzy and Diesel Sweeties during the period between the end of college and actual graduation (that's really when I started on all of these) when I didn't have a lot to do. Sometimes they were ok, but I gave up on all of them. None of them were as good as Fruit Cakes.

The best one, though, is undoubtedly Dinosaur Comics. I wish Dinosaur Comics was a blanket so I could wrap myself up in it while I watch tv.

I started reading about Borat and ended up at Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist

I hope this happens to other people. Sometimes I start thinking about something, go look it up, and somehow end up at IMDB or Wikipedia and one thing leads to another and I don't know how I got there. Sometimes it starts with Napoleon and ends up at the Farsi language; others I start looking up what the deal with the free kick after a safety is all about and find myself reading about Paul of Tarsus. You might want to know what the intermediate steps of that chain would be, and honestly, so do I.

Usually, when this happens, I don't even remember why I wanted to know about the thing that sent me on this snipe hunt in the first place. Like tonight, for example, I was sitting on my bed watching the football game, started to check out a video with Sacha Baron Cohen appearing with Martha Stewart on Leno and next thing I know I'm thinking to myself, "You know, if Sarah Silverman were consistently funny instead of annoying, she'd be the perfect woman," and watching Desperate Housewives. But then again, if Silverman's with Jimmy Kimmel these days, then there are deficiencies with her decision making of which I want no part.

In these bizarre series of discovery, you never know what you'll find out. Like that Dr. Katz was on for six seasons. Remember that impossibly irritating program that had wiggly people in it? It was one of the very early Comedy Central shows, back when it had stuff on it that wasn't MadTV. I watched a lot of Dr. Katz in the mornings when I was home from school during the summers. You might also find out things that will be helpful in Jeopardy, like for example, the word prose comes from the Latin word prosa, meaning straightforward. Unless Wikipedia is lying, which it very well might be. I didn't get that far in my Latin class to know for sure. I do remember that "rex parvorum virorum sum" means "I am the king of the small men." Beautiful language, that Latin.

Geronimo

There is something inherently fascinating about the vending machines where things fall down after you select them. Like candy bars or gum, after the strange circular springs (which look like dough hooks) rotate and advance them and they fall into the ingeniously designed chamber that prevents you from reaching your hand up to pluck them from their resting places. There was an episode of The Critic where guns did that.

I purchased an individually sized, overpriced bag of potato chips in this manner today to eat with my lunch. (It was a chicken sandwich with swiss cheese, mayonnaise and honey mustard, if you're curious. It was average.) Some of the chips were smashed when I ate them, and that is really unfortunate. Is there anything less desirable, chipwise, than broken pieces? No.

This isn't revolutionary news, I'm aware, because chips are frequently broken at the bottom. However, I also noticed that the potato chips are on the top level of the vending machine. What a disastrous placement of such a fragile food! Especially when there are heartier things in there, like Snickers and granola bars small tubes of Pringles. I want to share with you a design to help minimize the tragedy of chip breakage in vending machine falls. Observe:

I can't say for certain that the chips weren't broken before the fall, but really, I don't want to take that chance, either. Hopefully, together we can keep other chips from suffering a similar fate. The gum can go screw itself, though.

A mystery for the ages

You know, every morning when I open my newspaper after I've finished reading the news, opinions and sports sections, I always go to comics. It may seem juvenile, but really, there are a few that I look out for and occasionally enjoy. There are a few that are just so ingrained in my newspaper experience that I read them even though I know they're not going to be amusing in anyway, like Garfield and Blondie. Dilbert is usually solid, sometimes brilliant and every once in a while terrible. But, if you know me, you know I don't want to talk about the good ones. I want to talk about the ones that are so maddening that I would rather set fire to the page and burn my initials into my right arm with the fire.

This is a tricky distinction, though, because comics like Snuffy Smith are immediately unreadable. This one is just blank space as far as I'm concerned, so it doesn't offend me nearly as much as, say, Mary Worth or Cathy. Most of the continuity print comics, like Mary Worth, are difficult to get into because you can't read from the beginning of the arc. Also, Mary Worth has been running since before World War I (Mary Worth was quite a dish when the series started), so it would take a lot of back reading to get started. Cathy is just ink vomit on the page; she a stereotype of annoying woman that I wouldn't tolerate in real life and certainly don't want any part of on the comics page. Oddly enough, I don't mind For Better or For Worse, though, even though that one's not funny and it is nominally a continuity comic. It manages to pack a lot of stuff into the four panels, handle the continuity and stand alone. That's the key -- standalone as well.

Family Circus, Ziggy and one called Pluggers all get honorable mention. Family Circus is supposed to be cute, I guess, but it isn't. It's like "Dennis the Menace", another one panel comic, without the "Menace." Who cares? Pluggers is one I don't recall seeing outside of the Greenville paper, but it's MO is describing what a plugger is, and basically it's an old fat person. Great. Just what I always wanted to see in average drawings and writing. I don't know what Ziggy's problem is, but I don't want any part of it.

Undoubtedly, the be all end all of awful comics is Frank and Ernest. If you are unfamiliar with this comic, I have the deepest envy of you. It is a poorly drawn comic that is never funny. Yet somehow, every time I open to the comics page, I end up reading it. I don't have this problem with Snuffy Smith. I don't know why Frank and Ernest fill me with more hate than, say, Nazis. I think that whoever this Thaves character is deserved to be tried for crimes against humanity.

This comic, which I just made up, is better than any Frank and Earnest comic I have ever read.


Who out there thinks that Frank and Ernest is good? If you leave me a comment and say you like it, you better be able to describe to me your favorite strip or I will call you a liar and an accomplice. I cannot believe that this comic continues to run. I suppose newspapers don't really get a lot of complaints about comics, especially inoffensive ones, but I'm thinking about writing some letters.

Do insurance villains attack with cartoon blimps?

Most of you probably already know that I have pretty strong opinions about television commercials. Like, for example, I think that Taco Bell's advertisement people should be put into a box with angry shrews. I also am convinced that the cell phone companies are in a competition to see who can generate the most inanity and put it on the air; it's really the only explanation that makes sense. Geico's still on top, their new campaign is pretty amusing (except the one with Mini-Me, that one sucks). The Sports Center commercials are also hit and miss; you've heard how I felt about Maria Sharapova -- the new one with Peyton and Eli getting the tour of the studio and Peyton kicks Eli is hilarious. The one with Ladanian kind of blows, though.

There is one that has an entire campaign that I have no idea what to make of it. Esurance, an on-line car insurance company, has got an animated ad campaign involving secret agents and villains and romance. I haven't been this confused by something I've watched since my old roommate rented Brazil. I'm sure you've seen one -- Erin Esurance, the super spy super hero, is a magenta haired animated babe (she does manage to pull off the magenta pretty well, much better than P!nk does, I have to say. Mostly because P!nk looks more masculine than Jerome Bettis lately -- oh that's another, the Square Table is a good campaign as well) who does things like drive racecars, go to sporting events and drop in on car dealerships being chased by villians that I'm pretty sure used to appear in Dexter's Laboratory or possibly Invader Zim. I don't know what the hell any of it means, or why the tagline is "If you're on the go, you gotta get Esurance."

Apparently you can get insurance over the internet and immediately print proof of insurance, and that's what is so amazing about this, even if you're being chased by an evil professor who looks vaguely like a composite of Frankenstein and Tom Brady wearing shades. Really, if I'm being chased by the likes of a Super Bowl winning quarterback that has been reanimated from dead flesh, whether or not my get away car has car insurance probably isn't going to be the first thing I worry about, it will be if that magenta haired chick is single.

Party Time

I was wondering recently about politics and how difficult it would be to match political parties to people while knowing only a little about them. I think it could be a fun exercise. Below are ten people and I will provide a quick bio and some analysis explaining why I think each belongs in the parties I chose. Disagree? Leave a comment and tell me why.

Let's start with somebody everyone will recognize.

1. Batman - A billionaire who, in order to avenge his parents' death he needed to dress up like a bat to fight crime. His Wayne Enterprises corporation gives away a lot to the poor and he keeps an adopted child in his bat cave. This is kind of a close call, because even though his character can be interpreted as vaguely gay, I think that his being super rich, tough on crime and driving a car that can't possibly be eco-friendly puts him in the Republican camp.

2. Prince Hamlet - One of the most famous Shakespearean characters, he is the Prince of Denmark and is called back from school when his dad dies. It turns out that his uncle did it to take his mom and kingdom, he decides to get revenge after being told what went on by the ghost of his dad. Even though taking revenge definitely sounds like a Republican trait, he was still in school and really whiny and pretty obnoxious, so I'm willing to bet this kid would be a Democrat.

3. Captain Planet - This was a cartoon that I think all of us remember as kids. Five teenagers from all over the world had powers based in their rings that they used to fix the planet and with their powers combined, summon Captain Planet! This show was created by Ted Turner to brainwash kids about the environment, so you know that the blue skinned, green mulletted superhero would not have voted for Bush in the last election. In fact, if this were around today, I'm pretty sure he'd be convincing kids to lay guilt trips on their parents for buying SUVs. Even with his military background (he reached the rank of captain, after all) he is clearly a Democrat.

4. Destro - Destro's a Scottish arms dealer who supplies Cobra with all their equipment. Not only that, his clan supplied both sides weapons during the English Civil War. Oliver Cromwell made all the leaders of the Destro clan wear the silver mask, according to the comic series. He is absolutely Republican Party material. In fact, this sounds like something Tom DeLay would do.

5. Trix Rabbit - The cartoon rabbit who only wanted a bowl of cereal, but could never quite get one himself because he was foiled by children who kept telling him, "Silly Rabbit, Trix are for kids!" Well, you know what? That's ethnic discrimination, and Rabbit should be on the phone with Jesse Jackson and the ACLU to punish those kids for violating his Civil Rights. He could be a figure for all Rabbit kind, and a big source of votes for the Democratic Party.

6. Yosemite Sam - A gun totin' Southerner (or is he a Westerner?) who like to hunt his rabbit who first appeared in the Looney Tunes in 1945. He is quite fiery tempered and always gets outsmarted by Bugs, but with that goofy voice and his appearance on trucker mud flaps, who doesn't find him delightful? This is may surprise you, but knowing his stubborn personality and that he was created in 1945, he would be a Democrat, or more accurately, a Dixiecrat. Even though clearly his 2nd Amendment sensibilities seem very important to him, I think his pride and bullheadedness would keep him from actually switching parties. Think of him as the cartoon equivalent of Zell Miller.

7. Scrooge McDuck - A self-made billionaire, Scrooge is the richest duck in the world. He started out as a simple Scottish (duck) immigrant and made his fortune by finding gold in the Klondike and then expanding into a financial empire all over the world. He is also Donald Duck's uncle. He keeps his money inside of his Money Bin at Duckburg and literally swims in his money. You know this duck wants to keep taxes low and trade free. He would obviously be a Republican, but since he's a duck, I'm not sure he could actually vote.

8. Papa Smurf - The lovable red clothed, white bearded father figure of the smurf community who is 542 years old. He, like the rest of the Smurfs, is three apples tall and lives in a mushroom. That right there is representative of their hippie culture; also considering the other elements of how Smurfs live, there is really no question on this one. Communalism, no market economy, worker's style clothing - this guy, and all of his blue ilk, are reds. He would've voted for Eugene Debs, rooted for the other side in the Cold War and even looks like Karl Marx. He's a Commie. A Pinko. A Soviet. Take your mushroom induced communist ideas elsewhere, Papa Smurf.

9. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi - The mongoose who fights the pair of cobras who want to kill the family who rescued him after a storm. He defends the house, kills the cobras and destroys their young. He doesn't shy away from using military force, family values are important to him and he's a mongoose, which are definitely free market animals. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is so Republican that they should replace the Elephant with a mongoose.

10. Mayor McCheese - The leader of McDonaldland who has been discontinued for a while due to an apparanet plagiarism of H.R. Pufnstuf. Since this guy's agenda was to spread hamburgers to everyone affordably and he wants to rehabilitate the Hamburgler, rather than put him in jail where he belongs, this mayor is a Democrat. He also dresses like FDR, suggesting that he may want to establish a New Deal in McDonaldland, but Grimace the Libertarian will lead a recall before he allows that.