top-o-yer-corn over at slashfood they've got a story asking people what they top their popcorn with and so far it's pretty pedestrian. the usual culprits are there -- flavored butters and salts, sweet and savory additions, bacon, cheese, hot sauce. what i want to know is" where are all the freaks?

i worked in movie theatres. before the bomb got dropped on coconut oil (what had been used for decades in the theatre biz, dropped because it was supposedly a "bad" oil) people used to request all kinds of toppings. parmesan cheese and brewers yeast were the top requests, season salt at the very least. sodium-free alternatives were also high in demand. eventually the condiment counter looked like a collection of refuge containers from the italian restaurant on the corner with shakers of all different sizes and hole openings. we even had to chain them down as people would take them into the theatres for their own personal use (selfish bastages!) and then leave them there, empty, sitting in pools of soda filth on the floor.

popcorn topping freaks? yeah, we saw them. hot sauce requests were common, and why these people couldn't be bothered to bring their own bottles along was beside me. i remember the one guy who really wanted ketchup and went a few doors down to a deli and got a handful of those little foil packages. mustard came up as well, and that almost intrigued me, because i like mustard on things most people don't.

but the king all-time topper of popcorn toppers came from a woman who ordered a large trough-sized cup of corn and requested we let her season it half way before moving on. people often requested we stop half way so they could salt (or have us add butter to) the bottom half for better distribution. that's not such an unusual request. but what she wanted was for us to sell her a bag of m&m's to sprinkle in the middle, then salted it and then had us add extra butter. to just the bottom half. then we filled it again, she had us knock a little off the top, sprinkled another bag of peanut m&m's on top, salted it and had us give extra butter.

understand this about the "extra butter" question at the snack bar; it may be one of the most expensive items to stock, but the reason theatre's try to go light on the butter is because there is a hidden cost of putting too much butter in the bag or cup -- dry cleaning. after a while a pool of butter is going to settle and either leak through the seams of the bag or through the bottom of the cup. you can't wax these containers the way you do drink cups because the wax will melt alongside the melted butter or when stored in a warming bin, so the best they can be is a coated paper that is resistant but not seep-proof. i cannot tell you the number of times people came out of the theatre with the tell-tale extra butter stain on their clothes demanding we pay for dry cleaning. folks, if you ask for extra, don't expect a theatre to also cover the cleaning bill for your indulgences.

i mention this not only as a public service but because we knew when we loaded up that m&m/butter/popcorn concoction that there would be a mess to clean somewhere down the road. at the end of the show we all swooped in to find the evidence. Like treasure hunters on the beach someone shouted "eureka!" and we all converged. there, on the floor, to our horror, we found it. the bucket was completely empty. she had eaten the entire thing. worse, the butter had melted the candy coating off the m&m's leaving a rainbow swirl of congealed butter about a quarter inch thick on the bottom. furtherworse, it appeared she had dredged her fingers through the butter leaving little furrows were her nails scooped up the candy butter that she would probably be licking off her fingertips for the coming week.

lest you think this was a one-off, may i direct you attention to the following recipe for popcorn cake? or perhaps this recipe? even emeril has a version, thought the recipe link doesn't work you can find the book pretty easy. if you're so inclined.

or perhaps this sounds more to your liking:

Harry & David’s Spooky Moose Munch, a wonderful combination of fluffy, crisp popcorn glazed with almond toffee and tossed with candied orange peels. The best part of this Halloween treat is that some of this divine popcorn creation is dipped into semi-sweet dark chocolate and drizzled over with orange-flavored chocolate. A gourmet treat everyone will enjoy.

people, need i remind you: it CORN! it's what we use to fatten livestock! do you really need further incentive to gorge yourselves on chocolate and sweets to the point of casual obesity?

now, what did i do with those leftover easter candies...

Labels: corn, non-food, not recommended, popcorn, toppings

  ¶ Sunday, April 15, 2007 4 comments

  all hail king ding dong, still strong at 40! dateline: america

hostess ding dongs, those little hockey pucks of chocolate cake-y goodness filled with white creamy stuff and topped with a thin, hard shell of yummy waxy chocolate officially celebrated its 40th birthday.

originally presented to the public on march 18, 1967, these vitamin-fortified nuggets of joy, individually wrapped in a square of micro thin aluminum foil were an instant hit in peanuts and banana splits lunch boxes across the northamerican continent. for a time they replaced the twinkie as the snack of choice until partisan factions broke out among the snack food eating populace. to this day you can still hear arguments from both camps denouncing the other.

those of us fortunate enough to be there the day the ding dong was unveiled remember distinctly how perfectly smooth the foil wrapper was along the top of the cake, showing every slight ripple in the chocolate coating's texture. only in retrospect does foil seem the most obvious choice; the snack was released during the height of the space missions, the mirrored surface serving as an homage to the moon as viewed by lunar orbiters.

according to the official hostess propaganda the ding dong was named after the chiming bell heard in the first commercial. how can this be? how can you name a snack for a commercial for a snack where the name is featured in the product for which the bells are ringing? say what? that's crazy? dingy? ding dong!

ah, the zen of snack food, the yin and yang of it all. stay to the white but remain true to the black; stay to the black but remain true to the white. does the chocolate shell exist to enclose the cake, or does the cake fill the void created by the shell? is it an encapsulated earth, a magma of cream surrounded by a mantle of cake and topped with a chocolate crust protected by an atmosphere of foil?

the secret was the foil. the foil was the secret. without the foil all you had was... a snack cake. ah, but with the foil, what a world! if you carefully unwrapped the ding dong and then proceeded to flatten out the foil you would end up with a perfect sheet of aluminum, as thin as silver leaf. with a little work you could use that foil to wrap ordinary household objects and create unearthly art. wrap a barbie doll and create a scary robot straight out of agerman expressionist silent movie! carefully tear it into half and use the pieces to cover your teeth, a gangsta grill 20 years ahead of its time! paint your finger nails with clear nail polish and attach bits of the foil, trim with scissors when dry and marvel at the glam rock of it all!

now-a-days kids don't get no foil. now you get hermetically sealed little plastic pillow bags with your ding dong sitting on a cardboard insert that looks like the stuff they use to keep a man's dress shirt stiff. nothing you can do with that. no imagination, just a snack cake with a shelf life longer than the memories it will never engender.

Labels: cake, hostess, memories, non-food, snack, snack hole?

  ¶ Thursday, March 22, 2007 0 comments

  6 weird things about me (although 5 would be better) lyco tagged me on this one. gotta list six weird things about myself. how weird is that?

1. kindergarten. this is where i established my true weirdness. when we were all asked what we wanted to be when we grew up all the boys either said firemen or policemen. i was the only boy who said something different and i said swimming pool builder. can you tell i grew up in LA? what the hell? i think i took that natural boy idea of digging and projected it to its most natural conclusion. another piece of personal weird for me in kindergarten was when i waited outside the bathrooms and when elaine k. came out i kissed her. why? because i liked her. oh, but what a firestorm i created! conferences were had and i was asked repeatedly if someone had put me up to it or if i meant to hurt elaine. hurt her? i kissed her! why was that so hard to understand? but, oh, the trauma, the drama. after that i had kids calling me weird and my response was uniformly "yeah, so i'm weird." i knew it then, i was proud of it, and embracing it early on prevented my enemies from using it against me.

as a side note, i ran into elaine k. at my 20 year high school reunion. she introduced me to her hubby as "that guy i was telling you about." for years, all the way through high school and up until that night in the convention center i had assumed elaine hated me. and she had assumed i hated her because she had spurned me at the tender age of 6. truth was, i never hated elaine, and just assumed her distancing from me was a sort of smugness. but there we were, 32 years after the fact, still talking about that kiss outside the bathroom. that's pretty weird when you think about it.

2. a buffalo once snotted all over my hand. true. i was driving through golden gate park in SF when i noticed they had an enclosed field with a small herd of buffalo in it. i pulled over to an area that had a sort of feeding paddock where there were a couple of buffalo next to the fence. one in particular seemed to have it's eye on me and defying all logic and safety i stuffed my hand through the chain link fence to pet it. the friendly buffalo moved forward and made contact with my hand, rubbing the flat of it's face against my palm, the part right between the eyes. a couple of strokes later it backed up and sneezed, covering my entire hand in buffalo snot. apparently the buffalo had a need for an irritant to make it sneeze and clear out it's nasal passages. extracting my hand through the fence essentially acted as a squeegee, leaving a long ribbon of buffalo snot hanging there for all to see. extract the lesson and moral you see fit, few can say they've pet a buffalo much less had one deliberately sneeze on their hand.

3. in fourth grade i won third place in the state-wide dental health association dental health awareness contest. i don't know if this qualifies as "weird" but it was a total rip-off in the end. everyone in our class made posters for the contest and the teacher mailed them off. i took third place with a poster of a crazy looking monster (it represented tooth decay and bacteria) with the slogan "don't let me get in your mouth." to this day i can't believe that was a third place winner for my division. my friend pat got an honorable mention for his version of uncle sam in the classic montogomery pose saying "i want you to brush your teeth." we were the only winners in our school district in any age group. we were taken to a special awards luncheon at royce hall at UCLA by the school nurse. the american dental health association had just rolled out their new slogan "operation: apple brush" with the idea that eating an apple after a meal was as good as brushing your teeth, if you couldn't brush your teeth. ha ha, how silly we were back in the 1970s. anyway at the luncheon the first place winners got a certificate and a plaque and a t-shirt with the new logo on it. second and third place got nothing but lunch. nothing. how is that any different than honorable mention getting nothing but a lunch? why did i even go to that stupid luncheon. i hated that experience, hated it. don't ever enter a contest where only first place gets something. it's a rip off. it was boring and they served us school cafeteria style salsbury steak and it sucked. no, i'm not still bitter.

4. i have supersonic hearing. a few years back i began having a problem in my ears. basically i could hear things i never used to before, like my sinuses dripping. and if i focused on it the sound of swallowing was like the roar of the ocean in my ears. i went to a dr, then had some x-rays of my perfectly round head, then went to an ears-nose-throat specialist. the ent cleaned out my ears and then did some tests, those kind where you have to indicated when you hear a tone. i'm sitting in a soundproof booth with bone crushing headphones on and poking my finger in the air when i hear the tones. it feel like forever and i'm worried i'm losing my hearing. the dr shows me my results. it looks like a bell curve with the highs and lows sitting on the "normal" baseline. but the mid-range, the top of the bell curve, had been sliced off. "your mid-rage hearing is off the charts. you probably have some problems with sounds in that frequency causing interference with other sounds." yeah, like a television studio's worth of electronic can trigger a migraine and i can walk into an en empty office suite and tell you if there is a single computer on in a cubicle somewhere. or i know when a fluorescent light is starting to die, long before it starts to flicker and hum. because i can hear all these things.

5. when i was a boy, pre- school aged, i thought that if i sat in front of the TV when it was turned off it would swallow me up. this requires a couple of explanations. first, this would be back when we had an old black and white TV that used to take a while to warm up. and when you shut it off the old cathode tube would reduce down to a glowing dot that would fade away. it's not that strange a thought to imagine those people trapped in the big TV box being shrunk into oblivion, and being afraid that, like a bathtub drain, getting sucked into the whirling vortex of the cathode rays. second, anyone who thinks i got this impression from seeing poltergeist as a kid (as some have assumed when i've told this story) you need to understand: i'm old enough to have written the script for that movie.

6. zuska says that i have to write this one: every time i pee i have to go get a glass of water. i must protest this point because it really is only at the end of the night, just before i go to bed. but even if it were every time (as she insists) how can that be weird? you replace what you lost? you're going to sleep for 6 to 8 hours and you're not going to eat, your body's going to perspire, your mouth get's parched. and there's nothing worse than waking up dehydrated. do i occasionally overdo it and need to get up in the middle of the night to pee? yes, but i'm not like some old man with an enlarged prostate like those farts on those TV ads who let a problem get well out of hand before they even go to their doctors.

i forgot what i was supposed to do here. tag some people? virtula t, do you want to take a stab? i can see you all out there on my sitemeter traffic but you don't leave comments or link to me so i can't invite many of you personally. please, feel free to take the ball and run with it. let me know who you are and what you've posted so i can see, too.

Labels: buffalo, meme, non-food, personal, tagged, weird

  ¶ Sunday, February 04, 2007 0 comments

  the boston hoax
breaking away from the food and whatnot this time to chat about the little problem we had here in boston yesterday.

it appears that government officials and first responders -- as well as a number of this burg's citizens -- have swallowed the kool-aid of paranoia that the bush administration has doled out over the past five years and over-responded to a guerrilla marketing campaign gone awry. until i see evidence to the contrary i can now say i am living in the heart of urban dumb ass country.

there's a lot of ways to break this down, and everyone's gonna want a parse of the pie in blogland, but the basic fact remains: the city of boston shut the city down for four hours yesterday because, as much as they'd like to tout their homeland security, they didn't have the ability to actually figure out what they were dealing with until it was too late and decided not to lift the web of paranoia until they had a fall guy.

basically, until turner broadcasting came forward they weren't going to look like asses in public.

you can read the timelines and analysis elsewhere but the simple fact is that even once the city realized they weren't dealing with terrorists, even once they had enough clues to know it was a city-wide marketing event, the most they were willing to say was "it's a hoax, folks, don't worry about a thing."

a hoax. implying still that there was an intent to provoke city-wide panic. they're going to have a hard time proving that in court against those two patsies hired to put those things in place.

hoax: an act intended to trick or dupe. that's what the dictionary says. why would the mayor and newscasters call this a hoax?


...because they're clueless.

...because modern news is no longer based on facts, it's based on the same tactics used by the administration: fear. don't believe me? watch you local news for half an hour and count the number of stories that are doom and gloom, meant to make you feel small, bad about yourself, bad about your neighbor, or just plane afraid of the world.

...and because the government as a whole has no mechanism in place for admitting blame or guilt when they overreact.

government and first responders aren't the kind of people watching cartoon network's adult swim. they just aren't. so when they find a little homemade LED display on some public infrastructure the first time they blow it up, just to be on the safe side. that's what happened a little after 8 am yesterday morning. if had electronics, it was attached to a highway structure, play it safe and blow it to bits with a water cannon.

typical american response: blow up what you don't understand.

but four hours later the city is getting calls from people who have spotted more of these little things. bomb squads are dispatched. roads are shut down. public transit is halted. in those four hours leading up to this point has anyone bothered to analyze the first object they destroyed? are they comparing notes in the field? what conclusion are they drawing?

the news stations are picking up that the city is shut down. helicopters are showing bomb squads investigating. wall-to-wall coverage begins.

hmm. it looks like it's a character from a computer game. hey, it's giving us the finger! it's giving us the finger! it's in our face telling us we're fools and asses! that does it! this is a hoax! it was meant to provoke us into overreacting! get the mayor on the horn, we're being made fun of!

pride before the fall and all.

no, the poor little mooninite didn't register with homeland security because it isn't a "known threat" or some sort of symbol affiliated with a terrorist group. it's a cartoon, and had it been a more widely known figure like bart simpson people i sincerely doubt anyone would have given it half as much notice. see, the police couldn't tell reporters "yeah, we've got some sort of light thing with bart simpson on it" all they said was "it appears to be a battery operated electrical device with blinking LED lights on it." that's what one guy said yesterday. doesn't that sound scarier than a lighted cartoon character? but because of their cultural ignorance the emergency crews didn't know the character and took it's meaning personally.

screw you, homeland security.

when turner broadcasting finally came forward and the origins of the "hoax" were explained it was clear that so many people over-responded in such a way that you just had to figure real terrorists were watching the news (a) laughing their asses off and (b) kicking themselves for not thinking about something like this themselves. in fact, i wouldn't be surprised to find the rest of the western world laughing at the city too dumb to know a fake "threat" when they see it. dude, check out boston shutting down the harbour because some hacker dudes put little lights on the bridges! yeah, that makes us look really intelligent.

during the whole ordeal, before there was much info, an "analyst" (and really, isn't that just a fancy title for a person who passes off quasi-educated opinions as facts?) was talking about how this looked more like a dry run by terrorists to see how quickly emergency response teams react and to test their ability to tie up a city.

fascinating. so now we know how easily it is to divert a city's attentions away from real terrorist threats and targets. it's going on 6 years after 9/11 and a city can be crippled by lite brites.

so here we are with all the morning-after quarterbacking. the mayor is promising law suits against turner, hoping to get sanctions against them by the fcc and make someone accountable for a minimum state cost of three-quarters of a million in frosties. the news media continue to refer to the incident as a hoax because they refuse to accept any responsibility on their part for perpetrating the paranoia. and people are rabidly badmouthing the firm that created the campaign by accusing them willfully disregarding how this would all turn out.

but...

if the reports are correct that there were 15 other cities where this campaign was carried out, why was boston the only one to react like this? either the other cities failed their homeland security tests or boston is too stupid to know the difference between a real and an imagined threat. and public response, judging from comment sections on news websites and elsewhere, is 9 to 1 leaning toward blaming the blamers.

the campaign was lame, perhaps criminal in failing to get a permit in advance but of little else. the government responded inanely. the news media fanned the flames. and in the end i didn't hear one word about the terror threat level being raised or lowered.

when you're raised on a diet of fear you can expect this kind of regurgitation. enjoy life, folks, the terrorists are winning. they also happen to be your elected officials and your news media.

Labels: boston, fear, hoax, lite brite, non-food, stupidity, terrorism

  ¶ Thursday, February 01, 2007 2 comments