#15 - i've been a bad, bad man.

last night, i was walking back home from picking up a fast food dinner & needed to make a stop & pick up a pint of newcastle for my roommate & to my surprise, after stopping in no less than six bodegas, i still hadn't procured the pint. the six bodegas didn't even have a six-pack of newcastle. if only my roommate liked smirnoff ice, everything would have been fine. judging by the coolers at aforementioned bodegas, people love that smirnoff swill. sure, the roommate had mentioned that i could go with bud as a backup, but based on the love that newcastle & i have for each other, i assumed that at least one bodega would come through & help us all avoid the bud.

nobody came through for me...not even stop #7, the midway between a bodega & a supermarket locale with the somewhat-diverse beer selection...my last option...so i formulated a quicklike alternative...

#15 - i've been a bad, bad man.

snack: kettle brand island jerk krinkle cut chips
drink: guinness draught in a bottle

seconds earlier, i had been scoping the chip area for snack yumminess on my way past to the beer coolers & the words "island jerk" had popped out at me. when i arrived at the beer coolers & realized that there was no newcastle to be found on that stretch of 4th avenue leading to my apartment, i called the roommate, requested that he split a six-pack of guinness with me & developed this concept for a blog entry...follow my convolution...

island jerk...brooklyn is the west coast of an island...i live in brooklyn...i like guinness...guinness is an irish beer...i'm a good % irish...when irish people find themselves in a stereotypical situation with too much guinness, they can be jerks...me...island jerk.

concept: a blog spawned by the duo of kettle brand island jerk krinkle cut chips & guinness draught in a bottle, detailing three of my jerkier yet still blog-safe moments...friggin' brilliant, right?

#1: the fights of pre-high school - growing up, in terms of popularity pecking order, i was in some sort of in-between world, where i wasn't a cool kid but i wasn't a nerdoid. as a result of this ambiguous social status, i took it upon myself thrice during the 1st-8th grade period to start fights with the kids who a few of us thought were the least cool kids in our group of friends that week. this was some sort of attempt to oust the least cool person from our group, thereby upping the overall group coolness. the stupidity of my thinking is obvious now & anyhow, it never worked & i got body slammed once. sorry eric bonde, rich rittenhouse & bill gadoury.

#2: remember when there was no interweb? - near the end of my sophomore year at b.u., when i was pledging chi phi, i met a girl who was pledging a fellow sorority. we hung out a bunch for the last few months of that school year & i thought she was a cool girl & when the summer came, i went back to nh & she headed down to alabama. before leaving, she wrote her phone number on a piece of paper for me & we said goodbye for the summer. a few days later, i was back home & looking to call her & could not find the piece of paper anywhere, a fatal flaw, as i didn't exactly do the email yet (yeah, 1995) & found myself with no way to get in touch with her, effectively killing what relationship we had. thanks a lot, non-prevalent interweb. sorry ada.

#3: mind your own damn business - after college, when i had returned to boston after a brief ft lauderdale stint, i was dating ms mj & we were with melissa shaw & an unknown third person. i've always looked quite young & as a group, i suppose we looked quite young. we were standing in coolidge corner waiting for the c line to take us back to my brighton apartment & i was smoking a cigarette. a woman of about 60 walked near us, looked at me & said "put that cigarette out." i looked at her & said "excuse me?" she came back with "you're too young to be smoking, put out that cigarette." i was 24 years old & told her so. her response..."you are not. you're sweet sixteen never been kissed." i've always been a bit insecure about being called a liar & about being talked down to because of my apparent youth...so i told her straight up to mind her own damn business. sorry nosy old lady...sorry that you were such a nosy old lady. i may have been a jerk, but you were probably miserable.

in conclusion, try the island jerk chips...even if you live on a peninsula.

#14 - get wild!

for those of us who are lovers of scrabble & its various derivatives, these last few days have seen the game really grab a hold of the headlines, pretty much entirely because of the hasbro/electronic arts/scrabble vs scrabulous copyright lawsuit that has resulted in the removal of the scrabulous application from facebook...& the big deal is what now?

the scrabulous application is still available on their website. in fact, i'm on my fifth game of the night right now. sure, you may have lost the results of games you were playing on facebook, but last time i checked, those results aren't redeemable like ski-ball tickets or anything. it just means that you lose some computer memories & that there is one less reason to go onto facebook, people. in fact, by playing scrabulous, i've avoided facebook for the last two hours or so.

as for scrabble protecting their copyright, that makes sense & it's great that cnn & msnbc will discuss copyright law for a few days, but after listening to a story on npr earlier, there's some eyebrow-raising precise timing behind hasbro's recent actions towards scrabulous.

#1 - tuesday was the final day of the 2008 national scrabble championship down in orlando, a tournament, which according to npr, featured players such as 11-year old bradley robbins, from WINDHAM, NH BIZZNITCHES!!!...he won 24 out of 28 games against adults.

#2 - scrabble/electronic arts launched their beta application on facebook...& it is currently unavailable due to maintenance.

#3 - electronic arts announced that it had missed analyst estimates.

it's probably just pure coincidence that scrabble ordered scrabulous to shut down their facebook app at the same time ea missed estimates & launched their beta app & at the same time as the national scrabble championships. clearly, the real loser in all of this is hasbro, whose game has been negatively impacted by the publicity as a result of the existence of scrabulous & the fact that 13-year old girls across the country now know the rules of scrabble & enjoy words more.

#14 - get wild!

snack: limited edition wildly cherry m&ms
drink: coca-cola classic

...so & i'm on my sixth game of scrabulous now & while i've been playing, i've cracked open a bag of limited edition wildly cherry m&ms to snack on. as a rule, whenever i see the words "limited edition" on a candy item, said candy eventually ends up in my mouth. i tried these cherry m&ms for the first time a few days ago & went in with no great expectations. over the years, m&m has done a lot of good beyond the early peanut or plain-only days of the m&m. from the reincarnation of the red m&m to the inventions of the mint and mega m&ms, mars has done a lot to keep me interested over the years, but i've still remained skeptical of new types of m&ms. i don't know why i just don't give them the benefit of the doubt & let it be done with. these cherry ones are friggin' amazing. they're the same size as the peanut butter m&ms & each one is like eating a chocolate covered cherry sans gooey stickiness.

the front of the package urges me to "get wild!" & believe me, i am. it is 1am & i'm sitting in my boxers blogging, covering my teeth with coca-cola classic and watching an eight-year old japanese prodigy play "crossroads" on conan. believe me, i don't dare get any wilder than this. i'd hate to wake the neighborhood & attract the wrath of the nypd. they do not tolerate wildness.

#13 - backyard yumfun.

i spent this past weekend up in n.h. at the parents' house, celebrating my father's retirement from the the u.s.p.s. after 38+ years of service. government jobs are strange animals that breed interesting people. these jobs & people have things like pensions & grievances & overtime rules & seniority & pay scales & a union. whereas my father had all these things, i, at the one job at which i even had the chance to join a union (when i worked for b.u. after college), chose not to join, half because i felt unions pressured people into joining & half because i couldn't afford it. oh to be a naive 23-year-old again.

the retirement gathering was on saturday at the house of one of my 6'0" tall almost-16-year-old brother's friends, whose father my father has become friends with. they live in a house with a yard that slopes down from the road past the house & some landscaping into the backyard, where the grass continues downward around the pool & pool house and rolls for a while before hitting the sand area, featuring a horseshoe pit & bocce court. off to the side, there is a shed & behind it all, there are two tall trees, from which they have hung a 30' x 50' screen that they pull out at will to project movies onto in front of the forest. one phrase i overheard from one of the more-grownup-than-me grown ups was "he must have at least an acre here." i am not the one to verify acreage, but i was duly impressed with the environs.

it was a perfect day weather wise & a 4pm start time gave the heat a chance to partially subside. after three hours of yummy catered food & homemade salads of both the fruit & vegetable variety, the sun began to go down & our hosts capped off the meal with a table full of cookies & treats, of which i chose...

#13 - backyard yumfun.
snack: many dainty canollis
drink: iced cappuccino

...& we waited quite a while for the sun to go down so we could watch the slideshow my brother & his friend had thrown together in the hours before the party. the husband host offered up coffee beverages. i was away at the restroom & missed when he initially took orders, but when i returned & saw people with cups that featured a straw sticking out of them & a whipped cream topping, that changed faster than you can say "gimme." turned out they were iced cappuccinos & turns out it was the best iced cappuccino i have ever had...ever...in the history of me.

coming into the gathering, i had expected that, given the flagpole that jutted out of the sand area & held both a large italian flag & a large american flag, that the evening's dessert would feature either tiramisu or cannoli...either way, i knew victory would be mine, yumwise & when they brought out the boxes of dainty cannolis, my tastebuds flashed the ol' V sign.

as we waited for it to be dark enough for the slide show, i passed the time with my tasty treats & a conversation with my dad's friend/our childhood dentist, a man who, when i was a kid i thought of as "preachy." now that i'm an "adult," he is "opinionated." during our chat, his wife brought up this youtube clip, which captures him at his dental office on this january's nh primary day working on a patient whilst talking politics. he commented that it had over 1000 hits already.

finally, the sun went down & my brother put on the slide show. we got to see my father graduating, in various poses with the four children and in a series of photoshopped photos that placed him in canada, paris & italy (where he also had a photoshopped afro & sunglasses). among the photos were photos of me, my oldest brother & my sister as "adults." as my teenage brother had put the whole thing together that afternoon, he pulled this photo of me off myspace & it became the adult photo representation of my dad's eldest son:

i would have gone with one where i wasn't half blinking & at a party, but that's just me...& in a time that lasted in the area of two minutes, the slideshow looped back around & was over. soon after, the guests started to head for home. i hung around for a while & left with my mom for home, with approx. fifty pounds of food in my belly, all topped with dainty cannolis & iced cappuccino.

#12 - good, clean fun.

up until i left high school, the tape was still pretty much the dominant way that i listened to music. my two high school cars came equipped with tape players. i had a receiver with two tape decks, which was absolutely necessary for making mix tapes. growing up, my first tapes were born in the u.s.a., the joshua tree and colour by numbers, although it would be years before i could even grasp what the deal was with boy george...come to think of it, i still have trouble grasping what the deal is with boy george.

a lot of the tapes i listened to came from my parents' collections. around the time i was 10, my father came back from a stint in the air force reserves in texas & brought a walkman & a bunch of tapes back with him, including albums from hall & oates, styx & men at work.

somebody in the house had this lionel richie tape...

...and my brother took a sticker of a smiling popsicle & stuck it above his hand, since it is sitting in that weird position like that, perfect for popsicle holding. seriously, picture a happy popsicle in lionel richie's hand & see if you don't smile back. i still get enjoyment out of that cover until this day.

my dad had a sweet stereo setup for its time, with big wooden boxed speakers that ran from the "playroom" into the living room & sat on either side of the fireplace. two feet from the left speaker was a recliner, where my grandfather always sat when he visited. one day in 83', this put him in a perfect position to experience my new thriller tape when i surprised him from the other room by turning it on somewhere in the 6-7 range of the stereo.

one of the tapes my siblings & i listened to over & over again was bill cosby: himself, which featured the favorite comedic piece of most of my childhood years, one that probably reigned up until i discovered monty python...track 5..."chocolate cake for breakfast," where bill cosby tells of his kids convincing him to let them eat chocolate cake for breakfast because cake has eggs & milk in it.

this was my childhood--obliviousness to cross-dressing, sticker fun and bill cosby. good, clean fun.

#12 - good, clean fun.
snack: betty crocker warm delights minis chocolate raspberry decadence cake
drink: 1% milk with bosco chocolate syrup

at the pathmark last night, i was loitering in the baking section when i came across betty crocker's line of single serving baking products for the lazy. as a snack-eating swinging bachelor type, there was no mistaking that these were made with me in mind. as a snack-eating swinging bachelor type who loves chocolate, raspberry & decadence, the type to get was also quite clear.

to sum up these treats, for two & change, you get two individually-wrapped bowls, each containing a tiny bag of cake mix & a pouch of raspberry drizzle. all you have to do is add 1 tbsp & 1 tsp of water to the cake mix, stir it up a bunch, drizzle the raspberry jelly stuff on top of the batter, pop it in the microwave for 30 seconds & let it cool for a few minutes...piece of cake.

to go along with my cake, i could have just drank milk & that would have been yummy, but i was feeling chocolatey, so i decided to pick up a bottle of bosco chocolate syrup to add to it, figuring that in the long run, it'd get me, at age 33, to drink more milk. this plan would work out perfectly if bosco chocolate syrup did not taste ABSOLUTELY HORRID. it is beyond me how you can mess up chocolate, but this company has done it. i drank the whole glass because i felt bad about wasting the milk. i haven't figured out what i'm going to do with the rest of the bottle yet, but i'm thinking i might sprinkle it on the souls of my enemies or salt the earth with it...you know, good clean fun.

#11 - corn nuts & the american dream.

in the world o' shawn, mondays have recently become a night for watching my picture stories, both those that i follow & a few that i'm checking out/catching up on. last week marked the beginning of generation kill & the fifth episode of weeds.

this week, i upped the ante by continuing with those two shows & adding in the first episode of mad men, which until fresh air shoved it in my face over the past couple weeks, i had no idea existed. i mean, it is sort of like somebody telling you about this unicorn they saw...a good tv show airing on & produced by amc. american movie classics? that amc? 13 emmy nominations? the 2nd season starts next sunday? huh...guess i better get caught up.

anyhow, come september, generation kill will be long done, weeds will be nearing the end of its season & we'll have the new season premieres of dexter and it's always sunny in philadelphia, who fx has just ordered 39 more episodes of the show from, meaning with the new season, there will be at least 52 more episodes of this lovely show, all with the same five key cast members!!! OMG!!! by my calculation, i will be nearing the tail end of my 30s by the time that this show goes off the air. LOL!!! :-/ :( :'(

i mention all these shows (& tonight's lineup of shows in particular) because they are my type of shows for one reason, really. each, to some degree, focuses on some version/aspect of the american dream. it's the same reason i was drawn in the past to shows such as six feet under, the sopranos, the office, golden girls, etc...& for viewing these shows, really, what goes better with the american dream than...

#11 - corn nuts & the american dream.

snack: corn nuts caliente mix
drink: mountain dew

have you ever tried corn nuts? i think i might have once or twice in my life, but they've always seemed a bit weird & possibly bland to me.

apparently, they have been around since friggin' 1936, which i'm pretty sure makes them an official american tradition. today the company is owned by planters/kraft, which means that corn nuts are now a subsidiary of a subsidiary (planters) of a subsidiary (kraft) of a subsidiary (altria/philip morris). that, in itself, sounds like the american dream to me...& i purchased them at a 7-11! that's like double corporate jeopardy or something.

the caliente mix features seasoned peanuts, crunchy corn snack (the nuts!), spicy sesame sticks, corn sticks & red chile crescents. red! chile! crescents! that is a band name if i've ever seen one. it works on so many levels! but seriously, tossing corn nuts in a snack mix where they can sort of just fade to the back of the mix totally cures that blandness problem i was having with them.

i figured that there was no better drink to pair the corn nuts mix with than a mountain dew, pepsico's fruity #2 beverage. i figure as far as american dreams go mountain dew is right there with them all the items on tonight's menu...

altria/philip morris made $38.5 billion in revenue in 2007
pepsico brought in $39.4 billion in 2007
the american military spent $439.3 billion in 2007
the california marijuana business takes in about $2 billion per year
it is estimated that in the u.s., advertising & marketing is a $381 billion dollar industry

billions of dollars...that's the american dream right there, folks.