#26 - shawn's fantastical hoighty toighty ice cream sandwich.

...so i'm watching the emmy awards tonight on abc & it's a three-hour show, so that means tons of commercials & of course, that means tons of commercials for abc's fall lineup. that means tons of commercials for a lineup that includes samantha who?, ugly betty, desperate housewives, boston legal, brothers & sisters, eli stone, dirty sexy money, life on mars, grey's anatomy/private practice and pushing daisies...oh, and the crappy reality tv shows.

the best part about the ads for these shows is that each commercial ends with the note that next week is, "national stay at home week," an occasion created & announced by abc's pr team about a month back. what this means is that with tomorrow being the start of fall, we should avoid the outdoors at all costs & plop our asses down on the couch for the next week to absorb the abundant wonders of abc's fantastic fall lineup.

if you choose to not celebrate national stay at home week, you're disobeying a national holiday & not only would that make you a communist, but christina applegate would probably never talk to you again. samantha who? sassy christina applegate, that's who!

#26 - shawn's fantastical hoighty toighty ice cream sandwich.
snack: bierkraft's dark chocolate gelato & cherry blondie
drink: lakefront cherry lager beer

with the emmys, i'm enjoying a dark chocolate gelato & cherry blondie from bierkraft, the local yummy beer & cheese & gourmet food shop. a few weeks back, i went there to buy some beer & on the way in, noticed a sign they had posted on the door that suggested pairing their chocolate chip ice cream sandwich with a smuttynose old brown dog ale. i passed on that particular occasion, but filed it away for later.

the other night, i decided to go back & pick up the combo. i got the smuttynose but when i saw the ice cream sandwiches in the freezer, the dark chocolate gelato & cherry blondie made getting that pathetic chocolate chip one a non-option. at the register, i discovered i was purchasing a $5 ice cream sandwich. hoighty toighty. that night, i totally drank the smuttynose & then the freezer door got left open for a couple hours at some point during the evening, so the ice cream sandwich got a little thawed/melted. undeterred, i went back to bierkraft today & picked up the lakefront cherry lager to pair with it.

they're both really tasty. the ice cream sandwich itself is so rich & tasty & filling that it's a two-sitting ice cream sandwich...it'd better be for $5! as for the beer, it's brewed with wisconsin cherries, which i assume are good based solely on their work in the field of dairy.

in closing, yay mad men yay!...and people sure do love tina fey, huh? "the elaine may of our time," according to alec baldwin's speech...which means she has both a mikey & nickey and an ishtar in her. people probably love tina so durn much because she's wittier than any other female on earth & a verifiable stone. cold. fox. seriously, i'd give my left...

#22 - somebody's watching me/you.

over the first three months of eat! drink! snack!, i've kept an eye on the traffic to the blog, mainly to see if any strangers made their way to my blog & if possible, whether they stuck around or not. it also gives me a rough idea of who's reading out of the people i do know, which will come in really handy come xmas card time.

in monitoring the blog activity, i've come across one distinct fact...people really want to know about caliente corn nuts. over the past three months, i've had countless folks who have come to my blog because of a google search for the term. turns out my blog entry about them, corn nuts & the american dream, has made me the #2 entry on google for that search term. in my book, this makes me the official caliente corn nuts spokesgod. in numbers, 9 of the last 40 visits to the blog are from that alone. yesterday i had three separate caliente corn nut visitors, one who was from anchorage, ak & one who was from delaware & more specifically, a "STATE OF DELAWARE" ip address. i assume these are the two vice presidential candidates...and now i've likely made it worse by blogging about it a second time.

somebody from procter and gamble checked out an entry on their TOTALLY EXTREME product, screamin' pickle pringles.

i'm international. folks from israel, maldives, algeria, canada & new zealand have stumbled across the snack-related diatribes of a manboy in brooklyn.

crazy internet.

#22 - somebody's watching me/you.

snack: immaculate baking co. sweet georgia brownie triple chocolate chunk cookies
drink: cream-o-land dairy 1% milk

tonight's snack comes direct from hendersonville, nc's immaculate baking co. last night, on my way home from a focus group about public radio, i was at the local grocery store & must have felt "i've listened to way too much despairing public radio" bad about something...probably world peace or hunger or the "bridge to nowhere" lie and as a result, was no match for a box of cookies emblazoned with the words "cookies with a cause," "soul-cially responsible" and "chocolatey."

from what i can tell, these cookies' cause is creativity & more specifically the folk arts. as far as causes go, it's no rwanda, but can't everybody be paying attention to rwanda, which works out for folks (& their arts). the cookies themselves are organic, yummy & full of chips both white & black, an obvious nod to racial harmony.

milk. what more can i say about you? you do a body good. you can be found on the upper lips of celebrities. you might be really, really bad for me. you might not need to be pasteurized after all. you are only in my fridge because of coffee. you make these cookies better. you came from a third-generation company in new jersey. thanks for helping out with making other stuff better sometimes. 'preciate it.

#10 - a delayed fortune.

on tuesday at work, someone put out the office-wide call for the lunch special at sea asian...not to be confused with sea, the uber-hip uber-loud locale in williamsburg that features a friggin dj (do people actually enjoy bass-pumping beats with their pik pow squid?) normally, i'm a bring-my-own-lunch kind of guy, but i was feeling a bit saucy that day, so i threw caution to the wind & heeded the call with an order for chicken pad see ew. i'm just that crazy.

as expected, the order came with fortune cookies for all, so when i was done with my pad see ew, i grabbed one & made my way back to my desk. in the usual spirit of my job & my temperament, i got distracted & forgot about my cookie & fortune for the rest of the day. when i was leaving for home, i looked down at the lonely cookie sitting on my desk & tossed it in the side pocket of my backpack. i couldn't leave the lil guy by himself in the office all night & i figured i'd make him into a snack later that night & possibly end up with a blog-worthy fortune.

it is now saturday & through what i can only assume is the result of some sort of cookie mind trick, the cookie still remains.

#10 - a delayed fortune.

snack: four-day old fortune cookie
drink: fort collins brewery the kidd lager

it is mid-afternoon, 95 degrees outside & today's the day of the siren festival down in coney island. although i didn't attend in 2001 (the first year of the festival & the year i moved to the city), i'm a sucker for the indie bands, so i went every year from 2002-2006. the yearly rundown of my experience with the siren festival:

2001 - didn't attend. two months later, the pre-9/11 generation came to an end & we will never forget & whatnot.
2002 - my first festival, with the shins, liars, yeah yeah yeahs & sleater-kinney and sound quality rivaling thomas edison's first phone call.
2003 - the crowd was so friggin huge that i watched modest mouse from outside of the concert area, at an angle off to the side of the stage behind some carnival ride.
2004 - there were a full schedule of bands, including the thermals, tv on the radio, mission of burma & ...trail of the dead. as usual, the crowd continued to grow & the situation was particularly hot & sweaty.
2005 - spoon & mates of state headlined. particularly hot & sweaty again.
2006 - i went down early to see man man & then, afraid of the heat, took the train back home & chilled indoors for a while before hopping back on the train & going back down to catch art brut...once again, a record setting crowd.
2007 - it was too hot, or at least not cool enough where i would go down there to see cursive, who i had already seen a bunch of times during my omaha-loving phase. 100,000 people. record crowds.

now, it is 2008 & it is the hottest day of the year thus far. this year's lineup has a number of standouts--parts & labor, annuals, ra ra riot, islands. of the headliners--stephen malkmus & broken social scene--i am so bored with everything stephen malkmus does, but broken social scene are one of my faves these days.

still, it is now two hours before broken social scene goes on & it is so hot outside that i haven't yet been able to convince myself that traveling to coney island is a better option than sitting in my relatively cool apartment watching the red sox game and drinking the leftover beers from the tasty fort collins brewery 12-pack we got last night before the deerhoof show. this one i'm drinking right now--the kidd lager--is tastetastic & according to the label, "looks dark, drinks blonde."...just how i like my women.

will i leave the comfort of my apartment? based on my fortune cookie, i guess i'll figure it all out sooner or later:

your ingenuity and imagination will get results.

i waited four days for that & to top it off, the fortune cookie mirrored the fortune...stale.