a short while back, i received an email from the folks at pom wonderful regarding samples of their coffee drinks & my interest in trying said drinks. interest = medium/high. soon after, i began imagining the possibilities for a pom-themed blog. more often than not, i found myself returning to thoughts of cheerleaders, with their unflappable love of cheers, cute outfits & ruffly pom pons. between the recent appearance of glee on fox (which features a cheerleading coach as a main character & which i've yet to see) & the start of football season & the general hotness of 18+ cheerleaders, there was a lot to go on with that theme. in the end, i went with a variation on that theme. since there's nothing you can't find out with google, i did a little search for "pon. what did i come across? a 2002 south korean film called phone. in korean...pon. i investigated further & after reading the description, i netflixed it faster than you can say "oh wacky asian horror."

the description: "a vengeful ghost with a cell phone terrorizes anyone who answers its murderous ring in this twisty horror film. after exposing a sex scandal involving children, gritty reporter ji-won (ji-won ha) begins receiving disturbing phone calls. she changes her number, but the ominous calls continue. ji-won's search for the source of the mysterious calls reveals a rash of unsolved murders--and leads her straight to a serial killer." somebody who murders people with phone calls. brilliant! the company that produced it? toilet pictures. even brillianter!

the film opens with this girl in an elevator. she gets a phone call & when she answers it, she hears this piercing noise that kills her. soon after, that ji-won chick, harassed because of her article, changes her phone number & moves into her sis & brother-in-law's other house. the new number she gets turns out to be the same number as the elevator girl...& that's when the freakiness begins. one day, her little niece answers her phone for her & hears the piercing noise & she's basically possessed for the rest of the film. possessed lil girl = horror gold. as the film progresses, the lil girl gets crazier & ji-won learns more about the story behind her phone number & the hilarious horror ensues. i say "hilarious" only because thanks to film school, i'm desensitized towards horror films AND IT'S A FILM ABOUT PEOPLE GETTING KILLED VIA PHONE CALLS! i don't know. it might freak your shit out.

really, i don't mean to make it sound like it's a crappy film. it's not. there were no cheerleaders in the film, but it was still engaging. other than her frequent screaming fits, the possessed lil girl is possessed with awesomeness. near the end, there's a crazy twist that i've amazingly been able to avoid talking about. when i saw it, i was all like "oh that's what's going on." so yeah, if you don't mind a film with a LOT of phones ringing, you should check it out. if you're scared of subtitles & if you believe bloody-disgusting.com (how can't you with a name like that?), hollywood's coming out with a version of the film next summer. i'm sure it'll be awesome. hollywood never screws up remakes. rumor i'm starting: the role of the phone will be played by an iphone.

#129 - pom pon.
snack: clif nectar cherry pomegranate fruit & nut bar
drink: pom iced coffees (chocolate, cafe au lait, vanilla)



whilst watching the film thursday night, i snacked on a clif nectar cherry pomegranate fruit & nut bar. i first experienced the clif bar in large quantities just after college, when i worked for the b.u. sports marketing department & clif bars was one of our sponsors. sports? high-performance snack bar? makes sense. there were clif bars all over the place back in those days, but since my physical activity has never been all that physical, i've never really eaten them as some sort of exercise-related treat. it's always been more of a "hmm. i could use to get that much potassium & fiber & whatnot. should i have the one that looks like flattened poop with chunks in it but tastes like carrot cake or the other one that looks like flattened poop with chunks in it but tastes like pumpkin pie?" the choices!

at the above-average neighborhood grocery store the other day, they had a whole section of clif bars (& their sister bars, the luna bars) amongst the healthy snack bars, so i picked up one of the cherry pomegranate ones. they're part of their nectar series of fruit & nut bars, which includes a cranberry, apricot & almond one, a lemon vanilla cashew one & a dark chocolate walnut one. in looking at the names of the other flavors, i can't help but wonder if i got the lesser of the four. still, like chrissie hynde said, "don't get me wrong." the cherry pomegranate one's good & all. it's got the same sort of poop chunk texture without the poop taste, but it's made solely from organic dates, cashews, sour cherries & pomegranate concentrate, so i enjoyed the flavor immensely, especially given my recent love affair with dates...& my butt loved the fiber.

...so the folks at pom sent me a package of their pom iced coffees, a package that i actually received this time thanks to a tip from my dad, a postal veteran who provided some solid (& successful!) fatherly advice by telling me to have pom write "HOLD AT POST OFFICE. LEAVE NOTICE" on the box. i wanted to add "BUILDING FILLED WITH THIEVES," as well, but figured that might be a bit much. luckily, as the website & the pomster who contacted me noted, the drinks don't taste like pomegranate. i assume such a pomegranate-coffee concoction would be a sin against lord java, but i wouldn't be surprised if starbucks tried to craft a version. maybe they couldn't do so because a louisiana company already has...or maybe just because it's a bad idea.

...so pom's come out with three coffee drink flavors--chocolate, cafe au lait & vanilla (the newer one)--and created this insane website based on the tagline "the healthy buzz." it features a sheep with bugged out eyes who says things like "for maximum wakey-wakedness" & "click a flaaaaaaavor" in his thick sheep accent. if you're looking to me to know when it's ok to laugh, it cracked me up significantly.

the drinks! i started my thursday morning with some npr, the chocolate one & (since it goes well with coffee, chocolate & public radio), a cigarette. that night, whilst watching pon, i tried out the cafe au lait one...with a cigarette. it was fairly similar to the chocolate one, but i'll choose something with chocolate over something without any day of the week. the next morning, i woke up with the vanilla one, a bowl of blueberry pomegranate total (which you can actually get a free sample of, btw)...& a cigarette. the vanilla one's my favorite of the three, likely because it's so different from the other two. i'm usually not big on the vanilla coffee, but akin to the starbucks caramel coffee drink, this one could dominate my pre-made iced coffee purchases...if i just stopped being so cheap. the best part about the coffee drinks? since they're healthy, i'm pretty sure that counteracts the effects of all those smokes. they don't claim that in the press materials or anything, but wouldn't it be nice? i could be addicted to two things!