pumpktoberfest #43 -
treat yoself.

spice up yer nuts.
 

pumpktoberfest 2010!

#195 - links &
drinks 2011.
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Entries in fruit drink (4)

Tuesday
Apr172012

flea at laff #13: madécasse/dosa royal.

snack: madécasse pink pepper & citrus chocolate bar
drink: dosa royal mango lassai

oh hey! what do ya know? the brooklyn flea is back! although i severely neglected it last summer, this summer i've sworn to give it a lot more love. it's like...in the summer of 2010 i gave it its own column & shizz. then in 2011, while i made it to the flea a bunch, i only documented three of my trips. thing was, there came a point where i'd eaten my way through most of the food vendors & there wasn't all that much in terms of new stuff. luckily, this year there are a number of new booths in the mix. bon chovie...after being spurned from your anchovy-based delights twice at the smorgasburg last year, i will not be spurned again this summer. take notice.

Click to read more ...

Tuesday
Oct062009

#132 - & now for something completely different.

& now for something completely different: an eat!drink!snack! blog entry about something funny. by something funny, i don't mean that i'm actually going to break tradition & be funny. i mean that i'm going to talk about monty python's flying circus, the uproariously funny sketch comedy show which made its debut on bbc one forty years ago this past monday. i first started watching the show when i was a teenager & although a good amount of it was british stuff i didn't understand, i fell in love with it. as a result of repeated viewings, the show's dry, ridiculous tone is probably responsible for about 50% of my sense of humor. i'm sure there are countless others out there who would say the same thing.

& now for something completely different: a man with three buttocks...a man with a tape recorder up his nose...a man with a tape recorder up his brother's nose. have you got anything without spam? i don't care how fucking runny it is! i'm a lumberjack & i'm ok. i fart in your general direction. what did you expect? a spanish inquisition? strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government! know what i mean? wink wink. nudge nudge. say no more.

& now for something completely different: career paths! when the show eventually came to an end in 1974, its members ended up taking a divergent set of paths. between fawlty towers & a fish called wanda, john cleese arguably became the most famous of the troupe, but through a string of awesome directorial efforts, terry gilliam has given him a run for his money. terry jones has done a bunch of writing & michael palin ended up doing a number of documentaries, a ton of which have been travel docs. graham chapman did a bit of acting after python, but died at age 48, twenty years ago this past sunday. eric idle is probably best known for creating the rutles & spamalot, the broadway production which supports the theory that he's over-commercialized the show over the years.

& now for something completely different: a smart idea on the internet. back in november of last year, in response to the wide array of monty python videos up on youtube, they decided to set up their own youtube channel & put up a bunch of the best monty python clips. all they asked from fans was that in exchange for them putting a bunch of high quality clips on youtube for free, the fans go out & buy their DVDs. as a result, sales on amazon rose by 23000%. i didn't even know that percentage existed. anyway, in this brand new interweb world, they pretty much put to bed the fear that giving your content away for free would kill sales. you hear that, record industry?

#132 - & now for something completely different.
snack: peppercorn ranch sun chips
drink: hawaiian punch fruit juicy red



this weekend, i picked up a big ol bag of peppercorn ranch sun chips. they're a new flavor for sun chips, along with roasted sweet chili & spicy chipotle, neither of which i've come across in my snack travels. as part of sun chips' initiative to move to a 100% compostable bag by next year, this bag of peppercorn ranch came in a bag made from 33% recyclable materials. i don't have an active compost bin or anything, so once they go fully compostable, my bags will likely linger in a landfill for years, but it's still a pretty cool idea. 

as for the chips themselves, the flavor's good enough to put them in a tie with french onion for the coveted "tastiest sun chip" award. i love pretty much anything with ranch on it, but the peppercorn combination really works for me. like other sun chips, they're flavorful, but not too flavorful, making it possible to eat a ton of them at once without making yourself sick. as such, by monday night, i'd finished off the entire bag pretty much single-handedly. any chip that's both healthy and supports my gluttonous tendencies is ok in my book.

since i've been in a hawaiian mood lately on the blog, i decided to take a trip down memory lane this weekend with a bottle of hawaiian punch fruit juicy red. back in the day, i used to drink a good amount of the stuff & generally, it came in a large aluminum can you had to use a can opener on. old school! it's not as good as i remember it being though. it's full of sugar & is basically the fruitiest fruit punch available, but i guess to my parents, at the time, if i was drinking hawaiian punch, at least i wasn't drinking soda.

as a kid, i was inspired by hawaiian punch's commercials, which featured punchy, the hawaiian punch mascot. in the ads, he'd walk up to this other character (opie) & ask him "how about a nice hawaiian punch?" since it's impossible to resist a nice hawaiian punch, opie would always answer in the affirmative & punchy would sock him one. aided by that phrase, i've dealt a lot of bruises myself over the years...good times.

hawaiian punch updated the punchy character in 2003 & now they're all 2006 style on their website, which is laid out as punchy's pad. while he lounges on the couch like a lazy hawaiian, you can get all interactive with a game called "punchy's pursuit," where punchy tosses bottles of hawaiian punch & other debris onto the street from the back of a truck & you have to clean up after him. given their environmental leanings, i'm sure the people at sun chips are quite unhappy about punchy's wanton littering. not me though. i love that hawaiian's mischievous capering.

Wednesday
Nov262008

#41 - F.L.O.R.I.D.A...flo-ree-dah.

back in 97, shortly after college graduation, i moved to pembroke pines, fl, a city in broward county just minutes north of miami. it was the year of the expansion florida marlins' first world series win, a dark year for baseball indeed.

my girlfriend at the time had moved down there to get a masters in o.t. & i really liked her & for the most part, had never left the northeast, so i went with. she was moving down earlier than i & so we flew down there a few months before her school year started to find an apartment, see the school & area, etc. i was 22 & it was the first time that i had flown in a plane & was old enough to actually remember doing so.

prior to that, the only other time i had been to florida was in between junior & senior year of high school, when i rode all the way down from hudson, nh to jupiter, fl in the back of a mostly-empty van that belonged to the father of my (first real) girlfriend at the time. we drove down there with her divorced parents & little sister. one day, the girlfriend & i took her dad's van to the mall & when i was finished purchasing a pair of midnight blue jean shorts at the guess store, we left the mall through an entirely different entrance & got lost. while trying to figure out where i was going i almost ran a red light & slammed on the brakes. the sand on the road caused the van to slide sideways & as we skidded to a halt, i remember a tool box & a jar of change unloosing themselves all over the van. we emerged unscathed other than the tool & change collection duties necessary to do to avoid detection from her parents. a couple days later, hurricane andrew hit. that should have been a clear sign as to the future of that relationship.

...so in august of 97 i moved to florida & lived in a one-bedroom apartment with my girlfriend. from the outset, it was obvious that she was stressed. school was pretty hard, neither of us had long-standing friends in the area & for the most part, things did not go well between us. i know i wasn't happy...hell, i only went to the beach once my entire time there.

my best friend at the time was a girl named michelle, who i worked with at my data entry job. as far as i know, we were the only two college-educated folks in our office, so we naturally gravitated toward each other. as far as i can remember, she was my first ever gay friend (nh & b.u. kept me a bit sheltered up until then). often, when my monthly new issue of playboy arrived (via a gift subscription from my girlfriend), michelle & i would flip on through together. we'd go out to lesbian bars & shoot pool & ramble about our respective relationship issues. she brought a lot of happiness to me at a time when many aspects of life sucked...& it helped that she was totally cute...& then i moved away after only eight months in florida & came down to visit a few months later for new years' eve & then through circumstances, we completely lost touch, even with the recent advent of social networking...friendwise, this is the loss i most regret. she was a really good friend to me & i really hope she's doing well now that we're ten years into the future.

#41 - F-L-O-R-I-D-A...flo-ree-dah.

snack: hershey's all natural extra dark assortment
drink:
sobe orange carrot elixir

as i've mentioned previously, i currently have a thing for dark chocolate. recently, it's gotten worse & regular dark chocolate just won't cut it any more. when i go to a store & they only have one or two types of lindt bars & both of them are nothing more than your average dark chocolate, sans any fruits or nuts or geographical cacao branding, i scoff heartily...but i am occasionally a rational man & when my best choice at a local rite aid the other night was a bag of hershey's all natural extra dark assortment, which contains single serving pieces of both the average "pure dark chocolate" & "pure dark chocolate with cranberries, blueberries & almonds," i "went for it." i absolutely love the cranberry, blueberry & almond ones. the fruits & nuts are tiny & worked into the chocolate really well. basically, biting into one is like biting into any other candy bar, until you notice that there's a chunk of cranberry stuck in your teeth & you get to lick at cranberry for 2-5 minutes trying to get it out of there...& when you do, the reward is all yours. this bag is definitely no match for me tonight.

with them, i'm downing a sobe orange carrot elixir. it is SO ORANGE!...but i wouldn't ever turn one down based on its shocking color, because it's a pretty tasty beverage & carrots are totally good for your health. some might say "this beverage is too friggin' sweet." to them i say, "your teeth only live once, jacko." i was addicted to sobe beverages (& more specifically the black tea) in the years round the end of college, when they started appearing on the shelves of boston convenient stores. when i moved to florida in 97, i was forced to starve my addiction. as far as i could tell, there was nary a sobe drink to be found in the greater ft lauderdale/miami area, which absolutely baffled me, considering that the drink gets its name from south beach, an area of miami beach, located just 30-45 minutes south of my pembroke pines apartment. it turns out that sobe is based out of norwalk, ct, known primarily for its oysters & from what i can tell, "sobe" is pretty much just a pre-geico lizard marketing gimmick...& i hate their website. it tries to be cool while sacrificing functionality for bird chirps.

in closing, originally this post was going to be more lesbiancentric, but in the end, i decided to go in a different direction...instead i'm just going to throw out this one random thought from that thought train: are there any females in my neighborhood who aren't lesbians? even one? i remain skeptical.

Friday
Sep052008

#21 - x = _.

i listen to a lot of npr. you might call the amount of npr that i listen to in a given week "disgusting" or "irrational" or "humanly impossible," but i do it. it's just that, by nature, i'm curious about everything that's going on at all times everywhere. a typical week by my calculations:

all things considered (weekday) - 135 minutes x 5 days = 675 minutes
all things considered (weekend) - 50 minutes x 2 days = 100 minutes
all songs considered - 30 minutes x 1 day = 30 minutes
morning edition -
105 minutes x 5 days = 525 minutes
day to day - 50 minutes x 5 days = 250 minutes
fresh air -
50 minutes x 5 days = 250 minutes
news & notes - 50 minutes x 5 days = 250 minutes
talk of the nation - 110 minutes x 5 days = 550 minutes
tell me more - 50 minutes x 5 days = 250 minutes
weekend edition (saturday) - 105 minutes x 1 day = 105 minutes
weekend edition (sunday)
- 105 minutes x 1 day = 105 minutes
car talk call of the week - 5 minutes x 1 day = 5 minutes
this american life - 60 minutes x 1 day = 60 minutes
studio 360 - 52 minutes x 1 day = 52 minutes

TOTAL - 3,217 minutes (53 hours) = 32% of my time

it's really not as hard as you might think to listen to this much npr. i have the ability to slap on a pair of headphones whilst at work, so i usually end up spending half my time there listening to npr. between walking, subway & whatnot, i usually get in another two hours of listening a day. then, the rest of my listening is done whilst at home, which comes out to...

3,217 minutes per week
work listening - 240 minutes x 5 days = 1,200 minutes
travel listening - 120 minutes x 7 days = 840 minutes
home listening - 1,177 minutes (19.6 hours per week/2.8 per day)

two facts you may have gathered about me:
1. i love math
2. i am slightly o.c.d.

#21 - x = _.
snack: e. frutti x-ray fish

drink:
snapple goji punch

with my math, i've decided to break out the gummy x-ray fish that i got when i was up in boston weeks ago for the radiohead show. check out this (hastily photoshopped) bad boy:

obviously, everything gummy is good, so we don't even have to go there. the best part about gummy things is that they contain gelatin, which means that i'm getting my daily fill of connective tissue! yay! as you can tell, the skin comes off to reveal the best parts of the fish--the head, spine & tail. mmm. fish spine.

to wash this fishy down, i'm having a snapple goji punch. apparently a goji is basically a wolfberry & according to the back of the label, this fruit "just might be the world's most powerful food." why is it so powerful? according to the front of the label, the beverage offers immunity to the drinker. this excites me to no end. if i am ever attacked by infection, caught in a foreign land with contraband, or on a reality show, i am so going to drink another one of these. the bonus? it's tasty too.