#113 - only in new york.

WTF NYC? i leave you alone for a few days last week & upon my return, you & your immediate environs start actin a fool & stirring up all sorts of good ol fashioned trouble. it's the summer. you couldn't just chill out & enjoy it, could you? you had to go grabbing for attention & get arrested & scandalized & brought up on charges for a wide range of things all in the same week, didn't you?

on tuesday, you started off light when it was reported that over the past week, mayor bloomberg (who had strengthened the city's anti-idling law earlier this year, prohibiting idling over three minutes) was caught idling his vehicles for up to an hour on multiple occasions. then the next day, it was revealed that a local man who grew up in long island had traveled to the pakistan/afghanistan border & trained with al-qaida, along the way providing them with details about the LIRR & the NYC subway system. that same day, a judge ruled that FDNY exams had discriminated against minorities, despite the fact that the rescue me firehouse totally has a black guy & a hispanic guy.

the very next day, on thursday, 44 new york & new jersey officials, including two state lawmakers, the mayors of hoboken, secaucus & ridgefield and a number of rabbis (including one from brooklyn who sold black-market kidneys), were arrested as part of a wide-sweeping FBI sting. to close out the week, on friday, obama announced his new education stimulus guidelines & guess which state wouldn't qualify under the guidelines? that's right...you, new york. hell in a hand basket much?

NYC...i just don't know what to do with you, but i suppose there is some hope for you, some good coming out of you. the naked cowboy, fresh on the heels of taking on mars, inc, announced this week that he's throwing his hat into the ring for mayor. j lo & her boo-tay celebrated their 40th birthday on friday, the same day that minimum wage in the state went up by a whopping ten cents...& of course, there's the big one. steely dan's coming to the city for a run of eight shows at the beacon theater starting tomorrow night. with all the dirty work that's been going on around here, it's just what the city needs right now.

#113 - only in new york.
snack: glenny's all natural multi grain milk chocolate drizzle crisps
drink: new york homestyle pomegranate blueberry acai iced tea



to go along with the area's recent uppity nature, i'm celebrating with a snack/drink pairing from two long island companies. for my snack, i went with a bag of glenny's all natural multi grain milk chocolate drizzle crisps. they're made by a company out of freeport, long island, a company that's celebrating their 30th anniversary this year. according to their website, their "soy crisps are now the #1 selling soy crisps in drugstore chains across the u.s." way to go, glenny. they've even won a horribly unnecessarily-apostrophied & grammar-deficient award for supporting the soldier's in iraq.

their milk chocolate drizzle crisps are pretty good overall. they're basically like a rice cake, but not as thick & crumbly. healthwise, these bad boys are totally kosher & they're made out of the flours of corn, rice, oat & wheat, with some soy bits tossed in, so you're getting a good amount of fiber. the drizzle of chocolate makes it so that it doesn't taste like you're eating air, which is a nice touch. still, like with rice cakes, even an entire bag of them isn't very filling.

for my drink, i had a bottle of new york home style pomegranate blueberry acai iced tea, made by multi-vitamin energy corp, a company out of bay shore, a hamlet about a half hour west down route 27 from freeport. i don't know what exactly qualifies their iced tea formula as "new york home style," since it's essentially no different than any other iced tea.  in fact, since they use cane sugar in their iced tea, it has a taste akin to a snapple, the one-time official iced tea of new york.

because of the fruit trifecta, it's a little sweet for an iced tea, but i can handle a little sweetness here & there, especially if it's not because of HFCS. not only is it an acceptable iced tea, but it also has manhattan fun facts on the side of the label. my favorite: "manhattan's central park is larger than the principality of monaco." take that, prince albert II! i heard your father's stuck in a can! booyah!

#93 - lunchability.

during the work week, as often as i can, i restore my sanity by punching a random, lucky co-worker in the face in my mind (jk! i love you all!) and leaving my office, perched high on the 24th floor (penthouse, bitches!) of the live nation building in times square for a lunchtime break. usually i walk around manhattan aimlessly for twenty minutes or so, for the ridiculous time sq sights, extreme tourist dodging, podcast listening & mile of walking exercise i get out of it. multi-tasking off the clock!

it's an opportunity to clear my head & step away from work & also an opportunity to secure foodstuffs. other than the mcdonalds immediately downstairs, my main lunch spots are the BK across from port authority, a mediterranean joint over on 44th & 10th and the food emporium. i've only hit up a few places other than that. on special days, i give my love to the wendys eight blocks away, down on 34th street.

it's also an opportunity to scout for snacks amongst all the times sq stores, although i haven't even done much of that, as it would mean having to navigate my way through the more heavily-tourist trafficked areas of times sq & i'm trying to restore my sanity, not rake it across the coals. as such, my current main snack procurement destination is the slurpeelicious 7-11 across from port authority, followed by the duane reade on the corner of 8th & 42nd.  i know...yawn.

there's also an auntie annes across the street from duane reade, but i haven't snacked there yet. i probably should try it out, since i'm an official member of the auntie annes pretzel club. i get a monthly newsletter delivered directly to my email inbox every month, with a coupon included. this month, it's for a "free 21-ounce soda or lemonade with the purchase of a new pepperoni pretzel." it's a pretzel with pepperonis affixed to the front of it!  i'm sold. auntie anne, i'll see you next week.

#93 - lunchability.
snack: doritos late night tacos at midnight
drink: sweet leaf sweet tea



without fail, i always end up ravenously hungry by the end of the work day. this past wednesday, i planned ahead & on my walk, stopped by the 7-11 and picked up a snack & drink for when the 5-5:30pm hunger came a callin'. for my snack, i broke all the rules by picking up a bag of doritos late night tacos at midnight IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AFTERNOON. living life on the edge is the only way to go, i tells ya.

i ended up breaking into the bag about an hour after lunch, more out of curiosity than anything. i've been saying this a lot recently, so maybe it's my new catch phrase, but HOLY CRAP. these things taste like the beef tacos of my "dad's cooking tonight" childhood experiences. dad also made good smelts. but the folks at doritos have taken whatever seasoning you use for tacos & fused it with what they learned from the beefy taste of the doritos X-13 chip (photo from my kitchen wall), an ambiguously-named chip labeled with the clue "all-american classic," that tastes like a friggin' big mac. the flavor sort of weirded me out/overwhelmed me & i couldn't eat a ton all at once...so i brought a half bag home with me at the end of the day.

btw...congratulations, doritos. you've created the most bandwidth-sucking, least user-friendly website ever. what is this secret property? is that a friggin' helicopter pad? some sort of xbox 360 fortress? a giant tv that has crashed to the ground & was just left there because well, it's a giant tv? what the f is "snack strong productions?"

ok. after discovering that holding your mouse over stuff on the secret property makes cool things happen, i decided to check out the "flavor lab." i chose it mainly based on the fact that it appears to be many sublevels below the earth, which rules, and partially because it makes the helicopter take off for lands unknown when you hold the mouse over the lair. whoa! they have segways & floating bags of chips down in the flavor lab! actually, it's not as cool as it sounds. you can see what flavors they have down here if you care.

my beverage for the afternoon was a bottle of sweet leaf sweet tea. seriously, this stuff is not good. i've tried two sweet leaf beverages now & both have had an f'd up flavor. like with the taco doritos, i ended up bringing half home with me to finish later that night.  eventually, i finished the whole bottle despite its weird ass taste, but at my own peril.  the odd taste can't be entirely because it's made with cane sugar & black tea, can it? how can i describe it?...it goes well with a chaser.

i feel bad because sweet leaf is from good ol' austin, tx and has that rosy-cheeked granny mascot on the label, but the taste is just too abnormally abnormal to ignore.  since i love baseball & our legal system (both proponents of a three-strike rule), i'm willing to give sweet leaf one more chance...but if granny fails me again, i'm putting her & her slightly-creepy cartoon grin out to pasture.

#63 - dushk as you're told.

...so i watched me some josh whedon's dollhouse the other night. i haven't really seen much of his other shows, so i figured i'd give this one a shot. first thing's first...the show's star...mmm eliza dushku (pronounced "douche-coup") mmm. hotties rule! how have i never noticed her existence? it looks like i need to brush up on my maxim magazine. and she's from watertown, mass! graduated from watertown high! i lived there for five months! hottie!

here's the thing though. as a university-educated white male with a snooty film degree and a non-snooty rural middle-class upbringing and a snooty bookshelf that includes such feminist literature as cunt, the second sex and they call me mad dog! and limited knowledge of josh whedon's feminist mores & lesbian subtexts, i'm supposed to be wicked offended about the premise behind this show, right?

the premise: there's this company. people ("dolls") voluntarily come to them & agree to have their personalities wiped clean for a period of five years. during these five years, the dolls are imprinted with new personalities, go on "engagements" with clients and then have their memories wiped at the end of each engagement. in between engagements, they live at this facility ("the dollhouse"). kinda sorta like prostitution, right? a female lead with no free will?

turns out that josh whedon actually ran the show by the gals at equality now (who work heavily against human trafficking), so it's all good in the hood. plus, he sounded pretty sincere about his intentions in a recent interview on fresh air when discussing the show's premise. plus, the totally gnarly lead scientist dude (fran kranz) says early in the episode, "we gave two people the perfect weekend together. we're great humanitarians." plus eliza dushku is a hottie boombalottie. yes, that is the correct spelling.

the first episode was pretty good. within the first six minutes, echo (eliza) is seen racing motorcycles with some dude through the streets & eventually they drive straight into a hall, to his birthday party & then seconds later, she's dancing with him, wearing a dress that hangs at what is basically the curves at the bottom of her butt. the concept of the show's interesting enough too. anyway, it's good enough that i'll watch it again next week.

#63 - dushk as you're told.
snack: archer farms salt & pepper cashews
drink: archer farms blueberry black tea

since i have no free will myself these days, when i'm looking for a snack, 83% of the time, i find myself at target, plunking one after another of their target-brand archer farms products into my lil red basket like a good little target target customer. i ate about a quarter of an 11.5 oz jar of archer farms salt & pepper cashews while watching dollhouse. i mean, cashews are good, but cashews covered in both salt & pepper are at least ten-fifteen times whatever good is. good for shoveling. mouth shoveling. it's a simple flavor genius that i've enjoyed ever since the days when i first moved to nyc & first laid eyes on a bag of utz salt & pepper chips, during the pre-9/11 era. i can never forget that moment.

the label provides me with a wealth of juicy info:

#1 - these cashews are multicultural, as they're a product of india, brazil, vietnam & indonesia. that means that these cashews have been to twice as many countries as me. nuts. i should get out more...& eat locally more. i don't even want to know what the carbon footprint is on deez nutz.

#2 - they are made up of four ingredients--cashews, salt, black pepper, modified food starch (corn). wtf target! i know you're all "shelf life shelf life shelf life," but i've been in your brooklyn location & unless your employees are lame at restocking which i couldn't IMAGINE FOR ONE SECOND that they'd be, stuff flies off the shelf. so shelf life's not a problem. please. can i eat one thing that doesn't have friggin corn in it?

#3 - the label offers up a "100% satisfaction guaranteed" guarantee...followed by the phrase "and they said you can't guarantee happiness." i bet the woman sitting alone in her apartment right now bawling as she shovels cashew after cashew into her mouth whilst watching tivoed episodes of extreme home makeover & picking cat hair off the sofa agrees with you 100% about that happiness thing.

speaking of what isn't good, there's archer farms blueberry black tea. ever since every beverage company & their mother started bottling teas, everyone thinks they can just whip up a good tea & call it a day. for starters, the name's got "black & blue" in it. for finishers, the tea tastes as bland as an ang lee film. boom. roasted. sorry target. i refuse to be an empty vessel for your crappy tea. i'll take your corn-laced cashews though.

#61 - you so famous!

my first ever face-to-face meeting with a celebrity was in the early eighties, outside fenway park after a baltimore orioles-boston red sox game, when my father & i ran into hall-of-fame orioles pitcher jim palmer. my dad told me who he was & asked me if i'd like an autograph, but i declined, since i didn't want the autograph of the guy in the underwear ads.

for a long while after that the closest i think i came to celebrity was that one of my fraternity brothers is scarlett johansson's brother...but she was like 12 & in manny & lo at the time we were in college, so yeah...oh & also one night a friend & i followed fishbone into a party at tufts & drank their bottles of guinness.

...but ever since i moved to nyc back in 2001, i've had the opportunity to pseudo-brush elbows with a few celebrities here & there in my doings and through it, have developed a sense of celebrity that i assume is different than, say, some dude who has never left windham, nh and only sees celebrities on tv or in the national enquirer or on the internet, naked or non.

i've been in social situations with rob corddry (formerly of the daily show & currently of the hilarious wb online-only series, children's hospital) on two non-consecutive occasions. once was at iona, a bar in williamsburg. i approached him & asked "you know jon stewart, right?" he responded, "you could say that"...and we went on our ways. we also crossed paths at a shins concert at bowery ballroom, where he stood in front of me & between songs, enthusiastically screamed "play your good song!"

other than that, i've had a few other celebrity run-ins. i've been on a flight with corin tucker (of sleater kinney), been at parties & bars with heather graham (who is WAY too skinny) & tracy morgan (on a couch with some ninny), and met the dudes from ac/dc (something that rhymes with "inny"). turns out they all seem like normal enough people...go figure.

which leads me to the topic of michael phelps & the infamous doobie-smoking picture of him. i've been at parties where there have been people who are in bands or films or tv series & never have i once thought to myself "oh my god, i totally need to get a photo of that person doing something that will be construed as awful & will publicly humiliate them & cost them a lucrative sponsorship deal!" that is a sign of somebody who is obviously an ass with no sense of consequences exposing someone who assumes what he's doing, at that point, at a party among "friends," has no consequences. i guess that doesn't matter to kellogg's either way.

#61 - you so famous!
snack: ocean spray cranberry & chocolate craisins trail mix
drink: nestea pomegranate & passion fruit red tea

the kellogg company, out of battle creek, michigan, is the world's largest producer of cereal & had $12.8 billion in revenue in 2008. beyond that, i'll just say that seth meyers covered their actions in response to the photos of michael phelps hitting the bong pretty well. in the end, they're bigger than michael phelps (he's only worth $10 million at the most) & can toss him aside in favor of a cartoon jungle cat any day of the week.

only 1/12th as big as kellogg's & 100 times bigger than michael phelps is ocean spray, an agricultural co-op based out of massachusetts. they're the owners of the largest cranberry-processing facility in the world. both the co-op & the massachusetts thing automatically score points with me & they've also turned down a buyout offer from pepsico, which is rad. even they've had their own problems in the past though. i guess nobody's perfect.

right michael phelps? nobody's perfect? hey michael phelps, i bet you'd love this ocean spray cranberry & chocolate craisins trail mix that i'm eating right now. nuts & berries are good (craisins!), but the chocolate chips make it even gooder if you know what i mean, michael phelps. wink wink. mmm. i bet you could eat like 50 bags of these when you're "training."

since i'm in a reducing-soda intake phase right now, i'm having a bottle of nestea pomegranate & passion fruit red tea with the trail mix. nestea is a part of the coca-cola company, who, by comparison, makes anything evil that kellogg or ocean spray might do look like a girl scout selling you a box of samoas. the label on the bottle tries hard to be hip though. i have to give them that. you've gotta be hip when you're dealing with pomegranates. with phrases like "pure liquid awesomeness" and "(c)an it help you wrestle a wildebeest?" it's a pretty extreme label, just like the pomegranate, the current biggest blinged-out celebrity in the fruit kingdom. long live the pomegranate.

#39 - it's a crazy cracker world.

as i sat down to write this blog entry, i went in not knowing exactly what i was going to write about. all i knew was that i had me a big glass of iced tea by my side & some hummus & crackers in the kitchen awaiting my consumption. to get warmed up, i decided to do a little research on my crackers, whose box was all the way over in the kitchen & whose exact name escaped me at that moment...so i searched for what i knew--"triscuit parmesan nabisco.com." about halfway down the list of searches, i came across the words "kraft - the tale of the magical crackers." as one who grew up in new hampshire, i couldn't help but be curious about magical crackers. i clicked through...& sidetrack! on the other end, i found a cracker wonderland mini-site, complete with:

the tale of the magical crackers
this is main attraction on the site. a guy named lester has brought you & a family of four to his attic to watch his magical cracker movie. once the internet catches up & the movie starts, it's all soothing narrator telling the magical story of one holiday season in cracker town. it starts with a knock on the door & on the other side, there's a giant ritz & his buddies giant wheat thin & giant triscuit! when i first saw these monstrous crackers, i was all "holy crap! those crackers are monstrous." then the soothing voice used the word "ginormous" to describe them & i stood corrected. these three ginormous crackers stay through the winter, magically regenerating over & over again, feeding the family when the dog pulls the turkey onto the floor at dinner & helping santa haul his ass up the roof on christmas eve when he's too tired to do it his damn self. at the end of the film, it is revealed that in a past year, a giant block of cheese showed up in town & then it is revealed that the narrator is actually the dog, the same dog who pulled the turkey onto the floor. i love surprise endings!

you can download this film onto your ipod!

snowball showdown
to play snowball showdown, you first create a character.

my character is a young black boy named "kickass kid." the backstory i created for him is that he is an outcast in the land of magical crackers. as you can sort of tell from the below image, others throw snowballs at him & attempt to destroy his giant cracker. assessment: life is not fun for the kickass kid of magical cracker town.

uncle lou's tale-o-matic
uncle lou likes to hang out in the shed, where he's created a very elaborate machine that spits out a lame mad lib that is nothing more than a written version of the "tale of the magical crackers" film. it appears that you should wear yellow gloves when operating the machine, probably because direct contact with it can result in terminal lameness. the only thing i like about uncle lou's creation is how it flags inappropriate words & makes you change them. it flagged the word "basement," but "attic" is completely acceptable...obviously.

seriously, nabisco. who approved the creation of this mini-site? carol from the steno pool?

#39 - it's a crazy cracker world.
snack: triscuit parmesan garlic thin crisps with athenos roasted red pepper hummus
drink: 4c red tea antioxidant/peach

these triscuit parmesan garlic thin crisps are pretty good. they're definitely better than regular triscuits, which are really only good if you top them with lots of cheese & dips & junk. these ones actually have flavor on their own. it's subtle, which makes sense, because if triscuits are anything, they're subtle...the hint of parmesan makes me wonder why all triscuits don't at least have some flavor.

regardless of their acceptable flavor level, i'm still dipping them in athenos roasted red pepper hummus. this stuff comes with chunks of red pepper & parsley bits sprinkled on the the surface, which looks quite fancy & makes you think that you might be eating something other than your average, everyday hummus...but you're not, really.

the 4c red tea is the final 4c iced tea flavor i've experienced & it is way too friggin' sweet, especially if you follow their recommended water/drink mix ratio. i mean, it's pretty good overall, but i really wish it wasn't so darn sweet. it's overwhelming & with every drink i take, i get an image of me brushing my teeth in my head. that can't be good.