#29 - fluffycreamycreepysmooth.

tonight i'm watching the second vice presidential debate, featuring questions from myspace. take that facebook. the debate also features rules, which are to be wantonly flaunted in tom brokaw's face. he just keeps bringing them rules up & the candidates just keep giving him the ol' "don't make us oust you again, tom."

when obama speaks, he's always composed. he answers questions intelligently. this is probably a plus. i mean, it worked out really well for both gore & kerry. wait a second. mccain just replied to something obama said with something about nailing jello to the wall? did he just accuse senator obama of wasting dessert? oh, never mind. budget metaphor. obama not evil. jello safe. he's still not getting my vote though.

john mccain wants to sit down & reach across the table. bad table manners, senator. i really wish he would stop calling me his friend & chopping at me. i attended a taping of the daily show a year or so back & he was the guest, promoting a book or something. he was definitely charming then. now he just creeps me out. tonight, he keeps shuffling forward toward the audience like a mummy as he answers their questions. i bet you he's breathing his pharaohvian breath on the people in the front row. maybe he could throw silver dollars at the good people of america from high atop a building. i'm pretty sure he'd get the lenny vote.

here is the question i would have asked:

as a male in his mid-thirties who is so spectacularly disenchanted with the political system that i am considering going back to the green party & voting for cynthia mckinney just to say that i participated in the process, why should anything either of you say not sound like it is coming from the mouth of an adult in a peanuts cartoon?

i would reserve the right to fully emphasize the words "spectacularly disenchanted" and sing these words loudly whilst making hammering or baseball bat-swinging motions to emphasize my point.

the last question was from amherst, nh:

q: what don't you know & how would you learn it?
a: well, what i do know is that at the end of this question, you still won't know what i don't know.

#29 - fluffycreamycreepysmooth.
snack: smart ones chocolate eclair
drink: silk 11 fl oz chocolate soymilk

in honor of tonight's debate, i'm having myself a smart ones chocolate eclair. it is a perfect metaphor for the debate, except for the "smart ones" part. it is fluffy. it is creamy. it won't make me feel guilty about eating it. it needs to be taken out of the freezer & thawed out for an hour before consuming. it goes really good with silk soy milk, especially when it is the chocolate kind drank out of a wasteful american single serving sized bottle. perfect. metaphor. oh & they're both not very good.

#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.

#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.