I have been busy, lately. The internet has been regularly dysfunctional. These are not good circumstances for keeping websites.

00000000000000000000000000000000

Am I better off with total whitening or total advanced whitening? How is it possible to advance beyond total? Does the advanced one make teeth translucent? Is it just more challenging? How can this goop hope to accomplish any whitening at all without


whitening oxygen bubbles? Clearly, they are essential. Ha ha, I pity any poor fool who bought normal advanced whitening without knowing oxygen bubbles had been invented. That person is doomed to a life of sub-caucasian bite bricks.
I actually tried this eventually, and you’ll be surprised to know that in actual usage it’s exactly the same as every other toothpaste I’ve ever used.

I might go so far as to declare that the finest regular I’ve ever tasted.

How are there so many different types of toothpaste, with so little information provided to help a person choose? Is it important which one I use? I did not think it was like with soda or salsa or saltlakrids, where it’s a trivial thing I don’t need, am actually better off without, and should choose entirely upon the whim of a moment. This is supposed to be a tool for cleaning a sensitive, integral series of body components. It’s a health issue, not a fashion conundrum. Yes, there are heaps of soaps, too, but they are competing soap brands offering similar products. This is one brand offering similar products. When you do see multitudes of soap under one label it tends to be about the various smells they give off. I try to avoid smelling people’s teeth.

This article’s author has encountered far more colgates than I, but doesn’t answer, nor ask the question of what’s actually in the interests of teeth themselves (it does, however, include a picture which clicking upon causes to appear a javascript window with a smaller version of the picture inside it). Do I want to prevent cavities or fight plaque? Why do we lack the technology to do both? Long ago it was my understanding that all toothpastes did all these things. Now, though, they’ve gone soft. Toothpaste? More like toothglue! Eh eh eh.

Which of these is actually the most beneficial is impossible to discern. Not just because your deteriorating vision has rendered the print a blurry, unintelligible mess, but because each paste type only includes the check boxes which would be checked. They are, in effect, mere bullet points, but this makes them seem like bonus features. Which reminds me…

With Webster Premier Banking you get 5000 bonus points. Do you have any idea what that means? That means you’ll be one fourth of the way toward getting your first extra life. What other bank can promise you something so matenopoulos?

See! Only Wachovia gives you a Way to Save. You don’t even need extra lives when your bank has exclusive access to the Imperial Scrolls of Honor. Truly a glamorous bonus.

HEYDALYDOO! SOMEBODY CALL ME? STOMP STOMP

No, Baramos Bomus! Nobody ever calls you! Get out of here! You are not needed at this time! Go away before your friends show up…

GOOD MORNING! IT’S GREAT TO STAY UP LATE WITH YOUR OLD BUDDY OLD PAL BARAMOS GONUS! SHQUAWK

Wonderful. Now there’s some idiot purple monster skeleton here. Surely you can admit that’s kind of stupid.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN “KIND” OF STUPID?

Aren’t you glad I don’t update this site every two days anymore?

No way, man! This article is almost as awesome as purity rings and Family Friendly Flatulence inspired by a best selling book series!
This is the saddest day of my life.

June 29? I am trying to write something about toothpaste. Hopefully you can excuse me for not having the rushes of inspiration and motivation necessary to finish quickly.

6666666666666666666666666666666666666666

June 27: I’m not sure if my left eye actually hurts or if I just imagine it is in pain because every time I see it in a mirror it more and more resembles planet Jupiter.

0000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Busy busy busy. How am I always busy? Where are the time and effort going? (away)

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

June 25: I’m not surprised that Michael Jackson is dead today. I’m surprised that he was alive yesterday.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Why go to the restaurant? Just watch its page on the facebook. This sign is near the place, and the address confirms that (It confirms that if you are there in person and know where you are), but advertising an actual product or service was pre-nine eleven thinking. They trust that I will go to some website and type in their name more than they trust me to just go straight to their own website. Or their place of business where I give them money.

And yes, I did go to the face book, locate the search space and type “cuckoo’s nest” into it, but only for the purpose of researching my complaint about the sign telling me to do that. If I thought it was a good idea… I would have also done it. I suppose. But all this is irrelevant because either way a business has paid for a sign which tells me to do a thing which gets the business no dollars.

I guess the idea is that you go home and watch the page, so that the place can periodically remind you that it exists on occasions when you might not otherwise have considered visiting it. Which is fine, from a marketing standpoint, but as an internet user I find it pointless. I joined facebook to better communicate (in theory) with family members and friend members who do not dare engage me directly. I get absolutely nothing out of confessing to the emotionless second-hand webpage of some joint that I enjoy visiting it. And I don’t like visiting it, really. I like Margarita’s and Across the Border better. We mustn’t forget Jalapeno Heaven, either. Even Baja is better, and you know how Baja is.

Or how about this place with the bird threateningly positioned above my food? I don’t like that at all, but until something happens I like it better than Cuckoo’s Nest.

The best part about going to Cuckoo’s Nest is that you get to see this stupid gargoyle that’s in front of a house near Cuckoo’s Nest. And since it has no legs it can’t follow you around and pull any gargoyle business on you.

If every other fauxican place in southern Connecticut except Su Casa mysteriously gets mauled by skeletons and explodes I’ll consider visiting Cuckoo’s Nest again. Or maybe if I just become coo-coo. Seven year old me should find that last sentenceoid particularly poignant and clever.

While Cuckoo’s Nest beats Beans by about %250ish, beans is America’s Fastest Growing facebook group out of the two I displayed. Besides all that,

Hamsters dominates them both. Also in the running but with some catching up to do is

Hamsters. In a distant third is

Hamsters. But what’s this?!

DUCKS. I should have known.

GET OUT OF THE ROAD, DUCK!

In other news, I do not support dopes.

And neither should you.

“Time to head on home”
Said Dad to His Son
“Not ’til my Fruit by the Foot is done”
He started to eat and don’t you know,
Three hours later “still not ready to go!”
YOU SEE, with Fruit by the Foot, the fun just lasts and lasts
So he kept eating, “and the time just passed”

==============================

“Star” is a popular word in the world of marketing and public opinion. We have Energy Star, Starbucks, Sinistar, Kenneth Starr, Star Jones, Starburst, Starbirds, on and on.

Plenty of newspapers, radio stations and other media outlets identify themselves as “Star.” The people who occupy the most prominent roles in acted productions are said to be “stars.” The quality of various products, services and military ranks are often shown rated in amounts of stars.

Throughout human existence we have been infatuated with the mysterious glowing bodies that fill the sky at night and the ever present giant ball of light that commands our respect during the day. However…

“Foot Star” is not filling me with awe and amazement.

Ah, such majesty and splendor!

You’ll get over it.

I probably won’t post something new tomorrow.

/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\

page 30 (scroll down) of this.

Superfluous data:

The inking went better on the letters this time, but the actual drawings were still a mess and needed just as much post-scan mending as on past occasions. I at least seem to understand curtains better than I used to, but it’s still not enough.

People who have remarked have a few times done so to the amount that they don’t know what the characters’ names are. One thing that I find wacky about comics and indeed most fictional media is the manner in which plot details, including names, are compulsively stated even in situations where all parties (frequently just one person speaking to itself) should know everything and not need to say so. Still, somehow or another the reader ought to be informed, in most cases. I inserted a couple of names in here and it looked quite weird (apart from the the usual unusualness, naturally). It seemed like somebody else wrote it. I changed one of them to a “you.”

I drew the creature without ears, and then I saw some other picture where it had ears, so I drew ears on the next one, and they seemed unnecessary. If you’re bothered by the inconsistency you may imagine the fool has retractable ears.

No such excuse exists for the various background elements which are not totally consistent with prior depictions. Which is odd, because I knew all along what my intent was, so I should have been able to work something out. Maybe the room has more than one door and that control panel thing behind the bed is a stage prop.

I am not sure what the difference between a doctor and a doctrel is. Maybe this just regards the collar style of the laboratory coat worn, when applicable. Or perhaps doctrel is how they are addressed but doctor is what they are, even though this contradicts what I have already established. Maybe one kind is mean and the other kind is incompetent.

Between the page halves I lost my remaining point-three millimeter tip Techliner pen. It was certainly not the ideal drawing instrument and I only paid two dollars for it, but it was the best I had. I had to substitute… some other pen. It says “Pilot G2 07″ but I think that can’t mean 0.7 millimeters because the “big” pen I use, for most of the outlines and the frame edges, is only 0.5 millimeters at the edge.

I thought we were friends.

Papitas crujientes.

99999999999999999999999999999999999

The time has come to determine the superior soup. Prepare yourself.

The Stop and Shop super-market features two distinct generic store brand soups with the same flavors.

Even the hypey promotional copy on the can posteriors that’s suppossed to make me super excited about eating out of a can is essentially the same, and you’d know that if I’d taken a better picture of it.

So which is better?

Select, the left soup, obviously, for while Homestyle boasts the more appetizing image of actual soup, only Select comes in a GOLD can.

It was my assumption that I had merely acquired generic soup on both ends of a needlessly overdone packaging change; select’s food photography gives the impression of a thing that’s been hanging around since the 1980s; either just from label decay or because it was more feasible to find a depiction of a containers’ actual contents, rather than an idealized color-enhanced mockup, printed on one back then. The reality only becomes clear in the context of the store from which it takes its name:

The two leading / only evident to exist brands of canned soup come in red & gold and blue & grey cans. In its natural habitat a store brand’s survival instinct leads it to disguise itself as best as is legally permissable as a major multinational company’s brand, despite few competent people likely to be fooled by this for long enough to actually make a purchase. In a situation where there is no unquestionably dominant producer of a thing, and that there is no longterm risk in producing an excess amount of, it makes perfect sense to imitate them both. If Stop & Shop sells just as much soup as before, only with sales divided between its two colors, it won’t have been a total waste of effort because they can keep that stuff on the shelves for essentially ever. For as long as it takes for Progresso or Campbell to significantly alter their own label colors and layouts, which probably won’t happen. You might have noticed that the red cans shown are not “Select” but “Chunky,” which is apparently a word that makes people think of things other than vomit. That is because Stop and Shop actually has three identical generic soup brands.

Select is paired with, sure enough, Campbell’s “Select Harvest,” and while that comes in a primarily white, rather than red, container, the somewhat sickly depictions of the regular Select cans’ contents creates a whitish impression at a great enough distance.
I do not intend to criticize stop and shop for its curious multiplicity; I can’t tell the difference between Campbell’s identical soup brands, either. I merely wish these sorts of label shenanigans weren’t necessary to get people to buy less overpriced soup. Some years ago I would never have considered purchasing Stop & Shop anything. But it had really ugly, bland labels then. The sort that make you question the standards of the overall production. The labels are better now. I just don’t like that they’re playing along with the myth that there are three distinct styles of soup being peddled here, each worth being imitated individually.

Mmmm, yes… fascinating…

Oh, I know. Also of great potential interest: I wrote most of this entry while eating about 1/3 of a can of raisins. I had become aware of the 82% sodium rate in a full can of soup, any one of those, and thought I should eat something boring as punishment. No cereal, though; too much iron. I’m worried I’ll be walking past a junkyard, because I got lost in a cartoon from the 80s, and I’ll get stuck to one of those big car magnets. So I ate a lot of raisins. And then I felt diabetic for a bit. It can be hard coming to terms with the fact that eating fruit can make you just as sick as cookies. You might not get as fat, but you’ll feel like you ought to be. So if I’ve conquered dehydrated grapes and passed the test of soup, what, then, remains to be addressed by my can agenda?

GRAPE SOUP.

Pretzel companies love to brag about their great traditions on the back of their packages; often citing the dedication with which their founder hand twisted them and such. That would be relevant if you were trying to sell me a bag of hand-twisted, slow baked, 1900s style pretzels. What I have is a sack of tiny, cold, factory-mold prefabricated thingies flavored only by salt, designed to be eaten fifty at a time. The only tradition in the game here is my own tradition of gluttony. Even when I do see a big pretzel, it is still most likely a thing from a machine that has not earned the right to be shaped like an ampersand. I would settle for a circle if that meant you’d charge me less than five dollars for it.

What’s more wholesome than a big jar of salt? How about one that had been spilled and gathered up prior to usage? I would not trust desert-dwelling men without hats to handle these ingredients. Only to dance safely, and only if they want to.

Pretzels just think they’re better than every other snack, even though about a third of the way through the bag I always want to die. With popcorn, chex mix, p’tater chips, chocolate bars, and all the rest, I never want to die until after I’ve already eaten it all. Which means pretzels last longer, and I get sick more times on a single purchase. Very efficient. Something to keep in mind in a slow economy. So I suppose they are better. But they don’t need to get attitude about it.

Coca Cola is even older than a lot of pretzel brands and there’s no proud boasting printed on containers of that. Because it’s just dumb soda (and because it was originally sold as medicinal wine made with cocaine by a morphine addict with no business sense who suffered from Henniganism).

You don’t pick up a bag of cheetos (I hope) and see on the back something like

The grand Cheetos^® brand tradition dates back to 187X when our proud, humble founder Cheslinski Chitowski travelled from Bolshevik Mexico to the United States to fulfill his dream of opening his very own Cheeto stand in Michigan, where he used the old world cheeto method of hand mixing yellow 06 and monoglopxide mccarbonuke to make the original orange dust which he lovingly hand sprinkled over every individual hand misshapen cheeto skeleton. He declared his creation Chitowski’s Astonishing Curd Flavored Corn Wellness Supplement and sold them out of his humble horse drawn van. This dedication to craft, quality, and orange led Chitowski to coin the term “cheetostitude,” the feeling of joy and gradual loss of fine motor skills one gets eating properly prepared cheetos. By the 1930s cheetostitude had become nothing less than a national identity and is credited with ending the great depression, abolishing silent film and bringing Superman from Krypton. An outsider in his time, Chitowski never lived to profit from his work, and went to his death believing it was not easy being cheesy. And yet his message of peace, hard work and safe, reserved quantities of cheesiness lives on to this day in the Dangerously Cheesy^™ modern Cheetos^® brand Cheese and Bacon Balls snacks product.

Nobody would take it seriously. THIS is what is printed on the back of a bag of cheetos:

and I forgot what my point was. If there’s anything that’s dangerously cheesy it’s the people writing the labels.

I have an inferiority complex. I’m sure yours is better, though.

______________________________________________

People aren’t interested in civic matters. This sign was designed by a person who likes it that way. Why should I vote yes on what? This entire awareness campaign relies on the hope that nobody else invents a “no” sign. The issue of import[ance] seems to actually have been three things, increasing the town budgets for various purposes. You might figure out from my vague grasp of the proceedings and consequences that I took as much civic interest as anyone else. You might say that it is my responsibility to know for certain what is being voted on, and before that happens, but shouldn’t it also be my responsibility to make up my mind about it? See, even if the sign did what I wanted I could still complain about it! I welcome you, sign, to make a suggestion, but I do not detect the presence of a “please” or so much as a “hey why don’t you” preceding the order to get votey.

I’m guessing at least one of the votable measures passed through the thing those pass through, as the property taxes just went up suddenly, increasing to levels more befitting a town of boat-wiping, fence-raising, weed-whacking, police-calling-because-I-went-for-a-walk-during-daylight-hours connecticreeps. Unfortunately, this affects my location as well, even though we do not own a boat or a fence and if we needed to squirt our house with water for some reason would be content to use supersoaker technology or hope wet droplets start magically falling from the sky.

Oh, the plight of us peons, having to manually charge our water pistols, without strapping big jugs and model T engines to our backs, never knowing the joy of treating entire neighborhuds to 90 perpetual decibels with no regard for decency or necessity when we squirt our houses.

Note to buyers: “Bigger” Rotisserie Chicken may be same size as before, smaller than before but bigger in comparison to other products, not actually bigger than anything, or utterly non-existant. Big Y supermarket will not be held responsible for misconceptions on the part of the consumer regarding the relative size or presence of the product in question.

We additionally accept no responsibility for offering pizzas designed with California pizza standards in mind which bafflingly choose to market themselves based on that.
You, California, won’t allow gayed up marriages, but this is acceptable? The marriage of pizza and California is at least as queer as… Florida pizza.
I had a chain-fresh California pizza and I found it to be at or below the level of a frozen non-California pizza from my preferred ice pizza factory. If there are two unfortunate culinary styles, generally tolerated out of convenience, that are worth combining, I am not going to assume it is these two.

I should post something here later today that is not about tv shows. I should also stop consuming so much sodium and learn to play a xylophone.

()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()

I did not realize until the second broadcast that James Wormworth, the drum-player who replaces Max Weinberg during Bruce Springstein season had become a reglular member of the band, because if Stomp has taught us anything it’s that you can never have too many guys banging on things at the same time, making the total quantity of members eight and my reference to a “Max Weinberg 7″ inaccurate. Although the seven has never been officially designated as referring to the number of the people in the band. And even if it did, Max Weinberg himself was often announced separately from the Max Weinberg 7, suggesting a total of eight people. The name was wrong before. I still think “The Tonight Show Band” is a mundane name, however much accuracy it currently carries. I should probably hide this part, too. Give me a dollar.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

What follows are observations I had when watching the “debut” of “The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien” and other stories. It is only here to serve my compulsions. I wrote it in about forty minutes. It was not supposed to be like this. Yet if I do not post it now then I will always want to, and it will only get longer. I don’t need you to read it. I just need to be done reading it.

Aw naw!

I don’t trust any company that can show full tv shows for free yet still make a big enough profit to make produce 2 minute long ads with computer effects and superfluous celebrities and air them during America’s worst (id est: best) shows. They think they’re being clever with that tagline, but it comes across as just about the only thing sincere about it to me. There’s another ad that you’ve undoubtedly seen, if you see ads, featuring Alecander Baldwin, but I can actually tolerate him off the ads, at least. Denis Leary, however, always makes me uncomfortable, and this is regardless of whether or naw he ripped off Bill Hicks. Bill Hicks, by the wuh, I never heard of until maybe a year ago, by which point he had been dead for fourteen of them. I have since seen his name in several places. Did he come back to life recently? It’s hard to say, because if he had he still wouldn’t have appeared in this ad (this is, of course, assuming it would have been offered to him and that in fourteen years he did not undergo the necessary changes in character, which I would not put past anybody I have yet witnessed within my electric picture box. And that assumes his supposed anti-consumerist stances reflected his actual character and not just viewpoints adopted for the sake of a comedy routine).

Even before I knew about those ads, I didn’t trust Hulu. I just hated its name. It reminded me of hula. More specifically, Tony Danza, Fred Flintstone, et arrrg; america’s least respectable father figures and miscellaneous male oafs wearing grass skirts and coconut brassieres during inexplicable island getaway sweeps episodes that were always embarrassing. Also, nohulo, the non-website some garbanzo boron tried to make me pay homage to once.

Now I hate Hulu’s money and its attitude. I like to think what draws people to youtube is that it’s so ghetto and junkety that it seems like it can’t possibly be a corporate conspiracy (though with the bandwidth it carries it could not function if it wasn’t). But really, people will go anyplace where there is visual record of cats being idiots. You know that. I know that.

What I hate is when that isn’t enough for people, when they have to add obnoxious commentary, often attributed to the cat, in [non-negotiable] impact-font lettering, superimposed over the image.

It is scarcely a step above what cats say on greeting cards, except everybody’s too busy making more of them to charge money, so they’re inescapable.

Did I make that just now in 20 seconds or find it somewhere in 10? It doesn’t make a difference! (and I actually made it over a year ago in 20 seconds in recognition of a more general untraceable, unquestionable internet non-joke tradition complaint whose specific uninspired inspiration I have fortunately forgotten, which is why it doesn’t have a cat in it) We’re all grunting apes pasting letters on things. Everybody wants to be like Frankenstein. There used to be a thing kids did back when they talked to each other, they would hold one hand out, palm downward, slap the nearer edge repeatedly against their chest and say “URT URT URT I’M INTARDED!” That was as far as it went. If it went any further it would be dumber than whatever it thought it was mocking. Things were different back then. We could see a picture of a cat doing something strange and think “that cat is doing something strange.” We can’t be trusted to do that now.

I would like this without the awful letters. Now, though, it makes me mad, and this is probably one of the less awful examples. And, and, why should we univerally assume that if cats could speak it would be like that?

Some cats are very classy. Not this one, obviously, but some.