Yes, I actually did it. I screwed your brains out I bought the 30 ounce JAR of Utz snack mix. I know it says “party” mix, but I don’t go to parties, and when I do there’s never stuff like this there. This is what I stay home and eat while other people have parties. This is my meth. That may not even be so far from the truth; Judging by the way it is sealed, this stuff is apparently prescription strength. Although the side label professes the presence of 30 servings, one per ounce, I reckon I can have this finished in under a week. Hopefully I won’t have to. I will give it my list of demands in short time.
Officially, it is a “barrel,” but anybody who’s played enough video games knows that barrels often contain life sustaining, fully cooked, nonrotting foodstuffs (occasionally on plates), and while edible, what I have is not quite food. Beside that, suggesting that I can eat the entire contents of a BARREL makes me seem like a fat glutton. My metabolism is too fast for that. I am a moderately skinny glutton. I have a physical appearance accurately described as “salvageable.” Come back when I’m thirty [years old]… If I’m still there, eating utz party mix alone, stop me.
Donkey Kong would not throw Utz Party Mix at Mario. Monkey Donkey would not… no, actually we could be on to something. It is a shame that the only web page documenting this phemonemonemon is over ten years old. Clearly it is a relevant, pressing, depressing issue.
Look at that, just while I was here talking to you. I would weigh the remnants, but my scale is broken. No, not because I stood on it, narf narf. I was merely incidentally mentioning that I own a scale which does not function. Why don’t I throw it away? Why don’t you throw it away? Am I on trial here? Fleeps, lemmelone!
This jarrel, though very orange inside, does not contain cheeseballs. Tell us about the cheeseballs, Utzy.
I reckon you’ll pay more attention to the weather once acid rain starts pouring out of those bright orange clouds.
Those are not the famous Planters Cheez Balls… I know Planters’ are famous because one person uploaded this picture to the flickr and google images turned up the exact same picture of the same obsolete package design with the same sickly, faded colors and the same dented paper on numerous sites that had ripped it off, sometimes with site logos and bonus jpeg artifacts, most not bothering to have searched the “all sizes” link and just went with the 280×500 pixel preview. Somebody had even re-uploaded the smaller one to a different flickr page (to make it even flickier). To distinguish my own ripoff from the others I will put it through a really stupid series of filters that I have never once used seriously in a decade of owning Paint Shop Pro 6.
The only way to make this classier would be to scroll the text.
But that is not important. What is important, to me, about Cheez Balls, is that they have Mr. Peanut pictured on the cans. MR. PEANUT CONTAINS NO CHEESE. Neither do cheez balls, but MR. PEANUT ALSO CONTAINS NO CHEEZ. Mr. Peanut is not qualified to act as spokesman for any cheez product, balls or otherwise.
I could make a childish remark about how the most common cheez incarnations are the ball and the doodle, but I wouldn’t be able to commit to it and would present it as a shameful yet courageously suppressed inclination and pretend it was your fault instead. You should work on that.
Cheez is also frequently seen in the form of the -it, about which the less said, the usual.
According to legend, the planters phased out Cheez Balls because they didn’t sell anymore they were unhealthy. You don’t get into the snack business is to sell people cheap to manufacture trash which they don’t need to be eating. Because you’re a nitwit with no head for business matters. But I tell you, there are worse things in this world than cheez.
I give you chiz. And you’re welcome.
Some people, as in: more than one, talking about cheez balls on the internet, say the balls were discontinued in 2006. Suddenly! A page from 2008 documents a person finding them in a store! Great piggly wiggly! But, you know, they’re CANNED. And the cans are sealed. Those things are probably from 1998. There’s a reason people fill their bomb shelters with cans apart from being lunatics. Even if the balls are NOT fresh you’ll never know because those things will make you sick under any circumstances. Not that one needs the help with this visual accompaniment. I can tell you that if there IS a nuclear war… and the only things in your shelter are cheez balls… then you probably caused the war by hoarding them! I can’t believe you sometimes!
griph sez:
There is a Crazy Person around me who is constantly posting things up on switchboxes. One recent one had a request that the Utz people make their spokes-girl a Playboy model to reflect the sexualization of advertising. Remind me to scan it.
Anonymous sez:
Surely that jar is a party in and of itself. And do they really call that terrifying porcelain doll thing “Utzy”? If they don’t, they probably should. Not because it’s a good name, but because it isn’t.
I find it both curious and worrisome that all of the smaller, descriptive text on the McDonald’s Man bag is in Swedish, yet the large text on the main logo is in English. This is a disturbing trend. What’s more, considering that the Z-based spelling is, unlike the Planters and Jack & Jill brands, also used in the adjective forms, it is distinctly possible that the designer of the bag, being a non-native speaker, may think that “cheez” is the proper (or at least a legitimate) spelling. Take note, US-based marketing folks–Your slovenly misuse of language is poisoning the world.
Incidentally, may I ask precisely how you always manage to track down these strange and badly named food products? ‘Tis quite the gift/curse. Note that these capacities are not mutually exclusive.
Jumbi sez:
This reminds me of the snacks my grandmother used to keep for us, and that made me laugh.
She has since grown out of it. However, her mother has now gained the habit. I am not sure what that means.
Fonbiyulb sez:
Griphity:
Hey, whatever happened to that switchbox thing you were going to scan?
I hope this Crazy Person’s suggested change involves aging the character a few years, because, not so much that there aren’t a lot of professional artists with pedophile complexes, but I don’t think Playboy hires its models that young most of the time and therefore the plausibility suffers.
Mysterious stranger:
Utzy is a name of my own creation, or at least the Y is. There is also a Grandma Utz, who seems to come from a different dimension than Utzy, based on their inverse proportions and different pigmentations. Or maybe Utzy is merely a hypothermic macrocephalic. Maybe she’s related to Kickle Cubicle. That’s just the way it goes in my “doll collection.”
One of the image results for “cheez balls” was “cheese ball,” on this page on the site for The World’s Finest Food. I seem to have been just in time, too, as I cannot now duplicate the search, google’s malevolent robospider having covered its tiny octotracks. I merely scrolled down a bit and turned up both chiz curls and our humpy. Super Cheez Doodles came about when I wanted something to illustrate my doodle point. I was intending to use Wise brand but this one suited me better. It was right there with the first group of results, and quite large. I don’t recall how I came upon Super Piratos.
Jumbity:
I fear that it means cheez runs in your family.
My grandmother used to buy “chewy” Chips Ahoy. The ones in the red bags. It’s possible I at one point believed she made them herself because they were always in a special transparent cylindrical cookie-stack container rather than the store bought packaging, which was always disposed of before visitors arrived. I hope you never had to go through any part of your life believing your grandmother was personally responsible for cheez balls.