look at this, candy accumulated by my seven-year-old niece on Halloween, even two nights later, after she went to bed, and there is still good stuff left and milk duds. Where was this kind of payout when I was that age? No necco wafers, no monster munny, no bit-o-honey, no good-n-plenty, laffy taffy, walnuts, candy corn. Meanwhile, maybe twelve or fewer actual children came to my house collecting candy this year. Based on that and the load before me there must be substantially more people giving out candy than going out to be given candy. AND behold the humble expectations of this shoddy little plastic bucket. everyone i knew in the oaf days brought a big old pillow case or shopping bag when collecting, and probably ended up with less stuff than this in it.
granted, in addition to the shoddy stuff I don’t see, I also don’t the generally edible whoppers, 100 grand, rolos, junior mints, not even nerds or bottle caps. There are definitely fewer TYPES of candy being given out. Some of the fun of collecting is in the weird variety, and there isn’t much here. Did everybody in this area go to the same store? SOME of whom may have done an inordinate amount of shopping at that same store after hearing a local rumor that kids from other neighborhoods get driven over to this one in great numbers and quickly deplete the candy reserves of those who are unprepared?

maybe that is a local hazing prank. This is all the candy that was left over, not including what was still in the offering bowl. I had naught to do with it, however; I never buy reese’s junk. Because I want to be able to eat it afterward if nobody comes to take it. I noticed, with rare exception, the chocolate variety bulk packages at stores -always- try to force some peanut butter junk in there because peanut butter is cheaper for the companies than chocolate but they can charge the same amount and also get to act like it is a feature. I hate Reese.

and now you’re disgusting. I don’t know WHO it is but I want to KILL Reese with a spoon. To think I felt BAD for him when I watched Terminator. saying “not sorry” is like saying “not gonna lie” or “wait for it” in that it communicates absolutely no direct information but does provide indirect information that you should be punched in the nose.

I saw this and questioned if charleston chew was anybody’s favorite anything, except for adults who enjoy punishing children at halloween. They look like they are firm on the outside and soft on the inside and will be pleasant to bite into, but they have the same pencil eraser-like consistency the whole way through. Afterward I experienced an, i thought, unusually high amount of replies claiming to actually enjoy eating these things. to be fair, while frozen, something I never thought to do as a child, but did find necessary and functional with incidental milk duds in later years. Meanwhile reese cups remain distasteful to me at any temperature in ever-growing numbers, while Charleston Chew, good old Charlie C, who was always there for me, and I never realized it, thought I hated him and left town. Has Reese ruined my one true chance at happiness?

A bit more disturbing to me personally, the mother of some children across the street, prior to seeing off her brood for the candy-grab jaunt, was talking to my sister about one of her sons, who appeared to be dressed as Iceman from Megaman, of all things, with a pale face and blue parka, though I could not hear what she was saying. I saw my sister issue a gesture of “no I don’t know what that is” as I got closer. Then the mother saw and turned to me instead, to ask, “are you familiar with the video game under tayul?” and having that suddenly off the internet and real was so bizarre and unpleasant that I forgot what was real and half-consciously said “i try not to be” without considering that the person wearing that costume could hear me, and I noticed he looked rather sullen in the moments afterward before the group journeyed onward. Or maybe he is always like that. Or maybe that is part of the character, despite the smirky memes I have been accosted by. I didn’t exactly say “it is so ubiquitous and associated with easily-manipulable socially mutated mediocrity fetishizing cultists who think they are great people that it literally makes me sad and unlike the cartoon horse worship of ten years ago it never goes away because its members have convinced themselves it is “independent” even though people with followings larger than the population of Estonia have been financing and promoting it since before it existed” so I may be overthinking the incident. Having that as a costume, an unrecognizable cheap costume at that, for a few hours, is a long way from trying to sell or trying look like you are in good with people who sell non-fungible tokens. All he wanted were fudgible tokens.

NO, “trunk or treat” is NOT normal, it should not BECOME normal, nor should it become twit-commercialized and robbed of what little organic value it has. potentially the fact that I didn’t see any discounted candy but did find a full display of these on november 5 indicates that it isn’t being bought like it’s normal yet. Not that I NEED discounted candy because my house is already overflowing with full price “but it was on sale” pre-halloween candy but I still like to check on it and see how it is doing.

I should be glad I haven’t see under terror merchandise in any stores, (as much as twitter dorks will go quite out of their ways to let me know they acquired some) even though I know substantially more about every nuance of it without ever once trying than Overwatch, which I HAVE seen on junk at the super market, yet the only fact I know about it is that one of the main characters wears ridiculous skin-tight yellow pants. I suppose I could call the lot of them under-desired and over-exposed. haaaaaah my back hurts.

10-23-2019 is anybody still out there? no? I am going to get back to updating this anyway, but I was curious. I have only had things to say recently that transition into bitter related topics, and generally nobody else has a taste for those, nor should they, and those take a long time to write, besides. when I am slightly less paranoid about pressing deadlines, real and imagined, I can potentially write something that is angry in less of a sad way again.
i left that up for two weeks because anything in the running to replace it that I could have posted fast without saying something inflammatory would have been worse.
…………………….

I wonder why they need new staff

This was in Guilford Connecticut. at first I thought this was too much and had to stop there to take a picture of the sign on my way back, and at that point it occurred to me that this is probably in fact a gag to get exposure and of course it got me to stop when i would not otherwise have.
Supporting the “gag” explanation, I have seen the exact same text highlighted as unintentional humor in the context of fast food restaurants several times in the past, but the improperly attached G at the end is throwing me off.

deliberately searching for the text showing up wendy’s repeatedly speaks even more to it being marketing disguised as incompetence.

I clearly remember very similar text appearing in a Burger King advertisement that was reproduced in National Lampoon’s True Facts: the book, published circa 1995, and it looked like its initial publication greatly predated that of the book. And at a later point somebody sent it to Jay Leno for his Headlines sketch under the pretext that they had found it in the wild themselves rather than in a book that was specifically showcasing inadvertent silliness correctly assuming that tonight show staff would not know or care. On another occasion Jay read aloud some ridiculous Dan Quayle quotes that were in fact deliberately ridiculous fake ones printed in Mad Magazine a decade prior to then. However, the “now hiring” is new and I have only seen it in the context of wendy’s signs, and never on wendy’s signs without that part so I must conclude that it is intentional.

I would have believed these were fabricated images made by a “meme generator” that allows people to easily customize fake sign text had I not encountered one in person. indeed the middle sign on my montage heap I was unable to find without additional obnoxious no-joke-is-too-obvious meme text slathered over it which is why it is cropped so strangely.
the incorrect G on the guilford sign indicates somebody was following orders and poorly rather than executing their own idea. Or maybe the latest order is to screw up at least one letter since meme generators usually do not supply incorrect letters.

however, on another occasion in 2014 somebody, perhaps the samebody, mistook a dollar sign for an S. Or perhaps the letter box only comes with two Ses. Or perhaps this means to subtly mock the Michael Jackson estate that in 2014 still owned the rights to the Beatles song catalog and could demand royalties on mere usages of the terminology “strawberry fields” even though there is no reason this would be called that if not for the Beatles song continuing to be considered part of public consciousness. The secret ingredient message also only includes two Ses so that may be more probable.

I still prefer the enticing mystery of “FISH IS BACK” (which also only includes 2 of S) Where had fish gone? Why is it back? Did it succeed on its mission? Does it intend to make us miserable since it failed?

according to legend, outside the north haven wendy’s i witnessed a sign advertising their Frosty product but had spelled it as “fpofty,” which had such an effect on me that someone I knewish online nicknamed fr0sty I had taken to calling fp0fty but I never told him that. I spent longer than was reasonable last week trying to find that picture but couldn’t which may have contributed to the frustration inherent in that last mess I posted. I only turned up a shot of the same location’s sign from a later point by which time they had found the R but lost the F while they set about advertising jalapeno presco chicken.

Wendy’s seems to occupy quite a bit of space in my mind considering I don’t ever go there. Not just because I haven’t forgiven them for replacing Roy Rogers in Connecticut (though I haven’t), also because the price of their food has doubled in fifteen years so its only real appeal is being less shoddy than the relatively still cheap McDonaldses in towns like these that lack Burger Kings, and presumably that setup suits them both.

Somebody on the deviantart website has already conceived of the public representative of that collusion without realizing it.
flurk I was in Liverpool England for ONE day in June and saw about three burger kings, and that is not a nation that takes kindly to additional claimants to the throne.
Incidootily, Taco Bell now longer has cheap in its corner either. For a while it was possibly to find combination Taco Bell/Kentucky Fried Chicken stores, but all I know of eventually dumped kfc, and I presumed that was because you could get a taco for 89 cents but the cheapest single item of chicken was three dollars. However, on my most recent occasion 9 tacos cost me about $17, the same as an 8-piece bucket of chicken, that would take me twice as long to eat, be much less complicated to order and whose contents it would not be necessary to thoroughly confirm the accuracy of before I leave the establishment. But there isn’t either of those in guilford so the topic does not usually come up.

in fact there is a magical barrier along interstate highway 91 and a weaker one across i395 further east that keeps kentucky fried chicken out of any place that I would feel like driving to under ordinary circumstances. The i395 one is weaker because the eastern half of connecticut is a miserable clam chowder framed picture of boats magazines about lighthouses white baseball hat wealthy boron retirement community that I stay away from anyway.

is this funny to you, wendel?

hold on now pardner, where d’ya think YOU’RE goin? that’s right why doncha mosey on over this way

yep it’s true, you knew it, you know it. Strike up the band, batten down the hatches, run for the border, hang your stocking and say your prayers: cheap chicken is back. you thought i was gone for good! you doubted i would survive the results of your vile treachery. you thought you could make me pay full price. you thought you could bully me into adequately seeing to my own needs. just watch me bid $1 on the price is right. watch me opt for ups ground shipping and save two dollars to get my item three days late. you will believe one chicken can stand up for the difference between a “use by” and “sell by” date. and now y’ain’t NEVAH gettin ridda me! That’s right, cheap chicken is BACK and EVERY DAY!

E
 
V
 
E
 
R
 
Y
 
D
 
A
 
Y

Cheap chicken is HERE TA STAY! That’s right, just when you thought you were-

huh whuh a-HWuh?! What’s happening? What’s going on? Oh?

OH? Just who do you think you are dealing with? How do you intend tWLAAAAHHHHGHGHSSSSHHHHHHHHHHFFFFFFFFF

Attention citizens: The cruel sorcerer from the outworld, Cheap Chicken, has been cast back into its circular orange interdimensional portal and the portal sealed by our nation’s finest counter-sorcery experts, who guarantee the portal will not open again for a thousand years,

provided the 8 chicken cubes are not compromised or removed from their shrines. Return to work, go on about your lives, our long national nightmare is over. Rest safely knowing cheap chicken will NEVER be back.

I referred to this but forget to place a link. I’m sure you will find this invaluable.

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

I’m behind on my comic strip, anything written for this website, my college class schedule is ridiculous because I made it with the intent that I would live nearby, which I have failed to achieve, my chosen major is not anything with practical applications, yet I struggle with it, and I still can’t legally drive a car. HOWEVER…

True success! I have now truly mastered the Dungeons of the Unforgiven! But didn’t I do that a few years ago? No, I had merely completed the game under actual adequate conditions. I decided getting through a game with draconian level up policies and roving gangs of hostile, invincible rubbish bins that deletes your save file if your character dies wasn’t difficult enough, so I generated a player character that was utterly insufficient for the mere task of surviving; using the “monk” character class. Monks are the absolute worst class (yes, even worse than amphibia).

While monks are popularly known for their ability to perform astounding feats of acrobatics and concentration and match traditional orange robes with brand name sneakers, Moraff monks proceed cautiously and are afraid of things that most players don’t even notice, leading me to suspect that Moraff based his version on the Tony Shaloub character.

In addition to not backup up my character data, I refrained from making use of the inter-module escape tunnels, and the

magical respawning level 0 garbage can which drops dead instantly when approached but often leaves helpful trinkets behind. As helpful as you’d expect from a sentient waste receptacle, anyhow. It returns to the exact spot of its vapourization moments later and can be murdered and plundered over and over again. Yes, so, I denied myself even this glorious privilege.

Monks get the least hit and spell points and will not carry rings of regeneration, essential survival items, for spiritual reasons.

Fortunately they have no such reservations about hauling huge heaps of Worthless Greater American Dollars around. They are the Yang Song of the dungeon, and designed to die.

Do you know how hard it is to have a leadership of 1? You get 5 just for successfully ordering french fries at… eh… say, where should I get my french fries?

I have taken Moraff’s toughest challenge and been victorious. But in a sense, it is also his greatest curse; in the past such a character would be killed quickly and I could go and do something else. In fact, it DID die, once, but so quickly that I thought a retry was in order.

The longer this ineffectual figure lives, the less I live. It cannot win, only persist. I have very much in common with Pudensis, the gender-confused (the first one was female, the second was male), rodent monk.

This is another view of the Demon Queen as seen by a taller person. I like it because it looks like a really bad postcard.

Getting through all this took me about a day’s worth of hours across half a week, but what would I have done instead? Read the Southern Connecticut State University course catalog? Registered for classes pertinent to my interests? Actually prepared for them? Clearly there were more pressing and educational matters to tend at (Such as framing my Morvard rejection letter). I am a pioneer in making bad games less interesting and more tedious than ever. My place in history is secured. I may do well to drop the classes I did sign up for and write a book about this experience.
The Moraff scholars among you might have noticed that I have only played to the end of the first dungeon in the game, and have not yet entered the subsequent easier identical modules. Well we all need something to look forward to in life!

Aw bees, I wish I’d thought of that!

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.

In other news, Humpy Dumpy. NEW Humpy Dumpy. Don’t worry, it’s only margarine FLAVOR. This merely creates the impression of having dipped a corn chip directly into a goopy vat of generic butter substitute. Because who has the time these days?

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!

cakecakecakecakecakecakecakecakecakecakecakecakecakecakecake

I like your bread, Chabasco, but you’re not my mother.

Choose mountain dew color based on War-Craft allegiance, please. And sure, as long as that’s important to you, go ahead and buy ten. Although I can’t help noticing that red potion favors green bald guys and the blue potion favors pink ladies. Maybe the dewsters had some old formula left over from a Double Dare promotion 15 years ago, or the only two player video game they had in the office was Contra. Unfortunately, it’s still Mountain Dew. Although this is probably to the benefit of the pink ladies, as the huge green oafs already, I suspect, can take bigger beatings, and everybody knows the red kind refills all your hearts twice, so this would give a very unfair advantage to oafkind, me thinks.

Huh? Hwahzaw?

Oh, ho, it is not “still” Mountain Dew. Now it is Mtn Dew. Spelling stuff right is officially considered throwing back. Like, get with the program, puzzlewit. Unless you’d like to help us unload some old, unsold, flat, particle-separated inventory in a zanily misguided quest for nostalgia. If you really want to take me back, try tickling my innards with your manhuntin’ firearms and Appalachian stereotypes.

Kentucky Fried Chicken to “KFC” i can understand, because it’s a mouthful (of chemically-infused, frankensteinian steroided up grease flavored meat product that by the way animals were bred in captivity, abused in tiny cages, and killed to make (which I lamentably enjoy eating occasionally)), but mountain is only two syllables with no negative, truthful connotations to distract people from. In fact, the word “mountain” was about the LEAST creepy thing printed on the bottle (“dew,” is, afterall, a near-homophone for a childish euphemism for dog excrement). It’s like the Pepsikooks thought “gosh, mountain dew just isn’t inorganic and mysterious enough! How can we make it seem LESS natural? Apart from turning it red and putting shrek stand-ins on the label, I mean.” It’s not as if there isn’t inadequate space to spell out “mountain” in. Nor is the background better off for absence of letters. Get me more green starfoxy void, STAT! Maybe there’s something inherently extreme about abbreviations. Awkward, vowel-less abbreviations of single words.

Yo, hk m up wid sm o dat blu dew. I wld ttly swm in that, fo shew. Thn we tlk bznz. Excuse me. I don’t speak nintendo password.

And this news article is full of lies.
Theater carnies don’t need to raise popcorn prices to stay in business. They “need” to raise popcorn prices to maintain the same ridiculous profit slope they’ve had going since they first shouldn’t have. That article tries to make these bozoinks seem like heroes for fighting to save my popcorn. Yeeh, you’ll pay “whatever it takes to get popcorn planted,” because whatever that takes will still end up being less than what you charge for it, you redenbastid.

I don’t read the Los Angeles Times. I don’t read the any times. I don’t have time for times because I get so mad about things written in them that it takes me six greedeen hours to assemble my rage into incomprehensible messes like you see before you. Someone else must have found that link and told me about it. But ehhh:
Two years ago, a farmer charged about $10 for 100 pounds of popcorn. Today it’s about $20.
A ridiculous increase, sure, assuming absolutely no fabrication and projecting have taken place, but that’s still two dollars for ten pounds (in other words: the approximate opposite of the current US-UK exchange rate). I know there’s transportation, storage and disgusting fake butter which makes the entire purchase inedible not included in that cost, but how does one dollar for five pounds become five dollars for… I can’t even tell. I was going to say “half a pound” but I think that’s mostly the non-recyclable wax-paper container. Popcorn doesn’t weigh very much at all. I don’t know the exact figures, but they probably get like five-thousand bags of popcorn from one pound of the hard brown things and, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but some of them don’t even pop.
These kookaburras wouldn’t have told you two years ago that they were paying one dollar for ten pounds. At that rate, we ought to have been getting complimentary popcorn.

“If we didn’t charge as much for concessions as we did, the tickets to the movies would cost $20,” said Mike Campbell, chairman and chief executive of Regal Entertainment Group, the nation’s largest theater chain with 6,300 screens.
So charge twenty dollars, you pith. This scrum-bum admits his business practices are deceitful. I doubt he invented this practice, but I also doubt he ever questioned it. Maybe tickets would cost $20, but it would be obvious to everyone they wouldn’t need to. That also suggests popcorn only costs 2-3 times what it ought to. Maybe they should close the six thousand three hundred big loud expensive wasteful movie display systems they can’t afford and just sell popcorn since that’s clearly so much easier to overcharge for.
Gargoyles, you know why tickets don’t cost 20 dollars yet? Because if prices don’t rise at a steady incline we don’t get to name a new HIGHEST GROSSING MOVIE OF ALL TIME which may not necessarily be the same as the HIGHEST OPENING WEEKEND OF ALL TIME! every fiddling year, putting THE MOVIES back on THE FRONT PAGE.

The price of pop-corn in theaters hasn’t a thing to do with the cost of actual corn. Ehhh, unless you’d have me believe the raisinet and soda crops are getting replaced with ethanol fodder, too, because that can’t be had for less than four dollars most places, either. “Beverages provided by coca cola” my beanbag. Beverages provided by my dollars. Ooh dis. That stupid line is the only thing I remember about the pre-preview rule rundown. Which is unfortunate, because that means I yell at the screen, don’t turn off my telephone and make my garbage into stylish hats instead of disposing of it in the indicated garbage can. When will I learn?

For years, popcorn manufacturers have offset their rising costs by developing new hybrids that expand more. A few years back, a typical popcorn kernel expanded about 35% in volume when it was cooked. That figure has reached nearly 50% today, but the expansion rate can’t really get much higher, as movie audiences would essentially be eating little more than salty air.
This plan gets put on hold until the time comes to convince consumers they should buy their air.
So despite its intended message, the article admits that the kernels are popped harder than they used to be so they expand more, filling more space, requiring a lesser quantity of corn to fill the container. And yet prices did not go down when less corn was used! It has also recently been revealed to me that in some cases it is not corn at all but

the shrunken heads of white-haired bearded men, which I guess are cheaper to obtain? I don’t want to eat that!

Even with such an admission that article is still a parcel of porridge, because tickets around here don’t cost seven dollars. They cost seven dollars and fifty cents. Ha, ha! Oh, and after 6 pm, they are ten dollars. I could buy 50 chicken nuggets for that! Maybe I will. No no, not nuggets. I will get popcorn chicken. That costs less than real popcorn, and birds have to be murdered to get that, and those ate corn. All the cruelty and irony would overload my brain and I’d fall under a coma for three years/ever during which I wouldn’t have to worry about these things.

Regal regal regal. In the event you can’t tell from the poster pimping the immenent hostile occupation by SHREK THE THIRD (because you’ve undergone therapy to block it from your mind), I took this picture over a year ago. Who’da thunk popcorn cost SEVEN DOLLARS before my wallet was getting bites taken out of it? Verily, the 7 dollar order is a moderately decadent bucket you could probably wear as a helmet in the event you were blind and not in serious need of protection, but the 5.50 purchase is a standard sized paper bag (with wax coating). If greater corn economics were a concern, the three sizes would have more disparity between them to encourage the buying of less popcorn for more money. Instead, you get to thinking “gee biz, it’s only a dollar fifty more, and look at how much extra pop corn I get!” because regardless of how much they sell they still have more corn than they can give away, so they might as well sell a huge bucket that most people won’t finish, even accompanied by something resembling proper butter.

Thanks to holding a massive inventory of uncooked popcorn, the Regal theater chain won’t have to raise its popcorn price immediately but probably will have to eventually.
Whoa, thanksh a bunch there! That means for some time it will continue to be only seven dollars! Let the good times roll! I mean pop! Deeeeeeee!

but probably will have to eventually. “The prices will have to go up a bit,” said Campbell.
URRRRGH! I just imagine the smug, smirky face he said that with. The prices will HAVE to go up. They have no choice in the matter. Modern movie theaters aren’t bloated, inefficient wastes of space, they just don’t charge enough for popcorn.

You’re so smart, howard we gonna stay in business if we don’t overcharge for popcorn, then?
You could sell a big glump of ad-time prior to all movies, set up to resemble a sub-Entertainment Tonight glib-fest which goes behind the scenes of imminent releases that have already gone out of previews and that will soon be inescapable during television commercial breaks! And you could give that ad its own commercial breaks so I forget it’s all just one big ad and possibly think you’re doing me a favor by bringing it to me! “And now back to the big ad!” Thank you so much! Yes yes, and after that you can show actual normal preview ads anyway! Huh? I mean, like, Hwuh? You already do that? And you still don’t make enough money to fund your twelve ludicrous theater rooms that I don’t think I’ve ever seen filled to capacity? Howzat now? You could always blame dvds and big television sets, and hope I don’t realize those existed six years ago when you cut down the great deku tree to build this place. Ehhh, it’s probably my fault for hiding a bottle of water in one of my big coat pockets instead of paying you three dollars for an eternally plastic water bottle I’d be just as likely to vomit into as drink out of.

Concession sales are a theater’s lifeblood, accounting for as much as 45% of profits at the nation’s largest chains. Popcorn offers one of the biggest returns on investment for exhibitors, because the unpopped kernels used to make an entire bucket of popcorn cost just a few pennies.
Great gimpity, and now it’s going to cost even more pennies! How will these people feed their families? Not with corn, definitely.

What monstrous, unscrupulous fiend would allow this disgusting sequence of events to take place?

I could cry.
This problem is bigger than popcorn, naturally: it’s not being replaced with crops that aren’t corn and demand less pesticides, just other kinds of corn, for ethanol, which I’ve never seen a reasonable person suggest is a good idea. Also, that article links to more articles. I don’t want to read them; you saw what the first one did to me. Essentially, it doesn’t matter how much better ethanol is than gasoline because coal is used to make the ethanol, and coal is worse than gasoline, and we can’t put the coal mines out of business because then we won’t get to say it’s a miracle when all the miners get trapped but look like they’re going to survive but then don’t. The only real difference is that there’s more stupid corn getting grown and more dipstipple republican gooselivers getting to collect money while pretending they give a bunkbed what happens when they’re dead. I’m sure if you do the research it all goes back to Jesus not liking gays. It always does.

I hope we run out of popcorn. I can live without it, you can live without it. The only people who seem to need it are the graboopis selling it like Leonardo DiCaprio smuggled it out of Africa. I don’t think he did!

I’ve noticed I write a lot of really long articloids in which I paranoidly expound upon issues which really don’t matter all that much. Which reminds me:

Disciplinary action? Are they going to make him sit in the Time Out chair? Will he have to stand Against the Fence during recess? I have long been of the opinion that Jay Leno’s writers don’t do all that much and the apparent ease with which he gets through the regular monologue without them, to the extent that the people representing the writers have to tell him to stop proves it. I think? The show’s best bit is Headlines, featuring news items, some of them headlines, from various publications and such, and most of them, as I understand it, are sent to the show by viewers. At most, the writers then sift through the things to decide which are funny. But you wouldn’t necessarily need a writer to do that. And all the terrible non-lenoly field segments since Howie Mandel got another job certainly don’t seem written and might as well not be. If this particular class of Leno writers out protesting means no more of those, then great. The remainder of “desk pieces” and sketch-like-presentations tend to only seem funny when a prop doesn’t function properly and Jay Leno has to cover for it. For years they would have, for who-knows-why, Gilbert Gottfried portray characters that were only funny when Jay went off the script to criticize them for forgetting the script.

KFC explains the writer’s strike. I present it in full not because I feel like addressing it in full (so don’t feel compelled to read those tiny letters) but just because I don’t want to look like I fear kfc’s 11 herbs and spices of persuasion.

So already we know we’re dealing with a masochist.

I don’t know much about the writer guild strike, because I’m not in it and don’t belong to any union, though I did follow one or two Yahoo clubs for about a week back in the day. But I know enough to see that it’s mostly valid and at any rate I could always stand to watch less dumb tv shows. All I know about KFC, who evidently has made no other post on any news article at whatever site this was, is the name KFC, which I confess I don’t necessarily associate with the task at hand. In fact, there are few situations in which I would be most inclined to agree with someone named kfc. I don’t know. On this particular occasion, I tend not to think of “kfc” and “reasonable attitude towards worker pay-rates and general well being” in the same paragraphs. Even less so if chickens count as employees.

Which is not to say this kfc doesn’t have any points, just that it’s unlikely. I don’t trust this a great deal more than I trust the person who signed up at the imdib just to give Who’s Your Caddy? a ten star rating. But maybe KFC so simply thought “I have been silent long enough. Now is the time for KFC’s feelings to be known. My recipe shall remain secret.” While KFC doesn’t seem dangerously crazy regarding this whole thing, it’s that bit about writers knowing “their place” which puts me off. Not just the phrasing and choice of words, either, though that historically has brought to my mind the thought of fat bearded oafs smacking their wives around for not fixing mah dinner. Or more recently, if a couple years past relevance, Dwayne “Rocky Melvin” Johnson ordering a coworker to “shut your mouth and know your role, jabroni” which I suppose is an improvement but still inappropriate workplace behavior in most other professions. Ooh, oh, h, also, stating advance predisposition toward the “I’ll give you something to complain about” approach to resolving disputes, which haven’t even been brought up yet, is worth monitoring. I reckon kfc is used to monitoring people so my apprehension shouldn’t be a problem.

But ehhh! You can’t just lead in some new yarbos to write all the tv shows, yarbos who don’t necessarily know what the program’s goal is or have a decent relationship with the actors. If it got that far, you would only have a new show that pretends it’s an old one. It would be like Kevin on the telephone in Home Alone 2. Credit card? Nooo problem! Every day. We’ve seen, surely, what happens to movies when important people aren’t involved with sequels and such. I mean, look what they did to the once splendid Air Bud franchise. I believe a dog can play basketball on a competitive level but baseball? Puhleeze. That kind of movie should be illegal and then I can call the pahleece.

I could have used you about fifteen seconds ago! Try and keep up!

And why we don’t get legions of non-guild writers devising a legion of non-guild sit-coms is a more complicated matter than I’m capable of going into at the moment, but I’m sure it would be slightly worse than the current situation. Not for the financiers; KFC is right that enough patrons probably don’t care sufficiently about writer justice leagues or whatever to not watch a program out of protest of a network or production company or intelligence insulting grits ‘n gristle. But they should!

Many employers will take the opportunity to be abusive, even if KFC might not, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Workers need some sort of collective power so we don’t get mafia-like organizations, to an even greater extent than they already are, firing people for arbitrary reasons and sending children into coal mines and all that sort of thing.
I can understand disagreeing with the strike, but unions in general are good things. KFC also seems to have disregarded the existence of a Screen Actors Guild, which has just as much potential to strike and would be even more obvious and obnoxious in doing so.

What KFC doesn’t understand is that it’s not about writers wanting more money. The strike is about writers wanting any money at all for the redistribution of their material in media not mentioned in their previous contracts. There’s also some stuff to do with cartoon writing and “””reality””” writing, as those writers are not involved with this strike. While I don’t know why this means Jay Leno risks a spanking and a harsh talking to for writing his own monologodonahue, I think it’s worth letting happen. I suppose.

Jay Leno doesn’t have Conan O’Funyun’s advantage of being able to act like a skeleton and dance around for 20 minutes should the need arise. The Daily Colbert have done surprisingly well, to me, without scripts, but a lot of what they do involves watching stupid moments from MSNBC and having approximately the same/opposite reaction as the audience. Deciding which clips are funny and queuing them up to play in a certain order at certain points evidently does not constitute “scripting.” And good. I like those shows. But oooh, Jay Leno can’t scribble out some jokes, some of which he’s been telling for over ten years? Eh, as far as I know he hasn’t stopped. Well, we read that story a week ago, maybe the threat was rescinded. Well don’t we owe it to our reader to verify-

Keep quiet and let me finish this!


I do hate some of those pedantic union rules, like how I’m not allowed to move this table here. No, we have to call someone to come in and move it for us. You don’t get paid on a commission, do you? I’m not trying to steal your job! I’m trying to move a table! If I tear my scottbaculoids from overexertion because I tried to move the table, it’s not like I can sue you for owning the table, because you already told me not to move it! Oh. I see. That works. Well, maybe Ron Paul can fix that. It might surprise you to know that there are just as many people writing this page as before.

All kfc famous bowls will get you are famous bowels. Ha ha ha ugh.

I suppose it’s no coincidence that “bowl” is also part of a toilet. The slogan should be “one good bowl deserves another” or “from our bowl to yours.” Oh ho, I crack me up.

We might as well toss it all in a blender and make a convenient drink. And do you know anyone who eats like that? People in ads always engulf their food in such unconvincing, often gross ways. They do the same thing with hot dogs* and Snickers Bars. First, they hold it sideways, in a Price is Right inspired position. Then they open their mouths really wide in a “wlahhhhw” fashion and slowly grind down on the thing and pulsate their mouths around while nodding their heads as if to say “oommmm hoommmm!” Who has time for that? I never did that. Even when I was six years old and I always loudly exhaled “ahhhhhhh!” after drinking Coke from of a can I didn’t do that.

*actually, I think the proper way to eat hot dogs is sideways. What I mean is that people hold the things upright, which is sideways from the most efficient way of eating one. Ehhh.

In the rare instance people not from the 1970s are shown eating the titular product (“Kentucky Fried Chicken”), they’re always holding it at opposite ends the way nobody does and smiling kookily even though it’d be impossible to take a satisfying bite out of with such a weak grasp. If you tried you’d drop it. I just thought I’d mention that.

I realize that in the making of ads like these people typically have to pretend to eat continuously throughout a day of filming because… they’re obviously really bad at making it look natural and so require a lot of takes. And yet we still end up with this as a final product. I forgot what my point was. Which is good, because it was a counter-point to what I was already saying. I face quite enough doubt already without adding my own.

There’s always room for doubt! I’ll see you shown!

But ehhh, I’m tired of KFC scheming up new ways to trick me into buying things from it other than what its name is. If there actually was a KFC within fifty miles of here, I’d make this well known. Get it: I don’t want your “sides!” I don’t want smaller pieces of chicken! I don’t want more paper and cardboard junk to throw away! This last point is alarmingly and increasingly prevalent among many food servicers. I can’t figure it out. I went to Target, recently, in search of the green Chex Mix, the primary reason I go to Target. It was not present.

There was CHOCOLATE Chex Mix, though, and a pleasant space where the green Chex Mix should have been. Because what better complements a salty savory snack than chocolate? I’m surprised KFC doesn’t put that in the famous bowls. While there are chocolate covered pretzels, I never seem to find them in my mouth.

And when I say “green chex mix” I mean the “hot m spicy” variety, not apple cinnamon, which is also much more ridiculous and much easier to locate.

What I did purchase found itself wrapped in two plastic bags at the buying counter while my attention was diverted by enormous scary monochromatic people painted on the wall. Quite a devious tactic, I must say.

I don’t even know what to do with one bag, and now I have two!

And no, the suggestions printed on the bags concerning what to do with the bags don’t help. If it was up to me, I would have figured you out you wouldn’t be trying to give me plastic bags. In conclusion, Target without good Chex Mix is Wal Mart, and I don’t need to travel to Old Saybrook or wherever to find one. Also, this.