My father James Thomas Cunningham is dead. And has been for a month. Well it was supposed to be a month, which actually would have been marked yesterday. Well WELL at first this was to be within the first week but hrm hah urm. I had difficulty writing something readable on the topic. Nonetheless I have embedded appropriately inappropriate messages within the images for if you hover your mouse cursor over them, like always.

Ever since it happened, or at least the first two weeks, I occasionally wrote a little note about it, in the hope of making a proper public post on the topic. But it never came together, because I did not want it to be depressing. I already make the positive updates depressing! But I do not feel like this was a good death, either. He deserved better, from me most of all. From November 1998 onward I did not speak to him, or in any place where I thought he could hear me. Not out of hatred, but simple, or rather complicated psychological blockage. And people generally did not accept this. I could not explain how it worked, and how their suggestions for how to fix it were totally non-applicable. And I would say now, looking back, it drew directly from the absence of fundamental human decency I experienced at the school I attended at that time, Cedarhurst in Hamden Connecticut curse them to heaping heck. Initially I stopped speaking there, and my father had the job of bringing me to various doctor appointments and one hospitalization that those monsters forced me into under threat of custody revocation, and without deliberately meaning to I transferred my speech prohibition to any time I was in his company. And gradually through the years following, owing to one illness and illness treatment side effect after another, the quality of my father’s life declined. It was only after I returned from an apartment I had in New Haven, and became his more or less constant in-home companion that the guilt from not talking began to overpower whatever force kept me from speaking, succeeding at last maybe in mid-2015. He did not even have two years remaining. And by that point he was almost more obligation than parent to me. Our relationship was healing, finally, after far too much sadness, but I do not feel like we finished the job. It was hard to be with him without resenting the job to some degree. I tried to ask him things nobody else would ask, and understand what he went through, and do things for him that nobody else would think to, assuming he had little time left. But I thought I would have more notice than I did, since the reduction of his physical abilities had always been gradual. One day he could speak, eat and move through the house with some level of assistance, and the next he could do nothing at all, confined to a hospital bed with tubes down his throat, on account of his myocard infarcting. Not even related to the prostate cancer, cerebral ataxia, immobilizing tremors, rib and spine injuries, but those things meant that he was not expected to survive heart surgery. There was no chance to take inventory of what we never got to and deal with it. No time to do something as simple as ask what his favorite movies were so that I could get copies of them and let him watch all that stuff instead Bones and Law & Order reruns he had already seen 4 times apiece. He was legally alive another two weeks, but not in a consistently coherent state, owing to more weird medications and stress, presumably, and not in a place that I would call comfortable.

We could even have finished watching Breaking Bad; we had the dvds, and had started to watch it, with my mother, also. But eventually their schedules diverged, and by the time they verged again we also had the Game of Thrones dvds and those had the higher pointless death to minute of airtime ratio and therefore took precedence.

Yes so we shared that, but the show wasn’t finished, was it. Presumably there will be closure in that somewhere, eventually.

Somebody in East Haven, Connecticut, actually wanted to pay my father to make methamphetamine. He was a chemist who could make stuff other people couldn’t. Certainly I don’t think he aspired to be a Walter White sort of person but he appreciated the subject matter –he liked to identify the element symbols used in the opening credits– and to some degree I have to think related to the character more than most people would, including having cancer and not being appreciated for his skills; he started a business with a partner who eventually cheated him out of it, and there are ASPECTS of the television character which might be seen as fantasy fulfillment.

I wondered if I should mention this on the internet at all. It is important to my life, and affects, and has affected what I do, but I hate dealing with people reacting to it in a rote manner. At the funeral wake thing, one after another people I barely knew approached me to say “sorry for your loss.” Why? Who are you? Why are you sorry for MY loss? The poor man whose crushed bone dust is in the box over there lost more than I did! I do not know what to say to people except “it is alright, it was not your fault.” Or “eh it is part of life. And death, I suppose.” Most of them probably did not want to say the line to me, but they SAW me, and thought: “oh pringles we made eye contact. if I don’t say ‘sorry for your loss’ to THAT one now it will blab to the people here that I actually need to like me.”
I appreciate that persons want to be helpful, but I think very few of them sincerely do.

It is the same reason I keep my birth date a secret on the internet; I hate dealing with rote reactions from those whom I barely know, and then feeling like I owe each of them a unique, non-rote response, and then worrying that I now owe them unique birthday wishes when the time comes, and I do not have the energy for it. And I would be even worse at condolence-issuing. Fortunately in person nobody can see that I already gave the same reply to the person before them, so that at least I kept under control. The funeral scene is not for ME. The death was six days ago by that point, and I had grieved before then, before the death occurred, even. Afterward, getting the funeral to happen and visitors coordinated and met and all that, plus local family grieved with and reassured and all that, I was gosh darn exhausted by the time of the semi-public event. And then that was not even the end of it since there was a large dinner gathering following it, and people who had traveled to attend all this were still around a few days following that. However much I surprisingly enjoyed their company, it was tiring. I do not want condolences, just a break.

But until then wishing me well is meaningless, especially if it comes, as it did plenty, from somebody whose life would be no different were it me who was dead. And I am not demanding special attention, either; I just wish we all could spend less time pretending.

And less money on mopey parties for people to pretend at. Did you know that even a non-frilled cremation costs over three thousand dollars? And somehow having a little ceremony for it, a newspaper notice and a box to put the bone dust in costs $2000 more. And it isn’t even a FANCY box. We could have bought a fancy urn but there was concern about being permitted to bring it on an airplane if we wished to transport the ashes someplace else. Obviously this is because you could easily hide three ounces of water inside one.

We should not force ourselves to be sad because we think etiquette dictates it, and we certainly should not dive deeper into debt for the opportunity. I am terribly fortunate that whatever arbitrary force made my parents feel like they had to put all their children into Catholic schools was not in effect by the time half of them were dead and it allowed us to have a traditionally incongruous karaoke conclusion.

This is the picture that got placed on the ash box. It is a good picture, and it occurred during our 1989 visit to England, my father’s native country, but I have no idea whose dog that is.

Perhaps my foremost regret is that I never communicated how important he was, or had been, in introducing me to some of my favorite things.

Even if I did not always like the same things; I never liked futbol, Harry Potter or fish+chips, but definitely stuff that I knew of on account of him stuck with me my whole life following their introductions. For example, Rupert Bear books had been sent by my English grandmother to my family for several years in the 1980s (and for longer to my father’s brother’s family, who were a bit older), and I never got rid of them. I enjoyed John Harrold’s artwork, and it inspired how I drew a few things, long after the books’ initial acquisition. I am told I even once had a sweater with Rupert pictured on it that this grandmother made for me, but I have no evidence of this.

My appreciation for classical music started with my father. And I hate to condense centuries of artistic expression and styles into a single “genre” but that is beside the point for now. On his last day of open communication, Friday the 21, when he was done with life support and yanked all the tubes out, so at least he could speak and take liquid sustenance again, I quickly set up a playlist of music that he had used to listen to that I had always kept track of –he asked only for “Beethoven” and I knew precisely what he meant, and he seemed glad to hear it, and sadly I did not get through the list before Jeopardy came on

(Jeopardy! I still watch that), and he was still calling out answers to the end, and afterward he preferred the quiet. But being able to share that back was meaningful to me. I didn’t get to Smetana’s Moldau, one of the primary pieces, with Beethoven’s sixth symphony and Holst’s Jupiter, among others, that remind me of my father. Or rather I started it, but since the beginning is so subdued I think he didn’t recognize it, or maybe he did, but it reminded him of the Canals of Mars level in the NES version of Toobin’. So rather than try and jump to the distinct part I skipped it entirely.

That was a joke, but my appreciation of certain video games, Dragon Warrior and Romance of the Three Kingdoms foremost, two of the slowest, more inaccessible titles on the NES ever to be localized, I saw my father playing first, and eventually took a liking to, and I thought I was quite a bit smarter than anybody who thought those were boring, and this led to continuing fascination with that sort of thing. I even at some point read the original [translated] Three Kingdoms novel that inspired the video games, which is to date the longest thing I have read. I believe I also first saw him playing Landstalker (or trying to), my perhaps favorite sega genesis game, but that is only appropriate to mention with regard to a screenshot I ended up putting in this entry too late to be relevant to this paragraph. My father’s general Britishness struck me, as a small child, as being in some way superior to common American habits, and even if that was not accurate, it helped me to look outside a box I might otherwise not have. I even said so on one of my earliest terrible but preservable web pages back in whenever that was.

And I have alluded to all these things on numerous occasions throughout my years of frivolous website production, and I think my father, of all people, might have appreciated it, especially when I was not able to speak to him –So many of the strange quotes I adorn my entries with and that surely confound of those who attempt to read the dumb things, come from strange old movies that my father would have on the television, or the stranger advertising– but by 2001 or so, before I was writing regularly, and long before I was writing half-competently, he no longer wanted, or no longer could use a computer and certainly would not have had time to read my rubbish weekly. And it was never my way to impose nonsense on others. I wouldn’t go and print out pages and pages of this and assume it had a purpose. Occasionally when I had art prints I might show those, but a great majority of my drawings have never been printed, and my sketchbooks are messy and incomprehensible, even for me, who does not require spectacles.
Indeed for the most part my father probably had no idea what I was doing. And he was supposedly proud of me anyway. That does eat at me inside: He was content with me being totally worthless and I never got to prove that I wasn’t!

One tribute to him, in a sense, that I am sad to say he did not know about, and that to my knowledge nobody else did either, even though I drew it just over ten years ago, is the way the creature “kumquat” types on its computer device is based on how my father did back when he could still use a computer. One finger at a time, alternating. Even by early 1998 (prior to my problem) when we first had home internet, my father’s coordination was not stellar. It was not long before he was asking me to type out replies for him when another user of the AOL trivia whatsit accused him of lurking in the game for long enough that the questions looped around. He had me explain, in considered detail, that while he had observed that behavior in others, he would not do such a thing, and he knew the answers he knew because of this this and that, but the person had already logged off, not concerned with whether they were actually right (and, I have to think, probably lost the trivia game due to THAT tendency) and in those days that meant you just plain could not send a message to the person. Argh what a scumbag! My one opportunity to fight for my father’s trivihonor and I wasn’t fast enough. My only hope is to make that incident into a bit of useless trivia itself.

In fact, that I recall, I do not think I ever drew anything for my father, except a really crummy photograph imitation watercolor painting of a pelican. In 2012, before I could speak to him in person, I had become able to speak over the telephone, and I asked what his favorite animal was, thinking that I could imitate photographs of animals in physical media in a way that is pleasing, and that would be easier than any other thing my father would possibly want art work of,

based on my experience with this manner of product. I had not considered that I chose this picture not due to there being birds in it, but rather to its suitability to the task of imitation by me, due to an abundance of vague but colorful details. The pelican scene featured complicated but specific feathers, a limited range of colors and a view of the sea where the light reflection made it seem mostly white, but the imitation to look like I have a fundamental, pre-school-level misunderstanding of what water looks like.
It was so bad that i never showed it to its intended recipient until that last Friday, in the hospital, since I had such massive guilt about what I just told you. A bit later somebody had propped it against a wall in the room with the wrong side up. That is how bad it was. I became the classic delusional artist joke, where two people take turns turning the canvas around to try and determine which orientation is correct. The stuff that I knew how to draw well I was always embarrassed by. Nobody in my family has a “fursona.” And thank goodness but for people who do, it is at least much easier to figure out exactly what to draw, and usually not very difficult.

February 26 of this year, the last time my father went to a restaurant. Zhang’s Madison, the closest restaurant to our home, since he did not like to travel at all by this point. But his sixty-fifth birthday had been on Tuesday, the 21 of February. “Oh two, two one, five two,” as I heard enunciated as clearly as he was able in countless doctor waiting room visits. often multiple times the same trip since the people in that building don’t communicate, and don’t realize you already proved your sanity once to them today. Anyway, something moderately special seemed called for. He is seen here drinking his customary “Coke…. NO ice,” with the latter part usually appended just as the server is leaving. In fact he preferred Mountain Dew, but through the magic of corporate contracts those two are mutually exclusive offerings in any food service establishment. I think he possibly learned that habit from me. Before I stopped speaking, he took me to and from therapist appointments, and I remember stopping at the McDonalds on the highway and ordering the then new “crispy chicken deluxe,” and with none of the customary unspeakable goop on it, which the employees could handle, and a large coke with no ice, which they could not handle. With no ice because nobody can drink ice, but I could drink a lotta coke, and you can fit more in there without the ding dang ice. Presumably the ice is to save THEM money on soda, even though that is probably the cheapest to produce thing in the entire store, a category in which there is fierce competition at a McDonalds. And sometimes servers aren’t mentally equipped to process “no ice” and assume, through what seems to me a more strenuous stretch of logic, that I must have meant “no sugar,” and I end up with a huge undrinkable cylinder of diet coke, just about as undrinkable as the ice in there with it. This all seems to be mostly about me, but I have few coherent memories from when I was on good terms with my father and he could actually do things. Everything afterward has regret attached, so I will take what i can get.

I am fortunate that the recent deceased got to 65 years; many people lose parents at younger ages, and without even the little amount of awareness that it is coming which I had. Not everybody has a father, and some have no parents who love them at all. This could have been worse. Much as this entry could have been much longer; I removed or did not attempt to implement several parts that seemed attached to a different narrative, and perhaps I will see those later.

But right now I need a break! Preferably to do something non-depressing in.

Thank you for your time and consideration in these matters.

Hey, do you want to read about voting? Neither do I! You can read it first.

This is less likely to shame me into voting than it is to make me go to their office a throw a brick through the window. It is worse news that some company I have never heard of has a record of my votes than the content of the record.
But this came addressed to my sister, Saginaw. I was sent a weird call where the speaker reminded me that I told them, who I have never heard of, that I was going to drive to the polling location early in the morning to cast my vote, even though I voted last time at 5:30pm, cannot drive legally and never told anybody anything. They found me at a Madison Connecticut telephone number but would not let me vote in Madison because my non-driver id card still says New Haven on it. I am sure you care. I appreciate it.

Hey just checkin’ in. Ya votin’? Hope you’re votin’. Heard you weren’t votin’. Ya know that’s below average? Not sayin’ it’s bad but… just sayin’. It’s bad. Okay gotta go. _{Probably not goin’.}

For my older brother Cochise, who has not lived here in thirteen years, I got to meet a woman wearing sunglasses and ludicrously bright lipstick at my front door. In retrospect I imagine the exchange might have gone like this:

hi we’re working to build support for ted kennedy jr. can we count on your support this november?
who is we? I just see you here
we are the committee to elect ted kennedy junior and we are hoping we can count on your support at the polls this november. We’re just passing out literature right now
literature? is he an author?
no Ted Kennedy Junior is running for State Senate and hopes that-
oh another kennedy
yes he is the son of the late ted kennedy
so he is qualified based on that?
no he is qualified because etc etc etc as you can read in the literature
i have just remembered i can’t read
that’s OK! Ted Kennedy Jr has worked tirelessly for the rights of the disabled can we depend on your support?
He needs my disabled support to fight for the disabled?
the people’s voice matters and we can’t do it without you
why aren’t I running, then?
this is america. if you believe in yourself you can do anything. Have you considered offering us your support?

but in actuality I went to special education for eight years and the Connecticut Department of Developmental Services for more years afterward, and I dealt with staff who talked like that so frequently I cannot even imagine a hypothetical exchange in which they did not have some condescending phony-optimistic reply for everything. When you work for a political campaign you are trained that no potential voter is too dumb. You cannot risk interpreting the dopiest question on the planet as a joke, because somebody who asks a stupid question sincerely is more likely to believe their vote counts and to feel special when some creep from a campaign pesters them at home, whereas somebody who is so disgusted by the process as to deliberately abuse campaign workers is likely a lost cause.

Ehhh
after 16 years of being moderately aware of the political situation I have observed that at every election, the two controlling parties and their news-slaves put forth the story about how high the “stakes” are and who stands to gain/lose “control” of this or that house. But regardless of who wins, the same stuff doesn’t get done. My optimism was artificially propped up by the people i was aware of in 2008 and nothing changed after that either, except that I stopped being able to distinguish my “friends” online from the banner ads that I had only just found a reliable way of blocking. So how are there people two-to-three times my age who still act like this is an urgent situation year after year? It just starts to look like the two sides are useless but at odds on purpose so that people focus on the bickering re:nonsense and ignore the horrid rubbish both ends agree on, like getting into undeclared wars, using robots to kill in wars that are even undeclareder, supporting allies who kill indiscriminately with and without robots so long as those allies promote American commercial interests, sometimes within confinement of a wall that they themselves built, monitoring citizens, fric-a-fracking, propping up obsolete industries, outsourcing the ones that are still profitable, and on and oh. What do people criticize President Barack Obama for? Wearing a light brown suit. Calling some jackass celebrity a jackass. Having a middle name. Taking away Our Guns despite not having done a ding dang thing to that end.

That should do it. The S here looks too much like a 5, though, making this wall into a buzzfeed headline. 5 TOP WARS you don’t own but should!

And meanwhile, the news media, our actual governing body… if you want to complain about them rushing to declare a winner before all votes have been counted, they declared Hillary Clinton the next US president the instant Obama was inaugurated, if that late. It doesn’t matter who wins, so we might as well announce it eight years in advance. Although that’s no reason we can’t keep tittering excitedly about it for the next 96 months.
2018 addendum: and they were still convinced that was going to happen until up to about ten minutes before it didn’t. And I think what happened instead is ultimately a consequence of these same systems!
Hey look this potential candidate that is not part of our pre-written outline has passion on an issue! Let’s laugh at it until it cries. We need to eliminate anyone with actual emotions or the potential for shame from the herd. Need more smirking dead-eyed married couples with inherited nonpinions STAT. Get pictures of the kids, too. And a dog that they didn’t have prior to entering politics, GREAT. This is just irrelevant enough to be crucial. No kids, no dog, no service.

And the crummy debates are always closely monitored. you get 30 seconds to answer, “let’s move to the next question.” NO! If they have more to say, let them say it, and let them address each other. Are we electing a governor or a game show host? We probably know more about Louie Anderson’s background than that of Tom Foley, the challenger to Connecticut governor Dan Malloy. And when one brings up a point that your preplanned questions do not ask about, for beet’s sake ask that question. “My opponent is saying things about me that just aren’t true.” Things like what? Oops no time. And neither protests because neither really cares beyond saying their scripted lines.

Look at these yahoos. These guys are chum buddies. One of them HAS to be in charge from now on. I don’t believe for T seconds that anything major is going to improve based on one being elected. We just choose what we want to get worse slower.

They both own boats and devised a scheme to make boat ownership a bigger campaign issue than actual campaign issues (the campaign issues being “taxes.” They “mix it up” by sometimes talking about taxes first and boats second). They probably own paintings of boats. They probably own paintings of their own boats, which are then displayed on the boats. No boat, no ugly white baseball cap, no service.
Even if I had never seen them before I would feel like I had seen them before.

It is true, the taxes in Connecticut are nasty. But I do not trust this guy to reduce them in a way that will provide a net benefit. He wants to be in charge of a whole state (admittedly, a tiny one) and all he has is “I have a plan to cut taxes and create jobs.” Oh so? This is literally Mitt Romney’s platform from two years ago. He could have lost the republican primary election to a parrot trained to say “tax cuts” and “job creators” if the target voters were not likely to perceive a red, yellow and green candidate as gay or Mexican*.
(those are actually the colors of several countries in South America but everything south of real “America” is Mexico to the sort of person receptive to this pitch)

Even with Zob on his side it didn’t work.

can you believe it, somebody drawing this pathetic X over the donkey silhouette on a cheap printout at an institution of supposedly higher learning didn’t clinch the deal either.

the most effective anti-democrat promotion I saw was something they made themselves. Vote or DIE. Or maybe this means Vote AND die.

Every time: One oaf says “I’m going to lower taxes and protect your guns” and the other says “we’re going to FUND services and protect the environment or or whatever you want me to do, I swear.” They promise impossible outcomes, so then at the next election whichever side lost then can claim the winner LIED. Candidate advertisements, when they give information at all, are the equivalent of saying to a child “I have a plan to push back bedtimes, make the bath cuts permanent and give you candy for dinner.” There are consequences to these actions and only an undeveloped fickle mind would fall for it. Not only do people fall for it, they fall for it over and over again, despite rising evidence of the consequences. They fall for it as a matter of personal principle and are more motivated to vote and squawk about it through falling for it than people who realize it is rubbish, because the opposition’s broken magic tricks are less impressive and no more varied. “I’m going to protect the environment, control guns, hold the banks accountable…” Or in other words “If I elected I pledge to give you a bigger bedroom, make dogs stop barking at you and drive you to school instead of making you take the bus.” More responsible sounding but unlikely to be delivered.

HEY did ya vote yet? Hope so! Heard ya didn’t. Say could ya help me? I think I’m stuck.

You cannot save the economy just by cutting taxes and you cannot save the world just by raising taxes and throwing money at issues. This year the incrumbent democrab Malloy did not even bother to say what he was going to do or already did. He just pointed at his opponent and said “this guy is a scumbag.” Or rather some other voice said “this guy is a scumbag” and then the actual candidate said “I’m me and I approved this message.” It would be nice to believe that our governor was busy actually governing and had no time to contribute to messages beyond saying that he approved one, but his use of the “I approved this message” tag shows what an unthinking imbecile he is. Show me the poll that shows voters demand that their candidates say those exact words. Nobody does. Nobody cares. Nobody notices when they do not hear it. Even candidators who say their OWN messages have to remind me that they approve what they just said. Candidates in USAmerica elections are legally required to include proof that their campaign authorized its own ads, and for good reason, but not to use that exact wording. They just do it because they have no will or desire to do anything but what the person from their party before them did. I have been conditioned through my upbringing and preference in media influences to illogically believe democrats are usually right, and have an unshakable subconscious belief in that, just as I have a subconscious illogical belief that Jesus Herbert Walker Christ really doesn’t want people mentioning him, and that he knows, out of many billions, who is doing so and how often. If that is the case he can send me a vain name-taker report card.

Jon Stewart, who I hated in 2000 and came to appreciate, was also with me through the past gang of elections. Even when the people he likes get hired, the same nothing goes on occurring. How can he still believe in this donkey vs elephant, red vs blue rubbish? He was the lone “late night funnyman” who seemed to legitimately care about the state of this country, and not just go with its flow for fresh joke setups.
And you can say “but his JOB is to tell jokes!” but he acts like it isn’t! Unless somebody challenges him, in which event he says “ey I’m on Comedy Central! The same network as Battlebots! I don’t know nuttin’.” Battlebots was canceled in 2002, to give you an idea how long Stewart has had that excuse.
And you can say “we talk about blue vs red because no other colors get to this stage!” But we don’t let them! This isn’t Double Dare. The world doesn’t start with just two opposing sides (and I doubt the geriatrics in congress would be able to break enough water balloons in 60 seconds to fill a cup past the red line).

The presence of independent candidates in minor elections creates a false impression that these opportunities are out there and not taken. These independents are exceptions, and in races that are monitored by national media, exceptions are caught early and are the first ones to go.

Halten Sie! We interrupt your regular programming to bring you an important update: 6. Why we couldn’t have crammed this six into a smaller part of the screen without interrupting or, if this 6’s contract requires it be fullscreen, shown you it during the preceding hour of scheduled, election-soaked news programming is oops here’s another update:

We’ve interrupted the only show on broadcast television you actually watch with this big old map on our Connecticut affiliate even though Connecticut isn’t actually important enough to be colored on our map! Now back to your common rubbish.

Must… get to polls! Must return… to polls! Must… replenish… my strength…

I have a comic update ready, but I am so disgusted with the character called “nemitz” at the moment that I need more time to prepare my presentation of grievances.

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Nothing I like better after dinner than a good brand. Ah, what delectable trademarks. You can really taste the copyright. If I am feeling quite decadent I will sprinkle on some focus group.

In fact my hands are drawn to things which rhyme with them, so in the absence of a brands I will sometimes just have stands until the craving disbands. My life is rather bland. It did not turn out as I planned.

The red computer m&m with a face has passed beyond edgy attitude into brazen hostile jerkiness. This thing appears to genuinely hate its life shilling for the mass consumption of its tiny, speechless evolutionary forebears.
Got a problem with artificial gingerbread flavor being needlessly injected into bizarre forms where gingerbread flavor is not necessary or desired? Hey, shut up and shove it down your face hole, ya bloated apathete. You got somethin’ better ta do? I didn’t think so. Nyeahhhhh.

You may recall how last year pop secret genetic engineering experiments dating back to World War 2 were exposed, with the surviving progeny of the original subjects liberated at last. At this time they are gradually being introduced into the populace. You could learn from them, red computer m&m! They still remember what it means to be subjugated, and choose to embrace life and live it as best they can, shilling for the mass consupmtion of their tiny speechless evolutionary forebears.

More glorious stix. On the topic of embracing the bad position you have been given, SwirlStix has decided to unsheath the mystery flavor. And why not, I say, if we already use mystery ingredients. The stix have combined their ingredients in such a way as to produce something that the scientists agree has a taste, but they cannot identify a conventional earthly edible whose taste this vaguely resembles.

I had long presumed that Kirby was not at liberty to disclose the contents of the magic food bag, but perhaps, far from being pop secret, simply nobody knows.

Quite simply, due to the magic density, the magic food bag is opache and cannot be seen through. Placing your stix into a blox may assist you in determining their contents once you tire of holding them up, but it is only a temporary solution.

There is a solution to this but it was not known in Kirby’s time. The visual clarity of its contents notwithstanding, magic food bag is immensely superior to a regular food bag

Food Bag is so crummy that nobody would ever stop there, and thus the sign can only be photographed while speeding past it, requiring the resultant skewed-perspective picture to be stretched horizontally to be legible on a website, which makes it appear to be collapsing, which never completely occurs, a tantalizing affair. Food Bag, despite being horrid, is superior to foot bag.
On November 11 2007 I wrote a several-hundred word rambling anecdote about how stupid I think foot bag is that ends with “That sounds like a sock a hobo would wear” which I think is the most important point and the reason I went looking for the anecdote half an hour ago.

Which is not to say I was looking to look at one in action. Great gimpity. I cannot think of anything dumber than that.

I am going to ignore that as long as I am able.
I was inspired by an objectifying photograph of a woman kicking a lump in some most certainly awful publication with the corrrrrrrny caption “FOOT BAG BEAUTY” but that I otherwise neglected to collect any evidence of. Stop the presses: FOOT BAG BEAUTY. Calling all cars: FOOT BAG BEAUTY. Spy Kids 3D: FOOT BAG BEAUTY.

Additionally, Foot Bag concerns my sole experience with an Atari Lynx. On a terrible school bus ride, one student had a Sega Game Gear, and only awful licensed games. I myself also had a Game Gear and after that experience I became convinced and afraid of its badness. Particularly the audio component, the only component that could get me while on the bus if I was not within visual range, despite my comparatively functional selection of games. So then another student had an Atari Lynx, and seemingly only one cartridge, California Games, and it was worse. The worst California Game was “Foot Bag.” A mess of pixels vaguely identifiable as a human being kicked a smaller mess of pixels, with that being the goal in itself, and you, the player, used 20th century technology to press buttons to facilitate this without even needing to be near an electrical outlet for the 20 minutes or so your 16 double-A batteries lasted. After seeing the worst california game, I was convinced the Lynx must also be the worst game system, because if better games had been possible somebody surely would have made one, and I was presented with no evidence of this. Our state that spanning most latitude and containing the most people and these were the best games software company Epyx could come up with to define the whole, and then ported this to every video platform. It makes me want to go back in time 18 years and die abruptly after playing it.

Foot bag is not an event! At best it is a prevent.
According to wikehhhpedia that foot bag portion of the game specifically was coded by Ken Nicholson, who also invented DirectX, which meant I could not install a game on my computer without hassle for the next ten years. Later the XBox video “game” system was itself named for the X in DirectX, which brought recreation of actions I had no interest in to new heights of realism and popularity, and therefAGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH MY FOOT’S BEEN BAGGED

I think that reaction is in excess of what is called for.

bow ties, candy allsorts, how did this take hours to do?, rupert | How to lose a guy in (5) days | !

I was on Connecticut’s route 34 tonight. Twice (in a car). It is a horrible, scary place.

I hear Tuxedo Mask has been slated to portray Kato in the proposed Green Hornet feature film.

Craig Ferguson was talking to his tie on his Late Late program on Friday. Anybody who’s seen Bimshwel: The Live Show knows that is totally my schtick. And he knows; look at his guilty expression there. It’s been bothering me all weekend. He’d better watch out.

As you may be aware, I am sick sick weak of the growing number of products available in “singles.” I would have assumed, with the elevated environmental awareness so many persons, places and things claim to have that the trend would be opposite. I have noticed that what I would have assumed is almost always terribly wrong. It’s a good thing I didn’t actually assume it. People love wrapping smaller and smaller bits of stuff in more and more wrap-stuff. That’s the real reason potato chip bags mostly contain air. If they simply contained the chips there’d be less plastic, but plastics make it possible! It’s an enabler, that’s what it is. While much of Connecticutland has decent water service, I’d say we are decades behind where we should be with regard to our in home potato-chip taps. I mean, mine doesn’t even get mesquite barbecue. Shameful.

As we’ve observed in the past, canned soups are now available in smaller, more complicated packages which don’t taste as good. But were you aware that Hamburger Helper is now, also? Well I hope so, because otherwise you didn’t see a picture immediately above here and I know I put one there. I concede that the default HH serving is considerably larger than that of canned soup, but, eh well it’s hard enough to retain one’s dignity eating Hamburger Helper under normal preparative conditions. Microwave ovens make everything trashier and rubberier.

Poptart “Snak Stix” fall into the popcorn chicken/mini-muffin category of lousy attempts at disguising decreased amount of filling.

Oh, these are different and called “go tarts.” The exact same thing, except with more plastic and no longer named after a river in hell. This makes me wonder how close they came to being called mr.roboto tarts. I think about it all the time.

Crunch Stixx. With two Xes. One more and Daffy Duck can drink it. What is so much more marketable about snacks in stick form when spelled improperly? Eh, I suppose this is preferable to calling it “chocolate jerky.”

Kool Aid, too is available in “singles.” Putting a stop to that doesn’t begin to solve the kool aid problem, however. One time somebody gave me kool aid and said it was water and i thought it was kool aid but i tried it anyway and i knew it was kool aid and i don’t remember what happened after that.

I was under the impression that you’d be buying wretched Caprisun-style bags of premixed Kool Aid, but I now see they are in fact just little packets of dust. Pretty much you buy these if you can’t work a measuring cup. Or you’re training your kids to take over the family meth lab.

I’m sure they’d like you to think they are promoting recycling, but it seems more likely to me that for a reason I lack the science-understanding to uh comprehend, it is illegal to sell Kool Aid in bottles. Maybe they explode if they break.

As we’ve already digust, I never drank Kool Aid. I always imagined it tasted bad. And this was at a time within which I would put ketchup on pancakes. At least it was Ketchup from a proper glass fancy ketchup flaskoid. I’m tired of finding little bags of ketchup and suey sauce and various things of that nature which I have no use for. One time I got seriously twenty of them. I counted. I remember because I didn’t think it could be more than eighteen. What can be done with them? I know there’s somebody that makes portraits with it, but aside from being kind of gross, how is that any more special than using red paint? And why would you want a bright red portrait, much less one that smells like McDonald’s?

The Wendy food-vendor chain, and for all I know other places, there aren’t any around here, likes to employ extra large reinforced bags (paper and otherwise) for especially gluttonous orders (id ehhh: mine). However, they still insist on placing the contents within regular sized bags first. Cowards.

And remember, it’s never too early to start. I took this in December, but still. I have many glorious memories of waking up at 7 am on Krimmid and unwrapping sparkle parcels full of week old hamburgers and milkshakes. But I think the sign is meaning for you to simply give the card to someone rather than its spoils, in which event “easy” should not be confused with “appreciated.” You definitely shouldn’t give them to any German or Norwegian people, because “gift” means “poison” and “card” probably means something, too.

I seen these at Stop & Shop, the superbmarket. It seems like a conflict of interest for a grocery store to be promoting its arch-enemy food service, but that wouldn’t be allowed so obviously this is a mutually beneficial relationship and I will have none of it. Obviously. These are right beside the checking-out region, as if to say “maaan doan cha hate waiting behind other people and then having to wait some more before you can pay? And then having to carry stuff in bags? Well clearly you don’t so come to our places where you can also do that!”
A Wendy’s card is probably better an than applebee’s card, though. First of all, Applebee’s. Second, there really is no occasion when it’s dignified to have gotten a bill and then rise up from your ridiculously low Applebee’s booth seat and say “ehhhactually I will be placing the first five dollars of this on my Applebee’s gift card. Your tip is on my other Applebee’s gift card in my pants.” Although if you bought any and are suddenly feeling bad about the idea of giving them to anyone I will gladly accept them in my [convenient card-holding wallet compartment].