I’m sick, ill, infirm, putrescent of “what happens in vegas stays in vegas.” First of all, Las Vegas is horrible. Second, it has billions of money so it doesn’t need you hyping it by paraphrasing its tourism slogan all the time. Thoid, that’s not even the line. It’s “what happens here, stays here.“ Figure it out! Grah! I know that and I hate that! Why don’t you, you people who say that? Oh, and there’s some dumb movie coming out called “What happens in Vegas.” No! Incomplete sentence, inaccurate reference, stupid everything! I want to punch Vegas in the nose.

There’s one, anyway. Super!
(Except “vegas” actually means something like “fertile valleys” and those lack noses so my struggle must continue).

I wish stupid ads and Elvis songs and country music awards plus all applicable broadcast signals would stay in Vegas. We should build a steel dome around it. It would be like the world’s largest tin-foil helmet, except made of steel. You can’t legally grind up and smoke some leaves to give yourself a bit of the unconditional euphoria life has denied you, but you can give $3000 to some dipe-wipe because you lost… not even lost, just didn’t win a five second card game, and live the rest of your life surrounded by popular media suggesting you must have had a grand old good time.

Perhaps tonight’s edition of Lewis Black’s Root of all Evil featuring Las Vegas versus The Human Body even though that makes no sense will address my issues. It never does, but if I tell you it won’t then it will for the first time just to make me look stupid. It seems unaware that I make myself look stupid!

It does make me mad, though. The commentary rarely extends beyond the accepted common knowledge aspects of the topics, which we’ve already been hearing jokes about, in some instances, for over ten years. Your honor, Viagra makes stuff happen and the people who buy it are old. Well I know that! You’ll devote a program to claiming that’s evil? Why not mention the health issues related to reckless reckreational idiot users, the innumerable scamming rip-off products, many of which don’t work at all, and the never-ending insidious creepy advertising in the most insidious creepy places created to sell the ineffective scamming ripoffs? Because that’s not funny? Or because you don’t actually want to truly condemn anything, despite labeling them as roots of “evil,” and risk alienating sponsors/sponsor patrons? No, it’s probably just apathy. I just like thinking there are conspiracies everywhere. Yes, like. Sometimes that’s the only hope I have.

And yet, I’m actually still seeing that awful Christmas Enzyte ad. Like right now, projected on the backs of my eyelids when I blink. But I also saw it on the tv yesterday, and at 8:30pm, when I venture to assume normal people could see it. Who, at this point, is paying for the ad, and who, at this point, is paying for the product? Sometimes I think it’s me who’s paying for this. Nothing makes sense. I believe it was the great poet Lanny Poffo who once said ARRRRRRHGHGJGHGJH NOISE LAWNMOWERS AND CHAINSAWS GO BACK TO CAPISTRANO AND TAKE YOUR DECADENT DIRTY MACHINES WITH YOU, YOU SMIRKING SILENCE PIRATES!

I’m glad somebody is taking action at last!
Even if it is in a fifty year old comic book I can’t read!

You know where these things are sold in English? India, by Jove! What am I supposed to do about that? Call technical support and have someone read them to me? And, and… “Fon tassio?” Since when? Time for punishment!

Don’t let it happen again.

Need more data.

Am I wrong to assume these might as well be the same album? All that matters are the bodiless, earless heads of bored wavy-haired women in touch with their spirits and who they are.
Yef, I get it. You are your own person and you do what you want to do, and if that involves being indistinguishable from your peers and making moany music perpetually pressing your word-orifice against a camera lens, then who am I to deny your right to millions of dollars?
At least Alicia Keys can play a piano to some degree which I can’t, but this other bozo appears to be another garbage pointless “cover” making contest winner. Gimpis, one of her smash hit covers, from 2006, is of “a moment like this” a song credited to but not written by Kelly Clarkson, another contest winner, in 2002. Do we really need remakes of overproduced melodramusic less than five years old? True, I assumed that song was from the 70s or something and that I’d been hearing it my whole life but… that’s just the point. There’s nothing interesting going on. I couldn’t honestly tell you which one I heard in an ad for what product.

I’m confused by life. People all over de waruld love and enjoy and make inescapable things I find dull or repulsive. I feel so lost, mentally, lately. Unlike the featured ahtists, sometimes I don’t even know something as simple as who I am.

Am I Johnny Depp?

No, I’m Spiderman!

Now that’s uncalled for. All great heroes doubt themselves sometimes.

I bet you thought I forgot! Yes, today you are a stupid smiling orange bipedal beast with an inadequate vocabulary and questionable eating habits. I hope you’re proud of yourself.

My brain is constipated.
 

 

Consumer Alert:

 

Rorschach wants your eggs.

I’m glad I never had a way to obtain normal comic books on a regular basis during the years one typically goes through a phase like that. I’d have hated to have found out I was a comic book nerd, and I doubt I could have afforded it, besides. Still, if I had a bunch of those they’d be more likely to get themselves re-read than the collection I accumulated over what appears to be a considerable period in which I regularly purchased Weekly World News. If you’ve seen one final warning from Billy Graham, you’ve seen them all. Most people associate the Weekly World News with Bat-Boy if they associate it with anything, but when I was buying it there was a red hot Lost Dead Sea Scroll craze going on.

It (becoming/understanding I was a nerd) probably wouldn’t have happened anyway and I’d have been turned off them and ended up much as I was (just down some dollars), because as I saw from my uncle’s collection, most of them were made to fill a quota and just weren’t good and they never stopped coming. I’m content for now to let some other slob read them and decide which ones from decades ago are worth distributing illegally buying somewhere or something. Although even that can get suspect results. I can’t tell if Robert Crumb’s popularity is a joke on me or a joke on him. I will abort this topic before I do something resembling what I did last time. Fash that was horrible. Even for me that was bad. It’s like I took that thing terrible I wrote about Mad-TV and took it to a ho’ nubba levuh.

ARRRRRRGH!! It was all a plot by Danny Devito to get mentioned on my stupid website again!

rogue clowns | May I have a word with you? | !

Like a lot of lazy shows these days, Late Night with Conan O’Brien has been soliciting audience submissions. Somehow my write-up of this has become more embarrassing than the personal embarrassment it was originally intended to focus upon, but twelve years and nine months from now I might be reminded of and want to read this again or link to it and so I will leave it alone.

I’ll spare myself the detail writing, but in the end Mr. O’Brien wanted viewers to send ideas and suggestions at the “Late Night Underground” website as to what he should do to bring down a stuffed raccoon wearing a jet-pack which had recently been flying in circles and screeching in the studio. Because seriously, what are you going to do about that? They don’t teach you that in talk show school. Eh, but when he says “ideas and suggestions,” what he actually wants are scribblings and drawings and elaborate paintings of himself doing the thing because those are the things he gives attention to on the program.

Conan thinks he’s Maddox, but Maddox only asked for pictures once and he gave people a couple days to come up with them. The raccoon was the third such solicitation from Late Night in a year-and-a-half and the second in three months. I like to think those things are done with now, but things I like to think are usually made up.

This image is therefore the property of “NBC Universal,” but I don’t think it knows that, because NBC Vivendi Universal doesn’t want it. I am being quite infringeful having this on my page, even though I made it. I think the Universe has bigger problems to worry about than a certain Capt’n does, but you know, a cease and give up letter from General Electric would constitute proof that somebody at some level of its employment saw this.

In the glass, they weren’t supposed to be ice cubes, but they looked like they were supposed to be ice cubes, so they became ice cubes.

I’m torn, ripped, shredded between admitting this is an ugly picture and protesting that it’s better than the ones which ultimately were displayed, and that were displayed in such a way as to suggest that’s all there were. No! They were not!

This took a bit under or over five hours, but that’s fast for me, and a lot of it was probably redundant anyway. This was not seen on the program, or any of the program’s websites, or acknowledged in any way beyond an automatic notification e-mail that you get even if you try to email them a virus (still more than I ever got from Maddox), but it did prove that I can do something fairly quickly if adequate motivation (eeg: being mentioned on television by someone I’ve watched for ten years) is provided. On the fire escape of artistic relevance, this is probably a step above drawing things eating sandwiches and half a step below painting sad clown portraits. I am not satisfied!

You’re probably thinking, you’ve probably thought, long before now “yeah, I guess your pictures are pretty good for someone who primarily writes junk, but you aren’t nearly good in a legitimate artistic sense, and you’re probably past your prime so it’s only going to get worse, and you’d be a better writer if you didn’t waste time on other things you’re clearly not suited for” and… I don’t have anything to say to that. You really know how to hurt people.

I think I thought if I spent time trying to make it actually look like Conan it would take too long. Ha ha ha? Yes, so, not only did it take plenty long, all I have to show for it is that awful picture I’d rather not look at/know other people are looking at. I thought, half asleep and paralyzed with really weak greed, that the bizarre nature of this thing would free it from the common “art class project on the internet” stigma and finally get Conan’s attention, but it is in fact an ugly pointless picture. And I STILL lost to paint.exe stick figures. Worst of all, all through that week in February, even after typing the part before this, I still secretly (from myself?) believed there was a chance it would be used. I typed this, here, now, before the week was finished, and would have told you if I’d posted it that my thing would not be shown. And I think I secretly SECRETLY thought THAT would cause fate to try and spite me by giving me what I wanted. I have very little respect for fate, apparently.

I’m surprised they [the Conan people] didn’t call off the search after getting letters complaining about promoting the abuse of animals (assuming anyone writes letters to tv shows these days). Although this is the show that for a long time paid actors with electric prodding devices to pretend to shock a man in a bear suit to keep the bear from diddling its point of diddling, the bear has long since become a solo act. A solo solo act. I hate my life.

One of the pieces which did make air and wasn’t a heartless scribble but still kind of sickly looking was a scene involving a helicopter assaulting the cord suspending the raccoon. Conan liked this idea, said he liked it, and attempted to launch little toy helicopters at the raccoon. There is at the moment video of this bit but that site is horrible and there are better things you can watch on the internet, even just about Conan, but eh. I like the one with the honey.

You can see, if you look at the user comments on the specified Late Night show web-site object, and you shouldn’t, and I won’t even link to it because I’m afraid despite what I said earlier, that a great deal of people suggested solutions involving radio controlled helicopters. I don’t know why, but they did. I have to assume a couple even submitted those ideas properly. How many people suggested poisoning the raccoon’s drink? As far as I know, just me. Because it’s a stupid idea. But it’s an ORIGINAL stupid idea!

Also, about the comments: anyone who reads the body of the original message sees that ideas are supposed to be sent to the linked e-mail address, yet both times the announcements got well over a thousand public responses,

generally hashing and rehashing each other’s ideas in Dilbert list form, often involving Chuck Norris or the afore mentioned “masturbating bear.” Maybe it’s for the best that there’s no official, bold-faced addendum stating “remember, send your ideas in e-mail, not the comment form; legally we can’t claim ownership of comments, and if we don’t claim ownership then everybody can sue us and we can’t sue them and our position in the sue hierarchy is important to us” to keep out impulsive psychopaths (rather than paranoid rule-reading psychopathics who remember everything forever, like me), but the attitude still bothers me.

This whole thought “don’t worry boss, we’ll get enough in the e-mail that we can disregard any legitimate creativity which may have manifested itself elsewhere or come from someone whose email client is set up with a weird name…” I don’t like it. And then, of course, the idea that even the stuff they do look at is plentiful enough that they can toss aside 94% of it that has no other reason to exist. Those people wasted their time and possible effort for no fleepsing reason, on your request, never even knowing if an actual human being ever saw what they did, and it means nothing to you! That time amounts to no more than a couple minutes in most cases, but, oh… I don’t know. It just seems rude.

Also questionable, is that though the website is all like “oooh, we’re the Late Night Underground, yeah! We do what we want! We don’t take no guff from the man,” the e-mail address it demands sacrifices be sent to is @ nbc.com. It’s all totally phony. It’s like The Captain’s Blog, except instead of Captain Morgan it’s Aaron Bleyeart. He does various things related to the show, but he also seems to handle its websites. Someone that I assume was him but maybe wasn’t but probably was recently added a link to the underground site from the manatee site in the form of his enormous disembodied grinning soulless head. Otay, no one’s coming to see you, Aaron. The entries that aren’t mentioned on television and don’t have Conan in them are only slightly more popular than mine, and mine aren’t. You know there’s a chance people are helpless egomaniacs if they design major site graphics with pictures of themselves. I remember there was a website called “web pages that suck” which complained about poor web design, but the site itself was covered with this stupid bespectacled 50ish white haired man who thought he was the best person in the world, talking about how things sucked on the web all the time, and it was impossible to take any of his advice seriously, which is why I still put light text on dark backgrounds. I’ve only seen two people good enough to do this properly, and one wasn’t you. You don’t even know me! Don’t get that attitude, like anybody who comes to your site is automatically less than you. I want to wallop that guy. I should make a page called “Websites Called Web Pages That Suck Which Disappoint.” And then kill myself because I don’t need to be doing that. These days it has a picture of a baby. The only thing uglier than crazy men making crazy faces are babies.

The manatee site is an example of what happens when the NBC internet department does provide an exhibition for user sent material, but this is long enough already and besides I didn’t get on to that either.

But this did! above this text, not below it.

This here, another one from me, took considerably less time and came about around Thursday and got as much attention as anything else I did. Although it’s not as ugly as my previous, it’s probably even more shameful. And yet I made it and can’t do anything else with it than show you, to whom it should have no significance. The next time the subject came up, Conan produced a bunch of pictures of just himself cutting the cord in various ways (once again already addressed by the helicopter comments), suggesting that such an unimaginative outcome was the magnificent consensus among viewers. No! Some viewers wanted you to create balls of flame with your mind! I want to die.

I remember thinking, while the bit was progressing “wow, the viewer suggestions are much worse tonight! Mine has to be in there!”

My problem is that in my mind everything is a competition. That shouldn’t be a problem; scientific progress, the betterment of our lives as humans (at least it sometimes seems that way) comes frequently from one group of persons trying to outdo another. Except I’ve never won anything in my life except a kite that I never even got to use. But why should I care if Conan held up my picture? He’s not going to come visit me. And if he doesn’t, who ELSE is going to care that I drew him in a chariot racing down a vinegar volcano? Yeah, hokay, then I can say “Conan held up my picture! I’m special!” But I’m the only person I know who watches Late Night or anything. I could say that anyway. Whenever I mention something I’m interested in without saying I’m interested in it people always laugh or don’t care. Care care care I hate that word. I am going to say flimmb instead.

Why spend hours, few or many, on something I made no one flimmbs about when I can have them not flimmb just as easily by playing with my roms? Hey, I can show you a picture I already made, just because I felt like it, and tell you Conan held THAT up. “Hey, Conan liked my dope on a conveyor belt picture so much he didn’t even mind that he wasn’t in it.” Also keep in mind that Cronan’s cronies, who man the e-mail address, have to like it first before they show it to Conan, at which point Conan might not like it. I couldn’t even please my own cronies in a hypothetical situation in which I had some, so what hope was there for this, really? There is zero possibility of something Conan likes that a crony doesn’t appearing on air unless Conan finds it himself, and he won’t, because he hates the internet and rightly so.

The show has artists. Conan wouldn’t say to them “hey, could you design something based on a vague yet limited premise by tomorrow which you will not be paid for and that I’ll probably throw away without looking at but still retain all rights to should you decide to dig through my dumpster?” I exaggerate the severity of it all, but I still think it’s dirty, and I thought it was dirty before it applied to me. “Design an ad for us! We’ll use the ad and ideally collect revenue from increased sales! If you win, you get to know you helped us get more money for ourselves! If you lose, go die.” Sleazy sleazy sleazy. And these mountebanks get away with it because there’s always someone with enough free time to do their bidding who would never have a chance at any exposure otherwise. But I think my time must not truly be free, because I miss it greatly.

I complain about the America Idol and its associates, and I’m not done, but at least rejects get rejected personally. Some of them, anyway. I have to assume there’s a primary audition to make sure you’re potentially whiny and bad-song-unhatey enough to be chosen or embarrassing enough to raise publicity for the show. And it’s not too bad when we’re talking about five second clips of cats falling off porches or men getting hit by tennis balls in the ear, but NBC, Comedy Central, Myspace, et everyone are expecting something resembling professional quality output. They want production values. And they want it when they say they want it. If Dimension Pictures can’t dress a couple people up like Borat and Paris Hilton for less than 20 million dollars, how does anyone get away with making these demands? I’m mad, and I didn’t spend very long or even stand to win anything. I find the principle frustrating. What happened to raffles? At least he’s a gentleman thug. (I just spent yet one more hour tossing things about in search of what I was going to scan to accompany and possibly explain that statement. Pretend you saw it and were mildly disappointed or confused.)

I need an editor.

Hey, just one stupid comic page this time! (plus the second half of the previous, just because I like making people scroll vertically) Someone told me I might have more friends if I tried that instead of waiting a long time to finish three pages. Although this still took a long time.

Indeed, though there’s just the one page and with very simplified backgrounds, my nemitses, it’s still been a month since the last. I did do a bit of work on the backgrounds, and the fact that I ended up removing them anyway should give you an idea of just how hard I was having to work at it. Sometimes things just don’t go the way they seem they should. Also, no one will jump on your hand if you ask.

I did use some of the time to give rudimentary coloring jobs to- rudimentary. I love saying rudimentary. I must think that makes me look sooo smart. But at any rate you know I’m never satisfied with rudimentary so naturally you can’t see that yet so whatever it was is just as white as before.

You might be surprised to find out how few people are willing to jump on your hand. Well, I was. One seemed just about offended that I would request such a thing. Crimps, all you have to do is step on it. I’m not asking you to lick it (I know full well we can’t even lick it no more). I don’t even want that. How often do I ask anyone for anything? Saying I’m doing it for “research” doesn’t help, either. Although that is completely true, that it’s research. I know a standard sized human would hurt me, but I need to know how much because I can probably downgrade it in my mind to find out how much some purple muppet, probably weighing less and better insulated would hurt dumb old nemitz.

ALSO: for some reason it really bothered me that I had to remove this “gag.” I have a vast archive of wrong things that just had to go, but unknown forces led to me typing junk about this one.
I planned the viewpoint change wrong, and it’s still wrong, and I couldn’t put this there anywhere without having to explain why it wasn’t in subsequent backgrounds, and by the time that part of the room is visible again this is no longer hypothetically potentially funny in my mind to see there. I guess I’ll have to save this one for the movie! Ha h-sob sob sob sob sob sob sob sob.
Although given that the angle is still wrong and my main reason for not just starting the page from that side, NEMITZ being at the front, doesn’t really matter because nemitz ends up isolated at the left, the “start” of the frame anyway, plus awkward, at the point when it is meant to be least conspicuous; when its hand-like-thing is landed upon. If I’d just gone with a normal side-view I could put in my stupid elbow drop scene in frame one and get those fools out of the way in time for stupid nemitz to get bopped in frame three. I told you I’m bad at backgrounds. But I couldn’t do that because the switch would be so abrupt from the previous view, even though the turning of the imaginary page would likely excuse this. Oh, trouble!

 

Consumer Alert:

 

Bat-Man wants your eggs.

 

 

 

Now that the Enzite ads have ceased (I guess when I wrote that their en was in zyte), replacement ads must immediately appear, and comparisons with the old 2:30pm Colbert Report re-run commercial break shall be inevitable. Will the new hold up? Will it bring honor to the Enzute legacy?

What inspiration will today’s challenger bring? And, how will the Iron Chef fight back? The heat will be on!

I’m going to win.

No! Not ugly and creepy and fake-whistly enough! I don’t want no second-rate insincere grinning scamming megagoon!

I am not attempting something resembling hyperbole with “scamming,” this truly is quite worse aside from not making me think of peenuthes, but now that I’ve thought of how I haven’t thought of that, I have thought of it, so cashcall is still bad for that. And… that guy’s naked, after all. At least gobgammed Bob kept his clothes on.

But ehhh!
Enzait would probably only repeatedly charge you for the useless pills it would give you and not take back in a month, but for $2525, the apparent minimum which can be borrowed from Cashcall, it demands 42 monthly payments of $216.55! Over nine thousand dollars! The annual percentage rate is 99.25, so by the end of the first year you’ve pretty much paid what you’ve borrowed, but then you have to keep paying for 2.5 more years! Or something. And you don’t even get any fake pills! It’s so bad, Gary Coleman himself apparently had to back out of the deal before I found out! And he’ll sell anything! It would seem.

Residents of states beside California which have not specifically forbidden the likes of Cashcall (Iowa, Massachusetts, Nevada, New York, New Jersey and West Virginia) can borrow as little as $1500, but have to pay a $500 loan fee rather than the usual and still kind of ridiculous $75. And if you need $1500 with such urgency you’d take it at 141.42% interest or whatever for one year you probably can’t realistically afford to be paying $500 fees. The thing I read which attempted to explain “APR” to me mostly used figures between 9 and 10 percent so I must assume this is absurd.

Cashcall must be pretty bad for the casino crooks to bite their thumbs at it. Or perhaps they simply can’t stand the fool-from-money-parting competition. Whatever the case for the Nevada exemption, that likely won’t stop Cashcall from being advertised there, if Iowa and Canada have taught us anything. We could learn a lot from Canada.

Who’s watching basic cable television in the afternoon on a week-day but desperate and unemployed / confused and elderly people, right? They’re lost to the world, anyway. You might as well grab whatever they have left and rescue them from their emotionally exhausting cycles of optimism and grim realizations, and send them straight into comfortable routines of grimness. If you put this ad on at night you’d potentially risk someone not blinded by despair seeing it. You’d also have to pay more money and CashCall is more into the getting money side of things. Aye yi yi. When did I start saying “aye yi yi?” Am I going to start saying “aye caramba,” too? Can cowabunga be far behind?

This isn’t clever in the remotest sense, but it is still the most coherent digital communication I have executed in a month.

Alas, in looking over a cashcall recruiting ad which was in search of new employees, presumably to replace whoever was the most recent to quit from fear of constant angry post-cashcall calls, I was redirected to and therefore went to careerbuilder.com, which I said four and a harf years ago I’d never do. I just thought you should know that if I make an unaccredited vow of minimal significance I might momentarily breach it unintentionally a long time after that. For my penance I have to look at the page I said that on and attempt to read standard weight text against an animated background.

Cashcall.com is like the only website I know of that doesn’t work unless you type the www first. I’m sure that must mean something. I just don’t know what. And they like it that way.

“CashCall Watch” defends the Cash Call in a limited capacity by saying how much worse some things called paydoy loans are with interest and disclosure and such. Those I only know about from my junk e-mail and robot comments. Definitely a titanium support beam of responsibility and stability to prop your argument against. It’s a bit like defending cancer by comparing it to AIDS, isn’t it? Or maybe like defending White Chicks by comparing it to The Hot Chick.*

I don’t know how to help people who lose their jobs, or still have their jobs but just can’t afford things because everything costs more because the people selling them are selling less and charging more, because unlike their customers they lack the self discipline to not buy seventy gold toilets, cowards. I forgot what my point was.

Look at this, I just came here to show you a dumb picture and somehow that turned into another huge whiny complaint about something I don’t understand and can’t fix. I imagine you can imagine how this affects personal interactions. It is at least better to complain about something you don’t understand than to accept money from it, theh.

*according to the Wikipedia, Rob Schneider “was the first Asian-American to be a cast member” on some Saturday evening television programme, because his grandmother was from Phillipines-land, and I suspect he added that and related distinctions to the article himself. If he has a problem with me having a problem with that he is welcome to take out a defensive blubbering full page rebuttal ad in Variety which I’ll never see.

Happy birthday!

Surely someone’s birth-date occurred today.

————————–

This web-location has not been very professional recently. If it does not improve soon I may have to take my business elsewhere.

————————-minus

That movie “Smart People” makes me mad. I haven’t seen it and I won’t see it because it makes me mad. And not even because the name is “Smart People.” Like they’re saying I’m dumb if I don’t see it. I am not so easily tricked! That movie thinks it and its people are so smart! With their dull emotionless non-joke self-centered whiny people I beat that movie up! Sarah Jessica Parker is creepy. Her eyes are too small and her nose is too big. If she wasn’t one of those people I’m automatically supposed to like it would still bother me but I wouldn’t feel so compelled to say so. Not that such a thing is a reason to not watch movies but ahhh and this cannot get longer without me thinking about it and I don’t want to. That hasn’t been getting good results lately. Good pumpkins.

————————–dashes

This webpage has a reason to exist.

I would like to report that some unknown vagrant recently abused my horses by feeding them bananas.

I need to know. If I answer incorrectly the kidnappers swear they’ll rub a gluestick on my head and attach a banana there and bring in a horse. I’m not even sure if they can do that.

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!