I guarantee you safety and fun
Two years ago, I considered this an obnoxious advertisement. And no one's won Dave Matthews' guitar yet. I wonder why he and no one else wants it? It must be one of those "the songs write themselves" guitars.

The pictures on this page are big. I need to make them big because I am a terrible photographer who likes small details. Therefore, I shall use a big font.
Ah, there we go.

I went out again. This time it was to the West Farms' Mall. West Farms is the town in name only, not an actual set of western farms. My inability to grasp many basic concepts is only attributable to good old fashioned inbreeding.

I thought it would be a good idea to bring the camera. It wasn't, because now I'm wasting more time writing stupid stuff like this that I could be spending... writing other stupid stuff like this. I have a near-finished page about Denny's that is precisely 379 days old as I tell you this. I'm even counting . Salgorps sees the camera and wants to take pictures of our cats. Salgorps always wants to take blurry, meaningless, occasionally cruel pictures of our stupid cats.

yes, on this page too
Because there just aren't enough of these on the internet.

The party consisted of my mother Maltos, the mystical midget-mangler, my sister, Salgorpsponce the sorcerian soldier of salisbury steaks (I believe you've already met), and I, Ilpaopuah, the imbecilic idler of indignation instigation (I get magic powers on the second disk). Grand-Ma wanted to come too, but she just can't keep up these days.


Baw, were we surprised!
This is a joke, by the way. My grandmothers have been dead since 2002 or earlier. HA HA HA HA HA!

At Mall, we parked in section V3. That rhymes. Salgorps thought that was really funny. Our first stop was Filene's. We always enter through Filenes. I don't know what we'd do if we ever found a mall without a Fileenz. We'd probably start a petition to have one installed there and refuse to enter until it was. Why... I am not aware. I doubt it is for any sensible reason. I don't even like Failein's. It's a clothing store, and I already own some. Also, I've found that if you don't, you're less likely to be permitted to purchase any. People are strange.

Always a good sign...


...vomit on the ground right outside the store. Salgorps wanted to see this picture on the camera's viewscreen right after I captured it, despite being several feet away from the actual vomit. Hopefully I've effectively established by this point that my sister is an idiot.

Fighleans had lots of posters of models who looked to be in the process of either putting on or removing their pants. It's hard to tell. This is probably why the store is represented in print, on television and shopping bags by figures which don't wear any.


That's kind of a stupid transition, but I didn't take any pictures of the models.
Besides wearable, Faelan's also sells appliances and furniture. What all these things have in common is that none of them fit into boxes that size. Give the greatest gifts, not these.

Right outside Filene's was the Rainforest Cafe. If you have the money, you can be served up the finest endangered birds, plants and voodoo witchdoctors you'll ever find right outside a Filene's. When you go out to a place where things are sold, you'll do best when you bring plenty of money.


Ah, there we go.

However, we didn't dare venture inside.


I, at least, didn't want to be around when the giant Smurf came home.

There was a store where you could have a stuffed bear custom made for you. I saw little reason to have it done. The place seemed to be full of completed bears, they looked exactly the same, and the customization process was limited to choosing tiny clothing for the bear, which is also already made. But they already paid for this BIG STUFFING MACHINE, so oh well.


This contraption is either filling a bear, or messily killing one. Also, Cher-hair era Wonder Woman tries to make a cameo.

I even saw someone wearing a homethtahwunnuh.net shirt in there (the store, not the machine). I don't wish to bring up again the one time I viewed it and neither "got it" nor desired to come back and "get it" later; I didn't get The Robot With Distended Intestines Flash extravadanza either. But then, I've never seen anyone wearing a shirt with that thing on it. That was four minutes (I estimate 1/4 the loading time, not counting the frequent two minute pauses throughout the feature) of some really, really badly drawn, I mean so badly as to build much anticipation for whatever the elk I just waited 20 minutes to download, robot with intestines pouring out of the region which you would expect intestines to be in who is trying to rent a pornographic film without being recognized. The professionally performed, wholly uncompressed audio theme song which played at the end made sure to inform me "Robots shouldn't have intestines... but this one does," so that's going to stand out, yeah. Not mentioned were any organs conducive to the enjoyment of pornography, or whether a robot ought to possess them. At any rate, regardless of how hilubrious you might think that is, you still look like a twit displaying a picture of it on yourself. It was time to leave.

In time, we encountered The Body Shop. All of us had one already, so we didn't stay long. Next time, we should bring Krang with us.

We went in more stores. Just so you know.

There was a soft pretsel selling place. I wonder what, centuries ago, fat bearded Bavarians (or some other confusion of European stereotypes), feasting in their great Oktoberfest halls, would think had they any idea that the only thing they ate besides sausage would one day be associated with women's tennis.


I wasn't sure at first if this person had a really, really muscular right leg, or if that was just part of the sugar glazed pretzel. However, I'm certain you aren't going to GET FIT by eating what are essentially oddly shaped doughnuts.

The time to eat (but not those) was nigh. The hour of closing was not yet upon us, so we didn't get it to go.


Maybe next time.

We ended up eating food at Gorbo Di Capri or something. Although it was run by the same people and/or robots, Maltos insisted it was "a step up" from Sbarro. I know that a step up from gravel is asphalt or slightly better tasting gravel, but I took the chance.


Apparently, I was not sophisticated enough for Leo Di Capri Sun. I ordered pizza (which was better than it should have been) and instead of glass my plate(s) were made out of paper. Worse yet, they were from frupping Sbarro. The folks who run the place couldn't be bothered to order plates with their own logo. However, I suppose this of little significance, since everything edible is going to look like junkfood on a plastic cafeteria tray. My four slices cost 957 gp. I was not pleased with that amount.


I made scandalous use of the free garlic, oregano, red oregano and plenty of eese in an attempt to justify the price. The very Italian Cher song being broadcast in the vicinity reminded me to stop before I opened any Sweet 'n Low packets and look for some Equal instead. A moment later and I'd have been out of luck, for I cannot turn back time.

Afterwards, the restrooms were a destination, I went there before eating, actually, but here I am telling it as if I did it later. We saw one childe run into the man-room and then run right out. Maltos thought that he must not have arrived as soon as he would have liked, whereas I observed that the stall dividers did not reach to the ceiling (why?), and it seemed plausible that, providing the space was vacant, a talented person could use the toilet without venturing far from the doorway. Come to think of it, this technique would probably work regardless of vacancy. And... why stop with a toilet? You could relieve yourself just about anywhere. You needn't even expose a bit of yourself to do it. That's why these are all over the place:


This warrants further investigation.

In Kaybee toy store there were Spider-Man gloves. I don't have a picture of them. Hey, the camera only holds twenty four images, and I wasn't sure how well my pictures of the condiments would come out. Spider Man gloves, for when you only feel like washing your dishes or gardening nerdily. There were also Spider-Man footballs, for when you can't decide which side you want to be on in a college movie. My favorite is the Spider-Man trying different jobs action figure series, in which he's wearing a police uniform, Robin Hood costume (bow included) or even scuba gear, all of this over his Spider-Man suit, of course. I guess people buy this stuff. Or maybe they don't. Towards the back, there was a wire bookshelf with official strategy guides for N64 games. They probably even had the original Nintendo Players Guide in there (actually called Player's Guide), in which can be found, among other things, an incorrect level select code for Ghosts 'n Goblins. These legendary tomes were close enough to the floor that I didn't bother to look through them for the Forbidden Codex of 2XL, but more towards the vicinity of eye level was this:


I'm glad to see the Pull-Ups Training Pants [big] kid is still getting work. Fun at Playtime. Playing is fun. Playing, playtime. Of course! So that's the secret! Soviet Russia suffered needlessly!

More recent entrants include many dog figures dressed to resemble famous dead music stars, except not really, because they're dogs, after all. When provoked, they emit terrible sound quality snippets of popular songs I hate whilst waving their limbs around. I suspect they were inspired by the singing wall-mounted fish, which before now I considered anything but inspirational.


I know why some people must like them, at least. Salgorps thought this was really funny. I did too, but I won't admit it. I shan't ask what you think of it. I especially like the sedate, submissive glance the deer is giving the elvis-dog.


This one was more "in the mood," as evidenced by its lack of pants. Still, neither dog's performance compared to the "Kung-Fu Fighting" gerbil we found at the Crystal Mall. No, it's not a mall made out of crystal. I was disappointed too.

Speaking of too, we went to Limited Too, too. Limited Too is what the place is called. Fortunately for me, not being anorexic, under 15 years old or evil I didn't buy anything. I think it is called Limited because the shear trash factor of their products insures that no great amount of any one thing will be made and Too just because that sounds dumb and is harder to put in a sentence.
In addition to garments for people I hate, there were Neopet... things. Neopets are like Pokemon without the great artwork and fanfiction quality. If you go to their website which they conveniently wrote everywhere, you can "adopt" one for your own website. Or you can just save the image to your hard drive and use that and not bother with logging into their weird cgi-jungle and/or selling your soul.
At this establishment I set a new personal record, being asked three times by store staff if I needed any help.


No thank you, I already know how to spell stab. Before leaving I would have liked to be asked again, so that I could request directions to the exit, but I suppose it is possible, however unlikely it may seem, that they believed me the third time I turned down their offers.

As long as there's a picture of books, I'll talk about books some more. Most malls have several book stores which all sell the same books. I don't "read," so this is not of great concern to me. I noticed that there's another new re-collection of Charles Shulz junk. He's like the Tupac Shakur of bad cartooning. Or maybe Tupac Shakur is like the Charles Shulz of recording yourself talking and then forgetting about it. Ehhh. This new edition was titled "The Art of Charles Shultz." Because he made it so well. Surely you've seen Peanuts in a newspaper and thought, gee whillickers, I'd appreciate the work that went into creating these flat colored, undetailed, large-headed photocopied cretins a lot better if they took up the whole page. The next time we meet will be on the battlefield.

Right beside this book store there was another store. These things are everywhere.


The Rock (whose real name is Rocky Melvin) has really changed since he went to Hollywud and became a metrosexual. I saw that word on the What's New Compuserve menu once. I thought they had just made it up to annoy me. I still do.

All these places we went to, and I ended up not buying anything. I wasn't planning to buy anything. I have problems. However, I did not wish to leave without some kind of shoevenir.


Mentos insisted I put this "back" because someone might come looking for it. I think that's about as likely as the same person not finding it and then coming here and using this web page to locate it.
There were a few shoe stores. I contemplated entering one, taking a chair, and waiting to be asked if I needed any help (I just look like I need help). And then I would say "why yes, I'd like to return this." But I didn't. Ehmm... wait, you don't know that. Yes, I did that, didn't i. We all had a good laugh and then we smoked cigars and sang some showtunes and gave out fire safety tips to the home viewing audience. And that was the end. You'd like that story better, wouldn't you! So would I. In my version, Maltos and Salgorpsponce came out of the Hallmark rip-off store just as I was asessing the situation and they directed various signals at me. They didn't even try to leave without me this time. The getaway car was right where we left it, so we made our way back through Filene's and departed, though I would have prefered to take a prolonged stroll through the parking lot by way of


any other exit at all.