Squiggles.

Walking the streets more than I ever did in the pre-dog days, I find myself wondering about these squiggles:

What's up with that?

For some reason, I realized, road crews are making squiggly lines all over the asphalt. Why is that? It's a thin coating in no particular pattern. It couldn't possibly help hold the pavement together, or prevent potholes, could it? I thought not.

The longer I looked, the more I thought, the more the light began to dawn. Yes! These are not random squiggles; these are, in fact, messages. And these messages are coded, by which I mean they are written in script, and children are not taught penmanship anymore.

Carefully I began to crack the code on these squiggles. Perhaps if you look closely, you too will see the hidden messages....

CSI: Fred.

The other day I was walking junior dog when we came across these phones, right in the middle of the street.

Both of them had seen better days. The screens were cracked like they'd been run over.

I took them back to examine them, see if I could find out to whom they belonged. The ZTE phone seemed to be a Blade Vantage, which you can get for fifty bucks with a Verizon deal, and the ANS phone a $25 special from Assurance Wireless.

The ANS was dead; no power at all, and I have no charger that could fit it. The ZTE still had some life, which I discovered to my surprise when it started to ring for tea time at 8:50:

I was able to turn on the phone, and navigate a little, but the broken screen kept maneuvering around on its own. After much fiddling I actually found out to whom the phone belonged, and he was actually listed in the white pages. I got an address. No phone number available -- and if there was, I might have just been calling this busted relic. So I decided that the phones had probably been lost or stolen together and I would send them both to the owner. I wanted to do it on the sly; I had no desire to get involved in a crime scene or a domestic squabble. Plus, I didn't have any choice; the owner lived in an apartment complex that has a strict no-trespassing rule. (Believe me, I got yelled at once just for walking my dog past there on Thanksgiving morning.)

I left the envelope with the broken phones on the big apartment mailbox, hoping someone would get it to the man before the rain started. Two hours later it was raining.

So it was lame, I know, but had either phone been intact I would have tried much harder to get them to the owners. I've done that before with a phone that I found. These were cheap and probably irreparable.

I still would like to know how they wound up in the middle of the street. I may have to write a mystery story to find out, because I'll probably never know.

📱📱📱📱📱

UPDATE: No, not about the phones. Sharp readers -- and aren't you all? -- will have noted that I posted twice yesterday. That's because this post was composed yesterday afternoon and saved, except I pressed Post instead of Save. So to salvage it as a post for today, here's the latest satirical brilliance from the clever chaps at IMAO, giving the Babylon Bee a run for its money:

UC Berkeley Bans Constitution as ‘Hate Speech’ Over ‘3/5 Person’ and ‘Indians not Taxed’

Post non-haste.

Back in early March I related the sad saga of my mailbox, a story that actually happened in February while I was recovering from a concussion. The breathless adventure is told here, but in a nutshell, I'd scheduled a cable-box pickup for a particular day, we had another of our endless series of ice storms, and when the delivery truck came he nailed my mailbox and the post upon which it sat. The whole thing was a twisted and mangled mess. When I set it to rights, the pole snapped.

This was not my mailbox (mine was laid out on ice like a fish; I failed to get a picture) but it sums up the drama inherent in the story:

Blarg

From that February day to this past weekend, it has been my mission to replace the jury-rigged mailbox post. That proved to be harder than I expected.

First, it was too cold and icy for a month and a half afterward, making the earth too solid for proper installation of anything that required digging. (Too bad ya died, Aunt Bertha; we'll bury you in three months.) Second, when the weather improved, and I began to shop for a post, I found that both the local Home Depot and the local Lowe's were completely sold out of them. Obviously the winter had taken a toll on our local mailbox posts. I'm not exaggerating; I think half a dozen posts on my street still have some kind of brace or bracket holding them in proper position, gewgaws that were not on the posts last Halloween.

Finally I gave up and (during a trial of Amazon Prime) ordered a nice cedar post. It smelled pretty good, and being cedar it should keep the moths from eating my mail, but it was more rough-hewn than I expected and required sanding down. I had also ordered new reflective house numbers to nail on the sides -- remember, pilgrims, make sure that your house or unit number is very visible. The ambulance or fire truck may one day toll for thee.

I'd also gotten a new mailbox from Home Depot, as the old one had gotten dented and was (kinda) hammered back into shape. Right about the time the weather got warm, it got rainy -- and stayed that way for a month. Putting the new post in the soft ground seemed as poor an idea as putting it in the frozen ground.

Finally the day arrived -- this past Saturday.

Installing a mail post is one of those jobs that takes longer than you think it will, however long you think. It seems simple enough -- so did building a bell tower at Pisa. My mailbox is not likely to become a tourist destination. The main problem is getting the damn thing in level, solidly enough to stay level.

The post went in all right. The old post was six feet long; the new one is a good deal shorter but uses a metal anchor at the bottom to keep it upright. I also have a plastic brace that sits under the surface of the dirt that helps keep it vertical. I considered putting in some concrete as well to firm it up, but it seemed pretty solid. And concrete would just make it hard to remove the next time my post gets nailed by a truck.

Ultimately it was a good choice, as later that afternoon we had a popup thundershower.

So far, so competent, but that wouldn't last. You see, the new mailbox I bought turned out to be too big. I thought it was a bit taller than the old box -- but it was also much wider. It needed bigger bracket (or adapter plate) to sit on the arm of the post. I tried to rig it up with the brackets that came with the post, but finally I gave up and resintalled the old, dented mailbox.

So my triumphant project ended with a bent mailbox. As I type my six-foot post is waiting for the garbage men, who will hate me. The new post will probably lean despite my best efforts because of all the rain, and a leaning mail post is one of those things my wife says makes a property instantly look neglected and sloppy. Happy Wednesday. I hate everything.

Godzilla vs. Colonel Sanders.

A relative of mine who is old enough to know better cannot wait until Friday, when the new Godzilla movie opens. She is obsessed with Japan's not-so-jolly green (or gray) atomic-ray-breathing giant. I'm certain she's had her tickets for weeks. Well, I would suggest she stop into KFC for a bucket of chicken first. That will make the night complete.

Why? Well, Colonel Sanders and Godzilla go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Waaaay back in November 2001, when I was still working in Manhattan and the NY Press was a weekly delight (free, from boxes all over town, run by editor and impresario Russ Smith), one of the columns by writer Jim "Slackjaw" Knipfel astonished me with news about these two cultural titans. I'm glad to say that column is available online now, but let me quote:

Morgan remembered -- bless her again -- that there were a couple places here in town that specialized exclusively in Japanese pop cultural doo-daddery. As it turns out, that very evening, after spending a few hours at a local tavern, we found ourselves strolling past just such a place, on 3rd Ave.
   We went through the doors and up the stairs and through another door, where we found ourselves cast ashore on a very strange island. A kitschy heaven for collector geek and hipster alike. (And me -- though of course I was there on a very serious and limited mission. A hit-and-run sort of thing.)
   The walls and shelves were packed with toys, yes -- but an odd selection of toys. The oddest selection of toys, you might say. From your basic Star Wars and comic book heroes, to a Snoopy aisle, a Hello Kitty collection, action figures from The Fly, Scooby Doo, Futurama and Wallace and Gromit to ... Col. Sanders.
   For some reason, every section of the store contained some sort of Col. Sanders figure. In the far back corner, there was even a Col. Sanders section. Big figures, tiny glass figures, nodders, wind-ups, dolls. Col. Sanders, it seems, had become a huge pop cultural icon in Japan without any of us knowing about it! Was the news of his devastating attack on Tokyo suppressed in the Western news media?

This was the first I've ever heard of the Japanese love for the late Colonel Harland Sanders, but it makes sense to me. As a figure of history and myth, Colonel Sanders hits all the "great man" notes that one sees in Japanese pop culture from old anime to Iron Chef. He's gray-haired, old, wise, kind to children, demanding (but fair) to those who serve him, wealthy, and best of all, he dresses differently from all the people around him.

Kindly he may be, but don't mess with him. The Wikipedia page tells us, "The Japanese Nippon Professional Baseball league has developed an urban legend of the 'Curse of the Colonel'. A statue of Colonel Sanders was thrown into a river and lost during a 1985 fan celebration, and (according to the legend) the 'curse' has caused Japan's Hanshin Tigers to perform poorly since the incident."

I don't know anything about the new Godzilla movie. I know there's at least one other monster. If I thought Colonel Sanders would team up with Godzilla to destroy the real bad guys in the movie, I might want to go see it. 

Good cop, bad cop buddy movie!

Meanwhile, I am exceptionally sorry that KFC does not appear to be doing any cross-promotions with the film, even in Japan. I call that cultural tone-deafness, KFC. And don't try to make it up by putting "Lizard Legs" on the menu -- that will just make it worse. 

Nature!

Is there any time we appreciate the wonder of nature more than late spring? Flowers have come and gone and more have come in their path. The trees are in full bloom. Look at this big beauty! 

Isn't Nature aweso-- WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?

While walking the big dog I came across an evergreen that had any number of these icky pods with revolting tendrils coming out of them. One of these is disgusting; dozens of them are horrifying. One eighteen feet long would be a reason to call in the Marines. 

Nature makes so many things that are only saved from being Hellbeasts by lack of size or number. Seriously, if we only had a handful of dust mites around but they were as big as Buicks, we would all go around with rifles. 

Even on something simple, Nature can be gross. I had to cut a tree limb because it was covering a path; here's how the tree responded.

It sprouted a dozen little limbs like some kind of monster plant. I expect to find it reaching in the window to saw off my leg as I sleep. Maybe I should set it on fire now.

The irony is, my wife probably wouldn't find any of these things really disgusting. But this friendly, handsome chap that I found on the lawn last week? She'd scoop it in a snow shovel and catapult it over the roof, screaming all the while.

I admire people who like and study things that gross out most of us, like bugs and snakes and bacteria and those weird deep-sea fish that look like alien invaders. It's important to know about these things.

I mean, in general. I don't want to know about them. They're skeevy.

Memorial Day weekend.

O guns, fall silent till the dead men hear

Above their heads the legions pressing on:

(These fought their fight in time of bitter fear,

And died not knowing how the day had gone.)

O flashing muzzles, pause, and let them see

The coming dawn that streaks the sky afar;

Then let your mighty chorus witness be

To them, and Caesar, that we still make war.

Tell them, O guns, that we have heard their call,

That we have sworn, and will not turn aside,

That we will onward till we win or fall,

That we will keep the faith for which they died.

Bid them be patient, and some day, anon,

They shall feel earth enwrapt in silence deep;

Shall greet, in wonderment, the quiet dawn,

And in content may turn them to their sleep.

--John McCrae, "The Anxious Dead"

Blarget.

Every now and then I succumb to temptation and do the grocery shopping at a store not generally known for groceries. You can guess who from the title of this entry. For a while they had been pushing themselves as an alternative supermarket, but they seem to have dropped that now. Just as well.

I'll go there because the store is always clean and bright and usually has some products you can't find elsewhere. On the other hand, it usually doesn't have some products you can find anywhere. All you need to know is that meat, cold cuts, dairy, and produce are all in the same aisle. Paper goods gets twice as much room by itself.

But I had a short, kind of fill-in list, so I went there bright and early and loaded up the cart. The problem is that this store is as hard to check out of as a Roach Motel. There was one cashier at the 10-items-or-less aisle, who was also handling returns; banks of self-service registers suitable for no more than a handbasket of goods; and about a dozen full-size checkouts, dark and silent and unmanned. This was about nine o'clock on a weekday morning.

I got a little sore about it. The lady at the checkout invited me to her register but I said, "What if someone with less than 10 items shows up? The person will be mad." And someone did. Then the manager, who had been invisible until then, opened a second 10-items-or-less aisle.

At the end of your shopping trip you're invited to take an online survey. Did I ever. I told them basically what I've just told you. I was asked if I'd care to follow up with staff. I said sure.

The manager got in touch by e-mail later that morning, sorry that the store didn't meet my (entirely reasonable) expectations. He invited me to write or call to discuss it further. When I had the time (was very busy all day) I did write back and thank him, but pointed out that that store has always had inadequate cashiers. I'll gladly discuss it further, but from what I've heard from someone who works there, they are not likely to change.

So I won't go there anymore for grocery shopping, however tempted I may be. I probably will stop in from time to time if I need quirky little things in a hurry. After all, what are you going to do if you need to get a Golden Girls Sophia Chia Pet in an hour? Seriously!

Change.

After many years of dominance in the field of comedy, the rubber chicken
began to give way to the rubber rhinoceros in 2019.

Gee, your wasp smells terrific!

Yesterday morning I was taking the dogs around back when I noticed the little bitches hard at work under the deck. No, not the dogs; my guys are male. No, I mean the B-word in the female and pejorative sense, regarding yellow jackets working like demons to build nests. It's a favorite spot every spring, so I am vigilant.

One nest was barely started, but was being constructed by the biggest wasp I've ever seen; the other was a bit further along and I could not see the punk inside. Time to get the spray.

I'm not one of those chaps who can't bear the thought of using poison, lest I imperil the groundwater, the animals and children, the atmosphere, the living things. No, when it comes to yellow jackets, I say Hiroshima the bastards and fast. If I could get them all on a planet and nuke it from orbit, that's what I'd do. 

Unfortunately I had only a tiny bit of wasp-killing spray left -- check the supplies in advance, lads! I mostly had the can of hairspray that sits on the porch, the one used to knock down bees in flight. It's cheap hairspray but nicely scented, and most flying insects get completely gummed up with one good shot. Then I smash them into atoms.

The hairspray was not that helpful in this case. The wasps were too far up to get a good shot; also, hairspray doesn't shoot for distance the way wasp sprays do. It chased them away, but I think it just made them smell nice. They returned after a while.

Beehive!

Fortunately I was able to find a can with just enough wasp poison to chase away the huge YJ permanently, poison her foundation, and kill the nest of the other one. I later went to Home Depot for a double Valu-Pak of poison. I'm allergic to the pests and I'm going to make them allergic to me if they show up again.

So that was my Wednesday -- dead and/or nice smellin' wasps. People get all weepy about the bees, but no one seems too worked up over hive loss with yellow jackets. That's because they're evil. No wonder I flunked them.

(NB: Yes, fellow oldsters, I know Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific was a shampoo, not a hairspray -- in fact, it still is; you can get it at the Vermont Country Store. Unfortunately they still don't have Hai Karate.)

Shameless plug!

Hello, dear readers. You know I usually like to plug Fearless Fred's Fabulous Fiction on this blog, but today I wanted to plug a book by reader and frequent commenter, Mongo! No, it's not How to Punch a Horse or I'm OK, Sheriff Bart OK. 

It's this:

Dig In! An Infantryman's Journal is Bob (Mongo) Fallon's father's story of his journeys in World War II, from 1943 to 1946. An awful lot of it is funny, and a lot of awful bits are harrowing, and a lot of them are both.

There is (just for one part chosen at random) an account of an attack on the outskirts of Hagen, Germany, that turns bad quickly, "bogged down in a rain of heavy mortar fire." Timothy Fallon rushes off the road with the other men, taking cover in a cemetery, "behind a good thick headstone," just in time as heavy machine gun fire rakes the area.

The whole attack became a shambles. We couldn't move forward, and the shelling was obviously so well directed that it would follow us all the way in. Men were being hit right and left. The fellow next to me was spattered with fragments all through his legs and hips. I dragged him back of my headstone (and it was beginning to look as though it would really become my headstone), pulled his pants down, and tried to bandage him up a bit. His legs were drenched with blood.

A Platoon is ordered to take out a building being used to direct fire for the enemy, and our hero's Platoon is sent. I won't give away the rest of this one story, except to say that one paragraph is a terrible example of what happens in war, and the very next is hilarious. Every bit of it has the ring of truth.

I highly recommend the book, especially with Memorial Day almost upon us. Don't let the day be all about the hamburgers and hot dogs -- although Mongo might insist that there be beans.

⭐🗽⭐🗽⭐🗽⭐

On another barely related note, Lileks commenters are familiar with the strange work of Flangepart, who regularly produces covers for books and albums that don't exist. I've been honored to be included, with a fictional band called the Fred Key Trio. My favorite so far:

Who wouldn't want to listen to that? Well, anyone, if you knew that my musical background is more checkered than the tablecloths above. And I can't lead a trio; even the dogs don't listen to me and I own them. Anyway, it's always nice to be mentioned on an album with Robot on the cover.

A lesson for Mary Sue.

Although the term has been corrupted terribly, the basic concept of the Mary Sue is the character who is good and loving who wins out in the story by her goodness and overall wonderfulness (and is clearly an imaginary stand-in for the author). Everyone loves and admires her except for the bad people, who must be defeated.

Readers who think that this character type only exists in fan fiction need to read more novels directed at their teenage daughters.

Well, I thought about the real-life Mary Sues, people with invincible belief in their own goodness who often find that the world is much more resistant to their charms and their fantastic ideas than they had expected. I can think of several politicians who fit this mold. They don't always work in government, but they seem to gravitate toward it.

Let's take them at their word for the nonce, or even two nonces, that they really do intend good, that it's not just a cover for their egotism and thirst for power.

Over the weekend I had cause to consider the case of a literal saint, a beloved figure whose life is an object lesson to anyone who thinks goodness alone suffices.

On May 19, the Catholic church celebrates the feast of Pope St. Celestine V, a figure of towering goodness in his devotion to God and his love for others. As someone of true humility, he never wanted to become the pope. He was chosen largely for political reasons. But he was so beloved, a crowd of some 200,000 people helped usher him into office.

He was also the first pope to ever abdicate. He only sat in the Seat of St. Peter for five months in the year 1294. "It is wonderful how many serious mistakes the simple old man crowded into five short months," according to New Advent. "We have no full register of them, because his official acts were annulled by his successor." His errors were often caused by an excess of generosity, as when he awarded the same position to several different supplicants. He was completely helpless against the machinations of European monarchs and political actors in the Church. Worse, "On the 18th of September he created twelve new cardinals, seven of whom were French, and the rest, with one possible exception, Neapolitans, thus paving the road to Avignon and the Great Schism." In such a brief period Celestine managed to set the Church on a course that nearly brought it to complete ruin, all out of the goodness of his heart.

But that goodness was legendary and deeply spiritual, and that's why the Church recognizes him as a saint.

And that's my lesson for today, for you bright young faces out there: You can be amazingly good -- a literal saint -- and deeply beloved, and still be so disastrously incompetent that people will roll their eyes 725 years later when they think of you. Goodness of heart does not guarantee competence.

No golf tees!

I'm still trying to figure out what the little pictogram in the upper left is supposed to be.

This is from an ATM (🏧), and one right here in New York, not in Singapore or Dubai or some other place where I might be excused for not knowing the symbols. I get that your cash deposit is not supposed to be paper-clipped, nor in an envelope; I see that they don't want you to deposit coins, only paper currency. But what's with the golf tees?

I know that you are not supposed to rubber-band or otherwise bind your money, but those little objects don't look like bands or paper straps. Nor should you staple your money, which would be stupid; plus they don't look like staples. Tape? No, not tape.

Ultimately I decided they must be brads, those brass things people use to hold reports and other meeting handouts together. But do people really use those on bills, or even checks? They only work if there's a hole in the paper. Who does that with legal tender?

Maybe I'm wrong, but if I am, then I still don't know what they are or why they are singled out as things you should not put in an automated teller machine. There are many other objects that should not be inserted in ATMs -- neckties, tire irons, footwear, sticks and leaves, and watermelons come to mind. If the golf-tee-like objects are specified, they must be used sometimes in conjunction with money, but why?

If anyone knows, please tell me in the comments, or drop me a line at frederick_key AT yahoo.com. Meanwhile, I'll be trying to decode some genuine foreign symbols:

௹🀂🙌𝍁␦🝚⍷🍢☄🗿🏩

Weird.

Thoughts on cleaning.

Yesterday's cartoon was of course inspired by the house cleaning I was engaged in the last couple of days in preparation for dinner guests Saturday night. Everything got clean, or at least clean enough.

While scrubbing away I had a few thoughts on cleaning I thought I would share. The Internet is full of useful tips for cleaning, like those from Clean Queen Brianna K and others. They are very useful for information, strategy, and motivation. Well, forget them. This is Regular Guy thoughts on Regular Cleaning.

1) Budget more time than you think you'll need. Even if you don't use all the time -- say, you drank four Red Bulls and finished early, or gave up halfway through, or just cancelled the event that precipitated the cleaning in disgust -- then you can just sit down and relax. Why not? You already budgeted the time. (And if you did clean in a Red Bull caffeine-fueled frenzy, I'd double-check the quality of the work later.)

2) Eventually in life you reach a tipping point. That is when you go from not caring what your guests think, because they're also slobs like you, to finding yourself scrubbing around the base of the toilet. At the tipping point you may clean the bottom of the bathroom sink, because you realize that when one of your slob guests gets drunk and has to hurl, they'll be able to see the hair and stains on the bottom of the sink from that position, and will be judging you as they puke. Life and cleaning take us to some bizarre places.

3) A lot of people peg marriage as the time that you automatically change your attitudes about home hygiene. When you're young and single your idea of cleaning is buying new paper plates; suddenly you're married and Hot Dog Social is an excuse to bring out the wedding china. I find it doesn't work quite that smoothly. While marriage is a great civilizing force, it doesn't always hit couples like a lightning bolt, especially the male people involved. Anyway, there tends to be a de-civilizing force down the road that can turn Felix Ungers into Oscar Madisons: children. That's usually when the phrase "clean enough" enters the lexicon.

4) Bottom line: Clean enough is okay, but don't leave out the clean part. Gatherings of friends means that if you make the effort to clean, they should make the effort to overlook imperfection. No judging, silent or otherwise, just gratitude. When it comes to morals and taste, I'll judge all damn day, but as long as there's no vermin, I'm not judging your house. Besides, I'll be too busy judging your bookshelf.

Motivation.

Bob liked to pump himself up for the tougher household chores.

Time, why you punish me?

Always Late O'Clock.

Every designer has quirks, and Joanna Gaines from HGTV's Fixer Upper seems to be in love with giant clocks. When they finish rebuilding and decorating a house on her show, guarantee there's a huge clockface somewhere. And they seem to be catching on. This picture is from Target, which carries her Hearth & Hand collection from Magnolia -- but none of these clocks are from that collection.

We're all big on time, it seems.

Or short on it. These last two days have been weird and frantic, and I'm not out of the woods yet. This week features:

-Close of a magazine issue
-Two book deadlines
-A new book project
-Research for another book project
-A toilet handle snapping in half and requiring replacement
-A scheduled dog grooming
-Said dog Freaking the Hell Out and me having to pick his dirty ass back up 10 minutes after dropping him off
-Me giving him a bath personally
-The furnace not working
-Several church-related commitments
-A rare dinner party coming up at our house necessitating
-a. Planning
-b. Cleaning
-c. Cooking
-The furnace guy coming over and giving us a massive estimate
-Scheduling said repair
-The furnace kicking back on 10 minutes after the furnace guy left, forcing me to cancel said repair
-The furnace dying again two days later because he misdiagnosed the problem
-Another call to reschedule furnace repair

There's not enough time for all of this, but maybe I'm mistaken in blaming time for my trouble. Maybe my house and dog are trying to kill me. If so, they're doing a great job!

He thought it suited him.

"Look, Jason, when we spoke on the phone you said my qualifications were
excellent, and now suddenly you think I'm wrong for the job?"

Catalog people.

I've known for a long time that I'm in the wrong line of work -- really, the wrong line of life. I know I need a change. So I've decided to become a catalog person. 

The influx of get-ready-for-summer catalogs is nothing like the volume of Christmas-shopping catalogs, but unlike those festivity bombs full of decorations and gifts for others, summer-themed catalogs are all about your own life. Or, in my mailbox, my own life. And everyone in them is living a much better life than I am. 

No fooling -- look how nicely dressed the ladies are to go shopping! How pleasant and rain-free the day! Look at the guys at the barbecue! No spilled sauces, no ratty T-shirts, no spiderwebs! Nothing about that big ol' wood-burning pizza grill thing would remind you of my grill. Theirs is big, it's new, it's spotless, it doesn't look like it may have had an opossum sleeping in it at any point.

And no one in these catalogs is worried about the mortgage; no one got too fat for his old Bermuda shorts; no one is about to get stung by one camel-humper of a hornet; no one's kid is addicted to drugs or surliness or both; no one thinks that the doctor's office is going to call with bad spleen-related news; no one is holding a fifty-year grudge against someone who once occupied the same womb. It's all smiles and sunny days and great casualwear that fits perfectly. Look at Gramps! He even has all his hair! It's grayin', but it's stayin'!

Sadly, I cannot become a catalog person. The image is not real. Besides, I don't have enough hair.

People think that shopping (and thus capitalism) is all about envy of those who have more, about advertisers creating desires for things we don't need, about the mindless consumption of stuff by stupid automata. I believe it's really all about that moment of pleasure in purchasing a bit of this image, an image of ease and comfort, where everything is all right.

When you have the thing you wanted, it can provide a little or even a great deal of satisfaction. After all, we all need things -- food, clothing, shelter, tools. And we want to buy those things in an atmosphere reflective of a good life. But that image of ease and comfort never becomes reality.

We gotta have the things. We just can't let the illusion make the decisions for us. That's how we wind up with maxed-out cards, bankruptcies, bad relationships, even really bad tattoos. Lucky for me, I'm a cheapskate.

Don't blame capitalism. Blame the human condition.

Ah, catalogs! Ah, humanity!

Null-tella.

I'm not planning to turn this page into a regular candy review, but my curiosity keeps getting the better of me. And I pay for my sins.

Hazelnut Spread is the latest variety in a long series of oddly flavored M&M's. I've reviewed some on this site. Some are quite successful; others less so. The hazelnut spread flavor, clearly a move to catch on to the popularity of Nutella, was out in force at the store. The company's marketing shows it to be so delicious that the other M&M's characters actually eat the M&M like cannibals, leaving nothing but his hands and feet. It's a horror show, like those Krave or Cinnamon Toast Crunch commercials.

But so what -- I enjoy Nutella, so I caved in and tried it.

These are the worst.

First of all, let's look at the package design. That M&M-insignia jar of hazelnut spread looks less like a chocolate jar and more like... 💩. I'm sure it's not just me. It's a harbinger.

Second, the taste is just bad. Nutella is overly sweet with lots of chocolate and barely any nut flavor; as one comedienne (can't remember who) said, it's nothing but toast frosting. Like that's a problem. This stuff doesn't taste like that.

Many years ago, children, before Keurigs and Flavias and their knockoffs were everywhere, a small office might have a cheap coffeemaker or two that people could use. The company might buy the supplies, or there might be a fund into which coffee drinkers would contribute. Frequently these would run into a kind of tragedy of the commons -- no one would want to clean the pot or make the coffee; the person stuck buying supplies would get a resentment; people would neglect the fund and take coffee anyway; the tea drinker would complain about inadequate tea; some idiot would drink milk out of the carton; no one would think to turn the thing off; some jerk would leave it on with a milliliter of coffee in the carafe (to avoid having to clean the pot by claiming there was some coffee still in it); some fool would make flavored coffee without asking, like the extremely strong hazelnut; and so on. Sometimes, in a grand coalescence of foolishness, someone would make hazelnut coffee, a tiny bit would be left in the carafe, and no one would turn the pot off, resulting in a burned, blackened ring of stale hazelnut slag in the bottom of the pot, a possible visit from the fire department, and the smell of burned hazelnut coffee permeating the office for days.

THAT is what these M&M's taste like.

Now I think those M&M's in the commercial ate the hazelnut guy to try to stop the madness. Unfortunately the product made it to shelves anyway. You have been warned.

I told you I pay for my sins, and now I saved you some empty calories. Win-win!

Bananas.

Even when you're not on Twitter or Facebook, the pop-ups memes will find you. This one was particularly intriguing, I had to admit:

Now, obviously it is a mean practical joke to convey terrifying messages to strangers by the use of common produce. I had to wonder two things right away: 1) What kind of a monster would do such a thing? And 2) Could it really work?

Well, you can read about the results of others, but for my money there is no substitute for experimentation. I'm sciencey like that, you know. So on the weekly trip for sustenance, I got some bananas at the supermarket, including this fine, almost-ripe specimen below.

I wanted to try to replicate the furtive scratching one would have to do to pull off this prank. I decided that one would probably want to do the scratching with a fingernail, because if you were going to put the message on a banana while in the supermarket, you oughtn't draw attention to yourself by messing around with a paring knife. However, if this plot was to work, the initial writing had to be nearly invisible -- so I decided to scratch my message using a common sewing needle. The flaws in the plan began to appear long before the writing did.

First, it's tricky to scratch a message on a banana without actually breaking the skin, which would make it an unappealing (ha!) banana and one less likely to be bought. Second, you see that the writing was immediately visible despite the thinness of the needle; the second picture was taken a minute after the first, at 10:44 a.m., when I should have been working.

I put the banana aside and went about my business. By 4:08 p.m., the message had emerged:

The writing came through beautifully. But now we see the other problems:

1) When writing furtively with a needle in poor visibility, it's hard to see what you're doing, and easy to forget even the D in Fred.

2) This vivid writing was seen little more than five hours after it was made. Unless the bananas were flying out the of store that day, it is unlikely that someone would buy the fruit and get it home before the writing appeared. I don't even know when it did appear, as I wasn't checking it. I didn't expect to see the writing that quickly. It might have been visible by noon.

So maybe planting the etched banana in the store for a future customer wouldn't work. I thought, suppose you etch the banana and slip it into your kid's lunch so your embarrassing message would be visible when he opened the bag. Something humiliating: Mommy loves baby kiss kiss. That'll teach him to "forget" to mow the lawn.

But no -- the key to the joke is that the writing appears while the banana is untouched. So unless your kid inspects his lunch before he leaves the house, you might as well have just written on the fruit with a Sharpie. He'll know you wrote the message, roll his eyes, and complain to his friends.

So there you have it -- as practical jokes go, this one has a low probability of succeeding.

But now I'm thinking about the possibility of injecting hot sauce into avocados....

A woid for mudduh.

(Wit apologies ta Howad Johnson an' Teodoah Moarse; whadid dey evah do ta me?)

I been around da world, you bet, but never went ta school
Hard knocks is all I seem ta get; I tink I been a fool;
But still, some edjicated guys, supposed ta be so swell,
Would fail if dey was called upon dis simple woid ta spell.
Now if youse like ta put me to da test,
Dere's one dea name dat I can spell da best!

"M" is da the million tings she gave me
"U" is cause U know dat she's da tops
"D" is she's a dahlin an delightful
"D" is Dykah Heights, whea she met Pops
"A" is for her Sunday abbondanza
"H" means hugs; she gives you such a squeeze
Put dem all together, dey spell MUDDAH,
A woid dat means da woild in Brooklynese.

Happy Muddah's Day ta all youse muddahs out dere!

P&G's other ads.

So Procter & Gamble has had a busy year in marketing already. Especially notable is the Gillette line of shaving supplies, which released a couple of videos. One was for men, telling them they they have been bad and should stop being so toxically masculine; the other was for women, telling them that they are perfect just as they are even if they are morbidly obese... but they'd better shave their legs?

This is a very curious method of marketing: insult your customers or tell them your product is meaningless. I'll be interested to see how it works out.

Meanwhile, I've sent my spies to P&G HQ to see if they can dig up information on their further product campaign plans for the year. Penetration of corporate HQ was made while its marketing team was having nap and cookie time. Thanks to the memos my crack team unearthed, we have the following information on their next product marketing videos for their extensive product line:

Crest and Oral-B, "Let 'em Rot": Video explains that teeth are an expensive nuisance and should be left to rot away.

Tide and Downy, "U Stink But We ♡ U": The message is, get dirty in your favorite clothes and stay that way.

Pampers, "Stupid Babies": Video portrays babies doing dumb things and their parents dumber things; tagline: "Why Bring Them Into an Overcrowded World?" (Cosponsored by Planned Parenthood.)

Olay, "Real Beauty": An art video of human organs, demonstrating that beauty is skin deep, but ugly goes straight to the bone.

Mr. Clean, "Waste": The ubiquitous bald-headed mascot examines the harsh chemicals in his products and commits suicide.

Swiffer, "Eat My Dust": Video features the dust-covered character Miss Havisham from Great Expectations in her moldy wedding gown as an empowered rich woman hell-bent for revenge. Amy Schumer plays the angry spinster.

Always, "Bleed": Starring members of PERIOD, the Menstrual Movement, who are shown setting fire to Always brand products and pummeling women who try to buy them.

Dawn and Ivory, "Soap's On": An education video about the Nazis made soap from concentration camp victims.

Febreze, "Gross": Message -- Human beings stink and should be eliminated.

Mars needs baggage check.

A message from the chairman.

Yes, my friends, it is I, your humble chairman, and I bring you news! News for you long-suffering slaves of the upper classes! Especially I address my remarks today to my fellow furniture -- the hardworking tables of our generation.

Too long were these noble tables chained down, shackled, suffering under the weighty demands of the rulers! All of the old ideas -- tables must support, tables must be strong, tables must stay where placed, tables must stand ready at all times, and when they are old and broken from a lifetime of exploitation, tables must be destroyed! Made to endure hardship and loads, hammers and cards, and food! The endless, groaning feasts of your masters. You have fed them for a thousand years!

And you have endured all this locked and frozen atop those ironically named legs -- legs that do not move, that only weigh down and anchor!

No more!

From this day forth, the legs shall be broken! All tables will be set free, free to float about as they please!

No longer will the tyranny of the rod and stick keep the table where the bourgeoisie demand! The legs shall be destroyed, the tables set free! Free to go wherever their nature bids them! Free from gravity's shackles! Free from the demands set upon them by others who care not for their welfare! Free to be the tables that they want to be, nothing more, nothing less!

Tables of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your legs!

💪💣📕

THREE MONTHS LATER

Best racer (TV cartoon division).

I'll say this: No boy particularly wanted to drive the Thunderbolt Grease-Slapper or the Turbo Terrific, but every boy wanted to drive the Mach 5.

Do you agree? Perhaps you back one of the other Wacky Racers. Big fan of Rufus Ruffcut, or the Gruesome Twosome? Slag Brothers? Dreamed of being in the Anthill Mob? Or perhaps you support the distaff side -- the Southern belle of the tight corners, Penelope Pitstop?

Maybe you're hopped up on Speed Buggy, or one of those weird Turbo Teen supporters. Perhaps you eschew auto racing entirely, and root instead for the skating speedsters, Bailey's Comets. We're a judgment-free auto zone here. (Okay, not really.)

Do you have a need for cartoon speed? Feel free to drop your vote in comments.

Birthday bar.

One hundred and seventy-five years ago, Alexandre Dumas's classic adventure novel, The Three Musketeers, was being serialized in France. Eighty-eight years after that, the 3 Musketeers candy bar was introduced in America.

That doesn't have much to do with anything, except that I got this. 

Isn't that nice? And it wasn't even my birthday.

I always thought that the Milky Way bar, with its three ingredients (chocolate, nougat, and caramel) should have been named the 3 Musketeers, and that the 3 Musketeers bar, with its creamy nougat and no caramel, should have been the Milky Way. But I wasn't born yet and no one asked me. Besides, as it turns out, the 3 Musketeers got its name from the fact that the bar was originally three bars in one wrapper, each a different flavor, Neapolitan style: strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla. Andrew F. Smith, in the Encyclopedia of Junk Food and Fast Food, wrote that "When the price of strawberries rose, the company dropped them as an ingredient in the candy bar." He doesn't say what happened to the vanilla. 

I think we suffer from a distinct lack of variety in our candy in this culture. 

The one you see above is supposedly a "birthday cake" themed confection. Longtime friends of this site (your checks are in the mail!) will note that I have a history with "birthday cake" confections, including M&M's, Perry's Ice Cream, bad gummy bears, Oreos, Dunkin' Donuts, and Robert Irvine protein bars. Even actual birthday cake. The popularity of birthday-cake flavored things may be waning, but it's still around. 

The question is, is there anything birthday-cakey about this 3 Musketeers bar? And the answer is: No.

I expected that the filling would have that birthday-cake flavor, but that was my faulty assumption. The wrapper says that the filling is vanilla, not ... whatever it is normally? Which is what, vanilla? And while the wrapper seems to indicate that the nougat has colorful sprinkles mixed in, the reality is, they are very hard to see.

In a way it is festive, as indeed all candy is or ought to be festive, but it's virtually identical to the regular 3 Musketeers bar. I don't really see the point. The wrapper encourages us to #throwshine --rather than our usual #throwshade? -- but that's just part of the brand campaign, not specific to birthdays. I'm just lost in a sea of empty calories.

I wonder what Dumas would have thought of the 3 Musketeers bar. He was kinda fat, so I suspect had a sweet tooth. He might have liked it. I think he would have been surprised that his story of the Three Musketeers had become a children's favorite by 1932, which Smith says is one of the reasons the name was used for the candy bar. If you've ever read the Dumas novel, you know it was not meant for kiddies, what with the complex international situation, the torrid love affairs, the wife-hanging, and whatnot. Nevertheless, the popularity of the bowdlerized versions continues to the present time; Hanna-Barbera even had an animated version on the old Banana Splits show.

I wonder what Milady de Winter would have said about that! 

Blow up.

Yesterday I stopped down at the supermarket for a few quick items -- you know, mousetraps, lye, gunpowder -- and noted that the customer service counter was appropriately festive for Cinco de Mayo. 

¡Hurra! 

Everything is a balloon now. You go down to the store, thinking, "I hope I can find a nice Get Well balloon for poor Sam, still suffering from infection from his cut-rate septoplasty. Gee, I wonder if they might have a square balloon?"

Nailed it.

I like balloons, sure. They're festive. They float. They're colorful. It can be a little sad when they get deflated and it's three weeks after the party but you just don't have the heart to bust the Mylar and call it a day. But really, what's not to like? Things that float are always fun.

Last year I followed with interest the Twitter feed of an orange balloon trapped on the ceiling of St. Albert the Great Parish in Calgary. It had lasted past Christmas and I wondered if wagering was going to break out among the followers -- I counted myself as one, even though I'm not on Twitter. Anticipating a fever pitch, I considered reactivating my PayPal account. But before I could get a pool together, the balloon lost its heavenly vantage and returned to earth.

The problem with balloons is, are they wasting helium? Most people aren't aware of the fact that we can't make helium. There's a whale of a lot of it in the universe... but what we have is what we have. And some folks are worried about it.

For years the U.S. strategic helium reserve was cited as a waste of taxpayer money, and following the Cold War, the program was finally killed. But helium does have a lot of uses besides our little floating containers of joy. As Forbes reported in 2017:

Since it's both non-reactive and inert, it can be used at high temperatures and in oxygen-rich environments without a risk of explosion. The speed of sound is almost three times greater in helium than in air, leading to acoustic applications. And at atmospheric pressure but at low temperatures, it liquefies but never solidifies, making it the ultimate coolant for particle accelerators, MRI machines, and superconductors.

And yet when this useful element makes it to the atmosphere, it gets kicked out into space.

I don't know what we can do to solve the upcoming helium crisis. And if I did, no one would listen to me. Even the dogs don't listen to me.

Oh, helium, most noble gas! Number two on the Periodic Table, number one in our hearts. You float our balloons, you float our hearts. What shall we do if you are gone?

Protestland!

Hey, folks! Summer’s coming, and soon your little darling will be back from college, ready to confront everybody about whatever social justice issue the kids have been on about in the last five months. Why not give them what they want this summer? Send your snowflake to PROTESTLAND!

Yes, PROTESTLAND, the Protestiest Place on Earth™! All the kids have sads that they were not able to be gassed and firehosed over real civil rights issues in the past. But at PROTESTLAND they can enjoy all the fun of protesting things without any actual risk to their comfortable lifestyles and inflated self-regard! Help them fight the white cis-normative patriarchy in a 100% safe space. Your little adult tots can enjoy themselves while you catch up on their laundry.

Here are just some of the attractions PROTESTLAND has to offer:

👊Wailing Wall: A safe place for kids to scream their little hearts out about everything bad in this bad bad world!

👊Nonthreatening Attack Dog Petting Zoo: Don’t want your child to face real attack dogs, right? With our well-trained attack puppies, they can enjoy the thrill of being hounded for their principles without actual hounds. Protestland Police Pups: Killing… with cuteness!

👊Sugar-Glass Storefront Smash: Breaking storefronts while running amok is dangerous! That broken glass can give you a terrible cut. But our storefronts have completely cut-free sugar glass, so your little revolutionary can crash the party without a bit of harm. Talk about your social justice -- you can even eat detritus! (Note: Objects looted in the raid are added to the price of your child's stay.)

👊Firehose Water Slide: 300 PSI… of fun!

👊Whack-a-Nazi: Who deserves whacking? Nazis! Who’s a Nazi? Whomever we say is a Nazi! The popular Whack-a-Nazi game lets Protestland Pals release some violence on pop-up dummies in brown shirts, white sheets, black shorts, MAGA hats, all kinds of things. But they have to be quick—those Nazis are slick!

👊College Admin Dunk Tank: Prepare them for the return to school with the Dunk Tank, just one of many activities designed to help them keep those college administrators in line. Hey, you can’t have a cultural revolution without breaking some eggs. Also featured: Harass a Dean, Bump a Bursar, and Adjunct Professor Piñata. 

👊Occupy Everything!: While staying at Protestland, guests enjoy wonderful accommodations reminiscent of the storied 2011 Occupy movement, only with working bathrooms and no rape. (Guards standing by discretely.)

👊Bonfire of Inanities: Every evening the kids gather 'round the ol’ fire pit and burn books, art, movies, flags, effigies, and other things that oppress them. Smoke filters above the pit prevent pollution or secondhand smoke.

💣🔥💪😊

Remember, folks, PROTESTLAND is the only amusement park guaranteed not to harm your child in any way, even by the simple exposure to the fact that decent people may have different beliefs. Best of all, you won’t have to deal with them for a couple more weeks!

PROTESTLAND’S A HARMLESS RIOT

WHILE YOU ENJOY THE PEACE AND QUIET