Work needed for slightly used mascot.

We are all very happy about the return of the Twinkie a couple of years ago. When Hostess closed its doors at the end of 2012, it looked like Twinkie the Kid was washed up. But just eight months later, I saw a poster in Times Square announcing the triumphant return of the Twinkie.

Well, now it's gotten even more serious. Not only are Twinkies back, but...

Chocodile Twinkies!

You kids out there may not understand why these are called Chocodile Twinkies rather than just Chocolate Twinkies or Chocolate Basted Twinkies or something.

It has to do with this guy:

Yes, that's Chauncey Chocodile (or Choco-Dile), the original mascot for Hostess's Chocodile. It was a chocolate-coated Twinkie then, but they didn't call it that. See Chauncey in action here:

The question is: Where's Chauncey now?

This is no idle question from a guy who wrote a novel about advertising mascots come to life (see Larry and the Mascots, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, iBooks...). While Hostess may have brought back the Chocodile, its pitchman is still in limbo. Instead, Twinkie the Kid has been pressed into service, as if the Chocodile was just another Twinkie.

I can't improve on Dinosaur Dracula's insane rave of joy about the return of the Chocodile. All I can say is: I'm glad it's back, but does anyone have an opening for a slightly used sort-of-crocodile-shaped mascot?*

---

*As it happens, Captain Cupcake and Fruit Pie the Magician are also MIA; do you think Twinkie the Kid has survivor guilt?

Angry Birds 2: Even Angrier Birds?

I probably saw the original Angry Birds on the iTunes App Store first, but I didn't think it would be something I would like. Then a friend of mine mentioned over cards that his daughters had gotten him completely hooked on this stupid cartoon catapult game. It was cheap, so I tried it, and I was disgustingly hooked. Got hooked on the Seasons game, too. And the first Rio game.

If you've been offline except for this blog and your flip phone, here's the description: a bunch of green pigs have stolen eggs, and the birds are mad. They pursue the pigs to kill them and reclaim their eggs. Each different bird has a different ability (speed burst, explosive egg drop, splitting into three, etc.), but they all have to be launched from a slingshot. You kill pigs, you move on to the next board. It never ends.

When I changed phones and lost all my progress, I lost the will to live. No, kidding! I lost the will to start the games again and go through all the frustrating levels of the past. I never much enjoyed the Space or Star Wars versions; I thought the Epic game was little fun, and the racing game (Angry Birds Go!) was pretty much the same thing over and over: Here's a race! It's over! Buy upgrades with actual money! It looked like that would be it for me and the Birds of Anger.

Now there's Angry Birds 2.

First off, I really dislike in-game purchases, but that's the way of the game world now. You get a free game and you progress either through skill and patience or through buying access. Kind of the way of the actual world, I guess, so maybe there's a lesson there. They also use advertising inside the game, which you can use to your advantage---watch an ad and get an extra bird, for example. Which is worth the thirty seconds of your life when you're thiiiiiiiiiiis close to getting through a board. It also has the lives system that Candy Crush made so popular: When you're all out of  birds, you will have to wait half an hour to get them back. You may get the ad-watching option. Or you could buy some more lives, if you're impatient and want to pee away money.

I'm sad that three excellent birds, Stella, Bubbles, and Hal, are not in this game. Bubbles especially is awesome. Hal, the boomerang toucan, would have had limited advantage; this game uses spitting flowers (they spit back whatever falls into them) and teleportation portals (the pigs can't build a decent house but there's teleportation?), so around-the-back shots are not as crucial. In the original game, you were given your birds in the order in which you had to use them; here you're given random birds and you can choose among three for any given shot, unless you have fewer than three birds left. Repeating a board does not mean it will be identical; in keeping with the "under construction" theme of the game, there are possible differences each time. There are also magic spells you can use... unless you run out or (doy!) want to buy some more. The advertising can help you in another way: You may have to watch an ad for Honey-Nut Cheerios, but the game may also randomly give you a Honey-Nut Cheerio spell to attack pigs with for a round.

Whereas the original game was a puzzle that required skill, the new game is more skill and luck based. Boards less often have a particular means of completion. In fact, the setup is very different in that, rather than having a level made up of a number of boards, as in the original game or Candy Crush, you have levels made of boards that are themselves made up of a series of three or more boards; you have to budget your birds to get through the series. You can earn extra birds in the series by scoring lots of points, or you can... dare I say it?... buy more.

Do I like the game? Sure; it's always fun to destroy things in the name of justice. And there is some relief in retrying a board and finding it set up easier on the second go-round.

Am I disgustingly hooked? Not really. The original game was so challenging I would have to resort occasionally to instructional videos on YouTube; can't see me doing that here. A game ought to not be impossible, but should occasionally make you nuts. It isn't love if it can't make you crazy.

On another note, I hear that there is an Angry Birds movie coming out next May. It could be fun... but I liked the grittier live-action version that came out a couple of years ago.

The mean Sesame Streets.

Many dresses are up over many hysterical heads over the news that Sesame Street will be first-run on HBO (of all places) before running on PBS. I can't imagine why this is considered a good move by HBO, which has celebrated its gross inappropriateness (to say the least) for decades.

People have reacted as if this is the equivalent of the Bada Bing opening next to the Hundred Acre Wood. I say, not quite.

When I was a kid the Great Society was in full swing. That meant all kinds of things that would have today's well-meaning youngsters soiling their Underoos. Busing, enormous housing projects, and tremendous amounts of concrete were everywhere, and (not coincidentally) lunatics literally being let loose from asylums. White people, who had been enticed to suburban living with the advent of the automobile, now ran screaming to the suburbs. Fun times!

When Sesame Street debuted in 1969 it was a typical hippie project of the era. It seemed to be intended to connect to urban kids, who prior to this were only seeing children on TV living in whitebread suburbs. No problem with that---except that the cities were falling into the crapper, and cheerful idiots like New York's Mayor John Lindsay were pulling the handle. So forget the Muppets---episodes were full of street scenes from the city that probably looked funky and cool  to the producers, and looked like an absolute horror show to small children at home.

Dumpy, dreary housing projects!

Of course, they looked even worse on our old black-and-white TV.

Gritty, dreary housing projects!

We learned that the show's city clips were a good time to go to the bathroom or try to wheedle a snack out of Mom.

So don't tell me that Sesame Street doesn't belong on the mean streets of HBO. It had a bird with a hallucinatory "friend"; an unemployable blue hairball with the perma-munchies; and a con artist who was selling shady or possibly stolen goods. For decades it has featured a cranky bum living in a garbage can! What the hell was the idea? I mean, I like Oscar just fine, because I am now a cranky bum, but was this supposed to teach children that the alcoholic nutcase living on the street could be their pal? The more I think of this, the more I think it should have been on HBO in the first place.

Touch not the spoon!

Every home cook seems to have some tools they cannot bear to be without. This is one of mine:

Daaa...daa....daaaaa.....DA DUM!!!! (dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum)

This large spoon has been in the family for years. My immediate family, that is. We bought it at a Lechter's. "A what?" you say? Lechter's Houseware was an excellent chain of home supplies, including many kitchen items. This spoon was part of its Cooks Club line.

The chain imploded in 2001 due to increasing challenges from national chains like Bed Bath & Beyond, overexpansion, and cash flow problems. It went from almost 500 stores in 2000 to none the next year. But the spoon marches on.

Incidentally, one of Lechter's most ferocious competitors was Linens 'n Things---which itself collapsed as a chain of stores in 2008. We still have a bunch of LnT things, too.

I know my mom had a lot of tools that she was loyal to, tools that she stuck with because they seemed to be unbreakable and they worked just the way she wanted. They were the right size, or held the right amount, or were fireproof when other tools of the type were not, or just stuck around so long that they became the tool. She had a colander that outlived her that finally developed a crack, and I kept using it until it was nearly split in half. It may have been older than I was when I had to let it go.

If you're interested in Greek food, or just really good food, I recommend the Kukla's Kouzina site, which features wonderful recipes by the author, Kelly Staikopoulos, her sister, and their late mother and grandmother. Their grandmother wrote down her old family recipes in Greek, but she didn't know how to write (not having been schooled), and the recipes came out as one loooooong sentence. Their mother was an educated woman, but she tended to use all sorts of things for measurements:

We started writing this cookbook with our mother in 1997 but, unfortunately, she was diagnosed with cancer one year later. During that year before her diagnosis an ominous feeling compelled us to learn not only how to read her Greek script, a challenge to be sure, but also to record measurement amounts for typical Greek recipe terms like “a handful”, “1 wine glass” or “1 water glass”—the most daunting being “1 little plastic cup.”

Their mom could use such inexact measurements because they were exact for her. She did not see the need to upgrade her tools.

I wouldn't be surprised in the least if professional chefs also have their favorite idiosyncratic tools. They like to make a big fat display of their beautiful knife sets, as if they were precision surgical tools, and the good sets cost about as much as something that usually has four wheels---but maybe somewhere they have an old spoon, or a cheap paring knife, or a cracked colander, or 1 little plastic cup, things they would hate to have to cook without.

Food chain jealousy.

So there I am Saturday, working away, and where is the dog? Tralfaz is enjoying a restful snooze in a spot by the A/C vent, relaxing until it is time for his treat. Maybe later he'll take a turn in the yard, see if the deer left him any presents. Me, I'm trying to pile up billable hours to pay for everything.

For this I made it to the top of the food chain?

I have long been taught not to compare my insides with others' outsides, for one never knows what secret sorrows and insecurities gnaw at the breast of one's fellows. That said, Mr. Dog looks pretty cheerful no matter which way you look at him.

I thought I might compare the advantages of being the human to being the canine. Maybe there's something I'm overlooking. Here is the list I drew up:

ME: Control of the larder      

DOG: Which he can access food from by being cute, in addition to his two solid meals daily

ME: Have to go to store with money earned by the humans, buy food, schlep it home

DOG: Can get treats just by being cute 

ME: If I go wild and attack dog, it's my fault

DOG: If he goes wild and attacks me, it's my fault

ME: Lifestyle requires long hours of work

DOG: Lifestyle requires long naps

ME: Toys come from Best Buy and cost a fortune

DOG: Toys come from PetSmart or, even better, the lawn, and cost little or nothing

ME: Have to write checks for the mortgage, electric bill, cable bill, water bill...

DOG: Does not have to write checks for the mortgage, electric bill, cable bill, water bill...

ME: Can drive a car wherever a car may go

DOG: Has no idea that there's anyplace you would want to drive a car to; therefore doesn't care

ME: Can use the comfortable climate-controlled bathroom

DOG: The entire world is his bathroom

ME: But for baby and wisdom teeth, got all my original parts

DOG: Um....

You know what? Maybe it's not so bad being the human after all. 

Proofreading and copyediting.

I'm in the midst of a fight with a publisher. Rally 'round the flag, boys!

And I don't mean I'm fighting with the fine people who work with me on my books; heaven, no. Most writers of novels do other things to help pay the mortgage while they wait to hit the big James Patterson payday. Many teach, the poor sorry souls. Many others edit books or magazine articles. Still others, like your humble Fred, do a lot of copyediting, as well as some proofreading and fact-checking.

Everyone knows what fact-checking is: It's what newspapers and magazines desperately need but usually fail to do; or they pay money to hire people as blinkered by ideology as the writers, which is just a waste of money. ("'Hmm---'Handguns kill more people annually than every other single cause of death combined.' Sounds good to me!")

But few people outside the industry know the difference between copyediting and proofreading, and it is the cause of my current conflict.

In brief: There are three distinct editorial jobs in standard book publishing---editor, copy editor, and proofreader. The editor is the most creative of the three, usually working with the author to improve structure and development of the book, whether fiction or nonfiction; the editor may correct the written language as he goes, but it is not his real concern. That falls to the copy editor, who corrects spelling and grammar, adjusts the book to the house style (for example, some publishers would never use the generic "he" anymore as I have done in this paragraph), queries inconsistencies or other problems, make suggestions to fix such problems where possible, and essentially functions as the first reader---the man outside the creative process who will approach the book with the eye of the public. The proofreader is the nitty-gritty man, looking at each line and word and letter to fix that spelling and grammar; he doesn't care what the book says as long as it says it properly. (Much more about the process if you're interested at Upwork.)

A publisher whose name I shall not divulge---yet---hired me to proofread an instructional book. What I did not know at the time is that it had not been copyedited. Even a little. It also appeared to have not been edited.

You can get away with this if you have a highly competent writer who is dedicated to turning in a clean, well-organized, well-written manuscript. That would describe the writer of this book... on Bizarro World.

Proofreaders work very hard, often just at staying awake. But there is a reason that copy editors get paid more. Copyediting is much more time-consuming. You can zip over sentences when you're not reading for sense. When you copyedit, you have to make sure each sentence is logical, each paragraph, every page. This is the position I found myself in when I got into the book (under a very tight deadline, I may add).

At first I thought they had sent me an early draft by mistake---but no, they expected it to be proofed as is.

Let me offer an example of the problem on two lines of text:

This is a lnie that can easliy be fixed in teh proofreading stage.

This a required line   is copy editng . Must be dun.  

As you can tell, the writing done on the second line is barely understandable, but is the kind of thing a copy editor can deal with. You query things a lot. If you're getting a whole book of that crap, you cannot call what you have to do proofreading. It would be like taking a crate of parts to your mechanic and asking him to assemble a Buick.

When I complained, I was told that I just had to buckle down, take a deep breath, and proofread as best I could. I explained that it is impossible to proofread something that is so completely bollixed up---proofreading is for minor errors, not major overhauls. I insisted that they pay me the higher copyediting rate. This went on for days, during which time I continued to work on the thing because (A) I am an idiot and (B) I never expected them to hold out on me in the face of reason. After all, they are publishers, with a company that releases hundreds of titles a year; surely they must know the difference between copyediting and proofreading, right?

Finally, reluctantly, seethingly they agreed, with the warning that they would not do me this huge favor again in the future. I agreed, promising that I would look over each job before I agreed to do it and refuse if it was improperly assigned. So we shook hands like professionals (well, over e-mail, but you get the idea) and they continued to assign me work.

Here's the problem: They have not paid me for the book, and this all went down in June. I've been paid for two jobs I did, but about a dozen more have been billed, and of those three were billed more than 60 days ago; five more than 30 days ago. Either they are broke, they are irresponsible, or they have it in for me. I'm sensing the latter.

And this is the kicker: When all the dust settled, the difference between what I asked for on the job and what they wanted to pay was a little over SIXTY DOLLARS. Because they offered a flat fee rather than an hourly wage, I was so underpaid that Bernie Sanders wanted to make me a poster boy.

So, I'm being forced to consider legal action; I hope it doesn't come to it, but for the sake of any other idiots they hire I think they need a lesson. And I guess my lesson for you is: Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be copy editors. Please, please tell them to skip college and go to plumbing school. Yes, sometimes they'll have to deal with real crap rather than metaphorical crap. But they'll be happier and probably be seen as more useful members of society. And while their clients may occasionally try to stiff them, they'll still be clearing more money than your average editor.

Goldilocks.

At home the next afternoon, Goldilocks was surprised to find that the bears had taken matters into their own paws.