Little orange balls.

In the yogurt, no less. 

The new NBA season kicks off October 27, so to gin up excitement among the yogurt-slurping children who are or could become basketball fans, there's this:

I got it on deep discount last month because the expiration date was coming up quick. These little cups of vanilla yogurt come in a four-pack for eating by children (or overgrown children) on the go. What's so basketbally about yogurt? Glad you asked:

Little orange balls!

We've seen this kind of thing before, of course; yogurt, the once-healthy ideal hippie dairy treat, now comes with everything from Froot Loops to Snickers in the plastic cap for mixing in to the sugared yogurt. I know, I know, I say like it's a bad thing. The iron rule of food drift is: Everything healthy that can be made less healthy will be.

In this case, the little orange balls are not flavored orange, but are actually little round bits of white chocolate. The taste is almost indiscernible, even on their own. Mixed in to the yogurt, you essentially just taste the yogurt.

This Alpina yogurt, of which I had never heard, may be healthy as far as its non-chocolate section goes; it's not very sweet, and is in fact quite tart, like a traditional yogurt. Alpina is actually huge in South America. They have, however, struggled some in the US market. On the other hand, they claim to have cracked the code in combining real coffee with yogurt ("This has been a challenge for food companies because of high acidity levels in both coffee and yogurt" says Buffalo Business First), so there's that.

Meanwhile, they have little orange balls, which come with stickers in the four-pack:

Collect 'em all, kids! Stick them on your school textbooks! Stick them on the side of Daddy's car on the way to school! Stick them to your baby brother's fontanelle! And get ready for tip-off!

Badass Fred.

Yeah, we used to get into some trouble when we were kids.

We were badasses.

Still am. 

Everyone nowadays says he's a badass. They consider themselves badasses by nature, engaged in badassery, badassing their way through life. Look, sister, you may be the most badass junior benefits administrator in the HR department, but that don't make you a badass in the world at large. Not like Fred.

Yeah. Fred Badass.

Of course, no one who's really a badass calls himself that. It's like being tough. You have to let other people call you tough. Usually after you just nailgunned your forearm to a plank, ripped it off, rubbed a little dirt onto it, and got back to work. "Wow! Lucy's tough!" they'd say. Sure. Badassishness works the same way.

"But wait!" you say. (That's just like you.) "You're calling yourself a badass, which you just said disqualifies you from badassdom."

That's right---unless you've been at it as long as I have. Then you've gone all the way through and out the other side. Even the rules of badass appellation designation no longer apply.

How long have I been at it? Long time. Me and the boys, we used to go downtown. Me even go alone sometimes. Then us boys would talk about chicks, about fights, about how we were too badass to care about using personal subject pronouns when we should be using personal object pronouns and vice versa. Then we'd get some smokes and a couple of bottles, and raise some badass-flavored hell.

Then we'd hop on our Big Wheels and ride.

'Cause we were badasses.

Over time I got badasser and badasser, until I was the baddest badass of them all.

How bad?

A proctologist once said he'd never seen an ass as bad as me.

Or as bad as I.

Yeah, man. And when this badass shows up, you better watch out. You better not cry. You better not pout.

And I ain't even telling you why.

Badass Fred. Yeah.

Baseball playoff outlook.

Well, now we've gotten past the regular season, and it's on to the Major League Baseball playoffs. Baseball fans worldwide may be waiting on my predictions for each series. Feh---let 'em wait.

Of course, the fact is I have no idea who's going to get to, let alone win, the World Series. Nobody knows anything, as William Goldman said about the movie business, and countless others have said about sports. ("Nothing" is also quoted as being something about which nobody knows, but the meaning is the same.)

The question of who I'd like to see win, however, is different.

What we have now is:

Astros at Yankees (Wild Card game)

Cubs at Pirates (Wild Card game)

Astros/Yankees winner vs. Royals

Cubs/Pirates winner vs. Cardinals

Rangers vs. Blue Jays

Mets (hooray!) vs. Dodgers

FACT: Shea Stadium was perfectly round, and surrounded by dark blue shag parking lots.

So rather than doing power rankings or anything, I'm basing predictions on which teams I like and dislike. In the order in which I want to see them win:

#1. THE METS

I've loved the Mets since I was a little kid and they made it to the 1973 World Series. The 1986 team was awesome, winning 108 games in the regular season and clinching in August, but they came soooooo close to losing the NLCS to the Astros and the World Series to the Red Sox. Yet they were so good that they should have repeated in 1987 and 1988 (as Mookie Wilson predicted), but A) the Cardinals were an awesome team in the 80's, B) the Dodgers were an awesome team in the 80's, and C) New York was shin-deep in cocaine at the time, including (it would appear) the Mets locker room. Soon we were wallowing in the mediocrity of the 90's, the momentary thrills of the late 90's to mid 00's, and then crapsville. Now we have a chance, although this team either hits all at once or not at all, and it looks like everyone is so hurt that someone's arm may actually fall right off in the middle of an inning.

#2. THE CUBS

No World Series championship since 1908. No National League pennant since 1945. Although W.P. Kinsella once wrote a story in which the Cubs winning the pennant was believed (by the Cubs' coach) to be the sign of the impending Armageddon, it's almost worth it if these guys can get finally get it done. When there's no other rooting interest I have to root for the guys who have waited the longest, and no one has waited longer than these guys. Then again, the Mets went 0-7 against the Cubs this year, which makes me less sympathetic than I could be.

#3. THE ASTROS

True, that the Astros almost beat the Mets in that 1986 NLCS, when the Astros were in the NL, But then again, they did not. The franchise is as old as the Mets, and while we have a 2-2 record in World Series championships, Houston's got a 0-1 record. Maybe it's time.

#4. THE ROYALS

Small-market team with a storied history, but little to show for it since 1985. I was rooting for them in the Series last year, but maybe not hard enough.

#5. THE RANGERS

Another team with a long history of not winning the World Series. going back to 1961 and its roots as a Washington Senators franchise.

#6. THE PIRATES

Pittsburgh fans have much to be proud of with one of the great old franchises, but not in a long time. Until recently they sported a record 20 losing seasons in a row. Even the Cubs, with their ridiculously long drought in postseason play, never achieved a length of suffering like that.

#7. THE BLUE JAYS

The Jays have a pitcher I really like, former Met R. A. Dickey, and they kept the Yankees from winning the AL East. And Canadians are nice about sports, except hockey.

#8. THE DODGERS

There are STILL guys around here who are heartbroken about these traitors leaving Brooklyn. Not so many about the Giants going to San Francisco. Maybe because the Dodgers that left Brooklyn were on a huge upswing, and the Giants not. Anyway, did I mention 1988 and the NLCS? Uh-huh. My boss at the time and I sat shiva after Orel Hershiser slayed us. And if they advance this year it will be over the Mets' hopes and dreams. Boo. But because they are a once-beloved Brooklyn franchise, they edge out the Cards in my rankings.

#9. THE CARDINALS

Did I mention that the Cardinals knocked the Mets out of contention in 1987? And since then the Cards won two championships to our none? Bleh.

#10. THE YANKEES

Twenty-seven championships. And being a Mets fan, I have to hear about them all the freaking time. It's like being the little brother who always gets beaten up. Twenty-seven championships is enough for, say, the next 75 years. Lose to Houston and go home, you greedy slobs. Thank you.

Even at Citi Field, you are not safe from schmucks with Yankees jackets.

Face it.

Forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit at 7:30 this morning. 

Only one house in the neighborhood has refused to cover its swimming pool. 

We are all about to die!

I am not panicking about Hurricane Joaquin, which appears to be on a trajectory to head away from us. Why would I worry about something like that when the entire PLANET is about to be DESTROYED?!

It's true and I know it's true, because Cablevision, my cable company, told me. Jim Dolan would never lie. I know he loves us, too; we get the cable bill first, ahead of all the other bills, every single month, and unlike our other utilities we have to pay prior to consumption of services. That's devotion. They're just scared that we'll leave them!

But we may all be leaving soon. Here's what the e-mail says:

Between October 4 and October 13 you might notice a very brief interruption in TV service due to sun outages. 

Holy crap! The SUN is going OUT?

Screw the TV service -- if there's a sun outage, there will be a permanent interruption in US! 

So if the sun goes out, how long until we all die? We would have a grace period of about eight and a half minutes before the light stops coming to us, and apparently that would include the heat as well. I don't know if we'd get any data that tells us the sun went out in that time. If we did, it might give us just seconds for NASA to instruct us to kiss our butts good-bye. Then WHAM! Frozen ice ball.

Now, it may seem a bit odd for a guy who endorsed the SMOD 2016 campaign to fret over a thing like the sun going out, but if the sun is just going to puff out like a candle, there won't be a lot of time to prepare for the end. With SMOD, at least we'll have some warning. 

Anyway, I went back to the e-mail from Cablevision to see if I could pinpoint when the sun was supposed to go out. 

As the sun’s path across the sky gets lower each day, there are times when it goes directly behind a TV satellite and its radiation overpowers the satellite’s signal. This results in what is called a sun outage. 

Oh. 

Damn.

I guess I have to pay my cable bill after all. 

Another story from the bargain bin.

This is an interesting soap product.

Yes, it is a hand soap meant for children, and is by Kandoo. It popped up a basket of sales at the grocery store. My mission: Make an uneducated guess as to why.

I can say a couple of things in its favor right off. First, there's no dadblasted Disney character present. Although the turtle on the label looks like a bit like a cartoony Teenage Mutant Ninja type to me.* The bottle, a friendly shade of green, is shaped like a happy frog, so they have all your amphibian needs covered. The spout and the soap itself are purple, the soap being a lighter colored foam. Essentially they came up with an eye-catching kids' product that used just purple, green, and white instead of the usual panoply of colors that looks like clown barf.

The base of the bottle is wide and thick, which is very helpful for the tykes. Those who have to reach up high to get to the top of the sink, and approach the bottle at a bad angle, are as likely to send the bottle flying off the vanity as they are to get some soap out of it. This makes it as easy as could be hoped for a kiddie pump bottle.

I'm sure they product-tested the squirt soap on the little squirts, but I find the scent rather odd and hard to place. Sort of like Miscellaneous Berry. It supposedly contains fruit extracts, so that's exactly what it might be. When I wanted extra cleanliness and mixed a handful with some Purell, the combined scent was powerfully reminiscent of beer wort from fruity homebrews. Haven't smelled that in maybe fifteen years, but it took me right back.

It is an odd soap in other ways. I find that the color stays on the towel if you don't rinse off properly, but that's not a bug, it's a feature---the idea is to teach the kids how to wash their hands. I guess I need some rinse reminders myself. The color comes right off in the wash, so don't worry about staining the good guest towels.

I think it may have wound up in the bargain bin just as a sale, to drum up interest in the product, and I hope so. Hoover's says the parent company, Nehemiah Manufacturing of Cincinnati, is a smallish outfit of $27.3 million in annual sales---a plucky David compared to the self-care Goliaths that fill our supermarket shelves. So if you have little kids, or even if you don't, try the Kandoo soap and see if you like it too. And if you are a homebrewer, try the Purell thing and let me know if I'm right.

---

*As it turns out, it's Captain Clean, a super-strong frog.

Muppet fruit!

No, this has no post bearing on the theoretical breeding ability of Fozzie Bear. I am merely referring to this:

Yes, look at those puffy, fuzzy green fruits---whatever could they be? Well, let's just pick one and have a AAAAIIIIIEEEEOWWWWCH!!!!

You all are way ahead of me here, I'm sure; that's no fruit, that's the extremely prickly outer coating of the chestnut!

Secret toy surprise!

This is the only chestnut tree I've seen in these environs, and it's right outside a house, so it may have been planted there generations ago. No one seems to be harvesting the nuts, though.

I was surprised to see that the American Chestnut Foundation says that the chestnut has been smited by blight here in Eastern woodlands. The blight is a fungus that came in on Asian chestnut trees (bastards!) planted in New York (sorry!) and just plain murders the American chestnut. Looks like this is my week to find out about tree perils.

The ACF has been working on a blight-resistant American chestnut, and it would appear they are in beta testing. If you're interested in helping out, the Web site gives you plenty of information on how to do so. Be aware, though, that the ACF failed to meet Better Business Bureau standards by its failure to divulge budget information.

Personally, I hope the American chestnut makes a roaring comeback. I like trees, and I love the smell of roasting chestnuts. I've never eaten a chestnut, but they sure smell good. Of course, maybe it's only the Asian ones I've been smelling. Maybe the domestic ones smell different.

The Agricultural Marketing Resource Center notes that many chestnuts sold in American grocery stores come from China. Does this mean that when we sing of chestnuts roasting on an open fire at Christmas, we're talking about Chinese food?