Big Lots Presents Your First Baby!

So  I was at Big Lots the other day looking for a dented barbecue grill with chipped paint and missing hardware…

Bingo!

Anyway, I happened across these things:

…And it occurred to me that the reason the shelves are so full is that in this neighborhood, most girls have already had their first baby!

Posted by Ted on October 24, 2012, 4:11 AM.

Flyer Alarm!

WE’RE UP TO 47.

That’s the current tally of mailbox-jamming political ads and flyers I’ve received so far over the last few weeks.

It may not seem like much, but considering every single one is on thick, almost cardstock-like paper, none smaller than 8-1/2 X 11″ (and most of them were at least that size folded – they opened up even larger), and I have a post office box that I don’t check but once a week if that, this is indeed quite a lot. Especially for an apathetic voter such as myself who prides himself on staying as uninformed as possible.

When I’ve gone to collect my mail these things have been crammed in there tighter than the delicious salty, hairy fish in a can of Haddon House rolled anchovies with capers – and pulling them out was similarly messy and left me feeling just as dirty.

By the way, candidates, if you’re listening…? I read virtually none of your ads. This was the one exception:

An ambitious little brochure – eight pages long – it’s laid out as a children’s book with adorable illustrations showing Congressman Howard Berman enjoying the perks of being a US Representative by spending taxpayers’ money.

I have to hand it to Brad Sherman, Howard Berman’s opponent for the congressional seat: I really loved this flyer; it’s delightful.

Oh, by the way, despite the clever political ad, I don’t actually like Sherman, so neither Berman nor Sherman will be getting my much sought-after vote – or since I don’t have to show photo ID – votes. Me, I’ll be voting for a different candidate entirely.

Anyway, the volume of political mail from this election cycle must be doing wonders for the near-bankrupt USPS. Why, I’ll bet we won’t see another rate increase for at least another couple weeks!

Posted by Ted on October 22, 2012, 11:18 AM.

Crikey!

Confounds kids who fling their toys out of their cribs.

Posted by Ted on October 21, 2012, 3:13 AM.

Making Contact In This World And Beyond!

So tonight last year, a pal, he calls me up and he says to me, “Ted,” he says, “Ted, you’ve got to see this [then] new program on TLC – ‘Long Island Medium,’ it’s called. A more lively and compelling show you’re unlikely to see!”*
*Until “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” debuted ten months later.

Like you, I’m fascinated with the bizarre and the unexplained, the weird and the eerie. I just can’t get enough of all that, despite already spending half my time in thrift stores and the other half in dollar stores.

As you know, it’s just over three four years this month that I lost Marni to chronic inner thigh chafing. (My God, I begged her not to wear wide wale corduroy – the not-so-silent killer.) A day hasn’t gone by when I haven’t wanted to talk to her again, if only for a moment – long enough to find out where the hell she put my goddamn flat-jaw Vise-Grips. (She used to straighten her hair with them.)

Anyway, while said pal and I passed the time of day on the phone, I divided my attention precisely in half and the part that wasn’t distractedly muttering “Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Oh. Uh-huh. I see. Mm. Okay. Mm-hmm.” was busy dicking around on the internet looking for more details on this show. Could this “Long Island Medium” be for real? Could she, at last, put me back in touch with the ol’ Marnster?

What I discovered was startling:  I found a short article on a website called “Channel Guide Magazine,” where the writer describes her experience speaking with the star of Long Island Medium Theresa Caputo.

Isn’t that freaky?!

I guess I should be more specific. The puff-piece article itself wasn’t all that startling. What was astonishing was that of the (then) 90+ comments below it, over 70 of them were directed to Caputo herself, as though she has anything to do with the website!

Inexplicably, scores of people somehow decided that posting a message below an article about the Long Island Medium was the best way to get in touch with her.

Once someone over at the “Channel Guide Magazine” website saw what was happening, a link labeled “Information on contacting Theresa Caputo” was added below the article. Click on the link and you’ll read:

Below this bit of helpful information…? Well over six thousand comments, the most recent one as of this writing, posted around 3:30 p.m., Friday October 19, 2012. Judging by the sampling I looked at, they’ve been coming in steadily every single day. Nearly all of them completely ignore the information above, and yes, address Caputo directly in the comments section.

By the way, Channel Guide’s tagline is “Watch Smarter!” I guess it’s good it doesn’t reference reading comprehension.

Many of the 6,795 messages are pretty sad. You’d have to be a complete heartless bastard not to feel for some of these people who are desperate for specific closure, real or manufactured, regarding someone who died. (And believe it or not, I’m not a complete heartless bastard.)

But mostly, it’s a fascinating contrast of communicative abilities that are light-years apart. On one extreme, we have a woman supposedly gifted with the remarkable capability to contact the dead. And on the other: thousands of her fans who are clearly in way over their heads just getting to the right website to send an electronic message to her.

As for me, I’m not about to get in line behind 6,800 people and wait two years for an audience with the psychic. I’ll avoid all of this nonsense and use Marni’s life insurance money to buy a pair a new pair of Vice Grips. I don’t need Theresa to tell me she’d have wanted it that way.

Posted by Ted on October 19, 2012, 4:15 PM.

Shouldn’t Box Tops

be on the top of the box?

Posted by Ted on October 18, 2012, 10:13 PM.

Recently at Red Baron Pizza Corporate Headquarters…

Posted by Ted on , 2:45 AM.

Save Big Bucks!

SEEMS it never rains in Southern California, the song goes, it pours. Right after you’ve put up a yard sale sign with ink that’s going to run.

Still, we can read it and “Everything Brand New In Box” might imply a marriage that imploded right after the wedding. However, most of the merchandise is pluralized, so we must assume there are multiples of each, and therefore perhaps we’re dealing with goods that, eh, fell off a truck. So to speak.

And speaking of plurals, there are hundreds of thousands of people on the internet better, smarter, wittier than me who get angrier than I do and can work themselves up into an indignant yet snarky froth over unnecessary apostrophes. I’m not going to even attempt to match their brilliance. I’ll save my anger for reasonable things, like being the only person in the world who ever got a parking ticket.

Yet I’m still left wondering why “iron’s” and nothing else?

Posted by Ted on October 17, 2012, 3:04 AM.

What’s Bueno: Tasteless Unlicensed Michael Jackson Halloween Decor!

SURE, you could do your Michael Jackson-themed Halloween shopping at one of those overpriced and seasonal Halloween stores where packaging for Michael Jackson wigs feature an unsurprising non-African-American model…

Oh, how nice that Adam Lambert fellow is still getting work.
And he gets to tell friends “I’m working on a Michael Jackson project!”

Yes, you could buy officially-licensed (and expensive!) MJ stuff there…

But instead, why not head to your local 99¢ Only Store where this bony gentleman might greet you over over the registers at the entrance?

He’s available in the Halloween aisle for sale, too! For 99¢ Only!

Can we get a closeup of his head?

Awright, who’s the comedian?! The head of the decoration! Sheesh!

Posted by Ted on October 15, 2012, 1:57 PM.

#219 – Parking Tickets! Or, A New Feature Is Introduced and Things Take a Dark Turn

REGULAR readers to this blog know that I often refer to Los Angeles as a filthy toilet. “Ha ha,” you might laugh. “Oh, that Ted…!”

Here’s the thing though: No, it is. I really do loathe this city. And to quickly deflect and/or ignore the obvious question of “Then why the hell do you live there?!” I hereby offer up something new – a fun little bit I call…

Why “857”…? Well, I’m not going to write these all at once, and I didn’t want to go with something ridiculously low like “500” because then what happens when I reach 501, right?

I’d been hoping to launch [industry term] this feature for a while, but I needed just the right reason to get started. Something that really set me off.

Thank you City of Los Angeles Parking Enforcement Officer Dickwad for giving me that inspiration.

So what happened exactly?

Eh…I, uh, didn’t put money in a parking meter and I got a ticket.

Now listen: I’ve parked on this street dozens of times and always fed the meter. Last night, however, it just didn’t occur to me that I had to worry about it. It was way past six o’clock on a Saturday. I just assumed we were beyond ticketing time.

Turns out metered parking is enforced on this particular street six days a week, Saturday included, until 8pm. Oops.

Hey, now I know, right?

Here in the Valley – not in the middle of Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard where street parking is almost always impossible – here in the Valley, in Canoga Freaking Park, where I pulled up in front of – yes, folks, have a good laugh! – a Goodwill in a low-income part of town (in what is largely a lower-income community itself), on a block with plenty of empty metered spaces, it seems to me that perhaps – just perhaps! – sixty-expletive-deleted-three dollars is a tad on the high side.

Ah, City of Los Angeles Department of Transportation, still stinging over the “Gold Card” scandal of last year. Most cities count on some money generated by parking ticket penalties. Our mismanaged, misgoverned city is doing its best to stave off bankruptcy and apparently generate its entire bloated annual budget by robbing its citizens via crazy parking violation fees.

So while I certainly don’t agree with the ludicrously high cost of a parking ticket that I’d have avoided by dropping a damn quarter in the meter, at least I do understand it.

And so I’m proud to debut this new feature and announce #219 – Ridiculously Expensive Parking Tickets as the first in our non-sequential, arbitrarily-numbered 857 Reasons to Get The Hell Out of the Filthy Toilet That Is Los Angeles.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to check the Dumpster behind Sizzler for a few unwashed gallon ranch dressing jugs and start counting out 6,300 of these guys.

Posted by Ted on October 14, 2012, 12:00 PM.

Exciting Cereal News!

AS YOU KNOW, I always enjoy learning of new advances in the cereal sciences, but since even the most current breakfast cereal websites seem to have been last updated to announce the demise of General Mills’ Sir Grapefellow in 1972, I’ve found that the only way to stay “in the know” is to get out there in the field and find the news myself!

And it was on a recent fact-finding (and sock-buying) mission to Target that I happened across this:

I speak for all of us when I say “Thank you, Quaker! It’s about damned time!”

To hell with the bowl, damn the milk – sometimes you simply want a handful of dry cereal just to munch on! Sure, we’ve all been there – you don’t have to explain to me!

Maybe you’re outside with your MacBook Pro on your lap by a field of California buttercups. Well, that enormous box of Cap’n Crunch’s Crunchberries isn’t going to fit on the small 4-1/4″ x 3-1/2″ inch area below the keyboard and to the right of the trackpad. Not without you knocking it to the ground every time you hit the enter key, you clumsy oaf!

But as this image from the back of the box shows, a curiously near-overflowing packet of Snack’ems is right at home there! Fits like a glove, it does!

Crunchy nuts, granola clusters, chocolate chips, marshmallows, M&Ms – these are just some of the traditional delicious snack mix elements you won’t find in a packet of Cap’n Crunch’s Crunchberries Snack’ems! No sirree – Cap’n Crunch’s Crunchberries Snack’ems contain just pure, unadulterated Cap’n Crunch’s Crunchberries cereal! Nothing more! The exact same stuff that’s in this box, to be precise:

As long as we’re here, let’s take a look at the price – just for fun! – of this box of cereal, hmm?

$3.04 for an 18.7 ounce box. Seems reasonable. After all, this is Target – the home of reasonable prices!

Now, uh, just out of curiosity – again, just for laughs! – do we have a price on the Snack’ems?

We do?!  Excellent! Let’s take a look!

Hmm! $2.99! Also seems reasonable, right? Oh, wait, how much does the Snack’ems box weigh?

2.4 ounces?

No, c’mon. How much does it really weigh? Seriously now.

2.4 ounces?! Really? That’s it?! Holy crap.

So in other words, for a lousy nickel more – $3.04 for the regular box of Crunchberries versus $2.99 for Snack’ems containing five tiny packets – I get over seven times the amount of food?

And all I’d have to do is take five stupid Ziplock bags and grab a handful of cereal out of the box – a handful much larger than the Snack’ems packs’ stingy 0.49 ounce amount – and put it in each one…and still have enough Cap’n Crunch to eat with milk, from a bowl, with a spoon, like a civilized human being, for probably over a week?!

That’s it. I’ve heard enough.

Awright, men!  Tie him up!

Posted by Ted on October 13, 2012, 3:32 AM.