Coke Blak: ack!

Tonight, I tried Coke Blak.

But first, an aside. Now, I like men. Some of my best friends are men. But here is the problem with these bullish critters. Not one, *not a one,* does not go "huh uhuhuhuhuh huh" when shown previews for "Jackass: Number Two." It's sad, really.

But I digress. Regarding Coke Blak, Nupper's reaction: "It's like... if you spilled Coke and coffee on the ground at the state fair, and dropped your cotton candy in it."

"No, you wiped it up with cotton candy," interjects Makry.

"Right, wiped it up with cotton candy," Nup went on, "and then froze it."

"Or burned it," Makry finished.

My reaction? Jelly Belly headache.

Oh crap, I ate spinach

I ate a giant spinach salad today. I KNOW. What was I thinking? I went to this restaurant, see, and looked at this nice chef's salad on a bed of romaine. But there was this gorgonzola pear thing on the specials menu, and I'm all, looks yummy to me! Except that it was propped up on a massive fluffy truckload of the deadly greens, unbeknownst to me at time of ordering.

Salad arrives. The sinister leaves of doom are piled high, topped with a token pear and some walnuts. "Oh no," I say to the husband. "It's, uh, spinach. It kills people."

"It's only bagged spinach that's the problem," he suggests, optimistically. I check my brain at the door in that very moment, and devour the entire toxic pile of vegitation while chattering on about the extreme cuteness of the baby, who is sitting on my lap and watching her mother stuff down forkfulls of death.

It's hours later. Is that a stomach ache or did I just drink that chai too fast? What was that restaurant thinking, and for that matter, what was I thinking? Kidney failure, anyone?

Being that food poisoning is my number three fear in life, just behind firey car accidents and serial killers, I am totally freaked out of my mind.

Pray for me.

Update OK, so I called the restaurant in a fit of paranoia. They claim it was arugula. The husband is laughing. I would strangle him with the cord of his Xbox controller except that it is cordless. &^%!

In memory: Tasha

He spoke with tears of fifteen years
How his dog and he
They would travel about
But his dog up and died
He up and died
And after twenty years he still grieved

Mr. Bojangles

Tasha, we love you! You are remembered by your many friends, none more than Brandon, the friend who stood by your side for fifteen years.

Please see the Flickr link at right for a collection of photos of Tasha from last summer.

Return to the Mall of Death

18 months after my initial visit, I returned to the Mall of Death to check its pulse. This mall, nestled in an upscale Eastside Seattle suburb crammed with frantically-escalating condo development, should by all rights be stuffed to the rafters with ubiquitous middle of the road retailers like Eddie Bauer and Starbucks, and yet I report back to inform you that it remained as lifeless and wizened as the husk of Mrs. Bates.

Into the mall I crept, a wide-eyed baby in my arms, to experience the cold, rattling breath of dead retail space. The infant clung to me in silence, eyes round and dark like Dilly bars.

The decrepit antiques resale hut was long gutted, but the Christian Supply house stood firm, bullishly displaying god-themed board games like "Bibleopoly" and "Teen Choices." Across the way there stood a gaping storefront where the fossil shadows of massive stick on letters for a Gottschalks remained. In this abandoned store husk, a Halloween supply store had taken seasonal root, like a wood-pile scourge of wolf spiders. Countless empty store fronts on either side were closed off by massive chain link drapes. A zombie loner male or two crept in the long shadows down by the closed-off restrooms.

The baby emitted a tiny squeak of despair. I wrapped my arms around her and raced for the exit. What had I done? How could I have exposed such a small dab of innocent human life to such a deafening vacuum of retail culture?

Good lord.

Hannity: bringin' you the news

Pointing out that Sean Hannity is an inane, blathering puppet is really not a wise use of time, since he himself does it every day on TV. Case in point, this transcript of his "analysis" of a sad pop-culture news footnote, the death of Anna Nicole Smith's son, Daniel. "Look, I didn't really watch a lot of that reality show. I've got more important things to watch," he blusters, after encouraging hard-hitting guests like Anna's makeup artist and a gossip columnist to infer that Anna Nicole killed her son indirectly via her sluttiness. "But I watched a number of times, and I literally felt sorry for her." Um, Hannity? Did you watch it a number of times, or did you have more important things to watch, like maybe your fellow lying sack of faux-patriotic crap, Tucker Carlson, on "Dancing with the Stars?"

For crap's sake.

Things I learned in Montana

• A baby porcupine is called a "porcupette."


• "On par" is apparently a golf term. What, you knew that already?


• Organic produce is not pesticide-free. It is sprayed with organic pesticide.


• You cannot grow huckleberries in captivity.


• Wild mountain goats are real.


• The maximum weight capacity of a Pack n Play bassinet insert is 15 lbs.


• These give me the creeps.

What do you think...

...of the new design?

Does a bear s**t in the woods?

I have always been freaked out by this toilet paper campaign.

These toilet bears, as everyone who watches TV is aware, tend to gleefully scroll off wads of this premium rump-wiping product from nearby tree branches before skipping off to do their business in the brush. Something you may not know, however, unless you frequent cynical corporate web sites for personal care products, is that each bear allegedly has its own quirk. Leonard, for example, is "known for the cha-cha Charmin butt-wiggle dance," whereas Molly "dislikes finding an empty Charmin roll." Whatever happened to that dude who simply went around squeezing four-packs of TP during commercial breaks in the Six Million Dollar Man when we were kids?

Not to be outdone, Northern has busted out with its own animated ass-cleansing mascots (asscots?), The Quilters: Marcy, Sally, and Laverne. You can waste even more time on this site than on Charmin's meet the bears, as each Quilter features an excruciatingly slow and irrelevant flash animation allowing you to randomly turn on lamps in their homes.

How this sells TP, I cannot say.