I won't eat anything with googly eyes

The difference between vegetarians and vegans is that vegetarians don't eat meat for whatever reason, whereas vegans don't eat animal products for strictly moral reasons. What this means is that to be a vegan, you have to do a lot of research before you eat anything.

If you're a vegan and you accidentally eat a mint, and this mint is made of a type of gelatin in pig feet, then guess what? You're going to hell. Or...I don't know what you do, but you should be ashamed of yourself.

Usually the vegan diet comes down to, 'Did any part of this food come from something that had a face? If so, don't eat it.'

I'd like to get a bunch of vegetables together and put googly eyes on them, then put a sign up above them that says, 'What now, vegans?'

...though I'm sure their response would be something like:
'I'm not eating those.'
'Why's that, vegan? Can't eat vegetables now that they have a FACE?'
'No, you attached those googly eyes with glue, you ass.'

See, I thought googly eyes were self adhesive, but after an embarrassing amount of time spent researching googly eyes for sale online, I learned that glue is now the googly eye adhesive of choice.

You learn something new every day. However, nobody said it was going to be interesting.

(work.)

Vegans and turducken

Yesterday at 6:54pm, a vegan sensed danger. He grabbed the arm of the other vegan on the bean bag next to him and looked into the distance.
'Something horrible is about to happen,' he said as a single tear rolled down his face.

'Turducken's done!' yelled Prashant, pulling from the oven a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey wrapped in bacon.

The other vegan's right arm went numb and the first vegan's nose starting bleeding. 'What's happening?' asked the first vegan.

'Everybody grab a slice!' yelled Prashant to his guests. 'Plenty of turducken for everybody! Oh, and there's sausage stuffing between each of the birds.'

Both vegans said nothing, because by now their heads had exploded.

(work.)

While Prashant happily served up the turducken like a good host, I couldn't help but feel like somewhere vegans knew what we were doing. Kind of like when the Death Star blew up Alderaan and Obi-Wan Kenobi said, "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."

Only this was different. Some vegans down the street winced when Prashant cut the turducken and said, "Something terrible is happening. A bunch of fatasses are eating three birds wrapped in a pig."

Turducken is Russianly stackable food

I'm about to eat turducken. That's a bird inside a bird inside a bird. If I didn't know better, I'd assume a dish with this many levels is Russian.

As Russianly stackable as turducken is, I'm guessing it's American. It probably happened like this:
'We're having a turkey for Thanksgiving. What else should we have?'
'Duck.'
'No, that wouldn't work. Our table's not big enough.'
'Put it in the turkey.'
'That's absurd.'
'Not as absurd as the chicken I want to put inside the duck.'
'Okay, funny man, what goes inside the chicken, then?'
'A smaller bird... but what's smaller than a chicken? Hey, how about Marshmallow Peeps?'
'I'd hate you if that didn't sound delicious.'

'Hey, looks like Henry's running out of ideas.'
'Yes. Yes he is.'

(Turducken.)

I've provided a visual aid to help everyone understand what a Turducken is:

Looks appetizing, huh?

If there's any time in your life to think you're a failure, it's while you're searching the internet for the very best picture of a Marshmallow Peep. I went through about 10 pages of Peep-related search pages all the while thinking, "I graduated from college and now I'm doing this?!"

I accidentally ate bugs

This next part's kind of gross, so don't read it within 30 minutes of eating food.

Yesterday I was eating Kashi cereal for dinner when toward the end of the bowl I noticed a couple of tiny black specks floating in the milk. I looked closer and then realized oh shit, those are bugs.

So, I thought, what do I do now? Quit eating the fucking cereal, obviously. But now do I throw up? I mean, just how many bugs did I eat without realizing it? Were they always in the food or did they climb in up off the table? Are they going to lay eggs?

Then I started thinking about how nutritious the bugs were to stop myself from throwing up. 'Some cultures eat them all the time, right? I think I read that in National Geographic.'
'Did you?' I thought back at myself. 'Did you really read that or did you make it up? Also they probably clean the bugs first, and they're most likely different bugs. Healthier bugs.'

So I, not sure if the bugs that may be in my stomach were even dead, just drank a beer really fast to supposedly kill them, but even then I wasn't sure if they weren't going to lay eggs.
Maybe pouring beer on bugs is like pouring water on a gremlin, ya know?

So I may be sick today, but I feel fine, at least until an army of bugs bursts out of my stomach.

(work.)

I thought about how bugs supposedly have a lot of protein in them, and how all that protein was good for me, and because of all the protein I should have no problem eating bugs that may have been crawling around in my cereal for weeks, because at least it's healthy.

But I don't even know if bugs have protein in them. I think I just assumed they did so I didn't feel sicker.

Young love tastes like mustard

8th grade was a dumb year.

I had a crush on a girl in one of my classes (the girl with the biggest boobs, coincidentally) and I showed my love for her by writing 'I <3 (her initials)' in mustard whenever I made a sandwich.

This meant that not only had I found a dumber way to express myself than poetry, but I was putting a shitload of mustard on my sandwiches, too.

This meant that every sandwich I made tasted like mustard because I liked some girl in my class that won the pubertal lottery. That's stupid.

(bed.)

I wonder how that girl would feel if she knew that I'd been ruining my sandwiches because of her.

Me: "Hey, when I make sandwiches, I write your initials in them. In mustard."
Her: "Why?"
Me: "Because I like you."
Her: "Why didn't you just tell me instead?"
Me: "I really, really like mustard."
Her: "Really?"
Me: "No."

Hot lady starving in the lactose desert

When I was a baby living in Colorado, I hung out with another baby named Danielle. Danielle's mom and my mom would hang out and do mom stuff, so Danielle and I hung out and took naps, drank from our ba-ba's, generally did baby stuff.

19 years later I was in Colorado for the summer selling fireworks and I saw Danielle again. Turns out she was an aspiring model, which is a big change from the last time I saw her and she just sat around and shit herself all day.

One night we hung out and she showed me her modeling portfolio. In every picture she looked emaciated and sad, like the photographer was saying things like, 'You're tired, baby. You're stranded in a desert and it's so hot and you're exhausted. But what's this? The desert is suddenly made of cheese. And oh no, you're lactose intolerant, so you can't eat all that tasty cheese. Look hungry and helpless, baby, 'cause you're in a cheese desert.'

(work.)

Needless to say, I told her she looked great and hoped she'd have sex with me. Instead of engaging in Hot Post-Diapers Reunion Coitus with me, she and her sister smoked pot in the front seats of her car while I sat in the back seat in silence. I haven't talked to Danielle since.

True story.

Clarence Birdseye Day

Last weekend I was in Gloucester, Massachusetts to celebrate Clarence Birdseye Day.

Clarence invented the frozen food process, a method of converted sugar cane waste into paper, and a sweet harpoon gun. Gloucester owes him because frozen seafood is the only thing keeping Gloucester going, aside from rampant sailor alcoholism.

Clarence was truly a renaissance man, being not just an inventor, an author, a naturalist, and an entrepreneur, but also a hillbilly chef.

From a USA Today article:
'Birdseye could make a mean soup of mice, chipmunks and gophers... He once told an interviewer: 'I'll tell you another thing — the front half of a skunk is excellent.''

Way to go, great grandfather.

(bed.)

Unfortunately, there's no documentation of Clarence going insane and inventing crazy shit. For example, he made a pretty sweet harpoon gun that shot harpoons using kinetic energy generated from a large rubber band and a crank mechanism.

Now imagine he snaps and turns the gun into something that shoots, say, frozen gerbils. Because he was so brilliant, there would be at least a week or two where people take him seriously and think "oh man, frozen gerbils. I've always had trouble moving all my frozen gerbils over long distances before they melted, but now that genius invented a frozen gerbil gun."

Then after Clarence is committed, that person would look at his large cache of frozen gerbil guns and think "Ah, fuck."

Unfortunately for comedy, Clarence Birdseye died of a mostly unhilarious heart attack. Damn.

In the event of rain, ice, or interrogation

Well, it looks like it's going to be rainy today, so bring an umbrella. It'll dip down into the 50s, too, so bring a light coat. And in case it gets really bad, don't forget to bite down on your super secret suicide capsules.

Mine are vanilla-flavored!

Protect your secrets! Die with fresh breath!
JERRY'S SUICIDE CAPSULES
"Tastes like the End."

But seriously, bring an umbrella.

(work, Defcon meeting, long trek home.)

Coming soon: Diet Vanilla Suicide Capsules
"Don't die fat!"

Salmon burger and the subsequent vomit geyser

Good Time Charley's, a local watering hole for college kids, needs to fix its advertising before I barf on its waitresses.

A few weeks ago, they were pimping their hot wireless internet, which is great, because who DOESN'T bring a laptop to the bar? Recently, they've taken down the internet ads and put up signs that say the following:

TRY OUR NEW SALMON BURGER!
(picture of sweaty salmon burger in sexy pose)

Charley's is lucky most students become illiterate when they drink, because if people read about fish sandwiches after a few beers, puke would surely burst forth from many mouths like hot water and steam from a geyser.

Go back to the internet ads, please.

(work.)

Read about the other misguided antics of Good Time Charley's here.

Eating your sandwich face first

Hey Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich! Would you like to watch TV with me and Katz? You would? That's awesome.

Is it OK if I eat you? I'll be nice, and I'll wash you down with milk. That cool?

Ok, good.

I am going to eat you. If you had a face, I'd eat that first so I wouldn't have to hear you scream. I don't know how thin these walls are, so a screaming sandwich just might piss off the neighbors. 'What's all that racket?' and I say 'It's just my living sandwich, screaming in pain because I'm eating it' and they'd say 'well then eat the face first' and I'd say 'I'M TRYING.'

Yup.

(sandwich, face first.)

I don't know why I anthropomorphized my food just to murder it. That'd be like some kids putting a magic hat on Frosty the Snowman and bringing him to life only to scoop away his face to make snow cones. Sure it's delicious, but man, you look like a dick.

Alumni donations, homeless man tits

I just got a call from the Michigan Alumni Association. I, being naive, thought what began as casual conversation with the female representative would end in survey.

Turns out, the bitch just wanted my money.

But that didn't stop her from making small talk first.
'What are you doing now?'
'Working for Campus Computing Sites.'
'Where is that?'
'Basement of the Union.'
'OH! I went there because my graphics card was having problems. They couldn't fix it.'

We don't fix computers. This lady had us mistaken for the Computer Showcase, which is similar, but not the same. I can imagine this lady calling other people at 9pm and saying stuff like:
'Oh, you work at Wendy's! I LOVE the Big Mac. Can I have all your money now?'

That bitch.

(around.)

What bothers me about that whole exchange was that she was chatting me up the way a stripper chats up a potential client (or so I've heard).

"Hey! How are you? What do you do? That's cool, that's cool... So you want me to put my breasts in your face? Because that's why I'm talking to you. I rub my breasts on people to pay my landlord and buy food."

Only instead of something fun like a proposed boobs-to-face interaction, all I got was "you got any change?" only over the phone and on a much larger scale.

Let me tell you, you put a pleasant-sounding woman on the phone and I'm a lot more likely to give several dollars to her than I am to give a couple quarters to a hungry man who sleeps in the streets. It's illogical and wrong, but that just drives home the point that homeless men would make a lot more money if they had nice tits.

Vanilla Frosties, my conversational best

Visiting home is a great way for me to feel both bored and boring. Today, over dinner with my mom, she talked about:
- A man she had met who robbed a bank to pay off gambling debts
- A friend's husband who likes to get drunk and chop wood (we later drove by his house, and holy shit, that was a lot of wood)
- Other stories of interesting stuff she's been up to lately

I, on the other hand, had this topic to cover:
- Wendy's has vanilla Frosties.

'Hey Mom, Wendy's has vanilla Frosties now.'
'Oh really? How are they?'
'They're pretty good.'
'Hmmm.'
END OF CONVERSATION

That's the best I could do. Summer is making me boring. I need an adventure, or at least a bad habit.

(bed.)

If we could go on an adventure, loyal reader(s), what would we do? I'm thinking it should involve vanilla Frosties, but that's probably my summer rut (and gut) speaking.

Hot call ahead seating action

Yesterday I grabbed dinner with my dad at Mongolian BBQ. They do call ahead seating, so my dad phoned them and said something along the lines of, 'Hi, I'd like to set up some hot call ahead seating action.'

That phrasing threw me off. As soon as he said that, I thought, 'Great, my dad's going to show up and fuck a chair.'

Mongolian BBQ has you fill a bowl with whatever you want, then some dudes stir fry it on a huge communal hot plate. I got two plates while there, each time taking back something I did not originally pick out. Potatoes, noodles, steak. Their motto may as well be, 'Mongolian BBQ: Better hope the guy next to you doesn't pick out weird shit.'

I move out in a week, so I've taken a ton of stuff home. Be back tonight.

(Home.)

I also observed that Mongolian BBQ is quite possibly the worst place to meet women. Firstly, it's a huge date place, and secondly, people end up doing a lot of stuff independently. A woman may finish getting her bowl ready before her husband, leaving her alone in line just long enough for a single man, say, your father, to strike up a conversation, only to have it awkwardly terminated by said husband joining the woman in line.

Another important thing to note about Mongolian BBQ is that the waitstaff, like every restaurant's waitstaff, is totally banging one another. Every griller has slept with every waitress. Every Friday night, after the doors close, all the Mongolian BBQ employees get together and have an orgy in a big pile of raw chicken and baby corn.

Also, chicken and baby corn are my two favorite ingredients at Mongo, so that mental image made me both horny and hungry. Horngry.

Love, a microwave, and three to five minutes

Marie Callender's fettucine alfredo takes me back to a time when my grandmother would take the freshest ingredients and tenderly make a delicious pasta dinner using only love, a microwave, and three to five minutes (depending on the microwave).

(Rock.)

What bothers me most about Marie Callender's Frozen "Meals" isn't that they're unhealthy. Oh no, frozen meals are notorious for causing heart attacks before they're fully digested. The packaging Marie Callender (personally) uses, however, is wildly inappropriate. Banquet's simple red packaging says "Here's food. Eat food." Hungry Man meals, which don't even try to be healthy, may as well be called "Fat Guy Dinners." Marie Callender, on the other hand, takes a different approach:

Marie Callender's home-cooked foods:
A grandmother made it. You love your grandmother,
DON'T YOU?

Don't lie to me about where my crappy food came from. If you make your food with machines in a factory, then don't talk about how the food's made. Don't come up with a charming story of an old lady who loves fresh ingredients. If you want to provide a cute "how your food was made" story on the box, just say "A robot made this." Or better yet, "A robot grandmother made this with her metal hands."

I'd buy frozen food that featured a robot grandmother, especially if the back of the box had a picture of her shooting laser beams out of her eyes while she fought a zombie Elvis in a post apocalyptic New York City.

Every meal she made with her robot hands

From a package of Marie Callender's 51g-of-fat fettucine alfredo (plus nuggets of truth):

Marie Callender was like a lot of grandmas (with morbidly obese grandkids). She put her love ('fat') and care ('sodium') into every meal she made (with her robot hands), using only the finest ingredients (off the assembly line) and her own special touches (a $3 price tag). Today, at Marie Callender's (windowless factory), each homestyle meal (to be covered in plastic and reheated in a microwave) is still made the same way (as all other food made in a factory). So, sit down (on the floor of your dorm room) . . . eat (alone) . . . enjoy (getting diarrhea)!

(bed.)

My hatred for Marie Callender's tricky advertising inspired me enough to sit in front of the computer and transcribe the writing on the back of a box of frozen pasta and then insert my own snarky comments. That's dedication. And sad. Mostly sad.

Volcano diarrhea and the first chat room

Today, while riding a train back from Chicago, I ate a microwave cheeseburger from the cafe car.

The microwave cheeseburger is one of those inventions that probably seemed really clever at first.

'I've found a way to make a cheeseburger hot and ready to eat in less than two minutes! I'll sell this idea and get rich!'

Then he'd actually eat the microwave cheeseburger and, an hour later, he'd poop lava while muttering, 'What have I done? I just wanted to help mankind, not give it volcano diarrhea.'

Bastard cost 5 dollars, too.

(bed.)

The same process of well intentions and deep regret happened with many other inventions. Albert Einstein talked about splitting atoms or whatever, then they made a bomb and he was sad. Scott Chatroom, inventor of the chat room, at first thought, "People can finally meet on the internet and discuss things intellectually!" then soon people were swapping pornography and calling each other fags.

The very first chat room conversation went like this:
MeInventedChatRooms has joined the first chat room
Intern8235 has joined the first chat room
MeInventedChatRooms: Hello? Is this working? Wow, after years of work, here we are!
Intern8235: hay scott, ya wuts ^?
MeInventedChatRooms: Wow, this is incredible!
Intern8235: wutevr. u want porn? s2r
MeInventedChatRooms: I'm afraid I don't understand, intern.
sK8RbOiDooD182 has joined the first chat room
sK8RbOiDooD182: Wut up? U got porn? press 555
Intern8235: 555
MeInventedChatRooms: How did you get in here, sk8rboi? Hello? What's happening?
SLAYERdeathSTAB has joined the first chat room
SLAYERdeathSTAB: u guys r fags
Intern8235: fuk u homo
MeInventedChatRooms: Anybody want to talk about photosynthesis?
sK8RbOiDooD182: I did ur mom fag
SLAYERdeathSTAB has left the first chat room
sK8RbOiDooD182 has left the first chat room
Intern8235 has left the first chat room
MeInventedChatRooms: Um, can I uninvent this?
MeInventedChatRooms has left the first chat room

Scott Chatroom went with the screen name "MeInventedChatRooms" because "IInventedChatRooms" repeats the I's too soon and it looks confusing. "MeInvented" is obviously the next logical option.

Eating wings until I'm physically unable to eat more wings

The Heidelberg offers unlimited wings for people who drink two beers. And there are decent beers available for two dollars. This means that if I spend four dollars (plus a dollar tip), I can eat wings until I'm physically unable to eat more wings.

How does the Heidelberg stay in business? I'll tell you why: the lines for the wings are ridonkulous, the trays of them get empty very quickly, and the wings are kinda crappy.

But did I mention that they're free? Because that'll make people wait in long lines regardless of whether or not the free thing is good or not.

Still, that doesn't mean I won't try to make this place go out of business.

(Ending the Heidelberg.)

If I ever get rich, I'm going to every bar in town and putting enough money in the jukebox to play Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl" 30 times in a row. Drunk guys hate that song.

Beep beep dinner is ready beep

The apartment I lived in last year had a smoke alarm right next to the kitchen. Whenever anybody made a hot meal (e.g. grilled chicken, pot roast, microwave popcorn) our smoke alarm would go BEEP BEEP DINNER IS READY BEEP. It was more of a food alarm.

But this year, oh yeah, life is great! I can burn chicken all I want, because the smoke alarm is far away from the kitchen! In fact, we don't even have smoke alarms! How sweet is that?

But no, seriously, I'm checking our ceilings and I don't think we have smoke alarms. At all. Not even a coal mine canary in the foyer.

I'd be ok with the canary system. If the bird stops singing, it means maybe someone forgot to take a pizza out of the oven. I can understand dead birds, but not overzealous smoke alarms.

(Bed.)

I may not have mentioned this before, but an obscene portion of my readers are obnoxious middle schoolers. We're talking screen names like xxSk8orDiixx, FallOutBoi7238 and AIM profiles that link to the most obnoxious, Good-Charlotte-mp3-autoplays-upon-loading Myspace pages you've ever closed.

So, naturally, I want them to stop enjoying my "comedy" and go finish puberty. In front of a moving bus.

But if they won't do that, the least they can do is stop reading my stuff, and I figure the best way to do that is to allude to obscure facts about canaries. Soon they'll think, "Hmm, where's the butt humor? Use a swear, internet man," and then never IM me in broken English again.

However, I just referenced pubes, and pubes are HILARIOUS, so I think I just accidentally won them back. Pubic hair cancels out coal mine canaries.

Home is viruses, death, and pudding

Every time I go home for the weekend, a few things happen:
1) The neighbors are having computer problems and only I can save them. Someone was using KaZaA and they accidentally downloaded a zip file filled with tuberculosis. The problem is usually unfixable.
2) My mom tells me who died. I'll be eating cereal and watching TV and then she'll say, 'Did you know Ryan Berg? Because he was shooting up heroin in a parking lot when a drunk driver hit him, got out the car, and then shot him because he was in a rival gang.'
3) I eat like a pig. In college, you can't afford food amenities like candy bars and pudding cups, so I go home and it's like 'holy shit, this is where the good fat people go when they die.'

Be back tomorrow.

(Home.)

Racial unity and cracker snatches

Two friends decided to visit me at 3am in the computer lab while I was working. Oh, and they were drunk.

So I tried to maintain balance between Professionalism and Not Telling Your Friends to Fuck Off, then we went to Bell's for pizza. However, the highlight of the evening was this:

My buddy Aaron Brown, who, coincidentally, is brown, wanted to see if some white girls would move if he walked down the sidewalk on their side, swinging his arms like a jackass.

He did so, they moved, and he called them racist. 'No, Aaron, it's not racist because you were in their way. It would be racist if you swung your elbows around and yelled 'gonna hit me some cracker snatch.'

So he laughed. Then he actually walked down the sidewalk singing, 'gonna hit me some cracker snatch.'

That's racial unity, right there: two people of different backgrounds walking down the street, joking about hitting one race in the vagina (with their elbows, somehow).

(Bed at 5am.)

Well that scared away any female readers I may have had. Or black readers. Or readers.

Though in cracker snatch's defense, cracker snatch sounds like a tasty after school treat.