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Salt!
Well, it hadn’t been a week since I last showered you with images and descriptions of products in delightfully anachronistic packaging before the emails started coming in. “Ted, won’t you please find more products in delightfully anachronistic packaging to share with us, the readers,” so many of you wrote. Okay, okay, I give in! But you’re just getting one more…for now.
And here we are. Despite the little missus’ recent heart attack scare, I can’t keep the salt away from her. I’ve given up trying to let her dole it out via the traditional shaker and just let her pour it onto her Fritos pie right out of the canister. She’s going through a package a week, and at this rate, Morton’s is getting a little pricey. Solution? Royal Crystal Iodized Salt.
Picked up this baby at the Dollar Tree for – yes! – a dollar and believe me, brother, you’re not going to find a more delightfully anachronistic package of salt.This Royal Crystal Iodized Salt looks like it’s from…the 1970s.
Proof of Its Modernity: Mention of trans fat on nutrition label.
Where You’d Expect to See It: In the background of a photo in a print ad for Fit & Trim dog food in “Family Circle” from 1979, shot in a grocery store with all the products on the shelves out of focus just enough so you can’t read the brand names. But you’d, eh, recognize it from the color scheme, sure.
Buy It Because: For God’s sake, salt is salt. You might as well get the cheap stuff. Hell, I’d feed our six foster kids road salt if we lived in a climate where I could scrape it off the streets in the winter.
• A simple design with bold letters on a field of that deep red-orange – that’s what makes this one look old. That and the double-shield thing – I’m sure it has some sort of graphic design name – in which “Royal Crystal” is printed in white on deep blue. That thing alone looks like something you’d see as part of some sort of modern American colonial bicentennial style decorating motif, right? Oh, you know what I’m talking about. Look, the important thing is it looks like the Royal Crystal salt people designed this thing 35 years ago, and here it is, still today. I love it, and now that you’ve seen it, so do you. -
Sears!
As you know, this past weekend a lot of folks were hoping to get an iPad from Sears for $69.
And while you may be heartened to know that public opinion is largely on Sears’ side rather than on that of those who ordered the item in question (and who most have labeled as “greedy” or “stupid,” or “incredibly greedy and enormously stupid”) I’d like to offer some evidence that may in fact change your mind:
Sears pulled this little stunt once before! Oh yes!
Back at the turn of the century – the real turn of the century, not that lame one we just had less than a dozen years ago, my Great Great Grand Uncle – oh, let’s say, Zebediah—sure, it’s a little cliché but why not? – Great Great Grand Uncle Zebediah Parsnips was fascinated by the latest in state-of-the-art moving-picture technology. Sure, he had a Magic Lantern, but those were so 1890s. So when he’d seen a crazy good deal in the Sears, Roebuck and Co. Fall 1900 catalog – $34.00 for an Optigraph – he of course jumped at it:
Now, bear in mind, this price wasn’t for the already outdated 1899 model, oh no. For thirty-four bucks, Sears was promising you the next generation Optigraph. Too good to be true? Uncle, eh, what was it?, Zeke? Zeb!, he didn’t wait around to find out:
As you can well imagine, there was no way Sears was going to actually let the 1900 Optigraph go for that price. Turns out $34.00 was a so-called “typo.” The real price? A significantly steeper thirty-four and a quarter.
Well, Uncle What’s-His-Name was pissed, especially since Sears refused to honor their advertised price. Instead they sent him a couple upright parlor grand pianos, a pump organ, a houseful of furniture, a four-seater enclosed surrey, six bushels of oysters and a credit for the balance, $18.35, which they put on his Discover Card.
Just so you know, I spent a goddamn hour and a half in the garage looking for that stupid retro catalog.
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Slap Tags: The Gateway Graffiti!
In an ongoing effort to “completely ruin my knees” before I’m even 35 (as my more zaftig pals insist I’m doing), I go running thrice weekly. (And I say “thrice” because I’m really trying to ramp up the pretension on the blog this month.) I need to exercise now because once I hit fifty, I plan on not caring any more, really start packing on the pounds, and rest on my laurels that at one point, years ago, for a month or so, I ran thrice weekly.
That way, at the buffet at Circus Circus (or whichever buffet), Mrs. P and I can chat with an attractive, trim, younger couple at the next table, and as I dig into my third plate of all-I-can-eat fried shrimp, I’ll remark, “Oh, yeah, I used to run, too – just like you. Worst thing I ever did. Blew out both my knees.”
But that’s all in the future.
These days I run in one of my community’s more affluent neighborhoods, because it’s fun to pretend I live there, and because occasionally someone leaves their garage open and this is an excellent way to score power tools. (You’d be surprised how few people look twice at a half-naked man lurching down the sidewalk carrying a bright red plastic Sawzall case that’s loudly slapping against his left thigh. In fact, most tend to look away.) Also I figure it’s only a matter of time before I have some sort of impromptu rendezvous with one of the comely housewives on my route though so far the only luck I’ve had has been an awkward tryst in the pricker bushes with a gardener here or there and these fellas always – and I mean always – fall in love with me. And afterwards, it’s difficult – they don’t speak English and I don’t speak…you know, whatever. Gardenese.
For a little more than a month, as I passed this one stretch of houses that border a park, I saw these things in the leaves and dirt on the curb:
And, well, you know me, I’m like a five year old – always picking crap up out of the gutter (and then putting my fingers in my mouth). So a couple of weeks ago I gathered all of these that I could find, tucked them into the waistband of my sheer running shorts – with the liner intentionally cut out and the legs slit way up the sides to give me plenty of freedom of movement – with the intention of writing an insightful post on taggers.
Well, I never did. But some of the points you would have enjoyed reading might have included:
• How delightfully amusing it is to find evidence of tagging in wealthy neighborhoods by the kids who live there and should know better. Because they’re not poor. (In addition to pretension, I’m also trying to increase the overt elitism here on the ol’ blog.)
• Some over-the-top rant about how dumbasses like this are solely responsible for USPS rate increases since his monicker was scrawled on free Priority Mail labels – which now are used more by taggers than by law-abiding postal customers like you and me who stimulate the economy by selling, on eBay, ashtrays stolen from long-defunct hotels and then shipping them across the country.
• And some little zinger like, “Isn’t this fellow’s little monicker missing a letter? Specifically S? Shouldn’t it read LOSER?” Yeah, I went there. Or, rather, I was going to.But I never wrote any of that, instead deciding to focus on more pressing matters over the previous weeks, like cartoon birds and French fries.
And then two days ago I was driving down the street, a few miles from where I found these slap tags, and I see this billboard:
Hm! Recognize the name?
Anyway, CBS Media, owner of the billboard: I can’t guarantee it, but I bet – I just bet! – I can pinpoint to within maybe three or four houses where the young man who’s vandalizing your signs lives. Ooh, and his family’s rich so it’ll be fun to make an example out of him. Especially if you offer any kind of reward to me, and by God, I’m putting my life on the line here, so you’d better make it worth my while. Hell, let’s get Warner Bros. and J. K. Rowling in on this thing, too. They’d be happy to throw some cash my way to nail the little bastard, right?
As to the mother and father of this miscreant: Dad, you pony up a new cordless drill, a small table saw, and one of those big red metal tool chests on wheels – namebrand, none of that crap from Harbor Freight! – and we’ll forget the whole thing. (Unless CBS, et al., offers a better deal. Jesus, I could have a bidding war on my hands!). Or Mom…? I need you to go outside and pick up the paper in your bathrobe after hubby’s left for work when I run by tomorrow morning and, eh, we’ll take it from there. And, ooh, wear fuzzy pink slippers, too – I have this thing for them.
Look, Mr. & Mrs. Where-Did-We-Go-Wrong, it’s up to you, but Junior can kiss his chances of getting into Pepperdine goodbye and LOER his college expectations if I blow the whistle.
And that’s not a threat. That’s a…well, that’s a vague hope that I can something more out of this whole thing than the dog doo under my fingernails I got from picking up trash from the side of the road.
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Zooey Deschanel Versus the LA Times
I’ve been under a lot of pressure lately from all of you to weigh in on the whole Zooey Deschanel / LA Times brouhaha, or, if you prefer, kerfuffle. God, how I hate both of those asinine terms – “brouhaha” and “kerfuffle” – and you have my word that I will never again use them on this website.
Anyway, you’ve been emailing, calling, sending postcards, a few of you have even shown up at our offices unannounced (and then begged to use the bathroom) – all demanding that I pick a side in the whole kerfuffle – this brouhaha, if you will.
Okay. I give in. Here’s my official position:
…Actually, first, let’s review what we know about the case:
Actress Zooey Deschanel reportedly said, with regards to Prince Will and Princess Katie’s recent visit to some event in downtown Los Angeles, “I just don’t want them to see the worst of L.A…This is such a big deal and there are, like, parking lots filled with trash all the way here. I hope they helicopter them in past that.”
And on July 10, in an LA Times opinion piece, opinionated opinion piece writer Patt Morrison opined, “I can’t believe Zooey Deschanel is really the snobby cow she came off sounding like Saturday evening.”
The verdict? I have to side with Zooey on this one. I mean, first of all, it’s the LA Times for God’s sake, so it’s a no-brainer. C’mon, we all hate the LA Times, and it’s a given that you just automatically take whatever the other side is.
Secondly, well, the fact is, Los Angeles is a toilet. And, yes, Zooey’s right: Downtown Los Angeles is a big ol’ greasy, corn-studded Number 2 wedged in the bottom of the bowl, and if you ever manage to flush that overgrown mudpuppy down, break out the Bon Ami and the waterproof Freezy Freakies because otherwise you’re going to have brown streaks all along the white porcelain of your low-flow Kohler. Hey, I’m not saying anything that we all don’t already know and agree on. However I will concede that I should have ended the toilet metaphor right after “Number 2.” It doesn’t really make any sense after that, though it sure was fun to read, right?
But I’m not letting Zooey off that easy. Because I have to listen to her sing this song every day at my gym:
They pipe music throughout the gym, but only in a coupla rooms do they have monitors, so I’ve been hearing her caterwaul for three months before I was finally in an area where I saw the actual video, and I was stunned – because like you, without seeing the video, I presumed this was some singing nobody wearing Birkenstocks and sporting unshaved armpits if you know what I mean. But then I saw the video. “Oh, okay, it’s Zooey Deschanel. Well…good for her…I guess.” But it’s still annoying. You know the most annoying part?
“And you can worrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrk…” Her extending the single-syllable word “work” just goes through me, and believe me, it’s about ten times worse on the cheap, tinny speakers at the gym than it is here. No other singer in the history of singing would take the word “work” and sing it “worrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrk.” In fact it’s more like “worrrrrrrr-urrrrrk.” I hate it. I hate it even more than you do, and I know you hate it a lot.
And the other thing is the comments below the video. Everyone is going on about how amazing it is that Zooey has recreated the sound of the 60s with this song.
Newsflash, folks: She hasn’t. But you think she has because of the kitschy extended intro to the video, the various dance scenes, the 3-Zooey girl-group back-up singers, and all the vintage set pieces in the admittedly extremely smart-looking video.
But the sound isn’t all that 60s. If you want the quintessential 60s-sounding modern song, look no further than Amy Winehouse and “Rehab.”
Now that’s not to say that Zooey isn’t absolutely adorable in this and everything she does, because you know, I know, Craig Ferguson knows, we all know, she is. She’s absolutely adorable. Christ almighty, you look up “adorable” in the dictionary and there’s Zooey looking adorable, wearing something adorable, doing something even more adorable. No wonder Josh Deschanel married her. She’s adorable.
Great, now that damn song is stuck in my head.
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Gluten-Free Rice Krispies!
I VISITED the cereal aisle of my local grocer yesterday hoping to see what the long-overdue new prize is in Kashi’s Good Friends cereal (still the Ira Glass Mini Goofy Glasses) but what ended up catching my eye was Rice Krispies! These weren’t just any Rice Krispies but Gluten-Free Rice Krispies. Like you, I had to laugh. As you know, this entire “gluten-free” nonsense is the next ridiculous trend in household products that Big Grocery is shoving down our throats.
Remember just a few years ago they were adding oxygen to every manner of cleaning product because somehow the filthy air we breathe was supposed to get our underpants whiter? (Yeah, like that did your bloomers any good!) Next, all these different food products were suddenly infused with acai berry and green tea and flaxseed oil and whole grains! (What had we been eating before, partial grains? Sheesh.) And let’s not forget pomegranate – and to a lesser extent, blueberry – mania from a few years ago. Jesus!
Good citizens all, we dutifully began to eat food with these new, exotic ingredients no one ever had heard of before. And no sooner had we all gotten used to buying mayonnaise with “olive oil” in it then we’re supposed to recalibrate our grocery buying again as they pull the same crap with this gluten-free campaign. But now we’re to avoid certain foods – the kind with “gluten” in them – at least until the manufacturers can come up with a gluten-free variety of whatever it was we were eating before. They’re working fast and hundreds of new variations of old products – gluten-free, of course – have already popped up. What’s also sprung up out of nowhere like so many gluten-free mushrooms in a pile of gluten-free horse manure are your gluten-free blogs written by these well-meaning but, okay, let’s face it, naive and half-witted gluten-free Moms who somehow have convinced themselves that their children can’t handle gluten. Whatever gluten is. (And, no, I don’t know, either.)
Now I ask you: do you remember, growing up, a single kid in school who had a gluten allergy? Of course not – they didn’t exist! So what happened to this loser generation of children that this previously non-existent problem has become such a wide-spread epidemic? I’ll tell you what happened – nothing! Nothing happened! Also, helicopter parenting.
Gluten allergies are of course a myth, like Bigfoot landing on the moon and gluten-free spider eggs in Bubble Yum. And to prove it, I encourage you, if you know some kid with a supposed gluten allergy, to carry around a loaf of Wonder Bread. And when you see that that poor little putz about to take a bite of his almond butter and goji berry sandwich on sunflower-seed-and-brown-rice gluten-free bread (all of which was purchased at Trader Joe’s, and don’t get me started on that place!), you knock it out of his hand and cram a slice of Wonder Bread there in its place. It helps build strong bodies 12 ways, and if he was eating it in the first place, he wouldn’t have had his sandwich knocked to the ground so easily.
To see how completely joyless the whole idiotic gluten-free craze is – to show you that this gluten-free crusade doesn’t just remove the delicious gluten from our favorite foods, it removes the fun – you need only point your browser at the Kellogg’s website, and visit their Gluten-Free Rice Krispies recipes section.
I don’t need to tell you that the quintessential regular, good ol’-fashioned Rice Krispies recipe is of course, what else?, the beloved and revered Rice Krispies Treat. But not Gluten-Free Rice Krispies! Oh no, brother! What do you make with that cereal?
Parmesan Zucchini Sticks. (Try showing up with those at the next bake sale. You’ll be drummed out of the PTA!)
See what I said about forcibly removing the heart and soul from our favorite foods? The gluten-freeniks would have our kids after-school-snacking not on an 8″x8″x2″ Rice Krispies Treat or two, presumably washed down with a quart of delicious Strawberry Quik as you and I did each day Monday through Friday, but rather on something made with vegetables.
…Oh, look, if you scroll down on that same page, it turns out you can make Rice Krispies Treats with Gluten-Free Rice Krispies, too. Huh.
I bet those gluten-free Rice Krispies make the marshmallows taste terrible.
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The Long-Awaited Final 10 Products with Anachronistic-Looking Packaging That I Found at the 99¢ Only Store That You Need To Know About, I Guess
Here’s that last ten I promised you weeks ago! And this is what’s going on, if you’ve just joined us: Apparently I have some weird fascination with products in packages that look like they were designed decades ago. Lord knows I’ve tried to get you interested in this, too. I thought maybe it could grow into a hobby we can share (since you evidently have no interest in competitive horseshoeing) and we could work on it during the weekends that I have you. You know, we could even take a trip to the 99¢ Only store sometime, just you and me. And…and maybe Lucinda, too, Daddy’s new…eh…roommate. Oh, you’ll like her fine.
So what I did was I went to the 99¢ Only store and I found these things. Each and every single one is currently available there! (Well, except for the two that aren’t, but we’ll get to that later.) And the thing is, they all look old, which is pretty cool. They all look old, but they’re current products. Isn’t that neat?
Now let’s dip into this final ten…with some dip!
This Laura Scudder’s Green Onion Dip Mix looks like it’s from…the early 1980s.
Proof of Its Modernity: Website listed on back.
Where You’d Expect to See It: In the cupboard where your elderly widowed neighbor keeps all her spices and seasoning packets, the last of which she most recently purchased in 1983.
Buy It Because: According to their website “Once you try it, you’ll never want to use any other brand.”
• What a great old-looking design – made all the more wonderful when you realize those onions are rendered entirely with just two shades of green and one shade of brown. -
Taint Funny, McGee!
Okay, come on.
Come on!
As though the headline wasn’t enough, they run a picture of a kid splashing in some water beneath it? Oh, like they didn’t know exactly what they were doing! Slow news day – even for the silly season – at the end of a shortened holiday week. Plus the regular editor’s on vacation probably. He won’t find out until a few weeks from now when Leno holds this up on “The Tonight Show” and says something like, “Gee, honey, is it me or does the iced tea you made taste vaguely like bologna?”
I guarantee you’d never see something like this on the front page of the LA Times.
And this is precisely why the Daily News gets my business!
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Cartoon Birds!
You’re probably wondering what happened to Fred “Herb” Herbert, Don “Dink” Dietrich, Jack Cannon, “Spence” Irving, Hank Jacobs, “Foof” Fredericks, Joe L. Quimby, “Chick” Dixon, Lou and Morty Schwartz, Frank “Hobe” Hobart, and all the rest of the creative team that worked for Jay Ward Productions after the studio closed up shop in, I think it was 1984, probably.
Now these weren’t the same fellas that drew “The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show,” or “Rocky and Friends,” or “Rocky and His Friends,” or “The Bullwinkle Show,” or “Bullwinkle, RFD,” or whatever you may have known it as in syndication when you were too old to be watching cartoons and it pissed off your father every time he walked in the room.
No, that show was animated in Mexico – because animating a moose and squirrel was a job that Americans wouldn’t do!
But those animators, Dink and Hank and Foof and Herb and Ed and Ted and Slim and Melvin and all the rest – they came on board for “George of the Jungle” in the 60s, and by God, they stayed til the bitter end. Anyway, they’re every single one of them all still working today, in 2011, those who aren’t dead that is, and guess what they’re doing! Go ahead, guess!
Well, you’re wrong!
Here’s what they’re doing:
They’re painting pictures of cartoon birds on store windows in the Valley.
Oh, and on the permanent sign on top of the store:
Heh heh…”Discount Birds.”
Okay, okay, settle down, I’m just pulling your leg. My point is that these particular cartoon birds look exactly like something out of “George of the Jungle,” don’t they? It’s like whoever did character design on “George of the Jungle” back in 1967 painted these birds, right?
Of course I’m right – why wouldn’t I be? So, look, every time I pass this store I see these goddamn birds and I think “It can’t be just me that thinks they look like something out of a Jay Ward cartoon; Jesus, no, it can’t just be me! Others surely must think the same thing! They just need to see them! They need only to see them and then they’ll think the same thing! I have to get the word out!”
So I’ve done my part.
You won’t find content like this on Cartoon Brew.
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Rappin’ Kyra!
The other day I read a news story right here on the internet about bratty kids and their permissive parents. No problem with the content of the story at all; this fellow LZ Granderson who wrote the piece (and is interviewed in the accompanying video) is, of course, right: Most people with young children today are lousy, irresponsible parents who should have never reproduced – and yes, sorry but this includes you, probably, if you have kids. Your children are little monsters and I hate them. Those (few) of you who this doesn’t apply to – well, you know who you are.
Okay, maybe that wasn’t exactly what he was trying to convey but it’s what I took away from it.
But, Jesus, don’t get your panties in a bunch over that – it’s really beside the point. Your kids suck. What I’m getting at is, in the video, we have a CNN anchor, who a little Ted Parsnips-patented Internet Research tells me is one Kyra Phillips. A pleasant enough gal, to be sure. Attractive, well-spoken, dresses real nice, a regular delight, sure.
If you watch the video, and I’d like you to, thank you, at about the 1:30 mark and continuing for about ten seconds, she suddenly starts gesturing like she’s in some sort of gangsta hip-hop rap-music video.
Well, my point is she looks ridiculous is all.
Now I’d like one of you to do one of those mash-ups with this video of her and audio from one of those rap songs, you know the kind, so it looks like she’s singing a rap song. I’d do it myself but I don’t know how to.
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French Fries!
You know, it’s been hot here in Southern California these past few days – but not only during the day. Oh no. It’s also hot at night.
Very early this morning, three a.m. it was, I was sweltering in bed, writhing beneath my sweat-soaked, greasy, Hawaiian Tropic-stained, sandy bedclothes (Like you, I didn’t shower after coming home from the beach on the Fourth of July – too tired!), unable to doze off. I had to be at a meeting at ten o’clock! I needed some sleep!
Ambien? The goddamn pharmacy won’t give me any more refills. A stiff drink? Well, maybe, but then I’m going to want to find a karaoke bar. Besides, what fun is a stiff drink without Ambien? Suddenly I remembered this:
Of course! McDonald’s can help! So I got in the car and drove over to the local Golden Arches to pick myself up a large order of fries.
“Make sure they’re good an’ hot!” I directed the gal through the speaker.
“¿Que?”
“Nevermind, just get my fries! My fries, woman – I need to get home and sleep!”Oh, you know I kept that bag good and closed all the way home. Once there, I climbed back in bed, dumped the contents on the pillow next to my head and began pulling them into my mouth a fry at a time, darting my tongue in and out of my mouth like a Gilbert’s skink.
McDonald’s fries work quickly: I was probably only on Fry 4 or 5 before they did their job and I was suddenly in the Land of Nod. I woke up refreshed some hours later – not fatigued as you’d be from, say, Wendy’s fries.
As you know from the time we had to share that bed at the Peppermill in Reno, I’m a violent sleeper – flailing about while I slumber like a Gilbert’s Skink caught in the jaws of a hungry coyote. So while I slept, I must have mashed the hell out of the uneaten fries into a sort of paste with my head.
And here’s the most amazing part: where this mass of frymush had adhered to my scalp, my chronic eczema all but disappeared! Sure, I had been picking it out of my hair while meeting with a potential publisher that morning about a new project (the fries worked so good I overslept and hadn’t time for breakfast), but after realizing its additional medicinal properties, I stopped snacking and left the rest of it in/on there.
However: No word yet on whether they’ll alleviate that undiagnosed skin condition on my left foot. But as a handful or two of the fries have migrated down to the bottom of the bed, I’ll have a definitive answer to this in a day or so. Stay tuned!
Ted Parsnips
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