A bacon-wrapped pithy

I wonder if young comic book fans appreciate the golden age they live in?

Super heroes are freaking everywhere. Movies. TV. Conventions. Nowadays you can't pee without hitting a super hero. Pardon my French.

When you think of super heroes it's natural to ask yourself what kind of super power you would want if you could chose. Right now I would choose Pac Man power.

I'm sitting in front of a table right now and my mom surprised me with a bacon-wrapped turkey. It was a 30 lb. turkey with 10 lbs. of bacon and so you wouldn't think I'd struggle with that. Thing is, I filled up on pie beforehand.

I don't know how Pac Man does it. He eats all those ghosts and dots. Ghosts probably aren't all that filling, but the dots? Where does he put all those?

That's what I want. Pac Man power. That would be great.

Daily Ambivalence - pilgrims ate popcorn

Pie, as everyone knows, is the best part of Thanksgiving.

Putting that aside. What can you say about all the food people typically eat on the 4th Thursday of November?

I have a coworker who is going to have a bacon-wrapped turkey tomorrow. This sparked a discussion about bacon and combining bacon with other meats.

Dude, the card is in mint condition

Is there any combination of bacon and (fill in the blank with some form of meat) that doesn't see a substantial improvement in overall taste and succulent red or white protein goodness? To me, when it comes to even the most compromised homemaker, bacon-wrapped turkey sounds like the perfect solution for achieving success. How can you mess up bacon wrapped turkey? It's impossible.

My coworker friend said he would take a picture of the bacon-wrapped turkey to show us what it looks like, but I think he was just bragging.

So that brings us to popcorn. My 11-year-old came home yesterday and said he learned in school that the pilgrims ate popcorn on the first Thanksgiving.

What are they teaching our kids in schools? How stupid do they think we are? And besides, saying the pilgrims ate popcorn on the first Thanksgiving is just mean.

Sure Orville Redenbacher the inventor of popcorn looked old, but he wasn't that old. And he's dead. So he can't really defend himself against such slander. Saying he was old enough to be there with the first pilgrims is like beating a dead horse. Only you're beating an old dead guy wearing a bow tie.

I'd give my 11-year-old's teacher a piece of my mind, but I swore I'd never go back to grade school and I meant it.

Pilgrims ate popcorn . . . eh.

Daily Ambivalence - Christmas music in November

If you start listening to Christmas music in November you will totally hate the song The Christmas Shoes by the time . . . well, by your first listen, actually.

That was a bad example. I should have chosen a classic like Bing Crosby's White Christmas. Yeah, that one. You know the one where you can totally see Danny Kaye standing next to Bing in the radio.

If you start listening to Christmas music in November you will be sick of White Christmas by Christmas. No one should do this.

Take me. I've been listening to Christmas music for a week now. I'm not sick of White Christmas yet but I've had my fill of You're A Mean One Mr. Grinch.

It's sad.

Christmas music in November . . . eh.

Daily Ambivalence - words that rhyme with poem

Home.

In thinking about this entry it occurs to me that rhyming things isn't a talent I value. Poetry that rhymes usually sounds trivial to me. And it's harder to write.

Chrome.

When I write poetry I don't like to be fettered by unnatural restrictions or rules. Those things demand talent. It's better just to pull a paragraph from something you wrote and then use hard return in an unconventional way.

Dome.

To conclude, the only people making money today for rhyming are rappers. I've got no street cred so even if I worked harder at rhyming that option is not open to me. [hard return]

Foam.

Words that rhyme with poem . . . eh.

Daily Ambivalence - weeds

For lots of people the word "weed" has a negative connotation.

However, for people with dreadlocks saying weed is a lot like saying bacon-wrapped bacon.

Remember that one Saturday Night Live skit? This rastafarian-type guy who runs a novelty shop and any time a customer brings an item to him and asks what it does he takes it and says "You put your weed in it." Doesn't matter what it is. You put your weed in it.

I think I was a teenager when that skit was showing. For that very reason I found the skit endlessly amusing.

But I'm older now. More mature.

I happen to be at a novelty shop looking at a strange item in the back of the store. It's kind of a wavy box thing with three handles and some leather strings that come out of holes on the side. Somebody glued marbles and what appears to be pencil shavings on the top. I have not idea what it's for. Where's that novelty shop owner when you need him?

Weeds . . . eh.

Daily Ambivalence - baker's dozen

You know that old saying where someone says you should never trust a skinny chef?

I've always liked that saying because usually fat people are the ones who get discriminated against.

I don't know what the first guy who said this had against skinny chefs. I like to think it was something like a brother and sister who grew up hating each other because one of them liked country music and the other liked rock 'n roll. The sister opens a barbecue ribs restaurant and the brother, who has a band, asks to play there one Saturday night but the sister says no because she has already signed a banjo quartet. So they stop speaking to each other, but then years later when they have families of their own his daughter and her son fall in love, but it is forbidden love because they are first cousins.

And because their parents hate each other.

It's sad.

Still, the brother should never have trusted the sister in the beginning, but not because she didn't like his band or because she was skinny. It comes down to the whole baker's dozen thing. Ask any chef how many in a dozen and they'll probably tell you 13. That's just wrong.

You can't trust a chef. Skinny or fat.

Baker's dozen . . . eh.

Words what folks don't say right

Some people don't pronounce words correctly.

Like the other day I met a guy who didn't know the correct way to pronounce the colored sticks Crayola makes. Instead of saying crayon like cranberry minus the vitamin C, he said crayon like he was just returning from a science fiction convention and still had a Klingon phrase stuck in his throat, something like heghlu'meh QaQ jajvam.

Not that I have anything against Klingons. Or Star Trek in general, though I still think it was strange when Tasha Yar went down to that planet in episode 23 and died unexpectedly. She wasn't wearing a red shirt.

Dogs and cats living together.

Daily Ambivalence - Cheerios and rasins

My kids think I'm weird because I put raisins in my Cheerios.

When I was young I was a bit anal retentive with Cheerios and raisins. I needed to have one raisin with every spoonful of Cheerios and I admit that was weird.

But now I can have two even three raisins with a spoonful of Cheerios and that's no big whoop.

Just so that I tap my right foot on the floor once for every raisin while I chew. That and recite the original 13 colonies alphabetically backwards in my head. And hum the chorus of Eleanor Rigby in the key of C#.

So, huge strides.

Cheerios and raisins . . . eh.

Daily Ambivalence - killing time

I'm not one who normally agrees with most of the people but sometimes I do agree with some of the people.

Some of the people say that the English language leans a little heavy on the violent metaphors. I agree with those people.

Take killing time. I would be more comfortable if the saying was "framing time," like for murder. Not that I need to frame anybody for murder. I'm not saying that. Pending charges aside.

Anyways, I think framing time is a much better saying than killing time.

Killing time . . . eh.

Six Christmas Stories

My collection of Christmas stories is on sale for the next few days. $0.99.

That's one McSpicy without the sales tax.

There was that dream about fresh strawberries

There was that dream about fresh strawberries where Willie Wonka was going on about snozberries but whoever heard of a snozberry and I pretended to be Mike TV to get into the chocolate factory and it occurred to me that it wasn't likely that someone named TV should be such a freak about TV except that my friend Stevie Iphone likes to say "you can pry my iPhone from my cold dead hands" so maybe it isn't all that far-fetched and it made me sad because my name is Edwards not video game or gambling habit so there isn't much chance that my name will ever be descriptive of who I am unless someone invents something really cool and decides
to call it an edwards.

Which would be really great. I'm just saying.

Daily Ambivalence - bobbing for apples

So, uh, the kid holding the mirror
is naked too.

Back in the day, way before there were 7-11s, candy and sweets were sucky enough that when you played the game Bobbing for Apples and won, the prize was just the apple you had in your mouth. Even though, as a result of the game, the apple was now smeared with facial grease from the other people playing the game.

Kind of surprising when you consider how Rubenesque things were back then. Peter Paul Rubens is the dude you can thank for us knowing what Rubenesque means. No Peter Paul and Mary reference there, nor was he the inventor of the Ruben Sandwich. He was a painter and it is because of him that we know everyone was fat back then. When you say someone is Rubenesque nowadays it's a euphemism for sloppy fat.

Which, again, is just inconceivable because the stores back then didn't carry any good candy. Someone with a sweet tooth was relegated to their choice of Red Delicious or Jonagold. Or both. Dude, they must have been eating apples by the wagon load.

Bobbing for apples . . . eh.