Awesome Xmas Junk Food!
A post like this needs no introduction. You know what you’re in for. But I still feel compelled to write one. That wretched header image will seem excessive without a small army of paragraphs beneath it.
So, I’ll use this space to share my feelings about pomegranates. In summary: I love them. I love them, but I do agree that they’re messy. Like, I can’t eat one without looking like I murdered someone afterwards. Every shirt and book I own is stained with pomegranate juice.
The real kind, mind you. The kind you can only get by trying to eat a thousand-seeded pomegranate in the same way you would an orange. I’m not talking about that boring “POM” juice. If you want those antioxidants at their full intensity, you gotta buy the real, whole fruit.
Some grocers sell pomegranate seeds separately, in little plastic containers. Don’t buy them that way. You need to pluck them from the fruit yourself. It may be messy, but it’s also fun. Besides, buying pomegranate seeds separately is soooo disproportionately more expensive than buying pure pomegranates. You’d swear they were extracting the seeds with crazy advanced super robots that each cost 500 million dollars.
Archer Farms Red & Green Tortilla Chips: I don’t know if “Archer Farms” is an exclusively-at-Target thing, but it might be. Either way, I’m surprised nobody’s been on my case to write about these. One look at them will turn anyone into a Christmas loyalist.
Don’t judge them by their plain packaging. It’s what’s inside that counts. A miracle masquerading as a snack:
That isn’t trick photography. The tortilla chips really are that red and that green. They taste no better than white tortilla chips, but eating them is like finally satisfying that common childhood curiosity about the effects of swallowing an entire strand of Christmas lights. If the holidays had a pill that made the season everything it is, and that pill was later converted into tortilla chips… I don’t know where I was going with that. Drugs.
Had I friends and a clean apartment, these would be served at the gala. Most definitely. Yes. Read More…
Dino Drac’s Advent Calendar: 12/14 – 12/15/12.
A tree!
Dino Drac is PISSSSED.
He’s pissed, and it’s all my fault. I made such a fuss about how Playmobil was only going to give us good gifts for the rest of December. Now we got a tree, and it’s not even a WHOLE tree. It’s really just a branch. Today’s gift is a BRANCH.
Now me? I like it just fine. It looks like a palm tree, and I’ll never not like something that looks like a palm tree. All the same, I understand Dino Drac’s frustration. From motorcycle to velociraptor to tree. Even for an outsider, it would be pretty easy to look at this sequence and know where to stick the “shit balloon” sound effect.
“You promised me amnesty!” I don’t know why Dino Drac is suddenly quoting one of Count Dooku’s cut scenes. I take it to mean that he’s upset about the tree.
I know this is bad form, but I can’t go to bed knowing that he’s miserable. I tell him to go ahead and open tomorrow’s gift early.
“Really? But won’t the world blow up if I do that?”
I tell him to stop believing in stupid urban legends. Between Bloody Mary and the idea that Earth with explode if someone opens Playmobil gifts prematurely, it’s like I’m living with a bad Lili Taylor character from a bad Lili Taylor movie. Read More…
BFCDAW #12: Karen and Shirley.
Here’s Karen Carpenter and Shirley Manson, singing a duet at an outdoor Christmas concert.
Explanation: For the past week, I’ve spent my entire commuting hours listening to nothing but The Carpenters’ Christmas album and a Garbage greatest hits compilation.
Garbage broke big when I was in high school, and I still listen to them constantly. The Carpenters thing was really a byproduct of my Christmas obsession, because nobody – NO BO DY – has ever rocked those old carols quite like Karen Carpenter.
So, here they are, impossibly together. I am very fond of this concept.
Dino Drac’s Advent Calendar: 12/13/12.
A gecko!
I like him. He’s tiny, he’s drowsy, and he looks a lot like a baby alligator. (Despite this, I am sure that he’s a gecko. I’ve never been more sure of anything.)
His arrival was not without drama. Dino Drac assumed the gecko to be food, and was salivating like a big gross monster. Thinking fast, I lied about it actually being a newborn velociraptor. Since it wears the same colors as the one we got on Tuesday, Dino Drac bought it.
Now I just need to teach him to be gentler with the thing. He’s one hug away from making that gecko explode. I started writing a gecko care guide, culling information from websites filled with funny lizard GIFs. Then I got distracted by Play-Doh.
My winter wonderland isn’t amazing, but it’s not my fault. I had none of the good Christmas colors. There was no white Play-Doh, and the Play-Doh that came closest to red was still too orange to ever pass an official red test.
The black rocks represent Santa’s coal. The purple thing on the far left is…well, I don’t know. I guess it’s one of Delia’s sculptures from Beetlejuice. Not very Christmassy, but when your available Play-Doh colors force you to make a green snowman, there are only so many ways you can praise Jesus.
Oh, great. Now the gecko is missing.