This Japanese commercial for cup noodles is funny, but turn down your speakers before playing it – there’s a lot of screaming:
Categories
Tag: OH GOD IT BURNS
Categories
Music Video of the Day
Some things defy description, and this Lawrence Welk-esque music video from the 1970s is one of them. You’re just going to have to watch it.
The gentleman in the video is one Edward Anatolevich Hill or Эдуард Хиль, and the song he’s performing is titled I am So Happy to Finally Be Back Home. The song is meant to be sung in the vokaliz style, which means that it’s meant to be sung without words. And wow, does he do just that.
Luckily for us, there are scholarly types out the on the internet who’ve taken the time to do the research behind such oddball phenomena. Go over to Justin Erik Halldor Smith’s blog and get the skinny on Edward Anatolevich Hill.
Categories
The World’s Most Terrifying Children’s Book
The blog Awful Library Books recently featured what I consider to be the world’s most terrifying children’s book: Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child’s Book About Satanic Ritual Abuse:
It would seem that Satanists have their own version of “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”:
Form follows function in this book, with dreadful pencil-crayon illustrations matching the dreadful prose:
For more, see these articles in Awful Library Books: Satan for Kids and Satan for Kids, Part 2.
Categories
Sketchy Santas
In addition to Santa, NO!, there’s another blog of funny/sad Santa photos called Sketchy Santas. Here are a few of my favourite entries…
I call this one “Playground Candyman Santa”, and wonder if the poor kid ended up in therapy:
I lived in the Philippines from age 3 to 7 and hence my memories of Santa are based on how he’s portrayed there. Even there, the image of “Santa” is of the fat white guy in a red suit that was popularized by Coca-Cola ads, so they hired white guys who happened to be there and who needed the extra money. As a result, my mental image of Santa is often cloudied by memories of sweaty guys with Australian accents reeking of Tanduay rum. Hence I find the photo below comforting rather than creepy:
If you don’t rat anyone out, Goodfellas Santa will give you something byoo-tee-full for Christmas:
Hey, Santa, watch where you’re putting that left hand!
I’ve nicknamed this guy “Harry Dean Stanta”:
and finally, Santa shouldn’t have cold serial-killer eyes:
Have you ever had a coach that asked you to “give 110 percent”? Judging from the infographic below, 193 is the new 110:
If you’re going for sheer entertainment value and nothing else, back Palin. It would be like watching a real-life, large-scale version of Marat/Sade.
All I wanted was my dinner. After an early morning flight back to Accordion City from Calgary and enough work to keep me from getting a decent lunch, I was looking forward to a nice dinner with The Missus at Wasabi (1730 Bloor Street West, at Keele), the all-you-can-eat sushi restaurant that had opened a few blocks away from our home.
Wasabi’s menu is not unlike those at other local all-you-can-eat sushi places like Aji Sai. It comprises a selection of sushi, sashimi, tempura, donburi and other things that can be made quickly and cheaply and can provide a lot of bang for your twenty bucks.
It’s the busiest restaurant that’s ever opened at that corner. When we walked in on Friday night, we saw a full restaurant bustling with all sorts of people: groups of young friends having dinner before a night out, many young families with strollers in tow, solo diners who brought some reading material with them, couples out for an end-of-week meal and so on. At first glance, the place appeared to be the next neighbourhood hit.
It took a little while for someone to take our order. We chalked it up to the place’s newness; it often takes a restaurant a little while to work the kinks out of its system during its “shakedown phase” and get a sense of how busy they’ll be. They appeared understaffed, and the the staff they had clearly weren’t used to working in a busy restaurant.
The orders we did manage to get were, for the most part, decent. The seafood tempura was done right, the dynamite roll was tasty and the edamame was well, edamame. After that, no food came to our table for a good while.
After asking around, we discovered that our order had been sent to the wrong table. We were still willing to forgive this mistake and place another order, and the waitress apologized and told us she’d be right back with a notepad. Hey, it’s an all-you-can-eat place, and most of the stuff was the kind that other places can make quickly.
She never came back. A good quarter-hour, complete with a lot of waves to the waitress, has passed without any service. It was clearly time for plan B.
“Enough already. Pizza slice?” I asked Wendy, gesturing to the Pizza Pizza across the street.
“Sure."
We walked up to the front, told the staff that our order had been served to the wrong table and no one had attempted to correct the mistake. Another customer who was standing at the counter said “Yeah, they screwed up my order, too.”
We also told them that we weren’t paying, and walked out. They gave no reply other than confused looks, tilted heads and stunned silence – not even an “I’m sorry". This sort of reaction is the hallmark of complete incompetence and the front-of-house staff treat the place as many similar people do: the restaurant’s just a place that provides a paycheque in exchange for you just showing up.
As we walked towards the pizza place, we ran into our neighbours Chris and Wanda, who were heading to Wasabi to try them out, and warned them away from the place. Consider this blog entry the same warning to the rest of the world: Wasabi is run by scatterbrains, and if you’d actually like some service, go elsewhere.
Categories
Kraft Dinner’s Horrific New Flavours
Here in Canada, “Kraft Dinner” is the brand under which Kraft Macaroni and Cheese is sold. Macaroni and cheese is one of those tastes of childhood, and being cheap and easy to prepare, “KD” is a staple of university student life. Back in university, a number of us enhanced the dish by adding all sorts of things: ketchup, mustard, hot dog slices, tuna and so on. I liked putting a couple of strips of bacon on mine, because there’s little that bacon can’t enhance.
The people at Kraft must have noticed these enhancements since they’ve release a series of microwaveable Kraft Dinner meals with different flavours such as Alfredo, “Extreme Pizza” and SPicy Szechuan. Being the kinesthetic sort when it comes to food, the Ginger Ninja and I decided to buy a couple of flavours and give them a taste.
The verdict: avoid at all costs. These Kraft Dinner variants aren’t junky-good in the way that original Kraft Dinner is. They just taste awful and have looks that match. Here’s what “Extreme Pizza” looks like:
“Extreme Pizza” is a very bad blend of that Velveeta-esque Kraft Dinner cheese with a low-grade tomato sauce reminiscent of the gunk they put on Chuck E. Cheese pizzas (I know that taste; I have young nephews).
Spicy Szechuan is even worse:
It tastes like an attempt to blend Kraft Dinner cheese with the flavours of soy sauce, Chinese five-spice and peppers. If the Long March had a taste, it would be this.
Note that they use different noodles for different flavours; it’s the one bit of culinary artistry that went into them. Different sauces call for different noodles – for example, you don’t serve capellini with a thick meat sauce – and each noodle in this series of Kraft Dinners seems chosen to convey the culinary horror perfectly.
If you must eat these, I would suggest Listerine as a pairing: Listerine Original for the Extreme Pizza, and Listerine Mint for the Spicy Szechuan.