Don't know if many are around tonight, but if you're here, here's your thread.

I'm not terribly fond of eating shit food during the week, because I don't want to feel shitty eating shit food during the shitty weekend when I shittin' need it.  That said, when I get off the bus after the commute home, the short walk to my car involves strolling past a Wendy's, and yesterday, I couldn't help noticing much signage with pictures of fried chicken strips and the word "AWESOME."

The "AWESOME" notations weren't for the fried chicken strips, because they've already been well established as awesome for some time, and thus are in no need of further promotion budgeting for those ends.  Instead, I was being told of the new "AWESOME" sauces for said strips, including Wild Buffalo Ranch and the holiest sauce of all, Sweet & Spicy Hawaiian.  It's the latter of those two that brings me here tonight, because with full knowledge that Wendy's Spicy Hawaiian sauce will not last for long no matter how "AWESOME" it is, I felt it was my duty to archive and celebrate its great existence.

There are two special things about Spicy Hawaiian sauce that make it worth this tribute.  First, the name.  "Spicy Hawaiian."  You can turn down a hot chick when you're married and you can avoid stealing a car even if it'd be really easy to do so.  As we grow we develop a strong sense of resistance and where it needs to apply.  With "Spicy Hawaiian," you're sold Continental American, 100%, you can not turn down/deflect/say no to/avoid a sauce named after the only state in our great nation that is inhabited solely by people in raffia skirts and flower crowns.  Two, the seeds.  Spicy Hawaiian sauce is essentially regular sweet and sour sauce with a different color additive, but they've also included paper-thin peppercorn spices to turn what would've been an everyday sauce into a Hawaiian fire dance in your mouth to appease the gods of your throat.  I don't know.  I like-a the sauce-a.

I write this on a Friday night, and I'd like to wish the week that was a hearty FUCK YOU, because the week that was sucked.  I'm becoming a broken record about that and I'm starting to think it's time to stop wasting time and just hit the damn Win For Life scratch-off jackpot already.  I know I'm prone to complain about anything that needs me for something, but we're getting to a breaking point that can only result in me growing a really long beard, renaming myself "George" and moving to Utah under the guise of a shoemaker.  I hope the Wendy's restaurants in Utah have Spicy Hawaiian sauce.

hubba hub-ba now THAT is a spicy hawain!

Congratulations to Rock-A-Dile Red, the latest Kool-Aid flavor to be reviewed, for being so insanely good that I finished an entire pitcher of it mere hours after snapping the pics.  A combination of real life and technical difficulties precluded me from finishing a "real" article this weekend, so enjoy the Kool-Aid for now.  Will have a new Cereal Prize Project update this week, and a new article or two next weekend.

It's been a while since we've done a formal survey.  Let's do a formal survey.  What was the best day of your life?

Christmas mornings were usually the pits at our house.  It's an Italian tradition for families to blow their holiday wad on Christmas Eve, having the big get-together then, opening the presents then, and eating all the really good food then.  Christmas itself was always sort of depressing.  No parties, no nothing.  The only shine came from the minute amount of stocking stuffers that my parents would only firmly release on the 25th, and in 1987, I got something that, for whatever reason, seemed like the coolest something I'd ever seen.  It was this little electronic keychain that played different weapon-themed sound effects depending on where you hit its one big button.  I was in love with it, and when you're in love with one of your new toys, the first thing on your mind is showing it off to those less fortunate.

So, as was tradition, I marched over to my old best friend's house, new toy in hand.  He lived just across the street, and during my youth, I spent a great deal of Christmasses at his house, because his family was German and they had no fucking clue what to do with Christmas Eve.  These holidays were actually more fun that I've ever given them credit for.  I grew up with two wholly different sets of Christmas traditions: Those of my own family's, and those of my best friend's family.  Mine had a lot to do with wine and that funky port wine cheese with all the nuts on it.  His had a lot to do with "After Eight" dinner mints and 15-person games of Yahtzee.  I've always felt cultured for having rode two sides of the Yuletide fence.

When I showed my friend and his brothers my hot new keychain, they weren't impressed.  It wasn't that they acted unimpressed out of some misguided envy; they really weren't impressed, and they had very good reason to not be impressed.  They too had felt the glory of little gizmos that made machine gun sound effects.  Only their glory was way bigger.  Their mother, who on normal occasions gave presents shittier than the bad kids who died young and ended up spending Christmas in Hell got, finally managed to hit the home run.  With my increasingly pathetic keychain in hand, I sweat green as each of them yanked their new reasons for being out from what I still swear was thin air.  My best friend and his brothers received a trio of "Revengers."

The Revenger was amazing.  Powered by two "AA" batteries and assumedly a few Norse gods, the little black box burst forth with rapidly spanning LED lights and three magic buttons that provided three magic sounds of destruction.  Click here to see and hear the beast in action, and put yourself in the body of a little kid in a world that offered far less electronic intrigue: This thing was all kinds of awesome.  The intended novelty purpose was for adults to velcro-stick (velcro stickers included) the box to their dashboards, using it to "blast" any annoying cars in lieu of giving them the finger.

It didn't take long for me to land my own Revenger, which I've kept since forever and still bust out whenever a situation calls for a sound that vaguely maybe possibly sounds like a missile being launched.

It's funny though.  Drawing a comparison with the nephew I most often see: Whenever I see this kid, he's got a PSP, DS and iPod Nano on him.  If it's going to be a long party, he'll bring his Gamecube in a big silver briefcase.  When the Revenger came out, I didn't even have a Game Boy.  I guess you don't need things until they're in the Sunday circulars.

The tradition continues.

There's no shame in saying that “Transformers: Beast Wars” was, pound for pound, my favorite chapter in TF lore.  Revitalizing the thought-dead franchise in the 1990s, the series was just terrific: Great characters, awesome writing, a groundbreaking look and enough continuity between episodes to reward every viewer who bothered to watch them sequentially.  I loved, loved, loved that show, and its ability to “re-geek” me in the mid-to-late '90s is one of the reasons there's an X-Entertainment today.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Beast Wars, Hasbro has re-released many of the original figures and, more or less, not changed a thing.  Even the packaging is in most ways a throwback, right down to the tech specs.  There are enough minute differences to keep collectors who've spent good money on the originals from feeling like dickheads, but the hot new addition for the anniversary figures is: TRANSMUTATE!

“Transmutate” is both the name of a special once-only-appearing Beast Wars character, and also the name of the episode she (he?) appeared in.  Without going into great detail that would first require a Beast Wars refresher course for yours truly, the character was essentially a Transformer with severe birth defects, created all wrong but with indescribable raw power and a little baby voice that made you want to pinch her cute silver cheeks.  Each of the new Beast Wars figures come with a different Transmutate body part, and only by collecting the whole set can you honestly claim to have a complete Transmutate – this is the character’s first go at becoming an action figure.

To begin my collection, I chose “Waspinator” first.  He wasn't really my favorite character, but he's up there, and he's the one that comes packaged with Transmutate's most important part: His head.  All this talk has me crazy-ready to plop on a couch and watch the entire series as soon as possible, a notion that doesn't at all destroy me because hey, I have off on Monday.

In other news, today at work I snuck outside for a cigarette, and when I returned four hours later, a gigantic box with a LEGO logo was sitting on my desk.  I'd heard rumors of a thank-you gesture ever since I worked on those Exo-Force spots a while back (archival screenshot here), but I never expected this…

(click here to enlarge)

It's the entire freakin' collection of LEGO Exo-Force toys.  Every last one.  A couple of people at the office wondered if I was going to pass 'em off to a nephew or whatever…come on.  Riiiight.  You'd think the collection of Ghostbusters bobbleheads and Toddler Ninja Turtle figures would tip them off about my deep dark secrets, but I wasn't going to pull up the site and tell them that everything they know of me is bullshit.  "Yeah, my nephew Tommy…big fan of Exo-Force!"  Riiiight.  My only regret is that there's far too many toys for me to even carry 'em home, meaning I'll have to mail them, meaning I'll have to wait a few days before I can bust open the ultra rad evil robot dude and give Knacks and Kuse an adversary they can yell at eye-to-eye.

It's been a really sucky stretch ever since Christmas, and I'm taking my glories wherever I can find 'em.  So hello, LEGO.  Will you be my lover?

There will definitely be a new article this weekend though, because I definitely can't wait to write about what I'm writing about next, even if only 10% of you will have any memory of it whatsoever.  Oh well.

The woman spent Valentine's Day kicking ass.