I can't decide if I kind of wish it was summer, or kind of wish it was October.  Happy SNT.

New article, covering thirty years' worth of McDonald's history…as told by one dozen promotional tray covers.  Once merely thought of as those sheets of paper that protected loose fries from tray grime, these tray covers are a window into fast food history, and a solid memento of those swank Batman Forever mugs McDonald's used to sell.  Read it and weep.

I'm back from Philly, wearing a shirt covered with cat hair to prove it.  I took a train there after work on Wednesday, which brought me to Penn Station in the city. I haven't been to Penn Station in years, but if you can somehow picture a train terminal mixed with a dilapidated shopping mall mixed with enough hardcore city grime to build a second city solely out of grime, that's Penn, and that's where I spent two hours waiting for a train last Wednesday night.

Since I was going to get to my hotel pretty late, the odd assortment of eateries in Penn Station provided my only opportunities for dinner.  The place is kind of like an airport, and whenever I'm in an airport alone, I feel too stupid to go to any real, respectable restaurant.  The rare times that I have, I rushed through the entire meal making sure to be on my cell the entire time, because I have a complex about eating out alone and can't stop thinking that everyone is looking at me.

So, aiming to eat quick, I stumbled onto a disgusting food court composed of several small fast food joints.  I say it's disgusting, but the place was great.  Looked like it hadn't been remodeled since the 1600s, with stained glass touches, all kinds of weird, broken tile mosaics, and the ultimate showstopper: A Roy Rogers.

Roy Rogers restaurants used to be all over the place when I was growing up, and I often lobbied to marry their fried chicken.  Then, they all went away.  The franchise didn't completely die off, but there were just a handful of restaurants left for a great many years.  While the owners are now trying to rebuild the once great house of chicken, it's been a slow burn, and this tiny shack in the middle of Penn Station is the only Roy Rogers I've seen for roughly a decade.  Obviously, I had to eat there.

Research tells me that this particular restaurant is probably privately owned and not a true franchisee.  It was tiny, gritty and staffed by demons, but against all better judgment, I handed a dirty hand my five bucks and left with a tray full of familiar fried fowl and a misshapen biscuit.  Incredibly, the chicken tasted exactly the same as I'd remembered.  Crispy, crunchy, oily and guilt ridden.

They even had the Fixins Bar!  The mighty Fixins Bar!  The place where customers could doll up their sandwiches with all kinds of day-old toppings and unmarked condiments!

This means nothing to you if you're in one of the few towns where Roy Rogers restaurants are still competitive with the larger fast food chains, but for me, it was like someone let me borrow their time machine with the rule being that I could only use it to eat food once loved.

I didn't finish the chicken because the only seat left in the place was a tiny table practically attached to the order counter and I felt really dumb eating there, but now, whenever life throws me a curveball, I'll know that salvation in the form of binge eating can be found in the filthiest corner of Penn Station.  Yay!

Happy SNT.

Uh, wow.  The soda article clocked over 75,000 unique readers today, and that's…uh, wow.  Pretty sure it's never happened before, and we're close to 200,000 unique readers landing at that one article in under four days.  I can't explain it.  Sometimes, stuff just hits.  It's luck and chance and stars aligned, but it feels damned good, and even being stuck in Camden, NJ right now can't steal the deliciousness that is this week.  Thanks to all the sites that've linked in, and if you're a new reader, picture me saying "hello" like Mrs. Doubtfire five times in a row.

Actually, I'm not in Camden — I'm just working there by day, at the Tweeter Center.  We're shooting stuff for some "Go, Diego, Go!" live show.  Diego = Dora's cousin, for the uninformed.  I was warned that Camden was something like Beirut, but the area we're working in isn't so bad.  You're not going to invite too many drive-by shootings at a place that hosts live shows where audiences are asked to hold up little paper jaguar masks and make meowing sounds.

I'm at a hotel in Philly now, happily drinking overpriced liquor from the room's mini-bar and waiting to see if the soda article manages to clock an additional forty-million unique visitors in the next hour.  I haven't been writing articles too often lately.  Maybe this was God's way of saying, "Hey asshole, stop not doing that."  Or maybe people just like pictures of Surge.

PS, I don't know if anyone caught Joanie Laurer's appearance on Larry King tonight, "mourning" Anna Nicole and being called out on being a big phony idiot, but seeing that was almost as satisfying as the soda triumph.

There was a time, many, many years ago, when I wrote these things called "articles."  I was feeling nostalgic, so I decided, what the hey?  Let's use, a lot of commas, and see if it still feels, okay, to write articles.

Today's feature chooses "eleven" as its arbitrary token number and examines "eleven" different soft drinks that are no longer with us, running the gamut from Surge to Strawberry Burst Pepsi and beyond.  It's my way of getting a return on the many thousands spent to amass a ridiculous collection of old, sealed soda cans.

I hope you find the article to your liking, because I gave up watching Wolf Creek to write it, and I really wanted to see that "head on a stick" part.

Hello, and happy SNT.

A few weeks ago, I picked up "The Complete Omen Collection" — a pretty nice DVD box set containing each and every film from that very devilish umbrella, including the obscure made-for-television fourth installment and the 2006 remake.

I've already written about the first Omen flick here, but now that I've seen the rest, I'm giving The Omen II the nod as my personal favorite.  Not that it's some great movie that changed my life or anything, but there's something oddly cool about a movie with a storyline that could best be summed up as: "Satan's teenaged son comes of age."

And now that I've seen last year's remake, my fears were confirmed: It's a pointless shot-for-shot retelling of the original, where everyone goes through the motions and absolutely nothing new is brought to the table.  Watch this movie and you'll appreciate a lot of the so-called "reimaginings" that've hit the horror market in recent years, because at least those movies made some attempt to do their own thing.

Plus, what was with Damien in the remake?  What worked about the original (and even Part II, to a degree) was that Damien was seemingly nice and normal, and almost damned by his parentage.  Here, right from the start, he's a total freak and there's no way to justify why his parents didn't have him committed.  Speaking of his parents, Liev Schreiber was more bored than annoying as dear old Dad, but Mother Julia Stiles gave a performance that made me go out and kill her family afterwards.  The remake isn't entirely difficult to sit through, and that's something, but it's still a shit movie.

Naturally segueing from Satan to Valentine's Day, there's a whole heap of candies that celebrate the almost-holiday with vanilla flavors and edible love notes.  One of my favorites are heart-shaped Ring Pops, which sadly forgo the notion that customers are sucking on expensive edible jewels, but make up for it with a Ring Pops that are much bigger than the originals.  Plus, all of the Valentine's Ring Pops are strawberry, so I don't have to spend the extra minute sifting through the display box to make sure I don't skip town with grape.