Oh God, I hate dial-up so, so much. I can't do anything. Plus, X-E is brought to you by a combination of a desktop and a laptop, but mostly the desktop. Unfortunately, I can only get online on the laptop, meaning that every picture, Word document and anything else has to be built on one computer, burned to a CD and brought to the other to upload. If I make a mistake or forget something, I get to do it all over again. I'm counting the minutes until Verizon comes tomorrow, bearing the gift of Fios. Beautiful, beautiful Fios.

So, since putting anything of substance together on dial-up is entirely too frustrating for my fragile bones, let's use this space to reflect on a couple of articles from X-E's past that newer readers probably haven't seen. Here are five from 2003 that I've always liked...

The Mystery of Hostess Choco-Diles: I grew a profound obsession with these west coast-only Hostess cakes, and went absolutely batshit crazy trying to track them down. Ultimately, I called some random Hostess bakery in California, plead my case, and wired 'em like a hundred bucks to rush-ship me a box of dozens of Choco-Diles -- most of which ended up being glue-gunned to an antique frame we had laying around as some alien form of art. Nearly all of them fell off the frame in the weeks following, but the thing looked pretty cool during its short life.

The article had a lot of traction when it was first published, and got linked all over town. I'd like to think that it had a big part in the current availability of Hostess Choco-Diles -- not from Hostess, mind you, but from day-playing entrepreneurs who realized that they could charge people double or triple the retail cost and make decent cash running their own little Choco-Dile mail order businesses.

Recreating Charlie Brown's Thanksgiving: I never really have a huge queue of articles waiting to be written, so it's always exciting when I stumble upon something that inspires me. Sometimes, something inspires me so much that I get seriously depressed when I'm finished writing about it, because there's just no telling if I'll ever "feel it" like that again. This is a great example. I don't know why I thought it was so cool to recreate the absurd dinnertime feast seen in the Peanuts Thanksgiving special, but I did, and still do. From freeze-framing on all of the table and kitchen shots in the cartoon to running rampant in the grocery store on the hunt for pretzel sticks and jelly beans, it was just such a blast.

Glofish - The Living Fad: The house of X-E was built on random nostalgic musings, but when I review what I've covered, that barely seems to account for half of the articles. Truth be told, it's much more exciting for me to hunt for and write about all the new holiday-themed candies and toys that come out each year. This is partly because I've written about enough old crap to know that we live in a world that throws most of its stuff away, and it's important to me to "archive" those little slices of heaven that would otherwise be forgotten. This article, about that "Glofish" fad from a few years ago, kind of falls under that umbrella.

The 1984 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade: There are times when I get so excited to write about something, it becomes almost daunting. When I know I have a goldmine of material and that material just happens to be something I have a very genuine and true love for, it's almost hard to write about it. In this case, I handled those feelings by turning what would normally be a regular-length article into like 450 pages of words, pictures and videos. Looking back on it now, I'm not exactly thrilled with my choice of words, but when I reflect upon the morning I spent watching the parade on a grainy VHS, screaming over and over again about how cool everything was, it reminds me that doing this site is half about what I publish and half about what I get out of the trip. If that makes sense?

The Halloween House: Sometimes, the stuff I write about is the fruit of months-long searches. The Macy's Parade review, for example, was no easy find -- it involved phone calls, long drives and at least a little begging. Other times, shit just falls in my lap. When you're spending an October writing about any and every Halloween "thing" you can find, and you drive past a house with two dozen life-sized statues patterned after every horror icon imaginable, it's tough not to feel a little charmed. As things turned out, there wasn't much to say about the place once I put the article together. There are times when I'd say in retrospect that maybe I shouldn't have bothered writing a certain article, but with something like this, fuck that. It was posted on Halloween in 2003. It couldn't have been more perfect, all things considered.

Great, now I'm jonesing for Halloween during a Summer Megaparty. This is what happens when you're on dial-up.