Sorry I haven't been around for a week…it's been a really lousy month.

Remember Gizmo's reaction when the malfunctioning water fountain sprayed his head near the beginning of Gremlins 2?  I've been doing that all month.  Every five minutes.  It's become a coping device.  Like, I'll be at work, find out that a thousand bucks worth of tape has gone faulty, and instead of yelling…I do the Gizmo water fountain reaction.  If I wake up in the morning and notice that my left eyelid has mysteriously swollen up to twice its normal size in an apparent effort to make me face the world as a monster, I don't cry…I just do the Gizmo water fountain reaction.  These are all true stories, and I suggest that everyone give it a shot.  Dunno where I'd be without the Gizmo water fountain reaction.  Likely in a box.

I can't wait for August to be done with, because I've decided that the month is cursed.

And besides, we all know what September brings…the all-too-early and yet all-too-inviting start to the Halloween season.  I've been trying to look the other way as every store in town starts filling their aisles, because I don't want to waste the glory of a New-For-2007 Halloween item when it's 100 fucking degrees outside.  Shit like that calls for sweater weather, not sweat weather.

Still, try as I might, even with a swollen lid, I can't pry my eyes away from the holy unholy sights of things orange and black.  Especially when they're edible and light-shining:

As a premise, "Lightning Pumpkins" is nothing new.  I've seen the same gimmick on other candy sets, usually ones involving gummy bugs.  The frightening fun involves picking up little pumpkin candies with a special tong featuring an inbuilt red light, which is powerful enough to beam through the gummies and create some kind of glowing alien pumpkin effect.

The packaging is extra special.  It seems to have stolen a bunch of Halloween clipart from one of the few still-running 1998 Geocities sites that offered such things, with repeating images of the same angry ghost and the cutest little pumpkin patch ever put to plastic.

Admittedly, grabbing pumpkin candies with light-up tweezers gets old after a while, but it fulfills its promise of $1.39's worth of entertainment value.  What's even more fun is using the tweezers on other, random items to see which are able to get a full shine-through.

Anyways, after a couple of days in the office next week, it looks like I'll be in the clear for a while.  Just in time to scour Target for the latest bat-shaped snacks.  Stay tuned, and happy SNT…if you're here.

Narrowly managing to fend off the pen-and-pad-clad masses as I entered Toys 'R' Us with my newfound fame, I dodged the vile paparazzi hanging near the back-to-school section and made my way to the clearance racks.

Sadly, clearance racks aren't what they used to be.  When I was a kid, I'd get things like the Wheeled Warriors accessory sets — each with two rubbery "Monster Minds" brains — for eight cents a pop.  Whereas "clearance" used to roughly equate to "please get this shit out of our store," now it's just a clever way of saying, "this is on sale."  It's a bit of a crapshoot, but sometimes, you win out:

These toys are so not my style, but I have to admit a certain appreciation for Boogaz, a gross-out toyline made by Moose Enterprises.  Moose apparently has like twenty-thousand tons of sticky/slimy toy material, as this is no less than their eighteenth attempt to market toys that make use of such materials in the past few years.

The disgusting concept: Kids purchase plastic noses (or large picking fingers, which are pricier) that are stuffed with copious amounts of ooze, and at least one official Boogaz figure.  There are 24 figures in all to collect, and some are rarer than others.  Borrowing liberally from the Monster In My Pocket series, the figures are assigned point values to help us understand which are "common," "rare" or "glowing ultra rare."  My kingdom for a "glowing ultra rare" Boogaz figure.

The fun's in the mystery.  When you buy a nose, there's no telling which figure might be inside.  The package also states that one out of every six noses has two figures lurking among the hidden ooze.  Moving past the off-putting notion that this is a toy collection dedicated to snot, I kinda like the cut of its jib.  Hope I pick a winner…

Damn.  While "Sir Picks Alot" is worth a respectable nine points, he's still a common figure, delivering nowhere near the level of glory of, say, the forty point "Skummy Mummy."

Once you get the loose slime off (harder than it sounds), the figures serve as strangely-shaped Wacky Wall Walkers — you can splat 'em against the nearest wall, and if the gods decide to take pity on you, they'll do their little gooey vertical catwalk much to the delight of dimwits and house cats everywhere.

The slime itself counts as a toy, and to really push the idea that it's snot, it's really watery slime.  Much different from normal toy slime fare.  There's really no way to get it all back in the nose container once you yank it out, and I eventually had to give up and wash my hands clean.  I don't like it when toys create a need for me to wash myself, but since I'm getting to pull rubbery medieval knights out of noses, I'm gonna give this one a pass.

This is probably a minority opinion, but I like Boogaz toys.  Gonna marry 'em.

Happy SNT.

I really needed a kick in the neck to restore my motivation after a week's worth of dry X-E due to an overload of work, and last night, I got it.

We went over to Best Buy, because I felt that I could relieve stress by purchasing DVDs that I would probably never open.  The woman strolled off to whatever aisle it is that she usually strolls off to, and I made my way into the horror section.  I'm not sure if the two-disc Jaws special edition set could be considered a "horror" DVD, but there it was, and due to its 50% off sticker, it went into my pile.

Next was It's Alive, a fairly famous flick (alliteration!) that I've somehow never seen outside of creepy pictures in old science fiction magazines.  At five bucks, I couldn't pass it up.  Finally, I chose the first season set of Tales From The Crypt, mainly for the episode where Larry Drake plays a psychotic killer Santa Claus.

Now armed with over 12 hours of quality entertainment, I was ready to go home.  The woman wandered over with a copy of Bridge to Terabithia, which I talked her out of by saying that I heard it sucked, even though I've never heard anything about it, and in reality just didn't want to see yet another movie with the kid who had to take a "wicked crap" in RV.  Enough's enough.

So, we sauntered up the horror aisle on our trek to the cashier, and out of the corner of my eye, I see…this:

Holy hell!  I couldn't believe it.  Ghoulies IV made its way to DVD?  Ghoulies IV?!  I would've been less surprised to see a DVD of that Lifetime movie where an evil Johnny Galecki commits suicide by walking into a burning house to the chagrin of Judith Light.  Really, Ghoulies IV?

My gasp was audible, my excitement palpable, and there were a ton of other cliches swarming around as I lifted the DVD box, held it to the sky and thanked God.  While it's rarely a good sign to see a DVD with a seven buck price tag when it isn't even on sale, I'm just happy to know that this very obscure and final chapter of my beloved Ghoulies series can now be witnessed by more than the three people who rented the VHS copy back in 1994.

That's not the best part.  As I reviewed the cover artwork, I flipped to the back of the box to see if there were any special features included.  No dice there, but I saw something even better…

I'm quoted!  I AM MOTHERFUCKING QUOTED ON THE GHOULIES IV DVD BOX!

"…one of the more better-acted films of the genre…" — X-ENTERTAINMENT
The line isn't even grammatical, and I don't care!  Longtime readers may remember that I reviewed the film back in 2002, and that review is where they grabbed the quote from.  This incident instantly became one of my all time favorite X-E moments, narrowly beating out the day one of the girls who starred in that Treehouse Trolls video e-mailed me to confirm that what she starred in was stupid.

I'm wondering how this will change things for me.  Like, if I head down to Nobu or some other ritzy restaurant, can I flash the back of this DVD box to the maitre d' for priority seating?  If I ever make it back to Six Flags, will they let me skip to the front of the lines?

I'm totally going to have to get new business cards made up, too.  There's so much to be done!

Fondly recalling my time spent as a five-year-old at the long-dead Ma & Pa video store up the block from our old house, staring at that little green monster in the toilet on the VHS sleeve for the original Ghoulies movie and wondering what in the fuck, it's nice to see things come full circle.  Now that I am a bona fide celebrity nearing the top of the A list, I promise to use my powers for the forces of good.

Sort of like less refined and more obscure Garbage Pail Kids, the Mel Apple company's Weird Ball series consisted of glossy, wacky trading cards with a definitive gross slant.  Whereas GPK cards were mostly a free-for-all, Weird Ball seemed to fashion itself as some kind of parody sports set, with the nutty characters all being based on different kinds of athletes.  Course, they took a few liberties.  You were just as likely to find ninjas and bloody army dudes as baseball players.

I thought the line to be an immense failure at least in terms of sales, but it must've done okay considering the fact that there were a couple of different toys spun from the card series.  In fact, if you look beyond the larger and now prohibitively pricey Weird Ball action figures, you'll find another set of playthings that could've given our old pink pals from M.U.S.C.L.E. a run for their money.

If the cards were an attempt to cash in on GPK's success, Weird Ball Mini Collectums were most definitely a vie to swipe some of the tiny toy pie from the M.U.S.C.L.E. collection, which debuted just a year earlier than these in 1985.

Even the package jokes about the figures' poor quality, but while they indeed fall short of M.U.S.C.L.E. in terms of the materials used, but I'm not so sure that they lack heart.  Considering that you got twelve of these dudes for about the price of four M.U.S.C.L.E. figures, it wasn't such a bum deal at all.

I feel almost guilty saying this, and maybe it's just because the things are so fresh and new to me, but these Weird Ball figures seem almost as good as M.U.S.C.L.E. figures.  Aside from the insane level of detail, they're just great characters.  Everything from some kind of zombie sheriff to another guy who looks like a Madball with legs is represented, and I'm now totally convinced that I need to spend the evening carving them a miniature dollhouse out of soap and coconut shells.

When I think back, I have really vague recollections of other M.U.S.C.L.E. knockoff lines.  We'd usually find them at pharmacies or lower end toy stores, and even if they weren't official, I loved 'em to death.  Think I would've loved these to death, too.  There's just something about action figures small enough to pocket in your cheek like a hamster on a grape.

Busy working on a ToyFare article tonight, so this may be a good time for a patented SNT survey.

What's the best deal you've ever gotten?  Garage sales, store clearance sales, eBay hiccups — they all apply.  I have some great stories, but I'll save them for the comments thread.  See you in a bit.

Sorry for the lack of updates the past few days — as one might surmise from the tone of the two previous entries, it's been a week from hell.  I can't even enjoy the fact that it's Friday night, because we're pretty close to Sunday night, which starts off another work week, which could spell DOOOOM.

But, I'll try.  After several days of Tatooine-like heat, the gods have finally smiled upon my fair town with what's essentially perfect Halloween weather: It's cold and wet, with a barely illuminating purplish gray sky signaling a night best spent watching Halloween: H20 and laughing at the part where Michael Myers holds that Andy Garcia lookalike up in the air by a knife.

That's a little gloomy, and since I spent most of my X-E time this week being gloomy, let's mix things up with the boisterous good times of Betty Crocker's Fruit Roll-Ups.

We went grocery shopping the other night, which is another way of saying "beer and popcorn run."  I couldn't believe how many different types of Fruit Roll-Ups were on sale.  There's always been a ton of flavors and even a ton of specialized gimmicks, but I'm referring to wholly different "species" of Roll-Ups.  Different box shapes, different Roll-Up shapes, different everything.  I think the two shown above best represent this renaissance period of the Fruit Roll-Up, but even if they don't, I'm eighteen Fruit Roll-Ups richer for trying to portray them as such.  Go me.

First up, it's "Crazy Pix: Wild Ones" Fruit Roll-Ups, with each snack featuring one of a number of multicolored patterns, ranging from tiger stripes to gator skin to army fatigues.  Printing weird shit on Fruit Roll-Ups is nothing new, but these take it to a five star level.  There isn't really much point in the effort since the snacks as most often seen rolled up or crunched into little fruity boulders, but I can at least appreciate my newfound ability to fantasize about a bedroom fully wallpapered with Fruit Roll-Ups.

There's a girlier variety out, too — "Crazy Pix: Cool Chix."  It's not really that girly, but it's indeed the cooler of the two varieties, featuring plaid patterns, bejeweled patterns and another pattern which is hard to decipher but looks something like the trail of superpowered idiocy left behind by fallen Marvel Comics icon, "Speedball."

Even more outside the box are new Fruit Roll-Ups "Stackerz," which may have been partly inspired by those old school candy buttons.  Instead of getting a sheet, the fruit snacks are divided by color and flavor into neat little rolls of stackable discs.  While I dig the effort in reinventing of the Fruit Roll-Up, I'm not sure I understand the point of these.  Maybe it's because I'm trying to view them through the eyes of a fifth grader, when I really should be viewing them through the eyes of a preschooler.  Fifth graders aren't going to sit around making little sandwiches out of fruit discs, but preschoolers might.

Then again, the discs are quite sticky and, if you gather up enough red ones, you can poorly fake the measles just like every dumb sitcom kid in television history did.  That's fun for all ages.  Also of note: The revised texture and thickness has done wonders for Fruit Roll-Ups — the Stackerz are by far the best tasting I've ever had.  They're as close to Slush Puppie fruit snacks as we've ever been.

That about covers it for the Fruit Roll-Ups.  I'm off to build some kind of super mutant freeze ray with which I will end the world's rotation and let it remain Friday night forevermore.  If I'm unsuccessful, see you in the SNT.

This has been a terrible week.  Everything that could go wrong, has gone wrong.  I suspect it will continue for a few days, as I can't shake the feeling that I'm like some sentient cold slot machine that must fulfill its quota of zero payouts before sliding back into the tropics.

To this gripe, I have a case in point.  Had to go into work today.  Not to the office, but to one of the facilities I'm working with.  Got there about an hour early, and so to avoid being "that guy" who hobbles around the lobby until it's time to punch in, I stood outside for forty-five minutes, smoking cigarettes and nervously checking my text messages, even though I knew I had none.  So, we hit 9:55, and that was close enough for me to make my elevator-assisted ascent to their office.  I'm taking my last drags, and with mere seconds to go before I'm in the building and off to work, what happens?

A bird shits on my arm.

Now, I was hesitant to tell this little story, because technically, the last blog entry was about shit.  I'm not trying to create a new trend for X-E; this was purely coincidental.

So, I'm standing there, happy that my hour-long bake in the sun was nearing its conclusion, and all of the sudden…I feel it.  I didn't even need to look down to know what had happened, but I did, and it was the blackest, most tar-like bird shit the history of bird feces.  It looked like Courtney Cox's open wound after Skeletor blasted her in the leg in the live-action He-Man movie.

Now, what do you do when a bird shits on you?  If my reflexes and impulses are to be believed, the first thing you do is scan the area to make sure that nobody else saw what happened.  It's one thing to be shat upon; it's another to be shat upon with an audience.  Somehow, even in the heart of Times Square, nobody noticed.  I quickly rubbed my forearm against a nearby wall to take care of the excess, then did away with the rest with what I swear to you was a napkin sent from God himself, which just happened to be laying in the back of my work bag, even though I've never carried napkins or tissues in my life.

Long story short, even after arriving an hour early, I was ten minutes late to work.  Aside from needing to wash off any remnants of this most foul turn of events, I was also convinced that another bird –or perhaps the same bird– had secretly shit on my back as well.  So I lurked around the lobby for a few minutes, trying to catch a glance of my back in every not-a-mirror-but-kind-of-reflective surface I could find.  Fortunately, I was just being paranoid.  Even during a bad week, it's not easy to get shit on twice.

After describing my awful morning to the person I was working with, he told me that it's good luck to be shat upon by a bird.  I've heard that before.  Maybe I even believed it.  Now that I've been there, though, I'm going to have to disagree on that one.

I actually feel a little bit better now that I've confessed.  Thanks for listening.  I'll be back tomorrow with a review of a Battle Beast or something.