It took almost an hour to cook up the right mix of junk, but I'm back from Toys "R" Us with a hundred bucks worth of whatever.

And it was freakin' fun, let me tell you. Notwithstanding the pain one must endure if he or she chooses to plow through the virtual Land of the Dead that is a Toys "R" Us store on a Sunday afternoon, the experience was delightfully ridiculous, and I can't recommend it enough for anyone who is both in the black and not at all opposed to looking like an idiot.

I'm taking pictures today and will work on the article this week, but suffice to say, it's a great collection of completely pointless trinkets ranging from mainstream action figures to all of the weird junk they hide two aisles beyond the Hot Wheels section. You can get a general sense of the wealth of toys from the photo above. Also take note of our super genius talking cat, seen thumbing through a pile of books in the hopes of finding something intellectually challenging. (I believe she settled on a Far Side compilation.)

Now for something completely different, with a catch: I reserve the right to expand this into a full article at a later date, assuming I find the other things that I'd need to do so.

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My utter fascination with the many marketing hits and misses of the McDonald's company has been well documented across the site, but outside of slight mentions in one or two blog entries, we've never seriously discussed one of their best promotions of all time: Chicken McNuggets Shanghai.

I can't remember if it happened in 1986 or 1988, but it was one of the two. In a promotion that wouldn't fly today since we're all so uptight about everything, McDonald's issued special takeout-style boxes of Chicken McNuggets, complete with a fortune cookie, teriyaki sauce and most holily of all, a pair of chopsticks. (Holily is an actual word; I can't believe it either.)

The commercials for Chicken McNuggets Shanghai featured patrons goofily trying to work the chopsticks and failing miserably, treating them like such insane novelties that we must assume that sushi didn't once touch American soil until the '90s. I can't speak to the validity of chopsticks being totally foreign objects in the late '80s, but since I was just a kid at the time, they were certainly new to me. McDonald's food always had an intangible "play factor" to it, but here we had an open invitation.

Between the fancy red boxes that housed the nuggets to the individually wrapped fortune cookies (which were actually imported by the planeload from China), Chicken McNuggets Shanghai thrived on its presentation. The meal was served in a themed bag filled with four different dippping sauces, and when all was said and done, nobody could deny that a Chicken McNugget just tasted better when you ate it with chopsticks.

Which got me to thinking: Chicken McNuggets Shanghai might be history, but chopsticks and Chicken McNuggets aren't. I've got a stockpile of the original McDonald's chopsticks in one of my many drawers full of mirth, but you don't need to be so lucky. Any regular pair of chopsticks will do, and nothing is stopping you from reliving the glory of a high class Chicken McNugget.

Whether you eat them once a week or once a year, I'm really going to have to insist that you use chopsticks the next time you down a pack of Chicken McNuggets. What was merely delicious before transforms into a distinctly religious experience, and I can think of no simpler way to make shitty McDonald's food reek of top floor metropolitan class.

I'd originally intended to show you how to recreate the discontinued McDonald's Salad Shaker collection by using a few Slurpee cups and a pair of scissors, but this is way cooler. Try it. You'll feel distinguished and sooo less greasy than usual.

PS: You don't need to be a chopsticks wizard to make the magic happen. Shown above is how I did the deed back in '86, and it worked just as well. Actually, it worked even better: Poke two holes, and you've created your very own McNugget Buddy, free to cavort around McDonaldland as Ronald continually suggests an innocent round of Marco Polo in a pool full of barbecue sauce. It's a good thing dead chicken parts can't sleep; clown will eat them.

Posted by Matt on 04/06/2008. E-mail me!