We went on a cruise about a week ago, and now that I've had sufficient time to reflect, I can say with all confidence that I will never, ever do that again. Even if the cruise was free and Charo was performing in the lounge, NO, no no no, no more God damned cruises.
We sailed on the Carnival Victory, and if the Victory is indicative (systematic?) of the other ships in that particular fleet, I feel compelled to broadcast the sad fact that Carnival totally blows. What a horrible, awful cruise. What a miserable, ridiculous waste of money, vacation days and dapper first-worn pants.
I don't even know where to start. Everything that we loved about last cruise (on an NCL ship, keep in mind) was clearly absent on this one. The Victory's general decor bridged the gap between a low-level Vegas casino and a 1987 shopping mall's food court, and though I had no issues about that, my list of grievances is so long that, if I were to list them all here, I'd need to drop the font size by two points just to keep things manageable.
Lowlights:
1) You know the "muster drill" you must endure before sailing, where they gather everyone on the decks and teach them how to use lifejackets and such? It's an annoying but mandatory exercise, but I have to believe that the muster drill on this cruise was less than typical. If there are any cruise addicts out there, tell me: Do muster drills usually begin with a 45 minute waiting period, where you're forced to stand cramped with a thousand other people wearing neck-crunching lifejackets? I'm not talking about the actual drill, mind you. They made us stand like that for 45 minutes to wait for the 5% of lazy assholes who refused to come out of their rooms. I think the actual drill lasted 20 seconds. Oh, and did I mention that the boat started sailing away during the drill? So much for the joyous and romantic bottle-breaking moment when you hear the horn and feel the tiles shake for the first time. I was too busy getting a rash on my face from lifejacket velcro.
2) "Buckets of beer" are a big thing on any cruise ship. You're sitting out on the deck, and you order buckets full of ice and beer bottles for too much money. It's fun. On our last cruise, we had our pick from virtually any beer we could think of. On this cruise, our choices were limited to Bud, Bud Light and Miller Light in plastic bottles. They refused to serve anything in glass bottles. Anything. We asked why, and they said it was illegal to do so. Well, it may be company policy, but I don't think it's "illegal." Sound like a small gripe? Sure, but you try to get your load on with nothing but Miller Light out of a plastic fucking bottle for four days straight. Along the same lines, most cocktails arrived in cheap plastic tumblers.
3) The food. WAS HORRIBLE. I accepted the fact that Carnival still adhered to the archaic and ridiculous "eat in the same place at the same time for dinner each night" rule, even though it sucks. But what about the rest of the day? Well, for the most part, you were forced to eat from the worst buffet the world has ever known, which was half-inside, half-outside, reeking, filthy, sticky, with all the edibles thrice-cooked under the power of God's sun and Satan's 40 trillion heat lamps. I am a person who will pick a peanut out of a muddy puddle and eat it without nary a dare, and still, the food at this buffet was so unbelievably disgusting that I pretty much resigned myself to chicken tenders for breakfast and lunch for each of the four days. Serious haute cuisine.
4) The ship's layout was so insane and convoluted that there were literally instances of us needing to go up and down several floors just to get to a different point of the same floor we started on. I'm not fucking Algernon; I had nothing to prove by solving Carnival's Lament Configuration.
5) The ship's only port-of-call was in Saint John. Not the tropical island — Saint John in Canada. Sailing northward meant that we were sailing into cooler climates riddled by fog, which was kind of neat but sort of ruined the ambiance of the lip-synching three-man calypso band which played on the pool deck incessantly. As for Saint John, it's a nice enough city, but I'm a little perplexed as to how it became a port-of-call for a large and trusted cruise line. When we got there, we had two options. We could've spent an additional hundred bucks each to get driven out to some wooden picnic tables to eat quickly cooked lobsters, or, alternatively, we could browse a local shopping plaza for an hour before heading back to the ship. We went with the latter. Highlight was, uh, getting coffee.
6) I lost a small fortune at the casino. I guess I can't blame Carnival for that, but it didn't improve matters any.
Now, it's hard to fuck up a cruise, even a horrible cruise. We still had fun and plenty of it. But when the highlight of an expensive vacation is signing a drink receipt to Lieutenant Eckhardt and getting away with it, chances are good that you picked the wrong vacation to go on. No monkey-themed towel animal was going to change that.
Granted, it could be that the stars just weren't aligned for this particular cruise, but I doubt it. Based on our (albeit limited) experiences on other cruise lines and from the hundreds of reviews I've read, Carnival really needs to figure out how to modernize. As other lines gravitate upward with ships that are true entertainment complexes with every conceivable whim catered to, this vacation felt like something you'd win from a shady church raffle. Blah.
In happier news, we're just days away from X-Entertainment's Summer Megaparty, starting July 1st. If you weren't around for previous Megaparties, all this really means is that I'll post everyday in July, if not longer. Revised Summer Jukebox will be active, and yes, for those concerned, sunshine-themed stickers will be added to our faithful Trapper Keeper logo.
In fact, I better go start taking care of that, so enjoy your SNT!
It's Friday the 13th! It's ten thousand degrees out, but it's still Friday the 13th! Though the collective attention of everyone seems to be focused on that The Happening movie, I dare declare that M. Night Shablahblahyaha's FIRST R-RATED MOVIE, FIRST R-RATED MOVIE EVER, HOLY FLAMING TABLES, FIRST R-RATED MOVIE IN THE HISTORY OF M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN, IT'S M. NIGHT'S FIRST FORAY INTO R-RATED MOTION PICTURE MAKING, IT'S
M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN'S FIRST R-RATED MOVIE
Ah fuck that and fuck M. Night Shyamalan. Friday the 13th will always belong to Jason Voorhees. Camp Crystal Lake's number one son isn't one for abject chatting, but I wouldn't be surprised if he broke his silence with a bloody, obscenity-laced tirade about how the world completely neglected to kiss his feet on this, his most holy day. Seriously, I just went through the TV listings, and there isn't a single F13 movie being played on any channel tonight. Not even a shitty channel. I could watch seventy-four episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond, but no Jason. On Friday the God Damned 13th. Criminal. Criminal, cock-like behavior from those responsible.
In lieu of watching Jason tear apart happy campers, I provide consolation in the form of a Matchbox car with a thirty-seven foot Jason Voorhees attacking it.
From Matchbox's 1999 Character Car Collection, it's the Friday the 13th…uh, character car. Basically, Matchbox took a varied and surprising bunch of movies (everything from A Nightmare On Elm Street to The Mask), and celebrated them with movie-themed Matchbox cars topped with movie-themed PVC-style figurines. And thus we now know the definitive halfway point between stupid and awesome.
The results were largely ridiculous, but on a night when I can't even persuade AMC to show me the cut-down version of the famous scene from F13 Part V where the Michael Jackson knockoff sings a duet with his girlfriend while shitting in an outhouse, I'll take what I can get.
The toy provides an unintended montage of Jason's many movies. The package photo depicts him as he was seen in Jason Goes To Hell, but the figure shown above was clearly inspired by Jason's appearance in Friday the 13th: Part 3. I understand that this is of little consequence to you, but I didn't feel right not pointing it out. Furthering the issue is the fact that a Part 3 Jason is shown attacking a "Camp Counselor" truck, even though there were no counselors in that movie. Okay, now I'm just being a brat.
I was saddened to find out that Jason is permanently attached to the Matchbox car, but I suppose it's for the best considering that he wasn't constructed to stand upright without it. All told, I'm kind of glad to own this thing, though I'm not sure why I do or how it even got into my office. Maybe I'm just blocking out the memory of paying 15 bucks on eBay to have a forty-cent Matchbox car mailed to me via USPS Priority Mail.
Happy Friday the 13th. Pop in the DVDs if you have 'em. Check out X-E's old-to-older collection of Jason-related articles with the conveniently underlined links below:
Thanks largely to the gamut of '80s/'90s Chex Mix commercials starring the Peanuts gang, I've come to consider no winter holiday complete without a trough full of buttered cereal and snacks drenched in Worcestershire sauce. I can't pronounce "Worcestershire," but I enjoy the invitation to smear it on Chex cereal.
While the good people at Chex HQ would have me believe that this "Chex Mix" was a holiday staple since the cereal's inception, I give all credit to Chuck Brown and his crew, who always managed to make everything they cooked and ate look so ridiculously palatable. I remember one Peanuts cartoon where the gang went to France, and there was this twenty minute scene where the non-French speaking Charlie Brown failed in his attempt to order "one loaf de bread." I ate nothing but loafs de bread for the month following that.
Then there was the classic Peanuts Thanksgiving feast; a glorious spread of jelly beans and ice cream sundaes that charmed my ass straight to the grocery store so I could attempt to recreate it. I can only describe the Peanuts gang's influence over what we find appetizing as something metaphysical if not outright occult. There's no logic behind it. It just is.
Little did you know that everything above was merely an introduction to a photo of a sealed Chex Mix seasoning packet from 1990. I took the long way home on this one.
I can't remember exactly how it came to be in my possession, but I've got what's likely the last remaining Chex Mix "Instant Party Seasoning Pack" in existence — a cereal "premium" stuffed inside Chex boxes in 1990. Like the Ninja Turtles "Honey Ooze" I wrote about recently, I refuse to open this seasoning pack due to the high probability that it's the last of its kind.
My desire to preserve history is pretty annoying in this case, as I've never been able to truly master cooking up a batch of Chex Mix. I tell people that I'm good at it, but I know the truth: My Chex Mix needs work. I don't know if the various salts, sugars and tamarinds inside this polyurethane wrapped foil pack of dust has gone sour in the eighteen some odd years since its creation, but for the ultimate result of the perfect batch of Chex Mix, the risk/reward ratio seems to lean towards the latter.
Maybe a Chex Mix seasoning pack wasn't the most action-packed blog topic that I could've chosen, but it felt like I was fated to do this. Not ten minutes after finding the pack in one of my many cardboard trunks, I stumbled upon a 1990 magazine ad promoting the promotion:
Lucy totally went pinky-up, so you knew this shit was serious.
I've forged batches of Chex Mix for every Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday in recent memory, and eventually, I must assume that the law of averages will favor me with a bowl that tastes just right. Until such time, all I can really do is draw pictures of dinosaurs wearing sunglasses.
Happy SNT.
PS: In case you didn't catch the green note on the Trapper logo, we're set to move forward with X-E's Summer Megaparty as of July 1st. What this means: New blog posts everyday, at least for the month of July. Vegas odds are against this being a successful venture, but we can safely assume that there will be many, many more entries than usual. Feels like I should add an emoticon here, but I know it's kind of improper. Fuck it.
I've gotten a few e-mails from readers wondering if I was slowly abandoning the site. Well, duh, I thought not posting for weeks on end would make that pretty obvious. ALL KIDDING ASIDE, this will be my last post ever. ALL KIDDING ASIDE AGAIN, no, not abandoning, probably will never abandon, even when I'm in my sixties. Unless I'm dead, though I admit to finding some secret joy in the notion of being the first to blog from the grave. I don't know if the site's best days are behind it or still ahead, but I don't particularly care either way. After doing this ten years and evolving past the point of it being a personal necessity, I enjoy knowing that I will not be empty inside if I'm not on here for a week here and a week there.
But no, not stopping. Why would I? In a strange way, I actually enjoy writing for the site more now than I ever have. I always did this because I wanted to, but I definitely don't "need" to now. And not "needing" to means that I can write garbage about my socks and not have to worry about it being Digg-worthy. Right now, it's just for kicks, and that's the way I want it to be.
Ertl, the toy company chiefly known for rhyming with "Squirtle"
Ertl, the toy company chiefly known for producing toy cars made of the kind of metal that can dent a football helmet if you throw it right, has rarely ventured into the "true" action figure market. Still, they managed to nab at least a few home runs, even if those home runs didn't exactly translate to huge sales. Socket Poppers, an extremely quirky collection of action figures from 1991, was one of the best toy lines you've absolutely never heard of.
The dude shown above is actually just a mutant made up from four different Socket Poppers figures, and that was the gimmick: The figures' limbs could be mixed and matched to create wholly unique characters. Having spent most of my childhood yearning for the opportunity to make Swamp Thing wear Dracula's leg and a pterodactyl wing, Socket Poppers provided both catharsis and full-blown permission to tear apart my toys like a deranged murderer. In some circles, they might call this a twofer.
Incredibly, Socket Poppers didn't even need the mix-and-match body part gimmick to hold my interest, because even when left with their original limbs intact, they were among the greatest action figures I've ever chewed on when nobody was looking. Check out the diversity, featuring everything from a "Monster Fly" to a ripoff Terminator to an especially leggy Mr. T. It was akin to M.U.S.C.L.E. figures being brought to life in glorious, four-inch posable color, with the added bonus of switchable heads! Or so said the description in the 1991 JC Penney Christmas catalog. Drunks.
The line's relative obscurity makes collecting Socket Poppers both really easy and insanely difficult. You'll rarely find them on eBay, but when you do, they'll cost pennies. Figurative pennies, at least. Dollars, if you want to get literal. I hate you.
The back of the package contains an interesting fact, and one so wordy that I'm not even gonna attempt to paraphrase it: "Assuming there were no duplications in their work, one trillion people each working continuously for one trillion years could complete less than one one-billionth of the possible combinations offered by all 16 Socket Poppers characters."
Sounds a little fishy to me, but I guess I can't disprove it. I can't afford to spend the next trillion years creating Socket Poppers characters. Not when there are Doritos that taste like Mountain Dew to eat.
Okay, these are such old news by now, but new Doritos "The Quest" tortilla chips provide both a clunky product name and the chance to eat chips patterned after the fruity flavors of Mountain Dew. Without delving too deeply into the corresponding viral campaign (mainly because I cannot resonate tortilla chips having viral campaigns), chip-eaters from around the globe were invited to some wacky website to enter guesses as to "The Quest's" mystery flavor. Lo and behold, it's Mountain Dew.
I say with all confidence that those responsible for the campaign leaked the correct answer, because nobody –absolutely nobody– would've ever guessed Mountain Fucking Dew as the flavor. These chips DO NOT taste like Mountain Dew, and I believe that to such a degree that I'm actually sitting here all preemptively appalled at any forthcoming comments from those of you ready to swear that you thought they did without already knowing that they were supposed to. YOU ARE LYING; we both know it.
If you want a truer sense of the flavor, picture mashing a box of Froot Loops up into dusty grains and pouring said grains into a bag of salty Doritos. Doesn't sound appetizing? Well, good, because these are decidedly repulsive, eaten more for the thrill of knowing that you're eating something inherently wrong than for, I dunno, underscoring network television with the steady crunching sounds of Dorito chewing. While I concede that the initial flavor shock quickly wears off and they end up being only a minor offense to society at large, I can't say that "The Quest" Doritos are any good.
And besides, didn't they just do this same exact concept with those X-13D cheeseburger chips? Et tu, Frito Lay?
I don't know why Dew-flavored Doritos are making me write so crankily. I suppose we all have our buttons.
When it comes to music, I'm an asshole. It's why you'll rarely find me writing about it. I have the worst taste in music in the entire history of people listening to other people making noises. Dead serious. Aside from having absolutely no knowledge, insight or opinion about the current music industry at large, what I do listen to is so heinous and embarrassing that I find myself shielding my iTouch screen from view whenever I'm flipping through playlists during my morning bus commute. Case in point: I don't think a day has gone by for over a year now that I haven't listened to the Freddy's Greatest Hits album…in full.
I'm not joking. I actually like the songs. And not in some harebrained "novelty" way. While it's true that I got a good laugh the first time I heard Robert Englund mixed in with a bunch of stock pop singers doing altered covers, I've come to honestly enjoy the album, much in the same way normal people enjoy normal music.
Freddy's Greatest Hits consists of nine songs performed by The Elm Street Group, which is really just a bunch of studio musicians competent enough to make songs with titles like "Do The Freddy" and "Down In The Boiler Room" not sound like the musical equivalent of frog ass. Englund is all over the album too, but he doesn't exactly "sing" — he kinda just adds minute-long cackles here and there. Somehow, what should've been hilariously bad is actually hilariously decent, and though I don't expect to convert anyone since it takes about 80 listens to get to the point where you'll accept that this isn't complete and total shit, you can click here to hear the whole album and decide for yourself.
Uhhh, I was going to go a little longer on this entry, but I think that's enough for today. Back tomorrow. No, really, I will be.
Saturday, June 28th, 2008
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