The Message Whore

There’s a time of the month where cravings are insatiable and any sort of sweets will do. That’s when I spotted Mrs. Fields Ice Cream Sandwich cookies in our local Shop Rite. Sure it was $4.55 for a package of 5. But I was told, “Hey, it’s a luxury item, prices don’t matter”.

Usually I stave off such cravings, but my biggest weakness seems to be ice cream. The best type of ice cream is always ice cream + something else, like cake, brownie, or cookie.

With these frozen sandwiches the ice cream is paired with two generic cookies, but Mrs. Fields is a way famous brand. That was guarantee enough for me to justify buying it. From the box cover I pictured something giant and delicious–oversized–supersized! Mmm. Somehow I resisted the urge to rip open the box on the way home in the car.

Finally at home in the kitchen I opened the box and only to be sorely disappointed by the size. Yes, size does matter; it matters a lot. Especially when I need to eat TWO sandwiches to sate my sweet kick and at 250 calories each sandwich I felt a little bit guilty (and ugly inside) about eating 1/4 of the 2,000 suggested calories per day.

The cookies were soft and crumbly, but the vanilla ice cream was pretty standard. Surprisingly, the sandwiches are not as tasty as a Chipwich. Maybe with the rising fuel crisis impacted goods like sugar, milk, and flour the ice cream industry has started to resize their sandwiches to tinier portions?

These get a 2 cheese rating out of a possible 5 due to size :’(

It has been a while, hasn’t it? Has anyone even noticed?

I doubt it, but that’s no reason not to keep the pithy amounts of writing we do for this site going. Maybe we just need more energy. In order to charge ourselves up in a nice healthy way we could get more sleep, maybe change our diet, or exercise even more than we do now, but what fun is that? Who wants to live responsibly when we can buy drugs that will do all of that for us?

Emmi Cafe Latte

Yup, more caffeine, and this time in a prepackaged highly processed form. Yeah, it’s yet another coffee drink. Whoop de do. Why should we care about these? Good question, sadly I do not have an answer for you, but they were free so we figured that we would give them a shot.

The nutrition information leaves quite a lot to be desired but completely unexpected. All of these are pretty much the same. A bit of coffee, a bit of milk, and a crap load of sweeteners.

Another problem is that they are small. I am sure everyone remembers this commercial..

We could apply the same thing to this drink.

Mr Jezo, how many sips does it take to get to the bottom of a Emmi Cafe Latte drink?

One! Two! Three!

Yeah, that’s about it. Nonsense!

Anyway, I think you might know my feelings on this already so let’s just get this over with and move on.

Two cheeses. Hardly worth it in any form unless you are desperate for a highly sweetened coffee beverage from a prepackaged plastic cup, and even then this stuff is no different than almost every other canned or bottled coffee product on the market. One cheese because pretty much everything gets one cheese, and a second because i wasn’t completely disgusted by the flavor, just highly annoyed at the size and that it’s pretty unhealthy, but I doubt people drinking these things are calorie counters. This one really

Meh.

Kashi's new "u" dares to ignore almost every natural law.

I’ve long held that Kashi is on of the better brands of health foods. They provide simple, tasty non-threatening products for all ages that delivers the too-often broken promise of healthy cereals, energy bars and other snacks. However, Kashi’s new “u” cereal seems to be designed specifically to turn off our friends and destroy the delicate work we’ve nurtured in getting our families interested in healthy foods. With this -and the knowledge that fluff-piece lists bring traffic- in mind, I have decided to craft a list of the five ways Kashi “u” represents all that mainstream consumers hate about our lifestyle.

Currants. I don’t need my cereal to be more pretentious than me. In fact, I would have thought this impossible and even as I look upon my desktop background, a wordle created using the final chapter of Ulysses, I find myself angry at the hubris of the box. Not only is it impossible to explain to people what they should be buying (The name? Lowercase “u.” It’s shelved alphabetically) I also have to either explain what a currant is or explain why Kashi can’t just call them what every other company calls the shriveled and tasteless old grapes they leave in their breakfast: raisins.

A Mission Statement. There is an unknown force at work surrounding all cereal boxes, one that compels those eating the aforementioned cereal to lazily half-read the box over and over until it’s empty. This particular box contains an enigmatic paragraph that I have been attempting to decode for the past week:

“At Kashi, we believe you are what you eat. We also believe you are more than that. So we created a cereal from us to you. This is your cereal, for your life. And in life, everything is interconnected. Just as your systems work together, your body works with other bodies. And everybody unites to build our world.”

I find that the difficulty in getting people interested in a product is directly proportional to the resemblance that product’s description has to a cultish dark mantra.

Harsh Reminders of Our Own Mortality. Kashi “u” claims to promote vitality in 5 body systems and, assuming we need something to back up these claims, goes into explicit detail about how each of your systems is kept healthy. There are a lot of things on my mind when enjoying my break fast but they do not include information pertaining to ALA omega-3s, the strength of my bones or the types of bacteria that are currently in my digestive tract.

This fun fact was included in the mix: “…your brain consumes 20% of your daily energy, it’s important to feed it…” So now I can feel free to panic about the vampiric-parasitic nature of my own brain. Grasping for some information that would not horrify me I turned over the box to find that it was manufactured with 100% wind power. The thought of the wind was calming. I thought of the wind gently brushing my hair. But was it the breeze blowing across my ears I heard, or the sound of my brain slowly draining my qi?

Price. Apparently wind power isn’t as cheap as one would think. I recently saw it in Whole Foods and Shop Rite for 5.99 and 4.99, respectively. Absurd price tags is one of two reasons health foods get a bad reputation. And until this moment, Kashi had been pretty good about reasonably prices products that were able to compete with their high-fructose corn syrup enriched competition. Nothing ends a discussion about trying new products out like a ridiculous price tag. Nothing, that is, except for the other reason health foods get a bad name which, unfortunately, is the last on our list -

Solve for "u."

Taste. Kashi “u” tastes terrible. I believe this is a universal constant, something that will force all other edible products to bend based on that assumption. For example, if someone were to say to you, “I accidentally ate a bit of my cat’s clumpable litter this morning. It’s the worst thing anyone has ever tasted!” You would be scientifically correct when responding, “It may be the worst thing you have ever tasted but Kashi’s constant (u) suggests otherwise.”

It tastes like the dry, abusively bland 100% recycled cardboard that it was boxed in. Which is only a revelation because health food has been accused of this for years but I highly doubt it has ever proven to be an accurate description. This is exactly the type of food that people who hate tofu think of when they think of health food and, for this and the above reasons, this product should be removed. It re-enforces every negative stereotype about health foods that had been destroyed over the course of the last twenty or so years.

So I have updated the theme on the site. The old one was getting a bit dated and didn’t support any of the new features that I wanted to add behind the scenes. This is a bit of a work in progress so if you come back and the whole thing blew up, don’t worry. We’ll get it back and running properly as soon as possible. Right now it’s pretty much in it’s default site, we’ll customize it a bit once we figure out what we are doing.

kthxbye.

Well, we are back from our marriage and honeymoon and it’s time to start writing again. It was a long trip, complete with Montezuma’s revenge, a couple doctor’s visits, a tropical storm, and a beach front wedding. During our trip we went from a small hotel run by a couple of gay folks, a mega all inclusive resort, and what we will discuss today, a hipster boutique hotel with a recycled theme (as in garbage put to use) that is all the rage in the circles that care about these kinds of things.

Hotel Basico.

Hotel Basico is the second and third floor of that building, rooms overlooking the main street in Playa Del Carmen. Sister to the acclaimed Hotel Deseo, Basico is the latest botique hotel to grace 5th ave and it does everything in a minimalist green earth flavor.

From the first look in the lobby you’ll notice that Hotel Basico is a little different. With an open face covered alleyway pumping out groove music, old tire treads covering the floor, and a “library” covering the walls, Basico is not your typical hotel.

While waiting for your room to be prepared (3pm check in seems to be the standard) check out the roof pool.

An oil tank converted into a swimming pool overlooking the main street and offering a nice view of the ocean a block away. At night a dj spins and everyone hangs out overlooking the main street in the city.

Back down into the hotel you’ll find something very unlike what we have come to expect from a hotel. No room numbers for this place, instead the rooms are named for women, we had Fernanda.

A glowing pink neon light greets you when you first walk in, bathing the room in bright colored lights.

A glowing pink neon light greets you when you first walk in, bathing the room in bright colored lights.

Under the elevated bed is another colored light which gives the rest of the room a bright glow.

The light bleeds through the rubber window curtains giving people from the street something to curiously look up at.

Settling in to the room you’ll find no comforts outside of the bed, which is them encouraging you to spend more time in it. With an attached retro Polaroid camera the designers of Basico are hoping make a little fun in the barren space they have given you.

The walls are just as barren.

Exposed piping and a mirror placed strategically with a view of the head of the bed.

Then the water closet.

A tiny little room, the door handle is one from a saw, the light switch is a hanging disco ball, and on the door you have a bunch of old post cards to look at as you are doing your business (which was many many times due to the Mexican food I had).

Other rooms sit right against the restaurant, privacy comes optional.

As I noted when I saw someone’s bum behind the curtain.

So that’s Hotel Basico.

Want another take on it with professionally shot pictures? Click here, but if not go down there and book yourself a room and try it out yourself and have fun with the camera for us.

It’s time for the world debut of Extra Special Ops!

This is only the start of a world wide media take over. Soon it will be bigger than the Tim and Eric Awesome Show.

You agree, right? Comment and let us know, or instead let us know if you think it’s the worst thing you have ever seen. We have been working on this project for quite some time now so we need all the feedback we can get.

Be sure to digg it: http://digg.com/comics_animation/Obama_Chooses_Running_Mate_2

Spread the word. The Extra Special Ops are coming.

Frying bacon is an art, something that is handed down through the ages from father to son, from sensei to grass hopper, from (insert something here) to (insert something else here). Unfortunately for me I never paid attention during the bacon course given in life and every time I try to fry it I end up leaving it in the pan for too long and it loses all of its marvelous crispness and becomes a dried out piece of pork.

Pork?

Did I say that? Ha! Pork is so unfashionable these days. For us in the “community” we now only deal with bacon of a different sort.

Bar S Turkey Bacon.

Sure, turkey bacon has been around for a very long time, but this turkey bacon has only been around long enough to have a big NEW right on the cover. When I saw it in the store I gave out a little gasp of glee and threw it into my shopping cart knowing that I could bring it up, cook it up, and both feel good that it was not of the pork variety (soceity tells me that I should’t eat pork) and that I would be able to write about it in my obsessive need to (for no reason I can actually think of) write about these things on the internet, pretending to myself that people care.

So the bacon.

I have decided to first try frying it. As expected it came out meh at best. No matter what I do I always end up cooking it too long. But once you smother it in all sorts of stuff and eat it with a hot dog that doesn’t really matter.

But then the mbeattie, a savior to bacon lovers everywhere:

from mbeattie
to Lord Jezo

cook it in the oven.
Yea, I never thought it would work until I saw it.
Put it in a 350 degree oven for like 20-30 mins. It comes out just right.

Bacon in the oven? What the hell? I didn’t believe it so I asked Google what she thought.

She said it was okay so I decided to give it a shot.

Sexy, no?

So I left it in the oven for 20 minutes as the mbeattie told me to, and guess what, it came out pretty decently.

Just pretend that is decent. It’s turkey bacon after all so it doesn’t look as delicious as the pork stuff (it doesn’t taste as good either, but that’s okay for now). mbeattie knew what he was talking about. Thanks mbeattie!

Three cheeses. No where near as good as pork bacon but I suppose I could get used to it if I had to for the better good of my arteries.

Breakfast of champions Mr. Hoover!!

Before everyone forgets TMW is on Twitter, or at least I am, so go and follow us!

So here I am, ready to amaze you with a head to head unlike any head to head ever done anywhere before.

Yeah.

Cascade vs Electrasol.

So here I am, a single dude for a whole 30 more days and I am trying to find out what the better dishwashing detergent is. How the heck am I supposed to know such things? I usually stuff the dishwasher beyond capacity, arrange things very haphazardly, push a few buttons, and hope for the best.

To me a dishwashing detergent should get foods mostly clean (I can pick stuff off of them if needs be, I don’t mind), wash off clear, and not smell too strong. I don’t want to be eating off of a lemon sented plate, thank you very much.

So first up we have the Electrosol. It has a fancy sounding name. I really don’t know what it means or where it came from but it makes me think of the future where electricity will be used for lots of crazy things, and the sol part of the word, um, maybe the Mexican sun? I used it for a few loads and it worked for the most part. Stuff was washed.


Now the Cascade Complete. Folks rank this one as the ichiban of dishwashing detergents. From what I hear its the most amazing cleaner on earth and with slay the food off of my dishes with such a vengeance that I will have no need to pre-wash. So I gave it a shot.

became

Oh crap it’s clean.

But then I think the Electrosol did the same thing a few days prior. I think the Cascade did do a better job with the really caked on dried out dog food on some of the bowls, but with the normal stuff both worked equally as well.

So which one did I like more?

Well which one was cheaper? Now while the Cascade Complete may have dug into things more than the Electrosol I don’t think it would be worth a premium price. Personally I just stick with the Target store brand powder, its cheaper than all of this and works the best for the price.

So what does this TMW man fraü recommend? Get what is on sale but if you have money to burn spend the extra and get the Cascade.

There I was, sitting in my seat about 35,000 feet about sea level going hundreds of miles an hour. The only thing I had to keep myself company were a couple of bags of Trader Joe’s wasabi pees and the entire first season of The Wire. My feet were still cramped up from hiking to the top of Half Dome (I almost made it to the top, a snow storm got in our way). The flight was smooth and with my lack of sleep over the past few days I was struggling to stay awake in order to fix myself back to east coast time.

Ever use a GPS on a plane? It’s pretty neat.

I still had a long way to go and already the almonds, walnuts, wasabi peas, and sunflower seeds were getting to me. I had beef jerky but after living off of it for a 16 mile hike (I was delerious by the end of it) I wasn’t sure I ever wanted anything to do with it again.

But then came one of the last friendly things in the sky, Continental still serves you food on their flights, and for free! Shocking, isn’t it. With all the new fees and other nonsense the major airline carriers are pulling these days its pretty shocking to still find one that gives you a bit of customer service once you are trapped in that sardine can and hurtling across the sky.

Since it was the morning today’s feature was breakfast, and wouldn’t you know it, it was something new for me to write about a week later. The New Kangaroo Pita Pocket. I opened it up, took a sniff and consumed. I think anything at this point would have tasted pretty marvelous so I may have been a bit biased, but then again I have always been a fan of airplane food, there is something wonderful about a warm meal served to you while sitting in a plane staring out the window. This one was no exception. The bread was nice and soft and the egg was warm. It could have used a piece of cheese or a strip of bacon, but I’ll take what was given to me. There were a few other things on the plate but I was not as concerned with them as I was the main dish.

But in a minute the meal was over and I was back to my carry on food. They joy that had come was gone. Luckily the flight was shorter than the one out there so I only had to occupy myself for another 4 hours.

3 cheeses. I don’t suppose this is something you can really get too easily, but if you do fly make it Conntinental and get yourself some free food.

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