I Do Not Recommend This To Anyone

"THAT looks terrible."

This is what I expected the Wifey to say upon my presenting her with this image. She did not. She said, and I quote, "yowza," which is equally appropriate, oddly enough.

This is one of the newer Hungry Man XXL meal dealies, the "Hamburger Hero" (as they call it; Der Unterburger, as I call it). It is definitely a guilty pleasure. I know it can't be any good, frankly. It is the epitome of processed foods. It's a fine Swanson product, inventors of the Rubber Chicken. It's a Hungry Man meal, for crying out loud. (My niece Cayla helped throw this into relief last weekend; when I announced that I was planning on eating a Hungry Man product, she twisted her freckled little face into a scowl and went "Grrrr!", explaining that's the noise that comes to mind whenever she encounters a Hungry Man product.

On the other hand, since none of the schmucks who spend their time lambasting Swanson products (or, more specifically, Hungry Man brand items) on the internet have touched this so far, it can't be that bad. And I am taking a kind of a reverse-word-of-honor here: these idiots are looking to revile, to be shocked at the nasty, naughty, greasy, unidentifyable, and clearly just plain wrong kinds of things they can stuff into their slavering maws, and compound that with the fact that they all spend vitually as much time describing their craven, vermin-infested hovels (or dressing up camp photos of Swanson meals flanked by bottles of decent wine and candles in silver holders and napkins in onyx rings), and, well, these people are clearly looking to make trouble, because they're geared for it. If they couldn't find a reason to be absolutely outraged at this product, there can't be much wrong with it.

Of course, there clearly can't be anything specifically right about it. Swanson, after all.

But I love it. I do. As with all things, they key is in the futzing, which in this case is minimal: a little extra cheese, some ketchup and mustard, some fries on the side, and it's a good ol' hunk of processed cow. And sometimes, well, that's just exactly what you want.

Or what I want, anyways.


The beer I can recommend. The Kona I had heard of, but it just now showed up in our market, and it was on sale to boot. The Longboard Island Lager . . . Well, first things first. This is an extremely hokey brand-- proudly serving you since 1994!-- and while beer is easily associated with surfing and surfers, the labelling clearly enunciates that their target audience consists of people who have never surfed, and thus associate surfing with something that has not been regularly practiced since 1958. On top of which, why this would be "Island Lager . . . " Well, it's just that lager is a German thing, and so why it would be made on Waikiki (or Kona, for that matter) . . . Now, maybe if it hailed from Guadalajara . . .

But the lager itself is just lovely. Lovely body, solid hop notes, lovely ligering aftertaste . . . Just lovely. I can wholeheartedly recommend it, regardless of the marketing.

The film of the day I also cannot recommend.


I remember hearing about this around the time people were finally conceding that The Kids In The Hall were more or less a defunct entity, and about the time that those same peoplke were concedeing that News Radio was a pretty good show, and probably would not, as they had been silently hoping, crash and burn, sending Dave Foley screaming back to his Canadian pals for a revised version of TKITH (or Tkith, which is a fifth level Scientologist or one of the lesser minions of Gozer). I did not see it when it came out, because a) I had no money, 2. This spent maybe 30 seconds in our market, and +, It looked like the kind of thing that the Wifey, who at that point was still The Girly, would reject out of hand.
Which, I don't know, maybe she would and maybe she wouldn't. It is pretty silly, and while it is clearly a vehicle (not only for Foley, but also for Dave Higgins, who co-wrote it and has an extended role as a cop thoroughly exploiting his investigative resources for personal gratification, as well as the dozen or so A-minus-list comic actors who have small, if meaty, parts) it is genuinely funny most of the time. Additionally, it just keeps moving on, so the bits that do fall flat (and there are but a few, MHO) pass under the wheels like pebbles. Also, it is good to see Jennifer Tilly get a role that requires her to be something other than a jaded movie star or a raging nymphomaniac, recently lobotomized. (In this case she plays a narcoleptic, and it is a genuine treat to watch her work it.) (Yeah yeah yeah; this was back in 97-98, I know, but still, good to see her get good work, past or present.) Also, Enrico Colantoni has a bit part, with one of the best line sets ever: "Know how many gunmen were involved in the Kennedy assassination? NONE! No guman at all! Kennedy's head just did that!"

Also, the 80's era cliche mining that was rampant in the films of the late 90's is represented, but with a tad more wit and subtlety than was common for the time. And while there is definitely a harking back to the TKITH esthetic-- a handy subtitle would have been "Heccubus Goes On The Lamm!"-- it's also removed enough from that not to taste like imitation, bitter, bitter imitation of youthful success.

(Or at least not to me.)

So I cannot recommend it. If you love Dave Foley, Second City, mistaken identity comedies, late 90's comedy in general, then maybe I can. But I can only conclude that it played an excellent balance between the perfect pleasure of the Kona Longboard Island Lager and the filthy, dark, lowdown, soul-dimming guilty pleasure* of a great big ol' chunk of processed cow.

Now that's good eatin!

*Chuck Klosterman can now, officially, get bent

Yesterday's News

THIS was yesterday's lunch. Today's lunch was a bacon cheese-burger at one of my favorite local joints. This particular model came with barbeque sauce, two kinds of cheese, lettuce, onion and tomato, fries on the side and a Red Hook ESB.

Yesterday's lunch was ramen noodles with soy sauce and chili-garlic Cholula, along with the items you probably can't make out in the background there. Those are Kahiki brand lemon-grass "chicken stix," which, honestly, taste like something you might have found of a good Chinese buffet. Honest. They came with their own dipping sauce, which was on the sweet side, and the day I bought them, I used it as an excuse to purchase a jar of Chinese style mustard. Seriously, people, there's like 135 different tastes at work here, once you include the Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. (Which, obviously, I did.)

It was also not the accompaniment to the film of the day, which was Wet, Hot American Summer. This is also yesterday's news, in many, many ways.

It was recently re-reviewed by the guys at the Onion AV club (it wasn't this review, but one of Nathan Rabin's My Year Of Flops bits, which is, unfortunately, not indexed in a way that I am finding easy to access). (To.) (At any rate, the combined weight of the MYOF review and the one linked there said I had to see this flick.)

The basic saw is that teen flicks are bad and that's funny. So making fun of teen flicks must be funny, especially if you make it clear that you love the bad/funny teen flicks that you're making fun of. And then of course, if you hire half the cast of MTV's The State, which all hipsters agree was funny, despite the fact that no one who wasn't completely stoned ever laughed at it once, well, that's gotta be even better!

The clock read 3:04 by the time the DVD had loaded and the flick was ready to play. During the opening montage, which portrayed the kind of loud, stupid teenager bonfire parties I used to hate when I was a teenager-- it's summer, people. This is the WRONG TIME OF YEAR TO BE STANDING AROUND A HUGE OPEN FIRE!-- I figured I would give it 15 minutes to get funny.

I made it to 3:15 before I shut the damned thing off.

I could see why they thought it might be funny, but . . . I mean, no. It . . . it just wasn't. Maybe with the proper kind of re-inforcement I could have watched the whole thing, but it was way too contrived, the acting was ham-fisted and squirmy, the joke premises were creaky to say the least, and the basic plot device-- take the moral-sexual ambiguities of adolescence, boil them into concentration in a Petrie dish, and smear the resulting compund over each character in a thick layer-- was obvious. I knew from prior experience there was a fairly funny montage piece coming up-- it was posted on Nabin's review-- and another one with a pay-off that you might not have seen coming from a mile away, but it just didn't seem worth my while.

Oh, well. Maybe some other day. I ended up watching Lewis Black's History Channel special The History of the Joke. Much better. Much better.