newpageone.com

I was just watching the Bruins game on NESN and saw an ad for the new “shrimp taco” at Taco Bell.

Not exactly a conventional equation

Who came up with this one?  Who really wants to eat this?  Maybe you’d think to yourself during a lazy Friday night with some friends thinking, “Hey, guys, I’m real hungry for a taco but it’s Lent; what do I do?”  If you did it at home, where you know that you have control over the environment, you might think it sounds like a good idea.  Maybe you’d put it on the Internet and think you’ve beaten Bobby Flay to the punch.  But this is Taco Bell we’re talking about.  The idea of getting Mexican food from a place where I can’t directly see it being prepared frightens me.  Now we’re throwing shellfish into the mix?  I’ll pass.  Why?  Because I’m scared, and I’m man enough to say it.

Well, now I’m hungry.  I’m thinking Moe’s for lunch tomorrow…

Apparently, it’s “Doppelgänger Week” at Facebook.  The idea being that you’re supposed to put up a picture of a celebrity who people say you look like.  Well, I don’t do stupid crap like that.  But if I did, I’d have put up a picture of Ice Cube.

Straight outta Worcester!

Spittin’ images.  I almost don’t recognize myself sometimes.  Okay, so I’ve never actually been mistaken for Mr. Cube, but I always saw a resemblance.  In my family we always say, “You can tell your own.”  I just didn’t feel like going with the old “HEY COSTANZA LOL” treatment this time around.

ANYWAY.  This is just an example of the kind of thing that I hate to see at Facebook.  MySpace was rife with this sort of thing and now it’s creeping up on my cleaner, more streamlined social network of choice.  Soon enough there’ll be plenty of embedded music players and migraine-inducing animated backgrounds.  That’s how this sort of thing starts.  There goes the neighborhood.

I’ve got more to say about social networking… it’s a video I’ve wanted to do for a good long time and once I’ve got a weekend to myself, I just might do it.

Worst Fortune Ever, originally uploaded by newpageone.

I was intensely disappointed. At least the cookie itself was tasty.

BTW, this is kind of a test post from Flickr. I didn’t even know you could do this. I love how interconnected everything is these days. I don’t like how it looks though, don’t know if I’ll keep this up.

Way back in NP1 history, I posted a story about having some trouble with a bathroom vending machine.  I wasn’t really “blogging” yet, but I knew that this little adventure had to be chronicled.  Since re-doing the whole site, I stumbled over this gem and knew I had to bring it back out into the light.  Originally posted circa winter 2002-03.

I recently paid a visit to the KFC/Taco Bell in Gardner for lunch.  I’ve been here a couple of times before and I try not to make a habit of it.  Not that the place makes bad food.  It’s just that the food is bad for you.  I may be known as the George Costanza of my circle of friends, but just because Jason Alexander tells me to eat at these places a lot is no reason to do so.  Ah, well.  Anyway, on this particular day I didn’t have much to do.  I was killing time in the worst way.  I had studied quite enough and had to stay in town to see a play for my music class.  So when lunchtime rolled around, I decided to take my time with some tacos and chicken strips.  The meal was a satisfactory journey, although these guys should add a Super Size option to their soda.  However, my hands were, well, greasy.  This lead me to the bathroom to wash my hands, where I notice this…

"I got all kinds of crazy crap!"

It’s one of those men’s room vending machines.  You usually expect to see these at night clubs, hotels, interstate rest stops, bars, and the like.  They typically carry stuff like condoms and aspirin, sometimes band-aids, all sorts of stuff you’d expect a guy could get at CVS but doesn’t care to actually purchase in quantities that would leave them thinking that they now have to use the WHOLE thing.  These dispensers are the perfect solution.  However, today I stumble across one at a KFC/Taco Bell in GARDNER.  If you’ve never been to Gardner or the ensuing Route 2 region, this might strike you as funny, but after I thought about it, I realize that people in this area are far away from anything interesting to do and they probably lead a boring lifestyle that leads to the use of the type of stuff these things give out.

But I could tell that today I had come upon a vending machine that is much different from any other I’ve seen.  First of all, this one says MEN’S SHOP on it, but it seems to feature a picture of what looks like a woman trying to pass as a guy.  Look at the lips, people.  Tell me that’s not effeminate.  But there was another thing I couldn’t help but notice sticking out at me.  Perhaps you noticed as well.

What a find!

That’s right, this one sells GLOW STICKS!!  How cool is that?  Now, I’m not into the whole “raver” culture or anything, but I love glow sticks.  You never know when one is going to come in handy, but I can’t help but think of how ravers have sort of tarnished one of my favorite trinkets.  Still, I can’t help but want one, and if it’s only gonna set me back one dollar, I’ll give it a shot.  Maybe I could use it at the play later that night to dazzle my classmates.  I mean, we were seeing Funny Girl, this would have been almost as much fun as getting a laser pointer and shooting it at the stage for a while.  Or I could have used it to read something more interesting while the houselights were down.  The possibilities were endless, and it all began here with this machine.  I had found the evening’s salvation in a fast food restroom.

Ka-ching!

I had  $1.63 of change in my pocket, which not only was a lot for my normal day, but I could also purchase a whole glow stick and 2/3 of another, or perhaps the glow stick and half a dose of Tylenol.  I didn’t really have a headache, though, and vending machines are hardly ever open to reason.  I also figured I didn’t smell bad, so I could care less about whatever types of cologne might be dispensed by this thing.  So I plopped in four quarters and PUSHed the glow stick button button firmly as the sign told me to.  Nothing happened.  I was upset.  Where was my glow stick?  I checked the little window to see if there was indeed a “zero” there, but there was nothing to be found.  Either this thing was there to only give me false hope or to completely mislead me and steal my money.  Sure, from just me it’s one dollar, but if there are others, then this could be quite the scam going on here.  That’s when I started to panic.

Umm... this is sort of perverse, now that I think of it.

I ended up sticking my HAND into the machine to see if I could disloge anything, but to no avail.  Now I had to wash my hands again.  I proceeded to smack the machine and bang away at the coin return button, and nothing worked.  Damn you, Men’s Shop vending machine.  Damn you, Mendy’s Scandinavia, Inc.  You’ve messed with me for the last time.  That’s right.  Just once is enough with me.  When I am denied a glow stick, or anything from a vending machine, I’m one tough cookie.  I mean, I let it slide the night before when I wanted a Twix and got a Hershey’s out of the machine at school the night before, but that’s because I was partly to blame.  (Hmmm… Twix… I think that’s another Costanza reference, don’t you?)  But this was different.  I should have thrown a fit at those guys behind the counter.  I should have written letters to the estate of Colonel Sanders and to the Taco Bell Chihuahua.  I’m tight with him.  But then I realized that all of those people/dogs have other problems that they hardly have time for, let alone my plight about a vending machine in an outpost restaurant like this.

Not happy... Man, I've lost a lot of hair.

And so I just plugged on, back to school, knowing that I was one dollar short and had no glow stick.  But big deal, right?  This, too, shall pass.  Tomorrow’s another day.  Maybe I’ll discover a machine that gives out flavored toothpicks at a Pizza Hut.

According to UrbanDictionary, a “troll” is:

One who posts a deliberately provocative message to a newsgroup or message board with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument.

That’s the first entry.  Most of them are something along the same lines, but if you only scroll down to number six, you’ll pick up this nugget:

One of many unsung internet heroes who are almost entirely misunderstood. Contrary to popular belief, many trolls are actually quite intelligent. Their habitual attacks on forums is usually a result of their awareness of the pretentiousness and excessive self-importance of many forum enthusiasts. As much as people may hate trolls, they are highly effective – their actions bring much of the stupidity of other forum users out into the great wide open.

Both definitions are most certainly valid.  But it’s the second one that I find more truth in.  These days, it seems like just about everybody needs to get trolled once in a while to keep them in line.  And like most things that seem to Internet-only phenomena, trolling can spread into real life.  And boy, was 2009 a good year for trolls.  That’s why I want to recognize some of my favorites from the past year.

The Balloon Boy Family: Sure, we know the aftermath.  The kid’s father, Richard Heene, was just sentenced to 90 days in prison.  But for one wonderful afternoon, the country could remember a simpler time when kids could fall down a well or something like that and lie about it for attention (like Bart Simpson did).  Give them credit for saying they sent the kid up in a hot-air Jiffy Pop balloon.  Let’s see Sting get ‘em outta that one.

Michaele and Tareq Salahi: AKA the White House Gate Crashers.  Another couple of attention-seekers, these two trolled their way to the top.  Not only did they get to rub some elbows and shake some hands (one of which belonged to the president, I believe), they exposed the fact that even the Secret Service has become just as inept most other government agencies.  And that’s scary.

Mark Teixeira and Nick Swisher: Tex gets on the list for telling the Red Sox that he’d join them, only to turn right around at the last second and sign with the Yankees instead.  Sox supporting colleagues gave me the stink eye all year long, never with more vitriol than after the Yanks took the World Series in November.  Feels good, man.  As for Swish, the dude was obviously in the wrong place all season.  Nobody, not even Johnny Damon, caught onto the fact that this guy should have played for the Red Sox in another life.  He’s a full-blooded “idiot” if I ever saw one, and just knowing that his switch-hitting, relief-pitching visage is in pinstripes only makes it sweeter.

Mahmoud Amadinejad: As long as this guy remains in power in Iran, he’s trolling it up.  And he’s not one of the good ones.  Election protests?  No problem.  Round them up, arrest them, shoot them, whatever, just as long as it shuts up the opposition.  Holocaust?  What Holocaust?  Oh, and the whole nuclear power program has nothing to do with building missles, even though I really want to blow up Israel.

James Cameron: Avatar is probably the best example of the long con that I can come up with.  For years, geeks like myself had been reading all about The King of the World’s glorious return to science fiction after spending years underwater taking pictures of jellyfish.  When he came back up, he announced that he’d be making Avatar with all sorts of new CGI, mo-cap, and camera technology in order to create a hyper-realistic movie experience.  The rumor mill was going crazy, saying that the film was going to be revolutionary and that the story would be beyond epic.  And then the trailer hit the Internet, and all of geekdom reacted with a unanimous, “Meh.”  Remember the last time a visionary director said he’d wait years until the special effects were good enough to produce his magnum opus?  Yeah, thanks, Mr. Lucas for those prequels.

Had our hopes been built up too much by all the hype?  No.  Not this time.  You can get out-hyped by Transformers 2.  You can’t get out-hyped by being told one thing and given another.  This didn’t look like something I’d never seen before.  It looked like a video game.  It’s a cliche, I know, but it’s true.  Then again, I still haven’t seen it (probably tomorrow afternoon, incidentally).  But I’m nowhere near as pumped.  If I still was, I’d have seen it already.

Barack Obama: You know, I’d give the president the number one spot, but you have to look at it like this: he’s nowhere near done.  It’s like when the Lord of the Rings trilogy was coming out.  The Academy didn’t give Peter Jackson the Oscar for The Fellowship of the Ring or The Two Towers.  That’s because they all knew that The Return of the King was coming.  They’d shower him with little naked golden men when the story was over.  It’s the same here.  And boy oh boy, if this is where we are after just one year, you can only imagine what the next three can bring.

And the winner of the 2009 Golden Troll Award:

Lady Gaga: Yeah.  Lady Gaga.  There, I said it.  That’s one reason she’s my Number One.  She made people have to say the words “Lady Gaga” with a straight face.  Why?  Because she sold records.  Tons of ‘em.  And the music is terrible.  It’s like the second coming of Italo Disco.  Plus, those ridiculous outfits.  It’s beyond Bowie or Madonna when they hit the scene.  She’s even been accused of being a hermaphrodite.  And the kicker?

Her lyrics are fantastic.  Being a person with working ears, I am subjected to hearing these songs all the time.  And after hearing “Poker Face,” “Just Dance,” “Paparazzi,” and “Bad Romance” as many times as I have, beneath that mind-rotting beat, there are plenty of lyrical gems.  I won’t get into it, but if you can stomach such aural torture, you can’t help but notice that she can write a good song.  Yeah, she writes the words.  That makes her legitimate.  I can only hope that she picks up a producer who knows what “melody” is so that I don’t want to shove sharpened pencils into my ears.

So good on you, Stefani Germanotta of Yonkers, NY.  You are the Golden Troll of 2009.  Take a bow.

You should have seen that coming.