Alright, I’m finally going to contribute to The League of Extraordinary Bloggers, a fellowship of pop-culture-minded bloggers who contribute to a weekly topic. This week’s topic is:

What is something you absolutely hate or love or just don’t get, or maybe it’s something you have never even seen or read. What is your deepest, darkest geek confession?

Deep breath.

Here it is. I’ve never beaten Super Mario Bros. on the NES. Never got to the end of the game. Never reached the final castle. Through countless issues of Nintendo Power Magazines and the invention of the Game Genie; through game guides and multiple cartridges, ports, and emulations, through childhood to adulthood, I have failed to do one thing: save the princess. Not with warp zones and infinite lives tricks. Not with cheat codes and secret tips. Not even with the Power Glove. Although let’s face it, you couldn’t do anything with that.

“Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!”

It’s the story of my life.

Beating Mario Bros. was something of a prowess in elementary school. There were kids who could beat it no mushrooms, no one-ups, and no warp zones. Kids who could beat it in one turn, no damage and no deaths. There was even a kid who claimed he figured out how to jump over the flag pole, but nobody believed that.

It’s not even a difficult game. Mario Bros. invented the archetype for platformer games to come. The game is comprised of just thirty-two levels with intuitive controls that are easy-to-learn. The basic controls are just two attack moves, stomping and shooting fire balls. The beauty of the game is that it does have a deeper complexity, however it’s also simple enough that it can be beaten in a world record five minutes and eight seconds.

It wasn’t like I’d run blindly into the first Goomba I’d see in World 1-1. It wasn’t like I was a slouch at video games. I knew the Contra Code. I knew the code to Mike Tyson. I knew the secret cave in the Legend of Zelda, the secret to beating King Hippo, and the secret to the Power Pad by pounding your fists onto it instead of your feet. We didn’t call it cheating. We called it efficiency.

Our Nintendo was hooked up to the television in the family room—a television that was shared by my mother’s daily appointment with Judge Wapner and The People’s Court, my father’s sports, my sister’s cartoons, and of course, my own schedule of cartoons. Some families run their lives by a calendar. We ran ours by the TV Guide.

Between television, catching up on my Choose Your Own Adventure books, devoting time to advancing our plots in the ongoing saga between the Ninja Turtles and Barbies with my sister, and spending time outside riding bikes and collecting sticks in the woods for my “top secret” project, getting in quality time with Mario was difficult. Not to mention quality time with Link, Pac-Man, Jimmy and Bimmy.

No wonder I didn’t have time for extracurricular activities, organized clubs, and summer camps. Sure, I’ve paid the price as an adult being a social weirdo who doesn’t know how to swim, pitch a baseball, or play nicely with others in board games of Monopoly, but at least I can score 50,000 points in Double Dragon on an arcade machine at a bus station.

And seriously, you put a hotel on that Boardwalk and I’m flipping this board upside down and scattering the pieces everywhere.

Mario and I drifted apart by my teenage years. We didn’t move on together to Mario World or Mario Sunshine. Mario went into the back of the closet for twenty years, and though I had a brief affair with one named Sonic and his cool 16-bit Genesis ride, for the most part I moved away from gaming. That’s not to say I didn’t suck at my other hobbies. Alright, I’m about make a couple more gory confessions. I’m a writer, and I’ve never read Hemingway. I’m a rock fan, who’s never listened to Hendrix. And I’m a vegetarian, and I don’t like vegetables.

Seriously. And what the hell are my excuses? Oh you know, the usual: lazy, tired, working, too much delicious bread to eat, playing Minesweeper obsessively until eyes bleed, For Whom The Bell Tolls too heavy to lift off bookshelf, busy listening to corny 1980s R&B instead, busy wiping blood from tear ducts, still collecting sticks for secret project.

Jesus, I’m a horrible person.

People, I’m going to do it. I’m going to read Hemingway, eat some baby carrots which are very good for my complexion, take Bell Biv Devoe off my record player, and beat Super Mario Bros. In the end, I’ll be a better person. I’ll be nicer to old people and kinder to animals. I’ll have ten percent fresher breath. I’ll go better with Coke.

Or I’ll die in world 4-1 after getting hit by a Spiny, curse the game, throw the controller down, and sulk—because I never learned how to lose games with dignity, a skill that I would have no doubt picked up at summer camp, along with swimming and macaroni art. And I’m talking precision macaroni art, which is a true art form, not the kind where you get glue smeared all over the paper.

But just you wait. One day I’ll reveal my big secret stick project and I’ll take the art world by storm.

Here’s another installment of this weekend’s yard sale and flea market finds. Well, it’s more like the last two weekends. First up are the McDonald’s Changeables Happy Meal Toys. I scored these for a quarter a piece. The Changeables are some of the most fondly-remembered Happy Meal toys. They were toy versions of McDonald’s foods that transformed into robots, a total cash-in attempt at the height of the Transformers popularity.

However the Changeables also became popular in their own right. Kids begged their parents for return trips and Happy Meals to collect all of the toys, and McDonald’s responded to the sound of cha-ching with three different series of them in 1987, 1989, and 1990. Today they are one of the few Happy Meal toys that even warrants its own Wikipedia page.

Here I have a mixture from each of the series, including the third series which transformed into dinosaurs instead of robots. Yet the transforming aspect of the toys was never the appeal. Each only has one or two moving parts, and the robots themselves kind of suck. It was having miniature plastic versions of the foods themselves that was so neat.

We loved the foods. No, I mean, we loved them. McDonald’s has been demonized and dismissed in the last decade, sometimes rightfully and sometimes not. Today, the Big Mac is at best thought of as a greasy processed food, and at worst, a symbol of an obesity epidemic. But in the 1980s, it was a symbol of American popular culture and capitalism. It was iconic. The Economist coined the Big Mac Index as a reference point for comparing the cost of living in different countries. “Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions all on a sesame seed bun” was more than a commercial jingle. It was a rallying cry.

Kids love icons. For the same reasons we loved Mickey Mouse and Paul Bunyan, we loved the Big Mac and the Egg McMuffin. Even the packaging itself—the yellow boxes of McNuggets and airy styrofoam trays of Hotcakes—was something altogether more, something beyond fast food. Now add in the fact that they transformed into robots and dinosaurs—ROBOTS AND DINOSAURS—and it’s a slurry of lost American nostalgia that’s particularly unique to a generation of kids that grew up in the 1980s.

Paid: $1.75 for all
Value: $1-4 a piece

(I’m nabbing this paid/value thing from one of my favorite blogs, Cool and Collected, and if you like these yard sale finds posts, check this blog out.)

Next up: Z-BOTS!

I didn’t find all of these Z-Bots this weekend, because if I had I’d have died from awesomeness overload. I could have just picked out the ones I did find to show off, but instead I chose to show off my entire collection, which cannot be shown off enough. Seriously, I feel like inviting random strangers into my house just to show them and scream I HAVE LOTS OF Z-BOTS. I HAVE LOTS OF Z-BOTS!

Paid: .25 to .50 each
Value: $1 a piece

Next: PVC figures!

I’m like a nut for random PVC figures. I’m always having to muscle little kids out of the way to dig through the big plastic tubs of toys, and I’ll be there digging for ten minutes, since the world is always against me and the good ones are always buried obscurely at the creepy, dusty bottom. I really hope that’s dust.

The California Raisins, Snorks, and ET represent some of the most popular PVC figures released in the 1980s. I find them all the time. I’ve got a load of each of these guys. The girl Raisins are my favorites to find because they’re a bit rarer and funkier than the other Raisins. Well, except for the Raisin in the orange glasses who, of course, defines funk.

Paid: .25 each
Value: $1-2 each

The Chuck E. Cheese figure was a particularly cool find because it’s marked 1985 Showbiz Pizza on the bottom. Chuck E. Cheese was originally founded by Atari mastermind Nolan Bushnell in 1979, but later merged with Showbiz Pizza. Eventually by the 1990s, they turned all the branding over to Chuck E. Cheese and CEC Entertainment.

I’ve started collecting some of the old Showbiz Pizza stuff after watching an amazing documentary on Netflix, The Rock-afire Explosion, which is about the cult fans of the animatronic character band, although that’s a bit misleading because documentary is really about something more. It’s a documentary about a sort of human truth that you can never quite place your finger on—and yet you know it’s there.

Here’s the best way I can explain this haunting documentary: Joni Mitchell recorded her classic album Blue in 1971. It’s sad, spare and beautiful. It will knock you on your ass if you let it. She is a genius of human confession. She sings about her disintegrating relationship with Graham Nash, the out-of-wedlock baby she gave up for adoption, and about pain and life and everything in between—she lays it all out there, bare. Once, Mitchell played it for Kris Kristofferson who listened speechless until he finally said, “Jesus Christ, Joni save something for yourself.”

Then I watched this documentary and I thought to myself, Jesus Christ, Joni never even got close to it. This movie dives into a whole new realm of some human truth, the sort of realm where only a warehouse full of rotting, melting animatronic bears could exist. Watch the documentary if you haven’t seen it yet. I felt profoundly unsettled for days.

I recently wrote to the man behind the Rock-afire Explosion (also the man behind the aforementioned warehouse) and asked him to autograph some Showbiz Pizza 45s I have. He was very happy to oblige and include some weird but sincere inscriptions:

Next – COLLECTING FAILS #1

I’m calling this my collecting fails because this is part of my ongoing sad attempt at trying to collect the stuff that people want. You know, the stuff that sells on eBay. The stuff that pro collectors collect. Stuff like Masters of the Universe, Transformers, GI Joe, and Thundercats. People can make big bucks off it and I want in on the game.

My first problem is, I couldn’t identify a Transformer or GI Joe if my life depended on it. I know nothing about these lines. I blame my age. These cartoons had the height of their popularity from 1984-1987. That was when I was between three and six years of age. I watched these cartoons but geez alright, I just liked Scooby Doo better. Okay? Okay?

So those smaller figures in the picture are not GI Joes, but instead Visionaries. It’s actually another collectible line from 1987, except the holograms are missing. Dang, why’d that kid have to peel the hologram stickers off the chests for his notebook?

My second problem is, I eagerly hand over two or three bucks a piece for these things thinking I’ve scored some rare figure that I can sell for twenty bucks online, only to realize no one wants Mantenna with his eyeballs scraped off. Or that Sectaurs bug with half a wing ripped off.

COLLECTING FAILS #2

Hey look, it’s a G1 Transformer! G1 is the nerd-speak for “this Transformer is worth a hundred dollars.” Except this is one is what an eBayer might refer to as “as-is” condition, which brings down the price drastically. Like to two dollars.

By the way, my favorite and/or saddest moment as a collector was the time at a toy show with three bucks left burning in my pocket, I was like, “hey how much is that robot dinosaur thing?” and the dude was like “that’s Grimlock, Dinobot Commander complete and in mint condition. It’s two hundred dollars.”

Also, hey look, it’s a Voltron figure. Those things are worth big dollars. Until I realized it’s a freaking POWER RANGER toy. God, I suck at collecting.

There’s also a broken Go-Bot toy in there. I’m not gonna lie. Broken or not, that thing is awesome.

Paid: $1-3 each
Value: Maybe $10 for all if I’m lucky

Next: Video Game Stuff!

Alright, now we’re back in my comfort zone. I got that table top Galaxy Twinvader game for $9. I rarely pay that much for anything at a yard sale. Five bucks is my price limit for stuff. But I didn’t have a vintage table top game yet, so I couldn’t leave it behind.

I scored the Atari 2600 games and Mario Goomba toy for a quarter each. I paid a dollar for the How To Win At Video Games guide. I love it because it only features arcade machines. The copyright is 1982. In the back they devote about a half a page to home video game systems, but at the time they were still thought secondary to the true versions in the arcades. There’s no screenshots or photographs of the games, and instead all the screens and diagrams are beautifully hand-drawn just like on the cover.

Paid: $10.50 for all
Value: $30-40

Next – Turtle Stuff!

Now we’re talking. Ninja Turtle crap is my favorite. I paid a quarter for each of these guys. Any idea what those hockey-stick wielding figures are? I have no idea. All I know is I now own Genghis Frog in hockey-playing form. Then I’ve got some Turtle survival gear with that Turtlecom and compass. Doomsday preppers can stockpile all the bottled water and canned meat products that they need. I have a compass that will lead me to the Ninja Turtles and a proprietary device for communicating with April.

Paid: $1 for all
Value: Priceless when the apocalypse comes

Finally, look: The Surfing Pizza sticker exists!

Whoa! The people at Build A Sign hooked me up with some Surfing Pizza stickers, and I’m giving them away. I want to send you one FOR FREE. This thing is soon to be collectible when I’m famous. You know, when I finish my book and it gets published. Or when the Hoarders people call me up to feature me on their show. Whichever comes first. The price is free but the value is more like a million future dollars. Future dollars is a very real currency.

So email me at surfingpizza@gmail.com and I’ll hook you up!

This weekend at a yard sale, I came across a massive vintage pogs collection. And by massive I mean a four-pound red binder packed with sheets containing over five hundred pogs. And by four pounds, I mean it’s not like I weighed it on the scale, but this thing was hefty. And by all this I mean I’m going to rule the playground so hard with this totally sick 1990s pogs collection.

For many of us, pogs hit a nostalgia sweet spot. They were collectible cardboard caps with different pictures. They were also a game, but our interest in the game itself was often secondary, if existent at all. We collected the pogs to have. To brag about. To carry around in our pencil cases and plaid mini-bookbags. They were sold everywhere—in toy stores, comic book stores, in pharmacies, and in giant loose tubs at the craft store. Pogs even had their own stores sprout up, places in malls like “Pog City.” What started out as a Hawaiian game involving simple milkcaps mutated into a crazed fad and turned innocent children into frothing-at-the-mouth fiends for pogs.

Fad is almost too simplistic a word to describe what pogs were. Slap bracelets and starter jackets were fads. Tamagotchi pets and Furby toys were fads. Pogs were a currency in the dark underbelly of the playground circuit. Like everything fun, they were banned in many schools, as school administrators and the media proclaimed them a form of gambling. A New York Times article at the time reporting on the school bannings, described it as a “raucous recess game” that were causing fights on blacktops across the nation.

Raucous. Hardcore. You would cut a kid over a holographic poison black widow pog.

So what the heck was it? Pogs was a game where you threw a chunk of metal at pieces of cardboard to flip them over. You got to keep the caps you flipped over. That’s all it was. It was kind of like playing jacks, only it was the 1990s and instead of jacks, it was cardboard caps with pictures of trippy yin-yang symbols. We went nuts for them. No—we went batshit insane for them. We went batshit insane for jacks.

Instead of a rubber ball, you used a slammer, which was a heavier version of a pog made of rubber, plastic, or metal. Slammers could be as colorful and collectible as the milkcaps. A slammer shaped like a ninja star was among the most notorious types, quickly confiscated in schools as deadly weapons.

Slammers were a special sort of pride. Go ask any twenty-five to thirty year old to describe the slammer they used to have and their face will light up. While pogs were often dirt cheap, ranging in price from ten cents to a fifty cents a piece, slammers were more expensive, so kids generally only had one or two. My slammer had a cartoon caricature of OJ Simpson’s mugshot. My mother hated it and thought it was inappropriate, which made me like it even more. This is how kids rebelled in the 90s.

I wasn’t even a kid by the mid-1990s. I was in the eighth grade when pogs happened—but not even middle-schoolers could resist the charms of small cardboard game pieces with floating yin-yang symbols and flying eight balls. Or maybe it was just me. And apparently I still cannot resist their charms, because I knew I was going to buy that four-pound binder the moment I laid eyes on it.

The lady was asking five bucks, which at first I thought was exorbitantly overpriced because I am the kind of sneering person who wants to buy this massive totally sick 1990s pog collection for a dollar and no more. But of course, there was no way I was going to leave it behind, so five dollars it was.

First off, before we even see a single pog, just look at the decorated binder. This kid was proud of their pog collection. Real proud. It’s a capsule of pure joy. The stickers and labels scream with sincerity and enthusiasm. If any of us could muster just a shred of this kid’s enthusiasm for anything in our lives, we could accomplish mindblowing things. We could probably cure cancer in like five minutes with happiness. We could save every endangered animal and even the ones that are already extinct. And we could probably eat as much bread as we wanted and never get fat. That’s how amazing this book is.

I have to assume it’s a girl’s collection from the choices of duckling and panda stickers, as well as the trading cards in the back of binder majorly being comprised of Saved By The Bell: The New Class and 90210 cards. But make no mistake: her pogs came first, and she had a totally kick-ass collection that must have put everyone else to shame.

As you can see, every inch of this binder was decorated. The kid went all out with stickers. Inside are special pog-protecting sheets, all the pogs carefully arranged by characters and themes. This whole thing is my new secret weapon. Anytime I’m feeling down and sad, all I have to do is flip through this book of awesomeness and grooviness.

Now let’s check out some of the pogs. You can also click on the pictures to see them larger.

Pogs often featured characters from popular TV shows and movies, as you can see here.

Of course Disney got in on the pog game:

Other series of pogs included eightballs and the number eight. It was some weird misguidedly mystical stuff, which we just ate up because we were children of the ’90s and we were always trying to expand our minds through Magic Eye Picture books and Ouija boards.

Then there was a “poison variety” which usually featured dark, occultish imagery like skulls and grim reapers. Summer of ’67 gone nightmarishly wrong. Something like that.

Then there were the types that were just oh so very poggy—little microcosms of the early 1990s itself.

Here is my favorite sheet in the entire book:

Pogs ruled. For about a year or two. We accumulated a few hundred a piece, won a few, and maybe even stole a few. And then we put them away, deep into the depths of closets and never spoke of them again. That’s how today’s kids are gonna feel about those Silly Bands bracelets, or how kids in the past felt about their pet rock collection. It’s a rite of passage, and pogs were ours.

Check out The Surfing Pizza Facebook page, where I’ve posted pictures of all five hundred pogs. And while you’re over there, why don’t you make it official and “like” the page?

The other day I went to the doctor and found out I have a leaky heart valve. Don’t worry Mom, it’s not going to kill me. It’s a benign condition. The worst thing that happens after being diagnosed with a leaky heart valve is the freaking out that you have a leaky heart valve. You obsess and convince yourself that you can feel the leaking. And then you think, great, you’d be one of those otherwise-healthy people who suddenly drops dead after riding Epcot’s Mission:Space or after running a twenty-six mile marathon due to some vague “heart condition.”

And then you tell the doctor, “I rode on Mission:Space when I was there on my honeymoon in September, and I didn’t die. So that’s how I know my heart is fine. Right? Right?”

The doctor just laughs warmly and noncommittally and says he likes that ride with “that runaway train.” Then he sends you off to a dimly-lit room with someone named Donna where you will undress and be slathered with goo and be forcefully prodded with a magical heart-listening wand.

But first he asks, “what’s that runaway train called?”

“Thunder Mountain,” you say weakly.

My backwards bleeding heart is called mitral valve prolapse, and it actually explains why I’m so crazy. The uneven rushes of blood to the brain and nervous system causes anxiety and hair-trigger reactions. Which is me. So I’m a little neurotic. In fact, it’s one of my better qualities. People love neurotics. Every book and movie and album is always made by some neurotic with deeply-buried insecurity issues. Neuroticism sells as well as sex and Coca-Cola.

In other news, I’ve decided my new hobby is Legos. I have no idea if I’m doing it wrong by pluralizing Legos or if it’s only the singular Lego, which makes it sound like a cold-hearted and faceless empiric entity. But on a whim, I decided to buy an Alien Conquest UFO kit the other day after browsing the toy aisle at Target. I expected my wife to grimace when I came home and proudly announced my new idea for my next hobby, but instead she was excited. Apparently, they’re very therapeutic to crazy people.

“They’re a good focused activity for people with anxiety disorders,” she said in her therapist voice.

A-ha. See? It’s all connected.

So I feel like I’m eight years old or something, proudly declaring my new hobby, my next new thing. In fact the last time I played with Legos I was probably eight, and I was a very volatile eight-year-old. I blew through hobbies from dinosaurs to Shrinky-Dinks to looking at things under my microscope kit—things like food crumbs and grass blades and other important science stuff. Then there was the rock phase. Not rock-n-roll; actual rocks. Good rocks. Shiny and smooth ones.

As I grew up my hobbies became narrower, stubborn and set in their ways. Do adults even have hobbies? Well, the weird ones do—and it’s always the weird ones. When I think of adult hobbies, I think of stamp collecting, model glue, and train sets. And then I think of beards and suspenders. I don’t want to think about that anymore.

Maybe “interests” is a better word. Interests is that word we’re always using to sell ourselves to others—to new acquaintances, friends, potential significant others. My interests are music, collecting toys, writing, reading, football, and exercising. There. I think I perfected that just enough to make me seem well-rounded, somewhat quirky, and intelligent. I think a lot people would buy that package. Especially one that is as good-looking as myself. My wife bought it.

Of course, what these interests actually mean is I will dump hundreds of dollars on stereo equipment, fill our living room with a few hundred ratty old records, fill our basement with random figures and toys, and fill our bedroom with dozens of books stacked in haphazard piles. As for football, I will not only watch our game on Sundays, but all of the other games, too. Hours and hours, all day, every Sunday, for the next sixth months. Furthermore, I will read all the news stories talking about the games and follow fan forums of opposing teams and speak at dinner about how stupid other fans are. I will do my writing, but not nearly as much as I should because I will be too busy procrastinating and browsing stereo stuff online and still thinking about those stupid fans. Exercise? I was only saying that. I don’t really like it. At all.

Maybe “obsessions” is the best word. Like anyone, I have my obsessions. But really what I’m into is just eating pizza and watching movies and sleeping in bed. And that’s the key to finding love. You find someone you can do these mundane things with, without screaming at each other. If you find someone who likes the same pizza toppings, can sit through the same movies, and doesn’t kick and punch you in their sleep, that’s it. And if they do kick and punch, you can find a way to laugh about it the morning.

For the record, screaming at each other is perfectly normal in certain situations such as road trips, board games, and camping. However I’ve found it’s best if you never go camping. Ever.

I’ve promised my wife Legos will not become a new obsession. I will not browse the Lego fan forums or research rare kits on eBay. However, I’ve also promised I would watch that subtitled World War I French romance with her. Amazingly, every word in that description is somehow worse than the last.

Nope, I promise, it will just stay a hobby, the connecting together of perfectly-symmetrical plastic little bricks, shiny and smooth. And besides, my hobbies are fleeting and my patience is hair-trigger thin, and next week I shall tell you about something else.

Dinosaurs is one of those television shows that I remember absolutely nothing about, and yet I’m absolutely certain I love it. Sometimes love is like that. In fact, love is always like that.

Dinosaurs ran for about one or two seasons. Wait—I just looked that up. The show actually existed for four seasons from 1991-1994. I’m rustier than I think. Come to think of it, I can’t even remember the characters’ names. But I’m serious. I really LOVE this show. My original Nintendo sat in the back of the closet for fifteen years, but that didn’t mean I ever stopped loving it. I think it’s time to dig Dinosaurs out of the memory closet.

The show was a collaboration between Walt Disney Studios and Jim Henson Productions. The show centered on the Sinclair family, a family of dinosaurs in the Pangaea era. They were Earl Sinclair, the father; Fran Sinclair, the mother; Robbie Sinclair, the son; Charlene Sinclair, the daughter; Junior Sinclair, the baby; and the grandma dinosaur who wore a bonnet. The grandma dinosaur probably had an official name, but do you really want to call her anything other than “the grandma dinosaur?” I think not.

The show aired on ABC on Friday nights during the “dream team” block of programming that was TGIF. Like everything in the 1990s, the show was a bit deranged and often dealt with very serious subjects such as environmentalism, endangered species, women’s rights, sexual harassment, and corporate crime. Then in the series finale, the writers decided to kill all the beloved characters in a nuclear winter apocalypse. TV Guide even printed a warning that the final episode might disturb viewers. I’m not kidding. Go look up the series finale. The last three minutes can be easily found on YouTube. It’s depressing. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s the reason why I can’t remember anything about the show. I probably watched that ending as a kid and was so upset I just blocked out the whole thing. The whole thing.

Still, I need to watch this series again. I’ve sort of been waiting for Netflix Instant to add it. Hello, Netflix Instant? You never have anything good. Instead I’m forced to watch your oddball documentaries about Dolly Parton stalkers and stage parents. These documentaries are like crack to me. They’re Netflix’s secret weapon to keeping customers.

You know what? I’m so certain I’ll love Dinosaurs that when it comes on Instant, I will watch every episode. And not like that deal where I leave it in my queue for eternity after struggling to sit through the first episode. Like Street Sharks. One episode down and thirty-nine to go. Oh god. So many. It’s more likely I’ll finish reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and I can’t even get through the first paragraph of that.

“Well, Prince, Genoa and Lucca are now no more than private estates of the Bonaparte family. No, I warn you, that if you do not tell me we are at war, if you again allow yourself to palliate all the infamies and atrocities of this”

NOPE. Can’t get through it.

My whole point is THAT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN WITH DINOSAURS. I AM GOING TO WATCH THE SHIT OUT OF DINOSAURS.

Here’s what got me thinking about Dinosaurs in the first place—I recently found a Dinosaurs lunch box.

I bought it for two bucks at a yard sale. The wife was all like “don’t buy that dirty old lunch box,” and at first, I listened. I took one last longing look at it, put it back down on the table, and walked away.

Then I realized that was crazy. I JUST PUT DOWN A FREAKING DINOSAURS LUNCH BOX. I marched right back over to the table and plunked down two dollars. What else I am going to do with two dollars? Save it? Donate it to starving children? Finally buy a new light bulb for the front porch light? When there’s a purple Dinosaurs lunch box, it instantly moves to the top of the priority list. Sorry, starving children.

Now, this lunch box isn’t in mint condition. It’s pretty banged and scuffed up. There’s no Thermos inside, and the lunch box itself has trouble snapping shut all the way. Whatever kid owned this lunch box before lunched hardcore with it. And of course they did. They chose the coolest lunch box to exist in 1991. Choosing a lunch box at the beginning of the school year was the most important decision a kid could make, but it was also one fraught with danger. You’d better not pick something lame or else you’d be hiding the telltale plastered sticker of secret shame all year. Not that this ever happened to me.

A side thought—these days all kids’ lunchboxes are made with soft insulating material to keep the lunches cool. Kids today will never know the putrid smell of room-temperature sandwiches and Kool-Aid that wafted out of the plastic box when you unsnapped the plastic latch. That’s right, a plastic latch, you kids and your fancy zippers.

So I salute you, kid who chose the Dinosaurs lunchbox in 1991. You’re most likely in your late-twenties or early thirties now, and you would probably think the fact that someone just bought your old lunchbox and wrote a thousand words about it on Internet is kind of weird. Or maybe you’re the cool kind of person who would appreciate a tribute to an old lunchbox, and that’s why you’re reading this right now. Right on.

It’s getting warm outside, which means it’s flea market and yard sale season again. So it’s time to do another installment of flea market finds.

First up is that Bombs Away handheld LCD game by Tiger Electronics, released in 1998. Except pardon me, it’s a high-resolution dot-matrix graphics game, not LCD. Only in the 1990s would the words dot-matrix mean something technologically impressive. The packaging also brags of “digitized 2-channel duophonic” sound. 8-bit fake stereo, people. Only in the 1990s. To think, I only paid two dollars for this amazing artifact.

Tiger was a very prolific toy company in the 1980s and 90s. They unleashed hundreds of these evil handheld games onto unsuspecting elderly relatives to buy for children who really wanted a Game Boy. Still, I have a lot of nostalgia for these games. Whenever I see kids at the grocery store or waiting in line somewhere, they’re always fixated on their little 3D-screened Nintendo DS consoles. Tiger games were our equivalent of that. Only we weren’t having fun playing them. We were actually living the worst moment of our lives. LCD games were frustrating, repetitious, button-mashing madness. We would have never played them while blankly following behind our parents in the grocery store. You know why? Because the grocery store was better. The grocery store was awesome. It had carts to ride on like scooters, freezer frost to trace pictures in, magazines to look through, and candy bars to beg for. I don’t know what is wrong with kids today.

Now here is an example of true old-school Ninja Turtles goodness, which I scored for two dollars. I love the design and shape, the round belly, the rounded-nubs for feet and hands. Unlike kids today who have soft plush Turtles to cuddle with, we had these hard, styrofoam-and-shredded-paper-filled Turtles. I’m not kidding. Shredded-paper is the first filling listed on the tag. And this was actually a licensed toy.

These guys are hard to find in nice condition because they were made with the cheapest-possible materials. It’s like they couldn’t afford even an extra half-inch of fabric for the bandanna, which for every single one of these dolls, just barely fits around the head. Each one of the stitches looks ready to pop and vomit shredded paper and polystyrene balls everywhere, but trust me, it seemed that way twenty years ago, too.

Nintendo games! For $2.50 a piece, I got Roger Rabbit and Dick Tracy in the boxes with all the original pieces inside. These games are infamously bad. In fact, of all the games I played as a kid, most of which are a blur, I still remember the regret I felt one Saturday morning after choosing to rent the Roger Rabbit game at Russ’ Video. I can’t even talk about it. The answer to “Can You Solve The Mystery” is no. I can’t even figure out how to get past the first level.

It’s interesting that I found these games together, because they’re pretty similar in gameplay as the detective going around collecting clues. Both games have parts where you drive around on a map to get to buildings, where the game then becomes a side-scroller. Also, am I the only who used to think Bob Hoskins and Warren Beatty were the same person? And if they weren’t the same person, they should have been?

These are squirt-toys made for Hardee’s. There are actually two sets of these, and the original food squirters came out in 1990. But these are the rad neon versions that came out in 1993. This is the complete set which I picked out for a quarter a piece. The french fries with sunglasses is obviously the best, but I have a soft spot for the hot dog.

These are a really great example of when fast food premiums used to be awesome. I read an article recently about children’s declining interest in Happy Meal and other fast food toys. There were a number of possible reasons given, including prices of the meals, the economy, kids’ interests in technological gadgets, and something about healthy choices. Blah blah blah. The reason is because the toys suck now. Plastic bag hand-puppets would be more fun than the unimaginative toys kids get today. Also, the separating of boy and girl toys now at McDonald’s is appalling. McDonald’s used to just turn kids into fat little butter beans, but now it socializes them into narrow gender roles, too.

And what’s up with the milkshakes these days at McDonald’s? They got this bargain-basement Maury Povich makeover, and now they come in a plastic cup with weird-tasting whipped cream and a cherry.

Here are some other loose things I picked up for a dollar a piece. First there’s a Ninja Turtle figure, one that transforms between the human form and mutated form of Rocksteady. It’s one of my favorite finds. Then on the right is a Masters of the Universe figure, Mekaneck. I’m convinced I’m the one who brings vintage MOTU figures home to die. I always find these figures so fragile and so deteriorated on the inside. He’s about three or four more handlings from a leg falling off.

Here are a few more randoms that were between fifty cents and a dollar a piece. I picked up another piece for my Pez collection — this guy is known amongst Pez collectiors as the “fat-earred bunny” or the “FEB.” Oh Pez weirdos and their funny language. Then there’s the Mario Ball, which I thought was a 1990s Madball-type ball, but it’s actually a 2000s-era Wendy’s fast food toy. No matter, it’s still awesome. Finally I found a dinosaur. “You love a good dinosaur,” was the wife’s response, which is true. I do love a good dinosaur, and this one is perfectly good.

So that’s one weekend for me so far. Total spending: Thirteen bucks.

You’re speeding down the highway at seventy miles per hour and a big fat hairy spider appears on your lap—and you’re not kidding—it is really hairy. It is about the size of a nickel, but when you tell the story later, it will be the size of quarter or possibly a half-dollar.

It’s a wolf spider with grey hairs that sprout profusely from each leg, all eight of them. He also has eight eyes arranged in three rows, but you are grateful you can’t actually see that. The abdomen is round and engorged. Engorged, by the way, is one of the grossest-sounding words in the English language, followed by ointment and moist. And gorgonzola. Although you have nothing against the cheese.

Just moments before, it had all been so different, a peaceful Sunday afternoon drive. You were singing along with the radio, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, by the Beach Boys. You should never attempt to sing with the high part, and in fact you should probably never attempt to sing. This is probably what caused the spider to appear in the first place, this primal screeching noise. He was probably taking a peaceful Sunday afternoon nap, snuggled in the upholstery of your car seat, when that howling awoke him and caused him to flee in fear.

Also the word upholstery. Yuck.

And so he appears, skittering across your lap nimbly. Forget coins. This thing is the size of your fist. And this is what to do when you’re speeding down the highway at seventy miles per hour and a big fat hairy spider appears on your lap:

First, do not slam on your brakes. It will only cause the driver in the car behind you to use profanity in the name of a) various holy figures, b) animals, c) your mother, and d) all of the above.

Second, do not count on your wife, sitting in the passenger seat, to save you. Instead, her response to your pleading “kill it, please find it and kill it!” will be screaming followed by a short round of hyperventilating. In other words, you are totally on your own.

Third, remember you are still driving.

The worst part will not be the actual spider crawling on your lap. The worst part is when he disappears after your wife temporarily pulls herself together long enough to limply toss her bottled water at your lap. It lands with a soft ping.

“Did you get him?” you ask, trying not to sound scared—because you’re not afraid of some dumb spider—although you do notice your voice comes out at least an octave higher.

“I don’t think so,” she says.

Great. Now he’s mad, yo. Now he’s somewhere. Planning his next move. His big fat hairy move.

“Can you look for him?”

“I can’t. I’m crying,” your wife says.

The next exit off the highway is a half-mile away, roughly six hundred miles away in angry-missing-spider-in-your-car length.

Your wife is now completely paralyzed in fear. You’ll have to find a way to break through to her. Try begging.

“CAN YOU PLEASE HELP ME. PLEASE.”

Her hand shaking, she meekly reaches over to grab the water bottle.

THERE HE IS.

Screaming, she blindly begins whacking at you and the spider. But he won’t die. He is like the big boss at the end of the video game.

“Is it dead?” you ask.

“I don’t know. I don’t see him.”

You were wrong. The worst part is not when the spider is missing. It’s when he goes missing the second time. You start to feel crawling sensations everywhere. Your leg. Your neck. Your head. And even though your wife is swearing the spider is on her now, don’t worry, she is only experiencing sympathy crawling sensations.

The rest stop exit is just ahead. Your plan is to pull off, safely and calmly come to a complete stop, proceed to unbuckle, open the door, and run around in circles until all the bad spider mojo is gone.

WAIT. THERE IT IS AGAIN! This time the wife raises the water bottle with the weight of fate her hands. She’s got an eye on him time. The target is secure.

WHACK.

“Got him,” she says with triumph. She’s done it. She’s beaten the game. The princess is in the castle and Elvis has left the building.

Finally, you will be wrong again. The worst part will be driving with a shriveled-up, dead hairy spider on your lap, as your wife withdraws back into frozen fear, refusing to pick it up with a napkin.

This week the Mega Millions lottery held the largest jackpot ever at $640 million dollars. Earlier in the week, the news reporters began salivating outside of random convenience stores interviewing the bewildered, bug-eyed clerks inside. People began clamoring for the tickets, lining up in stores, and fantasizing on their Facebook feeds. Like everyone, I also bought a ticket, and now a day later, like everyone, I also did not win the lottery.

If I didn’t keep my dollar, at least I kept my dignity. I stood in the line begrudgingly, and I did not smile at anyone the entire time. So there. Take that. I did not wink or nudge or speak to anyone, even if the rest of them were acting as though they were waiting in line at the circus. I approached the clerk solemnly and asked for a Mega Millions ticket with my best “it’s cancer” voice. I didn’t fantasize about what I would do if I won that much money. I didn’t choose any special numbers. I didn’t rub a troll doll’s hair or wear my lucky shirt or turn my underwear inside out. Besides, everyone knows that stuff only works on football games.

I was perfectly fine being one of those killjoys who spouts off the likely statistics of getting struck by lightning or having a television fall on your head and crush your skull. Yes, what I’m saying is you’re more likely to die like a cartoon character than win the lottery. And yet there I was in line. I had my reasons.

I knew I would have won if I didn’t buy a ticket. I realize statistically this makes no sense. But I’m not talking about statistics. Statistics are neutral and scientific. I’m talking about the universe. The universe is whimsical and mocking. She is a lover who dares to asks what might have been.

So I buy a ticket to find out, even if I know I’ll end up just like all the other schmucks holding a losing ticket in my hand. The Universe is cruel, but I’m going to love her anyhow. Ms. Mathematics is an ice queen and Religion is too much of a prude. The Universe is mysterious. I guess that’s why I like her.

A few months ago, the wife and I traveled to Atlantic City to gamble and carouse and forget about the Baltimore Ravens’ heartbreaking and horrible playoff loss. Forget what I said about wearing lucky shirts. There can be no hope when your kicker misses a thirty-yard field goal that might have tied the game and taken us to the Superbowl.

But as with love and the lottery, it’s also best not to question what might have been in football.

Maybe I’d win some money at the slots. Maybe I’d win so much money, I’d be able to spread the cash out on the bed back at the hotel and dive into it like Scrooge McDuck. On the drive up the coast, we listened to the radio and Sinatra’s Luck be a Lady came on. We turned it up and knew it was a sign. A sign from the universe. Yes, maybe.

The second sign came after we got there and walked out onto the beach. The beach always seems naked in the winter without towels and umbrellas and small lumps of sand and kicked-over castles. This always makes me a little sad, but the beach is never shy or ashamed about this nakedness. The beach shrugs at everything—old men in Speedos, too-tight bikinis, scurrilous seagulls—everything. I guess that’s why I like her.

But for now it was empty except for footprints. And then right there, I saw a dollar bill lying in the sand. The beach gave me a dollar! In Atlantic City! This felt like more than a sign. This was a promise.

We walked along, huddling and bracing ourselves in our coats. The cold January sun kissed the beach and the seashells at our feet, and we collected a few shells as the water pulled back to reveal them. Each one sparkled and promised to be a diamond, but they each became dull and sedimentary when cupped in our hands. Waste of time. These shells were all dumb. Everyone knows all the good ones are always taken before you get there.

Except wait, there was something. Something whole apart from the scattered and broken ones. I stepped closer to look. It was a baby crab shell that still had the eyes. But the rest of him was gone, all the guts picked clean and limbs snatched away, leaving only an empty shell with gutted eyes.

Sometimes I think it’s only Mother Nature that’s the cruel one. She makes the Universe seem perfectly fair.

In the end, we didn’t hit any jackpots in Atlantic City that weekend. It should have all added up: Sinatra. The beach dollar. The dead baby crab. One plus one plus one. But sometimes that adds up to zero. Mathematically it can’t be true, but then again, in the universe, anything goes. I guess that’s why I like her.

Today is the day your life changed profoundly because today is the day you found out Kite Brownies exist. Kite Brownies are quite possibly the most exciting innovation in snack cake production in the last twenty-five years. Even the cashier at the grocery store took pause at the box of Kite Brownies travelling down the conveyor belt. And grocery store cashiers are the most jaded, grizzled people anywhere. They’ve seen it all. Nothing fazes those people, not even those weird cans of Vienna sausages.

But Kite Brownies, now that’s something. It looks like Little Debbie has been feverishly baking again, this time combining the delicious flavor of kites and brownies into a new snack cake. Little Debbie, you’re my hero.

“You know she doesn’t really exist, right?” the wife says.

And what, is she going to tell me that Betty Crocker and Mrs. Freshley also aren’t real?

“I won’t believe it,” I say.

Snack cakes can be scary stuff. There’s the brittle, salty frosting and the machine-perfect stripes. There’s those freaky cream-injected holes on the bottoms, like the baked-over scars of puncture wounds. Thousands of snack cakes prodded and injected by machines, two hundred and fifty Twinkies made every second. Not baked, but rather, created. Snack cakes symbolize all that is unnatural in food processing. They aren’t made with things like butter, milk and eggs. They’re made with chemicals swirling in industrial vats, transformed into plastery, sugary goo and pumped into cake molds.

Seriously, that shit freaks me out. I find Little Debbie’s beaming face and pigtails comforting. I find her old-timey straw hat reassuring. I want to believe she’s somewhere in a kitchen baking up a storm. So I’m choosing to believe Little Debbie is real, because the alternative is far more unsettling. Which is also how I feel about God and heaven. And now that I’ve connected those dots between my feelings on God and snack cakes, I have reached the end of my self-examination and existential thought. I’m done. I’ve written every word there is.

But then I saw that Kite Brownies exist. I must continue writing and exploring.

A lush spring has begun to unfold. Everything has come out early—the flowers, the bees, the neighborhood children who ride their bikes perpetually in our court, circling like a pool of piranhas. And now the brownie embodiment of spring itself has hit the stores. They soar freely beyond the grasp of winter’s frigid claws in a sudden burst of freedom and warmth and new beginning. George Harrison tried when he wrote, “here comes the sun,” but he didn’t get close.

They’re like the free-spirited cousin of Cosmic Brownies without the acid edge. They’re the idealistic child of the stuffy, old-and-in-the-way fudge brownies with nuts. Bob Dylan tried when he wrote, “the order is rapidly fading,” but he didn’t get close.

Kite Brownies get it.

The Kite Brownies are small but hefty. They’re individually-wrapped and pack two hundred calories per kite. They also contain nine grams of fat, sixteen grams of sugar, one hundred and twenty milligrams of sodium, and absolutely zero nutritional value. Unless you count that less-than-one gram of fiber, which I’m totally counting. Hey, there’s even like four percent iron in here. This thing is basically turning into a vegetable before my very eyes.

The green frosting and yellow striping is inviting and attractive, but has no flavor on its own. Still, it provides a satisfying waxy texture. The shape is perfect for biting into. The long narrowed corner of the kite is nice to bite off. If you’re an “ears-first” biter, you know what I mean. The brownie itself is really fudgey, which is impressive since “cocoa” is the last ingredient listed on the box. The way they make things taste chocolate without actually using chocolate is one of science’s most enduring mysteries.

Here’s a side profile of the brownie:

I want to know more about that darker stripe in the middle of the Kite Brownie, but like God and Little Debbie, some things aren’t meant for us to know.

I like the Kite Brownies. I’m a big fan of seasonal snack cakes. When I was a kid, the season changes ruled my life, when it mattered how close to was to summer or Christmas. Before I was tall enough to see the calendar on the wall, I watched the seasons change by the products offered at the grocery store. Christmas-tree-shaped cakes meant it was almost here and the baseball-shaped ones meant school was almost out.

Snack cakes, remember, remember. Back when you were a kid and didn’t mind the chemical aftertaste. Back before boutique cupcakes were all the rage. When you didn’t have such discerning tastes. When all cake was inherently good. And yet it’s still true: all cake is good. Open your heart and let the Kite Brownies in.

The Shout ‘N Shoot was a voice-activated water gun released by CAP Toys in 1994. Back then, it was a water gun from the future, a hands-free, multi-directional electronic water gun. Except now we’re in the future, and there’s nothing like it. The Shout ‘N Shoot was ahead of its time, but it was also an idea precisely of its time: the 1990s.

I can’t believe I found one the other day, unopened and never used at the thrift store. When I saw the box sitting there on the shelf, my heart skipped a beat. But then I assumed the box probably contained a couple loose, damp-smelling hoses and broken headset pieces scattered in the box. Nothing to get excited about. Instead, upon inspection, I saw the toy had never even been opened. The neon green hoses were still twisty-tied up and wrapped in plastic. It was amazing. No, it was more than that. It was beautiful.

And it was only four bucks. There’s totally a collector’s market for vintage Super Soakers and other old water guns. I knew I could make a couple bucks selling it, but I wanted it for the personal collection. Never mind that I already have a small arsenal of vintage Super Soakers. I’m stockpiling. For the coolest backyard cookout ever. EVER. Where friends will come over and be handed a vintage water gun upon entering. Never mind that I fantasize about having fancy parties all the time even though I’m really a curmudgeonly reclusive person who writes in the basement.

Or I’d get it “for the kids.” That’s my new license to buy anything I want with zero guilt. For the kids I don’t have yet. But the wife and I are starting to think about having a baby. We’re in that stage where we say it out loud and introduce it into conversations to make it seem like something normal and realistic, instead of something absolutely terrifying and abstract. Or at least, that’s the stage I’m in. The wife is in the stage where she sighs at babies and small children and tiny socks. I’m still in a stage where everything that comes out of my mouth has utter disregard for basic sentence structure and ends with a question mark.

“Yeah maybe? We’re kind of in that starting stage? Where like maybe we’re starting to beginning to planning for something involving something like that? You know?”

Never mind that annoying drumming sound in my brain that just keeps saying TINY HUMAN BEING THAT YOU WILL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR FOREVER. TINY HUMAN BEING THAT YOU WILL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR FOREVER.

AND THEN IT WILL TURN INTO A BIG HUMAN BEING.

So yeah I’m going to be over there in the corner rocking to myself, fantasizing about that cookout party. I’ll have the Shout ‘N Shoot gear firing on demand from my head, and I’ll also be blasting away with a Super Soaker in each fist. It’s going to be so bad ass. FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!

The history of water guns is a surprisingly menacing one. Up until the 1980s, water guns were simple squeeze pump plastic toys. Then a NASA engineer, a man named Lonnie Johnson, came along with an idea for a new type of water gun that used a battery-operated electronic motor. These electronic motorized water guns called Entertech, and released by LJN in 1986. At one point, the Entertech guns were even tied-in with Rambo due to the popularity of the film. Kids went bonkers for them.

The only problem was that they resembled actual uzis and machine guns. There were at least three incidences where people, including a child, were mistakenly shot by the police for posing a threat. Then there were criminals robbing stores and banks with them. Realistic-looking water guns were subsequently banned, mandating that all toy guns have neon and bright color schemes.

Then Johnson came up with another idea for a water gun: one that involved a pressurized air system. The first Super Soaker, the SS-50, was born in 1990, and was able to shoot water in a powerful continuous jet stream. By the summer of 1992, Super Soakers were the most popular and fastest-selling toys. They sold in the millions. Stores couldn’t keep them on the shelves.

From there Super Soakers only grew in popularity and size. Some could blast water up to fifty feet and could hold the amount of water equivalent to a small aquarium. The tanks were so large, kids could barely carry them. They required over the shoulder slings and belts to manage the weight of the water, leaving welts on the skin. These were no squirt gun fights. Shit was like ‘Nam.

Then the Soakers grew in controversy. As children begged and clamored for them, parents began to panic—because parents always freak out over insanely-popular toys.

“The Super Soaker craze may be the latest sign of a jaded society’s need for ever-increasing thrills: more drug use, more transvestites on Donahue, more fire power in our water guns,” one newspaper in Boston breathlessly wrote.

There was even an incident involving a Super Soaker filled with bleach and a drive-by bleaching of innocent bystanders who had their eyeballs burned out. This caused many cities to outright ban the toys.

And yet somehow, the water gun—and a generation of violence-craving fiends—survived. There are still some great water guns out there, including electronic ones that can shoot multiple bursts per second. Check out these Waterguns at ToySplash.

Even so, today’s Super Soakers are emasculated in comparison, with smaller water reservoirs, less-powerful air-pressure pumps, and far less range. This has opened up a market for vintage Soakers. The “Holy Grail” of Super Soakers, the beastly “Monster XL” from 1999, regularly goes on eBay in the hundred or two range.

There were dozens of imitators with different gimmicks. I even reviewed one of these knockoffs way back in 2009 when I found an unopened Super Stinker water gun.

I guess it’s just my luck—or fate—to find and review unopened Super Soaker knockoffs. Which brings us back to the Shout ‘N Shoot:

It was definitely one of the more inventive and cool knockoffs. A voice-activated, hands-free water gun. It even won some awards because it enabled kids with certain disabilities to play with water guns, too. Like I said, a water gun of the future. But just like flying cars and food in capsule form, perhaps it was just too futuristic for us Luddites.

The Shout ‘N Shoot had two parts: the water reservoir that attached to your belt, and a head set, connected by a neon green tube running between them. The headset had a small cannon that could adjust and shoot in multiple directions which triggered upon voice/sound into the headset’s mic. The thing required six AA batteries.

The commercials made the thing look super rad, showing kids perched in trees guerrilla-style and soaking their victims with gallons of unrelenting water. In real life, the Shout ‘N Shoot’s range probably wasn’t quite as impressive, and you probably looked like a chump running around with water-squirting head gear on.

Like most toys, the Shout ‘N Shoot was probably cooler in lore than it was on the playground. Yet there was always some story about that one kid who had one somewhere. Perhaps that kid even went down in the local history books of modern water warfare on some hot summer day. Like every kid, I’d wanted one too, but suspected it probably sucked. The mic probably didn’t pick up anything unless you screamed your throat raw, and the water probably only spit out in a feeble little stream.

As tempted as I am to rip open the packaging and settle the decades-old mystery once and for all, I think it’s better to let it remain a playground legend. And anyway, it hardly seems worth it to rip open plastic that has remained intact for the last eighteen years for something like that.

But maybe one day, if I ever throw that cookout party. Or maybe one day, for the kids.