The Surfing Pizza Remembers Dinosaurs, The TV Show

Posted on April 20, 2012 | 12 Comments

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.

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Posted in Things I Like

First Weekend of Flea Market Finds

Posted on April 12, 2012 | 13 Comments

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.

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You’re Speeding Down the Highway at Seventy Miles Per Hour and a Big Fat Hairy Spider Appears…

Posted on April 10, 2012 | 8 Comments

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.

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Posted in Things I Do

I Also Did Not Win The Lottery

Posted on March 31, 2012 | 3 Comments

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.

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Posted in Things I Do, Things I Write

The Day You Found Out Kite Brownies Exist

Posted on March 22, 2012 | 9 Comments

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.

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Posted in Things I Eat

Stockpiling

Posted on March 6, 2012 | 14 Comments

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.

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Posted in Things I Like

Our Puppets, Ourselves

Posted on February 24, 2012 | 7 Comments

The assignment was puppets. Oh god. I read over the ditto sheet again, my palms moist and my stomach thick with a feeling of dread. It was seventh grade, a Spanish-class assignment. Making puppets was supposed to be a fun way for students to learn Spanish by interacting and conversing with them, one for each hand. A way to learn the language beyond boring flash cards and chalk shrieking against the board.

Again, I read the directions, making sure I wasn’t just missing something. No, it really said puppets, a boy and girl. Dress them in Spanish-styled clothing. Give them names. Use household items and a little creativity! Get artistic!

Oh god.

Ms. Albert was just the kind of Spanish teacher that would do this. Lady was crazy—or as the kids today would say, “cray.” And Ms. Albert was seriously cray. She was a small woman with a long, shrew-like nose, darting brown eyes, and a flowing mass of curly hair that billowed and detoured severely off her head. She spoke as though the tip of her tongue was always touching her teeth. Vamos! Vamos!

Lady ran on caffeine and the fumes of seventh-grader insecurities. Lady could smell blood in the water. She didn’t teach a love of the Spanish language. She taught a fear of it.

Sitting in her class was like a pack of nervous gazelle grazing in the open plains, sensing the lion was somewhere watching. Waiting.

Choosing.

We’d nervously eye the floor, the walls, the ceiling, the clock, the door, anything but eye contact. You never make eye contact. Ms. Albert waltzed slowly around the room, beguiled.

Then, the poor kid, the poor bastard. Like a lion exploding into the gazelle, she ordered him to the front of the class. Always the front. Lady was sick. He was singled out from the pack. He was alone now.

“Que estudia Usted en la escuela?” Ms. Albert spit out rapid-fire, waiting for an appropriate response in Spanish.

“I’m, uhh—estoy…”

“Espanol, por favor!” she shouted, slapping a ruler she used as a pointing stick down on the desk in front of her. That was some straight-up old-school Catholic nun shit. Sisters of Mercy had it in their textbook on the first page.

We couldn’t watch. It was too much. The poor kid, the poor bastard was still stuttering, trying to fight the English words out of his head and fumbling for a Spanish word—any Spanish word. But the English words were most natural thing to his brain, and they slipped to the tongue like small pats of butter, sliding all over the place. We watched the floor, the walls, the ceiling, the clock, the door. The clock again.

The stuttering only made Ms. Albert stronger and more powerful. She zipped across the room, waving her hands wildly, demonstrating the words through a bizarre sort of ritualistic dance, or flailing, or seizure. Or something.

And it was always something. Last week, it had been singing. We had to stand in front of the class and sing La Bamba. We were allowed to sing it in groups, but each kid had to do a solo. Ms. Albert didn’t believe in teaching the Spanish language. She believed in forever burning it into our minds through complete and utter humiliation.

Now this. We had to make puppets. I felt so sick I couldn’t even enjoy lunch, which was the period right after Spanish class. Not even the tater tots. I wanted to puke. But that could have just been the gristly nuggets.

I’ve never had an artistic flair. Not even a little bit. My old art class projects? They aren’t being stored nostalgically right now somewhere in my parents’ basement. Nope. Even my parents threw that stuff out.

Most kids have something to scrape by on, a modicum of natural drawing ability. But I painted pictures like I had a fundamental misunderstanding of the color wheel. I was one of those kids that enjoyed fervently mixing all the paints together just to see it turn that gloppy shade of brownish-black. That never gets old.

How the hell was I going to make puppets?

Suddenly, the solution came to me. It came effortlessly and simply, like solutions always do, as though it had always been there and perhaps always was. I’d assign it to my mother.

But I’d have to get my game straight. She had to understand what the school was asking of me. She had to understand the stakes here. She knew how crazy Ms. Albert was. She had heard my horror stories. These couldn’t just be any old puppets—surely not puppets I would be capable of making on my own. I needed some fancy stuff going on. I’m talking felt-fancy, people. Oh yeah, I went there. I needed good puppets. Mom, WE needed good puppets.

I handed my mother the ditto with a grim look on my face as though I had just heard the “it’s cancer” diagnosis.

“What does this mean, “household items?” she asked, reading the words with disdain.

I shrugged.

“What kinds of things does this woman think we just have lying around the house to make puppets?”

“Ms. Albert’s crazy, Mom.”

“Doesn’t she know parents have jobs, too? And I have to make dinner.”

I shook my head resignedly.

My mother looked over the ditto again, furrowed and frowning. She cracked open the tab on a can of Diet Coke and it fizzed and she took a sip. She sat up in her seat and placed the paper down squarely between us. At that moment, I noticed a change in her, a light bulb going off. Like solutions always do.

“I’ve got an idea,” she said.

Maybe I should be ashamed to admit I’d pawned off more than a fair share of school assignments on my mother. But in this I learned one of life’s most valuable lessons: delegating. It was never stuff like writing or math—I could do those well enough on my own. But she wasn’t above helping me make up some of the research for science fair projects just to get them done. And she made one hell of a hamburger pillow that I had to sew for the Home Economics class.

However, the puppets were perhaps my mother’s finest moment, one in which she truly rose to the occasion of tortured middle-school assignments.

Oh god.

My mother always fancied herself somewhat of utilitarian sewer. She knew she was no Martha Stewart, but she could patch up a hole in our jeans, damn it. She went rooting in the closets for her old sewing kit, a few pieces of yarn, and some tattered old t-shirts.

She started with two pairs of my father’s rolled up socks. The balled socks would be the heads. For hair, she used the yarn, snipping it and sewing a strand at a time, one by one, onto the bald sock head. The boy puppet had short curly brown yarn for hair. For the girl puppet, my mother showed a bit of flair and chose a thick lemony-blonde yarn.

Next, she found old t-shirts, and cut out little clumps to fashion into clothes for the puppets. A shirt and pants for the boy, a dress for the girl. Around the waists, she tied on little yarn belts.

She sewed and sewed. Through her evening shows, through her morning coffee, through the weekend. She fretted over them and fixed their outfits, until the dress looked just so and the hair sat just way. She decided to name them after her parents, my grandparents, honoring them in namesake through sock puppets. Frank and Margaret. Francisco and Margarita in Spanish.

And then, when she was finished, and because it was my project, she gave them to me for the finishing touches. I grabbed a Sharpie marker and crudely drew a simple stick-figure face on each puppet. Done. Or as the kids today would say, “donezo.”

My mother looked at me skeptically. “I just did all that work, and that’s all you’re going to do?”

I shrugged.

Then we looked at them together, these puppets. These things. These creations. Francisco and Margarita. My stomach began to feel thick with dread again. I had been excited about the puppets, but suddenly it began to feel all so completely wrong. The lumpish Dad-sock heads, the raggy little bodies hanging down off the socks by a few desperately-sewn threads, their kindergarten-level Sharpie faces. The individually-sewn strands of yarn hair.

Especially the yarn hair.

The next morning was their grand unveiling in class. I threw them in the dark recesses of my backpack, where they limply looked out at me, gently awkward and slightly bizarre, in the way that handmade things always are. They were so sincere. Too sincere.

That was the day that I learned sincerity has no place in middle school.

Other kids took out normal puppets made from brown bags and popsicle sticks and construction paper—maybe one or two kids got fancy with some pom pom balls and pipe cleaners—but nothing more than that. What had I been thinking? How had I let it go this far?

I deserved it. I deserved it.

Ms. Albert waltzed over to my desk, taking a special interest in my puppets. She picked Francisco up, his floppy body hanging off the sock ball.

“Que lindo,” she said, her eyes flashing.

Lady could smell blood. To the front of the room I was about to go, to talk in Spanish to my hands that were wearing my father’s socks. My face burned bright red. I looked away. You never make eye contact.

But then Ms. Albert actually smiled at me—a tight-lipped, empathetic smile. Lady actually took pity on me. She placed Francisco gently back on my desk, careful not to muss a single yarn curl. With that she waltzed over to another student to claim as her victim.

The poor kid, the poor bastard.

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