June 24, 2008
Review - Wildly Cherry M&Ms
I’ll make this brief. If you’ve got a hankering for Ex Lax dipped in Nyquil, the new(ish) Wildly Cherry M&Ms are for you.
It’s kind of sad when you look at the words “Limited Edition” and you can’t wait for the limit to pass. But so it is for the Wildly Cherry M&Ms, the bane of chocolate existence. Your first clue that these little treats will be garbage is the M&M character on the front of the bag, trying to hang himself with a cherry stem.
by Zach at 10:35 pm
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When I woke up today, I ran through the list of things I needed to do today:
If there’s one thing that’s gotten a little tired lately, it’s the institution of the Bejeweled clone. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting multiple Bejeweled clones - which, isn’t always a bad thing, as long as they improve or change the formula (see my 
What’s cherry and chocolate and has zero calories and tastes like a pile of the Kool Aid Man’s crap?
A more cinemaworthy story couldn’t have written itself; the classic equations of good versus evil, family versus business and…well, blonde versus brunette. I had to wait for this movie to come out on video, as it never saw a full nationwide release. And honestly, I don’t know if my wife would have tolerated driving 50 miles to watch a documentary about two men’s battle for a video game record.
Let’s get the math out of the way first.
…or ‘Scissors’ is the new ‘Blue’
I imagine that the development for Space Giraffe at Llamasoft went something like this -
Very seldom do my only major complaints with a video game have to do with a color-choice. So goes my review of Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords - I enjoyed this game on so many levels, and if I had to pick at it, I could criticize it…but still, it’d be tough.
I may seem to declare a new king of burgers every other week, but The Sandwich Factory’s Big Daddy Burger might just be a solid contender for the crown (extreme-eating burgers aside). Hiding off of a main road in Ventura, California in a neighborhood full of warehouses and dead-end roads packed with wholesalers and automotive supply garages, The Sandwich Factory serves nearly the entire area’s lunchtime needs with great food and a bar atmosphere - without the bar. Of course, this is no coincidence…Sandwich Factory is owned by the local bar-n-sports-grill chain 
Someone at Coca-cola headquarters must have flipped his lid when his teenage daughter came home with a case of Vitamin Water after Coke’s flirtings with Vitamin Water’s parent company Glaceau [edit: Coca-Cola bought Glaceau the day after I wrote this]. The new son-of-Coke promises to replenish your vitamins as it quenches your thirst; if the 90’s were about the “Diet” identity, and the early 00’s were about the “Zero” identity, I can’t imagine any other direction for sodas than the “Plus” angle - a carbonated beverage that not only promises no caloric footprint, but actually intends to give you (a somewhat minimal supply of) vitamins and minerals.
What I miss most about living in the San Fernando Valley are the hamburger joints. I mean, yeah, my family and place I grew up too, I guess. It seemed like every corner had a little burger place on it - the kind of dirt-shoveling food counter that got shut down once every couple of months for health code violations. They’d usually serve both American food and Mexican food - and do an incredible amount of business. Ever since moving north to the Ventura County area, I’ve seen a lot fewer of these great American joints…but from time to time, one gets my hamburger gland tingling.
Here’s the problem with doughnuts: no matter where I get them from, they generally taste the same. The reason for that isn’t the ingredients - I could care less whether one place uses a certain flour over another, or if one place uses freshly-made over wholesale icing. Seriously. I’m not a quality snob - it’s a doughnut, not a tuna steak. But what I find discouraging is that aside from one or two special doughnuts at any given location, you’re going to find the same thing at Store A as you do at Store B. And by the time you get to Store G, you’re sick of the same old maple bar.
I have memories dating back to the early 90’s of seeing the Greco’s New York Pizzeria commercials. I distinctly remember them saying that “the pizza wars are over and Greco’s New York Pizzeria wins!” I remember seeing an old dude (presumably Greco) holding the biggest box of pizza ever. All throughout my teenage years, I wanted to try Greco’s, but before the proliferation of information on the internet, I was always too lazy to look it up and order it.
Oh Big Fat, I’ve missed you.
Ever since I was young, I was into fish & chips. Before I began my torrid love affair with burritos and hamburgers, I was a little dude that would fish & chip it wherever I could…even if it was in an ill-advised, total non-seafood place like 
It’s important that you know that I held out as long as possible to buy a cellphone. I didn’t want one for the longest time. Not interested. Hate the phone (no, seriously - who knew?), and if I’m not at home, I usually don’t want you calling me. All I had heard were people saying “I hate my carrier, it always cuts off, the calls sound like hell, my bill’s too high…you should get a cellphone.” Coworkers always dubbed me “the last person in America to not have a cellphone.” Yeah, I know…brutal. North AND South America.
From 
I do. Recently, I found and fell in love with the “Naked Lunch” series of plates from the 
I intended on making this review short and sweet, but I had so many rotten things to say about this game that I knew the review couldn’t be a two-liner (as I initially imagined it). My first intuition when writing this game up was to say something simple like “In the end, I had wished that Diddy Kong Racing would have just become what I had initially feared it would be - a carbon copy of Mario Kart DS.”
I’ve had this question on deck for (let’s call it) fifteen years. So, if you know me, you know that I’m an avid doughnut fan. There’s nothing more loving than the wholesome taste of hot pastry in your gut. Nothing warms up a rainy day like doughnuts. Nothing soothes a nervous soul like doughnuts. Nothing mends a broken heart like doughnuts. Nothing finishes a sentence like “doughnuts.”
I just recently started a new job, and decided that it was time to get gung-ho about making my lunch again. While at my previous job, I started out strong and made my lunch (almost) everyday for two years. But once I moved and transfered stores, I got lazy, living only 2 miles from work, and less than a block away from fast food. So, starting a whole new job and not knowing the delicious fast food corners of my new employment’s neighborhood was a good thing.
Certain things stand out to me in films - things that, to me, make a film or break a film. In Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, the element that most stood out to me was the difference in the terms “future” and “futuristic.” Although the film takes place in 2027, one could easily forget that it is the future from the lack of overt technological gadgetry. I can’t help but think that the stragglers that came to the theater late (or people that went to the bathroom and missed the first five minutes) would not have been off-put to find out later that the movie was a film about the future. Everything is understated. Sure, there are little GPS units in the cars that give away a future, but for the most part, there are no real sci-fi elements that tend to bog-down the believability of a film’s future view. 