Posting this early this week since I’ll be on the road for a couple days starting tomorrow.  I’ll make sure I have my Flashback Friday ready to go before shoving off in the AM, and Saturday’s squirrel post will probably be delayed until the afternoon.  Just a heads up for those who have come to rely on my weekly garbage features here!

And thanks to everyone who made my send up to Kool Aid Man one of my most liked and commented on posts ever on my blog!!!  As usual, I wasn’t sure the result was all that hot, but who am I to judge what people like?  Special thanks as well to Merby for the reblog, Juliette for the pingback, and Experienced Tutors, jrosenberry, & jennsmidlifecrisis for the awards they bestowed on me this week! (Hope I didn’t miss anyone!)

Oh yeah? He’s carrying around a pitcher of his bodily fluids. Shouldn’t that be creepy?

If you were a kid at any point in the past 60 years, you have undoubtedly quenched your thirst with the one and only sugary fruit drink Kool Aid.  And even if you were raised by possums and somehow missed out on the Kool Aid experience, you’re certainly familiar with the official spokespitcher for the product, the one and only Kool Aid Man.

Here’s an old commercial for Kool Aid from the greatest decade of all time.  This ad seriously couldn’t scream “1980′s” more if it was being rapped to by Ronald Reagan…

Kool Aid intended to market itself as an innocent looking kids drink that was so cheap and easy to make that no mom in the world could resist buying it for their children.  Those plans all went to hell when they hired Kool Aid Man to be their mascot.  This dude has some serious issues that would have most mothers today clutching for the minivan keys hanging around their neck.

The black guy is Samuel L. Jackson saying, “The door’s over there, muthafucka!!”

Kool Aid Man came to this planet from a world without doors, which is the only possible explanation for why he can only make an entrance by crashing through a wall.  Kool Aid Man broke through plaster, wood fences, brick and even cement walls in commercials throughout the decades.  Amazingly, he never managed to maim or kill any of the innocent children who were just thirsty for some Kool Aid with his wall shrapnel, or if he did, Kool Aid’s insurance company worked quickly behind the scenes to pay off the affected parties and hush everything up.

Ich bin ein tropical punch! Oh ja!

Not only did Kool Aid Man have violent tendencies when it came time to make an entrance, but the lazy fuck wouldn’t even clean up the mess he made by choosing to create his own door.  Not one time did Kool Aid Man apologize for the giant pitcher sized hole he made in anyone’s wall or offer to pay for the damages.  Graffiti artists get busted for vandalism all the time, but at least they leave the object they violated looking pretty.  Kool Aid Man creates a public eyesore and probably hasn’t spent a day in jail for it… not that there’s a jail out there that could hold his badass self…

Off to Elba with you…

What makes Kool Aid Man an even worse influence on kids is the obvious fact that he’s been taking a whole heap of steroids to attain his wall-breaking powers.  I tested out his favorite pastime by filling a glass pitcher full of Kool Aid, taking it out behind my house and throwing it as hard as I could against the wall.  My house isn’t the sturdiest out there, but when this trial was all said and done, my wall stood there laughing at the red mess dripping down its side onto the shards of glass below.  Sorry Kool Aid Man, but it just isn’t natural for a glass object to be able to break through walls.  What gives?

Kool Aid and bacon…. hmmm.

So the next time you pour yourself a nice refreshing glass of Kool Aid, think about what you are supporting by drinking it…. a freakishly oversized pitcher who carries around his own facilities, who offers his own secretions to thirsty children, who has absolutely no respect for the property nor the safety of others, who thinks that a little “Oh yeah!” makes him look cute enough to forgive the collateral damage of his visit, and who has the absolute most creepiest shit-eating grin that literally could be wiped off his face.  He’s either a product of Three Mile Island or maybe a reject from Misfits of Science… but regardless of his origin, he is the one and only Kool Aid Man.  And should you ever find yourself in a situation where a nearby child calls out for Kool Aid, there’s only one sure way to stay safe from a surprise Kool Aid Man attack…. stand in front of the door.  It’s the last place he’d think to enter…

The ladies must fall at this guy’s feet…

How suburban….

Question: Do you buy a house to live on the inside of it, or the outside?

I’ll give you a few minutes to think about it…

Here’s a little music while you ponder…

Some people’s yards look better than than their living rooms.  Lawn care products sell like crazy at my store in the Spring and Summer.  What is it with the obsession over how “pretty” our yards look?

Go to hell, Scott! This guy’s lawn is as green as a golf course, and you have him a nervous wreck!

OK, I stay inside waaaay more than most normal people do.  About the only times I’m ever even standing in my yard are when I’m refilling the corncob feeder or mowing the damn grass.  Whoever invented the lawnmower didn’t have a huge fucking yard, that’s for sure.  Unfortunately, this cozy little house I was able to find has an expansive backyard which the city Nazis say I must keep trimmed to an unreasonable short length or else face stiff penalties.  The one good thing about how hot and dry it was last summer was that it turned my lawn into this:

Burn baby burn!

I had to break out the lawnmower just twice the entire summer.  And I didn’t give a care in the world that my lawn was brown and yellow.  Served it right for growing so tall when it rained all Spring.  Die grass, die!!!

You think I give a shit if grubs are feasting on my lawn’s roots, or if dandelions are sprouting up everywhere?

Dandelions are purty!

And then there are those who obsessively water their lawns… even in the middle of a drought.  Yeah, that makes sense.  We’re all thirsty, and you’re giving the yellow grass a damn two hour drink!  You misguided people are the Dusty Bottoms of suburbia!!!

I’m sure by now you all must think I’m that crummy neighbor who is infesting your lawn with my flora vermin and dragging your property values into the toilet with my outdoors eyesore.  Well, I have something growing in my yard that you can sit on….

Maybe this will remove that stick you have in your nether regions…

Here’s to those out there like me whose only item of lawn care equipment is a mower.  We aren’t lazyass good for nothing neighbors, we just have different priorities than you do.  If you want to spend the entire weekend poisoning four leaf clovers and spreading animal feces on your lawn, that’s fine and dandy with me!  It’s a relatively free country.  But don’t expect me to waste hours of my time and dollars in my wallet beautifying my outdoors when I choose to live inside instead.  The squirrels don’t care about the grass, so why should I?

Help!!! I think I’m being gnawed on by a Venus flytrap!!!

Normally, my Saturday Squirrel posts feature real pictures I took of real squirrels who happen to inhabit my neighborhood.  There are times, though, that call for breaking the rules… and this is one of those times.  I stumbled across the cute little guy you see above while perusing the interwebs yesterday.  That is the absolute cutest squirrel figurine I have ever seen, and there is no way I could resist featuring it for this week’s Saturday Squirrel!

The official name of this piece is “Squirrel, Crystal Copper”, and is a part of the Swarovski Crystal collection.  It is a recent issue that can be found for sale on the internet at anywhere from $70 to $100.  As much as I am completely smitten with this piece, that is just a tad out of my price range….

Maybe not MBRS’s though…

I have to admit, when I pass through some store with a crystal figurine collection, I do eye the case for a potential squirrel hidden somewhere amongst the hundreds of unicorns, dolphins, and kittycats.  While I have never found one, even if I did, it could not possibly touch Copper up there!  I love how the facets of the crystal give the illusion that he is smiling…. that can’t be seen from any of the overhead angles of the squirrel I found…

Well, there you go.  We’ll get back to the squirrels in the wild next week.  Until then, make sure to get another eyeful of this sparkly beauty!  If you weren’t already smiling this morning, you most certainly have to be now!

Enjoy your weekend!

Now showing on Channel 33…. scrambled porn!!!

Oh my… for the second straight week, I’ve started out my Flashback Friday post with some archaic looking device that anyone born since Ronnie Reagan left office has most likely never seen before, and is probably frightened of.  Relax, kiddies… back in my day, this was one of several old relics that we used to tune in cable TV.  Yes, we had cable TV back in the 80′s… and a number of those stations are still with us today and at some point in the recent past have likely celebrated 30th anniversaries.

Back when MTV’s acronym actually had some meaning!

I scoured and scoured the vast openness of Google to find an old cable channel lineup from the 1980′s, but came up empty… which is too bad, because it would have pointed to one of the first oddities a youngster might notice about that old cable box.  Why does it only seem to have 37 channels?  Heck, these days, most basic cable packages come with around 100 channels.  Well, even though cable TV was first getting a strong foothold on the country back in the early 80′s, there still weren’t very many channels of national prominence.  When you factor in that about 10 of the spots on that box were reserved for local network and local access (not to mention three set aside for FAA access, which my 9 year old mind couldn’t comprehend at the time), there were only about 20-25 actual cable channels back then.

The only possible explanation for how Mother Angelica became one of the biggest cable TV stars of the 80′s.

That simple, but clunky box sat atop many televisions three decades ago.  Here’s an even older version of a cable box that was the kind I saw the first time I laid eyes on this curiosity that gave us more than 7 channels…

Is that AM or FM?

Notice that neither of these boxes had an eyehole to make them compatible with a remote control.  So even if you did have the luxury of changing channels on your TV without leaving the couch, you still had to wriggle your ass out of the seat to switch from The Nashville Network to The Christian Broadcasting Network.  That was one of the small prices to pay to have access to music videos any time, any day instead of just on Friday nights, or to get the weather whenever you wanted it from trusted names like Dale Dockus and John Hope.

John Hope practically invented hurricanes!

Today, cable TV is a vast wasteland of hundreds of channels with a ridiculous amount of content.  What’s truly sad about the state of CATV is the way many classic niche channels have allowed their very identities to be stripped so that now there is very little actual variety on anymore, and the programs offered are essentially just heavily edited “reality shows” involving almost any theme you can imagine.  MTV is the most infamous example of this devolution, but so many other stations have followed suit.  Does anyone out there really believe that TLC stands for The Learning Channel in these days of pageants and Honey Boo Boo?  What could possibly be Artsy and Entertainmentlike about a bunch of hillbillies or bounty hunters?  Since when are modern dramas considered to be American Movie Classics?

Just try and hock this, Pawn Stars!

The early days of cable bring back so many memories for me… and I’ll be sure to share some more of those in detail in future Flashback Friday posts.  But until then, I need to get up and press a new button after the umpteenth night of some silly reality marathon.  I can only pray my shiny 21st century cable box can become a time machine, and allow me to stumble across some semblance of coaxial sanity.  This looks like a job for the greatest secret agent in the world…..

Oh, crumbs!

Oooh! The prize is a naked picture of Wilma!

There are breakfast cereals out there marketed to adults, and there are breakfast cereals out there marketed to kids.  How can you tell which is which?  Well, there are two ways.  First, if the picture on the box looks like a bowl full of shredded cardboard, it’s probably cereal for adults.  Second, if one or more cartoon characters are present, it’s probably a cereal for kids.

Grandma probably wouldn’t be able to chew this with her wooden teeth…

There were so many different ad campaigns going on in the 80′s surrounding kids cereals, I could do a year’s worth of Tuesday posts about them.  For my first TV Commercial Tuesday tribute to a balanced breakfast, I chose one of the best remembered and longest lasting gags in the sugar coated oats industry… that for Fruity and Cocoa Pebbles.

Post introduced these two cereals back in 1971, and they were revolutionary in being one of the first products ever designed around a licensed character.  If you lived through the 80′s, you know that just about every cartoon character had their own cereal (see above) in a pathetic attempt to cash in on their popularity.  While they’ve all come and gone, Fred Flintstone’s Pebbles are still on store shelves forty years later…

Unfortunately, Bam-Bam is now more demographically pleasing than an old caveman…

One of the hallmarks of the commercials for Pebbles cereal is Barney trying to get at Fred’s bowl of Pebbles with every bad cartoon disguise gag in the book.  These ads usually began with Barney saying, “Watch while I trick Fred!” and ended with Barney being found out and Fred exclaiming, “Barney!!!  MY Pebbles!!!”  These ads were at their best in the 80′s, and here’s a brief montage of them….

As cute and funny as this campaign was, at least to us kids, it did beg a few questions… like why couldn’t Barney just go out and buy his own box of Pebbles?  I think the answer to this is obvious… quick, do you remember what Barney’s occupation was in The Flintstones?

Corruptor of youth?

Yeah… I can’t come up with it either.  It wasn’t exactly brought up in the original series, and that leads me to believe Barney was slumming the unemployment line… probably making Betty walk the street for cig money.  This likely explains why Barney kept trying to pull out all the stops to steal food from his gainfully employed best friend.

But Fred, being the fine, upstanding WASP he was back in the 60′s was having none of that shit.  Fred undoubtedly voted for Goldwater, and he wasn’t about to be doling out handouts to some lowlife bum who didn’t want to earn his keep… even if it was his BFF.  This is the only possible explanation for why Fred is such a stingy-ass about his precious cereal, and has a conniption fit if anyone so much as chews on a single blob of his fruityliciousness.

Plus, he was also likely tripping on an overdose of these, as most kids were back in the 80′s.

So there you have it… a peek into the dynamics that brought us one of breakfast’s most notorious confrontations.  Join us next week, as we delve into the perplexing logic the evil kids were using to starve that silly rabbit to death…

Cruelty to animals is apparently fine in the cartoon world…

So I couldn’t resist the notion of trying to work out a design featuring the sleeping squirrel picture I showed off this past Saturday.  I thought the squirrel should be shown dreaming, and inspirationally so.  I dug up another picture I took that same day of another squirrel who seemed to be happily eying something… threw in the acorn I used to decorate my Blog of the Year award a few months ago…. and voila!  The result is above…. and  dusted out the cobwebs from my little online store I’ve been neglecting and threw the design on a bunch of stuff over there.

This is the second time I’ve turned one of my pictures into a design for my store, following the infamous Who Me? Squirrel last Fall….

So, whaddaya think?

So I got home from work this morning, made me my usual big “breakfast” full of non-breakfast food, and sat down to check out my blogs I follow.  Now that I actually use WordPress’ Reader, I no longer need to suffer the embarrassment of responding to a post on one of my favorite blogs that’s a week old.  Anyway, the posts this morning seemed like a broken record (Uncle ES, what’s a record???)…. Mother’s Day, Mother’s Day, Mother’s Day, Mother’s Day, and um…. something related to Mother’s Day.

So I guess I’d be a complete douchebag if I didn’t create my own post for the occasion…

Someone’s going to get a whoopin’!!!

After all, I have a mother too.  In fact, she even reads my blog on occasion since, unlike my sisters, I don’t have a Facebook account for her to stalk me on.  This blog is her only way of finding out little personal details about my life that I would otherwise not reveal to her…. like the fact that I’m really a squirrel.  She’s so proud of what I do on this blog, that she even likes to show it off to others so they can bask in my jenius.  Just a few weeks ago at the bowling alley, she brought up my blog on her phone and was showing it to my aunt (her sister) and was particularly wanting to show off what an amazing comic strip artist I was.  Naturally, the comic I had up that week that was shown to my aunt and everyone else in the family sitting at our table was this one.  That’s my Mom!  Not afraid in the least to show off to the rest of her family that her son is a huge prevert.  I have no idea what my aunt thought of it since I immediately went up to bowl.  I don’t even think it was my turn….

Prevert? Me???

I embarrass way too easily, so I’m not one of those who buy into the whole bit that parents are entitled to embarrass their kids.  It wasn’t the usual stuff that did it though… the rolling junkheaps we had to ride around in, acting goofy, dressing up like hoosiers.  Heck, everyone in our town did that.  Now fancy stuff…. that I particularly disliked.  So when Mom thought it would be cute to dress all of us kids up for Easter one year when I was 8, and then make damn sure the pictures would still survive thirty years later… that still makes me want to bury my head in a trash can.  That horrific day is still one of only two times I’ve ever worn a noose around my neck tie, and it was absolutely awful.  I really hope you enjoyed that mother….

Someone is going to die for this…

My Mom did teach me a lot of things, though.  The most important being to never, ever, EVER have children of my own.  I really don’t know how she raised five of us on little money while both her and my Dad worked odd shifts, and I’m sure there were plenty of times she wanted to go all Susan Smith on me and my sisters, but she didn’t.  She also passed along her warped sense of humor to me, though I have still never given anyone a gift packed inside of an empty Tampax box like she would entertain us with every Christmas.  She also taught me how to properly love animals through her pet dachshund Dante (who I always call Beast, because that’s what he is), who she thought was the greatest thing in the world and would fiercely protect every time it seemed like he had bitten himself a ticket to the dog pound…. but she would never touch the dog or allow it to jump up on her lap because that would be icky.

No scritches for me!?!?

So happy Mother’s Day, Mom!  Enjoy your special day, and your very own blog post… if you happen to read it.  Thanks for making me who I am, accepting me for what I became.  And since I know I’m still not too big for you to beat my ass, I’ll go ahead and say I love you too….

This is getting too mushy…

ZZZZzzzzzzz….

For most people, Saturday is the start of the weekend, and a day to get out and do things that can’t be done during the workweek.  For me, however, Friday night is the first night of my weekly grind, so I always spend all day Saturday doing what this little guy here is doing.  While the rest of his sciurine buddies are out and about frolicking around, this week’s Saturday Squirrel is enjoying a nice, peaceful rest on this tree branch in my backyard.  This pretty much sums up my Saturday ritual of sleeping the whole day away while the rest of the world more actively enjoys their free time.  While I won’t be laying myself out on any branch, I will be in the same la-la land this cute little snoozer is in within the next two hours, and the sun will be down before I awaken.  Sweet dreams, little buddy!

Have a wonderful Saturday….. but please, keep the noise down so me and my pal here can get some shuteye!