Quick life alert: this weekend we will be performing our first official stint as foster parents with our new agency by performing two simaltaneous respites for two foster families. ("Respite" basically is time you are accorded by the agency whereby the kids are not your responsibility. With our first agency, we elected to not use much of ours.) This means we will have SIX kids sleeping under the roof from Friday to Sunday. The nice thing is that all of them have been here before, they know the rules, and all are generally well-behaved and do not cause much grief for us. As bad as the weather looks for this weekend (to paraphrase the Eurythmics, "Here Comes the Rain Again....and Again...and Again") hopefully we can still have some fun. We are going to a wedding on Saturday which should be entertaining. We are unable to get to a wedding last weekend which both Kel and I deeply regret. So, maybe by Monday I'll have a play by play of all the shenanigans. I also want to give my take on the Brett Favre situation at some point, so to whet your appetite, here's a haiku I found on the web about ol' #4.
Throw It Up For Grabs
Hope That My Guys Bring It Down
Go to Hall of Fame
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Wall Of Ice Ahead... ! or ?
[NOTE: I also posted this at my normal home for musical musings, which is right here.]
So the hot music news of the weekend revolves around a leaked mp3 that may or may not be an advance for a new Radiohead extended play release that may or may not be available for public consumption on Monday. They're speculating on Stereogum, they're pontificating on Pitchfork. Heck, the buzz on this has been so large it woke up grandpa at the old folk's home and he dutifully told his floormates at Rolling Stone. Whether or not there is an actual Radiohead release at the end of this Rainbow (pun intended) is not the point of this blog, at least not the main part of it. Instead, let's take a step back and dissect exactly what the discovery and overanalysis of a single mp3 floating in cyberspace means.
Firstly, I think any doubts that Thom Yorke and co. are NOT the band of this generation can be quelled. Let's assume all this research is somewhat accurate and this track is indeed a cyberteaser for a Radiohead EP. Honestly, when was the last time a large audience got excited about a freaking EP? (My guesstimate would be around 1992-3 when Nine Inch Nails released their Broken Ep... people were jonesing hard for some new NIN and The Downward Spiral would not see release until 1994. I recall it doing really well, and you still see it here and there when used CD shopping.) EPs are habitually the redheaded stepchild of the music industry -- sometimes they fulfilled an artists's record contract, sometimes they are halfhearted attempts to keep a band's buzz, most of the time they were too much money for too little content. You name it and it's been used to fill up an EP: live tracks, band interviews, dub versions, remixes, versions of songs in a different language, etc etc. If Radiohead can get the masses excitedly expecting an EP, clearly they're a tail wagging a pretty damn big dog. Nickelback, purely in terms of raw sales, are like 10 times bigger than Radiohead... but if they tried a stunt like this, it would get 1/10th the publicity, if that. Love them or hate them, Radiohead get people excited about music.
Now, let's do some thinking here. Obviously, this leaked track has been the music news of the weekend, or the month (well, not counting Les Paul's death, but we'll say good news to qualify.) Radiohead don't really seem to be the type of guys who crave constant press attention, and that's probably why stunts like these (if this is, indeed a stunt) are right down their alley. U2 as an example wouldn't use this as a promotional tactic; they'd have a press conference involving robots and firecrackers and maybe Bono wearing a spacesuit. Now think about your run-of-the-mill aspiring band who have hope, dreams and a MySpace page to boot. Like a kajillion bands in this day and age, let's imagine this hypothetical band's two biggest influences are U2 and Radiohead, and so they want to try to appeal to the listeners of those two heavy hitters. Chances are they don't have the budget or the cache to do a U2-style press conference. But leaking a track anonymously and putting "Radiohead" in the ASCII code? Just like
Anyone Can Play Guitar, anyone can reasonably do that. Based on this weekend's wild speculation, you can get thousands, if not millions, of people to check out your song if it sounds enough like Thom Yorke and co.
Now if you're dismissing this out of hand and claiming that no band would have the gumption to try to piggyback off another band's existence, there is historical precedent for such a thing. In the 70s, a struggling Canadian band named Klaatu made slightly proggy, Beatlesque '70s rock. One single newspaper article made a passing reference to the contents sounding like something The Beatles would made if they had re-united, and a Pandora's Box of hype, speculation and notable silence from the band itself ensued. Time passed, people eventually discovered Klaatu were NOT Paul, John, George or even Ringo, and they went back to obscurity. But during that time, Klaatu sold a fair amount of records, simply based on people thinking the Klaatu might or might not be the Fab Four, secretly back on good terms. Sound familiar?
Whether a band would go to such unseeming depths to get people to check out their stuff is a interesting topic to consider. (Your run-of-the-mill record company, on the other hand, would do it in a heartbeat. In fact, they're probably checking with their lawyers to find loopholes as I type this.) What do you think? Is Radiohead, by taking part in secret leakings and other tactics, simply creating a new way to sell music? Or are they opening the floodgates for lesser bands to try similar tactics to get a step ahead? (Let's not forget the flood of bands who released material from 2008 on with the "Name Your Own Price" online gimmick. I am not saying Radiohead were BY NO MEANS the first band to try that tactic, but their success with the "online tip jar" really and truly legitimised such a practice.) I guess in less than 24 hours, we may know if we hit a Wall of Ice...
{UPDATE: Monday came around and the track in question ("These Are My Twisted Words") did end up being a Radiohead song. The "Wall of Ice" EP however, was nowhere to be found. The band simply put the song up on its site for free, with another song dedicated to last surviving WWI vet Harry Parch, available for a small donation.}
So the hot music news of the weekend revolves around a leaked mp3 that may or may not be an advance for a new Radiohead extended play release that may or may not be available for public consumption on Monday. They're speculating on Stereogum, they're pontificating on Pitchfork. Heck, the buzz on this has been so large it woke up grandpa at the old folk's home and he dutifully told his floormates at Rolling Stone. Whether or not there is an actual Radiohead release at the end of this Rainbow (pun intended) is not the point of this blog, at least not the main part of it. Instead, let's take a step back and dissect exactly what the discovery and overanalysis of a single mp3 floating in cyberspace means.
Firstly, I think any doubts that Thom Yorke and co. are NOT the band of this generation can be quelled. Let's assume all this research is somewhat accurate and this track is indeed a cyberteaser for a Radiohead EP. Honestly, when was the last time a large audience got excited about a freaking EP? (My guesstimate would be around 1992-3 when Nine Inch Nails released their Broken Ep... people were jonesing hard for some new NIN and The Downward Spiral would not see release until 1994. I recall it doing really well, and you still see it here and there when used CD shopping.) EPs are habitually the redheaded stepchild of the music industry -- sometimes they fulfilled an artists's record contract, sometimes they are halfhearted attempts to keep a band's buzz, most of the time they were too much money for too little content. You name it and it's been used to fill up an EP: live tracks, band interviews, dub versions, remixes, versions of songs in a different language, etc etc. If Radiohead can get the masses excitedly expecting an EP, clearly they're a tail wagging a pretty damn big dog. Nickelback, purely in terms of raw sales, are like 10 times bigger than Radiohead... but if they tried a stunt like this, it would get 1/10th the publicity, if that. Love them or hate them, Radiohead get people excited about music.
Now, let's do some thinking here. Obviously, this leaked track has been the music news of the weekend, or the month (well, not counting Les Paul's death, but we'll say good news to qualify.) Radiohead don't really seem to be the type of guys who crave constant press attention, and that's probably why stunts like these (if this is, indeed a stunt) are right down their alley. U2 as an example wouldn't use this as a promotional tactic; they'd have a press conference involving robots and firecrackers and maybe Bono wearing a spacesuit. Now think about your run-of-the-mill aspiring band who have hope, dreams and a MySpace page to boot. Like a kajillion bands in this day and age, let's imagine this hypothetical band's two biggest influences are U2 and Radiohead, and so they want to try to appeal to the listeners of those two heavy hitters. Chances are they don't have the budget or the cache to do a U2-style press conference. But leaking a track anonymously and putting "Radiohead" in the ASCII code? Just like
Anyone Can Play Guitar, anyone can reasonably do that. Based on this weekend's wild speculation, you can get thousands, if not millions, of people to check out your song if it sounds enough like Thom Yorke and co.Now if you're dismissing this out of hand and claiming that no band would have the gumption to try to piggyback off another band's existence, there is historical precedent for such a thing. In the 70s, a struggling Canadian band named Klaatu made slightly proggy, Beatlesque '70s rock. One single newspaper article made a passing reference to the contents sounding like something The Beatles would made if they had re-united, and a Pandora's Box of hype, speculation and notable silence from the band itself ensued. Time passed, people eventually discovered Klaatu were NOT Paul, John, George or even Ringo, and they went back to obscurity. But during that time, Klaatu sold a fair amount of records, simply based on people thinking the Klaatu might or might not be the Fab Four, secretly back on good terms. Sound familiar?
Whether a band would go to such unseeming depths to get people to check out their stuff is a interesting topic to consider. (Your run-of-the-mill record company, on the other hand, would do it in a heartbeat. In fact, they're probably checking with their lawyers to find loopholes as I type this.) What do you think? Is Radiohead, by taking part in secret leakings and other tactics, simply creating a new way to sell music? Or are they opening the floodgates for lesser bands to try similar tactics to get a step ahead? (Let's not forget the flood of bands who released material from 2008 on with the "Name Your Own Price" online gimmick. I am not saying Radiohead were BY NO MEANS the first band to try that tactic, but their success with the "online tip jar" really and truly legitimised such a practice.) I guess in less than 24 hours, we may know if we hit a Wall of Ice...
{UPDATE: Monday came around and the track in question ("These Are My Twisted Words") did end up being a Radiohead song. The "Wall of Ice" EP however, was nowhere to be found. The band simply put the song up on its site for free, with another song dedicated to last surviving WWI vet Harry Parch, available for a small donation.}
Monday, August 10, 2009
What I did this weekend
So I spent the weekend pretty much wifeless. Not by any plan or any blow-up, but she went to a party in Madison Friday night, had a lot of fun and stayed up until about 7am. She then decided to go up to her hometown and hang out with her folks and her sister (who coincedently lives across the street with the parentals.) They went to movies, went out to eat, did this, that and the other thing, and now plans to come home early this Monday AM.
So what did I do? Well, Friday night after Kel left, I listened to my iTunes and transcribed my diary. (I keep track of every CD I listen to and keep a daily tally, which I call my diary. I started on notebooks and did have them typed onto my computer, but it crashed and I lost 7 years worth of stuff. So slowly but surely I am catching up.) I was going to load the van with all the front porch stuff so we can clear that out and make it into something useful, but I lost time and motivation and decided it could wait until the morning.
Come Saturday morning it was rainy and miserable. Sadly for me, with my current work schedule Saturday is the only day I can do a dump run. So I steel myself and begin loading the front porch stuff into the van while it's coming down ***sheets*** of rain. The nice thing is that after two minutes out in stuff like that, you begin to not notice it -- you reach your saturation point, as it were, and can go on. So I fill up the van fairly quickly, only getting tied up trying to wedge in a cheap wooden cabinet. (Ingenious solution: attack that bad boy with a hammer at the pressure points. Made a lot more room, too!) I drive the van to the city dump, only a mile or so away. I pay my dues, drive to the designated area and start unloading. Now I should mention the back door of our van is wonky so all of the loading and unloading I have to do from the side doors rather than just popping open the back. So I try to back the van up at an angle to the dumpster below to make less trouble for me. (The dumpsters and drive-ups are situated where the tops of the dumpsters are level with the concrete you stand in, so you can throw stuff down and ahead and as long as the dumpsters aren't teeming full, you're OK.) I back up and after a while stop, because my senses tell me I'm dangerously close to the concrete devide. I get out and I'm a good 12 feet away, which causes the fellow using the dumpster beside me to giggle to himself. (When it comes to backing up and parking, I skew HEAVILY towards safe on the safe/sorry axis.) Since I already stopped the engine, I decide to work from there, and of corse the rain just then goes from a meager splinking to a virtual downpour. I empty the van out with a quickness, and hit my work (The Pharmacy America Trusts) as it's on the way and I still haven't had breakfast. My co-workers are amused at how wet and miserable I look and I yap with my buddy and co-worker Rob while I scarf down a Yoo-Hoo and a Honey Bun. I got some money back as I was just short of being able to afford another load, and then went back to the van once the rain let up again.
It takes me a few hours to work up the enthuisam for load #2 (we have stockpiled a LOT of junk on our front porch.) But it gets done, delivered and paid for, and on the way back, I hit the local record store (yes, in Wisconsin we have a chain of stand-alone record stores, and even as the rest of the record industry collapses, they seem to be doing OK.) I see if I can afford anything and find a wrestling DVD I've actually been looking for (New Year's Revolution '06, notable as the pay-per-view where John Cena successfully defended his belt against five other people in a cage-like structure called the Elimination Chamber. Right after that, Edge invoked a "any time, any place" instant title match clause he earned the year before, picking up his first world title in fairly easy fashion.) used for only $6. I head home, watch that while doing little odds and ends around the house. After that, I putter on the compy a bit more, play waaaaay too much Bejewled Blitz (the crack cocaine of Facebook game apps) and by seven, decide I should eat something. So I hit the Subway on the south-west side of town, pick up a few subs and some energy drinks at the connected gas-n-gulp and then decide to hit Blockbuster. Now I normally go to Family Video as they seem to be more reasonably priced and usually closer (and no, I do not do Netflix, but I may one day) but I was in the neighborhood. I found two PS2 games for $7 apiece and rented the Wire season one first two discs. Having suppressed my retail jones, I headed home and watched the first few episodes and ate. I had budgeted an 11pm bedtime, but by the time I hit the sack it was 1:45 am.
So I wake up around 9:30ish and commit myself to a few solid hours of diary typing, which works out well except for all the air guitaring I have to do while listening to the Queens of the Stone Age. Then downstairs for brunch and the rest of the Wire that I rented. I spend a little time downstairs with the laundry and then head back up to compute. I send off a few emails to friends that I need to catch up with, talk to my wife and figure out where she's at. Then I make what is, in hindsight, the worst mistake I made all weekend. I went to eat out at Wendy's.
I still had a little money left over and decided to get a small burger meal, and absolutely nothing tasted good. The drink tasted soapy, the fries were cold, and the burger was grisly and bland. But I have the logic malfunction that dictates that I don't want to throw away the food I had spent good money on, and so I finished every bite, threw it away and headed home. Ever since then -- that would be 8:30ish pm, I have had what feels like the Barnum and Bailey circus performing in my stomach, and NOT doing their best show ever. I puttered around the rest of the night, feeling progressively cruddier. I do manage to make a run to the recycling area to dispose of a few trash bags of plastic stuff. I manage to get about 35 minutes of sleep in, which wouldn't bother me if I didn't have to work a 7 hour day at 7:30am (and do the truck order, which involves marching up and down the store, ensuring all the empty spaces get ordered.) Kel and I also have to meet up with our foster care liason and finish up our licensing late in the afternoon. I am awaiting that with the excitement I normally reserve for extensive dental work (NOT because I don't want to foster, but I know by then I will be flatlining and my body will basically go on strike.) But if nothing else, I wrote this blog....
Seriously, though, Wendy's? Why oh WHAT was I thinking? Wendy's is way down my fast-food depth chart, but I guess I felt I did Subway the day before, it seems like I do Taco Bell and McDonald's more out of habit and proximity, and I hadn't been there in a while. It will be several whiles before I go willingly again. It's one of those stomach sitautions where all that needs to be done is to throw up and the recovery will begin. But that sickness is doing the backstroke around your stomach lining, and refusing to get out of the proverbial pool. I normally do not advocate random violence against fast-food mascots, but I seriously want to fling that fleckled hussy Wendy around the living room by her pigtails. (And before you get a nasty misogynist vibe from me, had Ronald McDonald or the Burger King had wrecked my tum so badly, I'd be just as dementedly malicious towards them. I'm an equal opprotunity mascot mauler in my imagination.) Hopefully I can talk my store manager into giving me a 1/2 day once I do my order. Otherwise, I am going to be one grumpy zombie the rest of the day.
So what did I do? Well, Friday night after Kel left, I listened to my iTunes and transcribed my diary. (I keep track of every CD I listen to and keep a daily tally, which I call my diary. I started on notebooks and did have them typed onto my computer, but it crashed and I lost 7 years worth of stuff. So slowly but surely I am catching up.) I was going to load the van with all the front porch stuff so we can clear that out and make it into something useful, but I lost time and motivation and decided it could wait until the morning.
Come Saturday morning it was rainy and miserable. Sadly for me, with my current work schedule Saturday is the only day I can do a dump run. So I steel myself and begin loading the front porch stuff into the van while it's coming down ***sheets*** of rain. The nice thing is that after two minutes out in stuff like that, you begin to not notice it -- you reach your saturation point, as it were, and can go on. So I fill up the van fairly quickly, only getting tied up trying to wedge in a cheap wooden cabinet. (Ingenious solution: attack that bad boy with a hammer at the pressure points. Made a lot more room, too!) I drive the van to the city dump, only a mile or so away. I pay my dues, drive to the designated area and start unloading. Now I should mention the back door of our van is wonky so all of the loading and unloading I have to do from the side doors rather than just popping open the back. So I try to back the van up at an angle to the dumpster below to make less trouble for me. (The dumpsters and drive-ups are situated where the tops of the dumpsters are level with the concrete you stand in, so you can throw stuff down and ahead and as long as the dumpsters aren't teeming full, you're OK.) I back up and after a while stop, because my senses tell me I'm dangerously close to the concrete devide. I get out and I'm a good 12 feet away, which causes the fellow using the dumpster beside me to giggle to himself. (When it comes to backing up and parking, I skew HEAVILY towards safe on the safe/sorry axis.) Since I already stopped the engine, I decide to work from there, and of corse the rain just then goes from a meager splinking to a virtual downpour. I empty the van out with a quickness, and hit my work (The Pharmacy America Trusts) as it's on the way and I still haven't had breakfast. My co-workers are amused at how wet and miserable I look and I yap with my buddy and co-worker Rob while I scarf down a Yoo-Hoo and a Honey Bun. I got some money back as I was just short of being able to afford another load, and then went back to the van once the rain let up again.
It takes me a few hours to work up the enthuisam for load #2 (we have stockpiled a LOT of junk on our front porch.) But it gets done, delivered and paid for, and on the way back, I hit the local record store (yes, in Wisconsin we have a chain of stand-alone record stores, and even as the rest of the record industry collapses, they seem to be doing OK.) I see if I can afford anything and find a wrestling DVD I've actually been looking for (New Year's Revolution '06, notable as the pay-per-view where John Cena successfully defended his belt against five other people in a cage-like structure called the Elimination Chamber. Right after that, Edge invoked a "any time, any place" instant title match clause he earned the year before, picking up his first world title in fairly easy fashion.) used for only $6. I head home, watch that while doing little odds and ends around the house. After that, I putter on the compy a bit more, play waaaaay too much Bejewled Blitz (the crack cocaine of Facebook game apps) and by seven, decide I should eat something. So I hit the Subway on the south-west side of town, pick up a few subs and some energy drinks at the connected gas-n-gulp and then decide to hit Blockbuster. Now I normally go to Family Video as they seem to be more reasonably priced and usually closer (and no, I do not do Netflix, but I may one day) but I was in the neighborhood. I found two PS2 games for $7 apiece and rented the Wire season one first two discs. Having suppressed my retail jones, I headed home and watched the first few episodes and ate. I had budgeted an 11pm bedtime, but by the time I hit the sack it was 1:45 am.
So I wake up around 9:30ish and commit myself to a few solid hours of diary typing, which works out well except for all the air guitaring I have to do while listening to the Queens of the Stone Age. Then downstairs for brunch and the rest of the Wire that I rented. I spend a little time downstairs with the laundry and then head back up to compute. I send off a few emails to friends that I need to catch up with, talk to my wife and figure out where she's at. Then I make what is, in hindsight, the worst mistake I made all weekend. I went to eat out at Wendy's.
I still had a little money left over and decided to get a small burger meal, and absolutely nothing tasted good. The drink tasted soapy, the fries were cold, and the burger was grisly and bland. But I have the logic malfunction that dictates that I don't want to throw away the food I had spent good money on, and so I finished every bite, threw it away and headed home. Ever since then -- that would be 8:30ish pm, I have had what feels like the Barnum and Bailey circus performing in my stomach, and NOT doing their best show ever. I puttered around the rest of the night, feeling progressively cruddier. I do manage to make a run to the recycling area to dispose of a few trash bags of plastic stuff. I manage to get about 35 minutes of sleep in, which wouldn't bother me if I didn't have to work a 7 hour day at 7:30am (and do the truck order, which involves marching up and down the store, ensuring all the empty spaces get ordered.) Kel and I also have to meet up with our foster care liason and finish up our licensing late in the afternoon. I am awaiting that with the excitement I normally reserve for extensive dental work (NOT because I don't want to foster, but I know by then I will be flatlining and my body will basically go on strike.) But if nothing else, I wrote this blog....
Seriously, though, Wendy's? Why oh WHAT was I thinking? Wendy's is way down my fast-food depth chart, but I guess I felt I did Subway the day before, it seems like I do Taco Bell and McDonald's more out of habit and proximity, and I hadn't been there in a while. It will be several whiles before I go willingly again. It's one of those stomach sitautions where all that needs to be done is to throw up and the recovery will begin. But that sickness is doing the backstroke around your stomach lining, and refusing to get out of the proverbial pool. I normally do not advocate random violence against fast-food mascots, but I seriously want to fling that fleckled hussy Wendy around the living room by her pigtails. (And before you get a nasty misogynist vibe from me, had Ronald McDonald or the Burger King had wrecked my tum so badly, I'd be just as dementedly malicious towards them. I'm an equal opprotunity mascot mauler in my imagination.) Hopefully I can talk my store manager into giving me a 1/2 day once I do my order. Otherwise, I am going to be one grumpy zombie the rest of the day.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
IN PRAISE OF #1: GOURMET LOLLIPOPS
Believe it or not, quite a few things have happened on a personal level since I last blogged (I got a minor case of the gout, had my wing-fest, we passed our home inspection for our new foster care provider, etc.) but I will address none of them here.
Instead, I will christen the first of (maybe) many whereby I will closely examine a random person, place, thing, animal, vegetable, mineral and offer you reasons why I think it is awesome. (I may or not include musical offering, more than likely... something like that I'll probably leave to my ongoing last.fm journal log, as I'm sure me geeking out about music bores many to tears.) My first offering is a flashback of sorts, as the younger version of me enjoyed the heck out of them and I had one today for the first time in at least 5 years. It's weird how certain things can burrow in the mind, gradually buried under the constant steaming of new data and new situations. Yet, when they are again brought to the forefront, your recall becomes eerily focused. This comes to mind both from the subject at hand and from renting a CD from the library which I owned on cassette and hadn't listened to since before 1990 (Falco 3, which featured both kitsch classic "Rock Me Amadeus" and "Vienna Calling.")
Anyhow, yeah, GOURMET LOLLIPOPS. For some reason, gourmet lollipops seem to bring Door County to mind as a knee-jerk word association way. I am pretty sure they are not made in Door County and certainly not exclusive to that area (the one I bought today was at a ShopKo in Appleton, WI.) But there was a mini-tradition I'm sure that revolved around me getting gourmet lollipops when we traversed up Wisconsin's "thumb." Basically, gourmet lollipops differ greatly from the plain-jane Spangler Dum-Dum pops, the (IMO grossly overrated) Charms Blow-Pops or even the Tootsie Pops. Let us break down why the gourmet lollipop reigns atop the suckable hard candy on a stick mountain.
1) Gourmet = more expensive. You could probably get one of those Tootsie Pop/Spangler "bunches" for the same price as a single one gourmet dealie (I paid $.59 for mine today... when I was a kid I want to say they were $.49 or 3 for $1.00, something like that.) Conventional candy logic, in comparing the two options, might lead towards the quantity over quality, but only if you had never enjoyed the gourmet stylee.
2) Exotic, "adult" flavors. Even though lollipops are invariably kid-orientated, the preponderance of the big brands did not address one concern all kids shared: variety. Sure, Tootsie Pops had orange and chocolate, raspberry, grape and strawberry, and the Dum-Dums had ten or so myriad flavors including the dreaded "mystery flavor" with the question mark wrapper (which I almost always seemed to get Root Beer Barrel, my least fave.) But the gourmet had crazy, out of this world flavor offerings. I seemed to remember always wanting Strawberry Daquari and my mother always cautioning me against it ("you won't like that, dear. Trust me.") I think I would end up with either Cotton Candy or one that was very vivid blue -- blue moon, maybe? Today I enjoyed German Chocolate Cake. It was as though the makers wanted to ensure the money you spent on your candy concoction would be remembered, and so they splurged on stuff like Key Lime Pie and New York Cheesecake, knowing the Spanglers and Charms wouldn't have the cojones to follow suit.
3) More Suck For Your Buck. (Yes, that sounds bad. Deal.) For my money, gourmet lollipops were the utmost in long-term lollipop enjoyment. Now I can already hear some of you thinking about this subject and retorting "Oh, but Adam! If we're talking about lollipop/suckers on a strict size scale, surely you're not saying these gourmet lollipops can offer as carnival suckers?" Now if we're talking strictly square footage or inchage or whatever, yes, those circular suckers that are about half an inch thick and big enough to hide your face behind beat the gourmets hand down. But there are two HUGE drawbacks to the carny pops that ultimately put them at a disadvantage: first, you never never EVER finished a carnival sucker. It would break off the flimsy stick, you would set it down for a second and an army of ants would find it and inhabit faster than toothless people at the local flea market, any number of things, most of which nicely dovetail into drawback #2. Basically, carny suckers taste OK for about 3 minutes and then begin resembling the probable taste of sugar-spun asshole. So while you get a lot, you don't take advantage of it. With gourmet lollis, you suck that candy treat until only the stick is left. Along the way, you notice a few things the gourmet style do that other suckers cannot.
For one, they are deceptively big. You can take your run-of-the-mill grocery store pop and do what you like with it the second you prise the wrapper off. It can go straight in above the tounge, below the tounge, on the side of either cheek (the Popeye as I like to call it.) The gourmets, not so much. You try the Popeye with a fresh gourmet pop in your mouth and you will stretch your cheek to painful dimensions. So the first few minutes of a gourmet pop you have to suck at it like a pacifer, creating a small lake of sugar, flavor and saliva in your mouth that will become so large it will cascade over the side of your bottom lip if not careful. After a while, you can finally set it in a cheek and enjoy it from there. Gourmet pops also tend to wind down a bit differently than their more common brethren. I find that the top of the stick will protrude out, leaving the final 1/4th of the process with the customer tasting both the pop flavor and a hint of that cloudy paper taste. While this isn't ideally the taste sensation one shoots for, I would imagine the sheer weight of the pop forces it to be placed lower on the pop in order to remain firmly on the stick until it ceases to be a choking hazard. (This would be the point where, had I paid attention in high school science class, I could cite some fancy theory and provide an equation as to why. Yet, all I remember from science class was my Chem teacher asking bizarre questions to the class and uttering all sorts of weird non-sequiters. But that's a blog for the future. Thanks, Mr. Kaiser!) The other after-effect of your gourmet stick is another result of its mass: the poor thing will likely be hanging by a thread of rolled up paper by the time the pop has completely dissolved. Granted, this happens to every pop, but with the gourmets it seems so much more drastic.
Now, the same thing that makes gourmet pops great also work against it. Where I could enjoy a Tootsie Pop every day for a week, I can't conceive of having gourmet pops on a regular rotation, even with the wide flavor assortments. It's almost a delicacy, maybe like a fine wine or a cuban cigar. (I can only speculate on that front, as I have never had the latter and only had the former once. But I definitely feel as though I'm at least two tax brackets higher when I've got a gourmet pop tucked in the jaw.)
So that's my spiel on gourmet lollipops. Stay tuned for more installments of "In Praise Of" which hopefully concern more mature subjects....
Instead, I will christen the first of (maybe) many whereby I will closely examine a random person, place, thing, animal, vegetable, mineral and offer you reasons why I think it is awesome. (I may or not include musical offering, more than likely... something like that I'll probably leave to my ongoing last.fm journal log, as I'm sure me geeking out about music bores many to tears.) My first offering is a flashback of sorts, as the younger version of me enjoyed the heck out of them and I had one today for the first time in at least 5 years. It's weird how certain things can burrow in the mind, gradually buried under the constant steaming of new data and new situations. Yet, when they are again brought to the forefront, your recall becomes eerily focused. This comes to mind both from the subject at hand and from renting a CD from the library which I owned on cassette and hadn't listened to since before 1990 (Falco 3, which featured both kitsch classic "Rock Me Amadeus" and "Vienna Calling.")
Anyhow, yeah, GOURMET LOLLIPOPS. For some reason, gourmet lollipops seem to bring Door County to mind as a knee-jerk word association way. I am pretty sure they are not made in Door County and certainly not exclusive to that area (the one I bought today was at a ShopKo in Appleton, WI.) But there was a mini-tradition I'm sure that revolved around me getting gourmet lollipops when we traversed up Wisconsin's "thumb." Basically, gourmet lollipops differ greatly from the plain-jane Spangler Dum-Dum pops, the (IMO grossly overrated) Charms Blow-Pops or even the Tootsie Pops. Let us break down why the gourmet lollipop reigns atop the suckable hard candy on a stick mountain.
1) Gourmet = more expensive. You could probably get one of those Tootsie Pop/Spangler "bunches" for the same price as a single one gourmet dealie (I paid $.59 for mine today... when I was a kid I want to say they were $.49 or 3 for $1.00, something like that.) Conventional candy logic, in comparing the two options, might lead towards the quantity over quality, but only if you had never enjoyed the gourmet stylee.
2) Exotic, "adult" flavors. Even though lollipops are invariably kid-orientated, the preponderance of the big brands did not address one concern all kids shared: variety. Sure, Tootsie Pops had orange and chocolate, raspberry, grape and strawberry, and the Dum-Dums had ten or so myriad flavors including the dreaded "mystery flavor" with the question mark wrapper (which I almost always seemed to get Root Beer Barrel, my least fave.) But the gourmet had crazy, out of this world flavor offerings. I seemed to remember always wanting Strawberry Daquari and my mother always cautioning me against it ("you won't like that, dear. Trust me.") I think I would end up with either Cotton Candy or one that was very vivid blue -- blue moon, maybe? Today I enjoyed German Chocolate Cake. It was as though the makers wanted to ensure the money you spent on your candy concoction would be remembered, and so they splurged on stuff like Key Lime Pie and New York Cheesecake, knowing the Spanglers and Charms wouldn't have the cojones to follow suit.
3) More Suck For Your Buck. (Yes, that sounds bad. Deal.) For my money, gourmet lollipops were the utmost in long-term lollipop enjoyment. Now I can already hear some of you thinking about this subject and retorting "Oh, but Adam! If we're talking about lollipop/suckers on a strict size scale, surely you're not saying these gourmet lollipops can offer as carnival suckers?" Now if we're talking strictly square footage or inchage or whatever, yes, those circular suckers that are about half an inch thick and big enough to hide your face behind beat the gourmets hand down. But there are two HUGE drawbacks to the carny pops that ultimately put them at a disadvantage: first, you never never EVER finished a carnival sucker. It would break off the flimsy stick, you would set it down for a second and an army of ants would find it and inhabit faster than toothless people at the local flea market, any number of things, most of which nicely dovetail into drawback #2. Basically, carny suckers taste OK for about 3 minutes and then begin resembling the probable taste of sugar-spun asshole. So while you get a lot, you don't take advantage of it. With gourmet lollis, you suck that candy treat until only the stick is left. Along the way, you notice a few things the gourmet style do that other suckers cannot.
For one, they are deceptively big. You can take your run-of-the-mill grocery store pop and do what you like with it the second you prise the wrapper off. It can go straight in above the tounge, below the tounge, on the side of either cheek (the Popeye as I like to call it.) The gourmets, not so much. You try the Popeye with a fresh gourmet pop in your mouth and you will stretch your cheek to painful dimensions. So the first few minutes of a gourmet pop you have to suck at it like a pacifer, creating a small lake of sugar, flavor and saliva in your mouth that will become so large it will cascade over the side of your bottom lip if not careful. After a while, you can finally set it in a cheek and enjoy it from there. Gourmet pops also tend to wind down a bit differently than their more common brethren. I find that the top of the stick will protrude out, leaving the final 1/4th of the process with the customer tasting both the pop flavor and a hint of that cloudy paper taste. While this isn't ideally the taste sensation one shoots for, I would imagine the sheer weight of the pop forces it to be placed lower on the pop in order to remain firmly on the stick until it ceases to be a choking hazard. (This would be the point where, had I paid attention in high school science class, I could cite some fancy theory and provide an equation as to why. Yet, all I remember from science class was my Chem teacher asking bizarre questions to the class and uttering all sorts of weird non-sequiters. But that's a blog for the future. Thanks, Mr. Kaiser!) The other after-effect of your gourmet stick is another result of its mass: the poor thing will likely be hanging by a thread of rolled up paper by the time the pop has completely dissolved. Granted, this happens to every pop, but with the gourmets it seems so much more drastic.
Now, the same thing that makes gourmet pops great also work against it. Where I could enjoy a Tootsie Pop every day for a week, I can't conceive of having gourmet pops on a regular rotation, even with the wide flavor assortments. It's almost a delicacy, maybe like a fine wine or a cuban cigar. (I can only speculate on that front, as I have never had the latter and only had the former once. But I definitely feel as though I'm at least two tax brackets higher when I've got a gourmet pop tucked in the jaw.)
So that's my spiel on gourmet lollipops. Stay tuned for more installments of "In Praise Of" which hopefully concern more mature subjects....
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