Snack wrap attack

Just thinkin' about McDonald's new Snack Wrap. Woah, it's a wrap? Must be HEALTHY! (It's 16 grams of fat, or about 1/4 of your daily intake, according to their site--kind of a lot for a snack, no?)

Looking it up on the McDonald's site, I found a ludicrous propaganda section optimistically titled, "From the farm to the table."

Not surprisingly, the story of where your Snack Wrap chicken comes from pretty much starts and ends with name-checking Tyson as their supplier, and conveniently leaves out pesky details like how the chickens are packed together by the thousands and pumped full of antibiotics, their 98% chance of E.coli contamination, etc.

If they told you that, you wouldn't be thinking about what a bucolic farm Farmer Tyson must have, and wondering if he also grows the fresh vegetables McDonald's uses, and if the cheese comes from his loveable cow Bessie, and how you'd really like to stuff about three or four Snack Wraps in your Snack Wrap hole.

Excellent and bogus times with Dinosaur Jr.

Last night's Dinosaur Jr. show at Warsaw rocked so amazingly hard. I give it 4 out of 4 Awesomes. It started off by my scoring a free ticket via the magic of myspace. Once inside, I saw the crowd in the Polish National Home ballroom had a decidedly '90s feel, in a most welcome way. All these longhairs had come out of the woodwork, and most people seemed to be around my age. When the band took the stage it seemed that J Mascis had been secretly replaced by the old hippie who stands proselytizing atop a crate in the town square of Woodstock: all unfurled (yet healthy and soft-looking) long gray hair everywhere and a purple T-shirt with a Native American and wolf theme. Or maybe he was a witch. But it was J, all right.

And then they effing brought it! In the most trancendent moments I didn't even notice the corned-beef stench wafting from the dining area.

"These hippies ROCK!" I said. Dancing Longhair Who Was Obsessed with Lou Barlow agreed, though I suspect he felt this only applied to Lou. He expressed this by again bellowing, "Loooooou!"

The only potential spoiler was a tall fellow I dubbed Captain 1994. For his first act, Captain 1994 began by swinging his sweater above his head at the start of the show (Is that a flannel?! I thought incredulously), but that was OK because he was too far away in the crowd to be a bother. For his second act, though, Captain 1994, who stood at about 7 feet tall, planted himself directly in front of myself and three shorter women. I tapped him on the shoulder and he was all, "Ohhhhh OK," and did like a joint smoking mime to his mouth. And how do you communicate, "No, I'm not offering you a joint, I'm asking you to not to be so tall in front of us," to someone who is clearly drunk and stoned to the bone. Then it was time for him to dance, like as hard as Dinosaur Jr. was rocking, which included the main move of shaking his long blond hair vigorously, regardless of who he was hitting. From the smell of things it was also evident that he hadn't recently washed his hair.

Oh, and Captain 1994, true to his name, really wanted somebody to crowd surf, offering his clasped-hand stirrup to everyone. I was torn between annoyance at his distractions and amusement that he was so enthusiastically and confrontationally trying to get others to rock out in Williamsjerk (well, close enough--Greenpoint). He finally, somehow, got people to lift him up--barely--for a few precarious moments of glory, nearly getting dropped to the floor, then back up, then actually getting dropped, then getting forcefully dropped out the door by the shaved-headed Poles of Warsaw security. We saw him outside after the show distributing flyers before I guess he disappeared back through the hole in time to some eternal Lollapalooza.

Today I heard the tragic news that after playing their slightly-larger-than-they used-to-be-asses off for us last night, Dinosaur Jr.'s equipment was stolen last night in Long Island City. While I toiled away at Naked Men magazine today, Brooklyn Vegan was on top of the story, so you should just read the sad news here. And of course the story is accompanied by a fancy digital photo.

Ah! But does Brooklyn Vegan have this exclusive photo of Captain 1994 in his brief moment of crowd-surfing triumph?

Some might say, "Cokane, this piece of crap cameraphone photo doesn't look like anything." To which I say, "Oh--doesn't it?"

On getting clock-blocked by nature

WARNING: DON'T READ THIS if you are an awesome dude who wants to ask me on a date. I'm about to tackle the most libido-vaporizing subject matter imaginable! (And if you are an awesome dude who wants to ask me out, might I respectfully inquire as to what you are waiting for.)

Amidst the nation's unstoppable baby bump fever, as two of my relatives go through pregnancies that, because they are in their mid- 30s, are no non-pregnant picnic, descriptions of these women's energy-depleted conditions are reported to me. And sometimes I receive the reports similarly to other family news items of suburban milestones that I am nowhere near attaining now, if ever; they arrive in my brain as bits of unintented indictment. Like, what have you accomplished? A marriage, a house, offspring? A promising boyfriend at least? Nope to all of the above, but I've totally interviewed a bunch of naked dudes!

So, hearing how draining and "risky" it is to be pregnant in one's mid-30s, it does make a single woman of 32 who isn't entirely opposed to eventually reproducing think. (Sorry, I know I'm not supposed to ever go there, commitment-phobe fellows who are cokane's main demographic! Actually, I'm not sorry. F U.) Whereas as a very young woman when I was least qualified mentally, financially, experientially, etc. to bring someone else into the world, my self-contained baby incubator was something like a penthouse in The Plaza for fetuses, with major gourmet room service, a hot tub, and a balcony overlooking the skyline with a pegasus flying in the sky with a unicorn; now it might be more like a Holiday Inn on Route 18 where the TV's a bit on the fritz, on its way to becoming a motel with small blood spots and unidentifiable stains on the bedcover. By the time I find that special someone (if ever) and have the financial stability to responsibly reproduce, and you know, no longer feel like having fun, my womb could very well be the equivalent of that sordid fleabag flophouse in the 1982 low-budge horror classic Basket Case. And I sure don't want no monster blob-in-a-basket baby when they are throwing away perfectly good Chinese girls in China.

In conclusion, pregnancy is gross. And, like, beautiful or whatever.

(tee hee)

Going out on a limb here...

David Johansen is totally sexy (?!)

As seen, at 56 years of age, all leathery and skeletal yet super-charismatic and an absolute doppelganger for Mick Jagger, at the free New York Dolls show at South Street Seaport on Friday. At least from far away.
Who knew?

Oh and also, for some reason they also had a tour bus. How many blocks away do those guys live? I guess they just wanted to party. I would've totally partied with them.

(This marks my third consecutive posting featuring devil horns, see foreground.)

Idle f**t are the devil's...uh...cloven hooves

I am probably about to jeopardize some major, major Gooooooogle ad revenue by writing about my blog's AdSense ads (as seen above), which tailor their content to your blog based on what you write about, but I can't help myself. After my amazing blog about fat t-o-e-s last month, I suffered weeks of ads relating to f-o-o-t maladies. That is not sexy.



Finally, after yesterday's blog about the satanic goat horns in metal, an ad appeared titled, "Satan Was Never Lucifer!" which leads to something intending to prove that Satan was ALWAYS evil and was never the angel Lucifer. (Wait a minute--so they are saying that not everything in the Bible is true?!?! Did I just beat up a homo for nothing?) Obviously, this new Google ad is much preferable to the ones about fe*t.

Therefore, I shall now try to stack the AdSense deck in my favor by listing a bunch of phrases that are things I enjoy:

meatless buff wings
being awesome
naitch
kittens
vintage pyrex
ruins
zombies
zombies
zombies
zombies
bad horror movies
good horror movies
motherfuckin' snakes on motherfuckin' planes

I forgot what other things I enjoy. I'll do another installment of F-in with AdSense in the future when necessary.

You mess with RJD, you get the horns

Devil horns: which side are you on? I don't mean good v. evil, God v. Devil; I mean, which way does your hand face when you throw the horns?

Me? I'm with Ronnie James Dio, who claims to have pioneered this emblematic metal seal of Satanic approval, as documented in the 2005 documentary Metal: A Headbanger's Journey, and it really throws me off to see it done with the fingers facing towards the perpetrator.

In that film, RJD also revealed a chip on his little elfin shoulder about Gene Simmons. RJD tells us Gene has tried to claim credit for the horns, but that if you listen to Gene, he also invented breathing. This was entertaining on its own, but with his weathered face and scraggly dark hair, RJD also kind of looks like a mini Gene, but on a 3/4 scale (too big for Mini Kiss).

Much has already been said documenting the abuse, and thus increasing lameness, of the horns. But now look at this new photo (up yonder) promoting Gene's reality show "Gene Simmons Family Jewels": He's not even doing it right! Whichever way you keep your hand turned when doing it, it's never right to put the thumb out.

Oh RJD, I believe you. It's not your fault that Gene is an unscrupulous businessman who (as you noted in the movie) does things like patents something he had nothing to do with creating, like orange juice. Yet I'm sure Gene will buy the rights to the goat horns once his lawyers get around to it.

When will the little guy ever win?

Big dumb weekend

I did not attempt to become a successful writer at all this weekend, and now my Irish Catholic guilt has latched upon this as its latest victim. So I will compensate for this lapse by releasing forth more of Cokane's Blogging Gold.

I went to see the rare first blooming of the biggest flower in the world at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. Titan arum is also known as the corpse flower because of the foul smell it emits to entice egg-laying insects which somehow completes the circle of life. (I didn't pay enough attention to the info they provided.)




What I did pay attention to was the garden staffer's jaunty stance.





His foot would go back to normal rest position, but not for long.



The flower didn't smell that corpsey, more like rotting vegetables, so kind of like a C-Town produce section. My dorkiness soared to new heights via my tank top, which had a screen print of a R. arnoldiana flower on it (another giant corpse flower), so I wasn't quite being That Guy who wears the band shirt to the concert he's seeing, but almost. Kind of like wearing a Misfits shirt to a Danzig show.

And later:

Note: this is an action shot!

Lucky Charms has made some packaging changes.



I don't want to incriminate anyone, but somebody I know once accidentally smoked angel dust at a party of 8-foot-tall drag queens on Halloween, and a photo of this person under the influence looks very much like Lucky here. I know that person on PCP felt a bit lucky, because according to that person, it was pretty fun.




And I imagine this product with the ill-advised choice of names will test badly with anyone who had to shop in Sears' Husky section as a young man.

Then we watched two Will Ferrell movies in a row: Talladega Nights and Old School. Exiting the theater after Talladega Nights, I overheard a woman tell her friend that she is a bit of a harder to please than some moviegoers and prefers her comedy to be more witty. I wondered if she had expected Oscar Wilde-style witticisms from a Will Ferrell movie about Nascar. But she probably doesn't know who Oscar Wilde was, because that lady is dumb.

Old School was screened on the Big F'ing Swede's roof, and afterwards I noted what a Rear Window-esque view we had of a neighboring building. Speaking of rears, we observed that one fellow in the view had his boxers down around his knees. Since this was hilarious I rallied everyone to come look. Then someone asked why I was so excited to see a naked man, since I edit Naked Men Magazine. Then I cried.

A non-bitchin' review

Bitch magazine is often compared to BUST, and a review by Hillary Chute of Bitch's new book Bitchfest in the latest Time Out New York took the usual path.

"The San Francisco-based Bitch is one of the few magazines operating under the auspices of feminism that actually feels rigorously feminist." (That's when I knew the next sentence was going to be about BUST.) "There are no women modeling clothes, as there are in the once-heralded, disappointing BUST."

No! Modeling clothes?!?!

Sooo...Real-sized BUST readers modeling clothes isn't feminist? Or is it clothes that aren't feminist? How about if I just stop wearing clothes, since they are such a tool of the patriarchy, and then I can write a dense essay for Bitch on my experience living a clothesfree lifestyle.

Maybe for that reviewer, it's fun that isn't feminist. I would not want to hang with her.

Midnight Madness: Some serious nerd-ass shit

One reason people become more confident as they grow older may be that unlike in high school, they no longer have to attempt so many things they are not good at on a regular basis. Not coincidentally, this thought arose as I participated in the ninth annual Midnight Madness, an all-night city scavenger hunt which is run by Columbia grads based on the 1980 Michael J. Fox movie of the same name, just for the nerdy fun of it. (Yeah, you did hear something about it on NPR.)

Now for me, the actual scavenging part was cake. But we also had to solve puzzles cooked up by Columbia/ MIT geniuses in Game Control, which were another story. Try this one below out: there were other circles you can't see in this photo, but it doesn't really matter (in my case, anyway). The answer was "Caesura." I still don't get it.


So my response was often something akin to, "I love lamp." I believe our team, Midnight Blue, was one of the larger of more than a dozen teams, so usually I got nowhere near the puzzles anyway and stuck to gathering items and photos that earned us "Street Cred" dollars, with which we could buy hints from Game Control.

I had started with the sexy title of spy, which mostly entailed my waiting with my bike for two hours outside game start, where the teams all gathered Warriors-style at at 10 p.m. at the Grassy Knoll park by the West Side Highway.


I was assigned to follow Team Black, who had done well last year. When two Team Blackers left on bike, I gave chase, and tailed 'em for about 10 exhilirating blocks up 10th avenue, yelling drunks out of my path, mind taking in multiple streams of input (traffic signals, oncoming traffic in all directions, Team Black's duo biking ahead across the street) before the duo vanished.

Yep: I lost two guys who were wearing flourescent orange vests with reflective tape, who didn't know they were being followed, in a low-speed bike chase. I forgot; I should never do anything where being fast is important. Dejected, I attempted return to the Grassy Knoll, making the major tactical error of attempting passage on 28th Street in clubland, where it was boiling over with skanks aplenty and my every move involved unwanted contact with everyone's inflatable tits on parade (male and female, thank you Long Island and my homeland of the Jerse). Back at the park, the rest of Team Black was gone. Curses!

I rejoined Team Midnight Blue at a 23rd St. bar, our HQ for the next few hours, and went on Street Cred expeditions. One was getting a photo of a team member naked. Co-captain Dave went above and beyond, hanging bareassed from a street sign, then having his pants temporarily stolen by a passerby.



An easy cred-dollars-earner: human pyramid.



And I guess this creepo by F.I.T. had a clue for everyone, but I'm glad I didn't have to deal with him/her/it.




This Midnight Blue "tag" might get some golden showers, but a pic of it earned us some golden cred dollars...


















Teammate Reilly and I departed for what was a very successful Street Cred run--one item on our long wish list was "pic of team member in one of those retarded pedicabs" and lo, waiting right on the corner of 23rd and 10th, was our sweet retarded chariot with flirtatiously cooperative foreign attendant!















The cred hunt went fortuitously on from there, New York felt full of potential, and both of us felt renewed love for our city.
This one may be why my back is now more f'd up than usual.



















And this item from the scavenger list, a sign with misspellings, is something I can't help but see everywhere...this one seems a little racist to me...














Our photos and scavenged findings were then turned in to gangsta Game Control for Street Cred.



















But it also turned out that, thanks to Kinko's, paper Street Cred money is a lot easier to counterfeit than U.S. currency, and that was the end of scavenging for the cred.



Close to four when the bar was closing, we relocated to a teammate's modern office, where we had a conference room with dry erase board, a coffee machine, computers, air conditioning, bathrooms, everything we needed. There I was finally instrumental in solving a puzzle involving palindromes.

Later, in the first light of day, groups of these pennies from hell were glued all over the game zone and led somewhere, but none of the teams could figure out where. It became a source of torment for what may have been hours, and I heard later that they'd been tampered with by some rogue team.



After the penny debacle, we returned to the Grassy Knoll, this time in sunblock, to pore over a few new clues. One could've been designed just for me: it was all porn takeoffs on regular movie titles, i.e. Pulp Friction and Moulin Splooge. I write filthy puns like that for a living--I destroyed that one! Maybe I was getting the hang of this game after all.

But by noon, I hadn't had a meal in about 17 hours and hadn't slept in over 24, and my last Red Bull happened around eight hours ago, so the fun and my contributions were over.



Myself and a few others who weren't doing well waited blearily propped against some wall somewhere in the West Village like a line of junkies on the nod. I was well beyond caring about clues, hints or winning, just wondering if this would ever be over. How in the world were the others carrying on and still running from one false lead to the next? At about 2 p.m., mumbling a goodbye to whatever teammates were nearby, I cut a zombie-shuffle up the street and grabbed a cab, effectively leaving my bike to the bike-thieving wolves, figuring I probably would never see old Damselfly the electric-green vintage Schwinn again...oh well, we had a good run, longer than probably most NYC bikers do with their bikes, especially with my level of cheapo halfway-cut-through lock.

From the cab, everyone I saw seemed to be a MM player, everything I noticed might be a clue or something to turn in for Street Cred. Everything was wrong in that I've-stayed-up-too-long way when the sun is coming up, only the sun was well into its full midday blare. I didn't want to see anything else except foodandthenbed. And finally I did.


FROM - GameControl
TOPIC - - MESSAGE #165
Official results:
14:02 Team Plaid
14:24 Team Red
14:28 Team Cerulean
14:31 Team Ochre
15:11 Team Black
15:18 Team Spicy Mustard
15:21 (tie?) Team Baby Blue / Team Jade
15:25 Team Midnight Blue
15:44 Team Bling
15:50 Team Pink
15:53 Team Goldenron
~1600 Team Maize
16:08 Team Marmelade
16:11 Team Clear
16:24 Team Butterup
16:50 Rest of GC arrives at finish line

And: Damselfly wasn't stolen! Yay.

The doggs that got away

There's a reason I'll never be a photographer, and that reason is that I tend to miss the shot. This morning, I espied a shirt that I HAD to share with the world: it had a giant doberman head on the back and over it a banner reading, Who Let the Doggs Out? I tailed the guy to another platform while desperately trying to delete a photo on my phone to make room for this shot while pressing the wrong buttons and then--just as he disappeared onto the train---



Sigh. Who Let the Windd Out of my sails? Me.

And just yesterday, I walked through Fulton Mall in Downtown Brooklyn behind a real-live old cowboy! He wouldn't have stood out that much in, say, the West Village or the Loser East Side (except in the latter case, that he was old while being whimsically dressed), but set against the backdrop of ghetto-fabulous Fulton Mall, it was an extra visual treat. I passed him, getting the camera ready, surely he wouldn't even know I was taking his photo with my newfangled cellular telephone--I turned around all primed and--- he had vanished.
And the sad horn sound goes: Wah-wahhhh.

And theeen, when I had use of a digi cam a few weeks ago, I spotted this pair of neighborhood dogs I hate who were being walked on the other side of the street, who I want to mention on Stoop to Our Level because they look like living mops and actually wear little leather booties on their special little precious feet, and how lame is that? Struggled to get the digicam out and turn it on and---battery dead. Tried the camera phone but---too far away. I'll get you next time, trust-funded dogs!

Another factor holding me back in photography is that I don't have a camera, other than a Polaroid, a ye olde tyme automatick filme camerae, and my phone's camera. But I like to think I get more enjoyment out of the phone cam than most folks.



One day I shall have that coveted digital camera. But when it comes to blowing away the masses, I'll just stick with my golden word skillz.