Category Archives: Pointless Nostalgia

Füd, Pointless Nostalgia

The World’s Best Snack Food, Extended

cheezit.jpgCheez-Its are the world’s best snack food. It’s been proven by science. You may have a different opinion about this, but your opinion is wrong.

Not those blasphemous alternate flavors, though, like ranch and barbecue. Please, don’t insult the Cheez-Its legacy by even mentioning those in the same breath with real, original Cheez-Its. Those “improvements” are like hanging a velvet clown painting in the Taj Mahal, or sticking truck nutz onto the back of a Lamborghini. Perfection needs no enhancements, and Cheez-Its are perfection.

Like most deeply held beliefs, this conviction was bequeathed to me by my forefathers. My grampa wasa Cheez-Its fanatic. He liked nothing better on a lazy Sunday than to sit in his recliner, eat Cheez-Its, and watch golf. He always had an ENORMOUS box of Cheez-Its that seemed like it was half my size.

Since he lived next door to me, I was provided ample opportunities to invite myself over and partake of this bounty. My mom didn’t really have snacks in the house (for either nutritional or economic reasons, I’m not sure), so Grampa’s house was like an island of snacking anarchy. All I had to do was ask once, and I had carte blanche to dip into his Cheez-Its supply any time I wanted.

And if there was a family party at his house, which there often was, forget it. The Cheez-Its would just be out there in huge Tupperware bowls. I didn’t even have to ask permission to gorge myself! It was an orgy of unnaturally orange indulgence.

I even dipped Cheez-Its in Coke once, just to see how they would taste. The verdict: slightly sweet and soggy. I could fill a book with the crimes against food I committed at these family get-togethers, once all the pretzels and chips and soda and dips were laid out. Don’t judge me. It was an experimental era, a time of tumultuous change…

You know how awesome Cheez-Its are? They barely advertise. Once in a blue moon, you will see a commercial for Cheez-Its, or a page in a magazine. Why? They don’t need to advertise. Why would you need to run a 30-second spot for HEAVEN ITSELF?!

That may be why the Cheez-It box has remained virtually unchanged all these years. The color scheme is the same, the font is the same, even the little Cheez-It mosaic in the background is the same. If ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and there’s nothing broken about Cheez-Its.

One item has been altered since I was a kid, however. The back of the box used to have several delightful suggestions about how you could spice up an ordinary meal with Cheez-Its. Drop them in your tomato soup! Place them lovingly next to a sandwich, or maybe even put them in your sandwich!

But the most intriguing suggestion called for using Cheez-Its to bread chicken cutlets. They even showed a picture of a chicken cutlet, radioactive orange, with jagged peaks of ex-crackers protruding from its surface.

This seemed like a no-brainer to me. I loved chicken cutlets and I loved Cheez-Its. Deductive reasoning dictates that I would double-plus love Cheez-Its-covered chicken cutlets. Unfortunately, my mother was not keen on the idea, and lacking any cooking ability of my own, the experiment went unconsummated.

Then, last week, The Wife texted me at work to say we were having chicken cutlets for dinner. This is a common item in the Meal Rotation (mainly because we can cut them up and tell The Baby they’re chicken nuggets), but for whatever reason, the mention of “cutlets” brought back Proustian memories of the back of the Cheez-Its box.

ME: OOOH! Can you make chicken cutlets with Cheez-Its, like you used to see on the back of the box?

WIFE: ….Why?

ME: Because I always wanted to try it.

WIFE: If you can find me a recipe, sure.

This inspired a wild google chase, trying to find said recipe. But the internets gave me nothing. Nothing! A lot of people apparently make fried chicken with Cheez-Its, but that’s not what I was looking for. Fried chicken?! You people must be mad! Your quest is crazy and mine is not for many complicated reasons I can’t get into just now!

So I emailed The Wife and told her to just forget this crazy scheme, but when I got home, she had actually done it! She’d made chicken cutlets with Cheez-Its breading, and there they sat, glowing on the kitchen countertop, finally ready to be eaten. It was a moment that, subconsciously, I’d been waiting for my entire life.

But when I took that first bite, I realized that this was a dream that was best left unfulfilled. The food wasn’t bad, just weird. The Cheez-Its and the chicken did not mix. They were not united as one meal, but remained two separate food items. I tasted the Cheez-Its and the meat separately, as if they were two opposite charged magnets that could not touch one another.

And the Cheez-Its half of the equation didn’t come through the cooking process too well. Some of the crust was soggy, other parts slightly charred. It reminded me of The Simpsons where Lisa attempts to make fish sticks. (“They’re burnt on the outside, but still frozen on the inside, so it evens out!”) Since my wife is normally an amazing cook, I knew the blame lay squarely on the ingredients. This was a union that was never meant to be.

I thanked The Wife for giving it a shot and promised I would never make her cook this again. She in turn thanked me for promising that.

The lesson here is that pursuing things you really wanted as a kid is kinda stupid and will inevitably lead to disappointment. Except for that palace of Cheez-Its I plan on building, because that will totally happen and make me happy forever and ever.

Pointless Nostalgia

The Tell-Tale Haircut

rattail.jpgThis weekend, while visiting relatives in New Jersey, I spotted something in the wild I have not seen in many a year. In a supermarket parking lot, I saw a boy about 10 or 11 years old, and he had a rattail. Not a little one either, but a HUGE rattail that extended past his shoulder blades.

I was overcome by a precocious douche-chill.

I had very few deeply held convictions as a child–at least when it came to important stuff. Most kids don’t. Despite how children are portrayed in the media, very, very few of them have strong beliefs about Big Issues. You know those kids you see in TV shows who are committed to saving the environment or organize bake sales to rebuild an historical landmark? They don’t exist.

However, kids do feel strongly about dumb things, like the superiority of one line of toys over a nearly identical one. Or they can be 100 percent convinced that kids from a certain town, or part of a town, or even the other side of the street, are dumber than them. As for Kid-Me, there were a few things I firmly, unequivocally believed in, and one of them was this: If you had a rattail, you were a dirtbag.

One of many reasons why I’ve never understood 80s nostalgia (other than the fact that it was a terrifying time to be a kid) is that the fashions were horrendous. It amazes me that, when confronted by these trends, most people didn’t throw up their hands and say, Are you fucking kidding me? Shoulder pads. Pastel blazers with rolled-up sleeves. Acid-washed jeans. Any one of these items should brand a decade beyond redemption, and yet within a ten-year span, we got all of these things (and worse).

Even among this haystack of horror, the rattail stands out as the fetid pin it is. Because while those other fashion statements were simply awful, the rattail told the whole world that the wearer himself was awful. To me, even as a kid, I thought having a rattail meant you were a bad person liable to do bad things to other people. Because in order to have a rattail, you’d have to want your hair to look like that. And Jesus God Almighty, what normal person would want that?

I’ve held childish biases about certain things and places in my life, as I’m sure we all have. But in my journey through life, I’ve come across actual humans possessing characteristics I formerly mocked. I’ve realized that just because someone comes from Place X or looks like Thing Y, they’re still human. I’ve relinquished the unfair prejudices of my youth.

All but one: The rattail. Because as a kid, I interacted with kids with rattails on a far-too-often basis, and they were invariably dirtbags. The kinda kids who would try to force you to do their homework under threat of violence, or dump a bag of pencil shavings on your head, or key the teacher’s car. Every kid I ever met who had a rattail was a rotten kid, and I will guarantee every single one of them right now is either having lunch at a strip club buffet or doing time for some meth-related offense.

I’ll say the same for the kid I saw in the parking lot in New Jersey. So help me god, he had beady eyes. He looked like he was scanning the ground for rocks, so he could chuck one through someone’s back windshield. He walked like a dirtbag, with his arms bent slightly, Popeye-style, just so he could be ready to punch something at a moment’s notice. He looked like the kind of kid who’s a little too jazzed to dissect frogs in science class.

My question is, Is this just me? Am I just a rattail-ophobe, or is my prejudice justified?

Pointless Nostalgia Video

Pointless Nostalgia Friday Presents: Polly-O String Cheese

Who can say what forces shape us? We are often the prisoners of our times. One’s future could be shaped by simply being at the right place at the right time—or the wrong place at the wrong time. Have you ever thought about what might have influenced your life if you were born during a different age? The Renaissance? The Civil War? The Great Depression? Who can say what heights you may have climbed, or to what depths you may have sunk?

Me, I haven’t thought about this conundrum much, because I was born during the Age of Advertising, and thus have a miniscule attention span. I’ve said this many, many times here at Scratchbomb, but I have been immensely influenced by commercials. I feel like they’ve rattled in my brain my entire life. Anyone who says they are not influenced in any way by ads is deluded or lying.

When you’re a kid, you find many things funny that you don’t as an adult. Specifically, other people. Adults won’t just laugh in random people’s faces, but kids will. They can laugh for hours about somebody they see in the street with a weird haircut or dumb hat on. And if the same person also says something weird, in a weird voice, forget it.

I was reminded of this cruel fact of kid-hood when Joe Randazzo of the Onion tweeted a link to this commercial for Polly-O string cheese (the most needless and unasked for food innovation of all time until pancakes and sausage on a stick). This ad ran for roughly 8 billion years during my childhood, but despite its ubiquity, me and my brothers always found it funny. Always.

Why? Because of the wizened old man who says NUTHIN? The way he said this, combined with his wrinkly face—he looks like a slightly melted candle, or a shar pei—was comedy gold to us.

If you’re seeing this for the first time, or were not as struck by it as I was as a kid, I don’t expect you to think it’s funny. I wouldn’t either, if I hadn’t spent my entire childhood laughing at it.

Watching this ad an adult, I am struck by a few things.

  • Check out the odd posters hanging from the wall, that almost give it a Sedelmaier feel. I particularly like the one that bizarrely reads NO SCREAMING.
  • The guy behind the counter who yells at the old wrinkly man calls him “Shimmy”. Obviously, he was trying to say “Jimmy” and failed. But Polly-O wasn’t gonna shell out for more than one take or overdubbing in post. So there it sits, “Shimmy”. My brothers and I found this quite hysterical. HIS NAME IS SHIMMY! WHOSE NAME IS SHIMMY?!
  • Is cheese really the best part of the pizza, as this ad insists? That’s a matter of opinion, of course. But I think I’d rather have a whole slice of pizza than any one individual part of it. I like pizza, but I never get the craving to drink a cup of a tomato sauce on its own. In fact, cheese is probably the worst part of the pizza, nutritionally speaking.
  • I now realize that all Polly-O string cheese really did was make it acceptable for you to chomp down on a huge chunk of fattening mozzarella at lunchtime. It’s like having individually wrapped pudding cups filled with foie gras.
  • At the end of the ad, the kids taste the string cheese and give it glowing praise in foreign languages. But only the first kid says something in Italian (“Bellissimo!”). The last two say French expressions. (“Magnifique!” and “C’est si bon!”) C’mon, Polly-O, you’re making mozzarella and you don’t know the difference between Italian and French? Your handlebar-mustachioed ancestors are spinning in their graves.