Head Over Heels The Go-Go's (1984)
The third studio album from The Go-Go's, Talk Show, was released forty years ago today. I'm not especially familiar with the record, but it included one of my favorite pop songs from the decade. Head Over Heels hit #11 on the Billboard Hot 100, and was described by Jane Wiedlin as being "like a little pop truffle of chocolate that's just completely delicious".
Chizza Kentucky Fried Chicken (2024) The latest fast food oddity that I had the opportunity to try was KFC's interpretation of pizza that they've dubbed the Chizza.
Chizza is a piece of boneless crispy fried chicken topped with marinara sauce, mozzarella cheese, and pepperoni slices. It's very good and tasted kind of like a chicken parmigiana dinner to me.
Tropicana Rainbow Blue Raspberry Lemonade Applebee's (2024) In honor of St. Patrick's Day, Applebee's has added a line of Rainbow Lemonade to their menu. I had the Blue Raspberry one, which I thought tasted a lot like the old discontinued Kool Aid flavor Great Bluedini.
Their Quesadilla Burger was pretty good too. It's a burger served on a cheddar cheese quesadilla in place of a bun, and it's topped with bacon, pepperjack cheese, pico de gallo, lettuce, and a spicy ranch sauce
This is simultaneously the most realistic science fiction story that I've seen since Children Of Men, and probably the best love story I've ever seen. I caught it this morning on Kanopy, but it's also available to stream on Hulu or to rent on YouTube and Amazon Prime.
Little Fish takes place in the United States. Everything looks and feels the same as the world that we live in, but there is a condition called Neuro-Inflammatory Affliction (NIA) that is spreading. There's no explanation for how it's transmitted, and the people in this movie don't seem to have a great understanding on what it is, but it affects the human brain and takes away your memories. This happens gradually for some people who begin forgetting minor details before the disease progresses to forgetting the people in their lives, but it is fast acting for others, like a pilot who forgot how to fly midway through their flight.
The story is focused on a young married couple named Emma and Jude as they find their way a world that has been struck by this new pandemic. It is oddly beautiful and scary as hell at the same time, particularly in a post-Covid world. If this movie isn't already a cult classic, I think it will be soon enough.
The first movie of the night is the 1959 beatnik horror comedy flick, A Bucket Of Blood, and the second is a 1983 fantasy movie called Deathstalker. This will be my first time seeing both of them.
The whole album is very good, but the two songs that I remember best are the ones that they played on Z-Rock when I was a teenager: River Of Deceit and I Don't Know Anything.
The third studio album from Berlin was released forty years ago today. It became the band's highest charting album on the Billboard charts and included No More Words, which was their first single to hit the Top 40. It's a fun pop song that I've been lucky enough to be able to hear Terri Nunn and her band perform live in concert.
No More Words was promoted with a Bonnie & Clyde style music video set in the 1930's. It doesn't really match the tone of the song, but it's so bizarre and fun that you can't look away.
McRib Returns... Travis Chapman (2024) Art is getting pretty weird, and I'm not going to pretend that I don't dig it. I kind of want to hang a framed print of this in the dining room of my local McDonald's just to see how long it stays there before anyone notices that it didn't come from the corporate office.
IHOP Rooty Tooty Fresh 'N Fruity potato chips Lay's (2024)
When I first saw a picture of this product online, I assumed that it was fake... something AI generated, or maybe a mock-up that somebody made in Photoshop as a joke. Well, they're real, and they're available on Wal-Mart shelves right now.
I'll be damned if these things don't taste like pancakes with whipped cream and strawberries. I didn't really taste any bacon flavoring, and that's probably for the best. It's not something that I'd want to eat on a regular basis, but they're definitely worth trying.
Two of the most influential albums of the 90's are turning 30 years old today. One of them is The Downward Spiral, which I wrote about earlier today, and while I loved it when I was a teenager, my musical tastes have changed as I've gotten older. I still love and appreciate Nine Inch Nails, but when I'm in the mood for them, I'm much more likely to listen to tracks off of Pretty Hate Machine or Broken.
The other album that celebrates its 30th birthday today is the fourth studio album from my favorite band when I was in high school. They're still one of my favorite bands to this day, and this album in particular has a permanent spot in my top ten.
I strongly recommend listening to Superunknown from front to back because every song is freaking great and blends together to create what I believe to be the best 71 minutes of music from the grunge era. Black Hole Sun gets most of the attention from this album, but while I do love that song, I'm not sure it even cracks my top five favorite songs.
Let Me Drown, My Wave, and Fell On Black Days are maybe the best three songs to open a rock record that I've ever heard. Head Down is an awesome trippy song that sets up Black Hole Sun. 4th of July is an apocalyptic metal track that could be turned into a movie by itself, and Like Suicide is as dark and beautiful and the name implies. The song itself has nothing to do with suicide. A robin flew into the glass of a closed window at Chris Cornell's house. It broke its neck and was on the ground suffering when Chris discovered it. He put the bird out of its misery and was then went into the basement to write about the disturbing experience. That writing turned into the lyrics of Like Suicide.
It's hard to pick a favorite song off of this album. Limo Wreck and Like Suicide are definitely in the conversation, and depending on my mood, I'd be just as likely to pick either of those if you asked me. However, the one that hits me the hardest is The Day I Tried To Live. It's a song about trying to fit in, and it's a lot more complicated and less depressing than it may seem on the surface. When I heard this song for the first time, I immediately thought that this guy gets it... he captured what it's like to feel like an outsider in almost every situation. I'm not the angry kid that I was when I first heard this song. These days, I'm more the middle-aged Jeff Lebowski type if you replace the bowling alley with the drive-in theater, but this song still has the same impact on me today as when I first heard it three decades ago.
The second studio album from Nine Inch Nails is turning 30 years old today. It's an album that I played constantly when I was an angry teenager, with Mr. Self Destruct, Piggy, March Of The Pigs, and Hurt among my favorite songs. It's probably been about 20 years since I last popped it into my CD player and listened to the album from start to finish, but there is one track that has been on more than a few of my playlists in the digital age.
This was excellent! The only horror film that was released after the pandemic that comes close to this is Talk To Me. I don't want to say too much about it at the risk of spoiling things because it was just released today, but it gives you a genuinely creepy feeling without relying too heavily on gore or jump scares. The only thing that didn't land for me was the involvement of the birth mother of the two girls. Her story was so under-developed that they might as well have cut her out of the movie altogether. Still, that doesn't take away from what was one of the most enjoyable horror flicks that I've gotten to see in a long time.
It's The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown Kellogg's (2023) I picked this up last October and just got around to eating it this month. It's not bad... kind of tastes like Kix, but with a mild but pleasant vanilla flavor and some marshmallows. I'm kind of surprised they didn't try to make something pumpkin flavored.
Canadian programmer Lodef Mode has come up with a way to use an Atari 2600 to watch an entire feature length film.
His creation is the MovieCart, which is available on his Tindle shop for $24.99. You have to provide your own cartridge shell, but the cost includes a front and side label, as well as a fully assembled PCB board with a Micro SD that contains Night Of The Living Dead, which has been encoded and is read to play through your Atari 2600 console. You can encode any video file in a format that's designed to play through the MovieCart using free software and a plugin created by Lodef Mode.
This video from the creator's YouTube channel shows the MovieCart in action, using the sci-fi classic Westworld. The color pallet is very limited and the resolution of the picture is just 80×192, but that's a full color film with audio playing through a game console that was released in 1977.
A series of beer commercials from twenty years ago has been making the rounds on Twitter, and it's one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time. In 2003, the Chilean network El 13 aired the original Star Wars trilogy on television. The broadcast was sponsored by Cerveza Cristal beer, but rather than have traditional commercial breaks, the advertising agency convinced the network to allow them to insert beer commercials directly into the film to give the appearance that Obi-Wan Kenobi, Luke Skywalker, and Emperor Palpatine cracked open a cold one at various key moments in the story.
This is one of the funniest advertisements I've ever seen. I'd love to find a recording of the full movie from this airing. The music seals the deal for me.
Here are four of the original ads:
Twitter user @heyitswindy dubbed the original English dialogue over the clips of the commercials that have surfaced. Here are the results:
Now, I challenge you to not sing "Cerveza Cristal" in your head next time you watch the original trilogy.
If you played arcade games at any point in the second half of the 90's, there's a pretty good chance that no matter what game you were playing, you heard a voice singing "Day-tooon-aaaaaaa, let's go away". The iconic racing game whose attract screen produced this song is turning 30 years old this month.
Mellow Gold Beck (1994)
The album was once described by its artist as "a satanic K-tel record that's been found in a trash dumpster" was released 30 years ago today. Although I like some of his music, I wouldn't say that I'm a huge Beck fan. Still, the first track off of this album will always remind me of being a teenager in the 90's.
Fiery Big Fish Burger King (2024) Eh... this doesn't taste bad or anything, but it's not all that great. The triple pepper spicy glaze that they use isn't very hot and spicy. I don't mind that, but it's also not very flavorful either. The size of the fish patty was also pretty disappointing, especially for a sandwich that costs over five dollars. Hard pass.
Bob Marley: One Love Paramount Pictures (2024) This is a powerful film and I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I'm not going to lie... I'm going to need to watch it again with closed captions after it gets released on a streaming service.
I've only seen one other movie featuring the lead actresses before today: Qualley played Manson family member Ruth Ann Moorehouse (aka: Pussycat) in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, and Viswanathan was one of the three daughters in the 2018 coming-of-age comedy Blockers. Both were fantastic in those films, and although their romantic chemistry in Drive-Away Dolls felt a bit off, they both delivered a great performance overall.
Blueberry Lemon Pound Cake Turkey Hill (2024)
This new limited edition flavor from Turkey Hill would probably be better suited for a warm day in the spring or early summer, but it's tasty any time of year.
The lemon flavor is strong, but not too tart or overpowering, and it blends well with the blueberry swirl and the pieces of pound cake. My only complaint is that there wasn't nearly enough of either of the inclusions. Even if they included twice as much of the blueberry swirl and cake pieces that I found in this carton, it still would have been kind of sparse.
It's been all over the news for the past couple of weeks that Coca-Cola was about to introduce a new permanent product to their lineup.
The new flavor is called Coca-Cola Spiced. It's available in stores today in both a Regular and Zero Sugar version. When I heard the name, I was hoping that this would taste something like Pepsi Holiday Spice, which was really quite good, but the company website threw cold water on those hopes pretty quicky. Their description of this new product is:
"It’s Coca‑Cola, only spiced. Coca‑Cola Spiced transforms the familiar into the extraordinary. Blending the iconic taste of Coca‑Cola with a burst of refreshing notes from raspberry and spiced flavors, Coca‑Cola Spiced offers an uplifting taste experience."
So, what did this taste like to me?
The closest food or drink comparison that I can come up with is C Howard's Violet Mints. Consider yourself lucky if you haven't heard of this candy before now because they're terrible. Think of the most disappointing candy that you've ever gotten while trick-or-treating when you were a kid. Whatever came to your mind, I can almost guarantee you that after trying a Violet Mint, you'd sooner eat a whole plastic pumpkin filled with your most despised Halloween candy before you'd agree to finish the other 14 mints in a pack of these.
To be fair, Coca-Cola Spiced is not as bad as C Howard's Violet Mints. Nothing on the face of the earth is that bad. However, it reminds me of the candy because it has a similar flavor profile. Eating the candy, and drinking the soda, feels as if you are consuming old lady perfume. The full sugar version isn't quite as bad as the Zero Sugar variety, but in either case, I don't think they taste a thing like raspberry or spice. They tastes like stale flowery-sweet perfume.
Coca-Cola have come up with a few outstanding limited edition flavors in recent years like Starlight and Move. Not sure why they couldn't have added one of those to their permanent flavor lineup instead, but I can tell you that I wouldn't buy Coca-Cola Spiced again if it was literally the only beverage available at the grocery store.
UPDATE (2/26/2024): Not long after I posted this review, I received a voice mail from my dad concerning my thoughts on C Howard's Violet Mints. He's a big fan of the product and has a pack in the candy dish on his kitchen table at this table at this very moment. I talked with him earlier today and he suggested that I share his counterpoint on the blog, and I could think of no better way to do this than to let you hear it straight from the man himself.
Well... at least I have some gift ideas for Father's Day.
Space Dunk Oreos Mondelez (2024) The newest limited edition flavor of Oreo Cookies have hit store shelves this month, and they're pretty damn good!
This product is centered around a promotion in which Oreo has partnered with Space Perspective to send a lucky winner to the edge of the planet's atmosphere where you could enjoy Space Dunk Oreos from outer space. There's a bit of hyperbole here because the flight has a maximum altitude of 100,000 feet, but it still sounds like a pretty fun experience to me!
There are five cookie designs, and I was happy to see that one of them is a rocketship. There are also two stars, an astronaut, and a telescope. The center of each cookie has a small hole that allows the cream filling to poke through.
The cream filling is pink and blue and it has a marshmallow flavor, but the real attraction here is the fact that there are very tiny fragments of candy that are similar to Pop Rocks mixed into the cream which makes your mouth tingle while you're eating the cookie.
I hated to miss out on tonight's Mahoning virtual screening, but there as no way that I could pass up on the opportunity to see one of the greatest movies of all time on the big screen.
Seeing Bill & Ted themed merchandise and product tie-ins isn't too unusual, but I wasn't expecting to see something that has been based on their early 90's Saturday morning cartoon series. This collectors box from G Fuel includes a tub of Bahama Mama drink mix, a reusable cup featuring the animated versions of Bill S. Preston and Ted Theodore Logan riding on the phone booth, and a pair of Rufus-style sunglasses.
It was announced on Friday that the Phillies have signed a dude that they have been rumored to be interested in acquiring for a long time. Super-utility veteran Whit Merrifield signed a one year, $7 million dollar contract with a team option for 2025.
This is exactly the kind of move that championship teams make. Merrifield gives the Phillies depth at practically every position on the field. He's a three time all-star (including last season) and has led the American League in stolen bases three times, the most recent of which was just three years ago. He's 35 and past his peak seasons, but he's still one of the best utility players in the game.
We didn't get any pictures of our front row crew. Everybody was kind of bopping all over the theater meeting up and chatting with each other before and after the screening, so an opportunity really didn't present itself, but thanks to Kate, we did get a couple of selfies in.
This year will be the 75th year that the Mahoning Drive-In Theater has been in business, so the theme for the season will be "75 years of 35 mm". There were a few announcements of films and double features that haven't been made public yet, as well as a pre-season 35mm road show, a new sponsor, and a partnership with a major film studio whose name I won't mention. We don't yet know what movies will be screened on the lot as a result of this partnership, but the possibilities are pretty damn cool!
The title of the movie we were going to watch was not announced ahead of time, but we were given a clue that it was a PG film that they've wanted to screen at the drive-in for a long time, but after years of searching, they couldn't find a 35mm print. It was the 1972 disaster flick: The Poseidon Adventure. Virgil and Mark have often joked that they wanted to host a three day weekend of Ernest Borgnine movies at the Mahoning with triple features every night, and an event title of The Borg Nine. I suggested that they spread it out over a season and give us something like the old Subway cards that you would get punched every time you got a hoagie. Fill up your card with Borg Nine and your Borg Ten will be free!
The Poseidon Adventure is an amazing movie. I always assumed that I had seen it before, but I realized at about five minutes in that nothing looked familiar to me at all, so either my memory has really taken a turn for the worse, or I was mistaking this for another disaster-on-the-sea movie that I've watched at some point in my life. I'm pretty sure that it's the latter... at least I hope that's the case. So, as luck would have it, my first time seeing this all-time classic was on the big screen with our friends from the drive-in, which was an awesome experience!
After watching The Poseidon Adventure on the big screen, we had a much less fun experience with The Mazda 3 Adventure on our drive home. We knew that we were going to get some snow, but they were calling for it to start early Saturday morning and last through the afternoon. It must have moved a little faster than expected because we hit a snow squall about halfway down I-80 which made it pretty damn hard to see and to keep the car from slipping. It got even worse once we took the 309 exit and ended up stuck behind a car that didn't seem to know how to drive in the snow. Not gonna lie, it was a bit scary at times, but we made it home safe and sound.