My Fairy Princess and the Deranged Easter Bunny

If for some reason you have not watched the best part of the best holiday movie of all time, or perhaps if you simply want to watch it again, here it is…

The Lid

The foil seal requires a small handtool, teeth, and/or ultra-tiny fingers to remove. And it always spurts just a bit of yogurt on you when you open it. This was clearly only tested by midget mechanic vampires at sea level.

(NOTE: For your own mental well-being, do not for the love of all that is good and holy perform a Google image search for “midget mechanic vampires”. What has been seen cannot be unseen.)

The lid contains the expiration date. It is also the first item discarded. This makes it particularly difficult to determine until after the fact that the odd-tasting yogurt you found at the back of your grandmother’s refrigerator was in fact 6 years old, rather than just fat free.

The Inside Design

The inside flange under the human-proof foil seal traps approximately 1/3 of the yogurt contents. Attempts to remove this with your tongue result in you looking and feeling like a fat idiot – something yogurt eaters are naturally trying to avoid.

Unless you eat with a Q-tip, this design sucks!

Another 1/3 of the contents is trapped in the deep ridges at the convex bottom of the container.

The advantage to this design is that you expend all 100 calories you’ve consumed trying to extricate the remaining yogurt from its furrowed safety grooves.

The Fake Bottom

Ain’t that a rip in the shorts? They call it Yoplait Light because the container is in fact 31% air.

The Container Shape

As are many people that eat yogurt, the container is wider at the bottom than at the top. Several minutes of intensive research involving an oddly-worded Google search resulted in the lyrics to a Sir Mix-a-Lot song, a J-Lo photo album, and several interesting facts about this design.

First, the shape masks the false bottom. If you look into an empty container, it appears much deeper than it is. I’ve concluded that the engineers at Yoplait have found a way to distort both time and space. The thing appears to go on forever as if you were peering into an eternal worm-hole of cultured pasteurized grade A nonfat milk and high fructose corn syrup goodness – in other words, heaven. And when you eat from it, you’d think there is an unending supply, when in fact nearly 2/3 of every spoonful is actually scraped off by the narrow opening at the lid, thus magnifying the deception.

Second, the containers are impossible to stack. Jeffrey Howard of Wilson Elementary School won the Yoplait cup stacking competition last year by getting three of them stacked on end. Amazing!

Third, the container kills skunks.

Apparently health conscious skunks everywhere are getting their heads stuck in the container after futilely attempting, like you, to get all that remaining yogurt out of the bottom. There are several entertaining YouTube videos of this phenomena. I have summarily scattered several more-or-less empty containers about the yard and have the video camera ready.

PETA has protested and boycotted Yoplait and there are several damning posts on environmental forums such as treehugger.com – for which I have declared myself a lifetime Yoplait customer.

There’s even a Facebook group titled “Guys Against Yoplait” or G.A.Y. as they appropriately call it. The 9 male and (inexplicably) 1 female members (ironically all members of the Olfactory Dysfunction Support Group) describe this situation as “an epidemic sweeping our nation” caused by “cup ‘o death”. Their mantra is (exclamation marks maintained for impact) “Skunks are our friends!! We must protect them at all costs!!!”

This article describes how “between 2 and 14 skunks were reported killed” in 1997, which is approximately the number of skunks I kill per year with my truck, though I’ve yet to have a hippie chain himself to it (the hippies I’ve chained to it do not count, naturally). The article explains how General Mills spent “10 months of intensive research” to primarily add a warning label to their containers which reads:
PROTECT WILDLIFE CRUSH
CUP BEFORE DISPOSAL
which if you read just right is kinda funny and nonsensical, though not nearly as much so as spending 10 months to come up with that.

Yoplait Will Kill You

The label on Yoplait yogurt is like Kate Gosselin’s reverse mullet – party in the front, business in the back. There are more warning labels than a barrel of plutonium. It contains warnings for things like Phenylalanine, which the internets says causes brain damage. It contains kosher gelatin, which I have no idea what it does, but I’m pretty sure it’s made of Jewish horses.

And that’s just the beginning, or so claims this post on a conspiracy theory forum, obviously written by some loser that has nothing better to do than write a long blog post about yogurt.

I’m not much of a pet person, but when Mary showed up with a 20 gallon fish tank about 18 months ago, I relented (and by relented, I mean I didn’t have the energy to take it back to the store). So we set it up, threw a bunch of fish, snails, and frogs in there, and then watched them slowly die over the course of the next year. That’s not all we did – we also bought new ones to replace the ones that were dead. And then they died. We had mini funerals for them after fishing their rotting corpses out of the tank and before flushing them – at least for the ones that weren’t cannibalized by other fish. Not really my idea of fun. I was starting to wonder if they were suicidal.

So after losing almost all our fish a few months ago, I’d had enough. I was running out of things to say at fish funerals. I was going to make this fish tank work, or it was going to storage. I spent countless hours reading about aquariums and ‘the cycle’ (fancy term for letting nature keep the tank chemicals in balance). We’d been doing everything wrong.

Several months and the equivalent of the GDP of a small country later, we have a healthy, happy fish tank stocked with 5 Long Fin Black Skirt Tetras, 5 Rasboras, 1 Dwarf Gourami, 4 small Otocinclus, and 2 Mystery Snails.

Last week, on a whim, I purchased 6 Ghost Shrimp. These are tiny, almost transparent shrimp. They were $.33 each – what did I have to lose? They are all doing well and are fun to watch. They eat fish poop. To our surprise, we found that one of the shrimp was full of little green… things. We checked the internets and it said that our shrimp have been bumping uglies behind our backs! A shrimp with the preggers! She had around 25 tiny shrimp inside her.

I read further that the mother will eventually push out the tiny shrimp balls which pop out into gangly, slimy things with a massive head, dangling tentacles, and an inability to do anything but eat and poop, and then they’ll immediately be eaten by other fish. This sounded exactly like the birth of my children, minus the eaten by fish part. Having witnessed enough tank carnage, I decided to see if I could spare them this barbaric death.

I moved mother shrimp to a small fish bowl with lots of fish poop and a cool thing which makes bubbles. I read that baby shrimp like to eat something called “Green Water”. This is exactly what it sounds like – water that is so infested with algae and lots of microorganisms that it is green. The baby shrimp eat the little organisms. Of course shrimp eating tiny swimming things is much less barbaric than fish eating tiny swimming shrimp.

My plan was to start a fetid bowl of Green Water this weekend, but today, tiny baby shrimp started popping out of their mother.

(to give an idea of scale, that tube is 1/4″ wide)

A new one is arriving every 20 minutes or so. And the ones that are still attached to mom are active and anxious to find freedom.

Notice the tiny, pleading eyes. How could I not try to save that???

So I have a jar full of the nastiest stuff imaginable under a bright light in my living room hoping that it somehow turns into shrimp food before the microscopic baby shrimp starve to death or are eaten by their post-partum depressed mother. I’ve spend hours on this project. I cheer each time a new, almost invisible shrimpette pops out and swims to freedom.

I am starting to wonder about me. All this for the offspring of a $.33 shrimp?

Assuming this all works and by some miracle these little fellas make it, I’ll soon be the proud owner of a crapload of shrimpies. And if it doesn’t turn out? Well, there’s always a nice scampi…

Stay tuned…

Update 1

Mom is almost done dropping the kids. I snagged this short video of it. You can see a bunch of wee ones floating about.

The babies aren’t really inside her, they’re just stored up under her swimmerets (which I now understand to be a fancy word for small swimming fins, not a type of water-proof diaper).

Update 2

Mom is finally done. As the last child swam free, she did what many women do after childbirth – she reached up and pulled her own face off. She then proceeded to tear off all of her skin. Seeing her molt was one of the coolest, freakiest things I’ve seen (though not quite as cool as when that cow pulled another cow’s placenta out with its teeth – that was COOL!).

Here she looks from a distance at her newly shed skin.

A few of her many young ones get a good look at mom (moments before she eats them?)

I’ve gained a new appreciation for this amazing animal called the shrimp. How inappropriate that name. I’d never call anything a “shrimp” that gives birth to 28 babies in 12 hours then tears it’s own epidermis off in celebration. I will never look at shrimp the same… unless well doused in cocktail sauce.

Update 3

It has been two days since the “shrimpening” (as it has come to be known) and most of the baby shrimp are dead, I think. Either they are hiding somewhere in the bowl, were eaten by mother, have somehow evaporated, or were added by Mary to tonight’s delicious teriyaki chicken. I can count five still swimming around – which is five that are not fish food, so I consider that a success… so far.

Update 4

It took me a few days to place where I had seen the baby shrimp before. They look just like a very miniaturized version of the alien from the old Sigourney Weaver movies (back when Sigourney was just scary, rather than both disgusting and scary as she is now).

If the missing baby shrimp suddenly pop out of my chest one day, then we’ll know for sure what happened.

Update 5

Failure! The little shrimp have all now died. They are now literally ghost shrimp. I guess the environment just wasn’t properly established to sustain miniature shrimp. Most of the babies quickly died after the ‘shrimpening’, which I suppose is not a whole lot different and perhaps slightly less shocking than quickly being consumed by other fish. One little guy held out for a week or so, and we did our best to nurture and care for him, but he soon relented to the harsh grasp of invertebrate death. Mother is coping with the loss as well as can be expected though she’s splurging on fish feces and does not associate well with the other adult shrimp. We’re hoping that time will bring her comfort at the premature deaths of her 30 or so offspring.

It sure was a fun experiment! And it appears that another is starting to form eggs…

I was seated in the front, bulkhead row of cabin class and when the plane stopped at LAX, I stood up, squeezed through traffic, pulled down my bag from the overhead compartment, and then tried to back into the galley area right by the exit door. I didn’t realize that while I was getting my bag, David had come from First Class and had occupied the area immediately where I was backing. I smacked him pretty hard with my backpack. Of course this is perfectly understandable because in real life David is roughly the height and build of Frodo Baggins.

I immediately apologized and he said it was OK. It took me a few moments to realize who it was. I knew it was someone famous, but it took a second for my mind to process…

Famous person? Yes.

Singer? Yes.

On TV? Yes.

A Jonas Brother? No.

David… whatchamasomething……….? Yes!

I now realize that if I’d have been paying attention, I would have realized something was up before we landed. Apparently everyone on the plane but me knew he was in first class. I suddenly realized that the stench of estrogen was strong in the air and that every female was now mobbing to get a glimpse of him. I was literally being pushed toward him and he was being pushed, by me, into a corner. I’d like to say that I was filling the role of his bodyguard by shielding him from the onslaught with my body, but I really didn’t have control over the situation. (He was, by the way, totally alone.) We were inches apart and face to face… well, face to neck/chest/breast area maybe.

I COULD SMELL THE AIRLINE PEANUTS ON DAVID ARCHULETA’S BREATH!

Here’s how our conversation went from there…

Me: “Oh… Hey… How ya doin’?”
David (smiling): “Great!”
Me (shouting): “GET BACK YOU DEVIL WOMEN!!!” Ok, I didn’t yell this, but wanted to. Instead I stupidly asked, “You here for work?”
David (probably thinking I’m a git for asking that question in L.A.): “Yeah.”
Me: “Cool. Ummm… have fun!”
David: “I will.”

The flight attendant then opened the plane door.

Me and David at the same time: “Go ahead.”
Me: “No, go ahead.”
David: “Go ahead!”
Me: (Stared at him knowing there’s no way I can go before HIM!)
David: “Sorry. OK. Thanks.”

We then exited the plane where we were both mobbed by teenage girls who kept asking us for pictures… or more specifically, asking me to take a picture of them with David. I think they thought we were together – probably brothers… or something like that.

He was very gracious and even thanked me a couple times for taking pictures of other people with him. I did sneak one quick picture in before he literally RAN through the terminal to get away from the growing mob of giddy teenage girls and middle aged mothers.

This is pretty much what it was like, sans-ipecac:

BOOM

Tim used his Santa hat to wipe the gore from his face. “Man… who would have thought that old people still contained that much blood! They look so dried out, but it’s like they’re pressurized or something…”

“Tim!” Sally screamed. “The portal is getting bigger. Something is coming through! Something big and evil!”

There was a scream of incomprehensible terror from the portal to hell. “HO HO HO” Then a sleigh made of bone and chaos exploded into our world in a flash of fire and a stink of corruption, pulled by eight tiny Hell-Deer, being whipped onward by a horned demon in a jolly red suit wielding a cat-o-nine tails made of Christmas lights and barbed wire.

“On Stalin! On Hitler! On Sodom and Fred!” shouted the demon at its hell-deer. “On Carrot-Top! On O.J. Simpson! On Rosanne Barr! Move your lazy ass, Ted Kennedy! Ho Ho Ho!” His belly shook like a bowl full of jelly. Poison jelly-fish that is!

“Santa?” Sally asked stupidly, as Sally was actually pretty dim-witted, but she was really easy on the eyes.

“No,” Tim said as he pumped another 12 gauge slug into the chamber. “It’s the Anti-Clause.”

“I’m checking my list, and checking it twice, and now I’m going to swallow your souls,” bellowed the Anti-Clause.

“Not if the Christmas (Noun) and my Black Tiger Style Kung-Fu can help it!” Tim shouted.

Am I sick for thinking this writing style is hilarious? More here.

You guyses

For example, “What happened to you guyses trailer house?” A common deviation is your guyses, as in, “Why are your guyses sheep walking funny?” The proper word is your. Ya’lls is not an adequate substitute. A version often heard in the Northeast is youse guys, as in, “Youse guys from Brooklyn?”

I seen

Bastardized form of I saw. It is commonly heard on hunting shows, as in, “I seen some monster bucks!” Another Outdoor Channel favorite is using was instead of were – “There was three bucks.”

They’re, there, and their

A friend tells the story of seeing a Burger King sign that read something like, “Bacon Whoppers – Their Back!” The manager apparently got a bit snooty when he was told the spelling was incorrect. The next day the sign read, “Bacon Whoppers – There Back!” Some people are made to be Burger King managers.

“Let me tell ya.” or “I’ll tell you what.”

I’m not stopping you, so stop talking silly talk and tell me already. Commonly spoken by former Republican vice-presidential candidates.

Acrossed

The chicken went across the road. Yep, he crossed it. That’s all.

I’m a people person

This is commonly spoken by people that have no social skills. I recently interviewed a girl that had the personality and communication skills of a bar stool. I nearly laughed out loud when she said this was her top qualification for the job.

Buttload

This one just elicits bad imagery. It’s commonly spoken by Mormon housewives – “There’s a buttload of kids in the nursery.”

No offense

When you hear this, you can always replace it with, “I’m a douche bag.”

Should of, would of, could of, or must of

All of the above are incorrect. Replace of with have or at least provide the proper contraction (e.g, should’ve). You would of known this, but don’t because you should of stayed in school. You could of dropped out because English must of been too difficult for you.

Nevada, as in Nuh-vah-da

If you say it like this, you’d better be a Mexican.

Rediculous

Saying ridiculous this way makes you sound ritarded.

Basically

When you hear this at the beginning of a sentence, the speaker/writer means, “Let me use short words of one syllable so that your pea-sized brain might have a remote chance of comprehending a portion of the superior intellect I am about to impart” or optionally, “I’m a douche bag.”

Fustrated

I can’t describe the fRustration I feel when people say this.

I’m nauseous

This means you cause nausea. You more likely mean, “I’m nauseated.” Commonly spoken by pregnant women who may or may not be nauseous.

Well, that’s all I can think of for today. Is there anyone I haven’t offended? What are your speaking/grammar annoyances?

I heard Max Hall tried to pass a kidney stone yesterday, but it got intercepted.

By the way, the game was awesome in person! (Thanks Robert!)

The blonde starts crying to her husband, sobbing “That’s horrible!!! So many men dying that way!”

Confused, he says, “Yes dear, it is sad, but they were skydiving, and there is always that risk involved.”

After a few minutes, the blonde, still sobbing, says, “How many is a Brazilian?”

“Except for the cars we turn out to run the road courses at Infineon or Watkins Glen, we don’t usually have cars that go both ways.”

LOL!

And speaking of NASCAR, guess where I’m going in February…