X-Entertainment's cell phone takes pictures.

I'm not really sure where this article's going to go. If it goes nowhere, I apologize.

The combination of being a packrat and running X-Entertainment can be deadly, and the proof is in what my apartment looks like. I've developed a system of ridding myself of some of the mess: I can throw things away, but only after I write about them. Like, if I immortalize some stupid toy or fruit snack online, it's okay to finally say goodbye to it. It's for this reason that I spent a weekend paying tribute to the contents of my freezer, and it's for this reason that, today, I can finally delete the collection of years-old pictures from my cell phone camera. Yeah that's right. An article about the pictures on my cell phone camera. HELLO hits.

There are articles I things with the hopes of making hot chicks throw diamonds at my feet, and there are things I write just because. This article falls into the latter category, and thank God for our right to proofread, because we were that close to it falling into the "ladder category." I bought a cell phone years ago and, swear to Christ, have used it less than 50 times. It's almost never charged. I have some sort of strange psychological block when it comes to cell phones, because while they're handy and I'm already paying to use one, I just can't bring myself to ever find the plug when I see one battery bar instead of the more attractive three.

Since I rarely bother with my cell, its crappy camera component has managed to hold onto some very old pictures. I don't use my cell phone's camera often because I usually have my digital camera strap around my dick, but whenever it's not, the phonecam becomes a necessity to archive those sweet slices of life that so direly need archiving. After a brief scare last week where my provider wrongly assumed that the pictures on my phone were forever lost and could never be plucked out, the thought of losing so many sweet slices of archived life was just enough to inspire me to pen, or type, one of the least marketable articles in the history of this website. Here we go! Anecdotes for every photo on my cell phone! Hooray!

Disclaimer: I only remembered to increase the camera's resolution once in a blue moon, so many of the pictures are tiny and shitty. "Shitty" is going to be a running trait in this one, so make friends with it. Shake Shitty's hand and see how it's doing.

This is the oldest picture on my phone, from the 2004 E3 Expo in Los Angeles. The folks at UGO asked me to go, either because they were short-staffed or because I'm just good like that; whatever the case, it was a miserable experience that I'm not looking to replicate ever again. I run a geek show, but I'm really not into video games. I would barely even call myself a casual gamer. I buy games like Metroid Pinball because they require no real emotional and/or time investment, but beyond that, zilch. I explained that I wasn't a prime pick to write game-related stories to the guys, but after some self-arguing, I figured I could cover weird shit, like the ice cream vendors outside. Instead, I more or less was put on babysitter duty for an outside cameraman they'd hired, and spent the entire convention trying to guide this poor guy from game demo to game demo, from booth babe tit to booth babe tit. I just couldn't have cared less about any of it. You don't spend five years running a pop site without hearing a great deal about E3 conventions, so while I don't really regret having seen what all the fuss is about in person, it was an awful week. And it was totally my fault. I should've just said no.

I was in a major funk in the weeks leading up to the trip, and it didn't help that I literally went to the airport straight from a funeral, and then straight from the airport to the convention floor. I was determined to have a bad time and nothing was going to rob me of my right to have a bad time. It was one of those trips where everything that could've conceivably went wrong...went wrong. Example: The cameraman and I had to hit some of the night parties, and it'd take somehow take us 90 minutes to get to places only to find that we had no credentials to actually go inside those places. I was totally out of my element and hating every second of it, and it didn't help that UGO was nice enough to book a REALLY nice hotel for us all. All I wanted was the hotel. All I really wanted was to sit in the damn Beverly Hilton all day long, blogging about whatever was in the vending machines.

But, every cirrus has shiny wallpaper. In addition to being swank, the Beverly Hilton is the home of Trader Vic's. You know, the Polynesian superstar restaurant that gave birth to an unending ceramic Tiki tumbler fad. We ate (and drank, and drank) there for three nights straight, and there's really nothing finer in the world than getting belligerently tanked in a restaurant that you know is too good for it. I've got a long life ahead of me, but had it not been for this otherwise blah trip, there's a strong possibility that I would've never seen, much less eaten at Trader Vic's. For free, no less. I can't remember much outside the 17 zombies and the kickass fried rice, but considering how much of an ass I'm sure I made of myself, the less remembered, the better.

As for the picture, I can't recall the girl in the green shirt's name, but she was our on-camera hostess for some Nokia contest -- we had to grab unsuspecting E3 visitors and force them to play against each other in a then-new racing game on Nokia N-Gages, with the winners receiving said Nokia N-Gage. So yeah, we'd grab these random people, use them for five minutes and give them prize packs worth over a hundred bucks. They were pretty happy with that arrangement. I wrote a couple of articles for UGO detailing the overall E3 experience, and looking at those articles again, I'm a bit surprised to read about all the fun I had. Either Father Time mixes sours in with his sweets, or I was lying. Eh, maybe I'm just a dickhead shut-in. It really wasn't so bad.

Not long after that, a few friends and I went miniature golfing at a rundown-but-awesome local haunt called "Safari Golf." You might remember the article. Afterwards, we headed on over to a mall-stationed restaurant to experience wholly insincere Mexican cuisine, unless you consider giant inflatable Corona bottles and some chili pepper party lights a true reflection of our friends down south. As is the glorious norm at any Mexican place that feeds you, we received a complimentary basket of tortilla chips and a tub of salsa. I don't know what kind of Mexican voodoo magic the German chefs in the back practiced, but it made for the best chip salsa I've ever had. I climax just thinking about it. For us to go to a mall-stationed restaurant to order overpriced whatevers with six screaming children one table over, it could only mean one thing: This was a salsa worth sacrificing dogs for.

There's a point to all this. The picture of chips and salsa above isn't just a picture of any chips and salsa -- it's a picture of the primary ingredients of the Infamous Chip & Salsa Incident of 2004. One of my friends -- we'll call him Crabtuff -- was happily munching away on salsa-drenched tortilla chips. We all were. We were all loving the chips. And perhaps, if you too have loved tortilla chips and salsa, you know the trials and tribulations of getting small amounts of soppy chip dust on the tips of your fingers. This is why God invented napkins and jeans: So people could rid themselves of naughty, soppy chip dust. Instead, Crabtuff went temporarily insane and opted for the now-legendary method of ridding himself of soppy chip dust -- by flicking his fingers clean, right into the salsa tub. As if it was an ashtray to put out filthy fingers. Soppy chip dust, sent by hands grimy from miniature golfing right into the communal salsa tub. I still haven't totally forgiven Crabtuff, but then, I'm not so sure Crabtuff has forgiven himself.

I started working at Nick a few months later, which came as a complete shock and knocked me from the sanctity of my couch into the bowels of Times Square. I've lived my life within earshot of New York City, but I rarely went there for social reasons. You need friends to do that. While I wouldn't describe the fascination with my surroundings in those first few weeks as tourist-level, I definitely appreciated the irony of me, an eternal homebody, spending forty hours a week in one of the busiest areas on the planet. I work in the same building where MTV's Total Request Live is shot, and galloping through the sea of freaks yelling love-yous to the big TRL window everyday took some getting used to.

Eventually, I will quit or be fired from my job. What I'll miss most are those Times Square mornings, where stupid things are constantly being promoted in the strangest ways. Take something I saw just a few weeks ago. To celebrate the fact that Diet Mountain Dew had changed its taste, the company dragged a damned snowboard arena into the middle of the street. There's something like this every other week. Before King Kong came out, an animatronic version of the beast (torso up, but life-sized) gnarled in the same spot. I can't fathom how much money is spend to put these events together, but considering how often they're done, I guess the results are awesome.

On a smaller scale but occurring more frequently is one of two things: Either broke college kids give out thousands of free samples of a new product (I still have like 85 trillion leftover Quaker Breakfast Squares), or a company employs a costumed character to impress upon the general public that they need to buy whatever the costumed character is representing. In the case of the above picture, it's a 7' Mr. Peanut making everyone in New York crave cocktail nuts. Most of my smoke breaks are for single cigs, but when I see a guy in a Mr. Peanut costume trying to navigate through tourists, I'll stick around for three or four.

Can't remember if it was last summer or the one before, but it was a hot day when we found an injured snake hiding between our apartment and screen doors. It was a totally harmless gardner snake, but you know how it goes -- seeing a snake when you don't expect to see a snake makes even the most burly brawns scream like little girls.

After the initial shock wore off, we noticed that the snake's tail was all sorts of fucked up. Our first thought: "Wow, snake blood looks a lot like human blood." Our second thought: "We must save this snake!" It was such a cute little snake, and it was obvious to us that it wouldn't have called on a miracle to somehow lodge itself between our doors if it didn't absolutely need our help and protection. We couldn'd tell if its injury was a natural goof or the result of an enemy attack, but for lack of a better description, it looked like some clumsy ape stepped on its tail. Just the last bit of it. This was nowhere near bloody enough to register as a fatal injury, so we kept it in an oversized pail for a few days to let it regain its confidence and critical tail cells. I eventually tipped the pail over knowing the tried and true fact that snakes must eat, and whether it survived its return journey to the wild, I may never know. If it's flying, it's a movie star.

For a while, my happy thought was our fish tank, a handed-me-downed 55-gallon with a rotten wood stand and a fluorescent lamp that only works when it's in the mood to. But, the fish...I loved the fish. We started off with a bunch of "painted parrots," which, if you're unaware, are regular parrots snatched during their youth and violently injected in the face with dye-loaded syringes. (No, we didn't know that when we bought them.) The results are parrot fish in a wide array of ridiculously awesome colors: We had red, green, neon blue, purple -- we even had one nicknamed "Christmas Fish" by Petland, because its oppressors had injected half of its body with red dye, and half with green. Happy holidays to poor, violated fish everywhere.

The fish got ick, which is fish language for "sick," and many of the parrots died off. We managed to hold onto three of them, which have since grown to surprisingly immense sizes considering their needle-given head deformities. But while the tank began with parrots and will apparently end with parrots, they're far from the coolest sealubbers that have lived in Tank St. Mattins.

On the left is a fish that was only described to me as a "Dolphin Whale," and though I later researched and found out its formal name and species, that information has been totally exiled from my LTM. For all intents, it was a fucking baby dolphin with an elephant snout. Cutest motherfucking fish on the planet. All of my fish used to eat these freeze dried cubes of bloodworms, but not Dolphin Whale, oh no -- he had to have the real, live shit. I put aside my lifelong disgust with anything and everything from the worm family to carefully hand-feed him scoop after scoop of gooey red heaven, which he'd suck up vacuum-style before -- I swear -- smiling a "thank you" my way. I loved that fish. He was later mangled to death by two ugly blue botias who showed no previous inclination towards violence, but I don't fault the botias. The sea plays by different rules.

The fish on the right was my giiiant Geophagus, "giant" being a relative term since most of them rarely get anywhere near "big" in a standard home aquarium. Presuming that the plural of "Geophagus" is "Geophagusses," Geophagusses are mostly docile and insanely active, lifting scoops of rocks and gravel off the aquarium floor, spitting them out and repeating that process for approximately 8-10 hours each day. My Geo seemed to derive so much joy out of sucking gravel that I'm still entertaining the idea of trying it myself. With glowing, reflective scales and coin-sized eyes, this was the kind a fish you came home to and screamed aloud, "I cannot believe I own a fish like this!" Geo left us last year from a combination of skin disease and old age and me going away for a week without a fish-related contingency plan.

Ah, here's a collection of pictures starring various Shrek 2 related products from that long, long series of articles I wrote, collectively known as "Shrek Crap." I love big merchandising blitzes for making everyday things like Cheez-It boxes seem out of this world, but the run of junk for Shrek 2 was like nothing I'd ever experienced. Everything had gone Shrek. Popcorn! Soda! Chips! Microwave dinners! Dixie cups! It was all there, and it was all wearing Shrek heads and Shrek logos. I still haven't seen either of Shrek's films, but do you really need to be a fan of his work to appreciate an ogre-flavored 7-11 Slurpee? For a person like me, a person who likes to find commercial absurdity and tell other people that he found commercial absurdity before they did, the "Shrek Crap" series was so much fun. Everywhere I went, there was Shrek, and thus, another reason to blow money and take pictures and call myself a "writer" because I could describe those pictures.

I still have a sealed box of Shrekicized Pop Secret popcorn, which is a lot like regular popcorn, only dyed green. I'm always tempted to give in and open it, but who knows if they'll ever run a promotion like that again? How could I eat the green popcorn knowing that it may very well be the last green popcorn I'll ever have a chance to eat? I'm saving it for my death bed. When they put me in a hospice, I'm bringing the photo album, a Jimmy Buffet CD and a bag of Pop Secret Shrek corn. I'll die happy and oily in Margaritaville.

Shrek Crap Series: Volume I -- Volume II -- Volume III -- Volume IV

Kitten in a box. Kitten in a box. Kitten in a box. But what kind of box?

My biggest problem in running X-E is time. Time is not on my side. Time hates me, time wants to chop my dick off and feed it to Minutes The Dog. I see things, I see wonderful things and I want to write about them. Most of the stuff that really tickles my typing fancy has nothing to do with marketability or hits, but rather the joy and pride I take in archiving a piece of holy stupidity that might only otherwise live on in a few poolside conversations or years-old forum posts with broken avatar images. I honestly feel I provide a service, and that's how I can stomach being in my mid 20s and doing this. Trust me, there's no other way to stomach it. There's a difference between jackasses and conscious jackasses, and I'd like to think I'm in category numbahh tyoo.

So, the kitten's in a box, and I had every intention of writing about that box. It's a piece of one of the most glorious misfires in the fast food industry's history, from my pals at McDonald's who so desperately need us to believe that they are in fact a chain of gymnasiums and not in the business of hocking french fries. My kitten, formally named "Saturn" but more commonly known as "Kitten," isn't just resting in any old box. No, that's the box for McDonald's ill-fated "Go Active" Happy Meal. This story continues under the next set of hard-to-see pictures!

Dressed in an oversized box done up in all sorts of athletic colors, "Go Active" meals were McDonald's grandest effort to make the world believe that they hated pear-shaped people. Inside the box was a big ol' salad and a pouch of light "Newman's Own" dressing, along with a bottle of NATURAL SPRING (!!!) Dasani water complete with McD's golden arches on the cap.

The food was pure fluff, though -- anyone who ordered a "Go Active" Happy Meal did so for one reason and one reason only: The chance to own an official McDonald's pedometer. Yes, they gave out pedometers with a Happy Meal. Pedometers in all sorts of wacky colors. Pedometers that didn't work correctly, unless you believe every step you take should count for four, and if you're the type who gets exercise equipment at McDonald's, there's a very good chance that you do.

Better Pictures Of The Go Active Happy Meal: The box! - The salad! - The water! - The pedometer! - The other pedometers!

Seen above are a few more Times Square freaks, including the Statue of Liberty, someone in an official Planet of the Apes costume, and The Hulk. "The" should be capitalized there, right? The fourth picture features a giant kangaroo I found walking around a Target department store in Jersey, and to this day, I still have no fucking idea why I found a giant kangaroo walking around a Target department store in Jersey. If it was a Candid Camera situation, I guess my reaction wasn't goofy enough to make me worth chasing down to get the release signed. I knew I should've shouted "holy balls" when I saw that kanga, but cezie l'est levie bleh bleh, or whatever. I'm used to regret.

I've already told the story of the Spider-Man above, so I won't again. But it's worth knowing.

Last Christmas, I gave Hess my heart. I always do. Hess makes Hess Trucks, which is a lot less strange than Exxon making Hess Trucks, and since childhood, I've longed for Hess Trucks at Christmastime. Though I've only ever owned two or three of the annual offerings, I've definitely spent every Christmas season from the 2nd grade until now in a Hess station, staring up at a pretty teaser poster for that particular year's Hess Truck and wondering if I should give in. The picture above was taken this past December, and you can almost see what I was trying to catch on a film: A small sign advertising 2005's Hess Truck. I remember having enough money and enough gusto to buy the thing, but for whatever reason, opted to drive away sans-truck and sans-smile. Some would take it as a sign that I was growing up, but really, I'm sure it was more something like me wanting to have enough money for fast food or Lotto scratch-off cards.

That's Gray Cat. We tell people we have five cats, but more truthfully, we have four cats and one Gray Cat. The story about how we ended up with Gray Cat would take too many paragraphs to tell in full, but I'll sum it up: We thought we would only be temporarily sheltering her, but one thing led to another, we got lazy, we got attached, and now we have a poor, skinny, all-four-paws-declawed cat that in no way, shape or form meshes with our other four cats, each fat, each with all-four-paws-with-claws. The other felines living with us HATE Gray Cat. They HATE Gray Cat with such unflinching HATRED that we had no choice but to keep them separated, pretty much forever. Thus, while the fearsome foursome is forced to find shuteye in the kitchen, Gray Cat lives it up like a purebred in our big fancy bed. Her solitary confinement, her checkered past and her constant paranoia regarding other cats-premises have conspired to make Gray Cat one of the most absurd felines in history. Among Gray Cat's unique habits are making out with sneakers, eating grapes and pretzels, bunny hopping and, in lieu of the standard "meow," making noises more akin to a squeaking pork chop dog toy.

I love Gray Cat to death, and I think that's partly why all of our other cats keep beating the holy fuck out of her. They see the kind of cat treats I save for her. They've had to notice that Gray Cat's personal litter box is nearly 50% larger than the other litter box they all have to share by now. As I write this, Gray Cat half-sleeps beside me, sprawled out over silk. I think she'd rather take the perks and the beatings than just be a normal, everyday #5.

For one of my projects at work many months ago, I had to attend my first "real" shoot. Alone. The company we hooked up with was stationed in Toronto, and that's where the shoot was going to be, so off I went. I was pretty nervous to be put in the position to represent the company without someone more senior to stand behind and constantly agree with, but to my delight, everything went swimmingly. The facility we were working with was full of amazing people, and at our kickoff meeting, we became fast friends. They took me out that night for dinner; I'd like to think it's because they loved me, but really, I was the client, so they had to do it. Whatever, we all got nicely toasted on impossibly expensive wine, and I was introduced to the "Bloody Caesar" -- a Canadian spin on the Bloody Mary that replaces tomato juice with...Clamato.

It really was one of the best days of my professional career, and when I settled into my comfy hotel bed the night before the shoot, I was happy. Now, here's where the confession comes in: I'm lame, and I sometimes wear color contacts. Don't shoot, don't shoot. Because I was drunk, I made what turned out to be a deadly mistake by sleeping with my contact lenses still in. When I woke up the next morning, just an hour shy of needing to be on the set, the contacts had completely destroyed my eyes. I'm not just talking about a simple case of bloodshot -- I'm talking...well, you know all that funky shit that goes down with Tasha Yar's eye at the end of Pet Cemetary? I was paying tribute. And of course, since all my new pals had only seen me with the fake colored eyes, I desperately tried to keep the contacts in, only making the situation worse and worse.

When I arrived at the set, it was with my natural eye color, and naturally, my eyes were all but bleeding. I also learned the hard way that when you're having eye trouble, you have to blow your nose constantly. So, there I am, meeting the kids we cast and getting ready for eight hours of intense focus, with bleeding eyes and a bunch of coffee napkins shoved up my nose. It got so bad that I had to borrow some lady's sunglasses and wear them all day, on a set that absolutely did not require sunglasses. If somebody had described this situation as unavoidable to me before I got on the plane, I would've called the office and lied about a family member dying.

The picture above was taken on the set during everyone's lunch hour. I was on a couch, dying and tearing.

It went as well as it could've, all things considered. When I got back to the hotel, I ordered a salad that, for whatever reason, came with a whole hard-boiled quail egg. So I figured, "Why not?" I took a bite, and the anything-but-fully-cooked yolk squirted out at my face like the world's biggest zit explosion, forcing me into a raging fit of grossed out despair. A fitting end to my time in Toronto, but at least the spot came out nice.

These pictures are from another shoot that went down near Christmas in Times Square. We rented out MTV's giant video screen for a little while to film a logo for a specific campaign, letting me feel really important for approximately fifteen minutes. The second picture is from the actual shoot shoot, in Central Park. If you look close, you'll notice a 7' orange gift box running around in pantyhose. That's our guy right there. I'm starting to think work is a lot cooler than I give it credit for.

That's me, wearing a pair of Madballs sunglasses that I'd intended to write about, but didn't, because...I don't know, I guess there just wasn't much to say about Madballs sunglasses. There still isn't. Fuck.

Since this article is 750,000 words long, I must've mentioned the Toys 'R' Us store across the street from my workplace by now. I go there virtually everyday, and frankly, I'm starting to feel like a giant clod loser because of it. Nahh. Well, yeah, but still. I don't always buy something, instead browsing the aisles for the same reason my coworkers takes walks up and down the open streets. Sure, it's debatable that wandering around the world's busiest toy store could constitute a sense of unwinding, but this is one of the things that make me me, and fuck you for making fun of my Ninja Turtles collection.

Thus, this picture is of course of the giant animatronic T-Rex in the Times Square Toys 'R' Us store, representing the Jurassic Park franchise. While the store is one of the city's touristy hot spots, it's amazing how few renovations have been since the big grand opening many years ago. The decorations indeed rock and are indeed sights to see, but they're all pretty dated. It's more noticeable in the T-Rex area than anywhere else, as just beside the dinosaur is a big long wooden path that leads up to "Jurassic Park Central," where they deliver-as-promised with a quality assortment of Ice Age 2 toys and basketballs.

I went crazy collecting Revenge of the Sith stuff for a while, perhaps subconsciously concerned that it would be the last time ever for me to lose myself in a Star Wars-related merchandise blitz. After spending 50,000 dollars on toys I haven't looked at since being on the checkout line, I cried to everyone who'd listen about being unable to find a, as we call them, "Red Royal Guard." You know, the red robed dudes who took care of the Emperor's bidness in Return of the Jedi and, to a much lesser degree, the final prequel. The guards came in either blue or red robes. I wanted the red one for two reasons: One, that's the guard robe color I grew up loving. Two, the blue one had terrible headgear that looked like a shoe polish brush. For whatever reason, Red Royal Guards were impossible to find. I still haven't seen it in a regular retail store. A friend of mine bought it for me at a comic shop, but if I'm being honest, I'm still not really sure if he bought it for me. He walked over to my desk holding a Red Royal Guard, and I started thanking him. There's a few schools of thought on whether he'd actually planned to give it to me, but I'm with the school of thought that doesn't give a fuck. I have a Red Royal Guard now and that's all that matters.

The second picture shows off one of my favorite desk decoration at work -- "Granite," an unbelievably cool action figure from the '80s Inhumanoids collection. Offices are naturally soaked with florescent lighting, and this works to Granite's advantage, as any light forced through a small hole on his head makes his green eyes glow radioactively. Now you know.

These were taken at K-Mart this past October -- or maybe late September. I went there with some buddies who've been around for virtually every "trip article" posted on X-E since its inception, I think the site's annual Halloween Countdown was birthed from the fact that I've generally had more fun with my friends during the scary season than any other time of the year. Making trips to department stores that we wouldn't otherwise step foot in on Friday nights is just one of the reasons, but it's a big one.

The Halloween Countdown began in 2003 when I was a work-from-homer, and continued in 2004 when I was a work-from-homer with more responsibilities than the previous year. By the 2005 edition, I'd started my "real" job, but tried very hard to keep the Countdown going...and it almost killed me. Contrary to the kind of crap I write about, I actually do take some pride in what I'm writing, and trying to focus on writing articles for 45 days straight while holding down a more-than-FT job was...well, judging from the number of missing entries near the end of the 2005 Countdown, it was impossible. That makes me sad, because I love love love the Halloween Countdown and cannot stomach the thought of something lame like work forcing me to discontinue it. The problem is in my own expectations for what things should be. If I limited my expectations and actually met them, that'd be a lot better than setting higher expectations and not meeting them. It's just tough to go to the store and see so much great scary candy and toys and know that I'd have to take "sick" days to write about 'em all. I did that last year. :)

I've spent my life wandering through the aisles of toy stores, department stores and supermarkets with bright eyes during the various holiday seasons, and X-E has given me the justification I've forever sought: The justification to buy every damn holiday-related item I see.

Hrm, looks like we have the start of a Chex Mix cook-off in the first picture, and the start of Mom's famous Italian Christmas Wedding Meatball Chicken Soup in the second.

After years of making stuffed mushrooms my official contribution to every family holiday dinner I attend, I switched to Chex Mix. The fact that nobody complained isn't a strong testimonial to my stuffed mushrooms, but in all fairness, I make Chex Mix better than anyone else on the planet. I can't count the number of erected statues, electric leg lamps and eel avocado rolls I've received as tokens of appreciation for my delicate blend of Worcestershire sauce and table salt. I rule, pretty much.

Took me a while to identify the pictures above. They were taken at some hilarious Greek Festival my friends and I went to years ago. It was a local thing and, despite its crowd, done on the cheap on the grounds of what I assumed to be a Greek-only church. We didn't stay long because the live music made us feel too self-conscious, but I remember two things specifically about the Greek Festival:

1) All they sold was barbecue food, and all the barbecue food they sold was left uncovered and being attacked by flies.

2) There was a tiny "arcade" with the worst arcade claw machines you could ever hope to see. Don't hope for too long, because you've seen them -- that's what the pictures above are of. The prizes weren't just your usual worthless shitty arcade fare. Tiny plastic dinosaurs and boxes of eight generic easily-broken crayons...that I can live with. It went deeper, though. Most of the prizes were used. Putting the puzzle together, I can only surmise that the Greek-only church held a Greek-only charity drive to get people to donate old toys for the upcoming festival's hot hot arcade claw machines. Spending seven bucks worth of quarters to win a cheapo plush bunny sucks in every case, but it sucks even more when the plush bunny comes out smelling like old ketchup, and it sucks even more when it comes out smelling like ketchup with the word "SALLY" written in red marker on its ass.

For these offenses, I curse the Greek population at large to eat a bad batch of kalamata olives and die.

Finally, we're up to some pictures taken about a week ago. A bud from work and I took advantage of our employers by skipping out to Toys 'R' Us late in the afternoon, ostensibly because WWE legend Mick Foley was going to be signing autographs there. The line was wrapped around the store on the outside, and even worse on the inside. Fortunately, we were only interested in the opportunity to say "we saw Mick Foley today," and not so much interested in being able to say "we got Mick Foley's autograph" today. We didn't need no stinkin' line.

We got there a little early, and to my absolute shock and delight, I found a "WWE Classics" Kamala, The Ugandan Giant action figure. I'd been checkinh the store everyday for weeks on a fruitless Kamala search, and now, out of nowhere, there he was -- and sweeter still, it was the only one left. I bought Kamala without a second's hesitation, and since Mr. Foley was still going to be a while, we went back to the office for a bit. Within that, I can confirm that walking into your place of employment and trying to keep your new Kamala, The Ugandan Giant action figure a secret is neither fun nor easy.

When we returned later, Mick was there, but stationed on the Fort Knox-esque fifth floor, where nobody goes without a security escort. We were fouled, man. The only way to see Foley was to wait on the official Foley Autograph Line. Instead, we ran around the store to try to catch glimpses of official Ugly Foley Hair from the lower floors, and the picture above represents the closest we got to him. Check it out: Dead center, black dot #2. That's Foley. Stupid faraway Foley.

Finally, Sea Monkeys on Mars. I'll tell you how that went next time. I cannot talk about cell phone pictures anymore.

Yeah, so I'm thinking I'm gonna call this article an April Fool's prank. Haha, gotcha.