maggot-like dinosaur eggs: breakfast of champions

Welcome to the semi redesign, folks. www.spatch.net is now alive and active and I'm hosting it, so I thought I'd update the look of the pages before I totally switched content over to the new domain. Yes, you can still access everything through the old spatch.ne.mediaone.net (ok, spatch.net is merely a CNAME in the big wheel of things, but it's easier to type) but all the personal URLs will now point here. A lot of thought was put into the site redesign before I finally settled on a variation of the norm -- you can see one opening splash page treatment here and also my sample template of this new design with some thoughts with regards to the whole blog movement of late. At any rate, I just needed a change and change I did. Living for the moment, yeah. Let me know what you think if, indeed, you're still thinking at the end of all this.

A little sparrow had decided while perched on my balcony to give up the ghost over the weekend. I noticed its body on the concrete floor of the balcony on Monday. It was a tiny one and looked as if it had died from natural causes (predators, while part of nature, usually aren't "natural causes" and they don't usually leave the corpse whole.) It felt vaguely odd to me that death would strike a little bird right there, right there on my balcony. My personal space experienced a moment of death. Aren't these things supposed to happen to other balconies? The cats paid no real notice to the thing -- they were more concerned with the living, moving birds who frequent the trees around my balcony. I believe that Cat Ethics dictate you eat only what you yourself have killed. Or, as well, you eat only what you see the people eat, too. That's how Abbie thinks, anyway.

So I had a dead bird on my balcony and no real idea of how to dispose of it. What do you do with the dead animals just lying around? Put 'em in the trash? Burn 'em? What? I finally figured out how to deal with the bird after thinking through the old hippie joke. One hippie says to the other, "Look at the dead bird, man." The second hippie scans the sky and says "I don't see anything."

You may not make the same leap of logic I did with that joke ("It's funny cause birds don't die in the air, they fall to the ground. The ground. GROUND.") but somehow I did. I stepped out onto the balcony and, with a little prayer eulogy for the dead bird (it was a pretty bird, too) I gently nudged it over the side of the balcony with my foot, hoping to miss the downstairs neighbors' slab. The bird dropped like birds don't usually drop and landed, with a little soft thud, in the soft dirt directly under a tree. For corpse removal, I sure do have good foot-aim. Satisfied with the feeling I'd done a good deed and returned the bird to nature (if not ground level), I stepped back into the apartment and shut the slider behind me. That's when I noticed the clump of feathers still stuck to my shoe.

So it goes.

I bought some instant oatmeal the other day after not having tasted the brown sugar and cinnamon treat in many a moon. Grabbed the box with the smiling Quaker guy on it and took it home, all happy and ready to feast upon the oaty goodness therein.

I realized as I emptied the first two packets into my bowl that I'd bought the wrong kind of oatmeal. This wasn't just plain Brown Sugar Cinnamon oatmeal, this was some wacky "Dinosaur Eggs Oatmeal" I hadn't come across before.

Simply put: Added to the dry oatmeal are "dinosaur eggs". When you add the hot water and stir, the eggs "hatch" and you're treated to sugary pieces of sugar shaped like little sugary dinosaurs, in true dino-riffic colors like pink and green and yellow. These dinosaurs don't have much of a taste to them other than sugary, but their texture is slightly crunchy and not what you'd expect from a bowl of smooth oatmeal.

Still, I can handle the post-water effects of these eggs, but it was the dry state that caught me off guard. When I normally see oblong white shapes in my dry grain product, I don't immediately think "neat! dinosaur eggs!" I know, I know, I'm weird and culturally out-of-touch that way. Instead, I poke 'em to see if they're moving or not, and then I proceed to dump the entire thing in the trash. It's instinctive, really, and only the bright bold logo on the box (which I hadn't noticed in the store) alerted me to the fact that hey, these were safe to eat. Well, more or less.

The cool thing about these eggy things, though, is how they work. They're not totally moisture-activated -- I took one out and tried to dissolve it in my mouth. It tasted waxy and not at all good and it did not dissolve immediately. These things are heat-activated as well as moisture-activated, because once the hot water hit 'em, they shed their eggy trappings much like a sexually promiscuous person sheds their clothing when they are given the opportunity to have sexual relations with a willing partner. Yes, this rotten, clunky, impractical simile was intentional, and worth the extra five seconds it took to type.

So basically what I've got in my cupboard (and what I had two bowls of this morning) is brown sugar cinnamon instant oatmeal with sugary wax-coated sugar in the shape of fun dinosaurs that hatch when you pour hot water on 'em. It's progress, folks, and I'm more than happy to be living in the best time of all.

ABC sure knows the value of a cash cow over quality, decent programming. It cancels Sports Night but adds a new evening of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? onto its already Millionaire-bloated schedule. Regis Philbin gets to introduce himself as "the man who saved the ABC television network" and Aaron Sorkin, arguably the best person writing for television these days (though Joss Whedon is close second) has decided to provide us with only one piece of quality television from now on. Too bad -- HBO or Showtime picking up the show would've given me a great reason to subscribe (three great reasons to get HBO if you count Sarah Jessica Parker.)

And now comes the ultimate insult -- reruns of Millionaire. Wasn't the whole idea of this game supposed to be the suspense you get when you watch some complete stranger sweating their way through a question whose answer you just yelled, indignantly, to the television set? And now we can all reference our handy episode guides and sniff, in a Comic Book Guy voice, "Oh, she doesn't even make it to the $32,000 point. I can safely continue watching The Man Show until this is finished."

And can I just say that I'm probably one of the few people in America who has yet to watch an episode of Millionaire all the way through? Hell, I've seen episodes of Teletubbies and Pappyland all the way through, but never a full ep of the game. I've also never watched Survivor and I don't really have much desire to. And I can't explain why. Stuff that in your pipe and smoke it, networks. You can't have my soul! No no no! I've already promised it to David Lynch in return for the unaired episodes of On The Air! But perhaps if you wish, we can trade packets of oatmeal...

Take care, and don't eat anything you shouldn't.