Parts is Parts

I realized the other day that part of the reason I'm not posting as regularly these days is that I wait until I feel I have enough to post about. This seems to be antithetical to the idea of blogging what with it's offerings of instantaneous publishing. I could be posting all the time, as things popped into my head, but that seems silly to me. It would appear that I don't "get" blogging. I tend to think of this place as more of a collection of columns, rather than just a place to record my various thoughts, which, on the one hand, leads to what I think are more entertaining pieces, but on the other hand, they come less frequently. Honestly, I don't see that changing any time soon, however I'm going to try to pop in more frequently with smaller bits if anything just to keep the hoards clamoring for content in between bigger pieces. Keep clamoring hordes!

That being said, today's post is a collection of these aforementioned small bits. I have a mind to parcel them out over the next few days in some sort of advent calendar of useless content but that serves no one well. Plus, this new Blogger keeps forgetting who I am and the sign in process is unnecessarily shitty, so I'll just stick to the one trip down Blogger lane for today.

Recently, when Linda and I were out and about, we saw a sign for a restaurant's breakfast offerings. The sign said "The best parts of breakfast." For some reason, this struck both of us as very unsettling, as if breakfast at this place was just an assortment of cooked animal parts, a plate of limbs and wings and other appendages all akimbo. Perhaps they were swimming in a sassy sauce, perhaps not. Eggs and hash browns may also be present, however it's not guaranteed. We're not sure if they meant to say that their breakfast was the best part of a morning, in an attempt to wrestle the title from Folgers, or they meant to say that their meals were the best part of breakfast, unlike toast which is just lazy and brings nothing to the table. At any rate, the misplaced "s" ended up screwing up everything and instead of visions of a hearty morning meal, we had visions of dismembered farm animals. Think The Shining meets Animal Farm. Not pretty.

Thanks to some diligent searching on my part, Ramjet has now joined the Transformers party. He's a pretty cool model in both robot and vehicle form, despite his robot form looking like a mechanical Conehead. This helps bring the Decepticons to within one of an even playing field. I guess I could buy Astrotrain, but come on, it's Astrotrain. How evil can a supply vehicle possibly be? Thankfully my reissue of the classic Soundwave is on it's way and the Decepticons will once again be on equal footing with the Autobots. Plus they'll have tunes. Linda scoffed at my notion that Soundwave needs to be a tape player and not some lame ass stealth bomber, but at least tape players don't have that DRM bullshit. I bet if I showed some youngster how I could take a tape and play it in any tape player ever built he'd shit his knickers. Try doing that with your fancy iTunes songs. The best part of getting Soundwave is that I didn't have to go anywhere. Toys R Us emailed me (it's a TRU exclusive) and I made with the clickage. I realize that the hunt is half the fun, but I don't have time to flit from store to store. I'll gladly pay the shipping.

Target has an exclusive Ultra Magnus vs Skywarp set for the low, low price of 20 bucks. It's tempting except for the fact that Ultra Magnus is just Optimus painted light blue and white and Skywarp is Starscream painted black and purple. I'm ok with that last one, as the Decpticon air corps members all pretty much looked alike, but I remember Ultra Magnus looking decidedly different from Optimus. Still, 30 bucks worth of toys for 20 is a pretty good deal. I'm just not sure if I'm ready to have the conversation with my coworkers about Ultra Magnus not being just a repainted version of Optimus when he is totally just a repainted version of Optimus. I've seen the classics version of Cliffjumper out there too, but he appears to be just a red version of Bumblebee which means he's just a different shade of lame.

The other weekend I smoked another meat loaf and while it turned out well, it wasn't as spicy as I had intended. I'm mulling around in my head a recipe for a meat loaf so hot, so spicy, so decidedly caliente that I've decided to call it Heat Loaf. We're still in the planning stages but at some point I'll be going into prototyping. The problem is that I want to balance good taste with heat which is often difficult to do. Also, a lot of hot sauces have a vinegary flavor to them which doesn't jive well with what I think a good meat loaf should be. One thing I did think of was crushing up some wasabi peas into the bread crumbs but I'm not sure wasabi is the right flavor. We'll see. I like the idea of a very hot meat loaf as it's a nice surprising juxtaposition of comfort food and searing pain. It's as if your mom called you over for a hug and instead she poked you in the eye. This also got me thinking of different flavored meat loafs such as an Italian meat loaf with parmesan and mozzarella cheese, green peppers and pancetta and sauced with a spicy tomato sauce; a buffalo wing meat loaf made with celery, carrots, blue cheese and sauced with a spicy wing sauce; a bacon cheeseburger meat loaf with chipotle peppers, smoked mozzarella and bacon bits, "sauced" with slices of provolone cheese and the aforementioned Heat Loaf. I think we may have the beginnings of a good restaurant here. Think Zaxby's, but with meat loaf. Inquire inside about exciting franchising opportunities.

I have some gaming to speak of too, however I feel this is better left to Friday's post when the weekend lays before you and perhaps you can take a moment from the toil and drudgery of your every day life and engage in some digital shenanigans. Oh the times we'll have!