Wednesday, August 30, 2006

The Best Romantic Song

No mystery here. This really comes down to just two songs, each representing a different time in my life and each representing a different romantic ideal.

In this corner: "Dreamweaver" by Gary Wright. This is the video for this one:



Listen to it. Listen to it again and again. This song was popular, or re-popular, when I was in my late teens and early twenties, and would go to all ages dance clubs (those who know me can't believe I did that but I did and sometimes I danced, too, but not well...). After a night of dancing to the Communards and such, this song would come on, and it was almost always the last dance. And all the people who were part of a couple -- I almost never was -- would pair up and dance and go out into the night.

I, meanwhile, would head on home with this song playing in my mind, and the lyrics had an extra meaning to me, because this song represented to me my hope that someday I would find my own dreamweaver who would get me through the night.

That was then.

This is now, and in this corner stands the other contender: "True Companion" by Marc Cohn. Here is the Bolt stream for this song:


Upload music at Bolt.

I can play this song on guitar, and almost on piano. I can sing this song. I sang this song to Sweetie way back when we first started dating, playing along on my guitar for her.

This song represents the newer phase of my life, the one where I met Sweetie and decided to spend my life with her. It has all the right words: "Sometimes I'm an angel and sometimes I'm cruel..." "I've got my heart set on our wedding day." It captured, and captures, my new outlook on love since growing up and getting engaged and then married... sometimes it's not perfect (it's not a dream) but it's there waiting for you at the end of the road, at the end of the day, and at the end of life.

What tips the balance for me, what makes me go with "True Companion" are two things. First, I used it in our wedding as our first dance song. Second, the reason I did that is becuase of the last verse, which I'll reprint here:

When the years have done irreparable harm
I can see us walking slowly arm in arm
Just like the couple on the corner do
'cause girl i will always be in love with you
And when i look in your eyes
I'll still see that spark
Until the shadows fall
Until the room grows dark
Then when i leave this earth
I'll be with the angels standin'
I'll be out there waiting for my true companion
Just for my true companion


When you hear that sung, and when you have just been married and are dancing with your new wife in your tuxedo and she's in that brilliant white dress, and all your friends and family are around you, and you look into her eyes and see that spark, you should, like I did, get a lump in your throat and tears in your eyes. And everytime after that that you hear that song, you should, like I am now, get that same lump in your throat and tears in your eyes, because that perfectly captures what love is: Spending your entire life with that person, and then waiting for them in Heaven because they're what you want.

So, "True Companion," experience has triumphed over hope, and you are The Best Romantic Song.
I can play this song on guitar, and almost on piano. I can sing this song. I sang this song to Sweetie way back when we first started dating, playing along on my guitar for her.

This song represents the newer phase of my life, the one where I met Sweetie and decided to spend my life with her. It has all the right words: "Sometimes I'm an angel and sometimes I'm cruel..." "I've got my heart set on our wedding day." It captured, and captures, my new outlook on love since growing up and getting engaged and then married... sometimes it's not perfect (it's not a dream) but it's there waiting for you at the end of the road, at the end of the day, and at the end of life.

What tips the balance for me, what makes me go with "True Companion" are two things. First, I used it in our wedding as our first dance song. Second, the reason I did that is becuase of the last verse, which I'll reprint here:

When the years have done irreparable harm
I can see us walking slowly arm in arm
Just like the couple on the corner do
'cause girl i will always be in love with you
And when i look in your eyes
I'll still see that spark
Until the shadows fall
Until the room grows dark
Then when i leave this earth
I'll be with the angels standin'
I'll be out there waiting for my true companion
Just for my true companion


When you hear that sung, and when you have just been married and are dancing with your new wife in your tuxedo and she's in that brilliant white dress, and all your friends and family are around you, and you look into her eyes and see that spark, you should, like I did, get a lump in your throat and tears in your eyes. And everytime after that that you hear that song, you should, like I am now, get that same lump in your throat and tears in your eyes, because that perfectly captures what love is: Spending your entire life with that person, and then waiting for them in Heaven because they're what you want.

So, "True Companion," experience has triumphed over hope, and you are The Best Romantic Song.

Thursday, August 24, 2006

The Best Breakfast Cereal

As you read through these, you're no doubt thinking Just how many of these things are going to be about food? My former life as a fat guy should tell you that, yes, a lot of them will be.

And my love of Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch may tell you why I was formerly a fat guy and will in all likelihood return to that. But first, since my writing is the equivalent of driving using only your peripheral vision, two asides.

One, click on that link. Our breakfast cereal is so unhealthy that it's advertised as American candy.

Two, how dumb do the cereal manufacturers think we are? As cereal gets more expensive (it might be cheaper to serve a bowl of steak for breakfast soon) the boxes stay the same height, and width, but depth-wise they are almost two dimensional. I see the cereal on the shelf, reach for it, and it's like grabbing a piece of paper. I imagine the little Quisps and Frankenberries stacked single file in there.

And a third aside that occurred to me as I got those links. One of the things I like about writing these is the odd search terms that occur to me as I look for ways to jazz it up a bit, and, because of those odd search terms, I then get to see just what kind of things people will post on the Web. Things like this... an actual bowl of steak.




So with that done, I've already given away the nomination, and it's of course Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch. I have had a fixation on this cereal since I was little. It's like an addiction. I have to have someone else put away the cereal or I'll keep eating bowl after bowl. Even now, when I have a modicum of willpower, I can't leave the box out or I'll keep going. I'll pour a bowl of it and then reach into the box and grab a few extra anyway.

And I have a theory about why I like it so much, beyond the obvious that it's peanut buttery and crunchy and gets kind of melty when you chew it (not soggy, I can't stand soggy cereal and I use so little milk that I might as well not bother, as opposed to the rest of the family, which in eating cereal employs a formula with a ratio of 1 piece of cereal per gallon of milk).

My theory is this: I like fake flavor better than real flavor. I've been raised on preservatives and additives and riboflavin and the like, and by this time, I don't want "real" flavor, I want real flavoring. I prefer Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch to real peanut butter and prefer generic peanut butter to natural peanut butter and prefer all of those to the taste of an actual peanut, which if I eat them at all I get the honey-roasted kind (so I also, obviously, prefer sweets.)

That's why I like McDonald's chocolate shakes and cheeseburgers, two foods so far removed from "natural" that they might as well have been created in one of those Jetsons-style food-a-lators or whatever they called them. And why I prefer "Pajedas" to Doritos -- although Doritos is hardly a natural flavor, it's more "natural" than a Pajeda. It's why I love a soda that has so little actual relationship to "natural" flavors that they can only refer to it by colors -- "Red Pop" is what I drink. (You can read about that here, where they claim it's strawberry flavored, but they don't call it "Strawberry Pop," they call it red. They also say it's "infamous.")

And so, to circuitously and overanalytically come back to where I started, that is why I like Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch so much. Because they are the ultimate expression of the fake flavors I love. Think about it. They start with a peanut.
A peanut looks like this:



They then process it, mash it around, bake it, send it to college, however they transform it, and end up with a Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch. Which looks like a Bizarro Peanut, a peanut created by the use of kryptonite. So from a natural product we go to something that vaguely recalls that product in shape and taste and texture.

Or am I overthinking it? Either way, Peanut Butter Cap'N Crunch is the Best Breakfast Cereal.

I wanted to, as further celebration of both the Cereal and weird things on the Internet, show you a the number one video that pops up if you go to YouTube and search for Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch. But there's no such thing. So here is the video for "Peanut Butter Captain Crunch."





If you go to Babel Fish you will learn that "Pajeda" means... "pajeda." It has no English translation. I thought it might mean something. It doesn't.

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

The Best Pizza

Pizza has played an important role in my life. Not, perhaps, as much as it has in the life of this girl:


But an important role, nonetheless.

Sure, you say, we all love pizza, but I'm not talking about just loving pizza. I'm talking about pizza being an integral part of the biggest days of my life.

When I got engaged, I proposed to Sweetie on our regular Thursday night at her apartment, back when we used to play chess, then watch TV, and the loser had to clean up while the winner -- using that term loosely, given the prize -- got to watch "Veronica's Closet." And for a pizza tie-in to that, here's Dan Finnerty, who is credited as "pizza guy" on that show:


Which is not how pizza played into the engagement. How it played into it was, after we got engaged (which I did cleverly by tying it into the chess game: I'd start the game by holding a pawn in each hand and then having Sweetie pick one to see who went first. This time, I had the ring in one hand. Smart, right?)(People still ask me, what if she picked the other hand? I have no answer for that. I never thought about what would happen if she did that.) And then she got the ring (because she picked the right hand) and we were engaged, and we celebrated by ordering... Pizza!

Your interest is waning. Here's another picture:


And while you look at that, let me warn you. Do NOT go to Google and type in "hot girls with pizza." I don't know how those sites come up, but it's certainly not what I expected from that search.

Then, we got married. We had an hors d'oeuvres reception, and as you know, the bride and groom very rarely get to actually eat at the reception. So when we left the reception to begin our honeymoon, we celebrated our first night as a married couple, in the honeymoon sweet at the Holiday Inn, by ... eating pizza.

And so it goes. A big event in our lives is followed by ordering pizza. Any significant occasion is met with a pizza. Last year, when I had to have back surgery and couldn't eat for 24 hours before, the last thing I ate was pizza. We've had Valentine pizzas made, we've given them as gift certificates. I don't doubt that when the twins are born, we will order a pizza. I may bring it with me to the delivery room.

So I am uniquely qualified to weigh in on The Best Pizza. (I am, in my opinion, uniquely qualified to weigh in on The Best Of Everything. That's why I run this site. But Pizza is a particular qualification.) And I am here to tell you that The Best Pizza is, simply, Rocky Rococo's sausage pizza.

That's it. No fanfare. Just that one. It's got the great crust with Rocky's sort-of-sweet flavor. It's got big thick chunks of sausage. It's got melty, congealed, thick cheese. It's square. You can hold it in your hand and it won't slop off. And, perhaps most importantly for a pizza, it holds up as a leftover. That's significant because the only thing better than fresh pizza is leftover pizza that's been put in the fridge overnight. I deliberately over-order or over-make pizza simply to have leftovers, and then I get up early the next day to get to them before The Boy does. The leftover-quality is where Rocky's really puts themselves ahead of everyone else, because, man, does it ever hold up. Pizza Hut and frozen pizzas get soggy or the crust dries out. Papa John's? Don't make me laugh; the cheese falls apart. But Rocky's! The night before, you had a piping hot steamy slice of pizza dripping with sauce and juice and the cheese was stringy, just the way it should be. The next day? The cheese has insulated the crust, which has retained its flavor and shape and solidity perfectly. The sausage juice and sauce have hardened up and support the sausage, oh, man, I'm getting hungry just typing this. Look at it:



I've got to go, or I'm going to try to take a bite out of my monitor.

Friday, August 04, 2006

The Best Superhero

Update: Did you get here by googling The Best Superhero? I posted this way way back when and didn't know the controversy it would generate -- but don't let that stop you from weighing in, as all the others have done. See the end of the post for more.



This is a real bone of contention in our house, I have to tell you. The Boy is a Batman fanatic. Nobody else will do. He's watched all the Batman movies, even the boring re-run with Christian Bale (and, seriously, Batman's origin is among the most boring of all of them. How often do we have to watch that again), he has a Batman poster on his wall, he just went to Six Flags Great America and came home with a Batman hat and a Batman shirt for Twin A, you see my point.

In a different corner is Sweetie, who loves Spiderman, and hopefully it is Spiderman she loves and not Tobey Maguire. (Because how could I compete?) Sweetie is not a superhero person, or a comics person, per se but Spiderman gets her, so much so that she threatened divorce if we were late for the premiere of Spiderman 2. I do not think she was joking.

Then there's me, and my encyclopedic knowledge of superheroes that people who limit themselves to movie and TV do not ever get. That's because I grew up reading comic books, and, boy, did I read them. And the more obscure the superheroes, the better I liked 'em. Blue Devil? Loved it. Firestorm? Thought he was great. Ambush Bug? Had the entire series. I collected volumes of the Legion of Superheroes, (and thank you, Wikipedians, for concentrating on comic book history.) I even knew some of the more obscure members of the Justice League of America after it was no longer the original Justice League. (Steel? Come on, he sucked.)

But I loved even the lame superheroes, like Aquaman, whose miniseries was underrated (James Cameron, take note!) And I liked the weird ones, like Wildfire (whose potential was never really explored.)

So I believe that I am uniquely qualified to weigh in on the Best Superhero. And I have to tell you, it's not Superman. What's so great about Superman? First of all, there's no suspense. He can't be hurt -- barring Kryptonite, which given that Superman is supposed to get his powers from the sun, makes no sense as his Achilles' heel, and which the other superheroes should have long ago rounded up and thrown into a star somewhere-- and his powers make no sense. Turn lakes to ice by blowing on them? X-ray vision? Heat vision? Okay, if I give you X-ray vision because his eyes are so strong they can see in different spectra, fine, but how can he shoot beams out of his eyes? And why not cold vision, then? (Oh, right, because his breath is super-cold but apparently not enough to freeze Lois Lane's face when he kisses her.) And does he have to eat? He's invulnerable and can fly in space without oxygen, so why eat? I don't like Superman.

And, sorry to The Boy and the Batgeeks, but Batman sucks. Yeah, mystery, yeah, haunted past, yeah, yeah, yeah, but he's just a rich guy with improbable gadgets. He's not a superhero, he's a well-equipped CIA agent. Hero, maybe, but SUPERhero? Not by a long shot. Plus, that boring origin story.

And we've come full circle, because despite my love of the obscure and weird and underrated superheroes out there, the correct answer was in front of our faces all along, and Sweetie got it right.

Spiderman is the best hero ever.

Superpowers that make sense? Yep. Weaknesses to add suspense? He got beat up by his own suit! Sympathetic background story that explains why he fights crime? He let his uncle's killer go while he counted his money. How sympathetic is that? You'd spend your nights brooding while hanging upside down from a web, too.

But Spidey's got more going for him. He was the first modern superhero, and by modern I mean: hates his job. He doesn't want to be a superhero anymore than you and I want to go into the office everyday. He doesn't get the benefits from it and has to try to make ends meet and get the girl anyway, and all he'd really like to do is spend his time making out with Mary Jane (I might be a little out-of-date on the comics that I haven't kept up with) and studying science and taking pictures. But he has to keep getting captured by the Beyonder, or fighting Doc Ock, or (once) meeting up with Superman to go into space to fight Lex Luthor (a great crossover!) and then, when that's all done, he comes home to find he's facing eviction.

Spidey has cool powers, a cool backstory, the best villains, and a real life outside of the webslinging. He's clearly the Best Superhero.

Excelsior!



Other nominations:

Spawn.


Ultimate Spidey

Batman.

Dr. Manhattan

The Hulk.

The Hulk, Juggernaut, Doomsday, Thor, Superman, Yoda.

Spider-Man. (That one was mine!)

Captain Carrot
(Me, again!)

Batman, again.

And, if you like Supervillains, you can check out these articles:

"Carnage."

The Three Best Supervillains Who Deservedly Just Kept Coming Back And Should Keep Doing So.

The Best Worst Villain Ever,
a five-part series:
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five

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When Saoirse died in the plane crash, she had no idea that her life was just beginning. Now, she's running around her afterlife trying to find a way home... or to keep William Howard Taft from finding his way home.
Read the After, a thrilling novel published online at 5 Pages.