Small World ride revamped for bigger passengers. (CalorieLab)

The Small World ride now must accommodate adults who frequently weigh north of 200 pounds, which it often cannot do. Increasingly, overweighted boats get to certain points in the ride and bottom out, becoming stuck in the flume.

The ride monitors attempt to leave empty seats on many boats to compensate for the hefty, but this routinely antagonizes the hundreds of paying customers waiting in line. When a boat does bottom out, a long line of other boats backs up behind it, their passengers slowly going mad from listening to the ride’s theme song.

The ride monitors must then track down the stuck boat and attempt tactfully to help a rider or two to exit at one of the emergency platforms, which the riders in question do not always deal with graciously.

This is emblematic of America on so many levels.

Jim Gaffigan is a puffy, pasty comedian from Indiana that has been a mainstay in the comedy club and late night circuit for some time. You might recognize him from his commercial and acting work (he was a regular on That Seventies Show for a few seasons).

While other comedians might inject some aspect of food anecdote into their act — such as Eddie Murphy’s bit on McDonald’s in Raw — few “pepper” (get it?) their routine with the sheer number of sustained food references that Gaffigan “seasons”(!) his act with.

Perhaps it’s his modest, mid-western roots that positions Gaffigan well in this regard. He is the everyman, toiling in the mundane, and thus possesses a unique vantage point from which to wryly sink his teeth (ok, that’s it, I promise) into what you and I consider perfunctory and banal, such as the erstwhile Hot Pocket. This supermarket frozen aisle staple can form the crux of almost one fifth of his act, and it’s Gaffigan’s most famous bit. He’ll randomly interject the trademark commercial jingle (“Hot Pocket!”) and various, contextual permutations therein (“Diarrhea Pocket!”) throughout his astute observations on America’s popular microwaveable stuffed pastry (“There’s a vegetarian hot pocket for those who don’t eat meat but still would like diarrhea”).

Gaffigan reserves much of his derision for his stereotypical American brethren, including the lazy Fat American. He calls us out for the peculiar national holidays that revolve around gorging ourselves, such as Thanksgiving (“Let’s eat too much. But we do that everyday! Let’s do it with people who annoy us.”) and the Fourth of July (“I’m going to eat a burger AND a brat.”). Gaffigan effortlessly alternates between his on-stage persona and that of an incensed audience member having a running imaginary conversation with his/herself, a seeming prude so easily offended by the pasty bumpkin on stage and his incendiary ramblings that he/she would exclaim — with a tone that implies an incredulous case of the vapors — “But I like Hot Pockets, mister! They’re delicious.”

He has a keen ability to effortlessly expand upon the absurdity of the mundane (“Pie can’t compete with cake. Put candles in a cake, it’s a birthday cake; put candles in a pie…and someone’s drunk in the kitchen.”)

The subject of meat is given its just due (“Steak is like the tuxedo of meat…and bologna is the retarded cousin”) and Gaffigan pokes his fun at vegetarians (“I’m not a strict vegetarian, I eat beef and pork. And chicken. But not fish, that’s disgusting.”)

(Vegetarians will brag…)“I haven’t had meat in 5 years.” I haven’t had a banana in month – you don’t see me bragging. I love animals, I just like eating them more. Fun to pet, better to chew.

Jim Gaffigan will be at the Arlene Schnitzer Hall in Portland the evening of Friday, November 2. A second show has been added, so he will be performing twice in one night (7 and 10pm). Ticketmaster won’t allow me to purchase any tickets, so if anybody wants to give me a ticket, or if Mr. Gaffigan himself would like to put me on the guest list in exchange for effusive praise on this blog, I welcome the gesture.

Link: Jim Gaffigan on the Intertubes.

The pleasure principle. (Times Online)

On language and food writing:

The problem and the skill is not actually in the food, or in having an eye for decor, an ear for the staff, or a nose for the wine list (which I rarely mention, because I don’t drink). It’s in the language.

English, which is so gloriously verbose about so much of life’s gay tapestry, is summarily tongue-tied when it comes to describing food and eating. The reasons are partially cultural. It has never been considered polite to talk about food, partly as there hasn’t ever been much food that you could be polite about. Food and talking about food was something the French did. It’s often pointed out that while the words for farm animals are Anglo-Saxon, their names when they’re cooked are Norman – pork for swine, beef for cattle, mutton for sheep – distinguishing who did the herding and who did the eating.

But then, many of the words that we do have are swaggered in a Pooterish bourgeois snobbery. I can’t write “moist” or “succulent” or “luxuriant” without shivering. Writing about food and the sensation of eating can be as nauseating to read as watching someone eat with their mouth open. So you have to pick your way through the verbiage with care and imagination.

On the nature of criticism:

Finally, people often say: “Seeing as you know so much, why don’t you open a restaurant?” And I think of Brendan Behan’s famous quote: “Critics are like eunuchs in a harem – they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.” Like so much of Behan’s work, that’s smart, but not quite right. Critics may well be like eunuchs in a harem who know how it’s done – but having seen it done every day, they just don’t fancy having it done to them.

On the “organic” canard:

Can we just get the organic thing clear? Organic does not mean additive-free; it means some additives and not others. Organic does not mean your food hasn’t been washed with chemicals, frozen or kept fresh with gas, or that it has not been flown around the world. Organic does not necessarily mean it is healthier, or will make you live longer; nor does it mean tastier, fresher, or in some way improved. Organically farmed fish is not necessarily better than wild fish. Organically reared animals didn’t necessarily live a happier life than nonorganic ones – and their death is no less traumatic.

…

So what does organic actually mean? Buggered if I know. It usually means more expensive. Whatever the original good intentions of the organic movement, their good name has been hijacked by supermarkets, bijoux delicatessens and agri-processors as a value-added designer label. Organic comes with its own basket of aspiration, snobbery, vanity and fear that retailers on tight margins can exploit. And what I mind most about it is that it has reinvigorated the old class distinction in food. There is them that have chemical-rich, force-fed battery dinner and us that have decent, healthy, caring lunch. It is the belief that you can buy not only a clear conscience, but a colon that works like the log flume at Alton Towers.

On durian:

You can tell you’re in the presence of a durian from 20ft. They smell. No, they stink. They have the most exotically complex and psychologically confused life cycle of any vegetable, and rely on fooling carnivores to spread their seed. So they give off the odour of rotting flesh. It’s the scent of corruption, a whiff of the charnel house, a gag from a hot grave. If Stephen King books smelt, they’d smell of durian.

Inside, the flesh is marmoreally slimy, some say silky. Personally, I think it’s like lost babies who have been drowned in baths of whey. The flesh clings to the stones like putrefying muscle. You have to suck and nibble. Few westerners manage that twice.

I love this guy.

Eat your food, get your money back. (Reuters)

Norwegian food retailer Coop launched a new guarantee for its produce on Monday: “If you did not like the food, you will get your money back – no questions asked.”

Coop, a consumer-owned cooperative and second biggest food chain in Norway, said competition among retailers was so fierce that in order to win new clients it had to become more creative.

“We trust the customers, if they say they are not pleased with something, we do not ask any questions,” Coop spokesman Vidar Ullenroed told Reuters.

“We will refund the whole amount,” Ullenroed told top-selling tabloid VG, adding that there did not have to be anything wrong with the product to get cash back.

Pot candy factory owner surrenders. (Seattle PI)

The founder of an Oakland food factory that laces everything from cookies to barbecue sauce with marijuana surrendered Thursday to face a federal drug charge.

Michael Martin, 33, was freed on $300,000 bond on the charge of conspiring to manufacture and distribute marijuana.

This government hates capitalists.

Sometimes eating a large, carbo-centric meal — right when you get home — and then sitting on a couch with a laptop is not healthy.

For instance, I was too logy on a recent evening to take any decisive action when I suddenly found myself assaulted by a TV show. At one point it was simply piddling background noise to be safely ignored. I thought it was a commercial. Just a long commercial, and, after a while, one that had overstayed its welcome. It wasn’t until after five minutes I realized that this was actually a show.

The show in question is called “Cavemen”. It is part of ABC’s bold Fall lineup, and it exists as a potent reminder of what a horrible existence we humans lead on this earth.

If you’re at all familiar with what passes for popular culture in our society — and I consider myself somewhat versed in television, if only tangentially at times — you might be aware of the Geico advertistments which feature actual cavemen as the agents provocateur.

The general premise for the television show mirrors that in the commercial. It is all piled mercilessly upon the schtick that Neanderthals (or a similar biped from the more hunched, left end of the evolutionary diagram) have stopped evolving in any demonstrative fashion and have existed simultaneously (presumably) for hundreds of thousands of years alongside Cro-magnon man. And like us modern sapiens, these cavemen — despite their genetic predispositions for fashioning basalt spearheads and discovering fire — suffer from the prosaic angst we humans have consensually owned as our lifelong affliction.

In the commercial, these hombres erectus wax pathetic to unfeeling psychologists, explore frustratingly complex inter-personal relationships, and debate meta-physical reality in all its confusing glory. The 30-minute show provides this same launch platform for caveman ennui (sans a conventional laugh track).

It really is astonishing, the gall of ABC, to even consider showcasing this tripe. Do they expect the hoi polloi to swallow such a wildly unreasonable concept: a commercial that has shed its cocoon to emerge as a prime-time butterfly? Does ABC honestly believes this transaction is transparently on the up-and-up, that we are so gullible, so starved for self-referential Splendatainment that we’ll gladly line up to be force fed like a foi gras goose?

The idea is laughable at face value. Yet there it was, on television. In prime time, nonetheless. The synopsis of the debut episode is thus: one of the cavemen, I dunno, “Robert(?)”, who happens to be roommates with two other cavemen (let’s call them “Phil” and “Fred”¹), is convinced that the hot, blonde, female sapien action he’s been getting is illusory.

Robert is wracked with the same self-doubt and confidence issues that is so endemic to us all. He is convinced his girlfriend is ashamed to admit to her friends that she is getting porked by some guy with as much hair on his knuckles as on his back (which is a lot, for the record). However, once he confronts her — while she is enjoying drinks with her friends — at some trendy watering trough, he ultimately finds his fears have been unjustified.

Prior to this singular, episode-changing event, the other roommates go on a shopping spree to soften the blow of impending romantic disaster, indulging in crass materialism as a panacea (just like us humans!). However, it is with such boarish levity that Cavemen lowers the discourse. And this exists as the core of show: cavemen, like minorities and teenage Goths, are misunderstood. They may look different, and technically be another species (as one caveman tells his roommate, “keep your penis in your genus”), but underneath that primordial hypodermis lies the same vulnerable, quivering core of uncertainty, a fleeting, shallow and crass individual preoccupied with Pinkberry and fair trade coffee.

The very real societal maladies of over-generalization and false stereotypes are simply swept aside in favor of a running gag. It is hard to imagine how this can be kept up for the average length of an SNL skit, much less an entire broadcast network season.

The Cavemen environs are quintessential L.A. in all its wondrous self-indulgence. The roommates — despite being underemployed — live somewhat luxuriously in a well-appointed apartment replete with the latest modular IKEA wall units and kitchen systems. They have gym memberships, where they twiddle away the desperate details of their painful lives while walking on treadmills. All the chicks are generically hot, vacuous model types. The writers of the show are letting you into their world. They constantly sift through the detritus and present polished nuggets of pop cultural aphorisms that simultaneously denigrate and exhalt modernity.

I imagine they are a sick breed, these writers, wickedly smart and capable of absorbing trivial knowledge like a sheet of Bounty (the “quicker picker-upper”), yet with a healthy predilection for the absurd. While you or I or any other aging doofus is pefectly satisfied with indulging our camp fetish by bowling on Rock’n'Bowl night and drinking domestic beer by the pitcher, this is the sort of freak whose idea of getting his ironic rocks off is getting blown by a transgender high-rent call girl while a repeat of Family Guy plays on the hotel television, all the while texting his girlfriend on his iPhone AND watching some midget fist a dog on RedTube.

Cavemen is a paean to our drive-through society, encapsulating everything it stands for but at the same time saying nothing at all. After we willingly suspend our disbelief that modern day humanoids actually do exist (and shop at Abercrombie & Fitch), the viewer is presented with additional logical fallacies that on the surface seem to spark intellectual curiosity, yet fail to deliver satisfactorily. For instance, the fact that Neanderthals do exist appears to validate the core tenets evolutionary theory, and that they are consumed with consumerism and suffer the trappings of modern human culture and discourse speaks somewhat to Social Darwinism.

However, the opposite argument can be made; Neanderthals and Cro-magnons exist together because that is exactly how the Intelligent Designer created them 6,000+ years ago. God in this case allowed Neanderthals, unlike the dinosaurs, to continue existing. Albeit, he put them in cashmere V-neck sweater vests. It’s all part of the plan.

This sort of maddening dichotomy acts as a governor, keeping the show from driving too fast. This parallels our existence here in America, where a President can veto a $5 billion bill that extends healthcare for children, dismissing it as impractically expensive, yet go before Congress and demand an additional $150 billion to fund some wayward nation-building wet dream half a world away. With a straight face.

Then it struck me. Cavemen is an intentionally evil work of madcap satire. It is a carefully crafted alternate universe, a Kafka-ish dream state, one whose narrative constructs a meta-reality so insanely ludicrious that it defies the imagination. It mines territory heretofore unexplored by previous entries to the genre (e.g. the movie Encino Man, which existed mostly to capitalize on the brief supernova-like existence that was the career of Pauly Shore). The bulldada absurdity is viscerally poignant, so real and material you can smell it. It’s akin to screening David Lynch’s The Elephant Man in a convalescent home for a bevy of unwitting octogenarians, after dosing them with peyote and Dulcolax.

Cavemen is essentially a 30-minute malapropism built around a loosely constructed plot. The plot doesn’t matter. It doesn’t need to. It only exists as a greaser, a non-stick lube that allows a light, crispy, trans-fat-free breading to easily separate from the surface.

Cavemen reminds us of our shallow, empty and mindless pursuits of pomp and artifice². And for this alone, it is eminently qualified as fantastically lurid agit-prop that happens to use the premise of two hairy knuckle draggers playing Nintendo Wii as its delivery vehicle.

Then the following sitcom came on with four guys³ who carpool to work together AND IT WAS THE SAME EXACT SHOW.

Cavemen

Tuesday nights, 8/7 Central
ABC

Footnotes

¹These are not really the cavemen’s names, but they might as well be.

³ One of these guys was the fat kid from Stand by Me, who is the latest beneficiary of Rebecca Romjin’s incessant proclivity to marry down.