5/9/12

Come on over. We'll watch The Voice and have some soup.

I don't generally watch reality TV, but this season I watched a little bit of the Voice. I've learned the best way to watch it is via DVR. That way, I get to skip (a) commercials, (b) background stories I don't give a shit about (c) the long, drawn out, artificial suspense of the actual choosing process, built-up by saying "And the winner is..." and then NOTHING AT ALL for a solid 60 seconds while suspenseful music plays in the background.

So I fast forward until I see someone singing, listen for a few seconds to find out if it's a good performance or a song I like -- and if it's not I fast-forward again. When they're doing the actual cuts, I just fast forward until someone jumps up and down really fast, then I stop it to see who got picked to stay. It's amazing how quickly you can watch a two hour program this way.

I stopped watching it a couple of weeks back when the guy I liked best got cut. I can't remember his name, but he was some older black dude with a great voice. I'm sure someone knows who I'm talking about. I think Christina let him go and kept the opera singer who made every rock song sound like it belonged in a Disney movie. Anyway, my wife told me who won last night, and she asked me if I wanted to see them choose the winner.

So I watched it, however I was not adequately prepared. I mean, I already knew who won, so I was prepared for that -- but what I was not prepared for, not even in the slightest, was the sheer, gut-wrenching roller coaster of emotions I experienced when I saw Christina Aguilera's big sparkly diaper.

What the hell was that thing? I could not look away. At first I thought I was looking at the commander of the Vl'hurgs after someone said "I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle." Talk about your terrible miscalculation of scale. I tried not to imagine the horror of three low-paid assistants with plungers desperately attempting to tuck all that ass up into what looked to be some sort of adamantium chastity belt, but I failed. It was like the Klein Bottle of underwear, with no inside and no outside. It was just all over the place and nowhere all at once.

And while I'm on a rant about this show, am I the only one here who thinks Cee Lo sucks? He really cannot sing. I mean, granted, he sings marginally better than I do, but then again, nobody is paying me crap-tons of money for doing something I suck at (contrary to what most of my co-workers probably believe). His voice has the timbre of a dull circular saw cutting through sheet metal and just goes to prove that the music biz is mostly all about luck and who decides you're going to be a star.

At any rate, I couldn't finish watching it, so I wandered out into the kitchen to find something to eat. I was looking for cereal in the pantry, but I saw a little box in the corner that caught my eye. It was a memory from my childhood that I haven't thought about in a really long time. It was this:


When did my wife buy Maypo? I thought, pulling it off the shelf. I haven't seen this stuff in years.

It turns out that was a very good question, because when I asked her, she said she didn't recall buying it. When I looked at the box, I immediately discovered why this was:


Yes, that is a 13-year-old box of Maypo you're looking at right there. Clearly I need to watch less reality TV and do more cleaning shit up. Incidentally, this one was the winner, if such a contest can even have winners. The runners up consisted of about ten cans of soup, a few boxes of crackers, some blueberry pie filling, three full boxes of instant oatmeal, 2 cans of breadcrumbs, a package of chocolate made for dipping fruit, and some unidentifiable dried things that I think used to be raisins or cranberries. Maybe both. Or neither.

Basically, what we had here was an evil pantry of horrific death, because the most recent date on this entire batch of carefully preserved botulism was -- believe it or not -- 2009.

I did take great pleasure in throwing out the Lentil soup though. I hate those filthy little skin-covered bags of sand.




23 comments:

  1. Anonymous4:16 AM

    Ahhh, thank god your back. I was getting worried it was over. Keep 'em coming Johnny!

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  2. The Vh'lurgs... That is amazing.

    You should have given the oatmeal a shot.

    I mean with a gun. Gross.

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  3. I would've opened that 12 year old oatmeal. My curiosity about what might be living inside would've overcome the gross-out factor.

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    Replies
    1. It was OPEN already. I'm pretty sure it had become sentient and escaped long ago.

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  4. Hah, you watch The Voice almost the same way I watch Dancing with the Stars.

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  5. Anonymous12:54 PM

    Being from The South, I have never had the pleasure of eating Maypo. Not sure we have that available down here. So what or who exactly is that little guy on the box? I am imagining a whole series of TV commercials featuring the lovable Maypo imp... Intriguing.

    - Mackerel

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  6. No, no, no - you blew it. The garbage can was not the place for that stuff; you should have saved it and then put it out for the Boy Scouts the next time they came around collecting food! ("Scouting for Food," maybe you don't have it in your parts?) Failing that, another great outlet would have been your local food pantry. The volunteers there would have been LTAO when it came in the door, you know they need a little humor in their lives. :-)

    Seriously, I know whereof I speak. I have volunteered for many years at my son's troop's Scouting for Food drive, and my favorite thing is surveying the "expired" goods table. This year it was absolutely overflowing with probably 800 items that we couldn't take. The real gems of the collection that I came across were a can of Campbell's Cream of Celery dated 1994 (this I handled like the unexploded grenade that it was - anyone up for "Cream of Botulism" for din-din?), and a can of "seafood paella." The latter is truly frightening. Not only is it expired, it is a tiny little thing, maybe 4 oz., and yet supposedly contains everything from shrimp to oysters to mussels like you would normally find in paella. I actually saved it and brought it home. My plan is to get my seafood-business brother to crack it open, as I don't dare...

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    1. I can almost hear the gas escaping when you pop the top with the can opener....that's gooooood eatin'

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    2. That would be the perfect white elephant gift this Christmas!

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  7. Maypo. The name alone just smacks of marketing genius.

    As for The Voice, I got hooked early by the suspense of whether or not Christina's fun puppets would finally sproing out of their compression chambers. I was on the edge of my seat all season.

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    Replies
    1. She cheats. Those things are double-sided taped right to her clothes.

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  8. I, too, watch The Voice, but only because I'm obsessed with Cee-Lo's T-Rex arms and midget hands.

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  9. Cee-Lo has T-Rex arms and midget hands??? I've never watched The Voice because I thought it looked too American Idol-ish. As for Maypo wasn't there a little song that used to go along with that stuff? I've never eaten it that I know of but I do recall my mother singing a Maypo commercial.

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  10. Anonymous6:31 PM

    Mr. Virgil-
    Can you please tell the story about how your mother in law buried the pet bird alive?

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    Replies
    1. Oh boy. OK, deal. But only if you stop calling me Mr. Virgil. That's creepy.

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    2. Anonymous11:28 AM

      OK. Fair enough. Get on that fucking story, Johnny! LOL.

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  11. I threw way six or seven boxes of Jello earlier this week. I know I haven't bought Jello in at least five years, and probably longer. The grand prize still goes to my mother, though. We found a jar of basil in her pantry last year with a price tag from a store that has been out of business for over twenty years.

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    Replies
    1. I'm really surprised it hadn't turned to dust.

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  12. I refuse to watch all reality TV. It isn't any more real that wrestling, and nothing is lame enough for them to exclude. The day I had to spend watching live feeds of May Day protesters (for work) was like the seventh circle of hell for me.

    On the food front...my Mom was the Penicillin Queen of the Western World. She would save stuff so long past its expiry date I am sure some of it ate some of the rest, just to survive the cold in her fridge. The longest-running fiction in our family was that she was going to make soup out of the leftover turkey the day after Thanksgiving. One year, when we had a side-by-side fridge with a tiny freezer, we had to unpack the freezer to find room for the tin foil wrapped turkey carcass. As we pulled out rock-solid bags of peas and spinach, we finally found space...if we removed the turkey carcass from LAST year (at least, I assume it was only last year). The poor thing had stalactites hanging from its ribs.

    Diane

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  13. When we cleaned out my husband's grandmother's kitchen after she died, we found all sort of gems - spices in boxes stamped 9 cents (with the little cents symbol) in purple ink, cornmeal from the ninties (she died in '05), and tons of freezer containers that were well over twenty years old. You gotta love the Depression generation. That doesn't explain you, though.

    Cee lo does better as Gnarls Barkley, IMO. That might just be Danger Mouse, though. And no one expects you to sing - you're a drummer!

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  14. Anonymous5:31 PM

    OMG - how did you stumble into my pantry?!?
    -RobinM

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  15. Anonymous7:42 PM

    Skin covered bags of sand! Now that's funny.

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