bigtiny sez....

While I was at the theater the other night, the now common string of commercials was playing before the feature started. I HATE this, but there's nothing I can do about it. The last commercial was for a mall franchise called 'Build a Bear'. The commercial left me wide mouthed and speechless. It took me several minutes to realize that it was actually a commercial not some subversive Fellini-esque parody of a commercial. I hate...no I FUCKING HATE malls and all of the stupid franchises that have been invented as part of the burgeoning mall culture in this country. A bunch of bored, ignorant shit heads walking around a manufactured utopia of over priced stores buying shit that they don't need from companies who only want to get their money......it makes me want to puke. But I digress. I just wanted to convey how much I hate the mentality of the people who think up these concept stores for the mall culture...and that's part of what left me speechless after seeing this c...

When I was a kid, here was nothing l loved to hear more on a spring or summer afternoon than "we're going to the drive in tonight!" I LOVED the drive-in. Sitting in the family car, or later in my high school beater, eating home popped popcorn out of brown paper shopping bags and cracking the old cooler for a cold Dr. Pepper, while watching my favorite movie stars a 40x80 FOOT movie screen...it was excellent! When we were really young we'd actually get into our PJs before we left the house so that we could just sleep in the car....then get carried into the house without rousing...what a life! I remember sneaking out of my grandparent's house when I was 10 to go sit on the fence of the drive-in that was next door to their neighborhood and watch 'Bonnie and Clyde'. I couldn't have even gotten in to see it at that age, but there it was, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway (Faye Dunaway!!!) 40 feet high and blasting their way through anybody that got in their wa...

I was coming up out of the subway today and I noticed a young woman coming down the escalator with a GINORMOUS 'hand' bag. This thing was made out of leather, was about 3 times as big as she was, was so heavy that it was dragging her down the escalator like a horse drawn carriage, and looked like if one unfolded it it could be used as an open air shelter in the Iraqi desert. The little thing looked exhaused hefting this thing left, right, forward, back, its sides bulging like those old Xmastime paintings of Santa Clause arriving down the chimney with a loaded bag of goodies. I understand the need for carry bags in an urban environment, I've even been known to load my cell phone, iPod, a couple of geek computer books, and a hard drive into a backpack once in a while, but this seems to be getting out of hand. Is it really necessary for people to carry around bags loaded with 40-50 pounds of detritus? What IS this stuff they're all carrying around anyway? Well let's s...

Have you noticed that potato chip bags have been steadily shrinking for the past few years? Used to be, for $.99 you got about a 17 pound bag of potato chips. I'm talking Lay's potato chips (no one can eat just one!) Then for some reason (I guess potatoes just suddenly started costing 20 times what they used to) that big bag started costing about $4. Then a few years ago, the marketing wiz' at Frito-Lay decided to play some mind games, I guess to keep us from realizing that they were raising prices, and invented this new size bag, that cost the magical $.99. It held about double what we used to get in vending machines or our lunchboxes when I was a kid. I think this was labelled 'The Big Munch' or something stupid like that. The other day, I'm down at the sub shop and I figure I'll grab a 'Big Munch' to go with my turkey sub. I was shocked to see that the $.99 bag from Frito-Lay is now about equal size to what we used to get in the vending machine or...

Walking back to work today after lunch, I passed by the back of a locally famous seafood restaurant. Covering the usual plethora of restaurantly odors (garbage, old mops, bleach) was a heavy blanket, a cloud, nee a THUNDERHEAD of the smell of bacon. What is it about this lowly meat that makes it such a great foodstuff? And the SMELL! And that got me to thinking about smells. Our noses are really amazing things. Pulling scents out of the air, unraveling layer upon layer of aromas to be processed by our olfactory sense. And then there's the nose to brain interface, you know, that weird thing that happens when a smell jogs some latent memory -- for me there are many: - the smell of a kitchen where coffee is brewing and breakfast (usually including eggs and the aforementioned bacon) is either sizzling on the stove, or has recently been consumed - the smell of a carnival -- cotton candy and cheap perfume - brownies baking - grilled steak on a summer evening It's amazing that the bra...

I was in the supermarket the other day, someplace I hate to go, and I noticed something I'd never seen before. Now, I typically buy pretty straightforward stuff with a minimum of junk food. I tend to avoid processed foods when I can, don't eat a lot of mixes or frozen dinners, that sort of thing. Believe me, I'm not a health nut - plenty of bacon, wheat thins, and butter go in the basket, but I try. So, I'm surfing through the overcrowded dairy section looking for butter and what do I run into between the yogurt and the cookie dough (dairy?!?!?) but something called 'cheesecake filling' made by none other than 'Philadelphia Brand' (hey, what the fuck is it with Philly and cream cheese anyway....do they claim to have invented the stuff or something?!?!?). My mind reeled at the thoughts flooding through it as I stared at this new discovery. Why in the hell would ANYBODY want to eat preprocessed cheese-food crap like this and call it cheesecake. Why is it t...

Okay readers, I'm here today to talk about monkeys. That's right, monkeys! I was thinking today, how utterly fascinating monkeys are. They are our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, except for politicians, whose closest relatives are of the single-cell variety. I remember a trip to the Bronx zoo years ago, where I watched a silver back gorilla, sitting on a lawn as zoo visitors stood and watched him. He was kingly. It was clear that as far as he was concerned, HE was watching US. I remember that moment when I happened to catch his eye and had the profound feeling that I wasn't really looking at an animal, but that perhaps, just perhaps, just for a second, it was somebody familiar with whom I was sharing a moment..... Which made me think one of my favorite all time television commercials- it was for luggage (either American Tourister or Samsonite...I think American Tourister) where a narrator talks about the toughness of the latest line of luggage, while on camera a su...