A PRODUCT TO DIE FOR

No, this wasn't in a police evidence locker; I found it at my local hardware store.

DECK THE MALLS

I just saw this dress in Macy's. Are women flocking to the "Mrs. Claus look" this summer?"

DISCOUNT STALKING

Based on this sign by the exit, I think Sears is stalking me?

…OR NOT

GUATEMALAN LOVE SONG

In the movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Jane Lynch's character Paula tells Andy (Steve Carell) that her former Guatemalan gardner / lover Javier once serenaded her with a "beautiful old Guatemalan love song" which went like this:

Cuando arreglan mi cuarto
No encuentro nada.
Donde va con tanta prisa?
Al partido de futbol.

For those of wondering about the English translation, it's roughly:

Whenever they clean my room
I can find nothing.
Where are you going in such a hurry?
To a soccer game.


Weird, huh? Anyway… you'd probably love the funny t-shirts and stickers at my online store: TVsauce.com

SAN FRANCISCO

Transamerica knuckle

Textbook Pizza at Tony's

Palace of Fine Arts

The least mysterious room at the Winchester Mystery House

COWBOY FESTIVAL

Cowboy S+M gear?

Western ladies. You can't see it, but the one on the left is holding a Samsung Galaxy.

Fighting on arrival, fighting for survival

NO BANKING OF BALLS

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DEAR __________

Santa Monica's Pacific Park really knows how to make a kid feel special on his birthday.

IT'S A STEAL

Listen, Ross — if you're not cool with shoplifting, then you do not love bargains as much as I do.

MIKE AND IKE AND YIPES!

When I first saw this giant box of Mike and Ike, I thought it was a board game based on the candy.

COVER ME

This is the tag that was on my old electric blanket. I wonder if there's still a "Blanket Service Station" — and will they check my oil too?

SLOW BURN

Here's a delightful Yelp Review of Stella Barra Pizza. The reviewer is pissed that she literally burned the roof of her mouth eating some pizza. She didn't figuratively or metaphorically burn herself, mind you — she literally burned herself.

And the fact that she put hot food in her mouth before it had cooled enough to chew it "really bothered" her about the restaurant.

It's almost as if the pizza was in an oven or something.

YOU KNOW IT'S A LONG MENU WHEN...

PAPER TRAIL

At a job I had recently, the janitor stored the extra toilet paper on top of the paper towel dispenser. One day, I rearranged the rolls more entertainingly. A few days later, I found it had been rearranged again. He totally got it.

We went back and forth like this for a while. It was like having a delightful conversation with someone I never met.

I didn't take pictures of all of the configurations, but here are some of my favorites:

I'LL SEE YOU IN HEALTH

Just finished a cooking show for CBS. The premise: professional chefs transform unhealthy home recipes of normal folks into nutritious & delicious meals.

Here's a photo of our craft service table:

THE HANGOVER

I paid a visit to the Irish bar from my college days. The drink menu has undergone quite a transformation. With vodka flavors like "Birthday Cake" and "Salted Karamel," these days the place seems to cater to alcoholic babies.

OH, CANADA!

Jeez, Netflix, that's a pretty specific category.

SHE'S GOT LEGS?

If I could choose one word to describe a sexy female leg, undoubtedly it would be "Toothpick."

By the way, J Crew's mannequin is too skinny even for Toothpick Jeans, so the store had to pin them.

PECAN'T

Pecan Pie-flavored Pringles taste like dehydrated McGriddles.

COPY THAT

Shia LaBeouf has been accused of plagiarism... but no one can say he stole his new idea for a dried meat product:

MOONRAKE

Hm... I'm not familiar with that last film in 
the SyFy Channel's James Bond marathon.

BLANKET OF SNOW?

This sheet set is labeled "Weatherproof" but if there are 
meteorological conditions occurring in your bedroom, 
wet linens are probably the least of your problems. 

FRO-ROE

They've got lots of toppings at my local frozen yogurt place. 
The one in the upper right appears to be salmon roe.

LIQUOR? I HARDLY KNOW HER!

I tore this liquor ad (for Grand Marnier or Dewar's) out of a magazine in 1994.
I was fascinated by the Photoshopping of the model's fingers on her left hand.

SLIGHTLY IRREGULAR

Here's a page from a catalogue I got in the mail once.
This page caught my eye because of the woman in the upper left box.

At the bottom of the page, it says "Slightly Irregular" — this look implies that maybe the phrase is meant to describe the model, not the bra. 

BRANDEIS STORIES

Thirteen years ago today, I began the most rewarding job I ever had — I helped my friend David Milch teach a month-long theater course to high school students visiting Brandeis University.

Mara, David, Julia, Dave, Rachel, Josh,
Deborah, Emily, Naomi, Allie, Jesse, Sharon, Andi, Michal, Erielle, Gillian

David did all of the heavy lifting education-wise, but I enjoyed every minute I got to work with the students.

In addition to theater history and technique, the kids received a few life lessons that summer too. They got their first taste of self-indulgent, shitty absurdist theater thanks to the Gloucester Stage's idiotic play called Pipe. 

In Cambridge, they saw the brilliant Marcel Marceau. And in Boston, we enjoyed a delightful outdoor performance of The Tempest — that was enhanced by the brief interruption of an actual thunderstorm.

For the most part, I had weekends off and used them to run around New England.

I saw the movie Hamlet with a Dane (a teacher named Sara), and I got to see the Big Dig in progress. (I believe they're really close to finishing that project.)

David and I took a trip to Foxwoods where I won $500 from a Betty Boop slot machine. I stood there while the speakers blared "I wanna be loved by you... you and nobody else but you!" over and over again for 10 minutes until a casino employee finally shut it off and paid me. 

During a weekend in Manhattan, we scarfed down some coal-fired pizza at John's, and I ran into my buddy Frank Nicotero in Washington Square Park (he was shooting remotes for the show that would make him famous, Street Smarts).

As a baseball fan, it was a thrill to finally visit Fenway Park. The ballpark itself is a wreck, and they serve the worst hot dogs I've ever eaten, but far and away the best baseball fans I've ever sat with were at Fenway. They were the perfect combination of being very knowledgable and very salty. Fans would scream at the top of their lungs at the manager about dumb trades made decades ago.

I also enjoyed that around Fenway only two t-shirts were available for purchase: "Red Sox Nation" and "Yankees Suck." As a lifelong Yankees fan, I found Boston's specifically-directed sartorial anger fascinating and hilarious. You wouldn't be able to find a "Red Sox Sucks" shirt anywhere in New York; it wouldn't even occur to us to make one.

And that summer I achieved a lifelong dream: visiting Bourne, Massachusetts — named for a famous whaler named Jonathan Bourne (imagine a time when you could gain naming-a-town-after-you notoriety through fishing). 

I visited the Jonathan Bourne Historical Society and Bourne High School.

When I excitedly told the librarian "I AM Jonathan Bourne!" she couldn't have seemed less impressed. Guess I should've learned to catch a whale.

I still think about those Brandeis kids from time to time. We did a class exercise in  storytelling where each student had a limited amount of time to tell a personal story until a bell went off. Every time the bell would ring, we'd all feel disappointed that we wouldn't get to hear the end of the story.

On the last day we were all together, I told them that I was sad to see them go because to me, they were all stories, and now it was if a bell was going off, and I'd never get to find out how all those wonderful stories turned out.

But thanks to the internet, I've gotten to see a little more of those stories.

Mara got her doctorate in epidemiology from Harvard and is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Sharon went to Yale and became an attorney in Chicago.

After getting her Masters in Diplomacy and Conflict Studies, Erielle became an anchor on Israel's IBA News, then returned to her native Oklahoma to become the weekend anchor at KOCO.

Those are some good stories.

WHY SO SINEWY?

If you've always wanted rock-hard abs on your back, 
you can't go wrong with this Batman backpack.

DECORATIVE

This wooden egg from West Elm is "for decorative use only." So don't go trying to make a Denver omelet with it, okay?

PEPPER POTBELLIED

Found at my local Hallmark — this fat Iron Man doll. I can't decide whether this looks like Tony Stark ate too many Chocodiles or just had a bad allergic reaction to shellfish.

BALLISTIC MISSIVES

While at the Churchill War Rooms in London last summer, I purchased some great postcards featuring replicas of World War II propaganda posters.

Interesting choice — trying to recruit soldiers using the fashion angle.

More sartorial propagnda. I'm not sure why long sleeves were so dangerous. Maybe the Allies were rationing fabric?

Hm... they knew to avoid those deadly carbs even back then.

That's good advice even in peacetime.

PART OF A DISTURBING BREAKFAST

Safeway (aka Vons) sells generic versions of sugary cereals. Each one has its own loony mascot. And each one is utterly terrifying. Witness:

Cinnamon Crunch is the generic version of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. The mascot of the name-brand cereal is a kindly old baker named Wendell. But Safeway has chosen a space alien to represent their cereal. Is there some connection between extra terrestrials and cinnamon that I don't know about?

Well, obviously Cocoa Nuggets is the generic of Cocoa Krispies. Now, if the cereal were banana flavored, the monkey mascot would make sense. And maybe I could get on board this mascot if he were a brown monkey. You know — brown like cocoa. But inexplicably, he's a green monkey! 
(By the way, there are green monkeys. Known as Sabaeus monkeys, they spread the deadly Marburg Virus in the '60s.)

Okay, this one's on the nose. But hey — Apple Orbits makes more sense than Apple Jacks, right? 
Are you noticing the pattern with these mascots? They all have scarily protracted tongues. And crazy eyes.

Safeway's version of Froot Loops employs an amphibian instead of Toucan Sam. Well, at least the absurdly elongated tongue makes sense on a frog.

It took me a while to figure out what Crackles was the generic for — it's Cap'n Crunch. Once you understand that, the Crackles mascot makes sense; as a sea creature, he's even more nautical than Horatio Magellan Crunch. But he's not just an octopus — he's a pirate octopus! (which I suppose makes the proposition of "walking the plank" far less treacherous)

The rabbit mascot of Marshmallow Magic (literally the poor man's Lucky Charms) is the most unnerving. His tongue is thankfully not as tumescent, but I haven't seen such haunting eyes since the final frame of Roman Polanski's Repulsion.