Things I never expected to say

While talking to my wife: "I'm down with toaster oven shopping."

Us and them

Okay, let me get this straight.

This week's Us Weekly arrived in the mail today (addressed to my wife, not to me, wisenheimers...) and the cover story is about the interview Jennifer Aniston has given to Vanity Fair.

Boy, I hate when someone talks about a story that's appearing elsewhere.

Er, hmm.

Never mind.

Reasons I need to go to Canada...

Aw, man.

I have this horrible habit of jonesing for things that I can't have.

Like hair.

Or in this case, cherry Pez. In the U.S.A., the folks at Pez phased out cherry in favor of grape.

But if the Internet is to be believed (and why not?), cherry Pez is still available in Canada. Check out more pictures here.

Apple Pez is available in Spain, apparently, but that trip might be a little harder to sneak by.

"You want to go where?"

"Spain."

"You don't even speak Spanish."

"I know."

"So why do you want to go?"

"It's a country with a rich history, it's beautiful and .... they have apple Pez."

At that point, my wife would roll her eyes so hard, she could see back to 1982.

This isn't the first time I've coveted a cool flavor of Pez. I snagged a few packs of cola Pez on eBay a while back. At the time, that flavor was mainly available in Japan.

But a month after I got it, we found a whole buttload of the new cola Pez at Toys R Us.

There's no justice sometimes.

If there was, I'd have cherry Pez.

And hair.

"Who understands those rap guys?"

Is anyone else disturbed that Target has appropriated Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back" to sell backpacks?

I knew the song was destined to be used in a commercial, but I was thinking more along the lines of cereal.

"I like Grape Nuts and I cannot lie..."

Dumb things I've done (3 in an occasional series)

While riding in the car, I was goofing around with my newly purchased school supplies. I took two pencil-top erasers and pinch-suctioned them on both sides of my neck, a la the Frankenstein monster.

Why stop at pink rubber neckbolts? I emptied the whole package of erasers and stuck them on various parts of my face.

The flush of pride I felt at my cleverness soon faded when my mom made me take them off and I found that each one had left a miniature (but totally noticeable) hickey.

And then we arrived at the mall.

Never coming to a theater near you: Bad ideas for bad movies

It's the story of an interior decorator who, when knocked in the head by an errant curtain rod, goes on a rampage, dispatching those who get in her way with sconces and Yankee Candles.

The title: Bad Beth and Beyond.

Shape of ... a smoking gun!

Well, after this, it will be impossible to convince anyone that I don't have too much time on my hands. Just a warning: this is probably the geekiest thing you'll read today.

I recently mentioned that the Wonder Twins didn't use rings and how I'm such a dork that it bugs me when people said they did.

I figured that maybe people were thinking of the uber-lame Thing cartoon in which teen Benjy Grimm touched his rings together and said "Thing Ring, do your thing!" to change into the Thing.

But then as my wife pointed out, "Who in the world remembers that but you?"

Elsewhere, someone suggested that it was the Shazam cartoon. Billy Batson only needed to utter the magic word "Shazam" to turn into Captain Marvel.

But there was a cartoon called "Shazzan," which, like "Superfriends," was a Hanna-Harbera production. It was about two teenagers, Chuck and Nancy, and a genie named Shazzan.

Here's the opening narration, courtesy of IMDB.com:

Inside a cave off the coast of Maine, Chuck and Nancy find a mysterious chest containing the halves of a strange ring. When joined the ring forms the word Shazzan, and with this magical command, they are transported back to the fabled land of the Arabian Knights! Here they meet their genie, Shazzan. Shazzan presents them Kaboobie, a magical flying camel, and gives Chuck a magic belt and rope. Shazzan will serve them whenever they call, but he cannot return them home until they deliver the ring to its rightful owner. And thus begins their incredible journey!

So then it's just a quick hop and a jump through the Yahoo Image Search before I find this picture of the kids joining their ring.



Now compare this to the familiar Wonder Twins transformation scene.



Pretty eerie, huh?

The half-hour show popped up in syndication from time to time, along with just about everything else Hanna-Barbera made, so if you grew up when I did, there's a good chance that you might have seen it.

Another thing that would tie this all together is that Zan and Jayna were featured in short cartoons on the Superfriends shows in which they would help teens in trouble. This usually amounted to saving them from the perils of joyriding, hitchhiking, or being blamed for a tiger escaping from the zoo.

The kicker is that the kids would contact them via the Teen Trouble Alert, which appeared on the wrists of the Wonder Twins for the few seconds they used them. I seem to recall that once or twice, they might have been drawn as ring communicators as opposed to wrist communicators.

"Superfriends" wasn't exactly known for animation consistency.

So maybe all this stuff got lumped in together in everyone's collective memories to the point that Wonder Twins = rings. Just like after this, me = dork.

I knew that reading all those "Encyclopedia Brown" books would pay off someday...