I have discovered, just this minute, that I don’t particularly care for Sour Cream & Onion potato chips. They sounded good, as sour cream and onion seems like it would be a decent combination, and the whole pre-dipped-but-not-really-dipped-at-all chip thing. But it just doesn’t work well in reality. Now, of course, it’s just sour cream & onion flavor, and not actual sour cream and actual onions, so there’s a big problem. You’re getting this rather thin chip, without the weight and texture of the sour cream. Yes, and the onion bits, but mainly, the sour cream. So you’re left with a bunch of thin, lightweight chips that are already giving me a headache. I’d blame that on massive concentrations of salt, but it looks like they aren’t really all that salty, so, hey, MSG, I’ll blame that, even if Jasona wants to insist that MSG is delightfully tasty and the key to good health, long life, and a close, personal relationship with spiders.
I do, however, like the salt and vinegar (probably Salt & Vinegar) chips. But only a few at a time. Otherwise, it’s back to the headache thing. Actually, I am going to blame it on the sodium content, of which the MSG plays a role, as I have a strong urge to drink a lot of water, and, as with all salty foods, my desire to eat it fades very quickly. Like with soft pretzels that have inordinate amounts of salt on them, I mean enough salt to remove ice from an appreciable amount of roadway. At least, I hear tell that salt is used to remove ice from roads, but it’s something alien to my Coastal Californian lifestyle.
Not that it’s my fault: I spent one Christmas in Pennsylvania, and it didn’t snow. The closest it came to snowing was a small flurry, which looked like someone venting their clothes dryer improperly. Oh, the year before it had snowed, on an almost Biblical scale. Multiple feet of snow, huge drifts, people unable to open their front doors, ice on the surfaces not covered with snow. But when I was there? No snow. Fortunately, they didn’t identify me as the cause, so I wasn’t burned at the stake. Though I did steer clear of the Amish, because, you know, they’re big into that sort of thing.
Er, right. Chips. The worst, by far, are BBQ flavored. Although now that I think about it, they probably do taste much like a barbeque (grill), since they don’t taste like any sort of barbeque sauce that you’d want to put on anything. They’re certainly not designed to be eaten by people who actually like barbequed food, because any sauce, even a generic Kraft sauce, tastes better than BBQ-flavored chips. Maybe some off-brand, Smart&Final sort of bulk sauce is that bad, bad enough to make taste buds give up the will to live. Not as bad as, say, Town & Country Diet Cola, but still...you know, if I were to ever eat BBQ-flavored potato chips and drink Town & Country Diet Cola at the same time, I’d die. Hell, I just shaved a few years off my life by even thinking about that combination.
Guybrush Threepwood: [singing] Oh... there's... a... monkey in my pocket / And he's stealing all my change / His stare is blank and glassy / I suspect that he's deranged!
I never played that game. I might just have to search for a copy. Had I previously played adventure games that included puzzles so random that they seemed designed to force you to purchase the hint guide, I probably would have bought the Monkey Island games when they came out. I mean, it’s got monkeys and pirates. Like chocolate and peanut butter, but much more amusing.
I still have an article from Games magazine, a review of King’s Quest II, where they declare that it’s the first game to weigh in at over one megabyte, meaning that it required multiple 5 1/4" disks. How the hell did they ever fit Starflight onto two 5 1/4" disks? Or Wasteland onto one? Oh, yeah, because they just had a solid game, and not hundreds of megs of intro movies and repetitive music and now I’m getting crotchety and ranting about something that should be another column so I’ll stop.