EAT MOR CHIKIN. AND MOR. AND MOR.

Let's set the scene first. Last month, the local Chick-Fil-A had a buy-one-get-one type of promotion--along with a little voucher card, you keep the receipt from your order, bring it in again in August, and you get the same order again, free. I didn't realize the sandwiches were so fucking expensive, so I go the (relatively) conservative route and buy 6 to last me a couple days, along with some sides (no Icedream, sorry!).

I go in the other day to claim my duplicate on-the-house order, and I'm reading off the original receipt and about to hand it over. Then a cowbell rings. But "Don't Fear the Reaper" isn't playing; technically it's not that kind of cowbell anyway, but rather, a bell--well, more like a siren, actually--that happens to be on a prop cow. Imagine a door chime hopped up on meth or some overzealous guy trying to play blast-beats on a triangle for a close approximation of the sound.

Unbeknownst to me, every 100th customer gets their food free. So I get to keep the voucher for another use later. I'm kind of in a neutral nonplussed mood about the whole thing; it's cool I'm reaping so many rewards from the initial order, but at the same time kicking myself for not ordering more and stockpiling.

Due to all this free food, I can now totally overlook Chick-Fil-A incessantly using styrofoam and underwriting "Adventures from the Book of Virtues."

Obligatory side points:

1. Chick-Fil-A without a doubt is my favorite kind of boneless chicken, and I guess ultimately would probably tie with Kenny Rogers Roasters' chicken as my favorite ever. For some reason, though, I don't think the stand-alone restaurants have the charm of the stores in malls (in fact, I didn't know stand-alone ones existed until I went to one in Florida as a teen). Of course, all the mall stores around here were two-story double-decker style, which was great because you could be stuffing your face with waffle fries and still be theoretically enjoying the same high altitude dining experience as the bourgeoise assholes nibbling tea sandwiches in the Lazarus cafe. Of course, the one I frequented the most just happened to be right across from the mall's arcade, which contributes a lot to my memories of it. How grand it was to wolf down my food in anticipation of laying my peanut oil saturated digits on a N.A.R.C. cabinet.
2. Strangely enough, this is not my first streak of luck involving boneless southern-style chicken this year; a few months ago I found coupons good for free McDonald's Southern Style Chicken Sandwich and Southern Style Chicken Biscuit. I should probably do a full review later, but what really freaked me out is that every time I used a coupon, I got a plain sandwich, but on every second bite the chicken aftertaste had a strong pickle flavor.
3. Believe it or not, the graphic at the top was the very first Photoshop job I ever did in the late '90s. I was about to type that all my luck was S. Truett Cathy bestowing some posthumous blessings on me for my work, but by gum, as of this writing, he's still alive.

"...side, and the bumpuuuuuh..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcrei6ih0_c

I've been a huge fan of this song for years (probably the best of all their stuff), but only now have I seen its true, glorious potential when in video form.

1. The lead singer is like a lethargic version of one of the New Edition guys.
2. What's with the abundance of the Protectacap style helmets? I've never seen so many at once, even in groups of disabled people. If I saw them while driving by, there's a good chance I'd think it was just some hockey team holding the carwash. SO TRAGICALLY, I'D CONTINUE DRIVING.
3. What exactly is the kid with the walker doing at the beginning of the video? I mean, I could sort of understand if that was where the fuel intake was...
4. The driving scenes look like they came straight out of an Eazy-E video.

A Ploy Named Charlie Brown...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH1JEGgvKvQ

Ever since I was a kid, I've always loved the ending sequence to A Boy Named Charlie Brown, with Rod McKuen's words of melancholy drifting over flashes of the production staff in colorized negative form.

It's also a sequence I've solemnly sworn to parodize if I'm ever afforded the luxury (tragedy?) of doing some Family Guy type gig. I'm not sure yet exactly how I'd parody it. Maybe with serial killers, maybe with different angle shots of Chris Burke.

AZNTV, we hardly knew ye...

Due to billing issues with Comcast resulting from a takeover and generally mediocre service, I finally switched over to IPTV through my local phone company/ISP this week. The pair of guys running the wire and setting it up kept commenting to me with trying-to-be-polite variations on "Boy, you have a lot of shit in your house." I still can't tell whether they were jokingly envious, or trying to tell me they had trouble with the installation because of it (in one room and one room only, you do have to navigate a labyrinth of boxes and furniture to get to the old cable outlet).

Ironically, a day or two before the installation, I saw the news that AZN Television is no more when I attempted to check their scheduling (while investigating into this further, I also learned Lydia Shum from "Living with Lydia"--if you've never seen it, imagine a Singaporean sitcom striving to be the penultimate concoction of '80s plot devices, with sort of a Asiatic quasi-Roseanne titular lead--passed away in February). I felt genuinely sad, not only because had pretty much become my favorite TV channel of all time, but I had lost it in 2007. Without warning, it was suddenly replaced by EWTN, and since then I sort of always hoped I'd get it back sometime.

I didn't care for some of their original programming, and I think at times they tried to be overly hip and ending up just wiggerizing things with DJ Hapa. I also probably represented the least desirable target demographic; the young white guy generally looking for martial arts flicks and anime. But since AZN aired shows based on their cultural pedigree, not grouped by content, they presented a weird eclectic mix of programming--what other single channel could show Story of Chinese Gods (trippiest animation evah!!), a bunch of uncensored anime, that flick with Pat Morita and the kid from My Bodyguard as an American P.O.W., that movie where Jane March gets fucked a lot...uh...that movie where Jane March gets fucked a lot that's not Color of Night, Tae Guk Gi, Love Bakery, a film about the exploits of a Japanese guy obsessive about vehicular sex, a movie about a Chinese bathhouse with a retarded guy who aspires to be Pavarotti, rappers overdubbing Kung-Fu flicks, all kinds of weird indie films, PSAs on Japanese tourism, a technology show in which Randall Park assaults vendors at technological business fairs with unrelenting sarcasm, Filipino Jehovah's Witnesses spreading the gospel in the morning...well, you get the drift.

Ultimately, I got the feeling that AZN came to be because the International Channel executives realized the Asian programming was what most people in non-niche markets were watching. Certainly anime and Chinese/Japanese subtitled actions flicks have more universal appeal than Romanian newscasts. In case you never saw it, typical programming on International Channel would literally change countries about every half-hour or hour. The weekday daytime schedule was almost exclusively nonstop newcasts from different locales. Thus I assume a lot of people had some degree of interest in it, even if the programming in their mother tongue was a tiny slice of the pie. I think in going all-Asian, the sustainability was overestimated. AZN also had short and long-term oversaturation problems. Almost everything was shown twice in the same 24-hour period, and original series with only a few episodes were overkilled. The channel was also torn between two demographics--I remember a lot of Korean-Americans complaining that the Korean dramas shown were a year or two old, they'd already seen them, and thus the channel was devoting a lot of time to programming that was of no interest to them. On the other hand, for someone like me, these shows were totally new. I thought the anime programming was fairly decent. Unfortunately, almost everything was from Central Park Media, so some of the movies had previously been on Sci-Fi and IFC. International Channel definitely aired better anime series, but the only drawback was they never showed anything longer than half-an-hour (except for an April film fest where they showed some OVAs, but still, nothing over an hour--no movies). So AZN had mediocre-to-good programming, just not popular or fresh. And for such a specialized channel, that's probably what you need to pay the bills.

Still, the channel came a long way from the old International Channel days, which I also remember with some fondness. Well, not the real early days. Those are horrible, tragic memories of Dragonball Z in raw Japanese and Turkish films with full frontal male nudity which I'm still trying to wrench from my subconscious. I remember being so ridiculously happy a channel was showing The Adventures of the Little Prince again. In Spanish. Without subtitles. I don't speak Spanish. Yet, I videotaped all the episodes I could, if just for the ending theme and commercial bumpers.

I'll have to get used to things, because now I actually do have 100+ channels. I used to, for some odd reason, get the Chicago PBS station WTTW in addition to the nearest state one, and I did enjoy some of its original programming. I still get two PBS stations, but now the second is just a small one from a university a couple hours away, and their only original content consists of old-school telethon fundraisers, sans-celebrities. Unfortunately it seems as if Bravo, A&E, Sci-Fi, Cartoon Network, and Food Network have gone totally downhill in my abscence (keep in mind I haven't had upper channel tiers for about 2 years). TBS seems to have branched out from showing America's Funniest Home Videos, A Christmas Story, The Beastmaster, and any Golan-Globus/Cannon film (add emphasis if said film has Chuck Norris in it). The only thing I'm really missing entirely I guess I somewhat wish I had is The Independent Film Channel, although I doubt they have David Cronenberg film fests anymore.

I'm pessimistic about the state of television. But I get VH1 Classic, so there's still that sliver of hope...