McElfresh

If you do an inventory of my semi-suburban life, you might think that I was meant to be a redneck.

I own most of the things a redneck wants: a trampoline, a speedboat, a motorcycle, a dog. My favorite pastime is fishing. I drive a Diesel. I have two trailers.

We recently got rid of our old washing machine, and as the men were taking it away then put it down in front of the house. Though it only rested on the front lawn for a moment, it felt to me like it belonged there forever.

A closer examination of my collection of Redneckiana reveals that I am a redneck gone wrong. No self-respecting redneck (not a contradiction in terms, so get over it) would be caught dead with this crap. In fact, if a real redneck spotted me, he would spit out his Kool, close his fist around his Confederate Flag Zippo and punch my lights out.

My trampoline has a safety net. My speedboat is a Boston Whaler with an environmentally-correct 4-stroke outboard. My Diesel is a 25-year-old Mercedes that runs on soybean oil. My motorcycle is a Vespa. And this, this is my dog:

Jessie, my “dog.”

I repeat myself, because it seems impossible, but yes, that is a fully-grown dog. At five pounds, I realize she looks more like the Puppy of Doctor Moreau, a genetic experiment done for our amusement but gone horribly wrong, a Blade Runner-style genetic toy, living proof that mankind has indeed turned its back on the Creator.

And the weirdest thing about her, Jessie acts like a dog.

She has none of the droopy affectations of those handbag dogs made popular by Paris Hilton and her ilk (I suspect their dogs get into the loose pills in those celebutantes’ bags, and I’m not referring to the massive amounts of antibiotics they must take). She just acts like a dog.

In some ways, a tiny dog like this is pretty convenient. She is too short to get her nose into your crotch, for instance. If she has an accident, you only need half a paper towel to clean it up. One pig ear will last her lifetime. She can quench her thirst by drinking the dew off a few leaves. And even the largest meal she can eat comes out the other end no bigger than a Tootsie Roll.

But while she’s pretty low-impact (haven’t lost a couch yet), having a micropoodle is not without its drawbacks. When she plays rough, part of you can’t help but think that the batteries are going to fall out. Since I wear bifocals, I can’t see her if she’s within a two-foot circle of me. And, in addition to being the source of a future redneck beating, like most small dogs, she has no idea how small she is. She will go after a dog twenty times her size. Next to her, a cocker spaniel looks like a horse.

We had a good reason for getting her: she’s completely non-allergenic. Poodle mixes have hair, not fur, so they don’t excrete all of the allergens of a real, I mean regular dog. However, that same poodle hair is the source of her biggest problem: mats in her fur.

Which is why she looks like a plucked chicken wearing a white wool slumbersuit. Every now and again, just as she’s starting to look cute, she develops mats in her fur, and the tangles are so painful, she won’t eat. It only takes a day for a 5-pound dog to get sick from not eating, so, with great reluctance, we take her in and have her shaved.

But worry not, dear reader, for six months hence she will be cute again, if only for a few weeks. And to give you hope, I will show you a photo of Jessie, taken the day before she was shaved last month:

Almost seems like a dog, doesn’t she?

Hoss, like me

Okay, yesterday’s blog ended up offending a lot of people. My observations about the growing girth of Americans, as evidenced at Disneyland, was taken as mean-spirited. Sorry about that.

Hey, I’m no prize myself. We were watching “Bonanza” in Texas last year, and when I stood next to the big-screen television to turn up the volume we all noticed that I was about the same size as Hoss. Hoss! He’s the fat one! Worse, they were right! If Hoss had been wearing a black Izod shirt, we could’ve been brothers!

So who am I to talk?

It’s true that the average weight of Americans has increased by 30% over the past 20 years. Some people put it down to the price you pay as an industrialized nation – Germany having had taken the strudel until 1998.

But even Germany never had Fried Snickers Bars. I have.

It was at the Mall of America last year, the largest contiguous indoor mall in the country (smaller than the mighty King of Prussia Mall, near my hometown, which is broken up into 2 indoor spaces). I was there to shoot the Farm Show and Inventors’ Conference for a Pitch to America segment (fans of the show may recall the Kissing Shield as a standout from that piece), and we were on our way back to the airport with three hours to kill.

We had to go to the Mall of America. After all, it’s the biggest. I once flew nine people (including a famous Hollywood Director) 2,800 miles to see the second largest ball of twine – I was not about to pass up a record-holding shopping mecca that was right on the way.

The first thing we saw was the huge fleet of Rascal Scooters. Our guide told us they were specially modified to hold trays in the front, so shoppers could enjoy a snack while they cruised the millions of square feet of shopping paradise. We declined the offer for our own personal scooters.

Then, wandering through the indoor amusement park, we came across a food court of a very different kind. All of the restaurants were based on food stands from State Fairs across the nation. Our guide explained that, where they were once made up of corn-on-the-cob and fruit stands, all of that went by the boards for the stuff that really sells. And if it’s going to sell, it’s going to have to be fried.

We browsed the turkey leg stand. There were so many for sale, it seemed like there must be thousands of turkeys out there, flying around legless, unable to land. But you can get a turkey leg at Six Flags, so we moved on.

Then we came across all things fried. And I mean deep, deep fried. Fried bananas. Fried funnel cake (served on a tray with no plate, as the portion would overwhelm any standard sized piece of Chinette). Apple pie and ice cream, mashed together into a lump, frozen, battered, then fried. And fried Snickers Bars.

It’s the same theory as frozen ice cream at a Chinese restaurant. A Snickers Bar is frozen, then unwrapped. It is dipped in a batter made of Krusteaz Pancake Batter and Rice Krispies, and thrown into boiling fat. The batter browns, the batter crisps and becomes a hard shell within which the candy bar becomes a Vesuvial mass of melted Americana.

My first bite had what I would imagine to be the same effect as catching a glob of Napalm in my mouth. It just burned and burned. And yet, even though my molars felt like Johnny Tremain’s hand, I could tell this was something special. The alchemists at Mall of America had taken ordinary high-fructose corn syrup and transmuted it into pure gold.

It was not without its costs, however, and I’m not talking about the oral scarring. I could feel my metabolism slowing down. I knew I belonged behind the handlebars of a Rascal, cruising from one Orange Julius to the next. This was my Batism by Nougat. I went in a sceptic and emerged a True Believer.

So here I sit, Hoss-like, apologetic for my last blog entry. I had forgotten all about the fried Snickers Bar, and all of the Earthly Delights that must temp so many before they make their way to Disneyland. It may no longer be exactly the place old Walt had envisioned: Disneyland had changed, but I can’t say for the worse.

Could it be better? I can think of one way:

Start serving some goddam fried Snickers Bars, and pronto. I’ll be back on Friday. Start warming up the Crisco.

Doing 45 r.p.m.s on The Mad Tea Party ride

Yesterday was my daughter’s 9th birthday, we live in Southern California – it is practically a local ordinance that she must be taken to Disneyland.

Sure, she enjoyed it and everything. I mean, it was built for kids. But they built it 51 years ago, and nowadays little kids seem to play less and less of a role as time goes on.

Looking at the visitors strictly by age, I guess that there are as many kids there as in years past. But most of them seem to be missing something in the experience of being at the Happiest Place on Earth. Maybe they’re just used to consuming entertainment all day and night, so seeing it live doesn’t inspire the same sort of wonder and awe as it did when I was young. Maybe they outgrow the movies the place is based on at a much younger age than they used to. Or maybe they all just hate their families. There were an awful lot of obesely fat adults with mokawk-wearing kids in tow, on a bleak and pointless trudge.

And speaking of obesely fat, here’s an amazing shot of one woman’s bicep:

Aren’t biceps supposed to be side-by-side and under the skin, not one on top of the other? This woman’s arm was like an ice cream scoop spilling out over her elbow. Plus, she was eating ice cream with the other hand.

How dumb does Disney think we are, anyway? Yeah, we look dumb in our mouse-eared hats, but check out this “helpful hint” on how to wash your hands, posted over every sink in every restroom:

Really? Really?

I would like to say that Disneyland is populated by strange, inbred zanies from the Heartland, but they only account for a small percentage of the guests, and in many ways are much better than the locals. The idea that you can buy an annual pass for a couple of hundred bucks, giving you the right to enter for free and buy 6 dollar sodas and 3 dollar McDonalds French Fries, seems to appeal to a few thousand Southlanders, who take this membership seriously.

My wife, daughter and I felt self-conscious at the entry gates, because we weren’t decked out in Disney gear before we even got in. Almost everyone else was. There was a family in matching hats with Goofy ears sewn on, worn at the edges and sun-bleached from years of use. There was the old man in the rascal scooter in the “Cars” bomber jacket, apparently there alone. Creepy. And there were Disney tattoos on dozens of people, mostly Hispanic couples, who seem to make the place a second home. Not temporary tattoos, real ones. Here’s another upper arm shot for you:

Every time we go, it seems like the guests at the parks (Disneyland and California Adventure) get more and more bizarre. On the line into the Pirates of the Caribbean line, we were in a crowd of Japanese tourists who were taking more pictures of the American patrons than the Disney-themed festooning everywhere. Maybe that’s why Hong Kong Disney failed: foreign people like Disneyland so they can gawk at us, not Cinderella and the Little Mermaid. As I watched one Asian couple getting their picture taken with Grumpy, it seemed to me, just for a moment as they posed, that they were saying, “look at me! I’m the Ugly American!”

Don’t get me wrong, I like Disneyland. It’s amazing and weird and totally original, from the tall ship in the lake, to the heavily death-themed animatronic Brer Rabbit in Splash Mountain, to California Screaming, the most comfortable rollercoaster in the world. I like those little rides by the carousel, that are like little diorama Cliff Notes of Cinderella and Snow White and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. You get the whole story and whiplash in under a minute.

But as we waited for the nice Cal State Fullerton students running Space Mountain to get the Special Cars for Fat Folks on line, then feel around the flab to try to find some solid-enough flesh to haul Team Lane Bryant out of their “mobility chairs,” I got an idea. I like Disneyland. Everybody likes Disneyland. Especially morbidly obese people. Now, I have nothing against morbidly obese people, I’ve worked for them in the past, but they need something to change their lives. How about we don’t let them into Disneyland unless they lose the weight?

I mean, you have to be This Tall to get on the rides, right? Why not have to get through This Door to get in the park? I’m sure the rides wouldn’t break down as much, and the Medicare would save millions every year in caring for these people. Millions of dollars that could be plowed right back into Disneyland to pay for all of the lawsuits from fat people who can’t get in.

The only problem? The lines would only seem shorter. It’s why you get in line behind the trucks at the toll booth: the cars take up less space. Three times as many people could wrap around the Materhorn to Nemo’s Submarine Adventure.

I don’t know, maybe it won’t work. I’ll see if I can find a suggestion box this Friday when we go back. Yes, we’re going back. Haven’t you seen the ads? It’s 2-fer time!