I love Pringles. Always have. I remember my first taste of God's gift to potato chips, back when I was about 11. I remember whenever I was off sick from school, my Mum would get me some Pringles and a video to watch. Life was good. Pringles were even better.

And then the motherfuckers got rid of Cheez-Ums.

It used to be that Pringles came in four flavours back then - Original, Sour Cream and Onion, BBQ and Cheez-Ums. A four-way of flavour. A syndicate of savoury. A word describing group of a synonym for flavour beginning with the same letter. But around 1999, the Fab Four were broken up. No Yoko Ono this time, though there are rumours that Cheez-Ums were discontinued in Australia due to high MSG content, and she was Asian so you never know.

Yoko may be hiding Cheez Pringles in her hair in this photograph taken in 1978.

Pringles tried to compensate by releasing new flavours into the Australian market. Cheese and Onion. Paprika. Pizza. All of them flew by the wayside, unable to measure up to the oheesy goodness of Cheez-Ums, the King of Pringles. Sure, I'd eat them. I'd even enjoy them. But everytime I popped, I thought of my old flame. I thought of how I used to eat a whole pack in a day. How I used to 'melt' them on my tongue. The feel of her soft, cheesy flavouring filing my mouth. Oh god, how I loved thee.

All this time, Cheez-Ums Pringles were available in the United States. So, on the very first day in America, a mere hour and a half after we arrived in our hotel in Annaheim, I ran down to the hotel gift shop. And what was staring me in the face?

Perfection.

Say Cheez lol

Stacks of Cheez-Ums Pringles. $1 for a small can. I bought two. The taste was divine, the aftertaste not so much. Combined with a furry, jetlagged mouth, I could taste Cheez-Ums well into the night. I was in Pringles Heaven. Yes, Pringeven.

The affair was short-lived. Sure, there were more Cheez-Ums Pringles in Phoenix. More in Vegas. A few in Vancouver, coupled with some Ketchup flavoured Pringles. But like all affairs, it ended abruptly. I returned to Sydney with a bag full of American chocolate, but no Pringles. That part of my life was over.

Cut to yesterday. Fade into Woolworths, Winston Hills. Star wipe to me pushing a trolley through Aisle 5. Close-up of my chiseled face. Sounds of artillery fire in the background. The camera pans, halfway up the aisle, resting on a tight shot of cans of Pringles. Different coloured cans of Pringles...

New flavours of Pringles.

Yes, those fuckers had betrayed me once again. New 'Tastes of The World' Pringles, including 'Tomato and Mozarella', and 'Smoky Bacon'. Wow, how exotic. Tomato and bacon. What obscure nations have these... how you say 'tomato and bacon'. Do they dine on bacon much in the French Riveria? Is Tomato a delicacy in South America? Hey, I hear CHEESE IS PRETTY FUCKING POPULAR, WHY DON'T YOU MAKE SOME CHEESE PRINGLES?! WHO SKIPS TO BACON FLAVOURED CHIPS BEFORE CHEESE?! YOU HAVE CHEESE FLAVOURING! YOU TAUNT ME BY MIXING CHEESE FLAVOURING WITH TOMATO FLAVOURING BEFORE EVEN CONSIDERING THAT SOMEBODY MIGHT LIKE CHEESE FLAVOURING BY ITSELF ON A FUCKING CHIP!@w I KNOW THAT'S A WACKY IDEA, CHEESE FLAVOURED CHIPS, BUT MAYBE YOU'D MAKE A BIT MORE MONEY IF YOU COVERED THAT BASE BEFORE RELEASING PAPRIKA FLAVOURED FUCKING POTATO CHIPS YOU SMILING SON OF A BITCH MR PRINGLES!#@w

PROOF.

WE INTERRUPT EMOS IN THE WILD FOR AN URGENT NEWS BULLETIN


Health Minister Tony Abbott was punched yesterday by a mentally ill patient during a routine visit to a criminal psychiatric hospital.

Charges were not laid after Mark Latham apologised.

Emos In The Wild
Part II - The Poetry of xJARENxMANATEExENDANGEREDxCOREx

Poetry is perhaps the most important characteristic of a true emo. Without poetry, New Found Glory CDs and incredibly tight jeans, emos are nothing but pussy goths. To a MySpace emo, poems are like trading cards. They are paraded around, traded and commented on. On MySpace, even the very worst poems can generate pages of praise from like-minded nutbars. And when you talk of the very worst poems, one only has to look to our good friend Jaren for a treasure trove of emo. Yes, a tremosure trovemo.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, the Poetry of xJARENxMANATEExENDANGEREDxCOREx.



Obviously due to the high demand from libraries and universities, Jaren has put all of his poems in one easy to find spot - a blog on his MySpace. We begin with his 'fav one ive written', a three-part epic called '12:58pm'.

It is written like a conversation between two emo lovers, full of haunting questions like 'Do you have the keys to the hotel?', 'Why are you such a broken radio?' and perhaps the finest line of the poem - 'Is there such thing as an alleyway?'. Indeed Jaren, is there such thing as an Alleyway? Who are we to judge what is and is not an Alleyway, sitting in our ivory towers drinking our herbal tea. You truly are a literary genius.

12:58pm ends with one of the emo lovers commiting suicide. Surprise surprise. I've seen less predictable episodes of the Power Rangers. In the poem, the jilted lover curses the Gods for their predicament, before ending it all by jumping into the void. If only that happened before he wrote the poem.

I won't go through every poem, because we'd all be jumping into the void once I was done. Instead, I will construct a poem using the very worst lines from Jaren's. I call it the xJARENxMANATEExENDANGEREDxCOREx Mix-Tape.

In the spring
Plants sprout from her pores
Butterflies come out her eyes
Is there anybody out there
To watch the crickets fight

Little boys with little dogs
Small boys with small toys
Big boys with small rooms
The smell of the ocean on my doorknob
The smell of starfish on your sandals

In the urban
Where cicadas eat man
He sits on his roof
Looking for his lighthouse
He calls himself the iceberg
And love is his titanic
And they both shared a love of ballpoint

you can sleep on the motorcycle

Positively moving. It is a testament to his skill as a poet that even a random connection of lines can speak more truth than the entire canon of published literature. Jaren challenges our assumptions about life and love. We CAN sleep on the motorcycle. Butterflies DO come out our eyes. And yes, small boys DO have oh so small toys. (Unless they're black.)

We end our sojourn into this beautiful collection with Jaren's final poem, and perhaps his most controversial. He wrote it to 'make a girlfriend feel loved'. And according to Jaren, it is so controversial that 'VIEWERS UNDER 14 STEP BACK'

:O

Could this finally be the erotic emo poem I've been searching for?

Could this be...


emorotica?

Let's take a look...

Theres too much hair in my eyes
Everythings wet
In an empty park next to the most pitiful creek ever
Just wanting to fit in

Everything's wet, this is an excellent start. We'll skip the next part about how their teenage love interrupted the flow of a creek into the ocean. Because along with granting you the power to slash your wrists, teenage love can have an extensive geographical impact.

Id rather drink you
Then water
You're the sexiest thing ive ever tasted
Like licking sex
But still not ready to taste love

Hey Sex, whats up man

Oh nothing much just HEY GET OFF ME MAN WTF!! WHAT YOU LICKING ME FOR?!

Sorry

I never want it to end
I wanted the concrete to freeze
Clocks to suffer heart attacks
And live in your laughter
And in your bed

Now he's getting greedy. He wants an already-solid substance to freeze, and then he wants to give a clock an entire circulatory system, THEN give it a heart attack. Do these fantasy clocks have really bad diets? What is he feeding these clocks? And how do they eat?

Woah, this concrete is pretty hard, it's frozen rock solid.

All over you
I want your tongue in my mouth
Your sun in my morning
And my key in your door
And our bodies keep sweating

HEHE HIS KEY IS HIS PENIS HEHE

You are my sugar pill
My ecstasy
You are perfect
Night makes your skin glisten
And makes my tears joyful

He loves his bad analogies like a monkey loves a walrus. His poems are so confusing, like a baby eating electric tape. His rhymes are non-existant, like a drop of water in frozen concrete.

And I swear I love you more
And ill scream your name
And ill scream I love you
Until my veins collapse
And everyone whoever doubted you begins to weep

And ill never use apostrophes, because that takes time and then I wouldn't be young and emo anymore.

When they realize they've lost the most beautiful thing in the world
You make me feel safe
And feel like I matter
And I always want to matter
And I don't want to look both ways before crossing the street
Don't ever let me lose that
Just don't be scared..

Gee, I wonder why she's scared of you, cockspank. Maybe it's because you told her you want to lick her sex. Maybe it's because you don't look both ways when you cross the street and she's scared a car will hit her. Or maybe it's because she has a phobia of really, really bad poetry.

Having read that emo tripe, I can't believe I'm going to do this, but in Part 3 of Emos In The Wild...



Tommy is going undercover

BUP BEEP

BUP BEEP

BUP

Emos In The Wild
An investigative report by Tomm

I've made a point of bagging out Emos pretty constantly on my blog, culminating in 2005's mega-event - EMO Week.

And after all that, you would think that I've had my fill, but then I found this.


It's a MySpace page. MySpace, for those of you who don't know, is where emos go to die. They can post pictures of themselves, typically shot from the classic MySpace angles, post their poems and post embedded YouTube videos of screamo bands all on one horribly formatted page. There is even a massive comment box at the bottom of the page for them to get instant validation of the misery that is their life. It also has a brief bio of the MySpacer, which I've taken the liberty of posting here.


I could have chosen any number of MySpace's to bag out, but xJARENxMANATEExENDANGEREDxCOREx's was just too good to pass up. I wonder why he chose xJARENxMANATEExENDANGEREDxCOREx, maybe xJARENxMANATEExENDANGEREDxCORE was taken. The page screams emo. Yes, it screamos. His profile picture looks kind of normal. In fact, it kind of doesn't fit in on the black and purple setting, with the links to the emo poems and the emo band pictures. But then you click 'show more pics', and unearth an emo goldmine. Yes, a golemodmine. Take a look at this gem.

Patsy, the cat did a whoopsy in my hoody

Aside from the fact he got a white shirt caught in the closed door, well, I think you know where I'm going with this. One painted fingernail. Tight fitting hoody. Bent over on an amplifier holding a 7-inch "microphone" in his hand. This kid is queerer than Ian Thorpe riding a scooter on a rainbow.

But I'm not here to bag him out for being fruitier than Goulburn Valley. See, this kid isn't just emo. He's the perfect emo. He is the Michaelangelo of emos. Not only does he play in an emo band, not only does he write lousy poetry, but he has an ORIGIN STORY. Like Peter Parker getting bitten by a radioactive spider, Superman's home planet being destroyed or Bert Newton being exposed to massive amounts of gamma radiation, 'Jaren' shows us just exactly how he became an emo.

Because of a girl. You see, one fateful night in 2004, Jaren was playing a gig, when he met a girl with an eyebrow piercing. They laughed and joked around, 'threw things over fences' and ate hash brownies. I don't really get the connection there, but whatever. Eventually, they became closer. They watched Donnie Darko (ultimate emo movie) with friends, then traded gifts. She gave him napkins, because he complained about using tissues to clean his hands in his room.

Clean what exactly?

Anyway, she has to leave for a camp, so he waits till she's gone, then on the second day of the campm at 1:15am, asks her out over the internet. She says yes, and he assumes she is smiling. She may be smiling from the joy of a new love, or laughing at the hopelessness of a guy who waits till she's a few hundred miles away before professing his love for her over MSN. I wonder if he used a Wink.



Anyway, they start going out, start fudding each other to songs by The Cure, she tells him that she 'likes boys who cry' and he says he thinks 'that's why they get along so well', and everything is beautiful.

Until she unblocks her ex-boyfriend from her AOL Messenger Buddy List.

The slut.

So they watch Garden State and hump some more. She leaves the window open that night, because she knows there are crickets outside and how much he likes them. This results in Jaren crying, and then thinking about the walls in her room wondering why he was crying.

...

It was such a good night that Jaren woke up 'not fearing the morning like I usually do'.

...

So anyway, this chick lies about having an Oboe lesson to hang out with her ex-boyfriend, so this guy goes on Prozac. Then she starts hanging out with the ex-boyfriend some more, so our mate Jaren starts cutting himself. Then, even though Jaren says 'he was always not a good boyfriend', this slut starts hanging out with him more, so Jaren cuts himself deeper. Up the river, not across the stream young one. So, they have a chat, decide to get back together, but this bitch is all like uh huh i ain't talking to you so he's all like oh god why the essence of pain is eating my emotions, and she's all like fine you're dumped and he's all like stab stab stab slice slice

Here is his journal entry from the day she dumped him.

Im not going to be ok
nothing in the world has ever hurt this much
you cant tell me all the things u did and then just take everything away
I believed everything u said, everything
I still do believe you
please don’t leave.....
everything is right when Im with you.....
please dont do this...
i love you so much...
i havent stopped crying since...
please come back please
ill do anything to make it ok
anything
your the only one who can save me
no one will ever love you as much as i do
you always told me we're meant to be together....
i still believe that....
your the best person and gf ive ever had in my life...
please dont leave.......please.....ill do anything
u always told me i was the best bf ever and u told me how wonderful i am
no girlfriend ever treated me like you did....
you made everything ok...
please change your mind
for the love of god please change your mind
you have to save me..

Anyway, the bitch starts dating her ex again a week later, and Jaren is finally reborn. No longer is he a mild-mannered, crybaby little limp-wristed girly man, he is now something completely different (kinda)... Yes, when Jaren eats a banana, he becomes BANANA MAN.

He also becomes a fully-fledged emo.



Next on TommyIsCoolDotCom: Part II of Tommy's Emos In The Wild - The Poetry Of xJARENxMANATEExENDANGEREDxCOREx

I think it's common knowledge by now that I have a good relationship with former Opposition Leader, and the Prime Minister of my heart, Mark Latham. In light of his recent brush with the law, I decided to give Marky Mark a buzz, and see what was happening. What followed was perhaps the most troubling, least convincing phone call of my life.



Ladies and Gentlemen, I give to you the 437th Mark Latham Interview. Download as an .mp3 here, or a .zip here.

Call me slow to react, but damn, those wacky muslims sure are firing up about those Muhammed cartoons. Soon there'll be riots or something. I also think there's something inherently funny about the headline 'Five die amid global cartoon protests'. Like Marvin The Martian, Porky Pig and Foghorn Leghorn were picketing outside the Warner Brothers water tower for better conditions and maternity leave, but then it gets ugly when Elmer Fudd pierces their flesh with a hunting bow.

And then he eats them.

But if there is one thing I've learned from these cartoon protests, it's that controversy = money. People buying newspapers that publish the cartoons so they can see them. People buying newspapers that don't publish the cartoons so they can read about them. People buying newspapers that publish the cartoons so they can burn them alongside an effigy of Ariel Sharon. It's a freaking bonanza, and I want a piece of it.

The way I figure, if Muhammed = money, then a bit more blasphemy might = even more money. And why just pay out on the Muslims? If insulting just Muslims starts riots, imagine how many hits I'll get with THIS!

Nelson Mandela.

The Falun Gong movement.

Pauline Hanson.


Mark Latham.


What do these people/groups have in common? They are all political prisoners.

Except Pauline, she was just a bitch.

Mark Latham is innocent. I know this because I like him, and I don't like criminals. Sure, he probably punched a photographer. Sure, he probably damaged a $12,000 camera. Sure, he probably dropped a few f-bombs while he was doing it. But is that really a crime? Is assault really a crime? Who here hasn't assaulted a Daily Telegraph employee? I know I gave that fat fuck Piers Akerman a few punches to the gut when I saw him in line at Maccas. Assault is a natural part of life. A lion assaults a cantelope to feed, but does it get arrested? No. So if it's good enough for lions, it should be good enough for Latham.

I leave you with incontrovertible proof that lions exist. This therefore proves Mark Latham's innocence.

The defense rests, your honour.

test

Thanks to the majority of the people on our Contiki tour being Australian, and the repressive policies of the Howard Government entrenching cultural conservatism amongst young Australians, our tour was pretty tame compared to what you'd normally imagine a Contiki tour would be (the 6:30am wake-ups also played a part). But there were definitely some characters on the tour, from our tour guide Jennifer (who was way too funny for a chick), the annoying pommy chick, the guy who knocked on Jennifer's door in the middle of the night at the Grand Canyon in absolute freezing temperatures wearing only a pair of boxer shorts, and of course...

The Zammit.



You might have seen him already if you looked at my trip photos, but one photo does not do Dave Zammit justice. You see, there were 3 of us on the Contiki tour, and Contiki is based on twin-share prices meaning poor old Richie had to shack/shag up with a stranger. And when we looked around the group, there was pretty much only one guy we thought would suck to room with (no pun intended). And that was the Zammit. He wore Superman glasses and a Gortex jacket (not pictured) ala George from Seinfeld, and on the first night entertained us with a story of how he found a good sneaker store. Wow. He reminded me of Kyle's really, really Jewish cousin from South Park, except without the hard-on for the Old Testament.

But then everything changed.

In the few days it took us to travel from San Diego to Phoenix, the Zammit went from the geekiest guy on tour, to the coolest, geekiest guy on tour. Because the Zammit had a few tricks up his sleeve. A love of hip hop, and a penchant for laying down some phat freestyling beats. This dude must have taken 3-Unit Thuganomics at school, because his rhymes were TIGHT. They were first shown when we did 'Introductions' on the Contiki bus, and he finished his by saying WEST SIDEE MOTHER FUCKKKERRRR! But the 'Z-Unit' only busted out his true talent as the bus pulled into Scottsdale, Arizona. Yes, the Zammit gave us a full-blown freestyle rap, so good it may have even pimped our ride. Take a look for yourself, says Tommy, pointing downwards.

No, not there you sicko. The embedded video idea I stole from Matt.

So, I'm supposed to put a 'farewell post' here. So, I went to Tommy and asked him exactly what he wanted me to do.

Dr. Richard Kimble says:
what do you want me to write on your blog
PresidentTommy says:
just a short paragraph saying fuck you for not appreciating my blogs
PresidentTommy says:
hehe
PresidentTommy says:
maybe a picture of bill cosby

So: I just thought maybe I should let you guys know how hurt I was by some of your comments. I don't want to make a big deal out of it because, hey, I don't know a lot of you personally, but you should know that comments you make on the Internet can actually have a real effect on real people's emotions. I'd put a lot of time in, a few times a week, to consciously sitting down and writing articles for this site, all as a favour for my buddy Tommy. I wasn't getting anything for it, and you guys just decided you would have to sabotage my attempts to entertain a few people. Does putting others down really make you feel better? Did you get a kick out of knowing that my heart dropped after every time I'd spend an hour or more writing only to have you tear it all down with a few one-liners? You guys are just malicious wolves, picking on others around you, and I hope one day your lives will be filled with pain and misery because of it.






Ahahahaha, can you imagine what it would be like if I was really like that? See ya, I'm going back to reading Harry Potter slash fan fiction.

Tommy: The Criminal

Aside from being a lousy quitter, my trip to America also unearthed another side of me. A sinister side of me. A repeating side of me. A criminal side of me.

It was a Friday night on the Las Vegas strip. 52 farenheit. Slightly overcast. We'd just returned from a visit to the Bellagio casino, and I was thirsty. I felt a bit dodgy, and 2 for 1 drinks at the Imperial Palace had ended a few hours before, so I walked with my accomplice Richie to get some bottled water at the Imperial Palace's cafe.

As you can probably tell by my last post, I'm pretty impatient. I don't like waiting around in a five-person strong queue at 11pm to buy a $1 bottle of water. And considering the only server at the cafe was busy making some weird croissant for a fat American (probably because they eat ham and cheese croissants at 11pm), I decided to speed up the process. I grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, hung around for a while, then returned to my table. Yes, I quit the line. As I never paid for the water, I also shoplifted.

how come that one cop has a red stripe

It was freaking awesome. I have never had a better tasting bottle of water in my life. If you had a machine that took nouns, turned them into liquid and bottled them, this water would be 'exhilaration'. Now I know how Sean Connery felt when he made 'Entrapment'. I hadn't been this excited since that time I accidentally put a tab of E into my own drink instead of the 14 year-old girl I was trying to rape. Rape jokes are kind of cheap. And, 14 year old boy would have been funnier. Oh well.

Anyway, needless to say I was arrested and tried, and I'm typing this from a Guantanemo Bay net cafe.

Love,

Tommy