WoW--that's a heckuva bizarre prank

Hey, it's Kevin here, and I just wanted to thank everyone for reading BreakMentalDown.com, and it's been a great ride, but I'm closing up the blog. I realize this is going to disappoint sevens of people, but it's just something I need to do to get my life back in order. Now would be the perfect time to perform a parody rendition of “Dust in the Wind.”

Ahhhh, early April Fool's! You can't get rid of me that easily! And don't worry, this isn't actually my big prank. I'm trying to keep things under wraps, but let me just say I have been watching “Silence of the Lambs” religiously.

In celebration of the most prankiest times of the year (right behind Arbor Day—“Yeah, I'll plant a tree, because I really care about the environment, BAHAHAHAHA”) I've decided to recount one of my greatest pranks of all time.

During my junior year of college, my roommate was a World of Warcraft player. He had built up whatever the bestest characters were and was well respected within the WoW community. But then school work and sex piled up on him and he dropped out of the game.

Unfortunately, I had already purchased him a Christmas present—a “hoard” pin, his WoW faction—from Hot Topic. With him out of the game, it became an even odder situation for how I could actually give him the pin. It just would seem odd to flip it to him and say, “Hey Pete, here's an emblem of that game you used to play! Merry Christmas and enjoy!”

Fortunately, during final's week, an expansion beta came out and Pete started WoWing again. I knew he had one of his tests at 8 AM and would not arrive back at Casa De Kevin until around 10. I dropped the pin into an envelope. I then took some red finger paint (which I had purchased specifically for this purpose) and wrote “Welcome Back.” The topper for this setup came when I placed it in our entryway and made it look like someone had slipped it under our door.

Dramatic recreation of "Hoard" envelope.

When 10 o'clock rolled around, I went in my room and shut the door and pretended to sleep. As a result, I experienced the next couple actions by sound and imagination only. I hear the door open. I hear the sound of an envelope slide across the floor. I hear a pretty reserved “What the fuck?” He then must have bent down and picked up said envelope. This prompted another “What the fuck?” The glorious sound of an envelope tearing emanates through my room. As the pin comes out of the envelope, I am met with the most satisfying string of “What the fuck? What the FUCK? WHAT THE FUCK?”s ever.

At this point, I walked out of my room smiling. One look at my grin prompted him to say “I hate you,” and walk off into his room.

I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike, but would even Freddie Mercury ride it without a seat?

Any time you take a bike ride home at midnight, you must always weigh the good with the bad. Generally, whenever I arrive home and I'm not knife murdered to death, I mark it down as a “good” day. Although one time someone bazooka-murdered me to death... that wasn't so good.

With that said, I'd love to take you on a typical night's ride. It comes with its fair share of good and bad. I have enumerated which is which, so you can feel free to keep score, I imagine they'll come out pretty much even.

GOOD: It's a crisp night. I have 10 miles to go, my bike is in perfect working order and I'm ready to pedal my heart out.

GOOD: Five miles pass, and I'm still rolling. My bike remains in perfect working order.

BAD: I hit a bump, which somehow caused my bike seat to fall off. Apparently the nut that holds the seat on fell off and vanished. I retrieve the seat but cannot find the nut. This places my bike in imperfect working order.

Not to get too technical, but perfect working order would have more things connected.

BAD: A bike needs the nut that holds the seat on, to hold the seat on. Without it, I have no seat on my bike and must bike standing up.

BAD: Surprisingly, there aren't any 24-hour-late-night-bicycle-seat-sales stores open at this hour.

BAD: And I really don't have enough space in my messenger bag to hold a bike seat.

INDETERMINATE: But I place it there anyway.

BAD: Biking standing up kind of sucks.

GOOD: My bike lock hadn't been unlocking recently, but when I stop at a 24-hour-late-night-grocery-sales store for some much needed rest and Ramen, it does unlock!

GOOD: I lock my bike up, preventing any mustachioed bad dudes from saying “Hey, that seatless bike sure looks fun!” before absconding with my only form of transportation.

GOOD: At the grocery store, I see there's a new type of Doritos!

BAD: Doritos, unlike bike seats, are not a necessity.

"Similarities abound."--Damn, how does
he make it so cool?

BAD: Remember that insane awesome foreshadowing I did when I talked about my bike lock actually unlocking? I sit outside the grocery store for 20 minutes trying to get said lock to unlock. I get so desperate that at one point I contemplate approaching a late night road crew with a sob story about how my bike has no seat and it's locked outside a grocery store, and it's 12:40 in the morning, and it's cold, and I couldn't use the bathroom in the grocery store because they were cleaning it, and those orange reflectors are very becoming on them.

BAD: I don't.

GOOD: Miraculously, the lock pops open.

GOOD: I realize I will never be an action hero, so I use this moment to toss the lock in the garbage and cooly proclaim “Hopefully down there, you'll find Nessie, because you're a lock, and she lives in Loch Ness, so similarities abound.”

BAD: I will never be an action hero.

BAD: Back on the road, it really sucks to bike standing up.

GOOD: I'm getting really awesome at knowing the sound a bike seat makes when it falls out of a messenger bag and clanks on the ground.

BAD: I know the sound a bike seat makes when it falls out of a messenger bag and clanks on the ground.

BAD: I'm bleeding from the arm, and I have no idea why.

BAD: Did I mention how much I dislike biking standing up?

GOOD: I get home.

BAD: My bads outnumber my goods 13 to 9, and this entry definitely did not help matters. Luckily, I'm a really good practitioner of revisionist history.

GOOD: When the fog covered me for the last mile of my ride, no mist monsters burst out, and I didn't have to kill my friends nor my family.

GOOD: I also didn't get hit by any cars.

GOOD: In the fog industry, we call that a “two-fer.”

GOOD: My cats shoot me a triumphant “... soooo, when are you going to feed us?” As I walk in the door.

GOOD: We're gonna make that “indeterminate” entry from earlier count as a “good.”

GOOD: And we have now equaled out.

You see, when you go on insane, freezing, bike seat losing rides, you do take the good with the bad. And no matter how much you wish those fog monsters did come and murder you, it's just not going to happen. Don't worry, it will all even out.

If SiskelEbert Hadn't Trademarked It, This Post Would Receive Two Thumbs Up

Who has two thumbs and loves giving thumbs up? This guy!

There's nothing really groundbreaking about this hand signal. I'm sure even dinosaurs back in the 50s used it--”Hey, that sure was a neat episode of 'Leave it to Beaver,' thumbs up!” But that's exactly why I cherish it so. It's timeless, it's exhilarating, and everyone knows what it means. If you give a thumbs up, things are great.

However, I also love the fact that throughout its storied history, the thumbs up has shifted meanings and definitions. It's a chameleon of an action, and I love every single iteration of it. From the standard “I appreciate you, thumbs up!” to the sarcastic “That last Uwe Boll movie was great, I give it a thumbs up!”

You see, not only can thumbs up be sarcastic, it's actually one of the only hand signals that capable of this. Usually sarcasm requires some input from the voice to be effective—just try to spot the sarcasm in this statement, it's soooooo easy. You probably think you spotted the sarcasm there, but you're wrong, there actually wasn't any, it just doesn't translate to print, whereas it does to thumbs ups. Given the right situation, you can inject sarcasm into anything with a simple thumbs up. This is something you just can't accomplish with a peace sign or a “HA HA Turtle.”

Here's a case study for the sarcastic upper, as I like to call it. One time I was turning onto a street with a stop sign. For some reason, the guy sitting at the stop sign thought of that as an excellent time to ignore the stop sign and start moving into the person unencumbered by road signs (me). After I slammed on my brakes, he must have computed that “stop” actually means “stop,” and finally did.

However, I can't just let idiots go on being idiots. I didn't I just give him the finger, as that would be vulgar. Oh no, I used a far different, far better phalanx. I looked at him and raised my thumb toward the heavens. Initially he stared back at me with a look of confusion on his face. But I could see it slowly processing in his head—I wasn't complimenting his stopping skills, no, I was actually making fun of him because he wouldn't stop when all laws and logic told him to! It took a near-crash experience for him to realize this.

When he finally figured out how I gave him a sarcastic hand signal, his face contorted into a mass of rage. Spewing forth from that face of evil, I could clearly make out a rather loud profanity starting with F. Now, I didn't actually hear it, so it didn't offend me, but after it was out, I looked over in his passenger seat and saw an 80-year-old woman. I'm sure this grandmotherly type loved hearing the worst of worsts profanities coming out at a decibel level that is only describable as the loudest of louds.

But the thumbs up comes in hand for more than just sarcastic situations. If you ever become a circa seven BC Roman emperor, you're gonna need to know how to decide if the gladiator lives or dies, but luckily, you've practiced thumbs-upping so much, you'll be able to kill off anyone you dislike. Just remember, in those messed up times, thumbs up was the sign for “Kill the Christian.” So remember, thumbs up-bad, thumbs down-good.

That fruit treat tasted like bad movie!

But therein lies the problem, apparently in many countries, the thumbs up sign has held onto its gladitorial roots and has become the ultimate show of disrespect. I'm talking even worse than biting your thumb at someone (“No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir”). This could raise issues when all you wanted to do is tell someone they provided a real bitchin' Fruit Roll-Up. (Super Sour Lemon Drop Dead Fred Berry, get out!). If the pectin has swarmed your brain and you find yourself raising your thumb toward the heavens, simply explain you were sarcastically giving a thumbs up, therefore negating the ultimate disrespect of a thumbs up in that land. Since this hand signal is capable of being sarcastic, you just might avoid a stoning. Maybe.

No Need to Keep those Treasures Hidden

Equation for a Food Coma

Ahhh, cereal. I am a connoisseur. Everything from Corn Pops to Apple Jacks to Bill & Ted's Most Excellent cereal, I have eaten and loved them all. There is not one cereal that has not gone down my gullet, but there exists my one white whale—Hidden Treasures cereal.

For those who weren't cereal shopping during that one week it was available in 1993, let me explain to you the sheer awesomeness of this cereal. Hidden Treasures was a godsend given to the human race to make them a better species. It consisted of sweetened corn cereal, like Cap'n Crunch. Already now you're thinking it sounds great, but it gets better. As the name implies, Hidden Treasures held more than meets the eye. About every five pieces had Pixy Stix dust “hidden” inside!

Pixy Stix for breakfast? Might that just be the greatest concept ever? Even if you mashed up Crunch bars into a fine paste, then rolled it around in bits of 100 Grands, Mr. Goodbars, and Butterfingers before distilling it through some Whatchamacallits, you wouldn't approach the razzle dazzles that was Hidden Treasures. Heck, even if you added Razzles to that concoction, the sheer genius of breakfast Pixy Stix (as I hope Hidden Treasures was originally called).

My family only had Hidden Treasures one time. We went through that 14 oz box in an epic sleepover where my two brothers and I all had friends staying the night. The Hidden Treasures flowed like water. We squandered our supply, because we figured a cereal this epic would never go off the market.

Little did we know, we'd never see that cereal again. The next week it just wasn't at the grocery store. And it wasn't because everyone grabbed it all in a sugar-crazed rush, it just no longer existed. Even now, a look on ebay, a repository for all sorts of items from the food graveyard—from OK soda to Billy Beer—reveals nothing. There are absolutely no boxes of Hidden Treasures, not even memorabilia.

In the olden days, I might have distilled my own bootleg Hidden Treasures out of my bathtub. However, that's largely unhygenic and it would result in far too small of a production run to satisfy the millenials who crave the sugarness. But luckily, we live in the age of the internet.

If people can use the power of the internet to bring back Family Guy or make a teenage girl commit suicide, then we can definitely use it to bring back one of the greatest cereals of all time. If you just use this form http://generalmills.com/en/ContactUs.aspx, you can contact General Mills and tell them how much you demand this cereal. You can even claim to be a professional baker or an investor to further sway the cereal conglomerate into action.

And after contacting General Mills, feel free to go after Kellogg's. Contact Malt-O-Meal and Quaker Oats. You should and most contact anyone remotely associated with the cereal production game You could go after some of the bizarre British cereal producers I found on Wikipedia, but they might just want to produce some variation with blood pudding “hidden” inside. I think we can do without that one.

Once the cereal producers of the world have heard our call, they WILL produce our cereal. And once we get out from under that orgy of cereal goodness, we can feel safe in knowing there will be more where that came from. No longer will these treasures be hidden.

Second Bedroom Leaves Room for Improvement

Several months ago, I moved into a two bedroom apartment. We had great success deciding what to do with one of the bedrooms (put our bed in it), but the other one remains an enigma of possibilities.

We planned on getting a futon and making a super sweet guest room, but the problem with owning fuel efficient cars is they just don't have the carrying capacity to super sweeten domiciles. Maybe they're capable of just plain sweetening, but that's a level of vanilla I do not want to contemplate.

So I'm left with a room that's basically empty.

Currently, the room exists solely to house our cats' litter boxes. While this fulfills a great need, for some reason I have trouble seeing guests hanging out in the “Room o' Poop”—although that really just might be a naming issue. I do have several possibilities for making this room awesome. The only problem with awesome ideas is they're too awesome, and deciding which one to go with is difficult.

Here's a couple of my ideas. If you have any suggestions feel free to leave a comment!

Also doubles as an 80s time machine

Laser Tag Room: You might say what makes Laser Tag laser tag is the lasering and the tagging, and this level of cool cannot occur in a 132 square foot room. And I totally agree with you, but keep in mind, nobody has dropped ecstasy yet.

Urinal Room: I figure the cats are already peeing up a storm, why can't I? I'm imagining a solitary urinal along one wall, a trough one along the 12 foot wall, and if I get really ambitious I'd mount one on the ceiling. Sure, I'd need to overcome some amount of fluid dynamics, but the ease of pee would make it well worth it. If I install enough urinals, we can utilize the room for familial bathrooming—my girlfriend might take issue with this, but in time she will learn.

Milk Dud Room: Everyone wants a room that has a lot of Milk Duds in it. I'm not talking about the insignificant 50 boxes the average person keeps in their bedstand. That hardly qualifies as “a lot.” I'm talking about “a lot.” What I'd like to do is literally fill a room floor to ceiling with Milk Duds. I want the door to open and wave after wave of Dud to stream forth. If it doesn't kill someone, the room has not done its job. Plus, once we remove the bodies, it would taste delectable.

M.C. Escher's Relativity room: Just imagine walking into a room and suddenly find you're walking along stairs on the wall, but is that the wall, or is that the ceiling? To walk among this room is to question one's sense of gravity, place, sanity and hygiene. It's so mind tripping, you don't even need to drop ecstasy (please though, no Laser Tag in the Escher room, it will not end well).

McDonald's Room: Remember in “Richie Rich” with Macualey Culkin, when Richie wanted to show he had really arrived, he took the kids he kidnapped to his own McDonald's in his own house. Well I'm apparently just one smushed circus animal and styrafoam container away from that level of awesome.

Toxoplasmosis Room: What's the one thing everyone comments “This house could use some more of.” Toxoplasmosis, of course. But not everyone can have an endless supply of the delightful disease that causes inflamation of the brain and neurological problems. I want the walls literally painted with this whimsically named disorder—thats is, unless its coloring is like a chartreuse.

And I don't want just the naturally occurring Toxoplasmosis floating around the area. The room will have massive amounts of it. Like splattered all around—hanging in bags from ceilings, smeared against the wall, located in “Break in Case of Emergency” reticules, basically everywhere I can put it. The room will be Toxoplasmosied up the wazoo! No longer will houseguests crinkle their noses at the lack of this parasite. Instead they'll remark “Well... well, that sure is a lot of Toxoplasmosis.”

Oh, and if any pregnant women would like to drop by... please don't. Really.

Kill Room: The plastic sheets, the gurney, the bathtubs of blood, the rolls of duct tape. It seems like a little bit of heaven right on earth, because really, a good kill room shouldn't be depressing, it should really be seen as a welcoming, heartwarming homestead for all the runaways, drifters and circus clowns of the world. I don't know how I've made it 26 years without one.

Above: The ultimate plan for the ultimate room

With so many good ideas kicking around, I'll probably just end up combining them into some sort of urinal-filled, gravity-defying, laser-bending, blood-curdling, diabetic coma-inducing, McRoom of disease that my cats can still use to do their nasty business. The best part is, this paragraph can serve as the pitch to convince my girlfriend we need a Relativity Urinal Milk Dud Cat Poop McD Laser Tag Disease room! 

UPDATE: Since writing this article, we got a futon. My cat has pooped on it three times.

A Novel Idea! - excerpt from my first book

Tonight is the night. Tonight Christa knew she and Boris would come together as one. They would feel the most human of ecstasy. They would live the teenage dream of pre-marital sex. Tonight is the night.

Christa couldn't believe they had come this far. Boris always seemed so unobtainable. Sure her friends on the rock climbing team called him “Itsy Bitsy,” but she knew they were just jealous. They just didn't understand him like she did. He might be a senior and she a mere sophomore, but her feminine wiles had drawn him into her web.

And Boris. She absolutely loved him. She loved how he was so open about his past. His mother, Charlotte, had engaged in a similar forbidden romance. It even spawned his half-brother, Peter. While Charlotte loved Peter, she lived with that regret for the rest of her life. She never wanted Boris to endure what she had gone through.

But that happened in the past. Boris and Charlotte had drifted apart, and Boris was now his own man, free to be with anyone he wanted. And he wanted to be with Christa.

In Christa's bedroom, Boris performed all the right moves. Christa looked at him as he moved a tuft of raven hair from his face. He worked his hands into her lower back. Pressing, tenderizing, making her feel like a true woman. He moved down and tickled her toes. His movements so deft, he touched all of her toes simultaneously. Each one receiving a playful poke. She stared back, and it was almost as if he had eyes in the back of his head—he knew the moment was now.

He slithered up next to her ear and started giving a tender kiss upon her neck. As the kiss elongated, a pleasureful pain coursed through Christa. This is what all the girl talk had focused on, and now she lived it. She gasped. Might this be her first hickey?

It would be, but it would also be her last. As the pain intensified, suddenly it all made sense. His reluctance to come to this moment. The beautiful sweater he knitted her. His overwhelming fear of water spouts. How he had rooted at the start of “Arachnophobia” and cried at the end. How one of their dates had once been sucking the blood from a still-flapping cicada. Charlotte's Web. The forbidden love. Peter freaking Parker. The eight legs. Boris wasn't the misunderstood genius she had thought. Oh no, he was a spider! A black widow spider at that!

With the mating ritual complete, Boris skittered away from Christa. He mounted her wall where he proceeded to create an intricate web and place his egg sack. That's right, not only was he a spider, he was a female spider... a female lesbian spider!

Bet you didn't see that final twist coming.

I hated putting in this picture as much as you hate seeing it.

And that twist is what will make “Web of Love: An Erotic Investigation into Spider-Human Love” my first million seller. For you see, the spider erotica genre is a virtually untapped market. Just think, before “Twilight,” vampires were just viewed as jerks. Always sucking and tormenting Wesley Snipes—but now the IRS accomplishes that, not some mystical deity.

When “Twilight” hit, suddenly vampires are cool and sparkly and amazing. Sure, I may hate spiders with every fiber of my being, but I figure if Mormons can get over their vampire prejudice to make oodles of money, then so can I.

So publishers, if you are out there, feel free to hop on the “Web of Love” train. I actually already have an unauthorized sequel planned out. I'll release “Spider Shocker: Four in the Pink, Two in the stink” anonymously, so I can be indignant in the press and claim “I am indignant! That is the most disturbing mental image I've ever seen!... please read my latest novel, 'Ten Legs, One Cup.'” Which will further increase my publicity.

Oh, and for anyone who arrived here by googling “Talking Female Lesbian Spider,” you frighten me a great amount, but welcome to the blog! Enjoy!

Perform Murder without a Hitch by Hitchhiking

Except for all the stabbings, beheadings, chainsaw murderings and forced renditions of “Bingo had a name-o” (B-I-N-G-O!), hitchhiking just might be the greatest form of transportation ever invented.

There is, however, one real big problem with hitchhiking. Everyone who hitchhikes is a chainsaw murderer, and everyone who picks up hitchhikers also loves the sound of chain upon bone. It's really not a self-sustaining industry, what with all the murdering and the canceling out of lives and the unfortunate odors.

This is really too bad, because in a perfect world, whenever you wanted to go somewhere, anywhere, you could just hop in a car, wave around a chainsaw (non-menacing fashion) and voila, instant transport. It's like highjacking but without the unfortunate perception of being a douche.

But a couple million bad apples had to go and wreck it for the 12 good, honest hitchhikers out there. A shame, really.

And those apples have caused me to never actually hitchhike. Sure, the opportunity once arose, but that's just because I had on the most darling of capris and an Amish construction worker thought I had come onto him like a common harlot pornstar. Only after I explained to him how fashion forward my ensemble made me, did he leave me alone. The ironic thing is, I really could have used that ride.

But that hardly qualifies as a hitchhiking experience—I know the Amish cannot use the chain function of a chainsaw—so I must rectify this situation.

As I left work the other day, I approached a coworker, Randy. I didn't say a word. I just stuck my thumb out. He must have thought I gave him a compliment of some sort, because he raised his thumb up as well. This caused me to raise mine up higher, which gave him a slight pause before he raised his even higher. Since this is the universal sign for “A-okay,” I hopped in his car.

Randy initially looked a bit confused, but then I motioned my hands like I had cut off his head and it had rolled along I-5 over the course of several miles before coming to a stop alongside a Wendy's where someone proceeded to force feed it Frosty's until it melted (the head, not the delicious frozen concoction). In actuality, I had just given him the universal sign for “Hey, can you give me a ride to my car, it's right over there.”

Unfortunately as we've established, Randy doesn't know the hand signals of the road, and for some reason he thought I wanted to murder him unless he took me to one of the best fast food restaurants ever. This is not what I intended.

Frosty face melting - a common hitchhiking misconception

Instead he merely asked me to get out and leave. He said I should go to my car, as it was parked 17 feet away. Noticing this, I realized Randy has fulfilled his end of the bargain—I had arrived at my destination! And as his dutiful hitchhiker, I reached over, pulled out his spleen and used it as a rudimentary form of Nunchucks. thwacking him numerous times before his it finally notched a blow on the aortic valve, which proved fatal as it forced his rib cage through the pelvis.

I then got out of Randy's car and happily walked towards mine. I had made a successful hitchhike in these days of overprotection. And, just think, I originally thought I'd be killed doing this. Who knew how wrong I could be!

With the experience successful, I immediately started up my second hitchhiking excursion as I loaded Randy's body into my trunk and drove off for another great experience. B-I-N-G-O, B-I-N-G-O, and BINGO was his name-o.

DISCLAIMER: I have never had a coworker named Randy, nor have I ever murdered A Randy. The preceding work of fiction was to showcase our unjust fear of chainsaws.

Cookies with crap in them taste like crap

The first bite comes, and it's pure deliciousness. Flour mingles with sugar, which has already combined with baking soda and white chocolate. The tantalizing taste of the cookie lingers on the tongue, as it leaves, only one thought can remain. More. More. More.

Bite number two follows. The mouth region prepares for more amazingness. And it gets it! But what's this? Suddenly, there's a brick of inedibleness in this culinary delight. Hoping someone accidentally dropped poison in the batter, the chews continue. Soon the invader is found out, and it's far more terrifying than run of the mill anthrax or cyanide. Some fool has ruined pastry forever by bringing nuts into the equation. Macadamia nuts at that.

Rather than risk death from more nut cookie consumption, the cookie is quickly incinerated with a pile of napalm and torched to high heaven. Hopefully this wanton act of destruction prevents anyone else from falling for the siren sound of cookie only to get harpooned by the awfulness that is nuts.

It's amazing how frightfully common this scene occurs. I speculate it occurs roughly 17 times a day—but I'm probably undershooting. And while it's a great boon for the much maligned napalm industry, it's a travesty for connoisseurs of fine baked goods worldwide.

Just imagine being told you're about to do something insanely great and fun like going to an amusement park, only to realize that amusement parks are an incredible waste of time and money and are pretty boring to boot. In a nutshell, that's what happens when you combine nuts into pastry.

Keep in mind, I'm not some rabble rouser who aims to take the nut industry down—I'll leave that to the allergics and the hypochondriacs. No, I'm against putting nuts in baked goods, because it makes them taste awful, which is the pure antithesis of what cookies, scones, cookie dough, cakes, frosting covered cookie dough, cookie dough ice cream, nachos, cookie dough batter, doughnuts and cookie dough should be.

To prove my point, I now present to you two case studies that I definitely didn't just make up just to prove my point.

Case Study A: Monster Cookie

Oatmeal. Chocolate Chips. M&M's.

The monster cookie basically combines all that is good with the world into an amazing morsel of deliciousness. I'll even allow it to have peanut butter, because the crushing process actually allows the cookie to have decent taste. While the name might seem scary, the taste definitely isn't.

Now contrast this with another case study... a very different one.

Case Study B: Horrible piece of crap cookies that waste a bunch of good and tasty ingredients by including crap like macadamia nuts or pistachios or cashews or peas or walnuts or some other waste of calories, thereby turning goodness into a high concentration of awfulness which is purely inedible and nobody actually likes, due to the sheer crap-tastic nature of nuts in baked goods.

While the wining description of this product sounds “delectable,” you actually cannot check up on this cookie. Go ahead, just check out any bakery. You see those delicious-looking cookies? They have no nuts in them. You see that pile of nuts with a bunch of flies buzzing around them letting out the fly equivalent of profanity? Those are the remnants of nut cookies. Please note how even flies, who tend to eat vomit and excrement, avoid the awfulness that is nuts in baked goods.

These case studies are certainly damning, but the thing is, I actually don't dislike the concept of nuts. If there's a bowl of cashews, I'll definitely dig in. But when it saps the good out of otherwise delicious items, I get angry. I don't buy into this “Salty Sweet” philosophy, when we could easily push forth the concept of “Sweet Sweet,” and please the masses. If you put crap into good, it brings down the whole equation.

Here's a final bit of food for thought (pun intended)—one of the most popular cookies in the world, Chips Ahoy, is called “Chips Ahoy,” not “Nuts Ahoy.” You just ponder that one!