Pantsing Your Pez

Back in the late 1970's, professional crazy woman Anita Bryant became disgusted with the unraveling moral fabric of the American people and went on a cross-country rampage attempting to force her morality on the masses, whether they wanted it or not. Had she done this today she would be president, it being the 1970's she was instead stoned to death by an angry mob still caught up in a 'freedom for all' sort of Bicentennial craze. God bless them.

Before her unsightly finish Anita did manage to score a few moral victories against a handful of her many targets, the famous Pez candy company among them. Sickened by the sight of row upon row of nude Pez dispensers hanging in the express line at her local Piggly Wiggly, Ms. Bryant initiated a frenzied campaign of protest that actually drove the venerable company to take notice of her. Feeling sorry for the 'crazy American lesbian' (as the company's CEO called her) Pez introduced a line of Pez clothing hoping to soothe Anita's savage breast. We'll never know if Anita would have been pleased with what her protestations wrought, for by the time Pez clothing hit the American market she was already buried in an unmarked grave in a pauper's field just outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

As a child I was not much into Pez, despite the nifty cool plastic cartoon character dispensers. I prefered candy that tasted more like candy and not like really old Flintstone vitamins. Somehow or other I did manage to end up with two examples of these Pez outfits. They were nothing more than a cardboard sleeve with a hole on each end through which you could stick the tube of a Pez dispenser, and yet these simple little gadgets opened a whole new world of play possibilities... now you didn't just have a crime-fighting Batman Pez, you had a crime-fighting purple headhunter Batman Pez-

These are labeled as #6 of set A and #11 of set B, so there are at least 15 more out there somewhere. Daffy Duck always looked best in the lederhosen.

I love a good link so here's one that will take you to one of the best Pez sites on the web, Pez Central.

Addendum: I made most of that crap about Anita Bryant up. She was a professional crazy woman with morality issues, but I really have no idea what she thought about Pez or any other candy company. She didn't like gay people, clothed or otherwise. I can't even place what she looks like although when I hear her name I always picture the actress Nanette Fabray, who played Bonnie Franklin's mother on 'One Day At A Time.' Anita Bryant was never on 'One Day At A Time' nor was she stoned to death although I think someone did throw a pie in her face once... AN EXPLODING PIE!!!

Life Squared

That guy has excellent taste in reading material...

This is just one of many 'found photos' on display in the galleries of Square America

Bevo & Buford Do America!

I am a huge fan of Busch Gardens: The Old Williams-burg European Experience or whatever it's calling itself today. It's a classy place. I love classy places! It has roller coasters. I love roller coasters! It use to have free beer, but it cut that out before I came of age. Screw them!

Way back before the place was so classy and before they had most of the coasters they have today (but while they still had free beer. Screw them!) they also had Bevo & Buford.

Bevo & Buford were but one pair of a cast of characters that included the much more popular St. George & the Dragon (those two still put in the occasional appearance on souvenirs and kid's clothing) and a few more escapees from the Island of Misfit Mascots, each representing to the best of their abilities one of the European 'countries' that made up Busch Gardens as a whole. Buford the beaver was the official ambassador from "New France" aka "Canada" aka "Not Europe" while Bevo the fox-in-the-Robin-Hood-outfit-who-thinks-that-his ass-isn't going-to get-sued-by-the-Walt-Disney-company was, I'm assuming, from England. I'm assuming this 'cause I have no idea where Sherwood Forest is. Maybe Scotland. Whatever, it's British.

Cavorting about the park along with B & B were a frog from France (and you thought the Canadian beaver stereotype was bad) named Tallulah and some sort of a Sir Isaac Newton-like fop who's name escapes me. Somewhere within the copious archives (i.e. crap) that I've accumulated over the years I have a map of the park which lists all of these characters. When I come across it I'll be sure to update. If I was any kind of a person at all I would have found that map before I even bothered writing this post, but I really didn't feel like walking all the way upstairs and looking in the closet. Screw me!

Since they didn't have a cartoon series of their own and since their names weren't Mickey, Scooby or Bugs and since most of them were based on horrible ethnic stereotypes to begin with, these furry folks didn't remain in the park for very long. In fact, the only reason I bring up Bevo & Buford in the first place (besides as an excuse for that clever and not at all dated Beavis & Butthead spoof in the title) is because of the important place they hold in history as the first openly gay theme park mascot couple in the U.S. Of course it would take a Canadian & a European to break the boundaries of personal freedoms in America, but then again it always does. Screw us!

Buford, of course, was the bottom.

Playground Heroics

Spidey is the playground slide king!

Captain America? Not so graceful...

Simzilla

Godzilla returns from the cold ocean's depths and strides purposefully toward fair SimCity! Oh, what terrors shall he rain down upon the heads of her proud citizens?

"52 flavors!?! However will Godzilla choose?"

"One double-scoop butter brickle, please."

This is not butter brickle.

Godzilla never gets what he orders.

Mmmm, tutti frutti.

The End?

Links That Time Forgot

I'm not such a complete throwback that even I don't realize that the reign of 'The Sims' has long since become the stuff of which 95-seconds worth of an episode of "I Heart The Which-Is-Its" is built around. It's been some time since I gave up on my dreams of recreating every fictional city in the DC Comics Universe in Sim-land form or of building an entire neighborhood populated by nothing but pornographic versions of beloved storybook characters. I was once as Sims-addicted as the next virgin... 12 different neighborhoods I had. I had a neighborhood full of nothing but animal people. I had a neighborhood where it was Halloween 365-days a year. I had the biggest gay Sims neighborhood on the Eastern seaboard of the United States. Those last two things were pretty much the same. I had all this and yet there was so much still to be done. I had plans.

Then about a year and a half ago I moved and somehow managed to loose the cd on which I had burned every original object and skin I had downloaded over the previous three years. It was like a death. That cd represented hours and hours and hours of lonely nights' work. I still cringe when I think of the lost skins... two beautiful dragons, a skateboarding demon, the princess from the Candyland board game... it was all too much to bear. I could never look at the Sims in the same way.

Then yesterday in the course of Googling something else entirely I fell upon a Sims site which I had somehow managed to miss in all my sad-boy years of daily forum-surfing... a Sims site with- Oh God! Dare I believe my eyes?- a Godzilla skin! I never thought it possible! And lord help me, there's Rodan right beside him, and some other Giant Monster Somebodies who I don't recognize but are still awe-friggin'-some! And Ultraman! And King Kong!

The old Sims fire was alive in me again! I cranked up my "Makin' Magic" disc and started doing just that. God bless you Sims Pit!

So if anbody other than me will still cream over this kinda thing, that's a link up there at the top in case you missed. Enjoy. It's awesome.

But damn it, now I need Pee & Poo skins!

Kiss & Bajs

It's disturbing, it's Scandinavian... it's Pee & Poo. Smearing a fecal colored rainbow of joy wherever they roam!

Third (or is it the fourth) time is the charm...

I start 'em, I delete 'em, I start 'em back up again. I don't think I'm 100 % into this blog thing yet but I keep trying, God bless me!