Catchy Commercials from Childhood

No idea why, but I had some random commercial jingle from back in the day stuck in my head this morning. I used to annoy the crap out of my sister by singing commercial jingles all day as a kid (one of my favorite memories = annoying my sister). Anyway, thought I'd find the links of some old jingles (some of which even out-date me) that always find their way into my head!

CARAMELLO
Stretch it out out out, Caramell-ooooo!

MATTRESS DISCOUNTERS
Have a good night sleep on us....Matt-tress Dis-count-ers!

DOUBLE MINT
Double double your refreshment,
Double double your enjoyyyyyment,
No single gum double freshens your mouth liiiiike,
Double Mint, Double Mint, (oh it's the Double Mint),
Double Mint, Double Mint....Gum.
THERE"S NO SINGLE GUM LIKE IT.

HONEY NUT CHEERIOS
It's a race for the taste, of Honey Nut Cheer-eeee-O's!

LIFESAVERS
I never knew the words to this song, but I always loved this commercial. I'm just gonna let you watch this one for yourself. Enjoy!

BAGEL BITES
Pizza in the morning,
Pizza in the evening,
Pizza at supper time!
When pizza's on a bagel,
You can eat pizza any time!

ALKA SELTZER
Plop Plop,
Fizz Fizz,
Oh what a relief it is,


Which ones do YOU remember?

How Are We Already in May?

How in the world are we already in mid-May? Guess it's time for a quick "Land of Marc" update:

1) Two of my UCLA friends (1-4-3) are getting married this weekend up in L.A. Gonna be a huge reunion of all the UCLA people I used to cheer with, sleep with, eat with, tailgate with, camp with, plan events with, throw frisbees with, brush my teeth in a science lab with, jump up-and-down and yell "Ohhhhhh" with, look like a doofus with, and much, much more. I can't wait.

2) Next weekend is my work's annual Jack in the Box "Hoops at the Beach" tournament in Mission Bay. We're expecting around 160 teams to take part in this two-day 3-on-3 basketball tournament, and crossing our fingers for good weather too. If you're bored and looking for something entertaining to pass the day, check out this video from last year's Slam Dunk contest. These guys were ridiculous. Best dunk contest in the 24-year history of the event:

2010 "Hoops at the Beach" Slam Dunk Contest

3) I am still planning on running the San Diego Rock n Roll Half-Marathon on June 5th...and it's not gonna be pretty. Training has been severely affected by an annoyingly consistent barrage of injuries, and now the race is right around the corner. Let's just say my goals have changed from wanting a certain time...to just finishing.

4) I love the comments from the "Board Game" blog post. Let me know what other nostalgic topics could be fun for me to explore!

Waxing Nostalgic for...BOARD GAMES!

So growing up, me and my sister played a lot of board games. Be it playing with one another, our Grandmas or Mom, let's just say we became best friends with Milton and Bradley. Below is a list of the 18 games that most vividly stick out in my mind, and usually garner some memory of my sister beating the pants off me. You'll notice Candyland does not make an appearance on this list - cuz I never played it (and proud of it).

It should also be noted that "Crossfire" is not listed. Please do not think that game is not worthy. The only reason it is not listed and described below is because this list is about games I used to play and, well....I still play Crossfire. Nostalgia is for wussies, I play the game!

Enjoy the trip down memory lane!

TROUBLE
Does anyone remember how annoyingly difficult it was to actually pop that die inside the plastic bubble in a way that actually made it rotate off the number it was on? I swear you'd push down, just to see the die pop up, and either fall straight back to where it was, or roll over one number to the side! I actually don't even remember if there was anything more to this game other than pushing the bubble and moving your game-piece.


GUESS WHO?
Now I know you know this game! Do they have red hair? Do they have a mustache? It's Frans! I swear, the creators of this game were subliminally trying to teach children how to judge people and discriminate. Red hair? Black or white? Male or female? I mean, how many times did you look down, see that you got the red-haired guy with ugly facial hair and think, "Ugh, I hate being Alfred!"


SORRY!
Welcome to the first of many games that my sister absolutely dominated. I have an especially bitter taste in my mouth about this game from my childhood, because when I was young, my Grandma would tuck me and my sister in, and then once we went to bed, Grandma would go in and grab Paige and let her stay up past her bedtime and play Sorry! What the hell Grandma? Just cuz she was eight and I was six doesn't mean I can't party like a rock-star too! As for the game, it was just fun to land on one of those "Slide" spots, where you got to slide across the board like you were grinding on a skateboard.


BATTLESHIP
Now this is probably the only game on the list where even my sister will admit I wrecked shop. The reason I was so good at this game was not because I had great spacial reasoning skills and could guess where her ships were located. It was actually because I was super ballsy and would put the ships in the most bizarre places that would drive her nuts and make her think "There's no way he would line them up all next to each other, that would be dumb!" Well, in that case, "Hi, I'm Mr. Dumb, and I just sank your battleship!"


PARCHEESI
This one reminds me of my other Grandma (not the wily devil that gave sister preferential treatment past what I thought was "bedtime"). This is definitely an old-school game that dates back well past my childhood, but Grandma taught us the rules at an early age. I really remember liking the sound of the dice in the slim little shakey-cup when I cupped my hands over it to shake up the dice. Solid game.


YAHTZEE
Another game that my Grandma dominated. This was a really loud one that drove my Mom crazy in the next room, because that blue cup filled with dice was really loud and obnoxious as much as I shook it. But I gotta tell you, I was lights-out when it came to rolling a Long Straight or Four of a Kind. Do you remember how frustrating it was when you didn't get enough points in the upper section of the score-card to qualify for the additional 35 bonus points? Without that, I was done-zo against my Yahtzee-rolling Grandma.

BOGGLE
This is one of the more educational games you'll find on this list. I loved word games as a kid, so this was right up my alley. I do remember frequently making up words, then trying to convince my Grandma they were real (NOTE TO SELF - Grandma does the Sunday New York Times crossword in pen...wrong target).

MOUSE TRAP
This game was more fun just to set up than it was to play! Does anyone remember how touchy that final contraption was? It was that long post with notches with a basket on the top that falls on the mouse at the end of the entire domino-effect system. If you touched the board, the thing would fall over! Then there was that rubber-band spring-loaded arm, and the plastic dude who jumped into the "pool"? Oh man, that game rocked!


GRAPE ESCAPE
I have a feeling this one could be a relative unknown for some of you compared to the others on this list. Grape Escape was the "Squish 'em, Squash 'em, Squoosh 'em Game!" It was basically a bunch of purple play-dough that got put through a plastic torture chamber of fun. Not sure what the premise of the game was, but me and Paige used to run those guys through the contraptions for hours!

OPERATION
Ah yes, a classic. It really bothered me that the tweezers were attached to the board by a rope. What if I wanted to take a crazy angle at the Bread Basket? What if the only way for me to get the Funny Bone was to stand? Quite an inhibiting rule I think. But nonetheless, we all can remember easily grabbing the Adam's Apple, and breathing with a sigh of relief as we pulled out the Heart, and laughing uncontrollably as your opponent, without fail, developed a case of the shakes as they attempted pull out the Wishbone! Educational for the aspiring doctor, entertaining for the creator of the Saw movies.


SCATTERGORIES JUNIOR
We have all played Scattergories, the fun adult game that always stirs up a bit of controversy and argument in interpreting the rules and responses. But how many of you have played the kid version of this game? I can tell you with 100% certainty that there was nobody in the world better at this game than...my sister. Now, of course I may be a bit jaded as our two-year age gap probably affected most outcomes, but I tell ya, that girl came up with some creative shi*! As a 10-year old! She may be a dipstick, but man she knows her Scattergories Junior.


CHUTES & LADDERS
Another game I did not play frequently, but I feel like a lot of my friends probably played this, so I let it make the cut (and yes, I stand by my decision to omit Candyland from this list). For the same reason I liked SORRY!, this game allowed me the chance to slide my game-piece around the board. Anybody have good C&L stories?

DON'T BREAK THE ICE
I was proud that I remembered this one. Remember the little "ice pick" (aka plastic hammer) you had to use to tap out a single block of ice (aka sugar cube) underneath the little red man without knocking out the whole floor? I loved this game! You wanna know how I know I loved this game? I always lost! I didn't care! How fun is it to be able to take a swing at some ice with a pick-axe? I wrecked shop on that little red man!


TIDDLYWINKS
Ok, so this technically isn't a board game. But it's a childhood game, and it's my damn blog, so screw you nay-sayers trying to catch me on a technicality. This was a game that we always modified to fit our own youth desires which, in this case, meant flipping those little suckers all over the house! I think the original objective of the game was to flip your tiddlywinks into a receptacle of some kind in the least number of attempts? But that was too boring, so we created our own games, which I'm sure were way more fun.


KERPLUNK
In addition to being the best titled game I can remember, it also had the best drama! In my warped head, this game of marbles and sticks is a mix of Jenga and Hearts. Jenga because of the obvious pulling out the base without the whole thing crashing, and Hearts because you can knock over a couple marbles and still be in the game. You just don't want to knock them all over, like the Queen of Spades. You see what I did there? I'm crafty.


HUNGRY HUNGRY HIPPOS
This game had great TV commercials. I wanted this game so bad because of the commercials. And the game did not disappoint! How fun was it to hit the tail-lever on their butt as fast as possible and watch all the white balls fly across the board? Everything was perfect about this game. The stretchy necks, the board size, the colored hippos, the catchy commercials, the apparent promotion of binge-eating, and a solid name. What's not to love?


ROCK EM' SOCK EM' ROBOTS
Another dream-game for kids. Unfortunately, I did not have the pleasure of owning this game, so I had to take advantage of the times I had sleepovers and after-school care with kids that had it. And man was I missing out! Despite the heavy violence in the game (trying to punch a guy so hard you knock his block off?), it was so awesome that they put them inside a boxing ring. I feel my childhood was slightly less-whole without this game.


PERFECTION
"Pop Goes Perfection!" Man that is stuck in my head now! This was kind of a reversed version of Operation, but on speed. Another game on the list that some of you have never seen or played, and that's a pity. You had a set amount of time (maybe 60 seconds) to fit all the shapes in their respective places before the buzzer sounded and popped all the pieces out, ruining your masterpiece. An aptly named game, and for my OCD personality, I did not like it when it shot all the pieces out. What can I say, I was high maintenance...sue me.


PHEW! That was a strong list. Now I'm gonna go set up a life-sized version of Mouse Trap at my house to try and trap Julie. Complete with cage!

Let's Explore That Further....

Here's what I'm thinking about. Sorry, this is just how my brain works.

"IF LOOKS COULD KILL..."
What does that mean? People say that and usually are inferring that someone is so attractive, that if personal appearance were a way to end someone's life, that some smokin' hot babe could cut me down? Now, of course she could be so hot that my heart stops and I suffer a massive coronary, or I could see her across the street and want a better glance and step in front of a rapidly approaching semi filled with Krispy Kreme doughnuts...but I tend to think these ideas are just slightly far-fetched.

And even beyond the obvious absurdity of this idiom, I have a fundamental problem with the argument that attractive people would be doing the killing. I actually believe the exact opposite. Let's explore this further. Are you really trying to tell me that an ATTRACTIVE person is more likely to kill me with their looks than an UGLY person? There are some unfortunate looking people out there that have fallen out of the ugly tree, beaten with an ugly stick, and kicked with the ugly shoe, and you're telling me that "if looks could kill", Charlize Theron has a better chance of whacking me than this fool...?

Joakim Noah, President, Team Ugly

"CUTE AS A BUTTON"
HUH?! Who here has ever seen a cute button?! I wonder what a cute button would even look like. Do you think it would be a button that has a kitten or bunny on it? Or do you think it's just some button on a pair of regular pants that, for some unexplainable reason, gives everyone the warm-and-fuzzies inside because of its awesome color, shape and symmetry? "Aw, that little girl is cute as a button!"...Why do people think human babies resemble buttons?

ALSO ON MY MIND...
-What is a "heeby-jeeby"? (i.e. "Man, that Joakim Noah guy really gives me the heeby-jeeby's.")

-Who would win a fight between the Crazy Burro and El Pollo Loco (crazy chicken)?

-What percentage of the world likes to be "it" (the seeker) in a game of hide-and-seek? I would like to see this in the next census poll. My guess - under 15%.

-How sweet was Connect Four? I loved that game.

*Stay tuned for the next blog post on board game nostalgia from my childhood!

How Do I Follow That?

So I've been looking at my last blog post, and I feel like that set the bar so high for the rest of my posts that I've been hesitant to write anything else! So now this post is meant as a "mental blog reset". Now I can look back, see this as the most recent post, and not feel the pressure to write an epic opus like my last LaserTag post.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with an ESPN photo taken of Marcus Thames striking out in last Friday night's Padres vs. Dodgers game in San Diego. Recognize anyone?

Here's the link to the ESPN recap of the game, just in case you're thinking I'm just good at working in Photoshop.

Laser-Tag - The Ultimate Birthday Party

*THIS IS THE MOST RIDICULOUS POST EVER - CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED*

As I alluded to in my last post, this past Tuesday myself and ten others celebrated our good friend Peter's birthday with what anyone would call the typical birthday party celebration...for an eight year-old.

We started the evening with pizza and old school 2-liter bottles of soda (NOTE - I don't know why I think 2-liter bottles are old school, but I do), complete with Spiderman paper plates and napkins, and Star Wars plates for dessert. Dessert was a huge brownie with birthday candles...the re-igniting, impossible-to-blow-out, sparking kind. The only thing we were missing were the cone-shaped party hats (major bummer).

After having our Moms wipe our faces and making sure we'd all been to the bathroom, we piled into a caravan of cars and made our way to the main event of the evening - Laser Tag at ULTRAZONE.

That's right ladies and gentlemen, we celebrated a 26 year-old birthday by going to teeny-bopper central. And it was maybe the most awesome night of my life!

Let me first say that for what appears to be a chaotic, unorganized war for kids, Laser Tag is not for the faint of heart. I went in there expecting to wreck shop on a bunch of little munchkins (redundant, I know), so you can imagine my surprise when we found ourselves in the "instruction room" with very few kids and a ton of people our age and older. The following is a detailed account of the events that followed.

THE "INSTRUCTION ROOM":
RULE #1) There is no running allowed, for safety reasons. You have no idea how infinitely harder this makes the game. "Oh no, he's gonna shoot/tag me, I'm in the wide open! I guess I better speed-walk until I find cover!" Which leads me to...

RULE #2) There is no speed-walking allowed. Yep, none of that either. Although I find this somewhat of a subjective rule to interpret for the supervising "Game-Masters" (a discussion topic in themselves), it nonetheless was a stated rule. So now if I have someone pointing a laser at me, I'll just take a leisurely stroll until I find a place to curl up in the fetal position for the remainder of the game. Which leads me to...

RULE #3) There is no crawling allowed. The only body part allowed to touch the ground is your feet. No knees, no butts...just feet. For an inflexible, 6'3" string-bean of a man, ducking under a 3ft wall becomes problematic when there are impossibly-accurate snipers on the roof. I mean, these guys can shoot. Which leads me to...

RULE #4) Both hands must be on the laser-gun for it to fire. There is a heat sensor on the bottom of the barrel that must be touched for the gun to be fired. Talk about a game-changer!

So...any delusions I had of popping out of a somersault in a dead sprint while one-hand wielding my laser bad-ass sideways style and picking off little blue-lit-up munchkins had to be left behind in the instruction room, along with my chance of survival.

THE TEAMS
Once the Game-Master finished giving the field-leveling "rules", it was then time to break into three teams. Because we came in such a large group, we were informed that two of us would need to break apart and be on a different team than the rest of our friends. After a bizarre moment of silence where all us adults starting crapping our pants as we battled with immature thoughts like, "But I wanna be on Tom's team!", I leaned over to the birthday boy and said "Let's do this!" My logic was the following - why would we go play Laser Tag if we can't even aim at our friends? We would soon find out that we couldn't have been more right.

So our nine friends, from now on referred to as the Blue Team, exited the room, glancing over their shoulders giving us the "dirty traitor" looks, and I'm pretty sure I saw somebody give me the "I'm-gonna-slit-your-throat" gesture. This was war.

Peter and I were relegated to the Red Team, and while we were in full planning mode on how to rip our competition to shreds, it was announced that our seven teammates would be Billy, Tommy, Bobby, Joey, Johnny, Timmy, and Ronny from the Mickey Mouse Club. Yep, that's right, Peter and I weren't going to be shooting the little munchkins, we'd be helping them. We weren't sure if this was awesome (cuz these kids gotta know what they're doing, right?) or horrible (cuz they are 10 and won't know how to operate the gun). But before we could change our minds, we were shoved into the vesting room, united with our Red munchkin friends.


"But wait a minute, who's the third team?" Funny you should ask. After estranging us from our friends and ordaining us babysitters for the evening, the Game-Master had one more surprise for us. As we walked away, we overheard him say "Oh man, I left you guys together? That's not even fair!" Uh-huh. That last group of people left in the instruction room were RINGERS! We're talking those people that butt-in while the rules are being given so they can clarify how much they know about the rules. We're talking the people who, if given the opportunity, would bring their own laser to Ultrazone. We're talking...gulp...experts.

So we began our death march to the vesting room, suddenly not giving a rats-ass about our ex-friends on the Blue Team because we were too busy looking over our shoulders as the Yellow Team started looking like the MonStars from Space Jam.

THE VESTING ROOM
As we entered the vesting room, we found the Blue Team starting to gear up and laughing as they looked down at their vests. At first I thought they were laughing at how ridiculous they looked, but then I realized they were laughing because all the vests have character names attributed to them. So they were wearing vests named Juggernaut, Predator, Darth Vader and Voldemort, and I got excited to see which vest I randomly chose for myself.


I selected a vest off the assembly line, geared up, strapped on the vest, and looked down to see what glorious bad-ass name my light-up screen displayed, ready to boast about my killer character. And the name that was shining back up at me was...

"Kyle"

Yep, in the biggest grudge match since Frazier vs. Ali, the gruesome Blue Team, led by Predator, would be facing the Red Team and their fearless leader...Kyle. But not to worry, I still had my trusty sidekick to boast about. So I turned to Peter to find him struggling mightily with his vest because the last laser-tagger honored with wearing that vest was apparently the size of a lawn gnome. No matter, no matter. After having to help him adjust the straps on his back and waist to free him up, we looked down at his vest in hopes of showing off his villainous character. And boy did we ever, because he had the kick-ass name...

"Stan"

Now, I would find out later that there was also a "Kenny" on our team and we were named after South Park characters, but the emotional damage had been done. My wall of confidence and bravery had been shaken, and now I was off my game as my mean-spirited friends made fun of me like I was back in 2nd grade home-room. But I digress....

THE ZONE
After everyone had their laughs, the doors abruptly opened and the Game-Master told us we had fifteen minutes. Just like that, it was on....

Stan and I hung together for the first five minutes, exploring the two-tiered level, looking for areas to pick people off and snipe them from far away distances. We also ran into the excruciatingly annoying problem of our munchkin teammates shooting at every person they saw, including us. Before we could yell "SAME TEAM!", we found our shields deactivated and lasers dark for 5 seconds before we could continue. Little Timmy, Tommy and Bobby ran by us with their heads down, just audibly whispering, "Sorry." Damn kids.

Well, we had no luck finding a sniper post, so we decided to cut the crap and start charging Rambo-style (walking, of course) and ducking (but not crawling, of course) and shooting everyone we saw (with both hands on the gun, of course).

This proved to be way more difficult than I expected. I was being totally ineffective. I was getting frustrated. And then, all of a sudden, I looked over at the birthday boy, and something inside me just snapped....

"Stan! Enemy over your left shoulder, 8-o-clock, now! I'll flank you. Go! Go! Go!"

I turned into a mad-man. I started screaming strategies and commands, ducking and flattening my back against walls as I tried to disguise myself against the fluorescent walls. Stan looked at me for a second with a confused "Are you serious?" look, but quickly held his tongue when he realized "This isn't Marc anymore. This is Kyle." I definitely yelled "Go! Go! Go!" at least thirty times, and soon we found our munchkin-land teammates, and before I knew it, I was standing back-to-back with little Ronny saying "You go for the base, I'll stay down and cover you. Go! Go! Go!" And the best part? Ronny tore off for that base like a bat outta hell (walking, of course) and got us some much needed points. The kid had now found his new best friend, and for the remainder of the game, wherever I went, Ronny stayed right on my side. Good soldier, that Ronny.

THE GAME-MASTER
I mentioned earlier this guy was a piece of work. After making some of the world's worst jokes in the instruction room, he was then charged with the task of staying inside the Zone during our game to supervise the running, crawling, shooting rules. But when I came across this dark figure with no laser vest, what did I find him doing? He was raving and cryp-walking in a corner by himself! And I mean busting arms, legs, ankles...everything. He was getting down with his bad-self. So what did I do? After firing at him about thirty times before realizing he wasn't playing, I stopped, stared...and got deactivated as little Bobby shot me on accident again. Damn kids.

CATWOMAN
I am still quite bitter about the Yellow Team and its ringers, but it would be an injustice to this night if I did not mention their fearless leader, "Catwoman".

This sassy little blonde vixen was there for blood. I got lit up by her so many times, I was her own personal Christmas Tree. She would run by screaming "You're Mine!" and proceed to destroy me and make me quake in my boots. Then she'd get hit by a random girl and would yell "YOU BITCH!" It was amazing. I appreciated her dedication to the game. I think I was in laser-love. Ah Catwoman, we had a good run, you and me. But Kyle's got bigger fish to fry.

THE RESULTS
Mercifully, the music stopped, the sounds halted, and the Game-Master directed us to the vesting room. We de-vested, I parted ways with my alter-ego Kyle, and made my way to the main room, cuz we were done...but I forgot one thing...

They post the results. The reason we had character names was for them to track our hits, base-steals, sentinel kills, alien shots, and times we were tagged. I was not ready for this, because I knew I sucked. I slowly raised my head to the monitor to see the damage, and saw a bar graph, with the three teams totals represented in their respective colors. Not only was my team last, but if you combined our score with the ex-friends Blue Team, we still had less than the Yellow Team! Bastards.

Then they passed out our individual results, and we all laughed as we compared who got hit the most, who we hit the most, and everyone asking "How often does Catwoman come here?!" Shockingly, I (Kyle) was the second best of our friends, falling only to Predator, the leader of the ex-friends. I was ecstatic. I had made my mark. I was an effective laser-tagger.

I will miss Ronny. I will miss Stan. But don't you worry UltraZone...I'll be back.

More Madness

Random March Madness related notes:

1) Yep, I was right. UCLA beat Michigan State. Looks like my predictions are on the upswing!

2) My Bruins are out of the tournament after an extremely tightly contested game with Florida. Bummed because they had a shot, but okay with how it ended.

3) I am going laser-tagging tonight. If that's not March Madness, I don't know what is.