Okay, so I am just as starved for content as the next guy. Nothing at all in July, huh? Also, there is really nothing here, because this is a repost, without permission, of a hilarious rant by James “Kibo” Parry. But the pictures are mine.

Kibo is a USENET personality from way back, when the Internet was a gentlemen’s club. If you are a geek, this is funny.

Enjoy.

Subject: “Star Wars Eye” ruined my immortal soul forever. Waah! From: kibo@world.std.com (James “Kibo” Parry) Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology, alt.food.pez

Okay, so here’s my true story for today about the horror that is “Star Wars Episode Eye”.

As you may or may not have noticed (despite a hype barrage nearly a millionth as big as George Lucas’s) I have been putting up pictures of Dumb Toys on my Web site. (More slowly than I like — I have about 200 photos in the “holding area”, with only about 20 posted on the site) And you may have noted that I put up a gallery of Dumb “Star Wars” Toys the day before the “Star Wars Episode Eye” toys were released to enormous imaginary crowds of invisible, toy-crazed shoppers who only exist on CNN Headline News. So, anyway, in the past few weeks I’ve been smuggling my camera into places like Toys R Us — brazenly walking right past the “NO CAMERAS ALLOWED” sign which Toys R Us feels they need to put up to violate MY CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO MAKE FUN OF THEIR LAME TOYS WITH WACKY PHOTO CAPTIONS — and not checking my camera at the security desk, either. (At Toys R Us, they have “Security”. At other stores, they have “Loss Control”. I have never seen a Security person at Toys R Us — when I spent two hours in their Alewife store snapping photos all over the place, I heard them screaming into the PA system
for the Security guy every five minutes for some reason, but he never returned from his eternal coffee break — but I imagine that Toys R Us Security forces have uniforms not unlike giant versions of Lego Darth Vader’s outfit, only made out of leather. And instead of lightsabers they have cattle prods with the tips coated with Krazy Glue.)

Today I went to the Burlington Mall (aka “Simon” — no, I don’t know why
the mall is named “Simon” now) because I got a hot tip that they had
bait with a “YUM — HOG LARD!” logo on the package. (I also do photos of
Things You Shouldn’t Put In Your Mouth. Note that I am only required to
actually taste things intended for consumption by people, not crappies.)
This mall, like all large and trendy malls established during the Yuppie
era, has one of those candy shores where they have big bins of 59 kinds
of jelly beans (MOVIE THEATER BUTTER FLAVOR JELLY BEANS! DR PEPPER JELLY
BEANS! CHEERIOS JELLY BEANS! HOG LARD JELLY BEANS!) sorted by flavor,
arranged in a big rainbow, so you can mix the 59 flavors together yourself
and only pay a 50% surcharge over just getting a bag of jelly beans at
K-Mart and throwing out the licorice ones. Because, I mean, it’s obvious
that it’s better to waste money than to waste food.

I was buying my bimonthly bag of One Scoop Of Everything Blue (they now have
gummi space shuttles in blue! Yay!) when I saw that, like every other
store at the mall, they had a rack of “Star Wars Episode Eye” toys.
Of course, because everyone expected there to be a huge crush to get
“Star Wars” toys, every store stocked about 50,000 of them, meaning that
there is a horrible, terrible glut of “Star Wars” toys on the face of the
earth. Not only toy stores are chock-a-block with them, but pushcart
vendors, framed lithography stores, and everyone else except the Disney
store is stuffed to the gills with injection-molded “Star Wars” stuff.
This candy store had the candy-filled lightsabers (because every Jedi
needs a snack while he’s dueling with Darth Vader) and something which
I saw and (silently) told myself, “THIS HAS TO GO ON MY WEB SITE!”

What was this terrifyingly creepy “Star Wars” candy-slash-toy?

The “Jar Jar Binks Monster Mouth Candy Tongue” lollipop.

I am not making this up.

For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, let me explain who Jar Jar Binks
is. (I haven’t seen it either but I don’t need to because I’ve been exposed
to at least nine hours of TV specials about this two-hour movie so I can
truthfully say I know more about this movie than the people who wasted their
time seeing it when they could have been watching “E!”.) Jar Jar Binks
is the wacky, wacky, wacky comic sidekick in “Star Wars Episode Eye”.
How wacky is Jar Jar? Jar Jar is so wacky that even the “Star Wars” fanboys
find him creepy.

Now, George Lucas has NEVER cheesed up a “Star Wars” movie before by
including an annoyingly wacky comic sidekick. There weren’t any annoyingly
wacky characters in the original movie. Unless you count C-3PO.
And R2D2. And Chewbacca. And that mousebot that runs away from Chewbacca.
And that target-practice droid that zaps Luke Skywalker in the butt.
Okay, well, George Lucas jams his movies with wall-to-wall wacky critters.
But Jar Jar is considerably more annoying. Jar Jar is not only silly,
he’s stupid. He’s stupider than a Spice Girl forced to breathe pure xylene
for twenty-four hours after having drunk a can of lead paint. And he
talks funny. I mean he has wacky broken English (worse than Yoda’s)
and a grating, squeaky voice. And he has big googly eyes. And he wears
flared capri slacks sort of like if Mary Tyler Moore were on “Space: 1999”.
And he has big floppy ears. And he’s extraordinarily clumsy (even compared
to that stormtrooper who hit his head on the door in the first movie.)
And worst of all, he has a long and disgusting tongue which he refuses to
keep anywhere near the vicinity of his mouth despite the fact that
everyone else in the “Star Wars” universe is clearly disturbed by the
androgynous floppy-eared alien’s wet, prehensile erogenous zone.

Which brings me to the “Jar Jar Binks Monster Mouth Candy Tongue” lollipop.

It’s one of those modern rethinkings of the traditional lollipop, i.e.
it’s a lollipop with some plastic around it to raise the price to more
than any human should have to pay for half an ounce of sugar on a stick.
You know, these things are usually motorized and light up and talk and
stuff. In this case, a large plastic plunger (looking exactly the same
as the ones that two-part epoxy comes in) has a big head of Jar Jar Binks
on the end. When you ram the plunger home, Jar Jar’s mouth opens and his
long red tongue protrudes.

And you’re supposed to lick it. YOU are supposed to lick Jar Jar’s tongue.
His tongue is artificial cherry flavor.

So now you can see why I needed a photo of this for my Web site.
Because I know that you’re not going to believe my description of this
candy — WHICH REQUIRES THAT LITTLE KIDS FRENCH-KISS THE MOST ANNOYING
CREATURE IN THE “STAR WARS” UNIVERSE — without photographic evidence.

Now, because all lollipops taste the same (except for those Mexican ones
with all the chili pepper on the outside, which were a bit of a surprise
when I discovered them last week, and I think less disgusting than
Jar Jar’s tongue could be) I figured I didn’t need to actually review the
flavor of Jar Jar’s tongue (“IT TASTES RED! THE END.”) therefore I didn’t
need to buy the stupid candy, because I have better things to waste my
money on than “Star Wars” stuff.

But this candy store was really small, so that the guy behind the counter
could not help seeing my every move. While there’s nothing really wrong
with snapping photos of stupid stuff, when you do it directly in front
of the store staff it can lead to awkward situations. So I will normally
wait for a moment when there is nobody around, or I will pick up the
consumer item in question and carry it to a secluded spot to snap it,
but in this case there was no way to avoid the store clerk seeing (and
hearing) me taking a photograph with my noisy digital camera. This is
a special problem when you take into account that it was a “Star Wars”
item, and thus might lead to being trapped in a conversation with someone
who notices that I, like he, is an enormous fan of “Star Wars” and he
loves loves loves Jar Jar Binks too and the lollipops taste incredibly
yummy and he’s seen the movie eighty-seven times and can he have my
home phone number? So, to avoid a possible major embarassment at being
caught photographing the wares, I decided to just buy one of the damn
lollipops. After all, I was buying a bag of blue things anyway.

There were no price tags on the Jar Jars (which, oddly, were not in a jar,
even though most of the other candy was) but I figured one couldn’t cost
too much because, hey, it was a lollipop. I noticed that nobody had
bought any of them yet. (Will they ever?)

So, I took my candy and my Jar Jar Oral Contact On A Stick to the
register. They guy looked at my Jar Jar and couldn’t find a price tag.
He walked over to the rack of Jar Jars and still couldn’t find any price
tags. He typed the barcode number into his cash register and it didn’t
know either. (Apparently Jar Jar doesn’t actually exist as a consumer
product, much like the crowds that supposedly snapped up all the “Star Wars”
toys a minute past midnight.) The clerk was reduced to calling headquarters
(or possibly just another shop in the chain, or possibly George Lucas)
and asking what the SKU for Jar Jar was. Someone told him and he typed in 7708.

I now have a receipt which says

                Item No
                7708 STR WRS LIGHT SABER POP     1.00 @ $       6.99
                                                6.99 T6

…that’s right, I bought a seven-dollar lollipop. A “Star Wars”
lollipop. A “Star Wars Episode Eye” lollipop. A JAR JAR FRIGGIN’ BINKS
lollipop. I HAVE RUINED MY KARMA FOREVER AND NO AMOUNT OF ATONEMENT
COULD POSSIBLY CLEANSE MY SOUL.

I managed to go all this time having never bought a single “Star Wars”
licensed product (except for video games, which don’t really count because
“Star Wars” SHOULD be a video game) and I had to blow it all by wasting
seven dollars on the Jar Jar Saliva-Swapper. Seven dollars. Golly,
in my day you could see a MOVIE for seven dollars. Now all you can do
is buy a plastic Jar Jar head that you have to suck on after it has been
fondled by small children and “Star Wars” fans at the mall.

And the worst part is, after I rang it up, the clerk started talking
to me about how much he liked Jar Jar and how cool the movie was when
he saw it a minute after midnight on the first day of release.

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGHHH!!!

This has been a true story.

— K.

I haven’t taken the plastic
wrap off Jar Jar’s tongue yet…
I think maybe I should eat the
lollipop with the plastic wrap
still on. Incidentally, his
tongue is covered with
little spikes.

I really did like the “green mango and chili” pop from Mexico.