Would You Like to Eat on a Star?

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... or, you could carry moonbeams home in a jar.  You could go shopping for a snack.  And, you know, nibble on a Pitt?

So much for musical whimsy.  Down to business:  How about some Angelina chops? Some Brad burgers or Pitt pits?  No, we're not talking about acting abilities or World War Z cuisine.  Not really.

We're talking Soylent Sausages here.  Or, as a buddy chimed in,  The Other White Meat.  Yes:  It's what's for barter, if the dollar fails.  Or, as another one emailed:  Is this Soylent Bling?

Yes, it's all of those things. And more.  Too much more.

For the ultimate in a concept that's really hard to swallow, how about snagging some celebrity tissue samples and making artisanal salami out of that lab-grown meat?

(We'll wait here.  Go back and re-read that if you like.  Take your time absorbing that one, and re-spool your mind as needed.  OK -- done?  Good deal.  Onward.)

Yes, it's recipe time:  Take a quick biopsy.  Then, isolate some muscle stem cells.  Next, plop it all into the proprietary bioreactor.  Finally, set the controls to the heart of the sun, and voila -- Jennifer Lawrence meatballs, maybe.  James Franco marinade.  Kanye West under glass.  Ellen DeGeneres on a cedar plank, perhaps, hot from the grill.

We can only hope we don't get into Jay Leno tartare, if you know what I mean.

With no apparent snickering at the potential avalanche of very funny jokes possible here, and without any pause for retching,  the Bitelabs' website reports, with a straight face -- or, at least, and thankfully, with no face-in-a-case in sight -- luxury protein from celebrities, spiced into fine charcuterie.

Fee, Fie, Fo, Fum:  I smell someone drawing marks and rubes into the water with their advertising chum.  Chumps for Chomps, as it were.

Maybe this is another case of, "If you don't get it, you're just not with it, just not cool or chill to what's hot or not."  And that's fine.  I can live with that.  See, I also didn't get the hilarious idea behind Dumb Starbucks, either.  So far, my mega-lapse of pop culture foppery has shown no signs of unrecoverable penalty.

Although, come to think of it:  I'm pretty sure my coolness factor keeps dropping like the trustworthiness of Wall Street, the IQ of Teabaggers, and the believability of Fox News.  I am prepared to deal with this level of heartbreak, and without a trembling bottom lip.

Please be careful, now:  I am a trained cynic, operating on a closed course very much like a Habitrail, and wearing protective gear -- PJs and a coffee mug.  Unless you are all lawyered up, please do not try this measure of cynicism at home.

And, no -- so far, there's no word as yet on Emma-Stone-Kabobs, Rihanna-Ribs, or Megan-Fox-'n'-Fries.  Or the beefcake equivalent.

Although, this does present the opportunity for wait-staff to create sentences very few people have ever heard, outside of polite Korowai restauranteurs:  "My name is Harry Hopper, and I'll be your waiter, and your main course."

* * * * *

OK, it's now really, really obvious that America has no interest whatever in providing even semi-sane-useful-or-valuable products for actual humans any longer.  You might remember a somewhat odd presidential contender, and what was said.  No, not Michele Bachmann or Herman Cain howling at the full moon.  Back further, back when uniqueness was refreshing, and not an incubator for trying out interesting new strains of psychosis.

Ross Perot.  Remember his fears about NAFTA -- that whole sucking sound thing?  Not sure he foresaw the mad rush to export American jobs to all corners of the planet by wealthy, powerful, um, patriots.  But he sure envisioned our current economic situation when he said we'd never balance the budget by giving each other haircuts.

Now, today, after laughing at this strange little man, we're giving each other haircuts.  We're working each other over for cash via nail jobs, facial piercings, tattoos, trips to the tanning bed...

If that's not quite a cutting blow -- the crappy jobs, when there is one, and the high-end, celebrity protein biz, with few opportunities in the middle -- there is a hotnew service for the RoboBros (TM) and Mandroids (C) still walking around somewhat erect in the hominid neighborhood:

BroApp -- an auto-send texting service, for lazy, inattentive, unromantic guys too preoccupied with buds, and their own needs, to drop a hi-there line to their love interests.

(We'll wait here.  Go back and re-read that if you like.  Take your time absorbing that one, and re-spool your mind as needed.  OK -- done?  Good deal.  Onward.)

All I can say is, in a Godfather-esque voice:  What is this?  Your thumbs broke?

There's already been some second thoughts about this fabulous, new, two-dollar way to get yourself kneecapped by your heart's desire. One of these ways would be the auto-sending of a message that arrives on her device, when you're both together -- and she realizes her hook-up can't be bothered to make a few thumb-and-finger twitches of his own, when thinking of her.

That situation via BroApp will, I suspect, soon be called Bro-Back, after the Roman god of Enduring Humiliations, Maximus Blowbackus.

* * * * *

What else?  Well, first:  Welcome to "Buffet Day," aka "Let's Get Some Radiation Suits and Clean Out the 'Fridge Day."  Let's see now -- what else is way in the back, in the dark bottom corner, long forgotten, left to evolve into whatever life form it chooses?

Well, there's Target.

I made the mistake of trying them out.  I ordered a Blu-ray movie from their website.  It was a pre-order sort of thing -- you order now and the item's sent out to you when the official movie release date rolls around.  Works like clockwork elsewhere.  Works like a toilet paper poncho in a typhoon at Target.

Short version: Nine emails to Customer Disservice.  Four emails back, one somewhat snotty.  Three broken promises.  One Blu-ray, wrong version, not the one ordered, 6.5 days late.  One send-back.  One actual Blu-ray ordered, 16 days late.  Considering my savings, I think I was paid 2.25 cents per hour, by Target, to haggle with them, and get them even marginally trained and up to speed on how to send out a mysterious thing called a Customer Order.

Summary: My savings:  A buck-something, by ordering with them.  My experience:  Priceless.

Butt weight, as they say on the infomercials for an excess-buttocks-de-larder exercise device, there's more.

Late last year, you might remember, Target let 40 million credit card numbers and 70 million addresses, phone numbers, and other bits of personal info all spew out of its secure servers to hackers waiting downstream.

Bad as that was -- a little thing like the biggest hack in U.S. retail history -- they compounded events with two other sad and hilarious events.  The first was sending me an email that explained what happened, Oh Dear and Most-Treasured Target Customer, it began. This, I call the standard BAFO letter -- the Boned And Filleted -- Oops! letter.

Next, they told me that I would have a free ride on the big Watch Your Credit Activity Go-Round, at one of the credit reporting agencies.  OK, well, sure -- it's the least you can do.  And I do mean least.

The capper was what else was in that letter, which is where the secondary insults to my thinking apparatus confidently strides right in:  Included is a long, long list of what I -- me! -- might do to protect against hackers, and protect against having my credit and my personhood hijacked and sent in a zipped data packet, called an Electron Body Bag, to Shangahi or whatever.

Now, that really takes some stones.  Stonehenge comes to mind, size-wise.


Celebrity Snausages: http://bitelabs.org/

Ah, the depth of dumbness: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/02/10/dumb-starbucks-parody-free-coffee/5357597/

Hamster House: http://www.habitrail.com/ovo/eng/index.php

The GOP's Roster-O-Chuckles:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Party_presidential_candidates,_2012

What's that sound? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_sucking_sound

The bite that can bite back: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism

http://time.com/10764/broapp-sends-automatic-texts-your-girlfriend-to-make-her-think-youre-thinking-about-her/

Bro-Back: http://guycodeblog.mtv.com/2014/03/07/broapp-problems/

Tar-jhay: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-03-13/target-missed-alarms-in-epic-hack-of-credit-card-data

Today's Bonus:

Stonehenge ala Spinal Tap: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Acx4KYBS12c

Live: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ec1WaFrK8E

Part One of the interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMofDWzfA6A

... and with GMA:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZtSQCbAQxU

... and elsewhere: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38t4yPv4koA