Feaverish

I had Big Nachos for lunch today. From 7-Eleven? I haven�t eaten them in years, probably, but back in my Wild Bachelor Days� they were something of a staple, as the bus stop nearest my ground-floor studio apartment (woo!) was right in front of a 7-Eleven.

Quite a bit about the nachos has changed. For one thing, �Big Nachos�? They used to be called �Super Nachos.� I heard, maybe, that there was a class-action lawsuit accusing 7-Eleven of false advertising on the grounds that no interpretation or reasonable exaggeration of the word �super� could realistically be applied to the nachos. Or maybe I just made that up? Interestingly (an adverb which, in this case, doesn�t fall under reasonable exaggeration either), 7-Eleven�s Terms & Conditions page lists �Super Nachos� as a trademark of the company, while �Big Nachos� are nowhere to be found. Curiouser and curiouser.

Number two. The chips come sealed in a plastic bag now, where before it was just a bunch of mostly-broken chip pieces in a half-closed plastic container. I�m all for sanitation and sterilization, but is a bag really necessary? Probably human hands have handled those chips at some point, so why bag them right at the end? Or maybe not. Maybe it�s all machine from the time the corn is planted. Like in The Matrix. But then are machines really any cleaner than people? In my experience: most definitely.

The new bags do make the chips harder for 7-Eleven�s largest customer demographic�hobos�to tamper with, and while that�s probably something your average consumer appreciates, this consumer will miss the band-aids and hypodermic needles occasionally buried in his chips like so many unspeakably filthy cereal-box toys.

And finally there�s the matter of the cheese itself. With Big Nachos, after opening your bag of chips and dumping them into the plastic container, you place the would-be nachos under the soulless nozzle of a dual-purpose chili/cheese dispenser and press a button to activate a disturbingly tubular stream of cheese.

My memory�s a little foggy on this last point, but if I remember correctly in ye olden days the cheese dispensers were junk. They never worked right. Basically what would happen is you�d get your nachos half covered in cheese before the machine would crap out and you�d have to call the manager over to fix it. As any aficionado knows, nacho eating is a timed sport. From the moment that first glob of cheese touches down you�re in a race against the clock, with no time to stand around with half your chips dressed�and quickly growing soggy�while the other half remains un-cheesed. Anyway, the manager would reach into the busted machine and manually squeeze the cheese out of its bag while you furiously pressed the �Dispense Cheese� button to give the process some much needed suction. In other words: teamwork. Those broken cheese machines brought people together�in a way that sinister 2001(the movie, not the year�it�s in italics, people)-esque robot dispensers and THX-1138(the year)-era sterility never can.

ââ�¬Â¦but it’s still to too hot to be bloggin’.

This site is (finally!) the No. 2 Google result for the searches pee terribly and baby’s head smells like cleanser, edging out dooce in both categories. You know, she gets paid to blog; I do it out of the blackness kindness of my heart.