Hello and happy new year everyone. I’ve been inundated (not to be confused with “in-and-dated”) with assignments and other commitments in the name of “having a good time,” so this entry reaches you a week into the new year. Which reminds me… the person who introduced the system of having work to hand in after a widely celebrated holiday (e.g. Christmas) must have been on some kind of high. Sure there’s always work to be done, but couldn’t it all be put out of the way by setting deadlines for assignments before holidays? Pay it forward, pay it backward, but I don’t like “Pay it holiday.” So, by means of rebelling against this system, I decided not to work on any of my assignments till everyone else gets back to college/school… which is tomorrow. Yup, it’s been a nice long workless though not effort-less holiday for me. I made an effort to actually enjoy this Christmas/New Years holiday, for once.

Today, I woke up really late, but had breakfast anyway. After all, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. But no Champagne breakfast for me, Wilbur. I polished off the remaining pasta from the previous night in ravenous fashion, like I was trying to gain weight in Italian. When I sat, flicking the residual mince with my fork, I realised how much of a sucker for designer goods I was. I always eat designer supermarket food. Call me trendy, but if it’s not Marks & Sparks, Waitrose or some other famous high street chain, I’m not content. Going back to the pasta, I remember a few years ago when I noticed that they have Spaghetti Bolognese microwave meals amongst the other pasta meals. Wondering what these pasta microwave meals would taste like, I bought one and after nuking it for the recommended time on the box, I stuck my fork in. I should have stopped there, but if I didn’t lift the fork and place the bolus on the microwaveable platter into my mouth, I’d have never tasted what years of scientific research would have produced. After tasting real freshly homemade pasta, I tell you, you won’t want to go back… or rather, go forward in time, into the future where we can produce cooked pasta dishes by bombardment with electromagnetic waves for no more than 4 minutes on energy level setting “high.” The product of this lazy physics experiment is tasteless food, with a mixture of dampness to it. You get a neat combination of soggy pasta with dry-to-the-bone meatballs in a sea of watery tomato sauce. I shun you, microwaveable Spaghetti Bolognese and all your microwaveable pasta friends. Trust me, the extra effort of buying the ingredients and the cooking will make a huge difference in taste, at just the cost of an extra 10 minutes or so, which is the time the garlic bread takes to cook anyway. Salivating? You should be, all you microwave dependent minions of mu (pronounced like “you” with an “m” in front. It’s Greek, nevermind).

Strange isn’t it, how some of us will be doing a lot of retrospecting, thinking about the year that has just passed and wondering where it went? Last year provided many more questions, compared with the number of answers. Wait, let me illustrate this with an example which also made me think hard of a particular day in my childhood calendar… During the summer of 2000 I was checking out eBay (that place where you can buy or sell by auction, almost anything including your own nasal hairs, which you’re proclaiming actually used to grow on Ricky Martin), and I thought I’d search for those old toys I used to have which were a marketing strategy for 80s cartoon companies. I had a look for all my old favourites like MASanje, Transformers, Jayce And The Wheeled Warriors, and last but not least, He-Man. After searching for Masters Of The Universe merchandise, I was provided with hits for a number of He-Man action figures, all still sealed in their original packaging. “Impressive,” I thought, until I came to view a pristine sealed package of one of Skeletor’s most intriguing minions… Stinkor. Maybe you’re forgetful, like I am, or simply didn’t come across this fella when you were a young toy-collector, but here’s a picture proving his existence (taken originally from the eBay auction page for Stinkor). Just take a gander at that before moving to the next para-paragraph.

One question… “What was he all about?” What does that caption on the card say, Evil master of Odori? Nice. At this point in time, viewing the picture of Stinkor, I took a bus back down memory lane to a day when I was like 5 years old and playing He-Man with a friend and his action figures. He had the Stinkor figure and I remember wondering back then what he did. My friend told me that if you squeeze his head, stink breath was supposed to come out of the little orifice situated where our mouths would be. I tried it, but got no wheeze of skunk. He then told me that he took Stinkor to play with in the bath (or was that “during a bath?” I can’t remember) and after that he stopped smelling of ’shit.’ Did he really smell like that? Please write in and tell me if you know, because it’s baffled me completely. If you’re the marketing genius behind the “action figure that can actually smell of how you feel at times” sensory toy, I seriously applaud your attempts of trying to make toys interesting. *Applause* Stinkor was the Evil Master of Odori (or something), but he should have been the Evil Master, period. They didn’t have clothes-pegs in Eternia so everyone would have been down shit creek without a paddle, or at least, literally thought they were. Constantly.