The Smarmy Carny

This post has been re-posted at Random Fodder, Novac's personal blog.

I groggily pulled myself out of bed this morning. As I have been sick this week, I walked over to the glass of emergency orange juice I had poured myself before going to bed.

I took three large gulps of orange juice, and continued to the kitchen. I set the glass on the counter and headed for the bathroom. When I came back and approached the glass, it looked like there were cookie crumbs in my glass. Upon further inspection, there were three dead fruit flies floating on the top of the orange juice.

I quickly spit into the sink, with no obvious result. I opted not to induce vomiting for a few tiny pests.

The real unanswerable question is: How many fruit flies were there before I got up? I can only hope the answer is three.

Dasani has a set of commercials out with experts telling you about their product. The entertaining thing is that these "experts" are a dog, a hamster, and a bear.

No, they aren't cartoons, and they aren't actual animals with the fake moving CGI mouth. They're people, dressed in big animal suits. The dog tells you that drinking Dasani will "take the taste-of-tennis ball right out of your yap," while the bear informs you about other companies' mountain stream water: "You do not want any of that. There's salmon in there. And you know what they're doing? Spawning!"

And why, prey tell, are these commercials so amuzing? Simple. Dasani hired Wes Anderson (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) to direct them.

Head to Dasani's website, which will load up a Flash page. From there, put your mouse over "TV Ads," click on "Watch the New Ads," and click on "Watch the ads from 2005."

I am a big fan of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events and of the audiobooks read by Tim Curry.

I downloaded a free Daniel Handler interview via iTunes. If you're interested, just go to the iTunes Store in the program, search "Snicket," and look for the free listing. In the interview, he answers one question I have been wondering about some time regarding the switch between Tim Curry and himself reading the audio books.

Another piece of information that he divulges is that his friends had created an adult beverage called the Lemony Snicket Cocktail, due in part to the fact that his friends had an "overactive lemon tree."

What's in a Lemony Snicket?

• Plenty of lemons
• Powdered sugar
• White rum (Australian, when possible)
• Soda

Handler didn't give further details (such as how much of each item is used or which type of soda was generally used), but as I don't drink alcohol, it doesn't much matter to me. He did note that the drink generally evolved over time, and he invited others to figure out their own Lemony Snicket recipes.