Legends of the Hidden Temple...and the Not-so-Hidden Losers

Today I was utterly thrilled (perhaps a tad too much) to see that one of my Facebook friends had posted a reference to Nickelodeon's "Legends of the Hidden Temple." First, let me tell you, there's a serious dearth of Facebook posts that reference classic (S)Nick shows these days. This could be because a fair amount of people within my Facebook cohort have now birthed actual children of their own and no longer need to live in the constant state of nostalgia and stunted development that we New Yorkers are so dearly fond of, but I haven't run the analytics on this to speak with any real authority. ::pauses to take sip of spiked Ecto Cooler::

But, second, it reignited a deep-seated fury I harbor toward this now defunct gameshow. For those unfamiliar with the show... (Forgive me, but were you living under a rock?! ....or perhaps you were just born after 1987; your loss. Or your family was too poor to have cable, but come on, that's no excuse. Even I forged a friendship with someone who had Nickelodeon, Duck Hunt, and an Easy Bake Oven. Ain't no shame in it in the late 80s, as we were all just freaked the f*** out about contracting AIDS through a milkshake straw thanks to a particularly sobering segment of "Nick News" delivered by Linda Ellerbee.)

But for those unfamiliar with the show, it went something like this: six teams of co-ed pairs (presumably to make up for gender deficiencies or to shove some prepubescent romance down our throats) with fancy names like "Silver Snakes," "Red Jaguars," and "Purple Parrots"--no one ever expects much from the parrots when everyone else is named after a blood-thirsty predator--compete in mini-challenges and eventually all have to face the shame of being losers. Much like a guillotine, the elimination is swift and relatively painless--as a viewer, you're not emotionally invested in any of the losers because there's barely time to get a good glimpse of these helmeted and mouth-guarded kids before they're promptly ushered out--until just one team remains, and this is the team that moves on to the final challenge: the temple.

Now most viewers are oooing and aaahing at this final test of agility and jungle-gym mastery (or at least the ability to maneuver through packing peanuts), but I was not so easily fooled, for I knew that each team of bright-eyed 10-yr. olds would soon go the way of the rest of them...SPOILER ALERT: Everyone FAILS on this show. It's of course through no fault of the contestants, who really do try in earnest. I mean, why wouldn't they? Space Camp (aka another of childhood's disappointments and euphemism for 'really expensive babysitting') is on the line here.

Rather, responsibility lies with that smug stone bastard Olmec, who claims he "knows the secrets behind each of the treasures in his Temple." Yeah, I'll bet he does....i.e. the secrets of how to radio in a mildly racially offensive Temple Guard to clean up the job of a kid who went rogue and looks to be winning.

Look, I get it. Everything has to operate on a budget, and you can't be shipping every Tommy, Susie, and Purple Parrot off to space camp. But the fact that each child has a glimmer of that dream in his/her eye for just a moment only to leave Universal Studios with a lousy Sand Art kit is simply demeaning and cruel. Lest us not forget that those kids were pitted against each other, risking their safety by traversing moats and viper pits merely with the hope of eating astronaut ice cream (only to be disappointed yet again because that s*** is gross).

If you don't believe me, see for yourself. This clip perfectly encapsulates how rigged and ultimately dream-pulverizing this gameshow was:

(Granted, Albert looks like he could've benefited from a Red Bull and demonstrated a little more hustle, but really, could host Kirk Fogg's words of encouragement for Jennifer at the end have been more patronizing?! I think we can all agree that Jennifer carried that team, at least in the temple.)

In any event, this was a bitter pill for both contestant and viewer to swallow: the stark truth that, sometimes in life, we will encounter sadistic television hosts who want nothing more than to deny promising youths of camcorders and zero-gravity simulators to make up for the fact that they exist on this earth as narrators of doomed temple missions on a children's gameshow. But I'll be damned if I'm going to let Albert and Jennifer settle for layering colored sand into funky-shaped plastic bottles after having Temple Guards scare the bejesus out of them. It's time to raise awareness. 

Single White Female

Sadly, the time has come again for me to look for a new housemate. After exhausting several leads from personal contacts, I must now resort to finding some potential psycho off of Craigslist. I don't know why I am actively avoiding this inevitability so much. To date, I have lived with several people I've met through Craigslist, and it has always worked out just fine...except for the roommate who bought a tiny dog that wanted absolutely nothing to do with me but considered the floor of my bedroom to be prime real estate for its peepee. I am not afraid to publicly state this because, much like the dog's apathy toward me, I am fairly confident my former roommate's interest in my life does not extend to following this blog.

I'm certain my failure to search for a roommate is a mixture of one part dread, three parts laziness, and one part held-out hope that my quarter will finally unearth a $10,000 prize on one of those dollar scratch-off lotto tickets, in which case I would be able to afford to live alone. (Yes, I am indeed living proof that it's not just retirees whose McDonald's menu item-of-choice is the filet of fish sandwich who "invest" in those lotto tickets.) "You look like a deadbeat mother," a dear friend once commented as I walked out of a 7-Eleven carrying a gallon of milk, a fistful of lotto tickets, a pint of ice cream, and the latest TV Guide. (I didn't actually have a TV Guide in hand, but I feel that this is the only way it could have been a fair judgment.)

When considering my Craigslist ad, I am uncertain of the approach I should use. Part of me wants to start the screening process early, do a little weeding out before the face-to-face meetings. I could ask some simple multiple choice questions like this:

1) Clorox, Windex, aluminum foil, Drain-O, ammonia. Combined, what do these things make?
          A) a clean apartment!
          B) crystal meth
          C) Yo no hablo ingles.

(He/she would still be awarded partial credit for answering "C"--in my pursuit of becoming bilingual--but would still need to check out on the meth-cooking part.)

I could begin by providing a few fun factoids about myself in the hope of generating some compatibility, but then I run the risk of a situation like, "Ohmigod! I also wear a size 7 in shoes, am a left-handed recovering hypochondriac, find fart jokes funny, and don't like preparing meat or touching newspapers! It's like we're the same person or something!" And, in fact, we are at this point because she's been actively stealing my identity for months, controlling my paltry bank accounts and managing my Mint.com budget unbeknownst to me, as I wrote off Mint.com as the devil incarnate months ago and haven't touched it since. It's now just a stagnant webpage containing all of my most sensitive financial information, neatly compartmentalized and waiting [/asking] to be stolen, which I believe was the whole purpose of the website in the first place.

"Quit flattering yourself with these delusions, Kristin,*" is what you're saying to me right now.

*You are now one step closer to successfully hacking into my Mint.com account.

And I say to you, "Oh, I am flattering myself with exactly these delusions." Look, I paid money to sit in the theater and watched "The Roommate," so I know how quickly these things can escalate. It's all fun and games until you stumble upon a sketchpad filled with 73 charcoal renditions of your face from different angles--"Are these of me sleeping???" (...met with silence because, at that very moment, he/she is behind you wielding a knife aimed directly at your jugular. "Not my new Wüsthof! I just got that on sale at Crate & Barrel.")

In the end, I trust it will all work out, and I always welcome the opportunity to meet new people....or to be sketched. ("How about now? Does it look like I'm really sleeping???") If nothing else, it will give me more to blog about passive aggressively. "Ummm, whoever keeps dipping their knife into my peanut butter jar after they've already dipped it in the Nutella jar had just better stop!"

NOTE: You will NEVER see me write this, as peanut butter and Nutella are a delicious union of spreads.

P.S. NOTE: Kudos to you if you got this post's title reference. For your impressive knowledge of terrible '90s movies, I reward you with this:

J.C. Penney, the Friend I Never Had

I received a Wall Street Journal news alert today that announced, "J.C. Penney Nabs a Top Apple Executive." Relax, I have absolutely nothing to say with regards to that article.

It did, however, conjure up memories of the imaginary best friend I had as a small child. Well, let's take it down a notch and leave it at imaginary friend because 'best' would imply that I had many, which may cause you to infer unproven things about me and my upbringing. And let's leave it at 'child' because I never really was small, instead resembling a young John Goodman in my early baby pictures.

I fear that you don't believe me and  therefore wish I could post a photo of my baby self next to an image of John Goodman's self, but that would involve me teaching my mom how to use the printer's scanner over the phone. And seeing as how it is 2:15 in the morning (with the time being the irrelevant factor in this equation), you'll just have to trust me on this one.

As a promising and budding young mind, I proudly introduced my friend to my parents, "Mom, Dad, this is J.C.; J.C. Penney." (This is arguably the clearest illustration of why I have had this blog since 2009 and still fail to have more than 10 entries. 'Creative' never appears as a descriptor on my resume.)

In retrospect, I probably would have gone with a more nuanced J.C. Penny, but seeing as I had neither developed the faculties for spelling nor the knowledge of intellectual property rights laws, I was clearly liable for trademark infringement. (Dad, navigating me through the process of setting up a Roth IRA at the age of 7 was indeed an astute parenting move, but let me ask where you were on this one!)  

Luckily, the retail giant never pursued legal action because they really could've taken everything from me--my Fisher Price® (not making that mistake again!) kitchen, my cardboard general store of plastic foodstuffs, one recalcitrant beta fish, and a rough-and-tumble team of troll dolls.

In hindsight, I don't really know what purpose J.C. served. Our friendship was tepid at best. There was no use in bossing her around to do my bidding, as it simply would not have gotten done. That only happens when your imaginary friend is Bruce Willis. And I don't believe I was a child who ever really talked to myself. (So God, perhaps we can just pay that one forward when my turn comes around to parent...)

I think it was fueled by my desire to keep up with the Joneses. The Joneses, in this case, were not a nuclear family living in the suburbs with a cocker spaniel, but were in fact my brother and his imaginary wingman, Cheppy. I have to commend my brother for an early embrace of multiculturalism because, with a name like Cheppy, I had to assume he was foreign-born. (Maybe he was a Cheppi.) The compliments stop there, however, because in my view, Cheppy/i was a grade-A creep-o.

When asked to describe Cheppy/i, my brother informed us that he was an old man with white hair. Had I been born in 1999 and allowed to watch R-rated movies at the tender and impressionable age of 4, I would have pictured him as the character Blue from "Old School":

 

Instead, I grew up during a time when I could swoon over a young Macaulay Culkin, and hence I pictured him as that terrifying octogenarian who saves the day in "Home Alone":

Perhaps I was too harsh on Cheppy/i, though, because he seemed to get on with my brother just fine. I have no recollection of any escalating quarrels or threats of vehicular homicide using my brother's red Big Wheels® Jeep®. Through thick and thin, his friendship to my brother stood the testament of time. Unlike that good-for-nothing lout, J.C.

In the end, J.C. Penney and I parted ways. We still manage a Christmas card every now and again, and the last I heard was that she was pursuing her doctorate in linguistic anthropology at UC Santa Barbara. She always was a go-getter, despite me calling her a "lout" above. I was projecting, people. 

As for Cheppy/i, he has since moved on from this world due to congestive heart failure. We all have skeletons in our closets, but it turns out that old Chep-Chep was a 2-pack-a-day smoker for 45 years. I always got the impression that he was a bit of a morning drinker, too, but my brother warns that this is purely speculative. (He was also a libertarian.) My brother doesn't hold these secrets against him, though, as good ol' Chep bequeathed that shovel pictured above to him.