Orange County Police make a toy pony much more fun:

It's really a nice moment when the WFTV anchor throws to what she thinks is going to be a toy pony, but it's already been blown up. Or in the weirdly poetic words of WFTV:

When it was all over, all that was left was a charred area of the cul-du-sac, small pieces of the toy, plastic, wire and fur.

Ladies and gentlemen, if our radio show were a blog post, this would be its comment thread. It would also be way too long and full of misspellings. Anyway, talk about whatever you like. Maybe you want to talk about the new decor in the Oval Office, maybe you want to talk about helper robots, or maybe "campaign goggles." Up to you. Go nuts.

Today's game: Swarmation. It's hard out there for a pixel. You spend thousands of dollars on pixel graduate school, you work out every day to maintain your perfect square shape, and then you end up being part of a corner of a hole Mario falls into. All you've got is your pixel friends, and that's what this game is all about.

It took me a few minutes to figure out Swarmation. You're a pixel, surrounded by other pixels, trying to make shapes with them. What I didn't immediately realize is those other pixels are being moved around by other people sitting at computers around the world. It's a safe bet some of them don't know what's going on either.

You can name your pixel. If you play, look for me on there. I named mine "Jennifer."

Recommended for people who: have wondered what it's like to be pixels, are not easily frustrated. I wouldn't call this a fun game, exactly, but there's something nice about knowing other people are out there having as much non-fun as you are.

Joining Roxanne Roberts and Adam Felber on the panel this week is the very funny Maz Jobrani. You may know him from the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour, or from when he played Not My Job on our show a couple weeks back. Welcome, Maz!

Images at the link below are not exactly NSFW, but they're JKOWFW (just kind of weird for work).

We spent a few minutes in yesterday's meeting discussing whether or not to use a story from the Wall Street Journal about college football beefcake photos. This is apparently a longstanding tradition involving teammates lathering themselves in baby oil and posing shirtless together next to beefcakey things like orange Lamborghinis and big guns.

In the end we decided not to use the story on the radio show, because holding the photo spreads up to the microphone is not an effective way to communicate their beefcakeyness.

A couple Sandwich Mondays ago, when we ate the Lady's Brunch Burger, a few of you guys said for the true bacon-donut experience, I should check out the Bacon Maple Bar from Voodoo Donuts in Portland, OR. I'm not saying I flew to Portland this weekend JUST to get one, but it was a factor.

Just wanted to say thanks for the recommendation. I can now die happy. And early.

Disney, apparently, has been taking its classic cartoons and remixing them for today's media-savvy kids. They call it "Blam!" If it wasn't posted somewhere on the internet that they were real, I'd think they were a parody of everything terrible everywhere. Because really, wow:

BLAM IN YOUR FACE! It's especially weird because the narrator, an employee of the World of Disney, seems to have nothing but contempt for the beloved characters of the World of Disney.

Via Cartoon Brew, which has more episodes of "Blam!" and a sharp take on just what makes them so bad.

Not content to let other nationwide chains be the only ones to commit murder-by-sandwich, last week Denny's unveiled its Fried Cheese Melt. That's a grilled cheese with four deep-fried mozzarella sticks on it. Peter, Mike and I headed out to Oak Park, Ill., to give it a try.

Mike: This obviates the need for that awkward question, "Have you decided on an appetizer?"

Peter: Yeah, it's like, "Yes, I'll have the fried mozzarella sticks, and I'll have them encased in bread."

 

Mike: It's really got nice layers of crunch. There's the crunch of the grilled bread, then the mozzarella sticks.

Ian: Yeah. All the layers, it's Inception in sandwich form. The mozzarella sticks are really just a dream the grilled cheese sandwich is having. It's a good dream.

Peter: It really needs something inside the mozzarella stick. Another layer.

Ian: So what you want is not so much a sandwich, as Cheese Nesting Dolls.

Mike: Maybe like a beef skewer in there? Or pepperoni? That'd be good.

Peter: This is the first significant advance in grilled cheese technology since the sandwich was invented.

Mike: I remember what it was like before, in the olden days.

Ian: Yes, that's the period historians refer to as B.C.: Before Cheese Sticks.

Mike: It's a borderline guilty pleasure. Borderline because I'm not actually feeling any guilt.

Peter: No?

Mike: It's really like the grilled cheese sandwich is smuggling the mozzarella sticks into your stomach.

Today's Game: One Button Arthur, from Armor Games.

Like many of you, I've avoided things with the word "button" in the title ever since I saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. But One Button Arthur is worth a look.

You're King Arthur, and as we all know, King Arthur mostly needed to stab ghosts, flip switches, and jump over lava pits in his quest to save Guinevere from the Dark Knight (not Batman).

Gameplay: This game requires only one button. That's one of many ways this game is like my pants.

Click your left mouse button to do everything. What it does changes depending what level you're on. Figure out what it does, and do it as many times as you need to.

Recommended for people who like: clicking, clicking again, and then clicking some more.

In an unholy mashup of Supersize Me and Them, Brooklyn artist Elizabeth Demaray has built an ant farm where the ants get nothing but McDonald's fare. Cheeseburgers, fries, shakes, apple pies, and McNuggets, which they reportedly just mine the chicken out of, leaving behind a breaded cave. Says Demaray:

I wondered—what sort of an impact is junk food having upon the vermin who must depend upon us for sustenance?

I haven't seen any particularly fat ants walking around, so I'm guessing they're better at moderating than we are. Or maybe it's that Demaray reportedly chose the wrong kind of ant—a herbivorous seed-eater:

“My first response as a scientist would be bafflement as to why Pogonomyrmex was chosen,” Dr. Colin S. Brent, a research entomologist with the federal Department of Agriculture, wrote in an e-mail. “They might enjoy the sesame seeds on the buns, but that would be about it.”

That quote is from The New York Times, which points out another issue with the installation:

At the gallery last week, many of the ants were dead. A few looked disoriented. This exhibit lacks a queen and brood, so the workers are leading a life devoid of its fundamental purpose.

Seems like a problem. But imagine how the entomology world would be rocked if, absent a queen, the ants began to worship an Angus Snack Wrap as their leader.

A bit of a dust-up in Philadelphia over the so-called "Blog Tax." The city requires a $300 Business Privilege tax from anyone doing anything for profit, even if they don't actually make a profit. Who might that be? Well, check out this helpful diagram:

So in Philly, if you put Google AdSense on your catswhoscrapbook blog, and rake in $0.50 over the course of a year, you gotta pay up, winding up with a net profit of -$299.50. Says the man behind the music blog Circle of Fits, quoted in the Philadelphia City Paper:

Personally, I don't think it's a business...it might be someday if I start selling coffee mugs, key chains or locks of my hair to my fans. I don't think blogs should be taxed unless they are making an immense profit.

On his blog, he says he's been spared so far:

Nobody has come for the 300 bucks that I don't have yet.

Supporters say bloggers have no reason to complain—freelance writers are being hit too. What do you think? Fair or not?

When we heard there was a Pop-Tarts restaurant opening in Times Square, we had questions. One: Why? Two: How do we get their horrifying dishes to us in Chicago? They told us their sandwiches wouldn't travel well through the mail, but they sent us some raw materials and we made our own, based on their recipes.

 

First, "Ants on a Log." That's the celery, peanut butter, and raisins classic, with crumbled-up Pop-Tarts in place of the raisins...

Ian: Helpful tip for parents: this is great if you're having a hard time getting your kids to eat their Pop-Tarts.

Mike: Somewhere Jerry Seinfeld’s wife just plagiarized another author’s grave to roll over in.

Then, the "Fluffer Butter": two fudge Pop-Tarts sandwiching Marshmallow Fluff...

Mike: I'm really glad we're using the Marshmallow Fluff from the set of Mad Men.

Eva: Really tasty. Like s'mores, without the graham cracker or camping.

Ian: Man, Times Square must be even worse now, what with the hordes of six-year-olds flooding out of Pop-Tarts World with Sugar Rabies.

And finally, "Pop-Tart Sushi," ground-up Wild Grape Pop-Tarts rolled up in a Fruit Roll-Up (we used a fruit leather, because I couldn't find Fruit Roll-Ups at my corner grocery. This is not how my grandmother made Pop-Tart Sushi in her day.) ...

Ian: It's weird we're using grape Pop-Tarts for the sushi when Eel Pop-Tarts are widely available, but whatever.

Mike: I'm really excited to try this because I've only ever had Pop-Tarts Sashimi.

Eva: Depending on how you feel about Pop-Tarts, this is either like a rainbow exploded in heaven or a rainbow exploded in hell.

Today's Game: Solipskier, from Mikengreg Games. It's a skiing game, except you're not the skier, you're the mountain. Your job is to keep the skier alive, but barely—the faster you go and more you send him flying through the air, the higher your score.

The skier is a stick figure. He doesn't have muscles, organs, or skin. But he does have ears, so I hope he'll hear me when I say: I'm sorry I killed you 15 times.

Gameplay: Drag your mouse to create the mountain in front of the solipskier. Let go of the mouse button when he's in the air and he'll do tricks. Hit gates. Avoid things that'll kill you.

Recommended, for people who like: being mountains, killing stick figures, rainbows.

My only complaint: the makers of this game use the verb "solipski," as in "I just solipskied." It's not a word, and I refudiate it.

Over in the UK, the Advertising Standards Authority has ruled that asterisks in the middle of an expletive are not sufficient to cover up the expletive. This means "f**k," in their eyes, is just as bad as writing the whole word.

But you can't know what's behind those asterisks, really. And if you don't know for sure, you can't ban it, right? Maybe the way to save the Asterisking Expletives Technique is to establish an innocent precedent for asterisked words:

• Grandma, I like the sweater vest you made me, but the a**holes are too small.
• Spooning usually follows f**king.
• Hey! That sh**he*d ran away with my sheep!
• I like big b**ts.

Take that, British advertising standards board I'd never heard of before today!

*(That's armholes, forking, shepherd, and beets, of course.)

I thought I was a little nuts, taking pride in never saying "tall," "venti," or "grande."

But then, from The New York Post, this tale of a language showdown at a Manhattan Starbucks:

[Lynne] Rosenthal ... asked for a toasted multigrain bagel — and became enraged when the barista at the franchise, on Columbus Avenue at 86th Street, followed up by inquiring, "Do you want butter or cheese?"

"I just wanted a multigrain bagel," Rosenthal told The Post. "I refused to say 'without butter or cheese.' When you go to Burger King, you don't have to list the six things you don't want.

"I yelled, 'I want my multigrain bagel!' " Rosenthal said.

...

"The barista said, 'You're not going to get anything unless you say butter or cheese!' "

But Rosenthal, on principle, refused to back down.

The scene ended with cops throwing Rosenthal out of the Starbucks, ideally saying "you're out of here," but spelling it "your out of here," just to annoy her.

What do you think? Is Rosenthal a Noble Linguistic Defender or Just Kind Of Obnoxious?