After tinkering with it for a while I did manage to get it to sputter a little as it initially got power, but then it quickly shut down. Oh well, we’ll see what Fry’s has to offer.

Edit: There is now a faint hint of electrical burn smell.  Fun.

Doesn’t that look handsome? Look at how perfectly crisp the bacon looks and how brown and wholesome the sausage appears. And the egg and cheese? Poifect.

This is what you actually get:

Well, the egg delivers as promised, but unfortunately all the moisture for the egg has been soaked up by the muffin and sausage. The cheese, on the other hand, gets everywhere and eventually melts to the paper towel. After that, it releases all its oil and hardens, chemically bonding with the paper fibers.

The bacon muffin didn’t fare as badly, but it did manage to attach itself to the paper towel at a couple of points.

Still, a good meal to be had.

This handful contained a variety of weird flavors. The problem is you can’t really eat them together, as some of them don’t go well with each other (buttered popcorn and licorice do not a good combination make). After this bag is gone, I’m not going to avoid the variety bags for a while.

It may not look so creamy, and it may look a little lumpy.. but with a pinch of salt, all is well.

Doesn’t that look smashing?

One can only imagine this is what you get when god runs around aniquing defenseless worms while frying on acid.

Do I want the rest of the beef stew? Hmm, nah.

Looking in the cupboard, I spy a box of powdery goodness.

It’s All Natural! 100% Pure & Simple, period.

It’s like a heavenly cloud of premium potato.

One tiny little packet contains 8 servings! Oh boy! I’m really looking forward to this.

Look at all those instructions! Plus, I’d have to make gravy on top of it. Meh. Let’s look for something simpler.

Chef to the rescue. There’s no denying the Chef and his timeless cuisines. Canned spaghetti really does hit the spot on those warm winter days.

They advertise quality right on the label!

Straight out of the can, it’s mouth watering. I wish I could eat it plain, but a little dose of radiation really does being its game to a higher level. Into the microwave for 6:00 minutes we go.

Ahh, spaghetti, just like mom used to make.

Mmmm.. doesn’t that look good? Let’s have a closer look.

On second thought, let’s not. No matter how tasty something is, it seldom ever looks good close up.

After a dash of salt, we’re ready to roll.

Sliced like a pizza, I’d have it no other way.

As it turns out, the timer the kernel was using (TSC) wasn’t playing nice with multiple cores and ended up falling behind around 1.85 seconds every minute. Adding “notsc” to the kernel parameters in /boot/grub/menu.lst, causing the kernel to use another timer (HPET in my case), fixed the problem.

This is an artist’s recreation of the plate in question. There were in fact egg sandwiches. One consisted of the fried variety and the other, scrambled.

This one is for now…

This one goes in the fridge.

But that’s it, no more of these for a while.

The result.. microwaved cheese sandwiches with a hint of loaf.

If that doesn’t make your mouth water, nothing will.

Here’s the thing about Skittles, they don’t actually taste like anything other than.. well, Skittles. I’m sure they use some kind of “fruit” “flavor” in their secret formula, but what it amounts to is that the green Skittles taste like Green Skittles(TM) and the red Skittles taste like Red Skittles(TM). It is an invariable law of nature, skittles always taste like Skittles.

This gum has taught me a valuable lesson about Skittles. The secret of the rainbow taste is in the shell. Once that’s dissolved and gone away, the rest is pretty pointless, and to be honest, at least the candy version has enough sense to go away. This candy is so bad, the gum has completely lost its taste before it’s even gummified. Once the shell is gone, it’s like chewing on a wax tube filled with juice.

Shamelessly stolen from intrawebs:

Remember these?

Doesn’t that look yummy? I added some cheese, for good measure. There’s sausage under the cheese and egg, by the way.

Okay, maybe I overdid the cheese, just a tad. This is the bacon version of the breakfast sandwich. That still doesn’t explain why I’m eating it for dinner, does it?

These things really aren’t that bad when they’re fresh from the fridge.

Mmmmm.

Lunch time!

I made one of these for later.

It’s like heavenly slices of meat toast.

Yeah.

I, uh.. yeah.

Once you get past the diseased stool appearance, you can begin to look at their inner beauty. Cheeseburgers in hot dog form! Well, not real cheeseburgers, it’s more along the lines of ground chuck thrown in a grinder (again) with some stale cheddar, pressed into logs, flash fried for 45 seconds, frozen, then sold to a convenience stores. These convenience stores then take the frozen product and put them on those magical rollers under the hot lamp in order to defrost them. After 3 or 4 days under the lamp 24/7, they either bin the leftovers or do some sort of 2-for-1 sale.

They really weren’t as bad as they look, really. Honest.

So I had this slice of heaven in my clutches, but then the sandwich fell below plastic level. There are only two things you can do at this point: peel (don’t google image search the word “peel,” btw) back the wrapper to reveal more sammich like a normal human being, or fish out the sandwichy goodness like you’re Dave Coulier at a Halloween party, bobbing for an apple filled with delicious crack rocks.

Fare thee well, sandwich.

Well, it’s a little more than a midnight snack, but who’s counting? Actually, we were watching Hell’s Kitchen and watching them prepare and bin a barrage of food, I got hungry. Look at those portions! My, my.

If this doesn’t make me smart, I don’t know what will - after all, it has the word smart right on the friggin’ box!

It really doesn’t look all the impressive. It tastes good, however, and it does hold up with it’s cheese guarantee.. but still, I don’t agree with this popcorn on a moral level. Popcorn should not be pre-popped.

Now that’s what I call a sammich. I’m not entirely sure why, but the label claims this is a 28 oz sandwich. In reality, it’s much more massive than Safeway’s “32 oz” sandwich. So either Safeway is lying to me and pocketing the extra meats, or Albertsons is giving me the hookup, off the heezy.

Good god, that looks delish’. Even the crazy half-lettuce-half-parsley thing looks good.

Look at the helping of meat on that thing. Despite the appearance in the first picture, this monstrous thing isn’t entirely made up of turkey. There’s some roasted cattle in there, too.

Good times.

Meh, the packaging makes them look better than they are. They claim to be MADE WITH WHITE MEAT, but all that means is they threw a little bit of that in the grinder with the rest of the slop.

Made with rib meat, definitely. Basically they’re typical rib meat-based nuggets pressed in strip form.

Packaged.

It doesn’t quite end up as nice as the packaging suggests, but it’s nice.

A hodgepodge of what’s left.

It’s grrrreat.

Something called Happy Family. Lots of random things thrown together.

Some sweet and sour chicken.. or maybe pork.

Potstickers. Not my favorite, but it’s good.

Plain ol’ white rice.

Sweet and sour pork.. or chicken. Chicken is the good one.

Some crab rangoons. They’re like deep fried tortillas stuffed with some kind of weird crab and sour cream filling.

Spring rolls. Part of the eggroll family.

I’m not really into the fortune cookies, but the soy sauce packets are good.

A nice plate of random stuffs.

A little more stuffs.

Luncheon meats never tasted so good.

Well, it has, but.. nevermind.

If only it actually looked like that. Notice the abundance of baby corn.

The baby corn is a lie. What you actually end up with is some sloppy ramen noodles, a small pack of freeze dried “veggies” (92% freeze dried celery), and a packet of 85% oil/15% artificial chow mein flavored sludge. All in all, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

It really wasn’t terribly bad, but it was no Dominos or Good Guys.

Wal-mart really brings the goodness.

They put some sort of liquid smoke seasoning in these things to make them taste like they’re fresh off the laboratory grill. They always taste the same, which is quaint. Mmm.

A slice-sized slice of pie, half-sliced into dual slices. In other words, two tiny ass slices of Wal-mart pizza. It had some sort of sausage on it, and I think pepperoni, but I couldn’t identify the other two meats. I tasted of brand new plastic.

I had some more, not because I liked it, but because I was intrigued by the weirdness of the taste. It actually doesn’t taste like pizza, which is the weird part of it all.

These Pringles were both pickly and extreme. How extreme? Ever taste a pickle? It was something like that, only it wasn’t a pickle, it was a potato. Well, it’s not really fully potato, it’s more of a deep fried potato sauce pureed with pickling solution and live brine. Either way, it was pickly. Went great with cheeseburger Pringles.

They really don’t taste that bad. It has a slight aftertaste of a McDonalds cheeseburger and fries.

Remarkably good chicken, though it wasn’t heated up.

Yet another great flavor of piroshki.

Crazy lump of dough with an unknown goodness inside.

Peering into the wonder that is the piroshki.

The closer I look, the less appetizing it looks.

The usual leavins, the grease stain.

A somewhat filling, greasy, and strangely compatible combination.

Grilled chicken and rice.

It was good, but not terribly filling.

Unfortunately, this can’t be microwaved due to the mayonnaise, lettuce, and tomatoes. Regardless, it was teh gewd.

It was delicious.

Here we have our units.

By themselves, they look pretty pathetic. Certainly nowhere near as appetizing as the pictures.

A fully constructed Double Jack.

One for now and one for later, with a can of soda for reference.

And there we have it.

I’ve never understood why pictures like this bug people so much.

Looks simple enough…

Maybe a little too simple.

Doesn’t that looks appealing?