And Now For Something Completely Different

We do occasionally leave the house and go shopping, you know. Otherwise, we'd miss important stuff like this.

At one of the finer retail establishments in the area, we stumbled across this little gem. Yup, that's genuine "Larry the Cable Guy" brand beer batter mix for fish. "Just add beer" it says on the box. So I gotta wonder: Is it really beer batter if you have to add your own beer?

And what marketing department thought that Larry the Cable Guy was the ideal spokesman for their product? Maybe the budget had run out. Or he's the company president's nephew. Or cable guy.

It gets better. The selfsame store also stocked Larry the Cable Guy Beer Bread mix. Just add -- you guessed it -- beer. And butter. Which sounds to me like it's a box of flour and baking soda.

Note that the boxes are cunningly printed in different colors, blue for fish batter, red for bread mix. Wouldn't want to mix them up. For people who pour beer on all of their food.

On a somewhat unrelated note, the upside-down box marked "Light & Fluffy" is not one of Larry's. It's another brand entirely, for Red Velvet Pancake Mix. Not cake; pancakes. I think they turned it face down because nobody wanted to see what that looks like. And if you look really closely, you'll see that it's marked, "Best by 01/24/2011." By my calculations, that was over two years ago. Shame, really. I only make Red Velvet Pancakes when they're at their best.