1995dec23. Cardboard money. My serious addiction to Pepperidge Farms Goldfish Tiny Crackers® has enabled me to complete multiple sets of Goldfish milkcaps (collect all six!). Milkcaps, for those of you cowering under rocks, are small cardboard discs with images on them. These are implemented by the global youth in some sort of 90’s Marbles game mutant offshoot. They used to be called “POG"s (for “Papaya Orange Guava,” the types of bottled juice that originally yielded the game pieces), but of course someone snarfed the trademark to that one. If you can imagine a tiny Goldfish cracker engaging in he-man MTV-type sports depicted on a small cardboard disc, you’re just as insane as the marketing board that came up with this idea. These are three concepts that should have never been crossed. Someone should keep track of this heinous trend and make a coffee table book: “Late 20th Century Travesties in Marketing.”Anyone interested in acquiring the rarer “Spike!” (armless Goldfish wearing handkerchief and sunglasses, somehow playing volleyball) or “Shot!” (armless Goldfish somehow implements hockey stick) milkcaps should drop me a line to receive a true Christmas Miracle™. As an aside (is there anything that I write that isn’t an aside?), I enjoy saying the phrase “tiny crackers” immensely and try to work it into conversations whenever possible.
“To understand Nazism as its creator understood it requires that we discover something of Hitler’s real purposes, for only in terms of purpose does any human action make sense.”(1)Additionally, I received an evil skull milkcap from Juxtsuppose magazine with the following written on the back in teeny tiny letters.
“Hmmmmm ... tiny crackers.”
P.O.G.: Pre-pubescent Organized Gambling – the POG is symptomatic of society’s desire to propagate the super-capitalistic ideas, greed and selfishness from the older populace to the younger. By instilling these raw and powerful emotions at an early, impressionable age, they are sure to be carried through to adulthood, successive generations, and so forth. The POG, by no coincidence the size and shape of a coin, is a lead-in, something to accustom a child to the concept of money. They are a status symbol – the more POGs one has, the higher one is held in regard. The gambling aspect divides the children into winners and losers, or bourgeois and proletariat, while the only constant winners are the POG manufacturers, i.e. the government/elite class. As an aside, POGS are also the same size and shape as a diaphragm. The POG as metaphor for sexual control and gender displacement – if parents even suspected!
(1) Doc, “The Heart of Hitler: Adolf Hitler and the Immemorial Message of Man” copyright 1994-95, manuscript
Update (1996jan09).
Missive reader Britain P. Woodman has forwarded this succinct definition of pogs® created by net.pundit Lazlo Nibble:
“Pogs are small cardboard discs stamped with artwork (superheroes, baseball players, pretty colors) and impregnated with a new liquified variety of crack cocaine. They are sold in comic shops, convenience stores, and street corners, the target audience being impressionable 12-year-old boys who like to “slam” them, throw them at each other, and lick them so they’ll stick to their foreheads. Several children in the US have lost eyes to this “sport.” After a year or two of exposure to pogs (or, as the banners draped across the front of every laundromat in America read, POGS), children are encouraged to move on to “harder stuff,” like Magic: The Gathering and X-Files fandom. At this point, the government just rounds the kids up and ships them to strategically located dog-food factories.
Tourism to this country is strongly discouraged at the moment.”
Update (96jun16). The Goldfish Tiny Crackers milkcap premium campaign is winding its way down; now only the low-selling varieties of Goldfish (“great regular” flavor, “bacon-n-cheez,” “sharp porcelain”) only have POG treats inside. The new premium, however, has my heart all a-fluttering. “FREE 8x10 Portrait from Photography by JCPenny: Creating Memories for a Lifetime™.” This for only TWO packages of Goldfish Tiny Crackers. By the time of the deadline (June 30 1996), I estimate that I will have had over 30 free portraits taken. Toward the end of my photo reign, I will probably start dragging in furniture and appliances from other departments, just in case my apartment catches on fire.
Insurance agent: “You took ALL THIS STUFF down to J.C. Penny’s for insurance photographs?”The bags of Goldfish crackers are flying off the shelves at my local supermarket.Mark: “These items ... were so close to me ... [fake tears] ... especially this projection-screen TV ... and this cashier ... I must replace these things immediately ... ”