Cucumbers are quite simply the worst thing that has happened to food since, well, disease.  Strong stance?  Yes, but 100% ACCURATE and undeniable.  In short, cucumbers are to main courses what lemon is to dessert:  an uninvited guest whose very presence makes you want to shake your fist in outrage.

They add nothing to food.  In fact, they make food worse.  Like WAY worse.  Like "I'll-pass-on-food-forever-rather-than-eat-this" worse.  And if they weren't bad enough on their own, they are made infinitely worse by the fact that they are constantly being snuck into other, perfectly acceptable foods.  That's really the main problem with these horrible beasts - they assault you at every turn.  Let's call it what it is:  food torture.

Some of you are reading this thinking to yourselves, "C'mon, they're not that bad; you hardly notice them."  WRONG.  They are everywhere.  And they taste awful.  You DO notice them, and you know how I know??  Because they make every food I like taste disgusting.  

And the REAL problem is you can't get away from them.  Trying to tell a waiter not to put cucumber in your meal makes you feel like an old man trying to send back soup at a deli:  no one is listening to you, and even if they are, they think you're crazy.  So, to combat this problem, we few but strong-willed cucumber-hating pioneers are often forced tell those handling our food that we are allergic to them.  BUT here's the rub:  apparently, it is nearly impossible to be allergic to cucumbers.  They are over 90% water (the remaining 10% consists of a combination of dirt, murdered dreams and wet dog smells, obviously).  Which means that these plants have us caught between a rock and a hard place:  we're forced to either swallow our pride, along with the cucumbers, or be unfairly deemed high-maintenance liars by waiters the world over.   

While I could opine on this subject for hours, I will narrow my focus down to the top three foods cucumbers ruin for me on a daily basis:

Sushi.  Over the years, sushi has become a regular in my food lineup.  The best part about sushi is that it comes in a variety of flavors (much like ice cream but without the calories).  Can't decide what type of fish you want for dinner?  No problem - sushi, if you're unfamiliar with it, allows you to blend spices, flavor profiles and various types of proteins into bite-sized pieces of deliciousness that you can eat without ever really feeling full.  So, in a word, sushi is spectacular.  That is, sushi was spectacular.  Until the day some bozo trying to make a name for himself starting telling everyone how much better sushi could be by adding some hideous, flavor-sucking vegetable to it (a la, The Emperor's New Clothes).  Now these terrible things are used in sushi rolls to a) "cut" the spicy flavors or, what I now believe, b) preemptively ward off the run on sushi restaurants that would inevitably occur if cucumber was nowhere to be found.

Pickles.  For those of you that don't know, pickles are actually gussied up cucumbers.  However, and I can't stress this enough, they are not the same thing.  They taste nothing alike, they look nothing alike and you certainly never hear of someone seeking out a cucumber at a state fair (Note:  If you haven't been, state fairs are where everything delicious comes to play.  Get thee to a state fair immediately...and bring me back a corn dog).  Rather, pickles are cucumbers' hot cousins.  They are briny, crunchy and could kick a cucumber's ass if they happened upon one in a dark alley.  But the fact that they come from cucumbers truly ruins them for me.  To steal a line from a well-known pontificator, learning that pickles actually come from cucumbers is like learning that the main singer in UB40 is just an old white guy.  Once you learn that fact, there's really no going back. 

Water.  Yep.  I said WATER.  Do you have any idea what it's like to be insanely thirsty and have only cucumber water as a drinking option??  I do.  And I was hungover when it happened.  True story.  Spas are the worst offenders - they take something as pure and simple as water and, by adding a single ingredient to it, turn it into an assault on the senses.  Yes, senses.  Plural.  Not only do I have to taste my water now, I also have to smell the offensive odor that emanates from these wretched veggies.  Gross.  When you think of water, you think of a babbling brook, or an ocean, or a river.  All places where cucumbers are nowhere to be found.  So putting them into water is certainly not natural.  And rather then send me into spa-like serenity, the presence of a cucumber in what would otherwise be the purest beverage on the planet sends me into a frothy rage of (warranted) hostility.

Boom.  Case closed.  Cucumbers = Death.  The guy who wrote Little Shop of Horrors gets it.  You try telling me this man-eating plant doesn't have a cucumber as an ancestor somewhere in the family tree:

Winged creatures:  one shade away from dinosaurs.  Literally, the predators of the sky.  How is it possible, one might ask, that some of these creatures have evolved (regressed?) past the point of having hands while others have, instead, upped their predator rating and developed CLAWS??  Easy answer:  birds are dumb, and bats are badass (but terrifying) vampires.  

My premise, in a nutshell, is that birds are FREAKS because they don't have hands, but bats are SCARIER FREAKS because they do.  Let's take a closer look:

A girl's first crush is the one she never forgets.  He's usually mysterious, yet approachable, and obviously unobtainable.  And mine was all of those things rolled up into one perfect specimen:  Kevin Bacon.  

Here's the thing - while most girls only get to imagine what it would be like to meet their childhood crush, I actually got the chance.  And it was before I moved on to more age-appropriate crushes like Mark-Paul Gosselaar (Zach Morris) or Scott Speedman (Ben Covington).   I was twelve years old, a mere tween, and Kevin Bacon came to my town to film Apollo 13.  That fateful night, my mother dragged me to the Houston Rockets game.  Full of embarrassment at having to be seen out in public with my mother and angst at, well, being twelve, I begrudgingly joined her at the game.  And that's when I spotted him:  the love of my life, sitting court-side with the rest of the cast (yes, I was using binoculars...at a Rockets game...in jorts).  On the dare of my mother, I actually marched myself down there (NOTE:  This was either before they checked tickets or before they started worrying about twelve year old girls in jorts and braces making a scene).  PS, this might have been the bravest thing I had ever done.

So there I was, walking up to the man of my dreams, Rockets flyer in hand, ready for a signature.  AND then I saw him turning other people away.  "This can't be," I said to myself.  I mean, we were destined to meet - he shows up in MY hometown, and he's not even going to meet me?  I think not.  I knew once he saw my braces-filled smile and long gangly tween figure, he'd be hooked.

So I pushed forward, flyer in hand and putting on my best please-love-me smile, hoping to convince him to make an exception for me.  AND HE DID.  But only after Big Boobs McGee walked by and he made an exception for her.  Then he saw me and knew there was no getting out of it.  So he signed my Rockets flyer(!), gave me a smile and went back to his game-watching, and I ran back to my seat with my trophy.  That thing hung above my bed for longer than I'd care to admit, but I never forgot about that moment.  

And, if you ask me, Le Bacon is still brutally hot.

It's not even the shoe itself that's my issue:  it's the decision to buy Crocs over any other shoe.  Seriously.  ANY other shoe.  I'm even OK'ing Tevas here, people.  You had to make the conscious decision to walk into a store, see the entire shoe selection (which, I'm going to assume, included more than just Crocs) and voluntarily choose a shoe made entirely of a synthetic, polyurethane-like substance, with a strap on the back to hold your foot in place when it starts sweating (as it will obviously do as a result of being made of such material) and HOLES so that when your foot inevitably sweats, some cool open air can flow in and dry it off.

I mean, are we savages??  For those of you reading this and saying to yourselves, "I mean, I don't think Crocs are so terrible," you are obviously a Wearer of Crocs (WOC) and may not understand the offensive effect that they have on others.  Let me say this, there are only three acceptable occasions for a WOC to wear Crocs:

1. Someone comes to your house and holds a gun to your head (though, if I were you, I would do my homework and make sure the gun was loaded before I agreed).
2. You are participating in water sports/activities and Aqua Socks are not available (yes, Aqua Socks are preferable to Crocs any day of the week and twice on Sundays).
3. You are a baby.  NOTE:  You must be an actual baby (i.e., a child under the age of five) to fall under this exception.  And you only fall under this exception because you're not old enough to make your own decisions as to clothes and/or divorce your parents for bad taste.

If you are reading this post, you probably don't fall under any of these exceptions, as a) you are probably old enough to use the Internet, b) if someone is holding a loaded gun to your head you've got things other than reading 'Idle Minded' on your mind, and c) Aqua Socks are always available.

So, to sum up, be a human and wear real shoes, not shoe substitutes.

We open on a "sick" Ferris determined to convince his parents to let him stay home from school - a situation all of us have been in at some point in our lives.  But Ferris does us one better - he gives us a list of How-Tos to do it - a "must see" for any high school freshmen out there.  After winning that opening battle, he begins leading the viewer on a series of adventures - nothing crazy, all things that a typical high school senior could do:  fancy lunch, a trip to the museum, a baseball game and a little pool time.  Oh, yeah, he also gains access to a Ferrari.  You know, typical high school stuff.

ANYWAY Ferris, Cameron and Ferris' girlfriend, Sloan Peterson (who I always want to be for Halloween, but finding a white suede puffy coat with elaborate fringe isn't as easy as one might think), then embark on a series of adventures all over the city of Chicago.  At one point, they even happen upon a parade (naturally) where Ferris finagles his way into singing on a float, capturing the hearts of every girl watching.  After a long day of rabble-rousing, the trio heads home, Ferris on a race-against-time to beat his parents back to the house (SPOILER ALERT:  he makes it).

But it's what this all adds up to that makes Mr. Bueller my hero - he fleeces EVERYONE in the movie.  And they all love him for it.  In fact, he has enriched their lives by giving them an opportunity to play a small part in his - something we should all aspire to.  He also shows us the importance of stopping to look around and enjoy life's moments rather than always looking ahead to see what's next.  And he does it all while wearing leopard.  Again, swoon.

So here's to you, Mr. Bueller.  May your days be filled with adventure and your singing always be dubbed.

I have not been more than ankle deep in the ocean in over eight years.  Some people think that's ridiculous, but I think it's realistic.  You see, the sharks and I have reached an understanding - they don't come into my realm and I certainly do my best to stay out of theirs.  And guess what?  I have had exactly zero shark bites (way to keep up your end of the bargain, sharks!).  The whole not-evolving-to-the-point-of-growing-legs-and-an-ability-to-breathe-out-of-the-water thing is their part of the bargain (you're welcome, humans).  And the number one shark keeping me out of the water (other than the Great White, which will get its own, much-deserved post another day):  Megalodon.

Now, some people do not believe in the existence of Megalodon.  Like the boogey man, Dracula and other things that go bump in the night, some believe Megalodon to be nothing more than a scary story.  But I beg to differ.  Just take a look at the video above.  That thing is real.  And not only is it a predator, it eats the scariest predator we know about for breakfast.  Mind.  Blown.
 
They may never actually use the word 'Megalodon,' but that is obviously the only logical answer to the question 'what ate this shark?'  And it is predators like this (and really just the mere suggestion of their existence) that lead me to keep my feet on dry land.  Let me be clear - I think sharks are absolutely beautiful and amazing creatures.  And I believe they serve a purpose within their delicate ecosystems.  But we do not.  

So, to sum it up:  stay dry, my friends.