Is you is or is you ain't roast beef?

I was watching telly the other day (a generally bad idea), and saw a commercial for an Arby's (TM) sandwich. There was nothing particularly interesting about this commercial, except that it revived the old question in my mind: What is it about Arby's roast beef that makes it look and taste nothing at all like regular roast beef? I admit that this isn't a question for the ages, but I didn't set up this blog as a philosophy message board. Who knows? Maybe future philosophers and historians will one day look back at us with the four eyes that will become a common trait among the few surface-dwellers left after the inevitable nuclear holocost and wonder what our obsession was with roast beef that wasn't really roast (and probably not beef), with yellow-colored vegetable oil that's supposed to look like butter, with soybean byproducts that are molded into the shape of turkeys, and most of all, what exactly was bologna? After spending hours of the day contemplating this, they'll probably have their trained space apes carry their hideously shrivelled bodies down to the Temple of Forseable Outcomes, where they'll play ceremonial chess games in which the kings and queens have hemophilia and die after three turns. Whoa, don't know where that came from. Anyways, it has been said by certain people that they do not read my blog posts because I don't break them up into paragraphs, so how about I do this:

There, that ought to keep things interesting. I saw the new Wallace & Grommit movie (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0312004/) the other day, which was a lot of fun. At about three bucks, the movie ticket wasn't really a huge investment, but I have to admit that having rather liked the three previous W & G short films, I did have relatively high hopes. It was a bit funny going to this movie, since at 21, my two friends and I realized quickly that we were the only people in the theater who were anywhere near our age. The majority of the theater was full of children (not surprisingly, it's a cartoon), accompanied in a ratio of about 3:1 by either a parent (the youngest of whom were probably around thirty), or grandparent. After sitting through a string of previews for the seemingly endless fart joke that they're calling this year's family film offering, Dreamworks S.K.G. (the distributors, but not the producers of W & G and Chicken Run, both made by Ardman Animations LLC) treated us to a computer-animated short film, apparently in an effort to prove to us once and for all that they are not, much as they would like to be, Pixar. Sorry guys. Whoops, time for another paragraph break.

Whew! After showing their logo a few more times (Jonathan pointed out that Dreamworks would really really like you to associate them with this movie), the film finally got started, and all was right with the world. All in all, I would have to give the movie a rather favorable rating (I don't beleive in stars or thumbs or whatever else), since I think that I laughed louder than any of the children in the theater, and probably even loud enough to wake a few of the grandparents. The stop-motion (nope, not an oxymoron) animated film stars Inventor and Cheese enthusiast Wallace and his anthropomorphic (yet speachless) dog Gromit as high-tech pest control specialists in a vegetable-crazed village somewhere in rural England, who must deal (humanely of course, this is a children's movie) with an infestation of rabbits who threaten the village's gardens on the eve of the annual produce festival. If this doesn't have the makings of a great film, I don't know what does. As in previous (although shorter) Wallace & Gromit outings, (hang on, another paragraph break, this time mid-sentence)

sight gags and all-around Britishness abound (at one point an angry mob runs to a stand labled "Angry Mob Supplies" to buy pitchforks and torches), with perhaps two jokes being more off-color than you would expect in a G-rated movie. Whoops! Out of time for today. If you happen to have children to bring to this movie (not that I do) I'd reccomend it, or if you're like me and aren't terribly embarrased about watching cartoons. I hope you are all having a good week, more to come!