Left To My Own Devices

It was a trip to the mall today. This would be Newport Centre Mall in Jersey City. The distinctions between one town and another here seem to be fairly arbitrary but this one is characterised by the sort of high rise office blocks and flats you’d see in Docklands. All very ‘nice’ but completely soulless and missing the sort of life you only get around people with not much money and a disposition to get their nails done or spend all day under their car.

There’s nothing remarkable about the mall itself, its the sort of mall-by-numbers they stuck up everywhere in the 1980’s to give people access to all the chains, eat badly and travel in great glass elevators. I did manage to arrive in style on the New Jersey Light Rail (I love trains) which, after stealing $3.50 from my credit card then asking for cash, dropped me right outside the place.

What followed was a 3 hour journey in search of turtle neck t shirts involving Macys, Kohls, Sears, PayHalf, Gap, Express and JC Penney, who all perpetually asked me How Are You Today which as the list went on was answered with an ever descending series of unpleasentries. There are no turtle neck t shirts in the Newport Centre Mall. So I went to go and feed. The food court was the same as any, though I’ve alot of work to do to discover which of the fast food chains can replace dominos as my coronary of choice. One myth I want to dispel though is that fast food portions are no larger than they are at home. They are cheaper, so you can buy lots more of them.

Recently, Taco Bell was in all the news for making its customers retch in a more abrupt way than usual, giving about a hundred of them E. coli poisoning through killer lettuces. This has clearly had no effect on business as you can see by the busy outlet in the mall.

I felt sorry for them, and had a morbid curiousity as to what exactly E. coli did to you so I order the Double-Decker Taco Supreme which looked like it had the entire list of ingredients in it. It looked like this.

And as is usually the case with things that look like a traffic accident, it tasted lovely. Really lovely. So I wondered around the food court looking for more taste sensations and found a couple of bizarre looking places..

It may well be no coincidence that Pandas are endangered when they are offered in Express form in shopping centres but the Popeye thing definitely caught my eye. As far as I know Popeye was more a greens man than someone with a hankering for chicken, and as far as I know chicken and biscuits is not a combination anyone would consider having together. So in the interests of research I order the 3 piece Chicken and Biscuit Dinner (dinner?). It looked like this.

And the biscuits were worse. Apparently in that box was the leg, breast and thigh of a hitherto undiscoverd species. This animal has skin similar to battered Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, the muscle and sinew of a Rottweiler and the flesh of a diseased Ally McBeal. It was not good eating, they must be laughing their heads off over at Bluto’s Ferret & Felch Emporium.