Every kid has at least one birthday party in McDonalds. I think I had two, same McDonalds both time, 4th Avenue and 9th Street. Looking back now, the McDonalds’ birthday is such bullshit. McDonalds sucks, crappy hamburgers, crappy smell and a crappy atmosphere. I don’t know if kids do McDonalds’ birthdays anymore but, if they do, at least they have the ball pit and other attractions that make it worth while.

The McDonalds on 4th and 9th was really, really weak. It had this Hamburgler tree house made out of metal. You entered in a little hole on the bottom, climbed a ladder and you were then in the Hamburglers’ mouth which stretched 360 degrees around his giant hamburger head. There were bars on the perimeter that stopped kids from falling out and the crawl space was pretty tight but it was fun, you know, if by fun you mean crawling around in a tight circle on a hard metal surface.

The sad part is the hamburger head is where all the kids congregated – it was actually the best part of Playland. The ride-on Fry Guys or talking Grimace just couldn’t compete. These birthday parties usually turned into a long, painful game of tag where we constantly fell and knocked our heads on pieces of metal due to the confined space.

I could just say that at one McDonald’s party I had a Carvel ice-cream cake with a football theme. I could leave it at that and walk away perfectly masculine.

Or, I could redact my earlier statement that my Pirate cake was the gayest cake ever and elaborate by saying that this particular cake had a Cabbage Patch Kid in a football uniform. And to add the jersey was a Ken O’Brien jersey, thereby showing that I a) loved the loser Jets and b) loved their loser quarterback. If a & b then c) I had no clue when it came to football and really just wanted a Cabbage Patch Kid cake but didn’t know how to tell that to my dad.

A couple of things. For starters, I decided to be a man about it and tell the Hooker Hand story next week. I would have just posted it today but I committed to this whole “Birthday week” shit. Second thing, you might have noticed that I redesigned the sidebar with all the links. I’m breaking all the headings into separate pages and writing a little piece about each link. So if you were there before, you’re now on the linked pages with a little blurb about you. I also added a “Blogs of Record” section, other comic blogs that I noticed and deserve some attention. And finally, I’m not going to post a book and music link a day because I’m afraid I’ll blow my load too soon. One link a day. I’m also going to add movies to the mix, as well. Eventually I’ll put all the past product links on it’s own page as well, it’s just too massive to do right now. ‘Cause I’m lazy.

equilibrium sucks, fanboy: 12 Angry Men