LUDIC LOG

It's time for the most glamorous and prestigious awards show in America! No, not the Grammies. They've suffered a great decline in prestige since an artist under 50 was allowed to win "Best Album" several years back. No, not the Oscars. They've been seriously lacking in glamor since the birth of Melissa Rivers. I'm talking about the Ludic Syndicate Moronic Food Product of the Year Award, better known as the Crappy! Let's take a look at this year's candidates.

1. Ball Park Singles individually wrapped hot dogs.

Hot dogs have long been a powerhouse presence at the Crappy Awards. From the early days of Armour's "cutting room floor" to the 1979 sweep by Louis Rich turkey hot dogs to the miraculous near-upset two years ago by Best's Kosher bagel dogs, these sad, lifeless, gray meat tubes are always welcome guests at the Sodium Mononitrate Memorial Food Additive Pavilion. And this year is no exception: wastefully packaged, pointless, unhealthy, packed with preservatives and filler, and way too heavy on the paprika coloring (to simulate real meatness), these individually wrapped plump-when-you-nuke-'ems are an early favorite in the voting. Ball Park will be sending gregarious spokesathlete Michael "Darn! Surgery! And Just When Everything Was Going So Well" Jordan to accept the Golden Crap Shack award in the event of a win. Convenience never tasted so overprocessed!

2. Oscar Mayer ready-to-serve bacon.

Today's modern, now, a-go-go shopper is always in a rush. Between working 10 hours a day to keep up those productivity numbers, jetting the kids to soccer practice, keeping an eye on those stocks, and finding the time to watch four to five hours of quality TV a day, there's not a minute to spare -- let alone the two minutes it takes to fry up some bacon! Well, it's the meat-product experts at Oscar Mayer to the rescue, with these nitrate-laden, preservative-packed, quasi-actual bacon strips. These are the same vaguely delicious, liquid-smoke-flavored meatoid rectangles that add new levels of cholesterol-clogged enjoyment to the same old boring fast food cheeseburgers! Just pop them in the microwave (shaving precious seconds off the laborious prep time of "real" bacon), or eat them cold from the package, so as not to mess up a plate that you'll only have to wash later! By this motto they stand: "bacon in seconds, not minutes"!

3. P.J. Singles individually wrapped peanut butter and jelly slices.

In the paleolithic "Betty Crocker" days, busy parents had to open two separate jars to make a delicious, nutritious peanut butter and jelly sandwich for their kids -- a process that would take upwards of three minutes. The advent of Goober Grape (Crappy winner, 1974) cut that time in half. But today, pressed-for-time paterfamilias don't have time to open any jars, even ones that contain peanut butter AND jelly, helpfully pre-swirled for your spreading ease. That's where the twin genies of food chemistry and marketing come in. P.J. Singles come wrapped in a plastic sheath, exactly like "American cheese" slices (Lifetime Achievement Award, 1989), and are made of ingredients that are similar, in many important ways, to peanut butter and jelly. Your kids won't be able to tell the difference after a few drinks, and more importantly, you'll save untold microseconds by just being able to unwrap the slice and whack it down on some white bread, instead of all that dangerous and laborious messing around with jars and knives!

4. Mama Mary's fully prepared homestyle pancakes in a tin.

Convenience is a theme this year, and if modern consumers can't spare the two minutes it takes to fry bacon, they certainly don't have the upwards of five minutes it takes to prepare a pre-made pancake mix. Maybe your rich snooty billionaires who laze by the pool all day drinking tropical drinks and counting their lottery money can have their butlers whip up some eggs and milk and flour and put real pancakes on the griddle, but for working Joes and Janes like us, there's just not enough time. Mama Mary to the rescue, with chemically preserved, fully cooked and shaped pancakes in a tin, just like mom used to industrially process! Some insiders say that the "duelling breakfast foods" scenario set up by pancakes AND bacon will split the vote and cause a loss for both, but don't count these guys out: they're as useless and bad-tasting as the bacon, and have the added bonus of remarkably wasteful packaging -- while a small box of pancake mix can yield up to 4 dozen flapjacks, these come in huge, space-hogging metal containers holding a mere six griddlecakes!

5. Ruffles 3-D potato chips.

But it's not all about convenience. The sheer razor's-edge joy of innovation counts for a lot as well. While salty snack foods are delicious and convenient, they've long been scientifically limited by existing in only two dimensions. (For those -- like us! -- without degrees in advanced physics, here's the skinny: science tells us that any flat object, such as a piece of paper, a table, or a tortilla chip, is "two-dimensional".) Enter the daring futurists at Frito-Lay. These amazing, space-age, hi-tech robo-chips are sort of honeycomb-shaped and rounded, and hollow in the center, giving them the incredible ability to exist in three dimensions at once! It seems like only a few years ago this sort of technological breakthrough was the stuff of science fiction, but now you can go to your local convenience store and purchase a snack chip that has not only awesome, radical flavor, but exists in three -- count 'em -- dimensions at once! What won't they think of next?

AND THE WINNER OF THIS YEAR'S CRAPPY IS: Ruffles 3-D potato chips! Not only are they pointless, stupid, expensive, foul-tasting, and marked by a particularly shrill and irritating ad campaign, but while I was researching the link, the Frito-Lay site crashed my computer, forcing me to rewrite this entire entry! Congratulations, Ruffles 3-D: you're one of a kind! Unless you count Doritos 3-D!