Ketchup of the People
August 23, 2006Man, my love of ordering personalized printed crap online just may be the single dorkiest thing about me, and I can tell you why leaving the Scouring of the Shire chapter out of the Peter Jackson version of the Return of the King totally undermined Tolkien’s original message of the Ring trilogy, so believe me when I tell you that calling something “the dorkiest thing about me” is a bold statement.
So it was with mixed feelings that I found out that the good folks @ Heinz will allow me to custom order my own ketchup labels. On the one hand, I do love ordering custom printed crap. So much so, that there is at this moment in my garage a five year old crate of Jones Soda (root beer, to be precise) with a photo of my pug Oscar wearing my wife’s bridal veil on the label of each bottle. But on the other hand, for me the whole point of custom printed crap is the sharing of that crap with others.
I believe in my heart that when my co-workers see a post-it from me on their monitors that has, pre-printed on it, “Jonathan Rouse is probably smarter than you“, they are simultaneously annoyed by my sticky yellow hubris and ashamed that they have no post-it based comeback of their own to disprove the statement.
What’s the point of having something unique & special if no one’s gonna see it but people who live in this house? I mean, of those people, the baby & the pugs can’t read, and the missus is thoroughly unimpressed with my custom printed awesomeness, so it would really just be for my own benefit every time I grabbed the ketchup and saw my tiny bon mot, my tomato themed haiku. And I already know how clever I am. Of all the people in the world who need to know how clever I am, I’m about six billionth on that list, believe me.
jonsonblog 
You should definitely order the ketchup labels. Then go to mymms.com/everyday4 and order personalized M&M’s. Not that ketchup and M&M’s go together (unless you ask my 6 & 7 year-olds). Just more crap you can order with custom printing! And you can share the M&M’s with your co-workers. 🙂
You can always go guerilla and plan the personalized Heinz bottles at random restaurants in the area
“My ketchup is better than that Hunts swill”
“Jonathan Rouse licked this bottle”
“All your ketchup are belong to us”
The options are limitless.
You don’t even like ketchup!
Doh, that should be “plant”
“Jonathan Rouse licked this bottle” is a good enough idea to be implemented. I’ll get on it.
no no no no no
Aw, c’mon “Missus!” I’m kind of liking the guerilla idea. Very ‘Fight Club.’ Get the little, tiny 2.5 oz bottles and you get more bang for your condiment comedy buck.
Possibilities include:
Are you positive this is really ketchup?
Use this to hide the shitty taste of our food.
Ketchup/Dip Cup
Don’t be a wuss! Get some hot sauce you Nancy Boy.
Use this or we kill the puppy.
I use a lot of ketchup and if by chance one of those bottles makes it to Texas in some random resturant I am eating at, I would recognize you as a “God” perhaps, the God.
BTW, the LOR reference is just the tip of the iceberg for your dork factor. It’s even contagious. I never posted comments to blogs before I met you.
JK, you’re not kidding. I wanted to offer up evidence of dorkdom that people at least recognized. My “go to” proof of nerdery is a three page dissertation on the likelihood of Captain Kirk being realistically able to construct a crude weapon out of the surrounding materials found on the planet’s surface in the ST:TOS episode entitled “Arena”, and how that episode formed the basis for MacGuyver, some twenty five years later.
Dude, you could’ve QED’d after just writing ST:TOS…
It was the Gorn, by the way. The name of the Monster Kirk does battle with. I know you guys were wondering.
I found the order for custom printed m & m’s in the coupon section of the providence journal sunday paper. It said nothing about ordering ketchup first or anything about the blog. All I wanted was to surprise my 80 year old aunt who loves m & m’s with this special custom order. What is this a scam or something? If it is, it’s pretty cruel? Please respond.
I have a new favorite comment.
how do you order those m and ms
[…] I’m up to three (3!) strangers trying to order custom M&M’s from my site. Two of them are here (including the original & the latest one), the third is here. […]
My love for and appreciation of this thread continues to grow — I don’t know if I mentioned, but it featured prominently in my dissertation. I’m about to present on Norma’s comment at the human-computer interaction conference of the ACM tomorrow. It’s such great evidence that it’s not that folks like her don’t read what’s on websites *at all*, it’s that they expect they’ll find something else and then have to try and cope with reading the results the computer gives them, coming up with weird solutions that don’t serve them or anyone else well. Thanks for keeping this blog up (and for being a blogger who’s patient with errant commenters!)