Here's lunch - two frozen chicken & cheese chimichangas on a George Foreman grill:

                       

We recently aquired the George Foreman Grill from Kim's dad's house, when he passed away. We have no idea if they used it, or what they might have used it for, and we haven't used it the whole time we've had it (since February) until we brought it with us up to the condo here in Colorado.

We've gotten to where we use the dang thing almost every day. It is SO convenient and easy to use and easy to clean and quick. And it seems to be very durable and well-made, as well. It is NOT what I expect from an infomercial-spawned product.

So I got to doing the research - once upon a time, that meant a lot of work. Now it means googling "George Foreman Grill ".

George didn't invent the grill (although I've learned enough about the world to not have been surprised to find out just that very thing) - a company developed this item to be a "fat-reducing" way of grilling, and when George had his big comeback and credited his healthy lifestyle and healthy way of eating, he was a natural to endorse the product (besides, how can you not like George? : )

As I said, I think it's a good product. And it seems that over 100 million of them have been sold, and they last a good while. Good stuff, and no mistake. I begrudge them no success - I just wish I'd have bought stock in the company back then.

Here's the kicker - George made something like $70,000,000.00 just for the use of his name until 1999, when the company paid him another $130,000,000.00 as a single buy-out to be allowed to use his name forever.

That's right. He got TWO HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS for letting them call this the George Foreman Grill.

That's a pretty good ROI.

For the amount of money he made by saying "Okay, you can call it the George Foreman Grill" he could buy 1130 houses at the current median home selling price in the US. Or 8818 new Chevrolet Camaros at the base sticker price. If he actually used the phrase "Okay, you can call it the George Foreman Grill" then he made $22,222,222.22 per spoken word.

I say a lot of words for free. Just willy-nilly, talking all the time without anybody paying me anything at all. In fact, I'm doing that right now, in the virtual sense.

Maybe I should stop : )

...the subject line is a reference to the old Looney Tunes cartoon where the big dumb dog is talking about the little smart-alec slappy dog. The reason that that came to mind (other than the obvious George Foreman reference) is that we started watching the movie "Of Mice And Men" the other day - the new one with Gary Sinese and John Malkovich. (The reason those two are linked is that it quickly became obvious, to me, that that's where the two doggy characters came from. Of course, I may be wrong. If so, please tell me : )

Ethel decided that she didn't like it, so we stopped watching it. How you can not like a movie with those actors in it is hard to understand.

We also tried watching Excaliber, with another amazing cast, and we both felt like they were overacting. How you get Gabriel Byrne to overact, I'll never know. Then we tried watching Shadowboxer, with Cuba Gooding Jr and Hellen Mirren. Both were excellent actors, but there wasn't a good guy in the movie, so that one went into the bucket as well.

Then we tried watching There's No Business Like Show Business, and ANY of the actors in that movie would be a single-billing star in their own right in any other movie - but doggone it, we couldn't find a story. A lot of music and dancing, but no story.

So finally we stumbled across The Interpreter, with Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, and that one held our interest until bedtime. We'll probably pick back up where we left off tomorrow night (tonight is booked).

That's the thing about having a Roku - there are so many, many choices, and none of them cost anything. If I had paid actual money for any of the DVDs listed above, I would have given them longer consideration (okay, not Shadowboxer. Those people just weren't nice) but, since it's just a push of a button, we moved from movie to movie to movie like a bee in a flower shop.