Last month, a co-worker and I were talking about old Betty Crocker recipes and she mentioned Clown Salad – a recipe from one of their now-vintage cookbooks for kids. The salad basically amounted to a canned pear on a bed of lettuce with stuff stuck in it to make it look like a clown face.

Horrible, I know. Although the best I can come up with for a photo of a clown salad is this clown face salad, which isn’t quite the same:

Since then, I’ve come to really like the phrase “clown salad” to denote something icky, unpleasant, weird, nervous-making or just plain stupid. So I keep referring to things as clown salad and it occurred to me that this may be a concept other people may enjoy as well.

Some examples of clown salad are:

Any time you see one of those plastic teeth flossers lying in a gutter or on the sidewalk, that’s total clown salad.

A band-aid floating in a pool is clown salad.

Mel Gibson is clown salad. So is Brett Favre, apparently.

When you get trapped trying to exit a parking ramp after a big event lets out, that’s total clown salad. As you sit in your car, inching forward, you may say to your companions, “Will you look at this clown salad?”

Bosses are frequently clown salad (with a side of tuna salad dished out with an ice cream scoop so it forms a nearly perfect ball).

Any kind of cluster fuck is a clown salad. Clown salad is the cluster fuck of 2011.

But weird or wacky things are clown salad as well – they just have to be the right kind of weird/wacky. This is clown salad because of the level of creep:

But this isn’t, this is just hilarious:

Twinkies are not clown salad but those circus peanut candies are.

The Twilight movies are clown salad. Scott Baio is also clown salad.

Is any of this making sense?

This isn’t necessarily clown salad:

But this certainly is:

I’ll be out spotting clown salads to share with you throughout 2011. The great thing about clown salad? It’s everywhere, all around us, every day.