Tag Archives: Clown Salad

Breakroom Clown Salad

The winter days tumble by, one after another in a stupefying daze of cold and wind. Sometimes the only sure way to be sure that time is passing is to check the break room offerings:

Apple, orange, thin mints
Pick your poison…
Box of half-eaten Russell Stover candies
Russell Stover… when you couldn’t care less about giving the very best and you don’t care that it ends up in some break room.
leaking-cupcakes
I’m hungry, I’m bored, I want… a leaky cupcake. Or maybe a half-eaten muffin discarded in a plastic bag.
Boxes of Twix, Nestle Crunch, Kit Kats
Someone’s getting started on their resolution… by pushing their candy off on the rest of us.
book called Viral Hate
You wanted chips… maybe an Oreo… bagels and cream cheese… But all you get is Viral Hate.
A coke and a diet coke and a note that says "Take one!"
In case you weren’t sure what to do…

 

 

 

 

Clown Salad In the Locker Room

A Collection of Atrocities Committed in Men’s Locker Rooms at Gyms in Middle America

[There are no illustrations to accompany this post and soon you will be thanking me for that.]

*As reported by Keith Pille and Matt Waite

Sweaty, paunchy dude walking around the locker room naked, walks past a bin of dirty towels, shrugs, reaches in, grabs one, and starts wiping himself down.

Man blow-drying his balls with the wall-mounted hand dryer.

Old man applying some kind of liniment that smelled like cat piss.

Went to take sweater out of locker while getting dressed after working out only to find a nasty, used Q-tip left inside the locker by some sick fuck stuck to it.

Old man clipping nasty, thick yellow toenails and leaving them on the carpet. Bonus: he clips too close and starts bleeding. Another variation: old, naked man bent over clipping his toenails while pointing the wrong end at you as you walk in the door.

Old naked men watching Fox News – my God, do they watch Fox News in resplendent wrinkly nakedness. Or sports. One guy sat butt nekkid watching Oprah.

The Naked Man Gossip Circle. Talking. Laughing. Naked.
An oldie but goodie from the Bally Total Fitness days: old man taking a shower and using his tighty whiteys as a washcloth.

Old man sleeping naked on locker room couch.

Man shaving in steam room, just tapping the razor onto the bench tiles after each pass so that his hairs are scattered there. Bonus: he leaves the razor in the steam room.

Old naked man eating a bag of potato chips… naked… in the locker room… at the gym. Why, God, why?

Old men spritzing their balls with cologne… Septuagenarians hosing themselves down with Axe Body Spray.

Note: Although I’ve worked out at various gyms and taken many exercise classes throughout the years, I was not able to come up with anything from a women’s locker room that would rival these anecdotes (I did once have a disturbing encounter with a woman who was having some sort of mental break while in an empty studio, stretching, but that’s another story) So, are women just cleaner? More courteous? More inhibited? If you have a woman’s locker room atrocity to share, comment!

2014: Bringing Clown Salad Back

2014 is the Year of Clown Salad

Here’s today’s pic:

Tiny moccasin keychain abandoned in snow.

So, what’s clown salad? Back in 2011, I described it this way:

  • 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?”
  • Twinkies are not clown salad but those circus peanut candies are.
  • The Twilight movies are clown salad. Scott Baio is also clown salad.

To update this list for 2014 I would like to add:

  • Most sad, abandoned things you find on the ground (except money) are clown salad.
  • Any shoe you see on the side of the highway is clown salad.
  • People who write checks in the grocery store check-out lane are clown salad. Double clown salad: they don’t start writing it out until they get their total.
  • Pumping gas in below zero temps is clown salad, especially if the sad man in the Buick LaSabre one pump over is sitting in his car scratching lottery cards.
  • That duck hunting family of rubes who have a reality show are clown salad.
  • Otis Spunkmeyer muffins are clown salad.
  • The real name for ham salad or, heaven forbid, beef salad, is clown salad. Seriously, don’t eat that stuff.

Be on the lookout for clown salad and you’ll start to see it everywhere. Think of it as a zen experience – you are merely noting and documenting the clown salad. YOU ARE NOT THE CLOWN SALAD.

Got a photo you want to share? Send to reebs73 at gmail dot com.

Clown Salad: A Primer

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:

clown face salad

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.

Continue reading Clown Salad: A Primer