Oftentimes when I’m enjoying a tomato, some bookish fellow will stop adjusting his eyeglasses for a minute to tell me, in his nasally little voice, “You know, tomatoes aren’t vegetables. They’re actually a type of fruit.” Immediately, everyone within earshot stops what they’re doing. In hushed tones my friends start to say, “Oh, snap, shit’s going down.” If I’m at a party the DJ will stop the record, and somebody will flick on the lights. No one even questions why I’m eating a tomato at a party, because everyone has learned to let me enjoy my tomatoes in peace. I’m not even going to make any sort of joke in this update, because what I always proceed to tell these nebbish blowhards should be digested as immutable lifeless facts:

*Fact one: It is true that botanically a tomato is a fruit. Everyone talks about this. But guess what: so are squash, green beans, bell peppers, and cucumbers. Are you still prepared to pretend you’re a botanist?

*Fact two: To get even more specific, tomatoes are berries. You might also want to note that bananas, avocados, and chili peppers are also berries—and that, botanically, strawberries, blackberries, and raspberries? Not berries at all, my friend, but aggregate fruits.

*Fact three: Check this out, Gregor Mendel: “vegetable” doesn’t even have much botanical meaning. It’s a culinary term and since the tomato isn’t sweet, it’s treated as a vegetable for cooking purposes.

*Fact four: In 1893, the U.S. Supreme Court officially declared that a tomato is a vegetable based on its usage and should be treated as such in accordance with the Tariff Act of 1883, motherfucker.

By now, the egoistic tomato-as-fruit proponent is lying unconscious on the floor with blood flowing from his nose. I didn’t even hit him, I just laid down some knowledge. Then the DJ restarts the party music and everybody begins dancing—everybody but me. I’ve got a vegetable to enjoy.

Recently I chanced upon a gathering of true kite enthusiasts. I never really thought kites had much of a point, but that’s because I thought they were all just a bunch of lame triangles, or at best little rectangular boxes. But consider the following dreamland:

I was completely overstimulated at this park. I didn’t know which kite’s pleasant lulling motions I should examine first.

The octopus was a site to behold. It must have taken a team of geniuses to get this Leviathan into the air. To see this octopus sailing in the sky once more is merely my greatest hope in life.

That one kite near the center is a pair of disembodied female legs in stockings. Why not create such a whimsical kite? In case you couldn’t tell, I was completely lying yesterday when I said I hated hobby stores. Hobby stores make precisely these sorts of fantasies possible.

Many of these kites resembled parade balloons, but you have to understand that unlike balloons, these creatures rode the wind in a fashion that must be described as majestic. Needless to say, this lobster was a breathtaking specimen.

Now here’s a guy who’s figured out a new way to travel. He doesn’t give a damn for walking. What he does is he hops on a skateboard and lets his kite take him wherever it may. One day I hope to travel across the United State in precisely this fashion, except my dream is to find a kite modeled after Falkor from The Never Ending Story.

A lot of so-called “hobby stores” have a very narrow view on what constitutes a hobby. If hobby stores are to be believed, unless you fly RC airplanes or assemble little Japanese robot models, guess what: you don’t have a hobby. This would be like calling a business a “sports store,” but when you go inside the only thing for sale is racquetball equipment.

Hobby stores don’t want to hear a single word about your cooking or golfing hobbies. They really don’t care about what you do in your free time. If you ask a hobby store clerk a question about your photography hobby, he will laugh in your face and say, “Sorry, we only sell hobby stuff here. We don’t cater to bullshit amusements like photography.” Yeah, that’s a great attitude to have. This is why I took up a fun new hobby called never shopping at hobby stores.

You can find an article I wrote for CRACKED.com here. It’s about dated futuristic movies. You might find it a little more crass and more generically offensive than usual, but that’s merely to conform to the editorial standards at CRACKED.com.

Also, on November 19th this site was randomly quoted in an article about board games in the Sacramento Bee:

I admit that it’s kind of a jarring, disconnected quotation, but at least now I have a blurb for eKarjala that I can attribute to a major newspaper: “Ouch!” raves the Sacramento Bee. My next blurb will probably be something like: “Well that was just fucking mean,” praises the Kansas City Star.

Probably the worst Christmas gift you could give somebody is a Christmas tree ornament. It’s like, “Oh great, a new ornament for my Christmas tree. Which I’m about to take down because Christmas is over. This will really come in handy for the next hour and a half.” Not until the following Christmas season will an ornament truly become useful, if a fanciful decorative bauble can even be described as “useful.” Why not just give them some Independence Day fireworks? That’s only six months away. Or if you insist on mocking them with your untimely gifts, why not go ahead and have them unwrap an actual Christmas tree? I think that might really mean a lot to them. Or maybe you could surprise them with an engraved tombstone.