(Why are epic lists of awful side effects paired with actors smiling silently down the camera? It makes them look like they really, really want you to develop suicidal thoughts. Like they just they can’t wait for your liver to fail.)

Anyway, I was amazed to hear the receipt printers in New York cabs make a sound exactly like the Smoke Monster from Lost. When I mentioned this I was told the opposite was true: the Smoke Monster’s sound was sourced from NYC taxis.

New York is popular culture.

Australia has always been in an odd cultural position. With such a small population, relatively speaking, it’s always been cheaper to import media than to make it ourselves. A recent Screen Australia report says this is only going to get worse in the near future.

Given the choice, we seemed to pride ourselves on preferring classier British fare. Until recently, the most generic British crime drama was somehow considered more highly than the best American one. We’ll fight to the death for David Brent over Michael Scott in The Office. Our newsreaders, for years, had mostly British accents to give them a suitable sense of authority.

My childhood, though, was composed almost entirely of American cartoons, and sitcoms, and comic books. I never cared about seeing Australian stories on screen – no doubt part to a hefty dose of cultural cringe.

When I was young, I remember making jokes about Spider-Man’s abilities to always find something to swing from, any time of the day or night. Maybe there was a plane overhead! Or a blimp! Or a low flying (but sturdy) bird! Young Martyn wasn’t a particularly funny kid, admittedly, and seeing New York firsthand only proved that he was dead wrong, too.

Scott Bukatman explains why in his essay ‘The Boys in the Hoods: A Song of the Urban Superhero’. “Let me propose,” he writes, “that American superheroes encapsulated and embodied the same utopian aspirations of modernity as the cities themselves.” And, later: “The superhero city is founded on the relationship between grids and grace. The city becomes a place of grace by licensing the multitude of fantasies that thrived against the ‘constraining’ ground of the grid.”

Spider-Man only makes sense once you’ve seen his city. Superman might be “the mighty newspaper”, but as Spidey says in Giant-Size Astonishing X-Men #1: “I am New York.”

Now visiting New York makes me feel like I’m starring in a kid-friendly remake of Ringu and I’ve climbed inside the TV . And sure, the puppets might be people and the soundtrack by the Ramones, but staying in the East Village is like living on Sesame Street.

I’m never comfortable travelling. I subscribe to William Gibson’s theory of jetlag from the opening pages of Pattern Recognition: that it’s side effect of your soul, lost in the slipstream behind you, yet to catch up with your body. And I’m still stuck on how passports are faintly ridiculous, too. Little books of paper and cloth, stamped with actual stamps. Wielding one is like wearing a monocle or a pocketwatch on a chain.

But all my years spent in the middle of New York’s mythology – even from half a world away – makes visiting it a strange sort of homecoming.

But I don’t know what to do with those tossed salads and scrambled eggs. They’re calling again.

Tell me why I love you like I do. Tell me who could stop my heart as much as you.

Every time I turn around, I see the girl that turns my world around. Standing there.

Charles in charge of our days and our nights. Charles in charge of our wrongs and our rights.

I’ll be there for you – and you’ll be there for me too.

The following is a piece I recently wrote for The Big Issue. I dedicate it to the much loved, widescreen, pre-‘special edition’ VHS copy of Star Wars I have somewhere around here.

David Herbert's sculpture "VHS" (2005). http://www.davidherbert.com/

Vinyl simply produces a better sound than a CD. While music websites are still bursting with arguments about this statement – most punctuated with frequencies mapped on angrily-spiked graphs – the idea has been around for so long it’s now almost considered common sense.

“Vinyl’s just a superior sound than digital,” says DJ Andee Frost. He’s been collecting vinyl since he was sixteen and until recently ran Melbourne’s ‘vinyl boutique’ Hear Now. “There’s something more human about it. A CD is too crystal clear. Music needs the same warmth that it had when it was recorded.”

Warmer; softer; somehow more human. When asked if he could imagine someone praising video for the same attributes, Andee’s not so convinced. “I don’t know whether you’d find too many people claiming VHS is a superior format. How many people do you know who still use VHS? That’s the real question.”

Meet Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. She’s a cinema researcher with a frighteningly large (and ever growing) collection of VHS tapes. “Initially,” she explains, “it was because I never throw anything out. I never got rid of my player, because I always had stuff on video that I needed for work.”

It helps that Alex’s interest is in exactly the kind of obscure horror movies likely to be considered disposable. Her first book, Rape-Revenge Film: A Critical Study, will be published later in 2011.

“Most of what I see on VHS is stuff that’s never been put onto DVD – so I like the treasure hunt of finding it. Now I buy more VHS than I buy DVD. It wasn’t a conscious decision; I just like the look of VHS better. A video will play even if the tape is chewed and curled. It deteriorates more organically. The colours and the sound wash out, and it fades more like a painting.”

“Sometimes I don’t like the crisp HD look. It’s too harsh,” says Cassandra Tytler, a Melbourne artist working in Paris but soon taking up an artistic residency in Finland. Her work often has a pulpy, purposeful lo-fi look. “For one of my early films, I re-shot scenes right off the TV to give it a real ‘videoey’ quality.” Cassandra mentions Trash Humpers, the latest feature by cult American filmmaker Harmony Korine. Korine purposefully shot with the cheapest VHS camera he could find to give his film the authentic feel of a lost object.

As Cassandra points out, though, “I would say the real question is what format things are shot on, rather than whether it’s DVD or VHS.” Trash Humpers might’ve been shot on video – and Korine even made it available to buy on VHS – but most fans will still end up watching it on DVD.

And that ‘videoey’ quality is appearing more and more in popular culture. Just like every second music video was once filmed on Super-8 to give it that opening-credits-to-The-Wonder-Years glow, it’s now common to see the soft focus and horizontal static-lines of VHS. Mark Ronson’s new music video for the single ‘Somebody To Love Me’ looks like it’s composed of archival video footage. Even before you realise you’re meant to be watching a young Boy George, the specific quality of the image generates instant nostalgia. Is that retro appeal all there is to lingering affection for VHS?

Vinyl and VHS share another thing that separates them from their digital counterparts, and that’s their undeniable bulk. “You’re actually buying something, investing in something, when you buy a piece of vinyl,” says Andee. “And you’re getting beautiful cover art. It takes up more room; that’s how it becomes part of your life.” Alex waxes equally lyrical: “I love the materiality of VHS. I love that tapes are big black monoliths like in 2001. That’s the same with vinyl – you spend your money, and you get an art object. DVDs aren’t art objects. They’re consumer products.”

Could VHS ever make a comeback like vinyl? Andee says there’s one all-important difference: vinyl never went away. “Vinyl’s always been there,” he says, “and vinyl will still be here after CDs have gone. When no one even remembers what a CD-R was, you’ll still be able to buy records.”

Alex, however, doesn’t hesitate. “In certain circles, we’re there already. I strongly recommend that you jump on eBay and try to buy some VHS. I just thought I’d get a copy of Dario Argento’s Deep Red for a dollar or two, but I ended up paying $35 for it from a guy who only sells VHS. These people already exist. They’re out there.”

A version of this story first appeared in The Big Issue #374. I’ve edited out the embarrassing bit where I was fooled by the authenticity of the ‘Somebody To Love Me’ clip mentioned above. Damn you, Boy George!

Early on in the novel, a political agent is targeted by a “homicidal lunatic”. Why? Because his enemies have software that automatically generates hate-mongering messages about him and forwards them to those who’ll be most influenced:

“That’s spam from a junk mailbot. I’ve seen some junkbots that are pretty sophisticated, they can generate a halfway decent ad spiel. But that stuff is pure chain-mail ware. It can’t even punctuate!”

“Well, your core-target violent paranoiac, he might not notice the misspellings.”

There’s no need for Manchurian Candidates in Distraction; you just bombard those “core-targets” with the right messages and wait for someone to snap and pull the trigger. Is this the sci-fi version of illustrating a map of your political opponents with gun targets, or telling your supporters to reload instead of retreating?

I don’t really have anything coherent to add to the sea of what’s already been said about the possible links between violent rhetoric and violent action. I do think it’s both fascinating and awful, though, that the shooter was also obsessed with the cause-and-effect of language. As Bob Rehak wrote: “I think some virus of language did finally get to Loughner; I think words ate him alive.”

In Australia’s last federal election, the media’s weapon of choice was a knife. When Julia Gillard replaced her predecessor Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister, we were told over and over again that Rudd had been “knifed” by Gillard. Every appearance, every press conference, journalists wailed about Rudd’s knifing. Eventually you had to wonder if the metaphor had escaped them. Maybe they honestly thought he’d been stabbed, literally if not fatally. Why else would they be so determined to use the word, again and again? They must’ve been wondering why the police didn’t take their panicked phone calls!

Keith Olbermann called for the end of gun metaphors in politics, and many subsequently pointed out that violent political metaphor is nothing new. Sports are the same. One team winning, one team losing? That’s just not interesting enough. A quick google search for “football” plus “demolished” or “obliterated” or “destroyed” shows how many teams apparently disintegrated upon loss, never to play again.

(Don’t even get me started on “I’d hit that” as a substitute for “I’d like to have sex with her”, or the casual “George Lucas raped my childhood!” school of internet commentary.)

Perhaps I’m too cynical even for politics – man, that’s a depressing thought, isn’t it? – but I don’t think politicians honestly want their opponents dead. It’s almost sadder than that. I think it’s just the desperate hyperbole of those who think their audiences are drifting away.

We compare elections to sporting matches. We compare sporting matches to all-out war. Do veterans flinch to hear their horrifying experiences described in the same terms we use for teams of men running a ball back and forth across a field for an afternoon?

I can’t seem to make myself watch the videos left by the Arizona shooter, but I’m haunted after reading this statement: “All humans are in need of sleep. Jared Loughner is a human. Hence, Jared Loughner is in need of sleep.”

A man using words to try to convince himself he’s a human being.

(All that caffeine probably didn’t help.)

Buried amongst the hundreds of products on the walls, however, was an item worthy of a double-take. It was a can of something called OK Soda, featuring the instantly recognisable art of Charles Burns. When I interviewed him for Bookslut last month, I finally got to ask him about it:

Yeah, that was a very odd project. Another American cartoonist, Dan Clowes, did some designs as well. I kind of know what they were after – but I don’t know what they were thinking. They were going for this kind of ironic humour, for the 20-something audience. Instead of having that iconic Coca-Cola logo, the can would be different every few months or so.

It was test-marketed in maybe five or six different US cities. It was produced; it was out there. I never sampled it, but everyone I talked to said that whatever the soda was it was truly disgusting. It was a combination of grape soda and tea, or something like that.

I said that I felt like he needed to taste it for himself, right? Just so he knew what his art was wrapped around? He wasn’t convinced.

I wasn’t in one of the cities where any of this stuff was available, but they sent me a few cans. I never felt compelled to crack one open and chug it down.

In one episode, Lindsay Weir (Linda Cardellini) is trying to convince her parents to let her go to an upcoming concert by The Who. They decide to listen to one of the band’s albums first to see if they approve and, inevitably, find themselves interpreting the lyrics to Squeeze Box.

“Mama’s got a squeeze box, Daddy never sleeps at night /  She goes in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out…”

Her father isn’t impressed: “Just keep those boys away from your accordion!”

It got me thinking, though, about all the ways to secretly describe getting some in song. First some rules, though, because what’s sex talk without rules? (Chaos, that’s what.)  If we’re just talking about the sex act itself, then we disqualify other kinds of dirty euphemisms. All those songs that are bragging about a particular body part, for instance.

And we also discount artists who seem happier letting their lyrics stand naked than dressing them in metaphors. Missy Elliott’s Work It? Prince’s Mad Sex? I’m looking at you. I mean, hip-hop seemed to run out of metaphors – and spellcheckers – even before it reached Nelly’s Hot In Herre. “It’s gettin’ hot in here,” he crooned. “So take off all your clothes.”

(That’s just cause and effect, baby.)

What’s left is often A) edible, from 50 Cent’s Candy Shop to Warrant’s Cherry Pie. Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer asked us to “Open up your fruit cage / Where the fruit is as sweet as can be.”

Or B) automotive. R. Kelly – whose Bump and Grind became a part of everyday speech – gave us the unforgettable gift of Ignition. “Girl, please let me stick my key in your ignition”. “Girl, back that thing up so I can wax it, baby.” And Grace Jones’ post-disco classic Pull Up To The Bumper is hilariously dirty: “Pull up to my bumper baby / In your long black limousine / Pull up to my bumper baby / And drive it in between.”

If wikipedia is to be believed, Pull Up To The Bumper was used on a children’s TV channel in 2002, and no one seemed to care. The thinnest metaphorical veil is usually enough to get away with anything. Remember Madonna’s performance at the Haiti telethon? It marked the moment where the whole world seemed convinced that Like A Prayer is actually about, you know, praying.

Once enough time has gone by, you don’t even need to disguise your lyrics. Familiarity turns everything to muzak. I remember hearing Lou Reed’s Walk On The Wild Side playing in my local supermarket. No one heard: “But she never lost her head / Even when she was giving head…”

Everyone heard: “Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo…”

Coppélia (Leanne Stojmenov) and Dr. Coppelius (Damien Welch). Photography by Branco Gaica.

Mostly, I focused on the ballet’s villain, Doctor Coppelius. He’s depicted as a sad and lonely inventor, surrounded by his odd mechanical creations – some half-finished, some almost human. In the original horror story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, though, he’s an alchemist suspected to be ‘The Sandman’, and is much more monstrous. (Like stealing-childrens’-eyes more monstrous.)

Yet he’s not the most horrific thing in the story. That role belongs to his beautiful, artificial faux-daughter, Coppélia. In the ballet’s programme, I write:

“The existence of a lifelike doll in Hoffmann’s original tale is not a charming curiosity. After the truth of his creation is revealed, Hoffmann describes lovers forcing one another to sing and dance off-key and out of time, just to prove they are human. Otherwise how can they be sure?”

Popular culture has provided us with more supposedly scientific ways to test if someone’s human, like the Voight-Kampff machine made famous by Blade Runner. The movie’s production designer described it like this: “Basically it was a lie-detector machine. The lie is, I am not a replicant.”

In fact, as I saw the frail Doctor Coppelius appear on stage, I was reminded of J. F. Sebastian, Blade Runner’s old inventor, living alone except for his toys. The nursery rhyme his toys sing to him – “Home again, home again, jiggety-jig” – still plays in my head with alarming regularity.

Blade Runner – and a gazillion other science fiction stories too, of course – are designed to make us wonder if we’re human after all. How can we really tell? Singing out of tune and moving off the beat? Close analysis of our pupil dilation at embarrassing questions? Maybe it’s just as the theme song ‘Coppélia’s Coffin’ from the anime series Noir says:

“People are dolls tired from dancing / Sheep on the altar / The mechanical dreams / Where are they headed?”

We’re all just dolls, tired from dancing. Coppélia tries to dismiss these question with the light-hearted farce and energetic dancing at its beginning and end – but they remain bubbling under the surface of the stage while we’re in Doctor Coppelius’ lair.

An odd postscript: Coppélia’s choreographer, Arthur Saint-Leon, isn’t only famous for his ballets; he also invented an early form of notation to record these all-important steps. Ironically, he failed to record his work on Coppélia, and it only survived as its popularity kept it in almost constant circulation – even though it was initially interrupted by the Franco-Prussian war. What if it hadn’t been so lucky?

And another: in 2007, Japanese scientists offered a strange solution: a human-sized robot that could mimic the steps of a human dancer. In this way, the specific movements of folk dances could be perfectly captured and replayed, even after its original performers were long dead. “My impression is that there would still be a human element lacking,” one English folk dancer is quoted as saying. “The robot would still look, for the want of a better word, robotic.”

We keep telling ourselves that – but I can’t help feeling like it’s just modernity’s equivalent of whistling past a graveyard.

Inside the building at 372 5th Avenue Brooklyn, there’s a secret door. (I won’t say where because it’s a secret.) Behind it, there’s a large room where children sit and finish their homework, get help from tutors, or embark on ambitious extracurricular creative writing projects. When I visited, posters from their most recent batch of films were hanging around the walls. This is 826NYC.

Others have explained the make-you-all-warm-inside, bring-a-tear-to-your-eye, maybe-the-kids-will-be-alright-after-all charity work done at 826 National. There are seven locations around America, each fronted with its own theme. San Francisco has the Pirate Supply Store, Los Angeles has the Echo Park Time Travel Mart, and Chicago’s Boring Store does not sell spy equipment for secret agents. No sir.

But it’s the Brooklyn store that also houses the Superhero Supply Co., providing everything a young superhero needs to combat neighbourhood evil. As the sensibly-lettered sign outside says: “Costumes. Eyewear. Invisibility. Instruction Manuals. Dastardly plots will be foiled. Underground lairs will be found. ‘Ever vigilant, ever true.’”

There are X-ray goggles, wrist-communicators, industrial strength suction-caps, and secret identity kits – in case you need extra documentation to prove that you’re actually Ruben Fletcher, 46, an appliance salesman from Iowa City. There are other products that are a little more conceptual, too, just a jug of pure chaos from Bugayenko Laboratories.

There’s a selection of capes – and a cape-tester to see how it looks billowing dramatically behind you – and a Devillianizer machine in case you need to work on those occasional villainous tendencies.

I love the attention to detail, the utterly convincing graphic design, and the quips scattered around the store for those who are paying attention. (“Please ask a clerk for assistance with products on the higher shelves. Do not levitate, hover, or stretch.”) I love that you’re required to give your superhero name and recite the Vow of Heroism before leaving the store with your purchases. They frown on irony, too, so be prepared to say it with gusto.

Most of all, I love how democratic it all is. Too much fantasy seems to requires that its heroes are born special. Secret royalty; chosen one after chosen one; you know the drill. The division between who’s worthy and who’s not seems impossibly wide. Once you’re one, you can never be the other. Batman and Iron Man might be self-made heroes, but they’re the exceptions – and still chosen by tragedy. If you want superpowers just to help people, have fun, and save the world? You haven’t earned them. Look at anyone who takes Mutant Growth Hormone (in the Marvel Universe) or joins Lex Luthor’s Everyman Project (over at DC). It never seems to end well.

It’s also what made me wary of Brad Bird’s The Incredibles, even though I rank his earlier Iron Giant as one of my all-time favourite movies. It’s difficult to root for the stars when you know you’re just one of the mundane many who are holding them back from their heroic destinies.

I’m more of a sucker for the end of the good-hearted and much-maligned Mystery Men from 1999. The last thing these misfit heroes do in their film is assure everyone out there that they too have got what it takes:

“I think we would all like this victory to go out to all the other guys… and I’m talking about the people in this city who are super-good at their jobs, but never get any credit. Like the lady in the DMV. That’s a rough job.”

“For the people that remember jingles from tons of old commercials!”

“And for people who support local music and seek out independent film.”

Besides, at the Superhero Supply Co., they don’t look down on you just because you can’t fly. You don’t have to cross your fingers and hope that you were born special. Why wait for an origin story? Go and get one!

You might have to cough up some spare change for the gadgets and tights out the front, but it’s all to raise money for 826NYC’s free programs out back – and that means just by wanting to become a superhero, you’ve already made the world a better place.

Scuola di ballo (The School of Ballet) is the second of the three pieces that comprise the latest production by The Australian Ballet: the ambiguously-but-sleekly named Concord. Choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky, it’s the story of an egotistical buffoon in charge of a dance studio and the lengths he’ll go to in order to ditch his worst dancer, Felicita, onto an unsuspecting impresario. Eventually, though, the authorities dance in to put a stop to the schoolmaster’s schemes, and…

Hold on. The authorities dance in? Sure. I mean, it’s a ballet. That’s fine. Everyone dances.

But then… I mean…

If everyone dances, all the time, then why is there a need for a dance school? Is the dancing they do in the school somehow different than the dancing they do when they dance at home, or out of bed in the morning, or through the aisle of the local grocery store? Or is everyone forced to attend a dance school in order to learn some basic steps? If they don’t, they must be shunned the rest of society. Imagine if everyone was dancing around you at all times – friends, family, strangers – and you were just putting one foot in front of the next like a nobody. Imagine the name-calling. Imagine the self-loathing.

Furthermore: are they born with these steps already encoded deep inside their nervous systems? Perhaps they attend the school to learn a complicated selection of steps that they can use during various commonplace social events! A ‘happy’ dance, a ‘sad’ dance, a ‘my schoolmaster is trying to palm off his worst student and I wonder if he’ll succeed’ dance…

You accidentally ask one question; that question clatters into the next; before you know it, the entire premise of the fictional world has ceased to make sense.

Somehow, I’ve taken to naming these moments of complete logic meltdown after the Thirsty Mayor. It’s a reference to a quick joke from The Onion: “Thirsty Mayor Drinks Town’s Entire Water Supply“. This story was used as an example in a behind-the-scenes piece by beloved radio show This American Life on the hellish pressures of The Onion’s writer’s room. They describe how most writers thought the Thirsty mayor headline was ridiculous enough to be instantly funny – but one writer needed more. Some kind of reason. Why was the Mayor so thirsty? What does the joke actually mean?

(The answer that placated him was that the Mayor had “…deeply mismanaged city resources”.)

You can find the Thirsty Mayor everywhere. He’s particularly at home in superhero comics. The interconnected universes of Marvel and DC lead to exactly the kinds of logical fissures that the Mayor finds irresistible. Every kid has asked themselves why Batman doesn’t just call his indestructible pal Superman to solve 99% of Gotham crime without breaking a sweat, right?

These disjunctions are not only between different characters. They’re often contained within just one. For example, Batman (the all-to-human street-level vigilante who beats up punks on the streets of Gotham) must coexist somehow with Batman (the teleporting, dimension-hopping, alien-fighting member of the Justice League of America). Or take his relationship with fellow Justice Leaguer Zauriel. Zauriel was an angel. An actual, literal, from-heaven-above angel. Would you expect this undeniable proof of the existence of the Almighty would make Batman wonder about, say, his beloved dead parents and their eternal afterlife? You’d be wrong.

You can see the Mayor’s footprints all over commercials, too, especially those for food or alcohol. I remember one beer ad where animated bottles walked up to a bar, and the bartender (who was also a beer bottle) popped off all their bottle caps, and then, uh, I guess they happily drank themselves. Did they metaphorically drink the beer that was already inside their own glass bodies? Or slosh their internal fluids into each others’ mouths? And does that make the bartender-bottle some kind of sadist, or murderer, or…

The Mayor is very, very thirsty. Try not to think about it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the following in 1934′s Tender Is The Night:

“After lunch they were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over American travellers in quiet foreign places. No stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of their own thoughts came suddenly from the minds of others, and missing the clamor of the Empire they felt that life was not continuing there.”

To experience the absolute reverse of this, however, you need to abandon all hope and travel to M&M’s World in Times Square.

I’m no stranger to blaring corporate overdrive. I survived the Coke Museum in Atlanta, even though the staff’s ID badges bear not just their name, but their favourite flavour. Even though when the Polar Bear mascot was on break I was told he’d be back after “grabbing a Coke”. Even though their 4D propaganda film featured a hoverboarding scientist who discovered the secret to Coke’s success is – yes, yes, of course – “you”.

M&M’s World is a different beast. It’s not an exercise in legend-building and carefully constructed flag-waving like the Coke Museum. It doesn’t seem to care much about chocolate, or taste, or any other aspect of the actual candy. Here’s the best way to describe it:

Imagine a man having the worst day of his life. Death, divorce, or some combination of the two. He maybe eats an M&M that he finds rattling around the margins of the kitchen table, and he notices that the bright colour is the one spot of optimism on this awful, godforsaken day. The next afternoon, he eats a whole packet of M&M’s, ignoring the reheatable food provided by well-meaning friends. They’re worried his grief will cause him to waste away to nothing. They don’t know about the M&M’s. After a few more days, just seeing the chocolate’s logo lifts his spirits. Everything else in his house makes him miserable with reminders of what he’s lost. Not the M&M’s, though. They’re delicious.

This man lies awake at night and wonders: why can’t everything be an M&M? Wouldn’t that be a better world?

Come to New York, fight your way through Times Square, and you can buy yourself M&M’s Monopoly. M&M’s stuffed monkeys. M&M’s t-shirts, mugs, and magnets. M&M’s chessboards. M&M’s action figures, stickers, and stamps. M&M’s hand-embroidered designer jackets, selling for four figures, that you’d save for with your M&M’s moneybox.

See the yellow M&M loom over Times Square on a billboard like some ancient, Lovecraftian god. Witness the green M&M cast as some kind of misshapen, gamma-irradiated sex-symbol, pouting like Marilyn on jigsaw boxes and beach towels. Have the red M&M imprinted on a penny by one of those old-fashioned souvenir machines – because why buy something when you can cut out the middle man and have his image stamped directly onto your money?

I guess there might have been some chocolate for sale, too.