Vista Ridge Mall

I went here over five years ago (May 2004) after playing with my orchestra at Sandy Lake Amusement Park in Carrollton, Texas (suburb of Dallas). After the event and a day of fun, we went to a nearby mall, where we ate dinner. I got a guide to SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition here, a meal at Burger King, and a smoothie from Frullati Café. Regrettably, an Orange Julius was here, which I did not try (grrr) and I do not recall the interior much (it wasn't anything special).

But I DID get the directory, which I have faithfully scanned here.

Apologies for the wrinkly paper (I could have used Photoshop but I don't have Photoshop).

The listing of stores is also in black and white (it was originally the green on the front, but an automatic setting made it B&W)





Enjoy!

Sgt. Pepperoni's Pizza

This is a restaurant I visited in January 2007 but it is sadly gone now (as of early 2010). The name is derived from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and like the album, it was pretty good. There are other Sgt. Pepperoni's in the USA, but they aren't related. Anyway, the place had good pizza rolls, arcade games (I think? There was definitely another room), and ceilings out of another era.

It was a pit stop after driving on a long road in the county that stretched 32 miles, starting as a hilly rural road, crossing a railroad, becoming an urban four-lane road, crossing the highway, before doubling back on itself, crossing the highway and the railroad again, before going through cotton fields and ending at Texas 105.

That's about where Sgt. Pepperoni's was.

Here is the menu:

What? No anchovies?


So is the pizza man frowning? Or is that just his chin?
update Nov '13: cleaning up

Breakfast burritos

I don't know what I was teasing about "Floridian hamburgers" (oh wait, now I do...but it's more of >this variety) but today's post is on a good TEXAN breakfast burrito.

Ingredients:
2 flour tortillas (6" in diameter)
2 eggs
Milk
2 packets of Taco Bell sauce
2 "brown and serve" sausage patties
A slice of onion (preferably Texas 1014)
Butter
Salt
Cooking oil
Pepper
Cheddar or colby cheese

1. Heat a small saucepan with some butter.
2. Mix about a tablespoon of milk with the eggs, until the mixture is a nice uniform yellow. Pour the mixture in the pan and make the scrambled eggs (which I won't tell here. If you don't know, help is a few clicks away)
3. About this time, if the tortillas are frozen (or you'd like them heated a bit) put them in the microwave. A wet paper towel will help moisten them.
4. Before the scrambled eggs are done, thaw (NOT cook) the sausage patties, dice the slice of onion, and butter the tortillas.
5. Move the scrambled eggs off heat (as in, out of the pan), and add a bit of oil to the pan. Chop up the sausage patties, and add the sausage patties and onion to the pan.
6. Cook those things thoroughly. Grate the cheese, if it's not already pre-grated.
7. Take everything off the pan. Put the eggs on a tortilla, followed by the sausages and onions, followed by cheese, followed by a packet of sauce, followed by salt and pepper.
8. Layer the other tortilla on the mound of food. Then put the sauce on the top tortilla somehow (I like to draw lines with the sauce)
9. Put the thing in the microwave for 15 seconds.
10. Eat with a knife and fork!

...and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel

Apologies if you've seen this before, but previously the date was wrong, so...

Ask me to talk about Maxis and my memories of their products, and I will. The great games, catalogs and manuals in the early days, along with early SC2K cities were fun...but then, inevitably, things got a little sketchy there with 1996-1997, yet since none of those games produced in the lost era (read this for the full story) nothing really "touched" me, with the exception of SimSafari (NOT fun), and even that (and SimTown) were post-acquisition shovelware (I remember getting SimTown in the late 1990s at Sam's Club...I wonder how that got there....;o;)

But other companies, like Brøderbund, continue to elude me. Our focus is on Cyan (Worlds), more specifically, Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel. I won't explain the plot of Cosmic Osmo, but basically you explore around a cartoon-like universe and click on everything. It's kind of for kids, but no one should feel embarrassed by it.

Prior to my "rediscovery" of Cosmic Osmo, trying to remember Osmo was like a bad drug trip (in fact, Osmo has been likened to mind-altering substances. After piecing together some facts, I discovered a few things.

1. The first versions were HyperCard stacks with an overlay plug-in that let it play Director videos. Unfortunately, this didn't work past System 6. It was also published through Activision.
2. The later versions were made by Cyan and were directly Director-made products. Activision was going through some...financial problems.
3. There were two versions of the game made: Cosmic Osmo and Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel. The "Beyond the Mackerel" version was made post-Activision. The CD-ROM (big deal in 1990) version featured additional planets (three extras, making seven). Obviously, I never had the CD-ROM version: CD-ROM drives were expensive (and slow) in the early 1990s.
4. Curiously, I remember a website that my brother printed out for me that showed Osmo-like characters in a strange world with a TV station and an observatory and I think a professor...except they were in full color! I tried looking for the scenes but I couldn't find them until...
5. I find Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel at Macintosh Garden. All is awesome again.

So, then, where is color Cosmic Osmo? An abysmal "sequel" that made Osmo profoundly ugly and in a bland puzzle environment was released a few years ago...

I found this one picture which looks quite different than the pictures I remember seeing, this one looks like they just took a snapshot and colored it in...

...and we found this segment on a comment list somewhere recently...
There was a time when Cyan released DVDs of both Cosmic Osmo and The Manhole. When I bought them, in the late 90s, a nice lady at Cyan told me they were slowly working on a color version of Cosmic Osmo. I wish...
posted by thejoshu at 9:37 AM on November 3, 2005

Do you remember any real snapshots of a color Cosmic Osmo? Write in comments, below...