OK, this was very silly.  I was cruising around the internet, looking for more pictures of kettles for my kettle corn popper machines page.  Since I’ve done a ton of research on this, I might as well toss it all onto one page and hopefully get some Google Adsense clicks.  (Yes, I’ve sold out, I’ve now started putting Adsense ads on this blog.  Aren’t they annoying?) I discover this shot:

I’m thinking, “boy that sure looks like MY Northbend kettle..and MY blue long sleeve t-shirt with dark gloves…and MY blue cooler…and MY yellow tent.”  The  image was prominently displayed in the center of www.kettlepopper.us. I grab the image and do a screen capture of everything. The photo looked very familiar, but I couldn’t figure out who took it.  I fire out this email to them:

And I couldn’t help noticing in the photo you have shown - that *I* too have a North Bend Originals popper, pop under a yellow tent (you can see it in the corner and by the color balance of the photo), use dark gloves with a blue shirt, BOLTED A PIZZA SERVER TO A POLE to stir kettle corn, and have the same color ice cooler.

Wow!  Small world isn’t it?

Eric Bickernicks
Velma’s “Wicked Delicious” Kettle Corn

Later that night I’m arguing with Velma.  I tell her that’s me and our tent in their photo.  She thinks maybe it’s not.  No, I tell her, that’s definitely me in that shot.  I explain (once more to her) that I’m a guy and I’m a VISUAL creature…I can recognize my greasy torso and gloves anywhere.  Maybe you’re wrong she says.  It then hits me.  I go searching for this newspaper article that Steve had mounted on a plaque.  That was it!  The Springfield Republican newspaper had done a little article on us for their September 13, 2006 issue. It matched perfectly! I quickly run upstairs and fling the now moldy plaque onto our bed while Velma was reading. Everyone please take note: I clearly WON that argument with my girlfriend on the night of September 11th, 2008.  Next case your honor.

Steve got the same email and sent this out to them:

On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 2:30 PM, <steve@somewhere.net> wrote:
Time for a cooler inspection…. if the same drinks are in there, this is getting freaky, Man.

We get this back for a reply:

From: “Dan Somebody” <kettlepopper@somewhere.com>
HELLO ALL! LOOKS LIKE YOU NEED MORE BUSINESS IF ALL YOU WORRY ABOUT ARE OTHER PEOPLES WEBSITES!

That’s pretty funny.  Now…wouldn’t you be concerned if you saw yourself on the front page of a competitors website?  What kills me is somebody in Iowa needs to steal a shot from an East Coast newspaper to put on their website.  They obviously MAKE kettle corn.  How hard is it to pull a camera out and take a lousy shot of themselves making it?  On top of that, I went back and found the embedded text info within their picture.  It had my name in it!  (I could’ve won my argument even sooner if I had known.) I guess they only recently got computers out in Iowa, since they haven’t figure out how to turn off the ALL CAPS button.  And why are their votes considered so important every 4 years?  What gives?

 8/18/08 update:

Hey look what I got!

I guess when you’ve got lawyers on staff, they’ve got to keep themselves busy somehow. “Let’s get that guy in the tent before he goes after our Pulitzer Prize stuff next!” (I had to remove the photo of me and a caption that went with it.) Here’s a link to the original article on the Boston Globe website.

===== Eric’s original text ======

OK, so I know this is no BIG deal, but there’s always something to bitch about when you get into the media. First, Erica never got back to me when this thing was going to be published. I know it’s just a little crappy side-bar thing she did, but I discovered that we were in the paper when I walked into my corporate job today and saw the article stuck on a cubicle wall. We didn’t get a link, even though a gave her a couple of magnets with our website on there. (They screwed up the TT Buds link too, I found their real one.)

The photographer originally came by on June 26th. I mentioned it on this blog post a while back.

While I’m still bashing everyone: I’ve known about T.T. Buds kettle corn for a while. I saw a bag of their stuff at a farm stand I was trying to get our stuff into. Their kettle corn looked kinda skimpy, it didn’t look like they used very much sugar to get a decent coating on it.  But don’t take my word, see what Taquitos.NET said about them. Then read our review on the same website. On top of that they claim their stuff has a shelf life of at least a month. Yeah right. I take that back, if you hardly use any oil when popping, kettle corn will stay edible longer.

We thought we had a record day at Springfield this week, but it turns out we were $75 short of that goal. (We went through 8 1/2 oils this week.) What’s amazing is that this amount of sales matches what we made ON THE BEST DAY at the Brimfield Antique Festival. This was a spot where we had to pay more than $300 per day to set up there, and we now sell the same amount on a daily basis in Springfield for $15.

If you’ve been reading his blog, you would have seen that I made some t-shirts about a year ago. They just had the Velma’s logo on the front and this website address on the back. I think I sold about 3 of ‘em and gave away the rest. I just sold all the silk screening supplies to someone on craigslist.org. I found a new t-shirt method and another idea I want to try.

First off, the silk screening method works great if you want to print on many things with few colors for the cheapest price. It doesn’t print details and subtle colors very well and it’s a major pain in the ass to clean up after you’ve done a run of shirts. There are other methods of printing on a shirt.

Heat press transfers and dye sublimation seem to be the way to go if you want to print a photo or colorful design on a shirt on a short production. Once you have the stuff to do this, you can bang out single shirts and change the design as you go along, or even try different designs each time.

I had originally wanted to do a goofy cartoon design for my first T-shirt, but never decided on what a cartoon Velma should look like. I was an art student back in high school and always loved MAD magazine and the style of those drawings. (I especially loved Basil Wolverton.) I also remember seeing these trading cards called Odd Rods, drawn by the artist BK Taylor. Odd Rods are these oversized, grotesque monsters driving automobiles. The cards and T-shirts of the same designs were kinda popular back in the 70’s. Since everyone is calling our product “kettle crack”, I want to do a design of an actual kettle crack addict eating the stuff while having the words KETTLE CRACK right on there, and maybe toss our name and website on there too.

I like the idea of having it in the style of the original Odd Rods style. Then I thought it would be really cool if I could get BK Taylor to do the drawing. I found his agent online and shot out an email to her to see how much it would cost to commission BK Taylor to do it, figuring it would be too expensive to get the ORIGINAL guy to do this. She said that $750 will get me an electronic file of the final drawing. Apparently BK Taylor keeps the original drawing; I won’t own the copyright.

I dunno. $750 is kinda steep to shell out for an uncertain idea of mine. I still need to buy the heat press and printer to actually make the T-shirts, and I’ll only be making $7 - $8 per shirt. I need to move 90 shirts before I even start making a profit? Hoo boy…I dunno. I may take a crack at doing the design myself and see what’s left of my high school drawing skills.