Editors Note: You probably missed the Bitter Friday Giftures on Friday. Well, sometimes people celebrate the Independence of their country once a year. Sheesh, can you give a bitter guy a break once in a while? This is what I would have posted about if I was actually near a computer that day. Except for the Bitter Friday Giftures. I didn’t have time for that.

I was doing really well in California at the age of 6. I had a thriving Superhero business that I started with my brother, when my mom made us some capes out of felt. We took on different superheroes personas like Superman, Batman, and Spiderman, and fought baddies for a living. When we defeated them, citizens would give us money, because we saved them from utter destruction. Though thinking back, my business wouldn’t have failed as hard, had we been Superboy, Batboy and Spiderboy, because it would have been a little more realistic.

We regularly took down bad guys like Lex Luthor and Doomsday, as well as evil red ants that terrorized our neighborhood. One our most powerful weapons, the magnifying glass worked wonders on the ants, but not as well on Doomsday. Then, without notice, my dad thought his job, that paid him actual money, was more important than our thriving neighborhood business that brought in fake money, so we had close up our business and move to the Bit Apple for a bite (get it, a bite…of the Apple). We tried to build our business there, but the neighborhood wasn’t in need of saving, and we lost our superpowers, because my mom “lost” our capes in the move. Without them, we turned into ordinary citizens and that didn’t really help our business.

With that, we had to turn our entrepreneurial skills to baseball cards sales. We collected as many cards as we could with our $.50 a week allowance, and eventually got so many cards worth so much money that we were ready to buy a new house with our earnings. However, one of our suppliers, my mom, cut off our supply and told us we had to throw them away, because they were taking up too much space. She didn’t realize how much they would be worth someday, and besides she said we needed a place for our sisters to sleep. Moms are so unreasonable sometimes. And not very good suppliers.

That time, our mom and dad quashed what could have been a thriving business, because my dad again took priority as to where we would live and moved us again, but this time to a barren wasteland called South Dakota.

When we moved to South Dakota, we tried so many things, like selling snow to Eskimos, and ketchup to ladies with white gloves and none of that seemed to work. We didn’t have much luck growing up there either, because the walk to the bus stop was uphill both ways. We had to take on real jobs there, so we had to wake up at 5 am to do our newspaper route, often in huge snowstorms in the middle of the summer. (For those of you who are under 30, a newspaper is a thing we used to use to line the cages of birds, and the way the ancients got the news before the Twitternet was invented.)

Instead of focusing on our Superhero business, my brother, and partner in crimefighting, and I were reduced to shoveling the driveway every morning for my dad, so he could go to work. When it was 30 degrees out, we generally wore shorts and sometimes T-shirts, but that was summer. In the winter, it would get to -40 or lower and it got chilly, we would start wearing pants. But when it started getting really cold, like say, -80, then we would wear coats when we had to shovel.

My favorite days of shoveling were when we only had to shovel the driveway 3 times a day. Obviously, we’d have to complete level one and then re-shovel that part immediately from all the snow that was falling as we were shoveling. Later that evening we’d have to do a night shovel before we’d have to start all over the next morning, but when we had to re shovel the night shovel, those nights were pretty inconvenient.

When we had to wear coats, it made us pretty bitter. We called that bitter coating.

Little did we know that someday, Duracell, a battery company, would steal our bitter coating idea. Though Duracell didn’t really get the idea right. We knew bitter coating as something that we had to do when the weather started to cool down a little in the winter. It was bitter because we had to take all this time to bundle up. It was similar to Ralphie’s younger brother in A Christmas story when his mom got him ready for school. Except we had to do it ourselves.

It was insane and such a waste of time. We had to literally take the coat, insert two arms into the coat and then zip it up. That usually took us 20 minutes or so, and was really one of the most bitter time wasters of all when it came to getting the shoveling done. Of course, we really hated when, like Ralphies little brother in A Christmas Story, it took so long that we had to go to the bathroom and had to take it off again, go to the bathroom and then put it back on.

For some reason, Duracell thought that Bitter Coating meant putting a bitter tasting flavor on their batteries, so little kids wouldn’t swallow them.

The geniuses at Duracell aren’t very smart. If they wanted kids not to swallow their batteries, they would do something more effective, like give them a 100-volt shock when they touched them, or spray mace or pepper spray in their eyes. Kids are much better at learning not to do dumb things when you shock or burn them. You know, like when they stick their fingers in a light socket and get shocked. Or when they stick their hands on a hot stove and burn themselves. Kids are so thin skinned these days.

It’s pretty clear that Duracell needed to contact me for a better use of their term bitter coating. Also, they needed to get permission to use the word I’ve copywrited (bitter of course). Seriously, did Duracell think they could just get away with printing “bitter” on millions of packages of batteries and think that I wouldn’t notice? Think that I wouldn’t sue them for all their money? Some companies are so irresponsible. They will be hearing from my attorney, Charlie Cox. Though you probably know him as Daredevil.

You may end up having to get your batteries from Energizer soon, because Duracell is probably going to go out of business.

ARRRRGGGHHHHHHH

Bitter Coating Ben