"'Twas the night before deadline
And all through the bar
Was the clinking of glasses
Both near and far

The bills were arranged
On the bar, all in order
In the hopes that no one skips..."

Ok, so, we're not poets. Get over it. We do have a zesty turn of phrase, a light touch on the keyboard, and we figured that, like Zaphod, we're "Just these guys, you know?"

So, what are we doing here, eating bandwidth? We are travelers on the road of life who, in our travels, have observed people on both the left and right side of the map called Canada. As webmonkeys we have also traveled the web extensively; one of us being a long time member of an ancient network called GEnie, in the long lost days before NCSA Mosaic when a 9600-baud connection was considered hot shit.

After watching Dennis Leary's "Lock and Load" for about the 900th time, we tried www.whatthefuck.com and landed here. What better place to have as a platform for your observations than this. We begged the owners to let us write for them, and here we are.

Of course, wherever you go, there you are. Which means we have arrived. Please take all your personal belongings with you as you disembark.

We travel about 100,000 miles a year training the untrainable as software instructors for an unnamed firm. Some of the self-evident truths we have discovered are that people are the same no matter where you go: we eat, we shit, we work and, unfortunately, many out there haven't much of a clue at the best of times about many things.

An example: students in professional level courses, who, when they reach the edge of the screen with their mouse pointer react the same as a seven-year-old brain-injured Soweto street urchin upon seeing his first Rubik's Cube: "What the fuck do I do with this?" It is sad, but at the same time, vaguely amusing. Here are highly-paid, professional Information Technology gods, who couldn't create a text file without a nine-page procedure, starting with: "Step One: Find your own ass with only one hand..." And, may God avert his eyes, these sentient beings are siting in OUR class, expecting us to impart The Wisdom in three days.

But that doesn't mean all we'll gab about is computers. Hell No, Skippy; we're opinionated little shits who have no qualms about depositing a runny, flaming bag of our opprobrium over that which richly deserves it.

Or, for that matter, delivering pearls of thanks at the feet of something or someone who actually have done something worthwhile in the grand scheme of life. Wine, hotels, cars, computers, software, politics, women, men, average unknowns, the minutiae and the maximumae of life, people things and stuff that may or may not matter. We'll give you our opinion and if you can't make up your own mind, screw you. If we're wrong, we'll eat the shit burger but you can be assured that you will only get 100 per cent opinion from us.

Use our missive at your discretion, as a source of daily fibre, of laughs or as a way to insulate yourself from the cold. Every two weeks, we'll unwind another wad and the whatthefuck guys will publish it right here. For lack of a better term to define what this is, let us steal the print media words: column and regular contributors. Length: about 600 words or so. We're a little long this time, but we wanted to give you some backstory.

To start: What is the worst bar snack you've ever had? Define our terms: Bar Snack. Some type of potentially edible thing served as a gratis adjunct to drinks of beverage alcohol in a licensed bar, roadhouse, pub, tavern or watering hole. Usually salty, crunchy and purchased in volume (expressed as cents per hundredweight) by bar owners.

We've had the pickled pigs' feet, pickled eggs, pickled wieners and pickled losing Nevada tickets as bar snacks. We've eaten the Goldfish crackers, peanuts in or out of their closets, pretzels, sugar packets, cashews, salt licks and unidentifiable things that taste like Lego and have as much crunch as Lime Jell-O.

Right now, in this bar, there are fucking Chow Mein Noodles in the Bar Snacks. Now, we both like/tolerate Chow Mein, and even Chow Mein Noodles, but not in a freaking Bar Snack. Both of us have been to bars in the Pacific Rim, where the bar snacks are almost conventional and to Europe, where bar snacks are almost solely peanuts, but dried out noodles? We'd rather have an order of balsa wood, coated in seasoning and served in a martini glass as an accompaniment to our single malts.

As best we can tell, pickled things are almost the exclusive purview of Legion/VFW/Neighbourhood drinking spots. Pickled pigs' feet are exactly what you think they are; feet from pigs, stored in brine, hooves, leg bones, skin and all. Pickled eggs and wieners are also as advertised. Some places, near slaughterhouses mostly, serve pickled sow snouts, ears, tails, and pussy lips as a mixed grill of offal in brine. They uniformly taste like 5% acetic acid and whatever kind of herb/spice the pickler felt would be appropriate. We wonder how one determines what IS the appropriate spice for pickled pigs' pussy lips?

Crunchy things are just about everywhere else, except in certain places where dried, salted seaweed is served with your drink. No, it's not Japan, its Nova Scotia, the seaweed is called dulse and the bar calls them dulse chips. They near as dammit taste like green Doritos with extra salt and a whiff of seabreezes.

In one particular upscale hotel bar that shall remain nameless (except to say rooms are $1,000 a night and the cheapest drink on the bar menu is a $19.00 beer) they serve that crappy old Chex Party Mix as Bar Snacks. For those who don't know the recipe, Party Mix is equal proportions of Wheat Chex, Cheerios, stick pretzels, a handful of superannuated peanuts, and a cup and a half of floor sweeping compound, tossed with Generic Barbecue Seasoning. Bars usually make this up in a urinal and use a well-worn manure fork to stir it all together. There is enough salt in it to give a statue a heart attack, while dietary fibre is measured in milligrams per metric tonne.

We want to know what you think the worst Bar Snack is. The rules are simple; you have to have actually consumed it, viz., put it in your mouth and swallowed it. You may not have paid money for it, as bar snacks are by definition, on the house and you must have at least one unimpeachable witness, who, drunk or sober, will attest to you actually eating it. Prizes? Hahahahahahah. Not a one, no cash, no tee shirts, no mousepad, fridge magnets or iron-on transfers. Your only reward is the grateful admiration of your peers as a human Garburator who would eat anything. E-mail us at robanddave@whatthefuck.com.

To wrap this one up, our last lingering question that we alluded to in the headline of this ugly first one: If thousands of dolphins are getting trapped in tuna nets all over the world, why aren't we seeing canned dolphin meat at the supermarket alongside the tuna, salmon and clams? How would one cook a dolphin fillet? There, in a small can, is The Porpoise of the Column. If we're catching all these friggin dolphins in tuna nets, why don't we eat the fuckers? Whales consider dolphins to be a delicacy and humans will eat damn near anything, so why aren't we being server Flipper Fritters at the local roadhouse? Enjoy the ride.