Category: Endorsements

Little Caesars Deep Dish Pizza vs Domino’s Handmade Pan Pizza

I can think only of two people I know who would be interested in this taste test. We have too many friends who eat preciously. This household doesn’t exactly eat poorly, but nor do we discriminate. A few weeks ago we tried Little Caesar’s Deep Dish Pizza, with pepperoni, takeout, hot and ready, for just $8. There was general agreement that it was the best pizza we’d eaten in a long time.

Like many delicious things its deliciousness doesn’t grab you visually:

Somehow they nail the crust just perfectly. Crispy on the edges (and every piece gets a crispy edge) and soft and chewy on the inside. If pizza sauces were kinds of Southerners, Little Caesar’s’s would be a touring Floridian. So expect some brashness.

A little while after we put quick runs to Little Caesar’s into the weekly dinner rotation, Domino’s started advertising its handmade pan pizza, with two toppings for the same price—well $7.99 to LC’s $8, which considering this includes two toppings to LC’s one seemed like a better deal.

It’s not. LC’s deep dish measures 9×14 inches, for a total area of 126 inches. Domino’s pizza is round, 11 inches in diameter for 95 total square inches of pizza. Also, LC’s pizza is deeper, but I’m not about to measure volume, okay?

Still, Domino’s’s sauce is way subtler and sweeter than LC’s, but it’s not cloyingly sweet. Also, while it claims to be a pan pizza with “toppings all the way to the crust!”, I found it to only kind of be the case. Lemme try to grab a closeup:

Neither the toppings nor the sauce goes to the crust. (Cheese does, though.) In this way is Domino’s Handmade Pan Pizza just a pizza. But as you can see there’s a classic airiness to the dough that feels very nice when you bite into it. Also that’s good cheese, and enough of it. And if you want to go by nutritional data, it’s a wash. 340 calories, 16g of fat for Little Caesar’s. 300 calories, 16g of fat of Domino’s (which is a lighter portion per slice).

How will our household continue to spend its money on pan pizzas? Little Caesar’s, I think. That I can walk in and unless the joint’s packed grab a box and get right back in the car, that it’s much more pizza gramwise, and that it has the crust it has, cheap-ass pizza wins out over low-rent delivery pizza.

Right? Do we all universally set Domino’s below Papa John’s and Pizza Hut? (I salute you, Pizza Hut, for your lack of an apostrophe!) Isn’t that what its whole new ad campaign presupposes?

A Leftist's Guide to Alabama's 2012 Proposed Amendments

I’ve written before about how much I appreciate ballot endorsements. I do what I can to learn what I can about candidates. But ballot initiatives? Constitutional amendments? They don’t get enough press and are written in arcane enough language that I need help. Help’s been a little tough to find, so here’s how I—a liberal Alabamian—am voting, with the best citations I can find.

Amendment 1 – YES
This vote [i.e., as it’ll go below, a YES vote] will continue to fund the Forever Wild Land Trust another 20 years. Endorsers include the Left in Alabama blog, the Alabama New South Alliance (and sister group the Alabama New South Coalition…hereby ANSA/C), and funnily enough, the NRA (presumably people will be able to hunt there). The Tea-Party aligned Conservative Christians of Alabama oppose, because it’s spending probably.

Amendment 2 – SURE
Yes vote will raise the amount for any bonds the state issues to $750 million. Gov. Bentley says it’s jobs. No one’s really coming out against it.

Amendment 3 – YES
This vote makes a landmark district in one specific county, but more importantly it’s the sort of amendment to vote YES on in order to keep pushing the message that this state needs home rule desperately and like we in Tuscaloosa and other counties probably shouldn’t be voting on this stuff. Even the Tea Partiers are on board.

Amendment 4 – NO
The controversial one. This vote [i.e. NO] would prevent our state’s constitution from saying “nothing in this Constitution shall be construed as creating or recognizing any right to education or training at public expense.” In short, voting NO asserts the right to a public education for all. Hence the Alabama Education Association saying vote NO. Also LiA. The ASNA/C says to vote yes (as of Oct 11), otherwise we’ll leave in some racist language, which makes us look bad. But like no way is it that only thing in the state or the constitution (to say nothing of this constitution itself) that makes us look bad. See here for a more detailed discussion.

Amendment 5 – YES
Another home-rule amendment. According to the Mobile Press-Register, the Prichard Water Board members make way more money than they should, which voting no here would help them keep. Everyone endorses except the members of the Prichard Water Board.

Amendment 6 – NO
A NO vote is an endorsement of the Affordable Care Act (which the independent Congressional Budget Office has repeatedly shown ) and leaves it applicable in the state. The CCoA wants you to vote yes, if that’s any surprise.

Amendment 7 – NO
Such a vote will leave union elections as they are. Fellow NO voters include the AFL/CIO, LiA, and the ANSA/C. The CCoA says to vote yes, thus giving employers more influence over how (or whether) their employees form unions. Like amendment 6, this is another state’s-rights attempt to stop recent progressive legislation passed on a national scale, namely the union-endorsed Employee Free-Choice Act.

Amendment 8 – NO
Another controversial one. A NO vote will leave legislators’ pay and pay policies where they are. Here’s how the Dothan Eagle has it broken down:

Supporters [i.e. yes voters] claim the amendment will lower the salaries of state elected officials and keep expenses under control.

Opponents say the bill could actually increase the amount of money legislators make due to extra expense claims.

Supporters include the two GOP legislators who proposed the amendment and the CCoA, because it undoes a pay raise the now-long-gone Democratic majority passed a few years back. Opponents include the ANSA/C. What little I know of the once-in-power Democrats is that there was some corruption and cronyism, so even though I feel that forces that long predate me are at work here I’m going with NO. Anyone able to chime in below please do.

Amendments 9 & 10 – YES
These votes will do little to change actual legislation in the state regarding businesses and banks, but they are a baby step toward constitutional reform. (More details at the Anniston Star.) Endorsed by LiA and the Alabama Constitutional Revision Commission. ANSA/C inexplicably oppose these amendments. The CCoA are, adorably, against #10 because it does away with the gold and silver standards.

Amendment 11 – NO
Or yes. Another home-rule amendment. I say no because I’m wary of prohibiting any future tax. ANSA/C also say vote no. CCoA says vote yes.

Local Amendment 1 for Tuscaloosa County – NO
This amendment wants to prohibit a future tax and I don’t want to prohibit any future tax. CCoA wants you to vote yes.

Links to Endorsements, etc.
Dothan Eagle’s summaries. (Amdmts 1-6; amdmts 7-11)
Alabama New South Alliance / Alabama New South Coalition
Left in Alabama
Conservative Christians of Alabama

A full list of all 11 amendments can be found on Ballotpedia.

Tasty Banana Nut Muffins with Wheat Germ

So I’m a baking blogger now, okay? Which means I get to spread poorly reported, single-sided accounts of standup comics going off book.

This recipe is adapted from America’s Test Kitchen’s banana bread recipe (kudos to Food 4 Wibowo for collecting), the genius of which is how it makes a reduction of thawed-banana juice to inject flavor without getting the dough too wet. These muffins are healthy and delicious. They’re the best things I’ve ever baked I think.
Continue reading Tasty Banana Nut Muffins with Wheat Germ

Helpless Feelings

The thing about feeling helpless in the face of rich people’s ever-increasing influence over policy decisions in this country is that there are more of us than there are of them. I mean: they’re the 1% and we’re the 99%. But there’s another problem: the 1% are really good at spending their money on making the 99% bend to their will.

It helps to keep those 99% uninformed, uneducated, and unwilling to see itself as a single socioeconomic bloc with shared interests worth voting toward. It’s why, on this one-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement, I’m glad people in New York are still chanting Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out! in Zuccotti Park. Listen closely to their messages and OWS transcends left-right divides.

A little under a year ago, a friend of mine complained that OWS was so hypocritical—a lot of unemployed people spending their time protesting instead of finding jobs, much less making them. I had to explain to him that this wasn’t the point exactly, or even the case. That employed people were part of OWS. That people had left employment to join OWS. That instead the fury was over the federal government’s readiness to forgive Wall Street’s criminal activities with enormous bailout checks, while the middle-class were being asked to accept closed libraries and post offices, aggressive home foreclosures, and increasing student-loan debt without any hope of government assistance.

“Oh,” he said. “See, nobody’s really explained it like that.”

I didn’t even do a good job. Politics—particularly when it gets into fiscal policy—tends to cloud my head with abstract notions and make it tough to see the right path as a voter. I can’t be the only one. It’s why cable news and party affiliation is nice—they can do the thinking for you. But everyone knows now this is a dangerous way for a 21st-century U.S. citizen to behave. That being an informed citizen—an adult, really—takes hard work. It’s why I’ve been very happy for Left in Alabama this last week. They’ve got opposing viewpoints to weigh, for one thing, most of which with sourced links to follow. I’ve felt less alone and worried.

Most Alabamians know we’ve got a weird one-issue election Tuesday the 18th. The state is asking its citizens to vote on a new constitutional amendment[a] allowing it to take from the Alabama Trust Fund $145 million a year, for the next 3 years to spend on Medicaid, prisons, and other pressing budget needs.

I’m voting no.

Normally I’m for deficit spending, especially on social services, but Alabama has been cutting budgets to education so much that it ranks first in the nation in education cuts. Its perennial cuts of budget apportions to UA has caused repeated tuition hikes, transferring the costs of an educated public from the government we elect to students and their families.

Also, Governor Bentley has led the state to pass an expensive, unhelpful immigration law which has been more even more expensive to defend in courts. He’s OK’d billion-dollar tax breaks for companies while trying to cut public health care to children. And he’s scheduled this election—which costs us $3 million—on an errant Tuesday in September, rather than waiting 40 days to put it on the November ballot.

Which citizens share—not in theory, but in practice—these priorities? Republicans (at least in Alabama, though the case can be made) are the party of fiscal irresponsibility. And from what all I’ve read, it feels like voting yes tomorrow is a way of endorsing this irresponsibility. I don’t want to vote on a bailout for our state legislators to continue this junk budgeting.

And I don’t buy into the scare tactics.[b] If the amendment doesn’t pass, no official will want to be held responsible for closing nursing homes and freeing prisoners. They’ll be forced in a special session to rethink the budget. This is not an emergency, for which we need to draw from our trust fund. This is a manufactured political moment, where the party in power doesn’t want to work on a fair budget for the people.

Here: I’ll let this Left in Alabama post say it clearly:

If you like the way things are in Alabama, a “yes” vote probably makes sense. If you believe the people have the power to force the system to make changes, vote “no.” Left to itself, Montgomery will preserve its status quo approach forever, but the Legislature has given voters an opportunity to send them back to the drawing board and demand they find a better way next Tuesday.

Voting happens in your standard voting place. And you do not need a photo ID to vote (bank statement, utility bill, passport…click here for the full list). That nasty vote-suppression law doesn’t go into effect until 2014.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Not, in essence, a big deal. Outsiders should check out our constitution’s Wikipedia page for more.↵
  2. The language of the amendment calls us to vote “to prevent the mass release of prisoners from Alabama prisons, and to protect critical health services to Alabama children, elderly, and mothers”.↵

Scenes from the Dentist’s

At the end of the cleaning, KELLY, the dental hygienist, hands DAVE a clear vinyl pouch filled with standard dental supplies.

DAVE: Oh yeah, I wanted to ask you, this um … Glide, the Glide floss? Do y’all recommend that over the regular, like chunky waxed old-style floss?

KELLY shakes her head.

DAVE: Does it matter?
KELLY: Personally, I don’t like it. When I use it it just slides out too easily. I don’t think it gets, you know all the stuff out.
DAVE: So this isn’t like an endorsement of the product?
KELLY: We just get a whole box of ’em. Lemme see if we got any of the other kind.

KELLY disappears.

===

DAVE gets three different impressions taken around the segment of his mouth where he’s got a tooth hole from an implant, waiting to be filled with a crown. The epoxy tastes unpleasant, like latex taffy. CHERYL, the dentist’s assistant, pulls the last bit from his mouth.

CHERYL: You’re done!

DAVE gets up and collects his things.

CHERYL: Can I get you anything to drink?
DAVE: …
CHERYL: We’ve got Mountain Dew? Pepsi?
DAVE (laughing): What? Really? Don’t those rot your teeth?
CHERYL (marking something down on DAVE’s form): Well not one.

Presently, the two walk down the hall toward reception. DAVE spots a Keurig.

DAVE: Oh, actually, could I get some coffee?
CHERYL: Doesn’t that stain your teeth?

Scene.

===

Touché, madame. There is something decidedly Southern about these exchanges. I mean: these people are professionals trained in reputable places. Too-slick floss is better than no floss at all; and besides it’s just a sample. Also: they know what soda does to teeth. But Jesus, Dave, it’s one soda. Yankee Dave says he can’t believe a dentist would keep non-diet sodas on hand. The people at his dentist’s say he’s being uptight.

I’m not infrequently accused (verbally or otherwise) of being uptight down here. Most often, I refuse to yield on my inherent rightness. Today, though, I’m happy to.

When Being Not-Stupid Is Not Enough*

Better read critics and theorists may have long solved this problem, but for me it’s been hard to figure out where to go in critique and creativity after going meta—which I’m here going to clunkily define as using the very aspects, techniques, or tools of some process to go out and above that process in order to make some kind of comment on it. Or what the new OAD says: “denoting something of a higher or second-order kind.”

Now: it’s no good going meta about something’s having gone meta. This is just another form of going meta. Meta-meta is not cubing the square, so to speak, it’s making a 3-D model of a tesseract.

One way to get past meta came yesterday from Josh Fadem, a comic whose incredible, unparalleled, standup work is hard to find online but whose sketch work is all over. (You might know him as Liz Lemon’s agent.) I had questions about his deliberately “shitty” timing, where pratfalls and mic-stand trouble will last upward of 4 minutes while, later, four different one-liners get sped through all in a row. I suspected that there was careful timing going on on his end, despite the timing on our end being shitty, in terms of classic comic timing.

In doing standup, Fadem told me,

I’m gonna assume the audience all knows what good timing is. So if I make them think that a joke is going to come in a particular way, but then it comes in a totally bad way or different way, that’s a whole other joke in itself. But it’s also a new laugh. It’s the same thing—like if you ever watched movies like The Room. People have … they’re laughing at these movies for a particular reason, because it’s not doing what movies are supposed to do. There’s something funny about doing everything wrong. I used to approach it from a meta place, but now I think I’m thinking of something different. It’s like: where’s the joke that’s the off joke? I’m thinking of it more from a joke place than from a “What can I do that’s meta?” place.

I didn’t press Fadem on these ideas, they only surfaced going through my notes afterward. But I take him to mean that a “meta place” is highly rational, and the aim when one operates there is to provoke the audience toward increased awareness. Sure, this kind of provocation can lead an audience to laugh, but the whole approach is didactic and marmy. A “joke place”, on the other hand, is irrational. (N.B.: irrational ≠ subrational.) And given Fadem’s chronological development, it seems that one has to consume the meta in order to reach this third-order joke place—land of new jokes, wrong jokes, off jokes—the way we consume grammar to write novels or jazz musicians consume theory to improvise.

The difference is in intent. The problem with going meta in comedy is that it’s clever, and clever ≠ funny. Clever is right. Clever is correct. It’s sometimes a kind of truth, being clever, but clever’s from a meta place, and what laughs cleverness earns are given or proffered. They’re not yanked from folks’ guts. Funny yanks laughs from folks’ guts. It’s past intellect, even as so much good humor relies on its audience’s smarts.

For my ongoing appreciation of a joke, or for retelling or writing about later, that joke ought to appeal to my intellect, but when I laugh hard and suddenly and without consequence—when I laugh the way certain women’s posters exhort me to dance—it’s from somewhere past intellect. A joke place. Then I decide whether to wield my intellect to figure out why I’m laughing and whether I’m happy about it. It’s maybe a millisecond lag, but it’s like the way we feel that a surface is burning us before we sense its smooth or ragged texture. One quality is way more urgent and important than the other.

Lesson learned: being smart, clever, meta doesn’t get them in the gut. It may even be DOA as a creative approach. Or, as Fadem also put it:

Another thing that I like to do if I’m stuck is take the approach of “Well, I’m not gonna be able to think of something that’s brilliant and so I’ll just think as dumb as I can.” I’ll just be fearless and not cute or smart. You know? Just try to be dumb.

UPDATE: It occurs to me after the fact that cinephile Fadem’s celeb impressions—which are simultaneously accurate, funny-dumb, and about the dumb way impressions have to be accurate—are a better example of what I’m trying to say here than anything.

===

* Apologies to Built to Spill for borrowing and then clunkifying their title for a very great song.

BlogWeek, Final Day: Lorraine Nelson: A Biography in Post-it® Notes

To end the chiefly spiteful/sickly BlogWeek on a positive note, The Cupboard has just release its latest volume: Lorraine Nelson: A Biography in Post-it Notes. This was the winner of our first-ever contest, and it’s also (essentially) our first-ever work of nonfiction. A happy union.

It’s about a person who may be real and a job that feels all too real. Michael Martone (whose new book, Four for a Quarter is the exact sort of thing we would have loved to publish, if [when?] The Cupboard ever prints full-length books) selected the book among the finalists. Here’s what he had to say on it:

It’s made up of surprising but complex asides, elaborated and compacted articulations that scale beautifully into a durable and brilliant skin, a chain mail of associative links and leaps. The language is massive and minute, mute and malleable. The whole piece performs the paradox, recombining the airy ephemeral with an adhesive that does, in fact, stick.

Lorraine Nelson‘s one of our best volumes ever, and only $5. You can order a copy here.

BlogWeek, Day Three: Cabana Soaps

One shame in being sick is the way you let yourself go in terms of showering. I showered Sunday for the first time since Thursday morning. Is it gross? I was glad for the cinnamon sweet orange soap we had in the bathroom. Really? I’m going to blog about soap? I’m going to blog about soap. Cabana Soaps bills itself as a sensory experience, and this is accurate. It’s saying little of a soap that you get to smell it while you wash with it. Every soap smells. Cabana Soaps smell better than most soaps, but they feel good. I feel like I can feel how good glad my skin feels when I use them. Also: Zac when he makes soap uses nothing artificial. It’s to other farmers’ market soaps what other farmers’ market soaps are to Dial or something. He’ll ship some to your house!

BlogWeek Day One: The Appurtenances of Sickness

I’ve been sick this weekend with a throat thing and a chills/body-aches thing. Prescribed Chloraseptic throat spray has been mostly unhelpful, but 1000mg acetaminophen every four hours did fine work on the fever/chills/aches.

Before hearing from the on-call doctor that acetaminophen (which, like “Chloroseptic” I’d prefer to spell with another “o”) was best for body aches, I’d been taking ibuprofen. Of the Big Three in Pain Relief, I take naproxen sodium when I know I’ll be eating regularly, as it lasts longer but will upset an empty stomach. When I can’t eat anything (when, say, hungover) I take ibuprofen. I take acetaminophen never. Is it because I have this notion that it’s older? Or old-fashioned? I’m curious about what the rest of you take. I wish the doctors of the world would agree on some kind of heuristical method. I’d listen. Placebo effects are so strong with me that a doctor could say to get a haircut and dip my toes in bleach and I’d sleep happy and well each night.

Also, the folks over at Gatorade graped up the color of its Fierce Grape variety from what used to be a wrong-but-unscary deep blue, but somehow this has resulted in in a marked grapelessness to the flavor. I’d been a (sorry) fierce admirer, but no longer. Sorry, Gatorade. You’ll need to find another all-star athlete for your endorsements.

New Music, Old Book, Local Businesses

One of my resolutions for the new year is to buy one new record a month, at a store here in Tuscaloosa. And not Best Buy or Barnes & Noble, but Oz Music, which has these bumper stickers I’ve been seeing on the more sticker-laden cars around town that say “Support Local Music” or some such.

At any rate, I read somewhere that like most things worth doing, resolutions take practice, and that one should give them a shot in December to see how implementing them for reals is gonna go in January. Today I went in and had fun being a music-store clerk’s dream:

Hi, I’m trying to buy more new music. I have some things I like and things I don’t like. Can you help me find something?

One guy kept pushing Say Anything on me, which sounded from his previews like Blink 182 meets The Bloodhound Gang and I was: Not Interested. I almost grabbed the new Wilco record, but that felt like cheating. Instead I got this:

Fitz and the Tantrums: Pickin' Up the Pieces

And this:

Childish Gambino: Camp

…which latter record was only half a cheat as I knew all about it but had only heard one or two tracks. Then I put both CDs in my car’s 10-disc changer which resides in my car’s trunk, and now I get to actually listen to them rather than get them on iTunes and hope to remember to listen to them.

I haven’t bought a new CD since, oh, maybe The Arcade Fire’s Funeral?
Continue reading New Music, Old Book, Local Businesses

College Applications Asking "Quirky" Questions

(UPDATE: College applicants: Googling “i felt like i truly belonged when brown” is not going to help you get into Brown. Or maybe you’ve got rich folks…what do I know?)

Here’s a thing I’ve never done, I don’t think: comment on news articles! From , found somewhere on the New York Times‘s Web site:

College applications are increasingly testing students’ brevity, as The Chicago Tribune pointed out on Friday.

[…]

Brown University, for instance, has asked its applicants this year to write—in addition to the newly restrictive 500-word personal essay required by the Common Application—25 or fewer words in response to one of the following, rather ambitious prompts: “I felt like I truly belonged when …” or “If I could do something with no risk of failing, I would …”

I am on board. I’ve written here before about how writers should see things like Twitter and Web-page text boxes as fecund challenges the ways poets do certain strict forms. Ditto for college applicants: Everyone can text thoughtlessly, and everyone can write thoughtless essays in five clunky paragraphs. Brevity takes scrutiny, care, and time. Blaise Pascal: “I have only made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”

Ditto2 for college applicants’ parents:

Susan Van Horn, a mother of two high school seniors in Illinois, told The Tribune that colleges’ application questions this year were “markedly different” from four years ago, when her son applied to school. She also expressed frustration at the 25-word quotas some applications imposed, telling The Tribune, “You find yourself counting characters and editing ‘do not’ down to ‘don’t.’ It gets that silly.”

You are wrong, Susan Van Horn. “Do not” is not unsilly, it’s needlessly formal. You may think a college application is a formal occasion, but these schools are arguing otherwise.

Gifting Gifts

It’s a word I’m torn on. It’s unclear what gifting does that giving does not, and yet the OED cites it in the 16th century. That’s Early Modern English, folks. Old enough for me to throw up the proverbial hands and talk about what I’m gifting or want gifted this gifting season.

Most of this garbage is from the GQ I spent this back-from-a-long-trip evening reading the first half of:

The Hulger Plumen Compact Fluorescent Lightbulb ($30)
Yes, it’s $30, but that it supposedly lasts for 8,000 hours makes up for this price, right? And the thing that we all know by now about CFL’s is that the light they cast is ghastly white and bright and makes everyone’s skin look Twilight-sickly and everyone’s lunch on the verge of being lost. But look what’s going on with that wood right there! A room lit incandescently is a room well lit. And if a room lit incandescently is a room wasting heat energy, then here we have a heat-loss solution that makes me happy to look either at others’ skin or the words that fall on the book I’m reading’s page.
Continue reading Gifting Gifts

Quick Updates

The absence from posting for two weeks has mostly to do with the beginning of the semester and the ever-nearing end of my story collection’s revision process. Several days ago I was going to quote a nonfiction craft text and talk self-righteously about what made me angry about it, but I’ve got this new blowhard complex I’m trying to work on.

1.
I read a bit from chapter four of The Authentic Animal as part of InDigest’s InDefinite Podcast. For silly superstitious reasons I really wished I could have been episode 22, but overall I’m glad to have been a part of it. They have an impressive lineup. Michael Kimball, Deb Olin Unferth, and my man Dave Mullins. The excerpt I read covers the World Taxidermy Championship’s trade show, and includes some animal urine.

2. I’m also trying to endorse more products on this blog, for absolutely no reason other than increased and diversified content. The davemadden.org Board of Directors had me up for a meeting, see. It’s out of my hands. Now: I don’t historically enjoy ginger ale. I was fed ginger ale when I was sick as a kid and so drinking ginger ale makes me feel nauseous, and all I want to do is lie in my parents’ bed where the cable is and watch Pinwheel and Today’s Special. But then I tasted Buffalo Rock Diet Ginger Ale, and it burnt my nose and throat and made me think some major gastric distress was about to befell me. But then in the end I felt a little better, in the stomach area and elsewhere. Did you know ginger ales have spice levels? This is spicy ginger ale. It’s not so much enjoyable to drink as it is confusingly important and healthful to have made your way through. It’s the finally reading Ulysses of ginger ales. Alabamians can find it at most grocery stores (Wal-Mart for certain). Others can order expensive cases through the Web site.