So I worked on Mr. Stick for five hours straight last night. Work began at 5pm. I went and started adding improvements to the game. Then lots of wrong crap started happening. I went to sleep with a broken game. I woke up and worked on it some more. This was the most common problem:

Yeah. It started doing that. Whoopee. So after a few more hours, I think I finally got that under control. I played for 7 minutes and it didn't show up once. So here's what I changed.
+ Added a second food item on screen.
+ Added a short pause between "waves".

I wish I could add a pause between lives lost but I think it would disrupt the flow of the game's code. So now what I need to do is figure out where the waves should begin. And if anyone has an idea after playing this about how to handle deaths, let me know. I've included the ROM here so you can test it for yourself. And, please let me know if the picture happens again.

Right now, there's 3 waves, and they start at 0 pts., 2 pts. and 4 pts. But that's easy to change. I just did this to test the problem in the picture.