That boy ain't right

pre-halloween foolishness

Direct challenge to zombiegrrrrl: get all 50 hidden horror movies in less than 10 minutes. Major hint: it also includes movies that are more in the "Suspense" category than strict "Horror".

I could only get maybe 30 in 15. (Yeah, it's a corporate Flash puzzle put out by M&Ms, but so what? I'm bored at work.)

I dearly love that the puzzle is almost in the form of a Hieronymous Bosch or a Pieter Breughel painting.

just like old times

When I first met my wife, we instantly bonded over a now-defunct website: the Dysfunctional Family Circus, which paired Family Circus cartoons (ripped from that day's newspaper) with nasty comments written by folks at large on the internet.

It was deeply, deeply hilarious -- as only twisted captions written for saccharine Middle-America-that-never-existed cartoons can be. However, Bil Keane threatened to sue -- and the owner of the site respected his wishes and took it down, never to be seen again.

So it really warms my heart that I've found sort of a replacement: The Nietzsche Family Circus, which pairs a random Family Circus cartoon with a random quote from that misunderstood German. The results are pretty much what you'd expect. It's only a matter of time before Keane gets wind of this latest assault on decency, so view it quickly.

It's just like I met her all over again.

(Also good: The Comics Curmudgeon, where the site author takes apart all those useless and largely unfunny comics in the funny pages these days. He has a tendency to make them actually funny.)

the only winning move is not to play

Yes, I still play videogames.

The state of the gaming industry is such that any videogame coming out currently can be easily categorized into about 6 different types, over and over again. Variations on a theme. And yet, I'll buy something used if it looks interesting enough. Sometimes an indie company will come out with something innovative, that pushes boundaries, most often inventing a new take on how strategy or action games are meant to be played, and this interests me more often than not.

There's a British developer, Introversion, that came out with a hacker simulation a while back that was interesting for a while. You'd hack into databases, Social Security Administration servers, criminal databases, performing illegal work for paying clients. It was all right except that the jobs would get monotonous after a while and it was all too easy to be punished by the game for not having the right hacking tools at the right time.

Then there was Darwinia, a beautiful and clever game (in the real-time strategy genre) set entirely in the digital world of the computer, a la TRON, where you commanded digital units to take over various locations inside the computer while fighting viruses and other malware. Wonderful execution.

But the latest -- DEFCON -- is a first for me in that I find it all too disturbing to play at all. In an industry known for casual violence, gore, and less-than-adult perspectives (I'm a fan of the Grand Theft Auto series, for chrissakes, and no, L will not see any of this crap until he's old enough to handle it), the idea of global nuclear war in this game is too realistic, too well-presented.

Inspired by WarGames, there's a giant map of the world in which you set up radar installations, airbases supporting both fighters and nuclear bombers, missile silos that can be configured for both missile defense as well as ICBM launches, and fleets of aircraft carriers, battleships, and nuclear missile submarines, while the enemy does the same. That's disturbing enough.

And then there's the soundtrack -- very slow, mournful tones, and all the while you hear the faint sound of a woman weeping. Certain stages of the game are determined by the DEFCON level, also determining what actions you're allowed to take, but it's only a matter of time until DEFCON 2 (non-nuclear hostilities) and DEFCON 1 (nuclear war) are reached. You hear the weeping as you see blips move toward cities, and then big letters announce how many millions die. Your score is based on how many of the enemy's people are incinerated versus your own. The whole effect is definitely like watching the world end.

I downloaded the demo one night and sat about playing through the tutorials. Eventually my big test was playing North America against all of the Far East. I set up my installations and sent three fleets of ships steaming as fast as they could towards the Chinese coast -- and caught and destroyed two of the enemy's fleets in the process.

I couldn't find one fleet.

The final tally: I lost Detroit, Washington D.C., Phoenix, LA, and San Francisco.
The Far East lost everything, including Tehran, Tokyo, Bombay, New Delhi, Bangkok, Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul, Hong Kong...

I lost my appetite to continue with it. It was all too unsettling playing this thing that allowed me, through my own omission (as well as the multiple sins of commission), to incinerate myself as well as countless millions in a world-ending holocaust. No thanks.

out of seclusion

So I think I'm out of the woods w/r/t project hell, in which my wife and son became strangers for a little while. This penny-wise-pound-foolish approach of permanent crunch time has cost me a lot, and it's cost my coworkers quite a lot too. I'm back to blogging, at least for a little while.

So all of us are quite disgruntled at the moment.

Which is exactly why, when I got an e-card from Zombiegrrrl in my inbox, I knew just what to do -- I had to make tiaras for my group:

I only missed getting my manager in this collection because he was out sick today -- work-related exhaustion.

Then again, a coworker (the 3rd one in this series) just AIMed me with this: " this is what REALLY keeps me working here"

s r l

So it was, that a friend and I had had enough of our respective safe lives and annoying jobs, and both of us had heard of something coming to town that we'd only rarely heard about before; Survival Research Laboratories was its name, and we'd only heard about it by its cooler-than-thou reputation, where things blew up, exploded, attacked each other, and made noise; and so it was that we bought our tickets, endured some mild pejoratives from our significant others, and set off late on a Friday night to brave the corporatized and anonymous streets of downtown San Jose, and upon arriving, set off in a southerly direction towards the convention center, following the more extreme folks as we went; and the clumps of us started getting thicker, where we passed the occasional smell of weed on the wind, and then we passed ominous-looking and strategically-placed fire trucks, past an abandoned and boarded-up house on the edge of the lot, where we could see the tops of giant metal sculptures, and also the largest Tesla coil we'd ever seen, and we heard the faint sounds of rave music in the air, but still we kept walking, after being handed shiny coins with Bible quotations on them from some extremely concerned soul outside, reaching the entrance now, and entering a cavern of first-person shooters in the land of Native American ghosts, bio-sensitive light fixtures, art experiences inside shipping containers, suburbanites traveling outside their relatively narrow range of experience, women, men, and even children up past their bedtimes, electronic Virgin Marys amongst sunflowers, and the fusion of technology and art assaulting every corner; where we went through a narrow door into the heavy breathing throng, cameraphones coming up like weeds in summer, jockeying for position against other people for the front-row seat at "Six Flags Over Hell" (or, "Ghostly Scenes of Infernal Desecration"), where I can see at least one of the things our exhausted Christian out front might've been offended by: a lit upside-down cross; the waiting now, the frightened waiting as a man with a smoke machine in a child's wagon trundles around emitting smoke behind pictures of a gas station on fire, or a fiery plane crash; a high electronic whine coming from two guys in flame-retardant gear, perched high atop a wooden platform with stage lighting and laser pointers, and two massive jolts from the Tesla coil in the corner, and we're away into a place where it seems humans have gone extinct, a post-human place (say, in a Ray Bradbury story) where the machines continue onward, doing their work; where the machines have mated with each other, producing mutations of mechanized agriculture, transportation, and warfare; or, possibly, that this is what art is really like in the age of terrorism and marketed fear; but these distictions are moot for now as slowly, they start moving, crawling along the blacktop, spinning, waking up, snapping and jerking to life, and they're going even faster now as flames start appearing out of gas vents, reminding us of the pictures we saw of refinery fires in Kuwait, of living in an environment where the air bakes, the sky is dark and light from explosions miles away fills the air -- and suddenly, loud POP POP POP POP noises shake everyone to the bone, and a long phallic rusted metal behemoth comes to life, and starts wheeling itself around the living metal spectacle -- it's a mutation of a World War Two German V-1 buzzbomb, and it starts making a loud whirring whine that engulfs the city block, a large jet of flame extending over half the lot; a pitching machine, made out of a V8 engine mounted on spinning wheels, begins sending two-by-fours hurtling through other parts of the spectacle; a mechanized Baba Yaga hut lurches up on robotic metal feet, its three metal heads bobbing along in its hydraulic rhythm; an insect built out of combine harvester parts stretches its mandibles; the volcanic gas vents burst flame once more; and then, the huge Greek standing centaur that dominates the entire view comes to life, only to urinate from its red foil phallus directly onto the concrete -- but then it reaches up behind its horse head to grab massive foil orbs and hurl them downward into its pool of urine, where they break open and get set ablaze -- with more orbs, the statue sets itself on fire, immolating itself in a tower of cyclone flame, producing a column of smoke and fluttering ash that stretches up into the sky; some of the robots attack each other; and then everything starts burning now, the buzzbomb wheeling itself in front of things, whooshing and farting fire, and a compression gun aimed at the crowd now emits deafening noises but for our earplugs bought at Rite-Aid to start the night -- and then, things start to slow down, and the pitching machine is now halfheartedly throwing things at the flaming platform where the centaur once stood, but they partially disintegrate in midair; there are occasional listless bursts of fireworks going into the air from the upended, flaming Baba Yaga hut, on its side now; the Tesla coil still emits blasts of electricity; the buzzbomb has gotten caught in something now, but there's almost no point in getting free because there's really not much left to burn; the fire-jet hovercraft is quiet, and the gas jets aimed in the air burst fire at longer and longer intervals; the upside-down cross is no longer lit; the crowd applauds, and I'm marveling at it all, all this savage beauty I've just seen, except for two thoughts: we really need to get babysitting the next time these people roll around, assuming they can get permits again (since, contrary to her earlier pejorative outbursts, mammamer would really dig this), and so it is that my son, once he's old enough (maybe 8 or 9) would eat this stuff up, since he is a walking buzzbomb himself given to attacking life, running at full tilt, two-thousand-watt Tesla smile crackling to life, lighting up the room.

in which people are even crappier employees than me

So I'm in the breakroom, heating up my Healthy Choice semi-tasteless lunch (because I can't afford to eat out every day, and I need to lose weight anyway), where I see some papers laid on top of the trash where I've put my discarded lunch packaging. These papers are just sitting there, unfolded, unmolested, without any attempt to conceal their contents whatsoever.

And what contents they are!

Page One: "lets hit on her after this crap"

Page Two: "I'm gonna be a rebound guy"

Page Three: "Shrubster quality"

It's taking more than I thought not to post these to the company spam list. At a minimum I'm going to post them to FOUND.

best alarm clock ever

He says five things:

"Yeaaaaaaaaah, boy!"
"Bass in your face!"
"Yo G Yo!"
"Fight the power!"
"Get up get down..."

Although nobody needs a clock whose MSRP is $85 (yeesh!), not to mention the queasiness involved in financing somebody's sleazy antics all over The Surreal Life, an alarm clock that says "Fight the power!" every morning is just... beautiful.

That, and Mer is given to saying "Yeeeeeeeah, boy!" around the house every so often.

(Maybe I ought to stop playing Welcome to the Terrordome on the iPod shuffle play. LM seems to like it, though. He is, after all, a connoisseur of classic hiphop. And organic waffles.)

it's all hurty

Russian-styled folklore animation meets Japanese product placement in an animated short specifically designed to make your psyche implode, courtesy of Salon's Video Dog.

gack

Turns out certifiable nutbar Tom Cruise really has a taste for the bizarre:

I'm gonna eat the placenta. I thought that would be good. Very nutritious. I'm gonna eat the cord and the placenta right there."

Cruise has also claimed he knew that Katie Holmes was pregnant before she told him.

It's not as if eating the placenta is completely unheard of, but... ick. Dollars to doughnuts he's got some other strange birth rituals he isn't telling anyone.

happy birthday... to me

So once my coworkers found out that both me and my manager share the same birthday, they organized a 2-hour lunch to Chuck E. Cheese. Now, neither myself nor my coworker Anna had set foot in one since we were both about 5, and both of us hated its cardboard pizza, the noise and the smell even then.

But the prospect of seeing our manager, an urbane, worldly and sophisticated Frenchman, bedecked with all sorts of shitty cardboard children's accessories, was a lure too strong to ignore.

Immediately upon setting foot in the place, Denis says: "Holy shit, it smells like diapers in here!"

Yes, Denis, it does. It's just as awful as when I first experienced it. We lasted about 10 minutes in the place before we couldn't take it anymore and went next door for burgers.

Then, after coming home, my parents had already arrived and were setting up all sorts of things. They got to dote on their grandchild some more -- who was absolutely entranced by one of his presents, a felt frog bookmark he now counts as one of his best friends -- and they even brought up materials for a sandbox for LM, made out of a tractor tire, a wooden cover with his name on it and lots of play sand. It'll occupy a proud place in the patio where I'm sure he'll have lots of fun with it.

That, and my parents gave me a super-sexy corduroy shirt that I think might give me a chance with the hot Jewish girlie over there in the kitchen; and let's also say that there will be more game porn in my future. Oh yes. Oh my yes.

mormons

Bah. Here I am working in stripey loungey pants that make me look like I've escaped from a dire French Guyanan prison, and the Mormons come to the door to proselytize.

They were two younger women, I'd say around 25-27, in black overcoats, calling themselves Sister X and Sister Y (I forget their names). Sister Y, the follower, was Hispanic and silent, with her hair in a swooping Rachel do. Sister X, the leader, was blonde, blue-eyed, and EXTREMELY creepy as she talked with the wide-eyed calm earnestness of any cultish true-believer. I thought that my flat statement that "we're Jewish" would send the appropriate message, but upon reflection this response is more an incitement to these people to go after the unsaved. I might as well have told them the truth of my atheism, but then I think we might've been subjected to vigils and all sorts of repeated mischief.

And so I had to listen to an interminable 5-minute spiel about Jesus this and God's plan and Jesus Jesus Jesus. With a side order of Jesus. Oh, and I can get a free video! (I almost want to send away for it so I can tape over it with porn or something.) Too bad I was too annoyed to go into the threesome Mer and I had with God. This is not a good sign -- we haven't been bothered by the religious folks before now.

If you're looking at the church's metric of souls saved per hour, the single best way to get rid of proselytizers is to do what my dad does: greet them warmly at the door, invite them in, and proceed to argue with them, backed up by a wealth of facts at your disposal. Since my dad has a fair amount of time on his hands, a metric assload of books, a researcher's interest in religious history and teachings, a lot of education and an apartment that looks like a retired English professor's apartment should look, his arguments that the Lost Tribes of Israel are not in fact the American Indian native tribes, or that Mormons have an appalling history of racial prejudice usually make the clean crisp young men in their nice blue ties very antsy.

The Mormons and the Witnesses now leave him alone.

Honestly, my time is still too valuable to my corporate puppetmasters to do things like that.

But I really wish I could.

Contract of Wifely Expectations

Talk about issues with women...

Again, the sick-humored part of me says "if he'd just started collecting board games"...

There are so many great bits in it I'm just as flabbergasted as the Smoking Gun editors.

For instance, the dress-up requirements for church. Or the meticulous (and extremely disturbingly clinical) attention to shaving.

But what actually throws me for a loop the most is the typeface. Yes, the typeface. This guy actually sat down at his computer with these ridiculous evil things in his head, and he actually took the extra time to select a somewhat effeminate font to spout all this, like some demented barbecue invitation. And then, on the second page, there are the pornographic initial caps, added like an afterthought on this page and not the first, probably because he thought it'd be sexier that way.

I could also be a little waggish and say that all he was looking for was an appropriate sub -- that he was just running in the wrong social circles -- but what safety word works on a guy who's slipped entirely into the Porno World of his own head?

Oh, and that photograph of him in court? Hel-LO, beautiful man!

(I've got to start being wary of "Husbandly Expectations" notes being left around the house. There's a hell of a lot of shaving I need to start doing.)

how my sense of humor works

My wife shouldn't have posted all those nice things about my sense of humor. Because my sense of humor is, well juvenile and malicious.

My manager, of all people, put this site into my consciousness yesterday, and it's filled with bottom-barrel humor like this:

And then it gets even worse, with comics like this, or just really weird -- but I laugh anyway.

Eseentially, it's a retread of my beloved Red Meat, and its appropriately-twisted sensibilities.

Hee.

best toy EVAH!

There are several very cool things about the Imaginarium Sentence Building Blocks set, given to us by Michaela of your ideas are intriguing to me, etc.:

1. As L is under the recommended age for the blocks, he can play with them as colorful objects and knock down the towers Daddy builds.
2. When he is 3 years old, he can use the blocks to learn sentence structure.
3. At his birthday party, grown adults can form dirty sentences and phrases out of the blocks, giggling like pervy idiots for hours on end:

   

   All credit for this wonderful sentence belongs to Michaela.



Posted by brian at 08:25 PM | Comments (1)

best toy EVAH!

There are several very cool things about the Imaginarium Sentence Building Blocks set, given to us by Michaela of your ideas are intriguing to me, etc.:

1. As L is under the recommended age for the blocks, he can play with them as colorful objects and knock down the towers Daddy builds.
2. When he is 3 years old, he can use the blocks to learn sentence structure.
3. At his birthday party, grown adults can form dirty sentences and phrases out of the blocks, giggling like pervy idiots for hours on end:

   

   All credit for this wonderful sentence belongs to Michaela.



Posted by brian at 08:25 PM | Comments (1)

puerile link of the day

Come for the whale watching, stay for the scenery: "It is thought that the community may have got its name from Spain or Portugal, or an algonquin tree, or the shape of the headland that forms the harbour."

Toys That Should Not Be

L has a number of disturbing things in his room and immediate surroundings. Nothing dangerous, mind you, but things that make the voices get all antsy in my head. They tell me to go out and kill, I tell you.

Other parents know this, but when you're subjected to 500 toys that make noise on a daily basis, you get to know which ones are the most annoying or which ones are most likely to be traded away to other unsuspecting parents.

This post was brought on because as part of L's ongoing miraculous cognitive development, he's started connecting what he sees on Sesame Street with some things in his room. Namely, the huge-ass frightening Elmo and Cookie Monster dolls that one of our friends gave to him before he was born.

Yes, my son has started liking Elmo.

This isn't so bad, considering. If he had started liking Barney -- I refuse to have any Barney within 50 feet of the house -- I would've had to shoot myself. If Teletubbies, with their weird pseudo-Marxist world where everything is provided for, with life-size toasters, and a Big Brother-ish baby sun that frightens the bejeezus out of me, I think I might've had to fortify my tea with mushrooms just so it would all make sense.

So all things considered, Elmo and his high-pitched voice, as well as his computer-generated surreal home which must exist only in his insane red head, are tolerable. (Doesn't that picture look a little... Van Gogh/Jacob's Ladder to you? And what do you think Elmo's drawing? Considering he's colored the rest of his room in red crayon, I figure it's got to be a dead rabbit.)

But so many things we have are intolerable -- and, worse yet, L loves them with all his little heart.

So many disturbing toys, so little time:

1. Boohbah
   This little nightmare of a toy came at us straight from a white elephant party, of all places, given to us by our (soon to be former) friend Doug. This is apparently a lame American substitute for the Brit Teletubbies, and like most things that get transplanted from elsewhere over to these shores, in the process of becoming American, it got... obese. Either that, or the thing is all purple elephantitis scrotum. Furthermore, if you punch it in the stomach (or its distended balls) it makes a series of mostly incomprehensible, disturbing noises including a bit of flatulence. ("Boobah -- it's like Teletubbies, except it farts.") L's eyes light up and he laughs whenever he sees it in his crib, which makes me die a little inside, each time. I hate you, Doug.


2. Baby Tad
   Although Mer has talked at length about the depth of evil that is Baby Tad, she hasn't really illustrated Tad's demonic nature fully enough, I think. Tad introduces himself innocently enough, even if he's a little annoying, and then he gets a little more annoying, and then he gets downright creepy. The hell of it is that Tad is definitely one of L's favorite things -- and, although still creepy, is a godsend at bedtime. However, Tad's true mission straight from Satan becomes apparent once his batteries become weak. I've tried to approximate it with various effects, but the effect gets all HAL 9000 on your ass.


3. The Fun & Learn Phonics Bus
   My mother gave L this toy for Christmas. As you might suspect from looking at it with all the buttons and characters on the bus, this would be one of the most annoying toys we have -- which would automatically make it one of L's favorites. Every button does something annoying, even the letters. It will just sit there, being annoying, teaching your child questionable morals ("...into traffic! No one will miss them!"), until it's time to learn about making friends with urine (told to you, of course, by the most annoying character on the bus). Then it's time to sing and sing and sing, until you're singing it in your sleep or hitting yourself in the head with a claw hammer, like the Happy Happy Joy Joy song. If that weren't insane enough, imagine hearing these jokes each and every single day of your life.
   
   The bus spends most of its life thankfully being switched off.
   


4. The Leapfrog Learning Drum
   This is another toy L got for Christmas; you're supposed to hit it, and there are various settings so that you can either tap out the alphabet, numbers, music, or various Simon Says-like rhythms. In theory, this'd be a great toy that wouldn't be so grating to listen to in the scheme of things, but the sound recordings on the drum are desperately trying to convince you their product is fun, teaching my son that hitting things is fun, engaging in off-key aural abuse, getting weirdly sexual all of a sudden, and branding my son egregiously early in ways I don't appreciate.


5. The Baby Playzone Stride-to-Ride Walker
   Now, you'd think that a whimsical picture of L on his bike would indicate that he had an engaging toy that not only would teach him how to pull himself up on his feet and propel himself along, but would also be an island of sanity for Mommy and Daddy. Not so. Imagine, for example, that a couple of clowns, just out of clown college, decided to give up the clown life of pies and honker noses for a life of being hot club DJs in San Francisco. While hopped up on meth, they mix together what they think is the next club anthem for the glowstick set. Next, imagine the two songs they came up with played in succession on L's beloved trike. Then imagine these songs played whenever you press anything on the trike, move the trike, kick it across the room in the middle of the night, look at it the wrong way, curse at it, or beg, beg, beg it to stop. It just ignores you in its pitiless machine way, and plays its clown techno over and over and over again.

L will no doubt get more annoying toys -- hopefully, none more annoying than these. I do this as a public service; this insanity must be shared so that others don't repeat our mistakes. (Or, at least, when there is no risk any more of anyone playing with these toys again -- baby #2 or anyone else -- there will be a mighty spectacular accident of some kind.)

(See also: look at the unit on that bear!)
(See also: Why Daddy Drinks.)

In which L's parents go to hell, again

This object was handed to our son on one of his physical therapy visits, as a way to help L relieve his teething pains. Its distinguishing characteristics are:

1) It's made of soft silicone.
2) If you squeeze one of the top three points of the star, it vibrates.
3) It has the blue handle pictured for easy grasping.
4) Yes, both of us independently had the same thought you just did, even upon first laying eyes on the thing.

It's a relief he only merely tolerates it. It would've been very disconcerting had he taken an immediate shine to it. Our house is weird enough, and now we have My First Marital Aids lying around...

the wreckage of Christmas

So:

We arrived in Bakersfield, where all three of us promptly got a wicked case of the flu.
LM had it the worst of all of us; in fact, he had to be taken to the local urgent care center on Christmas Eve, where he was diagnosed with not only the flu but also a raging ear infection. This, plus his already-documented teething follies -- there may be more teeth coming now, all at once -- made him the saddest-looking baby alive on Christmas.

While in line at The Skeeviest Walgreen's in Bakersfield, California, waiting for LM's prescription, Mer met Jesus. No, she really did -- not the Spanish Hay-Soos, but the actual person J-E-S-U-S. She'll tell you all about it too... Jesus also took the time on Christmas to proselytize, while waiting for her prescription. The fact that all this happened on Christmas Eve just makes it all the weirder.

We saw a Christmas light display set up almost as a city tourist attraction, which was fairly nice as it was set up within a nearby animal rehabilitation center. Although the company setting up the light display has an unfortunate name given that it's right in the middle of the Kern County Bible Belt, but I still have to give the guy major props: he took what he liked to do more than anything else -- put up traffic-stopping, power-draining displays of lights -- and made his own business out of it while still at a young age.

Christmas itself was very nice in spite of the ravaging fevers we brought down with us. There was much playing with grandparents, and auntie Liz, there was much playing with Puss and Boots (a slightly standoffish, smaller, but cleverer gray kitten, and her puffy, black and white, bigger, affectionately agressive and playful but stupider brother), in spite of the fact that I found out that kittens, especially outdoor ones, make me as severely allergic as I've ever been. It doesn't help that my mom has become a cat mom.

My mom overfed everyone, as usual, so the diet went out the window for the time being, and the gifts were largely inoffensive -- a family Christmas record -- except for 2 items:

1) My dad decided this would be appropriate for an 11-month-old boy. (This became a present for yours truly, who is taking it to work to annoy the hell out of his manager. I will use it to deliver Post-Its in place of email.)
2) The Most Horrible, Horrible Object In The World. The whole sexual pose, combined with the weird warts, gives me nightmares. (Hello, future white elephants. We've got a ringer.)

Continuing on with the weird sexual vibes in this post, my lovely wife told me about the dream she had.

My dad, who has a history of spending a lot of money at Christmastime, outdid himself by getting my mom a very expensive laptop -- hopefully to get her to dump the 3 (!!!) computers -- in various states of disrepair -- she has already, in favor of a slim laptop she can do all her web development work with.

We didn't have time to take advantage of my sister's generous offer to watch LM while we went off to a movie.

I played one game of Lord of the Fries (yes, it's a VERY light card game about zombies making fast food), 1 game of Tikal, and 1 game of the infamous Ticket to Ride. (I got my ass handed to me in Tikal by my sister and my mate.)
My sister endeared herself to me -- proving that there was some common thread in our upbringing -- by saying "yeah, the simple ones are nice, but I like the complex ones more; they give you more to do." This was her one-sentence review of Tikal. However, she also said her boyfriend tends to squirm if she tries to introduce him to complexity in gaming evenings -- a trait he sometimes shares with the Divine Miss M.

LM recovered on the last day we were there; he became his smiley self once more, and engaged in a lot of standing, and one or two shows of guided walking ability. There was also at least one reported incident of rudimentary crawling. Standing is becoming his New Favorite Thing to do, which is both a boon and a curse for yours truly.

It was all over too quickly, especially because I was a bit crazy and brought a zillion games with us in hopes of playing more with my sister. Also because my family didn't really get to see the 3 of us in anything approaching a healthy state. Also because neither M or myself really got much time to fucking RELAX apart from maybe the board games we played. Ah well. New Year's is coming, and with it a blessed day off.

he bite me in my vagina!

While everyone else in the mediasphere is posting a "Best of 2005" list or another -- personally, aside from my wonderful son's birth, it's been one of the worst years on record and I just can't wait for the fuckin' thing to end -- Jimmy Kimmel has the Best of Reality Television 2005 clip reel for you to look at. An extremely fitting end to a fitting year.

A little person peeing in the corner, Brigitte Nielsen saying "thanks for the teeth", and a lady who clearly has some attachment issues with her dog. All part of the cesspool of TV that I gleefully and somewhat guiltily revel in every so often.

2005 just didn't have enough "biting in the vagina" clips for my taste. I mean really.

what to look for in holiday decoration

1. High strength-to-weight ratio.
2. Tinsel is distracting.
3. Prepare for people to be disappointed in you.
4. Better bone up on your wrestling technique.
5. The holiday is better left "unadorned and lusterless".

(via BB)

too bad HST is already dead

...because the animatronic band at the Deerfield Yankee Candle deserves a special mention.

It goes by the name of the Candle Mountain Boys Animatronic Band.
It goes off with frightening regularity, right in front of kiosks manned by ladies who are no doubt in the advanced stages of stress-induced insanity at having to listen to that crap over and over again.
The band itself has obviously been repaired haphazardly a number of different times, like something out of the Simpsons. One band member is supposed to be playing a washtub bass, but his strumming hand is three feet from the instrument he's playing. The hand itself is obviously stolen from a fashion mannequin -- a female one. I half-expect the robots to rise up and slay their human tormentors in a festive display of Christmas gore.
The band and the insane ladies selling fudge are surrounded by CHRISTMAS CHEER CHRISTMAS CHEER CHRISTMAS CHEER and tinkly carols being played on a constant loop, twinkly lights, and overpriced Christmas tchotchkes.
The next room is one of those "build a bear" stations that are starting to crop up everywhere. At first M thought it was for children's clothes. Then I thought it was humiliating costumes for pets. No, it's expensive costumes for your custom teddy bear as you select a bear, shove its anus onto a large hollow steel rod protruding from a high-speed stuffing machine, and then dress it up afterwards in a variety of costumes that say rather a lot about the person buying the bear in the first place.

I've been informed on a couple of occasions that the company takes very good care of the workers there. Good salary, great bennies, a gym, the works. And that it was a great boon to the town, as it brings in tour buses on a regular basis.

Just don't get caught manning the fudge kiosk next to the band, and try to block out the screams coming from the bear room.

Merry Christmas!

bad santa? bad parents

No doubt my lovely wife will be posting the "happy" picture of L with Santa, who came to her company party. Santa looks like a really good Santa, except the company logo behind him makes him look like a real shill. "I can give you whatever you want, kid, as long as it's a PVR with an unlimited contract!"

Of course I throw all this bile out there to begin with, because when God was handing out parent badges, He saved a couple for the idjits in the back, namely us. See, while we were in MA visiting inlaws over Thanksgiving, we took L to the local extreme tourist trap-slash-town institution that has COUNTRY CHARM farting out its wazoo. The theory in taking him in the midst of this bad craziness was that he'd get his first trip to see Santa. And see Santa he did, after we got an ornament with his name on it, watched his dull reaction to the extremely creepy animatronic bluegrass musicians, and ate squares of fudge.

See, I knew in advance that he would not appreciate St. Nick at all -- in fact, being held by a large bearded fat man, dressed in red, jangling things in his face and possibly smelling of booze, would probably be up there on the list of Extremely Scary Things if you're going on 1. But we wanted pictures regardless, possibly to put on holiday cards, possibly to send to a site like this one, where classic, hilarious images of child terror have been captured for posterity.

But what I ended up with was a screaming infant, a raised eyebrow from Santa and a possible call to CPS. My partner in crime didn't help things much by saying as L was shrieking his little head off: "didja get the picture? didja get the picture?" Not really funny so much as creepy for everyone involved. At least L won't remember a thing. We hope.

I'm really not proud at all. But here it is: enjoy.

Sigh. I owe the little guy a nice big toy, courtesy of the extremely scary fat man who will break into our house.

just kill me

There are so many things wrong with this I don't know where to start:

1) "Johannah's birth was especially exciting because it was the first time in eight years the family has had a girl, he said." When you're measuring births by frequency of gender, you've just invented your own Jeff Foxworthy joke.

2) Poor kid just probably fell out of mom one day. Just like in this movie. Her poor uterus is about ready to run away screaming. Either that or they should charge admission for uterine tours as a National Park Service event.

3) "'I have asked Michelle if she wants more and she said yes, if the Lord wants to give us some she will accept them,' he said in a telephone interview." This has really weird overtones of Jesus coming down from on high and doing the impregnating Himself.

4) "The Discovery Health Channel filmed Johannah?s birth and plans to air a show about the family in May." I think my last shred of sanity just curled up and whimpered in the corner.

5) "Jim Bob Duggar, who sells real estate, previously lost his bid for the U.S. Senate. He said he expects to run for the state Senate next year but isn?t ready to make a formal announcement." Just what the world needs. More Bible-thumping intolerant morons. Although if genetics is any indication, one or two of these kids will probably be gay. And who would notice if little Jed is a little too into the hot Ken on Ken action anyway?

don't actually need one

K, bless him, has alerted me to a valuable company and its product line.

You know, we are taking him on the plane to MA for Thanksgiving. However, he's not crawling yet, and may not ever crawl -- he might be too big to start. Furthermore, he could bust out of that carrier with two well-placed kicks to begin with. And then you have one pissed-off Mongo on your hands, something I doubt the FAA had anticipated.

look at the unit on that bear!

Well, after that exercise in near-devastating grief and near-panic, there's the Pooh-rection to talk about. Here he is (mouseover the buttons, from bottom to top):

Yes, all stacking toys are somewhat phallic. But this goes beyond anything I've ever seen...

First of all, he's got a shit-eating grin.
He's top-heavy.
The stacking mechanism is right in the middle of his crotch.
The phallus is about 2/3 as long as he is, for chrissakes.
His "balls" light up when you touch any of the buttons.
He moans when you press the first button on his Prince Albert.
He moans again, a little higher, when you press the second button.
When you press the third at the tip of his huge elongated plastic cock (or when you've stacked all of his honey pots), he has a little Poohgasm and talks to Piglet as only somebody who'd been in prison would: "Hello, Piglet. You're gonna be my little bitch now."
Then it plays a tinny version of the "Winnie the Pooh" song, and dammit if the stupid thing concludes with a final postcoital moan from Pooh.

"Stuffed with fluff", indeed. Stuffed with Viagra and X more like.

I figure if you're a toy designer that does nothing but design stacking toys for Disney, you're vastly underpaid, not to mention bitter. So you find ways of maliciously putting pornographic messages in your toys to poison little minds.

I figure I'm just enough of a sick bastard/abusive father not to care how my son sees Pooh cornholing farm animals.

vaseline and disgruntled chambermaids

When she was a surly teenager, Mer worked as a chambermaid along with her brother at the Candlelight Motor Lodge in beautiful downtown Greenfield, MA.

She has stories of the place, including the time they went into the room and found a dead deer from someone's hunting trip bleeding in the bathtub.

But her weirdest story is of the time an undescript man (she doesn't remember what he looks like) checked out -- and she went in to clean the room only to find that the entire room had been covered in a brown-green smoky goo. It took the entire staff, including Mer and her brother, all day to clean the room.

Well, I'm relieved to say that the Vaseline Bandit has been brought to justice. Mer isn't sure whether it's the same guy all these years later.

But at our house we just call it Thursday night.

The extra E is for extra PEEEE!

Ah, the awesome power of Flash. Or something. All I know is that I can write things in the snow -- virtually! -- and send it to unsuspecting people who didn't ask for it.

I'm the ambassador of pee.

(I sent this to Mer, who opened it in front of her boss. Score one for me!)

one of the many coming signs

...of the Apocalypse:

Mer was watching The Real World: Philadelphia when one of the female housemates said in a confessional that her parents bought her a boob job as a graduation present.

When I hear things like that, I want to go fetal.

ever wonder

...just what the East Bay tweakers are doing at 7AM on a Wednesday?

Making calls fueled by meth and rage, that's what.

Needless to say, we're changing our outgoing message.

(Speaking of feverish imagination.)

The best I can make out are the phrases "she's fucking around with my wife", "I'm gonna kill 'em", "she also has lesbian tendencies", and "she has AIDS".

Mer thought he said something about paper towels at some point too. Me, I thought of asking random people throughout the day if they had lesbian tendencies. (Yes, this is how my disordered mind works.)

Slightly funny, but more than a little creepy, no? I just hope this recording doesn't need to be used as evidence one day.

bow down before SATAN

You are the Devil card. The Devil is based on the figure Pan, Lord of the Dance. The earthy physicality of the devil breeds lust. The devil's call to return to primal instincts often creates conflict in a society in which many of these instincts must be kept under control. Challenges posed by our physical bodies can be overcome by strength in the mental, emotional, and spiritual realms. Pan is also a symbol of enjoyment and rules our material creativity. The devil knows physical pleasure and how to manipulate the physical world. Material creativity finds its output in such things as dance, pottery, gardening, and sex. The self-actualized person is able to accept the sensuality and usefulness of the devil's gifts while remaining in control of any darker urges.
Which Tarot Card Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

There are several disturbing things about this:
1) The whole Lord of the Dance thing. I categorically refuse to wear the pants.
2) If the devil knows physical pleasure, this means he sees a lot. That's all I'm saying.
3) Manipulating the physical world is something that's eluded me for a long time. I always thought I had Jedi powers but so far I haven't been able to do anything other than get the Underoos.
4) "Dance, pottery, gardening, and sex" -- "Hi. I'm into movies, reading, speed-walking, and furries."
5) Gotta love those darker urges. Right now I have a darker urge for pudding.

Oh, and another quiz from the same bullshit site says I'm this sort of bra:

You're a plain white silky bra with a little bow in
the middle, you don't like to take chances and
play it too safe.

Damn. I was at least hoping for something a little more exciting. Something without a comma splice, at a bare minimum.

a hero for troubled times

All internet traces of this story have been removed, except for one newgroup posting somewhere. A good Texan named Paul Riddell wrote and published this story online a while back -- I reproduce it here without permission, but I'm sincerely grateful that it's just now coming online once more.

Like I've said before... sometimes it's the only sane response.

”Attack of The Mad Shitter,” by Paul T. Riddell

Everyone has stories of subtle and not-so-subtle terrorism intended against their managers or fellow workers in the search for a decent work environment. I remember one manager for an insurance company who found that her serfs spent their lunch breaks at their desks playing computer solitaire because they didn’t have enough time to go out and get lunch anywhere else…and contacted the tech department to have all of the built-in computer games removed from every computer in her department. She then had the nerve to look surprised when someone climbed over the fence in her gated community and slashed all four tires on her new BMW. (I was not involved, nor do I know who was, nor do I have any interest in computer games, but considering that this was a company that required its employees to show up to the company picnic and then charged them $20 a head to attend, I understood the motivation.) Her predecessor was such a petty tyrant that she held a mandatory meeting when she left the company so she could bask in the perceived rush of sadness from the grunts, but instead her announcement was greeted with an impromptu rendition of “Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead”. But by far, the most base, most disgusting, and most honest rebellion against a toxic work environment I’ve ever come across came from a fellow I only know as “The Mad Shitter.”
Back a decade ago, I was working for Texas Instruments, back when TI was still involved in the defense contracting business and before it sold that big chunk to Raytheon. Although a firm supplier of Cold War armaments for the self-appointed Forces of Good, TI also spent quite a bit of time encouraging its managers to study the book “The Business Philosophies of Josef Stalin,” leaving every midlevel manager protected from assassination attempts by a good multilevel layer of professional asskissers and stoolies. TI encouraged betrayal of one’s co-workers and friends at every level, and if upper management wasn’t able to inflict the right level of terror through flunkies standing at the front door of offices and workshops to make sure that employees came back on time from a 26-minute lunch (not 30 minutes: 26 minutes, and never mind that the lunch area may have been a 12-minute walk from those areas), it encouraged the mobilization of a vast volunteer secret police force that tattled any comment, no matter how minor, back to a supervisor’s ear in a matter of minutes. Talking out loud about anything deemed improper, from the lousy food in the cafeteria to the merits of joining a union, guaranteed that the offender was sent to gulag. Before 1990, that gulag was an inability to move up within the company, which just stimulated more improper talk.
After 1990, that gulag was the layoff, which convinced the survivors to work harder and smarter if they didn’t want to be next.

And if you’re wondering why anyone would want to suffer under those conditions, remember that this was during the late Eighties, when Texas was suffering from a major recession brought about by the drop in the price of oil in 1985. By 1986, any permanent job for those without a college degree that didn’t involve flipping burgers or bagging groceries was treasured, and these were the days when blue-collar jobs were still valued or at least respected. Compared to all of the nasty and foul temporary jobs around, the promise of something approximating a decent rate of pay combined with basic benefits was seen by many to be worth any amount of discomfort, because that decent rate of pay was enough to buy enough booze and weed to ease that discomfort and make getting up in the morning a little more tolerable.

Not that Texas Instruments was willing to give a decent rate of pay: the initials “TI” stood for “Tiny Income” among the workforce. (They stood for “Training Academy” for the engineers, who took advantage of the great training but left because of the miserable pay the moment their contracts were done. This changed to “Totally Incompetent” in the Nineties, when TI’s layoffs regularly caught fresh engineers who had started weeks or even days before. A long-running joke among the labor pool was that they should get their resumes ready whenever the company promoted new vice-presidents: without fail, the company would promote anywhere between two and fourteen new vice-presidents to replace those who cashed in their stock options and bailed out, and then lay off another 6000 employees.) Every year, management would argue that TI paid a median rate compared to other companies for the same general type of work, conveniently leaving out that they were including companies based in maquiladoras on the Mexican border so as to skew the statistics. Shortly after making everyone feel that they should be proud to have a job at all, someone would roll out some boneheaded new policy intended to save a little bit of money but that completely destroyed whatever morale remained. (One of the best was the new smoking policy in 1991, which charged anyone using tobacco products an extra $10 per paycheck for insurance purposes. A well-intentioned policy, to be sure, but any former smoker or chewer who decided to quit had to be “clean” for a minimum of six months, and any contact with tobacco automatically turned a non-smoker into a smoker. How was this to be policed, one asks? By encouraging fellow employees to tattle on each other, of course.

The only rebellion that seemed to work was a mass exodus from making contributions to the United Way, which just made it easier to spot the obvious troublemakers and lay them off.) The only policy that backfired was the mandatory random drug testing policy that started in 1989: intended to round up all of the pothead proles, it was quietly dropped, according to rumor, because far too many members of upper management were testing positive for cocaine for their firings to be explained away as “leaving to pursue other opportunities.”

In a novel, the author would create a grand hero to fight the forces of oppression and incidentally make a name for himself in the process. This would have worked at Texas Instruments if anyone with ambition or options hadn’t left as soon as inherently possible, and the rest were happier complaining than doing something about the situation. Petitioning the government for a redress of grievances didn’t work, either: the only petitions the boss of my department listened to were petitions from those willing to get up at 5 ayem on a Saturday morning for a good eighteen holes of golf, and anyone coming to him during working hours with issues were either blown off or told in no uncertain terms that making waves was a good way to lose employment. In a comic book, we would have ended up with a strangely dressed but inherently noble protector of the weak and helpless, determined to prove that managers are a superstitious and cowardly lot. This was real life, though, and people running through a factory wearing leotards and their Pokemon Underoos on the outside get escorted outside by security or popped in the ass with a taser and thrown into the back of a police car. The stress was intolerable, and nature abhors a power vacuum, so TI nature created an avenger for us. It created The Mad Shitter.

The first signs that we had a superhero in our midst happened sometime in 1989, when one of the supervisors went to the supply mezzanine to collect some three-ring binders. To explain, I was working in the Non-Metallics Shop, a little area at the TI facility on Trinity Mills Road in Carrollton that was dedicated to making the nose cones for the Hostile Anti-Radar Missile (HARM for short) that TI was foisting upon the Navy. The company was doing well at that time, but very little of that wealth was trickling down to the people on the bottom, and we were definitely the people on the bottom. The Non-Metallics Shop ran three shifts for at least five to six days a week, and I was on the Second Shift: 3 p.m. to 11:15. Most of management only operated during daylight hours, and our supervisor at the time was usually in the parking lot with his girlfriend in the back seat of his pimp-red Camaro shortly after dark, so the environment wasn’t quite as foul as it was during the day. This time, though, the girlfriend was out of town, so The Man was actually accomplishing a bit of work when he went up to the second level of this gigantic shop space to get those binders. He got his binders, but he also found a gigantic human turd on the mezzanine, placed so that the first thing anyone saw as they came up the staircase was a nice brown replica of the Hindenberg. He screamed and ran back down, demanding an accounting of all of Second Shift, and waited for someone to confess to this atrocity.

Naturally, nobody in their right mind was going to confess to taking a crap on the mezzanine, so The Man bullied someone into cleaning it up and dutifully reported it to his boss, the Golfer. Quick triangulation ascertained that the offending fecal matter could have been plunked down at any time between 7:00 that morning and 7:00 that evening, so everyone received a stern lecture on proper toiletry the next day, with horrendous threats implied for those without proper bowel or bladder control.

A month went by, and then the Mad Shitter struck again. And again. And again. This time, he wasn’t going for an obvious doody drop: he was obviously hopped up on too many Judas Priest albums, because he was Screaming For Vengeance. Considering the size of those dumps, he was definitely doing some screaming: when security came in, they ascertained that these were (a) human feces and (b) left where they were issued and not made somewhere else and hauled in via wheelbarrow or forklift. They started appearing in other places, suggesting both lookouts and access to various equipment, as well as a particularly demented imagination.

Kong turds started showing up on the tops of light fixtures, on storage racks, and in file cabinets. The Mad Shitter struck one of the locked file cabinets intended to hold classified documents, tooting on an open file folder, folding it quickly, and deftly shoving it through. He even hit The Man’s pimp-red Camaro, squeezing out a long but pungent trail that looked and smelled like a dead water moccasin.

By this time, The Mad Shitter was a true folk hero to the masses: the managers wanted him dead or at least unemployed, and every report of a new atrocity just fueled speculation as to his identity. The Mad Shitter obviously wasn’t a woman: women were rara avii on a par with promises of profit sharing that actually came through. He wasn’t a member of management, unless we had a really sick bastard who liked blowing dirt. (One manager was fond of sneaking up behind his charges, farting, and running away, but he was quickly removed from suspicion.) By the time the Mad Shitter somehow managed to break into the plant manager’s office, shit on both his desk and chair, and then get out without leaving any traces of his identity other than that his blood type was O-positive, we knew that we had our own blue-collar Bruce Wayne, and anyone with an IQ above sixty was watched. Instead of quelling the attacks, this just increased the strikes against anything and everything in range, culminating in the great Fourth of July Bombing.

The Golfer was not only mean but paranoid, and he had enough clout that he actually had a real office instead of a cubicle with high walls like the supervisors. It was composed of cheapo Henry Miller wall units bolted together to make a monolith in one corner, but it was a real office in a garbage dump scavenger sort of way. Under no circumstances were any of the grunts allowed near that office unless they had legitimate business with him, and that business almost always consisted of lectures on Getting With The Program or scheduling for tee time on Saturday. Every evening before he left, he’d get up from his desk, close and lock the flimsy door that kept all of the proles away from His Stuff, and wander home, comforted that no matter how miserable everyone was, in no way could the Mad Shitter get in.

Well, July 4 fell on a Tuesday that year, so we had a four-day weekend. The Golfer came back rested and relaxed, opened up his door, and had a seizure. Sometime during that weekend, the Mad Shitter struck again. However, apparently MS really had something for the Golfer, because the Shitter had apparently overdosed on laxatives before going in. It was all over the desk, the chairs, the file cabinets, the walls: the place resembled the sets in “The Wild Bunch” if the film had been directed by John Waters instead of Sam Peckinpah. (Or, for those who saw the film adaptation of “Trainspotting”, this spot was an easy candidate for The Worst Toilet In Texas, if only someone had put a potty inside.) And did I mention that the plant shut down its air conditioning over that four-day weekend to save money? Or that the Non-Metallics Shop had one air vent up in the roof that was too small for a human to crawl through, but that let snow and bugs fall from the Great Outdoors?

Those faced with the horror of that stench once the Golfer opened his office were also hit with a puzzle. The lock on the door was still secured; the floor was concrete, so the Mad Shitter didn’t climb up from underneath. An investigation by Security ensued, and they discovered fragments of the acoustic tile that passed for a ceiling atop the mess. According to them, the Mad Shitter had somehow slung a rope from one of the overhead I-beams holding up the ceiling, climbed down, removed at least one of the acoustic plates, did his business, and climbed out, all without anyone else spotting him. Whoever he was, he didn’t do it over the weekend, because all weekend visitors had been accounted for. This wasn’t some garden-level pooter running around. This guy was good.

Sadly, this was the last strike by the Mad Shitter, at least at the Trinity Mills facility. Almost exactly a year later, the plant manager announced that TI was shutting down the Trinity Mills plant, moving the main factory equipment back to the plant from which it had sprung a decade before and my department to the facility in McKinney. In all of that time, although those smart enough to see the layoffs coming down had left while they had the chance, nobody stood up and even whispered about the identity of the Mad Shitter. Anyone who knew would have disappeared the way Sakharov and Theremin did, so he escaped to crap another day.

Well, it’s been twelve years since the Mad Shitter first popped up, and I still wonder if he’s retired, or if he’s still running around, his nightsoil-smeared face and shit-eating grin mortifying idiot managers everywhere. Either way, we could use someone like him to strike terror into the hearts of evil, and evil is all we seem to be getting out of business schools these days. Any retribution more subtle than his ways won’t get the point across, so it’s time to get up atop the city and turn on the ShitterSignal!

the story of the car salesman

This last Sunday my crazy parents decided to come up to see me in the play. They dote on me to distraction -- remember, I'm the good son who can do no wrong (and by extension, Mer is the dream daughter-in-law) -- and in amongst all the gushing over the play and the repeated requests for pictures (Mom has blinded people before by snapping big flash pictures at curtain calls)... Mom engages in a bit of gossip.

It's kind of her thing these days.

Anyway, this latest interesting piece of news -- besides the latest bit of lurid sensationalism with homophobic overtones -- involves a wedding one of her friends went to.

Very expensive.
Flew everybody out to Virginia.
Rumored to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $40,000.
Beautiful wedding.
Nice, good-looking couple.
Everything goes fine, until the wedding night.
When she tells him that she's had "deep feelings" for someone else.
And proceeds to leave the groom, on their wedding night, for --

A used car salesman.

Since we haven't quite had our fill of weirdness in our lives yet, this piece of news gives us two main reactions:

1) No small amount of sympathy for someone we will never know, who will be quite justified in avoiding marriage like the plague for the rest of his life.
2) Cruel jokes involving car salesmen, along the lines of whether this service is under warranty, how many points of financing she gets, or if the undercarriage cleaning is included.

And, having dispensed with the latest in sensationalism and weird stories, taking many pictures in the dark that will be sent to us later, and depositing depressing items from the LA Times about the completely inaccessible housing market there, my parents set off for the 5 hour drive to Bakersfield the same night.

I told you they were crazy.

more literary, um, heights

Here's an excerpt from Midnight Butterfly, by Joan Elizabeth Lloyd. Apparently she's also the author of Velvet Whispers. (Her site, while it guards against access by minors, seems to be fairly informative if not titillating.)

Apparently this book is from Good Vibrations. I have no idea how it ended up in our posession. This is disturbing to me -- until now I was only a student of bad movies. Now I'm a connoisseur of bad fiction as well.

I got your rated X right here:

His mouth descended and covered hers, his tongue playing beautiful melodies against her lips. She parted them, allowing his tongue entrance to her hidden cavern and the kiss lengthened until their universe was spinning out of control. She couldn't think, and knew she didn't want to, ever again.
Then, they were naked, lying on sand as soft as any feather bed, tiny waves playing with their toes. His hands covered her breasts, kneading her hot flesh, his mouth toying with her ears. "I want you," he murmured, "as I've never wanted anyone."
"Then take me," she replied, slipping her hands around his waist. Then he was inside her, his manhood large, filling every inch of her. His thrusts, his movements perfectly timed with her need, his huge body driving her upward, making her crave. His mouth covered her erect nipple, licking and sucking as his hips pressed his flesh more deeply into her.
"Oh, Lord," she said, "make me yours."
"You are mine," the man said, "always." And with one final push, warm fluid filled her and her pleasure was complete.

Again, shooting fish in a barrel. Nobody expects Tolstoy out of their porn. Nevertheless, I at least expect the porn not to sound like the woman is getting her car taken to Jiffy Lube.

It's definitely the height of eroticism to be filled with "warm fluid".

textual analysis

As part of our ongoing effort to rid ourselves of useless crap, Mer is selling used books on Amazon.

To come up with a list of what we wanted to sell, we had to go through absolutely everything. We found several boxes (ones we'd locked away and forgotten about in a storage locker) stuffed to the gills with Mer's old Nancy Drew mysteries that she'd read as a girl.

(Yep. I had a bunch of Hardy Boys books in my early reading collection too -- I remember graduating to Conan Doyle, S. S. Van Dine (who my dad read as a kid), and book after book of Isaac Asimov.)

We'll have to go looking through the Nancy Drew books again; the first Salon article mentions that collectors will pay upwards of $300 for first editions. We did a little digging -- apparently there's gold in them thar cheesy books. The weird part is that first editions seem to be a dime a dozen on Ebay and Amazon; rare booksellers will list them for anywhere between $50 and maybe $250. This is curiouser and curiouser.

My interest, however, is more than financial -- although it's like shooting fish in a barrel, a lot of the stuff in these books is unintentionally hilarious.

There's the brazen shilling (from The Crooked Banister):

She could hardly wait for the next day to come. Now that the Drews were directly involved in the mystery, Nancy was eager to start work.
Although only eighteen, she had earned a reputation as an amateur detective by solving several cases, among them The Secret of the Old Clock, The Hidden Staircase, and most recently The Mysterious Mannequin.

There are the weird Freudian plot devices (Crooked Banister, p. 42):

Nancy swung open the door to the kitchen and then stepped back, shocked. The electrician lay on the floor unconscious! Not far from him stood the robot, its head back on.
"Oh, Mr. Glassboro!" Nancy cried out.
She ran to assist him. As she was about to bend down, a whirring sound started inside the mechanical man and she turned to face him. The next moment the figure raised his two arms and clasped them tightly about Nancy. He began to squeeze her hard.
"Help!" Nancy screamed. "Help!" Then she blacked out.
Upstairs Bess and George heard the cry. "Nancy's in trouble!" Bess exclaimed.
The two girls scurried down the crooked stairway and into the kitchen. Their friend was draped over one arm of the robot.

The tourism for the lazy (The Secret of Mirror Bay):

Nancy, slim and attractive-looking with reddish blond hair, said, "There's a mystery, of course. Aunt Eloise heard that early on misty mornings a woman is seen gliding over the water."
"In what?" George queried.
"Oh, she's walking," Nancy replied.
"How could she?" George asked skeptically.
"That's one thing I want to find out," Nancy answered. "The lake, of which the bay is a part, is a hundred and sixty-seven feet deep in the middle."
"Wow!" Bess exclaimed. "Dangerous spot to fall overboard with heavy shoes on."
Nancy said the water was shallow near shore and gradually became deeper. Bess and George, who were cousins, asked where the lake was.
"In New York State," Nancy told them. "The Indians called the lake Otesaga and there's a lovely hotel named after it. Later James Fenimore Cooper wrote stories about settlers and Indians in the area. He found the water so much like a mirror that he called it Glimmerglass. Now the official name is Otsego Lake."
Nancy explained that at the southern end of the lake was the famous village of Cooperstown.
George's eyes lighted up. "That's where the Baseball Hall of Fame is."
"Right," Nancy replied, "and there are also many interesting museums in and around Cooperstown."
"Sounds great to me," Bess remarked. "When would we go?"

Or how would you like a bit of racism with your sexism (The Clue in the Crossword Cipher)?

In broken English the stranger told her he was a Peruvian. "You are beautiful girl from North America," he said. "I like you. We make date maybe?"
In her own mind Bess decided that he was the last person in the world with whom she wanted to make a date. She did not answer but repeated her question. "Have you seen a man who is thin and dark and has shifty eyes?"
The young man began to laugh. "You forget about that one. Tonight we make date?"
Bess was furious. She turned away and began to climb the steps. The Peruvian laughed. "Oh, you afraid of me? You are American girl they say is choosy?"

Hee. That last sentence is my new comeon to Mer.

the requested La Fondue story

1. Go to aforementioned restaurant with friends.
2. Get ushered into restaurant with decor strongly reminiscent of Medieval Times but without the odor of manure, or maybe a place where a whispered "Fidelio" is required to get to the good stuff. Minus all the orgies.
3. Have brief pang of guilt at breaking diet so flagrantly even though you'd explicitly planned to break it tonight anyway.
4. Cheesy goodness.
5. Continue shoving food down your gullet while you have a growing sense of unease.
6. Chocolate/Frangelico ecstasy. The pot commands you to follow its wishes and dip anything you can find into it, the better to bathe in the dark sugary wonderland. Continue overeating to the point of distended, gargantuan, criminal obesity.
7. Start farting uncontrollably in the car. Do not let up until you reach San Carlos.
8. Trade massive farts with spouse. Stew in own juices well past bedtime. Reminisce on the exciting life you lead. Cling to knowledge that no one need ever know of any of this.
9. Spend all day today achy and tired. Hone bitterness at having spent that much money eating cheese and chocolate.
10. Blame restaurant for everything rather than own lack of self-control.
11. Write whole humiliating saga as requested.

At least I'm not in that Wrath ghetto

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Second Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Yes, you can also find out what level of Hell you belong in. Although there should probably be a .5 level of Hell for frivolous forwarded quizzes. And the people who're part of the problem, such as yours truly.

...because it's SCIENCE!

From a wire service story: researchers can tell what personality you have by what position you sleep in.

Normally such stories are suspicious because of the media's propensity to take some scientific qualifier ("the data indicate that there may be"), remove the qualifier and trumpet the findings everywhere as if they were definitive. Doesn't do much for the media's image and doesn't do much for science.

Still, though, I sleep on my stomach.

...and now, your moment of zen

Saw a billboard on my way out of the parking lot yesterday.

Yes, I get that masochistic urge to disturb, unsettle and bother myself. Quite regularly, in fact. So I looked up a website and found these other nuggets of disquietude, all of which can be found here.

Draw your own conclusions, gentle reader.

that's nice, but can I get gonorrhea?

Which is more disturbing: that someone can be an ICON of karaoke at RWC's local skanky bar, or that RWC's emporium for crotch floss actually has a website? (Latter website is just on the sleazy side of being work-safe.)