1/2/04

      Written on a dollar bill I got today at work: "I LOVE YOU Precious". Gollum's diversifying.
      I added it to wheresgeorge.com for the hell of it. On New Years Eve, an old man had a W'sG? bill in his wallet. It was a 5 marked just like the last one I got, from the guy who writes little stories about his day with every one. I once got a bill from Yakima, WA at the Old Job, which is as far from CT as you get without stepping in an ocean. A week later I got another from Yakima, so it can happen twice. I wanted that bill!
      But he was an olllld man, and he fumbled with his money and needed the total repeated every 30 seconds and eventually the W'sG? bill--he drooled on it. Twice. Suddenly, I really didn't want it all that much.

      Ohh, lovely. Geocities has sent me an email titled "Building Your Site." In GeoSpeak, that means "We're Deleting Your Site."
      It's an utter fluke that I got the email. It's to the current Hotmail account, although it's really a years-deleted account that just happens to have the same user name. Seriously, unless you're hardcore AOL, who still has any email accounts left over from 1997?
      I can prevent deletion by updating a page on the site and saving it. Which would be easy enough, if tiny kitten Kill Kill hadn't dumped the piece of paper with the passwords into the garbage without me noticing 4&1/2 years ago. 2 of those sites are going, going, soon-to-be gone. Mainly just storage for Jen White MySTIngs and the Space Ghost Daily Planner, so those will have to be transferred to here. One, of course, is my original page, so that must be saved. The other, again, is just for storage, so I don't really know if I'll update it there or move it here. If Geo allowed you to FTP directly from them to your drive, this would've been done years ago. Otherwise, it's copying page source codes and downloading all the gifs and jpegs by hand.
      Glad I found out now from that one flukey email. I wouldn't've been happy trying to track it all down through Google caches later.

      Funny, earlier I was just thinking of an old page I never think about. Ever wonder why I use "Gourd" instead of "God"? Of course not! It came from some long-ago email exchange with Kitty the Splut-Prime. I made a joke about how we could never marry, due to our irreconcilable religious differences: She was a follower of Splutstianity, and I was IslYamic. The IslYamic Holy Trinity was the Gourd, the Yam, and the Friendly Ghost, and that reference was from this one-joke page. Like monkeys, yams are sure-fire comedy, and this page combined them both! Fucked-up country, I always said.
      That's a long way to getting where I'm getting. Splutstianity and IslYam were developed exactly that far. Maybe if I'd gone a little further with the concept, I could've come up with the Church of the Giant Fork:

I know -- and when I say "know," I mean God told me -- that the First Implement, the That Than Which There Is No Thater, was a transcendentally large but utterly invisible Giant Fork. As it says in the book of Gemnisis, Chapter 5, verse 3: "And lo ye looketh up in the sky, and ye do not see a Giant Fork, do ye? For that is proof that it is there, because thou art but man unless thou art a woman, and you have foul little weasely eyes that can't see nothing."

      New comments link below, which will have I title that I'll pull out of my head or ass sometime in the next few minutes (great, another thing to title every month!). The last gasp of Testing 1-2-3-4 is here, wherein our new playmate M3 has dirty thoughts about the "100 things for Xtian teens to do without having sex" list.

1/3

      Kill Kill wanted to go "out" into the condo common hallway last night. A while later, Byron followed her. After a bit, she came back in, and eventually so did he. After 15 minutes of them inside, I shut the door. This was at 1:30AM.
      I went to bed at 3. As always, Byron slept the whole night with me. As usual, Killsy slept by herself. I got up at 11:15. As always, Byron followed me around. Unusually, KK did not. After a while, this became odd enough that I started looking for her. She was not to be found. "You don't think..." I thought, and opened the front door a cat's width. She came in, and quick. She'd been locked out all night.
      Why, in that 90 minute overlap before bed, she didn't meow or scratch the door I don't know. It's warm and carpeted out there and after 4.5 years, maybe she just thinks that's its hers. I gave her Friskies Turkey in Gravy, her favorite wet food, as she was surely hungry. I hoped that she hadn't peed in the hallway. "I guess you won't want to go out again any time soon!" I said between apologies. At least the neighbors across the hall were still in Slovakia, so there was no one on our floor to scare this scarediest of cats while she was out.
      I opened the door all the way to go to work, and outside the neighhbors' door were 2 very large boxes. They'd returned this morning, and brought some big shit with them. I paused and wondered why Killsy seemed so calm after that experience, when she happily sauntered out into the hallway, ready for another day locked outside...
      Not so scaredy after all.

1/4

      Phase One of the saving of the Geocities pages began today when I opened up the old cokputer. Ha ha! Of course I meant to type computer, but that seems like an apropos typo, so I'll leave it.
      It failed after Byron spent too much time hitting the "power" key. There was one last old, shaky RAM stick in there, of the same type that caused our last crash. So Plan A was to pull it out, rearrange the rest of the sticks, and see if Pookie booted.
      I had help, of course. A beautiful white supervised, while another one who wasn't afraid to get his paws dirty leant a claw. After a surprisingly arduous unplugging of the Emergency Computer (I needed a flashlight and a nailclipper to worm the phone plugs from the emergency computer, henceforth to be referred to as EMERGACOMP!! with 2 exclamation points), I got Pookie all hooked up and rarin' to go. To go BEEEP just like it did the last time the memory went stinky.
      Aha, foul Pookie! You strumpet of the chips, woe betide thee! I have a Plan B, Pentium harlot! I'll just rend the very RAM from your gullet, and (insert Shakespearian-sounding verb here) it into EMERGACOMP!!'s very gullet! Oh, wait, I used gullet already. Into EMERGACOMP!!'s FARDELS! And don't think that I'm bearing those fardels, either!
      FORSOOTH! Which is Elizabethian for "Oh, shit!" EMERGACOMP!! has only one screw, and it's holding in the fan. Every other screw is a...Well, they're screwless. They're not Phillips head or regular head or even Linda Lovelace, they're some kind of rivet. I can't implant the memory when there's no way to open the case. No way short of a sledgehammer, anyway.
      Okay, okay, okay....We've got a Plan C, right? Plan C, Plan C--Ah yes! That involves the raising of the dead to attack their capitols! No, wait, that was our Plan 9. We could just put the memory sticks back into Pookie and...um. Well, yes, dammit! That's Plan C!
      The white-furred supervisor had decided to take her sleep break at this point, but the grey Teamster was still eager. He got hands on! Okay, he got teeth on. While I was futzing with things, he stuck his head into Pookie's guts and began chewing the wiring. GAH! Byron, NO! Good boy, go over here and STAY over here, thank you. I pushed in the RAM, plugged the absolute minimum in (power and moniter) and crossed my fingers.
      "IT LIVES!"
      Either it was Byron's chewing of the wires that made it work this time, or he was also crossing his fingers. That would be pretty powerful, given the amount of fingers.
      And so here we are, back on Pookie for the first time since Halloween. It still won't play any media files besides Shockwave or Quicktime, and now I need to buy another RAM stick to replace the fried one. But what I've got should be sufficient for moving the Geocities files. I do miss the lean-mean-computin' machine stylings of EMERGACOMP!! so I may be doing some deleting of ancient, cluttering files on this poor old warhorse.
      "She's a deaf old warhorse with years of hard drives and the power to crack the underworld. He's a lean, mean comp with a sharp focus but little memory. THEY FIGHT CRIME!" Heh.

      When I first heard about this movie, I was intrigued. It sounded like a combination of the old sci-fi pulps of the 30s with the low-budget serials of the 30s, done with modern movie magic. I'd just watched an old MST3K tape, Robot Monster, which had 2 episodes of Commando Cody before it. I was a huge, huge fan of an old PBS series called "Matinee at the Bijou," which was a recreation of the 1930s/40s movie experience, so I got to see a lot of serials from beginning to end. They're hilariously cheap but very exciting, with impossible cliffhangers at the end. There was another movie based on those...something about a Lost Ark...
      They were so cheaply made that, in Commando Cody, the super-evolved technologically-omnipotent Moon Men pause their invasion of Earth to rob banks because they used up all the Moon Money they needed to pay their Moon Minions. The real cheapness was that this bit of plot allowed the producers to stick in some random stock footage of bank robberies and car chases. Ah-hahaha! Now that's cheezy!
      You can view the trailer for the either brilliantly or retardly named (I haven't made up my mind yet) Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. It makes me wet my pants, it does. I'm not sure if that's from anticipation or if my bowels just recognize it as "friend!!" and want to come out and play. Sure, it looks great, but there's so little revealed about the actual movie beyond the effects that it could be the worst thing ever. And, of course, there are no words that can chill any sci-fi movie fan's blood like a producing credit for
      De Laurentiis!!!
      King Kong '76. King Kong Lives. "FLASH! Master of the Universe!!"
      Think I'll stop the pants-wetting now. And start practicing my barfing.

1/5

      With the first weeks of the Xmas returning season over and school back in session, today was the day for me to use my Best Buy gift card and replace the scanner. Maybe pick up a few other needed items, as long as I was in the Mall Area. My plans were rained on yesterday, when I saw that nothing I wanted was on sale in the online fliers, and literally, also, as freezing rain was supposed to cover Connecticut. I spend enough time being forced to drive in that shit because of work, so I don't volunteer to do it. But it was supposed to end at dawn, and I sure don't get up at dawn. I don't get up before noon on days off. There'd be plenty of not-evil weather by the time I roused myself from slumber.
      Rouse I did, then thought, "Just a bit longer." A bit longer meant I didn't get really aroused until 2PM. Wait, not "really aroused," that didn't come out right. I got out of bed and the freezing rain had only just ended. Good thing I'd slept in, as it wouldn't have been safe to drive. I downgraded my plans to merely driving 2 miles to the grocery store.
      A tractor trailer drove into a defunct plaza, one that shouldn't be getting deliveries. I turned for 2 seconds to get a view of its logo, then turned my attention back to the road when I couldn't make it out. And there was a monstrous luxury car heading towards me in my lane, ready for a head-on collision at our combined speed of about 80MPH.
      Some sort of astonished expletive left my lips as I hit the brakes and swerved into the (fortunately empty) left lane. This idiot--given the choice of vehicle, I don't think I'm guessing wrong by theorizing that he was an Old Man In A Hat--didn't want to wait the literal one second it would take me to get by him, with the nearest car behind me a quarter-mile away. If he'd slammed into me, my airbags would've deployed. And the force of the crash would've pivoted me into 2 lanes of oncoming heavy traffic. I would've been hit multiple times on the driver's side door, where I don't have airbags. It would've been a ten car pileup. Airbags wouldn't have mattered, and I wouldn't be typing this. But that fucking Old Man In A Hat would still have saved that single second!
      My first rule of driving has always been: "Never perform any maneuver that assumes that another driver will hit the brakes." My second is, "Just because the only person who'd cut in front of you would have to be the world's biggest retard doesn't mean the world's biggest retard isn't on the road with you right now." Words to live by. And I really, really mean "live by."
      Good thing I wasn't driving in that dangerous freezing rain!
      My first stop was K Mart for cheap work jeans. As I walked in, I saw a guy with a basket looking at the customer service desk and reaching for the out door. "Is he shoplifting?" I thought just before he ran out into a waiting car. I walked over, then walked back into the store and announced "6449, CT" as his license plate, then went on my way. My, but we've had our share of excitement the last 5 minutes. "It was that same guy as last time!" cried an employee. "Last time" turned out be yesterday. Niiice security system, K Mart.
      Then I went grocery shopping at Stop & Shop. They were under invasion by robotic polar bears from Dimension Z, but they were only eating people wearing Nike logos. After avoiding the Martian Tripods in the parking lot, I made it home with no more than 3 toes eaten by the Gerbuglian Weasel-Dogs, and finished the laundry after exorcising the Undead Wraith in the dryer. Oh, there were zombie cannibals too, but, you know. It's January, and those things are everywhere. Hey! Kill Kill, Byron! Are you gonna get that giant mutated Nazi cockroach devouring the Lay-Z-Boy, or do I have to do it? Again?

      The Bush in 30 Seconds finalists are up. I only voted on one of the ones to become a finalist, "Wake Up America," before I quit looking. C'mon, 1513 entries? It would take days to download and watch them all, and I watched enough utter stinkers to lose interest really quickly. MoveOn should've done some seperating of the wheat from the chaff and narrowed it down to, say, 150. But apparently they never even looked at all of them themselves, as the inevitable Godwin's Law ads made it, two ads that compared Dear Leader to the Fuhrer. Note that those ads are archived on the Republican Party's site. "This is the worst and most vile form of political hate speech," said Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie, while gleefully saving them for repeated viewings. Yep, when the State of the Union address comes, every single Wrong Winger will babble about those Hitler ads, until the average Ameriduhian doofus just assumes that the ad MoveOn does show is a Hitler one.
      I don't know which is the "best" (ie, the one that gets its message across to the average Ameriduhian doofus who doesn't care about anything that matters anyway), but I think that the funniest is "Hood Robbin'": Big version, small version. But you should check them all out. There's only 15 this time around.

      "Political hate speech"? What is that? Where did it come from? It's just a thing that the administration throws out to stifle any questioning of their policies and motives, their endless lies and failures. A while back, I saw Atrios had a link to a video from a Bush press conference (sorry, I don't know where this clip actually is). A reporter--if that is the correct word, although "lapdog" seems more appropriate--posed Dear Leader a "question" about Howard Dean's asking whether or not the administration had prior knowledge of 9/11 (and they did; even they admit it): "Is this Political Hate Speech?" The "joke" was that Dear Leader basically spent the next 30 seconds thinking on his feet and saying "Um...DUHHH...umm...DUHHH..."
      Sorry, but the real joke is what a joke our corporate-owned media has become. Kim Il Sung of North Korea would get a question like that. "Dear Leader, should the traitorous dog Dean be slowly, painfully hung for insulting your glorious rule, or should he be mercifully shot and fed to the pigs?"
      What You Can't Say, a brilliant (if long) essay on just that phenomenon:

In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force.

The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that.

We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them. Many come from the left, including the startlingly general "inappropriate", but the most recent comes from the right: "divisive", which the current administration uses to silence opponents on almost any topic.

In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's false, we should start paying attention.

      Another long but excellent article: The Empire Strikes Out.

      Phew! Enough long and heavy. Here's a little bon bon: 2004, The Year In Review.

1/6

      Well, I have nothing tonight. Unless you count getting a wheresgeorge.com bill, and finding this comment after entering it: "the bank kinda wrinkley kinda crisp." Yep. Wrinkely, crispy bank. Like Alan Greenspan, if you set him on fire.
      But for some reason I thought of a really stupid thing I did once, so I guess that it'll have to do.
      I got worried and patted my left pants pocket--"Oh my God! My KEYS are missing! I must've left them at the store I just left! I'd better turn the car around and drive back there! Oh wait...umm..."
      Yeah, they were in the ignition.
      NOTE: This site neither encourages nor condones setting Alan Greenspan on fire. However, if a series named "Jackass: The Fed" ever appears on MTV, they stole the idea from me.

      Okay, here's a bit more. There's some fun in the Comments, as well as a request to declare where you're from.

1/7

      That "where y'all from" question was more popular than I thought, and also less. A lot of people I didn't expect to respond did, and a few I thought for sure would didn't. But not everybody comes here every day, and not everybody would want to comment..
      Hey, canary, Roger--Lilly Joe is from Sacramento, too! Weird, that this one city on the opposite coast would have as many readers as I do in CT. And 2 of those actually know me in real life.

      I got some hate mail! Here it is, in its entirety:

You're a dumbass.

1/8

      More "Bush in 30 Seconds" ads, and they're more Best Ofs. And not a Hitler in sight!

1/9

      Yes, pickin's have been lean here over the last few days. But at least last night I had an excuse: The regular alternate-Thursday phone call with Jessica had been disrupted by all of this year's holidays falling on Thursdays, so we spent a long time chatting last night.
      Due to a comp day from Xmas week, I have tomorrow off. By a coincidence, Jessie's down in CT! So we're planning on doing the Xmas Xchange of gifts, then going out to dinner somewhere. She says my gifts are potential InExObs. Since she contributed several to that old thing, maybe you should look forward to my gifts, too.
      After I filled her in on the "Trauma for the Whole Family!" that was Byron's neutering, she related to me what a co-worker had told her that same day.
      She'd adopted a kitten from the shelter and named her "Noli." Noli had been to the vet 3 times for her shots, but now she was 6 months old and it was time to be spayed. Yesterday, a few days before the appointment, her young son came running up to her in a panic. "Noli's got a CRAYON stuck all the way up her BUTT!"
      Our family dog used to devour the Crayola 64 and shit Technicolor, Byron's eaten some strange stuff, and let's not even recap the "Poop String" phase of Kill Kill's career, so I guess that it's not impossible. Her son said, "Only the tip of the crayon's showing! And it's PINK!" She ran over and picked up Noli, who seemed to be very happy for a kitten with a crayon jammed up her ass, and discovered:
      It was not a crayon.
      Noli was in heat.
      Noli was not a girl.
      Again--it was not the tip of a pink crayon that was sticking up so hard...
      After Jessica stopped laughing, she asked, "Didn't you notice that Noli had balls?" "Well, I saw something down there," said co-worker, "But I've never had a cat before. I just thought that the girls had really large vaginal lips."
      The really amusing (or frightening) thing is that Noli had been to the vet 3 times and they didn't catch "her" gender. The co-worker switched the spaying appointment to a neutering.
      I wonder what name Crayola would give to a crayon the color of a cat-weiner. They've already used "Periwinkle."

1/11

      Yesterday Jessica came over. She was very happy to see Byron again, and amazed at how big he is. He still looks small to me, but when Kill Kill was his age, she weighed 2.5 pounds less than he does now. If he maintains that ratio, we're looking at a 15-17 pound lap cat. Oh, me achin' lap!
      She was less enthused when she held him, and the World's Friendliest Cat meowed and writhed to get away. She'd stayed overnight at a friend's house, who has 2 cats and a dog, and their hair was all over her. I don't think it was anything personal.
      We exchanged gifts. Two of mine are better shown than explained, and maybe tomorrow we'll have a working scanner. I also got some cat toys and a cat trivia book of the type you find in the grocery checkout lane. Did you know that the cat door was invented by Sir Isaac Newton? Or that cats have 5 toes on their front feet? That was a shocker to me--despite being 2/3s the size of Killsy, Byron's feet are easily twice the size of hers, with both of them having 5 toes. His front toes themselves are plain huge, a bit splayed and with a thumb.
      Jessie's daughter got a gift certificate (a tradition ever since I gave her a Toys R Us gift card, and she used it to buy a dress at Kids R Us. She kept proudly referring to it as "The dress I bought with my credit card," which is pretty dang precious coming from a 5-year-old). Her husband got the (re)gift of my dupe copy of Scalzi's Book of the Dumb, which is right up his alley. Jess got a "Jem and the Holograms" themed clock and 2 massive blocks of Panuche, a type of peanut butter/walnut fudge that the local confectionary Munson's makes fresh. Taped to each box was a little chocolate in a cat-themed wrapping--one was white, one was grey, of course. She also got that dopey ChapStik "Santa Photo-Frame Tree Ornament" thing I mentioned a while back, as she's a ChapStik junkie. I finally figured out why the photo frame is inbetween Santa's legs: Put your family portrait in there, and they truly are your family jewels!
      We played with Byron and his new toys for a while (Killsy stayed in bed). Both were of the thing-on-a-stick variety, and he loved one far more than the other--the one with the most color and moving dangly bits. That's not surprising, as most of his sensory input is from his eyes. I wonder why it took me so long to figure out that he was deaf; just watching how he follows things makes it obvious in retrospect.
      So we went to the chainstraunt Bennigan's. I was surprised to hear someone call my name. It was the sister-in-law of one of my old bosses, who herself was my boss 20 years ago at a gas station, and that's all there is to that particular anecdote. Jess had baked potato soup and a salad, I had a big steak and boy do I wish I hadn't. If you don't eat something like red meat for a few years, it can cause havoc to your guts the next day.
      After I got home, I discovered that Byron had already destroyed his new toy. On the other hand, I'm just typing filler because I don't like going more than a day without posting and I'm sorry that you're reading this. Good night!

1/12

      Sorry about that lame post yesterday, but I really kept feeling crappier. Ever get food poisoning? You wake up the next day with what seems like the flu, and you're puzzled where it came from. You felt fine yesterday! Then you mentally backtrack until you think about that one entree and your whole body convulses and your brain says in a shiver, "Yeah, that would be it." I was like that all night and into today thinking about that shiver steak. It wasn't food poisoning, it was just me eating a massive plank of dead cow when my usual beef intake is measured in pizza-topping quantities. Once your body gets used to not eating a certain type of food, it doesn't like being bombarded with it.
      I can eat a Roy Rogers bacon cheeseburger every couple of months and be fine. But the last time I had a Wendy's bacon cheeseburger I really felt icky, and it was one of those 99 cent miniburgers. A question of quality, I guess. I'd even made sure to tell them not to put their default condiment on there, mayonaisse. Mayo on a burger? Who eats that? Of course, McDead's and Burger Thing have as their defaults what I call "catchtard," where they combine catchup with mustard and splat it onto their fatburgers. Two tastes that might taste great alone, combined into a culinary car crash. It's like asking for a coffee and finding that they'd replaced the cream and sugar with Coca Cola.
      I went to bed leaving 12 hours for sleep and slept maybe 7. I woke up around 4AM and didn't fall back asleep until about 9. It took so long to fall asleep that I had the worst type of dream, the "dream where you can't fall asleep." You never wake up refreshed from one of those.
      But I had things to do, and this was to be the only decent day of this week. Or last week, for that matter. Today was 30 degrees warmer than yesterday! That prly sounds like I broke out the shorts and the SPF25, but it was 5 yesterday. It snowed a few inches today, too, but this was stll the best weather we'll see.
      I went to Best Buy to spend my Xmas cash on a scanner. I settled on a Lexmark scanner/printer/copier/fax, since I don't have any of those. I realized that, since it didn't cost much more than just a scanner or printer alone, it might do 4 jobs half-assed rather than one right. But it had to be better than the ones I own that do nothing. My last printer was a refurbished model that only cost $9.99 after rebate! It worked okay until, as happens to all printers, a sheet of paper got stuck inside it. That's when I discovered why it was so cheap--there's no way to open it up and get the paper out. No way short of a fire axe, anyway. My new scanner/printer/Belgian waffle maker/Estes rocket launcher also had a mail-in rebate. A fake one, a $20 Best Buy gift card. That's not a rebate, that just makes me have to go buy more stuff. It wasn't until I got home that I realized that the old one was a Lexmark, too...
      Demonstrating my rarified sense of high culture, I bought some DVDs. Pee Wee's Big Adventure was one (funniest line of dialogue in history: "Paging Mister Herman!"). The others were a pair of $5.99 2-disc budget DVDs, one of the Fleischer Superman cartoons of the 1940s, and the other of Popeye. These were originally sold as individual discs, and the 2-packs were taped back-to-back so that the contents couldn't be read. They looked to be a disc of classic Fleischer Popeyes, and a disc of not-at-all-classic Paramount toons. You know, the ones where Bluto steals Olive from Popeye and humiliates him until the spinach is eaten and he gets the beatin'? Yeah, their plots make Scooby Doo look like Memento.
      I went to BIG!Lots and Stop & Shop for some essentials. The supermarket was damn packed for a Monday afternoon, and the bagger wondered aloud about it. "It's supposed to snow tomorrow," said the cashier. Huh? It snowed today! Were these people here yesterday too, panic-buying their damn French toast? I always assumed that it has to be the same people who do this, thinking that it was only because they stockpiled on milk and eggs that they survived 3 inches of snow without eating the pets. The ways of the Hu-Man are mysterious indeed.
      At home I opened up the DVDs to see what was on them. I was correct about the Popeyes. But the Fleischers were the Fleischer classics, the 3 2-reelers with backgrounds that are 3-D. Literally, as they built revolving sets and filmed them. I was particularly happy to see that one of them was the only one I've never seen. I was less pleased to discover that, despite the cover claims that these were digitally remastered, they were on Good Times Video. As I used to say back in my days in music/video stores, "Good Times means bad videos."
      I followed all the instructions for setting up the scanner/printer/George Foreman grill/Venus butterfly right up to "Connect USB cable." Not included, of course. Good thing that there's a Staples 3 miles up the road. Cost of cable: the same as the Best Buy gift card I didn't have yet. Why couldn't they just have kept the card and given me the cable?
      Well, it works, but I'm not too impressed. It seems to worsen existing defects when it scans. Maybe this is because I wasn't using the editing software it came with, which I'll check next. Judge for yourself: here's the pictures of Byron and some of this page's dramatis personae, as well as a pair of Xmas gifts from Jessica.
      I was going to try pursuing the 2 projects I needed a scanner for, namely posting both issues of "The World's Worst Comics," and making a summary of the 2 issues of "Super Green Beret." Unfortunately, after much searching, I've only found issue 1 of the former, and issue 2 of the latter. They're not in the logical places for them to be, which means that they're in illogical places. That means that I'll probably find them only when I'm not looking for them. (As proof of that, I found a long-lost part of my white cat tchotke collection, the carved Tagua nut. I'd ransacked that same area repeatedly, and only found it today by not looking for it. It's been gone about 9 months.) Since the missing Tod Holton issue is the same one featured in the missing WWC issue (that's where I first heard of it, in fact), they're undoubtedly together. Somewhere.

      Via By The Way, the winners of the 2003 Wacky Warning Labels.

Via the Hitch ML, this is so wrong, but for all the right reasons: the trailer to Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ redone as if it were for Kill Bill.

      Well, I'm off to make dinner and watch some DVDs. I'm not sure which DVDs, but I sure as hell know what dinner's not going to be.

1/13

      Well, I was going to write something here, but then I got me the fuuny idea in my head-parts to check up on Gone and Forgotten, the comic-book-making-fun-of-page that hasn't updated since a year ago. After 9 or so months of inactivity (or longer; I stopped looking after October), there's stuff galore! C'mon, what kid didn't dream about a team-up between Superman and...ummm...okay, team-up with the Quik Bunny, can't say that was on my list.

1/14

      Shit. You know, here I am, trying to type a few words about the DVDs I bought Monday, and for the second day in a row something comes up on the web and my priorities shift.
      My favoritest net writer, John Scalzi writes:

"Perrin seems additionally shocked that James [Lileks]' observations are off-the-cuff sorts of things, without footnote or journalistic kow-tows to impartiality -- indeed, it's almost as if they were written, you know, late at night or something. In short, Perrin's huge news flash seems to be that James Lileks is writing like a blogger. On his blog, no less!"

      Wow, what could be wrong in thinking that the Nazis were superior to us puny people of today! Why--NOTHING, of course! It was on a personal web page!!!
      Yeah, okay, Nazi saucers, Ha Ha. What type of loon would actually believe that shit? Only a zillion or two.

      For a lighter change of pace, Abbie the Cat Has a Blog. Yeah, it's a "blog" "written" by a "cat." I had the same reaction, too--how twee will this be? But it's all in the details. It's great, although it updates verrry sloowllly. But quality is always better than quantity, eh? (Even if you haven't figured that out by reading my droolings) It's best to go to the start and read from there. Backwards from the bottom. Damn blog archiving standard model!
      (Via Space Waitress about 400 days ago)

1/15

      I checked my hit counter as always. What?! That many? The most EVAR? How is this possibl--
      Oh. Yes, there's that possibility.
      Yep, the referrer said Scalzi, Scalzi, Scalzi. Yeah, he linked to me in his post from yesterday.
      Well, I haven't (yet) gotten any hate mail over it (Note to new readers: "You're a dumbass" is the default for that). I guess either people decided I wasn't worth the bother or figured out that there was a lot of jovial sarcasm in my post. One thing that I wasn't being sarcastic about was that he really is my favorite web writer. Like Lileks with his head out of his ass, even if I've bought both of their books and have spread them around as gifts.
      I assume that he got enough hits from this popsicle stand yesterday to get his attention, as I can't believe he'd actually read it otherwise. But, sheez, ain't that just like my luck? The one time I complain is the one time he hears (a phenomenom that he'd written about a day earlier) . My fave writer finds out about me, and finds that I said he be the biggest, most dumbiest winky-dink ever to be a stupid poopy-head EVAR. It instantly reminded me of nothing else besides the Strange but True Story of my Dawn Wells Page.

      Know what's fun? Having your car's engine not turn over, and standing in a 25 below zero windchill trying to jumpstart it!
      Wait, wait--Hell. Not "fun," but "a 5-minute descent into hell." My coworkers jumped me (with baseball bats! We don't get along all that well!) and I was on my merry way. Wait, wait--"merry"? The damn battery had all this crust on the...electrical...diode-y thing (my knowledge of cars is largely limited to "the make-go thing is under the hood"). There ain't that much crust in a Wonder Bread factory. And I was so hoping that it would grow like a coral reef, and colorful fishies would make their homes in my carburetor.
      If I can make it through tomorrow, I'm okay. Tomorrow's only going to have 45 below windchill, while Saturday will be a positively balmy 30 above. Hopefully, if I start the car up once every hour after sunset, it should not become dead. It should be okay tonight, as it's in a garage that's built into the side of a hill. The recently overfixed garage door is a problem, as the new spring is so--ahh, I'd say "springy" might be the word--that high winds make it open by itself. I needed something to weigh the door down, as it doesn't lock. Given the nature of this household and its furnishings, naturally it was my 1950s Nadco VariSpeed Belt Massager. You know, that "exercise machine" that one stood on, wrapped a big belt around one's ponderous girth/big fat ass, and then it yanked one back and forth vibraciously. (They turned up in a few later Looney Tunes, and also DEVO's "Jocko Homo" video, where some slob uses one while attempting to drink a milkshake) Believe me, it'll hold the door down. People would've got a lot more exercise out of the thing if they'd just dragged it around their garages.

      Not to keep HAARPing on the weather (GEDDIT? Or is your tinfoil hat too tight?), but the storm windows are shut, the shades over them are drawn, the heat is on (this I'm sure of because I keep sticking my fingers in the vents asking the cats "Is the heat on? Does it feel like the heat's on to you?", and then I say "Well, you're lucky! You're a cat and have a fur coat on!" (to which the cats no doubt roll their eyes and think "Yeah, ha ha, never heard THAT one before"), then I pet the cats and go "HEY! Cold fur! You're supposed to feel warm!" and then I go stick my fingers in the vents again and now I'm here, with my fleece zipped up over my chin, wearing fingerless gloves so that I can type, and wearing a HAT.
      I'M WEARING A HAT--IN THE HOUSE!
      Please use thePayPal link in the sidebar to buy me some REASONABLE CLIMATE.
      (Note: The cats are getting weirded out by the hat-wearing. Please--PayPal me some climate. Will no one think of the cats?)
      PS They say they also want hot chocolate kibble. Hot tuna will do.

1/16

      There's a Salvation Army near work, and it's one of the bigger ones. Mostly clothes, of course, which I have no interest in, despite the fact that I wear them daily. I don't know how fruitful it'll be as far as finds, as it's a few miles from a college. Some young self-ironic hipsters were there when I arrived, and a second contigent arrived as I left (college kids tend to travel by the carload, as the car-to-student ratio tends to be very low). One wanted to buy an old Tony Little exercise tape because "He has a mullet!" Mullet-mocking is so last millenium, girl. Get with the curve! Damn whippersnappers! I invented self-ironic SalvArmy hipsterism 20 years ago, when it was called "buying weird crap"! These kids today, with their short hair and their quiet music! Getting drunk on their microbrews--WHAT'S WRONG WITH ACID?! It was good enough for MY generation!
      I grabbed a few bits of ephemera (ie, "weird crap") right off. One was a white ceramic Welcome Cat, apparently designed for cut flowers. It's got a reservoir and a hole in the upright paw. Another was "The Big Chief's Cigars," which I guess is a ceramic cigar holder with a weirdly-stereotyped Indian with a cigar as a figurehead. No readable identifying marks with which to date it. I passed by a 1950s souvenir wooden platter from Jamaica. Given every Jamaican I've ever met, I was surprised to learn something from the platter: Everyone is Jamaica is white! Doing the Limbo, going to market, every little scene besides smoking a spliff while playing a mean Reggae riff, and as cracker as a visit to Saltine Town. A bit further I came across its alternate universe: a painting of Jesus as a black man. Why, everyone knows that fair-skinned, brown-haired, blue-eyed men made up the entire male demographic of the first century Jews! Oh, sure, I suppose that Jesus would've really had olive skin, dark eyes, and black curly hair if he lived in Judea in the year zero-plus! Jesus ain't no Ay-rab!
      Actually, the oddest thing about the painting was that Jesus was wearing a necklace of bear claws. Y'know, I've read the Bible, and although that was a long time ago, I really think that Jesus' bear claw necklace would've stuck in my memory.

''Born in a manger crib in Galilee,
Sweetest land in the home of the free,
Raised near no woods cause this was the Dead Sea,
He kilt him a bear back there in 3AD.
Jesus, Jesus Crockett, king of the wild frontier!''

      Well, off to the living room with a brand new grocery bag. Memo to self: Leaving grocery bag full of old magazines for recycling is a good idea, so long as you leave it IN the recycling bin. And not where little grey kitten embodiments of Satan can rip it open and spread a year's worth of magazines all over the floor. Remind me to tell you you how he destroyed a DVD over the weekend...

1/17

      As the deadline for removing the content from my lost-passwords Geocities sites looms ever closer, I decided to start with the one that would be both the easiest to fix and the one that needed it most. The Space Ghost Daily Planner had a busted link in the middle that Snard had pointed out to me years ago. Unfortunately, he didn't notice it before Kill Kill came to live here. She kittenishly threw the paper which held the passwords for the various sites into the trash without me noticing. I could see from the source code what the problem was: somehow, a < p > tag had embedded itself in the link. Weird, as I'd checked to make sure every link worked before it went live, and Snard didn't spot the problem until the page had been up for many months. But without the password, it wasn't getting fixed.
      Today I was copying the source codes for the pages and was amazed to discover that 8 of the 12 links to the next month didn't work, and neither did half of the links back to the first page. The hell? Even I'm not that sloppy. They all had links that looked like < a href="June" > < /a > June < /a >. It's pretty obvious why those links didn't work.
      But every Geo page source begins and ends with < !-- text below generated by server. PLEASE REMOVE -- >. Maybe over the years they just added useless garbage to my code?
      But I fixed everything up nice'n'purty and the Space Ghost Daily Planner is up and running again. It's very funny, even if you've never seen Space Ghost: Coast to Coast. (Note: All typos are lovingly transcribed from the original. I say that as there's a lot)
      I went to my main Geo site to update the link and found that...the SGDP was already there?! Then why did I link to another Geo site--Hey, where's all the REST of my files?!
      Apparently, I have two sites, one under the name thoughtviper and another called thoughtviper.geo, with passwords that were the same. So the stuff that I need to transfer has been reduced to exactly 2 files. One's a big and complicated Jen White MySTing, the other just a text file that went down with a site that's been dead for 2 years.
      I felt pretty good about this news. Good and lazy! There's that much less that I need to move!
      Unless...how much code has Geo's pop-ups corrupted over the years? Now I have to go click through EVERYTHING to make sure that they actually work...GROAN. I just checked one page of the SGDP, and the code somehow got italics changed to unordered list tags.
      Ahh, but to go back in time and just buy the gourddamn thoughtviper.com domain and put everything here.

      Briefly, here's the long-awaited though prly not very anticipated review of the DVDs I bought Monday!
      I prly wouldn't have bought the ones made by GoodTimes if I'd known that they were made by GoodTimes. Their little niche market in the VCR years was to take a crappy print of a public domain movie and make a crappy transfer with a GoodTimes bug in the corner. Copyright laws are so very weird that putting that bug on it meant that they could copyright a public domain movie as theirs, because theirs was the only one with "GOODTIMES" stamped in the corner...They were free to steal someone else's work, then claim ownership because, hey, they had the only print with their name chromakeyed on it. Legal, but really not ethical.
      True to form, a "Digitally Restored Classic Collection" DVD means "public domain piece of shit copy." The lead-in to the Fleischer Popeye disc had an ominous warning about it being "an archival copy." When CDs first started coming out, I learned real quick that "historic recording" meant "no remastering whatsoever! We just slapped a 50 year old LP on and recorded every pop and hiss DIGITALLY!" Same here. It started off with the Popeye version of "Aladdin," and there were film scratches, drop-outs and a print so faded that the cels looked like they were painted with colored mud. There was a scene so dark that it was almost impossible to tell what was going on. No big deal; Popeye was just about to be beheaded, no reason to want to know what's going on when the main character's about to DIE.
      The rest of the toons looked better, so it was very odd that they put the worst first. Maybe they looked "better" because there was no way that they could look worse after that. Maybe they wanted to put as much distance between "Aladdin" and a 1930s newsreel feature about the making of "Aladdin" at the end of the disc. It was in gorgeous shape, and featured scenes from the cartoon. These showed off the brilliant colors and fluid animation of a real print. If this one reel was in such great shape, there must be an intact print of the original. GoodTimes just couldn't be bothered to find one.
      Everyone in the "making of" was dressed in their finest clothes and perfectly coiffed, just like I'm sure they weren't during the Depression and in a Max Fleischer studio. Max was noted for his cheapness, so I really hope that the newsreel was shot during the colder months, and none of his wage-slaves were pit-staining their Sunday best. All of the females wore perfect makeup and were New Dealishly HOTT! which I don't think was a coincidence.
      Max was also known for his ego, and he's seen operating the cel camera like he did it every day down there with the proles. Cause Max did everything!
      I watched one Superman cartoon to check the quality. Much better than the Popeyes. This being GoodTimes, they couldn't be bothered to do even the simple task of putting the toons in order on the disc. Superman's origin comes on track 4. The origin's so breathlessly rushed that you'd think the narrator was trying to finish reading the script while in a burning building.
      The first cartoon shown was like the first of the Popeye disc, the weakest one, "The Arctic Giant." A "Tyrannosaurus Rex" thaws from a glacier and comes to life. It's about as realistically drawn as the love child of Godzilla and Barney, and inexplicably changes size in every frame. Like 50 to 200 feet in difference. It also contains an amazing museum plaque while still frozen--"Active 2,400 BC." T. Rex was around before they built the Pyramids! Even Pat Robertson doesn't claim that!
      Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow had some robots that looked familiar. The briefly glimpsed tentacled ones I was sure were from some Gernsbackian pulp of the 30s. The flapping-winged ones I was sure they just made up for the movie, but the other flying robots, the ones with propellers...Damn, I know I've seen them somewhere! And I had: Fleischer's "The Mechanical Monsters." The de Laurentoids just plain ripped them off, right down to the tiniest bolt. The scene in the trailer where the 3 New York cops point their Tommy guns at an angle and blast away at the mechanical monsters? Straight out of the cartoon. Well, it's public domain, so I guess they can. I guess. And I wouldn't mind seeing a live-action movie in the style of Fleischer's Superman. But is this "inspired by," or is this just sheer paucity of imagination? Gonterman does this kind of shit all the time...

      Hmm? What? GONTERMAN walks among the LIVING again?! It just occured to me that not everyone who comes here reads the comments, so here's a couple of recent links that turned up there:
      Mimi (HOTT! inbetweener gal!) gives us Gonterman's "take" (ie, latest ripoff), this one on "The Hitchhiker's Guide of the Galaxy" by Dogulas Adams. Dogulas--wasn't that the name of the Elf from the Lord of the Ring's pet pooch? Just a few strips, but this is Daveykins, so--OW, head on fire. Note how he lovingly draws himself. Remember those Big-Eyed Starving Waif pictures you could buy through magazine ads in the late 60s? That's his new style.

      Kiru writes a Yamsylvanian folk tale. I've no idea where she came up with the characters' names.

1/19

      From the print version of the Hartford Courant and about half a mile from The Store comes this entry on the police blotter. Can you spot the tiny flaws in this criminal mastermind's Cunning Plan?
      Mastermind decides to smuggle 52 pounds of pot from California to Connecticut by having it mailed to a false address. He decides that the perfect place to make the pickup for his $400K shipment is directly across the street from the police station. In the parking lot of--
      --a Dunkin Donuts.
      Even Chief Wiggum would've caught this guy. Hope you have a better plan for getting your $1.2M in bail!

1/20

      I'm a big science freak in general, and a huge space science freak in particular. I was psyched when Spirit made it safely to the surface of Mars, and I rubbed my temples when it turned out that NASA dropped it where apparently there wasn't ever water. Oh well, there's another shot in a coupla weeks on the opposite side of the angry red planet.
      I've always said that Kennedy shouldn't have promised not that "We'd land a man on the Moon by the end of" the 60s, but that we'd establish a Moon base by the end of the 70s. In the boom economy of the time, that was doable. If we'd done that, Gourd knows where science would be by now.
      So I'm all in favor of Bushbaby's Man on Moon & then Mars thing, right? Course not! We can't even balance the damn budget as it is. This isn't Bush-bashing, either--I've always been mainly against the Shuttle and entirely against the International Space Station. Robots can do this shit a thousand times cheaper than humans can, and do it better. And without the whole "death" thing. When the Mars Observer crashed, were the flags at half-staff? We can always build another machine. Dead people are replaceable, too--but in a different sense, irreplaceable.
      Here's a brief and snarky look at George "Do I get to wear a space suit now?" Bush's space plans.

      Not all of these are funny, and all of them are intentionally stupid. But there's some good laughs in this Something Awful Photoshop contest based on LotR and...cars?

      Probably enough of you read Atrios to make this redundant, but here's a screencap from CNN that's worth a giggle:

1/21

      The Hitch! ML had an Amazon link to a newly published collection of stories by Jacques Futrelle, no one I've ever heard of. He was compared to Sir Conan Doyle, and as an owner of a dog-eared copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes I figured that it was worth a Google.
      No need to buy the book, they're all here. The best of the adventures of Prof. Dr. Dr. Dr. S. F. X. Van Deusen a.k.a "The Thinking Machine" (that's his name, don't wear it out) is said to be The Problem of Cell 13. I figured out less than half of how he got out of a maximum security cell by using...well, basically nothing, but I missed most of them, and even the easy bits that I got never added up to "escape." I had to laugh when I found out how he did it. Not because it was "funny," but because the solutions are right under your nose, if you can paste them together mentally (which you won't!).
      I'm going to go through the rest of the collection a story or so a day. They look to be fun reads, if your idea of fun (like mine) involves smart people thinking their way through strange situations. Which, of course, is basically the life of any smart person.

1/22

      Arch Enemy: A guy tries eating nothing but McDonalds' "food" for a mere 30 days. "Within a few days of beginning his drive-through diet, Spurlock, 33, was vomiting out the window of his car, and doctors who examined him were shocked at how rapidly Spurlock's entire body deteriorated. 'It was really crazy - my body basically fell apart over the course of 30 days.'"
      The article mentions in passing that his girlfriend is a "vegan chef," so that might be a factor in how sick it made him. Your cat would get sick if all you fed him was lettuce, and go blind from the lack of taurine. But it's not a matter of "what your body's used to" when your liver goes toxic like his did. And I repeat: After only 30 days.
      Topic for the Comment Crew: What do you eat? I've got my own weird criteria (such as eating the less intelligent meaty creatures like birds, not eating beef much due to the very real if admittedly goofy-sounding Global Warming threats of the deforestation that their grazing requires and the prodigous amounts of the greenhouse gas methane emitted by cow farts). My daily lunch is a 99 cent Wendy's side salad, with the cherry tomatoes thrown out into the edges of parking lot for the local scampering forest denizens to nibble upon.
      And you?

      The State of the Union address: "Weapons of mass destruction-related program activities? Well, no wonder we couldn't wait for the weapons inspectors to do their job. No wonder hundreds of Americans had to lose their lives. It is just like the Bush administration has said from day one: Saddam was harboring weapons of mass destruction ... -related program activities, and we cannot allow related program activities to fall into the wrong hands."

      That op-ed doesn't make mention of something I started seeing online after the speech, that Dumbya mumbled something about how bad it is when athletes use steroids. The whuh? WTF did that have to do with anything? I thought that it was someone's weird joke until I saw it enough to know that it was real.
      A website that just doesn't get the attention it deserves, Big Picnic, wonders if the SOTU was meant to suck.

      Outlander. Possibly Yamsylvanian, I am to the thinking.

      Y'know, if you'd told me when I was in 6th grade that there was going to be this "computer Interwebby" thing in the future, I wouldn't have believed you. If you told me that it would allow me to use before a potential audience of millions over the whole entire world the phrase "cow farts," I would've said "COOOOL!!!"

1/23

      I thought that yesterday's link, Outlander, was some very weird if simple joke. El wrongo, as the Mexicans always say ! (I'm sure Zefiel will back me up on that) It's a clever joke that's incredibly complicated, at least in the technological sense. Quite clever, really.

      Well, how nice. I've been a supporter of (well, via links to) Big Picnic ever since I discovered it. They added me to their blogroll today! That's the first I've ever had from a page done by someone who didn't already know me personally. Err, by which I mean, had sent me an email after reading the InExObs. (Note to Big Picnickers: Read thou the Tod Holton! Then, thou shalt worship at my altar FOREVER!) (Uh, don't read any of the other ones. They all suck)
      I'm glad that BP exists. Most of my political links are of the kind that cause my levels of anger, bile and blood pressure to rise. It's nice have a coupla like BP and Jesus' General to bring a sardonic smile. Yeah, a SMILE with the BILE!
      If you can think of any others like them, there's apparently a comments link somewhere here.
      Oh, and here's a BP link that fits into the current comments thread, What happens when those special McDonalds' sammitches are retired? GHOSTS!

      I got a spam (in Hotmail, of course, with my address right after billsplumbing) titled "Puutt the 'dean' in Deano." Do the what with the who? Have spammers started using Howard Dean as a subject line?!
      You tell me. Here's the text:

Fill out your wealth with a ])ipl()m/\ call,
1-212-330-7651
Or, to end our promos (within 48 hrs) call 1-801-684-6085
Now we''lll explaain tthe flow of iinformattion thhaat typpically takes pllace whheen two peoplle to communicate by e. Let us suuppose tthatt Alicee,, on heer macchine wwonderland.com, wants to ssennd to Bobb, onn his maachinee dobbs.com. BBoth mmaachhines aree connected to the Internne

      This is going to be 1% as funny to you weirdos who don't live in Connecticut as it is to us who live with our corrupt asshole fat-ass Republican scumbag governor/crook, who's spent the his last term trying to prove his props with Hartford's gangsta community by being a fat-ass Republican thief/dick-for-brains kinda guy. Who's an asshole. But if you have an artitistic bent, you can submit your work to the "National Design Competition for ' Official' Connecticut State Hot Tub and Accessories" contest. (But you'd better first scroll down to the prizes before you make it your life's work)

1/25

      That guy who practically croaked all dead from eating nothing but McDeadly's for 30 days is all over the web now. Here's the website for Supersize Me, his movie. "A film of Epic Portions." It has one bit buried in there that was my main question--What was he eating before the experiment?
      Kitsplut, raised as a vegetarian from childhood, once tried a piece of turkey on Thanksgiving and was sick for 2 days. Conversely, Kevin read a book on vegetarianism and halfway through it decided to become one (I remember him reading it at Sam Goody on break, and regularly stopping to swear "JESUS CHRIST! Listen to this!!" before reading off a particularly evil practice of the dead animal food industry. He too got sick from switching so quickly from one diet to another.
      So what did the Supersize guy before trying McDs? He says he got the idea after eating "Thanksgiving dinner with turkey and all the trimmings." Meaning he was at least a bit of a carnivore before his new diet tried to kill him. Now that's scary!

      Kirk more-or-less recommends Super Mario Rampage, a "one trick pony" of a Flash game. Mario kills Koopas with a shotgun! The site says that it'll add a high score page soon. Damned if I know why! It's the only game that I've ever figured out how to beat after playing for a whole minute. I got a score of 35,000 before I deliberately died. This is notable as I got this score while cleaning out the litter box and then taking a shower. Here's how I'd get the high score:

Use a spare keyboard and power plug and the SBC dial-up connection on EMERGACOMP!!
As I did today, start game. Depress gun elevation slightly. Stick a pencap into the space bar to keep the gun firing.
Let it run until I get the highest score.

      I watched the second of the Fleischer Superman DVDs last night. It was subtitled "Superman vs Nature and War," although "the later ones" would be more accurate. In true Good Times fashion, there was a bit of art on the box from a cartoon on the first DVD (it's of a race of birdmen that live in a cave. As Kiru noted about the Balrog, creatures that live underground always evolve wings). That's another thing that Good Times/Bad Videos was noted for: wildly inaccurate information on the boxes. The Popeye DVD mentions that it includes "2 of the earliest Popeye cartoons known to exist." Umm, all Popeye cartoons still exist. These aren't neolithic cave art, with "Popeye Fights a Mammoth" waiting to be discovered in the depths of a Lauscaux cavern. The cartoons were actually from the height of Fleischer Studio's creativity, so it's like calling "Sgt Pepper" the earliest known recording of the Beatles, or the Boeing 707 as the plane the Wright Brothers built before Kitty Hawk. And one of them is a compilation! So it could only be the earliest if Fleischer had a time-traveling Delorean.
      The cartoons were the best Fleischer ever made; beautifully animated, well-paced, excitingly executed. But they had one flaw: World War II. Lemme tell you one thing: Nothin' says entertainment like DEAD NAZIS! Let's face it, unless you're a total psychopath, Dead Nazis are good eatin'! Republicans call Mrs Clinton "Hitlery," the left points out Herr Ashcroft's Himmlerian tendencies. You scream, I scream, we all scream for DEAD NAZIS! They're our tabula rasa on which we imprint our enemies' faces. Would Raiders of the Lost Ark been as effective if Indy fought Maoists? Red China did/still has a damn evil government, but still. The Nazis weren't just the ultimate manifestation of human evil, they were also darn snappy dressers!
      You can taste the catharsis that 1940s audience must've felt watching Superman sink U-boats and blow up Japanese bases. One effective cartoon was "The 11th Hour." Clark and Lois are imprisoned in Yokohama (if there was a reason why, I missed it), and at 11PM every night, Superman sabotages Japan's war machine. I can imagine the cheering in the theater when this cartoon ran. It was made in 1942, right after Pearl Harbor and when the Good Guys were actually losing the war. But Supes is exactly the wrong hero for this fight. As he's sinking a battleship in the harbor, all I could think about was "Hey, since you're THERE, could you possibly go squeeze Tojo's head like a fucking grape? Then take a second trip to Berlin and rip, oh I don't know, HITLER in half? In a way that'd make him take a year to die?"
      I dunno, maybe all the Kryptonite on Earth landed in Germany and Japan and every officer had a bullet made of it, and there were special detachments of anti-Superman kommandos waiting for him to invade. The comic books of the time lamely stated that "Our boys don't need Superman's help to defeat the Axis menace!" but, y'know, bullshit. Either have him use Himmler's head as a soccer ball or leave him out of it. Maybe a few million dead isn't as important as rescuing Loser Lane. Whoops! Lois Lane! (I'll admit that Lois in the Fleischers is still a conniving bitch, but she really does kick some serious ass for a 1940s girl. She usually only needs rescuing because she's outnumbered or just had a house fall on her) And hey, I know it's from the radio program that predated the cartoons, but Clark, stop saying "This looks a job for Superman!" out loud. It's called a secret identity. And it just gets weird after a while. I don't see a delivery come in and announce "This looks like a job for Bill the Liquor Store Man!" every time I open a case of Jack Daniels. "This looks like a job for Charmin and Bill's wiping hand!" is a thing I don't say on the toilet.
      Another thing that threw me off was the rascism. Okay, I understand it's World War Fucking Two and they ain't gonna be nice to the Japanese (one cartoon was unpleasantly titled "Japoteurs," after the paranoia that saboteurs were running around the country. Which never occured. Sort of like that "imminent second attack!" we heard about for the 2 years after 9/11). But that's kind of expected, given the era, even if apparently the Japs don't have lips (even when their mouths are closed, all you see is teeth. Where did that come from, anyway? It's a caricature of a racial feature that just isn't there in any way in real life. It'd be like, I dunno, caricaturing Scots-Irish like me with doorknobs in our foreheads). What I really didn't like was the cartoon "Jungle Drums." The Nazis establish a base somewhere in Africa from which to command their U-boats around England. Y'okay, making no real sense already. But they do this by convincing the inferior stupid natives to worship them like gods. Chief Nazi expresses disgust at having to be on this assignment, which I guess means having to deal with blacks, although that's not spelled out. And the Nazis' "god clothes" look astonishingly like Klan robes, right down to the pointy heads. But the blacks? Dumb, superstitious, liver-lipped and pin-headed. And also the bad guys! Willingly joining forces with the Nazis, and who try to (groan!) burn Lois alive at the stake. I really don't think that there were any blacks back then that thought the Nazis were the shiznit.
      Now, Batman versus the Nazis, that would've been awesome! And believable as to why the war didn't end the day he went after them. Maybe that's why Captain America was such a popular wartime comic.
      The best cartoon was the last, and in typical Good TImes/We Suck fashion, it was the one in the worst shape. Murky, worn-out print. It involved a giant escaped gorilla at a circus. It had almost no dialogue, just pure visual storytelling. Although it got creepy when Clark joked twice about hoping for a circus fire to liven things up. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, and flicked back to the beginning to see when the cartoon was released: 1943. If you're from CT and at a certain age, you've heard of the Hartford Circus Fire that occured in 1944. 168 people died; horribly, two thirds were children. Everyone who lived in Hartford at the time knew someone who died in or escaped that fire, including my father. I remember it becoming news again 30 years later when Barnum & Bailey tried to put a show on--yes, they waited that long before coming back. Decades later, and there were plenty of people who never wanted them back in Hartford. The circus had waterproofed that tent with gasoline in 1944. The memories, unlike the children, hadn't died.

1/26

      Oh, great. Site's back up. Guess I have no excuse not to post now.
      Dammit!
      When thoughtviper.com goes down, I just check Negaduck's LJ. If her self-created emoticons are down, that means every site on Readyhosting is down. And that means I don't worry.

      So, what did I do today...The laundry! The bills! The grocery shopping! Oh, do stop, my head spins from the excitement!
      Yeah, just a big ol' get-chores-done day. The most exciting part of it was wondering if I'd run out of gas before I'd make it to the gas station (I did, with a whole .36s of a gallon left). Oh, MAN. I just gave away all of the suspense!
      Went to Best Buy with my worst buy, that shitty Lexmark 4-in-none printer/scanner/automatic milker/surface-to-air missile launcher/butter churn/8-track player/garbage disposal/iron lung/box of Crayola 64s/rat trap/bear trap/penis enlarger/ONE MILLLION EMAILADRESSSES FOR OLNY $20 SPAM disc/ACME Re-Integrator Gun/okay this isn't funny anymore.
      I'd given it one last try yesterday, then packed it up when it failed the simplest of scan tests. I didn't pack it as carefully as I usually do (by which I mean anally), as there was a $20 restocking fee. Steep price to pay for a product so bad that it shouldn't've been sold there in the first place. But that was partially my fault--if the store stock's all depleted after Xmas and there's a big bulk display of something, next time I'll ask myself "And why is that?" before I open it up. And at this point, I would've been happy to pay to get rid of it.
      They checked to make sure I'd returned everything it came with. The register warned the cashier to check that I'd returned the printer carts. Huh. I'd forgotten from my days at Lechmere how some people had a side job of buying and then returning printers, keeping and reselling the carts. Then...they just credited my account, no restocking fee applied. Possibly this was because I was not a rude returnee, and indicated that I just wanted a different one. Customer service people have more control over how miserable they can make your experience be. Try niceness first. And stick with it, no matter how much you think you're right. More flies with honey than vinegar, as they say.
      So I bought (with reservations) an HP scanner/scanner/only a scanner. All went smoothly (until I got it home and found that in a sense I had been charged a $20 restocking fee--this one came with a USB cable, which I'd bought for $20 for the Lexmark, and now have no use for). As smoothly as it did when I attempted my next chore, finding out why AAA charged me twice on my renewal. I'd used the "automatic resubscription" option, using my credit card and the mail. I had no idea how this could've happened. As I walked up with my CC statement in hand, the guy said, "Oh, you got double-charged, huh?" I still don't know how it happened, but I guess it happens a lot. Again, easily fixed. Never walk in mad; people treat you better and remove the problem that much quicker. And it's not like I don't need AAA--I called them Saturday when the battery didn't start again, and this time no one had any jumper cables. AAA is cheaper than a battery, if you consider how your battery isn't going to also tow your car or unlock your doors when you leave the keys inside.
      I did a bit of DVD shopping at Best Buy before leaving. I got Kaiju Big Battel for $12.99, which I haven't seen yet. After all these years of wondering what they're really like, I'm kinda pacing myself. It did come with a Dr Cube fridge magnet, so I consider it money well spent already. For $5 the discount section had a Something Weird Video trailer sampler. I love trailers, but SW's is a messy mix of schlock/nudie/crappy monster/softcore porn/gore/garbage/movies that actually combine all of the previous descriptions. With 90 trailers, this might be better as background noise at a party than as something you'd actually watch. These movies are so cheap, and some so tawdry, that it gets tedious after a while. However, you gotta love trailers with lines like "Blaze Starr, famous movie queen, stars as herself in the most amazing film ever screened!" That's from the all-time cinematastic classic, Blaze Starr Goes Nudist. One thinks there's a bit of hyperbole therein. Third most amazing film ever, sure.
      I'm just going to flip randomly through the titles. Can you guess which genre (schlock/nudie/etc) each is from?

Atomic War Bride
Bad Girls Go To Hell
Monster of Camp Sunshine
Confessions of a Psycho Cat (no, it doesn't star Byron)
The Curious Dr Humpp
Dracula the Dirty Old Man
Trader Hornee
Midnight Plowboy (I'm guessing that this is one of the softcore ones. Know what porno movie I would've made in the 80s? "Sexy's Midnight Rutters in Cum On Eileen." Too-rah-loo-rah-YAY!)
One Million AC/DC (ah-hahaha! Touche!)
Fiend of Dope Island
The Hippie Revolt
Bummer!
House on Bare Mountain
The Fat Black Pussycat
Lost Lonely & Vicious
Mantis in Lace (Zorak's dirty secret, his drag queen years!)
Psyched by the 4D Witch
Monsters Crash the Pajama Party
The Beast That Killed Women
Godmonster of Indian Flats
Monster-A-Go-Go
Nude on the Moon
The Pigkeeper's Daughter
The Gore Gore Girls
Night of the Bloody Apes
Bloody Pit of Horror
Blood Feast
Blood Freak
Blood Suckers
Blood Thirst
Please Don't Eat My Mother!
Mondo Balordo
Scare Their Pants Off
The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo & Juliet
Space-Thing
She-Devils On Wheels
Teenage Gang Debs
...and the winner IS:
Wam-Bam-Thank You, Spaceman

"You may be from beyond the Moon,
But to me, you're just a goon!"

(theme song is sung; close-up of teenage girl's hips doing the Twist) Go, you monster, go!
Go, you monster, go! (Monster strangles somebody; back to twistin' hips)
NARRATOR: Go! Go to this theater to see the science fiction picture to end all science-fiction pictures!
Did he or didn't he? (Sewer manhole is opened; geiger counter stuck in it)
Is he a monster or isn't he?
(NASA picture of a nebula) Only his space agency knows for sure! And they won't tell!
(random shots from the movie, mainly twisting girls cutting to guys in biohazrd suits looking bored) When the capsule comes down and the astronaut is gone, everyone is on the go! Including what did come down!
(title card) MONSTER-A-GO-GO!
Here's the picture that gabs the screen and shakes it! The picture that makes you wonder if the Earth is coming to an end right in the theater in front of you!
Never in your life have you seen such a combination of happy, sad, good, bad, rock'em sock'em action! (rock'em action: monster wandering aimlessly)
When you walk out, you'll wonder what you just saw!
Because never has there been a motion picture like this!
(title card) MONSTER-A-GO-GO!
With a genuine 10 foot tall monster to give you the wim-wams!
(title card) MONSTER-A-GO-GO!
With astronauts and space capsules and pretty girls and cosmic radiation and pretty girls and screams and--pretty girls!
There's something for everyone (secretary taking dictation; guy smoking and playing pool--yep, what else could "everyone" want?) in the picture they're all talking about--the picture with GO!
(twistin' hips) MONSTER-A-GO-GO!

1/27

      Right click for "Open in New Window," then come back to this window and keep reading while it loads. You'll possibly be glad you did! "CHEEEZE! It's my life!"

      Do all cats find snow boring, or just mine? You'd think that anyone who stares out the window for hours at birds and chases dustmotes in the sunlight would think that a billion snowflakes would be Greatest Cat Show on Earth.

      I went to work this morning. Eventually. The battery was thisclose to turning over, but even closer to the engine flooding if I kept on trying. I thought that I was safe when it turned over fine yesterday, after sitting in the garage for 2 days in far colder weather than yesterday. If it hadn't started then, I planned on calling AAA (again) and then going to Sears for a Diehard. But it did and I didn't, despite driving right past Sears on my way to Best Buy.
      When AAA jumped me Saturday, the guy told me to "Pour a can of Coke on that battery; it'll clean off the corrosion." I went, "DUHH, okay, George! That Coke will be my new little friend, and will I love it and squeeze it!"
      Different day, different AAA: I'll admit that the battery looked a lot worse in the day than at night--like a cake frosted with Alka-Seltzer--and this time's AAA guy said, "Yeah, get a new one. They're really only good for about 4 years, no matter what brand you buy."
      So's I calls me some Sears, they promise that your battery will be installed in 30 minutes (which it was! I saw my hood get slammed shut after exactly 30 minutes, with a new DieHard inside! It took another 20 minutes before I actually paid and left, but that wasn't their guarantee), so I call work and say I'm going to get a new battery. While feeling like A BIG TARD. Like I couldn't've done this yesterday! I didn't read the writing on the corrosion, so I decided to believe that the Magic Battery Pixies would keep my car running if I bought them a COKE.
      The Sears guy was really friendly and talkative, which would've been better if he didn't simultaneously mumble, talk really fast, babble about Michael Jackosn and "Dippity Dots" bought at Yankee Stadium blah blah blah and have some accent from ...Crimney, I don't know. It was like he was brought up American in a Spanish-speaking household on Mars. In CT, we have a huge Hispanic population and I can figure out even the heaviest accents, but this guy was pure alternate-reality. His last name was "Pagan," so maybe he was speaking Druidic.
      I wandered through the Mall. End of story there, it's a Mall. I looked through the Sears battery assortments (hmm, why buy jumper cables for $20 when you can buy jumpers with a portable battery attached for $30? Both my AAA jumps used these). I squirmed through Wolf Blitzer interrogating Kucinich on the waiting room's CNN. Hey, Wolf--die, couldya? Typically, the thing devolved into Castle Wolfenstein badgering a Democrat about The War, and rephrasing the whole reason as per His Master's orders. "Are the Iraqi people better off NOW than they were UNDER SADDAM?" over and over. Of course, we all know that the answer can't be answered truthfully unless you asked an Iraqi who LIVES IN THE FUCKING COUNTRY, and that the WRONG answer "No" means that you're a TRAITOR and SADDAM SODOMIZER. To his credit, Kucinich kept on his antiwar message, but he was eventually forced to say "That's besides the point, isn't it?" and Wolf looked all confused. I wish that he'd said "And when did the President say that we were invading to make the average Iraqi's life better? When did you say that, Wolf? Would you have supported the war if that was the reason? Are there any other countries that you think that we should invade to improve the resident's lifestyles?"
      But Wolf started back in, pounding home his one and only corporate-assigned talking point, while repeatedly making sneering remarks about how Kucinich surely would drop out of the race soon. Pretending that if he did, that meant that everything he said had no merit.
      The concurrent rise in my blood pressure during this is why I don't watch corporate propaganda "news" shows. They're all show and no news.

      Is it too late to post a link about the State of the Disunity address? The Bush line I heard that made me laugh out loud was “No one can now doubt the word of America.” "He said while lying about everything." Can the Bushites NOT lie? About ANYTHING? Good thing we have a lapdog media too keep the average Ameriduhian from thinking about things like this! Or anything.

      Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense who got the beginning of the Viet Nam War wrong (after being the key guy in keeping WWIII from starting during the Cuban Missile Crisis), knows what he's talking about. And finally, he's talking about Iraq, and how Rumsfeld's doing the same things he did wrong:

"And the reason I feel that is that we're not omniscient," he said. "And we've demonstrated that in Iraq, I think." He pointed to Washington's failure to appreciate the complexities of Iraqi culture, and therefore to anticipate the extended guerrilla war it is now engaged in -- a chief mistake of Vietnam. Without the full involvement of other major nations, he said, such mistakes will always be made.
"And if we can't persuade other nations with comparable values and comparable interests of the merit of our course, we should reconsider the course, and very likely change it. And if we'd followed that rule, we wouldn't have been in Vietnam, because there wasn't one single major ally, not France or Britain or Germany or Japan, that agreed with our course or stood beside us there. And we wouldn't be in Iraq."

      If you get an opportunity to buy that Something Weird comp I mentioned yesterday, do! Be assured that there's gore (which I don't care for), but it's all brief trailers. Most are more amusing than anything. And if you get a chance to buy Kaiju Big Battel, don't. It sucks. Sorry, it's so bad that I can't even work up the enthusiasm to pan it. It's just...bad. Backyard wrestling in monster suits. As boring as it sounds. Despite reading their website since, what, late 97 or early 98, and finding them really entertaining--they aren't. I'll admit that I didn't go all the way through the DVD. But I'm also not planning to.

      I haven't listened to all of Party Fun With Recorders Volume One, so I can't vouch for its quality. I meant to listen to it while I typed this, but I Like Cheese just required so much attention (and extreme laughter) that I'm waiting to check the rest until after I post. Of course, we all like cheese! But here's some kids playing with a tape recorder performing their magnum opus on cheeze. Composed for orchestra with choir, toy piano, talking Mickey Mouse doll with burnt-out voice box, and when that guitar kicks in--No, wait, it's a Gee-Tar. You will either recognize that name from your childhood or it's distinctive sound...or you won't. "Hear that people? The whole world is made out of CHEEZE! Excuse me."

1/28

      Mimi, via the Comments, sends this link to this site compiling old public domain shorts. All of the ones I looked at were great!
      Okay, I looked at only one of them. Is it my fault that she posted it the same day as the annual 101 Worst Moments in Business?

1/29

       The Political Ramifications of the Godzilla Cycle and Related Films. No, really. Very interesting, assuming your areas of interest include kaiju movies and Japanese views of the world. It helps if you've seen any of the Mean Green's movies since Godzilla 85 or later.

      Oh, yeah--I have a scanner that actually works! Here's the front of the handmade Xmas card Lilly sent me:

      I got it instantly. If you need a big hint, think of the gender representation. If you need another hint, half of the answer is hidden in the the Lord of the Rings Dating Manual (which is worth the chuckle anyway: "If you're the only girl among 100 guys you'll still fall for the only one who has a girlfriend").

1/30

      If you didn't get the card from Lilly I showed you yesterday, the solution lies in one word:
      That's my favorite poet, George Gordon, Lord Byron on the left, and Tura Satana on the right, the star of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! And the one word would be "cats."
      Of course, it would've been more accurate if Byron was attacking Tura rather than vice versa.

      A Fark Photoshop contest that combines two of my favorite things, cartoons and blasphemy. Like all of the Fark contests, the entries alternate between "roll your eyes" and "laugh your ass off."

      A funny review of a Kool-Aid Man comic book. It doesn't note that it's drawn by Don DeCarlo in his hyper-distinctive "Archie" style. One blonde girl is given the very "no-10-year-old-was-named-this-in-1987" name of "Betsy." Yes, but where's "Veronisa"?
      By the way...ROAST MY TOAST! Repeatedly!

      Is this just me, or have you users of Google news noticed a weird disconnect between the pictures attached to some of the stories? Like when they feature a story on Dean or Clark and there's a picture of a teenaged girl next to it, and she's eating a snocone and walking a poodle? For instance, the tagline "In the past 48 hours, the United States has received new intelligence that suggests a threat of possible terrorist attacks against the United States using aircraft" imminent second attack, WMD, War on Terrah, Moltar; Blah diddy blah! Zorak; Blah diddy blah blah blah! gets this little jpeg postage stamp of inscrutability:

      What, does the lady see a hijacked plane about to smash through the passenger window, and Daddy doesn't? The actual picture had this helpfully descriptive name:
t.http.3a.2f.2fmsnbcmedia.2emsn.2ecom.2fj.2fmsnbc.2fComponents.2fArt.2fTRAVEL.2f031107.2finsiders.5fsenior.5f148.2evsmall.2ejpg.jpg
      Seniors! Stay insiders! Don't TRAVEL to the mall, no matter how evs it might be! And don't 2fArt, it stinks enough in here!