Friday, July 31, 2015

It's Ibsen's "Ghosts" Meets "Gentle Ben"


Looking at this billboard really depresses me. Still, I know in my heart that if we all just pull together, we can be #1!

Thursday, July 30, 2015

You Can't Die in Dreams. But You'll WISH You Could!

So I subscribe to a couple services that list freelance writing jobs, although "writing" is perhaps too grandiose a term for the tasks involved. So is "job", now that I think of it. Most of the offerings involve brief, boring, and barely compensated labor like proofreading a grad student's overdue thesis, revising a foreign company's product descriptions so they're intelligible to native English speakers, or, most often, cooking up advertorial blog content for some business website to improve its SEO.

But every once in awhile, you hear the faint but melodious plea of a muse:
Hello, I am currently looking for a talanted writer to help me write a book based off a very intense and action packed dream I keep having. Its mainly about clowns and their unstoppable boss who orders a pack of clowns to murder an innocent family (my family) in a beautiful 2 story home set on a golf course overlooking a lake. But things take a turn when i find out who is actually behind the clown masks. If any one is interesred please contact me. Thank you.
Back off, bitches! This one's mine!

Spam as a 2nd Language: The Witch Doctor Edition

After compiling all those quotes to mark the anniversary of Doghouse Riley's passing, I visited his much lamented blog, Bats Left, Throws Right, thinking to rifle through the archives and assuage my blues, when I noticed there was a new comment on the last thing he posted. I immediately clicked through, figuring someone else had dropped by to commemorate the day. Instead, I discovered that noted Las Vegan Segio Collins had materialized, like a latter day Doug Henning, to deliver a prophecy which we ignore at our peril:
My name is Segio Collins from United States Las Vegas, I want to quickly tell the world that there is a real on line spell caster that is powerful and genuine, I was the world’s biggest septic.
Well, there you go. I've seen some pretty impressive transfigurations in the Harry Potter books (woman into cat, mouse into snuffbox, teapot into tortoise), but any spell that can turn a large subterranean tank full of urine and feces into a man capable of spamming the comment threads of deceased blogs is powerful and genuine indeed.
I never believed in magic spells or anything like that, but I was told by a reliable source Doctor Ebakor a great spell caster helping me retrieving back my relationship with my EX girlfriend back when she ended and turned back to me for quite a long time now (3 months ago). 
Three months? Seems like Segio was a little LAX about retrieving his EX.
He performed a spell for me and for 24 hours after the spell had been casted i receive a text from my EX girlfriend saying that she is sorry for what happened and the she needs me back.
"After she texted me for 24 hours straight, however, I realized sex is overrated, and decided to maybe look into league bowling."
I want to recommend Doctor Ebaklor to the world. You can reach and contact him on his private email; Doctorebakorspelltemple@hotmail.com. thank you so much Doctor Ebakor.
Now I'm no septic, but before engaging the good Doctor's services, I'd want to straighten out whether his name was Ebaklor or Ebakor, and get a guarantee he wouldn't use his supernatural powers to insert random "L"s into my name, because there's no way to introduce yourself as "Sclott Clevelngler" without sounding drunk.

Anyway, money is tight, and I've gotten in the habit of comparison shopping, so I Googled Doctor Ebakor, and discovered his satisfied clients are all over the Internet.  Here's just one example out of four thousand results:
Am Mario Charos from Switzerland, i want to share my great testimony to Doctor Ebakor the great spell caster that brought back my Husband within 12 to 16 hours. 
Doctor Ebakor has improved on his time, and is now achieving the kind of fast-acting results usually associated with tiny time capsules.
When i contacted Doctor Ebakor i never taught that this would have been possible but to my greatest surprise after 12 to 16 hours of me contacting Doctor Ebakor my EX boyfriend called me and said that he is ready to make up for lost time and he wants me to forgive him and accept him back as my lover
Well this is awkward, because now Mario's husband and his EX boyfriend have both come crawling back in the same 12 to 16 hours, which isn't going to leave him much time for a refractory period.

I clicked through another search result, and discovered that Segio and Mario got nothing on Marina:
All thanks to Doctor Ebakor for restoring my marriage
My name is Marina Panes and I base in USA... 
Base what? Base jump? Freebase? Ace of Base?
My life is back!!! After 3 years of broken marriage, my husband left me with three kids. I felt like my life was about to end i almost committed suicide, i was emotionally down for a very long time. 
Well suicide is no joking matter, and my first instinct is to urge Marina to get help, but I'm not sure if it's a good idea to clog up our suicide hotlines with fictional witchcraft consumers.
Thanks to the great spell caster called Dr. Ebakor, which i met online. On one faithful day, as I was browsing through the internet, I came across allot of testimonies about this particular spell caster.
Remember the early days of Yelp when it was all spellcaster reviews? (In fact, the name "Yelp" comes from the sound made by users who left bad spellcaster feedback and subsequently got their Voodoo doll jabbed in the ass with a hatpin. Prove me wrong, Snopes!)
Some people testified that he brought their Ex lover back, some testified that he restores womb,cure cancer and other sickness.
To be clear, curing cancer and other sickness is his day job. He only restores wombs in his spare time and frankly, he's no Bob Vila.
Some testified that he can cast a spell to stop divorce and so on.
This is the root of our adversarial legal system: Prosecutor versus defense attorney, divorce lawyer versus witchdoctor.
Dr. Ebakor is really a gifted man and i will not stop publishing him because he is a wonderful man... If you have a problem and you are looking for a real and genuine spell caster to solve all your problems for you. Try Dr. Ebakor anytime and he might be the answer to your problems. 
Well now that your husband has returned it seems like your only really serious problem is punctuation. I don't know if it's worth sacrificing a goat in a graveyard at midnight to correct, but it's something to think about.

But don't imagine for a moment that Doctor Ebakor has a monopoly on the spellcasting game. Next I checked out First30Days.com, Inspiration and Expert Advice for any Change in your Life, where I found a short boilerplate post about how Divorce is hard, and your first month will likely be spent having feelings and stuff.  But the real action was in the comments, as a battle royale broke out between the partisans of various magical Finders of Lost Loves:
Hello to the world i am Leroy..
Word of advice, Leroy: if you don't want people to assume you're a bot, maybe don't introduce yourself with a line that makes you sound like a C++ compiler.
i want to say that Dr Bully the mighty spell caster from India. He is the only spell caster that can help you solve your problem in 48 hours...after passing through a lot of problems in my marriage, i contacted Dr Bully Shrine in Mumbai India and in 48 hours, my wife who we were divorced for 4 years is back to me for ever...
Granted, she's in a variety of different formaldehyde-filled jars, but still...
Dr Bully is highly spiritual and can never disappoint you in any problem. No matter what type of Relationship, Marital, Getting Pregnant, Want a Baby,Court Case and disease you have, he is definitely the best answer for you in 48 hours...
I'm sorry, maybe I'm spoiled by today's modern spellcasting technology, but after the kind of 12 to 16 hour service people routinely get from Doctor Ebakor, 48 hours is excruciating. It's the age of the digital camera phone, baby, and this is like waiting two days to get your snapshots back from the drug store.

However, Dr Bully does seem to offering a wider array of services than his competitors:
(1) If you want your ex back.(2) you need a divorce in your relationship.(3) You want to be promoted in your office.(4) You want women & men to run after you.(5) If you want a child.6) You want to be rich.(7) You want to tie your husband & wife to be yours forever.(8) If you need financial stance.(9) He can make you pregnancy
(10) GET BACK YOUR GAY BOYFRIEND WITHIN 48 HOURS
Full disclosure: I'm currently involved in a lawsuit with Dr Bully because I hired him to GET BACK MY GAY BOYFRIEND, but he made me pregnancy instead. 

Next up was an unsolicited testimonial for dr. trust:
Hi My name is "BEKAR JOE" I was married for 15years with lilian. things started getting ugly and we had fights and arguments almost every time... 
Every time you asked her to call you "BEKAR JOE", I presume.

But it's not just men with crappy marriages who shout their unlikely nicknames at the top of their lungs. There's also the quiet heartbreak of Angela, from Columbia.
I was frustrated and did not know want to do until i saw some testimonies on the internet about people with similar problem and all other kind of problem and how a (spell caster) or (witch doctor) call Metodo Acamu helped them with spells. Me being me, contacted him with the address that was left on the internet 
(Chuckling)  Oh, that is so you.  Or so Raven. One or the other.
and like every (witch doctor) in know in Colombia he asked that i provide the materials needed for the work most of then were only found in India and Somalia i just gave him the money to get them for me because i told him i could not get them he offered to help me with his contact there. 
You know, this whole thing sounded kind of fishy until you got to the part about sending a stranger whose name sounds like an unsolvable anagram a blank check to buy witchcraft supplies from Somalia, but now I'm sold!
It was only after seven days he contacted with news of completed the work and sent me a package am not to disclose through some courier service underground that deliver thing like this. 
I believe it's the same courier that delivered that box to Brad Pitt at the end of Se7en.

Now as tempted as I am by (witch doctor) Metodo Acamu, I find myself coming back to Doctor Ebakor, because he's obviously the most legitimate, peer-reviewed spellcaster in the field.  Encomia to his prowess have also been found on WebMD, in a section devoted to helping children with autism (because they might also someday have EXs who could only be retrieved through the use of Somalian notions and sundries), and on the official website for the Steve Harvey radio show, where things turned into a spellcaster customer catfight!
My names is Alice Owens am from canada i want to use this opportunity to thank Dr guru the great doctor who bring back my husband which makes me very happy today so i could not keep the wonderful work he has done for me so i decide to share it with you all because he is real not like those who eat up my money and never do anything for me
I had someone like that in my life, too; someone who ate up all my money and never did anything for me. It was the vending machine in the break room, and maybe I was expecting too much, I mean we weren't even engaged, but I still felt betrayed when I'd slip those quarters into its slot, and try to do it all sexy like Mickey Rourke feeding strawberries to a blindfolded Kim Basinger in 9½ Weeks and it still wouldn't drop that package of Dolly Madison Zingers.
...until one day i met a good friend of mine that was also in a situation like me but her problem was her ex-boyfriend who she had an unwanted pregnancy for and he refused to take responsibility
I don't want to condone that kind of behavior, but I have to admit, if some guy in brown shorts with a clipboard showed up at my door and said he had an unwanted pregnancy for me, I don't think I'd sign for it either.
i was doubting if this man was the solution,because i have tried so many fake Doctor on the internet but they only eat up my money and never work for me so i contacted this great man and he told me what to do and i deed them all, he told me to wait for just 12hours and that my husband will come crawling on his kneels just for forgiveness so i faithfully deed what this great man asked me to do and for sure after 12hours i heard a knock on the door i went and open the door, in a great surprise i saw him on his kneels and i was speechless, when he saw me, all he did was crying and asking me for forgiveness
Again, I hate to be a septic, but is it possible that Dr. guru didn't use magic, and just hired two guys to break her husband's shins, and dump him on the doorstep?  And some of these stories sound awfully familiar. Like the woman who "never use to believe in spell casting until i met Dr Oga a powerful spell caster." As usual, she had "4 years of Broken marriage" and "almost committed suicide," until she blundered into some Consumer Reports sorcerery reviews:
some testified that he restores womb, cure cancer and other sickness, and so on. 
Yeah, yeah, but as we learned from Doctor Ebakor's Yelp page, that's all par for the witchdoctor course.  Gives us a fresh angle.
I also came across a testimony a woman called Anita, she testified about how his spell made her to be pregnant after so many years of bareness
Well all I can say is, if you spent years in the nude and still couldn't get knocked up, the guys in your neighborhood have unusually high sales resistance.

"Trish Eckles" posted the following (in fact, she felt so strongly about it she posted it twice in a row):
Am sharing this article to the world to know that spell casting is real with the help of Doctor Ebakor. I have been married with my wife for the past 7 years without a child and it got to the point that my mum drove my wife away all because she was not able to bear a child....
It seems a little harsh to drive away your daughter-in-law just because your lesbian daughter can't get her pregnant.
He prepared a returning love spell that brought back my wife and a conceiving spell that made my wife pregnant. 
You call it a "conceiving spell," Doctor Ebakor calls it "crawling into bed with your wife while you're passed out on the living room sofa after an L Word marathon."

And then, finally, there's this Cosmopolitan article, which is ostensibly about reasons a guy might turn down sex, but is actually just an excuse to host a rumble between various spellcaster groupies.  Dr. Dan's fans fight it out with Dr. agbuza aficionados; dr osumand gets a shout-out from all his "brothers in christ", who I'm sure are usually to be founding hanging out in large numbers in the Cosmo comments section, while Dr. Okosun1 takes on both Doctor Ebakor (of course) and the mysterious (dr.iyere@hotmail.com), who has apparently had his name legally changed to his own hotmail address. Or maybe it's someone else's hotmail address; I mean it's not like anyone ever checks their hotmail account, so who'd know?

But by this point it doesn't matter, because I don't know which to choose. Not only am I confronted by an embarrassment of (witch doctor) riches, but my wife hasn't even left me yet, so I don't see how I could justify this line item at the next monthly household budget meeting.

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Happy 20th Anniversary Waterworld! Now Die! Die! Die! Die! DIE!

A couple quick bits o' news...
  1. The sequel to Better Living Through Bad Movies is shambling along, and we expect to announce a release date shortly.
  2. We're doing an audio book version of BLTBM! This is also shambling along, but at a slightly faster pace (I would say that -- on the downgrades at least -- it is even getting up to speeds that approach lumbering), and based on what I've heard so far, it's going to be pretty funny.
  3. It's the 20th anniversary (china and platinum) of Waterworld, according to a lot of news stories that popped up in my Facebook feed, because FB seems to think this is exactly the sort of thing about which I would deeply and sincerely give a crap.  But before you run out and grab that 20th Anniversary Blu-ray edition, we thought we'd remind you of all the things the damp cast and the cashiered director would rather you'd forget.  So here's our review, from the chapter entitled It's the End of the World as We Know It, And I Feel Fine But You're All Dead.

Waterworld (1995)
Directed by Kevin Reynolds and Kevin Costner (uncredited)
Written by Peter Rader and David Twohy

In its day, Waterworld was the most expensive movie ever made, reportedly costing almost $200 million. While it’s nice to know that they cared enough to spend the very most, you have to wonder if nearly a quarter-billion dollars is a reasonable sum to pay for a routine action yarn about an irritable post-apocalyp- tic yachtsman who drinks his own pee. But that’s all you know, since you’re not a moviemaker! But then, neither are we. However, we do have a copy of The Making of Waterworld we got at the thrift store, and as we proceed with our summary, we’ll point out how each dollar is being spent.

Our movie begins with the Universal logo melting ($100,000). Then God ($150) announces that it’s the future and the Earth is covered with water. And then we catch our first glimpse of our hero, Kevin Costner ($25 million), as he pees into a cup. Despite what you might imagine, this isn’t a studio-ordered urinalysis to make sure their money didn’t go for drugs, as Kevin runs the pee through a primitive cappuccino machine and drinks it. And to show that his effluent has an especially piquant bouquet, he swirls it around his mouth, gargles it, and then spits a few drops onto a papier-mâché lime tree ($2), so it can also taste his goodness.

Kevin is a noble but crabby loner, much like Rambo or the Unabomber, and like them he also goes by only one name: Mariner. (I don’t dispute the hero’s right to assume the name of a major league ball club, although personally I would have picked one with a better bullpen.) Kevin lives aboard his boat made from scavenged eggbeaters, ice cube trays, and other crap, and ingeniously kept afloat by a large, inflated ego. He ekes out a living from the harsh and unforgiving sea, diving into its inky depths, where no ordinary man dare go, to recover leather mugs from the Renaissance Faire.

But before he has the chance to bring up a soggy pair of pantaloons, who should appear but evil incarnate: the Smokers! Yes, in the future, really strict clean-air legislation has divided the world into two groups: the Smokers and the Non-smokers. The Smokers are a gang of Jet Ski-riding Hell’s Angels who kill, rape, plunder, burn fossil fuels, and eat Spam. They are led by a gratuitously villainous Dennis Hopper, who was apparently asked to reprise his performance from Speed, but make it a little less restrained.

In contrast to the depraved Smokers, the noble Non-smokers inhabit a man-made atoll composed entirely of recyclables ($50 million); they eat only free-range fish, drink only Evian distilled-urine, and only watch PBS. But one thing both groups share is a fondness for leather clothing, an odd choice for Post-Apocalyptic beachwear because it is hot and becomes really smelly, which you’d think would be a disadvantage in a society lacking Arid Extra Dry. And hey, since there are no animals in this world, one is forced to conclude that Soylent Garments are made from people!

Anyway, before the Smokers can give him emphysema, Kevin heads over to the Non-Smoking section, but they won’t let him in until he displays what’s in the leather mug: dirt! He takes it to the assay office, where the county agent tastes it and pronounces it pure. It seems that in the future a 5-pound bag of peat moss makes you Donald Trump. This could also explain why the people of this particular future are so dirty—they wear their alluvium as a status symbol, with only the really wealthy being able to afford not to bathe.

Kevin takes his dirt money and buys a tomato plant from Jeanne Tripplehorn, who is apparently the poorest person in town, judging by her cleanliness. As Kevin leaves with his tomato, the Non-Smokers accost him, and attempt to shake him down for his man-seed, just like in The Postman. The reoccurrence of this motif suggests that Kevin is a thoughtful futurist with a brave vision of things to come: specifically, a time in which the current model of transnational capitalism has evolved into an entirely jism-based economy.

However, Kevin is apparently a skinflint (or in this case, a skinfluteflint) and denies them his essence. The Non-Smoking leader promptly accuses Kevin of hiding something. Oddly enough, it’s not his sexual orientation that he’s hiding, but gills and webbed toes! Kevin is arrested for being a mutant, and sentenced to languish in a dangling cage as a warning to Dan Ackroyd.

Meanwhile, let’s check in on little Ebola, a girl with a strange tattoo on her back, which is rumored to be a map to Dry World (where the Wet Head is Dead). She is busy doodling cave drawings of horses, trees, and soap, things no one in this society have ever seen. Her foster-mother Jeanne, and foster-uncle Coot (an amalgamation of Leon Russell and the Wizard of Oz), want to escape to the legendary Dryland, but they can’t figure out what the tattoo means (Mr. Roark often had the same problem).

Suddenly, the atoll is attacked by the Smokers, who are seeking the fabled Girl With a Map To Dryland Tattooed On Her Back. (Apparently the demise of the Automobile Club has left a real cartographic void.)

Coot’s balloon ($2 million) is inadvertently launched, and he has to leave Jeanne and Ebola behind; he can’t come back, he doesn’t know how it works! So, Jeanne releases Kevin from his birdcage on the condition he takes her and Ebola with him on his boat. But as soon as they are at sea, Kevin threatens to dump his passengers because there’s not enough urine for three. Jeanne disrobes and offers to have sex with Kevin if he’ll spare them. He stares at her naked form for some time, waiting for her to lay her eggs so he can fertilize them; when she doesn’t follow through with her part of the bargain, he clubs her on the head. Kevin hates a tease.

The fish, woman, and child begin to bond during their time at sea. Ebola uses Kevin’s crayons without asking, so he throws her overboard. Jeanne breaks a mast fighting off Smokers, so Kevin chops off her hair. In exchange for an old National Geographic, Kevin pimps Jeanne to a crazy Irish Robin Williams-impersonator. So, they are becoming a family.

But this idyllic life comes to an end when the Smokers find them again and grab Ebola. Kevin and Jeanne jump overboard to escape death from secondhand smoke. When Jeanne complains that she can’t breathe underwater, Kevin says he’ll breathe for both of them; he proceeds to blow carbon dioxide into her mouth while sneakily frenching her. When they surface, Kevin’s boat has been burned and the Smokers are nowhere in sight. So, there’s nothing they can do but have sex ($3.2 million), as Jeanne learns the origins of the term “cold fish.”

Kevin is saved from cuddling by the reappearance of Coot and his balloon. Coot indicates that the survivors of the Non-Smoking Section have started a new atoll made from old egg cartons and beer cans, and invites Jeanne and Kevin to join them. But Kevin declares that he must rescue Ebola, even if it means certain death. Not because he’s after her map, but because she’s his friend, and because she still has one of his crayons.

Over in Smoking Section Headquarters, the ancient oil tanker Exxon Valdez ($70 million for rental, plus a $5 million surcharge for Irony), Dennis Hopper tries to get Ebola to tell him what her map means. She doesn’t know, since she can’t see her own back, but she does know that her Westley...er, Mariner will come for her. And then they’ll be sorry—because he’ll make them watch Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves.

Just then, a lone, dark figure walks across the deck. Yes, it’s Mad Mackerel, the Roe Warrior! He’s a post-apocalyptic laconic hero who’s come to eat fish flakes and kick butt, and he’s all out of fish flakes! Dennis best sums up the situation: “He’s like a turd that won’t flush.” And since this was before The Postman, Message in a Bottle, 3000 Miles to Graceland, and Many More, Dennis is starting to look like Miss Cleo.

Kevin throws a torch into the tanker’s fuel hold and rescues Ebola. Uncle Coot arrives in the balloon, saving Kevin’s butt yet again (and if you want to see that butt, check out For Love of the Game, on DVD!)

Coot looks carefully at Ebola’s tattoo and suddenly realizes how to read the map (although he still has trouble refolding it). Armed with this convenient plot twist, he leads the other survivors to a lush, verdant land with pure, clean water—but alas, still no soap. The group spots a grass hut ($3 million), and inside, two skeletons lying next to tattoo needles and a copy of the graphic on Ebola’s back. And now it all makes sense! Ebola is actually the child of Gilligan and Mary Ann, the last of the castaways. They sent her to the mainland for help, but the stupid kid spent all her time coloring and forgot to tell the authorities about her parents, leaving them to die of coconut cream pie poisoning.

But everyone is so thrilled to have enough dirt to live like kings that there are no recriminations. However, the gilled-and-webbed Kevin isn’t at home on the land, and he must tell the tearful Ebola that she’s a fine girl, and what a good wife she would be, but his life, his love, and his lady is the sea. Kevin and Jeanne exchange half-hearted good-byes, then he steals director Kevin Reynolds' boat and sails off, taking the remaining $100 million of the studio’s money with him. Because even a mutant can see that his back-end participation points are going to be worthless. The End.

Of all the films reviewed for this book, Waterworld presents by far the darkest vision of the future: a time in which Man’s natural habitat has vanished, leaving him crammed onto rusty, floating hulks, where he is preyed upon by violent locals, forced to inhale noxious fumes, and reduced to eating Spam washed down with pee. In other words, it’s a Carnival Cruise, so the people best equipped to survive this harsh new environment are probably elderly Jewish women from Coral Gables.

But how can we use the wisdom imparted by this film to better prepare ourselves for the apocalypse? Well, to begin with, if you finally do get that tattoo you’ve been thinking about (oh, don’t deny it) you should forget the rose on your breast, the butterfly on your ankle, or the ying-yang symbol on your ass, and instead have Buzz at Inka-Dinka-Doo on Hollywood Boulevard inscribe the entire Rand McNally World Atlas on your back. (Oh sure, it’ll hurt, but at least when the apocalypse comes you’ll get to have middle-aged potheads and faded matinee idols listlessly tussle over you.) Other than that, there’s lots of little things you can do to prepare for the Deluge: load up on leather pants and Sea ’n Ski, Dramamine, Underwood Deviled Ham, and sphagnum moss. Take swimming lessons at the Y. Get your semen appraised. Cancel the newspaper. Oh, and you’ll want to start mutating. But don’t go crazy with it, or you could wind up like John Travolta in Battlefield Earth, whose bizarre alien digestive tract required him to continually chew, swallow, and regurgitate scenery like cud.

Monday, July 27, 2015

We Miss You, Doghouse

It was two years ago today (seems longer, yet seems like yesterday) that we lost Douglas Case, AKA Doghouse Riley, the best writer I've ever had the privilege to know (and I suspect I'm not the only one who feels that way). DR was a clear-eyed thinker and a devastating wit who neither took shit nor offered quarter to the professionally stupid; but though he played a curmudgeon on the Internet, he was in fact -- if occasionally in secret -- the most humane of men, guilty of many surreptitious acts of kindness. He was also modest to a fault, which is perhaps why he gave away his words to hoi polloi, rather than auctioning them per syllable to the highest bidder, and if he were still around to read this testimonial the first sentence alone would be enough to earn me a written reproach, of which "over-praising" would be the gentlest gerund I could hope for.

Since all we have left of him are his words, let's continue our tradition of reaching at random into our old comment threads and marveling anew at the pearls he strewed there.
On the occasion of Chris Vosburg's birthday: 
Happy Birthday, Chris. 
Also, Lyle Lovett turns 52, and Fernando Valenzuela started breathing through his eyelids 49 years ago. 
And 119 years ago today, Mississippi enacted a literacy test for voting, the beginning of the wildly popular regional “Grandfather clause” fad which would prevail for another 74 years. (Some people have Ann Coulter pics, I have Today in Institutionalized Racism entries.)
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At least this loser has the courage of her lunatic convictions 
And I’d agree with you, Jay B, if that courage extended to her actually facing actual evidence instead of making shit up. 
Sixty percent of the problem is it’s too fucking easy to be one of these people.
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Ya think Goober here refuses to eat fowl as a professional courtesy?
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Please, Scott, no more Dr. Mike. 
Hey, Joyce read the Police Gazette, van Gogh contemplated gobs of spittle on a wall, and Doug Giles is already up to 1997 in The Big Book of Pop Culture References. Genius has its prerogatives. 
Okay, questions: 
1. Can anyone tell me exactly when the Feminists took over the courts, and the centuries-old tradition of automatically awarding child custody to the father was reversed? 
2. Is there any political movement more pathetic than the thirty years of this Divorced Dads shit? “Hi, we have a legitimate concern, which we’d like to address by combining the worst possible features of Anti-fluoridationist rhetoric and Black Helicopter paranoia, worded as a snopes-worthy email, and all filtered through our blinding hatred of how that bitch spent so much of my money on clothes.” 
3. Dr. Mike used to be an atheist? Have we heard that one before, or is he tryin’ out some new material? 
4. Do you think it occurred to him that no professor would debate him because they’re smarter than the Christians he used to drag to his Level?
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Thanks so much; I love all you guys, and I’m honored to be the first non-Coulter birthday, I think. 
Also: Peetie Wheatstraw and Rebecca West. 
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Y’know, I sorta hate to see the War on Xmas business leaking steam; it’s given me my only Holiday traditions: 
1) Driving around my neck of the woods counting the number of churches, and private residences, displaying a creche, something which is so vitally important to to the Season when public land is involved. (This year was on par: one church, two houses, in a random search of a five-mile radius and a spot check of every local church in the phone book.) 
2) Noting when the issue comes up that the Nativity tale, with its seamy manipulation of text to correspond to the Hero saga, its clumsy, and shameful, historical inventions intended merely to get the Christ child to Bethlehem, which supposedly “fulfills” a “prophecy” of Isaiah that has nothing to do with it, and the dueling genealogies which suddenly turn matrilocal when necessary, ought to be spotted outright by any literate person post-Lord Raglan. It’s enough, really–too late for that now–to note that the historical facade was demolished in 1890 by Emil Schürer, the Protestant theologian and author of A History of the Jewish People in the Time of Christ, to such an extent that the book’s late-20th century revisers left that section intact and answered a hundred years’ worth of desperate attempts at rebuttal in the footnotes.
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Aw, jeez. The one Socialist you types would love to have an amiable discussion with, rather than hurling shit at long-range, and he’s already dead. Just can’t buy a break these days, can you?
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Interestin’, innit, that guys–and I use the term advisedly–like Matt and Dr. Mike Adams, Ph.D Doctor, who are so goddamn allergic to pushy dames takin’ over men’s work, nevertheless chose careers which can be boiled down to “Typist”? 
By the way, the Communications Director for Giuliani ’08 was Katie Levinson, who gives every appearance of being a woman. Which does raise the question of how one coordinated the communication of Giuliani policy–try to decide where the noun, the verb, and the three 9/11s were supposed to go?
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Funny, I was in Kindergarten in 1960, and I grew up trying to stick it into every woman I met, and I never made the connection. Sex, as I recall it, was something which seemed like an enormous amount of fun. Contraception was something which prevented pregnancy, was not nearly as much fun, and generally came in the form of a condom (which, I add solely for historical perspective, I was renowned among my early-teen, non-feticided peers for marching into the Hook’s Drugs and demanding of the lady pharmacist, though in those simpler times the pharmacist filled orders for her retailer employer without filtering them through her own moral system first). True, I have no idea what sort of contraception, if any, accompanied most of the thousands of tawdry, faceless, anonymous sexual acts I engaged in in the dorm rooms, motels, empty classrooms, alleyways, elevators, public parks, bridge abutments, cornfields, and fortuitously unlocked parked cars in and near my college campus, but the women I did bother to speak with afterwards were on the Pill about 50% of the time, and a lot had negative physical reactions; IUDs and diaphragms were trendy alternatives. Which, like all those Sheiks and Trojans that pockmarked my wallets, pretty much pre-date the ethical morass created by oral contraception by a century or centuries, you sick, sex-adverse fuck. Wonder what people were usin’ ‘em for all those years?
 ********************************************************************
On an article entitled "No More Terror in the Skies if Men Take Charge:
I see Gary managed to get into Western Michigan in 1969, while college deferments were still in effect, and ride out the draft. What a surprise.
 ********************************************************************
On a pro-male only military plea by R. Emmett Tyrrell entitled "The Male of the Species (American)"
Tyrrell’s own military record is spotty, as in “there’s a big empty spot in his bio where it would have occurred”, except for reports he was in Bloomington, Indiana, serving as wing-nutjob and vacuum-tube manufacturer Sarkes Tarzian’s buttboy. 
The verbiage bombardments apparently keep the flashbacks away. And/or the questions.
 ********************************************************************
The last person imprisoned for felonious consensual oral sex in Indiana, as I recall, was a heterosexual male who got a hummer from his ex, who then got mad at him for something and swore out a police report, after which she tried to recant but the authorities pursued it anyway, and the man did actual hard time, you should pardon the expression. 
Didn’t know about the puppet ban, actually, but I’m all for it; I had the same childhood reaction to the nasty little string danglers that other people have to clowns.
 ********************************************************************
Happy birthday, MaryC. Your earth-shattering birthday sex ’til dawn is in the mail.
 ********************************************************************
On a Pastor Swank column: 
His crook and liar cronies stand to right and left of his every move. 
I’m really not sure why Reality would be caught dead in Ol’ Glamorshots’ neighborhood, but for some reason this remind me that the first week of March, 1982, was about the point the list of Reagan administration indictments broke into double digits.
 ********************************************************************
The two things which probably have surprised me most over the course of my life are 1) the fact that crappy, intelligence-insulting advertising continues to sell crappy, intelligence-insulting products fifty years after television first irradiated the nation’s living rooms with it for eight hours plus per day; and 2) that right-wing/High Church apologetics still take off from the utterly fabulous and then start lying. (Which, by the way, is more delusional: armies of feminists “embittered” by every Palin speaking engagement, or Sarah Palin, happy hausfrau and political juggernaut?) It’s the same shit I used to get every morning on the editorial pages of Gene Pulliam’s Indianapolis Birch Society Morning News in the Sixties: perpetual outrage that one’s political opponents were always being disagreeable. 
As they worked to demonstrate that Anthony was indifferent on abortion, the Palin critics managed to conveniently skip over the other suffragettes and their writings in newspapers and letters. 
Oh, yeah. Just like all the people complaining about BP never mention that none of Shell’s platforms is gushing oil. Beyond the nominative, I mean.
 ********************************************************************
So far there’s been no organized protest against stopping at red lights and going on green. 
So, Farber’s never met any libertarians? Or is he just critiquing their organizational skills?
 ********************************************************************
Can you imagine someone, even a year or two ago, openly advocating Nazi racial policy as a paradigm for the U.S? 
Too young to remember the heyday of the National Review, aren’t you?
 ********************************************************************
Okay, again, since they never get it: unlettered appeals to “animal behavior” are definitely contraindicated if you’re trying to convince the world to keep its knees together. The whole of human sexualityscreams promiscuity: the lack of estrus, permanently inflated breasts, large testicle/body weight ratio, our close kinship with the chimpanzee. (The other apes have harems, by the way, not lifelong committed monogamous heterosexual relationships.) 
And, sorry, I missed the weekend discussion of Zombie Raquel Welch, because I was busy having sex (okay, so, ten minutes of sex, but it took 36 hours of pleading first), so may I just say, now,Raquel Welch was a sex symbol? In the era of Bardot, Deneuve, and Diana Rigg? Maybe to middle-aged drunks nostalgic for Jayne Mansfield. Raquel didn’t exude Sex; more like that plastic burning smell you get when you turn on an electric appliance for the first time.
Mrs. Peel? Really? Even without a head Jayne was way hotter. 
Dude, unless you really were middle-aged, we had very different childhoods, you and I.
And my point–or the one I was trying to make–was not that tastes don’t differ, but that Welch was about as “Sixties” as the girdle, the gin martini, and the flattop. Plastics, Ben. 
And she had racial issues, to boot. At least Jim Brown thought so, since he’s alleged to have asked her on lunch break during filming of 100 Rifles if she wouldn’t mind passing the salt, since it wasn’t black.
 ********************************************************************
Okay, I understand they’ve got a lot of nice artwork an’ stuff, but for the life of me I can’t understand the appeal of a religion which makes grown people fly off the handle about masturbation. 
The other thing I get no end of amusement from is the whole The Pill Caused the Sixties routine. And thanks for bringing up Eisnestadt; I remember what a big deal it was when women of my acquaintance could go to the college health center and get contraceptives. It’s curious that we still found reasons to engage in non-procreative sex before that.
 ********************************************************************
But there is an empty space next to the cards which tells another story that continues to grieve Jerry and his wife, Dayna. Over thirty years ago, Jerry and his then high school sweetheart, Dayna, chose to abort two of their children. 
Boy, there’s a love story for the goddam ages, huh? Let’s just make a little side bet here that the decision to terminate the pregnancywasn’t the mutual decision of two high school lovebirds, and that the empty place on the kitchen counter thirty years on is as ugly a little power play as could be imagined. “I love you, Snookums, and even though you murdered two of my children I hold myself almost as responsible for that blank space on my countertop shrine”. Any takers?
My own position has been, and remains, that I’ll be obligated to show concern for the politically-motivated professional mawkishness some time after those people have demonstrated genuine concern for the well-being of every unwanted infant born on the planet. 
Don’t expect to get called on that anytime soon, say, this lifetime. 
In the meantime, the fact that you, or any other average human has enough brain capacity to imagine some set of circumstances other than what he experienced, the language to communicate those imaginings, and the self-assurance to insist to others that he “knows” what is or isn’t possible I chalk up to an accident of human evolution and our apparent temporal proximity; it doesn’t compel me any more than your writing science fiction, or a cookbook, obligates me to sample it.
 ********************************************************************
On Sheri's return to blogging:
God, darlin’, I’ve missed you. This is like one of those family reunions I go to every…okay, I never go to family reunions.
 On idiot who wrote article she was making gentle fun of:
I am not an economist; I am not a survival expert; I am not a firearms expert; I am not an attorney; I am not a physician. In fact, I am not an expert in anything! 
Oh, sir; blathering on about survivalism as though you were Annie Jacobsen after an in-flight viewing of Mad Max is not nothing. Although it should be. 
Interesting, in a “non-expert demonstrating his insufficient grasp” sort of way, that the only proficiency you recommend is organized by caliber. 
Because, assuming you survive the Hoped-For Apocalypse with something to defend, how long, ya think, before you’re defending it from people who are even better armed and more proficient? It’sAmerica, dude; people like you have been helping arm every last jumpy loner to the teeth for the past fifty years. Freedom! (And thanks. A lot.) 
Second, how difficult is it to find anyplace in the continental US that’s more than a mile and a half from a road? National parks and nature preserves, maybe, and they’re going to be filled with idiots who learned survival techniques from a guy who read a pamphlet and projected his fears of Negro buttrape onto his RenewAmerica column. Plus they’ll be armed. Heavily. Did I thank you for that? 
Look, I understand the backwoods Baptist inclination is to hunker down in small groups headed by some cracked Big Daddy, and dream of being called on to repopulate the earth. And that’s every day, not just in emergencies. But, please, just try to avoid the temptation to give other people advice. And while we’re at it, don’t buy (indifferently treated and flimsily-packaged) bottled fucking water as an emergency supply.
 ********************************************************************
chimpanzify 
They really can’t help themselves, can they?
 ********************************************************************
“My name is Dawn Stefanowicz. I grew up in a homosexual household during the 1960s and 1970s in Toronto exposed to many different people, the Gay-Lesbian- Bisexual-Transgendered (GLBT) subcultures, and explicit sexual practices…. 
I was at high risk of exposure to contagious STDs due to sexual molestation, my father’s high-risk sexual behaviors, and multiple partners…. 
I was outraged at the incidences of same-sex domestic abuse, sexual advances toward minors and loss of sexual partners as if people were only commodities. I sought comfort looking for my father’s love from boyfriends starting at 12 years old. 
From a young age, I was exposed to explicit sexual speech, self-indulgent lifestyles, varied GLBT subcultures and gay vacation spots. Sex looked gratuitous to me as a child. I was exposed to all-inclusive manifestations of sexuality including bathhouse sex, cross-dressing, sodomy, pornography, gay nudity, lesbianism, bisexuality, minor recruitment, voyeurism and exhibitionism. 
Sado-masochism was alluded to and aspects demonstrated. Alcohol and drugs were often contributing factors to lower inhibitions in my father’s relationships.” 
I guess it’s lucky for Dawn’s audience that she seems to have been exposed to the whole damned megillah of perversion, the better to warn the entire potential book-buying audience. It’s a lot like the incredible good fortune that every believer in reincarnation with a story to sell used to be Caesar, or Cleopatra, or a Crusader, some historical figure vaguely known to a wide range of semi-literates, and not James Gadsden, or Robert Cooper Grier, or the guy who blocked Diana Durbin’s father’s hats.
 ********************************************************************
On Orly Taitz:
I hope he wants his daughter and his future granchildren to live in a constitutional Republic, not tyranny that we are seing today. 
Leaving aside the question of how one gets two professional licenses in California while exhibiting the writing skills of an eighth grader–and not a particularly bright eight grader–it’s amusing to note the diffusion of wingnut vocabulary (“This is a Republic, not a democracy!”), which for forty years has meant “Tough shit if the public doesn’t agree with the Retro-Dixiecrat/Mineral Rights West stranglehold on the Senate; you get another chance next election day”, and now gets contrasted with “tyranny” and without irony. Even if it is filtered by a woman who’s illiterate in five languages.
 ********************************************************************
Y’know, my feeling has always been that if you’re going to live in the 3rd century C.E. you ought to address your arguments to the 3rd century C.E., and leave all questions which have arisen since the invention of the microscope to the people who don’t.
 ********************************************************************
Well, you gotta love a measured, even complimentary response from a guy who apparently googles himself so often he got to my favorite blog before I did. 
So, back at ya, Russ J. Thanks for all the laffs. Can’t say I won’t miss all the kindnesses the Right has provided these many years. But I did want to mention, before things get ugly, that “Tea Parties”, in word nor deed, don’t raise my blood pressure. Y’all are more like seventy-two car alarms going off at once in the Wal*Mart parking lot: par for the course, self-defeating, and inaudible once you get used to it, I suppose, except I can’t see any reason to get within two miles of the place, myself.
 ********************************************************************
 Rest in Peace, Doghouse, you've earned it. But boy could we use you now more than ever.

Sunday, July 26, 2015

Post-Friday Beast Blogging: The "Hangover Part IV" Edition

Moondoggie:  Ohhhhh...man. What was in that catnip?  I can't even...  What time is it? The clock is all blurry and defective...

Moondoggie: Four o'clock? I slept right through my afternoon nap?!  Now I'll never catch up...

Moondoggie:  Ugh...!  I should get up, right?  Should I get up?  You're up...Unless I'm hallucinating you...

Well I'm not gonna let myself be browbeaten by some drug-fueled phantasm. And I'm certainly not gonna put one in charge of my Day Planner, because that's what serial killers do. "7:00AM: Wake up. 8:00AM: Crossfit class. 9:30AM: Shower and drink a delicious SlimFast shake. 10:00: Murder.  11:15AM: Murder.  12:30PM: Ritualistic murder with fetishized trophy-taking.  1:30PM: Break for a light lunch at LifeFood Organic with Chuck Starkweather and Dickie Speck."

Well no thank you very much! If that's your idea of good organization and self-discipline, you can just count me out.

No, seriously -- start counting backwards from a hundred. I'll be out before you get to like ninety-sizzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Saturday, July 25, 2015

Are You Miracle Whip? Well...? ARE You?

In response to yesterday's post, ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© accused us of spreading pro-Hellmann's propaganda, insisting that only Miracle Whip had the intestinal fortitude to stand up to Skippy. Which reminded me of a photo I snapped one day while loitering at the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Cahuenga -- known to fans of meaningless honorifics as "Raymond Chandler Square."

A billboard was being stripped down to the wood, and the bottom-most stratum revealed an artifact from the Age of EXTREME DIET MAYONNAISE SUBSTITUTES!
Remember when Miracle Whip was the new Mountain Dew, and all the kidz were chillin' with their MW?

[Full disclosure: I myself was never MW, because I instinctively grasped that a man of my advanced years would appear inauthentic with his butt hanging out of low-riding pants, texting his brahs on his Sidekick while smearing slices of toast with a low cholesterol sandwich spread.]

Friday, July 24, 2015

Happy Birthday, Heydave!

Yes, it's the natal anniversary of our very own Hawkeye, heydave. Although he was born and raised in Chicago, City of Big Shoulders and the apparent inspiration for those weird, linebacker-looking gowns they wore on Dynasty, Dave was eventually wished into the cornfield by Billy Mumy, where he has remained, shucking and detasseling, for the past twenty years or so. So really, when you think about it, his journey from dazzling urbanite to soil-encrusted rustic makes heydave our own version of the Eddie Albert character from Green Acres, or the Fred MacMurray character from The Egg and I, or possibly the Scarecrow from Jeepers Creepers.

Anyway, it's Party Time! Sadly, we're out of prunes, but I did find this advertisement extolling a concoction my grandmother used to make for me whenever I visited, perhaps because the Depression hit her particularly hard, and left Grandma with remarkably elastic definitions of words such as "edible," and extremely narrow definitions of words like "abomination."


Yes, Skippy and Hellmann's together! "Tremendous" is certainly one word you could use to describe it, assuming what you're describing is the size of the liability issue involved, but others certainly come to mind and nearly to the lips, before I remember there are ladies present. Now this isn't exactly Grandma's lunchtime recipe (which she always called "the Special," raising my hopes that she'd been hybridizing a particularly potent breed of chronic rather than slapping together a shit sandwich).  "The Special" was served on toasted Roman Meal bread, peanut butter spread on one slice, mayonnaise (Best Foods in this case, since we lived west of the Rockies, but it's all the same) on the other, with some freshly-washed iceberg lettuce added for a bit of crunch and water damage.  But the marketeers responsible for this Superman v. Batman-style battle in your mouth operated on the theory that if the flavor profile of their product was hideous, it would seem less hideous if it was buried under a bunch of other, more hideous combinations.  So let's check out the menu, shall we?
Peanut butter and mayonnaise...a brand new flavor promise!
It doesn't strike me as a promise so much as a flavor threat, but let's see what they've got...
1.  double crunch: For a sandwich that really swings,
Nowadays, of course, a sandwich that really swings is less concerned with tasting good, and more worried about hackers releasing its user profile from Ashley Madison.
...add crisp bacon and Fanning's Bread & Butter Pickles to your Hellmann's and Skippy.
And if that's not enough to bring about the End Times, just hold your Horses of the Apocalypse, because we haven't even gotten to the pineapple yet...
2. pineapple topper:  Scrumptious for supper!  Peanut butter and mayonnaise -- a welcome flavor contrast for fruits, like canned or fresh pineapple.
Okay, that doesn't "contrast" flavor, it just flat out contradicts it.
3. apple fandango: Deliciously daring!
I figured someone must have dared them to serve it.
Creamy-smooth Skippy and Hellmann's Real Mayonnaise with sliced apples and marmalade!
The exclamation point suggests the copywriter would like me to believe this will prove a treat for my tastebuds, a thrilling departure from the usual drab noonday fare, but it just sounds like the kind of sad little simulacrum of a Christmas dinner British POWs would cobble together from the dregs of their Red Cross packages.
4. crazy combo: Man-sized pleaser!
A guy passing out flyers once shouted those exact same words to me outside Show World on Eighth Avenue.
Hellmann's and Skippy with a trio of salami, onions, and sliced eggs!
It fails as a sandwich, but brilliantly succeeds as an ipecac.
Don't argue...just try it!
You know a product is bad when its slogan slips into verbal abuse.
5. funny face: Irresistible! Skippy-Hellmann's sandwich face, flavored with raisins and carrot features!
Not being an enraged chimpanzee, I'm seldom tempted to eat a face, but if it's flavored with desiccated grapes and root vegetables?  Well, that's another story!
6. lunchbox special: Happy new lunchbox surprise for all the family! The basic combination is a real "natural" as is, or use as a base for your favorite fancy fixings!
Translation: We're out of ideas and can't even pretend this is food anymore, but the boss wants the presentation on his desk by five and we're this close to snapping a picture of peanut butter and mayonnaise garnished with pencil shavings and that smoldering lump of latakia cinders Jenkins just knocked out of his pipe.  So figure it out for yourself, will ya?

I know foodie culture has gotten out of hand in recent years, but honestly, how was it even possible to be a food critic back then? I imagine every review just consisted of one word, like "Yuck" or "Don't."

Anyway, now that we've paid our ten cents and gawked at the freaks on the buffet table, let's head on over to the dessert station for the traditional birthday cheesecake. I've decided to keep the Myrna Loy theme going this week, so here she is, reasonably nude in The Barbarian (1933):


And of course...
Sexy Birthday Lizard!

Happy birthday, heydave!

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Happy Birthday, Preznit!

I'm sure the plethora of white sales tipped you off already, but for those who may not have been perusing the dry goods circulars in their local newspaper, today is the birthday of preznit giv me turkee, and therefore a national holiday.  Now, to be fair, the nation doesn't seem to agree with me on this, but I decided to take the day off anyway, because I think it's important to honor our preznits and their service and it's not like I had anywhere I needed to be anyway.  So whaddya say? Let's get this party started!

I don't know just how venerable Preznit is, but I don't believe he's quite old enough for a Lemon Party, so this seemed like the next best thing. After all, Prunes are "oh-so-easy", famous as the sluts of the desiccated fruit family, so there's a good chance the birthday boy will get lucky tonight! Or at least have a smooth and trouble-free trip to the toilet tomorrow morning.

Before we go any further, let's do some quick photo analysis, examining the image above for tips on conjugating the shit out of the verb "to party." Now admittedly, the girls on either end don't seem to be all that into the prunes; in fact, they appear to be ignoring the dried fruit entirely, and instead concentrating on their home-made incendiary devices, which I presume are intended as a protest against the lack of birthday candles on the cake. And the lack of a cake.

The girl on the right is treating her I.E.D. rather gingerly, perhaps fearful of a premature detonation, but the girl on the left is cool and ruthless, and probably went to Belfast after college and wound up in the IRA. Or perhaps she hiked into the Pyrenees and joined the Basque Separatist group, ETA. Or maybe even the SLA. At any rate, I'm sure that eventually she joined one of the many three-initial terrorist groups that end in "A", and all because of prunes.

The boy on the left is clearly attempting to eat around the prune, and seems pretty relieved by his success, but the boy on the right is overcome with despair and futility, and is actually cooperating in his own oppression by digging into the prune itself, because really, what choice does he have? He has been invited to a party, a party where cake is both expected and obligatory, and yet a party where there is no cake. He has been made to don a dignity-destroying paper hat, to sit awkwardly at a fragile card table, and to submit to the false cheer of his fellow partygoers, including a girl whose party dress and party hat are belied by the grimacing way she holds her party favor, which is most likely a bomb she has fashioned from straw and nihilism. In such grim circumstances, he no doubt wonders, why not eat the prune? In such circumstances, is the prune not, in fact, the perfect metaphor for human existence in a random and absurd universe: a dead thing, made even deader through dehydration.

Yes. Yes, he will eat the prune, for the prune is both the symbol and the essence of his own mortality.

But while the picture may tell a tale of existential and other kinds of nausea, the text is cheerful, optimistic, even manic about the menu:
Win their hearts with prune tarts
And win their minds with watermelon rinds. Why didn't we try this approach in Viet Nam?
Just yummy, Mummy!
Well, the prune is dry, wrinkled, chewy, and discolored, so I guess it does taste a bit like mummy meat.
Wonderful California prunes are fairly bursting with energy, iron, vitamins and minerals.
I was a lot like those kids when I was their age -- fretting over iron-poor blood, and always buttonholing the hostess at birthday parties to quiz her about the mineral content of the cake. Anyway, dig into enough of those prunes and you'll be fairly bursting too, so you might want to grab a magazine.
To make delicious, decorative prune tarts just use your favorite prune whip recipe.
Don't eat that you idiot, it's just decorative! Jeez, you'll be gnawing on the decoupage next.

By the way, before you pull out the prune whip I should probably tell you that my safe word is "roughage."
Pour into tart shells and top with whole prunes, stuffed with almonds.
If you're going to force whole prunes on us, you might as well have the decency to stuff them with bitter almonds, because then we might swallow a fatal dose of hydrogen cyanide and die quietly in a corner during Pin the Tail on the Donkey, our dignity intact.

Hm. This is ending on kind of a downer note for a birthday party. How about we replace the prune tarts with some wholesome pre-Code cheesecake?

In honor of the occasion we've flown in Myrna Loy all the way from 1931 to give you kids with your "hook-ups" and your "sexting" a master class in "bedroom eyes."

And just to seal the deal...
Sexy Birthday Lizard!

Happy birthday, Preznit!

Sunday, July 19, 2015

Random Scenes of Hollywood

Well, we haven't done this in awhile, and since lately I've been escaping our stiflingly hot apartment by meandering over hill and dale, snapping photos hither and yon, a happy wanderer, a vagabond prince, I might as well share them with you guys, because I'm just going to delete them, along with the pictures I accidentally took of my bunions, my thumb, and my cat's ass.

First, let's take a tour of our local flora:

If you're a 1950s astronaut and you see this on an alien planet, you've got ten minutes -- tops -- before it eats your comic relief.

I'm not certain what this is, I just thought it was pretty, but I'm fairly sure that if it were to suddenly discharge a load of spores into Spock's face it would totes make him horny for Jill Ireland.

In honor of the release -- under mysterious circumstances -- of Harper Lee's first novel, Go Set a Watchman, we present the next big trend in American arts and letters: Southern California Gothic.

Is this a tree? A bush? Oh why must you always label everything? Why can't you simply accept it for who and what it is, and let it be free to be you and me?

Enough of nature. How about some creepy, dead-eyed golems?

Thursday, July 16, 2015

The Force...AWAKENS!


...then hits the Snooze button and mutters, "Just five more months..."

The new edition of the All-Star Summer Jamboree podcast is out, and this episode is all about the geekgasmic movie news that leaked and oozed and pre-came from Comic-Con:
ASSJam Episode 63 “Grumpy McGrumpnuts Gets His Geek Back” 
Starring Jeff Holland and Scott Clevenger 
Music by Josiah Yareff and Ralph Ramond Hayes 
This week Jeff and Scott discuss Batman, Suicide Squad, and a LOT of Star Wars as Jeff reconnects with his inner child until it issues a restraining order.
There are the usual obsessive digressions, plus the never before told story of how I discovered the existence of Star Wars long before most kids my age, but thought -- due to a tragic miscommunication -- that it was about Star Belly Sneetches.  Click on the link above to give it a listen.

[By the way, my sincerest apologies for all the dead air around here lately. Things have been a little rough chez stately Crap Manor, but I plan to rise above it like an inexplicably buoyant Ugandan and resume actual blogging shortly.]

Thursday, July 9, 2015

Happy Birthday Jim Donahue!

Quick! Hide the hooch and straighten this joint up! I just found out it's Jim Donahue's birthday today!

Wait, that doesn't make any sense...Sorry, I guess I panicked. Let me try that again:

Quick! Unhide the hooch, I just found out it's Dim Jonahue's dirthbay!

Dammit!

Okay, deep breaths, deep breaths...There.  Good.  Sorry about the haste and hysteria, but Jim took his birthday off his Facebook profile, presumably so potential employers will think he's still a fetus (it's all about Flaming Youth in the tech sector), but still demands tribute from his thralls in the form of birthday greetings, so I rushed over here all of a dither. Not Mr. Dithers from Blondie, because that's a specific Dither, and I'm really in more of a general, all-purpose dither.  Anyway, had I my druthers rather than this dither, I would've written an appropriate movie review as a gift, but as you can see from all the vamping and flop sweat, I didn't have anything prepared, which bums me out because Jim really is a swell guy and a highly skilled movie critic (check out his autopsy on perhaps the worst movie ever made, After Last Season and his fascinating history of the Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger rarity They're a Weird Mob, which seems to be some kind of odd, Stuart Smalley-like daily affirmation for racist Australians).

He's also willing to share the wealth, i.e., dare me to watch movies so bad even he couldn't make it through them, which is how I wound up experiencing a Danish art film filled with American actors faking Polish accents, and which climaxes with lighter-than-air Ugandans floating at the end of tethers like so many dirigibles at Lakehurst.

But enough of my deep and unending bitterness. Let's see what the stars have to say about Jim's destiny!
July 9 Zodiac
Being a Cancer born on July 9th, you are masterfully in-touch with your feelings, as well as those of others
In fact, Jim has touched my feelings so often, despite the court order, that a social worker asked me to point out where on the doll. Unfortunately, it was a Tickle Me Elmo doll, and all the touching sent it into convulsions, and eventually, respiratory arrest.
You are ruled by the inclination to mostly keep your feelings private and secretive. It is this mysterious nature that often frustrates even your closest friends as they struggle to understand you.
Frankly, I think Jim is up to something, and this whole "millionaire playboy" routine is just an act. I bet at night he actually dresses up as a giant bat and writes scathing movie reviews.
July 9 Element
Water is the element paired with your sign and in fact, you have the more fundamental relationship with water than any other sign. 
Probably because you're over 60% water yourself. I'd say you two kids were made for each other!
It is the forceful nature of water that causes you to experience emotions with strong waves that you ride with understanding.
That's why I always watch Jim's face, and if it looks like he's struggling with some deep emotion, I immediately grab my surf board.
 Likewise, you can sense even the most subtle ripples of emotions in others. As you embrace the positive qualities of water, you will grow as a sympathetic and compassionate individual. Be weary of the negative influence of becoming overly influenced by water, as you run the risk of becoming emotionally unstable.
And having to pee a lot.
July 9 Planetary Influence
The moon is your sign's planetary ruler
And since this guy is the ruler of the moon, he's totally the boss of you.
And there's nothing you can do about it, because your birthday is your destiny, and also because the Moonmen have lunarium, which is much more efficient at generating atomic reactions than your puny uranium, and as you can see, their caftan technology is light years beyond earth's!

So there you have it. Please join me in wishing Jim a very happy birthday, and a successful career as a catamite to Retik, Lord of the Moon.

And just to make it official...
Here's some extra-slinky, Roaring Twenties era Carole Lombard.  And of course...

Sexy Birthday Lizard!


Saturday, July 4, 2015

Happy 4th of July!

We leave you now with this image, which is both an evocation of the just and blazing pride we Americans take in our liberties and heritage, and a graphic warning about the dangers of taking penis envy a little too far.

Have a great holiday everyone.

Update: Hey, look who just flew in for the Independence Day festivities! It's the 50 Foot Woman!
Alllllll right, we got ourselves a party now!  Listen boys, we're gonna need a couple cases of Hawaiian Punch, a fifty-five gallon drum of grain alcohol, and about two yards of 18-inch ADS drainage tubing to use as a straw...

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