A Tale of The Foo As Well The Woo

By Keith

Hi W-O'-Crackers, Happy New Year? Are you laughing? I've been laughing since about 10 pm. EST on Jan 19th. And continue to laugh spontaneously throughout day and evening. At the dry cleaner. At the bank. At the overpriced grocery. Even on the “E” train or while tracking commodities and equities on reuters.com.

You are no doubt asking why and I know you are expecting an answer so here it is: It's been very cold here in NYC. Not as chilly as Chicago or Cleveland but it was a warm winter here so far … Last night I crawled into bed with cat Sydney (aka “Midnight”) and we listened to the boring old Worldservice from BBC. Sydney likes it for the same reasons I do, it's simultaneously informative and soporific.

Behold the first hourly news bulletin. We both heard a blood-curdling shriek and poor Sydney was spooked. I was roused but conscious enough to hear that Sarah Palin officially endorsed Donald Trump for the Iowa Caucus.

After the bulletin was a lengthier newscast whereby we could hear more shrieking, some intelligible and some not so. As a much better scribe commented earlier today …

If I were a Democrat or a comedy-show writer, I would be on the floor right now flopping and hallelujah-ing like a holy roller at an Alabama tent revival.

Henceforth the gaiety: “Tundra Trash” meets “God's Little Cancre.” They become soul-mates. It's a match made if not in heaven at least somewheres between Atlas and D.D. Bean manufacturing. World famous former reality TV host joins force with another world-famous reality TV host and a hush from their Lord's blessings stills the known cosmos.

I've concluded that Mrs. Palin might have been intoxicated when presenting her endorsement, which makes it even more lovely. Well, we're being too kind here, she was flat-out drunk. If she were at Rudy's in Hell's Kitchen in the same state she'd be '86-ed. Thank you, “New York Values.”

Somewhere in the amorphous regions of the unconscious, between “Tastes Great, Less Filling” and perhaps even “Truth or Consequences” lies the essence of this liaison.

(No offense intended to New Mexico residents of “ToC”.)

Random Scenes of Hollywood

Pundits working the business beat are suggesting that McDonalds may be doomed, after suffering record-setting lows in customer satisfaction surveys and announcing the "closing [of] hundreds of locations this year". But perhaps the clearest indication that the once mighty fast food giant is in its last throes is the news that mascot Ronald McDonald has defected from McDonaldland to join the KISS Army.

Walking down Hollywood Boulevard last night, I was happy to see the shrine that sprouted up around David Bowie's star was going strong a week after his demise -- votive candles still alight, fresh flowers replacing wilted bouquets, touch-up dusting of glitter applied to the brass letters. Then two 12-year old boys decided to stop by and ruin it:

12-YEAR BOY OLD WHO WANTS TO SEEM COOL: (Craning his neck to read the name on the star) I knew it. It's David Bau-wee.

12-YEAR OLD BOY'S 12-YEAR OLD FRIEND: (Bored)  I don't know who that is.

Okay, you two little shits...! Crawl back into your mothers' wombs and bake until you're done this time.

And finally, for this week's Beast Blogging:

My friend PJ wrote a formal apology (with an explanation) for blowing a deadline last week, and used her two cats Belle and Willow to illustrate her many excuses, all of which I then turned into a video. Click and enjoy.

Mass Extinction Event, Or Just a New Podcast?

Sorry about the lack of posts lately. I made a resolution to do better this year, but our Internet connection has been off, due to a problem with the technology; that technology being the replacement of the barter system with money (I've been attempting to pay AT&T for TV and Internet service with chickens and voluntary seasonal labor on the CEO's massive pyramid-shaped tomb).  Anyway, we're hooked back up to the Matrix now.

And speaking of transitions, we've got a new podcast out -- the final ASSJam and the first Slumgullion, so it's kind of a cross between a Comic-con bull session and the K-T Extinction boundary. (Why is the show now called The Slumgullion? Listen and find out!).

One Last Sort Of ASSJammy Kind Of Thing 

Starring Jeff Holland and Scott Clevenger 

They thought they were recording the pilot for their new show. 

Jeff and Scott have been Star Wars fans since before it was A New Hope. 

This is the first time they’ve spoken about The Force Awakens. 

That’s all you need to know. 

WARNING: Bad words, shameful secrets, and spoilers ahead.

As Jeff warned me when the episode went live, we geek out to a degree never seen before, and have the MOST EPIC STAR WARS CONVERSATION EVER.  Please click here to check it out.

Normal blogging will resume on Monday. Possibly Sunday if I can get the cats to cooperate.

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee Replacement

Guys, I hate to do this to you, but I'm going to have to pass the hat again. I know it's right after the holidays and we're all tapped out, but this is a NATIONAL EMERGENCY!, and just as the Continental Army perished in the snows of Valley Forge for want of a few weevil-ridden Johnny cakes, so are patriots languishing at a bird sanctuary visitors center because they are no longer able to snap into a Slim Jim. Mark my words, this rebellion shall not fail on my watch!  In fact, I'm looking into franchising the idea of White Guys turning Federal facilities into pop-up, Gitmo-style prisons and house-arresting themselves, because I think it's a tremendous blow for justice! And irony.

Hear me out...

Like the zebra mussel, white guys with guns are a non-native, invasive species that migrated to North America on ships and is proving very difficult to control. Now, I suppose we could always spray them from helicopters like the Mediterranean Fruit Fly, or maybe introduce a predator into their habitat (gun shows, Cracker Barrel), but I can't offhand think of a species which hunts the White Guy, not even the wily Northeastern blue-bellied cop, and I don't think we can afford to wait for natural causes (arterial plaque, toddler-involved shootings) to cull the herd for us.

Nope, we need a bold new idea, and I don't have one, so instead let's combine Mitt Romney's old idea of solving the immigration issue through "self-deportation" with the even older American notion of the reservation -- desolate and remote areas where Native Americans were shipped off to while White Guys with guns established squatter's rights to the rest of the continent. Unfortunately, we can't stage a new Trail of Tears, because it wouldn't be metaphorical this time -- the modern White Man takes his First Amendment right to whine very seriously -- and it would all be captured on smartphones and posted to YouTube, and I'm guessing footage of internal exile would make the government look kind of tyrannical, unless they could think of something fun to do during the exodus, like play "I Spy" or get a round of "Row, Row, Row, Your Boat" going.

So clearly, the answer is Self-Imprisonment: let's not dislodge these Minutemen (as their wives derisively call them), let's lodge them. There must be hundreds of isolated and half-forgotten government buildings these guys and their brethren could crowd into -- corrugated steel sheds where pesticides for the Tri-County Mosquito Abatement District are stored; the gift shop at the old Yucca Flats nuclear testing ground; the shack used by that guy from the state Agriculture Department who takes the annual skunk census in Mingo County, West Virginia (I mean, I assume that's a thing; I'd hate to think Mingo County is just guessing about its skunk population).  Let's face it, guns are dangerous, and White Guys carry guns the way ground squirrels carry plague. But while you can keep a squirrel out of your day care center without Wayne La Pierre taking you to court, White Guys and their death-dicks not only have the run of the country, they can even point sniper rifles at police officers, the way Ammon Bundy's buddies did at his daddy's ranch, and never even risk a ticket, let alone arrest. So really, confining these pasty patriots to a secluded spot in the woods is the closest they're ever going to get to a jail cell. Or at least to a progressive dinner at the Unibomber's cabin.

So let's allow, even encourage these pastytriots to occupy our nation's ranger stations and nuclear waste sites, just so long as their guns remain there with them, under house arrest (and I'm serious here guys: your AR-15s and your AK-47s have to wear those tracking ankle bracelets too).  And like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who managed to write A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich while laboring in one of Stalin's gulags, the Occupiers would be free to write pamphlets and manifestos and exchange ideas (at a fair market rate of exchange) with fellow Constitutionalists who share their belief that the nation's founding document says private citizens can beat up the Federal government and steal its lunch money (incidentally, according to Merriam-Webster, the proper collective noun for such a confab is a blowhoard of blowhards).

So anyway, we should all kick in to buy these latter day Spartans some Fritos or something, before they get peckish and go home.

Post-Friday Beast Blogging: The Force Awakens (Then Falls Asleep Again) Edition

SHADOW:  I love you...I loooooove yo--Hey! WAKE UP!  I said I LOVE you!

MOONDOGGIE:  ZZZzzzzz--huh? What? Oh...That's great, kid. Thanksssszzzzz...

SHADOW:  You have a kind face...

MOONDOGGIE:  Okay, that's enough...

Sunrise, Sunset

Connoisseurs of hucksterism and ballyhoo will have noticed my regular promotion -- if not outright pimpage -- of the All-Star Summer Jamboree podcast.  Founded back in 2010, the ASSJam was originally a vehicle for Mike & Ike, the perpetually stoned and inventively profane pop culture critics created by my friend, writer-actor-director and gently warped genius, Jeff Holland.

Jeff had me on the show in 2011 to promote Better Living Through Bad Movies and -- prophetically, as it turned out -- go careening off on wild tangents and gab about a multitude of inexplicable crap.  Against common sense and natural law, Jeff has had me on as a guest many times since, and at the beginning of 2015, he invited to appear as a sort of semi-regular guest host after his former partner left the show to spend more time with his family and less time chatting about Scooby-Doo and Cannibal Holocaust. But to all things there is a season (turn, turn, turn, kick ball change, turn), and Jeff decided to retire the ASSJam, making this, our most recent show, also our last.

ASSJam 69 “Namaste Part One”

GeekplanetOnline, the Fascination Nation, and Very Amateurish Productions, the Rejuvenation Indignation, can finally say piss off to the All Star Summer Jamboree.  Indy knows it’s the end, but no one at WVAR seems to. Jeff chats with the lovely and talented Mary Clevenger about Bones and all things Joss Whedon, Scott sends us a holiday message filled to the brim with good cheer and Drew Barrymore, John Szura joins Jeff and Scott for a William Castle led descent into film geekery, and it ends with the man who began it, a special message from Tom Elliot.

But we're going out on a high note, with Mary making her podcast debut in the first segment, talking about an eclectic salmagundi of television shows, from beloved space operas that died too young, to whimsical crime procedurals in which the guest stars are extravagantly decayed corpses.

Which reminds me, for some reason, of the first joke I wrote for Frankenfish, as we floated on a camera barge on the Tensaw River and struggled to meet the producers' mandate that female star China Chow (playing an animal physiologist working for the State Department of Wildlife and Fisheries) would doff her top within ten minutes of meeting our hero, a medical examiner.

"Well," she muses, untying her bikini while straining to deliver a mixture of flirtation and rationalization. "You're a doctor, you must've seen lots of naked ladies."

"Yes," our hero allows. "Although they're usually on an autopsy table in an advanced state of putrefaction."

(Happily for everyone concerned, this scene was cut.)

So anyway, if you've ever wanted to hear Mary chat about geeky stuff (in other words, get a load of what my daily life is like), this is your chance.

Afterwards, I step up to the microphone for a dramatic reading of Babes in Toyland (the Drew Barrymore/Keanu Reeves version).

Then for our final segment, put on your Ghost Viewer glasses, because you're about to experience a New Dimension in Horror with my friend John Szura, who tells us what it was like to sit in a theater as a kid and throw Jujubes at the amazingly lame skeleton from House on Haunted Hill.  So if you've got a little time, please click on the link above and give it a listen.

Rebooting the Franchise in 2016

Yes, this year was pretty much like beating myself on the skull with Maxwell's Silver Hammer.

So...Before we exit the year in a safe and orderly fashion, I just wanted to give the final birthday shout-out of 2015 to Wo'C lurker Jacquie, whose natal anniversary was December 29. In the past she's requested such toothsome ladies as Eliza Dushku or Charlize Theron for her (cheese)cake, but I think we should go out on a classic note, so here's Coleen Gray, who I just saw at her loveliest in the great (but unlovely) film, Nightmare Alley:

Happy birthday, Jacquie!

This past year hasn't been all bad, but it sure started off rough, with one loss after another. Totaling up the butcher's bill from last New Years Day, we'd recently lost Riley; Mary had recently lost a couple of organs, several tumors, and her job, and we nearly lost the apartment. But thanks to the many wonderful Crappers who rallied to help us, we were able to keep a roof over our heads (or at least an acoustical cottage cheese ceiling which does little to muffle our upstairs neighbor's nightly attempts to stage a one-man version of "Stomp").

Things were hand-to-mouth for most of the year, but toward the end of summer Mary got a job which, while it doesn't pay much, allows her to help people and make the world a little better, and that makes her very happy.

Then Moondoggie, who's been lonesome for a very long time, found a small, black, difficult to photograph friend...

And also a taste of karma, since it turns out that Moondoggie's back fat is to Shadow as Riley's ass was to Moondoggie...

And now it looks like Mystery Science Theater 3000 is coming back for a new season, and since Mary and I met twenty years ago at a screening of MST3K: The Movie, she's has decided to take this as an omen, or a portent, or maybe just a hint, and declare a reboot of life for 2016. So please join us in a toast:

May the coming year be a good reboot, like Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica, and not a crappy one, like the 2014 Robocop.

Happy New Years, everyone.