Just a few more left

Are you ready to get snownd? The G is. She went to the grocery store at midnight on Thursday and the lines extended all the way down the aisles, back into the cold cuts. And all she wanted to buy was bleu cheese dressing for our Super Bowl wings and 6 frozen pizzas for her and the dog. I don’t really care for football, so I’m not going to watch the game. Have fun. Plus, I already know what’s going to happen thanks to my trusty, dog-eared copy of Boston 2010: XXI Supercoppa.



Boston 2010: XXI Supercoppa is the superior Italian translation of Killerbowl, Gary K Wolf’s realism masterpiece. While, most will remember Wolf as the creator of Roger Rabbit, Boston 2010: XXI Supercoppa is actually the brightest star in Wolf’s constellation of fictitious works. It’d be easy to find or write an English synopsis of the book. But who has time for that? Let’s make things complicated and toss the Italian summary into a couple translators and see whats what. We can break it down from there.

It’s 31 December 2010(1). In a few hours, begins the finals of the oval ball between the team of the San Francisco Prospectors and that of the Minuteman in New England. TK Mann, ace Prospector, is preparing(2) the dressing room. At 34 you(3) feel old, and his murderous rival, Harv Matision(4), has sworn to kill him(5) ... Because in 2010 the American football, which is already one of the most violent sports in existence, has evolved into a clash of gladiators. The athletes take the field as armored medieval warriors armed with clubs, spears, daggers, rifles(6), and the game, rather than the stadium, takes place in an urban district, vacated for the occasion and littered with cameras. Everything is ready for the Super Cup XXI(7). But as we witness, hour by hour, the chronicle of the fierce battle, a series of dramatic flashbacks gradually reveal why this particular Super Cup is different from all others. There are mysterious backstages(8), strange interference, cynical machinations behind the big game. And TK Mann, a hero at sunset, still has many cards to play: first and foremost that of revenge.

1. HG Welles was able to correctly predict technological advancements in submarines and electrical batteries. Lovecraft accurately foretold the arrival of the batrachian Deep Ones , that race of frog-like ocean-dwelling creatures who are currently plaguing the Connecticut coastline with their affinity for mating with humans. I don’t see why Paul K. Wolf would not assume that the NFL would add a bye week to the middle of the season, extend the schedule to 16 games and add a wild card round to the playoffs. It’s ridiculous for anyone to think that the 2010 Super Bowl would be played even on the last day of December.

2. Every translation indicated that TK Mann, the ace Prospector, was preparing THE dressing room and not preparing IN the dressing room. With bunting, I assume.

3. The translators also appear to have issues with pronouns. It isn’t Mann who feels old, but the reader. Also, is a 34 year-old quarterback considered over-the-hill anymore?

4. Granted this was written decades ago, but doesn’t Harv Matision seem like a lazy attempt at changing the name of Marvin Harrison? The gun-toting, alleged attempted murderer and former Colt Marvin Harrison?

5. Only one translation says “sworn to kill him.” The others claim that Harv Matision has “sworn to make him the skin.”

6. Also cudgels, claves, giavellottis, javelins, daggers, and carbines.

7. With the way the NFL stretches out the season to make monies, it can be forgiven that Wolf would get the date of the game wrong. But there are some wildly inaccurate mathematics being used to compute the Roman numerals for the 2010 Super Bowl. When the book was printed in 1975 it had been firmly established that the Super Bowl was an annual event. It should have been easy to calculate that the game was the 44th championship and not the 21st. Super Bowl XXI was in 1987.

8. Not mysterious backstage activities. Just mysterious back stages.



Enjoy the game everyone. My guess: Boston Minutemen in four sets. 7-6, 6-3, 4-6, 6-1.

Home Fries

I'm sure the sudden and embiggening change to Luke Wilson face has been thoroughly discussed wherever people talk about these things nowadays. (Internet cafés?) I know that we sure have in our poor household. Every time the commercials come on for whatever it is he’s selling (cordless phones?) I say “he looks like a Wii character.” But it’s clear nobody in the room with me (the dog?) gets what I mean. This is what I mean.

Luke Wilson used to look like this.



Now he looks like this.

There is a Mii face setting that looks like a trapezoid, but I knew of no person whose head was shaped like that. And then along came Luke.


There are several thousand other things I should have been doing in the 30 minutes it took me to make these.

"Younger students in the classroom were often frightened by the presence of Elvis."

May I suggest first putting on headphones, due to the automatic (awesome) audio.

http://www.elviskarate.com/

I have spent 35 minutes and counting on this site. may I add that the Special Savings package in the Elvis Karate store is only $38.99 right now, and my Easter basket for 2010 is as of right now, empty.

A picket to Titsburgh, please.

Curiosity once demanded that I travel to Carnegie Mellon to watch their automatics department stage a soccer game between two packs of warring and ferocious robot dogs. It was interesting. However, they were also outfitting Segways with cameras to play soccer with/against humans. Obviously, it was terrifying given that DARPA will happily replace “play soccer” with “hunt down, exterminate, render biomass for fuel and replace their cold metallic handles with fleshy hands” within the year.

The trip required a trip to the through the Pittsburgh International airport. They have a Franco Harris/Immaculate Reception statue in the terminal. And there are vast unoccupied stretches where you can sit for 3 hours and only occasionally here the irregular clack of someone’s broken suitcase wheel. But they also have a Gap and Brooks Brothers behind the security gates that don’t mark up their prices like this $11 Quizznos sub I just forced down my gullet.

And there is a Brookstone. Brookstone used to be the best store in the mall because their wares seemed to be sent from 6-months into the future. Not impossible things, but just a little sleeker than the version out there at your suburban Zayre retail store. Now it’s nothing more than a tumbled-down, terrestrial SkyMall.

Last time I came through the Pittsburg airport, the Brookstone had the massage chairs out front and were inviting weary travelers to enjoy they kneading coils. Today, they’re in the back and you need to sit through an employees pitch before you sit down.

Sir, it snowing and I’ve been in this airport for 10 hours. Please start my goddamn $3599 massage and leave me alone.

No Joy

There is no more room in the house. The kitchen cupboards don’t close. The laundry is in a perpetual cycle of never making it into the drawers before the articles are worn and then put back into the dirty laundry. The cabinet on the wine rack spontaneously bursts open and not awesomely because we have so much wine but pathetically because it’s stuffed with napkins for a party we will never have. Old CDs are stored in the trunk of a car that serves less as a mode of transportation and more as test subject for the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety.

But change is coming. Goodwill has already received a massive donation of books and men’s clothing. And the G keeps claiming she’s going to blow out her closet and toss all her Exile in Guyville era outfits in the garbage. No longer will the last place we look for our winter coats be the coat closet because we are afraid to open the door lest an Emmy falls on our heads.

There is a sad note, however. It goes “bwwwerrrthpp.” The collection wasn’t extensive, but all my old Sports Illustrated Swim Suit issues have been trashed. And that one Playboy. So long nekkid ladies. May the hobos enjoy your glossy pages.



The loss isn’t too terrible since the internet still exists and every one of those images could recaptured with a click of the mouse. But I feel bad for the future friends of any kids we may have. They’ll never be able to find my old porn collection in the basement or attic or anywhere. Now they’re going to go have to hang out with Avent’s second kid and go through his giant cache.

Bwwwerrrthpp.

some kind of pun about autoerotic asphyxiation but i'm not that smart anymore because of shit like this happening all the time, so you figure it out

- what are the chances that you get hit 6 separate times driving the same car in a span of, I dunno, 3 years?

- what are the chances you get rear ended at a red light on your way to the bodyshop to have aforementioned car fixed from a separate accident that had occurred three days earlier?

- do you have any cars you'd recommend purchasing?

BLT Update!

Because I know a guy...



Real exclusive video of real bears and real tigers chumming it up with real lions.

i'm inventing a blahg!

new blog invention:

i want to track all the invitations I receive from elder female relatives on the ol' FB to find missing children/have a virtual hug/support breast cancer awareness/help them find a lost farm animal/hang out with the mafia.

I will also include the daily phone conversations I have with my mother when she asks how to tag people in photos and/or why she can't read my "wall."

i will post on this new invention 30000 times a day.

that horse is eating my cake.

So Matto is all hyped up about bears and lions and tigers sharing those BFF necklaces that are shaped like hearts and split apart but let's talk more about all the other insanely awesome photos on Noah's Ark's flickr feed. She linked to a few but let's discuss, for instance:

- The zebra is named "Evidence." Holy crap.

- A mass of dog butts greets you.

- The horse is eating Little Debbie Snackcakes. Neither of us can really get over this I guess.

- ! ! !

- Salad? Yes.

- THE GOAT AND GERMAN SHEPERD ARE IN THE KITCHEN. Probably making dinner for everyone.

- Also Evidence likes chillin in the backseat with his college bros even though he called shotgun first and that is unfair.

- Now you will die of cute.

- And, finally: my favorite.


Basically I want these people to adopt me. I spent most of my latenight computer allowance yesterday sending everyone freaked out IMs with Flickr links. I apologize for that. Actually, no I don't.

plus, shatner

The wikipedia entry for "Rescue 911" lists all the episodes where people died instead of lived. Only 16 episodes! Man that really was a feel good show.

Also: in 1994, Premier Technologies (trade-name: Gottlieb), released a Rescue 911 pinball machine. It featured a helicopter that magnetically captured the ball as well as a red revolving light on the backbox.

It's things like this that really make my mornings bearable. Internet, you and I are going places.

awesome

How have I never seen 1973's Sisters before?

I don't practice Santeria/I ain't got no crystal ball (or finger lickin barf)

It’s been previously noted that our neighborhood has weird bird issues. There are always too many. They are always carrying on at the worst times of the night with impossibly amplified voices that sound like 1000 garbage trucks crashing into 1000 dumpsters. They have attacked us with their Mach 5 razor beaks and Quattro razor talons. And they are hideously deformed.

Obviously, it’s shameful that I live in a world where my exposure to wild biology is a negative one. Well, the dog is pretty wild. But when throws up for no reason other than he has a weak constitution he still does it mostly in a house in the suburbs.

This week, however, the neighborhood (as a sentient entity) finally got its revenge.



But it’s been a few days now. So if you were carrying a chicken carcass in a plastic bag and you dropped it on our street, you can come pick it up now. The dog is down with it but the rest of us find it a little gross. And flat.






HAPPY X-GIVINGS, SUCKAS!

My Flickr account proves my reality

Remember when i used to have the really shittiest job from hell but one awesome thing that came out of that job was an incredibly ill-fated trip to the Carlisle, PA Bike Fest? Yes, that really happened. It wasn't just a night terror.



Hell yeah I met Brad Whitford!


Anyway, this made me think of that.

cue the digital wolves

"That was my favorite part. The screaming."

A cold and wet November dawn/And there are no barking sparrows

I found out two things about my marriage this weekend. First, my wife is the only member of her demographic who reads Parade Magazine on Sunday mornings. Any demographic she qualifies for, she is still the only one. Second, she has been tweeting the wolf-face crazy things I say. Especially the ones that make me sound brain-dead.

The tweeting thing is my fault. I am an early adapter of everything I don’t understand. I joined Twitter awhile back and was apparently following people but never actually looked at what anybody wrote because I couldn’t really noodle out what was going on. If I had bothered looking into it, I could have curbed my yammering.

So what is this all about? Me being a moron?

Close.

According to my wife and this week’s Parade Magazine, our Pilgrim fore-invaders didn’t watch the Lions lose on Thanksgiving, they played an equally painful game called Kick the Shins. It’s as it sounds. You put some straw in your pants and then kick the crap out each other’s legs. And it’s still played today! Here’s last year’s championship:



And this is timely because just last week, when I discovered my wife tweets about me, I was talking about the very same thing! And she tweeted about it! On the internet!

But I feel I need to expand on what I said.

Ladies or beta males, if you’re getting messed with and all attempts at a peaceful resolution have been endeavored, may I suggest a kick to the shins as an alternative to the cock punch. Any old asshole is going to expect a furious knee or fist to the groin and will employ a stance to protect the area. But the shin should be considered the groin of the leg. Its vulnerability has been ignored by Hollywood and the MSM for decades. Although, not in the funny pages.

Even better, deliver the assault and wait a week. Close to the bone, the bruise will swell to a degree so painful that even a bed sheet resting on the leg will cause muffled pillow screaming. Track the guy down and when he’s least expecting it, deliver a follow-up blow. The hematoma will rupture and spread instantly to the rest of his leg. He will either throw up on the spot or crumple into a howling mass.

And best of all, he will end up with those weird knobby legs that old men have. You know the kind with all these bumps that look like knee caps but start only six inches north of the foot. And their legs are mostly hairless except for around the ankles for some reason. And they’re at the pool.

Or so has been my experience in the last two weeks. And the bruising is nice down there too. In between yellow and purple somehow.

instant rats

Amanda: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/arts/television/17ober.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

me: yeah! i heard that on the radio this morning!
also he was 52
so we should all be dead soon
...
hi have you met me? miss mary sunshine?

Amanda: yeah, where can we send you? for some relaxation?

me: maybe i have a vitamin d deficiency
maybe i have delerium tremers
tremons?
which one is the beer and which one is the affliction?
wait
they are both the same

Amanda: hahahahaha

me: but i had to wikipedia that to find out

Amanda: yeah i swear, the vitamin d thing is for real. i am way less awesome in the winter

me: and have therefore stumbled upon the best wikipedia entry ever, btw
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delirium_tremens
from now on it shall be referred to as ""the abdabs"
thank you
i decree this
to all my friends
you now have the abdabs
the end
WAIT. THE RATS.

Amanda: HAHAHAHAHA

me: awesome
the rats
whats wrong, you?

Amanda: the jimjams

me: i have the rats
man I should really have a blog to talk about this in more detail

Amanda: HAHAHAHA

and it's where i lock the children during the day

K & S and I were talking about bed sizes the other day. Full disclosure: pitchers of beer were involved. I think the conversation was something like oh we all have queen mattresses but that it would be fun to own a king sized bed or something; and how it's funny when big people have doubles and tiny people have california kings and etc etc.

Anyway I was telling them about my childhood art projects: remember when you were in elementary school, everyone drew like, their imaginary dream houses or dream rooms, right? And a lot of time kids constructed rooms/houses with waterslides (me too) and ponies and crap, but for a few years in a row my Dream Room was nothing but a giant mattress. Like, you opened the door and the FLOOR WAS MATTRESS.

They laughed but I still think this is genius in a sleep-where-you-fall style way, and would have come in awesomely handy say in college/my early twenties; actually okay now. What I'm saying is: someone build me a mattress room. *


Which is essentially a padded soundproof room. Oh my god?

hello.

one

two

I spent Veterans Day cleaning up copious amounts of dog shit (poop: it's coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE); BD's bowls exploded in the kid's room. It was like the next installment of the Saw movie franchise only with poop instead of blood and no weird puppets. okay, other than the weird puppet my mom recently bought, which actually is a puppet that looks just like the dog. Is crapping all over the house his way of honoring those who serve? I don't know, but it certainly just proves what a dick our dog is.

. . .

the above paragraph is why i no longer blog.

It actually turns me on a little

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Peter Peter Pumpkin Destroyer 2: The Inevitable Let Down

Hi there.

We’re going backwards this time.

Here is how this year’s squirrel pumpkin turned out.



I agree, it’s a little disappointing. Kinda sucks, in fact. I was even hesitant to post anything after last years astonishing debut. It found its way into the trash first thing Monday morning. Where it belongs, with the other garbage.

After action report:

First, the squirrels waited until Halloween afternoon before they even began working on their half of the project. Granted the weather was not ideal in the days leading up to Saturday but I presented the partially carved pumpkin to them on Tuesday. That means they dicked around for three entire days before getting their flea-bitten acts together. On Saturday morning, I resorted to throwing a handful of party nuts into the thing to entice them out of the trees and into my gourd. It’s why it looks rushed and careless.

Second, it’s obviously not as creative as last year. The asymmetry that made the 2008 version so fantastic was inflated to an excessive degree this year. The squirrels overstressed the right eye to the point of violating the sovereignty of the nose. And it nearly collapsed the entire face after dangerously swelling toward the mouth. And then there’s the other eye. Left untouched it leaves an imbalance too extreme to chalk up to anything except laziness. Once they were able to drag their fat carcasses through the eye and get their nuts they gave up. Very disappointing.

So who’s to blame here? Obviously, it’s the squirrels. Last year’s project seemingly garnered too much attention for their egos to handle. In the last 12 months, they’ve let themselves go and don’t even bother getting out of the way of cars. They just waddle around the streets with haute attitudes and musky odors. If our neighborhood dogs were still running free like they were before the overzealous animal control officers started patrolling they’d eaten all the squirrels by now or at least broken their necks.

Our collaboration may have come to an end. We are not enemies like we were 3 years ago but this relationship is on the brink of abandonment.

So.

Where did this start? Like everything sciurine-related it was once enormously promising. I found a pumpkin at the local patch the seemed to fit all standard pre-carving conditions. A few taps returned a solid, reassuring echo. A small child sat on it to test out its fortitude. Its stem was comically large as a way to over-compensate it smallish height and fat gut. R2 is standing in to provide scale.



I was feeling optimistic from moment one. Some animal started to dig into my gourd the day the pumpkin stork brought this bundle home from the pumpkin hospital. And since the initial gnawing seemed like an ideal place for an eye, I took a potato peeler and punched the rest of the way through. Since we had great success last year with the small holes, I decided to do the same thing with the other eye and nose.

But, damn, did it look boring. We need something magical for the mouth. But what kitchen utensil could be enchanting enough to carve something magical into this beautiful pumpkin? I’ve got it! I’ll use our

(side note – sometime last spring, we were in one of those fancy suburban stores that sells nothing but very specific fancy kitchen supplies to mostly young white folks. Because it was spring, all their Christmas goods were 75% off. This included a GIANT gingerbread house that needed only a quick and easy assembly. Or so the box said. All supplies were included! But my beautiful wife would not let me buy it, put it together, leave it on Amanda’s doorstep and run away. Instead, all I was allowed to get was a)

unicorn cookie cutter!



So if worse comes to worse and the squirrels don’t get after the pumpkin, at least it will have an awesome unicorn shaped mouth. All it took was a little delicate beating with a rubber mallet and BAM. Halloween is a go.






Well, as we all know, worse came to worser. The squirrels mangled the eye hole and absolutely destroyed the mouth. There is nothing unicorny about it. Honestly, we would have been better off leaving the squirrels out of it.

So what’s the lesson? First, don’t trust squirrels any farther than you can throw them. And I could throw a squirrel pretty fucking far. At least over that fence. Second, a unicorn makes a pretty awesome pumpkin mouth. And finally, if you have the opportunity to buy a monster gingerbread house at 75% off its retail price you better buy that son of a bitch because come Halloween you’re gonna wish you had something you’re proud to put on your doorstep.

And not some bullshit squirrel pumpkin.

The end. See you next year.