no thank you

this generation’s mascot scientists face a complex issue: how can they improve upon the previous generations’ creepifying efforts? Every benign forgettable character from the 1950s that hasn’t been excized has already been over airbrushed and 3d rendered and sapped of all remotely organic elements. What possibly remains to be done that can make them worse? the keebler company, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Kellogg company, decided to have the creepler elf give up its long standing sideways glance in favor of a horrifying straight ahead stare.

here, at the same store, in a picture taken AFTER the previous two, is a vintage keebler elf on the a shelf for damaged products, ironic considering the psychological damage its descendant inflicts. Perhaps they had a fight for leadership of the tribe, this one lost and was banished. Or exported as the labeling suggests.

captain crunch, a long time veteran of my posts fixating on the packaging of products I do not buy, doesn’t look quite 3d rendered but mysteriously rather like an attempt at a two dimensional drawing OF a 3d rendered captain. the question here: is the box on the right the previous design or the aftermath of people seeing the box on the left and filing complaints?
another possibility: the left side character is actually a different Captain. Consider that he needs to order himself to crunchatize himself even though all crunch scholars know that “he” has done that already. However, the management saw

“oops! All Mega Berries” and finally realized the previous Captain Crunch had been all these years filling boxes with his personal berries (and donuts) on purpose while trying to pass it off as production errors. but as is too often the case, the corruption goes all the way to the top. Or to slightly below admiral, anyhow. The yellow box does not even bother to say “oops!” I never accepted the oops but its absence shows that the captain believes he is entitled to all berries, and his hubris level has become uncontainable. On that note, he ran out of cereal containers, and had to put the berries into little pouches instead. What would have been next? “oops one berry in a thimble” ? That Captain had to GO. Perhaps the previous elf has also been replaced for the same reason.

Now I have to go as well

These are all magazines I saw at the same store, Big Y in north branford connecticut, on the same day, august 14 2019. except for one that I had a pre-existing but unposted complaint about that this reminded me of.

Robin Williams five years later: still dead, still having his death exploited by people with no lives. Pardon me, too soon? I admit I only saw this magazine a week ago.

Is ten years too soon to say that Patrick Swayze had as much impact on my life as I did on his?

Hey how about 1999? Remember when one person got dead that year? Someone who was only famous because his father was also dead?

or how about the time that- what? I didn’t even know Farrah Fawcett was dead. I suppose this does serve a purpose. However you aren’t doing a very good job remembering “the Beloved Charlie’s Angels Star” if you forget that she quit that show after one season and spent the rest of her life trying to not be remembered as its star. Also: this and the one before it have both been placed beside the same issue of

National Examiner, ALSO obsessed with a death that happened ages ago but I forgive them for that because The Tabloids never stopped touching themselves while thinking about Diana’s death for a minute. That’s the closest they come to journalistic integrity. Call it monogamy if you want.

and just over to the right: Hey Daniel Ratcliff isn’t doing any more Harry Potter movies. Seems like a good time to put him on the cover in that costume and run a story on this like it’s new.

hey remember when you could only watch tv shows when tv channels said you could? Wasn’t that great? Do you remember when you couldn’t even find out what programs were going to be broadcast and when unless you bought a separate little book just for that? No probably not since studies have shown I am the oldest person on the internet.

if you are like me (as I already established you aren’t) you barely remember the early 1990s and never sought out any of these idiots on purpose but saw them on your television incessantly anyway so that perhaps you believed they appeared on the same program called 9021OJ in which every one of those bleached smiling scumbags in that pile get murdered. These magazines are here and separate to set you straight and possibly no other reason.

I actually did like the Naked Gun Movies in which Mr. J appeared, and since I do remember that, no magazines are necessary.

speaking of no reason, why celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of these movies when it is also the thirtieth anniversary of movies from 1989 and more importantly the twenty-fifth anniversary of movies from 1994 and yet more importantly totally pointless? Unless the critics are actually being CRITICAL of movies that made loads of money and have inarguable legacies there is nothing new to say here and they could just reprint what they probably ran ten years ago. maybe they did. George Orwell’s concept of 1984 society using thought control to keep people in their places greatly over-estimated how much effort that would require.
i tried to watch indiana jones and the temple of doom, just incidentally, a few weeks ago. It is a really stupid movie! Loaded with stereotypes, improbable mercy from adversaries shown none and Harrison Ford making even less effort to be likeable than Bill Murray in Ghostbusters, without two partners of equal rank to balance that out. But i appreciate that it gets fight to the point and doesn’t waste time trying to pretend it is a smart movie. I sure wouldn’t want to read a magazine article about it NOW.

hey how about some dead bands? Look it is even in their name! And by gamera they are GRATEFUL to be mentioned at all. You know the only thing I like better than hearing music from the same singers and same instruments for hours simply because somebody else told me the band is great-filled is READING about it.


how about some dead decades? the 1960s: the only time anything ever happened. That was a decade that changed a nation. How many of them can claim that? That is why so many countries seem like they are stuck in other centuries; only one of them can change every ten years, and luckily this one got its one chance five of that ago.
magazines tend to agree on this. they will place 90% of the greatest songs OF ALL TIME, that being all sound created by all beings in the history of the universe, all of which having been heard and equally evaluated, into this decade* via

The Man’s 500 most acceptable mainstream vocal English-language songs of the middle scrap of one century issue. What a shock that the one their magazine is named after tops the list and a band with the same name dominates it otherwise. They would have me believe “the times” are “a-changin'” when their musical taste was chiseled into granite around the same time my mother was born (presumably a coincidence). Luckily Rolling Stone Magazine is not generally stocked by the checkout aisles as Big Y World Class Markets or else I would have to write a version of this web page once a month rather than every two months.

*that figure was a cynical guess; statistically it is apparently only 40%, but the closer you get to the top of the list the closer it comes to that, with 9 of the top 10 coming out within a 12 year period that includes the 1960s.

additionally:

History Channel Magazine ALREADY had a Beatles issue THIS YEAR. Do you know how much history there IS? All the history in HISTORY. And the magazine named after it can’t find enough in five months to not have to go into reruns.

i suppose in a media format that is dying out you stay in business by reminding people of times when more people bought magazines. Because when those times actually do a-change, expectations a-do as well, which a-is not good for business. Achoo! This may seem to contradict the adage of those who forget the past being doomed to repeat it, but consider that this may itself be the doom prescribed. This is what we get for for getting.

Oh this is too much. I need to think about something else.

Dead civilizations! My favorite!

////////////////////////////////////

addendoy: i had to take the pictures in the store somewhat hurriedly so the details were not all clear and I did not realize that the lower two sections are showing different pictures. Some dorky band and touching a rock in space are evidently not just more important, but substantially so than the civil rights movement and one of United Statia’s worst wars. I could definitely claim there was a racial angle to this if I could do so without screwing it up.

this sums up why i do not like or even think about the hotel transylvania film series enough to have previously acknowledged it. My picture is terrible and compiled from several terrible pictures since I did not want to look like I was photographing it, and also the stop and shop granola bar shelf is arranged like a mosh pit but this is all it deserves. “it” being just another bland story of pixar-derived normal boring people with a single unusual trait that happens to manifest itself in appearance + celebrity voices. Legally Adam Sandler still has more than enough money to be considered a celebrity and is not at risk of being called an actor. In fact the “moral” is probably don’t judge a book by its cover! Maybe the MONSTERS are not the REAL monsters! Like every computer movie that has ever come out. in fact pixar has a series that is literally also “monsters” that are just like “us.” And also the Addams Family did that half a century ago and the Munsters even used Frankenstein. I don’t know why the Sony corporation didn’t just brand Hotel Transylvania a Groovie Goolies reboot. I didn’t think Underdog had enough name recognition to justify a 3d animated point-missing remake, and the Goolies have even LESS.
Anyway I thought there was no idea to start with, but by 2018 they have run out of no ideas since the third installmeh has a “everybody takes a trip to the beach” theme, which puts it into Brady Bunch territory. That is even the premise of the third The Chipmunks bad computer animated movie. Apart from the mummy, these characters aren’t really recognizable as monsters now. They just look like slobs.

I might have thought the right side one was Shaggy from Scooby Doo if I did not see the Hotel Transylvania logo and there being a woman attracted to him. in fact there is a Scooby Doo “movie” called The Reluctant Werewolf in which Shaggy gets transformed into a werewolf and gets taunted by recycled Groovie Goolies animation.* he even has an inexplicable female companion named “Googie” whom to my knowledge was not seen prior to then nor afterward (and isn’t seen here either). I remember watching it at the age of 6-9 on the USA network at my grandmother’s house since she had cable. It took about two hours. The running time was insane for something that dull and crummy. And I watched it anyway because kids have no taste. The left character here, I guess is just some lady. These people are PERSECUTED just because they’re MONSTERS even though they keep up with contemporary American fashion and gender norms.

Or maybe these two are the “normal” normal people that are supposed to be like the viewer’s avatar, who start off AFRAID but realize eventually that some business man/ trophy hunter / scientist nerd is the REAL monster, even though they are the people actually making the movies. the trophy hunters are doing it in a sexual sense but otherwise there is no difference.
(then I drew this) I don’t know. and i can’t tell. And once i can’t tell, what even is the point? “it’s what’s inside that counts!” that’s true! as long as you are completely ordinary and submissive to commercialism inside, be as garish as you want. Eat up –it’s on food, even– the fake politically correct morality of the moment.
I don’t even know if Hotel Transylvania 3: Die Darkman Die came out yet, maybe it even came out last year; these things are preservatived enough to be legally edible for several years.

here is The Roughly Adequate Dinosaur branded consumable material in shop rite in 2017 despite a visible copyright notice identifying 2015. Of course to be fair it IS at Shop Rite. You can tell it is Shop Rite because there are bright yellow labels that say “SAVINGS” on items which are not actually on sale. And you can tell I took this picture two years later than the date on it because I just typed text saying so.

_{(emphasis mine)}
what on earth is “spooky” here? The five smoke stacks on the ship in the distance? The unsupervised child playing on a stack of abandoned cargo? That Quaker uses the iconography of a health food company while selling candy and corporate propaganda? I buy granola bars because I want to eat chocolate chip cookies and consider these marginally less detrimental to my well-being.
this is from the quaker website because the box with these characters on it was sold out when I finally decided to take pictures of them, not considering that I would postpone finishing what I was writing for another three weeks and would have ample time for the store to restock them even though I never finish one of these in under a month anymore.

*I mis-remembered this; recycled Groovie Goolies animation appears in a 1984 episode of The Let’s Go Ghost-Busters which I also have seen, but the production on Reluctant Werewolf is so shoddy and 1970s looking that this is plausible enough to leave in with a disclaimer. I was surprised just now to read it came out in 1988!

I have also been told by my own nagging need to sabotage my efforts by looking things up, that the completely ordinary looking woman here is Dracula’s daughter and the conflict is more of an obnoxious sitcom sort of deal with Dracula being overprotective of his daughter from this human who isn’t even a vampire and hanging out with his oafy friends who can’t stand their nagging wives. The nagging wives bit is extrapolation by me based on them being portrayed by Fran Drescher and Molly Shannon, them being absent from the plot description and my memory of commercials for Father of the Pride (that page is from 2004, when my parenthetical asides spanned whole paragraphs watch out). I was thinking: more Shrek, with all the annoying Saturday Night Live crummydians in the place of actors but really it’s more Shrek 2, with annoying pop singers added in to raise the marketing value among kids who aren’t yet old enough to think they are smart because they watch Saturday Night Live. In any event everybody’s just a slob at the beach by now and that means this completely ordinary-looking woman standing in direct sunlight is supposed to be a full-blooded vampire, so plainly it doesn’t matter that she IS a vampire. They probably try to play it like “look at this allegory about social harmony ho ho ho we’re so positive and messagey even though we just likened Jews to vampires.” Mel Brooks was even hired to voice Dracula’s father in the sequel (but not to write the screenplay). What’s even the point of calling him “Dracula” at this point? Dracula is only interesting because he does evil things while seeming pleasant and welcoming. A Dracula that is just an average nice guy –Adam Sandler isn’t a credited producer or writer but his wife and his daughter portray his wife and his daughter so one assumes he dictated how his character came across– and doesn’t kill people to keep himself alive or even kidnap them just to amuse himself isn’t Dracula!

It isn’t even Duckula because Duckula’s attendants legitimately want Duckula to start killing people, are disappointed when he doesn’t, and he is usually suffering most of the time. It’s more like Count Chocula: The Movie, especially considering the sugar-loaded rubbish component. Everything I see about Hotel Transylvania makes it seem like it is only as interesting as a two hour episode of Scooby Doo. Which regrettably is enough.

8-10 230am howdy. i have a comic page -almost- done but i hurt my back and am presently using that as an excuse for not having it ready on 8-9 even though I did not actually create this problem until around 1 am, unless we pretend that I live in alaska. And if pretending I live in alaska gives me less anxiety about going to bed before finishing a job for the sake of my health, why do I still feel compelled to announce this?
————————

this ad is making several key misconceptions about my mental state. first of all, that if I have specific favorite misheard lyrics, there are enough of them that I classify them by topic type, and that there enough in the food category alone that I can choose 8 standouts without exhausting my supply, and that a marketing company knows which ones those are. and then also that I would like to watch sock puppets — at all, but especially to act out misheard food lyrics, when whoever designed the advertisement isn’t even that into it, choosing instead to fixate on the graphical possibilities of the number 8.

which reminds me:

gosh FINALLY. Dial For Men. No, not a 1970s gay porn film, but Dial SOAP to be USED by men. For the first time in history, it’s gonna start raining men may bathe themselves.

For comparison, here is what regular, apparently woman-only dial looks like.
beets since when is SOAP not masculine enough? Is this marketing reacting to a demand, or trying to make men self-conscious about not having a manly enough soap?

gosh even the number 8 needs to be harder and manner. How long before Dial for MEN invades regular Dial’s territory citing an ancestral claim to the power berries?

I am not surprised at all that there are more transvestites than ever. The harder you push this “gender must permeate every object you own” agenda, the more people like me will turn away from it. And the more normal men will become insane and convinced there is a “war on men” just because the world is less unilaterally made for them. And then push more products like this, and they will keep getting oafier. With that said, I won’t feel inclined to buy Zest Tranny Clean soap once that starts showing up, because it would have the same message: you are defined by the non-personality-related products you buy. The companies who make these aren’t giving you anything. They are looking for sneaky ways to get money out of you in perpetuity, and to shut out their competitors who don’t yet offer man-only soap

It is true that there are hard biological differences between women and men, and perhaps different soaps are in order, although I always understood that was what dodderant was for, and I already do not feel comfortable buying that unless I am unaccompanied and in a store which allows self-service scanning. Already every product marketed at children has a gender-coded character or object on the package, which increasingly is impossible to avoid unless you buy off-brand stuff that status-conscious kids will still pick on you for owning, but at least adults are still free to have neutrally aligned noodles out of a can. Maybe some day there will be his and hers water and oxygen and there will be an indicator on your forehead if you try to use the wrong one without asking the government’s permission first.

I was in Washington DC this year during what apparently was “Capital Pride Weekend.” Outside of New York City, I cannot think of any place with less of a pride deficiency. Specifically it means non-caucasian non-heterosexual non-male pride, but it uses the gay pride colors, but we can’t say gay pride because that offends trans people who think they aren’t gay and you still can’t change your race because that’s racist and even if you’re trans everybody knows you are trans and still identifies you with what you were born as and on and on and we pretend this isn’t fascism garishly disguised as freedom. Anyway people who formerly were not comfortable are supposed to be proud of themselves, even though chief executive also in that capital doesn’t actually believe in this. And the ones who run Connecticut sure do not, either, lest we incite the gods to send a cursed storm of blood over our crops.

You get a F or an M that is assigned to you and you cannot have the other unless you pay thousands of dollars to have your body destroyed, and you DEFINITELY cannot have neither. This is absolutely crucial to you being able to drive a car or buy liquor (requiring the same card for both was a great idea). And apparently now to washing yourself too. Maybe someday people will be proud of themselves just for taking a shower. Like a small child would be, and perhaps then they will share their princess/truck-branded soup with the rest of us.
They will take pity on us knowing we came from a culture which temporarily thought this was acceptable. This conclusion makes no sense but I like that it tied together. Therefore I win.

Or somebody other than the custodian does.

You will never believe what happened to me this week-end! And so I shall not make the effort to inform you of it.

========================================================================

Those are people alright. Yes indeed this appears to be a random sampling of [white male] human beings [of the same approximate age]. I have no idea who these people are but they’re hilarious. they all have the same dumb facial expression. this is like a mad magazine cover.

Apparently I can collect all five. It looks like the upper four collected the middle one, and the giant red pin on the blue one’s shirt insists there are 170 more where these came from. I wonder if they staged a jail break at the sitcom precocious child factory. I’m not even pretending I don’t know who they are to show my desired disconnect from this sort of thing; I legitimately have no trace guess at their identities.

This IS the same way I learned about Justin Beeper, but this isn’t positioned in such a way that I know what this gang is collectively called, and that makes it more amusing. I don’t necessarily need to look forward to somebody I sort of know ragefully decrying the utterly predictable success of this target-marketed executive concoction (even though that’s been happening for over forty years) and possibly find myself sympathizing until the person promotes instead something with just as much legitimacy and boring typicality but directed at their own demographic.
I’m guessing the second from the right is the leader, based on the expanded cranial space to allow for a miniature alien control center, and this is after the photoshop editing. These kids are utterly unremarkable and no doubt they were designed that way. They probably grow up into

someone like that and appear on different magazines. Who IS this guy? Precisely! Is it Jason Sudeikis? Is it someone from the Big Bag Theory? Is it the model portraying a doctor who appears in mass emails for semilegal phallus pills? I don’t know, but he sure is THERE. I already forgot what the magazine was called but I remember that there was a picture of a slim, unblemished human who passed for a doctor on the cover.

This person has credibility through holding the box. I know it’s not just a stock model photograph they took off the internet; it’s a stock model photograph they took off the internet and artificially inserted this box into.

i believe it because theres a picture of someone wearing a lab coat there. This could be a veterinarian, or a robot inventor, or just somebody wearing a costume, but the costume is what counts. The person isn’t holding a box, but it is a lady. And the text printed above her approves of viagra. That means that SHE wants to DO SEX with MEN WHO USE VIAGRA.

Like them. These guys are cool.

Even more than them, if it’s possible.

They meet up once a week to redo elvis songs to be about how their penetration apparatuses don’t work.

Viagra isn’t just for old white guys, either! Eh unless this gleeful fellow is only there to gloat.

E D is a colorblind affliction. Pfizer makes the pills blue just in case you aren’t because that’s the friendly kind of [entity] Phizer is.

And then once the pills kick in I guess the gang stops playing together and does something else.

Whatever it is, it involves shooting white stuff in all directions and out the windows.

This ad came out five years ago (judging by the television set and camera I was using) but it’s still relevant today. At least as much as elvis is.
Their motto is Viva Viagra. Long life to the artificial sex organ stimulating device. Not long life to themselves; they wouldn’t need viagra if they weren’t already having long lives, right? Although then Viagra wouldn’t be in business at all. The young, recreational users Viagra is legally prohibited from admitting it welcomes the business of would never see its ads in GOLF MAGAZINE, after ehhh.

I’m not buying Golf Magazine. I’m not buying golf magazine to SEE an AD. I’m not even buying golf magazine to see golf junk. I’m not buying Golf magazine to see an ad for VIAGRA, much less on the recommendation of another ad, one for the same product, at that. I KNOW about viagra! I wish I knew less! If there’s anything that you absolutely NEED to tell me you should do it now while you have my attention! I don’t even like golf. You know who likes golf? Decepticons.

Therefore I allege that decepticons are the primary purchasers of Viagra.

Everything makes sense, now that nothing makes sense.

I might have accused these kids of being robots in disguise if they were disguised.
In addition to being photographed, though, they have proven their ability to smile and be rich, a skill many robots currently lack. Alas, that means they probably don’t grow up at all. If they do, though, then they are truly exceptional robots. I see good things in their futures.


Look at this guy, if you can stand it. Now that I think of it, those could be Mitt Romney’s children up there. I heard he had a bunch. If these aren’t his, perhaps he’s looking for more. This picture isn’t Mitt Romney, of couse. It’s… who is it?

More importantly, who searched for “bimswel bow tie” 12 times in one month?

Who wants to see THAT?

What?! Why was this picture made? Who wants to see THAT?!

Some questions are best left unasked.

Well that was quite a week, wasn’t it!

===================================

No this is about something else!

I had a half-hearted complaint about fox television [back in September] and realized I hadn’t posted this where I said the same stuff better. It’s old but time increasingly has no meaning to me.

from the creators of arrested development comes another ugly, ugly, vulgar lecherous cartoon. Usually they can say from Mike Judge or Seth McFarlane or Matt Groening, established ugly cartoonists who just happen to have had success in the field. Arrested Development was not an ugly cartoon. Why, if they were to transition into animation, would they choose to have their product be ugly if the possibility existed that it did not have to be? Footooraba at least has some competent background design work, even if it’s no less derivative of 1950s science comics than any live action shows of the 1980s. THIS, if I am accurately informed uses no background design at all and just swaps in photographs. It appears to take place at an academic institution of some sort, if I had to guess, and I do because I’ll never watch this advertisement with the sound on or again, I’d say it’s a High School, because America[‘s broadcast masters] can’t get enough high school. I’ve been avoiding tv shows and movies set at high schools my whole life. There have been so many, that I could watch a few regularly and still miss enough to claim to have avoided them.
After a bit of reading I probably definitely shouldn’t have bothered with, I discovered that far from creating this, Mitchell Hurwitz merely copied the idea from ANOTHER show from Australia and then pitched it to networks after the American The Office got popular, and it was only the Fox channel in the end who demanded it be a terribly drawn cartoon. The character designs, incididdly, are by Mo Willems, of whom this page claims “His illustrations, wire sculpture, and carved ceramics have been exhibited in galleries and museums across the nation” Of COURSE they have.

Somewhere there’s an exclusive club made up entirely of multi millionaires who had absolutely terrific times in high school and want everyone to know it.
Glee, I saw the first episode, and no more. Maybe that’s not long enough to form a proper judgment but it should be long enough to make me want to watch again and I didn’t even want to finish. It was a mildly entertaining rehash of the same old high school-themed junk I’ve been sick of/utterly unable to relate to for most of my life. It didn’t do nearly enough to bring me back for a second show, but the dorkwash of praise around it was plenty adequate to keep me away. That stuff is 100% market research. People will watch anything if it has high school or kids singing at the screen in it.

I simply have no interest in people playing sports and falling in love and losing sports but then winning sports and going to classes sometimes in highschool, regardless of whether they’re the first black anything. No part of high school for me was easy and definite enough that I would let it pass in a montage. This was related to some movie that came out a few years ago that I almost wrote about but I can’t remember what it was, but it’s worth saying, because they make that one a lot. I don’t suppose anybody wants to watch a television program about filling in worksheets, twice daily hour+ long busrides, or a year long speech strike resulting in expulsion, including me, and my situation(s) are so unusual that I shouldn’t expect anybody with money to know, much less care, much less gamble a pilot on it. But what they show instead is such a fallacious fantasy that after a few tries loses its novelty value and we realize it’s not meant to be novelty value but they think that’s reality.
I’m sick of “anti-hero” nerds. I’m at the point where The Most Unlikely is always exactly who I expect it’s going to be. Being a nerd must rule. You actually understand course material and there’s an established clique of like-minded gorkachus who share your interests. To date the only depiction of high school I’ve seen that I relate to that I recall occurs in Billy Madison, one of the least realistic movies ever made, even by Adam Sandler stadards, assuming he has any, in which at one point Billy starts yelling out the corny lines (Chlorophyll? More like bore-o-phyll!) that made him popular in grade school the week before and suddenly nobody thinks he’s funny anymore. Thankfully he only had to be in high school for a month. Forrest gumping Gump got through high school and college in about three minutes evidently without any stress or emotional crises, dropping only some narration of the length it time it took in non-montage time, five years, that’s supposed to make him seem like a twit for not realizing that’s longer than it’s supposed to take… I’ll be lucky to do it in six, not including the four year break in the middle! Clearly I’m not going to find fictional underachievers more pathetic than myself unless I invent them.

How is this at all fair? Even they get to have a dumb club.

Golly goopity I typed “gleek” into google to get a picture of that dopey blue monkey so I could post it here and pretend I was confused, not expecting gleekitude was an actual THING that people have taken upon themselves. I can’t tell if the television marketing ad executives invented it or if the viral marketing ad executives invented it, but it’s awful enough for either. Ha ha look we are proud to call ourselves an insulting name! We are very fond of labels! Please sell us official authorized merchandise with this word on it!

Alfight so I wrote most of that last year… by now this trope processing plant’s been on television for about a year and a half and it already has [at least] seven albums –depending on whether the two christmas albums are included in that total– presumably all covers, performed by the exact same people. I don’t even think Now that’s what I call an album title that’s annoying to use in a sentence was chudding them out that fast, and they weren’t presumably also producing a quasi-weekly and one imagines scripted national broadcast at the same time. Why indeed even make the television show? Glee Christmas II: Return of Durant has twelve songs on it. Unless the program has already degenerated to the point where every week is a christmas episode, it seems most likely a majority of the recordings were produced exclusively for the album, which unlike the TV show people have to pay for in currency apart from their souls and I am meant to think they do. Maybe the price is worth it to be able to imagine the singers aren’t in tv high school.

My theatre class ah teacher let’s say pronounced me a “gleek” when I stated that Michael Crawford from the film edition of A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum went on to play the Phantom of the Opera, after she posed the question of what Crawford was best known for. First of all, if I’m anything, it’s because I know Michael Crawford starred as Phineas in the London West End production of Barnum in 1981 and while I admire his linguistic speed and ability to walk across a fleeping tightrope while singing I still prefer Jim Dale’s official Broadway cast album version of the same songs because his put-on American accent sounds less like Regis Philbin.
But second, I object to having my awareness of things that predated my existence summed up in terms of a tacky sponsor expo that’s younger than my external hard drive. If I’m older than Glee but share some of its passions then perhaps glee is a meek. Ha uh oh no.

If this smarm mill is for establishment nerds who aren’t cool enough to like Kidz Bop, the muhponies of a few weeks ago may be for those not cool enough to like Glee. Whether or not that is true it lets me transition into the next bit which isn’t looking to be relevant again soon.

I can’t tell if this is a gag or not. I no longer have any concept of what’s funny and what’s serious to these people (“these people” being the users of the website with that or similar layouts or other websites used by them dissimilar in appearance). If you’re unacquainted with the orange-horned albinos that’s well enough but they tend to manifest their presences in the exact same way as the diminutive equines. This person isn’t against obsessive fans; just obsessive fans for other properties. Although I suppose merely having a ripoff character that you represent yourself with is a long way from the extreme of obsession, and this person has a considerable list of obsessive traits that he does not possess. So I am instead concerned that he possesses an obsession obsession. I am concerned because I saw what that affliction did to me.

However, is there a club for me if I’m also anti-random tough guys with mustaches? Must I align myself with the Ice Road Truckers to express frustration with something? Must I stand behind Animal from the Legion of Doom to have a say in this?

By Skipper I don’t feel safe in this company. Gleek’s not going to be any help against the Legion of Doom; the Wonder Twins were cut from that series!

Whatever am I going to do about pink-shirted, booted men in gargoyle poses flying through space by their own power?

No, not compose an ode of praise!

A more important question, perhaps: does this make me an obsessive Superfriends fan? If it’s possible to ask the question, to be in my presence without this becoming immediately apparent then we probably don’t have to argue about it.

Furries, glecowafers and their ilks are very much like the people in Flatland, a book about a world that exists entirely in two dimensions (there’s an inaccessible bit for my math class), in that they are incapable of looking at matters as a non-furry would. They can’t be “against” any overpromoted entity for breeding monotony because they’ve never been “for” anything that didn’t.
But I was here to talk about Glee and the gleek army specifically, right? (sort of) Well good news I’m done. They may live and do as they please.

But good news for whom?? Oh deef. Well I hope somebody managed to learn something from all this.

I also look forward to next year’s means of being dumber than this one.

I wish I could say I’m off my medication, but I’ve been off it for nine years. Wo_oo0°^o°0o_oo0°^o°0o! Mystérieux! I also haven’t been in an America Online chatroom in about as long and I miss making neat designs with letters and things.

Once again I’ve typed all this junk up and held it captive hoping it would improve without that happening. This is three page-downs of letters I can no longer tolerate the mental stench of knowing I have made but not used, so here, you deal with them. Do you enjoy being my personal dumpster?
Aw naw!

Long time, part time or morphin’ time readers may know I have an ongoing feud with ducks. The Aflac duck, akadaka “The Aflac Duck” usually doesn’t factor into our dispute… I consider the rivalry to be of an honorable sort, or as closest a wretched scoundrel duck can come to that, but this duck is but a dirty uncouth rapscallion without even the minimal decency of its fethren. I’m sure some person, some place thinks it is comendable that advertisers attempt to make their filths tolerable to larger audiences then those who might have an immediate “need” to purchase insurance, but that ignores the fact that there’s no reason for anyone to watch ads or accept that they are shown. And insurance in general is a dire, dire dock scam against humanity. And also that that duck is a magnificent distance from tolerable.

It’s bad enough when every fumblewig who can afford ad time thinks they’re so clever commissioning wooden puppets of themselves roundabout December, but this is… slightly more bad than that.

I don’t even like stupid rudolph the dumb red idiot nosed moron reindeer and I think the recent aflac ad, which I can easily embed in this page but never will, is, was despicable. Like worse than the other ones. I suppose it’s good that the ad was “unauthorized,” meaning whoever owns the rights to the characters and situations and such gave no assistance or permission, but it’s also bad because that means anybody can make a cheap daft Winnie-the-pooh-job ad with any characters they want and get away with it. Not that anybody really “owns” Santa Claus, but I think we’re smart enough to know when something’s an obviously derivative work which exists exclusively to sell a product or service and only attempts to be entertaining to distract us from that while it takes our nostalgia behind a barn and shoots it in the head. Fortunately, the ad is so quick and crowded -and I knew it was coming! I was mentally prepared in advance when I watched it online- plus the addition of that tiresome duck which never wasn’t annoying that no one could possibly like or excuse it.

Also, am I the only person who’s bothered by these vague “smart dates” that show up all over the place now? That really messes with the accuracy of my screen grasps if I don’t use them right away; all my rudolph abuse occurs past immediate relevance so you know I mean bidness. I prefer to see a simple calendar figure. It doesn’t matter to me if you put the month number first or second. I’ll figure it out from the context the first time and remember it after that. I’m smarter than I eat.

Even at the moment the dates are generated, when they’re correct, I have no immediate concept of what “four weeks ago” means. Was that in November? Was that in… no, that’s twenty eight days, right? Almost a month. So what about “1 month ago,” then? And how do I know when something occurred beween 1 and 2 months ago? As far as this system is concerned everything happened on the same day. Grapety purple, I need to know these things! We aren’t talking about veoh comments, after all. Stop trying to make the past seem like uncertain memories of insubordinate importance which are worth knowing with decreasing specificness the older they get! We have the technology to know exactly when these messages were left! If I choose to say an event took place one month, two weeks, three days, back to back law and orders and a belt buckle ago, it should be my choice! And it won’t be! Screebidy deebidy!

As I said to mxy, and in fact exactly what I said, as I merely copied the text, I’ve unfortunately not been able to work any of the truly stupid, tenuous wiki trivia into any of my complaints here. The tv show “Joey,” despite being, as I hear it, hated by everyone, had a considerable list of direct, vague, and non-existent references to Friends, the show it was spun off from. Who’d have thought, ehhh?

In the first episode of Season 2, Zak is on the table in a hospital and he makes a reference to Hugh Laurie who plays Dr. House in FOX’s House, who, humourously, is also the passenger on the plane who sat next to Jennifer Aniston’s character Rachel Green in the episode “The One With Ross’s Wedding: Part One”.

In a rare act of anything from me, I removed the “humourously” from this comment, justifying myself with

It’s a tremendous stretch merely to call that a coincidence, let alone a humourous one, and even if it is (it isn’t), the humor ought to be self evident.

…it isn’t, I restrained myself from adding. This is the sort of otherwise uninhibited boldness that only comes about when I’m awake at 9 am. Unfortunately, I forgot to loggeth-in, and perhaps the greatest of my 12 wikipedia edits is not included with the rest. If I had space I also would have criticized the needless spelling out of “Rachel Green’s” full name and the identifying of the actor who portrayed it. There’s really no wrong reason to hate Friends trivia and the people who compile it. Watch the show if you want, and even enjoy it if that’s so important to you, but keep it out of my potato salad. There are a number of packaged Friends trivia “games,” most in English, enough that it would greatly distort my focus to mention them today. Some other time, perhaps. After I finish writing about Kinder Surprise, Zelda Classic, Whirlo, my other problem with Wikipedia and being sued by Capt’n Eli (never).

Later, some other froog removed the line entirely stating

House didn’t even exist when “The One With Ross’s Wedding: Part One” went to air, so I don’t see the relevance.

Hey, don’t complain at me. I didn’t PUT it there. I thought if I’d deleted the whole thing it would just come back and I’d get one of those “Welcome to Wikipedia! Please spend a year reading our manifesto etc. etc.” things on my discussion page. It occurs to me that this kindly helper is surely as much a part of the problem as anyone, as it insists on typing out the entire title, including the “part one” and the “the one with.” It seems that every episode of Friends except the very last one bears a title starting with “the one with.” So you needn’t include it every time. More importantly, I hate enforced casualness. I should have a right to refer to them that way, not be required to. They should not officially be called that. Yeah, ha ha, it’s our running gag, right? No, because it’s not funny and it’s annoying. It’s just a ritual. You could change it but you don’t. Even change itself only occurs through ritualistic lack of change. Just like you only changed your hair because Jenniferniston’s character Rachel Green changed her hair, and often enough during the show’s run that such events are also stupid Friends trivia that the world insists on me knowing. I just assumed you had stupid hair. No, I didn’t even notice your hair, so you might as well not have bothered.

Unfortunately, by now Joey’s trivia section has been done away with entirely. Trivia sections seem to be disappearing on a lot of pages, losing me one of my greatest sources of joyful rage on Wikipedia, one of my greatest reasons to whine about it. Even the Hammerspace page, which was essentially an entire article of garbage nerd trivia has been cut down considerably into a mere brief acknowledgment on the Magic Satchel page.

It’s still a long way from being reputable though, thankfully. As long as those “this user is” boxes exist, I cannot rest.

I mentioned radio last time, but I got distracted by something uninteresting.

Back at Air America, the good old days, when Al Franken wasn’t fumbling through a comedy bit with no end but whose punchline was probably “Mission Accomplished” and Randi Rhodes wasn’t howling at the moon across four commercial breaks because a local reporter somewhere once misspelled her name or Dick Cheney wore an ugly coat to someone’s funeral, a nut called Ed Schultz would step up and across political lines and prove that deep down, we’re all human. Despite a few fundamental disagreements (I would assume), he’s every bit as simplistic and pushy as Sean Hannity, who I believe it was that shared the timeslot on another station. Some days I would get in the car and I couldn’t tell which it was, since the driver was relatively openminded about things. Though I suppose “relatively” is relative (as was the driver, to me), since you don’t get a job in radio to listen to other people’s opinions, do you.
I had to plug my ears when someone called the program, because I didn’t want to hear the host cut off the caller, obviously miss the point and declare himself right, or, even worse, have the person agree with Sean/Ed totally.

The only way I could tell when it was Ed Schultz was when the ads told me to go to Office Depot. Sean Hannity’s sponsors wanted me to invest in Office Depot.
Or rather, they wanted me to invest in gold. GOLD.
That’s when you know you have too much money. A miser on a budget has to be content with hoarding actual gold. You’re so over your wealth, you’re in such a hurry that you just like throwing money at the idea of gold. An ad for gold came on when I was writing this. (I typed it later (and showed it to you much later))

I really need to manage my time better.

I had some Chicken McNuggets recently, for the first time in over ten years, I reckon.
I thought they’d have matured over the years (Which is not to imply these nuggets themselves were ten years old, but I wouldn’t have put it past them), I thought they’d be different, given all that “now made with white meat!” bit McDonald was going on so much about a few years back, and right now, still. But I was mcstaken. The ‘gets* were exactly as I remembered them being. The same unpleasant skin-like breading process, the same empty taste, the same mc. A person known only as Yamamanama insists the taste is styrofoam, but considering that I ate ten of them I don’t want to think about that at the moment. The only thing perceivably different to me about the nuggets was the packaging, which more resembled the style of the Burger King chicken nuggettender box. Hey, why isn’t there a Burger King around here? I’d much rather go there than McDonald’s. And why do I suddenly have a desire to coat these nuggets with a fine layer of Morton brand salt?

*A popular rumor from the ’80s states that in America… there are no ‘gets, which I still don’t understand the pervasiveness of