Surf City, North Carolina
Ocean City, Maryland
Fort Myers, Florida
Fort myers is structurally identical to every other tacky beach town. Endless wide, flat roads surrounded with bars, tall hotels, tiny houses, miniature golf courses and stores selling a strikingly homogeneous range of souvenirs.
I do not belong in any of these places during the day (thus most of my pictures are taken at night in places where the features I described are not evident). I go on the trips because they were happening anyway, I was invited and I like the change of scenery, but it is much the same scenery as far as the will of the people is concerned.
The only way to know we are further south is because the water tastes terrible –and with the humidity about, the air actually smells like the water tastes– and there are more insects, and more lizards. Nature knows the difference, even if developers do not.
which is not to say I accept this arrangement.
But Florida lizards work harder than the ones further north. Drop the temperature a few degrees and suddenly they are too weak to stand. For my part I REFUSEd to eat at this place. I probably would not have gotten service anyway, with this layabout on the job.
A lizard so lazy it cannot even spell “the.” or perhaps it is French, and its name means “of lazy lizard.” Not an improvement! I wandered over to near the place (at night of course) after it was closed, and observed that there were wall decorations depicting other lizards than this one. If I end up in Ocean City again I assure you I will make every effort to photograph any lizard murals but for then that was unfeasible. However I do not have any reason to ever come here again. I did not have a reason this time. And yet I am entertained by the idea of hearing a police report like “suspicious individual picked up by the lazy lizard.” I would be far more suspicious of the lizard! Especially if it was picking up suspicious people.
I did find something worse than eating with a lizard. Less than four blocks away, not surprisingly.
And things can be yet far worse. I do not drink anything from someone smiling like that.
Luckily I have access to other, nicer places unspoiled by commercialism or other spoily beings. I should get into the postcard business.
Unfortunately I had to start eating again. A pity. It eats so much time.
“”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””
I haven’t eaten, and I haven’t had my sob fit yet today, but my nose continues to be just as inclined to stuff itself as usual. Just what AM I allergic to? Dust? Walls? Pixels? My own insufferable dullness?
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How do I still have solid excrement to pass? I haven’t eaten a proper meal in almost two days and the last substantial thing I remember ingesting made the complete tour fairly quickly.
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I think I’m going to be out sick for a while. You probably won’t notice!
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Breaking news: I believe in life after love.
I don’t much LIKE it, but that’s not news!
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I saw Shutter Island on Sunday. I have nothing to “spoil” for you, just that I’m rather sick of movies trying to pull that kind of trashbag on me. Also, prior to the show, between a coke ad about time travel that clearly cost way too much money to make for a stupid ad, a trailer for a movie about a time traveling uh hot tub that would NEVER have been MADE before the internet gave a bigger voice to the professionally retarded and ANOTHER trailer for ANOTHER movie about a time traveling pocket knife, I want to take a voyage in my own chrono-kayak to however many years in the future is necessary for everybody to get this out of their systems. That and the “ha ha, ’80s!” mentality that’s been ironically marketable now for longer than the 1980s themselves lasted.
Speaking of skulls, what on earth is going on with Comedy Central’s internet video ownership-designator? And why is some angry man shouting “DIH! DIH!” at me? Is he a mentally-imbalanced murderer who thinks my extracted head-bones are funny and he laughs in monosyllabic outbursts? Is he related to the guy who shouts “come on, yall!” and “HIT me!” for no reason? Are those both challenges at me so that the guy can make his deeds seem like self-defense?
Were the skulls the invention of the same master of design and draftsmanship and unnecessary clenched teeth who invented these? I hope the monkeys are better at building things than whoever built them. I will admit they did a good job digitally removing the notebook lines.
Oh incidentally I don’t see that little sequence anymore since comedy central withdrew its shows from the hew-loo I eventually came to watch them on, out of disgust for comedy central’s own website and video player, to be seen exclusively on its own website and video player, where instead of dih men I see ads for stuff like the eternally infallible South Park and what I showed after the monkeys because Todd forbid we have a prime-time animated series that doesn’t evoke Beavis and his posteriorcephalic companion or the opening sequence from Juno in some aesthetically repugnant way (although I understand that Todd’s cool).
But it’s GOOD to remind me of Maniac Mansion, right? It was so ZANY and INNOVATIVE! And it had the worst interface in the history of item-quest adventures. Or at least it did if you’ve only played the Tandy and NES versions, in which one must use standard four way directional arrow keys to control a mouse cursor to select nine different variants of “USE.” All of that is beside the point because I don’t get to make that guy get murdered for bragging about his recording contract to a jealous tentacle or blow up the mansion by pressing random buttons on the security keyboard and other stuff I’ve read you can do in that game that I never figured out. And anyway I was just commenting on how dopey the guy looks standing like that. I could be little less concerned with the actual content of the program.
This show is called Ugly Americans. And it’s ugly. And I don’t care. I don’t even feel like going through the ad and explaining point by point why each hilarious gag makes me mad. Here’s my tip to you, aspiring artists who don’t aspire to anything greater than aspiration: those free-floating black lines you use to indicate muscles in skin, folds in clothing and texture on various inorganic surfaces don’t look like anything else but black lines. I bet the artist has sketchbooks full of legless big-shouldered torsos. Which doesn’t mean anything to you but I once saw a sketchbook by someone who drew like this and it had a lot of legless big shouldered big necked male torsos in it and I was certain there was something to that. If there isn’t may I please be permitted to dis-remember it?
Not that this is any day for me to be criticizing the visual quality of sketchbooks.
Years ago, specifically on the very last line of this otherwise mystifying page from 2003, I scoffed, I sneered at the idea that internet video was then, or could ever be a replacement for television, but that was back when I had dial-up eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…eeeeeeeeeeeeeee oreorocfffeoroghcffgghhghg nyurrrrng, nyurrrrng internet at 50% functionality via america online or compuserve and compression algorithms were less sophisticated. Watching streaming video then was an unbearable hassle. It was slow, it was buggy, it was blurry, it was small, it couldn’t be viewed fullscreen. Some sites still won’t let you do that, but the holdouts are dwindling. When they try to force me I will start the video, pause it, wait for it to load in its entirety, copy the data from my browser cache and then watch it in a different program. Ha HA, I sure showed nobody!
I remember a while ago reading some news article about the reasons Conan O’Brien’s latest television endeavor was canceled. Apart from Hugo Chavez I can’t name a single South American head of state, I don’t know who my own comptroller is and I’ve never even seen proof that my garbage isn’t taken away by fairies every week but I know why some dork who was on tv for a really long time now won’t be for a little while. One line bothered me, though, and I took note of it and complained about it without recording where I had found it or who had said it:
“Add to all the other issues the fact that Mr. O’Brien’s young fans did not really have to watch television to see him. His shows were made available later on Web sites like Hulu. And his best comedy bits would frequently be posted on other sites — and passed around by fans — shortly after they appeared.”
Then why was it ON Hulu if being watched there did not count? And why is that my fault? Nevermind that this could easily have been revealed prior to the program being removed. Once people have been liberated from timeslots, they won’t go back unless you force them to. And yet if you try to force them, by revoking their privileges, they still probably won’t go back. I know I won’t. But I won’t go back to watching anybody’s tv show at 11:30[5]. I gave my television box away back in August or thereabouts because my parents’ machine was broken and most of the shows I watched I could now get through the internet. It was not a supplement to normal television viewing; it was a replacement. It is hard to turn people away from a new convenience and you should never assume that you’ll be able to do it. That’s why pro-environmental legislation is worthless. And also because most of our business depends on wasting things.
Howevah, even in a relatively non-wasteful field of decisions, such as one electricity inhaling broadcast media or another, stepping “back” is hard to convince consumers to do. A week or two ago I made myself buy a music album thing online that I had been listening to illegally distributed digital recordings of for a few years. I felt like I had wasted my money, even though that was the proper thing to do. Right. Just 3000 more to go, then. For most of the games that HAVE sound tracks, the things have been out of eh print for years, possibly eh decades by this point, and the cost to make honest men out of them often seems to rely on paying off weirdos who will be charging for rarity, age and the fact that the things are imported. It was never meant that I in Americonia be able to have heard this stuff, but the people who made the games never assumed anyone would care about the music later. Which is also why they never provided clear credits, I reckon.
S. BIG LAND, will your identity never be revealed?
This is understandable; I have become accustomed to an illegal practice that is, in essence, cheating. Hulu is totally legal and partially owned by NBC. It is completely unfair to blame people for using it. I even used it after complaining about its stupid name and creepy ads. Why spend so much money on a commercial thing that does not earn money?
I also watched Colbert’s Report with that thing, with which the more interesting part of Conan’s show was competition, and that’s still on the air. But not on Hulu. Hulu is lethal, evidently. It’s not a plot to destroy the world (for one thing, it blocks users from other countries), just its own business partners.
This is no good. I need my Tonies FULL TIME. Is that really so much to ask? I hardly think I am guilty of glut-tony.
Where have you been, Tony? I needed you here yesterday! Having to ship all your body parts separately in a magical monochrome analog tv set is not an excuse! You could put wheels on that thing!
Maybe tell me less?
I praise your intention to amend your commend, Luckas. On a side note, that poem is just so great. Were you even aware that EVERY DAY there is a child went forth?
You know, just the other day I was asking: WAS there a child went forth? There was : )
I’m surprised the dope can simultaneously press shift and nine or semicolon in order to produce the complicated smiley face symbol. Who spelled out “a dope” and loaded up my comment form for it? It really makes little sense. Yet somehow it has less sense than that. Perhaps I am betrayed.
Historical note: Half & Half was a real television show that people watched and also a coffee flavoring. It may also be other things.
You can HAVE the dope! O cyborg of the phallic nose and steel mustache.
Alright, guy. I wasn’t doubting you. I think you’re being a tad oversensitive, sir.
cakecakecakecakecakecakecakecakecakecakecakecakecakecakecake
I like your bread, Chabasco, but you’re not my mother.
Choose mountain dew color based on War-Craft allegiance, please. And sure, as long as that’s important to you, go ahead and buy ten. Although I can’t help noticing that red potion favors green bald guys and the blue potion favors pink ladies. Maybe the dewsters had some old formula left over from a Double Dare promotion 15 years ago, or the only two player video game they had in the office was Contra. Unfortunately, it’s still Mountain Dew. Although this is probably to the benefit of the pink ladies, as the huge green oafs already, I suspect, can take bigger beatings, and everybody knows the red kind refills all your hearts twice, so this would give a very unfair advantage to oafkind, me thinks.
Oh, ho, it is not “still” Mountain Dew. Now it is Mtn Dew. Spelling stuff right is officially considered throwing back. Like, get with the program, puzzlewit. Unless you’d like to help us unload some old, unsold, flat, particle-separated inventory in a zanily misguided quest for nostalgia. If you really want to take me back, try tickling my innards with your manhuntin’ firearms and Appalachian stereotypes.
Kentucky Fried Chicken to “KFC” i can understand, because it’s a mouthful (of chemically-infused, frankensteinian steroided up grease flavored meat product that by the way animals were bred in captivity, abused in tiny cages, and killed to make (which I lamentably enjoy eating occasionally)), but mountain is only two syllables with no negative, truthful connotations to distract people from. In fact, the word “mountain” was about the LEAST creepy thing printed on the bottle (“dew,” is, afterall, a near-homophone for a childish euphemism for dog excrement). It’s like the Pepsikooks thought “gosh, mountain dew just isn’t inorganic and mysterious enough! How can we make it seem LESS natural? Apart from turning it red and putting shrek stand-ins on the label, I mean.” It’s not as if there isn’t inadequate space to spell out “mountain” in. Nor is the background better off for absence of letters. Get me more green starfoxy void, STAT! Maybe there’s something inherently extreme about abbreviations. Awkward, vowel-less abbreviations of single words.
I’m tired of all the people with their light-blue houses and hired machinery! How is there any plant left around here that still needs to be chain-sawed? What would be audacious or stupid enough to grow here?
And evidently that’s not enough, because here comes an intentionally ugly, blatantly wasteful 1950s car in fact accurately described as a “jalopy” that’s even louder! A backup plan, I suppose.
I’m tired, tired tired. Not just of this section of this town, but I mean this section of the continent in general. Every house is white or blue, and every mailbox has a boat or a beach or a beach with boats painted on it if it has anything painted on it. Every wall-hung painting is of a ship or a boat. You’re right down the road from the ocean, and I see you walking back from there every day! You have real boats! If you have the freedom to decorate as you please, why not depict things which you don’t see every day of your life? Like armadillos or the Taj Mahal or Mexicans not employed by you? Have you no imagination? It’s just like how nobody likes theoretically artistic recreations of large boots, barbed wire and dead cow skulls more than in Texas. People are obsessed with the shape of Texas. Don’t you see that every time you watch a weather forecast or visit a public building? Or is that just something city folk do?
I’m fed up and starved down of N’ England, so I will be spending the next week far away from Connecticut, far to the east. Yes, the far east (but not the down east). All the far way east to the Cape Cod. To a place which embodies everything I’m sick of here (It’s named after a fish, for frog’s sake), just without the personal accompaniments and machinations I’m not sick of, the things I maintain my few remnants of sanity with. The biggest difference seems to be, at least according to the giggle images machine, that every home has a complimentary lighthouse growing next to it. Maybe I’ll get to eat in more restaurants shaped like boats* which make no accommodation or preparation for any patron who doesn’t want lobster or clam chowder. I made sure I would be staying in a rented house, too, so I could feel like a hypocrite for decrying the decry-worthy scoundrels who come here in the summer and think they own it, polluting it with their noise and ever increasing number of fences, despite utterly gweepsing out the instant the temperature drops below 70 degrees fahrenheugen. Thankfully, the grass-cutting club continues to return through November.
If you’re wearing a coat, it’s too cold to cut the grass! Also, if the grass has become yellow through any natural process unrelated to my own natural processes forming a loving union with gravity.
I don’t understand driving in a car for half ever to reach a place that looks just like Madison and that we still need to drive long distances from to get to any specific destinations which are still all 19th century / nautically themed. I’ve exceeded my fill of dopey restaurants in which the only non-chowder soup is “cheese onion.” Tugboat Inn = Guilford Mooring 6 hours’ drive from my home. I do not like either of those places.
It is unusual to eat inside a boat and all, but that doesn’t affect the flavor of the food much. I’m tired of places judging me for only wanting appetizers, specifically chicken fingers, and not even having good chicken fingers. I can understand them not knowing their way around a quesadilla… and I’m sure they’re glad to have my support. I had to get a quesadilla because they didn’t have chicken fingers at all. Or maybe they did, but only for “li’l sailors” or “young trappers” or “subservient cabin boys for long voyages” or whatever embarrassing thing they happen to call special children orders. I really ought to know better than to not like the flesh of the same small, helpless, murdered animal in my mouth as you.
But I’m digressing, and AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHJ I’VE BEEN PUNCHED IN THE NOSE!
In the event I’m incorrect in assuming my mother no longer watches this page, I should add that, at least today, I’m not criticizing the trip[s] [them]sel[ves]. Just Maine [and places like it] thinking [they’re] great. It’s nothing against you. It’s something against [someone else].
Arlington National Cemetery, I went there, once. It was during my trip to Washington Dic in September of 2006. I wrote about that length of time extensively but simply lack the discipline to order things these days.
Ennywaw, my feet had been totally destroyed by a combination of walking everywhere, doing it for hours, wearing cheap shoes, and this being the third day of that. We (we being us) had already checked out of the hotel (the mysteriously named George Washington hotel), and I assumed we had begun the long stupid car trip back to Connecticut, but then a graveyard appeared and, well, you know. Graveyards. Who wouldn’t want to get out and take a look? Evidently no one I’m directly related to.
I was a bit worried, having left my whip and case of holy water at home, but I went out among the dead anyway. What choice did I have? I was only 23 years old, for smedley’s sake. I followed the procession up a few hills, at which point the pain returned and it became clear that even if I turned back immediately I would not escape undamaged. Not from undead with military training angry at my failure to meet the posted reverence specifications, my feet. I told you my feet hurt.
How am I supposed to silently acknowledge invisible death boxes when I feel like I may die myself? My besocked limb terminuses, they were as fried fish filets, and I don’t even like fish, so if I fell down and faced starvation it would take me longer than usual to get started eating them, and by then it may be too late. This does present an interesting question, at least: If you drop dead in a cemetery, what is done to your corpse?
Not actual photograph
People brought kids. People brought babies. Why would you do this to them? You are not teaching them rethpect. You are teaching them resentment. I know. I’ve been going to awful war monuments for years. I’m fairly certain my day at Shiloh in 1990 or so was one of the worst of my life up to and beyond that point, and I had more practical shoes then. I had not known such disappointment up to then and thus could not protect myself against it. Death is disappointing.
In the considerably more recent past, as I was retreating to automobile, fleeing my fate among the dead Kennedies, I saw people coming. “Goooooh baaaaack!”, I truly wanted to warn them. But I couldn’t. The signs said to be quiet. If I’d started exclaiming and making a fuss, why, there would probably be dispatched a security guard to come pick me up and carry me off the premises.
I’d never put a little icon on my page that says “I honor people, not graves,” but this whole business still bothers me a bit. Don’t ever put me in the ground, please.
Nuy.
For whatever reason, either fear of mega-americans or angry zombies, or maybe my camera was full of pictures of “please excuse the inconvenience” signs from the previous day’s National Zoo tour, I did not end up with an actual image from within the bone zone, but here’s a book about drawing with a cover by someone who can’t. It’s illustration now! after all, not illustration in a couple minutes!. This book tells you how to turn out the artistic equivalent of microwave popcorn. I guess. I assumed, looking at this picture I’ve long since forgotten producing, it was all Gary Baseman (for that is the artist’s name) junk but a glance online tells me this is in some form represents a wide variety of people who mass produce what is likely ugly commercial rubbish. Indeed, this cover now seems to say “150 illustrators” on it, but I can’t blame myself for not studying it with but the same dedication and interest I give an end-user license agreement. Also, the author is Julius Wiedemann, not Jesus Wilberman. I was mildly disappointed. But I’m used to it.
We (“we” being me plus at least one other person) went through a few Nintendo Entertainment Systems in the old days. All the dust particles that built up due to the machine’s cartridge door being held open by the object also holding the game down because the spring-lock was broken probably did not help. Lincoln logs, legos, Sega Genesis games, many items held the honor of this holding. Various “game cleaning” devices may also have found at last a legitimate use in this role.
The games themselves similarly suffered. There were some, like Air Fortress, which always worked, either due to disuse or simple irony, but the older ones were a different delaware. I actually had mapped out in my mind which glitch patterns and colors meant Legend of Zelda was how close to starting up properly. A blank blue screen was bad. That was the furthest from function. I knew when it started being gray and occasionally showing white dashes it was almost working. The NES we got later, unfortunately, defaulted to a blank grey screen so it was really hard to know how much more blowing needed to be done. We had to replace the first NES, as I said, because its spring-lock broke. Its door had also broken, but that didn’t really matter since that wouldn’t stay closed while the game was being held down. Though the second’s spring also broke, we were cautious enough to see that the door remained intact. By that time we had moved on to leaving control devices in stupid places and letting them get stepped on. Big kid stuff. (that’s noise)
Good old Legend of Zelda. This was the version without the “hold reset or lose data!” warning.
This warning was added to the later issues of the game without the gold cartridges, which has me mystified, as it doesn’t look at all expensive to have produced. All the more mystifying is that the absense of silence, which is also golden, ought to have resolved any budgetary issues. Perhaps this is golden wisdom.
There were some graphic errors with which the game was playable, like vertical white lines, and others which I knew not to bother with, like the horizontal orange lines which gradually spread from the upper left corner to cover the whole screen. My cousin Patrick called that “the ozone layer,” and I never questioned it. I don’t think I ever questioned a thing he told me, even though 53.7% of it was rubbish, and that’s a bit more than half. I believe it was from a friend of his that I learned the “blow in the cartridge” trick. You know, that great trick that never worked one time. We did that for six years.
It’s impossible to say to what extent this sort of thing contributed to my lifelong fear of being sent to prison. Incidentally, Patrick also told me that the creature with wings is named The Guy Who Flies With His Pants On. It makes sense; why fly with your pants off, if you have pants?
Different games had different diseases, but all suffered from the ozone layer. It is a good thing I never heard that aerosol sprays “depleted ozone” until later, as I would probably have found myself emptying those directly into cartridges in lieu of plain inefficient mouth-driven air and thought myself quite clever. Mmmm.
Sometimes there would be “good” lines at the start, but then ozone would slowly start sneaking in. Of course I was always in denial about it. I would pretend not to notice it, and hope that it would go away. Alas, ozone is all around us, and is in all places at all times, so it really cannot go anywhere. Even if it could, Ozone Road was a mere two blocks from my place of business, Olympus Battling business, so its fearsome layer could return before long. It did.
There was a period when I was just grateful to get a certain intendo tape, as the people I liked less liked to say more, working for a few minutes. There was one Metroid password that I entered so many times that I actually memorized it and no longer needed to consult the birth certificate or Abraham Lincoln autographed picture I had written it over. It wasn’t even a good password. I think it had one energy tank and fifteen missiles, in the second part of Norfair without the high-jump boots.
BOOTS, I said! Why, in a situation which involved boots, and you had space on the screen to print “boots,” would you not do so? I guess I’m just old.
Newer Legend of Zelda cartridge side-by-side with picture I found online of older Legend of Zelda. Obviously taken by an amateur, who set it up in an environment with minimal light reflection or whatever, so the precious metal exterior just resembles plastic painted to be a goldish color.
Newer Legend of Zelda side-by-side with earlier picture I took depicting itself and gold cartridge picture. Despite the tape issue, not I nor anyone I had or yet have met called these things “carts.” I remember getting an occasional issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine between 1992 and 1996 and wondering what video games had to do with driving around in little mechanical cars or transporting groceries.
I also wondered if Mike Weigand was really a Battletoad.
How Blackthorne could be “game of the month” in any situation had not yet occurred to me to ponder. I mean, you can’t even draw your gun when climbing up a ledge. I hate that. For shame!
Oh, and Gary Coleman did own an arcade at the time this magazine was printed, but I assure you Mike thought he was being every bit as hilarious dropping the name then as he would today.