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I just saw what this site’s rss feed looks like. You have my condolences. I cannot function without them.
May 29:
I will mention Mad TV again. My mentioning this could not be too much worse than this entry’s original content regarding Ben Stein.
But that show, I’m not sad to see it go. I’m sad that I didn’t go. That I never was able to give it up. I did, for about three weeks, but then I watched it again and then the final show was the next one so I had to watch that one too, even though it was kind of bad. So many better things to watch, so many better non-watching things to do. Why did I return? What was I expecting? Why can’t I accomplish anything? Why would I take 80 pictures in one day, half of them of my television screen, approximately none of which I will do anything with? Why would I eat so many raisins that I felt ill?
Even when the show was good, was it ever that great? Great enough that if it was bad next time that the positive experience outweighed the negative? Great enough that I could confidently assume that it would not be bad next time? (yes, briefly, in 2005. This tapered off right about the time I started writing about it, requiring me to rebut myself, several times, and by now I am sadly quite used to being the butt of a but (and I should not have said that) )
Was I ever able to share it with one person who didn’t think less of me as a result of it? At least the indifference / scolding I got when I told people I watched Conan O’Brien had to face off against memories of presentations that I often sincerely enjoyed, and with some amount of consistency. Even when he was appearing in ads for Budweiser and the Milk Growers of America and encouraging the participation of an audience it increasingly seemed as if he had just a bit of contempt for I never quite felt dirty.
Yes, I only extracted this from a longer, worse, Mad TV eulogy I’m too indifferent to finish because it mentions Mr. O’Brien and I don’t want to risk having to reword that one part in the event he does something catastrophic on his new show that requires me to distinguish the old one from it. If he does something great it will be easier to delete this part.
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Ben Stein is not an economist. He’s just some guy from tv. Some guy from tv who fits the stereotypical perception of what a smart person looks like. Some guy from tv who had a game show about giving away his money. Would you trust an economist who gave away his money and/or a career to Jimmy Kimmel? He may have majored in economics at Columbia University, but he does not work in the field of economics, and by his own admission has not done that since the Lyndon Johnson administration, and he hated it. That doesn’t necessarily mean he was bad at it, but it certainly might. I’m sure he knows a lot of stuff, but I don’t reckon what he learned in 1960eh is 100% relevant to the financial issues us peons deal with these days, all the less so when it is filtered through a co-endorsement deal for the very worst provider of an outmoded method of television signal delivery* that he shares with Shaquille “I love em I don’t leave em I got a vysectomy and now I can’t breed ’em and I was also Kazaam the rapping genie” O’Neal.
You can call Ben Stein an actor/writer/lawyer/game show host, but don’t just say “economist” and not offer any justification. Please?
Also, this is beside the point, but Ben Stein blames the theory of evolution for The Holocaust. Because, supposedly, scientists researched evolution and scientists also invented gas chambers. This idea almost certainly appeals to people who get offended when guns are blamed for murders and accidental killings done with guns. That’s a tenuous thread of logic.
Bad. Bad science. I don’t know where Ben Stein thinks tv cameras and glasses came from. “Science” is in fact a very vague word and you can attribute to it just about anything. You can even type it in capital letters with an exclamation point at the end and get an instant fanbase on the internet. It’s like the new “69” except it’s actually a reference to a dopey song from over twenty five years ago. In that respect, I suppose, Ben Stein is older than science and knows what’s best for it. Who am I to talk about science, after all? I’m no economist.
I don’t need to go into this much because Ben Stein bothered me long before I knew that he had actual beliefs and opinions, and what they were. I always thought his screen persona was annoying, and discovering that this is actually his true self makes it easier for me to deal with; he hasn’t expended the creative energy necessary to create a character, or even what passes for one in a time when each and every creative person grew up surrounded by half+ century-old infallible merchandising icons who will not step aside for any reason (perhaps Ben aspires to be one?). He’s not trying that hard. He is naturally annoying. He thinks he’s so boring that anything consciously idiotic he does (rapping about how he dislikes Al Gore) or says (such as “cleareyes is awwwwsome”) while being boring is automatically funny, but it isn’t. He thinks that wearing a black business suit and Teddy Ruxpin shoes makes a statement, and it does. That statement is “somebody needs to throw a muffin at me.”
Don’t watch the video attached to that last link. There are plenty of things I could suggest to “you” to watch that would be better than that. I just had to prove that it happened. But at about four minutes, twenty seconds he starts with the “mo-fo” talk and then he tells some really awkward rap-thing about Al Gore not inventing the internet that he had to write on three different pieces of paper for some reason, that he couldn’t be irked to memorize despite it being short and basic and sort of terrible. Jon Stewart appears to be laughing, but there are different types of laughter and many of them are not good. This wasn’t quite as bad as it seemed to me when I first watched it (compare the dates and it seems probable that the memory of this interview in part inspired that other thing I wrote that I linked to somewhere in here), but it’s far from good.
If the best grime you can scrub up on a presidential candidate approaching an election, the bit that you save for last, is that he made some exaggerating statement totally irrelevant to his candidacy then you have misplaced priorities and I don’t trust you to do things for the right reasons. And Gore did help with the internet. He did not create it, he did not develop the technology, but he very much helped to ensure that it would be used, that it would be useful. In comtrast to Comcast, Ben Stein’s current president, which pretends it owns the internet from time to time.
I can just imagine Ben Stein saying to himself in a Ben Stein voice how hilarious he himself would look while dressed like AC DC. But in actuality it’s just embarrassing. I can see him and Lorne Michaels forming a comedy team that’s just them.
*I personally don’t find anything special about the current incarnation of satellite television, but I believe it has greater potential that it just won’t allow me to use due to arbitrary legal trash, yet I can see that changing. Cable service, on the other hangnail, relies on actual physical cables, going from your home to someplace else, and if you decide you don’t like the people who own the cables you have to get the things removed and then have a whole new set of cables put in, in the event you want to risk more cables. Or something like that. Most people won’t bother with that; it’s hassle enough getting the stuff installed to begin with, and cable companies use that knowledge against their own customers. But then satellite things are also such a way; I still need to have cords going from my television machine to the dinkity plastic thing that I don’t own stuck to my house. But it would be easier to wrap that up and send it back, and by the wuh I would if I was paying for it and the only person who used it.
I’ll be brief: I don’t know how to be brief. Or I do know, I just routinely fail to be satisfied by remarks and explanations by myself that are not as informative as they could be or that don’t make use of all the available resources that seem reasonable to make use of. Even this does not prevent me from making inaccurate statements or saying things that I regret, and in fact when I do they are only worse due to the longwindedness that they are presented with. This is a continuing problem.
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I just received an invitation to join something called flixter. I thought it was just another stupid facebook thing and didn’t realize it had redirected me to some scam thing (rather than a totally valid, useless vacuum of misery) run by one “smileymedia” until it repeatedly rejected my fake telephone numbers and addresses. Ordinarily a service does not take the trouble to verify who actually lives at 99 Luftballoons, Dumpsteropolis, Arizoner. Obviously I know my own address and a valid organization would get the hint that I just didn’t want it to know. Only in the event that it had no other purpose other than to get these things would it have a mechanism in place that looks for names of actual places. On one of the submits it somehow pulled up my normal email address rather than the backup I had initially entered, and I suspect it may already be too late to totally unbind myself from the wretched thing. Peh.
Smiley Media. As soon as I saw that name I knew. Why would anybody distrust a company named after the international symbol of walmart and the third most revolting banner ad series after “lookit my ugly teeth” and “what state do you live in?”
Also, I have found some other pages complaining about sleazy flixter invitations, like just the normal ones that don’t have some other site hijacking involved. Flixter is creepy enough that harvesting social security numbers and such isn’t even necessary. The page writers tend to get some scummy message from a supposed employee saying that they aren’t sleazy or scummy soon afterward. Because it’s apparently easier to individually tell every person in the world that there is no problem than to fix the problem that there obviously is. I also encountered this a lot when I was researching web hosts. They like to lock people into longterm deals and hold domain names hostage when somebody tries to get out and nonsense like that. “Oh, gee, we can’t really be that bad if we’re personally addressing you in your very own comment form, can we?” That’s what being an entrepreneur is about. I think D. Trump is a magnificent scumbag, but at least he isn’t so pouty and insecure that he needs to assign a task force to look up everybody who complains about him on the internet and get in their business about it. I don’t even do that. Yet.
Forgive me if you’ve seen this already. As has been previously noted I sometimes forget that I’m allowed to show my own dumb pictures on my own dumb website. I have been too engaged with other matters recently to edit any of my recent long-form gripes into something resembling coherence, and that’s when I’m supposed to put these up instead. And then I started writing about this for an hour. Sure enough, I was too weak to make that make sense, so it is unfit for display, but I still need to tell of its existence to… no, I can’t even make something out of my excuse this time. I am well and truly out of… and this is the same thing. I can’t close it. There is no resolution to be made. Here, have some shift key dividers.
may 23
I think I need to reconsider what justifies a new, separate page entry.
may 21
Am I mistaken, or have we (collective United Statians) heard more from Dick Cheney in the first four months of the Obama administration than in the first two years of his own? Toward the middle of 2001, wasn’t his absence so absolute that it seemed plausible that he had gotten dead at some point following the inauguration? Is he now merely making up 16 months or so of metaphorical snow days? Can we yet rule out the possibility that he actually was dead during that time?
may 20, maybe
I don’t think I could have sanely survived ads for Night at the Museum movies without mute powers. Those are some embarrassing ads. The merry melody people used to make cartoons about supposed books which would cause mischief based on their titles and cover illustrations. They were only about six minutes long which is precisely as long as that sort of thing is tolerable for (though apparently seven minutes, I used to have this one on a vhs tape, the more prevalent version with the bell guy and some of the racism removed, which took out a solid minute of it)
And that’s when it’s good, or decent. I can take roughly three seconds of Guido Thinker. And even then I will only take them to the dumpster.
Aw beans! page 29 of this.
It is below page 28. It is sort of dull.
The creature’s horns are different because of some reason. This change may not have been a good change. The thing looks too much like a pokemon. It did before, but the horns at least were in opposition to that. I may change them back. I have that power. (and I used it)
Monday, the eighteen
For the first time, I cooked a ham today. Or, more accurately, I placed a pre-cooked ham on to an aluminium foil-covered tray which I then placed into an oven and checked back on an hour later. It tasted adequately hammy, but that it bore a flavor like the flesh of a slaughtered animal proves very little. How well I actually did will only be revealed by how soon and how severely I become confined to the intestinal cleansing chamber. As a child it was common for me to eat just meat during a meal and ignore any side items provided and I suffered no ill effects from it, as far as I can recall linking ill effects to meat consumption. Today, less than ten minutes after eating four or five sizable slices of the ham I’ve already consumed nearly two snapple bottles* worth of water as part of my recovery process. Phlegm production has only just begun. It is an exciting time to be alive.
*I used this curious unit of measurement as I drank the water out of a snapple bottle.
And now, I place here the things I placed above the previous entry, because it was already obscenely long, and I hate to dilute the glory of Buck Choc, besides. I will have a nap and decide if I still like these being here when I wake up.
And no, I don’t, but they can’t go anywhere else.
Sunday the seventeen: I am not a third wheel. Third wheels provide safety and stability. I am a fifth wheel. I am the tire-shaped object attached to the back of a jeep after the tire has been used. I’m just some round thing that you have to teach yourself to not be aware of because it’s so out of place that it cannot be tolerated.
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Saturday, the sixteen:
Mad Television, a program which I have spent far too much of my life (that being any of it) complaining about the errors of, never quite able to totally pull myself away from, much like a drug, just without the superficial fun times and convenient dulling of the senses, seems to at last be airing the series “finale” it’s had coming for a decade or so, thereby pulling itself away from me instead. Ah ha, ha ah! I win! The question on every me’s mind is: can the Mad Televised get through the last show they’ll ever do without padding up the 48 minutes of air time with old sketches featuring people who aren’t on the show anymore and isolated instances of writer competence despite producing at least eight best-of specials, presented as new content, in the past two years, these specials themselves not able to find enough usable content to justify their existences, needing to be padded up with needless, annoying “host” segments? The answer may bore you.
The still thriving program alleged to be its counterpart also had some slightly unusual thing going on today, yesterday or tomorrow and I said something about that but I’ve been in strange places lately and what I wrote currently still is. Curiously enough, if I had it I’d say nothing because I’d realize it was a mess and I just wouldn’t use it. I don’t have time to realize this is also a mess.
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Friday, the fifteen:
I’m tired of “funny” white rappers. Saying rhyming stuff over slow beats while wearing sunglasses isn’t in fact incredibly hard, and it isn’t necessarily hilarious just because you have light skin and chose deliberately dweebish subject matter. I don’t think Andy Samberg invented them nor embodies their absolute worst qualities but he certainly empowered them. I realize I linked on more than one past occasion to a web [my-space] page by some Mad Dome Gettaz, but a: I am related to one of them and 2: they could actually rap, however big a fan of that I may not be.
The first thing to observe about 2 dollar buck choc is that it does indeed cost exactly two dollars. Years of deceptive advertising practices have made this seem to mysteriously come out cheaper than the $1.99 Symphony bar. Or perhaps this relates to the Buck Choc being fourteen ounces and the Symphony being four ounces, down from six ounces at the same price several weeks prior. But that is of minimal significance because I did not get to eat the Symphony bar. I decided to save the superior candy for later. When I had finished with the Buck Choc I placed the Symphony in my refrigeration unit, not realizing it would be another week before I had any appetite for anything remotely chocolately, by which point an unseen force had visited and abducted the item. I wish I had put the Buck Choc there first, because then not only would I have had less buck choc to eat later, this would undoubtedly be a good defense against future chocolate heists.
It was quickly pointed out to me that the company, Palmer, is the one responsible for much of the low quality seasonal candy which would have little chance of being purchased without some sort of gimmicky sense of urgency to appeal to someone other than that who would consume it. No kid with its parents’ dollars is going into a candy store and buying QuAX “the hollow milk flavored” The Yummy Ducky when there are Cadbury eggs available. Sadly, kids these days have little appreciation for molding expertise. Someone should tell them that most of Palmer’s Easter candy is kosher.
That anonym thing on the link is probably unnecessary, but I thrive on the unnecessary.
If you’ve ever received some of this at Halloween you know who to blame. The world makes just a tad more sense when you realize the same creative force came up with the idea to wrap budget Hanukkah gelt eight different ways throughout the year to keep kids from catching on as Buck Choc.
Although I must confess a bit of fondness for the 1960s design aesthetic on the individual pieces, this seems unlikely to be a conscious marketing decision and more probably a result of a product being introduced in the 1960s and Palmer never hiring anybody to update the packaging.
Much like the famous MILK DUDs, one of several hershey products no longer legally permitted but that allegedly were at one point to call themselves chocolate, reformulated to cut costs, because unlike symphony they weren’t big enough that two ounces could be brazenly chopped off and still leave something resembling a finished product, no legimitate claim of chocolate is made on the Buck Choc label, though “chocolaty” and of course “choc” are both present.
Which is fine with me since the difference between “choclate” and “chocolate flavored” is not quite so garish as I would have expected, ingredient-sounding wise. Because to me it is the “milk” which is most repulsive, so the more that is replaced with chemistry terminology the better I like it, just regarding the label. It only seems bad when your sole experience with non-chocolate comes in buck form. I have yet to taste this modern make of confection perpetrated by a company with any trace of a reputation to uphold. The fact that “doublecrisp” is evidently a registered trademark in the chocolate-not-mentioning field doesn’t mean anybody wants to rip it off.
Ordinarily I would not eat a thing I saw that looked that bad, with labelling that bad (another effect of firing your entire art staff in the 1960s is that whatever you produce in the future gets no art). But I just liked saying Buck Choc so much. It seemed so special, so otherworldy. Like it wanted to take me to a better place, both spiritually and in my own mind (those are different things, right?). Some people find Jesus, I found Buck Choc, despite its superior hiding skills. Jesus expects me to put 10 dollars in a basket in exchange for an hour in an arcane, depressing place. Buck Choc wants two dollars for Buck Choc. This concept was easier for me to grasp. Now older and wiser, I stick by the decision, reasoning that no god as just and all-knowing as the one told of in Catholic lore would allow Buck Choc to exist.
Day two:
Buck Choc is good for compulsive eaters because you can thoughtlessly bite at it for a long time without having to worry about replacing it. I had this next to me for several hours and didn’t even get past the 2. It will last much longer than a box of cheerios and tastes about the same. As the box. Although Cheerios have one eleventh the fat and contain actual nutritive ingredients, no official documentation is provided for the box. Also, there are some influential troublemakers who insist that cheerios thinks it is a drug. Nobody ever got addicted to Buck Choc.
A better comparison might be to a Hungry Man XXL dinner, a whole pound of sodium men (bucks) love. It’s possible they see the same chemist. They have many preservatives in common. Buck Choc is to candy what bagged black chicken nuggets at a Walgreens is to candy.
Day three:
Something is not right here. I must have eaten about half the bar yesterday. And yet observe that at this stage it is still almost as big as a dinosaur. But I can’t give up now. I’d be a buck chump. It is my destiny to be a buck champ.
Day four:
I forgot to take a picture of it before I started eating it. I believe I was down to the “last” nine squares, however. Rather a big step as it was now quite smaller than a bear. By this point it was down to about the size of a regular chocolate bar, only just big enough to poison a dragon with. But oh, ouch! What has caused my mysterious neck pain these past few days? There was only one major change in my life recently; choc it up to buck choc.
Day five:
Still not done. But there is less than there was. It has begun to collect dust.
And now it is done.
Arrr, somebody’s plundered me buck choc! You don’t need a telescope to see that. In fact, using a telescope at close range surely impedes your vision. Boya, has that recent largely publicized incident regarding modern day pirates, which actually have been making news for a couple of years, finally put a stop to twerps thinking themselves witty and clever by taking facetiously strong stances on the issue of pirates v ninjas? Ninjas are trained for battle. Pirates are just thugs on ships. I don’t see why there would be a question of which would “win in a fight.” You might as well put Zulu warriors against kids with spray paint or the Capital One ad vikings against actual vikings. A better contest would be which could survive longest on a diet consisting solely of Buck Choc and the Walgreens store brand Vitamin Water imitation the cashier, sensing I lived dangerously, asked me if I wanted to purchase, that a helpful sign informed me I would get free if the cashier forgot to mention it. Jeepers, thanks a lot, guy.
In summation, I ate Buck Choc and took pictures of it. In conclusion, this is the end.
Next time: the further adventures of Dude, da’ world’s most totally awesome chocolate transsexual Bunny.
I wish I could say that when I’m too busy to post something for a few days, rather than just slacking off, that it is a good thing, but it never is.
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I forgot I could do this, too.
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Apparently sensing both my lack of direction in the world and my lack of wistful longing for the past, The Church of Latter Datter Jesus now brings me the nostalgia bible. Yes, it’s true!The Bible is coming out of the Jesus vault! All it’s missing is a doctored down grey bible to pose this one next to on a split-screen.
I remember that everything about my Cathorific religious instruction, supposedly derived from The Bible and the various sectual exceptions and alterations made over the centuries, made me feel scared. I never felt loved by Jesus so much as threatened by eternal suffering if I complained about the giant creepy statue of his hanging dead body stuck to the wall. Or merely did not memorize some weird poem or sit and stand in a weird room for an hour every weekend. And this was before I was aware of the parts about Angry God destroying people before they otherwise would have died (and then suffered) just because he felt like it. The modern, commercial approach to spreadin’ the word that the late saints take seems opposed to just about everything left that might be labeled as “pure” about western religion. Sure, I think it’s all silly made up stuff (I must be the first person on the internet who does!), but I don’t understand how anyone else could not start to think that when they see paid ads for it on television or above their email. This summer: Caffeine is The Devil. Media.fastclick.net is a-o-k, however.
I would like to make an attempt at reading a bible at some point, but not because people I don’t know, oblivious to how crazy they come across told me to.
Truth restored! Digitally re-lorded! We took out some of the lies that may or may not have been a fundamental basis of our faith!
Stupid ads, I said. This is a horrible ad. It’s an empty trashy garbage homage to other trashy homages to some scene in some movie that most of its product’s target demographic has never seen and only knows at all from rubbish reverent near-religious homages to just that specific scene. That movie was called Risky Business and it came out in 1983, the same year I came out, of a womb. You might as well make an ad that references my umbilical cord. They can say “oh it’s parody” but if they do I’ll know they’re lying because nobody who needs to explicitly label their work as parody has done it properly. And who’s that guy in the front? Does he really expect me to believe he wears such big underpants? No, he just thinks if he doesn’t have the upper halves of his legs totally covered on tv he’ll magically turn gay which is a fate worse than this, apparently. He’s seen enough Snickers ads in the same timeslot to know that. You don’t get to be the best selling chocolate bar of all the times by letting customers turn gay, after all1.
I remember there were something near eighty ads exactly like this last year, suddenly, for no reason, all ostensibly for that guitar game (even though I assumed most of them were the exact same ad, and so why have bothered with so many?). I can confirm this because some wikipediphile has listed all of them on the page for Risky Business as if they were isolated occurrences or particularly relevant to the film. Of note (whaddaya mean? If it wasn’t notable it couldn’t be in there, right?) are that it mentions the cartoon Doug (Aka My Name is Earl the animated series2) and the film Mrs. Doubtfire, two things of which I came to not be fond through direct experience without even knowing they had done Risky Business ripoffs. I could block those bits with my mind and still have enough ennui-disgust smores left over to do the deed.
And then midway through itself page section mentions an ad with Metallica that I saw but doubted in which instead of doing the thing they kidnap other people who looked like they were going to do it, because that foyer film set is a theme park attraction or something, and then Metallica Guy says, in the ad, that they won’t do the ad and then the house explodes, just on it’s own, I guess, as the Metallicites walk away from it. Oh, go die, Metallica. You were still in the ad and accepted Activision’s dirty money. You’re just about as bad-ass as those letters kids used to send to EGM magazine with Sonic the Hedgehog beating up Mario drawn on the envelope. You’re so pouty, you wouldn’t let your songs be in the game unless you got a special version with no one else’s songs in it sold at the price of a new game. But Aerosmith, the world’s third worst old band after KC and the Sunshine That and Kiss outpouted you and did it first. That is the interpretation this presentation has led me to and I feel you are not owed a thorough investigation, even though this vague disclaimer seems to indicate that I gave you one anyway.
1 I realize that makes no sense but I laughed when I typed it so it stays.
2 That makes perfect sense.
I just realized I had a redundant copy of this entry on my page. I finally came up with something brief and I posted it twice. Ooeh.
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I heard recently that former Illinoyse governor Rodney “The Goya” Blagojevich had been ordered to not appear on a game show, but I don’t think he saw the situation as being so strict. In fact, he may have misunderstood it entirely.
If you hurry, you can also catch him as Spock’s wacky college roommate in the new Star Trek film.
I just realized I had an earlier draft of the text of the entry following this one typed into this entry for a whole day. Now the whole world* knows I had thought of “chubby uncle” before “wacky college roommate,” before I realized the guy wasn’t very chubby and didn’t look all that much older than the young Spock. Think of all the ad revenue I lost!
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Apparently Reese’s peanut butter candy bar is made with Reese’s peanut butter. You don’t want to know what the chocolate is made with. Because you don’t care.
I once attended a school in which Reese’s peanut butter cups were a common trinket of value used to motivate students, so to prepare them for the cigarette barter systems common at many of their potential future places of residence, and a single unit was always referred to as “a ree-seez.” That made me mad. Now that reese does indeed produce a product with no name, it still makes me mad because those crum bums were saying his name wrong. It is Reese, not Reesy! They also pronounced scythe as “skeeth.”
The question is: Am I worthy? This slogan was no accident; it’s printed on the unnecessary plastic bag the bucket had been placed within, also. Now, then, while I certainly would not eat something which had been declared unfit to occupy a bucket, I likewise am not filled with anticipation at the idea of food designated as just right for a bucket, a hop, skip and a gump away from food unfit to fill anything else.
Jack Links: the only raw chicken that’s convenience store room temperature plastic bag-worthy. When did this stuff get to Connecticut? I know in The South people are more in touch with their meat. They are open to the idea that these are parts from dead animals that are only dead because people killed them to eat them. That’s part of the fun for them. In the north-east, though, it’s all about deluding one’s self. Some people have convinced themselves that lobsters don’t feel pain (that is a seven page pdf article. Just so you know). They have convinced themselves, in fact, that fish isn’t meat at all. But there’s no denying what’s in this bag is a cause of suffering. Why not have it be yours? As to whether it’s actual “meat,” if it isn’t, that’s only a result of legal shenanigans, something like “oh, this contains greater than 30% beak and feather per gram, so THEREFORE…”. If you were to attempt to pass off something with no animal flesh in it as meat, if you were in the business of deception, wouldn’t you try harder than this to make it look palatable? This is an honest product. I think the point of taking a picture of the back of this, rather than the front, which bears merely a marketing approved photograph of what this stuff is supposed to look like, only at the rear do you get a hint of its true nature. This may also be the case if you have already eaten it. However, this picture didn’t come out particularly well so you can’t see the indistinct dark brown/black bits which float about unrestrained and affix themselves to the edges of the container. So thank me. A responsible web-log-keeper would have purchased the item, consumed it and documented the experience for the sake of journalism. However, I’m no journalist and I reserve the right to delude myself that this is something other than what is popularly, unfortunately, regarded as a “blog.” I’m not going to spend my own money on something weird just because
Oh dear. I’m almost out of toilet paper.
Ah! Almost done, but not close enough.
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Contrary to what might seem to be the case I actually write more than ever, it’s just less focused and more tiring.
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I box in yellow gox box socks.
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I am aware that the lifting device depicted in the image I posted last week is closer to a nineteenth century railroad crane than whatever it should be, but the only non-clipart construction cranes I could find had lifting things coming from the back of the unit and that interfered with what little image balance I had achieved, I thought. Considering that I did it free and not for an actual construction related project, and also that obviously whatever company is doing this construction is run by really stupid animals it seems like it should be of minimal significance. And yet I mentioned it.
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It is a bit early for me to have one of these on this entry, don’t you think?
I wonder if I shall ever be nostalgic for the 1990s. I question if that’s possible. Any potentially nostalgia-inspiring thing I liked about it I quickly retreated back to when the subsequent decade disappointed me, and nothing that I hated or was indifferent toward ever went away; they just got bigger and more plentiful. Why is Survivor still on? How is that possible? How did it ever have the audacity to include “outwit” in its masthead? All it’s ever been about has been randomly not getting voted away. If everybody on the show slacked off and put no effort into anything somebody would still have to win. Tuh. Survivor.
And… Resident Evil is still getting sequels and ripoffs, Rage against the machine is still getting national air time, Windows is still the dominant computer operating system, Macos still thinks it’s better, I’m still afraid of telephones, “Steve-O” is apparently still famous, The Disney Channel is still watched by people who are allowed to leave their homes and influence others.
At most I could have nostalgia for ten years ago when I still had nostalgia. It seems like so long past that someone could type “Skeletor” or “Optimus Prime” and I’d laugh for twenty seconds. Now they’re all over the place. “Lion-o” should still be good for a little while.
Sometime midway through the most recent year I was in cars a lot again, and somehow we had jumped ahead ten years [from the unbearable 1980s session whose mentioning this was intended to follow] and I was hearing Black Hole Sun every friggin day, and which only made them more friggin. I never realized back in 1994 how long and horrible it was. There’s a solid two minutes of just some guy saying “
Around the same times I heard “Red Red Wine” in a supermarket (the perfect place to hear it) and it got cut off half way through like it usually does, because eleven forbid we air a song with any sort of progression in it. More recently I heard red x2 wine in a diner, again, totally appropriate, and again aborted before the deep voice man starts talking about breaking lions and choking monkeys. Black Hole Sun always finishes, and it has no further wilderness survival secrets to reveal.
And yet this really should make little difference to me, because the next song certainly won’t be better.
Would it not be more courteous of me to simply request that the radio machine be off-turned than to say nothing and then at some later point deliberately trash the musical taste of the persons I was sharing the automobile with? Could I not more effectively state my discontent by stating it? Ideally, I keep it to myself and don’t ruin someone else’s enjoyment. Except I don’t think they really enjoy it, they just have a compulsive need to have words coming at them always, and sometimes this occurs to me and I accidentally voice a complaint and then I feel bad, even when the end result ends up being what I want, the immediate stoppage of the alien noiseflow.
This has not, after all, removed the song and others like it from the radio station, nor has it removed the radio station. The songs are still out there, and I’ll probably hear them again, either in another person’s vehicle or in this one again once my grievance has been adequately forgotten. These pieces of misery are following me around. Ignoring them won’t solve the problem. Being contrary on the internet to what I perceive as public consensus doesn’t solve it either, but it does temporarily alleviate the other problem that is my need to be contrary.
Uh oh, here comes another one
No! I already have more birds in my business than I can handle. And you needn’t be spiteful when denying me this thing I do not want. All I want is silence occasionally. Is that unreasonable? The thing I want relief from mocking me for that is most unkind and only drives me further away, and I’ve been in other people’s transportation units long enough. Why don’t you go pick up my friend under the bridge? He told me he needs a lift. This song, I thought me and my brother Cobol were the only people who liked it. Now, with 50% of its known fanbase reporting an aversion to it, I don’t see how its return is justified.
The song “come out and play,” while I thankfully still cannot discern most of its words, nor feel (much less desire to feel as I might on a day when I could discern them) compelled to facsimilize any in green text, has revealed to me a melody that is the same pitch most of the way through. That, I would not even play indoors!
All request weekend — may I request you stop? Oh, ho ho.
So I wondered: why, after so many years of Train and Smashmouth and Good Cherlertt did the early 90s songs I had safely associated with my few decent memories mysteriously re-emerge and show themselves for the rubbish I was not as a child equipped –standards would have kept me from enjoying Sonic the Hedgehog “3d” bonus stages, Chef Boyardee Dinosaurs and Goof Troop– to recognize them as? My guess is that dopey guitar game is at fault. People obeyed the command to buy every identical dot-field simulator and in the process were reminded that songs also existed in the previous decade. And then the usual calls from call-enthusiasts to radio stations to demand to hear the wretched things that they listen to all day anyway merely changed to reflect the game’s influence. Listeners were initially confused at the absence of loud plastic clicking on every note, but eventually convinced themselves these were unreleased demos, and people love unreleased demos, because who needs a finished product when you can have a scrappy mess of partial thoughts? And when that was done they requested the other singles by the same bands which were not in the games. Non-singles still did not count. I suspect a Kraft konspiracy.
But I have so much more to tell you!