Here are some things. You may have seen them before. Maybe not.
Don’t you know, this is a PRIVATE beach.
It is supposed to be a thing getting shot at and struck by arrows. It does not look like that. It looks like a thing standing around with either Nintendo graphic glitches or nothing attacking its right leg. Oops. I will hope for better luck next time.
The castle guards, those who have defended themselves with the arrows, are either invisible or possessors of ant like strength to lift such comparatively big, almost ballista bolt-sized arrows with. I kept the guards intentionally unseen because I thought it was funnier that way. You see the castle, then you see the arrows, then you look back at the castle and wonder. If there were visible little men running around in it, the creature would have approached more cautiously. I like it being ambushed and being stunned by the ambush. With a single image, by me, this is the only way it can work. But that does not mean that it always will work, and on this occasion it did not. And so I wish myself to make a better effort in the future.
Somebody wanted a “shoreline themed” image, specifically regarding United-State Connecticut’s shore line. Several pictures, actually. I only made two, though. And you might suggest to me that armadillos don’t live in or near Connecticut, and I would (I know myself better than I know you, after all) respond by pointing out the many differences between that thing and an actual armadillo (and that is why you should never ever talk to me). In fact, these do not live anywhere, for they do not exist. Go directly to school. Additionally, I exaggerated the likelihood of a sand construction recognizable as resembling anything existing in this place. I know, I tried to build one to use as a model and it was impossible.
You know how sometimes people will claim something they made is “bad” but they’ll show it to you anyway, expecting compliments? I won’t even do that.
This Aztec eagle thing that I made without trying, just by digging my fingers into the ground so to grasp sand for lifting looks better than the castle I attempted to make. Part of the trouble was that I did not want to actually sit on the ground, preferring instead to awkwardly semi-crouch around, which is painful and not helpful, only cleaner. Also, the people who make “real” sand castles bring their own special sand for the purpose (as I understand it). And in that case I ask: why even use sand? If it’s not the stuff you’d find on a beach, why bring it to a beach? Why not just sculpt it in your house? Why not use a more permanent medium that you can actually save? Why make castles all the time? Some people don’t make castles, but overwhelmingly they do. In addition to bringing their own sand, they also have sculpting tools, experience and clothing they don’t mind getting sand on. Elitists.
Getting back to the failings of the thing I made and did show you, the only realistic aspect of it is that dreadful pink house. I’ve been seeing that thing for years; one [human (me)] would think I could produce an accurate representation of it without endless redraws and multiple references. One, as usual, is dreadfully misinformed, as the house is just normal dreadful. However, at the time of this picture making I did not guess how dreadful it could be.
The pink house now has a stupid pitiful fence around it. We don’t want anybody touching our precious sand, does we! You can still see the house, and any person weighing more than a pumpkin could easily topple the thing, so why is it there? To make me mad! I’m glad they’re thinking of me, but not enough that I am no longer mad.
It showed up about two weeks ago. One week ago I discovered an attempt to put a fence around the marsh, despite the fact that nobody can walk in the marsh and there’s no reason, logical or otherwise, to attempt to restrict passage by tall, bipedal humanoids into it.
Oh, somebody’s a fancy katydid now.
The walkway is admirable. Now instead of having to wander into the road and then down a short path to the beach, a few people can walk down a slightly shorter path to the beach that nobody else can walk on. I don’t know enough about marshes to be able to say what natural life this harms, but I can complain about the gate: id ecch: why is there one? Even the Heaven’s Gate cult made more sense than this one. People feel a need to announce “I made this path, only I may make walk on it.” Nobody but you wants to go to your dopey house anyway! I might have wanted to visit, but I changed my mind when you started to build a fence around the marsh. Sneer! All these fences are new. They were not here ten years ago. What prompted this? These people would put a fence around the moon if they could. Then they would put a fence around that fence.
No, I am not going to blame nemitz for all fences in the galaxy. I know you’re disappointed. I promise to yell at nemitz about something later.
I always either do too much research or too little. All the New England fish that I like are ocean fish. A lot of grey, ugly fish in the “fresh” water around these parts. And then I find out that the two dopey imps prominent here don’t actually exist. Hopefully I can keep that a secret.
I wanted to put a viking ship in the background but I forgot until I had already put the other ship there. They pillaged the part of my brain that remembered to put them in there. They also pillaged all my good viking jokes. Chris Browne offered to buy them but changed his mind when he saw that only my good jokes had been stolen.
My setting this time was less scripted than the one with the beach. Because of that it took much longer but looks just as mundane. How do I do it?! (sorcery)
The pile of boots was the hardest part. It’s still not quite clear what that is without prolonged investigation. Must tend to later. Probably won’t.
The boots were the hardest part to draw, I mean. Overall, that reddish thing toward the left gave me the most reason to be upset.
Yes, of course I was talking about you! That doesn’t mean you’re special.
Obviously we are collecting boots today. I don’t see how you could have POSSIBLY messed that up. Hey, fool! We are not catching fish here. And yet you caught one. You couldn’t even catch cholera by eating food or drinking water contaminated with the Vibrio cholerae bacterium, and still you caught a fish. Good job. “Good” as in “opposite of good.”
This is a first grade concept. I guess you would know that if you weren’t in the orange reading group, that’s only up to level two skillpack booklets. You probably aren’t even aware that
Knowing what I now know about what you don’t know, I would most certainly not be
I don’t know what’s dumber: that they’re deliberately catching boots or that NEMITZ is too dumb to not accidentally catch fish. And it, as usual, refuses to accept the consequences for its own incompetence. You, NEMITZ, knew you weren’t supposed to do that, but you did it anyway, and then you pouted when scolded. Bad, bad nemitz. As we see here, nemitz can NOT handle criticism. Hey, thing, you did a bad job! You can’t consistently, exclusively do things poorly, do things WRONG and expect to be tolerated.
It’s bad enough that you’re naked, but how dare you appear before me without your shading on? Disgraceful! Meet me on the battlefield!
My back hurts.
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The Geico “cave men” series of advertisements depends on the viewer understanding that these people are themselves endlessly, hopelessly surrounded by Geico ads. That, to me, is the more tragic aspect of their un-relievable plight than that they can’t quite get respect as human beings. Even if they weren’t second class citizens they still couldn’t get away from Geico. And the Geico company itself has no problem with its ads being depicted within themselves as inescapable sources of dismay with no regard for the people they continually discriminate against.
TRY! Lean Pockets quesadilla. That’s awfully considerate of Hot Pockets brand Lean Pockets to plead for me to be open minded at this point, after I’ve purchased the item and removed it from its home. Always the chance exists that I will buy an item, take it out from its packaging and then decide I don’t want it. Perhaps I never intended to eat it. Maybe I have a hopeless addiction to opening boxes and non-resealable plastic bags. I could not possibly return the item for store credit at this point. Lean Pockets has already made the sale, and yet still it wants to make sure I eat something. Please, just try it. You have to eat! Just one bite, at least. Do it for me. Think of it as a science experiment. You like monoglopxide mccarbonuke, don’t you?
Here, eat this piece of my head that I just sliced out so I could have a mouth. Don’t be concerned with the fact that by the very nature of where it was, it was essentially in my mouth; I did not have one at the time. You might better devote your thoughts toward how I have terrible eyes or a nose or a body. As to how I put a shirt on over my enormous head, you are mistaken; I do not wear a shirt. I am simply badly burned across my torso. Thanks for your sensitivity, by the way. I do, however, wear flesh colored pants and gloves. By the way, Lotta Melon isn’t my actual name. It’s just some weird thing concocted to sound like “watermelon” so that the sugary drink-product I represent can hint that it is flavored in such a way. What baffles me is why I was chosen to endorse it. I don’t even know what that’s supposed to… you say my head looks like a what? How dare you!
GRABADA! I HUNGER! FEED MY RAGE! I SHALL TASTE THE PAINBOW! GIVE ME ONE GOOD RAISIN NOT TO! YOU CAN’T STOP THE EAT! THE TOOTH HURTS! I’LL SWALLOW YOU ON TWITTER! CHEW FIRST, DIGESTION LATER! IF I, WANNA TAKE A LIME, HOME WITH ME TONIGHT IT’S NONE OF YO CITRUS! YER PLUM OUTTA LUCK, YOU SONOFA PEACH! YOU GOT BIGGER PROBLEMS THAN MELONOMA!
I never could write endings.
Am I better off with total whitening or total advanced whitening? How is it possible to advance beyond total? Does the advanced one make teeth translucent? Is it just more challenging? How can this goop hope to accomplish any whitening at all without
whitening oxygen bubbles? Clearly, they are essential. Ha ha, I pity any poor fool who bought normal advanced whitening without knowing oxygen bubbles had been invented. That person is doomed to a life of sub-caucasian bite bricks.
I actually tried this eventually, and you’ll be surprised to know that in actual usage it’s exactly the same as every other toothpaste I’ve ever used.
I might go so far as to declare that the finest regular I’ve ever tasted.
How are there so many different types of toothpaste, with so little information provided to help a person choose? Is it important which one I use? I did not think it was like with soda or salsa or saltlakrids, where it’s a trivial thing I don’t need, am actually better off without, and should choose entirely upon the whim of a moment. This is supposed to be a tool for cleaning a sensitive, integral series of body components. It’s a health issue, not a fashion conundrum. Yes, there are heaps of soaps, too, but they are competing soap brands offering similar products. This is one brand offering similar products. When you do see multitudes of soap under one label it tends to be about the various smells they give off. I try to avoid smelling people’s teeth.
This article’s author has encountered far more colgates than I, but doesn’t answer, nor ask the question of what’s actually in the interests of teeth themselves (it does, however, include a picture which clicking upon causes to appear a javascript window with a smaller version of the picture inside it). Do I want to prevent cavities or fight plaque? Why do we lack the technology to do both? Long ago it was my understanding that all toothpastes did all these things. Now, though, they’ve gone soft. Toothpaste? More like toothglue! Eh eh eh.
Which of these is actually the most beneficial is impossible to discern. Not just because your deteriorating vision has rendered the print a blurry, unintelligible mess, but because each paste type only includes the check boxes which would be checked. They are, in effect, mere bullet points, but this makes them seem like bonus features. Which reminds me…
With Webster Premier Banking you get 5000 bonus points. Do you have any idea what that means? That means you’ll be one fourth of the way toward getting your first extra life. What other bank can promise you something so matenopoulos?
See! Only Wachovia gives you a Way to Save. You don’t even need extra lives when your bank has exclusive access to the Imperial Scrolls of Honor. Truly a glamorous bonus.
No, Baramos Bomus! Nobody ever calls you! Get out of here! You are not needed at this time! Go away before your friends show up…
Wonderful. Now there’s some idiot purple monster skeleton here. Surely you can admit that’s kind of stupid.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN “KIND OF” STUPID?
Aren’t you glad I don’t update this site every two days anymore?
This is the saddest day of my life.
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I have been busy, lately. The internet has been regularly dysfunctional. These are not good circumstances for keeping websites. Only a fool would continue to do so!
June 29? I am trying to write something about toothpaste. Hopefully you can excuse me for not having the rushes of inspiration and motivation necessary to finish quickly.
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June 27: I’m not sure if my left eye actually hurts or if I just imagine it is in pain because every time I see it in a mirror it more and more resembles planet Jupiter.
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Busy busy busy. How am I always busy? Where are the time and effort going? (away)
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June 25: I’m not surprised that Michael Jackson is dead today. I’m surprised that he was alive yesterday.
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Why go to the restaurant? Just watch its page on the facebook. This sign is near the place, and the address confirms that (It confirms that if you are there in person and know where you are), but advertising an actual product or service was pre-nine eleven thinking. They trust that I will go to some website and type in their name more than they trust me to just go straight to their own website. Or their place of business where I give them money.
And yes, I did go to the face book, locate the search space and type “cuckoo’s nest” into it, but only for the purpose of researching my complaint about the sign telling me to do that. If I thought it was a good idea… I would have also done it. I suppose. But all this is irrelevant because either way a business has paid for a sign which tells me to do a thing which gets the business no dollars.
I guess the idea is that you go home and watch the page, so that the place can periodically remind you that it exists on occasions when you might not otherwise have considered visiting it. Which is fine, from a marketing standpoint, but as an internet user I find it pointless. I joined facebook to better communicate (in theory) with family members and friend members who do not dare engage me directly. I get absolutely nothing out of confessing to the emotionless second-hand webpage of some joint that I enjoy visiting it. And I don’t like visiting it, really. I like Margarita’s and Across the Border better. We mustn’t forget Jalapeno Heaven, either. Even Baja is better, and you know how Baja is.
The best part about going to Cuckoo’s Nest is that you get to see this stupid gargoyle that’s in front of a house near Cuckoo’s Nest. And since it has no legs it can’t follow you around and pull any gargoyle business on you.
If every other fauxican place in southern Connecticut except Su Casa mysteriously gets mauled by skeletons and explodes I’ll consider visiting Cuckoo’s Nest again. Or maybe if I just become coo-coo. Seven year old me should find that last sentenceoid particularly poignant and clever.
Hamsters dominates them both. Also in the running but with some catching up to do is
Hamsters. In a distant third is
Hamsters. But what’s this?!
DUCKS. I should have known.
GET OUT OF THE ROAD, DUCK!
In other news, I do not support dopes.
And neither should you.
“Time to head on home”
Said Dad to His Son
“Not ’til my Fruit by the Foot is done”
He started to eat and don’t you know,
Three hours later “still not ready to go!”
YOU SEE, with Fruit by the Foot, the fun just lasts and lasts
So he kept eating, “and the time just passed”
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“Star” is a popular word in the world of marketing and public opinion. We have Energy Star, Starbucks, Sinistar, Kenneth Starr, Star Jones, Starburst, Starbirds, on and on.
Plenty of newspapers, radio stations and other media outlets identify themselves as “Star.” The people who occupy the most prominent roles in acted productions are said to be “stars.” The quality of various products, services and military ranks are often shown rated in amounts of stars.
Throughout human existence we have been infatuated with the mysterious glowing bodies that fill the sky at night and the ever present giant ball of light that commands our respect during the day. However…
“Foot Star” is not filling me with awe and amazement.
Ah, such majesty and splendor!
You’ll get over it.
I probably won’t post something new tomorrow.
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page 30 (scroll down) of this.
Superfluous data:
The inking went better on the letters this time, but the actual drawings were still a mess and needed just as much post-scan mending as on past occasions. I at least seem to understand curtains better than I used to, but it’s still not enough.
People who have remarked have a few times done so to the amount that they don’t know what the characters’ names are. One thing that I find wacky about comics and indeed most fictional media is the manner in which plot details, including names, are compulsively stated even in situations where all parties (frequently just one person speaking to itself) should know everything and not need to say so. Still, somehow or another the reader ought to be informed, in most cases. I inserted a couple of names in here and it looked quite weird (apart from the the usual unusualness, naturally). It seemed like somebody else wrote it. I changed one of them to a “you.”
I drew the creature without ears, and then I saw some other picture where it had ears, so I drew ears on the next one, and they seemed unnecessary. If you’re bothered by the inconsistency you may imagine the fool has retractable ears.
No such excuse exists for the various background elements which are not totally consistent with prior depictions. Which is odd, because I knew all along what my intent was, so I should have been able to work something out. Maybe the room has more than one door and that control panel thing behind the bed is a stage prop.
I am not sure what the difference between a doctor and a doctrel is. Maybe this just regards the collar style of the laboratory coat worn, when applicable. Or perhaps doctrel is how they are addressed but doctor is what they are, even though this contradicts what I have already established. Maybe one kind is mean and the other kind is incompetent.
Between the page halves I lost my remaining point-three millimeter tip Techliner pen. It was certainly not the ideal drawing instrument and I only paid two dollars for it, but it was the best I had. I had to substitute… some other pen. It says “Pilot G2 07” but I think that can’t mean 0.7 millimeters because the “big” pen I use, for most of the outlines and the frame edges, is only 0.5 millimeters at the edge.
I thought we were friends.
Papitas crujientes.
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The time has come to determine the superior soup. Prepare yourself.
The Stop and Shop super-market features two distinct generic store brand soups with the same flavors.
Even the hypey promotional copy on the can posteriors that’s suppossed to make me super excited about eating out of a can is essentially the same, and you’d know that if I’d taken a better picture of it.
So which is better?
Select, the left soup, obviously, for while Homestyle boasts the more appetizing image of actual soup, only Select comes in a GOLD can.
It was my assumption that I had merely acquired generic soup on both ends of a needlessly overdone packaging change; select’s food photography gives the impression of a thing that’s been hanging around since the 1980s; either just from label decay or because it was more feasible to find a depiction of a containers’ actual contents, rather than an idealized color-enhanced mockup, printed on one back then. The reality only becomes clear in the context of the store from which it takes its name:
The two leading / only evident to exist brands of canned soup come in red & gold and blue & grey cans. In its natural habitat a store brand’s survival instinct leads it to disguise itself as best as is legally permissable as a major multinational company’s brand, despite few competent people likely to be fooled by this for long enough to actually make a purchase. In a situation where there is no unquestionably dominant producer of a thing, and that there is no longterm risk in producing an excess amount of, it makes perfect sense to imitate them both. If Stop & Shop sells just as much soup as before, only with sales divided between its two colors, it won’t have been a total waste of effort because they can keep that stuff on the shelves for essentially ever. For as long as it takes for Progresso or Campbell to significantly alter their own label colors and layouts, which probably won’t happen. You might have noticed that the red cans shown are not “Select” but “Chunky,” which is apparently a word that makes people think of things other than vomit. That is because Stop and Shop actually has three identical generic soup brands.
Select is paired with, sure enough, Campbell’s “Select Harvest,” and while that comes in a primarily white, rather than red, container, the somewhat sickly depictions of the regular Select cans’ contents creates a whitish impression at a great enough distance.
I do not intend to criticize stop and shop for its curious multiplicity; I can’t tell the difference between Campbell’s identical soup brands, either. I merely wish these sorts of label shenanigans weren’t necessary to get people to buy less overpriced soup. Some years ago I would never have considered purchasing Stop & Shop anything. But it had really ugly, bland labels then. The sort that make you question the standards of the overall production. The labels are better now. I just don’t like that they’re playing along with the myth that there are three distinct styles of soup being peddled here, each worth being imitated individually.
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Mmmm, yes… fascinating…
Oh, I know. Also of great potential interest: I wrote most of this entry while eating about 1/3 of a can of raisins. I had become aware of the 82% sodium rate in a full can of soup, any one of those, and thought I should eat something boring as punishment. No cereal, though; too much iron. I’m worried I’ll be walking past a junkyard, because I got lost in a cartoon from the 80s, and I’ll get stuck to one of those big car magnets. So I ate a lot of raisins. And then I felt diabetic for a bit. It can be hard coming to terms with the fact that eating fruit can make you just as sick as cookies. You might not get as fat, but you’ll feel like you ought to be. So if I’ve conquered dehydrated grapes and passed the test of soup, what, then, remains to be addressed by my can agenda?
GRAPE SOUP.
Pretzel companies love to brag about their great traditions on the back of their packages; often citing the dedication with which their founder hand twisted them and such. That would be relevant if you were trying to sell me a bag of hand-twisted, slow baked, 1900s style pretzels. What I have is a sack of tiny, cold, factory-mold prefabricated thingies flavored only by salt, designed to be eaten fifty at a time. The only tradition in the game here is my own tradition of gluttony. Even when I do see a big pretzel, it is still most likely a thing from a machine that has not earned the right to be shaped like an ampersand. I would settle for a circle if that meant you’d charge me less than five dollars for it.
What’s more wholesome than a big jar of salt? How about one that had been spilled and gathered up prior to usage? I would not trust desert-dwelling men without hats to handle these ingredients. Only to dance safely, and only if they want to.
Coca Cola is even older than a lot of pretzel brands and there’s no proud boasting printed on containers of that. Because it’s just dumb soda (and because it was originally sold as medicinal wine made with cocaine by a morphine addict with no business sense who suffered from Henniganism).
You don’t pick up a bag of cheetos (I hope) and see on the back something like
Nobody would take it seriously. THIS is what is printed on the back of a bag of cheetos:
I have an inferiority complex. I’m sure yours is better, though.
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People aren’t interested in civic matters. This sign was designed by a person who likes it that way. Why should I vote yes on what? This entire awareness campaign relies on the hope that nobody else invents a “no” sign. The issue of import[ance] seems to actually have been three things, increasing the town budgets for various purposes. You might figure out from my vague grasp of the proceedings and consequences that I took as much civic interest as anyone else. You might say that it is my responsibility to know for certain what is being voted on, and before that happens, but shouldn’t it also be my responsibility to make up my mind about it? See, even if the sign did what I wanted I could still complain about it! I welcome you, sign, to make a suggestion, but I do not detect the presence of a “please” or so much as a “hey why don’t you” preceding the order to get votey.
I’m guessing at least one of the votable measures passed through the thing those pass through, as the property taxes just went up suddenly, increasing to levels more befitting a town of boat-wiping, fence-raising, weed-whacking, police-calling-because-I-went-for-a-walk-during-daylight-hours connecticreeps. Unfortunately, this affects my location as well, even though we do not own a boat or a fence and if we needed to squirt our house with water for some reason would be content to use supersoaker technology or hope wet droplets start magically falling from the sky.
Oh, the plight of us peons, having to manually charge our water pistols, without strapping big jugs and model T engines to our backs, never knowing the joy of treating entire neighborhuds to 90 perpetual decibels with no regard for decency or necessity when we squirt our houses.
Note to buyers: “Bigger” Rotisserie Chicken may be same size as before, smaller than before but bigger in comparison to other products, not actually bigger than anything, or utterly non-existant. Big Y supermarket will not be held responsible for misconceptions on the part of the consumer regarding the relative size or presence of the product in question.
We additionally accept no responsibility for offering pizzas designed with California pizza standards in mind which bafflingly choose to market themselves based on that.
You, California, won’t allow gayed up marriages, but this is acceptable? The marriage of pizza and California is at least as queer as… Florida pizza.
I had a chain-fresh California pizza and I found it to be at or below the level of a frozen non-California pizza from my preferred ice pizza factory. If there are two unfortunate culinary styles, generally tolerated out of convenience, that are worth combining, I am not going to assume it is these two.
I should post something here later today that is not about tv shows. I should also stop consuming so much sodium and learn to play a xylophone.
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I did not realize until the second broadcast that James Wormworth, the drum-player who replaces Max Weinberg during Bruce Springstein season had become a reglular member of the band, because if Stomp has taught us anything it’s that you can never have too many guys banging on things at the same time, making the total quantity of members eight and my reference to a “Max Weinberg 7” inaccurate. Although the seven has never been officially designated as referring to the number of the people in the band. And even if it did, Max Weinberg himself was often announced separately from the Max Weinberg 7, suggesting a total of eight people. The name was wrong before. I still think “The Tonight Show Band” is a mundane name, however much accuracy it currently carries. I should probably hide this part, too. Give me a dollar.
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What follows are observations I had when watching the “debut” of “The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien” and other stories. It is only here to serve my compulsions. I wrote it in about forty minutes. It was not supposed to be like this. Yet if I do not post it now then I will always want to, and it will only get longer. I don’t need you to read it. I just need to be done reading it.
I don’t trust any company that can show full tv shows for free yet still make a big enough profit to make produce 2 minute long ads with computer effects and superfluous celebrities and air them during America’s worst (id est: best) shows. They think they’re being clever with that tagline, but it comes across as just about the only thing sincere about it to me. There’s another ad that you’ve undoubtedly seen, if you see ads, featuring Alecander Baldwin, but I can actually tolerate him off the ads, at least. Denis Leary, however, always makes me uncomfortable, and this is regardless of whether or naw he ripped off Bill Hicks. Bill Hicks, by the wuh, I never heard of until maybe a year ago, by which point he had been dead for fourteen of them. I have since seen his name in several places. Did he come back to life recently? It’s hard to say, because if he had he still wouldn’t have appeared in this ad (this is, of course, assuming it would have been offered to him and that in fourteen years he did not undergo the necessary changes in character, which I would not put past anybody I have yet witnessed within my electric picture box. And that assumes his supposed anti-consumerist stances reflected his actual character and not just viewpoints adopted for the sake of a comedy routine).
Even before I knew about those ads, I didn’t trust Hulu. I just hated its name. It reminded me of hula. More specifically, Tony Danza, Fred Flintstone, et arrrg; america’s least respectable father figures and miscellaneous male oafs wearing grass skirts and coconut brassieres during inexplicable island getaway sweeps episodes that were always embarrassing. Also, nohulo, the non-website some garbanzo boron tried to make me pay homage to once.
Now I hate Hulu’s money and its attitude. I like to think what draws people to youtube is that it’s so ghetto and junkety that it seems like it can’t possibly be a corporate conspiracy (though with the bandwidth it carries it could not function if it wasn’t). But really, people will go anyplace where there is visual record of cats being idiots. You know that. I know that.
What I hate is when that isn’t enough for people, when they have to add obnoxious commentary, often attributed to the cat, in [non-negotiable] impact-font lettering, superimposed over the image.
It is scarcely a step above what cats say on greeting cards, except everybody’s too busy making more of them to charge money, so they’re inescapable.
Did I make that just now in 20 seconds or find it somewhere in 10? It doesn’t make a difference! (and I actually made it over a year ago in 20 seconds in recognition of a more general untraceable, unquestionable internet non-joke tradition complaint whose specific uninspired inspiration I have fortunately forgotten, which is why it doesn’t have a cat in it) We’re all grunting apes pasting letters on things. Everybody wants to be like Frankenstein. There used to be a thing kids did back when they talked to each other, they would hold one hand out, palm downward, slap the nearer edge repeatedly against their chest and say “URT URT URT I’M INTARDED!” That was as far as it went. If it went any further it would be dumber than whatever it thought it was mocking. Things were different back then. We could see a picture of a cat doing something strange and think “that cat is doing something strange.” We can’t be trusted to do that now.
I would like this without the awful letters. Now, though, it makes me mad, and this is probably one of the less awful examples. And, and, why should we univerally assume that if cats could speak it would be like that?
Some cats are very classy. Not this one, obviously, but some.
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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.