How I feel.

A man gets off the subway carrying a black laquered case. He goes to Times Square, unfolds a cloth on the ground, kneels on the cloth, opens the case and removes a black laquered sword.

After fumbling with the sword for several minutes, he opens it and drops the sheath to the ground. It makes a hollow clatter. He sneezes.

As he looks for a tissue, a taxi goes by and splashes last night's rain onto him.

The man decides not to bother blowing his nose after all, as he's about to make a far bigger mess.

"For honor!" he shouts, and commits seppuku.

No one notices.

Hours later, a boy who had been walking down Broadway wonders just what is on the bottom of his shoe.

How I feel.

Letter to a girl of the future.

Hey baby, you might not know this yet, but everyone in the whole world loves you very much.

You have yet to make good grades, win awards, do anything more spectacular than just be, no one even knows what you really look like yet, but you're the greatest thing in a lot of people's lives just because you're you.

Hold on to that feeling, if you can. Don't forget it, even when things don't go the way you want--and I hate to be the first to tell you this, but that'll happen. Learn from those times, but don't ever doubt or forget how loved you are.

Letter to a girl of the future.

Oh my stars and garters: movie reviews from the fog.

Due to The Puppy's leg surgery, the holidays, and lack of time in general, we haven't gotten to see as many movies as we were seeing, and many of the movies we've seen lately are repeats of movies I've already opined on here. Short-term memory loss is an annoying thing; I forget a lot of things, unfortunately the movies I'm about to mention will not leave my mind so easily.

We have seen the remake of The Omen that I blogged about, and it it was annoying because nothing much has changed. Oh sure, the effects were updated, but no part of the plot changed. I'm not sure what part of the plot I would have changed, and had I never seen the original Omen, this would've been better, I'm sure, but come to think of if the only Omen movie I really dug was The Final Conflict.

X-Men: The Last Stand, or X3 as the abbreviators call it, was a letdown. I loved the first two X-Men movies, and I expected to love this one as well. Jean Grey was neat, of course, but wasted. The rest of the movie seemed like other movies I've seen...it even reminded me of my Turducken story, and that's just messed up. No, I haven't read many X-Men comics, but I have read about the comics, and there were better storylines the writers could have borrowed from. Not knowing every line from the comics caused me to finally lose my mind and start laughing when the very large, tough, and surprisingly rather kick-ass Beast says, "Oh my stars and garters!"

I know Hollywood is trying to get kids to emulate better behavior, but I can't really see "Oh my stars and garters!" catching on. I would say I'll use it from now on when I'm looking at something really nasty like full-on mutant war, but I know that line will pass into the same fog as flame-handed ninja Dr. Watson.

Oh my stars and garters: movie reviews from the fog.

A duck!

Adventure is still the very first Atari 2600 video game in the vinyl-coated plastic cases which reside in my desk. I think I played this for all of early 1985, usually while listening to (Don't You) Forget About Me by Simple Minds and trying to figure out if the singer was David Bowie. I didn't have the Internet then, you see.

If I've ever mentioned killing ducks on my way to the castle, this game is what I was talking about. The designers might have intended them to be fearsome, fire-breathing dragons soaring through the skies, but bloodthirsty, vicious ducks are what ate me a hundred times over back in the day. (They're positively evil in the later levels.)

A duck!

The Abominable Turducken.

Once there was a Turkey so irritated by the implanting of lesser poultry in its most private of parts, it took out an entire city.

First to go were the power lines. No news would be broadcast on this day of the terror waddling down the road. Some ventured out with their video cameras, in an attempt to warn the world, but they were flattened by the greasy knob of a drumstick.

The people of Lake Charles were helpless. Had it been a bad batch of Paul Prudhomme's Poultry Magic? How had they offended the gods of food so badly that this creation was now spitting molten liquid over the rooftops of the unsuspecting residents?

John Madden stepped in to stop the violence, but it was no use. With two crispy strips of flesh, the creature ripped Madden in two before he could even formulate an elaborate strategy to battle the bird.

"The bones!" cried an old woman. "It wants its bones back!"

The townsfolk gathered at the sanitation department. They rushed the garbage barge and began tearing into bags. Many things were found, but nothing that seemed as if it would be any use against the horrific, looming mass of flesh clomping towards them.

Suddenly, a voice boomed from the heavens.

"Stop right there, you bastard!"

The undead creation froze in its tracks. The people saw a tall figure standing atop one of the heaps of trash and their hearts leapt for joy. It was none other than Sir Ian McKellan! To either side of him, stepping out of a cloud of smoke, were pop stars Boy George and Sir Paul McCartney.

"We've come to stop this madness once and for all," McKellan said in a clear voice that carried a ridiculously long way.

The people began to think of fantastic side dishes they would prepare to go with their slabs of turducken. The river of drool dried quickly as McCartney smashed a bottle over a nearby stripped car and hollered, "Who wants to feel a duck up their arse?!"

A scream arose from the crowd as they stampeded out of the dump. The turducken smashed some of the mob as they passed. Boy George hurled a disco ball at a slow-moving man in a Larry The Cable Guy T-shirt.

With a ululating cry, dozens of vegetarians appeared at the borders of the dump to prevent any escape, and the turducken resumed its rampage.

When the sun rose the next day, all was silent. One very large stuffed body lay on the ground, with dozens of boneless legs sticking out of every orifice. The vultures would eat well this Thanksgiving.

Those who survived that day say they will never forget the way the sun sparkled off Boy George's makeup.


Any similarity between The Abominable Turducken and Hambo are purely bloody freaky and I am so utterly thrilled that I am on the same wavelength as Weebl & Bob that I want to cry tears of pure tomato sauce.

The Abominable Turducken.

Stemming the flow.

With the time of sitting around and eating heavy meals coming up, I'm finding less time to do things. Posting here every single day is fun, but I'm going to run out of all my great ideas if I keep going at this pace. I think I'm gonna slow things down a bit, play some slow jams for the couples, tangle their wheels.

I always used to hate the couples-only songs at the roller rink. Never could rent skates for the people in my head. Good thing they always brought their own.

This doesn't mean I'm leaving, it just means I may be a bit spotty for a while.

Stemming the flow.

My days as a super spy are at an end.

I scored poorly on Guess the Logo.

Have fun with the weekend, don't let the meteors hit you on the head...unless you like that sort of thing. I'll be attempting to catch the Leonids later, if the sky lets me.

My days as a super spy are at an end.

Faking your first step into a much larger world.

Entertainment Weekly recently ran a story about a reader who had never seen the Star Wars saga before. They describe his account as "hilarious," and then the first picture is captioned, "All his friends warned him about Jar Jar."

The story loses any credibility for me right there. I realize instantly that this Star Wars virgin either was told what to expect by his friends, or he looked it up on the Internet beforehand, or--and this is the worst possibility--he thinks he invented his issues with the movies.

I rarely read Entertainment Weekly, and this article is a good indication of why.

Any person with access to Google can look up what the loudest critics of the Star Wars prequels had to say, and repeat them as they've been repeated here--the sanctimonious outcry against Luke and Leia kissing has been done to death in the archives of rec.arts.sf.starwars.misc, and everywhere else Star Wars geeks with little sense of humor congregate. But that someone got paid for this story is really tragic. Virgins going straight into prostitution, what is this world coming to?

The guy who came up with the idea for the story in the first place misspelled womprat, which is a good indication of what we're dealing with here. What are we dealing with anyway? I've read the article twice and came away both times with nothing more than a sense that someone was hired to poke fun at The Phantom Menace. In the end, Morrison liked the movies overall, which is always good. I won't be an idiot towards him, because we're on the same side. I would have liked to read more about what he thought of the other five movies, but then, maybe I already know.

Before I'm accused (again) of being a Lucas apologist, I would just like to point out that I do have a very big problem with one of the movies. Why was Duel of the Fates playing as Anakin asked a Jawa for directions?

Faking your first step into a much larger world.

Too tired to make up my own words.

And so I give you Chinese Translation by M. Ward. It's a new favorite song of mine that's been turning up all over the place.

Too tired to make up my own words.

Doing my part to ensure better programming.

If you know me, you know that I can kill television and radio shows merely by liking them. This leaves me very little to watch, and I've been warned not to watch any shows which are currently on the air. With that in mind, Dancing With the Stars ends tonight.

Last week's show, which attempted to tie-in Election Day, left us with Mario Lopez and Emmit Smith as the final two. This made us happy here as we like them both and now we don't have to have a collective stroke over who wins. Personally, I was hoping for Jerry Springer to take the big prize...whatever the big prize is.

Yesterday, we brought The Puppy in for knee repairs, she's still being worked on last I heard, and so the final episode of Dancing With the Stars was rather welcome to take our minds off The Puppy, sitting in a cage, scratching lines into the floor for each hour we've left her there. She will have her revenge. I will, of course, welcome that as well.

Meanwhile, I decided to take notes on the last night of competition, because I was tired, and things like that amuse me. Here are my notes, with some elaboration so you know what I was on about.

Emmit's shoes. I wrote that because I liked his metallic green dancing shoes. I once had my eyes on a pair of metallic sneakers in Capezio, but they never had my size. I dealt with that crushing blow by going mad with glitter on my existing sneakers. Did you know gluing glitter to sneakers makes them stiff...even sharp?

Christmas commercials. Oh hell no. The last thing I need to be reminded of is the oncoming buying holiday. Why aren't there ads for book sales for Kwanzaa? I would enjoy those.

I don't know the Brit name. This meant that I was having a breakdown and momentarily forgot Glenn Goodman's name. He says "mambo" funny.

Emmit's red shoes. I am attracted to shiny things when I am tired. For the record, I didn't like his gold ones, but I did like his partner's boots.

It's not mAmbo or sAmba. Maybe it is in ballroom circles, but until the day I have a fake tan and really painful-looking, yet gorgeous, shoes, I'm pronouncing mambo the way Rosemary Clooney and Perry Como did. So there.

Krunk Clown. I had totally forgotten the name of Tommy the Clown, who teaches inner city kids to krump, and taught Monique Coleman some moves. He had a balloon drawn on his face that looked like a bullethole. It was hilarious.

Damn, I hate the Funky Bunch. I didn't rememeber that Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock do that It Takes Two song that Mario and Carina used for their Freestyle, so I blamed the band I could rememeber.

Dancing With The Cylons. Dear Gods, what have I done?

SHAT-tastic! I really hope someone at ABC gets a dictionary for the holidays. Shat is far more than a nickname for William Shatner, and when that fact comes out, it will explain the quality of Show Me The Money, the show that followed Dancing With The Stars last night.

"When civilization gets me down, I want an AK-47." This was something I heard on another station as I walked around the house. It was on the History Channel, I think. It amused me, because I am of course of the opinion that we need to invent the lightsaber as quickly as possible.

This just in--The Puppy has survived surgery! The Puppy has had one knee repaired, and shall be back to kicking my ass before year's end. I have never been so happy at that thought as I am now.

Doing my part to ensure better programming.

Here comes Speed Racer.

I'm just going to get it out of the way and tell everyone that before Han Solo, Speed Racer, the Japanese animated demon on wheels, was my first love. Oh, the times we had. Trixie never found out, and neither did Sparky...until now, I suppose. Chim Chim probably had some idea, but I bought him off with food. In those days I used to have access to a stash of Devil Dogs and Funny Bones, and after about 40, Chim Chim (or Spritle, I could never tell the sneaky little bastards apart) would be passed the hell out and Speed and I could get down to figuring out how to outwit the car acrobatic team, who had infiltrated the local drag-racing scene.

With that said, (I feel better, don't you?) I am going to make it my business to track the new live-action movie of Speed Racer that the Wachowskis are working on.

I'm going to give you all a minute to take in all the information I've just thrown at you. It's okay, I know finding out I had an imroper relationship with an animated cartoon twenty-five years my elder must be startling. Now you can imagine how startling it is for me trying to imagine what the hell the Wachowskis are going to do to my friend.

I don't generally like to follow movie spoilers since the days when I used to rabidly defend The Phantom Menace, which I will still do to this day, even though the idea of needing to defend a seven-year-old movie that made $925.5 million seems kind of silly to me now.

Almost as silly as me hoping that Speed Racer (2008) is as good as V for Vendetta, but nothing like the two Matrix sequels. I mean, it's a story about a kid in a race car (albeit a bloody super car!) fighting crime; maybe I should not invest so much interest a full two years before the movie is slated for release.

Maybe I should just be happy that Lyra from the movies based on His Dark Materials looks pretty good.

Here comes Speed Racer.

I Don't Feel Like Writin'.

Life is good, I've had more Star Wars this weekend than any weekend in history.

Life sucks, my puppy has two luxating patellas and the left one has progressed to the stage where she needs surgery.

Life is funny. I picked out a new vet for The Puppy when we adopted her, in case she ever needed surgery.

Life is a bitch. My puppy's appointment is for 4:45, so I have to drive her in the dark, in the rain, to a busy street, and by busy, I mean New York busy.

Life is mystifying. Be careful what you wish for.

I Don't Feel Like Writin'.

Burning Question 11/11/06

What's so magic about magic markers?

Burning Question 11/11/06

I remember what I was doing half my life ago.

I was looking at the sky, unaware that I would never hear you tell me a new story.

For anyone to think that you died would be wrong; your presence guides my every good deed.

I've never forgotten a thing you taught me, I've never lost a thing you gave me.

As long as there's music, you live.

As long as everyone remembers you, you live.

As long as I live, you live.

Nothing but Star Wars.

To say I like Star Wars is like saying I like cats. It's true, but a bit of an understatement. My house is covered in Star Wars--cat hair and dog fur too, but that's another story.

Like most people who can name every X-Wing pilot, Podracer, and creature in Mos Eisley's Cantina, I would gladly risk being laughed at by saying that Star Wars shaped quite a bit of my life.

This weekend, Cinemax will be playing all six movies back-to-back, four times in a row. Not bad at all. It's been a while since something good was on telly.

I haven't seen Attack of the Clones in 171 weeks, and that is a rather long time, so I will most likely catch some of the marathon, even though I could watch the DVDs or recite the movies in my head on any given day. It's not the thing of just watching the movies; it's how. I'm sure there are tons of people who are stockpiling soda and beef jerky in preparation for this event, and as I learned so many years ago, it doesn't matter to the geeks if we see the movie in the same room as long as we know some other geeks somewhere are watching. Hundreds of people the world over all downloading the same bootlegged movie trailer at the same time back in 1998 proved that. I think. Maybe it proved Star Wars fans are crazy, especially the ones with dial-up. Okay, so I didn't get to see the trailer for The Phantom Menace at the exact same time as everyone else, but I made up for it by watching it three hundred times...a day.

Cinemax has been running a preview for the movies with the Coldplay song Fix You, and, sap that I am, thought it was cool. No, it doesn't beat T.N.T. by AC/DC for the Death Star run, but I was not consulted.

Nothing but Star Wars.

LimeProject: getting naked to kick cancer's ass.

LimeProject is something BronxElf put together to help YourHermione beat her medical bills following treatment for Hodgkins Lymphoma. Go buy a calender.

LimeProject: getting naked to kick cancer's ass.

Let there be light.

Let me just brag for a moment and say that if people would listen to me the first year that I say something, things would get done a lot faster.

Our big '70s-era kitchen light, the one that was pronounced dead about three years ago, is working. Perfectly. Two hours' worth of work--much of which was spent on line in Home Depot and soaking the paint off screws--and it's done.

We can see what we're cooking again. Oh...my...God.

Let there be light.

Saturday Night's Alright for Angsting.

I like to keep it light on the weekends, you know, when I remember what day it is. I'm pretty sure I'm hurting my chances of ever being picked up by BlogBurst every time I post a video off YouTube, because it's so mainstream television of me, but I don't care, because this is funny.

Harry Potter is ready to move on to Battlestar Galactica in this jolly good puppet show by Neil Cicierga.

Saturday Night's Alright for Angsting.

Repression...recession...it's all the same thing, man.

On many autumn days, I can be seen doing two things: wearing my insanely green hoodie, and raking leaves. I am a rebellious little punk. No, really.

England has banned people from wearing hoodies and baseball caps inside of stores in case of crime. A requirement to wear unique, bold numbers on all clothing is pending.

I don't hold up well under direct sunlight, as you may know, and I have a few hooded jackets that I wear. The most socially alarming one is of course the black UV-resistant cover-all that I wear during summer. I've been followed by security in Stop & Shop because of my jacket, which becomes really amusing if you know how I look in public and hold the image of me trying to perform "terrars" with a tissue wrapped around the handle of whatever weapon I smuggled in under one mesh armpit of the cover-all while my plummeting blood pressure keeps me from damaging anything more than a few floor tiles.

So my choice in jackets is dangerous, at least in the U.K. and Boston. Closer to home, however, I'm guilty of far worse.

The NY Department of Sanitation wants everyone to put their raked leaves in brown paper bags. This would not be a problem if there was a store in all of the area that carried brown paper leaf bags. Five free bags are available at our local leaf collection center, the location of which is a mystery, even to the Department of Sanitation. Judging by the map, it appears to be floating in the East River. I don't live near the East River, but I've heard it's pretty. The only route to the fabled land of leaf collection involves the Bruckner Expressway. I'm sure it's a delightful road, however I really want to waste gas on something more useful and exciting than five paper bags.

We bought a leaf eater years ago, but we also have respiratory systems, and I think I still have some gum tree leaf dust in my upper right sinus from 1998. This year, though, I think The Puppy came up with an excellent solution to our decaying leaves. She dug us a hole over the summer which expanded to roughly the size of a shallow grave. Not having any bodies to stash this season, we're stuffing the leaves in the hole. Every now and again we turn it, just like compost on TV, and little by little our worm buddies digest us some new soil.

So, New York cannot have my leaves, because I am a hippie gas-saving, hoodie wearing punk with a puppy who can tunnel faster than Roger Bushell on a sugar high. This autumn is gonna rock!

Repression...recession...it's all the same thing, man.

Recipe for the absurd.

What happens when you mix Bollywood Superman with hours of caulk removal, Plexiglas cutting, and replacing gaskets to make a shiny new storm window? Last-minute Halloween costumes for my babies, made at 3AM the night before they were to go hitting up the family for treats. You may already know I'm a crazy cat lady, you may already know I have access to scissors and glue, but you still may not be ready for this level of crazy.
 


First up, Macadamia the mysterious, predicting the future. She helped make her costume, you know. She picked the feathers off a few toys she found in her brother's beds. She loves feathers.


0.8 seconds later, she predicts..."Get in my mouth!"


Are they birds? Are they planes? No, they're the Supercat twins! I'm not going to be the one to decide which of the guys are more super than the other. The Fluffy One has the power to land on 2-inch wide doors and tame the wild sticks in the grass.


The Slinky One can do the dance of enchantment and is able to hover for minutes on end. His Kryptonite comes in the form of Nabisco graham cracker boxes.


I went as a rather pasty-looking pirate. Really. You could tell by my earring and occasional yell of, "Arr!"

Recipe for the absurd.

Would anyone notice one less blog?

I have always been subject to the opinion that my words leave little mark on the world. There are, I theorize, a very small number of blogs that actually do make a lasting impression in the collective psyche of the world. Is the usual routine to skim a post, maybe think about it, maybe comment, and then forget it?

So many television shows have recaps after each commercial. House Hunters, for instance, rehashes the history of the buyer at least five times in thirty minutes. Does it make people better remember what they've seen? Do the fast, flashing images of stars on entertainment "news" make people remember any longer than they would if they read some gossip off a static web page?

I remember flashing. I remember spinning.

I cannot remember why I sat down.

I think there was something I was meant to do.

Would anyone notice one less blog?