Check out our beaver!

A beaver, the first to be seen on the banks of the Bronx River, has been named Jose after the politician who cleaned up some of the mess which prevented anything but mutants from wanting to go for a swim.

200 years after idiots took out the last beavers in the area for a hat, this brave--and possibly gay--beaver decided to forgive humanity and build some riverfront property. He has no girlfriends coming to visit and will probably end up having to date one of the delightful local rats.

Provided the taxes do not drive him away, look for a happy beaver population explosion started by this one trail-blazing dam builder.

Check out our beaver!

Spay Day USA

Spay Day USA is February 27, and as the friend of many great four-legged furry creatures who have all neutered and spayed, I'm taking part in the Humane Society's national campaign to raise money for free neutering/spaying programs. It's more that NY Governor Spitzer is doing, I can tell you.

While I'm on Spitzer, he has proposed a budget that would take the funding from helping animals to helping pay salaries for state employees. If you're from NY and reading this, call Governor Spitzer, the leaders in both houses and your state representatives (click here to find their phone numbers) and urge them to support a budget that increases rather than depletes the resources of the Animal Population Control Program and Pet Dealer Licensing Law.

Governor Elliot Spitzer
(518) 474-8390

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver
(518) 455-3791

Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno
(518) 455-3191

Spay Day USA

Up from the ashes.

HAHA, get it, it's Ash Wednesday...um. Testing? This this on?

[edit]: It works! It works! I migrated! Now if only I could resurrect old televisions.

Up from the ashes.

The end is nigh!

No...no...don't be silly. *looks over shoulder*

Blogger has informed me that the time has come to move on with the rest of the world, and switch to new Blogger. So this may be the last you hear from me if I run into the demons I've seen a few others run into.

Especially considering Mercury's retrograde and that's never good for electronics. I've had a TV go all weird on me just this week--but I digress.

I see a few previous posts of mine didn't even go up until today, so that was brilliant. I guess new Blogger can't be much weirder than old Blogger.

The good news is I'll get that dropdown archive thing I wanted a while back. The worst news could be that I can never post here again. If that happens, I'll mention it on my webcomic's LiveJournal, probably with very small and nasty words.

Next post will tell if my account survived. I've got all this backed up...just in case.

*sniffle* I'll miss you.

The end is nigh!

I am an aunt.

No, for real.

Haha, crap, I'm old. She's worth it, though. I just hope I'm half as cool an aunt as mine have been to me.

This kid's gonna change the world someday. I am so going to show her weird tv shows and music in the meantime. Hee!

I am an aunt.

Dancing in the Dark

Sometimes I feel that I'm not clear enough on some things. It should be obvious that I write. What I hope isn't painfully obvious is that I try to be as funny as possible when I write. If it's obvious I'm trying, then maybe it's not working.

Most of the criticisms I've had are very vague. I'm not what people are looking for. One helpful person once told me my comic strip was, "Not funny. At all." His comic tanked after about 20 strips, and so I took perverse pleasure in the fact that I was still going, still plucking away in the face of adversity, not listening to the naysayers who just don't get my style.

Of course, I don't actually have a "style" with my comic strip, it's just me getting things down on paper so I don't forget. I once joked that I was the Gen X slacker version of Cathy. Then I read some people's opinion of Cathy, and I didn't mention her anymore. (I still read Cathy.)

Right there is a pretty good glimpse into what most of my time has been wasted doing. I back down when people like something else, because I feel that they obviously must know more than I do. When everyone else my age was listening to rap, I was listening to The Cure. Other kids would ask if I'd seen In Living Color, I said that I watched Monty Python. People were flocking to theaters to see the latest movies, I was just catching up with last year on cable. I felt guilty for a long time, embarrassed by myself, so I wouldn't talk about what I liked, expecting that no one would know what I was on about. I spent a great deal of the 1980s being happy by myself in my room with my high-falutin' books by dead authors, Atari video games, and tapes of bands that mainstream radio never played.

Twenty years down the line, I hear other people my age saying how much they liked things I liked, and I'm jealous I didn't get to go to school with them. I've always been convinced I could have amounted to much greater things much quicker if I'd had constant input on my ideas, but I realize now that I never actually approached anyone, because I had already decided that whatever I had to say, it was either trivial or no one would "get it." I'm bloody grateful I had one good friend to put on shows with and be silly with and be a kid with, he even led to me getting this blog account (Yo, X). Of course...he didn't like my Level 42, but after hearing their new album, maybe he had something there.

(This post sat in drafts since December of 2006. Four years later I decided it was time to post it. And I still love Level 42, I don't know what I was on about in that last line, don't mind me, Level 42, you're lovely and I hope you tour in the US in 2010.)

Dancing in the Dark

It's solid ice.

Solid ice is surprisingly easy to run on.

It's solid ice.

Heaven Must be Missing a Gas Line.

Philadelphia, the company responsible for the glorious thing known as cream cheese, has a new ad on TV. Maybe you've seen it.

Angels, for some reason, are the spokes...beings for Philly, and tragically, they show that even when you go to heaven, if you're a blonde, you're going to be stereotypically a few feathers short of a full wingspan. Silly in the halo-holder, I mean. Dumb as a brick.

I'm not sure why, but in Philadelphia's vision of heaven, there is a break room. Enter the blonde angel, who cannot get the oven to heat up. Maybe this isn't heaven after all.

The snarky darker-haired (but with highlights!) angel makes a comment about the oven being in shock because blondie never uses it. So basically we now have The Odd Couple afterlife-style...with cooking required.

That's where the great news comes in. Philadelphia now sells cheesecake in a tub! You don't have to make your own, you just buy this, scoop it out of the package, into a crust, refrigerate in the great heavenly fridge, and you can have desert without following a recipe!

Oh, the angels sing. Or eat. They're very skinny angels, perhaps that's where the heaven part comes in. Eat as much cheesecake as you want; continue to look the same. That was also the plot of The Golden Girls, wasn't it?

Heaven Must be Missing a Gas Line.

When I Come Around.

Sirius, the dealer of my drug of choice, has announced the upcoming change of channel 75 to "Siriusly Sinatra," focusing mostly on Ol' Blue Eyes himself, who I've not heard on the radio for more than a few minutes since the demise of WPAT in 1996.

Which brings me to the other addition to the Sirius line-up I'm looking forward to. Channel 24 is going to feature '90s rock. I have no idea why I'm looking forward to this. Yes, it could be Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden--who have mostly gone from FM radio in New York--but it could also be Sponge and Candlebox, who are now probably going to remind me of times I'd rather not relive. That's what channel up and down on the remote is for, of course, but I'm really surprised at the way I'm suddenly fine with the idea of a '90s station, as long as it's rock.

I know the time of '80s flashback shows is most likely reaching its end. Aside from stations like First Wave on Sirius, many of the bands I grew up listening to aren't played on mainstream radio anyway, so I'm seeing this transition from the '80s to '90s and it almost isn't affecting me at all. I used to dread the day when the WPLJ's Saturday night '80s show flipped, because I remember the days when those five hours on Saturday were devoted entirely to '70s music. For a while they blended '70s and '80s, but by this time ten years ago, it was all '80s.

Our time is almost up. The cookies on TV are singing The Human League, Devo is selling Target, and it's only a matter of time before the adult diaper ads have Cyndi Lauper playing over scenes of the elderly acting happier than they ever were in their punk days, walking on a beach they probably would have protested the opening of due to the needles washing up on shore.

I'm a hopeless junkie to what's being fed through my ears, however, and I can't wait to hear loads of Frank Sinatra and Faith No More on Sirius come next week, because if there's one thing music needs, it's more fracturing of the recent genres and less variety in the oldies. I kid. I look forward to these station changes because maybe I can revisit the mid-'90s and figure out just where it all went wrong.

When I Come Around.

The depths of insanity.

I have two videos for you this weekend; the first is genuine editing gloriousness and shows what happens when Doctor Who meets an old French friend.

The next video is the first of many I was turned on to the other night. The Shaye Saint John movie Washroom 2 is a real thriller. I haven't seen greatness like this...well, maybe ever.

The depths of insanity.

I'm not dead yet!

'salright, happens all the time.

No, I took the week off, I think. I took the time since my last post off from blogging, because I was creating things offline. Many buttons were made; such as those I claim to make in that spiffy corner banner up above. I somehow even made buttons that I didn't have, that is how incredibly productive my button making was.

Brainstorming for writing ideas is difficult when all I do is notice that the weather has turned seasonably cold, and that my brain hurts. It's been done before, and while I could probably make cold weather fascinating were it not the middle of winter, even I find it uninteresting that my eyeballs have frozen solid and there are icicles forming on my eyelashes.

I do not plan to switch to New Blogger in the near future. I'm saying that now in case I go away again and you get to thinking maybe I fell victim to whatever it is that's been eating unsuspecting bloggers lately. If I do change my mind, or if my blog is forced to get hep to the times or die, I will be sure to post at length on it beforehand.

I now return to my ruminations on the universe, and apologize for the 200 or so words that really just said, "Hi! Gosh, the weather's cold! I'm back, now. What's up with that new Blogger? Would you like a button? Snappea crisp? Tea?"

I'm not dead yet!

It makes so much sense now.

I always consider 1983-1987 to be the glory days of my radio. Then there was that whole mid-'90s phase where bands like Nine Inch Nails were the greatest thing ever and I started to wonder if I was wrong. I have just learned that Trent Reznor was programming a computer to make music in 1986. My theory stands. Wow.

Check out Thomas Dolby explaining that the computer is his instrument. I never thought about the music purists who were probably vomiting fire when electronic music came along. This clip is seriously historic.

It makes so much sense now.

Twenty Years Later.

Twenty years ago, I'd just come back from visiting family, and the latest craze in my mind was a MadLib done by a bunch of kids at lunch. I loved it so much that I risked the frown of my beloved Pa (beginning at the first plural noun) to read it out loud to Nan off my quickly-scrawled copy.

A few years back, I was entrusted with the original. I think it might be because only I would be loony enough to celebrate the anniversary of meeting a MadLib.

Ladies, gentlemen, creatures of all sizes...I give you The Monstrosity. I would say this might inappropriate for the kids...but it was done by kids.

Twenty Years Later.