A Sign That It's Going To Be Okay.

I appear to spend a great deal of time obsessing over RSS feeds. A few posts back I vented about Newsgator's new AJAXed-up beta reader, and how it's slower than the old reader it's meant to replace over time. I gave up on the beta yesterday, after being unable to get the unread feed count down from 1523 in under twenty minutes. I mean I couldn't get it down to 1522. So I switched back to the classic reader, and read all but 50 blog posts (and yes, that probably means your blog if you're reading this. Yes, you, dear reader. I like to get junk out of the way before I read the good stuff, and you know you're the good stuff. But I digress).

My mind goes through phases much like the moon. Yesterday, I considered myself to be thinking better than usual, because for instance I actually thought to switch back to the classic reader to get anything done. In preparation for the inevitable removal of the classic reader, I started copying feeds over to another online RSS reader, and then actually thought to look up how to export the Newsgator OPML file! It's shocking, that I could utilize my sick research skillz to make my task easier and leave more time for marking Spontaneous Opera Syndrome read.

This has been an elaborate way to remind myself how to export the Newsgator OPML file in the future, because you know I'm not leaving that easy.

A Sign That It's Going To Be Okay.

Deep Thought of the Day.

No one knows anyone else's world.

A child of seven couldn't care less what life was like in the 1930's, a man of 80 has no idea what it's like to grow up now. Empathy only goes so far, memories and imagination both have their failings. We're all fools, and the sooner we accept that, the better.

Meanwhile, this is a pisser:

Deep Thought of the Day.

How I Almost Ruined Meringue.

I woke up slurring. But that was not it. I could hear just fine. What I heard were instructions to gradually add the sugar when the egg whites were "frothy."

"AH DA ESS NOW!" I believe I said, then realized it was the eggs bubbling, and said, "DE SUGR! AH DE SUGR! DEY SAH FROHY! SAR ADDIN IT!"

I actually enunciate a little better than this when my jaw's all locked up thanks to my ventriloquism fixation of 1986, but I have to give an idea of what I must sound like to people, and that's the one I'm going with today. Anyway, I heard the word frothy, saw bubbles, and commandeered the making of meringue.

Fifteen minutes later, meringue was just beginning to form. Why? Because "frothy" is not when you add the sugar. "Frothy" is like when you get rabies from drinking too much peroxide (don't do it, kids) and a quick look at "How to akme merigue" on Google told me that the egg whites had to be way past frothy to start getting some sugar.

Notice how I develop dyslexia when I'm slurring. I love Sunday. Not as much as I love pie.

(I am happy to report that two days later the pie was gone, but we were all still alive. Meringue can work if you add the sugar too soon, but only if you burn it to a crisp in the oven to avoid death by raw egg whites.)

How I Almost Ruined Meringue.

Cat Face, He's Got A Cat Face!

Maybe baring my soul to Blogger isn't such a great idea. I'm going to stick what I enjoy. I mean, what I enjoy when I'm not venting. What I currently enjoy when I'm not venting is Cat Face, the latest series from the glorious beings that gave us Weebl & Bob.

If you haven't seen them, check out Cat Face, Cat Face 2, and the third installment, Cat Face 3. You will want to go out and be rubbed with a special scent. I know I want some ash. It's very important, you know.

Have a good weekend, peoples.

Cat Face, He's Got A Cat Face!

Waiting For The World To Not Be So Damn Touchy.

To follow up on yesterday's post about the choreography on So You Think You Can Dance, I'm watching the results show, and Nigel (who I *heart* anyway) started off by apologizing to pro-war people for the Wade Robson solo routine to the John Mayer song Waiting For The World To Change.

I shouldn't need to add to that, really, but it's been a while since I let off some steam on certain issues, and if you want an example of the amount of steam I could let off if I really unleashed it, I'm just sayin' that pipe that blew downtown last week knows how I feel. To keep it light though, because unleashing it is not what I do here, I will say that I like that John Mayer song, I believe in its message, I'm on the same wavelength as Nigel when I say that after three times, it started to be a running joke every time the dancers would scream, and I'm not going to go out of my way looking for more than the one complaint I read against that routine, because it boggles my mind (and it's been pulled so I can't link to it, but I assure you it was an amusing call for all peaceniks to die). It shouldn't surprise me, because So You Think You Can Dance is on Fox, and I know there's a fraction of Fox viewers who are so naturally confused that there would be enough of a deal made that it would go to the judges for a public explanation, and I just hope I never get caught in an elevator with any of those people, because the universe might cease to exist. Then again, we might meet, talk about the show, agree that the dancers are good this year, and go on our seperate ways glad that we met someone who knows what we're talking about, never suspecting the dark reality that there are some things we just might not agree on.

As for me, I had a problem with the waltz to Angel by Sarah McLachlan a few weeks back. First off, that song makes me want to self-medicate until I see unicorns that are able to talk by themselves. Second, why did the choreographers make Hok be dead? Isn't being dead not good for winning a dancing contest? I loved Hok, and they gave him some bad routines. That waltz made me uncomfortable, dammit, not some hope for the future dance by the guy who does the really neat hobo zombie routines.

Dancers are artists, and artists have pretty extreme views. You know, like, "Killin' is a sad thing," which I think I said a few days ago, and I'm just flabbergasted that some of the viewers of the show would get so twisted over a routine that was designed to show how each dancer did the same choreography, when you know, it's not like they came out and danced to Megalomaniac by Incubus. Although I would've loved that too. I guess that's why I just don't get it. This born-too-late-to-be-a-proper-hippie peacenik just will not die.

Now I have wasted enough of our time, Pasha's safe for another week, yay!

You know...speaking of wasted time. It's 2007. Grow the hell up and lose the bloodlust, world.

Waiting For The World To Not Be So Damn Touchy.

So I Think I Can Judge.

What do I do when I'm not spouting words out of every finger? I watch So You Think You Can Dance? on television...when it's actually on! I'm just happy it managed to come back for a third season. Usually shows I watch don't last more than a few episodes. No wonder people latch onto reality TV.

For about the tenth time this season, the judges have had a problem with the choreography the dancers do as if they have a choice in what they're given by the master crazy people who design these routines. Say, the Viennese Waltz being done as a Paso Doble. I said it, I said it like five times, because although Don Quixote was playing, I wasn't sure anyone else was noticing, and by God the head judge Nigel SAID THE SAME THING. I'm so happy I haven't wasted my life. *ahem*

I'm just waiting for each dancer to come out and scream to the John Mayer song. This show is so damn fun. I want to scream like that every time the flashing commercials come on. How much do I love this show? I sit through the camerawork and ads.

So I Think I Can Judge.

Explaining it All Away.

(I feel the need to point out that the following news is unsurprising and my apparent ignorance is really a deep-rooted sarcasm mechanism which I have honed over the course of many nights.)

Children who prefer the night are more-likely to be anti-social. This just in: Vampires have fangs.

I don't think these findings are totally accurate. As a child, I got along with anyone willing to stay up until 4AM playing Atari or watching Mary Tyler Moore. It was only during daylight hours that I hated everyone. Even the infamous rake kicking incident took place while the light of the sun was just leaving the sky.

Honestly, people, who will our next generation of night workers be if all the kids are monitored vigilantly into a state of being ready for the button-down hours of The Man?

Explaining it All Away.

Counsel This

(No Harry Potter spoilers follow, I'm not like that...anymore.)

Is the world is so sad? A grief counselor wants to help those who cannot cope with the release of the final Harry Potter book. (Here's a link that has a to the official story, as well as a funnier, more verbose, or otherwise just different version of what I'm about to say.)

As Yoda might say, my own counsel I will keep on who is to be laughed at.

I don't know, I always thought books--particularly those geared for the younger, nimbler minded among us--offered their own type of solace to the reader. You know...like...how the characters handle things?

Harry Potter, for instance, he's had his deal of crap thrown at him. I doubt his most faithful readers are unable to deal with much.

That's all I'm sayin'. Enjoy your book, people. Enjoy your feelings.

As for the grief counselors, where were you when I read Dickens? Huh? No, I read those books alone, in a dimly-lit room, in winter. Sydney Carton? I mourn for him still, but he did what he felt was right. David Copperfield? Holy mother of crap, I didn't sleep for a week after his mother died, and then after everything else that was heaped on him he still managed to end up okay. Telling people they aren't alone in their grief is like saying everyone gets the same headache. I wanted to be alone in my grief, it was my grief, man, no one else's...well, you know, until Nan told me how bummed she was over the end of A Tale Of Two Cities too. How about that, millions of people read the same thing, see the same movies, watch the same PBS adaptations, over and over and over, and yet somehow, there are always a few twits that think all those millions of people aren't going to be able to cope.

Children of the world, I prescribe for you books. Books are written by people who have either Been There, or have the capacity to understand that Places Like That exist in almost everyone. In books, people sometimes do bad things, sometimes they do good things, but everything they do has an effect and if it can make you feel your own feelings, then that is always the point of a story. If you can't read, there are audio books. If you can't hear, well, then you probably have a better grip on stuff than people who don't listen. If you can't listen, even to yourself...bah, you're in trouble. Before you go to grief counselors, go to wherever it is you write, or draw, or pick up a camera, or a tape recorder, or an MP3 recorder, and make something of your feelings. You don't need to get the entire world in a frenzy over what you've created, things like that don't last, and there will always be people who don't understand, but there will be people who do understand, and not because it's their job to think they understand, but because your feelings reminded them of their feelings, and in that moment you made them feel like they could come through anything.

(Killin' is not one of my approved-of art forms, just for the record. If you read something and if makes you feel like you want to go killin', then you really need to keep it to fiction and not do it for real. You'll be a hero that way.)

Counsel This

I am the mouse killer.

In this year, I have been through three separate pointing devices. Do I still possess the Hands Of Doom? Or is it just that I buy cheap mice? Wait, I didn't buy the most recent one, it came with my old PC.

Rest in pieces, my good ol' cheesecake-colored PS/2 mouse. Ever since the last time I took it apart to remove the small furry creatures from the inner workings, there are extra clicks happening. I cannot drag with confidence anymore. It's been nine good years, and it pisses me off to think I did it myself, this last bit of damage.

Well, like, who else would? No one else is allowed to touch my sterile mouse.

I currently use four different mice, recently I had the delight of meeting an optical mouse. I'm new to this optical thing, so it blew me away that I can track on my leg and still get a decent line. I hear there are also waves that carry sound and special media than can capture images. I'm impressed.

So I've been replacing any mice that suddenly decide they want to go left all the time with optical mice. The cheap one I got the last time I killed a mouse has a light that flashes on and off and makes me fell like I could very well take down an entire shadow government if only Jeremy Northam would show up.

...Um. Okay, mice, I'm talking about mice. Optical mice: good. Having to dissassemble things to clean them: bad.

I am the mouse killer.

Boobies!

It's the middle of the month and I just feel I haven't taken ten minutes to unleash unnecessary personal judgments against people I don't know in a long time, so here goes.

The Internet Movie Database. We all know it and love it and can't live without it, but have you ever looked through the message boards attached to some movies? I mean really looked? There’s a pattern of sometimes young, sometimes just very, very strange users who ask, "How much nudity is in this movie?" or "Is this movie too violent?" as if someone else can properly judge how much is too much for another person.

This last one, asked of The Fantastic Four back when all I'd seen was the trailer, complete with Dr. Doom tossing his doctor through glass after he gave him some bad news (and who wouldn’t want to do that? Come on), came from a kid whose parents wouldn't let her (or him, I can never be sure about these things) see the movie if there was blood. You know, there can be killing, but for the love of all that's holy, don't show it how it really is. Like in House Of Sand And Fog. There are some scenes in that movie that top the horror of every cut-em-up I've ever seen.

I understand that with summertime popcorn flicks though, who really wants to go all Marnie in the middle of a date? I mean, I thought the explodey brain thing in Mission Impossible III was pretty gross, but compared to the camerawork, it was clever. But then I've watched The Toolbox Murders and believe me, that kid's parents would not want me showing that movie to their child. Bad enough I replied something along the lines of, "Supervillians tend to damage people," but then I remembered I am not the world's conscience and got away from the message boards again as fast as possible before my own head went all explodey.

The Osterman Weekend was on the other night, that's what put this thought in my head. I know I watched that movie a lot as a kid (two words: Rutger Hauer), but all I could remember about it now was Meg Foster asking what was going on, the swimming pool being on fire, and everybody having sex at the same time. Lots and lots of '80s movie sex. Being it's now twenty-something years later, Nan and I had a good laugh about that. Not that she didn't have had a laugh about it then, too, but I was one of those awful stuck-up prudes I am now ripping in this post. I just found out today that Sam Peckinpah directed The Osterman Weekend, and that explains a lot, and makes me as happy as any other Monty Python fan who remembers Salad Days would expect.

In the '80s there was no message board where people would go and warn each other that movies weren't for kids. Was it better that way? I don't know, I got to see a lot of good movies and I never had any "embarrassing questions" later on in life. I also learned not to turn my back on closets, dark windows, or lakes. These kids today don't know the important life lessons they're missing avoiding movies just because of a little fake sex and violence. I'd love to see these kids when their grandparents say, "You know what movie I loved when I was your age? Halloween." Those kids on IMDB talk about feeling uncomfortable watching sex and violence in movies with their parents and grandparents? Their parents and grandparents invented sex and violence.

Boobies!

Fear of Change Beta

Look, an actual experiment! And it is very mediocre. I've taken to reading RSS feeds of things. For one thing, they can sit, and sit, and sit some more until I am in the perfect frame of mind to read the things I want to. For another thing, I used to break Firefox opening everything in tabs at one time. So I chose Newsgator a while back, and I've had no real complaints with it. I split things into folders, like the Rathergood.com stuff and Monkeys for Helping go in a folder I like to call "crazy," because that's what I favor most in this world, and then there are folders named "Blogs" and "News" and "Music" and so on and on until my little Internet world is more organized than the real one.

Then Newsgator's gotta go and announce they're phasing out their "classic" reader in favor of some souped-up version that has little pop-up windows to let you know things are loading, so, you know, you won't forget. My initial thought on seeing the loading window was, "How long does it take for the loading window to load? They could just load my damn page and it might be faster."

Because this is eventually what I'll have to use if I want to stay with Newsgator (which, believe me, I'm like people who keep rebuilding in flood belts), I decided to go ahead and let them hit me with the beta nonsense. Of course I hate the whole thing, and it's slower than the classic reader, and there are two scroll bars and it wasn't like before and so I no longer recognize this thing I've invited into my eyes.

I used to be a beta tester, you know. Once, long ago. I think I was too critical of the project I was testing for, because I was never asked to do it again. I'm still not sure if I can talk about it, but all I'll say is it never took off, so there.

But I digress. I popped over to the Newsgator forum to give some feedback, and after sifting through thread after thread of, "It works fine for me, what are you using?" I gave up, because this world, it's not meant for people who want things to work for everyone, including the poor kid up the street with a hand-me-down Windows 95 box or the old guy who could swear that screen looked different yesterday*. So what if I have to click the checkmark three times to mark something read? That only means I click too fast. (And I do, baby. My fingers are wicked fast, numbness and all.) I have predictions about the next thousand years that go this way. "Asthma? What kind of weak-ass lungs do you have, this smells great to me." Or was that the past? Maybe my prediction is really my past, and it just took this long to load.

*Not actual people I know, unless you count my split personalities**, and you shouldn’t, because you haven’t met them—they can’t get on the web, they don’t know how.

**This footnote was not meant to poke fun at those with multiple personalities who may be adept at technology.

Fear of Change Beta

Looking To The Next 300 Posts.

Today I relocated the contents of my backyard to my sinuses.

Looking To The Next 300 Posts.

Same As It Ever Was, Same As It Ever Was.

Someone who hasn't been to New York a while might come back and think that not much has changed on some stations. 92.3 and 101.1 are two frequencies, which, as hard as I try, I cannot stay away from. I turned to them both in the wake of WLIR's sale to the ass-end of Long Island, and then, little by little, I lost both of these lifelines to the music I like to call MINE, ALL MINE.

92.3, perhaps famously, used to be the station Howard Stern broadcast from. Then the dark times came, Janet Jackson got naked by the end of Justin Timberlake's song, and suddenly if was unfashionable to be shocking. Whatever, I have no idea, the only times I was ever awake during any radio morning show I was usually in for bad things, so I only knew the end of Stern as being the end of K-Rock. The music was being taken away in favor of something called Free-FM. Free as is you can say whatever you want as long as it doesn't involve anything that can make that lady in the old Polaner fruit spread commercial faint.

It didn't work. I don't know what happened, but after Jake & Jackie weren't on anymore, I stopped listening to 92.3. There's also a pirate station that bleeds into the frequency so it made any chooglin' I did very difficult.

CBS-FM, the home of the oldies, land of Cousin Brucie, also flipped formats. The entire staff was unceremoniously dumped without any send-off, and that pissed off a lot of people. The Jack format didn't offend me as much as it did the regulars of every radio forum on the Internet, because at least Jack played some obscure '80s new wave every once in a while and that's all you really need to string me along. I'm a whore for that Flock of Seagulls stuff, man.

A few weeks back I saw a message in a WLIR Yahoo group that K-Rock was back. I had long ago reprogrammed my 4 button to Q104.3, and had no reason to venture higher than 90.7 or lower then 95.5, so I didn't just find this out on my own until days after the fact. All the White Zombie and Stone Temple Pilots music was back, just like that. Poof, like nothing changed. Except, of course, that the current morning show used to be the competition for the past morning show and most of the DJs had gone on to better things. (Jackie Clarke's on Radio With A Twist now, BTW. Yay!)

So yesterday I'm outside melting and dropping my pencil and hacking away at the hedges and saving the cats from the noisy fence installation next door, and what do I hear in my head? (Where the radio plugs in, you know.)

Well, I don't remember word for word what it was, but Jack-FM has swapped spots with the "oldies" format that's been on HD radio since The Great Dark Flip. These oldies will now include '80s music. I bloody well hope so, because I can't get my Depeche Mode anywhere else. From what I've heard, there's not much '80s so far, and even then it's not much more edgy than Little Red Corvette.

So that's it. There is no Howard Stern or Cousin Brucie on FM radio anymore--they've both gone to Sirius (along with Jake Fogelnest)--but the formats that went with them have gone off to find themselves and they've come back and realized they're falling right back into their old patterns and, like a bunch of hangers-on, we'll start going out with them again, as long as they're buying.

Now if only Whiffs Fresh-FM on 102.7 would go away. The liners say they play different soft rock than other stations, and it's true to the extent that they don't play the songs at the exact same time, but that station could play Beijing Opera and interest me more. No, really, I loves me some Beijing Opera.

(This has been a veiled plug for 90.7 WFUV, the station that only stabbed the polka fans in the back, but has otherwise remained a great station as long as I've been listening.)

Same As It Ever Was, Same As It Ever Was.

Give Me A Pill That Makes Me Slur.

I'm feeling very honest at the moment, and that never ends well for me, but that is the consequence of listening to the Bryan Ferry song from Legend too much. I get migraines, and part of the glory that is a migraine--for me--is that my jaw gets very stiff and it appears to people who don't know me very well--like for three decades--that I am having some sort of stroke or drug overdose. This always amuses me a few days later.

One thing I found to be useful after a night of banging my head on the keyboard to get relief was an article that describes a device that goes between the front teeth and can reduce jaw stiffness or something, I don't remember what I read by now because the lightning, it is in my head.

Seeing as I'm uninsured and unable to find a dentist willing to work at 2AM in exchange for say, a nice lemon pie and a few bootlegged B-movies, I looked at the one thing I knew would bring relief. My trusty little happy face pencil. Except instead of using it to stab myself through the temple, I put it in between my front teeth. Oh, if my family could see me now, never mind drug overdoses, I'm gonna die from the lead poisoning!

No, you know, I think these pencils were made in China, and a lot of the paint has been gnawed off over the past few months. Not to mention that I've been wary of putting the pencil in my mouth the past few migraines because I dropped it in the yard the other day while I was drawing, and you know, ants breed out there.

The thing that amuses me even more than being told I need medical attention is being told that the Excedrin Migraine that I take once I notice my elaborate aura is what is causing me to slur. Personally, I see no reason to take pills to give me slurs. I am not that emo. And God knows I am emo, but no, HGTV or the occasional Tony Scott film and the big ass hunk of chocolate cream pie (which was fabulous BTW, damn it) possibly maybe coupled with the 9000% humidity, decongestant withdrawal, and psychotic hormones out to remind me I am a woman maybe sorta are all things that are higher on the slur-causing list that a puny single dose of an over-the-counter aspirin/Tylenol/caffeine "preventative."

I totally have taken one aspirin, one Tylenol, and a cup of coffee to fashion my own version of this thing in the past out of desperation. No research has been done on one bourbon, one scotch, and one beer, but I'm guessing if I tried that the migraine would be the least of my problems. Being arrested for public nakedness with disfiguring hives, maybe, but then I'd really have some hardcore trouble to talk about at family gatherings.

Because honestly, crawling away to chew on a pencil (even if it did fall on the ground) and taking two weeny little Rite-Aid Excedrin knock-offs only when the pain gets so horrendous I think trepanation with a Swiss army knife might work is small time.

Which reminds me, I saw the Tom Waits movie Big Time, and it made me want to live another day. Which is kinda sad, because the next day I got this blasted migraine. HAHA, I kid. There are three days out of a month when I don't feel like I'm either going to die or kill for some reason, and after 25 years I've pretty much realized that no amount of happiness pumped into my eyes and ears changes that (although I'm not turning down a nice loud Level 42 song in my ear right now), but I'm used to it. I wish everyone else were. I mean, it's not like I block doorways.

Give Me A Pill That Makes Me Slur.

It's Too Darn Hot.

Oh Cole Porter, you brilliant man.

I've been putting a lot of my resources into writing non-blog things, and drawing my strip, and tragically what happens when the weather is this hot and all-encompassing, I tend to just draw pictures of myself saying, "Damn, it's hot."

Also, in the hot weather my writing takes a turn for the worse. I'm sure it could be very good, if only I knew what it was I had written when I go back at read it. You see that typo back there? Yes. I have some sort of encryption built in, and whe nthe weather is hot, I turn into Ed Harris in The Abyss, after he'd gone down the great big hole. I'm not sure if I'd like aliens helping me out right now, as I would not be the one to persuade them to save humaity--that's humanity to the non-bleary--and I'd have a lot of explaining to do to my neighbors when the tidal wave took out their nice five-car garage. (Director's cut of The Abyss only.)

Resigned to stay indoors if I want to live to see the end of season 3 of So You Think You Can Dance? (and I do), I'm currently making nice co-ordinated covers for my computer parts and trying to win at Scrabble Scramble and 3-card Solitare. It's very much like the stay at the happy home many (all in my head) thought I required back in the '80s.

Are these the most exciting things I've been doing? Probably not, but I can't bloody remember anything else. My mind, much like the wiring in my house, is faulty in the hot weather, and we've been narrowly avoiding a blackout for three days. Provided I continue my habit of sitting in the dark when I want my computer, everything should be fine. Naked smoking man's got an air conditioner now, though, so the whole block may overload at any minute.

It's Too Darn Hot.

Scads of Sevens Fill the Air.

Here's an animation I made of one of my heroes, Count Von Helsing from She Beast on a swing.

Scads of Sevens Fill the Air.

I can't say I'm surprised by this at all.

I saw a headline that said Concerns Over Chimp Attack on Movie Set and instantly knew it had to be Chim-Chim, up to his old crazy routine.

Now, in a cartoon, it's okay to dress your youngest son and your illegitimate chimpanzee in the same clothes, lock them in a car trunk, and...you know....

Wait, is that okay? I don't know, I don't think anything about Speed Racer was sensible, and that's why I love him. Changing animated hijinks into reality, though, that's tough, and unlike getting those cars and trucks to transform for that new Transformers movie, live chimps have a tendency to draw the line at red overalls.

I hope the chimp playing Chim-Chim wasn't seriously messed up by some handlers in a back alley, but you know, I've had a puppy. I kinda understand both sides of this dilemma these days. "Aww, no baby, take the teeth out of my booby," only goes so far with anyone, let alone a chimpanzee, who was probably just adlibbing his part.

Now, when that article says a young actor was bitten, I'm thinking Paulie Litt, who plays Spritle, maybe was the receiver of Chim-Chim's wrath. I don't remember Chim-Chim and Spritle ever getting into it that bad, but you know in between episodes, who knows what went on in the Racer household. I would have loved to be a fly on that wall sometimes. Holy moly, what a whacked out family.

I can't say I'm surprised by this at all.

Well, you know..."Manos."

I recently got it into my head to go off in search of the inspiration for my favorite screensaver, Torgo saves the screen (PC version Mac version). I knew it was some movie featured on MST3K, but considering I was a deprived of whatever station MST3K was on, I never saw the fateful episode that featured Manos: The Hands of Fate.

I decided that like Rocky Horror, the trailer for The Phantom Menace, and Greek mythology, I was going to experience this thing alone in my room and set off to find the movie. Luckily, everyone else is exactly like me and I had a crappy copy with Spanish subtitles downloaded within an hour.

I will most likely eventually buy this movie. I think...I think I fell in love with Torgo all over again. After 14 years of him saving my screen, there he was, in full color, twitching and debating whether or not the master would approve of a child and a poodle. I was sad to learn that John Reynolds died not long after making the movie, because I would have watched him in anything.

Ah Torgo, forgetting you is a thing I cannot do.

I found the MS3TK episode a few days later, and I'm convinced that I could very easily have enjoyed that show when it was on. I mean, what was I doing for Thanksgiving, 1991 but getting out of bed every 43 minutes to change the tape on the first WLIR Shreeek-End and sneezing a lot all over my family? I wouldn't have even bothered going back to bed if we had Comedy Central back then. I guess it's probably just as well we didn't have Comedy Central. I was really wiped out after that Shreeek-End. It was like some kind of sick sleep deprivation game, and everyone lost.

Well, you know..."Manos."