The Week From Another Universe.

Last Saturday, we saw Robin Cook's Invasion, which was a made-for-television mini-series starring Luke Perry that I had managed to miss for eleven years. Now that I've seen it, my forehead hurts from being slapped so much, and I'm worried about my rock collection. Oh my...I worry that things I write are too close to stories that already exist, but this mini-series, the author (not so much Robin Cook as the guy who writes a lot of Farscape) obviously had no fears of this. By the end I weas expecting Luke Skywalker or Tom Jones or Will Smith to pop out, start punching people, and saying some regular-TV-friendly things while curing the aliens with farts. Okay, gas, but still, it's funnier to say farts.

Why hasn't an alien invasion story been done yet where the cure is farts? It would be a hit. I'm copyrighting that idea now, unless someone else already has. I'm not saying the special effects themselves weren't pretty good for CBS in 1997, but some of the dumbest people in creation managed to take down a dude in Sith makeup and an army base crawling with people infected by the space tinglies. For the first hour, the main doctor--played by Kim Catrall, who I loved in Big Trouble In Little China and Mannequin--is like, "Gosh, some people died really oddly, but everyone has the frikkin' flu, BUT IT CAN'T BE THESE STONES YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT, I mean, it's not like children were coming in saying stones bit them, or anything."

And then they go to an underground government facility, but the student who knows how to use the Internet has to use his laptop to do stuff. Like they don't already have computers down there...okay, maybe they don't, the scientists would have all been playing Solitare instead of fighting space herpes. Oh wait, the underground government facility was totally deserted. Maybe security was in the other room playing solitare. Unless they were in the desert waiting for the spaceship. Or maybe it was an incredibly clean, yet abandoned facitity and that's why they had "VR microscopes" to show the nasties living in the rocks, which looked a bit like enemies from DOOM, but no Internet.

I can't say I didn't have a good time watching the movie, because I had ball. It was like Rocky Horror, I was rasping all kinds of helpful advice to the characters, it was great. I don't get to have three hours of fun like that often.

I didn't come back here and make notes of what outstanding things happened this week, so much of it is lost. I did bust out the pole pruner and take down some vines that were going to grow even longer and higher and tangle with the telephone lines eventually, but I didn't get to pick them up the same day I did it, so I was treated to the entertainment known as cats dragging a tangle of vines behind them on a leash, looking like, "OMG, it has me!" No, I'm sorry, that's mean, to giggle at my guys when they pick something up and get freaked out by it. Even if it is frikkin' adorable.

I also used the pole pruner and the bow saw and the entire palette of instruments of death to take down a young mulberry tree that was growing in the front yard. Mulberries can get to be about 80 feet high and six feet in diameter, and the driveway with my car on it was one foot away, and the power lines were even closer to the tips of the branches, so I did what I had to do, man. I'm not proud. But now I have a bargaining chip for all those trees I'm growing in the backyard, that are starting to become visible above the stuff I've had strategically placed for the past two years. Oh yes. Never forget the mulberry of the front yard.

The storm we had on Wednesday left me with even more nature to pick up and send off to the happy land where seagulls play, and I wrote a whole post about that with pictures. Some bird who liked to live dangerously was out trying to get worms in 35mph winds. Birds rock.

Although I can't remember the exact order this week, it's safe to say a lot of the rest of my time goes to things like sleeping, not sleeping, eating, working, driving around, gathering food, feeding my furry children, playing with my furry children, watching American Idol, drawing, writing, cleaning, spacing out, listening to music (this week it's Imogen Heap again), watching X-Files and movies I've already seen, and of course YouTube. Lots and lots of YouTube. Remember last year when I'd use Saturday to just post the crazy stuff I found on YouTube? Man, those were the days.

Have I mentioned that I'm crazy about this disturbing video of a Japanese guy wearing a horse mask and little else, cooking toxic mushrooms and dancing? No? YES.

The Week From Another Universe.