Joker...joker...underwater basket-weaving

It's another hair-raising Friday night here, so that means I've combed through YouTube to find something that really shines.

And how much cooler can you get than the first episode of The Joker's Wild?









My thanks, as always, to the awesome people who take the time to share this content. My hat's off to you.

Taco...grande!

I had a big post all ready to go, but then I went to pick up a few things at the store and discovered that Frito-Lay has brought back taco-flavored Doritos.

So I'm rockin' out to a late-night snack. I promise, actual content tomorrow.

In fact, I never understand these things I feel

Dammit.

I've wanted to go to visit North Carolina for a number of years now, but in this particular case, I'd give my left nut to be in Chapel Hill on September 18.

Why?

Because for the first time in 10 years--for a one-time-only show--Ben Folds Five is performing. Specifically, they're playing The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner in it entirety.

It's the inaugural concert in a new series from MySpace, believe it or not, called Front to Back, in which artists play an important album of theirs from beginning to end.

I miss Ben Folds Five. A lot. Even now, when I see people talk about their BFF, I have to stop for a second and remind myself that it stands for Best Friend Forever.

Alas, short of me winning the lottery, it seems unlikely that I'm going to be able to fly across the country to catch the show.

So I will crank up my CDs and sulk at home, I guess. Bah.

Ben Folds Five

Look, up in the sky...

Sometimes it seems like there's a book that was written just for me. And while we haven't met, it seems that Brad Meltzer had me in mind with his new novel, which is in stores now, The Book of Lies. What makes me say so? Here's the blurb:

In 1932, Mitchell Siegel was killed by three gunshots to his chest. While mourning, his son dreamed of a bulletproof man and created the world's greatest hero: Superman. And like Cain's murder weapon, the gun used in this unsolved murder has never been found. Until now.

Here's the trailer:



And if you haven't read any of Brad Meltzer's books or comics, here's a brief video that might help you decide:



I'm going to check it out, just based on his previous novels, which I enjoyed. Well, that and the fact that it involves Superman in some capacity. I'm a sucker that way because Superman is important to me.

Yeah, I know people think Superman is corny; that he's a big blue Boy Scout, but to me, especially growing up, he was my hero. I went into more detail in this post. He became even more important to me when my son Harry died at 7 weeks old. On top of everything else Harry had to deal with, he also had what, the doctors informed us, is sometimes called "Superman Syndrome."

So now it might make a little more sense why tonight I'm deviating from the normal retro-themed pop-culture-obsessed blather. There's this project that just kinda hit me in the right way, not just because of its first goal, but because of its mission. It's, well, let me give Mr. Meltzer the floor briefly.



In addition to the launch of OrdinaryPeopleChangeTheWorld.com, today is the official launch of The Siegel & Shuster Society, with a celebrity charity auction that'll raise money to preserve the home of Jerry Siegel, creator of Superman, along with artist Joe Shuster.

The items up for bids are about eight different kinds of awesome, but if it's not your deal, you can buy a Siegel & Shuster Society T-shirt (designed by the legendary graphic designer Chip Kidd), or you can just make a flat donation to the cause. All proceeds of the auction go to the restoration of the Siegel house.

It would be amazing if someday, I could take my kids and show them the spot where Superman was created. And even barring that, just to show them evidence that indeed, ordinary people can and do change the world.

I'm cynical and pessimistic as a rule, but there's a part of me that embraces the optimism and good will inherent in humanity. That's the part of me that will always like Superman, who does all the great things he does, not because he should, but because he can; he just wants to help.

If you want to help, then by all means, go to www.OrdinaryPeopleChangeTheWorld.com, and you can get even more detailed information.

Ridin' the rolly coaster!

What was the first roller coaster you rode? Do you remember?

I was 10 (a late bloomer in my opinion, but I was a short kid), and my parents took my brother and me on a trip to Great America, which at the time, had recently changed from Marriott's Great America to just plain old Great America.

Now I wish I'd have been able to compare that 1985 version to the classic version of my early youth, but since, as I said, I couldn't ride much of anything, everything was fairly new to me, except for The Demon, which I decided I would ride as soon as I was able.

But The Demon wasn't my first coaster. My first coaster was The Whizzer, formerly Willard's Whizzer. It was a fairly pedestrian family coaster with a spiral lift and some nice twists and turns.

I'd have to say that it was the perfect coaster for me to start with; not too scary, not too boring. From there, I went on The Demon and anything else I could legally get on.

Here's a video of The Whizzer at Great America's former sister park in Gurnee, Illinois:



I've been thinking about theme parks, and old-school Great America in particular because I've been writing a story in which a theme park plays a role. But in my not-even-humble opinion, Great America hasn't been a true theme park for years now. Now it's just an amusement park.

Oh sure, there are some great rides, but there was something cool about how you knew where you were based on the names of the rides or the style of decor. I mean, some of the names were cheesy as hell, but at least there was a theme, you know?

Now, it's California's Great America, which to me, sounds a bit odd, but they've got some new stuff planned, and it would be awesome if there was some effort made at some actual theming for the rides since they have to change the names anyway now that they aren't a Paramount park.

What particularly frosts my Popsicle is that my two favorite rides were Loggers Run and Yankee Clipper, only one of which still stands. Back in the day, the rides were like conjoined twins; at a few points, the tracks were close enough to see the other riders. In one spot, you were close enough to fling water at them if you happened to bring a cup with you.

But Yankee Clipper departed this plane a year before Joe DiMaggio so they could put in Stealth, the "flying" roller coaster. Don't get me wrong, Stealth was a cool ride--though my already long wait in line was made longer to rig a camera for some chucklehead from 98 Degrees to get pics taken for Tiger Beat or somesuch and they made me take my glasses off, so I saw a whole crapton of blurry nothing--but after only a few years, they took it out and moved it to another park. My Yankee Clipper had died in vain!

I know, I should just chill. Loggers Run is still there, I know.

But my brother and I had our own little name for the Yankee Clipper; one that I'm not at liberty to divulge, but should I finish and publish this novel I'm working on, you will discover. We had alternate names for most of the rides, as we had a lot of time on our hands with season passes in the summer of 1994. And we were dorks.

Good thing I grew out of that.

"If we'd have known you was comin', we'd have baked a cake."

To get you prepared for Labor Day hijinks, here's one of my favorite Three Stooges shorts, Cash and Carry.



There are a lot of little moments in this one that just kill me.

Math is for eggheads!

Every now and then I share stuff with my son that I enjoyed a lot when I was a kid. His newest favorite is Donald in Mathmagic Land. I remember seeing this in school fairly early in my scholastic career--it was on a film reel rather than a videotape.

He's quoting it already, which is very cute. His favorite parts are the billiards demonstration and the "doors of the future."

Check it out for yourself.

Today is canceled due to illness.

Nothing like a little food poisoning to kick off a three-day weekend. Hopefully I'll be over it soon. Blech.

Once you've had extra-crispy...

Saw this on Topless Robot, and it was too good to pass up.



Really? This got signed off without anybody thinking it was a trifle peculiar to have an action figure set where the characters are facing imminent death? Maybe they just thought, yeah, it's creepy, but at least it's not this:

Exercises in frustration

OK, so back in the day, I played craptons of games on my Commodore 64. One that used to just drive me nuts was Aliens.

I eventually got decent at it, but it took forever and a day to get past the first level, which was the spaceship re-entry procedure. You had to maneuver through a series of rings that, I assume, represented the safest trajectory for your ship through atmospheric re-entry.

At first it seems pretty easy, but once you run into turbulence, the rings are farther apart, and more scattered. Miss a ring, and you're pretty much screwed because you'll have to start over from the beginning.



This particular gameplay "feature" would come back to bite me in the ass with Superman 64, a game that I actually asked for. On purpose.

How bad is it? Ask the Angry Video Game Nerd. He pretty much says it all. But if you doubt his opinion, try looking up "Superman 64 sucks" on Google.

There's always room for cello

When I was in fourth grade, we had a music assembly in the multipurpose room. It was their annual orchestra recruitment assembly where they'd tell us that we could have fun in the orchestra, bla bla bla.

Naturally, piano wasn't one of the options (I played a mean electronic organ at home), so I wasn't paying that much attention. For some reason, fourth-graders could only play stringed instruments such as the violin.

They gave us a demonstration of the various instruments, and still, I wasn't interested.

Until the guy with the cello showed up.

I was intrigued by the fact that, unlike most of the other instruments, to play the cello meant you got to sit down.

Hey, I'm lazy.

But what really sold me was when he started playing the theme to Star Wars on it. How badass was that? I'd be the life of the party in no time.

Now there were a few obstacles in my way here. The instruments, I'd heard from friends, were very expensive, and being a total klutz, I knew there was no way I could convince my parents to buy me a cello outright.

Oh, and there was the small matter of me never having played the cello or any other stringed instrument, unless you counted the Mousegetar I had when I was 4.

There was essentially one way for me to be able to play cello in the orchestra. There was a district-wide music test that would be given in all the schools, and the top students would be allowed to use the district-owned instruments.

And out of all the students interested, only two in our school would get the cellos. So the odds weren't exactly in my favor.

The day of the test came, and we musical wannabes filed into the multipurpose room and did our best.

As it ended up, the two students who got the district's cellos were my friend Erin and me. Don't ask me how I was a top scorer. To this day, I have no idea.

And while I never learned how to play Star Wars (apparently you can't just start with that; who knew?), I was still excited to play in a school recital.

How excited?



Yep. About that excited. How I ever ended up getting married is beyond me.

Stupid Internet. Bah!

As I spent most of the night trying to revive my Internet connection, I'm fresh out of time to regale you with a pointless tale from yesteryear.

But I don't want you to go away empty-handed, so here, providing just about the same level of maturity, is an episode of Jackass.

Let's be careful out there

With school starting for the youngsters, I thought it might be a good idea to review some basic rules of bicycle safety.

Since I fell off my bike almost every time I rode, I thought maybe I should leave the safety tips to someone else more qualified.

Like YouTube.

Actually going out somewhere

No big blogging for me. This is where I'll be:

Using my great brain

I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but one of my favorite book series as a kid was John D. Fitzgerald's The Great Brain books.

I read all the books a billion times, but as a kid I chanced upon an old paperback version that read something like "Soon to be a major motion picture starring Jimmy Osmond!"

In all the years since then, I've still never come across that movie. I'm sure somehow, someday, I'll track it down, but for now I'll have to settle for a clip on YouTube of Jimmy performing the theme to the movie.

This is the first time I've heard the song, and wouldn't you know it, the damn thing is stuck in my head already.

I'd love to see even a TV movie of these books made in the future.

Blinded with science

Staying abreast of the latest gadgets

I've said before that when it comes to products, names are very important. Some products sound like all of 30 seconds was used to come up with the name (Head-On, Active-On, etc.). But sometimes a clever or funny name gets the customer halfway to buying without even looking at the product.

Case in point.



What more can you say abou tit?

There should be a version for guys that's like a bird instead of a bear. You'd get the pirate market for sure. You could call it the Parateat.


I look forward to seeing the Great Balls of Fire Refrigerated Athletic Supporter. I mean, come on...where do you go from the Tiddy Bear? Geen-frickin-ius.

A work of genius

Found a blog today written by a certifiable genius. I can't put my finger on why he's so awesome, but I just had to share.

Now *that* is a memorable obituary

During my tenure as a newspaper copy editor, one of my many duties was to write the obituaries. Our paper, as a community service, printed obits for free. If the family wanted, they could also buy an ad, in which they could write all the flowery prose they wanted.

I mention this because our free obits were written pretty straight--you know, like a news story. This doesn't seem too difficult until you realize that sometimes deciphering what came in on the obit form was like translating stereo instructions into Aramaic. In the dark. With off-brand crayons that didn't so much write as they did crumble and smear in more or less of a line.

One of the first obits I had to write was for one of my teachers in junior high school. That was kind of a bummer. The last obit I wrote was after my newspaper days, for my son, Harry, and it was the hardest thing I've ever written. But remembering how things would come in from funeral homes, I wasn't about to take any chances.

As I said, we had a straight news format for our obituaries, and it was not uncommon to get calls after they ran, admonishing us for not phrasing it exactly how it was on the form. In news obits, generally speaking, people die. They don't pass on, pass away, or as one form put it, "jumped into the arms of Jesus."

I took great care in writing the obituaries, though, as you can imagine, it was a hell of a way to start the day. I had to call the local mortuaries every day to see if I should be hovering around the fax machine for anything.

"Hi, this is Jeff. Just checking to see if you had anything today."

"Nope, none today."

"I guess everyone felt like living today."

"Looks like it. Talk to you tomorrow."

Yes, it's true. You can't deal with these day after day without developing a bit of gallows humor. Not to the families, of course.

In fact, I tried not to bother them unless absolutely necessary. They had enough to deal with, and part of the cost of funeral service is going over next of kin with the funeral director so you didn't have to talk to some schlub from the newspaper.

That said, after being burned enough times by less-than-stellar transcription from our sources, we ended up calling the families more often than not.

It's awkward talking to the bereaved anyway. Especially if you're a stranger. And extra especially if you are uncomfortable talking on the phone to the point that you don't even order pizza.

But we had a duty to double-check any names that were spelled out of the ordinary, confirm any discrepancies in service times, that kind of thing.

I was talking to the son of someone who'd died, and I was trying to verify the time of the Mass, as it was on there both ways.

That's another thing you learn. Depending on religion, the deceased could have a Mass of Christian Burial, services, Trisagion services, or remembrance.

Every time I asked about the Mass (as it was written on the form), he'd tell me the service was at 2 p.m. Usually, the Mass would be early in the morning, and that's why I was asking. Eventually we got to the salient point:

"No, I don't under--it's just a service. My dad wasn't even Catholic."

This also meant that the service was not, in fact, going to be at the local Catholic church.

Reading the forms was often like reading a really interesting story, or part of one. The universal thread in every obit I wrote was that the person who died would be missed by their family. Not once did I come across one that was "Mr. X was a right bastard, and in lieu of flowers, attendees are asked to line up early to urinate on the gravesite."

This obit, which I found on Fark.com, comes pretty damned close, though. As the original obit link disappeared, they've pasted the text of the obit in the discussion thread.

Ouch.

OK, there's *not* always room for Jell-O

At least, there's no room if it's something like this:



Dear God, this makes head cheese look appetizing by comparison. I may have posted this before, but this really deserves another look because you should avoid this at all costs.

Public service announcement

Saw this today, and it struck me as important enough to share with all of you, especially if you, like me, are a fan of The Office.

Won't you think of Jenna?

Friday night freakout

I stumbled across this today. Back in the early days of VCRs, we must have rented every Disney title on the market. Not just The Parent Trap or Alice in Wonderland. I'm talking Snowball Express, Condorman, and The Black Hole.

This movie weirded me out a little as a kid; it was awfully dark for a Disney movie (aside from the black hole, which for some reason was red). And I was fine throughout the bulk of the movie, but it was the ending that got me. I could never tell exactly what was going on.

Even now, I'm a little fuzzy on what is happening. You watch the ending here, and you tell me what happened. The bad guy goes to hell, but the good guys in the spaceship are led by an angel through Heaven and out into open space?

Ad fail?

I giggled when I saw ads for the DC Superheroes cartoons while perusing Marvel.com.

It's a small world, after all

So what with all the various social networks around, there are a lot of ways to contact me. The most popular one is Facebook, where people I didn't know even remembered me are getting back in touch. For a social pariah, this gives you a warm fuzzy.

I decided to jot down the ones I could think of off my head, and this is what I came up with:

Become a fan on
Facebook

Become a follower on
Twitter
Plurk

Become a friend on
MySpace
Facebook

See what weird crap I listen to
Last.fm
In the interest of disclosure, I should point out that the Richard Marx song that is in the playlist played while I was away from my desk. So when you see that, it was just a pee break.

Now I marvel at some of my co-workers, who have legions of fans and followers, and I wonder how much time they're able to devote to sifting through all that stuff.

Fortunately, this is not something I am currently burdened with. But hope springs eternal, right?

Sometimes you just need a musical number

First day of school

I was happy to see my son looking forward to attending his first day of kindergarten. He's really jazzed about going to school, and I'd like that sentiment to last as long as possible.

If you check the picture below, you can see that he has inherited my inability to keep my eyes open for pictures. Apparently plaid is also hereditary; who knew?

Another successful hunt

Hit a few local thrift stores today, and not only did I come away with an armload of books, but I managed to snag -- for $2.99 -- a working, in-the-box and Styrofoam Bandai Electronics Gunfighter game.

I love old-school handheld electronic games, but not enough to spend exhorbitant sums of money on them. This price was more my speed.

Here's a video I found on YouTube that gives you an idea of what it's like:

We are currently experiencing technical difficulties

Translation: Something got boned on my computer and I have to fix it. Meh. Will be back as soon as I exorcise the demons.

What's invisible and smells like carrots?

Long day + happy hour after work + tired = another YouTube clip. But hey, it has a bunny rabbit!

Why my son sometimes calls me Dave

My son had finished watching the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie when I had an idea.

"Hey, Brody," I said as I rummaged through the bin of records in the living room, "Check this out." I pulled Chipmunk Punk out and showed it to him. His face lit up as he recognized Alvin, Simon and Theodore on the cover.

We listened to that and then Chipmunk Rock following that. He sat mesmerized, listening to the whole thing. He studied both album covers.

He pointed at Chipmunk Punk and told me, "Those are the old-school Chipmunks." I had to ask him to repeat that because I wasn't sure that I heard him right.

But I had. He seems to prefer the old-school Chipmunk design, apparently.

He can also be heard running around the house singing "I Love Rock N' Roll" in his best chipmunk voice from time to time. It's weird how much like me he is. Kinda scary when I think about it.

For him.

Does this creep anyone else out?

For some reason the addition of a baby to the cast of the Plastic Man cartoon creeped me out as a kid. I mean, look at Baby Plas.

Random thought before bed

A year ago tonight, I was a little nervous. My daughter was to be born the next day, and I had no idea how things were going to transpire.

But a year later, I can honestly say that I couldn't be happier about our addition to the family. Unless, you know, she came out with bundles of money or a PS3 or something.

Or a Slurpee machine. But that might have hurt.

Get the point?

Having just watched the Indiana Jones trilogy the past few nights, I noticed something and thought, well if I noticed it, and I'm pretty slow, someone else surely noticed it as well.

Someone did, but the page has since gone. But since we're dealing with an archaeologist, I thought it fitting that I use the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to resurrect it.

Warning: This may distract you the next time you watch a Harrison Ford movie. If you don't mind, then by all means, check out the finger gallery.

Let them eat cake

The birthday girl (technically not till this week) enjoyed her party as far as I can tell. She was very smiley. This picture was just a few minutes before she got a bath.

I'm still freaking out. My son will start kindergarten in another week or so and my daughter is already a year old. Where does the time go?

Hurrrrk.

Now I have to be honest: my grandmother used to work for Golden Grain, so I'll always have a special place in my heart for the company's products. I could eat a box of chicken Rice-A-Roni all by myself.

But this one...I just...I dunno.

Get back, Chococat

My house is slowly turning into a Sanrio store. Hello Kitty's visage is emblazoned on many a decoration hanging up.

We're getting ready for Ramona's first birthday party. Yeah, I can't believe she's 1 already, either.

I'm looking forward to seeing what she does to her cake. Fortunately, we got a deal where if you buy a first birthday cake, they give you a stunt cake for free. That's the small one you give to the kid while everyone else eats the main cake.

There's a joke in there about having cake and eating it, too, but I'm just too tired to bother. Let's just pretend I did, okay?

I'm so jealous of this hairstyle.

I always had a hard time explaining exactly what I wanted when I got my hair cut. I saw this picture, and I wondered, wow...how do you ask for that?

Yeah, it's like if Iron Man modeled his helmet after Wilford Brimley?

Oh, brother

I think I know what I'm going to work on in this writing workshop. And since I can't bring all of you with me, I figured I'd give a brief synopsis.

Two brothers (fraternal twins) decide to go on a road trip in California to get out of their respective ruts. As with many brothers, they're very much alike but very different at the same time.

How far into their journey will they get before they want to kill each other?

My kingdom for a time machine

Seeing this makes me want to go back in time and stay up late:

Group therapy

Well, for the first time in ages, I'm part of a writing group. I'm pretty jazzed about it because we all write different types of stuff, so it will be interesting to see different voices and points of view.

I will always have a love for creative writing classes, though it would take a while for there to be a good reason for it.

When I was in my first creative writing class in the first semester of junior college, I was not exactly inspired by some of the feedback.

I wrote a story about, of all things, a guy going to his 20th high school reunion. Keep in mind that I had only graduated high school a few months prior; heck, I was still 17.

While much of the feedback was positive, the one that sticks out is someone who was in the class to write Literature, and anything that didn't have a deeper meaning was a waste of her time.

Which, I should add, is perfectly fine. Different strokes for different folks, right? However, you can be more diplomatic about your disdain for humor-based pieces.

"The part at the end with the phone call was funny, but the rest was crap unbelievable."

This, by the way, was criticism from someone in her early 30s directed at a 17-year-old. I shouldn't have let it bother me, but it soured me so much that for the remainder of the class, I just used stories I'd already written.

It wasn't until the next year that I took another writing class, this time with a different instructor. While not entirely enthusiastic about my writing--the thing that stuck out to her was that it appeared to be meticulously proofread--the class was inviting enough for me to actually want to share my writing.

At the end of the semester, we could, for extra credit, compile a list of 10 markets to which we could theoretically send our work and choose one to actually submit a piece to.

I just did it for the extra credit and promptly forgot about it. But August rolled around and I got a manila envelope in the mail. Inside was a magazine, a letter of congratulations, and a check for $10.

I fully expected to get the first of many rejection letters. Instead, I got published on my first submission. Score!

So I rested on my laurels until a creative writing class at CSU Stanislaus. The instructor and I didn't agree on very much, but I met a cute brunette in that class, so in the long run, it was time well-spent. I think so, anyway. My wife may disagree.

I was getting prolific again at that point, and it seemed like I was churning out almost as much stuff as I was in high school.

But one thing pissed me off, and as typically happens with people like me, I focused all my energies on something that didn't warrant the attention.

I had turned in the first draft of a story in which there's a mention of how one of the characters loves the breadsticks at a certain restaurant. I wrote that shortly after gorging myself on breadsticks at Olive Garden.

The corrected version of my draft came back from my teacher, and he had crossed out breadsticks and written "garlic bread?" I meant what I wrote, and left it as such in the final draft.

Sure enough, he "corrected" me again.

So in the next story, I included a page-long conversation between two characters about the difference between garlic bread and breadsticks.

In retrospect, I think I may have crossed the line a teensy bit with one character asking the other in exasperation, "How the hell can you have lived on this planet for this long without knowing what a friggin' breadstick is?"

The only comment from the instructor was "This is not amusing."

How quaint.

It's funny to see an ad for a video game system that basically has to explain what it is, but that's just how it was in the dark ages of 1978.

I didn't get my Atari 2600 until a few years after this ad; I was only 4, after all. And yes, we had a black-and-white TV (in my parents' room). Do they even make those anymore?

And while technically true, claiming over 1,300 variations is a bit misleading, don't you think? It's not like all those different levels were completely different games.

Admittedly, the Pong version of Combat was my favorite because no matter where my brother positioned his tank, I'd always ricochet a shot and nail him. How many people played the invisible version of Combat? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Because Spanky was already taken, I guess

You gotta love some of the old-school He-Man figures.

Hey, this guy has a groovy beard, a giant armored hand and wears a Speedo to battle. Let's call him ... Fisto!

Yeah, nobody could take that the wrong way...

Great moments in cinema

As a Friday night treat, here is my favorite part of the blaxpoitation epic, Black Belt Jones.

If you're watching this at work or in front of the kids, this was rated R, so be warned.



Here's the trailer:

One of the best things about TV Guide

I recently nabbed a 1984 Fall Preview TV Guide off of eBay, and I noticed that the infamous Turbo Teen premiered that week. I scanned the page so you wouldn't think I was making this up:



"Debut: Teen-ager Bret Matthews turns into a turbocharged racer whenever his temperature rises."

How many times did they have to try to summarize this without sounding like they were on drugs? By using the phrase "turbocharged racer," one could think that he was able to run really fast instead of turning into a friggin' car.

For some reason, ABC debuted its fall offerings this week, while CBS and NBC waited until the following week, hence the teaser ad for The Snorks also on this page.

Even when we were kids, we recognized The Snorks as a shameless ripoff of The Smurfs. Sure, they came in different colors and had phalluses on their heads (yeah, I know they were supposed to be snorkels, but come on), but still, we knew this was weak sauce.

Of course, we all thought Turbo Teen was badass, so maybe we weren't the best arbiters of quality programming...

Just one of those days...

The answers revealed!

So how did you do on the crossword? Too hard? Too easy? Too pointless?

On writing.

I've been thinking about writing a lot lately. That is to say I've been thinking a lot about writing. Aside from the daily posts here, I haven't been doing much writing at all, which kind of bums me out.

Sometimes I like to dig up something I wrote a while back and see how it looks, which, since I'm a little tired today, is what the bulk of this post will be.

It's just the first little bit of a story I started writing for NaNoWriMo back in 2006. I never finished it, so I never came up with a title.

Solomon Cauldar looked at his target and sighed.

Another bank job, he thought, looking skyward at the moon, which, he noticed, was waxing. I live for the day I don't have to waste my time with this crap.

The first couple of times, he used a couple of guys he found to help him, but as time went on, they seemed to be more trouble than they were worth. Besides, he tried to keep in shape; he could manage most of the heavy lifting he needed to do.

He checked his watch: 11:37 p.m. Amazingly, this place didn't have much in the way of security, relying instead on surveillance cameras.

Morons.

He cracked the knuckles of his long, thin fingers and headed inside. The cameras wouldn't see him, and no one would know that he had been there until the morning.

He headed down the hall, staying in the shadows. Solomon wore black, as he usually did, right down to his black Chuck Taylors. He could stand right behind someone and they'd never even see him there.

Finally, he arrived at the vault. He pulled a piece of Wrigley's Doublemint out of his pocket and started chewing. Then he went to work.

How many times? he wondered. Solomon tried to keep his mind busy to fight off the pangs of guilt that plagued him during lulls in his heists. He liked to tell himself that the crimes he committed were relatively victimless, but he knew there were people out there who needed his treasure as much as he did.

He was just a little more proactive in terms of getting what he needed, that's all.
Back at his car, a green 1971 Plymouth Duster with deeply tinted windows, he loaded his haul into the trunk. He always knew exactly how much to get; no sense letting greed trip him up. That's one of the reasons he'd never been caught.

His take secured, he closed the trunk gently and slid into the driver's seat. Solomon took one last look at his target in the rear-view mirror and released the parking brake, letting the car coast down the hill a bit before starting the engine.

As the engine turned over, the radio crackled to life. Neil Diamond's "Thank the Lord for the Night Time" was playing. Solomon smiled.

"Amen," he said.

The Franklin County Blood Bank, the only two-story building in the small town of Baileyville, grew smaller in Solomon's mirror until it, like him, was out of sight.

There's a lot more, but I'm just curious if this beginning is enough to make people want to continue reading.

Pop culture freakout crossword puzzle

Okay, crossword fiends, this one might be a little tougher than the old-school TV Guide crossword puzzles I've featured before.

Well, tougher for you; I know all the answers already because I wrote the puzzle. These are all things I could answer without consulting reference material or the Internet.

If you can finish the puzzle without any help, then you are as big of a freak as I am. But don't feel bad if you have to look something up. That just means you have a life and are probably well-adjusted socially.

Special thanks to pal Jessica, who made me aware of the program I used to make this puzzle, which you can get here.



Across
1. You went to this store? Tell a friend (two words).
3. Score over 50,000 points on this Activision game to get a Sub Club patch.
6. What to say if you want to get slimed on You Can't Do That on Television (three words).
7. His real name means "star child" in his native language.
9. Proprietor of the Pizza Time Theater (three words).
13. In this craptacular 1980 musical, the sun rises in the west in the first 10 minutes of the movie.
16. Creature that attacks Luke Skywalker in the garbage masher aboard the Death Star.
17. The first Christian antidrug, turkey vampire biker movie (two words).
19. 5th-dimensional imp who pesters Superman every 90 days.
20. Host of Battle of the Network Stars.
21. Last name of The Greatest American Hero: Ralph _______.
22. If I were a Popsicle, I'd be this flavor.
23. Hulk's secret identity in the comics: _____ Banner.
26. Location of the Hall of Doom.
28. Preferred biscuit of Bill Maxwell.
29. Dragon faced by Dig Dug.
30. Bear on B.J. and the Bear was this kind of animal.
32. Last episode of Star Trek: _________ Intruder.
35. Super ____ Osborne
36. Funny no matter what everyone else says.
38. Protagonist of The Phantom Tollbooth
39. Tom Fitzgerald had a great one.
40. First host of Creature Features.
42. Rosco P. Coltrane's epithet of choice.
44. Director who also wrote under the name of Akdov Telmig.
46. Only Super Powers Collection action figure I never got.
47. Jack and Janet's first roommate after Chrissy on Three's Company.
48. Occupation of Charlie Brown's father.
49. He's a cereal killer (two words).


Down

2. Typical answer on Match Game.
3. Last name of the original Ronald McDonald.
4. Dukes of Hazzard spinoff
5. Home planet of Sinestro.
8. He set fire to the Bradfords' home while playing with a soldering iron.
10. Video-game-themed game show.
11. The best place to be marooned with wisecracking robots.
12. What color underwear Lois Lane wears in Superman.
14. First name of the killer in the original Friday the 13th.
15. Zan and Jayna's home planet.
16. Builders of tasty crystalline construction on Fraggle Rock.
18. Ronald Raymond and Prof. Martin Stein originally joined together as this hero.
20. The hottest place north of Havana.
24. My favorite Brady girl.
25. Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, get your ______ here.
27. Tastes good like a cigarette should.
31. 1983 Bill Bixby/Mariette Hartley comedy: Goodnight ________.
33. Wrote the music for the 1980 movie Popeye.
34. Pebbles' and Bamm-Bamm's pal with bad luck.
37. This Teen Titans villain was also Raven's father.
41. No. 12 on the 70s-era Oakland Raiders.
43. The Saving Place.
45. Hulk's secret identity in the 70s TV show: ______ Banner.

The only people I allow to talk during movies.

Just watched Cinematic Titanic: Doomsday Machine the other day. Cinematic Titanic is the latest venture from MST3K alumnae Joel Hodgson, Trace Beaulieu, J. Elvis Weinstein, Frank Conniff and Mary Jo Pehl.

Now, being a fan of MST3K, I might be a little biased, but I watched this by myself and still ended up laughing out loud, which almost never happens.

I highly recommend you pick these up, so go to their site and order now. You won't be disappointed. You can see trailers for the first two releases here.

I can't wait till the next one. Hopefully it will be out in time for my birthday.

I also recommend Rifftrax, alternate audio tracks featuring more MST3K folks. I have yet to subject myself to their riffing of Batman and Robin, but having them with me is sure to make the experience less painful.

Get your motor runnin'

It's Friday night, and that means YouTube video fun. Tonight, we've got an hour of classic car commercials. Just try not to think of how little gas was per gallon back then...

OM NOM NOM NOM

Every now and then I get struck by inspiration. While talking to a friend at work yesterday about the natural splendor of Count Chocula, I had an idea.

Make Rice Krispies Treats, but instead of Rice Krispies, use Count Chocula. So I took the standard recipe, swapped in the best cereal ever, and voila, the greatest snack ever conceived.

The recipe calls for 6 cups of Rice Krispies, but since Count Chocula is bigger, I didn't use as much. I just kept pouring the cereal into the melted marshmallow mixture until it looked about right.

I brought some to work, and the unanimous opinion was that they are damned tasty.

I foresee some more cereal experiments: Fruity Pebbles, Crunch Berries, and Cinnamon Mini-Swirlz are a few of the candidates. I'll keep you posted.

Ch-ch-ch-changes...

As of today, if you don't feel like typing in http://siftin.blogspot.com, you can get her by just typing www.jeffsparkman.com.

Yep, I finally went and got a domain. That's just the first part of things I'd like to do with the blog this year.

Special mad props to pal Dorf for helping me set it all up. W00t!

Why I'm not employed by Topps

When I was in junior high, I spent a great portion of my lunch money on the old third-series Garbage Pail Kids, and I've picked up some of the new ones every now and then.

On the official Web site, you can make your own Garbage Pail Kid. I decided to get in touch with the 11-year-old me and come up with the grossest kids while still capturing the spirit of the series.

This was the first one I thought of.



The two that didn't make the cut: Uri Nate and

...Jack Ulate.

So ashamed...

Crossword revisited

Well, this one went a lot quicker than the first one, even staying with my no-Internet rule. There was one brief moment of horror when it appeared that the answer to "An adjective for Cher" was "erotic," but it turned out that I was a letter off. Whew.

How did you fare?

Three years and counting...

I somehow missed this last month, but this blog has been going strong for three years now.

Thanks to everyone who comes by to read my pointless babbling and reminiscing.

Back to the usual crap tomorrow.

Indiana Jones and the TV Guide Puzzle

OK, I got Lego Indiana Jones today, so I'm going to go play that while you guys try another TV Guide crossword puzzle. This time, it's from December 1978. I had just turned 4 the month before and was just now trying these puzzles out.

You can click on the picture for a bigger version. Good luck!

NOTE: Blogger is being uncooperative right now, so I'm using Photobucket. If you click the picture, you should get a big, complete version. When Blogger gets its act together, I'll fix this entry.

I would buy this album in a heartbeat

I love They Might Be Giants. My son, Brody, is also quite a fan, thanks to Here Come the ABCs and Here Come the 123s.

I had an idea for another themed record, that while targeted at an older audience, would nevertheless be filled with catchy educational songs.

Here Come the STDs!

A whole album about how to avoid getting venereal diseases. I know that sounds weird, but I know the two Johns would be able to craft a host of tunes on the subject because they have the super power to write songs about anything.

Besides, how many other chances do songwriters get to try to come up with a rhyme for "chancre"? Off the top of my head, I can think of "anchor," "wanker," "spank her" and "thank her."

This song practically writes itself.

And as they've covered old-school public service announcements ("Don't Cross the Street in the Middle"), here's one that would fit in great with the concept for this album.

It's more of a pubic service announcement, but still...

This one's for you, English majors...

How not to talk to a woman

OK, I spent most of my evening dicking around with my wireless network settings, so there will be no magnificent insights this time around.

But I do feel obligated to share something, so here's a commercial for the now-unfortunately named Ayds diet-suppressant candy.

Yes, I've seen the commercials on a number of Web sites, pointing out how different "The Ayds Diet Plan" sounds 25 years later, but that's not really why I'm posting this commercial.

Watch it real quick.



"Gotta get a shot of this--you're eating less!"

That guy was just aiming for a Falcon Punch in the junk with that comment, wasn't he? I mean, how insensitive can you sound?

What if their places were reversed and this was a Viagra commercial? "Gotta get a shot of this--no more Limpo the Clown!" Somehow, I doubt it.

And while I'm thinking about it, why is he using a Polaroid at the beginning, but an old-school camera later?

He probably knows his comment is going to piss her off, so he doesn't want to risk the Polaroid, that's why.

Choad.

Give that man a hand...

Something that always interested me when I was in school was how at the end of the year, a lot of people relaxed their personae. Like a guy who might have been a complete douche all year long suddenly start being nice to you for the last few weeks of school.

I could never figure out exactly why, whether it was because school was almost over, or so you didn't plot revenge on them all summer long, or in the case of grades after which you may never see the person again, it was so you didn't plot revenge on them for the rest of existence.

At any rate, I did find this fascinating. At the end of seventh grade, I noticed that a classmate of mine (the guy who, um, disposed of the periodical during the infamous San Francisco trip) was teaching one of the girls how to play chess. This was notable for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that he didn't know how to play.

Even in high school, every time the end of May/beginning of June rolled around, people were a little friendlier. Case in point:

During the Grad Night trip to Disneyland, what started as a giant group eventually broke up into smaller and smaller groups. While we were still at least a dozen or so strong, we decided to hit Splash Mountain. Keep in mind that as per the rules, we were all wearing semiformal wear.

I was decked out in my mad-pimp/Bob Barker black pinstripe suit I got for five bucks at Salvation Army, so I wasn't worried about the possibility of getting wet.

We were in line, chatting with our friends, when one friend of ours--let's call him Jeremy, since that was his name--started schmoozing with a few female classmates. Talking to the ladies was one thing, but he was laying it on awful thick--at least, that's how it seemed to my friend Jeff and I.

We both looked at Jeremy, and then looked at each other. Wordlessly, we agreed that letting this behavior go unchecked would just be detrimental to our friend in the long run, so we had to do something about it.

"Yeah," Jeremy said, "I draw a little bit. In fact, I was--"

He stopped in mid-sentence, because Jeff had stepped forward and held up Jeremy's hand as if it were a trophy. The girls waited for an explanation with a puzzled look on their faces.

"This," Jeff said in the most serious voice he could muster, "is the hand of a man who masturbates."

And then as if nothing had happened, he got back in line with me. The girls laughed while Jeremy sputtered, trying to think of something to say after that.

I admired Jeff for his ability to cut through the crap like that.

Unless he did it to me. That was a sock in the arm.

Quandary

Now that I've written about a bad movie that starts with P, I'm stuck with trying to come up with the next movie. I thought O was bad, but there really are not a lot of movies that start with Q.

I have a few prospects, but I figured I'd solicit some suggestions. If you know of a good bad movie that starts with Q, let me know in the comments.

If I don't use your suggestion, don't be offended.

Bad Movies From A to Z: You blew it

I was on the horns of a dilemma as to which movie to feature for the P installment of Bad Movies From A to Z. The easy choice would've been Plan 9 From Outer Space. My second choice was Pieces, but my brain exploded when I tried to write down the plot.

So instead, I thought I'd go for a movie that I bet not many people have in their libraries. Kermit Schafer's feature-length documentary based on his book and record series, Pardon My Blooper.

The movie in a nutshell: Various TV and radio bloopers are replayed and in many cases, re-enacted. Poorly.

The story: Okay, this really doesn't have much of a story. Schafer, essentially the father of the blooper as we know it, had been amusing millions with his books and records that relayed the bits from radio and TV shows that otherwise would have hit the cutting room floor.

It seems an odd choice for a full-length movie now. There are a few yoks here and there, but your attention really flags near the end. This R-rated feature was released to theaters (!) in May 1974, and to be fair, we hadn't yet suffered the barrage of blooper shows of the early 80s when you not only had TV Bloopers and Practical Jokes with Dick Clark and Ed McMahon (practically the direct descendant of this movie) but Foul-Ups, Bleeps and Blunders with Steve Lawrence and Don Rickles, as well as the occasional Life's Most Embarrassing Moments special with Steve Allen.

Back in the day, this was the one of the first video exposures many had to bloopers (the blooper reels shown at early Star Trek conventions also come to mind). But a few years after this movie was released, you could see movie bloopers during the end credits of many a Burt Reynolds movie.

Now while Schafer had much to do with the proliferation of hearing and seeing outtakes, he also re-enacted many gaffes based on reports from broadcasters. And in a bit of overreaching to share a funny story, he also re-created bloopers that were actually urban legends.

Probably the most infamous fake recording was the "Uncle Don blooper." You can read about it in more detail at Snopes.com.

The Uncle Don clip is played during the opening credits, and it is one of two different versions I've got on the old blooper records. Matters of truth aside, were closing songs to kids' shows really that bad?

"Good night, little kids, good niiiiiiight. We're off? Good. Well, that oughtta hold the little bastards."

After that gem, we find that what we're watching is clips from the records dubbed over stock footage, people recreating (badly in many cases) bloopers over stock footage and on special occasions, dreadfully re-enacted clips in which people don't even try very hard to lip-sync to the audio.

I'd love to post a clip to show just how bad some of the clips are re-enacted, but I don't have the resources. Go on Amazon or eBay and pick up a copy of the tape for a few bucks. Trust me.

And let's talk about that title song. "The Blooper Song (You Blew It)" is sung by Danny Street, who should not be confused with Danny the Street from Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol.

I think.

It's a Sinatra-esque number that consists primarily of repeating "You blew it...you blew it, you blew it, you blew it." There are a few other words, but not as many as you'd hope to break up the monotony.

I should warn you now. The damn thing will be stuck in your head forever.

The key novelty of this movie is hearing dirty words and seeing a boob or two. These days, it's all pretty tame, but if you, like me, are permanently 12 years old (no offense to real 12-year-olds, who are undoubtedly more mature), you may find yourself giggling when you hear the phrase "pubic service announcement."

For shame. Honestly...

Here are some other gems from the movie:

From a commercial for a butcher: "Remember ladies, nobody can beat Charlie MacFarlane's meat...oh, no..."


"Stay tuned now for a dramatization of Dickens' immortal classic, A Sale of Two Titties...er, A Tale of Two Cities."

"...the Canadian Broadcorping Castration."

It's actually kind of neat to see vintage stock footage from the 60s and 70s.

My biggest pet peeve is the poor audio re-enacting. You've got a few lines to say. How hard is it not to stumble over or otherwise kill the joke?

"With the 7 on the side--and--uh, U-P after, huh-huh-huh..."

Having watched this movie so many times growing up, my brother and I quote from it constantly, and I have yet to meet anyone who picks up on the references. Hell, we may be the only ones.

"Where'd the son-of-a-bitchin' dog come from?"

"Who goosed the soprano?"

"...the largest producer of magnoosium, aleeminum and stool."

"Clear up to my ass--ankles!"

The big event (and probably the reason for this movie's R rating) comes when they relate the story of how a TV station accidentally broadcast a stag movie late one night. I have no idea if the clips they show were from the actual incident (why would they start now, right?), but you can see a brief bit of nudity, over which we hear what supposedly are early-morning calls to the station.

Uh, yeah.

And then it's back to tame slips of the tongue. Well, aside from a mispronunciation of Kentucky Fried Chicken (you figure it out), anyway.

The other big segment is about Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" broadcast, which they inexplicably refer to as a blooper.

Again, the big build-up, and then more regular clips.

There's a re-enacted clip from "The Newlywed Game," but it's not the infamous clip you may have heard of.

At the end, a little bit of the "You Blew It" song plays, and then fade to black.

Afterthoughts:

I managed to snag this movie at Kmart for $9.99. We swung by Subway on the way home and got a pastrami sandwich with black olives, a sandwich I think of every time I watch this.

Now I'm hungry.

Damn.

I would be willing to bet that I've seen this movie more times than anyone else on the planet, which is sad for a number of reasons, the least of which is--it's really not that damned funny.

I think if I had seen it for the first time now, I'd probably have ejected and burned it about 15 minutes in. But since I was a teenager when I got it, this flick has a bit of nostalgic appeal. Still, even when I was 15, I remember feeling screwed when I found that there were no "real" bloopers in it.

However, there is still some kind of appeal to Schafer's collections of bloopers. The books are actually the most giggle-worthy, as they have all kinds of swears in them, many of which I presume didn't make the cut on the records.

I have a few of the record collections (billed as "A Treasury of Radio and TV's Most Hilarious Boners"), and interestingly enough, on two separate volumes, the Uncle Don blooper is featured.

But here's the funny part: the "authentic" clips are completely different recordings. If you're going to BS the masses, at least keep it straight. I mean, seriously...

If you want a sample of what I'm talking about, a cursory Google search will yield a bounty of fun. Just to get you started, there's a best-of compilation at Shoddity.com.

I'm actually surprised this hasn't gotten the dollar-store DVD treatment yet; if and when it does, my stupid ass will buy it, I'm sure.

How can you pass up a movie with lines like "...Mayor Friedman has just ordered all families near or adjacent to the Mill River to ejaculate immediately."?

Rock out with your adult male domestic chicken out

I looked out at the crowd in Yamasaki Plaza. A sea of familiar faces looked back at me expectantly. Very shortly, I'd find out if I was going to fail miserably. I looked at my keyboard, its black and white teeth smiling vacantly back at me and wondered how I got into this situation.

I blame Ajax Laundry Detergent.

Well, I guess I need to explain that a little further. One day I was hanging out at my friend Eric's house. Eric had a drum set, and we'd just kind of goof around and try to play along with whatever we were listening to. I was goofing around intermittently with the keyboard he had lying around.

"Brother and Sister" by Erasure came on, and I picked out the intro on the keyboard. Here's the song for reference:



Eric was impressed with how quickly I picked it out, hearing the song for the very first time, and asked how long I'd been playing. I told him I got my first keyboard for my 10th birthday, but I didn't really play very well. This was true; I could pick out melodies by ear, but I had a hell of a time trying to play anything with both hands at the same time.

I tried to tell him it was luck more than anything that I played it, but he didn't buy it. I felt like I was deceiving him somehow. While it was the first time I'd heard the song, the intro was similar to something else I'd listened to a kajillion times: the jingle for Ajax Laundry Detergent.

One of the CDs I listened to constantly was the TeeVee Tunes compilation of classic commercial jingles, and the "stronger than dirt" part of the jingle was similar to the intro of the Erasure song.

Yes, I realize there's an entirely good chance that I was the only 15-year-old in the world who would've made that connection, but let's just ignore that for right now.



Well, this one little thing got blown out of proportion by Eric, who told our friends that I could play anything after listening to it once, and in all honesty, I was not as diligent as I could've been in dispelling this notion.

So when it came time for the Spring Cultural Faire my senior year in high school, a few of my friends decided they'd band together and play some songs. They had a drummer and guitarists, but they needed a keyboardist for a few songs.

"Hey, Sparkman," one of them asked me, "do you think you could learn the intro to 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida' in time for the Cultural Faire?" I had put the song on a mixtape I'd made for this particular friend, so I was already familiar with the song.

They just needed me to play the introduction; I didn't need to learn the solo crap in the middle. That wouldn't be a problem, I thought.

"Sure."

"Awesome. You'll be our guest keyboardist," he told me. Another friend of ours, Nick, was going to play on The Doors' "The End."

Being the attention/affection whore that I am, I couldn't pass up a possibility to perform in front of fellow students, so I was looking forward to it.

Not so forward to it that I started to learn it as soon as I got home that day, but I was pretty jazzed about it. We went over to Eric's to practice, and everyone else was hashing out their parts. Someone would ask me how my part was coming along.

"Oh, I'll be ready," I said, which sounded positive, but was also true, considering that I had yet to try figuring it out. This was pre-Interwebs days, so it's not like I could just Google the song and get the music.

Here's part of the song. The part I was in charge of is at the very beginning.



So the weekend before I was to make my guest performance in front of my peers, I decided that I'd stalled long enough. I pulled the album out of the cabinet and put it on the turntable. After a few abortive attempts that had me seriously worried that I wasn't going to figure it out in time, I turned the record player off and tried to play it from what I had stored in my brain.

And all of a sudden, it clicked. I kicked myself after seeing how simple it was. So I spent another few minutes just trying to play it all at once without screwing up.

Within a half-hour of starting, I had it. Now I was able to go over to Eric's to practice. We ran through the song a few times, and we had it down about as good as we were going to. We were prepared.

So on the day of the actual performance, it occurred to me that I didn't know what I was supposed to do once I finished my part. It was only a few seconds long, and this was a long song. Was I supposed to sit there like a tool?

The band, Toast House (I didn't come up with the name, but I wasn't surprised at the story behind it), was introduced, and I realized that this was my moment to not screw up.

I started playing.

Aside from a minor screwup, I did okay. After playing the last note of the intro, I turned off the keyboard and went to sit in the front with the rest of the audience. The rest of the show went just fine, with one of the high points being my friends and I wondering if Richard, our guitarist/singer, was going to drop the F-bomb during his rendition of "The End."

After the performance, people I didn't talk to much would say hi or make a comment about the performance, even though I played only for a few seconds. Considering I was used to getting attention as a target of ridicule--which admittedly was seldom by the time I was a senior in high school, but old habits die hard--it was nice to be noticed for something else.

Thus I ended my rock star career while I was still on the top.

Independence Day

Happy Fourth of July, everyone! Taking the day off to spend time with the family.

To get in the 4th of July mood

Smokey Bear does not approve.

Crazy-ass pizzas

Notice the hyphen in the post title; these aren't ass pizzas that are crazy (although the very notion of an ass pizza certainly is crazy; I can't deny that).

Apparently, in 1970, since there was no Internet, no home VCRs and only a handful of channels on TV, people had lots of spare time on their hands.

At least, that's the only reason I can think of to explain these treats:



With Chef Boy-ar-dee Complete Pizza Mix and copious amounts of alcohol, you too could create such edible masterpieces. You get all the basics: sauce, flour mix and cheese.

Now, looking at these pictures, it appears that Chef Boy-ar-dee is being slightly disingenuous. I'm thinking you get a dime bag of Parmesan cheese. Any other dairy products are purely from your own supply.

These look like the pizzas (or pizza pies, if you will) I've seen in old drive-in intermission commercials for the concession stand; pizzas that appear to have been sponsored by Clearasil.

And I'm sorry, if you put sliced hard-boiled eggs and pasta on my pizza, you're getting deadlegged as soon as I catch you.

Funny-shaped cakes = good

Funny-shaped pizzas = lynching

This nightmare-inducing ad came from the Dec. 1970 issue of 'Teen magazine. Yes, the Siftin' archives truly know no bounds.

Thundercats, LOL!

I can't believe this isn't a shirt already:



And while we're talking about Thundercats, why haven't I seen ThunderLOLcats?



Oh. Right. Well. Moving along...

A writing quandry

I actually prefer writing fiction to nonfiction, not that you'd ever know it by my writing output. Aside from a brief productive period during my junior year in high school in which I managed 125 pages (not coincidentally, in the mostly pre-Internet, pre-insanely addictive guitar-based video games era), I don't get very far in my fiction writing.

Part of it is guilt, I suppose; feeling guilty that I'm taking time from my family by being hunched over the computer. Another part is the feeling that I'm wasting my time--I have nothing "important" to say.

This usually manifests itself in wondering "how the hell would I market this to someone?" The stuff I find myself writing isn't all that easy to explain succinctly. I guess you could say it's funny. I mean, I try for it to be, anyway.

But I don't see many books marketed as comedies; do you? And the humor section is generally essays and other nonfiction.

I started a story for National Novel Writing Month last year, and much like every other story I've started, I haven't finished it yet. At least with this one, I'm still interested in seeing where the story ends up.

But I find myself balancing the notion of justifying spending time and effort on something that will likely only be seen by me and a few friends with the simple fact that when it comes down to it, I have to write. I can't go long without it, lest I get headaches.

Writing: My brain's way of taking a dump.

This is not a thinly veiled plea for compliments, though I admit I have no shame and will take them. It's mostly me just wondering out loud if the stuff I want to write has an audience that makes it worth writing.

Here are a few stories I've worked on in the past few years, boiled down:

Fraternal twins celebrate the end of their 20s by going on a road trip.

Dracula's son and the Frankenstein Monster team up with other monsters to halt a zombie invasion.

A coming-of-age story about a smartass high school student.

I stop once I get to the point that I ask myself why I'm writing it. I mean, those are all interesting to me, but I'm not sure that I'm the average book buyer.

My ultimate goal is to sell a book, but first, I have to finish one, right?

When I was in junior college, the teacher offered a chance for extra credit if we a) made a list of 10 potential markets for our writing and b) submitted a piece to one of those markets.

I'd never submitted anything before, and if I didn't want the extra credit, I probably wouldn't have bothered, because damn near every book on writing tells you not to be discouraged because no one gets accepted on their first submission.

When August rolled around and I got a manila envelope in the mail with a check for $10 and a copy of the magazine my article appeared in, I was ecstatic. Yeah, it was only 10 bucks in a tiny magazine, but I got published on my first try.

A normal person would be inspired by such an event and start churning out reams of stuff, submitting it to every market that seemed to fit.

But since I'd met my goal of being published by the time I turned 21 (I actually beat it by a little over a year), the pressure was off. I set a new goal to publish a book by the time I turned 25.

This turned into 29, 30, and is now resting perilously at 35, which gives me a shade less than two years to get off my ass.

If I were smart, I'd write a story about some wiseass who keeps procrastinating when it comes to a life goal he set when he was in elementary school.

I'll write that when I get around to it. I've still got until November 2009.

Walk this way...

Taking the night off and playing Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. W00t!

My band name is FVB, which stands for Future Villain Band. Before you tell me what a craptacular name for a band that is, watch this:



Badass.