Red Gerbil Fights In Cleveland Attack!

Put down the merlot, stick a bookmark in your copy of 'Love in the Time of Cholera'. The job is far from over, ladies.

What a lot of you are doing now and calling 'feminist' amounts to living in purdah...taking a 'Womens Studies' class in college, belonging to women-only webrings, writing scathing diatribes against the phallocracy which only other women will ever read...no. It's not time to sit back on your ass and wait for you fingernails to dry. Here's one good reason why:

http://www.bratz.com/

Let it load. Turn on your sound. Feel the magic.

Quit treating the movement like a student council meeting. As long as women continue to behave like children...as long as women TRAIN THEIR DAUGHTERS TO REMAIN CHILDREN...to fear standing out, to identify 'feminine' with 'trivial' and masculine with 'everything distasteful', to value appearance above content and safety to risk, our daughters do not stand a chance!
Men are not the enemy.
COMPLACENCY IS.

the sordid truth: MJ EXPOSED

We are human, and humanity is imperfect at the best of times.
Sometimes, we fall from grace.
Still, there are those who, in falling, seek to turn away the justifiable scorn of their fellow beings with lies, falsehood and deception. They veil the harsh light of TRUTH in such a way that the shadows of pity instead fall around them.

These persons would snatch the brie from a beggars teeth, would dash the very cheddar of lovingkindness from the lips of a starveling child. Their shameless subterfuge is a veritable Cleveland Steamer dropt upon the face of every good and kind impulse.

Such a person is MJ.

Oh yes....she seemed chastened. She appeared amongst us head bowed, wearing the sackcloth of humility.
This was a LIE.



Rehab? Nay!
MJ was reporting to her superiors at THE SECRET SCOTTISH RITE OF FREE AND ACCEPTED NAUGHTY LADIES!!!!!
IMPROVED ORDER OF HEPTOSOPHS AND ZUZIMITES, VEILED ILLINOIS GRAND PHARMACISTS MILITANT.








"Approach sister and give the sign!" is the greeting our initiate hears upon approaching the entrance of the secret lodge hidden deep in the malodorous Chiliwackian fenlands.

Yes Canada has fenland.


It does.









Once the secret sign is displayed the initiate may enter.

















At first she is permitted to retain her street clothes. But not for long...this wanton wastes no time; eagerly she drops her linen in anticipation of...



The shameless mysteries of 'The Ass of Ha-Nu-Shop-Vac'


Their wild incantations ring through the marbled temple halls! "I must not fear! Fear is the mind-killer! Fear is the freaky gnome with big warts that smells weird like onions! Barada! I call upon He who walks unseen and foul ! N'gai!"


The Great Beast appears! Behold, he turns.....












Suddenly the mystic portal to the inner sanctum is revealed!!!
















MJ enters, and here she greets and joins her sister initiates in performing the Festivus Feats Of Strength!







Once their frenzied writhings have subsided their sacred Lodge Mother summons them to stand before her altar. Her gaze is merciless; keen and black as shattered obsidian! Or a tire! Or a mixture of obsidian AND a tire!










MJ performe the Ritual Canadian Inverted Obeisance!!!










"Lave your earholes with the Vasoline of truth! I bear strange messages via the kidneys of abnormality and the vesicles of remorse; yea, many and convolute are the colons of the blessed, flaccid, timeless and vaguely sonorous in the endless icy wastes! Ai! The goat with a thousand young!"

Thus begins her tale.

And SHE TELLS ALL.











In appreciation her lodge sisters grant her the Order of the Ethnic Necklace! They crown her with the mystic Lumpy Hat! Joyous, she bursts into extemporaneous song!

"La la la, I'm wearing a hat, yes, it's nice....this hat; I'm just standing here wearing it.....its lumpy...is this room cold or is it just me..."









They fete her with strange delicacies, curious cucurbits, unexpected tubers.

Ham features prominently on the menu.








Their obscene revels last until the dawn!!!!















But all things must end. Finally, she takes her leave. Crowned with the daybreak, foul with unnamed secretions, she disappears into the early morning...as anonymous and mysterious as she had first cameded.



One final ritual then ensues, one which her sisters reserve apart, a special rite only enacted upon MJ's departure from those sacred precincts...














"Oh God, you're kidding. Get it. Just get it."
"Ew, no, you get it. It's on you."
"Anybody got a comb? Or a lighter?"



note: MOST OF THE B/W PHOTOS HERE ARE FROM VINTAGE PULCHRITUDE. THIS IS A FANTASTIC SITE! I STRONGLY URGE YOU TO GO THERE AND (TRY NOT TO THINK ABOUT YOUR GRANDMOTHER) REVEL IN THE GLORIOUS FEMININITY OF IT ALL!

the talkies

Lately I've become fascinated with the classic movie channel. I don't think any of the producers or stars would be particularly flattered by my interest though; it's the quaintness of the form I find just as appealing as the performance. I feel a strange kind of pang realizing that all these beautiful faces are gone, yet I can still see them in the prime of their lives and the height of their powers, and still feel the impact of what they've made.

That impact is a strange phenomenon. You associate it with the living. To stand in the presence of a great piece of static art is like being a lone tree on a hill struck by lightning. It's over quickly although the impact remains for the rest of your life. To see a great film, to watch artifice moving and breathing and speaking is another kind of overwhelming because it feels exactly like life. It leaves a magic impression in the mind like something experienced as one goes under anaesthesia. At least in my mind, and we all know what kind of a place that is.

For that reason, the silent movies are just about too much for me to put myself through in one sitting. As full of machination as the form needs to be, when it works it nails me to the wall like nothing else does. Again, part of that impact is the poignancy of knowing that everyone involved is gone to their reward, the antique effect of the film technique, the long-gone styles in clothing and appearance. When all those elements are also perfectly executed? You watch a film like 'Metropolis' with all its glorious nightmares and wonders, and see it knowing that even the future being imagined there is now years past-that's delicious and eerie and absolutely wonderful.

In the early days when acting always meant stage performance, bland features didn't make much of an impact. Actors with open, readable expressions did. Further, their training was centered around projecting the action and the meaning to the very back walls of the auditorium. That Method transferred to the screen makes these people seem almost unbearably immediate. In many instances it makes them seem almost unbearably campy, too. But given the right kind of talent, it has the effect of carrying a very few actors directly into your presence, warm and breathing. Despite the fact that they are 'acting', despite the lack of color, despite the years that separate you. Irregardless of the truth, they are not dead.

When I was in grade school we were taken on a long drive to see a smokehouse storyteller performance. None of us really quite got what was going on; the culture was unfamiliar and the tales were about things we had no experience with, like ravens and killer whales. Add to that unfamiliarity the strange costumes and masks and the fact that the whole thing was presented in Salish... still, the method was strangely familiar. It felt familiar. So familiar, in fact, that the performance was embedded in my memory. I think there is a map of an underground river, of story, in every human mind that we are all following.

quaint vignettes from my charming rural idyll

I'm up at 4:00 this morning because my Goonybird had a bad dream. The poor kid was cursed with the vivid dreaming gene like I was, and so because I know what a waste of time trying to get back to sleep is going to be, we're up drinking coffee and watching the Disney Channel. I'm drinking the coffee. He's watching the movie.

Yesterday we fired up the DVD player and watched the movie grandma got for Christmas: The Transformers. Grandma really, really likes this movie. Grandma does not care that the critics passed it off as 'just another CGI movie with no discernible plot'. It is about robots and there are explosions and I think it is WICKED BAD. So does the Goonybird. We made so much noise watching it that it chased the Yummy Biker completely out of the house.

My daughter, the Stainless Steel Amazon, and her new husband the Lucky Bastard apparently spent the entire weekend shopping at boutiques, dining on gourmet tidbits and attempting to make me a granddaughter.
I REALLY REALLY REALLY HOPE it is a girl too. Why? Because then my revenge will be complete.


Today, after I drop the Goonybird off at her place (gaze carefully averted) and scuttle away I have to take the Playboy of the Western World off to a doctors appointment. Why? Because on top of everydamnthing else, the man has a hernia!

How on earth does someone who uses a walker get a hernia?

I may not know the answer to that, but I know how a person who uses a walker gets a bloody nose and ends up taken to the emergency room. Would you like to know how a person in a walker gets a bloody nose and ends up taken to the emergency room?

This is what happens when you get old. Men, take special note here.

One of the Playboy's dinner companions-no, not the Playboy- at the 'still sentient' table had been feeling lonely. Being a single gentleman of modest means, outcall was not in the budget; nor was pay per view. So he decided to take matters in hand.
As he was sitting on the edge of his bed, then, thinking about Lillian Gish, he missed a stroke and slipped. His fist was apparently whipping at such a high rate of speed that he struck himself on the bridge of the nose and broke it.
Blood, helped along by hefty doses of Coumadin, fountained everywhere.
He reached out for the call bell to summon a nurse. As he leaned forward, though, he began to feel faint. He simply continued to lean forward until he landed face first on the floor, the call cord still clutched in his grip. That is how the EMTs found him...passed out in a pool of blood, pants around his ankles, wang waving in the breeze, ass in the air and face in the carpet.

I think this is why my father in law has a hernia. When he told me this story I nearly got one too.


We are planning to go visit my son and his family in March. Having a son continues to be a surreal experience. I now own several pictures in which there is more than one person who is related to me by blood and that too is a surreal experience.
The guy has my sense of humor, God help him.
He is also a dirt nerd. After we had known each other for less than 4 hours we were already having a very frank and open discussion about root aphis.
We are the type of people who have taken pictures of our soil.
He has taken pictures of his soil. He apologized for not bringing them. However, when I visit I will view these pictures. We will use lots of botanical Latin. We will review current sustainable agricultural practices in the commercial nursery business. I will tour his nurseries and look upon his arborvitae and cupressus leylandii. He has promised to save me a stack of trade publications and I plan to spend an evening happily going through them with him. Because nothing says maternal bonding like pricing backpack sprayers, Kubota rootball diggers, and computerized temperature triggered greenhouse ventilation systems.

One thing I find endlessly strange is that the guy looks exactly like me back when I was in my twenties. I now know what I would have looked like as a boy. I would have been DROP DEAD GORGEOUS as a boy.

My son is DROP DEAD GORGEOUS.

...momma ain't lyin. click on it; it's worth it.

He also has three kids and he's still in his twenties; obviously he got the 'repopulate the earth' thing from me too.

The last time I saw this guy he was the size of a loaf of bread. 22 years later he comes back to visit with my attitudes, my values, my interests and my looks. I like him. Of course I love him...but I like him.
That makes two of my kids that I like.
I mean, dang.

Lest old resentments be forgot

Recently an old acquaintance from high school got in touch with me.
This is the first time this has happened. EVER. I was shocked.
Well no, more than shocked. In fact, I want to state for the record that I have never been more glad in my life that I wasn't a guy because both 'nads would have schlooped right up into my abdomen; I did not panic-I totally fucking panicked.

So the first thing I did was write porn.

The flesh having been satisfied, I set about dissecting why someone who had nothing at all invested in her high school memories should still be feeling any aftershocks at all, let alone one of this magnitude? That person being me; keep up here.

Why indeed. I may have mentioned that I did not enjoy high school. That would have been an understatement on my part and I apologize because actually it ranks closer to 'ludicrous bald faced lie' on the accuracy meter. High school was horrible. High school was a joke. An endless, excruciatingly unfunny joke told by a smelly drunken uncle who always copped a feel.

The thing was; I wasn't particularly unpopular by then; I wasn't being bullied. It was simply a matter of the daily fucking hopelessness. My parents had delivered an ultimatum: I had to maintain perfect attendance and get passing grades or I would be 'sent to a home'. They meant it. Academically speaking this was easy enough...classes were a joke. The football team was the only thing the district funded. Teachers ranted at us for entire periods about poor game attendance and 'school spirit' while I sat and watched the clock and knew I had to go home to people who referred to me as 'The Whore of Babylon'-and had to take it if I wanted to sleep in my own bed. I sat through the bullshit and turned in my assignments. I never went to the dances and I never ran for student body anything. I was sent home with 'attitude needs improvement' and 'not working up to her full potential' on my report cards.

Because I liked not being institutionalized, then, I continued to go to this place where people were genuinely concerned about volleyball tryouts. Cheerleaders snickered after me in the halls because I wore the wrong shoes and didn't shop at the Brass Plum. As far as boys were concerned I was too 'weird' to make a suitable peer trophy and so I was passed by again and again like something turning green in the reduced-to-sell meat cooler. The only person who showed anything like a personal interest in me was an English teacher in my Jr. year, the notorious Ms. T; and her interest was in getting a handful of tit.

On the one hand I'm proud that I was able to say no to that kind of exploitation. On the other hand exploitation was all that was being offered to me. I hated myself for it, but there were times that all I wanted to was five minutes of contact from someone in my everyday life. Anyone.

The guy who got in touch with me after all these years was someone I remembered as one of the very few intelligent students in that school. Wonderful sense of humor. Filled out a pair of Brittania Jeans well too. He knew I was interested. I was interested even despite the fact that he often came to creative writing class so pathetically loaded that I literally had to help him find the door, or that once in class he'd sit at his desk and trip on his hand for 45 minutes. Of course, he was 17 too, and so, of course, he was interested in something that displayed well. That something wasn't me.
I wasn't cool enough.

I was shocked at how much this still hurts and how much it still matters to me. I can tell myself that we were all kids and none of us had a clue; that matters not one tiny bit. On top of all the other major and minor indignities, apart from the shit I lived in and what kind of things I had to pull out of myself just to make it through a day...to be judged and found wanting on my 'cool' quotient still just ices the absolute fuck out of me. The shame. The rage. I can't begin to describe it; and it's all still just as vivid and bloody as it was back in 1978.

At least he stuck with his convictions. He was one of the few boys that I didn't have to send packing, who, once graduation was safely in the past came flocking around now that the 'coast was clear'.

Ah, but recent events had landed him back in the old hometown, single and feeling horny retrospective, so he opened up the old yearbooks and got as far as 'M'. Oh yeah, her...

So he got in touch. We emailed a couple of times and spoke about old times.

He denied getting stoned.
Never dropped acid.
Had no idea what I was talking about.
Bemused but friendly...until he ascertained that I wasn't single.
The next email, when it came, was offhand and terse.

High school never ends. It never fucking ends.

pirate snakes

So many overwhelming things have happened to me lately that it's difficult to sort it all out...a daughter married, a son found, Playboys relocated and two households finally merged into something resembling order after two years...what a year it's been, and it's only January!
That is why I have decided to write about pirate snakes.

The great ninja vs pirate debate has pretty much been settled...if not to everyone satisfaction, then at least to a mutually agreed upon, scientifically provable set of data:
NINJAS: GOOD

• Black outfits
• stealthy
• silent
• can do all kinds of kung fu and leaps and shit
• cool weapons

NINJAS bad:

ABSOLUTE SILENCE. even if you get hurt you can't yell or anything.
Boring clothes
Anonymous IDENTITY
Can only eat rice and fish plus you have to use chopsticks
Cannot receive mail or any packages because
They don't live anywhere.
FACT: Nobody has found the home of any ninjas.









PIRATES good:


Extremely cool outfits with lace
Cool hats
Money +jewels
Treasure!!!!!!
Sailing ships
And cannons
Muskets
Flag with a skull on it
Pistols
Swords
Daggers
Rum
SHARKS





PIRATES bad:
Frequent amputation
High maintenance lifestyle
Parrots crap on you
Substance abuse common
Getting keelhauled is bad
Scurvy
Being cabin boy
They put you in a barrel sometimes and then all the other pirates stick their weenises in there. According to Frobisher.











Now the thing that could put pirates over the top here is if they were snakes, but also pirates.

...FEEL the extreme snakey awesomeness cascading out of the screen into your lap here. I mean oh my GOD.


SNAKES: always look cool. Even when they're dead.
...I will blow the first person who sends me a jug of this. I will. Really.


Snakes have FANGS, which are not only sharp and cool looking but are like a hypodermic syringe. They inject this heinous, heinous poison into stuff they bite and you swell up and turn black and your skin splits APART. I'm totally not kidding here. Plus snakes are stealthy, are silent, are really fast, have freaky looking tongues, AND can constrict stuff.... like animals, a cow or even people! They wrap around and SQUEEZE and you turn into a big pile of squashed up guts and bones and THEN their jaw like unhooks apart and they stretch out really huge and swallow you whole with your shoes and everything, although of course they barf out all that stuff later.
And remember, snakes are viviparous OR oviparous.



BAD: there is no bad.


Think about it. You piss a snake off, it doesn't fuck around doing a bunch of kung fu stances 'Oo, this is the Crane! Oo, this is the Monkey!' No, it bites the shit out of you and you fucking die.

That's why people don't generally dick around with snakes.


You piss a ninja off, he goes wigging around for ten minutes doing leaps and shit and just generally being annoying and meanwhile you're waiting to die. Then he gets around to chucking a shirikun at your head, or they do that touch of death thing where a week later you croak off in front of the television and everyone runs around freaking out and its all mysterious. Which is smooth, but lacks a certain je ne sais quoi.

When pirates get mad first of all one of them stabs a knife into a table and says ARRRRR! Then they all start breaking bottles and running around. Someone knocks over
a candle and shit catches on fire. Then finally they stab the crap out of you with their cutlass. This is a kind of hugeass sword. Or sometimes they torture you first, then they chunk you overboard to some sharks and they all watch while the sharks eat your head and blood goes shooting out all over the place. Which is excellent but time consuming.


As should be obvious, if one were to combine pirates and snakes the result would be almost too rad for the human mind to contemplate.
PIRATE SNAKES WOULD BE:
Silent except they would hiss sometimes
Have poison fangs,
No stupid parrots crapping down the back of their clothes because they'd eat them ,plus they wouldn't have to wear clothes in the first place!
No amputation because no limbs! And the sweetest part is, if you cut one in half then that'd just make TWO snake pirates so they'd will all the sea battles!
They also have sailing ships (they'd hire ninjas to run it)


You see how this would all work out for the best here? We have the technology to grow a sheep in a jar, we have the technology to clone Christopher Reeve's spinal cord and and use it to power massive cybernetic tanks in the Antarctic, so why not use all this knowledge to update pirates so they wouldn't get their ass kicked by ninjas all the time? OK? Think of the pirates. At least think of their kids. All the ninja kids pick on the pirates' kids at school. For gods sake people, think of the children, OK?
THINK OF THE CHILDREN.

born to be tiny and spoiled

Who should come knocking on our door yesterday than our buddy Albert? Hey, Albert! Haven't seen you in awhile! Come on in!

Alberts' 2 year old Corvette is parked in our driveway. Alberts' 60 year old butt parks in one of my kitchen chairs. He's been up to a lot, and we catch up on it all at 98 mph.

Alberts one of those guys who just starts in, mid-sentence, and off he goes. This is not a man you ever, ever interrupt because it just throws his whole thing off. You have to wait for the breaks, slide in all your remarks and then heeeeee's OFFagainandherecomesanothermonologue.

During this he reached into his jacket and pulled out-what? Guess.

A brick of hash?

A flask of Jaegermeister?

A PEKINESE.

Yes, this bad man pulls out a tiny, tiny little freak dog, a scrunchy wunchie snuffly wuffly dog, and sets it on the floor.

It was wearing a pink sweater. With a hood.

He' s far from an anomaly, at least in this. You see a lot of guys, club guys, 1%ers, toting tiny ridiculous dogs around inside their coats, and its not rare to see those dogs in full outfits either. Years ago the president of the Vagos used to carry around a chihuahua named Suicide Killer. I've seen every toy breed you can imagine peeking out of a bad mans' leather jacket.

About the largest dog you can travel with comfortably on a motorcycle is a Staffie, and then it has to be on the smaller side of the breed standard. I've seen four or five Staffies in my time riding on the tank of a Harley, wearing goggles, jowls fluttering in the wind. Their owners usually glue a piece of carpet on there and the dog simply crouches down, digs in its nails and hangs on. This is, of course, illegal as hell. Imagine taking a Staffie upside the chops when his owner hits a big bump in the road. This would probably fuck up your entire outlook on the rest of the day.

Australian Sheepdogs and Border Collies will happily sit behind dad on the stock seat. But more often you see dogs poking their heads out of some kind of modified touring luggage. Beagles seem to like this. They sit in the container and poke their heads out the various holes and grin at you.
Anyone smaller than a beagle rides in dad's jacket, though. For hundreds of miles at a time. Happy as a little freak clam.

This fascinates the hell out of me. When we go to the ABATE swap this year I can guarantee you there'll be four or five guys wandering around with a buggy-eyed little freakdog sticking out of the front of their jackets like Cuato. They'll stand around in groups and talk to their buddies, just petting their doggies' head all the while. Most of these dogs will be wearing just about as much leather gear as their owners are wearing, and that gear is just about as expensive as Dads too.

When I lived in Portland there used to be this hippie guy that wore a top hat and rode around on an old Schwinn bicycle. Mounted to the front of the bike was a huge wire basket, and seated in the basket was a beagle-sized Champagne Poodle. Always. The guy was pretty nice; he was a busker and I saw him all over the place. The poodle, however, was NOT NICE. Not one little bit. That dog never left the bike, either. The guy would park his bike and that dog stayed right in the basket. Woe betide anyone who got too close or tried to pet the nice doggie. Nice doggie turned into fang faced slavering Hell Doggie. I never heard it bark. Attitude was all it needed. It simply became an eye rolling, snarling, keening monster in the blink of an eye while passers-by slowly backed away. You see, that's the kind of dog you'd think a biker would have, right? Not a bicycle riding vegetarian in a top hat.


I will never own a toy breed dog. I think it's unfair to the dog That dog's whole life is going to be spent looking stupid. Nothing you can do to it will make it anything other than stupid. Even if it's a mean little dog; nobody is going to take something the size of a guinea pig seriously, particularly when it's going yipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyip. But of course, you know that every time Albert leaves the big, bad, heavily tattooed desperado I'm married to starts making remarks like 'Wasn't that a nice little dog? What'd you think of that dog, huh?'

Oh, he has one already picked out. He wants a pug. Yes, no mere toy breed horror for this bad man. You can pay up to 900.00 for a pedigreed pug. Oh yes. And what you get is broken! You have to spend an additional 800.00 just to make the thing work right! I personally would expect a little more value for my money in that case, you know? You get a pug; they can't breathe. Their hips are all messed up so they can't walk. Their jaws don't meet correctly. When they eat they get their food packed all up their noses and then they stop and snort it out all over the place. And then once you get it working right, what does it do? Sit there and look asinine. Why? You can get the same effect with a teenager. Plus you can make them yourself, for free.

Robert Patrick UPDATED: now with more pictures!

I can't think of another actor with as interesting a career trajectory as Robert Patrick, but then it's early too. For some reason, someone early on decided that Mr. Patrick had a 'science fiction' face.

...this guy here. Robert Patrick. you know exactly who i mean.

See, that's not a conclusion I would have made. As one reviewer pointed out back in 1984, 'he doesn't look particularly creepy or villainous; he looks more like a really mean waiter'.* And in his younger years, he resembled nothing so much as one of those rough trade boys Armani used to pull off the boulevard and stick a suit on. Which was niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice.

I digress. Ahem.

Suddenly he turns up in one of the best, quirkiest science fiction screamers of the last 20 years; The Faculty.** If you haven't seen it; do so...it's that rarity, a well written, well acted scifi. (I don't even remember what the space monster looked like, but it could shoot out disgusting babies that would tunnel into your skin. Which is rad.)

Robert Patrick plays the coach of the football team. At first glance this seems like a miscast. Every high school football coach I've ever seen was fat, middle aged, bitter and drank heavily, screamed often and had delusions of past glory. Patrick, however, captured the sneering, macho, 'Head Thug' attitude perfectly. And when he goes over....oh my. Oh gracious me.

Next he crops up in That Which May Not Be Named.

...i hate even looking at the cover ew ew ew ew ew

Here he doesn't play much of a role, but he gets to add another well done, memorable scifi to his credits, and look cute in a beard. Aaaaaaand she skips over this quickly......

And then we come to Terminator 2.
I had no idea prior to this movie that a medium sized man of average looks could generate this much menace simply with an expression. Add that to the fact that he's this fucking insane evil robot that can turn into shit and grow swords out of the end of his arms and kill the fuck out of you and ruin your WHOLE day....man, everyone talked about him on the way out of the theater. "Who was that guy who played the cop? You know....'Saaaaaaaay....that's a nice bike' that guy. The melty robot guy. God he was cool!"

Next we see him pop up in 'The X Files'. And he does a creditable job here; he's vivid enough to hold his own against the glorious Dana Scully, but he was merely placeholding for Fox Mulder and everyone knew that. Which was sad; I was getting kind of sick of Mulders' weak chin and whiny problems. Mr. Patrick would have been a dynamic replacement-but of course then Dukovney returned the next season. Still, another groundbreaking, memorable scifi gets added to Bob's credits.

The next time I saw him I was sitting in the theatre next to my buddy Coon Dog watching Walk the Line. I'll be damned if Bob doesn't crop up playing Johnny Cash's hateful white-trash father. And once again, vivid enough to stand out, but this time so submerged in his characterization you have to stay and watch the credits just to win the argument 'no that is him!' And I did.

You go through Robert Patricks' filmography (courtesy of IMDb) and you find more of the same....uniform types in action-scifi contexts. One odd foray into wrestling, which we will ignore. He also does some voiceover work, and again the projects are a cut above average...among them Batman Beyond, Avatar: The Last Airbender

...an excellent kids show. of COURSE i got addicted.

and Race Bannon in the brief-lived New Adventures of Johnny Quest (which kicked ass just as much as the original one. More actually.)

Autopsy is Mr. Patricks' latest project. I seem to recall it's having been released for a short time already back around Christmas of last year (because nothing says 'I love Baby Jesus' like watching a guy run a drill into some chicks head while she screams and brain matter shoots out of the hole.) but then Seattle's a test market. A lot of things open here briefly; and those that don't fly here never see the light of day again. Of course, if it is re-released I will not be buying a ticket, because a. I have to ingest a backhoe full of tranquilizers simply to get my teeth worked on. My definition of entertainment doesn't include a medical setting. b. Robert Patrick holding a fucking scalpel? With hospital syringe restraints not quite deceased eyeballs infected with parts, stomach contents, bleeding congealed lymph with incision maggots, and matter, with eyeballs? Nooooooo, Paco. Of course I'll rent it; what I mean to say is there ain't no way I'm going to a theatre to see this IN A CROWD OF STRANGERS? Am I stupid?
Just think of the kind of person a movie like this attracts.

Shut up.

______________________________

*Either Siskel or Ebert; one of them.

** Frodo (Elija Wood, you know) was in The Faculty too, doing an excellent job and suffering beneath several layers of concealer; puberty was not treating him well at the time. Also a young man I've always suspected of being Leonard Nimoy's son. Kid had some wicked yeshiva smoulder going on. If I'd have gone to that high school, that's the guy I would have been blowi
hanging around with.

Rerun: Ecco Strophionum

Dedicated to my sweetie rat Frobisher
___________________







This image was pulled from Ebay one year ago and shows us a man in the act of exhibiting one of my bras for public inspection.

Actually no. But I think he may have just removed it. And his pants too for some odd reason. Perhaps the weather is a tad sultry where he is. (We will cling to this assumption like barnacles to a rock anyway.)

Now he could have upped the ante by describing all the little floaty spots you can see drifting around as 'orbs' and by claiming that this bra is haunted by spirits, phantoms, ghosts, boogies, spectres, Marie Antoinette, Don Knotts and Christmas Past. But no. I quote from the sellers' description: "Sorry about the spotty picture".

Whatever else he may have (we refuse to speculate) this hairy, naked guy selling a bra has INTEGRITY.

"See! Our superior spookiness has attracted a powerful phantom ally! You cannot defeat our spooky fu!!!"

This photo was posted on a ghost site. We are helpfully provided with two red arrows which point to the terrifying circular anomaly hovering above Bad Devine and Premenstrual Woman (apparently Scary Bathrobe doesn't rate supernatural hoverage.)

Now, what I find most disturbing about this picture is that there appears to be a great weight pressing down on their house which is bending the wall over on the right there like a banana. I think that they missed the REAL picture. I think while they were busy immortalizing their Dungeons and Dragons personna a BIG HONKIN UFO LANDED ON THE ROOF. And what would have totally kicked ass bigtime is, if what happened next is that they all started melting and smoking and getting big gross blisters from radioactivity and then the alien spacecrafts landing gantry thingies came spearing down through the popcorn ceiling there and skewered our trio like three badly costumed Ball Park Franks.
Now THAT would have been a cool picture.

I used to play around with hobby photography and darkroom stuff. This type of thing just makes me rabid. Ladies and gentlemen, its not a ghost. It's crud on the lens.

Now maybe Naked Guy spilled the urn containing Aunt Rita and didn't get all of her out of the carpet. Or maybe he lives atop an Ancient Indian Burial Ground. Lord knows, America teems with these; we have to fly our deceased around in airplanes because the ground is so full of dead Indians. In any event, even if what we are seeing here is particulate human, it is still DUST. And God bless him, Bra Dude may be naked, he may have bad paneling, and he may even be kinda icky when everything is said and done, but the man knows the difference between shit that doesn't exist and a dirty lens.


with a tip o' the hat to frobisher, who wondered why there were not any pictures on my blog. well, why not indeed?

IT WENT WONDERFULLY

He is not only a good man and a smart one, he is just as wild as his mother was/is. He is a family man, he is handsome, and he knows his USDA zone. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a happy ending not even Frank Capra would have touched. it is BEYOND HAPPY. he is AMAZING.
he looks like me.

I promise i'll post up-or try to-whatever pictures i get permission to post. and that there'll be a better description of the proceedings (mostly us bragging about the quality of our soil and talking about our mispent yoooths.) I gotta go. I love you all, my darlings. You are wonderful, twisted people, and being acquainted with you has made my life better (and substantially weirder).

Now go party amongst yourselves! Bring on the federally controlled substances and go take over a small rural town! ONWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARD!!!!!!!!

deep breath.......

He's coming up tomorrow with his whole family.
I am tripping hard.

I know all the words of encouragement and I am thinking clearly here, but it's still an emotional maelstrom, kids.

Don't try this at home. Trained professionals on closed course.

...WELL GODDAMMIT, THERE YA GO.

Blogger keeps chowing down on my pictures so fuck'em.

Well. I guess a few updates are in order.

My daughter eloped and broke my heart. I will never speak to her again and I hope

Nah, I'm lying. It was great!!! She looked BEAUTIFUL, she married a great guy, AND IT DIDN'T COST ME A DIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!! If you want to see the picture you have to go HERE, though. MY blog won't print them.

Ninjas are cool, but not as cool as robots. If robots break down you can repair them. Plus you can bolt on awesome stuff like laser cannons and circular saws that come shooting out of their chests and fly out and saw through stuff. You can't do that with ninjas.

I gave up a baby for adoption in 1979, and lo and behold, he found me three days ago! He is a gorgeous young man and he had a wonderful life growing up. We are still getting acquainted, but I think things are going to be great. I have five more family members now...and three of them are grand kids! What does it feel like? A BIG DAMN RELIEF IS WHAT IT FEELS LIKE. I know from bitter experience exactly what Moses' mother must have felt as she put her baby into a basket and set it adrift on the water. And when that's the best, sanest option, you know things must suck....and they did.
I am so overjoyed now that it keeps hitting me in waves. Strange? You have no idea. But very joyful too. Incredibly joyful!

My husband finished his first half of college ON THE HONOR ROLL. This is not too damn shabby for an evil, cigar chomping, tattooed old reprobate. In fact, this cigar chomping old reprobate placed in the top 2 percentile IN THE NATION.

IN THE NATION.

Y'all.

My dog smells bad. That's not news, but I thought I'd say it.

The Playboy of the Western World has moved once again, into a facility that is something in between a full-on nursing home and simple assisted care. I just went to help him get his phone service transferred and had to cut my visit short because he had a 'gentleman caller'. Once again I am pleasantly surprised, not to mention relieved and grateful, at how far care for the elderly has come since I was a child. It's nice to know that being old and sick no longer means poverty, squalor, bad smells and over-medication. These places are WONDERFUL. If anyone is having to face the time when their parents need more than you can provide, I cannot urge you strongly enough to go out there and take a look around. This place costs 2350.00 a month, with a supervising R.N. and L.N.s to administer meds and assist with other personal and medical needs. That ain't too damn shabby at all. All meals provided, trips, shopping, housekeeping, a billiards room, visiting doctors...the list goes on and on. He's private pay, but Medicaid COVERS THIS. YES.
Things have changed for the better, and I mean REALLY CHANGED FOR THE BETTER.

wack up smel the coffee

Before Jesus and my mom met we had a subscription to 'Fate' magazine.



It was actually a pretty entertaining read. Anyway, when I was a little kid I used to sneak down into the basement with a stack of them and scare the living crap out of my self, reading about demonic possession, banshees (I was convinced there was one lurking around outside my bedroom window just waiting for me to relax my guard) UFO abduction, the Loch Ness monster, The Jersey Devil, Bigfoot and all the rest. In addition to that, we owned copies of: Flying Saucers: Serious Business, Chariots of the Gods, A Gift Of Prophecy, The Sleeping Prophet: Edgar Cayce,

...Seth Speaks, The Search For Bridey Murphy, You Have Lived Before, The Lost Continent of Mu....on and on. And on. And on and on.

As I read my way through all of this I came to the realization: "Goodness me, this here is some sad made-up old bullshit isn't it?" And time has borne this out...all of the above titles have been utterly debunked. I gotta say, though, if a grade school kid can figure this out without the need to consult with The Amazing Randi, well...

I think I was lucky in that I was encountering it at the same time I was running onto the great storytellers because I learned how to recognize the 'psychological structure' of fiction, I guess you'd call it. Really, though...you read some of that shit alongside Bradbury or Tolkein and all the seams and strings show up horribly. It becomes very apparent that fiction is precisely what it is...whether it be fiction written by people who have decided that anything that happens to pop into their heads must be real because they're thinking it (like Edgar Cayce or L. Ron Hubbard), or fiction written in a cold blooded attempt to deceive (i.e. Seth Speaks, anything by J.Z.Knight.)

That's one of the things I thought was interesting about it and still do...that the mind, even the malfunctioning one, has a way of organizing things that are drawn from the imagination in a different way than it structures things experienced as an exterior event. People who are recounting a 'real' experience seem to struggle to whatever degree with what they've encountered. They don't have answers. There isn't a theme or a plot. Of course, that doesn't mean that their perceptions were accurate...it just means that they perceived that 'x' happened and they want to tell you about it in whatever words come close to getting the job done. The other stuff always has some kind of giveaway narrative or thematic structure, however cryptic. I've always thought that's part of what makes it so seductive, though. That glimmering of organization you can just barely sense is, in fact,an OCCULT TROOTH...and the trooth is, the shit's made up.



What really makes me shake my head, though, is when people continue to believe in a supernatural explanation long after the subject has been conclusively exposed as fraudulent. Take crop circles for example.

I used to make hay highways the same way in the field next door; you'd take a big cardboard box and scoot around in it to flatten the stalks down. After we'd done we'd climb up the neighbors tree and go look at the designs we made. Come on! How obvious does it have to be?


This is more complex than a hay highway, but anyone with a compass, a straightedge and some basic design layout skills could draw this. To execute it, the only supplies you need are a scaled design, a few friends, something like a surveyors stake and string, and a length of board. Come on people. This should never have needed debunking. Yet time and again, even after the creators come forward and claim responsibility, people STILL INSIST SPACE ALIENS DID IT.



You find a similar reaction to the man who was responsible for the famous Loch Ness Monster photo. The poor guy came forward shortly before he died and admitted it was all a hoax, yet no one wanted to believe him. He still had the fricken' toy submarine he used to fake 'Nessie'!



Using the original prop, they recreated the photo, and lo and behold!

Nessie sails again! Irregardless of which people are still spending God knows how much money every year to go annoy fish in Scotland. Loch Ness has got to be the most well explored body of water full of the most pissed-off fish on the face of the earth. Not to mention home to the most well-documented case of non-existence. Every single year they rediscover the same exact thing: There is no Nessie, no swimming elephants, no mutant anaconda, no landlocked whales, no pleisiosaur. Truthfully I wish there were a Nessie, and I wish it was a pleisiosaur because it would be completely badass if if were a pleisiosaur, but it is not, because they are extinct. Coelecanths have nothing to do with it.

...innocent, and delicious

Everyone always bring up coelecanths here. 'Well, ' they say, 'the coelecanth was thought to be extinct but it turned out not to be, so there!' The problem with this argument is that people have been catching and eating coelecanth for hundreds of years in blithe disregard of the fact that some twat in a museum decided they didn't exist. Not so Nessie. The only eyewitness documentation we really have for the existence of a Loch Ness Monster is that time St. Columba yelled at it.

...don't make him admonish you. 'cos he will.

Of course once he yelled at the Loch Ness Monster it hoofed ass and nobody's seen it since, so there ya go. Blame him.



Then thars Bigfoot.
I cannot believe this shit is still around. This is one of those things thats so excruciatingly fake it makes spoon bending look plausible by comparison.
It stands to reason that if you run into a big, hairy, smelly thing in the woods, there's a better than 50% chance that IT IS A CANADIA
A BEAR.
It's the damn woods, people. Bears live there.

...someone at Steiff has a very peculiar sense of humor

Something a lot of people don't know is that your basic wild bear rolls in all kinds of nasty shit like a dog does, by which I mean they are BAD FUNKY. A bear also stands on it's hind legs and walks when it feels like it, and if it has an opinion it needs to voice it will. Your average person thinks 'bear' and pictures Dan Haggerty's loveable buddy. Or Dan Haggerty himself smeared in Vaseline, hanging from an engine hoist with his ankles handcuffed together, wearing leather motorcycle chaps and smoking a cigar. But when they run into something on the way to the outhouse at 2:am that's 6 feet tall, smells loudly of ass and screams when it gets scared, they don't think 'bear'. The conclusion they jump to is Bigfoot. That conclusion is wrong. It could be Dan Haggerty. If it smells like Vaseline it probably is.

Footprint casts? Don't even.

Look at this. That's just sad. If you're gonna fake something, put a little effort into it; geeze.

The 'hair' they find has always been proven to be either BEAR HAIR or PRIMATE HAIR.
Hint: we're primates. So if it wasn't a bear, that only leaves one thing: HOLLER MONSTERS.

...I seen 'em

Now I am here to tell you from my own experience that there are in fact some awesomely inbred nutty motherfuckers running around out there in the Mt. Baker Wilderness Area; and they don't wear pants of they don't feel like it. And just like nutty people will mess with you on the bus in town? Nutty people will mess with you in the woods, too. They do not care. If you are in the woods and they are in the woods they will mess with you. That's just how they roll. No, the big mystery here is why don't the bears get on the damn job and eat them? As we all learned from Timothy Treadwell, bears only put up with a limited amount of shit from nutty people.


Now maybe that's just Alaskan bears. Short-temperedness in bears could be regional; we don't know. Maybe Mt. Baker bears are the peaceful hippie-bears of the bear world. I'm not going to run out and stick a daisy up ones' tailpipe, though.


As far as UFO sightings go, I've known a lot of people who have claimed they've seen one. George, for example, has seen a UFO.

That's the category most UFO witnesses fall into, at least in my experience. Then there's the segment of the population who don't normally qualify for that distinction but who were having a 'George moment'.

And we've all had them, kids. Admit it. Eat some of that Alice fudge; you'll have one.

I did see something one time that I think might go along way towards explaining a lot of UFO sightings, though. I was standing on a hillside overlooking a small clearcut. It was a sunny day, but with large clouds overhead. I saw a movement up near a snag at one side of the clearcut, and as I watched a brilliant silver ball flew out of the top of the dead tree and circled over the clearcut a few times, during which I experienced a mild coronary event.



It was about the size of a cantaloupe and as shiny as polished chrome. Then the object tilted to one side. Immediately it darkened and resolved into a small kite shape, which sailed back into the snag and landed on a branch. I had my binocs, and when I got a closer look it turned out to be a little saw-whet owl.

Now those two pictures bear no resemblance whatsoever to each other, do they? But thanks to a trick of perspective and refraction, the shiny surface of the feathers on the owls' back caught the light in such a way that it reflected the sun like a mirror.
I picked up a rock and chunked it at the base of the tree, and the little owl startled up and flew around again-sure enough, when it was banked a certain way it appeared to be a silver circle for a few moments.

Am I saying that UFOs are actually stupid, highly reflective owls who might think they're really funny but aren't funny at all? Since that time I've seen the same light effect on swans and on, of all things, chickens. So yes, I guess I am. Some of them are birds, anyway. The rest of them are real.

No, ha ha, that is a joke! No, FirstNations is just running her toes through your brain there; I think UFOs are 99% horseshit, 1/2 % USAF and 1/2% birth trauma artifact.

Do I know* that? Nope. But neither do you, so get off my case.



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* If its certainty you're looking for, go HERE. They have a whole great big boatload of it.