serizawa3000

I AM the button...

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 17:35:56 GMT

*sigh*
I can UNDERSTAND some of the MST3K hate.
It's just the struggle to NOT AGREE with some of it these days...
* You're a filmmaker. You've maybe busted your hump trying to put a picture together, and after things settle down, some golden spider duck and crimson pig are on TV calling Alan Hale Jr. a "pork vacuum" or, if you're Ray Dennis Steckler, saying very TERFY things about your wife.
* You're Thom Yorke, and someone just described you as a "heroin vacuum" to the MTV viewers.
* You're a documentarian, and for whatever reason your student film has been unleashed on an unwitting audience of Sci-Fi Channel viewers.
*You're Joe Don Baker. Never mind Walking Tall or being in James Bond movies or whatever, everyone bugs you about Mitchell.
* You're someone who's never called by their name anymore; now you're "The Paper Chase Guy" or "The Fish-Lipped Guy".
*You're a regular Frankie fan, going to Rocky Horror nights at the local movie theater. Then you read Kevin Murphy's A Year at the Movies, where in the entry on going to the theater on Halloween, he tears mercilessly into Rocky Horror and its fans. Pot, have you met Kettle? Never mind.
*You like to go to the Renaissance Festival. And then, you go and find what Kevin Murphy (again!) wrote about RenFests and Fairegoers, taking digs at the SCA as well, reminding us that Ye Olden Tymes weren't ideal because they didn't have antibiotics or paved roads, but apparently not knowing (or worse, knowing and not caring) that the first ever Renaissance Festival was established to raise funds for Pacifica radio AND provide work for blacklisted actors.
*You prefer Joel to Mike because (from your POV) Joel kept the show from getting too mean. You can hardly watch any of the Sci-Fi Channel episodes because you think they're just vitriolic at times, you enjoy the new episodes with Jonah and Emily, you donate to Joel's Kickstarter for Season 14, and it flops... and about a year later Mike and his Rifftrax crew start up a Kickstarter and it's a success. And more recent news has you thinking "Joel has left the show... again."
*You like Patton Oswalt and some troll on a board is immediately like "He's not funny".
*You're a Creature Feature host, one of many across the country, trying to keep your show going for whatever market you have, when some Minnesota prop comic's UHF-based show suddenly hits a new cable channel.
*You just like cheesy movies whether they're riffed or not. You think about likely candidates while everyone else is doing the "throw it at the wall and see what sticks, watch the world burn" shtick, naming films that really wouldn't be likely candidates.
*You like movies and never cottoned to the idea of goofy cowtown puppets talking over them in the first place.

Anyway.

(Like a lot of things I write, when I remember to, this was long percolating)

*vehemently slams fist down on button, breaking it*

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Remembering the "You are free to write garbage" tip for writers

Sun, 21 Sep 2025 20:26:23 GMT

A face from a dozen 1950s science fiction films appeared on the screen: huge round multifaceted eyes like an insect, an enormous exposed brain threaded with blood vessels, a triple-jawed toothy beak for a mouth. Curiously, the BEM wore a black suit and tie, its pocket square impeccable, keeping in mind said suit was tailored for someone with huge shoulders and almost no neck at all. The creature was holding a sheaf of papers in one armor-plated hand. The insect eyes seemed to squint as a voice out of old radio dramas said “This is Herald the Square, speaking on behalf of the Powers That Be. We have been trying to reach one Miss Velvet Plutonium in regards to a recent incident where property was damaged and or absconded with in a remote sector of the galaxy. We may not have your little homemade planetoid surrounded, but it can be before you can say—”

“Jack Robinson,” said Velvet, fists on hips.

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Oh jeez, look who's at the food court in the Velvet Plutonium Galactic Emporium...

Sun, 21 Sep 2025 14:10:31 GMT

"At one table a tall, thin, gray-haired man with serious eyebrows and a dark suit jacket thrown on over a plain gray T-shirt was having a quiet but animated conversation with a much, much shorter man in white tie and, oddly, an old leather aviator’s helmet with goggles. The latter was looking at a map through a monocle, not saying anything, but nodding while the gray-haired man spoke."

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Um

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 21:58:43 GMT

Over twenty-odd years ago I saw 8MM (long story short, screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker wasn't terribly happy with the end result, and not just because the filmmakers ignored the "WE NEVER SEE HIS FACE" bit of stage direction about Machine), and one of the things that stuck with me was a throwaway line from Max California (Joaquin Phoenix, and I don't want to think about how he got into character for this role) about "Gothic hardcore" and it was in my nature to immediately go "What? WHERE?"

I mean, "Gothsploitation" I am faintly aware of, and, yes, I know all too well about Rule 34, but really, what are the chances of a "Big Ti**ie Goth GF Experience: the Movie" floating around out there...?

I might imagine a lot of poorly lit outdoors shots where they try to make it look like a cemetery, fog machines cranked up to eleven, a lot of glasses of claret falling over, and a sort of reverse tan lines thing where the pallor of the performers' faces fades into less pale from the neck down...

(Maybe Voltaire would know, but I dare not ask.)

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...

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 12:41:36 GMT

So I guess the Silly Million-Dollar Question is "Why does a story about the Last Man on Earth begin with a twelve-year-old boy lost in the mall, and the kindly (and, presumably, incredibly cute) Goth girl who keeps him company until his parents find him?"

(He isn't lost; he knows where he is. He's sitting on a bench in front of what used to be an Aladdin's Castle but closed now.)

In The Neverending Story (the book, peeps; I know that the movie figures in nearly everyone's memory, but over thirty years ago I read the book in a single gulp), one of the things that stuck with me--and it's a major plot point, even--is how Bastian winds up in Fantastica and meets the Childlike Empress, however briefly, and his wanting to see her again (along with Xayide getting her hooks in him) is what drives the rest of the story until Bastian--well, I'm not giving THAT away...

Anyway.

Part of it is trying to write it from the POV of a 12-year-old (3rd person). Is he going to be sophisticated enough to decide that Velvet is easy on the eyes? That she smells like vanilla and cinnamon? That her coat looks like it could have been made from the shaggy purple pelt of one of Cookie Monster's unlucky cousins? Is he going to be THINKING "Nice boots"? I thought not, so he did not. I put in a moment where he does his best to NOT check out the neckline of her Little Black Dress. His dad gets in a "Okay, you can say goodbye to your punk rock girlfriend" as they're all leaving. His mom is "At least she didn't try to drink your blood" and NOT joking. (Cue creepy stories of the old country.)

I was wondering if he was going to be seeing her again, maybe when he's older, like at a science fiction convention where she's a celebrity guest... and she remembers the boy in the mall...

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So... there's a Word document where there wasn't one before...

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 03:09:53 GMT

Josh was twelve, and twelve was too old to be getting lost at the mall. And he wasn’t lost, not really; he knew where he was. It’s just he didn’t know where Mom and Dad were. One moment he had been following them to the discount furniture store, and one bathroom break later, it was like they had been spirited away by flying saucers, minus the lightshow. He couldn’t find them at the furniture place, but he remembered Dad saying that was where they were headed.

What do you do when you’re lost? Stay in one place, but that was if you were in the woods. He really would have liked to go to Waldenbooks, but no, he decided that he should probably go to the front entrance, because that was where they had come in. Going outside to wait by the car might have worked if it weren’t utterly lousy with rain.

He settled at one end of a bench facing what used to be his favorite place to go on mall visits. Just a couple months ago, it had been alive with electronic lights and sounds, and people fed quarters into machines to engage in battle with aliens, or race cross-country, or face off against each other at air hockey. There was even a mini-golf course further back, made to look like the surface of the moon, complete with a little lunar lander. Now it was dark and empty, the security shutter pulled all the way down. Even the sign over the entrance was gone. But the pizza place next door was still in business, and if he had the money for a slice he would have gone there.

He looked at his watch. Quarter after four. It was Sunday, which meant the mall closed at five o’clock. People bustled past, going about their lives like normal. His eyes prickled and watered. At least he didn’t need to take a bathroom break.

That was it. He’d had to use the bathroom—one along the way because most of the stores didn’t have public restrooms--and that’s when Mom and Dad had disappeared. Had they marched on to their destination, bought a table lamp or whatever, and just gone back out, presuming he’d been good and was still following them? Was this what happened when you made an unscheduled pit stop? Your parents just abruptly forget you exist?

His stomach was doing that thing where it felt like it was sinking into his feet when the vampire girl sat down at the other end of the bench. At least, that was his first impression. She was like nothing he’d ever seen before, despite looking a lot like a young woman. He tried not to stare too much, looking at his sneakers instead. At twelve, he was somewhat aware of punks and metalheads, but he had never heard of Goths; were he to see one in the wild, he probably would have mistaken them for a punk. Or a vampire.

Josh dared to glance in her direction when their eyes met. She smiled at him. She had bright blue eyes and purple hair, purple lipstick, and wore a purple coat that looked like it had been fashioned from the shaggy pelt of one of Cookie Monster’s less fortunate cousins. Josh went back to staring at his shoes, wishing that the arcade was still a thing, the lights and sounds distracting him from the general discomfort of being lost, but no, he wasn’t lost, he knew where he was. On a bench with a stranger. A pretty stranger, but he was twelve, and… he had no idea how old she was. Older than he was, in any case. His eyes prickled and watered, and it hurt to breathe a little.

“Are you okay, little man?” The voice was soft, husky, gentle. Josh dared to look at the vampire lady. She was looking at him, smiling. She had braces. Mom would have said something unpleasant about the lady having too much makeup on, or her skirt being too short. Josh was oddly reminded of Tinkerbell from Peter Pan, or a ballet dancer; the lady’s dress—what he could see of it under the shaggy purple coat—was black and frilly and lacy. Her legs were covered by black and white striped stockings, and on her feet were shiny black boots with very pointy toes. Her smile widened. “Yes, I’m talking to you. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to. You know, just nod for yes, or a headshake for no.” For a vampire, her teeth weren’t all that pointy, and vampires probably didn’t have braces.

His eyes prickled some more. She was blurry when he looked at her. He managed to shake his head. He sniffled as quietly as he could. He was twelve. Big boys don’t cry.

“Are you lost?”

He shook his head again. “I know where I am.” He waved a hand at the metal shutter. “That used to be my favorite place to go, and now it’s gone. Like Mom and Dad.” And he rubbed his eyes and tried to be quiet.

When Josh could see again, he was vaguely aware that the lady was talking quietly to someone he hadn’t noticed before, a man with flyaway graying hair and a scruffy beard, dressed in a silver spacesuit, wearing goggles and holding a video camera.

And looming behind this apparent astronaut was an enormous figure that made Josh briefly scared for his skin. It stood on two surprisingly bony legs, but its chest, shoulders, and arms were huge with muscle. It had a head like a Tyrannosaurus rex, with yellow eyes, and sickly yellowish-green scaly skin. It was dressed for wrestling or the circus, with black trunks over dirty gray tights, and a dirty gray long-sleeved shirt. Black boots, tightly laced. The left hand wore a black glove. There was no right hand, but something like a huge metallic crab claw. A metal antenna sprouted from the top of the dinosaur head, which was partially covered by a tight black cowl. The creature hardly moved, but it wasn’t a statue like Josh had hoped. He was thinking, remembering when Dad explained to him that the Creature from the Black Lagoon was a man in a suit, and not a real monster. This was someone in a suit. A big someone, or a big suit.

The vampire lady had scooched over on the bench a little. She smelled nice. “What’s your name? Maybe we can help.”

Josh wasn’t sure what to do or what he wanted. He thought about heading for the car, if it was still there. He looked at the lady, then at the astronaut, who smiled politely. The dinosaur wrestler raised its metal claw in what looked like a friendly manner. Josh managed to mumble his name and looked at the floor. “Am I on TV?”

“No, Josh, not unless you want to be.” The astronaut held up the camera to show that it wasn’t recording anything. “Maybe we should introduce ourselves.”

The lady chuckled. “I was just thinking that. Josh, my name is Velvet.” She touched her right hand over her heart, and Josh managed not to look at the neckline of her little black dress. “This is my uncle, Orion.” The astronaut saluted. “And keeping a close watch on things is the former Interdimensional Heavyweight Wrestling champion, Flubb Dinoslammer.” The creature waved with its left hand. Just three fingers and a thumb. Josh waved back in spite of himself, and Flubb Dinoslammer seemed to smile.

A voice on the PA system said the mall would be closing in thirty minutes.

Velvet had scooched a little closer. Josh thought about scooching away, but not much. “So how can we help you, Josh? We’re old hands at traveling through space and time. We’ve eaten food court fish and chips in more solar systems than can be counted on the fingers of both hands. We collect lost things and lonely people.” Her eyes were huge and blue, the dark makeup around them making them look bigger. Silver rings glittered on her fingers.

“I don’t want to be collected. I just want to go home with Mom and Dad. I’m twelve, I shouldn’t be getting lost. I’m not lost. I know where I am.”

Velvet looked sad for a few seconds. “I know, honey, I know,” she said, very quietly. Then a little more audibly, “This captain’s lost his crew.” The astronaut held out a battered satchel, placing it almost reverently on the bench between Josh and Velvet, who fumbled it open and started rummaging. Three mismatched socks—one striped, one spotted, one bright pink—were produced, then crammed back inside. A bag of marbles. An orange. Something that looked like a cross between a TV remote and a plastic dinosaur. Orion shook his head and said that the Nucleoprotonic Dinotransmogrifator was not ready for humans to use. Velvet’s rummaging became more frantic. The satchel wasn’t very big, but the lady’s arms were in it almost to her elbows. Josh thought he might fall in if he got too close.

Orion bent down and whispered something. Velvet nodded, and the astronaut went towards the mall entrance, hoisting the camcorder onto his shoulder. Flubb Dinoslammer tottered after Orion on his spindly legs. Some people looked surprised, but not a few seemed not to notice. Velvet mumbled something and pulled out more bits and bobs: a rubber duck, a bag of licorice, a coffee mug purporting to be from the Maryland Renaissance Festival. She would look at each item, make a little disappointed huffing sound, and put it back in the bag.

Finally: “Eureka!” Velvet held up an action figure. It was a miniature Flubb Dinoslammer, nearly perfect in its details, complete with a stubby head antenna and the metal crab claw where the right hand would be. It had the heavily-muscled arms and chest of a Masters of the Universe figure, but the legs were different, starting out muscular but becoming longer and thinner below the knees. Even the dinosaur head was the same shade of yellowish-green.

Velvet held out the little dino-headed wrestler to Josh. “I think you need him most.”

Josh’s eyes prickled some more. He held up a hand to accept this gift, remembering how teachers, police, and Mom and Dad would say not to talk to strangers, accept no gifts from strangers, don’t answer the door if you don’t know who it is, let the answering machine pick up the phone calls, and he didn’t know why he wasn’t scrambling off the bench and running towards the parking lot. Surely, if she really was a vampire and wanted to drink his blood, she would have done it by now, even if this weren’t a monster movie.

His fingers curled around the cool, molded plastic. The little dinosaur head grinned up at him with ivory-colored carnivore teeth. He wanted to say thanks, but couldn’t get his mouth to work. He blinked a couple tears away. She smiled at him, eyes shining.

“Josh? There you are. Have you been here all this time? The mall is about to close.” Mom and Dad were there, having appeared as abruptly as they’d disappeared seemingly hours ago. And then Mom was apologizing to Velvet about something, but Velvet was smiling sweetly, saying there was no need; Josh wasn’t a bother at all, she knew how to babysit, she thought he was lost and decided to keep him company. That’s nice to know, we thought he was scared of clowns. No, Velvet wasn’t a clown, but she often worked with them. Further polite pleasantries were exchanged, and it was time to go. Josh stood up. Velvet stood up. Josh joined his parents, and Velvet walked alongside them; they were all headed in the same direction, after all.

Outside, the sky was still a cloudy gray, but the rain had stopped.

“Would you look at that,” Dad said.

Josh thought it was a fire truck at first, but fire trucks were red or yellow, not silver. It looked like a bus, but with not as many windows, and the tires looked more serious. Flubb Dinoslammer was standing beside an open door in the vehicle’s side, waving with his claw at people. Orion was there too; he had taken off his goggles, and had changed out of his silver suit into a maroon jumpsuit. He stood in the vehicle’s doorway at the top of a little flight of metal teps, taking pictures with a Polaroid camera.

“We are not getting one of those,” Mom said. “Not one that big, anyway.”

Velvet came to a stop at the shiny silver vehicle. “This is where we leave you, Josh. Our planet needs us.” She put on little sunglasses with round red lenses and gave Josh a thumbs-up using both hands. “You might catch us on TV if your folks let you stay up late.”

Orion chuckled softly. “Somewhere in the universe is a mall where the arcade is still in business and, there’s a Mystic Marathon cabinet with my name on it.” He offered a business card to Mom, who took it and handed it to Dad.

Josh stopped for a moment, then held out his gift to Dad. “Could you hold this?”

“Where’d you get this? Looks weird.” Dad looked at the mini Flubb Dinoslammer, and the mini Flubb Dinoslammer grinned back at him.

“She gave it to me, I know that I’m not supposed to—”

“It’s okay, Josh. You can say goodbye to your punk rock girlfriend.” Dad said it to be funny, Josh knew that, and he knew it would have been worse if Mom had said it.

Josh went over to Velvet. She was taller than him, but shorter than Mom. He tried to look her in the eye and succeeded. She smiled at him, and he would have liked to say something, but he didn’t know what to say. He reached out to her, feeling like he was five years old, and found himself gently, all-too-briefly enveloped in warmth and softness and a sweet aroma. He sniffled. “It’s okay, Josh. It was nice to meet you today.” Velvet and gently patted him on the back before letting him go.

Velvet’s astronaut uncle took two Polaroid pictures of Josh and Velvet standing side by side, she with her arm around his shoulder like they were buddies. Josh got to keep the one that looked better, shook hands with Orion, and then he was off with his parents to the family car.

“What was that all about?” Dad didn’t sound angry or anything, but curious.

Josh took a breath, let it out, took a breath. “You said you were going to the furniture place but I had to use the bathroom and when I got to the furniture—”

“Oh. We weren’t headed to the furniture place, we were going to Gee Bee.”

“Gee Bee?”

Mom sighed. “We almost went to mall security, but Dad remembered that you usually go to where the video games are.”

“So I guess it was good I didn’t go to Waldenbooks.”

“Well, we looked for you there just in case.” Dad and Josh were the big readers. “I didn’t know they closed the arcade. Unless they relocated it.”

“Relocate?”

“Moved the games to another part of the mall. But I’m guessing they’re gone for good.”

“Who was the girl?” Mom sounded a little impatient. “She looked like a mime.”

“She said her name is Velvet. She’s on TV or something.”

“Like Creature Feature,” Dad said in a Dracula voice. “Saturday nights after the news, when you’re supposed to be sleeping.”

“I’m sorry,” Josh said, the Flubb Dinoslammer figure clutched in one hand, the picture of himself and Velvet in the other. “I remembered to stay put.”

“It’s okay, Josh. You’re not in trouble. It was just a miscommunication. We should have said we were going to Gee Bee in the first place. But on the plus side, you had a little adventure and met someone nice.”

“You were lucky she didn’t want to drink your blood,” Mom said abruptly.

Josh wondered if he was going to have to listen to another of Mom’s creepy stories from the old country about some child who got lost in the woods and was eaten alive by wolves, but she said nothing more about it on the ride home. Instead, Mom and Dad talked about things that Josh wasn’t sure he understood, and there was a pre-season football game on the radio. He looked at the gift Velvet had given him, and it looked back at him with googly eyes. He looked at the Polaroid, at Velvet’s smile, the purple hair and the fluffy purple coat.

When they got home, the Flubb Dinoslammer figure went on top of Josh’s bookshelf, leaning slightly back against the wall because it had trouble standing upright on account of the toy’s skinny legs, and the Polaroid of Josh and Velvet was pinned to the bulletin board in the kitchen, beside the old picture of Dad receiving some kind of commemorative plaque in recognition of something or other at his job.

In time, Josh took the Polaroid with him to college, keeping it in a photo album amid pictures he’d taken with his own camera, pictures from visits to Renaissance Festivals, museum trips, and assorted fantasy, horror, and science fiction conventions. It was on one happy occasion at a sci-fi convention, a month shy of his twentieth birthday, that Josh met Velvet again, and the purple-haired dimension-hopping Goth lady happily remembered meeting the little boy who turned out not to be lost in the mall after all.

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This was from over THIRTY YEARS AGO...

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 15:32:28 GMT

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_This_Once

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So... uh...

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 03:33:36 GMT

I feel a little like this is the literary equivalent of eating a Twinkie instead of a granola bar.

Copilot is ubiquitous with assorted Microsoft things, but it can be switched off, so there's that.

But, oh... um. In spite of EVERYTHING, I did NOT turn off Copilot, O Best Beloved. Out of the desire to satisfy some sort of curiosity, I typed something into the prompt and clicked "Send". Just like I used to do with Craiyon, trying to get the program to create images of Godzilla playing chess with Robby the Robot, or Tank Girl as Richard Corben might have drawn her, or... whatever.

Anyway. I typed, I clicked "Send", and... Word eventually regurgitated a three-page story at me. And it wasn't completely awful. I mean, there were some choices I wouldn't have made, like the name of the POV character, or the flavor of ice cream, but there were bits that might even be of use.

Maybe that's what was so saddening about it. One of the tricks of writing is making it look effortless. Remembering one person's declaration of how "I wrote this on the flight from New York to L.A." Sure, I popped out a novel in a month MANY years ago, but still. I was in something like literary Goblin Mode, trying to write garbage.

I'd once heard the news of how some software programmer came up with a computer program that could "write" in the style of a particular author. Jacqueline Susann. That was over THIRTY years ago.

And now we have Chatbots and... Copilot...

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a sheet of blank paper to stare at...

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True story, inasmuch as it matters to anyone...

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 21:23:05 GMT

(Just noting it down YET AGAIN as I have done in my notebooks as if I need reminding...)

Over thirty years ago, I wrote an odd little story that was inspired somewhat by some of the odd things I remembered from a dream... and I added dinosaurs. Like the ones in those photo collages by David Peters. It went down like a lead balloon in Creative Writing Class, but about a year later I went at it from a different angle. I was thinking, funnily enough, of trying to write something that could become an episode of HBO's Tales from the Crypt: some weird goings-on, scary stuff, a plot twist near the end... it was shaping up to be a story about two girls--sisters, no less, possibly twins--who performed a summoning and didn't have a specific, er, spirit in mind, so... they ALL showed up. In the backyard of the girls' house. i decided to tell the story from the POV of the boyfriend of one of the girls. Since this was before the internet was really A Thing, I went to the library to look up occult books. My friend Walter had a HUGE book comprising a certain magical system, which he let me look at, but after a weekend I returned it to him because just having it in the house was bothering me despite having barely looked at it, even if the walls didn't ooze or whatever. I kept doing research and writing stuff down, wondering if I could find this Kabbalah that Walter had mentioned, and then The X-Files episode "Die Hand die Verletzt" made its debut and some of the wind went out of my sails. I kept writing, putting the occult focus on the back burner as I thought about the characters and the relationships between them, and I was thinking about how my story's narrator and his girlfriend became an item, and so while still muddling about the story of "two girls accidentally summon all the demons", I started writing a story that initially started out as that of an amateur theater group working on a play, but eventually that went by the wayside in favor of... a bunch of stuff. A river port town started taking shape, with quirky, artsy characters, a park full of monster statues... thousands of words, but in the end, nothing has really come of it. Sometimes I'll open the files to look at them, and wonder if there's anything what could be salvaged from it. Some of the people in the writer's group liked what they heard of it...

And then I wrote a novel about a battle of the bands, published it online on a website, but no one bothered to read it so I took it down.

...

All because of the delusion that I'm good at this sort of thing...

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sigh

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 21:20:20 GMT

One type of comedy I kind of have difficulty with comes from where the comedian feigns cluelessness about what would seem to be common knowledge. Philomena Cunk might be the pinnacle of this brand of humor. Before Cunk, Mo Rocca did well by it on those VH1 "I Love the 70s/80s/etc." shows. Even the SOL gang on MST3K got into it a bit when (during their Sci-Fi Channel specials) Mike keeps referring to Halloween H2O as "Halloween Water" and Crow MANGLES Djimon Honsou's name into something I won't repeat here.

So... it exists, and, well... I find it irritating. And I'm trying to figure out whence the pebble in the shoe.

Part of it is probably that urge to correct a mistake (which SNL touched on in a decades-ago Weekend Update where Jimmy Fallon (I think) bellows "NERD ALERT!" at Tina Fey as she starts correcting him because he was mangling some LOTR-related news). A lot of "I'm right, you're wrong" back-and-forth, as well.

But I find myself thinking about when Jay Leno took over The Tonight Show. One of Jay's segments was "Jaywalking", where Jay would take microphone and camera crew on the street and ask questions of people they met (a tradition as old as television itself at least, and presumably older. Fry and Laurie call this sort of thing "Vox Pops"). Really EASY questions. And four times out of five, the people questioned would get those answers wrong. Some of these people became popular enough to appear repeatedly, eventually at the Tonight Show studio itself to participate in a quiz segment to provide more wrong answers to easy questions...

It was one of the most depressing things I'd ever seen.

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Huzzah?

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 18:38:39 GMT

When I was eight, I got to see an outdoor performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream at Wilson College in Chambersburg. Of course, being eight, with Shakespeare not quite a concept to me (aside from Christopher Reeve posturing with a talking skull on The Muppet Show), I didn't quite understand what I was watching, but I wasn't bored. Bottom, with his borderline-taxidermist ass head and later "performance" in the Pyramus and Thisbe segment were what stuck with me.

In 1987, during a busy week of a busy summer (my aunt was getting married) I caught a sizable chunk of the famous yet obscure Flying Karamazov Brothers production of The Comedy of Errors on PBS, and if I knew then what I know now I would have popped a tape in the VCR and hit RECORD (famous because it's the Flying Karamazov Brothers, obscure because there's no official home video. No, I don't know why. Thankfully, the whole thing is now on YouTube).

In 1991, the high school Drama Club put on The Taming of the Shrew (the workshop with the Foot in Mouth Players was my favorite).

In 1997 (and no, I don't know why I didn't go sooner; maybe I was invited, maybe I weren't), I went to the Maryland Renaissance Festival for the first time (despite all the vicious digs made by a certain Minnesota-based TV show about "good-natured" riffing of "bad" films) and maybe THAT was the beginning of it all?

What am I trying to tell myself? That I should join a long-haired comedy troupe? (My hair was a lot longer for a long time.) I can't juggle or play an instrument...

Maybe if I dug a tunnel to 1997...

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Wonders of the East?

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 18:36:52 GMT

"Jordanus, of course, had never seen a dragon. I think it improbable that any had survived to within a thousand years of his time. Like many another learned man he was copying his story from some other manuscript, perhaps combining two or three sources and trying to make sense of them where they contradicted each other. These sources would also be copies of yet other copies and re-tellings, going back to a time when the tradition lived only in the spoken word, and eventually to some traveller who had actually seen the dragon-flight. Still dragon-lore dies hard, though it may become twisted in the telling. In particular the punctuation of early manuscripts is non-existent, so that it is difficult to tell which bits of the argument really belong together."

--Peter Dickinson, The Flight of Dragons

(There is a movie based very loosely on the book but anyway.)

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ridiculous random thought

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 19:33:46 GMT

If Wayne's World were to be made today, there would be a "NO WONDERWALL" sign in the guitar shop...

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So tasty!

Sat, 22 May 2021 19:08:18 GMT

I started playing Monster Hunter World. I know, I know, it originally come out in 2018, but I didn't have an Xbox One back then, and it's been just a little over a year since I got the one I have. (I had originally gotten Monster Hunter for the PlayStation 2, but I didn't stick with it, but anyway.) And, well... I'm having fun, so I guess that's all right. Also, while there's still the thing where you cook meat out in the open, it's nice to have a canteen where a bunch of anthropomorphic cats do the cooking for you...

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Welp...

Mon, 03 May 2021 02:17:13 GMT

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remembering things

Sun, 18 Apr 2021 19:27:41 GMT

Thinking about stories I read as a kid in children's magazines. Most specifically, a series about a boy named William who, due to the circumstances of stories like this, acquires a fairy godmother. Now William is a present-day (well, early 80s) kid, and the fairy godmother doesn't have a wand or wings, and does not hail from the land of summer's twilight. Instead she's immensely tall, solidly built, and dressed like an aviatrix from the dawn of powered flight, complete with leather helmet and goggles. She's from Tibet (though the illustrator drew her as not looking very Asian at all). And her magic is a little iffy. These were stories meant to inform as well as amuse, and after the introductory story where the magic and suchlike is explained (and a promise from William to eat healthier), there's a pattern of the magic acting up, William meeting someone about his age from another country (perhaps by visiting the other country), and learning what life is like for a kid in that country. The first few stories featured a touch more magic, and a Tibetan boy whose English isn't very good but improves in each story. The boy has a pet dragon (featured in only one story) and has learned transmutation courtesy of the fairy godmother, which allows him to turn into a three-headed snake or a Yeti (which complicates things when a real Yeti shows up). The last story of William I read was set in New Zealand, where he meets a Maori boy with ta moko (drawn on with a Magic Marker) and they visit the glowworm caves. The magic was limited to William being taken to these countries (sometimes at inconvenient times). I also remember a bit where William actually telephoned the fairy godmother, not taking time zones into account (twelve noon at William's house is four in the morning in Tibet.).

And of course, I can't find anything online about these stories.

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Statsraad Lehmkuhl

Thu, 18 Mar 2021 01:12:16 GMT

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WHAT.

Wed, 10 Mar 2021 16:09:37 GMT

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Minute of Islands

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 01:13:30 GMT

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Thu, 04 Mar 2021 01:58:10 GMT

more than anything i just want to stay home. write. draw. walk the dog.

my gut tells me to stay home unless i need to pick up groceries or medicine or something like that.

but somehow i am an essential employee. hours somewhat reduced, sure, but no one in accounting wants to stray too far from their desk. i don't have a desk. my "office" is a chair jammed in a corner alongside some filing cabinets in the copy room.

thirteen years and occasionally i'm still mistaken for a customer by one of the salesmen...

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SCANIMATE

Thu, 04 Mar 2021 01:51:42 GMT

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YES, I CALLED THE NUMBER.

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 02:42:45 GMT

Are they the Cave Johnson brand combustible brand?

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It sounds like the name of a country from whose dread bourn few return...

Sat, 20 Feb 2021 00:14:52 GMT

take an eye for an eye

take me down with you

take it all away

i know it all comes back times three

that human, that demon, showed me

how it ends when you treat your friends like foes

so don’t come looking for me

I’ve got my walls up now

protect myself like a fortress

and I’m on my own now

no I can’t sleep baby

and waking up is just a dream

my sadness has lost its cause

and I’m suffocating

so don’t come looking for me

I’ve got no joy to lend

protect myself like a fortress

isolating, bridge withdrawing

isolated, I can’t take it

anhedonia

I’ll be your silent witness

I’ll be your border line

I’ll keep you safe and sacred

just keep your heart close to mine

anhedonia

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It's TRADITIONAL, kid.

Thu, 26 Nov 2020 05:32:54 GMT

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Old Time Radio...

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 03:56:49 GMT

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