Home Security Goes Green

We’ve come upon the last post from the Boddie blog that I’ll be moving over here.  For all you recluses and antisocials out there, this product is for you.

What better way to keep those annoying trespassers off of your freshly seeded grass than a carnivorous plant that kills it’s prey with it’s own slimy spit? While these Venuses are still only large enough to maim your ordinary house fly, I’m sure, with science and their wily ways, they’ll take a break from their attempt to bring dinosaurs back to life and mutate these Alien cousins into six-foot tall guard plants that hawk loogies of doom. Screw ADT. When these puppies come out, all you’ll need is a giant pot and a fresh stock of medium-sized mammals and you’re good to go.

A Movie Title Means Everything

How I love Absolute Write.  A bunch of us farted around in the humor section and one of the mods came up with an alternate movie title thread, humorous, obviously.  We all proved why we’re not in the marketing departments of any major movie house.  But, yet again, I tickled not only myself but many others with my alternate movie titles (I wasn’t the only one doing the tickling, mind you).  Originally posted on the Boddie blog, read on to see titles that were scrapped probably immediately.  If you can, try to guess the movie before you get to the parentheses.

The Fat Man’s Half-Drunk Brother That Needs An Eye Lift (Fred Claus)

OMG, Robert DeNiro Is A Gay Cross-Dresser! (Stardust)

Jackass . . . oh wait . . .

Yeah, It Sinks So You Might As Well Save Your Own Ass But Not Before You Take My Virginity (Titanic)

The Life And Times Of Keith Richards (Pirates of the Caribbean)

Subpar Elvis Impersonator Runs Amok In The Mid-Atlantic States Searching For Shiny Things (National Treasure)

Oh My Gawd, Like Totally Awesome Valley Girl That Totally Likes to Stab Things With A Gnarly Older Man (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

Backstreet Boys With Thermal Events On Their Backs (Ghostbusters)

Oh My God, Inanimate Objects Can Talk! (Cars)

Been Done Before (See Also: Heathers) (Mean Girls)

Deep Impact . . . wait . . .

Overly Veneered Teeth Take Over The World! (Armageddon)

A Desperate Attempt to Make A God-Awful Movie Funny By Throwing In Ashton Kutcher (Dude, Where’s My Car?)

Statistics Don’t Lie

This is probably one of my favorite blog spots that I’ve ever written.  Again, I wrote this originally for the Boddie blog but I just couldn’t let it get sucked into the internet void.  I’d like to think it humbles a certain major league fan base but, like them, I’m filled with delusional thoughts.  In fact, it does just the opposite.  *le sigh*  And just FYI, this was posted maybe a week after the Series last year, hence the beginning language.

Unless you have been living under a rock or boycotting modern technology, you’ll know that the Boston Red Sox have won yet another World Series, bringing their total up to…6 (7 if you count them playing as the Boston Americans in the first Series)…in 104 years of the Series existence and 102 Series played (two of the 104 there were strikes). Pardon me while I get mathematical here…so that’s winning 6.9% of all World Series played (102), averaging 1 Series win every 15 years (just under, actually, going at the 104 Series that have been played, hey, not my fault they went on strike 2 of those 104 years, that’s 2 lost years that the Red Sox might have won, although I highly doubt it). In other terms, roughly 1 win per generation, 1 win per major war or 14 out of 15 “almosts.”

Now lets take a look at the Yankees. They have 26 World Series wins out of 102 Series years or roughly 26% of all Series won, averaging 1 Series win every 4 years (playing fair, that’s at the same 104 years of the Series existence). In other terms, who will the Yankees play in the Series this year?

At the average years stated above for the Red Sox and the Yankees, it’ll take the Sox 300 years from this point to catch up to the Yankees’ Series record, assuming that the Yankees will never win another World Series (and then the pixies fly out of my backside and Steinbrenner rises from the dead to wreak revenge on the futuristic manager). If these statistics remain stagnant, the Sox will never catch up. Considering, statistically, the Yankees win three Series for every one the Sox do, it would be like trying to catch a car traveling three times as fast as yours. Unless the Yankees blow a flat, their driver gets launched out of the windshield and the vehicle catches fire, it’s safe to say the BoSox will forever be behind. The sooner the Sox fans come to terms with this fact, the less instances of aneurysms the Boston metropolitan area emergency rooms will see.

Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

While it had its moments, I have to say I struggled to get through this one.  I just didn’t find it all that interesting.  I did, however, pull some excellent lines from the text–

“Old Tom, the University’s venerable clock, tolled not sounds but silences.  Not simply ordinary silences, but intervals of noise-absorbing nonsound, which filled the world with loud soundlessness.”–Footnote

“The Watchmen turned and stared.  A large blob of foam, which up until that point had been performing sterling service in the cause of the essential decencies, slipped slowly to the floor.”–Ridcully exposing himself

“Because of pressures of space, bones in the crypt were stored by size, not by owner.  There were rooms of ribs.  There were avenues of femurs.  And shelf after shelf of skulls up near the entrance, of course, because a crypt without a lot of skulls wasn’t a proper crypt at all.  If some of the religious were right and there really was bodily resurrection one day, Fred mused, there was going to be an awful lot of confusion and general milling about.”–Fred Colon

“He just wished she was a bit more sensible about cats.  He felt instinctively that if you were going to fondle a cat while discussing matters of intrigue, then it should be a long-haired white one.  It shouldn’t be an elderly street tom with irregular bouts of flatulence.”–Havelock

“”You can take our lives but you’ll never take our freedom!” he [Reg Shoe] screamed.

“Carcer’s men looked at one another, puzzled by what sounded like the most badly thought-out war cry in the history of the universe.  Vimes could see their lips moving as they tried to work it out.”–Vimes

Headuprectumitis (hed-up-reck-tum-eye-tiss)

This was my version of a rant after a run-in with a pedantic driver in a parking lot that I originally posted on Finding Boddie. Tis better to refocus the energy more creatively, don’t you think? Just a comment on the Volkswagen driver bit: here, in the Nutmeg State, 95% of the Volkswagen drivers I’ve come across were taught to drive by lobotomized chimps on methamphetamines. Really, I’m surprised I still have fenders.

Has your brain been tied into a knot by the overwhelming stupidity of another? Is your logic meter flailing off the charts, causing your verbal communication to bumble in your mouth? Is a particular event or set of words bouncing around in your head like a Ping Pong ball on steroids? If so, your offending counterpart may be suffering from Headuprectumitis. Read on for more information on this debilitating disease.

Definition–

Headuprectumitis, in the simplest terms, is a mental disorder that causes the sufferer to think in illogical, narcissistic thoughts that have no rhyme or reason and do not compute in the universe in which we live. While this is a non-discriminating ailment, it tends to cluster in those deeming themselves part of the “I’m Better Than You” society and amongst those hiding behind the anonymity of the internet.

No Love For The Monsters

I’ve decided that I’m going to transfer the blog posts that I liked from the Boddie site over to here before I delete it completely.  Some of them I just tickled myself with and I can’t bear to part with them.  This is one of them.  This little piece, about showing love for other undead creatures besides vampires, is a segue into my Frankenstein parody that I wrote.  Why should vampires get all the love?  Edited to tone down the language a bit.

Don’t get me wrong. Being a fan is, well, fantastic (to be utterly uncreative and just downright lazy, granted in the amount of time it’s taking me to type this I could have thought up a better word than fantastic, oh well) but there are some googly-eyed crazies out there wearing “Edward Cullen is my Boyfriend” t-shirts. And people say I need to get out.

For those of you that don’t know, Edward Cullen (I think that’s his name, I guess it is, I don’t know, I haven’t read the books) is one of the main characters in Stephanie Meyer’s book Twilight and so on and so forth (there are more, I just don’t know the titles off-hand). It’s a vampire series that I have not read (because I didn’t state this fact already?). Why haven’t I read it? Because I read the back of the book. Don’t get me wrong…the last thing I want to do is bash another author (unless it’s absolutely rendered, those who spit on their fans, for instance), especially since I haven’t read her work. It’s not her writing that kept me away (obviously). The back read something along the lines of “I am this girl from somewhere, Edward is a vampire and he’s madly in love with me.” In a nutshell. And there it goes right back on the table from whence it came.

What happened to vampires that people actually feared instead of wanting to screw? Girls used to throw wreaths of garlic at them, now it’s their bra and panty set. What the hell? A vampire is a creature of the night, a being that is undead that rises from the grave to drain the blood from humans in order to survive. Oh my god, blood drinking zombies! *squee* Want to see my boobs?! It’s hard to pinpoint where our poor blood-sucking bastards were first literarily castrated but it’s just spiraled out of hand. I owe the makers of 30 Days of Night some gratitude for putting vampires back in their feral nature, even if it is in Alaska.

From Prince Of Thieves To Men In Tights

Well, I’ve had a rather blatant shift in tone in Diamond Crier. It just decided to tell me to go screw myself and shifted. The thing is, it’s not like I didn’t see this coming. The other three novels have a similar tone, kind of snarky, a little humorous with a little serious but balanced. This one was supposed to be pure serious and I fought the snark incessantly. I don’t know why I wanted to maintain a different voice, maybe because of a “should” I had, that this story “should” sound like this. Or perhaps it was because of the original pieces I wrote for the story. They were very serious, and very dark, and so I began writing the story around those two pieces of short fiction.

The thing is, logic came into play on the dark aspects. Like I mentioned in a previous post (I think), my evil overlord can’t abuse the Criers because they won’t manufacture tears like they should and they’ll die a lot sooner than he wanted them to. So the dark toned down. Then when I started reading Rachel Vater’s blog , she kept asking questions like, “When was the last time you recommended something dark and dreary all the way through to a friend?” And I went, “well I like the dark and dreary, but I see your point.” Misery loves company but how many people read for the misery? Unless it’s Misery?