On the left.
Twitter might be all hype, or it might not. So far, it's nice to be able to update the blog while driving, without taking too much attention away from my talking on the phone, eating, and playing my little magnetic travel version of Battleship. Oh, that reminds me. A4.
Hey, it’s Free Skate, everybody! Free Skate! That means everybody get on into the roller rink – all can skate. Get on out there!
Young or old, guys and gals, no restrictions. You could be 900 years old, or female, or whatever. Free Skate!
Have you ever wanted to skate backwards? Or in a small circle? Now is your chance. Free Skate only comes around once every few hours. The time is now. The skates are on. The rink is waiting … for you.
If you’re a demure housemaid, steal your mistress’s favorite dress, get in the rink, and put on airs. Maybe you’ll meet a wealthy baron who will fall in love with you. And maybe that baron will turn out to be your mistress, in drag, and when you go back to his place in his horse drawn carriage, the horse will turn out to be six cats, working together.
Most cultures have a taboo against eating human flesh, and rightly so, but right now? This right here? This is Free Skate.
If you see a friend across the rink, you don’t need to skate clockwise along the circumference of the oval. Cut right across. Bisect it. Bisect it hard.
Free Skate’s just another name for nothing left to lose.
Get a bunch of your friends together and skate in formation while holding hands. You’re Voltron! Or have you ever tried a Reverse Voltron? It’s where you get a bunch of your friends together and start removing each other’s clothing. There are other names for it, too.
This is Free Skate, so I feel perfectly comfortable telling you all that sometimes, the announcer’s booth can be a mighty lonely place. And I think it might be haunted. It’s definitely really humid. That’s not normal. Someone come up here and see if it seems humid to you. What about you? What about your hot friend?
Hey, who here has heard about the ten second rule for dropped food? Raise your hands. No one? That’s right, there is no ten second rule. This is Free Skate.
Who here has heard about how you should pour an acid into a base, but never the other way around? Free Skate. This skate, you cannot chaaaaange -
Oh, it’s over? Already? Aw, darn it. We were just about to transcend the laws of time and space. I think I saw someone skating on one foot, too. It was quite a thing. Well, you heard it, people. The bacchanalia of Free Skate has once again come to an end. Sigh. Everyone line up for the Hokey Pokey.
Friends, we shall create a perfect society, far from the corrupting influence of civilization, yet close to parking. It will be a new utopia, and like every utopia it will fail, due to hubris or global warming or something. But this is not the end! For you see, from the wreckage of our utopia, we shall fashion a new, neo-utopian world. Our success will be assured, because everything our previous utopia did, we will do the opposite, no matter how immoral or gross. And the citizens of this perfect re-new-topia (still working on name) will be the cream of the crop, the very few essential people of any society. Right now, we have openings for:
Please apply in person, by the docks, at midnight. Just to be clear, this is not the first, doomed utopia. This is for the utopia that can never go wrong. Also, we have an opening for one (1) atom bomb technician. Feel free to apply even if you’re not that good at tending to atom bombs. You won’t be tending it for long.
The Battlestar Galactica finale is finally here, on my DVR, and I’ll be watching it soon. It truly is a momentous occasion. It’s time for this entertainment/cat fashion blog to look back on what any rational person would have to describe as The Most Important Show of All Time, Forever. Let’s make some bold predictions about a finale everyone else has already seen.
Today is Ada Lovelace Day. She was the world’s first programmer. She was so good, she was able to write code for a machine that didn’t exist. Time passed. Actual, physical computers showed up around town. The U.S. Department of Defense got in on that action. They created a programming language and named it for her. It’s still around. It’s a pretty advanced language, but she was a pretty advanced person. Not only was she a versatile mathematician and pre-computer proto-programmer, but she was also one of those 19th century social types who brought together all sorts of intellectual stars from different fields. She knew Lord Byron (as he was her father), as well as Charles Babbage, of course, the “father of the computer,” and a good thing, too, because without any program to run, his computer would look pretty silly indeed. A big, theoretical paperweight, really.
All the bloggy people were supposed to write something in honor of another woman in technology for Ada Lovelace Day, but I only just found out about this event, and the day’s nearly over, so I’ll just link to this very old post about Marie Curie. It may be slightly inaccurate. Another time, I’ll write something nice about Caroline Herschel, a lesser known woman from the history of science, and one of my personal favorites.
I’m watching Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, even though the subject matter doesn’t especially interest me, because I believe that, like nature, Whedon will out. So far, it’s decent, though unrelentingly grim, which is exactly how Battlestar Galactica started out, so that’s promising. The difference is that I’m looking for more funny from Dollhouse. I didn’t expect Battlestar to have a sense of humor, and was pleasantly surprised to see how amusing Baltar could be, whereas so far Dollhouse’s only comic character is the tech guy, who isn’t funny. It’s like watching Joss Whedon write with the humor lobe of his brain tied behind his back – gross, and it looks painful, too.
Because the whole personality-changing assassin with amnesia thing doesn’t do it for me right now, I’ve spent the past two episodes coming up with questions. The show is fairly self-explanatory – this recent episode featured the line, “Tabula rasa. Or, blank slate.” Thanks, self-translating character! – but I still wonder about the technical details of this Dollhouse program, and hope that all these questions will be cleared up in future episodes, before it’s cancelled:
I saw Coraline the other day, and although I was really excited at first, I found myself getting more and more irritated at the wasted opportunities. It’s a very pretty, dark, stop motion animated film, and I think it might be interesting to watch with the sound off, while doing something else, but the story isn’t worth the amount of time and attention lavished on the visuals. It’s very dull, obvious attempt at a moralistic fairy tale. I don’t need to be told again that children should appreciate their parents, and parents should pay attention to their children. Yes, I knew that. Only a very small child wouldn’t be able to predict every single thing that happens in this movie, and unfortunately, the movie is way too scary for small children. So we’re left with a bunch of animation fans who are just happy that someone took 500 still photos of a doll saying “Boo,” and the people who find Neil Gaiman’s story imaginative and entertaining. Turns out I don’t. I haven’t read the book, though. Maybe the movie just took the very dullest elements from it and left all the creative ones? That wasn’t a good strategy.
It really came down to the sound. As I said, I would have preferred to watch it idly, without sound. Most of the writing would be obscured that way, and the experience could become mysterious, even magical, as it was supposed to be. Also, I wouldn’t have had to hear Dakota Fanning as Coraline. I don’t have anything against her, but she’s not a voice actor. She made this weird, alienated little girl sound like just another precocious, soulless Hollywood child star. Did anyone look at the character model and say, “You know who would be perfect for this role? Dakota Fanning! That is, if Lindsay Lohan is still busy with Shakespeare in the Park.”
Coraline also has a magical black cat who happens to be voiced by a good voice actor, Keith David. The cat doesn’t talk at first, but it’s clearly very wise and important. I’m not kidding here: the very first time I saw the black cat, I said to myself, “That cat is going to talk,” and shortly thereafter, I said, “That cat will be a black person’s voice.” I was leaning towards a black grandmotherly voice, but it was Keith David instead. So we get a magical black cat which reveals itself to be a Magical Black Man. The cat turns out to be wise and helpful, just when all hope is lost! Who’d have thought? I think at some point, he also teaches Coraline how to dance.
And for the record, no, I didn’t see it in 3D. I hear that’s how it’s supposed to be viewed. Perhaps those other two dimensions are Goodness and Not Sucking. Too bad I saw the other version, rather than the one everyone loved so much. Oh well. Sometimes it’s hard being on the Internet, you know? The Internet likes what it likes, and there’s no use arguing with it. But for the record, Snakes on a Plane wasn’t such a good idea, either. Coraline is Snakes on a Plane with Dakota Fanning, but nothing good comes of it. There’s your blurb.
Are you a crooked politician? If you answered yes, then you’re not a very good crooked pol, but I’m here to help. Do you have a problem with subtlety? Again, if you answered yes, or if you shouted “No!” at the top of your lungs in a crowded restaurant, then you need to work on being crooked, but subtle. If you talk about your crooked business straight out, without any coded language, you’ll end up being impeached faster than, uh uh, you know who. Don’t be like him – or her – I didn’t specifically say “Blagojevich,” did I? Could be anyone.
You need to learn Mafia-level euphemisms, like they would use in the Mafia, if it were real. Listen to this sample conversation and see if you can tell what’s going on.
“Hey, is this Local Pizzeria? I want to order a, uh uh, pizza.”
“Hi, boss. Sure thing. Do you mean you want a Chicago Deep Dish pizza, or a for real pizza?”
“Chicago Deep Dish.”
“Oh, that’s good. We’re out of dough. For real dough, I mean. Who do you want to receive this pizza?”
“Vito ‘Excessively Chatty’ Scarpone.”
“Can’t say I didn’t see that coming. Would you like toppings on it?”
“Yes. On half of the pizza, I would like pepperoni.”
[Sound of air being sucked in through teeth.]
“OK, you got it. Pretty brutal. We can do that, though.”
“And on the other half, mushrooms.”
“What, really? I thought that was just in the movies.”
“Yeah, mushrooms, like in the movies. Send a message to the other, uh uh, pizza parlors.”
“Whatever you say. It’ll be done by tonight. Where, and how, do you want us to deliver it, you know?”
“Just put it in a bag and throw it in the river.”
“Yes, we will do that. Now, I’ll just need your credit card number.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“We’re a legitimate pizza parlor, boss, you’re ordering a pizza. It’d sound pretty suspicious if you didn’t pay for it somehow. All due respect.”
“Uh, all right, it’s 4593 2057 8821 6304. MasterCard.”
“And the expiration date?”
“June 2010 … hey, are you giggling over there?”
“2010, great. That checks out. I’ll have your pizza ready very soon. Wait up for it.”
“Say, you don’t sound like – is this Vito? ‘Chatty?’ Is that you?”
“It was Vito, like in another life. Thanks for the tip, boss.”
[Sound of running footsteps, sound of a car door slamming, tires squealing.]
[Sound of a small single engine aircraft heading for Clovis, New Mexico.]
“Vito? Are you there? Vito, I was kidding? I meant a for real pizza?”
So yeah, never mind about this sample conversation. It’s not, uh uh, illustrative of nothing. Dammit. I got to see a guy about a thing.
Link: Chicago Carless – great on Chicago, good on New York, but no useful info on how to parallel park
Rest in peace, John Updike. You could have written more, but you wrote enough. As an affectionate tribute, here’s a useful quiz to help you determine if you’re a John Updike character.
Are you a character in a John Updike novel? Take this quiz and know the truth!
[From the May, 1973 issue of Fictional Character Quizzes Monthly]
If you answered “Yes” to Question 12, you are an Updike character. You’ve just admitted it. Don’t feel bad that you never figured it out, because Updike characters are notoriously oblivious to their own motivations. You should, however, feel bad that by the end of your story, someone will die, everyone’s affairs will be revealed, and the rest of your life will become one long, relentless sad-stravaganza. Good luck with that.
I just found out here about this, which is here. It’s Mona the Assassin, a five level expansion pack for Max Payne 2 created by some of the original design team. I’ve played both Max Payne games about six times, total, not counting some of the fan-made mods such as the excellent Kung Fu mod and the obvious, yet somehow soulless Matrix mod. I even considered watching the movie, twice. That is, I considered watching it and then re-watching it. Or did I consider watching it, then also consider watching it at another time? That comma is unclear. Also, I’d never consider watching that fetid, celluloid shit whistle. Boo, on it, forever.
I really liked the Max Payne games, and it was the ultimate kick in the teeth that we never got a third one. The story resolved itself, more or less, but it had all the makings of a nice, tight trilogy. I mean, it’s not as if the games didn’t have themes which could be explored and wrapped up in a final act. It’s nothing but themes. That damn series has themes lying around everywhere, stuffed into drawers, stacked three deep. On one of my many playthroughs, I encountered a symbol which stood for two other symbols, which in turn represented the symbol of a theme. And I don’t know what that means either, but wow, huh? I remember taking down a note on it, something like:
Rain – does it represent snow?
This Mona the Assassin dealy better have some redonkulous symbolism, or I refuse to consider it part of the Max Payne canon. Because Mona already represents so much. She’s a living metaphor for redemption, revenge, renewal, re-redemption, Dostoyevskian “twin” characters, shooting in slow motion, and tits. Oh, and asses. Wait, I get it. Mona the assassin. Ooh. That’s brilliant. I can’t wait to deconstruct the rain out of this one – if you catch my drift.
I’m not attending the inauguration. I’ll be watching it on TV. Why is that, asks the rest of the country? Isn’t it very easy for you to go downtown and see President-elect Obama become Full-on-Finally-President-for-Real Obama, in person? Well, since you asked, no it isn’t, rest of the country. And it’s all your fault.
The city expects massive Metro delays, as well as major traffic jams from bridge and road closures, all because a bunch of people who do not live here have decided to come and block our view of this historic event. I’m just a little annoyed that someone from South Dakota is standing in my spot. I don’t care if you voted for him. Everyone knows that D.C.’s votes are the ones that put him over the top. We had dibs.
How would you like it if you went next door to welcome your new neighbor, and you couldn’t get in to see him because thousands of yokels from the state of Washington were milling about on the stoop? I could’ve used South Dakota again in this example, but I don’t really have anything against those decent, hardworking folks. Washington state, on the other hand, is cold biting off D.C. anyway, and should fall into the ocean immediately.
I’m so tired of being confused with stupid, lame Washington state. “Where are you from?” “Washington, D.C.” “Oh, I love Soundgarden!”
Oh, phoo, enough bitterness, this is starting to sound like a blog. I really don’t mind watching from home. It’s probably a better view, and I’ll be able to flip around if it starts to get boring. As for witnessing history, I’ve got that covered with my case of Obama-themed “Orange you glad for change” Cola. In case you didn’t know, all the grocery stores are selling Obama shirts, Obama party supplies, and even little Obama figurines by the checkout counters. I was lucky to get out of my last grocery run with just this soda. I’m drinking one right now!
Hm. That’s odd. This doesn’t seem to be alcoholic at all. They said it was for parties. I don’t understand.
It also doesn’t taste anything like Obama.
It tastes like orange. Not the fruit, the color. Know what I mean?
What’s this on the bottle? “Barack Obama does not endorse Jones Soda and Jones Soda isn’t affiliated with the President Elect.” Wait, really? You lied to me! I thought that drinking this stuff was like voting twice! I thought I had to buy this, as a patriot, and drink it all, despite all my diabetes.
I’m going to write to these Jones Soda people in … let’s see … Seattle. What state is that in, again? Hold on a min … Google’s still working on it …
Oh, hell no.
If you’ll excuse me, I have to go cross the country and break someone’s window.
This won’t be as odd as the title makes it sound.
Tales of Bingwood (technically, it’s Chapter 1 of the Tales of Bingwood series, la di da, as all adventure games must be episodic now) is a cute little point ‘n clicker which pays homage to the Monkey Island series. It pays a lot of homage. It should really pay royalties. A pair of Finnish game developers, Markus Tupperainen and Carl Granberg, spent fifteen years, off and on, creating it, through many different iterations, and it finally ended up as what’s essentially an alternate-universe Monkey Island. Imagine if Ron Gilbert had been two indefatigable Finns. OK, now let’s imagine him as a sheep and three slices of pizza. Why the pizza? Well, the sheep needs to eat something.
Most of the mechanics in Bingwood are tried and true adventure game standards, which is fine and nostalgic, but even adventure games have learned some new tricks in the past fifteen years. One nice exception is the eye/hand cursor, which uses an approach I’ve never seen before. Other adventure gamers, have you heard of this one? The cursor defaults to an eye the first time you click on an object, and then becomes a hand if you’ve already looked at it once. A simple idea, but very useful.
One can, of course, cycle through the cursors to look at things twice, or manipulate/pick up things immediately. But I rarely do that because the default behavior coincides with my default adventure game behavior: look at everything in the room, then try to pick everything up, then fiddle with every switch, button, and lever. Works very well in traditional point and click adventures, less so in Myst clones, as I usually begin by immediately pulling the very worst lever. It also doesn’t work real well in life, where such behavior is considered a) shoplifting or b) “lever fondling.”
The Eye and the Hand symbols are a good shorthand for how people used to, and occasionally still do, play adventure games. The Hand is the obvious way to play – figure out the right action to perform, do it, repeat, and you win the game. The Eye represents what old-school adventure gamers tend to consider the real reward: a clever bit of description, dialogue, character insight, etc. I’d bet that almost all Sierra and LucasArts fans back in the day examined every object in hopes of a fun response before trying to use it. The Eye is the game showing you how well-realized its world is, and the Hand is you showing the game how cleverly you can outwit it. Bingwood and similar retro games can only succeed if the player is able to derive enjoyment from both acts, and I’m surprised that more adventure games didn’t come up with equally helpful ways to facilitate that constant switch between the two fundamental actions. I’m inspired that, fifteen years later, two fans of the genre found a new way to get the funny from the game to the gamer, and created a damn funny game to show off this new technique.
As the world’s leading architect and designer of buildings and houses and stuff, I’m often asked, “What’s wrong with architecture? How can it be restored to its former glory, like in Renaissance times?” I have one simple answer: get rid of hallways. Toss hallways into the rubbish bin of history, where they belong, and then wait until the bulk pickup day of history when they will empty the bin.
Think about it. Who likes hallways? No one. I say this as an architect and an expert.
When was the last time you were in a hallway and thought, “This house would truly suck, if it weren’t for this wonderful hallway tying the whole piece together?” Let me guess, was it never? No one has ever thought that.
Hallways waste space. I can tell you that everyone who designs an office building has a moment where they wish that they could just skip the hallway design process. There’s no art to it, no beauty. I’d rather design a very unsafe building covered in unpleasant materials than one with a lot of lame hallways laming up the space between offices.
How would I design a house without hallways? Simple. I would make the rooms larger. Each room would open onto another room, without some half-assed, long, skinny, pretend room trying to insinuate itself between them.
Do you need to use the bathroom? Go through Wayne’s room, Tina’s room, make a left in G. K. Chesterton’s room (no, not that G. K. Chesterton), and you’re right there! Do your business, and either head back the way you came, or continue going through rooms until you find the one where we keep the towels.
Yes, we have an entire room for hand towels, because getting rid of hallways frees up so much space. Yes, it is a wondrous and beautiful new world.
In conclusion, hallways are an abomination and must be destroyed, etc, etc., and I am just the man to take them out for good. Not just because I’m the most important architect since Frank Picasso, but because I know all the hallways’ weaknesses, since I sleep in a different one each night.
Oh, and campfires by train tracks could really use some better lighting.
On this week’s Top Chef, Melissa (she was raised on a horse farm!) was nearly sent home for a crostini with too much Gorgonzola. “All you can taste is the cheese,” the judges told her. “It overwhelms the other flavors.” This was probably true. These damn judges have impossibly high standards. They want every dish to be perfectly executed in limited time, to follow the spirit of some silly challenge, and to be some kind of imaginative new flavor combination. Often I can’t really tell what the dish is supposed to taste like, much less evaluate it based on the subtle twitches and tics playing across Tom Colicchio’s big, shiny face. But I think I see what Melissa (from the horse farm) was aiming for: fancy-ass diner food. And that’s a good thing.
All the ingredients work well together. You’ve got your
So, why do all these tastes work together? (You’re probably ahead of me on this one.) Because it’s a cheeseburger. Bun, cheese, beef, ketchup. Who doesn’t like a cheeseburger? Even Internet cats covet them. In fact, the hell with this crazy crostini thing, I’d just like a nice, well-cooked diner style cheeseburger right about now. That’s probably why I fixated on this minor dish in an old episode of Top Chef.
So, to put all this more succinctly,
Mos Def turns thirty-five today. Doesn’t it seem like Mos Def should be older? He should be surprisingly, then unsurprisingly old. For example, let’s say he’s forty-three. You’d think, “Wow, I feel really old. Forty-three? Dang. He looks so young! But I guess he always looked young. He had to have time to be a rapper, then an actor, and then both simultaneously. Yeah, that makes sense, forty-ish. I don’t know why I was surprised. I bet Wil Smith is like sixty-four by now.”
Happy Birthday, Mos Def! The older you get, the older I get, too. Say, how old is Macy Gray right now? She’s forty-one. Surprised? Then, not so surprised? Yeah.
The Christmas tree arrived in D.C. today! I don’t have any pictures of it yet. I think it’s still on the truck. I also don’t have any pictures of the Christmas truck, but I’m sure it’s radiant. The 2008 Capitol Christmas Tree is a 73 foot tall Alpine fir from Bitterroot National Forest in Montana. It was originally 100 feet tall in the ground or wherever it is you get trees. Montana is also providing over 75 smaller trees for various offices and agencies around D.C. I guess the missing 27 feet got split up and then grew into the 75 little trees? I’m not really sure how trees work.
This morning’s edition of Morning Edition had a story about the Republican governors’ convention in Miami. First of all, wheeee! That sounds like a lot of fun, hanging out with a bunch of Republican governors. Imagine being in a room of Libertarian attorneys general. It’s better than that! These people have no reason to hold back now. It’s like: daiquiri, cry a little, daiquiri, bitter accusations, double daiquiri, Governor Tim Pawlenty (of Minnesota) takes his shirt off. And he makes that face right there, but without a microphone.
Speaking of Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, he just dropped some major word knowledge by describing the new target demographic as “Sam’s Club voters.” This is the first time I’ve heard that one. Is it the new big thing? I’m not a member of Sam’s Club – yet! – do they talk a lot about how they’re going to vote? I’m with Costco. We pretty much just buy huge tubs of mayo. (Please don’t consider that an endorsement of mayonnaise. I think mustard also has a lot of good ideas.)
I’m glad there’s a new super-thin slice of the demographic hoagie, because I was getting very annoyed with hockey moms, for various reasons. Did you know they don’t play hockey? No, their kids play hockey. Common misconception. They don’t even watch the kids, they’re up in the stands secretly texting, and they just stand up to cheer with everyone else. What are they texting about? They’re asking their friends if they want to meet up at Sam’s Club later, to buy 40 pounds of, I don’t know, hockey sauce. Technically, they’re Sam’s Club voters, not hockey moms. So now everyone please stop saying “hockey mom” forever, ok, thanks.
Really, Sam’s Club voters are too diverse for anyone to predict their voting patterns. Republicans should focus their efforts on an even smaller subset: Front of Cart voters, as seen here. They sit in the front of the cart and try to play with everything in the cart, but are notoriously stingy when it comes to actually purchasing the items. Their voting patterns are similar. You take them to the polls, but once in the booth, they’re like, “I just want the sticker.”
“No, you have to choose a candidate first.”
“Sticker!”
“Sticker isn’t running. Do you mean Nader? I’ll put you down for Nader.”
“Waah! You threw my vote away!”
Republicans, if you want to lure Front of Cart voters away from the insanely popular Sticker party, you need to offer something better. Once in power, will you let them play with your keys? The remote control? Are you willing to say that in certain circumstances, if the world situation demands it, you will let them eat a bug? This is what they’re looking for. Or you could make up a scary story about your opponent, call him an evil baby-eating monster or something. That ought to work again someday. Good luck!
Let me stop you right there. This is not a “spike pit,” it is a pit which contains spikes. It’s a pit for spikes.
There’s a difference.
My hobby is collecting spikes, and I need a place to properly mount and show off my spikes. It’s like an album for stamps, as they say. You can see that I have many, many sharp spikes, so obviously I need a very big pit. It’s not a deadly trap, it’s a testament to the tranquil art of spike arranging.
Obviously, I’ve gone with a traditional configuration: very closely spaced, perpendicular to the walls and floor of the pit for maximum pointiness. I like to call it the “inverse hedgehog” or the “pokey hole.” But its beauty cannot be fully expressed in words. You’ll just have to see it for yourself.
The best way to view it is by attempting to jump over it. I should mention that’s a bit dangerous. And yet, well worth it, my friend. Well worth it.
My entire spike collection is not limited to the pit. Some of my best spikes are hidden in the walls and floors. They’ll pop out when you least expect them! Maybe I shouldn’t give away the surprise. Forget I said that. You see those little holes in the floor? Run over them real quickly. Who knows what’ll pop out? Flan? Yummy flan?
Spikes! I thought that I gave it away, but you still look surprised. Be more careful next time, those spikes almost killed you. They’re just for looks.
Now, you seem a bit exhausted, but check out the room’s centerpiece, my aforementioned pit for spikes. Just take a running jump and fly over, but not into it. Or, who am I to tell you how to experience these spikes? Everyone has their own aesthetic sensibilities. Fall into the pit if you must. Embrace the thing-in-itself nature of each spike. Where do you end, where does the spike begin? The answer may surprise you. Jump for it!
And I know you were pretty surprised by that big ol’ pendulum which just knocked you into the pit. I didn’t mention before that I also collect pendula. Pendulums? Pendula? What’s up with these Latinate endings, any – oh, you’re dead it seems.
OK, everyone else, stay with me, I want to show you the kitchen. It has an island! An island for lava!
TruthWillOut89, this comment is directed directly at YOU and your obvious LIES. How can you send me this and not see what is in front of your own face? You are once again blinded by the mainstream media into swallowing a bunch of sugar coated lies like some kind of sheep being led to the boiling frog pot. Do you know what happens if you put a frog in boiling water? Guess what, you put the frog in water and then you heat it up slowly and the frog doesn’t notice until it’s boiling, and then he jumps out, but it’s too late because the pot of water is right next to a cliff and he DIES. It’s a metaphor look it up. Frog.
YOUR PHOTO IS FAKE.
Where is the cord? Ask yourself that. How could he be playing music without power? The nearest, logical source of power is the car’s battery, so there should be a clearly visible cord connecting the car and the boom box. Like so. I have also added “power vibes” so you can see that the boom box is emanating electricity, and musical notes to indicate the presence of Peter Gabriel (who is there in spirit).
Also, I guess you wouldn’t know this because you’re too busy putting together photographic fakery, but boom boxes are heavy. And Lloyd Dobler is not physically capable of holding up something loaded with over 83 pounds (that’s right, 83 lb.s look it up) of soulful romance, because he spent most of his athletic career developing his LEGS. He has leg strength, not hand strength. You fool, you put him in upside down.
I guess you weren’t paying attention when he said he was a kickboxer, were you? No big deal, it’s only just the most important part of anything, idiot. I’m being sarcastic. And speaking of sarcastic, that’s some really good attention to detail with Lloyd’s choice of apparel. You really got that correct. (No you didn’t.) For your information, Lloyd Dobler is a romantic at heart, so he wouldn’t just throw on any old clothes and play “In Your Eyes” in someone’s yard, he would dress for success. He would anoint himself in the finest of oils, slowly rubbing them into every tired muscle in his lithe, romantic body, and then he would stand outside completely naked, wooing as hard as he can woo, ready to instantaneously get it on with the object of his wooing, even if she’s not right for him and he could do better. Oiled, naked, ready. Romantic.
Nice try, TruthWillOut89, but the truth will out itself without any help from your Photoshop fakery. It’s sad, really, that you have to perpetrate these obvious hoaxes, tossing and turning on your bed of lies, when you could just go to the window and face the music of truth, which is right there on your lawn, in your eyes. The light, the heat. It’s a metaphor look it up.
Remember to vote, kids. Voting is important. I know you hear that a lot, but it’s especially true right now, with an election coming up. All those other times I lectured you on how voting is important, when I would wake you up in the middle of the night, or those surprise voting “jam sessions” when I would get out the acoustic guitar and serenade you, and you were like, “who are you?” and shots were fired, and I realized I was at the wrong window, remember that? No, you wouldn’t, but I do, and voting is even more important now than it was then, and it was pretty important, believe me. Like, pay a pet groomer to yank a slug out of your arm important. So remember to vote.
Let me tell you a little story. Once there was a little boy who thought his vote didn’t matter. “Blar, blar, I’m not gonna vote today,” he said, stupidly, because he was dumb, and then he – I don’t mean to freak you out but this is a true story – he didn’t vote. It was a Presidential election and everything, and he just stayed home and took a long bath. Well, when he got to work the next day, everyone was like, “Oh no! The election is all messed up! Up is down and right is left and elegiac couplets start with pentameter now, it’s CRAZY TOWN FOLLIEZ.”
The boy soon realized the error of his ways and fortunately, he was given another chance to vote and make it all right, because that boy, you see, was Antonin Scalia. Although now that I think about it, this is more of a cautionary tale about something else entirely. This is really a story about a guy who should’ve stayed in the tub a lot longer. It wouldn’t’ve done any harm. He’s thick and leathery, like an old, lying rhino.
I just want everyone to vote, because I’m sick of hearing about how few people vote for President and too many vote for American Idol. It’s such an unfair comparison. American Idol needs voters, too. Every other show is a results show – do you know how boring those would be if nobody voted? “We were going to eliminate one of you, but I guess America hasn’t spoken, and that means you’re all winners, or losers, whatever. So, uh, who wants to see another Ford commercial?”
So go out and vote, participate in democracy, etc., etc. The most important thing to remember is that voting is important, and the second most important thing is that you might get dehydrated while waiting in line, so bring a water bottle. And the third thing is that after you vote, if you get a sticker, you can put it anywhere on your body. Within reason. I repeat, within reason. You have to be able to reach it. There are other important things but I’ve done a very good job of staying on topic so far and I don’t want to jinx it. Wow, I am like the best patriot essay guy since John Jay.
