Archive for June, 2008

Rage (Part Six)

June 24, 2008 at 12:07 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , , ,

AfterDark: The scariest things, you CAN’T imagine– publishes serialized horror stories. Here’s a taste of “Rage.”  He was abducted before he was born; now he wants her to know what she missed.

Click here to read the whole story.

“You did, you did, you did” it was howling now “You knew what they were and you did not save me and you did not even try and now, mother, LOOK!”

The lights came on and were so bright, so sudden, that tears sprang to her eyes and she clamped her lids shut involuntarily, gasping, but not before the sight that loomed over her burned into her retinas. It would never leave her memory after that. The face – face? Was it? — that had been hanging over her had been so terrible that it registered in her like an electric shock, like touching a live wire and knowing in the microsecond before you jerk back that you’ve done something wrong and dangerous.

“OPEN YOUR EYES!” It howled again. She could not. She kept them closed and wished that she would die rather than see that face again, but it was there in her vision even with the eyes closed.

It was wider than a normal face, at least one and one-half times as wide. And it was not symmetrical. The left eye sat nearly down at the jaw line, while the left ear, clearly visible, was higher than it should be. The right eye was in its proper location, but was tiny, and red, almost a glowing red. The mouth was a giant gaping maw looming over a lengthened, elaborate chin that was pockmarked and bulged with knotted muscles and clefts in the bone. The teeth in the mouth, the few that were there, were both pointy and slimy looking, and were a variety of shades of yellow and green-almost-black. The nose was concave, it opened into the skull rather than protruding from it.

Tears were welling out of her eyes. “OPEN YOUR EYES” the voice roared now, and she felt something touch her face, something bony and cold and stonelike. Her eyes were pulled open and the face was right there, right in front of hers, her nose almost going into the cavity that was the thing’s inverse nose. She could not see the right ear. The thing had only patches of hair, limply clinging to its scalp. The skull itself, she could tell, was misshapen and lumpy. The skin was grayish-white, a dull gravelly color. She saw, as it talked, that the tongue was not just forked but actually split into three at the end. She saw all that because the thing held her eyes open and made her look. The fingers holding her eyes open were cold and hard and rough-edged. As she watched, the tongue snaked around and wiggled one of its teeth.

“Look at your baby, mother,” it said. “Look at your pride and joy.” Eva struggled again, tried to pull away, but its hands gripped her head on the side and still the fingers held her eyes open. “Quit struggling,” it said, but she didn’t, she struggled more until it suddenly wormed two of its fingers into her mouth, pulling the gag out, grabbed her tongue and pulled it out, squeezing the end of the tongue hard, so hard she thought it would burst, and she had to face it as it held her tongue and squeezed. She gasped with the pain. Her throat gurgled with dry screams.

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The Sorta Great Wall

June 23, 2008 at 7:28 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged ,

Thinking The Lions is about life, only funnier. This appeared there first:
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Here’s why I’m increasingly down on science: I’ve heard over and over that most of what we think of as “matter,” which laypeople call “stuff,” is actually made up of empty space.

Well, that’s a lot of, as my dad used to say, “bull-lar.“

I don’t know what “bull-lar” was, but my dad said that a lot of things were “bull-lar.” He’d say what we did, as kids, was “bull-lar.” He’d be yelling at us for something, and say something parental, old-school parental, like “You think you can just take a car and race it along and jump it 100 feet off the road? Well you can’t! That’s a lot of bull-lar!” (It was not 100 feet, though. It was 110, at least.)

Between the frequent use of the phrase “bull-lar” and my dad’s habit of holding my younger sister, who was only about two, while he yelled at us, very little ‘punishment’ actually soaked in because we spent half the time wondering what “bull-lar” was and half the time watching our sister mimic dad as he yelled.

I suppose “bull-lar” was one of those things that parents learn to say when their kids are young because they don’t want to swear around their kids and are trying to be good role models. I try to do that, too, which was why a while back when I slipped while installing the stove hood and banged my head hard enough to draw blood, I didn’t swear or cuss or yell. I didn’t do anything for about 10 minutes except try not to explode, and I did it. I didn’t swear at all. I just bled. So I’m a good role model, except that while I try not to swear and I never drink, I also regularly let the Babies! watch, on Youtube while they eat breakfast, a clip of Butters from “South Park” singing What What In The Butt, which I think is hilarious and the Babies think is hilarious, too, and it really helps us get through breakfast a lot easier.

I know, I know. I can hear you now: How can you possibly do that? How can you, of all people, possibly expose your not-even-two-year-old boys to copyright infringement? I feel bad about, it, too. But listen to my side: A family is an economic partnership. Everyone has to pitch in. So some people make sure that the Babies! get fed and some people make sure the Babies! get bathed and some people make sure that the Babies! don’t fall out of windows. Those people, in our family, are Sweetie. Other people (me) have them watch South Park clips on Youtube and determine what occupations they will have in the future to make sure they make enough money that Other People (me) don’t have to work after they’re fifty. (Currently, Plan A is them having a Disney show, since if you are a kid and you appear on Disney TV you are instantly worth a billion dollars, and also, I like “Bunnytown.”)

Plus, consider this: if someone in the family is going to take a fall for the rest of us, shouldn’t it be the infants? Let’s face it; someone has to pirate the South Park clips and illegally download music and make fun of Tom Cruise. If, when the hammer comes down, the Babies! take the fall, then they will receive shorter jail terms and lighter sentences because, well, they’re cute. Cuteness is still a defense to most criminal charges, isn’t it? I should probably know that.

But I don’t know that. I don’t know a lot of things because all my memory is taken up with everything “science” has filled my head with, like hokey stories about how everything is mostly empty space, how we are all made of “atoms” and that these are very small and are made up of mostly smaller things like “electrons” and “quarks” and “my paycheck” and that as a result of all this small-osity, things that we think of as solid matter, things that seem good and thick to us — the table, the old shed, Kris Kristofferson– are in fact mostly empty space.

Well, I’m not buying it. I’m not buying it because nothing is mostly empty space.

I’m not mostly empty space. I’ve tried, unsuccessfully, fitting into some of my more favorite t-shirts lately, and I’ve tried going jogging, and I can assure you that I am far from being made up of mostly empty space. Empty space would have a far far easier time lugging it’s empty-space-belly up the hill at the end of empty space’s running route, and empty space would not fill up a t-shirt quite so snugly. My own scientific analysis has led me to conclude, at this point, that I am mostly made up of Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch, which also is not mostly empty space.

Another thing that is not at all empty space was our old shed, which is finally down, and which somehow warped time and space in that the shed, torn down, managed to contain more actual material than it had when it was still standing. I can remember when it was standing, and it was four walls and a roof and some old household furniture inside. I would go inside, sort of. I would actually stand just outside the shed and look in, to see if there was a place to put more junk, in between the older junk and the raccoons, and the shed was full of lots of seemingly empty space, because it wasn’t full of stuff and according to “science,” things that aren’t full of stuff are mostly empty space. I wish “science” had been here to help with the work. But, as usual, “science” never shows up until the work’s done and the pizza’s being served, when “science” tries to prove that it knows something after all by having your pizza remain superhot for longer than it should so that you burn your mouth even though you waited a really, really long time before eating the pizza.

Tearing down the shed was like battling the hydra; every board we tore out created three more. Every wall that came down left two more. It just kept multiplying and multiplying and we just kept hauling it to the second of two dumpsters using our specialized shed-tearing-down-tools of “old winter gloves” and “a garbage can with wheels.”

Using that highly technical equipment, we threw away the entire shed which, when torn down created a pile of rubble that took up two dumpsters. Two. When they redid our roof last year, they only used one. So there was more stuff in that shed than there was in our entire roof on our house.

Of course, the roof of our house did not contain, as I found out the shed did, five live raccoons and one very very dead raccoon. At least I hope it didn’t, because if there is that much wildlife in our roof, I’m moving.

There is nothing quite like pulling up an old board and seeing most of a raccoon skull sitting there in front of you, not quite attached to most of a raccoon skeleton. The only thing I could think was where’s the rest of it? Is it on me? I still kind of feel that way. That’s my most common reaction to nature, as I sit here and think of it: Is it on me? I’m not the outdoorsy type. Put me outdoors for any length of time, and I’ll begin to think that the outdoors is on me, and not shake that feeling or the way it makes my skin crawl, until I get back inside, take a shower, and watch Newhart on DVD.

But it’s done! The shed is down, and where there used to be a sagging, possibly haunted shed there now stands what looks like empty space but isn’t. What it is, is a bare dirt area covered with leaves and bits of grass and the smaller debris that I decided to leave there. Trust me, it’s an improvement, even if technically part of that dirt area is still made up of shed parts.

There’s still shed parts there because I took The Boy’s advice, something I only am ready to do when I’ve been working in the hot sun all day and am covered with raccoon flakes. We were hauling and hauling and I was trying not to think of what the pieces of animal would do to my lungs and, and we got down to the last two items of stuff to haul: the world’s largest collection of cement cinder blocks, and a pile of stuff that included shingles but was, in my imagination, made up mostly of dead animal skin, animal skin that was getting on me.

We looked at that, me and The Boy and The Boy’s Friend, who I’ll call “Q,” and The Boy said the smartest thing he’s ever said. He said “Let’s just let erosion do its thing.” Who says kids don’t learn anything these days?

I brushed some raccoon parts off my head and decided we’d do just that. We spread the pile back out and hoped for erosion to work more quickly than most so-called “science.”

That left the cement bricks, which as it turned out made up a lot of what appeared to be the empty space under the shed. (They may also make up a lot of the empty space in me, if the doctor’s scale is to be believed.) There were more cement bricks under that shed than I could have imagined. If cement bricks were money, we’d be rich. But they’re not, so we’re just tired.

We decided to not haul the cement bricks, and instead to turn them into The Sorta Great Wall. I began stacking them into a line of bricks along the lot line between our house and Q’s house next door. I got permission to do this by asking Q “Do you think your parents would want us to stack those bricks there?” He shrugged and said he’d ask them, and then I began stacking them there before he could do that, because people can only tell you “no” if you give them a chance.

The Sorta Great Wall now extends about fifteen feet along the lot line, and about two feet tall, and will hopefully one day be very scenic. Until then, I’m hoping that Robert Frost was a little wrong. “Good fences,” Robert Frost probably said, “make good neighbors.” I’m hoping that “Crummy fences made up of things you are too lazy to haul to the dumpster” make good neighbors, too. Or least make neighbors not call the zoning committee on you.


That’s what I’ve spent the first three days of my vacation doing: Tearing apart the last of the shed, beginning construction of The Great Wall, and pondering just why science is never right. Because I know now: matter is not made up of ‘empty space.’ It’s made up of cement blocks and raccoon skins, and it’s on me.

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Rage Part Two (Stolen)

June 22, 2008 at 12:57 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , ,

AfterDark: The scariest things you can’t imagine.  The site posts serialized horror stories, like this one:  Rage.  He was taken from his mother before he was even born.  Now he’s back and he wants her to know what she missed.  This is part two. 

Shapes.

She stood there. She stared at the shapes. Two were directly behind her. One was off to her left. One was off to her right. She looked over her shoulder, the direction she’d been headed. She could not see anything there, but the light faded and it was a long way to the next street lamp. She was two blocks from her apartment building. She was five blocks from the grocers. She looked around. There were no lights on in the windows of the buildings near her. She saw no glow of a television being watched quietly, no warm yellow gleam of an overhead kitchen lamp inviting her to call out to an elderly neighbor doing a word search puzzle before bed.

The shapes were like men, almost, but with strange outcroppings, odd appurtenances. They hunched or leaned. They did not move or talk and she could not make out features in the mist; they stood just outside of the range of the streetlight.

The pain in her back and stomach subsided. She looked from one shape to the other and wondered what to do. She could not run. She could not fight them.

“I have only a little money,” she said.

The shapes did not react.

“I’m pregnant,” she said. She pointed to her stomach.

The shapes did not react.

Eva slowly wrapped her arms around the lightpost, hugging herself to it and it to her, feeling the damp metal press against her clothing and the water seep into the fabric.

Another pain hit, and she bent a little at the waist. “No,” she whispered to herself. “Not now baby!” She gasped in and held her breath.

The shapes moved. They did not move quickly, but they were faster than the pregnant young woman who could barely breathe as the baby in her prepared to come out. The shapes waddled forward, they crept forward, they lurched forward. They moved with a grinding, pulsating throb that made her teeth quiver. She screamed and clutched at the light post as the contraction pulled her from the inside, grabbed at the walls of her body and dragged her breath from her, the scream withering into a gasp as the first of the shapes reached her.

It was gray. It was solid and cold, like cement or concrete or granite. It was cold and the water rolled off of it. It had arms, it had legs, and it had a head, but it was all wrong, all twisted, all off, and that was all she could think because the first shape to reach her grabbed her arm and pulled and another shape reached her and she felt frigid, implacable hands pull at each of her arms, they were so cold and they stung where they clutched at her and then more shapes were there, all moving deliberately and in strange motions, seeming to head in one direction while actually going the other, like a sidewinder might or an insect, and they were pulling at her limbs and she fell to the ground.

And another contraction hit as they pulled at her and she saw one take a large mitt of a hand, but it wasn’t a hand, it was like rock or claws and it was hard to focus on in the pain and the dim wet dark but even then the edges seemed blurry, the hand pushed down on her stomach and she felt something else, it had to be the other hand, reaching down between her legs, it was cold like stone…

“nooooo” she hissed as the contraction racked her while the shapes held her down and the hand pressed on her belly, on her womb and she felt the baby’s head push through, felt the shape’s hand, or talon, leave her and the baby was sliding out. She tried to scream when she had breath, yell at them, tell them not to do it, but she could not even think what to say as the baby was half out of her and another hand, or claw, or slab, pressed down on her face.

And then the baby was out, and she felt torn out inside, but the baby was out and she knew it, she heard it gasp and inhale and begin crying and the hand left her mouth and she opened her eyes, not realizing that she had closed them. She lifted her head off the ground and looked.

The shapes were retreating down the street, the one that had grabbed her dangling the baby by one leg from its right hand, the baby crying and bloody, screaming.

They moved slowly away from her, moving this way and that, almost falling over, crunching over the sidewalk like teeth grinding.

She saw them fade from the light of her streetlight into the dark.

She saw them re-enter the light a little further down. The baby was still in the shape’s paw, still crying. She could still hear it. She reached out her hand, but could not gather breath to move or speak.

She watched them leave that way, in and out of the light, until she could no longer see them.

 

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Countdown to Football Season: Team 28

June 21, 2008 at 6:09 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

Nonsportsmanlike Conduct! doesn’t just spend all its time making fun of Fat Prince Fielder; sometimes it also focuses on football, like today:

 

Well, thank God that’s over; with the NBA End-of-the-seasons over, we can all go back to ignoring baseball until Roger Clemens does something, and dream dream dream of the start of football season. To help with that, here’s

The Boy’s Power Ranking Countdown To Football Season:

Team 28: Denver Broncos

Division: AFC West.
Record Last Year: 7-9

NC!’s one-liner about them: At first, I didn’t like the Broncos new uniforms with their space-agey little swoop on the side. But now I do. I like Seattle’s uniforms, too.

The Boy Says: Until the most overrated coach Mike Shanahan leaves, the Broncos will never be the old “Elway Broncos.” No one knows what Jay Cutler is going to amount to. But it won’t matter because the Broncos dn’t have much talent at receiver anyway, and no good running backs — just an okay O-line. Finally, their defense is so inconsistent it’s hard to tell how they will do on D.
Safe to say that The Boy is not joining the Mike Shanahan fan club this year.

 

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Rage

June 20, 2008 at 2:09 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , ,

AfterDark:  The scariest things, you CAN’T imagine.  AfterDark is home to the world’s best serialized horror stories.  Today a new, never-before-published story begins:  Rage: He was taken from her before he was even born.  Now he’s back and wants her to know what she missed.

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They moved with an aching, grating gait that sounded to normal ears like moldy gravel scraping down a culvert.

They moved slowly.

They moved oddly, suddenly lurching in one direction or another.

They moved always in oblique curves, never directly forward or sideways.

That they moved at all was the second most frightening thing about them, to Eva.

The first most frightening thing was that they took her baby.

It had been quiet that night. Quiet, and misty. But still. The mist did not fall, or blow. It hung in the air, a curtain of water through which Eva had to continually pass, the light reflecting at unusual angles off the billions of tiny water droplets that hung in her way, the shadows more liquid than usual, the edges of everything blurred a little and blending into each other. Brick into air, water into ground, light into dark: there were no sharp edges that night.

Eva had been nine months pregnant. She was ready to give birth at any time and should not have been out. But she had needed milk and Tom was away for two days. There was no telling the baby that she did not have milk and could not go get it, the baby wanted milk and she’d learned that she’d have no peace until she gave it milk. And so she’d put on her housecoat, women still wore them then, and her slippers, and she’d walked the three flights of stairs down to the street that looked to have nothing in it but parked cars and the misty air and the streetlights striving to shine down through the weather and provide her some illumination.

She clutched at her purse and began walking the seven blocks to the grocery store that was open late. It was only 9 p.m. but that was late then, that was before all-night convenience stores and all-night everything.

She’d taken a few steps when she heard the scraping sound. Rock on rock?

She paused.

Nothing.

She took a few more steps and heard it again, behind her. And in front of her? A scraping, slight echoey, not quite rock on rock, not the sound you get when a brick lands on another brick. It was… mushy. She looked around. Had she had sharper eyes, she might have been able to see her reflection, wide-angled, in the water droplets that surrounded her and were slowly coating her clothing, her hair, her face. She saw nothing.

She walked again and heard it again, looked around but did not stop. The sound was loudest behind her, but never directly behind her, it was off to the left, then the right, then the left. It was off to both sides of her now, but not ahead of her, and she picked up her pace, she tried to walk faster with her belly bulging in front of her, the baby kicking and fidgeting. As she walked faster, she felt a pulling, tight, spasm across her body and through her back.

“No…” she muttered. “No.” She walked as fast as she could through the pain. The sounds were catching up. She stopped and inhaled sharply, looking to her left and right. She was directly below a streetlight and took advantage of that to see what she could.

Shapes.

 

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The Best Music To Indicate That Good Times Lie Ahead But Also That Everything Is Fraught With Portents of Evil.

June 19, 2008 at 2:31 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

The Best of Everything: Our Opinions Are Righter Than Yours! exists to tabulate The Best in any category you can imagine and a lot you can’t. This appeared there first. If you want to hear the music that went with this, click through that link to the original website.
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Filmmakers use music to set a mood — it’s no secret, I’m sure, that they carefully choose the music to indicate certain things to people, especially at the outset of a movie or in the previews for a movie or TV show.

The music is fantastically important to setting a mood. Remember the ending to [SPOILER ALERT INVOLVING THE FIRST RICHARD GERE/DIANE LANE MOVIE, WHICH IS WEIRD BECAUSE NOW THEY'RE MAKING A SECOND ONE, ONLY IT'S NOT A SEQUEL TO THE FIRST ONE, WHICH IS JUST LIKE THAT THING THAT GERE DID WITH JULIA ROBERTS WHERE HE MADE 'PRETTY WOMAN' WITH HER AND THEN LIKE 15 YEARS LATER MADE 'THE RUNAWAY BRIDE' WITH HER AND EVEN THOUGH IT WAS THE SAME PEOPLE, IT WASN'T A SEQUEL, AND NOW HE'S DOING THAT WITH DIANE LANE, SO I GUESS IT'S HIS 'THING,' ALTHOUGH COME TO THINK OF IT, DIDN'T TOM HANKS DO THAT WITH MEG RYAN SO MAYBE GERE IS COPYING HANKS. HOW COME GERE AND HANKS HAVE NEVER APPEARED IN A MOVIE TOGETHER? THEY COULD MAKE A ROMANTIC COMEDY WHERE THEY BOTH FALL IN LOVE WITH THE SAME GIRL, WHO DATES THEM BOTH AT THE SAME TIME AND FEELS TERRIBLE ABOUT IT AND WANTS TO END IT WITH ONE BUT LOVES THEM BOTH EQUALLY, SO SHE TRIES TO GET HER TWIN SISTER INVOLVED IN THE RELATIONSHIP, TRICKING THE TWIN INTO GOING OUT WITH TOM HANKS AND THEN RICHARD GERE TO SEE WHICH ONE SHE LIKES AND IF THEY ARE FOOLED AND LIKE HER, SO THAT SHE CAN THEN BE WITH THE OTHER ONE AND NOT FEEL BAD, ONLY THEN THEY BOTH FALL IN LOVE WITH THE TWIN SISTER, AND ULTIMATELY IT ALL WORKS OUT FOR THE BEST. I WOULD TOTALLY GO SEE THAT MOVIE] “Unfaithful” where Richard Gere and Diane Lane, having killed a guy and then gone to their kid’s program, sit in the car? As I recall, it was either quiet or there was some soft sad music playing while the car just sat there in the dark and everyone left the theater thinking “Oh, man, that’s messed up.”

Now, picture that same scene, only playing over the view of the car and the credits is “Yakety Sax.” You’d walk out of that movie going “Yeah! Way to go, Gere and Lane! You totally messed up your marriage and killed a guy but now you’re probably going to a wacky party.

From that, we can see how music sets the mood and tells you how to feel and what to expect, kind of like a Mom does. There are even specific songs that they use in previews to clue you in to what to expect. They use, for example, that Buffalo Springfield song about something happening here what it is ain’t exactly clear, to tell you, the viewer, that this movie will not be straightforward, there’s something weird about it. That song was used in Three Kings previews to tell you, the viewer, that this ain’t no Private Ryan or … what’s another war movie? Star Wars. Using that Buffalo Springfield song with its minor keys and pings and soft lyrics tells you that Three Kings is not Star Wars.

Which brings me to Irish music, and the way Irish music is used in movies to tell you that although there are some good times ahead, the good times are fraught with portents of evil to come and something bad is pretty much going to happen. Irish music in fact is The Best Music To Indicate That Good Times Lie Ahead But Also That Everything Is Fraught With Portents of Evil.

Here’s how I came to realize that fact: Last night, I had to run some errands and so I popped the Babies! into the SUV we have to use to drive them around even with gas more expensive than steak, because the car seats are in the SUV and I’m too lazy to try to move them everytime we need to. As I was driving around on my errands — dropping Sweetie off, getting an ice cream cone, going to the library to buy discount used books — I first listened to the song “Istanbul Not Constantinople” by They Might Be Giants.

That’s a catchy, upbeat, fun song. Later, still driving those errands, I listened to “Fire In The Belly,” by The Kissers.

And while I was driving around to Istanbul, life was good and happy and sweet and I was singing and laughing. While I was driving around to Fire in the Belly, I began to feel that something was going to go awry, and soon.

So I tested it out. I picked up Sweetie and put the song in and said to her– this is the truth — Pretend that you and I and The Boys are in the opening credits of a movie while this plays and we’re just driving around. So she did, and after a minute or two, I asked her “What do you think? If that was the beginning of a movie, would you assume that something bad was going to happen to us?” and she agreed.

So try that. Do something innocuous, something you do everyday, like sit at your desk and blog about Irish music, but first do it while listening to anything else in the world, and then do it while listening to that Dropkick Murphy’s song, or, say The Pogues’ “If I Should Fall From Grace With God”) and as you do that, see if you don’t keep looking over your shoulder waiting for the tidal wave or gunshot or leg-amputating accident or whatever it was that Frank McCourt was always so sad about to happen.

I’m not the only one who feels this way. They used Irish music in Titanic, for that scene where Leonardio DiCaprio dances, and maybe it was just me knowing that the Titanic was doomed, but that scene was Fraught With Portents of Evil, despite being a very good time. It wasn’t long before Leo and Kate Winslet were making out in the car, and it wasn’t much longer before Kate was letting him slip into the ocean and drown. [AND THAT WAS NOT A SPOILER BECAUSE ACCORDING TO THE CENSUS BUREAU, EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER LIVED IN HISTORY HAS SEEN 'TITANIC'. TWICE.]

Martin Scorcese used “Shipping Off to Boston” in the beginning of The Departed, which right off the bat tipped you off that things were not going to end happily. Begin a movie with Irish music and you know that at the end you will not see Brett Favre lip-synching to “Build Me Up Buttercup.”

I don’t really know what it is about Irish music. It’s not that I’m anti-Irish or pro-Irish or even Irish-neutral. I guess I’m in the middle — I’m somewhat pro-Irish because I’m a little bit Irish and I have one of those t-shirts that says Everyboy’s Irish On St. Patrick’s Day, even though I don’t celebrate St. Patrick’s day and I’m a little Irish all year round, but on the other hand the Boston Celtics just beat the Lakers in the NBA Finals and that means I lose my bet with The Boy and have to buy him and Sweetie Celtics’ t-shirts, and Celtics are Irish, aren’t they? But I’m pro-Irish-music because I have a lot of Pogues and Dropkick Murphys and and U2 and Hothouse Flowers and Kissers’ CDs, and I like bagpipe music and Scotland is really close to Ireland, so liking bagpipes is kind of like being an in-law in that sense — bagpipes aren’t really part of “Irish” music but they are pretty close to it and would get invited to Irish music’s barbecues and people would be polite to them and all.

I say all that to point out that I don’t just have some grudge against Ireland, Irish music, or the Irish that I’m going to take out in a passive-aggressive way by pointing out the universal truism that Irish music portends evil after good times. It’s just a fact, something that’s incontrovertible and that you feel in your gut, the same way you feel that Bruce Springsteen was never really “working class” at all, or that Phoebe never was a real part of the “Friends” or ham doesn’t belong on pizza: Irish music as good as it is at times, is also The Best Music To Indicate That Good Times Lie Ahead But Also That Everything Is Fraught With Portents of Evil.

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Jim Falls

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Can Garfield Beat Up Bugs Bunny?

June 16, 2008 at 2:25 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , ,

My Dad Can Beat Up Your Dad exists for one reason only: to find out who would win in a fight. What fight? ANY fight. Like today’s:
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Fight submitted by Middle Daughter. Submit your own fight and maybe get a t-shirt; you can submit two fighters and I’ll write it up, or write up your own whole fight, and email it to me at “thetroublewithroy[at] yahoo.com“.
This did not seem to be a fair matchup at first. Think about it. Garfield is that cat that just sits around and eats lasagna. Garfield, to my recollection, rarely gets out of his box-bed, although maybe he’s more active now. I can’t say because I don’t read Garfield every day.

I used to read every comic in the paper except the “serious” ones featuring old ladies and except “Prince Valiant” because it looked boring. But with more and more of my time being taken up by things that are not reading the comics, things like Babies!, I have to be more judicious in what I read because those are precious seconds in the morning, plus if you read a bad comic, it can wreck your otherwise great breakfast (consisting of a cup of coffee and a mixture of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch.) So I skip comics like Garfield where I know what the punchline is going to be (“I hate Mondays!“) and I skip comics that are boring me more and more, like “Get Fuzzy” which used to be funny but which lately has gone to the well of “Stupid Puns as Jokes” once too often; lately, the cat in that strip is making Russian puns. Why? I don’t know, or care. (For some reason, I still read Blondie even though it shames me. )

So I don’t really know what Garfield is up to. I checked it out today as part of the extensive research process I decided to go through. (Okay, reading the comic strip today was the extensive research process.) I didn’t get it, really. Jon told Garfield that his birthday was in three days, and Garfield glared at the calendar and said says you or something like that. Or he thought it. I don’t think Garfield can talk. He eats lasagna and he mopes and he thinks to calendars.

Bugs Bunny, by contrast, is like a force of nature, a dynamo. I am so familiar with Bugs Bunny that I might as well have a Ph.D. in Bugs Bunny. I watched Bugs Bunny cartoons every Saturday morning for most of my childhood; to this day, hearing the theme song for the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner hour makes me happy and excited because that means it’s Saturday morning.

Despite how often I watched it, I have to confess that I was always a little confused about the beginning of the theme song. All my life, all my life until about two years ago, I thought the theme song began Oh, m’sieur, hit the lights. I could never understand why Bugs Bunny would use a shortened French word at the beginning of his song. Eventually I decided that it was a theater thing.

Then, two years ago, I happened to hear the song. (Okay, I was watching the cartoons.) I realized, clear out of the blue, that they were saying Overture, hit the lights. Which is also a theater thing and makes a lot more sense. So I can add “Oh m’sieur/Overture” to the lengthy list of things I never quite understood while growing up.

Bugs Bunny, I figured, would mop up the floor with Garfield. After all, this was a bunny that has gone to Mars, and fixed the space program, and invented “Fiddler Crab Season” and taught a generation of kids what the music to “The Barber of Seville” sounds like and survived Elmer Fudd’s Ride of the Valkyries as Fudd tried to Kill The Wabbit! Nobody ever beats Bugs Bunny, right?

How The Fight Would Go: The only people Garfield ever fights with are Odie the dog and that kitten, Nermal. (No, I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t know who Nermal was. I hate when people do that. I hate when people try to convince you that they’re better than they are by claiming they don’t watch TV or they like broccoli or something, and a subset of people who do that are those people who you just know watch every celebrity gossip show there is, but then, when you talk about the celebrity gossip at lunch, those people act like they don’t and they say Oh, right, like… what’s her name again, the person I barely know and pay no attention to and certainly don’t know well enough to know her name, you know, she was the girl whose Dad was a professional wrestler not that I watch that kind of thing, but she’s kind of a singer and she wore those pants without the butt in them… Brooke something. I hate those people. Just admit that you’re no better than the rest of us. I know who “Nermal” is and you know who “Brooke Hogan” is.)

It would have to be, then, that Odie got Bugs Bunny to help him. Say, Garfield kicks Odie off the table in some totally original gag, and Odie flies out the window and lands near a perfectly round hole in the ground, from which Bugs Bunny comes up, chewing his carrot and says something clever like “Ehhh, what’s up… dog?” Odie explains that Garfield’s always picking on him, so Bugs decided to even the score, rolling up his sleeves and marching into the house.

Even Odie expects, being familiar with Bugs Bunny, that Garfield won’t last long. It’ll be just a few minutes until Garfield drives a car over the cliff, looks at the audience, then calmly opens the car door, steps out, and stands there, then watches as the car drops out of sight, and then Garfield drops out of sight, too, ending in a poof! of a cloud of dust at the bottom of the canyon. Or in a few seconds, Garfield will chase Bugs up a tree and they’ll keep climbing and climbing and climbing until Garfield looks around and finds out that the tree ended about a mile below them, at which point Bugs will whip out two parachutes, and Garfield will put his on, and they’ll both pull the ripcord, and Bugs’ parachute will open up, while an anvil pops out of Garfield’s, and he drops to the ground.

But… it’s a little too quiet in the house, so Odie peeks in through the window and sees, to his surprise, that Bugs is losing it, and losing the fight.

Bugs has, stacked around the room, TNT and dynamite and barrels of nitroglycerin, and he’s got rockets and firecrackers and the Plutonium P38 explosive space modulator. He’s got a drawing table on which he could paint weird adventures for Garfield. He’s got an entire construction crew and a wrecking ball and girders. He’s even got that little singing frog that kept making everyone crazy.

But Bugs is slumped over in defeat, because Garfield won’t get out of his bed. Odie realizes, as Bugs and the construction crew and frog have just realized, that Bugs wins because his enemies go nuts trying to fight him — they try to beat him at his own game, trying to trick Elmer into shooting Bugs because it’s water buffalo season, or trying to beat him to win the Million Box, only to get so caught up in their schemes that they lose sight of Bugs and suddenly are following ink-stamped tracks through a log into thin air.

Garfield doesn’t fight back that way. Garfield doesn’t get excited about anything. The overwhelming lull of Garfield’s mere presence, the deadening effect that Garfield has on people, has enveloped Bugs and Bugs Bunny is sitting, head down, in defeat, having met the one thing he can’t possibly defeat — having learned a lesson that Robin Williams has not yet grasped: it doesn’t matter how “wacky” you are if people don’t pay attention to you — and Bugs is about to pack up and head back to the Wabbit Hole, when Garfield whacks him with a newspaper and goes back to sleep — saying “I hate Mondays.“

The Verdict: Garfield, you’ve done it again!

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But Is It A Sport: Golf.

June 13, 2008 at 3:16 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , ,

Nonsportsmanlike Conduct!, the sports blog for people who love sports but hate sports blogs, periodically determines, for the world’s sake, what is or is not a sport.  It’s golf’s turn:

**************************************

The U.S. Open is going on this week; I understand that’s a pretty big deal in the world of golf, although as I pointed out rather obliquely not long ago, deciding what’s a pretty big deal in golf (or tennis, for that matter) appears to be somewhat arbitrary. It looks to me like they said Okay, these four are the big ones and the rest are the ones where Tiger can spend the week in his air-conditioned Habitrail environment instead of on the course.

But even so, it’s a big deal for golfers, and I’m a golfer, plus, there are no sporting events going on right now whose outcome is not alleged to be predetermined, (and don’t you think it’s a little too coincidental that the Lakers win Game 3, then news comes out that the NBA is accused of rigging things so that the Lakers win, and then the Lakers blow the biggest lead ever in the playoffs to a team that can’t win on the road?) so I thought this was a great time to ask:

But Is It A Sport: Golf?

The Basics: You take a stick and hit a ball with it. The ball is motionless and 18 times per match is actually sitting on a little tee waiting for you to hit it. You keep hitting the ball until it goes into a little hole — called the “cup.” This is much, much harder than it looks, and at the pro level, even harder than you could imagine. Four of the best non-professional golfers, including Matt Lauer and, for some reason, Justin Timberlake (?), played the U.S. Open Course recently and only two of them broke 100. “Par,” or the score you are supposed to get, is 72.

There are roughly 100,000,000 kinds of golf clubs, ranging from “Drivers” to “9-irons” to chipping wedges to I don’t even know what because I bought my clubs second-hand and tend to use just three of them. You can also get a variety of different kinds of balls; I favor the kind with a little shark on them because, well, cool, it’s a shark! I like to line up at the tee and say “I’m playing the shark ball.”

Wouldn’t Shark Ball make a great sport? Why isn’t that an Olympic event?

The Big Names: There’s only one name anyone cares about in golf: Tiger Woods. He’s pretty much the only professional golfer around, these days. When my dad calls me with golf updates because he watches them on TV (?), I ask only one thing: How’s Tiger doing?

There are other people that enter tournaments, I understand, and sometimes they win if Tiger is playing while comatose or if he’s distracted by… anything. If I were another golfer and wanted to beat Tiger in a tournament, I’d stand about a mile away and breathe loudly through my nose. From what I understand about Tiger’s delicate sensibilities (the same sensibilities that require him to never be exposed to Florida’s atmosphere, judging by how he built his house), that would throw him so off-balance that he’d not only lose the tournament, but might well kill his caddy.

Is It On TV? Constantly. Just what is the golf season, anyway? And who, besides my dad, is watching this? Golf is a pleasant way to spend an afternoon– if you’re out on the course getting some exercise and swinging the club and catching some rays. On TV, it’s like a screensaver. All they ever show are the putts, anyway.

Coincidentally, asking my dad how the golf match is going and getting his reports is every bit as exciting as actually watching the tournament on TV.

Is The Scoring Objective? At the pro levels, yes. Hit the ball, it’s a stroke. Count all your strokes and the lowest number wins. At the amateur levels, scoring is anything but. For instance, I employ two different rules for when I swing and miss the ball entirely: If I’m competing with someone, then I ask myself whether it really was a practice swing, and if it wasn’t, I count the swing. If I’m not competing, then I only count those swings where I make at least some contact with the ball. Other golfers employ “mulligans,” (an Irish term meaning I’m gonna do that again and try not to be so embarrassed), or the “foot wedge” (kicking the ball out of the weeds doesn’t count), the “man-made object rule” (if it’s kind of blocked or in the general vicinity of a man-made object, I get to move it to a better location, like on the green) and the time-honored Jeez, why’d you make a noise while I was in my backswing, I get to do that over again strategy. (Tiger employs a variation of that; see the caddy-killing point, above.)

But at the pro levels, scoring is objective.

Does It Involve Physical Exertion? Again, at the pro levels, yes. Pros walk the course. Someone else carries their clubs, but they do walk the course. And there’s some movement with all the swinging.

At amateur levels, most players use carts that are equipped with motors and carry their clubs and have one of those little GPS things to find the beverage cart. Some players never leave that cart.

Can You Get Hurt Doing It? Only if you are standing anywhere in the world and have the misfortune to make a noise while Tiger is swinging. I’ve taken to lying in bed under the covers for the entire weekend while he’s playing, just to avoid trouble.

Can You Play While Drinking A Beer And Smoking A Cigarette? Yes– and you can drive a golf cart during all that, too! To get an idea of the average golf course on a weekend, picture 150 drunk drivers in electric cars, all with metal clubs and cigars and getting increasingly frustrated. Sort of like NASCAR with uglier clothes and more weapons.

Is there some kind of incomprehensible rule that only avid followers will understand? Golf is unique in that, at the amateur level, golfers get to make up their own rules as they go along — see the scoring section, above– something they do even when golfing against themselves; solo golfers cheat. Why? So you can come home and tell your kids, who don’t care, that you shot a 75 when really it was more like 75-squared? What do you get out of that? They still won’t clean their rooms.

Golf courses, like individual golfers, get to have their own idiosyncratic rules, like how Augusta won’t let any woman play there, and the different layouts and challenges of each course result in local rules like this one warning you not to start an international incident with your chip shot:

Florida golf courses appear to have not gotten around to making rules about what to do when your ball is near an alligator; I’m sure they’re working on it.

THE VERDICT: I’ll say… YES! It’s a sport! But keep your cheering down; somewhere, Tiger might be teeing off.

Other sports include:

Homing pigeon racing.

Things that aren’t sports:

Fencing.

Auto racing.

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I’m supposed to say “I hate to say I told you so” but I don’t hate to say “I told you so.” I LOVE to say “I told you so.”

June 12, 2008 at 3:03 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , , , ,

Nonsportsmanlike Conduct!’s slogan is AlwaysMostlyRight. But today, it’s AlwaysAllRight:

Just a couple of quick points to make today:
This week, Tim Donaghy, who nobody wants to believe just because he’s a convicted criminal/habitual cheater, said that the refs favored the Lakers in Game 6 a while back, and that they did so because the NBA wanted to — according to Donaghy — “sought to manipulate games using referees to boost ticket sales and TV ratings.” (Quoted in Mirror.co.uk.)
I told you so, over a week ago, pointing out that everyone believes the NBA is rigged. (To be fair, the NBA denies that there was any rigging going on. To be even fair-er, the NBA cannot deny that there was any rigging going on, since it wants you not to believe Donaghy because Donaghy was convicted of rigging games. So there were, in fact, games in the NBA that were rigged by the refs; the NBA doesn’t want you to believe that any games are rigged because the only ‘proof’ that the games are rigged is that a ref was convicted of rigging games.)
Whew! Got all that? Let’s move on to something that’s more easily understood:

Fat Overpaid Prince Fielder, through 64 games — nearly 2/5 of the season — has 10 home runs. He’s on a pace to hit a whopping 25.3 home runs this year. His .274 batting average ranks him at
219th in the league. That’s down from last year, when Fat Overpaid Prince Fielder ranked 197th in the league.
Oh, he also has 6 errors already this year, putting him on a pace to make 14. 5 errors, or more than he made all of last season.
Prince Fielder’s raise alone is more than $200,000. But let’s suppose you’re a greedy jerk like Prince Fielder, and you say “Well, there’s a lot of money in baseball, shouldn’t he be paid something equivalent to how he does?” Let’s say that you’re that kind of jerk. Well, then, we should look at the stats to see how Prince Fielder does.
Let’s hope the Brewers do just that and cut his pay in half.

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Thinking The Lions is the hilarious compilation of the adventures of a guy with a lot of kids, a lot of love of 70s music, a lot of time to watch Battlestar Galactica, and a very patient wife. Life, only funnier.

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Could the police bees help protect us from Cloverfield?

June 11, 2008 at 4:17 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , , ,

Thinking The Lions is about life as a husband, father, lawyer… in that order… and about more than that, as you can see from this article: 

Here’s what I did so far today: I invented a new kind of cereal. I call it “Breakfast Cereal.” It will have little cereal bits shaped like pancakes (and slightly maple flavored) and muffins, and will also have marshmallows shaped like bacon and eggs.

I have no idea how to take it from the “I’m driving to work but have a brilliant idea which I will text to myself using my cellphone while I drive so that when I get to work I have an email that says bkfstcrl waiting for me” to the “Here’s the finished product that people can buy for too much money at the store and then have their Babies! spill all over the floor so that the vacuum cleaner they bought for $39.99 at Wal-Mart will jam up, as though it didn’t jam up a lot already because it’s frequently used to vacuum up macaroni and Ramen noodles and pretty much everything else that’s on the floor after dinner, including, possibly, one of The Boy’s school textbooks” stage, but that’s not really my problem, right? It’s a problem for engineers, or factory workers, or someone who has skills that are more of the functional/useful variety than mine.

Although I am very proud of the skills I do have, which at this point include not just lawyering and inventing breakfast cereals but also making up new games to play with the Babies! — the latest is “Police Bees,” which I had to invent because “Cloverfield” is taking a toll on me. Cloverfield is a hard game to play. These Babies! are up over 30 pounds now, and so to play “Cloverfield” I not only have to walk around swinging my arms, but I have to pick them up and drop them on the couch, sometimes doing that for as much as a half-hour, and sometimes they don’t really try to get away, sometimes they just sit on the couch and I have to pick them up right away again, so my arms don’t even get a break. Plus, I have to roar and keep yelling “CLOVERFIELD!!!!” and that gets hard on my throat.

So I invented a second game, for when my biceps just can’t lift them anymore, and that second game is “Police Bees,” which is more or less what you think it is, assuming that you think it’s me chasing Mr F and Mr Bunches around our house while making siren noises and, when I catch them, tickling their ears while buzzing — because that’s what Police Bees do, they chase the criminals and then sting/tickle their ears when they’ve got the bad guys.

That’s pretty much my contribution to society these days. I’ve been worried about my contribution to society ever since I gave The Boy’s friend a ride to school last Friday. I had to give The Boy’s friend a ride to school because it was the first of final exam days, and at The Boy’s school, they don’t have to be at school all day for finals; they only have to show up for the start of their test and then they’re free to leave.

Ordinarily, The Boy and Middle and the friend go to school together at 7:30 in the morning. But on that morning, The Boy wasn’t going in until 9 and Middle wasn’t going in until later. Neither had bothered telling the friend this, so he showed up at our house at 7:30 expecting a ride to school and only then learned that he was on his own.

I don’t know why The Boy didn’t tell him; I don’t know what it is that makes The Boy so busy that he can’t tell his friend — who lives next door — that he’s not going into school until later so the friend would be able to arrange his own ride. It might be that The Boy’s projects keep him busy, projects like the olive-ectomy he performed on a slice of pizza the other night. We were having leftovers for dinner, and The Boy wanted leftover pizza. So while I sat down and ate and Sweetie sat down and ate, and the Babies! sat down and ate, The Boy was off at his own end of the table doing something with his slices of pizza… for 45 minutes. When we were all done (I thought) I got up, and began cleaning up Mr F and Mr Bunches and said to The Boy “Okay, start clearing up,” and he protested, saying:

“What? I haven’t even eaten yet!” I asked him what he’d been doing for 45 minutes, and he explained that he’d removed, apparently surgically, every olive and mushroom and green pepper from the leftover pizza, digging into the cheese to get them out while leaving as much cheese and sausage as possible.

Because The Boy is always too busy doing food surgery, I ended up driving his friend to school, and asked him what exams he had that day. The friend’s only exams were in shop-related classes, and he described how he’d machined a bolt and built other kinds of stuff and wired things, and kept on until we got to the school and I dropped him off and drove away wondering what good I might be to society.

As a longtime fan of science fiction, I’ve long known that it’s only a matter of time until civilization as we know it collapses. It might be a nuclear war, like in The Day After or Alas, Babylon. It might be giant elephant-like aliens who we have to attack with a nuclear-powered spaceship piloted by bikers with bad backs. It might just be that American Idol gets cancelled. Whatever it is that causes the collapse of civilization, it’s certain to collapse.

After it collapses, then, it’s also certain to need rebuilding, and that’s where I get nervous. I have exactly zero useful skills. Do you think all those people gathering in Colorado to battle Walking Dude and his forces of evil in The Stand would need a blogger? When they relocate the capitol of the US to Albuquerque, New Mexico, because the Russians have invaded and C. Thomas Howell isn’t around to fight them off, will a consumer lawyer be very much in demand?

I’d like to think so, but I’m skeptical that the dregs of humanity will be beating a path to my door saying things like only your encyclopedic knowledge of e e cummings’ poems can help us now!

It’s not like I’m completely useless. This past Sunday, for example, when crisis threatened, I was able to capably lose a tool while getting soaked. We were coming home from church around 10 a.m., and I was contemplating how we’d have to spend the next few hours continuing the shed demolition, when God intervened and rewarded me– I thought — by making it start to rain. Hooray! I could spend the rest of the day watching TV and playing “Police Bees.”

Only it didn’t work out that way, because the back stairwell started to flood again. Having just replaced the carpet, I wasn’t about to let it get wrecked. We might have bought bottom-of-the-barrel, 55-cent per square foot carpet, but I like it and I’m going to defend it with my life.

My life, or the tools to unclog a drain. At least, the tools I have to unclog a drain. The tools I used to try to unclog the drain were: my Starbury running shoes (not the basketball shoes; those were muddy from the shed day), a long pole that was duct-taped to another long pole and used to be in my closet for some reason, a spade, a long metal pole with a hole in one end, a branch trimmer, a bucket, a laundry tub, and two hammers.

With those highly-useful tools, I went out in the pouring rain — there was also lightning– and stood ankle deep in the mud and began to try to figure out how to unclog the drain. I first tried reaching down into the drain itself, which required that I kneel in the mud water.

You have to know this about me: I saw Jaws when I was really little and ever since then, I don’t trust any body of water larger than my hand. I don’t even like bottled water.

I mention that because when I reached my hand into the water to reach down into the drain pipe, my very first thought was I hope something doesn’t bite me. I don’t know what I expected to be living in the drainpipe under water. An aquatic raccoon-shark, maybe. I just expected something to bite me.

When getting my arm dirty and wet proved to be useless, I began phase two of Operation Save The Carpet, which involved sticking various poles and saws into the hole and trying to dislodge the dirt and muck I assumed were in there clogging it. That’s why I needed two hammers. I would put one of the poles or the shovel in there, and then ram it around with my hands, and then pound on the end of it with a hammer. (Don’t try that at home. Or, do try it. After all, I did it safely, so you should be able to, as well.)

That completely failed to work, too, and resulted in my losing a hammer when the first one slipped out of my hands and dropped right down into the drain. So far from unclogging the drain, I was adding to it. And still the rain kept coming.

Phase three of Operation Save The Carpet had me pouring all of our Liquid Plumber into the drain, in case Liquid Plumber is capable of dissolving rock and dirt and hammers. (It’s not.)

Phase four involved me realizing that I was now standing just over ankle deep — the water was a risin’ — in muddy water in the lightning, only now the muddy water also contained Liquid Plumber that was probably going to start eating away my shoes.

Phase five was bailing out the stairwell with the bucket. I did that three times that day, going outside and getting soaked and throwing buckets of water into the yard until the water level went down to where it was no longer threatening to flood the new carpet. One of the times bailing the water out was around midnight that night. So whatever I’d thought earlier that morning, it was clear that God was not giving me a day off, and I’m definitely going to pay a lot closer attention in Church this week.

It worked: there was no flooding, and we got a drain guy out the next day. I had to call three drain guys to get one to come out there; the other two actively talked me out of hiring them. I’m guessing they had so many calls the day before that they’d retired from being drain guys and were going to move to Hawaii on their drain guy profits.

Drain guy number three came out, looked at the drain, and said it wasn’t clogged, it was just a small “French drain,” designed to take runoff and leach it into the ground, and that it was overloggged with water from all the rain. In short, there was nothing he could do for us– except charge us $60 for coming out, and recommend getting a pump.

So if society’s collapse was one involving either (a) a lot of flooding, or (b) a need for new breakfast cereals, or (c) someone to guide the Police Bees to their quarry, I’m your guy.

Anything else, you’ll probably want to get The Boy’s friend. Or The Boy — odds are, pizza surgeons will be in high demand in the new world order.

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