Would you be interested in partaking of a little show of force?

From days of long ago, from uncharted regions of cyberspace, comes a legend; the legend of Goatse.cx, Scourge of the Internet, a mighty .jpg, loved by evil, feared by good. As Goatse.cx’s legend grew, unrest spread across the galaxy. On Planet Earth, a Galaxy Alliance was formed. Together with the good moderators of the internet, they maintained peace throughout cyberspace, until a new horrible menace threatened the World Wide Web—Tubgirl. Voltron was needed once more. This is the story of the super force of web explorers, specially trained and sent by the Alliance to bring back Voltron, Defender of the Internet!

As I am sure you’re aware, the internet has a long and storied history of presenting viral videos and shock sites—I’m sure you’ve seen or heard about content like 2 Girls 1 Cup and Kids in a Sandbox. Maybe you even remember being goatse’d back in 2001 (I sure do…thanks Neil!).  As far as I can tell, the basic idea is to trick unsuspecting people into viewing content that they will almost surely find disturbing and/or disgusting.   Personally, I have a weak stomach for that kind of thing and have never made it through an entire video of, oh say, girls eating poop like it’s a tasty cup of gelato.  For years, I believed that nothing good ever came out of these ridiculous links, but as it happens, I have been proven wrong.  Apparently, it is popular to record (via hidden camera or otherwise) the reactions of your friends and family viewing these unsettling links for the first time.  Frat boy shenanigans, clearly.  Not worth the time it took to upload said videos to the interwebs.  Then, as is true of every popular whatzamahoozen on the internet, the parodies arise and lo, they make me laugh for they are funny.  And also?  Not safe for work, if your work disapproves of implied puppet masturbation.

In other news, I just caught The Mangler on cable.  I remember vaguely pondering seeing the movie when it came out because as loathe as I am to admit it, I am quite the fan of Stephen King’s books/stories that aren’t part of The Dark Tower series.  The Mangler is loosely based on the short story of the same name from Night Shift which I read roughly eight thousand times between 1990 and 1997.  I am certain that I could done another five or six hundred if my copy hadn’t been this super creepy edition with cuts outs on the cover and the hand with the eyeballs on it that give me the wiggins so badly I had to hide the book in my closet so I wouldn’t accidentally see the cover in the middle of the night.  True story.  So, The Mangler.  I only TiVo-skipped over about a quarter of it, which is more than I can say for the last episode of the new 90210.   On a scale of Death Bed: The Bed That Eats to Gingerdead Man, with Death Bed being the lowest and Gingerdead Man being the second lowest, The Mangler rates a pretty solid Monkey Shines.  Not over-the-top bad enough to be truly hilarious, but you know, still terrible in its own right.

buggre alle this for a larke

As I am sure you know, I never met a book about adventure on the high seas that I didn’t love.  Since April introduced me and my father to the Bolitho books, I’ve been scouring used bookstores for tattered, dog-eared copies of installments of the series.  I was deeply involved in this book (Dick finally finds his brother—and he’s a traitor to the Crown!):

Then, I hit this page:

What the deuce?  Flip it over:

!!!  There is an ad for dirty cigarettes for filthy smokers in my awesome book!  Shenanigans!  I protest!

This is a lot of dolls…and they’re nice, you know, not super creepy at all.

As I type these words, I am sitting at my breakfast bar, faithfully watching my pot o’sweetened condensed milk, lest the water level dip. Something tells me I will be very, very sorry if a can of caramel explodes in my kitchen. Thanks to Annie and Jessica for the tip—I can’t wait to taste the end product. Though I may regret it if it is so good that I end up licking the can clean.

I know that I promised you some Red State Adventures, but on careful consideration, nothing really exciting happened. I did show up out of nowhere (seriously, I just turned up at random in a mall that my family was visiting and nearly gave my mother a coronary at the jewelry counter in Macy’s) and surprise the heck out of everyone, which was so worth the effort. My mother looks wonderful and healthy—hell, my dad seems to have borne the brunt of my mother’s illness as in the past four months, his hair has turned almost completely white. Once the preliminaries were out of the way, it was family business as usual.

I’m not sure if you are familiar with the area, but in the absence of snow for winter sports, there is all kinds of nothing to do in Nevada if you’re not a dirty hippie heading to Burning Man.  These are the more rewarding options:

1. Sunbathing:  Nevada is ALWAYS sunny.  Unfortunately, in the summer, it’s roughly 450 degrees.
2. Chain Restaurants:  Mimi’s and Macaroni Grill are the devil—evil and yet, so delicious.
3. Movies:  Always a  viable option, unless, like my parents, you like 45 minutes form the nearest movie theatre.
4. Satellite TV: You can’t go wrong with 700 channels.  No, seriously, you can’t go wrong.  I tried!
5. Find The Hipster:  This game gets harder and harder every time I visit.  where are all the indie kids hiding?!
6. Find The Douchebag Teenage Poser:  Perhaps a little too easy.  Every child between the ages of 12 and 18 in Nevada looks like he/she was chewed up and spit out by either Wet Seal, Abercrombie & Fitch or Hot Topic.  THERE IS NO MIDDLE GROUND.

Aaaaand, that’s about it.  I spent the bulk of my visit getting my ass handed to me at Texas Hold ‘Em by my card sharp younger brothers, watching BBC-America, listening to my dad wax lyrical about whichever Bolitho book he was reading at the time and eating my mother’s wonderful cooking.  Time well spent, I’d say.

shun the non-believer...shuuuuuuuuuunnnnnn

Sometimes people have too much time on their hands and do stupid things on the internet.  And sometimes, people have too much time on their hands and do BRILLIANT things on the internet:

Christian the Frog/Kermit Bale

not my fault! monkey bastard hands...

To Whom It May Concern:

I am sick and I hate you, leave me alone.  I wasted a perfectly good three day weekend languishing in bed, suffering fever dreams and tearing through kleenex by the double handful.  Beth had a Brain Candy/Rock Star party that I totally missed AND I could not attend Rira’s Gossip Girl Premiere Hootenanny.  SO STUPID.  HATE EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE.  And, my nose is so plugged up that I can’t taste anything, not that I’m eating anything but soup and bread, but still—it’s the principle of the thing.  I mean, I brewed up a big vat of hot/sour soup, filled it with a handful of ground-up super scary Mexican peppers my ex-work husband gave me and then doused it with a grip of rooster sauce and NOTHING.  You know that episode of the Simpsons where Homer eats the Insanity Pepper (and I’m not even going to pretend like I don’t know the title: El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer)?  Yeah, like that.  Basically, that soup should have landed me in a crazy vision talking to a Space Coyote and I didn’t even BLINK.

My only solace is Hulu.  

Colbert Report: Sarah Palin for VP  (My thoughts exactly.)

Two A-Holes In A Live Nativity Scene

They also have feature-length movies that I’d be ashamed to waste a netflix on, like Master and Commander and Finding Forrester AND full episodes of tons of awesome TV shows.  God bless the internets.

Gotta dash, things happening. Well, four things. Well, four things and a lizard.

La Lechera, light of my life, fire of my loins, has introduced this newfangled drip-proof squeeze bottle, so now I can enjoy some sweetness on my strawberries without futzing about with can openers and ignoring that metallic rim taste.  Do you love sweetened condensed milk as much as I do?  I feel like it’s not as popular in the states as it is on the rest of the planet, which is a shame, although, more for me, I guess.   I discovered the true and uncontested beauty of sweetened condensed milk for the first time in Singapore.  A street vendor sold me a rolled up waffle that had been coated in butter and smeared liberally with that sugary-creamy goodness and I was hooked, now and forevermore, world without end, amen.  The taste reminded me so strongly of home—like a big bowl of corn flakes. 

Perhaps that doesn’t make as much sense to you as it does to me.   It’s like this:  the cost of living is incredibly high in Hawai’i—it’s in the top 5 in the nation.  The last time I was there, I literally gasped at the prices in the grocery store.  The issue, as I am sure you’ve gathered, is that Hawai’i is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  Over 80 percent of food items, both perishable and non- have to be imported, which drives up prices significantly.  At any given time, there is only a week’s worth of food in the state.  Granted, anything vaguely tropical (pineapples, mangos, papayas, guava, bananas—the good ones too, not those starchy gross ones you get here) is cheap,  but that doesn’t exactly offset the 7 bucks you’re shelling out for a gallon of milk.  This is a roundabout way of explaining that I grew up drinking powdered and evaporated milk.  I hail from a big, milk-drinking family; a gallon a day would be a conservative estimate.  Instead of half-and-half for my mother’s coffee, my grandfather would go out to the PX and buy a crate of evaporated milk which, for some reason, we also put on our cereal.  I was the sort of child who doused her otherwise healthy cereal with sugar—I wasn’t fucking around either, I would upend the canister over my bowl and pour until I couldn’t see the corn flakes anymore.  If my mom wouldn’t buy me sugar frosty flakey os, I goddamn well would MAKE them.  Then, I drowned the entire concoction in evaporated milk.  The best part was the sugar/milk sludge left on the bottom of the bowl, which is, you guessed it, pretty much exactly like sweetened condensed milk, but with little Corn Flake dregs floating around.  Mmmm, cornflake dreg-y sugar sludge.

 

Years ago, when I read Good Omens, I was fascinated by one of the character’s habits of swigging the stuff straight from the can.  This is a bad idea.   For serious.  You think you can handle the sweet attack, but you can’t.  I couldn’t and I can eat half a cake and, I’m pretty sure, a whole pie, if I tried.

Stay tuned for Ahe’s Red State Adventures.

do you need me to do any attacking, sir?

Coucou, je suis revenue!  Nevada was lovely, albeit oppressively hot.  Luckily, my parents understand that there is no pleasure, no rapture, no exquisite sin greater than central air.  Details to follow after I’ve settled back in at work.  To tide you over, here are some blurry shots of the charming menu at the Mexican bar in the Concourse B at SeaTac (and yes, it was about 9AM.  What?  THE BAR WAS OPEN.  What was I supposed to do, just walk right by and let all that booze go to waste?  Blasphemer.) 

Ah, my old friend, the mis-used apostrophe, how I have missed thee.  This next one is my favorite, though:

The question mark really cinches it.

elephants are not purple--this is *wrong*

Eff why eye, friends, I am heading out of town to visit mi madre, so I will not be posting anything until next week sometime.  I’m a little nervous; my mother is recovering from surgery and radiation therapy (she’s doing well and cancer free, yay!) and I’m apprehensive  because I’ve never actually seen her, you know, not super healthy.  I’m sure it’ll be fine, though, and I’m looking forward to the time off work and also, making my father, the peanut butter-lover, what may possibly be the greatest cake the world has ever known.  (Rira, do not worry, I will still make it in cupcake form sometime in the near future.)

Cheerio, here I go on my way!

art thou calling my father a goodly rotten apple?!

Anyone else out there besides Rira and I get effed by the Great Netflix Outage of Aught-Eight?  Shenanigans!  My Netflixing system is DELICATE.  It relies on a perfect balance of time and the somewhat unexpected efficiency of the main post office downtown.  Don’t they understand that my entire life is planned around this system?  Oh, the humanity.  I was happy to receive the following e-mail:

Though I’m not entirely convinced that refund of $2.68 is going to make up for the pain and suffering.  I detest being inconvenienced!

welcome to you're "doom!"

**Spoilers ahead for Breaking Dawn.  But if you haven’t read it by now, you’re probably not obsessive enough to care about spoilers and furthermore, I doubt your commitment to SparkleMotion.  Also, I don’t believe you could possibly have escaped the Sparkledammerung.  From hell’s heart, it stabs at thee.

As previously recounted, I am very much a fan of Stephenie Meyer’s best selling teenage vampire books.  Without shame.  To the bone.  This is the thing:  the first three books?  Kind of suck.  The series is a prime example of a fundamental principal of life:  you can still love things that suck.  You know, like Dawson’s Creek and Torchwood.  Or Ben Affleck.  Ooh, or General Foods International Café Vienna, mmm, powdered goodness.

The fourth book, Breaking Dawn (which has spawned an internet whine-fest the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the last Harry Potter movie came out) is on the bottom end of that list of things I love which happen to suck.  A subset of that group, really, which would be more appropriately termed “things I love in spite of the fact that they are offensive, awful, terrible and maddening.”  It ranks somewhere between American’s Next Top Model and Details magazine.

The main character, Bella, is supposed to be this super awesome, smart, strong girl—someone sooooo cooooool that even a wicked hot sparkly vampire would fall in love with her at first sight.  Oh, and every other dude in the book is totally in love with her too and she’s super-gorgeous, even though she has no idea how beautiful she really is.  Apparently, Edward is demonstrating that aforementioned fundamental principal of life:  he loves Bella, even though she kind of sucks.  She’s stupid, boring, indecisive, whiny, lame, dresses terribly and has ridiculously low self-esteem.  But that’s all okay because Edward loves her!  That makes her special!  Bella is complete with the love and protection of a man-boy vampire who treats her more like a clumsy, mentally deficient daughter than a partner.  Oh, and then, when he knocks her up with an undead half-vampire baby that he doesn’t want her to carry, she doesn’t even have the guts to tell him that she wants to keep the monstrosity.  Oh, I am so frail and helpless, I couldn’t possibly disagree with my husband—I must find someone bigger and stronger to protect me!   Because her husband would what?  Tie her down and force her to have an abortion?  Which, remind me, was it ever explained how they planned to abort a fetus encased in a granite womb and HULKSTRONG enough to break Bella’s spine and then punch its way out of her? Let’s not forgot that Deathbaby telepathically communicates how much it loves Bella while killing her from the inside and planning one day to EAT ITS WAY OUT OF HER BELLY.  Oh, Mommy, I love you!  You are delicious, om nom nom. Nom.

Also?  Vampires do not have sex and they certainly can’t impregnate a human being.  You know what?  I don’t think they sparkle like diamonds in the sunlight either!  Why does she even bother calling them vampires?  I don’t care what Spike and Angel do, vampires can’t have sex.  Well, not actual sex.  Metaphor sex, sure, if you look at it in terms of how horror stories are cautionary tales about social and cultural fears and vampire myths warn against the dangers of sex, deviant sex and sexual predators.  Ugh, stop me before I revert to communications class film criticism mode and start talking about shadow-myths. 

(For the record, I think vampires don’t bang, but they do have sloppy makeouts.)