Excerpt from Daddy Takes Us Psychic Battling

"Oh, how powerfully enhanced your psychic powers are!" cried little Mabel Blake, one day, as her brother Hal came running out of the school yard, where he had been having a telekenetic battle with some other boys. Mabel was waiting for him to walk home with her as he had promised.

"Yours are powerfully enhanced, too, Mab!" Harry said. "It's as powerfully enhanced--as powerfully enhanced as some of the brains we boiled with our minds at our seashore cottage this summer."

"Are my psychic powers powerfully enhanced?" asked Mab of some of her girl friends.

"They surely are!" replied Jennie Bruce. "All our psychic powers are powerfully enhanced!" she went on. "It's the planetary alignment that makes 'em so. It's very cold today, and soon it will be the time of the assassins, with lots of blood and violence! Oh! I just love the time of the assassins!"

[Note: This is another of my find and replace travesties.]

Yes, please take my money

Wost spam subject line ever: "Do you want to see the fountain of sperm? Try our new Soft Cialis Tabs."

No, no, no, a thousand times no, I don't want to see the fountain of sperm!

Sadly, there's no scenes with Potsie

I know this probably isn't an original idea, but it's a shame no one has ever staged Samuel Beckett's play, Happy Days, with Marion Ross and Tom Bosley.

Enter the fotdella

Many, many, many years ago I bought a record (yes, one of those big black flat round plastic things yer grandma used to listen to music on before she got an iPod like a civilized human being) by Tav Falco. On the back cover of this rockabilly oddity, the legendary Jim Dickinson was credited with playing something called a "fotdella". What's a fotdella, you ask? For more years than I care to mention, I wondered the same thing. Often I imagined it was a sort of flatulent rhythm instrument, possibly played with a bellows. Anyway, this morning I finally looked it up on Google and, much to my surprise, actually found an answer.

The fotdella is a stringed bass that you play with one of your feet using a crude keyboard. Oddball bluesman Jesse "Lone Cat" Fuller invented it for his one man band. [Note to self: Look for some Jesse Fuller MP3s, pronto. I must hear the fotdella played by the master.]

So now that I know what a fotdella is, I want one. In fact, I believe I was born to play the fotdella. Where can I get one? So far my search for an online fotdella dealer has been fruitless, but did find a guy who had made an improved model. Ah, but my fotdella dreams are sure to be dashed.

Victoria Regina Tarot

The Victoria Regina Tarot is a tarot deck made entirely by collaging 19th century engravings. It's somewhat like (but nowhere near as marvelously strange as) Max Ernst's surrealist collage novel, Une Semaine de Bonté. (A book I still don't own, even though I first saw it more than ten years ago.)

The bad thing about the Victoria Regina Tarot is that it's out of print. But the illustrations of each card seem to be viewable at the site.

They're inflatable!

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Such disappointment

There was some kind of fire near my job last night. All night we could smell wood smoke in the warehouse because the fans in the ceiling were sucking it in. The smell gradually died down so that it wasn't that noticeable, but around 6 AM it suddenly got strong again and I could actually see smoke haze in the air inside the warehouse. I wondered if the smoke alarms would go off. Then I wondered if the sprinklers would go off. That would've been interesting, but, sadly, it didn't happen. Fun stuff never happens at work.

What?!

This morning my boss was yammering on about something or other (I wasn't really listening) and she said what sounded like, "I couldn't get my bowels to move." I suddenly looked up at her and thought, "Did she just say what I think she said? And, if so, why in the name of all things decent is she telling me?" Then I realized she'd said, "I couldn't get my mouse to move." She was having computer problems in the new area where she's got her office set up.

Postal humor

Contained in this mashed box is the best deal I ever got on Ebay. For a mere $20.83 I snagged a Schick adjustable injector in the original case, a razor I've seen go for over a $100 more than once. There were also six other vintage razors, one of which was also in its original case. Of course both cases were smashed. (That's plastic for you.) Thankfully the razors weren't damaged.

The seller put a big label on the box reading, "Handle With Care", but they would've been better off with a label reading, "Please crush this box with some big heavy shit!" Jackasses.

The Chuck Yeager of stupid

Does stupid have a terminal velocity? I'm beginning to think I'm on the brink of finding out.

Last night at work as I left to go to lunch, I somehow managed to lock myself out of the office. Naturally, no one had a key. That's not as surprising as it may seem since there's only half a dozen people on third shift. So a supervisor from the only other populated office and a security guard did much poking and proding with various implements in an unsuccessful attempt to break into the office. I just stood there like a big doofus and ate my lunch since I'd already achieved professional levels of stupidity by locking myself out in the first place. Eventually someone showed up with a screwdriver and we took the damn door off the hinges.

I'd like to say that locking myself out of the office was a rare occurance, but last Friday I locked myself out of my car. So, it begins... Next I'll suddenly find myself out in public with no pants on.

Vacant

Monkey Chow!

The Monkey Chow Diaries: "On June 3, 2006, I began my week of eating nothing but monkey chow: 'a complete and balanced diet for the nutrition of primates, including the great apes.'" [via Metafilter]

Who knew there was such a thing as Monkey Chow?

The Monster Show

In the comments of my "Monsters want our women" post I mentioned a book I read a few years ago that had interpretations of horror movies from the silent era to the present. The title's The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror and there's even an official site.

Stupid comics

I love websites about old comics, particularly if the old comics in question are seriously fucked up. So much time was happily wasted when I found Stupid Comics a few weeks ago. How stupid are they? Pretty stupid. And in one sequence Dick Cheney makes a surprise appearance.Women of the world, I don't let Dick Cheney carry you back to his lair!

Monsters want our women!

A few weeks ago I watched Creature from the Black Lagoon again. I wasn't planning on watching much of it, but I ended devouring the whole thing instead of napping like I'd wanted. (I live for napping.)

It's a great monster flick, but it made me wonder why it was that in so many of these types of movies the monster killed the men and carried the women away? What were the monsters going to do with the women? I, and all the other straight men watching Creature from the Black Lagoon, know what we'd like to do to Julie Adams, but did the gill-man harbor similar urges? Apparently, he did, but it's never mentioned in the movie at all. There's no scene where any of the male characters say anything like, "The monster wants a mate, so we better lock up whatshername and tell her to stop jiggling around in that bathing suit." But the original movie posters leave nothing to the imagination. One states bluntly, "Terrifying monster of the ages raging with pent-up passions! ...with every man his mortal enemy ...and a woman's beauty his prey!" And on another poster, "Centuries of passion pent up in his savage heart!"

So, in the 50's there was this deep-seated fear that monsters would be canoodling our womenfolk? I thought the 50's was all about commies. You know, commies canoodling our womenfolk. (Oddly, in the poster for one of the two Black Lagoon sequels, The Creature Walks Among Us, the monster appears to be wearing pants while on his rampage in some big US city after he escapes his captors. I can imagine a scene where the guy running the zoo/freak show/whatever says something like, "Somebody put some pants on that thing!" Of course he ran around nekkid all through the first movie.)

So monsters do want out women! Somebody should make a website about this! Oh, look, they already have. At least two of them actually. Giants and Girls [not all safe for work] is devoted to monsters, aliens, mutants, etc. chasing and carrying away beautiful women. Lots of nice galleries if you just stick to the old movie stills and ignore the creepy computer "erotic" art. It's more of fetish site than a purely movie buff site, but interesting none the less. The other site, In My Arms, is devoted to the "carry phenomenon", which is basically just monsters, aliens, robots, mutants, and just regular old run of the mill human men carrying unconscious women. Needless to say, this is also a bit of a fetish site and probably not all safe for work.