I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

I’ve always liked the line-art “doodled in a notebook” style of Built-by-Wendy’s t-shirt series, usually showing scenes from cult movies (Birch Harms has the To Kill A Mockingbird one and someone else has the Bad News Bears dugout one, but I can’t remember who).

I checked their site recently, and they’re totally pandering to comedy nerds (or suddenly hipsters are all really into cusp-of-70s/80s comedy). Not only do they have a Gene Wilder/Gilda Radner shirt, but also a Bob & Doug MacKenzie shirt.

Oh, so many reasons to buy giant chess pieces!

Like, pretending you’re in an episode of the Avengers (or an Avengers-themed XTC video).

Even better—Plastic Chess Hats, particularly with the WARNING: ...these products may cause neck injury in the natural course of child play. Constant adult supervision is required. “So, how DID your son end up a quadrapalegic.”

A friend comments that the pawn hat looks like “a condom full of whale jizz”

I think it’s strange that the price of the chess hats bought individually scales upwards with the piece’s status in the game. I mean, the hats are all made of the same stuff… why is a queen hat $50 and a pawn $13?

(Site found by thebighonkin.com; they used a black knight for “Dark Horse” in Defenders of Stan #12)

I found myself thinking about scientists who spend their lives teaching animals to talk, like Koko the Gorilla and the recently deceased Alex the Parrot. A lot of skeptics say the supposed teaching and logic on display that the researchers say is the breakthrough, is operant conditioning… rehearsed performances (usual name-check-dismissed with an eyeroll to “Hans the Wonder Horse“)

I found, through cross-references in Wikipedia, a current parrot subject who’s being taught through “conversational” methods. And just to throw some sand under the wheels of scientific legitimacy, Nkisi can not only speak and understand English… he’s psychic too.

Nkisi Speaks
I could listen to this for hours. Nkisi sounds like a teenaged girl from LaJolla.

It cheapens the whole having-an-astral-body-named-in-your-honor for the other honorees.

The UCB Theatre called me up and said, “Hey, why not tell people about our new video site” and I was all like “Nah, they can find it on their own.” Then they were like, “Don’t be a dick, Jesus. We’re just trying to get through the fucking day, already.” And I was like, “Well, shit, if you’re going to be all up in my jock about it, I’ll link to your goddamned website.”

Here’s what you get—all my no-good same-old videos, now in beautiful hi-res that looks better than YouTube. (Also, Monster in A Wheel Chair)

Remember this chestnut back from 2006?

Fatal Farm is back! And by that I mean, I finally took notice of something they’ve probably been doing for months and months! So, only my perspective of things makes them exists! Yee haw!

Lasagna Cat: Tributes to Jim Davis

Fatal Farm, as you recall, I last reported on for their bizarre/hilarious re-versions of TV opening credits(and there’s a couple new ones since last I posted). And fucked up interpretations of newspaper comics were twice reported here in the form of the awesome Mary Worth video series (tip of the hat to Matt DeCoster for pointing out originally). Finally, two great internet tastes that taste great together in… Lasagna Cat!

I read an article about LastExittoNowhere.com in the Times, a guy who makes logo’ed shirts for fictitious companies and products from famous movies.

He does a Hudsucker shirt (The Hudsucker Proxy is my favorite movie released within my lifetime, despite its many faults), which is weird enough since as far as I know it hasn’t generated a gen-X cult the way other Coen Bros movies have.

I actually like it less than many on the site, just because Hudsucker Industries wouldn’t make a shirt in 1959 (the year the film takes place in), and if they made it in the 80s or later, they would have changed their logo. (Hudsucker Industries still exists in the 80s because H.I. works there in Raising Arizona in the opening montage.)

Still, I was impressed the Hud’ made the cut.

My problem with blogs is that they’re too wordy… gab gab gab, I get it, you know how to type. Jesus Christ. I like to look at pictures… that’s why I like the internet. It’s a buffet of wonderment to a functional illiterate like me.

Finally I found a blog worth reading, with lots of pictures from old art, history, and science books without any bothersome words to muck it up:

BibliOdyssey

This is a pretty gender-neutral blog, I think. I’m not a girlie person in 90% of areas in my life, but the following blog is tremendously girlie. I’d make the link text into a puffed pink glitter sticker if I could:

Dress A Day

You’ve been warned.

I had been hearing about Brad Neely’s “Wizard People, Dear Readers” for years but I decided to hunker down and listen to the entire audio track. It’s meant to be played along with with the video, but I’m just rocking it audio-book style.

I usually prefer to hearing people summarize movies than actually watching them… that’s what Wizard People is, pretty much. A fun drunk dude half-remembering what happened in Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone... with swears.

I love Thai Iced Tea… it’s my favorite year-round beverage, but in the summer I could drink 20 in a day. But that would be expensive. Unfortunately, the take-out thai counter on A has switched recipes for their tea from “holyshitamazinglydelicious” to “metallic & bitter,” so I have to actually sit down and get one now. Then I feel like I have to get food too, even if I’m not hungry.

Maybe the internets can help me?

Import Food
(this one has pictures of Thailand’s Ice Tea Streetcarts—better than streetmeat!)

CurrySimple’s Tea Syrup
(This one has a joylessly-narrated video!)

Temple of Thai’s “Kit”
I know where to get condensed milk, guys.

Stewardess Uniform Collection

What people in other countries call the “@.”

My email address is now nobodyssweetheart-pickled herring-gmail-dot-com

What to do if you’re 9 years old and desperately need to get married? Go to Yemen.

Who were the great pederasts and catamites of history?
—
Moon pies had reached a peak of their popularity during the 1950s, when many workers bought them as an inexpensive snack to tide their hunger for a while. Around this time, the typical cost of a moon pie was about five cents, and a soda to drink was also a nickel. The popular legend of moon pies states that R.C. Cola became the drink of choice to accompany a moon pie, because a serving of R.C. Cola was typically larger than a serving of Coca-Cola or other sodas. The combination of “an R.C. Cola and a moon pie” became inseparable, and was often referred to as the “working man’s lunch.”
—
BONUS - NOT FROM WIKIPEDIA

What if I find myself at a backgammon convention where no one speaks English?

Well, that’s fine and dandy for backgammon, but my game is the ancient sport of Emperors, Go! Is there anything in the Wizards bag for me?

Iiiiiiit’s FRIDAY!

Time to buy a bunch of glowing shit!

In the last week, I’ve signed up for MySpace, Facebook, Linked In (which I apparently had already), and Vimeo.

So far, I have failed to get a job, a husband, or true happiness through any of these services.

Gyp.

Sometimes I feel like a failure who’s wasted my life so far. A lot of the time, actually. The rest of the time I download free games from the internet and play them, like this one:

Recently I started buying them, too. So far, I’ve bought Alchemy, Mystery Case Files Ravenhearst, Virtual Villagers: The Lost Children and now, Chocolatier. The problem with a lot of these games is they’re meant for people who are half-asleep at their boring office jobs and are really easy, so I end up beating them within a couple hours of buying them. Then I feel bad I wasted $20 (less with coupon codes) on less than an evenings entertainment.

Chocolatier is a weird game that reminds me a little bit of Pirates! You go to different ports sourcing ingredients to make bon bons, then you sell them for profit in other ports. There’s a mini-game where you shoot those ingredients out of a canon at spinning targets in your factory to make the candy. And there’s some lame “story” about these sisters who ran a chocolate company, but one of them married some jerk and left the company. Oh, and it’s 1888. But a weird community theatre unresearched version of 1888 with a multi-ethnic cast (including the “sisters” who range in skin hue from vanilla fondant to mocha to 80% cacao), women who work as naturalists (but not Charles Darwin “naturalists” wearing wool suits in the tropics; modern hiker types) and people throwing around “awesome” in a very un-gilded age manner (as in “Awesome!” as opposed to “Our God is indeed awesome and terrible who will smite us all.”) You get a zeppelin in the second half of the game.

Casual games always ask your name at the beginning. I always use the name of someone I know.

This guy made incredibly complicated and labor-intensive deer head mask and costume.The breaking point in the tutorial is where he describes wanting to make sure the head has a long neck and narrow head to make sure it looks properly cervine, so he shifts the mask to have its chin where his nose is, so his human eye is actually lined up with the muzzle. So he puts a camera in the mask’s eye and feeds it to a tiny tv monitor in the nose, but because the distance between his eye and the monitor is too short to focus on normally he gets special contacts made so he can focus on the tv at a short distance… And the ears are on servo motors that he programs into switches in his gloves so he can register different “emotions” in his mask…

This guy is kind of my hero. And also, depresses the shit out of me

Back in April I uploaded a couple of old vector designs I had laying around to the new t-shirt site bountee.com. I’m not entirely sure whether they want to be cafepress or threadless, but you could upload vector art directly, so it took about 30 seconds to make the shirts. But you have to have your designs “approved” to have them go live on the site. I get pennies on the dollar for each shirt sold, so it’s barely worth it financially… just wanted to dust off some old vectors and see if they’d fly.

I thought I had blogged about this, but I accidentally set the entry to “private” so no one actually saw it.

Key Lime Pie for jaded ladies for jaundiced gentlemen Girl Guitarist for ladies for gentlemen All my shirts.

I’m directing a sketch show for Will Hines and Matt DeCoster and we had a meeting yesterday. It’s a lot of old sketches from their show “Chronicles of Riddick,” the performance of which was attended by less than 10 people at the Red Room. Five of them were their friends, five of them were random drunk people lured up from the bar who spent the entire show talking loudly and making cell phone calls. Brett Gelman (one of the “friends”) nearly got into a fistfight with one loud drunk lady, who later came back after the show to alternately complain about Brett to the performers (“he must have been related to you because he was laughing at stuff that was’t funny”) and damn them with faint praise (“Some of your stuff was OK. You could play at Funny Bones in Staten Island.”)

During our meeting, Matt DeCoster brought up his favorite online video series, declaring every creative decision made by the creators to be perfect in every way and that he’s watched every episode over and over. I was skeptical at first, but it does grow on you—
ZeroTV’s adaption of Mary Worth