10:59PM - L-Tryptophan + Pug =
( People who write on buildings are smart. )
Good advice.
( Creepy guy... )
I love you Vlad.
( People who write on buildings are smart. )
Good advice.
( Creepy guy... )
I love you Vlad.
Visa is running a contest and if you win, you get all your purchases in 2004 for free.
Each purchase you make in 2004 is an entry in the contest.
However, at the end of the commercial for the contest, it says that no purchase is necessary to enter.
So, if you enter without making a purchase and you win the contest, what do you win?
This story is so full of unexplained bits, I just had to share.
So, lets paint the picture. A guy is going to shoplift a few CDs and some other stuff from K-Mart. His bright idea? He goes to a beehive and puts a hundred or so bees in a jar, just in case. He lifts the stuff, thinks he has been spotted, and then goes into the men's room. He opens the jar and yells, "Bees! Bees!" And, while everyone is scrambling around to get away from the bees, he makes his getaway. The best part, IT WORKED!
I wonder how he came up with the idea of the jar of bees. Did he consider jars of other things? Would a shoebox of mice work? What about a weasel or ferret? Would you run out of a bathroom if someone yelled, "Ferret!"
Now, squirrels would be hard to catch, but I think they would be perfect for shoplifting. Get about ten squirrels in a box, shoplift and then throw them on the ground in Nordstroms and scream, "Squirrels! Squirrels!" The little brown disease bags would careen around the store making mischief. While you make your way out of the store with your new pair of $500 furry boots. Could they blame you? If you got caught, you would just say, "I had to get away from the squirrels. They sometimes carry rabies and their little claws would feel creepy on my skin if they made their way up the leg of my oversized pants." (You'd have to remember to wear oversize pants for that one to work.)
Of course, if you could sneak it in, the ultimate would be a cougar or a croc. If you snuck a cougar into Circuit City and released it, I bet you could get away with 3 or 4 laptops easy. Imagine the reaction if you screamed "Cougar!" and that great muscular beast just started taking out the weakest members of the Circuit City sales team with the brute force of a bloodthristy carnivore that has been hidden in an overcoat for an hour. I bet the cougar could tell who hadn't met their service plan quota and would go for their neck first.
Also, why limit this jar of bees thing to just shoplifting? It's the perfect excuse to get out of a date that isn't going well. Or, maybe you're about to get fired at work. Or, declared guilty in your murder trial. Just as they're about to announce the verdict, you release the bees.
I am definitely going to start carrying around a jar of bees, just in case.
I once appeared in a documentary on Men In Black encounters with my face blacked out and my voice a high squeak. The documentarian called me "Larry" during the interview.
It played on Public Access for a couple of weeks in Columbus. People recognized me.
Anyway, I just found reference to it on the web. But, no pictures.
The weekend started Friday night with the popcorn machine at the theater shooting a fireball when the concession person opened the door. No serious damage, but the whole theater filled with with smoke. Two fire engines and an industrial fan put things right quickly and cleared out the smoke.
( Read more... )
The inside of the popcorn machine...
( Read more... )
The names of the culprits written in smoke and extinguisher residue.
( Read more... )
My outfit for Friday's 80s show...
( Read more... )
Roscoe has fleas! Here, Nancy is going over him, after a flea bath, with a literal fine tooth comb.
( Read more... )
Prayer in the Fremont Sunday Market.
( Read more... )
More food outside restaurants! I think it's officially a fad now...
Someone slapped a picture of their dog on the back of the giant Lenin statue. I like this picture. It seems symbolic of something. I'm not sure what.
Tonight and tomorrow at 8PM, Unexpected Productions, including me, will be performing an improvised 80's Teen Movie!
I have been studying Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club in preparation. And dredging up memories of teen angst and all the times I fell in love with a girl from a different social group and her friends didn't like me and my friends didn't like her and then everyone forgot it was my 16th birthday and my foreign exchange student made out with with Joan Cusack and I stood outside the girl's window with a boombox in the rain...
Leave a comment if you'd like 2 for 1 tickets!
So, this guy at my work got a spam email that said, "TURN YOUR REGULAR TV INTO A 150" BIG SCREEN TV ONLY $24.95" and he paid the money. He talked about it with everyone. Bragged he was going to get it. Invited people over to watch football.
It reminded me of the scam from the 20s where you would put an add in the back of a magazine that said, "WORKING SEWING MACHINE $1" and when you got the package, there was a needle and thread inside. I didn't know specifically, in this case, what the needle and thread were going to be, but I was interested in finding out.
It arrived in a flat catalog sized envelope. Inside, there was a xeroxed piece of paper, instructions, and a flimsy transparent sheet of plastic. The plastic was a fresnel lens. You see, the idea was that you would build a cardboard holder around your TV and mount the lens in front of the screen and it would project the picture onto the wall. He was really pleased with his purchase and couldn't wait to get it home.
Here is the genius part of the scam. The lens projects the picture upside down. So, they suggest that you send them another $24.95 for another lens so that it can turn the picture back around the other way.
This isn't the same company, but the same idea.
I said, "You aren't really considering sending them another $24.95, are you?"
He said, "No, of course not, I'm going to hang my television from the ceiling, upside down, with a bungee cord."
I love the idea that he is at home right now, trying to suspend his television from the ceiling and then building a cardboard case around it so that he can watch his porn on the wall.
Maybe he should just spend the extra $24.95.
An expanded version of my "Page From William Shatner's Journal as Found in Airport VIP Lounge" piece is on the main page of Uber.nu today.
I emailed them to fix the formatting. For now, just pretend that there are hard returns before and after each category heading.
There was a big march for peace yesterday in Seattle. After I finished the show last night, one of the protesters had written this by the driver's door of our fuel efficient Honda. Thanks for oversimplifying the anti-war position to the point of idiocy! If we all drove our cars less there wouldn't be any war. Also, the 30 year old VW van gas hog parked next to me remained mysteriously chalk free. 
This bundle of objects showed up at the front door of the apartment building across the street. I'm imagining a breakup and someone returning stuff. A robe, a pair of panties, shoes and glass products. Any other ideas?
( Another view of stuff... )
A Thai restaurant if Fremont has started serving "American Breakfast." They had all the meals prepared on a picnic table out front. Each plate was appetizingly wrapped in plastic with the name of the dish written in magic marker. Pancakes in plastic, YUM!
( Thai Omlette )
Tonight and tomorrow night, Unexpected Productions is proud to present an improvised disaster movie at 8PM.
Because I love you so much, here is a 2 for 1 coupon you can print out!
If you are interested in keeping up with what's going on at our theater, you can befriend ![[info]](http://library.vu.edu.pk/cgi-bin/nph-proxy.cgi/000100A/http/web.archive.org/web/20041126190720im_/http:/=2fstat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
unexpected_prod and all the latest gossip will show up on your friends list.
My DVD player broke a couple of weeks ago under mysterious circumstances. (That means I don't know what was wrong with it and am not tech savvy enough to look into it, so I chucked the whole thing into the area of my brain marked "Here Be Dragons" and refuse to think about it.) Less than fifteen minutes after it stopped working I was in my car to buy another one. I did no research about DVD players. I just knew that I wanted to pay less than $75 and there were a few features I wanted. (I like the magnify function even thought I rarely use it.) I bought the most expensive single disk player at Fred Meyer ($64) and brought it home.
I am still working out the ins and outs of it, but it has one feature I don't understand at all. It's called "sound effect", you press the button and it makes everyone sound like they are talking in an echo chamber. It even has three levels of echo, so they can sound like they are in a sewer or they can sound like they are screaming off the side of the grand canyon. Why? I don't know.
The other new feature I love! If you fast forward at 1.5 times, they leave the sound on. You can understand the voices. This is great. I have been renting documentaries from Netflix and just burning through them. If there is any artistry to the thing, I watch it on normal speed. But, if it is mediocre or bad, I can watch the whole thing on super speed.
Plus, I feel like I'm one of those guys in a science fiction movie that just got his intelligence increased by an alien race and is burning through information on a screen while all the other characters stand around and talk about how he read the entire encyclopedia in an hour. I'd love to be that guy! Until I got all evil and tried to take over the ship and/or planet. That usually ends badly.
Scopitones.
These were video juke box machines invented back in the 60s and they filmed awesomely cheesey videos for them.
Check out the one for Calender Girl! I am not linking directly to the video, the files are big, but worth the wait. Check out the leopard print bikini lady wearing a hat with a lion's tail on it.
Here are a bunch more.
My favorite is "Queen of the House", it's the tune of "King of the Road" with new lyrics about how hard it is to be a housewife with crazy dancers. AWESOME!
Got the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 2 and I am really enjoying it. Some great cartoons, it really fills in some of the blanks from the first set. Once again, my favorite disk is the one that collects the random one shot cartoons without a major character. Most of them are music based.
Serious collectors have complained that Warner is skipping over the less politically correct cartoons in their catalog. Well, I think they might be testing the waters with the bonus section in this set. They include a live action short with an all monkey cast.
Cool! I love monkeys. Who doesn't?
Well, in the middle of the cartoon the villain monkey goes to get his shoes shined and the shoeshine monkey is in blackface! Let me repeat, A MONKEY IN BLACKFACE.
A monkey in blackface. A real life, living, brown monkey with black makeup on his fur and white lips drawn on. Mel Blanc, who does all the voices for the short, does a stereotypical minstrel voice.
Man, if they're holding back the un-politically correct stuff...
I got walloped in the gullet with a 24 hour flu yesterday.
Roscoe stepped on something sharp and got a bloody paw this morning.
If I were a fairy, I would be the kind that leaves a trail of sparkles. Not a rainbow. I hate the fairies that leave rainbows.
I feel the urge to write livejournal entries in the style of people on my friends list, just to see if they notice.
Oct. 6, 2004 - Republican US Senate candidate Jim DeMint on Wednesday apologized for telling a newspaper on Tuesday unwed pregnant women shouldn't be allowed to teach in public schools.
In a debate Sunday with Democrat Inez Tenenbaum DeMint said openly gay people should not be allowed to teach in the state's public schools.
DeMint defended that remark during an interview with the Aiken Standard on Tuesday and said he would feel the same way about single, pregnant women who lives with a boyfriend teaching a third grade child. He said teachers should be held to a higher moral standard.
And this guy:
TOM COBURN, Oklahoma
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) - For conservative Republican Tom Coburn, running to the left in Oklahoma's Senate race meant lining up with President Bush.
Asked about his opposition to the death penalty, the former three-term congressman said he favored executions for ``abortionists'' and others who take life. At one town hall meeting, he said he had heard lesbianism was so rampant in area schools that girls could only go to the bathroom one at a time.
There are spoilers below, so if you don't want to know about Law and Order: CI, don't read.
So, it gets to the end of the show tonight and the two cops have been trying to track down this woman's daughter and they figure out that the daughter doesn't exist.
So, they go to confront the woman at her boyfriend's garage. He's been killing homeless people to raise money for the daughter that doesn't exist.
See, the woman had been pregnant in the early 70s, but she had never had the baby. Now she had dementia and talked about this baby like it was alive and lived in upstate New York. Vincent D'Onfrio knocks something over toward the woman and she clutches her stomach. He points at her, "You never had that baby. It's still inside you! It died and now it's calcified in there..."
Then, the female detective says in a way that is obviously supposed to explain to the audience what's going on in a perfect succinct way, "Oh, a stone baby!"
What? Is this a common term I'm not familiar with? Were there people at home going, Oh man, I should have guessed, a stone baby. It was so obvious.
Anyway, it's my new favorite phrase of the moment.
Oh, and when the woman's boyfriend asks her why she never told him she says, "I didn't want you to know that I was a coffin."
Have you got a stone baby in there?
Edit:
I just made the mistake of typing "stone baby" into google and clicking on the first link. Eeeeeeeew...
Doctor Who fan buried in Tardis casket...
Edited to add:
Doctor Who themed wedding...
I watched Trekkies 2 this week. Trekkies, if you haven't seen it, is a great documentary that shows the lives of intense Star Trek fans. Not in a way that makes fun of them, but in a way that allows them to reveal themselves in all their nerdy glory. Trekkies focussed on Americans. Trekkies 2 follows up on the Americans, but it also shows Trekkies around the world. Great stuff. Worth getting just for the chance to see what nerds in Serbia are like.
One of the Americans they follow up on is the woman in Little Rock who wore her Star Trek uniform to the Whitewater trial. She is now the most famous Trekkie in the world. She talked about what a positive reaction she got from people when she wore her uniform and how it made people happy.
In honor of her, I went as a Sci Fi nerd for Halloween. (I know, quite a stretch.) Most of the stuff I took off whenever I could, but the shirt stayed on all day. At one point, I was picking up some cupcakes at Cupcake Royale (delicious peppermint frosting, yum!) and I forgot I was wearing the Star Trek shirt. Really, I was just walking through Ballard, carrying a box of cupcakes while people stared at me. I started to notice that everyone around me was smiling and happy. People were waving at me.
I just waved back, I'm a simple man, I didn't even think to question it. Then, I remembered I was wearing the Star Trek science officer's shirt. Strange experience. I can see why someone could get addicted to wearing the uniform. It makes people happy. Some probably feel superior to you, laughing at you, but most, I think, are just smiling. It is really fun to see someone who enjoys something so much that they dress up in a special way.
Here was my costume:
Here are more costumes from the store on Truckstop of the Damned day.
Things I have used instead of "Sincerely," to end my emails this week. (Yes, some were business emails):
If there's a rainbow that everyone else can see except for you, it's not because it isn't there, it's because you're the pot of gold at the end!
You are a ray of sunshine that shines directly on my heart!
If life were nothing but trick or treating, you'd be the house giving out whole full size Hershey bars.
Who's the best print buyer in the world? You are! You are! Yes you are!
Can I have your autograph? Because in my eyes you are a supernova sized STAR!
You are the fuzz on the peach!
In a handful of pocket change, you are the shiniest penny.
An email from you is like getting an ehug from the whole internet!
I'm making up a new word for how great you are! Magnabulous!
Finding your company was just like finding a framed paint by number clown for just a $1 at a garage sale!
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Today, a couple of guys from our graphics department had an intervention and told me to stop. They said they thought that I was being sarcastic and it if I wasn't it was just plain creepy.
Oh well...
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