If I die in such a strange and drug-related way that Rolling Stone is interested in reporting it, I hereby state that they are not allowed to do so unless they work in the phrase “seamy underground world of webcomics.”
Category: Mild Lunacy
Someday I will invent a tiny device that consists entirely of a wound radio antenna, a one-tone speaker, a battery, and some adhesive. I will then attach these devices to every single thing I own. When I’m done with that, I will assign each device a unique low-watt radio band all for itself, and put together a remote control that can broadcast on any of those bands. The remote will be voice-operated, and keyed to my voice, so that all I have to say is “where is my {stupid, fucking, blue} CD case?” and the device attached to that CD case sets off a furious beeping. Maybe THEN I won’t LOSE THINGS SO OFTEN.
(Hypothetical problem #1: What happens when I lose the remote? I guess I could create a secondary backup remote to find the first, but that way madness lies.)
So I’m watching this commercial for a wondrous new cooking gadget and a few things strike me. First of all, why do allthe cooking gadgets for our generation suck so hard? Does anybody remember seeing cooking gadget ads in the earlyEighties? There was nothing they couldn’t do! No commercial was complete without a list of “it slices! It dices! Itgrates! It files! It sorts socks! It eats your children!” There are yellowing reams of comedy writing devoted entirelyto making fun of this phenomenon, and now it’s gone. What do we get instead? Vacuum-sealers–which were stupid before Iwas born–and that “Egg Fucker” or whatever it’s called, the thing that takes delicious, ordinary fried eggs and makesthem into perfect little circles of horror. I hate that thing.
Also! Have you ever noticed that every cable commercial trying to sell a new and purportedly brilliant gadget has thesame guy doing the voice-over? How old is he? I remember hearing his voice in the late Eighties, and it hasn’t changeda whit. Maybe there are actually dozens of guys who all grew up listening to the original, and they have formed a corpsdevoted entirely to sounding exactly like him, renting themselves out for cheap commercial voice-overs. What would theycall themselves? How would you know where to find them? What kind of horrible things must they do to themselves, orhave done to them, to be able to get that enthused about (I am not making this up) a batter dispenser?
| Announcer: | And that’s not all! You’ll also get– | ||
| Director: | Not good enough. Back in the Eel Chamber. | ||
| Announcer: | No! NO! And that’s not all you also get AAAGH SWEET JESUS NOW AVAILABLE IN HARVEST GOLD |
I am a seamster, which does not, as you might expect, refer to my actively seaming, so much as it does to my cosmic, astonishing ability to sew. I can sew things. I am in fact “the man” at sewing things. I sew like the proverbial Stygian bat.
Actually I’m fairly awful at it by anyone’s standards but my own, but the fact remains that not only did I successfully fix up three years-old rips in my favorite coat, I also made repairs on another shirt entirely. That’s four (count ’em) different seams in two articles of clothing, for an average of two seams per article. At least three of those consisted of itsy bitsy stitches, and two of those I actually did inside out for that nifty hidden-seam effect.
Too many italics. Next topic. My roommates got me a pirate monkey! Or possibly a monkey pirate! Either way I’m going to marry them. Also, go hang loose in the new forums right now. They taste of delicate butters.
I’m trying to figure out how to do some sort of Xorph special, since Tuesday (ie Newcomicday) is also, um, Christmas.It’s going to be difficult without the ability to draw anything. Maybe I should do it in ASCII art.
You can’t buy real Christmas lights anymore. You go to Wal-Mart, you find the seasonal aisle in the back corner by the gardening supplies, you expect massive stacks of light boxes. Not so! You can, technically, still buy the traditional tiny-white-bulb strings–but that’s about it. No C9s or 7.5s, not even multicolored small bulbs. Instead we have–yes!–the stupid light extravanganza!
You have your net lights, which are a cheap and stupid way to get out of wading into the bushes. You have your rope lights, which are not only ugly but unwieldy. You have your bubble lights, which are fine, in limited qualities, indoors. And you have truckloads of curtain / icicle lights, which are–I firmly believe this–the will of Satan manifest on Earth.
All of this is meant, essentially, to explain the slightly odd configuration of this year’s Second House on the Left light display. We had a nice multi-colored theme going on, up until I ran out of working colored strings and still had three trees (the big ones, naturally) to go. The aforementioned trip to Wal-Mart produced the aforementioned results, and only by scavenging the clearance rack at Big Lots did we come up with five strings of C9s. Unfortunately, all of them were entirely white.
I got two of the big trees with said white lights, which at least makes for a symmetrical design. The problem was this: the enormously fat tree by the basketball goal (which I have privately nicknamed “Brendan’s Self-Image”) was mostly strung with colored lights already, and needed maybe one more string to top it off. A white string would have to be distributed evenly or look like whipped cream atop a cherry-and-lime jello mold.
This is why I sat on the driveway for twenty minutes today, unscrewing and switching bulbs between one white string and six colored ones.
Experts estimate that I have spent at least six months of my life doing menial, pointless work like that.