FLOG

Thanksgiving Weekend . . .

. . . as told to FLOG by a 3-inch by 1-inch chunk of intricately sculpted plastic:

Good stuff in there. I have one thing to say, however: I love our digital betters. I prefer an electro-intellectual organism that has the exposures I just made over breakfast available worldwide in 6 seconds, to the one that had me wait a week or two for some dumb kid to bathe it in chemicals and expose the result to a sheet of silver halide crystals and dunk it in vinegar. That's just nuts right there.

What's really scary is that it's not a Gateway

It is a terrifying world, my friends, this world of science. Consider this chapter in the life of FLOG compatriot Longbourne:

Lo and behold, there was a small swarm of little black bugs all over my computer and books. "Eww," I said, and proceeded to kill them with kleenex. After I had killed them (or so I thought) I began to work on my computer. Then, like some scene from a horror movie, a great swell of these little black bugs comes out of my keyboard. They hatched inside my computer!

{No, no, avoid the obvious pun, Kenny. Try harder.}

Up next: my text messages!

So I have this camera-phone. Which is an odd way to put it because it's definitely a phone first. Anyway, I've decided it's good policy to put its low-res results on Flickr:

Enjoy.

It's like meditation

Head on over to Flickr, where I have uploaded my latest batch of basically identical beach photographs. Gray sky, glassy beach, a band of white surf and dogs being dogs. Repeat.

But this time I went b & w! And there are some photos with no dogs at all! Such as below:

I apologize for a week of silence. I have been busy.

Zuma apologizes for not blogging yesterday. He had a bone.

Picked a hell of a weekend to leave town

Man. Oh man. So on Friday afternoon the FLOG Experience decided, on a dime, to split for YACHATS for a couple days. Cool it, get our heads together, what have you.

I left my phone here at home. Upon return, I found that it had six voicemails of varying urgency.

My notes from these voicemails are transcribed in their entirety below.

1. Drag strip -- Chuck D Band
2. Out drink fucking pussy
3. J Stamos -- forgot name -- hipsters
4. Ribs, declassify ing photos.
5. Ducks!!
6. Cockfag, asshole, answer your fuc alcohol-burning funny cars!!! lots to discuss

But the beach was pretty nice, anyway. Well, okay, I spent about an hour of the past evening standing on a highway bridge over a tidal bay, bracing against 60-mph winds, drinking rain-watered whiskey and allowing sideways rain to saturate my pants to the very heart of my nether-crotch. So now you know. What were YOU doing at 2:47-3:43 am PST last night?

The coming Waterworld, and my place in it

I hate to intrude on Zuma's day, but there are a few things that need attention.

First, this article is WAILING for the headline "Mothership Connection." It also suggests that Somalia will be the capitol of Waterworld when we get to that point. They are decades ahead of the rest of us. Though as yet none of them have gills -- at least according to the MSM!!!

Second, I just got an email on my student account with the subject line "Careers: Hat?" And, honestly, I'm thinking about it.

I Try To Love Pepper

Lately, we have as a family been spending an increased amount of time strolling about the horse pastures of Howard Buford Park. I suspect this is due to the unreconstructible nature of my benighted fellow, Pepper, and his singular inability to acknowledge the reality of the leash. The piteous boy does not even know his own name. In these past few days, Mom has taken, on our sojourns, to calling his name and rewarding him with a dainty upon his timely return to her, in an effort to apprise him of his name.

Needless to say, I have made quick sport of this effort. For, as we all know, it would be inequitable not to reward me with a dainty upon my successful return to the pack -- and, should Pepper tarry too long, I think it only proper that his dainty, too, should forfeit to mine obedient tongue.

My heart shouts to me that this is wrong -- that the poor pupchild Pepper should be given cause to grow and learn. But watering a dead fern does no good. 'Tis with me that the future lies; let the brute make do with his own leavings, and the better of mine own. With time he shall go, by death or by shunning; makes no difference.

Sguir! I apologize; I can be overweeningly selfish at times. Pepper's a good lad; I wish him no harm.

But by my balls, I got off-topic here. I shall put my actual topic -- which was not "I Try To Love Pepper" -- over for the next fpost.

The best French movie ever

Check this out:

CLICK!!!

{Mirrors: One. Two.}

{It is a large file; I recommend saving it via right-click and getting on to other things while it downloads. It's worth the wait, and would really suck streaming.} {Plus, this is the sort of video you want to put in the archive.}

Someone else's description:

On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris. The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur. No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit. The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 MPH in some stretches. The footage reveals him running real red lights, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up real one-way streets.

My description:

Holy sweet lovely fuck. They didn't even sell me a seat, and it's a good thing, because I only needed the edge. Stay tuned, on account of the second half is the best. However, I can only give it three and a half stars because it appears no pigeons or Parisians were harmed in the making of this film.

Also for sale.

Some new additions to Flickr

New, but not, like, "new." I mean, they're all either pet shots or landscapes from Mount Pisgah, like usual. But give 'em a try anyhoo:

Huh?

Huh?

Huh??

Huh???

Huh????

Huh?????

To try to make sense of this, go here. Something to do with giving starving people live animals, which apparently makes celebrities feel better about themselves. (All of the sudden I'm getting screenshots from Apocalypse Now in my head.)

Anyway, no matter what kind of feel-good crap they tell you on that website, there is no, repeat, NO, appropriate context for a studio photo of Walter Cronkite with a sheep on his lap.

None whatsoever.

The best movie ever

The copy on the back of the video case only begins to evoke the awesomeness of what I saw on Saturday night:

Action: Bond style. Beauty: Vanity style. Hero: American style. NEVER TOO YOUNG TO DIE stars teenage idol JOHN STAMOS and the sensually exotic VANITY as two of the most dynamic secret agents seen in years. GENE SIMMONS plays the supervillain who plans to take over the country, and finds his plot blocked by Stamos and Vanity. The two suddenly find themselves the targets of the vicious Simmons, and must take on the maniacal hermaphrodite. The resulting battle of the "sexes" blows the lid off the evil plan, and Stamos joins the ranks of the American Hero.

Powerful heavy-metal music, state-of-the-art weaponry, and the explosive chemistry between two of the sexiest stars on the screen blend to make this exciting action flick an automatic winner.

Yeah, I know, that sounds pretty good. But in truth it is many times better than that, for there is only so much you can fit into case copy. And this is the sort of film where each new element that makes it better has an exponential effect on the overall awesomeness. (I know I'm sounding pretty brain-dead here, but see, my mind has been blown by the awesomeness. And this is 48 hours later, mind you.) For example, just minutes before the end, [SPOILER WARNING!], the movie becomes exactly 16 times as good as it was before when, set upon by a mob of bloodthirsty drunken anarchist cult-members, John Stamos turns to Vanity and says, "Don't blame them -- they're victims of a tough society," and you learn that it was a bleeding-heart social commentary all along.

I have seen two other movies in the intervening 48 hours, one of which was Commando. I will watch many more in my remaining days. But I have already been to the zenith of cinema, and it's all pale pretenders from here on out.

Un Fun Run

So at this moment I am sitting on the toilet wearing boxers over a pair of thermal longjohns, all Superman style, except with boxers, and I have been up for 23 hours.

Why?

This morning I was rudely awakened by the White Stripes and told I had to get my groggy ass down to school to stand in the wind and rain and duplicate the purpose of a ten foot long chalk arrow on the sidewalk.

Why?

I had duties. I was, as they say, "expected to volunteer." Which is fine -- I'm civic as a motherfucker -- but on a Saturday morning? Damn.

So alright. I helped a race get run. Like, people run this race around campus and it gets confusing, so they need a fellow to stand there and point runners in the right direction.

So I did. And a lot of people thanked me, mostly in earnest. But damn did it rain.

Ten minutes into the thing, you get a lot of these Serious Running People, and they all blast by, not really needing my help, each lost in their own vein-popping reverie.

But after that comes the long tail.

The very long tail.

(Notice how I'm making new paragraphs way too often?)

(This is modern sportswriting.)

(Soon, I will make a couple paragraphs that are only a word long.)

(This is proper sportswriting style.)

(Ready?)

Long.

Tail.

The long tail consisted of the non-running runners. The folks who are all, "Oh, it's a run, but I don't run, and I can't think of any better way to pay 20 bucks and walk three miles on a Saturday morning, so let's do this."

The long tail began with a duo of competitive dork-walkers. Have you seen this in the Olympics? The sport where they almost jog, but they get disqualified if both feet are off the ground at the same time? Them.

A couple of them went by, and then mostly nobody went by for a very long time.

Something like an hour.

I was bored, and cold, and it was raining a lot. So I set about using my shoe to make dams in the runoff at the edge of the street.

I was pretty into it when an old lady drove up and jumped out of her car and said, "I have a cell phone, would you like to call someone?"

As though I was stranded there.

I declined, which must have disappointed her, 'cause then she offered me a newspaper. Declined that too.

Finally the last of the walkers came by, a family of three fairly well-apportioned individuals, and in banter the father said of his pouting 10-year-old son, "He's very big for his age."

This was meant almost apologetically, as in "I'm sorry he's fat." Which isn't a very nice thing to say about your kid in public. But let that go.

I was too cold to really be listening, and thought he was saying something more complimentary about his son.

So I blurted out "Oh, yeah!"

Which I regretted instantly.

Now you know what I did this morning.

After that it's been: go home, get dry and warm, watch awesome football game, avoid crapping out afterwards, then drink a lot of beer and watch the best movie I've ever seen. About which, more to come -- let me just lay out the principal points for you: John Stamos, Gene Simmons, George Lazenby, Vanity, mutant anarchists with Cure hair.

UPDATE 11/8: I forgot to mention that the head of Career Services at my school, as he jogged past me, said, "You're working today!" And I am still afraid this was not just innocent banter, that it was instead a passive-aggressive dig related to his awareness that I have not as yet secured post-graduation employment, and that I really ought to go in and see him one of these days.

Damn.

Friday open thread

Say what you will; my pride is bruised already.

Life in this domicile

Dan left the stove on last night. Again. He swelled himself up on pinot grigio and made one of his signature Careless Quesadillas (of which, I am at pains to mention, he did not share a whit). Why, my dear readers ask, do I fit these quesadillas with the appellation "careless"? They are careless because the final step in the recipe, invariably, is to leave the stove on.

I am fed up with having to get up there and turn it off for him. Every time I do I singe off a few hairs, and of course although this hurts beyond mercy, I daren't make a noise. If I do, they'll wake up and come out and set about an awful fuss: "Oh, are you okay, Zuma? Oh, what happened?" As though I am the one in need of help. 'Tis pitiful.

Don't mistake me, dear readers, for a spiteful lad. I love Dan and Mom, and on the whole life in this domicile is a pleasurable one. But at times, dear reader, at time, it stroooooOOOOOO OOH OHH OOH OH OHHOHO ASDHJAL;JHLKJ:lkj!kl2JL11Q1111!!!!

My goodness, the shame. For the sake of editorial transparency I shall resist the urge to spread veneer over the above lapse in intellect, though it rends my pride terribly. Dan, you see, just scratched my rump.