Ok, so I will probably never see it, but man this is a funny movie trailer. I mean there’s just no way you could take this sort of thing seriously, but they give it a good try. I especially love the implied and oh so scary man-sheep that’s hinted at. I wonder how that happened…. oh wait no I don’t. Kyle, this is your worst nightmare.
The Violence of the Lambs (as Metafilter put it)
Every year around this time, the blog starts to get a few more hits than usual from Google, usually searches for stuff like “Vallentyne’s Day”. Folks are obviously not looking for this blog, but rather are looking for tips on romance, special Valentine’s Day gifts, great ideas for dates and ways to woo your special someone. Oh man, have they come to the wrong place. I mean really. Just ask Nikki how romantic I am. It’s a tragic irony (for her) that my name is Vallentyne, but my romantic instincts are that of a gorilla, or perhaps, an aardvark. So in an effort to help those folks out a bit, here are some things I know about Valentine’s Day.
Valentine’s Gift Ideas you should never consider:
– Power tools and/or small appliances have nothing to do with Valentine’s Day, no exceptions that can be listed here on a family blog
– Tickets to Sporting events – as a general rule, maybe an exception for the Fabio Look-alike Shirtless Wrestling Association
– A lovingly crafted selection of RSS feeds for her own Google Reader account is not the “mixed tape” of this decade. If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, you should consider yourself lucky to not be married to me. If your name is also Nikki, then I guess I’m sorry, but you knew I was a geek when you married me.
Valentine’s Gift Ideas you should consider:
– Chocolates, wine, flowers are usually acceptable, as long as the chocolates aren’t in the form of a nude female torso, the wine doesn’t have a screw cap, and the flowers are real and don’t have a clump of roots and dirt hanging from them
– Extravagant jewelry purchases are excellent, unless you had to sell a kidney in order to buy it. If you did already, forget the wine (above).
Some tips for celebrating Valentine’s Day:
– There should be no television turned on while attempting to create a romantic mood. Ditto for the presence of any children, no matter how well behaved, or how soundly they appear to be sleeping.
– There should be candles. Anything here is fine, just don’t burn the house down. It’s just too hard to whisper sweet nothings over the sirens, axe chopping, hose spraying and firemen radio noise.
– There should be music. Not just any music of course. A good benchmark is if the song makes use of cowbells, heavy guitar distortion, spandex, (usually) accordion, excessive hair spray, righteous rock and roll screams (see: Won’t Get Fooled Again), spoons, and any use of a fiddle (however if it could be called a violin it could be acceptable. The exact border between violin and fiddle is incredibly hard to distinguish, but usually falls somewhere near the place you want to put down your snifter of cognac and kick off your slippers to start a frenetic River Dance on the coffee table while sweating out a quart of moonshine and beer.)
So there you go folks. Again, no guarantees for anyone that follows these tips. But you really could do worse, couldn’t you? I mean, come on you are searching the Internet for tips on wooing your loved one, this stuff may be just what you needed, right?
If you say that title three times fast, it sounds Spanish. It’s a good thing there’s no possible way that could be mis-interpreted, cause this is a family blog, mister.
Wilson got his high speed installed a couple of days ago and he was catching up on watching The Show with Ze Frank. He reminded me that I hadn’t seen any for a few weeks and I had them on my iPod already so I was catching up myself. I saw this one about Ze playing with his Wii and it’s very very good, even if you don’t get the wonderful sophomoric puns, which I personally thought were hilarious.
Enjoy.
Ah Dylan, ever the sunny and cheerful fella.
Every moment of existence seems like some dirty trick
Happiness can come suddenly and leave just as quick
Any minute of the day the bubble could burst
Try to make things better for someone, sometimes,
you just end up making it a thousand times worse
Sugar Baby – Love and Theft
There’s an uplifting quote. The song is excellent, a scathing piece that blames his girl for tearing his heart out. Nikki often makes fun of me for listening to Dylan, she complains that he is bleak and sad, although to be fair she does like “Love and Theft”, and “Modern Times” quite a bit. Those albums are generally more up-tempo band-oriented songs, bluesy and rich. I still like the old whiny Dylan too, and I guess that’s just not as universal a thing to like.
Anyway, that’s your Dylan for the day.
Nothing to read here, move along.
I have had very little motivation to write something new here recently, sorry if I disappoint anybody (probably not, you are most likely immune to the blog droughts by now if you are still coming here today). I have only these few things to share, which I have freely stolen from Boing Boing and Table of Malcontents:
Amazing acrobatics that make me feel old and tired just watching it. I don’t think I believe the title of the video, which definitely sounds a tad make-believe, but the video itself is still compelling.
Then a cool video about a promotion for Jeep with an incredible waterfall display. It’s mesmerizing.
And finally a quick link to a happy little fun game where you play as an infectious disease, and your job is to evolve in the right way to infect and ultimately kill all of the nasty humans on the planet. What a better way to lift your spirits on a Friday afternoon, than by eliminating those pesky frickin’ bipeds?
There you go folks.
You aren’t. Not really. Not compared to this guy. You will realize it when you give this link a read. Oh man, this is crazy. It’s an article on the Modern Drunkard Magazine website (no, I’m not a regular reader, I saw this on Wired) about the legendary drinking exploits of Andre the Giant. Yes, the wrestler. He had a disease that caused him to grow far, far beyond the normal human size, obviously. At over 500 pounds, and looming about 7 feet tall, this man also had an inhuman tolerance for alcohol. Let me paraphrase the very entertaining article that you should definitely go and read in it’s entirety.
There are lots of really funny stories and anecdotes about this man’s life, including some funny stories about Hulk Hogan being his little buddy and scampering off to get beer to keep Andre happy so he wouldn’t hurt anybody. His life of course was unusually short because of his disease, but not necessarily a sad one because of the lust for life this guy had. Go and read this now.