Archive for August, 2008

Strawberry Pancakes, I'm Coming For You

Sunday, August 31st, 2008

All the elements were in place. I felt like treating myself for my upcoming birthday. I woke up early on Sunday and couldn’t get back to sleep. And most of all, this tune kept running through my head. It was clear I needed pancakes. So on my bike I hopped, all the while humming about pancakes. I wouldn’t get to have strawberry pancakes (Kerbey Lane Café doesn’t serve them), but anything pancake-related would satisfy the musical demon.

At Kerbey Lane, it became more than a craving: it was a divine mandate. The Pancake of the Day…

…was Strawberry. Weebl’s Stuff, you’ve done it again.

I

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

This person’s personal ad on Austin craigslist didn’t turn out so good; it was flagged for removal within minutes. Emphasis mine:

I am looking for friendship leading to possible ltr.     I love to go out and have fun with friends, I love the clots and UofL football

Look, lady, it’s OK to love triple cheeseburgers, but you’re not required to love the heart bypasses that come along with them.

LittleBigPlanet Is A LittleBigMystery

Saturday, August 23rd, 2008

LittleBigPlanet is a game so radically new that all attempts to describe it must fail. Words aren’t enough, because my eyes glaze over trying to understand the Wikipedia article. Even trailers aren’t enough, because the ones available on LittleBigPlanet’s official site are so surreal that I spent all my viewing energy figuring out how the images onscreen resembled a game.

Critics continue to stain their underwear in anticipation of a game I don’t think they understand beyond secondhand accounts. Until LittleBigPlanet gets in my hands—if LittleBigPlanet gets in my hands, if I ever pick up a PlayStation 3—the game will only have the one redeeming quality of OMG CUTE vouching for it.

Push the Button, Frank

Sunday, August 17th, 2008

I have more faith in the concept of a divine ‘random B-list celebrity generator’-thingy than in any theist religion. It would probably just be an SQL database on an old 286 PC tied by dialup modem to the huge server farm dedicated to every human’s fate. Clotho would be a good DBA.

I bring this up because you never know who’s waiting for you on a given day. At a co-worker’s birthday party on Saturday, I met the most unexpected person. She falls nicely between obscurity and petty fame: anyone who watches enough TV has seen her image, but no one would mention her if they tried listing every character of every show they’ve encountered.

Remember Pearl Forrester? Not by name, you don’t. Remember ‘that recurring lady on Mystery Science Theater 3000‘? Yeah, I met her as we sat on plastic porch furniture drinking booze. Words can’t describe how surreal it is to meet someone so random in such a random fashion.

They Know What They Want And They Know How To Get It

Saturday, August 16th, 2008

I was walking by Austin’s Paramount Theatre a couple weeks ago. The lettering on their sign was unfortunate. Not nearly as dumb as other theatre mistakes, but still amusing:

CLASSIC FILMS THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE

Paramount, like many arthouse theatres, is pandering to a microscopic niche market: the group of people that know what they want but would rather they didn’t. ((If you’re totally lost, here’s a hint.))

Dude, You Are Totally Racist Against Zombies

Thursday, August 14th, 2008

Dinosaur Comics has a new competitor in postmodern weirdness. Not new new, exactly, but new to me. Thinkin’ Lincoln is a webcomic dedicated to the disembodied heads of various historical figures and their hastily drawn antics. Example here. Together with Dinosaur Comics, Thinkin’ Lincoln creates a subgenre of humour that’s 50% lazy artistry and 50% gags that shouldn’t work but do. These boys make postmodern a freakin’ verb:

I hadn’t heard of Gregor MacGregor until Dinosaur Comics postmoderned him.

White Ninja Comics and anything you find in the back page of the Daily Texan aren’t part of this group. Where’s the 50% funny?