That's cold, Obi-Wan

There's only one explaination: FoxDie.

It's the big one, Elizabeth...I'm coming!

I just ate a Monster Thick Burger at Hardee's . I feel like I am going to die.

New words

Something I ran across that seemed pretty cringe-worthy for Tim and Andy: disemvoweling.

Michael Jackson is dead

And for some reason the world is mourning this.

I have to post because no one else is posting willingly

Amish is taking me to Walmart. To wander around. Albia is so much fun.

Transformers 2 was fun. There was a stupid love story in there. There was also a fair amount of fan service. But then again, there was a stupid love story spun into it. The camera was also manned by an 11 yr old that got taken off his Ritalin and allowed to carry it in his hands. Did I mention the kid was allowed to drink Mountain Dew and fed Skittles? There was a stupid love story in there, also. Stupid love story. Robots. Explosions. Meagan Fox and her inability to close her mouth. Shia LeBeouff playing every role. Robots. Explosion. Shaky cam. Love story. There. I just saved you the time and effort.

I also got paid $50 an hour ($40.09 an hour for you Austrian folks) to draw elephants for a conservative t-shirt company. so in 10 hours of work, I made as much as I did working two weeks full time over at Sears. I am not complaining about that at all.

In closing, Pharaoh throws a car.

Passing Thought

I should start a suicide hotline. Except it would work on RSS and be an app for iphones. In general, it would be a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read each others' updates and suicidal tendencies.

I'm going to call it: Quitter.

This should be your desktop

Look at this ridiculousness

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/showcase-9/

Super Mario Bros 3 Was A Damn Play

Your brain just exploded.

In other news, I am dropping the O from the DaveO tag. Why? Why would you do such a drastic change! You must be saying. This completely destroys my world! To be honest, Abusso came up with that tag, and as the last step of washing (and disinfecting) her stain out of my calico-colored dreamcoat life, it has to go.

Gone!

Mostly for Andy

Cabasa de Cabras (aka Goathead)

If you do wind up in Melrose this weekend, and you manage to stumble upon Albia...



HELP ME

oops

Instructor (to me): That's your last name?

Me: I'm afraid so.

Instructor: The women must be chasing you all over the place.

Me: More like the adolescent boys. Wait, no. I mean. No.

Weekend

Anybody in the Des Moines area doing anything fun this weekend or next weekend? I'm trying to figure out the best time to go out there and visit everyone and get the hell out of Illinois.

Kara Drew This

Yet has never met him... Uncanny.

Well, well, well...

That's how every villain came into Pete and Pete. Minus the schlong.



I made it back to Iowa. Most of you know that. Actually, all of you know that. Aside from little pockets of people. And you know what I realized?

Albia is FUCK TONS boring. No wonder everyone migrated up to Des Moines.




I miss Denver. Specifically, the people in Denver.

~Oh! I got a freelance job. I'm animating for someone's website. Here is how the conversation went:

Man: So what is your hourly rate?
Me: Well since this is minute work... $20 an hour is what I-
Man: TOO LOW! What's your hourly rate?
Me: (panicking)Okay... well, $35 an hour is the Denver ra-
Man: TOO LOW AGAIN! I tell you what. I'm going to pay you and you are going to like what I give you.
Me: ...okay.

I wonder what he would have done if I dropped $75? TOO LOW! I would have pooped'em. Out my schlong.

Sarah: You love posting conversations ALTERNATE TITLE: The weather does weird things to his schlong. ALTERNATE TITLE: OMG LOL to the MAX

Sarah:  i want to play the violin
 Sent at 4:03 PM on Tuesday
 me:  maybe you should!
http://cgi.ebay.com/Student-Violin-by-Crescent-NEW-SAME-Day-FEEE-Shipping_W0QQitemZ250302542024QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item3a4731b0c8&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=65%3A12|66%3A2|39%3A1|72%3A1205|240%3A1309|301%3A1|293%3A1|294%3A50
 Sarah:  i bet that is a scam
it's too cheap
 Sent at 4:05 PM on Tuesday
 me:  they've got 99% opsitive feedback
it's probably just very junky
and used
man
can you imagine

 me:  it would be the best party prop EVER
except for a wheelchair
 Sarah:
we'd have no place for a wheelchair
 me:  i know
if we had a bigger place it would actually be pretty nice
you could use it as a regular chair
and wheel it around as needed
like
well guess i'll sit close to the tv and play some l4d2
guess i'll wheel ol' spokes over here
and tuck a bottle of whiskey into the saddlebag
woudn't that be an insulting name to call someone?
"Have a seat, Saddlebags."
 Sarah:  we can call amish that
 me:  i agree
and pretend like there's a very specific reason we call him that
so that he wonders why

i'm gonna buy that violin when ig et some money

 Sarah:  i have heard they are hard to play

 me:  it would be fucking great

 Sarah:  but i would try- a lot harder than guitar

 me:  i'd be like, pour me a margarita! And I'll play this violiln

 me:  and we could talk it up like it's a $3000 instrument

 me:  and then i'd just toss it to a drunk
and it would break
and i would scream like a demon
throw a chair through the window
light the couch on fire
go otuside and slash tires
 Sarah:  say you won it from the devil
 me:  and then be like
"just kidding"
HELL YES
 Sarah:  in a fiddling contest
 me:  that suggestion
 Sarah:  we can spray paint it gold
 me:  gets the gold star for the day
 Sarah:
 me:  FUCKING PERFECT
Just all casual like
I'd be like
 Sarah:  then kevin can sing the song
 me:  "Yeah, that's my violin"
and they'd be like, you play violin?
and I'd be like well, no. But Sarah won it from the devil in a fiddling contest

would a spray-painted violin still sound right?
i mean
not that a 3-dollar violin woudl be that great anyway
 Sarah:  probably wouldn't sound good
ask the internet!
i'm sure there is an answer
 me:  heh
i should just call a music shop
and be like, i have my grandfather's violin here, i'm thinking of
painting it gold
 Sarah:  to trick the devil
 me:  hell yes
 Sarah:  into thinking it's his violin
 me:  the fool!
and then i'd cackle
OR
better
"I'm planning on dressing up like the devil
and messing with my nephew"
ZOMG!
That would be LOL
to the MAX
 Sarah:  ha
 me:  we should actually do it
and film it
it'd be very trigger happy tv
i'd go to a middle school band room
and approach children
and whip the golden violin out from under my billowing crimson cape
do you mind if i post this to attic apartment?

. . .

In other news, Dave started chatting me up while I was in the break room. When I got back he was gone. It's too bad cause I had a great idea: he should start dropping the word "schlong" frequently and inappropriately, so that he becomes known as "that guy who came back from Denver and now says schlong all the time,"

How was Denver? Great but the cold weather did weird things to my schlong.

Want a soda? Does Amish's grandma crave schlong? (IE: of course!)

Will that be all, sir? Give me an extra order of fries. For my schlong.

I heard something about you and a traumatic swing set accident? It took my schlong.

. . .

I've proofread the to: line of this email about six times making sure it's not actually going to my boss.

Stand by for the Hugo award

me:  I really want to write that book now by the way

 Juston:  do it

 me:  I can't think of what the plot would be

But I'll try

i think it'd be like space opera meets western

I'VE GOT IT

here it is:

In the future, the government is controlled by a small group of powerful men. Most women have died of an airborne disease that targets their genetic makeup or some such shit

So the remaining men in power start using a time machine to snatch hotties from the past

 Juston:  wtf

 me:  but consquently disrupt the past more with each woman theypull

 Juston:  ok

 me:  until they almost BREED THEMSELVES TO DEATH II

or really out of existence in the first place

Let's All Collaborate on this Novel

me:  Breeding to Death II: Back in the Saddle

 Juston:  thats gross

but compelling

To those I've blown off this weekend.

Sorry I've been busy.

Time to hide

Right now at 10:33 sitting at my desk hoping against likelihood that nobody will show up for the Saturday morning English GED class. Of my four students, I've had one callout, and nobody is waiting (as they usually are) outside the room. I locked up and left a sticky note and plan to liberally salt my next fifteen minutes with coffee breaks and wanderings to ease the freaking out.

Why does it matter, you ask? Not because it is difficult to teach GED English skills to a handful of people, but because it is wildly annoying to have to teach it to one person and have one other person show up at the very end, who in turn is annoyed because class has ended 45 minutes in because I was able to work one-on-one with the only attendee. And then to have a totally different group show up the next week.

R!

Here's some other news:

Two Fridays ago I felt both romantic and gluttonous and stopped at Whole Foods to buy roses and a pineapple pie and happened to see a sign I could barely believe proclaiming that the frontman for Tool would be in the store the next week (last night) signing bottles of wine from his vineyard. Sarah persuaded me actually to go over there but the line was so phenomenal that we instead went home and ate grilled cheese, watched TV, drank vodka, and finally ordered a pizza. It was just like college! I know it sounds horrible but it was great. Then I abruptly fell asleep at one in the morning, ocean time.

10:37 and nobody's come yet!

Another reason I'm hoping for a no-show is that the company heads are coming to campus Tuesday and we GED people have been asked to almost stage a class for them to see, on short notice, so if nobody comes today I can maybe direct them back here Tuesday morning--although the attend rate will probably not be any higher than it is now, or, worse, will amount to an embarrassing one.

What do you people think of painting walls brown?

What do you think of hamburgers made out of pigs?

What do you think of Left for Dead 2? (I support it.)

Dave, please report here on your encounter w/Shalina. Have you noticed there seems to be a pattern with my exes?

Maybe this is a trait common to all exes?

10:40: I've tempted fate long enough and it's time to hide in the breakroom.

Needless to say, I will never eat sardines again.

I don't recall exactly what I said on Tim's voicemail, but here's the gist of the sardine thing:

Last week I was eating my last tin of sardines when it occurred to me that I had purchased those sardines nearly a month before. At that time, Walgreens had them on sale for like 40 cents a tin so I bought six of them. Sardines really aren't too bad. They're like tuna: by itself it isn't that great, but throw in some Tabasco and a saltine and, baby, you got yourself a stew! Or heartburn and bad breath.


So I was eating these month-old sardines and I was thinking, "dang, how long to sardines stay good?" I had never looked at the expiration dates on them and, considering the clearance price and the popularity of sardines, the store might have been trying to get rid of them before they went bad. That could explain why the empty tins stink so bad in my trash, too. Just the week before one of my co-workers sent me an email requesting that I take a bath. It wasn't my unwashed junk that she was smelling, though, it was the sardine tin in my trash. I hope.

So I plugged my nose and dug the stinky tin from the trash. To my shock and awe, Bumblebee assured me that those little fishes were good until 2011.

Two more years to eat those fish. I couldn't believe it. Isn't that crazy?! Is it just because they're in an airtight container, or do they add some sort of edible formaldehyde? What kind of preservatives are capable of embalming those fish for two years AND keeping them safe to eat? These fish could have been killed three years ago and, oh, I think I'll just pop one in my mouth on a cracker. Three year old fish corpses drowned in oil and sealed in tin. It's like a little dead-fish time capsule. How delicious.

When I right-clicked "Goathead" by accident, Google Docs suggested "Goatherd's, Goat head's, Fathead's, Goatherds."

Reviews

Goathead's Voicemail Concerning Tinned Sardines

This voicemail used a specific moment in sardine eating history as a springboard both for the examination of Goathead's recent sardine-related behavior and, more engagingly, for speculation on the scientific (and questionably moral) processes involved in tinning dead fish for consumption years later. Key line: "Needless to say, I will never eat sardines again." I include this here as both a teaser and a goad for Goathead to write a more detailed version for this blog.

The Russian the Guy in the Next Cube Keeps Spouting into his Phone

Pretty spooky sounding. With the right language you can sound like you're going to rip a Diet Rite in half and use the jagged aluminum to rend someone's head from his or her shoulders.

The New Issue of Ninth Letter

I have been regretting the subscription to this journal since I bought it last summer (more than a year ago! In this very fucking state!) but the new issue redeems the previous three. Smaller size and good writing, most notably (so far) an essay on the perils of completion compulsion in modern video games (the narrator writes about Halo skulls and various other achievements-rich time sinks) and fiction about an eyeless sexless infant born in 1939 Germany who tells parables about Herod to the doctors. This stuff is great! I'm really enjoying this. So much that I would recommend your checking it out next time you're tooling around a fancy bookstore. It's got a white cover. Or if you're really interested I will mail it to you.

My Coworker Staying Over Last Night

This was awkward at first, but pretty good. Sarah was cool about it. There was a trip to Wal-Mart that scored me a Kashi Mayan veggie bake (whatever that is). The only real downside was that we all went to bed too late and in the morning she left a Dogfish Head bottle heavy with cigarette butts on the balcony.

The Dr. Pepper Cherry She Bought Me for Letting Her Stay Over

So good I keep digging it out of the trash and pouring more into my cup.

The Pineapple Pie I Foolishly Splurged on Friday

Worth all eight dollars.

All the Literary Journals I'm Getting Suddenly at One Time Probably Due to Academic Year-End Publishing Schedules Converging

Pretty lame. Most of this is poorly written and poorly designed crap. And really, who cares? Fuck this, I'm becoming a computer programmer.

That Last Review

Unnecessarily negative.

Google Docs

Can't believe I haven't used this before! I used to write plot notes to myself in a .doc and mail it to myself, but this eliminates several annoying steps. If you haven't experimented with this feature yet, it's definitely worth checking out, especially if you get hot transporting files between locations.

In Error, I Posted This On Another Blog And In Horror Proclaimed "Shit!" In The Crowded Library

Andy, I concur. I chose the wrong job field. And I have about the same problems. Let me divulge the rest of you to my problem:

1. The Asian Theatre. What would cost modestly $25/hr entry level animation job stateside costs roughly $2 over in Malaysia, Korea, and Japan. Look at the credits of your favorite cartoons with budgets and you will see. Examples being Futurama, The Simpsons, and even Clerks. So which side of the ocean are you going to rely on?

2. Adult Swim is stingy. King of the Hill & Family Guy are still sponsored by companies as they are both syndicated. The entire Adult Swim lineup is paid for by the revenues of the commercials (as well as Robot Chicken and Venture Bros. but they also have private producers). This is why we see hour blocks. Also, syndicated shows are pay for play, so now series that have roughly 170 episodes need to be cycled through between 8-10 plays on different days to fulfill this obligation (Futurama, 3 years).

3. Adult Swim hates its own ratings. Everything else is paid by itself and its commercials, and as soon as a show becomes a fan favorite, despite how much revenue it may be pulling in, it gets scheduled for Shark Jumping or Cancellation. Most of the time the same teams will get another show. Examples being Sealab, Frisky Dingo, and Moral Orel. They too have Pay for Play, so when you see a marathon for an AS show, it's going away.

4. Private Schools are flooding the market. Now that the entertainment industry supplies 27% of the US economy, every kid that watches a seizure inducing Michael Bay film or another dog shit taco created by Uwe Boll wants to do special effects and 3d animation. I won't even begin to mention dick-flexing shows like Naruto and Bleach that inspire kids to love animu and promote Pearl Harbor II (even at 63% of their true power). Because credible institutions have yet to tap this giant funnel of money, private colleges scoop up any kid that can pay the bills and use words like "Motion Effects" and "Video Game Design" to flood an already niche job market. People with talent now have to apply for a job with 200+ candidates, 180 of which came from overpriced private schools.

I would go on, but I realize that I cannot find any sources. Plus, bibliographies are not my forte.




I will be back in Albia on Thursday evening. I will be in Des Moines Friday and possibly through Sunday. My phone number is unchanged.

Also: I have the Rifftrax for Twilight. It's the only heterosexual way to watch that damn abortion. Anyone interested?

Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature OR Eighteen Reasons Why I Chose the Wrong Field of Study

by Bruce Sterling from Wired (origninally titled "Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature")


1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.

2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.

3. Intellectual property systems failing.

4. Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized.

5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs.

6. Core demographic for printed media is aging faster than the general population. Failure of
print and newspapers is disenfranching young apprentice writers.

7. Media conglomerates have poor business model; economically rationalized “culture industry” is actively hostile to vital aspects of humane culture.

8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.

9. Digital public-domain transforms traditional literary heritage into a huge, cost-free, portable, searchable database, radically transforming the reader’s relationship to belle-lettres.

10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.

11. Barriers to publication entry have crashed, enabling huge torrent of subliterary and/or nonliterary textual expression.

12. Algorithms and social media replacing work of editors and publishing houses; network socially-generated texts replacing individually-authored texts.

13. “Convergence culture” obliterating former distinctions between media; books becoming one minor aspect of huge tweet/ blog/ comics/ games / soundtrack/ television / cinema / ancillary-merchandise pro-fan franchises.

14. Unstable computer and cellphone interfaces becoming world’s primary means of cultural access. Compositor systems remake media in their own hybrid creole image.

15. Scholars steeped within the disciplines becoming cross-linked jack-of-all-trades virtual intelligentsia.

16. Academic education system suffering severe bubble-inflation.

17. Polarizing civil cold war is harmful to intellectual honesty.

18. The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast.

______________________________

I would really like to see a few of these explained in more detail. #17 definitely needs an explanation. What the hell is this "civil cold war?" Is he talking about political polarization? Who could know for sure?

I've seen enough evidence to verify #11 is accurate.

I am, lately, wishing I would have become an astronomer. I have no idea what sorts of jobs astronomers actually do (probably something mind-numbing like cataloging stars), but it couldn't be worse than what I'm doing right now. You know: hanging out, taking phone calls, reading the news . . . blogging. Its rough.

Birthday Gangbang

Thanks to those who did so.

The rest of you... dissapointment.

Dreams I Might Have Had (But Didn't) Installment One

I'm in a tattoo parlor sucking peanut butter out of a hookah pipe. Vorwald is in the corner bent over a Joust machine. Suddenly I realize: it's not a tattoo or a hookah parlor at all! It's a gender reassignment clinic. Amish comes out of the back room with massive breasts and a pair of live cats sewn into his shoulder blades to balance things out. After a long courtship, takes Bunny's place in Ryan's life.