*tap-tap*

Hello?  Is this thing on?  Can you hear me out there?

Good.  Now shut the fuck up.

Well, my little forced hiatus is over.  Due to technical and human interaction issues (which I shall not bother to go into because I’ve had a hell of a cheap ride for the last few years and therefore have very little to bitch about) the site was down and all but the SQL data was recoverable at the time of the downage.  Since the blog and all other dynamic content is stored that way it seemed a bit foolish to restore anything without it.

But…

Now that that all the data is in attendance and accounted for, I would seem to be back in business.  This is all courtesy of Mensa and his diligent efforts not only to reacquire his and my critical information, but also to give me a new digital home and to sort out the mechanics of getting everything to work properly at said home.  Bravo.  Now go fetch me some lemonade.

*ducks*

On the prior note, If anyone finds anything out of sorts, please let me know so’s I can remedy that ASAP.

Like Mensa pointed out on his site, I didn’t realize that I had so much to say until the means to say it went away.  But of course, the time to say some things has passed and therefore they shall fade into memory, that is until a particular bone gets stuck in my throat again and then I shall set loose the Dogs Of Whining… er, War.  Yeah, that’s what I meant.

C’est la vie.  The wheels of life continue to turn until such time as one goes flat.  Then the man of life must get out and change it while the woman of life bitches that he’s taking too long.  It is as it has always been.

Saturday, December 11th the wHoReS walk-in theatre will be showing Christmas-like movies starting at around 8:00pm.  A’yup, we’re pulling out the big screen in the back and viewing from the comfort of the patio.  Owing to the very unpredictable weather, I’d recommend coming prepared for cool, evening time temperatures (bring a blanket you can snuggle in) with an option to strip down to short sleeves and be comfortable if it ends up being warm.

Also — as an experiment — bring a radio (walkman, miniature FM tuner, whatever… as long as it has digital tuning controls) and a pair of headphones.  I’d like to try out the possibility of broadcasting the audio from the DVD to individual headsets for private listening.  We won’t end up using this for the evening, I just want to test it as an option for the future and would like to see how it works across a wide variety of radios.

Also also — on an unrelated note — I now have a recipe database on this site (mucho thanks to Mensa for the hard work).  Currently I have the full collection of my family recipes in there which my mother has worked very hard to preserve digitally for more years than I care to count.  This is the latest digital iteration and I get to share it with the world, more specifically my friends.  This will also — hopefully — be the most up-to-date rendition of any of these recipes.

I am also inviting everyone to submit their own recipes to add to the library to preserve them and to share them with others.  All recipes are subject to my (mostly cosmetic) tinkering and approval, but I’m pretty easy-going.  There is a submission form in the recipe section that you can use to do so.

Eventually, I hope to have a printing option that will let you generate 4×6" cards to place in your recipe box at home.  Eventually.

This Saturday, December 4th, is an official wHoReS event.  We will be decorating for Christmas and we would be thrilled to have our friends join us to do so.  If any of you, the (un)willing troops would care to lend a hand let me know, or hell just show up.  You all know the drill better than I do.

Merry X-Men and a happy New Mutant.

This weekend is when I go to procure the great orange victims.  Likely Saturday.  I need to get a feel for who is inclined to be in attendance the Friday before Halloween (October 29th) for our annual Pumpkin Carving Party.

If you are going to come and are interested in carving a pumpkin to show off at the big Halloween party, please let me know very soon so I can try and have enough for everyone.  I have all the weapons of destruction and patterns a pulpy murderer could hope for, but don’t let that stop you from bringing anything you feel you might need to make your life easier.  My only stipulation is this: no "cutesy" patterns on the pumpkins.  The Pumpkin Masters series of pattern books include at least one feline face pattern and a few goofy "let’s not frighten the children" patterns every year amongst the clever and downright cool looking ones — and I despise them.  I also might veto any pattern I remember having been used in recent history.  You are also free to bring your own patterns, once again subject to approval.  Jebus, I’m such a megalomaniacal whip cracker.

"We fancy men are individuals; so are pumpkins; but every pumpkin in the field goes through every point of pumpkin history"
    — Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Men are like pumpkins.  It seems like all the good ones are either taken or they’ve had everything scraped out of their heads with a spoon."
    — Anonymous

October 1st is Friday, and marks the official start and observation of the Halloween season at the wHoReS.  Fiddy has so graciously let me burgle Friday night away from him, and being the selfish bastard that I am I am claiming the entire weekend — but for a good cause.

Everyone is invited to spend the entire weekend at the wHoReS.  Friday’s Halloween commencement starts at… er, well, whenever anyone wants to get there after 6:00pm.  We are inviting you, our friends, to the holiest of holies — the most sacred act of decorating the wHoReS for Halloween.  As Fiddy so succinctly put it "We’re going to Halloween the fuck out of your house."  Thank you, I’ve never heard anyone use Halloween as a verb before.  I’ll have to remember that.

Bring your jammies and sleeping gear, because once the house is in appropriate order the rest of the days are designated as a "Useless Turd Weekend".  Let me define that for anyone not familiar with this concept: being a useless turd means laying about in a dark, cool house watching movies, sleeping and basically re-charging your biological batteries & soul in a stress-free environment.  That is going to go on until we kick people out on Sunday. 

Folks are free to come and go as they please.  There’s plenty of nooks to put people in at the wHoReS, so don’t fear for sleeping space but sleeping bags, air-mattresses and blankets might be a good idea to bring along.  Also, seeing as the wHoReS is gearing up for a killer Halloween party later in the month, we are making this a commune-like BFE (Bring For Everyone) event.  Bring some munchies, drinks, alcohol and solid food to contribute to the communal eatery pile for this weekend.  Bring some cash because we’re likely to order pizza or venture out at some point for Chinese take-out and/or burgers (or other such delicacies).

We will start with the traditional The Nightmare Before Christmas (Jebus bless Tim Burton) and move on to other Halloween-ish movies (good, bad and cheesy movies… and good bad cheesy movies — there is a difference) until that theme gets voted off the island, and then we will resume with other entertaining media.  Bring any movies you think would be entertaining, but don’t be disappointed if they don’t get watched.  I have at least one or two flicks I need to inflict upon you people, so be prepared.

One final note, I pushed a perfectly good blog post off the radar to post this announcement — it’s the one directly below what you are reading here.  Don’t forget to read it before you go gallivanting off to other destinations on the InterWeb.  I hate to think that I wasted perfectly good time ranting and raving for your amusement only to never have it read.

Message ends.

Every year.

Every damned year the commercial juggernaut winds it’s spring a little tighter and steps up the date, that invisible line that denotes the winter holidays, most notable amongst them being Christmas.  For criminy’s sake, we’ve barely broken Fall’s hymen… give us a chance to break her in a bit before we kick her to the curb to let Winter’s icy feet warm beneath our sheets.

There’s no disguising the fact that I am a Halloween fan.  I love the Fall season and Halloween is the greatest way to celebrate it — give the devil his due, so to speak.  Halloween is a voluntary holiday, widely recognized but not federally mandated.  There are no bank closures; no government employees get the day off (which is a bit of a shocker there).  Everyone is allowed to take or leave it at his or her own discretion.

Halloween is a time of year when folks can let their guard down and have some fun, to let their inner eight-year-old bubble to the surface and help them take life a little less seriously for a while.  It lets people be silly without a license, and that’s a dandy thing to be every so often.

Christmas is a mandatory holiday.  Regardless of your level of recognition and celebration, it still seeps into your life.  Businesses, banks and governments shut down.  The stores transform into shark infested waters that you dive into with an albacore tuna strapped to your back — cut, bleeding and chumming the waters.  It becomes a sales fiesta and common decency is a piñata that gets beat to hell with a frenzied stick.

The biggest kernel stuck in my craw is this: it seems that no sooner do the stores put out Halloween decorations and other accoutrements, then they are shoving it down and back to make room for Christmas crap.  Truly, it’s ridiculous.  You start to see Halloween stuff around September 1st, with the hardcore push starting around the end of September — 2 months worth of exposure, and that’s being generous.  With Christmas, product is on the shelves in mid September with the first rush hitting November 1st, and the really big push happening after November 26th.  All told 3½ to 4 months, and it starts earlier every single year.

I don’t want to see a happy, jolly little elf sitting on a shelf (and getting top billing, no less) next to the pumpkin that bleeds from the eyes when you plug it in.  It’s just wrong.  Unless of course you make the elf bleed instead.  From the ass.  Santa’s little elf-whore that got gang-banged by the other elves when they "circled the wagons" in the North Pole elf dormitory.  Plug him and watch the red fountain flow… see the animatronic rictus of pain writhe across his face.

Ahem.

Don’t even go looking for Thanksgiving merchandise.  While I don’t necessarily buy up all the turkey and Pilgrim crap I can find, nor do I really decorate for that portion of the season, I do think that all holidays should be allowed fair representation in the stores for those that do.

Don’t get me wrong.  I enjoy Christmas, but obviously not for the "birth of Christ" aspect of it.  At the very least, it should be a reminder to spend time with your family and friends.  After all, the government has designated it a federal holiday so you should have a good chance of having some time off to do so.  What it should not be — and I know this is a trite and well-traveled path — is an excuse to be a decent person for a few days when otherwise you are an outrageous, unmitigated asshole.  If you’re going to be decent human being, it should be 365/24/7, or at least as close as possible.  It’s a life-choice, not a seasonal change.

The commercialism of the Christmas holiday is not what bothers me so much as the steamroller effect.  Hell, I embrace being able to buy what I like to celebrate how I like.  If Halloween had no commercial element, I wouldn’t be able to get all the groovy decorations and effects that I love so much… and let’s give a great big hand to Don Post and the other people who have been releasing more and more gobs of realistic horror and gothic designs to the Halloween market each year (I have a tendency to steer clear of the "cute" decorations).  I freely admit that I’m a consumer whore.  I live in a capitalist nation and I embrace that.

But…

Don’t shove things down my throat.  Don’t overshadow one (or more) perfectly enjoyable holiday in favor or another, especially if the holiday taking precedence offers a bouquet of peace in one outstretched hand and a Louisville Slugger of animosity in the other hand hidden behind it’s back.  Retract the creeping commercial glacier dates a bit and let Halloween catch its breath.  Don’t assault me with black and orange on one side, and red, green and white one the other.  Keep Christ in Christmas and out of my candy bowl.  Take a lesson from Jack Skellington.

Good night kiddies, and unpleasant dreams.

Suddenly I feel very old… and very happy at the same time.

I would like you to kindly recall my challenge in the comments of THIS post to anyone with children of the specified age to garb their rugrat in one of several very special costumes that I found enormously funny and drag them along to the Halloween party.

Apparently, not everyone finds these costumes as amusing as I do.  Some people have ISSUES they really need to work out.  I suppose that they fear that dressing their kids up like a hooker from the roaring 20’s or a pimp that is more reminiscent of TV’s Huggy-Bear than some coked-up, assault happy malcontent will transform their pre-pubescent white suburbanite knee-biter into a formidable criminal resident of the Vice Squad’s holding tank who scrapes the last bit of crack resin out of her pipe when she’s been skipped on by a John and has to fork over her folding money or else taste the blunt end of a cue-stick, or worse, the wrong end of straight razor by her "manager", or even into the pimp himself who regularly sends his fleet of disease ridden man pleasers out onto the streets to dole out their fair share of affordable love and venereal nastiness that would make Osama Bin Laden envious of the efficient execution of germ warfare.

*inhale*
*pant*
*gasp*
*cough*

I mean, c’mon.  It’s fucking Halloween.  The concept is to dress in a costume that skirts, or even better, escapes reality.  A kid in a pimp or ho’ costume will no sooner become one, as a kid in a Frankenstein costume will sprout spark-plugs from his neck, an industrial zipper on his forehead and sashay around the countryside in size 27 shoes wreaking havoc, killing villagers, and escaping torches and pitchforks.  Ok, so we can’t rule that particular scenario out, but I mean it’s still such an infinitesimally small chance.

Lighten up, people.  Forcibly remove the sticks from your collective asses and enjoy a national public holiday that allows you to dress up in a silly costume and show it off to your friends and neighbors without fear of having them shoot you in the face with a 12 gauge as soon as you show up on their doorstep.  It’s planned, nonsensical fun.  Look at yourselves and have a belly laugh at how ridiculous you sound.  C’mon, you see it… you HAVE to see it.  It’s as plain as the big rubber nose on your big rubber face.

Mensa and I were talking about Guy Ritchie this morning, specifically two of his movies: Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch.  These are both pretty good movies — good storylines, a twisted plot, entertaining characters and good character relationships — bit what makes them so good is that they are infinitely quotable.  Hell, we’ve been using the "It’s a deal, it’s a steal, it’s the Sale of the fucking Century!  In fact, fuck it Nick, I think I’ll keep it!" quote for years now.  Allow me to pepper you with a few of my favorites… some of them are lengthy, but worth it for the context.  Snatch is my favorite of the two, but they are both excellent movies in their own right.

Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels:

Eddie: They’re armed.

Soap: Armed, armed with what?

Eddie: Err, bad breath, colorful language, feather duster… what do you think they’re gonna be armed with?  Guns, you tit!

————————–
Rory Breaker: If you hold back anything, I’ll kill ya.  If you bend the truth or I think your bending the truth, I’ll kill ya.  If you forget anything I’ll kill ya.  In fact, you’re gonna have to work very hard to stay alive, Nick.  Now do you understand everything I’ve said?  Because if you don’t, I’ll kill ya.

————————–
Gary: Shotguns?  What, like guns that fire shot?

Barry the Baptist: Oh, you must be the brains of the operation.  Yes, guns that fire shot.

————————–
Nick the Greek: What else does it come with?

Tom: It comes with a gold-plated Rolls Royce, as long as you pay for it.

Nick the Greek: Dunno. Seems expensive.

Tom: Seems?  Well, this seems to be a complete waste of my time.  That, my friend is 900 nicker in any store you’re lucky enough to find one in.  And you’re haggling over 200 pound?  What school of finance did you come from Nick?  It’s a deal, it’s a steal, it’s the Sale of the fucking Century!  In fact, fuck it Nick, I think I’ll keep it!

Nick the Greek: Alright alright, keep your Alans on!

[peels off notes from his wad]

Nick the Greek: Here’s a ton.

Tom & Eddie: Jesus Christ!

Eddie: You could choke a dozen donkeys on that!  And you’re haggling over one hundred pound?  What’re you doing when you’re not buying stereos Nick?  Finance revolutions?

Nick the Greek: 100 pound is still 100 pound.

Tom: Not when the price is 200 pound it ain’t!  And certainly not when you’ve got Liberia’s deficit in your skyrocket.  Tighter than a duck’s butt you are.  Now, lemmie feel the fibre of your fabric.

Snatch:

Brick Top: You’re always gonna have problems lifting a body in one piece.  Apparently, the best thing to do is cut up the corpse into six pieces and pile it all together.

Sol: Would someone mind telling me, who are you?

Brick Top: And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them.  Cause it’s no good leaving it in the deep freezer for your mum to discover, now is it?  Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs.  You gotta starve the pigs for a few days, then the site of a chopped-up body would look like curry to a pisshead.  You gotta shave the heads of your victims and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies digestion.  You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don’t want to go sifting through pigshit, now do you?  They will go through bone like butter.  You need at least 16 pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm.  They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes.  That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute.  Hence the expression ‘as greedy as a pig’.

Vincent: Well, thank you for that.  That’s a great weight off me mind.  Now, I mean, if you wouldn’t mind telling me who the fuck you are, apart from someone who feeds people to pigs, of course.

Brick Top: Do you know what ‘nemesis‘ means?  A righteous infliction of retribution manifested by an appropriate agent.  Personified, in this case, by a horrible cunt: Me.

————————–
Turkish: Fuck me, hold tight.  What’s that?

Tommy: It’s me belt, Turkish.

Turkish: No, Tommy, there’s a gun in your trousers.  What is a gun doing in your trousers?

Tommy: It’s for protection.

Turkish: Protection from what, ‘Zee Germans’?

————————–
Bullet Tooth Tony: So, you’re obviously the big dick, and that on either side of you, are your balls.  There are two types of balls: There are big brave balls, and there are little mincey faggot balls.

Vincent: These are your last words so make them a prayer.

Bullet Tooth Tony: Dicks have drive and clarity of vision, but they’re not clever.  They smell pussy and they want a piece of the action. And you thought you smelled some good old pussy and have brought your two little mincey faggot balls along for a good old time.  But you’ve got your parties muddled up.  There’s no pussy here, just a dose that’ll make you wish you were born a woman.  Like a prick, you’re having second thoughts.  You’re shrinking, and your two little balls are shrinking with you.  The fact that you’ve got ‘REPLICA’ written on the side of your gun, and the fact that I’ve got ‘Desert Eagle .50’ written on the side of mine, should precipitate your balls into shrinking, along with your presence.

Stupidity, thy name is Kaiju Big Battel.  Don’t get me wrong, I love a good dose of stupidity and this is exactly the kind of Supreme Idiocy I can get behind.

Check out the VIDEO section for a peek at what I’m talking about.  The best way to describe Kaiju Big Battel is like this: it’s the illegitimate love child of GWAR, WWF, backyard wrestling and Sunday-morning monster movies (ala Godzilla and UltraMan).

This train wreck is the brainchild of a coupla’ twisted art students from Boston back in 1994.  It has evolved into a slightly migrational show that has performed on both coasts, with a core of eight folks that expands to thirty come show time.  You can tell that these guys are having a hell of a lot of fun putting on this show.

I say we pepper these folks with email until they crumble under the pressure of our whining and come down here and stage an event.  I’d be there in a heartbeat.

This warms the cockles of my Halloween-loving heart… even the sub-cockle area.