Junkyard Dog Friday

I wound up sitting on these videos for weeks or months in the faint hope that sooner or later some topic would arise that absolutely needed a dog riding a lawnmower or the fattest Englishman in the universe being presented with an animal carcass. This was pretty stupid of me, but I think the point here is that I made at least a token attempt to do something other than dump a bunch of videos into a single post.

I can't take credit for this one. If I remember correctly, a guy named Moving Shadow thought this up. Regardless, Eternal Mobius Dog Is a Cool Dog (click image to play):

Foul Things I Have Eaten

My stepmother's shock at what my father usually ate during a regular week probably owed more to her background in health care than to anything uniquely revolting in my dad's refrigerator. He worked twelve-hour days, took business lunches and was too exhausted at night to do much more than eat takeaway. The first sweeping change she visited upon the house was to clean out all the junk foods from the cupboards and insist on salads and tasty but balanced entrees.

I looked on in something like horror. I didn't especially get along with my dad, but the thing time with him had going for it was shooting pool in the living room while eating giant pizzas with the works, watching grown-up movies on the couch while eating chinese from the carton or going out to the Mexican restaurant that made a "Super Burrito" that hung off the end of already oversized plates like a dead lamprey.

Fuck You, 2009

You sucked. First of all, Hitler got inaugurated. Then we all lost our liberty. Now there's some goddamn healthcare bill that puts a tax on life. I keep praying someone will just kill all the liberals who are doing this, but first you struck down James Inhofe, and then you tried to kill Rush Limbaugh. Now I find out you took Avenged Sevenfold drummer TheRev from us. You are a cold fucking bitch. You've consumed everything I've ever cared about. You see this wonderful spread of delightful snacks and crudites I've laid out, representing those things dearest to me? No, because you fucking ate it, you fucking fatty year. The only thing you had in abundance was bullshit, from Glenn Beck on TV to everyone anybody ever knew and wanted to forget getting on Facebook and creating more stupid drama in less than 12 months than in all the years since high school put together. The Chinese Zodiac sign for this year is a fat girl in a corset who smokes cloves and likes to brag at Denny's about how good she is at giving head even though the only time people are drunk enough to ask her to do it, she flips out and screams "I AM NOT A SLUT" and then tries to break their cell phones so they don't have her number anymore. Nobody wants to think of what she looks like naked, and goddamn, 2009, do I not want to know what you looked like sober. Here's the first image that comes to mind when I even wonder about it:


2010 will be the year of the potato. We begin by greeting its distilled nectar.

I Can't Stop Making Youtube Doublers

I waited ten days. Give me that much credit. But I can't stop making these things. I think of Arcade Fire songs, and then I think about trying to find a video of cats wailing while having sex. I read someone going on and on about the sublimity of Sigur Ros, and I wonder, "Can I find a video of endless rows of full coffins?" I see a trailer for Watchmen, and I think, "I'm fairly certain it will take me less than 30 seconds to find an obese person screaming about this movie on his 'vlog.'"

Maybe those are best left for another day. For now, these:

YoutubeDoubler II: More Assaults on Taste

A few weeks ago, I posted this amazing link to a YoutubeDoubler that set the bar for YoutubeDoubling. Classic hip-hop is always going to be cool, and anything entitled "Unintelligible Empanada Truck" is always going to be funny. Together, you can't lose.

Since then, I've tried to be funny with the format and mostly come up short. Anything spastically funny is going to be funny on its own. Anything dull is going to be dull. The problem is, where do the two converge? I'm still not sure where that happens, and maybe it doesn't happen with any of these, but the efforts should still be tolerable, especially since they're not all mine anyway.

Brief Thanksgiving Update

I apologize for updates being somewhat thin on the ground during this last month. As some of you may know, I've been involved in a pretty demanding and exciting writing project. It has the potential to open a lot of doors, so I've neglected this blog because its meeting a quota has been secondary to doing the best possible work for the current job.

I also want to apologize because this blog's taking a backseat won't be rectified for at least a couple more weeks — both because of this new job and because of the holidays. Right now I'm very pleased, lucky and thankful to have family visiting, and I will have both friends and family dropping into town every weekend until the New Year. Hopefully they'll do so on a lucky rotation that allows me to crank out copy for work without making them sit in the guest room for an hour while I "finish something."

In the meantime, I'll do my best to crank out new content whenever possible. As this is the day when we theatrically stand at the dinner table and thank other people at the dinner table in full view of still other people at the dinner table, I would be remiss in not giving gratuitous public thanks for those of you still reading this junk even months later. I do appreciate it, even if I don't know who you are. (Especially one person. I apparently have a faithful reader from Sydney, Australia, and I literally have no idea who this is. Post a comment; out yourself.) I know some of you check back daily to see if there's new content, and I always feel like I'm letting you down when there isn't any.

But don't worry. There are currently eleven half-written book reviews rotting away in my head, to say nothing of campaign postmortem posts, etc. We'll get those suckers printed sooner or later.

Happy Thanksgiving!

And to those who do not celebrate Thanksgiving, greetings from America!