The Orville

One of the things I've had in mind to write about is The Orville, Seth MacFarlane's live-action science fiction show on Fox. I've had this in mind because the show has been a topic of lively and evolving debate in a small circle that consists of me, Ilse, Whispers, and Databoy. I've watched every episode of the show that has broadcast thus far, and I think I've discussed every episode with Ilse and Whispers (Databoy has an interesting spot in the pantheon of opinions about which I give a shit).

So let's start here: I'd give just about any Seth MacFarlane-involved product a shot. We're long-time Family Guy devotees. We liked the Ted movies. I could watch A Million Ways To Die in the West a hundred times over the rest of my life and like it every time, although that probably has more to do with Jamie Foxx's cameo, Neil Patrick Harris' perfect villainy and film-stealing delivery of "If You've Only Got a Moustache", and Charlize Theron sticking a daisy in Liam Neeson's asscrack, as it does with anything MacFarlane-related. We'll even get around to watching Sing one of these days. I think MacFarlane is a funny guy and his productive energy is pretty amazing. While I think he's a better writer/creator and voice actor than live-action actor, I think that's trivial in the context of his talents as an entertainer and a creative.

All of which is why I'm dithering about getting around to bitching about The Orville, and the dithering and exposition ain't done yet, so chillax. Or don't.

The Orville is both an homage and a parody. It's a love letter to Gene Roddenberry; the tone and values are decidedly Trekian, the design and look are unmistakably TNG, MacFarlane has enlisted some old Star Trek hands to help out, and the plot cribs are predominantly TOS, with some TNG tossed in. The characters are essentially Star Trek franchise archetypes remixed (with some distracting exceptions that I'll get to in the bitching portion of our program). The look of the thing is beautiful, when they're doing interiors--like every other show and film, it's amazing how much location sets do not in any way resemble Southern California, to steal a joke from Austin Powers. The effects aren't shabby, and the production seems pretty tight. They've had some kickass episode directors--Jon Favreau, Robert Duncan MacNeil, Brannon Braga, James L. Conway, and Jonathan Frakes. That's right, that Jonathan Frakes. No matter how pissed off I end up at this show, they fucking got Frakes on board, and that is a castle I will not assault. This is a serious effort here, the homage comes from pure fanboy love, and there is no faulting the cast's and crew's passion and enthusiasm for this.

The parody is what you'd expect from MacFarlane. Some of it's pretty lowbrow, some of it's wickedly funny, and a small portion is absolutely devastating. The humor is episodic--the effort is pretty clearly to leaven the homage with humor. There's nothing inherently wrong with that intent. It turns out it's harder to execute than you might think.

So before I open up, I have to say this: I've read some (but by no means all) of MacFarlane's output--interviews, tweets, various other media posts--on what he intends here, on what he's trying to accomplish. His intentions are perfectly fine to outright good. Hell, I'd even say they're close to pure. It's abundantly possible--likely, even--that I'm missing the boat on some of what he's trying to do. I'm not a trained critic, I'm not a trained television/drama/story guy. On the other hand, I'm also not a dumbass, I am reasonably well-educated in literature and narrativium. I understand the basics of telling a story. I'm trying to say that I welcome debate on this critique, if you care. But I think the problems are pretty fundamental and structural.

So here's the primary and insurmountable problem: I can't take it seriously. By this, I mean that the show doesn't get me to suspend disbelief, which everyone knows is an essential element of storytelling.

Let me clarify. I know it's science fiction. At an intellectual level, it's semi-stupid to suspend disbelief, and the whole connection has to be emotional. But the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises had no trouble clearing this hurdle. Yes, I take Star Trek seriously. This cannot possibly be a shock to you. What's my name, what's my motherfucking name?

I know it's parody, and here's the killer: Ted, a pair of movies about a gorram bear that talks (in a facking Boston accent, no less) had no trouble getting me to clear this hurdle, Million Ways had no trouble, and Family Guy clears the hurdle by being so ridiculous that it doesn't need to clear the hurdle. Seth MacFarlane has a demonstrated ability to get me to suspend my disbelief for humor products. And he's not doing it here.

There are structural, plot, and character elements of the problem. I get that the intent is to walk a line that includes both homage and satire/parody. I think a basic problem here is that the parody gets in the way of the homage. Sometimes, as in episode seven, "Majority Rule," the problem stems from all three: the conflict in the episode (sidebar: direct plot steal from the utterly wretched TNG season one episode "Justice") derives from a crew member's rowdy behavior on a covert rescue mission. The behavior is pure parody that completely abnegates the homage and the story.  WTF is this goofy douchebag doing in a military service, let alone on a covert mission? The plot contrivance, driven by dissonant comedic behavior, leads to the plot theft and massively overloads any hope of a coherent story.

This works in Family Guy. It's a cartoon. Peter can turn his family station wagon into a pirate land-cruiser; he can have a 15-minute death match with the Giant Chicken; he can abandon Stewie in a park while he gets drunk at the Clam. I chose to watch a cartoon and that's what I get.

Not so with The Orville. Look, the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises both incorporated elements of humor, countless lighter moments sprinkled through the gravity of the larger stories (some of the humor, like the endless race-based McCoy-Spock feud of TOS, doesn't even hold up all that well). And cranking up the volume on the humor, while maintaining a little gravitas, is something that should be plausible. And it's something that MacFarlane explicitly wants to achieve. It's not even criminal that MacFarlane returns to his base entertainment instincts by overamping the humor. It just really screws up the tone of this show. It is without gravitas or majesty. That probably sounds like I've got a giant stick screwed into an overly tight sphincter. But you cannot deny that gravitas and majesty are significant elements of the Star Trek universe, however overdrawn some plots and no matter how ridiculous Kirk is in retrospect.

"Majority Rule" is far from the only messy plot. Shortcuts and deus ex machina are Orville staples, and there's nothing unforgivable about that. It's science fiction. You don't want to write a freaking physics lecture for every episode. I saw a link to a video about the science of The Orville, and I ran away screaming to watch cute bunny vids or some such shit. Look, I'd expect a show walking the homage/parody border to skate over some logic holes. We're talking giant leaps over major problems here.

Another issue is triteness; a recurring plot device is that MacFarlane's character, the ship's captain, used to be married to his first officer. Who cuckolded him with an alien. An alien who shoots blue goo when excited. Okay, it's parody. All good. What's trite is the constant draw on romantic tension between the captain and first officer. MacFarlane's Ed Mercer vacillates between rage and tenderness toward Adrianne Palicki's Kelly Grayson, who vacillates between remorse and jealousy toward Mercer. In one episode, Grayson just doesn't trust Charlize Theron (whose character has it on with Mercer), who turns out to be less than truthful. Horrors! I had to teach Databoy the meaning of "hackneyed" here. I did not have to teach him the meaning of "Charlize Theron" (along with Frakes and MacNeil as directors, MacFarlane does have an awesome talent for recruiting some pretty incredible guest stars for his content, and he makes pretty damned good use of them).

Some other characters, while well-played, are over-the-top stereotypes, in particular Scott Grimes' Gordon Malloy, an insubordinate wildman pilot, and J Lee's John LaMarr (whose statue-humping on a covert mission in a society governed by social media led to the aforementioned tale of woe). They're funny. They're great cartoon characters. But the show ain't a cartoon.

And I don't want to impugn all of the acting. Penny Johnson Jerald (formerly of DS9) is a great addition to the cast, which didn't rescue the episode that featured her character. Halston Sage is an unexpected delight as the petite (but superhumanly strong) security chief. As for the actors I don't care for all that much, I think the problem isn't so much their skills as the weight of their characters--the ones I'm not naming are just irritatingly direct ripoffs of other famous TV sci-fi characters.

There's another structural problem here; MacFarlane has chosen to translate his perfectly normal and in no way problematic obsession with 80s/90s culture to yet another venue--one 400 years in our future. In one episode, the bridge crew watches an episode of Seinfeld on the main viewing screen (leading to a very funny bit about teaching a robot character cribbed from Spock, TNG's Data, Buck Rogers' Tweaky, and every other robot or android character evar, about humor). It's amazing how consistently all of the crew's cultural references date back to the end of the 20th century...and no other time. I saw episode 8 this morning and had to take a long break when MacFarlane's character cracked a Barry Manilow joke. You know what? This trend is parodying our obsession with our own exceptionalism. That's fine. But damn, it's a long way around the maypole, and this show is making me work way too freaking hard to enjoy it.

And yet, I keep watching. One reason is that it's become a family enterprise; Databoy loves it, and Ilse was getting irritated with my mockery of the show until last week, when it all suddenly broke through and she got the point. Same with Whispers, who does some small portion of his TV-watching in this house. I went outside to smoke after the last episode and came back inside to Ilse and Whispers dealing the show a lively post-broadcast whipping, based muchly on my itemized critique. I'm okay with having been down on the show before it was cool.

TL;DR: If you like MacFarlane or science fiction, watch the show and decide for your own damn self. If you hate MacFarlane, just walk away, because this isn't gonna change that. Nuh-uh. Me, I'll keep watching. Christ, I watched Voyager, how fucking sophisticated can I be?

Well...FUCK

Alsotoo, he was not Herbert.

(Update: Dr. Death weighs in.)
And in conclusion, well, FUCK.

All the Colored Girls Go Doo De Doo Doo Doo De Doo Doo de Doo Doo Doo De Doo

Damn. Lou Reed, dead at 71.



Hey sugar, take a walk on the wild side.

The wrong Beatle keeps dying.

Oh. That.

It's apparently Google's 15th birthday. This required some research, since whoever designed today's Doodle didn't bother to do a little bit of Javascripting to include mouseover text. So as an actual Web guy, let me just say this:

Fuck You, Google. It is your good fortune to be only slightly less evil than Apple, and about precisely as evil as Microsoft. Comparative analysis aside, Fuck You, Google.

The Figure 5

So BFF posted about the incomparable William Carlos Williams, whose birth anniversary was yesterday. But he left out the part that's about me. What a fucking number 12 wanker.

The Great Figure
Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
fire truck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city

A print of this used to hang on my crackhouse wall, click to DeMuthanize*

Fin.

*All hail Phil Plait.

Labor Day

So, I'm actually working on Labor Day, but as always on Labor Day check out Loomis at LGM, and backtrack, because for Loomis every day is Labor Day and he's the most outstanding populist labor historian I know of.

It seems that we missed Labor Day last year, although we made it right shortly thereafter. We did not miss in 2011, and I can't figure out what the YouTube-dropped video is. 

Finally: today's xkcd transcends all. No, I mean all. Holy fucking shit.

Zomney

It's almost impossible that you haven't seen this, but just in case:



Hat tips to Zombie Rotten McDonald, Susan of Texas, and Tbogg, the three places I saw it, but this is going to become a bigger virus than Sandy.

Fuck It, I'm Through Saying Shit For Myself

I succumb. Fuck words, just look at my fucking videos and intuit my meaning. Or not.
Hint: Not.

Also: if you're a gamer, check out Geek and Sundry, Felicia Day's relatively new site (with accompanying YouTube channel). Y'know, if you haven't.

Hint: Felicia Day is the person fronting the band.

The Dyspeptic Whale

Today's Google doodle is fucking awesome; the late Robert Moog was born 78 years ago today, and some enterprising Googlenaut came up with a doodle of a working Moog synthesizer. 

Without Bob Moog, we couldn't have danced away the 80s. Thanks, Bob.

Along about 1974 or so, we premiered a Moog synthesizer at a band concert (Himself may recall the grade we were in and the name of the guy who was enamored of the thing, but I don't; it was somewhere in junior high, the guy was also a Robert, and he demonstrated the thing using some hideous composition of his own...well, composition). Now, junior high band concerts are awful enough without some 9th-grader noodling around on a synthesizer made, as all things were back then, in black and white from rocks and mud. John the Daftist put it best, post-concert: "That thing sounds like a dyspeptic fucking whale."

At that moment, I agreed. I evolved, John the Daftist didn't (hence Ilse's comment after four days with John and Lucretia some years ago: "Oh my fucking God, please make the fiddles stop.").

Dance, bitchez.

Shorter NBC Sports Ice Hockey Broadcasting Crew

My goodness, the Pittsburgh Penguins' cocks certainly are tasty. Slurp. Yum.

(It's 1-0 Caps at the first intermission, the Pens down on an abysmally dumb turnover by Yevgeni Malkin, whose cock is apparently the yummiest, since poor Cindy Crysby was tragically and brutally struck down in his prime by a Washington Capital, and yet Doc Emrick and Eddie Olczyk still can't shut the fuck up about how fucking primo mega-alpha dominant Malkin is. And don't fucking get me started on that egregious can't-die-hard-enough asshole Mike Milbury. Furthermore, Marc-Andre Fleury has bobbled the puck on easy handles four fucking times, two of which almost resulted in goals, one of which was denied only by the graceless turdery of Alexander Semin, and yet these NBC fucks can't stop picking on Tomas Vokoun--who is wretched and should leave my fucking city on the first stagecoach, but who is playing reasonably well thus far tonight. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck NBC Sports.)

All The Nod This Shit Is Getting From Me

There's nearly as much noise about what a pile of shit the 911gasm is as the 911gasm is making itself. Nearly, but different in tenor and still only nearly in quantity. A little while ago (as I write this), United's number 9, Charlie Davies, scored in the 11th minute of a soccer game. Talkybobbleheads went wild for this bit of insignificant random numerology.

Think for a second about how fucked up in the head someone, individually or collectively, has to be to write this:

ON THE 10TH anniversary of al-Qaeda’s attack on New York and Washington, the conventional wisdom seems to be evolving from “We will be hit again” to “Osama bin Laden won by provoking us into a decade of overreaction.”

The feeling is understandable but incorrect, and it would be dangerous if it took hold.

That is a serious contender for the most fucking abysmally retarded thing I've ever read (h/t to Thunder, who linked to this gem of YFWP swill in BFF's comments).

I've never thought that 3,000 people senselessly killed in one day by wackaloons was or is a good thing, and anyone who thinks that the people--American or not--killed in the wars since constitute a good thing is dangerously fucking insane. Apparently, Fred Hiatt disagrees. I'm not going to get all chesty about that part, pretend I'm better because even I can do the pretty simple fucking math here. Nobody of sense or humanity wants fellow citizens murdered. Nobody of sense or humanity wants anyone to die prematurely or needlessly (and I'm not even up for the mental gymnastics of contextifying "needlessly" here). And nobody of sense or humanity could possibly contort the incredibly senseless changes in our national mindset since that day into a good thing, by any measure or in any context. It fails every test of logic, every test of truth, every test of rationality. That's a part I can get chesty about.

But apparently, Fred Hiatt differs, and he thinks I'm wrong. That's why I now call on the President of the United States to use his extraordinary powers--granted by Congress in the past 10 years--to shut Fred Hiatt and Your Fucking Washington Post the fucking fuck up. I'd personally consider that to be an isolated good outcome of 9/11.

Best wishes to you and yours for weathering the next 24 hours; for my part, I dread the afternoon's football games, and the mute button is likely. If you or someone you love lost someone that you or they loved on 9/11, or in the wars we spawned in its name, I am terribly sorry for that, and I respect your right to remember your loss, or theirs, as you see fit. But anyone who tells me that 9/11, or the changes since, are a good thing, and sneers that I'm wrong for thinking otherwise, is certainly a fit motherfucker to be punched.

Things To Say

Not much, but I had thoughts that I had to share. Yesterday was Bam-Bam's 11th birthday, following hard on the heels of Planet's high school graduation, which followed hard on the heels of the weekend from Hell that I circuitously referenced in my last post. Bam-Bam is still awesome, and Planet is so awesome that she's unique in category. She is the sweetest and most unaffected kid I've ever known, and she's going to college at precisely the right place. Looking around at the tramps and punks who graduated with her, I came to realize yet again how lucky I am to be part of her extended family. Congratulations and love, Planet, and see you at the party.

Bam-Bam rocks on, the anchor to which I tether. It's not that Ilse and Databoy are incapable of keeping me from drifting, or that they don't deserve their own satanic attention, but the pull of Bam-Bam is accompanied by its own song, its own weight, its own ferocity. He is also, in his weight class,  the sweetest and most unaffected kid I've ever known, a constancy of the unconditional. His aging confuses me. I am unsettled about his future, his adolescence,  his growth. It's stress in the light of love. I really don't know what the fuck to do about it. Or anything. Except babble.

I have often said that there's always an 80s dance party in my head (unlike BFF, who always has a New Order song in his head, and he's really better off, I think, because the people dancing take up an assload of room and they're thrashing around and shit). I started thinking this morning as I drove to work and realized that I really am a fucking sucker for idiot power pop, to wit:



That's what I got. Next post is the 500th, not sure when it will appear or what will be in it, but probably soon, because Monday next is an obligatory blogging day.

Rebel Leader Killed

Obi-Wan Kenobi dead after firefight with Imperial stormtroopers, Vader still refuses to release birth certificate.

(via)

Things Literary and Artistic

First things: it started for reals today, the faraway project that has consumed me and torn me from the loving bosom of my family, and late tomorrow I shall leave this place out by the highway off in deepest America for at least 4-5 weeks, the longest stretch I will have been away from it for nearly 8 months. Joy doesn't start to describe it, fellow East Coast urbanites.

I can also say that not only did it start, it started really, really well, and I am proud of and grateful to the several dozen underesteemed, mostly youngish rural Americans who work for me on this project, for their cunning and tremendously hard work and their motivation and their commitment to a thing done well for an entity I despise, despite that entity's best efforts to queer the deal. Opening Day for a big project is always fraught with little buggy things. Not so today--I can't imagine how, realistically, it could have gone better. By about 10 AM, when it became clear that we shot, we scored, I had secured from battle stations and the adrenaline crash had started, and the magnitude of the crash makes clear that this was one hell of a fucking rush. You're not reading this, mostly youngish rural Americans (and if you accidentally are, STFU, because it's a total coincidence that you think you know who I am, and it's someone else who's not me), but thanks. A tear to my eye, much larger than the one I gave Julius James last week, for reals.

But I digress, and I bore. Funny, if mostly unintelligibly clouded by literary wankitude, discussion of Moby Dick over a post and a couple of posts worth of comments over at BFF's.

I'm with the Dick haters. I learned long ago (see BFF's for cryptic clues if you give a fuck, or don't) that the novel (sperm!) is an extended and dreary metaphor (sperm!) about boyparts (sperm!) and their issue (sperm!). That is to say, it is about sperm, sperm, sperm, harpoons, sperm, sperm, harpoons, sperm, sperm, and sperm. Sure, epic framing story, way better than, say, The Menagerie and far superior to the horrific crap the same folks erected around Harlan Ellison's epic and legendary and beautiful The City on the Edge of Forever. And BFF will tell you that it's melodious, or some such poofy literary shit, and frankly, he's entitled to that sort of poetry because, well, you know, he just is.

But seriously, kids. Sperm. I have yet, in 40 years since, to hear a more compelling explanation, even from BFF, who's about as superior to me at comp-lit stuff as the Federation are to the Pakleds technologically. Hmm. Seems I'm vigorously rubbing a theme here. Oh well. Some say that's my greatest utility, and I have no cogent defense agin that theory. And let's not trivialize the Star Trek/sperm connection.

Let's flip elsewhere for further literary and artistic insight. It says here that some assclown hilariously thinks that Picasso conceived cubism as a misogynistic plot. The punchline, of course, is that the assclown writes this for First Things, a mostly Catholic journal that makes a dedicated pretense of interfaith contributions. Boggle. But read Edroso's post for some awesome commentary and meme-extension on this majestic assitude.

"Why?" you might well wail."Why do you, Landrucutus*, of all people, feel a need to pretend to any fucking substantive insight on literature, art, or really, anything other than sports or farting?"

It's a fair question. The truth is that you know what I think about me, and about Wisconsin and Egypt and admiring, and agreeing in every respect with, a SCOTUS opinion authored by Antonin Fucking Scalia, and rural America, and the ICC, and what My Local Locality's governing legislative body is getting ready to do to my wife and her ilk (which includes BFF's wife). The truth is that, of late, I've mostly used this space to whimper and otherwise proclaim my pulse to beloveds whose primary and utterly understandable reax (of late) are along the lines of, "Oh? You're not dead in a ditch somewhere along I-75, or tied to a tree grunting and squealing? Well, good for you, then, I suppose, sure, why not?"

I gotta say, I've thought about this long and hard (SPERM!) for the half hour or so I've spent writing this, and I'm pretty sure it boils down to fundamental insecurity about BFF's massive superiority in literary appreciation and his considerably less substantial superiority (mostly on account of being married to an artist and having fathered another artist, imhoe) in art appreciation, which is all a shame because we're not at all competitive except that's a lie and we are, totally. That's sort of an astonishing realization (except it isn't and shouldn't be), given that I just started popping this off (sperm!) after I read a couple of things and connected some dots that aren't really connectable except in the stream (sperm!) of my consciousness. Jealousy? Really? Jesus H Fucking Christ on a Wobbly Fucking Dryrotted Crutch, Landru! Get a fucking grip!

Finally: someone in one of the hotel rooms bordering mine is going at it really long and hard (sperm!). I mean, thump thump thump thump thump thump thump, at a really astonishing pace and rhythm, I mean we're talking like Surfin' USA or 52 Girls, sustained for a ridiculously long time. Salud, neighbors. And, of course, sperm!

Just thought you'd like to know.

*My friends call me either Landru or "Hey, Asshole," although my mother still tends to stick with "Dammit" and my wife mostly goes with, "Dood, what the fuck?"

A Must*

Wow. The Onion SportsDome looks awesome. I mean, really, Colbert and Stewie are getting a little tired. Let's have some fun with Jay Cutler.

* I know the song is just Michael Stipe reading the liner notes from a Revellaires album, but it really takes on a special significance when it's blasting from the stereo while I zip down a rural interstate in the most Jesusy state in the Union.



Some people (for instance) likely doubt the cultural significance of Michael Stipe getting oiled up, heading down to the studio, and forgetting to conceal that he has a massively chronic Southron accent (my guess is that the cited friend thinks I could've cut off that sentence after the word "Stipe").

Not me. We had a brief discussion over there about some asshat band called Vampire Weekend, which is, it appears, responsible for an unspeakably annoying series of commercials this season for a company once best known for making engines for the planes that attacked Pearl Harbor**. Until today, all I knew is that this song was selling cars, and that it sucked. Now, thanks to BFF, my life has new focus. I am going to start a camp for overprivileged children who think that this is music.

"But wait," you cry, "Didn't your elders think that your generation's music was despicably horrid?"

Yes. They did. They were wrong. My elders suffered through Eisenhower in their formative years and thought it was normal. My elders were morons. This generation's elders were born from 1946-1962 and rule the world. Get the fuck over it.


**This is a lie. The part about aircraft engines, I mean. It's important to grasp the historical concept that the victors*** write the history.

***Yes. That's exactly what I mean. Suck on it, Gen WTFEver..

How Important Is Principle?

Nate Silver's blog, FiveThirtyEight, has been linked to your right since several days after its inception during the 2008 presidential primaries (during which two of my three best friends to whom I'm not married did some incredible gymnastics to convince you that their eventual corporatist tool was substantively better than the other corporatist tool, while I took a more realistic, balanced, Trumanesque, and ultimately correct view--and yes, I'm done, at least until the next time I'm not done).

FiveThirtyEight has published some outstanding statistical analysis, and Nate Silver certainly deserves to make a buck. I'm not at all pleased that he's moved the blog to the newspaper that started the war in Iraq, enamoured though fellow travellers are of it as an institution. Ordinarily, I'd dump him--not that he'd care, or that he should. I think the Times is up its own ass (as is our local journalistic institution). But FiveThirtyEight's work is too good, too reality-based, and too useful to dump on principle. Some middle-dwelling skeptics (you know who you are), or just plain smartasses, might suggest that I should consider the possibility that the blog is a sign of the Grey Lady lifting itself from the ashes of the destruction it has wrought. And I think we all know what I have to say to that.

So enjoy the money, Nate, and fuck you. Not that you should care.

Dear Someone

Whoever you are, please make a decision about the Air Force's fucking refuelling tanker so that I stop hearing the ad spot catfight (targeted at you) between Boeing and EADS (Foreigners! Commies! Eurofags! Seriously, why is this even a fight?) on My Local Shoving News Up My Bum radio station.

Thank you.

One Shining Purple Moment

Unlike my good friend Purple, I am not a showman¹. I go about my business. I lurk. Exuberance is not my thing². I prefer not to reveal my feelings and motivations to those around me, unless I'm in comfortable company.

There are moments, though, when I am moved to action, when I forget my surroundings. I arrived at the day care with little Bam-Bam⁴ this morning, and "Beat It" was playing on the boom box as he and I went through our routine of safely stowing his coat and backpack and leaving him to his fate for the day. I began, as is my wont, to sing to the little tyke, right there in the multipurpose room of his diversity-rich school, there among his fellow day-care pupils.

Let's leave it at this: it appears that fat middle-aged white guys belting out Weird Al Yankovic lyrics is just a touch beyond the range of these kids' normal expectations.

¹ Purple knows this to be a damned lie. I simply prefer, in general, a considerably narrower audience than he does. Sasha³ also knows this to be a damned lie, but that's just because she's a Myers-Briggs slut.

² Purple knows this to be a damned lie, but can shade and correct the record as he chooses, because I'm digressing out of control here.

³ Who posted the awesomest Valentine ever.

⁴ Who outweighs his older brother by about 12 pounds and can no longer truthfully be said to be "little," but old habits die hard, said the nun as she prepared for...uhm, never mind.

The Original Fuck Your Calendar

Let me take you down
cause I'm going to
strawberry fields

Nothing is real
and nothing to get hung about
Strawberry fields forever

Living is easy with eyes closed
misunderstanding all you see
It's getting hard to be someone but it all works out
It doesn't matter much to me

Let me take you down
cause I'm going to
strawberry fields

Nothing is real
and nothing to get hung about
Strawberry fields forever

Always 'no'. Sometimes think it's me
but you know I know when it's a dream
I think I know I mean 'yes' but it's all wrong
That is I think I disagree

Let me take you down
cause I'm going to
strawberry fields

Nothing is real
and nothing to get hung about
Strawberry fields forever
Strawberry fields forever
Strawberry fields forever

Yes. Germany Is A Strange Place.

I know. I don't write, I don't post, I don't rant on command, even when I should. I work 12 hours a day at three different jobs and I may or may not fob one of them off on some other schloob before I drop dead. Whatever. You think you revile me, just ask my family's opinion.

Maybe I'll come back. Hold your breath waiting. Machts nichts to me. In the meantime, drop some Purple Microdot and watch this: