Join Me, to the Edge of the World

I was going to put an exclamation at the end of this post title, but I've been overusing those lately I think. And as an English tutor, I refuse to be called a hypocrite. So if you are calling me a hypocrite...

SHUT UP!!

Phew. That felt good.

Here's an interesting tidbit before I move onto the delicious meat and potatoes of this post: I'm currently listening to the Winamp Radio channel "Movie Scores." I just heard a soothing melody from The Motorcycle Diaires and now I'm enjoying some of the score from The Talented Mr. Ripley. It's putting me in quite a calm and pleasant mood for blogging. Unless there's a chase scene.

A question from the audience: Why did you choose this Winamp station option? I thought you were going to listen to some Celtic music?

An answer from the author: I was, but the fast pace and high-pitchedness of the Celtic music was making me a bit more anxious than I wanted to be. Also, on Movie Scores I have the chance of catching Hilary Duff's "Come Clean." That had to be in some teen movie, right?

MEAT AND POTATOES


I included this picture of meat and potatoes because it serves well to introduce this picture-full segment on my new vacation destination obsession. Now, I know it's the middle of winter and all, but there's a spot on the following map of Europe that really caught my eye the other day. See if you can guess what it is. (You might have to click on the map to get a bigger view.)

While I wait for you to guess, I will be enjoying the title theme of Raggedy Man:


Probable answer from the audience: Zagreb.

That is a good guess, and PBS's Nature has inspired me to visit Croatia's lake country, but you are incorrect. Look up. Way up.

Probable inner dialogue of the audience: What is that city doing way at the top of the map? And what's it called? Longyearbyen? How weird!

How weird, indeed. And how awesome, as well. I've done some research on this small Norweigan settlement in the Arctic, and apparently it's a rising star of tourism. No not the North Star, silly. I mean in the context of popularity and such.

So, I invite you all to come with me to Longyearbyen some spring or summer in the future. I need someone to come with me so that we can play cards there. Otherwise, I don't know if there's much else to do and I'll probably settle for being attacked by an elephant seal.

I know you've all been whining about the Winter Olympics and how much you hate snow, but guess what? The Winter Olympics aren't there. They're in the land of pasta fatties. Plus, do you really like the Summer Olympics better? Professional hockey is so much more fun than professional basketball. And those are the only two events I care about in either olympics. And they're the only events you care about, too.

I am dating Sasha Cohen, though. (Yes! That's 20 more blog hits from searches for Sasha Cohen.)

Hold on a second. "The Flight of the Mechanical Bees" from The Avengers just came on. This shit is scary!

Phew. The tempo has slowed. Anyway, I just thought I'd provide you with a couple more pictures of Longyearbyen to encourage you to sign up for my trip of indeterminable date.

And as you muse it over, please enjoy these memories from Gladiator:

Who's a cute wittle Arctic village? You is!

I need more exclamation points to describe this.

Gotcha!

So you all thought I was going to start posting more frequently, eh? Looks like I gotcha good. Real good.

I'm not sure I wanted to gotcha that good, though. It's just that I've been a bit upset lately. You all want to know why I'm upset, right? Thanks for your concern, but it's really none of your business.

...

Fine I'll talk. Now stop crying.

1. I've realised more and more that I don't like most people very much. Christians and Muslims and all whining about cartoons and marriages that have no real effect on them. Atheists whining about God not caring about them. Wah wah wah. (That's crying onomatopoeia, not a disappointing trumpet sound).

You guys who visit here are lucky I do like you, even if it's only because I plan on one day turning this webiary into a net-store where I can sell really cool t-shirts and you'll be expected to buy them. "I'm with not so stupid." Get it?!

2. I've come to above realisation via my job, which is tutoring online for a company I won't name anymore in case they are affiliated with the mob. Because I'm a new employee, I have a mentor who monitors my sessions with students and criticizes them every week. My mentor is a witch, but one of those "nice" witches who pretends she isn't looking down on you. Like the ones who give you love potions even though they know that love will only get you into more trouble. I'm not sure that makes sense.

Anyway, every week I get told I'm not professional enough in my typing or "online lingo" or some shite. I also get criticized for telling kids what is wrong with their grammar. I'm supposed to help them get to the answer themselves or some new age crap like that, which is basically impossible online.

That's right. I, the hippie, do not support something new age. And since I'm on that track, I don't support yoga either. I know very little about it, but it seems cultish and painful and irritating. And hello, we already have a word in our language that sounds like yoga. It's called Yogi, and it's the name of my favorite bear.

I cannot emphasize enough how much I do not support the unnamed company I work for. They train their tutors to be robots who give no real knowledge. (Can I use the word "who" with robots? Teach me, Will Smith of I, Robot). If you want your kid to have a tutor who isn't ever allowed to show personality or type anything creative, I say just hire one of the writers from Everybody Loves Raymond. Zing!

3. I'm actually not upset at all about this next thing, but the ante has been upped to almost unreachable degrees by Chad Igo of Igos vs. Suburbia. The picture of him as an Apple-like product had to have required at least five times the effort I ever want to put into this...

No. Wait. I do want to put the effort in. I want to be somebody. To make a difference. You can't tell me what to do, anonymous tutoring service! I'm gonna be a real person! I'm gonna take a cool picture of myself and post it!

Below is a picture I took today after putting in a ton of effort and thought. I figured you, person I like, might want to know what Brookfield, Wisconsin, looks like in the middle of winter, so I trudged all the way to its highest peak and snapped the following shot. What effort I put in! Good day!

The Caribbean never looks as good as it does from Brookfield.

Yummy Addendum

In reference to my January 16 post supporting cheese yummies in the shower, I would like to add two more recommendations:

Pickles - The high water content of pickles makes them a no-worry option if you're an amateur who's worried about getting the food wet. I prefer the standard dill variety, but I'm pretty boring that way thanks to my part-British pallet.

Charleston Chew - I will admit that this is not a new revelation. I remember eating at least one or two of these in the shower back in high school. Optimal are the full-sized bars, especially if you're hungry, but the mini-bites work excellently if you just want a quick snack. IMPORTANT: Freeze the Charleston Chew before taking it into the shower. The combination of a cold chocolate bar with hot water is revolutionary. ALSO, the "back to stream" position is of utmost importance here. The chocolate will begin to run once it gets wet, and you don't want to have to explain the brown stain in the bathtub to your family.

So if I didn't ruin it with that last comment, Bon Appetit!

I do NOT support pickle frogs in the shower.

Saves the Dan!

First, I would like to humbly welcome any "Randy"s (random internet frontiersmen who I don't actually know in the real world). I don't know how I tricked you into stumbling upon this site, although my Statcounter suggests you were probably searching for "Usher Raymond gay rumors," but I consider you to be my friend. Friendship, for me, usually comes after a roofie, a lawsuit, a child, another lawsuit, and three years of violent parenthood finally bring me together with my original victim... But I guess I can streamline that here on the 'net.

Second, I would like to make an annoucement. Tonight I had some discussions with the public - notably Mike "The Hero" Ritmanich and my parents - and an incredible conclusion was stumbled upon, much in the same way that you might have stumbled upon this site. The conclusion was this: If my family grows poison berries in our backyard, we can use the alcohol the berries produce to fuel our cars!

Why poison berries? Because the poison keeps the deer away and my backyard is too shady for any field crops such as corn.

Third, and most important, I would like to kick off the "Saves the Dan!" campaign. For you Randys, Dan is my friend and he is very sick. Or at least that's what my musically-inclined friends tell me. You see, Dan used to search all over the world for the next great bands. He even claimed to have discovered Coldplay for America. His search was difficult, as it had to be given his high musical standards, but he didn't care. Finding new and original music was his destiny.

In the past few months, this Dan seems to have disappeared. Not only has his blog been bare for almost a month (sans one stolen-picture post), but his musical landscape has reached a plateau of dire condition. Dan currently believes that "derivative yet genius" groups who "may not be original but spill their hearts out" are the cream of the crop. This includes Yellowcard and, umm, that Christian group that was popular last year and had a music video by a pier. What Dan doesn't realize is that these musical crops, if you will, are parasites! They may right now look like as if they're filling the plateau with good harvest, but really they're digging deep into the soul of the Earth and ripping out the foundation.

Dan. Your musical choices are creating a metaphorical Dust Bowl. Collect your soul and get out of there! Head for the gold mines of California!

But not Ocean Avenue!

Actually, yeah Ocean Avenue. That song does rock.

Saves the Dan!

The dust, Dan! The dust!

Muffins for a Six Pence!

I think I have an extremely low form of schizophrenia. Either that, or it's an extreme form that's yet to be declared "extreme," in which case I would like to take some early action and label it "Xtreme." Because that's awesome.

I vary between the following two personalities:

1. The guy who hates anything with a laugh track, considers the Grammys to be "poetry by idiots who don't even write their own poems," and thinks every movie should be minimally as philosophical as I Heart Huckabees.

2. The guy who wants to be a 12th century cobbler.

Right now, I am the latter.

I've mentioned my desire to return to simplicity before, but this time I'm going to paint the scenario with some new colors. Because that's what artists do. They paint with different colors and then they show it to you, the public. And then you reject them and they head back to their studio in tears to bathe themselves in the only water they can afford - the same water they washed their paintbrushes with. Xtreme.

Consider my current dream:

I cobble all day and all night, making the best and only shoes in what is modern-day Portsmouth. I cobble shoes of all sizes for villagers of all ages and I love it and the people love my shoes.

I have a comely wife who, although only marginally attractive by today's standards (given her affinity to eat those huge racks of meat) is still more than do-able, and she cooks some killer muffins on top of that. We don't actually sell the muffins for a six pence because capitalism hasn't been invented yet, but we share them and we eat them and we think about selling them for a six pence.

I pay my dues to the lord of the fief and I pay my tithe to the church when the tax collector comes round, but ya know what? I don't really care. I'm the only one who knows how to cobble shoes this f'ing good and they're not gonna let me be so poor that I can't survive and can't cobble. They can't walk around those cold castle and cathedral floors with nothing but woolies on their feet, can they? Of course not.

Plus, I see them all checking out my comely wife when they stop by. Sorry boys. Swinging's not in style yet.

And that's it. All I think about is cobbling and my comely wife and that's it. Maybe the weather sometimes crosses my mind, and maybe a plague will come to kill us all. But I don't care. I know I have a purpose - to cobble - and as long as I do that then I've lived a good life.

Other Harry: What if we have no purpose? What if we mean nothing?

Curse my modern personality!

Okay guys, she's comely enough. Please don't bring any more.

A Day Late and a Dollar BILL Short

The event to be described actually occurred a couple of weeks ago now, but when I just thought of it I laughed again, meaning it is due to be...

BLOGG'D!

(I don my wicked cool sideways hat and the post begins...)

Word. So me and Pat and Mike - maybe you should call us the Devil's Rejects...SIKE! - were hangin' out in my 'rents bottom floor.

(I turn my hat frontwards, already disgusted by the jargon of today's pop culture...)

Anyway, we rented Wes Craven's Cursed, featuring the ugly and adopted step-child of horror movies, werewolves. I take responsibility for this disaster in that I held the final vote on this choice. I was hoping it would be scary enough to invoke some serious cuddling, but I was wrong. It invoked something on an entirely different level...

Bird jokes!

Such was the quality of the movie, that half-way through we began to entertain ourselves with aviary humor. The situation actually unfolded as a result of the following, HILARIOUS conversational gem, featuring me as Person 1 and Pat as Person 2:

Person 1: How do you get to a town called Wolves?
Person 2: Where?
Person 1: Wolves!

Get it?! Ha! I knew I was on a roll, so I moved us into the bird category with this next number I had actually prepped earlier on my parents (hoping I would at last gain their respect):

What does a bird say when he needs to know if there's any vacancy in a birdhouse?
Can you SPARROW room?

Ha! My parents still thought I was failure, but the joke was a solid hit. It was now time for all to join in:

What did the bird say to the used car salesman?
You're a ROBIN me blind!

What did the southern bird say to her guests when they arrived from their long journey?
ORIOLE hungry! (Clarification: "Oriole" needs to be pronounced like "are ya'll" to make this work)

How many birds can fly?
TOUCAN!

We were really feeling it. Christina Ricci and her werewolf buddies onscreen were a distant background to the glory that was our bird jokes. We were flying high. Nothing could shoot us down. As long as I didn't break formation...

What would a bird say is the past tense of "swin"?
SWAN!

Boooooooooooooo.

For a moment we were giants. For a second we were kings.

And for that I thank Wes Craven, more than I ever have before.

(Finally, an excuse to post the Orioles mascot.)

Download this joke I wrote.

A nun, a rabbi, and an English professor were going through an airport security checkpoint. The nun passed with flying colors, no 1960s television allusion intended. The rabbi was let by despite almost being cut off, no circumcision pun intended. The English professor then grew upset that preceding lines of the joke were clearly lying about their intentions, edited the punch lines, and sent what was left in to get published.

Bada bing?

A Journey Through My Night and Time

This last couple of hours have been quite a journey for me, in the best of ways. Here's the journey in one-sentence lines, because I had it all written as a paragraph and it just looked too jumbled.

• I did some more writing on my book, currently titled Teen: The Choose-Your-Own-Adventure for Adults who like Teens (I have to include the "for adults" part legally because of one option in which the hero ends up in a heroin den, doing heroines).
• I took a shower which, although tragically grilled cheese-less, inspired me with many book ideas, none of which have to do with showers.
• I wrote "Charleston Chew" on the grocery list for tomorrow so that my mom will buy one and I can then freeze it and eat it in another night's shower.
• I learned that Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant are going to write an episode of the American The Office, something that I expect to enjoy.
• I learned that there is a Silent Hill movie coming out in April, something else that I expect to enjoy, though baselessly considering both that I've only finished about a quarter of one Silent Hill game and I've hated almost every horror movie I've seen recently.

So that was my recent journey through the night. Now for something a bit less narcissistic (follow the link to my post on narcissism!):

Clocks. They're more than just The Mix's favorite Coldplay song. They're also good at telling time! And they look cool. Remember Back to the Future? That scene with all the clocks was both cool and appropriate.

Here's a picture of a cool clock:


Actually, it doesn't look like that clock makes any sense. 12, 6, and 9, all evenly spread apart? Either I've been hosed in my image search, or that dancing skeleton knows something we don't.

I'm guessing it's the latter, since skeletons have experienced both life and death.

Unless they were stillborn.

Eeeeeeeeegh what an inappropriate note to end on. Save me with appropriateness, Back to the Future!


COOL!

Narci-Rocks!

I noticed in the car today that most radio songs are very narcissistic. They use the words "I" and "me" a lot, and they talk about very personal problems. Then I tried to think of a song that wasn't narcissistic and all I could think of was that Enya Africa song (please ignore, for the sake of this post, the fact that the first line of that song is "Though I walk through warm sands in Africa").

It seems like there is an extreme gap... whoops, I mean Xtreme gap 360!... between singing about yourself and singing about a whole continent. Following is my attempt to fill that gap. I present a series of 3 music-less songs (also known as "poems"... check your history books to learn more about the relevance of poetry) to serve as the bridge to this new dawn:
__________________________

1. Narcissistic song

I look in the mirror, and I see a face
A face that looks so lost in space
What planet, ho!, do you hail from?
Oh, the planet of "ho!"?

What a coincidence...

Stop looking back at me, you alien face!
Can't you see that I despise you're race?!
Of course you can because I see your eyes.
Wait, ho!, those eyes are my's.

What a coincidence...

2. Gap song

Look at the road,
Look where it leads.
It leads to the gaps
In the trees.
There's monsters there!
And they'll kill us all!
But not if you don't
Not protect the magic ball!
(Double negative, double negative...)

Gap song! Shout it! Gap song! Shout it!

Magic ball, where do you roll?
You roll through the gap!
And onto Africa!

Gap song!

3. Continent Song

Thanks for the memories
White angel
I remember when I touched you
With my wooden ship
I'm talking to you
Antarctica
So thanks for the memories
But no more calls
My phone is off the hook
__________________________

So there it is. Either I just fixed music forever, or I just got paid to write nonsense while waiting for students to come online and tutor.

Only one can be true.

Round Table... Metaphorically and Literally

Gawrsh, blogging frequently is hard! Especially when you're pretending to write a book, like I am. I spend at least 3 hours a day locked in my room "writing," plus an additional 2 hours stocking up on the tissues I cry into while I'm sitting in the corner "writing." Add that to the time I have to devote to watching Jeopardy, watching other television, and eating, and I only have like 15 minutes left to blog!

Because my life is so incredibly consuming, I've brought in some guests tonight to help me blog. I will be moderating a round table on a melange of topics with my friends Ronnie the Lion, Ginger the Cat, and Ted the suspiciously defensive Panda.

TOPIC 1

Did Stephen Colbert steal my response to the "Snake 'befriends' snack hamster" story? My friend Dave knows an associate producer on The Colbert Report, and Colbert's comments deriding the snake for going against its nature sounded dangerously close to my comments on the...ahem...CIIIIIRCLE OOOOOFFF LIIIIIIIIIIIFE!

Ronnie the Lion: Whereas we'll probably never know the answer to this, your response, Harry, was not so original that you shouldn't have expected another to think of the same.

Ginger the Cat: I agree that the comedic undertones of this story are strong enough that numerous writers might have thought of the same kind of joke, but the path from Harry to Stephen Colbert is only 3 degrees. Consider that today is January 31 and Harry's post on the matter was the 19th, and you can see what a long amount of time there was for it to get, may I say, 3 degrees hotter.

Ted the suspiciously defensive Panda: I don't really know what we're talking about, but I definitely haven't talked to anyone at The Colbert Report. I'm too busy...ummm...eating bamboo to do that. Yeah! Munch munch mmm this bamboo is delicious.

TOPIC 2

Is global warming a serious problem? Michael Crichton's recent book State of Fear calls into question many of the conventional beliefs on the issue, but scientists have called Crichton's criticisms flawed at best.

Ronnie the Lion: I think that global warming is a marginal issue that, while important, should step aside for the more important issue stemming from it. The ocean could take us over one day, and we have virtually no idea what lives at the bottom of it! I hope that more lions live there, but from the little I've read about biology, that possibility is slim.

Ginger the Cat: I don't know what you're worried about, Ronnie. Global warming is happening so slowly that we will not only have the ability to maintain life well above sea level in plenty of time, but we will also have numerous inventions that can trap these sea animals you're worried about. I know a bit more about biology than you, so I can estimate that most likely these animals will be fish. That means that you and me, Ronnie, being members of the feline family, will have our stereotypical food fantasies realised.

Ted the suspiciously defensive Panda: What? There's water on this planet? I didn't even know that, so I don't know why you're asking me if it's a problem or not. (Ted hurriedly knocks the guests' mugs of water off the round table, and returns to his seat, sweating).

TOPIC 3

Is our round table discussion entertaining enough? Early feedback is confirming expert predictions that there is too much serious content in this post to be truly appreciated by normal Americans. Normal Americans would rather watch Meet the Fockers than read this post and would also rather watch In Good Company than give their child a hug.

Ronnie the Lion: First, let me praise the normal American for their support of what I, too, consider to be a hilarious film. Meet the Fockers contains both Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro's best performances ever, and the film is so timeless that my sarcastic lauding of it even a year later is fun. Second, let me... (Ronnie puts a whoopi cushion under Ginger). Ha! How's that for entertainment, America?!

Ginger the Cat: I thought for sure that although our discussion was a bit thick, our cuteness would win over even the biggest skeptics of knowledge. I'm quite disappointed. Mew.

Ted the suspiciously defensive Panda: Certainly you're not accusing me of this ratings valley! I mean, I've done some things I'm not proud of... I mean I haven't done things I'm not proud of... I mean (Ted jumps out the window and never returns. Never.)
____________________
Thanks, friends!