So Zoom is the latest and hottest thing in teleconferencing apps, and it’s become the official video conferencing interface of the 2020 CoronaVirus pandemic. Isn’t that a cheerful backdrop for your company to get famous?
Lately I see a few people having fun with Zoom backgrounds. There’s the burning house meme which went viral. Others have picked backgrounds from The Office or Star Trek: The Next Generation. I figured I’d join in the fun, because if there’s one thing you all need right now to cope with the epidemic, it’s my deep-fried dark sense of humor.
As texting on mobile devices continues to take the world by storm, more and more people are confronted with the complications of using an interface to communicate. And of course, cursing themselves for the mistakes they make.
Is this typed correctly so far? Let’s run a spellcheck: No, the word “texting” hasn’t made it into the dictionary yet, nor has the word “speelcheck” for that matter. Whoops, we mean “spellcheck”. See, now how do we tell the difference between an omission in the dictionary and a fumble on the part of our fat, clumsy fingers?Continue reading “A Homage to the Typo Fairy”
We are experiencing a montage of images from inside the protagonist’s head. In rapid succession we see: An apple being sliced in half by a chainsaw. A horse galloping out of a toilet. A balloon with frosting on top baking in a microwave.
Before You Fall For This “OK Boomer” Nonsense, Read This
Let me ask you information-age savvy Millennials a real stumper: When was the last time you heard a Generation Xer complain? About ANYTHING?
Well, it’s about time you did. I’ve spent my whole life hearing from both Boomers and Millennials, while like a typical Gen Xer I’ve kept my head down and quietly stayed in my lane.
Because I’m a Gen-Xer and I’ll swear on my tattered Breakfast Club ticket stub that I never heard about a generation war until Millennials came along. Before that, generations were just one more arbitrary method of sorting demographics, useful to marketing executives and the occasional political survey, but otherwise unremarkable. I’ll put that up front, even though I’m about to talk about generations as if they meant something: Generations are nothing but what Papa Kurt Vonnegut dismissed as a granfalloon, a word we could stand to bring back for the label-happy modern media.
Bottom line: Front-runner wins, everybody else GTFO! I dress it up in my characteristic snark, of course, but the nut of the matter is we lost 2016 because the only thing a Democrat seems to hate worse than a Republican is another Democrat. When Republicans are onstage, all I hear are people ripping up Democrats. When Democrats are on stage, all I hear are people ripping up Democrats. We need allies, not saboteurs.
I don’t care who’s polling at the top, if it’s a fireplug, everybody else needs to bow out, shut up, drop out, and throw their support behind the fireplug! This is the easiest election to win ever! All you have to do is present a united front.
Bill Maher points it out: “All the Democrats have to do is come off LESS CRAZY THAN TRUMP and of course they’re blowing it!”
Please, people, save your petty little tent agendas for some other year. This is a life and death election. We are amidst a Cold Civil War. Our nation’s soul is at stake. The Titanic is sinking and Democrats can’t stop fighting over how to redecorate the underwater ballroom.
Pardon me for sounding so… preachy… but as a prophet I am obligated to share my testimony. The Las Vegas grasshopper invasion is God’s punishment for not believing me when I said this exact same thing happened in Bullhead City, Arizona, back in the 1990s. Bullhead being a tiny town and the 1990s being what they were (I swear we were the only household at the time to discover Internet), there weren’t many to witness it, so now I finally have a back-up confirmed sighting.
Yes, folks, Old testament locust plagues happen!
I love how all the news reports have to reassure panicky people over and over: They’re harmless. They don’t bite. There is nothing to be scared of, don’t panic. What, are people running around screaming in fear of being devoured?
Having braved a plague like this (BELIEVE ME NOW???), I’m afraid I have to point out that they’re not entirely harmless…
So this was a weird experimental post based on my starting an argument in which I held the position that you can make an Amazon product list out of anything. “Anything?” they said. “Anything, just pick something,” I said. So they said “something for the spiritual category.” And then I was naming the Flying Spaghetti Monster and Bob J.R. Dobbs and they went “Wait a minute, maybe this isn’t such a good idea.” But I said “Too late! Things have been set in motion which cannot be undone!”
And that’s how we got a list of Best Devotional Items For Alternative Religions. With a bonus section where I introduce my own alternative religion: the Cult of the Temponaut! I hope one day to have my cult grow to a world-wide viral phenomenon, just like all the wacky cults we deal with already. I mean, mine is mostly benevolent and nobody can get hurt in it, right? Ah well, we’ll find out, omelets and eggs.
Iowa thunderstorm season always puts me in the mood for catching up on my horror reading. Call it Pavlovian conditioning from all the years watching mad scientists in castle laboratories working during a thunderstorm. So pawing through my bookshelf, it occurred to me that there’s one horror genre not born of literature, but film.
Zombies, to wit. Vampires, werewolves, mummies, serial killers, ghosts, Jekyll and Hyde, and Cthulhu, they all came from the pages of literature first, then got adapted to film second under the loving guidance of Universal, Hammer, Amicus, and company. But zombies formed on the silver screen, and they took a few decades to catch on there. And only then did they start showing up in literature in the same form.
Sure, technically speaking, the first zombie movie, 1932’s White Zombie, was based on William Seabrook’s 1929 novel The Magic Island. But these were early prototypes, still steeped in voodoo medicine (inaccurate, by the way). What we mean when we say “zombie” now is owed to George Romero, full stop, and then the genre had to drift into literature.
So, here’s a great reading list of zombie apocalypse novels over at Suggested Reads. Oh, yes, they’re all very modern. Quite a few of those have seen their own film adaptation, circulus vitae, including Patient Zero and The Girl With All The Gifts.
But this subject got me to wondering: What is it about zombie apocalypses that make them such a self-contained stock scenario? Their popularity stems from what TVTropes calls the “Cozy Catastrophe.” The apocalypse always just so happens to leave a few lucky middle-class folk who, in between fighting off the brain-hungry hordes, is having a smashing time having the world to loot to themselves.
No more boring office job for me! I’m going Mad-Maxing!
Over at 366 Weird, my latest cinematic safari is a special treat: The Manitou (1978). A serious contender for the campiest Exorcist ripoff ever made, it’s a thrill ride of one “WTF?” moment piled onto another.
Whose idea was it to cast Tony Curtis in the lead? Who decided “native American medicine man” is a close-enough substitute for Catholic demons? Why did the 400-year-old medicine man pick this woman out of the blue to incubate his neck-rupturing reincarnation? Why did they go with a frozen hospital with meat-popsicle nurses frozen mid-wave? Why is this suddenly turning into 2001: A Space Odyssey? And why is it always black magic or white magic, doesn’t magic come in any other colors? We will never know, but even the late, great Roger Ebert had to warn people to set down their coffee before continuing the review.
So you all might be noticing by now, I’ve been tinkering around with IMGUR a lot lately. I can’t help getting hold of a social media platform and eventually experimenting with it to see what kinds of nifty posts I can make in that medium. The IMGUR format is underappreciated; it’s more like a super-Tumblr since you can post any amount of text appended to images and chain images together into albums. Not bad for a site that originally started as a side-feature for Reddit.
