Can We Try Cowboys And Sharks Next?

That would kind of rock. Or maybe Snakes on a Spaceship. I'm actually kind of enjoying the mashup movie playground, and to be honest, Cowboys and Aliens was, if somewhat derivative, at least not an actual fucking reboot. There were no Smurves, the A-Team did not show up, and Harrison Ford's character's kid was absolutely not Indiana Jones redux.

It's easy to get snotty about a movie called Cowboys And Aliens, but it was actually not a bad movie, and anyway, anyone who thought Firefly was fun needs to aim their contempt a little carefully.

The thing with the hat kept annoying me unreasonably though my partner did not notice it at all, and I honestly still don't know why, even after having it explained to me by the movie and by reviewers, the aliens were bothering to abduct people and experiment on them to find their weaknesses. Because on a planet with no sattelite technology, avoiding the humans would probably have been easy enough, and as far as I could tell the only reason anyone tried to fuck with the aliens at all was to get back the people they abducted. So, yeah, there was that, but a movie where the aliens come, mine gold from barren deserts, and disappear without a confrontation is probably pretty boring, so I'll give them a pass.

This is not necessarily a spoiler, but I will note that the aliens seem to take a fairly unsystematic approach to investigating the weaknesses of humans. After you've established that your disintegration ray disintegrates them, you may not need to start exploring the potential of The Pointy Stick. Disintegrating them kind of seems like you've solved your problem ("How can we get rid of these stupid human things?") and further messing about with poking holes in them seems like busywork.

The woman next to me appeared to have been unprepared for the possibility that there might be blood, and made louder-than-necessary "EEewewwYuuuuCK!!!!" noises every time someone got, you know, shot, or hit, or whatever. In her inner landscape, apparently, cowboys don't have guns, and she was apparently expecting them and the aliens to sit down and negotiate a settlement. Or maybe she stumbled into the wrong theater by mistake and spent an hour and a half wondering why they'd decided not to make them blue after all.

Almost everyone dies who you would expect to die, everyone lives who you would expect to live, the special effects were not terrible, and if you're plunking down fourteen bucks to see a movie called Cowboys and Aliens, you pretty much are getting what you are paying for and if you think it was a terrible movie but you were not paid to go see it, then you are an idiot because you cannot possibly have been expecting something else.

And I'm too lazy to look into it and see why this has suddenly become A Thing, but I would have found the "Depictions of characters smoking are not intended to make smoking look cool" end credits disclaimer somewhat less sad if there'd been an accompanying one about shooting people.

Breakfast!

Break out the wok, we're cookin'!

You're gonna need eight eggs or equivalent egg product. You're gonna need a couple boxes of frozen pre-cooked sausage links, any flavor, or a can of Spam, or the GNP of Bolivia's worth of microwavable bacon. You're gonna need a bag of frozen tater crowns (the flattened tater tots), or frozen seasoned potato chunkettes, or frozen hash browns, up to you. You're gonna need a bunch of green onions, chopped. And you're gonna need a bag of shredded cheese, you can pick the flavor/blend. Your grocer will provide.

You're also gonna need a couple of friends with minimal standards in food. Depending on how minimal, exactly, you can also have on hand chopped dill pickles, leftover white rice, grits, english muffins, Tabasco, sour cream, and catsup. Arguably you can use hot dogs in place of the meat, but that's kind of tacky.

You want everything in bite-sized pieces, basically. Then you dump some vegetable oil in your wok, and start with the largest pieces. (Eggs last!) This will generally be the potatoes, unless you're using sausages or shredded hash browns. The hash brown bits require less cooking time, the sausages more. You know how this works. As each ingredient becomes fully cooked, add the next sized item. You can move your stuff around to keep some of it from getting overcooked, but there's a limit to how well that works.

My wok is an electric wok, with a nonstick coating. I love that thing, and if it could make conversation I'd have already thrown over the SpotBot for it as Household Appliance I Would Most Like To Marry. So it's ideal for this sort of thing, and you may have more problems with the final step, which is urgently-whisked eggs or egg product, delivered in a hurry over the other items. Stir! It's a wok, that's what you're supposed to be doing! You should have just enough time to add a little pepper and maybe some salt before the eggs start to cook hard, and then you need to keep stirring so the other breakfasty goodness gets well distributed in the clumps.

Yummy, scrambled eggs with all the fixings! Apply cheese or condiments to taste, and wait for your friends to say something like "Hell, this is actually edible, what gives?"

Or you can always add food coloring.

Monday Arts and Crafts

Canon has a bald eagle paper model up. My partner wants me to build it and mail it to Stephen Colbert, because my partner has a crush. I'm not getting involved.

Meanwhile, there's this extraordinarily cute and easy little guy over here at Marshall Alexander's site, you may need flash player to see it. It's a little guy in a hazmat suit looking quite alarmed at the test tube of pink stuff that's just exploded all over him. I painted the pinky-haz-goo stuff over with a couple of coats of clear glow in the dark nail polish when I was done building.

It Always Looks Like So Much Fun When They Do It

Please allow me to present the voice in my head that is apparently Bill "Culture Warrior" O'Reilly's biggest fan, and the Watch It Like A Wingnut movie review, crossposted at No More Mister Nice Blog, where I can't even keep my fonts straight.

Wow! We finally got to see the Transformers movie, and it just goes to prove everything I've believed all along! But first, a confession. My partner and I went to the theater in our brand new car, which is a tree-hugging hybrid, and a foreign car at that. I'm pretty sure this means my partner is a traitor to the idea of America. I'm so ashamed. And I was even more ashamed after seeing the movie because it is, quite simply, the most American movie… ever.

For starters, it's very pro-military. And even better, pro-defense spending. If we hadn't been pouring all that money into military research, we would never be able to defeat the evil alien robots, so thank God for that, and also for the NRA, which helps us all defend ourselves from evil alien robots.

The movie also makes the point that an alien invasion would establish the president's legacy as a take-charge, leadership, kicking-ass kind of guy. So I'm pretty much rooting for that now, since really, if you think about it there was very little collateral damage, so the president wouldn't even have to go to any funerals, and besides it just looked cool.

Now, there was a recruiting ad for the Marines before the movie, but that's okay because the movie itself proves what I've been saying all along: You don't have to enlist to fight in the War on Terror! The main character, some skinny nerdy guy whose name I can't remember, doesn't do that. Instead, he buys a car. A gas-guzzling, American car. Which turns out to be a cool alien robot who's both his bodyguard and a really good way to get the chick the guy wants. And with the help of the chick and the car robot and the other good robots (all of whom, I note, were good American cars and trucks, big ones, too, and none of those lame hybrids.) and a couple of military guys who were just sort of hanging around and a couple of hackers, the nerdy kid manages to save the world. How? By buying a car! And also by memorizing lines from cartoons.

Even the hackers helped save the world, so now when your mom tells you you'll never amount to anything just sitting in front of the computer eating Cheetos all day, tell her she's wrong. If alien robots come, you'll be needed to save the planet, which is way more important than sitting in a kiddy pool in the desert somewhere with all those other guys who got basically blown up when they weren't expecting it and none of their weapons helped very much, so you have to stay here and make sure you're safe, because if you enlisted and got your arms blown off, for example, the whole world would be destroyed when you couldn't type anymore. It's like that thing Spock was always saying about the good of the many. And anyway, one of the robots gets killed and another loses his leg, so it's not like we're not all on the frontlines in the War no matter where we are.

But, okay, at the beginning, in the opening credits, there's something about the movie being produced in association with Hasbro, and the whole audience started laughing, because Hasbro is a pretty funny word. And then there are the military guys in a helicopter, and one of them keeps speaking Spanish, I guess, which annoys the other guys because they don't and they know he speaks good English, so why is he doing that? He might be making fun of them, and how would they even know? So they keep yelling at him to speak English, which makes sense, and he won't, and I think he gets eaten or killed or something or maybe it was some other guy, I couldn't really tell them apart.

Anyway, at some point the military guys end up in an Iraqi village, and they yell at some kid's dad that they need a telephone, and he just points to it, so everybody in Iraq speaks English well enough, too. I think this just proves how stupid the Left is when they say things like, oh, but we should keep the Arabic translators, even if they do keep being gay. Clearly they just want to use the military as a social experiment to integrate the gays. Which is pointless because we don't need them anyway. I mean, even the robots speak English.

I won't ruin the movie for you, because you should totally go see it instead of giving your money to Michael Moore to see his stupid hypocritical movie (If he was really interested in health care, he'd lose weight!). But I want to tell you a few other really cool things about the movie. At some point the Secretary of Defense tells some weaselly guy who looks kind of Arabic to me that he should do what the military guys want because "Losing is not an option with these guys" or something like that, and the whole audience just cheered! So those polls about how Americans think we're losing in Iraq, I don't know who they're polling, maybe they're just calling up the offices of CounterPunch and The New York Times or something. Because where I was sitting in that theater, everybody thinks we have no choice but to win!

Also, and I don't want to ruin this, but I don't know how they did it, they made the perfect argument for pardoning Scooter Libby—sometimes you have to defend your friends or family out of loyalty, and it's not right that you should have to have a criminal record just for being loyal. Loyalty is supposed to be a virtue, after all.

I also want to point out that the movie makes a great point that you shouldn't go around destroying dams just because the fish-huggers think you should, because they might be there for a very good reason, and it would endanger us all if the government had to explain why they needed to leave any dam where it is. We should just trust them, since they know more about this stuff than we do. And while we're at it, it's clear evidence that Hollywood has finally rejected that failed "theory" of evolution—the aliens are cars, not dinosaurs!

And, really, I think the whole thing is basically an analogy for Iraq—part of it is even in Iraq—where the Autobots are America, and the Decepticons are Al Quaeda insurgents, and Optimus Prime is Bush. Because the Decepticons want to take over the planet to get something from us—just like the oil in Iraq—and they also think humans should be killed because they don't deserve freedom. So the Autobots have to fight them because they think that Iraq, or in this analogy the humans, should have freedom. So, really, the Megatron guy just hates us for our freedoms, which is what the president has been saying all along.

Finally, I just want to encourage everybody to go see it. At last, at long last, the liberal secular progressives who control Hollywood have given us a movie that's not about hating Christ or about loving anal sex, but is instead about patriotism. I haven't been this proud to eat American theater popcorn since Independence Day came out and proved that guys with computers can defeat an alien invasion. Booyah!

Independence Day Not Exactly Random Ten

I've got rather a ton of good, lyric-based trenchantly cynical or wistfully ideological music appropriate for this Fourth of July, so let's see what the first ten that come up that seem appropriate are. And yeah, if "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" pops, you'll hear about it, as trite as that seems.


American Idiot, Green Day. I figured to mostly get folk songs out of this, but this isn't a bad place to start. Newer can be good. Random can be apt. (Though, I grant you I skipped some Weird Al to get here. If it'd been "Biggest Ball of Twine", I might have felt compelled to go with it.)
"Welcome to a new kind of tension/All across the alien nation/Everything isn't meant to be okay."

God Bless America Again, Bobby Bare. You might recognize this as the song at the end of Canadian Bacon. I was kind of hoping this wouldn't turn up. I'm pagan, I know a bunch of y'all are atheists. Nonetheless...
"God bless America again, you must know the trouble that she's in."

I'm A-Lookin' For a Home, Pete Seeger. Hard to believe this is current again, innit.
"If anyone should ask you why I sing so shrill, tell 'em I'm a discharged soldier a-waitin' on the housing bill."

Seatbacks and Traytables, Fountains of Wayne.
"Trade one town for another, delayed now why did we bother. X on the calendar square, new city, same stuff."

This Land Is Your Land, the Woody Guthrie classic. I was hoping this would come up, but since I have about twenty versions of the damned thing, it wasn't bad odds. You don't know the lyrics to anything but the chorus? You should. Find another set of 'em here.
"Near the relief office, I see my people. As they stood there hungry, I stood there askin', is this land still made for you and me?"

To Have and Have Not, Billy Bragg.
"I've come to see in the land of the free, there's only a future for the chosen few."

Do Re Mi, Woody Guthrie. (I admit it, I skipped "We Shall Overcome" with Pete Seeger. It seemed a bit cloying for the day.)
"California's a garden of eden, a paradise to live in or see, but believe it or not you won't find it so hot if you ain't got the do-re-mi."

I'm Afraid of Americans, David Bowie. I'm laughing too hard to keep going, I think. At least this balances out the Bobby Bare:
"God is an American. God is an American."

Okay, no more. My iTunes is clearly possessed. Your ninth and final song is the Arrogant Worms, We Are The Beaver.
"You might think a rodent is a pretty lame choice for a national animal..."
Never mind. The lyrics are here, there's no way I can do it justice.

Feel free to speculate in comments on what the tenth song might have been. I was holding out for Woody Guthrie's I Got To Know, but the way things are going it's more likely to have been some punk cover of that Simon and Garfunkel song and then I'd never have respected me, which would suck 'cause I'm the only one who bothers.

I Wasn't Done With Thursday Yet!

My partner is considering getting me a toolbelt to keep my zombie-poking spoon in.
"Hey, if you're going to invite Crazy in, you might as well let it sit down on the couch and offer it some lemonade."

In that spirit, today's random ten: Be What You Are, Even If That Happens To Be Crazy edition.


Crazy Mixed-Up Kid, The Smithereens. Album, Especially For You.
Yeah, yeah. I should have taken a mulligan, I suppose.
"I guess she's just a crazy mixed-up kid."

Tunnel of Lungs, The Minus 5. Album: I Don't Know Who I Am (Let The War Against Music Begin Volume 2).
I have to say, this song sounds like a migraine.
"It's not all right, it's never okay."

So Long, It's Been Good To Know You, Woody Guthrie. Album, in this case, a compilation called That's Why We're Marching, though I have it on others as well.
"I've sung this song but I'll sing it again."

Worthless, The Young Fresh Fellows. Album, Because We Hate You.
It's like this. There's a special place in my heart for Scott McCaughey, California-born but Seattle-famous songwriter with the world's worst case of ADHD. I'm convinced he's a shark, if he stops moving he'll die. But I own nearly everything he's ever done in various guises (and a lot of what people he's done stuff with have done with other people), and he's the guy behind The Minus 5 as well, including a vinyl more-or-less bootleg of the YFF doing a charming piano version of "Shake Your Love", I'm not making this up so stop looking at me like that. Anyway, few people turn a phrase as slyly as he does, and I love him for it. This is maybe not one of his better efforts, however.
"I don't know why I should try to explain a thing."

Whistling in the Dark, They Might be Giants. Album, Flood.
This might be some kind of euphemism. Or it might just mean what it says. Hard to tell, with them.
"Be what you're like, be like yourself."

Emergency, The Tragically Hip. Album, Day For Night.
Not my favorite song here.
"Things we say here stay here forever, amen."

Crazy Love, Volume 2, Paul Simon. Graceland.
This came up last week, too, I note.
"I have no opinion about this."

It's Only Me, Barenaked Ladies. Album, Disc One: All Their Greatest Hits.
"It's just natural, it's only me."

She's Got A Problem, Fountains of Wayne. Album, um, Fountains of Wayne.
My partner thinks this song is hilarious for some reason.
"She's gonna do something dumb."

All of a Sudden (It's Too Late), XTC. Album, English Settlement.
"Life's like a firework, you're only lit once, you must stand and radiate correctly."

You are cordially invited to leave your own in comments, or to just tell me ten songs you like, or anything else you want. I'm pretty easy.

I Have No Taste

No, the zombies haven't complained. My taste in music, that is. So, just because everybody else gets to, here's a Friday Random Ten, "Losing It" Version, with lyrics.

King Of Bedside Manor, Barenaked Ladies. Album: Gordon.
"You know he was quite a singer, quite an actor, quite some time ago."

Days Of Wine And Booze, Minus 5. Album: Down With Wilco.
"Who will pick up when you call in?"

Standing By, Actual Tigers (Or Willis, depending on what album.) Album (in this case): Gravelled and Green.
"In the age of information it's so hard to be a saint."

Crazy Love Volume 2, Paul Simon. Album: Graceland.
"Well, I don't claim to be happy about this, boys."

We Want A Rock, They Might Be Giants. Album: Flood.
"Where was I? I forgot the point that I was making..."

Mister Blue, Charlie Chesterfield. Album: Studebakersfield.
"Sometimes I feel like some sad old goddamned song that everyone knows the words to but just won't sing along."

Lost Track Of Time, Young Fresh Fellows. Album: This One's For The Ladies.
"There's no way that I fit in the way I did before."

It Ends Tonight, The All-American Rejects. Album: Move Along.
"The walls start breathing..."

Bukowski, Modest Mouse. Album: Good News For People Who Love Bad News.
"Who would wanna be, who would wanna be such a control freak?"

Shop Vac, Jonathan Coulton. Album: Thing A Week I.
"If you need me, I'll be downstairs with the shop vac. You can call but I probably won't hear you because it's loud with the shop vac on."

I'm going to skip the bonus, you guys have put up with enough. If I had to pick one of those albums to tell you to go buy, I think it'd be Gravelled and Green, a choice which even surprises me because there's a lot of good stuff on that list. Of course, I say that as someone with no taste at all.

Display your own in the comments, or just mock mine.

Bigfoot!

My Bigfoot army is finally within my grasp! This little guy is paper, but not imaginary. Also, he's adorable. And free. (Scroll down.)

Model by Paul Shih, hat tip to the blog Paper Forest.


My partner and I were recently watching my Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law DVDs, and Mentok the Mind-Taker shouted "Zombie guards! Seize him! Tell me that's not fun to say."

We cracked up. It was suggested I keep the zombies and turn them into minions. It seems a bit overdone to me, really, and nowhere near as cool as the Sasquatch Militia.

Stealing Riley's Gig

Well, because he makes it look like so damned much fun. And it's monogamy over here at the moment, anyway.



So last night I decided to take a shower, and announced to any and all zombie bigfeet that anyone who tried to sneak up on me while I was doing so was going to end up with a rubber ducky right in the face. My partner overheard this, and the following conversation ensued:

"Is this the schizophrenia acting up again?"
"No," I say. "This is a psychotic episode. I'm just talking to the zombies. The schizophrenia is when I talk to myself."
"But you do that all the time."
"Well, only because I started the conversation and it seems rude to ignore me."

I suspect someone is pricing the traditional canvas jacket with the extra-long sleeves for my birthday. One size fits all, honey, and I like green best.

Statement of No Intent

Blog? What blog. I'm just trying to be allowed to comment elsewhere. Ignore me, that's the whole point.