Caturday - I Has It

Before I get down to today's Caturday fun, I couldn't pass up adding this little nugget of joy to the mix. Check this guy out. His name is Mark Douglas Jones, and he's been charged with hit and run after running his girlfriend over with his truck (FT). What sucks for him is, she's since died of her injuries, and now he's probably going to face more serious charges to boot.

First of all, how the hell did this guy get a girlfriend?!? And second, if he managed to get a girlfriend at all, don't you think he'd do everything he could to keep her? I mean, it can't be easy for this winner to find a woman. I hate to think of what she looked like...

Anyway, on with teh Caturday! The World Cat Congress is meeting in Houston, TX this week (FT). There's a World Cat Congress?!? How awesome is that!











Have a Happy Caturday, Everyone!

Two Fitty

Is it a milestone? A landmark? A reason to party? Or is it just me making something out to be more than it really is? Probably a little bit of all of them, but mostly the latter.

This is the LP Blog's 250th post! And there was much rejoicing (yay).

It's also the 50th post for this year to date. Party reason? Not so much.

I wish I had something nifty to talk about, but given the fact that I'm in the hurt locker and hopped up on meds, posting something intellectually stimulating isn't quite in the cards.

I also wish I had the motivation to move all the blog entries from Rancho Relaxo, but that's going to be a daunting task. You see, when I was doing Rancho Relaxo, I was doing all of the HTML myself. I didn't have the automation present here on Blogger, so each individual page had to be coded by hand.

Well, OK, not by hand, I used Dreamweaver.

But still, it was a pain in the ass to create all these pages, and since Tripod, as a host, didn't offer up much along the lines of services and options to help me automate the process, it became too much work. You all now I love to spout off and type some fairly long entries, and having to edit three and four pages at a time just for one blog post was just too much.

Converting them over would be a similar pain in the patoot. So, I'll leave the decision up to all of you: Should I make the effort to repost old Ranch entries? Would you be interested in reading what the heck was going on in my mind before the LP blog came into existance? If so, drop me some comments. If the response is OK, then I'll consider either making them all back-logged entries or posting them in new ones as a sort of "Looking Back" feature.

I've also noticed that I haven't done any game reviews in quite a while. Maybe I should get back into that, too.

Either way, happy 250th post to me and my stupid little blog! Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I need to go fall over on the couch...

Luck Be A Lady

So I hear it through the grapevine that the Moshannon Valley Super Bowl is having a Karaoke contest. Took me a while since the start of the thing, but last Friday, I finally made my way up the hill to the lanes and took the mic.

Talk about fun! The joint was damn near packed, which rocked, since that gave me my largest audience in quite a while. And as the title of this entry proclaims, my weapon of choice that night was none other than the Chairman of the Board, Frank Sinatra.

It was a slightly chilly Monday night in Manhattan, but I still decided that a long sleeved shirt was enough to keep me from shivering. The lights of Times Square were bright, and even though it was nearly midnight, things were as busy as ever. It was my first time in the City that Never Sleeps, and having already done the two things I'd set out to do (see Ground Zero and get a picture of me flipping the bird to MTV Studios, when I find it I'll repost it), Justin and I spent some time wandering up and down Broadway.

After getting a beer at Tonic, served by the single hottest straight-off-the-boat Irish girl I've ever seen (another picture I'll repost when I find it), we walked up the legendary street and came to The Colony Record and Radio Center. I'd heard about the place before - to any music afficionado, it's pretty much the place to find hard-to-find recordings and related media. It's also the home of the single largest in-store Karaoke CD selection I'd ever seen in my life.

This was our goal, to freshen up the songbook at Electric Avenue with some new discs. The associate, Joe, was a true New Yorker if I'd ever seen one. He had it all: The golf cap, the south Brooklyn accent, and the lines of years spent honing his craft on one of the busiest streets in the world hewed onto his brow. He asked us what we were looking for, and I'd already had the answer in my head for some time.

I was looking for the definitive Frank Sinatra collection, and Joe knew right where to look. "If you want Sinatra," he said, "then this right here is the way to go." I got the impression that he'd made this suggestion to quite a few customers before us, because this man didn't even flinch. It didn't take him a moment or two to scan the shelf and find it, he was on top of it like Brad on Angelina.

"It's the original orchestrations," he explained, "basically a carbon copy of Sinatra's studio bands. You won't find anything better, period." He handed me the case: It was a four disc set, replete with pretty much every single major hit the Chairman ever released, and then some. I quickly skimmed over the track list, and found the song I'd been looking for.

I'd sang it before, Tag has it in his collection. But that version (I can't remember who the publisher was, but it wasn't this set or any Sound Choice disc) lacked the intro to the song, pretty much castrating it and starting cold when the music hits full swing. I wanted that intro, because it established the song as a whole, and it made for a right-sweet opening once the full band hit. That extra 45 seconds is the difference between singing the song and giving a performance of the song, at least in my twisted little brain.

Somehow, Justin managed to get that set, valued at $150 by itself, as well as another $150 worth of Sound Choice and Legends discs, all for... You guessed it, $150. I couldn't wait to get back to the Avenue and pop disc three into the CD+G box, but at the same time, I still had the concrete jungle of New York City to explore, and plenty of time to do it in...

Since most of the crowd was the older set, I thought that Frankie would sit well with them, and I was happy to discover that I wasn't wrong in the slightest. When the music started, I noticed several folks make "oh my goodness" faces and comments amongst themselves. Others took a bit more time to realize what the song was, but when they did, they got big smiles as well. With the right song chosen, all I had to do was nail it.

And since it'd been almost four years since Justin and I had found that Sinatra CD+G collection at The Colony, it came like second nature.

But even the best laid plans of Nerds and Men go awry, and my performance was marred by one of the more embarrassing things that can happen to a man such as myself: My top teeth, which are false, de-suctioned themselves from my gums and decided to freefall to my bottom teeth, which are my own, just as I was hitting the last word. That note is probably the highest in the song, and since it's one of those "big finish" situations, you have to go for broke.

In what proves that I have a big mouth, I opened a bit too wide, and my choppers got away from me. Awk-ward!

That aside, I still managed to tie with the other qualifier, and it wasn't an easy win, either. The other four people who entered were all very good in their own rights, and each deserved to join us in our trek to the finals. This contest is no joke, the competition is hot, and I'm going to have to find some even bigger guns to pull out for subsequent rounds...

(This is the first time I've ever told a story within a story, or at least I think it is. Didn't turn out too badly, IMHO. I don't think it'll be a regular thing, but it's always fun to try something new...)

Boooooooooooooooooooooooo

What is the obsession with all things Britney? Why do we care? Her life is a trainwreck, her music sucks ass, and her choices in men aren't the greatest, either. For example, here we have Kevin "Cletus the Fat Redneck" Federline getting booed offstage for his pitiful rapping - at his own birthday party (FT):

Awkward...

By The Numbers

This past week, thanks to the Jesse Campbell murder story (which noone has linked back here to, ignorant bastards, I was the first online with this thing), traffic to this site has seen the most in one week it's ever seen since its inception.

But... How many will stay?

Apparently, I've pissed alot of kids off. "The system failed Jesse," they say. They say "You're wrong about him."

How can you say something negative about a kid who kills his own mother and have it be wrong? At that point, the kid has invited everything negative known to man into his front door and had a party for all of them.

No, the system didn't fail Jesse. Jesse failed Jesse. The system works, but only if you choose to work within it. If you don't, then you've doomed yourself to failure with no blame cast on the system at all. You kids can stop crying about how the system failed, and start crying anew because your so-called "friend" failed himself.

Instead of asking why they didn't do more for him, ask why Jesse didn't allow the help he was offered. Instead of thinking this is a horrible tragedy that befell a sweet boy, think how horrible and terrible this twisted little fuck's mind is. After all...

HE BEAT AND SLASHED HIS OWN MOTHER.

I'm probably the least religious person on the face of this planet, but even I will concede that killing your own mother falls into the "unforgivable sin" category.

Face it, kids: The person you thought Jesse James Campbell was, wasn't.

So, now that I have all these new readers, how many have I alienated with those comments? Honestly, I don't care, because you kids need to hear someone speaking the truth. And, as the old saying goes, the truth hurts. This time, though, it hurts like a motherfucker.

A young man has betrayed his friends and his family. A mother is dead at the hands of her son. The motive? Selfish greed. The excuse? None.

Noone failed Jesse James Campbell but Jesse James Campbell. And he failed all of you, too. Don't mourn his "mistake," condemn his actions. Quit making excuses. Jesse didn't make an excuse when he beat and slashed his own mother, did he...

Let Your Colors Shine

Ahhh, Easter. To the Christian faithful, a time of mourning, then celebration. For the rest of us, a time to make a gigantic mess of the kitchen table in the name of holiday fun. The age old tradition of coloring eggs for Easter is as old as... Oh, who the hell cares. The point is, it's fun. And when you go to WalMart in search of egg coloring supplies, sometimes you find the niftiest stuff.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Freestanding, Collapsible, Reusable Easter Egg Coloring Condoms.
Dunk An Egg. $1.88 at WalMart.

So, what comes in Dunk An Egg, AKA the Egg Coloring Condoms? Well, you get five color-coded condoms to dunk eggs in, a cheesy wire egg holder, five multi-colored dye tablets that look like festive, Easter-themed Ecstasy pills, and a bunch of stickers featuring eyes and mouths to decorate your finished aborted chicken fetuses with.


Now come on, I couldn't show you the condom without opening the SOB up, could I?

Here's the whole shebang, condoms in the upright position (snicker), stickers... um... smiling, and the box punched into its recycled egg drying mode.

In a kit as advanced and well-thought-out such as this, you'd think you'd get a better egg holder. Well, you'd be wrong. When I was a kid, all the Paas kits came with an identical and equally crappy wire egg holder like this one. By contrast, the kit Angel got for her older boys had a decent looking plastic one, but the handle was pretty flimsy.

The real selling point in this kit is the condoms themselves. Made of a thick plastic, they expand and collapse for storage, making them totally washable and reusable. How awesome is that? It's just grab...

Lift...

And when you're done, rinse and smush. Awesome.

So here we've tossed some eggs into each of the dye-filled condoms. As you can see...

The warm colors are more translucent, making the eggs themselves easy to see as they soak up some color.

The cold colors, however, are cursed to an eternal darkness, hiding the egg in shrouded secrecy, lest the egg be touching the side of its plastic condom prison of doom. See? Easter can be creepy, too. All it takes is a little boredom and a creative wit.

Now, here's the egg we let Teddy drop into the green condom. As you can see, it doesn't look too bad. Not finished yet, though, because...

Angel's oldest son Nathan's green egg, done in the other kit featuring reusable-yet-less-exciting plastic cups, looks alot better than the one in the condom.

Meanwhile, my blue egg is coming along decently. Here it is at an early phase, still soaking up some color in its dank, blue aquatic tomb.

Aha! A little more time with Teddy's egg shows that the color has set in better. Yes, those are rubber gloves I'm wearing. I said it was about making a mess of the kitchen table, not yourself...

Red never turns out well, and such was the case with both kits, sadly. Here's the red/pink condom egg, and it turned out fairly splotchy. For some reason, the red dyes had a habit of allowing air bubbles to form on the egg, thus preventing color from soaking in evenly. Damned tap water anyhow...

Finally, the ultimate evolution of my blue egg...

You'd think that the stickers would work like they do on the box, and have a clear outline around the eyes and mouths. Not so, as they obviously have a non-fun white border around them. Oh well, what do you want for $1.88. Hopefully, Wally World will have a few of these on special Monday, when the Easter holiday is over and people start getting back to life in general. We plan on picking up a few of these kits, if only for the reusable condoms. We can get dyes seperate... Better dyes... Yes, I'm scheming... This is my scheming face... First I raise this eyebrow, then this one...