Our tree is up! I clearly must have my digital camera taken away from me. But until that day comes, please enjoy the photos. Extra bonus points for anyone who can guess which picture was taken while running full speed at the tree.
Click on each pic to get a bigger image.
One thing that I have noticed is that this series of pictures as displayed on my blog looks pretty neat when you scroll down the page quickly.
No, I’m not high.
First commenter with an idea gets a doodle.
UPDATE:
For Randal G – Charles Nelson Reilly punching George Bush in the balls. 
How can I live up to a post title like that? The truth is, I can’t. I’d love to show you a video of Baklava killing rabid thistle bears, that, despite being rabid, were honestly doing no harm to Baklava before he made vines shoot out of the ground and entangle them. Unfortunately, that video does not currently exist.
I *can* give you an account where I witnessed the druidy punishment dealt by Baklava firsthand. Well, I was sitting behind my brother when he was doing the killing. The family Thanksgiving dinner was actually had at his house. After dinner, I asked for a brief display of his World of Warcraft (WoW) prowess.
Baklava is Level 19 now. I saw him kill some rabid thistle bears, some moonkin, and other things I can’t remember. He was shooting bolts at them, turning into a bear and swiping at them, etc.
One funny thing I noted during the gameplay was that when you are exiting a game, there is a 30 second delay before you get completely logged off. During this time, your character sits down on the ground and quietly waits. No matter how foul or evil a character you play in WoW, at least he or she will have the common decency to know when to sit and when to stand.
I thought the game looked decent enough, but I confirmed my feeling that I do not want to wander down the path to WoW any time soon.
I’m not sure if it was from seeing the game played earlier, but for some reason after we got home and put the kids to bed, I felt the need to watch Return Of The King. What time was it when I started the movie? Oh, around 9:00pm. And we have the Extended Edition. And I had to go to work the next day. What the hell was I thinking?
MizSplotchy was gracious enough to sit down and remain awake with me for the movie. Right after the ring was destroyed (a little after midnight), I asked her, “Do you mind if we turn the movie off now? I just wanted to see Sauron get his ass kicked.” She thankfully agreed.
Something funny occurred to me in viewing Return Of The King. In the films, we hear the scary, disembodied voice of Sauron at different points. I thought it would be cool at the end, when we see the tower with his eye on top collapsing, that you hear some final words from him:
The above images were modified from original screenshots here. Go there for a quick, web-based way of whipping through the trilogy!
Here’s one of the scenes I skipped over in last night’s viewing, with the audio tweaked a little for humorous results.
And now, here’s a little purple elf cheesecake for you.
P.S., for all you Mazgul fans, I saw him kill some bats.
Via my idiosyncratic blog-reading habits, I have been led to discover a very surprising blog-math revelation.
I was reading the latest post from Matty Boy regarding a mathematician in Russia who recently proved the Poincaré Conjecture.
The post included a picture of the mathematician, Grigori Perelman.
And then it hit me. This was not Grigori Perleman, but the blogosphere’s very own The Idea Of Progress, cleverly disguised!
Why is he in disguise? Does he not want to jeopardize his “Sexiest Man Alive” title? Isn’t this the 21st century, Mr. Of Progress? Math is the new sexy!
Or, am I spoiling a surprise you were to unleash on the public on Idea of Progress Day?
Either way, congratulations!
Hi kids,
If you use the “Rounders 3” template for your blog, you surely have wondered aloud the following:
“Boy, I wonder what it looks like when someone attempts to read my blog and encounters some kind of fatal error — fatal enough to serve up a generic ‘Google error’ page, but somehow still incorporating the stylesheet colors of my chosen blogger template.”
Well this is your lucky day, person with strange, boring flights of fancy!
Below, witness a pretty Google error page I ran into today while browsing my blog.
You’re welcome!
It’s another Friday in November, which means it must be time for another Splotchy-created holiday, as defined in a previous post.
Are we that close to the end of November? Yes!
Is this post just an excuse for me to use the word “penultimate”? Yes!
Is this a holiday I plan on observing? Probably not.
In any case, Happy Purchase Preprocessed Turkey Products Day!
Next and final November holiday: Whatever Splotchy Says Day (consider this your final warning)
I just remembered something not included in my original Halloween review.
There was another celebrity cameo of note — Monkees drummer Micky Dolenz plays a gun shop owner who sells Dr. Loomis a .357 Magnum.
My joke in the review would have been as follows:
“What, Peter Tork wasn’t available?”
I am aware that this joke is not strong enough to support an addendum, but I write this not to be funny, but instead to point out the presence of a haggard Monkee — we must keep track of these people and the Monkee philosophy they are attempting to spread.
Going to see movies at a second-run theater has more than just cheapness as a positive aspect. While the rest of you are despairing about the lack of product leaking out of the luxurious sphincter of Hollywood due to the ongoing writers’ strike, I’ll be munching popcorn while I watch Good Luck Chuck (of course, I’ll still be sobbing in the bitter darkness — how could one *not* sob in the presence of Good Luck Chuck?).
Anyways, what the hell were my choices today at the lovely LaGrange?
The Jane Austen Book Club – Not my cup of tea, probably. I felt pretty crappy after I realized Waitress, a movie I had previously avoided at the LaGrange, was written and directed by Adrienne Shelly, a woman who was recently murdered in NYC. Still, that guilt wasn’t enough to make me feel like seeing this movie tonight. I DO NOT LIKE CHICK MOVIES.
Superbad – I had checked the listings online, but I hadn’t realized this was playing until I was waiting in line with a collection of high school age kids. I half-heartedly wanted to see this, but…
I was already pretty much set on seeing Rob Zombie’s Halloween.
It was a dark, rainy and extremely crappy night as I walked into the LaGrange. There was actually a guy inside who took my ticket and tore it in half, a first for me there — probably due to the fact that it was relatively crowded, being an unusual weeknight before Thanksgiving and all.
The crowd was apparently there for Superbad. Halloween was showing in Theater 4. This theater will henceforth be known as the Bob Seger Theater, for the amount of times I have heard “Night Moves” there waiting for a movie to start. It was for the most part empty. There were just a couple guys to the left of me and a large Latino family (with two small girls!) sitting several rows behind me.
This new version of Halloween ain’t scary. It’s different than the original version in that we spend a lot more time with Michael Myers as a boy. A lot more. A lot, lot more. It attempts to explain the roots of his evil. And you know what? Who gives a crap why he’s evil. That’s what was so great about the original. When Michael’s parents come home to find him holding a bloody knife, it just defies a rational explanation why he would do such a thing, which is one of the reasons why it was scary.
So as we finally get to Myers as an adult, and he escapes a sanitarium to wreak havoc upon the small, imaginary town of Haddonfield, Illinois, I look at the time. Holy crap. They took like 45 minutes to set his crazy badass adult self in motion.
And the thing is, for the remainder of the film, Myers is just this relentless killing machine. I mean, the actor who plays him as an adult is literally seven feet tall. Whatever attempt to humanize Myers in the first part of the film is pretty much thrown away for the rest.
His unstoppable acts of violence actually made the movie kind of boring. Every scene where some character would come up against Myers I kept on hoping *someone* could hurt him, or get away, something. But he’d always just push his head through a wall, grab them and twist off their head like a carny killing a chicken.
Malcolm McDowell plays Dr. Loomis, previously played by the unfortunately now dead Donald Pleasance. There’s a crapload of other cameos which I guess we are supposed to find amusing or interesting. Brad Dourif plays a sheriff with a complicated beard that was apparently sprayed with fake snow, Sid Haig has a small part, as does Dee Wallace, Ken Foree, etc. Sybil Danning plays a nurse who gets forked to death (yes, forked to death), but does not show any boobs. Repeat… Sybil Danning does not show her boobs.
None of the characters really registered on any kind of emotional level for me, even the chick playing the Jamie Lee Curtis part. There was a scene where she was hiding behind a wall as Myers was looking for her. She was keeping her hands on her mouth because she couldn’t stop making noise. What the hell? You can’t be quiet when a psychopath is looking for you? You actually have to put your hands over your mouth to prevent you from making involuntary “Oh my God” sounds? What, does she have Tourette syndrome or something?
So, the movie ends and I walk outside. Thank heavens it’s not raining any more. It’s goddamn snowing.
Current conditions shitty, with a chance of increased shittiness later in the day.
Hit me with a doodle idea!
UPDATE:
For Lulu – Lulu facing the wrath of her seniors when she tells them that their senior class trip has been canceled due to cyclone damage.