Alright, hummingbirds. The jig is up.

For years I've bought this garbage about you little guys. How you beat your wings 8,000 times per second and you never slow down and you're always just zooming around making the rest of us look bad.

Well, recently, I've started to see a few hummingbirds just sitting around on tree branches. That's right! Just sitting there, not doing anything at all.

Don't look at me like that.

The way I see it, you've got a couple of options here, or I go public with this:

1. Pick up the pace a little. I don't want to see any more lounging around. I want you out there collecting pollen 24-7 (or whatever it is that you're doing with those flowers)

or

b. Tell the world that it's all a lie. That you, too, get a little tired and need a rest every now and then. I'm sure the world would understand, after the initial shock and consequent rebuilding of our entire value and belief systems, which will have been thrown into a nightmarish maelstrom where we question the relevance of even our own existence.

Johnny Cash is on Larry King tonight.

Just a little heads-up for everyone who wants to find out what the hell he was thinking covering Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus" on his last album.

I've seen Johnny Cash live 3 or 4 times. Every time I think, this'll be his last tour. I'm glad I got to see him one last time. But the guy just keeps hanging on.

Just in case you were wondering, it is still really incredibly unreasonably windy here.

I just drove over to get a cup of coffee, to remind myself that not all of life is bleak and empty and meaningless, and I was menaced by at least four separate tumbleweeds. They launched themselves at me from the side of the road, as if they were hurled skyward by some scoundrel lurking behind a fence, waiting for such a windy day to wreak havoc with his private tumbleweed army.

Actually, as far as hobbies go, that sounds kind of fun.

I'm a vacuumer. I like it. It's cathartic. You spend a few minutes running your Hoover over the rug and you feel cleansed. The chaotic whirlpool that is your life finds its purpose in this little act of order.

But I have a fear. A primal fear.

It's rooted in the legend of the Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail.

I'm afraid that one day the vacuum will suck up its own cord. What will happen? Will I die in a fiery, dusty flash? Will a wormhole open into a parallel dimension?

I just don't know.

But I'll keep vacuuming, man. Someone has to push the envelope.

Evil Clown Generator

[wrested from the clutches of Not My Desk]

Pretenders to the Dr. Pepper Crown

I had no idea there were so many faux-peppers out there. Nice to see a picture of a can of Dr. Nut (of Confederacy of Dunces fame).

Another Doctor page

Still another fake Dr Pepper page, with taste test results.

Oh what the hell. Here's another one.

Who knew the conspiracy was this deep?

Apropos of nothing at all:

The Awful Green Things From Outer Space!

Man did I love that game when I was a kid. Here's the Epilog.

Tom Wham, apparently did that game, along with Snit's Revenge, Elefant Hunt and more. Ah nostalgia!

Lords of Light!

For perfectly valid reasons, I just ran an errand to buy tennis balls, and I'm here to tell you that it's unpleasant outside.

It is 8,000°F outside (or, for our metric friends: Real Hot). Eight thousand degrees is too hot for November!

And windy. It's windy. That's the thing (well, one of the things) about living in Orange County that sucks. You get these Santa Ana winds that blow in from Mercury. Hot wind! Along with being one of my least favorite gastrointestinal complaints, hot wind makes you feel like a turkey in one of those convection-cooker Ronco things.

The metal buttons on the ATM? Also, 8,000°. You could see marks where people had left layers of skin on the buttons. Groups of victims with bandaged fingers were gathered around the ATMs, just waiting to see the next poor sap get his burned, so they could howl in anguish-tinged glee.

So I'm saying it's hot.

(Today's entry was brought to you by the number 8000)

Someday, when I'm done gone, they'll write my biography.

It'll be called "A Man and His Struggles with Cling Wrap".

Did you know that the inimitable Suckerman is once again in production?

Maybe. Maybe you did.

Did you care?

Maybe not.

I am happy to report a renewed sense of hope and vigor. The world seems a joyous place. The birds are singing. Prairie dogs are playing the banjo (one of them handles the neck and the other the strumming).

That's right. I bought a new bottle of Pert Plus!

Also, in a not-entirely unrelated story: Eddie Tenpole Tudor is in the new Harry Potter movie. Don't take that as an endorsement of Harry Potter or anything. I've never read any Harry Potter books*. They might be good. They might suck.

*This is somewhat untrue. There was a stolen moment at my sister's house sitting on the pot after a particularly effective coffee, when reading material was hard to come by (see? there's the link to the shampoo thing. Who hasn't been reduced to reading the shampoo bottle on occasion?), when I perused a couple of pages.

You know what's horrible?

The smell of a Mrs. Fields' Cookies or Cinnabon in a mall.

God it's awful.

Um. That's about all I had to say about it.

Oh, no, wait! I have more: The old Kmart smell! Does anyone else remember that? It was like old popcorn and spilled blue ICEEs and cheap food at the Kmart food counter.

And, of course, the smell that is punishing me right now: someone making microwave popcorn at work. There oughta be a law.

All of these things are bad. But I am guessing none of them are as astoundingly bad as Steven Seagal's new movie Half Past Dead.

Get in the cup.

I know. I know it's not a cup. It's a tub. Get in the tub.

I know it smells. It had crumbled bleu cheese in it. Get in there.

No! Don't run the other way!

Look. The walls are metal, they're sloped, and you can't get up there. And it's wet. And if you go down the drain, well, I can't be responsible for what happens to you down there.

It's not like I invited you in here. You just show up. And then you're running all over the place like a maniac. Watch out!

Was that your leg? Did I break your leg? Let me see it. Oh great. Now your leg's broken.

Don't cry. Stop crying.

Look, I'm saving you here. I'm your Jesus. You hear me? I'm your Jesus. You should be singing a little song about me. Maybe, later, you can tell all your pals about me and maybe all of you together can write the song. And you could make a little statue of me. Me and my tub. I know. I know it smells.

Now get in the tub and we'll go outside. It's nice out there. Your leg'll be OK. You have more legs. Look at me. I break a leg, there's no way I'm going anywhere. You? You can suck it up.

Get in the tub, for god's sake.

OK, you in? Good.

No. No! Stay in there. Don't crawl on me! Get off my arm. Are you venomous? You're not venomous.

Get back in there. Let me get the lid on.

OK. Here we are. We're at the door. You cool? You stayin' cool? I'm going to dump you out now, and (listen to me carefully here) when I dump you out, do not under any circumstances attempt to run back into the apartment before I close the door.

It's going to be sort of a flinging thing I'm going to do with the tub and I just want you to be ready. I'm guessing that with you being so small and light there's no way you could get hurt, but I honestly don't know. Maybe you should, like, tuck up into a little ball or something.

Maybe you have some kneepads? You would need eight of them though, right? Well, seven, now. Sorry.

Or a little crash helmet?

Look, if that's your attitude I'll throw you over the railing. How would you like that? Four floors of freefall.

That's what I thought.

OK. Ready? Bye!

Why did you put your web on my hand??? Get off me!

Damn spiders.

Plush Nyarlathotep!

It's important to have toys that can cause major freakouts, especially for the young.

Why not stop by Too Much Coffee Man and catch up on the hilarity?

Or buy some of their new stuff in the Coffee Shop. Christmas is coming, you know.

It's good for America.

Man, have I had Boiling Point out from NetFlix for a long time!

It's not even that I don't want to watch it. I do want to. I like Takeshi Kitano a lot, even if he can be a little demented sometimes.

It's just that I enjoy pissing off the next person who has it in their queue*.

I'm sure, for the first couple of weeks, he thought "Cool! I'm glad someone else out there is enjoying this edgy Yakuza flick."

Weeks 3 and 4 may have brought a sense of indignation.

By week 6, he may have begin to suspect that someone (me, in this equation) was keeping the DVD for an unreasonable amount of time. He may have something there.

If you're out there, Boiling Point guy, I swear I'm going to watch the movie soon, and maybe just a month or so after that, I'll return it. How's April for you?

*In case you don't know, NetFlix is an online service where you rent DVDs and they mail them to you in nice red envelopes** that make you feel important. You put your desired rentals in a queue, and when the next one is available, they send it to you. In the queue, your choices have little notes to tell you how long it will be until they are available, like Now, Short Wait, Long Wait, or Forget it. Some Foul Trickster Has Had This DVD Gathering Dust on His Early 70s Teak Wood Wall Unit for 3 Months. Go Rent Tron Again.

**The envelopes are postage paid. I have come up with a complex scheme utilizing NetFlix envelopes whereby I would never have to pay for postage again. Obviously, such a scheme would require some elaborate precision, and for the phone company to sign up for movies right after I do, but I'm confident with a little research, this thing could pay off. Failing that, I'm looking into the possiblity of drug trafficking using copies of Porky's 3.

And lo, thirty-one years ago today, there was a great rending of garments and gnashing of various things that are generally gnashable. Also, there was some wailing.

The sky burst open and the thunder roared. This effect, however, was achieved by a guy offstage with some aluminum foil and ball bearings in a bowl.

A headless goat was born to a headless goat mother. Certain other, smaller mammals were born variously with a somewhat larger than average number of heads and no heads. Some trading of heads was allowed, until the head to mammal ratio was acceptable to all concerned. Obviously, not all of the mammals were quick enough on the trade and ended up looking a little silly, but they all agreed that it was better than the alternative.

So there was a lot of confusion.

And me, also. I was born then too. Thirty-one. Makes you think.

Inexplicably, a Seattle Times reporter (who apparently has developed some ways that just aren't right) singled out My Life as an American Gladiator in her article "Where to Get Started in the World of Blogs".

Cats in Hats

Rest assured that for every time you've thought about buying a hat for your cat, your cat has thought about slowly tearing you into shreds over a protracted clawing period of about two weeks.

[grabbed from misterpants]

Yesterday, one of my hopeless lackeys here at Purgatory Inc. was eating a lemon.

Just a lemon. Sucking the meat out like a damn lemon vampyr.

He looked up at me, lemon pips around his mouth, like a hyena interrupted while feasting on some putrefying carrion, questioning me with almost human eyes, and said "What?"

I quietly turned and left. At least he won't get scurvy.

We went to Tokyo Delve's Sushi Bar for a friend's birthday party this weekend.

Very fun in a singing, disco dancing, screaming waiters kind of way. Also recommended if you enjoy dancing on chairs and drinking sake bombs (sake shot dropped in a mug of beer).

The sushi, also, was excellent.

Last night I managed to catch a little bit of Halloween 4 on the electric television device.

Now, I remember Halloween 1 being pretty scary. Halloween 2, kind of scary. Halloween 3 had that pumpkin mask thing going on, with the great song ""____ more days to Halloween, Halloween, Halloween. ____ more days to Halloween, Silver Shamrock!", and then bugs would come out of the masks and eat kids brains or something. I don't know what that had to do with Michael Myers and chopping people up into little bits, but I have some dim memory of Stonehenge being somehow involved. Those were different times, as noted horror film enthusiast Lou Reed has been known to say on occasion. You've got masks and kids' brains being eaten. That's good enough for me.

Maybe Michael Myers was on sabbatical or something. Or some kind of psychokiller exchange program, hacking up the innocent in the south of France for a semester.

Anyway, he was back for Halloween 4. And his strategy seemed to have evolved into basically boring people to death.

To begin with, Mr. Myers victims seemed unable to figure out that this guy moves really, really slowly. Any way you look at that, you're going to have a leg up in the whole "getting chased by a guy with a knife" scenario. Also, Mr. Myers walks around with his knife raised all the time. And I mean ALL the time. This makes him easy to spot in a crowd, not to mention the fact that he's probably going to have some sore muscles from maintaining that pose for any length of time.

So in the movie, he's chasing a little girl around for an hour and a half or so, or until the budget runs out. And boy, is he chasing her around slowly. It's like being chased by an asthmatic or a tree sloth or something. One scene has the little girl (who falls in the category of incredibly annoying) hiding in a garbage chute. Mr. Myers figures out she's in there (which isn't hard to do because she's saying really loudly "PLEASE DON'T LET HIM GET ME!", not one of the better hiding tactics I've ever seen), at which point she slides down the garbage chute. Mr. Myers walks down to the basement to hassle her some more in various ways, all of which involve him trying to stab her unsuccessfully. This goes on for about five minutes, then she wriggles back up to the top of the garbage chute.

Mr. Myers sighs, and trudges back upstairs to do some more unsuccessful stabbing.

Seldom have I seen someone with less job satisfaction. The guy's really just punching the clock at this point.

And then you have Donald Pleasance, the doctor who is obsessed with Michael Myers, and frankly doesn't seem to have any other hobbies or interests. He runs around being dramatic and breathless a lot, and brandishing guns at law enforcement officials. This is a guy who's had four movies in which to kill one really slow moving, sore-armed killer, and hasn't gotten the job done. His work ethic just can't be all that great.

I think I had a point about this. Maybe it was that Halloween 4 isn't very good.