For some reason I find this Hamster Puppet pleasing. I could stare at it for hours and hours, until it starts to bend me to its inimitable will. Maybe it's best you don't look at it for too long.

Meet Chiquita, the whimsical chimp holding the bunch of bananas! Chiquita looks more like the whimsical chimp who knows he's going to get another savage beating, doesn't he? "This is my Chimp figurine, Chiquita," you can tell your friends when you have them over to view your intriguing crappy collectible collection. "He's cringing in terror."

Hermit Crab Figurine Graceful and svelte, a fitting tribute to the grandeur of the hermit crab.

I'm not entirely sure why you would want a statuette of a Moose Wedding. Of course, it's perfectly understandable that you would want one of a Chicken Wedding. But a Moose Wedding?? Weird!

No comment

Startlingly hideous and just wrong

Oh what the hell, frogs too.

Official Rules to the MIT Winter Olympics Drinking Game

OK. I know that last post about the dead singer may have proved a little traumatic for some of you out there, but it's not going to get any easier for you because today we have to discuss the very serious subject of Royal Caviar. Before you click the link, be warned that there's some pretty serious grooving going on over there at Royal Caviar. Not only is Royal Caviar not real caviar, but it's just got to funk. (note to the sound-card impaired: Why, there's music on that site!)

So what is Royal Caviar? It's kind of like caviar. It's caviar shaped and I'm sure it's got artificial fish stinkiness added to it to give it a caviaresque bouquet, but the cold hard reality is that it's soy. Because, according to the website anyway, we all want to eat caviar every day. Now I'm speaking here as someone who likes caviar, and hardly ever thinks about bait while eating it, and I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that I don't want to eat it every day. I'm guessing from the mega-phat jams that they're laying down over at Royal Caviar that they're aiming for a young and hip demographic with their soy caviar substitute. I can see it now:

*We fade in on the Club that does not exist except for in movies like The Matrix and Strange Days, with music playing that you're not quite sure if it's Ministry or a cheap Ministry rip-off because they couldn't afford to license the real thing*

Groover #1: "Hi there Groover #2. Is that caviar you're eating? *sigh* I wish I could eat caviar and still keep my youthful and fresh sensibilities and pert buttocks, but it's just too fatty."
Groover #2: "Well, Groover #1, now you don't have to worry about the flabby decrepitude that results from a lifetime of excess and ridiculous overindulgence.You can eat Royal Caviar Soy Caviar Substitute every day for the rest of your natural life, and only worry about the odor and bowel trouble."
Groover #1: "That means I can still groove every night. Kickin! Thank you Royal Caviar Soy Caviar Substitute!"

*Fade out*

And the best thing about Royal Caviar? Even though it's soy, it still costs 17 dollars a jar. That's part of what makes the "caviar substitute" thing so effective: you're out the same amount of cash as if you had bought the real thing! Ain't life grand?

(Note for all you caviar hounds out there. I'll call you my "caviar posse" if I may be so bold. Trader Joe's has pretty good caviar for, like, four bucks a jar, and it actually comes out of a fish.*)



*Note: If you are a high-up executive and at Trader Joe's and would like to send me some free caviar for that unsolicited endorsement of your fine establishment, feel free to do so. And that good Samuel Smith's beer. Not the cheap stuff. And you can keep that Vodka of The Gods too. So, to review, a little caviar (not too much as it's kind of fatty) and maybe a twelve pack of Samuel Smith's Pure Filtered Lager. Thank you for your time.

I happened to catch about half of this VH1 show (which I think was called "conspiracy theory" or something) this weekend about Nick Drake and his untimely death twenty-five years ago. The thing that really stuck out to me was something his sister said: "Those of us who were closest to Nick felt like we didn't know him at all. But people come up to us all the time now and say 'I really know him'". How arrogant these fans are. They really only know his music, this small part of him, when in reality he was a fractured and fading personality, a prisoner in his own home to the depression that eventually took his life. The big question on the show was whether his overdose of antidepressants was suicide or accident.

Anyway, Drake was an interesting character, but he's one of those artists that everyone and their brother is listening to now. That doesn't bother me anymore. Time was, I couldn't go near a band that was popular. I guess that's just getting older. I kind of backed into listening to him about three years ago, when I heard the Swans cover of Black Eyed Dog, a really haunting song about, as so many of his songs were, death. He was pretty far gone by the time he did this song, his voice so shaky that he had to go back into the studio to redo the vocals.

"But Kafkaesque!" I hear you cry. "I don't come to this site to hear fruity manic depressive guitar music from dead hippies! I crave wackiness and links to pictures of monkeys!" Well, my friend, you have to take the monkey with the hippie sometimes. That's just the way it goes.

100 Years, 100 Stinkers: The worst films of the last 100 years. Not Drop Dead Fred! How could they?!

The Mascot Grand National, featuring the greatest mascot in the world, Sammy The Shrimp (who can be seen on the far right in this picture).

In the stables

Dilapidated looking Dragon

Striding Masked Robin Thing

In action (Just after this picture was taken, one of the Bee Mascots broke its leg and, tragically, had to be put down.)

Menacing Wolf Mascot Wins Prize

The whole gang. Strangely, giant foam Homer Simpson seems to be in attendance.

Last night we had artichokes for dinner. I got to thinking how much trouble it is to eat artichokes, compared to the relatively small amount of food you get from them. I mean, you have to peel each individual leaf from the blasted thing, and perform a strange sort of scraping motion with your front teeth, not to mention the fact that you will probably burn your hand trying to pull the last batch of small leaves from the heart. And then you have to factor in the idea that this plant wants to choke you to death with its little "choke" hairs. How complicated!

Then, all of a sudden it hit me: How goddamn lazy am I that I think eating an artichoke is a pain?!

Want people to leave you alone at work? Just say "I'm having problems" a lot. I've been doing this all day and so far it's working great.

Whenever anyone seems ready to ask you something, or engage in some mindless banter about the relative coldness or warmness of this particular part of the office, throw a preemptive strike their way. Sigh, just a little, and say "I'm having problems."

Most people will just leave you alone right there. They don't want to know about your problems. They don't want to know if you're talking about problems with your three-hole punch, or problems like not knowing how to drive a stick, or something more along the lines of your teenage son dressing up like a Siamang on the weekends. People just want to be left alone. I know this is true because I'm a people and I want to be left alone.

If the "I'm having problems" thing doesn't work, get under your desk, armed with whatever office supplies you can muster, and scream obscenities at your coworkers while flinging staplers, phones or 17-inch monitors at them. This should get them to leave you alone. For a while at least. You may have to run up to one of them and smash their head down into their keyboard. See if you can spell actual words by mashing their nose and saggy jowls into the keys again and again and again.

If people still won't leave you alone (especially touchy-feely HR type people), tell them you're having problems some more and maybe cry.

I'm still working on it, OK?

So, a couple of things. First, I managed to move some stuff around on the left side of the page there without making everything disappear with an enjoyably anticlimactic *POP!*, as I feared would happen. I feel a real sense of accomplishment.

Next, you may have noticed my ugly mug is gone, replaced by a friendly Medium Sized Plush Cthulhu. For those of you who have had trouble telling the difference between photos of me and photos of The Cuddly Great Cthulhu, just remember that The Cuddly Great Cthulhu is the one with the sensible haircut.

Another addition is the snapshot of multi-talented mollusk Oyster Billy. The difference between Oyster Billy and your average oyster is that Oyster Billy has had years of accordian training. And he was manufactured in Thailand. And he is not in fact made from a real oyster shell. I point out these differences as a public service to oysters everywhere, so you don't find a garden-variety, non-accordian playing oyster whilst strolling down the beach one day, and pester him for an autograph because you think he is mega-oyster-star Oyster Billy. Oysters hate that sort of toadying.

Well, that's out of the way and I feel better.

There is also now a link to my Bootleg Trading Page. Browse at your leisure, and if you are interested in a trade, email me at kafkaesque@mediaone.net But don't go telling Neil Young I have bootlegs of his shows.I don't want that guy calling me all hours of the night. He can get a little whiny.

What has to happen to you that you wake up one morning and find yourself wanting to wear those blue dress shirts with the white collar? Is there an alternate reality of which I am unaware where this sort of irresponsible clothing choice is acceptable?

Don't even talk to me about the pink dress shirt with the white collar. Yeesh!

Random Beat Poetry Generator

The Beat Poetry Game

A word on the Beats: I was big into Kerouac for a while, during high school and college. Recently I tried to read one of my favorites of his, Desolation Angels, with no success at all. Ten years ago, I wanted to be that Fire Lookout. I wanted to stand on my head for an hour a day and go slowly crazy from loneliness and hold conversations with mice. Now I just get bored with the book. What does that mean? I don't know. Maybe you can't recapture the something that made a book one of your favorites. Am I now too old for Kerouac? I'm just going to go have a cry now, if my decrepit bones will support me that is.

A word to people who persist in writing Beat Poetry: How annoying is the whole stream of consciousness thing? Plenty annoying. Hell, the stream of my own consciousness is uninteresting enough, like I need a glimpse into yours?

Hmm, doubled up on my cranky pills today I guess.

Zen Generator

From the Personal Poetry Generator:

fly away, El Diablo Jazz

violin ignites sun
simply because
blue food torments the toll of the bells

Oyster Billy obsesses about the meaning of life
however
Kafkaesque lingers with the open road

blue food readies the light
therefore
seahorses mourn over death

So one of my minions at work was telling me this morning how the CEO was hovering over his shoulder while he was working. The minion was trying to print some stuff for CEO's big board meeting today. Join me as I reenact this magic moment in Blank Stare Theatre:

Minion: "He was hovering over my shoulder the whole time."
Kafkaesque: "You know who Carlos Castaneda is?"
Minion: blank stare
Kafkaesque; "He wrote these books about Don Juan and the Yaqui Indians?"
Minion: blank stare
Kafkaesque: "They thought that death was constantly hovering at your left shoulder, just waiting for you to see him."
Minion: blank stare
Kafkaesque: "So, you see, He's kind of like death, hovering at your left shoulder."
Minion: blank stare
Kafkaesque: "Ha ha ha! Get it?"
Minion (edging away): "Oh...uh. Yeah. Ha ha. Yaqui Indians. Right."
Kafkaesque: "Oh, the times we have."

This kind of thing happens to me a lot. I can't decide which Baldwin should play Minion in the movie version. My role will, of course, be played by Jet Li, master funnyman.

Legodeath

See your favorite torture devices, etc all lovingly depicted in Lego.

Here's another Shaggie picture that doesn't take forever to load. Because I care about you and want you to have fast-loading shaggies.

Sorry about the whole alliteration thing happening in the last post.

Also, just wanted to mention that I got a fax spam today for Grandfather Clocks. Chances are not real good that I'm going to be strumming along on the ol' gueetar or playing Quake, and suddenly look down at the fax machine, when all of a sudden it'll hit me: That's what my life has been missing all this time! A Grandfather Clock!

And not a good Grandfather Clock either. I want an incredibly cheap Grandfather Clock for oh, say, 300 bucks. One that's going to break in the first month I have it and then gather dust and wait for me to hurt myself by walking into it late at night.

Another exciting feature of the GRANDFATHER CLOCK NEW YEAR BLOWOUT fax spam is that they promise delivery by Christmas. That's right. In just eleven short months, these speed demons of the timepiece world will have that baby on your doorstep, ready to start keeping time adequately until the one year warranty runs out. I'm guessing after eleven months most people would have forgotten they ordered a 300 dollar Grandfather Clock and might be more than a little puzzled when one showed up. Just imagine if you got liquored up one night and went ahead and placed your order. What a surprise on Christmas morning!

But eleven months! That's like the gestation period of an elephant for god's sake.

And 300 dollars? For a Grandfather Clock? I don't want it to be made out of balsa wood. I want some quality in my needlessly grandiose chronometer!

It's the same principle as a $1.99 Vegas buffet. Things just should not be that cheap. At least after you eat a $1.99 Vegas buffet, you don't have to wait eleven months for the result.

Dude, demonically annoying advertising apparently works wonders.

An oldie but goodie: Shaggies

Just in case you feel an urge to shamble around in the forest looking like a pile of animated cole slaw. And who doesn't now and again?

True color of the universe revealed.

It's minty green. Kind of looks like a Mentos or something. Alternately, it resembles the innards of one of those avocados that aren't quite as good as the Haas avocados but are much cheaper. Hence, the universe is an inferior avocado.

Just thought you should know.

Existential Pud: the Web's Premier Source For The Convergence of Bubble Gum Comics and Existential Philosophy

[via MetaFilter]

The Elves and The Sportbike

Teaches valuable lessons for any child considering becoming a motorcyclist as an adult: don't steal motorcycles, keep your motorcycle right side up, don't hire elves to take care of your kids

If there's one thing I tell people time and time again, it's "Don't hire elves to take care of your kids!"

How hard is that? I know they look all cuddly and stuff, but they're just waiting to get on that sportbike and cause some grievous mayhem. I know what you're thinking: "Wouldn't it be alright if I just let the elves watch the kids for a little while, like for an hour every other Sunday?"

NO!

Report a Celebrity Brush with Jurgen Prochnow:

"Jurgen was sitting 4 seats down the row I was in, and yes I did sneak peeks at him occasionally, and no, unfortunately, I don't know what he smelled like. I was recovering from a cold I couldn't smell a thing. But he did look like he came to the premiere fresh from the shower ;) "

I feel confident that within the decade, there will be at least ten Jurgen Prochnow Celebrity Brushes. We just have to want it, people.

Also: Find out just how many times Jurgen will be on TV this month.

The Jesus Filmography, which is kind of Jurgen related since he's on the list for having been kinda Jesusy in The Seventh Sign.

Even more tangential: This incredibly annoying page that's kind of about Dune but which somehow finds an excuse to talk about Kung Fu a little bit. Nice to see Kwai Chang getting a mention there. Waaaay down at the bottom there's mention of Jurgen getting burning glass dropped on his noggin.

Here are some diseases that are probably really horrible and I hope I never contract, but which nevertheless sound sort of quaint and amusing:

Shingles - Can anyone hear the name of this affliction without a mental image of a picturesque little disease-infested cottage, roof thatched with the advanced form of Chicken Pox? I sure can't.

Rickets - I have no idea what this is. It sounds like it has to do with two of my favorite things though: 1. Robots and B. frogs. Hence, Robot Frogs! or Frog Robots I guess would work too. I'll have to contact the FDA to see if any of the treatment for Rickets involves Robot Frogs.

The Gout - This one sounds like it should be said by a pirate. As in "Arr! Ye've got The Gout, Jim-Boy! Nothin a quick trip round the keel won't fix, though, eh me lubbin finey?" (Note: "Me lubbin finey" is not widely accepted as real pirate talk. Some of your more advanced pirates would try this sort of phrase, in hopes that it would catch on amongst their pirate colleagues, with little success. Every once in a while, a gem would crop up though, and a mellifluous turn of phrase like "newt-booty" would be born.)
(Note: previous note totally untrue. I just got carried away.)

Scurvy - Another pirate disease! Pirates seem a fun-loving bunch when you picture them lashing people to the mast, having feisty cutlass duels and counting their captive's teeth, all the while sucking on half a lime, which would protrude from their mouths, and give the impression that they had a green beak.

From the good folks at Despair, Inc:

Bittersweets: Valentine's candy with such heartwarming messages as "Luv 2 Stalk U" and "See Other People".

Come to think of it...my wife sent me that link. Wait just a cotton-pickin minute here!

HEY!

I just added this crazy whacked-out BlogSnob Ad Thing to this here hootenanny. As a result, waaaaay down on the bottom left, underneath the links, next to the giant dust bunny, just this side of Over The Hills and Far Away, you'll (hopefully) see TextAds for other sites. Don't let them scare you. But also, let it be known that anybody could be randomly advertising on them. So if you click-thru (high tech there, eh?) and get sent to the blog of a pale friendless virgin who's into staying up late of a Saturday and painting his D&D miniature collection, don't say I didn't warn you.

Not that there's anything wrong with having a D&D miniature collection, you understand.

"Cream Puff Caspar Milquetoast"

You know, from The Piano Has Been Drinking by Tom Waits. Maybe you don't know. You should know. Inevitably, the moment will come in your life where you will be quizzed about this song. Maybe someone will make a comment about Foster Brooks or Dudley Moore or some other drunk-guy-shtick person, and then The Piano Has Been Drinking will come up. It's not something you can avoid, so get used to the idea. And be prepared. Impress your friends with your extensive knowledge of Tom Waits minutiae.

Anyway, Here's the lowdown on Milquetoast, via pracowity, who certainly seems to be all up in arms about this language thing. I bet I made him mad just by saying "up in arms". Somewhere, a dart is being thrown at my picture this very moment.

God, apparently, hates figs.

Who knew?

[thx, bungee benji]

Bad Poetry. Get some inside of you.

The Worst Poem Ever Written?

links via mattpfeff

Now I know how to spice up my next cocktail party: Lifesize Standups!

I'll put Newt Gingrich over by the potato salad. Dr. McCoy over by the Little Smokies.

Now...where do you put the 5'5" Talking Gorilla Standup? I think by the dessert tray sounds just right. Right next to 6 Foot Uncle Sam.

Yep. Gonna be the best party ever.

Quick! Call a DeskJet Printer exorcist!

My printer is, quite possibly, possessed by the hoary host of the netherworld. At random times, and for no good reason at all, it will spit out a page of paper. It is not, as was suggested to me, printing in tongues, but I feel that eventuality is pretty much a foregone conclusion at this point. I think the random nature of these paper outbursts may not be random at all, and may be indicative of a larger and much more sinister scheme at work behind the scenes. My fear is that the printer is only trying to lull me into a false sense of security with the seemingly random paper spew.

I think it's trying to kill me.

Think about it. All that has to happen is that I fall asleep in front of my printer (a prospect which is frighteningly possible, in my fast-paced world of shirking), and happen to expose my tender neck...next thing you know, it's a paper-cut laceration to the jugular! They'll find me lurching around back here, slamming against the cubical walls as the blood spurts in slow motion, the Matte Finish Great White Imaging and Photo Paper still protruding from the angry wound as the choral music swells to a fever soprano pitch, which would maybe even include a theramin or glockenspiel.

And then it'll all be over. But at least I won't have to worry about memos anymore. So there's that.

I do wish Captain Howdy or whoever it is that's possessing my InkJet would keep things little quieter though. It's hard enough to sleep, much less have a meeting with the company president, while your printer is yelling out things like "You're all gonna die up there!" and "La plume de ma tante!"

So it goes.

So I am back, after a week in Atlantic City. Actually let me capitalize that. A WEEK in Atlantic City. If you ever want to dump a body, Atlantic City is the place for you.

I like Las Vegas. I like gambling. I like glitz and chintz and cheese (particularly a good camembert or Port Salut), but I draw the line. In Vegas, you have casinos with carpet that look like someone vomited Play-Doh, you have row upon row of slot machines slowly sucking the souls out of the dead-eyed button-pushers in front of them, but you also have other things to do, like Siegfried and Roy statues and the Liberace Museum. Atlantic City has casinos. Period.

And a lot of people wearing gold chains.

You leave the casino in Atlantic City and there's just nothing else going on. Unless you get mugged and beaten so badly you have to be identified by your dental records. Actually, they check you at the airport to make sure that you have your dental records along, so they can identify you later. Nice of them. When I say "airport", I mean Philadelphia airport. I flew into Philly and had to take a shuttle for an hour and a half to get to Atlantic City. On the way back, though, I did get filmed by some local Philadelphia news station, so if you saw someone glaring at the camera on your local Philadelphia news, you may have gotten a glimpse into the depths of my admiration of Atlantic City. They filmed my face, then my bags (which I made sure to pack as heavy as possible for added fun), then my face again. I never understand these people who just lose it when they are on camera and start jumping around and waving. My look told the cameraman pretty much instantly that I was considering some Sean Penn-like action if he didn't stop filming me.

Anyway. One humorous thing that happened while I was there was that I had flowers sent to me accidentally. I had a message in my room that there was a delivery for me, so I went down to the concierge, and it turned out to be a dozen yellow and red roses in a big vase. They were addressed to my wife's name care of me. I thought this rather peculiar, but figured my wife had sent me flowers, just for generally being a great husband and all, and because she wanted the mental image of me staggering through a casino to the elevator with a giant bouquet of roses. I did the aforementioned staggering and made it back to my room, a task made even more enjoyable by the fact that the elevators in the tower my room was in were out of service, so I had to hike quite a ways, constantly assaulted by groups of old women screeching "Oh! They're gooooorgeous!" and a housekeeping woman who indignantly demanded that I give her the flowers.

I made it up to my room and called my wife, who decried any knowledge of the flowers. So I called back down to the desk and it became apparent that they were not for me. The concierge had seen the name, and matched it to mine, in a fit of what can only be called non-brilliant decision making. I also discovered that I am a pushover. I asked if I could leave them outside my door for pickup, to which the concierge replied "Oh no! Those are really valuable!"

If I had any sort of a spine, I would have demanded they come and pick them up. Instead I meekly said "OK" and brought them back down, under yet another hail of abuse from lonely octogenarian women.

*sigh*

Anyway, I'm back and I promise to not be bitter like this in the future.

~~~~~~~~~

As far as the "In The Elevator" feature is concerned, I had unsubstantiated reports that there were little bits of scrambled egg in the elevator in my absence, but I can't really be sure. I did, however, catch the lingering aroma of Vicks Vapo-Rub in there today, so I'll add that.

I don't know how many of you wash your own car. I do. By that, I mean that I wash my own car. Not your car. So when you saw me out there the other day rubbing your car vigorously, it was not for any purpose that included cleanliness. I can tell you that much.

I wash my little car at one of those do-it-yourself car wash places, where you get your tokens and pile them on into the machine, then perform the wash with an ever-increasing anxiety that you haven't put enough money in and the time will run out, leaving you with a sudsy ride for all eternity. That kind of place.

Anyway, my usual program at the car wash is to put my 87 quarters in the little machine, and set the selector to "Rinse" which usually results in a startlingly strong spray of water out of the hose. I learned it was startlingly strong when I attempted to rinse some suds off my hand in the stream of water and lost about 3 layers of skin. The hand-rinsing resembled that old Civil Rights Protest footage you always see with the protesters having firehoses turned on them, or perhaps a prison atrocities movie.

After the rinse, I move straight to the "Foaming Brush" portion of the ritual. The Foaming Brush is connected by a hose to the ceiling of your little car-washing alcove and rotates to allow you to easily circumnavigate your car. Theoretically. I don't seen to be able to accomplish the Foam Brushing without some sort of minorly embarrassing or life-threatening episode. At some point in the circuit around the car, I always manage to get tangled up in the hose, or have to execute a dainty pirouette to stop the hose wrapping around my neck anaconda-style. If you've ever seen Conan The Barabarian, where he has to fight a giant snake puppet thing, you get the idea of me battling the Foaming Brush.

Conan, of course, was only dealing with a puppet. I, on the other hand, have an adversary which not only threatens to cut off the vital supply of oxygen to my brain, but also continually spits out foam (unless of course it's one of the innumerable occasions where the Foaming Brush has somehow been rendered impotent and can summon only the feeblest of sud-streams. This is roughly every other time I wash my car.)

So, here I am trying to deal with the Herculean task of taming the Foaming Brush, in public I might add, so everyone else at the car wash can watch my bumbling exploits. This is too much for someone as uncoordinated as myself to deal with. The floor is slick with suds, I have to suds up the car before the machine begins to beep that it's running out of time, and I have to keep the Brush in contact with the car without either getting choked to death or slipping and falling on my butt.

Do you begin to appreciate how tough my life is?

That's about all I have to say about the Foaming Brush actually. I know you probably don't care, but think of my travails the next time you do something even moderately coordinated. Maybe you can donate some coordination my way. I could sure use it.

I'll be out of town for a week or so, so I'm not sure if I'll be able to update for a while. Please find all your non-sequiturs and rambling elsewhere for the time being. But don't let me catch you wandering off to someone else's blog while I'm gone! There'll be hell to pay.

Another rambunctious Kafkaesque Great Idea:

Baked Potato Jelly Beans

You heard me. Baked Damned Potato Jelly Beans. They already make Buttered Popcorn Jelly Beans and Unspeakable Evil Jelly Beans (also known as the horrible light brown Peanut Flavor, which you think are Root Beer or something wildly unlike the hideousness of the Peanut Flavor, but in fact turn out to be Peanut Flavor. As an aside here, I recently scarfed a small, maybe thirty-bean size Jelly Belly assortment, out of which a full SEVEN were Unspeakable Evil Flavor. This leads me to the conclusion that either 1. The Jelly Belly people really want to get rid of those Peanut Flavor beans; or B. that there is a cosmic law that means you end up with a disproportionately large number of your least favorite flavor bean. I wouldn't want to say. Maybe somewhere out there, some poor sap is eating Watermelon Jelly Bellies by the handful, nonplussed by their watermeloney goodness, tears rolling down his cheeks as he wishes for the Unspeakable Peanut Beans that even now haunt my kitchen counter, refusing in their evil to even be thrown away, and remaining as a chill reminder that not all Jelly Beans are your friends).

So why not? The marketing is a cinch: Jelly Beans already look like baked potatoes, so just wrap them in tinfoil and you're ready to roll. You could even have an assortment which featured different toppings, like BacOs, Sour Cream 'n' Chive, "Butter-like", and my favorite baked potato topping: Hot Fudge.

Maybe if it goes well, I could get the Magical Elves at Kafkaesque Labs to whip up something really tasty, like a Clamfruit Jelly Bean. Now we're cookin with gas baby! But hell, those layabouts can't even make a potato that wants to mash itself, so how could they even come close to this kind of grandeur?

...ok maybe that was just a Marginally Good Idea, or Borderline Catastrophically Bad Idea. Only time will tell.

A new feature has been added to the random detritus on the left over there: In The Elevator

Why? I live on the fourth floor and therefore ride an elevator to and from my apartment hive home every day. In the elevator, I am often surprised by some little thing that just seems out of place in an elevator. Today for instance, there was a small "baby" carrot, sitting innocuously in the corner. As an elevator companion, I had no qualms about it. I didn't get flustered or wonder if maybe I should be making conversation with it. To begin with, it was way down there on the floor and I get a little woozy if I bend down while the elevator is in motion, so that was out of the question. I try to be well behaved in the elevator, since the time I encouraged my wife and a friend to join me in jumping up and down in an elevator in San Francisco and we ended up stuck in what was a very small elevator for forty-five minutes.

(The first words out of the hotel manager's mouth: "Were you jumping in there?"...our meek and probably unconvincing answer: "no!")

No. It was just a little carrot there in the elevator with me, so I thought I would keep a little record of the odd things that make my daily vertical journey with me. Now that I have said that, there will probably never be anything else remotely obscure in there. Mark my words.

I've just been notified that my sister may be reading this site today, and she's a teacher, so now is the time for me to recant all my grammatical indiscretions. Let it be told: I Recant!

For 2002:

- No more saying "no biggie". Every time I say it, I'm going to cut off a finger, until typing gets to be really difficult.

- The whole "mullet" thing. Not really all that funny anymore.

still to come: Kafkaesque vs. The Foaming Brush

So all my sweet sweet painkiller is gone, and I'm still marginally lumped up, which gives me a really great excuse to be cranky (one of my favorite hobbies).

Amusing anecdote about what an idiot I am:

I am currently playing Clive Barker's Undying, which is an extremely good first-person shooter/horror game for the PC. I was racing right through this game, blasting all the unspeakable, Stygian horrors into horrible little bits at an honestly pretty alarming rate. Then, it happened.

I was cruising around this island where I had to sneak up on a bunch of swarthy pirate types and bust a cap in their pirate booties, something I accomplished with relative aplomb, and I went on my merry way, to bring more death to the forces of darkness. But I noticed that I was moving incredibly slowly. As I meandered across the island, and fought my way through a barn infested with hideous baboon-type thingies, the slowness continued.

I cursed my computer: "Damn you computer!" I cried. "Why must you antagonize me so?!"

No improvement.

I cursed the game: "Damn you Clive Barker's Undying! Why must you test me in this way?!"

Nothing.

The next challenge facing me was a leap from the barn roof on which I stood to a neighboring roof. I tried this, and I am not exaggerating here, eight thousand times. I would almost make it, but not make it, and go crashing earthward, damning my virtual self to at the very least severely twisted ankles again and again. I howled with misery at the callous, uncaring world, and made a few agonizingly slow circuits of the ENTIRE island again, in search of something else that might help with my jumping dilemma. Nothing seemed to help.

Nothing, that is, until I accidentally hit the "K" key, thereby toggling the "Sneak" mode off for the game.

OK, that was an extremely geeky anecdote, I know. But I just picture this hapless video guy that I am controlling having to constantly crawl and shuffle along, preparing to jump in slow motion, knowing there is no possible way he will make it, because his Creator and Controller is a complete goober who can't figure out when he's in "sneak" mode. Enough said.

In case any of you doubt the veracity of this little tale, just ask my wife about the time that, after a year of owning a particular coat, which I wore almost daily, I looked up with an expression of childlike glee on my face and said "Hey! This jacket has pockets!"

I rest my case.

The jaw pain and swelling continue, invulnerable to the soothing efforts of frozen peas, corn, and even soy beans. It's quite amazing what an effect a small thing like the swelling of your jaw can have on your whole appearance. I really look like a different person. I kind of look like an old guy now, one of those jowly old guys who hem and haw a lot. I'm OK with the hemming, but I really don't know anything about hawing, so I guess I still have a ways to go.

I had this weird memory of the tooth-pulling, wherein the dental hygienist, assistant person was having this conversation with the doctor:

Dentist (or oral surgeon) to me: "You're going to be numb here, hopefully. Ha ha. [Dentists pretty much universally have this talent for actually laughing like the way you write laughing: "Ha ha." I think it's their way of subtly telling you that they don't really care if you think it's funny or not, because they make more money than you do, and deserve every cent of it for having to go rooting around in your gaping maw, which has to pretty disgusting. I think they also start talking to you more to see how spaced out you're getting from all the novocaine]

Hygienist: "Wow, wouldn't that suck if you were numb like that forever?"

Dentist to Hygienist: "Well, some people are like that. If they break their jaw or something."

Hygienist: "Wow!"

That conversation just struck me as a little weird. Were they trying to let me know that I should be grateful for these hours of pain and swelling that I am now suffering through, with the help of my friend Mr. Codeine? Maybe they were trying to warn me, now that it was too late, that there was indeed a chance I would never feel a thing with my jaw again. It is true that this is the same hygienist who was telling me how she used to get all kinds of free drugs from the last dentsist she worked at, and launched into a rather lengthy comparison of the relative merits of Vicadin vs. Codeine for recreational use.

Movies viewed so far:

cheezy rentals:
Rush Hour 2 - Kind of funny. The whole "You wacky Asian!", "You wacky black person!" thing is wearing a little thin though.
The Breed - Movie about vampires in some knock-off 1984 future that had the budget of about twelve dollars. Kind of like watching cut-scenes from a kind of crappy video game with a budget of twelve dollars. The only movie I've seen in a while that actually has "level bosses".
Mission To Mars - Excruciatingly boring. I like Tim Robbins, but after it took his character ten minutes to finally die in an extended "floating off into the coldness of space" scene, I'm not so sure.

From the Kafkaesque video library:
O Brother, Where Art Thou? - A classic of course.
High Fidelity - I love this movie. Don't ask why. I just do.

on the slab for today:
Panic
Robin and Marian
Caddyshack
Following

Only 5 codeines remaining? How will I survive?

Hi everyone! I just got back from two hours of super-fun!

That's right, I got my lower two wisdom teeth extracted, and boy was it fun!

The dentist had to give me about four rounds of shots, for some reason, which made it even better. So I'm a little loopy right now. The lower half of my head feels like a tetherball that has been played with by wolverines for a couple of hours. I am now eyeing bags of frozen corn and peas, wondering which frozen veggie will bring down the swelling more effectively.

Just a couple of comments before I retire to watch movies for the next 37 hours: When the dentist is levering your tooth out, he is levering it against your cheek, a part of your fragile form which has not been anaesthetized. I had a momentary thought: "Will my cheek in fact withstand the pulling, or will it give way, leaving me wisdom-toothless but with a flapping, torn cheek that will frighten children and result in my forever being known as 'Flappy Cheek'?"

I also thought this: "Are you pulling out my tooth, or bits of my skull? Because it kind of feels like the skull, doc."

Ahh, sweet codeine, take me away!

mmm! New Wong Kar-Wai film, "2046" seems to be rumored for 2002. Don't know who Wong Kar-Wai is? Shame! Shame on you! Go and rent ChungKing Express (Don't mind Tarantino's ugly mug introducing it...that's what the FF button is for. Just say no to giant film egos!) or Fallen Angels this instant! Or, if you want to ease into it with a little romance, try In The Mood For Love, simply one of the best films of the last couple of years.

I'm serious. Let's get on the ball here! I'll turn this weblog around right now!

Try me.

Something to think about next time you want to get up there and sing a little Love Shack in Cambodia. I have yet to decide if this is a good or bad thing.

So it's New Year's Eve. Inexplicably, I have the day off work, which means I am free to take in hours upon hours of the "In Search Of" marathon on the History Channel.

I love In Search Of. They really set it up perfectly, having Leonard Nimoy as the host. He just sounds so credible (unless you get a mental image of him hanging upside-down from a tree branch in that one Star Trek episode). Just a moment ago I saw this great episode about looking for Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat in 1969. And before that there was the search for The Garden of Eden in Bahrain. That's the great thing about watching In Search Of. It's 25 years old. Nothing you see on In Search Of is going to be in any way current. I think one of the things that tipped me off about the age of In Search Of was when the "modern equipment" they were using in their search for Noah's Ark was distinctly made of Bakelite and resembled an Easy-Bake Oven. "There's the damn Ark, oh and by the way your tart is done. Ping!"

When I was a kid and I watched In Search Of, it seemed kind of cutting-edge to me. Now, I really wonder if it's not all a bunch of stock footage, with Leonard Nimoy sitting around in a studio reading cue-cards and wearing a serape.

Nimoy Nimoy Nimoy

Hunter Dan Bow Hunter

I'm guessing Ted Nugent has a few of these attractive, yet nicely understated hunting action figures strewn about his Xanadu-like estate. As misterpants kindly pointed out the other day, The Nuge recently celebrated his birthday, so maybe now would be a nice time to send him some action figures.

Also: Christian Bowhunters of America.

It happened. It finally happened.

For years I have been successfully avoiding being the recipient of the George Foreman Lean Mean Fat Reducing Grilling Machine. And now, I too am saddled with one, like a lean, mean, fat reducing albatross around my neck. Even now I can feel the urge to grill something creeping into my consciousness. Like this poor sap I guess. Maybe they'll pull me away from the grill one day, as I try to stuff more ramen noodles into it, tears streaming down my emaciated face from all the fat-reducing. "No!" I will shout. "I must grill leanly! Fetch me some ground pork!"

But no-one will listen.

When A and I were registering for our wedding, the kindly saleslady (who by the way ensured that we will never in a million years have a complete matched set of dinner plates) warned us (with a tone reminiscent of Fiver the Rabbit from Watership Down screaming about blood streaming across the warren) that we would undoubtedly receive at least one Lean Mean Fat Reducing Grilling Machine. I couldn't quite figure out if she was saying that we shouldn't bother registering for it

a. even though we were desperate to grill everything in sight and couldn't wait for the selfless gift that George Foreman had martyred himself to create for our sins

or

2. because no-one really wants or needs it.

Maybe she has a Grilling Machine. Maybe she has ten of the things. Maybe she stays up late into the night grilling things that probably shouldn't be grilled. I don't know.

As an aside here, I must say that if you are registering for a wedding, you can't go wrong with this. The Dark Monkey Lord Candleholder. My pal Chimichanga was kind enough to get the Dark Monkey Lord for us, after it hypnotized me with its little monkey devil eyes and forced me to register for it. Definitely the coolest gift ever. Here's some more of the work of the Arthur Court Designs people. If you want peculiar, they got plenty of it.

Oh, and I can't forget The Juiceman. I love our juiceman. I love the fact that it was invented by an overgrown oompah-loompah with Bob Barker's hair. That is close to the Dark Monkey Lord on the coolest gifts ever list. I think I enjoy the Juiceman so much because it mixes two of my favorite things: Fresh Fruit and Extreme Violence. You can put the pineapple in the juicer with the rind still on, the saleslady told us at the registry, and I was hooked. I never thought I'd be at a stage of my life where I am purchasing more than one pineapple a week, but here I am, and I love it. You hear me? I love it! You can get The Juiceman's little recipe book with the juicer, in which he starts to get a little weird with spinach and garlic juice, and other things of a decidedly unseemly nature. But we stick to oranges, apples, pineapple and mangoes. Let's just say, you don't want to be a piece of fruit in the Kafkaesque household. Not that you would want to or anything, but you get my point.

Oh, and someone seems to want to stop The Juiceman.

Where was I? Oh, the Grilling. I am now a Griller. Oh! Did I mention it's got burger bun warmers on the top? Must...grill...must...grill........

Pray for me.

Oh, and by the way, feliz navidad!

So I have returned from my Christmas ramblings. I got all the important Christmas items this year. I'm sure you already know, but the important Christmas items are:

1. Johnny Cash paraphernalia
2. Plush Cthulhus
3. A Drink with Shane MacGowan

I did get my wife a GameBoy Advance for Christmas, which of course means that I will never see her again. Damn that Yoshi! Now all that is required is a million-candle-power halogen light so she can see the screen.

I hope all of you had a peaceful and happy Christmas. The new year is approaching quickly, and I think we can probably all agree that it has been one of the strangest and saddest years in recent history. This is the time to be thankful for your life, and your friends. Take a moment to remember those we lost this year in New York, in Afghanistan, and all that will be lost in the coming months. I'll raise a pint of the black to them, and to you. Thanks for wasting your time here, and sharing some of the monkey love.

The Soup Conspiracy Revealed

Something is afoot around here. I put off mentioning it for a long time, because I think this goes deep. Real deep. In the last few weeks I began to notice something as I drove to and from work: a peculiar odor. Not the odor present in my workplace after a catered buffet by El Pollo Loco. Something more sinister: Soup Stink.

I work in a largely industrial area, which makes the soup smell even harder to fathom. And it's not just any soup either. It's that peculiar powdery greenish chicken soup that you get out of vending machines with faded pictures of hot cocoa on the outside. That soup has always had the sad future-nostalgia quality of things designed to be futuristic in the late 60s, and that missed by a mile. Like those chairs shaped like eggs with the speakers in them. I once worked in a place that featured the Hot Drinks vending machine, and once I even worked up the courage to buy the soup. This is how I learned, among other things, not to buy that soup again, and that it wasn't so much chicken-flavored as it was rust-flavored.

This soup is in some way related to the "Lipton's Cup O' Soup Spontaneous Generation" Phenomenon, whereby a cupboard in your kitchen, left in its natural state, will develop small nodules resembling vestigial organs that will over time become Lipton's Cup O' Soup packets. You will lead your normal (and let's face it, pretty tedious) existence, without a care in the world, until one day you open up the cupboard, hoping for a little chocolate pudding or something pleasing, and your eyes will be shocked by the vision of spontaneously generated Cup O' Soup packets, grinning out at you like hideous instant soup demons, possibly from another dimension.

Where was I? Oh yes.

So what I'm saying is that it smells like instant soup as I drive along on my way home. This fact was disturbing enough in and of itself, but then it struck me: There are two soup-themed restaurants in this area. The Soup Plantation and the enigmatically named Soup Exchange. I don't buy for a second that you can bring in, say, five packs of Ramen and get a bowl of French Onion. And god knows the exchange rate on a can of Chunky Sirloin Burger. I think it's a fair assumption that whatever soup is being exchanged there, it is purely metaphorical soup and is no actual exchange of physical soup per se.

Now, one soup-themed eatery I can understand. BUT TWO? I think the whole thing is indicative of a vast underground soup network. Powdery greenish chicken soup is being piped through our sewer system, and we are powerless to staunch the flow. I just have to work out some minor details, like who is doing this crazy soup stuff. And why they would want to. I think it may have something to do with scaring off people so they can buy the land really cheap, and involves phosphorescent footprints. Hmm.

~~~~~

My apologies if that post just got weirder and weirder. It was written over the course of a day that involved repeated attacks by lurking Swedish-Butter-Cookie tins, and consequent sugar weirdness.

Anyway, I may not be able to post again til after Christmas (unless the elves let me that is), so please have a happy and safe Holiday. And spare a thought for the monkeys. I'm sure you can spare one little thought for the monkeys, you miser.

Further proof that people have, at best, a questionable sense of humor.

I don't know who it was. I don't care who it was. The fact is this:

You do NOT leave an empty box of Krispy Kremes sitting out, fooling the innocent donut consuming public into believing a tasty treat is within their grasp, only to have their hopes dashed by the donut-vacuum within. I experienced the crushing emptiness of the box this morning, containing only the donut run-off of a few red and green sprinkles. Truly a sad sight. I drew the line at licking the inside of the box, in a pathetic attempt to glean the last shreds of Krispy Kreme goodness from the unfeeling white cardboard.

As everyone knows, Krispy Kremes are best donuts in this world. And I ought to know, because I live in Southern California. There are a ridiculous amount of donut shops here. I'd even go so far as to say that there's a plethora. And that's not a word I use lightly. So there you go. They have drive-thru donut shops. They have giant donut-shaped donut shops. I'd be willing to guess that donuts in this county probably outnumber mammals. That (besides being a recipe for a nightmare donut-coup of epic proportions, led by a deluded Maple Bar who seizes power before he can be eaten) is way too many donuts.

So, of course I'm going to have a Krispy Kreme jones for days now, until I give in and drive in a rabid donut fury to get a box of the damn things. Life is so hard.

And I don't even really like most donuts. I just eat one every now and then to remind myself how icky they are.

Deep questions with The American Egg Board.

Cookin up a storm with eggs. That is some damn fine egg art.

What's that you say? You say you want to see bead-work that depicts alien pods and the many philosophical questions raised by gene tampering?

You didn't say that?

I think you did.

Everyone should have a cow friend

I believe that this is true. I was so moved by this photo I made up a little poem:

My best friend's a cow
She chews her cud bovinely
and startles easy

The beauty of the cow friend is that they don't want anything from you and even if they did, they would be pretty much incapable of telling you about it. So it's pretty much a win-win situation for you, the Human component of the Human-Cow friendship. You just take and you take, don't you?

The DoubleTree Inn Powerpoint Complaint

via machaus, among others.

I just had a great conversation with a coworker of mine (Let's call him "Steve" because that's his real name).

Steve: "Dude. I just saw Jurassic Park 3 last night. It was awesome"
me: "I didn't see those movies."
Steve: "Yeah, you know in the first one, like they had that Raptor thing?"
me: "No."
Steve: "Well, they had more about the raptor."
me: "I didn't see it."
Steve: "And then you remember in the second one? When they had the T-Rex, and it was running around in San Diego?"
me: "Um. no?"
Steve: "That was stupid, huh?"
me: "Sounds stupid. ['Though you must remember that I haven't actually seen these movies of which you speak, oh wise one,' I wanted to say but didn't. Funny how you only think of these things too late. ah well.] So, these movies are about an amusement park with Dinosaurs in it right?"
Steve: "Actually, there's this island with Dinosaurs on it."
me: "Why don't they just not go to the island?"
Steve: "Because they were windsurfing."
me: "Ah. I see."
Steve: "Remember in that part? When they were like, let's go near that island?"
me: "No. I didn't see those movies."

You get the general idea.

Metal frogs love to play golf. When they're not expressing themselves musically, that is.

And let me just leave you with this. I'm not quite sure what's going on there, but it's nothing I want to be a party to.

So the preliminary results are in for the big "Should We Have Comments on My Life As An American Gladiator" vote.

The results so far:

Aye: 0
Nay: 0
Where can I get stickers of Calvin pissing on Jeff Gorden [sic]: 1

As you can see, the above results are really too close to call an exact winner at this time. And as the polls have not yet closed in Hawaii, I feel it would be premature to project.

The opinion expressed in the single vote cast is a valid one, of course. The question of whether or not to add a Comments feature for the vast hoards of readers who frequent this den of iniquity automatically brings to mind the stock-car racing angle. I'm glad one dedicated soul took it upon himself to point this out. And I hope we've all learned a little somthing. I know I have.

I also got to use the nice little "[sic]" thing, which is a great tool for telling people you didn't make the boorish spelling mistake, you merely reprinted it for others' petty amusement.

Does anyone really think it's a good idea to to put bumper stickers like "BAD COP – NO DONUT!" on your car? That won't negatively effect your experience with law enforcement, now will it? Those stickers are just about as good of an idea as a pot leaf or those stupid Grateful Dead teddy bears. The only saving grace on those last two is that they're usually stuck to a VW microbus that could only dream of exceeding the speed limit if it had a severe tailwind going.

~~~~~~~~

Some of the more observant among you may have noticed that there are now pictures over there on the left of your screen. We in the high tech "biz" call them "graphics" or "images". Don't worry. You don't have to write that down or anything. I won't quiz you. Not for a while anyway.

What happened was that my wife, the techno-whiz of the family (I run third, behind her and the cat), finally imparted the secret of how to put graphics on my blog, with the infinite patience of those who teach the handicapped. First, we have a picture of me, to ward off evil spirits and make my readers feel better about their own appearance.

Below is a guy I simply call El Diablo Jazz. Who is he? Where did he come from? Can he draw Tippy and gain entrance to the exciting, fast-paced world of art?

The fact is, he was made for me by the multi-talented Bindlestick Billy, no stranger to the Play-doh Arts. Consider him your unofficial guide to My Life As An American Gladiator. Well, maybe that's not the best idea because you can't really interact with him in any way. Consider him your personal Gatekeeper, who will never, ever let you through the gate.

Ever.

Note to self for possible Mariachi / Pixies Cover Band name:

Jalapeno Pixie Stick

Time for another super fun day!

Let's all play some Flash Air Hockey.

Now maybe we should calm down with a little Fling the Cow.

Now, get ready for the mind-boggling fun of Home Run Rally at the Life Savers website. The really great thing about Home Run Rally is that you can compete for prizes. Even better than that is the fact that you will never beat the high scores that have already been posted there, unless you are dedicated enough to winning valuable Life Saver prizes that you are willing to sit and crack mighty mouse-click home runs for literally hours without having that moment of clarity when you say "Oh man! I've been clicking a button for two hours and my socks are sitting in the washing machine, wet and sad. I am truly worthless." That's the kind of Satori you can expect from Home Run Rally. Not everyone is ready for such a lightning-flash glimpse in the darkest depths of their soul, but if you think you're ready, go ahead. Don't say I didn't warn you though.

If you get a high enough score, you get to stride to the pitcher's mound and pull off the pitcher's mask, "V" style, revealing the true depths of your baseball nightmare: The pitcher has your own face! All of a sudden you realize your life has been a battle against your own ineptitude, launching mighty home runs off a virtual scoreboard but only wounding your own fragile self as you experience the duality of the pitcher-batter dichotomy.

Knowledge is a powerful thing.

by the way all these links are gratuitously stolen from Not My Desk, a site that is consistently hi-damn-larious, which is unsettling but true.

OK everyone! Time to gather the children around and anoint them with lotion and make sure they're all bundled up in their neckerchiefs and bloomers. It's time for another of Kafkaesque's Great Ideas!

It goes a little something like this:

Ever since I can remember, there have been really impossibly lame campaigns against drugs. One clue as to how effective these campaigns have been is that they come out with a new one every 6 months or so. if any of them had been even marginally successful, it would still be around. You'd still be seeing ads with that guy chasing a vial around a bathroom stall, or the exciting 'I do more cocaine, so I can work longer, so I can get more money, so I can buy more cocaine..." which must have been made into a club dance mix at one time or another. But you don't see those anymore. Or the laughable "Brain on Drugs" thing, or Rock Against Drugs.

I think if Lou Reed or Iggy Pop or Keith Richards is telling you not to do drugs, they're only doing it to make up some community service time from last time they got caught sleeping naked in a stranger's guest room or something. I mean Lou Reed looks like he's been keel-hauled every Thursday at 5 for the last ten years. It would be more effective if Lou just said "Look kids, if you don't want to look like you've been dead for six years, lay off the hard stuff. Oh, and don't settle for walking." Or maybe they could just play some of his back catalogue of 70s and 80s solo releases for a while and say "Don't do drugs or you too could end up writing songs called 'Disco Mystic'".

But I digress. I have the ultimate way to keep your kids from doing drugs: do drugs in front of them. That's right. Spark up a bowl while little Johnny has his friends over for his fourteenth birthday party and then (and this is the real key) act really embarrassing and dull. After the bowl is depleted, the bong has bonged its last, put on some sweatervests and play your Helen Reddy albums. Sing Karaoke to Britney Spears songs. Suggest that all of Johnny's guests join you in a knitting circle, or maybe make God's Eyes out of popsicle sticks.

Johnny will be so traumatized he will stay away from that devil weed for the rest of his life. This plan's beauty is in its simplicity: kids will do whatever you don't want them to do, so remember to constantly reinforce the message. "Johnny!" you can yell from the converstion pit "Come in here and play Connect Four with your parents! We're hopped up on goofballs and ready for fun!"

Oh man, is Planet of the Apes bad! Bad, bad, bad! Not to belabor the point here, but it was probably one of the worst and most disappointing movies I have ever seen. Tim Burton, formerly one of my favorite directors, now goes straight to the bottom of the pile, or to the bottom of a well, if I can arrange it. This piece of crap film will join the unspeakable badness of The Naked Man and Free Enterprise in the file of My Least Favorite Movies.

the evidence:

- The lead female ape looks almost exactly like Michael Jackson, which makes the sexual tension between her and Marky Mark even more disturbing than it already is (which is plenty disturbing)
- Both big endings of the film are guessable exactly ten minutes into the film.
- Both big endings make you want to pull out your eyes and/or ears rather than have to endure their stunning lameness.
- Cutesy catch phrase lines like "can't we all just get along" are liberally used until you are standing up and challenging the movie: "Do your worst!" you cry. "I can take it! Bring on the moronic dialogue and atrociously poor scriptwriting. I don't even care anymore!" Maybe that one was just me.
- Human female native type included purely for cleavage reasons somehow manages to keep herself spotlessly clean as all around her remain covered in various layers of slime and monkey filth.
- The biggest problem with Planet of The Apes, besides it being astoundingly, unimaginably tedious and migraine-inducing: Not one of the apes in this movie (not even the Jar-Jar-esque comic relief guy) ever once put on a sailor suit and danced around.

We all know that if there were a real planet of the apes, at least half the time would be spent dancing around in sailor suits. Probably the other half would be spent in a variety of feces-related activities that I don't want to go into here. Use your imaginations, if you must.

So they're renovating our offices here at work. Part of the fun inherent in doing this while we're still working is that I now have no cubical walls, and am consqeuently adrift in a wall-less cube farm. Imagine a hamster if you suddenly whisked away his Habitrail from around him. That's me. Not even a lousy Liberty Ball.

One of the best things about the renovation is that they're repainting around us as we work. As I am typing this, I can hear the resounding thuds of my coworkers' heads hitting their keyboards as they are overcome with paint fumes. Even better, not satisfied with your garden-variety white walls, they have begun to paint "accent" walls. My new office will be yellowish, though the color is called mustard or something made up because someone thought "yellow" was a little too pedestrian. Today, I have witnessed two walls being painted. I am told the colors are "taupe" and "grape". After a few moments viewing these walls, I am ready to tell you that taupe and grape are this year's Official Colors of Soul-Crushing Despair, barely edging out the former champs "salmon" and "teal".

Just in time for Christmas: The Pause of Mr Claus. That's right, it's the saga of the Last Guy, enshrined at arlonet forever. Life is indeed good.

Today's message is a very simple one, and one that you would do well to remember as you struggle through life's many highways and byways:

Corn-nuts smell like pee.

My coworker told me about a great dream he had last night (and I swear to god I am not making this up):

Apparently Sir Water Raleigh and Hulk Hogan were fighting for the hand of Queen Elizabeth I.

That's all he told me. I needed to hear no more. After you have a mental image of Sir Walter Raleigh and Hulk Hogan beating the snot out of each other, while Queen Elizabeth I sits off to the side watching and applauding softly, you've pretty much had it all.

This whole dream thing brings me to something I can bitch about, which is really why we're all here, now isn't it? You know what sucks? When you tell someone about this great dream you had, like the masterpiece mentioned above, and they come back with "Oh, yeah. I guess that's weird, but let me tell you about the dream that I had". Whereupon they launch into a description of the most mind-boggling, technicolor dreamscape, beyond your wildest imaginings: "Dinosaurs with chicken heads swimming through oceans of rice pudding, complete with an appearance by superstar prop comedian Carrot Top, who dropped by and gouged his own eyes out with a live salmon. In my dream, toast was used as money and the king of wombats ruled over all he surveyed from the silken walls of his castle made of Jamaican Allspice. Your hair and fingernails grew inward instead of outward, complicating haircuts and manicures to a ridiculous degree. Elvis was still alive and running a VCR Repair Shop...etc etc."

But I digress. The point is that at least half of the time, they're making it up. It's the pettiest form of one-upsmanship that there is: the "my dream is better than your dream" syndrome. This phenomenon is akin to the "lack-of-sleep braggadocio" which we have all been a party to at one time or another:

"Good gosh," sighs your coworker. "I only got five hours of sleep last night."

Sensing your opportunity for self-aggrandizement, you leap into the fray with a chilling tone "Five hours?" Then with a wistful look in your eyes, you say "I wish I could get five hours of sleep. I get more like two and a half" which is of course a complete lie as you were snoozing away, making icky sleep noises for a good 7 hours last night. This will continue until both parties reach a unit of time which both agree is too ridiculous to allow the charade to continue.

So today I had to have a picture of myself (well,my hand anyway) taken holding the company's product, because I have big hands and it made the product look small. Draw your own conclusions.

Anyway, after we took the picture the photoshop guy took the background out and I inserted the photo into a brochure I'm making in Quark XPress.

"But Kafkaesque." I hear you cry "Why must you trouble us with this boring tale of your humdrum existence?!"

Because, my friends, it started to get a little bit creepy. Here I am, fiddling around with what is, ostensibly*, a picture of my disembodied hand! To make matters worse, the photoshop guy had kind of feathered the wrist-end of the picture, making it really look like a severed hand traveling around the page, re-justifying text all willy-nilly.

And even worse than that, I saw a film last night called The Crimson Rivers, starring internationally recognized Stupendous Badass Jean Reno, and the movie featured numerous shots of severed hands! Including a whole bucketful of them. Yikes! The movie, buy the way, is ok if you're into Stupendous Badass Jean Reno. Otherwise it's a little disappointing. Top marks on the severed hands though. Very lifelike.

So what I'm getting at here is it was creepy. Did I mention that? Well it was. I'm going to curl up with some chamomile tea now and try not to think about it, until I go to sleep and have nightmares about my severed hand and serif fonts.


*For fun, use the word "ostensibly" in every sentence you can until people start to notice and stop inviting you to parties. "Ostensibly" is a word you can use to make yourself appear smarter than you actually are, which is always nice.

By the way, that last post was my official entry for "most nonsensical and uninteresting post of the year" award.

*fingers crossed*

I was thinking about The White Seal today. Not the show with the white basketball coach. That was The White Shadow. No, I'm talking about The White Seal, a seasonal cartoon for kids that was about the dangers of clubbing baby seals, because if you do club baby seals, you will be menaced by a white seal, which as we all know is pretty scary. I remember digging this special when I was a pup, though I don't think they show it anymore. It was probably too traumatic. In some corner of my mind it is linked to a horrible film they showed us in grade school that featured a field full of prairie dogs being blown up using copious amounts of TNT. Of course, it was very similar to another Rudyard Kipling cartoon: Rikki-Tiki Tavi, which was about the dangers of being a King Cobra when there's a strutting mongoose hanging around the veranda.

Anyway, what I'm getting at here is that I think these sort of stories scarred me emotionally as a child. I get too worked up when I see them and end up sobbing like a little baby.

Whenever there are animals on screen, I know trouble is afoot. When you've got a cute little dog in a movie, he may as well be wearing a red shirt on Star Trek: his fictional thread will be cut short just as soon as you, the viewer, grow attached to him. Don't even talk to me about Where The Red Fern Grows. I'm getting choked up just thinking about it. Or The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Where's PETA on this one I ask you? Protect the fictional doggies! Let them no longer be used to tug our heartstrings! Make their existence more meaningful than simply a plot device!

Christmas Music from Santa on Monkeybike.

I defy you to read the text on this site without bleeding out of your eyes. I think the Monkeybike-Santa connection is something best left undiscussed.

Oh stop! It's just too good. Santa Cthulhu!

I hope you have all been keeping the faith on that "boycott Clamato" thing in my absence. We will bring Clamato to its knees! Not to suggest that clams have knees or anything. Maybe they do. They're probably just biding their time on this whole evolution thing, awaiting their moment to rise and claim the earth by divine right, smashing the state underneath the awesome grandeur of their Red Tide. Just imagine the glorious tiny deep knee bends!

Anyway, maybe mobile pants and clams will fight it out one day on Pay Per View. We can but dream.

The reason for me being incommunicado for a stretch was of course that Thanksgiving reared its turkey head and I was at home and therefore subject to the whim of AT&T Broadband, which sucks a mammoth amount of ass. Or butt, if you prefer the PG version. We were unable to get DSL in our current digs, and therefore were forced into a Cable modem situation. One of the great things about having a cable modem is that you get a modem which looks like a cross between the shiny black Alien head from Aliens and a suped up Future-Toaster (which, in itself, looks a lot like a shiny black alien head, without the second jaw thing or as much ichor dripping from its thristing snout thing). Sadly, though the modem looks keenbean and all, it is:

a. incapable of remaining vertical on my little computer rack, performing a near-nightly ritual in which it pirouettes daintily and falls over on its side, owing to it being shaped like an alien head and all. Actually it kind of looks like a shark fin too, though I wouldn't recommend anyone making soup out of it.

and

2. seldom functional.

When it works, it's fast as something very fast. Say, one of those lizards that run across the water on their back feet. That kind of fast. Way faster than our DSL was. But it goes out with stunning regularity and when it goes out you can:

a. Take all the wires out and go eat some cereal. Usually a high-fiber choice like Just Right or Special K will do the trick, though sometimes you have to kick it into high gear with some All-Bran. Then, after you have had some internal flora exercise, you return to your computer den, where you patiently reconnect all the wires, wondering if you should do it in some special order, or if maybe you should have tried the Cookie Crisp, with the end result being that it still doesn't work.

or

2. Call the apes at tech support who will tell you to disconnect all the wires and wait a while and then reconnect them (they never even mention what you should snack on in the interim, which I feel is a major factor in their low success record). The end result of this will be that it still doesn't work. If you really pester them they get all defensive and threaten to actually send one of their goons to your home where he will disconnect and reconnect all the wires, and probably clear out your pantry while he's waiting. If you push them past even this sad state, they will just say "powercycle the modem" until you hang up.

That's enough about AT&T.

Another thought occurred to me while we were cooking up our turkey this Thanksgiving: by living on the fourth floor of my apartment hive, I am placing an obscene amount of trust in the people who live below me. This thought really hit me when I began to hear a chorus of smoke alarms going off in the building. Then, it got worse when I realized that most of my experience with my fellow apartment drones is hearing them sitting in the hot tub of an evening and making hooting noises. Best not to think about it.

~~~

Another thing here: What do all seven of you think about having a "comments" feature on this here weblog thingy? Email me and let me know. Of course, if I did enable comments, there would be no calling me a chucklehead or doing anything but lauding sycophantic praise upon me. That would be OK right?

Just a word on this whole "mobile pants" thing:

I am hopeful that soon there will come a day when you will be able to purchase pants that will hold your laptop as well as your PDA, along with maybe the yellow pages and medium sized rocks. I envision a future in which pants rule the earth! People carry around so much weight in their voluminous pants pockets that they lose all ambulatory power, in a cruel twist on the "mobile" pants theme.

Then, after experiments to free ourselves from the shackles of our mobile pants, the pants become saturated with Gamma Rays (much like Bill Bixby except that he's a dead actor who turned into the Hulk and hosted a TV show whose title I can't remember but which I think had something to do with Roald Dahl, and the pants are not) and become sentient pants, roaming the land in gargantuan herds, dragging their sobbing owners behind them as they do terrible things that pants have always secretly fantasized about, like...well...bad pants stuff.

Hmm this sounded much more interesting when I started.

Oh well. Have a Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Eat lots of turkey and enjoy the wonders of bloating, napping and breaking wind with the rest of the country. I know I will.

I am currently rockin' in the free world. If any changes occur to a. my rockin' or non-rockin' status or 2. my location or its relative freedom, you will be notified immediately. Should a loss in rockin' status occur (which, though unlikely, is within the realm of possiblity) more rockin' will be added until an acceptably rockin' level has been restored.

You say you want free access to page-long paragraphs about unspeakable Old Gods? Well, buster, here you go.

Quantum Tubers.

There's nothing particularly wild about Quantum Tubers, except that it would make a badass band name. Also, it's fun to say in a voice like people have in old Roger Corman movies when they come around the corner and realize that all that genetic tampering the government has been doing with cuttlefish has finally produced a 500 foot tall, really pissed off cuttlefish. Let's all try it now: "QUANTUM TUBERS?! Why, God? Why?!?" Then we fall to our knees and weep openly at man's hubris.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

On a completely unrelated note, have a look at my good friend Sasko Sam, the South African Bread Man.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Also pretty much completely unrelated: Very cool T-shirt.

A documentary about Kafka's distant cousin, Egon Kafka. When I heard "Egon" Kafka, I was hoping for more of a Ghostbusters-meets-Kafka sort of thing, but what can you do?

Useful fact about Kafkaesque: I was once beaten at Ping-Pong by a midget. Swear to god.

Yipee!

Going to see Sparklehorse tonight. Can't wait.

Grievous plans have been set in motion for the future look of this site, like for example making it not look like crap. That would be a step in the right direction. I hope people are getting the idea that I am from the "Less Is More" school of blog design. In actuality, I am from the "What the Heck Am I Doing?" school of blog design, but don't let on.

Oh, and by the way, I am mourning the loss of a blog entry that included such highlights as:

· Julio, the suicidal bagel shop manager
· Why I am, in fact, better than him
· The unknowable name of God

Not necessarily in that order. But, of course, the all knowing Blogger pooped on it and took it away for ever and ever, so it will remain a subject of myth and legend but nothing more, until one day the lost entry surfaces in an abandoned mine in Peru, the product of an elaborate hoax and some restless gnomes.

Let me just finish today by saying that it is probably a good thing that the whole "Gnome" craze faded almost entirely from the public eye, remembered only by nostalgic folk such as myself who remember that in the Nick Jr. cartoon "gnome" series, the voice of the lead gnome was Tom Bosley of Happy Days, Father Dowling Mysteries and Glad Garbage Bag fame. I'm not talking about your garden variety gnome here. I mean those guys with the red caps and beards that were cropping up in books and on the side of innocent coffee mugs in the 80s. Sends a chill down my spine just thinking of it.

I will one day put actual links in my entries. For reals this time.

So since this whole "living every day in at least relative fear for your life" thing started, we wake up every morning and put on CNN. A few thoughts have occurred to me as I munch my bagel or my scintillating mix of Corn Flakes and Frosted Flakes (a devilish mix which summons up bizarre mascot ideas in which Tony the Tiger must be cross-bred with that green chicken Corn Flake thing. The whole "weakening of food" principle has loomed large in my life as I have gotten older: Watering down the Orangina with some mineral water, tempering the sugar-bang of cereal with analagous, blander and altogether less pleasing flakes. It is my firm belief that I am not backing away from the sensation of full-powered food items, but merely decreasing the frequency with which I sample their delights, with the objective that when i do eat a bag of Pop Rocks, say, my head will become fully rotational from the sugar rush and I will be able to join a traveling freak show, a career choice about which I have so often fantasized.)

1. All CNN anchorwomen are slowly gravitating towards the exact same haircut.
2. Why do I care about Paula Zahn's haircut?
3. I really really really want to play RISK on the giant map they have over there at CNN. Can you imagine the rush of power as you stand in a ten foot long representation of Kamchatka, eyeing the west coast of North America with a steely glare as you boldly stride across a huge plastic representation of the dotted line across the Pacific?
4. I find myself distracted by the people who have their desks directly behind the anchors' desk. What are their lives like? They must know that they are visible. I bet their friends call them up while they're in-shot and have them make some secret signal. I have experienced momentary thrills of excitement when I have caught one of them in a secret on-air bite of a danish, and I once saw two of them engaged in a lively discussion which was obviously in no way work-related. They're like the CNN Elves, cobbling together the stories for the clueless anchors, ready for a heartfelt delivery in which the anchors approximate sincerity and act like authority figures, when we know they're really only worried about their outfit.
5. They have some strange commercials on CNN. I don't know if it's because the spots are extremely cheap, but they seem to take an almost sadistic glee in running the commercial for the 15 year-old opera singer's greatest hits ad infinitum.
6. Wolf Blitzer = No longer the cool and hip dude he once was, now relegated to a supporting role, like some crazed and disfigured Phantom of the Opera, lurking in the highest CNN scaffolding and soiling Larry King's wardrobe in a sad plea for help.
7. I promise not to watch CNN tomorrow. I really mean it this time.

Thanks to everyone for your support in the groundbreaking write-in campaign, but I feel it is my duty to support Dodge Ram as the new mayor of Truckville. It was a close race right up to the end, but when Dodge Ram got Aerosmith's endorsement, I could see the writing on the wall. So please join me in lending my support to Dodge Ram, and let's all try to get behind big ugly needless trucks in their quest to rule over all they survey.

Well, that wasn't technically true.

What really happened is that your old pal Kafkaesque turned 30. A (my wonderful wife) took me to Point Arena, where we stayed at a rad (as the kids say) Bed and Breakfast called the Historic Coast Guard Inn, and did some wine tasting in the Anderson Valley.

So there really wasn't a whole lot of rasslin' going on. Unless you count the luxurious bathtub in our room where I rassled a loofah for a while until A explained to me that a loofah is not technically alive, and therefore not a legitimate rasslin' foe. For an inanimate object, though, that was one tough loofah. Maybe I'll reconsider this whole rasslin' thing.

And A also planned a surprise party for me, which I have never had before. All my buddies showed, except of course for Bungee Benji, who's on a deep cover assignment in Costa Rica, being professionally cool for the government.

Did I mention I have the best wife in the known universe?

Well, I do.

OK, I know I haven't updated this thing for a week or so, but I was unexpectedly called away to go rassle stuff. That's my new thing: rasslin'.

If you need any critters and/or varmints rassled for any reason, just drop me a line. I understand that some of the reasons for the desired rasslin' may be of a personal nature, so you don't have to go into detail. Your anonymity is assured. As long as I get to rassle something, I'm cool.

You may also be required to sign a waiver in case of damage to yourself or any garments, particularly suede garments, that may be incurred as a result of the aforementioned rasslin', because, as you are probably well aware, once the rasslin' starts, it can get ugly right quick.

OK. That's it.

**Clam Signal**

I never got any free stuff from the Clamato people, and now all bets are off. Please join me in a complete boycott of any and all Clamato products. I know this will probably entail actually starting to consume any Clamato at all, which may give some of you the willies, but this is important!

Honestly, you could probably get away with just telling everyone how much Clamato you used to drink before some idiot with a weblog forced you to boycott your favorite bivalve beverage. It'd be your word against theirs, after all, and who wouldn't take your side? No jury in the land would convict you! Feel free to give in to the spirit of the occasion by describing huge troughs of Clamato, to which you may have added whole Clamfruit, for added clamness, that you would consume nightly in a vast clam juice orgy of truly biblical proportions.

They'll be sorry. Oh yes.

I'm sorry. I know I haven't posted for a few days, but I have been deeply involved in the assembly of IKEA furniture. I may have gotten a little too involved. At one point I managed to trap myself inside a Wall Unit for six hours, only freed when a kindly group of dextrous Swedes liberated me. So of course, that was a little traumatic, but the upside is that I am now totally modular and can be expanded to hold everything from kitchen utensils to an entire entertainment system, using only an allen wrench. My nose can be placed in up to four different positions, in case you're having company over and need that extra space. It also seems that my legs are now available in birch, beech or medium-brown veneer, which will be handy for assimilating into foreign cultures where birch veneer is the norm.

Thank you, by the way, for not including the shelf hangers in my wall unit packaging, kindly Swedes.

So we recently purchased one of those fax/printer thingys. Mere days after bringing this little bundle of joy into the Stygian depths of our study/computer lounge, Fax Spam started to spew forth copiously. Fax Spam is mystifying to me. Admittedly, many things are mystifying to me, like how TV works and why a tomato is a fruit, but that's beside the point.

Do they just keep trying numbers until one of them happens to be a fax machine? I picture legions of pathetic lackeys shackled to phones with lots of shiny buttons that don't really do anything calling number after number after number, their cruel, hunchbacked supervisor leaning over them and lightly brushing their pasty neck with a riding crop, whispering "Was that one a fax number, you fool? No? Oh yes, the whip I think."

So they determine I have a fax machine and just start hurling garbage at me, on – and this is the best part – paper I paid for. Why just today the good folks at Wendy's somehow decided that I was in dire need of a FREE CHICKEN SANDWICH! and sent me some convenient coupons. What a nice guy that old man with the heart trouble must be.

After I get done with my sandwich, it's off on a delightful CARNIVAL CRUISE for a mere $299! But the fun doesn't stop there. Then I can buy toner from people who use clip art cheerleaders on their flyers. That must be some damn good toner.

But the real coup de grace, which I'm keeping under my hat, is the HOT STOCK TIP which showed up on something that looked mindbogglingly close to a copy of the Wall Street Journal. Oh, except that it was on a letter-sized piece of MY paper and seemed to consist only of an article about how it would be the very height of depravity not to divest my entire life savings and invest in UniverCell Holdings (OTC BB: UCVL: PARROT TURD).

Oh no! I let the name of my hot stock tip slip! Now all seven of you reading this will be able to reap the gargantuan gains which can only be gained from unwanted crap shooting out of your innocent fax machine. Horrors!

Thank you, Fax Spam!

Today, an investigation into a strange behavioral anomaly that has been cropping up across this great nation of ours much like one of those frosted strawberry pop-tarts, especially in that if you stick it in your mouth too soon you burn the crap out of your tongue. Sound familiar? That's right, I'm talking about Cat-Dancing.

Just look at the delight:

Monica & Buster

I can't even begin to guess what's going on here.

Someone is just off camera throwing this cat.

And again, the weirdness.

And not to be excluded from the current cat artistic renaissance: Cats That Paint.

Feather Fondue.

Feather Frontier.

A little something I like to call: Cat In Bathtub Making Huge Mess.

All this is taken from the awesomely peculiar: Museum of Non-Primate Art

Umm, bird crap art?

Mallard poo as art.

Maybe this is a joke. Can this be a joke? Who among us would not leap at the opportunity to pay over $100,000 to go on this expedition, where "Generally, he will become more fully conversant with all aspects of Tibetan cat charming." Tibetan Cat Charming. Hmm. This had better be a hoax or you know that Rage Against The Machine guy will be all hot and bothered either protesting or supporting it. I'd say he'll probably come out in favor of Tibetan Cat Charming if he gets to wear one of those wooly Tibetan hats. Tough angry singer types love those things.

It has to be a joke. They misspelled "Scholarship" for one, and their research includes the development of a "Walkcat". Oh and the study of day-glo cat spray.

Please let it be a joke.