Site Update: Family Troubles

I'm working on an essay type thing for the site and hope to have somethin' new up soon. However, the family's been experiencing technical difficulties of late. It's been One of Those Weeks.

Hopefully, I'll be back.

Forbidden Secrets, Forbbiden Places, Forbidden Things

Back in February, I reviewed a short film called Cigarette Burns. The basic plot of the film deals with the search for a film that, when viewed, drives the viewer insane. Your basic Uwe Boll movie, say.

It's a powerful notion, isn't it? By design or accident, someone create something that can destroy you by you by seeing it, by hearing it, sometimes even just being in its presence.

It is a most interesting subject. How do you deal with something like that? Can it be stopped?

Here, for the reader's edification, is a short list of Forbidden Secrets, Forbidden Places, and Forbidden Things that should not be seen, things that should not be read, things that should not be heard, places that should not be visited. Be wary.

Click here for the list.

• The Funniest Joke in the World: a sketch done by Monty Python's Flying Circus. A failed joke writer succeeds in making people laugh with fatal consequences. As silly as the sketch is, it paints a very good picture of how a government might want to use such devastating power. It also seems to have inspired a story in the animated Fraggle Rock. It's called The Funniest Joke in the Universe, so as one can tell the difference between the two jokes, and while I can remember seeing it, I can't recall that much of it.
• Need to Know: a story from the New Twilight Zone. that I remembered called in which a man struggles to prevent a "secret" from spreading madness over the world. He doesn't do a very good job of it.
• The Haunting of Hill House and The House Next Door: Two novels of houses that were just built wrong. I've only seen the (original) Hill House, so I can't speak of how good the novel is. However, the House Next Door is, as I recall it, well worth a look
• Cell: a novel by Stephen King. A signal is sent through cell phones that changes the listeners into monsters.
• The Reaper's Image: A short story also by King. A mirror has a nasty habit of making those who peer into it... disappear.
• In the Mouth of Madness: A movie by John Carpenter. The latest novel of Sutter Cane causes madness... among other things
• The Necronomicon: What one tends to think of when one thinks of books that inspire madness. One of H. P. Lovecraft's most enduring creations, it has been used in horror stories both good and bad since it's creation. The power of the old tome has, of course, diminished with each mention.
• The King in Yellow: Perhaps the inspiration for the Necronomicon itself. It is a play so horrible that it causes madness or foul ends. Lovecraft used it to how more modern writers use his dread work. It's creator, Robert W. Chambers, used it as a basis for several of his works, included in the collection bearing the same name.

Let the Pun-ishment Begin

Yesterday was card night and my family went over to my Aunt Jeri's to play cards with my Grandfather. We had a good supper, my Mom helped Grandpa with his check book, and things ran their course as per usual. In the fullness of time, cards were dealt and the games began.

Playing that night were, around the table, Cousin Emily, Brothers Eric and Todd, Mom, Grandpa, and myself. We play the Bidding Game, a variant of Oh Hell. Things are rather loose at the table. Before bids, for instance, we have been known to trade hands, trying for better cards. Such antics would have been verboten back in the day, but we're more into enjoying the company we're with than the rules.

We're well into the second game when Todd pulled his shirt over his head. You must understand that when he's On, there's no telling what he'll say or do. He's sort of like the Waters family's version of Jonathan Winters or Robin Williams. You start laughing and he'd go off God knows where saying the damnedest things. Sometimes he's a joy to be around. Other times he's a pain in the butt.

The shirt routine, sadly, fell into the pain category. He wore it like a mask over his face, exposing his more than a little hairy chest and stomach. Both Eric and Emily told him almost at once to put his shirt back on. Mom, unfazed, said nothing; suffering three fool boys for as long as she has has made her a bit unflappable. Grandpa studied his cards, in all likelihood unaware of any of this nonsense.

I, of course, Have To Say Something. My brothers are extremely talented in the wit department, and I try to compete with them whenever I can. What I come up with was, "Yeah, Todd, put your shirt back on. We don't wanna play with a Wookie."

Oscar Wilde I am not.

Continued

Emily saw this as an opportunity to get Cullen. I have no idea why she would do such a thing, except for twenty some years of being a victim of the aforementioned wit. That might turn someone a wee bit bitter. Downright hostile, even.

In fact, now that I think about it, that might explain the slight twitch under her left eye whenever she sees me...

Fabricating things about innocent parties aside, her verbal assault is worthy of me. "You have room to talk."

This earns, what was for me, the Comment of the Evening. Without missing more than a half a beat, I said, highly affronted, "I'm no Wookie, I'm a Pwofessional."

I love puns.

Eric does not.

He's put a contract out on my life.

So if, later in the week, I fall silent, you all know that I deserved it.

How Fleeting Fame

So my mom calls me, waking me from a dead sleep, just to ask me how I'm enjoying MY day. It takes a map, an act of Congress, and two Divine Interventions before just why she calls it my day clicks into place. "Oh, 06/06/06. That's right. Ha ha, Mother. Ha ha."

I've oft times thought that if the police ever caught me on a roof top with a sniper rifle, I'd be saying "SHE made me do it! SHE DID!"

Point of trivia: At one point my high school's address was 666. Oh beloved Marian Catholic High School. How much better you must be without me.

Back on subject, whatever that was. After deciding that I wasn't going back to sleep anytime soon (my sleeping schedule's ducked up beyond belief and needed fixing anyways), I went surfing the web. And I discovered that today at Wikipedia Krazy Kat has her entry as the entry of the day.

The comic Krazy Kat is about, as described by the entry,

...the relationship triangle between its title character, a carefree and innocent cat of indeterminate gender (but often referred to in prose as female), her antagonist Ignatz Mouse, and the protective police-dog Officer Bull Pupp. Krazy nurses an unrequited love for the mouse, but Ignatz despises her and constantly schemes to throw a brick at her head; for unknown reasons, Krazy takes this as a sign of affection. Officer Pupp, as Coconino County's administrator of law and order, makes it his unwavering mission to interfere with Ignatz's brick-tossing plans and lock the mouse in the county jail

I wonder just how many people looked at that entry on the front page and asked, "Who?"

And look who the comic inspired. You'd think there's be something, some retrospective, just because of some of those names.

Maybe I missed it.

There's more.

There's a lot of comics like Krazy Kat out there. Like Little Nemo, say. Especially Nemo. Look at that art! Why isn't that being republished? Why aren't there movies and cartoon series about that?

I know, I know. Nemo had a movie. I even played the videogame, as I recall. But where is the movie now?

What are kids getting these days? Ed, Edd, n Eddy? Pokémon? I'm sure they have their merits (well, not the Eds. God, no.) but come on! Little Nemo kills them both with a half a frame.
I'm talking ever so elitist, as if my childhood was steeped in the Katzenjammer Kids and such (longest running comic ever. How often have you heard of it?) It really wasn't. I knew of Krazy Kat and Nemo because of my research into the field of the Fantastic. I've read maybe a handful of strips, most of which are at Wiki. In fact, I gorged myself on Smurfs, G.I. Joe, Transformers, and the bijillion crap Scooby Doo remakes, clones, copies, and parodies. I watched ever Spider-man cartoon I could, every Hulk, every Superhero.

None of them compare.

But this wasn't meant to be the sort of rant that begrudges mispent youth, or spoiling the youth of others by denying them access to wondrous fights of fancy.

Instead, let me ask you something. How often of late have you heard people talking about, say Dennis Wheatley? Or James Hilton? Big names, once. Can't say that they deserved it, as I haven't read word one, but big names.

All but forgotten.

It's what people forget, when seeking fame. How short it is? I bet I could name drop H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe and have a better chance of someone knowing what I was talking about. Neither one a critical or financial success in their time.

Wonder if Stephen King will still be as big twenty years after he's gone.

Countless names of writers who have work or who are working now in the field of the Fantastic who no one has ever heard of. Some waiting to be discovered. Some deserving oblivion.

Makes you a bit humble, really. And, perhaps, a bit eager to set out and see who you can find.

I dream of fame and fortune, of cheering crowds, but I know that if it even comes, it'll never last. I'm no Dickens, no Shakespeare. If I influence one person to write, I'll be moderately happy.

But I'm still going to try. And maybe I'll make it, for a time, then fade away. So little lasts. So little stays.

Not even the Mark of the Beast, it seems. I'm glad Mom caught me when I was half awake, or I might have spoilt her fun by mentioning that the Dread Number is no longer 666. It's 616...

Anal

Back in my glory days at Kinko's, we had a regular customer that no one working at the store wanted to see. I'll call him Bad Peter, as is this is in no way shape or form his name.

Peter would come in with his things to copy and hand them to you with this too wide smile. You'd do your job, same as you did for everyone else, and hand them back to him. And you would hope he'd pay and leave.

Because you're an optimist.

What would really happen is Peter would look at the copy and find something wrong with it. A smudge. A speck. Something. Anything.

Worse, he sometimes look at you and say, "That's crooked, isn't it?"

You'd look at it and it would be dead level, nothing wrong with it. You'd pull a fellow co-worker aside and they'd say the same. You'd pull strangers off the street and they won't know what the hell was supposed to be wrong. That's a damn perfect copy. You only spent ten minutes of your life making sure it was a damn perfect copy. The hell, man. The Hell.

Peter would be sure it was crooked. If he could see it, the people he was going to show it to would see it. And he wasn't going to show an inferior copy to Them.

It wouldn't do any good to point him to the self-serve, because at some point he'd come back to the counter and ask for help. And "Couldn't you just do just this one?" And this and that and the other. And as you're trying to get him out the door, your work is backing up and you know you're never going to finish and why won't he just go, go, go.

Most frustrating.

Deep down, I wanted to help Peter out most thoroughly, but Kinko's frowns on misuse of the hole punch.

Can't see why.

More here.

All of this is a round-about way of saying I've been a Bad Peter. I've been fiddling and fiddling with this site, trying to get it just right. Again. As always.

I started thinking about when, over at my Aunt Jeri's house, I checked my blog and saw that her computer didn't show things quite the same was as they appeared on my computer. In fact, things looked all too familiar.

I suspected what wrong right from the start, and it just took a quick check at home to confirm things. Since December I've been using Mozilla Firefox, and it looks fine. On Explorer however, we have drooping sidebar.

And I hate drooping sidebar.

It bothered me and bothered me and bothered me until I couldn't stands no more. I changed to a different template, one that had areas for background images, and started modifying. Getting everything just so.

Things are fine now. The blog looks nice. Real nice. It seems to me that every change was better than the one before. Got Krevan in the header, the little Wizard Dude in the sidebar, and the Goblin At the Foot of the Bed at the bottom of the page. Perfect. Smooth. Looks real professional, even.

Only.

Only this wasn't right. And that wasn't right. And maybe I could do something over there.

Sure, my family can't see it, the strangers I pull off the street can't see it, but I can see it. And my readers might see it. And I don't want that happening.

So I fiddle with it. And fiddle with it. And fiddle with it again.

Wondering all the while where I can find a really good hole punch so I can put myself out of my misery...

channelinG alicE

Have you ever learned how to do something, then suddenly want to do it no matter how much it might annoy other people? And then done it, only to find that it didn't bother you in the slightest? And then wonder if this made you a bad, bad person?

Me neither.

Face Lift

And so the order changeth. Once more I have dived into HTML code and emerged... unscathed.

As I haven't mucked around that much, that isn't saying much...