The scariest thing I have ever seen on the Internet

Last year, I participated in Nanowrimo for the third time, and wrote a novella called Silicone Sisters about this completely lurid and bizarre topic. A friend of mine recently read Silicone Sisters which got me to thinking about this topic of creepy, realistic silicone newborns once again.

I ventured over to the gallery of one Carol Kneisley, creator of simulated human offspring, and was horrified to discover the scariest image I have ever encountered on the Internet.

Before you click it, compose yourself. You will be scared half out of your mind.

Carol, I am going to assume you have never encountered an actual human infant, if this is your closest approximation. Here is a picture of a real, live newborn, who is maybe 1 hour old, tops, at the time of this photograph. Note that she does not look like something that would appear in someone's toilet in the movie C.H.U.D..

i realize now that, in Silicone Sisters, I in no way did the depravity of this hobby justice.

Morning has broken

Reasons to blog at 4:00 a.m.:

• You are a shift worker and things are really slow at work.


• You're actually in Tokyo, where it is 8:00 p.m.


• You are a giggly BlogHer attendee who is hammered on cosmopolitans.


• You are a college student who just finished writing a paper and forgot to save it and you know you are doomed.


• You've been up throwing up Pizza Hut all night and suddenly you are starting to feel better.


• You are generally up at 4:00 a.m. with small infants who make scritchy noises on their baby monitors but if you try to put pacifiers in their mouths, they spit them out and try to suck their thumbs, but their motor skills are so poor that the thumb doesn't stay in and they poke themselves in the eye repeatedly.

One of these reasons applies to me.

Lipstick

If you're not a crazy plant person, just move along now, there is nothing here to see. Ok, who's left?

Hello?

Anyway I have had this damned lipstick plant since the Ford administration more or less, well, for a couple of years anyway, and it has never produced any g0d *&^%ed lipsticks no matter how much I mixed up the the holy trinity of plant care factors, light, water, and that green stuff in the dropper bottle. And let me point out that there were once years where houseplants became strangely important to me, to the point where I needed a machete to access my office at work. During those verdant times, the lipstick plant stubbornly refused to reward me with any of its namesake blossoms, and in fact often sulked with dropped leaves and an overall dull, dispirited appearance.

This season I have ignored it completely. Perhaps it got some ambient moisture from a spilled Coke can, I can't be sure. It has definitely baked at random times depending on the position of the windowshade, pulled up and down without any concern for its high-maintenance "indirect light" needs. And the contents of the dropper bottle have certainly calcified this season from dis-use. And how am I repaid?

In lipsticks.

It's worse here so shut up

People, I am tired of hearing about how hot it is in your godforsaken desert town or Southern bog or wherever it was you chose to live that has 115 degree summers. Don't try to play heatmiser with me, I grew up in the Sacramento valley, satan's foyer, where 110 is just another sunny day. But now that I live in Seattle, I am done with the heat. DONE. D. f*&kin' O.N.E. It's 93 degrees today, and supposed to be hotter tomorrow. HOTTER. And here are the reasons why you, dweller in blisteringly hot wasteland of a city, need to shut up about how it is "hotter" where you live than 93 degrees.

1) I live in Seattle. It should be about 70 degrees, at best, on a summer day. This is why we live here. This is part of the contract. On a hot day, we are being CHEATED and LIED TO by god.
2) WE HAVE NO AIR CONDITIONING. People, you really need to stop and think about this one. I don't *care* if you have "humidity." Why are you living in a swampy bayou if you don't like humidity? The bottom line is, you go home, flip on the a/c, and you're Pablo the penguin. We here in Seattle go home to muggy, sweaty, gross deadly still stifling 85 degree air inside our homes, day and night, and lie awake cursing Jesus while our babies scream.
3) Because if you don't stop telling me how much "hotter" it is in your home town of Death Valley, etc., I will have you killed.

Played it till my fingers bled

Crap, I had an idea for a post about 30 minutes ago when I was out, but when you have anyone in your family whose age you count in weeks, youhadbettterhurryupandpost because you have about 4.3 minutes to get it down in pixels. It had something to do with the greatest 80's song ever recorded, that being, "Summer of '69," by Bryan Adams. Don't try and argue-- it's in the can. This is the best 80's song, case closed.

In this canonic hit, Bry reminisces about his erstwhile teen years (although these probably occurred somewhere around 1977, in his case, in the interest of accuracy) as a hard rawkin dude with a dime store axe who's moonin' over a heartbreakin' hometown sheila. As you may recall, the whole thing fell apart when some dude quit or got married, or something, although hey, this is confusing, since as we all know, BA became a supastah.

This peerless song got me to thinkin' about my own long lost, wistful summer-- the summer of '89. Unlike Bry, I feel accuracy is key to wispy reminiscence, and there in fact exists a diary in my own attic in which the grueling summer of eight-nine is committed to flowery journal pages in Bic. However, being that I have a family member whose age is counted in weeks, the odds that I will find the time to scale the precarious attic stairs and dig in unmarked boxes is nil. Thus my own memory will have to stand in as I recall the following events...

I'm riding shotgun in my friend's Chevy Nova on the way to Pizza Hut, store 22. We're listening to Paula Abdul on KPOP FM, because she really likes Paula Abdul. I'm sittin there in my tie dye shirt telling her how much Paula sucks, and how much I hate that song, you know, Straight up now tell me is it gonna be you and me foreva oh oh oh? I am pretty sure that when we arrived at the store, she made out with some guy in the manager's closet-sized office while I sulked in a greasy booth that smelled like spray cleaner. Later that night, we went to Lyons and played table hockey with empty, flattened half-and-half containers and split an order of fries. It was the summer of '89.

Blak-sploitation

Holy mother of god, what is this product? I'm drivin' around my local 'burb where there used to be a lovely billboard over the tourist-dinner-train train tracks advertising some kind of really minty gum, and suddenly everything had changed. Now it's hawkin' Coca Cola Blak.

I make haste to see how on earth Coke is going to position this latest unholy flavor hybrid. This "innovative carbonated fusion beverage" is here peddled as "mid-calorie" and targeted at restless "adult consumers" always hedonistically seeking that "new way to stay refreshed any time of day or night."

Based on the breathless pace of their godless flavor mixes and calorie ranges, Coke has apparently revealed via research that the average American soda pop consumer is in relentless pursuit of ever-increasingly grotesque frankenstinian beverage experiences, recalling to mind the similar conclusion of Pizza Hut with its unsavory stuffed crust campaign.

None of this will stop me from trying it.

Summer movie extravaganza '06

Was a time when I could idle away the summer checking out summer movie dreck with nary a concern for bazooka barfing infants distressing fellow filmgoers, but that time has passed. However, I somehow managed to see two suitably underwhelming summer features that may have to suffice as my entire moviegoing summer.

Firstly we shall discuss The Lake House. Why did I see this? Well, I am in the habit of seeing at least one lame chick-type flick per summer, being that I am a chick. Probably the same reason men all uniformly laugh at previews for idiotic and repetitive SNL-spinoff comedies like Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. It's a gender thing.

Did it suck? But of course. I was a little pleasantly surprised by the casting of a 40-year-old actress in the lead romantic role, but aside from that, it was stock schlock, complete with whispering Nick Drake ballads on the soundtrack. The movie is kind of a lame little epistolary, an offline "You've Got Mail," featuring the exchange of notes via a magical mailbox stationed outside of a glass-walled shack on some lake outside of Chicago, ergo, "the lake house." Keanu Reeves gives his trademark affable, yet balsawood performance, with a side order of man-crying, and Sandra Bullock is suitably button-nosed, but the whole thing is just a little mass-produced, soggy and tasteless, like one of those weird McDonald's apple pies that comes in a sleeve. I'm not saying I wouldn't eat one, but you know what I mean.

Onward.

Under the identical circumstances in which I saw its predecessor, I found myself watching PotC II with parental units visiting from distant lands. I had low expectations going in, as the whole PotC thing is another one of those candy-coated corporate vehicles Johnny Depp has taken on of late, and the first movie was rotten with unconvincing CGI skeletor FX. It is no secret that I hate bad CGI, and was dismayed, in the case of PotC II, to be subjected to three hours of hugely unconvincing computer handiwork standing in for character development-- essentially, brine shrimp digiwolves.

Did I mention the film was three hours long?

In short: digiprawns. Jamaican soothsayers. Slapstick cannibal antics. Barnacles. Relentless, earth-toned murk. Random sub-plots. Thick, gelatinous helpings of aquatic-themed CGI.

Conclusion: it sucked with the G-force traction of the Kraken's maw.

Rocket chair

I have been meaning to write about the drunk teen boy who crashed his car into my lawn on the 4th of July, taking out imposing walls of mature shrubbery in his wake before speeding off (this is a sunken lawn that one has to crash through hedges and barrel down an incline to access, so this is not your average lawn doughnut maneuver), but my mind just keeps returning to a more important issue, namely, what the hell is this?