Going through the change.

I got sick somehow over the weekend – somewhere in my travels, someone must have had something or been getting over something because round about Saturday I noticed a slight tickle in the throat. The tickle became soreness on Sunday (getting progressively worse as the day went on) and then Monday was just full blown sore.

Throughout all of it, I didn’t have any kind of runny nose to speak of, no coughing really but I was (am) definitely sick. Yesterday was one of those days where you walk around not quite sure if it’s that oppressively humid during the day or if you have a fever (I get a sense it was the latter). All things considered though, I only took a couple of aspirins and just slept when I felt the need. The only part of the day where it really became an issue was when I had to make some phone calls and I kept hearing my voice crack while I was talking - puberty all over again. Kind of funny though, I have to admit.

Today the voice is still raspy but I feel scads better so whatever it is seems to have run it’s course and is abating. Just a reminder of how amazingly good I feel the majority of the time.

The mandate.

I keep remembering last year how there were a bunch of people crowing over the mandate that the American electorate had given by returning to the Democrats control of the House and a gain of 5 seats in the Senate.

Everyone was talking about a groundswell of change that would sweep our country - my question a year later is: what happened?

The reason I ask is because it sure seems like business as usual. Considering all the rhetoric that was thrown around prior to and immediately after the election it speaks volumes about the effectiveness of the current Congress, don’t you think?

Terror filled Mondays.

Today’s entry into terror filed Mondays is one of those movies you just have to have seen to appreciate.

The evil alien “Ro-Man” has destroyed all but eight humans with his death ray, the “Calcinator.” Survivors include a family of five, a scientist and two unseen men in a spacecraft bound for the orbiting space platform. All eight have developed immunity to the death ray as a side effect of an antibiotic serum developed by the scientist. Ro-Man must destroy these survivors before his invasion of earth is complete.

Aside from the fact that Ro-Man has the mien of someone I used to know, they just don’t get much badder than this! So bad as a matter of fact, that it’s good. This is the movie that should be on a double feature with the earlier terror filled Mondays entry Attack of the Crab Monsters

The poor quality of the movie gave rise to a long-lived rumor within the film industry that the poor reception from audiences caused director Phil Tucker to attempt suicide. According to Keep Watching the Skies!, a comprehensive history of 1950s American science fiction films, author Bill Warren claims Tucker’s attempted suicide was actually due to depression and a dispute with the film’s distributor, who had allegedly refused to pay Tucker his contracted percentage of the film’s profits.

Terror filled Mondays will go back and forth between the truly great movies of the golden age of scifi and horror to the truly terrible to behold. Certainly Robot Monster is one of those truly terrible to behold but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth a watch – you just can’t get dialog this bad in too many movies!

Fairytales come to life.

Anytime, anywhere, anyplace.

Someone made the mistake of thinking a situation is different than they think it is - they made an empty threat (one of many) and of course then did the cowardly thing by running away and hiding. Like the title says anytime, anywhere, anyplace - you may wind up getting what you want but you may not be all that happy when you get it. I can say though it will be a pleasure to give it to you because it’s been a long time coming.


LOOK FAMILIAR?
You know who you are - and to think
they even named and based a character on you!

Terror filled Mondays.³

Well, here we are three out! I’m not sure if anyone is amazed by the selection of movies but, I have gotten email from others who also fondly remember some of those movies of yesteryear.

Today’s entry into terror filed Mondays is celebrating its golden anniversary this year!

That‘s right! Today’s jewel is half a century old! Simply amazing but, fortunately for me it isn’t a flick I saw during it’s original run in theaters. However, it was a delightful film that harkened back to a day when the Cold War was at its height and the power of the atom was all the range.

Dr. Wainwright, you’re a scientist, you know what grasshoppers can do. I’m a soldier, I know what guns can do.

Yes, those were heady days back in the 50's (and through to the early 60s) where the forces released by the atom could do wonderful and remarkable things. Also, they could cause nature to run amok, challenging man’s very existence as a species! The atom would power incredible rocket ships that would challenge the laws of time and space, or they would mutate people and animals giving them incredible new powers.

Reporter Audrey Ames is driving along a highway in Illinois when she is stopped by the military. She then finds out that a small town was destroyed and everyone has seemingly disappeared. She then goes to a lab run by the Department of Agriculture. While she is there she meets the lab’s director, Dr. Ed Wainwright. Ed then tells her that strange things have been happening ever since he discovered that a bunch of grasshoppers managed to get into a silo containing a batch of radioactive wheat.

And if anyone ever wondered how Peter Graves could lead the IMF taskforce, it’s finally obvious that after defeating a horde of giant grasshoppers descending on Chicago, anything else was a cakewalk!

%*$$*%###*$$**%*#*$$ Mets!

It’s sad to watch a team just flush a season down the toilet. The most painful part will be suffering through a long winter having to listen to the fans of that other New York team. Thank God though that even as bad as this collapse was, it still doesn’t set the standard for all time chokes, not when you have:

THIS!

I will give the Yankees all the credit they deserve for playing terrific ball the second half of the season when I (and a lot of other people) thought for sure they were dead. This is the year I would give Joe Torre a manager of the year award if ever because even though he has the talent on the team he has, no one thought he would be able to pull off the magic he pulled off this season.

I will probably write something about the season after it stops smarting so much. In a sense, it was a good year but, even as a Mets fan, there was something about this team that didn’t excite me. I didn’t even go to a game at Shea this year and that’s a telling sign.

I know there are going to be big changes in the off-season and there definitely should be. I’m still not happy with the way the pitching staff was handled throughout the season and that directly speaks to the manager. There are a bunch of guys who will be gone next year too - Tom Glavine, Mota, Delgado, Alou, Green and even Lo Duca (from what I understand). So, it will be interesting to see what direction the team takes.

For now though, the thing to figure out is what team to root for in the post-season. Oh, and also to give the Phillies their due as well because if they hadn’t been so hot over the last two weeks they wouldn’t have won and what they did was no small feat!

Ewwwwwwwwww! Crusty!

You just can’t make these things up, I have to imagine this is one of those subtle jokes someone slipped in:

Christie’s to auction Marie Antoinette's pearl necklace



You mean... SHE SAVED THOSE THINGS!?!?

Yes, it was right there on the page this morning and when I saw it I couldn’t help but laugh. For the uninitiated who don’t understand the joke, Wikipedia even has a page devoted to the term here.

A well spent day.



I marked another year today; I try to keep these days low-key.

I am less about building a big event and more about enjoying and having a good day. It’s a lot easier to have a great day when the weather is as glorious as it was today. Sunny and very warm (I think we crested 85°) it was the kind of day that hinted more at summer than the onset of fall.

I don't like fall so much because I’m not really crazy about the cold weather or the shorter days. The baseball season ends soon and I find nothing provides as wonderful a backdrop to the day as a ballgame on the radio. So, it’s not any one thing but a bunch of things that make me like September less.

Still, today was beautiful!

And since I was marking another year and I keep trying to stress in life how important it is to continue to do new things, it was time to go for the inaugural ride on the new scooter. Admittedly, I was a little nervous. I didn’t want to be out riding the thing in heavy traffic but I did want to ride it and I had put of riding it for over a week now since it was delivered.

So, riding today was going to be my treat - a bit of a gift to myself.

And I rode over 33 miles! And it was WAAAAYYYYYY FUUUUUNNNNN!

I’m still learning and I will take it easy on the thing, I’ve no desire to injure myself - although I did fall off the thing already. I kind of think of the falling as a good thing, I didn’t hurt myself but it was a good reminder of how much I could hurt myself if I’m not careful. Still the thing is perfect for what I need it for! All those small errands around town to the post office, to the supermarket, to get the paper are just much more fun when done riding the scooter.

Plus, the weather being so nice and all, riding around the back roads up here is such a treat. Everything is so very beautiful! I enjoyed it so much, I had a stupid smile plastered to my face throughout most of the ride and couldn’t help myself with the occasional celebratory laugh - that’s a recipe for a good day in my book!

Terror filled Mondays.²

Well, trying to keep with event days (and still trying to figure out what to do with the other six days of the week), let’s hit up another one of those fright filled films of yore.

These are deliciously bad movies - fun, but bad.

This one sticks in my mind as one of those films I think I saw at around 10 or so and subsequently had nightmares from it.

Looking back, it‘s hard to figure out what exactly it was, maybe because the monsters were invisible for a large part of the movie, talk about your money-saving special effects! Maybe it was the sound the creatures made when they were around? I don’t know but it was a glorious black and white scary movie for a Saturday night.

Mysterious deaths begin to occur in the small town near the base, and postmortems reveal that the victims’ brains have disappeared. The locals become convinced that fallout from radiation at the base is causing the deaths. But Jeff Cummings, an air force major, becomes suspicious of Professor Walgate, a British scientist who is experimenting with telekinetics.

I had thought Van Johnson was in this flick but, doing a little looking around it turned out the lead in the movie was Marshall Thompson. The name might not ring any bells but if you were a kid during the sixties, you may remember Marshall Thompson as the lead actor on Daktari!

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?!?

So, tomorrow is supposed to be a nice day and all. A good warm day, perfect to go to a baseball game and as fate would have it the Yankees are playing their last home game of the season and it’s a day game to boot! (I’ll never understand why they don’t play more day games)

I thought just on a whim I would see if there are tickets available for the game. You go to the online ticket application and search for tickets and the option is to look for the best available seats:



Somehow, I think I’ll be passing. What I do want to know is what idiot would actually pay this much?!?!

It’s gotten that bad.

Like many Mets fans I have become so nervous that I had the game on for the last three innings today but with the sound off. It’s just too nail-biting to watch.

NO FOOD!!!

I don’t know if it’s a trend or not but, I have gotten food stuff for my upcoming bday - I can’t eat any of it! No food!

Deep inside...

So, the other day I was having a conversation with a guy I hadn’t spoken to in a bit. He was relaying how he had been the subject of a bizarre attack by a mutual acquaintance and how it came out of left field.

These things happen and I counseled him to just ignore it. I’ve dealt with the same thing myself at times - sometimes you can say something in a totally innocuous way and it can be taken entirely the wrong way. I’ve done it myself. Something touches a nerve in a person and all the insecurities swell forth and raise their ugly head. It’s embarrassing when I succumb to that kind of behavior and it’s sad to witness it in others.

Then again, I wonder if some people aren’t more susceptible to it.

Maybe they aren’t susceptible; maybe there is a small part of them that relishes this conflict because it gives them a chance to disrupt other people’s lives. There are people like that too, people who feed on drama and discord, who can only feel secure or satisfied at the misfortune or consternation of others. It makes me think back to those days in high school where self-image is based so strongly in one’s relationship within a group. If you’ve seen Mean Girls, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

In this instance during the course of the conversation I could only postulate that the instigator of all of this discord really had a fourteen-year-old girl trapped inside of them. That led to me getting this cartoon a little afterward that can be summed up only by the word wicked and that the cartoon had me laughing hysterically.

What a great idea!

Beautiful Alix passed along a great link that I checked out and I want to pass along to all the other cat lovers/cat owners:

How to turn an old sweatshirt into a no-sew cuddly pet blanket.

Putting the whiff in whiffle ball.

I came across this via Jeff Passan’s column over at Yahoo Sports where it was described as the coolest thing ever and I have to admit if it isn’t it is pretty damn close!

Ready to give the hall-of-famers a run for their money.

Terror filled Mondays.

Maybe making ‘event days’ is more the way to go in terms of blog content?

So, let’s start of the week (a gruesome task as it is) by looking back at the films I remember fondly as staples of Saturday evening fright shows hosted on local channels (or it could be Saturday afternoons as well). First up is this classic of American Cinema that as the poster says, brings you a ‘TIDAL WAVE OF TERROR:’

A group of scientists land on a remote island in the Pacific to search for a previous expedition that disappeared and to continue research about the effects of radiation from the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests on the island’s plant and sea life. They learn to their horror that the earlier group of scientists have been eaten by mutated giant crabs that have gained intelligence by absorbing the minds of their victims.

Makes me think with a title like that it could have very well been one of those old Army training films you hear about.

A new way for the candidates to get their message out:

The ’08 Democratic Candidate Mashup, a pretty interesting thing if you ask me:

Welcome to the first online debate. Charlie Rose interviews the candidates, but you get to compare them. Step 1, pick as many candidates as you want; Step 2, pick one issue. Then, watch your mashup. Don’t forget to vote for who you like best.

I’m getting this strange sense of déjà vu.

Police said Sunday that Simpson asked to speak with his lawyer before proceeding with an interview, although he spoke several times with investigators before his arrest. The attorney, Yale Galanter, said that he was attempting to get Simpson released.

“Obviously we intend to fight these charges vigorously. We believe it is an extremely defensible case based on conflicting witness statements, flip-flopping by witnesses and witnesses making deals with the government to flip,” he said.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Make it go away!

Another Viagra advertisement?



I just caught this picture when I was looking at the baseball scores and my first thought was I had somehow stumbled on another of those Viagra ads. The headline for the article was: Moore’s single lifts Orioles over Blue Jays 8-6 in 12 innings. I’m just not sure whether or not the guys in the copy room were having a good laugh over that one.