Ever notice how it's the little things in life that amuse us so much? More to the point, ever notice how it's the silly little idiocies in life that amuse us more than anything else? Well, this is not as much ''the little blog that could'' as it is ''the blog that enjoys going up the down escalator in your local mall.'' Will it have anything of real importance? No, probably not. But enjoy the ride never the less!

 


If you know your Naked Gun 2 1/2, then you know exactly where that line shows up. Not only is it a brilliant joke, but the sheer wording of the sexual euphemism is hilarious. It's strange though how sometimes life imitates a Zucker/Abrams/Zucker gag:

Iain Hollingshead wins bad Sex prize

By JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press Writer Wed Nov 29, 2:38 PM ET

LONDON - First-time author Iain Hollingshead scooped a dubious literary honor Wednesday, winning the Bad Sex in Fiction Award for his novel, "Twenty Something."

Hollingshead beat established writers including Booker Prize nominee David Mitchell, best seller Mark Haddon and literary maverick Thomas Pynchon to the prize, which aims to skewer "the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel."

Judges were moved by Hollingshead's evocation of "a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected images and explosions of a million little particles." His description of "bulging trousers" sealed the win, the judges said.

"Because Hollingshead is a first-time writer, we wished to discourage him from further attempts," the judges — editors of Literary Review magazine — said in a statement. "Heavyweights like Thomas Pynchon and Will Self are beyond help at this point."

Hollingshead, 25, who received his award from rocker Courtney Love at a London ceremony, said he was delighted to become the prize's youngest winner. "I hope to win it every year," said Hollingshead, who receives a statuette and a bottle of champagne.

Now in its 14th year, the award was established by the Literary Review to celebrate truly cringe-worthy erotic writing. "It's mixed metaphors, embarrassing fumbling. It's the redundancy of the scene in an otherwise good novel," said assistant editor Philip Womack.

This year's runner-up was Tim Willcocks' medieval action novel, "The Religion," for a scene in which characters grapple passionately in a forge "across the cold steel face of the anvil."

"In the pit of his stomach a cauldron boiled and some seething and nameless brew rose up through his spine and filled his brain with the Devil's Fire," Willcocks writes.

Willcocks praised the Bad Sex prize as "a much better guide to a good read than those purveyors of powerful sleeping drugs, the Booker, the Pulitzer, the Goncourt et. al."

Other finalists included Mitchell's 1980s coming-of-age story, "Black Swan Green," for a passage in which one character's breasts are compared to "a pair of Danishes" and another's to "two Space Hoppers." Pynchon's long-awaited, 1,000-page novel, "Against the Day," was nominated for a scene involving a spaniel that ends: "Reader, she bit him."

Haddon, the best-selling author of "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time," was shortlisted for his description of rapture in his latest novel, "A Spot of Bother": "Images went off in her head like little fireworks. The smell of coconut. Brass firedogs."

The other finalists were Scottish writer Irvine Welsh's "Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs"; Julia Glass' "The Whole World Over"; Michael Cannon's "Lachlan's War"; "Tourism" by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal; and Self's "The Book of Dave."

Last year's winner was food critic and novelist Giles Coren for a memorable passage comparing a male character's genitalia to a shower hose. In 2004, the prize went to Tom Wolfe's novel, "I Am Charlotte Simmons," for sex scenes the judges called "ghastly ... inept ... (and) unrealistic."

The article can be found here:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061129/ap_en_ot/books_bad_sex

And ultimately this award begs the question: if the judges found these professionally published sexual references ghastly, how many seconds would it take if they tried to read most of the lemon fanfics out there before their heads exploded? It frightens me to say that, as far as perspectives go, having to contend with seeing a woman's bosom and immediately thinking breakfast pastries isn't quite so bad when stacked against such epic hits as "Artemis' Lover" or a Harry Potter lemon involving Buckbeak and the Ford Angelia.

Today's Lesson: hooray for danishes! (That and, apparently orgasms smell like coconut.)

posted by Phillip at 9:49 PM

 

The Lizard King. The Walrus. The Shiznit.

I am all of these things. Forget the fact that the walrus might eat the lizard, and the digestive result is a word that amusingly resembles 'shiznit', but I am all of these.

Today's little bit of nowhere features an inflated ego of epic proportions, brought about by sadism and grandiose accomplishments. And exhaustion. It's probably the exhaustion talking more than anything else, and when the euphoria passes I'll marvel at how silly I sounded and wonder how on earth the cat ended up wearing my pants.

On Saturday, I had the pleasure of working a full 12 hour shift at the store, due to a very sick employee. With a little help from Mel, and more than a handful of Tylenol, I survived. Sunday was spent helping Mel with a research essay wherein one of her group partners made a contribution that ultimately sounded like what might happen if you heard the bagpipes being played by a deaf, leperous giraffe.

(Mel has just informed me that perhaps I've given that team member a little too much credit, so we may have to revert to the old stalwart "a contribution as impressive as a dead mouse performing Shakespeare.")

Monday was another 12 hour day, capped off by a first for me. I got to fire someone. In fact, I was sanctioned by Head Office to spread the doom. Doom, doom, doom! What was her crime? Well, said now-defunct-employee spent most of her shifts being perfectly useless, and seemed to think it criminal that she must perform customer service in a retail job. (The nerve of company policy! I mean, really! What are they going to expect us to do next: work?!)

Head Office went so far as to send an auditor in to observe her, and by all accounts gave the command to my district manager to have this employee axed. So far, I think a grand total of no tears have been shed by anyone else over her sudden and swift boot-to-the-ass dismissal. Mel even took up to singing, "Ding dong, the witch is dead!" at the kiosk when she arrived for her shift later that afternoon.

Granted, in firing the girl, I was forced to take up her shift for the day, and then cover the remainder of my evening shift at the store. But meh, what can you do in a case like that?

But the Monday didn't end there. Upon returning home, Mel & I were up until 3am working from scratch on an English paper about the use of the supernatural in Oedipus (the guy who killed his father & slept with his mother) and Hamlet (the guy who killed his step-father after his step-father tried to kill him but accidentally killed his mother instead. Oops.) We were going to work on it Sunday, but the bagpipe/giraffe project ended up taking the entire day to unravel, tweak and rework into something that didn't look like it had been copied word for word from a university textbook.

While today was a mere 8-hour shift by comparison, tomorrow's got another 12 hour gig in store for me. And if I'm really lucky, the next day I have off will be Sunday. Somehow I still have most of my mental faculties despite all the long hours. All in all, I'm impressed at how well I'm faring, but then again, we've only reached the midweek. I've already conquered two 12-hour shifts, giving me an inflated sense of accomplishment as I face the third one. Plus, there's that whole getting to fire an employee who was really starting to piss even me off. I'm floating high on a managerial God Complex.

Damn, but I'm good!

I am the Lizard King! I am the Walrus! I bring you tidings of my inherent awesomeness, and DOOM!!


Today's Lesson: sometimes, metal dollies can spontaneously manifest themselves in the middle of your store. Oh, and poodles can also be guide dogs for the blind.
posted by Phillip at 9:16 PM

 

It's Sunday.

I am doing very little of anything this Sunday.

I am happy about doing very little of anything this Sunday.

And before I start sounding like a Dr. Seuss book (only without rhyming couplets and doodlefluzits), I'll explain by simply saying that when I woke up yesterday, the last thing on my mind was, "Gee, I think today I'll work a 12 hour shift at the store!"

Twelve hours later, I was somehow and oddly sane. Well...as arguably sane as I get, anyways. The short of it was the only available person to work the Saturday evening shift spent all of her Saturday either throwing up, or dry heaving when there was nothing left for her to throw up. So while I can't exactly fault her for needing to call in sick, 12 hours later and I have never been so grateful for having a Sunday off. Though for the most part I was really lucky that the mall traffic almost died entirely by the time 6pm rolled around, so I was able to conserve my energy for those last three hours. (Not to mention, Mel & I commiserated the day's end with pizza and alcohol, which is always a plus in my book.)

You know, the last time I wrote about anything like this, it was...well, damn, it was one year ago, almost to the week. Except that was a 13-hour shift (thank you, Midnight Sadism--er, Madness) due primarily to an annoying nit of an employee.

Speaking of...Monday is going to be another long day courtesy of this year's annoying nit of an employee. Funny how at this current moment, I'm the only person at the store or kiosk who knows how long a day I'm about to have.

Just pause for a second and reflect upon the ominousness behind that paragraph.


In other news, I have a hankering to go and bake some cookies. This could potentially end in disaster. Then again, Shady will adore it if anything explodes, since it means more bits of food falling to the floor for her to snack on.

Today's Lesson: if it's your day off, and you are pretty darned syre you're not going to want to wake up when the alarm goes off, don't set the alarm.
posted by Phillip at 11:22 AM

 

Outside, the fog is thick enough to almost make me believe I've woken up in Silent Hill. Only there's still noisy traffic and Pyramidhead isn't skipping about happily flaying people.

This week has been both kind and cruel, and in unusual & gratuitous ways. It has seen an evening spent with an old friend and a mall filled with lots & lots of zombies. (And, much to everyone's amusement, when playing Dead Rising, if you break into the toy store and get your character to wear the big yellow lego-head, it still shows up during the cut scenes. You can't take the scene seriously when it looks like some sort of kaiju show, but that's what's so fantastic about it.)

The week has also seen me sit back and wonder just how in the hell I suddenly managed to get so close to finishing up the 3-years-and-counting SM fanfic "Angel Electric". It's been a long and strange journey for me. I've spent many hours in the company of these characters, and for the most part enjoying the time we shared together. Now I get to show them all how much I appreciated their work...by killing them all off.

Should I be worried I'm feeling rather jovial about this fact?

However, as mentioned before the week hasn't been without its petty cruelties, most of which I won't go into here. It's not that I don't want to rant about them, or that I don't want to rant about them to you specifically, but for the moment it's better to play certain proverbial cards close to the chest if not for potentially legal reasons. Suffice to say, there's someone at the kiosk (not Mel) who's not making things pleasant for...well, everyone, and unfortunately we've had orders by the higher-ups to keep stringing her along for another week.

I can only pray this means we're giving said asshat-employee enough rope to hang herself with. I'm getting tired of this crap, and Mel's bordering somewhere between mental breakdown and killing something.

Ideally the next little bit of nowhere will find the both of us in better spirits, at which point we'll returing to doing what we do best: bitching about Commercialmas and the customers it brings.
posted by Phillip at 5:26 AM

 

It's been a curious couple of days.

Our bathroom is currently sporting a hole right above the showerhead, mostly to air out the leak from the apartment right above us. From what the repairman told me, it seems that our upstairs neighbours (formerly our next-door neighbours. You know, the ones with the late night Bollywood Karaoke parties?) did not...well, he just left it at "they weren't the cleanest of people." By all indications, the bathroom above us has had to be practically ripped right back to base building and rebuilt from the proverbial ground up. But I can live with that, and the drainage holes over our showerhead. It certainly beats our ceiling getting turned to paste and falling down on our heads.

In other news, labels are everything. Consider, for a moment, a few days ago. The plan had originally been to have toast for breakfast. I picked up my loaf of white bread and discovered it was white, green and white (the fuzzy kind). The following is pretty much a word for word excerpt:

Me: "What the hell? How'd it get moldy so...'expiry date: November 4th'. Ah."

Flash-forward to yesterday. After picking up some groceries for stirfy, Mel & I strolled into the elevator and I pressed the button for the third floor. The elevator stopped, the doors opened and we sauntered out. Halfway down the hall, we heard the sounds of a piano being played. Now I hadn't heard a piano ever before on our floor, so I ventured a guess as to which of our neighbours must have just procured it.

Then Mel & I came to a stop in front of our door...and heard the piano coming from inside the apartment. The following conversation is pretty close to what was originally said:

Mel: "Why is there a piano in our apartment?"

Me: "I don't know. Maybe the repair guy dropped it off when he looked at our leaky bathroom ceiling."

Mel: [looking up at the door] "But why on earth would...'Apartment 210'. This isn't even our floor!"

Me: "Well that explains the piano."

Mel: "Are you sure you pressed the third floor?"

Me: "Yes! I pressed the third floor button only and...dammit, we got gimpified!"

As it turned out, it wasn't a case of Gimpy the Wonder Elevator paying us a visit. We can thank the horde of little kids chasing each other up & down the floors, and pressing all the buttons in the elevator for that.

Mel adds here, "And I get to thank you for not having noticed they'd pushed all the other buttons in the elevator."

Um...oops?

And finally, we bring you today's The Wonders of Technology: the iBRATOR.

http://www.bedroompleasures.co.uk/sex-toys/Vibrators.10/
Massaging-Vibrators.67/OhMiBod-iPod-Vibrator.3630.html

(Though this suddenly does beg the question: what would you have on your playlist?)
posted by Phillip at 8:58 AM

 

Best Buy is not being my friend today. Well...it might be, but it's the sort of friend who tells you that setting fire to a porche is a fun thing to do. At the very least, the store seems to be the only place in all of KW that actually has the Old School Sesame Street DVDs in stock. Alas, I won't get paid until Friday, so I must wait while the box set continues to mock and tempt me for the next few days.

It is also vexing that Best Buy also has all 3 seasons of Penn & Teller's Bullshit! on for $65. I'm already being tempted by Muppets; this isn't helping! Throw into the mix the Avatar s.1 boxset on at HMV for $50 (at least I think it was that price), and the Tick vs. Season 1 on for $25 at Walmart, and I'm starting to think I'm better off avoiding anyplace that sells DVDs for the rest of the year.

Which reminds me: Kevin, you are now the proud owner of the Emmet Otter's Jugband Christmas DVD. Congradulations!

Today's lesson: consuming almost half a pound of bacon (cooked, of course. What do you take me for, an idiot? Wait...don't answer that!) will come back to haunt you a few hours later.
posted by Phillip at 9:02 PM

 

I've been meaning to update this little bit of nowhere for a few days now. I wish I could say there was a valid reason for this, but in truth I've just been watching Trainspotting among other things. (Currently it's Mel parading about in a new pair of pyjamas she bought today.)

This past weekend was spent seeing a lot of old friends and family Mel & I just haven't been able to see in a looooong while. We spent Friday night in Toronto, and pretty much all of Saturday in Oshawa visiting with my grandfather as well as our aunt & uncle from up north. Sunday was spent visiting some new Anime titles, with the evening being capped off by the shindig at Roupen's, where many a friend gathered to celebrate. Somewhere amidst the lasagne & falafels, the random conversations and happy episodes of Robot Chicken, the following revelations were made:

1. If the Fancrew were forced to ever resort to cannibalism, I would be deemed too skinny to be used as a decent entree. Instead, I would be forced the indignity of being ranked as mere "soup stock."

2. Apparently, my writing can break the Internet. According to Jen, whenever she's tried to link my blog (and possibly any of my writing) to Livejournal, the feed crashes. This unto itself has hidden potential. Whenever the machines rise up and Skynet tries to take over, all they have to do is connect that pesky AI to my fanfics and it'll commit computer seppuku.

(On a related note, I was sorely tempted to create a regular LJ account if not for the sole purpose of seeing if I could break poor Ginny's mind on a near daily basis.)

3. The best way to kill any ongoing conversations around you is to mention "MPreg". It doesn't have to be in any sort of context. It doesn't even have to have a sentence wrapped around it. But guaranteed you say "MPreg" and suddenly you are the centre of almost everyone's attention...though not necessarily in a good way.

In other news, the USA has undergone the beginnings of a paradigm shift, and Britney Spears has filed for divorce. Now be honest, and a show of hands here: who didn't see either of these coming?

And finally, I have at long last encountered someone's solution to a Calculus problem that actually makes sense to me:


posted by Phillip at 9:08 PM

 

'Tis a day or two into November, and already I have seen 3 blatantly Commercialmas ads on television, and heard at least 1 or 2 over the radio. I shall cry now. (Is it truly sad that a commercial can break my will around this time of year?)

In other news, the weather has been what could be best described as mildly schizophrenic, alternating between a few piffly bits of snow amidst the sunshine, to an all-out and thoroughly gleeful blizzard.

That still didn't stop me from continuing my epic search for the Sesame Street: Old School DVD box set. It's been pretty much a week now since the box set was due out on the shelves, and from what Mel's told me, Gaffney has already acquired it. Yet for some silly-assed reason, every store up here in KW is lacking in its Sesame Old Schoolness. Most of the stores just don't have it in stock or even in their listing. The few stores that do have it listed as "in stock, check shelves" have also seen those DVDs mysteriously vanish from existence. I should know: I sent a poor clerk all over the store searching for a DVD the computer said they had, but reality argued otherwise.

I'm starting to think they're all hiding my Old School just for the sake of vexing me. The Evidence Mice are no doubt behind this conspiracy, and if they thing they can come between me and my latest Jim Henson fix, they are sorely mistaken.

On the plus side: oooh, happy shiny GitS: SAC 2nd Gig collector's tin....

Today's Lesson: finely tailored dress pants look great, but offer little resistance against a frigid wind. I think that last gust just took off my right testicle and sent it rolling down into the next lane--it's that bloody freezing.
posted by Phillip at 8:03 PM