Rainy is the New Snowy

I think I must not have recieved the memo about how starting in two thousand twelve, January will be required by unnatural law to behave exactly like March. If I was March I’d be so pissed to have my unique role as “The Crappiest Month Alive” snaked out from under me.

In other news, I think my blogger spell-check is on the blink, because whenever I’ve clicked it lately something other than flashing red lights and miles of highlighted text appeared. So until further notice, my spell check is broken. I consider the odds of the computer software (whose only purpose in life is to fix spelling errors) being messed up as being far better than the odds of me, after 29 glorious years of inneptitude, having learned to spell.

Belated Greatest of the Latest

So yeah, while I’m at it, I hope everyone had a lovely holiday. And by everyone, I of course mean most people. For instance, I don’t particularly care if Lindsay Lohan had a lovely holiday.  I hope that Glen Beck’s holiday was downright rotten.

What an awful shit I am.

But you, gentle reader!  I hope your holiday was lovely and fantastic!  Joyful, even.  And triumphant!

Anyway, my holiday was pretty nice. Those of you who have suffered my company over the years in even a peripheral sense have probably gleaned some notion as to my enthusiasm for the electro-shock-injected sport of whirly-ball. It has become customary for me to claim to be planning holiday whirly-ball outings. It has also become customary for these claims to be treated by my friends as invitations to be baked into a giant pie and eaten ala mode by a monstrous hill person.

Needless to say, whirly-ball matches never ever come to fruition.

Never, that is, until this year! This year marked the first time in a long time that I was able to flatter, bribe, intimidate, seduce, or otherwise force enough people to commit to a game of whirly-ball, which made me very happy. Moreover, I think everyone had a good time. I, for one, had an excellent time. This was due –at least in part– to having been struck by an inexplicable fit of competency (see mad skillz), which resulted in the best played whirly-ball game of my life and, eventually, the only time you will ever see someone blog about how good they are at whirly-ball.

In any case, thanks for tuning in.  And happy Twenty Dozen!

Still crazy after all these years

One thing for sure is clear.  Whatever happens to be going on in my head while I’m asleep is consistently either terrifying or just plain nonsensical.  Often it is both at once.  This includes variations of the nonsensically terrific and of terrifying nonsense.  A couple years ago it seems like lucid dreaming was pretty much standard.  I could stop, pause, rewind, ct+alt+delete, and whatever the hell else.  Lately it seems this is not so much the case, or at least that I am far less aware of it.  I’m not complaining.  I’m still just pleased that I can even remember my dreams.

But dammit, last night there was no end of bullshit.  And by bullshit I mean werewolves.  Not to mention an intricate plot amongst the warewolves… or something?  Also, I was a werewolf?  Maybe?  Sometimes?  That’s odd because usually when I have werewolf dreams (it happens more than one might think) I just kill them or beat them up or run away or crash a biplane into them (true story).  Last night I did get to stab a few, but I sadly don’t recall it eliciting much of a reaction from them.  Last night I even went to a club and tried to buy one a drink when it was in person mode, but then there was a gang war on the roof of the building and I think she got hit pretty hard with a piano.

Whatever, we played football after that.  I played quarterback AND receiver and was about seven feet tall.  I wore a blue jersey.  I met a talking blue tree, which turned out to be a smallish blue person.  I think he ran away when the dream began to recycle itself and the werewolves came back again.  Aw crap.

This dream is not especially weird unto itself.  I think I just felt more out of sorts about it because I’d been having relatively sane dreams lately.  Like, the other night I dreamed I had to take some college exam or something…

Although…   Now that I think about it, Alan Alda showed up shortly after the exam and some slightly messed up stuff went down.  Yeah, actually, nevermind, I think I died in that one…  At the hands of Alan Alda and the energy blast from a walking root system under his control…

I give up.

Bears love me ’cause I’m crazy huggable

That’s the line we’re going with around here these days, folks.

More to the point, I have created a bear.  It lives on tee shirts and makes the tee-wearer more huggable.  It could also very reasonably be said to lend the wearer extra strength, in addition to tiger-face and some sort of unqualified electric fish powers.

In short, this shirt gives you powers.

I designed this shirt with powers in mind because it is the official shirt of a very important & strange annual event, called “Tundig,” and sometimes extra powers are needed to fully understand or enjoy it, if not survive it.  Extra powers could come in handy when–while ensconced in a remote & undisclosed corner of Michigan’s northern Lower Peninsula–one must evade a Whiskey-Otter™, rise from the drunk, slay a wendigo, win a round of custom Apples-to-Apples, or, well, fight a North American Black Bear…

The shirt, which, after a hundred more words than I thought would be necessary to get to this point, is pictured below and represents the first shirt I’ve designed and printed in a while that was created –wait for it– just for fun.

Fellow designer, citrón:ade, caught in an attempted demonstration of the motor-booty powers…

On matters of the hypothalamus

Man, freelancing is great and all, but sometimes someone really ought to revoke the “make my own hours” privilege that is irrevocably attached to the whole enterprise, as it occasionally leads to things like “poor time management,” which tends to leads to “sleep deprivation,” which tends to lead to friggin’ “PROBLEMS.”

For instance, I’d swear that the lace to the shoe sitting next to me was actually a giant face-eating spider if the giant face-eating spider on the shoe next to me didn’t seem so steadfastly affixed to the shoe sitting next to me and bare so close a resemblance to a common shoe lace.

You see what I mean here, people? PROBLEMS.  I’m having some flippin’ problems at the moment.

Crap.  Just now, entirely without warning, some Weather Tracker application flickered up, consuming the entire screen.

Terrifying.

Also, I am beginning to wonder if the “rant” and “nonsense” tags in this blog will ever be used independently from one another.

Woah, differences.

Last week, while ambling along the historic corridors of downtown Cleveland I ran into an old foe.  The mutual surprise of the encounter conspired with the oppressive heat to turn our grudge down a violent path, and though the day’s end found the peace broken, also did it find one ancient villain subtracted, for in the familiar contest of a dual was Hamilton once again made low.

I don’t suppose there is much that will do by way of remedy or explanation, though either would be rightly due to any reader not already frightened off the internets.  Alas, I can’t take away the knowledge that you’ve squandered moments of your precious life reading this blog post; All I can say is that in 2007 my friend and I went for Halloween as Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, respectively, and that since then I am easily provoked into mock violence at the image of our ill-fated Secretary of the Treasury, thus necessitating his reenacted assassination along the Erie shores last Sunday when he was discovered so pompously displayed outside the Cleveland courthouse.

Other than all that unpleasant business, however, I daresay our stay in Cleveland was better than expected– Which was good considering we more or less expected a boarded up hive of scum and villainy (Buckeye state, after all).  In all seriousness though, it was pretty enjoyable, not to mention good old fashioned pretty.  Below you will find a few pictoral snippets of our Ohioan sojourn, as well as an old photograph from October 31st, 2007 in Madison, Wisconsin.

For those who know me well, and therefor know that I typically do not venture into Ohio without good cause (Cedar Point, Put-in Bay, to get to the other side…), the purpose of this trip was to attend my buddy Logan‘s wedding.  Though why he had it there I’ll never work up the courage to ask.

Summer storm

For anyone not in the loop, there is a place called “Up North” in Michigan.  There is probably a place called Up North in other states as well, but I have a difficult time imagining that it has earned quite the Proper Noun Status as Up North, Michigan.  It’s something of an institution in the nomenclature here.  That being said, if you’d like to know exactly where Up North is, don’t ask, because nobody knows.  Or rather, everyone knows but no one agrees.  Like pornography, they know it when they see it.  Everyone would agree that Traverse City is Up North.  Well, everyone from the lower peninsula anyway.  But ask a fellow if Ludington falls within the fabled confines and you’ll draw mixed remarks.

If you go far enough back in history there was a time when anything north of Detroit was considered Up North, with US-12 the acting boundary between civilization and wild frontier (Bear in mind, there is an average of only about 25 miles of real estate between US-12 and the Ohio/Indiana border).  Nowadays, I’d say a safer analog would be M-10, but I still might prefer an even more selective designation (I used to say, “Wherever the black bears aren’t,” but apparently that is far less discriminatory than I was able to appreciate).  All of this is, of course, just a very roundabout way of telling you that I went Up North last week (Frankfort, if you are interested) and that I saw an opportunity for a mini rant regarding perhaps the most general of Michigan’s many mythic regionalities.

As is fitting of a late evening journey Up North –mysterious place as it has been above described– my compatriot and I encountered some curious –if not epic– doom-type meteorological events at the outset of our trip, not far north of Ann Arbor.  It was documented on an iphone and later cut and assembled into the video embedded below.  This was all accomplished by my friend, Anna K Jonsson (one-time Up North native), whose brilliant choice in listenables may have taken some of the DOOM out of the experience, but none of the beauty.  I just wish an iphone had the same color capture capabilities as a peice of professional HD hardware, because damn, there were colors.  In any case, I’m quite taken with the vid, and not just because I’m in it. 🙂

Trough-pissers / Evil-doers, beware.

Man, one of my favorite Ypsi bars is apparently considering installing a trough style urinal.  GROSS.

For anyone who has not experienced The Trough, I have one thing to say about it: Multi-vectored close-quarters spray-back.

Seriously. One should not have to foster concerns regarding how much of another man’s urine may accumulate on his person whilst visiting the loo.

In case you’re wondering, yes, it IS drop-random-British-colloquialisms-like-they’re-hot-potatoes-day.

IN OTHER, NON-POTTY NEWS:  I’ve created Frankenfeather– Mad Raptor Scientist.  His wisdom.  He used it for eeeeevil.

Zoom zoom!

Just got back from my west coast road trip. It was super long and super fun:

It was my second longest road trip, though perhaps most intense. The longest by mileage was back in ’04:

I’m Having Trouble Concentrating… Could I be Pregnant?

Found this oooooold post of mine from a previous blog and thought it was kind of fun, perhaps even enough fun to share.  TIME WARP!

I’m Having Trouble Concentrating… Could I be Pregnant? That’s the very first line of what might be my new favorite commercial of two thousand ‘effing six (I’m sorry, but I simply can’t go without at least implied cussing when speaking about a year that starts with TWO thousand and ends in anything above, I dunno, four.  Such is my capacity to deal with change.  Anyway.  I believe the line is for the “e.p.t. sure-fire hands free works underwater or something stupid” pregnancy test, which is a wholly uninspired snippet of air time but for its giggle-inducing intro-hook, which I’m sure was not intended to be humorous at all.  How serendipitous for everyone.

In case you’re wondering what my previous favorite commercial of O’-fuckisnotawordrecognizedbyspellcheck-six is, you should perhaps direct your attention to Teh Milky Way.  See, some people fear what they do not understand.  I laugh out loud at what I don’t understand and then I whore it around on the internets.

edit: I would say that the new “Un-pimp Ze Auto” Volkswagon commercials starring Peter Stormare (The Big Lebowski, Jurassic Park: The Lost World, Minority Report, etc.) are my favorite new commercials, but they never get air around here anymore.

I don’t think I watch enough teevee these days to pick out a favorote commercial or two-thousand and nine.  It’s definitely not that “Think with your dipstick, Jimmy,” nonsense.

Feelin’ Crabby, Bonkers.

Fact:  There is a cheapiddy-cheap sale at one of the various (generally low-ish quality) online printing vendors.  In light of this fact, I ask why the dickens shouldn’t* I order a few dozen business card variants of me as an aristocratic crab-man?

* You needn’t answer this.  In fact, it’s probably best for my self esteem if you don’t.

P.S. Regardless of whether or not this makes a good card, I think I might make a comic in this style, which I am convinced will be super fun.

With powers comparable to Wonder Boy

I tuned in for the last five minutes of a late night edition of Sportscenter and witnessed the following: a Big Lebowski quote, a Doobie Brothers reference, a Tenacious D reference, a Burger King reference, and what may have been a Simpsons reference.

Those dudes be crazy.

I also found the image below in an old notebook of mine.  In these days where I occasionally long for the familiarity and ease of an undergraduate college classroom, I sometimes forget how bored I was at times.

(I ate your teacher.  He tasted like stupid.)