Macarena and Ketchup:
I found this bizarre brass band from Germany and heard their bizarre takes on American pop music: Guido Horn (iTunes link)
Please give a listen to the Sousa-style renderings of “The Macarena” and “The Ketchup Song”.
I found both tunes to be so exquisitely jarring / annoying / brassy / sassy that I ponied up the $2 to own them both.

Mushroom:
     Some of you may remember that a few weeks ago we had a learning disabled boy mow our lawn, and that the resulting job was “retarded”. I may not have mentioned that he sported his own hand-made pair of cut-off jean shorts, or that the legs of said shorts were approximately 10″ longer in the front than in the back. It was like his thighs were wearing bibs. Hey, I think that might be a marketable idea:
SafeTinspector Leg Bibs, for those discerning gentlemen who wish to remain civilized whilst enjoying raunchy peep-shows the way God intended them to.
     Anyway, our mentally deficient young friend didn’t come by this week, so I donned flight gear and attacked my blanket of disobedient vegetation my own damn self. I don’t have a huge plot of land, but it is a corner lot, with several trees and about twenty border stones. Usually an hour job to get the whole thing done, even if you aren’t retarded.
Sometime in the week since my lawn’s encounter with leg bibs, a monstrous mushroom grew in the center of my back yard. This happened last year, too, and while I didn’t stop to take pics of this year’s model, here are some pics of last year’s model (with Sam standing next to it to provide scale). I am no mycologist, so I have no idea what variety of smurf home this is. My guess is that it is a Tudor or a Colonial. (‘Mycologist’ is latin for a person that wears fungus ornamentally, especially as a hat or cod-piece)

     Last year I let the dinner-plate sized ‘shroom sit there until it got all floppy and disgusting and then I scooped it up with a snow-shovel. I didn’t feel like it this year, so I ran it over with my trusty lawn mower.

     Apparently some mushrooms have thick stalks with a wood-like consistency and strength. Did you know that?
     The unfortunate fungus became caught under my mower, making loud, alarming banging noises. I leaned the lawnmower back, hoping it would eject the offending mass, but instead it simply began firing bite-sized chunks of mushroom all over my back yard, into the trees, and onto my neighbor’s patio. This went on for about twenty seconds, until the last of the mushroom had been regurgitated by my rotating blades of doom. I stopped the lawn mower and gazed appreciatively at the almost even distribution of gibbed fungi. Then it hit me….stench….so…bad!

     Apparently some mushrooms stink like steaming piles of dog-crap and dead flesh. Did you know that?
     High-school science teaches that an easy way to increase the surface area of any object is to break it into pieces. I had drastically increased the surface area of what was apparently the stinkiest substance on earth, and the result was repulsive and nauseating. I retreated to the front yard and nonchalontly began retching. My wife Heather, who was inside the house and had no idea what had happened, walked out onto the patio in the back yard with a glass of ice-tea and began yelling something about shit, and soon Samantha came running around the house toward me, asking me if I pooped in the back yard. She then wanted to say that mommy was in big trouble because she broke a glass on the patio. No, Sam. I think daddy is the one in trouble…

     Next post:Road Trip To Ohio, and the White Trash Special

I’ve created another blog, SafeT’unes. (http://safetunes.blogspot.com)
This blog will deal with my musical compositions. I’ll be posting one new live performance per week, and I may toss arranged stuff up there in-between posts occasionally.
My first posting is Three, and is kindof a test case on how I’m going to swing this thing. Please check it out and let me know what is and is not working.

DaveCat wrote something that robbed me of breath and sentiency for several dicey moments.
You simply must read it.
http://sixsixsixties.blogspot.com/mjnewsflash

I was cleaning my hard drive and found this writers’ equivalent of a doodle. Christmas is so very special…
dying-man-hides-in-wnic-studio.html

Oh, also, I’ve edited the coffee shop story to enhance readability and style.

I mean it, too.

Today I spent a few hours in an abandoned medical clinic, squatting in a vacant office next to a file server which has been behaving badly for three weeks.

The problem has been so damned intractible that multiple attempts and multiple fixes had failed to take hold and the blasted pile of overpriced electronics continued to betray me three to four times daily. This level of betrayal can only have a metaphysical cause. Perhaps all of the insects I’ve killed in my life have banded together to discredit me. To coin a phrase, these bugs in the computer are causing it to crash.

A cheery phone call:”If you don’t fix this thing we are going to sue you”

Hours earlier, I was preparing to photograph an assortment of electric train-set pieces when I discovered, nestled deep in a box of tressles, a miniature squatting horror at a tiny crossroads. Click the pictures for horrific blow-ups thereof.

Could this little lurking monster have had anything to do with the events in the abandoned medical center? Not likely.
What an odd conceit to think that an inability to figure out an intermittent, vague and ambiguous failure would constitute criminal negligence! I can try to explain how the failure codes have been about as meaningful as an episode of “Doctor 90210,” and that this reduces me to using process of elimination to slowly close in on the problem. Deaf, stupid, user ears can’t hear my screaming.
Oh, but you know what I find even more repulsive? Cyberseduction: A LifeTime Original Movie all about how a young man becomes addicted to pornography and it destroys his budding extreme sports carreer. No, I am not lying. They made this movie.

I needed coffee.
     Last night Heather came home and had some bad news: political trouble at work (she works for a government, so I’m talking politics politics, not office politics). Pretty serious, and so we sat up late talking. Well, I was trying to get her to talk and she was trying to sleep. (Have I ever mentioned that Heather and I have an almost gender-reversed relationship? Fodder for another posting, I suppose.)
     Anyway, this morning I opened up my store⁽¹⁾ all stressed out and sleep-deprived.

     I wanted some coffee strong enough to be my man, and there just so happens that a coffee shop shares the strip mall with me. It was there that I intended to find my beloved, homoerotic java.
     Five dollar bill in hand, I sauntered⁽²⁾ on down. The sign on the building said “The Espresso House” along with the requisite pictogram of a steaming cup of coffee.
     It was 9:30 in the morning, and the room was full of Chaldeans⁽³⁾ and smoke. They huddled around two tables talking in their native tongues and gesticulating wildly. I suppose the subject of their conversation was extra exciting, but I only know enough Chaldean to say,”uh..”
     As one, they stopped and stared at me. Tiny curls of smoke continued to ascend toward the ceiling tiles, and their faces turned neutral and reserved.
     I walked past them and sidled up to the counter. One of the men, pausing only a moment to mash his unfiltered butt into eternal darkness, stood and walked around the counter.
     ”Yes?” came the heavily-accented, ambiguous question of the day. I scanned the impressive menu board, which was all the more impressive when I realized it was cribbed directly from a Starbucks right down to the exact prices and drink names.
     ”Well….just give me some regular coffee.”
     ”Coffee..?” You should have seen the look of confusion. It is safe to assume that coffee was the last thing he expected me to request.
     ”Yes, coffee. A large?” I looked around behind the counter. None of the appliances were on. None of the coffee pots were on. There was a single lonely carafe next to a dusty blender.
     ”Let me see….,” mumbled the Chaldean as he looked around and about himself. “Ah-ha!” triumphantly, he pulled a dented and creased styrofoam cup from under the counter. He turned to the carafe, and began to pump. Before the cup was full, however, the carafe piddled itself dry. He turned to me apologetically and handed me the half-filled Clinton-era styrofoam cup.
     ”I’m out. Well…Here. Free of charge.” Thanking the fellow, I beat a quick retreat, not bothering to look for the cream and sweetener that I had a hunch I wouldn’t find.

     A coffee shop without as much as one full cup of coffee. I can only assume that what I thought was a friendly gang of coffee lovin’ Chaldeans is actually a cadre of alien invaders who have disguised their Earth-bound base of operations as a non-descript coffee shop. Ingenious, if you think about it. No one thinks twice about the fact that there is a coffee shop on every corner. No one suspects that “Venti” is Gor-Blookian for “Eat My Brains With A Straw, I Would Thank You For It If I Would Not Then Be Dead.”

1. where I shall be until monday, when I shall resume my life as a breaker of that which is broken and implementeur of that which must be implemented.
2. Yes, I REALLY sauntered. Weeks of training were paying off with every leisurely step I took. Eyes turned to watch me stroll, and I felt my ants grow to fit me even better as my body swelled with success.
3. Detroit happens to have the highest concentration of Turko-Persian Chaldeans, a middle-eastern Christian ethnic group, outside of the middle-east.
4. Curious about coffee?

Doctor Thunder!!
Today I learned that Sam’s club sells a soft drink called “Dr. Thunder,” which tastes a lot like DrPepper, only it frightens children and makes dogs howl.
I’m not the only one who has noticed this God of carbonated beverages:

• Quest Of The Dr Thunder Clones
• http://www.fakedrpepper.com/
  • Ok, I take it back. Mr. Pig is the greatest name for a carbonated beverage ever!!!
• Dr Thunder Scores a 7!

The Bad Elves and their Ugly Gift
There is a sad place in Italy where things like this are produced by sad little elves who were thrown out of Santa’s workshop for trying to unionize.
Elves who now toil endlessly in a silence only occasionally interrupted by their involuntary gasps of despair and disgust at the repulsive objects which they have wrought.

Behold the Italian bookends!!!!

Parody of Extreme Make-Over:Home Edition.
http://SafeTscenes.blogspot.com/
Serial killers, zombies, and Ty Pennington!

Davecat dished the Q’s, and I spoon the answers.

1. So, SafeTInspector, what’s with the name ‘SafeTInspector’?
   • It’s really a very stupid story, but here it is:
     I used to enjoy playing a multiplayer internet game called Quake. You might have heard of it, no?

     Anyway, I usually played as a character named “KickMe.” As in the witty sign kids like to tape to one another’s backs in grade school. It gave me a perverse pleasure thinking about a gun-toting, muscle-bound, murderous warrior in a nightmarish kill-zone running around with a peice of paper taped to his back, saying: “Kick Me.” I pictured other dangerous types, engrossed in deadly combat, running up behind my character and, after reading his little sign, lowering their weapons, hauling off and kicking him squarely in his butt.

     Back then, I had a very slow internet connection. A side effect of this glacial information spout, besides ten minute waits for twelve second porn shots, was terrible performance in Quake. I would press a key to fire off one weapon or another, and watch in horror as poor little KickMe would slooooowly fire several seconds after I sent the command. In the meantime, the person I was shooting at had not only dodged my torpid shot, but had calmly fired enough ordinance into KickMe to make the sign on his back a moot point–it’s hard to kick someone who is mainly made up of bits and pieces separated by ruddy little pools of yuck.
     On nights like that, I would grow frustrated with the whole shebang. I would leave the game and return, miraculously transformed into the SafeTinspector! I would merrily run around, sending out messages warning other players about the woeful lack of safety precautions in the play area.

     SafeTinspector:THIS ROCKET LAUNCHER DOESN’T SEEM TO HAVE THE PROPER SAFETY MECHANISMS. EVERYONE TAKE SPECIAL PRECAUTIONS WHEN CARRYING THE ROCKET LAUNCHER!

     SafeTinspector:EVERYONE BE CAREFUL AROUND THIS LAVA PIT. THERE DOESN’T SEEM TO BE ANY RAILINGS! CHOOSE A BUDDY AND KEEP CLOSE.

     Most of the other players didn’t seem to get the joke.

     Later, I eventually decided that I needed a throw-away EMail account. This is the account I give out on web-sites when I don’t want to give my real EMail address. So of course I tried to set myself up as KickMe@yahoo.com. Unfortunately, someone already took KickMe. I guess my idea wasn’t as unique as I had originally thought. Stuck for ideas, I went ahead and tried SafeTinspector. It took! No one else was stupid enough–I mean original enough–to choose that as their EMail address, and SafeTinspector was born.

2. It’s probably too early to tell in your illustrious AuctionItTODAY career, but barring the NASCAR edition GigantiGrill, what’s the oddest thing you’ve shipped out?
   • Hmm…well…
   • TRS80 Model 4
   • Cursed divorce ring
   • Virtual Boy in a BlockBuster table-top display case
   • A used, dirty, beat-up girl’s off-brand 5-speed 20″ mountain bike. It sold on eBay for $47, not including shipping. That totals to more than what you’ll pay for a new one at Walmart.
   • Oh, and I test-listed a Gummi Bear impaled on a shard of glass.

   

3. In reading your comedy sketches, I notice that they’re quite funny, yet unrepentently insane. Who or what would you say inspires you when you start a-typin’ out a sketch?
   • You read my scenes? Holy shit! Oh, uh, well, my comedy inspirations range from Monty Python, Upright Citizens Brigade, Kids In the Hall, Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Tim Schafer, and Neal Stephenson (I know, he’s a lot more than just a comedy writer, but he did name the main character in a book “Hiro Protagonist.” Tell me that’s not funny! I stole that name for one of my scenes…).
   • Idea inspirations come from my ADHD addled brain. I suffer from almost constant involuntary free association, which leaks from my body as an alarming stream of wierd. Like a mental version of a weepy colon.
   • Usually my scene has a specific idea I thought was funny and then I loop through it while trying to adhere to the rules I’ve set within the scene. Then there’s the additional challenge of drawing a scene to a logical close before energy drains from it; I don’t always get that, however.
   • I’m sortof an eternal journeyman, however. All my scenes are stuck in first or second draft level for all of eternity.
   • URL? http://SafeTscenes/blogspot.com/
4. If you could design a whimsical corporate mascot for amy fast food place (either still in existence, or now-defunct), what would it be, and for what food chain would this mascot shill for?
   • That’s easy. I’ve been trying to get McDonalds to use “Testy the Intestinal Parasitic Protozoa” in their Fish Sandwich commercials for years. Other ideas off the top of my head:
     • Harvey the Drunk Bastard – Denny’s late night menu mascot.
     • Tracy the Screaming Taco Shell – A character so delicious that children chase, corner, and bite off mouthfuls of her still living flesh as she screams for the mercy she shall never receive.
     • Insung the Incoherant – A helpful Korean animated mouse that completely fails to help Americans use LG phones due to his inability to speak English as more than a collection of randomly selected adverbs.
     • The Aromatic Puddle – A sentient and musically gifted vegetable oil slick that uses his greasy smell and a siren song of tuber praise to entice customers to buy french fries from Burger King
5. If a maniacal ex-Nazi doctor had you strapped in a chair, all the while closing in on your unanesthetised mouth with a gleaming array of dental tools asking ‘Is it safe?’ over and over, what would your answer be? Keep in mind that he’s read your blog, and knows that you’re the SafeTInspector.
   • I would love to say that I would castigate him for his lack of resolve. Becoming an “ex”-Nazi indicates that he’s a quitter, and quitters never prosper.
   • But in actuality I would probably shriek like a school-girl and beg for mercy. I would energetically wet myself to the point where I would smell like a walking asparagus and I would do my best to lose consciousness quickly.
   • Oooh! I know! I would engage in a spirited and high-speed reading of depression-era dada poetry. Nazi’s hate that, as it makes a mockery of their cruel efficiency. Oom pata, doo shlata, tube-ity joot!

This was a response to the “Interview Game.” If you want to play, let me know in a comment on this posting. Please be aware that this game pre-supposes the existance of your blog or journal.
The Official Interview Game Rules

1. If you want to participate, leave a comment below saying “interview me.”
2. I will respond by asking you five questions — each person’s will be different.
3. You will update your journal/blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview others in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.