chuckles: April 2007 Archives

The trouble with announcing the "good mood blogging" is that it's pretty easy to read my mood when I don't follow through on the promise. I've got an entry to follow this one, but a little bit of research to do (read: movie to finish) before I can post it. In the meantime, I thought I'd offer a link to a site that is (a) funny, (b) nostalgia provoking, and (c) the best argument "against" Wikipedia that I have ever read. (I got it from someone, but it was long enough ago that my source has slipped my mind. So if it's you, sorry about that, and a belated thanks.)

Feast your eyes, my friends, on Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Captured Koala. Adam Cadre's riff on the old Encyclopedia Brown tales is pretty durn funny. And there was a time, some thirty-odd years ago, when I soaked up every EB tale I could get my hands on.

At no point, however, did I call myself Encyclopedia Brooke. That is all.

I was going to try and squeeze a post tonight out of the fact that I don't really have anything to blog about, but fortunately for me, McSweeney's came to the rescue, in the form of Regarding Pete Seeger's Requests for a Hammer and His Descriptions of What He Would Do if He Had One. John Moe brings the funny, and it's worth tracing back into his various Pop-Song Correspondences.

Thank goodness, because this is the time of year when it seems everything is just that much more dramatic, coming as everything does at the end of the school year. Our patience is worn thin, and the cruel tease that is spring break only ends up making it that much more difficult to get to the end.

And I'm as bad about this as anyone. A long time ago, I started the policy of requiring my writing students to wait 24 hours before coming to me with questions or complaints about grades. And honestly, I think my keel would be a lot more even this month if I could deploy some analogous strategy on my behalf. Instead, I have a tendency to binge/purge emotionally, getting all worked up one moment and crashing the next. Part of it is the occasional sleep deficit, which works its own disorder on my ability to keep things in perspective.

And there you have it. An entry almost entirely devoid of content, but with plenty of discontent. Maybe what I should do is to devote the next few entries to blogging things that improve my mood. McSweeney's is a nice place to begin that series, and I already have something in mind for tomorrow...

See you then.

A couple of days back, I saw an ad for an otherwise uninteresting movie that's opening this Friday, called Pathfinder (IMDB), and I've seen it a few times since. Maybe it was my mood at the time, but the end of the commercial made me chuckle:

Rated R for strong brutal violence throughout

I'm sure that it's happened before, but I had a hard time recalling any other movie that so obviously and blatantly used its MPAA rating as part of its appeal.

1. Sold domain to Abe Frohman, sausage king of Chicago

2. Live-blogging the Weather Channel

3. Dedicating site to reviews of movies featuring talking babies, talking animals, or both

4. The Official Web Presence for the Syracuse Chapter of the Pussycat Dolls Fan Club (OWPSCPDFC, pronounced opes-cup-dific)

5. Three words: other people's pets

Update: If you don't otherwise, be sure to check out the spread of new, seasonal products over at ThinkGeek. I'm particularly fond of SurgeStix...