How many Sleeping Beauty characters are stupid? All of em.

I mentioned yesterday how insanely idiotic Sleeping Beauty's characters were. Okay, so I said they were stupid, same thing. I'll start from the beginning; The happy kingdom has a kid, and fairies show up to bless her with beauty and song, because apparently genetics weren't enough to gamble on her being ugly. Or maybe her mom was hideous at birth and the faeries wanted to stack the deck in her favor. Anyway, Maleficent, an evil faerie, shows up pissed and crashes the party because she wasn't invited. Probably because she is the kind of person that crashes parties simply because she wasn't invited.

So she curses the kid; on her 16th birthday, she will prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die. Nice, curse a baby because her parents snubbed you, probably because you shit in the punch bowl once. Your name's Maleficent, for Christ's sake.

So Merryweather, who apparently is not as powerful as Maleficent (evil is always stronger in these things. Great message for the kids.) tweaks the curse so that the girl won't die, she'll just go into a coma until the man who loves her gives her a smooch. Remember this; it's important later.

So what do you think her parents do? Sit on it for the next decade and a half and then work on protecting their kid? Maybe help her find that special someone (they had already arranged her marriage to the kid from the next kingdom) so she could prick her finger and then immediately get a kiss? No, those would be simple solutions that a non-idiot might consider. Instead, they do what any reasonable parents would do; they order every spinning wheel in the kingdom burned (how many livelihoods did that destroy?) and send their brand new baby daughter out to the woods to be raised by the faeries that were already not strong enough to stop the evil one in the first place.

The three faeries then proceed to raise her to be afraid of any and all strangers until it is time for her to go back to the kingdom and become the princess and marry the prince. On her 16th birthday. Now, think about this for a second; the curse says she will prick her finger on her 16th birthday. Not the day after, the day of. So why not wait 1 day? Nope, bring her out of hiding the fucking second she is actually in danger. They had 15 years, 364 safe days leading up to that day, and the rest of her life after it.

This is like going back in time and telling everyone involved with President Kennedy's drive through Dallas that he was going to get his brains blown out, they believe you, and wind up closing some libraries and sending him out anyway.

Sorry, dude. It turns out that a kiss from Marilyn Monroe would have stuffed your brain back into your melon. Guess you should have rethought that whole "shutting her up" thing.

So they wheel her out on the day she is fated to almost die (but not really) and Maleficent finds out and lures her into the castle tower and, because the girl is in a trance, makes her prick her finger on a spinning wheel she conjured out of nothing. Hmm. Seems like hiding her for her childhood was kind of a waste time. Maybe if they had waited one fucking day, that would not have happened. Shit, they could have lied about what day her birthday was and the evil one's plan would have been fucked. Apparently, the kingdom was slaved to stupid.

But don't worry, to spare the parent's grief of their daughter being asleep until they could find someone who really liked her, the good faeries put the entire kingdom to sleep.

What?! Wait, hold on a second. You mean to tell me they can knock out an entire country, but they can't lift a curse? So they find out that the princess has indeed found a true love and it's the prince she was arranged to marry. Sweet! But he's been captured by Maleficent. So no biggie, the y just teleport in and free him.

What the fuck? They can teleport? And they give him a magical shield and sword. I think they were holding  out the whole time. Either that, or they spent the princess's childhood in the woods killing boars and gaining XP.

So the prince rides to the sleepy kingdom to give the princess a kiss, and Maleficent shows up and turns into this:

Wait a godamn minute.... What was that shit with the spinning wheel? She clearly was acting purely out of spite, why not turn into a dragon and bite the princess in half? If you wanted to crush the parents emotionally, I think bisecting their kid would do that.


You can see how this all worked out; the entire story is filled with dilemmas with a clearly right decision and a clearly wrong one, and they all choose the wrong one. The prince is the only non idiot in the whole thing, once he is done being fucked with, he simply goes and stabs the dragon, kisses the girl and saves the day.

Instead of "Sleeping Beauty", it should be called "The Prince in the Sea of Stupid."

The Queen from Snow White

First off, if you are still following this blog, holy shit, and thank you.

Next, my kid is watching Snow White, and a thing occurred to me; why does the queen try to have Snow White killed? Because she is younger and more beautiful? She was a sorceress and presumably had the political power to treat the princess of the kingdom like a peasant and the magical ability to polymorph into an old woman and brew apple poison that would have made the princess sleep forever; that is some serious shit.

 Not to mention the fact that she had a sentient omniscient mirror at her disposal. Speaking of the mirror...

Did Snow White suddenly blossom into a woman that morning? Was she a troll until that day, somehow waking up with porcelain skin and beautiful hair? Did she suddenly grow boobies? I ask these things, because as the story goes, at least what we see in the movies, the queen was apparently the hottest piece of tail around until that fateful morning at the beginning of the film.

Or maybe he was lying to shut her up. Or just a dick who nearly got a kid killed because he was tired of saying "Oh, you're totally hot still... You're what? 50? What are you hoping for? Bo Derek had wrinkles at 50 and Demi Moore looks like a fucking dude now. But yeah, you're a total dish."

She is so vain, she has her huntsman take the girl out into the woods to not just kill her, cut out her heart and bring it home in a box. Seriously? What the fuck, Disney?! My 5 year old daughter watches this. For perspective, the last movie I watched on the very same Blu-Ray player was Rango, which had exactly 0 heart-murders, even inferred. Before that? Equilibrium, which has a face sliced off and a shitload of shooting, but still; no hearts being cut out of girls.

So we've established that the queen is a wizard, a powerful one, and President for Life. Why not slip some ugly potion into Snow White's oatmeal? Or have your maid throw some battery acid in her face? The point being, literally every alternative to "Trust a third party to go somewhere that I can't see to do something that would have made Hitler pause" would have been better. But she does, and what does a woman so self absorbed she'll sentence a royal child to death because she was better looking do?

Turn herself into this:

That makes sense. That's like fancying yourself the best smelling lady in the land, and then rolling around in cow pies to get revenge on the person judged better smelling. Never mind the fact that the mirror sees fit to tell her the next day that she still isn't the fairest. He knew Snow White was still alive, yet slept on it because, you know... He's apparently a big fat dong of a mirror.

That dress doesn't make your ass look fat; your ass does. 

And the wrinkles on your forehead look like a scrotum. How's it feel to be second best?

Then there is the fact that despite being the ruler of a kingdom, she opts to go take out Snow White herself. Okay, I will grant her that the last person she sent fucked her pretty good, but at this point she knew where the princess was; living with dwarfs. Keep in mind, these weren't "Little People, Big World" dwarfs that are just people, these were fantasy dwarfs. Like Gimli.

Hi-ho, motherfucker.

Okay, so Peter Jackson won't be hiring me to pen shitty one liners any time soon, but the fact remains that the 7 dwarfs wind up being what I have come to expect from dwarfs after over 20 years of Dungeons & Dragons; they grab pickaxes and chase the old bitch to her doom. And by doom, I mean, struck by lightning, falling off a cliff, and a giant boulder falling the same distance on top of her. (Seriously Disney... What the fuck?)

I guess what I am getting at is that if she had kept away from stupid knee-jerk reactions, she could have saved herself a lot of grief. I mean, Jeffry Dahmer was a bit of an idiot, and even her managed to kill 17 people. You're in charge of a country, exercise some creativity for Christ's sake.

On the other hand, at least she didn't reach the magnitude of stupidity displayed good and evil alike in Sleeping Beauty, but that's a different post for a different day.

Buy a book, donate to a worthy cause

If you have a Kindle or an iPhone, go grab The Four Humors, a collection of short stories by some of the best writers Cracked.com has to offer, plus original artwork and a foreword by none other than JDATE's David Wong.


I had nothing to do with this particular book, but most of the team is also working on a book I helped write and edit, so I am showing my solidarity.

Just call me "Darth"

I was perusing some articles over on Wired.com and came across this:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/st_dropdownmenus/

And here is the final line:

So come up with something good. Grand Vizier? Empress Regent? Darth and Mr.? It’s your box, and it’s achingly blank.

It got me thinking; why do I insist on going by "Sir" or "Mr" (not that anyone calls me either)? I now proclaim I shall be referred to as "Darth" from now on. "Can I fill your cup, sir?"

No!

"Can I fill your cup, Darth?"

Yes! (and it's "may I", punk)

So, from now on, it's no more "Mr Dietle", it's "Darth Dietle."

Some BK: Part 2 of what will be a continuing thing on Fast Food

As previously mentioned in this very blog, I love fast food. Today, I decided to extol a little on the virtues of Burger King. It's been years now that fast food restaurants have made their menu's nutrition information transparent to us; if you want to know how much a McNugget is giving you in fat and calories, just Google it, or even check the bottom of the box they came in. No doubt, when this first went into practice, more than a few fast food executives probably thought it would spell the end of fast food as we know it.

Fortunately for our race, we collectively aren't that stupid; this is why society as a whole has not choked to death on it's own spit. Our world is full of morons, but even though they are loud, they are not in the majority, so for every 1 person who looked at the nutrition information on a fast food meal and screamed "That greasy slab of beef covered in mayo cheese and bacon was bad for me?!?! AHHHHHH!", there were about 10,000 who shrugged as he ran off, because they weren't surprised, they knew that shit was bad for them.

So here we are with BK. Supersize Me was biased aimed at McDonald's, but Ronald and company has nothing on the King. In fact, while Mickey D's was dropping Supersize from the menu, and Morgan Spurlock frolicked in a field somewhere, feasting on self-righteousness (which is Vegan and low in cholesterol, I hear), Burger King was not only not in the "They're killing us with saturated fat and sodium!" spotlight, they unveiled the Enormous Omelet Sandwich, which I believe the Japanese refer to as "Fuck you health breakfast" or something like that.

Note, while searching for the Bk sandwich link up there, this is what Google's autofill came up with:

The third one down made me choke on my drink.

Anyway, that attitude carries on to this day, and their cavalier attitude towards your ability to not have your arteries seize on fat is admirable and obvious. Just look at the Flash intro to their nutrition menu. I wish I could link you directly to it here, but they probably have some security in place preventing hot-linking, as they should. But if you don't feel like clicking, it looks like this at some point:

That, boys and girls, is completely unapologetic food porn. Whoever is the Ray Crock of Burger King is the Larry Flint of fast food. I suppose that makes McDonald's the Playboy of fast food; they never show you everything, the pictures are doctored and the food is less whorish, but it's really just a watered down version of the other.

Once you actually get into the menu, the fun starts in earnest. I made this:

I wanted to show it in full size because I wanted you to be able to read the nutrition info on that monstrosity. See, the menu configurator thing apparently lets you design a meal that you can order for real at any one of their fine BK locations. That started off as a Quad Stacker. Then I added 4 more kinds of cheese, onion fries, a whopper patty, an Angus patty, a Tendercrisp Chicken fillet, a fish fillet, a veggie burger, extra Stacker sauce and ketchup. Oh, and pickles. I think maybe a goldfish or a baby wound up in there at some point, I am not sure; I got a little carried away adding stuff.

I also added lettuce and tomato, but whether it was because of the sheer amount of garbage I crammed onto the bun or a sign of Burger King's continued war on health, they disappeared out the top of the configurator. They literally let you build food too large for the food builder to display properly.

Kudos to you BK. Kudos for not caring what others think, even when that means people have inadvertently committed suicide with your food. I love you all the same.

Burger King; Don't fuck with us, or we'll make you eat here.

Minivan rear doors: The hidden danger

That right there is a picture of a brutal pummeling instrument. Now, that is just a picture I found on Google image search, not my wife's minivan, but the design is pretty similar. I have walked into those fucking things plenty of times in the past, but this morning I had an incident that convinced me they are pure evil and must be stopped, like a much more boring version of the machines in Maximum Overdrive.

I had opened the back of the van to remove a bunch of boxes and to put trash in the back because we have to take our trash to the dump (every day is trash day for us!) and as I stepped around the back of the van with 2 large bags of garbage, the rear door leaped out and punched me in the forehead. I swear this; I did not just walk into it, because I have suffered several head injuries, some traumatic (like the time a 50 lb table hit me in the head and I had to get 7 staples in my scalp to close it up. That made me dizzy and bloody.) but this morning, my vision went black, then I saw stars.

That's "getting attacked" behavior, not "stupidly walking into an inanimate object" behavior. My head has been swimming all morning and I want nothing more than to crawl under my desk and sleep, which I am pretty sure is a symptom of a concussion. Or maybe a symptom of not enough coffee, but I will go with the more dramatic option because it make me feel like a TV character instead of some random idiot who didn't look up.

This is not the first time I have walked into the rear door of my wife's van, although it is (so far) the most painful and the only one to give me a lasting headache, so if I should happen to not wake up tonight, I would like to say "kiss my ass" to everyone on planet earth for not making my stay here more comfortable and loaded with beer and lap dances from my wife.


If I don't die, then I am totally kidding, I love you all and keep following my blog because I need the attention. And always keep your eyes peeled for low-hanging mini van doors; you never know when one may be lurking nearby, just waiting to brain you and doom you to an eternal sleep.

I've heard they even sneak onto airplanes.

And if there is a Hell, I am going to it.

Death in Kid's Movies

I recently (finally) finished watching Toy Story 3. There is a long story about my daughter freaking out during the daycare scene because it was fucking loud and terrifying, (okay, so it's apparently a really short story) but basically we went to go see it in the theater on Father's day and I only saw the first hour. Well, my mother in law just gave us the DVD, so I finally got to see the whole thing, and Holy Shit... Spoilers to follow. (for Toy Story 2 and 3, Transformers the movie, and some other kid's movies. You have been warned.)

Believe me when I say this; 

this movie will likely scare the shit out of your young child.

So, my wife and I were watching TS3 (which is what I will refer to it as from now on 'cause im lzy) and realized that even though it is rated G, there was no way we could let our daughter watch it. You see, these movies all have some pretty disturbing implications when you think about them; Toy Story 2 (TS2) for instance; Jesse has some horrible abandonment issues, and Prospector Stinky is messed up, way messed up. But he gets his, right? He winds up in the hands of a child who mutilates and paints up her toys. For toys, I am pretty sure that is like living a Saw sequel, but I guess that's fitting since he threatened to take Woody apart piece by piece. (speaking of Saw...)

The third one is several times more disturbing, but comes with some pretty useful lessons for small children, like "growing up will emotionally destroy your once-loved toys" and "new people are terrifying sociopaths under the surface, especially the friendly ones who smell nice."

Kids, that there is the face of evil. once you get his back-story, he is even more frightening than Big baby, who combines the already freaky-ass imagery of a baby doll that speaks entirely in baby sounds, it combines it all with a shriek-inducing Paris Hilton quality lazy eye:

Honestly, Big Baby scared the hell out of me when I first saw him, and pretty consistently for the rest of the movie, until it turns out he was lied to. Oh yeah, Lotso Huggin Bear is a royal shithead; he is accidentally forgotten, and then because he was replaced, he turns into a bastard who lies to the other two toys that were left because, you know, fuck everyone if he couldn't be happy.

But the awful doesn't end there; by the end of the movie, he is revealed to the other toys for the asshat he is, and after he is rescued by Woody and friends from a garbage shredding machine, he is given a chance to save them all from a fiery death, and runs off. You hear that kids? If you help people, they will screw you. I say that because he is saved by Woody and Buzz because they hope he will stop the conveyor belt that is dragging them and tons of shredded trash into an inferno.

Losto is repaid for his douchebaggery by being lashed to the front of a garbage truck, presumably until he shreds after years of exposure, or until , well forever. In Toy Story, toys have their own Hell. But the worst part is when the hero toys from the series wind up in a huge, slow moving whirlpool of flaming garbage, drifting inexorably toward a fiery end. After some ineffective attempts to crawl against the falling trash, they start holding hands. Cute, right?

Nope, they are grimly accepting that they are all going to burn to death. In a kid's movie! Holy Shit! Pixar! What the fuck? Did your dad die while making this? Jesus, that part was dark for an adult movie. It's not like the scene was horribly inappropriate; it would have been fine in an adult movie, and was actually one of the few non-idiotic scenes in Armageddon but God....

I also mentioned Transformers: The Movie. I am, in fact, referring to the "kid friendly" animated film from the 80s. I still remember it vividly; it was one of the first movies I went to myself. I lived on Grissom AFB in Indiana and was about as die hard a Transformers fan as there could be at the time. In the opening of the movie, after we get past the cheesy 80s guitar music and the "Hey, we're fun-loving! Something awful is just around the corner!" scenes, and after the ominous planet eating-planet-opening, we get treated to some good old fashioned Transformer fighting! Yeah! Robots! Lasers!

Death!!!

Wait, what? What the hell?!

Do you recognize this guy? I do; that's Ironhide. He was a Transformers staple in the 80s. He is also dead less than 15 minutes into the movie. It turns out that a lot of the cartoon's plot-lines could have been trimmed down to Starscream using Megatron as the gun he was. He kills every god damn Autobot on a spaceship in under a minute with Megatron as a gun. Boom. Dead.

EDIT: I Found the video on Youtube:

The worst part is probably Prowl buying the farm; it's a kid's movie, yet we see the light fade from his eyes, and smoke pour out of his mouth as he tumbles to the floor. And I forgot that Ironhide and the ambulance jerk spasmodically as gunshot after gunshot rips through them. No wonder I'm so screwed up.

Then they did the equivalent of murdering Transformer Jesus for fun Hostel-style; they kill Optimus Prime. I mean seriously. Why not make a My Little Pony movie and shoot Pinky Pie in the face 20 minutes in. Seriously people, that's fucking brutal.

Disney is pretty bad about this kind of thing. It's like Mickey and Goofy hang out and snort coke, then laugh while bathing in the tears of terrified children. Have you seen the end of The Little Mermaid? After Ursula loses her shit because she killed her own eels, she grows huge(r) and gets rammed by a ship. The prow pops her like a balloon! AHHHHH!

Let's also not forget, they gave us Bambi, where a young child's father is an absentee and mom gets fucking shot. It's only a matter of time before Dora finds the remains of several kittens who were burned in a forest fire and has to bring the arsonist to justice, is what I am getting at.


Holy Hell, Hollywood. Let the kids get fucked over by their classmates in high school to get their innocence ripped away, I guess I am saying.

Oh, the ironicness

I have not posted anything in weeks, and when I finally do, it's because I wrote an article about Immortality, and then linked it to my blog about Death. As Bart Simpson said, the ironing is delicious. Basically, science is offering us several alternatives to dying in the coming century, which is pretty cool. Except...


The world is still filled with bullets, rogue waves and scary foreigners who apparently want to kill us all (every country has someone who hates them for no apparent reason. Like to fucking Lilliputians.... God I hate those smug, Gulliver kidnapping assholes....) Of course, why would anyone want to live forever? After all, movies like The Highlander and Wolverine show us why it could suck, but there is an important consideration to be had here; those movies involve that one-off guy who can't die, as opposed to an entire society that decided not to. There's a pretty big difference.


In the second case, there is not that heartbreak because the love of your life turned into a feeble old coot who once baked the cat in a flurry of utter culinary confusion brought on by senility; she is right there with you, outliving trees and marveling that when you were in your first century of life, dogs didn't yet control Haiti and speak fluent Esperanto. It completely changes the game.

Add to that, we have huge advancements in military tech that is significantly increasing the survivability of our troops, on those odd occasions that we wind up actually having to send them. We have UVS and unmanned ground vehicles in the works, not to mention power armor and DARPA trying to make genetic enhancements to our guys and girls in the military that will turn them into super-humans.

So, it looks like immortality will probably A. happen (and soon. ish.) and B. not be the Highlander type where you can jump off a sky scraper or play RoboCop cosplay with actual criminals, but at least that whole peeing yourself and forgetting your kid's names thing will be a thing of the past, or at least only a problem after your weekly drinking binge.

Sorry about the hiatus...

NaNoWriMo is over! Shorty is done! I finished an article about alien rape! Woohoo!

Things should be back to "normal" now, with regular posts about random crap, and hopefully gory details about books and such. I have 2 completed proposals and a finished novel, so I should be busybusy.

At any rate, since I just finished an article on it, here is a Giger painting, just 'cause.

I will put something substantial up soon, I promise.

Done and Done!

Doafs should be back in business for the month of December, since I completed my NaNoWriMo mission!

Look for more awful blog posts in the near future. Huzzah! (the final chapter and epilogue of Shorty will be available on my other blog soon.)

Bring the Crunch!

Okay, so I have been seriously slacking these past few weeks, but for good reason. I am writing a novel, plus I have 3 Cracked.com articles in the works, so I am busy.


However, because it is topical (as I am a huge Cthulhu fan), I figured I would give you this teaser for last week's exciting conclusion of South Park's Mysterion trilogy (I am assuming that is what they are calling it), because all 3  episodes have the great tentacled one himself. Enjoy.

Coon vs. Coon & Friends
Tags: SOUTH
PARKEric Cartman,Bradley Biggle,more...

Because I love you all

This month has been really busy, what with NaNoWriMo eating up most of my free time, I have not had it to put anything interesting here in a while, so I figured I would link you to my work in progress, Shorty, in case you are interested.

Chapter 1: Beer, Robots and the Past

Chapter 2: Escape, Food and Zombies

Chapter 3: The PES, The PET and The PEN

Chapter 4: Planet Terror, Planet Happy

Chapter 5: The Cure, and Zomburgers Explained

Chapter 6: Pandora, R'Lyeh, Vhoorl. And stuff.


Let me know what you think, if you feel like it.

I officially freaking love Hulu

Seriously, check this out:





Episode 1 of The Walking Dead. Watch it. Love it. (ZOMBIES!!!!)

NaNoWriMo Novel: Shorty, chapter 1 is up!

I folded, I bent and I broke. I haven't even finished it yet, but it is up:
http://shorty-novel.blogspot.com/2010/11/chapter-1-beer-robots-and-past.html

NaNoWriMo - It Begins....

Today is the first day of the National Novel Writing Month; the personal contest that places quantity over quality and challenges writers to put down 50,000 words in 30 days.

I am personally very stoked. I have a great story in mind, I love the main character, and has villains that will hopefully be simultaneously menacing and funny. I will post updates as I have them, but until then, happy writing.

2 more days 'til Halloween (Halloween, Halloween)

2 more days 'til Halloween, Silver Shamrock.


For the first time in a while, I made it through the Halloween season without watching the Halloween movies. Not that there is anything wrong with them, mind you, I just didn't. This year has been more about a lot of other classics, mostly from the 70s and 80s. Here are some that I watched in the last month (there are spoilers, so don't continue on, if you don't want the plots of 30 year old movies ruined for you):


The Omen 2

Damien is back! Despite the fact that this movie came out 2 years after the original, about a decade has passed, and Damien is in boarding school, where he discovers he has demonic powers (the power of staring people into the fetal position and making their brains die by, you know, staring at them). At first he seems pretty against the idea of being the son of the devil and stuff, but by the end, he is pretty cool with it and kills his best friend/cousin with the brain killing thing because he strangely has an issue with his best friend being the anti-Christ. Silly bastard.

The Omen 3

This one could have been so much better; The first two were good (the original is awesome, who doesn't love hearing Gregory Peck say "Damien?") and it has Sam Niel as Damien this time. Sam is a damn good actor, I loved him in Jurassic Park and he was one of two shining beacons in that turd Event Horizon (the other being Lawrence Fishburne. Props to Jason Issacs for looking like a scary bad guy even when he isn't) , but man, this thing floated before being flushed.

This one came out in 1981, 3 years after the second, and again Damien has aged over a decade. Now he runs a major corporation and has political aspirations. He also has forcible butt-sex with a woman, which I imagine is what the son of Satan would do, but then after the initial horror of being sodomized, she seems pretty okay with it. Back in the first movie, we find out that kin order to kill Damien, he needs to be stabbed in a certain order, on holy ground with 7 daggers. This is reiterated in the second. By the third, apparently sticking him with one in a non-lethal place is enough to end Satan's reign of terror. I guess the writers were getting bored by this point, too.


The Gate

Not at all what I was expecting, but that is not necessarily bad. In this movie, an old tree falls over in a very 1980s back yard in the 1980s suburbs. 2 1980s little boys accidentally unleash unholy demons into their 1980s world and very nearly bring about a demonic cataclysm that opens the sky and brings the dead back from the grave once or twice.

No one seems to notice. Literally, there is a giant tornado from Hell spiraling up into the sky in the middle of a crowded neighborhood and not one person comes out of their house to see what the fuck was up. Of course, this was the 80s, so maybe Micheal Jackson was burning off his hair or a little girl was stuck in a well and everyone was glued to their TV.

Despite being almost painfully 1980s, it was still a charming little movie. Go watch it and enjoy the cheese.


Pet Semetary

The movie has it all; Stephen King, scary animals, creepy kids and an idiot making out with his dead wife while goo dribbles from her shattered eye socket. It also gave us Jud, played by Herman Munster, and therefore the old guy from every other episode of South Park that is constantly warning people not to "Go ovah theyah."

Pet Semetary is iconic; it's one of those movies that without us even realizing it, squirreled its way into pop culture without even trying. It also has a ghost with a smooshed head that kind of acts like the guardian angel from It's a Wonderful Life, only he REALLY sucks at his job and manages to save exactly no one, and still manages to look really smug while doing it.

Crows, scary black (AWESOME) birds

I watched this the other night:

Watch the full episode. See more Nature.

It is freaking amazing; you will never look at those obnoxious black birds the same way. In the opening scene, the narrator (Sigourney Weaver!) explains that the town in Canada had a crow problem, so they held a contest to see who could shoot the most as y of dealing with the problem. They managed to kill a single crow before the rest figured out how high to fly to avoid being shot, then told their friends.

It turns out that crows have developed smarts for much the same reason we did; they are omnivores and opportunists, just like humans. That lifestyle requires that you learn multiple methods for obtaining food, and to be good at all of them. Along with that comes the necessity of communal living, which means that communication becomes important.

They have also evolved tool use, and are actually much more impressive about it than monkeys and apes. They have been shown to memorize truck routes and traffic light patterns, all to ensure they get the good food.

So the next time you see a large, black, beady eyed bird watching you, it likely is plotting something against you. Maybe even to kill you (or at least your livestock.)

Halloween week: A week of pure self indulgence

For those of you who somehow managed to find this blog, read it with some interest, and didn't know I write for Cracked.com, I write for Cracked.com, and have been for over a year and a half. I usually focus on science related subjects, but occasionally branch off into things like movies. Okay, I branched off once on movies and once on people.

This week, myself and Jacopo della Quericia have an article slated to run the last week day before Halloween, about which I am completely stoked. Also, Cracked's Halloween page features an article about zombies I wrote that ran 2 months ago and apparently angries up the blood of zombie lovin' types.

In the spirit of being a total attention whore and shamelessly self promoting douche, I bring you a list of Halloween Appropriate articles I have written for Cracked for you to enjoy, and possibly tell me why I am an awful person after reading.

7 Terrifying Giant Versions of Disgusting Critters

7 Awesome Acts of Nature (That Science Can't Explain)

13 Real Animals Lifted Directly Out of Your Nightmares

6 Creepy Animal Behaviors That Science Can't Explain

6 Things Your Body Does Every Day (That Can Destroy You)

6 Terrifying Diseases That Science Can't Explain

7 Terrifying Prehistoric Creatures (That Are Still Around)

Today I was thinking about Centipedes...

So, I wrote this several months back (I did not do the header image, the rest is all me though) and the number one most horrifying monster on the list to me was the Gejigeji, a monstrous Japanese centipede that are apparently considered good luck, and look like a bunch of spiders glued together with fear:

I could not imagine how anyone could not be horrified by these things. Then something really weird happened; people in the comment section of the topic page started saying "Those are just house centipedes, they have them where I live." So I looked them up, and lo-and-behold, they are an ancient family of centipedes that really should only be terrifying to insects, spiders and scorpions. They are completely harmless, kind of like if a werewolf only ate other werewolves. (Which is to say they are still freaky to look at, but at least they don't bite)

So because my life seems to love irony, I discovered within a week of the topic page being featured on Cracked that the apartment building I live in is infested with these things (the smaller American version, which tops out at about an inch and a half) and it turns out they are fascinating and not really scary up close.

The first one I saw I thought was a cockroach, and it moved FAST. They hunt by jumping on their prey, and believe me, these bastards can jump. This segues nicely into the whole reason I am posting this; this morning, I find a little one, no more than a half inch long in our bathroom sink. My wife is the kind of awesome person who wouldn't kill a tarantula, despite being terrified of spiders; she would just make me take it outside. Fortunately, New Hampshire is lacking in wild tarantulas.

So she had noticed the little centipede in the shower and scooped him up and put him in the sink so as to not drown him in the shower; this is where I found him. I showed my 4 year old, who thought he was cute (he was, actually. I like it when animals act like dogs, and he was cleaning himself, which looked a lot like a dog scratching itself)

I caught him after a chase (they can run like a damn bullet train) and carried it over to a particularly poorly built part of our bathroom where he could run off into the darkness and be safe. I set him down on a flat surface, and he leaped 180 degrees from what we would consider upright to upside down faster than I could register it and ran off.

Why there is not a "Gejigeji Man" superhero yet is beyond me.

Okay, maybe because the people he rescued would run away screaming. The best part about these things? Not only do they pounce on their prey using those awesome jumping skills, they poison them, and beat them to death with their legs. It's like a bug mixed with Mike Tyson and Ted Nugent.

Food + Death = Fast Food

I decided that since I am all out of cream at home today, I would stop by McDonald's and get breakfast; their coffee sucks way less than it used to, and I am a huge fan of all things fried. I was actually surprised by the amount of grease on my sausage biscuit, which is pretty terrifying considering a sausage biscuit from any fast food joint is little more than a lattice of biscuit and spices used to hold grease together.

There was so much, it soaked through the wrapper, which was completely translucent at that point, and even drenched the Monopoly pieces on the hash browns, which were sitting on top of the sandwich. They tend to be greasy enough on their own, but Jesus Christ, when they are being out-greased by their neighbor, something very wrong is afoot.

Now, I am also a huge fan of booze, but I am certain that if I die early because of ingesting too much of something, it will wind up being Burger King instead of vodka, which makes me significantly less cool than a rock star. On the other hand, I won't have herpes, chlamydia or syphilis when the sweet embrace of death takes me, so I think that ultimately I am the winner here.



I will likely muse on fast food quite a bit here because it is A. Funny, B. Deadly and C. I have issues with obsessing over shit and fast food is a pretty big addiction for me.