5 Comments Finally, a decent movie from Spokane–The Knights of Badassdom.
I can’t believe Tyrian Lanister (Game of Thrones) is friends with Jason Stackhouse (True Blood), Liam McPoyle (Alw
ays Sunny), River Tem (Firefly), Abed (Community), and Steve Zahn. They summon a demon during a heated bout of live-action role-playing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gTT59NibGw
Courtesy of Flagstaff Medical Center
After a year off, I’m starting to send out work to literary magazines again. After having a good laugh at my thesis and writing and editing a number of other pieces, I decided it was time to figure out what kind of essays literary magazines have been publishing in the last two years.
I read each essay in the neglected magazines I subscribe to, and began making my way through the online content of my thirty favorites—the ones I lust after the most—and I uncovered a common theme. The huge chunk of the essays being published are about illness—with the unmistakable prevalence of cancer. Some of these sickness pieces are wonderful and succeed in transcending the trope, and there are many books, particularly Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Trillin’s Ask Alice, that are stunning.
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Courtesy of Dark Horse Comics
It’s almost been a year since I’ve gotten my MFA, and aside from the precarious stacks of omni-genre books in my house, I’ve had one reading mainstay—Axe Cop. Every Tuesday, I open my computer at work and read a new page of a web-comic created by two brothers, Ethan and Malachai Nicolle. Malachai, a six-year-old, writes the book, while Ethan, his 30-year-old brother, draws it.
The story is also about two brothers—Axe Cop and Flute Cop—fighting bad guys on their flying tyrannosaurus that has Gatling guns for arms. Axe Cop carries an axe and tells bad guys, “I’ll chop your head off,” before decapitating zombies, robots and all manner of creatures (excluding girls, who he just knocks unconscious because they can’t be on his team).
It takes place in a world that William Burroughs and Philip K. Dick couldn’t dream up, where anything is possible: unicorn horns grant wishes; if you get an animal or vegetable’s blood on you, you turn into that animal (including an avocado); there is a hero with socks for arms who wields a golden chainsaw and gets Santa Claus’s powers, and a lobster/dog/zombie who can sense danger.
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Based on nothing but the disassembled genitalia of some butterflies in his collection, he postulated that five waves of butterflies came across the Bering Strait and he was actually right. This goes under the pros column for whether or not Nabokov was a timetraveler. Read the Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/science/01butterfly.html?src=me&ref=general
I was digging a ditch with my thirteen-year-old nephew the other day. Putting down his shovel, he asked, “If you had a gun with one bullet, and you were trapped in a room with a pedophile, and a zombie, which one would you kill?”
“It depends on the kind of zombie it is,” I said. “If it’s a Night of the Living Dead zombie, I wouldn’t have anything to worry about because it would take fifteen minutes for it to get across the room. If it was one of those zombies from 28 Days Later, I would wait to see what it does to the child molester before I shot it.” After I got home, I couldn’t stop thinking about my nephew’s correlation between the undead and pedophiles. Although they both prey upon the living, at least child molesters have an 80% recidivism rate.
What if there was a prison for zombies where they could have group therapy together. They could talk about their addiction to brains, and the rotten life they must have had to rise from the dead. One of them would talk about the time he staggered into a split level rancher and ate the brains of an entire family, while the rest of the zombies drink watered down coffee and get a vicarious thrill out of it. Pfizer could release a medication called Zombcore to treat the symptoms of undeath: skin lesions, swollen joints, conservatism, drooling, incontinence, lack of coordination, and obsessive thoughts of consuming human nervous tissue.
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Republican Majority Whip, Eric Cantor, looking disappointed.
The other day I was in a coffee shop by my house and there was this guy in the corner—skinny jeans, flock of seagulls revival haircut, horn-rims, apple computer, intense expression. You know the type. These two cute girls were giggling and eyeing him from an adjacent table.
One of the girls asked, “What are you doing?”
“I’m writing,” he said, not looking up, intensity unwavering.
“Are you a writer?” the other girl asked.
He nodded and said, “Yes, I’m writing a novel.”
I know this is well-trodden ground, but I always feel like a douche bag on the scale of a Macy’s Day parade float whenever I almost call myself a writer in social settings. I’m not a writer. I want to be one someday, but applying the term to myself feels somewhat dishonest. I occasionally find myself in situations where the word, writer, laps like acid reflux against the back of my throat.
Doing it for the Kids is a current exhibition put on by [re] design to showcase the latest, most innovative sustainable toy designs from around the globe. Among them, the Placenta Teddy Bear by designer Alex Green. A crafty alternative for those who don’t necessarily want to eat their baby’s placenta, but want to pay their respects to the life sustaining organ by turning it into a one-of-a-kind teddy bear. Green’s ‘Twin Teddy Kit’ ‘celebrates the unity of the infant, the mother and the placenta,’ and enables preparation of the placenta so it may be transformed into a teddy bear. The placenta must be cut in half and rubbed with sea salt to cure it. After it is dried out, it is treated with an emulsifying mixture of tannin and egg yolk to make it soft and pliable. Then, you craft it into a teddy bear. But is this not quite so cuddly creation cute or cringe-worthy? You tell us
I can’t tell if the melody is made from the harmonics of a distorted guitar, recorded feedback run through a MIDI, or if it’s the sound of a dopamine overdose cooking all the neurons in my head to gristle.
1. In the first month of your first year, sleep with as many people as possible. This is important. Sleep with as many people as you can because after that, everyone will pair off like penguins until graduation and you’ll be forced to sleep with people outside of the program and you won’t be able to talk about how bourgeois everything is after sex.
1.1. Sidenote: in the first month of your second year, sleep with as many first years as possible. You only have a narrow window of opportunity until they figure out that you’ve been “thinning out the herd.” So what if everyone in your program thinks you’re a sleaze. At least they won’t think of you like the people from your home town did, as that introverted virgin who sang entire Anne Murray albums with your mom.
2. Hate everything you read. I mean really fucking hate it. If you’re lost for words, say it’s “trite,” or “bourgeois,” or the kiss of death, “sentimental.” You shouldn’t read anyway. It’ll water down your genius.
3. Only refer to books written by non-Americans, preferably books that haven’t been translated. This accomplishes two things; it proves to everyone how much more widely read you are and it creates a totally defensible argument for anything.
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