Peer Pressure Works!

This truly takes the cake (not to worry, it was a crappy cake anyway. All dried out and lacking in anything resembling flavor). Piracy will apparently do everything up to, and possibly including, cutting you open on a dark streetcorner and leaving you holding your guts in with your hands while it rapes your children.

Okay, I beefed up the font point sizes so it SHOULD actually be readable now (godDAMN was that an eye killer before!)…works for me in Firefox and IE but let me know if it stioll shows up in midget print for any of you.

So yeah, a few changes. I dropped a bunch of the sidebar content I had (which was out of control before), swapped the theme out, dropped some redundant categories…it was time for something new. I’m not 100% sure this will be the final theme. It isn’t bad but I’m still looking at options, too. I have a couple geektacular gaming posts in the works with a bunch of screenshots and the like, but I figured I’d get the changes done before I even start on those.

Or, you know, in my finger…though not anymore! No, they are now removed. There are advantages to having a parent who’s been nursing for 40 years. It was awesome during the days of street hockey, when I would return home from another night of somewhat organized savagery, call her up at the ER and request a package of gauze pads, triangle bandages and med tape to be brought home (and on at least one occasion asked her to pass on a greeting to Liam, who had incurred some sort of injury during the same game. And no, I wasn’t responsible…my game of choice for destroying Liam was baseball). And the time before this most recent one that my Tetanus booster needed updating, I got shot up in the kitchen…which beats making a doctor’s appointment. And this time, that same room was the location for stitch removal…once the cat was coaxed (thrown, actually) from the table (he’s shown a weird fascination with all things medical. Every single time I’ve been changing out the bandage, he comes running. At first I thought it was just the rustle of packaging…actually, he likes chewing on adhesive. Basically, he’s the kid who eats paint chips), that is. Now, unfortunately I couldn’t join my dad in healing thyself after an injury (remember that mention of his broken leg? Well, the day he was scheduled to have the cast taken off, I had worked the previous night, so I was asleep. I woke up, came up the stairs…and sitting at the top was a dusty hacksaw. I immediately knew he’d cut the damn thing off himself. Apparently ‘there was a line’ to wait to get his cast off. Miraculously, he was left without so much as a scratch) since I had no earthly idea how exactly stitches get removed.

Apparently some stitch/suture removal kits have really crappy plastic forceps! Wow, THOSE are a delight! Four or five attempts to grab and pull that stitch of thread laced through my flesh before it was finally ‘in position’ for snipping! Huzz-fuckin’-ah for that! At least they’re out now. The cut, by the way, is a sort of jagged smile…I basically have the visage of The Joker’s mouth on my middle finger, which is a little bit awesome. Perhaps I’ll snap a photo of it at some point. And the whole area that was lifted up when it was laid open is this half-moon bruise. And since this is the first time that what’s left of the cut has been exposed to air since the stitches were put in, it’s goddamn cold (ever grow a beard, then shave it off? Remember how your face was frozen for the first few days? That feeling). And I keep getting this sensation of something flowing down my finger. Of course, I immediately think “Oh shit! It wasn’t healed enough yet! Blood is pouring!”, look, and find…nothing. Nothing but that jagged grin looking back at me. The bastard’s playing his sick jokes on me…and I keep falling for it. Oh, it’s on finger…it’s on. One word of warning…I’ve seen Evil Dead 2…I know how to deal with you if you start smashing things in to my face. And that hacksaw is still around here somewhere…

I didn’t even realize they’d collected a bunch of the best skit material that was on during Conan’s run until earlier this evening, otherwise I probably would have made a post like this a couple of months ago! Anyway, a few of my favorites from the show’s run were on there so I shall now help spread the spores of the Conan virus around these Internets like a plague of giggles.

First up, old time baseball. He visits a group of guys who play old fashioned baseball…as in 1860’s baseball. 1860’s rules, uniforms, clothes…all of it. Hmmm…the embedder ain’t workin’, so I shall find them on Youtube.

Secondly, when Attack of the Clones came out, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog was sent to speak with the people standing in line. Normally I hate Triumph and find him rather lame…this skit was frigging hilarious.

Part 1

Part 2

And finally, no ‘best of Conan’ can be complete without mention of Pimpbot 5000. If you haven’t seen early Conan, you missed this character before they retired him.

Actually, I’ll tell you now…yes. Yes it is. Oh, the gloop inside might be okay, but the cans are death traps just waiting for the chance to rip your children wide open!

Yes, I have just returned from the ER, having had to deal with the deadly aftereffects of dealing with a pet food receptacle. I have never liked cans with pull tabs that contain anything more substantial than beverages. They never really work all that well. You either have to exert the equivalent force needed to tear a phone book in half, or when they DO open, the top only partially separates itself from the main body of the can, leaving you fumbling to remove the rest (the rest usually held in place solidly enough to convince you that perhaps it was welded there).

Anyway, tonight I was dealing with just such a can…this particular one was being a right bastard and not coming open, obviously as a result of some delightfully prickish cannery employee who made sure it would be hard to open as a prank. Incidentally, nameless bastard…I respect the cut of your delightfully fiendish jib. Anyway, I reefed on the stupid handle, and just as the can started to open, my finger slipped out of the grip thing. I somehow managed to tear open the pad on my middle finger on my right hand…well, not tear open the pad, actually, they cut basically cuts up UNDER the pad. It was hanging there lain wide open with a nice flow of blood pouring out of the resulting gash. (continue reading…)

For instance, if that title mystifies you, please take the nearest writing implement and jam it in to your eye socket. Don’t stop pushing until it can’t go any further. Now, feel the warm embrace of the betterment of society as a whole as you bleed out on to the floor.

Let’s begin with the Catholic Church, an institution that seems hellbent on being mocked on a constant basis. Their newest basis for mockery…oh look, one of those thoroughly average Dan Brown books is being made in to a movie again (quick sidebar…Dan Brown fans, please stop extolling this guy’s stuff as being among the greatest literary works of all time. I am sick and tired of you people rambling about his ‘great’ novels. They’re not bad, but about as close to great writing as the ingredients list on a package of cookies. Expand your reading habits), let’s have a hissy fit! And yes indeed, there they are protesting. One quote from the Vatican describes the movie as…”highly denigrating, defamatory and offensive” to the Catholic Church. (continue reading…)