Build Date: Tue Jan 21 05:00:07 2025 UTC
He had a very sort of, a strangely very attractive sort of pungent sort of gamey, sort of a venison or a lamb sausage... and a little bit of rosemary with a touch of ranch dressing.
-- James Spader, discussing the aroma of William Shatner
Self-Indulgent Pukes
1999-10-30 17:05:26
"The train tracks are less than a mile from my backdoor; and very late at night when everything's still, I can hear the train whistle. It sounds so mournful sometimes, like it's crying. Sometimes, though, it sounds like it's calling out to some distant beacon to say, `I'm coming. Wait for me.' I love listening to the train go by..."
It gets worse.
The old BBS classic of "the running story" has made it to the web. Why this form of prose ever survived beyond the 14-year-old autistic set is beyond me. The basic idea: Get a group of people, each one of them writes a bit of the story, one after the other, until you get enough pages to read. Maybe fun for a few friends who can laugh at each other's clever in-jokes, but inflicting this crap on the rest of humanity is a violation of the Geneva Convention. (You can find "running stories" listed right in between "chemical warfare" and "human medical experiments" as something too foul and evil to be inflicted on enemy troops.)
There's something oddly schizophrenic and haunting as the writing jumps helter-skelter from one point of view to the next, from a mind of an author who can write to the mad typing someone crashing the party, characters who act like art snobs in one paragraph become homicidal maniacs in the next. It's bizarre, twisted, not quite funny, and not quite readable. It sucks you in, chews you up, and spits you back up on the carpet like dog food gone rotten.
Something tells me we'll be seeing more of the same.
T O P S T O R I E S
The Future Ain't What It Used To Be
Ideas have taken horrifying shape and rooted into our modern reality. (More...)
The Once & Future King of Dust
Only The Onion could have acquired Infowarts. (More...)
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
This week: another fine spocktail from the beverage researchers at SMRL! Drink it in peace, because WE DID THE RESEARCH! (More...)
All this talk about death, wakes and Moloch recently has, frankly, got me a little worried. What if I'm next to go? I could slip on a wet banana peel and slam my head against an enormous brass statue at almost any time. I'm not planning well enough for this sort of thing. Who will talk for me when this terrible day comes? (More...)
Patient Joab's scientifick editorial discusses aspect of the space-time-beer continuum never before processed by sub-bush-robot minds!!! Too fabulantastic to contempulate! (More...)
Skunk School -- Learn Why Not To Keep Skunks As Pets
There is an alarming trend in pet purchasing habits this fall. People inspired by the WWII film, "Life is Beautiful" -- the one with that annoying Italian guy -- are buying descented skunks by the millions. (More...)
A Day in the Life of a Beverotologist
It was starting to look like a very boring Saturday, trapped as I was in the suburban wastelands of the outer Bay Area, so I called my Able Assistant (AA) and proposed that we perform some Spocktail field tests. For some time I've been working on creating the quintessential cinematic beverage and even tho' SMRL does most of its testing during nocturnal hours, this seemed an opportune time to roll up the sleeves of our labcoats and get some science done. While the beverotology creation tested this day (The Neurotoxin) must be deemed a success, this article focuses more the journey of the experimenters, rather then the science of beverotology. (More...)
High Availability Guinness Stress Test
All too often we forget the incredible depth of technology behind the weekly ritual of TNiPN@*. We tend to only become aware of the strategy of High Available Guinness (HAG) when it rises to the forefront during a complete and utter venue failure. Yet we should all be super grateful that this system exists. (More...)
