I apologize..

This site got all messed up due to some weird host-side error or another the other day, and ate the archive so that I had to re-send a lot of stuff. There IS some new content from within the last couple of days so read down through things if you haven't seen it yet.

Specifically "Now there are only 314 days remaining..... " is new, as is "Brofnakken? Who's that? " and "If I were commuting aboard a space shuttle... ".

If I thought anyone read this outside of 1-2 friends, I might put it on a more reliable, personal site. ;)

Later peeps.

The Tale Of The Great White Monster

When I was a kid I was great friends with Kenny and Bart Wickham who lived up the street from me in 21 Oaks, our housing development. They were two siblings in a household of many more, a big Mormon family. We would often wander off into the woods back behind their house, which was a big undeveloped area that is, sadly, all gone these days.

Imagination is a powerful thing. As kids, we were convinced that many things lived in the woods or haunted them, and we had our own private mythology worked out about it including how to protect ourselves from the monsters. Here are some of the things were KNEW were out there:

The Great White Monster: OK, I don't really understand this one. Bart was convinced something lived in the sky, especially on days where the sun could barely be seen through the clouds. He called it The Great White Monster.

Huge Worms: We would on rare occasion come upon long furrows of dirt which had been kicked up by construction vehicles, and were convinced they were what was left behind due to the burrowing of huge earthworms.

Triffids: Thanks to this dumb-ass movie Dawn of the Triffids, we were convinced some of the trees were alive and wanted to kill us. In particular, Bart was paranoid about them. One time, one of us hid in a big pine tree in the front corner of my parent's yard, and shook the tree as Bart walked past. It was pretty mean, but amusing too. The little weeds that grow up through sidewalk cracks with tiny yellow flowers we considered to be "baby triffids" and would pull them out whenever we could. Talk about an overactive imagination.

Sleestacks: We were big fans of the Land of the Lost back then, and we would sometimes see discarded bits of colored plastic or garbage in the woods and be convinced they were left behind by Sleestacks, the weird reptilian bad guys from that show.

Old Indian Guy/Woman: My brother got us going on this, I am pretty sure. We were told there was an old indian who lived back in the woods somewhere, in a run-down shack, and to stay away because he sacrificed things all the time. Understandably freaky for a kid to believe.

Ferns: You know how, on your average fern, there are little red spots on the underside of the fronds? Well I'd guess those have to do with pollination, but when we were kids, we thought they were alien spores left behind, hidden under the leaves.

We used to make these weird things out of paper clips and pieces of paper that were talismans to ward off the monsters that lived in the forest. I have a very vivid memory of sitting in this long rectangular room at the back of the Wickham household making those. They had these weird lights on the wall in there, kind of like globes on stalks, and I remember thinking that the way they reflected on the dirty sliding-glass door and windows that they looked like eyes.

My brother and his friends were very much into gore and horror movies at that time, and in retrospect I am pretty certain they it influenced my friends and I to some degree. This was the day and age when movies like Friday the 13th (Yeah, part 1) and the like were appearing, the golden age of cheesy slasher flicks. Combine that with numerous gore magazines and stuff lying around and I think it is easy enough to pin down part of the source of our over-active imagination.

I have no end of weird stories from my childhood, no doubt I will post many more of them.

The Mallot of God

My friends and I, we all have our little fantasies about dealing with the awful traffic in and aroud the Seattle area. I think everyone has their own personal imaginary scenario about how they would deal with the offending motorists around them.

Jason, for example, has frequently voiced a desire that cartoon-like "16 Tonne" weights would fall at random on the cars in front of him, flattening them completely into the ground and leaving the way before him completely clear. It is an appealing concept.

Personally, I have always had a private traffic-rage fantasy I think of as the Mallot of God(tm). In this fantasy I have a button on the dash of my car. When another motorist does something to irritate me (such as having the nerve to drive on the same stretch of road), I would depress the button, and trigger this series of events:

1. All other cars quietly move away from the offender.
2. A huge mallot (Perhaps resembling a croquette mallot) Sweeps in from the side, conncting solidly with the offender.
3. The offender vanishes instantly.
4. Moments later, the offender is seen as a tiny speck near the horizon, falling quietly like a single dark snowflake.

I'm sure I am not alone with such thoughts. In any case, they make the often sliggish commute to and from work more bearable by a good measure.

Fireworks and the Red Dragon

When I was a kid I used to look forward to the 5th of July. It was the coolest holiday to me.

Yeah, the 5th.

After the pyrotechnics of Independence Day wore down, Bart and I used to take a wagon around the block, and we'd collect all of the used fireworks people so kindly left behind in the street. This was the good old days before the cops were cruising around all the time busting people for having anything deadlier than a sparkler, so we'd find all sorts of cool things. Huge rockets, big cannon-shaped things, bumblebees, fireworks that looked like tanks, jet planes, etc. We'd pile 'em high.

My sister had a clubhouse when she was younger. Over time it wore down and eventually it was destroyed because it was too dangerous to play in. What was left behind was the floor, which meant I had a great wooden platform in the side of my backyard. We would take all of the fireworks we collected and construct elaborate mazes with them. We'd spend hours.

Around this time was the heyday of the Atari 2600, and especially the game Adventure which was a favorite at the time. We used to take Matchbox cars and race them through the maze, and we had a plastic dinosaur we called the "Red Dragon" in homage to Adventure, who was, of course, trying to catch and eat the driver of the car.

Looking back on this bizarre yearly ritual I wonder how we ever got the idea, or why my parents allowed me to do it. Maybe I hid it from them, I forget. I am sure the neighborhood didn't mind a couple of kids cleaning up their leftovers for them, that's for sure.

My archives got eaten!

The next few posts are older ones that got eaten when the archives disappeared.. scroll down for 'new' stuff. Sorry. :P

(You get what you pay for I guess)

Now there are only 314 days remaining.....

Without a doubt, the coolest cartoon I watched as a kid was Star Blazers. It had everything.. action, adventure, robots, spaceships, drama. Though I was too young at the time to care, it even had romance. If you never saw this show, take a look at the website I linked to above. This was one of the shows that was a root of Japanese animation, thought it was called "Space Cruiser Yamato" over there. The art, story and animation in this series influenced countless artists over the years and helped to make Anime what it is today.

Of course, as a kid it was just a cool-ass show because they blew a lot of stuff up. The main weapon on the Argo (Called the "Yamatao" in the Japanese series) was the "Wave Motion Gun", which was able to destroy.. well, pretty much anything. They destroyed a sun with it once, I think.

The basic story of the first series (There were 3 altogether, with some followup movies and episodes) was that Earth was under attack by the Gamilons, who were launching "Meteor Bombs" at the surface, causing radiation to kill everything. Surviving underground, humanity was running out of time. While out patrolling, Derek Wildstar discovered a capsule which contained information on how to construct an engine for a starship, and a message from a mysterious woman to travel to distant Iscandar.. to locate the "Cosmo DNA" which could counteract the devestating radiation attacks.

The Argo was an old Earth battleship which was turnd into a space cruiser using this new technology, and launched with a 1-year mission to retrieve the "Cosmo DNA" and bring it back.. Every episode ended with a dramatic narration.. "Now there are only 250 days left.. can they make it in time?" It was great.

I won't go into much more detail since such a great website is available. I'll just say Captain Avatar is the man, Mark Venture had a SUPER cheesy accent, and IQ-99 could kick R2D2's ass any day.

Re-watching the show in this day and age, you have to get past the dated style and voice acting to appreciate the depth of the story. Like all science fiction, there are truly touching moments thrown together with some forgettable and cheesy episodes. Anyone who is a fan of current anime, particularly dramatic adventures should at least explore the website for this great cartoon, if see the series itself. I am thankful that modern entertainment has resurrected interest in classic animation like this, making it available to all on DVD.

We're off to outer space
We're leaving Mother Earth
To save the human race
Our Star Blazers!

Searching for a distant star
Heading off to Iscandar
Leaving all we love behind
Who knows what danger we'll find?

We must be strong and brave
Our home we've got to save
If we don't in just one year
Mother Earth will disappear!

Fighting with the Gamilons
We won't stop until we've won
Then we'll return and when we arrive
The Earth will survive
With our Star Blazers!

Brofnakken? Who's that?

This bears some explaining. Back when I was in high school, a handful of my friends and I amused ourselves at lunch and in-between classes by writing stories. Specifically, we wrote run-on stories. You know, where one person writes a sentence, then passes the story to someone else, and so on. We wrote so many of those types of storis that by the time we graduated, we had enough to make a book.

To the horror of Mr. Frasch, my Pascal Programmin teacher at the time, we did exactly that, printing 5 copies of "Cool Stuff" which were about 150 pages each, and summarily murdering all of the toner cartridges in the computer lab as a result. It was great, we had all the pages spread out all over the floor and yelled at people trying to come into the computer lab for getting in the way.

Brofnakken was a character that appeared in several of these stories. Mostly ones Van and I wrote, to the best of my memory. Now, bear in mind these stories were incredibly strange due to how they were written. In them Brofnakken had a tendency to get into fights with Bob, who appeared at random no matter where Brofnakken was. Brofnakken also had a son named "Broffy."

My online story really only uses the names of these characters and nothing else. That is why I state it is "loosely based" on them. But damn it, Brofnakken had to live on!!!

So there you have it. Perhaps sometime I will send one of the original stories up to this site to amuse anyone who actually reads my ramblings.

If I were commuting aboard a space shuttle...

I can conceive of a time when people travel through space. It isn't likely to happen too soon, but it seems like a certainty down the road at some point. While the concept of "artificial gravitiy" is thrown around in real science, I certainly hope those of us who are permanently immature are given the chance to fly in a zero gravity room. Here are some of the things I would smuggle onto the shuttle to play with in zero gravity:

1. A slinky - It would be too cool to stretch one of those out in zero gravity and do all of the lame wave experiments we used to do on hallway floors in high school.

2. 50 Koosh balls and a can of compressed air - I think I need say no more.

3. A squirt gun - I've seen how fun water looks in zero gravity. Shooting it out of something could only add to that.

4. My cat - She's insane to begin with and very twitchy. Watching her cope with bouncing around in a weightless environment would be high comedy.

5. Two flat, skinny boards and a tennis ball - Can anyone say "Recreating the PONG experience?"

6. Legos - Actually, this is something I would NOT bring with me. It's hard enough finding all of the pieces as it is, much less with them floating into the frigging air.

7. A bunch of thin, transparent cloth - It'd just look cool.

8. A 1975 Chevy Impala and a camera - OK, while I might not be able to smuggle this onboard, pushing it around in ZERO-G and taking pictures would be fun.

9. A big tractor tire - Of course, to sit inside of and have someone bounce you off of the walls.

10. 5000 activated neon green Glo-Sticks - Hell yeah.


part 6 of Brofnakken posted at 3:00 pm.

Obviously I have way too much time on my hands today. Bye.