When asked for an animal with a three letter name, the first guy says “frog”.   Frog?  Well, ok.  He’s at least close!  Four letters is just one more than three.  The answer the second guy comes up with is indescribably awful, though–prompting Dawson to ask “You don’t use narcotics, do you Bob?”

Quick, name something that comes with a summer storm!  I bet nobody comes up with the answer Bob #1 blurts out.

Between the two of them, they’re so bad that Dawson allows the answer Bob #2 gave for the final question to be counted even though he answered long after the buzzer, because there was no chance they were winning the big money anyhow.

Man, I love game shows!

You may wonder why I don’t just delete these obvious spam posts.  Well, the truth is that some of them say nice things about me and my awesome blog, so I let them have their link to their dirty porn site or whatever it is they’re spamming for, because hey, they stroked my ego.  Sure, those posts were probably written by a robot who didn’t even read the article, much less understand it, but I’m so desperate for affection I’ll go ahead and approve any bit of broken English that tells me I’m awesome!

The best ones, however, are the random Russian spammers.  I’ve approved several comments from Russian spammers so far, mostly because it turns out Russian spammers are completely awesome.   The Russian prostitute spam is pretty straightforward, but my favorite so far is this guy who quoted Cervantes at me.  I don’t speak sputnik, but thankfully Google translate does.  Otherwise, I might not receive the wisdom of the great Russian spammer philosopher-poets.  And I definitely wouldn’t be able to get a date the next time I’m in Moscow.

Anyhow, thank you spammers for all your kind words and the great links to products I’ll never buy and websites written in a language I don’t understand.  I don’t know what what I’d do for entertainment without you!  I mean, besides read my own awesome blog.

There’s the kind of crazy that makes you walk around in public shouting at things that aren’t there and getting into fights with imaginary people.  That’s a sad kind of crazy, something to take pity on and try to help if possible.

Then there’s this kind of crazy.  The kind of harmless, way-out-there crazy that makes a person build a large elevated platform in the middle of nowhere and call it a UFO Watchtower.

In the middle of Colorado’s San Luis Valley, just outside of Hooper, lives the self-proclaimed “Crazy Lady Down The Road“, Judy Messoline.  Judy apparently moved to the San Luis Valley to be a rancher, but quickly found out that cattle don’t eat rocks and dirt, which appears to be all that grows on her property.  So, being the entrepreneurial sort, and being a big fan of shows like “Sightings” and “The X-Files”, she built the world’s first UFO Watchtower.

Now, right away you’ll notice something weird about this watchtower.  First, it’s not much of a tower.  It’s really more of a watch slightly-elevated-platform.  It stands maybe 12-15 feet off the ground.  Second, and most confusingly, is that there isn’t any reason for the thing to even be “slightly” elevated in the first place.  The thing stands in the middle of a giant featureless plain.  Usually watchtowers are elevated to see over the tops of trees or nearby hills.   But not this one.  This one is elevated… just because?  I guess because “UFO Watch-fenced-in-area-on-the-ground” didn’t have the same ring to it.

If you visit, Judy will apparently let you camp out on her property.   She’ll also gladly sell you all manner of craziness in her gift shop, and show you her magic garden.  This appears to be a circle of random trash strewn on the ground.  But… I guess it has healing powers?  It’s unclear.  The website claims it also has two vortexes, and then defines vortex as “portal to a parallel universe.”  That’s not the definition I found in my dictionary, but hey.  I’ll go with it.  I’m told there’s also a magic shrub.  Nobody is really clear on just what the shrub does that is magical, but shit man, it’s a magic shrub!

If you feel like donating to the cause of UFO spotting, Judy has a handy list of things she needs on her website.  She lists things you’d expect to see, like money, picnic tables, benches, and playground equipment.  But you’ll also find more esoteric needs, such as Geiger counters, seismographic equipment, 55 gallon drums of paint, black helicopters, and my personal favorite, jet packs.  Hey, just so you know, I also accept donations of helicopters and jet packs.

And of course, no crazy UFO related website would be complete without a list of sightings.  My personal favorite is the one about the hunter who told of his hunting trip the previous fall.  He’d stopped for a bit, laid down on a rock to rest, and the next thing he knew, he’d lost three hours!  Shit, that happens to me every night!  I lay down on my bed to rest, and I lose like seven to eight hours at a whack!  Holy shit I’ve been abducted too!

Anyway, there’s another type of crazy I didn’t mention earlier.  It’s called “crazy like a fox.”  If I had to wager a guess, I’d say that’s the one that probably describes Judy the best.

The US Consumer Protection Commission lists Colorado among the 39 states that “permit some or all types of consumer fireworks”, which means they either don’t ban anything more than the Feds ban already, or they at least don’t have an outright ban.

But this is misleading, since a closer look at Colorado fireworks laws reveals that the state bans pretty much everything that might remotely be considered fun.  Basically, if it leaves the ground, explodes, or does anything cool, you can’t have it.

I’m not a big fan of banning things at all, but fireworks bans really irritate me, because blowing shit up is just so damn much fun!  What’s more American than exploding the crap out of shit?  Nothing!  So screw fireworks bans.

What it sure as fuck does not do, however, is enable you to fly.  But check out the assholes in this video:

That’s actually the first phase of yogic flying.  I’m not kidding.  They actually think they have some mystical fucking powers because they can hop around in the goddamn lotus position.  Yogic flying is said to have three phases:

1. Hopping
2. Levitation
3. Flying

What these people are doing is obviously phase 1.  And the hell of it is, many of those people probably paid upwards of $1500 for the privileged of being taught how to bounce around on their asses busting their ball sacks against the ground.  Seriously, those TM jackholes charge people thousands of dollars to learn how to hop like a frog.  It’s completely insane.  Never mind that nobody, anywhere, ever, has managed to get past phase 1.  Not even the Maharishi himself has ever convincingly demonstrated the ability to levitate, much less actually goddamn fly (although I’m sure he could if he really wanted to!)

And the sad part is, yogic flying isn’t even the most ridiculous claim TM makes.  There’s also something called the Maharishi Effect that proposes that if as few as 1% of the world’s population would only practice TM, then magically the entire world would be awesomer!   You think I’m making that up, but go ahead and look it up for yourself–that’s essentially what they claim.  If 1% of a population practices TM, magically everybody else benefits in… some way.  I guess peace magically breaks out or some shit.  It’s sort of unclear, but to be sure, IT IS AWESOME!

I wonder if there might be some other motive for encouraging people to practice TM?  Hrm.  Let’s do some quick math:

1 % of 6 billion times $1500 = A FUCKING SHIT TON OF MONEY

Yeah, I think there might be some other motive here.  Just a guess.

How would you like to be this guy?  You’re all kinds of tanked up on liquor of various sorts, you’re at a pro wrestling event, and you think “Hey, these guys aren’t so tough.  Heck, I’m bigger than that guy in the mask!  I bet if I got in there, those guys would piss themselves and run away!”  You work up the nerve to jump the barricade, you stick your head in the ring… and get it almost taken off by a kick from the 5’6″, 140 lbs referee.  Worse still, you then get locked in a choke hold by said tiny referee, and are held down, unable to break free (and clearly in great discomfort) until security guards hit the ring and frog march you away.

Pro wrestlers have been “protecting the ring” by beating the crap out of any fan who dared get too close since time immemorial.  But what this dude didn’t count on was getting in the ring with Brian Hildebrand, better known as referee Mark Curtis–a man Mick Foley once described as, pound-for-pound, one of the best wrestlers he had ever seen.  He trained for years to be a wrestler, but his metabolism would never let him put on any significant muscle mass.  Coupled with his small stature, this effectively ended his dream of being an active wrestler.  Instead, he became a manager and later a referee.

The best part of the video is how amused the announcers are by what is going on in the ring.  Like most other events that have to sometimes deal with fan interference, most wrestling organizations have a policy of not broadcasting fans who get in the ring, and usually the announcers make just a passing reference to such things–just enough, usually, to let the viewer at home know why there is suddenly a long shot of the crowd on their TV.  This time, however, Bobby “The Brain” Heenan is clearly so tickled by what happens he can’t stop talking about it.

The wrestlers too take it unusually in stride.  As I said before, wrestlers tend to beat the crap out of anybody who gets in the ring who shouldn’t be there.  It’s something of a time honored tradition.  Dean Malenko and Psychosis, however, barely break their rhythm.  Dean watches the guy get in the ring, and he and Psychosis both give him one good kick after the ref takes him down.  Then they just go about their business, realizing everything is under control.  They continue the match like they didn’t just see a big fan get taken down by “the smallest referee in the world” (as the Brain puts it).

Sadly, Brian died of cancer in 1999.  He was just 37.  But we’ll always have evidence of what a tough little son of a bitch he was!

For several months now, I’ve been using the alarm on my iPhone (or as I like to call it, my iPad Nano) to wake me up in the morning.  Every morning, things go approximately the same way.  The alarm goes off, I fumble for the phone, stare at it for a second, hit the on-screen button that gives me five more minutes of sleep, and instantly pass out again.  I do this a few times, then I actually get up.  The whole process has worked pretty well–until yesterday.

Yesterday morning, the phone started doing its impersonation of an air raid siren.  I fumbled for it on the dresser, looked at it, and–hang on, what’s that?  The button on the screen was labeled with an unfamiliar word.  I stared at it for a second or two, the alarm still blaring, and vaguely wondered if I’d accidentally changed the language settings on my phone.  Was that Russian?  Norwegian maybe?  Whatever.  I hit the button and went back to sleep.  About five minutes later, when the phone went off again, I picked it up and started blankly at that word again.  I tried sounding it out this time, but it sounded so unfamiliar to me, I still was convinced I’d accidentally changed my phone over to some crazy non-English language.

The third time it went off, I realized, hey, the word “Alarm” is still in English.  But under that, there was still that word I couldn’t figure out.  I sounded it out again, but… man.  It wasn’t happening.  No matter how I said it, it just didn’t sound like any word I knew.  I was more confused than ever now, but I was also still super tired.  So off to dreamland I went one last time.  Finally, the fourth time the alarm went off, I was able to wake up enough to clear most of the fog from my head.  I looked at that strange word one last time, tried sounding it out again…

You’ve probably guessed where this is going, right?  Yeah, the word was “snooze”.  A perfectly good English word.  In fact, the same word I’ve been staring at two or three times every weekday morning for the past three months.  I was even sounding the word out, pronouncing it correctly even, but I was convinced it was some Norwegian word or something.  It couldn’t possibly be English anyhow.  Snoooooze.  Snooooooooze.  WTF?  That’s not a word!

Yes it is, asshole.  And now I take my place amongst the dummies of the Internets.

Well, I’m here to help.  I’m not of your generation, but I feel your pain (every two weeks when I get my paycheck and I see how much you bastards are costing me in Social Security taxes. )  So I want to help.  I’m going to help you recapture some of those halcyon days of your youth.

I’m going to help you out by showing you this $900 bean bag chair.

As I write this, it’s on sale for a measly $570.  But even if you don’t make it in time for the sale, I know you can afford it.  I mean, you drive that Lexus and all.  And what is $900 in the grand scheme of things?  $900 to recapture some of your youth spent as a culture warrior!  $900 to get together with some of your other ex-hippie friends and smoke tons and tons of pot again (ha–like you ever stopped.)  And you can afford the good shit now man–no ditch weed for you, and no dirty $12 bean bag that’s leaking beans all over the basement floor, either.  Think of how groovy it’s going to be when you get together with your friends, spark up a doobie, put on some of your vintage vinyl albums and pretend like you’re not a bunch of hypocritical assholes who sold out everything they believed in to become everything they claimed to hate.

So yeah, spark up that fatty, put on that Dead album, and park your fat champagne socialist ass in the most expensive bean bag chair you can find.  Because you deserve it!

In the interweb community, however, Cold Steel’s biggest claim to fame is perhaps their test cutting videos.  They do one for almost every one of their knives and swords, and they show various employees of the company cutting, stabbing and slicing various objects to show the effectiveness of their products.

These videos are, even by product promotion standards, completely over the top.  My favorite of the lot, though, is the one below, for the Chinese War Sword.

It starts off in standard Cold Steel style, with a still picture of the product and a dramatic voice over explaining just how awesome it is.  Note the dude says this sword will “shear through armor as if it were butter, not to mention mere flesh and bone.”  Ok, no it won’t.  Not unless by “armor” you mean “motorcycle jacket”.  It could probably severely wound a man in chain armor, especially if you caught him completely unawares, but it wouldn’t do more than dent plate armor, of that I am certain.  NO sword ever went through armor as if it were butter (no, not even the katana).  Nobody would have worn the stuff if it were that ineffective.  Also, remember that “mere flesh and bone” bit for later.

The video then goes into some rather standard cutting demonstrations.  Bamboo poles, rolled up tatami mats, ropes.  I just love how Lynn Thompson (President of Cold Steel) seems to insist on doing these test cutting videos in a shirt and tie.  It’s surreal.  I imagine him sitting in his corner office doing some paperwork, maybe having a meeting with some supplier or distributor, when he gets buzzed by his secretary.  “Mr Thompson, you’re wanted downstairs.  They’re ready to shoot the Chinese War Sword promotional video.”  So he winds down the meeting, excuses himself, and goes downstairs to hack apart sides of beef in his business wear.

Oh, did I not mention the sides of beef?  Well, if you’ve already watched it, you know the video continues to up the ante, moving on from the more standard test cutting fare to more, shall we say, interesting things.  At about the 2:20 mark, the famous Cold Steel “boot full of meat” makes its appearance.  I love that one.  I wonder whose job it is to stuff the boot full of meat scraps before every video?  I bet they make the rookies do that as a hazing ritual.

At 2:38 they chop apart some kind of freaking skull on a pole.  What is that, a cow skull?  I’m not even sure.  Anyway, remember how the dude earlier in the video made a crack about “mere flesh and bone”?  Note how it does NOT go through that skull.  It makes a nice cut, but it does not “shear through it like butter”.  If it can’t go through flesh and bone (despite what they insinuated earlier), what makes them think it’s going to go through steel?  After the skull, Lynn quickly takes apart a plywood pirate, and then it quickly goes back to what everybody wants to see.  BEEF.  Lynn demolishes a rack of ribs in three powerful chops.  Man, now I’m hungry.  Nothing sells me on a sword more than a beefy man chopping through beef!

At 3:08 we get perhaps the most bizarre bit of test cutting ever.  A vicious basketball is chopped cleanly in half by the impressive Chinese War Sword!  Yeah, a basketball.  Seriously, watch it for yourself, I wouldn’t dream of making this shit up.  I haven’t any idea what this was supposed to prove, but there you go.  If you ever wanted to know what the inside of a basketball looks like, here’s your chance.  After the basketball, there’s some more bamboo, and then another of Cold Steel’s old standbys–at 3:32 they chop through the “trash bag full of meat wearing a denim jacket.”  This one is especially dumb, since even in slow motion it’s not clear the sword did much more than just chop through a denim jacket and a trash bag  and push aside some meat scraps.  All the meat just kind of falls out onto the floor, and it’s rather unimpressive.

There’s a lot more stuff (plastic trash cans full of Gatorade, soda cans, soda bottles, all demolished to a pulse pounding metal beat!) until finally, at around 5:00, we get the pièce de résistance:

Have you watched it yet?  You’re not just reading this in lieu of watching it, are you?  Because seriously, you need to watch the video.  I do my best to entertain, but I know my limits, and I know that just describing the final bit of the video isn’t going to do it justice.  I mean, I’m going to do it anyway.  But I want to make sure you’ve seen it for yourself first.  Because really.  You need to.

Ok, finally, the pièce de résistance.  Two pig carcasses, hung side by side, are methodically chopped in half, then chopped in half again, then beheaded.  I’m sure this is probably illegal in some states.  It also seems like rather a waste of good pork, but I suppose they could have picked the meat up off the floor and hosed it off afterwords.  I was actually sort of impressed with this bit until I realized the carcasses have been gutted and cleaned already.  Still, a clean cut through both pigs with one blow!  Man, if this thing didn’t cost the world, I’d buy one right now!  It’s good to know that I could kill a charging wild pig with one blow, all while wearing a shirt and tie!

The entire focus of the game is something called Project Purity.  The main character’s father and several other NPCs in the game worked on the Project for some time back in the day, but failed to get it running and so abandoned it.  The intent of the Project was to mass-purify the irradiated water in the area surrounding the purifier, thus providing clean water to everybody in the area for the first time in over 200 years.

Of course, this being a video game, there are bad guys that want to control the purifier for their own nefarious purposes.  The very end of the game is a fairly cool sequence where you mount an attack on the bad guys who have taken over the purifier, take control of it yourself, and then decide what to do with it.  In order to provide some tension, however, it is revealed that the purifier’s power systems were damaged in the fighting, and it needs to be turned on right the hell now or it will explode (whoever heard of having to turn something ON because it is damaged??)  The problem is, the control room that has the “on” switch is heavily irradiated.  Anybody who goes in there will die.  Ok, I liked Wrath of Khan too, but can we not copy the ending please?

The hell of it is, when Spock sacrifices himself at the end of Wrath of Khan, that’s an actual thing that has to be done or lots of people will die.  And somebody does indeed have to sacrifice himself in order to prevent this.  Spock’s whole ethical belief system basically requires him to make this sacrifice, and he does, and everybody cries, and it’s a great fucking ending.

Now, I bet some of you are bracing yourself, waiting for me to explain why I don’t think “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” and how it’s bullshit that the only “good” way to end the game is to sacrifice yourself.  Well, buck up!  I’m not going to do that.  Sacrificing yourself to directly save countless lives is something I consider noble, and if faced with a clear situation like the one in Wrath of Khan or the (more contrived) one in Fallout 3, I’d like to think I could be the hero.  No, there’s something far more pernicious about the ending that I’m going to bitch about, and it has to do with this guy right here.

Meet Fawkes.  He’s a super mutant.  You meet him earlier in the game (just about one main-quest mission before the endgame, actually) and if you’re playing the hero, you probably freed him from his prison and let him go.  If you did so, you found out something special about Fawkes.  He is highly resistant to radiation.  In fact, part of what he offers you in exchange for freeing him is his services in retrieving the game’s macguffin from where it rests inside a highly irradiated room.  See, he knows you’ll probably die if you go in there to get it yourself, so he offers to retrieve it for you if you let him out.

Furthermore, if you free Fawkes, he returns later in the game to help you out, and offers his services as a follower.  In fact, it’s rather hard not to end up with Fawkes as a follower at that point, since something happens just prior to that point that causes all your other followers to disappear and go back to their home bases, waiting for you to come around again and re-hire them.  So there’s really no reason not to take Fawkes with you at that point, at least for a little bit.  And if, like me, you went right from that point into the endgame, Fawkes is there with you when you must make this awful choice to either sacrifice yourself or let someone else do so in order to save Project Purity.

Now those of you who have been paying attention may have noticed something rather important in what I’ve just written.  It sure didn’t escape me while I was playing!  In case you missed it, though, here it is laid out for you:

1.  There is a control room full of dangerous radiation that somebody must enter in order to save countless lives.

2.  Fawkes is essentially immune to radiation.

Do you see it now?  After briefly mulling over these facts, I came up with what I thought was the correct answer:  Send Fawkes in to press the button!

It seems perfectly logical, doesn’t it?  If you’ve been playing the hero, you saved this guy who would normally be your enemy.  In return, he helped you out a bit, and offered his further services later on.  This is your way out of the dilemma!  This is your reward for playing the hero the whole game–you get to live!  Everybody gets to live!

Not so fast, sunshine.

Here’s what really happens.  You turn to Fawkes.  You ask him to enter the control room and flip the switch for you, since, hey, you’ll goddamn die if you have to do it yourself.  And he refuses.  That’s right.  He says no.  Not because it will hurt him (because it wont).  Not because he thinks it’s a bad idea (he doesn’t, apparently) or for any other reason that makes any kind of fucking sense.  No, he refuses, because it is “your destiny” and he doesn’t want to deny you that.

What?  Fuck you Fawkes!  I’ll decide what my goddamn destiny is!  And I’ve just decided it’s NOT to die here needlessly if there is another, perfectly good option to take!  And hey, look–there is one!  I don’t have to send another fragile human in, either, to die in my place–I can ask the guy who will not be hurt by the radiation to help!

But no, Fawkes knows best.  He knows my destiny, and my destiny is to go in there and get fried.  Thanks a ton, man.

So yes, another hearty FUCK YOU to the designers of Fallout 3, who couldn’t be bothered to come up with a non-shitty reason why Fawkes (or Charon, the ghoul follower you can have, or that robot dude who can become your follower if you’re non-good) can’t go into the chamber for you.  I would have accepted “It’s too much radiation, even for me” or something like that.  But no, he mutters some shit about goddamn destinies, and fuck me anyhow for asking.

Can you imagine how goddamn awful Wrath of Khan would be if there were an established character on the Enterprise who was immune to radiation?  And if this guy had, earlier in the movie, retrieved some important object from a huge room full of radiation so that Kirk wouldn’t have to?  And then at the end,  if Spock turns to him and said “logically, Ensign ImmuneToRadiation should go in there and do the thing with the warp core that needs doing” the guy said “I’m sorry Spock, I can’t do that.  It’s your destiny to go in there and die so we can make Search for Spock.  So go on, get in there bub!”  Would that be a satisfactory ending?

The hell of it is, if you purchased and installed the first downloadable expansion for Fallout 3, you CAN ask Fawkes (or Charon, or the robot) to go into the chamber for you.  Because hey, there wouldn’t be much point to an expansion if you can’t fucking play it because you’re DEAD.