At the very least, I deserve some kind of a loyalty-point cash in with the good folks over at Murphy's Law. Or perhaps some half-off coupons over at Metaphorical Bird Shit All Over You Inc. Maybe my karma needs an oil-change; fuck knows. But either way, I'm seven different shades of feeling sorry my own arse and about nine other hues of a few choice swearwords. Lemme 'splain- no, ees too much, lemme sum up:
So had a little three month dalliance with dating outside of the relationship I'm carrying on with Benedict Cumberbatch in my head. It started out like every excellent and slightly indie rom-com you've seen, and now it is kaput. Kind of first three quarters Garden State, last five minutes 500 Days Of Summer. I don't mind telling you I'm more bummed than three months really ought to merit, but there it is. Not angry, mind you; this is not a Baartin Botze sort of a breakup. Collectively, we who identify as pie-people still like his personage very much, and in fact are seriously considering having to kidnap some of his friends because they are all awesome. We do however want to eat about 5 litres of ice-cream and play Adele songs really loudly until 4 AM also, which I can live with.
Mostly my weekends have been spent commuting in and out of Joburg from Centurion on the Gautrain to sleep over at his place, which is one of the reasons this blog might have appeared to be napping for the last while. We went to Roller Derby and had some other hoots, but not a lot of bloggable material unless you count chronicling the words and phrases we made up on a weekly basis. (You might well count that, we were on some kind of roll, let me tell you.) Mostly we hung out and laughed ourselves sore at inside jokes and I kept him company while he worked overtime from home. Allow me to assure you they have been my favourite three months out of the past 22 years bar none, and no amount of Setting Fire To The Rain or rainbow sprinkles over toffee sauce is going to mitigate that.
Now I need to get my arse up and out of PJs, and do stuff so you good people can have the chuckles I so badly want to give you. This starts with me applying and auditioning for absolutely any band looking for a female vocalist who is so rad that she could probably build you a papier-mache pirate hat on command, and includes in the initiation phases me corralling up every one and sunder who has legs and is available to be dragged along to Wolves this Thursday for their weekly gig night. I am cashing in every friend card I have, because damn it people I cannye spend no more on cheering-up shopping sprees and I certainly shan't be able to continue consuming the amounts of flour-based foodstuffs that I have in the last few days. This is Operation Get Loraine Back to Equilibrium (catchy, no? OGLBE. Probably pronounced "ogglebee"- we'll get some T-shirts and buttons made up, it'll be a whole thing.) and it needs YOU.
It most especially needs you because if I stew for too long here it's going to be impossible to keep my mind from going to angry places, and I'd prefer to keep this person as a friend if at all doable. So I need distracting and/or Benedict for at least a month- get out the tinfoil and glitter, because we're going to run out of legitimate distractions quickly and everyone knows I'm like a crow with anything remotely shiny.
I have a couple of bigger projects I'd like to get going that have been sitting on my shelf forever, I will keep you updated. One includes a booth, which will be a Pie Project through and through. There will be banners printed up and publicity drummed up, and hopefully it will result in candy-coloured chaos.
So, Thursday- who's in for Wolves?
Monday, August 27, 2012
Saturday, August 25, 2012
Hello, Mon Bebes
Sincerest apologies for paucity of posts the last while, I've been terribly boring. Unless you want to read about my adventures in artificial sweetener, in which case I invite you over post-haste for coffee and chats.
I'll just drop in a cursory "fuck" and then I'm off again, but I do promise a fairly meaty post with heartfelt expletives, some dallying in the realm of hairdressing stories, and explanations for my absence of late. Sufficed to say, I am wallowing the fuck out of my martyrdom right now as I find myself at the ugly end of a fairly shit stick, and this precludes me writing and/or functioning like a normal, non self-centred human being for the moment. There may have been an inhalation of a cupcake, half a wheel of plastic Camembert and some Chinese food involved in this wallowing, so you should understand that at best I'm only about a third of the way through my required self-pity food consumption. I think Monday I shall go spend all of my monies buying clothes I don't need and hairstyling implements I'll never use.
All of the above said in a fair amount of humour, but just quickly: fuck everything. Fuck it all right in the neck, and bring on the daiquiris.
With that out of the way, allow me to leave you Hellboy Mario to look at so you know I still care. I show my affection in measured instalments of pop-culture parodies, apparently.
Oh, and please have Benedict Cumberbatch bathed, powdered and sent to my room immediately. That combined with some left-over garlic bread might just eke me forward towards my wallowing quota.
I'll just drop in a cursory "fuck" and then I'm off again, but I do promise a fairly meaty post with heartfelt expletives, some dallying in the realm of hairdressing stories, and explanations for my absence of late. Sufficed to say, I am wallowing the fuck out of my martyrdom right now as I find myself at the ugly end of a fairly shit stick, and this precludes me writing and/or functioning like a normal, non self-centred human being for the moment. There may have been an inhalation of a cupcake, half a wheel of plastic Camembert and some Chinese food involved in this wallowing, so you should understand that at best I'm only about a third of the way through my required self-pity food consumption. I think Monday I shall go spend all of my monies buying clothes I don't need and hairstyling implements I'll never use.
All of the above said in a fair amount of humour, but just quickly: fuck everything. Fuck it all right in the neck, and bring on the daiquiris.
With that out of the way, allow me to leave you Hellboy Mario to look at so you know I still care. I show my affection in measured instalments of pop-culture parodies, apparently.
Oh, and please have Benedict Cumberbatch bathed, powdered and sent to my room immediately. That combined with some left-over garlic bread might just eke me forward towards my wallowing quota.
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Never Blog Angry. Or While Watching Ellen.
Ok, so I need to grrrr a bit. You people- you lovely few, with your loveliness so oddly centred in the Baltics- are my self-inflicting audience, and so you are about to find yourself on the receiving end of said "grrrr". Don't worry, I'll intersperse my angst with cartoons and casual blasphemy, so it won't infringe too hard on your Lol Cat and/or Awkward Penguin time.
(A warning: I am in enough of a funk so as to insist on watching Ellen and type up a blog post at the same time, so there's every chance that today's dose of pie might look like the result of several Google translating back and forths.)
Ok, so the source of the emo is this: fuckity fuck all. I am displaced in euphoria for absolutely no reason at-fucking-all. This- rather pleasingly- coincides with the inhaling of much, much Creme Soda and 2 Minute Noodles, and since Ellen has just introduced a segment called "Oh Puh-lice", the very laws of physics makes it impossible to sustain a state of melancholy for any time at all. I may have grossly understood what both "physics" and "impossible" means here, but I've now got Ellen and Melissa McCarthy green-screened onto motorbikes and wearing wedding veils, so the function which allows me to give a fuck has ceased to function entirely.
Really what I'm whining about here is that I've been sitting here the whole day in a cloud of utter fucking grey without anything to blame it on. When there's a clear cause for angst, at least I can target the damnéd thing and attempt to either kill it with fire or lists and spreadsheets. When the problem is quite simply a disturbance in the force because Yoda is constipated, it tends to want to add momentum to the suck. My stupid, stupid brain flails out wildly, trying to find a cause (this is largely because I am actually Sheldon With Tits And A Crush On Benedict Cumberbatch, and I refuse to believe something should happen without being logical), and in so doing latches onto everything and interrogates it as though enough digging on any subject at all will unearth the offending stink. After sifting through existential insecurities, unrealised life-goals and my fat jeans now being my slightly-too-small jeans, I will eventually start glomming onto much less deserving causes.
Why is my favourite new knitted hat already unravelling at the back?
I smell toast. There is no toast. I obviously have a brain tumour, and now I want toast.
I think I've used the word "kerning" too much in the last week. I believe that this speaks very poorly about my person and character, and maybe I should stop giving so many shits about Comic Sans.
See? I'm absolutely unwell in deeply ingrained ways. The whole day I was bouncing around like this, trying to find things to do to distract myself away from inflicting irreparable damage to issues that are not actually issues but could, by virtue of this issue I have, become issues. (Also, as an aside: can someone pleeeeeese write to Ellen and tell her how awesome I am and how her life would not be complete without meeting me? And possibly flying me out to Burbank and gifting me a pair of Ellen underwear? Get on that, good friends and family.) I get stuck in these modes sometimes, and for a whole day I'll just be trapped in my head like I'm Leonardo DiCaprio in an under appreciated adaptation of a Dumas novel. It usually takes either a significant piece of awesome or the reset of sleep (not nap, mind you, sleep) to get out of it. Today I've found that it took a mere 10 hours to fade to a dull murderous urge, and most of the issues it has molested in the process seem not too worse for the wear. (And by this I mean that I am no longer ardently, voraciously convinced that the function key on my laptop sticking means that I am marked for death. Now I simply believe that it's a minor conspiracy on behalf of my entire keyboard to insinuate disparagements upon my self-esteem, which is obviously much better.)
(Listen, not to harp on this, but dude, I love Ellen and Melissa McCarthy together. Well let's be honest, I would make out with both of them at the absolute drop of a function key, but look:)
OK, I believe I can now stop whinging about my boo-boo and move on to more interesting things. Well, interesting for you, I love hearing about my blues.
A couple of weeks ago (which makes me realise how long I take in between posts and I apologise half-heartedly) we managed to go through with a plan for once. Better still: that plan was ROLLER DERBY. Now, Roller Derby seems to be one of the most singular animals in the world of organised- or even semi-organised- sport. It involved hot chicks in non-existent skirts, seamed stockings and hallowe'en level makeup beating the ever-loving snot out of each other whilst appropriating violence and punk-themed punny stage names. This seems to attract a little bit of every kind of my favourite unsavoury elements, and we observed hipsters, rockers, grungers, goths, emo kids, jocks, dub step... people? Plus some punks, zeffers and even a few senior citizens. The latter were presumably there to support granddaughters playing that night, but it still lends granny a kind of bad-assery not half the audience have achieved with their fashion mullets and neck tattoos. No seriously, I saw more head-socks, ironic leopard-print, high tops and horizontal stripes than I could shake a stick at. You'll be proud to know I attended wearing a purple dress that covered what could very justifiably be called not enough of my cooch with matching lurid eyeshadow. When in Rome and all. Or Joburg, as the case may be.
It was a fascinating exercise in crowd-watching. There was a lot of phone-Googling and eavesdropping on the conversations of the people behind us to keep up with the rules and general strategy, but we more or less jumped up and down and yelled loudly just on merit of someone going arse-over-tits. This I believe may even be the official protocol.
At some point, Marnu, two other friends and I went outside because a) there was a pre-game act that included rapping, and b) peeps be hungry, yo. So once some of our party had returned from the wild outdoors with tales of hotdogs, it was decided we would escape the abysmal hip-hop being played through an even worse PA system and I would watch them smoke and eat. While we were standing in the queue, waiting on the chance to order boerewors rolls of questionable providence, the long waiting period allowed for conversation to drift horribly, abotherably amiss. I shan't go into great detail here, because while all topics covered seemed both germane and hilarious at the time, I believe there's a certain frame of mind and specificity of audience required for a warm reception. Some of the more savoury items included something about butt-rape (which led into discussion about one particular individual who looked a little too keen on his chances) and spitting in food while preparing it. It was at this last one that one of our company burst into explosive laughter, having noticed the expressions of the poor, poor couple behind us. As it turns out, loud conversation surrounding the comical properties of butt-rape is not so much the norm at a roller derby exhibition as one may have imagined. I garnered extensive pleasure at the realisation that at least within a ten metre radius from where we were standing, we were the biggest freaks there.
The single funniest moment of the night however came courtesy of Marnu. Fuck that, it may well be one of the funniest moments I've ever had the privilege to be privy to.
There was one poor soul floating around close to our seats that stood out to me immediately. He had a bushy brown beard, long flowing locks, and was wearing jeans so skinny I'm struggling not to make a Karen Carpenter joke with an ironic wife-beater. Naturally, as one does, I immediately turned to Marnu, poked him painfully in the side and shouted "HIPSTER JESUS!" loudly over the ambient fucking racket.
We had a good ol' chuckle over this and noted Hipster Jesus every time he walked past with a newly filled dixie cup of beer. Well, at least I know I did, I think by now we all know I find myself singularly hilarious. This was not the moment to which I refer- nay, that moment came when Hipster Jesus ambled once again past us newly refreshed (a Hipster Jesus does not turn water into wine; he turns flat Black Label into a crisp cold Pabst) trailing a second man who was clearly not the Messiah but a very naughty boy. I think you could see the whites all around my eyes as I took in his even more magnificent facial hair (or, in Pidgin English as I greatly prefer: Gras Belong Fes), flannel shirt, painted on jeggings and Repunzel mane.
Together they looked so highly improbable that I think I was very near post-ironic ecstasy. I was just going to smack Marnu on the shoulder to shout "HIPSTER MOSES!!!"- with extra punctuation- when he turned to me and- much cooler than I could have managed, even if mine had been funnier, said:
I believe that that can stand on its own as one of the funniest things fucking ever, and I absolutely refuse the "You probably had to be there" clause on this one. Hell, I spent most of my sulky day illustrating this story in order to ensure that you pretty much were there, so I damn well expect you to pee yourself laughing like any sane human being. (In searching for "Hipster Jesus" I naturally found that it is already an existing meme. Srsly guise, c'mon.
The actual derby itself was both awesome and just a wee bit disappointing, much like every time Brenda and I go to the Medieval Fayre. Like the Fayre, some of this is fixable. There was no scoreboard, even though there was one enormous screen up playing the same loop of a 5 second clip of chicks biting the dirt. This means we had to rely on the MCs for updates on both scores, fouls and rules, but therein lies the second big issue: the sound was FUCKING HORRIBLE. Just about the only thing we could ever make out was the announcement of another band coming on at half-time, and let's face it, that wasn't great news. That band also ended up consisting of 99% base, pumped so loudly that I could actually feel my kidneys coming to an epiphany.
So should we spend a moment updating the scoreboard and actually broadcasting audio in an audible manner, half the battle would be won. The other thing that could have rocked a little harder was the sport itself. I suppose it would be silly to expect the kind of intensity a Drew Barrymore directed movie promised, but it would have been nice to have seen at least a little more knuckle dusting than there was. This isn't so much a cry for more chicks with ankle sprains and broken noses (although it is a little bit of a cry for more chicks with ankle sprains and broken noses) as it is a cry for some commitment to the sport. Ah, but still, there was blood on the rink and matching underwear ahoy, so really at the end of the day all of us left satiated.
I'm going to leave this as Video Of The Day not for its inherent humour, but because it has attained connotations that leave me gasping for air and clutching my ribs. I tried to explain it to Marnu as it's a clip Comedy Central regularly beats to death to advertise SNL. As I've professed, in and of itself it isn't so gut-bustingly funny, but in illustrating the "sneeze" Will Ferrell employs in the sketch I found a little button in his soul (Marnu's, not Will's. Will doesn't return my calls) that kills a small part of him every time it's pressed.
I'm linking to the video instead of embedding it because it's both a terrible quality version, and the only one I could find. It also wouldn't embed using Blogger's built-in function and I'm way too lazy to figure out how to do it manually.
So for an entire weekend I took every ounce of pleasure humanly possible from making loud "HUUUUUUUUUHHHH" noises at him. Even ones that were forewarned and counted down induced both a terrified cringe of utter and debilitating sadness, and the accompanying cry of absolutely genuine "But whhhhhhyyyyyyy?!" God, it just didn't get old. In fact, it was just so funny that often when I inhaled sharply in preparation for a "HUUUUUUUUUUHHHH" I burst out into uncontrollable laughter and wouldn't be able to either complete the scream-sneeze or explain my sudden apoplexy. Perhaps one of the cruellest and most enjoyable weekends I've ever lived through.
There was also a moment for which I am entirely willing to accept "you probably had to be there" cards in which he accused me (for reasons I utterly forget right now) of being an orang-outang. He was expecting me to be rather disgruntled at the comparison, but I pointed out that both the Librarian and Cousin Louie were orang-outangs, and that I thusly felt it to be rather a compliment. He was completely and properly baffled at the Cousin Louie reference (in fairness, he's referred to as "King Louie" in the movie, but I was speaking in deference to him deigning himself the man-cub's "cousin") and before I could explain he launched into a rousing chorus of a song that could only possibly have been done justice to by a banjo and dungarees- aptly named and scored around the refrain of "Cousin Louie Was An Orang-Outang". It started out something like musical genius akin to Wayne Brady on Whose Line Is It Anyway, but quickly devolved into something about Cousin Louie being "snow white" and "unable to catch a tan." And as tempted as I may be to paint you a pretty picture of me as Cousin Louie the Hillbilly Orang-Outang, I am fucking tired and desire only a warm bath and horse tranquillisers at the present time. The earlier bout of melancholy may have abated somewhat, but it certainly has not yet cleared entirely, so I shall be rather pissy and incrementally more critical about the latter seasons of My Family until I can reset.
(Seriously, if anyone should manage to get in touch with Ellen and convince her of the absolute paucity of Loraine in her life it would go a long way towards encouraging both equilibrium and maybe even a Cousin Louie sketch. I think there's a function for that on her website. Go along, I'll wait.)
I'll leave you with this- there is a wonderful little book called The Meaning Of Tingo. It is full of odd little phrases and words in the most esoteric of languages, most of which have no direct equivalent in English. Some of them are entertaining for their novelty, but others are excellent in that Meaning Of Liff kind of a way; it becomes immediately apparent that we are hurting sorely for the lack of that word. One that seems rather oddly bespoke for me- considering my tendency to reset to Tokyo Time and call people up at inappropriate times of the morning- is thusly:
And with that, I bid you an almost certainly grammatically mangled goodnight. (It was worth it. I love me some Ellen.)
(A warning: I am in enough of a funk so as to insist on watching Ellen and type up a blog post at the same time, so there's every chance that today's dose of pie might look like the result of several Google translating back and forths.)
Ok, so the source of the emo is this: fuckity fuck all. I am displaced in euphoria for absolutely no reason at-fucking-all. This- rather pleasingly- coincides with the inhaling of much, much Creme Soda and 2 Minute Noodles, and since Ellen has just introduced a segment called "Oh Puh-lice", the very laws of physics makes it impossible to sustain a state of melancholy for any time at all. I may have grossly understood what both "physics" and "impossible" means here, but I've now got Ellen and Melissa McCarthy green-screened onto motorbikes and wearing wedding veils, so the function which allows me to give a fuck has ceased to function entirely.
Really what I'm whining about here is that I've been sitting here the whole day in a cloud of utter fucking grey without anything to blame it on. When there's a clear cause for angst, at least I can target the damnéd thing and attempt to either kill it with fire or lists and spreadsheets. When the problem is quite simply a disturbance in the force because Yoda is constipated, it tends to want to add momentum to the suck. My stupid, stupid brain flails out wildly, trying to find a cause (this is largely because I am actually Sheldon With Tits And A Crush On Benedict Cumberbatch, and I refuse to believe something should happen without being logical), and in so doing latches onto everything and interrogates it as though enough digging on any subject at all will unearth the offending stink. After sifting through existential insecurities, unrealised life-goals and my fat jeans now being my slightly-too-small jeans, I will eventually start glomming onto much less deserving causes.
Why is my favourite new knitted hat already unravelling at the back?
I smell toast. There is no toast. I obviously have a brain tumour, and now I want toast.
I think I've used the word "kerning" too much in the last week. I believe that this speaks very poorly about my person and character, and maybe I should stop giving so many shits about Comic Sans.
See? I'm absolutely unwell in deeply ingrained ways. The whole day I was bouncing around like this, trying to find things to do to distract myself away from inflicting irreparable damage to issues that are not actually issues but could, by virtue of this issue I have, become issues. (Also, as an aside: can someone pleeeeeese write to Ellen and tell her how awesome I am and how her life would not be complete without meeting me? And possibly flying me out to Burbank and gifting me a pair of Ellen underwear? Get on that, good friends and family.) I get stuck in these modes sometimes, and for a whole day I'll just be trapped in my head like I'm Leonardo DiCaprio in an under appreciated adaptation of a Dumas novel. It usually takes either a significant piece of awesome or the reset of sleep (not nap, mind you, sleep) to get out of it. Today I've found that it took a mere 10 hours to fade to a dull murderous urge, and most of the issues it has molested in the process seem not too worse for the wear. (And by this I mean that I am no longer ardently, voraciously convinced that the function key on my laptop sticking means that I am marked for death. Now I simply believe that it's a minor conspiracy on behalf of my entire keyboard to insinuate disparagements upon my self-esteem, which is obviously much better.)
(Listen, not to harp on this, but dude, I love Ellen and Melissa McCarthy together. Well let's be honest, I would make out with both of them at the absolute drop of a function key, but look:)
OK, I believe I can now stop whinging about my boo-boo and move on to more interesting things. Well, interesting for you, I love hearing about my blues.
A couple of weeks ago (which makes me realise how long I take in between posts and I apologise half-heartedly) we managed to go through with a plan for once. Better still: that plan was ROLLER DERBY. Now, Roller Derby seems to be one of the most singular animals in the world of organised- or even semi-organised- sport. It involved hot chicks in non-existent skirts, seamed stockings and hallowe'en level makeup beating the ever-loving snot out of each other whilst appropriating violence and punk-themed punny stage names. This seems to attract a little bit of every kind of my favourite unsavoury elements, and we observed hipsters, rockers, grungers, goths, emo kids, jocks, dub step... people? Plus some punks, zeffers and even a few senior citizens. The latter were presumably there to support granddaughters playing that night, but it still lends granny a kind of bad-assery not half the audience have achieved with their fashion mullets and neck tattoos. No seriously, I saw more head-socks, ironic leopard-print, high tops and horizontal stripes than I could shake a stick at. You'll be proud to know I attended wearing a purple dress that covered what could very justifiably be called not enough of my cooch with matching lurid eyeshadow. When in Rome and all. Or Joburg, as the case may be.
It was a fascinating exercise in crowd-watching. There was a lot of phone-Googling and eavesdropping on the conversations of the people behind us to keep up with the rules and general strategy, but we more or less jumped up and down and yelled loudly just on merit of someone going arse-over-tits. This I believe may even be the official protocol.
At some point, Marnu, two other friends and I went outside because a) there was a pre-game act that included rapping, and b) peeps be hungry, yo. So once some of our party had returned from the wild outdoors with tales of hotdogs, it was decided we would escape the abysmal hip-hop being played through an even worse PA system and I would watch them smoke and eat. While we were standing in the queue, waiting on the chance to order boerewors rolls of questionable providence, the long waiting period allowed for conversation to drift horribly, abotherably amiss. I shan't go into great detail here, because while all topics covered seemed both germane and hilarious at the time, I believe there's a certain frame of mind and specificity of audience required for a warm reception. Some of the more savoury items included something about butt-rape (which led into discussion about one particular individual who looked a little too keen on his chances) and spitting in food while preparing it. It was at this last one that one of our company burst into explosive laughter, having noticed the expressions of the poor, poor couple behind us. As it turns out, loud conversation surrounding the comical properties of butt-rape is not so much the norm at a roller derby exhibition as one may have imagined. I garnered extensive pleasure at the realisation that at least within a ten metre radius from where we were standing, we were the biggest freaks there.
The single funniest moment of the night however came courtesy of Marnu. Fuck that, it may well be one of the funniest moments I've ever had the privilege to be privy to.
There was one poor soul floating around close to our seats that stood out to me immediately. He had a bushy brown beard, long flowing locks, and was wearing jeans so skinny I'm struggling not to make a Karen Carpenter joke with an ironic wife-beater. Naturally, as one does, I immediately turned to Marnu, poked him painfully in the side and shouted "HIPSTER JESUS!" loudly over the ambient fucking racket.
We had a good ol' chuckle over this and noted Hipster Jesus every time he walked past with a newly filled dixie cup of beer. Well, at least I know I did, I think by now we all know I find myself singularly hilarious. This was not the moment to which I refer- nay, that moment came when Hipster Jesus ambled once again past us newly refreshed (a Hipster Jesus does not turn water into wine; he turns flat Black Label into a crisp cold Pabst) trailing a second man who was clearly not the Messiah but a very naughty boy. I think you could see the whites all around my eyes as I took in his even more magnificent facial hair (or, in Pidgin English as I greatly prefer: Gras Belong Fes), flannel shirt, painted on jeggings and Repunzel mane.
Together they looked so highly improbable that I think I was very near post-ironic ecstasy. I was just going to smack Marnu on the shoulder to shout "HIPSTER MOSES!!!"- with extra punctuation- when he turned to me and- much cooler than I could have managed, even if mine had been funnier, said:
I believe that that can stand on its own as one of the funniest things fucking ever, and I absolutely refuse the "You probably had to be there" clause on this one. Hell, I spent most of my sulky day illustrating this story in order to ensure that you pretty much were there, so I damn well expect you to pee yourself laughing like any sane human being. (In searching for "Hipster Jesus" I naturally found that it is already an existing meme. Srsly guise, c'mon.
The actual derby itself was both awesome and just a wee bit disappointing, much like every time Brenda and I go to the Medieval Fayre. Like the Fayre, some of this is fixable. There was no scoreboard, even though there was one enormous screen up playing the same loop of a 5 second clip of chicks biting the dirt. This means we had to rely on the MCs for updates on both scores, fouls and rules, but therein lies the second big issue: the sound was FUCKING HORRIBLE. Just about the only thing we could ever make out was the announcement of another band coming on at half-time, and let's face it, that wasn't great news. That band also ended up consisting of 99% base, pumped so loudly that I could actually feel my kidneys coming to an epiphany.
So should we spend a moment updating the scoreboard and actually broadcasting audio in an audible manner, half the battle would be won. The other thing that could have rocked a little harder was the sport itself. I suppose it would be silly to expect the kind of intensity a Drew Barrymore directed movie promised, but it would have been nice to have seen at least a little more knuckle dusting than there was. This isn't so much a cry for more chicks with ankle sprains and broken noses (although it is a little bit of a cry for more chicks with ankle sprains and broken noses) as it is a cry for some commitment to the sport. Ah, but still, there was blood on the rink and matching underwear ahoy, so really at the end of the day all of us left satiated.
I'm going to leave this as Video Of The Day not for its inherent humour, but because it has attained connotations that leave me gasping for air and clutching my ribs. I tried to explain it to Marnu as it's a clip Comedy Central regularly beats to death to advertise SNL. As I've professed, in and of itself it isn't so gut-bustingly funny, but in illustrating the "sneeze" Will Ferrell employs in the sketch I found a little button in his soul (Marnu's, not Will's. Will doesn't return my calls) that kills a small part of him every time it's pressed.
I'm linking to the video instead of embedding it because it's both a terrible quality version, and the only one I could find. It also wouldn't embed using Blogger's built-in function and I'm way too lazy to figure out how to do it manually.
So for an entire weekend I took every ounce of pleasure humanly possible from making loud "HUUUUUUUUUHHHH" noises at him. Even ones that were forewarned and counted down induced both a terrified cringe of utter and debilitating sadness, and the accompanying cry of absolutely genuine "But whhhhhhyyyyyyy?!" God, it just didn't get old. In fact, it was just so funny that often when I inhaled sharply in preparation for a "HUUUUUUUUUUHHHH" I burst out into uncontrollable laughter and wouldn't be able to either complete the scream-sneeze or explain my sudden apoplexy. Perhaps one of the cruellest and most enjoyable weekends I've ever lived through.
There was also a moment for which I am entirely willing to accept "you probably had to be there" cards in which he accused me (for reasons I utterly forget right now) of being an orang-outang. He was expecting me to be rather disgruntled at the comparison, but I pointed out that both the Librarian and Cousin Louie were orang-outangs, and that I thusly felt it to be rather a compliment. He was completely and properly baffled at the Cousin Louie reference (in fairness, he's referred to as "King Louie" in the movie, but I was speaking in deference to him deigning himself the man-cub's "cousin") and before I could explain he launched into a rousing chorus of a song that could only possibly have been done justice to by a banjo and dungarees- aptly named and scored around the refrain of "Cousin Louie Was An Orang-Outang". It started out something like musical genius akin to Wayne Brady on Whose Line Is It Anyway, but quickly devolved into something about Cousin Louie being "snow white" and "unable to catch a tan." And as tempted as I may be to paint you a pretty picture of me as Cousin Louie the Hillbilly Orang-Outang, I am fucking tired and desire only a warm bath and horse tranquillisers at the present time. The earlier bout of melancholy may have abated somewhat, but it certainly has not yet cleared entirely, so I shall be rather pissy and incrementally more critical about the latter seasons of My Family until I can reset.
(Seriously, if anyone should manage to get in touch with Ellen and convince her of the absolute paucity of Loraine in her life it would go a long way towards encouraging both equilibrium and maybe even a Cousin Louie sketch. I think there's a function for that on her website. Go along, I'll wait.)
I'll leave you with this- there is a wonderful little book called The Meaning Of Tingo. It is full of odd little phrases and words in the most esoteric of languages, most of which have no direct equivalent in English. Some of them are entertaining for their novelty, but others are excellent in that Meaning Of Liff kind of a way; it becomes immediately apparent that we are hurting sorely for the lack of that word. One that seems rather oddly bespoke for me- considering my tendency to reset to Tokyo Time and call people up at inappropriate times of the morning- is thusly:
And with that, I bid you an almost certainly grammatically mangled goodnight. (It was worth it. I love me some Ellen.)
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