Robust McManlyPants on Average Display

So, one of my absolute favorite blogs, Republic of Dogs, is currently hosting a bake-off. Their entries have been mailed out to their judges, and I am deeply envious of those who will get to taste these creations. I have spent a goodly portion of the afternoon just staring at their entries. I have to share this one in particular, from the blog’s host, Res Publica. He describes the following:

5.) Chocolate Macaroon Sandwich Cookies – I heart these in a way that some might consider unwholesome. I could easily stand in the kitchen and eat the entire batch. If you love chocolate, these will be a near-religious experience. The cookie itself is a chocolate-almond macaroon that comes out crispy on the edges and chewy in the center. They get sandwiched around a dark chocolate ganache with just a touch of coffee flavor. After sitting for a day or so, the cookie and the filling just sort of meld together into one extremely, severely delicious mouthful.

It is terrible and wrong of him to inflict such thoughts on the world and not share the recipe. So, I’ve emailed him to ask for it. In the South, asking someone for a recipe is basically the highest compliment that can be paid, and it is a sort of sacred rite. To ask for a recipe is to compliment the chef and pay high honors to their work. To receive the recipe, on the other hand, is in some ways an even higher honor. When my mother sent me the recipe for her cornbread after hearing about my own disastrous* attempt at a “Mexican” cornbread, it was both a gentle ribbing for my results and an endorsement of my skills by sharing a recipe she’s been asked for many, many times.

Not to put any cultural pressure on him or anything.

UPDATE: Res is a scholar and a gentleman, and sent me links. Whee! I’m going to make cookies tomorrow! Thank you, Res!

–
* “Disastrous” only in a purely orthodox cornbreadishness sense. As stuff-in-a-bowl, it was delicious even if I do say so myself.

This?  This is just about the funniest thing I’ve seen all week.  Heck, maybe in several weeks:  The Nameless Dread, aka The Lovecraft Family Circus.  My personal fave is this one, though this is a close second. 

Many years ago I was a regular reader of Spinnwebe‘s old Dysfunctional Family Circus.  Yeah, yeah, the Keanes don’t like it, I’m sure, et cetera.  I still find it hysterically funny.  Thbthbthbthbthbthpth!

Speaking of Lovecraft, I read The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft a few weeks ago.  I’d never read "The Rats in the Walls," but I had read "The Colour Out of Space" and "The Dunwich Horror" previously.  "At the Mountains of Madness" was a reread, as well, but it had been so long that I remembered almost nothing of it.  The stories aren’t great by today’s standards – they are obviously the early ancestors of today’s horror and science fiction stories, with rough edges and Lovecraft’s patented opacity as a wordsmith – but they’re a lot of fun to read and I find it very interesting to read a story and at the same time dissect what about it was supposed to be explicitly horrifying and what was left unsaid to let the reader create their own dreadful circumstance or description.  I am fascinated by taking those sorts of oblique horror stories and juxtaposing them with, say, Christine, a book that includes a lengthy description of how when someone is crushed to death in the back seat in an auto accident, the driver’s first impression is that they’ve been doused with a bucket of warm water because of all the blood hitting them in the head.

The annotations are mostly interesting, but occasionally they’re just nonsense – some of them are simply unnecessary and some of them are pointless.  For example, I’m pretty sure someone who’s sufficiently into Lovecraft to seek out annotated versions of these stories is also going to know what a cyclops is in mythology; similarly, I do find it interesting to learn when Lovecraft has named someone or something after a friend or pointedly sought out and made use of old surnames common to the settings, but do a few instances of such necessitate dithering over every name in the book?  Let me tell you, I have named a lot of characters over the years.  Some names were meant to be significant – Roderick was intended to be a clear allusion to "The Fall of the House of Usher," of course, with his disastrous ancestry and his long descent into a subtle but insidious madness masked by his more overtly "crazy" characteristics – but some were simply the names that occurred to me.  Pitrick Thatcher was named that because the Standard Fantasy Names Act of 1927 requires that fantastical first names sound almost but not exactly like "normal" names and his trade was, in fact, making/maintaining/repairing thatched rooves in his rural village.  One of Pants Wilder’s most memorable characters, Berol Musgrave – doomed priest of a dead god chosen as the temporary avatar of another prior to its birth as a more beneficent and respected power – was named after two brands of office supplies that happened to be present in the room when he was rolling up Berol’s stats.  So, really, when someone who’s a very minor character and might as well be named Villager #3 pops up in a Lovecraft story, I don’t really need a footnote that wrings its hands over being unable to explain why that character is named what s/he is named.

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I read this article at Escapist Magazine (produced, it appears, right here in beautiful Durham) on Sunday.  It is a collection of fascinating experiences one woman has had online, from IRC to running a raid instance in World of Warcraft.  Her conclusion, based on what everyone tells her, is that she does not exist.  There simply are not, she is told, any women on the Internet.  What fascinates me is the childishness so universally exhibited by the boys she encounters; when they find out she’s a woman, they demand pictures.  When she refuses to send them pictures of herself, they insist she must be a guy.  When they think she’s a guy and she mentions a guy being "hot," they think she’s a gay guy and get freaked out.  And yet, as she rightly points out, there are plenty of female characters running around. 

What I don’t get is that their expectation that all players are male must mean that they also expect all female characters are being played by men who are doing electronic drag.  She points out, again quite rightly, that some of these people actually offer to tip female characters if they dance for them.  And yet, they think the person on the other end of the keyboard is a man, and yet they are homophobic.  If you hold your breath for a moment, you’ll hear my brain pop as it tries to process this.

Bottom line, though, It’s not that I’m shocked that there are silly boys or desperate and socially unskilled men online (I’m not – there are also socially unskilled and desperate women online, and that the Internet and a life that can be filled with one’s immersion in same come more easily to the poorly socialized of either gender should shock no one), it’s that no one really seems to step forward to treat her like a person.  Assholes are common enough in the world that I think the more fair-minded among us are accustomed to at least trying to separate ourselves from them when we get the chance.  I’m talking about things like her guild leader telling her he thinks her guildmates were immature.  Where are the other people out there who, if they won’t slap the offenders, also won’t hold out their hand in friendship to the offended?  Admittedly, her guild leader does step in and thank her for speaking aloud on Ventrillo and asks her to try to expose the boys in her guild to a woman on a more regular basis in hopes it will make them more mature, and at least he’s thinking along those lines, but I’m not entirely sold on the idea that using her as a teaching tool, like any other stuffed and mounted animal, is really "equality" – and no one will ever convince me that it’s fair to expect her to spend her personal free time doing what amounts to workplace equality training.  Her guild leader should not expect her to pay $15/month for the privilege of spending her spare time training twelve year olds not to be assholes.

That entire issue is about women and gaming, and well worth a look-see.  Given that it was a woman who convinced me to try World of Warcraft, I find it stunning that people are so bothered over the idea of women as gamers.  That said, I’m also at least twice the age of anyone who’s that big of an asshole.  At least, I hope I am. 

While looking for that story, however, I wound up on a different website with "Escapist" in its title.  This one is definitely funny, though (and you will need a good laugh if you read the story linked above).  Bottom line, this guy does some pretty solid scientific investigation into Harry Potter’s and D&D’s abilities to teach us real-world sorcery.  If you have a mom or dad or aunt or minister who rails against the demon-worship inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, they might find this sort of empirical data interesting.

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Courtesy of The Onion.  An example:

Roddenberry (April 22—May 13)
You’ve never encountered a problem that can’t be solved by the combined
mental and spiritual resources of the enlightened people of the galaxy
or by swinging from the doorframe and kicking people in the gut.

Beautiful… (more…)

(The title of the post is something I frequently say to The Boyf when I’m just about to launch into something seemingly – seemingly – deeply tangential to the current topic when, in fact, there is a complex and surely highly respectable whole series of thoughts that led me there.  At any rate…)

So today I read a post by apostropher which links to the latest Steve, Don’t Eat It!, which is volume 8, which is about “prison hooch.”  It’s a hilarious post, and you should go read it. 

In this particular example of gustatory error, though, he mentions having gotten the, er, recipe from a book called You Are Going to Prison,
a sort of prison-life-for-dummies book about how to spot the gangs,
avoid being murdered and, obviously, make illicit alcohol in a trashbag
concealed in your prison cell.  I, being the descendant of some of
the first settlers of what was then a penal colony,
was immediately fascinated and had to go check out the book’s
description on Amazon.  The whole concept seemed amusing enough
that I scrolled right on down to the user reviews section and found
this gem:

You’ve Got Jail!, December 23, 2002

Reviewer:    Charles Henry Higgensworth III (Boston, Massachusetts) – See all my reviews

This detailed and eye-opening guide makes the perfect gift for any
prison-bound friend or colleague. Street-dumb executives caught up in
white-collar crime sweeps will find the sections on surviving prison
riots and identifying deadly prison gangs to be particularly
illuminating. I came across this remarkable book shortly after our
family was served a notice of expulsion from our social & athletic
club. Although our ancestors were amongst its founding luminaries,
circumstances had sadly caused us to fall several years behind on our
dues, and in the face of our record-setting delinquency the Membership
Board surely had no other option. Despite that, I was overcome by an
urge to take some sort of petty revenge, and this book proved to be an
ideal avenue to that. Our club – one of New England’s oldest and
grandest – now has a truly national membership, and many of the
best-publicized players in the current corporate crime wave are
affiliates based in Philadelphia, New York, and (especially) Houston.
Since many of these new celebrities are indeed amongst the potentates
of the Membership and Steering Committees, I decided to make an
anonymous gift of “You Are Going to Prison” to several of them, with
appropriate passages highlighted or flagged with Post-It notes. Readers
with similar aims will find Chapter Six (“Don’t Drop the Soap – Sex in
the Slammer”) and Chapter Nine (“Blood In and Blood Out – Prison Gangs
and Violence”) to be particularly rich in opportunities to draw
attention to poignant passages (e.g. “saw this bit on chain gangs and
thought of you!”).

This… this is art.  If you go to his page (just click on
his name up there), you’ll be treated to some of the most amusing
short-form, subdued humor you’ve seen in a while.  Check his other reviews.  They’re worth it. (more…)

Saw this today:  Things He And His Girlfriend Have Fought About.  It’s hilarious. 

It’s also really, really long. (more…)

I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but it’s cool as hell:  PostSecrets. 
It’s an art project in which people mail in anonymous postcards, each
with a secret on them.  They are encouraged to be artistic with
the secret’s presentation.  Then the secrets, still anonymous, are
made publicly available.  Some are touching, some are funny, some
are deeply disturbing, some surprise me with what their author-artists
considered necessary to keep secret up to the point they made the
postcard.  The archivist asks that the secrets all be true and be
truly secret – something never told to anyone else.  Weird and
fascinating and beautiful and sad all at once. (more…)

In moving things over to my Mac, something remarkably easier than I’d
feared it might be, I ran across some old photos and some old image
files in general, including these church signs generated at, naturally,
The Church Sign Generator.  The first one was back when I was a Compoundian and Andy and I were posting on compoundx.org, since defunct.
[[image:churchsign.jpg::center:0]]

In all honesty, the next one is stolen entirely from Pants Wilder.  One year he went to Bascha‘s Halloween shindig as Charon and handed out homemade business cards including one that said what’s on the sign below:

[[image:churchsign2.jpg::center:0]]

The rest are entirely my fault, and I assure you I’m very sorry for them.

[[image:churchsign3.jpg::center:0]]

[[image:churchsign4.jpg::center:0]]

[[image:churchsign5.jpg::center:0]]

To be honest, on a day (or during a week, no month, no year, no decade)
in which the religious fundies are trying to run everyone’s life it’s
awfully therapeutic to just kick back and make up some shit to put on a
church sign.  Mighty relaxing, I tell you. (more…)

Maybe I’m a weirdo, but satanic banjos are just the mix of weirdness
and comedy I look for in a good webcomic.  In other words, time
for another gentle poke, dear viewer:  if you’re not reading Achewood, you should be.  The current storyline is hilarious. 

Start here
and work your way forward.  It’s been running for a couple of
weeks, so it’s quite brief and won’t take but a couple of minutes. (more…)

Tales of the Plush Cthulhu, by Jon Hansen.

I love the Internet.  I want to say, right now, to all the Old
Ones who lie in uninterrupted, death-palled slumber or sit at the edge
of the universe with their thousand sharp-fanged young amid the
howling, rhythmless cavorting of their mindless cantors, thank you for the Internet.

Interestingly, I saw a rumor online today that Mr. Hansen has been to
see the kind folks at Cartoon Network to pitch Tales of Plush Cthulhu
to them.  Aw yeah.

Also, holy hells, this Spiderman’s Greatest Bible Stories thing he linked to is hilarious. (more…)

Bascha, don’t look at this.  Just don’t.

Gods, but my eyes are like fountains of blood.  And that’s just from the background image.  Please, please make the hurting stop.

Please. (more…)

My eternal thanks to Doc, who sent the SPAM list a link to The Hall of Douchebags. 
Work-safe, as far as I can tell, it’s the MST3K of band
portraits.  Hell yes.  Favorite entries that I’ve seen so far
are here, here, here, here, here and here (actually, I meant here, but hey, that one was funny, too).

I have honestly laughed until I cried over this.  Holy crap, this is fucking hilarious. (more…)

A fraternity sister of mine has posted the following unbelievably hilarious information:  new rulings on citing unusual sources.  She’s a librarian, so this is her gig, but damn.  Damn, damn, damn.  A sample:

Rest-Stop Restroom Graffitti

When citing rest-stop graffitti:
1. List the name of the rest area (if it has a name) in italics.
2. Name the state in which it was located.
3. Name the highway it abuts (with direction headed).
4. List the nearest mile marker.
5. List the date the graffitti was observed.

Example: “Head you wouldn’t believe, call 555-3278.” [The Ida C.
Collins Memorial Rest Area, Wisconsin; Interstate 94 South (Mile Marker
218): May 14, 1997.]

That is some funny shit right there.  I keep giggling every time I read it. (more…)

Now, I love me some Patsy Cline, and even some Loretta Lynn.  I’m
even willing to give Sissy Spacek a pass by association.  But
still, today’s Achewood is hilarious.  If you read just one
webcomic all week, make it this one. (more…)

Today is the last day ever of Wigu.  I look forward to his next project, and there’s always his cartoon blog, but I am still a little sad.  I’m wearing my Topato shirt as living memorial.

I probably need less nerdy hobbies, but whatever. (more…)