awkwardly

Thursday

Thor, Deputy Dawg, treasure trove of toons

The Might Thor - "Trapped By Loki"
Deputy Dawg - "Kin Folk"
The Mighty Heroes - "The Stretcher"
The Green Hornet
Alfred Hitchcock Hour
Night Gallery
...plus lots of banned cartoons, WWII propaganda cartoons, old tv shows, new anime clips, and other stuff you could probably find on youtube, but why not try guba.com instead?

Wednesday

The Wilhelm Scream Compilation

Direct Mail Marketing for all your death threat needs.

"Every day it seemed more Iraqis woke up to death threats tossed into their carports. At first the death threats were handwritten, but as kidnappings became a daily occurrence, the kidnappers grew more brazen and organized. The terrorists now issue generic, computerized threats with the organization's name as letterhead. Only the name of the victim is written by hand."

Apple Butter and other horrors

I'm experimenting with these home canning recipes to make for Xmas gifts. The apple butter was an amazing hassle because I tried mashing cooked apples through a collander instead of using the food processor. I looked up other recipes that require no collander mashing and discovered spicy apple chutney and apple marmalade. I made a batch of chutney last night. I'm a little worried about whether it turned out the right consistency. It didn't get as thick as jam, and I haven't used a lot of chutney to know what it's supposed to be like. Haven't tried the apple marmalade recipe, but the advantage of that one is that it has few ingredients and doesn't require fruit pectin like most jams or jellies do.

Tuesday

Troy Gentry fined $15k for hunting with head up ass

Country singer Troy Gentry pled guilty to falsely registering a captive bear as being killed in the wild. He was fined $15K, had to give back the bear's hide, relinquish his bow, and won't be allowed to hunt or fish in Minnesota for five years.

I can't tell from the articles if it's illegal to kill a captive bear in Minnesota, or if they just dropped those charges as part of a plea agreement. I hope country music fans make a bigger deal about this scumbag than they did about the Dixie Chicks, but it's doubtful. This seems like a bigger redneck rule to break. Rednecks might talk politics with each other and disagree about it, but what kind of lying sleazeball would claim to be a hunter and show off the tanned bear hide as a trophy after buying a bear and killing it inside an electric fence? The Dixie Chicks were being honest. Gentry is a liar.

Don't miss the music video for Montgomery Gentry's You Do Your Thing. Troy drives through city streets with a deer strapped to the hood of his SUV and his two kids inside.

Saturday

Buck Rogers and Space:1999 comics

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Space: 1999 were a few of the tv shows from the 70s and 80s given comic strip treatment in a Brit kids' magazine called Look-In. I hope they'll continue adding full scans of old comics to lookinarchive.com. Dig this list of tv shows they comicked: Charlie's Angels, Battlestar Galactica, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, Knight Rider, The A-Team, Kung Fu, CHiPs, The Fall Guy, Street Hawk, Logan's Run and The Man From Atlantis. I'd be mildly curious to check out the comics derived from UK tv shows: The Tomorrow People, Sapphire & Steel, Timeslip, Robin Of Sherwood, Dick Turpin, Worzel Gummidge, Black Beauty, Follyfoot, The Famous Five, Catweazle, Freewheelers, Oliver Twist and Smuggler. Not to mention comedies like: Benny Hill (??!); Doctor On The Go; Doctor At Sea; Doctor In Charge; Bless This House; Man About The House; On The Buses; Mind Your Language; Cannon & Ball; Please, Sir!; Danger Mouse; Star Fleet; Mork & Mindy; Inspector Gadget; Terrahawks; The Smurfs; Alf; Metal Mickey; Super Gran; Crowther In Trouble and Scooby Doo.

Sunday

Angel (banjo Hendrix)

Video of Little Robbie Dayjob performing James Marshall Hendrix's "Angel" on banjo.

Saturday

Peanuts Grow Underground

I ran out of free space on my tripod account and had to move some deadwood over to a free angelfire website. The "awkwardly storage closet" is now at http://www.angelfire.com/funky/redhausman/index.htm

Maybe we can get some new green sucker shoots coming off the deadwood if you check out one of the old, under-rated articles I moved there. I created a page called Peanuts Grow Underground - "Questioning and Celebrating the Darker Side Of Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts Mythos." It was meant to be a site where I'd post weird jokes and interpretive articles about Peanuts, kind of along the lines of what Metaphilm does with movie reviews. I ended up writing only one big piece: The Tao of Pooh vs. The AAUGH! of Brown. "One of the problems with Benjamin Hoff's philosophy [in The Tao of Pooh] is that it assumes you can analyze your own life and easily see the best way to flow with it. But what about when life throws you a curve? How would Pooh react if Piglet started selling his Very Small Body to pay for his Very Small But Growing Smack Habit?..."

"In my imaginary war between The Tao versus The AAUGH!, the philosophy of Charlie Brown triumphs over the philosophy of Pooh not by showing how you can live a happier life, but by showing that sometimes, you can't live a happy life..."

Sock Karma

As part of my morning ritual, I pick out the clothes I'm going to wear for the day, bring most of it into the bathroom to change into after my shower, and I throw a pair of clean socks to the bottom of the stairs. I've gotten into the habit of sitting on the landing, three steps from the bottom where it turns a corner into the living room, to put on my shoes and socks.

I also have the bad habit of leaving things in the corner of that landing when I'm too lazy to bring them upstairs. Right now there are a couple of bills, a small box of CDs, a book and a bottle of shampoo waiting to be brought up. The theory is that one of the times I need to go upstairs, I'll take that stuff up and put it away. Objects sitting there in the walkway serve as a reminder that they need to go up. And there is a good reason to go up several times a day, because the bathroom is upstairs.

I don't put that theory into practice often enough, because I'm pretty sure the CDs and the book have been there two weeks or more. When it comes time to do bills, I usually go down and pick up the stragglers sitting in that corner. Actually I'm going to fetch them right now while I'm thinking about it...

There. I feel better now. Don't you?

Another foolish habit I've gotten into is taking off my dirty socks in the living room and tossing them in that corner of the stairway landing, with all the other things that will theoretically go upstairs.

So today when I put on my socks at the bottom of the stairs, I noticed they were inside out. Melinda has gotten me trained to put them right-side out before putting them in the dirty laundry, and even if I had left them inside out, she probably would have turned them the right way before putting the laundry away. (Not that I'm a stickler for this kind of crap. I don't care about WIRE HANGERS either.)

I thought nothing of it, went to work, worked diligently as always, came home with groceries, put stuff away, put Melinda's double cheeseburger in the fridge because she had already gone to bed, and carried my veggieburger and fries upstairs to use the interwebs. Near the bottom of the stairway, wedged in between the stair rail and the wall, was the clean pair of socks I had thrown down this morning. I like to slide pairs of socks down that rail to see if they'll go all the way to the bottom or if they'll fall off the rail partway down. I had forgotten about them getting wedged in the rail today. The ones I put on this morning were dirty socks left on the stairs from the night before.

Sorry. That's not much of a payoff.

And then an anaconda bit me and shrieked, "That's what you get for leaving dirty socks at the bottom of the stairs, jerkwad!"

The End.

Friday

Are you ready for your anarchy yet?
Two police men holding down a suspect, kneeling on his throat. One cop punches him in the face to help pacify the perp. Caught on camera.
On the fourteenth, UCLA campus police tasered a student for failing to leave the library after he would not produce his student ID. You can watch the students gathering around them as the police taser him repeatedly because he won't stand up and leave. I count at least three police, maybe four. They could easily have hog-tied him with cuffs and carried him out of the building, then charged him with resisting arrest or whatever. Instead they threatened to tase him again if he wouldn't get up, and they did it maybe four times. At one point after they already zapped him twice, a crowd of about 20 students gather close to them. I was hoping just then that the students would rush the police and stop them. Take the bastard to jail, do what you gotta do, but you don't taze somebody after they're in handcuffs just because they won't get up and walk away with you.

Somebody needs to do a research project on what harmful contaminants are seeping into the donut supply around L.A.

Bonus link: check out the podcast devoted to police brutality, misconduct and corruption -- Bad Cop, No Donut!

Wednesday

Communist Manifestoon
Here's equal time to counterbalance those capitalist propaganda cartoons. This one is just a reading of the Manifesto over clips from old cartoons (not all Disney). You might also enjoy Communist Manifesto read by a housewife, or this serious and effective critique, Capitalism & Other Kids Stuff.

Saturday

Make Mine Freedom
This 1948 cartoon uses humor to tout the dangers of Communism and the blushing benefits of capitalism. Interesting that they show Communism crushing unions and forbidding strikes. Somebody should have shown this cartoon to Reagan. Also notice we have "the right to worship God in your own way" but no mention of a right not to worship anything if that's our way.


Some other propaganda cartoons by this same studio are:
Going Places (1948)
Why Play Leapfrog? (1949)

Thursday

Turtles Can Fly (2005)
The Little Rascals take a wrong turn at Lord of the Flies and detour through Catch-22 in Iraqi Kurdistan.
An armless boy unscrews landmines with his teeth so he can sell the mines for food. Also features child rape and infanticide.

But why stop there? If you enjoy your movies with a wee touch of dead infants, you owe it to yourself to see Nobody Knows. It won some awards including best actor at Cannes 2004. And Melinda likes it so much she made me buy it. But keep in mind how weird and fleeting her taste in movies is. She likes Land of the Dead mainly because of the sad, sympathetic old lady zombie animatronic puppet in the first three minutes of that movie.