I’m so hungry, I could eat a huss
Also known as spiny dogfish, blue dog, common spinyfish, darwen salmon, dogfish, grayfish, Pacific dogfish, piked dogfish, rock salmon, spiky dog, spotted spiny dogfish, spring dogfish, spur dogfish, spur dog, victorian spotted dogfish, white-spotted dogfish, and white-spotted spurdog.
In Sussex fish and chip shops, they are known as huss. They’re related to sharks. We always get cod or haddock, but tonight we had to wait for our chips and we struck up a conversation with the fishnchips man. He told us the huss was local today. Eh, what the hell. Batter-dipped and deep fried, I’d eat worse.
It was good. Finer-grained flesh than cod with a slightly stronger flavor. They leave the backbone in and you eat around it. I’m not terribly keen on finishing my meal with a spine on my plate, but other than that…yeah, I’d eat it again.
I don’t experiment nearly enough with local food. I’d be missing the point of being an alien if I didn’t try some unfamiliar gnosh from time to time.
Of course, I yearn to discover the British equivalent of Ho-Ho’s, Ding Dongs and Suzie-Q’s.
January 27, 2011 — 11:14 pm
Comments: 29
Sputnick, salmon, high speed rail
Okay, I lied. I did watch Obama’s State of the Union speech. In fact, I’ve watched it over and over and over tonight.
See, I was going to make you a nice little YouTube highlight reel, but I just couldn’t grab a clean copy. Sometimes I managed to download video but no audio. And sometimes I got video but it juddered horribly. And sometimes…oh, fuck it. You get the idea. I gave up in the end. Clearly I have some things to work out, videographically.
So what did I think of the speech? Honestly? I didn’t think it was as bad as people are saying.
I mean, it was a mess philosophically. The Sputnik metaphor doesn’t work at all, and — oh, dear god! — high speed rail?! Really? That one’s older than I am. It was a muddle, but it was a low-key muddle.
He didn’t flip anybody off. He managed to look reasonably gracious congratulating Boehner. He didn’t come across as too stuck up or madder’n hell. He didn’t look like he was sucking a lemon.
I was terribly disappointed.
January 26, 2011 — 11:18 pm
Comments: 22
It is good to be the weasel
This morning I got a brand shiny new Photoshop CS-to-CS3 upgrade — installed, registered, activated and working great — for a bit over £100 from a reputable retailer. So I’m cool until CS6 (right? It’s three hops now, isn’t it?).
And Dead Space 2 was released today, so Steam is offering the original Dead Space download for the outrageously reasonable sum of £5. (Can something be outrageously reasonable? Yes! It can!).
Engineer sent to repair giant mining ship encounters ship full of mutant alien zombies cobbled together out of bits of the old crew. So, the usual. But gorgeous to look at. Oh, and head-shots don’t work — you have to hack off at least two necromorph limbs using power tools. w00t!
I’ve already had a dream about it, so there’s that.
And thank ke-rist the State of the Union starts at 2am my time, so I don’t even have to pretend to watch. The SOTU is the most degrading spectacle in modern politics. I don’t care who’s in office.
Guys from the president’s party hopping up every ten seconds, waving and high-fiving and giving him the standing-o. Guys from the other party sitting and sulking. Cripples, dudes in uniforms and designated nobodies in the gallery for Hisself to point to (Ronnie started this one). It’s like freaking Queen for a Day.
Oh, and then comes the shopping list of boring, expensive programs that probably won’t even get started, let alone finished. (Clinton’s last one was an hour and a half recitation of stupid shit that could never, ever come true because he only had a year to go).
I’d give a thousand quatloos to a president of either party who stood up and said, “no theatrics. These are serious times and we have serious things to discuss.”
Not going to happen.
January 25, 2011 — 6:48 pm
Comments: 35
This cat has never been out of this tree
Never. He was born in the tree, the other kittens grew up and left, then his mother did. So Wisconsin man Ron Venden built him a shelter in the fork and began feeding him a diet of meatloaf and salami in milk. Cat’s name is Almond.
Yeah. I wondered that, too. The article doesn’t say, but I bet Mr Venden is very, very careful how he walks around that tree.
What? Yes, that’s it. It’s Monday and I’m damned if I’m going to write about Rahm Emanuel.
January 24, 2011 — 9:24 pm
Comments: 20
Plus, we got some beans for the cow
Just a bit of Friday afternoon silliness. Have a good weekend, folks!
January 21, 2011 — 10:27 pm
Comments: 28
No post. Sulking.
Meh. We had a power outage and lost the artwork for tonight’s post (it wasn’t great, but you don’t know that). Then my server fell over and waved its legs in the air for a while.
Not my night. No post. Drink now.
— 12:11 am
Comments: 22
Where would I be without the easy ones?
Huh. I guess the National Enquirer thinks Obama has worms*. I’m not sure. When I click the link, I get “The content of this website is not available in your area.” That happens with Saturday Night Live skits, too.
See? England isn’t all bad.
In other wormy news, did you see the Cheezburger Network got a major capital infusion?
I love the Cheezburger folks, but I don’t know how they’re getting away with this. They pretty much admit they don’t know where most of the photos come from and that’s totally, no-doubt-about-it, not even a little bit legal. You can’t do that. You can’t nick other people’s stuff; it doesn’t matter if they’re amateur snapshots of pussycats and you supply the captions.
I assumed they got away with it because there weren’t any deep pockets involved, but $30M is a respectable pocket. Well, long may they escape the roving bands of aggressive IP lawyers that scour the internet (and ruin my fun on Zazzle).
January 19, 2011 — 10:49 pm
Comments: 16
Jack Kevorkian is the most successful serial killer in history
Harold Shipman probably has a higher body count, but they didn’t make an HBO special gushing about what a swell, compassionate guy he was, did they? I don’t fucking believe they made a sympathetic Kevorkian biopic. Yeah. It won a Golden Globe last night.
Look, I’m not set against euthanasia. That’s a national conversation we’ll have to have some time. It has absolutely nothing to do with that sick fuck Jack Kevorkian.
In 1956, when he was still just a resident, he picked up the “Dr Death” moniker. He asked to be notified when any patient was close to death so he could stare into their eyes while they died. Sometimes he took pictures. He said he was searching for a way to pinpoint the exact moment of death.
What is the medical need to know the exact moment of death? There isn’t one. Who knows how many friendless people he robbed of dignity in their last moments of life.
He didn’t start in the assisted suicide biz. What he really wanted was permission to vivisect death row inmates. I’ve never read exactly how he thought medicine could be advanced by killing people under general anesthesia. I get the impression he just thinks it would be kinda neat to paddle around in people’s innards until they die.
When permission wasn’t forthcoming, 1987 he advertised himself in Detroit papers as a physician consultant for “death counseling.” By 1991, he’d lost his medical license.
He named his death machines Thanitron and Mercitron. He killed 130 people between 1990 and 1998 and was acquitted of murder five times. When authorities gave up prosecuting him, he forced one more arrest — he taped himself administering a fatal shot and walked the tape over to his friend Mike Wallace, who aired it nationally on 60 Minutes. He videotaped all his killings, presumably to enjoy again and again. He spent eight years and a bit behind bars.
Equal parts ghoul and attention whore, then.
Oh – about three quarters half [70 out of 130] of his victims weren’t terminally ill, just depressed and in pain. Five of them weren’t sick at all, their autopsies showed. He hadn’t bothered to find out; medicine wasn’t part of his deal.
He ripped out the kidneys of one of his assisted suicide victims and offered them at a press conference, “first come first served.” The “surgery” was so crude that the Oakland County Medical Examiner called it out of a “slaughterhouse” and a “bizarre mutilation.”
Say, have you seen his paintings? One of the pigments is his own blood. Isn’t that nice? And the captions show an absolute Loughnerian grasp of the English language.
So, basically, somebody who should have spent the last thirty years (at least) in a hospital for the criminally insane. A perfect hero for Hollywood. They called the film You Don’t Know Jack.
Hilarious.
January 17, 2011 — 7:22 pm
Comments: 21
Gumby and Clokey
How did I miss this? Art Clokey died a year ago.
Yeah, you know — the man who gave us Gumby and Pokey. Among other psychedelic horrors.
After undergraduate work in geology and a stint in WWII, Clokey studied film under surreal filmmaker and master of the montage Slavko Vorkapich.
Cokey’s USC graduate project was a short clay animation called Gumbasia — a play on Fantasia. Watch it; it’s worth three minutes of your time.
The president of the Motion Pictures Producers Association saw Gumbasia and funded Clokey’s next project, which turned out to be Gumby.
Oh, and lest we forget, Art and his wife Gloria created the doll-based animations Davey and Goliath (admit it, the words, “oh, Davey” just went through your head in Goliath’s goofy-ass voice). Yeah. That’s weird, because Clokey was a Buddhist or some shit, and D&G was a product of the Evangelical Lutheran Church.
I read that Davey appeared in a late Gumby cartoon acting like a dick, but I can’t find a copy of it online.
Gumby’s wonk-head was inspired by this picture of Clokey’s dad, who died in a car accident when Art was nine. As tributes go, that’s a weirdy.
I’m fascinated by Clokey’s work in particular and clay animation in general (the term “claymation” was trademarked by Will Vinton in 1978), mostly because it skeeves the hell out of me. In 1975, I sat through the Fantastic Animation Festival, like, seven times, mostly to see the short Closed Mondays over and over.
I tried my hand at stop-motion animation in my teens, but all I had available was a video camera. That’s no good at all — you get a little jump and snow whenever the heads start and stop, which is every frame. I soon gave up, so you’re spared that horror.
Anyhow, RIP Art Clokey. Here are some links:
The intro to Gumby Dharma, a documentary about Art Clokey. Mandala, another Clokey film for adults (really, really stoned ones). Clokey’s animated credits for Doctor Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965). A print interview of Art and Gloria from Omni. Part one of a six-part interview with Clokey. And finally, Marv Newland’s famous 1967 student animation Bambi Meets Godzilla — just because.
January 14, 2011 — 9:37 pm
Comments: 30
Flap harder, Hillary! You’ll make it!
A brief moment of amusement. Oh, c’mon — you didn’t expect me to let this one go. Me?
I went to the Rhode Island School of Design, which is built on the side of a steep hill. One morning on my way to class, I hit a rain-slicked manhole cover and went down.
I didn’t so much fall as come in for a landing. My left foot went out from under me, my drawings went airborne and I instinctively attempted the save — ran sideways for about twenty feet, gradually lower and lower, until I slid full length into Angell Street.
First class of the day, so hundreds and hundreds of my peers looked on. I had people coming up to me for weeks afterwards.
There. My moment of solidarity with Hillary Clinton is at an end.
January 13, 2011 — 7:27 pm
Comments: 16