A Possible Explanation For Why I'm Like This

All of my favorite comedy acts end up doing something like this sooner or later:

And, better yet, those are usually my favorites. (Also see Kids in the Hall and "We work in silence. We shovel fuel.")

This particular piece of rural lunacy is from Mystery Science Theater 3000, a '90s puppet-show that made fun of bad movies.

For My Conservative Readers

I seem to have drifted leftward politically over the last few years, and that may have left some of my old friends wondering whether my brain has been ruined by decades living in the toxic swamps of Jersey. (Which is a fair question....)

In the interests of fairness, then, I have to link to the 26 Ways Obama Has Completely Ruined the Country. I hope this will return the scale to something near balance.

It's Writing, Captain, But Not As We Know It

The annual running of the bad prose has come again, with the winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest announced today. (Yes, that page is apparently official, even though it looks like something that crawled out of 1996, and not before dying, either.)

In honor of the "dark and stormy night" feller, the judges of the Bulwer-Lytton contest every year choose the most lousy opening sentence they can from among a myriad entrants. This year's winner was:

As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting.

And it was extruded by one Cathy Bryant of Manchester, England.

Since there are always more bad sentences, there are also category winners. Those of genre interest are:

• Fantasy: "The brazen walls of the ancient city of Khoresand, situated where the mighty desert of Sind meets the endless Hyrkanean steppe, are guarded by day by the four valiant knights Sir Malin the Mighty, Sir Welkin the Wake, Sir Darien the Doughty, and Sir Yrien the Yare, all clad in armor of beaten gold, and at night the walls are guarded by Sir Arden the Ardent, Sir Fier the Fearless, Sir Cyril the Courageous, and Sir Damien the Dauntless, all clad in armor of burnished argent, but nothing much ever happens." from David Lippmann of Austin, TX 
• Science Fiction: "As I gardened, gazing towards the autumnal sky, I longed to run my finger through the trail of mucus left by a single speckled slug – innocuously thrusting past my rhododendrons – and in feeling that warm slime, be swept back to planet Alderon, back into the tentacles of the alien who loved me." from Mary E. Patrick of Lake City, SC 

(via Publishers Weekly)

Meta, Meta, Meta

I've been trying to make up something amusing to write about John Scalzi's post, yesterday, whose title proclaimed that he can handle bad reviews. (Backstory: I posted a mixed review of Redshirts here a few weeks back, which may have been one of the things that triggered Scalzi's "maybe you shouldn't read my books if you don't like them" post. And I hasten to repeat that I didn't consider that a "bad review" or that I dislike reading Scalzi's books.)

But it kept coming out too snarky, as if I was calling out Scalzi or insulting him. And that's not the case: I agree with his sentiments in both of those linked posts, even as I demur on the actual claim of my not-liking-his books. (Perhaps I don't like them sufficiently, but that's the way I am on most things: tepidly critical.)

So, instead, I'll just note that I attempted to make a joke, decided that I couldn't do it the way I wanted, and point in the direction of the joke that I didn't make. For that failure, I'm going to blame the fact that I spent the whole day constructing a series of big spreadsheets (pretty much out of my own head) for a Big Meeting tomorrow, and that my brain is tired. Perhaps I will be amusing tomorrow.