Until then, here’s something I did with Twitter’s new whale-free Image of FAIL:

And if any of you newer readers (all 7 of you) missed my previous graphic work, “Twitteral Difficulties”…

Thanks for reading this. I will now return to trying to avoid taking anything seriously. I mean, what’s with the name “Tea Fire”? Did it start when somebody dropped a lit cigarette into a Lipton box? Okay, there’s a “Tea House” near where it started… yeah, a “Tea House” just outside Santa Barbara… explains the first crew of firemen acting like Bill & Ted. As for Cagle’s archive of political toons, I’m surprised some of them didn’t spontaneously combust long ago. Thanks, I’m here all weak.

(REVISED) This version includes the controversialracist “Abbos” verse… I mean, gee whiz, this “Australian stockman” had more respect for his pet animals than for the indigenous aborigines working for him. But then, he also had them “tan me hide when I’m dead, Fred” so civilized social norms were obviously not his thing.

And there was another version on YouTube which illustrated the “tanned his hide when he died, Clyde” verse in a most disturbing manner. No link. I’m not going to share ALL my pain on the blog.

And the “previously” link at the bottom was something I’d sadly missed. Plush Toys for Grown-Ups. Or at least those, like me, who are chronologically grown-up. I’ve been meaning to get a Monty Python Killer Bunny for a long time, and now I’ve added Weebl Badgers and Viking Kittens to my wish list. (But what I really NEED is a couple of fully-functional Farscape Leviathan Diagnostic Repair Drones. The Roomba is just not enough.)

I grew up in the Hot Summered L.A. suburb known as The Valley in a house that had neither a pool nor Air Conditioning. What we had was an Evaporative Cooler on the roof, pumping air through continuously flowing streams of water to drop the temperature of the air to a central location of the house. It worked OK, mostly because The Valley usually had a very dry heat and the cooler’s side effect is (logically) increasing the humidity. In places that had humid heat, this device would probably make living conditions inside the house even worse.

Well, that roof-top box had to have filters on all areas of air input, and those filters had to be replaced periodically, and my father was always enthusiastic about letting The Kid (me, only child) help him with his home-based chores (okay, forcing). So I got to get up on the roof, holding large sheets of meshy filter stuff while he unscrewed parts off the cooler to fit them on. I got a great view of the neighborhood, including the houses that did have pools, and over the large embankment at the end of the block behind which was Highway 101, known in that part of town as the Ventura Freeway. Oddly, right now, 180 miles away from that location, I’m a little closer to Highway 101 and can see it from my front porch. But I digress. Again.

Every time I got up on the roof, I had fun (more fun than my dad, I’m sure), although I was always afraid of falling, and never considered the possibility of flying. That’s because I never owned a Superman cape. What my parents were OK in me having was the James Bond 007 Attaché Case (Thanks to the non-blog website of Wes Clark, not the former general but a dude about my age who grew up a few miles away from me in Burbank).

Of course this Attaché was fully weaponized, not only holding a toy handgun with extra parts to convert it into a “sniper’s rifle”, but the Case itself fired plastic bullets and concealed an easily accessible plastic knife. But, as if to foreshadow my future as a briefcase-carrying office dork, I was just as interested in the other accessories, including a decoder gadget, a passport printed with all the places Bond had been as of the last movie, and James Bond’s business cards, showing both his “cover job” with, of course, an Import/Export company and the 007-gun logo. Yeah, real great cover job, Q.

Everything a double-ought secret agent on the go could ever need in one package. Although I thought it needed a place to put a Thermos.

For more Penicillin-Resistant Nostalgia, check out these scans of a 1966 J.C. Penney Christmas Catalog. If you were a kid then, the toy section (starting here) will delight you, and if you weren’t, you’ll get some serious insight as to why people my age are so damn weird.

Currently devoting my entire intellectual capacity to organizing my Real Life Environment, 2 computer hard drives (WendellCentral and the Slaptop) and the backends of this site and one you shouldn’t be looking at yet (ooohhh… teaser). This may affect the way you see this site (but I will be annoyingconsulting with you readers on most of the site issues). So most of my usually only-kinda-funny content will be replaced by even-less-funny administrivia. Apologies in advance.

First of all, RSS readers? Do you love FeedBurner? I’m ambivalent about the value of its service to me, the webster (that’s my term for a small webmaster), but if it’s good for the audience, I won’t change a thing. If you’re “meh”, “blah” or even “bah”, I may bring the feed back to an internal thing for me to more directly control. It’ll be quite a battle for supremacy between the Lazy Bum in me and the Control Freak. Any words from you in my half-vast audience would be useful.

Here come the Batman wannabes right after them.

I don’t know if those stories were even true in the first place, but that story about lemmings committing mass suicide? It’s a myth. But Climate Change is killing them off anyway.

Here in Southern California, there was an outbreak of Stereo stores in the ’70s vying for the young, hip and hopefully-stoned-enough-to-buy-anything consumer. And they were primarily using radio to reach their potential victimscustomers. University Stereo kept the psychedelic ’60s alive well past their expiration date, with spaced-out effects thrown together by a DJ who called himself Shadoe Stevens. Cal Stereo had the motormouth Tom Campbell putting 90 seconds of ad copy in a 60 second spot. And Pacific Stereo took the high road with commercials that could’ve been for any retail operation.

In 1977, I was straight out of college radio and working at KGIL In The Valley (Suburban L.A.) as Assistant/PhoneMonkey/ThirdSidekick to the forgotten radio legend Sweet Dick Whittington (and yes, for the thousandth time, we DID call him Sweet Dick in the ’60s and ’70s, except me, emphasizing my role as Underling by calling him “Mister Sweetdick”). I’d had fun writing a parody of Tom Campbell’s manic commercials as “Tom Krell for Krell Stereo” but never got it to sound right (or come under a minute) at the college radio studio. At KGIL, I was answering the phones in Production Booth #2, which was equipped with a big reel-to-reel tape recorder with a homebrew variable speed gizmo. I tried doing Tom Krell at a higher speed and it was funny. In future listenings, I realized I had the voice all wrong, but KGIL was demographically aiming for the Over 30s and would never have gotten any business from Cal Stereo, so Sweet Dick said “let’s run this bit anyway… can you do a few more?” He used them to solve a problem semi-unique to him. He was very popular among advertisers who wanted him to do live ad-lib spots (probably because he always went well over the time paid for, but the commercials were often as funny as anything else he did.

But sometimes he was given so many live commercials to do, he had to do two back-to-back, and he found doing the segues painful. So he’d occasionally slip a fake commercial from Tom Krell for Krell Stereo between the real commercials. I felt honored. Another DJ at the station who did serious voiceover work on the side (including, if I remember correctly, as one of several voices for Pacific Stereo) played my Krell commercials for some influencial people, but I didn’t get my big break. Probably because I got the voice all wrong. I was never comfortable with my ‘radio voice’ until years after I left the radio biz. But I digress. Big time.

Shadoe Stevens broke up with University Stereo (which went under a frighteningly short time later) and started doing radio ads for Federated Electronics, aka the Federated Group. Rather than going psychedelic, he sold them on a Tom Campbell/Cal Stereo parody himself (and HE had the voice for it… you do know he replaced Casey Kasem on American Top 40 and is now the announcer for Craig Ferguson’s Late Late Show, don’t you?). He called himself Fred Rated. From there he evolved into higher levels of general wackiness. Meanwhile, Pacific Stereo had begun advertising on television, just as uninterestingly as it did on radio. After a failed campaign with a production company with TV experience, Federated let Shadoe bring Fred Rated to the boob tube. The rest is L.A. television history (although some still insist it was all an acid flashback).

But wait… there’s more…

And more, and more, and more, and more, and more, and more, and more, and more? This orion10590291995 dude is semi-obsessed. There are worse things to be obsessed with…

And then there was the radio pitch man for Waterbed Warehouse who invented the word “humongous” to describe the big building the store was in. But I digress. All night long.

Making fun of Team Mascots is kind of low-hanging fruit among writers of semi-humor, so I’ll keep to the most current of observations.

The Bulls are no longer the Honorary Team of Wall Street, replaced by the Bears, oddly both in Chicago.

After the recent election’s political realignment in Ohio, do the Cincinnati Reds have to go Blue? And considering how close the election was in Missouri, the St. Louis NHL team the Blues really should be renamed the Purples. As for the Blue Jays, they totally missed out, being in Canada and all.

There are, no doubt, dozens of small schools in America reconsidering naming their sports teams the Mavericks…

And I for one am especially relieved that the Tampa Bay Rays lost the World Series. It did quiet down many of the Fundamentalist Fans claiming that they went from “worst to first” when they dropped “Devil” from the team name. I would’ve enjoyed a Devil Rays vs. Angels league championship.

I did graduate from a college whose teams were designated the Lions,

which back when I attended, used a logo designed by an alumnus who was also a Disney animator. THAT logo was cute; way too cute for competitive athletics. And it took some deep digging into the Wayback Machine to find any images of it, having been well wiped from the memory of the Internet.

There remain traces of his essence in the school’s physical mascot, named Ignatius (after Ignatius Loyola) or Iggy for short…

But I think you can guess what my all time favorite mascot is:

*Moms Who Don’t Wanna Know You’d Like to FScarborough Them

Lore’s latest Rant Lite is from his pre-dating-everything-on-the-internet-except-Al-Gore-Porn “Capsule Reviews” series, about Logic Puzzles, and my last minor doubt about the awesomeness of his videos, even when dealing with something as trivial as, well, Logic Puzzles, disappeared completely at 1:59 into the three-minute production, where, instead of loudly expressing his disapproval like every other opinionated ass-hat on the Web, he pauses to give a severely disapproving look. If looks could kill, he’d have the inside track for the lead in “Saw 13: We’re Running Out Of Things To Kill People With”.

Whoa. And Woah. When you can get your message and a good chuckle across without saying anything, you have truly mastered the art of video commentary and are ready to get in line at the back door of “60 Minutes” to wait until Andy Rooney keels over.

But I need to address the last part of his video where he deals with the scourge upon the logical landscape that is Sudoku. And while he does correctly define the proliferation of Sudoku books as “Paper Kudzu”, he still “looks kindly” upon it and gives it a B+. Obviously, he has not been afflicted, as I have, with a severe, disabling Sudoku addiction that was harder to beat than the five-star 16-by-16 puzzle in the Sunday Tribune.

Yes, my name is Wendell, and I am a recovering Sudokulic. And I did indeed try to solve the Sunday Tribune 16-by-16 puzzles every week (thinking, how hard can it be, I know hex!) only to be reduced to a drooling wreck who never saw the light of day on Sundays, never completing one successfully even those of supposedly two-star difficulty. I’m not proud of that.

I had to cut off my newspaper subscription entirely to get away from the Sudoku. I was buying Sudoku books, ranging from the 99-cent Dell SUPER SUDOKU publications to 400-page collections authorized by Puzzlemaster Will Shortz, who should have been above this kind of thing himself. I was playing Sudoku on-line… at news media sites, game sites, sites that had no reason to feature a Sudoku game but did… did you know the US Mint had a Flash Sudoku game on its site using nine different coin denominations instead of numbers*?

Yes, I have played the Mutant Sudoku Variations, some even more random than the “Farmer’s Pen” variation that Lore used as an ‘it could be worse’ example in his video:

Cows, chickens, wolves, cabbages, rutabegas, portable TVs, Trader Joe’s frozen Pad Thai dinners, human cadavers and HOPE. Seriously, that is not the worst possible combination I have seen AND PLAYED.

I practiced every anti-social Sudoku-based behavior featured in the not-very-viral “Sudoku Song” video of 2006, except one.

No, I have never worn a light blue suit four sizes too big.

I thought I would never beat the Sudoku monster, either the unsolvable five-star puzzles or my addiction to them, but then I saw something in, of all places, the xkcd webcomic.

I realized that Sudo, the programmer’s term for a command that overrides everything, is part of the word Sudoku. And then I realized that it wasn’t really my fault. I had no control over the Sudoku because it was a Sudo Ku. Once I realized that I carried no responsibility for my Sudoku addiction, it was suddenly easy to beat, as if I had switched over from a Unix-based system to Microsoft Windows. Once I accepted Bill Gates as my Personal Savior… but that’s a story for another time. It’s like a 12-Step Program but you only have to go up to 9. Except on Sunday, when it’s 16.

I’ve been Sudoku-free for over seven months now, except for that incident last week when I was waiting for my car to have its brakes done and there was a newspaper in the waiting room, but I paid my price for that; when the bill for the brakes came, it had all nine digits from 1 to 9 unrepeated.

I did develop a secondary addiction to the xkcd webcomic, but the “Secretary of the Internet” series a couple weeks ago made that easy to kick.

*Removed from the US Mint site after I quit Sudokuing, possibly because I had singlehandedly provided half the traffic to the feature.