Do NOT listen to these people! Only listen to me!

Okay, you can listen to some of what the writer of this article is saying, but by all means skip #3, #6, #7 and #9!

The chicken broth/ water idea has been floating around for years, but it's false. The problem is, animal fat & protein releases chemicals in your brain that make you feel good. This is as technical as I'ma gonna get! Without the fat, people tend to eat more looking for the mild emotional high they would get from eating the fat. And besides, even if you don't eat more, do you really want to go through life not eating the skin off the turkey? Do you really want to avoid having butter and sour cream in your masheded patoes? Don't you want to cut loose for just one day of the year? If you don't scoff cheeseburgers every other day, it shouldn't be a big deal.

However, I will agree with some of this. Don't skip breakfast, do start with some soup, have some orange juice instead of gin, and go for a walk after dinner. #8 sounds like sort of a neat idea, but I'm not sure it will replace real pie. I'm not even going to address the tablespoon to serve thing because it's fucktarded.

What shocks me is that they don't mention the most important thing! Here is it, the thing you should remember for Thanksgiving...

Eat with people you like to talk to.

Ta-Da! That's a number one hit right there. When you talk, you eat more slowly and you get to feeling full with less food. Granted, this may mean skipping your relatives, but you know, fuck 'em. Grandma has been a pain in the ass these last three years and Aunt Mertle was a stinking rotten bitch when she was a kid too. Just ask your dad. No one has EVER liked Aunt Mertle. Go ahead, call your friends and see if they want to share in the turkey instead.

Also, fuck Aunt Mertle. Rotten, fucking, judgmental bitch.

Return of Jack Collier (Chapter Twenty-Two)

The Return of Jack Collier

A Jack Collier Story

By Brett N. Lashuay

 

 

Last week’s entry can be found here. 

 

Chapter Twenty-Two: Talking to Daddy

 

            As I approached the Piper residence, I couldn’t help but think about how things had been the last time I’d driven up this path. It wasn’t so much being shot by the daughter that bothered me, as it was being shot at by the father. If Jill had been snatched again, then she couldn’t shoot me here anyway. With Peter Piper here though, he might give it a go.

 

            He didn’t look like he was getting ready to have a repeat of the night he and Cole King tried to gun me down in his living room though. He looked panicked and scared out of his wits as he came out of the house. He was wearing a silk robe over his pajamas, the pockets bulging with papers, which made me wonder how long this had been going on before he decided to call me. I didn’t worry about that too much because I was quickly concerned with trying to decipher his speech. I’ll break the words up, because if I wrote them like he said them it would be one single word shot out like a torrent.

 

            “They took my little girl again. They stole her from her school grounds on the last day of school. They’ve taken her away again and they’re going to harm her. They took her like they took her mother form me.”

 

            “Slow down!” I said holding my hand up in front of him. “Who has done what?”

 

            “They’ve taken my little girl away from me,” he said as we stood on the porch. “They snatched her off the school grounds.”

 

            “Where?” I asked.

 

            “In California where she was going to school.”

 

            “Okay, now second question, who?”

 

            “They,” he looked around him nervously and grabbed at his robe. “We shouldn’t talk here, they may be listening, let’s walk.”

 

            Almost running, he left the porch and started down the path that I’d taken three years ago when I was chasing Cole after he ran from the house. We walked in silence for some time, walking along the path that I’d taken to chase after the man I’d watched shoot himself just a few days ago. I could have asked him why we were pursuing the path of a man I’d caught up with, but no one actually knew that part except me.

 

            We walked for a half hour in silence, I noticed that the field where Cole rolled his SUV had grown up to the point where you could only tell where the car had crashed if you knew the spot and were looking for it. This path led to the hill where Jill had become very confused about things and put a few rounds in me. As Piper started to walk up the hill I almost wanted to grab his arm and demand that we had walked far enough. After all, I wasn’t too happy about all of this to begin with, but walking to the exact spot would be too poetic if he’d decided to finish the job his daughter had started.

 

            I decided though, that Tracey wouldn’t approve. He’d say I needed to climb the hill and look at the spot where I fell. He’d also say that I needed to get that big rock I hit my head on and take it home. It’s a good thing I only followed his advice to a point and then decided things for myself.  I couldn’t tell which rock it was, but it must have been a big one and it would have looked weird if I’d gone looking for it.

 

            “They’ve taken her,” he said as he started up the hill.

 

            “Who?” I asked. “I mean they can be quite a large group.”

 

            “The people who took her last time,” he whimpered as he walked.

 

            “No,” I corrected him. “Cole King is dead.”

 

            “Cole King was just the individual they had do the taking,” he told me. “They told him he could take her from me, and now they’ve done it again.”

 

            “Who took her then?” I asked.

 

            “The Council.”

 

            “Council?” I asked.

 

            “The Council of the Church.”

 

            “Act, if you will, like I spent two years in a coma and then another year recuperating,” I instructed. “Then you might be able to tell me what the hell we’re talking about.”

 

            “The Church of Thinkonomics,” he said, as if I were a simpleton who should have known all this. “The Council took my daughter away for the second time.”

 

            “Took her away?” I asked.

 

            “Kidnapped, stole, confiscated, it’s all the same to them. They took her,” he said.

 

            The hill was pretty much as I remembered it. The tree was a bit older, but not changed much. The spot where I fell looked the same, the place where Jill knelt down and begged me to take her away was still there, it might have all happened yesterday. I didn’t feel any particular spot on my body ache from the proximity, but I was aware of the spots where bullets had torn into me.

 

            “And they did it the first time you say?” I asked him.

 

            “That’s right,” he nodded. “They told Cole he could have her, even though he wasn’t supposed to take her yet. He was supposed to wait until she was sixteen to take possession.”

 

            “Take possession?” I repeated the phrase, which has always has a connotation of property to me.

 

            “It’s in the Church law,” he snarled. “You can’t take a man’s child as your own until they’re sixteen. Then you have to wait until they’re the age of consent to have sex with them,” he spat the words out with anger and indignation. “But he broke the rules! He had her when she was still too young. He took her when she should have been my precious flower.”

 

            “It would have been okay to steal her away and lock her up in a room and rape her after she was sixteen?” I asked.

 

            “It would have been according to the Church’s laws,” he said.

 

            “Could we call this group something other than the church?” I asked. “It’s just calling them a church sets up a confusing mental name thing with me. I know a guy named Church and you keep making me think of him.”

 

            “I suppose,” he shrugged. “Call them the Council or we could call them the Thinkonomics people.”

 

            “Council works for me,” I told him and then asked, “So how does it work that they’re allowed to take your daughter and make her his property?”

 

            “If you want position you have to pay up,” he shrugged. “I thought I wanted position, so I gave them three million dollars. They tried to take controlling stock in the company, but the board of directors stopped them. They temporarily seized the stock from me, so I couldn’t sign it over. So I signed over my wife and our child instead.”

 

            “You what?” I asked.

 

            “She was so beautiful,” he continued. “They gave Carol to some Swiss businessman who got the EU to recognize Thinkonomics as a church instead of a cult. Just came and told her she was going and took her away. I never saw her after that but Jill was able to visit her a few times. They just came and took her.”

 

            “What did she have to say about that?”

 

            “It doesn’t matter,” Piper snapped. “Women do what we tell them.”

 

            “Right,” I said and nodded sagely. If I’d been alone I would have kicked my self for not bringing a gun to shoot him with.

 

            “Carol did what she was told,” he assured me, “After they broke her of course.”

 

            I did not like the sound of that.

 

            “Broke her?” I asked.

 

            “That’s what they’re going to do to Jill in a few days,” he said. “They call it the Rite of Kahn Singh, but it’s just breaking her.”

 

            “You want to explain?” I asked.

 

            “They’ll put her in a white room, make her dress in white, leave her for a few days on water and vegetables. That’s to detoxify her. Then they rape her. Then they beat her, starve her, rape her again. Gang rapes are a large part of it. Makes her indifferent to whatever man or men she’s assigned to. After a while the subject comes to understand her role and even accepts it. If you don’t completely ruin her, she’ll even come to enjoy it. You’re a man of the world, you know how these things are done.”

 

            I’m going to admit to you that I was just too flat out astonished to argue him on that final point. I may have read some of those books Debbie keeps around for when she’s feeling a bit frisky over the years, but I hadn’t seen any of them as how to guides. There seemed to me to be a line where fantasy was supposed to end, consensuality being a big wide part of that line. I knew what he was describing though, I had read about it. It sort of made me a little ill that in a way, yes, I did know how these things were done.

 

            “And they’re doing that to Jill now?” I asked.

 

            “They’ll wait,” he said. “They’ll wait until June twentieth.”

 

            “Why?”

 

            “She’ll be eighteen on the twentieth,” he said. “They’ll follow the rules, they will wait until midnight and then they’ll either rape her into compliance or to death. They claim I am still a member of the Council and I should come to California to help in the Rite.”

 

            “How delightful of them,” I said. “You know where they’ll be then?”

 

            “I know some of the houses they own,” he said. “I can give you some addresses.”

 

            “Where?” I asked. “In California?”

 

            “That’s right,” he nodded. “If you can bring her back, bring her back safe, I would give anything.”

 

            “Well, we’ll talk about payment later.”

 

            “I would give half my kingdom,” he announced. “I’ll pay you half of everything I own!”

 

            “Okay,” I told him, waving a hand for him to calm down. “Just stay cool.”

 

            “I’ve written it out here,” he pulled a paper from his pocket and handed it to me. “You can have half of everything, if you just bring back my daughter.”

 

            I looked at the paper, which outlined that half of his company, land and assets would go to me if I rescued his daughter from harm. That’s the wording he used, rescue his daughter from harm. There was then a quick list of assets for me to have half of along with their value and what I would be getting if I could return said daughter. While I was glancing over that he reached into his left hand pocket, the one that was really bulging and pulled out a largish manila envelope.

 

            “These are bearer bonds,” he said. “Everything you’d want is attached. They should be worth about two million dollars. I think it should fund your operations.”

 

            “Yeah,” I said taking the envelope, looking at it and then him. “That’s probably a good retainer.”

 

            “You’ll find her, won’t you Mister Collier?”

 

            “Yeah,” I said looking in the envelope at the bonds. “I’ll find her. What are you going to do?”

 

            “I don’t know,” he shook his head.

 

            “You think they may come here and try to force you to go there?” I asked, and his face was a sudden mask of shock.

 

            “They…” I could see the idea had only just exploded in his mind.

 

            “I’ll send some people up here to take care of you,” I said, and considering the look on his face I added “Professionals, guys who know what they’re doing.”

 

            “You think they might?” he started, but faltered. “They might force me?”

 

            “Not if I get some people here,” I said and when I looked down the hill I saw a large chunk of granite that looked like it would get in the way if I rolled down the hill from here. I looked at the tree, the place where Piper stood and then at the ground again. I was standing in the same spot, so that probably was the rock.

 

            “Can you get some guys here soon?” he asked.

 

            “Yeah,” I said glancing down at the rock again. “Yeah, I’ll get some guys sent up right away.”

 

            “Are you alright?” he asked.

 

            “This is where it happened,” I said looking at him and letting the weight of my stare fall on him.

 

            “Oh dear lord,” He put his hand up to his mouth and gasped. “I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t…”

 

            “Forget it,” I said. “I’ve got to go to my office and get some guys arranged. I need you to get some contracts together, this letter is nice but I need something more concrete than this. I’ll have to get people started on the paperwork while I go find your daughter.”

 

            “When will your men arrive?”

 

            “They will be here as soon as I can get them,” I said.  

 

            “How will I know it’s your men?” It was a fair question, but he was getting on my nerves.

 

            “When they arrive they will give you a phrase.”

 

            “What?” he asked. “Should I write it down?”

 

            “No, it’ll be easy to remember. Goodness how delicious, eating goober peas.” I said, because it was the first thing I could think of.

 

            “Pardon?” he blinked.

 

            “Goodness how delicious, eating goober peas,” I repeated. “It’s a Civil War era song. If the guys who get here don’t mention goober peas, start shooting and then run.”

 

            “It probably won’t matter,” he tried to smile.

 

            “Yeah,” I smiled back. “If they’re not from me they’ll probably just shoot you on sight anyway.”

 

            I started down the hill after that crack, I had a lot of work to do.

 

Sad really

Syd just noted that Charlie Brown is the most bullied kid in all of animation. His specials are just a series of everyone telling him he sucks. He has one friend, Linus, who either goes with the flow or sometimes tries to talk Charlie down. And yet, the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving is called a classic, rather than a series of events that led to another childhood suicide.

Bullies suck, cartoons that implicitly allow bullying suck harder.

Open Letter

Dear Ronan Keating and Maire Brennan,

If you're going to cover something like Fairytale Of New York, you should at least give it a tenth of the feeling of the original. The song is about two people eating away at each other, hating one another and yet needing each other because they can't bear to be alone. See, no one wants to hear people being melodic and showing off their lovely voices with this tune. This is one of the few songs where you ruin it if you sing it beautifully. This is, if anything can be, the one song that SHOULD be sung by Shane MacGowan. I mean, Kirsty MacColl was a lovely singer, and yet she matched her style to MacGowan's for this song.

Original


Lame Cover



YOU FAIL!!!!!


Also, the line is: You scumbag you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot. and not You scumbag you maggot, you're cheap and you're haggard. I mean really. Haggard? Are these two over educated liberal arts majors? Who the fuck puts haggard in place of faggot? Who ever says haggard in any regard? Yes, faggot is an offensive term, but he just got done calling her an old slut on junk for crying out loud. Quite frankly I find trying to make this song PC far more offensive than the line itself ever could be.

Reason #349 why you want to date a geek (Possibly)

For a few years, I’ve had this idea floating around in my head. I think geek men, fall for girls in a much more… there is no other way to say this, feminine way than other men do. I’ve been watching geek guys for years and I definitely see a correlation in how they dig a celebrity chick and how I dig a celebrity chick.


Your geek male loooves that chick from The Guild. Hang on a second while I go look up her name. Felicia Day. Now, I don’t find her ugly or anything, I think she’s very cute. However, I know for a fact that I don’t get anywhere near as excited about her as some of the guys who will no doubt read this get. Guys who watched Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog are far more likely to pick Ms. Day over say... Scarlett Johansson. A matter of taste you say? No, I say it isn’t. It’s a matter of differential brains. According to this Cracked Article* women are far more situational about what man they find attractive. I dig Scarlett because she has a kicking bod, but the geek lad digs Felicia because she’s a geeky sort of girl. I’m pretty sure that neither girl would be kicked out of either of our beds on a wet Saturday night, but I’m pretty sure I know which would be chosen by who first.
*Yeah! That's right! I'm using a Cracked article for back-up. Beat that for useless internet sources!

We actually know that women are more situational about what men they find attractive. If a man is good with kids, loves soft furry animals, does the dishes and can perform foreplay for up to seven weeks, he’s going to be picked over a guy who kicks children and neglects puppies while letting the dishes sit in the sink for a week. There have been studies that prove women are more likely to dig a guy who does the dishes while holding a baby, but I won’t cite any because fuck accuracy and proof.

Now, your basic geek guy is into chicks who sort of conform to their interests. While a non-geek will hit on anything with a pulse (And between 15-21, a pulse is sort of optional really) the geeky guy is far more likely to restrict himself to the cute girl in the library with the horn rims and the “Librarians do it quietly” t-shirt. Again, I’m going on my own observation here, I have no hard data. I’m only using the evidence of what celebrities I’ve seen geeks crush on.

Geek guys tend to crush on girls who have been in Sci-Fi or Fantasy shows. Quite often, if taken objectively, they will overlook a slight lack of hotness* if the woman in question was in a show they really like. I have seen guys declare love for women I wouldn’t give a second look to on TV and really would never even think of looking up photos of them online. However, because of the connection to the show, they dig the girl even more. I’ve even caught one or two expressing that they like the girl because of how she acts on the show. Conversely I’ve heard some women say they don’t like a perfectly good looking guy because he was a jerk in something they saw. As an example, I’ve been told some women don’t think… what’s his name, the guy who was the captain on Firefly… you know… the one who looks like he suffered some Casino style vice incident in his youth. Whatever, because he played Captain… Vegetable (?) in Dr. Horrible, these women don’t like him. They can’t separate the douche he played in that with the actor. Similarly, geeky guys are into the nice girl in movies and will pant after the actress who played the nice girl. If they decide they like bad girls, they’ll pant after the villainous chick. Where as I look at them and if they’re both hot I wonder why being between both girls doesn’t occur to them.
*I’m talking they’ll mark a girl as a 10 when by all objective measures she’s only an 8.5 at best. I’m not seriously suggesting they’re upgrading a 2 to 10 status.†
†Oh don’t give me that fucking look! We all do it, you know we do it. Don’t act surprised just because I refuse to pretend like we’re above this.

I have no reason, or conclusion on this, I’ve just been finding it interesting. Try it some time. Show a guy a nude photo of Betty White and then one of that chick who was in Battle Sun Galactic… or whatever it’s called. See if they don’t pick the chick who was a robot, or did they turn out to be angels? Is it a spoiler if I don’t really know anything about the show besides the fact that the end ruined the whole thing? Hell, I could be talking about Lost if I were going to use that criterion.

My point is that geek guys react to women in a more interesting and less shallow way than other men. Yeah, that’s it.

Girls!

It's okay to like Star Wars!
It's okay to like Highlander!
It's okay to like Transformers!
It's okay to like Lord of the Rings!
It's okay to like Westerns!
It's okay to like Kung-Fu!
It's okay to like G.I. Joe!
It's okay to like Star Wars!

Anybody who says it's not?
Fuck them!
Fuck them sideways!
Fuck them with that strap on from Seven!

If you think girls shouldn't like Star Wars, then fuck you!

I would like to file this under "Some motherfuckers are always trying to skate uphill."


Addendum: Boys!
It's okay to like easy bake ovens, Care Bears, Romantic Comedies, wearing pretty shoes and Dr. Who.
Again, if some says it ain't, cut the bitch* and tell them to fuck off.


*Bitch in this case refers to whatever motherfucker tells you you shouldn't like Care Bears, not to gender. Men can be as a big a bunch of bitches as any woman, and when fighting for equality, all that matters is that you keep your pimp hand strong.

Red Cliff

So we watched the two halves of Red Cliff this week. We didn’t watch the cut down version that’s on Netflix streaming, we went for the original 2 movie cut.

It’s a good movie, but with limited appeal.

The actions was very good, the characters were well fleshed and individual, the story (such as it was) went along at a fairly even pace, and the actors all did a good job being the sort of people they were expected to be. As I understand it, this story is a bit like the Arthurian collection of knights in that they’ve got the wise one and the funny one and the nice one… so on.

Here are the problems:
1. Chinese people don’t all look the same to me, but their names do. I ended up giving some of the character’s nicknames or referring to them by the actor who played them. That wasn’t a big problem and didn’t distract me because, as I said, my issue was purely with the fact that Asian names all run together for me very quickly.

2. I don’t know Three Kingdoms history. I know a pretty good amount of China’s cinematic history, and I know the legendary history they put in their cinema, but I don’t know about this period of their history. As a result, I was lost at sea. The movie is more or less made with the understanding that you know the history and know who at least some of these people are. The generals are presented without any fanfare or announcement. You’re just expected to know them on sight. Well, in this instance, it worked for half the house. Syd has played Romance of the Three Kingdoms since it was on the NES and even commented that the generals look exactly like the drawings from the games. For once, Syd was telling me about Chinese history, which was an odd place to be in. I did recognize Guan Yu, but that was for different reasons.

3. There isn’t much of a story. It really is just a battle and a siege. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t good side plots, because there are, but it isn’t some grand sweeping story. It’s just the story of this one battle that, in the end, didn’t come to very much.



Still it was a good movie although your mileage will vary. It’s nice to see John Woo make something watchable again at any rate.