"It was then that Delirium noticed that she had absentmindedly transformed herself into a hundred and eleven perfect, tiny, multicolored fish." — Neil Gaiman, The Kindly Ones
You could kind of just take last year’s Thanksgiving post and repeat it again this year. Different restaurant, different MST3K episodes — well, except for “Final Sacrifice,” which is playing now — but the basics are just the same.
We had a nice meal, just the three of us, and now I’m enjoying the rest of the evening.
Have a happy Thanksgiving, or just Thursday, which ever it may be!
Last night, after work, I joined some fellow cappers for dinner and then the live simulcast of Rifftrax‘s Manos: The Hands of Fate. I thought it got off to a slow start, after some very funny shorts, but in the end I thought they did a really great job. It’s been a little while since I last watched the original riff, but last night’s was probably its equal. It was a good time, though I didn’t get home from Manhattan until after eleven, and I didn’t really fall asleep until after midnight.
So it’s probably a good thing I didn’t have to go into the office today. Every year we have some kind of company outing, and today’s was out on Long Island, at the Country Fair Park in Medford. That’s about a forty-five-minute drive from here, which seemed like the better option than an hour’s regular commute into Manhattan so that I could be on the bus the company had chartered for 8:45. A bus that, even if it hadn’t been a half an hour late, would have taken half an hour longer than my car ride. Then another hour-plus bus ride back into the city and an hour’s train commute back home. We were done at one o’clock, and by driving I was home before two. I think I definitely picked the right option.
The park itself was a lot of fun. There were go-karts, laser tag, a driving range, miniature golf, and batting cages. And while I only participated in the first three of those, I’m kind of exhausted now. Running around and shooting co-workers with sensors on their heads and failing to improve my heretofore nonexistent golf game…well, it takes a lot of you. But there was food, and the weather was good — if quite hot — and I got to leave the house at 9 and get home by 2. So I’m really not complaining.
A brand new year means a brand new “Forgotten English” desk calendar, and the delightfully archaic word for today is “scurryfunge,” which reportedly means:
A hasty tidying of the house between the time you see a neighbor and the time she knocks on the door.
Overall, today was enough like yesterday, and many of the other days before it, frankly, to make me think this whole “new year” thing is perhaps just some kind of arbitrary social construction. Last night, I had dinner out with my parents, then spent some time watching the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode The Final Sacrifice. I don’t know that it actually is, as they claimed, “the worst thing to ever come out of Canada,” but it was a terrible, terrible movie. Yet they were in fine form riffing on it, and it’s easily one of the funniest episodes of the show I’ve seen. Canada takes a lot of good-natured ribbing throughout — “Bobo ate a bad can of Canadian bacon and he came down with hockey hair…” — but in the DVD extras, Zap Rowsdower himself, Bruce J. Mitchell, comes across as a really likable guy with no hard feelings towards Mike and the bots.
Today, I spent a little time writing and a little time reading — not as much as I’d have liked to of either, but enough to get hopefully get me back into the swing of things. I did precious little of either — of anything, now that I think about it — over this two-week vacation.
And then this evening, I watched the 1985 horror movie Fright Night, which I guess was okay. I think if I’d seen it in the ’80s or shortly thereafter, when I was younger (and effects were not perhaps significantly better), I might have liked it more. Roddy MacDowall’s quite good in it, though, and it has its moments.
And that was Saturday. Tomorrow’s the last day of my vacation before I head back to work. Yay?
I bring all of this up simply because I was amused to see my initial question listed among Wikipedia’s lamest edit wars. You have to know which battles are worth picking. [via]
I do find it curious that none of the reports I’ve seen mention the more recent ’90s adaptation of the show — which, for better or worse, ran 5 years longer than the original.
The non-Sarah Dittoheads among us have to decide whether to regard this babble—favoring creation science, aerial wolf-shooting, and freedom of the press, so long as the press is “accurate”—as scary or funny. During the 2008 campaign, when there was a real chance that Palin could become the automatic successor to an impulsive, elderly cancer survivor, I found it more scary than funny. After McCain lost, and after Palin terminated her governorship in the effusion of furious gibberish known as her resignation speech, I have found it mostly funny. To be alarmed by Palin today presumes a Republican Party suicidal enough to want her to do more than run its weekend paintball games.
Me, I’m still a little scared. In today’s politics of the right, crazy is quickly becoming the new sane, and crazy seems to love it some Sarah Palin, you betcha. [via]
Last night, three fellow cappers and I went to see Rifftrax Live in Union Square, allegedly the first theater in the nation that sold out for their simulcast riffing of Plan 9 from Outer Space. I’d never seen the movie in its entirety before — just bits and pieces, and then a big block of it earlier this week when I discovered Netflix had it online — so it was a blast seeing it on a big screen in a crowded theater. It’s such an endearingly awful movie, obviously made with a huge amount of love and excitement by Ed Wood, if not even the tiniest shred of talent or ability. For a movie that is so terrible — “the Citizen Kane of bad movies” — it really doesn’t drag at all, and I think it could be genuinely entertaining even without three really funny guys making fun of it on the side.
But Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett did a great job, first with a really terrific short — “Sorry, Fort Worth!” — and then the feature, really bringing their A material, a script you can tell they’ve been honing for awhile. It was also great to see and hear Jonathan Coulton do a couple of songs (and help out with another), and you definitely got the sense that some people were going to go home after the show and look him and his music up.
Speaking of going home, I didn’t make it there until sometime after midnight, just missing the first subway uptown from Union Square — no Metro card, and long lines at malfunctioning machines — and then having to wait around Penn Station for half an hour until my train showed up. It gave me time to chat with some of the station’s late-night drunks and transients, particularly the one gentleman who, instead of just asking me for some money, wanted to give me a story about how he’d just gotten out of prison for…well, something cocaine-related, though it wasn’t entirely clear what. I was happy to give him a dollar, especially if it meant he’d wander off and bother someone else. He had the unmistakable scent of alcohol on him, plus the look of a man whose good humor and gregariousness could turn to violence, so I just wanted to escape with my book to another (more crowded) section of the station. He, of course, wanted to fist-bump me in thanks for the dollar and to ask me about the book. When I told him it was a book about gardening, I don’t think he approved. But at least that seemed to end the conversation, and he walked off to the Amtrak station upstairs.
Those few moments of weirdness — plus the disgusting heat in Manhattan, especially in the subway — notwithstanding, I had a great evening, and I’m definitely glad I went.