Clapcop. Clipclap. Clappyclap.
Goodgod henev erheard inall.
Deaf bald Pat brought pad knife took up.
A moonlight nightcall: far: far.
I feel so sad. P.S. So lonely blooming.
Listen! (329)

What the fuck? This is the great James Joyce? Ulysses, the holy grail of literature? Fuck that. I’m going back to reading Steven King.

“More like a six foot turkey!”

Yesterday I spent about three hours obsessively cyber-stalking him. It turns out he’s a writer now and does some acting on the side. He recently stared in this short film called “Elliot.” I furrowed my eyebrows through the entire thing. He has a very strange face! Okay here’s a link to the very cheesy and weird short film, which I found strangely mesmerizing on account of its cheesiness and weirdness.

So it was exactly two Octobers ago when my then-roomate, Prasanna, and I were kidding about getting kittens, in lieu of girlfriends. It started as a joke but we toyed with the idea for a while and eventually figured “ah what the heck.” We found a free kittens listing on Craigslist and made the trip the next day. I think there were four kittens in the litter and each had some sort of growth on the face, except one. Naturally I chose the one without a growth that being Penny. Destiny, of course, but also common sense.

I took a surprising number of pictures and videos of Penny with my cellphone. I’ve decided to upload some for posterity. Sorry the video quality is poor and there is no sound. Here Penny is playing with my feet on his first day in a new home. My two feet were Penny’s mortal enemies during kittenhood. 1:44 will eat your heart out.

Penny chilling on the carpet, like a boss.

Hungry little bastard.

Penny’s first meal.

One of those pictures that hurts your neck.

A video of Penny playing with a pen.

Penny, a little older, playing hide and seek. I usually initiated our hide and seek games by throwing something (a pill container in this case) at him. Then running away. I’m glad there’s no sound because I was giggling like a little girl.

Penny as an adolescent.

Classic Penny look.

I came home from work one day to this scene. One of my housemates had left his window open to the roof.

This picture was taken in the middle of the night with flash on. Penny would sometimes sit on one of the couch arms next to my bed and stare at me while I slept. I would wake up and see his silhouette hovering over me. It freaked me out. Creeper.

After weeks of futility, Penny finally did catch that mouse.

Unfortunately he had no idea what to do with it. We ended up letting it go outside.

Ladies and gentlemen I give you a photo compilation of Penny’s (often hilarious) sleeping positions.

This one’s called “Roadkill.” It was funny at the time..

I like the lighting in these pictures.

Penny’s favorite chill spot at the old house on Denver. Never cracked open the textbook by the way.

Penny guarding the door to my room.

Penny falling asleep, guarding the door to my room.

Penny’s first encounter with the opposite sex.

Penny’s first rejection from the opposite sex (it happens to the best of us).

This little lady has been camped out on my back porch since the time of Penny’s death, six days ago. I had seen her before together with Penny. She doesn’t want to come inside, she doesn’t want to be held, she shows no interest in food. She just stares and walks around in circles on the back porch. I take her inside and she looks around aimlessly, then returns to standing by the porch door. My guess is that Penny had a girlfriend.

This is oddly my favorite picture of Penny. I remember my exact thoughts before taking this picture. “I know I will probably have a lot of stupid bushes, a lot of grills, and a lot of cats in my lifetime. But I won’t always have this stupid bush and this grill and this cat.” So I took this picture.

A sick, sick game.

What’s worse is the asshole mustard people. Man has mastered the skies and ventured space, defeated polio and small pox, scaled Everest and K2. Millions of years of evolution.^[1] Untold bounds in science and medicine, especially in the last century. Yet we’re still squirting 3 ounces of warm yellow water – the condiment equivalent of diarrhea — on our franks. Somehow no one has figured it out. Not even the geniuses over at Oscar Mayer, responsible for the innovative ‘frank that actually fits your bun’. I for one blame the mustard people but the ketchup people are by no means innocent. You’d be lucky to get a squirt of diluted diarrhea-ketchup out of a half-finished glass bottle of Heinz, after your hand goes numb from smacking the bottle. Someone was being real cute at the Heinz bottling factory. And fuck pickle jars! I’d have better luck opening a cockpit door on a mid-flight 747.

After 9/11.

That’s why every man knows to never ever (ever!) attempt to open a pickle jar when a girl is watching. Four minutes in and you’re the girl. And should a girl ask you to open a pickle jar, you can pretty much kiss your masculinity goodbye. It’s not going to open. Not even if you happened to carry around a crow bar. Not with three sticks of dynamite. Then come the usual can’t-open cliches …

“Hmm … can’t seem to get a grip on this thing …”

“My hands are wet!”

“Hmph … I think the lid on this pickle jar might be defective!”

Message to pickle people: Let me in. I’m not a terrorist. And fuck you.

Fuck you and your pickles.

1. ^[1] Play along. I’m no evolutionist. I find Darwin’s theory laughable and therefore see fit to allude to it in the facetious tone. Men evolved from apes … how absurd! It is far more reasonable, though a tad misanthropic, to assume apes evolved from men. ↩

I think I will do that.

You come home from work on Friday night and get totally drunk with your best friend Jim Beam. Then when you’re super drunk you pig out on cheese doodles dipped in ranch dressing while watching straight through the entire first season of Mad Men in your boxers. You ignore everyone and everything. You periodically doze off and wake up in drunken stupors throughout the weekend. Sure you check the time every once in a while, but only to make sure it’s not Monday yet. You don’t do anything adultish like taking out the trash or washing the dishes or feeding the cat.

You just sit there, lie there, and lapse.. the entire weekend. And you enjoy every god damn minute of it.

Anyway, I noticed the voice of Charleston Heston in Thade’s father this time around.

Thade's father (left), played by Charleston Heston and Thade (right), played by Tim Roth.

In the above scene, Ape-Heston is on his death bed consoling Thade (the evil chimp villain on the right) to exterminate the humans or something like that. His last words are “Damn them … damn them all to Hell!”

Love it! Golden!

Anyone who is familiar with the original 1968 Planet of the Apes knows that Charleston Heston (playing as a man, not an ape) utters that very same line during the famous beach scene, just after he finds the Statue of Liberty in ruins and discovers that the humans destroyed themselves. I used to re-enact the scene as a kid, on the beach during family vacations, much to my mother’s amusement.

Ahhhhhh!! I love it so much! Heston says it so emphatically, with so much umph. And with his hands in the sand like that … the waves! A truly magic movie moment. I’m pretty sure I re-enacted that scene every time my family went to the beach.

There is a delicious parody of the scene in the animated adventure comedy Madagascar. I watched Madagascar for the first time a few summers ago at a camp I was working at in Maryland. It was movie night and the room was full of kids. None of them understood the reference.

Of course the lion (Ben Stiller) omits “God” and uses the euphemisms darn and heck in place of damn and hell. I guess that’s to be expected in a kid’s movie, but it really only adds to the humor.

I’m not too anxious to see the new Rise of the Planet of the Apes movie. I feel the overly-exhausted end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it theme has lost its novelty (with 2012, Battle: LA, I am Legend, Daybreakers, Priest, The Book of Eli, The Road, etc) and, besides, as stated, apes don’t do much for me in any sort of dramatic context. I’ll probably see it when it comes out in the dollar theater.

Don’t judge. All the cool bloggers are doing it. I also got a new tagline.

The universe is a vast cosmic conspiracy …^[1]

Genius, I know.

And I added a Facebook Like Box at the bottom of every page, which is pretty snazzy.

I love looking at the handsome faces of people that liked my site on facebook. They’re all beautiful people with exceptionally good taste. Except for the guy who used to live on my dorm named Josh. He’s just a complete retard.

It’s a humorous facebook profile pic you have there Josh, but …

Never go full retard.

I’ll be doing some more much needed renovations, possibly a full redesign. I’m still considering different tagline ideas, so if you can think of anything clever or witteh, submit it via the contact form… meh who am I kidding? There isn’t anyone actually reading this blog, let alone someone that gives a damn what the design is… But still, it’s fun to pretend!

1. ^[1] Changed from “Of course it’s a metaphor you fools …” which I felt was too condescending. ↩