“Say, do you think I can use your bathroom before I go?”

“Shhhh…” replies the harried girl. “My parents are asleep and they’ll kill me if I have a man in here. Tip toe into the kitchen and use the sink.”

The young man figures that’s good enough and off to the dark kitchen he goes. The girl waits nervously around the corner and after several moments, she hears him calling for her.

“Psssst,” whispers the young man. “Can you get me some toilet paper?”

I believe that’s the first joke I’ve told here in the Screaming Room. It will also be the last, because I’ve moved all my stuff to a new address and I’ll be hanging out there from now on. The address is listed below and I think you should come on over. The new place looks like the old place and I’ll be moving new stuff in over the next few weeks.

I’ve really grown tired of the moving metaphor and so I’m just going to go. Be sure to make note of the new address. And stay the hell away from my sink. Use the backyard like the rest of us.

The Screaming Room has moved here

Unfortunately, the touchy questions therein have a way of illuminating the complex workings of the inner mind. You might be amorous and desperate as an alley cat in heat, but that stranger across the candle can start to look pretty frightening after a good round of questions and answers.

For instance, an answer to the following question so turned me off from a girl I was seeing, I went frigid on her for nearly an hour.  I mean, come on! I was a lascivious young man, but I had my scruples. Sort of.

Consider the question as long as you’d like. Just be careful not to get candle wax on exposed body parts. Unless you’re into that sort of thing. Call me.

For an all-expense-paid, one-week vacation anywhere in the world, would you be willing to kill a beautiful butterfly by pulling off its wings? What about stepping on a cockroach?

Fool. Chances are good that you have already ingested something nasty placed in your food by some snotty punk who did it just because he could. And because he didn’t like your face. He resented you because you’re an adult, driving a nice car and ordering him around just like that bitch at home. And it gives him an enormous sense of empowerment to reach down into his pants and pull something squishy and warm and gush it deep inside the enchillda you’ve been craving all day.

But don’t take my word for it. There are documented cases of restaurant food being intentionally contaminated by nasties including, but not limited to, urine, feces, congealed mucus, pus, spit, ear wax, blood and, yes… the most intimate bodily substance a young man has to offer.

WHEATON, Ill. — Parents in Wheaton, Ill., are being told a high school student played a nasty prank by contaminating the cafeteria salad dressing with semen.

School officials said this week they weren’t sure if anyone had eaten the ranch dressing or had become ill and noted that the container from the lunchroom was routinely washed after lunch every other day.
The Napierville Sun said Saturday that the offending senior ejaculated into the bottle last week and then returned it to the condiments table. He then bragged about it to presumably flabbergasted classmates.

Read the nice letters school officials wrote to the students here. And go get yourself a nice double cheesburger with all the extra sauces. You deserve a break today.

If you shop around a little, you’ll find action figures of Albert Einstein, Edgar Allan Poe, Evander Holyfield and The Rock. Perfect last minute gifts for that lonely, lonely woman in your life. Of course, you could go all the way and order a real, life-size companion for that sad friend but then you’d face a tricky return policy if things go bad in the relationship.

I tried to create my own, personalized action figure here but I didn’t have much luck with it. This much is true: if there were a Mark doll out there, it wouldn’t come with any string. It would just start talking out of the box and then it would never shut up.

“Imagine a plane is sitting on a massive conveyor belt, as wide and as long as a runway. The conveyer belt is designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels, moving in the opposite direction. Can the plane take off?“

Decades later, I have a copy of the flick on DVD. I watch it a couple times a year and pick it up on late night television whenever I can. It’s a movie that never gets old for me. It’s downright hysterical (Madeline Kahn getting boned by the big guy and breaking into “Sweet Mystery of Life” is just goddamn funny), yet the movie caters to my need for horror, too. The monstrous castle carved out of a mountaintop; the dusty, basement laboratory where unholy work is undertaken; the sight of the lifeless monster rising from the table with its zipper neck, its massive features, its ferocious frown.

I get chills. And whenever I think of the movie, I see the face of the creature, all gray and ghastly, both menacing and sad. The monster, above all, was played to perfection. And though Peter Boyle will probably be remembered as the crotchety dad in “Everybody Loves Raymond,” he’ll always be the reanimated dead guy who boned Madeline Kahn, had a painful cigar with Gene Hackman and did a riotous two-step to “Putting on the Ritz.”

It takes a giant of a man to upstage the likes of Gene Wilder, Cloris Leachman, Terri Garr, Marty Feldman and Kahn. It takes a monsterous performance to produce a character that achieves something close to immortality. That’s Boyle in the form of Frankenstein’s creation.
Boyle died Tuesday at 71. I’m inspired to watch the movie again even though I watched it on Halloween just two months ago. Peter Boyle is dead. Long live the monster.

From Mandy:

I am not a snob when it comes to popular culture, but my tastes have always turned towards the eclectic. Growing up, my idea of a “boy band” was the Cure and while my classmates were listening to New Kids on the Block, I was enjoying Depeche Mode, Bauhaus and the Cocteau Twins. And while I still love Madonna despite her never-ending attempts to “find herself” and believe to this day the “Airplane” and “Naked Gun” films are pure genius, I also have a deep abiding passion for the films of David Lynch, Peter Greenaway and Akira Kurosawa, as well as the shows the X-Files, the Prisoner and Iron Chef.

However, I am definitely not above a guilty pleasure, whether it is one of VH-1’s “I Love the’80” marathons or the E! network’s “True Hollywood Story,” but my latest guilty pleasure surprised even me. Yes, I am a fan of Justin Timberlake’s “FutureSex/LoveSounds,” especially the lead single, “Sexyback.”

I first heard “Sexyback” when trying to find something to review for our paper’s Music Quarterly issue. On occasion I try to review an artist I’m completely unfamiliar with so I avoid falling into the trap of always writing positive reviews because I’m writing about something that, nine times out of ten, I know I’m going to like. While I was beaten to the review by a co-worker, I couldn’t get the song out of my head. As the weeks passed, it became a siren’s long, luring me to radio stations I wouldn’t typically listen to, just for the opportunity to hear it one more time. The pull of the song was so strong that I broke down and bought the whole damn album today while out shopping for Christmas gifts. You know what, it’s really quite good, and I never thought I’d ever say that.

So with that in mind, what are your current guilty pleasures? Come on, you know you have them, and you want to share.

During the blog move over the past few days, I’ve been figuratively throwing boxes off the truck and kicking them until they land where they’re supposed to. To carry the moving metaphor a little further, the new blog still has blankets over the windows and you can’t find anything you need because it’s still back at the other place. Goddamit.

The last time I blog moved, it was because we got blown up back at the Sun Journal site. Those were fun times. Dan was constantly drawing our wrath and then running to the webmaster ever time things go hot. Herb was still alive in those days, though he was on his third reincarnation. Bulldog was around a lot more but of course, that was three rehabs and a prison sentence ago.

While I’m trying to get the new joint in order, I’m reminded of the early days of The Screaming Room. It began with a mushroom cloud and the dust of previous battles still hung in the air. You could smell the anger and most of us still had open wounds, bruises or crabs. Good times, man.

Just for the hell of it, here is a post from March 25, the day after the fallout. Those were different times. My, how you all have grown.

Day three. Earlier, I left the relative safety of the shelter to wander out into this new world of night. Out there, where oily black clouds block out the sun and the stench of ruin is thick, I wandered to the remains of The Lost Sole. There are no remains. All is lost. Not a single wall stands. No bones poke from the rubble to indicate a form of humanity once existed there. The hellish pit that was Street Talk has been blasted to oblivion.

Still, in the smoldering landscape of the world that remains, wanderers pass through this unhappy valley like a legion of walking dead. They bear the dazed expressions of those who believe they are dreaming. There are jagged wounds and missing parts. There are hands that tremble with rage and hands that tremble with fear. There is shock and sadness. Mostly, there is a will to battle forth.

So, I’ve always wanted to write an apocalyptic tale. Scattered survivors shuffling through a damned world, without sunlight or hope. Frightening, dismal crap like that. The Stand, maybe. Or Escape from New York. But I’ll refrain so we can get back to talking about animal sex, outhouse mishaps and stupid criminals.

But first, a head count. So far today, a number of survivors have stumbled in to the shelter. Fred, Bobbie, AO, Mainetarr, Gil, K2, Flamette… There’s enough food here to last us a few weeks and a good supply of booze. We’re building up our cache of weapons too, because you just never know when the next scavenger will come by. You never know when vermin from the old world will come by.

We’re keeping our eyes out for the rest of you. All are welcome here. My name is Pliskin. But you can call me Snake.

There’s something to be said about participatory journalism if you’re being sent to a war torn country or going undercover in the nebulous nighclub scene at Greenwich Village. Playing a sexually confused elf at the mall? Well… we’ll see.

Flamboyant elf beaten at mall

AUBURN — A newspaper reporter was pummelled by a group of elderly women and small children on Sunday after his debut as Santa’s Little Helper. Journalist and elfin Mark LaFlamme was attacked as he browsed the aroma therapy line at Bed, Bath & Beyond, police said.

“My pointy shoes!” LaFlamme was heard screaming, as he stumbled bleeding and dripping makeup outside the mall. “They took my pointy shoes! You bastards!”

No arrests were made. The investigation was stalled as police doubled over giggling for an hour and then spent another arguing over who had to process the battered elf.

Outside the mall, a group of blue-haired women were seen high-fiving with several boys and girls aged 5 to 10-years-old.

“Who’s our bitch!” one 95-year-old lady trumpeted, one bloody elf tassle clinging to her bloody fist. “That’s what I’M talking about!”

Asked if she was at all troubled by the fact that she had beaten up Santa’s closest aid, the woman croaked: “That was an elf? I thought it was just a cross-dressing preevert.”