Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Re: Adventures in Pac-Man Date: Thu, 7 Nov 2002 08:37:25 GMT On November 3, Nick Bensema (nickb@io.com) wrote: > > Earlier, I could routinely get to the fourth level on one life. Now, > I'm lucky to make it out of the first. > > Why? Because I started worrying about that worthless cherry that jumps > in and does laps around the ghost pen. That's Ms. Pac-Man, dude. Regular Pac-Man has a cherry that just sits there like a rock or something. In Pac-Man Plus, it's a can of Generic Coke, and in Pac-Man Jr. all the fruits have turned into toys that walk around eating your power pills and crapping out big sticky dots. (Note that in the original, Galaxians were considered fruits.) Don't get me started on Super Pac-Man, Pac-Land, Pac-Mania, Baby Pac-Man, and Mr. & Mrs. Pac-Man (the latter two games were half a pinball machine nailed to a videogame, and a pinball machine nailed to half a videogame, respectively.) Super Pac-Man's the easiest. Oh, and I almost forgot Pac & Pal, the one nobody loved. But it's easy too, especially if you keep hitting the "Killer Halitosis" button that lets Pac-Man shoot the ghosts with deadly expanding circles emanating from his mouth, penetrating ghosts and their Gardol Shields. I can understand that one might freak you out because it has all the fruits on every screen at the same time, and that little green ghost who keeps carrying the fruits away, plus it has a lemon and none of the others had lemons, just the weird fruits they have in Japan. > [...] > > And suddenly, I started to notice when the cherry was thump-thump-thumping > its way out of the escape tunnels. I started to chase after it as soon > as it showed up, and as a consequence I usually ended up with Pinky all > over me. Damn you, Pinky! > > And even though I've identified the problem, I can't get my zen back. > This always happens when I lose my zen. What's worse is when you mention Pac-Man on the Internet and immediately Hollywood gets a bad idea from you. On November 5, a mere 48 hours after you mentioned your love of Pac-Man, The Hollywood Reporter printed a story that some company named Crystal Sky has spent an undisclosed amount buying the film rights to Pac-Man... for a live-action movie. No, really. Live-action Pac-Man movie. DAMN YOU, NICK BENSEMA! DAMN YOU TO THE EXACT CENTER OF AN INFINITELY LONG TUNNEL WHICH GOES ALL THE WAY OFF THE RIGHT EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE AND COMES BACK ON THE LEFT! Still, I suppose Hollywood deserved SOMEONE giving them an idea that bad, so in a way, I'm glad it was you. Here's my professional opinion on how they could pull this off: They need to get that wacky Kramer guy from "Seinfeld" and that wacky principal woman from "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" and they can run around eating pies and then Andy Kaufman would come in and beat them all up and the Masked Magician would reveal how to swallow a sword and suffer from internal bleeding, then Kramer would turn into Richard Belzer and George Shapiro would become Danny DeVito, causing the real Danny DeVito to vanish, due to The Law Of Conservation Of DeVitos In Live-Action Movies Based On Sixteen-Color Video Games, and any violations of that law would result in Andy Kaufman being exiled to a sixteen-color island unless another quiz show scandal resulted in Jack Barry being put on a kids' show where he could tell kids how to draw on their TV screens to make a boat. Sadly, they probably won't do something that awesome. It'll probably just be Ezio Greggio in a T-shirt with sticky letters on it that say "PACK MAN", and then Leslie Nielsen would chase him around while yawning, and then there would be a disclaimer screen explaining that the movie is not meant as a serious portrayal of people with eating disorders, who have very hard lives and deserve our pity, especially if they're so fat that they can't get up and walk out on movies like this one. -- K. I believe I just accidentally made Trizantine weave. Oh, there's my problem -- I forgot to interlock Andy Kaufman's real twin brother with Danny DeVito's imaginary evil twin. MISS PIGGY'S SPECIAL WAS RUINED! ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Re: Adventures in Pac-Man Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 06:32:08 GMT [regarding a live-action "Pac-Man" movie, which should be disregarded] David DeLaney (dbd@gatekeeper.vic.com) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > Here's my professional opinion on how they could pull this off: > > They need to get that wacky Kramer guy from "Seinfeld" and that wacky > > principal woman from "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" and they can run around > > eating pies and then Andy Kaufman would come in and beat them all up and > > the Masked Magician would reveal how to swallow a sword and suffer from > > internal bleeding, then Kramer would turn into Richard Belzer and > > George Shapiro would become Danny DeVito, causing the real Danny DeVito > > to vanish, due to The Law Of Conservation Of DeVitos In Live-Action Movies > > Based On Sixteen-Color Video Games, and any violations of that law would > > result in Andy Kaufman being exiled to a sixteen-color island unless > > another quiz show scandal resulted in Jack Barry being put on a kids' show > > where he could tell kids how to draw on their TV screens to make a boat. > > I am sitting here _trying_ to parse the fuck out of this sentence, only to > discover after deep analysis that it doesn't seem to contain any. Heeeelp! Here it is in words of one syllable, because anything in all caps counts as one syllable: KIBO LIKE TV. KIBO THINK DRAWING ON TV SCREEN FUNNY. KIBO LIKE WATCHING WRESTLER MAN MAKE FUN OF TV SHOWS FROM BEFORE KIBO BORN. KIBO DRAW BOAT NOW. KIBO SMASH BOAT! SMASH WITH SCRIBBLE! RRRR. (That oughta hold the little bastards!) It might work better if you imagined me dressed as Commander Mark from "The Secret City" and Winky Dink can be the thing from the animated phone company propaganda film in "The President's Analyst". > > I believe I just accidentally made Trizantine weave. > > Try it sideways and see if it tessellates... Know what I hate? When I've made a big patch of 6-in-1 chain mail and there's one ring in the middle where I goofed and linked it through seven instead of six, and I didn't notice until a few inches later when I realized that the extra ring made the whole thing stiff as a board and it takes a lot of delicate surgery to extract the bad ring because the piece is so stiff I can't move the others out of the way, and then when I get it out I have to figure out how to get its replacement in, and I say "Oh, screw it, now I know why all real Crusaders just wore wimpy 4-in-1, AND THAT'S WHY THEY'RE ALL DEAD!" There should be an easier way to make chain mail, preferably involving Legos. -- K. Also, I'm told it was quite a sight to see the UPS man having to get a dolly just to bring in my little shoebox-size carton of rings. They're like SpaghettiOs, except denser and they probably only cause half as much internal bleeding if swallowed. ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Re: Adventures in Pac-Man Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 09:29:53 GMT Lots42 (lots42@aol.com) wrote: > > It's freaky that Kibo has started talking about Ferris Bueller. > 'Cause the guy who played the principal in the movie was arrested > for having child porn and having sex with a seventeen year old boy. > > I swear to holy god I'm not making this up > > How COULD I? Oh, that's right -- I forgot to link Jeffrey Jones (the principal in the movie, but not the TV series, if I remember -- he was okay as Criswell in "Ed Wood") to Pee-wee Herman when I breezed past Pee-wee during my trip through the land of television inspired by Andy Kaufman. You see, Jeffrey Jones and Pee-wee Herman were implicated during the same child molestation / porn investigation a year or so ago. I'm intrigued by how when Pee-wee got busted for something fairly minor a decade ago (he went to a porno theater to do what you go to porno theaters to do) it got an incredible amount of media coverage, jokes proliferated, etc., but now he's been accused of something far more horrifying, and it's gotten almost no media coverage, nobody knows about it, etc., probably because the two of them are being investigated for something so sickening that even the TV news people think it would be too tawdry to talk about. It got momentary mentions in the supermarket tabloids and NY Post (and it seems the police really did raid Pee-wee's home and take away his porn, according to his PR people, although I'd still like to see this verified a little more thoroughly in real newspapers) and the people in Hollywood seem to have heard about it enough that Pee-wee has dropped completely out of sight (when he had been on the verge of a comeback) but, as you say, almost nobody seems to have heard that Pee-wee is REALLY a pervert now, and Jeffrey Jones is EVEN MORE OF A PERVERT THAN PEE-WEE. He was officially arrested a few hours ago (the LAPD moves slowly but surely, assuming you're famous enough that they won't just forget about you.) Also, Melanie Chartoff (the principal in "Parker Lewis Can't Lose") is a million times funnier. Sexier red hair, too. The question I always ask is, if Jeffrey Jones was the "We can't afford Gerrit Graham" guy, who is the "Jeffrey Jones is too perverted" person? Conan O'Brien? Melanie Chartoff? Gerrit Graham, incidentally, not only got a box around his name on the poster for the movie "Starship" (aka "The Creature Wasn't Nice", costarring Leslie Nielsen, Patrick Macnee, Cindy Williams, and Bruce Kimmel) but he also wrote one of the Grateful Dead's songs. AND he's never raped ANY children! Still, if Jeffrey Jones survived "Howard The Duck", maybe his career isn't dead yet. But... whither Pee-wee? (Paul "Pee-wee" Reubens is accused of somewhat less horrible charges -- child porn, not child molestation -- but still he's been squirted from the Universe like a watermelon seed, as Vonnegut would say.) -- K. This is going to make it less likely I'll be able to get the complete run of "Pee-wee's Playhouse" on DVD any time soon. It's only ever been released on (overpriced) VHS. ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Re: Adventures in Pac-Man Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 06:21:25 GMT [on explaining one of Kibo's explosions of special cultural references] "talysman" (talysman@globalsurrealism.com) wrote: > > sorry, I don't even know who Andy Kaufman is. he sounds like > an economist or something. and what's "Parker Lewis Can't Lose"? > I think kibo's making fun of "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", which > means that he thinks Ben Stein is a woman! either that, or he's > mixing up that movie with real-life actor Parker Stevenson, who > played Isaac Asimov in a crime drama once. "Parker Lewis Can't Lose", starring Corin "Corky" "Gumby" Nemec, is one of those rare cases of a knockoff being better than the original -- the TV show of "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (starring Charlie "George Burns" Schlatter) was pitiful (and I didn't care much for the movie, either, as Ferris is the sort of jerk I didn't want to spend any time with -- the plot is that he bogarts his friend's father's sports car, and his friend has an abusive father, and Ferris wrecks the car and then tells his friend now he has to stand up to his abusive father, and then the movie stops before we find out in what sort of funny way they were going to handle the child abuse.) "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" had a great cast and a nice sense of surrealism (better than most cartoons, even) and, hey, what other show dared to expose the horrors of being forced to comb "My Little Pony"'s mane against your will? Ben Stein is the only celebrity I can do an impression of, except that it happens when I don't want it to. I can sort of do Bill Gates doing an impression of Kermit doing Bill Gates, too, but that doesn't count because two of them are just sock puppets. I liked Parker Stevenson's short-lived 1985-ish series "Probe", a show for which Isaac Asimov got his name in the credits. I have no idea if he did anything. He was previously credited on "Salvage One" and I seriously doubt his involvement with it went beyond collecting a paycheck (he would have had something to say about the episode about the oil which was chemically identical to regular oil except bright green), and then there's "Light Years", where he was credited with writing a movie that has already been made in France before they put his name on the dubbed version. I liked "Salvage One", but "Light Years" is really hard to sit through, even as French cartoon movies go. (Tip to animators: Anything with lots of rotoscoping will be condemned to only be seen at sci-fi nerd conventions between Ralph Bakshi disasters. Don't trace your cartoons. You could just show the real stuff you're tracing over, or you could learn to actually animate where people can move and stuff. "Parker Lewis" was also more cartoony than "Light Years".) Oh, lest I forget, you need to link "Parker Lewis" to "Solar Crisis" (directed by Allan Smithee) because in that movie, Jack Palance says my all-time favorite Jack Palance sentence, "I FORGET what my name IS... but I know it BEGAN... with AN ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!" to Corin "Corky" "Parker" Gumby" Nemec. Also, "Corin Nemec" only got spelled out on his birth certificate because a dead fly fell into a teletype and caused it to spit out that garbled anagram when it was supposed to be printing an arrest warrant for Robert DeNiro. Be sure to build a bridge to "Brazil" too, because I liked that movie a lot better than "Solar Crisis" (it's so bad, Allan Smithee should have taken his name off it and used some made-up nonsense name, like "Corin Nemec".) -- K. Other Japanese movies in the news: "Black Tight Killers" is playing at the Coolidge Corner Cinema, but I've already seen it, and I'm worrying about whether I should go see it on the off chance that the subtitles will be even wackier this time. Their description seems to be copied right off the DVD I have, so I have a suspicion they're showing the same blurry print with the burned-in fractured English. And I just found out it's only playing last week, even though it's still on the marquee today. Well, at least I got to see it even if you can't. Also, I still don't know whether "Tight" is supposed to be a noun or an adjective. ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Re: Adventures in Pac-Man Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 05:58:26 GMT Pugg (pugg71@hotmail.com) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > Here's my professional opinion on how they could pull this off: > > They need to [...] Kramer guy from "Seinfeld" [...] wacky > > principal woman from "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" [...] Andy Kaufman > > [...] internal bleeding, [...] Richard Belzer [...] a sixteen-color > > island unless another quiz show scandal [...] Ezio Greggio in a T-shirt > > [...] a disclaimer [...] have very hard lives and deserve our pity, > > Trizantine weave [...] MISS PIGGY'S SPECIAL WAS RUINED! > > I get maybe about 30% of the references in that one. Could someone > please post explanations of all the references I don't get? Use > diagrams and/or flowcharts if necessary. Please e-mail me as I don't > read this group. Well, whaddaya know? I started writing this several days ago, and just got around to finding your article, so here it is. It's not terribly entertaining, but I had to write it because Matt McIrvin called me up and said he didn't understand anything I said. No, wait, I called him up and told him that. Actually, no, I called him up and said I was writing this anyway even though he already figured all this out. DAMN HIM AND HIS BIG BRAIN FULL OF TV!!!! So now you get to see it, no thanks to Matt. Last week, I wrote: > > On November 3, Nick Bensema (nickb@io.com) wrote: > > > > Earlier, I could routinely get to the fourth level on one life. Now, > > I'm lucky to make it out of the first. > > > > Why? Because I started worrying about that worthless cherry that jumps > > in and does laps around the ghost pen. > > That's Ms. Pac-Man, dude. Regular Pac-Man has a cherry that just sits there > like a rock or something. In Pac-Man Plus, it's a can of Generic Coke, and > in Pac-Man Jr. all the fruits have turned into toys that walk around eating > your power pills and crapping out big sticky dots. (Note that in the > original, Galaxians were considered fruits.) Original Pac-Man (which was "Puck-Man" in Japan) was an unusual game in that the four ghosts had slightly different algorithms they followed as they chased you, and the game occasionally tried to shake things up by having all four of them simultaneously reverse or head to the four corners of the board, but it didn't have any true randomness, so people learned to beat it by simply memorizing a path they could take to avoid all the ghosts. (It was more or less deterministic.) While the Japanese creators of Pac-Man were developing the sequel (Super Pac-Man), the American distributor decided to improve the game to add a little more novelty (to cash in on the craze) and to make the game less predictable (to make it less easy to play for three hours on one quarter) so they added a few little hacks and renamed the game Ms. Pac-Man, the difference being that the fruit prize wandered around the mazes (which were different shapes on different levels) and the ghosts were a little less predictable. (They were still mostly predictable, though. Also, the game wasn't yet ruined.) Then the Americans decided they needed to ruin the fun for everyone, and modified the original game a second time, resulting in Pac-Man Plus, which was just Pac-Man except the fruits had been replaced with what may or may not have been a product placement (the cherry was a can of sort-of-Coke) and the game cheated to ensure nobody could ever play too long. When you ate a power pill, instead of all four ghosts turning blue, three would turn blue and the other would kill you instantly. Or sometimes the ghosts would just turn invisible. (This is not to be confused with some of the modified bootlegs, such as Hangly Man, where the maze's walls would turn invisible. The first Pac-Man bootleg I ever played was an even more modified version of Hangly Man where the Pac-Man had been changed to a little Popeye head.) The first sequel by the Japanese, Super Pac-Man, didn't have any dots in the maze, just lots and lots of fruit (all of one type on each level.) You had to eat keys to open doors to get to the fruit, and there was a button you could push which made you move at double speed (a feature some people added themselves to the original, via a simple hardware modification) and a second type of power pill allowed you to become invulnerable and pass through closed doors. So if you ate a super power pill and held down the button, you could clean out the whole level in about ten seconds while just ignoring the ghosts altogether. It was too easy and not as interesting as Ms. Pac-Man. The next sequel was Jr. Pac-Man, or Pac-Man Jr., I forget which order the name went in because there were so many games (it's not the same as Baby Pac-Man.) This one was tedious because it was just Ms. Pac-Man except the maze was now about three times as big (the screen scrolled as you moved around) and, for no apparent reason, as the prizes wandered through the maze they ate your power pills and turned regular dots into big fat dots that slowed you down. I think they put that in just to force Nick to stop ignoring the worthless prizes, by replacing them with evil worthless prizes. > Don't get me started on Super Pac-Man, Pac-Land, Pac-Mania, Baby Pac-Man, > and Mr. & Mrs. Pac-Man (the latter two games were half a pinball machine > nailed to a videogame, and a pinball machine nailed to half a videogame, > respectively.) Super Pac-Man's the easiest. Oh, and I almost forgot > Pac & Pal, the one nobody loved. But it's easy too, especially if you > keep hitting the "Killer Halitosis" button that lets Pac-Man shoot the > ghosts with deadly expanding circles emanating from his mouth, penetrating > ghosts and their Gardol Shields. I can understand that one might freak > you out because it has all the fruits on every screen at the same time, > and that little green ghost who keeps carrying the fruits away, plus > it has a lemon and none of the others had lemons, just the weird fruits > they have in Japan. Mr. & Mrs. Pac-Man was a pinball machine with a small grid of light bulbs in the middle. Every once in a while, you you got a ball locked, you could move your light bulb around the tiny square while another light bulb chased it in slow-motion. The left flipper rotated your symmetric dot, and the right flipper moved your dot one space, in a direction indicated by a compass next to the game board. It was a real dog of a game -- not very good as a pinball game, and the attempt at a video game was below pathetic. Baby Pac-Man was better. It was an upright cabinet with a small pinball machine in the bottom and an actual video Pac-Man game in the top. If you shot the ball to the top of the board, it would be captured temporarily and the video game would start, until you moved off the bottom of the screen at which point it turned back into pinball. The pinball game was too tiny to be any good, but the two halves were integrated with each other and both were playable, unlike the worthless grid of light bulbs in Mr. & Mrs. Pac-Man. Pac & Pal is one nobody remembers, perhaps because it was no fun. I don't remember ever seeing one in an arcade (it may not even have been imported to the U.S., but that would be hard to believe given the huge craze for selling anything with the word "Pac-Man" stamped on it.) This one was like Super Pac-Man in that there were no dots and lots of locked doors with fruit behind them, except that this time instead of keys you had to eat playing cards, and each card opened up one fruit (usually at the opposite end of the maze.) A special fifth ghost (light green and short) would head for any unlocked fruits and carry them away if you didn't stop her. Instead of power pills, the maze had two of the Galaxians (as seen in the original game when they ran out of ideas for fruit) which gave you the ability to shoot stun rays from your mouth by pressing a button. So you couldn't eat the ghosts, just mildly annoy them. It was an irritating game with annoying sound effects. Eventually the Americans started producing wholly unrelated games with the name "Pac-Man" slapped on. Pac-Land was one of those side-scrolling- jump-over-the-killer-mushrooms-while-walking-fifty-miles-to-the-right games that used to be popular, like most of the Mario games and that f'ing Smurf Adventure. I've always hated those games where all you could do was make precision jumps over lethal hurdles over, and over, and over... (Moon Patrol was the only good game like that, because it was so lenient in its jumping that it could move faster, and it didn't require you to memorize the scrolling wallpaper.) Pac-Mania was a revival of the original Pac-Man with fancy 3D-ish graphics in orthogonal perspective, better music (which got louder as the ghosts got closer), and the ability to jump over the ghosts (except for Funky, who could also jump into you.) There were more arcade games after that (such as Virtual Pac-Man) and a number of home games, but nobody really cares. I'll bet nobody ever makes a movie out of the Pac-Man board game I have (where your plastic Pac-Man would eat marbles by sitting on them) or my favorite early '80s artifact, a bootleg Rubik's Cube with unlicensed depictions of Pac-Man characters on the six sides. Oh, Gardol was a mouthwash or toothpaste or something that had TV commercials in the 1950s with concentric circles coming out of people's mouths, although I don't know if that represented bad breath or the Gardol Shield, I just know of this "Gardol Shield" through old issues of Mad magazine (the Smithsonian of TV commercials.) > > [...] > > > > And suddenly, I started to notice when the cherry was thump-thump-thumping > > its way out of the escape tunnels. I started to chase after it as soon > > as it showed up, and as a consequence I usually ended up with Pinky all > > over me. Damn you, Pinky! > > > > And even though I've identified the problem, I can't get my zen back. > > This always happens when I lose my zen. > > What's worse is when you mention Pac-Man on the Internet and immediately > Hollywood gets a bad idea from you. > > On November 5, a mere 48 hours after you mentioned your love of Pac-Man, > The Hollywood Reporter printed a story that some company named > Crystal Sky has spent an undisclosed amount buying the film rights to > Pac-Man... for a live-action movie. No, really. Live-action Pac-Man movie. > > DAMN YOU, NICK BENSEMA! DAMN YOU TO THE EXACT CENTER OF AN INFINITELY > LONG TUNNEL WHICH GOES ALL THE WAY OFF THE RIGHT EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE > AND COMES BACK ON THE LEFT! This, of course, is a reference to one of the cleverest details (of many clever tiny details) in the programming of the original Pac-Man. There was a tunnel leading off the right-hand side of the screen, and if Pac-Man went down it he would reappear at the other side of the screen, and the ghosts could do this too, but the ghosts only reappeared after a slight delay, as if the wormhole was longer for them than it was for you. > Still, I suppose Hollywood deserved SOMEONE giving them an idea that bad, > so in a way, I'm glad it was you. > > Here's my professional opinion on how they could pull this off: > They need to get that wacky Kramer guy from "Seinfeld" and that wacky > principal woman from "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" and they can run around > eating pies That's a description of an episode of "Fridays", a "Saturday Night Live" knockoff starring talented people like Michael Richards (from "Seinfeld") and Melanie Chartoff (from "Parker Lewis Can't Lose") as well as the terrifyingly repetitious Mark Blankfield. In that episode one of them, I forget who, put on a yellow rain slicker and ran around trying to eat a pie while the others pursued. Sadly, that's just about the funniest thing they ever did (most of the other sketches were just Mark Blankfield overacting while pretending to be stoned), with one exception... > and then Andy Kaufman would come in and beat them all up and > the Masked Magician would reveal how to swallow a sword and suffer from > internal bleeding, Once when Andy Kaufman hosted "Fridays", he had the idea to end the episode not with yet another lame sketch about Mark Blankfield being stoned, but to stage a fight with the other cast members. He stopped in the middle of a typically unfunny sketch (people were at a restaurant taking turns going to the restroom and coming back stoned) and refused to continue, so Michael Richards went over and took the cue cards and dropped them in his lap, and Andy threw a glass of water, and then a big fake fistfight erupted. It was all carefully planned, of course, but for some reason many people believed Andy Kaufman's brain broke on TV, and I don't understand why they don't think that all the sketches on "Saturday Night Live" are real too. One of the other things Andy Kaufman (and his co-conspirator Bob Zmuda) did on "Fridays" was that Andy (who could actually swallow swords) played "The Masked Magician" purporting to demonstrate how magic tricks worked (much like some Fox specials two decades later, except that Andy was a more talented magician) where the joke was that Andy would show how to swallow a sword, then pull it out with blood all over it. The censors wouldn't let him do it as bloody as he wanted to. That's a shame because if he had, then people who believed the staged fight was real would be saying "Did you see 'Fridays'? Andy Kaufman really killed himself, and then he really started a fight!" > then Kramer would turn into Richard Belzer and > George Shapiro would become Danny DeVito, causing the real Danny DeVito > to vanish, due to The Law Of Conservation Of DeVitos In Live-Action Movies > Based On Sixteen-Color Video Games, In Milos Forman's movie "Man On The Moon", based on Bob Zmuda's biography of Andy Kaufman (in which Zmuda takes credit for just about everything), Jim Carrey played Kaufman, and Danny DeVito played his manager George Shapiro. However, because Kaufman and DeVito were on "Taxi" together, for the scenes where Jim Carrey and the now-elderly cast of "Taxi" recreated some "Taxi" moments, Danny DeVito's "Taxi" character was omitted. > and any violations of that law would > result in Andy Kaufman being exiled to a sixteen-color island unless > another quiz show scandal resulted in Jack Barry being put on a kids' show > where he could tell kids how to draw on their TV screens to make a boat. Now here's where it gets tricky. In the 1950s, game show host Jack Barry hosted a rigged quiz show called "Twenty-One" (this is depicted in Robert Redford's movie "Quiz Show".) For some reason there was a huge craze for quiz shows (much bigger than the one two years ago) and it became a big scandal when people found out that TV SHOWS ARE RIGGED!!! THOSE PEOPLE ON THE LITTLE SCREEN AREN'T REALLY GENIUSES! Jack Barry and "Twenty-One" got the boot, but be eventually made a comeback with "The Joker's Wild" -- a REALLY OBVIOUSLY rigged game show, but nobody cared because the questions were so easy that the only people who could enjoy the show would not be swift enough to notice that whenever a contestant was losing they'd switch reels on the big slot machine so that every wheel had nothing but jokers. Every time Jack Barry would say "The score is 400 to nothing, the only way you can win is if you spin three jokers..." you could see that the reels were solid masses of jokers and everyone would act all surprised when the contestant hit the fake jackpot. The other show Jack Barry is remembered for is "Winky Dink And You", one of the most unusual children's TV shows of all time. You had to send away for a cardboard frame filled with clear plastic, and put it over your TV screen (this was back before TV sets came in large and small) and because the title was "Winky Dink And YOU", whenever Jack Barry's little cartoon friend Winky Dink fell in a hole, YOU had to draw a ladder so he could climb out, and if you didn't buy the plastic sheet, Winky Dinky would DIE, unless you just drew right on the TV screen with your crayons, which you probably did, because you would have been pretty small if you liked this show. On one of Andy Kaufman's TV specials, there was a sequence where he was arrested for breaking the rules of television, and the judge exiled him to a crudely-drawn cartoon island, so he asked the boys and girls at home to draw him a little boat so he could sail back to the TV studio and finish his special. ("Pee-wee's Playhouse" later ripped off the idea of ripping off "Winky Dink And You".) > Sadly, they probably won't do something that awesome. It'll probably > just be Ezio Greggio in a T-shirt with sticky letters on it that say > "PACK MAN", and then Leslie Nielsen would chase him around while yawning, > and then there would be a disclaimer screen explaining that the movie > is not meant as a serious portrayal of people with eating disorders, > who have very hard lives and deserve our pity, especially if they're > so fat that they can't get up and walk out on movies like this one. Oh, man. Where to begin. First, Ezio Greggio sucks. He's one of Italy's national treasures, somewhere between Roberto Benigni and all those burnt corpses in Pompeii. I refer you to my review of the movie "2001: A Space Travesty" for an explanation of why his powers of awesome unfunniness can suck all the energy from Leslie Nielsen's sad, tired body. And I refer you to even earlier comments about the movie "Silence Of The Hams" (in which Ezio wore a T-shirt that said "JO DEE FOSTAR") if you truly wish to understand how funny his sense of funny isn't. SEE, HE SPELLED IT "JO DEE FOSTAR" INSTEAD OF "JODIE FOSTER"! It's almost as sophisticated as Cracked magazine! Anyway, Ezio Greggio and Leslie Nielsen were both in "2001: A Space Travesty", which ended with the audience being told that now we would hear some funny fart noises, and then a guy made some fart noises while explaining them (the fat person farting, the skinny person farting, the little kid farting, etc.) which may be the lowest point in the history of comedy, surpassing even Leslie Nielsen's live-action "Mr. Magoo" movie, which ended with a disclaimer explaining that the movie was not intended as an accurate portrayal of the visually handicapped. (Of course, it didn't say that in Braille.) > -- K. > > I believe I just accidentally made Trizantine weave. Okay, here I'm just meta-ing about how proud I am that I got from point A to point B by passing through point Ezio and point Kaufman and point Fart. That week I was learning to make jewelry and armor from chain (it's quite simple, really -- all you need is two pairs of pliers, and fifty thousand million pairs of metal SpaghettiOs, and a bucket of patience and Band-Aids) and I had just learned how to make box chain and its backward little brother, Byzantine weave (which is box chain with some extra pairs of rings in it.) Trizantine is so named because it's like Byzantine except that it has sets of three rings instead of two rings, thus it's named after a nonexistent historical period because people who make things out of metal at the Renaissance Festival like to make math jokes which involve imaginary historical periods. > Oh, there's my problem -- I forgot to interlock > Andy Kaufman's real twin brother with Danny DeVito's > imaginary evil twin. MISS PIGGY'S SPECIAL WAS RUINED! The obligatory callback. Andy Kaufman's character Tony Clifton (the obnoxious, unfunny comedian) was a creation of sheer genius. First you weren't supposed to know it was just Andy Kaufman having fun torturing the audience. Then you were supposed to catch on that it was Andy Kaufman in makeup. Then after a few months of that the real Andy Kaufman would start running across the stage behind Tony Clifton. So you see, the Tony Clifton character was what Phil Dick called "a fake fake". In Bob Zmuda's book, Bob talks about how he played Tony Clifton when it wasn't Andy. There's no mention of how Andy had an almost identical-looking brother (Michael) who played Tony Clifton most of the time. (When Tony Clifton looks like Andy, he's either Andy or Michael; When he doesn't look anything like Andy, he's Bob.) In the movie of Kaufman's life where Danny DeVito played a guy who wasn't Danny DeVito so that nobody played Danny DeVito, some guy played Bob Zmuda playing Andy Kaufman playing Tony Clifton, and because the movie was based on Zmuda's book, there was no mention of Andy's secret twin brother. (They weren't actually twins, but they looked like they were. You can see pictures in Bill Zehme's excellent "Lost In The Funhouse", which is the good biography of Kaufman, written with access to his family and George Shapiro's audio diaries and everyone else that Zmuda didn't talk to. Zehme is currently hosting some Comedy Central show I haven't seen. Note that you're only allowed to write an Andy Kaufman book if your name starts with "Z", so I expect to see a two-volume set by Zsa Zsa.) And THAT'S why "Pac-Man: The Movie" is a bad idea. Whether or not it involves Pac-Man wrestling women while wearing long underwear under his boxing trunks to conceal that he has duct tape wrapped around his crotch, for the part of Andy's wrestling that involved frottage, which would be all of it. They should just make "Pac-Man" into a rigged game show. It could air between cartoons on WPIX! -- K. A while ago, WPIX changed their logo from the World Trade Center to that dancing frog, and I still think the terrorists blew up the wrong one. I liked them better when they were an independent rerun station, especially when they'd air filler consisting of kids attempting to play video games over the phone between Deputy Droopalong cartoons. ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Re: Barry's Astronomy-style Pork Date: Thu, 7 Nov 2002 09:22:53 GMT Gregory King (greg@flyingpawn.com) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > I apologize if this article has ruined your beautiful dream. > > Coincidentally, I had a dream last night where (someone claiming to be) > Kibo came to visit me at my parents' house. > > All I really remember is that he RUINED everything. Everything? You mean I somehow ruined that live-action "Cat In The Hat" movie with the really horribly deformed Mike Myers in hideous makeup that makes small children cry? I find it hard to believe that even I could ruin something which is already as terrifyingly defective as that movie is going to be. I also don't think I ruined all the dairy products they sell at Walgreen's. I think that happened naturally. It just seems to happen whenever milk sits next to a triple-priced burrito for more than two months. I also did not ruin the burritos from Walgreen's, although I did prevent them from getting three times tastier when they marked them up from 33c to 99c. I did, however, ruin the final season of "Happy Days", when they renamed the show "Potsie's Place" and they introduced me playing Potsie Junior. I was only eight, but I should still be blamed. You may remember the "TV Guide" cover where I'm sitting on Potsie's knee, made up like a ventriloquist dummy. This is why I now go by the name Kibo, because the producers decided that instead of paying me it would be cheaper to legally change my name to Potsie Jr., so I could no longer use my original name because it had been legally changed, and I can't keep calling myself Potsie Jr. because they threatened to sue me for approrpriating the valuable intellectual property of "Potsie's Place", so now I'm Kibo. I also apologize for the episode where I burned down the library while playing with matches so the entire town had to pitch in rebuilding the library and we put on shiny tuxedos and sang about the Dewey Decimal System to a medley of disco and rap tunes. Oh, also, I ruined the environment when I built a solid Styrofoam factory to produce toxic, indestructible plastic animation cels for Ted Turner to draw "Captain Planet" on. When all life on Earth is destroyed, you can put up a plaque saying it was all my fault, except for the milk at Walgreen's, and those burritos, which will probably survive the destruction of the ozone layer, and will also still have cold spots after the cosmic rays fry the planet and anything that can enjoy burritos. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go ruin Pepto-Bismol by whispering in the ear of sleeping pharmaceutical executives: "TEAL! TEAL! TEAL!" -- K. Mike Myers as "The Cat In The Hat" is the most horrifying image burned into my retinas since Bruce Jenner wore hot pants. ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: One more thing I'm not going to be eating. Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002 07:28:31 GMT Although it's rare, once in a while I find something at my local Asian grocery store so strange that I refuse to taste it, even if it's cheese-free. This time it's a marginally-bilingual vial from Thailand: WATER GIANT BUG ESSENCE ESSENCE DE WATER GIANT BUG I figured it was a mistranslation, because it was part of a product line which includes vials of various plant extracts (such as durian and banana and pandan, two of which taste the same) and who would be so crazy as to sell vials of a clear fluid made by squishing bugs in some sort of tiny hydraulic press? The ingredients list explains that it's "mangdana extract". So I went to the Web to look up "mangdana": [from Thailand's Office Of The National Culture Commission] -> -> Thai Name:ÊMangdana -> Common Name:ÊGiant Water Bug -> Scientific Name:Hemiptera -> -> It is a bug with two pairs of wings. The feet of the front pair -> are hard and the end is thin and soft while the hind pair are thin -> and a bit shorter. It has a mouth which pierces and sucks. The male -> has a pointed tail and is more fragrant when cooked than the female. -> The female lays eggs on the grass during the rainy season. The bug -> lives in swamps and rice fields. Since it likes light and moonlight, -> it can be caught easily. It is eaten as food and the male is also -> used for flavouring different kinds of spicy paste sauce. It fetches -> a high price so it provides additional income for villagers. Okay, so I guess I did buy a bottle of bug juice because I was thinking "Ha ha, I can make fun of this because it's mislabeled as bug juice" when really everyone in Thailand is saying "Ha ha, we made Kibo buy bug juice by cleverly disguising our bug juice as itself." But the big question is, what sort of bugs? They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, that Web page has a picture which says: "COCKROACHES COCKROACHES COCKROACHES COCKROACHES COCKROACHES COCKROACHES" ...one hundred sixty-six and two-thirds times. And I don't mean the little bitty New York cockroaches. I mean the big chunky California cockroaches, the ones that look exactly like the ones Archie McPhee sells, only bigger. But of course on closer inspection, these aren't just cockroaches. Real cockroaches would be too boring for Thailand to export. These are some other similar insect similar to a cockroach with giant scorpion pincers that look like devil horns. So I apologize to these bugs for calling them cockroaches. These are bigger and more demonic. A great Thai cooking site, ThaiTable.com (which has the same name as a company which sells Thai entrees I used to enjoy) has more details: => The Thai water bugs are about 3 inches long, and look much like a => big big version of its North American buddy. The water bugs live in => the rice fields and farmers catch them at night by using a light to => lure the bugs into a net. => => The scent of the bug is important in Thai cuisine, especially in => nam prig or chili sauce type of dishes. The wings and head are removed, => and the rest of the body, including the legs, are eaten. => => Water bugs are very difficult to find at Oriental markets. So far, => I can only locate them at a few markets in California. However, => the artificial scent is a lot easier to find. It comes in a tiny jar => with a dropper wrapped in a tiny box that says "Mangdana essence". => => A few words on How to Speak Thai: Mangda has two meanings. One refers => to a water bug. The other refers to a pimp! I checked, and the bottle I have claims to be real mangdana juice, not artificial, and I got a no-frills vial with no box or dropper, and it's the kind made from bugs, not pimps. So, there's no way I'm putting this mystery ichor into my mouth. OKAY, YOU GUYS TALKED ME INTO IT! I'm opening the vial now. It smells almost exactly like turpentine. Given that the ingredients involve a mixture of bugs, propylene glycol (antifreeze) and ethyl alcohol (actually the last one is two ingredients: "ethyl, alcohol") I suspect that I am smelling the solvents, not the bugs. Now I am putting a drop of it on my finger... Hmm, it has no taste. Oh, wait, nothing came out because there's a plastic stopper jammed into the mouth of the vial. Uh oh. I suspect it's going to smell REALLY turpentiney when I get the vial all the way open. Excuse me a moment, I'm going to go open this over the bathtub. Ecch! Know that clove oil the dentist swabs on your gums before sticking in the hypodermic needle? And the flash of pain immediately afterwards? This manages to achieve a flavor similar to a clove-turpentine-banana smoothie with a twist of agony from both the awful flavor and the idea that liquid bugs are now circulating to every cell of my body. Because this is an extract, of course it tastes lousy by itself. The question is, would this stinky bug squirt taste good if I put just one drop of it into a yummy durian cake? Well, first of all, I'm not going to try doing that, because it would be too much work, and secondly I'm not even sure the durian cake would be yummy even if it was uncontaminated by bug broth. So, I've tasted pure bug extract. Now you people owe me. -- K. The previous item I bought which I will never, ever eat is another bug-based product from Thailand. ThaiTable.com informs me that in Thai the name means "express train" although my can just says "bamboo carterpillar". It's a whole can of pickled worms named after Jimmy Carter. I need to find some way to seal the can in a block of clear plastic so I can't accidentally open it. (If these are what express trains look like in Thailand, I'd hate to see the slow trains.) Fun fact: While spell-checking this article, my computer insisted that there is no such word as "ichor" and demanded that I change it to one of these: itcher rich chair minor Escher iPod either into inbox other Corel court ITC Kibo Kino Osco TiVo Viacom biform limo ...for some reason, when I say a word its tiny little brain doesn't know, it thinks it probably should have been one of the other words I used that it didn't know, because about three-quarters of that list are words I taught it. So it tends to try to change everything to "Kibo", "durian", or "shazbot". Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go flush bug juice down the toilet. -- K. This stuff's aftertaste is so vile that it's making me lose count of how many times I've ended this article. -- K. ECCH! ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Re: One more thing I'm not going to be eating. Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 06:57:34 GMT Pugg (pugg71@hotmail.com) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > Fun fact: While spell-checking this article, my computer insisted > > that there is no such word as "ichor" > > Kibo's spell-checker makes baby H.P. Lovecraft cry! Baby Gary Gygax, > too! Hey, you already made one followup to my article. Stop making two followups to my articles! Only I get to do that! I'll explain why in my two followups to this article. Does anyone else think it would be fun to get trapped in an elevator with Gary Gygax and ask him lots of questions about logical inconsistencies in "Dungeons & Dragons"? Especially if it's the crappy movie and not the board game? And has anyone else here actually played the board game version? (Yes, there was one. It was "Dungeons & Dragons" without all that hard math -- "Is the number on the die less than 20? What do these two dice add up to?" -- was replaced by a spinner and some cards.) Also, why won't Matt McIrvin write us "Stanley Kubrick's H.P. Strangelovecraft"? -- K. I practically had to tie my hands down to avoid going off on a rant here about historical inaccuracies in Nethack... Also, the REAL Gary Gygax knows that there's no such thing as Hobbits, only Halflings! ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Re: One more thing I'm not going to be eating. Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 06:48:24 GMT [on tasting a vial of insect flavoring for insect-based pastries] David DeLaney (dbd@gatekeeper.vic.com) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > It smells almost exactly like turpentine. Given that the ingredients > > involve a mixture of bugs, propylene glycol (antifreeze) and ethyl alcohol > > (actually the last one is two ingredients: "ethyl, alcohol") I suspect > > that I am smelling the solvents, not the bugs. > > Uh-oh, pure ethyl has been known to cause Wacky Mishaps! May be you need to > rethink... Is this going to be the episode where I have to do the Jitterbug at Club Babalu while I'm going blind? Or is it the one where I get locked in my personal walk-in meat locker that smells like bug juice? I don't care, as long as it isn't the one where I alphabetize everything in Gale Gordon's hardware store and then he carefully leans over the pasta machine so that I can accidentally put his paper necktie into it in slow motion and then he reminds me not to turn on the soap suds machine and then I turn on the soap suds machine. (It's just like the "Pull Rope To Drop Walls" segment of Bob Hope's worst movie, except that it ends with soap suds all over the place.) By the way, Darla, I checked at another pet store today, and I still can't find your favorite bacon-flavored soap bubbles for dogs. Fun fact: Years ago, I bought a bottle of insect flavor that was intended to be used by people who were having trouble getting their pet iguanas to eat regular meat -- sort of a Hamburger Helper for lizards. But I can't remember what it tasted like, so it probably wasn't as bad as this insect flavor for humans. -- K. Some of the local Star Markets used to have pet departments where they sold live goldfish, but they eliminated all the edible pets, but at least the Super 88 still has live fish and the occasional Death Crab. ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology,alt.fan.beable From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Re: Eat my shorts! Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002 07:55:47 GMT Beable van Polasm (beable@NOS.PAM.beable.com.THANKS) wrote: > > http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2002/11/09/1036308528213.htm > > Eddie Fitzmaurice wrote: > > -> Losing weight off your buttocks and hips could soon involve nothing > -> more arduous than pulling on a pair of underpants impregnated with > -> seaweed extract and caffeine. > > Now if they impregnated them with HELIUM, this would make sense. But then we'd have to retire the expression "Who cut the cheese?" in favor of "Who popped a balloon?" Also, the Goodyear blimp would cause kids to point to the sky and yell, "LOOK! IT'S THE GOODYEAR FLYING UNDERPANTS!" > -> Each Wonderslim garment is impregnated with a seaweed and caffeine > -> mixture which is massaged into the skin by the movements of the > -> wearer. > > So you still have to MOVE? That'll never catch on. If people > WANTED to exercise, they WOULD! And I can prove your theory by simply turning on my TV: 90% of all late-night infomercials are for mail-order excercise equipment. Because infomercials are just for people too flabby to get up and go to a store. > -> It is claimed the ingredients interact with natural chemicals in > -> the body, causing fat from around the bottom and thighs to > -> dissolve. > > But what about the "fat" in your "fat"? Will that dissolve? My question is: When it dissolves, where does it go? Does it come out somewhere? It's not the corners of your eyes, is it? > -> It is the latest in a growing list of so-called smart clothes - > -> garments that go beyond the normal bounds of duty. > > You mean like underpants that cover your WHOLE BODY? At last, clothing designed for today's mime! > -> These include a T-shirt impregnated with a substance called > -> pro-vitamin, which it is claimed turns into vitamin C on contact > -> with human skin. > > Heyyyy, if the T-shirt turns into vitamin C, is that like a dissolving > T-shirt? Once again, science goes horribly wrong as they find another way to ruin edible underwear. What's wrong with NORMAL edible underwear? > -> Each T-shirt imparts the equivalent of two lemons, Fuji Spinning > -> Company spokesman Makoto Suzuki said. > > "Our T-shirts have MORE LEMONS than our competitor's T-shirts! BANZAI!" > said Mr Suzuki. Please don't call me when they stuff two durians into a t-shirt. > [...] > > -> He added that the company was also working on a range of > -> vitamin-enhancing knickers, specially designed for career women too > -> busy to formulate their own nutrition programs. > > "Too busy to eat? Let your knickers do it for you!". Can this work? > If you're too busy to eat, how are you going to find time to buy > some vitamin knickers every day? Also, WHERE'S THE OXYGUM! These new underpants that eat lunch for you -- please tell me these aren't advertised by Fonzie pointing to a burrito and saying "SIT ON IT!" Also, I don't want to know about it if there's another product with Chachi saying "WA WA WA!" -- K. I still have an awful taste in my mouth from that vial of stuff which was the Thai equivalent of Nestle Quik except that instead of being chocolate-flavored it was roach-flavored. If Thailand and Japan merged, would they start selling roach-flavored underpants? ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Re: Eat my shorts! Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 08:25:11 GMT [regarding underpants that "dissolve" your body's assfat] Jacob W. Haller (spog@jwgh.org) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > My question is: When it dissolves, where does it go? Does it come out > > somewhere? It's not the corners of your eyes, is it? > > I thought that with these sorts of schemes the fat was supposed to melt > away! Not melt off, because that would be kind of gross if you think > about it, but melt away, because then you can pretend that the fat is > melting somewhere way off in the distance, far from anywhere you are > likely to go to. Like Jonathan Frakes's sock drawer or something. "Captain, I found this lipid substance while I was looking for my pornography... perhaps we should have THE BOY look into it." "Yes, I concur. Send for THE BOY." (I'm watching reruns of the early episodes where all the other characters were so jealous of Wesley's non-subnormal intelligence that they only ever referred to him as "THE BOY" in this really loud sarcastic voice, even when he was in the same room. I think Wesley hacked the Starfleet computer to transfer Barclay to the Enterprise just so they'd have someone else to mock.) > So the fat probably dissolves to someplace else, like the locker room of > the Fleet Center or something. This is to be contrasted with fat that > is removed as part of cosmetic surgery by Michael Jordan for reasons I > won't go into. Does the Fleet Center's locker room have a glass wall so you can watch the hockey players undressing to see if they're wearing fat-dissolving underwear, like the Molson Centre in Montreal? (I like how in the corridors below street level there are all these incongruous stone walls with barred jail-style windows sticking out in odd places because they forgot to tear down the antique train station before they built the hockey arena on top of, and inside of, it.) I haven't been in the Fleet Center since they built it (a block back from where Boston Garden was bulldozed because of a Big Dig spinoff involving widening the street to build a "superplatform" for trains) mainly because I don't like the Boston Bruins (evil hockey team) or the Boston Celtics (basketball is boring.) There's no way I'm going to pay fifty-eight bucks to go to a hockey game just to see a team I like lose to the Bruins. The Bruins are doing quite well this year, because they know just when to start whacking the other team's players in the face with their sticks. I expect the Fleet Center will get replaced by another stadium soon, because the roof will undoubtedly collapse from the weight of all the banners they've been hanging from it -- every year, the Celtics and Bruins retire another seven or eight players' numbers. Soon they'll have to start giving new players four-digit hexadecimal numbers. Fenway Park is much closer to my apartment, but I have nothing against the Red Sox, even if they have that deformed two-dimensional pitcher with one long leg and one short leg attached in a pretzel shape who advertises groceries at the Fenway Star Market. (Thankfully, they erased the deformed guy from their window once the baseball season ended.) And I have never been anywhere near where the New England Patriots play, mainly because I live in Boston, not New England. -- K. I think there's a soccer team too (the New England Revolution) but I have no idea where they play, assuming they're not just an imaginary team made up for a video game. At least in Los Angeles you know they have an actual soccer team because all the safety posters on the subway show pictures of LA Galaxy players (the LA Galaxy logo is a nacho cheez Dorito. Apparently Los Angeles seceded from the Milky Way and joined a triangular yellow galaxy.) ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Re: Swim Team Story of the Day Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002 08:21:28 GMT Paula (mmmtoblerone@earthlink.ent) wrote: > > While watching my kids at swim team practice, I noticed one of the > little boys grabbing at his speedo and dancing around a lot. His mom > was not around and the coaches were occupied elsewhere, so, ever > helpful, I asked him if he needed to go to the bathroom. "No," he > replied and kept on grabbing and dancing. I said, "Are you sure you > don't need to go to the bathroom? Go ahead and I'll tell the coaches > where you had to go and that you'll be right back. I know you won't be > in trouble or anything." "I don't have to go potty," he told me, "I'm > just playing with myself." What sort of bleak and horrible dystopia do we live in where little boys are allowed to wear Speedos? In my day, we wore swim trunks, which were so named because they were the same shape and size as your car's trunk, and were fastened with six or seven drawstrings that wouldn't hold, and were lined with some sort of plastic netting that the supermarket puts onions in. And in gym class, our shorts were only short in the sense that they were wider than they were tall, and we had to turn sideways to fit through the doorway because of the giant folds of canvas jutting out from the sides of our hips. In school we wore a wide variety of wide shorts, trunks, bloomers, pantaloons, plus-fours, and knickerbockers, and we didn't get screwed up none, at least not by the comically oversize shorts, just by the dodgeball matches. Know how in "Peanuts", Charlie Brown is always wearing short pants two feet wide by two inches tall? Scale those up by a factor of ten to normal human size and imagine me standing ducking bumpy red rubber balls thrown at my face while wearing two giant hoops of starched fabric that extend out several feet to each side of my hips, and the other team got an extra point if they tossed the ball through either of them. Occasionally they'd make us play some stupid game involving a war-surplus parachute, and we'd keep getting it confused with our gym shorts, and by the end of the day someone would be wearing only a parachute and nobody would notice. It made baseball games more fun because one good breeze and you'd score a home run as your body sailed over the outfield. Amazingly, the giant gym shorts claimed to come in "small", "medium", and "large", and the size was printed right on the leg, to save you the trouble of finding an eleven-foot-wide measuring tape to see what size yours were. I took a "small", which, when converted to Earth measurements, was an XXXXXXXXXXL, where each "X" stands for "room for an extra person". It was all so much better than having to wear spandex. Why would anyone want little boys to wear Speedos? On second thought, I don't want to know, it probably has something to do with gym teachers being Speedophiles. -- K. In a perfect world, gym shorts would be so uncomfortable that it would make no difference if bullies gave you a wedgie, and the bullies would be sad that wedgies had become useless, and they'd cry, and you'd point at them and laugh while suffering. ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Re: Swim Team Story of the Day Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 07:10:52 GMT Paula (mmmtoblerone@earthlink.ent) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > Paula (mmmtoblerone@earthlink.ent) wrote: > > > > > > While watching my kids at swim team practice, I noticed one of the > > > little boys grabbing at his speedo and dancing around a lot. > > > > What sort of bleak and horrible dystopia do we live in where little boys > > are allowed to wear Speedos? > > Hey, if it were up to me, nobody would be wearing speedos. They do have > the option of wearing speedo brand "jammers" which are kind of like swim > trunks, only they stay up because they are tighter lycra stuff. I have > heard that the boys on the team chose speedos instead. However, many > older boys refuse to swim competetively because in older kid > competitions, they only allow the small speedos. > > Why don't you take over the team, rename it the Death Rays, design a > logo and require them all to wear jammers already? I think the boys would be in the junior division, the A.R.K Death Crabs. The A.R.K Death Dot and the A.R.K Death Rays would be the professional swim teams that compete professionally at professional swimming for millions of dollars, all of which would go directly to whoever designed their logos, even if they lost. Oh, and one of the farm teams would be the A.R.K Death Of Bob Hope In A Horrible Zeppelin Wreck. You can imagine how cool that logo would be. > > [...] In school we wore a wide variety of wide > > shorts, trunks, bloomers, pantaloons, plus-fours, and knickerbockers, > > and we didn't get screwed up none, at least not by the comically oversize > > shorts, just by the dodgeball matches. Know how in "Peanuts", Charlie > > Brown is always wearing short pants two feet wide by two inches tall? > > Good grief, Charlie Brown, we went to the same elementary school! Then > I went to junior high where the boys got to wear cotton tee-shirts and > shorts but the girls had to wear these polyester-infested shirts and > shorts. If you weren't being chafed, you were being slow roasted. Not > only was the size listed, but also you had to write your name in this > one spot that wouldn't even hold my first name only you had to put your > last name because we all know that everyone performs better in sports > when called by their last name at all times and my last name was never > going to fit in that space but the teachers didn't like it when it came > out so itty bitty that they couldn't yell at me by last name until they > actually bothered to learn my name instead of trying to read it off my > shirt or shorts. This reminds me, I recently got a big catalog of supplies for gym teachers. I'm not kidding. It's a big book of whistles and dodgeballs and parachutes and all sorts of special-purpose tools for humiliating us nerds through special new made-up games that are only played in one gym class that bought all its equipment from a random page of the catalog. I've been wanting to go through the whole catalog and make fun of everything for some time, I'll try to do that this weekend. > > Why would anyone want little boys to wear Speedos? On second thought, > > I don't want to know, it probably has something to do with gym teachers > > being Speedophiles. > > I am so glad that my swimming children are girls. They make them wear > very modest one piece suits at the same time that they insist that the > boys freeze to death and are forced to play with themselves. In this > sport alone is it actually better to be a girl. I think girls make better mud wrestlers, too. And there's no way I'd pay to see all-male Foxy Boxing. -- K. I still wonder why there are no TV commercials produced by the Union Of Gym Teachers where a fireman tells us, "This family would not have died if they had known how to climb a cargo net..." We are, however, getting baffling ones which I'm told are supposed to make kids exercise, where they show a kid being suffocated by a bunch of infinitives all over his skin while the announcer says, "VERB! IT'S WHAT YOU DO!" I'm not kidding, that's the slogan: "VERB! IT'S WHAT YOU DO!" I suspect it's made by the same people who made the one where Frankenstein's monster and Sherlock Holmes are best friends who tell you to turn off the lights. The local mall has that ad campaign in the form of huge externally-glowing backlit posters. ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Re: Swim Team Story of the Day Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2002 06:23:43 GMT Kenton Cernea (requiem@socket.net) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com): > > > > I recently got a big catalog of supplies for gym teachers. > > Please tell me if they have pickleball supplies. I played pickleball > in 10th grade, and have never seen nor heard of it ever since. It's > like ping-pong with giant paddles and a whiffle-ball on a > badminton-sized slice of the gym. Very Kibological. Oh, do they ever have pickleball. And every other weird made-up trademarked sport created solely to exploit the gullibility of gym teachers. Dozens and dozens of sissy fake sports designed to not be too hard for us bookish kids who aren't up to the rigors of real Ping-Pong or badminton. I'll write up a full book report on this catalog this weekend, once I figure out what to say about the horrifying "CO-OPER BLANKET". I requested the catalog because I was researching Super Pinkies after someone mentioned them here, and wow, have I found a treasure trove of things every bit as interesting as Super Pinkies. -- K. Super Pinkies are not the same as Super Pinky Lee, who would be ripped off by Super Pee-wee Herman, who would get accused of hoarding Super Child Porn, which is a terrible thing to own, unlike ordinary Super Porn. ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Re: Dumb examples of sex in 'educational' books Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002 08:51:05 GMT Tim Chmielewski (chuma@dcsi.net.au) wrote: > > Some kids would be confused when trying to read about sex in books as they > might think they would get cut in half with a big knife if they tried to > have sex (most of the books only show diagrams.) So does your geometry textbook, but please don't tell me if you're pleasuring yourself while flipping through it with your other hand. > The dumbest "representation" of sexual intercourse I have seen in an > 'educational' book was what look like two entwinined robot combine > harvesters with one dumping a load into another one. Well, I'm glad to see you didn't have your imagination crushed by that age. Those of us in the United States had all our imagination, creativity, and human emotions destroyed by our school system somewhere between "Goofus & Gallant" and "and sometimes Y". Not to mention Base Twelve. > It reminded me of the Goodies episode where they had to make a gender > educational film and they couldn't mention S-E-X. I haven't seen "The Goodies" in twenty years. My local PBS station used to show it (because all our government-funded non-commercial TV stations show one hour of "Sesame Street" for every twenty-three hours of stuff made by the BBC, to ensure our kids grow up with Cockney accents) but it got yanked off the air because British humor tends to offend Americans. (We don't want little boys to learn to run around at double speed while wearing dresses.) Fun fact: Graeme Garden was NOT actually Isaac Asimov, although the show might have not been any weirder if he had been. And even though I haven't seen the show in twenty years, I can still sing the theme song. I also have vivid memories of their movie, in which they climbed a giant beanstalk to a nudist camp. And the episode where the giant kitten knocked over London's Post Office Tower. And the episode where Bill Oddie had to paint everything black and white so he could make a black and white movie. And the one where they bred Rolf Harrises in captivity, and explained what would happen if they put Benny Hill in the same cage as Morecambe & Wise. Also, I remember Morecambe & Wise. But I'd rather see someone release DVDs of "The Goodies" and the best years of Benny Hill (his 1970s color episodes, not the lame 1980s ones that are currently available.) Fun fact #2: "The Goodies" was the first TV show to kill a viewer. It was the "Ecky Thump" episode. A guy choked to death laughing at people hitting each other with blood sausages. -- K. Fun fact #3: I'd watch almost anything else before sitting through an episode of "Absolutely Fabulous" or "Are You Being Served Yet?"... even "The Red Green Show". ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Re: Dumb examples of sex in 'educational' books Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 07:24:02 GMT Lots42 (lots42@aol.com) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > I'd watch almost anything else before sitting through an episode > > of "Absolutely Fabulous" or "Are You Being Served Yet?"... > > even "The Red Green Show". > > Yet? Wherein comes the 'Yet'? I remember 'Are You Being Served'? Well, see, YOU haven't been served YET. That's why you can't have more tea, because you haven't had any tea yet, and you'll never have any tea until you realize that Steve Meretzky wants you to type "DROP NO TEA" and deposit a check for a negative amount to withdraw money to defend yourself against a heavily-armed Woody Allen and also if you cheat and turn to the last page of the "Zork" book it makes fun of you for cheating at a stupid "Zork" book. "Are You Being Served Yet?", which may have only aired inside my head, is just like "Are You Being Served?" except the woman with the funny funny hair color has slightly less funny hair. > If I walked fast on the way home from school I could see the last > fifteen minutes of it. > > This led to a lot of frustrating moments later where I would be > enjoying the show then get to the part I saw. Yeah, it sort of spoils those twist endings where Forest Whitaker reveals that THEY'RE ALL ROBOTS!!! -- K. and HE'S A PSYCHLO!!! and BILL COSBY SAID HE WAS RUINING FAT ALBERT!!! ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Re: Dumb examples of sex in 'educational' books Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2002 05:19:59 GMT Pugg (pugg71@hotmail.com) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > Lots42 (lots42@aol.com) wrote: > > > > > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > > > > > I'd watch almost anything else before sitting through an episode > > > > of [...] "Are You Being Served Yet?"... > > > > > > Yet? Wherein comes the 'Yet'? I remember 'Are You Being Served'? > > > > Well, see, YOU haven't been served YET. That's why you can't have > > more tea, because you haven't had any tea yet, and you'll never have > > any tea until you realize that Steve Meretzky wants you to type > > "DROP NO TEA" and deposit a check for a negative amount to withdraw > > money to defend yourself against a heavily-armed Woody Allen and also > > if you cheat and turn to the last page of the "Zork" book it makes > > fun of you for cheating at a stupid "Zork" book. > > Y'know, it saddens me that I "get" most of Kibo's stupid video game > references, but almost none of his stupid movie or tv references. For the benefits of those who are culturally deprived in a different way from Pugg: Steve Meretzky was responsible for the puzzles in some of Infocom's early computer adventure games (the all-text ones), including "Zork" and the two Douglas Adams-inspired properties, "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy" and "Bureaucracy". In the "Hitch-Hiker's" game your inventory list always included NO TEA and you couldn't acquire the tea because you obviously can't have tea and no tea at the same time, so you had to type "DROP NO TEA". Bureaucracy ripped the lid off those mysterious orange or green stickers that say "3" on your junk mail, and you had to cash a paycheck which had a typo consisting of a minus sign before the number, and avoid a gun nut who was always described as looking like "a heavily- armed Woody Allen." In the days when computer games were allowed to consist entirely of words, books were also considered a form of game-style entertainment (as evidenced by the "Dungeons & Dragons: Choose Your Own Adventure" books) and Steve Meretzky wrote a few "Zork" puzzle books, which were a bit more entertaining than all the competing ones because he's silly. Also there would occasionally be a page where the book said "If you have the Enchanted Underpants Of Velvis, go to page 253, otherwise go to page 252" and if you went to page 253 it would tell you there was no such item in the book, you filthy cheater. The last page would also be a cheat trap, with the actual endings hidden somewhere in the middle. Of course, these books could only contain about thirty minutes' worth of entertainment (more if you cheated) so they didn't really compare to the computer games, where you'd sit there staring at a blue screen for hours tearing your hair out trying to guess that you were expected to type "DROP NO TEA". > > "Are You Being Served Yet?", which may have only aired inside my head, > > is just like "Are You Being Served?" except the woman with the funny > > funny hair color has slightly less funny hair. > > Kibo, I think you're mixing up "Are You Being Served" with "What's > Happening Now." Remember, one relied almost entirely on fat jokes for > laughs, while the other deftly blended the fat jokes with gay jokes > and double entendres. I think you're thinking of "Happy Days Again", "More Happy Days", "Laverne & Shirley & Co.", "Laverne DeFazio & Shirley Feeney", or "More Real People", all of which I've actually watched because I like anything where they're not really sure what their own title is. > Wasn't there a series with exactly the same cast as "Are You Being > Served" playing the exact same characters, but they all worked in a > hotel, or on a farm, or a youth hostel, or something? That one was "Are You Being On A Farm Yet, Or In A Youth Hostel, Or Something, Yet?" It was cancelled after only two episodes (that's half a season in England) but to recoup the costs the BBC sold the title to Universal, which tried to slap the title on one of the versions of "Brazil" which ended with a big dance number where everyone got married and lived happily ever after. Terry Gilliam hated that title, along with the other fifty or sixty Universal tried (the best was "The Electro-Circuit Ball-Bearing Memory Buster") but fortunately he was able to get the film released with his title and his ending, where Jonathan Pryce was tortured into insanity and went on to star in a movie based on a theme-park ride ("Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Movie", Disney's followup to "The Country Bears: The Movie".) > Not that the setting mattered much to me; I only watched "Are You > Being Served" for its sensitive portrayal of gay culture in England > during the 70's. Wow, you've been gay a long time. If I ever turn gay, years from now, I'll only be comfortable watching shows from after I turned gay, so I'd be limited to seeing the twenty-fourth season of "The Simpsons" (the 3-D one) and episodes of Conan O'Brien's show where he does "In The Year 2100" and of course reruns of "seaQuest 2032". Incidentally, a memo was just leaked from Viacom detailing their plans to start an all-gay cable channel (the second one, after "E!") called "Outlet". They say they're going to make it a subscription-only channel so that nobody will ever complain about accidentally seeing it, but we know they're really just doing that so that the cable company will know precisely which customers ask to have their television made gayer so that the manufacturers of Zima will know where to send the free samples. I hope this channel doesn't get started because then I'll no longer be able to see "Knight Rider" on the free stations. > > > This led to a lot of frustrating moments later where I would be > > > enjoying the show then get to the part I saw. > > > > Yeah, it sort of spoils those twist endings where Forest Whitaker > > reveals that THEY'RE ALL ROBOTS!!! > > > > -- K. > > > > and HE'S A PSYCHLO!!! > > > > and BILL COSBY SAID HE > > WAS RUINING FAT ALBERT!!! > > See? This is what I was on about earlier. One of this week's typically terrible "New Twilight Zone" episodes (the UPN ones hosted by an out-of-place-seeming Forest Whitaker, not the 1980s CBS episodes or the subsequent syndicated episodes) had that twist ending. See, these futuristic soldiers had to go into this forest to hunt this deadly offscreen creature that nobody had ever seen, and it was very dangerous, because their prey was THE!!! MOST!!! DANGEROUS!!! GAME!!! and it turned out that it was A GUY!!! AND!!! THEY!!! WERE!!! ALL!!! ROBOTS!!! That twist was so novel that it requires that many EXCLAMATION!!! POINTS!!! to slow it down to where your brains can comprehend how awesome it isn't. Forest Whitaker's previous work had been directing the live-action "Fat Albert And The Cosby Kids: The Movie" a few months ago, except that never happened because Bill Cosby fired him so that he couldn't ruin the timeless elegance of the crudely-animated cartoon about a bunch of deformed kids who were black and square. (Forest was going to use a big foam rubber suit to make Fat Albert fat enough, and computer animation to make Weird Harold tall enough, in order to make the live action look exactly like the cartoon, except in a creepy way. I have no idea precisely what convinced Bill Cosby that this revival was going horribly wrong, given that he was the one who made the worst of the three "I Spy" revival movies -- "Leonard Part 6" -- maybe Forest Whitaker had Fat Albert eat the wrong brand of pudding pop.) And before that, Forest Whitaker had been John Travolta's sidekick in "Battlefield Earth". He was the one who turned against John Travolta and joined forces with the humans to imprison in him Fort Knox until the sequel (which never got made.) There was also supposed to be a cartoon series (animated in France) but that never seems to have materialized either, so we'll never get to see Forest Whitaker with rubber tubes hanging out of his nose ever again. Unless he gets lung cancer. And that sounds almost as horrible to watch as "Battlefield Earth". Forest Whitaker used to be a respectable person, but lately he's been involved with three Bad Ideas in a row, so I think we can put him on that list of actor/directors who should be quarantined from any movies and shows that shouldn't be ruined. It would be okay for him to be in "Baby Geniuses 2: Superbabies", though. -- K. Something I forgot to mention in the discussion of the live-action "Pac-Man: The Movie": The boneheads who are making that -- a company called Crystal Sky -- have apparently finally completed production on their previous project... "BABY GENIUSES 2: SUPERBABIES". Wow. These bozos might actually be able to make "Pac-Man: The Movie" turn out even WORSE than everyone expects it to be. ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: bad superheroes on TV (was: Dumb examples of sex in 'educational' books) Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2002 21:55:45 GMT talysman (talysman@globalsurrealism.com) wrote: > > [...] that made-for-teevee "wonder woman" where cathy lee > crosby was attacked by mud; But she's not attacked by it. She's just locked in a room where she LOOKS at it slowly oozing down a wall ... AND IT'S NEAPOLITAN! I seem to recall she worries about it over a whole commercial break before she just kicks open the door without ever touching the goop. I have no idea what the hell it was supposed to be, or why it came in three flavors, none of which did anything but still somehow scared Wonder Woman so much that she ran away from it after staring at it for several minutes. I get the feeling that that TV-movie was so low-budget (even for a TV-movie) that they couldn't get their only costume dirty. And what a costume! Wonder Woman fights crime in A SEVENTIES JOGGING SUIT! It makes the "Captain America" TV-movies look ambitious (but then again, so did the "Captain America" theatrical movie.) Wonder Woman didn't have any powers and never did anything and didn't even wear that little bathing suit. So what was the point? I'll tell you what the point was: TEDIUM! Like all TV-movies, it was carefully engineered to induce tedium, possibly to make the commercials seem interesting. One of the special things about TV-movies is that ratings get measured during the first thirty seconds of the first airing, so they really don't care about building up word-of-mouth to tell your friends to go see this movie, and they don't even try to keep you interested all the way through. Most TV-movies contain no entertainment at all, just two hours of mind-numbingly actionless filler. There have only been two or three in human history which contained ANY interesting moments. Let's put it this way: If they made a TV-movie and it turned out any good, they wouldn't show it on TV, they'd release it to theaters. (In fact, that's what happened to the pilot movie for "Buck Rogers In The 25th Century".) On the other hand, theatrical movies which turn out so bad that the studio thinks "We can never, ever allow anyone to see this because it would damage our reputation" get aired as "original" TV-movies on Fox and UPN. For instance, "The Tower", in which Paul Reiser is trapped in a skyscraper controlled by a computer designed to murder anyone who pushes the elevator button repeatedly (I am not making this up) but then he makes the building explode by singing "Bad Moon Rising" over and over, off-key. Really, the big "action" scene is PAUL REISER SINGING. This is the only movie which could have been improved if it had William Shatner singing instead. Paul Reiser is so irritating in this movie that they practically had to put up a caption saying "THIS IS PAUL REISER, NOT RICHARD LEWIS". And the Sci-Fi Channel's programming now consists of 50% shows about how ghosts and werewolves and vampyres and the Dean Drive are really, really, really real, really, and 50% awful TV-movies, all of which are "Alien" or "Terminator" knockoffs with no budget so that the only way you can tell the hero and the monster apart is that one of them's Mark-Paul Gosselaar and the other's just some guy who wasn't even on "Saved By The Bell". But I fail to see what this has to do with me getting new eyeglasses next week. Oh, that's right... Cathy Lee Crosby was replaced by Lynda Carter (thankfully) who was a professional eyewear model. You couldn't go to an optician in the 1970s without seeing big posters of Lynda Carter's head with even bigger eyeglasses. She had a face specially designed to promote really huge eyeglasses. Sort of like if Brett Somers was younger and liked to tie up men with her golden lasso. If I wander into the "inspired by comic-book-quality TV" section of the eyewear store, I'll have to be careful not to accidentally buy Clint Howard's eyeglasses from "Space Rangers". -- K. "Space Rangers" is one of those shows where I spent the whole time composing lists of in what order I would want to punch most of the characters in the face, after swooping in with my jetpack to carry Linda Hunt and Gottfried John to a different show. I think the stubbly hero (played by Jeff Kaake), "Doc" (the guy with a mechanical heart he kept taking out to show us, because it was in a CD tray) and "Mimmer" (Clint Howard trying to be EXTRA- geeky) wound up in a three-way tie, followed by the butch woman and the fake Klingon. ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Re: Somebody rip my eyes out for me... Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002 09:02:39 GMT Wiblur the Once (jchapman@aros.net) wrote: > > I just went to the eye doctor to check on the progress of my lasered eye > and why I seem to be going all blind and stuff. Alas, I found out that my > other eye not only needs to get laserated, but operated on as well. Nobody's eye NEEDS to get lased at. In fact, if you look at the laser in the doctor's office, it'll have a sticker right on it saying that you should never, ever look into it! The only way you could retain your sight after laser surgery is if it's all just a scam and the laser is really just a GAF ViewMaster turned backwards! Here's how to tell: If the surgery involves looking at seven still pictures of Popeye which are sort of 3-D in that he's completely flat but he's in front of a completely flat background, you're being ripped off, and also bored. > A week from monday, I go under the knife and since my sight in the newly > bad eye is at 20/200 (and the other one hasn't quite returned to normal > yet), my status on the interwebnet may become more lurkable than in the > past. I have reset the fonts in my reader to gigantor size, but I can't > spend great quantities of time online without some marvelous headaches. Oh, come on, 20/200 is not bad for fonts. I usually take my glasses off when drawing letters, and at around 20/200 (I'm somewhere in that range) the fonts get really big so I can do detailed work, as long as I'm careful not to smudge the ink with my nose. > This post is all about being blind and depressed, but not-bitter. Do you also get the one where you go in for new glasses and they examine your old ones and they tell you, "You know, now you can get those new extra-thin lenses so you won't look like a major dork... oh, these ARE the extra-thin lenses!"? I got that sales pitch last time, although they didn't actually SAY "major dork", but I could see them thinking it the moment they took my glasses away and every nerve ending on the surface of their heads swelled up to the size of a balloon in my super-powerful 20/200 visual field which gives me abilities far beyond those of the terribly deprived normal people. This is why I don't have contacts. For the same reason Clark Kent doesn't. Because it's a pain for him to have to rinse them off and put them in their little protective case every time he needs to use his godlike powers to save the world. I find that a nuisance too. > p.s. Worst of all, we are out of bacon! On the bright side: Corned Beef > and Cabbage for dinner (Yayyyy)! Sounds good, except for the cabbage part, and the corned part. I had freeze-dried beef stew for dinner! It was squishy and crispy at the same time. It was squispy! -- K. I should get new glasses, just in case my eyesight ever improved to the point where I'd be able to see all the scratches on the surface of these. ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Spamorons (was: Somebody rip my eyes out for me...) Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 07:57:38 GMT Andrew Pearson (apearson@pt.lu) wrote: > > In other news of genius spammers, what about spamming half the world > (including .lu addresses for fuck's sake) with adverts for a restaurant > in Sao Paulo. With embedded pictures of the food, and the front door of > the restaurant. ROANNE RESTAURANT: Rua Henrique Martins, 631 - Jardim > Paulista ö S‹o Paulo - SP Fone ö (11) 3887-4516 / 3885-2464 / 3885-5343 > if you want to eat there soon. Oh, I can top that. At my office yesterday (in Coolidge Corner in Brookline, a suburb of Boston) we got physical spam from an actual physical idiot -- someone shoved Xeroxed sheets under every door in the building. They advertised "PETERPANSALE.com", who will deliver construction paper, staples, and Chap Stick to your door. This big-time operator promises that your Chap Stick "may arrive in an hour", and delivery is restricted to the Coolidge Corner area. Curiously, the items for sale are almost exactly the same as what's available at the Walgreen's drugstore downstairs from my office. Or from the CVS drugstore across the street. Or from the other CVS drugstore around the corner. So if you live at this one intersection that has three drugstores and you can't find any of them, call this bonehead if you need some construction paper in the middle of the night. It was emphasized that this is a 24-hour service, so now I know that at least one of the drugstores is open past midnight. And I think this quote from www.PETERPANSALE.com narrows it down: -> Our price is unbeatable from CVS or near your stores.Ê Look below -> our list of product, and get product with lowest price.Ê I've been buying my cardboard at Walgreen's by actually going through the door, but I will consider paying Peter Pansale the extra money to carry it up one flight of stairs for me, if I ever become a total freakin' ameba. Do you think he pronounces his name "Peter Pansail" or "Peter Pansalay"? PETERPANSALE.com appears to have been constructed with something called "The Internet Treasure Chest As Seen On National TV" (www.ITCTV.com) which I guess distinguishes it from those "any-idiot-can-start-an-imaginary- business-online" snake-oil kits that are only sold through LOCAL infomercials. "Now only $59.95 plus S&H", says ITCTV.com. Their sucker's going to have to deliver a lot of Chap Stick within that ten-foot radius to earn it back. (Actually, his business address -- a sixth-floor apartment -- is about three blocks from my office in Coolidge Corner, so now I'm wondering whether he walks, rides a bike, or pulls a little red wagon with a sign saying "CHAP STICK 5c" where one "S" is backwards but not the other.) -> Why do you bother to go to store?Ê Everything you need is here. ->Ê Just click on the product or give us a call.Ê We will get product -> to you very soon.Ê Why wair? PETERPANSALE.com is your source for any sort of single-serving snack food or office supply, whether you eat it or wair it! -- K. Every office door got one sheet of colored letter-size paper and one sheet of white legal-size paper. That's a lot of copying to inform me about a lame fourth choice to buy Chap Stick on this corner. These are the type of gullible dreamers who make Kinko's laugh all the way to the bank (when their employees aren't busy testing to see if their color copier has that imaginary chip that prevents copying dollar bills.) ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Re: And so proceed ad infinitum. Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002 09:21:11 GMT Glenn Knickerbocker (NotR@bestweb.net) wrote: > > They're repaving our parking lot today, and I just looked out the window > to see this procession: A huge dumptruck full of asphalt was followed > by a lower but equally wide spreader, and then a huge but narrower > steamroller behind it going over what was just spread, and a little lawn > tractor-sized roller zipping along at the back, smoothing out the line > left by the big roller. I expected to see a little kid with a Tonka toy > come zooming in next, followed by Stuart Little and Chester the Cricket, > with an enormous Jonathan Swift looming above. I swear that the first time I read this it looked like you said "with an enormous Jonathan Harris looming above", and I thought you meant that the ghost of the beloved "Lost In Space" star was haunting you instead of me because I was bad, and then I felt guilty because I must have done something bad, but then I remembered that I hadn't, so I re-read your post and it fixed itself the second time it swirled around in my brain, so now I understand why you expected to see something other than Jonathan Harris towering over you. -- K. I bought an edition of "Gulliver's Travels" which is padded out with letters Swift wrote to people who didn't like the book. But I bought it at the "Dollar-A-Pound" shop where it was next to the knee-deep pile of used smellies. Dollar-A-Pound, for those who like shopping for clothes while bending over. ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Goofy goggles Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 05:51:28 GMT Next week, I have an appointment to get my eyes checked for the first time in several years. My eyesight hasn't been changing but my current glasses are so scratched up that they look like they have cartoon eyes drawn on them. Of course, the same style of frames are never available in two consecutive years, let alone frames from the era when I got these, back when Usenet was more famous than the Web. I hate having to pick out new frames, because they never have any I like. So I'm floating the question here on this not-such-a-big-deal-anymore Usenet: What sort of glasses should I get? Bear in mind I'm at (if memory serves) something like minus ten diopters per eye, which means lenses that are really thick around the edges. This rules out certain kinds of eyewear, such as the LeVar Burton wraparound oil filter, but allows for interesting new sculptural possibilities if you can think of a clever way to enhance my face with a solid glass veranda or something. I usually just pick out the biggest frames I can find, because I want to get the most glass for my money. Plus if I had little bitty Val Kilmer glasses I'd look like I was looking at you through two glass marshmallows, so I prefer the big glasses where I just look like I'm wearing big glasses. I'm not getting contacts. I tried them many years ago, but the glasses worked better for looking at computer screens, and it was too disorienting to switch back and forth between them and glasses -- to have something to wear with the contacts, I'd have to buy a whole bunch of 50%-larger clothes. Also, is there some way I can ensure that they won't give me raspberry-scented ones like the safety goggles I bought last month? ("I used to be afraid of getting drenched with flying acid, but now I can enjoy pleasant candy scents while my eyes survive the destruction of my face...") -- K. If big glasses aren't cool, why do they design chemistry goggles to fit over them? Also, how large is too ostentatious when it comes to a brass ring in the nose? I just want to scare bullfighters... ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Re: Goofy goggles Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2002 06:12:25 GMT Jacob W. Haller (spog@jwgh.org) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > What sort of glasses should I get? Bear in mind I'm at (if memory serves) > > something like minus ten diopters per eye, which means lenses that are > > really thick around the edges. > > At first I was all like "Why doesn't Kibo just have them put the new > lenses in his old frames so he can save BIG BUX?" But then it occurred > to me that maybe you didn't want to walk around BLIND for the twenty > hours it takes to hew your lenses out of raw obsidan using only > primitive tools or however they make eyeglass lenses these days. No, see, my current eyeglasses are several years old. They're going to disintegrate into a fine cloud of green brass oxide if I don't get the frames replaced along with the lenses. I've already had the nosepiece and the screws and the earpieces replaced at different times, and now structural failure is imminent. Remember, I live on the coast, where the salty air makes metal rot away even if I forget to sweat all over it. And to all who told me to get the extra-thin lenses: I ALREADY HAVE THE EXTRA-THIN LENSES, DAMMIT!!! What, do you think I went out of my way to get glasses this thick? I take a strong prescription because my eyeballs are the shape of coctail weenies because I'M A GENIUS! I'm thinking nobody else has glasses with one big lens and one small lens, so I'm considering getting one pair from the John Lennon collection and one pair from the Charles Nelson Reilly collection and cutting them both in half to make two pairs of glasses so wacky that nobody would notice how thick they are. Either that or I could just get a big ball of glass that encloses my whole head. Except it would probably have to be inside-out because I need demagnification, not magnification. But it's still a good idea. -- K. Also, I'm still not decided on the matter of the nose ring: A two-inch one would look really boss, but a one-inch one wouldn't interfere with lollipops. Is it okay to get one with a big gap in the bottom, for eating? ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Re: ON HAPPYNET, THE NETWORK LOGS ONTO YOU Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 08:35:49 GMT "definitely what" (^#*&$@ennui.org) wrote: > > SBC + Yahoo have a new DSL product with the darkly threatening slogan, > "Internet That Logs Onto You". Is this the presaged return of Yakof > Smirnoff to the American Mainstream? Should i load up on shotgun > shells and sandbags? It depends on what they mean by "logs". And I don't think it's anything to do with logarithms. We must alert the government to retarget all their nuclear missiles at the home of Yakov Smirnoff -- Branson, Missouri. -- K. WHAT A CRATER!!! ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Re: Just checking on something... Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 08:50:17 GMT Sean (linwood@mailandnews.com) wrote: > > So, has the Segway(tm) changed life and Western civilization as we know > them yet? > > I had expected to be informed of this. If something's happened and no > one told me, I'll be more than a little irritated. Get me a Buggy-Rollin' suit and I'll tell you the terrible secret of the Segway -- the first transportation device that causes herpes. WHOOPS! OH, WHAT A GIVEAWAY! I'm sorry I accidentally leaked the secret because now I'll never get a Buggy-Rollin' suit. Hmm. Okay, you guys, if you get me a Buggy-Rollin' suit I'll tell you the OTHER terrible secret about the Segway -- that Dean Kamen was so upset over the discovery that it causes herpes that he didn't even notice that it also causes diarrhea. WHOOPS! Oh, hell with it, give me a Buggy-Rollin' suit anyway. I NEED one. -- K. I'd like an all-chrome one with a little motorized red light in the helmet's visor like a Cylon, please. Also I want to meet Ensign Greenbean. ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: And at White Castle, the seats are really squishy. Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2002 10:25:47 GMT CNN.com once again bashes those filthy Swedes: -> -> Customer: Fast-food, toilets don't mix -> -> Toilet humor -> -> Friday, November 15, 2002 Posted: 3:03 AM EST (0803 GMT) -> -> STOCKHOLM, Sweden (Reuters) -- A customer in an international hamburger -> chain outlet in western Sweden lost his appetite when he discovered the -> restaurant's toilet seats were being washed in its dishwasher alongside -> the kitchen utensils. I like how CNN says "an international hamburger chain outlet" so that they won't get sued by a big scary clown wearing makeup made from ketchup and mustard. -> The man noticed on a visit to the bathroom in the restaurant in Arvika, -> Sweden, that all the toilet seats had been removed. -> -> When he asked staff about the missing seats, an employee took them out of -> a dishwasher where they had been cleaned together with trays and kitchen -> utensils, the Swedish TT news agency reported Thursday, quoting the -> regional newspaper Nya Wermlands-Tidningen. -> -> The employee tried to reassure the customer by saying that the freshly -> washed toilet seat would be warm and pleasant to sit on. What's Swedish for "Ayyy! Sit on it!"? -> A senior representative of the restaurant chain said the incident was a -> mistake and not standard company procedure. Of course! Everyone knows the red and yellow clown tells all employees to NEVER clean the restrooms! -> Arvika's environmental and health inspector later visited the restaurant. ...and there the article ends before getting to the important details, such as: How did this story get into the newspaper? Why would anyone go to the trouble of removing toilet seats and putting them in the dishwasher when it just takes seconds to mop them down? (I know they're not hard to remove, but really, why?) And most importantly, were the seats warmer than the hamburgers? CNN's Web site has one other article tonight which seems like it could have had a humdinger of a headline if it just tried a little harder: => Military dismisses gay linguists Isn't that Ireland's national airline? -- K. Fun fact: My local 7-Eleven suddenly started carrying potato chips ("potato crisps", actually) made in Northern Ireland. They say so on the bag. I have no idea if buying these potato chips will make things blow up overseas, but they're darn fine potato chips (loaded with MSG.) I wouldn't be surprised if these were here in Boston as some sort of IRA funding scheme -- some Boston residents are big supporters of the IRA, as evidenced by a big billboard in the South End. ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Re: And at White Castle, the seats are really squishy. Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2002 05:58:43 GMT Rune Ness (runen@netcom.no) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > -> STOCKHOLM, Sweden (Reuters) -- A customer in an international > > -> hamburger chain outlet in western Sweden lost his appetite when > > -> he discovered the restaurant's toilet seats were being washed > > -> in its dishwasher alongside the kitchen utensils. > > Luckily I've only eaten at one McDonald's restaurant in Sweden. What are > the odds this happened in that one? Probably a million to one! Yes, but those are better odds than getting both Boardwalk and Park Place in their stupid fake rigged "Monopoly" sweepstakes. (Do you have Monopoly in Scandinavia? Are all the streets still named after parts of Atlantic City that now have casinos on them, or are the streets named after fjords?) > > I like how CNN says "an international hamburger chain outlet" so that > > they won't get sued by a big scary clown wearing makeup made from > > ketchup and mustard. > > I, however, am broke, so I'm not afraid of some suit. McDonalds! It's not the money that you should be scared of. Ronald McDonald has far worse ways of punishing us for talking about him on the Internet. For instance, there was this one guy, who said he found a rat in his milkshake, and Ronald McDonald took off his red wig and smothered the guy with it, and it was a lot worse than being suffocated by a regular wig that doesn't smell like rancid clownburger grease. > > -> The man noticed on a visit to the bathroom in the restaurant in > > -> Arvika, Sweden, that all the toilet seats had been removed. > > GAAAAH! ONE LOUSY RESTAURANT VISIT, AND I HAD TO CHOOSE THE MCDONALD'S > IN ARVIKA! GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! > > And the sucky part is, I *know* it's the McDonald's, because there are > no other international fast-food chain franchises in Arvika! One > super-sized Big Mac meal coming right up! Soon there will be no other international fast-food chain franchises anywhere. I think White Castle is only in the United States, so maybe it will be allowed to continue operating, although I think only about seven restaurants are still open (they never quite recovered from the stock market crash of 1929.) I like them even though their hamburgers are tiny, square, and very damp. Does Scandinavia have anything like White Castle? Would a Swedish White Castle serve little meatballs the size of peas? Would Norwegian White Castle serve lutefiskburgers, or isn't lutefisk squishy enough? -- K. Sadly, the original Buzzy's in Boston was torn down last week. Now I don't know where I can go to get french fries that are two inches thick and still raw on the outside! I miss going there at 2:00 in the morning to eat improperly cooked fast food in the middle of a cloverleaf in front of the jail under the highway next to the hospital. ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Re: And at White Castle, the seats are really squishy. Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2002 05:45:04 GMT Lots42 (lots42@aol.com) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) wrote: > > > > Fun fact: My local 7-Eleven suddenly started carrying potato chips > > ("potato crisps", actually) made in Northern Ireland. [...] > > I wouldn't be surprised if these were here in Boston as some > > sort of IRA funding scheme -- > > When I was younger, I liked to draw. ...before Commander Mark took all the fun out of it by emphasizing the violent, fascist, military dictatorship nature of all doodling! (Does anyone but me remember that show?) Mark Kistler's a great guy, I just thought the paramilitary angle to that show seemed a little... odd... > I sort of did it improv, so one scene was a construction worker > digging a hole while an IRS agent watched. But I put IRA on his > briefcase. My mom saw it and was confused and it was only much later > I realized she thought I was drawing terrorists. It's okay as long as you touched it up to make the IRA guy and the construction worker holding hands to represent world peace, as long as you didn't make them the same color. In other foreign snack news, I'm eating Tohato's exciting new product, "Chocorinco 2", yet another Japanese snack made from the same stuff as Cheetos except with something more entertaining than cheez. These are corn puffs which are shaped (for no reason) like pretzels of two different sizes. The little white ones are white chocolate flavor and the big green ones are white chocolate plus green tea flavor. They're actually pretty good if you like the combination of tea, grease, and crunch (which are three of the five food groups in Japan, they forgot to include the other two, dried fish shavings and seaweed-flavored carbon paper.) Tohato seems to specialize in making fake Cheetos of every conceivable color and flavor. Except they haven't yet gotten around to bacon ones. THERE MUST BE BACON CHEETOS SOMEDAY. Or I will tell the potato-chip terrorists to blow up Japan so that Commander Mark can build a giant slave-labor bacon Cheeto factory with huge tank treads so that it can roll around crushing its enemies. I always wonder if Commander Mark wore his uniform in real life. I think he probably did, because he probably needed felt-tip pens all the time, and most clothes don't have those convenient pen holders built into the epaulets. I also wonder whatever happened to him. No, wait -- I just looked him up on the Web, and found a picture of him -- and now I know what he's doing right now -- HE'S SADDAM HUSSEIN! It's always such a shame when art instructors turn evil. If you don't believe me, see www.drawsquad.com for proof that he's Saddam Hussein... although I think that's The Six Million Dollar Man's jumpsuit. OH NO! SADDAM HUSSEIN HAS BIONIC POWERS! AND HE CAN DRAW! -- K. I was born too early for "The Secret City", so I learned to draw from "Captain Kangaroo". Now I can only draw on tissue paper, from the back side. ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Re: And at White Castle, the seats are really squishy. Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2002 22:19:05 GMT Gregory King (greg@flyingpawn.com) wrote: > > James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com): > > > > I always wonder if Commander Mark wore his uniform in real life. > > I think he probably did, because he probably needed felt-tip pens > > all the time, and most clothes don't have those convenient pen > > holders built into the epaulets. > > Oh, NOW I remember that show. I was pretty young then, so I think I did > learn drawing techniques from it, but I never knew when it was on so I > was never prepared to draw along with Mark. Also, I think my drawings > were always disappointing, if for no other reason than the fact that dull > pencil on the back of a church bulletin doesn't look as nice as felt-tip > pen on a sketch pad. Still, I thought I did pretty well, and at some > point I'm sure I thought I was going to be a cartoonist when I grew up. Is there anyone here who didn't have that fantasy? Didn't we all spend a lot of time wishing there was a way we could grow up to be an astronaut who also had a syndicated newspaper comic strip we could draw in outer space? Commander Mark's show ("The Secret City" -- he also has had several other shows, although he only dressed funny on that one) was actually a very good art-instruction show. He's an excellent teacher and makes sure that the lessons involve stuff that everyone can actually do, and introduces lots of advanced topics such as shading and perspective and stuff. The goal was to teach you how to draw what you imagined, not just copy. It was just the way he did this while wearing a sort of fascist dictator outfit that was weird, seeing this genial, smiling man drawing pictures while dressed like Idi Amin. It was a very good show if you didn't look directly at the costume. Bad art-instruction shows and books always bother me. There are the ones that consist of "Draw four eggs and a trapezoid, and now let me take this one out of the oven I made earlier -- look, offscreen, those four eggs and a trapezoid somehow turned into Abraham Lincoln! Now go practice drawing this one thing in this one specific pose with no background because that's the only thing I've told you how to draw." Commander Mark was one of the ones who emphasized creativity and technique, while a lot of the others emphasize copying (and of course your copy never looks as good as the one on TV, unless you get it exactly right, in which case you still don't feel good about it because it's not yours.) The major flaw in "Blue's Clues" is that the drawing segments are the bad kind. If you follow along with the show, you have about ten seconds to draw whatever the rugby-shirt guy draws... "Make a line here, add a curve here, put a line here, and now your drawing looks exactly like mine," is the basic principle, but I doubt toddlers can keep up given that the instructions go really fast and they have to look at the paper and not the screen when they're drawing. Plus you have to buy the special expensive notebook with only eight non-refillable pages in it. -- K. Now let's add a happy tree to this article. You can make the tree as happy as you want, because it's your world. Why are you all asleep? Is it my giant spherical hair? Hey, suppose we cross-bred Bob Ross with Jon Gnagy. What would we call the new hairstyle combining the size of the Afro with the pointiness of the devil goatee? And why was Bob Ross the one with the spherical hair, given that Jon Gnagy was the one who made everything out of spheres and cubes? "Ball, cube, cylinder, cone. By using these four shapes, I can draw any picture I want. And so can you!" -- Jon Gnagy (Think about the meaning there: He can draw any picture he wants... And we can also draw any picture he wants.) ----------------------------------------------------- Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology From: James "Kibo" Parry (kibo@world.std.com) Subject: Things with funny names that gym teachers might like. Date: Sun, 17 Nov 2002 06:37:35 GMT Okay, as promised, I went through every item in my catalog of gym teacher supplies. Ignoring all the whistles, climbing ropes, flag football flags, dance music on your choice of vinyl records or newfangled cassettes, and awesome computer programs on five-inch DOS floppies, here are the items I thought were noteworthy, with the catalog descriptions and/or my lies. RANDOM THINGS IN A CATALOG OF WEIRD STUFF FOR GYM TEACHERS: "Skillcoach Shooter Basketball" (a basketball with hands printed on it to show you where to hold it, in case you're so stupid you hold it with your feet) "Heads-Up Dribble Aids" (I thought these were funnels that attached to the lower lip, but they're just sport goggles that don't let you look down) "Possession Indicator" (penalize any player determined to be the devil) "Fan Shooting Station" (all the fun of being Mark David Chapman!) "Hockey Butt Ends" (what's worse is when your hair turns into Hockey Hair With Butt Ends) "Gym Canoes" with "Mushroom Paddles" (what is this, a catalog or "Mad Libs"?) "All Ball" (and now they're letting Koko name products) "Tilt & Roll Bleachers" (to guarantee people will get seasick at the game) "2 Sided Ball Locker" (I usually just store my 2-sided balls in an envelope) "Rubbermaid Containers" with "Brute Dolly" (must be 18 and German to order) "Deluxe Kink Free Hoops" (not for use with Brute Dolly) "Dyna-Might!!!" ("Work-Out Using A Latex Strip Called A Dyna-Band"... I just mention this because "latex strip" fits in with the theme of things that are not kink-free) "Heavy Duty Game Cone Transport" and "Lightweight Cone Transport" (wheeled things used for moving plastic cones around -- really, apparently gym teachers are too wimpy to move traffic cones without a wheeled cart) "Triathlete Chute" (the photo shows a woman running with a little parachute attached to her belt. I think it's a practical joke.) "Step-N-Stones" ("...audibly release air and become flat when stepped or pushed on... employs color and number recognition elements for implementation of cognitive activities" meaning that anyone young enough to be entertained by farting rocks can probably learn something from having "1", "2" and "3" printed on them) "Peacock Feathers" (for only the very wussiest gym classes) "Chess" (I stand corrected about the peacock feathers) "Spinning Plates" (who knew Ed Sullivan was a gym teacher? Yes, these really are plastic plates that you have to balance on sticks.) "Heavy Duty Unicycles" (if you're not one of those clowns who's only pretending to weigh 600 pounds) "Hijax(tm) Aluminum Stilts" (the box doesn't include stilts, just a gun and a pre=printed note saying "I'm taking your stilts to Cuba.") "Black Hole" ("Group members must pass through the Black Hole to return from outer space.") "Commodore's Retreat" ("The idea is to move the commodore (inside the large green ball) from the bridge of one 'ship' to another. Set includes a large gymnic ball...") "Nuclear Waste Transfer" ("A teamwork activity... Set includes one wooden octagonal isotope mover... The nuclear warhead is now your 2-liter soda pop bottle -- not included.") "Belly Bumbers" (I think they mean "Belly Bumpers", but I like the idea of belly bumberchutes better.) "Bucket Of Chickens" ("and they chirp when you squeeze them") "Deck Tennis Rings" (I always wondered what those 7" rubber rings in the Special Gym equipment room were for. Well, now I know what they're called. I still have no idea what they're for. How does one play tennis with a doughnut, and why would one do so on the deck of a ship?) "Hoop-La Activities Book" (I mention this book of hoop games just because its cover shows a bald blue superhero in red underwear playing with a hoop, and he has a big "H" carved into his forehead like someone rejected from "Red Dwarf" for being too ridiculous-looking) "Bury-All Plate" (In Russia, home plate steals YOU! <-- You have to imagine Yakov Smirnoff yelling that while pounding on the table with a cleated shoe.) "Yellow Dudley Thunder" (I call dibs on using that name in a short story about an oddly-colored giant rabbit who lives on an Indian reservation and dyes Easter Eggs all day) "Football/Lacrosse Jerseys" (there's nothing funny about those, until you read the description and say "Eww! Sounds icky!" because they have a "double knit shoulder yolk".) "Smedley III Grip Strength Tester" (measures how much stronger you are than anyone named Smedley) "High Quality Licorice Speed Rope Ex-U-Rope" (is it the speed of high-quality licorice, or the quality of high-speed licorice?) "Heavy-Duty Vaulting Box" (I mention this solely because my elementary school had one the teacher only ever referred to as "the Swedish box" and now at last I know what it's really called although I have no idea what made the Swedishness of ours more important than its intended purpose.) "Co-Oper Blanket" (this is the single weirdest thing in the catalog. It's a big spandex doughnut designed to encase thirteen kids. I have no idea what you do once you've packed your kids into a doughnut. I guess you tell the doughnut to inch towards the other side of the room to encourage cooperation by telling the kids you're going to flunk all thirteen of them unless they learn the valuable skill of moving a giant doughnut with their butts from the inside.) "Body Sox" ("Body Sox are designed specifically for spatial awareness and