You better watch your happy home

There seems to be a lot of talk this week about whether any of us know the true nature of any of our neighbors. Some guy might seem like a normal dude who you’ve lived near for years, even eaten barbecue with, or he might seem a little creepier because you could have sworn you saw three naked women on leashes in his backyard (but maybe that was your imagination, because the cops didn’t seem to care much about it when you called them to report it). How do you know where the bad people are?

Hopefully you’ll have another neighbor who will post helpful signs.

Then again, maybe that sign is referring to the dark nature of the pointy succulent behind the fence, not the neighbors. There seems to be a cactus nearby that has been labelled in much the same way.

(No, I wasn’t about to go up that walkway for a better picture of the sign. Just trust me.) Oh wait – I guess it is the neighbors they are talking about.

Yep, looks like it’s definitely the neighbors who are evil.

But which ones, exactly?

I’m just glad I don’t live in this neighborhood. Oh wait; I’m petsitting across the street next week. This should be interesting.

Adventurous

When we were kids, my brother and I got chocolate advent calendars from Germany every December. Every day, we could pop open a new window and find a differently shaped piece of chocolate in there. One day it was a beach ball, one day it was a sunflower. The 24th always featured a larger piece of chocolate shaped like a star. It was very hard not to open the windows ahead of time. I seem to remember my brother and me devising new rules governing when it was acceptable to open the next day’s window, and then at a certain point I think we just would see how many we could get away with opening before Mom got mad.

I think I have finally found an advent calendar where I am not tempted to open the windows ahead of time. Courtesy of Metafilter, I bring you Jul!

That was just Tuesday. The more I’m looking at this, though, the harder it’s getting not to open all of the windows. Well, at least it’s not going to give me cancer like that chocolate one is going to.

William Pene du Bois, take us away

The weather today is beautiful, but I have to say that something about the day itself is rather strange and sinister. On my way to work, as I drove down Beverly Blvd. I noticed about two blocks-worth of gutter filled with bras and panties and high heels. On my way to lunch, I encountered two bags of groceries in the crosswalk. A sack of oranges, a packet of sliced beef, and a bag of maybe sausages (but maybe turds) getting run over by cars as they drove by.

On his way to lunch, Benny walked by a dead dog in a box with a sign over it that said, “Do you recognize this dead dog?” Then he drove by a probably dead guy at the moment that the cops and ambulance were driving up to investigate. Then he got stuck behind a funeral procession.

I’m not sure what is happening here today. It sure would be nice if a bunch of balloons could just come and take us to Krakatoa.

Bluebirds and bottlecaps

I’m sure getting a lot of conflicting information from my friends today about drugs. Ross says:

but then Alan says:

I don’t know what to think. Maybe I’ll just get some pancakes and think it all over.

Oh geez. Nobody warned me about the dangers of pancakes. I’m going back to bed.

The bible tells me so

You know what we don’t have enough of on Fancy Notions? We don’t have enough religious hymn singalongs. Let’s get to fixing that right away.

via Metafilter

You may call them cavies

So, I may have to be looking for a new job in the near soon future. I may not. I don’t know. Agh. It’s been sort of a tumultuous week for me, as you might guess.

When something like this happens, I think it’s natural for a person to question whether she wants to continue on in her current career or think about a new path. Am I suited for my career? Is there any future in it? Is it something I actually want to be doing? What else would I be suited for?

I have to say that I lack some self-confidence, so I’ve been a little hesitant about the whole jumping careers thing unless I start at an entry-level job, and at my age most people don’t want to hire me for an entry-level job. Thankfully, The Awl pointed me in the direction of a career that I’m sure I can excel at – guinea pig rental agent. I am a shoo-in; my brother and I wound up with 17 guinea pigs when we were children without even trying. You see, it’s really hard to tell the difference between a male guinea pig and a pregnant female guinea pig. And then your dad can’t make enough guinea pig cages fast enough to separate them before the children start breeding with each other, and then there’s like this exponential number of cages your dad has to build, and voila! Guinea pig kingdom. Ready for rental. Now all I have to do is lobby Congress to get one of these “No Single Guinea Pigs” law enacted. Piece of cake.

Oh; you hate guinea pigs? Watch this and tell me you don’t need a guinea pig, even if just for a weekend:

 

Deep breaths

Let go of the telephone shouting match you just had with a deranged British woman who insisted she was very close friends with an Academy Award-winning director and this song was going to take her to the top if only you would stop ruining her life and her future and the Academy Award-winning director’s film by being difficult. Let go. Let go.

Now take a deep breath, and look deep into the jewel on my turban. Let go of the irrational thought that she is going to burst into your office and try to karate chop you any minute now. Let go. Let go.

Word of the day for Monday, April 18th

I recently rented the documentary film Until The Light Takes Us, which is about the history of Norwegian black metal (which is not the same as death metal, thank you very much) and some curious incidents associated with the scene in the ’90s. “Curious” like murder and suicide and church burnings and such.

Anyway, I’ve watched the film twice now because I’m still trying to figure out a couple of things and I also really want Benny to see it, but every time we put it on, he very quickly falls asleep. This is not to say the film is bad, by any means; it’s just that Benny has to wake up at 4 a.m. and the score for the film is really breathy/icy ethereal stuff, not black metal.

Though he hasn’t technically watched the film, it appears that the subject matter has been seeping into his subconscious. One day he came home from work and announced that he had set up a black metal Pandora station featuring the bands Mayhem and Burzum*, among others.

“Mayhem**! That’s Euronymous’ group. And Burzum is Count Grishnack, the guy who killed Euronymous.” And then Benny directed me to a website that exhaustively listed the finest records that Norwegian black metal has to offer. It seems that there is a record label called Head Not Found, and there is a band called:

Technically, Fimbulwinter means “the great winter,” the event in Norse mythology just before Ragnarok. I think it sounds much cooler to define it as “the immediate prelude to the end of the world,” though.

*not linking to official Burzum site because Count Grishnack has a lot of opinions about blood and race that I don’t support and don’t want to imply that I support by linking to the site.

**also not linking to Mayhem’s official site, mainly because it’s your typical Myspace mess.

Meat the new globalism

The video below is a Russian ad depicting an Italian salami taking part in a whirlwind Mexican romance with sado-masochistic undertones. Errr… discuss?

I am once again in your debt, madamjujujive.

The power of editing

It’s such a fine line between touching and terrifying sometimes, isn’t it?

via Nag On The Lake