The movie gave me bad dreams even.  Which NEVER happens.  I dreamed that the government was going to take away my college degrees because I never actually fulfilled all of the requirements for completing Junior High School.  I had to go back to Junior High for one complete year.  It was like I was trapped in an Adam Sandler movie.  Shiver.  Even worse, I had to go back to the same Junior High of my youth.  Inexplicably, all of the same teachers were there.  I would go up to them to work out a scheduling conflict, and they assumed I was an irate parent.  Then I had to explain to them the situation.  That really threw them off of their game.  They were such little cowards after that.  They couldn’t look me in the eye; they kept calling me “Mr.” Lizard King.  It was awesome.  What was not awesome was that they set my lunch period from 5 to 6.  Who ever heard of such a thing?  I spent that whole dream following the bureaucratic chain of command to get a decent lunch hour.  When I was supposed to be in Shop class, I was instead trying to get an appointment to see the principal.  When I was explaining to the Shop teacher why I wasn’t in class, I was missing English.  See what a nightmare it was?  I remember this one kid looking at me and scoffing, “What? Are you like ‘thirty’ or something?”  I replied, “Yes.  Yes, I am thirty.”  Since “thirty” in the eyes of a fourteen year old might as well be fifty or even seventy.  But having people think I was thirty was much less demeaning than having them know my actual age.

There you have it.  The experiment is done, thank the gods.  It took me places I never wish to revisit.  Like Home Economics.  But isn’t that what good Horror movies do?

I appreciate scary movies.  I enjoy scary movies.  But I am not scared by scary movies.  Know why?  Because they’re not real.  Few things scare me outside of the three C’s.  They, of course, being Cancer, Credit Debt, and Circumcision.  I am especially not frightened by movies that deal with “ghosts.”  Ghosts are right up there with aliens and bigfoots (bigfeets?) in terms of unbelievability.  If I saw a ghost I would ask it one question:  what religion should I join?  Because if ghosts are real, then there is an afterlife, and I need to stop fucking around.  But I’m not too worried about that happening because ghosts are bullshit and people who believe in ghosts need to review the three C’s.

Part of my resistance to horror movies comes from my family.  By that, I mean, if you grew up with my family few other things would frighten you either.  Horror movies were my cartoons when I was a kid.  Well, horror movies and then actual cartoons were my cartoons.  Also, I went to really tough schools.  Kids at my school would ask you if you believed in Dracula or if you believed in the Wolfman?  No matter how you answered, you ended up getting punched and then sat on.  If you cried, you had to smell someone’s farts or get punched and sat on again.  I learned the way to avoid this was by using their own fear against them.  Which means I ran home and told my mother and then they had to deal with HER.  Once someone had been exposed to my mother’s rage, they never came near me again.  Sometimes they moved.

If Paranormal Activity can actually undermine those emotional scars by frightening me, I will be quite impressed.  Here I come ghosties.  Do your best.

Is anyone else ancient enough to remember watching this?  It was 1972, people!  Recognize.

I think at this point I can back off my commitment to post each day.  It was initially just a way of prompting me to blog again.  I’ve been blogging pretty regularly, so I think I’m back in the swing of it.  If I keep making myself blog every day, then I’m just going to end up cheating and putting up more cat videos.  (Which, btw, never get old.)  I’m going to go back to my old method of posting when I actually have something half way decent to go on about.  Which means I’ll probably average about 3-4 posts a week.  Still a pretty good average if you ask me.

There’s nothing like having a one way conversation about something that no one else really cares about.  Which reminds me of video clip!

I learned a couple of very important lessons from all of this. First, ambien kicks in faster than I thought. And second, it is possible to take a trip without ever leaving your living room.

This is the kind of insanity I’m talking about. I feel like I’m still medicated just watching it now.

I had little sleep the last two nights after a heavy night of barfing up greasy food on Saturday.  You didn’t need to know that and yet there it is.  The last thing I feel like doing is writing a post.  Yet here it is.

Not enough? Here’s another one.

I think that last cat is me today.

And whatever happened to Cheney?  Believe me, I don’t want him to come back or anything.  I just want to know where he’s at so he can’t sneak up from behind and bit me on the neck.  My guess is that after the last election, his blackened spirit was denied corporeal form and went flying back to Mordor.  Where the shadows lie.  After lie after lie after lie.

Also, have you noticed how Biden is practically invisible?  Of course, if you were Obama, you might want to keep it that way.  Every time Biden opens his mouth I cringe.  Hell, I saw him on a morning show talking about Avatar and it made me uncomfortable.  How for the love of God can you seem that dimwitted about such a dimwitted movie?  He couldn’t even remember the name of it.  He was saying, “That, uh, that thing at the movies where they come at you through the screen, uh . . .   .”  Finally, the interviewer said, “Avatar!  It’s called Avatar, Mr. Vice-President!  For the love of Fuck how do you not know the name of the movie you just saw?  It’s on the cover of every freakin’ magazine in the country!  The trailer is on ever five minutes!  Avatar!  Avatar Avatar Avatar!’  Then secret service men rushed the guy off camera and Biden just went on talking about “those big flying things that grab you with their grabbin’ things.”  Painful to watch.  Truly painful.

But I dig Obama enough that Biden can’t even ruin it for me.  I don’t even expect that much from him.  Bush set the bar so low that all Obama has to do is not destroy the world.

This President has been lizard approved.

It also has love.  True love that threatens the very bonds of death.  At one point, Conan’s woman tells him, “If I died, I would come back from the deepest pit of hell to fight by your side.”  Now that is what a man wants to hear.  The closest Mrs. Lizard King has gotten to that is telling me, “If you die, I will make sure no one spits on you at the funeral.”  It’s a great sentiment, and I do appreciate it because I know there are people who will come to my funeral just for that purpose.  But it’s still not quite the same.

Conan hasn’t been issued on blu-ray yet, but I’m lucky enough to have a player that converts standard dvds to near HD quality.  I’m telling you, that’s the way to watch Conan.  If you’ve only seen the movie in standard def, then you haven’t seen it.

Here is the scene I was talking about.  The absolute best scene in the movie.

At the start of the scene, you hear one of the guys say, “My greatest fear is that my son will never understand me.”  Who the hell invited that guy to the barbarian pancake breakfast?  I don’t think real barbarians are that concerned over their sons understanding them or not.  And I’m not including Hagar the Horrible, so don’t bring him up.  Then, at the end of the clip after Conan speaks, you hear someone say, “That is good, that is good.”  It sounds like it’s the same guy who’s sons don’t understand him.  I think he’s some average schmo who crept in for the free breakfast.  I can see him nodding and going, “That is good, that is good.  Yep, gotta love the lamentation of women, uh huh.  Um . . . is anyone going for that last pancake?”

I might have watched a little too much Conan last night.  I had a dream that I was part of a barbarian army going up against a deadly race of alien monsters.  We had to beat them in order to save the universe, yada yada.  My sword was only made of heavy plastic.  But I was told if I hit the enemy with it enough times, then it would eventually kill them.  We go to meet the enemy.  The first one I encounter is one of those little “yip yip” dogs.  I smacked him a couple of times with the plastic sword and he settled down.  I told the commander that maybe we should just take this one prisoner.  “We take no prisoners, kill it!”  I told him I didn’t want to.  I thought it had learned it’s lesson.  “You don’t think it’s dangerous then?” he asked.  The little dog jumped up on  my legs a couple of times and I smacked him, again.  “No,” I said.  “I don’t think he’s dangerous.”

The next enemy was bedridden.  It was like he had mutated to become physically part of the bed.  Again, I had a moral issue with killing someone who couldn’t move from their bed.  My commander had no such conscience, so he started smacking the guy with the plastic sword.  I couldn’t bear to watch so I walked away.  In the background I kept hearing, SMACK!  OW!  SMACK!  OW!

Welcome to my dreamworld.  Not a pleasant place.  Not a particularly interesting place, either.

It’s reminding me why I loved reading Elmore Leonard so much.  I actually cut myself off from Elmore Leonard years ago.  I used to have this rule with books.  If I had read twenty novels by the same author, I figured it was time to move on.  Plus, you read that much by one person and it starts to lose its appeal.  You start noticing characters and plot devices being repeated and it makes the stories seem too formulaic.  Back then I thought if I really wanted to revisit an author, I would wait until I was an old man and then I would pick them up again.  Well, I am sort of an old man now.  I mean, the current me doesn’t think I am.  But the younger me who made that rule would definitely call me old.  So maybe I can pick up some Elmore Leonard again.

By the way, the Spam Comment of the Week Award goes to the d-bag who left this one:  No matter what others say, I think it is still interesting and useful maybe necessary to improve some minor things. I was just impressed that it wasn’t linked to a penis enlargement ad.

Now, they’re playing Wii Sports in resting homes for Christ’s sake!

It makes me slightly angry.  Some of the same people who told me that video games would rot my brain are now waving Wiimotes around in public like they just don’t care.  I knew I was onto a good thing if they just would have listened to me.

I don’t even know why we’re still calling them “video games?”  It’s such a dated term it’s almost embarrassing to say.  With the release of a title like Heavy Rain it becomes even less appropriate.  The entire experience of this “game” is more or less an interactive movie.  You watch the narrative, and occasionally perform timed button presses (“quick time events” for you noobs) to continue the story.  You’re not shooting aliens or traversing mazes; you’re simply guiding the events of the story.  No more a game than is reading a book, really.  But we are so accustomed to calling them video games that I’m not sure if anything else would work.  I thought of combining “game” with “cinema.”  Then I got “Gamenema.” 

Hey, gang!  Anyone up for a gamenema?

You won’t make many friends like that.  Not the good kind anyway.  I’ll keep working on it.

For those interested, here’s the Gears of War 3 trailer that debuted on Fallon’s show.

This is big news here at Brain Lizards.  The staff and I are very excited.  As long as he doesn’t come around asking for money like so many of my distant cousins.  This guy was over six feet long when they found him.  He was being carried on the back of a local villager, presumably destined to be dinner for a month.  That was six years ago.  It’s taken them that long to thoroughly check him out and determine that he is, indeed, a new species.

They also found that his credit record is spotless, which is quite  impressive for a monitor lizard.

Unlike other monitors his size, he doesn’t hunt deer or people.  He climbs trees and eats fruit.  Not only a clean credit history, but a health nut as well.  He’s making the rest of us lizards look kind of bad.  Although, I’m very impressed by his ability to stay hidden from scientists for so long.  I’ve spent much of my life hiding from annoying friends and relatives, so I feel a bond with this lizard.  I think they should name him after me.

One of the perks of discovery, however, is that scientists now say they can oversee efforts to protect this species from extinction.  My guess is the first step will be to ask the local villagers to stop eating them.

There is one tidbit that oddly enough wasn’t reported in all of the articles. I read on Telegraph.co.uk that this guy has a double penis.

In summary:  good credit, health nut, and double penis.

I salute you O’ misanthropic lizard!