First up, some odds & ends, mostly stuff I forgot to mention last time, along with stuff from the past couple of days…
- Remember the Killing Joke show? Well immediately afterwards, Mooney needed some smokes, so I went with him to the Walgreens that was nearby, and while standing in the somewhat long line, there was this dude behind us, a person I recognized from somewhere but just couldn’t put my finger on. He immediately went into this routine of sorts, making fun of all the el-crapo Halloween products that was dotted along the aisle, and then it hit me: he was a stand-up comic I had seen on television, back in the day. As in, back when I used to regularly watch TV, which was when I had cable. So I all of a sudden said ““Hey, I know you!” Though truth be told, it was mostly to stop him in his tracks, because there’s really nothing sadder than some old stand up comic that nobody knows, dying for attention.
Kinda washed up comic guy was pleased as punch to be recognized, though he immediately took offense by my next statement “You used to be a comic, right?” which was not what I really meant. “Used to? I’m STILL a comic!” I then defended/clarified myself by mentioning how I used to watch him on Comedy Central, which I no longer have, and therefore am out of the loop. Anyhow, because he felt either slighted or was simply the really narcissistic type, he continued on with the somewhat lame jokes (I never said he was a good stand-up comic, now did I?), so as another attempt to shut him up, I mentioned that I really couldn’t hear him because my ears was ringing due to the show Mooney & I had just been (which was no lie; that show was easily the loudest one I had ever been to, and I was wearing professional grade ear plugs). Cue a bunch of lame “Why do people go to shows to become deaf” jokes. LOL. The guy behind him, who was also at the show, not only supported my statement but also recognized the comic, and ended up getting into an actual conversation with the comic (about himself of course… I believe I heard him say that he’s on Last Comic Standing…. yikes) therefore spared Mooney and myself the annoyance. And to this day, I still can’t remember his name, though that encounter was sadly not my only one with a been doing it for over twenty years and no where close to getting a sitcom stand-up comic, which there are quite a few living in the city.
- Time for a cat update; I forget what was mentioned last time, but life with Josie is fine I guess. She’s cute and all, but God is she f’n retarded, even by cat standards. But aside from her dumb blank stare, which is at least endearing, she’s just not very friendly, which I’m constantly reminded of whenever I visit a friend’s place and their cat comes up to me to be petted. But that might be due to once again, a severe lack of intelligence, and not extreme passive aggressiveness as Hilary once observed, though its a pretty fair observation; Josie will let you pet her one second (though you always have to approach her, she never comes to you), and then in a heartbeat, she’ll freak out and run away, terrified to death of you. It’s all pretty annoying. Best is how Josie will approach me when I’m in the bathroom, taking a crap, by literally pulling the door open (mind you, this is when I’m home by myself, so no real sense is closing the door completely, right?) and then for whatever reason, she immediately has to leave, but despite being able to pull a door open, Josie can’t figure out how to push (you’d think that would be twenty times easier, right?), which then puts her in a state of utter panic. Even better is when Katie is taking a shower; she’ll apparently stick her head into the current to see what’s going on, but the instant water gets near her, Josie will again freak out. Though my favorite is when I get too close to her, causing her to panic and attempt to flee, but because of the hardwood floor, Josie can’t get a good start and ends up running in place, a la the Scooby gang.
A while ago, Josie was doing this thing where she was crapping outside of her litter box for some bizarre reason (to this day, Katie & I have yet to determine the reason). Once I was at my computer, which is in the living room, and smelled something foul. I looked over the place to figure out where it was (since I most certainly knew what it was) and found nothing. I tried going back to work when it hit me to look under the couch, which is right next to me. And wouldn’t you know… I got pissed, which freaked the cat out, who then climbed on-top of the microwave. When I tried to get her down, she gave me a nasty hiss and even swiped her claws at me. Josie then immediately hid herself under the couch, which is where she goes to hide. Initially I was freaked out that our relationship was forever damaged, but to my surprise, she was actually somewhat affectionate to me a short time afterwards.
Fast forward to about two weekends ago; despite what our crazy holistic cat adoption agency had told us about never needing to give a cat a batch, our Josie was starting to stink, plus her fur was getting all matted and greasy. We knew going in that giving her a bath was gonna be a pain in the ass, but we had no idea that it would be such an ordeal; knowing what I recalled from my last roommate, whenever she gave any of the cats a bath, they would freak out in the beginning, but after a while submit themselves, perhaps in hopes of getting it over with as quickly as possible. As hilarious as it was to see our fat cat look like a tiny rat thanks to comedic property of wet feline fur, as well as her pathetic wail of woe (Josie also never meows, she just has this rather grating whine whenever she’s hungry or in moments of duress), it wasn’t funny when the little bitch bit Katie in the arm… HARD. The bit was nice and deep, with plenty of blood flowing. Not knowing what to do exactly, I fired up iChat to see if Mike was online. Because that dude knows EVERYTHING. Here’s the conversation that immediately followed, or at least the highlights…
me: hey mike, quick question…. katie just got bit HARD by the cat. its a single puncture, a very tiny one, but also pretty deep…. do you think stitches is necessary?
oconnor: if it’s a puncture wound then it can’t really be stitched anyway… no she should be fine
me: that’s what I figured… but I had to ask. just needed a second opinion
oconnor: i’m presuming the cat is up to date on shots and whatnot?
me: yes
oconnor: why’d she get bit? just being weird?
me: we tried to give it a bath…. not the best of ideas
oconnor: ha… yeah they’re not so into that
me: anyhow thanks for the advice… gonna get some proper bandages
oconnor: throw some peroxide on that bitch or whatever… just in case it was eating poo. etc.
… And wouldn’t you know, after the ordeal, Josie was all of sudden much nicer to us! Though whereas Katie used to not be so happy when I expressed my desires to lightly torture the cat, now she’s all of a sudden quite gung-ho about it. Mind you, we’re not throwing her out our 4th floor apartment window…. though Katie does like to throw her in the air, onto the couch (which we believe the cat somewhat enjoys at this point). We also like to put her in a cardboard box and watch her try to escape. For those that might be upset by such news, think of it this way: we feed her, make sure she’s nice and warm, etc…. all things considered, we do a lot for the cat, so there’s nothing wrong with having her provide us with entertainment. Plus it always good to show pets whose the boss sometimes.
- Hey, remember that creepy, animu molestation game for the iPhone that was such a raging hit at SPX? And remember Hilary’s high score of 13.5? Well this past Friday, she beat her pervious record, which no one else had come close to touching! It’s now 13.134. Since the congratulations screen is pretty NSFW, here’s a shot of the new top time behind the safety of a mouse button click.
It was during lunch in her neck of the woods, in Queens, and near her apartment is this really old-fashioned hobby shop that mostly deals with model trains, planes, and automobiles. Hidden in the many piles of boxes was a kit for the Back To The Future 3 Delorean from Japan that I had to fight the serious urge to pick up! There was also a pretty sweet looking Star Trek Enterprise model, based on the original series design (which is still the tits), that I also didn’t nab, but because its supposed to be easy to assemble, without any need for pair or glue (which my shaky hands simply can’t handle), I might get it next time I there. In addition to models, they sell old second handbooks, which Hilary helped herself to, and old secondhand VHS movies, one of which I almost picked up, called Hard Rock Zombie, simply on name alone, though the boxart was equally as amazing. So why didn’t I? Was gonna swing by after hanging out at Hilary’s to pick it up and totally forgot. Yet I still got the chance to watch it later that evening, since it was coincidentally one of the films shown at Joe Simko’s, which was the scene once again for Horror Night!
- Here we have the special holiday themed cupcakes that Joe whipped up for the special holiday themed evening of crappy horror flicks…
Since I kinda wanted to keep things somewhat short and sweet (yeah right), I’ll save the detailed plot analysis of Hard Rock Zombie for a later post, mostly because there’s a lot of ground to cover and I will most definitely want the DVD handy to pull forth some visual aides (for a while now, I’ve been meaning to do the same thing I do over at GameSetWatch when it comes to video game movies but for other flicks around here, and on a greater scale), though I will say that it is perhaps one of the weirdest movies I have personally seen, and this coming from a guy that’s actually seen Oh My Zombie Mermaid. It has it all: a crappy hair metal band that invades a sleepy town that hates rocks and roll, and which enjoy lounging around in their underwear among themselves a bit too much, the very young girl with very large eyebrows that still loves them, another girl totally in love with her boyfriend’s decapitated head, evil midgets, one of which is a Nazi and the other eats himself whole, and speaking of Nazies, a sex scene involving Hitler with an old woman that’s supposed to be Eva Braun (I think) that’s really into knives and is a werewolf, stutters, the most absolutely asinine yet brilliant anti-zombie tactic ever conceived, countless crappy musical montages, and the list goes on. Wait for it! And second flick was the super disappointing Ghoulies 4. The very first was pretty neat, in its own way mind you, but part four was an atrocity, not at all befitting of the Ghoulies mythos. It was seriously so bad that there’s honestly nothing much to say, so moving on…
- Want to know one of the best places to get a hot dog is in the city? Oddly enough, the beer lover’s paradise, The Ginger Man on 11 East 36th Street has an awesome cheese covered dog with bacon bits sprinkled about, and served with a side of tater tots. Which came in quite handy Saturday afternoon, during Mike’s best friend’s Fritz and his wife’s drinkathon. There’s nothing like getting loaded during daylight!
It was also where I revealed to Mike’s wife Liz that plans to force both our significant others to watch Harry Potter 3 is off; Katie simply flat-out refuses to watch the flick, despite my assurances that its actually pretty good! And I believe most folks will agree, even non Harry Potter fans; admittedly, the first two, especially in comparison with the third movie, are not that great at all, whereas Prisoner of Azkaban had numerous traits that your non diehard Pothead/aver movie goer would more enjoy, such as a super compelling story, a super strong cast, and a real director. I’ve generally had a pretty good track record when it comes to introducing Katie to the stuff I like (on a side note, its always funny to discover the crap that one’s girlfriend’s previous boyfriends tried to force onto them…. I can’t tell you how many females I’ve met that used to hate video games for a while because of an ex, like how one particular girl I know whose former mate would force her to watch him playing nothing but wrestling games). But when it comes to movies, it’s been a very hard sell, and I’m not just talking about the live action Popeye flick. In the end, Katie proclaimed “No kids crap!” which got a hearty hight five from Mike and the assessment that they were separated at birth or whatever. Eh, their loss. And for the record, yes, Harry Potter 3 is a kids movie, but one of the finest ones to be produced in recent memory. Oh well…. guess I’ll be seeing Harry Potter 6 by myself, or just with Liz. I guess ogling Emma Watson right next to my girlfriend would have been weird anyway. At the very least I got Katie to sit through Total Recall.
- Yesterday I finally met Andrew Toups, aka Mister Toups, a longtime staple of the Insert Credit/Select Button/The Gamer’s Quarter scene, the guy that holds the keys to the SB kingdom, which I was once a part of but am no longer, after deciding to carve my own slice of the video game message board pie. For those who aren’t aware of petty internut drama, the people at SB (or at least some of them) absolutely HATE me, so the meeting was dare I say historic to a certain degree (Lord knows I’ve given Andy some crap in the past, but its always been in good fun). Unfortunately no pictures were taken; I was going to as a goof, but then forgot about it, yet two people have already asked for them! But yeah, nice guy! I love dem southern boys. He’s in town for CMJ and will be performing at the Knitting Factory this coming Thursday, sometime in the mid-afternoon, which seems weird, but that’s CMJ for you. Anyhow, since I’m not confined to a desk job, I’ll be able to check his band, which I’ve heard nothing but great things about.
- It’s gonna be a crazy week, I just know it. Tomorrow Capcom is in town, which means my first chance to finally give Resident Evil 5 a spin, as well as Dead Rising for the Wii, which I’m now no longer interested in, thanks to all the negative buzz. D3 is also in town, meaning some Onechanbara action as well. Thursday as just noted is Toups’ thing, which reminds me, CMJ is going on right now (it actually just kicked off today) and I’m simply way too busy to check out anything else out (plus I missed my chance to pre-register; nabbing press credentials the day of is always a pain for any event, but doubly so for CMJ), plus also check out Rock Band 2 for the Wii, and then later in the evening I’m rendezvousing with the movie night crew, not to watch movies, but to play D&D! It’ll be my very first time, believe it or not. Friday night is some “underground” Street Fighter 4 event sponsored by Capcom that I know virtually nothing about, other than its at some undisclosed location in Brooklyn and that the console versions of SF4, with Sakura and Akuma playable. Saturday is a pre-Blip Fest chiptunes event in which everyone is going to be playing nothing but covers, and I’m all about hearing old 80s standards redone with Game Boys. And on Sunday is an all-day punk rock fest at Tompkins Square Park, headlined by the Gorgeous Ladies of Bloodwrestling. Should be fun!
And between all that, I’m gonna attempt to give the just fan translated Mother 3 a shot, though that mostly depends on whether I get a flash cart for my Game Boy Micro (I know there’s DS options out there, but I just prefer playing GBA games on GBAs, even when its one that I’m not entirely sold on…. sorry, but as much love as Earthbound gets, I found it to be an absolute borefest).
