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| $5 flapjacks all day long. |
30.5.14
29.5.14
"My Friend Kyle"
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| Ok, Da-da lost count. |
Da-da rarely reposts the work of others, but in this case he'll make an exception for, "National Friendship Week." Now that Da-da thinks about it, EVERY WEEK should be National -- and International -- Friendship Week. Alas, Da-da can't speak to sources, as it was emailed to him without one. If this is your work, please speak up. Without further ado...
My Friend Kyle
One day, when I was a freshman in high
school, I saw a kid from my class was walking home from school.
His name was Kyle.
It looked like he was carrying all of his
books.
I thought to myself, "Why would anyone bring home all his books on a Friday?
23.5.14
Triumph of A Man Called Da-da's 5th Anniversary!
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| Five years of waiting for The Return of Da-da's Brain, soon to be a major motion picture. |
22.5.14
Top 5 Books to Bring to the DMV
The DMV isn't an easy place to read. People coming and going. Nervous teens fidgeting, awaiting first-time driving tests. Strangers jostling and making inane small talk. Cranky, reclusive writers taking it all in and not paying for it. Numbers on a screen chanted by a banal computer voice every minute or so, only one of them yours.
Sure, you could go the obvious vehicular-travel-essay route, but if you know you must visit the DMV -- and chances are good it'll happen at least once every few years -- you might prepare for it in a different way. Da-da suggests the following ontological experiment.
People are curious, in more ways than one, especially about what other people are reading. Read a book in public and you're guaranteed to have at least one person in three glance at the cover of your book -- and judge you accordingly. This proportion goes up if there are more women than men. In this light, below are Da-da's top five books, off the top of his head, to take to the DMV, each designed to not only discourage conversation, but to give you a nice and puzzling no-man's-land buffer zone radius, or at least near-total invisibility.
5. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
This is the book equivalent of classical music when it comes to driving away people you don't want to talk to. Note: be wary of using psych books at the DMV; like the DSM-IV et al, tomes such as these can actually draw in PSYCHOLOGY STUDENTS, which might be good, or it might be bad. Da-da married a psychologist, so you do the math.
4. Cracker Ingenuity
This pretty much pegs the people at Da-da's DMV, such that the book is nearly invisible to said patrons, referencing their outward lives so resolutely that they run screaming into the night. In a good way, o'course.
3. The Killer Inside Me
A disturbingly realistic story, esp. these days, and Jim Thompson's best work. For maximum distance, be sure to laugh loudly while reading, fist-pumping and exclaiming, "YES! YES!"
2. Abe Lincoln Grows Up (dust jacket mind-hack)
Da-da was famous at his university for reading this one book over and over again for years. You could find Da-da everywhere, in every shady alcove and every library carrel, his nose deep inside its pages. Thing is, Da-da has never actually read this book. He just borrowed the dust jacket from one of his old childhood books, hiding the books he was reading inside this book cover. He'd even move his lips sometimes when he read, whenever critical people walked by, to give them something to complain about. Many thought him simple and either said something nice, as to a loose mental patient, or snort and not give him another look. The people who were nice to Da-da are still his friends. DMV-ers will probably fall into the former category, but you never know.
NOTE: Da-da also used several incrediby boring and subject-specific dust jackets for use in class... but then, it has to be a special kind of boring. Thus:
You can almost hear the snoring. Which brings us to the #1 Ultimate Book to Bring to the DMV...
1. Jane Eyre
Jane Eyre? Believe it or not, Jane Eyre is a manly and modernesque, two-fisted tome about a former soldier living with his crazy pyromaniac (soon-to-be-ex) wife and adopted daughter in an old dark manse, and how a hot, intelligent tutor he hired falls for him. Slowly. Besides offering up a perfectly opaque and a near-incomprehensible shield for DMV denizens, Jane Eyre is the ultimate Stay-at-Home-Dad book. Why? C'mon, there are (poorly paid) servants who do all the housework and child rearing, with the eponymous Jane doing all the teaching and discipline work, leaving the master of the house free to lounge around and read all day, ride horses with vapid blondes while delivering fey, smoldering glances at everyone. It's a postmodern male dream come true. It's also one of Da-da's favorite books, so it does double duty.
Anyway, this is such a good book, it's easy to forget where you are, which is probably the whole point of reading it, at the DMV or anywhere else, plus it's got a name not easily pronounceable (like Da-da's real name), making folks balk at its cover, not to mention its thickness. Plus, there's the extra added attraction that males don't typically read Jane Eyre, guaranteeting you even more of a witch's circle distance around you -- and an impossible-to-deny allure for that one special someone who'll appreciate it. Not that Da-da needs this, anymore. He caught his limit.
Honorable Mention
21.5.14
16.5.14
WHERE'S DA-DA'S KEWL MICROBUS?!
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| Give it up, clowns. |
Ok, this thing was promised eight or nine years ago. Da-da hates to be so shallow and emasculated, but WHERE IS DA-DA'S COOL VW MICROBUS? Did the clowns take it again? (The clowns scare Da-da.)
15.5.14
Taking the Mouse by the Horns: A Puzzling and Overly Image-laden Foray into Disney's Recent Dark Hornage
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| Aiiieeee! |
Da-da knows there are a lot of serious things going on in the world that require serious attention, but... well, this is earth where, for the time being, the E stands for Evil or Egregious. Da-da doesn't believe in Evil, per se; more apt to call it insanity, which is what it is. What Da-da sees most are people foisting said insanity on otherwise sane humans (bygones) in the guise of entertainment. Da-da himself does this all the time and it's fine, as Da-da's blog is for adults, mostly parents whose brains are still missing in action. Filmwise, insanity is a given. Take the work of David Lynch for example. However, studios don't market David Lynch movies to children.
The point Da-da's trying to make the hard way is that Disney's new movie, "Maleficent," is ostensibly marketed toward kids, showcasing Angelina Jolie being... well, creepy. Creepy and disturbing. Sure, she was already creepy and disturbing, but these are two things you want kids to avoid if you don't want them to go insane and drag you along with them.
The movie trailer creeped Da-da's boys right out.
"I'm not watching THAT," 9YO Nagurski announced after viewing the teaser, and his 7YO brother agreed. Thanks, Disney. You just saved Da-da about $50 in tickets and sundry theatrical junk food.
But these kids weren't the only ones who felt this way.
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| Ug, creepy. Even the baby doesn't approve. |
Not surprisingly, the kids they tried to cast for the part of the 4YO girl victim in the movie couldn't even make it through the audition, because Jolie -- in full make-up -- frightened them so badly.
"One little kid even said, 'Mommy, please tell the mean witch to stop talking to me,'" Jolie recounted.
The only kid they could find who wasn't scared was Jolie's daughter, who of course got the part. For the record, she was scared, too, but she was used to the fear, having to live with Jolie and THAT MONSTER Brad Pitt all the time. Ever see Brad Pitt eat a burrito? (Yes, Da-da's joking. Brad only eats ground up baby unicorns.)
So, what exactly is Disney trying to do here? Exemplify the Dark Arts? (Without Snape?!) And why is it on its third director, anyway? No one wants responsibility... why? And why couldn't they just use a computer-generated Tim Curry with a new coat of paint as Maleficent? Would've been much cheaper and a lot more disturbing, if that's what they were looking for. (If you really wanna get weird, try using a floating green CG Truman Capote with horns for the sequel. Yikes.)
Horns? Tangent time!
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| Horns. Tim Curry as Hellbo... er, Big Red Legendpants. |
Hm. Horns back, horns forward. In films, if the horns go back, does that mean the character is submissively evil? Or perhaps passive-aggressively evil?
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| Dominant AND submissive. And derivative. Another stick, too. Hm. Da-da's not gonna go there. |
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| All the pretty manbat hornage. Who are you leaving the kids with, tonight? RIGHT: the one who looks like Da-da. |
...straight-up (so to speak) Manbat hornage. And then there's...
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| Oops. Sorry, Ron. |
... no, wait...
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| Loki's horns looked familiar, right? Da-da loves Hellboy, and really anything written by Mike Mignola. |
...THERE he is. Horns forward AND back... but typically denied and cut off and sanded down. Aha. At least Hellboy has a sense of humor. Manbat and Maleficent and Loki and Big Red are NOT big piles of giggles. Point? On Da-da's head, chief. Ok, wherewerewe?
Ah...
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| Fallen-angel clean-up on aisle nine. John Constantine, get ready for your close-up. |
...creepy.
Da-da doesn't know about you, but there sure are a lot of horn-y dark scary beings prowling around movies these days. Is someone trying to sell us something? Or is it just faux end-times zeitgeistiness? (Note: THERE ARE NO END TIMES. It's propaganda.) Doesn't matter, but OH how this epoch will be studied ad nauseum over the next 1000 years.
Da-da won't get into the fascistic overtones of films (and sporting spectacles) over the past ten years (many by the same director), but "Maleficent" alone should make one wonder if there's indeed some ulterior motive at work. Da-da's not naturally suspicious, he simply distrusts corporations -- and banksters and politicians -- and assumes they're nearly all either devil worshipping yahoos or greedy predacious pedophiles. Or perhaps they're just misunderstood and need a hug. By a straightjacket.
Anyway, if "Maleficent" were somehow self-deprecating, or wryly fey like "Hellboy," that'd be one thing. An entertaining thing. But a black-horned evil witchiepoo delighting in scaring and torturing children? Sure. Ok. That's fine for a certain kind of movie, but this is a Disney movie! What's next, a "Ghostbuster's" remake, but without the humor?
Unless Da-da's missing something, Disney itself seems to have fallen pretty far from Walt's Happy Tree, so far that they might want to call the company something else like, "Mammonpants," or "EvilMediaDeathMachine3000." Either way, the below gentleman, were he alive, would not like his namesake's current, downspiraling direction. Fact is, he'd be pretty pissed off.
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| Get up, Walt. Time to kick some butt. |
Disney has just announced a new Disney spokesperson who will also be the new Walt Disney for their newly revived, "Wonderful World of Disney." Yes, it's...
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| More horns, but at least they're on a UFO. |
7.5.14
ALERT: EARTHQUAKE LIGHTS Northern California (UPDATED)
ALERT: Da-da saw, "earthquake lights," like the ones above, over the San Andreas fault at 1:45 pm PDT in Northern CA. This might presage a quake within 1-2 hrs. Da-da hopes he's wrong. Note: Da-da's an old hand at spotting sundogs and other sky phenomena, so he knew that the angle was wrong for such an obvious explanation.
UPDATE1: There was a magnitude 2.7 quake about 50 mi. from Da-da 30 minutes before, so hopefully that was it. EQLs can occur before/after, apparently. There was also a magnitude 6.8 quake in Mexico 12 hours later, but that was a thousand miles away. We're still learning the impact of EQLs.
UPDATE2: Prior to the most recent 6.0 quake in Northern CA, Da-da did NOT see earthquake lights... as he was asleep. He did however have a dream of Homer Simpson drinking a light beer. This can never be good.
6.5.14
This Might Be Very Telling (UPDATED)
Click on the above image and look at it in detail. What is it? It's the proton and electron flux as registered by the GOES-13 satellite. For those in the know, this is extremely exciting. Da-da will hold off writing about it until he's sure the pattern will continue.
UPDATE: After a bit of a hiccup, things look to be improving. Let's see how this plays out on the world stage.
5.5.14
4.5.14
Voldemort vs. Death Star
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| Who will win? Who's greyer? Who's more ruthless? Who has the biggest lack of nose? Who cares? |
3.5.14
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