Longer Works and HTML Miscellany

Another post with old material, as my holiday break “putter project” continues into the week. (By the way, most of the existing stuff on the site should be working now; if you spot something that isn’t, please be helpful and post a comment below so I can fix it. Thanks!)

In this batch are various longer pieces I’ve written over the years that either depend heavily on their HTML layouts to work or would simply be a huge pain in the ass to transport over to JP.com’s fancy-pants new WordPress layout. As with my Lampoon post, it’s a bit of a grab-bag here; still, based on word count alone it’s a pretty imposing stack of free writing, so if there end up being a few stinkers in the batch I make no apologies. (I should also note the appearance here of several pieces I’ve gotten emails about concerning their disappearance, in particular “A Tribe Untouched,” “Torso Messiah,” “Love Letter” and “Lordo Ringfellow.” So to the two or three people out there who still remember them and actually care enough to ask: bless you and here they are. Feel free to stop emailing me about them.)

• A Tribe Untouched
• Back of the Bible
• Lordo Ringfellow
• News Skim Comics
• The Trailer Trash
• Batman Begins Primer
• Teenagers are Retarded
• Me and Fred Savage
• How to Assemble an IKEA Desk
• Torso Messiah
• Inspector Poon
• RingLord III: The King’s Revenge
• These Are a Few of my Favorite Things
• Urban Legend Database
• Summer Movie Preview 2004
• Steve Bartman and the Cubs
• Charlie Sheen Super Keen Dream
• Charlton Damned Heston.com
• Love Letter
• Wendy’s Employee Newsletter

My Lampoon Years

One of the drawbacks of whoring your comedy-writing ass out to anyone with a handful of cash and a website is sacrificing the right to your own work in exchange for a paycheck. The upshot is that I’ve watched material I’d slaved over for weeks (and, to be honest, some weak material I dashed off over a weekend for beer money) get time-humped to oblivion whenever the comedy site I’d been writing for changed formats, went bankrupt, overhauled their backend website system or otherwise obliterated my stuff in the name of progess and decency.

So it’s been a nagging irritation for me that all my National Lampoon stuff got wiped from the Internet Hivemind some time last year to make way for that upsetting next wave in internet comedy, video clips. (Even the Onion’s got the damn things now.) Why bother writing things when you can upload clips of fat men getting hit in the nutsacks with objects of various weight, or cats wearing/doing/dry-humping things they shouldn’t, right?

Though not complete, here’s what I managed to unearth (and a big thanks to Scott Mulder’s generosity shortly after I left NL, without whose email packages of old archived material I most likely wouldn’t have even these). Varying quality here, I admit, though in particular check out “Golden Heat,” a piece of such unapologetic stupidity that it still makes me smile years later. My apologies that, post-Zoolander, it now reads a bit “done”. In my defense, though, this piece pre-dates Stiller by a considerable margin (as did the dancer-in-the-coal-mines bit, also a later Zoolander scene. Perhaps I’ve got a tasty lawsuit on my hands?)

• Al Jazeera Guide
• Bono’s Third World Products, Inc. (with Karla Pacheco and Scott Mulder)
• Conserving Energy in the Home
• Flush-Rite Holiday Catalog 2003
• Things You Didn’t Wanna Hear
• The Curious Adventures of Inspector Poon
• How to be Loathsomely Repellent to Women (with Sean Crespo)
• The Thrashing of the Christ DVD Release Page
• Christmas ‘Round the World (with Sean Crespo)
• Golden Heat: My Life as a Solid Gold Dancer
• The NL Guide to Taxes

Radiohead: the anti-Wilco

Back when I was living in Toronto, I was lucky enough to see Wilco a few times live. The highlight of the shows, for me, was a beautifully spare and moving unreleased song alternately introduced as “Spiders” or “Kidsmoke” that frontman Jeff Tweedy played unaccompanied on acoustic. I simply loved the song — having not really listened to Wilco a lot prior to seeing them live in concert, you could go so far to say “Kidsmoke” was the song that made me a fan of the group. It’s just that good a song.

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Off to Canada!

Due to a longstanding familial obligation involving my birth and raising, Karla and I are once again making our annual trek to sun-dappled, palm-shaded Ontario, Canada for Canadian Thanksgiving. In truth I’m looking forward to it. Getting from Seattle, Washington to Kingston, Ontario is, granted, something of a day-long plane-and-train nightmare; but once we actually arrive, and get a chance to take in the multi-colored splendor of an Ontario autumn, I’m sure we’ll be glad we invested the time, at least for a good twenty minutes, until the novelty of dry orange leaves wears off and we realize we’re still in Kingston, Ontario for some reason.

In prior years, my American friends’ perplexed expressions at the idea that Canada might have its own Thanksgiving — “What do you have to be thankful for?” “You just stole it from us, didn’t you?” “Why is it in October? Is it because you guys are idiots?” — led to heated debate and explanation. This year I’m better prepared, and have so far managed to cut the hataz off at the pass with a curt “We have our harvest earlier in Canada because of the weather,” and if necessary, “We have plenty to be thankful for in Canada! Having a great neighbor like America, for instance!” and “Yes, we probably stole it from you. Is that firearm loaded? You got it at Wal-Mart, did you? Fantastic!”

Yes, this year I know what I’m doing, and in fact only two things have managed to catch me with my metaphorical pants around my ankles: that we told my parents some months ago we’d quit smoking (we had), but haven’t told them that we’ve since backslid and started back up again; and that the Canadian dollar is now actually worth more than its American counterpart for the first time in years. This in particular is cause for Yosemite Sam grumbling on my part, since I’d intended to pay off the last of the money my parents lent me years ago to get several bossy student loan collection agencies from phoning me every half hour (”Got the money yet? How about now? Is it cool if we come over and search your apartment?”) Realizing that if I’d settled up four years ago I could have paid 60 cents on the dollar is, I’m sure you can imagine, akin to finding a rented DVD under a couch cushion that you could have sworn you’d returned weeks ago, except with several extra zeros at the end. Luckily, it looks like they’re throwing in a big turkey dinner, possibly to “sweeten the deal,” so while I’ll be returning to Seattle significantly poorer, I’ll at least be fatter, a big plus in the realm of poverty.

Well, we’re off. Keep it real, America! Don’t touch my stuff while I’m gone!

Going Down

Every morning I use the elevator in the building across the street from mine, taking it down to the parking lot so I can walk across the sky bridge to my office. (If this seems needlessly complex, keep in mind that the area of Seattle I call home is built on top of a mountain that engineers sliced the top off of in the ‘30s and sold as real estate. This means you’re constantly on the look-out for elevators and sky bridges that obviate the need to inch your way down steep 200-foot embankments—inchings that, if it’s early enough and you’re not paying attention to the task at hand, can easily become a pants-peeingly terrifying, rapidly accelerating two hundred-footing.) 

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The N-Word

I lived in a fairly integrated neighborhood in New York and would often overhear black teenagers using the n-word in casual conversation. When I say “using” I’m understating a little. These guys were giving the n-word the most exhaustive workout I’ve ever heard, substituting it for adjectives, verbs, punctuation and proper nouns in ways it was never meant to accommodate. Taboo, incendiary, upsetting: the n-word is many things. What it isn’t is versatile.

At one point in the conversation, for instance, one of the teenagers turned to another and said “N—–r was goin’ to the n—–r, n—–r, but n—–r n—–red it up on the n—–r.” I’m not joking. That’s a direct quote. I spent the better part of five minutes walking quietly behind them parsing through all the name and place substitutions, but eventually gave up: I had no idea what the hell this kid was talking about. His friends seemed to grasp his meaning, though personally, I like to imagine the opposite is true: that they, like me, were completely lost. Their enthusiastic overuse of the n-word had started as a loud and provocative public exercise meant to embarrass guys like me and establish them as “screw-you” teens with a healthy disrespect for social mores. But it had somehow managed to get away from them by the ten-minute mark, and now they could only soldier on, helpless, none of them wanting to be the first to admit their conversation had descended into a hopeless gibberishy mess composed of a single word.

Come on now, though: “N—–r was goin’ to the n—–r”? As a swearing connoisseur, I’m sorry, that’s just lazy. If we were walking down the street and I turned to you and said “Motherfucker was going to the motherfucker, motherfucker,” I’d like to think you’d have the decency to pull me aside and tell me how ridiculous I sounded. “Your heart’s in the right place, motherfucker, but you really need to learn to swear properly before you try and do it in public, bitch.”

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Getting There…

Still plenty to tinker with, of course, but at least the blog looks vaguely like something I’d have designed myself now. I seem to have reached a point where, for better or worse, all the stylistic choices I randomly decided on over the course of a weekend, drunk, six years ago are now permanently associated with the look and feel of the site. I briefly courted a complete overhaul, with a sweet gothy all-black look and a background image of Trent Reznor weeping with sorrow, for instance, but it just didn’t feel “Pinkertony” enough. Subsequent experiments with Hello Kitty themes and l33t-style “hacker” fonts yielded similar wizened, inedible fruit. Looks like we’re stuck with the baby blues.

At least I managed to get my body copy back to a simple left-alignment. I realize it’s a small thing, but that boxy justified alignment always looks better than it scans, with its alternations of buncheduptext and w i d e a s s  c o p y; it’s like trying to read something and constantly forgetting how to in mid-sentence.  

I’ve also now learned the hard way not to type entries directly into the WordPress posting page, as it has an alarming tendency to suddenly wipe clean of all content mere seconds before you click SAVE, meaning you get the opportunity to see yourself erasing a page full of writing in realtime. 

Honestly, to hell with MovableType

…or maybe MovableType’s the shit, and my hosting package just sucks. Or maybe my hosting package is tits and I’m just functionally tech-illiterate. I refuse to quibble over semantics. The point is that I’ve spent the better part of three weeks trying to get MovableType (my old blogging software) rocking at my new, non-Cracked-hosted home, to mounting frustration and zero results. I’ve now got so many contradictory trouble tickets in with my hosting provider that I’m growing concerned about all of them getting resolved at once, resulting in my website becoming sentient—at which point I have little doubt it would hunt me, tramp-like, for sport in retaliation for my lack of updates.

So this is the middle ground: a new-car-smell, right-out-of-the-package WordPress blog, with my previous site available as a static archive. Honestly, to hell with all this tech nonsense: I’ve been itching to get back to a regular blogging schedule, and it gives me a migraine that I’ve ejaculated all my free time these past few weeks into my metaphorical own face with all this noodling around with templates and cgi-bins. If you want the old site, it’s there. If you’d like actual updates, tadah.

Granted, it doesn’t look like much at present; this is pretty much the default template WordPress hands out to any sub-literate with a desire to set the record straight on what Buffy character they most resemble. With any luck I’ll have it looking suitably me-like over the next few weeks.

I’ll also be starting up a columny-bloggy-type thing at Surreal Game Design, a designers’ blog written by all my new-car-smell, right-out-of-the-package coworkers at Surreal Software. I’m currently their game writer, meaning I write all the cutscenes and dialogue everybody tends to skip over to get to the next cool bit in the game. As you can imagine, this puts me somewhere between the janitor and the guy who delivers the sandwiches on the staff totem pole. I’m sure I’ll be writing plenty of navel-gazing wank about the state of storytelling in video games—or if I’m feeling particularly lazy, making a few easy jokes about fucking something small, furry and defenseless and calling it a night.

Alright, off to figure out how to make this blog template not look like shit. Talk to you soon!