Blinding you

It happened again! I've gone a whole roman month without writing for the Chesterton Review. I'm probably losing readers left and right. If you ever come back, readers, please know that I'm sorry for neglecting you.

You might be happy to know, however, that my absence here is largely due to my spending time on another project: The Daily Science Fact blog. The downside of DSF, like all my other projects, is that it can detract from the quality and quantity of TCR posts. The upside is that I'm doing my very best to have a new post on that blog every single day. This isn't as hard as you might think. Unlike the 'Review, which is rich, deep and original, each Daily Science Fact post is pretty brief, and can be drawn quickly from my tremendous mental reserve of science facts.

Like most of my projects, I've been keeping the DSF kind of on the down-low. But now I have nearly a month of posts built up, and more in the queue, so I figured it was time to open up the flood gates and let the bulls in.

I'm not sure that the DSF is quite appropriate for the general public, but if anyone out there knows a college science professor who is looking to enrich his (or, potentially, "her," I guess) curriculum, I recommend sending them a link.

Enjoy! And I'll be back! With bells on!

Baddle Toads

Ok, also, I don't know if y'all knew this, but I just found out that Battle Toads aren't real.

I mean, I knew the weren't real. But I still figured that there might be battle toads out there, sort of like armadillos or narwhals, you know?

What a bummer. Did you know that it was the Battle Toads who first taught me that the best way to beat something to death is with its own leg? But, now ... where did that lesson even come from?

PS—If he were even real, Rash the Battle Toad, pictured above, would have some major emotional hurdles to deal with. Who calls himself "super cool"? The crazy one indeed.

PPS—Oh, I'm just being sad. There's nothing wrong with you, Rash.

Updates: Bird Dogs

Just a couple of things.

Popeye's Fried Chicken is new in town, and I've been eager for the opportunity to support a struggling new business, so yesterday I went to the drive-thru to try out some of their Waffle Chicken Tenders. I was all the way to the point of confirming my order when the voice on the intercom asked if it was ok that they were all out of Honey Maple Dippin' Sauce. I don't think it was until then that I finally understood what "flabbergasted" really means. All I could say was, "Well, shit. I guess I'll wait." And then I drove away.

I was, and still am, very disappointed. And I'm disappointed in myself for not telling her that they might as well throw out all their goddamn waffle chicken tenders until they get restocked with honey maple sauce, because what's the fucking point otherwise? I have to assume that Popeye's International Inc. supplies each franchise with equal quantities of waffle chicken tenders and honey maple dippin' sauce, so what the damn hell happened there? They have a leak. Or some horrible Jabba the Hutt is just taking shots of dippin' sauce.

Argh. I'm still angry about this. I should report that location to Popeye, and he can have it burned to the ground.

Man, I'm a regular Jerry Sienfield today, right? I just have this stuff on my mind. I should write it down sometime!!

The other thing I wanted to mention is an idea I had for a TV show. It's called "Meth Lab." Originally, it was going to be about a labrador retriever who figured out how to make crystal meth, and then I guess it would just be like a Breaking Bad with (and for?) dogs. I realized later, though, that because of their paws and small brains, the idea of a dog synthesizing complex molecules doesn't make a lot of sense, and we'd have to use puppets or CGI for all of those scenes. What would work a lot better, I decided, was to instead have the show be about a labrador retriever who just smokes a lot of crystal meth. It's entirely plausible, as far as I'm concerned, that a dog would enjoy and become addicted to meth, and, as a bonus, we could still use a real dog for the smoking scenes. Depending on dogs' tolerance for meth, the post-credits blooper takes could be a lot of fun.

So, to sum things up:
Popeye's can go to hell until they act like goddamn adults and figure out what the deal is with their dippin' sauce, and if I get even the slightest notion that you're going to steal my Meth Lab idea, be prepared to wake up tied to a table in a burning Popeye's.


PS—I don't like to curse this much, typically, but that Popeye's nonsense really burns my bippy.

Well, that didn't pan out the way I expected

I don't mean to focus so much on website traffic metrics, but it's obviously been on my mind.

My last post hasn't generated the herpes sufferer traffic that the Internet had basically promised me. So far it has had two views. "Rhymes with 'Slurpee,'" you're never going to blast into the top 5 with an attitude like that. I mean, my posts are like my children, but you're maybe my least favorite child.

On the plus side, one of the top referring sites of the last week has been something called "Underground Porn." Titillating! Chilling!! I'm not certain what's so saucy in here that it made it all the way into the troglodyte porn community, but, hey, even CHUDs must need to get a little crazy now and again*, and if hobo photos do it for them, who am I to judge?


*To be honest, though, I had always assumed that the genitals of cave people atrophied and disappeared at about the same time as their eyes. After all, if you haven't got eyes, what's the point of testicles? (And don't say "reproducing." Aside from the queen and a couple drones, everyone knows that cave people are pretty much like Shakers.)

Rhymes with "Slurpees"

As everyone who's anyone knows, I'm not great great at updating my diary regularly. (I'll cop to being great at it, but not great great.)

A big reason for this is that a while back I discovered that simply checking the site traffic stats on old content was much easier and equally rewarding as creating new content. It takes less time, it's dynamic at a pace I'm comfortable with, and it helps me feel much more connected to the world; when I see Russia turn dark green on my traffic sources map, it's a powerful reminder that there must be living human beings there, shoveling uranium into the giant machines that produce vodka and automatically check American websites. You'll never feel less alone than when a notion like that flies through your head.

These stats provide a wealth of information about what part of Dandy the world wants. For a long time it was slash fiction. Then it was a post about The Sweetest Thing, I assume because it was the first (of many, now) thing on the Internet that referenced both Cameron Diaz and "a penis with a nail sticking out of it." And then, of course, there was the hobo boom of '11. That's my top entry by something like 400%, and I have the popularity of that hobo picture that I took from some other blog to thank for it. Other Dirty Bindle entries don't even make the list—it's that rascal hobo, and him alone.

And racing up the charts is this unassuming post: It's Official. That post is currently tied for third in all-time visitorship, and it's only something like 9 months old. Why is that?!

I racked by brains. Could it be the focus on Thai electronics? Doubtful; the quality of Thai electronics speaks for itself, and has never needed my help. Yeah, the computers catch fire pretty often, but usually it's because you're using turpentine to clean the housing.

Is the attention due to excitement around faster-than-light spacetravel? I'd like to think so. A groundswell of public interest might get President Nointerstellarexplorationbama off his Buttrack Obuttma and into space! But I don't think that's it. (Full disclosure: I only did that wordplay on the president's name for the NSA site traffic. Topical!)

No, I think that post's popularity comes from the one thing the Internet simply cannot get enough of: herpes. Specifically, genital herpes.

(If you guessed "recording artist Seal" before you read "herpes," you're dead wrong. But I'm just as surprised as you. None of my Seal posts even rank. What gives? Apparently the world still isn't ready to get a little crazy.)

What about genital herpes? It can't be photos, because that post didn't include any. Was it some combination of "Chesterton" and "herpes"? Probably not, because as any GK Chesterton enthusiast knows, the man never had sex with anything that wasn't made of wood, and consequently never came within a hundred miles of a chancre. Splinters, on the other hand ... (before you let your imagination go too wild with that one, non-enthusiasts, all I mean is that the common understanding among Chestertonians is that the man had a small library of life-sized, carved wooden women.)

It seems to me that what the Internet herpes divers of the world are looking for in It's Official was simply this: hope. The possibility that an embarrassing and painful disease could be explained away by a cigar-burnt penis. (Although I'll remind you folks that penis burn scars are also, apparently, forever.)

I think that's all there is to it. And I wish I had more to offer, but nothing comes to mind at this point. I guess aloe is good for most stuff. And who knows? Think back to the last time you were naked around an intense heat source—maybe you'll surprise yourself.

I don't know. I'll give it some more thought, and maybe I can come up with something useful for the four hundred and thirty-three people who have scrabbled desperately through It's Official for one soothing dab of hope. But for now I'll leave you with just this, some words from GK Chesterton himself:

"A wooden lady never turned anyone down, not even for having a wiener as bent as a spider's leg.





Aaaah, you know what? He didn't really say that. I just wanted some Chestertonian traffic too. But it's probably not bad advice. While dealing with an outbreak, why not whittle yourself a nice lady or man to spend time with? Is that gross? No, we're adult medical professionals.

A quick update

Hey, y'all

As usual, it's been a while since I've posted anything, so I wanted to give everyone a quick update. It turns out that the dream I had last night wasn't real. I repeat: it wasn't real.

I woke up very concerned about what my neighbor might think of the drawing I taped to his door, and whether or not he'd be able to trace it back to me. The drawing, of course, was of him, naked and crawling on all fours, with stink lines rising off his body.

I'm not sure why I drew that (in my dreams), but I may be harboring some resentment towards him for the drunk and screaming man who has been showing up at my neighbor's door late at night, drunkenly screaming my neighbor's name (his name, I guess, is "Dunstaaaaaan," which is perfect for screaming.) I suspect that the screamer is a vagrant and/or Dunstaaaaaan's lover.

At any rate, I drew a stinky, naked Dunstaaaaan, and taped it to his door, but really I didn't, so that's a relief.

Keep up the good work, everyone.

Time for a re-design! !!!

I know some of you—that is to say some of the 'net-bots that try to spam my comments—have come to know and love the layout of this web page. And I understand the possibility that changing the layout could have dire consequences for your psyches. But, frankly, whether or not you flip your shit and stab all your pets doesn't matter that much to me. I think I ought to change to look of this site, and I have my reasons.

First and foremost among my reasons is that my mother recently asked me "for the code to [your] web-diary." I normally wouldn't think that she'd have much interest in this sort of thing, except that several years ago I convinced her that this blog was actually a website for getting fake prescriptions for pain meds. Lately her back has been "acting up like you wouldn't fucking believe, Dandy," and so she's a little bit pill-crazy, and she's after my website. I need to make this thing as non-fake-prescriptiony as possible.

Also, the "cats and dogs, living together" subtitle turns out to be more or less lifted straight from Ghostbusters. I didn't do it on purpose; I was way into pain meds myself at the time, and the only tape I owned was half Ghostbusters, half-10 o'clock news, and apparently the line lodged itself in my memory. I'll fix it soon enough.

Misunderstandings

So, yes, Seal was (and probably still is) after me.

His people were clearly not thrilled about my Seal trivia posts for whatever reason. I don't get it, frankly—it's all public record, and I didn't find any of it particularly bad. But that wasn't the whole of it.

See, I started a Seal-impersonating Twitter account. In retrospect, it was a bad decision. I didn't even say anything sassy. I just wanted to experience, in even the smallest way, what it must be like to be Seal. So I tweeted a couple dozen times, mostly about tour dates that I had made up, and what I thought Seal's diet must be like. (I assume that he eats a lot of salt water and potato bread.)

No harm no foul, right? Wrong. Seal, or Seal's people, came down on me like a soulful ton of bricks. I started to get calls threatening legal action, and I just ran. I went to a bar, where I may or may not have talked a lot about being chased by Seal, and then I woke up in that basement.

Make a long story short, a group of gentlemen to whom Seal apparently owes quite a bit of money thought I was a representative of Seal Inc., and decided to hold me for ransom, or something. I was out of that basement inside of 36 hours, as soon as they realized that there was no chance that Seal was interested in rescuing me.

So there you go! I'm a free man!

PS—I didn't mean half the things I said about Laos. I was under a lot of stress.

Send help, Seal has me.

Hello friends I guess I should say that I'm only assuming it's Seal that has me, but tor one reasonggghgg or another, the shit has really hit the gan God enmity. I'm "typing" by touching bare wires together, and Ii'm getting shocked pretty regularily. And it"s not a super precise method, as you cam.maybe tell. Whoever has captured andimprisoned me uses exclusively Laotian computers,and, as you know, I"m a Thai computer kind of guy. The Pc has spellcheck at least, butwhile spellcheck.is both helping and hurting me, the computer itself is ONLY hurting.me. I've said it before: the Laotians can mot make computers that don'telectrocute users to save their lives. Hey, Laos, try using rubber as an insulator, because whatever this is judtisn't doing the trick. Seriously, I had a Laotian LED belt buckle for a few weeks, and I got ball-zapped so many times I'llbe genuinely amazed if I don't have x-men babies. Amazed and disappointed. But I don't have much time. After my Seal expose a couple weeks ago, I started to get a lit of letters from lawyers. Naturally, I just threw them into my neightnors yard and forgotten about them. It's called the circle of life, and it's what we should all be doing. But Iguess someone feels rifferntlg, because yesterday. As I was. Exiting the pit toilet Kruger behind the super America, someone dropped a bag over my head and hit me with something that felt a lot like a rock. I'd know. And today I woke up in a cellar, covered in shit that can onlybe mine (I'd know), looking at a cinder block.wall with "Lay off, wanker" spray painted on it. Now, ok, Seal isn't the only Brit I've allegedly libelled, butthis feels like too much of a coincidence. It's only by pure luck that the pile of trash they gave me to sleep on had a Laotian computer with an active dialup connectiojesus chrsit. I'm sorry@ but who else could possibly have such awful electronics? It's like they manufactured this accidentally while trying to build some sort of finger incinerator. Let me say it one more time: Thai children can make a computer like you've never seen, but Laotisn child labors couldn't put their own socks on. If they had socks. I hats laos. No, I don't mean that. I'm just stressed. Forceful imprisonment is making me so mean! I'm going to cutthis short and take some tiime to relax. But send help. Tucking.Laos.

Regrets

I dreamed last night that I was Buffy, of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series. I had been transported back to the beginning of season 1, and I knew that everything we had fought for, all the sacrifices we had made, had been for nothing, and I was franticly trying to explain to my friends what had happened before those memories disappeared as well. (Apparently that was an obvious side effect.)

I woke up pretty sad. Who knew that reverse time travel was such a tragedy? Avoid it! It will mean that everything you've done meant nothing.

What's more, in all that time as a lady, I never once thought to look down my own shirt. God dammit. Accuse me of objectification, but it was my body.

I tried to get over the whole experience by using conditioner on my mustache in the shower. It was ok, I guess, but I think I'm just going to stick with goose fat for now.

(I'm really getting the hang of this web diary thing now!)

Tha 2 Chxrtuns

I don't remember if I've brought this up before, but this is not the only "The Chesterton Review" in the world or even on the Internet. No, far, far from it. As far from it as one is from zero.

There is, in fact, <a href=http://www.shu.edu/catholic-mission/chesterton-review.cfm>The Chesterton Review</a> of Seton Hall University in New Jersey. That particular TCR, if you can believe it, predates this one by a matter of months (several hundred months, but whatever.)

I'd feel threatened, if not for two things. One is that I have a stable of lawyers at the ready, just begging for food, legal work, and to be let out of their stable. (J/K, it's not a real stable. But they still aren't allowed out.) I can't imagine that a little trademark business would give them any trouble.

Secondly, the other 'Review seems to focus exclusively on the works of one G.K. Chesterton, who, as far as I can tell, was some kind of wizard or mystic. That's cool and everything, and I would never want to offend a wizard, but this TCR looks at so much more than that. It's like we're Walmart, and they're a Chicago Dog cart sitting outside of the Walmart. Sure, we're trying to sell Chicago dogs inside the Walmart too, but the cart isn't exactly a threat to our overall business model.

So there's that. Look them up of you want to. Or don't, actually. I don't want The Other Chesterton Review messing up my search results.

On a somewhat related note, I think now is as good a time as any to give my I'd Rather Be Queefing campaign another little nudge. We want to top the charts with this one, so we have to stay at it.

Actually, if anyone from the other publication has found their way here, maybe you'd be interested in some sort of reciprocity. I could license out the IRBQ phrase to you, and you could, say, put it on some school mugs, or on your website or whatever (think, "I'd rather be queefing ... at Seton Hall University!"), and I could occasionally make an effort to try to get your wizard's face out into the world a little more. Here, actually, you can have this one as a freebie. Put it in your next issue, maybe?!

Breaking the Seal

Is that even a pun? I guess it is, but not like "A Man for All Sealsons." Even though that one was kind of a linguistic stretch, and even though it didn't really relate to any of the ensuing content, I really liked that one. It made me think of Seal standing in the snow, wrapped in a buffalo robe.

I know it's been a little Seal-crazy around here recently, and maybe I've been neglecting important world events (both the Pope and Hugo Chavez recently abdicated, one from life and one from the papacy, but I don't remember which did which), but as I've said, Seal is an interesting guy. I'd call him a latter-day Marquis de Sade, if I didn't think it was more accurate to call the Marquis de Sade an old-timey Seal.

Anyway, I've turned up another Seal gem. (I'm working my way through Seals biographies. None of them are great, but each has some good stories.)

The year is 1990. Seal, booked as "Seal S. Seal," is sitting in a police station. He has been arrested, and he is handcuffed to a desk while he waits for his booking officer to return with some paperwork. Seal was caught, covered in butter, trying to slip through a ceiling vent into a veterinarian's office. Seal claims that he was simply hoping to steal some tranquilizers, but after he regurgitated a large pellet of fur and small bones in the squad car, the arresting officers began to suspect that Seal is not telling the whole truth.

Now, affixed to the desk, Seal is wearing an oversized aloha shirt and cargo shorts, both very buttery. He watches a young girl, perhaps 8 or 9 years old, take a seat at the desk across from his. Seal catches her attention with a hiss, locks eyes, and begins to sing.

That song, made up on the spot, would become 1991's hit single, Crazy.

Seal discussed the incident years later in an interview with NME:
"I don't know. I guess, if I'm being honest, I was trying to hypnotize the kid, or something. I thought I could get her to unlock the handcuffs and set me free. But, see, while I was singing, I guess I broke my own thumbs and pulled my hands right out of the cuffs. I didn't even realize it until the kid came out of her trance to see my broken thumbs wiggling around, because I was dancing, see, and she just started screaming. Yeesh."

When asked about the fur and bones he had vomited in the squad car, Seal had this to say: "First of all, I learned that trick from owls. You gotta get rid of the bones and fur, so that's all that was. Secondly, I was being absolutely honest with the police. I really did want those tranquilizers. I'm just of the opinion that cat tranquilizers are not even worth taking, unless you take them after a cat has already begun to metabolize them. If you have a better idea on how to do that, you write it down and send it to me. No, write it down and read it to me. Doesn't matter, though, because no one reported a missing cat, and no one saw me eat nothing, so I didn't break any laws. How's that idea coming?"

What a guy!

Let's try again: Signed, Sealed, Delivered!

Seal is an interesting guy!

I was searching for him on Yahoo yesterday to make sure I had been spelling his name right—my neighbor had left a note on my window saying that it's actually spelled "Seélle," but my neighbor has been proven time and time again to be a goddamn idiot, so I shouldn't have wasted my time—and I found all sorts of interesting stuff on the Man from Lupus.

Get this: In early 1994, Seal was arrested for punching open the window of an elementary school classroom and, in the middle of Math, sticking his head through the hole and screaming at the 3rd graders inside. He was eventually charged with something like First Degree Upsetting Little Babies, but the slippery ol' pinniped skipped bail and went on the lam.

Even though he hadn't yet been given any sort of prison uniform (having not been convicted of anything), Seal burned his clothing (later explaining that he was sure someone would recognize him if he kept it on), and holed up, naked as a piglet, in a derelict lighthouse.

He spent the next 18 days eating mold and being eaten by vampire bats.

When Seal emerged he was more than 50 pounds lighter, and, according to him, "not even the same fellow who hallooed at those children, so don't even try, yeah?"

Sent to the lighthouse to collect the jewelry that Seal had eaten and passed during his stay there, producer Trevor Horn discovered, scratched into the wall, a single line of lyrics running the entire length of the tower's spiral staircase. Horn copied the lyrics into a notebook, and when he presented the pages to Seal (along with a sandwich bag of filthy rings and bracelets), the artist explained that it was meant to be an epic poem about being consumed by the vampire bats. The title and refrain "kiss from a rose" referred to the flower-like folds of flesh on the bats' noses. (Seal never did say what "the gray" meant, as in "a kiss from a rose on the gray," but in ensuing months he often would mention "a pain in [his] gray.")

It's either a tremendous coincidence or no coincidence at all that "Kiss from a Rose" was later featured on the soundtrack of Batman Forever. Seal, you'll be my batman forever.

What a world!!

Ha ha. Duh!

Well, don't I feel like a stack of bricks and shit.

Obviously the title for that last post should have been "A man for all Sealsons." Dandy, if you always let opportunities like that slip through your fingers, you will never, ever be a published poet.

A man for all seasons

 
A little old-news-news factoid I just learned to (hopefully!!) brighten up your Monday:

No, actually two factoids.

#1:
The artist known as Seal actually wrote the theme song to the 1987 animated series, Duck Tales. According to Seal, most of the lyrics were already written when he was asked to write the song; he claims they came to him in a dream that was "a lot like Blade Runner, but with these little ducks who were wearing clothes." The characters of the Beagle Boys*, in fact, were written into the series based on imagery from Seal's dream. In Seal's own words: "They were, like, three hairless dogmen always chasing me and my duckfriends. They were called Loneliness, Self-Doubt and Death, and they were always trying to get their paws on my crazy! I told the producer about these dogs, and he said, 'Seal, mate, we have to do this.'"

Also, while laying down tracks for the song, Seal reportedly punched the recording engineer in the face when the man asked what a "duck-blur" was.

#2:
We've all heard about Seal's run-ins with animal services and the Humane Society, but this bit had somehow escaped me. Maybe it's new to you as well?

After being videotaped dropping a mouse into a bucket of acid, Seal defended himself to the ASPCA by claiming that it was actually not a mouse, but a toad dressed up in a costume made of mouse skin, and that it had already been dead anyway. When questioned as to how the toad had died (and where the mouse outfit had come from), Seal reportedly became apoplectic, shouting "How do you think it died? How do you think it died? What did you expect me to do?", before pulling an object from his vest pocket and throwing it at the judge. While the thrown item was never found, both the judge and the court artist insist that it was either a live mouse or, taking into consideration the recent testimony, a toad dressed in a mouse costume made of mouse skin.

SUPER exciting news!!!

Ok, so I understand that we all have bigger fish to fry right now. I should probably be working on the better mousetrap and stocking up on eggs (for vandalism), and you should probably be devoting more thought to whatever it is you've been putting off. Child support, maybe.

But none of that means that we can't take a moment to appreciate an exciting new achievement of mine and The Chesterton Review and mine: a Google search for "I'd rather be queefing" (even without the quotation marks!) returns two sites of utter bullshit ... and then The Chesterton Review! We're #3!

This is super exciting. I mean, there's so much more to TCR than Hurricane I'd Rather Be Queefing, but it's still important. We're getting out there. We're doing it. We're making money*.

Now, I know that Google has a bold and complicated algorithm, basing search results on your age, gender, what your personal website is, how often you search for "I'd rather be queefing" and so forth, so my 3rd place return might come in at, say, 9th for you. But unless your online profile includes tons of stuff about how much you hate queefing, I think we can safely assume that TCR and the original I.R.B.Q. will consistently come up in your top search 20 results.

Where do we go from here? Anywhere! Just keep at it!

Dammit. I feel like I had something else to mention here. My twin uncles Seamus and Sean recently beat the living tar out of each other in an empty pool last week, but that wasn't it. Hey, though, while it's on my mind, I should say that I found out that Sean isn't, as I had previously assumed, partially retarded. It turns out that he's just a little bit drunk all the time. He still can't drive worth a damn, but it's interesting to get a little more info on that.

*Not from the website. I've started charging my neighbors to protect their houses from overnight eggings. But money is still money.**

**Holy moly! "Money is money" could be the next I'd Rather Be Queefing!

A Cigar

"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes it's a mummy's penis." — Sigmund Freud

I guess he said that while speaking at the American Psychological Association's annual conference. Immediately after saying it, according to the president of the APA, Sigmund did that hand-pumping, bulgy-cheek blowjob motion, which is hard to get across in a typed quote.

Anyway, can you believe that guy? It makes you wonder whether his cigar smoking was a symptom of mummy-love ... or if it came from some deep seated mummy-hatred. Both make sense to me. The whole thing makes sense to me, really. I'm amazed that cigars aren't regularly labeled as "Mummy Penises." Or vice-versa!

(And please, no comments about "mummy/mommy issues" We're talking about embalmed penises, not making cutesy puns to deconstruct one of the 20th century's greatest thinkers.)