A Crayon Haiku #53!

Oh my god. I mean, I expected it to be bad, but bloody hell, man. BLOODY HELL. I just had to write A Crayon Haiku #53 promptly after watching this movie in order to express my complete and total disdain for it. Good lord.  (9/24/06)

A Crayon Haiku #52!

Windows Media Player is so totally helpful, isn’t it? I mean, if you’re listening to a groovy CD, all you’ve gotta do to buy it is click a link in the corner of the window! But wait! A Crayon Haiku #52 notes a problem with this.  (9/24/06)

It’s thirty-four syllables in all with two new installments of A Crayon Haiku! I generally wouldn’t post them all at once like this without some more substantial fare too, but I felt I had to get A Crayon Haiku #52 out since it’s apparently been finished since May — guess I just forgot about it. I won the CD via the weekly drawing at a local goth club. 🙂

The real star of today’s show is A Crayon Haiku #53, though, which I just had to scribble and post immediately after watching New York Minute because holy hell that movie was horrible. I mean, Greg of Pop Arena told me it was bad, and I’ve seen lots of bad movies, but in no way was I prepared for the pure and unadulterated horrendousness of this film. You’d like me to do an audio review, wouldn’t you? But I honestly can’t think of what it would contain except a half-hour litany of curses and the odd blanket statement of fucked-up nonsensical details like “Andy Richter spoke with a stereotypical Chinese accent for most of the film” and “they visited a salon called the House of Bling.” Despite the positive attitude with which they appeared to regard their work on the movie in the making-of featurette, I refuse to believe that the cast and crew were aiming to create anything other than the worst film ever made. Everyone who had anything to do with it should be promptly and painfully exterminated with extreme prejudice. If I were standing in the front hall of a church and a smiling six-year-old girl with a frilly blue Sunday school dress and flowers in her hair told me she loved this movie, I would be strongly tempted to punch her hard in the face in front of the entire congregation and then burn the place to the ground with everyone in it faster than the Micro Machines guy can shout, “Hallelujah!” Holy fucking bloody hell.

In other news, I’ve been playing with the prototype layout for the new extended Dusty Plastic HELL toy comics (yes, after two years, Krang’s saga will finally be resolved), so have a look and tell me what you think of the various color schemes. I’m personally leaning towards the browns, though the greys don’t look too bad either. And of course, additional color suggestions are always welcome. 🙂

P.S. See if you can spot the minor changes to the content pages. 😀

TAPAS ARE DELICIOUS.

However, the discussion of the tasty tapas is a minimal part of our “review” of the La Tasca Spanish Tapas Bar & Restaurant. It’s certainly non-traditional as far as dining critiques go. And slightly creepy. It is our way.  (9/19/06)

YES, IT COULD GET STRANGER.

Just when you never thought literature was beginning to make sense, The Absolute Strangest Christmas Story Ever Told continues! In this freaky fourth installment, more crazy rambling takes place. Cling to your sanity.  (9/19/06)

Dusty Plastic HELL: Hot Flash #86!

Don’t think too hard about Dusty Plastic HELL: Hot Flash #86 — there’s nothing deep happening here. But isn’t it interesting what you can see and overhear in public? A ninja is always aware of his/her surroundings.  (9/19/06)

Yes, today we’ve actually got three pieces for you. In addition to the freaky fourth installment of The Absolute Strangest Christmas Story Ever Told, there are Dusty Plastic HELL: Hot Flash #86 and a “review” of the La Tasca Spanish Tapas Bar & Restaurant in Baltimore, MD. Now, as noted in the piece, I don’t particularly get off on restaurant critiques of the traditional sort that one finds in magazines and newspapers, to say nothing of the even less interesting kind that pepper weblog entries and the like. It pisses me off that people are so enthusiastic about restaurants and eating in general, especially when there’s no creativity on their part involved. (Personally, if it were possible, I would have my stomach replaced with a computer — but insofar as it is not, I do try to make something interesting out of this basic life necessity. Maybe not interesting to everyone, but those people should be eaten by hyenas.) So after the introductory remarks, this review focuses on my experience at the restaurant, much of which was determined by my semi-creepy infatuation with the utterly gorgeous waitress, because even that is far more interesting than noting that I ate food and it was good and telling you that you should do the same. I’d much rather you create your own dish from random ingredients and read Schleiermacher (or Scary-Crayon! ;)).

As noted on the content pages, there’s nothing particularly involved about the Hot Flash — I just happened to be sitting at La Tasca waiting to meet my server when the woman at the table next to me exclaimed that she liked her shirt, stood, and pulled it down such that it highlighted her breasts. They weren’t nearly as big as I drew them in the comic, though. Also, note the slight difference in the background color of the Hot Flash — that’s intentional. We were just off of the river and enjoying the breeze from that direction, so I made the background kind of a sea green. Yep.

Got a comment from someone that I thought had a cool website devoted to OROKU SAKI, but it was actually a spam comment that linked to a site that sells paper shredders. I dunno, I thought it was funny.

And speaking of spam, I keep getting these e-mails asking me if I’m worried about the loss of “erectoin”. Not really, seeing as how I don’t even know what that is! But considering that thinking about what “erectoin” might be (maybe a special grade of heroin that makes one horny and high?) made me think of Ghostbusters, I move that we add the term “erecto-plasm” to the list of slang terms for semen.

Until next time, minna-san. 🙂

A RANDOM LUNCH #11!!!

After an extended hiatus, spontaneous culinary insanity returns to Scary-Crayon in A Random Lunch #11! See what wonders you can create with a can of creamed corn, stale croutons, and dollar store turkey franks.  (9/11/06)

It feels odd to be posting A Random Lunch #11 on September 11. I was going to write a bit about the superficial similarities between the feature and the events that took place five years ago to the day, but after reading through the Wiki article on the subject I can’t quite bring myself to do it. Instead, let’s have a moment of silence, or better yet you can silently read parts of the article and see what comes to mind. Pretty heavy stuff.

Anyway, had I gone on to detail how both the features and the terrorist attacks feature various components that ostensibly do not belong together, I would’ve ended with, “And like the unfortunate machinations of that day and the ominous implications of the numbers 9-1-1, the unnatural combination of these ingredients is similarly suggestive of danger — gastrointestinal danger.” Which would have brought us to another point (and this is where the gloom ends; welcome back to Scary-Crayon):

Speaking of gastrointestinal processes and whatnot, I just had a thought (before I got all somber and serious, anyway) that made me laugh out loud. Okay, so this is nothing new to Latin scholars, and if you have a tendency to analyze odd vocabulary words you may already have considered this — but look at the word defecate. Now, note that the more proper term for shit is feces. Now, look again at defecate. De-fecate. So the word pretty much literally means to de-poopify! Fantastic.

In other news, I was at the Baltimore Comicon on Saturday, so I’m planning to do a full review (in the vein of the Shore Leave Report) at some point during the next week or two. But then again, knowing me it could be three months to never, so I figured I’d go ahead and plug some of the cool webcomic-related people and groups that I met there right now, in the random order that I remove their flyers and comics and business cards from my convention bag. I’ll save the other cool folks (and individual mentions, where the groups here are concerned) that I met there for the article itself, but in the meantime you can check out these sites and whatnot. Tell ’em Wes sent you! Which won’t mean much to them since nobody knows my name, but I do enjoy confusing people. So there. 😉

So. I’ve got a sticker from www.odeercomics.com, a compilation comic from the Webcomic Hotness group (lots of cool folks in this group, so check them out), issue 38 of High Noon presents, a business card from Rob Balder of Partially Clips, a neon green card from UpDown Studio, a pink flyer thingy from http://www.rocketsrockout.com/, and an issue of a zombie comic called Dead of Summer. Again, I’ll have more to say about some of these folks (and others!) whenever I get around to the report.

Ja ne, minna-san!

COULD IT GET ANY STRANGER?!?

Spiders! Rumplestiltskin! Pac-Man! Werewolves! What do these creatures and characters have in common? They’re all mentioned in the third part of The Absolute Strangest Christmas Story Ever Told! Take your medicine.  (9/4/06)

Happy Labor Day, crayon fans! As you (hopefully) relax on your day off, why not catch up on some reading? But given the nature of the holiday, comprehending what’s going on in part three of The Absolute Strangest Christmas Story Ever Told might be too much work. After all, how does one make sense of nonsense? That is arguably an existential question.

I think my favorite passage in this part is the bit with the library spiders. 🙂

By the way, for those of you who’ve taken an interest in paper crafts following last time’s Dalek piece and have some skill with 3D modeling programs, this Pepakura Designer program might be of interest. You’d want your models to be fairly simple, though.

You might also want to try your hand at making a simple optical illusion dragon. The reality doesn’t fool me at all (though it is a cool model), but the interesting thing is that when I filmed it with my digicam, the illusion totally works in the video. But then, I can’t see magic eye puzzles either. Note that while this page attempts to provide an explanation — not for this particular problem, but for Spy Kids 3D and 3D-type stuff in general — that the illusion works when viewed by the camera’s monocular lense seems to debunk it. It’s also worth noting that the illusion failed for me even when I wore my glasses. Strange!

But not as strange as today’s fictional installment. 🙂