Elections.

I've been following the republican nominee race with various levels of closeness for the last four or five months, and it has definitely had its share of awesomeness. Notably, Herman Cain Quoting the Pokemon Song, Michelle Bachmann claiming that HPV vaccinations cause retardation, and, as a bonus slice of fried gold, Newt Gingrich revealing his plans to build a Moon Base. Yes. an honest to goodness moonbase. Still, none of those things brought me even half the joy that this comic I stumbled upon did. Go, ahead, click that image on the right and enjoy.

P.S. When I Googled "Michelle Bachmann" to get this clip, Google politely offered to finish for me "Michelle Bachmann Sexy". Wtf? Who is searching this shit?


A few days ago as I was feeding ol' Salamandy McGee, the sacrificial cricket clung to the edge of the tube instead of conveniently falling out. I tried to "scrape" it off onto the sides of the tank, but it wasn't letting go. Eventually I resorted to swinging the tube erratically in an effort to shake the little bugger (heh) off, and I accidentally flung the diminutive chirper directly into the water dish. As it started to drown, I panicked, but then with the clarity of mind that only comes in moments of crisis, I heroically scooped it out with my bare hand, and triumphantly deposited him on the safety of dry ground.

It was pretty comparable to a mother lifting a truck off her baby in a surge of adrenaline; one of those once in a lifetime events that get made into terrible lifetime movies. I was feeling pretty full of myself and superman-like after my rescue, but alas, the feeling would be short lived. Mere moments after the cricket was deposited onto the "safety" of dry land, Jethro darted out of his log and scarfed the little guy down before it had even shaken the water off of its legs. Talk about a letdown.

Speaking of letdowns, I was driving the other day and I saw a cop driving and texting at the same time. I was super excited and wanted to take a picture of him on my phone for evidence, then was crestfallen when I realized I couldn't...

Bad show

Tv and movie dramas should not have child actors. Occasionally you get someone awesome like Arya* from Game of Thrones, but the vast majority of children are really bad actors, creepy, or annoying. Game of Thrones had the right idea, aging almost every child-character 5-10 years so they would only have the bare minimum of kids involved. I suppose with all the boobs and violence flying all over the place its not appropriate having a bunch of kids on the set being all... youthful.

Now there is another show (recently cancelled) with an annoying kid called Terra Nova. I watched this dumb thing every week, and was ashamed of myself for doing so. The little girl character is a constant cheese-fest, if she was on full house the fake audience would go "awwwww" everytime she opened her adorable mouth. Considering that the premise of the show involves time travel and dinosaurs, you would think you would get some decent violence here and there, but noooooo. This show is much more interested in showing a little girl make friends at school, and draw pictures of her family holding hands under a rainbow.

Remember last week when I clearly established that in the future, guns shoot exploding frisbees of death? Well apparently in this future, guns only shoot sound. One of the problems that arises when you use a glorified loudspeaker to fight dinosaurs, is that sound doesn't kill dinosaurs. At best, they think "oh, this is mildly annoying" and at worst "Wow, that guy is making an annoying sound. I'm going to eat him now". Nobody on the show really seems to mind that they are powerless to stop dinosaurs though, because In Terra Nova, no one ever hurts dinosaurs. Ever. Even in self defense. Its as though the show creators were worried that animal rights activists would be upset if they showed their poor, defenseless CGI dinosaurs being harmed in any way or for any reason.

The straw that broke logics back was when a velocorapter eats some dude alive, and they need to get his dogtags out of the things stomach. instead of doing the normal thing and killing the monster that is eating your people, they capture it alive, carefully surgically extract the dog tags, and then release it into the field twenty feet from their camp. Its like knocking down a wasp nest and then putting it back up inside the house. Its no wonder this crap was cancelled.

If you don't mind your PC games crappy, short and full of bugs, you might be interested in beta testing! Diablo III just launched its open beta, and there is also a Korean MMO called Tera That is beta testing until the 23rd only. Happy gaming!

Winter

I hate the snow. This wasn't always the case. When I was a kid growing up in Southern California, the snow was cool. It was this far off exotic thing; It didn't stroll into town every winter with the homeless, we had to drive to find it. Snow represented fun and frolic, snowball fights!

Now? Snow sucks. Its cold. It causes accidents. It delays planes. It causes people to slip on the ice and fall on their ass as their "friends" laugh, then quickly feign concern. It awakens the white walkers, and every time a kid gets triple dog dared to lick a pole they have to call out the fire department. This is a huge drain on city resources! No wonder the economy sucks; We have winter.

If you have a computer and like free games that are awesome, you should check out Tribes: Ascend. By far the best free game I've ever played. The premise is, Its the future! Guns now shoot explosive frisbees instead of bullets! And... everyone can fly! If those last two sentences didn't make you think "I need this inside me" than go watch Stargate: SG1 until you enjoy happiness again. And then watch this.*



"But, Zach" you say haughtily, swirling your fancy-person drink in a chalice "I just don't like things with space or explosions or excitement, especially when they are free!" Just get out. Go. I can't make a logical argument with you. There is no reason why free (FREE) access to exploding frisbee deathmatches at breakneck speeds should not be taken advantage of.

* I am aware that this video includes the word flag a comical number of times, but I give it a pass due to the bombastic awesomeness of everything else

Crickets and Worms

I mentioned before that I have a pet salamander; I caught him fair and square as he was crossing the street several months ago. My diligent google-based research on the care of salamanders informed me that crickets are the best food for them. Being the responsible* and dependable* person I am, I promptly went to the pet store and bought a bag of crickets for Jethro (the best salamander name ever) to consume. Have you EVER tried to extract only a single cricket from a bag of 25 of its living, jumping brethren? Its about as easy as typing with chopsticks while blindfolded. I finally managed to do it by just barely opening the bag, squeezing out most of the air, and then herding a single cricket towards the opening from OUTSIDE the bag while holding the whole mess above the tank. It took about 10 minutes. Unfortunately in my zeal I had forgotten that crickets, like MOST animals, need air to survive; The remaining 24 crickets were dead in about 2 hours. Well, I'm not doing THAT again.

* The claims made in this post are not evaluated by the FDA

Since that accidental massacre took place, I've been feeding Jethro a steady diet of mealworms, waxworms, nightcrawlers and other things used as live bait.

As much fun as it is to store vermin in my fridge behind the yogurt, I recently decided to step up my care for Jethro. I went out and got him some new moss, cleaned his tank all nice, and even decided to give crickets another try. Thats when I discovered THIS contraption. You put the crickets inside, with some food, and they crawl up into the little tubes to escape the light. When its time for some of them to get eated, you pull the tube out, evict as many of the tenants as you please, and then replace the tube! The guy who invented this is probably some kind of evil genius. No doubt he spends his off hours stroking white cats and designing elaborate ways to kill Mr. Bond.

My nephew saw the cricket box yesterday, and excitedly asked me when I had gotten pet crickets. I told him they weren't pets, I was only keeping them so I could feed them to Jethro. He screamed "NO YOU CANT FEED THEM TO HIM, THEY ARE TOO CUTE". It took me a long time to calm him down, but at least I wasn't feeding him mice.