The looks on these Québécois’ faces tell me that they do not have a strong command of the English language.
Strike that: the Mike Pence-looking Midnight Cowboy furthest to the right? I think that mofo 1) speaks serviceable English, 2) selected this song, and 3) told the rest of the dance team that it’s about competitive swimming.
(For reference, here’s the original video; God bless Clarence Carter, he is a national treasure)
(i told you)
Straight talk: this still cracks me the fuck up.
… I mean, a severed Russian head is a pretty dope thrift-shop come-up.
A seasonally appropriate list of creepyscarry links:
This story resonates with me tremendously as a Jew. It captures the ambivalent, ecstatic trauma of becoming part of the thing that is America in a way that perfectly matches my lived experience.
NIGHTLIGHT (A Black Horror Fiction Podcast) # 422: “Mitochondrial Assimilation” by Khalifaziz
They also have an interview with the author, Khalifaziz, that’s well worth your time.
… yes, they are cheesy showboats—no doubt—but they are cheesy showboats performing what is likely the ONLY FUNCTION most folks ACTUALLY want out of the Fourth Estate: to warn them about shit that might harm them on a regular day-to-day basis.
A huge portion of “news” focuses on opinion and “analysis” (which is just another kind of opinion) and “commentary” (a third name for opinion). All of these are technically forms of fiction: a person takes a nugget of reality and weaves whatever the hell they want around it. (DISCLOSURE: I was an op-ed writer for years. I’ve looked hard and long at how these particular sausages are made. It has lead to me being pretty goddamned disgusted by the prospect of eating any.)
Meanwhile, the easily maligned local TV investigative reporter? Say what you like about the smarm and histrionic gotcha!ness, but those bastards are speaking facts: they smell something fishy, go and get pics, take samples to a lab, and report the results. God Bless ’em
I mean, it’s weird that no one talks about the obvious visual similarities between the beginning of hot dog ad (top image) and the final image from Bergman’s Seventh Seal (bottom image), right?
Are we to understand that the Armour hotdog ad takes placed in some purgatorial afterlife, where we are all condemned to revert to a childlike state of un-knowing and follow a sinister hot dog man, terrified and singing? ’cause that’s a dark, dark Easter Egg, folks.
Here’s the entire VINTAGE 1967 ARMOUR HOT DOGS COMMERCIAL – KIDS MARCHING & SINGING:
And here’s the end of Bergman’s 1957 film, Seventh Seal:
Just a brief reflection on First Days at school. I wrote this back in 2017, when my youngest began kindergarten. I posted it now, because after 406 with no in-person school, it’s taken me a month to process that her first day of the school year came and went without dire consequences.
This old essay begins like so:
Tuesday was my daughter’s first day of kindergarten. At 4:20, when her bus finally arrived, she didn’t get off.
The driver checked, first calling out from the front, then shushing all of the kids and calling out again, then finally going seat to seat down the length of the big yellow bus.
My daughter wasn’t there.
Don’t worry—this is an “all’s well that ends” situation…
from First Days (or “To Hell with Mitch Albom and his Bullshit Flat-Earth Nostalgia”)
It goes on from there. And, no, I have no clue why I chose to defame Mitch Albom in the title of this pieces. I never mention him in the entire essay. He must have just pissed me off that day. Dude does that.
I’ve added a new interactive fiction, “Shoot First!“, to my Patron’s Only Digital Vault. For as little as $3 patrons get immediate access to all the goodies in the Vault, including an analog horror film, audio books, new fiction and music, interactive goodies, etc.
Check it out on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/DavidErikNelson
