Scotty is Lost In Space!

Actually, no. It’s worse:

Scotty is slowly sinking to the bottom of the South Pacific in a fine grey cloud of ash.

My God, It's Full of Stars!

My God, It's Full of Stars!

Dignified and strange, in its own way, and somehow an almost-adequate substitute for the original plan, which was for the cremains of James Doohan, proud Vancouverite, former Canadian war hero, and the actor who played Montgomery Scott, Chief Engineer of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701, to be shot into space in a private SpaceX spacecraft. Goddam dilithium crystals!

The Falcon 1 owned by Musk’s private space exploration company, SpaceX, left the ground and stayed off it for 2 minutes and 20 seconds before second- and third-stage rockets failed to ignite. The whole thing, including Scotty’s ashes, plunged back to earth.

Well, back to the Pacific Ocean anyway. But nothing, particularly not the fate of a legend, is simple, and it seems there had already been a couple of false starts and a frantic search leading up to the ultimate un-ternment. For a man who claimed (falsely, but amusingly) that he was kicked out of the Canadian Air Force for slaloming his plane between hydro poles on a bet, the rolling swells of the unfettered tropical ocean are indeed the Final Frontier.

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Trend Alert: Ghost Whipping!

Ghost riding: SO 2007! The new hotness: Ghost Whipping.

I’m not sure where the whipping comes into things, as there are no apparent signs of ghost abuse in the video; perhaps it refers to what your underwear does under these conditions?

Raj can gloat all he wants about his pimped-out ride, but does he have a sun roof? Sun floor? Sun doors? Sun hood?

You know my sweet ride is crazy insane, going walking pace hee-yah in da BIKE LANE!

Lyrics over the jump. Continue reading

The Horror! The Horror!

I cannot even hint what it was like, for it was a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable. It was the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity, and dissolution; the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation, the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide. God knows it was not of this world – or no longer of this world – yet to my horror I saw in its eaten-away and bone-revealing outlines a leering, abhorrent travesty on the human shape; and in its mouldy, disintegrating apparel an unspeakable quality that chilled me even more.
HP Lovecraft, The Outsider

So, today I was shopping for a bathing suit and…

quiz: the sunglass personality test

Well, at least my sunglasses have personality. In fact, they have more than many of the people I’ve dealt with this week. This one is dead-on. It’s scary.


What Your Sunglasses Say About You


You are chic, bold, and mysterious.

You are larger than life and very sexy.

You need to be shaded from people who are dull and ordinary.

You feel sunniest when you’re around fabulous, exciting people

Elvis is the Emperor!

I should explain.

I should explain, specifically, about the fangirl gene. I got the fangirl gene (I think The Sister escaped that particular fate, and much time and cash it has saved her, too, even though the first concert I went to was a Shawn Cassidy concert because my mother was damned if SHE was taking my sister to a Shawn Cassidy concert, but somebody had to; oh yes, and then there was the Starsky and Hutch phase she went through, and the Donny Osmond come to think of it but hey, Osmond could sing and there was precious little in the way of entertainment value in Wiarton, let me tell you OH and did I mention I asked Wiarton Willie to friend me on Facebook? We go back aways) from my mother.

My mother was the original Elvis fan.

It’s family legend, and probably truthful at that (rare in Irish families, it must be said, and it must be said, in fact, by none other than me) that when she worked at Eatons she told her boss she needed Tuesday off, because that was the day Elvis was coming to Ottawa and her boss said she couldn’t have Tuesday off, so she threatened to quit.

This is where I learned my work ethic as well, by the way.

She nearly divorced my father any number of times, the most serious of which was when they went down South for a trip and he did NOT take her to see Elvis, who was playing 20 minutes from where they were staying.

So, that’s where I get it. Apologies to (um, lessee…) Viggo Mortensen, Steve Jobs, Kenneth Branagh, Tony Blair, Bono, Kurt Cobain, Prince Caspian (circa Voyage of the Dawn Treader only), Mark and Jason from Battle of the Planets, Mister Spock, and the boys in The Wolves of Willoughby Chaseand The Little White Horse.

But I’m over that now.

No, really. Despite my occasionally slightly-more-enthusiastic-than-can-quite-pass-for-objective comments on Valleywag Steve Jobs posts. So over that.

In any case and anyway, here is something my mother would treasure: actual physical evidence that stars, or at least Elvis, transcend(s) time and space, manifesting here in a 2nd Century AD Roman bust:

Elvis isn't the King, he's the Emperor!