A gentle reminder--spring forward!

Courtesy of Lileks Twitter feed

Happy Thanksgiving! What's on the menu?

I love being the first one up on a holiday and having a little time to organize and enjoy the quiet.

After last weekend's 2-day long bacchanal (MizBubs' brothers and their families have gathered at our house for an early Thanksgiving each year for the past 6 or 7 years) during which we fed 27 for dinner on Saturday, and then had brunch for 15 on Sunday, today's Thanksgiving celebration will be a breeze.

So what are we serving up here at the compound on this glorious holiday?

• Appetizers: mini-tarts with onion and mushroom, and celery stuffed with blue cheese
• Corn bread
• Chopped salad
  
• Hot Brown sandwiches (the family elected to skip the whole turkey and do this instead, it's a Kentucky recipe and a family favorite)
• Mashed potatoes and gravy, because kids demand it at every holiday. I'm roasting the garlic for the potatoes as I type
• Roasted sweet potato rounds
• Brussels sprouts with caramelized onions and pecans
• Southern style green beans
• Corn pudding
• Dessert: apple pie, pumpkin pie and a monstrous chocolate cake. I mean monstrous in a good way.

I'm trying out a little something new in the bourbon department. They had Red Stag on sale at the Jewel's, and I thought I'd try using the black cherry-infused bourbon to make old-fashioned cocktails before dinner.

I hope that whatever trials you've been through will ease for you, and whatever burdens you carry might be lifted. Please accept our wishes to you all for a very warm and peaceful Thanksgiving.

That reminds me...

It may not be hunting season yet, but it's never to soon to show off your pelt.

Zombies bring wholesome family fun to the Ren Faire

For some reason my brothers and I have always found something inherently amusing about Sansabelt slacks. We have a similar attitude toward dickeys, to the point that my brothers sometimes wear one, Cousin Eddie-style, at Christmas, just to amuse themselves.

One holiday season I discovered there was a Sansabelt shop in Woodfield mall, and I decided to visit while we were doing our Christmas shopping. My brother John and I walked through the door and were almost immediately struck with what can only be described as the giggles. We were rendered nearly speechless within moments of walking into the shop, and when a smiling young woman approached and asked if she could help us we just lost it. I mean, lost it--trying desperately to maintain control, I managed to croak out a "no, thank you" in a voice that sounded very much like Squeaky-voiced Teen from the Simpsons. John started shaking and snorting, and we wheeled about and practically ran out of the store. Once we cleared the exit we fell apart, punching each other and laughing like loons.

I mention this because I discovered this is nearly the same reaction I have when I walk through the gates of the Bristol Renaissance Faire. Within moments of arriving at the Faire, before I even had a beer in hand, I became giddy to the point of stupidity. At first I thought it was all the cleavage on display. I know that always has an effect on me. But it was so much more than that. The heady combination of sights and smells, walking around in the sun, the flesh on display, the sheer exuberant hokiness of it all...

It turns out I really enjoy visiting the RenFaire. There. I said it.

Of course, I had an excuse for visiting. The only reason we were there in the center of that den of iniquity was that our eldest was helping out at Plague Day, the first zombie event held at Bristol. Nora was helping out with makeup for people attending the event who hadn't zombie-fied themselves in advance. Her friend Geoff, the man behind Kitty Zombie, organized the event.

And what an event it was. I'll just get right to the pictures from the day. MizBubs kept me out of trouble by preventing me from approaching anyone sporting a combination of near-nudity and chain mail, so these pictures are all SFW.

One of the things I love about the RenFaire is the people who show up with random bits of fantasy wear--I saw fur tails attached to several ample rear ends, bondage gear, Weimar cabaret costumes, gladiators and Orcs. Last year I saw a group of Klingons visiting, but they must have gone to the Dells instead this year. I half expected a group of Civil War reenactors to show up in uniform, claiming a professional courtesy discount.

This guy decided to wear some vaguely SWAT-ish vest, black jeans and musketeer boots:

There were acrobats

Faeries

Living statues

And living statues with obnoxious shirtless drunks



There was a disturbing moment when the Royal Court roamed the grounds, seeking a suitable male child to take away with them and raise as one of their own

On to the zombies.

There was a fine collection of living dead at the Faire yesterday. I am especially impressed with people willing to put in freaky contact lenses to complete the undead effect:

Nora, horror's girl next door, stayed busy making up the not-yet undead



Kitty Zombie is seen here working out costume contest details with Lord Bedlington-Fop (not his actual name--I just like saying "Lord Bedlington-Fop". The actor did a fine job of announcing the contest, and was quite funny.)

There was a costume contest. The medieval tranny zombie did quite well and made it to the finals. See if you can spot her.

And a zombie pinup contest. I have to say that some of these gals were more goth and steam punk than they were medieval, but I still enjoyed the show.

It was a good day.

______________________

I found an article in my email this morning, sent to me by my friend Bawb the Revelator. You will want to remember this formula:

Want to know why? Because that formula is the mathematical formula for surviving a zombie attack:

“An outbreak of zombies is likely to be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead,” the authors wrote. “It is imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly, or else we are all in a great deal of trouble...

“Only sufficiently frequent attacks, with increasing force, will result in eradication, assuming the available resources can be mustered in time,” they concluded.

And if we don’t act fast enough?

“If the timescale of the outbreak increases, then the result is the doomsday scenario: an outbreak of zombies will result in the collapse of civilization, with every human infected, or dead,” they wrote. “This is because human births and deaths will provide the undead with a limitless supply of new bodies to infect, resurrect and convert.”

How fast do we need to deal with the outbreak? Here’s the equation they used, where S = susceptibles, Z = zombies and R = removed. If an infection breaks out in a city of 500,000 people, the zombies will outnumber the susceptibles in about three days.

We are now working on committing this equation to memory, in between target practice and alphabetizing our canned goods stockpile.

Hope y'all had a good weekend!

Happy Independence Day

I like this country.

Have a great weekend!

OK, I owe you one

Maybe more than one, actually. After springing Pam and Mr. Tuggles on you, I figure I owe you a little visual palate cleanser.

Here you are. Think happy thoughts, the holiday weekend is just around the corner.

Besides, you need to prepare yourselves. One of our assets may be on the ground in Pittsburgh, reporting back from Anthrocon. We'll see...

More married life (and more risque content)

One of the neat things about being married to MizBubs is that she's always bringing home cool stuff for me. Since she works at the library she sometimes gets to see used books that are brought in as donations to Friends of the Library before they go on sale. She has a particularly keen eye for pulp paperbacks. Not too long ago she brought home these two gems:



"More" was published in 1965 and contains material going back to 1954; "Still More" came out in 1968. Much of what passed for swanky humor back then is now more likely viewed as a series of tacky jokes about date rape, adultery and office sexual harassment. Still, there are some good times to be had, in a sort of retro/atomic fashion:

"What's that drink you're mixing?" the stranger asked the bartender in the exotic Caribbean bar.

"I call this a rum dandy" said the bartender.

"What's in it?" asked the stranger.

"Sugar, milk and rum" said the barkeep.

"Is it good?" asked the stranger.

"Sure," said the bartender. "The sugar gives you pep, and the milk gives you energy."

"And the rum?" asked the stranger.

"Ideas about what to do with all that pep and energy."

Then there are the limericks:

A limerick packs laughs anatomical,
Into space that is quite economical.
But the good ones we've seen
So seldom are clean
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

God's plan had a hopeful beginning,
But man spoiled his chances by sinning.
We trust that the story
Will end in God's glory,
But at present the other side's winning.

And, of course, there are the cartoons. Leroy Nieman's Femlins (think female + gremlin) decorate the covers of both books and appear on nearly every page inside.

I picked two of these cartoons to post on our anniversary. Our roles are not so locked in as the characters in the drawings. We mix it up. Scroll down to see 'em.

***WARNING NAKED CARTOON LADIES BELOW***

Snow day

For the girls, that is, not for me and MizBubs. Policing and library work wait for no one.

Until we get back, why don't you keep our art model friend company and build some snowmen? And please make sure she gets something warm to eat and drink when she goes back inside. Honestly.

Happy Thanksgiving

The turkey is marinating in what is now the official poultry marinade of Sprawling Ramshackle Compound:

1 stick of butter
1/2 cup of olive oil
juice of one lemon
3-4 tablespoons of honey
2 tablespoons of Tony Chachere's seasoning
A few dashes of Worcestershire sauce
A few dashes of hot sauce

-Heat the ingredients together until the butter melts, then use an injecteur de gout to shoot the marinade into the turkey in several places. Pour any remaining marinade over the turkey and refrigerate overnight.

I am enjoying a post-work bourbon and catching up on my email. Before work I managed to bake a chocolate bourbon pecan pie, and amazingly enough I have also managed to not yet eat any of it.



I have to go in to work in the morning, but I plan on taking some comp time so I can come home early and fry the turkey, then it's off to my brother's house in tornado alley for a late afternoon family feedbag.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

The Future, the way it used to be: Rocket Mail!

Howdy!

MizBubs and I met the lady to your right last December in Las Vegas. She was taken with my gold lame jacket, and we were both impressed by her atomic headgear and pneumatic sense of style. After a few drinks and a reasonably priced buffet, she agreed to stop by and help host our "The Future, the way it used to be" feature.

The year is 1957. A bold visionary by the name of Frank Tinsley reports that, in the not-too-distant future (1965), mail will be delivered via rocket:

IT’S Friday noon. In the home office of a giant New York corporation the final drafts of a secret merger are being signed. If they can be signed by the party of the second part in San Francisco and be back here in the office before the stock market closes—so that “buy” orders can be rushed to dealers throughout the country—a possible Monday financial slump can be averted. The atmosphere is tense. A micro- photo machine has been moved into the president’s office and a trusted operator inserts the sheets, one by one. Two tiny prints of each emerge, one for the files and one for mailing. The latter is sealed in a pencil-thin plastic carrier bearing the written address and the code punch for San Francisco. The carrier is then popped into a pneumatic tube that takes it to a central post office where it emerges into a sorting machine. Automatically identifying the punch mark, this device drops it into the San Francisco container. At scheduled intervals, an attendant seals these containers and inserts them in a large pneumatic tube to the rooftop heliport. Here our letter is picked up by a fast convertaplane that flies hourly between the city and the rocket base.

Arriving at the base, our pilot hovers over the Frisco-bound rocket. Mail containers are lowered to a loading crew perched high on the missile’s open cargo doors. Parcel post packages follow swiftly and the doors are swung upward and locked. The “service stand” retracts its telescoping tower, folds it neatly on its bed and pulls away from the missile pit.

You can see the rest of this nifty article at one of my favorite places, Modern Mechanix. Honestly, I am envious of all the cool stuff they've got over there.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy V-Day, tiger.

Lately all kinds of strange yet alluring chicks have been stopping by the Compound for no apparent reason. I can't explain it, but I'm not arguing with it either.

_____________________

Anyway, it's Valentine's Day. Happy Valentine's Day, all you wonderful readers!

The lovely and hilarious Katie Schwartz helped put me in a romantic mood by sending me this picture
along with a link to this article: Gary Coleman weds quietly in Nevada.

Yes, it was a small ceremony, held back in August, but revealed to the world just in time for the holiday of love! Evidently Gary decided to take a page out of the Dennis Kucinich playbook and hitch himself to a hot redhead twice his height. The bride, Shannon Price, is described in this article as "a great e-Bayer...a fabulous e-Bayer."

Best wishes you crazy kids!

_____________________

I've changed the tunes for the holiday, giving the blog a classy all-Cramps romantic soundtrack for the weekend:

The Most Exalted Potentate of Love
Let's Get Fucked Up
What's Inside a Girl
Cornfed Dames
(Hot Pool Of) Womanneed

If anyone in 1956 had known this was how rockabilly would turn out, they would've strung up Elvis on the spot.

_____________________

Next up is a handy travel guide from Radar Online: The Geography of Desire. (Warning, some links on that page NSFW.) It's a love-map of the greatest nation in the world, the US of A, providing interesting tidbits like these:

• Madera (CA) hosts the highest percentage of men under 25 seeking women over 50. They say you can smell the Chanel No 5 for miles.
• Albany (NY) has the highest percentage of Muslim singles seeking Jews in the country.
• Oregon rents the highest percentage of Hentai, or pornographic cartoons, of any state in the union.
• South Carolina has the highest percentage of female porn enthusiasts in the country.
• The gentlemen of Danville (IL) top the list of those open to women who use smokeless tobacco—pucker up.
• Fast-clicking Coloradoans rent more porn online per capita than any other state.

Moving right along, here's a spot where you can buy "purposeful products to help you encourage God's people." Many of the Valentine messages from God are sold out, but you can still get a magnet set:

For those of you thinking slightly less long-term than an eternity in heaven, there are these heart-shaped sweetheart grave markers.

_____________________

Now, on to the freaks.

Former freak of the week Carlton Davis, the Minnesota Toe-Licker, was back in the news recently. Mr. Davis was sentenced to probation for an incident in which he robbed a woman on a Minneapolis street, ordered her to remove her shoes, and then licked her toes.

There's nothing like a couple of drunk, sexed-up hillbillies out for a joyride. Police in Nitro, West Virginia investigated a one-car crash and found a shirtless man running from the scene with his pants unzipped. A woman left behind at the crash claimed to be the driver, but once she found out the penalties for DUI identified the man as the driver. The cause of the crash? Wait for it...

Road head.

Drunken road head, specifically--Matthew Justin Clark, receiver of the road head, had a blood alcohol content of .211 and was driving on a revoked license. Katie Ann Stewart, provider of the road head, had a blood alcohol content of .12. Their parents must be very proud.

In more traffic-related news, police in Cumberland County, Maine, are looking for this man:
The Sheriff's Department has received six reports that this man, dressed in "women’s underwear, a garter belt and black high-heel boots", has pulled in front of women drivers, jumped out of his vehicle and modeled his attire in the roadway.

Not all naked people are lovers. Many are fighters. Like 28-year old Peter Lu of Peekskill, New York. Lu, described in this article as a "naked martial arts expert", fought four police officers on the appropriately-named Hardscrabble Road before being Tasered twice and taken down.

Finally, in news closer to home, 27-year old Izaac T. Channen got arrested by the Des Plaines Police Department. All because he wanted to go to church wearing a bra filled with water balloons, argued with his friend who refused to take Izaac to church dressed like that, took the friend's car keys and refused to return them, and then fought with the police who arrived to investigate.

I like to sign off on a pleasant note, so here it is, a nice Valentine card for all of you:

The guest who wouldn't leave

Well...

Things are finally returning to normal around here, and it's a good thing, too. What with the Mardi Gras, and Super Fat Tuesday, and the drinking and the dancing and the overeating followed by the snowstorm, things have been a little topsy turvy in the Bubs household.

I don't know when Doctor Monkey Von Monkerstein "interviewed" all those models he featured yesterday, and I have no idea whatsoever what he gave them to drink, eat or otherwise ingest.

I'll tell you this much, though. When this doll


showed up at our doorstep in the early morning hours Wednesday, she already had a full head of steam going. She'd been drinking, of course, but there was something else. She was obviously worked up after ranting to Doctor MVM about the Bush administration, and she was out to take her edge off. No matter what we put on the hi-fi, it wasn't fast enough, or loud enough, or swinging enough for her taste.

Most of our friends left. The PTA Moms for Obama left. Not our model. She stayed, drinking and dancing and yelling VOTE YOU MOTHERF*CKERS, VOTE! MONKEY LOVE!

Some time before sunrise the neighbor came over, bleary-eyed, and asked us to turn the music down. Our girl here lurched over to the back door, grabbed the neighbor and planted a big wet kiss on him, which embarrassed the hell out of all of us. The neighbor reeled away, down off the porch. My children locked themselves in their rooms. The dogs wouldn't stop barking. I could see MizBubs calmly removing her glasses and taking off her loose jewelry, which she always does when she senses a brawl about to erupt.

The next few moments were confusing, a blur of popping balloons, shrieking and stereo speakers blowing out. Next thing I know, our model pops out from behind the tiki bar, stark naked, and asks where we keep our game of Twister:

And then she passed out on our zebra skin rug.

MizBubs and I breathed a sigh of relief, turned off the hi-fi, threw a blanket over our model, and went to sleep.

This morning she was gone. I spent the better part of the morning throwing out deflated balloons, confetti and empty Abita bottles. I swept out 8 pounds of lemon rinds from behind the tiki bar, and then I made a sad discovery. Whenever balloon girl crept out, she apparently took my last bottle of absinthe, a can of pepper spray, three of my Las Vegas ashtrays and my favorite Herb Alpert LP record. You know the one.

So Doctor Monkey...please. Next time you get some impressionable starlet all likkered up and politically agitated, don't point her in my direction. OK? Thanks.

Good morning!

Between the big game and our ongoing Mardi Gras celebration, we've got some cleaning up to do around here. Better tell our guest here to throw some clothes on, grab a snow shovel and start digging the cars out.

Merry Christmas baby...

Swag?

Check.

Belly full of food?

Check.

Family?

Check.

Peace on earth, goodwill toward men?

...Well, at least for now, in this little corner of the world, yeah.

Merry Christmas.

Baby it's cold outside

Best way to keep your honey warm? Pour it into a mug full of hot tea, lemon and bourbon to fight off the cold you're coming down with...

Wish You a Nice Weekend

I know it's not holiday-themed, but I still think it's a nice thought.

I must make amends

I was in a dark and troubled place when I subjected you all to those scary Santas.

Please allow me, in the few days I have left before Christmas, to make amends. You know, like when Ebeneezer Scrooge buys a goose and runs around making merry, only I'm getting started before Christmas Eve. I don't need ghostly visits to make me get my act together. No sir.

Allow me to begin with a Santa who's altogether more pleasing to the eye:

Seasons Cheer

A simple holiday wish from Sprawling Ramshackle Compound and the beautiful Bettie Page.

It's Monday, and I'm back to work this evening after a glorious 10 day break. I need to keep some pleasant holiday images in mind, and I think Bettie works wonders in that department.

Peroxide and wrestling

And what the hell peroxide and wrestling has to do with anything, I have no idea. I just know I found a cute pic of a hot dame and a snowman, and it's wintertime and it's three weeks until Christmas and I got snow all over my yard...so there. There's your winter pinup.

Enjoy.

OK, let's start getting in the Christmas spirit...