A farm down in Peru

9.4.2k1

Mysteries. I sure like reading mysteries. Or seein' them on the big screen. Little screen, laptop screen ... doesn't matter. I like watching mystery movies. Based-on-real-life mysteries are cool too. Hard to believe some of that shit happens. Justice files, Law and Order, anything with Bill Curtis on the Discovery Channel counts. Interesting stuff. I like when the bad guy gets caught and gets the chair. There's a show on the Home BO called Autopsy. If you haven’t seen it, you might be right to guess that it’s about autopsys. These ain’t yer average autopsys, though, these are case studies about how the Medical Examiner done solved the crime with the bag of bones and his or her forensic skills. Normally this kind of stuff – (real) blood and guts and slicing and dicing and bone saws and maggots and such – really turns my stomach. I mean I want to puke. Really. However, I don’t really feel so much like reverse-eating when I watch this show because it’s so frikkin’ cool that some scientist can figger out whodoneit just by analyzing a bathtub full of goo. The bastard doesn’t get away with it. All this fascinates me and I still sorta hate the low-level "real-life" mysteries. For example: The Disappearing Brownie.

Well I was working on my farm ‘round 1982 – or rather – I was on my way to school one day in ’85 or ‘6. My friend Phil (not my best friend Phil … my other friend Phil) had him a car and he was kind enough to slow down on his way past my house so I could jump in. We’re high-tailing it to school because, like usual, we were running late. Knowing that we are usually running late, I took to skipping breakfast but for coffee and some portable something – Pop Tart, toast, cereal bar or on this day, Brownie!
This was the last brownie from the batch. Fresh from the oven, the thing was half-devoured in record time by my brother and sister. I protested the feeding-frenzy but, as she pointed out, my sister did in fact make them. She preheated the oven, opened the box, tore the plastic sac, dumped the mix in the bowl, added the eggs, oil and water, mixed the proto-brownie, greased the pan, dumped the mix in the pan, threw the pan in the oven then sat on her hands for 35 minutes. I guess they were rightly hers.
The gracious person she was then, despite being honked off at me for something, she saw fit to let me have a brownie. I was about to chow down when I thought of what a wonderful breakfast treat it would make. So I wrapped the fucker in foil and hid it.
I dig it out the next morning just before Phil shows up. He honk-honks at me and I haul ass to meet him. Soon enough we're on the way down the street toward school. Our route takes us through this elementary school zone where the speed limit is 15 mph. The cops threw the book at you if you sped through, so everyone took it at 15. Once folks got beyond the zone, however, it was Daytona Speedway. Phil punched it, as did everyone else, and we were making tracks toward our right turn onto Bethany Home Road. Phil slows to make the turn and WHAM! We get popped from behind. All I know is my brownie went flying just as I was about to chomp it. Phil looks at me and says, "What do I do?" I told him to pull over, stupid. Perfect excuse to lay out and smoke cigarettes for an hour before going in. We pull over and the person who hit us is getting out of her car. She is stacked. We just got run over by Famke Janssen. (Well, not quite FJ, but still pretty.)
Phil looks at his car - no damage. Her car - no damage. The girl is saying, "Oh, I'm so sorry. Are you okay?" Phil is in Hound Dog mode: "Oh we're okay, are youuuu okay?" I'm disgusted and figure now's the time for a smoke.
Phil gets the girl's number and we're off. I suddenly realise that my brownie went flying. As the windows were all closed and a search of the car was fruitless (and it didn't fall out of my lap onto the street as I got out of the car or I would have certainly noticed goddamn it), the mystery of the Disappearing Brownie was born. I'm sure stranger things have happened, but where that brownie went ... nobody knows. Haunts me to this day. (Oh, and Phil got an STD from that girl and I've since quit smoking.)

Annie's Cocktail Lounge

Re: Last week: I ain't gonna try to trick anyone ever again. Promise.

Tonight's Contest: Finger the Reference!

Tonight's Singled Out List Member: How 'bout Dee? No Sho Ho.

Porn Title of the Week: Beetlejizum

Tired now. See you at Annie's! bye-ee!

Dill-hole

9.3.2k1

I’m sure I don’t know how I’ve ever had a plan come together. Especially if there’s some level of sneakiness involved. To witness: How badly I fokked up Anna’s bday/weddin’ surprise. A couple people noticed that the email that set up Anna’s surprise sort of, well, included Anna in the list of recipients. Uh … yeah. I meant to do that. What a dope. Some of you might remember the Todd Lindo kar-a-oke surprise a few years back. I’m sure the only reason that worked is because it was two months after his birthday that we sprang the party on him. He couldn’t possibly have been expecting it. I remember torrential rain, a fried fiesta and Ced and Greg singing a duet of Ebony and Ivory that should have turned Lionel Ritchie’s dead career over in the grave. (No, really, it wasn’t that bad.)
Regarding Anna’s aborted party, the planning got off to a bad start. We had intended on springing it next week, and had the monkey grinder, mariachi band and sky writer lined up for then. Rampant Ebola viruses, closed borders and illiterate pilots (Bjeldanes is hard to spell, I grant you that) crossed those off the list one by one. Also cramping the proposed date next week is the small detail that Miss Anna is already in San Diego and no where near Great America.
This maybe ought to plant the idea in your head that I am not the one you want to call when you’re planning your sweetheart’s or best pal’s surprise party. I’ll rent a can of air and blow up the balloons, but that’s where I draw the line.
So the surprise is ruined, but the party is not. Meet up at Zeitgeist and bring quarters: Anna loves the Area 51!

See you there! bye-ee!

shit

9.2.2k1

If I ever see anything like I saw on the TV on Tuesday morning it will be too soon. What a fucking world we live in.

Tonight we’ll raise a glass to the victims of these horrible events. Here: Hyde Out.

I don’t feel much like carrying on, so that’s all for now. See you next week.

**Meeting starts at 8 tonight.

Pismo

9.1.2k1

I got a bunch of projects I just can’t seem to get off the ground. I got others that are in various states of development: Some almost finished, some just started and others in a state of perpetual hold. Like my ship-in-a-bottle. Man, I was the happiest clam in the chowder when I found that sucker on the eBay. The listing claimed, “The romance of the tall sailing ships can be magically captured in a bottle,” and boy, by the look of the finished product on the scanned packaging they weren’t joking. Four big masts, lots of rigging, the sails fakey-full of air … one could almost taste the salt spray.
I’ve done a fair amount of internet auction buying. I was told early on how to win them: Wait until there’s ten seconds left in the auction then bid your max. That way you’ll certainly win if you are the highest bidder, as there is no time left for anyone to out-bid you. If your bid is not the highest, then: A. You make the other bidder pay more (which is sorta sneaky-cool), and B. You take solace in the fact that you’re not paying more than your max.
So this ship-in-a-bottle started at a great low price. I watched it for a few days as the price went up a little, then a little more, and still a little more. On the last day of the auction the price was still within my max and the minor bidding-war had subsided. Just noisy_pants331 left with a high bid of $33.45. I synced my PB’s clock with eBay’s and counted down the minutes – ten, five, one – then the seconds – 45, 30, 20, 15! Oh how exciting! At ten seconds to go I placed my bid: $44.51 and I became the high bidder! Moments later I won! Yee ha! Somewhere out there I heard noisy_pants331 scream in anguish – the plaintive, anguished lament of the recently-defeated in bidding. Sucker!
I paid electronically with the PayPal and a week later a rather large, heavy box arrived via the UPS. I cracked that sucker open and dang there were a lot of parts. And the bottle was bigger than I thought. A lot of parts, a big bottle with a small hole. This was going to take a while.
In anticipation of the project I had gone to the hardware store and upgraded my tweezer collection. I got two copper-plated flathead tweezers, a solid brass needle-nose tweezer and a custom-painted stainless steel alligator clip tweezer. (I had a local artisan who specializes in painting “Your Name On A Grain Of Rice” paint a vista of the driftwood-littered beach in Monterey on the shaft of the tweezer.) I also went to the optics depot and got a couple magnifying glasses. One was a free-standing one that you could position, one was a pair of magnifying goggles and I couldn’t resist the old-school Sherlock Holmes antique.
Yeah, so, piece by piece I got the hull put together. It was a total pain. Then I put the deck on. Jesus. That took a month. The masts took another month. That’s when I took a break. The thought of stringing up the rigging shivered me timbers. That was two years ago. Haven’t touched the sucker since.
Got several projects in limbo like the ship-in-a-bottle. When I gear up to take them on, something gets in the way. Most often it’s a six-pack of Vida Alta that road blocks.

North Beach drinkey-poos here:

Drinkey Poo

News: Okay. One more week to pick out code names. Several of you lovely list members have submitted some clever names. Now for the rest of you. You’ll need a code name for future Venue Announcements.Submit via email here: Code Name
Kathleen is back onna list. yea!
Golden Boy Pizza is right around the corner from tonight’s venue. Do yourself a favor and get a slice. Mmm-mmm!
Mary Haring had an announcement but I forgot what it was.

Comments: tnsc@therein-lies.com

TONIGHT'S CONTEST: Find the reference!

Last Week’s Contest results: For the reference to “Backwards K” Longtime List Member Mrs. Alan J. Chimenti posted this found reference: “Barry Bonds, strike out, K is the scorekeeping symbol for strike out. Specific enough?” It’s funny that she said “Specific enough” because, sadly, it’s not quite specific enough. As an out of state List member pointed out, the backwards K is the scorekeeping symbol for a called third strike, the kind cock … er … Barry Bonds had for the last out in last year’s playoff game. So our winner … Longtime List Member Mrs. Alan J. Chimenti. Huh? you say? “Why not,” Robot says.

Dramatic reenactment: Filling in for Tonight’s Dramatic reenactment is Tonight’s Satanic Word: Chimenti

TONIGHT'S SINGLED-OUT LIST MEMBER: Mark Bobek. He's back from Asia for a week.

PORN TITLE OF THE WEEK: Der Porno Filmer (Sounds like a foriegn job.)

ummm ... tonight. The bar. Bring your friends. I know I will. See you there!

bye-ee!