I let my paid LiveJournal account expire. Who cares?

This song always makes me think of journeys west and new beginnings.

As you might know, I'm moving again; this typically involves me finding stuff to rid myself of before I am consumed by the horrors of relocating. Since books sell for jack squat on eBay, I'm offering all four of my remaining blog readers a bargain. You want any of these books? All you pay is enough for a padded envelope and Media Mail shipping. Just shoot me a memo at bobwmackey@gmail.com if you're interested, and we can set something up.

Oh, and anything not claimed by the end of Friday, May 20th will be donated to somewhere. Maybe a roaring fire. 

Here they are:

Paperbacks:

Dodsworth by Sinclair Lewis
Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
A Handful of Dust/Decline and Fall (COMBO BOOK) by Evelyn Waugh
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Night Shift by Stephen King
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

Hardcover/Larger Paperbacks:

Burton on Burton by Mark Salisbury
I Drink for a Reason by David Cross
A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon
The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
Eleven by Patricia Highsmith
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Some book about the War of the Worlds radio broadcast with lots of cool pictures and stuff

Just a note: Since I'm incredibly busy, I will send these things out at some point before I move. You may be waiting a few weeks.

Oh, and I'll be updating this as the e-mails (hopefully) start rolling in.

This has been sitting around in the "hey, you should probably put that on the Internet" pile for over two years--and I really can't think of a solid reason why I've procrastinated so much. Anyway, the video you will no doubt be compelled to watch is a recording of a chat I had with John Hodgman on WFMU's The Best Show around Thanksgiving of 2008. I think it's entertaining enough on its own, but additional entertainment value comes from the fact that this recording took place when I was knee deep in the trenches grad school, making sub-sub-sub minimum wage at a teaching position and generally hating myself and all those around me. Little did I know that grad school would soon release me into the wilds of year-long unemployment, where I learned how to catch, skin and eat various yard animals in order to survive.

But I'm much happier now. Enjoy!

I only have one real Christmas tradition, and that is watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode 521, "Santa Claus." It's not just one of the best episodes in the series; it might be the best episode of any series (this thing will be full of unnecessary hyperbole). I originally recorded the rerun on Mother's Day weekend 1996, the last year Comedy Central ran the show. Don't ask me how I remember these details; all i know is that for the last 14 years I've faithfully watched this episode around Christmastime.

You should also watch it. Santa Claus is on DVD, Netflix Instant Watch, and here:



I think Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is the more popular of the two MST3K Christmas episodes, but that's mainly because the movie has a weird Baby Boomer cult thing going for it. But Martians is dull and plodding and grating, even if it still makes for a funny episode. (Cinematic Titanic revisited it 16 years later and improved things a little.)

Santa Claus involves the titular hero fighting the devil on Christmas Eve for the fate of children's souls, and it's mostly carried by this premise alone and its inherent creepiness. And just like in Martians, Santa Claus himself is insane and bipolar and terrible at his job. Then it gets weird. Just watch it so I have something to talk to someone about.

The Onion A.V. Club has been doing a series of fantastic articles called Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation? which you should read if you were born in the past 40 years and have any interest in music. The newest entry is about the inexplicable popularity of alternarock-band-thing Live -- their name is apparently supposed to be pronounced like the verb form of the word "live" but I don't care. I'll dismiss Live publicly and live with the consequences.

Anyway, much discussion was had about their hit single "I Alone," which was a radio-friendly ditty that you could easily listen to with your mom -- provided she had some tolerance for empty angst. The video, on the other hand, revolves entirely around the unique premise of a bald, shirtless man writhing around and smooshing his face and junk while the world dies around him. Whenever I watch it I can't help but hear the sounds of Hank Hill being horrified somewhere deep within my brain: "Gah! Someone needs to tell that twig boy to put on a shirt!"

If you lived through the 90s, you probably saw this video at least 30,000 times. I know I did. But going back and watching it again some whatever years later, I can't help but be dumbstruck once again by Live's poor drummer, who, without his drums, is forced to wander through the video in a futile attempt to not look awkward. Granted, Live's frontman Ratboy Jr. sure can cause a distraction, but if you pay attention to the drummer through the whole video, you can't help but feel his plight.

Faster than my mom could ask, “Do you have a Kindle?” I found myself the owner of Amazon’s gimmicky device, all thanks to the power of maternal love. I should probably note that when my mom first asked me this question, in a grand display of gratitude I replied with “Don’t get me a Kindle.” I’ve never been a fan of the whole eBook phenomenon (-na?), mostly due to the inflated costs attached to downloading what amounts to glorified text files. Having served eight years in the trenches of academia, I became well-versed in the art of getting books for free -- I scammed my way through countless semesters checking out and perpetually renewing everything on my syllabi, instead of forking over hundreds of dollars that could be better spent on microbrews and life-sustaining awful pizza. And when I made the move to grad school, living a short distance from a used bookstore did a good job of spoiling me; I was once infatuated with the idea of building a semi-respectable library of books, and this business allowed me to live out my horribly impractical dream for pennies on the dollar.

In retrospect, I really should have known better. Since the summer of 2007, I’ve moved a total of five times -- soon to be six when I finally get around to hauling the rest of my garbage mounds from New Mexico to California. And in this time I have learned that books -- once a valuable part of my life devoted to earning valueless degrees -- can be the most cumbersome shit in the universe. I’ll admit that I enjoy the physical form of books; I like having a large, imposing bookcase in my home, if only to offer a monument of my personal tastes to any visitors who happen by. In fact, I tend to use someone’s bookcase as a yardstick by which to judge them. Ayn Rand? I start asking questions. Nothing but young adult fiction? No questions need to be asked. The Secret? I will request that you use your crazy brain powers to wish me away to the cornfield or something. Books allow me to be a judgmental prick, and for this I thank them. So help me god if I find a copy of Ishmael anywhere near you.

On the practical side of things, books are heavy. Books take up a lot of space. Books are not fun to carry in boxes up flights of stairs. And let’s face facts; with very few exceptions, a book that is read and put on a shelf will never be opened again. Yet another fact (you should be writing these down): books have absolutely no resale value (again, with very few exceptions). Every time I’ve moved, I’ve shaved dozens of books off my collection, mostly via donation to libraries because the majority of rational human beings realize the value of a used book is not even worth estimating. Out of all forms of media, the Internet has devalued text the most; as a writer who has lived well under the poverty line until the last few months of my life, I can verify by the emotional scars that this bleak observation is indeed true. In a world where it takes a negligible amount of effort to get anything for free, text is just there for the taking.

So while I treasure, and will soon find new ways to further pare down my single-bookcase library -- the result of years of delicate pruning and wholesale ransacking -- I see the Kindle as a way to read new books without necessarily adding a pound of weight to my total belongings; in fact, when I once again have access to my collection, I’m going to find everything I own that’s in the public domain, and eliminate it with moderate prejudice. I’ll still enjoy owning physical copies of my favorites, for psychological reasons far too boring and obvious to go into here, but I’m not going to miss buying new books and shelving their useless remains once I’m done with them. Granted, the average $9.99 price of an eBook is still way too much -- I think $4.99 would be a happy medium -- but I guess this is the price you pay for the convenience of not having to figure out the best way to dispose of a book once it’s been read. And I’m a little bummed that a good number of the books I’ve planned on reading -- especially the ones only available in expensive, hardcover editions -- aren’t yet available in Kindle form, and probably won’t ever be. The world demands digital versions of comprehensive multi-volume Orson Welles biographies!

I do find a lot of oddities when it comes to what’s missing from the Kindle marketplace. I don’t read very much of it these days, but manga seems like a perfect fit for the device -- yet all I can find on Amazon’s site seems to be nothing but the smuttiest of smut. For a brand of comics where series typically last for dozens upon dozens of volumes, I can’t think of a better method of delivery or consumption. Though my black heart was warmed when I discovered that the Kindle is completely worthless for academic work, once again signifying the irrelevance of a world I’ve since washed my hands of. Try finding the original pagination for your sources when you write your boring articles for tedious journals now, jerks! Note to Amazon: please don’t change this so I can remain justified in my bitterness, thanks.

So yes, the Kindle has won me over, despite my healthy skepticism. Now I can only pray that some new technological standard doesn’t make this new e-library as valueless as my vast coffers of Flooz.

As part of this blog's Halloween tradition, once again I present the scariest story ever written (by me).

---

WARNING: The following story I have written may be too intense and shocking for younger readers.



There was a new car wash in town. A skeleton car wash. It was called “Skeleton Car Wash” because it was a car wash run completely by skeletons.

It was Saturday. I was in the car with my stepmother, and she asked me, quite bluntly, “Would you like to go to the Skeleton Car Wash?” I asked, “You mean, the one run completely by skeletons?” She nodded. The other Skeleton Car Wash was run by the Skeleton family who were not skeletons.

We pulled up to the Skeleton Car Wash, and a skeleton in coveralls walked over to the driver’s-side window. “What’ll it be, ma’am?” My stepmother asked for a normal wash; the skeleton walked over to my window, rapped on it, and stuck the ten dollar bill my stepmother had given him right in his eye socket. It popped out of his mouth and I guess it would be scarier if we hadn’t just shopped at the Skeleton Supermarket (they have a skeleton in the back that works in the deli).

My stepmother drove into the car wash, and the lights went out. It was just like a regular car wash, except you were supposed to tune your radio to a specific frequency and they would play spooky sound effects. Except I guess the skeletons weren’t paying attention because there was just a bunch of jungle sounds.

We pulled out of the Skeleton Car Wash onto the main road. We both felt empty, somehow. Suddenly, my stepmother looked at me and asked, “Wasn’t that car wash supposed to be $8.50?” At that point I realized that my stepmother was a ghost all along, and we didn’t get our change back and things were scary.

THE END?

Pinwheel was Nickelodeon's answer to Sesame Street, though it was stolen from Canada and probably filmed in Chernobyl. Like the majority of Nickelodeon's programming in the 80s, it was imported cheaply from another country and presented to American children with far different standards for entertainment.


To be honest, I don't remember much about the show aside from the fact that it was poorly lit and every puppet seemed like it was capable of murder. Like the rest of 80s-era Nick, Pinwheel was dull, but distressingly creepy at the same time; I distinctly remember being excited to watch the network at my grandma's house (she was the first one to get cable), but always walking away from hours of programming with an odd sense of fun-sized depression.

I mean, they used to show stop motion shorts about a tepid boy hanging out with his equally-tepid grandma. And they were both British. Hundreds of cups of tea were downed, but was a single child entertained? I think not. I tried to find a clip of this on YouTube, but I'm guessing the creator dissolved the original prints in acid once he realized that he made the cartoon equivalent of carbon monoxide.