I HAS A SWEET POTATO
You know, a lot of times I write up random posts and then don’t post them. But Best Beloved just called me, and I could not really explain why I was inarticulate about sweet potatoes, so I said I’d go ahead and post this. That way, she can read it at work and know just what kind of day it has been. (Short version, for those who do not feel like reading the whole post: ARRRRRRG. Fucking sweet potatoes.)

The longer version, summarized in conversation form:

Dog: I am starving.
Me: Actually, no. You aren’t starving. You get two very good meals a day. And treats. And Best Beloved fed you extra food while I was gone.
Dog: STARVING.
Me: I saw you get fed not four hours ago! You are not starving.
Dog: Pity me, a sad and tragic creature, for I can barely walk, I am so starving. WOE.
Me: I am now ignoring you.
Dog: STARVING.
Dog: Did you hear me? I am starving.
Dog: Are you seriously ignoring me? Fine.

[There is a pause, during which the dog exits the room in a pointed manner.]

[From the kitchen, there comes a noise like someone is eating a baseball bat.]

Me, yelling: What the hell are you doing?
Me: *makes haste for the kitchen and finds dog there*
Dog: *picks up entire raw sweet potato, which is what was causing the baseball bat noise, and flees for the bedroom*
Me: *chases dog, retrieves most of sweet potato, less the portion which has disappeared into dog’s gullet*
Dog: See? STARVING.
Me: …That can’t be good for you. It’s a RAW SWEET POTATO.
Dog: I had to do it. I haven’t been fed. Ever.
Me: You realize you aren’t normal. Normal dogs don’t steal raw sweet potatoes.
Dog, sadly: I was badly brought up.
Me: Yes. Yes, you were.
Dog: By people who starved me.
Me: Oh, no. I am not doing this again.
Me: *exits the room, bearing sweet potato*

[There is a pause.]

[There is a noise like someone is trying to eat a baseball bat very very quietly.]

Me: Oh, for the love of GOD.
Me: *heads off to the kitchen*
Dog: I am not eating a raw sweet potato.
Me: You have sweet potato parts all over your snout.
Dog: But you don’t actually SEE a raw sweet potato, do you? So maybe that’s just – um. A birthmark.
Me: Did you seriously eat a whole sweet potato?
Dog: You don’t listen. I told you, I wasn’t eating a sweet potato.
Me, searching around fruitlessly: Look. NO MORE SWEET POTATOES.
Me: Oh, what am I saying? This is you we’re talking about, here. *goes to hide all the sweet potatoes that are left – which isn’t many – in the fridge, because some people cannot be trusted*
Dog: *attempts to look thwarted*
Dog: *does not succeed, because her tail is wagging so hard small cyclones are forming in the kitchen*
Me: *has a very bad feeling about this*

[There is a pause, during which I do not even bother trying to return to what I was doing. I just stand in the computer room, waiting.]

[There is, as I wholly expected, a baseball-bat-eating noise.]

Me, stomping back to the kitchen: OKAY. GIVE ME THE DAMNED SWEET POTATO.
Dog, looking up guiltily: What sweet potato?
Me: THE ONE IN YOUR MOUTH.
Dog: Oh, did you want this? I just, um. Found it. Lying here.
Me: *confiscates the sweet potato and deposits it in the locking trashcan*
Me: Let us say no more about this.
Dog: …Nooooo! They be stealin’ my sweet potato!

[I attempt to remember what I was doing before the sweet potato episode.]

[Some ten minutes later, I succeed, and return to it.]

[NOT ONE MINUTE LATER, I hear a noise with which I have become all too familiar.]

Me, bonking head on desk: Arg.
Me, arriving in kitchen: How did you even get another sweet potato?
Dog, smugly: I have my ways.
Me: Are you punishing me for being away for several days? I was at a FUNERAL, you know. It wasn’t FUN.
Dog: How would I know? You didn’t take me. You left me here with only one human to look after my needs. One human is NOT ENOUGH.
Me: *shuts dog in bedroom, conducts a sweep of the kitchen to track down all remaining sweet potatoes, wipes up random sweet potato particles from floor, eradicates all traces of sweet potato from house*
Me: *lets dog out*
Dog, sulkily: Oh, so you think you’ve won.

[I watch her go about her business with the same sense of overwhelming doom that heroines of Victorian novels get when they meet Count Sinistrus Grimblack for the first time.]

[Half an hour later, there is a wetter, juicier eating noise, as though someone was eating a very moist baseball bat.]

Me, wearily: What NOW?
Dog, hunched over the remains of a butternut squash: *says something garbled because her mouth is full*
Me: Okay. Fine.
Me: *stomps over, empties entire vegetable bowl into trash*
Me: WE JUST WON’T HAVE ANY ROOT VEGETABLES ANYMORE. THERE. ARE YOU HAPPY?
Dog: I’m not even remotely sorry. I told you I was hungry. And you went to a funeral without me.
Me: ARRRRRRRRG.

[A half-hour later, there is another baseball-bat-eating noise from the kitchen. The dog, who apparently does not know how to win gracefully, has found another sweet potato, or possibly caused one to materialize from the Rift.]

Me, hauling chewed sweet potato parts from the mouth of a dog very reluctant to part with them: Oh my god how is this my life?
Dog: Don’t you think it would just be easier to feed me?
Me: EVERYONE GO TO THE BEDROOM AND STAY THERE. EAT NOTHING.
Dog: Actually, I feel…um…not so good.
Dog: *throws up* *vomit is very bright orange*

[Unfortunate details ensue.]

Some time later:
Me, attempting to rescue something from the wreckage: So. What have we learned from this?
Dog: Sweet potatoes are yummy!
Other Dog, looking thoughtful: I should pay more attention to crunching noises. Sweet potatoes are probably yummy.
Me: I need a lobotomy.

And that, Best Beloved – and anyone else who made it through that – is What Kind of Day It Has Been.

FUCKING SWEET POTATOES. ARG.

Do you need to relearn how to breathe without laughing? I certainly do now.

I’m not going to lie and pretend I have great taste in movies, in either a classical or ironic manner. To be perfectly honest, I am frequently cursed in group settings for choosing movies that make everyone cringe (and I also won’t pretend that it doesn’t amuse me when that happens).

However, I have to stand by one of the genres of movies that consistently entertain me, and that’s B-rated sci-fi horror. Nowhere else is there such a collection of high aspirations and low achievements; or, low aspirations with exceptionally successful results in that department. I can’t even claim such lofty reasoning as cultural phenomenon or being interested in the directors’ lives (like Ed Wood, who was a fantastically odd duck). No, I love the sheer desperate scrabble that is a low budget sci-fi flick. Stories that we’re lucky to find even remotely cohesive, plot holes the size of the center of the universe, poor acting, worse dialogue, hastily-assembled wardrobes are all tolerated for the sake of two things: fake blood, and a rubber monster suit, and if they’re really lucky, some exploding prosthetic heads.

I actually enjoy the lack of realism, because it’s less scary for me, and without the constraints of reality anywhere in sight, anything is possible (I say that in a ‘your obviously drunk cousin out on your front lawn, wielding a traffic cone  in one hand and what looks suspiciously like a police officer’s hat in the other’ kind of way). The plot is going to surprise me not with brilliant actions on the characters’ parts, but with the sheer stupidity they’ll manage to come up with along the way, or how badly the writers mutilate natural laws. “How much worse can this GET?” I’ll scream at the screen, and then they’ll deliver beyond my wildest expectations.

In Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, for example, the premise is that global warming has caused two ancient predators (and I bet you can’t guess what they are!) to defrost – apparently, they were flash frozen in the ice millions of years ago, and are (surprise!) still alive. Being movie monsters, they begin wreaking havoc rather than… I don’t know, pursue prey out in the open ocean like they used to do? The octopus in (surprise!) Tokyo, and the shark in (bigger surprise!) New York, I think. It doesn’t matter, just insert the name of a highly populous US city in that spot and it works. Meanwhile, a no-holds-barred renegade marine biologist, Dr. ToughLadyJustLikeHerRespectedRenegadeFather, is working on some sort of groundbreaking scientific project despite her company’s wish for her to find ways for it to make money. In Tokyo, marine biologist Dr. ThankGodHeDidn’tFakeAJapaneseAccent is also working on something totally unrelated but equally groundbreaking project. When monsters start rampaging through their respective cities, the unsurprisingly dense government refuses to believe the reports, but both ToughLady and Didn’tFake spring into action to investigate, despite warnings against it! And through some crazy coincidence, they’re major fans of each others’ work, and collaborate.

Then Didn’tFake ends up in the US for a while, and suddenly the two biologists switch focus from marine life to human reproduction (and without ANY warning that it was going to happen). Their impromptu field research apparently inspires ToughLady and Didn’tFake, because their grand idea is to lure the shark and the octopus back together for their ultimate death match using the unique mating pheromones for each species. Somehow, they manufacture enough of these hormones (for extinct creatures that no one’s been able to get close to) to make trails reaching around entire continents, leading to (surprise!) San Francisco Bay, which is apparently the only place suitable to contain monsters who’ve already busted up two major metropolitan areas. The military gets involved, or is already involved – it was hard to determine, because the man representing the military voice in the movie had a habit of speaking only in muttered, growly one liners through clenched teeth and looking up through his eyebrows, which made it tough to figure out what the hell he was saying – despite the scientists’ warnings.

On their way to what they think is going to be a hot date, the shark jumps out of the water and eats some helicopters mid air, and the octopus squeezes the Golden Gate Bridge. When the two monsters meet up and realize they’ve been set up on the worst blind ever, they wreck more things and then kill each other. There’s more bad dialogue, hints at a second movie (just in case their second script might possibly get greenlighted), and then awesomely bad credit music.

Granted, I was a little distracted during the movie from laughing so hard, but you get the picture. It was the stuff of CG legends. Do you see what I mean? These movies are like campfire stories, or ChowChow puppies – the good stuff is in their wrinkles and weirdnesses, instead of in their ‘correct’ bits.

All right, I lied. I was going to talk about three different movies, but after recounting Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus, I realized that movie encapsulates the radness all on its own. So there you have it! I’m going to cut this short, because I have a dog that weighs almost as much as I do demanding that I play with him right now, and it’s difficult to argue with him about that.

Let’s go see Blood and Thunder in concert this coming Friday! One of the LARPers in Jessie’s group is the lead singer and the drummer! Oh boy! And even better, they’re playing with Dark Tranquillity, a really neato Swedish metal band — and if you get the tickets through Blood and Thunder, then they get credit for it AND you get them cheaper than at the door! Wow!

Gee, that was a great lesson. I hope we can do this again!

I know nothing about this, except that you needed to see it, too.

I’m floored. These sculptures are unearthly, otherwordly – they look like the lost ruins of some fantastical culture. Apparently, you can buy them… I’m afraid to go look at the price, though. Anything I fall in love with like this ends up costing more than both of my cars put together. Someone braver than I can go investigate!

Amazing Terraform Sculptures That Grow! – Homeqn.