I would really love to have something profound and meaningful to say on this, the final day of NaBloPoMo, but quite frankly, I got nothin’. So check out this instead:

Yes, this is a real book.

I’m sure that, all this time, the vast majority of you have been laboring under the illusion that the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is the only annual prize awarded for horrible fiction writing.

How wrong you were!

When it comes to truly deplorable writing, not even death, it seems, lets you off the hook. This year’s Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award has gone to the late Norman Mailer for a description of oral sex in his final novel, The Castle in the Forest, in which a male member is likened to a “coil of excrement”.

“It was the excrement that tipped the balance,” admitted Philip Womack, assistant editor of the Literary Review, whose editorial staff judge the annual prize. “That, and the line about Alois [the male character] being ‘ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety’. That was pretty awful.”

(link via LISNews)

As further irrefutable proof of the timeless maxim that People Too Old For Sex Should Not Write About It, the article notes that in 2004, the award went to Tom Wolfe for the amazingly awkward and voyeuristic I am Charlotte Simmons, a novel in which the 74 year old Wolfe described a bunch of raunchy college sex scenes from the first-person viewpoint of a female, 18 year old coed.

You know, so he could express his disapproval of such naughty behavior.

Riiiiight…..

Keith gives a big thumbs up to the new BSG movie:

Razor filled in a few holes in the Battlestar Galactica story as well as opened up a few new ones that promise to be really exciting. While it was nice to go back and see what happened on Pegasus during the Cylon attack and especially nice to see how Cain became the hard ass we met in Season 2, the real thrust of the story didn’t get moving until we got to the Old school Cylons. That story is going to be the corner stone of season 4 and I for one can’t wait. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Remember back in Season 1 when people were still skeptical about Trisha Helfer’s acting abilities? “A Model? Pfft. Whatever. She’s eye candy for the fan boys.” Anyone still skeptical after her mind bending turn in season 3 (where she played, what, three iterations of her character?) needs to see Razor. She really shines and for not having a large part, that’s saying something. We’ve already seen how Gina ends up. But she manages to make Gina a compelling character even when she’s just standing in the background. of course we know what happens. I honestly wasn’t expecting to many revelations in Razor. I thought it would be mostly spackle bridging some of the negative space between seasons. Not that this wouldn’t have been good as well. But, luckily, Moore and the BSG gang aren’t willing to settle for good and deliver instead great.

Like the best episodes, Razor has a nice balance of character moments with whiz bang action. I honestly didn’t see the old school Cylons coming but as soon as the old-style raiders fly into view, I knew they were up to something interesting. I’m, not going to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet but there’s quite a bit of story building going on, which is nice to see in what, for any other show, would be just a bit of holiday vamping, making time until the regularly scheduled program kicked back in.

Some people will try and make something of the Gina/Cain relationship but it was one of the most human moments of the whole series. Cain feels betrayed and her desire for revenge is what pushes her into becoming the hard hearted Razor she feels is her only option left. Because, as far as she knows, she’s it. This is humanity. Her crew and she has to lead them and being soft is what led her to be careless, which is what led the colonies to fall. Cain, and all of humanity, was blindsided by it’s desire to be loved. That this can be a strength and a weakness is the real twist of the series. That dichotomy and how the characters deal with it, is what will carry us through to the end.

We wantss it, o yes we does, precioussss.

Well, ain’t that a kick in the teeth: as if mankind wasn’t causing enough damage to our own planet with the global warming and the environmental destruction, it turns out that we may be destroying the entire universe – just by looking at it!

New Scientist reports a worrying new variant as the cosmologists claim that astronomers may have provided evidence that the universe may ultimately decay by observing dark energy, a mysterious anti gravity force which is thought to be speeding up the expansion of the cosmos.

The damaging allegations are made by Profs Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and James Dent of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, who suggest that by making this observation in 1998 we may have determined that the cosmos is in a state when it was more likely to end. “Incredible as it seems, our detection of the dark energy may provide evidence that the universe will ultimately decay,” says Prof Krauss.

Of course, none of this comes as a surprise to those of us in the know. The conclusive evidence that mankind’s observation of the universe hastens its destruction has been publicly available for over a decade.

Ah, now there’s the Randy Moss I remember from Minnesota (and especially Oakland.) Five catches, 43 yards, no scores, several drops, a pushoff that negated a touchdown, and a complete invisibility during the pivotal fourth quarter. When it was obvious that Philly was leaving Welker and Stallworth open in order to double and triple Moss, Brady stopped throwing to him…and Randy, as he’s always done when he isn’t the sole focus of the offense, began to pout.

He’s the Manny Ramirez of football, only without the endearing personality.

Thank Jeebus the Pats didn’t sign him to a new deal before the season started. If Good Randy reappears after tonight’s debacle, they can ride him to a Superbowl title, then talk contract. But if Bad Randy’s return becomes a trend, they cut him loose after the season, and let him be someone else’s problem.

Today, the 25th of November in the Two Thousand Seventh Year of Our Lord, is truly an auspicious day. After years of torturous deliberation and consultation with teams of experts, it is our great pleasure to present to you the

GREATEST.
VIDEO.
EVER.

Care to disagree? I’m open to suggestions, but they’d better include links, mofos.

(link via zapatopi.net)

When Black Friday comes
I’m gonna dig myself a hole
Gonna lay down in it ‘til
I satisfy my soul
Gonna let the world pass by me
The Archbishop’s gonna sanctify me
And if he don’t come across
I’m gonna let it roll
When Black Friday comes
I’m gonna stake my claim
I’ll guess I’ll change my name
-Steely Dan

Lord, I do loves me some Buy Nothing Day. It’s the only day of the year when doing absolutely fuck-all can be considered a form of social protest. By sitting at home and dicking around on the computer, I’m proudly contributing nothing whatsoever to the economy. The great, mindless orgy of frivolous consumer spending that normally powers this day can swirl unabated all around me, but here in my house I am safe.

It saddens me to realize that my fellow Americans have been so thoroughly conditioned into finding happiness and fulfillment only through incessant spending on junk they don’t even need, but I realize there’s very little I can do about it. When someone’s drunk that much of the Kool-Aid, the last thing they want to deal with is some self-righteous putz telling them “The Things You Own Own You.”

My primary activity today is reinstalling Windows XP on my father’s laptop. Having mercifully ditched Windows in favor of Ubuntu several months ago, I forgot what a royal pain in the ass this can be. I am now on the my third hour of hunting down drivers, installing security updates and patches, and setting up protection for viruses, spyware, adware, scumware, etc, etc, etc. I must say, I really didn’t miss this at all.

It goes without saying that everyone should switch from Windows to Ubuntu immediately. However, if you haven’t yet gotten to the point where you feel comfortable throwing off the chains of the Redmond Borg Collective, at least make things easier on yourself by using as much free software as humanly possible. Finding free programs that aren’t loaded with adware and spyware can be a challenge, but luckily, this site has done an awful lot of the work for you.

There, you see? Sure, I’m a self-righteous putz, but I can occasionally be a helpful self-righteous putz. You’re welcome.

As I sit here on my couch, sipping an Old Thumper Ale and watching a bunch of football teams jockeying furiously for the right to get beaten stupid by the New England Patriots next February, I am thankful for many things. (Yes, many things besides the fact that I have the consummate good taste to drink Old Thumper and root for the Patriots.)

For instance, I am supremely grateful for the existence of this person. She makes the world far less boring than it would be otherwise.

I am also grateful for this. Just one more year, people.

But if you ask me to name the one single thing in the entire world for which I am the most grateful at this exact moment in space-time, I would have to say that I am very, very grateful I arrived on this planet 390 million years after the eight foot long, carnivorous, aquatic scorpions went extinct:

“This is an amazing discovery. We have known for some time that the fossil record yields monster millipedes, super-sized scorpions, colossal cockroaches, and jumbo dragonflies, but we never realized, until now, just how big some of these ancient creepy-crawlies were,” said co-author Dr. Simon Braddy from the University of Bristol.

Personally, I prefer the human-lobster relationship in its current “We eat Them” configuration.

Since leaving Seattle and moving back East, I no longer have easy access to the wonderfully demented concoctions produced by Jones Soda. Today, caught up in a wave of Thanksgiving-inspired nostalgia, I perused their website, hoping that the magic of the Interweb Tubes could deliver me some of their delicious Turkey & Gravy Soda to brighten up the impending holiday season. Alas, it was not to be! For it seems the delicious ambrosia, first unleashed upon the world in 2004, has been discontinued!

However, not all the news is bad. The Thanksgiving Holiday Pack may have sadly gone the way of the dodo, but new nectars have appeared to take its place. Namely, new Christmas and Hannukah holiday packs. Needless to say, I ordered both immediately. I can hardly wait to find out what the Christmas Ham Soda tastes like.