Sweet Jesus crap I’m glad that thing’s extinct, I would shit myself if I saw something that size flying through the sky. And hey, good news: scientists think it mostly ate carrion like its relative, the Andean condor. However, apparently it would occasionally hunt small to medium sized animals and “[s]kull structure suggests that it ate most of its prey whole”. I think children count as small to medium sized animals. Something to sleep on, friends. Pleasant dreams!
Oh fine, all Argentavis fossils are around 6 million years old and they’re all from the Andes, so it probably never swooped down and dragged our ancestors screaming into the sky.
A.k.a. Victoria Day, traditionally celebrated by oppressing brown people. If you haven’t harassed any brown people today, get to it fast before midnight if you want to stick to the spirit of the holiday. I suggest finding a South Asian convenience store clerk and shouting “God save the Queen from you savages!” at them. If you yourself are brown, be sure to punch yourself in the stomach at least once before the sun goes down.
The last episode of Community ends with a piano piece that was maddeningly familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite place it. Apparently it was from My Dinner With Andre, but knowing that fact didn’t scratch my itch since I’ve never seen that movie at all. So then I looked for the piano music on Youtube and found the answer in the comments: Gymnopedie No. 1 is the piece used in the trailer for The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya. Whew, I’m glad I found that out, not knowing the answer was really starting to bug me. And to think, I would have been simply out of luck in the days before the Internet. Thank you, Youtube! Also Internet Movie Database, that site has answered innumerable questions for me as well.
Fun Elizabethan fact: “wherefore” means “why”. So when Juliet asks, “wherefore art thou Romeo?” she means “Romeo, why are you Romeo?” To explain more clearly, Juliet is asking why her beloved is Romeo, i.e., a member of her family’s sworn enemies. It’s obviously a rhetorical question, since it’s not a question anyone can answer. “Wherefore” thus does not mean “where”, and it is incorrect for someone to use it in that manner. This piece of trivia about Early Modern English is brought to you by my sense of responsibility about not updating in too long.
There’s an explanation behind my absence. To sum up my situation succinctly: I have a new job, it’s got crazy hours, but the pay is pretty damn good. I barely have time for anything else now, though, and my scarce downtime is mostly taken up by decompressing. I’ll still be keeping my hand in, but I won’t be as visible online as I used to be.
I ran some of my writing through an online analyzer and it gave me this result. I guess Kipling isn’t so bad, but I haven’t read him in years and I was never super into him, so he probably didn’t influence me that way. Then I ran another sample through the analyzer and got this:
Oh come on, I’ve never even read Lovecraft! Be more consistent, literature robot! I was actually afraid I wrote like Isaac Asimov, I read most of Foundation when I was 10 and I think I absorbed Asimov’s sparing descriptions. Strangely enough, the Lovecraft sample was from a non-fiction essay. I guess Lovecraft’s writing sounds like dry academic text.
Ever wonder what The Great Gatsby would have been like as a mid-80s Japanese video game? Yeah, neither have I. But a couple of enterprising chaps have answered the question that was burning in no one’s mind. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The fake manual and fictional provenance propels it further into the heights of absurdity, but the cut scene where Gatsby teleports while gazing at the green light from Daisy’s house is already sublime in its awful glory.
You’ve got to love the fact that you have to fight Meyer Wolfsheim’s Jewish gangsters along with hobos, flappers, and the Black Sox. But where is the ghost of the Dutchman from? I don’t remember that from the book, but admittedly I haven’t read it in a long while.
Video game trivia: the titular character of The Legend of Zelda video game series was named after Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, wife of dear old Francis Scott.
EDIT:
Holy crap, some company made Gatsby into an adventure game. It’s not a parody like the game above, it’s an actual thing that’s supposed to make money and everything. It looks like one of those classic inventory games where you click on everything trying to find the object you need to solve the puzzle you’re stuck on. Pretty pictures and you even have a GOSSIP action, but I wonder if the game makers kept Tom’s fascination with racist literature?
The pic is from the adventure game, not the fake 80s parody from above
Man, I remember watching Blue Velvet late one night on tv. I knew nothing at all about it beforehand besides the fact that it was showing on Showcase, the art film channel. I think I was still in high school at the time. I still don’t get it.
Okay, so let’s just get this out of the way: Bulgarians, I am not connected to the Sara Pen store that apparently sells fashion accessories. As for the rest of you, I have not read Lonely Werewolf Girl nor have I named my blog after one of the characters. You people are skewing my Google Analytics numbers. Not that I mind getting more visitors, but I don’t want anyone to feel like they’re being gypped.
The blog itself is named after a Filipino children’s rhyming chant that goes like this:
Penpen de sarapen de kutsilyo de almasen. Haw haw de carabao batuten.
Sayang pula, walang pera. Sayang puti, walang salapi.
Sipit namimilipit Gintong Pilak Namumulaklak Sa tabi ng DAGAT!
At least that’s how the version I learned as a child goes, apparently there are minor variations. For a translation and further explanation, gohere.
Finally, all of the posts and comments from Sarapen II have been imported here. At last, my blog is whole once again. None shall stand before me!
Or not. Say, does anyone out there remember the Infinity War crossover mini-series from the 1980s? No? It was pretty fun as long as you checked your brain at the door. Man, check out how wordy comics were back then. Like a third of the picture is nothing but words, almost all of them unnecessary. Purple dude gets a magic glove, how many words does it take to describe that?
Magus there used to have a totally sweet afro, though, instead of that chasen-gami samurai topknot he has in the pic. And damn if he isn’t afraid of rocking the codpiece and the hot pants. Now that’s a man who deserves to be ruler of the universe. If you’re too much of a wussy to even wear short shorts in public, how could you be trusted to wield the Infinity Gauntlet responsibly?
