One of the best things about the internet for a guy like me is how you can just completely get lost in it, going from one random whim to another until you end up either reading about theoretical physics or porn. That’s pretty much the entire bredth of the internet. In that vein, let me start my update with a story about a short little wander I had the other day. Yes, you have to read it.

I was watching movies during work, as I often do, and came across Arsenic & Old Lace, which is actually a pretty funny movie in it’s own right, and I’d recommend it if you haven’t seen it. But I digress. From my story about rambling wherin I am also rambling. Of course, this little walk started out on IMDb, but there’s so little fun information on IMDb. Sure, you’ll get all the hard fact, maybe a bit of “trivia” and the most obsessive/compulsive list of continuity faults ever, but where’s the stories about the actors fighting each other and the director quitting in a huff due to jellybeans or whatever? So there we go to the next stop on our journey: Wikipedia.

We’ve talked about Wikipedia before on here, but hell, let’s do so again. It’s a really interesting concept, you know? Anybody in the world can add anything they want to this database of knowledge. The problem is that there are a lot fewer people who know anything than there are people who contribute to Wikipedia. This ends up in billions of pages about minor Transformers characters and detailed histories of Marvel comic book characters. So, I looked on the Wikipedia page for Arsenic & Old Lace. The page has a detailed summary of the plot, but that’s about it, and since I just watched the movie, that didn’t do me any good. Well, that dried up my normal “resources.” Guess it’s time to Google it.

On leg three of my trip, I consulted my good, personal friend Google. The first few matches were, of course, Wikipedia and IMDb links, and after that there was very little about the actual movie. Instead I got things like a bed and breakfast called “Arsenic and Old Lace” (which is a terrible name, by the way, since that movie is about people looking for a room to rent getting poisoned), an online wiccan supply shop that was probably designed at the height of Angelfire, and… several OTHER beds and breakfastses with the same name. The hell? I wonder if there are a string of hotels named Bates… but that’s a diversion for another time! As far as this story is concerned, I started clicking on random personal “fansites” of the movie. Here is where I start to get near the point of the update. Kinda.

From one of these sites, I managed to get to a “shrine” (you know, those internet shrines of people which are just some shitty background image tiled and like six really poor quality pictures of the person?) of Priscilla Lane, an actress in the movie. Then, at the bottom of the page… I came across something very, very strange…

Priscilla Lane - see more hot women

The hell? “Chikipedia”? Go ahead, click on it. Once you do, you’ll find yourself at Chikipedia, “the wiki of hot women.” Everything you’d ever wanted to know about any famous woman, as long as all you want to know about them is their body measurements, the fact that they have assets like “being hot” or “boobs”, and three misspelled paragraphs about their life and work. Oh, and about 70 pictures per person. Yes, friends, Chikipedia is one of the creepiest websites I’ve run across in many a day. It’s basically a stalker repository, written by stalkers for stalkers.

So, now you may be wondering why I spent all that damn time rambling just to get to the point instead of just GETTING there. That’s not how I roll, baby. I’m the wind. I guess I’m just a rambler and a gambler and I guess I always will. Rawhide. Wait, what was I saying? Oh yeah! I was going to say that I really didn’t have anything more to say other than I found some creepy website, and what kind of update would that be? Rambling is much more word-efficient. Welp, gotta go now. See ya.

Have you noticed that they don’t make spy movies the way they used to? Modern spy movies are either set during World War two and directed by an actor so they stink and are way too long, or set during modern times and the agent has gone “rogue” which means there’s gonna be a bunch of blurry hard to watch action sequences where you don’t know what’s going on. And of course there’s still James Bond, who I think in his latest upcoming adventure is going to fight a black hole. A depressed black hole. Probably with a pen or something.

Classic spy movies are all about mysterious trains and chasing people across boat docks and kissing femme fatales, evil guys in fezzes in Moroccan bazaars and envelopes handed from trench-coat to trench-coat. I guess all that old-fashioned espionage stuff is sort of dated now, what with satellite cameras and women’s rights, and trench-coats only coming in high-school black anymore. But there’s one aspect of the classic spy thriller which I see no reason to lose, and that’s cool secret code talk.

You know what I’m talking about- “I’d like to buy a box to put my daughter’s present in” says the man with the horn-rim glasses and the red hat. “Would you like a purple box, or the kind that has no bottom?” says the man with the carnation in his lapel. They walk together along the canal bank, until they reach an old bridge, and if anybody had been watching closely they would’ve seen the two men go under it but never come back out again. THAT’S how spy shit works, that’s how secret agents should act. None of this talking to people openly on your cell phone shit- whenever a spy or an agent or whatever is being talked through some process remotely by a woman at a computer console miles away in a movie, I think to myself “how do they know nobody’s listening? How does he even know she should be trusted at all?”. But of course modern movies barely deal with stuff like that except as conveniences for plot twists that you saw coming a mile away. The point of the old spy stuff was that you never knew, never knew who was gonna betray our hero or if our hero himself was even a good guy. You couldn’t assume “oh, he loves her, she’s a good guy” back then. Fuck, you could almost assume the opposite. And when people started saying shit like “I used to keep Gerbils until one of them got too big for baseball” and someone else responded “I’m more of a lacrosse fan, but don’t let my dog know”, you knew shit was going down, but you didn’t know exactly what. That’s where the suspense came from.

Sigh… but enough of my pining for simpler days (of more complex fictional spies). I can live with the knowledge that my dream of playing piano in a gin joint in French Africa and slowly unraveling intricate plots to kill ambassadors and steal ancient statues in my spare time is fairly unlikely at this point, no matter how good I might look in a white tuxedo. I know that if I do ever meet Ms. Right, it’s fairly unlikely she’ll be a Russian triple-agent in a slinky cocktail dress sent to poison a shipment of wine headed for Vatican city by steamer, and every time I eat any microfiche they tell me I’m not allowed in the public library anymore. I’m never going to live out any of these dreams, but dammit, there’s one thing I refuse to give up, and that’s cool spy talk! C’mon, who wants to talk cool spy code talk with me? C’MON, DO IT! DAAAAAAAD! MAKE THE WEBSITE READERS PLAY SPY WITH ME!!!!

So here we go…

“It’s a hot day for hippopotami”, isn’t it? What’s that you say? “I have no idea what that means”… very good, very good. Ahem… “Blue foxes can’t stay too long in the frying pan”. You know? Yes… “screw this I’m going to go read another website” indeed. Excellent, we can talk now.

Here are your orders, confusionaut- the enemy has posted a website our agents in the field discovered. It appears innocuous enough at first, but upon further examination the entire site is obviously a front for something diabolical. So far we’ve only begun decoding one section-

“Brian if you where a Boys Stater confronted by a sexy freshman lonely from being in new place with no friends and she wants to hang out, what do you do.”

“Well Boys Stater, temptation is a powerful thing, but in that situation I would go immediately to my city councilor and report the young lady so that he may warn my fellow Boys Staters not to fall into her seductive trap.”

Obviously it’s some kind of secret code, but we’re baffled. There’s a juicy promotion in it for whoever figures it out, but be careful- this Brian Mimbs is not to be trifled with. Get your answers into the comments section of this update ASAP. Dismissed, agents.

It’s a pretty well-established fact that the United States should have just let the South secede from the union. The northern states wouldn’t have lost anything important, no schools that are any good or cities that don’t just wash away because somebody decided to build them under sea level and protect the whole thing with what amounted to a series of cardboard boxes and hope. Lincoln probably flipped a coin, and sad to say it came up tails and the George that is the North had to fight to help the Lenny that is the South, no matter how many standards of decency it had petted to death. The North COULD have just said “fine” and sent generals out to dynamite the Mason Dixon line, setting the entire southern half of the country adrift to starve because all they know how to make is garbage for food. This is the point I’m getting at, really- we should’ve let the south go because then we’d never have to eat their filth anymore.

Biscuits and gravy. Boiled Peanuts. Fried candy bars. Grits. In the American south, “food” is roughly defined as “whatever fits in your head” or, in the local dialect, “It’suma tastee viddles shoot mees-a jugband yeeha”. Have you ever seen a very small child put things that aren’t food in its mouth? That’s because the child’s brain doesn’t work yet, but nature has protected it by making it cute so grown-up humans pay attention to it and keep it from eating poison and knives and wild animals. Adults who live in the American south, however, lack this natural ability- they do not have their mommies there to tell them “you spit that out mister! That’s not food, that’s lard and dirt”. And so, an entire regional culture’s cuisine has evolved around things like tripe and moonshine, because nobody ever told them that bowels and rubbing alcohol aren’t fucking food.

Some people tell me that food from the South tastes good, but I really can’t understand it (with the exception of Cajun food, but that’s what happens when you have a French colony in the middle of worthless swamp lands. The French can make anything delicious). Even if hominy tasted good- which it certainly doesn’t, but even if it did it’d still be horrifyingly bad for you. Antifreeze is supposedly very sweet and refreshing, that’s why pets drink it and die from it. Hominy is corn that’s had anything even remotely nourishing or good about it bleached out with chemicals, just like biscuits and gravy is animal fat baked into animal fat and served with great white globs of animal fat. Eating at a restaurant from the south, especially at breakfast time, is like being an emaciated dog ripping great blubbery chunks out of a beached whale and eating them as though they were meat. That dog is eventually going to die of malnourishment and bowel obstructions, and so are you if you think what you got at the Jimmy Dean’s was food.

Grits are by and far the worst offender of all culinary entries from America’s unsightly lower growth. Once again they take corn, but instead of turning it into a science fair experiment they grind it up into corn meal and boil it for a while. The recipe for grits is as follows-

Grits-

-One cup corn meal

-One cup cold water

-One teaspoon salt

-Three cups boiling water

That’s right, there are four ingredients and two of them are water. You boil the hot water and the salt, you mix the cold water and the corn-sand, and then you mix THOSE things and stir it around so it doesn’t start making horrible hissing and vomiting noises and shooting hot globs of itself onto your ceiling. You can eat the resulting goop with sugar and milk, or with cheese melted in it, or with apple slices… but then again you could eat it with beach sand or crumpled up aviator glasses or a pound of hair if you wanted to. No option is better or worse than any other, because no matter what you’re eating goop made out of corn dust. It tastes like goop made out of corn dust, end of story. Grits were invented, like most things from the South, when some hick with the IQ of a bag of nails got drunk and fucked up his harvest for the year, so his wife had to figure out how to still eat the horrible remains so they didn’t all starve. There’s a reason they call it “grits”- it’s both an admission that the shit is made out of dirt AND an apt description of the uncomfortable feeling in your mouth after eating it. Plus an “s” because plurals is hard, a hyuk!

So, in summation- fuck the South, fuck cornmeal, and fuck having nothing else to eat in your house so you have to eat grits. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go lie down to keep from throwing up my “breakfast”.

There are certain benefits to being nocturnal. It’s cooler in the summertime, nobody bothers you, and occasionally you meet people who are so bored at their job at the Kinkos that they’ll do your entire 200 dollar print job for a case of beer, which you then get to drink with them on the roof of their strip mall, just as long as you promise not to tell anybody (this last one is OBVIOUSLY fictional… heh heh). The best thing about being out and about in the stranger hours of night, however, is the other people you see running errands and doing their shopping and whatnot. These people are quite often a huge dollop of food for thought.

Take, for example, the woman in front of me at the grocery store check-out lane the other day at 3 AM. I vastly prefer grocery shopping in the middle of the night; everything’s being stocked (by people with the coolest job title ever- “night stockers”) so you know you can get whatever you want, you get the best selection of discount stuff in those shelves of day-old bread in the back, and if you time it just right you can hang out in the bakery while they’re making all the fresh stuff for the next day. This particular instance found me with my usual assortment of shrink-wrapped discount donuts, a few microwave burritos and an Arizona green tea, but the woman in front of me… well, if what she had was HER usual order, then… wow.

She couldn’t have been that much older than me, maybe 26 or 27 at the oldest. Short and very pretty, even without any makeup and in a jogging suit as she was. Normally a pretty woman at the store is cause for maybe three seconds of attention, but this one had come to the only open check-out lane with a shopping cart piled with the most curious assortment of things I can think of- Gatorade and condoms. Literally thirty or forty units of each, individual bottles of Gatorade and the smallest packs of condoms they sold, not in bulk, but the little twenty-or-whatever packs. To make it even odder, she hadn’t just gotten one kind of either; each bottle of Gatorade was a different flavor, and she had obviously bought every kind of condom they sold, from the generic brand to the fancy crazy chemical-heat-and-flavors kind to those ridiculous Magnum condoms you see dumb teenage boys buying sometimes as if to impress someone. She had picked out a lovely sampler-bouquet of sports drinks and prophylactics, and of course, my mind immediately started jumping to the big question of “why?”

This poor woman obviously had hoped to have nobody else in line with her at three in the morning while she bought this odd assortment and seemed very nervous as she stared at the floor and waited for her ungodly enormous total (condoms are expensive, though I guess not as expensive as kids, so there you go). Instead, she got me, trying to be polite by giving her some space, but still my brain raced with possibilities. Here are, in the order of their occurring to me, the theories I formulated as to why a young lady would be buying 30 different varieties of Gatorade and condoms at the King Soopers-

Option 1- She and her partner were planning on doing something astoundingly complicated and dehydrating in bed, and she had no idea how condom sizes worked.

Option 2- She was an extremely careful woman and had decided to scientifically test the reliability of different brands of condoms, using the different colors of Gatorade as a way to keep track of her results.

Option 3- A really elaborate sorority initiation or, if I hadn’t looked close enough at “her”, perhaps a really REALLY elaborate fraternity initiation.

Option 4- She and her partner had invented an amazing new sport and had finally worked up the courage to start a league.

Option 5- Larry Flint was in town.

Option 6- Two words- naughty Otterpops (Naughterpops?)

Option 7- Dennis Hopper was waiting outside in the car for her, sucking on a gas mask connected to a nitrus tank, and I was going to find a human ear in the parking lot on my way out.

Option 8- Some highschool basketball team was about to have their best season ever.

I had gotten all the way to option nine when she scanned her credit card as fast as possible, gathered up her many MANY grocery bags of condoms and Gatorade and literally ran out of the store. This is good, since option nine is by far the best/worst- she was an inventor and was trying to create some kind of contraceptive line with electrolytes in it. Some sort of sports-themed lubrication alternative, or maybe even the next logical step, “Gatorade M.A.: the morning-after sportsdrink”. I can just see the commercial for that now: a woman is in gynecological stirrups and she’s sweating but it’s all neon-colored… yeah, I should’ve stopped at number eight.

Whatever that woman was buying all that stuff for, I salute her gutsiness. I doubt I’ll ever see her again, though that’s not going to stop me from making the occasional very strange Google search…

Part 1- Here.

Part2- Here.

Click to enlarge.