So after Tim threw up Night Caller, we got on the phone and started talking about the “archives”. Soon after, the dig began.

The thing is Night Caller isn’t all that old. Like what, maybe a year and half? I dunno. Somewhere, the debauchery of Night Caller is still fresh in my mind. The “10 years” of absolute nonsense before that is all but a forgotten prehistory. Going back another 5 beyond that, to the unlistenable 4-track years, it is like trying to decipher cave writing. If we are the late night of the web now, 15 years ago our only fan was truly our mother. Wonder why. Luckily though, all wasn’t for nought. We actually managed to make some gems during that time.

Over the next couple weeks, months, maybe years, I’m going to be posting up some of those choice gems. Tim probably will too. This will hopefully placate our readership, encourage them to come back, attract a couple new folks and maybe even writers for the forum – that is until we get around to posting the things that we are actually doing now. You can expect one of these later this week or early next. So be sure to be constantly (and I mean constantly) refreshing your browser.

For now though, I give you the first installment from the vaults:The Lesternomicon. The Lesternomicon was originally an offshoot of Chook. While not directly related to what Chook would become, or even show up on the Chook site, in a lot of ways it gets at what the spirit of Chook was. Chook, even in its early days when Dragon and I were cooking up Chung Hort stories, was originally intended to be a mythos and a universe of characters. While arguably this was never fully realized and at best half-baked, it was always working in the background. For most of us involved with the sprawling and disjointed project, the word mythos pointed dead ahead to Lovecraft. That was the genesis of The Lesternomicon. It would become part Shub, part Chook, part Lester, part Larry, massively unintelligible and also unfinished. Originally, it was to be a book unto itself, a sort of religious text, much like Lovecraft’s Necronomicon. While I don’t foresee it being finished any time soon, perhaps it one day will be. Till then, enjoy what there is of it.

Props to Chris who probably wrote more of it than I did. I’m not sure who did the PDF though. It might have been Tim (nice spider).

Click here to Download The Lesternomicon in PDF format.

The premier of the second season of the new Doctor Who ran on Sci Fi Channel last night and it was really good. Though I know a lot of people liked Christopher Eccleston’s more hard-boiled take on the good Doctor, I thought David Tennant’s Doctor was more in the spirt of the show’s more eccentric qualities. While the series willingness to inject a little more action into the stories does change it from the feel of the old considerably, it also finally brings the series into the 21st century. Here is looking to more episodes!

DJWebb alerted me to the rather baffling fact that over 1,800 people have viewed Spontaneous Combustion on Google Video. Sure maybe all 1,800 people stopped after minute one, but really who is counting? When you type in the words “spontaneous combustion” into the Google Video search engine, the movie is ranked number 1, above South Park‘s take on the phenomenon. It even gets a respectable 3 out of 5 stars. That converts to something like 6 stars on IMDB, or maybe one of those ubiquitous 7.1’s on Pitchforkmedia.

One of my favorite drinks is coffee. I like my coffee black. No sugar. No cream. I also like hot tea, especially Earl Grey. When I lived with Tim, I’d also drink green tea (generally because he had a lot of it). While I don’t drink tea nearly as much as coffee, I do thoroughly enjoy a cup now and again – especially when I don’t want all that caffeine and I just want a hot beverage. And much like my coffee, I also don’t want anything else in my tea except “tea”.

Yet, I have always been vexed by the question that why when you mix the two together do they taste so nasty? It would seem logical that a mixture of tea and coffee would be quite nice. Even refreshing. Both hot drinks are bitter. I even drink both hot beverages the same, unadorned with frills. Still, the very thought of snarfing down a piping hot mug of toffee or cea is repulsive.

Why? The table is open.

For many years I have been haunted by a reoccurring dream… beholders doing savage battle with mindflayers. Now, in a unprecedented event, I turn this topic over to the Protozoic forum. I ask you, our faithful readership, who would win? The beholders or the mindflayers? Why would they win? Which faction would win the respect of the umberhulks? Additionally, if a script version of beholders vs mindflayers was proposed to a major motion picture studio, what could be done to ensure that the screenplay was as exciting, if not “more” exciting than Alien vs Predator? Would the beholders fight the mindflayers in a large underground Mayan temple located in Antartica (sort of like Alien vs Predator)? Or would they wage war in downtown D.C.?

The table is now open.