This garlic bread had the most disgusting amount of garlic butter on it. This is post oven; there was so much that it didn’t melt totally.
Category Archives: the mindlab
Van
Toasters
I got a new toaster recently as a gift. Before I tell you about it, I need to give you a little backstory on my relationship with toasters. A couple of years, when I was living with Mike and Joe, Mike and I figured we needed a toaster to fill our occasional toasting needs. So we went to Target or something and bought the cheapest toaster we could for $6.
It was piece of shit.
BK Pipe
This is some shit. I bought a Burger King milk shake the other day on the PA turnpike. I got a medium. It was fucking enormous of course. So big they didn’t give me a regular straw for it. I got a straw so big it had it’s own branding. The BK Pipe™. Apparently the product of “Have it your way technology.”
Maniac
In Dwain Esper’s 1934 Maniac, a man eats a cat eyeball, while commenting, “Why, not unlike an oyster or a grape,” another man deals in cat pelts, there is a bunch of montage, possibly intentionally or possibly not, suggesting that women are cats, random nudity (probably has something to do with the cats), countless hodgepodge Poe references, one of the strangest Dr. Jekyll / Mr. Hyde transformations ever committed to celluloid, and a bunch of other stuff I am fairly sure I have failed to mention. I will not try to give a plot summary of the film, but exploitation historian Eric Schaefer does, and after doing so writes, “The ‘story’ of Maniac may sound odd, but a synopsis of the film cannot begin to convey the disjointed, confusing experience of an actual viewing of it.”1
Basically, this is a great slice of entertainment to put on at the office while you are taking lunch today.
- Schaefer, Eric. “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!”. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1999. ↩
Shore Leave 31
Shore Leave is an annual SF convention held in the Hunt Valley area during the second week of July. It is a con that is geared towards Star Trek but all other branches of fandom are welcomed. It is also a “media” con (i.e. the main draw are actors from SF shows). The DeLorean is an operating vehicle with a valid tag.
Letter
Wesband
Wesband is a modification of The Battle for Wesnoth that I’ve been making. It is a dungeon-crawler, loosely based on ZAngband, but with features unique to the genre.
Wesnoth is a mutli-platform, open source, turn-based strategy (TBS), fantasy game. Originally made as a single player game, Wesnoth has expanded its mod-ability to the point of allowing multiple players to play co-op in a continuous series of scenarios. Wesband makes use of the newest modding functionality that Wesnoth has to offer.
Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four
Back in 1992 the company Constantin Film was about to loose its option on the *Fantastic Four* property. In order to maintain the rights, they turned to Roger Corman to produce an ashcan copy of the film never intended for actual release. Corman sunk $1.98 million to make the movie. While I’ve never seen it, supposedly there is a trailer of the film on the VHS version of *Carnosaur* (1993), directed by Adam Simon and Darren Moloney; also executive produced by Corman. The plan worked and Constantin Film would eventually go onto to make *Fantastic Four* (2005), directed by Tim Story, for $100 million, and *Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer* (2007), also directed by Story, for $130 million.
I’ve know for some time about the film, and am sure back in the early 90’s, when Thom was making me watch Mark Goldblatt’s version of *Punisher* (1989), starring Dolph Lundgren, and *Captain America* (1990), directed by Albert Pyun, I would have also been made to sit through the 1994 version of *Fantastic Four*, directed by Oley Sassone.
In looking around for Corman films on the [Internet Archive](http://www.archive.org/) this afternoon, I discovered one could actually watch the film in its entirety there.
Thom, I know it isn’t the 90s any longer, but I fully expect you to watch this entire film and write and in depth review.
Old photos
Mike recently asked me for a photo of him and mom. I actually don’t have many, and the ones I have aren’t always ‘serious.’ I had about 100 slides from home from our childhood and said I’d look through those. This batch of slides were the loose ‘reject’ slides that never made their way into boxes or trays. I was relatively unsuccessful, but I did find a couple photos that my dad took that I think are really neat. I’m going to start going through the old slides at home and digitizing them.
