Budweiser, Breakfast of Champions
Tuesday, Jan. 03, 2006 at 7:59 a.m.
HAPPY NEW YEAR! three days late . . .
A small amount of mirth was to be had at casa Valkyrie on NYE. I made some daquiris and we played Munchkin, a D&D type card game that has a lot more humor (one of my Christmas gifts from the Hubster). I�d been looking at it for several years everytime we went into the games shop. I just find the artwork very humorous. I used to hang out with a group that played a lot of those kinds of games, like WarHammer and Groo and Lunch Money and Guillotine and Flux and Chez Geek. And of course, Five Crowns, Set, Quiddler, and Xactika, which the parents of one of the guys in the group invented. Most of that games group moved or disbanded, and the people that were left were pretty much the people I didn�t like, but tolerated because I really liked the other people; that is, the ones who moved or disbanded.
Funny how we classify our friends, isn�t it? You�d think, in this cold, cruel world, we�d want to not diversify our friend-groups into pigeonholes, but then, speak to any woman, and you�ll learn about the many classifications of friends that include �People I�d let see me cry� to �People who I�d rather just drink coffee with, but not have lunch.�
Speaking of diversification, this person is just an all-around provider of goods and services:
Because I always seem to need repairs done on my rice cooker whenever I buy a plane ticket.
I jest; I don�t even have a rice cooker. I can�t cook rice. I have historically messed up even instant rice. My very first cooking attempts for Hubster (then Hubster-In-Training) included rice that was alternately soggy and crunchy. In the same serving. Since then, the rice situation has gotten better, but I still can�t graduate past instant rice. Rice-a-Roni is still stretching it for me, and I�m afraid boil-in-the-bag rice would simply burn my house down.
Talk about truth in advertising:
Actually, this reminds me of those driver�s ed and other �social engineering� films we all used to see in high school. I actually had the disc Educational Archives: Social Engineering 101 over the weekend and was alternately bored and amused. Most of the �getting along with others� basically said that blending in was the best way to get into a group, although one girl in one film would today be stuffed full of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds, the way she was going. Of course, there also was a film by the American Dairy Council, Why Doesn�t Cathy Eat Breakfast? which constantly harangued the girl about why she didn�t eat breakfast, yet she never explained herself. I�m guessing that Cathy was following the cardinal rule: �The person who eats a balanced breakfast is the only person who throws up in gym class.� Also included on the disc was the classic Lunchroom Manners, which was featured in the original HBO special Pee Wee�s Playhouse. Don�t be a Mr. Bungle, and make sure you pick up every crumb with a pair of tweezers, by God!!
The other film of the weekend was Mesa of Lost Women. It really was more of a butte, though, but I suppose I can let that slide considering the quality of the rest of this film. Two people are found wandering in the Desert Muerte by an oil surveyor, and when they�re brought to the �Amer-exican Field Hospital� the dude spills the whole story. Apparently a mad Doctor (aren�t they always?) Aranya (which translates to spider, a very very very important plot point) has been experimenting with removing bits of giant tarantulas and splicing them into nubile buxom Mexican girls, creating women who have spider-like mentality and personality. With odd wigs. But with very tight clothes with high-slit hemlines. Dr. Aranya attempts to get a Dr. Masterson to help with his experiment. Dr. Masterson is really disgusted by the whole concept and attempts to escape. Fool! The number one law of possible getting involved in weird freakish experiments is if you don�t want to participate, you will be killed! He somehow manages to escape but fries his brain wandering around the desert. He is sent to the Muerte Insane Asylum (insane asylum of death??) but later escapes and turns into one of the more amusing characters I�ve seen in bad celluloid. He adopts this goofy grin and a sort of �look at the pretty colors� physicality and begins to say things like �Birds don�t have motors, yet they fly�. Masterson then manages to get a gun, attaches himself to a golddigger and her future husband whose plane has had engine trouble and Masterson then shoots a spider-woman who moonlights as an exotic dancer in the local caf�. Everyone goes a little nuts and as the bartender calls the local posse, the spider-women reveals that she�s not dead, prompting the line �The dead body just got up and walked out of here!� At any rate, the movie finishes out with double-crossing a double agent, a �red shirt� killing, and Masterson regaining his sanity and blowing up the lab of the illustrious Dr. Aranya and his big marionette spider. The pilot and the golddigger are the only survivors and manage to climb down the mesa/butte/foothill and wander in the desert until they�re found by the hapless oil surveyor. The end. Oh, by the way, the whole thing is narrated by Lyle Talbot, one of the best �that guy!�s ever. The narration has such supercilious overtones that you feel a bit slimy by the end.
Oh, and the music was �composed� by Hoyt Curtin, if you consider pseudo-Mexican guitar riffs and a cat playing a piano compositions. However, Hoyt Curtin went on to compose nearly every Hanna-Barbera cartoon show theme song from the beginning of time til his death in 2000. He is also responsible for the musical compositions of the movie KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park.
Let�s all go to the lobby . . . let�s all go to the lobby . . . let�s all go to the lobby . . . and get ourselves a treat.
Okay, eewww. NO. That would be up there with pickle brine milkshakes and putting bacon grease on cereal.
Maybe that�s why Cathy doesn�t eat breakfast. There�s no bacon grease for her Wheatabix.