Best Party Ever

I love happy coincidence.
After yesterday's post on schadenfreude, Phil pointed me at my Dilbert desk calendar, which I hadn't checked since the weekend.
Lo and behold …

Hee hee hee. How cool is that?

And talking of cool coincidences:
Katie's post yesterday mentioned Katharine and Otto's 1962 vacation movie, which immediately rang bells in the stranger parts of my brain.

Many years ago, the wonderful Peahen introduced me to a band whose link has been in my sidebar since day one (take a look; it's still there).

I wrote:
"There's a strange band over there in the States called the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players (their link is in my sidebar, inevitably). They take all those old home movies and sets of slides and set them to music (imagine a hilariously amateurish They Might Be Giants tribute band with a nine-year-old girl drummer and a mom who operates the projector). They did a great song called Mountain Trip To Japan, 1959, starring some folks' holiday slides they found in a yard sale. They also performed a short opera based around an early 1970s Mc.Donald's staff training slideshow. They'd have a whale of a time with your postcards."

To which Katie replied:
"Dive if you can believe it, I've actually SEEN the Trachtenburg Family perform LIVE! Yes, for 3 months in 2003 I lived in my sister's apartment in Williamsburg Brooklyn and got to see them at a local joint. They were absolutely hysterical, the daughter especially, and I just loved what how they combined the slides, movies and their music."

So here - for any of you who wish to bathe in the glow of Katie's über-coolness - are the glorious Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players performing "Moutain Trip To Japan, 1959".



Check out the rest of their stuff, too. They are a cure for both the blues and sanity.
They're still going and still wonderful.

A Blasphemer Writes

Ah, schadenfreude …
A guy got on the train this morning at Ipswich and was struggling up the aisle, looking desperately for a seat.
Big guy. Smart business suit, briefcase, laptop bag, newspaper under one arm, coffee in one hand.
He suddenly rears back and lets rip with an enormous sneeze, at the same time raising his hand politely to cover his mouth.
As a result, he sneezes into his latte and sprays three rows of seats, then drops it and it spills coffee all the way down his front, at which point he tries to catch the falling cup and drops the rest of his stuff before falling flat on his arse as the train lurches into motion.

True!
I make no apology for laughing so hard I nearly wet myself. The rest of the carriage found it pretty funny, too - even those poor sods who got sprayed with coffee and sneeze.

Shadenfreude is the most basic form of humour; laughing at the misfortunes of others.
No matter how much we like to think of ourselves as enlightened, caring, civilised beings we still laugh like the pack of fuckwit chimps we really are when someone walks smack into a lamp post or Wily E. Coyote blows himself up with his own Acme dynamite.

Schadenfreude does of course carry with it an element of "there but for the grace of God go I".
But you shouldn't be thanking God for letting you off, you should be thinking "Holy fuck! What kind of sicko deity does that to somebody?"
Some twisted old git of a God sitting at a wall of CCTV screens, seeing this poor bastard and hitting the "SMITE" button, then sitting back and giggling at His own cleverness.
Twat!

If it turns out there IS an afterlife I'm going to track down that old fucker and kick His arse so hard!
Then we'll see who's laughing.
If Robyn and Shan are right and He is up there, glaring down at me, then all I can say is "Your aim is off. You'll have to do better than that, beardy."

That's the trouble with religion: we've made our Gods in our own image so when Hans Moleman gets smacked in the nuts with a football our Gods find it just as funny as we do.
Actually, that explains just about all of the Old Testament …

Our ancestors were simply too crap to think up a decent God.
Sigh.
The Greeks imagined a bunch of layabouts bickering amongst themselves and shagging anything that moved.
The Hebrews gave us a bullying big brother, "Don't you mess with MY God! He's bigger than yours and He'll thump you!"
The Hindus … well, that's just weird, but at least it showed a bit of imagination.
The Japanese had eight million of the little fuckers scurrying about. "Everything has a spirit so treat it with respect or it might bite your ass".
The Buddhists dispensed with a God altogether, but replaced it with the silly idea that if you behave yourself you might get reborn as a bald bloke in an orange bedsheet … or an ant.

Religion … almost as funny as schadenfreude.
God walking into a lamp post. Now THAT would be funny!

A Cautionary Tale

Robyn's mouth-watering, chocolate-covered post reminds me of a cocoa-related cautionary tale of my own:

Where I used to work we had a guy who would cruise around peoples' desks and help himself to any chocolates that happened to be laying there. As you can probably understand, this kinda rankled after a while.

So anyway, Elaine had a chocolate making kit (one of those crappy mould things she got for Christmas) with which we spent an entertainingly disgusting evening creating a small batch of rather exclusive chocolates with … er … "exotic" fillings.
And drinking a lot.

The first one we made was a cube of cheese with a tiny pickle on top, lovingly encased in chocolate. It looked so damned good sitting there I almost ate it myself.
The next was a wad of cotton wool soaked in meths; again a rather enticing prospect when coated in the yummy brown stuff.
Another was a dead spider (quite a meaty one) enhanced with a dollop of tomato ketchup and gloopily enveloped in a dark chocolate shell (yum).
The fourth was tuna cat food.

We arranged our creations artfully in an old chocolate box and left them on the end of Elaine's desk the following morning, every one of us surreptitiously keeping a sly eye on events.
Sure enough, within minutes, Frank (hi, Frank) zoomed in and snaffled a couple, cramming them into his mouth with unconcealed glee.

Oh, joy unbounded!
He got the dead spider in ketchup and the cheese and pickle. And it took several seconds of self-satisfied grinning and chomping before his expression changed to one that is best imagined rather than described.

Ah, schadenfreude … Pointing and laughing is always such fun.
Unfortunately it didn't stop Frank's predatory ways but he was somewhat more circumspect as a consequence, only snaffling unopened chocolate bars.
We did offer him the meths and cat food chocs but he nobly declined.

Let that be a lesson to you.

P.S. Happy birthday, little brother!