Mark A. Rayner's Blog: Mark A. Rayner's Goodreads Blog, page 78

Ask General Kang: Do you have Santa Claus on your home planet?

No, we didn't have Santa Claus when I was growing up. We didn't have Christmas. Heck, we didn't even have your primitive paleo-brain concept of religion.

We did have the concept of gift-giving, and something we called Consumer Day, when we tried to boost our Neecknabian economy and give gifts. And we did have a folk tradition similar to your jolly Saint Nick. We called him Troglor the Consumer, and if you didn't buy at least a thousand pargnags (that's roughly $700 US in the current exchange rate) in gifts, then you were put on the "naughty" list.

Now, in your ridiculously soft human custom, getting on the "naughty" list means no more than receiving a lump of coal in your stocking, or at worst, having some dude dressed up as the devil coming to your house to scare you.

Troglor was not so innocuous. If you got on the "naughty" list, you didn't find yourself invited to sexy parties, oh no, you found yourself in receipt of a shitload of hurt. Most of the time you would find yourself auctioned off — organ by organ — to the highest bidder at the yearly "Boxing Off" Day sale. Sometimes, if you were really bad, he'd just put a Neecknabian Rectal Weasel in your bed before Consumer Morning.

Nasty.

I always gave at least 1200 pargnags worth of gifts, just to be on the safe side.

Next Time: Is it normal for things to explode for no reason?
Alltop is also working hard to stay off Troglor's naughty list. Originally published, December, 2008.

Charlie Brown: shallow bastard

So Charlie Brown's troubles are not because he's a loser, they're because he's shallow: He's in love with a girl because of her looks. He wants to kick a football because his ego won't let him fail (or learn that Lucy is a sociopathic liar). He is a child, but his dog has a much richer inner life.

I don't think this explains the kite-eating tree.

Alltop never kicked a football either.

Unwanted Christmas Gifts Through the Ages

In 1170, King Henry II says, "What a parcel of fools and dastards have I nourished in my house, and not one of them will avenge me of this one upstart clerk." Said fools and dastards decide that this means they should kill Archbishop Thomas Becket.

In 1600, Queen Elizabeth grants a formal charter to the London merchants trading to the East Indies. This doesn't work out very well for the East Indies.

In 1777 George Washington's Continental Army is given "cozy winter quarters" at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

In 1888, artist and talented loon Vincent Van Gogh cut off the lower part of his left ear, to give to a prostitute named Rachel, who worked at a brothel nearby. Um, thanks, but does it come in, like, not bleeding?

In 1912 the Parisian literary review, Nouvelle Revue Francaise, rejects an excerpt from Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. Doh!

In 1915 Sir Douglas Haig is made the commander-in-chief of the British army in France, and eventually gives his soldiers the thoughtful and exploding gift of the Somme.

In 1972 Pepe Lopez is invited to join the Stella Maris rugby team, and gets a free trip to Chile on Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 over the Andes. He proves to be very tasty.

Another parcel of fools and dastards can be found at Alltop. Originally published December, 2008.

Space Lunchbox would be a great name for a band

Sad Spaceman contemplates lunch.

Alltop would be a great name for a humor blog aggregator.

Christmas Shoes – Patton Oswalt

It seems like all the lights are up in the neighborhood, so I thought I'd post this hilarious Christmas routine by Patton Oswalt:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Also here on youtube.

Alltop gets cranky at Christmas time too. Originally posted Dec. 2010.

Sad Spaceman doesn't read Nietzsche

More Sad Spaceman here.

Alltop reads Nietzsche. It just doesn't understand it.

Why Those 25 Things About You Aren't "Random"

This is one that has been festering for some time, so please forgive the Phrase Freak if he goes "off the Bale" a bit. Like many changes to the English language, the meaning of this word has become twisted. Once, it defined something that was done without a method or choice, something determined by chance.

It did not mean something unexpected, strange, improvised, capricious, absurd, and cheese-eating monkeys flying out of my butt. (See that last one was absurd, a non sequitur for sure, but it was not random, even if it might have seemed that way to you.)

Now the Great Beast (Facebook) has slouched its way into the Bethlehem of my daily routine with an epidemic of lists (which by their nature tend to be the opposite of random) giving me supposedly "random" facts about the people I love and admire. Many of these people are incredibly literate. Way smarter than me. Yet they have fallen under the sway of the googly-eyed siren that spawned the phrase, "that's, like, so totally random."

It is easy to mistake great complexity or subtlety for randomness. I'd be willing to bet that most of those lists are:

carefully chosen
written to achieve a specific effect
tomato paste.

I'm afraid this usage gets eight gobsmacks out of ten. We're on full alert now people!

Other freakish phrases:

Shovel Ready | specific timetable | full patch | IED | on the ground

You can check the definition of random yourself. Yardsitck! Alltop's lack of coherence should not be considered random either. This was originally published in 2009, and I'm only repeating it now because I have heard it used by students so much recently.

Literary horror stories

But only if the author is very, very lucky.

Alltop would like to be turned into a View-a-matic slideshow.

The Tyranny and Creativity of a Word Count

On the other hand, a really specific (short) word limit can force one to be more creative and improve the text. I love the Blaise Pascal quote: "Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte."

In English: "This letter is very long because I did not have time to make it short."

In other words, brevity is not only the soul of wit, it takes more time to achieve, sometimes, than much longer pieces of writing.

This post notwithstanding.

Alltop is long on funny. Cartoon by Noise to Signal

Top rejected final messages from David Bowman (spoilers)

1968- "2001" – astronaut David Bowman, a photo by x-ray delta one on Flickr.

As you probably know, in the book version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, David Bowman's final words recorded by mission control are: "My God, it's full of stars!". (This excellent line didn't make it into the movie, but it did make it into the sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact".) What you don't know is that David Bowman had some time to think about his final message, and he had a few early drafts:

By Thor's Hammer, it's replete with twinkly lights.
Holy shit, I could have had a V-8!
On the whole I'd rather be in Philadelphia.
O Vishnu's titties, I am become … aaahhh.
I have a bad feeling about this.
I love you Charlie!
Mission Control? I'm shitting Twinkies.

As always, feel free to add any other final lines in the comments.

My god, Alltop is full of funny.