David S. Atkinson's Blog, page 172

The Best Laid Plans Of Roaches And Men

I just read I Will Rot Without You by Danger Slater, a book I highly recommend by the way. It got me thinking about what happened over the summer when Danger was traveling across the country with Lisa LeStrange and I got to meet them and talk writerly things over dinner at Casa Bonita.

Part of his promotion for the book involved these rubber roaches he was leaving all over the place, taking and posting pictures of them occasionally. We of course explored Casa Bonita after eating, and at one point ended up in the treasure room. The little bins of dime store kids toys were empty. No big deal since we weren’t kids anyway, and Casa Bonita was really, really slammed that night. With that many people, you couldn’t expect them to keep the treasure room bins stocked constantly. We were rational enough to understand that, but Danger got the wild hair to put one of the rubber roaches in the bin.

I think he was hoping it’d be funny, that someone would see it and get freaked out. However, when we checked back a short time later, the roach was gone. No one said a word about it. Nothing. No screaming, no freak out. Nothing.

Of course, this wasn’t surprising when we thought about it. Really, a rubber roach isn’t that much different than the sort of things that are in free kid toy bins at places like that. Rubber bugs are pretty common, and kids often go for them (little boys in particular, but definitely beyond that when cultural conditioning hasn’t completely forced kids into a predefined path). Worse, Danger’s rubber roaches were probably more expensive and significantly higher quality than the free toys that were supposed to be there. We’re probably talking about hard plastic spider rings and nickel bounce balls. Not only did some kid just think it was a toy, they were probably overjoyed to find something better than the toys they normally found there.

The hoped for shock and disgust did not happen. I think he wasted a roach.

It’s cool though. Danger didn’t seem to be averse to sharing roaches with children. That’s just the kind of guy he is.

Mash Up Of “The Stranger” by Camus And That Guy Shoveling Water Animated Gif

Remember that animated gif of the guy shoveling water? I thought the best thing to go with that would be audio of someone reading The Stranger by Camus. Gifsounds let me explore that idea. Click below to check it out (audio of The Stranger courtesy of Whispered reading of “The Stranger by Albert Camus chapter 1“):

https://gifsound.com/?gif=p.fod4.com/p/media/b808431fbb/O3rdysatSvGaSO440KM4_water%2520shovel.gif&v=pTz7GuNMEpU

It works now. I hope it works later. We’ll see. If not, imagine.

The 80s Ruined Me

The 80s ruined me. I grew up in the 80s and it is impossible to ignore the mark left upon my psyche by that era. Specifically, I’m almost incapable of not immediately and reflexively responding to any Russia reference with a lame Yakov Smirnoff parody. It isn’t intentional, and hasn’t been relevant for well over twenty years now, but I can’t help it.

For example, a writer friend made a reference recently online to a mash up of Pinhead from Hellraiser with Vladimir Putin. I immediately thought: In Soviet Russia, box opens YOU!

Similarly, this morning I saw a headline that Serena Williams beat Russia’s Daria Kasatkina in the Australian Open (that’s the way the headline referenced Daria Kasatkina). I immediately thought: In Soviet Russia, tennis serves YOU!

Why am I still doing this? The Soviet Union dissolved in late 1991, the breakup starting well before that. Yakov Smirnoff wasn’t that great to begin with, and his popular era certainly ended around that time. Still, the number of Yakov Smirnoff punch lines that got drilled into my head in the 80s apparently shaped my psyche permanently.

I simply can’t get rid of it.

Why Was That Empty Seed Packet Attached To My Bill?

My wife and I went to lunch downtown today. Lunch was good. We ate, and then the bill came. There was an empty radish seed packet attached to the bill with a wooden clothespin. I’m not entirely sure why.

Now, I’m guessing that this was supposed to reinforce their image as a farm-to-table kind of restaurant. Those are big right now, particularly in Denver. Though it’s good to have fresh food, it’s also a little hipster and pretentious. This place was good, but it was definitely hipster and pretentious.

I mean, how else am I supposed to take an empty radish seed packet clothespinned to my bill? It served no function. It was smaller than the receipt, and even lighter, so it didn’t really make the bill easier to keep track of. It wasn’t rigid in any way, made of very light paper, so it wasn’t like I could use it as a rest so I could write on the receipt easier. The only function seemed to be to reinforce their supposed connection to freshly grown food. It was just so out of place, having no functional role beyond pure image. Frankly, it looked kind of trashy.

I will note that I do not recall radishes even being mentioned anywhere on the menu that I saw. They might perhaps have been in a salad somewhere, but I don’t recall seeing that. As far as I know, they didn’t have any radishes. My food certainly had none. My wife’s as well. So, why present an empty seed packet for an item we didn’t eat?

Whatever they were going for, it came off poorly.

Ramen Animated Gif!

I’m feeling lazy today, so let’s do another examination of a weird thing someone made an animated gif of again. Today? Ramen!

Yes, someone made an animated gif of ramen noodles. No, I do not know why. Like the guy who attached weather balloons to a lawn chair and shot up to 15,000 feet before floating into controlled air space, sometimes a man just can’t sit still.

Contemplations On The Death Of Glenn Frey

The death of Glenn Frey got me thinking. I saw a lot of commemoration online, but I also saw a lot of people taking the chance to reiterate how much they didn’t like the Eagles. The Big Lebowski certainly popularized hating on the Eagles, and there was some of that, but some people just really didn’t like the Eagles. That’s cool, their tastes and all. I thought the timing was a little in poor taste, but again their tastes are their tastes, even on opinions of a band upon the death of one of the members.

Still, it got me thinking.

I mean, as many people dislike the Eagles, I’ve still always been decently fond of them. I’m not a huge Eagles fan, but I like what I like. Most of what I really dig is on the Hotel California album, “Hotel California” itself mainly for real fandom (love that song), but some appreciation for songs like “New Kid in Town.” I’ll admit, there are many Eagles songs that are catchy but I still find pretty lame. Still, even with that I still like the Eagles. Glenn Frey’s death still has some significance for me.

In fact, I remember going to an Eagles concert in 2004 the same year I went to a Metallica concert. Metallica played a lot of older stuff I was familiar with, but a lot of newer stuff I wasn’t. Regardless how “new” some of the material was, there was a lot I didn’t know…and I was always pretty big into Metallica (previous to Load). Having never considered myself that big of a fan of the Eagles, I was surprised when I contrasted the two shows that I was much more familiar with what the Eagles played than Metallica. I wasn’t always big on the song, but I knew it. Many times there was a song I’d heard a thousand times before and thought: That was the Eagles?

Just a thought I had. Always considering myself more of a metal head and not being that big of an Eagles fan, I still knew more of their show that year than I did Metallica’s. Whatever that means, I’m not going too much in for hating on the Eagles right now.

Book Trailer!

I’ve been sharing already on Facebook and Twitter, but not everyone who comes across this blog follows me on Facebook and Twitter. As such, here is the book trailer for Not Quite so Stories:

Thanks to Jordan Mapes for putting this together. Remember, the book drops March 1, 2016.

Don’t Forget About The Tall Man

People have been talking a lot about celebrity deaths recently. Lemmy, Alan Rickman, David Bowie, Dan Haggerty, and so on. There are others fewer people have talked about in all of that. I know not everyone had as much contact in their lives with them, but it’d be sad to forget them in the all the attention paid to the others. I’m just saying remember Angus Scrimm.

He played a good game, boy.

Village Inn Gives Me And My Wife A Heart Attack

Village Inn scared the crap out of me and my wife recently. We were in for brinner the other night and tried to order the veggie omelet with the multigrain pancakes. The waitress told us they didn’t have multigrain pancakes anymore.



Now, this combination is a staple for me and my wife. Despite having made reference to them as evil and linking them to the biblical eviction of humanity from the garden of Eden in my novel, The Garden of Good and Evil Pancakes, my wife and I actually are pretty fond of them. They’ve got a bit of a cinnamon flavor to them. We get them around once a week. We were, suffice it to say, a little alarmed.

Also, we were a bit surprised. Village Inn has had the multigrain pancakes for a long time. I served them when I worked there over twenty years ago. Would they really get rid of them? If so, why?

I went online to see what I could find. After all, the menu we were looking at still had them listed. Turned out, they were still listed online as well. The Village Inn website listed some new things, but made no mention whatsoever about multigrain pancakes being discontinued.

I found that fishy.

As it turned out, the waitress was wrong. My wife later talked to the manager. Turns out, that particular location had a problem for a bit with getting the ingredients for the multigrain pancakes in from their supplier. As such, they hadn’t been able to serve them for a period of time. However, that was over. They had them available that night and our waitress had informed us incorrectly that they didn’t. She hadn’t worked in a while apparently and didn’t know they were available again. She had completely mistaken “don’t have right now” for “permanently taken off the menu.”

We understood. It was a mistake. Still, I kind of wished she had checked.

Then again, that poking around online revealed that Village Inn had recently finally posted full nutritional information for their menu. Two multigrain pancakes are 290 calories. That was a bit more than expected. Two buttermilk are only 170. We’d assumed that the multigrain were lower in calories than the buttermilk, not higher. Combine that with the fact that the veggie omelet is served with three multigrain pancakes rather than two (so 435 calories, compared with 255 for three buttermilk) and our breakfasts/brinners were much higher in calories than we thought. Since we were trying to eat at least somewhat healthier to begin with, we might not be that worried about whether or not they have multigrain pancakes in future.

We might just get buttermilk, or an English muffin.

Updating Paintings With Text: Cape Code Morning Edward Hopper

The meme about adding text to paintings to make them funny has kind of ruined paintings for me in other ways. A writer friend recently posted Cape Cod Morning by Edward Hopper. Immediately, I thought of an Edward Hopper/John Waters mashup:

I’m not sure how many people will get this. Regardless, I’m not sure I can even look at paintings normally any more.