L o b a B l a n c a {dot} c o m

You opened the door to this cyberworld in which I have now lived for the better part of my years on this planet. You introduced me to this life of tech-savvy geekery that captured me in its Web and helped lead me to who, what, where, why, and how I am today.

Computers were always our starting point, our common ground, our shared language. I think for a while, you were close to giving up on me and my timid, clumsy ways around a computer. It wasn’t long, though, before I fell into the binary rhythm and began to hold my own in our conversations about the bigger-better-faster computer bug that had now bitten us both. You always indulged me, custom-meeting my every CPU craving, from 286 right through to dual core Athlon-ed gigs of geeky gamer goodness. I’m forever a PC Girl because of your influence.

You indulged us all regardless of how silly our passions, welcomed us into your home (whether for a dinner or a summer), accepted us for all our familial weirdness (with minor ribbing, of course; that’s what family does). Fleetwood Mac owed you huge for turning me into another of their lifelong fans. So did Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart.

You also fathered and helped raise two of my absolute favorite people in this whole universe.

You were a great big guy with an even greater, bigger heart. You’ll always be the Tech Guru in my Geek Pantheon.

I love you, Uncle E—.

Ha! I bet you thought I’d forgotten about this series, didn’t you? Never fear, this wolf has the memory of an elephant. I also share a strange fear of mice and a constant craving for peanuts. My ears will not support any attempts at flight, though, so don’t get your hopes up.

Whathafu?

Okay, for this entry, we’re going to come forward in time to this 1996 pre-Lord of the Rings offering from awesome Kiwi director Peter Jackson.

This is one of my favorite “less is more” posters. It’s clean and simple and effectively eerie. You start out with a parchment-colored canvas and the movie’s tagline, “Dead Yet?,” which has the same straightforward punch that the similarly simple “got milk” ad campaign would later flaunt—only this one’s delightfully darker.

You move down to what’s obviously not a human skull pushing through the canvas: The eye sockets are wider and slope downward into a scowl, the smile is more pronounced and demonic, the features are more angular and sinister (nice little butt-chin dimple, though!). This is a great effect and one that horror movie fans might even recognize. Those horror geeks in the know will probably recognize this as similar to the effect in A Nightmare on Elm Street, when Freddy Krueger bulges out of the wall over a sleeping Nancy Thompson. Wes Craven’s special effects team took a sheet of white spandex and stretched it behind Heather Langenkamp and had Robert Englund slowly push forward in Freddy Krueger makeup (I believe Jim Doyle was the brain behind this trick, but I’m more than likely wrong). That’s the whole effect. No CGI. Just spandex, which is arguably already a horrific material anyway, so it blends right in on a horror movie set.

You then get the name of the movie, in a nice two-toned serif font, and that’s all she wrote for this one. I love how this is all the poster gives you: tagline, provocative image, movie title. You know it’s going to have horror elements from the skull, but the irreverence of the tagline hints at a humor element as well. Funny-scary is as awesome as sexy-ugly when done right, and Peter Jackson does just that with The Frighteners.

You’ll notice that this image is a bit blurry. I believe this might be a shot of the lenticular version of this poster that was released to some theaters (or it’s just a really bad scan and I’m making excuses again). Lenticular posters are the ones that when you walk past them, the image slowly morphs into another image…kind of like 3-D but not quite. The lenticular version of this poster showed a blank canvas that, as you passed by it, showed the demonic face slowly pushing through.

I’ve been on the losing end of a couple of bidding wars for the lenticular poster. As much as I love this version, my love is cheap. This poster is not. I might just break down and seek out the regular double-sided version. Either way, this is a great poster and a great movie that I think slipped under a lot of people’s radars. I also think that a lot of people had difficulty seeing Michael J. Fox play a less-than-perfect, somewhat anti-Marty McFly character. But he gives a great performance in this movie, you can see Jeffrey Combs before he played practically EVERY ALIEN in the Star Trek televised world, the special effects were pretty ace for 1996, and it’s got John Astin as an over-sexed ghoul (not that much different from his Gomez Addams days!). If you haven’t seen it yet and you’re a fan of quirky, semi-scary movies, I’d highly recommend you give it a watch!

The Gateway Slurp

I have a horrible confession: I kept a big secret from you all this weekend, and I did it intentionally. This past Saturday, July 11, was Free Slurpee Day at 7-Eleven. You could go into any 7-Eleven Convenience Store anywhere in the country and get a free 7.11-ounce Slurpee (get it? Free 7.11-ounce Slurpee at 7-Eleven on 7/11? Clever, eh?).

Why didn’t I tell you? Because I didn’t want to run the chance of you standing between me and my free shot of Slurpee Love. Yes, I’m serious. No, it’s not rational. I don’t care. You have no idea how excited I was about Free Slurpee Day. I have forgotten every single damned time ever since I first learned about it about 2 or 3 years ago. This year, I was NOT going to forget. I did everything short of branding the date onto my forearm.

I love Slurpees. They are the most syrupy-sweet, sugar-packed, enamel-rotting, brain-freezing, diabetic-coma-inducing cup full of high fructose happiness ever. I used to drink them all the time. I also used to be two clothing sizes bigger than I am now. Needless to say, it’s been probably more than a decade since the last time I had a Slurpee fix. As much as I miss them, my waistline is grateful for the moratorium.

So why open the door? Uh, hello? Did I mention they were free? And yes, I said they. I went to two different 7-Eleven stores that day. I’m not ashamed to admit it. And they were delicious. I had one blue raspberry and one wild cherry/cola combo, which was always my favorite choice when I was a Slurpee junkie.

I fantasized all day Sunday about finding a 7-Eleven that was extending the free Slurpee day to encompass the whole weekend. But I didn’t go back into any of the stores. I kind of like fitting into my clothes a little more than I like that sugar rush.

Guess I’m just going to have to wait until next year to satisfy my itch. And now you all know about the free treat, too. Just one warning: Don’t get in between me and that Slurpee machine. We don’t want any incidents on such a happy day, do we?

This is a test of the LobaBlanca Blogcasting Service (this is also apparently a very slow Friday at the office).

So, see the little tab on the left that reads “Contact”? This is me meeting you halfway. I’ve had a couple of regular readers say that they’d really like it if I activated my comments section. I still say I’m not ready (how can I be such a technological Luddite? It’s hard, I tell ya).

But, I love hearing from you. I really do! So this is my halfway point. Click the tab and you’ll be able to drop me a line just as quickly and easily as leaving a comment. No, it won’t get posted for the world to read; think of it instead as your very own personal subspace frequency straight to the head of Starfleet Command. You’ll get to make your comment; I’ll get to read it; you’ll even get a fun auto-responder message at the end!

We’ll see how this goes; if it proves successful, I’ll keep it around for a while. I might even post some of the more entertaining messages I receive now and then…

And I will strike down upon thee with great pump action and furious water pressure!

I’m a gimmicky kind of wolf sometimes. Probably not as much as I used to be, since age seems to bring with it an ever increasing shadow of surliness into my life. I think I’m going to be one of the most curmudgeonly old people in the history of oldness.

As a young pup, though, I loved gimmicks. So a pump-action water cannon with about a 2-liter-sized reserve tank? Oh, you betcha I was on board for that! This was most assuredly the next generation in summertime water gun warfare. I knew it was something I needed to have if I was going to be the Big Wolf in our annual school picnic water battle. So I saved my allowance for a couple of weeks so I could buy the Super Soaker 100, which at about $30 was a rather pricey gimmick at the time.

This was one of the most awesome piles of crackable plastic I’ve ever owned. And, yes, it did crack. And leak. I remember doing routine repairs on my Super Soaker 100 in preparation for big water battles. I had to if I wanted it to work properly. And model glue goes a long way indeed in doing up your plastic artillery. I imagine, though, that were I not the resourceful wolf that I always have been, I would have been sorely disappointed with this purchase.

This gun also taught me a very valuable if somewhat creepy lesson about human nature.

As I already mentioned, each year we would have a “School’s Almost Out” all-day picnic, which included our traditional water battle. This particular year I was already a marked wolf. Everyone knew from the previous year that I was packing a Super Soaker, which I had wielded with gleeful impunity and frightening precision (I was very proud of the fact that I could blast you square in the face if I had to, although I preferred to aim for lower areas, like the neck or armpit).

That year I ended up walking away a bit more scathed than I had the previous year. However, the one encounter that outshines all others in utter strangeness and creepiness came from an underclassman about whom I knew nothing beyond his name. As I was shooting at him in response to the dousing he’d just given me with a liter bottle, he charged at me like a Pamplona bull. His intent was to grab the gun for himself. He nearly succeeded until my somewhat feral response, which was to grab a clawful of whatever I could reach on him before he got away.

Remove your mind from the gutter, please. I ended up with a handful of his shirt…and pieces of his back skin embedded under my nails. You are permitted to shudder now. Yes, I marked him with my at the time always sharp and always painted black nails. He stopped, lifted the back of his shirt, where I saw three welted stripes that were, in some places, dribbling tiny rivulets of blood.

I was quite horrified at what I had just done, until I realized that he was somehow pleased by this. Even as I apologized, he stood there with the most discomfiting grin I think I’ve ever seen. I found out later that he showed those scratches to everyone he could, each time explaining happily that he’d gotten them from the Junior girl with the water cannon. He also would say increasingly sadomasochistic comments to me each time he saw me the rest of the day about how he’d been bad and perhaps I needed to deal with him more harshly.

Ew.

Who knew a Super Soaker would introduce me to the potential I could have had as a dominatrix?

Will Smith, second from right, walks on a street in Beijing. His son Jaden is co-starring with Jackie Chan in a remake of The Karate Kid called Kung Fu Kid. Dad Will is a co-producer of the film.

See, the actual photo that matches this caption doesn’t even matter. It’s a craptacularly grainy paparazzi shot that really would only appeal to the most die-hard Will Smith fans. I am not one of those people.

I am, however, one of what I’m sure are thousands (possibly even millions) of people horrified by this caption. Kung Fu Kid? Are you friggin’ kidding me? Please, someone sweep the leg before Hollywood remakes every movie ever made.

As pathetic as it is, though, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We keep going to these remakes, reboots, regurgitations, re-whatevers. All Hollywood needs to see is even the slightest glimmer of a profit and they’re convinced they’ve got a winning formula. Doesn’t matter that the formula tastes about as disgusting as pabulum, as long as we keep swallowing it, they’re going to keep mixing it up.

I think one of the most disheartening remakes that I have heard of recently is A Nightmare on Elm Street. I think that recent remakes of Halloween and Friday the 13th have proven that more is less, and lightning really doesn’t strike more than once (with the exception of Star Trek: The Next Generation, of course).

I suspect I’m not the target audience anymore anyway. Actually, I suspect I never have been the target audience of anyone beyond places like Intergalactic Trading Company and Diamond Select Toys. It is what it is. Here, however, is my own crack at captioning another shot I passed across during my pre-work Interwebz perambulation. Hope you enjoy!

Cate Blanchett begins to seriously regret her request to sit in the cheap seats...

Ever wonder why the Berber carpet used in most office workplaces is the most heinous looking kaleidoscope weave imaginable? It’s so when your red-dyed soda explodes all over the place the minute you pop the tab, no one’s really going to notice. It just blends right in with all the other garish color splotches. Who knows, maybe that’s how they make this carpet in the first place.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, this post was brought to you by the word “Procrastination.”

Gather round, kiddies, for this fiendish tale spun for you from the depths of your Uncle Alice’s darkest nightmares!

Okay, maybe not. The book is called Golf Monster after all. You know Alice is a huge golf junkie now, right? That was the whole “Fairway to Heaven” reference in my last BC entry. He used to be a drunk, and then he replaced his alcohol addiction with a HUGE golf jones. Seriously. He plays at least 18 holes almost every day, no matter where he happens to be.

Of course, I love Alice Cooper. I love his music. I love his camp. I love his snakes (real snakes, you dirty buggers!). I love his speech about Milwaukee in Wayne’s World. He is teh awesome. Therefore, take my review of his book with that caveat as an apéritif.

Also, take the book as a history of Alice Cooper as told by Alice Cooper. History always looks different when told by the winner. I’m not necessarily saying that I think he lies in this book; just that we should always take things in stride and remember that every coin has two sides.

That being said, this was a fantastically entertaining read. I was worried at first that the golf talk would be a huge turn-off. I’ve never made secret of the fact that I share Mark Twain’s view of golf as being “a good walk spoiled.” Admittedly, by the time I reached the final few “steps” of the golf addiction sections, I was skimming them for funny bits. But each of those sections was short enough that they were minimally painful to non-golf fans.

Plus, the book is loaded with name dropping, and not just the names that you would expect to be part of Alice Cooper’s past. Yes, he interacted with the likes of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Aerosmith, Frank Zappa, The Who, Pink Floyd, etc., but did you also know that he was friends with Salvador Dalí, Peter Sellers, Groucho Marx, Vincent Price, Fred Astaire, Bob Hope, and even Frank Sinatra, who sang one of Alice Cooper’s songs at a Vegas show? See what being a shock-rock monster with a golf handicap of three or four will get you? Possibly the strangest mix of friends this side of nowhere.

I think the most jarring factoid to come from this book didn’t appear until almost the end: Alice Cooper is a born-again Christian. I nearly dropped my goblet of goat’s blood when I read that.

Okay, just a joke there. I only use sippy cups when I’m drinking goat’s blood.

I must have missed this point in Cooper’s time in the rock god spotlight. Admittedly though, I know very little about most of the musicians I listen to, especially from the heavy metal/hard rock genre. I suppose I could rectify that, but holistically, what makes it into the entertainment headlines about them is usually so off-putting that I just can’t be bothered to want to know more about them. And ever since the Dark Prince of the Black Sabbath allowed himself to be turned into a doddering, burned-out clown on that abysmal reality show about his family, I think I’ve avoided any further revelations about these icons of my misspent teen years.

This book, however, was totally worth it. If you enjoy Alice Cooper and would like to read his take on the history of how young Vincent Damon Furnier turned into the originator of musical concert Grand Guignol, then I would recommend this book.

Final score: 4.5/5. I’m deducting for the golf angle because I’m just snippy like that, and for the fact that it does drag a bit toward the end (everybody needs an editor!).

This video is proof that you don’t have to understand the lyrics to really enjoy the experience. This is one of the most amazing and amusing music videos I’ve seen in a while.

Cap-Sac: It’s a Fanny Pack for Your Head.

Is it just me, or is this the most oversexed product ever? Especially if you take into consideration what “fanny” means over in jolly old England.

Even without the added U.K. slang dirtiness bonus, I don’t really like the idea of wearing a “sac” on my head. Especially when one of the big draws is that the cap tucks up into its own sac. Hmm. Buffalo Bill as accessory inspiration? Marinate on that image for a minute while you rub the lotion on your skin; I’ll wait.

Everything about this product screams 1980s nostalgia almost as loudly as Mr. Chapstick up there in the photo. The hats come in a variety of the most garish day-glo colors imaginable, including a neon yellow almost exactly the same color as one of my favorite hats from my early teens (I wore a lot of hats when I was young; I still do, but they’re more metaphorical than literal now…haha).

I don’t really have much else to say about this product. So I’ll just let the (NSFW) Cap-Sac Rappers take us on out…peace out.