The Unofficial Badmovies.org Random Thought Thread!

[LilCerberus]

For the last few days, I've had Insect Collector by Shonen Knife stuck in my head, which keeps making me think of Sweetness And Light by Lush...
It kinda makes me wish I was still doing radio so I could add two more songs to my "Sound Like" mixer...

[Alex]

Ah, the weekend approaches again. Never quite lasts long enough.

As I went into work today I could see lots of dramatic looking clouds, on the left side of the daylight sky a 3/4 moon and off to the right a rainbow. I wished my phone could have taken a photo that could have fitted it all in, but they were too far appart. Sorted out getting a train down to Leuchars for a meeting next Thursday. Going by train this time. Will have to get the train around 8am and with a bit of luck I'll get back 12 hours later.

Gus is getting ready to go do some guarding in the desert. He volunteered for a 4 month detachment out there, rather than face 6 months in the Falklands like I did, then wants to move back to a squadron. I hope his wife doesn't mind him being away a lot then. Got a surprise last night just as I was coming home. Was saying hi to my previous SNCO, Dave and he told me he'd just put in his PVR (premature voluntary release). A spreadsheet we have to do daily had a orange box instead of a red box and the JEngO (Junior Engineering Officer) wasn't happy, so Dave got a snotagram (unpleasent email) from him about it. This particular spreadsheet was the bane of my life when I worked in there and filling in all the information required correctly is surprisingly difficult. Dave had been going to request a move to a squadron, but evidently the JEngO had let the Warrant Officer know he wasn't a happy bunny, so the Warrant sent another snotagram to Dave and he decided he'd had enough and pulled his ejection seat. Its a shame as he is a good sergeant, but I think he is doing what is right for him. The service will miss him, but I think he'll do fine in civvy street. Makes the 4th sergeant that department will have had in two years. Given they are normally in post for 3 years plus, you'd think the management would realise something is going wrong in there. Oh well, since I moved out of that office last week I guess I don't have to worry about it too much. In the same 2 years there have been 6 different cpls through the office too out of 4 posts, I don't see the rate of attrition changing any time soon alas. Felt a bit sad this morning about him leaving, but its a Friday and I can't stay down for long on those days.

Our kitten has us well trained. Called him Dagon. We know when he wants picked up, played with (generally if he wants to sleep he crawls up on Kristi and wants to be held lying upside down and have his neck stroked, while if he wants played with he runs up to me and jumps on me to sink his claws in and climb up me). I had planned on him to sleep in the laundry room, but my en-suite in the man cave appears to be his bedroom. He has a tent sort of thing in there to sleep in, a litter tray, scratching post and assortment of toys. He also likes to sleep in my comfy armchair of DOOOOOOOOOOOM!!! when he isn't sleeping in my bathroom. If you pour any liquid into a glass Dagon will immediately come running and try to investigate it. Especially my beer. Kristi has started refering to him as the "Tiny Overlord".

Came home at lunch time and the sun was beating down. I was wondering if I should bother wearing a jacket to head back to work. By the time I was heading back fourty minutes later it was pouring down with a heavy rain instead. Anyway, being a Friday we got to finish around 15:00. Had a couple of ideas for mini encounters for the D&D campaign to liven up an otherwise dull journey that the party may or may not take depending on where they decide to go. I had been thinking that if people liked the blog of it, I could put up a poll at various times and get people here to vote on what monster the party would face next, but since someone from BMDO is going to be playing I guess I'll have to dump that idea. My biggest problem doing NPC's (non player characters) is that I struggle to do more than my own accent, so I try to make characters a bit more memorable in other ways. Hopefully one of the two encounters I came up with will have a very memorable character that the party will remember for a long time.

Anyway, beyond that stuff most of my day was spent trying to track down a 90 litre foam fire extinguisher. 1 sqn had been using it when they borrowed the Hot Pit hut (hot pitting is when a aircraft lands, keeps its engines on, gets refueled and takes back off right away) and couldn't find it. Me and Gus walked over there and spotted it out beside the old VASS (Visiting Aircraft Support Sqn) building after a day of phoning around and everyone saying they couldn't find it. You could see it by looking out of the main window in 1 sqn's crew room. Anyway, all is sorted now and come Monday hot pitting will be able to proceed.

Got my mum and sister coming up tomorrow. Might go to Inverness and meet them tomorrow, or I may have to stay home and do house work while Kristi sleeps her twelve to fourteen hours a day in between having to go be sick. Really women, you've had many thousands of years to get this whole pregnancy thing sorted out and make it easier on yourselves (only joking there before I get lynched :P ).

Anyway, need to go make us some dinner. Cooking Indian tonight, so a korma for Kristi and something a bit more spicy for me.

[Flangepart]

Do NOT introduce Dragon to you-know-who's cats...just sayin'...

[ER]

Who needs sleep (me!) when you stay up all night watching shooting stars?

[Alex]

My legs are filled with tiny holes where Dagon has stuck his claws in and climbed up me. Currently he is tearing up his scratching post. Luckily he seems to figure out what things like that and his litter tray are for without any training. I have some housework I should be doing before my mum and sister arrive this afternoon, but right now I am trying just to get the enthusiasm up just to get dressed properly. Today feels like it should be spent relaxing.

[indianasmith]

Once a year, me and my friend Ray host a local Indian Artifact Show.  Today was the day.
I got to the Civic Center a little after 7 AM, set up my tables, and helped other collectors bring their stuff in and get set up.
We had about 20 tables full of arrowheads, spearheads, flint and stone tools, fossils, and pottery.  Lots of fun; I sold some fossils and a few of my books.
Good BBQ dinner.  Then we had to clean up the civic center when we were done.  Then I hauled all my frames, cases, and boxes back into my relic room and put them all neatly back in place.

I am WHIPPED! 

[javakoala]

Once a year, me and my friend Ray host a local Indian Artifact Show.  Today was the day.
I got to the Civic Center a little after 7 AM, set up my tables, and helped other collectors bring their stuff in and get set up.
We had about 20 tables full of arrowheads, spearheads, flint and stone tools, fossils, and pottery.  Lots of fun; I sold some fossils and a few of my books.
Good BBQ dinner.  Then we had to clean up the civic center when we were done.  Then I hauled all my frames, cases, and boxes back into my relic room and put them all neatly back in place.

I am WHIPPED! 

Way to go, Indy!! Gotta respect someone who has that much oomph. Glad it was a great day. Now go watch a bad movie, you knucklehead.   

[ER]

Once many years ago in high school while I was driving home, doubtless from some misdeed or other, I saw a highway sign for a local evangelical academy, K-12, that said:

“Christian Education At It’s Finest”

While few beyond English majors and nit-pickers probably caught that sign, I, a fervent diarist who’d spent at that point about a dozen years in the hothouse environment of high-stakes Catholic prep schools, did, and I thought how at the school I went to, an uptight institution which cared about virtually nothing except getting its graduates into the “right” universities, such an error would have resulted in someone being fired without a reference, and sent the remainder of its staff into crisis mode, hyperventilating for an entire semester, worried that perhaps some admissions rep from Georgetown or Brown or The Big H had happened upon that highway, saw the sign and tsk-ingly made a mental note never to admit anyone from a place of learning that would commit such a mistake.

Yes, where I went was that awful. How I turned out the sterling specimen of Joy Division-loving nihilist I did defies all logic.

But I had cause to reflect on that sign this morning, or more properly the smugness seeing it set off in me, because while perhaps my alma mater would never have sent that typo out into the world it certainly had its share of other horrors to its credit. One of these was the required annual classes in Martyrology, these actually beloved interludes in theology classes in which the gruesome demises of various Blessed So-and-Sos and Saintly Blahblahs who resisted all manner of unpleasant discouragements yet still kept faithful to the *Pope were related in loving detail.

*Yeah, they also died for Jesus, but mainly it was the loyal Pope-centric deaths they especially liked to tell us about.

I was cast back across the years to Martyrology this morning after Mass, where, when once the consuming of Jesus was done, one of the family we meet there, with all four of whom I have what might be called “complex and complicated” relationships, took my daughter aside and began talking to her under a painting of Saint Sebastian, full of arrows.

The acoustics being what they were in a church, I heard She Who Was Nearly My Mother-In-Law telling my daughter, who would not presumably have existed had she actually been my mother-in-law, the story of Saint Lawrence of Rome, 3rd century patron saint of comedians and chefs, a designation largely based in both parts on the apocryphal tale of how when the Romans were giving ol’ Larry his martyrdom, they grilled him over a sort of skillet, and the impending saint and erstwhile fry cook, well-noted for his sense of wit, gasped out, “I am done on this side! (Ouch, my privates!) Flip me over!”

It was at that moment the remembrance of the sign along the road flipped into my thoughts and I decided that while my school may never have put out any such typo, I doubt the little Protestant kids there ever had to sit through the Wes Craven meets de Sade parade of grisly, demented inhumanity that cataloged those post-lunchtime lessons upon which we were actually graded at pop quizzes straight up thru twelfth grade. (I am not kidding.).

I know my daughter well enough to know hearing about a comedian in a frying pan (and honestly, who hasn’t wanted to put a few there) wouldn’t warp her, it would actually have quite a different effect, and it did.

In the car coming back, she, dressed somewhat like my middle school heroine Charlotte Flax, clutching a doggie bag from brunch, dreamily announced, “You know, Mom, it’d kinda be awesome to be a martyr.”

“Do tell, Diz.”

“Well it’d suck to get roasted or whatever, but then you’d go straight to Heaven, and back on earth people would name churches and babies for you and stuff.”


So you’d like to be Saint Daisy?”

“Yeah, especially since I don’t think there is one yet.”

There you have it, martyrdom would be “awesome.” The reflections of my eight-year-old.

I remain just so thankful they no longer have nunneries, or we’d lose that one to the habits ‘n wimples, although I have been a little encouraged about her future just lately since she seems to be laser-focused on her second-cousin in ways that can only bespeak of a sweet ‘lil crush, the hopelessness suits her since he is:

A.   More than twice her age (a bit prohibitive even by standards I had when I was a few years older than her)
B.   Um, did I mention her cousin?
C.   Gay. So very, very gay.

So hope springs eternal that I am not raising a future Sister of Charity (though pray God she is not like me, as the crush on her own college student at an even younger age than mine was hints), and the drive was cheerful as she detailed her plans to Bing more martyrs when she got home (looking at her phone in the car makes her motion sick we’ve….discovered) and I impressed her by telling her about some I knew, like Saint Stephen, who as the first Christian martyr was stoned by his critics, and Saint Perpetua, Virgin and Martyr, who, though I did not tell her this part, was inadvertently responsible across the centuries for me seeing my first post-pubescent male member in a sky-reaching state, in a church, no less! (Long story, but if anyone reminds me I’ll tell that tale sometime. A lot less lurid than it sounds, but, hey, seeing your first Jimmy is still seeing your first Jimmy.)

So that was our Sunday morning, and I hope all of you are having a day spent with loved-ones and almost-mothers-in-law at least as gore-filled and reflective as ours was!

[indianasmith]

NO one describes a Sunday at church quite like you, ER!!!!   

[lester1/2jr]

a bushy bushy blonde hairdo

[ER]

Had to do a meet 'n greet tonight at the elementary school and my tongue is sore from biting it so many times. Honestly, something about schools brings out the RC in me.

[AoTFan]

Hmm... wonders if we should do a "The Badmovies.org Random Tales and Stories" thread for all the longer (but interesting) stuff that may not fit into the tiny "thoughts" thread...

[Paquita]

In honor of the king, I'm having peanut butter and banana oatmeal for lunch!  OK, that wasn't really my intention, but since I have chosen to put peanut butter in my banana oatmeal and it is the anniversary of Elvis' death, let's say it's in his honor.

[Alex]

Got to thinking about old relationships today, from the female friend who told me I was fantastic for casual sex, but I wasn't designed for long term relationships to the one who in the middle of an arguement (nose to nose screaming match) told me I was terrible in bed, then spent the next six years trying to get back with me and onto one who told me the week we spent together travelling around the UK and staying in random motels was the best week of her life.

No idea why they were occupying my thoughts today, but there you go.

[ER]

Got to thinking about old relationships today, from the female friend who told me I was fantastic for casual sex, but I wasn't designed for long term relationships to the one who in the middle of an arguement (nose to nose screaming match) told me I was terrible in bed, then spent the next six years trying to get back with me and onto one who told me the week we spent together travelling around the UK and staying in random motels was the best week of her life.

No idea why they were occupying my thoughts today, but there you go.

So if you average all the opinions out, you're an all-around normal, fairly fun guy.