(from myteespot.com)

Nice stash, Murkster. And what function does that hat serve anyway? Because it doesn't seem to make you any smarter.

Oh, poor Murky. He gets his ass handed to him daily by an 8 year old (approximately) and her friends, and his only form of help is this guy:

(from google image search)

And in retrospect, Lurky looks a little... phallic.

Anyway, Murky and Lurky live in The Pits and trundle around in their Grunge Buggy spreading Gloom Clouds and trying to steal Rainbow Brite's color belt.  A wikipedia entry reports that Murky once colored all over the walls in his house as a toddler and his mother told him to wash off, "every bit of color, if it takes all day, if it takes the rest of your life."

So, what we're looking at here is a villain with Mommy issues pathologically trying to work out his childhood trauma.  A villain with psychosis? I can get behind that.

In case you have forgotten Murky or didn't obsessivley watch Rainbow Brite in the 80s (and if you didn't- you were wrong), here's an epsiode that features Murky in a most prominent way. I now present Murky DIsmal in "Mom," his tragic villain origin story.

Part 1:

Part 2:

]]> http://sparksfromthewheel.wordpress.com/?p=100 Fri, 03 Oct 2008 17:33:06 +0000 bittersweetone http://sparksfromthewheel.de.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/awesome-villains-29-statler-and-waldorf/ #29 Statler and Waldorf of the Muppets

Statler: We'd love to see your act. 
Waldorf:  We'd hate to miss your act.
Statler: In fact, we'd love to hate your act.

(from abcnews.com)

Ah, the first example of the snarky villain. They're not exactly trying to take over the world, but they are making life miserable for someone else.

I remember watching the various Muppet movies as a kid and thinking, 'Ugh, Fozzie Bear is really lame. This is such a waste of space and time."  Only I probably didn't think it in those exact words. And then the two hecklers would come on screen and voice my disgust, and I always looked forward to their much-too-short appearances.   I was supposed to like the earnest and caring Fozzie, but I always rooted for the critical and dry-witted cynics.  This probably explains a lot about my current point of view.

You can see them in a more modern context at the New York Times Op Ed Page...

Ugh. Just look at his fat, smug face!

(picture from buddytv.com)

While Dan Scott is admittedly a formidable villain, he's relatively low on the list because I don't love One Tree Hill.   I like it sometimes when Tyler Hilton is around talking in the third person and when Brooke is being particularly bitchy, but mostly I just roll my eyes.  However, I will give credit where credit is due: One Tree Hill brings the drama, and Dan Scott is the master of ceremonies.

He started off as a low-key villain: the over-bearing father, pushing his son in basketball like a pageant mom, and then trying to keep his son away from his sweet  and moral girlfriend/teen bride. He left his high school girlfriend pregnant and alone, only to knock up his college girlfriend right away and then marry her.  Scummy, but nothing astounding.

And then then the atroctities start adding up, each one a little worse than the previous. First, he encourages his sons to hate on each other, then he pays a woman to pretend to love his brother in a revenge scheme ending in a jilting at the altar. He refuses to pay for his son's HEART medication when he fails a "loyalty test."  He runs against his ex for town mayor and airs footage of her looking crazy in the election.  He blackmails his wife to stay with him despite the fact she hates him, and ultimately he kills his own brother and let's a disturbed teenage boy who committed suicide take the rap.    It's almost like he gets away with a small crime and then decides he wants to see what else he can do.

The infuriating bit is that he does seem to come out on top, over and over, depsite the best efforts of all the other players involved. Everytime someone appears to get the better of him, he pulls that horror movie killer back from the dead stunt and pops up with a smirk and a swagger. And he L-O-V-E-S that  "I've changed, doesn't everyone deserve a second chance?" bit. I believe he "changes" about once a season, and he usually has at least one hugely heroic act per season that makes everyone grumble and grudgingly allow him back into their lives only to force him out again when he reverts to his old ways.  Once, shame on you. Twice, shame on me.  10th betrayal?  We're just trying to get ratings here, people.

#31: Crazy Margo, from the Sweet Valley High Series

(found on 1bruce1, the LJ community dedicated to recapping all of Sweet Valley)

I wasn't even allowed to read Sweet Valley High, but I some how managed to tear through the whole Margo series at some point in my youth. Probably I snuck them in among other library books like Flowers for Algernon. If you're not familiar with the extensive series, all you really need to know is that Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield are a set of identical twins with perfect bodies and totally opposite personalities-- which actually sounds like a set up for a porn movie, but is not-- and that they live in the magical land of Sweet Valley, CA. Most of the books center around their romantic entanglements and the series is ripe with timeline inconsistency and contradictions and drama, drama, drama.  It's a seminal book series in the lives of most twnety-something girls today and probably psychologically damaged all of us as we tried and failed to emulate Jess and Liz as high schoolers.  Today, you'll find a very active online following of people who both love and hate the series.

The original teen girl to be pushed over the edge of sanity by the impossible perfection of the Wakefield twins? Crazy Margo.  She altered her appearance to match the twins exactly and schemed to replace Elizabeth, the "Good Twin," and thus forever set Sweet Valley apart as the Passions of teen book series.   There was butcher knife caressing, evil monologuing, and probably cackling at some point.  The writers brought her along to celebrate the 100th book in the series and dedicated a full 5 books to introducing her and really fleshing out the full extent of her crazy. For full recaps of her mini-series see 1bruce1.  While I'm at it- this is a great site to waste time. The Sweet Valley recaps are witty and nostalgic and AWESOME. Come to think of it, it's not a waste of time at all.

A brief Margo History in Sweet Valley HIgh:

# 95 The Morning After (in which Margo is introduced and her command hallucinations tell her to kill her foster sister and head West to find her "family")
# 96 The Arrest (in which Margo kills another innocent child and discovers she looks JUST LIKE the Wakefields because she found a Sweet Valley newspaper in Texas of all places and the twins are featured, of course)
# 97 The Verdict (in which Margo is almost busted but still makes it to Sweet Valley and dons her convincing blond wig for the first time.)
# 98 The Wedding (in which Margo sees the Wakefields up close, kills a lady with a baby, and decides Todd is the perfect boyfriend)
# 99 Beware the Babysitter (in which Margo gets a job as a child care worker and further insinuates herself into the Sweet Valley world and thinks about killing everyone who crosses her. )
#100 The Evil Twin (in which so many woderfully horrible things happen that I can't even begin to describe, but suffice to say that Margo stands over both twins with a butcher knife and is then pushed out of a window.)

And like any good villain, she stages a comeback in the Magna Edition: Return of the Evil Twin, in which she convinces another look-alike to help her replace BOTH twins. And seriously, how special can the twins be if there are not one, but two look-alikes out there?

Margo sounds like she might have schizophrenia, delusional type with command hallucinations, but let's just go ahead and call her Batshit Crazy NOS.  She gets extra points for being especially callous about death, like when she writes her own letter of reference from a parent of a kid she killed and re-phrases "drowned child" to "taught child to swim."  And then she gets further points for being ultra creepy in her odd sense of humor, like when she shatters a glass in her hand and starts laughing uncontrollably.  Now that I think about it, she probably deserved to be further up on the list, but I wanted to start things off with a bang.

Scientists involved have in fact been receiving death threats. Lawsuits have been filed, all kings of fun stuff. It seems a shame to miss out on it. But for those of you who are stupid enough to place your faith in the paltry science of puny man instead of The Great Cthulu whose invention this clearly is, this first video is actually very informative (and a white nerd rap song to boot!) as to what The Large Hadron Collider will be hoping to achieve:

For those who aren't so easily placated, and i quote:

To form black holes, the Large Hadron Collider would need to generate many billions of times more energy than it can, according to Jonathan Feng, a theoretical particle physicist at the University of California, Irvine.

And even if black holes formed, he said, they would be smaller than protons—which fit in the nuclei of atoms—and would evaporate in a miniscule fraction of a second, "long before they could grow by [absorbing] other matter," he wrote.

"Thus, even if black holes are produced at the LHC, they will not annihilate the Earth."

But Feng was willing to lay out his worst-case scenario, he said, "as long as we make it very clear we're going off the deep end."

If a black hole did form and begin eating Earth, there would be no spectacular display, Feng said.

"This tiny little black hole grows little by little and starts eating up the Earth," he said.

"It has to loop back, and it's a little bit like a comet that has an orbit that keeps going through the Earth."

After absorbing the entire Earth—how long it would take is unclear—the black hole would be nearly the size a golf ball but would have the same mass as Earth did before it was gobbled up.

The baby black hole would simply take Earth's place in the solar system, Feng said.

"The moon would be orbiting around this little 'golf ball,' and the other planets would orbit just as they are now," he added.

And even with the most sophisticated of observational techniques, potential intelligent beings in another galaxy would be oblivious to the change.

The lights of Earth would of course be gone, "but the fact is that no one [in another galaxy] can see that anyway," because the illumination is simply too faint for intergalactic detection."

Yup.  So, time for the end of it all celebration (and just by the way, the video itself could be better,  but you must admit, the version of the song is kick ass):

Man går ned Sveavägen langt fra vand og det maritime, også pludselig dukker det op den overraskende navnet Pub Anchor op. Hvor langt op på land har dette skibet sejlet? Når man kommer ind døren bliver man jo så overrasket at man står med kæppen på gulvet! Det er ikke meget maritimt over denne pub nej, men derimod er den rocka, måske den mest rocka pub jeg har været på!

Interiøret er publike… Der er en meget lang slidt bare med meget charme og patina. Bag baren er der 10 fadøl og det koster 36 SEK for en 0,4. Puben er delt i flere sektioner. Først er der siddepladser, så nogle stående samlingspunkter, derefter er der nye siddepladser i ny stil. Alt med vægge af træ. I enden der en scene, og over scenen er der hyggelige siddepladser igen. Der er også udeservering.

På TV er der rockevideoer og ikke Fodbold. På Tirsdager og Søndager er det rockekaraoke. Her er det bare at finde frem puddelhåret fra 80’erne og synge ”final countdown”. Klientellet er jo meget forskelligt. De rocka og sortkledde og de som kommer forbi for at tage sig en fyraftensbajer.

Dagens Normism:
"Beer, Normie?"
"Uh, Coach, I dunno, I had one this week. Eh, why not, I'm still young."

This Release Candidate will also contain scripts that will allow OpenClinica to run on the Oracle 10g database for the first time as part of a downloadable package.

As you can see below in another post about the release of 2.5, I mentioned it would be on August 29th.  Mea culpa. Clearly, however, it is more important to issue a software product that has been fully tested (and retested) rather then putting a marginal product out just to meet a date. If only Microsoft realized this :)

The release candidate will be available to the general public on Wednesday morning, 9/10/2008, and we will be targeting a full production release within the coming weeks.

As we get closer to the production release, please check back for more updates. In the meantime here's some Final Countdown inspiration from Europe.

No substitute for the original...Now check out the mic stand pumping and permage!!!

There is absolutley no way this singer could be any worse. Just when you think that they can suck no more, it just goes further and further downhill. I felt for the people that had to sit in the audience with a straight face. Here's some advice to you young musicians out there. Recording yourself can be a great learning device: but NEVER post it to You Tube without getting some serious critiques first.

• I hope this guy gets out of my way before I have to swerve around him. 5...4...3...2...1...Well played sir. Heard me coming.
• My glasses really look good on my face. I think I picked the perfect shape this time. And the color makes my eyes look nice and green. I should put pics on my blog.
• My ass looks really good in these pants, too.
• I really like the cut of this shirt. It doesn't make me look too busty.
• Oh my God, am I really that conceited that I can't stop thinking about myself? Better than thinking bad things about myself, though.
• I can't wait to go home and play with the dogs.
• I can't wait to go home home and see my parents. T-minus 8 days.
• Holy crap that came up fast. I need to buy Mom a b-day card.
• Oh man, that means that school is starting again soon. I think I'm really going to miss it this year.
• When am I EVER going to have time to apply to grad school?
• Good, thick hair runs in the family. I can't be going bald at 22. I'm going to try and stop thinking about it. It's just stress, it's just stress, it's just stress.
• Why do we lose hair as we stress out? Wouldn't it be better to keep that. One less thing to stress out about right? RIGHT?
• I can't believe how slow it has been at work tonight. Great. I jinxed it.
• I wonder if they will send me home early tonight. Probably not. They never do.
• I'm thirsty.
• I love ravioli. It is so filling. And tasty.
• I wonder if I should eat that nectarine in my bag when I get upstairs. Nah. Not if I'm not hungry.
• Wow. I really can't resist looking at myself in every, damn full length window. And there are TONS on this walk.
• Must. Resist. Checking. Out. Self.
• Hmmmm....those sprinklers are on over there. I hope these on this side (which are much, MUCH closer to me) don't decide to turn on all of a sudden.
• Uh oh. Gonna be late. Better book it. If only I hadn't caught my own eye in that window. Damn!
• Obama chose Biden. I'll have to look into his credentials. Doesn't really matter tho. No way in this life I'm voting for McCain.

Dupa ce m-am gandit si dumirit mi-am dat seama ca am gresit (desi de-a lungul timpului..blogului.. am urechiat proportional si derapajele occidentului). Da domnilor si doamnelor AM GRESIT; MEA CULPA... De vina nu este doar Rusia care s-a comportat EXACT dupa tiparele ce le-am reliefat, ba mai mult reconfirmandu-si statutul de mare pericol mondial la adresa stabilitatii si pacii, aducand pe shest in linia frontului georgian lansatoare SS 21 posibil purtatoare de ogive nucleare (...) ci si autointitulatul jandarm mondial USA ce printr-o politica de dumping moral si neindreptatita superioritate genereaza reguli si trenduri mondiale ce tot dansele (impreuna cu cateii lor obedienti de prin UE) le si incalca, completand starea si climatul mondial de insecuritate cladit de schizofrenicii aia din statul major militar a complexului militaro-industrial rus.

Stiti sau nu stiti, pacea mondiala, existenta noastra din lumea concretului cu tot ceea ce poate fi atasat conceptului de viata, atarna AZI de un fir de ata... Suntem in aceste zile langa un pericol (razboi atomic) mondial mortal...iar noi romanasii "tot cu tzurca, bre"... Sa dea domnul ca sa trecem intregi de acest moment critic...sa speram ca maine soarele va rasari din nou pentru copii si parintii nostri... Sa speram ca analiza mea este, cum altfel, decat (cum imi doresc "prietenii ambuscati")...gresita  :/

1=

Os dejo, pues, con una canción bastante tópica para cuando se habla de cuenta atrás, sí, me estoy refiriendo a Final Countdown de Europe:

Nos vemos en el aniversario.

I will see you all back here after the honeymoon!!!!!!

Till then,

Cheers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I want to dance in the dark like the Summoner Yuna from Final Fantasy now, to this song. It'd make me feel so free! Being outside at night really is nice :) I may do it actually once I've typed this.

Do you ever get the feeling where NOBODY understands you? Or cares? Because I certainly do...

I was talking to my Mum earlier, about how eager I was about French...she hardly responded, as if she doesn't give a fuck! All she wants is for me to 'do my best' and 'remember others'...all it is, is fulfilling her duty as mother if you ask me. Which also makes me think maybe I should pay more interest in my friends' and family's interests...ah well on the 'to do' list :D

Anyway, as for understanding me, PROPERLY, knowing how my brain thinks and how my heart works - well to be honest I thought I'd found the one person who could do it in Adam. Omg starting to get upset again I'm moving on. I just need that person who gets me, so they can comfort me in a way that really does mean something.

OOH I really fancy swimming in a cool, refreshing pool in the dark now, all alone, but so I can still see the moon of course :D That'd be so great...

It's the final COUNTDOWN!!! [spins around madly]

and now the contractions are big and bold when they come. i've been ordered to drink a castor oil smoothie (to the tune of SIX OUNCES OF CASTOR OIL) to push myself over the edge into active labor.

michele fully expects me to have a baby in the next 24 hours.

i'm going to enjoy a late lunch now, before taking on the smoothie. i'll update later if i can.

so we walked. a little over a mile to the corner store, where h bought me kk donut holes. such sweet rewards. contractions were pretty intense while walking: 2-4 mins apart, lasting over a minute. we watched a chicken cross the road with her little chicks. an auspicious sign, yes?

so i called the midwife to let her know about just how low sparky is. (her bum, which used to rest just under my ribcage, is now situated at my belly button, which has finally popped all the way.) i gave her all the details of contractions and cramping, blahblahblah, and she sounded very excited and said, "sounds like you might have a baby today!"

so now i'm back to the pump and the herbs and will check back with her in a little while with an update, if there is an update...

the news from here is that we're working bootcamp today. i gots 10 minutes till i pump again, and torture myself with a little black cohosh under my tongue. at least it tastes like scotch.

woman three, by the way, gave birth yesterday. after making to 6 cm, the baby's head would not engage, and kept floating high high up. the midwives worked their magic for a long time, before deciding it best to transport. the docs at the hospital advised that pit would probably have about 20% success rate in bringing the baby down, and recommended a c section. so that is what happened, and she gave birth to a nearly 10 lb little girl with a perfectly round head; she clearly had no intention of descending on her own.

michele told me all of this over the phone this morning. "i'm only telling you the details because your baby's head is already much lower than this one ever ended up. you're going to break this crazy cycle of transports..."

so, h gave me a cervical massage this morning (so much more pleasant than when done by a midwife), and was shocked to find sparky's head very very low, my cervix all but gone, and dilation wide enough for 3 fingers to fit through. (mercifully, she didn't test the 3 fingers estimation. bless her.) she could feel sparky's head begin to assume cone shape.

and we wait.

contractions come and go, and i feel my baby's head between my legs when i walk. come on out, child o mine. come on.

time to hook myself up to the bovine machine again. if you were here, you'd see me staring down in absolute wonder over the long slugs of nips being sucked through the pump horn, as h knits a scarf next to me. patty griffin is singing about burgundy shoes. the dogs are asleep under the bed.

after our flurry of guests, we napped. this is the view from around here as i lay low, and h still naps as i type:

[note h's new fish, a betta named georgeburns.]

i'm feeling a bit peckish...ice cream sounds good. mmm...

more later.

ETA: scratch bootcamp. woman #3 from my birth class has finally gone into labor, just under the wire, it seems. i just got a call from midwife kristen telling me explicitly NOT to do ANYTHING today. no pumping. no herbs. no walking. no.thing. i am trying to swallow this like a nice girl. but being told that i am essentially not allowed to have my baby today makes me feel all kinds of rebellious. i need a snack.

the past 24 hours have brought a new hormonal shift. one where tears are constantly sitting on my eyes, and i swing moment to moment between feeling ridiculously needy and wanting to be left utterly alone. h asks if she can do anything, and she can't do anything, and i feel frustrated at once again having to say no. she worries i am angry with her. and i am not angry with her; i am weary, period. sleep is increasingly uncomfortable. last night, i was awoken over and over to contractions burning in my back and left hip. contractions that go nowhere, of course. i'm not in labor. the braxton and the hicks are simply conspiring against my chances for a good night of sleep.

they say you know you are in transition when you feel like you can't do it anymore, when you want to give up and escape. surely, i am in transition from not-in-labor to in-labor then, because i can't take the mind fuck, let alone the aching heaviness of lugging this baby around, any longer. i am so weary of this.

...but i am trying to buck up for the possibility of another two weeks of this.

seriously, though, would it kill mother nature or the weather channel to give us something other than triple digits and extreme drought? every.fucking.day?

done ranting. really. and i'm sure my hormones will shift again, and i'll be back in my mother teresa, zenlike place of tranquil readiness for whatever comes.

pee ess thanks for the colostrum-saving recommendations. i would save it, if there were enough to save. right now, it's just sticky drops that mostly end up hanging out around the rim of the pump horn. if i produce something more salvageable, i'll freeze it fo sho.

while i'm waiting, i've finally finished my labor playlist. 101 songs. 7.6 hours. artists include:

amiina
andrew bird
arcade fire
be good tanyas
billie holiday
brightblack morning light
duke special
edith piaf
finn brothers
gillian welch
innocence mission
julie lee
bon iver
bright eyes
cat power
devotchka
faultline
flaming lips
great lake swimmers
iron & wine
jane siberry
jeff buckley
jolie holland
jose gonzalez
kris delmhorst
massive attack
modest mouse
nick drake
over the rhine
patty griffin
radiohead
rosie thomas
ryan adams
sam phillips
sarah harmer
sarah masen
sigur ros
sixpence
sufjan stevens
susan enan
trespassers william
yann tiersen

sparky better be inspired to be born nicely to such wonderful tunes...

and now to milk myself again...

oh yes, the birth. so, contractions continue, as does the crampiness. i received another lovely cervical massage today, which really ached after having so much poking and prodding up there this week. the plan is to keep doing what we're doing with the walking and resting, etc through the weekend. if sparky still won't budge, we begin boot camp on monday.

boot camp goes like this:

i spend two whole days hooked up to a breast pump, double pumping 20 minutes on the hour, every hour. i take a tincture of black and blue cohosh and caulophyllum, rotating every 20 minutes. basically, i'll be watching a lot of movies.

if nothing happens after two days of this regimen, i will take two days off, and start it up all over again. the hope is that the herbs and pumping will inspire my body to get things going before i suddenly find myself 42 weeks pregnant, and stuck with pitocin. shudder.

at this point, i am completely relaxed about the whole thing. i am confident that sparky knows what she's doing in there, and will choose her own birthday wisely. (but how kick ass would it be if she decides to come on friday the 13th???!) and i am hoping that the birth stories of the other three women from my birth class simply mean i will have an ideal, uneventful birth.

woman one: her story can be found here.

woman two: she did boot camp at 41 weeks, after nothing was happening. the next day, she had a beautiful labor at home, pushed for four hours, and then had to be transferred to the hospital for a c-section. her baby's head wouldn't fit under her pubic bone. she gave birth to a nearly 11 lb baby, who is healthy and humongous.

woman three: was due june 1. she's still not budging, despite all the midwife tricks. the baby is fine, according to an ultrasound she had yesterday. but if she doesn't deliver by monday, it's pit and the hospital.

woman four: me. can i just have my baby at home please?

michele is amazed at 3 transfers in a row. "i haven't had a transport in 2 years!" she told me this afternoon. "statistically, your birth is now looking awesome..." she encouraged.

and now to a nap.

CPMAN's RCT3 Indoor Pool 1

Please post a comment and rate my pool and don't froget to visit my Youtube Channel and the Video Game Central Page!!! Oh and check out the SHARE SPACE page for 1 new pic and the Pics Page.

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so michele squealed a bit and asked me to check back with her in an hour. an hour passed; h and i enjoyed a lunch of falafel and gyro, respectively. contractions kept coming. i called michele back, and since were in the neighborhood, she asked us to come by for a quick exam. and guess what? i've made progress.

drumroll please: i am now 2 whole cm dilated, and 85% effaced, with a melty, buttery cervix. (such adjectives made me hungry for movie theater popcorn.) sparky has moved on down a bit (-1 station i think), which is why i am feeling pressure on my buttery cervix at all times anymore. well hooray.

michele massaged my cervix for awhile, which was quite uncomfortable, and when i asked about stripping membranes, she told me there was nothing to strip; my cervix and bag of waters are completely separated and ready to go.

and so she advised some mall-walking, which we did, hot sexy sexyness, which surely we will do, and an early night to bed. hopefully, things will pick up from there.

i had some good contractions at the mall, but they're slowing down now that i'm relaxing without pants on. (you wanted to know this, yes?) however, i am quite crampy and sparky has massive hiccups way down in my pelvis.

i'm ready for you, little hiccuppy girl, if you are ready to slide on out.