The Lump Before Christmas
(1) Catch the broadcast of "Dyker Lights" on your local public station -- here is the program's schedule for Channel 13 in the NYC area. It's a documentary on the over-the-top Christmas lights displays in people's frontyards of Dyker Heights, a Brooklyn neighborhood. I've always wondered what kinds of people would pile so many lights, animated figures, moving dragons, recorded music, all this stuff crammed into their frontyards. A common element is a brush with mortality, whether it's Dominick who survived cancer twice, Sal's daughter who has some extremely rare blood disease, or Tony & his wife, who had a miscarrige 14 times before they finally had a child. These guys start planning their displays in July, take 3 months to put them up and 2 months to take it down. It's easy to make caricatures out of these Brooklyn guys & their families (and they are very much Brooklyn old school, guys standing around giving one another ideas about what to do with the lights in their satin warm up jackets & the wives with the leopard print jackets, big nails & high hair), but the program incredibly makes it all seem so Norman Rockwell, without resorting to cheap melodrama. Great holiday TV.
(2) Great holiday reading: As featured today on NPR's Morning Edition, Stanford University has started a community reading project, featuring Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. Each week, it sends out a serialized portion of the book to your mailbox, be it of the real or virtual kind. Click here to visit the project's homepage, where you can sign up for delivery of the serial. The serials come in 6 page increments, the perfect size to sit around one evening and take turns reading aloud to one another.
Bah Humgnu
Comic Boy Gnu
Gno Ho Ho
g.
gnu
"It is also likely that whatever is built there will not resemble what was unveiled yesterday in the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center...In short, the architects' plans show how a memorial to the roughly 2,800 people who died at the trade center could work with office towers, museums, shops and housing. That is all the exotic models on display at the Winter Garden represent...'Fundamentally it's a sideshow because none of these things will be built,' he said. 'But they did show a variety of ways the site could have commercial development and a memorial without looking like a mess.'"
gnu
Yet another benefit of the Bizarro Button: we now know what "Gesundheitliches Servietteänderungsfetish getan hatte" means. Or do we? According to the Google language tools, that German phrase translates into English as, "Health Servietteaenderungsfetish had done."
Well, either way, YUCK.
gnoo
g.
gnunoo
PS: How can one get a copy of the Muppets Christmas Special?
Travel safely and eat dangerously!
-gnu.
PS: If you haven't already, check out the DJ Z-Trip link below -- turn up your computer speakers, sit back & shake yo thang!
gnu
Or not. Dowhatchalike.
The Rocktober page is now in the archives -- just click on "Los Archivos" above and feed your nostalgia.
Oh yeah: get an early start on holiday shopping. Here's a great gift idea. (Thanks, Naya)
-gnu
This site is likely to do it like a jackrabbit when viewed with Netscape. Lumpy Oatmeal is best viewed on an Apple II with an 80 column card installed. Whatever the fuck that means.
Brought to you by your host, Pandy Fackler.
Los Archivos
Monday, December 23, 2002 10:38 a.m.
Two great ways to celebrate the season:
Saturday, December 21, 2002 05:58 p.m.
Always at the forefront of interplanetary exploration, the Swedes have begun simulating landings on on Mars. This image shows prospective astronaut Ella Carlsson [who incidentally also sings, plays the piano, and was a UN soldier in both Bosnia and Kosovo] in a simulated Martian landing. An actual translation of the caption: "As a little girl Ella Carlsson pretended to be Han Solo, the hero from Star Wars". You can read the whole article in Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's premier daily. You'll need to have your English-Swedish dictionary handy.
Princess Joshua Organa
Saturday, December 21, 2002 03:54 p.m.
At last! The bizarre Twilight Zone government policies are finally explained -- it all makes sense!
Friday, December 20, 2002 03:22 p.m.
First you scroll over the falling snowflakes. Then you can't wait -- go ahead -- make a snowflake.
Friday, December 20, 2002 10:00 a.m.
The Boondocks presents a special holiday message.
Thursday, December 19, 2002 01:37 p.m.
La Ketchup Song -- that is one of the most evil uses of DJ-ology ever. Damn the dark side DJs forever. However, thankfully the Force has 2 Many DJs. They are known for ripping up old tracks & playing them over bizarre stuff -- their Part II album included Salt N Pepa's "Push It" over The Stooges' "No Fun" -- it works beautifully. A friend just got me their Part III album which opens with Van Halen's Eruption into Daft Punk's Superheroes. The pure use of the Force DJ-ology is evident when they play Public Enemy's Rebel Without a Pause over a Herb Albert track. Just something to make you laugh alone on the subway.
Thursday, December 19, 2002 12:04 p.m.
What do you get when you cross "The Macarena" with "Rapper's Delight"? Why "The Ketchup Song", of course. Topping the charts all over Europe and Latin America, this is europop at it's trashiest. Allegedly there's a christmas remix available and, inevitably, you can download the ringtone. It all goes to prove that the only thing more inane than american pop culture is european pop culture.
I'll tumble 4 Joshua
Thursday, December 19, 2002 09:59 a.m.
I'm also really excited about the architect's plans for the site, but there were some interesting insights in an accompanying article in the NY Times:
Wednesday, December 18, 2002 03:08 p.m.
The latest proposals for rebuilding the World Trade Center site are in and you and I can check them out in detail. I think that I like the chaotic designs best [e.g. the one by Studio Daniel Libeskind] because if there's one thing that September 11 stands for, it's the triumph of entropy. I am however a little disapointed, and yes even hurt, that no one at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation is taking seriously my suggestion to leave the site empty and plant two giant sequoias where the towers were.
Joshua Muir
Monday, December 16, 2002 10:01 p.m.
Liza is at her office Christmas party tonight, so I decided to follow Doonie's advice and rent Donnie Darko. It was pretty cool, kind of a David Lynch concocts a combination of Heathers and Back to the Future set to Tears For Fears kind of thing, but I was a little confused at the end. Did all of that mean that Dukakis won the presidency? And I thought that Drew Barrymore was just a kid in 1988. Did she travel through time also? Does that meen that she never actually married that wacky Canadian guy who's such a disgrace to his poor parents?
Run for it Joshua, it's the Libyans!
Monday, December 16, 2002 03:51 p.m.
For those of you who tried and enjoyed the glögg at Nuno's Friday night fest and for those of you who weren't there to sample it, here's the recipe as interpreted by Sweden's star chef, Marcus Samuelsson of Aquavit. Now you too can have a Swedish yuletide.
Joshua Svensson
Friday, December 13, 2002 11:29 a.m.
I confronted my friend Cecilia Campbell, who lives in the British town of Grasmere, with the indecorious images of her compatriots involved in Extreme Ironing. She was unphased. In fact she knew all about it.In fact it's a much larger phenomenon than any of us could have imagined.
Exhibit A The Extreme Ironing World Championships which were held in Munich in September. Allegedly this perfidy has infected countries beyond England and Germany. The US, Australia, and even Sweden had teams which participated in this outrageous event.
Exhibit B Downhill Hoovering which is only a subset of Urban Vacuuming. There are also two other associated sports: Suburban Mop-Jousting and Inner-City Clothes Drying, but apparently the participants in these last two activities were too ashamed to post images on the world wide web.
Conclusion Though I have been opposed to Dubya's planned adventurism in Iraq, I am now beginning to reconsider. Perhaps the British really need something to focus their energy upon before they collectively poke an eye out. Any mom can forsee that such horseplay is only going to end in tears, and when it does I don't want the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to come crying to me.
Joshua, with extreme irony
Thursday, December 12, 2002 11:38 a.m.
This is the perfect Christmas gift for that special someone who's in Reno with the vitamin-D or maybe even for the girls with the cellophane chests.
shit-kickin-speed-takin-truck-drivin-joshua
Thursday, December 12, 2002 dennistime
I know that somebody brings up Nedstat every couple of weeks or so, but sometimes the links that bring people to us really are lumpworthy. Give Google dancing squirrel and flying gonads, and you get us. Isn't that just fantastic?
Thursday, December 12, 2002 dennistime
Only the British could come up with a sport like extreme ironing. If it catches on in the United States, where will it be embraced first - California, Colorado, or Vermont?
Tuesday, December 10, 2002 02:56 p.m.
Have yourself a demented holiday season.
g.
Tuesday, December 10, 2002 dennistime
What better place than Lumpy to present strange new snippets of popular culture? This one comes not from surfing the internet, but the bookstore:
David Dark, an English professor at Christ Presbyterian Academy [no relation to Donnie Darko,] has just published Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred
Revealed in Popular Culture. Among his discourses is Boogie Nights of the Living Dead, a chapter devoted to dissecting the ouevre of Beck, song by song, from a Christian standpoint.
I'll have to find some bits to post.
Monday, December 9, 2002 dennistime
Poking around on the internet surely can lead you to some strange things. Today I learned that the group Erasure have a CD of covers coming out in early 2003. Here's what they have to say about their version of Peter Gabriel's 'Solsbury Hill.'
Vince Clarke: "That was one of my choices and I just think it's a fantastic record. The thing about that track is the time signature's 7/8 which is pretty difficult to put a groove to. We struggled with that beat, myself and Gareth, for ages, trying to make it sound groovy and it wasn't happening. And then we just figured, we'll make it 4/4, and the whole thing came together. That was quite a moment. It was such a simple thing to do, but it took us ages to work it out."
Andy Bell: "I think it's a really weird song. I would never have chosen 'Solsbury Hill' but because Vince really likes the song, you kind of take it and not listen to the original too much. So that song I think is like doing completely our own style, and it sounds almost like another record, it doesn't sound like the Peter Gabriel song. I know he was quite close with Kate Bush, so I took her as my inspiration for that song rather than him. It's a kind of gospel version."
I'm scared. Truly scared.
Sunday, December 8, 2002 11:54 p.m.
Sorry — had to get rid of the fucking sleigh bells or I was going to kill somebody.
Ebenezer-Joshua
Friday, December 6, 2002 11:52 a.m.
It's taken the muppets a long, long time to get back to their cool roots. You see, my fellow Lumpskteers, the muppets weren't always so rainbow-connection saccharine. There was a time, back in the days when John was the living Belushi and he was still hoovering 34% of Bolivia's GNP, a time even before the muppet show existed and Kermit was merely an ensemble player on Sesame Street, when the Muppets were a part of the original conception of SNL. This excerpt from the Tough Pigs Anthology explains most of the story [who are those tough pigs anyway?]. If you read the whole darn thing and get to the bottom you'll read SNL writer Michael O'Donoghue's legendary quote about writing for the muppets.
What's missing from the story is the true reason why they were thrown off the show: Rolf was caught pimping Janis to Chevy Chase on the Friday before the show was performed. The whole thing was covered up, but the Muppets were forced into exile, moved to England, regrouped and created the family oriented Muppet Show. Janis had to go into rehab [it was her need to support her freebase habit that drove her to turn tricks] and Rolf was neutered. Snoop Dogg's Diary of a Pimp hit a little too close to home for a lot of the veteran Muppets. Janis herself doesn't remember much of the SNL incident, but Dr. Teeth was infuriated when he found out about Snoop's movie and insisted that the rapper's portion of the Christmas special be edited out or else the Electric Mayhem would walk. Sources at Henson Co. claim that this is what eventually caused them to cut Snoop from the TV movie.
Joshua-Woodward-and-Bernstein
Friday, December 6, 2002 dennistime
I've been looking for screenshots of the rave muppets, but all I've found are the same old NBC promotional photos.
I have, however, found a couple of interesting things:
In a recent promotional appearance on The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn, Kermit discussed the removal of a cameo by Snoop Doggy Dogg: "Well, I think that kinda what happened was, that, uh, Snoop came along to do our movie at about the time that he was, like, quitting drugs. Unfortunately, he was starting porn. It's really nothing personal, because, porn's fine, you know, but it's not what we do in a Muppet movie. . . ."
Here's an alternative encapsulated plot summary:
A couch-surfing, ambi-sexual, obsessive record collector god watches Kermit have a nervous breakdown and cross into a reality where Fozzie the Bear is a psychopathic homeless man who steals wallets.
David Arquette [as an angel]:
"You have, like, every album ever recorded. Ever."
Whoopi Goldberg [as God]:
"Yeah. Plus imports."
Wednesday, December 4, 2002 dennistime
Once again it's that time when stale canned holiday tunes are thrown at us for weeks. Usually, just scant hours before the big day, the constant bombardment wears me down to the point that I revert back to that wide-eyed little tyke from the Grinch. It's really no wonder that Christmas tunes are on my mind - I'm simply doing the bidding of the bosses of consumer culture. That said:
Did you know that Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer was created by Montgomery Ward?
What ever happened to the heat miser?
And here's the behind-the-music story of another tune, perhaps the best Christmas song ever.
Tuesday, December 3, 2002 04:44 p.m.
Tuesday, December 3, 2002 02:22 p.m.
Some whacky [whack] Pole linked to Lumpy Oatmeal after doing a Google szukaj for "sanitary napkin change fetish". Wow. We showed up sixth in the search. Check out the other hits on the search — at your own risk.
On a lighter note: I continue to be amazed by how many people end up on Lumpy after searching for some combination of "teeny", "bikini", and "anime". Are there really that many men [women?] out there masturbating to bikini clad anime chicks? What does that mean? The internet probably serves no purpose better than to serve as a self-generating record of the sexual inclinations of society. Perhaps that was why it was created — as a grand Masters & Johnson sponsored experiment.
Squire Felix
Tuesday, December 3, 2002 01:58 p.m.
Tragedy Down Under
Tuesday, December 3, 2002 11:14 a.m.
Nuno — there's actually an interesting article on hunting that was published in Audubon magazine called Wanted: More Hunters. Apparently the white tailed deer population has exploded, especially over the past twenty years, because we have A) killed off all of their natural predators [wolves & bears = "bad nature"] and B) discouraged hunters from killing them [bunnies & deer = "good nature"]. The result has wreaked havoc in some ecosystems, driving some plants which the deer eat to the brink of extinction [which ironically will eventually cause the deer to starve]. My point is that it's not just W, the NRA, and Ted Nugent who want to kill Bambi, but some [though not all] responsible environmentalists as well.
Joshua-Bait-and-Shoot
Tuesday, December 3, 2002 10:25 a.m.
Gary Trudeau will be doing a 2-part interview on Ted Koppel's "Up Close" tonight & tomorrow.
Monday, December 2, 2002 04:31 p.m.
I stumbled across the website for the Conservationist, the outdoor magazine for New York State's Dept. of Environmental Conservation. However, I'm confused by their promotional gift: if you subscribe now, you get this handy Buck Weight Tape, which allows you to "accurately estimate your deer's weight." You know these sure are Republican times when the NYS environmental magazine features hunting tips. I'm guessing Ted Nugent must be on the editorial board.
Sunday, December 1, 2002 dennistime
Anybody catch the Christmas Muppet special this weekend? They cut out Snoop Dogg's appearance, but the club scene towards the end more than made up for all my previous doubts. [Sam the Eagle at a rave with glow sticks! Scooter cage dancing wearing black nail polish! I'm not kidding.] They've also introduced a gay muppet [the heavy dance instructor] and increased the adult content and innuendo. Bravo!
Wednesday, November 27, 2002 10:32 a.m.
The History Channel had a great special on last night about the history of Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, its website is focused on promoting the video of the program, so it's not as informative as the program. There are choice elements there, however, like a look at the original 1600's menu. On the other hand, this site has all the details.
Tuesday, November 26, 2002 09:50 a.m.
Me loves the Bizarro Button. Wish all of life had that. In answer to other questions: (i) my text box no longer moves around & is now permanently located in the center of the page -- could this be a Mac thing (if so, see warning at top of page); (ii) the sleighbells are keyed to play 3x's & then stop -- no, you not missing anything else. FYI, for those who share offices at work, I now mute my computer before I Lump, since those friggin' sleighbells are a very noticeable indicator of SLACK. Looking forward to checking out the mix tapes later on.
Tuesday, November 26, 2002 dennistime
He's P.T. Barnum. He's George Lucas. He's James friggin' Brown.
For all you fans of the shuffle out there: I've had this great eclectic DJ mix kicking around for a few months now, but finally I decided to go on the net and poke around for more. Just in time for the holidays, I present to you the motherlode. Clicking on the parent directory icon will get you even more. Hope you have a DSL line.
Monday, November 25, 2002 06:49 p.m.
In the spirit of giving, I've added a button (just to the left of the Ned-Stat button) which will now and forever more take you directly to the Bizzaro Universe. Enjoy, but careful you don't cut yourself now Mordecai.
Joshua-Klaus-Barbie-Doll
Friday, November 22, 2002 dennistime
Congratulations, Lumpyworld! We've broken our previous record for hits in a day. It seems we're getting a bunch of steady international traffic, so hello to you all and please e-mail Pandy if you have anything to suggest.
OK. Without any poking, voodoo, or hallucinogenics my text box is slowly moving around. That's pretty ingenious, Pandy. How the HTML did you do that? And why does the sleighbell sound stop after the page fully loads? I do have an antiquated machine, but I hope that's not the answer. Then I would feel that I'd been missing out on a whole bunch of lumpiness all along.
It's a silly idea, but can we make the bizarro universe translation a regular feature? It could have a button not unlike Nedstat.
Friday, November 22, 2002 dennistime
A friend of mine was half-complaining that the color of her areolae is not all that different from the rest of her body. Perhaps this could be a new market for some sort of cosmetic product - it could come in different colors, possibly different flavors, and of course moisturize the general area.
Nipstick, anyone?
Friday, November 22, 2002 01:06 p.m.
Since you all did such a fine job beta-testing my website, I give you now my newest font to beta-test. It's not quite finished; some of the more obscure characters, such as "#" and "%" are missing, but for the most part it's a working font. Roughly, the design is based on a liquor label that Liza and I found in Barcelona in September 2000, but it's evolved alot since then. I'm calling it "Baritone Sax", with the idea that now I'll begin working on Soprano, Alto, and Tenor weights of the font. Expect those sometime around 2006.
I'm especially interested to hear how the font works technically for all you lumpskteers, especially those of you misfortunate enough to be working on an operating system which is not published by Apple. So here's the font for you to download:
Baritone Sax | Mac OS [156 K]
Baritone Sax | Whack OS [160 K]
[Mac: click, hold, choose "save to disk"]
[Whack: right click]
joshua oldstyle gothic condensed
PS Does the Lumpy entry block "dance around" in anyone elses browser window?
Thursday, November 21, 2002 03:47 p.m.
Ya asked for it, so here it is. I did this kinda quickly, so as always, everyone please feel free to play around with it. In particular, if anyone agrees:
(1) could someone please align this entire text box on the right side of the page?
(2) Also, can someone figure out how to cut down the lenght of this text box?