Larry couldn’t believe it! Not only was he late for an appointment with his Fretardo, he could feel a period of rumination coming on.

“Shit, no, no, I don’t have time for it. I just can’t …”

Besides that, he was stuck in the middle of the worst gridlock London had seen in years.

While he waited for traffic to begin moving again, it slowly dawned on Larry that he was a mammal of the genus Ovis, of the family Bovidae, and probably related to the goat that just crapped on his foot.

And that he had no idea what a fucking Fretardo was.

Part of the Toulouse Le Grandfig collection. Photo by Mundocuardro

A few carnivals to note:

The Carnival of the Insanities

The Carnival of the Odd

The Friday Ark

Carnival of the Dogs

And some words I never thought I’d say: this ukelele player rocks!

Monday Update: Studio Best of Me Symphony

An entertaining Carnival of the Godless!

The only thing this is missing is a cat. But come on, what more do you need, there’s a gigantic Nazi robot! (Attacking Pearl Harbour for some reason.) I especially like it when one of the pilots of the Mustang has a truck thrown at him. (That’s definitely on the list of things they don’t train you to dodge in flight school.)

Kudos to Ellison for finding this.

This story is somewhat autobiographical (the stuff about the shoes and living in England is true) but otherwise, it’s fiction inspired by the smell of worms in April.

At recess, there will be worms

By Mark A. Rayner

Each April would bring rain, worms and mortification. But this year was going to be different. I could feel it in the marrow of my ten-year-old bones, because this year, I didn’t have to wear the clunky black oxford shoes that had been the bane of my existence for most of my short life.

In kindergarten, there was still a glorious joi-de-vivre to everything. Need to take off your dress in the middle of class? Why not! Wanna eat the paste? Go for it! Mom makes you wear ugly black shoes? We don’t care, you’re beautiful baby! But sometime in early grade one, that laissez-faire attitude changed. All of us discovered, in our own ways, the horrible truth: “I’m different and that’s bad.” My difference was a minor one — my shoes were weird. But this kind of tiny deviation from the norm can have enormous consequences. I became a figure of fun and teasing for at least a few minutes of every day that I had to wear that hyper-functional footwear.

I’d had one brief respite from the embarrassment of those shoes, which was the year my family had lived in Britain. I was sent to a state school where the food was terrible, the teachers were mean, and most of my classmates were jerks, but did I care? No, because everybody was wearing clunky black oxfords, so I didn’t stand out. My “American” accent was distinctive, but that was one of those rare differences that made people like you.

Read the rest of the story …>

We found this clip of the Fab Four doing a little Shakespeare, the hilarious presentation of Pyramus and Thisbe as performed by the Mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Those guys could not only make fun of themselves, they could get a larf or two. (And Paul actually had a pretty good take on Pryamus.)

I like this meme, which asks you to name your favourite cartoons (found at Blog D’Ellison, and started elsewhere).

I now recognize that perhaps Mr. Peabody may have had an alarming affect on my mind. Certainly my view of history is more pliable because of it. This clip may remind you of the Jay Ward cartoon, which was part of the Rocky and Bullwinkle show. (I saw it in reruns when I was a kid.)

For those unfortunates who’ve never heard of himt, Mr. Peabody was a genius dog, who invented the WABAC (”wayback”) machine, a universal translator, and who “adopted” the boy Sherman. According to the Wikipedia entry, Dreamworks is developing it into a film. I just hope it’s better than Boris and Natasha.

So what’s your cartoon poison?

For myself, I like to knock off work at about 3 pm, hit the links or drop by the club for a single malt scotch (or three).

Back on my homeworld, Neecknaw, I expected my troops, commanders, and personal grooming team to work 24/7, but that turned out to be unrealistic. So eventually I let them have ten hours off, per week. They could do with it what they willed: sleep, eat, bathe, and so on. (Though very few of my Gorriloids-in-Fezes Brigade ever chose to bathe.)

The main thing is that they worked so hard, they couldn’t possibly consider rebellion.

It seems to be working on this planet too.

Next time: Is it true they just discovered an inhabitable planet near Earth? Is the five-times Earth gravity going to pose a problem to my origami collection?

This is somewhat distasteful news on the erectile dysfunction front:

Singapore’s Society for Men’s Health and a pharmaceutical firm are proposing a four-point scale for erectile dysfunction, allowing men to rate their own hardness with four categories: cucumber, unpeeled banana, peeled banana and tofu (bean curd).

My question is this: how fresh is that cucumber, and is it an English cucumber, Chinese or — God forbid — a gherkin?

Luckily, this veggie-fruit inspired scale has yet to be adopted by any (reputable) medical body, though I suspect the folks at veggielovers.com are excited by this news.

More gory details here.

How can you not be interested in The Carnival of Medical Surrealism, featuring some Grandfigia and this gem, which has many imaginative deaths reminiscent of Sean Cullen’s “And the Food of Your Choice Will End Your Life Tonight.”

An excellent Carnival of the Insanities

Best of Me Symphony