Wilkins Coffee

Keeping with the awesomeness of coffee, I bring out some of those amazing Wilkin's Coffee commercials from the 1950s (done by Jim Henson!)

Wilkins Coffee commercials (about minute and half)

more Wilkins Coffee commercials (about minute and half)

and even more Wilkins Coffee commercials (about minute and half)

It's like Dr Suess' Green Eggs and Ham meets Itchy and Scratchy!

Don't you want some Wilkins Coffee?

About that most wonderful of drinks - coffee

So there was a story recently about how Coffee 'may reverse Alzheimer's', which said:

Neil Hunt, chief executive of the Alzheimer's Society, said previous research into caffeine had suggested it could delay Alzheimer's disease and even protect against vascular dementia.

"This research in mice suggests that coffee may actually reverse some element of memory impairment.

I knew it!

Coffee isn't my addiction - it is strictly for medicinal purposes.

The mice were given the equivalent of five 8 oz (227 grams) cups of coffee a day - about 500 milligrams of caffeine.

The researchers say this is the same as is found in two cups of "specialty" coffees such as lattes or cappuccinos from coffee shops, 14 cups of tea, or 20 soft drinks.

That all. Heck, that's nothing.

Thank you again Coffee!

Is there nothing you can't too?

Won't someone think of the kittens?

Excuse me.

I really have to interrupt the blogging here because there are some things I need to get straight.

First of all, I do not whine a lot! I'm just vocal in expressing my concerns.

Second, I'm shocked how this blog has recently failed to capture the true horror of that cat.

Sir Poops a Lot is a very, very bad kitty!

It's not just his wanton pooping ways or how he attacks my tail when I'm sleeping. I suspect he's a secret terrorist.

I remember him dancing with joy after 911! He routinely denounces the President and our country.

Sure I don't have any real evidence, but we afford to take a chance? Who knows what he is planning?

I think it is best if he is put under preventive custody, just in case.

It would be, um, lonely for me to be the only cat in the house again - but it is a sacrifice I'll gladly make to ensure our nation is safe again.

If you come around 3 PM he's usually just sleeping on the back porch. Just come to the back door and I'll let you in - then our long national nightmare of terror would be closer to ending.

6 Day Riot

Sorry for the lack of posting, but I got a significant different prescription on new glasses on Wednesday and it was just painful to look at the screen here, but any way.

#####

6 Day Riot - cool UK band you should check out now.

Here's their new single, Run For Your Life:

It's for a new album called 6 Day Riot Has a Plan which just came out and I bought today (only $6.99 on iTunes!)

You don't want to be the last on the block to own it, do you?

Synchronize Watches!

And I had no time to post yesterday because one of my favorite shows of the 1990s finally came out on DVD - well the first season at least - Parker Lewis Can't Lose (1990 - 1993)

Image via Wikipedia

As soon as I got it I started watching and couldn't stop watching.

And yes it was as awesome as I remember. Here's the promo for the DVD release:

You know you want it. And it's available at Amazon for $28!

Just a $1.07 per awesome episode! Total Coolness!

Here's some credit fun:

And the follow up:

What better use to you have for that money?

Image via Wikipedia

Rent it, buy it, watch it now!

Saturday Supercade - Return of the Crap

I tried to forget about it. Tried to erase it from my memories, but still it haunts me.

It's the Saturday Supercade (1983).

Here' the opening, individual show openings and ending (about 4 - 5 minutes):

Two seasons of entirely based on arcade game dreck, passing itself off a children's cartoon show.

I suppose it is no worse that the 1950s & 1960s children cereal mascots with shows.

Still it burns...

Moving on up

Today I bring you a tale (tail?) close to home. I share my abode with three four-footed furry things (and a couple of human ones who really are the ones they hang with), and this is the story of one of them. (Their names have been changed and faces obscured to protect their true identities.)

First there is Sir Barks a Lot:

but he's really not the star of this story. But his barking is legendary and is the only thing standing between us and our destruction at the hands of the vast Squirrel Conspiracy!

Next is the sibling of our hero, Sir Whines a Lot:

Sir Whines a Lot tends to be unhappy with a lot of things in his life and is sure to let you know it. Clouds blocks his sunbeam, he cries. He thinks his brother got more food than him, he cries.

But his brother, Sir Poops a Lot is the real star of the story:

One day there was a line at the litter box, and he really didn't feel like waiting. It was then he had a stroke of genius:

What about that giant human sized litter box in the other room. So there he went, and considerately pulled some of the towels down to surround his consecrating of his new special litter box.

But then he discovered an amazing thing! Unlike like that old litter box he had to share and wasn't always cleaned promptly - when he used this one his poop was removed instantly and the box cleaned thoroughly.

What great service!

So he started to make it a regular stop, and one day as I stumbled out of bed half awake. I swear I heard him bust a rhyme on his way out:

I like to poop and I can not lie.
Whenever I see a tub,
I've got to take a dump.
Cause my poop has to be,
wild and free!

Other cats only poop,
Where you want it to be.
I just like to do it,
where everyone else can see!

Rock on Sir Poops a Lot!

My eyes have behold the glory

For some reason while avoiding things I didn't want to do, I found myself wandering the portion of my brain devoted to lost breakfast cereals.

Here's what forced themselves out into the world again.

First up Strawberry Shortcake - the cereal:

Strawberry Shortcake cereal was craftily marketed at those who want a fruity breakfast cereal,and didn't want to buy Frankenberry because they weren't comfortable with its mascot being that girly and effeminate.

Pink Panther cereal -

technically I'm lying. I never even knew there was a Pink Panther cereal. But I am kind of amused there was one in the first place.

I wonder if the Pink Panther and Trix Rabbit hung out. Why do I have the creeping fear that if I looked, I'd find some disturbed netizen has written a furry slash fiction with the two of them.

Dang, not going to sleep tonight...

Godzilla Raids Again

Finally after way too long it is time to tackle the next Godzilla movie and this time it is the second entry, Godzilla Raids Again (1955). Which slowly starts the trend toward silly, trashy greatness we'd later find in the franchise.

GRA (Godzilla Raids Again) is a transitional film as the franchise sheds all that silly arty cinema stuff on hits way to the monster pro-wrestling style we know and love. The first movie was all about human drama against the metaphor of Godzilla. This one drops the metaphor nonsense but still tragically thinks we care about the humans:

“This then is the story of the price of progress to a little nation of people.”

No, no, no. Don't sideline the real importance of the movie (monsters fighting) with all that character drama stuff!

Admittedly while the character driven, melancholy dramas of Tennessee Williams would be way more fun with giant monsters, I don't think the reverse is true.

But no one listens to me so here's the characters they offer us.

First the hero who struggles to function in a world his intellect is scarcely able to cope with -

like Forest Gump and Gomer Pyle had a secret love child. I shall call him Mitch. (He and much of the movie narrated by George Takei with an awful accent.) He lives an exciting life flying above the ocean looking for fish for the fishing fleet to slaughter.

Next up a woman I shall call Blanche, who is kind of a primitive radio sex operator at WKOS (Kindness of Strangers)

Okay not really, but I can dream. Really she relays messages from the pilots to the lonely women starved sailors telling them where to "Go Fish." (A whole school of rather tasteless jokes that intersect both sex and fish, which I will not share in the interest of not spawning even more disturbing internet fetish sites...)

The grammatically astute amongst you will note that I used the plural "pilots", and the other is that magnificent bastard -

Kobayashi, a grand standing SOB!

The K-man's plane crashes when the winds whipped into a tempest as they rushed in a futile attempt to fill the vast vacuum created by the empty space between Mitch's ears.

The members of Koyabashi Appreciation Society & Doo-Wop Preservation Club crowd the room sharing their heartfelt concerns about him through a rousing rendition of Since I Don't Have You.

Thankfully having the search and rescue all be narrated as they watch saved lots of money in making the movie, which could be plowed into the release of the Kobayashi action figure line - which are still a valuable collectors items in parts of greater South Bend, Indiana (home of the world renowned Kobayashi impersonator and South Bend Mayor, Stephen J. Luecke.)

Mitch finds him on a seemingly deserted island and the two of them organize one of the worst

Burning Man Festivals ever.

Naturally as it was since time immemorial when you have men gathered around a fire, they share wisdom about life:

“Trying to please a woman is like to swim ocean.”

Yeah, sure. You know the G spot is not that hard to find. Especially in the current age of GPS and Google Maps. Just enter where you are and enter (I'll use Selma Hayek for example) Loc: Selma Hayek +G-Spot and it will give you a handy map and directions.

Finally their bleating is interrupted by the appearance of some real alpha males, because at last -

Finally our heroes have arrived. Stanley (Godzilla) and Stella (Anguirus) their relationship is long and complex and best summed up via wikipedia:

Godzilla , is a force of nature: primal, rough-hewn, brutish and sensual. He dominates Anguirus in every way and is physically and emotionally abusive. Anguirus tolerates his primal behaviour as this is part of what attracted him in the first place; their love and relationship are heavily based on powerful—even animalistic— sexual chemistry...

Naturally in the face of that Mitch and Koyabashi flee and spread the tale of what they saw. The authorities ask them to look at photographs:

Well actually those are drawings, but let's not get hung up on the details. Once the monsters are identified, one of the scientists proclaims:

“This is bad. This is bad. Every lesson we've ever learned has told us this. Horrors in the world of science are part of nature's plan.”

Huh, what? That's makes so little sense, I don't even want to try to think about it or else I'll end up like those robots Kirk always makes explode with little twisty pseudo-logic phrases. Perhaps its best to move on before the illogic infects my brain...

Well, thanks to a children's picture books of dinosaurs (no really that is exactly what it is) we learn that Stella (Anguirus) may come alive due to radiation and has brains several parts of his body. And that he is a member of the race of fire monsters that can wipe out the human race!

Man, that is some creepy text for a children's book.

But they go a little high tech to tell us about Stanley (Godzilla) with a whole recap of the first movie in the form of a highlight reel.

They get a running start by showing us the beginning of the world!

“What you are looking at is the formation of the world.”

Seriously, really? You had a film crew there? I feel so ignorant, because I never knew the world started from someone dropping something in a pan of milk.

After the movie, we hear from the same crazed scientist:

“Our fate is no longer in the lap of science, but is in the lap of the gods.”

Yeah, I'm thinking you should have gone into some other profession, perhaps tin-foil hat wearing crazy street preacher.

Does science have a lap? If I have to sit, can I choose which Goddess? Aphrodite might be nice.

Anyway the real heroes of the movie arrive in the city to fight.

Man, look at those teeth!

"Pardon me. Do you have any Grey Poupon?"

I never knew he was British. The things you learn.

And look,

Awww! Just so darn cute.

Although, before you adopt one you really want to get him fixed, because when they get "frisky",

their "humping" nearby buildings will result in unexpected urban renewal.

Whoa, what a brilliant group of Darwin Award nominees!

Giant monsters are fighting in your town. Planes, tanks and rockets do nothing.

And you take your gun out against them! Yeah, make their day.

Meantime, things get a little out of control as the fight.

Hey no biting. Seriously, someone needs a time out.

Even worse, he kicks him when he's down and uses his radioactive breath to set him on fire! No fair.

And then he sulks back home to his island.

Ah, crap. The other plot is back.

Hey, Kobayashi, can't you read? This office is designated a no creepy stalking man zone. Where you want to be is the male-room (mailroom.)

As he rushes out, he drops something.

Don't look. Seriously, who knows what icky pictures are there!

Yuck a picture of him and you in schoolgirl uniform. Clearly he's got some schoolgirl fetish. Well it could have been him in that outfit.

Meanwhile, back at home Stanley/Godzilla regrets his ways with Anguirus:

STELLA!

Oh, it's so sad, his tale is covered in Don McLean's song about him in this movie:

"Starry starry night, paint your palette blue and grey
Look out on a summer’s day with eyes that know the darkness in my soul
Shadows on the hills, sketch the trees and the daffodils
Catch the breeze and the winter chills, in colors on the snowy linen land

Now I understand what you tried to say to me
How you suffered for you sanity
How you tried to set them free
They would not listen they did not know how, perhaps they’ll listen now"

His revelry is interrupted by those annoying humans and their pranks.

Don't do it man! They want you to see the flaming bags and step on them to put them out and then you get human poop all over your feet!

After distracting him with that, the stupid humans following Koyabashi's lead (and flaming death) knock snow off the mountside burying him:

and so ending the movie and our hero - for now.

After this movie's epic fail at the box office, it would be years before they touched the franchise again. But then they start to get it right with the next movie.