Category: personal info

Scheduling

Many to collectTaken today, at the center of the consumer madness.

Tonight’s Flash Pulp will be posted on Sunday, as the whole crew is down with a bad case of the egg nog. To make up for our poor work ethic, on this, the most Victorian of holidays, we’ll also be releasing FlashCast 003 on the same evening.

Till then, blogging will be incidental at best, but know that we love you.

In the mean time, to fill your pulpy needs, why not browse the archive (or on iTunes), or check out our yule–related episodes?

I myself am about to depart to undertake the annual viewing of MST3k’s Santa Claus Conquers The Martians.

Feel free to join us:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzw0dFx8HSA]

The Goods

http://twitter.com/#!/JRDSkinner/status/10807876738097153

This is basically going to be a post collecting my week together – nothing extravagant, more just a brief tour through the recent highlights of my twitter feed.

Mr Seven is now Mr Eight. In celebration we went to visit Mr. Chuck E. Cheese.

DucksBased on an older design that used real boxers and real ducks.

gargoylesThere was also a “Deal Or No Deal” machine that was frequented exclusively by people over 40.

I still don’t get why a restaurant would present a super-sized rodent as their mascot. “Come to Taco Heaven and meet our mascot, Sammy Salmonella.”

I did get to play some Space Invaders on a stand-up arcade unit, however, so I’ll give the disease-carrier a pass.

Ripening

Banana Ripening Chart found at http://postharvest.ucdavis.eduIt’s 2002, and I’m up far later than my 9am class would encourage. I’m feeling a little lost and alone, suffering the dramas only a young man can conjure. My roommate, a fellow sitting about twenty feet away, behind his own closed door, sends me a link.

* * *

It’s 2008, and the conversation has found itself in an awkward pause. My wife suddenly asks the pixie on the couch a question, to which she receives a negative response.

“What,” she asks again, “you’ve never seen it?”

* * *

It’s last Tuesday, and I’m walking the autumn streets with the seven year olds. Their faces are sullen; they’ve just finished extravagantly explaining the opera that was their school day, which, unfortunately, concluded upon the rotten treachery of a classmate. It’s been a great walkabout until the tangent, and my mind moves quickly to save the moment.

“Hey, that reminds me, I wanted to show you something.”

It is Peanut Butter Jelly Time.

 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3ZAGBL6UBA]

A True Holiday Story

White MaskA few years ago, Jessica, my brother Codos, and I, were Christmas shopping in an HMV, when we encountered something I have never forgotten.

A woman entered the store from the mall beyond, a bundle in her arms which she held with some care. As she moved to speak with a friend who’d already been browsing the albums, the angle changed and I could see what she was cradling.

It looked like a child, a boy of maybe five, but his skin was a shade I’m hard-pressed to describe. Pea-soup green maybe, or the colour of lush but rotting jungle foliage, and with an aspect as if a portion of skin might peel away and fall to the floor at any moment; not in the sense of a dollop of costume make up, but in that of an advanced leper.

The most unsettling part were the boy’s eyes, lolling as his mother turned about the store, bright against his Lovecraft-ian face.

I certainly do not mean to offend, I have no idea what condition the child might have been suffering from, but it’s a hard image to shake: the tender affections of the woman as she cradled a boy who looked like he may have been dead a week.