TGIT

Thursdays are rad.

The only thing that can make Thursdays better is like, a drink and maybe some bounce house time.

Conan the Plumber

Look, I love you, Robert E. Howard, but you use the term “poop deck” with far too much regularity. AHEM.


property of the miraculous frank frazetta, not me.

Seriously, it seems like every time Conan is on a ship in one of Howard's rip-roaring, capitally adventur-rific and lusty outdoorsman stories full of wily maidens and magical sabertooth cats, he's got to go up and down the poop of the ship about 47 1/2 times before anything can happen.

That said, it's probably some of the best fiction ever written. Take that, Nathaniel Hawthorne, you limp-wristed girl's blouse!

MILLION DOLLAR IDEA OF THE WEEK

Non-molding gym shorts.
Think of it – you just finished a killer workout, you’re peeling the soaking fabric from your body and diving for the shower because you feel revoltingly gross and people are starting to whisper/faint.

Twenty minutes later, you’ve got “gym soap hair” (when you’ve used the “luxurious hand wash” provided to wash your scalp into a mullet) and you’re walking to your car in the freezing cold because the gym shower knob only has 2 settings: SURFACE OF THE SUN and ICE.

You throw your gym bag in the back seat of your car and fumble with the heater. You get home. You take real shower. You heat up some corn. You watch Netflix. You pass out over a bowl of corn.
You wake up at 3AM and slink off to bed.

You take the next day off from the gym. You deserve it and you kind of can't walk anymore.

Three days later, you decide you better get back to the gym (you’ve started putting butter on all that corn you’re eating) and go to grab your gym b-
WHOA!
What is that smell?
Whew, that is ripe! Did something die in your gym bag?
You unzip it – a wall of putrefaction punches you right in the eyeballs. What could it be? An ancient pair of dentures? Plague rats?

Then you find them…your gym shorts, left to huddle together in a damp ball amid puddles of your 4 day old sweat. Mold stink everywhere. Those shorts are DONE.
See, if you only had my No-Mold gym shorts all you have to do is worry about those gym showers. Terrifying.


Now we just have to think up a good name – No-Mold Gym Shorts doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. Here is my starter list:

• Smell-Eaze.


• Flavians (ooh fashiony)


• Slander Free!


• Skrins.


• Cannonball King Shorty Shorts

Obviously, I need your help. Please send in non-mold gym shorts names (or your pick of the brilliant list above) by commenting below.

AMUSING VIGNETTES

For your reading pleasure, an amusing vignette in which I ask Daft Punk to score my movie.


A HOTEL ROOM, CALAIS. LATE EVENING.

ME: Hello, thank you for coming. This is such an honor.

Daft Punk/Thomas & Guy: Hi. Cheers.

ME: So, umm, I hope your agent told you what is going down here. Um, basically, I am making a movie and I'd like you two to do the score. I think you'll really be able to capture the mood of the piece.

DP/Thomas: What's the movie about?

ME: Well...in a few words, which of course won't do it justice...it's about a Viking girl who is shipwrecked in Medieval Japan.

There's lots of beautiful kimonos and martial arts training.

And battles! Also magic.

Are you two at all familiar with shinto?

DP/Guy: Of course we are.

ME: Haha, of course!

Daft Punk's "Face to Face" begins to play out of nowhere. My face gets red. Really red. I fumble at my jacket pocket.

ME: Hello? No! What? No, I said DON'T call. Yes, I'm there now. No, I forgot to change the ringtone. I'll call you back. I love you, too. No, I love you more. Just shut up, will you?
Me laughing nervously
Sorry about that. Damn tigers. Anyway...

DP/Thomas: No worries. Look, tell us more about your movie.

ME: Well, so the Viking girl is learning all these new things about poetry and earth magic and the daily ritual of bathing. So it's really kind of a Bildungsroman. But with mounted archers... and tea.

DP/Guy: Do you play any instruments?

ME: ummm, What was that? Sorry, you have kind of a thick accent.

DP/Guy: Do you play any instruments? Any at all?

ME: Oh yeah, piano and violin. ...

Well, actually I used to play piano for a long time and I was pretty good, but now I kind of can't play at all. I still remember all my scales, though. And violin I was always kind of rubbish at because I hated the chairs we had to sit in - so all I remember is the Masterpiece Theatre Theme.

DP/Guy & Thomas: Hmm.

They have a little side conference in what is presumably French. I only know how to say "Do you speak German?" in French, so there's no chance I'm going to piece their rapid whispers together. The tension is palpable.

DP/Thomas: Right - we'll score your movie.

ME: You Will??!

DP/Thomas: Yeah, what the hell.

DP/Guy: On one condition: you agree to make some of the tracks with us.

At first I am crestfallen. But then...I break out in a wide smile. And a happy rash.

CUT TO

Me sitting at a keyboard flanked by Daft Punk - one with a keytar, one at the drums and we are rocking out. I am just playing the G Major scale over & over. Jam Session! I imagine the end result would be something a little like a-this.


property of Daft Punk and Virgin records, not me.

Battle wand!

So, I was just trying to think of the coolest Pretending game I ever played as a child. It was probably the Make Your Own Radio Station game (I have hours of tapes where me and 3 friends sing disastrously off-pitch Disney songs interrupted occasionally by commercials about farting and tampons - forsooth, the unabashed innocence!) OR the Flea Junk game.

Flea junk was what I (and eventually everyone else, by my own clever machinations) called the pods the fell off the huge maple tree in my yard. When my dad raked the leaves, he made a very tall pile, that eventually was big enough to have crazy jumping "Sears Portrait Studio" style fun.
But inevitably we rolled onto some of these pods, which were often oozing a thick white liquid and they stank (I guess they're sort of the embryos of the tree and therefore all fertile and hormonal or something). So I had kind of a strong adversity toward them and their constant attempts to tree-mate with my jacket.

Eventually, I set down some ground rules to what had previously just been a jumping and flailing game.
Flea Junk (this name was pure propaganda to turn everyone else against the pods) was an evil, poisonous, fully sentient entity that wanted to attack us, and we were the Utopian ideal of pastoral goodness just trying to live our lives in this big pile of leaves and always do the right thing, but the Flea Junk would always be there - the classic Trickster - to try and corrupt us from the inside out and make us do things like not recycle our bubble wrap or slouch.

So of course to counter this Machiavellian chicanery, I had to use magic.
But not just any magic. It had to be a righteous magic of bravery and honor and Air Jordans. And so I developed the Battle Wand.




The Battle Wand was a piece of bendy bark that I found in the pile of leaves one time. And it was miraculous because you see the Battle Wand is not so much a physical thing, but an energy. It can travel through time & space and will arrive precisely at the moment it is needed, in whatever form is convenient for the Battle Wand at the time (I've found the Battle Wand can be a little on the lazy side when it comes to assuming physical form).

First of all, it basically has Undo powers over all of the Flea Junk's deviance. And if I had to, I could do some pirouetting to really take care of business. That Flea Junk never stood a chance!

The Battle Wand changes form, but always remains a beacon of truthfulness and friendship. Should you ever feel corruption is at your heels, simply cry out in your heart for the Battle Wand and it shall disperse all fleak junk style evil forthwith!
Probably in the form of something like a steering wheel or an iPhone - the Battle Wand is not that high-ranking on the creative thinking spectrum, either.

TRENDS: Big Pimpin' Edition

My pal Megan is an artist. Not the fake kind that has their CPA, and then when you ask them to hang out, instead of being chill and talking about Andrei Tarkovsky movies, instead likes to dart around like they're all eccentric and organic and have "Happenings" where they drink all the Night Train in your pantry and talk about having a sit-in. (the genie from Aladdin is one such example of this type of "artist")

But Megan is fly. She went to art school (come on, who didn't, ha) & her art is really sharp and kind of disturbing in totally cuddly, relatable ways. For example, she may have a really great drawing of some friends genuinely enjoying a rhubarb pie, but then you see their teeth and you're like, "weird what's going on there?"

Plus she's a 1984 Wood Rat and obviously deserves the kudos of a princess from Valhalla! mmm, kudos.

She even came up with these tremendously cute AND Ready-to-Wear pre-fall sneakers. Her pre-fall collection is pre-Fab if you ask me. And I know you would.





I think she's still selling the shoes, in case you are smart enough to realize they are THE Must Haves of the season. Check out her Tumbler HERE for more info and be amazed and awed. Or her blog HERE where you'll be instantly at least 3 times cooler (like temperature-wise; it will make you feel at ease and chilled off. Out. Whatev, i didn't go to Weather Doctor school).