Batter Blaster

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Today I was walking through the grocery store and I saw something amazing:

“We have to buy this” I said, “so I can blog about it.”  It was even on sale.  So, it is a giant whipped cream can that contains pancake batter (as the name implies).  You spray it on the pan and, boom, pancakes.  It actually comes out a lot thicker than I was expecting, but then somehow the pancakes turn out really thin.  Maybe because of the thinness or something about the batter, but I was able to make them all look perfectly done.  I was very excited about these pancakes, but it turns out they weren’t that good. Well, at least I should say that I didn’t like them as well as regular pancakes.  They are a little sweeter and have a different sort of taste.  It is hard to describe.  Also, they were a little tough.  On the other hand though, there were no dishes to clean up and dinner took like no time at all.  So I would definitely recommend it for people in a hurry or for those lazy bachelors and college students.  Also, Sara pointed out it could be good for camping.

So, long story short, idea is A double plus, the implementation is meh.  I should also mention though, that it didn’t occur to me that you could write or draw with the pancakes until I was doing image searches for this post.  That certainly adds another dimension!

Surgeried

/ Shane / 1 Comment

We’re back from the hospital, ears freshly tubed.  Evie is fine, you would never know anything happened at all.  At first they said that we wouldn’t be able to be with her when she went to sleep, but they ended up letting Sara go back with her.

Here’s to no more ear infections!

And, as usual, a nurse said she looked like Shiloh Pitt.

Babies know from birth that bacon is delicious, FACT

/ Shane / 3 Comments

I was frying up some bacon yesterday and apparently the smell is somehow inherently delicious.  I don’t know how Evie would know the smell of bacon or know that it is something that she wanted!  She was just sobbing and sobbing, “Baaacon!  Baaacon!” and demanding “bacon” on her “plate” in the “big girl chair”.  On one hand it was quite funny on the other hand it was very sad because I too know the want of bacon when you don’t have any.  I was kind of thinking about grabbing the video camera for bacon posterity and then Sara said, “You’re thinking about recording this, aren’t you?”

So, the other day Sara sat me down for a Zombie Intervention.  “Shane” she said, “You know that zombies aren’t really going to attack, right?”  This was a funny thing to say since she had just given me the Zombie Survival Guide for my birthday.  I told her that of course I didn’t really believe that and it was a big joke and I am astounded that after all of this time she couldn’t tell the difference.  She seemed to accept that, so I think it bought me some more time to really get my zombie plans in place.  I mean, I know i might not be zombies per say, it could be velociraptors for example.  Anyway, she said that she was sure that some readers of this blog wouldn’t be able to tell if I were joking or not.  So what do you think, gentle reader? Vote in the comments.

I’m only half way through the Survival Guide, but so far it has been pretty good.  The only downside is that it presents only one type of zombies and says that is the only type.  So if you depend only on this text and it ends up being fast zombies or voodoo zombies or comet zombies, you will be in trouble.  Anyhoo, it has opened my eyes to a couple of interesting points, for example, consider holing up in a school.  They are often on lock down (at least inner city schools) and you will have access to both food from the cafeteria and first aid supplies from the nurses’ office.  So I am now thinking about abandoning my house (as I’ve said, it is indefensible) and moving to one of the schools down the street.  In addition to the benefits of schools, it also has a fenced in back yard with like 12 foot fences which could potentially allow for a secure vegetable garden of some sort.  “You see” Sara said, “This is when I start to think you take this too seriously.”  “I’m doing this for you!” I replied.  Oh well, when the dead start to rise, we’ll see who gets the last laugh…

In other me news, I have been quite the handy man about the house lately.  I’ve put up coat hangers and shelves including wall anchors, replaced 3 very high light bulbs, replaced a light switch and even repaired our broken, all-set-for-the-trash coat rack with some cement.  I even had to make two different trips to the hardware store.  Carpenter, electrician, mason…you want it, I got it.  In fact, the garbage disposal was clogged and I was a little disappointed that the trick I read about on the Internet cleared it out, because I was all set to take apart the pipe and add plumber to my resume.  Oh well, all’s well that ends well.

Biker Zombies from Detroit

/ Shane / 2 Comments

A few years ago, Sara received the greatest gift ever from my family dice game.  The game is one of those games you play around Christmas where everybody is fighting over a wrapped present and then you open it up and it ends up being a blank VHS tape or something.  But on that particular year, Sara won a copy of Biker Zombies from Detroit.  I have been dying to watch this for years, but somehow I never really got a chance.  So finally, when my brother was here, I finally got around to it.

There was absolutely no plot whatsoever, the acting was terrible, the sound quality was terrible, a lot of the shots were fresh out of art school, and last but not least, there weren’t actually any zombies.  Let me repeat that, Biker Zombies from Detroit didn’t contain any zombies, nor did it take place in Detroit.

So the movie starts with a 10 minute montage of shots of a motorcycle with a voice over from the head zombie or whatever he is.  This scene was unnecessarily long and annoying, but I understand they wanted to have a voice over. Unfortunately, this exact same montage was then repeated at the end of the movie for absolutely no reason whatsoever.  My best guess is that they needed to make it longer (even though it still ended 20 minutes shy of the listed run time).  I thought the soundtrack was actually okay, but it was mixed badly so it was hard to hear the dialog over the music.  I actually thought the dialog wasn’t too far off, although I was the only one who held that opinion.  But look, I watch a lot of crap movies and it really wasn’t that bad.  Unfortunately the writer tried way, way, WAY too hard to put foul language and vulgarity in there, forcing it in where it didn’t make any sense.  I feel like he fancied himself a Quentin Tarantino or a Kevin Smith, but it didn’t feel natural the way it does when they write it.  But if you could have removed that, I think it had promise.  I’m just saying with a little experience he may have a future in script writing. And to be fair, this wasn’t exactly Daniel Day Lewis delivering the lines here.  Instead it was 30 something “actors” who I’m guessing were the director’s friends, playing 14 and 15 year olds.  And why didn’t they reshoot the two different scenes where someone messed up their lines?  It’s not like they were paying the actors so much they couldn’t afford the time.

Okay, but those are the technical aspects, how about the storyline?

SPOILER ALERT (didn’t want to ruin it for you)

Well, there wasn’t one.  The zombies aren’t really zombies, just like regular people with ghoul-like faces or something. The entire movie takes place in some suburb which really could be anytown U.S.A.  Half of the movie revolves around the main zombie guy “recruiting” zombies for his zombie army or something, but that doesn’t even play into the movie. Meanwhile the new guy in town who we are supposed to believe is tough (even though he rides around on a dirt bike and can in no way be considered a biker) has some romance story or something.  He fights with the losers next door and then the zombie master decides to turn him into a zombie because he has a “special project” for him.  There is absolutely no logic to that at all.  The zombies are supposedly in Detroit, so why do they even know or care about this dude?  And what is the special mission, that he kills like these 2 or 3 people that he knows?  Why does the zombie master even care?  As long as we are asking rhetorical questions, why was there a random homeless guy with a sack that kept showing up after the zombies attacked but seemed to have nothing to do with the movie whatsoever?  Why did the Shell station attendant and the cops just start blasting away as soon as they saw the zombies?  I mean, they really just looked like people in makeup and I doubt that people would just start shooting before they were even threatened or anything.  I don’t know, maybe the zombies are scarier in person or something.

Now, I realize I have been harping on the bad points and not pointing out the good points.  This movie had two of the most fantastically bad scenes ever, and the best (worst) line of dialog I have ever heard.  The dialog is not suitable for printing on a nice PG blog like this one, so you will just have to watch for it when you see the movie.  The 2nd best scene took place after the main guy turns into a zombie.  He knocks a guy to the ground and then slowly backs his dirt bike onto the guy’s crotch and then revs the engine causing a jet of blood and gore to just fly all over the place.  The scene goes on and on with the guy screaming and the whole time, even while the zombie was slowly backing the bike up, the guy on the ground never makes even the slightest attempt to get away or even shift slightly so as not to be torn up by the tire.  The best scene though was one we had to rewind and watch about 5 times in a row.  The main-guy-who-is-now-a-zombie’s mom comes running out of the house and he pushes her in front of a car.  The car is already stopping and can’t be going more than 5 mph at the time.  Also, the guy doesn’t really push her enough to go in front of the car, so she has to sort of jog the last few feet to make sure she gets in front of the car.  Oh the indignity, having to jog to your own death.  Well, since they aren’t really zombies, maybe they have some kind of mind control power or something that can cause people to commit suicide.  Who knows?

So, in short, it was a fantastic movie.

It was really the sort of thing you would shoot with your friends.  Watch this one when you are in the mood and there are plenty of laughs.  It still doesn’t beat Vampires vs. Zombies as greatest bad movie of all time though.

Image Quiz

/ Shane / 1 Comment

It has been too long since I posted a game.  This is a little bit of a departure from my usual type.  Basically it does a google image search on a word and displays the results.  Then, you try to guess what the search term was.  You get three guesses and every time you are wrong they show you another set of results for the same search to help jog your memory.  Then your score is based on how many you get right and how many guesses it takes for you to get it.

Link courtesy PlanetDan.