Thrill und der Çhåszt

update, 5/28 - at Dawn's blog, commenter "Andy" suggested the blog title "Safety Gdansk." Wish I'd thought of that, darn it.

Ms Dawn Eden continues to conquer the book-publishing world - in fact, she's doing it so well she only needs the one book:


In English, it's called The Thrill of the Chaste. Clicking on the picture will take you to a place to purchase the book in English, and please do so. Clicking the link above will take you to the caption contest that Dawn's running for that cover, which is the Polish translation of her book.

My contribution is as follows:


True story: I have a good hockey buddy who is native to, and currently in, Poland - he's getting married in a couple of weeks. Coincidence?

Woot!

If you care at all about Obsession Central... if you have obsessions, or know someone who does... Then you owe it to all things crazy to go here (and also go here) and vote for The Sheila Variations.

People, just today the woman has about forty posts on Cary Grant in honor of his birthday. Are you not entertained? Are you not obsessed?

Fly, my monkeys! FLY! FLY!

We have a winner

The caption contest is finished, by virtue of (a) having no more new entries; (b) remembering what I was supposed to be doing on Tuesday. Great entries, too. Here are your top three:

• Bronze - Cullen: "You see, Abe, I eat planets. So, no, I can't just eat the slave owners. Tell you what, just for you, I'll give you guys another hundred years."
• Silver - the Judge, Rob Going: "Look! Our American Cousin's playing at Ford's Theater tonight!"
• Gold - newcomer Jeff of Sepiamoons.com: "Three words, Abe - Hostess Fruit Pies."

That just kills me. Anyone who read enough comics in the seventies will remember ads like this one. If only Tony Stark had remembered the good old days, when evil was thwarted with a few well-placed snacks, Cap would still be alive.

It didn't even have to be pies: click this picture for a closer look at hardened crooks dropping sacks of money and jewels mid-heist to gobble pastries. It's brilliantly cracked. (Bonus points for Peter Parker sewing up the annual "Suddenly Clark Excuses Himself Award" by saying that, in the middle of a brazen daytime robbery, he "just remembered something" - he HAD to have him some week-old preservative-packed baked goods.)

The crook couldn't help himself, and neither could Petey. You think people won't believe that? They can accept without question that somehow, while ducking out for a snack, Pete still got awesome eye-level pictures of Spider-Man hanging upside down from a forty-foot ceiling. Trust me, the Hostess thing is no stretch. We're lucky that MJ and the guard didn't join the scramble.

So there's your winner. Rob takes second for making me duck and cover under my desk, waiting for the skies to open on me for laughing at his caption; and Cullen sneaks through a crowded field to show.

Until next time, true believers - excelsior!

The get well caption contest

update, bump - first off, you guys rule. The word went out from this time and place... uh, sorry. Wrong President. Just chalk it up as another one of those weird parallels. Where was I? Ah, yes, you rule. These captions are a riot.

Second, I'm glad to report that the Invincible Super-Mom is OK - if by "OK" you mean

According to the doctors, there was no permanent damage, and the fact that she drove herself to the emergency room--stopping to get gas on the way, in an almost freakout-inducing incident of Old Lady Toughness--worked out well, as it kept her from suffering a major heart attack within the next few months.

The emphasis is in the original. When I said "Invincible Super-Mom" I had no idea. One of his commenters asked if she crashed through the hospital wall on a rocket-bike, guns blazing.

Chris Sims' Mom = Awesome. Chris Sims' Mom doesn't suffer heart attacks, she destroys them. Chris Sims' Mom wrecks cholesterol's face. We ought to just run a caption contest about her, instead of for her.

Fans of Chris Sims will be sad to hear that the Invincible Super-Mom has had a heart attack. Her prognosis is good, but it obviously means that Chris will take a break from the awesome while he handles important matters.

This is when the fans have to step up, and so I snitched the following picture from the ISB to run a caption contest - to fill the gap a little bit, and to give Chris a smile as a thank-you for months of fun. (Among his many gifts, he is the King of the Alt Tag.) So, you tell me - what do you think Galactus, Devourer of Worlds, and our 16th President are discussing down there?



"See that gap? I'd totally fit next to you on Mount Rushmore. It would even be actual size."

Do better than me in the comments!

(Photo is a Chris Sims original, used here with permission)

The Mighty Wingman Contest - update

Folks, your inventiveness knows no bounds. I got quite a lot of votes, online and off. There is, however, a little bit of a problem. As I compiled, I found that people went out of their way to name people whom they hadn't seen listed yet, and as a result we have something like a 17-way tie. It's fabulous brainstorming and I'm impressed.

Partly to honor all the choices, and partly because I'm having such fun seeing what you came up with, I'm going to take the nominees and list them here (not in any particular order). People in gold already have multiple nominations; people in green are those not nominated at all but on the huge list I had when I made my own top-ten. You can vote for anyone here or you can write someone in. If you want to keep your list from before that's cool too.

1. Samwise Gamgee - Frodo's faithful servant from Lord of the Rings
2. Mr. Spock - Kirk's XO on the Enterprise; logician and occasional harpist
3. Dr. James Watson - Sherlock Holmes' narrator and fellow adventurer
4. Artemis Gordon from The Wild Wild West
5. Sara Gaskell, Dean of the university in the film Wonder Boys
6. KITT - Michael Knight's car from Knight Rider
7. Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride
8. Goose - Maverick's copilot in Top Gun
9. Lt. Morris Schaffer, Clint Eastwood's character in Where Eagles Dare
10. Eastwood again, this time the aptly-named Pardner in Paint Your Wagon
11. Ned Logan - Morgan Freeman's character in Unforgiven
12. Chewbacca - every smuggler needs a first mate, right?
13. The Sundance Kid (that one was Redford) (AND that's two movies for Bill Goldman)
14. Mickey Goldmill (everything you want to know about the franchise is at Obsession Central)
15. Marion Ravenwood, Raiders of the Lost Ark*
16. Larry/Curly from the Three Stooges
17. Bert from Mary Poppins OR Sesame Street
18. Egon and Ray from Ghostbusters
19. Tyler Durden, Fight Club
20. Elwood Blues, the Blues Brothers
21. Harry Dunne of Dumb and Dumber (that's Jeff Daniels)
22. The .44 Magnum, deadliest handgun ever made, etc. etc.
23. Dr. Henry Jones Sr., Indiana Jones and the Last Penultimate Crusade**
24. Minute Mouse (and great theme song, by the way)
25. Dori of Finding Nemo
26. Jane Bennett, "Pride and Prejudice"
27. Agent J, Men in Black - clearly K's protege
28. Jet Black - master of the Bebop, yet he's Spike's right-hand man, not the reverse
29. Horatio, "Hamlet"
30. Susan Ivanova, Babylon Five
31. Silent Bob
32. Gromit
33. Hermoine Granger from the Harry Potter books
34. Juan Ramirez of Highlander (a double for Connery)
35. Ed Norton, the Honeymooners - such a good wingman he inspired Barney Rubble
36. Pikachu (hey, PT has four daughters, cut him some slack)
37. Mike Wazowski, Monsters Inc. (Pixar comes up with great wingmen)
38. James Boswell - the biographer of Samuel Johnson
39. Friday from "Robinson Crusoe"
40. Michaeleen Flynn, from the Quiet Man
41. Sgt Bothari: "I am Lady Vorkosigan's dog." (But who's Lady Vorkosigan? Oh.)
42. Al (Dean Stockwell) from Quantum Leap
43. Tinkerbell - from a mere spotlight on the stage to a vixenous icon of her own right
44. Fozzie Bear
45. Milhouse Van Houten - Bart Simpson's running mate, also cast as Fallout Boy in the Radioactive Man movie on the show (which makes him a double-second-banana!)
46. Pompey from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (another great theme song)

*You could also go with Sallah, who returned in the third movie
**Wow, this was released in 1989?

You may also notice that I've eliminated some of the field candidates - the crew of the Serenity and "any officer besides Kirk." It's not fair either to give all the points to each candidate or to split them so many ways. Neither do I want to average out five or six spots and then let the next candidate sink all the way to the bottom. It would skew the results unnecessarily.

...

The Mighty Wingman Contest

updated Saturday, 2/17/07, oh-dark-thirty am - Rant is completed, and sits directly below this post.

updated Friday, 2/16/07, 5:18 pm - I've got some ire to raise, but I'd best not be rash about it, so I will be crafting, crafting... This may hold up the contest results for a couple of days but I was considering that anyway. Monday is a holiday and it gives me a good opportunity to put up a much better post than otherwise. It also gives all y'all a better chance to send in your votes! Stuff that box, kids! In the meantime, tune in just below for a fresh Saturday morning rant about the NCAA and the thought police.

updated Wednesday, 2/14/07, 11:44 pm - So far, so good. With mail entries and people I know who have chimed in, we have a good 15 or so ballots. Interesting stuff. Also, you will notice that there are tags on this thing now. Blogger has been shoving all of us old-school holdouts into the "new Blogger style" and the Hive's turn just came up. My fingers are crossed (or they would be if I weren't currently typing); if they just add a way to ask for a little help directly, I'll consider it a rousing success.

originally posted Monday, 2/12/07, 9:38 pm

In honor of one of the funnier beer commercials of the past ten years and the recent Fifty Fab Robots list thing, I've decided to run a little contest here. I will peg this post so that it stays up top all week; you, the reader, are cordially invited to name the best wingmen in movies and literature (or songs, or what-have-you). Here are the guidelines:

• We are talking about the best of the wingmen - the guys without whom the leading man would be well and truly hosed. Try not to tab any comic relief or co-equals or love interests (unless you can make a case for one of the co-equals). For example, in the Mummy movies, Rachel Weisz' character, Evie, is NOT a wingman (co-equal), neither is John Hannah (comic relief). The wingman there would be Oded Fehr (hubba-hubba, ladies).
• Your first place nominee will get 20 points.
• Your second place nominee will get 15 points. (There's a bonus for being the top dog, the big cheese, numero duo honcho...)
• Third place is worth 12, and so on down to one point for fourteenth.
• If you name more than fourteen, anyone after that will get one point (think of it as a really big tie); if you name fewer, I'll stop where you left off.

You can vote in the comments, or drop me an email (nightflymail AT aol DOT com) if you like that whole secret ballot thing. I will tally me second bananas and come up with the winner on Saturday in the afternoon. Then I'll post the results, with a detailed look into my own list and why I chose as I did. (And yes, I do have a list.) I may also hit some of the highlights of the voting given enough time.

Have fun!