Via neonhummingbird, this is officially Very, Very Funny.

Also, Oscar bears a striking resemblance to the late great Diablo. :: points at icon :: He even gets loooong at one point.

Of course, it figures my Very Favoritest Engineer left on his honeymoon today. Must remember to email when he gets back. He and Sister-in-Love (with whom the cats in the household arrived) will definitely get a kick out of it.

Thanks to thanatos_kalos, I have just learned that Amy Winehouse has a song called "Valerie."

There's this running joke about how 95% of fictional characters with my name are either bimbos or crooks. Occasionally both. (They are!) So brainiacfive noted that, since we're talking about Amy Winehouse here, this one is probably a bimbo crack-whore crook.

Looked up the lyrics, and sure enough... *snerk*

I started giggling at "I miss your ginger hair and the way you like to dress." (A redhead by choice is still a redhead. So there.)

And then, of course, got to "Did you have to go to jail" and "Did you have to pay that fine that you were dodging all the time?"

So, crook. The trend holds. ;-D

That is the sound of me trying not to laugh too loudly as I type a letter to the attention of someone with the name of my character in Horror Academy who got killed by the vampire.

Office of Doom: We make our own fun.

This? [Non-work-safe language warning.]

Is my Honorary Little Brother. (Who is, thankfully, safely home now after a very close call, and retiring from the service in less than a year.)

He assures me (technically correctly, I'm sure) that they were required to detonate the grenade in order to dispose of it, as part of a discovered cache of unknown provenance. The washing machine, obviously, was not required. They were just bored.

He also contends that this is how he honored his oath to fuzzyspacekitty not to harass the wildlife. Which was extracted after he drew on a camel spider with a black magic marker and briefly had a hoax going around base that it was some sort of very dangerous new subspecies. (It's very difficult to dopesmack someone in Iraq from the midwestern U.S., by the way. fuzzyspacekitty managed it. Do not mess with her.) He didn't promise anything about household appliances...

Every once in a while, I just have to click on one of the news headlines at the top of my Gmail page. It's often the science ones, just because I have to see what the actual work is that the SF-influenced headline is about. Or, y'know, as near as one can tell from the article.

Today I couldn't resist clicking on "Researchers fire most powerful anti-matter beam ever." Precisely because, as brainiacfive noted, "It's not what it sounds like. It's called an accelerator. We live about twenty miles from one," all of which I knew, and I was curious to see if the experiment in question was there.

It wasn't, but the real gold mine is in the comments on the article. Particularly the ones arising from the declaration that the researchers "fired a positron bean." Their typo, not mine. Hilarity ensues.

Because, in about three steps, they come up with the funniest stuff that has nothing whatsoever to do with the OP.

Like this (which is Chock Full O'Spoilers for the Torchwood season 1 finale).

The whole thing is, perforce, narrated by Eric Idle in my head.

The results are, as usual, hilarious. Full splorfle warnings apply.

We're talking moron deaths here, people. We're talking the kind of death where people start seeing your ghost and telling the people from Biography that you were kind of transparent and your hand was frozen in the "facepalm" position.

(Because I'm too lazy to write my own content today. There's some brewing in my head, but it'll be a while before it achieves English.)

"Big O Burger."

Apparently they have a high degree of confidence in their product. *eyebrow*

Quite probably the best line ever written for Enterprise. Certainly the most memorable. Which is...kinda sad.

But not as sad as the fact that Hoshi loses her shirt about five minutes later for no dramatically defensible reason.

On a completely unrelated note, what is UP with the kamikaze wasps hell-bent on squeezing into the house around the air conditioners? This is not the Promised Land, guys! All you'll find in here are a couple of freaked-out humans with a flyswatter! Scout's honor! O.o

Yes, the Six Weeks Of Overscheduled Crazy are over, and this is what I'm posting about. *blush* Errr...check back when I've had more downtime...

Courtesy of tzikeh, who was kind enough to share her chat with basingstoke on the topic here. No spoilers, in case it needs to be said.

I'm watching all of this with great amusement, having yet to get around to, y'know, reading book 5...

tzikeh has dubbed cavalorn's post, and the comments building thereon, the "Fourth of JuLOL." The reason will immediately be apparent. :-D

More Bubbles goodness: Video clip on her official site of an early 1970s team-up with Danny Kaye that I'd heard of but never seen. High. LAR. Ious.

Solange really needs to stop being surprised that I speak French. I know it's hard to keep track of the language skills of a couple dozen singers, but seriously, mignon, we've had whole (albeit brief) conversations in it. :: pinches her cheeks ::

WTF moment of the day: Listening to the Slice of SciFi podcast, and encountering the statement (which seems to have come from either a press release or Joe Mallozzi's blog; the way they read their news isn't always totally clear) "McKay has had a secret crush on Sam for years." *blink* *blink* Secret??? From whom, the Amish?

Amazing how fast that happens. O_o

Still "meh" about my reading at the callback, but evidently "bombed" was indeed an inaccurate assessment, as I got cast. :-) I am, much to my amusement, in the segment with the vampires. And they don't even know me! Mind you, the other situations involve zombies, cannibals, etc., so it's not like anything would have been exactly inappropriate to my tastes. But still. As I'm not sure I previously mentioned, Horror Academy will be opening in October. They cast it a bit ahead of time, with rehearsals starting in late August.

Which is a good thing, as I also got cast in the one-act I auditioned for yesterday morning, The Stand In, running the four Thursdays in August at Gorilla Tango. (Located conveniently about 30 yards from the Blue Line stop at Western, which will come in mighty handy for getting home at a decent hour and hauling my butt out of bed and off to Office of Doom on Friday!) Apparently I give good sock puppet. Who knew? :-D (Eversoglad I was wearing a tank top with a sheer top over it, so I could approximate Jane's "Truth Snake" from Coupling, which remains the single funniest moment of physical comedy I have ever seen on television, without fear of wardrobe malfunction.)

That one gets a little cozy with World of Faeries, as the weekend of the festival (which is also the weekend of FoxFireFest in Elgin, so I'm still trying to figure out if I'll be able to do any of the opera performances at that %-} ) is when the first two full run-throughs in the theatre are scheduled. But the director says we can work it out, so it's all good.

So, for the next several months, I will be Melusine the lorelei, Xocko the sock puppet, and Lula the blood-bank employee in rapid succession. Sprinkled with excerpts of Countess Almaviva and possibly others to be announced. Buckle up!

But right now I need to be Val cleaning her house. Because if it doesn't start out that way, it's gonna be mighty scary mighty soon...

I think I'm most amazed that the originator's blog never crashed. And while I believe him when he says he picked the date at random, it wouldn't have surprised me if it had turned out to be some odd form of viral marketing for Fido. Which, incidentally, I really want to see.

Highlights of a day of fun viral silliness:

The first one I saw was tamarinne's, and I almost breezed right past it as I skimmed my flist. See, she's a Babe, and the words "meeting," "project," and "braaaains" actually made sense to me in the context of their next show.

ginmar had a whole saga going on over the course of the day, with references to everything from the original NotLD to Shaun of the Dead. finabair had zombie grasshoppers, shadowmaat wasn't sure whether it was a good or a bad thing to be on an island, and natmerc was rather hilariously fatalistic about it all. yahtzee63 took a romantic view of the development, while nique reminded us of the practicalities of the situation. And of course filkertom did what he does best.

My post was inspired largely by real life. At a couple different times, cicadas hitched rides into the building concealed in coworkers' clothing, and for a few minutes there the ensuing hysteria was almost at a level appropriate to a Zombiegeddon! leeflower riffed off this with an inspired bit of lunacy that had me picturing exploding zombies every time someone mentioned the cicadas landing on anyone.

Besides the zillions of links on the originator's blog and on Technorati, this one even made it onto Google News! (And really does sound like Fido!) It's the only actual BLITEOTW post there, but searching "zombies" also turned up this delightful cockeyed-Cinderella story about the first Pakistani horror movie. Which I now also want to see.

I see the originator already has a BLITEOTW 2008 graphic ready to go. Same time next year. Save me some brains!

Via shadowmaat and ivan23:

Unconventional Director Sets Shakespeare Play In Time, Place Shakespeare Intended.

I don't think they missed a single standard argument on either side, and they're all pitch-perfect. Comedy gold.

Via filkertom. Just in case everyone hasn't already seen it while I was off indulging in lots of pretend violence.

The Mouse House so asked for this one. They won't care, but they asked for it.

Solange just emailed this bit of trivia regarding next season's mainstage production.

Gaetano Donizetti to his librettist, Felice Romani, about L'Elisir d'amore:

"I am obliged to write an opera in fourteen days. I give you a week to do your share...But I warn you, we have a German prima donna, a tenor who stutters, a buffo with a voice like a goat, and a worthless French basso. Still, we must cover ourselves with glory."

And TV writers think (with perfect justification) that they have tight constraints...

susannetta has posted the sharpest and funniest rant about body image wackiness EVER. I thought about commenting with my usual "a size 6 when we were kids isn't the same as a 6 now" and expansions on why that makes things even more looneytunes, but decided it was mostly irrelevant and I would just enjoy and share instead.

So I'm sharing. Go read.

Shakespeare lolcats, via angevin2. Standard splorfle warnings apply.

[Sample from a 10-page packet faxed to me by the attorney we use in Montana, which also included several cartoons, a couple of eye-popping letters from debtors (with identifying information blacked out), and marketing materials for a guy out in California whose firm is officially called Attorneys Preferred Service but who advertises himself as "Jay Mason, the Leg Breaker." That last I actually already had in my attorney info files...]

( BILL TO BE PROPOSED TO THE MONTANA STATE LEGISLATURE TO REGULATE THE HUNTING AND HARVESTING OF ATTORNEYS )

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/05/07/srsly/

Hear, hear, kitty! Although I wish could take transit without leaving the house before 6 a.m.