From the jump I always thought that Morgan Spurlock of 30 Days fame looked like Oz season three's Tobias Beecher. So of course I had to watch when Spurlock went to prison for 30 days.

And laughed a bit when he mention the fear of being shanked or raped.

Take it from Toby, Morgan. Fear Aryans and muscular, prematurely balding guys with Jesus tattoos on their biceps.

I will just put in a shameless plug for a friend of mine, who—along with some compatriots—has produced a magazine called Rock Mania. This first episode of which will hopefully be arriving this Friday. It's a labor of love put together by a bunch of people that know way too much about music.

I only helped out in the beginning (answering some publishing related questions) and the end (I got it ready for the printer when it went from 2-color to 4-color) so my part is minimal but I got a title on the masthead.

So there you go. My plug for Rock Mania magazine. Check it out if you're a music lover.

Or, hey, option two: Check it out if you want to join the Clint Howard Fan Club. That alone is a badge of pop culture knowledge right there.

Clint showed up on the William Shatner roast last week, incidentally. One of the few bright spots.

It's been raining a fair bit this evening. And by this evening I mean Thursday night, as it's currently after midnight on Friday.

So earlier in the evening most local television stations had weather report update thingies instead of the regularly scheduled programming.

Whatever.

They were taking calls from eyewitnesses around the state (good timekiller I suppose). And as they were talking to some random I thought how funny it would be to call up and have some serious story for the screener and then once I got on air just describe insane things flying past my window. Like cats and midgets and toupees.

But then I thought maybe that wasn't so funny. So I was mulling over scenarios in my head about what funny fake bit I could come up with.

Not that I would ever do it, mind you. But it took my mind off the fact that I was staring at a photo of my state with blobs of red, orange and green plastered over my city.

I wasn't paying attention until I realized a crank caller was on the phone with the station—I heard the tail end of a call where he said he believed the storm was the fault of a has-been national radio personality. And then immediately hung up. Much to the confusion of the newscasters who shortly realized it was a prank.

What the hell? The idiot couldn't come up with anything even remotely funny? I would be a little embarrassed for him, but if he thought that was clever then...

No.

Oh the backstory: Years ago I had a guestbook. People would write lovely things to me about my site and how much they adored it. It was awesome.

But I shut it down some time ago because I got tired of deleting V¡@GRA spam posts. Not only that, but a lot of nice people would post their email addresses not realizing that it would get harvested.

But still the page remains, no longer active, quietly whiling away the time and occasionally being discovered by random searchers.

Now a curious phenomenon came about when my guestbook was in its heyday. I mentioned the wellwishers. But there were also those who criticized my site. In particular the Frank Lloyd Wright part (which was a project I built in college and rescued after the professor who taught the class left the University).

I would get people—pseudo-intellectuals, mainly—that would nitpick about certain images being mislabeled. They were rather disappointed in me and felt it was their civic duty to chastise me publicly.

Now seeing as my planet is not some fucking Utopia but in fact a dictatorship, I'd delete them. Because elitist shit annoys the hell out of me. You wanna talk down to me? Bring it.

Anyway. Delete. Move on.

Until one particular day that some guy was so condescending and rude that I just had to rewrite his post a bit.

I did, however, leave his email address. Hey, he posted it. If he was so all-knowing he should have known better.

Now I can imagine that this guy wrote his little diatribe, smugly hit "submit" and sank back into his imitation Aeron chair in the depths of his parents' basement, satisfied that he had firmly put me in my place.

Fast forward to today—two years later—when he decided (I assume it's him) to Google his email address to see just how popular he is on the Information Superhighway. He found two listings.

One of them was my guestbook.

Which for the last two years has told him that he can bite me.

But I said it affectionately. That has to count for something.

I did my various things yesterday and got home around 5 PM or so. About 2 hours later I looked down at my arms and had a mini-heart attack because they looked all red and blotchy. I was terrified that I had contracted some sort of rash.

It's called a sunburn, Claire.

But it's a sunburn that's even weirder than a farmer's tan/sunburn. Like one side of my arms below the point where my t-shirt stopped is bright red. Everything else is whiter than natural.

I actually got it when I went out to lunch with my mom and my aunt and uncle, who were in from Illinois for the weekend. They came to visit my grandmother.

My grandma was thrilled to see them, even if she really had no idea who they were. But she got that they were family. And was happier than I'd seen her in some time.

But Grandma is definitely going downhill. And I guess I'm not sure how I'd feel if my mom didn't even recognize me. I may be wrong, but I think my aunt looked a little teary-eyed a few times. Alzheimer's is a nasty nasty creature.

Death Cab for Claire showed up near my work yesterday. I pulled up to a stoplight, looked at the vehicle in front of me, and BAM! Death Cab!

Now, some may think that it's difficult to believe that Death Cab is following me since it shows up in front of my car all the time, but I think it figures out where I'm going to be at a certain time and pops up so that I can see it.

Because if I looked in my rearview mirror I'd never recognize it.



If the photo's not clear, it's a disembodied corpse. On a truck window.

And it's menacing me. For the record: It lives half a block away and has been known to show up a few blocks away from my work very often.

Riddle me that.

A week ago today my great aunt died at age 92. Didn't know her very well, but she was a wonderful person and had a great sense of humor. She was also pretty blunt.

Her husband died years ago, about a week before they were going to celebrate their wedding anniversary. Aunt Jo decided that they would have a party to celebrate their anniversary and also celebrate her husband's life.

So she went to the bakery to get a sheet cake for the party. And the woman taking her order asked what writing she wanted on the cake. Aunt Jo just said she wanted it to be blank.

Which, you know, makes sense.

But the woman persisted. They had never made a blank cake for an anniversary party and she thought this one should be no exception. She wanted to know what to put on the cake. And still Aunt Jo said no. She wanted a blank cake.

After arguing back and forth about it for awhile, Aunt Jo relented and told her to write "Sorry you didn't make it, Dear."

The cake was blank.

I'm not the only one seeing three T's in Litttle Ed's, am I? There have been a few searches into here looking for it. So apparently my eyes weren't deceiving me.

Or there's a mass hallucination going on.

Awesome.

What a weird week. It just is. I have no cute anecdotes, no funny stories, no lucid rants. It's just been a weird week.

But the Sixth Annual Gardner Anvil Drop is now over. It may just have been the best one yet.

I completely missed the first anvil dropping because someone was jumping around in front of me. Which made me mad, but the third drop was the money shot. And it was kind of cool watching people with their cellphones in the air recording the drop. Maybe it'll show up on YouTube.

And there was more watermelon. The one time my cousin listens to me it has to do with fruit. He spent the event (or most of it) on the roof so I hung out with my aunt.

I can't wait for next year. Especially since I suggested having a meat raffle next year and there was some interest.

Alright, I should go update the site.

I hate Sundays.

I've been camped out all day. I refused to go anywhere in protest.

Ah well.

I got nothin'. Have a good night.

It's that time again. Gardner Hardware Anvil Drop time.


Exclusively at planetclaire.org: a shot of the Gardner Hardware anvil during the off-season. But in a little over a week—August 10th to be exact—it will be flung off the roof onto an unsuspecting car.

Although personally I like the watermelon better. They do more collateral damage.

And, having just gotten off of the phone with my inside source, I have been assured that there will be "lots and lots of watermelon" this year.

Sweet.

I think I'm going to try and convince him to do a meat raffle next year. Just plain raffles are so 2005.

It sounds like this will be the biggest anvil drop in some time. And I'm completely and utterly biased, but it's a fair piece of fun to watch.

Anyway, further details are here.

In other news, there's an ad for a sub shop with BBQ owners asking that this sub shop not have a BBQ sub. Or something. I wasn't really paying attention.

But I glanced at the screen and thought, "The hell?". I had to pause and rewind to make sure my eyes weren't going. One of the owners appears to have an apron on that says "LITTTLE ED'S". Now maybe the apron's creased weird, or maybe there is such a place, or maybe I'm going insane, but now it's going to drive me nuts.

For like five minutes.