Coffee runs out -


Checks bank balance -


Realizes he's broke -


Gets angry-




Feck!-


Mrs. McLargehuge defends recent purchases-


Battle ensues-


Anger simmers-


Things are thrown-



What do you mean, no money for groceries?-


Surely, you can't be serious!?!-


I am serious, and don't call me Shirley, or I'll put my big toe right up your ass...


I'm crushing your head!-


Sometimes I think you WANT to fail!-


No one, now let me make this perfectly clear, is to argue with anyone about money, until I blow this whistle!-


You HAVE to make sure I get the slips when you buy things!-


We have a whole mess of unresolved financial issues to deal with... -


Things calm down briefly-


But it doesn't last-







We declare a cease fire-


This has been a long week. Health insurance premium going up $350 a month, starting September 1st????


That can't be legal!?!... Crap. It is...


How will we get by?-


Kindergarten is going to cost us $300 a month starting September 1st... (I live in one of 14 districts, NATIONWIDE, that doesn't have public Kindergarten)


Don't have any investments-


So have to cancel health insurance plan-


Who wants to live forever?-


But, my friend, that doesn't help with the current crisis-


Who doesn't get paid this month?


I'll haggle with some of the bill collectors-


And we'll eat-


Then try to clean up the mess later-


Money sucks. Lack of money sucks even more.

Mmmmmmmmmmm. I made it from scratch (well, except for the ersatz chicken)


We served five today, a little less than normal, but it's been raining like hell for a week now.


Homemade rolls and phoney butter flavored spread


Cooked to perfection on the new stove


Served by my lovely Mother in Law


And me

Eat up!

At the end of the meal, feel free to pounce on me for being an Atheist cooking in an Adventist soup kitchen. One of our patrons did today, and we had a wonderful hour long discussion about faith. Mrs. McLargehuge tells me there is an "undercover" preacher making the rounds of local soup kitchens.

I think we found him today.

1

Senajit peered out of the new moon darkness at the small groups of pilgrims spread out around the bonfire. He knew better than to sleep on Pilgrimage Road during the darkest of nights of the month. The tales of The Thuggee were not mere stories told to frighten unruly children, but sinister men who strangled and robbed unwary pilgrims to please the goddess Kali. Even though the British hung four thousand Thuggee, imprisoned thousands more, and drove them from all but the darkest recesses of the countryside, their legacy had not died.

Senajit had robbed them earlier that day.

He scrambled up the low hill to the base of a great mango tree and dug a deep and narrow hole into which he placed the fist-sized emerald, wrapped in sheepskin and tied with a length of silver chain, before covering the hole with the soft earth.

Senajit then strung his remaining meager valuables, a single gold chain and a small purse of rupees, around his waist beneath the folds of his white shirt before slipping back down the hillside to side of Pilgrimage Road.

He stayed in the shadows on the periphery of the bonfire and lay back. He struggled to remain alert to every sound in the deep forest that protected Srisailam Temple. But, the relentless heat of the coming Monsoon season sapped his strength more than the long walk from his village outside Pondicherri. Senajit's eyes soon fluttered and the sound of distant prayers faded into ghostly echoes.

He awoke breathless; a garrote twisted tight around his neck and strange, cold hands tearing through his clothes.

Senajit struggled for a second then slumped dead.

“Leave,” she said calmly, “just go. A recruiting visit was here just three weeks ago and they had no success. The people here don’t much like the Union. Hell, it took me almost a year before any of them would even speak to me, and I didn’t try to razzle-dazzle them.” She quickly scanned the list and produced folders matching each name. “Here,” she said and slid them across the desk, “but they won’t go with you.”

The Union tries very hard to get all Supers to sign on and become active members, but some simply won’t. This is the first Village, and already The Union is constructing others. Either the mutation rate is rising among the Normals, or we’re getting better at ferreting them out. Either way, we need more space.

Union Dues: Off-White Lies

www.escapepod.org

This is not a drill. A GD thread has been sighted in the vicinity of The Lounge. Do not panic, but move in an orderly fashion towards the busses. Do not panic.

Updated. Rogue GD thread appears to be carring on a battle from it's original forum.



As the thread rampages through the Lounge, Admin has scrambled the Lounge Defense Force.





MechaMcLargehuge, approaches the rogue thread.



And drives it back from whence it game. (Collateral damage in the hundreds of millions)

Our crew is ready and eager to serve all your gardening needs. From the smallest patch of crabgrass to the largest formal garden, our crew is experienced in all manner of lawn care and landscaping.


Ian McLargehuge (The Muscle).


Meg McLargehuge (The Foreperson)


Mrs. McLargehuge (The brains)





Our workers are all CDL and Site License equipped and can work even the most demanding heavy equipment.


Don't hesistate, call today!

Warning - explicit language below.


Road House: The Citizen Kane of American Film

Patrick Swayze broke into the big time with his Golden Globe nominated performance in the family friendly smash Dirty Dancing. A film that aside from being my late grandmother's all-time favorite movie, won an Oscar for best original song, introduced Jennifer Grey to the world as more than that asshole Ferris Beuller's sister, and gave us our first real glimpse of Jerry Orbach playing against type. It is also a film I have never managed to sit through for longer than the opening credits. Contrapositively, I have watched all of Road House, including the credits, over 1000 times. In fact, I watch Road House whenever I bump into it at any time and any place, on cable TV.

Hot on the heels of Dirty Dancing came Steel Dawn, which if I remember correctly, was a futuristic sword and sorcery movie also starring Brion James. Steel Dawn went directly to cable/VHS.

Steel Dawn was also shot in 1987, but it languished on the shelves until Dirty Dancing made Swayze a star.

So there was no surprise that upon the big release of Road House there would be some controversy. The uproar sprung from the slick ad campaign that simply showed a nicely smiling full-size Patrick Swayze dressed in happy preppy upwardly mobile clothes in front of a sign for the film. See, all those nice middle aged folks and early teens swept off their feet by the pure and unadulterated romance of Dirty Dancing (starring that nice young man, Patrick Swayze) stormed the theaters on Road House's opening weekend where in the first ten minutes were treated to butt fucking, redneck whiskey-bottle dentistry, and the first of a seemingly endless series of mammoth bar brawls that probably would have brought the National Guard had they occurred in the real world.

At its heart, Road House is a classic western, but condenses all of the western stereotypes, sweeping vistas, evil men with thugs, pretty girls who alternate between life as punching bags or former punching bags of the villain, and rednecks, into a single setting, the saloon. Which, if you take more than two seconds to think about it, is a pretty cool way to carry the idea over into a modern setting. This isn't really anything new, John Carpenter did it with Assault on Precinct 13 (AKA Rio Bravo) and more recently John Singleton's Four Brothers (AKA The Sons of Katie Elder).

Road House is also a martial arts picture that borrows the souls of both TV series Kung Fu and Chuck Norris action picture Lone Wolf McQuade. Dalton is the lone hero (with a few disposable pals) who brings the might of his ass-kicking, Chuck Norris Action Jeans wearing, combination ballet dancing/Wing-Chun movie-fu fury to the wrongdoers of Mudfuck.

Road House is also a romance picture between Patrick Swayze and Sam Elliot (although all the non-anal sex occurs between Swayze and scrunchy-faced Kelly Lynch). Think of it as Brokeback Mountain without all those disturbing mature themes and adult situations to confuse you.

Road House is also a Zen Buddhist exercise, with Dalton being the very embodiment of compassion and wisdom. His character has a masters from NYU in Philosophy, but when asked what discipline, answers "Man's search for faith. That sort of shit …" Which is either a Zen koan, or proof that he graduated at the bottom of his class.

Road House also features David Keith's only single-line performance in his entire career. His only line of dialogue — "Whiskey's runnin' low."

It's a virtual tour de force. I wonder how much they paid him for that single line?

Meet Dalton (all the best western heroes have only one name) a professional bouncer who is so amazing he is sought out by the nouveau riche owner of country-western-blues-bland shithole, The Double Deuce, in Mudfuck, Alambama (or local equivalent) Frank Tilghman (Kevin Teague) to clean up his place. Teague, for all intents and purposes, is the weirdest man ever to play the saloon owner in need of a professional bouncer ever, and literally every scene where he gazes longingly at Dalton, appears that at any second his member will explode from his pants and attempt to insert itself into the hero.

In fact, this overt homoeroticism goes for just about every single male character in the movie. Even the blind guy (Jeff Healy) looks like he wants to spend ample hours smooching away the night with Patrick Swayze, or at least, since he's sightless, sniffing Dalton's crotch until his face falls off.

What Tilghman doesn't tell Dalton is that the town of Mudfuck is under the control of villainous businessman, and 4 foot nine inches of pure evil, Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara). So evil, in fact, that at the denouement of the film, it takes four point-blank blasts from four shotguns to bring him down.

Wesley runs the town, but no mention is made of how. He lives in a gigantic palatial mansion literally 30 feet from where Dalton rents a room above the barn of local corn liquor distiller Emmitt (Sunshine Parker filling in for the long dead Gabby Hayes). He explains to Dalton that he brought the Photomat to town, he brought the Mall to town, and he was in the process of bringing JC Penney to town too. How? No fucking idea. But it doesn't matter. Wesley could be a cattle rustler, mine owner, gunslinger, or any of the other typical black-hat-wearing monsters from any John Ford western.

Dalton gets to know the other oppressed townspeople too, Red the owner of the auto-parts store, and Pete Stroudenmire owner of the local Ford dealership. Who else lives in town? No idea, so they are all irrelevant, but we can assume from the relationship between Red, Tilghman, Emmitt, and Stroudenmire, that they too wish for some hero to rescue them from the miniscule clutches of Brad Wesley. Who knows, maybe he steals their mail or something…

Anyway, like in all western, romance, martial arts, Zen films, the other townspeople are completely unimportant unless they are standing around in the back of the Double Deuce as Dalton and his team of bounders beat the ever-loving shit out of Brad Wesley's goons.

Think of it as Shootout at the OK Corral. No one cared about anyone but the Dalton gang, Doc Holiday, or Wyatt Earp. No matter what the outcome, the townspeople would still get up the next day and do their regular townspeople-type jobs, eat dinner, have sex with the good ladywife, and fall asleep watching Carson. Any of the events between the principal players, while ostensibly about the rights of the masses, amount to little more than a my-penis-is-way-bigger-than-your-penis contest even if the filmmakers want you to think otherwise.

Like any good western too, Dalton has to suffer. His suffering comes in the form of Wade Garrett (Sam Elliot), another pro bouncer, and Dalton's Zen Master, who comes to visit and decides to stay. Think of him as the Charles Bronson character from The Magnificent Seven. He's rough and mean and can apparently consume an unlimited quantity of beer. Wade rides sidesaddle to Dalton's heroics yet still manages to be the lone voice of reason. That voice, of course, must be silenced, and it is for this reason and this reason alone that he is killed.

Road House offers the quintessential American belief in justice via extreme physical violence. Nowhere in the town of Mudfuck are there any law enforcement officers, politicians, or civic organizations. Those are far too complicated. Instead, it's better to smash the bad guy's knee and let him crawl home, than to bother with all this boring Law and Order bullshit. And in that respect, Road House is a perfect film in that it distills the entire American experience down into 90 scant minutes, has at least three gratuitous boobie shots, and reams of macho single-line dialogue that could have been written by chimpanzees. It's easy to understand, the characters are archetypes, and the plot is totally linear. There is even room for a little lingering guilt as Dalton has already killed another man before the film starts, and as mentioned for leverage by Brad Wesley, was absolved through a self-defense, defense in the regular (as far this film is concerned) law enforcement and judicial world. So it establishes early on that any killing of another man can be successfully avoided with the belief in self-defense. Compounding this idea is that when forced into a similar situation with Wesley's A-#1 hired good, Jimmy, Dalton, like in the events before the film tears out his throat then kills all of Wesley's guards (except the comic relief one) and goes mano-e-mano with the villain.

Road House is pure. It never makes any excuses for the absolute insanity spooling out across the screen. Characters are beaten to a pulp only to reappear five minutes nary a scratch, whole buildings are engulfed in massive arson fires but no one asks who started it, Wesley's goons drive a monster truck through the showroom of a Ford dealership, yet since there are no police in town to deal with it, goes unpunished until the end where the victims of Brad Wesley's fury finally turn the tables like the townspeople at the end of High Noon and rush to the aid of their hero. In this case, dispatching him like the Nazarine Brotherhood of The Omen — with shotguns.

The film is so over the top that by the end of the first hour that Brad Wesley could have turned into a giant fighting robot commanding an interplanetary army of radioactive space badgers, and it wouldn't have seemed all that far fetched. Consider the setting, everyone likes to go and get a few drinks, listen to white-boy blues, and hit on poofy haired women, right? In Road House the Double Deuce has a steady, and growing, clientele even though every single night ends in an enormous brawl. For all the money Tilghman has put into the place, it's still a shithole. The only difference is he has higher quality breakaway furniture, can afford to hire Keith David to utter one line "Whiskey's runnin' low" and the band doesn't have to sing behind a barrier of chicken wire. So even for all of Dalton's work, the place hasn't changed even an iota. That is in and of itself the very essence of Zen.

So ignore all the hoity-toity blathering about Oscar winners, complex foreign films, or films with both a conscience and at least one toe in reality, and bask in the awesomeness of Road House — The Citizen Kane of American film.

Hell, it's probably on cable right now!

the naybors poodddle. That dam dawg yep and sneps all nite lung! I cant' ven spleep alltho I tayk masiff amunts of Ambient and Bud Lite b4 bed tyme. I wuz so pistuff afert wachin Bill Oriley (BILL ORILEY WOO!!!) and him tawking about Keith "the comunmist" Olderman givin him SHIT about sum of thuh thinks he sais. Well I 4 1 cant' stannd thet littel pist-ant (HA!) on MSNRUNDMC, His hare is so fayke!

God Bless Gorge Busch! GOD BLES YOU Mistre PRESDENT!!!! (*I wood joyne the Army and fiyt and dye 4 U but I got a badas kase of anal sists)

Make a less stupid movie, for example set up your own digital video camera and film yourself climbing into the grizzly enclosure at the Franklin Park Zoo with a dead salmon dangling around your neck.

Explore interspecies sex, for example, shoveling fire ants into your tighty whities.

Defy gravity, tell gravity to "go fuck itself" and leap from a very high place into a very hard place, such as from the top of a redwood tree into a parking lot.

Sex threads bring Daimajin, and his stony vengeance, down from the mountain.

Please do not taunt the stone idols.



Big McLargehuge
DU Moderator

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Don't hesistate! Call today or visit our extensive website! The only thing standing between you and the health usually ascribed to residents of Mt. Olympus is your unhealthy skepticism.

when a great battle threatened to consume the village. Because she was pure of heart and survived the trek to wake me with prayers, I answered them.

(President Carter on TV)
President Carter: -high inflation. What is the solution?
(TV cuts to commercial for Luke's yard taking place in Roy's yard)
Jeff: You want the solution to inflation? Hi, friends. Marshall Lucky here for New Deal Used Cars, where we're lowering inflation not only by fighting high prices, not only by murdering high prices, but by blowing the living shit out of high prices. Yessir. Here's an example. It's a 1972 Cadillac Coupe DeVille, for sixty-two ninety-nine. That price is too high.
(shoots car)
Jeff: Yessir. Here's another one. It's a Lincoln Continental, Mark IV, 1973. It's loaded. It's got air conditioning. It's got a stereo. It's got white-wall radial tires. It's got power steering, power brakes, power seats, power windows. And a price that is just too high.
(shoots car)
Jeff: Yessir.
(Jim appears on car behind him in costume)
Jim: YAAAAAAHHHH.
Freddie: (on microphone) Look out, Marshall Lucky. It's High Prices.
Jeff: Take this, you dirty ol' High Prices.
("shoots" Jim, who puts on a very convincing act)
Jim: AHHHH. Ya got me Marshall. Ahhhhh...
Jeff: (shocked) Jesus Christ.
(winks at screen)
Jeff: Yessir, that's New Deal Used Cars... Now wait just a Goddamn minute. What the hell is this? Is this a 1974 Mercedes 450SL for *twenty-four thousand dollars*? That's too fucking high.
(blows up car with dynamite. Roy watches at home)
Roy: You sonova bitch.
Jeff: (laughs) Yessir. We blew the shit out of that over-priced motherfucker just the way we blow the shit out of *all* high prices, down here at New Deal Used Cars. So y'all come on down. Did you hear what I said? New Deal Used Cars. So y'all come on down. Did you hear what I said?
(TV cuts back to President)
President Carter: I have heard you, with unmistakable clarity...
Roy: You sonova bitch.
(kicks TV and electrocutes himself)

Five weeks ago I bought a pair of Gap Jeans for $38.50 with a gift certificate from my brother. Also included in the purchase were three tee shirts, one short sleeve, and two long-sleeve for a total of about $70. I should have known I was in for trouble when after a single wash (cold with hang dry) all three "XX Large" tee shirts are almost too small for Meg McLargehuge (She's 1). But I was really happy with the jeans, they fit well, and was in need of new pants as all my regular jeans have various wear holes and look raggedy. I have worn these jeans exactly four times and washed them three times.

I took the McLargehuges out for cheeseburgers today and wanted to look at graphics cards at Best Buy so we headed off to the Mall of New Hampshire in Manchester. During the meal at a chain restaurant named for a Rolling Stones song I escorted Ian McLargehuge to the bathroom. Upon my return to the booth and reseating I sat on Ian's foot. A few minutes later Ian dropped his lemonaide beside me on the seat. Luckily it didn't spill (they have kids cups).

As we left the restaurant and walked the entire mall I became aware that my ass cheeks felt wet. I assumed it was some residual lemonaide from Ian's cup. However I could detect no wetness. Strange, I thought, but decided that my mind was playing tricks upon me. As we approached the carousel in front of JC Penney I became aware of uproarious laughter behind me. In fact, I had noticed laughter during our entire trek from the restaurant to the carousel but passed it off as regular shoppers exhuberance.

As we arrived in JC Penny, Mrs. McLargehuge and Ian took the escalator to the second floor. I wheeled Meg's stroller to the elevator at the other end of the department store. It was at this time that the cool wet feeling seemed to spread across my entire posterior region. Again I checked for wetness and realized that my fingers rested not on wet fabric, but on completely bare skin.

The entire ass panel of my jeans had torn away and hung flapping behind my knees.

Lovely.

I wheeled the stroller into the elevator and hurried to the mens department of JC Penney to find a pair of replacement jeans, which cost $34 bucks. I have come to realize that keeping one's back to the entire shopping population of a major department store is impossible. No matter how I tried to conceal my bare cheeks, someone was always within line of sight.

I also learned that It is impossible to push a stroller using your ass cheeks in place of hands, which, had it worked would have protected the innocent eyes of the shoppers as I crossed the store AGAIN to reach the customer service desk. After running Meg into at least three displays of shirts I abandoned this plan to get to the customer service area and pay for the jeans I had hastily selected.

The clerk could barely contain her laughter as she paged Mrs. McLargehuge for me so she could stand with Meg while I slipped into the newly purchased jeans.