Sitting quietly in the backyard of an ordinary suburban home, surrounded by the pickett fences of similarly ordinary suburban homes — an anachronism. A large black cauldron, bubbling from the heat of the fire beneath it. He stands over the cauldron, stirring and stirring. Magical ingredients are mixed in one at a time.

Eye of newt,
Mandrake root,
A dead man’s boot.

Unfazed by the heat, he stirs the steaming mix while muttering dark, mystical incantations. His magic, however, was directed at no one in particular. His only purpose is to offend the neighbors with the brew’s foul odor.

(vector_black phoneme appreciation)

I’m now back following a series of ultra fun computer related problems. I’m sure I’ll bore all of you (I like to pretend somebody still reads this site) with all the juicy details at some point in the future.

In the mean time, I’ve recently uploaded dorkclub.com’s most timely review ever: my review of Rogue Squadron 3: Rebel Strike. Even Gamespy just put up their review of the game this morning. And I didn’t even get paid for this.

While I’m being so uncharacteristically productive, I think I’ll go review all five Marathon games. While side talkin. The future’s looking bright.

She was like any other kitten, except for her secret life.

That approach will have taken on (willan on-take) a new importance by the time you have read it (willan on-read). Beware of clause changes, though, as your lawyer will seize upon (wioll seizen upon-when) things like that. Little problems with the theory, such as That Which Is (Whichen retro-Am), can be worked around (by-worken willan on-around).
*My thanks to Mr. Adams for his kindly assistance in grammar correction for Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional case conjugation.

But the point of it all is her — the kitten. It’s for her sake that we have created as much as we have.

(vector_black кошка/котён appreciation)

Unbeknownst to their colleagues, the behaviourist and the cognitive psychologist were actually good friends

No, I don’t have the tools necessary to open the door. I’m sorry. It’s not like you need anything special to open the door, either. No torches, explosives, or code-breakers. Just a pair of hands (even just one would do, really), and a Mk. I Brain. In fact, forget the pre-frontal cortex; if your Reptillian and Old Mammalian brains got together, they could probably manage just fine.

But, as I said, I don’t have the tools necessary to open the door. You’ll have to do it for me, thank you very much.

(vector_black Carolingian appreciation)

Laughing, because it’s a book about everything.

Secretly, the professor hopes you won’t write about the assigned essay topic and will write something else brilliant and original. The essay prompt is a ruse, you see. Every page you turn in that delivers coherent, on-topic commentary disappoints, but doesn’t surprise him. Yet, he reads on, hoping that you’ve hidden something at the end. And when it’s not there, he sighs and assigns the next topic.

Hoping you will create!

(vector_black b3wbz appreciation)

I guess I get the phrase “dumber than a soup sandwich.” Its meaning is pretty transparent: it would be dumb to attempt making a sandwich out of soup, and anything dumber than that must be TRULY dumb.

But what the hell is “dumber than a box of hammers” all about? Am I meant to postulate that hammers have a low IQ? Hello, phrase inventors, hammers do not have brains. It goes without saying that even one of them would have the maximum amount of stupidity possible. I’m not sure how having multiple instances of infinite stupidity sitting around in a box is any more effective than one instance of it.

I also take issue with “one fry short of a happy meal.” As though a person could honestly assess their sack of fatty foods and, in doing so, notice the lack of that one, solitary fry. As if, in perceiving the lack of that one fry, they would say to themselves, “Well that’s just crazy!” Perhaps while slapping their right thigh with their right hand.

I just can’t envision that.

Come to think of it, maybe we should amend that soup sandwich one to “dumber than an attempt at making a soup sandwich.”

Because if you think about it, managing to do something as impossibly stupid as the creation of a soup sandwich would be fucking brilliant.

INPUT: string “dorkclub”
OUTPUT: ?

Will you help me find a solution to the problem of heating an unreasonably cold lunch? Assume, for a moment, that we are in a restaurant, and that the conventional or immediately apparent means will not work. I would imagine you already have a plan in mind (there is one solution that’s fairly obvious, after all), but can you make it work according the the precepts of Nietzsche? Aristotelian logic? What about Bayesian logic?

Would your solution be acceptable when viewed through the eyes of Schrodinger’s cat? Through the eyes of a hardline Behaviorist? Your own eyes?

I need your help because I can’t do it on my own. My own solutions either violate the basic precepts of our conscious reality or are grossly offensive to my neighbors. Be flexible, for I am greatly interested in what you have to say.

(vector_black onomatopoeia appreciation)

On Sunday my @dorkclub.com e-mail address recieved sixty-four pieces of spam. Yesterday it recieved seventy-one. Today? Forty-one!

Seriously, what the hell?

When I was in the fourth grade, my circle of friends devised a means of cussing without teachers, parents, or any other form of those meddling adults knowing we were doing so. Our most used, and most clever, at least by our ten-year-old standards, newly invented slang was “ballwall.” It meant bitch. It was also a shinning example of elementary school social commentary.

Our elementary school – Alamo Elementary, situated several blocks from Orchard Elementary, both on Orchard Street – had recently installed a ball wall on its 4-6 playground. All the students on the K-3 playground were jealous, I’m sure. A ball wall, for those of you who didn’t have the opportunity to attend a more privileged elementary school, is a massive concrete wall positioned in the exact center of an equally massive concrete slab with the intention that students will bounce bright red foursquare balls against its surface. A ball wall is also ridiculously expensive.

So expensive, in fact, that Alamo Elementary, still desperately trying to pay off its bleeding-edge computer lab, had to force each and every grade level to run its own fund raising event. In shifts. All year. Seven grade levels divided over 36 weeks meant we would need to raise money for our ball wall, representing the latest in things-you-can-bounce-a-ball-against technology, five times over the course of the school year. The sixth graders, being the most mature and well-developed species to dwell within the halls of Alamo Elementary, would need to pick up the slack and run six fund raising events during the year. Our parent’s employers, as well as our neighborhoods, were thrilled.

Needles to say, we hated that wall. With a passion. With vigor. With hatred. As much fun as hurling a plastic sphere against its surface was, it was not worth leaving our homes five Saturdays out of the year to try to bum money off our neighbors. Every other student at our school agreed. We would have each jumped at the chance to toss our principal, the spherical Miss Busher, at the ball wall to see if she would bounce.

Seven weeks into the school year and it was the sixth grader’s turn to bring funding to our under-funded Californian school. The student who earned the most money would receive a radical Vacaville police bike helmet. Stay safe in style!

At lunch on the Monday of that week, immediately following our weekly assembly at which our obese principal had done her best to motivate the sixth grade class to sell as many cheap overpriced chocolates as possible, a small group of sixth graders saw themselves sit down opposite my friends and me. Sixth graders. At our table. Tubular.

“Dude, I hate Miss Busher,” one sixth grader said to the other. It was impossible not to hear, as the rest of us sat quietly in awe of our seniors.

“Yeah, she’s a bitch.” I glanced to my right. Those words had come from one of us. Ryan Ferguson, a lowly fourth grader, had just inserted himself within a sixth grade conversation.

“A real ballwall,” I added, smiling with my witty comment. Ryan glared at me – a look of intense disgust and disappointment.

“A what?” asked the other sixth grader.

“Miss Busher’s a fat fucking bitch,” I declared.

The two upperclassmen nodded in agreement. “Cool” was all they had to say.

Ryan, the two sixth graders, and I continued eating our lunches in silence.