An Ominous Portent?

I was walking to work this morning with my head lowered in abject submission, my eyes scanning the ground for change or bits of discarded plastic, as usual. Anyway, on the sidewalk I noticed a bit of movement and, looking closer, I saw a honey bee and a wasp locked in some sort of struggle.

They were grappling with each other face to face, each trying to sting the other, but in their positions, neither could flex their abdomen far enough to deliver the barb. They rolled on the concrete, buzzing angrily. They sort of reminded me of those pathetic fights you sometimes see in front of bars or hair salons, where inexperienced or out-of-shape combatants just roll around on the ground with each other, cursing and grunting.

So I watched for a few moments, thinking that the wasp would probably win this one, eventually. Then, the most bizarre thing happened... the wasp changed his (her? its?) position and picked up the honey bee and flew away with it, slowly and noisily like a helicopter airlifting a VW bug. It careened slowly into some ivy on a wall, then buzzed away into a clutch of small trees, its captor buzzing in protest. Is this normal? Is this the way nature works?

I never really thought about the sort of interactions that must go on between wasps and bees. They don't seem to intermingle and, until now, I had never seem them hostile with each other. I assumed they would maybe have some sort of kinship, as they are both in the business of causing me to yelp and become irrational.

But, moreover, does this incident perhaps have some sort of portent? You shall see a red sun in the west, or a great bird will descend from the sky, you will be met by a mysterious stranger from afar, you will see a flying wasp carrying a honeybee, etc.

I ate Chinese food the other night, and the fortune in my cookie said, "You will receive wise counsel from a friend." Somewhere, perhaps in Omaha or Florida or Chile or Space, someone opened a fortune that said "You will see a wasp fighting a bee, and then the wasp will fly away with the bee, and after posting about it on your dumbass blog, you will get herpes and run over" and then a friend of theirs walked up and gave them some wise counsel. This is the way nature works.

Thursday Sketchbook Rescue

Things Blurred Out On Google Maps

Diarrhea-ray cannon emplacements outside Moline

Ryan Seacrest's smooth-Laotian-boy stables

Enormous 'MATTEL' logo covering Antarctica

Entrance to Hell

Dick Cheney's '93 LeBaron

CineLatino: 12 Screens, All Features Dubbed or Subtitled

Giant vagina-shaped corn field in Oklahoma

Image of SpaceChrist Burned Into Peruvian Mountainside by Aliens

Visible edge of flat earth

The word 'FUCK' over Eastern Europe

Greenland

Mob Informant Island

Guy flipping off satellite

Entrance to tunnel complex linking all Hardee's locations

Secret Google Maps blurring facility

While I'm Drawing Things...

Here's a disturbing picture I drew of Ryan Seacrest:



If you've drawn a picture of Ryan Seacrest, I encourage you to email it to me at 'octopede [at] gmail-dot-com, and I will post it here.

This Blodging Thing is Difficult

So I haven't posted anything in a week. Sorry. I've been very busy with...whatever it is that I do. here's what happened last week:



PS: the last panel didn't actually happen.

More Reality Show Concepts I Will Sell to You

What is That? I'll Eat It.
Celebrity chef Hrald Cralwley roams under America's bleachers and in her couch cushions and eats what he finds.

Man vs. Self
Followed only by a camera crew and the possibility of a 10-minute evac to the closest Ramada Inn, outdoorsman Ronk Logsplitter must spend 7 days in the wild armed with only his stupidity and poor decision-making skills.

Clean This House!
Which brand of off-market cleaner will get this stain out? How long does it take to toothbrush out the grout in the master bath? Where the fuck is that one attachment for the vacuum, you know, the brush-dealie? All these answered, and more, in this four-hour-long, unedited program.

Iron Shemp
The nation's sad-sack Shemp impersonators battle it out, staying within the confines of this week's theme scenario (impersonating plumber during dowager's cotillion, installing acoustical foam during Prime minister's visit, etc).

Hostile Makeover
Fashion maven and delightfully bitchy gadabout Terence Van Zandt and his team brutally abduct slovenly patrons and force them to try on rack after rack of ill-fitting designer duds in a windowless, concrete room.

America's Next Shift Manager at the Airport Arby's (Concourse D)
Contestants compete in the fast-paced and sexy food service industry in a series of provoking tests to determine who will be...America's Next Shift Manager at the Airpot Arby's (Concourse D)

PunchLab 3000
Against a whirling backdrop of jump cuts and buzzing guitars, things are punched repeatedly: people, walls, rhododendrons, ladybugs, ice cream, fuel injection, VCRs, sheafs of paper, dogs, the floor, piles of Legos, the Magna Carta, etc.

Fart!
In this delightful Danish import filled with bright colors and zany xylophone music, contestants must truthfully answer questions about farting as posed by a celebrity panel: Have you every farted? Are you farting right now? Is this your fart?!

That Was My Kind of The Ropers episode
Step into yesteryear for a stroll through TV history as real people reflect on which 'The Ropers' shaped their lives the most.


Here's some other titles I'm still working on:

I'm Livin' It With David Faustino
BoreFactor
Smellin' Good
Pimp My Hang Glider
Dynamite Fishing and Impromptu Polemics with Dave Matthews
Project Scaffolding
So You Think You Can Matriculate?
The Biggest Douchebag
Survivor: The Celtic Thunder Concert
Jug Band
Who Wants to be Beaten to Death by a Bunch of Sixth Graders?
Junta
Do They Know It's Christmas?
Tori Spelling Island

Sunday Evening RAWK

So, uh, were you aware that, uh, Fugazi were the best rock band in the history of Western Civilization? I thought not:



PS: This is from 1991, people.

Very Stupid Post #2

PS: I did not create this.

A Few Crappy Ideas Forged While Drinking

Sure, I love the booze. It provides me with ideas, self-confidence, and gas. Here are a few involved concepts I've developed while at the bar or at home, alone, watching 'Mayberry RFD' and weeping into my chest.

Animal Crematorium/Park Service Barbecue Pit Cleaner

The idea is: you open a pet crematorium, preferably in a strip mall in a neighborhood with plenty of enfeebled old people with small, yippy, smelly dogs with skin conditions. Yes, those ones that bit you as a child. Marketing and branding should be very sentimental, lots of soft-focus images and script fonts and cloud backgrounds. On the side, you get a contract emptying and cleaning barbecue grills in your local town or prefecture. Instead of cremating pets, you just place barbeque remnants in Target urns and charge $1500 each. The actual dead pets just get thrown in the dumpster behind K-Mart or something. You figure it out. Win-win.

Hole-themed Restaurant

I've never been able to come up with a satisfying name for this restaurant concept, so feel free to suggest one. It's a fast food restaurant that serves hamburgers with holes in them. Not bagelburgers, mind you, just regular hamburgers with a big, inexplicable hole in the middle. The employees wear hats with holes in them, like a big 'O' upended vertically on the cranium. The restaurant's sign is in a similar shape, as are the dining tables. Seats: holes. Like toilet seats, sort of. No fries, only onion rings. The drink cups would likewise be extended toruses (tori?) with matching lids. Following the logic thus far, the straws would need to be solid cylinders of plastic.

Spherical Fast Food Meal

Following in the fast-food concept as above: I envision a giant sphere, deep-fried, perhaps the size of a bowling ball. The outermost, fried layer is the 'bun' layer. Biting into that, the intrepid diner then discovers, lurking beneath like some forbidden flower awaiting release of its intoxicating perfume, the ground beef layer. Sojourning onward we encounter the cheese layer, the sauce layer, the lettuce layer, etc, each progressively smaller and colder. At the center, your choice of Diet Mr. Pibb or a frosty delicious shake. The core of this should remain quite cold even after deep fat frying. The base price is $27.33 each.

I'll keep you posted when more ideas come to me.

Rejected Cable Shows

Chip Welyczko, Unlicensed Food Vendor

Can It Freeze?

Norway: Land of Fog and Wait, No - Sweden, Land of—Shit, No, It Is Norway

The Birds and the Bees and The Unger Twins

Growing Up Scotch-Irish

So You Think You Can Belch?

MacGuyver II (Starring Brian Dennehy)

How It's Filmed

Yards of Porn with Suzie Yards

CashRickshaw

Star Trek: Itchy Suits and Rooty Toots

Scott Baio is Not Breathing

MadMen: The Bodega Run By the Kwan Family, Several Blocks From The Agency and In the Early 1980s

Law & Order: Ice-T Rapping Incoherently For 43 Minutes

Inappropriate Games

Race Card

SimCamp

Gin and Juice Rummy

Chutes and Ladders and Sodomy

Candyland with Poison Inside

Nahtzee

Games Magazine: The Game

Naked Monopoly

Battleship Potemkin

Connect 4, Then Have Unprotected Sex

Scrabble: Kanji Edition

SimUnionBuster

Twister