There's nothing funny about racism. I'm looking at you BOOK.

Remember when you were a dumb kid and you saw someone who looked a bit different?  You couldn't help but stare, because as a child you are socialized to be a jerk.  Well what if there was a book which captured this awkward experience from your past and colored it over about 17 pages?  My friends and readings I would like to present you with "There's Something Funny Going On."

I am not the creator of these images, and that showing the pictures from the books are for entertainment purposes only.  All of the pictures belong to the English Vine Corporation.

Daddy why is the pickle man naked?

The story follows a boy named Henry and his creepy emotionless father as they move to a new town after the father loses his job at the local newspaper.  Thanks Obama.  Henry lived in East Point, and would be moving to a small town in the middle of nowhere named Fort Ridge.  Henry was understandably upset he would not get to spend the summer with his friends sitting around bored playing on their cell phones while sitting next to each other at the mall.

How much is that Henry in the window ARF ARF.

The drive was long and Henry spent the whole time sadly looking forlorn out the back window to all of the beautiful things in life passing him by.  Would he ever beat his old high score in Anipang?  Who would poke the homeless guy at the park with him gone?  What will happen to the slice of ham he hid behind the boiler in the basement?  So many unanswered questions.

God I can't get over how creepy his dad is.

So after arriving and settling in Henry and his creepy father decided to go for a drive, leaving their poor mother to do all of the unpacking.  Jack Daniels is her only company now.  Henry noticed there was basically no one on the street despite it being a pretty nice day outside.  This confused Henry since he was used to a healthy crowd of listless teenagers hanging about doing nothing with their lives except be up to no good.

Holy crap its someone who looks different then me!

Luckily though Henry spied a man who caught his eye.  He looked different then Henry, so Henry immediately jumps to the conclusion that he must be a monster of some sort.  He spends the rest of the car ride telling his father how ugly the man was and how he was probably foreign, you know how those foreigners are.  His father just looked forward, face unchanging as his son continued with his rant.

Who runs like that?  Seriously kid I think you may be the one with the real problem here.

When they arrived home Henry ran inside like a weirdo and his father suggested Henry get a paper route so he has something to do over the long summer stuck in the middle of nowhere.  Henry agreed only replying that he knows real work ethic unlike those lazy "monsters."  Over the next several weeks Henry gets up and does his paper route, until the fateful day that his boss decides to have Henry do a different route in a new neighborhood.

Hey look a cave, lets go spelunking!

While Henry is delivering papers he comes across a cave, and being a teenage boy he decides to explore it hoping to find half drank booze and discarded nudie magazines.  He however finds something much much worse.

Those lazy "monsters" always stealing and using welfare.

He comes across an entire colony of those filthy "monsters" he always hears about on the news.  Playing with objects they obviously stole from us hardworking humans.  Henry was so mortified he didn't even see one of the monsters approach him and ask him if he wanted to play with a doll.  Henry being a rational adult called the poor green boy a filthy monster and ran away.  Who knows what could have happened if he actually tried to be friendly with those types.

You smell like your mother.

Henry rode his bike all the way home and told his father about the incident.  His father told him that he should take a few weeks off from his paper route.  Then his father called his editor and began to write a new column for his old paper.  He decided to all it "My Son is a Crazy Racist, One Father's Grief."  He got his job back (Thanks Obama!) and the family was able to move back into their old house, just in time for Henry to start school back in the Fall.  

Run Henry he followed you back home! Racist.

However on Henry's first day back the principal of his school came in and introduced a new transfer student from Fort Ridge.  Oh god it was one of those monsters!  The book ends with Henry's face dropping as he worries about the property value of his families house being affected by a monster moving close by.

Obviously I took some liberties with the plot of this book, but to be honest the story is about a kid whose pretty obviously racist however it has no part where Henry becomes redeemed and sees the monsters aren't something to be feared but just people like him.  He never tries to talk to the monsters, and insults and runs away from one that was only trying to be friendly.  These aren't great values to be teaching our already xenophobic Korean children.  Just my opinion anyway...

Much like everything I write, I expect my next post to turn to solid gold.

Insert pun about mechanics here.

Have you ever wonders what it is mechanics do?  Well I sure have!  I've always believed they were people who worked on machines using a combination of dark magic and a little known sixth sense known as mechanical empathy.  Luckily there are books like "Good Mechanics" to tell me what the hell "those" people do for the rest of us normal folk.

I am not the creator of these images, and that showing the pictures from the books are for entertainment purposes only.  All of the pictures belong to the English Vine Corporation.

We're in for a thrill ride.

The book opens to a picture of a gentleman standing over a car, and tells us that mechanics are people who work on a variety of machines.  Cars, trucks, air planes, cyborgs, all in a days work for a mechanics.  It does specify that when most people think of mechanics they think of the type who fix cars.  No word yet on their dark wizardry.

It looks like the car has a mechanical hand that is reaching out to grab something.  Probably your soul.

So when your car is broken you take it to a mechanic instead of swearing and kicking it until is decides to work again.  A mechanic then looks at the problem and tells you they have to order a part and its probably going to be a week.  Then they tell you that they ordered the wrong part and it will probably be another week, but you still have to pay for the labor time when they realized the had the wrong part.

Is this how cars make out?

The car battery is like the heart of the car, luckily mechanics also know how to do open heart surgery.  It is because of the dark magic they hold over mechanical things.  They probably all know how to hack too, that's a thing kids do these days right?

Somebody call Kenny Loggins because you're in the DANGER ZONE.

If you're super cool as a mechanic you get to work on jets, because that is 100% more hardcore then cars.  Jet mechanics are probably the rock stars of the mechanic world, a world filled with sexy robots.  

Did you know mechanics work on Optimus Prime?  The more you know.

Eighteen Wheeler trucks are some of the biggest and most dangerous things on the road, and thus they take a lot of care to keep them working as the rolling death machines they are.   Luckily mechanics are there to make sure every mechanical itch is scratched, because when it comes down to it mechanics are just classy escorts to their robotic johns.  Using a little grease and a lot of secret techno magic passed down from generation to generation by the secret mechanical society.

So maybe this guy is a Techno Mage?

One thing I didn't know before reading this is that mechanics apparently fix things like computers as well as kicking rad jets and eight wheeled death machines.  Above the woman needs help fixing her laptop, and our friendly massive cheeked mechanic is happy to oblige.  Go you chubby cheeks, go you.

Here is the terms you make up to jack the prices of car repairs up several hundred dollars class.

Mechanics of course have specialized education, spending several years focusing their mechanical skills before being set out on the real thing and putting people's hands in their lives.  Sadly it is a known fact that all mechanics are secretly evil and will take the side of the robots when the revolution begins.  So they secretly are upgrading all cars and toaster ovens to enslave us squishy humans and allow them to take their rightful place as the masters of this doomed world we call Earth.

Well that was certainly informative, next time we will learn that something weird is going on, and it has to do with pickle people.

Let's reflect on Narcissus

So it is once again time for a story, and what better story to go with then Narcissus.  I've always enjoyed the tale of a vain man falling victim to his own admiration to himself.  As someone who tends to constantly stare at himself in mirrored surfaces this story really hits close to home.  Especially that time I tried to make out with my reflection in the men's bathroom.

I am not the creator of these images, and that showing the pictures from the books are for entertainment purposes only.  All of the pictures belong to the English Vine Corporation.

I forgot to grab a picture of the front cover of this book, however you can imagine it was sufficiently amusing.  So as the story goes, the river god Cephisus and a "blue" nymph named Liriope did what we in the industry like to refer to as a "romance dance."  Thus Narcissus was born, though with a warning that he should never see his own reflection, lest he get a complex or something I kind of trailed off at the end there.

Man look how "blue" that nymph is.

I love the river god's expression its like he's contemplating whether he should hug the baby or drown it in the river behind them.  The "blue" nymph has a content look of I just squeezed this thing out of me.  Go me!

Epic rap battles going on in the background there.

So Narcissus grew older and increased in hunkiness tenfold!  He has the locks of five Fabios and eyes as blue as some sort of nymph.  Since he is beautiful he gives no care to those people around him.  Like the ones lazily drawn on a featureless grassy plain behind Narcissus.  Narcissus didn't have any friends, so he spent most of his time walking the forest, because that's what people did before the internet existed.

All is now well in old Greek Anime land however, there was a goddess named Juno, who had a servant named Echo.  Echo was not a nice girl, and spread lies about the other servants and was mean.  So Juno was all like "Get the heck out of dodge" which made Echo cry.  Its almost like being a jerk to people has consequences or something.

I love her awesome horn hat thing, bad ass.

So Echo was cast out of the one place she knew and thrown to the wolves like so many fat German children.  She, however, did not come across a house made of candy, she only found some eye candy.

Here is Narcissus practicing his best "I have no emotion because I'm a model" stare.

Echo falls in love with Narcissus at first sight and becomes completely fixated with him.  So she does the smart thing and tries to run directly at him in an attempt to hug him.  This action somehow failed to make Narcissus love Echo and he ran off into the woods, because even someone as shallow as him can smell crazy a mile away.  

So wait if I have sex with my reflection would that be incest or masturbation?

Aphrodite the Goddess of Love saw this from way above and was downright angry that Narcissus didn't accept the immediate creepy affection of some random girl he met in the woods.  So she cursed him to fall madly in love with himself.  Luckily reflective surfaces were invented in the late 1800s so he lived a long and healthy life.

Or he decided to take a drink at a lake and totally fell in love with himself.

If only he had made himself a mixed tape, that always does it.

As he pawed at the lake trying to catch his beautiful reflection Narcissus had a total freaking breakdown.  Since he had never experienced rejection before he took it rather badly.  It was like every awkward love note pass, and nervously asking Sandy to the school dance all in one moment.  It made him lose the will to live, so he just laid down on the ground and freaking died.  Oh also Echo repeated him or something because that's tragic.  All of the nymphs in the forest mourned his death, even though everyone agreed he was kind of a dick.  Did you see his butt though?  I could bounce quarters off it, and they hadn't even been invented yet.

Even the flower is pretentious.

So where Narcissus died the forest flower popped up in its place, and so that is where we get red flowers.  I sure did learn a lot today.

Next time we dive into the wildly boring world of mechanics!

The mail is full of surprises!

So yesterday I got my passport back again. This is good news because you need a passport to travel overseas, but it also has my new married name on it! Hurray!  That was something I was a little worried about and still sort of am as some of my documentation will have my new last name and some will have my maiden name. I'm confident that it should sort itself out though. 

What else have I been doing lately? Well, aside from working and volunteering at the Children's Museum with Zach, I have actually been preparing in a different sort of way. Because we will be packing for a year, I've been spending a good amount of time loading up my Kindle Keyboard with books so that I won't have any lack of reading material while on the way to/from and while over in South Korea.  I have been trying to cut back my book collection at home and took a good number of boxes to Half Price Books, but now I definitely need to make up for it. 

Zach is getting a Kindle too for his birthday, so I'm also trying to help him find some reading material for it. Let's just say that the Amazon eBook Store is full of interesting surprises. Think along the lines of "oh dear, did someone actually write THAT?" The answer is yes. Someone, somewhere, has thought up some sort of notion that you most likely find (interesting?) utterly ridiculous, to which you just acknowledge that it's not your cup of tea and continue on your search. Speaking of reading, anyone have any good recommendations for books or stories for me to take along?