I remembered almost at the last minute, luckily just after opening some champagne. Originally it was intended to celebrate tonight being Friday — the week's work done — and having old friends and family drop by to stay for a while. But we can lie and all pretend that something intentional was going on. My personal last-minute celebration is perfectly satisfactory, but I'm sure it's not terribly entertaining for the rest of you.In the past, my go-to solution would be Twitter: just scrape together a couple recurring gags and post them here. There's Shark Hitler, a shark with the killing power of Hitler, a nightmare worse than even Robert Shaw's drunken narration in Jaws. (Full disclosure: someone mentioned months later that there's a throwaway line in Futurama where Professor Farnsworth says, "Everyone's always in favor of saving Hitler's brain. But when you put it in the body of a great white shark, ooohh! Suddenly you've gone too far!" I completely forgot about this, and in fairness, so did about a dozen other people.) Then there's Dirk Hitler, the world's foremost secret agent, who looks just like Hitler, even though he's a completely open-minded guy without prejudices and with a commitment to dropping humanitarian aid out of his spacecraft to third-world citizens. It's sort of unsettling how much Hitler appears on my Twitter feed, but I'm just a scribe. I merely write down what the universe tells me. If Dirk Hitler wants to make sure that the children of Darfur get sick big-wheels and that amateur Hitlers get punched out on Halloween, so be it.
Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned Hitler. I could just as easily have mentioned the recurring series of tweets in which Stevie Nicks violently verbally abuses minority employees of hotel chains. Better yet, I could have pasted all of them here if Twitter weren't an insanely popular website used by millions of people that nevertheless has a total inability to retrieve tweets older than a month or search its own archives, assuming the archives even exist. God, I hate Twitter.
Despite all that, it's a pretty good night. Because of houseguests and other personal obligations (one of the allegedly unsinkable ships I work for is listing toward failure), it's likely that updates will be infrequent — if not nonexistent — for at least another week. Still, it's a nice time to celebrate. Two years ago, I not only didn't expect to still be doing this in two years' time, I fully expected to have given up in disgust or laziness within two months. Instead, I was delighted to find a great and slowly building audience of genuinely funny people — even if they get nauseated by my infrequent fits of maudlin sincerity about morally uplifting commercials made by people throwing big ups to Jesus. Thanks to the readers and to an outstanding group of lamentably infrequent contributors, there are now roughly 350 posts and hundreds of thousands of words completely wasted. What a fabulously flawed set of priorities. It's been a blast so far.
While you're here, enjoy another annual celebration:
