Yes, it's been a long hiatus, but the site is back. I was neither slacking nor gallivanting. I was having a baby and taking care of her. She's a little more self-sufficient now, so I can alternate between cuddling her and the Internet. Check it out, she's gone from this
to this
in only a month. Crazy!
New content is on its way after the weekend, on Monday, unless there's some kind of federal holiday, which seems unlikely.
Due to some things and whatnot, this site is on vacation for a certain unspecified length of time. Sorry. Banditos! will be back soon with more lies, games, and words. Until then, here are a few older posts which people liked.
Touching Letters From Adorable Children
Harry Potter Has Many Feelings
Run and/or Gun (Finally playing TR: Anniversary, it's brilliant)
It's the Internet's only holiday, but we don't celebrate it here. This site is all lies anyway, so it would be redundant. To professional liars, April Fool's Day is amateur hour. I stayed home yesterday and deveined shrimp all day. I used a paring knife rather than a deveiner, while constantly yelling "April Fool's!" The shrimp thought it was hilarious. That's how a true professional fools it up, April-style.
Yes, I fall for April Fool's gags on occasion, not because I'm gullible, but because I trust other people. People who are obviously lying. Is that so wrong? Last year I saw a guy on the street with a cute dog, and asked if I could pet him. (The dog.) "Pet him? You can have him!" I got all the way to the corner before the extend-a-leash yanked me back to reality. April Fool's! Joke's on you, buddy, because in the short time I was holding your dog, I gave him worms.
Just clicking around yesterday, I saw a couple of good April Fool's jokes, including Gmail's Custom Time and Feminist Gamer's Pokémon ring. I like the sub-jokes in Gmail's joke and I really like the second photo in Feminist Gamer's piece. I've been playing a lot of Brawl and have learned to hate that chubby, cheerfully psychotic lightning mouse. Pika! Pika! Why won't he pika-die? Squirtle, he's a good sort. I'm on the fence about Charmander and the whole Char crew.
I can't believe I just wrote a sentence that began, "I'm on the fence about Charmander." I've gone beyond April Fool's into April Barely Coherent's.
I made an asparagus and mushroom risotto the other day, which is always a hit, but kind of boring to prepare. Asparagus and mushroom is my default setting for risotto, and risotto is my default setting for rice cooked in broth. Sometimes I raise it one level of tastiness to paella, and sometimes lower it to pilaf. Occasionally I trick the rice and make it into rice pudding, and it's all, "Hey, I thought I could only aspire to paella! What gives?" and I reply, "No. You are rice, but you can be pudding. Tell the others."
Coincidentally, I just found out about Cook Sister!, a great, tasty food blog by a South African expat in London, from her recipe for butternut squash and boerewors risotto. She explains that boerewors is a coil of sausage "made of several types of meat – usually a combination of beef, lamb and pork, but sometimes ostrich or game meat – combined with cubed pork fat (“spekvet”) and natural preservatives such as vinegar and spices (coriander seeds play a large part!)." You can order it online in the US. In DC, there was a place called the Cape Dutch Bakery, in Accokeek, MD, but it closed down a couple years ago. See, this is where the Banditos! food entries start to edge into food nostalgia. Rather than useful information, I provide you with the news that a convenient local grocery no longer exists. The proper mood when reading a Banditos! post should always be unfulfilled longing. Work on that.
The Cook Sister! boerewors risotto, which actually exists and is pictured here, looks like a great idea, even if I can't easily procure boerewors. But there are plenty of other sausages available in DC. Kielbasa, chorizo, Kenyan sausage, bloodwurst -- the important thing is to get some chunks of meat into my next risotto. I once had some German sausage with brain tissue in it and although flavor-wise it wasn't incredibly special, if you threw that into a risotto you'd have some hard core risotto. Risotto can be just a little too Parmesan-y, a little rice-y, you know? Risotto-y. I want to take risotto up one more level, beyond paella, and make it steak and mashed potatoes. It sounds crazy, but you know what else is crazy? Feeling unfulfilled longing for a South African sausage I've never tasted. And you know what? I'm doing that right now.
Marvin, the comic strip baby who remained the same size for 25 years, Tin Drum style, has started talking, as an anniversary treat sure to delight anyone who ever fantasized about text messaging with an infant. For everyone else, it's just creepy. The obvious question is, how can anyone tell it's 1337 speak unless it's written down? I like to think that Marvin makes clicky typing noises as he speaks each word, and before each sentence he makes a sound like a really annoying ring tone. Dick in a box? Too far?
The above link goes to The Comics Curmudgeon, a guy in Baltimore who manages to say something funny every single day about the newspaper comics, even the depressing ones like For Better or For Worse, or the ones like Gil Thorp which no one really understands. In fact, he excels at making the least funny comics perversely fascinating and hilarious. It's like slowing down to laugh at a highway accident where the car has twisted itself into a particularly witty shape.
Also, is Marvin unable to think in complete sentences anymore? It seems like that old story about how babies know the secrets of the universe until they're able to talk, when they start to forget. That seems unlikely. I've hung out with babies, and they're very ill-informed and credulous. At best, they have a certain low cunning, but I've never met a baby with a truly first-rate mind, much less an insightful theory about the universe. They're a little like Deepak Chopra. Or, alternatively, Deepak Chopra is just a rich, oddly unblinking, lanky baby.
Suicide Food features disturbing warped advertisements for meat products where the animals cheerfully exhort you to eat them. Ben from Seattle, who provides commentary, also has at least four other specialized blogs. The comments are fun but a bit masochistic because I'm pretty sure he's a vegetarian. Nowadays I only avoid certain types of meat (foie gras, overfished seafood, roadkill) but I was also a vegetarian for a couple of years and just thinking about meat used to make me feel ill. That kicks in after just a few months. Any type of meat cooked any way somehow becomes the most nauseating smell in the world. That doesn't happen with other foods. No one gives up carrots and suddenly gets all Little Albert about the color orange. "Ugh, carrots. Those grow in the ground, with the worms. What are you drinking, orange juice? Huuurrrgh!"
Turn OFF the sound on this video before playing. It's loud and even more annoying than the green title screens. It's the only video I could find of the experiment, which is sooo adorable.
Fun Fact: in 1920, a common child rearing practice was to bring all sorts of objects from the outside world to your baby, because it's never seen anything before. So at around six months old, you would show it everything in the world, listed alphabetically. Your house would have one aardvark, one anvil, one ampersand, someone with an astigmatism, an axe, etc. Now we just show babies picture books but back then parents' garages looked like Noah's Ark if God had been some kind of fucking moron who thought inanimate objects reproduced asexually.
Bent Objects are household items augmented with bent wires by this guy Terry in Indianapolis. It's weird and compelling even to someone like me who knows nothing about crafty type stuff. I really liked this matchbox scene, so I stole the image, but I'm willing to return it if threatened. This guy knows his way around a pair of wire cutters.
See how many discrete mental steps you take when looking at these things. I first notice the objects, then I start to personify them as my brain figures out what the wires represent. Then after a slight delay something usually clicks and I understand the action being performed in the scene, and what it means. For example, if it's a visual pun, I actually have to go through two steps before I "get it." I guess I'm either very methodical or not very bright. Let's say methodical.
Judge a Book by its Cover is a North Carolina librarian's guided tour of the worst book covers of all time. It includes pulp fiction paperbacks as well as modern works of suck, and even books that are actually good but have been assigned to the graphic designer of Sorority Scandal at Martian Wizard School. This cover of Billy Budd is going to really disappoint someone who expects to read about a guy towing a ship into harbor using only his wang.
On the other hand, Billy Budd starts out with a general description of the "Handsome Sailor," a type of guy often found around the docks of yesteryear. Melville then slips into first person and describes a particularly attractive African sailor he saw one time. The second paragraph gives more and more detail about just how hot this guy was, how everyone turned to look, as the narrator gets all worked up. The third paragraph is just, "To return." Then he continues with the actual story.
So Billy Budd has a bit of homoerotic humor in it already. But this cover should have been reserved for Salty McBoner's Lusty Tales of the Deck Heaved and I Slipped.
I just came back from answering the door . . . have I got a story to tell you! I should start at the beginning. OK, here goes. I heard a knocking at the door, and without thinking, I went to answer it. So far, so good, right? Well, there was a guy there with a clipboard, short, Hispanic, looked a little confused, but seemed nice enough. The guy asked me, “You want Comcast?” “What?” I replied. “Comcast. You want Comcast?” “Oh. No thank you. Goodbye,” I said, and closed the door.
I should explain that Comcast is the name of a local cable company. Cable is a wire that goes into your house and it's also a way to watch “America's Next Top Model” and some other shows. I have a different cable company already, and I didn't feel like switching today, which is why I didn't take him up on his offer. However, that's not to say that Comcast isn't a perfectly acceptable cable provider, although I hear they are awful.
It occurred to me that this story would be a good first entry for a blog, because it has everything. I think it also might make a good webcomic, or maybe I could work it into my reaction video to something I saw on YouTube. I don't want to say the words “feature film” at this point . . . actually, I guess I just did! I might as well also say the words “Antonio Banderas” and “Zack Galifianakis”. I'm saying them because they sound fun, and because I spent all those years figuring out how to spell them.
