The Goat Men Of The Greater Panhandle Ride Again!

SO Some-where along the line, after a brief vacation with extended family, a pair of nights spent in close quarters with derby folk helping the skaters in our new league get through assessments, an evening of wall climbing, and then a weekend derby double header, most of which was spent screaming my lungs out and hugging all the old friends in our old derby league-- and I am not exaggerating when I describe these in dozens-- and finally a day off in celebration of the Wifey's birthday, I became the ONLY PERSON IN THE WHOLE ENTIRE EXTENDED GROUP to have come down with a head cold.

Normally, something would have been going around and someone or other would have just gotten over it, but nope-- not this time. This time I had a fitful time getting to sleep Monday night, during which I interpreted my intermittent coughing fits as the side effects of cheering myself stupid at the derby. It wasn't until my nose started stuffing up, somewhere around one thirty or two in the morning, that I realized I was legitimately sick.

So I spent the following day trying to convince myself that I was no longer sick, which almost worked, until shortly after lunch-- more chili dogs-- when my sinus passages took on a sudden and troubling resemblance to an LA freeway. Today I am feeling much better, but a lingering of the symptoms reminds me that I might not be entirely over the cold, so I decided to have an egg salad sandwich.

Hey, listen: it doesn't HAVE to make sense to you. It made enough sense for me to boil three brown eggs (cage free, I'll have you know), chop about a tablespoon's worth of shallot, throw in about an eighth of a cup of dill pickle relish, add mayo, three kinds of mustard (yellow, deli brown, dijon, & Chinese prepared), salt and pepper to taste (or, in my case, substantially beyond), slap the mixture between two slices of white bread (with both white and yellow American cheese) and grill the thing silly. This, as you might have guessed by the photo above, required the use of a knife and fork, but was totally worth the concession to etiquette in order to consume it.


The film of the day is not MST3K, in any of its permutations.

Not that I am against or dislike MST3K, or the Satellite of Love, Joel and the Bots, Mike and the Bots, the Doc or TV's Frank or any of the lot. Its' just that, well, I'm done.

The Wifey, for reasons passing understanding, decided not too long ago that she wanted to give this stuff a spin, having either missed out on it or rejected it out of hand back when it was originally on Comedy Central (originally The Comedy Channel, but I'm just not going there right now). Her research led her to the episode wherein they took on the notorious stinker Manos: Hands of Fate. This was, according to her findings, the episode consistently rated best by the powers that be.

This is largely because Manos is a terrible, horrible, stinking turd of a movie. It was made on a bet-- and the bad kind of bet, too, not "I bet YOU can't make a movie!" but "Hey, I bet you I can make a movie!"-- by a guy whose obsessions apparently included lingerie sand wrestling, unilateral polygamy, half-man half-goat creatures with chronic arthritis being forced to do menial labor, and the long term effects of low-level narcissistic megalomania in west Texas.

Wait a minute. I think I just described Dan Jenkins.*

Anyways. I think my favorite part of the movie was the five hundred thousandth time the evil meanie in the movie held his black cape out just so we could see the bright red hand prints emblazoned three feet across it on either side. These, we are left to conclude, must be the prints of the manos of the title, which, one may assume, are the purported hands of fate. It's my favorite moment because it's one of the few that doesn't make me want to scream out loud "WHY THE @#$% AM I WATCHING THIS!?!?" (Really, 'cause it's just a guy wearing a cape by that point.) When you look at it from a production standpoint, it's kind of incredible for a film shot outside of El Paso with a camera with no sound that only shot 32 seconds of film at a time with actors from the local theater group and a director who had ABSOLUTELY NO @#$%ING IDEA WHAT HE WAS DOING.

But when in considering it as a film viewing experience, one may only conclude OH MY GOD! WHAT KIND OF A SADISTIC, MEGALOMANIACAL CREEP WANTS ME TO WATCH THIS INTERMINABLE BULLSHIT!?!

Which brings me around to why I am kind of done with MST3K. It's not that I don't like the series-- like I said above, I have nothing but love for the guys aboard the SOL (think about that for a moment) and their alleged tormentors-- nor that I don't see the entertainment value in making smart over old sci-fi movies, industrial shorts, and old PSA bits. It's more that I am reminded, or rather was reminded, of the kind of mean-spirited bastards who insisted to me back in my college days that I HAD to see this stuff, describing it as "Like going to the movies with a bunch of assholes!" (Gleefully, like that was a good thing.) And where the central gag here is really, really funny and totally right in my wheel house as a running gag (repeating the flick's title over and over again as there is, for the better two thirds of the movie, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to make any fun of whatsoever, and this culminating in two of the robot characters breaking down in tears over the impossibility of making anything useful out of this incredibly, impossibly stupidly vapid material), the fact remains that the reason this is continually held up as the paragon of MST3K virtue is the fact that the film itself is really, really awful.

Such things should not be judged, in my opinion, by degree of difficulty.

So I'm just kind of done. Not that I will never watch MST3K again. I've seen plenty, and I could well see some more. Just not the crappy one all the assholes tell me to.

*Just kidding. That would be EAST Texas.