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Hey guys, hoping I could get some input. My roommates and I are hosting a party in a couple of days. We've got a screen set up in the Rave Room, and we need things to show while we're in dance party mode. I was thinking action-oriented retro cartoons would be cool. The first thing that came to mind is Captain Planet. Any other suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

'Everywhere To Me' by Michelle Branch - and - 'Stranded' by Plumb

'Sexy Sadie' by the Beatles - and - 'Karma Police' by Radiohead


More?

Cartoon Network ran the episode of Futurama the other day where Fry spends 50 million dollars on one can of anchovies, and ever since then, I've been craving anchovies. Trouble is, I feel weird eating them plain, out of the can. I know you can use them in place of salt sometimes -- I do this when I make pasta sauce -- but I feel like the anchovy flavor gets lost, and I'd really like something that embraces the goodness.

Any suggestions? Much appreciated. Thanks!

All shall perish before the Mighty Dread Lord Cthulhu.

That is all.

I don't think I've ever posted in this section so I thought I might give it a go. This is a short story I threw together a few weeks ago - admittedly, not my best work, but there's a Crowley reference and some slightly Discordian themes so I thought it might interest. To be completely honest, I feel like the whole thing goes steadily down hill after the opening, but I'd love to hear some input.

They called him the Comedian. They had been doing this for years. He earned the name from his peers in elementary school when by the tender age of eight years old he had already mastered the art of comedic timing. In middle school he was voted funniest in his class two years running. They called him the Comedian, and he was destined for greatness.
   Then one day, the jokes stopped coming.
   "Nothing is funny," the Comedian announced to an astonished audience at the High School Talent Show, and promptly left the stage walked off stage.
   "What do you mean by saying that nothing is funny?" demanded Brian long after a bewildered audience had shuffled out the double doors of the auditorium and into a cool April twilight evening. Brian also played the snare, and at that time was dating the drum major, who did not play the drum at all but was a riot on the French horn, and her flamboyantly sparkle-tastic uniform made her the butt of a constant barrage of digs at football games, pretty though she was.
   "Nothing is funny."
   Brian stared at his friend of five years over a cup of black coffee, "Yeah, I caught that part, but why do you say?"
   "Because I can't surprise people."
   The Comedian became interested in stand-up at a young age after seeing Rodney Dangerfield in Back To School on television one idle afternoon. Soon after, he discovered the work of Andy Kaufman, George Burns and even Steve Wright, who was still popular at that time. As he grew older, he began to take an interest in Woody Allen as well - some have pointed to this discovery as the beginning of the end.
   "The key to making people laugh," he began to elaborate, "is catching them off guard. Take the chicken crossing the road, for example: most people wouldn't laugh at that joke because we all hear it a thousand times for some reason before we could even understand, but it's really quite brilliant. Think about it: Why did the chicken cross the road? You're expecting some sort of explanation, right? But all the chicken wants is to get to the other side. It's so obvious that you would never guess."
   "Right... So nothing is funny because people know all the punch lines? Why don't you get some new punch lines?"
   "Oh, that's not it at all. There's never a shortage of punch line. The problem is with punch lines themselves. Every time I tell a joke, people expect to laugh. I can never really surprise anybody; ergo.. nothing is funny."
   
   She stopped reading.
   "Tim, what's this?"
   "What's what?" he answered, turning toward where Jocelyn was reclined on the couch behind him, his arm dangling over the back of the chair.
   "The punctuation here... is this a period or an ellipsis?"
   "Let me see... oh, neither."
   "Neither?"
   "Neither."
   "It can't be neither. Either it's a period or an ellipsis. It has to be one or the other."
   "Why's that?" he asked nonchalantly as he meandered into the kitchen.
   "Because," she said a little louder, "Two periods is not punctuation. Nobody uses two periods."
   A pause.
   "I guess I invented it then," he called from the kitchen. His voice maintained its usual calm, but a close enough friend in her right state of mind might have caught a hint of glee at his roommate's frustration.
   "You can't just invent punctuation, Tim. Nobody is going to know what this means. I don't know what this means."
   "Sure they will. Isn't it obvious?"
   "No, it's not."
   Timothy walked out of the kitchen, a mug of wine held in his right hand, outward, as if to maintain his balance, although he had no difficulty walking. The vessel was an ancient looking thing, off white with a faded yellow sunflower painted on the side. He reclined on the other end of the couch.
   "It seems to me that the idea of two periods should be perfectly obvious: it's shorter than an ellipsis but less concise than a period. Like this.. see?"
   "Tim, you can't use two periods as punctuation."
   "Why not?"
   She sighed.
   "Well anyway, the bit at the end sounds contrived."
   "I thought so."
   Timothy took back his story back from Jocelyn and, setting down his wine on an old coffee table that had been carelessly discarded on the edge of someone's lawn with a sign that read "free", he began writing marks on his paper while his roommate returned her attention to her laptop. Timothy added where necessary and crossed out where necessary and mostly he crossed out until not very much was left. In fact, by the time their third roommate had burst through the door seeming a little excited and terribly out of breath, all that really remained of the feeble attempt at a short story was the original line, "They called him the comedian."
    Tim's inability to finish a story, however, was not a laughing matter. When his parents and siblings and casual acquaintances asked him what he intended to do when he finished his undergrad program with a degree in English Writing and he told them that he had no idea, he was perfectly serious, and when he muttered to nobody in particular that he hasn't a clue how he plans on paying next month's rent, he was serious about that too. In fact, Timothy had been perfectly serious about everything since the Peace Corps never got back to him and left him without a plan or experience, resulting in him moving back to his home town of Lancaster, where he found a little apartment on Orange Street with an old friend from high school.
   "I take everything I do seriously," he said to a disinterested customer at the Court where he was tending bar at the time, "And that's why I never finish my stories."
   "Why don't you finish your stories?"
   "Because I take them seriously. Too many writers will put down just about anything if they think they have a shot at getting published. Never mind the sanctity of the art, so many people are happy enough just to fill pages, but with what? Nobody is writing anything new anymore. That's why nobody reads anymore. Hemingway never just filled pages, and when Hemingway was still writing, people read."
   "Well, maybe you can be the next Hemingway."
   "Sure, maybe, but Hemingway had things to write about. What am I supposed to write about? Nobody writes stories entirely from scratch, and Lancaster isn't exactly the place to find inspiration."
   The man at the bar shrugged and drained off the rest of his whiskey sour, leaving his glass and a dollar bill on the bar for Timothy. The Court didn't get much bar business, although the servers might have done well enough – it was the kind of restaurant where people pay for the luxury of leaving the table a little bit hungry, a luxury afforded, at least on a regular basis, only to the county's wealthiest citizens.
   "Apparently nobody who can afford the place is under the age of fifty," he told his roommate a week after starting the job. It was not the sort of crowd that made any money for a bartender, although it did give him plenty of time to work on not writing.
   Timothy got along well enough with the kitchen staff at the Court that he could eat for free, but the cost of the entrees, even with his discount, was well out of his price range, and everything else about the restaurant matched. The floors were covered in expensive tile,  guests ate around beautifully hand-carved tables from plush leather chairs, and in the banquet room, right in front of the entrance so that it was the first thing people could see when they walked in, was
   "A life sized plastic cow?!" Jocelyn exclaimed.
   Timothy nodded, "A plastic cow."
   "Why would he do that?"
   "To tell you the truth, I have no idea. I have no idea about a lot of the things that man does, and I am convinced that he is either trying to run his business into the ground or himself into debt.
   "But.. a plastic cow? I don't believe it." Then, tilting her head a little in her own peculiar way, "Do you know what Greg has been up to?"
   Greg was attending Franklin & Marshall and needed a place to stay when Tim and Jocelyn had just moved in and immediately converted the study in their little apartment to a third bedroom that would hardly have served as a closet for one of the Court's regulars. The small space suited Greg just fine, however, and the extra split in rent suited Tim and Jocelyn.
   "What do you mean?"
   "I never see him anymore. He's always either locked in his room or out at really weird hours."
   "Oh, yeah. I'm not sure. I think he's been reading Crowley."
   "What?"
   "Aleister Crowley."
   "Yes, but I don't.. I don't know who that is or why it has anything to do with our roommate."
   "He had a religion based on the free will, promoted the practice of magic and all that. I think Greg mentioned something about Crowley's Illuminati group. Maybe he's joined... They're a shady bunch."
   "Illuminati?"
   Timothy was pouring himself another glass of wine. "Yeah, you know, the Illuminati. They infiltrate the media and governments and things and try to subtly bend the world to their whim."
   "...That's crazy."
   "They would probably say the same thing about you."
   "Really?"
   "I don't know."
   As strange as it seemed, the cow turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
None of the employees ever found out where it came from. A wedding rehearsal dinner had just arrived for their six o'clock reservation one evening and the hostess was leading them toward the banquet room.   Despite the beautiful furnishings, she had seated the room dozens of times, and only in response to the hushed whispers of the bride's family did she turn to face the source of her disbelief, and there it was, a brown, plastic cow, udder and all.
"Why is there a cow in the banquet room?" she asked Dave, the owner.
"It's an hors d'ouvres table," he said, as if this were the most natural thing in the world.
"An hors.. there's a cow in the banquet room!"
"It adds character."
And it did. Lest the banquet room were not enough, references to the cow began cropping up all over the restaurant. Photographs were taken, apparently professionally, and hung on walls alongside paintings by local artists. The little hotel across the street, another one of Dave's investments, named one of its finest suites the Brown Cow, and before long the gift shop was selling memorabilia.
"I hate that cow."
The beast was a miracle.
Timothy was working the bar one evening when an acquaintance from high school stopped in to inquire about a job. The standard procedure was to give the man an application and tell him where to drop it off, but Timothy knew this person and he could not remember having any particular grudge against him, so he gave the man the best advice he could.
"You don't want to work here."
"What do you mean, man? The people here make great money. The checks are high and the pace is slow, it's perfect."
"Yeah, you don't understand. Things are going down hill fast. Profit on food isn't that great, and they're not selling much alcohol – believe me, I know. The kitchen is overstaffed, and the only people on the floor whose jobs are safe right now are mine and possibly the hostess's. Trust me, this isn't where you want to be."
Just then, a frantic looking young waitress whose job was not safe ran toward the bar.
"Tim! Tim, you have to help! The cow fell!"
"What? How did the cow fall?"
"He just.. I don't know, he fell. We had the appetizers set up for the chamber of commerce banquet and people were walking around and I guess somebody must have bumped him the wrong way or something and he fell. I don't know what to do! There are appetizers all over the place and he's a lot heavier than he looks."
"It's a she."
"Sorry?"
"It's a she. Cows are girls."
   Of course the whole fiasco was not as devastating as the waitress had imagined. By the time she and Timothy got back to the banquet room, a couple of the men had lifted the cow back on to its legs, and the overstaffed kitchen was already busy replacing the appetizers, and somehow, as crazy as it seemed, Dave seemed for once to know what he was doing. The restaurant was able to recover gracefully from the incident, which provided some entertainment for that evening's customers, and the infamous creature became a subject of interest for all sorts of local gossip. People would stop in just to see the rustic cow situated in front of a set of eight-thousand-dollar drapes and end up making reservations, and the bar was busier than ever. It was a miracle.
   "You're fired."
   "Whoa. What? Why?"
   "Because, Tim, you're too slow. I'm sorry, but with you on, we would need a second person to handle the business, and it just doesn't make any sense financially. There are plenty of people around with bartender training who could probably handle Saturday nights by themselves. I've been training someone during your nights off and I think he's ready to take over. There's just no way I can keep you on."
   Timothy shot the cow a menacing glance on his way out the door.
   Ordinarily he would have caught a bus back to his apartment, but he decided that evening that the air would do him good. The following day was First Friday, when all of the art galleries opened up for a night of exhibits followed by some of the strangest parties he had ever seen when he used to go to them during his first summer after high school. He had been able to finish his shift that night, and the sky was long dark, illuminated only by the sparse lights of the city and by a dim red-yellow light off in the distance, toward his apartment. As he walked closer to the light, he found that it wasn't close to his apartment. Sprinting the final block or two separating him from his home, Timothy soon found that the faint light was his apartment. The fire engine was just on its way, and smoke was still pouring forth from the window.
   Timothy sighed and walked back up the street toward a coffee shop where he knew that he could go to not write.

I noticed people having some trouble with free picture hosts and the like, and since I have a lot of unused bandwidth and storage space on my server, I opened up an account for pd.com members.

server : forget.the-aristotelian-telescope.com

account name : forget@the-aristotelian-telescope.com
password : asdfqwerrewqfdsa

Feel free to post pics or pages or whatever, just try to keep it somewhat organized and please nothing too huge.

This might be a silly place to do this, but I guess the Discordian community is bound to have interesting taste in music, right? Anyway, I'm throwing a release party for our campus literary magazine, and the president is taking care of what to play in the background while we're doing readings, so I'm covering the after party mix. I'm trying to keep it semi-indie but most of the music I listen to isn't that danceable, so I'm thinking like,
Spoon - Don't You Evah
Kooks - Naive
Gorillaz - Feel Good Inc
Lily Allen - Smile
Gnarls Barkley - Crazy
Liars - Houseclouds
Maybe Aesop Rock
Deltron 3030
etc.

If anybody has any suggestions, I would love to hear them.

So, I am curious what this group's thoughts are on the Discordian calendar, or I suppose I should say Discordian calendars since I am sure there are multiple versions floating around. Personally, I like the idea of using five seasons and no months, although I might come up with a new system of counting years. Still, the whole thing does seem like it could be considered cliché.