The Everlasting Bog-Stomper

It's December! And as I type, the world outside is in the midst of a deep freeze the likes of which hasn't been seen since maybe last March. It's cold. That's what I'm getting at. Because it's December, and at least in the Northern Hemisphere (which is the greatest hemisphere, let's be honest), that means winter is coming. People are wandering about, buying lots of tacky shit and ignoring the individuals standing outside every shopping center they visit, ringing their tiny bells and pretending to be civil as they give a hearty nod and utter a cheerful seasonal greeting to the masses that swarm by them hour after hour, those penny-pinching bastards who refuse to deposit any loose change into the bright red buckets that they couldn't possibly avoid. They see the buckets. The bell-ringers know they see the buckets.

And yet they keep passing by, often attempting to avoid eye contact with the frost-bitten man or woman standing by the bright red bucket, ringing their tiny bell, because if they meet the chilled volunteer's wide, hopeful eyes, the guilt will constrict their hearts in its icy grip, and they might feel a little bad for a minute or two. At least until they find that Pocket Fisherman their booze-swilling great uncle wants for Christmas. Sure, he said he didn't want the Pocket Fisherman, and he insists that he utterly despises fishing and will lay waste to the unwary member of his brain-dead family that dares to present him with such a hideous and poorly-thought-out gift, but that's just reverse psychology.

Nobody who regularly staggers around his front lawn, stinking of Thunderbird and screaming red-faced at the heavens that he can't bear to even watch a fishing program ever since his daddy was devoured by a terrifying man-sized catfish before his very eyes at the old fishin' hole back in 1947 as he tears out handfuls of his prize-winning fescue and urinates freely in his antique yellowed briefs, just waiting for the cops to show up and drag him away could possibly be serious about the whole Pocket Fisherman thing.

In other news, somebody sent me an email telling me that my Schlock Corridor series was a rip-off of a series of articles found on Badass Digest written under the same name. He (or she) noted that I linked to one of these articles in a post last year that detailed the movie Possession, and that I deliberately lifted the concept and name from this much better (and much better known) website. In short, I've been called a fraud.

Honestly, I didn't remember those articles, at least not consciously, and the identical branding of my terribly written blog posts was entirely inadvertent. I was originally planning to name my series Schlock Treatment, as a stunning homage to the similarly-named 1981 film from Richard O'Brien that I enjoy a great deal, but in the end I thought the name Schlock Corridor, being an homage to Samuel Fuller's 1963 masterpiece Shock Corridor, simply sounded better.

I'm not changing the names of the previous articles on my blog, and if I decide to resurrect the series in the future, I'll use the exact same fucking name because that's just how things are done here at The Book Of Lies, and hardly anybody reads this terrible blog anyway except for you, e-mail dissenter (who demanded I keep their email address secret if I mentioned this business in a blog post because they're a gigantic pussy), so it doesn't really matter.

So, um... I have a new podcast for youse guys (and gals, I guess), so I should probably get to that. In the latest installment of Go Fuck Yourself, You Smart-Ass Cunt Whose Email Address I Refuse To Mention Because I Respect My Readers, get ready to laugh, or at least get ready to listen to other people laugh, because that's what makes up approximately two-thirds of this podcast's length. Topics of discussion include Liam Neeson and his doppelganger Arnold Vosloo, Wesley Snipes and his hard luck story, the abomination that Kenny Rogers has become, Lance Henriksen's dwindling finances, and the bizarre sexual proclivities of Donald Duck. And gambling debts. Oh my stars and garters, the gambling debts...

Chapter 44: Liam Neeson's "The Gambler"



Maybe I'll update this blog again before Christmas. Maybe I won't. I just don't know if I've got it in me to continue with this charade any longer.

TIME MARCHES ON?