Author Archives: Rob MacD

Ken Burns’ "Civil War Jazz Ballers"

“My dearest Edith, today saw the sun shining and the fields of grass being mowed in preparation for the Tantonville Titans’ jazz ensemble performance.  On the mound will be our top trombonist, Willie “Slide” Carmichael, so I am filled with great hope.  If the ensemble goes well, we expect to capture the Pennawatty Pirates fort by nightfall.  Capturing this fort will go a long way in ensuring the North wins the war.  I hope to be home before the fall turnip harvest, but Cpl. Adamson says I’ll likely die in the 7th inning, running for a foul note.  Still, I remain hopeful.  Yours, forever, Kenny.”
Left fielder and third trumpeter, private Kenny Kennilson’s letter to his estranged wife is but one of the touching and written letters from the men of the Tantonville Titans First Battalion Jazz Collective.  The first all white jazz group that saw battle in the great civil war.  Unfortunately, they all died at the Battle For Penawatty that day, by a score of 9-2.

Isn’t that a touching story?  If you’d like The Annekenstein Monster to continue with great stories, moving portraits like that, then I implore you to fake donate some money to The Annekenstein Monster right now.  It’s simple to do.  Compubots are standing by, over in the comments section of the Fake Pledge post.  Just click there and type in your fake-pledge amount.  Remember, no amount of fake money is too little, or too big.
I’m Rob MacDonald, owner and operator of this very site.  We’ll be back to Ken Burns’ excellent documentary “Ken Burns’ Civil War Jazz Ballers” in a never, but before we never get back, I’d like to tell you a bit about The Annekenstein Monster, and why it’s so important for you to fake contribute to it.
…
Having thought about it, I’m actually coming up empty.  Still.  The compubots are standing by.  And they do charge about $7.50 each per hour to stand by, so, I guess, that’s one reason to fake contribute…??
Thanks for your time, and now, back to “Ken Burns’ Civil War Jazz Ballers”, exclusively on The Annekenstein Monster…
…

Free Chicken – new update

Today, my usual Friday lunch with Dave being cancelled, I trudged off to conduct the latest round in the Great  Chicken Fingers Experiment.

Today’s results:
Five nice sized fingers
A pleasant mound of fries
And it was all free!

Yes, the guy (who some say loves me) took my order, cooked my order, gave me my order and said "here you go" and that was that.  But I didn’t pay yet!  I’m positive he knew that.  Obviously, this was a major attempt by him to tell me something. Some will say it’s love, some will say it’s something else.
Persoanlly, I choose love.
Anyway, I flatly snubbed his advance (as you all know, I learned the hard way that love and money don’t mix) by pointing out that I hadn’t paid for my meal. "Actually, I didn’t pay for this yet," I stated, emotionless. It was like a slap in the face to a scorned lover.  Quickly recovering, he gathered whatever composure he could muster and said "Oh yeah!  Seven Dollars."
Sad, brokenhearted man.
It will be interesting to see how many fingers I get next time.

I Demand A Recount!!

This, from a press release for The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe,  listed in the latest TheatrePEI email newsletter:

Laurie Murphy, PEI’s comedian,
writer, actor, director, producer, and musician (did I forget anything? I’m sure I
did!) will no doubt be superb in this role.

My question is:  When did this election take place?  Is PEI only allowed just the one comedian, writer, actor, etc?

 

Kicked When Down

Well, wasn’t Survivor: Pulau something last night?  What a turn of events, followed by another turn of events.
I am under the impression that, by law, reality show games such as Survivor are supposed to be pre-planned, from start to finish, before the contest starts, so that charges of impropriety and favouritism are more difficult to press.  Last night’s change from the ordinary made me wonder whether that was planned before the game started, or whether it was a made-up-on-the-spot effort to get force the Unbeatable Team to lose a member.
Whatever the answer, it made for one of the better episodes of Survivor that I’d seen.  The Reward Challenge was for the reward of food, but, it was revealed, the winning tribe of the challenge would, as would the losing tribe, have to vote out one of its members.  What!!!???!!!  How is that fair?  What is the justification for that?  Excellent!!!  But that wasn’t the only surprise.  The members of the winning tribe, after voting out their member (good riddance, Willard, boring Willard), were then told that they were to each vote to give immunity to one of the members of the losing tribe.  What???!!!???  A second surprise??  Excellent!!!  This of course resulted in the guy, Ibrahim, who was 100% destined to leave getting immunity.  Who would they vote out now?  How would they be able to confer?

And what a humiliating and tough day for the losing tribe (is it Ulong?).  Not only do they lose a challenge that they had come close to winning, but they must suffer the indignity of having the other tribe witness their tribal council, and the even worse indignity of seeing the other team eat delicious bowls of beef stew while they sit, stewing in their own patheticness.  Then the final kick is that the satiated winning team gets to screw up their plan of voting out Ibrahim.  Kick, kick, kick, kick, kick.  Frazier Goes Down!!!  Frazier Goes Down!!!
In the end, the Pathetic Tribe votes out the much-tattooed- and-therefore-much-more-ugly- because-of-the-tattoos Angie.  Apparently because she didn’t like being lost in the jungle during a lightning storm???   I guess the fact that she was one of the strongest and most consistent challenge performers on the team wasn’t relevant anymore.  Probably because the members of the team has likely given up the concept of "tribe" by now and are thinking about how they each can manage to survive whenever a merging of tribes takes place.  Their weak will now eat their strong.

Anyway, a good season of Survivor got even better last night.  Way to take everyone out of the usual discomfort zone.

Moe Gorman Sings

Sketch 22 is in the process of creating something (a couple of somethings, actually)  other than a sketch comedy theatre show for this summer (although we’re currently writing sketches for that, too).  For fear of spoiling the possibility of it coming to fruition, I’ll not say anything further on what it (they) is (are).
One of the elements, though, required me to record some Moe Gorman songs.  For those who don’t know, Moe is a character I created for last summer’s show.  He’s a fictitious descendant of the real Larry Gorman who was a 19th century PEI poet and songwriter, who, as Moe says "wrote and sang songs about them what pissed him off." 
Moe has not one bit of poetic or singing talent, but nonetheless feels the urge to carry on the Gorman tradition of creating songs about the people who done him wrong. Despite his lack of talent or ability, he does have oodles and oodles of passion and belief in what he’s singing, and in that, I suppose, lies his appeal.
No matter how slight the slight to him, Moe is likely to write a song about it.  Last summer for Sketch 22, Moe hocked his CD Moe Gorman – Songs of Slander and Libel and sang a couple of the songs that were on this (non-existent) CD.
Well, some of his songs are now recorded and will soon be available for public ?enjoyment?.
Even though I am not a great (or all that good) singer, it’s difficult to sing songs that are purposefully tuneless.  It’s even more difficult when the songs are such poorly crafted works.  Structurally speaking, the lyrics are abysmal, with horrible run-on sentences and absolutley nothing to hitch a melody to.

Here are the titles of the songs I recorded Monday night:
Phillip Arsenault’s A Real Arsehole
I’m Glad She’s Dead
Dan Simmons Got A Real Small Dick (And He Don’t Know How To Use It)
First Time I Stepped Foot On This Campus In Twelve Years
Keep The Thirty Bucks
(Ya Stupid) Snowplow Operator
Rubber Sheets
A Partial List of The Affairs I Know About

Here are the lyrics to my personal favourite Moe Gorman song:
I’m Glad She’s Dead
Sybil Monroe never gave me the time of day when we was going to school
She thought she was too good for me, and would laugh at me clothes.
Well, the last laugh’s on her,
‘Cause now she’s dead.
And I’m glad.
Oh yes, I’m glad she’s dead, oh yeah.
I’m glad her poor old mother outlived her.
And her stuck up friends, like Gladys Kennedy, and that fat one, Sharlene O’Connor
Crying their tears and smudging up their makeup at the funeral
Can go to Hell too.

Stay tuned for future updates on how you can get a little Moe into your world.

This Week, Rob Tells A Lie

One night, many years ago, I was with friends at Pats Rose & Grey, enjoying an evening.  Being introduced to strangers, and being somewhat inebriated, and assuming that the brief introduction would be my complete and total association with these strangers, I decided on a whim that I’d pretend I’m visiting from Scotland.  And so I put on my best (bad) Scottish brogue. 
Of course, the short introduction turned into us all getting a table together, so I was kind of forced to keep up the charade for quite a while.  I can’t imagine I fooled them, but they seemed to take me at my word. If they did take me at my word it was probably only because they (rightly) couldn’t imagine someone being so pathetic as to fake a scottish accent for an entire evening.  Seriously, how sad.

Since then, I’ve often thought of scnearios and lies I could tell people about me if I was in such similar situations (being introduced to strangers) and if the mood struck me.  And I’ve come up with the perfect one (I think).
Saying you’re Scottish (or anything where you have to put on a tough accent or any affectation) is dangerous because it’s tough to keep the charade up.  One needs to choose a lie which is easy to maintain yet fairly difficult to prove on the spot.  The lie also needs to be of a nature that the possibility of the truth is within grasp.  Saying you’re an astronaut is probably not going to be believed, and would be farily easy to disprove.  The lie needs to be within the realm of possibility, yet of appeal uncommon enough to be remembered.
And I have the perfect lie:

If you don’t know me, and you get introduced to me, and if I am of the right level of intoxication and if the mood strikes me, I may tell you my lie:  I am one of the writers of the little show description snippets in the TV Guide.  If pressed, I have a whole backstory ready to prove that fact.

"See that guy over there," you’d say to others.  "He writes those little blurbs about the shows in the TV Guide."

What’s your lie?

The Sith Sense

I am not going to post a link to the latest trailer for Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith, because I assume you a) have seen it if you heard about it, b) know where to find it if you care to, c) don’t care at all about it.
The reason I won’t post a link to it is because I don’t want to facilitate in any way you to get your hopes up, as I have mine, that this is going to be the best of the six in the series.  I don’t want to make it easy for you to see it, get your hopes up, and then be disappointed when you actually go and see the movie.
Not that it’s a great trailer, but it does stir hope within me that perhaps George Lucas will finally pull something other than technical wizardry out of his director’s bag.  Maybe this time there’ll be some emotional weight to the movie.
I have a sense that I may be disappointed.  For I have seen the trailer.  And from the trailer, hopes have risen.

There. And Not There

This weekend was one of those frustrating computer weekends. First, for whatever reason, my Picasa2 (a favourite, by the way, especially now that I have a digital camera) decided it would discount all the efforts we made to categorize and label our thousands of pictures.  You know, the "any picture with Rob in it gets a "Rob" label" kind of stuff.  Yesterday, I started up Picasa2 and it was showing zero pictures.  It had to import them all again, and the labels we had created had disappeared.
Oh well, at least the pictures are all intact.
Then, today, I open iTunes and lo and behold, there is no music in the iTunes Library.  The files are all still on the computer, but none were showing up in iTunes.  Had a heck of a time trying to get things back in order without losing playlists and smartlists.  I wouldn’t have cared too much, and would’ve just imported the files again, but I sync my iPod through playlists and smartlists, so I really wanted to find them.  Fortunately, a google search gave me the problem and solution:  a corrupted library file.  A quick deletion and moving of files in my iTunes folder, another importation of the moved library file and voila, back in action.
I am sure you are thrilled.  As if anyone read to this point.

,

There. And Not There

This weekend was one of those frustrating computer weekends. First, for whatever reason, my Picasa2 (a favourite, by the way, especially now that I have a digital camera) decided it would discount all the efforts we made to categorize and label our thousands of pictures.  You know, the “any picture with Rob in it gets a “Rob” label” kind of stuff.  Yesterday, I started up Picasa2 and it was showing zero pictures.  It had to import them all again, and the labels we had created had disappeared.
Oh well, at least the pictures are all intact.
Then, today, I open iTunes and lo and behold, there is no music in the iTunes Library.  The files are all still on the computer, but none were showing up in iTunes.  Had a heck of a time trying to get things back in order without losing playlists and smartlists.  I wouldn’t have cared too much, and would’ve just imported the files again, but I sync my iPod through playlists and smartlists, so I really wanted to find them.  Fortunately, a google search gave me the problem and solution:  a corrupted library file.  A quick deletion and moving of files in my iTunes folder, another importation of the moved library file and voila, back in action.
I am sure you are thrilled.  As if anyone read to this point.

,

I Should Have Died 3 Million Years Ago!!

According to 2 UC Berkeley scientists, the Earth gives itself a bio-enema of mass extinction every 62 million years. 
People, it’s been 65 million years since the last mass extinction, with the dinosaurs and all.  We’re 3 million years past due!  I’m scared to go to sleep tonight.

The Earth was talking on the phone its friend, a teenage planet.
"Wait", said the Earth, "I think I hear something."
The Earth turned it’s head slightly and saw something moving in the shadow of the closet, and its heart began to pound fast.
"Seriously," the Earth whispered into the receiver, "there’s someone in the galax—-"
There was a scream, and then…
diiiiiiiiiiiaaaaaaaaaaallllllllll    toooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnneeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!
"Oh. My. God." said the teenage planet.  "You better be joking, or I’m gonna be, like, seriously pissed!"
Teenage Planet waited a moment for Earth to stop playing its game.

But Earth wasn’t joking.  It was dead.