Toren Atkinson’s Absolute Blog

Tonight I am cleaning up the apartment. Oh my goodness am I ever! Holy smokes. LOOK OUT.

It always makes me chuckle when you can hear the person on the other end of the phone having trouble hanging up. Even better is when you answer the phone and they’ve got it on speaker so they can do whatever while they’re on hold, and then when you say “hello yadda…” they accidentally disconnect the phone while they’re fumbling to pick up. The very best was yesterday when the call was over, and I heard the other guy say “how do I hang up on this thing?” which I myself have done on others’ smell phones.

So remember how I posted about “There is No Such Website” a little bit ago? Well, if you haven’t already played them all, I thought I’d sift through and pick out my favourite real websites. And here they are:

For Chris: Project Denny’s http://www.p7a77.net/dennys/

http://www.monobrow.com/ Project: Monobrow

Stare down Sally http://www.stairwell.com/stare/

DVD Rewinder http://www.dvdrewinder.com/ Yes, you read right.

Center for the Prevention of Shopping Cart Abuse http://www.shoppingcartabuse.com/ is lots of fun

Mosaic portraits made from different shades of toast http://www.mauricebennett.co.nz/tportraits.htm including Dame Edna

Christmas letters to Christopher Walken. Real or not, hilarious. http://www.brandonbird.com/walken_letters.html

The Amish website (geocities, of course!) http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Lab/4199/amish.htm

This one’s for Marlo – celebrities yawning! http://cel.webby.no/celebrities-yawning.asp

plus a little known character from Star Wars: http://www.geocities.com/ocb75/

and for Stewie, who’s always going on about how actors are tiny – http://www.celebheights.com/

I just can’t get over this. There is a site for dogs dressed up as bees http://beedogs.com/ Now I want to see a site for bees dressed up as dogs. Ouch!

Loinloth site. http://www.karstensloinclothsite.com/ Pervs.

My forays into myspace has resulted in many a headshaking, and I’ll tell you why. People are so adamant about having a million things on their profiles to show the world how unique and special that they are, that the profiles turn into Homer Simpson’s website (you know, the one with the dancing baby and all those other animations) and are virtually unreadable. It gets even worse when the people who add comments have to include animated gifs and giant images in what they post. All style and no content makes the internet a dull boy. It’s like having coffee with someone that has dozens of bad tattoos. They may be talking about something but you don’t hear a word over the sensory overload.

Meanwhile, let’s recap what’s happening for the Saturday Morning Cartoon Party:

The theme is “April Fools & Other Pranksters.” Here are some episodes in the running:

SPIDER-MAN Spidey has to resort to pranksterism to defeat the Vulture, Green Goblin, Electro and Dr Noah Boddy when they try “To Catch A Spider.”

BATMAN THE ANIMATED SERIES. Whose “fool” act has got the Joker in a tizzy? Here’s a hint: “Beware the Creeper.” 22 minutes

DUCKMAN. Some whacko kidnaps Duckman to prove that he’s a TV show in “Clip Job.” 22 minutes

SUPERMAN 1941 “The Bulleteers” 8 minutes.

THE MIGHTY HERCULES. With softness in his eyes and fire in his thighs, Hercules fools the Thracian king. 5 minutes

THE TICK “The Tick vs Arthur’s Bank Account” Arthur is unhappy when The Tick blows his bank account to upgrade their “secret headquarters” so Tick moves out to his own rather shaky “Crime Tower.” 22 minutes.

CAPTAIN AMERICA “Zemo and the Masters of Evil” featuring Thor and Iron Man! 15 minutes

SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS “Fools in April.” Spongebob’s favourite holiday messes with Squidward. 11 minutes.

POWERPUFF GIRLS “Jewel of the Aisle” A bumbling thief loses his stolen diamond in a box of Lucky Captain Rabbit King Nuggets, the Powerpuff girls favourite cereal. 11 minutes.

STAR TREK ANIMATED “Practical Joker.” The Enterprises’ computer develops a sense of humour. 22 minutes.

LOONEY TUNES “Little Red Riding Rabbit.” Hey Grandma! Those are awful big eyes for you…ta have! 7 minutes

FREAKAZOID! “Wrath of Guiterrez” If you were at the 5th Cartoon Party, you’ll remember Freakazoid’s origin story. Now the Ricardo Montalban-voiced villain is back. Laugh with me! 22 minutes

THE VENTURE BROTHERS “Mid Life Chrysalis.” The Monarch sends Dr. Girlfriend undercover to seduce Dr. Venture in order to inject him with a body-altering serum. Meanwhile, Brock is deeply depressed to learn his secret agent license to kill has expired. 22 minutes.

HOME MOVIES “Broken Dreams” After Melissa and Jason break their respective arms, Brendan tries to break his own to get out of a test. Who’s fooling whom? Meanwhile, McGuirk takes a lifesaving course. 22 minutes

BATTLE OF THE PLANETS “The Space Serpent” 22 minutes

SAMURAI JACK “X-9″ 22 minutes

Wonderful Stories of Professor Kitzel “King Tut” 4 minutes

I forgot my livejournal password so I can’t comment on Marlo’s blog with this information, so I’m just making a new blog post. It’s fun for the whole family, anyway:

Yes, it’s time for a great new game which we just invented. It’s called There’s No Such Website! and your mission, should you choose to accept, is to spot the fib. Below are links and descriptions for five websites. Four of them actually exist on the Internet. One is a phony that we made up. Study all five and see if you can guess which link won’t lead you to the website in question. There is no prize for this except that you get to visit four weird websites and to feel smug if it doesn’t take you five clicks to find the phony. Enjoy

http://www.highprogrammer.com/alan/nosuchwebsite.html

Created by Mark Evanier, writer for comics (Groo) and cartoons (Dungeons & Dragons)

Meanwhile, not far away…

They have scalloped potatoes…who wants to help me come up with a recipe for potatoed scallops?

I can’t decide whether or not this more disturbing than traditional animal-killing:

SCIENTISTS FORECAST MEAT GROWN ON KITCHEN COUNTER

Here are some choice tidbits:

Scientists are trying to develop an industrial process that grows meat tissue from a few cells in a lab – or even at home, in a device like a bread maker.

Instead of being cut from a farm animal, the beef, pork or chicken would be grown in incubators from a few starter cells, a growth medium and some hormones to get the cells to divide.

“It has the taste and texture resembling the ground meat products that are already available,” such as hamburger or chicken nuggets, he said.

Researchers in the Netherlands have grown mouse meat and are now working on pork. Australian scientists served grown frog muscle tissue with apple brandy sauce at an exhibition in France in 2003. They said the meat tasted like jelly on cloth.

Mike’s blog link to a statement on the traditional definition of life in the bible (basically – life is in red blood, that’s why good Christians should eat flesh but let the blood “spill into the dust” (paraphrasing), and octopus and squid don’t have red blood so therefor they aren’t alive) led to me posting the link to The Octopus News Magazine Online TONMO.com which led to a careful discussion of religion vs science. I wasn’t going to just say “you religious people are delusional” so I skirted the whole religious issues to say:

Do whatever works for you to be a decent human being. If you have to wear a yellow t-shirt to avoid going on a stabbing spree, then far be it from me to tell you that yellow is a yucky colour. But don’t expect me to wear a yellow shirt. Conversely, if your belief in the Spaghetti Monster leads you to go on a bloody crusade, I’m against that.

Then there was some discussion about how much religion was responsible for violence in history. Clearly: lots. However, to think that getting rid of religion would end war and conflict in the world is specious. People are jerks and will fight over anything – land, skin colour, oil, sexual preference, women, etc etc etc.

And THEN somebody brought up this: “What lends the Bible credibility over the holy Koran, the Torah, the Egyption Book of the Dead, or the Greek pantheon of mythos? Holy texts depend on themselves as the base of their credibility.”

What’s interesting is that science textbooks are also bibles of a sort. Which is not to say that I believe they are sacred scriptures. My point is unless you are going to recreate every science experiment for yourself, you do have to take certain ‘tenets’ of science ‘on faith.’ Do I know for sure that quarks exist? No, but I put faith in science (generally speaking), and the reason for that is science’s foundation is one of logic, perception and constant analysis and revision. Christianity, on the other hand, is about wacky stretches of logic, unquestionable doctrine and outdated tradition.

On another note, who remembers MAOAM candies?

Jordan called me on being Mr Complain-o after he read the post I did on the Thickets, and he’s right, so I wanted to post a self-rebuttal to set the record straight. Obviously, if I’ve been in a band for 14 years and made next to no money on it, I’m not staying in the band to get rich and famous. I do it for the creative process which I love, performing, which I love (as long as it’s not unrequited love), and the satisfaction of a job well done (where applicable). My bandmates are all talented musicians – more so than me – and obviously it is a team effort to make the band work. So while I’m always striving to be better, and to diversify, I’m very pleased with and proud of being a member of The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets. I guess the main point of my post was that, like everything, it has its frustrations and challenges. I didn’t mean to single anyone out, we are all stupid human beings, except for Mario who is a cyborg, with our own very special shortcomings. Being in a band is like being on a sports team with no coach, which means we’ve got to identify where we’re going ourselves and work together to get there.

April 13 – Good Thursday (Friday is a holiday)
Event: Hansons Brothers, The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, This Week in History (Faith No More cover band)
Ticket Cost: $10 at the door.
Location: 8 seconds country cabaret 20299 Industrial Ave Langley, B.C.

We go on around 10pm. Hope to see you there!

I have set up an online store for myself at http://www.cafepress.com/thickets 

There is nothing there yet. But there will be…there will be. I’ll be selling stuff with my art on it. Specifically I’m thinking “Where the Great Old Ones Are” mugs and mousepads. I know that cafepress has crappy shirts so I won’t be doing any of that. I want to do a design for a clock. That would be fun. I’m sure more ideas will come to me but until then, can you think of anything from my past repertoire, or an idea you have that you need drawn that you want to go 50/50 on?

Come on, now’s your big chance!

I think it actually takes less time to get to work on bike than on the bus. Crazy.

My current art job is over. On to the next – pinups for Bad Girl chocolates. I spent all of my time on my computer and at my drawing board this weekend, and the forecast for the next 5 evenings is the same. Some of my time spent has been putting profiles up on stupid stupid dating sites that I hate. I registered a week or two ago on lavalife but did nothing else. Not even browsed. As soon as I filled out the few fields necessary to have an account on the site I felt so disgusted I closed Firefox. Then a couple days ago they sent me an email with free credits (enough to contact two people) so I put up my profile and poked around a bit. It’s very difficult to put up a positive “hey look at me! I’m so awesome, I’m single!” profile when that’s pretty much the opposite of what you’re feeling, and you hate the fact that you’re even on the site. There’s this one question on OKCupid – “are you happy with your life?” which is a trick question that I refuse to answer. Another way to phrase that question is “are you happy you’re looking for meaningful companionship on the internet?”

Throw up.

Tonight I will be watching “Life of Mammals: Meat Eaters” with David Attenborough (he’ll be on the black couch). Just so you all know. I discovered that you can go to http://tvschedule.knowledgenetwork.ca/knsch/KNDailyPage.jsp?dayDate= and assign reminder notices to the shows you want to watch for the next month or so and you’ll receive an email the day of so you don’t forget. HANDY.

8 days until cartoon party.