Mad for Mad Libs

Lily has recently taken to mad libs and I couldn't be happier.

If you don't remember mad libs from third grade, it's the game where one person writes a story and leaves out a couple words, and the second person provides the words when prompted for "a noun", "a verb", "a girl's name", "a part of the body", etc. It's a lot of fun and I've loved the game ever since I learned about it in grade school and I've done a bunch of them well into adulthood. Whenever I drive anywhere of length with my buddy Tim, we'll typically make one, with the passenger writing the story and the driver providing the words.

We've got our own routine to it, and it's worked out pretty well with the ones I make for Lily. In addition to the usual requests for nouns, verbs and adjectives, we usually include at least one "walkism" (synonyms for walked like strolled, sauntered, jogged or sashayed) and talkism (words used in place of said, like shouted, whispered, yelled, rasped and the ever popular "ejaculated").

Typically, I'll do a short page to introduce the main character and set the stage. So we'll get the character's name and rather than writing "same name" a dozen times, I'll just incorporate the name and the details of the characters as constants in the text of subsequent parts of the story once they've been established in the beginning. Sometimes we'll build on elements that have been generated randomly like that. If we determine the hero is a firefighter with x-ray vision, that might become a plot point in later chapters.

In the story we're working on now, Gargles, our heroine, is on her way to the ocean to buy some seaweed ice cream for her mom. She flags down her Uncle Joe when he passes by in his train by waving her heiney cheek at him. (Lily is, you will remember, five years old.)

She loves telling collaborative stories, and this is a great way to learn her parts of speech. It's strange that I happened to mention to even the most precocious five year old what a gerund is, and she probably won't remember it, but hey, she'll be that much ahead of the curve if she does. (Not that she needs it. She missed the cut off date by three days, so September will mark her third year of instruction learning her ABCs.)

It's fun, it's instructional and we can do it anywhere. They're rewarding to write and rewarding to read and they're always good for a laugh when you uncover a notebook full of mad libs from a couple years back.

Bonus Mad Lib! Give me the words in the comments

1. Talkism
2. Job
3. Name
4. Exclaimation
5. Job
6. Adjective
7. Adverb
8. Talkism
9. Body part
10. Adjective
11. Walkism

Search Results, Part 3

The latest in the series of the odd, unusual or downright disturbing searches people have used to find the site. Dear people who found my site through these searches...I hope it's meeting your expectations?

1. muscled fathers wrestling their sons to submission, video
2. comic heroes as helpless chess pawns
3. Batman eating hot wings
4. kari wahlgren feet
5. castration scene film snuff
6. empress dickings
7. pictures of boys football wrist watches 1 jewel
8. petite lap goat
9. hot buttered supervillains
10. zelazny porn

That last one baffles me. What was he expecting to find?

A Day in Silent Hill with the Amish Stallion

I went on a fun road trip on Friday that got its start in an interesting way. My friend Frederick is a bright guy not overly challenged by his job, so he'll often text me throughout the day. We were going back and forth last week and we got to talking about ghost towns one day. I said that we should go to one and Frederick enthusiastically agreed. I was like, "I was just kidding, but okay!"

So, I did a little digging and found that Centralia was within driving distance.  Centralia was an influence for the look of the Silent Hill games and movie. I posted a link on Facebook to Centralia 's wikipedia page, with the comment, "...we're going to see a ghost town, sir!"

A mutual friend of ours, Phil, saw the post and expressed interest. He's the same Phil who comments here occasionally and maintains an excellent blog about Legos and geekery over here.

He's known as the Amish Stallion in some circles, but more on that later.

Phil wanted a crown on the horse, but that's needlessly ostentatious. He's been hanging out with the English too much and he's taken on many of their ways.

I headed over to Frederick's house after dropping Lily off the bus. We watched some music videos on VH1 Classic and then headed out to the diner where we talked about the trip. Phil had a little further to drive and he was going to meet us there.  Strangely, I mostly know Phil through the blog. We moved in the same circles and even had a lot of the same friends as young adults, but we never really hung out. I think that's what I like about living in the modern, networked world. Acquaintances can become friends years after the fact.

Actually, I remember the first time I ever met Frederick and Phil. I was in the local mall with my future wife, talking with a friend of ours in the Babbage's he managed on the day the mall celebrated Halloween. I forget exactly what we were talking about, because a guy dressed as a mad doctor caught up to the guy dressed up as an escaped mental and plunged, I want to say it was a turkey baster, into the fake red ass cheeks the mental patient was wearing. I might be fuzzy on some details. It was a good decade and half ago, and it was, as you might imagine, a rather odd experience.

Frederick and I were talking about that when we were at the diner:

"When I first met you. were you trying to stick something up Phi's butt or was it the other way around?"

"No, you had it the right way the first time."

Phil showed up, we stopped at a local store because they had Lego minifigures at a decent price, then it was back to Frederick's house for some chocolate covered bacon and then piled into his jeep for the trip.

Silent Hill was famously foggy and we had a chuckle as we approached and saw the Fog Area sign.

 We noticed that there were a bunch of windmills nearby, presumably to keep the fog at bay.

I guess it worked.

It wasn't what I was expecting. When we had been walking around for a little while, Phil commented, "Cabin in the Woods was scarier than this place." A lot of the houses had been demolished, so the town didn't look abandoned as much as undeveloped.

As long as we're referencing Silent Hill, "There was a town here. It's gone now."

My mother-in-law asked me if it looked post-apocolyptic, but really, I think the best word to describe it is one that Phil used, picturesque. It was nice. It was peaceful, in the same way cemeteries are peaceful and I liked it for much the same reasons.

We walked around, and saw some smoke coming from the ground, which was neat, but none of it was visible in the pictures I took. Frederick had better luck recording it on his camera as a video though. We poked around for maybe 90 minutes before heading back.

We passed a surgery clinic in an outlet mall and I snapped a picture from the car. I can't imagine how desperate you'd have to be to go there.

We stopped at a Cabela's, because Cabela's is always neat. It was here that Phil revealed his dark secret. He moonlights as a producer of low end Amish pornography. Oh, he'll probably come in here and attempt to obfuscate the issue, but that's the long and the short of it. You may know him through some of his more adventurous endeavors:

• Hester and Patience have a picnic
• A Taste of Prudence
• 2 Girls, 1 Trough
• Rump-springa

Overall, it was great fun and a trip I'd be willing to make again. It was fun really meeting Phil and Frederick gets massive kudos for running with something I had suggested as a joke.

Roger Zelazny Book Review: Come to me not in Winter's White

This is another story that grew on me. I first encountered it in the Manna from Heaven collection and, while I never disliked it, it didn't grab me at first in the same way that Godson or Kalifriki did. I think that's probably just a function of my personal preferences; I tend not to like Zelazny's science fiction as much as his fantasy, even sf containing the strong mythic elements characteristic of his style.

It opens with the same dreamlike cadence of The Furies, the

She was dying and he was the richest man in the world, but he couldn't buy her life. So he did the next best thing. He built the house, different from any other house that had ever been. She was transported to it by ambulance, and their goods and furnishings followed in many vans.

Which reminds me of:

Captain Corgo protested, was declared out of order.

Captain Corgo threatened, was threatened in return.

Captain Corgo fought, was beaten, died, was resurrected, escaped restraint, became an outlaw.  He took the Wallaby with him. The Happy Wallaby, It had been called in the proud days. Now, it was just the Wallaby.

Both stories set the scene with very little dialogue at first and that helped cement the relationship in my mind.

Our hero is Carl Manos, of whom it is written, "It might be said that Carl Manos was Chronos/Ops/Saturn/Father Time himself, for he fitted even the description with his long dark beard and his slashing, scythe-like walking-stick. He knew Time as no other man had ever known it, and he had the power and the will and the love to exploit it." (That line reminds me of "Great was his grief and his hate and his love" from Divine Madness and also Sam's accusation to Yama that "You have broken upon the dark stone of your will that which is beyond all comprehension and mortal splendor." in Lord of Light.)

I can't see anyone else by Christophe Lee in the role.

(My only complaint is that the name of the character reminds me of Manos: The Hands of Fate, renowned as one of the worst movies ever made. Some quick research shows that the movie came out shortly before the story and now I'm haunted by the horrifying thought that it inspired the character's name in some way.)

Manos's wife is dying of a monstrously degenerative disease of her central nervous system so he builds her a slow time room so the specialists working on her cure have time enough to perfect it. This Mortal Mountain, Volume 3 of the Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny has some commentary from both authors, talking a little about the story, and of course it includes the editor's notes that I so love about the collection. Zelazny and Harlan Ellison took turns writing the story.The thing that impressed me the most was how well the very different style of each author meshed.

The other thing that surprised me was learning of the slight revisions made by Ellison between when the story was printed in Manna and when it saw print in Mountain. I'm just kind of surprised that creators not named George Lucas are still tweaking their work after so long, but I do admire his dedication to his craft, though I think I prefer some of the lines as they were in the earlier story. (However, in his author's note, Ellison tells a critic of the story to "go hump a toadstool", so he's probably unconcerned about what I think one way or another.)

Within the room, Laura is lonely, so Manos has his Foundation scour for the world for a suitable companion for her.  "The first was a handsome young man named Thomas Grindell, a bright and witty man who spoke seven languages fluently, had written a perceptive history of mankind, had traveled widely, was outspoken and in every other possible way was the perfect companion.

The second was an unattractive woman named Yolande Loeb. She was equally as qualified as Grindell, had been married and divorced, wrote excellent poetry, and had dedicated her life to various social reforms."

You can probably imagine which candidate a person in Manos's position would pick. He selects Yolande to serve Laura's companion and the rest of the story unfurls based on that decision.

I think that's all I'm going to say, because I don't like to spoil the ending of shorter works like this and I think the ending is a big part of what gives the piece its power.

I will mention that it did have one last surprise for me though. The text refers to the machine as a Tachytron at one point, and I didn't think that tachyons had entered popular consciousness at the time of the writing, but a little research showed me they had. Somehow I'm not surprised that Zelazny and Ellison knew about it back then.

"I don't know. Let's find out."

Lily did something kind of clever the other day, and I asked her "How did you get so smart?"

She thought for a moment and said "Because I try very hard and go to school."

I was talking to my stepmother the other day and she had mentioned a study she had read where it was concluded that being labeled as "smart" can be detrimental at times, because kids tagged with this label believe it is something inherent to them and they're frustrated more than kids without the label when they fail. This is part of the reason we fought so hard to get her into kindergarten this year. (Spoilers, it didn't work). I want her to work and not just think that she's smart enough to get by.

Lily's bus stop is a next to a little local cemetery, mostly disused now and populated by veterans of the Spanish-American War. (And that's one of those lines that sounds like a joke, but really isn't. There are a bunch of military graves of local young men who died in 1898.)

Jen was running late and with me working from home, I sometimes take Lily to the bus stop solo. We spied some flowers through the fence and I asked if she thought if they were real or fake. Lily replied, "I don't know. Let's find out."

I was trying to say something like this in an earlier post. To me, that's the essence of what I'm trying to give her. She doesn't know, but she's not ashamed. Years ago, I read an interview from one of the producers of  "You Can't Do That on Television". It was the Canadian show that gave us Alanis Morissette. When the people on the show said "I don't know," green slime would drop down on their head. In the interview, the producers said this was because, to a kid, not knowing something is the worst thing that can happen to them.

When I was in college, after the 100-level courses, professors would generally let us use cheat sheets with commonly used formulae on them, as they figured we'd have access to that kind of information out in the real world.

I like Lily's attitude, because now, moreso than ever, we have access to a tremendous amount of information at our fingertips, and I'd rather have her be inclined to spend a moment or two thinking about something, investigating it or looking it up if she's not confident about her answer. (Or I suppose, even if she is, because I think we make our most egregious mistakes when we're sure we're right.)