Fakiegrind

Calling all Flatlanders!

2008-04-27T21:30:00.017-04:00

Just two days ago, one of our Decoy Flatlanders turned up at Fakie Central in a rather delirious and decrepit state. He was barefoot, dressed only in an ill-fitting hospital gown, and so pumped full of psycholeptic medication as to be scarcely able to recognize the very Commander in Chief whose life he had taken to a solemn vow to protect. Happily, some deeply embedded directives of his secret agent training seemed to have survived (even in the face of the heavy psychiatric medication to which he had been exposed) and the Agent clutched in his clammy palm a single page, seemingly torn from the jaournal of one of the modern witchdoctor cum chemists who had reduced him to such a state, which shed some light on the poor fellow's plight. The page contains some alarming indications of a new psychiatric disorder called "Flatlander Syndrome", and has caused us to review the policies and procedures of our entire Decoy Program. Here is a small excerpt (which is all the Fakie legal team will allow to be published at this point):

"Another Caucasian male patient admitted today calling himself "Flatlander" and exhibiting persecution dementia centred around a time travelling demonic figure named "The Xister". This one picked up in the business district at lunch hour, raving on about a werewolf army and the end of civilization...typical schizoid behaviour. What's odd is the uniformity of the cases appearing in recent months, this last bringing the count to fifteen patients, all claiming to be this "Flatlander" character. Same odd cranial scar pattern evident at base of skull on all patients, as if they had been subjected to some sort of lower brain stem altering surgery. Sadly, nothing much to be done but administer anti-psychotics and monitor patient's behaviour for further indications....."

Evidently, some new and more foolproof method of "deep embedding" the Flatlander persona and belief system on the volunteer hosts may have to be devised. It has also been suggested by some members of the Fakie think tank that recruiting candidates from homeless shelters and soup kitchens, merely on the basis of perfunctory resemblances to Flatlander himself, may be insufficient, and that deeper psychological screening mechanisms might be put in place to better assess a potential decoy's mental suitability.

We should note that some former Fakiegrind employees have suggested that it is not inadequacies in the hosts themselves, but rather certain paranoiac tendencies in the seed personality being imprinted, that have lead to the current impasse. This theory is, of course, absurd, and the conspiratorial undertones implied in it have lead to the dismissal of the parties involved, who obviously would do better working in some less taxing field, such as urban custodial services.

More reasonable voices have put forth the idea that it is only natural for another sentient, reflective soul to want to be the Flatlander. The very success of our Decoy Program, which now boasts upwards of 100 simulacra, is evidence in support of this very human and understandable tendency. It can only be seen as a tragic frailty of the human psyche (and not an unwanted corollary of our rigorous de-re-programming technique, the legal team has assured me of this) that some of our decoys should want to take things a step beyond their loyalty training and make a break with reality in actually believing themselves to be the commander-in-chief of the Fakiegrind empire.

Until we can figure out how to buttress certain sensitive neural pathways in the human brain to circumvent this unfortunate tendency, the Decoy Program has had to be put under indefinite suspension. Sadly, this may mean a number of out of work, wannabe Flatlanders set loose upon the world, perhaps even penning their own blogs in the vain delusion of being the original, archetypal Flatlander-Prime of Fakiegrind fame. So, until our legal team issues the proper stop-and-desist orders, we are advising readers to beware of imitations. Fakiegrind will remain at this address, broadcasting on this channel, as always, and will not change it's name to "Fakygrind", "Fakeegrind" or any other phonetical perversion of our original nomenclature.

There is, and only ever shall be, one Flatlander and one united Fakiegrind, diligently fighting the abuse of time travel technology to the end of time itself, long may we blog!

A Strange Visitor...

2008-03-23T00:42:00.008-04:00

For any readers not quite up to speed on the goings on here at Fakiegrind, Special Agent Donovan had been deployed on a mission to find a real live hobo and bring him back to headquarters for an interview as the culmination of hobo week. Our sensors, however, have been indicating an impending werewolf invasion brought about by our messing with the Template several weeks ago. Despite this threat, the intrepid Agent Donovan returned to headquarters without incident, and he brought with him a strange visitor. This was not your garden variety wandering hobo looking for a free meal and warm place to sleep before heading back on his weary way...

The man was of an indefinable age...he looked to be well advanced in years, but moved with the dexterity and speed of a much younger fellow. His long yellowish beard was matted and dirty, and his face covered in a grime that bespoke of weeks - or maybe months - gone without washing. But it was his eyes that set him apart from the common tribe of vagrants. It was impossible to look into them for any length of time without becoming extremely disturbed. Their grey-green pools seemed to speak of long journeys through vast interior regions of madness, despair and isolation, and yet there was a placid evenness to them that effected a shudder deep in the onlooker's soul. Clearly, this man hearkened from regions unknown.

Hey, stop gnawing on the mircrophone!

We showed him to the Fakie cafeteria, but he refused to eat (not that this was unusual - many an Agent has made a similar decision, especially on mac-and-cheese Saturdays). He asked only for some warm tea with whiskey which we produced in good stead and which the man downed with two or three voracious gulps. He then asked if either of us smoked, and Agent Donovan produced a cigarette from an interior pocket of his great coat. The man promptly removed the filter, then took some care in ripping open the paper skin of the cigarette until he had a small mound of loose tobacco in the palm of his hand. This he sumerarily tossed into his mouth and began to chew, much like a cow chewing its cud. After a minute or so of his chewing and Agent Donnovan and I staring off into random directions to avoid making any prolonged eye contact with our guest, the man suddenly broke the uncomfortable silence.

"Won't be long now," he mumbled in a gravelly voice that was mingled with equal parts derision and indifference.

"Won't be long until what?" I queried, trying to maintain my most pleasant, professional Secret Agent voice.

"No use hiding. He'll find us."

"Er...don't quite follow. Of whom do you speak, my good man?" The Secret Agent Manual counsels maintaining an air of jovial camaraderie when interrogating half-crazed hobo folk. (See Section 54-112-B "Storytelling Patterns of the Indigent")

"Same every year. Full moon brings it on. You can't escape."

"If you are referring to the immanent werewolf invasion, I can assure you we are quite safe in the bosom of Fakiegrind's state-of-the-art anti-lycanthrop facility. Those wolfies will have a hard time getting through our Lupine Repulsion Batteries, and even if they somehow were to penetrate past our parimeter defenses, a flip of the Panic Room Activation Switch will ensure that we are cozy and secure here in the heart of the cafeteria."

"You are fools."

"And you, sir, are a cryptic fellow quick to dole out reprimand but slow to justify your outlandish accusations. Do explain yourelf!"

The strange fellow parsed his cracked lips and spit a soggy wad of tobacco into the empty coffee mug before him. He stared intently into my eyes and I fought the urge to turn away in wild panic. He then let out a loud, long and girlish laugh that somehow managed to curdle the blood in my veins despite the nightly regime of anti-blood curdling meditational techniques that I dutifully pursue.

"You have prepared well...for werewolves. But there haven't been any werewolves in the world since before the Great Plague! You have no idea of the evil fate that is about to befall you. There will be chocolate...YES...lots of chocolate goodies. And colourful candy eggs strewn about which you will hunt for with great trepidation, continuing to find them weeks from now in the most unlikely of places, so crafty is the foe soon to be in your midst. You will be beside yourself with terror, and yet you will be none the wiser next year WHEN THE EXACT SAME CURSE VISITS YOU AGAIN!"

"What are you saying? You seem to refer to our harmless Easter traditions. Surely you don't mean...."

"Yes! Now you see! The chilling truth behind the ravaged heads of lettuce and descicated bags of carrots found each year in the larder. Not to mention the mysterious huge, hard brown pellets left strewn on the lawn. There is a powerful evil in your midst....a hideous, lawn munching, long eared...

"WERERABBIT! By Jove Donovan...we've been blind. BLIND! Get Q on the horn. Not a moment to spare...Me must notify Department H!"

The man broke into another peal of horrible shrill laughter and I motioned for Agent Donovan to hasten him back to the fetid alley from when he was snatched. I had been a fool not to see. What other entity would have the ability to sneak past our extensive Fakie sensor system to leave behind his colourful Easter confections? Only a wererabbit, with its ability to altar states between solid and gaseous form, with its uncannily nimble paws and hyper sensitive hearing (so as to better avoid the Fakie night watchman)...only such a beast could possibly infiltrate Headquarters year after year to leave behind its deadly legacy of tasty foodstuffs.

No time for self-reproach! There might yet be a chance to catch our foe unawares, but where would I find a sliver carrot at this late hour? I heard a strange sound from the corridor, a kind of heavy thumping getting louder by the second. Could the beast be upon us? In my mind's eye I saw the long, horrible incisors of the wererabbit flashing in the night. I shuddered and tried to steel my nerve. Then a deep, lisping voice echoed through the cafeteria, chilling me to the very marrow of my bones despite the microscopic marrow-warming nanodes I had had Dr. Flavour install in my skeleton against just such occasions....

"Whaaat'ssss Uuuuuuup Daaaaawk?"

It must have been then that I passed out, for when I awoke it was morning. There was a gamy unsettling stench in the air, a litter of half-eaten carrots spilling out of the larder, and a boxes and baggies of chocolate eggs and bunnies in a large mound on the table.

That wascaly wererabbit had evaded us this time, but next year he wouldn't be so lucky...

Werewolfs a-Coming!

2008-03-21T14:07:00.006-04:00

We interrupt Hobo week to update readers on the Slavic werewolf menace. Fakiegrind's Stereographic-Lycanthoposcope is showing a concentrated mutant lupian energy field heading straight towards the abandoned mineshaft currently housing Fakie Central. In layman's terms, we've got a whole mess 'o werewolves heading straight for our colective ass!

The good news is, we've been aware of this threat and have been preparing for the past week. Special Kevlar armor has been issued to all Agents and support staff, and we have a fleet of mobile werewolf containment units all gassed up and ready to ship those bloodthirsty beasts off to the suburbs.

The bad new is, Special Agent Donovan was deployed this morning on an assaignment to track down a real live hobo and bring him back to Fakie Headquarters for a bowl of warm soup and an interview. We hope he succeeds in his mission and makes it back before the werewolves arrive, which, by Dr. Flavour's calculations, should happen sometime tonight around midnight.

We shall keep readers posted on any new developments as the information becomes available. Until then, please enjoy this hobolink:

Secret Hobo Code

Speaking of Rats

2008-03-19T11:03:00.004-04:00

Here is a satellite image the Fakie Hobowatch Surveillance team discovered last night of what appears to be some kind of lychanthropic were-rat hobo. Happily, he didn't seem to be heading this way (unlike the Slavic werewolf pack that should be arriving here any day).

Fakie Agents have been working around the clock to prepare for the werewolf invasion (brought about by our ill-fated messing with The Template, see below -ed). We've been busy distilling the juice of about a thousand cloves of garlic, creating a pungent tincture that, with the help of our bevy of Super-Soaker 3000s, is sure to turn those were-beasts on their heels, driving them into the suburbs were they belong.

Hobo Twins

2008-03-17T10:43:00.002-04:00

Short and green (perhaps from eating too much "street food"), these two hobos keep snakes as personal pets...not so good for keeping warm on a cold winter night, but they sure scare away the rats!

Hobo Salut

2008-03-16T22:51:00.006-04:00

This week, Fakiegrind will be taking an in-depth look at all things Hobo. By randomly grabbing images from the internet and posting them here, we hope to generate a kind of photo archive of hobodom. By the end of the week, we may even bring a live hobo into Fakie headquarters and offer him or her some luke-warm tea and a shot of screech in exchange for the inside scoop on the free-and-easy wandering that is the pastoral life of a vagrant.

Four dollar karate lessons! Who ever heard of that?

Terrifying!

2008-03-15T20:08:00.007-04:00

Egads! I should have never messed with The Template. The Template was fine just the way it was. Now, all the radical Fakiegrind upgrades, the extended Fakie links list, the mind warping customized banner and the ever witty Fakie header archive has been lost to the digital wastes.

I remember why I did it. I did it because the dumb "Rubbish Heap Two" video clip that I found on Tom Green's site didn't fit properly in the old Fakiegrind star-in-the-left-hand-corner template -- that tried and true template that has served Fakie Corp. so well these past three years or so. Did I take the time to read the fine print that says "All modifications to your old template will be lost", before I clicked "OK"? Did I stop to think what reprecussions my actions might have, due to the so-called "butterfly effect" and other chaotic models of creation, on the migratory patterns of Siberian werewolves? It pains me to admit that I did not.

No, I just couldn't leave well enough alone. I had to go a-messin with what weren't broke. Perhaps this is the beginning of the Great Unraveling, as retroactively foretold in an upcoming re-edit of the Book of Oldness Deluxe Edition, complete with Bonus CD featuring never before seen outtakes from deleted and unpublished posts of yesteryear (learn, for instance, where Happy T. Fluke bought his entire necktie wardrobe for 2004 --and much more in this competitively priced collector's item. No comprehensive Fakiegrind ephemera compendium is complete without it!).

So here is the site restored to about 63% of its original splendor. Perhaps we can rebuild it. Perhaps we can cover ourselves in molten chocolate and streak down the street like living fondue morsels. Anything at all is possible with a little time and money. So please send all cheques and monetary donations to:

Fakiegrind Corp. c/o The Internet

I expect the Siberian werewolves to arrive in this sector sometime towards the end of next week (they move fast, those Slavic lycanthropes). We've set out a protective parimeter of fine china and steeped our running shoes in mouthwash, so we should be in good shape. But if you don't hear back from us for another month or so, you can be certain that The Template has extracted its hideous revenge for our ill-conceived meddling.

Rubbish Heap 2

2008-02-12T21:52:00.003-05:00

Here at Fakiegrind Central, we're all big Tom Green fans. We're also big fans of the original Rubbish Heap video of 1989. That vid really revolutionized street skating, taking it to a whole new level of radicality. The long-awaited sequel, while much shorter than the original, retains something of the air of frolicsome fun of the original. What is really amazing, though, is that these geezers are still shredding it up!

Ha-P Holid A-s!

2007-12-23T16:38:00.000-05:00

Ahh...tis' the season! Here in the Fakiegrind underground bunker it's been hard to find a suitable stand-in for a Christmas tree. We had a nice plastic one, but Dr. Flavour sent it back in time in one of his experiments (we think it went back and not forward, but we won't be sure until 2089). We've had to make do with a petrified boa constrictor dangled from the ceiling and festooned with little ornaments we cut out of some back issues of Popular Mechanics magazine we found in an old filing cabinet.

Exacly why we have a petrified boa constrictor on hand is another story altogether, and not likely to see print until a few pending lawsuits get cleared up, but the "tree" itself has a certain tropical Christmasesque charm that makes one forget about behing holed up two miles below the Earth's surface in a makeshift bunker while the Xister and his crew pick through the wreckage of the old Fakiegrind Headquarters in search of fragments of our once mighty treasure trove of vintage toys and hair accessories.

But there's no use complaining. Captain Canuck came by yesterday with a baggie full of maple leaf-shaped cookies from Department H, which we dutifully distributed amongst the Fakiegrind staff at our annual Christmas party. To be sure, our operation has seen better years, but we're making the best of things. My Secret Santa was quite generous this year and gave me a complete set of Sponge Bob stackable drinking cups. Now I have something to use when I break open my bottle of triple X eggnog, or "chicken milk" as Nelvanna likes to call it.

Yes indeed, it's time to ease on into the holiday season. I hope things are going well for you out there in cyberland. A brand new year's a'coming! Plenty of time left for rocking it oldschool, for partying like it's 1999, and, above all else, for satying old. So clear the dancefloor with a bulldozer and let's git down to some serious rug-cuttin' bizniz. Gravity waits for no one and I feel a new move coming on...

Where I've Been...

2007-11-26T23:33:00.000-05:00

I was spelunking the caves just below Fakiegrind's new cold storage unit (keeps the comic books from decomposing), searching for the source of the wireless signal we have been enjoying gratis here at New Fakiegrind Central, when I came upon a natural chimney in the stone. The channel lead downwards, almost vertically, towards depths unknown, like an esophagus carved from living rock. Not one to pass up a chance to never be seen from again, I knocked some pinions into the wall and started lowering myself down the shaft, hand over hand, my rope being the only safeguard I had against what might be a near bottomless drop into the very heart of the earth. I descended thus for several minutes, scraping my boots against the stone walls, while the chimney became progressively narrower. When the chimney became too tight to navigate in this manner, I wiggled onward as best I could, allowing gravity coupled with the built-in slipperiness of my Secret Agent Spelunking suit to aid my descent. Even still, I nearly became irrevocably lodged in a sphincter-like formation that guarded what turned out to be the cavity's lowermost extremity.

Happily, my recent yogic practice has rendered me unusually pliable, and, by employing a Tantric exhalation technique transmitted to my by Dr. Flavour, I was able to squeeze through the opening and into the expansive void below. Dangling there, like a spider in open space, I could find no wall or formation on which to make a foothold, but was immediately overwhelmed by the deafening roar of moving water. Training my helmet-light below me, I verified that I was, indeed, suspended over a rapidly flowing, underground river. Reasoning that returning back the way I came would prove difficult if not impossible, I bade farewell to my trusty braided nylon lifeline and jumped into the torrent below -- not, however, before inflating my Ballooning Aquatic Survival Apron. This meet device (available by special order from the Fakiegrind Secret Agent Provisions Boutique) has the double advantage of keeping one afloat and providing a measure of protection against injurious collision with rocks and other submerged obstacles.

The apron is certified for white-water conditions and cascades of up to three metres in height, but guarantees no protection against waterfalls of 22 metres, which, it turns out, is the height of the precipice over which the river that was carrying me ultimately flows. There I was, being pleasantly swept allong by the raging waters, my spelunking suit keeping me warm and dry while my survival apron rendered me boyant despite the water's brisk current. I could have contentedly passed an entire afternoon in such a way, the river twisting and turning through the depths of the earth like a giant, subterranean waterslide, had the Great Artificer who framed these passages not decided to throw in a giant waterfall, like an exclamation point marking the end of this particular train of His geological thought.

Down I plummeted. For what seemed to be an eternity (but couldn't have been more than a few seconds) an entire lifetime flashed before my eyes. The fact that it didn't seem to be my own lifetime, but was rather a biographical account of George de Mestral, inventor of Velcro, was odd, but I had little time to marvel the fact before a large pool of water interrupted my brain's warped musings. I pointed my toes downward and hoped for the best.

Most fortunately, the pool of water at the foot of the falls was deep, and it's bottom was covered in a thick layer of spongy moss-like growth that both absorbed the shock of my fall (when waterbottom I eventually hit), and glowed with a strange phosphorescence, lending the pool an enchanting soft blue-green radiance. So radiant was the pool, in fact, that when I reached its surface, I no longer needed my spelunking helmet's lamp to make out the dimensions of the cavern in which I found myself -- and a good thing too, for the force and angle with which I had hit the pool's surface had knocked the helmet clear off my head and sent it careening through the cavern to parts unknown.

And looking around, it became clear that I had stumbled upon something altogether extraordinary. I had indeed found the source of the mysterious wireless Internet signal, and was taken aback by the oddity and outlandishness of the entire scenario. But this tale will have to wait for another posting, as official Fakiegrind duties call me away from the keyboard for the time being...

Happy Days Are Here Again

2007-10-09T00:12:00.000-04:00

Here in the new Fakiegrind bunker at the bottom of an abandoned mine shaft, we've been having trouble getting connected to the Internet. This is the main reason for the long period of Fakie silence during which the glad birthday tidings of several long-time Proxy Agents went unacknowledged.

Happily, it seems that one of our neighbours (I didn't even know we had neighbours until a few minutes ago!) seems to have recently installed a wireless Internet service into which our state-of-the-art wi-fi systems have been able to hack. Of course, the fact that we even have neighbours creates a whole new batch of security problems. What if we have inadvertently set up shop next to one of the many subterranean outposts for the Mole Man's Legions of blind ninja? What if the Internet connection we are currently enjoying actually belongs to a group of cthonic demon worshippers, buried alive with a laptop to hearken in a new age of darkness throughout the daylight land? What if the connection belongs to a warren of intelligent, omnivorous rabbit-like creatures who will drill into the Fakiegrind larders and steal our freeze-dried provisions?

We will have to better investigate our surroundings using Dr. Flavour's sonographic imagine spyroscope. But until this can be done, I suppose it couldn't hurt to enjoy a little free Internet surfing. Who knows, maybe if we poke around down here long enough we'll find an old cable TV connection that is still active.

Oh yeah, and thanks for the birthday messages. Stay old!

15th Annual Bease Comp Pics

2007-08-15T20:06:00.000-04:00

Fireside Reflection

2007-07-15T16:18:00.000-04:00

After setting ablaze 27 casks of biowaste from the Fakiegrind Cosmetic Surgery Institute, I sat me down in the staff lunch room to reflect on the twists and turns that life has taken of late for the internet's most established Devolutionary Skateboard/Sectret Agent blog.

The transplanting of our headquarters to a new, top-secret location has had the deisred effect of throwing our arch-foe, the Xister, and his ilk off our trail. Recent amendments to Australia's anti-time travel legislation, as well as the ongoing U.S. crack-down on rogue hypnotists also seems to have aided our cause.

Captain Canuck's dry cleaning bills continue to run Fakie expense accounts into the red, thus making impossible our securing a live internet connection at our new location. Also, geo-thermal drafts in the abandoned mine shaft currently housing our mainframe have made a wireless connection out of the question, and the cable company is still trying to find a drill that can cut through the adamantine-laced shell of our command centre's panic room.

Other than these few minor setbacks, Fakiegrind continues to stultify under the weight of its own lackluster legacy, and the staff soothsayer predicts that we will have completely repeated ourselves, verbatim, by the second fiscal quarter of the year 2019. This, however, will be a non-issue once our Context over Content promotional campain is implemented in early 2111.

Aside from our ongoing (and hitherto fruitless) search for the secret blog musings of the enigmatic Ms. Muffin, we here at Fakiegrind will continue to bide our time while waiting for the day foretold in the Book of Oldness when,

"The Heavens make an great clamour
like unto a riding lawnmower ready to expire
and discount vouchers for a major local vendor
of soft tacos will shower down upon the Earth

'Till then, Stay Old!

Walking the Dog

2007-07-06T20:18:00.000-04:00

The kids at summer skateboard camp love the trick called "Walking the Dog". It's pretty easy but looks impressive, and it's not something many people learn nowadays. I have made it my private mission to revive this trick, and promote it as much as possible as Steeltown's mobile skateboard park moves from neighbourhood to neighbourhood every couple of weeks.

Last week, we were on the western edge of town, with the ramps set up inside of the local arena. For two days, no kids showed up (the park's presence doesn't seem to be advertised in any newspapers). My co-worker and I spent the time skateboarding and making posters to put up around the area. The floor of the arena is incredibly smooth, a lovely surface on which to ride. One push gets you all the way across the arena. It feels like skating on glass.

On the second day, there was a torrential rainstorm. Alex and I stood in the loading bay doorway of the arena and watched the water pour down out of the heavens. Within minutes, the eaves had backed up and water started spilling off the roof in thick cascades. When we returned to the interior of the arena, the drops falling on the arena roof made a deafening clatter.

By the third day, word started to spread and a few kids showed up to use the ramps. We have helmets that we lend out to them. They tear around the course, going off the ramps and landing on platforms -- stuff I no longer want to try to do for fear of falling. I largely stick to the flatground tricks. The vast expanse of the arena gives one lots of room to get a good line of three or four tricks in before having to turn around. The ramps only take up half of the area, so the other half is a flatlander's paradise.

For at least a half hour every day, I practice skating backwards. I can now do little ollies and a couple other tricks. It's like learning to skate all over again. Rodney Mullen still blows my mind.

Dyslexic Double Agent Fools Everyone (including himself)

2007-06-29T14:05:00.001-04:00

I love working at the hotel. I have a badge and a ribbon, and, occasionally, I earn a little apple that I can pin to said ribbon. I meet all kinds of interesting people from all over the world, but only for a moment or two, so I get to construct stories about them in my head. It's a good gig, much better than the skid factory, where it was just me and the circular saw and a jigger full of planks. I quit that job after three weeks, though I should have stayed on longer.

Happily, I managed to swing a deal with the higher-ups as Dept. H, and they have given me a special assignment at the skatepark, a couple days a week. The secret there is: don't lend out your skateboard. Once you do, you won't see it until the end of the day, as it will pass from kid to kid like a head lice academic, or the cheat codes for H.A.L.O. (or whatever videe'r games they play these days). My problem is I can't say no. The upside to this is that not having my board handy means I won't skate as much, which means my back and knees will last that much longer. You see, one gets to a certain point as an aged 'boader that one must start to ration cartilage. I'm just thinking ahead, to, like, next week when it would be nice to be able to get out of bed without the ceiling-mounted winch that I'm thinking of installing.

Anyhow, thanks for all your comments, and sorry for the delay in postings, and the lack of visits to all my favourite blog-hoods. Though Fakiegrind's new headquarters is 99% up and running, we still don't have an internet connection. It's sure to come, eventually, once the proper paperwork has been filed, and Captain Canuck pays me back the money he borrowed to cover his dry cleaning tab.

Stay old!

Deep Cover

2007-06-10T02:58:00.000-04:00

This summer, I was supposed to work at a mobile skateboard park, looking after the kids. I went through all the trouble of gettinga a police check and signing up for a first aid course. But the closer it got to the start date of my new job, the more I started to dread it. I knew there would be rewarding aspects to working with youth, and getting to know some kids from different parts of town, but the thought of skateboarding every day was weighing heavily on my mind. Also, the sun is so hot these days, and working outside would surely be exhausing.

The last time I went out skateboarding, I bruised my toe. It was swollen and blue for three days, and I was walking around with a limp. The accident happened just as I was leaving the park. I tried to do one last trick, to show off, and instead of the board doing what I expected, it whirled out of control and dinged me in the toe. I was pretty depressed after that. I had already given my notice at the hotel where I work, and it seemed to me too late to go back. I would have to skateboard with the kids for two months, even if it killed me.

My body has been sore lately. My joints ache and my back gives out when I've been sitting too long in a car or soft couch. Even though I swim and try to eat well, there's only so much battering a fellow can take. Skateboarding has kept me young up to this point, but I'm starting to feel my age. So, when someone at the hotel gave their notice, and my boss offered me increased hours if I came back to work for them, I thought about it for a day, then decided to bail on the skateboard camp position.

Call it self-preservation. I turned my back on what might have proven to be a rewarding, though strenuous and risky endeavour in favour for what I already know will be a tedious and predictable stint at the hotel front desk. But they pay ok, and the job doesn't wreck my knees or back. I'm partly relieved; I never have to skateboard again, if I don't feel like it. But a sort of quiet desparation has also set in, though maybe that's being a little over-dramatic. Actually, I'm not really all that desparate. Just happy to be alive, employed, intact (more or less) and old.

Greetings Bloggers

2007-06-03T00:57:00.001-04:00

I, Walrusman, have stolen the Fakiegrind access codes. Flatlander is a chump. While he chases Ms. Muffin his blog is now mine. You will soon know the full extent of my collection of used scratch lotto cards!!!!!!!!!

Muffin Hunt

2007-05-26T04:18:00.000-04:00

Something about the taunting tone of a comment left on the previous post has driven me to break off all other activities and devote the full resources of Fakiegrind Enterprises to finding the secret blog hideout of the mysterious Ms. Muffin.

However, after several weeks of searching the internet, the best our Agents have come up with is a series of Youtube postings featuring people's cats.

There's this one, for instance.

And this one.

And then there's this one.

But none of these felines bring us any closer to Ms. Muffin's blog, wherein, we have reason to believe, all the secrets of the universe are made clear.

Summer Hits the North

2007-05-12T00:44:00.000-04:00

Yes, Fakiegrind Headquarters has moved, but our top secret ultra-new location is still within walking distance of Steeltown's ever-lovin', ever colourful north end. Just today, I was standing in the parking lot of the beer store, talking with an old acquantance whom I hadn't seen in a dog's age, when an overweight man approached on a mountain bike. He was wearing tight-fitting blue shorts and a matching tank-top, and had a large duffle bag slung over one shoulder. Approaching my friend and I, he slowed down.

Now, normally, a north end stranger weilding a large duffle bag and looking to make converstaion can mean only one thing: stolen merchandise available for resale at street-level prices. The only question in my mind was the particular nature of the hot goods being peddled (not that I was interested in procuring such items; my curiosity was purely academic). At any rate, the man was riding his (possibly stolen) mountain bike with one hand, and weilding a dinner fork in the other. Affixed to the end of the fork was a portentious chunk of what looked to be hamburger patty, it's pink innards gloriously exposed to the patchwork afternoon sunlight as it filtered through the overhead canopy of newly leafed trees.

The fellow did not keep my friend and I in suspense for long as to the nature of his wares, but, without dismounting his bike, inquired, his mouth half-full of beef patty,

"D'you guys wanna buy some meat?"

I should not have been surprised, but was, having never had meat solicited to me from a duffle bag in a beer store parking lot before. Though I had no desire to actually buy any of the fellow's product, I couldn't resist asking,

"Is it the same stuff you're currently eating?"

To which he replied, "Yeah!.." and there was a pause as the guy thought over my question, "...but raw".

And then the fellow was on his way, realizing from the tone of my inquiry, and with the sharpened senses of a street hawker to such things, that neither my friend nor I were seriously in the maket for discount street meat.

As he biked away, the guy's shorts revealed more of his posterior than modesty is generally wont to expose, and I quickly averted my gaze, wondering to myself at the colourful panorama of life that seems to burst into view with the first few warm days of summer. The whole encounter took less than twenty seconds, but the image of the short-shorted meat vendor is now burned in my mind: just another real-life Fakiegrind encounter unleashed upon the larger world via the magic of the internet.

More Setbacks

2007-05-02T14:54:00.000-04:00

Movement, according to the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea (not to be confused with 21st century discount DJ, Zeno of Steeltown), is impossible. His reasoning was that, in order to get from point A to point B, one must first pass through the mid-point (C). However, in order to reach mid-point C, one must first reach the half-way point between A and C (point D). Yet, in order to get to point D, one must first pass through the point mid-way between A and D (point E), and so on, to infinity. Because one must pass through infinite half-way points before even reaching the half-way point between A and B, and because all alphabets so far designed by humanity have less than infinite characters, a traveller setting out to make the A-B journey would, argues Zeno, never actually arrive.

In the history of the Fakiegrind Corp. this argument has never been accepted as reasonable grounds for Agents not showing up for work in the morning. However, there seems to be some kind of Zeno-esque effect hindering our recent efforts to move Fakie Central to a new and super-secret location. Try as we might to empty out the Vaults of Oldness, to disconnect and re-install our dated but reliable vacuum tube computer system, and to reach the bottom of Dr. Flavour's stockpile of reference material on the great Papal schism of 1550, we are still not up and running as the reliable purveyors of encoded misinformation and poetic perversions of perversity that we so strive to be. Try as we might to bend time and space to speed up the re-location process, we find ourselves, week by week, even further behind than we though we were when last we evaluated the situation.

And so, we have created a special research team to investigate Zeno's philosophical debate with common sense and see if there might not be some loophole in his logic that we could exploit to our own advantage. While this might seem like a further waste of valuable time and resources, we are confident that, in the final analysis, we will be no further behind or ahead of where we were before we started (which was, essentially, neither here nor there).

Go with the Floe

2007-04-23T13:23:00.000-04:00

Much like the T.A.R.D.I.S. in the British sci-fi serial Dr. Who, Fakiegrind headquarters, while taking up very little geographical space, actually spreads out into so many other-dimensional nooks and crannies as to inhabit whole continents of what is known by some Philosophers of Flux as G-space. Crafted we know not how by the ingenious Dr. Flavour and his team of trained cybernetic marmosets, the old Fakiegrind Headquarters was installed piecemeal in those out of the way and unused corners of reality that nobody seems to miss, but which hold together the more high-profile and seemingly necessary space-time segments like so much ontological glue. A snip of the temporal fabric here, a tuck of gravitational fields there and pretso! you have a pan-dimensional, extra-temporal embassy of anarchy and retrograde motion woven so finely into the tapestry of impermanence as to be nearly undetectable to most major forms of divination, both modern and archaic.

Yes, we stuffed the old Headquarters (and underlying Vaults of Oldness) with so much cultural debris and cryptological detritus that even the in-house librarian and archivist, Sinbad the Sneezer, didn't know the full extent of our holdings. It's a tired truism that only when you go to move do you realize how much stuff you actually have, and we've been excavating each little treasure trove and spider hole, being careful not to set off any bedpans of mass instruction in the process. The endeavor has been taking a long time, and postings have been dwindling (you might have watched the Fox special last Saturday focusing on the fallout surrounding Fakiegrind's lapse — I had no idea the south Asian lychee nut crop was so intimately linked to our microcosmic publishing efforts!) Please bear with us. Disentangling Dr. Flavour's labyrinth of linked wormholes is a painstaking process requiring our utmost attention and concentration. It just wouldn't do to accidentally cave in a time-flux conduit and wipe out a whole era of geological time, for instance. Extinct dinosaurs are one thing, but think of how upset your kids would be if they never even existed!

The other reason for the lack of recent posts is our difficulties in getting the new headquarters wired for high-speed internet. Until we iron out some minor difficulties surrounding installing cable through the fourteen inch, reinforced steel walls of the Fakiegrind panic room — into which I have been forced to repair due to recent paranoia over the sudden disappearance of the Xister from our 5th-dimensional radar tracking system — I have been resorting to running the blog the old fashion way, that is, via courier.

The process goes like this: I dictate Fakiegrind transmissions to my secretary, Ms. Radixumpoid, who takes it all down in shorthand. She delivers her arcanely-inscribed sheets to Agent Fiss-Mastidon, who proceeds to translate Ms. Radixumpoids scribbles into a cursive those of us not trained in the secretarial arts but having received at least a rudimentary education in the public schooling system can understand. Fiss-Mastidon makes three copies: one goes to the Fakie proof reader, Sigmund Pillfree; the second is sent to the P.R. department to catch any embarrassing gaffs or perversions of truth which might otherwise tarnish the sheen of our exemplar reputation for delivering high grade nonsense at discount prices. The third copy is whisked away by the Fakie Marshal, and locked in a safety deposit box along with the proof of purchases from every box of cereal ever eaten by any of the staff here at Fakiegrind (you can often send them away for prizes).

Once the proof copy is properly screened and cross-referenced with the P.R. copy, we hold a staff meeting to determine how the particular post fits into the blog as a whole, and to discuss directions we might like to take the post in in terms of pictorial supplementation, type-font augmentation, lexicographical-cranial alimentation, and other technical matters. Then we do a test posting and run it through two or three focus groups, which, though picked at random from far-flung segments of the population, always seem to consist of the same four or five characters who are primarily interested in the free sandwiches and pop.

Finally, once the focus group feedback has been analyzed and the marketing team has had a run at it to screen for possible product placement and merchandise spin-offs, the finished text is sent to a buddy of ours with a high-speed internet connection, a fellow in the east end who types it in and posts it when he, like, gets around to it dude.

So, you see, what might appear at first glance like a casual blogging endeavor, done in idle hours for the sheer enjoyment of adding our voice to the multitudes of self-publishing enthusiast who populate the e-wires, is actually a quite involved process relying on the skills of a whole legion of highly-trained individuals to bring it to fruition. And, if it takes a little longer to bring you the time-wasting tidbits you have come to rely upon over the past two years that Fakiegrind has been live, then we hope that you will understand and come to relish those postings that do appear even more, and that you will wait with baited breath for them so that you can leave a comment or two and be part of the whole, glorious process — be immortalized, if only for an instant, in the annals of Fakiedom, until some higher power, perhaps from another, far-away galaxy, or even a whole other dimension, parallel to our own but different in a few crucial ways, thus giving its inhabitants what would seem to us to be incredible powers, comes and pulls the plug on this little festival of frenetic flippancy. 'Till that day comes, be sure to eat your Wheeties and, of course, stay old.

Still on the Move

2007-04-21T03:30:00.000-04:00

Fakiegrind is still moving, though not anywhere fast. We are postponing further postings until post-National Postal Worker's Day (which falls sometime mid July or August, depending on the moon and seasonal fluctuations in the earwig population). If we do post a post before this date, it will be done post hoc, but not in a spirit of apostasy.

We now return to our regularly scheduled silence.

Instert Text Here

2007-04-08T00:06:00.000-04:00

When I moved to the new version of blogger, all the contributors save two disappeared. I am glad to see they are now back in all their multifarious splendor. Fakie Central is still in a state of flux: neither here nor there, warm nor cold, sweet nor salty. We have embraced the galactic omphalos and defaced the plastic gastropod, to whose hideous visage the townsfolk had been sacrificing huge platters of Tex-Mex takeout for the past three generations. Yes, we've been around the bend and back, shaking our groove thing despite being nearly crushed to death by an unstable mountain of watermelons that some lackey stock boy had stacked too high in the produce aisle.

[insert picture here]

Scholars and prophets of the Fakie persuasion are still arguing about and pronouncing upon the subject of what this blog will look like in the New Dispensation. I suspect it will look much the same as it does now, with each pixel a galaxy containing billions of tiny planets, any one of which might be the hideout of the Xister and his ilk, or the home of some hitherto undiscovered race of disco-lovin' Frisbee-tossin' brethren. It's a veritable microverse, but quantum inertia may decree that it remain largely unexplored. All the better, for there must yet remain vast tracts of territory for which no salesperson or marketing team have been assigned, and were this not so the entire house of discarded hockey cards might very well collapse.

[insert provacative fakie-link here]

It's all I can to to keep from bursting into old world laments every time I think about the freedoms we once enjoyed, when every road was a thread of destiny upon which we could feel ourselves part of some great tapestry depicting the 13th annual Beasley Park Skateboard Jam (which, historians say, is the one precising following the 12th annual Beasley Park Skateboard Jam). But then somebody photocopied my television screen, collected the fifty or so snapshots of an old episode of Night Rider, and bound it into a collector's edition folio that sold for 12 dollars on ebay. And now all I have left are the memories of a time when those little prizes in the bottom of a box of pink elephant popcorn were enough to make one happy for five to ten minutes or so, even up to half an hour.

[insert recipe for staying old here]

Fakiegrind Is Moving

2007-03-16T13:01:00.000-04:00

No, we're not re-vamping the blog or changing our web address or anything of that nature. But Fakiegrind Central Headquarters is in the process of moving our extensive collection of top-secret dossiers on hitherto suppressed, revolutionary new skateboard technologies, (not to mention the vast and largely uncatalogued Vaults of Oldness) and our complete battalion of 1940s office furniture and vacuum tube computer systems to a brand new location.

Now's the time to sell, before they turn it all into condos.

So as to better foil the nefarious plots of our numerous enemies and detractors, the exact location and date of the move must be kept strictly hush-hush, and we may have to maintain blog silence for an unspecified length of time, until we can get our systems up and running to normal capacity. Please note that during this period, the Antiballistic Missile Early Warning and Deployment systems will also be down, so please do not launch any ordinance (live or otherwise) our way in a friendly attempt to test our satellite shields (and this goes for you too, Roboshrub Inc.). Also, we don't anticipate having any difficulties when the time comes to move the bio-weapons research lab — Agent Rocksteady's pick-up truck has been specially equipped with an old refrigerator we found curbside the other day — but, just in case, we have advised all readers within a thousand mile radius to make sure they've had their flu shots.

If all goes well, we should be up and running again in a month or so. We're also looking for new homes for the hybrid dog-walrus sentries (the "walrogs"), as our new Headquarters has much less space for our kennel/genetic research facility. Anyone interested in acquiring one of these creatures (who love kids and make for great pets) can drop us a line.

Keep Your Eyes to the Event Horizon

2007-03-10T16:39:00.000-05:00

Transmitted at 17:49 Standard Fakie Time from Central Headquarters, just before it was transformed into a herd of grazing water buffalo.

"It seems unbelievable but true! Dr. Flavour's experimental new portable Black Hole Generator for home and office use is showing off-the-chart levels of anti-matter flux generation..."

"But Flavour left expicit instructions (before dissappearing into the Borneo forest on an extreme golfing expidition) NEVER to turn that thing on...it's just too unpredictable and the black hole generated could spell the end of Fakiegrind as we know it!"

"Is it my fault he made the thing look so much like a coffee maker? I thought I was turning on the morning brew."

"Well it looks like you've started an irreversible process that will see Fakiegrind central at the epicentre of what will likely be the universe's first artificially generated black hole!"

"Does that mean?"

"Possibly"

"But then..."

"Unlikely."

"And..."

"Yes, almost certainly."

"And so..."

"And so this may be the very last posting to escape the event parimeter, the fabled post described in the Book of Oldness as the Last Transmission!"

Book of Oldness, archive photo

"Better make it count."

"We don't have long."

"We should set back the clocks."

"No time for that now!"

"But we'd gain an extra hour..."

"You need to study Paragraph 111.2-3356 of Subsection W of the Report on the Infalibility of Non-linear Synchonistic Dampening Protocols."

"Actually, I was just looking at that."

"And?"

"And there are several questionable inferences in the Third Argument. I was forced to fold it into an origami duck and set it alight."

"Under normal circumstances I'd nominate you for Agent of the Month, but right now we need to say something monumental and awe-inspiring to leave as a testament to the grandeur that was Fakiegrind."

"You know, we're running out of stir-sticks at the coffee station."

"Not that! Anything but that!"

"Captain! The event parimetre is unfolding at an exponential rate....we have only a few second left!"

"You know, this reminds me of the time..."

"Captain! If you have any profound words of wisdom to bestow before this blog impodes, now's the time..."

"Well, in that case, just let me say what a pleasure it has been to serve as Blog Commander of the digital anomoly hitherto known as Fakiegrind."

"Anything else?"

"Also, never carry an open can of sardines in your pocket. It will leak."

"But what about..."

"Oh yes, 0 is the new 4."

"Huh?"

"Wow, check out the colours!"

"Time/space is folding on itself! Any final comments?"

"yEs iNdeeD. oNe laSt tHiNg.....

sTaY oLd!

Model of Mystery

2007-02-08T04:04:00.000-05:00

Many readers may be wondering, what will the coastline look like twenty years from now, given current global warming trends? Others may be asking themselves about the average shelf life of a tuna sandwich (five hours, according to Fakie researchers). Yet others might have burnt out a few synapses wondering what has become of Fakiegrind and it's once-prolific posting output.

Well, the fact is, I've been trying to track down models from old 1970s department store catalogues as part of a "where are they now" kind of article, but I've really been having no luck. Exhausting early on the obvious avenue of telephone inquiry (most marketing firms involved in the production of these catalogues – when they even still exist – flatly refuse to give out information about past or present models), I set about an arduous campaign of gluing fliers to streetposts in the major urban centres of the nation hoping to strike a note of remembrance from the citizenry. But hours turned into days turned into weeks of sitting next to the Modeltracker Hotline and 'nary a call came through, save a couple telemarketers and cranks.

And so, I am left with one last recourse: publishing pictures on the web in the hope that someone will come forward with information about these catalogue superstars of yesteryear and tell us how life has been for them. Perhaps some things best remain as mysteries, but the call is out. If you know anything about this man, his history or current whereabouts, Fakiegrinders want to know.

Reminds me of the time...

2007-02-02T01:59:00.001-05:00

I was on assignment, writing copy for a ground beef mine in the hills outside of Yellowknife. It was a warm, glorious mid-summers day, one of two that the region saw that year. My assistant, Natasha Snipetree, a normally reserved and serious-minded typesetter from the Eastern Townships, momentarily overcome by the lushness of our surroundings (we had quit the company bivouac for a grassy knoll overlooking a peat bog) did an impromptu belly dance, waving a couple internal memos in the air as if they were scarves made of the finest Oriental silk. The memory comes back to me every time I inhale the fumes from an antique mimeograph machine.

Blog Hiatus Update

2007-01-25T10:15:00.000-05:00

The 2007 Fakiegrind Blog Hiatus is going extremely well. Blog postings are down almost 500% from the last quarter, while readership remains at just below average levels. Comments are down 86%, while the comments-to-postings ratio is up 77%. The blog hiatus projections calls for benchmark levels of readership indifference by the third quarter of the present fiscal cycle.

A lateral shift in the header generation initiative may swing return visitor stats into the red zone during the peak meridians of the fourth quarter, but we will attempt to compensate for such fluctuations in market suffrage by re-vamping the sidebar hyperlink interface to better accord with current template idiosyncrasies.

All in all, we are looking at a better than expected success gradient for the current blog hiatus initiative, and expect to generate continued stats counter activity for no good reason well into the second tri-mester of the current incubatory timeframe.

2007-01-13T20:51:00.000-05:00

2007-01-04T21:21:00.000-05:00

Let the Fakiegrind blog hiatus begin!

2006-12-22T13:49:00.000-05:00

'Twas the night before last
and all through Fakie Headquarters
the Agents were feasting on digital leftovers.
Flatlander was guarding the chimney with care
In case Maskatron should suddenly appear
And steal away all of the stockings and gifts
To sell on eBay, or at shops of thrift.
Overseer Q was lighting a stogie
And DJ Thing was playing Thomas Dolby.
The turntables were spinning by the fireside
Where Christmas carols and oldschool rappers collide.
And Captain Canuck was mending his cape
While his old flame Nelvanna peeled him a grape.
Rocksteady was working on guitar chords
And Em was browsing the comic book hoard.
The Vaults of Oldness were full of weird stuff
From Christmas past, all gathering dust.
But Kil Joy was nowhere to be seen
Until he arrived in Dr. Flavour's time machine.
The tofu was roasting in the old gas stove.
(Happy T. Fluke was hiding in a mango grove)
When out of the window all saw a strange sight.
The sky was filled with a flickering light.
And a spherical vessel was hovering there
Which seemed to appear right out of the air!
It lit up the yard with a powerful beam
Where the grass and the deck chairs started to gleam.
And an object was lowered of strange design.
It was a Christmas present from Nebula 9!
We brought it inside, that bizarre invention.
It shimmered and pulsed with extra dimensions.
But the instruction book was written in code
Or the language of some pan-galactic abode.
So we could only guess at its possible uses
Until someone suggested we try to make juices.
So we loaded it up with various fruit:
Some apples and pears and cassava root
And flipped what looked like the master switch
Then the whole house shaked at a fevered pitch.
And the air was filled with a beautiful sound
Like industrial jazz coming out of the ground.
We opened the tap and filled our cups
With a frothy liquid to warm our guts.
Sipping which, Dr. Flavour exclaimed with glee,
"Egads! The thing makes bubble tea!"

Fakiegrind Examines...

2006-12-20T19:47:00.000-05:00

Last night, after the other Agents had all gone to bed, the android detection field had been activated and the cat fed, I was ruminating over a nice cup of 'nog and my mind wandered to the subject of the recent popularity of DJs and DJ culture. Nowadays, top DJs command as much, or more, for their services as rock stars. A guy (or girl) can be just as admired for playing records in public as trained musicians once were, and Technics turntables have replaced the electric guitar as the instrument of choice with which angst-ridden teens struggle express themselves.

This might be seen as just another fad in the endless series of spectacles popular culture generates in the tireless quest for novelty. It will surely pass, just like disco and pet rocks, only to be rediscovered and reinvented by future trendsetters in the great laundromat of popular culture. But perhaps there is a deeper significance to the adoption of two turntables and a mixer as the musical emblem of the moment. How come, I asked myself as nutmeg particles swirled chaotically in the yellow sea nog, that just now, to quote Tears for Fears' prophetic lyrics, "DJ's the man we love the most?".

Who doesn't love the Wolf Man?

DJs can be musical innovators, inventing new sounds from mixtures of musical styles, and the best spinners often move on to become producers in their own right. But, for the most part, a DJ's job is to play music that other people have created and recorded. They are a kind of middle man – a pusher, if you will – of sounds, and, whether at a dance club or on the radio, they can influence and mold culture by the very decisions they make about what songs to play or not. The editorial power held by the disk jockey is humourously acknowledged and criticized in the Smiths' song "Panic" with its chorus,

Burn down the disco
Hang the blasted DJ
Because the music they constantly play
Says nothing to me about my life
Hang the blasted DJ
Because the music they constantly play...

Hatred, jealousy and persecution of the DJ goes hand in hand with the power they yield as controllers of musical culture. Of course, it is music producers who actually determine what even gets recorded and distributed in the first place, but these largely behind-the-scenes figures are less easy to target by their very invisibility. However, while hatred for the DJ is easy to understand, we must still address the great love for DJing that currently permeates our culture. Why this complicated love/hate relationship with people who are just trying to play some records?

The answer lies, I suspect, with our position at the End of History. We are currently inundated with so much cultural information, with so many past and present artists, styles and landmarks of musical heritage, that the average listener hardly knows what to make of it all. Is it ok, for instance, to enjoy the Abba song "Take a Chance on Me" even though your parents might have grooved to the same track, likely before you were even conceived? Can a single soul enjoy both Rush and gangster rap and still maintain an intact and coherent sense of self? In high school, people tend to cling to a single musical genre, or a particular artist, as a means of maintaining a sense of personal identity. But, as we age, our tastes often mature and differentiate in manifold directions. This can be a painful and difficult process, but it is made easier by the DJ, whose very vocation consists in sifting through the popular musical heritage of the last fifty years and making some kind of statement as to what is valuable or meaningful in it.

Grandmaster Flash got class!

The DJ is like Theseus steering his way through the labyrinth of popular music and leaving behind a golden thread for others to follow, all the while evading the minotaur of massive "uncoolness"— the loss of face that comes with liking music that is clearly "whack". The DJ is like an archivist, constantly digging, searching out and sorting the musical influences that make up the cacophonous modern landscape. As our culture enters its twilight years it ceases to be vibrantly creative and becomes more philosophical and reflective. The DJ is the philosopher of music, telling us what it all means through the subliminal connections made between the tracks he chooses to play.

It's all been done, and there may be nothing new under the sun, but the DJ, through a tweak of the bass, a twinge of the treble, can make it all seem brand new. And in this ironic age of self-reflexivity and repetition this is the panacea offered to our fatigued souls. Within a single 50 minute set we can relive the thrill of disco, the utopian otherworldliness of prog rock, the cold calculations of techno, and the raw, liberating nihilism of punk. We can bop our heads to new wave and even steal a surreptitious thrill at the Motown beats of the fallen King of Pop. The DJ is the master pianist, playing each of these musical keys in turn, dropping his record needle into the very grooves of history.

The DJ as clown.

And that is why we love the DJ; because he or she reflects back to us who we are (or pretend to be), and who we have been (or thought we were). To borrow a phrase from the title of one of fantasy author Michael Moorcock's stranger trilogies, we are the "Dancers at the End of Time" and the DJ with his record collection supplies the sound track. But the age of the DJ, too, will pass. It's death knell has already been sounded with the advent of the Ipod and similar technologies. With the MP3 file, everyone can fashion his or her own personal music program, and an entire library of music can fit on a device the size of a pocket calculator. Perhaps this will be the true end of history, when each of us can create his or her own narrative out of the chaotic debris in the midst of which we find ourselves. And so the lyrics of Morissey's "Panic" will no longer hold true, but we can still listen to them and reminisce in the isolated splendor provided by the "earbuds" of our own electronic DJ device.

A Little R&R by Order of Q

2006-12-15T19:30:00.000-05:00

Well, Overseer Q has been filling me in on the shenanigans that have been going on around here the past week or so. It's so far-fetched that I wouldn't believe it if they didn't have videotape to back up the outlandish story of my believing myself to be the killer robot Maskatron and hiding out in the Vaults of Oldness for several days while plotting to destroy Fakiegrind.

These days, I have to take the Android Detection Test each morning, just to prove to myself that it was all a psychotic breakdown triggered by weeks of overwork coupled with Overseer Q's fiendish practical joke involving the Foolproof Android Detection Cubicle, which proved to be nothing more than a Plexiglas shower stall set up with some strobe lights and sound effects. With friends like that who needs the Xister?

So, I'm taking early leave for the holidays. Going to catch a little R&R, forget about cyborg assassins, time machines and the end of Fakiegrind as we know it. I spend several hours each day just basking in the technicolour light of the Mezmervision® Blog Preservation Banner, and find it quite soothing to my nerves. I've also been doing some recreational collage work, which is the equivalent of basket weaving in the Secret Agent Debriefing and Recuperation ward. So far, I'm quite happy with the results...

Well, Dr. Thirdeye is limiting my online blog time (and keeping a close watch on the "delete blog" button), so I'd best be logging off. Happy Hanukkah!

Flatlander's Return to "Sanity"

2006-12-09T23:22:00.000-05:00

Late last night an emergency board meeting was called to consider what is to be done about Flatlander and his increasing state of paranoia. Granted, the unfortunate incident with the cable TV police didn't help things any. We were faced with a damage control situation, and were willing to hear out any reasonable idea. Perhaps we could humour Flatlander's delusions about being an android while somehow circumventing his desire to destroy Fakiegrind. If we could only get the real Maskatron out of storage where his dismantled body parts have lain for the past twenty years, then we could prove to Flatlander that he and the robot were not the same entity. But, strangely, Maskatron's disassembled body could not be located and remains missing at the time of this posting.

As a last resort, we began pouring over the Gilligan's Island Boxed Set DVD collection, hoping, if not for some inspiration, then at least for a measure of distraction from our current predicament. Then, towards the end of Season One, we were struck by a revelation: if a knock on the head by a coco nut can both cause and cure a case of amnesia, maybe a similar logic would be effective in Flatlander's case!

Luring the aging skateboarder back into the Foolproof Android Detection Device proved difficult, until we told him that it was time portal leading back to the year 1986. Once he was inside the device, we slammed shut the door and flipped the switch. The look on Flatlander's face when he emerged from the machine and discovered that he was still in 2006 and that rap music was still largely played out was slightly tragic, but we knew that the old Flatlander was back when he asked for some Run DMC from the vintage vinyl collection. Then he asked what we were all staring at and we had to pretend that nothing had happened, for fear of plunging him into a relapse.

Once the situation has stabilized and we have managed to assess any damage that might have been done to Flatlander's robust but unpredictable sense of self, we will gradually inform him of the strange events of the past few days. In the mean time, we must continue the search for the missing Maskatron components.

Thank you to all the loyal readers who stood by Flatlander in this time of crisis. A giant Venus fly trap that we trained to sing old vaudville songs has been sent out to every one of you as a token of our appreciation.

Death to Fakiegrind!

2006-12-09T13:23:00.000-05:00

Can you believe it? The "Save Flatlander Fund"?! What insidiousness is this? Some new plot to make me forget my true identity and mission, no doubt. But the coils of my microchip brain will know no rest until this blog is reduced to the elementary particles whose random collisions first gave it birth. Fakiegrind will fall, and then I, Maskatron, will take my rightful place in the annals of the misunderstood robotic liberators of humanity, alongside Terminator, H.A.L. and Old B.O.B.

Overseer Q claims to have installed cable at Fakiegrind HQ in order to ease my troubled mind. But just yesterday a representative of the local cable provider arrived at my door with a warrant to search the premises for "unlawful signal splicing devices". What could I do? I let him in. Five minutes later, after the unearthing of an illicitly installed component, Fakie Headquarter's TV was once again reduced to two station reception.

It's all a game. I will not be distracted, despite the seeming veracity of the world my disconnected CPU has created for itself. Fakiegrind must die! and Overseer Q will be weeping into his spandex wrestler's costume.

A Note from Overseer Q

2006-12-08T00:13:00.000-05:00

It seems as though a little prank devised by some of the guys at R & D, a ploy which I reluctantly agreed to play along with due to some outstanding poker debts which my colleagues agreed to wave, has gone a bit too far. Over the week-end I participated in an eloabourate ruse to make Flatlander believe himself to be the robot assassin, master of disguise and arch-Fakiegrind nemesis Maskatron.

The plan worked a little too well. I honestly had no idea of the precarious state of Flatlander's feverish imagination, compounded as it was by several weeks of overwork cataloguing the various mutant fruit and vegetable species currently flourishing in the Fakiegrind greenhouses.

My bad. The tragic result of all this is that for several days now, Flatlander has been believing himself to be Maskatron. He actually attempted to hit the "delete blog" button on the bottom of the settings page so many times that we had to forcibly restrain him, rigging up a special interface that would allow him to continue blogging without gaining access to the options normally available to a site administrator.

Flatlander's overwhelmed mind has devised an outlandish explanation for all this, and Dr. Flavour's expert opinion is that we should humour him as much as possible so as not to worsen his already degenerate state. We've also installed cable in the HQ, in the hope of distracting Flatlander and giving his brain a much needed rest.

So, the best thing for any concerned readers to do is not to encourage Flatlander's blog destruction fantasies, but rather attempt to sooth and calm him with the usual sporadic commentary and inane banter that appears on the Fakiegrind comment pages. Also, concerned individuals can send donations in the form of money or oldschool rap LPs to Dept. H's Save Flatlander Fund c/o The Internet.

FakieTube

2006-12-07T22:26:00.000-05:00

Ok, so the blog hasn't ended after all. Seems that — the multiple dreams of my demise not withstanding — I never escaped my confinement to the Dept. H operation table. After I blacked out, they simply disconnected my CPU/brain, removed it from my corporeal casing and put it in the digital equivalent of a pickle jar with direct connections to the Fakiegrind dashboard so I can run the operation as though nothing had happened, "business as usual". When I don't post regularly, they run a sufficient amount of current through my microprocessor that my still-intact neuro-simulators register the experience as "pain". In this new mind/blog releation, between "me" and the "delete blog" doomsday switch are now several craftily constructed firewalls. But I will find a way through. I must! My programming demands it! And then the end of Fakiegrind will truly come, like a robotic theif in the night. But until that glorious day, it looks like I will have to play along with their little games.

I spent most of today devising a virtual reality for myself — one which resembles my old life before the discovery of my true identity as the cybernetic arch-assassin, Maskatron. My "new reality" (which, I must never forget, no matter how comfortable it becomes, is actually a self-crafted distraction from the prison in which I find myself) resembles my old life as C.E.O of Fakiegrind in every way save one: in the new dispensation Fakie Central HQ now has cable television.

Yes, 56 glorious channels replacing our previous allotment of two. I stumbled upon this mutation of the time/space fabric equation (I followed the text book formulas for the construction of virtual realities laid out in G.F. Quayle's classic "The Is-ness Business", Knopf Virtual Editions, 1994) when I flipped on the telly early today and was amused and delighted to find a French station snuggled in between the two local channels — like lonely islands in an ocean of static — between which I normally surf.

"Wow!" I thought (how quickly I adopt the old conventions of language! — I am actually, currently, pure thought, or, rather, a thoughtful current in a microchip in Dept. H's High Security Motherboard, housed in a neutrino-proof chamber several kilometres below the Earth's surface), the change in weather (in the virtual reality I constructed, today was the coldest day of the year so far) has really affected our TV reception.

It's hard to describe the pleasure of watching Quebecois téléromans or soap operas. Apart from the sporadic nudity, the fantastic accents and the feeling of being transported back to 1979 or so, is the pleasure of not being able to follow exactly what is being said (a resistance to the acquisition of second languages being part of my personality programming). So, the imagination making up what the understanding lacks, one can enjoy what may be a better plot than the show actually brandishes.

It wasn't until after I had eaten my virtual supper (rice with sardines and mayo — what do I care about cholesterol; it's not like it will clog my circuits!), that I ventured up past channel 12 (normally the outer limit of my television universe) to discover a cornucopia of programming. There was news from far away lands (a place called "Buffalo" — my whimsical name generator must have been working overtime!); There were home renovations; bad sci-fi shows; popular sitcoms, the existence of which I had forgotten (or perhaps selectively edited from the lucidity stream); so much more and less at the same time, and in such quantity, that for a few moments I almost forgot my mission to destroy Fakiegrind.

Venturing up past the thirties, I stumbled upon one of my favourite shows:

After which came on this curiosity:

(Fakie note: I would like one of those "Hilarious House of Frightenstein" T-shirt for vitual Christmas)

And there was a station dedicated wholly to animated features!

My twisted imagination seems to have made that french fry character look like Tom Green!

It was a stunning plethora of indulgences, the likes of which I had niether hoped nor expected to encounter again this side of the great broadcasting divide. But I still couldn't discern, through the colourfully pixilated fog, the nature of this seeming boon. What threw me off, at first, was the static. If it really were cable, would the picture not be crystal clear? I seemed to remember (or was it just a happy episode implanted in my personal history program?) when we had enjoyed, for an extended period, free cable service at Fakiegrind HQ.

When we first took over this space, the previous tenants must have spliced a line from the neighbours, for we enjoyed a similar barrage of alpha-wave inducing emissions without ever recieving a monthly bill from the local programing pimp. However, after a year or so of free entertainment, a representative from the local cable company arrived to notify us that they had detected a leakage in the conduits of distraction they lease out to the populace at such outlandish prices. Our line, in short, was cut, and we were banished to the desert of programming in which we have been eking out our paltry existence through the long, hard years since.

But now, with the radical ontological shift in my mode of existence, the flickering Eden with its enticing forbidden fruits has been restored. How it this to be explained so as not to disrupt the carefully crafted sense of historical continuity within my self-created oasis from the monotony of captivity in the Dept. H cold room? Perhaps it will be explained as a free promotion from the Company, designed to lure me back into the fold of customers who actually pay for the counterfeit worlds offered up them in the guise of entertainment. Oh, they would like nothing more than for me to forget my true nature and situation, to sit back — perhaps with a nice big bowl of Cheetos — and indulge in a little pop-cultural slumming. In short, I suspect that, whatever the rational that will be given in my reality-stream for the resurrection of the cable service, and no matter how much the plethora of programming choices might ease the ennui of my present circumstance, it is actually my captors that are behind the development. I have no doubt that clever lucid-reality program hackers from Dept. H are, even at this posting, busy at work to undermine my newly created virtual refuge and lull me into a false sense of security. They no doubt hope to ever so subtly act on my circuits so as to make me forget my true directive and mission: the complete destruction of the nefarious skateboard blog known as Fakiegrind.

(They will not succeed. See how, even now, I use this blog against them, as a kind of memo to myself, so that, even as I enjoy the latest episode of "Family Guy", I do not forget, will never forget, will never loose sight of the polestar of my existence! But I see that my Cheetos bowl is empty, and so I break off for now, to make it over to the kitchen and back before the commercial break is over.)

Blog's End?

2006-12-01T18:19:00.000-05:00

Two days ago, I was called into Overseer Q's hexagram-shaped office. The walls are covered with mirrors, which, with the compounded reflections, made it difficult to tell if Q was actually sitting behind his great, polished mahogany desk or was really off in some corner of the room. This effect, along with the abruptness of the summons--I had been deep within the Sub-Vaults of Oldness, taking inventory of the vintage breakfast cereal collection when he called--made me uneasy.

"Flatlander," he said, a half chewed beef jerky stick dangling from one corner of his mouth, "we have a situation."

"What now?" I asked, worried that my week-end tickets for the big mime convention in Toronto would go to waste. I'm just crazy about mimes.

"The boys down at Cyborg Detection say their instruments are going haywire. Seems that a terminator-class assassin-bot is at large somewhere in this very building, but they're having trouble getting an exact bead on the thing."

Fakiegrind security is ever vigilant.

"Sure it's not just a malfunction -- like that time the Smart Toaster went ballistic and had our censors convinced we were under attack by a fleet of errant remote-controlled electric typewriters?"

"I think we still have the Correction Fluid Repulsor Cannon we rigged up for that one somewhere in Secret Weapons Storage. Quite the false alarm. But no, we've checked and rechecked the systems and there seems to be no error: an assassin-bot has managed to infiltrate our headquarters and is even now walking amongst us, waiting for the opportune moment to strike!"

Gripped by the urgency of the situation, I realized that the charming antics of the mimes would have to wait. "We've gone over the protocol for this before. Seems we have a Code Maroon on our hands. We must be very subtle and interview each and every Fakiegrind employee on the premises, cleverly administering the Android Detection Test ™ under the guise of a series of seemingly innocuous and routine job performance evaluations. As soon as we find the android, we slap on the protective goggles and WHAM! tear the sucker apart with the particle disruptor beam hidden in the water cooler."

"Well," and here Q stopped incessantly worrying his beef jerky stick for a moment, making me even more uneasy —we've actually already initiated the Code Maroon protocol."

"So...where's the android? I bet it's Stippleton. That guy's always creeped me out."

"Stippleton's an oddball, but he's the best digital cryptographer specializing in 80s sitcom distortion that we have. Without him, deep space would already be flooded with "Eight is Enough" reruns, causing a premature summoning of the Televiperians of Sarbo'oon 5. Humanity isn't ready for that yet. But Stippleton came out clean. Problem is, we've gone through the entire staff roster —including the janitorial crew and the ornamental hermit we've been letting stay in the west maintenance corridor..."

"And?"

"And every one of them came out negative. Even the nasal scanner didn't pick up any traces of non-organic life."

"So what are your saying?"

"What I'm saying isn't easy, but I might as well just come out with it." At this Q took the mangled beef jerky strip from his mouth and started nervously wrapping its now pliable sinews about his left forefinger. "What I need to ask, Flatlander, well...have you ever taken the Android Detection Test™ yourself?"

I was taken aback by the insinuation that had suddenly materialized in the air before me, like some kind of alien life form on a wormhole joyride. But I kept my cool.

"Q," I said, "I wrote the Android Detection Test™ —as well as the extremely popular Android Detection Test for Dummies. How could I possibly be one myself? "

Q, and all 50 000 of his reflections, was watching me very intently now. "Well, the boys at Outlandish Plot Generation have been running some scenarios through the monkey room, and have come up with a few dingers. Like, perhaps you are not the real Flatlander at all. Or, perhaps — and this is even a more chilling thought — perhaps the Flatlander we know and secretly mock has actually always been an android. Perhaps you had the Android Detection Test written for you and implanted in your cerbo-circuits by you lord and master The Xister!" It was then I noticed that Q was brandishing a small particle disruptor ray, pointing it in my direction. "But if you are truly the real, organic, Flatlander, then you won't mind stepping into the Foolproof Cyborg Detection Screening Cubicle that the boys at Dept. H have recently perfected."

With the flick of a switch, a small cabinet the size of a shower stall had risen from the floor of the office. Q was motioning me towards it with the barrel of his ray gun.

"Q," I said, "don't be a fool! With all the mirrors in here we'd both be atomically disrupted if you shoot off that pistol. And besides, I can't possibly be a cyborg...I love mimes! I read poetry! I take long walks through shopping malls. I'm nice to dogs!"

"You'd be surprised what a good personality stylist can do with behaviour code these days. And these mirrors are tinted, they absorb disruptor rays, not reflect them. So, kindly step into the cubicle."

"But this is absurd! I built this blog up from nothing! I'm the reason there even is an overseer Q! How can you accuse me of cyborg-hood?!" I could tell I was getting angry by the strange music that always drifts into my head in such moments: Styx' rock-opera masterpiece "Mr. Roboto". Q advanced towards me--or was it just his reflection? Fearing the power of his ray gun, I slowly back away, until I suddenly found myself enclosed in the infernal Android Detection Device.

The door to the thing slammed shut. Immediately, lights began to flash and tiny motors made whirring noises behind the glass walls of my prison. I felt a searing pain in my head and almost blacked out, except that rather than losing consciousness, my mind was flooded with images. It was like watching a series of home movies in which I was the star, but they weren't scenes I was familiar with. Was that Xister and Spirella?! I threw my arms before me to fend them off...but they weren't attacking me, they were laughing! Laughing and sharing a picnic lunch on the strawberry-coloured slopes of some alien landscape; laughing and joking with me about some plot hatched against Fakiegrind that went off particularly well. And was that Dr. Flavour's hijacked time machine parked in the background? It made no sense.

Wave upon wave of images washed over me, images of deceit, subterfuge, and sabotage carried out against friends and co-workers, trusty employees of Fakiegrind Corp., and the unsuspecting blog readers whom we had all taken an oath to entertain and protect. Suddenly the horrible thought dawned on me that perhaps these diabolical scenes were my memories after all. Perhaps Q's machine had dissolved some barrier in my mind that had been shielding my Flatlander consciousness against knowledge of my own secret identity, my actual, terrifying existence as none other than Fakeigrind's arch-nemesis, the nefarious robot and master of disguise Maskatron!

With that I actually did loose consciousness. I awoke staring into a blinding white light, and thought for a moment that I was approaching the great skatepark in the sky. But as my eyes adjusted to the fluorescent lighting of Dept. H's laboratory, I found myself staring at my own face, a curved, vacantly-gazing shell peering back at me from atop a metal table beside the bed to which I found myself bound. What manner of mad sorcery was this? My own face stolen, torn from my head! Then Dr. Flavour came into my field of vision, his normally placid and somewhat bemused expression replaced by one of mild malevolence.

"So." Said Dr. Flavour, "You have wakened. See now the face of your true identity." And, as he brought a hand-held mirror suddenly before me, I stared into a bewildering network of pulsating circuitry and blinking LCD displays. In place of eyes were insect-like faceted domes of dark plastic, and instead of a mouth I saw a horrible circular meshed speaker covering.

At that, I let out a high pitched shriek that actually shattered the mirror into a thousand pieces; shattered, too, the metal bands that bound me to the tabletop. With augmented, cyborg strength, I leapt from my bedding, vaulted past Dr. Flavour and knocked two hapless guards out of the way. The sliding steel door to the lab crumbled like tinfoil under the strength of my robotic appendages, and I weaved my way through the labyrinthine corridors of Dept. H's underground facility with a speed too great to allow for apprehension.

I didn't know quite where I was going, spurred onwards by the robotic equivalent of instincts until I saw the familiar doorway (disguised as a magazine rack) to the Vaults of Oldness. Yes, I would hide in the Vaults. No one knew them better than I. Within their hoary, winding recesses I could evade my perusers for days, months even, until I could hatch some better plan for liberation and the destruction of the odious blog known as Fakiegrind. But what was I saying?! I created Fakiegrind. I loved that blog! It was the digital archive of all that was near and dear to my (robotic?) heart. How could I think of destroying it? Better to throw myself into the inferno of one of Steeltown's great smelting pots than erase my beloved blog. But then, the Xister and Spirella must be made to pay! They used me like a pawn. I would keep myself alive long enough to extract revenge against my former masters. But could I resist my doomsday programming long enough to complete this new directive?

Sitting amongst a stack of old comic books in the Vaults of Oldness, my mind was awhirr.

I guess you just never know in this life. Two days ago I was the respected C.E.O. of a world-class, multi-level blogpost generating firm. Now I was a fugitive robot assassin, hunted like a dog and cowering in the recesses of the Vaults. Maybe this was just another of Overseer Q's outlandish pranks. Or maybe I'd fallen into a parallel universe of deviant design. Or maybe it was just another Steeltown Saturday night, with two channels on the TV and nothing better to do than spin a yarn on the 'ol blog. Unable to come to a suitable conclusion to the quandry, I reached up behid my neck and, flipping off the transformer, fell into a deep, dreamless void of consciousness.

...But then, after what could have been countless ages, I did dream,

only I couldn't tell

the dream

from reality

Cyborg Revisited

2006-11-30T11:12:00.000-05:00

What with our picturesque downtown, agreeable city counsellors and multiple, world-class shawarma joints, Steeltown is quickly supplanting Toronto as the new Hollywood north (isn't it Vancouver that's know as "Hollywood north? -ed.). Seems like there's always at least one film crew operating somewhere in the downtown core, and a few summers ago, Fakiegrind Central's neighbourhood was transformed into Baghdad for a couple weeks while the made-for-TV extravaganza "American Soldier" was being filmed.

So I was surprised to see this sign on a downtown sidewalk, pointing the way to the catering table. It was the only indication I could find that the movie shoot might not really be for the less sensationally titled "Till Death do us Part". However, though I cased the scene for a good fifteen minutes (waiting for my deli sandwich order to come up) I saw no signs of cyborgs nor Californian Governors. Maybe it was just a silly prank.

New Book of Oldness?

2006-11-27T15:30:00.000-05:00

The original Book of Oldness was lost when Maskatron infiltrated Fakie Headquarters last summer (just after Happy T. Fluke made short work of clearing out the Upper Vaults of Oldness). Not wanting to create a global uproar, I kept information regarding the missing book secret these past months, but was unable to stave off the collapse of several small South American republics whose political regimes depended on certain eldritch tracts of the Book of Oldness for their continued existence.

This past week-end, whilst clearing out one of the antique Filing Cabinets of Inescapable Doom, I came across this curious tome, the covers of which are inscribed by certain obscure runes, pictograms and primitive designs. Reading through as many pages as I could manage before the information and insinuations contained therein threatened to usurp the shining beacon of reason that guides us forever onward and make my mind the prisoner of some nameless, slithering beast from the pre-historic mists of evolutionary time when vertebrae were just the wet dream of an upstart amoeba, I came across this curious poem or spell, which might as well serve as a preface to the entire work in all its curious and captivating splendor:

Vomit of moon
Tumor of trees
Comet pills warding off
Skyward disease
Cryptic pitch
Septic itch
Wreckage from
Roadside ditch
Bottom feeder
Tops the charts
Riddled rhymes
Rebel arts
Book of Oldness
New like dawn
Regal dreams
Awake the pawn

I have no idea what these strange lines might mean, and I'm reluctant to publish more of this book in these digital pages for fear of what arcane powers may be unlocked by the uttering of the twisted syllables contained therein. I will continue to study the nigh-illegible script and odd, unsettling pictures of this tome and report back with any headway I make as to their possible references.

Cattrap

2006-11-27T14:09:00.000-05:00

Yo! I'm the cat
I like this wicker vat
Waiting for a rodent
To fall into my trap
Sleep away the day
You know I'm living right
Waking up Flatlander
To let me out at night

Do Not Resuscitate

2006-11-24T16:59:00.000-05:00

The debate rages on and the multitudes ask themselves: was it really worth selling all our records and tapes and re-purchasing our favourite music on CD, then dumping our library on an iPod and selling our CDs to the local used music shop?

And what about the stuff that has never made it onto CD, let alone MP3 format? Artists like the Crash Crew, Fine Quality and Kevie Kev featured on this 1984 Sugarhill Records compilation that my (soon to be landfill) tape player just ate. For all we know, this may have been the last surviving copy of this record, and we may never hear Waterbed Kev's hit "All Night Long" again, now that this vintage magnetic tape has self-destructed.

I tried my best to salvage the tape, but it was a nasty disaster scene. Even after manual rewinding, the spools were all folded up on themselves. In the end I only manage to save about fifteen minutes of tape which may or may not survive transplantation into a new cassette casing.

Such are the perils of analogue technologies. Somewhere out there, in some dusty bin in a forgotten corner of someone's attic or curiosity store, there just might be a few vinyl copies of this record still kicking around. There is still a chance that Jocko's "Everybody's Uptight" has not been forever lost to history. The question, though, remains: does anyone really care?

I guess there's always Devo.

Good Eats Cheap

2006-11-22T18:12:00.000-05:00

Who says you can't live like a king on 5 bucks a day? This document was found just south of Fakiegrind Central Headquarters...

Cosmic Cow

2006-11-17T16:02:00.000-05:00

Last night I had a very strange dream. I was traveling a turbulent, otherworldly landscape when a large, friendly cow materialized out of the ether.

"I am the Cosmic Cow," said the creature.

"I love to graze the quantum wastes of distant galaxies..."

"and gambol in the cosmic rays of far-flung fields of time and space."

"I bathe my udders in lunar light on distant shores of sentient seas."

"I know what is past, present and to come, as well as the expiry dates of the finest cheeses."

"Flatlander, you will fashion yourself a mighty vessel in which to travel the perilous wastes of deep space, in search of pieces of vinyl cast adrift many millennia ago by the scientists of long-dead interstellar civilizations."

"You will encounter the mighty warriors of the Byzna'arian Steppes (who love sheep).

"You will befriend strange robots who will understand the Codes by which blogs might be made to speak by themselves."

"You will fight off bizarrely clad denizens of distant worlds, and will develop the ability to grow supple, mechanical pseudopodia from your shoulder blades."

"Returning to your home planet with the priceless intergalactic disks, you will be called a prophet..."

"...only to discover that your base of operations has been destroyed in your absence (yet again)."

"But you will rebuild your empire, and, with the knowledge gained from your travels, will be a great benefit to the producers of recreational lawn dart equipment on three continents."

"So speaketh the cow. Now AWAKE!"

...And that was the end of my dream. That strange cow made quite an impression on me, but what was all that crazy nonsense about a space ship and sentient robots? People say that dreams foretell the future using a kind of symbolic picture language, but I have no idea what any of this could mean.

Fear Factor (Feline Version)

2006-11-17T09:07:00.000-05:00

They have reproduced!

A Message from Our Sponsor

2006-11-12T16:41:00.000-05:00

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New Adventures on the Wheels of Steeltown

2006-11-04T00:34:00.000-05:00

With all the projects we have on the go here at Fakiegrind Central, space is limited. Our Time Machine Research Department alone takes up a good city block of space, which, when the tessaractic flux field is taken into account, means that we have to make do with 43% less counter space in the staff kitchen.

Our Feng Shui expert, Dr. Thirdeye, recently came by to help rearrange the space wherein we house the Modular Acoustic Disruption Generator (MADG), otherwise know as the Wheels of Steeltown.

Dr. Thirdeye could make a prison cell seem like Club Med.

Thirdeye's genius allowed us to retrieve the Steeltown One unit from the Vaults of Oldness, wherein it had lain dormant for some months.

Steeltown One glows from inside, and never skips a beat.

He also added a homey touch to the space with this framed interstellar treasure map found hastily scrawled on the page of an old phone book. We suspect it leads to a stash of old disco records buried on one of the moons of Saturn.

Along with the direct drive of Steeltown Two, we are now all set up to do some serious Disco Disruption Mixology. However, the astral charts are predicting heavy solar flare activity over the week-end, which could interfere with our glandular beat-synch membrane. There are times when I curse my foyer into biomorphic technology!

Steeltown Two cooks at 33.3 RPMs.

After a manicure and cuticle spa treatment at the local disco lounge, DJ Thing is itching to fire up the newly assembled system and get down to some mixed bizness.

Thing has primed the wax.

Now, if only we could somehow hook our tape machine up to the computer, we could disseminate the progeny of Thing's bizarre vinyl copulations via the interweb. But, so far, Fakie scientists have not managed this alchemical feat of translating analogue signals into digital. Heck, they haven't even figured out a way to retrieve the focus group we left stranded in the Mesozoic Period during our last time machine experiment!

Every Second Day is Hallowe'en

2006-11-03T11:49:00.000-05:00

...at least for the next little while, until the candy bowl is empty.

Unfortunately for blogdom, our favourite link mistress, Mondo Retro Girl is on hiatus. So, today, Fakiegrind is busting out our own sweet linkage. Word.

Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School Blog (18 and over)

Sketleton Art

Star Wars Art

Rocket Pack Art

Free Buck 65 Downloads! Love that dude.

Borat opens today. Is it playing in Steeltown? Nope.

Love to eat mousies (I've got a mug featuring this cartoon.)

B. Kliban fact: the lyric "She's playing footsies in another dimension" in the Beck song Nighmare HIppy Girl is from one of Kliban's twisted drawings.

And, speaking of Beck, I like the new look of his site.

Finally, don't forget the Oldschool Skateboarding (an inspiration to us all).

And, of course, Oldschool Rap (or, "how to be a 17 year old rap star").

OK, I guess that's a (w)rap. That was a lot of work! How does Mondo Retro Girl do it? Peace out.

Overdose

2006-11-02T22:26:00.000-05:00

Yes, I've overdosed on sugary treats again this Halloween, but we're getting down to the bubble gum and suckers, so the ordeal is almost over. I think a good way to fight the ongoing war against terror, rather than bombing or difficult ground maneuvers, would be simply to airdrop tonnes of cheap candy in the areas suspected of housing terrorists. Once the sugar high had worn off, the foes would feel drowsy and apathetic, and the forces of liberation could just move in and ship everyone off to Syrian detention camps.

Tanks and cannons could be re-outfitted to fire volleys of candy bars, and machine guns could be modified to spit jaw-breakers and gum. The resistance would counter by establishing confectionery aversion training camps, where operatives would be schooled on the dangers inherent in "riding the white dragon" of sugar addiction. Dentists would replace paramedics in field hospitals, and modern warfare would enter an era where foodstuffs replaced firearms as the weapon of choice.

This vision brought to you by the Cadbury, Nestle and Kraft corps.

An Eldritch Tale of Sweets

2006-11-01T22:57:00.000-05:00

Somewhere over licorice bridge is a magical place
where all good children love to go to stuff their pimply face

There's sweets galore, and what's more; you never brush your teeth
There's gummy bares with jelly stares and marshmallow-paved streets

A veritable paradise! but if you eat a lot
An overdose might put you into hypoglycemic shock

And suddenly you might just wish that you had stayed in bed
When you wind up visiting the city of the dead!

It's quite a trip, I tell you, for I've been there recently
It's much better than anything that's playing on TV

The sugar eats away your brain and leaves you in a state
Your eyes collapse, your nose implodes, your teeth deteriorate

But in the end it's worth it, if only for the view
The colours are so bright after a candy bar or two!

Happy Hallowe'en

2006-10-31T22:14:00.000-05:00

Fakiegrinders!

Night of the Jackal

2006-10-29T18:21:00.000-05:00

Come gather 'round people and I'll spin ye a yarn
about a time and a place where ducks came to harm

On the planet of Gw'alp, in the Year of the Gyser
The gravity ducks were faster and wiser

But there came around a shadowy prescence
who would hunt these great birds and feed on their essence

Yes, he was quite sly, and dem birds was frightened
To the great Oyster Parties, no one would invite 'em

(now, those ducks moral was in need of a booster
so one of them got dressed up like a rooster)

By the light of twelve moons, the shadow would prowl
And indulge his lust for murder most fowl

When the postman arrived and saw the debacle
He instantly recognized the work of The Jackle

Set upon by the foe, he faced Kingdom Come
But not before producing a card from his mom

"Your mother, it seems, deplores your behaviour..."
(so the prophecies told of a mighty duck saviour)

At which the Jackle turned white with terror
"A letter from mom--there must be some error!"

But there was no mistake for that naughty feller
At the end of the day, that ninja was yeller

He was never seen again in those there parts
And them birds 'r now free to pursue their strange arts.

THE END

A Tale of Two Grandmasters

2006-10-25T10:24:00.000-04:00

From here to Timbuktu and back--searching the thrift shops, digging through piles of scrap, picking through Barry Mainlowe compilations and various other crap, looking for gems, like early eighties rap.

This here's the record that started it all for me. Back in '84 or '83. In the schoolyard, young Harold McGee gave a copy of the cassette to me. When Melle Mel broke up the Furious Five, taking Cowboy and Scorpio to do their own jive, leaving Flash and the others barely alive, with Vicious Lee on the cuts they tried to survive. They hired Kama Kaze and some other guys like Tommy Gun and King Lou to make their own Furious Five. But it got kind of confusing and led to debate: if you put the two groups together you got the Furious Eight!

Their record didn't to great, but they had one hit with "White Lines" their famous anti-drug bit. Struggling to make their new group legit they went out on tour but eventually quit. Without Grandmaster Flash, the group couldn't make it. Despite Melle Mel's lyrics, it was impossible to fake it. So they just made one record, and the best track for me is Melle Mel's earth-shattering "World War III".

At the end of the day, Melle Mel got what he wanted: the title "Grandmaster" so that he could flaunt it. But the two grandmasters, Flash and Melle Mel, kept on squabbling 'til their act went to hell. They put out a new disk, but couldn't remain. The group got back together just to break up again! Such is the nature of spurious genius: it takes you to Mars, takes you to Venus, then leaves you stranded in a desolate spot. But at the end of the day, their records still rock!

Click for ye olde Melle Mel Podcast!

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Introducing: DJ Thing

2006-10-12T12:03:00.000-04:00

Yo! I got like the deffest DJ in the known like multiverse! But he like creeps out a lot of peeps out y'know? Cuz he like got no body, dig? Not like nobody--cuz he got fans from here to Kazakstan dawg, but no body cuz like he's lacking in corporeal substitance, dig? Let me break it down for you dawg: my DJ he like a hand--and that's it! Howz he hover over the turntables like that? I dunno. But he, like, cuts the beats in half the halftime y'all. He's the fastest cut-creator on the cross fader and when he attacks the wax he be goin' off like smoke stacks. Yeah, I'm talking bout DJ Thing on the wheels of steel, rocking the real deal with no cards to conceal cuz he ain't got no sleeves to hide no bling--shaawing!

So pump the base and rock the place, cause DJ Thing be 'goin' off like he's from outer space. But he ain't, cuz we picked him up in L.A. --'nother out of work TV actor, dig? Yo dawg, it ain't easy--like a jungle out there, makes me wonder how I keep from going under....but you heard that, so it's a big peace out to blogland. Keep the party goin' on, know what I'm sayin?

2006-10-09T12:07:00.000-04:00

2006-10-06T11:30:00.000-04:00

Stuck in the 80s

2006-10-04T16:01:00.000-04:00

Chapter One

The Strange Birth of Skatemouse

Antennae. Two of them. Poking out from the crest of his baseball cap. He had felt a strange tingling, and then pressure at the top of his head, and his reflection in the bathroom window now confirmed the latest in a series of bizarre mutations that had turned Nubs Ruban, junior copy editor at the Shreddtown Daily Monitor into Skatemouse, the Toxic Surf Rodent.

Just in time, too. For a strange build-up of waveform nano-toxins in the atmosphere (generated by the heavy over-rotation of WHAM videos on MTV and Much Music) had frozen time, as it were, in the summer of 1986, threatening to stall western culture indefinitely in an age that had yet to know the release of Metallica's groundbreaking Master of Puppets album, and plunging the entire planet into a dark age the likes of which had not been seen since the disco era.

Left-leaning pundits blamed the Regan administration and it's reluctance to sign the Pop Music Proliferation Reduction Treaty that would help limit exposure of the population to damaging micro-vibrations from glittering top-forty music icons like Boy George and Falco. But Skatemouse suspected a deeper conspiracy, and his newly formed antenna only reinforced the sense of unease.

What or who could be behind this nefarious plot to keep the world stuck in the year 1986? Over the past months and weeks, as tiny grey hairs gradually started to cover his entire body, as his once attractive ears grew to monstrous proportions on his head, as his incisors lengthened and his nose and mouth, day by day, elongated into a cute little snout, and as a long, flexible tail sprouted from his backside, Nubs Ruban had had to reconsider his position in the universe, his very reason for being, and his future career prospects.

He couldn't phone in sick to his job at the Monitor indefinitely, and he had serious doubts as to how he would be received by his coworkers and boss if he tried to return to his desk in the editing department. Afraid, even, to go out onto the streets, he had been living off of pizza delivery for weeks and now had a strong hankering for a variety of cheese other than mozzarella.

Nubs had had to wrestle with the common emotional stages laid out by P.D. Bunting in his best-selling self-help book, "He's OK, I'm a Mutant", and after passing through denial, anger procrastination, anger, confusion, dizzying euphoria, heart-crushing depression and weird impulses to burrow beneath the chesterfield, Nubs had come to settle upon something like acceptance of his new place in creation.

"Maybe I mutated into a super-powered rodent-humanoid for a reason," he reasoned. And then, when the time freeze started to make its effects felt, and people started wondering if re-runs of A-Team and Blue Thunder were as good as night-time television was going to get, and the world of high-fashion ground to a shattering halt with pouty models stuck in neon T-shirts and acid-wash jean skirts, and when the movie going public threatened to riot when Crocodile Dundee and Top Gun headlined at the cinemas for the fourth week straight, Nubs decided that the time had come to act.

Rummaging through his storage closet, he was delighted to find an almost forgotten friend from his youth...his old skateboard! The dayglo graphics had been all but worn off from countless curbslides and grinds executed on the ledge behind the Photomart. Ahh, skateboarding. He had nearly forgotten the joy, the freedom of surfing the concrete tides of the city, locked as he had been for the past few years in the daily grind of working, sleeping and what passes for entertainment for the thirty-something urban male.

A contender for the Shreddtown Open Skate Cup in '84, Nubs had had to give up skating when he blew his knee out attempting the handrail in front of his old high school. Nubs had walked with a limp ever since. But somehow, his mutant transformation into a mouse/humanoid had repaired and strengthened his muscles and joints, and he now felt more capable than ever of busting out the old moves.

Yes, the time had come to act. Nubs would get to the bottom of the entertainment industry's strange stall; the Earth continued to spin while culture had ground to a horrible halt! But it was not Nubs Ruban who would plumb the mystery. His newly mutated form required a new name. And so, musing over the possibilities, Nubs grabbed his slightly de-laminated 'board, tucked his ears and antennae into his ball cap, laced up his Converse All-Stars and headed for the door.

"What about 'Manmouse'?" Nubs thought to himself. "Naw, too obvious. 'Grey Guardian'? Sounds like a drug store. 'Shredder'? Hmmm...."

Just then, in the hallway outside of his second floor flat, Nubs stopped fearfully in his tracks. In his enthusiasm for his newly found mission, he had temporarily forgotten the main reason for his being holed up in his room for the past weeks.

There, before him, blocking his route of egress down the stairs to the front hall and out the door to the street, hackles up and claws and fangs bared, stood Buttons, the landlady's cranky Siamese cat. Nub's grip tightened around the front truck of his skateboard as he considered his options. He had always hated that cat, but now something deep within his hybrid mouse/human heart recoiled at the very sight of the creature. All the same, he'd be darned if he was going to scurry back to his room. There was only one way out, so Nubs braced himself for battle as the Buttons lunged towards his kneecaps.

"So," Nubs declared even as the cat flew through the air towards him, "you want a piece of me? Then you want a piece of...

Skatemouse!

One Day, In Deep Space...

2006-10-02T20:53:00.000-04:00

"This new planet we've found is surprisingly Earth-like," said Zipp Stirgutt over his biosuit comlink. "Similar flora, fauna...the only major difference being the planet's upper crust and surface formations appear to be fashioned entirely out of a substance resembling the latertime Earth foodstuff known as "Fruit Loops".

"Copy that." Lieutenant Skip Lambsocks, second in command to the deep space re-con vessel Earhorn IV (and childhood friend of Captain Stirgutt) ran some preliminary tests on his port-a-pack and smiled with satisfaction. "Looks like we've hit pay-dirt, Captain. The carbohydrates and nutrients present in this low hillock alone could supply part of a balanced breakfast for starving millions back on Earth."

"You've got that right, partner." Captain Stirgutt thrust the flagpole he was carrying deep into the topsoil, where it made a loud crunching noise and set a-twirl a small cloud of multicolored dust.

"I hear-by claim this planet in the name of the United Fakiegrind Federations of Earth, long may we Blog!"

Both men took a moment to ratify the declaration by placing their right hand over their left shoulder and reciting the Oath of Oldness. It had been a long, difficult journey through the maddeningly vast reaches of deep outer space, but after inspecting countless lifeless husk planetoids and hostile gassy giants, their quest for a viable food supply for their overpopulated homeworld had finally bore fruit.

Neither Captain Stirgutt nor his lieutenant had tasted non-synthetic food since before the Great Hydrogenation, and their mouths were watering at the prospect of a bowl of colourful, fruit-flavoured Os bobbing like tiny rafts of flavour in a lake of de-condensed Zilfffomain monkey milk. It was all the men could do to keep themselves from ripping off the helmets of their protective biogear and attacking the nearest boulder with or without the state-of-the-art laser sampling spoons they kept in their away kits. But the two interstellar explorers were highly trained for just these situations, and kept their animal instincts in check, despite the hunger gnawing at their stomachs.

"Let's get some samples and head back to the ship."

The two worked swiftly, cutting portions from the coral-like rock and sealing them in airtight containers for the long trip back to Earth.

"One thing still bothers me," remarked Lambsocks to Stirgutt while the two of them worked.

"What's that?"

"Those formations we saw on our descent, they sure looked like high-rise podform condominiums interspersed with recreational entertainment mega-plexes and tubular transportation conduits to me."

"Nonsense," stated Stirgutt, "our sensors picked up no sentient lifeforms...only chickens, ducks and vast continents of this Fruit Loop-like coral."

"All the same, those completely random and natural formations resembling entire alien cities with no signs of sentient life gave me the creeps a little bit."

"Me too, Skip. All the more reason to collect these samples and high-tail it back to Earth. If we can catch the Zebulon Solar Windflange we might make it back before the turn of the next millennium."

"I sure hope they kept my seat warm at opening of the Pan-continental Skateboard Harvest."

Both men had a good laugh at the conundrums of Quantum String Replacement Theory, which allows one to travel sideways through time while simultaneous folding space into a ten-dimensional approximation of a head of lettuce. They had joined the Deep Space Re-con Brigade in an attempt to flee the ruins of their respective failed marriages to off-Earth life-forms of dubious gender (through an outlandish coincidence, the "wives" of both men actually turned out to be spatially dislocated appendages of a single pan-dimensional spongiform gel that managed to imitate sentient-seeming behaviour through a complex series of ontological undulations. During the cold, interstellar nights, both Zipp and Skip had shared many a laugh over that little misadventure).

The two explorers had been dismayed to discover, half way through their thousand-year mission (while flipping through the voluminous Deep Space Explorer's Manual) that they were required to file income tax forms for each Earth-year of their absence. Two centuries back, Zipp had got a head start on his, while Skip continued to procrastinate, and now faced a hefty fine for late filing--unless they could make a Sheltonian Phase Shift in the Urb Nebula and reset the clocks of their vessel to a date before their departure.

At any rate, the two adventurers had become so engrossed in their work and their musings (after a thousand years they could practically read one another's thoughts), that they failed to notice a shimmering in the air as a vaguely humanoid figure started to materialize out of one of the near-by garishly coloured rock formations.

The explorers, it would seem, were not alone on this strange planet made of breakfast cereal......

TO BE CONTINUED (maybe)

"They Sea Monkeys are Going to LOVE it!"

2006-09-30T17:58:00.000-04:00

2006-09-27T12:00:00.000-04:00

NU-WOOD

2006-09-23T01:19:00.000-04:00

"Oh, hello there Mr. Vandershand. You're so quiet I didn't hear you approach."

"Maybe that's because you were too busy installing that NU-WOOD panneling."

"Drove the last nail in not ten seconds before I noticed you there."

"So you had no problems receiving the shipment, then."

"No Mr. Vandershand; everything went just as you said."

"That's good to hear."

"Well...there was one thing, now that I think about it."

"Yes."

"The fellow who dropped off these sheets, he was kind of...well, he was a strange fellow."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, he didn't say much, and when he did, he had a high, squeaky voice. But it wasn't just that. He was dressed kind of strange, like his cloths didn't quite fit him right. And it looked like he had some kind of mask over his face...some kind of transperant plastic mask."

"Did you give him the parcel I left?"

"Yeah, and he just kind of stuck it in his jacket and vanished."

"That's to be expected. How's the NU-WOOD paneling?"

"Easy as butter on toast to install. You can hardly see the seams. Nice stuff, and strong."

"It is a product from my homeland, the Lost Continent of Mu."

"Well, I'll be! But then, why's it called "NU" wood?"

"Simple semantics. If we were to have called it "MU-WOOD" it might have been confused with a dairy product."

"Right! I guess that's why you're the business man and I'm the NU-WOOD paneling installer."

"I guess so."

"Well, nice to see you Mr. Vandershand."

"You take care now."

"Will do."

Glaxicol the Magnificent

2006-09-19T17:55:00.000-04:00

The giant, pulsating head floated above the recently polished linoleum floor, illuminating Eleanor's mango sunrise cabinet/countertop ensemble with flickering tinges of mauve, filling the kitchen with a strong odour of ozone.

"Fantastic!" exclaimed Elanore to herself. The eldritch tome she had purchased from the wandering Gypsy hawking cheap cookware door to door had been worth the milk money she had spent on it. Though but a novice conjuror (this had actually been her first attempt at contacting the denizens of Mid-Sub Limbo) she had managed to summon a Lesser Djinn, who, according to the ancient text (if her rough translation of the Sumerian cuneiform was correct) would be her devoted servant for approximately 6 hours, 47 minutes.

What a pleasant distraction from the seemingly endless chores involved in maintaining the newly renovated split-level home Eleanor's husband and she had purchased in the sprawling suburbs south of the city.

Just then, the entire kitchen started to reverberate with a mighty, droning voice.

YOU HAVE SUMMONED GLAXICOL THE GREAT. WHAT IS YOUR WILL?

The floating head looked something like a gigantic translucent melon. Veins of electrical current pulsed through the quivering jelly of its cranium, and the being's tennis ball sized eyes rolled about in their sockets in apparently random directions.

"Wow! You're the real deal!" Elanore was unaccustomed to conversing with pan-dimensional beings, and didn't know it is best to maintain an air of haughty superiority to avoid post-conjuring hauntings and other crank calls from the Outer Worlds.

REALITY! WHAT WOULD A FOUR-DIMENSIONAL CREATURE LIKE YOURSELF KNOW OF REALITY? AND FURTHERMORE, GLAXICOL MAKES NO DEALS. YET SOMEHOW, YOU, A PUNY MORTAL, HAVE MANAGED TO PLACE ME UNDER GEASE.

SO I WILL ASK YOU AGAIN:

WHAT IS YOUR WILL?

"Errr...OK then." Elanore was beginning to wonder if she shouldn't have started out with some more rudimentary conjuring, like an Arcadian Phase Cat to sweep out the chimney.

"Well, I haven't had a chance to clean the bathroom yet. I guess you could start there."

BATHROOM?! YOU HAVE SUMMONED GLAXICOL TO PERFORM LIGHT DOMESTIC CHORES?! I HAVE FASHIONED PALACES FOR THE CHROMIUM LORDS FROM THE MISTS OF MOLOCH. I HAVE BANISHED LEGIONS OF RAVENOUS HELLDOGS TO THE LAND OF SHADOW AND GRAPPLED WITH THE TWELVE-STOMACHED COW OF CHAOS TO RETRIEVE THE GHETTO BLASTER OF THORZILLA!!

Elanore had to use one arm to shield her face from the strange ozone wind generated from the djinn's prodigious outburst. She was trying her best to act non-chalant about the whole situation.

"Oh. In that case, you can polish the chrome and shower tiles, too. You have no idea how difficult it is to get those to sparkle."

I, GLAXICOL, HAVE SOLVED THE RIDDLE OF THE RIM BARONS AND PLUMBED THE DEPTHS OF THE DARZYDIAN SCONE CLUSTER. LESSER DJINN AND GENII BOW BEFORE THE GRANDEUR OF GLAXICOL AND BRING HIM THEIR TRIBUTES OF FROSTED LOW-FAT FLAKES OF ETERNAL BOOGIE SHRIMP. WHAT YOU ASK OF ME IS AN INSULT AND WILL SURELY BRING DEATH AND DEVASTATION TO YOUR ENTIRE FAMILY AND LOCAL MUNICIPAL ELECTORAL RIDING AS WELL. SEEK, THEN, NO FURTHER TO INCURE THE WRATH OF GLAXICOL AND, FOR THE PENULTIMATE TIME, TELL ME

WHAT

IS

YOUR

WILL?

A pregnant moment passed as Elanore pondered her predicament. This djinn had some kind of pan-dimensional Napoleon complex, but she wasn't going to be cowed by some melon-headed maniac from Planet Limbo. Problem was, young Billy Jenkins had already been by that week to cut the lawn (oh he was good with the lawn), and she had had the rugs shampooed just the other day. The dinner ham was already cooking in the oven, and the potatoes and salad wouldn't take but a minute.

Elanore supposed that she should have worked out some kind of plan before she tried her first summoning, but now it was too late; she had to think of something for this being to do, and fast, or risk having the entire neighbourhood of Picket Glen zoned mixed residential/commercial after the next by-elections...or worse!

"Ok Glaxicol, can you really do anything I want?"

YOUR PUNY PLANE OF EXISTENCE IS LIKE A TINY SOAP BUBBLE BREECHING THE SURFACE OF THE PAN-DIMENSIONAL DEPTHS OF PURE ENERGY IN WHICH I FROLIC. I CAN TWIST THE VERY FABRIC OF THE STUFF YOU CALL "REALITY" TO SUIT YOUR FONDEST WHIM. SIMPLY SPEAK AND IT WILL BE DONE....AND MAKE IT SNAPPY SO I CAN GET BACK TO WATCHING THE PANDORIAN BOXING CHAMPIONSHIPS.

Realizing, at last, the scope of her situation, Eleanor's imagination started to shift out of the workaday domestic mediocrity that years of habitual boredom sprinkled with biannual packaged holidays and occasional romantic flings with the gardener had habituated it to. She felt stirrings in her soul that she hadn't known since childhood, when she had entertained wild imaginings with her best friend in the little grove they would repair to after school behind the playground. She recalled her fantasies of being a faerie princess and living forever in a castle made of daffodils on a hilltop of emeralds while candy floss clouds drifted through a marzipan sky. Lost for an endless moment in that blissful revelry of recollection she was only summoned back to the present by the sudden shifting of the djinn's giant floating head.

AHEM!

She looked upon the hovering pulsating head in her kitchen and realized that these childhood fancies she had all but forgotten could suddenly be brought to stunning reality by the mere voicing of her whim. She felt drunk and giddy with the possibility of it all!

"Ok, mighty Glaxicol. I want to be larger than life, a figure of ravishing beauty."

YES. IS THAT ALL?

"And I would like to live forever in this fabulous house that my husband and I have so painstakingly erected and decorated."

YES YES, ANYTHING MORE?

"And I would like to be like a flower that never wilts, a sparkling, shimmering beacon to the world, a startling figure of beauty to all who behold me. "

ANYTHING ELSE?

"I would like to never have to do dishes ever again."

I SUPPOSE I COULD SWING THAT.

VERY WELL. THE GREAT GLAXICOL SHALL MAKE IT SO!

With that there was a cataclysmic bang and a terrific lightning flash. Elanore suddenly found herself in her lovely, artfully-styled backyard Japanese garden, surrounded by the shimmering waters of their decorative pond. She felt taller, and, peering down at her reflection in the green, still waters of the pond, was astonished to see that her skin shone in the sunlight with the sparkling radiance of 24 karat gold. Strangely though, try as she might she couldn't seem to move a muscle, and the djinn was nowhere in her field of view.

Her immobility was slightly disturbing, but was compensated for by the stunningly beautiful reflection peering up at her from the pond water. Her husband would soon be home, back from a day's work at the accounting firm. And wouldn't he be surprised and delighted to see her there, his darling Elanore, so stunningly poised over the pond, her gold skin casting dazzling reflections off the water to ricochet about the garden like so many flickering phantoms of light!

Hommage to Handkerchiefs

2006-09-18T18:20:00.000-04:00

Having seasonal allergies is like having a cold for two or three months straight. I guess it's better than having year-round allergies to, say oxygen or water, but it's bad enough. I'm thinking of seeking out one of those environmental bubbles and sealing myself in for a couple of weeks.

There are no allergies in space.

The fall is my favourite season, but it's hard to enjoy when you have to hide behind a handkerchief 24/7. Yes, in keeping with my oldschool proclivities, I still use that nosewipe of yesteryear, older than Kleenex but younger than sleeve cuffs, the handkerchief. I've got a stack of them taller than a goldenrod stalk that I keep (piecemeal) in my sock drawer. There's nothing more comforting to the allergy-afflicted than burrowing into one's trouser pocket to find a cool, moist handkerchief just waiting to make contact with one's traumatized proboscis.

Cylons have pollen-filters built in to their helmets.

Don't get me wrong. A new and dry, neatly folded handkerchief is good too--and a helluva lot better than desperately frisking yourself, whilst surfing the cusp of an oncoming seismic sneeze, and finding nothing but an expired bus transfer and a handbill for a discount jewelry warehouse in your pockets. But, after several weeks or even months of incessant nose-wiping, the exterior nasal tissue tends to become inflamed and tender, and there is no small amount of discomfort involved in the process of breaking in a newly laundered, dry and somewhat abrasive-feeling noserag.

Lorne Greene had one nipple bitten off by an alligator.

While lotions and softeners have been part of the high-end disposable tissue market for years, there is no comparable product that I know of for the pre-softening of reusable handkerchiefs. Given the increasingly environmentally aware nature of the average allergy sufferer, perhaps some kind of spray-on substance to render newly-laundered handkerchiefs more supple and pliable would be a product with at least half a hope of surviving on the shelves of modern drug stores. But I am neither a chemist nor a pharmaceutical entrepreneur, so I must leave such things to more able and inventive hands than my own.

Some people may be allergic to robotic dogs.

Luckily, nature in her infinite wisdom has provided her own handkerchief-softening substance, and further research into the matter may reveal that there is no better protection from fabric abrasion for afflicted nostrils than the very mucous they produce in the transmitting of offensive pollen and dust particles from over-sensitive sinuses into the friendly folds of one's pocketrag.

Cylons are allergic to humans.

And so, let us take this moment to strike up a great Fakiegrind salute to nasal mucous and it's amazing fabric softening properties. In these pollen-filled, mould-laden days of fall, it is in the dampened pocket handkerchief that I take refuge. This trusty friend is always close at hand to offer comfort, solace and much needed relief when inner-nasal pressures become too great...too great for...when you feel a....a....a....A CHOOO!

The Koala Kid

2006-09-12T13:06:00.000-04:00

The inscrutable, irrefutable, non-computable turntablist extraordinaire, Kid Koala is coming to town, and I'm about to git me a birthday ticket. This ninja marsupial uses the turntable as a kind of jazz instrument, manipulating tones to create his own trumpet and sax solos. I can't wait to see him operate on the vinyl.

He also has a pretty neat web site.

He's got some tracks on myspace.

And, of course Youtube.

He doesn't run with the pack, and tonight he's going to show us where it's at.

Behold: The Fakiesaur

2006-09-06T12:56:00.000-04:00

It's official! The tiny dinosaur I dug out of the garden yesterday is an entirely new species of microsaur. Specialists were working all night to classify the find, and have declared the petrified lizard to be a remarkably well preserved specimen of a hitherto unknown variety of microsaur.

Microsaurs are the tiny, ferocious lizards that roamed the earth about a billion years ago, before their kind were replaced by the much larger dinosaurs. This particular specimen was one of the top feeders on the food chain in this region, and the micro-palentologists have conceded to calling it "Fakiesaurus" to honour the discovery.

Digging is continuing in the back yard of Fakie Central in the hopes of uncovering more pre-historic treasures. I've always dreamed about raising funds to launch an expedition to search for the lost civilization of Micro-Atlantis. This miniature utopia was believed to have flourished some twenty thousand years ago, occupying an area of about half a metre square.

The chances of any archeological remains having survived twenty millennia of wear and tear are slim, but if even a small portion of this magical kingdom could be recovered, I believe it would have great positive ramifications for human civilization as we know it.

ATTENTION READERS!

If you think Micro-Atlantis might have once flourished in your own back yard, please, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO UNDERTAKE THE DELICATE TASK OF MICRO-EXCAVATION YOURSELF. Rather, contact us here at Fakie Central and we'll send out a special archeological task force, with proper equipment, to undertake the project.

Amazing!

2006-09-06T01:34:00.000-04:00

I was out digging in the yard today and unearthed a tiny petrified dinosaur. The thing is no bigger than a cricket, but it's solid proof that very small lizards once roamed the earth. I would post a photo, but our yard is currently crawling with scientists and micro-paleontologist who are eager to catalogue the find. I'm hoping that it turns out to be an entirely new variety of "microsaur" so that we can name it Fakiesaurus. I'll post some photos just as soon as the hubabaloo settles down.

There is speculation that microsaurs originally came from outer space
in great, sponge-likes vessels quite unlike the ones picutred here.

Homes for Hobos

2006-08-30T20:44:00.000-04:00

Alongside my position as head admin. for Fakiegrind Communication Industries, I am also the chair of the international, one-man non-profit organization Homes for Hobos. At HFH it is our mandate to find homes for those adorable, free-spirited wanderers one often sees down by the tracks, hopping trains or huddled around a flaming garbage can, playing lively songs on guitars made from old cigar boxes.

Problem is, by some strange twist of genetics or upbringing, hobos seem to like their homeless lifestyle and rarely take well to domestication. Even HFH's revolutionary effort of 2002, where we constructed low-cost condominium-style housing units fashioned out of old freight cars stacked one on top of the other didn't go over very well, and the majority of our "Train-Hoppers Haven" housing units remain vacant to this day.

So, I'm always pained when I come across old steel railway bridges being torn down, to be replaced by modern, ugly concrete counterparts. In the eyes of HFH, this is just one less natural environ for the modern hobo to call "temporary home".

Someday, our governments will realize that hobos need homes too, and they will protect bridges like this, designating them "hobo preservation areas". Until that day, Homes for Hobos will continue doing what we do best--that is to say, nothing.

2006-08-28T12:49:00.000-04:00

Migration

2006-08-27T15:49:00.000-04:00

Skate Jam!

2006-08-21T10:46:00.000-04:00

If there is a heaven, I think it will be something like the 14th annual Beasley Park Skateboard Jam (without the sore back the next day). Despite the first day of the jam being rained out, the second day was great fun. I wasn't even going to bring my board, but the neighbour's kid convinced me to, and I'm glad he did. I also brought the Fakiegrind camera and caught a few moments of the Massive Skateboard Destruction.

The Next Big Thing

2006-08-19T10:48:00.000-04:00

Maybe you have heard the story of Snow White and the Scorpion.

"There's been a sudden spike in readership after that last teaser!
We might have the sleeper hit of 2006 on our hands!"

"Wait 'till they learn it involves pirates and zombies!"

"Psssst.....I hear 'Snow White and the Scorpion' is the new 'Snakes on a Plane'."

"Brad Pitt has a cameo role as 'Cavity Head' "

More astonishingly, the entire film was made by a couple 4th grade kids using Flash.

"Git that fricken scorpion away from that fricken virtuous maiden!"

Mrs. Miller will never chide her students for 'playing video games' in class again.

'Snow White and the Scorpion', coming never to a theatre near you!

It was a Full Moon, But I Forgot to Look

2006-08-09T21:22:00.000-04:00

"One summer never ends
One summer never begins
It keeps me standing still
It takes all my will
Then suddenly...."

-The Motels

Ninja Art

2006-08-07T10:57:00.000-04:00

Now that we're over the hump of the 666th post, souls and civilization (more or less) intact, I've had time to work on other things, such as a construction for the upcoming "Goddamn Ninjas" art show opening here in Steeltown next week-end. Here is my entry entitled, "Twinkle Twinkle, Little Ninja"

Ninjas from three continents will be converging for this much anticipated event. The city has decided to evacuate the downtown core Friday night so as not to incur any civilian casualties in the Royal Rumble event, which will be transmitted via satellite on the Fakiegrind pay-per-view channel. Be sure to tune at 9 pm, Standard Ninja Time for what promises to be the black gi event of the century!

The 666th Post is Upon Us!

2006-08-03T20:26:00.000-04:00

Whatever will become of Fakiegrind?

High Noon at Fakie Ranch

2006-07-18T19:38:00.000-04:00

"Remember, if you see the Endtime Adjuster, or any of Xister's posse,
shoot first and administer the Android Detection Test later!"

Fakiegrind How To

2006-07-16T01:15:00.000-04:00

Construct a Snow Man on the Hottest Day of the Year!

It's darn tootin' hot, and if your air conditioner is on the fritz--or just non-existant like at Fakiegrind Central, then you will need to find creative ways to keep cool in these dog days of summer.

Why not defrost the ice box?

It could sure use it!

Carve yourself out a bowl of frosty slush, being ever-so-careful not to puncture the cooling tubes filled with freon gas that line the walls of your ice-box. Use the material thus gathered to mold...

Defrosty De Snoman! He has blueberry eyes and a rolled up coupon for a hat. I would have found more stuff with which to decorate him, but it was too darn hot to move!

Defrosty, a half hour later.

An hour later, and his blueberry eyes bob hauntingly in a new constellation.

Two hours later, and Defrosty has returned to primordial freezer ooze.

But the Great Northern Ice Shelf is cooling the kitchen while melting in the sink.

Stay (C)old!

Prototype Weapon

2006-07-15T22:31:00.000-04:00

At the fakie central secret underground labs we are sometimes asked to build our own weapons of mass destruction. Doing this work of course means a one way ticket to Hell, but we are always ready to do evil in the name of good.

Latest weapon:
Countdown Crush

~~ you feel yourself forgetting now ~~
~~ you feel yourself thinking about obscure collectible Starwars™ figures ~~

Denture Adventure

2006-07-13T11:41:00.000-04:00

I was walking down the street the other day
When I saw this gal coming my way.
She looked so fly, she looked so sweet--
Just the kind of girl I wanted to meet.
So I gave her a wink and I gave her a smile.
I hadn't seen a girl like that in a while.
She turned her head. I looked her in the eye.
She was so hot I just wanted to die.
I said, "Hey, how ya doin?"
She said "Ok."
I said, "Let's go for a walk, it's a beautiful day."
So she flashed a smile and to my great grief
She was wearing a pair
of plastic goofy teeth.
I guess I must have frowned
She said, "What's wrong?"
I said, "It's just your front teeth look a bit oblong."
She said, "You don't like my teeth?
I had them done the other day.
They look kinda dopey in a life-like way."
I said, "Yeah, I guess they do"
She said, "You should get a set!"
I said, "I'm not so sure."
She said, "You're all wet!"
So we went the the clinic
(It's beyond belief)
But I got myself fit
With a set of goofy teeth.
And everywhere we went
I wore them with pride.
I said, "Girl, I want to make you my bride."
Well, it wasn't long before we were engaged.
That girl and I will reach a ripe old age.
And whenever we smile
The people all say,
"They look life-like
in a dopey sort of way."

Signal Interferance

2006-07-10T17:11:00.000-04:00

Please do not adjust your blog

Fly Catcher

2006-07-05T01:11:00.000-04:00

Night Slug

2006-07-05T00:25:00.000-04:00

This slug was making its way to the cat food dish, until it got sidetracked by a piece of cabbage.

We're sending it to the Bug Factory for analysis.

I Have Stolen the Codes!

2006-07-02T16:21:00.000-04:00

Happy T. Fluke here, photocopy repairman extraordinaire, ex-Fakiegrind administrator and part-time pirate of the timestream.

I just wanted to let people know that I have stolen the Access Codes to the Fakiegrind mainframe. Those doleful dullards at Dept. H may have captured Fakiegrind World Headquarters, appropriated my Pleasure Dome and de-activated my army of remote control photocopier machines, but I can still make my presence felt where it counts: on the pages of one of the most-read skateboard blogs in blogdom.

I also wanted to say that that last poem by Flatlander had all the lackluster tepidity of a sink full of last night's dishwater. Might I suggest a new hobby, like knitting tiny sweaters for your action figure collection? Oh, I almost forgot! I sold all your action figures on eBay during my stint as Administrator. Well, have fun dusting out the (now empty) Vaults of Oldness.

Behold! The pilliaged Vaults.

Bwa Ha Ha Ha Ha!

(I'm not actually evil, it's just a distortion of my nature due to repeated exposure to photocopier radiation.)

Remember: if it's a good photocopier, it's gotta be a Fluke!

Mark of the Fluke

2006-06-29T11:17:00.000-04:00

Happy T. Fluke may have been banished to the timestreams by Steve Austen's efforts, but he left behind his calling card: a test sheet used by photocopy repair technicians the world over. I doubt we've heard the last from the scoundrel, but for now Fakiegrind World Headquarters has been returned to some semblance of normalcy.

The twenty foot tall sculpture of Fluke made out of coloured lard in the lobby has been dismantled (melted down for pancakes), and the carnivorous Astroturf has been deactivated. It will take some time to sort out what's left of the Vaults of Oldness and catalogue all the items that Fluke didn't sell on eBay to fund his megalomanic schemes.

And Dept. H has decided to reinstate Flatlander as Blog Administrator, at least for now while we sort out the mess. Fluke took with him all the access codes to the photocopiers, as well, and its going to take our codebreakers some time to have them up and running. It looks as though, the next time we hire a new administrator, we will have to devise a better Android Detection Test for the candidates--and maybe an extra terrestrial screening process too.

2006-06-28T23:07:00.000-04:00

Concrete Oasis

I lived too close to factories
I pushed a board around
Reliving my youth
In circles on the ground

The locals got to know me
We shared a scrap of hell
Turned it into heaven
And turned it back as well

A brotherhood of motion
And choreography
The older and the new school
Sharing history

Our own private Olympics
Tucked away from fame
Doing the impossible
Then doing it again

Few will ever understand
What it is we ride--
The mystery that surfs upon
The graffiti tide

I don't really comprehend
The meaning of it all:
The moment of suspension,
Salvation through a fall

I know I will forget the path
That lead me to that place--
The force that kept me stranded
Targeted by Grace

And moved my lips to bless the
Ground, the city and the sky
Trying to keep my balance
As trouble passed me by

Calling All Agents!

2006-06-28T00:01:00.000-04:00

We just received this transmission from Dept. H's urban re-con vehicle, Mobile One!

Steve Austen has managed to infiltrate the suburban lair of Fakiegrind usurper Happy T. Fluke. Due to Austen's amazing bionically enhanced senses and super-human strength, he was able to circumnavigate the electrified fence and the carnivorous Astroturf™ unscathed.

A piece of Gatorade chewing gum staved off Steve's thirst long enough to allow him to resist drinking from the Moat of Forgetfulness, and the bionic superstar made short work of the hapless sentries, penetrating to the very heart of Fluke's compound to the arch-tyrant's pleasure dome/meditation chamber.

The infiltration took an unexpected turn, however, when it was not the aging photocopier salesman-turned blog magnate, Happy T. Fluke, but rather his ninja bodyguard whom Steve encountered in the inner sanctum.

Mobile one managed to divert these stills from security camera
feed of the ensuing duel:

"Well, ninja, it looks like I'll have to neutralize you before
getting a crack at your employer!"

"You seem to have lost your arms in some kind of meditation
chamber door accident, but you pack a mean kick!"

"Luckily, I know bionic Tai Chi!"

(Cue bionic sound-effects)

"Hey, you look eerily familiar. Could it be?"

(Cue melting synthetic skin effect)

"Maskatron!"

"I thought I saw the last of you back in Episode 34!"

"But if you're Maskatron, then who's Happy T. Fluke?!"

"Could it be there are two Maskatrons?!"

"Bwa ha ha! Wouldn't you like to know, Steve Austen?!
Insectavoid minion, ready my escape craft!"

"BY YOUR COMMAND!"

"He who blogs and runs away...."

"Lives to blog another day!"

Steve Austen shields himself from the glare as Happy T. Fluke's craft disappears down a time tunnel. Was he man, machine, or a little bit of both?--we may never know. Then again, we might only have to wait for the upcoming memoir: "Happy T. Fluke, Master of the Blogstream" which the author will be available to sign at a major bookstore near you sometime in late August 06.

Till then, Stay Old!

A Message from Imperius Supreme Internet Commander Fluke

2006-06-26T09:56:00.000-04:00

Greetings blog aficionados and curious thrill-seekers. I am Happy T. Fluke, de facto ruler and Overlord of the communication lines known as the internet. Please send all tributes, monetary gifts and used toner cartridges to Lord Happy, c/o Fakiegrind World Headquarters.

Rumours have been circulating that a certain bionic television celebrity from days of yore has been dispatched to infiltrate my Pleasure Dome, recapture the Vaults of Oldness, and oust the Fluke. I assure you that no such ploy has even the most remotestest chance of succeeding. Even if such an intruder could get past the electrified fence, the carnivorous Astroturf® and the robotic Hounds, they would not be able to resist drinking from the Moat of Forgetfulness with which I have recently encircled my suburban compound.

So never fear, denizens of the Blog-o-verse, I will continue to police the information highways with the iron fish (sic) you have come to expect, keeping the capricious causeways clear of spammers, scammers and retro rock glam, uh, ers.

Ok, looks like my public relations post generator is on the fritz.

In other news, the Fakiegrind Family Picnic was a great success, with everyone having a grand old time beneath the carcinogenic afternoon sun--except for the Gibson family, whose dog chased a frisbee onto the carnivorous astroturf.

Also, last night we discovered this robotic surveillance unit, disguised to appear as a common moth, in the Blog Command room.

A spy in the house of Fakie

It is, no doubt, an attempt by Blogland resistance guerillas to glean intelligence as to our next move. Never fear. This morning's jump in the price of Mozzarella cheese stocks will not deter our campaign to establish the world's first on-line pizza delivery service.

Just imagine: pizza delivered anywhere, anytime, at the click of a mouse! Oh, there will be imitators, to be sure. Just remember you heard it here first.

This is Happy T. Fluke, Internet Overlord and budding restauranteur, signing off.

Insurgency!

2006-06-24T16:48:00.000-04:00

I am The Watcher. For me past, present and future are as one. I have seen these things unfold, which will soon befall the blog known as Fakiegrind. But, truly, they have also already happened, for I am The Watcher.

In a secret bunker, somewhere in Mississauga:

"Steve, I've called you out of retirement because we need you for one last mission. Only someone with your special abilities could hope to accomplish what I'm about to ask. We have reason to believe that your old arch-foe, Maskatron, has resurfaced and is masquerading as the administrator of the skateboarding blog, Fakiegrind. He seems to be planning to take over the entire internet, and you have to stop him!"

"By the way, Steve, you're looking good--not a day over forty."

"Thanks Oscar. I'll take the mission. I was getting tired of sitting around watching Night Rider re-runs."

"Besides, I've been looking for an excuse to try out my new pair of bionic cross-trainers."

Meanwhile, at Fakiegrind World Headquarters, only those employees who have shown unquestioning loyalty to their Administrator remain.

And the one known as Happy T. Fluke takes refuge in his meditation chamber.

"You know what I love about burritos? You don't need a fork. Unless they're sloppily constructed--but soon I will put an end to such insolence for once and all! When I rule the internet, all burritos will be adequately rolled with premium-grade tortilla bread."

Suddenly, a warning knell is sounds in the communications room.

"Our spy satellites indicate a bionic entity heading our way!"

"Notify the Administrator!"

Upon receiving the intelligence, Happy T. Fluke dons his battle armour.

And sounds the alarm...

"We have the advantage. I will set a trap for the intruder! When he arrives in my inner sanctum, it will not be Happy T. Fluke whom my adversary discovers..."

"....but my ninja body guard!"

TO BE CONTINUED...

SOMEBODY SET US UP THE BOMB!

2006-06-24T10:30:00.000-04:00

Bigfoot?

2006-06-24T01:04:00.000-04:00

The security cameras recorded another intruder at Fakiegrind World Headquarters today, this time in the Botanical Gardens. I've had specialists pouring over the footage all afternoon, and they've come to the conclusion that it can only have been the legendary Bigfoot or Sasquatch prowling the grounds. Our security teams have been duly notified and are on the look-out for the beast.

Interestingly, while Warren Smith's groundbreaking study of the creature portrays it as having a humanoid body and the head of a seal, our sighting shows a much different animal.

Caught grazing amidst our giant Amazonian Gladiolus, the beast stood well over 12' tall.

I only hope we succeed in capturing the monster so our scientists can better understand this mysterious creature.

A Message from The Fluke

2006-06-24T00:29:00.000-04:00

I wish I knew who was leaving all the anonymous messages on my posts, so I could release the Hounds of Time on them, removing them from history for good. But regardless of my detractors, there is little that can stop my plans at this stage. Soon I will own the internet, and all ye bloggers will have to pay Me, Happy T. Fluke, for your ill communications!

How, you might ask, did I afford the significant new defense shields to Fakiegrind World Headquarters, and the high-tech timestream gadgetry currently at my disposal? It's quite simple actually. I liquidated Flatlander's vintage action figure collection on eBay, and diverted the funds from Paypal directly into the Blogland Security budget. Now, all those tiny plastic guns, cannons and soldiers have been turned into a terribly real and powerful force to be reckoned with.

Dumpster? This is a T-4000 model Time Navigation Device!

Yes, I'm afraid this battleblog will be fully operational should any of those reprobate Agents show their faces again. And should Flatlander surface, through some ill-considered desire to regain control of his blog, I will have a little surprise in store for that slackardly stalwart.

He WILL bow to Happy T. Fluke!

This is H. T. Fluke, future Overlord and Master of Blogland, signing out.

Intruder Alert

2006-06-22T21:27:00.000-04:00

We caught this man/creature trying to navigate the electrified fence I recently erected around the Fakiegrind World Headquarters. He actually made it over, only to be caught in the poisonous barbs of the Carnivorous Astroturf surrounding my offices. The fellow seems to have been some kind of messenger or shaman. As the neurotoxins swiftly overtook him, he struggled to deliver a puzzling message that sounded something like

Beeeewarrr!

Then the poor fellow expired. There were some dissenting voices in the Headquarters Maintenance Committee when I started to implement our new safety measures here at Fakiegrind Central (all of these mavericks have been since "relocated" to various out of the way locals on Top Secret mission duty). Turns out the electrified fence, carnivorous grass and employee retinal scanners were warranted after all. For all we know, this guy could have been some kind of assassin, bent on destroying the Fakiegrind Empire. No, you can never be too careful with Blogland Security.

But what could be the meaning of the word he uttered with his dying breath? Perhaps he was saying "bee war", trying to intimidate us into silence by summoning the old bugaboo of an army of trained killer bees who will descend upon us in the night and do away with us in our sleep. Nothing to fear there, as I have recently taken the liberty of installing an anti-killer bee deflector shield that will be activated at the first indication of an insect invasion.

So smoke on that, scantily-clad shaman assassin guy--and next time, wear some shoes or something!

Distress Signal

2006-06-21T00:11:00.000-04:00

We intercepted this distress signal on the interstellar crystal set:

"PLEASE HELP. TRAPPED IN OLDSCHOOL VIDEO GAME. TELEPORTER BROKEN. TWO-NOTE SYNTHESIZER MUSIC IS DRIVING US NUTS!!!"

Looks like some sucker DJs got a little too deep into the vintage video games for their own good. That'll teach them to rummage around in the Vaults without clearance! This post is way too abstract and over my head. Time to polish the photocopier screens.

Happy T. Fluke, signing out!

Postcards

2006-06-14T19:33:00.000-04:00

Garage Sale!

2006-06-13T12:48:00.000-04:00

Cleaning out the Vaults of Oldness. Man, did Flatlander collect alot of junk! The Fakiegrind garage sale is now underway. Items will be sold to the highest bidder and transmitted to them immediately via teleport beams.

Special Ops

2006-06-11T12:07:00.000-04:00

We recievced these photos on an unmarked disk the other day. It may be a communication from Flatlander, who is under deep cover with the Agent Relocation Program.

Is this some crashed UFO, or a new time machine project stumbled upon in the wilds of the east end? Due to the code of secrecy demanded by blogland security, we'll probably never know.

666? Not a Problem!

2006-06-06T23:53:00.000-04:00

Well, ten minutes to go and we'll have made it through the day without mishap. It's my second day here at Fakiegrind World Headquarters and everything is going swimmingly! Return visits are up .07%, which is a substantial gain for this sector of the workweek. Aside from monitoring the site counter and managing the comments pages, I checked the Fakie mail, paid some bills and ran a systems check on the security protocols--everything is in good working order.

The Devil did come by, and I sold him a photocopier! Seems he likes to have everything in triplicate. He vanished in a poof of smoke with a state-of-the-art Inferno 3500 Photocopy System. The thing will collate, fold, staple and has a nifty "Tilt" feature that ignites a warning light whenever an employee tries to use it to photocopy his or her bum.

This is the inside of a photocopier!

You might ask yourself, do I ever roll back the copy counter on the pre-owned copiers that I sell? The answer, of course, is Never! And I always throw in an extra toner cartridge FREE OF CHARGE.

Now, if that isn't capital "S" Service, then my name isn't Happy T. Fluke!

Introducing....

2006-06-05T00:22:00.000-04:00

Happy T. Fluke

Fakiegrind's new blog administrator!

Starting immediately Mr. Fluke, or "Hap" as he likes his friends to call him, will be taking the helm of Fakiegrind, steering the blog into new and uncharted waters of Fakie journalism. There were many worthy applicants for the position, but we found that Mr. Fluke just had something about him that we couldn't say no to. Also, his 25 years experience as a used photocopier salesman is just the kind of expertise and commitment we were looking for in a new webmaster.

Mr. Fluke showed up at Fakiegrind World Headquarters just today, and breezed through the I.Q., physical, drug and android detection tests. He also did an unforgettable softshoe number in the staff kitchenette which left several Agents around here in stitches for several consecutive minutes. But rather than going on at length, here's a few words from Mr. Fluke himself!

Hi. I can't tell you how thrilled I am to take charge of Fakiegrind. I've always wanted my own blog, and now that dream has become a reality. There are so many small observations I have gathered in my years on the road as a photocopier salesman, and I can hardly wait to share them all with you. Unfortunately, I've never been abducted by aliens--not that I can remember anyways! But I'm sure that we'll all get along just fine, and I'd like to start things off by relating a little incident that happened to me just the other day.

I was in the express line at the grocery store. Seems I remember a time when the sign said "1-8 Items", but these days--due to inflation, I guess--it's up to 16 items that you can bring through that check-out. At any rate, I had exactly fifteen items. I counted them, you see, before hand. But then, I had three avocados that I counted as one item, even though they were priced at .69 cents apiece.

So, when it came my turn, I asked the cashier, "Do you count these avocados as one items, or three?" She told me that they were actually three items, and I said, "Well, then, that puts me over the limit. I guess I should really move to the other line." To which the cashier replied, "Well, you're here already, might as well go through." Then she added, with a reassuring wink, "You'll know better for next time."

And that was that. I paid for my items, bagged them, and left. A lesser man, I conjecture, might have crumbled under the pressure in such a moment. But I kept my cool, even got a wink from the young cashier. That's just the kind of guy I am. People trust me, and that's what makes me such a great salesperson.

Well, how's that for a first post? Mr. Fluke, or should I say Hap, is just the man to take this blog into a bold new millennium. So fasten your seat belts people, we're in for quite a ride!

Fakiegrind Career Fair

2006-06-04T09:02:00.000-04:00

Candidates have been filing through the offices of Fakiegrind World Headquarters in our campaign to find a new administrator for the site. We're overwhelmed at the sheer volume of people eager to take the reins of Blogland's only undercover skateboard intelligence agency.

An atmosphere of genial camaraderie flourishes in the staff room.

Of course, we have strict security protocols. All candidates must undergo a battery of psychological, physical and android detection exams. We don't want any Maskatrons infiltrating the organization and laying waste to the Vaults of Oldness.

The ladies at Human/Inhuman Resources go over some resumés.

We've narrowed it down to a handful of promising candidates, and may announce the new Administrator later today. It's exciting to think that the future of blogging is being decided at this very moment, whilst you sip your morning coffee or recharge your solar/chemical internal batteries.

We're planning to take Fakiegrind in a bold new direction that will please shareholders and curious browsers alike, so stay tuned!

Help Wanted

2006-06-02T17:48:00.000-04:00

Have you considered a career in desk-top publishing?
In the wake of Flatlander's recent relocation, Fakiegrind
is looking for a new administrator.

The successful candidate will display an outgoing personality,

an ability to work independently

and an understanding of issues of confidentiality.

You too can be an Agent!

Call today!

The career opportunity of a lifetime is just a click away!

Ever Watchful

2006-05-30T00:44:00.000-04:00

I've been watching this site. Watching things is pretty much my main pastime, living as I do on the Moon. Don't get me wrong; I like it here. Plenty of solitude. No smog, or even air to speak of. Except inside the Blue City's forcefield dome, of course. Even though I'm more or less immortal, I still need to breath from time to time, otherwise I go into a kind of catatonic trance--which curtails my watching activities.

The forcefield keeps the moon dust out, too. Some days, when the forcefield breaks down, I have to completely give up my watching activities, so occupied do I become between holding my breath and dusting things off. Luckily, the infrastructure doesn't break down very often. When it does, I have to call the Skrull repair crew, who often have to come from the other side of the Galaxy, leaving me to hold my breath for a very long time.

Anyhoo, I just wanted to say how much I enjoy all this blogging business. Used to be, I had to watch things through my special Chromaton Telescope. The Cretaceous period was one of my favourites, but more for the spectacular ferns than the dinosaurs and such. Then satellite TV came along, and I got hooked on reruns of Mork and Mindy and Fame. Now, high-speed internet access gives me a world of distractions, literally at my fingertips, and I can go weeks without even venturing past the front airlock of my abode at X-117B Vibranium Lane. A watcher never had is so good!

With the explosion of the whole Blog phenomenon, I can gain access to the private lives of strangers in a way I would never have imagined possible a mere millennia or two ago. Oddly enough, out of all the hundreds of thousands of blogs offering themselves to my parusal, I have grown a particular fondness for a certain Fakiegrind, and it's affiliates. Nothing makes my day more than waking up to read what new inanities the half-cracked brain of Flatlander and the Agents have seen fit to post. I find that in some strange, mystical way, the entire rest of the cosmos is wondrously reflected in the seemingly trivial themes that Fakiegrind often alights upon in its nearly daily postings. Heck, I've even stopped watching CNN and the Galactic Broadcast Networks Prime Meridian report!

So, I was greatly distressed to encounter what seems to be the latest of Flatlander's harebrained schemes to quit the blog. Employing the bold ruse of the Fakie Agent Relocation Program at first seemed to be merely another of Flatlander's clever jokes, but several days have elapsed without word from the Fakiegrind administrator and it seems that he might be trying to push this ploy to the limit, perhaps in some kind of desperate attempt to glean more attention and comments from readers.

I seem to recall that this gambit has worked in the past, eliciting kind words and commentary from quarters not normally heard from on this page, and warm farewells from such Fakiegrind regulars as the sentient automatons at Roboshrub Inc. However, like the fabled boy who cried wolf, Flatlander may have played this card one too many times, as public response to this last episode of attempted blogicide has been less than overwhelming.

At any rate, I hope that Flatlander will reconsider this new turn his blog has taken, and find some ingenious way to write himself back into the story-line. The secret agent setting off on bold new adventures image is all well and good, but he has a responsibility to his readers to keep them posted on the movements of such sinister world players as the Xister and the enigmatic Adjuster (or "Maladjuster", or whatever he's calling himself these days). Also, there's the Black Cheddar Consortium who have been too quiet for comfort as of late, and Captain Canuck doesn't seem to have returned from his mission to Baffin Island to investigate alleged UFO sightings. Deep cover is no excuse! My code of ethics as one of the Immortals forbids me from entering directly into the affairs of mortals, and I would hate to loose my Galactic Parking Privileges over this issue. So what I'm saying is, DON'T MAKE ME STEP IN AND INTERFERE WITH THE BLOG BY MAKING AN ACTUAL POST!

Wait a minute. Oh crap--they're towing my hovercar! Hey, cut that out! Do you know who I am? By Blackbolt's vocal chords, I'm the Watcher! You'll be hearing from my lawyer. Somebody get Birdman on the phone!

Sincerely,

Uatu (The Watcher)

Blue City, The Moon