tildetastic

I was poking around the McSweeney's archives, which I find myself holding off reading and then reading a lot of it at once, as if it were a neglected article of clothing that eventually guilts me into wearing it (looking at you, hypercolor socks), and this thing by Dave Ng, None of My Science Piñatas Are Appropriate for Children, reminded me of a better version of something I had typed a long time ago (9/25/06): the first paragraph of Early Draft of Text Automatically Attached to the End of Outgoing Emails from Horizon Securities Ltd. (which itself was politely declined for publication by McSweeney's, around 2005 or thereabouts, if I'm remembering correctly) (at the time it was easy to pretend that they were afraid they wouldn't be able to render a tilde on their website; now I think I will pretend that they will be afraid that the site is becoming too piñata-y) (it's ok McSweeney's; I bear you no rancor).

Anyway, 9/25/06 = made me want to go back and see when the first post was and it was this: July 26, 2006. That means this blog's second birthday was a week and a half ago! If you forgot to send a birthday presents to the blog, c/o me, here is a fact: Since I work remotely part time, I am at a weird place in my wardrobe-cycle where I actually need more crummy T-shirts to wear around the house.

THUS: Here is the short list of T-shirts I need for my blog to have a good birthday:

• Secret Headquarters' God Save Stan Lee shirt
• The Sound of Young America's glow in the dark shirt (is this even still around? I have the other one)
• Dinosaur Comics' Wizard Has Turned You Into a Whale shirt

OK, I think that's it.

PLEASE DO NOT SEND HYPERCOLOR SOCKS.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, THIS BLOG.

Have Fun, But Please Don't Scare Your Mother

WFMU’s Beware of the Blog has an mp3 of Night of the Laughing Dead from Power Records from liiiike 1974. I had this when I was around six or seven years old, and I have literally never been so terrified of anything in my entire life before or since.

Night of the Laughing Dead was a 45 (!) narrated by Stan Lee (!!) in second person (!!??!) -- you are the Man-Thing (as opposed to DC’s slightly later but more popular Swamp Thing, and both as opposed to Hillman/Eclipse’s original Heap); you secrete a chemical corrosive when you sense fear; you witness a clown shooting himself in the head because your girlfriend, the tightrope walker, had an affair! (This always happens to clowns.)

Then the clown’s ghost appears and tries to make people laugh in a Roger Rabbit voice, while creepy circus music plays in the background. Then some other stuff happens. Then you get completely afraid-to-open-the-closet-caliber wigged out but can’t stop playing it over and over again until finally your mother gets worried that you’re not sleeping and tells you, “Why don’t we put this away until you’re older?” at which point she throws it away along with some flexidiscs you got off the back of a Honeycombs box about UFOs that also rattled me so much I wasn’t able to function.

I mean, you.

(Maybe this won’t be that scary to you; maybe I’m just remembering how scared it made me as a kid, but I just listened to this in my office on my iPod, with the lights out, and if anyone is reading this right now, will you please come to my office? And check the men’s room for dead clowns? Because I have to pee?)


N.B. In case you were wondering what the best blog in the history of all blogs ever, as of right now, is, it’s Scar Stuff, which has a lot of other recordings like this and has the added benefit of being named after the Halloween makeup from Imagineering, a company I kept in the black for much of the late 70s.

Mira: