Hey all my buddies, I’m moving all of this out of Google’s digital clutches and into my OWN poorly managed e-space, and so you can find me over at www.itsthebageler.com! All the bullshit you know and love and more! Thanks for everything, and I hope to see you all over there!
Casey Hills Could've Been Stopped
Tuesday, April 26, 2022
Wednesday, April 6, 2022
Review: The Kaiju Preservation Society, by John Scalzi
Wednesday, March 30, 2022
A GALLERY OF MY TERRIBLE CATS, EXHIBIT 1: HOLLAND
ALONE IN THE WORLD WAS A LITTLE CATBLOG
BECAUSE YOU DEMANDED IT, or you would have, HAD YOU KNOWN YOU NEEDED IT IN ORDER TO CONTINUE PRODUCING YOUR BONES' PRECIOUS MARROWS. But now that's taken care of, so you're ahead of the game; go ahead and take a break, fix yourself a drink, maybe!
Anyone who knows me for any length of time will find themselves wondering: wait how the hell many cats does this guy have? And to that reasonable question my reply is reliable, and unchanging as the sea: what are you, a cop?
Make like Ruggles, motherfucker
It's time for you all to get to know the tiny monsters that infest my home, pukify my carpets and bake more biscuits than a thousand Southern families could smother in gravy if given all the chickenfat in God's delicious creation, and so I have embarked upon a RECORD OF MY INNUMERABLE MEOWMARTS, like Quirinius taking his census of Judea, and we all know how well that turned out.
Today we start with the tiniest and, I'm not even ashamed to say it, my favoritemost:
CAT #1: CELEBRATED LOCAL CAT HOLLAND J. CAT
- Has no naturally-occurring meow! She mostly goes 'Peep!' and she gets along JUST FINE, thank you very much aggressive, condescending telemeowketers trying to sell us a product we don’t need.
- Is my little princess because JUST LOOK AT HER STUPID PERFECT LITTLE FACE.
- I narrate her in a little French accent sometimes: "Papa! I am on ze keetchen COUNTAIR, even zo I know zis is CRIMES for ze kitty to do! Vive la vie de crime!"
- The 'J' stands for 'Oats'!
My very first cat was her predecessor, Denmark J. Cat, who was my best guy for four presidential administrations, until he fell to the sword of feline lymphoma and set sail for the Undiscovered Country. I have it on good authority that he has since CONQUERED HELL, and is warming my throne there until I can arrive.
After what my wife deemed an appropriate mourning period, during which she experienced the only span in our relationship when I wasn't pointing to an animal and yelling for her to look at how good they were, she surprised me wif A BAYBEEEEEE
She is now my constantmost and steadfast companion and snugglecreature; she will not leave me the hell alone and I love it so damn much, she is on my lap as I type this, her paws buried beneath my laptop, like so much traysure.
HOLLAND’S FAVORITE PASTIMES INCLUDE:
- Scrumbling
- Going absolutely batshit cuckoo-bananas on the scratching-post when I crush a Diet Coke can in my bitchin' can-crusher, seriously for some reason it just drives her into a tiny berserker frenzy, it's hilarious
- Meepwalking (walking around going 'meep')
- Having breath that Elton John once called "screaming anguish of a thousand lutefisk-slathered ghosts’ asses" due to FIV-induced stomatitis
- Blepping at a Regional Championship level, but if I'd had any competitiveness genes for her to inherit she would destroy the rankings so completely that the league would never recover.
SHE LOOKS AMAZING IN IT.
part-time job at the parlor down by Swongburt's Pie-Barn!
Reno, Rude, Tseng and Elena took excellent care of her, thanks guys! Tell Rufus I'll SEE HIM IN HELL.
THE CAREFUL OBSERVER WILL NOTE:
and she raised me
Sunday, March 27, 2022
Tuesday, March 22, 2022
The Dinosaur To Which I Am Heir, Or: I, Jerk
Good evening. Thank you for joining me, and please feel free to help yourself to a frosty Fanta in the flavor of your choice, including Limited-Edition And Possibly Fictional Goozleberry.
Find below a photo-graph of Haplocanthosaurus Delfsi, a dead-ass thunder lizard first discovered in Colorado in 1954. Pictured is the most complete fossil ever found, still only around 60%, the rest being casts and leftover props from the most famous dinosaur film Hollywood has ever produced, Gran Torino.
Through a series of increasingly improbable events that I am nowhere near creative enough to have devised, I have a personal connection to this ridiculous monster, and like all stories, it begins with a gesture of kindness, has a life-exploding revelation in the middle, and ends with a pile of giant goofy bones, under which I will one day be buried, and which will eventually be indistinguishable from my own due to the bone-embiggening tonic I plan to quaff in my last moment as a gesture of revenge agains the funerary industry that once stole six months of my life, but that's a story for another day.
This is a true story; not in like a Fargo way, but in a weird, 3am public-access news-show way. I have actually changed the names of those involved except one, which will be evident, but all other events described are accurate to the best of my knowledge. You can trust in this, because if I were making it up there would be more Mole-Men and Dune references, and less heart disease and inconclusive emotional tumult.
In February of 2020, just before the eruption of what I can only hope to every god is the last era-defining historical event of my lifetime (update: nope, thanks to Putin!), my wife surprised me with an Ancestry.com test; as an off-the-shelf white guy with little in the way of identity, culture or heritage save vague notions of watered-down Irish and Norwegian ancestry, I've spent my adult life obsessed with finding out Who I Am, historically, ethnically and geographically speaking, and she thought this would be a good place to start. What self-discoveries awaited me??? Was I Jewish? (No.) Klingon? (No for different reasons.) ¿SPANISH? (A little.)
The test came back, accompanied by my saliva sample and a note saying "Why did you send so much?", "Please see a doctor", and "Where did you even get a Eureeka's Castle lunchbox-thermos?", but sadly revealing little beyond what I'd already suspected: I'm a dang mayonnaise mutt is what, fulla nothin' from nowhere. Still neat though! And still an extremely thoughtful gift that I recommend to anyone whose life and understanding of self you may not want to actively destroy, but to the destruction of which you wouldn't necessarily be opposed.
I looked the report over a couple of times and then didn't think much of it for the next month or so--sorry, my tiny, beautiful wife, but there're only so many ways you can read about different groups of white people and still be interested; academics call this the 'Texan history textbook problem'--until I received an email from a gentleman I'll call Harold, in which he said Ancestry had pinged him an alert that I was on the scene and that we were, somehow, relation to one another, according to the alleles and centimorgans and xenomorphs that the service uses to map genetic branches; specifically, that I was either his half-brother, cousin, uncle, nephew, or grandparent, and given that he's several years older than I am, cousin seemed the most likely, if least hilarious, possibility.
I said 'Neato!', we compared family trees and whoops, turns out we actually didn't have anything in common, that's weird! Better luck next time somebody's wife does something nice. I thought no more of it, and went back to reading Rat Queens, like a common Gary.
Then it got weirder.
Harold emailed me again, saying he'd recently discovered he had a SURPRISE HALF-SISTER (we've all been there, we all know this classic way) with whom he shared a biological father; he had been synthetically shaken and baked within his mother's ova-oven, which was news to him and had opened up an entire orchard of connections to relatives he never knew he had.
According to Harold this was further evidence that he and I were kin, and further evidence to me that he needed a new hobby. I sent a screenshot of his email to my mother; "Lol!" I said, "Check it out, this dude thinks I'm his uncle brother nephew grandpa cousin", and I didn't hear back from her for a week. In and of itself this was not unusual; we are not especially close, and the divide between us had only grown since the 'election' of The Twice Impeached citizen.
That's right: a DNA test for my birthday made my mother tell me I was a test-tube baby while I was watching The Jerk, a movie where Steve Martin's family tells him he's adopted on his birthday, and if I ever meet him that'll be the only thing I have to say to him. Needless to say this wrecked my entire ass in ways that may never fully resolve. Insert joke to break the tension here!
Now, this was not for any salacious reason; there had been no clandestine smoochin', and I'm sorry to say this is not merely due to my famous disinclination to publicly discuss such matters (outside my Smutty Award-winning fantasy series The Butt-Toucher Chronicles) but to the fact that the explanation was, in fact,
much darker and much more disturbing.
Harold did a lot of digging (HA, DINO-PUN), and a lot of Ancestry work, and sent out a lot of emails just as confusing as the one he sent me, and eventually he came to the inescapable conclusion that he had at least six half-siblings, all of whom had been conceived artificially, and all of whose mothers had been professionally attended to in matters gynecological, obstetric, and natal by the same man. The man who, we had no choice but to conclude, had swapped out an unknowable number of donor semen samples, including the one that eventually became me, with his own.
Enter: Edwin Delfs.
Update: I have been warned by that paleozoic pervert, and that was the last paleontology joke I will be making, and it WASN'T EVEN ON PURPOSE, BECAUSE LIFE IS UNFAIR.
Delfs has been dead for almost twenty years now, like an asshole would do, so we aren't getting answers from him and his precious ~legitimate~ family certainly isn't forthcoming with information or any of that sweet dinosaur-money, so this is where things begin to occupy a more speculative space.
The current understanding, through comparing where we now know our various mothers sought fertility services, is that Delfs was engaging, prolifically, in what is now known as fertility fraud or donor fraud, which is wildly illegal in the civilized parts of the United States, although my natural inclination toward generosity requires me to believe that in the remaining states it's 'legal' in the way that teaching a dog to understand that it will one day die is 'legal' in that what the hell man, why do you need a law to tell you not to do that.
As far as we can ascertain, throughout at least half of his horrifyingly long career as an OBGYN and fertility specialist in California, he scattered his foul seed in plots that had been clearly marked for other crops, leading to an ongoing harvest of duplicitous bellyfruit and metaphors that get away from you with upsetting and surprising ease. Delfs is one of only a handful of what I have to assume the telenovelas call los médicos monstruos that has even been found out, and he's not even one of the few that have been prosecuted or held to account, legally or otherwise because he died of congestive heart failure with, I have to admit, is a pretty elegant way to dodge prosecution. Fair play to you, you egomaniacal, power-mad kinda-rapist. Kitten to break the tension!
Thursday, February 3, 2022
Strange Academy, Vol. 1: First Class
Strange Academy, Vol. 1: First Class
Published By: Marvel · Written By: Skottie Young · Art & Cover By: Humberto Ramos
The Marvel universe has a written history and legacy longer and more convoluted than those of many countries, religions and efforts to reform the goddamn filibuster, and it can be intimidating to try to get into. Just how does one know when it's Clobbering Time, and is it affected by Daylight Savings? Exactly what are those mass-destruction-causing weirdoes 'avenging'? What the fuck is Paste Pot Pete's deal, and who in the Marvel org chart can I punch about him?
Saturday, January 22, 2022
November 2021 Books Read Standouts: Reign Of The Seven Spellblades, Vol. 1 / Maniac Of New York, Vol. 1: The Death Train
Reign Of The Seven Spellblades, Vol. 1
Written By: Bokuto Uno
Art By: Sakae Esuno, Ruria Miyuki
- A magic school where where children learn mystic arts, which now include swordfighting
- A cast of characters with more than one personality trait, including being from other countries without being huge ethnic stereotypes with names like Seamus Finnegan, Cho Chang and a black guy named 'Shacklebolt', Jesus Christ Joanne what were you thinking
- One character who is not a wizard learning swordfighting, no no my friends, but a samurai learning combat-magics
- Teachers who actually do things! ADMITTEDLY: Some of those things are drinking while running a class, or attacking students with flaming knives in the middle of lessons, BUT STILL
So Long And Thanks For All The Fish!
Hey all my buddies, I’m moving all of this out of Google’s digital clutches and into my OWN poorly managed e-space, and so you can find me ...
-
Good evening. Thank you for joining me, and please feel free to help yourself to a frosty Fanta in the flavor of your choice, including ...
-
The Superior Foes of Spider-Man, Vol. 1: Getting The Band Back Together Written By Nick Spencer Artwork by Steve Lieber Haaaaaaaaa s...