toxic taco, you say

WHAT.

Skeezix Visits Nina

I thought for the longest time that I had imagined the whole thing.


My dad, born in 1927, kept a ton of his toys from his childhood. One toy was a board game called "Skeezix Visits Nina". He let me play with his toys and I distinctly remember finding this game, realizing it was missing pieces, and drawing on the inside of the box to make it into a different kind of game. Probably pinball-based. I was very into pinball at the time. It was a time before video games.

In the late 90s I mentioned the game to Dad and how now, as an adult, I regretted writing in it. I said it was probably worth money and he nodded and joked a little about how writing in it must have killed the value.

Then in 2005 when both parents were gone and I had to clean out the house, the game was nowhere to be found. I really wanted to see that game again, too. So I came home and looked the game up online. Nothing.

For 4 years, nothing. Not a peep about the game anywhere on the Internets. I started to think I had imagined the whole thing, because the Internet is the repository of all human knowledge.

Until this guy listed one on eBay recently. (Link goes to the Italian version of eBay, the only one I could still find cached). His was complete and didn't have any writing so it wasn't the one we had -- which was a possibility since the seller lives not too far from where my parents lived -- but it's the only one I've seen since my dad's.

EDIT: I forgot to mention you can find the game on BoardGameGeek now, too. Same pics as the auction.

The game was boring, by the way. It had a spinner (missing in ours) and a board that was just paper glued to the inside of the bottom of the box. The board was a single path with a few little special spots along the way. You spun, moved your SweeTart-shaped piece along that many spaces, and if you landed on a special spot you followed instructions. First one to Nina's house won.

For very very low values of "win". I still wish I had this game again, though.

Futurama: 7 Damned? 7 Damned WHAT?

I've been meaning to post this somewhere for 2 years.

In the Futurama episode "Roswell That Ends Well", at about 19:50 into the episode the ship flies through an Army building, a hangar I guess. The retro windows on some of the Army buildings are made up of a bunch of small bluish squares of glass. In this scene, though, the glass spells something out:



That's the 600 px wide version, click here for the 900 px wide one.

It obviously says "7 DAMNED" or, at the least "7 DAMN". Until I grabbed this cap I couldn't see the last 2 letters, but now that I enlarge it they seem like "ED" to me:




I thought the commentary would address this, but it didn't. There's nothing on Google about this, either. Surely I'm not the first one to see this.

EDIT: Light bulb! There are 7 windows in this bit, or "7 DAMNED" windows. Were they hard to animate? Did someone at the studio get bored? We will probably never know.

catbox fishcoin

I'm trying to figure out why I don't own this.

Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen

Great storyboard art from my favorite Ren & Stimpy episode, "Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen." Which you can see here because I am your friend:

Ren & Stimpy - The Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen Anthem
Uploaded by Bodhisattva1956. - Full seasons and entire episodes online.

I need to post here more.

at least you get a brief glimpse of Ted Knight

Someone mentioned this YouTube clip recently on a post that no longer exists, but which sadly was still in my RSS feed. Did you know that if you delete a post it doesn't get deleted from the RSS feed? I didn't know that until now. Anyway, this nameless person who decided to spare his blog readers this pain was so horrified by this clip that I had to see it for myself. Words cannot express how wrong this is. P.S. A little background knowledge of Capote's research on In Cold Blood is necessary for the understanding of the wrongitude.



The "accidental" mispronunciation of "mugger" at about 1:50 made my headache come back.

in lieu of actual content

You tell us, Dick.

From everyone's favorite psychotic expressionistic comic strip, Dick Tracy.