Erm, hello? Is this thing on?

I’m back, for the moment anyway. It’s nothing personal, y’all, but if you look up “burnt out” in the dictionary, you’ll see a photo of.. well, you’d probably see a photo of Keith Richards, but I’m not far behind. (Except for all the cocaine.. and groupies. And I have better hair!) I’ve resisted on several occasions posting nothing but my feverish fantasies of Survivor Ethan and I starting a new life together and spending all his winnings on quirky Swedish furniture with names like Spluugle-Has. (“Oh, Ethan, you look so handsome next to that blonde pine and wrought iron table lamp.. now just move a little to the left.”) See what I do for you people? Anyway, I’ll try and stick around more.. now go click some links.

“I hereby challenge the Queen of England to either a kickboxing match or a math test (no geometry) for the crown of Canada. If, after that time, she has not accepted my challenge, Canadians can infer that she has forfeited the match, and I will be the effective new monarch of Canada.” I would pay good money to watch Queen Elizabeth in a kickboxing match… Thanks, Jeff!

404 Error Foretold in the Bible. In the interest of science, it should probably be noted that this dubious pronouncement was found using the less-accepted method of reading secret Bible messages, Alphabetics. The more sensible Bible Code followers, however, report that in fact the ancient writings say, amongst other things, “Tom Daschle, God is for me.” Thanks, Bible Code! (Neither prophesizing method seemed to turn up any tips I could actually use, though, like “Russell Crowe will win Best Actor”, or “The cat has pooped in your shoe.”)

January Bizarre and Unique Holidays. Today is “Play God Day”, which is amusing, but doesn’t hold a candle to January 23 and “National Measure Your Feet Day”. Ummm… no.

Years ago I worked in a call center where we received and forwarded after-hour phone calls to doctors and lawyers and the like, so I found this employee’s journal of two years of call center customer madness to be oh-so entertaining. (It even includes my perennial favourite: paging people with the message, “You left your pager here.”)

At a local BC university, forty-seven ecomonics students (ten percent of the entire class) handed in the same term paper. I am absolutely boggled as to how this could happen.. Drugs? Aliens? Just being so painfully stupid that you hand in the same paper as all your friends?

RIP Julia Phillips, movie producer and author of as fine an 80s tell-all tome as they come, You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again.

The Celebrity Atheist List: one can only assume that Marlon Brando realized there is no God when he saw himself with an ice bucket on his head in Island of Dr. Moreau.

I will not even begin to speculate on how much of my life I wasted today looking for a photo of Brando’s dubious chapeau, which oddly enough popular culture has seemed loathe to properly document. Mad props go to Jabootu’s Bad Movie Review, though, for both the pic and the excellent review of Santa Claus, in which Santa and Merlin the Wizard team up to fight Satan. Natch.

In other celebrity bucket news, reviews from the Guns N’ Roses show on New Year’s Eve report that Axl’s backup now includes Buckethead, who “sports a mask over his face and a KFC bucket over his head“. Yeah, and you thought Slash’s hat was an irritating affectation. (Wait.. Slash’s hat is an irritating affectation!)