Channel Surfer

She snaps her fingers at me
thrice in rapid succession

that's code for a cup of coffee and
a raisin bagel

(I forgot to tell you my new name is fido)

it's a twisted reality show and i'm
the unwitting star of channel WTF

the remote is two strides from her claw
but her whistle whine
is all the askance i get

... and
All she asks for is the moon and stars
Offered to her freely, with open arms.

(she says they would match her shoes)

(I say would bully for her,
but fear the possibility of a
tornado warning)


Finger and thumb crack another gunshot across my nose

... I can only ask how high.

Channel Surfer by Michael W. Hyde is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

What Comes Around ...

Ahh, Youtube. Thank you for making the internet a better place, but just sometimes. Neatorama posted this link from the cloud, making the ad come full-circle from its debut two years ago.

I forgot how much of a hoot it was to watch. Damn you consumerism. Damn you.

The Last Question

The Last Question by Issac Asimov must be one of the best short stories ever written. The old bird may not have correctly predicted the evolution of computer technology as we have realized over the last fifty years, but without him I think we would never have come as far as we have. Thank goodness io9 recognizes this also, and reminded me of it today when they posted this.

Quickie

I bloodhounded the mattress

for signs of you

Stranger because you

sat three feet away

I just wanted

to remember

how we slept.

Quickie by Michael W. Hyde is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

3 AM St. Louis Street

photo by Jennifer66

3 AM St. Louis Street, smell of fresh bread
Halfway between inner city rebeautification
and the industrial bank of chicken butchers
not quite as far from
the refuge sought homeless and
fifty-dollar-a-night pros
A world away from the
real lives of citizenship and college tuitions.
Three blocks from the nearest coffee dive
that serves bar-thirty patrons
scrambled vestiges of strength
for the swerve home.

3 AM, smell of bleached roads
and rubber that likes the
pavement better than the tires.
Screeches of a power-brake
hosted by Rebel Rednecks in one of
sixteen IROCs not tied around a tree
Up the block, someone
pulls another all-nighter
with a few hits of Green Checkerboard
and a gallon of Sunny-D.
stereo surround sound
climbs the decibel ladder
and straddles legality

3 AM, smell of broken beer bottles
whoops and hollers and dog collars
climb out from under
The Bedrock Club and
battle balance to the death.
Fraternity girls and Sorority boys
drink their weight in spirits
The only sound that drowns
out the vomit spills over asphalt
is the couple fucking in the IROC
that breaks traction
at every light.


3 AM St. Louis Street, smell of fresh bread.
The factory is closed now
and all the workers fired
just like the TV plant before.
The political pidgeon would say that's
a sign to stay away.
Not conducive to prosperity.


It's difficult, though ...
To avoid the smell of home.

3 A.M. St. Louis Street by Michael W. Hyde is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Starstuff: Existentialism Part I

The universe is expanding.

The universe is painted in vast shades of
black, white, and nebula.

The universe is insane.

The universe will explode.

Each day, the distance grows:

between innerspace and outerspace;

between Milky Way and Andromeda;

between the Sun and Earth;

between my head and my hand;

between the pen and the paper;

and every day my heart
is removed from its socket
by one more molecule.

Someone told me they don't know who they are
anymore ... but that's the easy part

We are all starstuff
(also painted in vast shades of black, white, nebula)

and we maneuver ourselves by any means to that end

the question is not who we are,

(it remains baldly rhetorical)

the question becomes: what shall we
do with our starstuff
before we give it back to the
universe ...

the question becomes:
will you have lived
your life to the best
of your abilities ...

the question becomes: what
one thing do you want before you leave ...



The universe will explode.
The universe will spit on you and call you a coward
The universe will paint you ...

I woke up this morning
missing another molecule.
I could feel the lack of it
like the ghost limb of an amputee

The universe is expanding
and it's taking our hearts with it.

And all the superglue in the world
won't keep our starstuff
together.

Starstuff by Michael W. Hyde is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Predawn: Existentialism Part II

Predawn, though I’m rarely up,

is one of my favorite times.

Maybe it’s the anticipatory energy

that wraps itself around my head like

a hot towel,

bleeding into my

thoughts. The blaze

of dawn will come

at any moment,

but waits patiently while

I encompass the verdant

silence of the

city.



It’s far better for

meditation and

rumination than classical music

Always better than TV.

Even sometimes

better than the internet.

(Though, let’s be honest here:

the internet

is a blanket of nervous

energy in itself,

and we all of us know

of its effects on our psyches.)



But I digress, sitting outside

with a cigarette

and the silence,

and contemplate

the Moon.

The stars have already

gone home,

and the sky is lonely

before the sun streaks into full autonomy.



A horizon

in blue hues and

morning dews. Just another

drop in the bucket …

Just another day. Just another

quiet moment

between

myself, and

existentialism.

Predawn by Michael W. Hyde is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

I also dabble in Science Fiction.

Horatio bent down to pick up the coin Jack had thrown at him. His fingers curled around the silver and electronic currency and he closed his eyes to access Google. He sent the command from his neuro-cannular shunt to the wireless pack strapped to his belt. Horatio scanned from side-to-side, looking for some free internet access, and found it fast; he brought up Google and inquired the RFID tag the coin was broadcasting. It came up unregistered, and the closest ten results to the arfid number were all different owners -- only then did Horatio decide it was clean enough.

"That'll do?" barked Jack, breaking the silence and forcing Horatio to open his eyes and refocus on the Real World. He minimized Google.

"Yes. Fill it up then bring it back to me. And I need not remind you, but if you so much as upload one extra bit, you will receive nothing." Horatio tried scowling, and thought he pulled off a passable job.

"It wouldn't do either of us any good 'Ratio. Dont' worry," Jack said, semi-concilliatory.

"Something I'm required to do, friend." Horatio crouched, then finally sat on the curb. He handed the coin back to Jack, who handed it to a street urchin in her early teens. She ran up the alley a few buildings then darted in somewhere to the left.

"You know how little I like being out in public," said Jack conversationally, "This won't take but a few moments." He tugged on his too-big blazer, looking to make sure it came down below his knees.

Horatio, in return, stretched backwards to make sure his own pistol poked him in the vertebrae. Both men shook out their hands at their sides, and tried vainly to look like a part of the alley.

The urchin reappeared from the shadows of brik-a-brack, running directly for Jack. She stopped just long enough to shove something in his hand, then sprinted toward street-side.

Jack and Horatio met eyes for the dozenth time that night, locked for at least a few seconds before Horatio held an upturned right hand. Jack dropped his gaze to the hand for another full moment, and gave 'Ratio his coin.

Horatio closed his hand around the coin and brought back Google. It was the same ID, that was positive. Horatio concentrated a little longer and found the secondary ID. It matched too. Then he sent a request to scan and verify the hash key. The final match made, and his paranoia satisfied, he queried the coin's worth. The results were emblazoned on his retinas.

He shut the 'can, and opened his eyes, smiling. "Here's the address." He pulled a business card out of his shirt pocket and gave it to Jack, who had no shunt, no dermal contacts embedded in his fingertips, no wireless belt pack, and in fact no upgrades whatsoever.

Jack did have a pad, however, and pulled it from an inside pocket to tap out the address. It verified itself as a temporary internet address with a three-hour timeclock, starting the moment the webpage was accessed. "Very well, 'Ratio," Jack nodded, "Always a pleasure."

"Likewise."

They shook hands a final time and left in opposite directions.

This work by Michael W. Hyde is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Flash (Subconscious is Bulls**t)

Fluid extravagance flows freely
from my bluish veins it's a

mad hatter experience;

maudlin comes later and it

calms me cannot express myself
enough to you cannot express
myself enough cannot
cannot cannot
explain the
rivalry in my head
going on it's red versus blue

it's me versus you.

Jeffrey McDaniel competes
with dead superheroes
and Wonder Woman
referees in her invisible
jet and
it's all just
craptastically
celebrity death/matching
socks always manage to lose the
better half
it's always the better half
and you can't hurt me you
can't hurt
me you can't touch me there
don't touch me there

ooh, wait.

yeah.

touch me
there is a place I like to go
when I'm drunk
or otherwise left to my
other senses
besides my mind is a terribly wasted society and the
Roman empire has fallen
the Roman empire has fallen
it's sickly and striated flesh
has fallen like a well-cooked
rack of baby back ribs and I'm
sorry to say I'm sorry
to say I'm sorry to
say that

I'm sorry.



I'm sorry.




And it's gone.

Flash by Michael W. Hyde is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

On Gratification

Consumerism sucks,
that short and
simple enough for you,
America?

Instant gratification
with instant coffee
instant oatmeal
instant bedhead
hairstyle instant
I-took-my-pill-four-hours-ago
sex instant
horsepower when you
need it thanks to the engine
of the all new
QXJR48ZS214PI Quad turbo
instant I’m
going to order at the drive-thru
and then honk at everyone
in front of me fast food
instant love at first fuck
but by day three
ready to move ahead
with instant knowledge
pouring through digital fiber link
broaden banded
high uber speed internet
with hyper threading technology
and kibbitz.

I always liked the word kibbitz.

And wouldn’t it be nice
if I could have
the world in a clamshell
or better yet one of those
little snow globes so I could shake
the fuck out of you people
when you piss me off,
then watch the pretty
reflections and
god
or gods
or gods and goddesses
would hand down instant
karma and hand me the
instant electroshock
to my chest.

On Gratification by Michael W. Hyde is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

AirMail Sleeve For MBA

manilamac.com

As much as I hate consumerism in general, I have to admit that this is Ingenious Marketing, capitalized (and pun intended). I believe most intarweb denizens saw people falling over themselves to make this envelope a reality. Congratulations goes out to ManilaMac for being the first (or at least one of the first) out of the gate with this product.

Solid Gold

All I want is a solid gold pearl handled laser sighted antistatic gas vented goosedown silenced .38 semiautomatic pistol, with a leather wrapped trigger by Gucci.

Like the one I saw behind the Donna Karen window. Shone by a single flood on its mealy metal glisten form.

They better have layaway because it's on sale this week and I think a second mortgage is all it'll take to make a downpayment on it.

Behind the ultra-light golden death machine they showed looping commercials of scantily-clad Hollywood actors and actresses playing Vanna in their hands.

(David Duchovny and Demi Moore have especially elegant fingers.)

As they fired magazines of Nike labeled shells into a two-day fresh cadaver, never missing more than a few inches off center mass.

It's Hollywood, man, you'd think with all their magic you'd see a couple of headshots. They obviously spared no expense – even the body wore up-to-the-second fashionable jeans and a sly-comment tshirt.

The advertising jingle floated down to the sidewalk from the awning and imbibed me, drank me full of wanton neglect for the outside world, talking about “The Bling That Matches Everything.”

For the moment it was just me and Belinda – every gun is supposed to have a name, right. Belinda smiled at me from her trigger while Drew Barrymore went POW after Earth-shattering POW in the nude. At least, I think she was naked, man, I don't even know because all I could see was this litle huddled package screaming BUY ME! BUY ME!

What you say? The trigger guard doubles as an earring post? Now I gots to get me one of these.

I'm already scheming, I mean, I already called my banker about that mortgage and I think there was a call on the internet just the other day for some child labor camp. Said they were paying good American greenbacks if you could get them to this barge over in Portsmouth by twelve o'clock tonight. I think I'll send them all but my favorite son; that oughtta at least get me through the first couple of payments.

Holy shit, not they have a monkey on TV shooting up the corpse with panache. Now I gotta get me one of these solid gold pearl handled laser sighted antistatic gas vented goosedown silenced .38 semiautomatic pistol with a leather wrapped trigger by Gucci.

I just hope they'll accept barter for those bullets with the swooshes on them.

Solid Gold by Michael W. Hyde is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Flag

It's the origin of our independent sin,
draped in patriotism of the blood
red he's dead and we're ahead now
head of state proclaiming the fate of our
peers with the fear of democracy; icy
white of our might as missle streaks into
starless night and soundless nightengales muted
chirps hale the steadfast tenacity of our tenitis;
less the ibis of id and ignoring the ego
of our placebo pleasure pill of freedom ...

Dark muddy hues of ocean blue scramble to gain
a foothold in places less visited by our Corporate God
churches search through dirt and lurch to attention
among the heart of industrial colonialism.

Fifty stars for fifty states of passion; cash in fifty late great
emperors, kings, god-heads; nifty ways to drain the last
drop of bloodmoney from well-oiled turnips and turn third
worlds to also-rans in the blink of a sniper's bullet.

Thirteen bars in suicide cars lift the par a little
higher. Maybe Cobain wasn't too insane when he put
pounds to pressure on the vertical smile of a trigger. Lean
too far to catch mean old czars and leave our bellys
bared but too lazy to care until another man with
a plan runs sidelong into a band of bankers on
Wall Street.

Then it's all about Operation Fuck
That Guy where the wise and gray entrench
themselves in mile deep bunkers and mull the ways
to force insurgents from caves at the low low cost
of a few thousand twentysomethings that should someday
instead turn wise and gray themselves and talk about
fixing Social Security.

That's thirteen stripes culling worldwide heights
climbing a hilltop of baby wipes – take
one per hand to cleanse besmirched land while the
band of hopefulls know it's a mound of tripe but
can't gripe about it either for fear of The Man
holding an infinite handfull of poison candy canes and
transvestational lipstick poised for the kiss to end
all negotiation.

There was a time when patriotism ran long in the tooth
but short in the gullet until the sand ground down
our canines to single-celled organisms with invasion on
the brain(less) function. Our aomeba dictator yelling
“Step off my Kool-Aid, bitch!” throwing the Reece's Pieces
trail and we're phoning home, baby, we're all-in on a two seven
offsuit while the OBL original badass holds pocket
aces and a hundred pounds of well-placed dynamite.

We used to believe.

We used to conceive greater dreams.

We used to not need the constant espousal of our better-than-thouness.

We used to believe. In us.

Flag by Michael W. Hyde is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

crescendo.

where is that thing you see, because it's not there, and i'm
trying really hard to search for it, and nothing's there. i've
looked high and low, close and far, far and wide and i
don't see it, there's nothing there. what is it that you see, again?
will you describe it for me?
is it some ephemeral bond that you can sense, is it
some bidirectional network connecting us in a series of tubes?
is it some clandestine right that you get and i don't because i
really don't catch any of this, it's going right over my head, but
i'm being a persistent prick for bugging you, and i'm going
to continue until you break some light on this subject, because i really
don't have a clue what you're seeing, there's nothing there, and i wish you
would describe it for me so i know what to look for, because right
now i don't see anything, there's nothing there. is it that
since we touched each other there's a
chaos string attaching us
at the fingertips?
or some form of spirit animal that just
so happens to be compatible with
my spirit animal
and so look great stacked on top of each other on a totem?
it must be something i can only sense and not see,
since you're so blatantly disregarding everything i say,
because i tell you friend, there's nothing there. yes, it
must be a sense ability in the sixth power, sensible enough
for a simpleton like me to understand, but i still can't see it, i only see
in colors, not usually images, and i can't see anything,
there's nothing there.
no color but the color of void, the color of null, and i can't
tell much more than that through the murk beyond my own bedroom window.
is that a telling sign? it must be. because i can't look
outside in, that must be it, because i tell you stranger, the way
i see it, there's nothing there. from inside the turtle shell it's only
bones and darkness and silence, wearing natural earmuffs and
screaming into a vacuum. there must be some greener
pasture with a webcam peering into my little apartment
with laser-guided precision and wifi --
can i get an ip address or something,
visit a webcast, download a torrent -- anything?
or is it pay to play? do you want me to subscribe to your
channel? is that the only way for me to see what you're seeing?
because i'll tell you something, from my viewpoint, there's nothing
there.
and i've been all over my room,
all over my car, all over google, all through my murse,
looked in my computer, in every disk i've collected,
every scrap of napkin, every
matchbook, every hokie birthday card from
relatives, every book since the eleventh grade, every
morsel of clothing, every lego in my
toolbox, all through the skeletons in my closet, into my hopes and dreams,
my nightmares and fears, my sobs of joy and cries
of ecstasy and shrieks of pain, and even the mumbling of mundanosity.

i tell you: whatever it is you have convinced
yourself to believe, however you tricked your eyes into seeing
something i don't, thinking something i cannot,
dreaming of whatever it is you obviously must be dreaming, because this
is not reality; this is quite a stunning fantasy, this thing
for which you have no description, no location, and no
clues whatsoever. the illusion is faltering, and you can't
keep it up for much longer, i will get it
out of you what you see.

because the way i see it, brother.
hm.
i tell you.

crescendo. by Michael W. Hyde is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

While You Were Out

While You Were Out by Michael W. Hyde is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Shuteye

This all started when I noticed she wouldn't open her eyes.

I thought it was innocuous at first, figured she had a
big imagination. Maybe she envisioned a hot-air balloon ride
with a twist; maybe a dingy pool hall with a pristine
King-size in a secluded back-room.

I told myself that she was afraid to look, like I
would disappear if she opened up. Poof, vanished, Houdini'd
away with Hot Pants.

Then I thought it must be the pleasure.
maybe she felt so good that if she opened her eyes she'd
burst with starshine and moondust.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm the one with problems. Got plenty
of 'em to go around. Maybe I should shut my eyes and not watch the
fold/unfold of skin. maybe if I squint hard enough, the little
boy will keep from escaping.

Maybe that's it.

Maybe there's a little girl trapped between eyelids;
and she wants out. Maybe she couldn't see anything
when the girl wasn't in the way. Maybe the
light only refracted when her eyes are closed and her
prisoner's pounding at her corneas to escape.

Maybe I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. It's true
I rarely do; especially when it's just the
pen and me talking. Maybe all of this is a farce.
Maybe I'm fucked in the head. not like it hasn't happened before.
I'm a little lost now, explaining myself.

Maybe it's a quarantine. Maybe her eyes stood as the only organ
able to cleanse everything she processed before moving on to the brain.
Maybe by shutting up tight she purified the pictures she just
captured before committing them to memory.

Maybe she needed me. It's a hard feeling to assign. It's one
thing to claim responsibility, but another to give it away without
asking. Maybe I wasn't ready to prop her up.

Everyone does silly things for people important to them. I once
gave up cigarettes for a girl. And once I kept my hair at a ridiculous length
on the off-chance I'd be with this other girl again. Once I bleached
a shock of hair in the front; when I pulled it back into a
ponytail it looked like a skunk stripe. Once I got a tatoo of
a cartoon man holding a thumbs-up; it looked more like a chicken
when it was finished. Once I started smoking because all the other
kids were doing it. Once I began writing poetry.

Once this girl kept her eyes shut because she was afraid of the moment escaping.
To look at the veins and wrinkles of skin and little
curly hairs instead of her eyeballs
was just a little disconcerting.

I mean, what's she got in there that's not out here?

Shuteye by Michael W. Hyde is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

RE: 99.9% Uptime

I seem to recall a recent Slashdot article asking why less than 99.9% uptime is no longer unacceptable, and I think I have finally formulated a response in easy-to-chew form: because the digital age is full of acceptable errors.

To put it more colloquially, the Analog Age was full of engineers while the Digital Age is full of programmers.

I don't mean there are necessarily fewer engineers; I'm sure that's quite the contrary. I only mean that they have been thrust to the back of the crowd behind the programmers in all the company photos.

Imagine if you will, fifty or so years ago, when electrical engineering was at its peak, and computers were warehouses, not set-top boxes. They had these lovely vacuum tubes instead of transistors, and were constantly blowing out. Tolerances were so tight because you only had a few hundred thousand tubes (if you were lucky) of computing power. Ahh, the good 'ole days.

Fast-forward ten years, when transistors really started taking off. Now you could get a few hundred thousand instructions per second (same joke applies) on a silicon wafer instead of a room full of tubes! Who cared if they weren't as reliable as vacuum tubes - since they saved about 10,000% of the space, electricity and manpower to run, it was a fair trade-off. Behold, the beginning of the end of Analog-scale uptime.

Stay with me here. Every computer in this day and age processes a gazillion errors per day, but we never see them. They come in the form of missing memory addresses, instruction collisions, bottlenecking, etcetera. They have been ingrained upon our very souls that these things are unavoidable; chalk them up to chaos theory. The irony of all this is - at least to me - the smaller our processors become, the more unstable they theoretically become. It's my understanding that each new iteration of smaller silicon lithography is exponentially more difficult than the last, which does nothing to bolster my confidence in a next-generation product. I'm serious: who cares that Silverthorne nee Atom is brutally fast when it produces more errors than the last piece of droolworthy hardware? (I'm speaking out of deductive logic here. I'm assuming that the more and smaller transistors there are, and assuming the rate of error return is the same [~0.00001%], the more errors will occur naturally.)

Programmers must account for these errors. The lower-level the language, the harder it becomes to program, the greater amount of detail is required, and the margin for error decreases at an inverse proportion. So while you're posting on the virtues of Ruby or Drupels, there are at least an equal number of souls sweating over thirty thousand lines of Assembler, wondering aloud where the bits go. Hell, they damn near have to bitchslap a computer to get anything accomplished at the machine level.

Analog networks don't have these problems. They're either on or they're off. Even when computer-controlled, at the end of the day it's just a circuit.

And so the very issue of uptime was introduced with the inception of the digital computer. The digital equivalents of analog networks are laughable in terms of uptime. I wonder what a chart would look like showing AT&Ts landline uptime versus its wireless service, month over month. I have a feeling it would be disgustingly lopsided in favor of the wired service. (And would only depress me further since I am an AT&T customer.)

So there you have it. Now that I've blogged myself into a ball of plasma, I'm going to go hide in the corner until the gestapo arrive.

viagra

Take your viagra scented emails,
all your sexually explicit
tastes, the vision of all
those sums of money from all
Those nigerian bankers, they call out
at once,
a cantankerous wail
that sends me over the
edge of the firewall and ... I get stuck in a tube sometimes.

Because it's not a truck.

Because five hundred
miles of submarine cable is equal to a puddle
of spit when it's severed. Much less
five of em.

Because spying on email is much
more satisfying than voice.
Because apparently voice rec
isn't any better
than ten years ago, whereas
email
is just
text.
(And comparitively only barely encrypted.)

Did you know sha-1
was cracked in the 90s?
Would you care if you
knew what sha-1 was? Would you
mind being any less of a tool? And
stop chewing your cud at the
screen. It's in poor taste. Just sip
your coffee
like the rest of us trolling etsy. And while you
craigslist your new fling
of the week, i'll be stuffing my brain
full of fcc filings and try to
get us out of existence by being paradoxic.

(worked for adams. He's with the dolphins now, somewhere, somewhen, somehow.)

I'm looking for a little collective consciousness so
i can get the same idea
and just torrent the blueprints.

Wouldn't that be easier than
building a new porn policy? Or stripping the latest
drm off blue colored media?

Or wait. What if this
entire charade was rated m for mature ... Would it
be taken any less seriously? I mean, grand theft
auto is rated M, and as we all know, if you
play that game you must be a crack-addled
terrorist with nothing better to do in
your spare time than to play a degenerate computer
simulation of killing hookers and stealing cars.

(Now that i think of it, doesn't sound like a bad LARP if you could just get the dice rolls to stick to the whore's ass.)

And what if i told you that this entire facade we called the internet is
nothing more than a program
run by IBM, who
wants nothing more
than to steal every published idea and filter it
down the pipe to its
lowest common
denominator
;
and then commoditize
it ...

(get your very own ibm brainstorming book
from amazon, only 29.95
plus shipping
and handling. You too can purchase other
people's ideas for fun and
profit. Now go forth
and be civilzed. that's on page 246.)

viagra by Michael W. Hyde is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Who-Filled Fun For Everyone Except This Table.

What better way to eat pancakes and a sucker simultaneously than to drizzle them in fruit-flavored icing and flip poor Dr. Suess' in his very grave by associating them with his good name.

The rhyming couplet on the menu is what really got me. In my haste to grab the photo above, I disregarded the description until just now, writing this post. But I'll get it. Oh yes. I will.

Vintage-Boxed Games

I saw these chilling at Target and thought they were very cute. Quite a theme they have going; it made me think of the Steampunk movement that's evermore popular. I applaud the marketers for this one: if I didn't already own copies of most of these games, I would have taken one or two home on the spot.