Reffing a Movie

Posted on 26 February 2022 by Larry Russwurm

A tall man in a suit was trying to get into a the movie theatre ahead of me. He had a coupon and was insisting it had no expiry date on it. Nevertheless, the ticket counter staff wouldn’t accept it. After two minutes of debating he finally gave up and said, “I’m a professional referee. I know what’s fair. Fine I’ll pay. But this won’t be the last of it.”

I hoped this was the last of it for me and paid next in line.

I got some food then went into my showing. Yes the referee was in the same showing. I just didn’t think much of it.

The theatre darkened and we were into the previews. The whole room tried to watch with an open mind. After a few of these began the movie proper.

The main character had a goal that developed near the start. Of course she went straight forward towards the goal. Of course if she got her wish right away there would be no more movie. But there were setbacks.

The first one revealed itself to the audience when suddenly there was a whistle sound. “2 minutes for interference of the main character!” yelled the ref from the back of the darkened room. A few people chuckled. No one was quite sure what to do so nothing was done about the ref.

After a couple more setbacks, the main character started to push harder and harder at the people in her way. The ref had had enough. “TWEET! Two minutes to the main character for elbowing her way through the setbacks!”

More people chuckled this time. A few had looked back and eyed the ref. But he looked to be bigger and more muscular than anyone in the darkened theatre.

Then a fight erupted between the main character and her enemy. The main character barely won because her enemy fought dirty. “TWEET! TWEET! Two minutes to the main character for roughing! 5 minutes to her enemy for fighting!

A man became an ally for the main character after that. In fact the main character and him began to plan things out better so the goal didn’t seem as far away as it had before.

There was a confusing action scene that held the theatre patrons to their seats. Much happened in those few minutes including the main character striving mightily against her cheating enemy. With some of the advice of the ally the main character barely prevails. In the lull came, “TWEET! Too many actors in a scene. We’ll never catch all of that without buying and pausing the film!” There was some chuckling but one loud “Shhhh!”

The ally was finally making his move on the main character. It was an awkward move so the main character almost bailed. Then she was reminded of his value and came right into his personal space and kissed him. “TWEET! Two minutes for holding!” That two minutes the audience watched as other parts were brought to a conclusion

Eventually everyone shuffled out of the theatre. Still no one complained so the referee still hadn’t got his revenge. He looked dejected.

One of the last patrons who was leaving, stuck two fingers in his mouth to whistle. “TWEEEEEE! Too appropriate to get you kicked out!”

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I Got Up Early and All You Give Me Is Worms?

Posted on 19 February 2022 by Larry Russwurm

The problem with the saying “the early bird gets the worm” is that it makes you think that the reward for getting up early is a worm. This is not the type of incentive I need.

I even think of chomping down on a dew worm, and to be quite honest this disincentivizes me more than anything.

And to be quite honest, imagining a dew worm is one of the better things that I can do. The other worms just put me off even more. Meal worms remind me of eating so doubly it grosses me out imagining eating these.

Then there are tomato worms which make my skin crawl even thinking of them. Ring worms and tapeworms are gross parasites. That in fact is my last mention of real worms because I am getting grossed out just typing this.

Granted they came up with gummy worms whom I can imagine without throwing up. But still, I’m not a huge fan of these sugar loaded snacks. It might tempt others to get up early but not me.

Then there are the sugar snacks that remind one of worms. Like shoestring licorice or twizzlers. But what happened to the tastes of everyone? The red twizzlers and shoestring licorice became more popular than black or licorice flavours. I never liked the red. And now the black is harder to find than ever.

So I am still disincentivized to be the early bird. Perhaps some of you can get on board with these worm substitutes.

The thing about worms is they come out at night. So either you can be the early bird or you can be the night owl if you really want these. I believe the night owls get more worms than the early bird. So even if the worm you’re searching for is the hard to find black licorice ones, the night owl has the best chance of getting these. Hurrah for the night owl.

It’s about time that someone celebrated the night owl over the early bird, isn’t it?

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The Long Game

Posted on 12 February 2022 by Larry Russwurm

Canada’s rise in the soccer world, first the gold medal winning women at the Tokyo Olympics and now the men’s team looking like it might qualify for the 2022 world cup of soccer – so far undefeated in the qualifiers, show Canada as a possible soccer hot spot. How exactly have we gotten this far?

North America has long been a soccer wasteland. Which isn’t that surprising when you realize that North America is a hotbed for sports such as basketball, hockey, football and baseball. It’s exhausting being the best in the world in so many sports. Soccer just fell by the wayside.

But why is Canada improving at soccer and America more or less staying the same? And is it here to stay or is soccer just the sport of the moment?

Canada is playing the long game. We have large immigration numbers from the soccer hotbeds. But we’ve had this for years. Why is it only happening now that men’s soccer is getting good? Well right now it is the players. Formerly, good players that immigrated to Canada would have dual citizenship and would play for the better soccer country. Canada overwhelmingly lost these players, event after event. So for the men, we haven’t qualified for the world cup of soccer since 1986.

Now, many of those players have decided to play for Canada, especially since the world cup of soccer 2026 is coming up and Canada has a guaranteed berth as a co host of such an event. For 2022’s world cup of soccer, I think some players just wanted to stake their claim early for 2026. So we have a really good men’s team that might make it onto the world stage.

But won’t Canada just lose these dual citizens after 2026? If we do it would likely be only if team Canada does poorly. Which is still possible.

However with our immigration strategy being what it is, we are also giving homes to trainers and coaches and other people crucial to developing good soccer programs. I think they would like to carry on in their winning ways here in Canada.

So our native players will get better, too, with all the good coaching and training all around them. And with good players resulting in more good players we should have good soccer for quite awhile.

It’s too early to say for sure but Canada may become the top place for soccer in North America in the coming years.

For years we’ve had the avid fandom of all those immigrants. Living in multicultural Toronto for many years, it didn’t matter how obscure the country that won in the world cup of soccer was, they would have supporters driving around honking their horns and waving their flags. The fandom was there and will be there for a long time. To do well at any sport, you need fans. And there are many fans all across the country that would support any Canadian drive to the world cup of soccer.

Immigration can also be used to increase other traits in the world that we might admire but do not have. For instance, I believe Canada is eating less meat per capita because that is a trait of the rest of the world. Just don’t tell the meat council of this. Or else they’ll force all immigrants to be Texans. And we cannot handle all the bullets flying around that Texans may bring.

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The Vilest Thing You Can Say On American Television

Posted on 5 February 2022 by Larry Russwurm

Last week, Jamie Dornan was on the Ellen show. They showed pictures of him, maybe at home in Ireland? He was in shorts and went into the water of the ocean. They said this was around Christmas. So presumably the water was very cold. But they didn’t say how cold. In fact they danced around saying precisely how cold the water was. I thought that was odd.

Then yesterday, Halle Berry was on the Ellen show. She was talking about her kid and how they had just discovered the F word (at least I believe it was the F word – it got bleeped). She had been advised not to punish her child as that would make the child resentful and make them want to say the F word even more. So now her kid says the F word all the time. They try not to react so that the kid will soon stop saying it because of a lack of reaction.

Ellen, ever the comedian, started saying the F word every other word, trying for a reaction. Halle Berry joined in and the reactions of the person putting in the bleeps was tested. Fortunately for the Ellen show, it is not a live show. Every F word got bleeped and they were not fined by the FCC. Obviously Ellen wants to go out classy in her last season.

Before these two appearances, I thought the vilest thing you could say on American television was the F word. And close behind that would be all the other swear words that the FCC objects to, too. But now I’m not so sure because of the earlier Jamie Dornan interview. I think there is a whole new category of words that the American public thinks is worse than the swear words, so much so that they are never said.

I believe Jamie Dornan wanted to say that the ocean temperature was near zero degrees Celsius. But he was in America, one of the last bastions of the Imperial system of measurements. So he was afraid to use metric units at all and in fact never actually said how cold the water was.

Ellen, knowing how badly metric would go down with the American public, abetted Jamie Dornan in his reserve. Truly, the vilest thing you can say on American television is metric units. Your degrees Celsius, meters, kilometers per hour, liters, Pascals etc. A big thank you to the Ellen show for making this abundantly clear.

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The Human Town

Posted on 29 January 2022 by Larry Russwurm

Look at this town built in the mountains of Sicily. Yes it looks suspiciously like a very large human. The odds of this, I imagine are pretty low. Sicily is an island in the Mediterranean just off the coast of Italy. You know, the peninsula that looks strikingly like a boot.

What are the odds that these two geographical anomalies would be so close together? I would say the odds are very low, so much so that my mind has crunched on the problem so hard that I think I have a valid theory for their proximity to each other.

Let’s say some early Italian peoples were more advanced than the others. The Etruscans come to mind. In fact maybe they were more advanced in ways than the rest of antiquity. Perhaps some inventive person developed a shrink/grow ray gun.

But something went wrong in the testing phase.

S/he was enamoured with stories of seven league boots and the fact you could travel seven leagues with a single pace. With such size, you could travel to all corners of the Mediterranean in minutes. So in boots that weren’t initially seven leagues, s/he aimed the grow ray at themselves. S/he grew so tall that they were soon gasping for air in the higher atmosphere.

Realizing their mistake, s/he changed the grow ray to a shrink ray and in their panic to do so, kicked off one of their boots. This of course led to flailing and accidentally crashing into what would become Centuripe and the end of the inventor S/he.

But the shrink/grow ray gun hadn’t broken yet and accidentally focused on the one boot across the Strait of Messina. It grew and grew until the peninsula of Italy was formed. Then it’s power either ran out or the ray gun was overheated and disintegrated.

And that my friends is the origin story of Centuripe and Italy.

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A Good Judge of Horseflesh

Posted on 22 January 2022 by Larry Russwurm

Before you tell some woman that you love them, be very careful. Mostly, you have to worry about an “I love you!” return. If you don’t get this return, the following may happen to you.

After saying the “I love you!”, what if she doesn’t respond in kind and instead beams at you and says, “Thank you!”? Then she keeps beaming at you.

You’re probably thinking that this is the best possible outcome considering there was no “I love you!” return. But it could also be something else.

Then the magical time comes when she gets you to hold her keys. That’s a sign, you say to yourself, of her trusting you. She might not trust you so much if you hadn’t said “I love you!” The relationship is now in a new stage.

Then the magical time comes when she gets you to hold her purse. Why that’s just further evidence that she really does trust you. Sure it’s a bit embarrassing, standing there and holding her purse but it is also great when you think of how much she trusts you. You also further that trust by not opening any of the compartments and seeing what is inside. Now she will have proof of your love.

Then the magical time comes when she gets you to hold her high heels. This is even more evidence that she trusts you completely. She might be testing your love but that is okay. How she ever managed to walk and stand in these things before you said “I love you!”, you’ll never know. But now she has you and things are different. Now you know why she beamed when you told her you loved her. It’s because she was an excellent judge of horseflesh.

Or at least an excellent judge of things related to horseflesh. Then, you finally get it. She was beaming because at last she had her pack mule she had longed for all her life. What a couple you make. Woman and pack mule.

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Blanket Statements

Posted on 15 January 2022 by Larry Russwurm

Blankets help me sleep. I bet they help the vast majority of us with sleep. I can especially tell in the summer, when my bedroom is too warm to wear a blanket during attempted sleep. I have a much harder time sleeping without a blanket and in the heat.

An electric blanket heats up evenly to help you sleep in the cooler months. This helps people with their sleep, especially if they are sick.

But I’m sick of living with the tyranny of the electric blanket. Electric shouldn’t always mean heat. I suspect some smart cookie is going to figure a way for an electric blanket to cool you as you sleep. This would be a great invention for the summer months. I wouldn’t mind cooling under a blanket in the summer months. I bet my sleep would improve.

The other thing that makes a blanket good for your sleep is the weight of it on your body. Even the slight weight of a thin bed sheet in the right time of year, aids in helping me sleep. Of course, on winter’s coldest night, two comforters on top of each other help me sleep even more. The added weight could easily be responsible.

So they sell weighted blankets to help with sleep. They actually are supposed to help with stress and anxiety, but that helps sleep, too. I was interested in seeing that they weigh between 5 and 30 pounds. Or basically from the weight of a small cat to the weight of a mid size dog. I was actually surprised to see them be as much as 30 pounds, but if it works, I will allow it.

One problem with the weighted blanket is that they are hot to lie under. Again, smart cookie, make a cooling blanket and this all can be alleviated.

Anyhow too much weight is bad for sleeping. Imagine if you had a 200 pound blanket on top of you. You would have to lie on your side, I imagine, so you could breathe easier. Then again you can have so much weight (many tons) that you can sleep very quickly and deeply and for untold eons or until they finally bury you.

Some weeks ago I saw an article in my newsfeed that the trust in media is at an all time low. I simply don’t buy it.

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The 100 Mile High Club

Posted on 8 January 2022 by Larry Russwurm

We’ve all heard about the mile high club. That’s the club where a randy couple have sex on a plane that is flying. Usually the plane is flying that high. So you can guess what I mean by a 100 mile high club. This is sex in space. In particular zero gravity sex.

Now zero gravity sex could have been attempted on the vomit comet. That’s the plane that does parabolas so the flyers experience zero gravity for about 25seconds at a time. But this is hardly enough time for even the fastest quick draw to have sex with a partner. So I don’t think zero gravity sex has been done in a plane.

Zero gravity sex may have even been attempted on the international space station. I’m not sure if there is much or even any privacy to be had on this space station. But some couples would thrive on a lack of privacy. No, where they’re being stopped is the unfortunate point that sex liquids might fly anywhere in the space station after being released. All the other astronauts are likely to inhale these liquids.

No I don’t think zero gravity sex has happened yet in space. But that’s why there are three private consortiums working on making space hotels.

What would be the cost? Well if Bezos charges $28 million to go up 60 miles, getting to orbit is likely to cost $100 million. So for a couple, it would be $200 million.

I’d also expect that the couple would go up for two weeks. One week to practice and get accustomed to the space hotel and zero gravity, and another week to have the best sex of their lives. But not so long that they’d have to do targeted exercise 4 hours a day, like long term astronauts in zero gravity do. Just so those same astronauts can still walk when they get back to earth.

But would the few couples able to afford such a trip, actually go? If you’re a billionaire and bored of everything – sure. It’s a new experience. If you’re engaged to a billionaire you might demand zero gravity sex for your honeymoon. After all it is a couples activity to consummate your love. If you are a billionaire and really, really want someone, offer them a trip with you to a space hotel. What an innocent sounding way to say I’d pay $100 million dollars to have sex with you for two weeks.

It’s only a matter of time before the first zero gravity porno movie is made. The billion dollar porno movie, that is, because it would have five couples who must all be trained to help shoot the movies as well. How could it possibly make back its money? Using all possible sex combinations amongst the ten, they would actually shoot 10 pornos over their two weeks. They could then sell each to a million people for $100 a piece. It won’t be a big moneymaker. But I’d expect it to break even.

There would then be a race to conceive the first baby in space. Expect names like Starchild, Stella, Orbitzo, and Luna etc. to be in vogue for awhile. Most will probably only be $200 million dollar babies. But expect the press to call them billion dollar babies. Those of us old enough to remember Alice Cooper will laugh. Because of these hopeful conceptions, expect the rocket schedules to have to synch with the woman’s maximum fertility.

So you might hear about space hotels and the wonderful experiments they are doing up there. And the beautiful views to be had. But the draw for most humans will be the zero gravity sex. The couples will perform their own experiments I expect.

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Best Posts of 2021

Posted on 1 January 2022 by Larry Russwurm

It’s that time of year where I pick my favourite posts of the the year and hence miss writing an original post for the week. Yes it is that time of year where I get a break from deadline stress. The very happiest time of year for me.

At the start of last year I liked the post Red, White and Chartreuse. It’s points are funny yet true. Who doesn’t like laughing at the truth?

Every time I think of farming tails by banging a gong in Meat for Vegetarians, I laugh. The only problem with this post is that I said that this should be good for all vegetarians. I should have said some vegetarians.

Practice Makes Perfect could be the prime directive in an alternate sports league. With this prime directive, instead of timing a 100 meter run, you could measure the distance of a 10 second run. Boom! More practice for the winner.

Premeditated Post asks if other crimes that are premeditated should have stiffer sentences. Like premeditated murder, I think they should.

Quota Time outlines three ways an Ontario cop might make their quota for the month.

Rainbow Adventure is exactly that and is wrapped up in only a page and a half.

I hope you enjoyed some of these posts and we hope to see you again for the rest of 2022.

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Method Writing

Posted on 25 December 2021 by Larry Russwurm

We’ve all heard of method acting where the actor tries to fully inhabit the space of their character. So this is less about acting and more about just doing what your character would do. Presumably this gives a more realistic portrayal.

Method writing would be more of a universe thing. The author would try to inhabit the universe or the milieu and basically try everything that is in their book. So how is method writing affected by all of the genres that it is in? Let’s have a look.

A romance method writer might have to have a lot of dalliances and affairs. Thus I don’t ever recommend marriage to method romance writers unless they’re honest and agree to an open marriage. It wouldn’t hurt to try to be up on STDs and proper protection.

Fantasy method writers, practically by definition, can’t really exist. The closest thing I can see is those who are lucid dreamers writing only about their dreams. Or drug users writing about their trips. Perhaps we’ll see more complete Xanadus. These method writers would be the most likely to be drug addicts.

Science fiction writers like to explore technological milieus we have never seen. These would be impossible to method write about. But, it’s just slightly possible that would-be method science fiction writers are trying to be abducted by aliens right now.

Method murder mystery writers would be of special interest to the cops. So expect these writers to not yell it from the rooftops what they are. Imagine getting proof of one of these scum having murdered someone. You could easily prove first degree murder simply by using one of their books as a guide. There would be little to no doubt.

The horror fiction of a method writer would be less about the supernatural and more about the grotesque. If I heard someone was a method horror writer, I would give them a wide, wide berth.

How about method literature writers? Those slice of life authors could be anyone. Precisely because they could be anyone, they are boring beyond belief. As are their books. Maybe their characters will impress you. But because it’s slice of life stuff, you’ve undoubtedly tripped over the characters before in other stories.

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