Today on "Japan's Got Talent"...

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the cutest damn thing ever painted onto acetate plastic: Ryo-Oh-Ki!

If you don't think that was cute on some level, you deserve to be strapped to a rocket and shot into the sun. Myah!

NASA: Now With 25% More Awesome!

In my last post, I chided the web team at NASA for being kind of lazy. Apparently, they have since read my blog, and after a period of self-flagellation and wearing of sackcloth, they have atoned and updated their "Missions" tab to eliminate the "See a Shuttle Launch" link. It's not all fixed, though, as following their "Full Launch Schedule" link will lead you to a page that still has references to Shuttle launches at the top. Oh well; baby steps, I suppose.

Anyway, there are more important things than that. Remember how I said that NASA was working on a new heavy lift vehicle? Well, apparently they are going to reveal the design concept this summer. I thought it would take a whole lot longer to finalize, but if this is true it will be a great thing for the American public to look forward to. Here's an article that discusses some of the details: http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n1103/31slsmpcv/.

Again, like the "fixing" of NASA's launch link page, it's not all good news. Due to congress' belt-tightening measures, NASA does not expect to be able to have the vehicle operational by the 2016 deadline. Big surprise there. Everybody in Washington talks about space being the future, somewhere we need to explore, but only a handful of those same politicians are willing to put their money where their mouth is and actually vote to fund NASA properly. But enough ranting about Washington. I said from the outset that I wouldn't drag politics into the fine emporium of knowledge, laughs, and fart jokes that is "How's Your Pangolin?". I'm much too classy for that. Heh heh, I said ass.

One thing to look forward to until NASA officially unveils the concept design for their heavy lift vehicle is the August 5 launch of Juno, a satellite that will orbit Jupiter's poles and give us redonkulous views of the biggest planet in our solar system. It's not exactly a small satellite, so the launch of the Atlas V rocket required to heave it out of Earth's orbit should be pretty cool. There are other cool things in the pipe as well, but I am mostly salivating at the thought of having a proper heavy lift vehicle for the first time in 40 years.

Sticks & Stones: Girls Bravo

   Welcome back readers, to the second helping of Sticks & Stones for your anime reviews. I've had some positive feedback from readers on my first post, so I'll continue to bombard this blog with more writings! How truly wonderful for you all. So with some further ado, let's go on to the series! (To assuage your burning eyeballs, I plan to make this post is a bit shorter than the previous one.)

Bikini clad anime characters? Yup, we're in a harem anime.

    This week I've perused the offerings of Girls Bravo. As you may surmise from the picture, this anime isn't what tasteful people would call a work of art. In fact, it may be the furthest thing from art that I've seen in years. But don't let that dissuade you from watching this show. What should dissuade you are the insipid characters, the middling & predictable plot and the enduring sense that you could be using your time better somewhere else. So what is this show about? Well, it's a harem anime where a boy finds a portal to a world of filled with women and brings back (accidently) a girl from that world, and slowly but surely he starts getting a menagerie of female characters around him. To the shows credit not every female falls for him. Which is surprising, but that still doesn't make this a good show. One thing of note is that unlike most harem anime I've seen, which have loads of fan service, this shows goes past that to show full on nudity. I think every episode (or nearly every) has some sort of nipple shot. Heck even the opening credits to the second half of the show has nudity. This is pretty rare in my experience when talking about mainstream harem anime. But...Maybe it isn't as mainstream as I would believe, but then again, it IS on Funimation. Once again, this isn't enough to really save this meandering waste of brain activity. On the positive side, because it takes such chances on not being to subtle on sexuality, the dirty jokes hit the best. I truly did laugh out loud at some situations I've never laughed at in an anime. When it goes raunchy, Girls Bravo is at its best. Otherwise, it's exactly like every episode of harem you have seen before, only done much much worse. I can't stress enough how incredibly uncreative this series is. So bereft of any new ideas that, It's almost a parody of itself.

   As an example, here's a summary of one episode that I saw. It was the date episode. Where to the main male & female character both go out. The first half of the episode was great, actually. I was laughing hard, and if you know my laugh you know that's not an understatement. This was caused by the raunchy turn the anime took. Good job show! Bravo, indeed! Then, of course, after driving through Hilarious Blvd., it decides to take a turn into Crap St. The second episode was filled with NO HUMOR and the typical plotline of someone getting there late...but instead, now they beat that horse twice by causing both of them get lost. What? Really? That's what they had to come up with? Are you kidding me? They were lost for most of the second half, with NO PURPOSE but looking forlorn. Talk about ruining the pacing of the show. NO, I'm wrong. Ruining would be not cutting the correct scene. Here they just wrote crap. They just had these two characters run around doing...nothing. It wasn't even emotionally moving. It was so frustrating, what happened to the great first half? It was literally, the best thing I saw the whole show...followed by the absolute worst.

   In the end, I cannot recommend this series. Pass. Pass. Pass. At best a D, it took some chances with the risqué aspects, but...to what end...well...none. Nothing truly came out of it. We just got a rehashed story. Even though the humor was quite good at times, to trudge through all that for just a bit of laughs? No. There are much better humor series out there. Much better everything out there. Don't watch unless you are some sort of hyper fan of Haremé (my name for Harem Anime). Instead go (re)watch Love Hina.

Picture courtesy of www.animehere.com

Well, Now It Must Be Said

NASA's web team is lazy. I had to say it. The last Space Shuttle mission has been launched and the one of  the world's most complex machines has safely landed at Kennedy Space Center. The program is over after 30 years. And yet whoever is in charge of NASA's webpage is asleep at the wheel because they still have a section under the "Missions" tab titled "See a Shuttle Launch." Come on guys! This is why so many people aren't taking you seriously. You can put men on the moon but can't manage your own website?

But all snark aside, I know many people there are probably reluctant to part with the memories of the awesomeness of the Space Shuttle, but it's time to let go. It was a great run while it lasted. Heck, we've been launching Shuttles longer than I've been alive. However, as the old saying goes, all good things must come to an end.

How about this, NASA: you take down that tab and replace it with something about your conceptual designs for the new heavy-lift vehicle you're supposed to be working on right now. People look at the place where the Space Shuttle program used to be and see a gaping void. NASA, now more than ever, has to fill that void with awesomesauce.

A lot of people just don't care as much about the space program anymore, which is sad, but is also a fact of life. To truly get people fired up, they need something tangible to latch onto. Sure, unmanned missions are great, but to tap into people's primal need to satisfy curiosity and explore their surroundings, manned missions are the only way to go. You guys can put up a whole section about what expectations the new lift vehicle should meet, and what it's purpose is. Get kids exited about it! They're the ones that will probably end up flying on the thing to Mars one day, after all.

I'll cut this short before it turns into a rabid, foamy-mouthed rant, but basically what I'm saying boils down to this: I love NASA to death, but they need to get serious as an agency about sending people past the places we've gone before. That can start by fondly remembering past glories, but acknowledging that they are just that - past - and moving forward into the future with just as much determination to create awesomeness as before.

And Now For Something Completely Different...

Ladies and Gentlemen: a man covered in bees. That is all.

Nintendo's Dreamcast Moment

By now, most people who follow video gaming news to some basic degree know that Nintendo is releasing a new console. It will be called the Wii U, and like its predecessor it will be a small, white box that Nintendo hopes will end up printing money. Also like the original Wii, there is a big focus on the system's controller, tentatively (and oh-so-originally) called the "New Controller". It resembles what can only be described as the bastard child of a traditional game controller and an iPad. I think it may end up being Nintendo's most important console ever. I don't make a statement like that very lightly. I never said it would be their best console, only that it will be the one that may very well define what path the company takes in the future.

It would be folly to make a statement like that without a little background, so here's some video gaming history for you. No falling asleep in the back of the classroom, you little miscreants! I've culled most of this info from Wikipedia, so don't accuse me of actually being knowledgeable about gaming history.

Where Wikipedia culled its gaming history info from.

Back in late 1999, Sega released the Dreamcast game system in North America. It was built because Sega's previous system, the Sega Saturn, was not doing so hot anymore in the States. Sony's original PlayStation system, launched around the same time as the Saturn, was beating the ever-loving shit out of it in sales, thanks to little games like Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid. Also, Nintendo had recently released the Nintendo 64, which basically sucked the remaining air out of the room in terms of console buzz. Remember this video?

NINTENDO SIXTY-FOOOOOOUUUUUURRRRRR!!!1!@1!!!

Yeah. This was the kind of buzz the Saturn had to compete with. Despite being launched around the same time as the Saturn, the PlayStation ended up grabbing most of the older gamers, and the younger ones soon fell in the thrall of Nintendo's black money machine (which sounds like a Japanese recording studio that produces gangsta rap albums). Something had to be done. Sega collaborated with Microsoft on the system's OS, built some hardware that was more advanced than anything else at the time, and built a modem into their game machine for the first time. They constructed a unique controller that could hold specially built memory card / mini-game machine extensions called VMUs, which would display info during a game being played on the Dreamcast, as well as allow for separate functionality in some games independent of the main console.

In late 1999, about a year after a fitful Japanese launch, the Dreamcast hit American shores. It was really popular, selling several hundred thousand units via pre-order alone. Many great games were eventually released for the system, including Sonic Adventure, the much-lauded Soul Calibur, Crazy Taxi, Space Channel 5, Dead or Alive 2, and a slew of others that went on to become classics. However, the "Party Like it's 1999" mentality didn't last too long. Sony had a nasty surprise up its sleeve.

This is one of the results I got doing a Google image search for "surprise."

Thanks, humanity! I'm going to bleach my eyeballs now.

In the year 2000, Sony unleashed the PlayStation 2 on the world. It hit Japan in March, and followed suit in North America in October. You know how in the previous generation there wasn't really any more room for Sega Saturn buzz? Soon there wouldn't be any more room for the Dreamcast, buzz or otherwise. The PlayStation 2 quickly muscled in on Sega's turf with games that used the new DVD format. This format would prove to be a boon to Sony not only in the game capacity department, but also because it allowed them to market the PS2 as a combination DVD player and game machine. Not everybody had DVD players, since the format had just launched a few years earlier, so this gave it a really big advantage in the marketing department. The Dreamcast couldn't play DVDs, because it used its own proprietary (and much smaller) storage format for games.

One of the smoking guns used in the infamous Dreamcast massacre.

The PS2 sounded the death knell for the Dreamcast in North America, which was arguably Sega's most important console market. The final nails in the coffin came in late 2000 when Nintendo announced the GameCube, and Microsoft announced the Xbox. The writing was on the wall: the Dreamcast was doomed. In January of 2001, Sega cancelled production of the Dreamcast in North America. While they would still be made in Japan until 2006, the loss of millions of potential American customers essentially relegated the Dreamcast to the dust bin of gaming history.

OK, you can all wake up now.

Why did I drag you through this lesson in gaming history? Because, as the old trope is so often repeated, history repeats itself. Look at the console market of today. There are 3 wildly successful consoles out there, but one (the Wii) doesn't have the luster it used to, so Nintendo is launching a new system (the Wii U) in mid-console cycle. The console will use a proprietary storage format and not play DVDs or Blu-ray movies. It has a controller that displays mini-games and can operate independently of the main console. Similarities to the Dreamcast abound.

It remains to be seen just how powerful this system will be. The original Wii was bashed for having hardware that was essentially like a slightly upgraded GameCube's. Unless the Wii U is substantially stronger than the Xbox360 and PS3 hardware-wise, it may fall into the same category. Also, the tricks that Nintendo used to gain so much buzz with the Wii will not work with the Wii U. Nintendo banked heavily on its motion controller, and it paid off big time. Nobody else had anything that could match it. That is, until Sony launched the Move and Microsoft launched the Kinect add-ons for their respective systems. Motion controls are now essentially old hat. They've been done before, and by everyone. Nintendo is now banking on another trick: a super-fancy touch-screen controller that essentially serves as a semi-parasitic mini-console, like the mutant Kuato from the movie Total Recall.

"Hello, my baby! Hello, my honey! Hello, my ragtime gal!"

To their credit, Nintendo says that this time they are more focused on 3rd-party games this time around, especially games that appeal to so-called "core gamers",  like Call of Duty, that have traditionally been stripped down to work on Nintendo's machines. Nintendo is also especially focused on developing a more user-friendly online experience; something more akin to the user account method of the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live, instead of the awkward friend-code system of the Wii. 

However, Nintendo's new trick might not be enough. They are at a major disadvantage. They have lost the element of surprise. Apple showed the world the potential of the touchscreen tablet. When they launched the iPad, they basically laid down ground rules for how such a machine should operate. With 2 iterations of the iPad under their belts, and more on the way soon, Nintendo will not have as much thunder when it unleashes its controller on the gaming public. Also, Nintendo's gaming network, whatever it is, will be playing catch-up with Microsoft and Sony, instead of leading the pack. The same can be said of 3rd-party games. When the next Call of Duty is released on the Wii U and looks as good as its competitors, instead of being wowed, some people will simply say, "took you long enough." Nintendo lives and dies by innovation, and it is walking a very thin line indeed with this console. We have yet to see its true potential, and selling the console short without concrete evidence would just be dumb. As stated earlier, Nintendo lives and dies by innovation, so undoubtedly they've got something crazy down the pipe that, like an Italian Plumber inexplicably doubling in size after eating a mushroom, may just surprise us all. Just because it isn't the iPad doesn't mean it can't be exciting. Knowing Nintendo, they will find some pretty cool ways to make use of the controller. Playing a game on 2 screens was a concept that proved to be a hit in the form of the Nintendo DS. This is the natural extension of that idea. The iPad, with a single screen, can't do stuff like that.

One sticking point for many people might be the new control scheme. The Wii U doesn't just re-use the Wii name, but also its control hardware. You will be able to use all your previous Wii controllers with the Wii U. Which is good! Buying new controllers sucks, especially now that they're so bloody expensive. However, until it is confirmed otherwise by Nintendo, the fancy new touchscreen controller will be a strictly single-player affair. One controller per console? Really? Not even the old NES had that kind of limitation on it. Hopefully it is just a temporary thing that can be solved by some clever game programming or a system firmware update, but the idea of a controller taking up so many system resources that only one of them can be used at a time is, frankly, bat-shit crazy. For a console that is supposed to unite casual and core gamers, a single-player system controller seems like a terrible first step. 

It doesn't help that the controller is basically an iPad with buttons and analog sticks. The result of having to put a proper screen into the controller is that the thing is fucking huge. It's positively elephantine, and may end up being the biggest dedicated 1st-party controller ever made. Yes, even bigger than the original Xbox controller, which was basically the size of a healthy newborn baby. I really can't think of another controller made by a game system maker that is or was that big. It may be a non-issue. Maybe it feels really good! Maybe you'll want to wake up every day and run your hands all over it first thing in the morning, which would be really creepy, but maybe it really works well!  Until more people get some literal hands-on time, the jury is still out. One thing I'm sure of: the new controller won't be cheap. There is basically no way it will be as cheap as current console controllers, which run around $50 bucks each. That pay wall won't deter the fanboys and early adopters, and if the "single controller per console" thing pans out it may be a sad moot point, but the bread and butter of console makers are middle-class folks who have at least a few friends, and want to play games with them. Making the controller too expensive may mean that these folks get left out in the cold. Not everything is bad about the new controller. It has a metric shit-ton of features, including a front-facing camera, tons of buttons, the aforementioned touch screen, a microphone, and a bunch of other bells and whistles. If Nintendo can keep the cost down, this controller that seems crazy might just be crazy enough to work.

The biggest elephant in the room is the emergence of app gaming. It will only get harder and harder for Nintendo (and Sony, and Microsoft) to convince people to plunk down 50-60 dollars on a game when thousands and thousands can be found in app stores for uber-cheap, many for free. Nintendo has been cagey on small, downloadable games so far. Sure, the Wii had WiiWare and the Virtual Console, but those were geared towards extremely small games that could fit on the Wii's limited internal memory. 

The Virtual Console was a bit of a disappointment for me personally, because when I bought the Wii, I was under the impression that at the very least I would be able to play most, if not all previous 1st-party Nintendo games. If I could download working ROMs illegally (and if anybody from Nintendo is reading this - I DON'T), then surely Nintendo with all its company resources could make them available to download. 

Didn't happen. I'm still waiting on motherfucking StarFox, Nintendo! It was one of your best games for the SNES! Oh sure, we got StarFox 64, but fuck that shit - I want the original, the classic. Despite the NES and SNES having at least 1,000 games between them, the Virtual Console, despite including old Sega Genesis, Sega Master System, Neo-Geo, and TurboGrafx games AS WELL AS Super Nintendo and NES games, still only has a few hundred games available to buy. There are so many games that I will never be able to give Nintendo my money for, even though they have all the capability in the world to release them. Sure, some games can't be released due to licensing issues, and others are just not popular. However, those are the minority. Still, the selection of games that have actually been released for the VC is all over the place, with several popular games with unambiguous licenses being released right alongside shit nobody knew about even back in the day. Why? Only Nintendo, the Great and Powerful, knows for sure. 

All that being said, I would be a biased dick if I didn't say I had hours and hours of fun with the games I could download. Many of the classics were there, such as Gradius III and all the Donkey Kong Country games from the SNES, as well as games with timeless appeal like Super Mario Bros from the NES. Just being able to play these games without blowing into a cartridge was a big deal for me. 

Nintendo is slowly starting to open up more to the idea of downloadable games with the 3DS's download store. It's a step in the right direction, and hopefully the Wii U will continue the trend. But as the old saying goes, actions speak louder than words. Nintendo needs to man the fuck up and smash the dam holding back the unstoppable deluge of its most precious possessions: games that tap into nostalgia. If Nintendo releases the majority of its back-catalog of games (which should now include GameCube games, since they max out at only 1.5 Gb or so, a relatively small download size, and anyway Wii U can't use the GC disks) they will be a force to be reckoned with. If they choose to hold back, it may end up going badly for them. One thing that still hasn't been confirmed is the size of the Wii U's storage for things like downloadable games. Early speculation for built-in storage was not promising, but maybe Nintendo will release some kind of external hard drive add on, like the Xbox360's, that will level the playing field. A modern console without any kind of hard drive capability is an anachronism, so I'm sure Nintendo will have something lined up. Again, I'll need more info to make a truly informed decision.

All this may be offset by the fact that Nintendo is launching the Wii U mid-console cycle. The Dreamcast had the misfortune to launch just a year or so before the PlayStation 2, but the Wii U will be launching in the clear in late 2011 or early 2012. Sony and Microsoft probably won't have their new consoles ready until at least 2014 (8 years or so after initial launch of the previous generation), so that leaves Nintendo with some breathing room to get prices down and fix any big issues. But they'd better make good use of their head start. Sony and Microsoft have deep pockets from being diverse corporations, and you'd better believe they will have cash to spare when it comes to marketing their new consoles.

So basically, the launch of the Wii U will be Nintendo's Dreamcast moment. Will Nintendo end up like Sega, cancelling the Wii U after 3 or 4 years and abandoning original hardware, becoming solely a software developer? It seemed an impossible fate for Sega at one time, but it did happen. Or will Nintendo's predictions come true, and the Wii U really ends up uniting casual Farmville players and Call of Duty fanatics? Usually I have a gut feeling about these types of things. That feeling is strangely absent right now. When I get more information, I'll be able to make a better-informed decision, but until that time I can't say anything about purchasing the Wii U one way or the other. One thing is for sure, though: this is the console that will define what Nintendo will become in the future.

UPDATE: In the name of clarification, I want to emphasize that the Wii U will not be a single-player console for multiplayer games played offline on one system. You will be able to play multiplayer games locally using the older Wii remote, nunchuck, and classic controller in various combinations. You can even play multiplayer games using the New Controller along with a bunch of older Wii controllers. You just won't be able to play local multiplayer games with 2 or more New Controllers in tandem on the same system. Nintendo may find a way around those limits in the future, but in all likelihood those are the only scenarios that will exist for local multiplayer. 

2001 Days in Space

The New Horizons space probe is a half-ton science platform made by the good folks at NASA, and in 2006 it was sent hurtling towards the dwarf planet Pluto (no, it's not an official planet anymore; get over it, Clyde Tombaugh fans). Why is it going there? Because we basically don't know shit about Pluto. We know it has 3 moons, a pathetic excuse for an atmosphere, and some slight color variations. That's basically it. Pluto orbits so far out from the sun that it's too dim for astronomers to get a good look at its features. This mission aims to change that.

This blurry smear that could easily double as a vaseline-covered photo of mold on a petri dish is our best view of Pluto.

And this was taken after the Hubble telescope's image correction missions.

New Horizons has been floating through the cold void of outer space for 2001 days as of this writing. Actually, as of the writing of this very sentence, it has been up there for 2001 days, 55 minutes and 3 seconds since it was launched. It's one of the fastest spacecraft ever to leave the planet, reaching about 10 miles a second after launch. In layman's terms, that's going really goddamn fast. It is going even faster now after a quick and dirty fling with Jupiter that left it speeding out of the solar system at over 50,000 MPH to avoid paying child support. New Horizons ain't payin' for no baby-mama drama!

 "One of these days Alice... Bang! Zoom! To da moon dwarf planet Pluto!"

You can find out exactly how long it has been up there by going here: New Horizons official mission page.
The plucky little space traveler is equipped with a bevy of scientific instruments with cute names like Alice and PEPSSI. It uses the warm, inviting decay of delicious plutonium (which may have been processed from uranium mined in Hell's Cow Patty) to produce heat and in turn electricity to power itself as it sails far away from the radiative effects of the sun's rays. The plutonium is stored in a rod configuration inside the long black finned cylinder jutting out from the right side of the spacecraft.

I am personally very excited about this mission, because there really aren't too many objects in our solar system that we need to fill in the scientific blanks of. We've already got a satellite named DAWN set to study the largest objects in the asteroid belt, Vesta and Ceres, and it has already begun sending valuable data back to Earth. We have tons of different probes orbiting the sun, moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and Saturn. NASA is going to launch a probe later this year to orbit Jupiter's poles. There were probes that flew by Uranus and Neptune, and out into the realm of interstellar space. After flying by Pluto, New Horizons is set to target objects in the distant Kuiper belt. Even with our best space-based telescopes, objects in the Kuiper belt look like faint specks of light in the distance. New Horizons should change all that. It will make its closest flyby of Pluto in approximately 4 years from now, in July of 2015.

We are this close to finally knowing what the majority of our solar system's backyard looks like, after eons of gazing out at it through our little Earth-house. It might be a long time until we get a chance to leave our backyard, but we've already taken a few tentative steps in that direction. Soon we might be able to find a nice house down the street to move into. Who knows?

7 Eleven - Thank You, Come Again

It's that time of year again. The time when the day and month coincide with the name of that American institution, that temple to convenience and type-2 diabetes: 7 Eleven. Of course, it only works if you use American date notation. European and Asian date-using types will have to wait til November 7th for this post to become funny - which may be never since this post isn't that funny to begin with.

7 Eleven was a phrase invented by a person who couldn't count past 12 as a substitute for the number 13. It's true.

The first 7 Eleven was built during the 1847 California uranium rush (1 year before the gold rush), in a bustling little desert town called Hell's Cow Patty, population 1,042. The town had grown significantly almost overnight as many an optimistic or downright desperate soul had come seeking his fortune, aiming to find the next big deposit of "glowin' gold" as it was popularly called at the time. Uranium was a popular food supplement, and was sold in every form you could think of, including tonics, powders, suppositories, repositories, pills, and also in a super-potent form known as "crack uranium" which was 10 times as strong as regular uranium, but half the price. Uranium's popularity made it very valuable, and mining towns sprang up like weeds anywhere it was discovered.

Undated photograph of a man panning for uranium.

In later photographs he removed his hat, exposing the mutated 2nd head that had grown atop his skull.

The proprietor of the first 7 Eleven was an Indian immigrant by the name of Raja Pawarnajahaputeevijam, or "R Peezy" for short. Raja saw a niche market looking to be filled in between the seedy bar hangouts and less-than-sanitary butcher shops that peppered the town like lice on a hobo. In letters now kept at the California Historic Archives, Raja told his wife back in India that "this place is as detestable as a festering boil on the back of a hermit yogi, but I believe that it can be made livable with hard work and- Hey! You damn kids, get out of my store! -perseverance."

Raja promoting his store. His grasp of English was... tenuous, at best.

The establishment was a spartan place. The Slurpee machine had to be operated manually by small 12 year old children stuffed inside a pedal-powered machine constructed out of some wooden Rube Goldberg-esque gears, belts, and grinders that crushed ice - cut by hand and carted by donkey from the glaciers of the northern mountains - and mixed it with sarsaparilla, bourbon, beef tripe, powdered pigs' knuckles, opium poppy sap, and lye. The lye was removed after the first few customers complained of ailments ranging from dementia, whooping cough, silly spins, skedaddlin' hootenanny runs, and shitting their organs out one by one until they shit out their own intestines and collapsed in on the void created within the space formerly occupied by their guts. The lye-free recipe remains in use to this day.

All modern 7 Eleven stores have a special area known affectionately as the "Slurpee pit."

The store became popular very quickly, and as a result the town remained even after the miners had moved onto mining gold instead of a substance that kept causing them to either die or mutate into a shambling, hideous shell of a person. The town boomed, and eventually turned into what is now known as Los Angeles.

Hell's Cow Patty, circa 2011.

Modern 7 Elevens are very different from their progenitor. The Slurpee machine doesn't have to be pedaled nearly as fast now, but stupid modern child labor laws dictate that only people over age 18 can be stuffed inside, necessitating the hiring of midgets. No longer is the nacho cheese made painstakingly by the hands of indentured Amish workers; now it is extruded by machines through the udders of genetically modified cows. Ah, progress! There are thousands of 7 Eleven stores dotting this great land, and other great lands throughout the world. You can now sate your desire for hot dogs and beer at 3:27 AM in countries like Japan, Canada, Mexico, and China. Recently minted country South Sudan (only a few days old as of this writing, and still has that "new country" smell!) is said to be in talks to open up a location in the capital city, after landmine removal is completed. OK, so I made that last part up, but seriously, the things are everywhere.

You can ride to 7 Eleven in a tiny Thai taxi!

Yes, 7 Eleven is truly a modern marvel, an idea for the ages. Long after the countries of the world as we know it cease to exist, and mankind has emigrated to other planets out of boredom, there will still be 7 Elevens. I predict the first 7 Eleven will be open on the Earth's moon by 2100 and on Mars by 2150, with locations on Phobos and Deimos by 2155!* Buy franchises now before terraforming is completed!

Safety of patrons at Martian 7 Eleven locations is not guaranteed. Heavy weaponry recommended.

*Phobos location will cease to exist in several million years when Martian gravity pulls the moon down to the planet's surface and obliterates it. Act now!

The Great Irish Menace

There is a plague upon this world. One which has existed for centuries, unchecked by all. I am talking, of course about Irish volcanoes. According to that respected, world-renowned bastion of reporting, FoxNews.com, scientists are anxiously monitoring Irish territory in fear of another outbreak of hellish violence and destruction, and also they are monitoring volcanic activity. Don't believe me? Check out this screen capture from a recently published article:

See?! It's true! The feared Irish gods of old have been awakened once again from their slumber by the sweet, sweet smell of Lucky Charms and the blood of Protestant virgins. None are safe from their blistering, acrid, fiery wrath! If you need me, I'll be in my basement surrounded by four-leaf clovers and pints of Guinness.

Or maybe all that is unnecessary and FoxNews.com can remember to type Iceland instead of Ireland, the buffoons.