I often think life would be so much easier if I could draw worth a damn. When I saw Lerms' fake movie poster for Attack of the Viking Zombie Babies I wanted to do something similar. And throw in some White/Rob Zombie goodness to boot. Basically, I wanted to make a Sideshowmonkey video (he did Rob Zombie's American Witch and Lords of Salem videos, among others). But I am not Hartman, I am Homie Bear, so instead I give you

Astro-Creep VS The Space Pumpkin

Streaking past the Oort Cloud in his '65 ThunderJeep
The undead dude with an attitude, the bastard called Astro-Creep
Comes flying past the Harvest Moon, screaming and careening
to reap a crop of little kids who go out Hallowe'ening
Ground up bones and pureed guts and sludge blood laced with sucrose-
the ghoulish fuel Astro-creep needs to terrorize the cosmos
But on Olympus Mons a red light turns on
threat detected by Trick-R-Treat-O-Tron
The Space Pumpkin leaps up, he knows the drill
He grins at the thought of a mutant to kill
He blasts off from Mars and heads for the stars
With his jetpack he's faster than a hundred squad cars
He jumps out in front of Astro-Creep's path
and launches an arsenal with a maniacal laugh
Solar spiders and asteroid bats rocket through the ether
Exploding on the ThunderJeep, above and underneath her
But Astro-Creep was far from beat, though he lost his cool
He shoots back nano-slime, laser snot and even robo-drool
Down below costumed kids see aurora borealis
Unaware 'twere an omen of freakyzoidal malice
But the Space Pumpkin was on it, he pulled out some tricks
With Vakuumquats and Saturn Squash and a whole gourdal mix
Orangish melons smash and micronovae explode
Greenish ones burst open and black holes implode
Astro-Creep was forced to retreat and knew for the first time fear
but with skull sockets blazing he swore revenge for next year
The Space Pumpkin laughed and said you can try
I'll use your brains to make space pumpkin pie
The children below are NOT yours to eat
Their souls are mine, they're MY trick or treat!

Astro-Creep, of course, is in reference to Astro-Creep 2000 and the song More Human Than Human. Did you know that song is very loosely about Blade Runner? That's where the title comes from.
Anyways, Happy Hallowe'en! For more Hallowy goodness, click on the halloween tag below. And my new blogbear, which is me dressed up as a panda, and offers a respite from the unremitting horror of my poetry, was done for me by Madison, aka Heartsmackingboombox.

You know what they're having over at the Space Science Center (or Odyssium or Telus World of Science or whatever it's called these days)? How about a whole slew of Star Wars Lego? And I foolishly forgot my camera. Again! When will I learn? Lifesize Chewie, R2, Vader and Jango Fett all made of Lego. But even better, scenes from the movies recreated in Lego. The Battle of Yavin. The Battle of Hoth. The Battle of Endor. The Battle of Genosha. All sorts of battles and all sorts of little Lego guys. It's great and you should go check it out. Oh yeah and then there's a bunch of scientific things there too you can look at while you're there.
I have Star Wars Lego for my PSP. It's a lot of fun but to be honest I hardly ever play it. Just not much of a gamer. But if they made a Star Wars Kenner video game I would be so into that- all the old school original action figures. That would be really cool.
One thing that sucked is that the gift shop at the Telusseum didn't have any trilobite fossils!

Have Some Ice Cream!
So today is the 5th anniversary of Pooing in the Woods. Free ice cream for everyone! The only catch is, it's poo flavoured! Haha, okay that was gross but I had to return to my roots, even if just for a second. It's been about four years since I felt obligated to make a dumb poo joke with every post. Ah the good times.

Gime? What's a gime? Oh, gime!
Shovel 8 was down all last night with electrical problems. It wouldn't propel, which is our fancy way of saying it wouldn't move forwards or backwards. The shovel operator, Happy, was telling me about the frustrating night he and the electrician had trying to fix the problem.
"I kept getting this turn-on flooj problem. Do you know what a flooj is?"
"A flooj? I never heard of that one." Since Happy has been running shovel for at least two decades longer than me and he didn't know what a flooj was,I didn't feel bad for not knowing. Still, that was a weird one. "How do you spell it?"
He screwed up his face and recited perfectly from memory: "F-a-i-l-u-r-e."


Anyways, coming home from work I realized Pooing in the Woods will be five years old this week- Monday or Tuesday. If I had been more on the ball I would've come up with some way to commemorate. Like a Lulu book of Homie Bear poems! Oh well. Instead I think I will admire these beautiful underwater photos. And I will listen to Ghettochip Malfunction which is the brilliant remix of Hell Yes on Guerolito. It's the one remix I would say is better than the Guero version. By a nanohair, maybe. The Hell Yes video is better than the fun but seizure-inducing Ghettochip. And who doesn't love this Nausea video? He uses those puppets in his live show, you know! Beck and his band play and the little beckets are dressed the same and play along.

Yay for stuff!
I went to the library to pick up a Kenneth Oppel book- Airborn, and I also found a Beck CD, Guerolito, which is a remix album for Guero. Guero is one of my top ten all time CDs. Sweet! How I missed Guerolito when it first came out I don't know but whatever.
Also I had an Amazon order come in- Mouse Guard and Otis Frampton's Oddly Normal graphic novels. Sweeet!
And although I still haven't obtained any trilobite fossils I am just as happy with my new tree frog magnets. Sweeeet!



I just finished reading a book called The Looking Glass Wars, by Frank Beddor. The back cover reads "You think you know the true story of Alice in Wonderland? Well think again." It's one of those books that takes an established story and retells or reimagines it. The trouble is, rather than treating the source material with the respect it deserves, he poos all over it in the first few pages. Alice, or rather, Alyss, sees a copy of what Beddor calls 'Alice's Adventures Underground' and calls it a "stupid, nonsensical book". To me that's not cool. Why not just make up your own story in that case? He already changed Alice's name to Alyss. He made the Mad Hatter into a paramilitary Wolverine-type named Hatter Madigan whose top hat is actually a dervish of blades. The White Rabbit gets replaced by an albino tutor with extra sensitive Wolverinish ears named Bibwit Harte. The Cheshire Cat is now an assassin named The Cat who possesses the Woverine-like ability to regenerate- nine lives, of course. Anyways, the book wasn't terrible, though I've read better for sure, and it will appeal to boys- I think Michelle's grade 7s would like it. I just think if you're going to borrow from the classics you shouldn't show such contempt for them.
Oh well, here's another picture of my sweeeeet frog magnets:

This morning we made our getaway. It was a 5 km run in the River Valley in support of Cops With Cancer. It was fun- the idea was, everyone was supposed to dress like an escaped con. Only thing was, Michelle and I were the only ones who did! But that's okay, we won the Running Room gift cards for best costumes. It was a good time.

Then a friend of Michelle called us up and invited us to go to a book reading. Kenneth Oppel, whom I had only vaguely heard of, was in town reading from his new book Darkwing. So even though we've never read him, we thought it would be interesting to go- especially since Michelle as a grade 7 teacher has marked umpteen million book reports on Silverwing and others of his books. I'm glad we went- he was a charming and personable guy and I think I will really enjoy his books- we bought all the Wing books, which are about bats. Should be cool!

I was sitting in the oiler's chair having a bit of a snooze yesterday morning when Vic, the operator, suddenly jumped up and told me to take over because he had to go. Shaking off my drowsiness, I let Vic down off the shovel and swung around to load the next truck. But the next truck wouldn't make his turn and instead sat there looking at me. I honked my horn to wake him up, and he made his turn, but still failed to back up. Now he was holding up production and I had no idea why. What he was doing would be the equivalent of, say, a bagboy at your grocery store just staring at your groceries. Finally I had to call him up on the radio, with my sternest shovel operator voice- "32 truck- are you broke down or something? Why aren't you backing up?"
"Because your bucket's empty," he said.
Which would be sort of like, say, the referee at a hockey game barking at the players to faceoff when he didn't have a puck.

Anyways, I took a bunch more photos. Sadly I didn't get any pics of the two bears I saw the other day.

Does anyone know where I can find a good triobite? I want one. Here in Alberta there aren't too many trilobite beds that I know of- most of the fossils in this area are of the less glamorous and more obscure family of beast known as dinosauria. I just want a nice Phacops or something!

I think my dayshifts start too early. Actually I KNOW my days start too early because when I woke up this morning at 5:20 I had overslept by half an hour. Damn! So I had to drive all the way out to the mine (50 kms or so) rather than take the sleep bus. And I really had to speed, too. It didn't help that in the dark I took a wrong turn on a road that didn't exist last time and wound up driving in circles in some new subdivision. Tearing off LGJ's catalytic converter in the process. That's twice in less than a month that driving to work has caused battle damage to my peaceful little Civic. Grr!
But the rest of the day wasn't so bad. I had to run shovel 5, which is almost as old as I am and in not nearly as good shape. (But then, what is?) But what I was doing was low on the priority list so my foreman took away my trucks at about the halfway point in the shift, leaving me with 6 hours to doze and read. I finished off a 70s SF novel called The Overman Culture and got a hundred pages into another 70s SF novel called Enchanted Pilgrimage, by Simak. Sweet!



Anyways, for walking machines that aren't 30 years old and decrepit, check out Zooillogix for some amazing vids.

Happy Thanksgiving!
I'm thankful that I have an extra day off today. I'm thankful that the Oilers are 2-0 so far in this young NHL season, and I'm thankful for:



Most people think of squids and octopi when they think of cephalopods (and well you should since they kick ass) but I think my current favorite foothead is the cuttlefish. CBC recently showed an amazing documentary on them (on The Nature of Things) which showed their amazing variety and surprising intelligence. Did you know they have a ring of brains inside their head? More likely a ring of neural ganglia but still that's pretty cool.

.Cuttlefish. by *Andoledius on deviantART

Here's just one of many cuttlefish vids on YouTube.
To further celebrate Cephalopod Awareness Day, visit the Cephalopodcast.

A Winnipeg man just donated a huge science fiction collection to the University of Alberta. Thanks for not giving it to the University of Manitoba! I'm pretty sure there will be some Fox B Holden in there- he of the Woman-Stealers of Thrayx. Those letters to Conan creator Robert E Howard would be fascinating to look at.
I've read some excellent sci-fi lately, including a superb anthology of shorts from the early 50s- the pre-Sputnik optimist period. I love that era. This particular anthology was Robert Silverberg's Worlds of Wonder and included stories like "Hothouse" by Aldiss (about the far future when plants are the dominant life form on Earth) and the more subtle but very powerful "Light of Other Days" by Bob Shaw. And then I read a book by Silverberg himself, Roma Eterna which is an alternate history in which the Roman Empire never fell, and Jesus never rose.

More Mandalore:


Clone Wars by ~panoramacon on deviantART

Here's Boba Fett discussing a bounty with the nazgul. Also, check out this JimSmash post with a great battle sequence that we never got to see in the movies.
Oh yeah and I was in Blockbuster earlier today and was tempted to rent Transmorphers. Except, no I wasn't.

Happy Life Day!






Well, I have no idea if it's Life Day on the wookie world of Kashyyyk or not, but I am the proud child-like owner of three new Star Wars action figures that hearken back to the old school- a Darth Vader done up like Ralph McQuarrie's concept art, and two Boba Fetts, one the original concept and the other the version that was in the Star Wars Holiday Special, which I remember with such fondness but which was actually really really bad. Still, the animated part was kinda cool. Especially when you're four.



Oh yeah and Happy Sputnik Day too! The Wookies salute the Soviet Space Program! Werrarrrgh!

Remember that tiny story, Godbear, I wrote for a contest a while back? Carl at Stainless Steel Droppings is holding another one, this one with a Hallowe'enish theme. Great prizes. You should enter- though I wrote mine last night at work (I had all sorts of time since I was operating a broken shovel for some mechanics- every now and then they'd need me to swing around or something and the rest of the time I was on my own) and it's pretty good. 100 words- and no word used twice- you can do it!