WUMF: September 2012 Edition

OK... so, I've been distracted lately with stuff.   It's kept me from regularly posting, and I'm still late on my Labor Day travels post,  but the culmination of a few things have led to another thrilling edition of WUMF!


The Replacements
We all know that the replacement refs suck.  Fine.  But really, does the NFL care?  No.  You know why?  Because even bad publicity is good publicity.  Was it a bit petty that the league did not cave until the blown Green Bay/Seattle game??  Yes.  But the league generates a billion dollars. Even though the regular refs get like six figure incomes for working half the year and first class airfare, that's a still a huge disparity. 

Yet, it kind of backfires when the biggest names in team ownership see their games impacted by the botched calls.  The Krafts, who own the Patriots, and the City of Green Bay, which pretty much own the Packers both had games with controversial end game calls, resulting in losses for them.  That might be why the talks finally resumed and came to a conclusion.  So, now, we can get back to bashing the regular refs for blowing calls.  At least we get to see the Hochuli pythons signaling touchdown or holding.  Flex them you douche.  Flex them all the way to the bank.

SPPPPOOOOOON!
If you know what that's from you'll know what the hell I'm talking about. On Sunday, my wife was about to give our five year old a bath when she noticed what looked like a blackhead on her back.  Turned out to be a tick.  I looked at it for a second and just said, "Eff it!"  I pulled it out.   I managed to get it all out, intact.  It sat on my finger nail looking at me, wiggling.  So, I flushed it.

In hindsight, I should have saved it.   We took her to the pediatrician on Monday and they actually wanted to hire me to do tick removals.  Seems to be OK.  They gave her an antibiotic to treat a sinus infection and after three days, the bite is hardly noticeable.   No, "Bullseyse", as it were.   We'll keep an eye on her, though.

Now, we have some woods around our house, but we don't go near them.  In fact, on Sunday, we were only outside to go to the store, and then she was outside with m for about twenty minutes while I grilled steaks.  She played on her swing.  She didn't go anywhere near brush.  So, I don't know if she got it then, or if those damn strays passed it along.  That situation is getting ridiculous.

Slenderman
The other reason I haven't been posting is that I got sucked into watching these videos.  For those of you who do not know.  Slenderman was part of a competition on the Something Awful forums.  The task was to doctor up some photos to make it look like some scary phenomena.   The result was this thing that looked like a cross between the Gentlemen from Buffy, and a sperm.  Go look him up.

Anyway, it turned into an ARG, which is an alternate reality game where a group of people started posting videos like they were found footage.   Under the guise of making a "Student Film" called MarbleHornets, a friend is given a bunch of tapes from the production and is told to "burn them".  Of course, you can't do that, so the person starts watching them and posting them as entries online.  What happens is that you see strange things like video and audio distortion, shapes, SLENDERMAN!

You get sucked in, even though you know the whole thing is fake, just because they capitalized on the thing that made Blair Witch so popular 12 years ago. There is no explanation for why it's happening and that's part of the fun.  You hardly see the monster.  Of course, when you do, it's so badly constructed, but still, it creeps you out a bit.   After three years and 60 some entries, it's gotten a bit ridiculous, but damnit if I won't watch every single one of them.  There's even free video games online surrounding the hilarity.

Hitchcock was really good in using fetishistic scopophilia in films like Rear Window and Psycho.  That's when you are entertained by watching others' as in the case of Norman Bates looking at Marion Crane through the peep holes or L.B. Jeffries looks at his neighbors across the courtyard.   But what really ratchets up the excitement or terror is when you are simply observers, unable to control what's happening.  You simply sit and watch something.  In the case of the MarbleHornets videos, you are given a POV (Point of View) experience and the person filming takes you along on for the ride, passive and unable to control what is happening in the frame.

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Hatless Yokam

There a few things in this world that truly scare me.

One is death by drowning. I’ve always had this intense fear of dying from drowning. I don’t know what causes it. As a child, I grew up spent as much time in the water as I could. I could spend all day in a pool with a mask and snorkel, simply floating along. When we’d go to the beach, I’d be out there trying to test the boundaries of where I could stand and where I couldn’t. Loved body surfing and riding on those big green and yellow canvas rafts. They seemed to last for years in comparison to the ones we have nowadays that seem to last one summer, if that.

But something about not being able to breathe and having water slowly fill my lungs, allowing me to drown, my eyes open, fully aware I was going away scares me out the crap (as my five year old puts it). In fact, when I had surgery 12 years ago to correct an issue brought on by wisdom teeth extraction, causing me to have packing in my nostrils, I had a dream I was drowning, only to awake to realize my covers had slipped up over my mouth, stifling my breathing.
That fails in comparison to what really scares me on this Earth.

Oh, another thing that scares me, horror movies where there is no sight of the monster. The most effective film to do this was The Blair Witch Project. I didn’t sleep for three days because I kept thinking about that ending. The fact that we never once saw a witch or anything didn’t matter. My imagination had already dreamt up something more sinister than the filmmakers could have inserted into that film. That image haunted me for days. Even though I had known it was fake, it still shook me to the core to think about an evil spirit lurking in the woods, waiting to be captured on film at any moment. It was just as jarring to have seen the alien in Signs as it passed by the camera on a “home video”. Of course, it doesn’t hurt when you have a stinger note to accompany the reveal.

Still, the real thing that scares me most is out of this world.

Yes, as the title suggests, the thing that scares me the most is The Hatless Yokam.

You see, there are two Dwight Yokams.  There's the cowboy hat wearing, country singing, fast as you Dwight and then there's the hatless, psycho home invading, abusive boyfriend Dwight that makes my inner child hide under the covers.  He is like bizarro Clint Howard.  He scares me so.  The Hatless Yokam nibbles on my soul.

Hatted and Hatless Yokam