League of Melbotis

I am very busy today at work, but a couple of things:

1) I was thinking about the Japanese invention I mentioned yesterday which allows you to translate a dog or cat's noises into "speech" by analyzing the tone and then giving a pre-recorded verbal cue. Well, nice idea, but they need to reverse engineer the device so that I can talk back to my pets. Otherwise, the damn thing isn't going to really be of much use.

2) People looking for Ann Coulter nude continue to pour in. I'll do a final tally this weekend, but I think I had somewhere in the neighborhood of four or five people yesterday.

3) Sci-Fi Channel has been re-running episodes of an early 90's Discovery Channel program entitled Beyond Bizarre (not to be confused with "Beyond Belief", which is anything but...). Beyond Bizarre is a sort of Ripley's Believe it or Not! with an even slimmer budget.

Beyond Bizarre must not ever have had much popularity. I remember seeing the show in a drunken stupor when I was 18 and being mystified by some rocks which reportedly move on their own during the night, but I had kind of forgotten about the show the way the rest of the world must have. When you Google search for info on the show, you get bupkis, although you can buy the series on VHS.

Beyond Bizarre is done in quasi-documentary style and chronicles strange and unexplainable phenomena as well as people doing goofy stuff. Most of the strange phenomena are generally explainable with a little logic applied (although the producers of Beyond Bizarre give no siggestion that logic could ever play into these events). They explore strange monuments like Native American Mound Builder artifacts and pyramids. My favorite was an episode which explored "vampires," or bored goth kids who cut each other and drank one another's blood. Not only unsanitary, but generally a big sign that mommy didn't love you.

At any rate, I think at long last, I have found my calling. The show is hosted by this guy, Jay Robinson, whom I believe once played Dr. Shrinker on the Kroft Superstars. The early 90's delivered him to us as a man now clearly bent upon making himself into the prototype for Landau's Lugosi in Ed Wood. At any rate, Jay gets to wear all black, stand in a darkened studio with leftover Universal Monster Movie props and a fog machine while being only slightly creepy. He introduces the program and segues between segments with spooky aplomb. I am not yet old enough to have this job, nor am I likely to abuse enough drugs nor smoke enough cigarettes to have the sort of Crypty Keeper like countenance and vibrato which the job requires.

Ahhh... to dream the impossible dream.

4) A few years ago (circa 1996) some friends of friends shot and edited a movie entitled The Schedule. The film was not really received anywhere excpet for The Dobie off UT's campus. Nonetheless, it was a noble effort, and as I understand it, just never landed a distribution deal. Judging from the less than stellar 3 of 10 stars it has on IMDB, it must not have been a fan favorite.

But the premise is not dissimilar to Showtime's new program Dead Like Me. Both center around recently departed souls being recruited by the powers that be to act as agents of the Grim Reaper and collect dead folks' souls or something.

Anyway, aspiring attorneys may wish to contact the producers of The Schedule and see if they can't get a chunk of Showtime's coffers.