???

Followed via Reddit.com: I really can't explain this and am not responsible for psychological damage incurred by viewing it.

Oddness Abounds...

I FINALLY HAVE A NEW CAR... YAAAAAY! That's not the odd part though... The middle-aged man whom my parents saw riding down the street on a bmx bicycle, with a quiver of arrows on his back, a thick & flowing beard, and a motorcycle helmet with an antenna sticking out the top... that might be part of it... or maybe the woman who waylaid my coworker with an extended diatribe about how all chronic masturbators should be locked up.... or maybe it's the man who wants to keep tropical fish in his outdoor pond in northern New England and insists that they can be kept in cold water if you feed them the right food... oh, and let's not forget the guy who thinks there is a conspiracy between the government, the religious community, and the medical community to conceal the fact that homosexuality is actually spread by pathogens (I'm pretty sure he also mentioned something about the neo-nazis being involved too)... life around here not dull very often.

Candid pic of my friend J (used by permission) demonstrating the potential of abandoned shopping carts as furniture.

2008 Subaru Impreza 2.5i Wagon
It is bad luck for a captain to pilot a ship with no name, so she is now known as "MATILDA"!

Das Kompost Nazi

Some of my coworkers think that I'm a little weird (ok, probably very weird) partly because I encourage them to give me their orange & banana peels as well as apple cores and I routinely empty the coffee grounds from the break room coffee machine into a used container in my lunch box just so I can take all these things home and compost them instead of allowing them to end up in a landfill. I've even been known to pick fruit peelings off the top of the trash and bury them in the flowerbeds outside. During the warmer months, I also bury the expired fish from the aquarium department. It may seem eccentric and it has gotten a lot of strange looks from those driving by, but let me tell ya, my workplace's flowerbeds have never had such rich soil.

I'm IT!!!

Having blogged for this long, I guess it was inevitable, but I've been tagged by Peterson Toscano. So, against my better judgement, here goes: six weird things about myself.

1. I frequently talk to myself when I think that I am alone, usually about some conundrum that I am currently facing.

2. I am a "dog breed racist." I only like large breeds and I dislike most small, yappy, ankle-biter types... pretty much anything that can wear a bow in it's hair and be called foo-foo. (though I do like mini-dachshunds and corgis)

3. When I get distracted by something while walking, I sometimes swagger clumsily and my head oscillates.

4. I occasionally have specific feelings of (mostly) bad things which haven't yet happened to close loved ones, but these things usually come to pass, someone else in my family has weird premonitions like this too.

5. I baby-talk my cats with saccharine-sweetsy, made-up words.

6. I have frequent dreams that involve me exploring the countryside and woodlands while inane, strange things are happening all around me.... a classic sports car zooming by on a very narrow hiking trail that cannot possibly accomodate any sort of vehicle; faceless people passing through my campsite carrying strange objects or pushing a wheelbarrow full of junky found items; seasons changing rapidly every few meters while traversing a path; dead people from my past walking along side me, having a conversation; and somehow most of these dreams involve me being on a mission to do something or find something that is yet unnamed and in the dreams I am apparently totally OK with all these unnerving things going on around me.

.... and in turn I will tag some other fellow bloggers:
Shelby
McPolack
Sensei Rainbow
Rachael
Steve S
'fess up folks, what are your personal oddities? :)

Speaking of Ballet...

I was just surfing the internet and I happened to run across a picture of a ballet dancer... this triggered a stream of consciousness in which I remembered one of the oddest sights I've ever seen....

It was quarter 'til midnight in the early summer of this year, I was sitting in my buddy's truck, waiting for my friends to select a video inside of Blockbuster. I was idly listening to the radio and staring off into the distance past the almost-empty parking lot in the plaza where we were parked. A large Ford van stops suddenly in the middle of the parking lot, and several young ladies get out of it and do an elaborate ballet performance around the vehicle, equating to an elegant "Chinese" fire drill (sorry, I know that sounds offensive & racist, but this is the only term I've ever heard in conjunction with this activity). They completed this within the course of about 30 seconds after which they pirhouetted & pliéd back into their respective places in the vehicle and took off just as abruptly as they had stopped; leaving me completely bewildered and confused about what I had just witnessed. Judging by the way they danced, they were not novices either. So now I am wondering, is this what accomplished ballet students do for kicks on a wild Friday night? I told my friends about it when they came out of the video store a few minutes later and they thought I was just blowing hot air.

"They Are Rather Fetching, I'll Declare That Good Times Are In The Pipeline!"

... is a quote from one of David Firth's more recent flash movies known as "Pulch: The Good Times". For those of you who aren't familiar with David Firth's animations, they are sort of.... ummm.... Tim Burton meets Salvadore Dali and Terry Gilliam at a Dadaist convention and they go out drinking... after a wild night filled with various crazy psychotropic substances, this is what they come up with. If you are, like me, bent toward slightly disturbing, dark, absurdist humor, then you should like most of the animations by David Firth.

Update: My apologies to those who have been to my blog lately. I've removed the previously embedded flash movie mentioned in this post because I did not know that they immediately load themselves whether or not you want them to, thus eating up bandwidth and taking forever to make the blog page load. Click on the title of this post if you wish to view the aforementioned movie.