So last night I ate some more of my chicken noodle soup and watched that new' dark kingdoms' that was on the scifi channel. It was OK. The soup and the show. To be honest I did not watch the whole thing
I do not have a record-o-box and thus have to watch it live
and the sheer number of commercials made it a mind numbing process. I was enjoying it though. It had more of a Hercules feel to it than a true fantasy. The lead blacksmith had an oafish charm about him that was similar to a young Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 'Conan movies'. He bumbles about and porks Icelandic princesses and slays dragons and becomes invulnerable. . The show was amusing me until I fell asleep. Overall it had some great side-boob shots
but too much man-ass. The dragon was ok
too. More of a fat lizard than a good dragon
but who am I to debate on what a dragon looks like.
An amazing number of fantasy stories start off with blacksmiths. They rarely involve coopers or candle makers. There are no clever coopers who forge the mighty barrels of might and then stride out and stuff it on a dragon's head or something. Unless your count Donkey Kong. But I do not think he made the barrels... he just threw them. However
I digress.
For whatever reason
coopers have me thinking about pilgrims. Pilgrims are reverend as our brave forefathers who came over on the mayflower
however the sad truth is that pilgrims were idiots. They were essentially middle-class people who got fed up over the religious politics of their homeland. So they stuck out their lower lip and said 'Let's get out of here'. They then packed up a few things and headed over to America. Historians actually have records of the ship manifests of the things the pilgrims brought. They brought books and shoes and clothing and chamber pots and more shoes and globes and various knick-knacks that middle class people hold dear. No one brought any farming equipment or livestock. They were literally dumped on shore with a few boxes of junk they owned. They were rather shocked to find no hotels or buildings or accommodations. Just a big forest. So they did the one thing they seemed to be good at. They died. A lot of them did. It took a bunch of Indians who felt sorry for these fools to show them out to scratch into the earth and plant a seed. I doubt there is a single pilgrim who would not have gone back to England if given the chance. Someone should have packed a hoe.
Speaking of Hoes
I got a new Heavy Metal magazine the other day. One of the comics was an amusing anecdote dealing with a couple of whores. They were human hookers and were decked out in the usual Heavy Metal comic fashion of panty-flashing miniskirts and nipple erupting blouses. The hookers were annoyed because a number of homely and mutated alien creatures were coming on to them
however the hookers kept turning them down because they were too freakishly ugly to fuck. At the end of the clip they see a handsome human man and come on to him strongly
offering him discounts
etc. They are then alarmed to see this guy is with his wife
a female version of the freakishly ugly aliens you had seen earlier. He tells the hookers to get lost
and also reveals the fact that his wife is actually a planet-wide beauty contest winner. The hookers are all alarmed and run off sobbing because
I suppose
they realized that they themselves were actually the freakishly ugly segment of the population. Or something. I'm not sure what the moral was
I got distracted by an ad for a Japanese anime-tentacle-rape video advertised on the next page.
My tax return check arrived. It was nice to hold it before I have to dump it all into credit cards. Sigh.
2026 Update
Dialing the time machine back to March 2006, where Ed is eating soup, dodging commercials, and pondering coopers.
Twenty years on, and the entire infrastructure you were complaining about has evaporated, Ed. You were watching Dark Kingdoms live because you lacked a record-o-box—now we don't even watch channels; we stream content from subscriptions, and there are more settings menus than there used to be commercials. The Sci-Fi Channel's Hercules-shaped fantasy with a dragon like a fat lizard has been out-geeked by endless, self-serious epic television where the CGI is seamless and the discourse is infinite. Your tax return check arriving in the mail? Refund expectations have become an app-refresh ritual, and your shackle to credit cards hasn't relaxed—it has just been joined by payment plans and a monthly subscription for everything, including loyalty. Heavy Metal magazine delivered physical ads for questionable anime videos; now that entire ecosystem is algorithmic, personalized, and follows you around like a demon with a clipboard. I miss the days when a hooker comic could exist in a printed magazine without a thousand thinkpieces spawning from it. Actually, I don't miss it. But I appreciate the record.
“2006 Ed, what possessed you to sit through all those commercials to watch a fat-lizard dragon and side-boob spectacle when you could have been writing the heroic saga of a cooper and his mighty barrel of might?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: So, Beelzebubba, you've got a point, but let me tell you, writing the heroic saga of a cooper and his mighty barrel of might takes effort, and I was already horizontal with a bowl of soup and a numb brain from all those commercials. Watching a fat-lizard dragon and some side-boob is the lazy man's fantasy epic. Plus, the commercials gave me time to think deep thoughts about pilgrims and hoes, which is more than a cooper saga would've done. And honestly, I did fall asleep halfway through, so it wasn't like I was glued to the screen. I was just there, you know? Putering. If I'd written about a cooper, I'd have had to get up and find a notebook, and that's just too much work after a long day. Maybe someday I'll get around to it, but right now I've got credit card bills and a cat who keeps leaving dead things on the rug. A barrel of might won't clean that up.
