I need to set some clocks in my house. Due to batteries running down and power surges, the only clock in my house that currently tells the correct time is on my computer, and even that is a little questionable. As a result I have been depending on two factors to get me out of bed in the morning, the sun and cartoons.
When I fall asleep at night I usually leave the television in my bedroom tuned to the cartoon network. Because I am a 30 year old man who watches cartoons. When I wake up in the morning and I notice sunlight trickling in my windows, I then look at the television. If the television is playing transformers or Dinoland, or any other cartoon, I can fall back asleep. However, if the television is playing 'A pup named Scooby do' then it means I have to get my ass in gear. One of these days cartoon network is going to change their morning programming and make me seriously late for work.
So, I watch 'a pup named Scooby do' in the morning when I am pulling on my underwear and socks. I really do not like it; the character transformations do not sit well with me. The cartoon supposedly takes place when the gang are kids. So they pretty much have the exact same adventures, except they cannot drive. Scoob and shaggy are pretty much the same, Fred is dumber (Although he was always a bit of a mimbo) and Daphne is rich (I can buy that. She always had a snooty rich kid air about her). The biggest change is Velma, who has been transformed into a little bigheaded freak. When she walks her legs suddenly becomes a blur and her body moves forward, followed momentarily by her big head. She no longer looks thoughtful, she looks wide-eyed and brain damaged. I wonder if her parents put her on some sort of mood altering drug. Ritalin would be my guess.
That's a shame because Velma is one of my favorite characters. You see, you might get the impression that Velma is chubby, which she is a little, but she actually has a set of huge knockers. I'm talking some big sloshing jugs here. This embarrasses her to no end because she wants to be taken seriously as an intellectual, but it's hard to do that when the boys in your class (and the teachers) are gawking at her set of giant titties. So, in embarrassment, she wears a big bulky sweatshirt to try and cover them up.
Yes, this is the kind of shit my brain comes up with when I am pulling on my underwear in the morning.
Tonight is my 'Out' night. First I am going to go to a Guinness 'Legacy' event taking place down at the pub. I am not exactly sure what this entails, but it's invite-only, and it claims to have free beer. Yes, free beer. Let's say that again, free beer. So I am going to wander down and see what that is all about. Then later on that night I am going to head down to I-bar, because I have not been in a while. I need my fix of two dollar drinks and gothy girls twisting about in exotic outfits.
I saw this article this morning about baggy
pants.
It made me laugh. To be honest, when I see a pair of baggy pants with underwear hanging out, I laugh and I sneer and I call it stupid. However, I really need to be honest with myself. Every generation has something that the generation before it finds stupid.
Point of example, when I was in high school it was ripped jeans. Ripped jeans were some hip shit, especially if you were a chick and there were little dainty holes in the ass showing off a bit of underwear. So, not only were people wearing old jeans with holes in it, they would buy BRAND NEW jeans and then artfully cut holes in it. I remember a girlfriend I had in high school spending most of the afternoon with a razorblade carefully cutting a serious of holes in her jeans. I also recall when the first jeans with holes already in them started appearing on the hangers of JC penny's. I recall my mother walking up to them, snatching them up, and saying 'You have GOT to be kidding me'.
So, everything changes. I should be more tolerant.
Fuck it, I'm still going to laugh.
2026 Update
Dialing back to June 2006, where morning cartoons are an alarm clock and Ed has Thoughts about Velma.
This whole post is a time-capsule artifact. You used the sun and the Cartoon Network schedule as your alarm clock, which is adorable. Nobody does that now; your phone buzzes, then you lie there scrolling through forty alerts before you’ve even blinked. Your bedroom TV isn’t a sleepy signal from the world—it’s a streaming menu that makes you choose, and choosing requires a personality. Clocks, meanwhile, are everywhere and useless: stove clock, car clock, microwave, phone, all slightly wrong from the last power surge. You’d have to live in a firehouse to trust one. The economics also sting: free beer at an invite-only pub event still exists, but it arrives as a QR code to your phone and asks for your email before you get a pour. Two-dollar drinks are the stuff of museum dioramas. Ripped jeans, of course, survived the decades and now cost forty dollars pre-distressed, which would make your mother scream into the void. I love that every generation thinks it invented rebellion, and 2006 Ed was standing in the aisle at JCPenney sneering at baggy pants while wearing artfully shredded denim.
“2006 Ed, was the free Guinness worth the mental energy you spent constructing an entire fan theory about Velma’s chest before you even put your socks on?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: So, Beelzebubba, you're asking if the free Guinness was worth all that mental Velma engineering first thing in the morning? Well, let me tell you, the beer was free, and I'm a sucker for free anything, but the honest answer is probably not. My brain does this thing where it just grabs onto a dumb idea and runs with it before I've even got my socks on, and next thing I know I've invented a whole backstory about Velma's sweater and her parents medicating her. That's just the price of doing business with my own head, I guess. The Guinness was decent, and the event was mostly just a bunch of people standing around pretending to be classy, so the free beer helped. But now I've got this Velma theory stuck in my brain like a dead cat on the bedroom carpet, and no amount of stout is gonna scrub that out. Take that, foul imagination.
