Friday, October 29, 2010

War



Once, long ago, War slept.

He dreamed of great deathless armies, endlessly battling on a blood-soaked plane.  He also dreamed of engineers devising new weapons that would rend flesh, new arrows that would burrow deeper with the movements of the wounded, machines that would crawl across the field and crush soldiers beneath their gore-clotted treads.  He dreamed of doctors and nurses stitching limbs back onto fallen warriors so that they could return to the fight.  He dreamed of scientists making gases that would blanket the battlefield with choking vapors.

But mostly he dreamed of two men, each strangling the other, rolling in puddles of freezing blood and fuel, ears bitten off, eyes gouged, teeth and noses broken from repeated head-butts.  As they died their grips only grew stronger.

This was the stuff of War's trade, more than any of the other trappings.  Armor was fine, blades and projectiles served their purpose, but without hate they would rust away to nothing.  Mercenaries may work for hire, but in the pitch of combat they hated the enemy as much as any partisan fighting for his home.  The swordmaster might respect his opponent, admiring his technique and form, knowing the beauty of graceful bladework, but the final flurry of vessel-severing strokes were driven by fury – controlled and channeled to be sure, but fury nonetheless.

Generals and logistics officers might be passionless in their deliberations, calmly calculating quantities of ammunition and dried meat, plotting routes to the front, keeping tallies of how many coins remained in their war-chests, but this was all in service to the moment when a soldier pulled the trigger that killed a man in flash of powder and bloodlust.  Coopers might joke at their work and return home to warm loaves at night, but when the barrels of boiling pitch broke on the ramparts the cries would not be those of joy.

No, hate was the ultimate substance of War.

Soon he awoke.

--Steve Kilian

Michael J. Fox’s Bad Day


Freddy vs. Wishmaster



Thursday, October 28, 2010

SOMEONE's Looking Forward to the Captain America Movie

MATT: YES!





DAN: "Peter Jackson on the Hobbit"? He'll CRUSH it!

Also, I've done a study, comparing graphs of hokey patriotism vs escapist machismo, cross referenced with a fantastically impossible shields chart, and it turns out it is scientifically impossible to make a good Captain America movie.

MATT: I’m hoping for a RAIDERS mix of old school action-adventure, some sci-fi elements, and Nazis dying spectacularly gruesome deaths.
Did you see this from Iron Man 2? It’s a close up of some kind of blueprint on the wall in Tony Stark’s lab. It’s pretty wild how they’re tying it all together.



--Matt Dolingo and Dan Kilian

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

At The Pawn Shop

Business was slow at the pawn shop. In fact, it was deadly quiet. Peter flipped through catalogues, and Joey got on the phone for every business related call he could conceive of, but the truth was that they had all the inventory they needed, and there wasn’t any business going on to make calls about. It became an unspoken truth neither of them wanted to address, but finally Joey broached the subject.

“You’d think in an economic downturn this kind of business would do well.”

Peter looked up, surprised at this acknowledgment of their current bad luck. “How so?”

“In good times, people might just go buy a whole new set.”

Peter thought about this, as an idea germinated in his head, but he did not say anything. He knew it ran counter to Joey’s vision.

Every morning they opened up the shop, the myriad orbs staring like blind eyes. As the silences dragged on, finally Peter had to speak.

“Joey, I think we’ve got to diversify.”

“What do you mean?”

“We need to offer other pieces.”

“But…the odds are sixteen in thirty-two verses…one in sixteen that…”

“All those ones in sixteen add up to half! Half the pieces!”

Joey had nothing to say. He knew the logic; he just hated breaking the purity of selling nothing but pawns. He hated breaking the pattern of all those little orbs. Still, he broke down, and soon there was a table offering Knights, Bishops, Rooks and Queens. Joey insisted that anybody who loses their king should concede and buy a new set, but this was the only point on which he didn’t concede.

Still nothing sold.

Then one day a ragged looking gentleman entered the store. He barely glanced at the merchandise. He walked over to Joey and pulled a small marble pawn out of his pocket.

“Want to buy?” he asked.

Joey laughed. “I’ve got a store full of pawns. Why would I want to buy yours?”

“It’s a nice piece. Marble.”

“I’ve got marble pawns. Lots of them.”

“All right, look. I’m a little behind on cash, and I need some cigarettes. How about this: you give me a dollar for this pawn, and I’ll buy it back at the end of the month for a dollar twenty five. You make a profit.”

“How do I know you’ll buy it back?”

“If I don’t, you can sell it for at least that much.”

It could have been desperation, or momentary confusion, or maybe Joey just wanted to see what would happen, but he agreed to the bargain. He took the piece and gave the man a dollar.

At the end of the month, the man did not appear, and Joey ruefully put the pawn out on display with the other unbought pieces.

Two weeks later the man reappeared. Joey scowled at him. “So, are you back to buy your wonderful pawn back?”

“Oh hey, yeah, sorry about that. Times are a little tough these days. I’m flat broke. In fact, I was wondering if we could do the same thing again.”

“No! Absolutely not!  I’ve got all the chess pieces I need!”

“Okay, yeah, I get that. What about a guitar?”

“What?”

“I’ve got a vintage Ovation out in my van. It’d go for like, seven hundred bucks. Throw me a few C’s for it and I’ll definitely be back with the cash at the end of the month. I don’t want to lose this guitar.”

Peter jumped in. “Look pal, we’re not a bank. We sell chess pieces! So why don’t you…”

Jerry stopped him with a gesture. “Let’s think about it. Why don’t you go get that guitar and we’ll take a look at it?”

The man smiled. “Sure buddy! I’ll be right back!”

He left and Peter looked at Jerry incredulously. Jerry said nothing, and looked around him at all the pawns and other pieces. He already knew that his business was about to change, forever.



--Dan Kilian

Godzilla’s Ghost


Definitely Probably Possibly

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Octopus Man #2: The Amazing Man-Spider!









































–Casper, Kilian, Kilian, Dolingo and McNulty AKA The Octomen

Editor’s Note: Casper, Kilian, Kilian, Dolingo and McNulty shall henceforth be known as The Octomen
Top Trek: A Pan Fiction!

Sweet Nothings

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Help The Ks Pick a Name/Artwork for Their New Album

Having some trouble picking one out. Let us know what you think. The better the critique, the more it will be considered. Here are some choices.













 

Let us know what you think!

--The Ks

Pupa


Sunday 11:29 P.M.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Rejected Baby Shower Activities




Now that they're making men attend these, I'm told everyone just sits around and drinks and there are some presents. Recently we hosted such an event.  I did try to come up with some activities, but they were rejected.


Humorous “The Mother to Be Is So Pregnant” Snaps

The Mother to Be and the Beer Bong

Name the Baby Using Boggle Note: It’s important that the parents to be promise to name the baby after the best Boggle name, or it’s really not fun.

Humorous “Why I Might Be the Father” Essay Contest

Key Party

Pentagram Ring Ritual Wherein We Offer the Baby To Satan That I Might Become a Successful Actor and That HE Might Have His Child on Earth

Perform The Great Gatsby in its Entirety, Reading the Book Aloud and Different Guests Assuming Different Characters. No Breaks!

Russian Roulette…With Daggers!

Naked Drumming, Telling of Manly Tales, Weeping and Hugging

Pin The Tail On The Donkey…With Daggers!

--Dan Kilian

The Ghost of Nixon and Obama: A Dialogue

Dan’s Almost Daily Musings

Friday, October 15, 2010

linKs

Octopus Man: Strip 1 The Fantastic Three!


How To Make Justin Bieber Sound Incredible: Slow Him Down 800 Percent



K Riddle: You know my numbers, what’s my name?



Lookwell! Pretty funny Adam West TV show. Thanks Tom!



A Bottle of Wyrms



Custom Urinal This one gets a little blue, folks!



Bacon and Rocketry



Tusks



Horseball!



The USBTypewriter



The Code Organ: Turn your website into pure music!



You should click some button on The Ks's's Facebook page.



And here we are on Myspace.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Custom Urinal

I'm thinking about a custom urinal that is a stone or steel cylinder, freestanding in the toilet room.  Plumbing and drainage are obviously fed from below, with flushing water being conducted up within the wall thickness of the cylinder and then distributed around the perimeter.  Shape could be oval or elliptical to accommodate the slack end of the pressure curve, but this is backing away from purity.

Thoughts?

A waterfall piss post. I like it. Splash is your biggest challenge. Is it like water flowing over a rock that you leak on? Or is base tapered so you leak in a free falling water. If running all the time you'll waste a lot of water. If not you'll need to figure how to flush the thing which will be tough.

Steel a bad idea. Stone ok. What about ice? Like those Vegas ice bars.

I was thinking of something more typical in terms of flush mechanism:  a sensor that you wave your hand over and it flushes, so there isn't constant running water – although that could be an option for the post-Green age when energy is cheap and abundant.  Regarding splashing, I was thinking that if the vessel is deep enough the splatter is contained (see attached – note that section and plan are not oriented the same way).


No doubt these initial assumptions are hampering the development of this idea beyond the normative.  I look forward to your suggestions.



How conventional…looks like a bidet.  Try on my sketch.


The Barragan approach – of course.  Now the juices are flowing, so to speak.  See attached.



Now you’re in business…..call the patent office.

--Steve Kilian and Tim Fryatt

Dialogue with the Loch Ness Monster


One Step Forward, Two Steps Banks

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Half Ours

We’re divorced from reality. We get half of it. We pay our fantasies in monthly installments. We get visitation rights to the world. The rest of the time we spend in a singles bar, on the rebound, deep into a midlife crisis, trying to finesse small talk into a seduction, trying to turn seduction into an ongoing conversation. We end up step-parents to someone else’s world. We don’t own it, and we know we’re going to leave. We won’t let anything bad happen to it while we’re here, but once we’re gone these  people are going to fall off a cliff into oblivion—and we’ll be oblivial to them.

We’re bugging out of a country no-one’s seen, building a country that will never be. All the while people keep dying, but we don’t see that  either. There are people who have seen too much, but they’re invisible. Others are oblivious and invisible. Everyone keeps winking out. Every time we blink we go blind. We’re only seeing half the time, and a third of that is a dream (do we blink in our dreams? We must, or we’d go mad). We tried to conquer half the world, and it’s only half ours.

Our visiting privileges get whittled down to weekends, then we’re cut down to visiting hours, then half hour slots. It’s a sit-com sliced into you-tube segments. Can I really hold your attention for half an hour? How about three-and-a-half minutes? How about the next five  seconds,  starting now?

--Dan Kilian

This was the program text from a solo show I did at The Sidewalk. It was a half-hour slot! Get it?


Unpublished Interview of Dan Kilian by Todd E. Jones


Adventures in Solitaire

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Tusks

His skin became dry and oddly numb.  It thickened over the course of a month or two, and he found himself eating handfuls of grass during his walks in the park.  A few teeth fell out on either side of his mouth, and the sockets never closed.  Eventually a nub of bone grew out of each of the holes, blunt cones that distorted his cheeks and made him drool all the time until his cheeks shifted and thickened to accommodate the tusks.

The depression was crushing.  He was in pain and wept openly for most of the day.  One day he went through the apartment and smashed all of the mirrors so that he wouldn’t be reminded of his deformity.  He closed the shades so he wouldn't catch his reflection in the windows at night.  He watched endless hours of television, drinking.

After six months the tusks were each a foot long and he could barely lift his head.   Either his fingers had shrunk or his palms had grown so that only one knuckle showed beyond the fleshy mass of his hand.  He could no longer speak and ordered food with his computer.  Mostly he got smoothies and such, as he had trouble getting normal food into his mouth.  He hadn't left the apartment in weeks.

One day he lurched up out of his reclining chair and collapsed to all fours.  He crawled across the floor to the window, sweeping aside the curtains and smashing it open with his tusks.  He raked out the broken glass and splintered mullions and put his head out into the strange air of the place where he used to live.

Then he trumpeted.

--Steve Kilian

Fab Facts about The Beatles Rock Band Game


Reasons To Hope For Our Economy