Life

The Couch

  • by Drew

Do you know how hard it is to get rid of a couch. We tried donating one to the Salvation Army years ago when we were living in Connecticut. At that time, in that location, they would only do pickups every third week or so. After passing the initial round of questioning, not unlike a college interview, they agreed to consider our couch. The day they were to come by with the truck and pick it up, we humped it out onto the porch. We’re not talking super modern furniture or anything here, but it was a very nice couch with clean upholstery. We just didn’t need it anymore.

So, the first time we dragged it out onto the porch, I came home from work and it was still there. I called them up and found out the truck had broken down. I dragged the couch back into our kitchen (closest room to the porch, and there was no way I would drag the couch all the way back into the living room – there was no longer any place to put it and it had barely squeezed through the varied twists and turns).

About three weeks later I rescheduled pick up and dragged the couch out onto the porch again. Again, I came home from work and it had not been picked up. This time, when I called, I found out the truck had been in an accident and the pickup had been cancelled.

Several weeks later, I called to schedule pickup for the third time. I was otld the truck was indefinitely out of service and I should continue to call weekly until they were ready to pick it up.

That night, after several months of tripping over a couch in my kitchen, I broke out a saw and took the thing down to it’s component parts. It went out in a variety of trash barrels the next day.

So much for charity.

Life

Brats

  • by Drew

Can I take a moment and make some paternal complaints? The kids are into video games. They love them. They have handhelds, they play wii and Internet based games, they recently even discovered games you can play with the remote on cable. Like I really need my 8 year old bragging about his Tetris prowess. Dude, I OWNED that game in college. I can totally bury his butt. Of course, then he cries, so I have to let him win…or at least give a good show of competing.

Anyway, my complaint is this: why are my boys incapable of putting the damn games away. Specifically with their handhelds or the wii. I am so sick of finding wii sports resort under the living room coffee table with the booklet from Mario Kart and the weird PS3-ish case our used copy of Lego Batman came in.

Meanwhile, my 19 month old baby girl can satisfactorily deliver an heirloom china cup across a thirty feet of hard tile from Mommy to Daddy on a whim. And then she’ll rearrange the tupperware on the shelf in the lower cabinet so everything fits and close the door. Is this a genetic thing? Is it ingrained gender type stuff? I don’t know, but if you could bottle it I’d have my boys drinking it by the liter on a daily basis.

Life

Bumper Faith

  • by Drew

Here’s something that’s been troubling me for a while. A couple weeks ago we went to Sam’s Club to see if there was anything we might want that would justify a membership at Sam’s Club. I mean, let’s face it the discounts just aren’t there any more, not even on the meg-ginormous packages of mac and cheese and toilet paper. Still, it is a compelling place.

In the parking lot I saw a pickup with some bumper stickers that really confused me. Actually, it was one bumper sticker and a few other visual accouterments that suggested (at least to me) that I might be very wrong about my role and the role of a creator in our little, limited, microverse.

First off, there was a huge bumper sticker that read “Jesus is the Answer.” Fair enough, I mean, they didn’t provide the question, but in your favorite Douglas Adams-y way, you can run down that little convo in your own mind. What gave rise to my confusion was the portrayal of two bathing beauty naked chicks alongside the Jesus sticker. I’m not talking art prints or even remotely tasteful presentations of the female form. These were the classic shiny metallic stickers depicting a buxom female with ample posterior, seated, with her head thrown back and her boobs pointed squarely at heaven.

Maybe the question is something like “who is your heavenly pimp?”

Confessions

History

  • by Drew

The great thing about historical fiction, like that presented in the Outlander books is that a reader needn’t worry about the issues that plague us in the modern day. It’s actually pretty fascinating in the Outlander books, because the primary female character starts in the first book as a nurse from World War II who accidentally goes back in time in Scotland, and ends up a few years before the Stewart rising in the Highlands. She later returns to the modern day and becomes a doctor. then, 20 years later she heads back in time to find her true love, who is also 20 years older. It’s very sweet, really.

And when she goes back to the 1760s or so, she does so with a lot of modern medical knowledge, much of which is somewhat useless. Sure, if you want to treat Mesothelioma with a bleeding by leeches or maybe a pill made of pulverized horse droppings and spider webs, yeah…there are shops for that, but a proper pharmacy…not so much.

One of my favorite passages in the fourth book is when the Doctor, Clair, is trying to grow penicillin. She leaves out dozens of slices of bread, hoping against hope that one of them with naturally develop the mold that we know as penicillin. Of course, her greatest barrier to success is neither circumstance nor bad luck. It is a combination of vermin (rats, mice, roaches and other pests) and her nephew eating her starchy ersatz petri dishes off the kitchen counter.

Booze

Titular oops

  • by Drew

I realize that in my last post I never actually explained the title. This is a common failing of mine. Sorry. The thing is, in historical fiction from the couple decades before the Revolutionary War, there may be no need for apidexin reviews, but there was one key substance that needed serious, regular abuse. Sort of.

What was that? Well, in the Scottish portion of the books it is definitely whiskey. And since a “modern day” character in the narrative hits the Lagavulin in a passage, nodding towards the time traveler for introducing him to such spirits, I’m thinking the whiskey they hit is seriously peated, smoky and killer in flavor.

I’m listneing to the audio version of the fourth book right now, Drums of Autumn, and the crew is in the colonies, roughly a decade before the Revolutionary War. They have developed a little community thanks to some land grants, and a handful of Scottish ex-pats that survived the Highland Rising are there. Out primary character, Jamie Frazier is, among other things, running an illegal still and making some serious white lightning in the style of old school scotts whiskey. It’s illegal because of the crippling British taxes on spirits production (one of our Revolutionary inspirations, of course) and he, being a Highlander, really f-ing hates the British. More than George Washington and Thomas Jefferson combined. I’m just wondering at what point he’s going to skip out on paltry wheat and go for a corn mash, successfully inventing bourbon.

I wouldn’t even mind if that’s how it played out. I guiltily love these books so much (even knowing they would be super duper chick flicks if they were movies and Hugh Grant would end up playing the bad ass Scott) that I wouldn’t mind if this dude was actually portrayed as the inventor of Bourbon. It beats the Jim Beam/Booker Noe assertions that their family did it, after all.

Confessions

Strong drink

  • by Drew

I  am an audiobook addict. This, I have gleefully and willingly confessed many times before. Sometimes, though, I listen to a book (while mowing or snowblowing or driving to the office or doing the dishes or…whatever) that is, from a traditional mucho-macho masculine standpoint…a little embarrassing. The Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon is my embarrassing chick book series.

I mean, I’ve listened to a couple of breathy thrillers that were clearly written for a female audience that is a step above romance novels. Not terrible necessarily, but the cowboy-ish main male character and the incredibly strong female executive who somehow needs to fold into her cowboy with sobs at key points in the story…yeah, it is a formula. And not really my thing.

Admittedly, there are such characteristics in the Outlander books, but they are fairly well seated, along with the occasional gratuitous sex scene. The payoff for enduring such moments, however, is so much fantastic historical fiction about the Highlander rising in Scotland, the liquor importing business in France circa 1760, life in the Carolina colonies in the decade before the Revolutionary War. Seriously, very enjoyable. Piracy, planting, potatoes to whether famine, dimensional time travel through mystical stone circles, old world witchcraft and new world shamanism…and everyone is slim and struggling to survive. No need for strong diet pills here. And since each book read unabridged is around 40 hours, that’s a whole lot of dishes I can wash.

Life

It’s Snow Joke

  • by Drew

We had a massive snow storm last week and I had to shovel out my driveway. Twice. Once at night and once in the morning. See, my snow blower kept stalling out, and I had no choice. Our driveway is like 100 feet long with a pretty big area by the two garages, so…that pretty much sucked. The snowblower, meanwhile, is at a repair place, probably in need of a new carburetor. No big deal, but we got slammed with another two feet of snow a couple days ago. 3 hours of shovelling and a broken back later, I was ready to start looking at Duck vacation rentals. Maybe for the duration.

Then I took a moment to watch the news (something I usually avoid if possible to keep my blood pressure down) and found that several of our southern states also got snow. So, maybe the Carolinas are not so much the place to be after all. Especially after talking to a friend and coworker in Virginia who had a great story about being snowed in for a weekend by about 6 inches of snow because nobody had a shovel. Nobody even had a scraper for their car down there, so…yeah, roughing it.

On the shovel thing I had to be understanding, though. I mean, it’s not like I have a surfboard and a ton of beach gear in my garage, so…

PS Blog

Sly

  • by Drew

I’ve taken some flack for participating in Sylvester Stallone bashing of late for one reason – lots of people loved The Expendables. Lots of people loved this movie. Hell, I loved this movie. It was no Cobra, but hey, it was pretty good fun.

The thing is, The Expendables is a piece of crap. It is bad, bad, bad. It is a horrible genre piece, and a clear vehicle for a bunch of action heroes, mostly well beyond their prime, to wank on screen. That said, it is so bad that you have to love it. But the difference is crucial. It is not in any way shape or form a good movie. The script makes no sense, it is full of gratuitous side plots that exist only to let various “actors” kick some ass in a thoroughly enjoyable manner that has nothing to do with the ersatz plot, and several characters don’t even belong. Seriously, you could remove at least half of the characters and it would have absolutely no impact on the story.

Nevertheless, if you ignore its lack of cinematic virtue, the ass kicking is truly righteous. So worth it. And even though some of these guys have gone way past the limits of “sensible” plastic surgery, there aren’t too many close ups. Thankfully. For Christ’s sakes, Sylvester Stallone’s facial skin is stretched so thin I can’t believe his cheek bones have ripped through. And I think Dolph Lundgren got confused about Botox and just started shooting crushed ephedrine diet pills into his brow ridge.

By the way, if you haven’t seen Cobra, you should totally Netflix it. It’s simply horribly wonderful. For reals.

PS Blog

The Hunger

  • by Drew

Having just mentioned the imminent demise of a member of the original Marvel Comics super-team, I am reminded of a recent visit to my favorite comic shop. The conversation turned to (no surprise) my recent visit to Chuck E. Cheese. Originally mentioned here, then elaborated on here and here, my favorite summary of the experience was this: if WalMart had a crappy arcade, it would be Chuck E. Cheese. A guy in the shop added this: If you want to see the future of this country, observe the children at Chuck E. Cheese. If you want to see its present state, go to WalMart. Ouch. So true.

And we went on to discuss things that trouble us – yes, comic fans do worry about the global state of affairs, believe it or not. And while we all may wish for a time when a celestial radioactive comet strikes the Earth, destroying the bad people and giving super powers to the intellectually gifted so that hot chicks everywhere will be immediately drawn to them…and they won’t need glasses anymore, we remain ground in the reality that such a comet probably ain’t striking down anytime soon.

So we lament the crappy educational system, the failing economy, and the real danger that there will soon be a massive insulin shortage with so many pre-diabetics texting their way through their 20s. One interesting suggestion came up while talking through the relative positive “plot” points of the classic 80s Rambo trilogy. When the more recent Rambo movie from a couple years ago was brought up, I mentioned the scene where Rambo slams his hand into a bad guy’s throat and pulls out his spinal column. I’m not sure if that made it into the theatrical release, but it was definitely in the trailer.

“Now that’s a way to suppress appetite,” someone said, not really joking. “Go see a Stallone movie.”

PS Blog

Fantastic 4

  • by Drew

Did you know that they’re going to kill off a member of the Fantastic Four like any day now? If you see a comic nerd with a blue and black circle patch or stick that has a 3 in it, that’s what he’s celebrating.

But that’s not what I meant to write about. Actually, it’s the quad phenomenon I learned about when I moved to this particular little community of rural delight. Lotsa quads around here. Big ones, little ones. My oldest son drove his friend’s into their house. Good times.

This was not something on my radar growing up in the suburbs of Manhattan. But around here, boy…they take their quads seriously. There is even some sort of town day when they have a race through a bog. Yup, you try to drive your quad across a field of thick, wet, “looks like sewage” mud. Apparently, just making it across is considered a real victory. 

And some of these vehicles are intense. I like the old school workhorses like Gators, that you might use to carry heavy stuff and workers around in a vineyard or on a large estate or something. But these quads are less workhorse than NASCAR wannabes. Just…bulked up. With the right Polaris accessories you can turn one of these ATVs into a micro-Hummer.

Which would look good parked next to your trailer, or…micro-house.

© 2026 Drew Bancroft. All rights reserved. Totally.