This Friday, let us be as free as the weather here in the Heart of Dixie. It was lushly low 70s and breezy yesterday. Today it’s dark and stormy and raining and getting colder and we’re supposed to have some heavy thunderstorms with something like 60 mph winds. Then, when those are over, we might get snow! Who knows what we will have become by Monday.

Double super bonus points for digging and naming the secret references.

• Marry, sir: Bacon stupidity. Mike J. Nelson, of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax fame has spent the entire month of February eating nothing but bacon.
  

  Now for the fine print: “Bacon” shall hereafter refer to the cured and smoked fatty cuts of pork, either back, side or belly. In other words “American bacon”. No “Canadian bacon”, which is really just lunchmeat. No pork chops. No turkey bacon. No “tofacon” or any such horror. Just bacon.

  No condiments allowed. No syrups, or hot sauces, or pureed vegetables in the form of ketchup. No sauces at all. Just nature’s finest bacon, all by its dignified self.

  I am making allowances for the following beverages: beer, wine, martinis and water. No juices, no V8, nothing that could be construed as “healthy”. This is somewhat arbitrary, I grant you, but one bit of madness at a time, is my reasoning.

  Discussion questions:

  1. Do you think the martinis have olives? Do you suppose he eats them or are they just for looks?
  2. For those of you who are Joel fans, and not generally inclined to enjoy Mike, does this help you have more respect for him?
  3. What food would you eat exclusively for a whole month?
• Moreover, everybody say “Hiiiii, Kira!” Y’all, if you get the opportunity to hang out with Kira, do so. It is awesome.
• Secondarily, 1001 things to do with bacon. What? Like you can ever have too much bacon? That’s just crazy talk.
• Sixth and lastly, EA and Spicy Horse are making a sequel to American McGee’s Alice, one of the most fun shooters ever. They’ve been claiming it will become a movie for awhile now, too (with Sarah Michelle Gellar as Alice), but I’m not sure that will ever happen.
• Thirdly, Alan Tudyk will play Alpha in Whedon’s Dollhouse. Subsequent rumors for which I don’t have links have led me to believe that this might be a one-shot. Which would suck. But it’s better than a no-shot. Am I right? Did I mention you all need to watch Dollhouse so that I can see Alan Tudyk? I love him. I’m counting on you. I have no problem hunting you down to personally, actively count on you so as to prove my love. Thanks!

  Also, I really wish I were able to actually link to the news page there at Alan Tudyk Dot Net. What is up with that? Are they using frames!?

• And, to conclude: Primroses (Primula acaulis) grow in Alabama, or so several websites tell me. I am in search of the name of a big flowering bush/shrub that grows in the parks along Highland Avenue. I start to bloom about two weeks before the Forsythias did. It’s tall, but wide and sort of rounded. It has little white flowers, slightly rounded, with pretty little pistils sticking out. The leaves are slightly rounded, too. Most importantly: THEY SMELL LIKE FROOT LOOPS. I AM NOT KIDDING. Are these just some huge-ass primroses or is it something else?

Y’all, I may have shot my wad last week, vis as vis freeing it for all. That’s a lot of links. This week I have proportionately fewer. As in, one? Look at ArcAttack performing the Doctor Who theme on Tesla coils:

Honu Girl just sent me that. Is that not the coolest thing you have ever seen? Or at least seen this week? I know, right!?

Here’s an awesome Rorschach Wanted Poster. In less awesome Watchmen news, Hollywood Elsewhere has a review from an early press-and-studio-exec screening and the news is apparently not good. I’m not going to quote any of it, mostly because I’m busy sticking my fingers in my ears, closing my eyes and singing la la la over and over again.

Did you watch Dollhouse last week. I did. I thought, “Meh.” We had fun playing the which-other-Whedon-character is this card. And watching Negotiator Echo act like the Buffy Bot. But mostly, meh. Tonight’s episode is supposed to be better. We’ll see.

No, I still haven’t watched any Heroes. I know I need to. It’s apparently Sylarier than ever. I’m going to try really hard to do that this weekend. Really, I was explaining it to someone yesterday, I feel like my boyfriend cheated on me, and then, when confronted, was a total dick about it. And now he’s asking me to take him back, without even promising he won’t do it again, and everybody’s telling me, “Sarah, you should totally give him another chance. Just one more. It’ll be better this time, I promise.” That’s the feeling I’m trying to get up over.

What is cool with you?

Hey y’all. Sorry about that. My grandpa died, so there were days in Iowa, and memorial services, and many cousins of all varieties and both sides of my family. It was a good service, as these things go. And it was very much his time, so we were all pleased that he’s finally at peace and not suffering anymore.

So shall we free for all? I’m still not feeling as whiz-bang as I normally do, but stick with me. I’m also trying to go from zomg-family-travel-airport to getting myself ready to run The Mercedes Half Marathon on Sunday. I don’t know how I imagined I would feel coming up on race day, but I didn’t anticipate it being melancholy. I got a couple runs in while I was in Iowa and I’m confident I can cover the distance. So I’m concentrating on working myself back into a love of running mindset, trying to focus on the pleasure of it. I suspect I will do some serious singing of “I Love the Whole World” before the race is over.

Topics? Topics!

• A behind the scenes look at creating and filming Rorschach’s mask. Whimper. Whimperwhimperwhimper. And if that weren’t enough hyperventilating and biting down on the heel of my hand, look at this picture of Walter. They’re trapped in there with HIM!
• State Representative Mark Miloscia (D-Washington) wants to tax porn! To the tune of 18.5%. Now you may have just become very worried that some people you care about, Doc, for instance, might be caught in this odious piece of legislation. But just remember, the internet is for porn. And if you’re paying for it, you’re doing it wrong.
• 
  Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (The Classic Regency Romance – Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!) is a real book that is really coming out in April and that we will all have to really read. Holy shit, y’all:

  “It quickly became obvious that Jane [Austen] had laid down the blueprint for a zombie novel,” said Grahame-Smith, a television comedy writer. “Why else in the original should a regiment arrive on Lizzie Bennet’s doorstep when they should have been off fighting Napoleon? It was to protect the family from an invasion of brain-eaters, obviously.”

  From then on it was easy to imagine Bennet and her four sisters as zombie slayers, trained since childhood in the deadly arts of Chinese kung fu, and Fitzwilliam Darcy as a promoter of the socially superior ninja skills of Japan. Together they stand bonnet to epaulette against a plague of cannibalis-tic interlopers from the accursed city of London.
  Times Online

  What other books do you think could be rendered awesomer with the addition of zombies. I mean, I know, “all of them!” But which do you want to see?

• From Iowahawk: Scientist Discover Largest Number Ever. Scientists named the number “stimulus” and describe it like so:
  

  “The number itself is incomprehensible by human minds, and can only be theoretically understood in a fractional parallel universe which we refer to as the DC dimension,” said Brossard. “The best way to understand a stimulus is to imagine a dollar sign followed by a packed string of hexidecimal nanodigits, wound into a triple helix, woven into a dodecahedron, and stacked on top of one another. Now imagine you were a black hole on the far edge of the universe, trying to escape the stimulus at 30 times the speed of light. The stimulus would still catch up to you and ram your black hole with such furious, repeated force that it would cause your entire reality itself to collapse.”

• And finally, fulfilling our Bacon and/or Booze requirements for a FfAF, have a Glow in the Dark Bacon Shirt. Just don’t wear it near the zombies. Zombies love bacon and things that glow! And maybe, like the rest of us, Mr. Darcy.
• And last, but not least, don’t forget to watch Dollhouse tonight. See Eliza Dushku, Faith the Vampire Slayer, as Echo the EveryGirl. See Amy Acker as Fred Burkle Dr. Claire Saunders. See Mark Shepherd as a guy called Tanaka, which more than any of these Whedon-verse-omnicasts messes with my head. “Tanaka raves about this guy!” And that guy! That Hoban Washburne is played by Alan Tudyk who, according to ComicCon press is set to have a recurring role on Dollhouse. So, when I said, “don’t forget to watch Dollhouse” what I meant was WATCH DOLLHOUSE OR I’LL AXE MURDER YOU BECAUSE I WANT ALAN TUDYK ON MY TV ALL THE TIME. Thank you!!!

How free do you feel? Breezy? Vaguely liberated? Skynyrd-level FREEEEE as a bird now? Today’s topics are all over the place. Pick and choose and gnaw and take, you know, air guitar solos as you like. And if you want to talk about something else, let’s talk about something else! We are, after all, free. Cos, you know, I rule things with such an iron fist the rest of the week.

• House votes to delay digital TV transition by four months. Whatev, kids. If they’re not ready now, they’re not going to be ready in four months. They’re not going to be ready ever. I think someone called “esp1954″ said it best when s/he said:
  more animals
  Also I am inherently suspicious of people who are all fist-poundingly against this. I wonder, if they were alive a hundred years ago, would they get all het up about not using new-fangled telephones when, by gawd, the USPS could get a letter to grandma in Missouri in just three days?!
• Robert Bork on Martinis. This is an old, nice little essay with an obvious political bent. But you can get past that, I’m sure, for a loving ode to gin:
  

  No, there is only one drink that conveys conservative correctness, spreads warmth and courage throughout one’s soul, and has the additional merit of being the most delicious cocktail ever invented. I refer, of course, to the dry martini, a distinctively American invention, which Bernard DeVoto called the “supreme American gift to world culture.”

  I do agree with him that there are only three gins to choose from. Skillzy says I’m a troglodyte for preferring Tanqueray over Bombay Sapphire, but I like its brightness. I agree with him (Bork, I mean, but also Skillzy), vehemently, that anything made with vodka is not a martini. If it is not gin and vermouth, it is not a martini. Get it right! I disagree with him that olives are superfluous. A good martini needs at least one olive. The olive declares, “I am drinking a martini. A real one. I am sophisticated, a witty conversationalist, and a tiger in the sack.” My prefered proportion is 7:1, shaken for a count of 100, at least.

• A humongous fucking snake! A Titanoboa. Could have been 43 feet long and eaten whole crocodiles. I cannot wait until they make this into a movie!
• Finally, for those of you in Birmingham, Leonard Nimoy is giving a lecture tonight on his photography series, The Full Body Project. I would very much like to go, but I’m not certain I’ll have the time. I’m really going to try to be there, because I want very much to hear his thoughts about The Full Body Project (link NSFW, for artistic female nudes). The images I’ve seen from it are beautiful, sensual, sometimes erotic, and so very joyful.