Weekend Edition

I am so totally full of, um, content this week that there's extra content spilling over into the weekend. Here are a few bits and bobs that we never quite got to this week.

There's an Election On!

Voters in two small rural states have been making important decisions about where political donors will be sending their checks for literally the next few weeks. The race is generally
characterized as being between an highly competant and charismatic man with modest government experience, whom everybody seems to like, and an highly competant and charismatic woman with modest government experience, whom some people seem to like but whom other people seem to hate with a startling intensity, but for no particular reason. Also, there are apparently Republicans.

I will bring you further updates as events unfold.

Boring Postcards: The Dirty Little Secret

Karmasartre remarked in his Thursday Quiz response that he had never received a boring postcard from Boring, Oregon, and I immediately felt a sense of deep, gnawing, guilt and shame. Why? Well, longtime readers may recall that Mrs.5000 and I actually have a boring Boring postcard in our collection. I bragged about it in this post.

But if you just followed that link, you may now find yourself confused and disoriented. "That does not look like the rolling landscape of the Boring area," you might be saying, if you are a resident of the Beaver State. Or, you might notice that the card looks suspiciously like the second card from last Wednesday's post, which is clearly from Glacier National Park, in Montana. That's right, gentle readers. Back in August, I posted the wrong postcard. I've known it all this time, and could never admit it. It has haunted me. I'm so sorry.

Here, at last, is the REAL boring Boring postcard:

Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for Boo and Her Monkey

As far as I have been able to reconstruct, the story goes something like this: Frequent L&TM5K commenter Boo received a monkey puppet in the mail as an unexpected gift. She scratched her head, wondered "what the hell do I do with this?" and came to the only really rational conclusion. She decided she would design, direct, film, and edit a online television-style show, with the monkey puppet as the star.

I am not sure if The Fillip Monkee Show will have universal appeal, but I am kind of mesmerized. I think it's a scream. Fillip is an impressively well-developed and consistent character, and it is amazingly easy to take on his point of view. He is perfectly candid about the fact that he is a puppet attached to "the lady's" arm, that he doesn't eat or wear clothes and spends most of his time in a bag, but somehow that doesn't make him any harder to identify with.

Fillip is kind of an Alexis de Tocqueville to human life, curious about almost everything that is going on in the strange place he finds himself and doing his best to report back to his public. He is very earnest, but wears his enthusiasm on his, um, sleave -- he can't help but tell us how excited he is about the topic of the day. Like another naive traveller of film, Borat, he goes out among the people, who vary greatly in their ability to conduct a graceful conversation with a monkey puppet. There is not a lick of mean-spiritedness in Fillip Monkee, though, and he is not trying to trick people into revealing themselves at their worst; this makes him for my money both a lot more interesting and a lot more funny than Borat.

The Fillip Monkee Show is a non-professional, homemade production; judged as such, it is startlingly well-produced. Kudos to Boo for undertaking such an elaborate project, apparently just for the hell of it. I think many L&TM5K readers will find the Fillip Monkee Show pretty damn amusing.

BeardQuest '08

Inspired by d's increasingly stunning mane, and more to the point provoked by his direct challenge, I am now officially starting my first winter beard in six years. I may even go goatee. As of this posting, I am about 10 hours in. Wish me luck; I'll report back.

And Finally,

By special reader request, it's The Beer Quiz! That's right! Identify these five beer brands, and win -- not a thing! Not so much as a virtual comma! But nevertheless, you can submit your answers in the comments if you are so inclined.

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