TOP 10 UGLY FISHES:

AND THOSE WERE THE TOP 10 UGLY FISHES.

(Also perhaps the top 1 ugly musics.)

I was rewarded for getting up early to vote yesterday morning by finding this awesome jack o'lantern right down the street from the polls.


Pennsylvania kicked more ass for Obama than I'd had the audacity to hope. Which means... my trip was a waste of time! I could've just not voted! Ha. Okay, I'm going back to Paris this evening. See you folks next time.

Lada gave me two pictures from the KISS concert last night to share with my LJ pals...



( Not for the faint of heart... )

I met my friend Andrea a few months ago through my artist friend Steve back home; Andrea is from Jersey and was going to model for Steve but it didn't work out because she was just on her way to France to study for a couple semesters over here. So Steve, being a nice guy who is interested in making nice things happen, put us in touch with one another just for the heck of it, and we've been hanging out every week or so since then. It's refreshing for me to have an expat friend here who isn't at all jaded; I don't know how I manage to not become jaded myself but I'm glad for it.

Recently Andrea's been trying to cram in lots of interesting Paris experiences because she's on her way back to the States in just a couple days! Hence our trips to the Musée Carnavalet and the sewers and La Defense and Serge Gainsbourg's house and grave, et cetera. I'd expressed to Andrea that I'm always up for anything at all, so she's been including me in a lot of the stuff she's been doing. We'd been discussing doing the Picasso Museum and the Rodin Museum and other cultural stuff like that, so today when she invited me to the Musée Grevin, which I'd never heard of, I expected an art museum or a history museum or something else educational along those lines. Boy was I wrong! It's a big touristy expensive wax museum, and it's awesome!


Putin, Krull, Sarkozy, Bush. We need to make a new Mount Rushmore out of this, please.

( More! )

So that's it, that was our last Parisian adventure together, as Andrea's moving back to New Jersey on Thursday; talk about a step up! Hopefully I'll be able to catch up with her when I'm visiting the States in a few weeks and see how the culture shock is treating her.

A great deal of the people I know on LiveJournal live in the part of the world where I spent my first 29 years, that being the New Jersey/Philadelphia area. Those of you from that neck of the woods are no doubt already familiar with Centralia, Pennsylvania and the underground coal fire that's been burning non-stop for 46 years there. Those of you who haven't heard about it, check it out! The town's mostly abandoned and there are big cracks in the road and you can see smoke and steam coming out sometimes. Pretty neat and kind of spooky.


Well, I thought that was all pretty cool until I just now learned over in dizietsma's journal that there's an enormous underground natural gas fire in Uzbekistan that's been burning for 35 years and is referred to by locals as The Door to Hell.


Wow. Definitely take a look at the rest of the pictures, and the video! Amazing. I want to go.

My friend Andrea is an American student who's finishing up her time in Paris in a month or two, so she's made a project recently of taking in a bunch of Paris sights before she heads home, and she's been kind enough to invite me along for a lot of stuff. Hence our mostly-pointless trip to La Defense last week, wherein we were rewarded with a giant thumb. Yesterday, I joined Andrea for a tour of Le Musée des Égouts de Paris — that is, The Paris Sewer Museum.


Manning Leonard Krull (left), Jean Valjean.
Here's me, either just before or just after throwing the devil horns; the Paris sewers have never rocked harder than when we two glamorous Americans were down there. Something I should have thought of: the sewers are maybe not the best place for a germaphobe like me. My roommate Lada made fun of me before I went out yesterday, "You are wearing a suit and tie to the sewers?" Hey, it's all part of the plan.

It turns out the sewer tour winds around under Paris and spits you out in right in front of the ( Eiffel Tower... )

GOD IN HEAVEN, THOSE EYES, THOSE EYES



Thanks(?), okaree.

When my friend Maura visited a few months ago, she and Alexis got into a spectacularly bizarre conversation about reanimating the deer head in our bathroom and attaching it to this small bench with a leopard-print cover that lives in our living room, and using the deer's three severed hooves (which are towel hooks in the bathroom; no one knows where the fourth one is) for feet. A few weeks later I was very ill and running an insane fever and felt the need to draw the thing...



Alexis went on and on about how angry the creature would be after being brought back to life in such a hideous and undignified form, and he acted it out for us at length. Imagine Bambi here with a gravelly French accent, yelling, "What have you done to me?! Why did you do ziss?! I hate you! I hate you!" Yeah.

Lada just returned to Paris after a week in Sarajevo bearing gifts for me! A Bosnian vampire/pulp/gore/sex comic and a Bosnian lollipop with Dracula on it! It's good to have friends who really understand you.

One fine summer evening in Philadelphia, probably around July of 2007, Steve and I were walking down Broad Street and talking about monsters, which is seriously just about the only thing we ever talk about. We were talking specifically about zombies this time, and the main topic of the conversation was how most zombie movies start out normal and quiet, and then when the zombie menace first becomes apparent to the audience, it's not yet apparent to the extras in the movie, so you've invariably got some poor slob who sees a guy limping/staggering and says, "Gee, mister, are you okay?" and approaches him to help him, and of course the zombie turns and reveals his rotting face and proceeds to eat the guy's brains out. Steve and I were talking about how, as jaded horror film fans, we would never be so foolish, and when the zombie apocalypse finally happens, we'd be ready; we'd be able to recognize that first zombie for what it was, from a distance, well before all hell breaks loose, and immediately formulate a plan to get to safety in plenty of time. There's no way we'd be those suckers in the beginning of the movie.

The next part of the story is almost too good to be true. We'd moved over to 15th Street so Steve could go to this little mini-mart near Spruce Street in order to use the ATM. As we walked and talked (we'd moved on from zombies to some other topic by this point, probably werewolves), we were suddenly slowed down considerably, stuck behind a tall, old, shabbily-dressed man who was walking at a snail's pace and somehow taking up the whole sidewalk. He was trudging along with some difficulty, with a sort of twitching motion to his gait, and holding his shoulders at odd angles, all of this probably due to some malady, or maybe just due to being really, really old. We weren't in a hurry, so we slowed down and strolled along behind the guy for a minute, continuing our conversation about whatever. But then Steve suddenly interrupted himself and very quietly said to me, trying to sound casual, "Uh, is this, err, do you think this is that situation we were talking about a minute ago?" And then we were both like HOLY SHIT. We continued to pace the guy, but backed off a little and watched him very carefully as we walked. Finally we were nearing the mini-mart and I figured we'd part ways with the guy there, but no! He turned and went into the mini-mart ahead of us! I asked Steve if he was still going to go in to use the ATM. He said yes, but his trepidation was tangible. I told him he was insane and that there was no way in hell I was going in there. So I waited out front and kept an eye on the big glass panes of the storefront, but the store was crowded with people and cluttered with big displays of merchandise, and I lost sight of both Steve and the maybe-zombie. I watched and waited, expecting to see huge splatters of blood appear on the glass and panicked people smashing their faces and bodies against the windows, trying to flee like wild animals. I hated the idea of having to kill Steve once he was infected, but I knew he'd want me to.

A very, very long minute passed, and I was startled by my phone vibrating in my pocket. It was a text message from Steve, from inside the store! I anxiously flipped open the clamshell and read the message:

"do they like oreos?"

I haven't done a stuff-I-did-over-the-weekend post in years. Because in France, I didn't really have weekends; most of my friends and I were on irregular schedules and we just did stuff whenever. So this last weekend was sort of my first actual weekend in a long time.

Friday morning I took the Chinatown bus down to Philly. Five minutes after my arrival, I heard somebody behind me say, "Hey, it's Manning Krull!" I turned around and saw a lady I'd never met before, but whom I vaguely recognized as a 100x100-pixel LiveJournal usericon. It was phedrang! What a great way to start my visit to Philly.

I went to my old job for the afternoon to say hi to everybody and try to solicit some freelance projects, then spent the evening with Ben. We got bored and drove to Ocean City, and we walked up and down the quiet, empty, gloomy boardwalk. It was awesome. We saw some sort of big animal running along the darkened beach at an alarming speed, and it must have been a big dog, but it sure didn't look like it. Too fast to be a dog, too small to be Cthulhu.

I slept over Ben's place, I forget what I did Saturday afternoon, and then Saturday night Steve and I went to Exhumed Films and watched two horrible old movies: Grizzly and Day of the Animals. In the former, a giant grizzly bear (represented onscreen by only its giant fake paw most of the time, due to budget restraints) knocks a horse's head clean off with one swat. When the filmmakers wanted to show more than just the bear's paw, they had to film a real bear and just pretend it was giant-sized. When they just showed the bears paws walking along the ground, it was a black bear, and when they showed the bear standing up, it was a light brown grizzly bear.

Day of the Animals should have been called Day of Leslie Nielsen, because he eventually succumbs to the same "mutant virus" that's making all the animals kill people, and he subsequently goes crazy and murders some kid by stabbing him with a stick, and then he tries to bang the kid's girlfriend. He also hollers a lot. Then he wrestles a grizzly bear and loses.

Afterwards, I crashed at Steve and Trish's house in Jersey, and then Sunday afternoon Steve took me to a Shao-Lin kung fu show in Philly as a belated birthday present. It was insane. Besides all the crazy weapons demonstrations and choreographed fighting, there were all sorts of preposterous feats of endurance, like one guy who, no lie, took these little cables with hooks on the end, stuck the non-hook ends into his eyes (like, under his eyelids, I presume) and then attached the hooks to two buckets of water and picked them up. By his eyes. Another dude, you're not even going to believe this, took off his belt, stuck his hands down his pants and tied his belt around his junk (they actually brought up some poor guy from the audience to look down the dude's pants and confirm that, yes, the belt is tied securely around his junk) and then he picked up a giant bucket of water using just his junk. How any of this helps defend the temple from invaders is beyond me.

Steve and I were two of maybe ten non-Chinese people in a sold-out auditorium of about 400 seats. Steve actually got called up to help with another stunt where the youngest member of the troupe, a kid of about twelve, laid down and had a plastic bowl smooshed onto his stomach like a big suction cup, and then Steve and one or two other monks picked up the kid by the bowl. Oh yeah, and another guy threw a needle through a pane of glass to pop a balloon on the other side. And then some guy stood on his head and jumped up a little set of stairs, with just his head. Man.

So, monsters on the beach on a cold November night, bad late night horror movies festivals, and kung fu guys picking shit up by their eyes and/or cocks. Help me remember here — is this what America is like every weekend?