Halloween Schmalloween.

Halloween is just around the corner!

The vast majority of Australians do not celebrate Halloween. Trick or treating is virtually unheard of. If you don't have small children, who might do some Halloween-themed coloring-in at school, you probably wouldn't even notice it coming and going. So I don't have the cultural connection to it or the emotional history that Americans who've grown up in this tradition might have.

As I remarked some time ago on the Caped Tirader's blog, I like candy (understatement of the year?) but costumes etc. are a bit too much effort for me.

So I propose a new holiday (I can hear the retailers salivating now):

Laze-O-Ween.

It's the lazy version of Halloween! Here, let me show you by comparison:

Halloween: Door-to-door traipsing around the neighbourhood
Laze-O-Ween: Lying prone in the comfiest chair in your house. Preferably a La-Z-Boy - they'd be the perfect Laze-O-Ween sponsors!

Halloween: Elaborate and potentially expensive costumes require thought and effort.
Laze-O-Ween: No costumes, you just wear your undies and a wifebeater. You're in your own home after all.

Halloween: You must buy large amounts of crowd-pleasing, individually wrapped candies.
Laze-O-Ween: You buy however much you want of the candy you like best.

Halloween: American culture dictates that you must give the aforementioned candy away to complete strangers just because they knock on your door and they're so little and adorable in their teeny weeny costumes!!!
Laze-O-Ween: You turn the TV up to drown out the sound of the doorbell, consume all the candy yourself over the course of the evening and fall asleep in a delicious sugar haze, nestled amongst the discarded wrappers.

See? Laze-O-Ween is much better!

What Halloween tradition would you improve with a Laze-o-Ween twist?

Namaste, dirtbags.

So the other day I misread Yoga Co-op as Yoga Cop.

Yoga Cop would make a great sitcom.

A big-city detective, retired after some traumatic experience in the line of duty, opens a yoga studio to try to find some inner peace. But after a typo in his newspaper ad, people keep coming to him to solve crimes and he always ends up using yoga to do it. Like maybe he meditates and centers his mind so that the solution can come to him, or he subdues the bad guy by twisting him into some pretzelly position, or discovers the missing bullet casings while doing a quick downward facing dog at the crime scene. Hilarity ensues.

Thomas Haden Church would make an excellent Yoga Cop. He would always be butting heads with the sassy Latina detective who's taken over his old beat. His yoga studio partners would be an elderly burnt-out hippie and a ditzy new-agey girl that would be his love interest.

Would you watch Yoga Cop? Leave your casting and plot suggestions in the comments!

I made something pretty! (updated)

So remember when I said I would create an award for G Henry's word verification game?

Well he announced the winner (international man of mystery Cooper Green) and posted my fishy little award for all to see!

UPDATE:
Not only that, but Cooper very kindly declared that he nominated me for my own Straight Pimpin' Award since it was through my pimping efforts that he found G Henry's blog, Goldfish Broth, in the first place.

I was stupidly confused at first and thought he meant he was nominating me for the award I had designed for G Henry.

It's a good thing I'm pretty.

UPDATE UPDATE:
Somehow in the confusion I managed to coerce poor Cooper into creating a delicious response to my Big Fish Award, both are now happily ensconced in my sidebar!

I don't know what you heard about me...

I just invented an award, y'all!

May I present the Straight Pimpin' Award for Excellence in the Field of Showcasing Other People's Excellence.


I must stress that in this sense, pimping does not refer to touting the services of ladies of negotiable affection*, but rather to the blogosphere sense of the word, which is the promotion of another blog via your own.

Basically, this award is for bloggers who have alerted me to other awesome bloggers. Now this only works if you like the blogs they introduce you to, but I must say I have found some of my most favorite blogs this way.

This award is kind of memey, but only if you want it to be. What that means is, I will award it to people who I consider to be excellent blog-pimps, but:

1. you may nominate yourself or another blogger by commenting here with a link to a relevant pimptastic post.

2. If you are a winner, you may choose to pass on the award to other pimps. But please let me know (with a link) if you do.

The winners of the inaugural Straight Pimpin' Award for Excellence in the Field of Showcasing Other People's Excellence are:

the girl with the pink teacup for this post on BILFs, with the promise of more pimping to follow...

katrocket for this post which pimps some of my favorite bloggers - I'm pretty sure it's how I discovered the third winner...

and Eric the Bored NeoClassical Guy for this ultra-subtle pimpage which introduced me to the newest addition to my blogroll!



*Thank you, Terry Pratchett.

Somebody please make this now. Kthx. UPDATED. AGAIN.

So the other night as I was drifting off to sleep I had the best idea evs.

Luckily for you I hopped out of bed and quickly made barely legible notes on the subject so I could blog about it.

Prepare to have your mind blown...

They should make an IM program (like iChat, or whatever PC users use) with a little paint application attached so you could draw messages.

It would be especially awesome if it could be in real time, sort of like sketchfu.com, so your buddy could see as you drew.

If anyone can invent this, I bet God can (are you there God? It's me, Soda & Candy).

UPDATE: Rudimentary Googling reveals that scriblink.com seems pretty close to what I'm after even though it is a website not a program but I haven't actually tried it yet. Anyone want to test it out and let me know what they think?

Update Update: Fine. It's already been invented by like a million people. Lucky I had no idea how to go about making it so I can't be disappointed at the millions I missed out on making. Sheesh.

Pimping and Low Grade Extortion.

Check out the ridiculously awesome* loungey header I made as a present for everyone's favorite knight, Words... words... words....

Maybe it's not as sexy as the portrait I did for my homegirl Vegetable Assassin, which she turned into her header (I'm crap at drawing boys). But let's face it, his old header needed to be put out of its pixelated misery.

Let me make this clear - I don't do these by request. I'll do it if:

1. I feel like doing something
and
2. I like you / your blog
and
3. You deserve it
and
4. I have a good idea

or
5. You will pay me. Especially if you would like to pay me exorbitant sums. Those are my favorite kind of sums.

Feel free to leave job offers in the comments : )


*As a wise man once said, it ain't trickin' if you got it.

sweet tweets

A new addition to the Soda & Candy family was recently discovered by the Husband: there is a little nest full of adorable baby birds snugly tucked up in the crazily overgrown flowering vine that dominates our back fence.

"Baby birds? I seen one." I hear you snort derisively.

But these baby birds are unlike any you've seen before, because not only do they cheep and chirp, they also tweet.

If you can't be arsed going to their Twitter page, you can follow their status with the handy RSS feed I just added to the top of the right hand column over there. Yes, I am a technological genius.

Perhaps the baby birds will try to make friends with some of you via Twitter, but it might take them a while. They can barely hold their own heads upright, so Twitter is bound to be a bit of a challenge.