Greenings (again) Earthers

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We are here once more to report on our findings after a thorough review of your video records, or, as thorough as we could manage after Klaarg’s run in with an electronic parking meter that he thought was a uni-wheeled utility robot, which made him late with the pizza. I suppose also that we need to reconvert our titling as so few of your records exist on video anymore. We should probably swap over to utilizing the phrase digital record but we do so love tape and film, no matter what James Cameron or George Lucas say.

In any point, we were discussing–Klaarg, Hmmmenmmmenefra, Decarlo (don’t ask), and myself–your penchant for trying to envision a deeper and darker future for yourself. Your pundits call this a post apocalyptic shadow. We call it a lack of vision or, simply, a species wide depression. We think, perhaps, that you are beginning to actually see how limited you are as a species and you are not encouraged by it. Thus, all of these post apocalyptic films that are dark, depressing and, essentially, expressing your special suicide. Wait, because we know some of you will misread the previous sentence we need to expand. We do not mean special as in different or nice, but special as in, related to species. Put the emphasis on the first e and make it long. Okay, now that we have gotten that out of the way perhaps you can explain to us why, in all of your apocalyptic movies, the first thing your species seems to do, post apocalyptically speaking, is destroy what little useful stuff actually remains?

We think there may actually be some kind of religious aspect to this but we can’t really explore that vein due to the loss of Bla’haauggh, our religious mythologist, who stepped into the sonic shower and turned the setting to dust instead of exfoliate. We have fond memories of Bla’haauggh and see him whenever we go to a zero gravity state (It’s really hard to get all the dust out of the mother ship, no matter how hard you try and it’s not like Klaarg will let us let loose a Roomba).

So, here we are, with a pile of somewhat dusty DVDs that we’ve viewed and studied in order to get some glimpse into why you do the things you do. Luckily we got a good bunch this time and learned a lot. For example, in “Resident Evil: Afterlife we learned that it’s not a good idea to let big corporations run things–at least on Earth, since Interstellar Trans runs pretty much everything to do with bi-dimensional, extra-solar voyaging from our end of the universe. But, we are talking of you and not us. In this documentary we learn that your phrasing of being a corporate drone might be truer than we had thought since many of the corporate employees in this video were not just drone like but downright zombie like. Sure, Milla Jovovich does her best to lighten things up but remember we are dealing with a plague of zombies so how much lighter can things get? Still, she tries. Perhaps she should shower more?

Monsters Special Edition + Digital Copy [Blu-ray] is not so much about monsters as it is about how silly you Earthers get when you take a simple idea and let it run away with you. In this video we are supposed to believe that one of your own spacecraft returned to your planet and somehow scattered alien life across a large part of Mexico which, in an oddly prescient review of the whole Arizona mess, caused Americans to build a huge wall between the two countries. Well, we have to tell you, alien life does not just fall from the sky willy nilly. Nor does any self respecting sentient just jump onto the first probe that comes along. You have a lot to learn.

As we mentioned earlier, and as we mention again because we know of your tiny ability to retain information in a linear form, we lost our religious mythologist so we have been making do as best we can. Hmmmenmmmenefra has been filling in admirably we must admit but we still wonder what gaps there might exist in the knowledge that a sustenance provocator who was formerly an interstellar radio manipulator (he lost his calling when everyone switched to cable) brings to the effort. Still, when all you have is an ex-communicator you go with it. So, while we are sure there is meaning that we are missing we are also sure that none of that is here. Consider what we gleaned, for example, from The Last Lovecraft: Relic of Cthulhu. We found your Cthulhu religion very reminiscent of the slithering overlords of sector A3B. The main difference being that the sentients in that sector did not survive the worship demands put upon them while you, as a species, still seems pretty oblivious. Ah well, perhaps ignorance is bliss.

We had more to say. We almost always do. But, if we put it all in one report they would expect us back sooner and we’re afraid we might miss something really important. You will produce something really important as a species sooner or later, won’t you? Do it soon or we’ll miss it. Thanks. And when in doubt send Spooze.

Where in the World is Klaarg?

Cover of Not of This Earth

We have received many missives from you Earthers asking about Klaarg’s whereabouts and all wondering the same thing–where in the world is he? We hate to inform you that Klaarg is not in the world at all. Nor is he on it. We know we have told you all this in the past but we figure you have simply all acted as Earthers and the moment you received the information you became interested in something else and promptly forgot it. So, we will inform you once more. Klaarg is navigator. He holds a certificate from the academy and while many of us wonder exactly how that happened, the fact remains that he has one.  So, he spends a great deal of time with the mothership. We are not quite sure what he is doing there, but, then, so long as he knows what buttons to push when we need to get from here to there who are we to complain?

Needful to say, Klaarg spends a lot of time fusioning here and warping there. We imagine he would spend more time with us if he had not lost the manual to the mothership. It’s a Mark IV, and while much of it is automated you still have to remember what to push, when to push it, and what all the numbers on all those readouts mean. It’s a lot easier with the manual. But, we don’t have one anymore. We think it was lost in the video disk fusing event that occurred one of your solar cycles ago. Klaarg was behind it all. We told him that the particle accelerator was not a good substitute for the microwave for making popcorn but he had to try anyway. Frankly, we are not sure what we actually had to eject into the sun that day but we believe it contained the full set of Highlander dvd’s, 29.5 ounces of cheesy popcorn, 2 sets of 3D glasses (the good ones with multiple and variable eye slots), a goldfish, 2 linear feet of Osmodium, a pear in a partridge tree, and, evidently, the manual to the mothership. There was also 35.6 ounces of additional matter, and we will probably never know exactly what it was. Could have been dark matter for all we know.

So, Klaarg is not here.  However, if you are missing a robot then he was probably there. He hates them you know.

He did leave this report on a batch of videos he watched the last time he was out and about. Or, as you Canadian humans say, oot and aboot. Yes, indeed, we are learning another human language. Eh?

“Not Of This Earth (1988)(Roger Corman’s Cult Classics) is an example of why we find you Earthers so amusing. So, explain to us why this Roger Corman would take the time to actually remake a movie that he had already made–and do it just as poorly? Sure, it has your Traci Lords in it and an alien whom we don’t really recognize but then we do not know everyone, and some small amount of humor, but this is like stepping in dog poop. Sure, it’s amusing the first time but not enough to bear repeating.  In any case, Lords is a nurse who gets a job taking care of an old human who turns out to be a blood drinking alien.  Why you think aliens want your blood is besides us.  With all that you ingest it is pretty toxic stuff.

For our second entry, we are again confused. “Highlander (Director’s Cut) [Blu-ray] is another example of your duplicity. This is the director’s cut, and yet it is pretty much the same as the non-director’s cut. Same idea: there can be only one, except when there are more than one; same silly notion that even in modern times you should be slicing people up with big knives instead of using the fusion weapons that your deity gave you; and somehow everyone pretty much just ignores the collateral damage that is occurring all about. We are pretty sure that if we landed the mothership on one of your buildings you would be upset about it, or at least notice.  Maybe not, you do spend a great deal of time looking inward.

And yet, again, you try to confuse us. This is “V: The Complete First Season and yet it is not since the complete first season was a decade earlier in 2001. And, yet again, you are recreating your history. Why are you showing this invasion all over again. They came once and they were not that interesting. They helped control the rodent problem for a short while and then you managed to get them to leave. Why dvd them coming again? It is almost as if you Earthers think that you can re-imagine yourselves to a better present. It can’t be done. Have we not had the time discussion with you? Perhaps you were not listening.

Lastly, and finally, a film that we can relate to. “Altered States We are big fans of altered states, what with our being amorphously transcellular. So, we watched this with interest. We watched four times in a row. We could not help ourselves. We kept losing consciousness. While the concepts are interesting and the acting is good, the pacing is tediously slow. We begin to wonder whether the title had more to do with the director’s frame of mind than the movie content. We will never know most likely as you humans have probably reinvented that particular story a couple of dozens of times by now.

So, that’s it.  Until next time, keep your robots indoors because Klaarg is out there.

I’m a Doctor, Jim, not an Operator

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We use the words of your very own Doctor McCoy from your very own Star Trek Documentaries (although how you are managing this when you can not even get out of your own gravity well still remains a mystery to us but it may explain why they never really seemed to want to return to Earth). But we egress. We were on the train, traveling to a conference in your capital of cities (where the people who live there, in the center of your self-proclaimed representative system of management have no representation). We egress again. We were on your mass transportation system Amtrak (which neither has much mass, galactically speaking, nor does it really transport all that well according to their inability to get one of these trains anywhere on time) Egressing once more. Sorry.

It was thus that we were presented with the inevitable proof that all young species must pass through a number of states prior to self-actualization. Of course, nuclear destruction, environmental disaster, asteroidal interruption, planetary disruption, and cometary impact can all delay this progress and, in many cases, severely retard it. This has happened to you previously which explains why you are so retarded now. But, once again, we egress. We happened to read an article in one of your advanced medical journals about robotic surgery. Klaarg was not with us, which explains why we were on the train to begin with, so we were free to read whatever we wanted to. We did not get the chance to read much of the article but surely the title captured the essence. And so, we wondered, why you would create a surgery for a thing that you do not yet have. Should you not have created the robots first? Sure you have Roomba and that one that cleans your swimming pools and those ones that build your individual transport devices. But these all require a great deal of human interaction before they can function in even a very rudimentary level. So, the fact that you have invented surgery for robots prior to actually having created robots is a definite sign that you are still in the confused stage of your advancement. This was further brought to our attention on the train itself as person after person spoke into their mobile communicators, saying over and over such things as “are you there?” “can you hear me?” “Hello?” “Hello?” Over and over we tell you. And loudly. Need we remind you that you had pretty much perfected telephones in the 1990’s? Then, for some reason you decided to make it all better. Now, instead of the crystal clear, world-wide communication you had in 1995 you have returned to the scratchy, intermittent, poorly receptive communication you had in 1957. Go figure.

But we egress once again when we are really here to administer our wisdom about your most recent video releases. To wit, and to whither, let us share with you our thoughts–no scratchiness or intermittentness involved.

Klaarg did not pick these so it is somewhat ironic that there is not a robot amongst them. Just the way the universe works it seems. And speaking of such let us begin by delving into Back to the Future: 25th Anniversary Trilogy (+ Digital Copy) Now, we should like to point out that this may very well be the future that this video wants to go back to given that this originally came out 25 years in your past. We need to tell you though, that time travel is pretty much impossible. Too many contradictions. if you knew that yesterday’s lunch would give you heartburn then you would go back to order something different which begins a causality chain, often involving waitresses who are destined to become nuclear physicists but won’t because of your missing tip money, with dire consequences. So, sorry, no traveling in time. Especially for you as a species. You can barely negotiate the now, never mind the past (again) or the yet to be future.

Okay, so Victoria, who is a different Victoria from before (no time travel involved) wants to destroy Bella who is in love, kinda, sorta, with Edward who is actually dead. But, Bella also seems to have the hots for Jacob who is friends with Edward, sort of, and also does not like Victoria, either this new one or the old one. Yes, that is right, we actually watched “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (Two-Disc Special Edition) We were confused and dismayed and nonplussed. In short it made all of our brains hurt just trying to figure out who was who and what they were about and why we should care.

Look, we enjoy a shoot-em-up involving blue beings as much as the next species. But we like to see some realism as well. We have been all over the galaxy (when we are not stuck way out here in the empty spiral arms with you) and we know a lot of blue species and, for the most part they are pretty sapient and use it diligently and that’s only speaking of the aquatic ones. “Avatar (Three-Disc Extended Collector’s Edition + BD-Live) [Blu-ray] kind of presents us with a dilemma since we were not sure who we were supposed to root for. We did not care all that much for the greedy humans who were seeking out their impossible mineral. But we also did not care so much for the blue people who did not seem to be all that in touch with their planet or with what was going on around them. It may have been pretty to look at, assuming you like to watch genocide and big explosions, but it fell far short on the meter of sentience.

Full circle have we come as we close with “Doctor Who: The Complete Fifth Series. Let us state once more that time travel is not a good idea, besides it being against the law. We did like the adventures a great deal although we did not know a single species involved which makes us a bit suspicious about some of the locations. Remember, we are pretty familiar with the galaxy in this area. We think we will have to look at more of this Doctor’s travels before we can make a full and final determination about its credibility.

And, now, it is most apt to egress a final time.

Welcomings for Inputs

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If we had known that so many of you would have responded to our previous report we might have taken more care to not say as much as we did. Too many instants have passed since then and the laws of temporal dynamics forbid us from rectifying it. Klaarg is still on probation for the last time we broke those laws and, even though we are stuck way out here in the spiral arm and probably safe from any interventions, we do not feel it is worth it to take a chance. They are out there you know. So, since we can not return in time to take another stance let us instead work to resolve some of your Earther issues.
*First, we know nothing about black helicopters. We have a Mark IV mothership and use the shuttles when we need transport. We would not even know which buttons to push to close the doors of these black helicopters never mind find the ones to make them move.
*Second, we thank all of you who volunteered for probing but we are finished with that arm of our research. We were only allowed to probe a very specific number of Earthers as part of our studies and those had to be limited to very specific parameters concerning intelligence and geography. So, please, read our communication membranes: No New Probing.
*Third, we need to remind you that we know nothing of robots.  We can not tell you about robots from your future, robots from your past, robots who may have been vice presidents, or robots that are currently working in the fashion industry and need to be stopped.  Klaarg would like us to remind you that the only good robot is a non-existent robot.
*Fourth, we know nothing about Area 51.  We did spend some time in Area 52, which was nice and kind of vacationey, and we did spend a few hours at District 9, and two days in Section 11, subsection 4, but this Area 51 you continually yammer about is unknown to us.  Fifth, we are here to study human behavior and not affect human behavior.  It is part of the extra-solar policies to  personnel, sort of a main directive if you will.  And it is a real one, not like that silly thing in those Star Trek Diaries where they blather on and on for twenty minutes about how important it is and then immediately turn around a break it with no consequences.  Trust us, there are serious consequences when you interfere with primitive civilizations.  And we should know.

In any case, now that we have fixed you all about this, we can move on to more important issues.  Videos we have watched!!

We have always been huge fans of planetary bombardment and collision.  So, when we saw Starcrash we knew we had to watch it. We were disappointed on a number of levels. First, there were no stars crashing, or even careening, just some woman in a skin-tight space suit cavorting with a fuzzy haired man and a robot. (And boy was Klaarg upset about that. It took us two days to get him to come out of the pre-sentient storage bay.) We are also pretty sure that bikinis in space are a bad idea. Then again, you Earthers really know nothing of space so you will perhaps find this out for yourself, assuming you survive the coming ice age.

No sooner did we get Klaarg seated and full of popcorn than we put in Bladerunner. Who knew that when they spoke of replicants they meant robots. We’re not sure where Klaarg went this time and we think it might be best to wait until we are finished with movie night to go look for him as he will not be a happy camper. In any case, to return to our work, we found this documentary somewhat fascinating. We believe we have seen it before but we were captivated anyway. We liked the way you continue to see your future as dark and despairing, albeit most of you seemed to have survived the cataclysms. We are also beginning to think that your fascination with robots is as unhealthy as Klaarg’s fear of them. Why do you constantly envision futures that are so full of them–and usually they are going wrong? Either learn to build good robots or just utilize genetic manipulation.

We, like many of you we bet, just love a good prison movie. This is why we picked up Convict 762. Unfortunately, the way we get our videos precludes their coming to us in boxes or cases so we almost never get a visual clue about what we are about to watch. This is usually a good thing since most of your movie documentaries are really not all that well done and your marketing ability often surpasses your creative ability. We mention this because Klaarg had managed to stuff himself into the research arena and heard us talking about the title and managed to actually do a subliminal authenticity search based on the name and thus managed to see the box cover–which, much to our embarrassment and chagrin–contained a cyborg, or, as Klaarg likes to scream out, a ROBOT! We just hope we have nowhere to go for the next month or so because Klaarg is the navigator and we think it will take him that long to come out of hiding. The movie was also pretty bad, a bunch of Earther young women flying around space, making bad choices and ending up on a penal colony, looking for rocket fuel. We think they though the penal colony meant something else. It is the only real answer for why they would go there. After a bunch of other bad decisions, due mostly, we think, to bad writing and lack of imagination, and a lot of deaths, one of the young woman manages to leave the colony with two penals aboard and everyone is happy. Or are they? It is unclear exactly what is going on at the end even though it involved a robot and that usually bodes ill for organics in your future imaginings.

Well, we have to go and look for Klaarg. We don’t expect to find him but he gets really upset if we don’t look. Until next time we remind you that Spooze is best served at room temperature, unless, of course, you are from a vulcan planet, in which case you should refrigerate.

November in June, Turkeys for all

We are turning over the log to Mummphm this time. He needs the experience and we have to keep him out of the shuttle for a while. It’s going to take days to remove all that cheese from the intake manifolds. Who knows what he was thinking?

Your month of November doesn’t really have much going for it unless you like turkey. And no need to tell us that it is your month of June. We travel using wormholes and it plays havoc with our calendars, not to mention our watches. Time is just a construct to be pushed anyway. But, wait, you don’t know that yet. Back to November which has either just been (assuming you think the glass to be half full) or is about to be (assuming you think the glass half empty), or, if you are exactly a half way kind of entity, both. But we digress. November follows the major US holiday of Halloween. It’s cold. It’s windy. It’s full of turkeys. It’s the start of holiday decorations and shopping. It’s one of the longer months to spell. It celebrates the death of big birds. The food of the month is mostly odd colored stuff–purple, orange and brown. It presents us with one of the major ironies as we wrestle with comprehending the brief history of one of your superpowers, the USA. Here is what we have learned so far. Without the Indians, the Pilgrims would not have survived. By surviving, the Pilgrims brought on the genocide of the Indians. This has led to the word Tryptophan being repeated close to a gazillion times in a four day period. Frankly, we agree with Ben Franklin that the month is symbolized by the perfect animal, the turkey. But let us move to things we better understand–your DVD historical records And, speaking of such, let’s take a look at what’s lurking out there.

It’s the Great Bird of the Galaxy!

Sometimes you sit in your blind and wait and wait and wait and nary a gobbler comes passing through. Other times you’ve barely had time for your butt to get wet when the big bird presents itself.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Watch Kirk emote the Enterprise across the galaxy. Watch Spock raise his eyebrow. Watch Mr. Scott build an entire interociter from just pocket lint and a rubber band. Watch Mr. Sulu eye Uhura. Buy this now and you get the director’s restored version where he puts back in the 35 minutes of space footage thought to be too boring. Yikes, another 35 minutes of boring space footage?? This on top of two hours of boring other footage in what is little more than a rip off of one of the television episodes? And they thought we wouldn’t notice? Load the photon torpedoes we’re being hailed by space turkeys.

It’s a known fact that turkeys replicate. That’s right, replicate. If they mated then genetics would come into play and make better turkeys. And I’m not talking about bigger butterballs. An excellent case in point is “Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday The 13th”, which attempts to spoof not only every recent horror flick but every recent flick combined. This total lack of focus and utter reliance on sex jokes drives the few redeeming qualities the film had right from your frontal lobes. Klaarg liked it though.

And before you go thinking that all turkeys are tom turkeys let me present to you– Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. If you discount the lousy writing, the crappy directing, the negligible acting and plot holes so big you could fly turkeys through them you’ve got a pretty good film here. Sick with the game and leave this bird alone, it spent too much time out in the sun.

Wait, Lara Croft, Ronald Ashcroft, I see a connection. That would explain why The Astounding She-Monster, shares so many of the apparent values and production qualities. Actually it’s the other way around since this flick came out in 1958. Not a bad watch purely for old time’s sake, like when you’re with your buds talking about how good the turkey was two years ago.

You can always tell a real turkey by how little time it spends in view of the public. Turkeys are shy, retiring creatures and avoid people like the plague. Planet Of The Apes, the remade one, is an excellent example of this. So bad it lasted but days in the theaters and minutes in the second run houses it now comes to roost on your DVD player. Don’t let it roost very long.

Classics – or should we say…leftovers?

So, what’s a droog to do after loading up on all that tryptophan? Steal a car? Look for rival gangs to beat up? Break into a few houses and contemplate stuffing the occupants? How about all of the above, but only if you’re Alex or one of his friends from “A Clockwork Orange”. A classic masterpiece which, while a bit slow and dated now, still shows you how movies should be made. Not a feather in sight.

He’s alien and he’s come to Earth to…well, we’re not really sure. The guvment wants to kill him, science wants to study him and the ladies they just swoon at his gaze. “The Cosmic Man”, pretty much fills the bill if you’re looking for really old turkey. This one was moldy the day it got released so fair warning if you try to watch it now.

Turkeys are big birds that look kind of neat and taste really bland. “Willow”, shares these characteristics. Visually stunning, with great locations and some fine special effects, but all wrapped around a story that is not only old hat but nothing special to begin with.

SFTV – Dinners, reheated in our atomic powered microwave.

Must everything turn to turkey? Must all turkey turn to poison? Must all poison be bad for you? Unfortunately a resounding yes to all of the above. Check out the pre-turkey episodes of “Farscape”. “Durka Returns” and “A Human Reaction” are the episodes presented here. Excellent stuff, but be warned, there’s a turkey lurking in the not to far future.

At some point there are just too many of these things flying by and you just have to sit back in amazement. The “X-Files” is a great example of that. This is the complete fourth season. Like you need more X-files. Like the first three years, never mind the first three episodes, didn’t pretty much play out the storylines. There is the occasional interesting episode tucked in here amongst the dark and white meat, sort of like finding the giblets. Will Scully? Will Muldar? Will the smoking man? Who the hell cares?

“Plan 9 From Outer Space,” or, how to not make movies. This one contains all the things you should never, ever do when making a film. The biggest turkey of the bunch.

Just to show that even science fiction writers love turkey, “Project Moon Base”, which was co-written by Robert Heinlein rears it’s ugly head. Two space babes get stranded on the lunar surface. Will they survive?? Jesus, what were you thinking, Bob?

Anime – Even Giant Robots can’t talk with their mouths full.

I hate to say it but of the 740 or so DVDs released in November of…we forget but we think there were some 0’s and 2’s in it, there wasn’t a single Anime one worth looking at. Actually there were incredibly few to look at period. Guess those giant mumblers know it’s best to hide when the big birds come out to play.

Greenings

Greenings Earthers! We have interrupted this communication and feel honored to particulate. We are not sure of the significance of this blogging though. We searched the dvds and it did not seem to help. We did find some worthy video of Sean Connery scowling however and enjoyed it greatly. We remember our first time with facial expressions. As a side report, Klaarg, our navigator, wanted to speak of a different first time but you would not like the details of what is an interesting but internally queasy process. Why are we here? Indeed, it was the wide diversity of your electronic flailings that first drew our attention to your backwards arm of the galactic spiral. It continues to draw us. You seem to be seriously confused. We struggled to discern the meaning behind the many of your messages. What is this F-Troop? And is it symbolic or an indication of a repressed past? What of this A-Team? You seem to have many teams. Surely this one is not the best. Who was Erica and did her work at a hospital for Generals mean your society was militaristically inclined? We were dismayed that the first three dozen or so Earthers we probed for information retained memories of numerous contacts with Galactic entities. We again were moved to study your dvd records and were stunned. After reviewing multiple tenstacles full of these records which chronicled your various encounters with non-human species it became clear to us that your multiple dysfunctions may simply be are due to your frequent contact with what we consider to be the lower form of superior beings. In any case, we have much more to share with you but the blog tools are waving to us and making Altair eyes which we interpret to mean we must end.

(The Damn Aliens can be found here weekly or whenever they get around to it)