Ask the Nerdy Fat Guy - the Sequel (Return of the Fat Guy)

It's that time once again, kids!  Time for 'Ask the Nerdy Fat Guy'!  We here at CDS Enterprises have been besieged by requests for the ol' NFG to put on his answer cap and help you out of a jam!  Questions have flooded in from around the world, though we'll ignore the ones that just want gratuitous pictures of me in my boxer shorts.

Oscar A. from San Jose, CA writes:  Dear NFG - what does a rooster's (ahem) reproductive organ (ahem) look like?

Well, Oscar, I'm going to refer you to the ever popular 'How do chickens do it?' post, recently rediscovered by Muppet porn afficionados worldwide.  Damn that Rule 34.

Speaking of Muppets and the pr0n, Dougie from Vancouver, British Columbia asks:  Dear NFG - have you ever cobbled together the vague plot of a 70's adult film for the benefit of your readers?

Okay, Dougie, we're not really that kind of website.  However, I have talked about the decade of my early childhood before, and referenced a bow-chicka-bow-bow type of screenplay in my g-spot post, found here.  Grab a Molson's and give it a look-see.  Writing of a higher caliber can be found at our sister site, Crappy Unfinished Novel Time.  Sure, it's not very popular, but if the readership suddenly demands it, we can add more to the page.  Who knows, I might even finish something.

Pam from Irving, Texas writes:  Hey, NFG - is it really necessary to use such blatant filler just to maintain your readership?

Oh, Pam.  Of course it is.  Most of this blog is blatant filler.  When the queries that send people here are obviously crying out for more of my fat nerditude, I can only respond by giving readers what they so desparately crave.  That means nerdiness and gratuitious near-nudity.

Do you have a question for the Nerdy Fat Guy?  Click on the icon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen to send me an email.  No question is too obtuse, we welcome all queries.  We here at NFG Worldwide would love to make this a regular feature, and that means your questions are important to us!

Random Acts of Thursday - Wherein I bare my soul to the movie gods

Some of you may have figured out I'm a bit of a film nerd.  Some of you may recall that I keep a list of the films I've seen, which currently numbers well over 700 (and I keep finding films I forgot about seeing until they cross my path again....)  It suggests that I've seen a new movie every 2.5 weeks since birth.  An impressive waste of good time, and that doesn't count the films I've watched ten times over or more, like most of the James Bond oeuvre, 'Mad Max', any Eastwood western or Dirty Harry film, and 'The 39 Steps'.  It's a wonder I get any sleep at all.

However, this is my list o' shame, films that I want to see, or probably should see, lest I be called out on my total lack of film nerdiness.  I've seen bits and pieces of a few of these, but never start-to-finish.  And that's just sad.  Worse, even if any of these show up on IFC or AMC, I'll be forced to sit through commercials and that's not happening, kids.  Even the ol' DVR can't get me past those breaks in continuity.

Vanishing Point
Be Cool
From Dusk til Dawn
Citizen Kane (it's been saved on the DVR for months)
Natural Born Killers
Blood simple
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
North by Northwest
Rear Window
The African Queen
Chinatown
The Two Jakes
Evil Dead
Dawn of the Dead
Night of the Living Dead
Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid
Pennies From Heaven
Paper Moon
Gypsy
The Rose

There are probably more, feel free to mock my unworthiness below.  Also, gift subscriptions to NetFlix are quite welcome, feel free to click on the 'donate' button to the right.

Random Acts of Thursday - Give me lots of hair

Hey, kids!  I know it's Cinco de Mayo, and I should be writing about beer, and how May 5th ties into the reason so many great Mexican beers are brewed with classic German brewing know-how.  However, that seems too predictable.  Besides, it's been almost two years since the NFG (owner and proprietor of NFG Worldwide and all known and unknown subsidiaries) shaved his face in its entirety, the first time in nearly 12 or 13 years that my chin was cold and nekkid.  That didn't last very long at all. 

For the most part lately, I've rocked a pure goatee, no moustache to strain my soup or tickle Lori's upper lip.  However, I am getting a little lazy in the shaving department, sometimes going a week or more without touching the fuzzy undergrowth.

I really want to do something 'out there' with the facial hair (thanks to La Bev for the linkage).  Handlebar moustache.  Long goatee, a la Scott Ian.  Elvis sideburns.  A la Elvis.  However, in deference to my marriage, I never go beyond joking about it.  Lori seldom laughs.

It's not much of a quiz this week, but since it seems nobody answers many of these anyway, not much risk in offending any of you.  This is a research quiz, for your benefit and mine, feel free to Google or guess, your choice.

1)  Who shaved his trademark moustache first: Alex Trebek or Tom Selleck?
2)  Who has the better beard, Billy Gibbons or Dusty Hill?
3)  For which film did Chevy Chase (known for playing Dusty Bottoms in the film 'The Three Amigos') don a wicked cool beard, Walt Whitman style?
4)  Is there anything besides Whitman's beard which qualifies him as 'cool'?  (Okay, that's a trick question.  Of course there isn't.)
4a) Which actress starred with a slightly zanier Chevy Chase after featuring in the original film production of 'Hair'?
5)  Which surrealist painter made a film about facial hair, and in which film was he dragged behind a piano alongside a fellow surrealist?

Not much this week, but you know.  Gliddy glup goopy, nibby nabby noopy la la la lo lo. Sabba sibby sabba, nooby abba nabba le le lo lo.  Feel better?  If not, go have yourself a cerveza.  That should fix it.

Blast from the Past - Before the NFG rocked the F

January's a busy time around here at CDS Enterprises (A wholly-owned division of NFG Worldwide, Ltd.)  As such, I don't have the time to rant anew - at least not in print.  Being as we are four months from my cresting (and subsequently being 'over') the hill, it seems only appropriate that I share with you some crotchety posts from the past.

We're jumping into the Wayback Machine this week, courtesy of an old college friend on the Facebook.

Because if you can't laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?


Me, apparently.  The more I look at this, the worse it gets.  Is that...hair gel?  Why yes, I think it is.  And those sneakers.  I'm sure that was the style, but really? 

But hey, at least I wasn't fat.  That's something, I guess.  Though NSG doesn't have quite the same ring. 

Adjective Noun Day of Week - Interjection! Pronoun verb possessive pronoun adjective verb.

Verb noun conjunction verb.  And you didn't think I could nerd the place up any more.  Interjection, verb pronoun.

I seem to be in a mood lately, moreso than normal.  It means I'm quite sensitive to the verbal and written gaffes of other people.  I did well in English class in school, with the exception of that paper I failed to write on Camus.  That's okay, since Sartre is smartre, anyway.

What I don't seem to recall is diagraming sentences.  I remember seeing sentence diagrams on television and in movies, but, though I'm certain we must have done these in school, the memory of it has escaped me. 

I remember Schoolhouse Rock, with its Conjunction Junction (not as exciting as Petticoat Junction...), Lolly's Adverbs, and that depressing little Mr. Morton wandering about, but I don't remember ever actually applying what I learned on Saturday Morning television to my schooling. 

I suppose between Grammar Rock and The Electric Company, there was a lot of education snuck into my entertainment, like the school lunch programs that added pureed prunes to their hamburger patties.

Because really, would you have watched if you thought it was good for you?

The Hair Apparent

Yesterday would have been Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón's 103rd birthday.  (Thank you, Google!)  And sure, she was a fantastic painter, surreal, edgy - especially for the '40's - and unapologetic.  But really, whenever you think of Frida, you think of the unibrow.  Admit it.

In particular, I always think of this painting.

Or at least I did.  It made me think of Willie Nelson.  Now I'll be fighting to keep this one out of my brain:

So it goes.

In other news of the hirsute, this guy just turned down $1 million for solving a math problem, just because he used another mathematician's work as the basis for his final solution.

In case you were worried, let me just remind you that not all mathematicians look like that.  Some of them look like this:

And even if she did rock the U.B. she'd still be hot.  AAAhhhhnd, with that picture, I have just quadrupled the number of hits this post will receive.  Don't you just love math?

Well, that was absurd, let's eat dead bird

I'm fairly certain that your week will be filled with posts about turkey, dressing, pumpkin pie and football. Posts about what you're thankful for.


I'm thankful for sentences that end in prepositions, and hopeful that the Pack will trounce Detroit on Thursday. We'll be spending our holiday Griswold style, celebrating a Vegas vacation, though don't count on any damn blog posts about the damn tour, because I'm not taking the damn laptop.


Something else for which I am eternally grateful comes from a nation that doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving, a holiday best described by the Indefatigable Mjenks:


"...our celebration of Thanksgiving, which, of course, was a way of thanking the Natives of North America for helping the colonists through the first few years of life, thus allowing them a foothold on this distant shore and making it far easier to usurp their land. Thanks for teaching us that bury-the-dead-fish-next-to-the-corn-plant trick, Squanto. Here's a blanket encrusted with small pox! Now, how many of these brightly colored beads would you like for that island over there?"

The glory of which I speak, the thunder from down under, the Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla, is the Mad Max series of films. Granted, Thunderdome kind of sucks, thanks to the infliction of Hollywood-style over-the-toppedness and dropping Max Rockatansky into a film where he was never intended, but it still has some merits. As a milestone, Mad Max (the original, oft-imitated) which drew some of its own insparation from the works of Kurosawa, turns 30 this year. Mad Max and the Road Warrior epitomized coolness to me in a way I couldn't understand when I was eleven. But I love that they're films you can watch repeatedly, each time noticing something new, understanding something deeper.

But now I'm torn. Seems they're somewhere in the process of making Mad Max 4. As much as I love the Max-ness of Thunderdome, taking the Aussie out of the wasteland seemed wrong. The plus here is that it's in development by George Miller, the same gent who wrote, directed and produced the first three films. The same George Miller who sacrificed his own car to the carnage when the first film was coming in over budget.

Caution: This is not art...

However, this is also the same George Miller who in recent years has given us such crash-bang action adventures as Happy Feet and Babe: Pig in the City.

I'll stay hopeful, but I still expect it to be a turkey. That way, maybe I can be thankful if it actually turns out well.

Movie Mania Monday - I thought of that one, better try again

Congratulations to Quote Guesser Emeritus Courtney, who deserves a lifetime achievement award for her unbeatable record, including last week's identification of Virutosity. Remember, there are still unsolved quotes and quizzes, kiddoes, so get crackin'!

Maintenant, this week's contest. Remember the rules. First person to guess correctly the original source of the quote wins a prize - no movie characters quoting other movies. No Googling or asking Jeeves, either you know the quote or you don't. The prize is a Major Award and consists of the people's ovation and fame forever (and the title of Iron Quote-Guesser). La quote de la semaine:

Hey you! Haircut! Where are you going?

Allez guessing!!!

Fun Fact Friday - Viva la Revolucion

Before we go any further, I would like to thank ReviewYourOwnBlog for such a glowing review, and welcome those of you who are joining us from that brilliant, insightful tome.

November 20th is the 99th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution. How can I not write about that?

Because today is Bo Derek's 53rd birthday, that's how. I get more hits on this post than anything else I've ever written, so I'm just feeding my target demographic.

And since Jenny and David Hanley honeymooned in Manzanillo, Mexico in 10, I can justify it as relevant.

What? I doubt there's a person in my age bracket that didn't encounter Bo Derek at some early moment in their sexual evolution. I remember the bits and pieces of 10 on late night television, and I certainly remember my father's Playboys with Bo in all of her glory.And now, 30 years after the film's release, she's still a beautiful woman. We can all hope to age so well. Born Mary Cathleen Collins in Long Beach, CA, she started modeling to buy herself a surfboard. Shortly after that, she met photographer and filmmaker John Derek, 30 years her senior. They were married in 1976 and remained so until his passing in 1998.
She's an avid horsewoman, pro-gun and pro-hunting advocate (and much better looking than Ted Nugent on his best day).


As fun facts go, I think I went the right direction on this. Sorry, Mexico, maybe next year.

Random Acts of Thursday - 99 and 44/100% Pure Chicken Fat

Gym class was torture as a kid! Surely I'm not the only one who thought so...

Who could have known that novelty trivia books aren't scrupulously edited for factual content? More on that in a moment.

First, though, I made chicken the other day, and generally can't do so without singing the 'Chicken Fat' song, along with Suzanne Vega's 'Fancy Poultry Parts Sold Here...' (What? You know I'm a nerd already, so shut up). I found chicken backs at the store, a big package for two dollars (two dollars!) and since they're gelatin-laden, thought they'd add a fair amount of stock to the dinner, which I ultimately cooked with rice. I was also left with nearly a pound of pure, golden chicken fat.

Not growing up in the Great Depression or pre-war Europe, I don't have a habit of spreading this on toast. Mmm, schmaltzy! However, I do still know when throwing something out is wasteful, and I know there must be something exciting to make with this. Something that isn't just simply a matter of replacing olive oil or butter as a cooking agent. Something that won't give me some sort of coronary artery disease.

Who am I kidding? I'm probably going to have to just chuck it, but don't think for one second that I'd ever do that to my pure, snowy bacon fat. Rendering, not just a term for sketch artists. In fact, I've had some of the best French fries and donuts of my life cooked in rendered beef tallow. Um, why is my left arm tingling?

Rendered fat can be used to make soap, if you're an extra in a bad Western or just a hippie earth-mother greenie. In fact, rendering plants often render beef fat for use in soap, so you don't have to worry that I've somehow missed the opportunity for a proper segue.

So, yes, there is that urban legend that Ivory soap floats because some slacker fell asleep at the soap mixer and incorporated too much air into the bar. Not true, at least according to Proctor and Gamble, the floating was intentional. So there's that little myth debunked. And irrelevant, since changes in the soap formula have since made Ivory sink like a stone.

And really, who still takes baths for sanitation purposes? Isn't that just like making You Stew, soaking away in warm water while all your oils, body salts and juices melt away into the brine? Sounds like rendering to me.

Which leads us to today's trivia question:

Which two actresses both featured in Ivory soap ads before they became famous, and which one caused her ads to be pulled by Proctor and Gamble by her subsequent work?

One hint, they are NOT mother and daughter, as my cheaply thrown-together trivia book would have you believe.

I can feel you but you're nowhere in sight

In case you haven't figured it out by now, I am a nerd of the multi-purpose variety. However, you may have also discerned by now that I am not, despite my work in the software field, a gadget nerd. I was the last person I know to buy a CD player. Ditto with the cell phone. I don't know what I'll do if the cassette deck in the Buick ever gives out. I only have a laptop because work provides me with one. Ditto with the cell phone. And I own no mp3 players, Bluetooth devices, gaming systems or flat-screen televisions.

It isn't that I don't like these things, per se. I just don't feel compelled to own the latest and greatest.

I mention this mild technophobia because until a few months ago, my crackberry was set to vibrate with every email I receive. That's about 80 in a normal work day and 20 more after hours, and it was getting to where I couldn't concentrate on the task at hand. I finally found the 'phone only' setting, to fight the compulsion (and uncontrollable compulsion it was!) to check email every time the phone went off, and now it only vibrates when my phone rings, about five times in a normal week.

The issue I'm having is that my hip and leg still vibrate 20 times or more in a given day, even when I don't wear the phone. People refer to this as "phantom vibration syndrome", or "vibranxiety". Apparently our bodies just grow so accustomed to the vibration that when the phone isn't doing it, our bodies take over and mimic the sensation. Cell phone companies have paid doctors to insist there's no real nerve damage behind this phenomenon. That's akin to the National Diamond Council suggesting the appropriate price for an engagement ring. Can you say conflict of interest? Good, I knew you could!

Because apparently our nervous systems are screwing with us.

I used to just worry about the potential brain tumor from the phone's radiation, but now it's attacking me even when I'm not talking.

At least I can rest securely knowing that as I struggle furiously typing my manifesto in a tiny shack in Montana (on a manual typewriter, of course), I'll never develop Texting Thumb, or Guitar Hero Wrist, or Wii injuries. I'd be especially worried about that last one.

Tied Up In Knots

It's the little things, really. I put new shoelaces in my boots yesterday, since I've been fighting with a frayed lace for a while, and the boots would loosen up while we were out riding. Last evening's ride was bliss, and the boots stayed snug and comfortable.

Have I mentioned that I'm nerdy? Not as nerdy as the dude who built this site, but still...the link takes you to the way I laced the boots this time, because I felt creative.

Makes me wish I had taller boots, let me tell you.

When I was a wee lad, three things frustrated my child's mind. First, and very early on, was tying my shoes. I could read at a 4th grade level entering Kindergarten, but heaven forbid I should ever have to take my shoes off. I may have known by that age how to do it, but it wasn't much before that.

Second was the whole bicycle-riding thing. Mainly because I'd get hand-me-down bikes, or things my dad would buy from the police auction, bikes I had to grow into. Difficult to balance when your center of gravity is suddenly high above the center.

Finally, was subtraction. Third-grade subtraction killed me.

Now I'm a motorcycle rider who ties his own shoes and does math in his head. How's that for progress?

Movie Mania Monday - I recall Central Park in Fall

As many of you have come to expect, congratulations once again to Courtney, for her identification of one of the many stellar quotes from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Now, for this week's contest, it's anyone's game again. Remember the rules. First person to guess correctly the original source of the quote wins a prize - no movie characters quoting other movies. The prize consists of the people's ovation and fame forever (and the title of Iron Quote-Guesser). La quote de la semaine:

Which god would that be? The one who created you? Or the one who created me? You see, in your world, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh, but in my world, the one who gave me life doesn't have any balls.

Allez guessing!!!

Fun Fact Friday the 13th - Good luck with that

How lucky could anything that follows 'Rock-a-Hula Baby' be? Since Elvis Presley's 'Good Luck Charm' reached number one back in 1962, I'd say pretty lucky. But, really. 'Rock-a-Hula Baby' sounds like something that should be in the juke box at my local Waffle House, next to 'Waffle House Hashbrowns, I Love You'. Really, that one's in there, along with 'There are raisins in my toast', 'Waffle Do Wop' and about 20 other WH-themed songs. I do love that the 'b' side is 'Anything that's part of you'. As if this was an answer when asked just what part is the good luck charm. Can't you just see Elvis sawing up bodies, perhaps humming 'Love Me Tender' as he carefully separates the joints? Or is that just me?It bothers me that airplanes don't have a 13th row, and that my last hotel glaringly went from floor 12 to 14. This is irrational. Generally speaking, I don't have a fear of the number 13, I don't carry good luck charms or amulets or tokens, though as a kid I had a weird, bony yellow rabbit's foot. I could do extensive research on why they're considered lucky in this day and age of modern science and technology, but ultimately that bores me. The fact that I can still buy them in a myriad of colors does not.

If you really need to get your nerd on today, click here to find out why 13 is unlucky. I can never hope to top the Straight Dope and would never deign to paraphrase.

I suppose this is Fun Fact Lite, so here are a few things that amuse me, maybe in the process you'll forget that today's post was mostly content-free.

Happy Friday.