(a quick note before we begin… as noted below, we’re working on a redesign for the moose blog… it’s not finished, and we’ll likely be tweaking it throughtout the weekend, so forgive us if things look a little wonky for awhile… and if you have any comments or suggestions on the redesign, be sure and let us know…)

ok, so here we are… moosings 100… we’d told friends we weren’t gonna do anything special for it, but hey… after all, when we first started this little project we figured it’d be a good thing if i made it through #10… but here we are, 100 consecutive weekdays where we’ve posted at least something, plus weekend features… according to the wordpress that’s a total of 342 posts… in the grand scheme of things it’s not HUGE, but considering how long a creative layoff we’d taken before this, it sure ain’t bad…

when we started this little project, we had certain definite ideas of things we wanted to do, topics we wanted to cover, ideas we wanted to express… some of those have come to pass, some are still in the works, some… well, some have fallen by the wayside either because of time limitations or because they were really just bad ideas… hey, we can admit those, too…

anyway, for this 100th moosing, we thought we’d take a look back over some of the topics we’ve hit on, some of the ideas we’ve had over the pst few months… if this were a sitcom, you could consider this our “clips show”… you know, where the cast sits around and remembers all the crap that’s happened to them so they really only have to film about five minutes of new show and the rest is taken from old ones? yeah, it’s like that… but with a moose…

of course, things started in the place where they tend to wind up around here… politics… moosings #001 began with the moose decrying the appearance of hillary and mccain as front-runners in the upcoming presidential race, and ended with his earnest plea for all politicians running this year to make a certain resolution:

for everyone in the political arena whether it be anything from a local schoolboard to the congress and president - how about resolving to actually do what you think is not only right but what is truly going to be best for ALL americans? and for the rest of ya out there… americans, and yes, i’m including you in this - how about resolving to forego ‘interesting’ this time around… and even ideology and agendas and actually only vote for and support those people that you actually know something about and that YOU truly believe will be best for america?

yeah, the moose can be a bit idealistic at times…

moosings 008 saw the first of our guest moosings as we brought you “notes from a squirrelist”…

THE SQUIRREL’S audacity enraged me. I bolted back out onto the patio and repeated the same actions described above, only with more vehemence, more vigor. I pumped my fist in the air and threatened her in a booming voice: “I SAID, ‘YA WANNA PIECE O’ ME? COME ON! COME ON! I WILL TAKE YOU OUT!’”

THE SQUIRREL sat in the pine tree on a low limb, chirping at me and flagging her tail up and down again, trying to get the last word. In my emotional state, I saw her lips curl into a smile as she said, “OH, YEAH? COME AND GET ME, YOU BI-PEDAL FAT-ASS!”

one of the things that we’ve tried to do around here is present a variety of voices… and that’s one thing you’re going to be seeing even more of as we go along… we’re working on rebuilding a stable of regular writers, and also trying to get more guest features… there’s even a rumor that before long the squirrelist will be back with another tale…

also at first, our popular junkyard feature was actually a regular staple of the moosings.. every friday we’d bring you a collection of links to all kinds of things… some of them were things that we thought you should know about (such as the riaa’s attempts to shut down internet radio or the ongoing follies of the bush administration) that we might not have time to write full essays on during the week, and sometimes they were just items that had caught our eye, as in moosings #020 which was our first (though not last) mention of panda porn…

eventually the junkyard outgrew it’s friday space and became a daily feature, though recently we’ve cut it back to monday/wednesday/friday… and beginning next week (hey, here’s some exclusive news just for those of you who have actually slogged through this far) it’ll be going back to just fridays… but in the mean time we’ll be beefing things up and bringing you more daily tidbits to give you a bit more than just headlines…

panda porn is not, of course, the only one of life’s absurdities that the moose has revelled in… no retrospective of the first few months of moosings would be complete without some mention of moosings 029 when the moose realised the power of certain words… especially the dangerous words hoohah and kwitzibitzi and which began with the following note:

this piece was originally titled “the hoohah over hoohahs” until it was pointed out to the moose that anyone who might be offended by the use of the word “vagina” might also know that the word “hoohah” was merely a slang substitution for the original word and therfore might be just as offended by the use of it, so we have therefore substituted the completely-made-up-by-the-moose work “kwitzibitzi” to replace both the word “vagina” and the word “hoohah” in an attempt to be gracious to those who are easily offended… hopefully they won’t figure out that we actually are talking about female body parts… unless, of course, they read this note, in which case we guess we’re just royally “cremmered”…

sometimes the absurdity even collided with our guest moosings as when moosing 039 brought you bucky’s movie review of “the house on haunted hill”… at least we think that’s what he eventually got around to…

Anyways, as I was makin’ my way back from the John I happened to notice a movie case settin’ on the little table there by the couch where Velveeta keeps the remote controls and stuff. “What’s this?” I says, pickin’ it up. “I dunno, somethin’ Jesse brought over that he thought you might like.” Now Jesse is Velveeta’s little brother who thinks he’s all big stuff and all ever since he started takin’ classes down at the community college where he’s studyin some kinda computer crap that don’t nobody but him and a buncha other nerds understand, and I don’t know why he even tries to suggest movies that I might like, since the last one that he brought over was some kinda pansy-assed cowboy movie that had two guys sharing the same tent if ya know what I mean, and even though I only watched about thirty minutes of it or so it kinda made me throw up in my mouth a little bit just thinkin’ about what was goin’ on there and wonderin’ what The Duke woulda done said if somebody suggested thet he was “sharing a tent” with Roy Rogers or something, because even though Roy did like to sing a little too much and mighta had Trigger a little too well trianed he still had Dale Evans and we all know that if Roy’d ever tried anything with anybody besides Dale, man or woman, Dale’da just whipped out her own little sixgun and made sure that Roy wuz firin’ blanks from then on if he was able to fire at all, and thet John woulda just taken anybody that’d said somethin’ like that out to the back of the barn and whupped up on ‘em just like he took care of that irish feller in The Quiet Man except that he might notta stopped fer that drink ’cause he’da been too angry at ‘em, so I was gonna just write off whatever Jesse mighta brought over immediately until I turned it over and saw the face of Mr. Vincent Price lookin’ back at me.

and yes, just fyi, despite our sometimes better judgement, bucky will be back, possibly as early as next weekend as we kick off our new weekend features (hey, that’s news tidbit number two, isn’t it? new weekend features are coming up… see how we reward those of ya that keep on reading?)

another thing the durnMoose blog has always been about is words, and that was never more evident than in april when we celebrated national poetry month with a series of posts featuring some of our favorite poets and performers… one of those that we featured was former poet laureate billy collins, though at the time we were having trouble locating a copy of one of our favorites called “the revenant”… we still haven’t been able to find a video to go with it, but here it is anyway: (what? a new billy collins poem in the middle of a retrospective moosing? dang you guys are nuts over there, aren’t ya?)

The Revenant by Billy Collins

I am the dog you put to sleep,
as you like to call the needle of oblivion,
come back to tell you this simple thing:
I never liked you–not one bit.

When I licked your face,
I thought of biting off your nose.
When I watched you toweling yourself dry,
I wanted to leap and unman you with a snap.

I resented the way you moved,
your lack of animal grace,
the way you would sit in a chair and eat,
a napkin on your lap, knife in your hand.

I would have run away,
but I was too weak, a trick you taught me
while I was learning to sit and heel,
and–greatest of insults–shake hands without a hand.

I admit the sight of the leash
would excite me
but only because it meant I was about
to smell things you had never touched.

You do not want to believe this,
but I have no reason to lie.
I hated the car, the rubber toys,
disliked your friends and, worse, your relatives.

The jingling of my tags drove me mad.
You always scratched me in the wrong place.
All I ever wanted from you
was food and fresh water in my metal bowls.

While you slept, I watched you breathe
as the moon rose in the sky.
It took all my strength
not to raise my head and howl.

Now I am free of the collar,
the yellow raincoat, monogrammed sweater,
the absurdity of your lawn,
and that is all you need to know about this place

except what you already supposed
and are glad it did not happen sooner–
that everyone here can read and write,
the dogs in poetry, the cats and the others in prose.

ok, so there’s probably a lot more we could reminisce over, but it’s time to look forward now… after all, monday is moosings 101, and that’s whole new ballgame, ain’t it? but before we go, just a quick thanks to all of ya who have been reading along with us all this time, and a hearty welcome about to those of ya who are just joining us… believe us when we trot out the old cliche “we’re only getting started”…

-moose out…

(oh, there won’t be a junkyard this afternoon, but be sure to come back over the weekend as we’re likely to debut at least one of those new features we were talking about… and then be sure to come back monday for more moosing goodness… and who knows what else…)

(and hey… don’t forget to check out our ongoing caption contest… you’ve got until midnight saturday to get us your best caption and win a dvd…)

so today we’ve got something a little different for you. as you know we’ve been trying to bring you a number of different voices, from the king puck’s “shorter the destination” to j.w. dixie’s more right-wing thoughts, to shorter essays and thoughts from the squirrelist and the chat… well, today we bring you what may well be our most unique voice yet… a few weeks ago, you may recall, we mentioned that the moose was thinking about doing movie reviews… well, apparently that inspired one of our readers who wrote to us, and… well, we’ll just let him tell that story… anyway, we told him we’d post his review on a sort of provisional basis, and see what our readers thought about it, so if you folks want to see more of bucky’s reviews be sure to let us know…

So it all started like this: A while back my number one girl, who for the purposes of this column I’ll call Velveeta, since her given name is Velveeta, even though sometimes I like to just call her Velvet ’cause she’s all nice and smooth like that, anyways, a while back Velveeta tells me about this here moose and his little bloggie thing and all and how it’s all so dang funny, so’s I takes me a look at it and I don’t think it’s all that funny since he’s up there makin’ fun of our president MR.GEORGE W. BUSH and all, but I let Velveeta go ahead and keep readin’ it anyway, ’cause I know if I don’t she’s just gonna whine about it and all. So’s anyways, one day she comes to me and she tells me that this here moose says he’s gonna start doin’ movie reviews and somesuch like that and she says “Honey, you oughtta write to that moose and tell him that you’ll do movie reviews for him, ’cause if’n anybody ought to be talkin’ about movies hit’s you ’cause you done seen so many of ‘em and all.” So I did the same thing I always do whenever Velveeta starts to thinkin’ and havin’ ideas and all and I tells her to shut up because we all know that her ideas really ain’t never all that good and usually they either end up with me getting punched in the face or me and Chester Goode (I don’t reckon I’ve told ya’ll about Chester Goode yet, but don’t worry, I’ll get around to him eventually) thrown in jail fer the weekend, which really spoils a fella’s weekend when he’s plannin’ on layin’ around the house and soppin’ up some beer and watchin’ the footbal game and he can’t because he’s in a jail cell with Chester Goode all because his girlfriend had an “idea”.

But then I gets me to thinkin’ on my own, which is always better because somehow I’m less likely to wind up doin’ time with Chester Goode or punched in the face or for that matter gettin’ near eat up by that bulldog thet one time that I don’t really wanna talk about nowadays because the court order says I shouldn’t and anyways I wasn’t really doin’ what they said i wuz to him anyways because i knows hits against GOD and all to do things like thet with man’s best friend. So’s I gets to thinkin’ and I thinks “Well, yeah, why shouldn’t I write to that there moose fella and tell him I’ll do his movie reviewin’ because I really have done seen a whole bunch a movies an’ I knows a bunch about ‘em and all, and I ain’t one of them high fallutin’ fellas that thinks he’s GOD’S GIFT because he knows all about all kinds a obscure frenchie films and stuff thet nobody cares about anyways because who wants to sit through some stupid frenchie film where ya just got a lot of poeple standing around and looking all frenchie at each other and everything and ya gotta read all them little words at the bottom and it all ends up with everyone realizing that they’re all already dead or something and that nothing that they’ve been doing for the past two hours really was worth doing and neither was them wasting two hours of my time not doing it and nothing ever blows up and nodoby gets nekkid or nothing and in the end ya just feel like going off and getting a beer with Chester Goode because ya know thet yer girl’s gonna be all weepy all night because the damn movie was so meaningful and all when even though what she means by meaningful is apparently the same thing as boring and so ya might as well be gettin’ drunk because ya ain’t gonna be gettin’ anything else that night anyway.”

So’s yeah, I writes to this moose fella and tell him thet he oughtta let me do his movie reviews fer him and i tell him about Velveeta and the Frenchie movies and everything and how i done seen every movie thet Tom Cruise and Bruce Willis and Bill Murray have ever done done including that wanna be Frenchie movie Lost in Translation thet Billy boy did when he musta been broke or on some kinda serious drugs or something because that movie didn’t make no sense and you could tell that it didn’t make any sense to Bill either and that he was just waiting for the moment when he got to stand up and lead the “IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER” cheer or give some chick the Aunt Jemimah treatment or somesuch, and whaddaya know, I get a letter back from him (the moosey fella, not Bill, ’cause i didn’t write to Bill, though maybe i should have just to ask him when he wuz gonna maybe do another Ghostbusters movie instead of wastin’ his time with that frenchie wannabe crap and stuff like Broken Flowers where he’s tryin’ to be all grown up and sad and stuff which i may just do oncet I get finished writing this but fer now I’m talkin’ about the letter I got from the moose fella) and he says “Yeah, Bucky, why dontcha give it a try and write me a movie review” and I started to write back and tell him that I didn’t need to give it a try, that I could just do it but then I decided that I would just do it instead of just doing all thet writing back and forth and all and so now yer reading what I’m actually wrote.

So anyways, a couple of days later I was telling Velveeta (I did tell y’all about my Girlfriend Velveeta, right? oh, yeah, there it is up above there. Ok, I was jus’ checkin’.) So anyways, I was tellin’ Velveeta about this idea thet I had about writin’ the movie reviews for the moose and how he’d said to go ahead and do it and all, and she got all excited because see Velveeta she ain’t never been with a real live Published Writer before which is whut I told her I would be once the moose published my review even if it was just on this here internet bloggie thingie because people still reads it and stuff so’s it’s just like bein’ published and all, and like I said Velveeta got so excited when I told her that I thought for a minute we were gonna drop our clothes and just do the moogy moogy right then and there exceptin’ that we were at the Home Depot and I can tell you from sad experience that for some reason they frown on that kind of thing even though it is just the natural expression of two people who are deeply in love with each other and extremely excited and very horney, but we managed to hold off until we got home and then I realised that if I wuz gonna write a review I oughtta probably watch a movie thet I hadn’t never seen before so that I could write it comin’ to it fresh with new Reviewer’s Eyes instead of jus’ watchin’ it again like a good ol’ Clint Eastwood movie where I’m just a fan although I may someday write a review of one of ol’ Clint’s movies just so’s he can read it and know what a fan of his ol’ Bucky really is despite the restraining order that says I’ve gotta stay at least a thousand feet away from him.

‘Course, the real problem wuz thet we was in Velveeta’s trailer that she keeps on her folks land ’cause she can’t afford no better than that an’ anyway it’s a pretty good setup because if we get hungry in the middle of the night we can jus’ sneak into their house and grab some cold chicken from the fridge and they usually don’t call the cops on us or nothin. Anyways, like I said, we wuz at her place, and she ain’t really got that many good movies bein’ what as she’s a chick an’ all an’ probly does like those ol’ Frenchie movies I was talkin’ about and what good movies she’s got we’ve pretty much all watched, though a bunch of ‘em I really should say I watched since she spent most of ‘em either with her hands coverin’ over her face or with her face buried in my lap ’cause she wuz scared of the googly monster on the screen or somebody wuz gettin’ all shot or blowed up or somethin’ and she didn’t wanna see all the blood because it was too gross and icky or some kinda girly thing like that. And it weren’t no point in tryin’ to get a movie from her folks because all they’ve got are those old black and white dancin’ and love story kind of movies and stuff with people with butlers and all, though I don’t know why because if they ever saw a real life actual butler I can tell ya right now that her dad especially wouldn’t wanna have nothing to do with “that prissy little brit” and would spend the rest of the night trying to avoid him.

Anyways, as I was makin’ my way back from the John I happened to notice a movie case settin’ on the little table there by the couch where Velveeta keeps the remote controls and stuff. “What’s this?” I says, pickin’ it up. “I dunno, somethin’ Jesse brought over that he thought you might like.” Now Jesse is Velveeta’s little brother who thinks he’s all big stuff and all ever since he started takin’ classes down at the community college where he’s studyin some kinda computer crap that don’t nobody but him and a buncha other nerds understand, and I don’t know why he even tries to suggest movies that I might like, since the last one that he brought over was some kinda pansy-assed cowboy movie that had two guys sharing the same tent if ya know what I mean, and even though I only watched about thirty minutes of it or so it kinda made me throw up in my mouth a little bit just thinkin’ about what was goin’ on there and wonderin’ what The Duke woulda done said if somebody suggested thet he was “sharing a tent” with Roy Rogers or something, because even though Roy did like to sing a little too much and mighta had Trigger a little too well trianed he still had Dale Evans and we all know that if Roy’d ever tried anything with anybody besides Dale, man or woman, Dale’da just whipped out her own little sixgun and made sure that Roy wuz firin’ blanks from then on if he was able to fire at all, and thet John woulda just taken anybody that’d said somethin’ like that out to the back of the barn and whupped up on ‘em just like he took care of that irish feller in The Quiet Man except that he might notta stopped fer that drink ’cause he’da been too angry at ‘em, so I was gonna just write off whatever Jesse mighta brought over immediately until I turned it over and saw the face of Mr. Vincent Price lookin’ back at me.

Well, I’ll tell you folks right now that if there’s one feller that’ll get me to put in a movie almost immediately it’s the gentleman of horror movies, Mr. Vinnie Price, though how Jesse ever had the good taste to understand the genius that is Mr. Price I will never know, though they do say thet even a blind man can catch flies with honey on a stopped clock that’s right twicet a day or somethin’ like that, so I guess it’s possible that it was just dumb luck that put that movie in my hand at that particular time. Whatever the reason I went ahead and popped it in and boy, lemme tell you! The flick was called House on Haunted Hill and it starts out all dank with spooky noises and chains rattlin’ and such, and that right there was enough ta get Velveeta all curled up in my lap and already startin’ to hide her eyes even though there wuzn’t nothin’ to hide ‘em from since all there was was sounds, but that’s just kinda the brainy kinda girl she is. Then all of a sudden there’s this floating Goober Head on the screen talking about how he was the owner of some place called Hill House and how nobody that’d spent the night there had made it out alive or at least if they were alive they were probably a candidate for the nuthatch er sumpthin’ and then he goes on to say how he’s desperate for money so he’s rented out this creep house to some feller who wants to throw a party there. That’s when Vinnie shows up, though at first he’s just a floating head too, and I’m kinda wonderin’ if this movie is just gonna be a bunch of floating heads and maybe what they’re tellin’ us is that Vincent and the Goober are the ghosts that are inside the house, though they look like they’re actually floating around outside since the house is in the background, but eventually we move inside and see Vincent really does have a body, and a wife, and he’s rich and they’ve planned this party in this Haunted House to celebrate her birthday and they’ve invited a whole buncha people that don’t know each other and don’t really know them and told ‘em that they’ll get a bunch of money if they can survive the night in the House. Of course, it’s not really that simple, since Vinnie has a buncha surprises planned for ‘em including a floating skeleton, his wife hanging by the neck, and a pit of acid in the basement.

One thing y’all oughtta know about this movie is that it was made in the fifties so it is in black and white, so i really shouldn’ta liked it as much as i did since a lot of times that just makes the whole thing feel old or tells ya that before too long there’s gonna be a butler show up or people are gonna start getting all frenchie existentialistical or something, but in this case that just gives the whole thing a bit more class, though with Vinne there it’s really classed up enough to start with. And since it’s from the fifties there ain’t nobody really getting nekkid and certainly nobody doin’ the moogy moogy er nothin, and there ain’t no cussin’ or nothin, and for that matter there ain’t nothin blowin’ up neither, but there is the floating skeleton and the guy thet goes swimmin’ in the acid pool, but most of the real scary stuff takes place off screen excepth for when Vinnies wife is yellin’ at him because she’s the real scary thing in the movie and she really oughtta know better than to be yellin’ at Vinnie anyways because he really don’t take that kind stuff very well.

Anyways, hit’s definitely a good movie and one y’all oughta check out. ‘Cause ya know if Bucky says it’s good it’s definitely good. That’s jes the way it is. Now if y’all will excuse me, I gotta head back down to the home depot ta pick up some upenholstlery cleaner, ’cause when Velveeta gets scared by something like that floating skeleton thing, she really gets scared.