APergo's Mancouch

This Is Why I Love Prog Rock

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 19:08:09 GMT

Every so often we come across certain things, books, articles, keepsakes, even YouTube videos, that remind us just why it is we fell in love with something in the first place. It's a beautiful and exciting feeling, and for me, this is one of those things.

Liquid Tension Experiment is a sort of side project of Dream Theater, with only two albums released since 1997. Despite their relative inactivity, their instrumentals are so strong that I keep coming back to those two records, and manage to find something new every time. And there is just no greater joy than watching these incredibly talented musicians in action.

Who are some of your favorite prog rockers?

How Often Do You Fantasize About Sex?

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:59:22 GMT

It's been far too long since I've delved back into this territory. Maybe I was burned out by your overwhelming responses when I first started posing Friday's sex question, but with the weather finally turning into something both beautiful and bearable, there's a certain spring in my keystrokes that's making it easier for the thoughts to flow right onto the text editor.

Now then, on to the question of sexual fantasies. Firstly, let's just admit that everyone has them. Guys think about sex many times over the course of the day, in varying degrees of frequency, if all the studies are accurate. Women are guilty of it as well, perhaps to a lesser degree, since they likely aren't the easily excitable horn-dogs that most men are. More Here...

Seen Any Leprechauns Today?

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:16:17 GMT

As all, or most of you should know, today is St. Patrick's Day. It's that one special day when everyone gets to wear their greenest greens, go out and get plastered for no more substantial reason than to get plastered. Taking that into consideration, I'm going to have to make the assumption that some of you are taking advantage of this most holy of drinking days.

Given the perception altering, sometimes hallucinatory effects of alcohol, I'm also hoping that someone around here has seen a leprechaun and either taken his gold, or at the very least captured a picture of him. I mean, today's supposed to be a lucky day, right? It's almost obligatory that someone has to find a pot of gold and become filthy rich. More Here...

Why The Aversion To 'Weird' Meats?

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:50:06 GMT

[Pictured Above: Snake Meat]

One of the most fascinating things about our planet is the how vastly the food is from country to country. The American palette is probably more limited than most, relegated mostly to the various kinds of meats, vegetables and other basic foodstuffs found at the local supermarket, while other places have no qualms whatsoever about chopping up a dog for dinner.

Am I suggesting we start eating our canine friends? Not at all. What we eat is, of course, based mostly on what is locally available. It's a whole lot more expensive to ship exotic foods from halfway across the world than it is to slaughter a cow from a nearby farm, have it chopped into steaks at the butcher and bring it home for Sunday dinner. But when was the last time you ate buffalo, alligator, or rattlesnake? How about a nice, hearty grub stew?More Here...

Are Female Gamers Underrepresented?

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:14:57 GMT

I've been gaming since I first developed motor skills fine enough to hold a controller and push a button simultaneously. Since that point, I've been able to enjoy games not only by myself, but with all of my friends, and with the inception of online gaming, hundreds of thousands of other people as well.

In that time, however, I've noticed something very distinct about nearly all of my multiplayer gaming experiences: they're almost completely dominated by men. Except, women make up a fairly large percentage of the game playing population. A study by the Entertainment Software Association suggests that 40% of gamers are female, not a majority, mind you, but still a large enough percentage that one would think they'd be more noticeable. More Here...

Cockblocking Yourself

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:47:36 GMT

Most guys don't want to come right out and admit it, but there's a (mostly) universal truth about people who've got some dingle-dangle going on between their legs: they're horny, often. Very often, in fact. Of course, everyone has weaknesses. For some it's chocolate, or maybe just food in general. For others it's booze, or internet gambling, or even WoW. But man's ultimate kryptonite, the one thing we all share in common, is the desire for unclothed encounters with the object of our desires.

Unfortunately, not every guy is skilled in the game of romance. Plenty of guys are just bumbling idiots who, though they're interested in sex, also happen to be overly interested in things like beer, the New York Jets, and hair metal. Even more guys are perfectly intelligent, worthy suitors, but are too oblivious to read cues from women or realize when they're cockblocking themselves. And that, my friends, is a huge problem. More Here...

Where You Live Isn't Boring, It's You.

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:21:28 GMT

At some point, everyone's overheard someone complaining, or had a conversation with a friend about just how boring their surroundings are. Usually it's because, after a certain length of time living in any one place, people crave new experiences, new sights and sounds, to break out of the norm and feel like they're living again.

The phrases are easily recognizable. It goes from "There's nothing to do here," straight to "Everyone's been hanging out at the same bar since practically the beginning of time."

Months of monotonous activity make this kind of thinking perfectly understandable. Hometowns, new cities and even friends can lose their luster after a while. But unless you're living in the middle of the woods, hundreds of miles from the nearest signs of civilization, or trapped in a hole thanks to old, dependable Buffalo Bill, the complaint rings a little hollow, especially when it's said over and over again by the same person. More Here...

Could You Handle Living In The Wild?

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:03:46 GMT

Our culture is steeped in depictions of people surviving disasters, disease outbreaks, fictional invasions of zombies and aliens, and all other manner of world-ending or altering events. We watch people hole themselves up in Wal-Marts, shopping malls, abandoned prisons and even the bitter cold of the wilderness, and in the movies, the televisions shows, the comics and books, some of them even manage to survive against the longest odds.

But in reality, if we were faced with a sudden scenario that forced us to flee our homes, neighborhoods, or maybe even our own countries, and were forced to live off the land to survive, what would we, as a society, do? How would we cope? Assuming, of course, that we can still call ourselves a society at that point. More Here...

Crazy Tom Cruise Action Figures

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:49:53 GMT

Remember a few years ago when Tom Cruise was going nuts, babbling on about love, Scientology and psychiatry? Sure, it was practically career suicide, but on the other hand, it was also a whole lot of fun, and it could have been an extremely lucrative time for him.

We could have had a whole line of Crazy Tom Cruise action figures, each one featuring Tom in one of his many patented insane guises. More Here...

Caprica Is Restoring My Faith In Sci-Fi

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:25:56 GMT

For a long time, I was really worried about the fate of science fiction. It seemed like everywhere I looked, hardly anyone was interested in the tales of grim futures, space travel and superheroes. Sure, there were a few movies that made people stir, like the Matrix, the somewhat sub-par Star Wars prequels and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but outside of major releases like those, good sci-fi wasn't easy to find. For the most part, it seemed like whatever was out there was only being eaten up by imagination junkies such as myself.

Television has often been one of the worst places to find quality sci-fi. Promising shows like Space: Above and Beyond and Firefly were canceled far before their time, and for quite a while, TV sci-fi was relegated to the various Star Trek series, all of which varied widely from week to week in quality, Babylon 5, and the X-Files (which isn't exactly the high-concept sci-fi I'm getting at here). And if you count the Sci-Fi channel's (now SyFy) movie-of-the-week in that tally, then our futuristic fantasy entertainment was left up to a handful of D-list actors, a few washed up Baldwins, and Patrick Stewart. More Here...