Meet Mr. Fox

Posted on April 19, 2018 by

It’s time for another Thursday trip down that road to nowhere that leads right through the private, communal dressing rooms of the stars of Shelf Critter Theatre.  This week, we’re going to meet one of the gang’s more mysterious and unsettling members… the stone faced Mr. Fox.  Don’t stare too long at him, or his eyes will devour your soul like a school of starving piranhas…

But he’s so cute……

AAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!

NAME: Mr. Fox

SPECIES: Fox.  Duh, right?  Yeah, how many people do you know named Mr. Fox who are actually humans?  You never know…

SHELF PERSONALITY: Mr. Fox and the vast emptiness of his eyes just sit and stare…. and sit and stare.  Mr. Fox never moves, and Mr. Fox never speaks… even when he has something to day.  Sometimes, critters should only be seen and not heard…

Fox heads, fox heads, roly poly fox heads…

RUNNING GAGS: Mr. Fox’s wide eyed gaze is often accompanied by colorful Photoshop brush gimmicks to show that there’s not much going on inside of that empty head of his.  Whether he’s stoned or just brain dead is up for debate.  The entirety of <r. Fox’s dialogue consists of a long run of ellipses like this: ……………. Whenever a scene calls for swift action, Mr. Fox is always there to disappoint the protagonist… particularly if he’s playing Snuggle Bear’s lawyer.

69 years in prison, AND you have to pay your lobotomized lawyer!

ICONIC SCT ROLE: The only time Mr. Fox actually “did” anything in an official episode of Shelf Critter Theatre was in the apocalyptic story “Rage Against the Machine,” where Fuzzywig’s robotic fox goes on an eye laser rampage and Mr. Fox’s steely gaze serves as critterkind’s last hope for survival…

Don’t cross the streams! That would be messy…

WHAT IS HE?: Mr. Fox is part of a latter day Beanie Baby spinoff series from Ty called The Beanie Boo’s (sic) Collection.  These critters are larger, fluffier, big eyed cousins of the infamous late 90’s fad that swept the nation.  His ear tag says that his name is Slick, that his birthday is May 1st, and it even comes with this poem…

I’m sly in the forest, I hide under wood
A visit from hunters would never be good.

WHERE DID HE COME FROM?: Ozarkland in Kingdom City, Missouri… the same souvenir shop I picked Rainy up at in 2014.  Mr. Fox was my prize on my most recent trip through that neck of the woods in 2015.

And a fine prize he is…

WHAT’S IN A NAME?: Mr. Fox isn’t particularly an imaginative name, though that’s the case for most of my Shelf critters.  The Sponkies referred to the vulpine as “Mr. Fox” in the episode “Seasons in the Snow,” and the name stuck.  That was his first SCT appearance as more than just a background character.

Angel Sammy got to meet the uncredited Mr. Fox in the previous episode.

ESN PREMIERE: I rearranged the categories of this post to reveal a secret about Mr. Fox that managed to elude my memory.  The often used stock photo of the blankly staring Mr. Fox (Which also leads off this post) came from his very first appearance on my blog in the Bashful episode “The Great Debate.”  In that story, Mr. Fox is not only credited by his real name SLICK FOX, but after the initial and familiar dialogue of ellipses, Mr. Fox actually TALKS!  Yes, he has spoken before.  Just not in an official Shelf Critter Theatre scene.  Got anything to say about that bombshell, Mr. Fox?

…………….

CAN I GET ONE TOO?: I paid almost $15 for this cute little bastard three years ago from a ripoff souvenir shop.  You can buy him today from Ty’s official website for the low price of just $5.99!  With free shipping in the US!  What a bargain for a stoned, mute fox!  Yeah, collectible, my ass….

Mitzi doesn’t care if you depreciate, just as long as you still give tasty snacks.

Come back next Thursday for another Shelf critter who’s just too cute for words…

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Shitty By The Bay

Posted on April 18, 2018 by

This isn’t going to be the San Francisco treat….

Twenty-nine weeks of tolerating horrible music everyone else seems to think is awesome has all come down to this!  Today, The Nest is rolling out the red toilet paper to honor the song we chose as the absolute worst in my Top 30 Iconic Songs I Can’t Stand countdown!  DJ Scratchy and her Sponkies are standing by with hammers, blowtorches, chainsaws, bazookas, or anything else you might want to use on the most worn out piece of crappy vinyl ever pressed.  Just be careful to avoid the groovy shrapnel.  I know at least one of you knows exactly which song we’re going to be tarring and feathering…

Hottie, may I get a drum roll please!

drum roll

#1. “Don’t Stop Believin'” – Journey

Forty years ago, a band from San Francisco became one of the kings of a musical genre that would later become known as arena rock.  Arena rockers weren’t hardcore enough for heavy metal, nor pretty enough to be a hair band… but they beat out both of those sister movements in the one category that counts… commercial success.  Record, release, tour, repeat was the credo these arena rock bands lived by before their parking meter of fame expired and they had to resort to playing county fairs.  A number of these stadium icons were pretty good and still make us want to flick on our lighter cellphone when their music plays on the oldies station today.  But not all of these groups aged well…

The illustration that accompanies “lame” in the dictionary.

Journey was that Bay Area band that dominated the Billboard charts in the late 70’s and early 80’s… and they did it with the largest collection of lame songs you’ll find outside of the Teletubbies soundtrack.  There are a few gems in the Journey catalog that are alright, but most of their stuff doesn’t make me turn up the radio… and one of their songs makes me wish I could not only turn OFF the radio, but shoot the deejay who played the damn thing in the first place…

“Don’t Stop Believin'” was a #9 hit for Journey back in 1981.  They had songs that charted higher, they had songs that were more popular…. but for some peculiar reason, at some point during the new millennium, this song was chosen as THE signature song of the band AND the entire arena rock genre that was full of so many better artists.  Don’t Stop Believin’ is the absolute worst of Jouney’s annoying lead singer Steve Perry, and I can’t understand how anyone can voluntarily listen to this even once, let alone continue to request it… or God forbid, sing it with 30,000 of their closest friends at a goddamn baseball game.

No wonder people look down on the city of Detroit.

What is the matter with people that they seemingly want to willingly wallow in such an ear scraping, self respect shattering song that could have just as easily been swept under the rug like so many other generic hits of yesteryear?  Well, I’m not going to tolerate this piece of shit music anymore… and neither should you!  This record must go down, and it must go down hard!

Yeah, fuck this shit! Let’s play some Phil Collins instead!

I hope you enjoyed the Iconic Songs I Hate countdown, even though the songs were all ones I really hated to even post the audio of on my blog.  A big thank you to everyone who came by to mock my taste in music, and share your thought for or against my choices in this rather unique musical theme.  After this and my tribute to cover songs, maybe there will be another Top 30 music countdown in the future sometime!  And who knows what I might choose to feature should I channel my inner Casey Kasum once again…

The Top 30 Singers Who Need To Become Mutes!

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Rescuing Baby Zeeba

Posted on April 17, 2018 by

It’s a big, big shelf…

Those of you who were around in the 80’s, particularly here in the US, probably recall the story of Baby Jessica, the 18 month old girl who fell into a narrow well in October 1987.  It was a media sensation back in the good old days of journalism… before media circuses typically involved non-famous people.  It took rescuers two days to find a way to extract Jessica from her intubated prison, but she made it out alive and so lived to prosper off the eventual movie rights.

Well, I was reminded of that incident a few weeks ago while I was putting together another fucked up performance of Shelf Critter Theatre.  That would be the “Viewer Mail” episode from March 16th that featured a small scene with SCT’s two newest darlings…

There are apparently worse fates than being led off to a secluded place with Uncle Snuggie.

That was the last time you saw either Bearcat or Zeeba, the two much anticipated “hatchlings” of Mitzi, on my blog.  Upon “filming” that scene, I put the two little critters back in their normal spot on the shelf, which due to a major overcrowding problem, is in the very right-front corner of the top tier…

My Sis? Oh, she went bye bye!

I placed Zeeba on the shelf first, than put her sister next to her…. only to accidentally knock the purple striped horse on her side and….. well, you see that hole in the photo up there?  That’s where the hollow poles that hold each shelf up are stacked.  Let’s look at that first photo again…

That’s a loooooong way down.

See where the pink elephant’s hanging up?  Poor Zeeba had fallen all the way down to the bottom of that shaft… and the only way to get her free was to completely take apart the right half of the shelf!  That meant removing three tiers full of junk, disassembling the entire thing, then putting everything back together again!  Damn, was a $2.50 Hatchimals toy really worth all that trouble?

How would you like to fall into this?

Sigh….. yeah, she is.

You better behave while you’re boxed up with all those other critters, Mitzi!

This past Thursday, after leaving Zeeba buried in her plastic tomb for four weeks,  I’d finally decided to take up the arduous task of inconveniencing everyone else just to save a clumsy little zebra.  So the upper shelf, which is mostly populated with SCT characters, came down and got boxed up first.  Careful Mitzi, get your paw off of Shadow’s ass.  Then came the tier that’s mostly full of sports figures and bobbleheads.  That finally got me down to the drinkware section that I’ll never actually use for its intended purpose…

My cups runneth over…

After stacking and removing soda cups from just about every stadium within a 500 mile radius, I finally made it to Ground Zero…

Now would be a great time to take a lunch break…

Our adorable little victim should be inside the bottom of that pole there.  Let’s bring in the crane and remove the last piece of rubble from this very expensive rescue effort…

There you are! Now it’s time to get your ass paddled for all this trouble…

And so the hatchlings were reunited, and are now free to appear in SCT episodes once again…

That was fun, Sis! I’m totally going down there again!

I don’t think you’ll be getting poleback rides again anytime soon, little miss trouble.  After painstakingly reconstructing the four tier shelf I had just torn down, I took some drastic measures to ensure something like this tragedy never happens again…

Duct tape really does fix everything!

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Who’s Cheating Who?

Posted on April 16, 2018 by

I think we found someone who likes getting caught in the rain.

Death, taxes, and Monday earworms.  They are the only givens in life.  So with that being said, it’s time for The Nest to audit the shelves and deduct another classic hit from the lost song income bracket out of that treasury full of happy returns we like to call the Dusty Vinyl Archive!  DJ Scratchy’s preparing to e-file you blast from the past that got buried underneath a mountain of paperwork, while the Sponkies are wondering why I am claiming them as dependents.  Uncle Sam won’t be making a dime off of this muzak…

Chances are you probably know the name Rupert Holmes.  No, he wasn’t the dumber little brother of Sherlock… he wound up with a #1 song (The final #1 of the 70’s) that still gets heard all the time on radio today.  You know what it is, and might have even began singing it if you read the caption under the lead photo.  It’s a strange story about pina coladas and how two people can simultaneously cheat on each other and seem happy when they find out what the other was doing in the end…

Your classified ad was very convincing, dear. Here, have some of this completely unpoisoned coffee I just made for you…

Yeah, everyone knows The Pina Colada Song.  But it wasn’t the only Top 10 hit Rupert had before he went back being not much into health food.  He followed up that corny, ridiculous hit with another song about cheating… the 1980 #6 hit simply titled “Him”…

I don’t know what Rupert’s obsession is with cheating lovers, but this time he’s not so happy to find out his wife’s been sneaking around behind his back.  Maybe she didn’t want to be associated with someone whose former group wrote a popular song about cannibalism.  Maybe she just realized Rupert’s not going to be making any Sexiest Man Alive lists.  Whatever the reason, Rupert’s giving her the choice between him or HIM, and I think we all know who the lady will be picking…

I can’t believe it’s not pina coladas!

Rupert sure gets himself into a lot of fucked up relationships, and it’s hard to feel sorry for him given the double standard that exists in “Him” and “Escape.”  This makes Holmes yet another artist with two popular songs that seem to contradict one another.  Other members of this group…

Dion:

“The Wanderer” can roam from town to town and lay all the girls he wants, but “Runaround Sue” gets chastised for being a floozy.  You don’t have to be a feminist to see there’s something wrong here…

Slut!

Gloria Gaynor:

“I Never Can Say Goodbye” to you boy, but she sure as hell “Will Survive” without your lame ass…

I love you dear. Now get the fuck out of my life…

Sheena Easton:

Sheena sure loves being a willing toy for her baby who takes the “Morning Train,” but just don’t ask her to “Strut,” pout and put it out…

What do you mean I’m giving you mixed messages?

Feel free to add any other contradictory songs that were among the most popular for a certain artist in the comments below.  Meanwhile, I’ll be back with another song from the dunes on the cape next Monday…

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A Big Showoff

Posted on April 14, 2018 by

“Hey!  You wanna see me do a trick?”

“Look, Ma!  No feet!  Or tail!”

These guys, I swear!  They’ll do just about anything to be featured as the Saturday Squirrel…

Have a great weekend everyone!

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