Secret Laboratory
Music, News, & Global Affairs
Installment #2 of the drama series, Cimmerian by Terencio Safford, Managing Editor of Secret Laboratory. In...
Introducing the new real life drama series, Cimmerian. This series is inspired by true...
Beware, dear reader: spoilers ahead. In October 1929, on a Black Tuesday that marked...
For those of you who regularly read my articles, you know that I generally...
Installment #2 of the drama series, Cimmerian by Terencio Safford, Managing Editor of Secret Laboratory. In this episode of Cimmerian, we continue to follow Dmitry in his quest to cleanse himself of the haunting stench of societal failure and rejection. He laments on his troubles trying to find sustainable employment and we get a brief glimpse at the preliminary frustration that he endures throughout his day. Today, my boss, Dave, showed his trust in me by...
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Introducing the new real life drama series, Cimmerian. This series is inspired by true events involving real people. The story is told from the perspective of the narrator. For the sake of privacy, the narrator shall herein be called, Dmitry. We will follow Dmitry, who has been so kind to lend his story to the Secret Lab, chronologically through time in his ever challenging quest of finding life after incarceration. Dmitry is receiving help...
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That’s exactly what he said when I showed him this picture; and while he might have wondered why anyone would marry a Megalodon shark, he kept his curiosity to himself. Apparently, you don’t ask too many questions when someone is paying you $200 an hour; instead, you just start drawing up papers and making motions and filing convoluted briefs with the court. But so what? When I came home last night, Kim was lying...
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Anyone listening to Secret Laboratory Radio this weekend must have thought that they had tuned in an insane asylum, one which had been overrun by the patients and was being taken apart, piece by piece. It wasn’t pretty, nor was it professional, but sometimes three good friends owe it to themselves to get together and go completely sideways in a very public fashion. As far as work and responsibility are concerned, Saturday and Sunday...
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Huh. It’s been two weeks since I wrote my last column and I’ve accomplished very little, in either my professional or my personal life. Every day I think that I ought to write something … but then I find something to watch on Netflix, instead. And there’s YouTube, which is a vast wasteland of interconnected videos that sucks you in like a black hole. You might start out at 9:00 a.m. watching the president...
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So here we are. Back in the lab. I can’t say that I am back with original literary enthusiasm and have pulled myself from my dark little crevice or if I’m simply poking my head out to see if the world still exists only to quickly withdraw again at the first sign of light and life. I’ve become comfortable in the blind man’s holiday; acquainted with palpable obscurity and nurtured in caliginous gloom. I’ve made friends...
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Welcome to 2013, the year of the … well … we’ll see, won’t we? 2012 was the year of the skunk—and if disaster strikes in the next ten months, I’d be pretty hard pressed to come up with a more odious creature. Usually the first two months of the year determine its outcome—and so far, nothing remarkable has happened, which is to be expected. Every ten years or so, a piano will land on...
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It’s become almost commonplace to hear about mass shootings—they seem to happen all of the time, in a variety of settings ranging from schools to movie theaters to shopping malls. Friday morning, as I was getting a haircut, my barber mentioned that there had been a shooting in Connecticut, but he didn’t know any of the details and neither did I. I caught the end of a disc jockey’s remarks as I was driving,...
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The last column that I wrote was churned out in a frenzy on November 6; it was started before the polls closed and by the time I was finished, Barack Obama had won a second term in the White House, seemingly without even trying. The whole thing was over by ten o’clock Central Time, leaving Mitt Romney embarrassed and out of sorts. The poor bastard was so shaken that it was all he could...
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Editor’s Note: This column was written while states were still reporting and before Obama was declared the winner. Congratulations and here’s to another four years! When I started this blog in June of 2011, it was designed to be a website to promote my books. It didn’t take me long to realize that about the only thing I was interested in covering was politics—the thinking man’s sport. By November, Secret Laboratory had been born,...
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![Ed: “His [Romney's] visage reminds me of a cheap Halloween mask—the kind of thing that you could find hanging on a clearance rack in your local drugstore on the 31st as the sun goes down.”](http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/486796_10151088962303133_1907598490_n.jpg)
As you know, we streamed the second presidential debate live and will do the same with the next one. In case you missed any of them, we have all three debates available in their entirety—just follow this link. And the last one … well … it was worth watching. Mitt Romney outdid himself by telling 31 lies in 41 minutes—the funniest of which was when he claimed that it took the president 14 days...
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The last few times I’ve had a wet dream, it was about me masturbating. Normally I wouldn’t mention this, for all of the obvious reasons—good taste, relevance, common decency—but I think that my strained libido and declining health might have to do with the looming election. Hunter Thompson described it as “campaign bloat”—and it’s been known to affect even people on the sidelines, such as myself. As November has drawn closer, I’ve become addicted...
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Beware, dear reader: spoilers ahead. In October 1929, on a Black Tuesday that marked the depth of what economist Irvine Fisher described as the “great plateau,” foreshadowing some pretty heinous irony, (or in other words, embedding what Welles would have described as an excellent plot catalyst) Orson Welles was probably examining the ideal life, trying to understand not only what he was supposed to do with his own, but also how he was supposed to interpret the sort of aimless circumstances he routinely had to contend with. And what he found, clawing through the...
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For those of you who regularly read my articles, you know that I generally write silly, funny things and tend to stay away from political issues, especially ones where I take direct quotes from newspapers, as I will in this article. But an article I read yesterday in the Sunday Edition Star Tribune got my nipple hair into such a twist that I couldn’t resist chiming in with my two cents, whether anyone else wants to hear it or not. For those who missed it, there is an article about gay marriage front page...
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(Despite my better judgment I felt the need to pull a comment from a recent email I received, which addressed my common use of the word determinism) Cite the exclamation, to whom I felt compelled to respond. “Time is movement. Nature doesn’t determine it. The only thing up for debate is the decision to act one way or the other.” You may be asking yourself what the heck this means, so I’ll try to break it down for you: this person says that time is the same thing as movement through space, that...
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Chronic pain can make your life completely miserable, sometimes even unbearable. I deal with moderate to severe pain on a daily basis and there have been times that I didn’t think I could live another day. I suffer from Fibromyalgia, Restless Leg Syndrome, and severe early onset osteoarthritis. Just imagine having the worst flu ever with aches and pains throughout your whole body. Well, that’s my average day. A couple of years ago I could barely function at times, and now I take medication to help with the symptoms, but the pain is still there....
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Gut-wrenching fear struck me as I looked at the name that popped up on my phone, Deanna Deanna. The name was supposed to only say Deanna, but apparently I had a brain fart the day I entered my Aunt Deanna’s name into my contact list. Just seeing her name once was a enough to make me nauseous, but twice put me over the edge. Deanna never calls me unless there is a problem, specifically with my Mother. As I live 90 miles away, my Mother’s sister is her first line of defense is something...
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Writing fiction is an artistic expression, and like most artistic expressions it relies for much of its essence on a lot of common patterns that both the reader and the writer can recognize. That’s sometimes the best part of observing art: trying to understand the messages behind the expressions. With fiction, there’s a difference between a monotonous description of a series of events, described in the objective voice from an omniscient point-of-view – as in, for example, an investigative news report – and a cinematic narrative intended to provoke a set of emotions...
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It’s Saturday night, and you know what that means, right ladies? It’s time to party! Time to kick back, take your hair down from that elegant-yet-oppressive chignon, and switch your makeup from “business professional” to “certified streetwalker.” My Saturday’s used to have a hedonistic ritual–sleep until noon, watch hours worth of TiVo, order out for food, and possibly sleep some more. Then, at 5 p.m., I would rise from my warm cocoon of laziness, luxuriate in a warm bubble bath, then slowly and lovingly prepare my hair, face, and breasts for a night out...
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In this video, Robert (KE6YDO), and his brother, Richard (KE6RJI), travel to Van Nuys, California from Pico Rivera by bus and rail to visit a friend, Pat Sullivan (KC6WZM), a ham radio operator who is donating some used bicycles to them so they have some form of transportation during their stay at Angels Motel in Pico Rivera, California! Thanks go out to Pat Sullivan (KC6WZM)!! Please go to http://www.youtube.com/user/ke6ydoCh2 and make a donation or click on the button below. Robert Martin, born sometime in 1961, began working at the age of 15 as a truck driver...
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Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone! Today is a day of love, chocolate, fancy dinners, jeweley, and sex with the lights on. Since I am your typical uppity diva, I generally demand a combination of 4 or more of the things listed above, but since this month’s fun money has already been pissed down the drain because of my addictions to shoe shopping and online porn, it looks like I will have to settle for a date night at home. After choosing the perfect boxed wine (i.e., whatever is the cheapest), my amazingly handsome, charming boyfriend...
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Editor’s Note: As the title of this article suggests, YDO takes this opportunity–and uses YouTube’s free service–to criticize the video giant’s seemingly unfair policies regarding what is and isn’t acceptable to publish. And while an entity such as YouTube, which is intended for all audiences, must adhere to certain standards of decency, we’re left wondering whether a reasonable alternative to censorship might be to offer its viewers and users an “adult” section. Barring that, we at least think that a more lenient approach to dealing with offending content is in order. For those of...
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Before you start reading this, you may want to first check out Creating Mental Illness, One Student at a Time for some context. I’m a firm believer in the idea that mistakes are opportunities in disguise – I mean, as long as they don’t result in the irreversible maiming of innocents, or the inadvertent destruction of something that costs more than your house – if you’ve done either of these things, uh, I apologize for my insensitivity. Although most missteps can be considered a kind of failure – especially if they’re made in front of a crap-ton...
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UPDATE: Mental Illness Redux – Behaviorist Mike Samsa Responds. I was having a heated discussion today about the somewhat contrived nature of modern psychology – at least fringe psychology. You see, as I understand things (with said understandings relatively biased and, I’ll admit, somewhat limited in an overall general way, so definitely don’t take my word for anything, ever) certain psychological and sociological principles seem to come about nowadays by self-actualizing university students who pan the streambed of human behavior for anything they can write about in their capstone, thesis, dissertation, whathaveyou…...
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Editor’s Note: YDO beta tests the new Redbox streaming option and he has some constructive criticism. Below, another user shows us how to kill an RCA console TV using dry ice & YDO. Please go to http://www.youtube.com/user/ke6ydoCh2 and make a donation or click on the button below. Robert Martin, born sometime in 1961, began working at the age of 15 as a truck driver when his dad got too drunk to drive. He was in a motorcycle accident at 17, resulting in a coma. After recovering, Martin worked as a security guard and also worked...
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Should Games have a story? Americans are getting dumber. Sorry to point it out, but your kids are getting a shitty education, being fed brain rotting cartoons and the media treats them like they are too stupid for their own good. Then again as a society, we’ve now become obsessed with reality TV, and celebrity gossip. Sorry, but we are now an idiotic country, who’s ruined our own freedoms, and warped the words of our forefathers to some jacked up version of what it was supposed to be. That being said, much like other...
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I was parsing the quality of some movies with a friend a few days ago. You know how it goes – us consumers often measure things against the standards by which all other things of equal categorization are judged – books to books, music to music, cars to cars, apples to oranges, and… movies to movies. I made the argument that the recent rendition of Dredd was of better quality, better writing (Alex Garland penned the script) better soundtrack, better story, better acting, cooler characters, more faithful to its original canon, and had...
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Editor’s Note: YDO appears as a guest on the radio show, Illogical Contraption. Update: No longer on fccfreeradio.com, Illogical Contraption can now be heard Sundays On a REAL radio station, Radio Valencia 87.9 FM in the San Francisco area! Please go to http://www.youtube.com/user/ke6ydoCh2 and make a donation or click on the button below. Robert Martin, born sometime in 1961, began working at the age of 15 as a truck driver when his dad got too drunk to drive. He was in a motorcycle accident at 17, resulting in a coma. After recovering, Martin worked as a security guard...
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Editor’s Note: In these videos, YDO wears a hat fashioned from a beer case and celebrates with RJI & Brian. Please go to http://www.youtube.com/user/ke6ydoCh2 and make a donation or click on the button below. Robert Martin, born sometime in 1961, began working at the age of 15 as a truck driver when his dad got too drunk to drive. He was in a motorcycle accident at 17, resulting in a coma. After recovering, Martin worked as a security guard and also worked in an appliance warehouse/distributor/repair business for awhile. Martin is currently living in homeless...
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Here’s a bit of mildly interesting mélange of events for you. First, it goes without saying that the Citizens United decision gets smellier the longer it remains unflushed in the toilet of our legislative process. My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that the largest businesses should be recognized as part of the legislative process, and should be held to the checks and balances that the branches of the federal government are held to. This is a digression. What happened was, apparently some guy in California conjured up the bright idea to drive around...
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For those of us here in Minnesota, winter is not quite over. May is half gone and a few hours ago, it was 40 degrees outside. I had the fireplace on and the space heater going. Then the sun came out, the temperature jumped about 30 degrees, and I had to open the windows.
These days we hear a lot of talk about Global Warming. Whether or not there is any truth to it remains to be seen—and frankly, it doesn't make a damned bit of difference either way. Climate change is real—warmer, colder, whatever—but it has nothing to do with us and we're never going to prevent it. And since we got a foot of snow last week and it's going to be 90 on Tuesday ... well ... I'm not sold on Global Warming. The weatherman can't even predict rain, let alone tell us whether or not we're facing an inferno and/or an ice age.
This weekend is the fishing opener. This means very little to me, as I never bother with a license anyway. It's also Mother's Day. Recently I've been bombarded by emails from an online florist, suggesting that I send Ex-wife #2 a beautiful bouquet.
Never in hell. Maybe if they had an option to have the arrangement stuffed with angry bees; but barring that ... no.
To hell with holidays and bees and everything else. For the last 24 hours, Terencio and I have been plotting the future of this magazine. He even wrote his column and published a couple of articles. The next order of business is for me to write something.
And I might. I have plenty to say—none of it important, of course—but a meandering essay with no direction whatsoever is probably the best way to ease back into my routine. Politics? Not to start. Not today.
And ... meh.
—John T. Schmitz
Publisher & Editor-in-Chief
Founder, Maple Hills Press
editor@secretlaboratory.org
Beware, dear reader: spoilers ahead. In October 1929, on a Black Tuesday that marked the depth of what economist Irvine Fisher described as the “great plateau,” foreshadowing some pretty heinous irony, (or in other words, embedding what Welles would have described as an excellent plot catalyst) Orson Welles was probably examining the ideal life,...
Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone! Today is a day of love, chocolate, fancy dinners, jeweley, and sex with the lights on. Since I am your typical uppity diva, I generally demand a combination of 4 or more of the things listed above, but since this month’s fun money has already been pissed down the drain...
Editor’s Note: YDO beta tests the new Redbox streaming option and he has some constructive criticism. Below, another user shows us how to kill an RCA console TV using dry ice & YDO. Please go to http://www.youtube.com/user/ke6ydoCh2 and make a donation or click on the button below. Robert Martin, born sometime in 1961, began working...
I was parsing the quality of some movies with a friend a few days ago. You know how it goes – us consumers often measure things against the standards by which all other things of equal categorization are judged – books to books, music to music, cars to cars, apples to oranges, and…...
If Germany is known for one thing, it’s their unofficial motto of “Go big or go home.” Whether they are holding hateful pep rallies or improving on wiener schnitzel, they always take things to the next level. So it’s no surprise to anyone that the newest metal band to come from there is taking...
I’ll be honest and say that I am a Grasshopper Manufacture fan boy. Killer 7, No More Heroes, Shining Soul, Sine Mora, to me they just make great games. I think the reason is because what they do is quite different from their contemporaries, they strive for unique. Personally I think Ghichi Suda is...
Nerds worldwide had a collective aneurism when it was announced that Disney was buying Lucasfilm. Some fans are bummed, some are looking forward to Episode 7, one cynical writer called it a Deathblow. That’s a bit melodramatic, as recently LucasArts games haven’t been steadily good. With games like The Force Unleashed and it’s sequel,...
Well… this is a unique treat. This game surprised me, I got much talk about it on twitter so I decided to check into it myself. This game, which started out slightly odd to me, won me over almost instantly with its over the top gore, unique art and bodacious soundtrack. That’s right, BODACIOUS....
Seriously reviewers, its easy to whine about how not scary a game is, how you can melee the whole time and fail to mention the good qualities of a solid title. So instead of showing a video, I will actually write a proper review, since all I seem to read is people bitching that...
On Sunday night I got to see one of my favorite comedians, Pete Holmes, perform live at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis, MN. Pete may be best known for his voice-over work including that of the e*trade baby, but he is also the host of a popular podcast on the Nerdist network called...
Little did I know that when I walked into the mall the other day I would be walking out the proud new owner of the Samsung Galaxy S III. This shit’s crazy! I have never owned a cutting-edge piece of technology. Even when I buy new stuff it’s outdated and on clearance. I don’t...
One of my favorite ways to spend an afternoon is to drive to the suburbs and skim the shelves of Half Priced Books. I usually go to the one in Apple Valley, MN because it’s closest to home, there’s ample parking, and it’s right around the corner from a pet store where I can...
Now that’s what I call a game. All the drama and heart you would...
Despite a hot start at home, Philadelphia was cooled off considerably in the second...
Clippers point guard Chris Paul made a sweet Los Angeles sports weekend sweeter still....
President Obama finally came out and admitted yesterday that he supports same-sex marriage, an...
Imagine, if you will, that you own your own home. You’ve decided after living...
A continuation of our part 1 piece on surviving the baseball-less winter and...
With a new year upon us, instead of reflecting upon 2011, we’d like to...
If you missed part one, check it out here. Football: Everyone and their sister...
