I’ve been letting my hair grow for quite some time. Why? I don’t know (which is the same reason why I grew my muttonchops). I’m just too lazy to get a haircut, I guess.

I’ve had long hair in the past, and while it was okay, it wasn’t great. Like, my world wasn’t changed the night I got stinking drunk on Red Dog beer and Tango (pre-mixed vodka and orange drink screwdriver) and woke up with my hair in a French braid (I also had lipstick and eye shadow on, but that’s for a totally different reason). It was just a thing I did in college because I wanted to look like a greasy, bloated martial arts star. Here’s an artist’s rendering of what that looked like (just add beard).

Because I don’t like shaving, over the last two weeks or so, I’ve grown a full, horrible beard, which combined with my wild, shaggy hair, caused one of my coworkers to send me a picture in work email with the subtitle “Ron, December 2008.”

While I have lost a lot of weight (135-150lbs) since I had my long hair, I don’t think I’m quite at that level yet. For one thing, my hair is very fine and thick, but also very straight, so it doesn’t really fall in waves like that unless I tie it back into a pony tail while it is still wet. For another thing, I’m shaped more like ‘bloated, about to die’ Jim Morrison than ‘light my fire in the panties of girls all throughout the world in the mid-60s’ Jim Morrison, even after losing all that weight.

However, I don’t think it’s a bad look, even for a gorilla like myself. I could possibly pull it off with a little bit of trimming to the beard. Since I’ve given up coffee (almost a month without my favorite non-alcoholic breakfast beverage) and cut way back on sodas and caffeine pills, I’ve got the tortured genius look down pat with the bags under my eyes and the general weariness that’s soaked into every clogged pore in my face since I still can’t sleep well at night (even having cut back drastically on my caffeine levels and cocaine intake).

The beard and crazy hair just ties it all together, just ask Ted Kaczynski.

Author’s Note: Yes, I have completely quit coffee and yes, it is torture. Every time I smell coffee I want to dash over and drink a cup or five, but because I figured sucking down enough caffeine to kill a horse every day was probably bad for me, I quit cold turkey.

Author’s Note 2: No, I haven’t actually quit doing cocaine. That’s only because I never started using cocaine; I’m a crystal meth guy. That’s why I’ve got such nice dentures.

Happy MILF Day to all you mothers (and mother-fuckers) out there. Special thanks to American Pie for introducing the world to the term MILF, and for launching an entire genre of porn based around the MILF concept. Cheers!

As you might or might not know, World of Warcraft and I have been in an on-again, off-again relationship for quite some time. I’ll admit, I haven’t always been faithful. I’ve had flings with old girlfriends (Fallout), I’ve got a lady on the side as a casual thing (Guild Wars), and occasionally I’ve been known to go out and shake it at the club with some hoochies (the Wii), but I always come back to my old faithful WoW. Well, not exactly faithful, since there are 10 million other people pwning her on a daily basis, but she always put out for me, and that’s all I ask.

I strayed again recently. It was a tawdry 9 ½ WeeksDays I spent exploring every sticky, tight crevasse of Lord of the Rings Online, but it wasn’t love. Not like it is with WoW. She’s not as pretty as LotRO, but she’s a lot more fulfilling, has more content, and lets you thoroughly explore her end-game content unlike the one-trick pony that is LotRO. Like that gay cowboy movie said, “I wish I knew how to quit WoW.”

Thanks to this Shaktronics post, I’ve got “Still Alive” drilled into my brain.

It was a great race. Big Brown, if he can keep from getting hurt, is the real deal. He’s a monsterous horse in size, he looks great, and he tore through 1 1/4 miles like it was a walk down the street. He even had enough energy after the race to bite his accompanying horse on the ear a few times. But unfortunately, that great story about the homeless trainer who comes back from nothing to win the biggest race in horse racing is overshadowed because of one unfortunate animal.

Friday I was discussing the Derby with my horse-friend Katie, who was absolutely thrilled with the fact that someone had balls enough to enter another filly into the Derby. Not only was Larry Jones entering her into the Derby, he was going for a historic Oaks/Derby double, and he had a damn good shot at it. That roan beauty was named Eight Belles, and she ran her heart out today. I thought for sure she was going to be gassed at the end, but she held on, she kept fighting, and she finished a strong (and well paying, at $16.80) second place.

Unfortunately, all it takes is one wrong step.

There’s no telling how it happened. She might’ve stopped too short. Sometimes it just happens, but when she went down and when I saw the two equine ambulances there, I knew exactly what was going on.

I’m not a huge fan of racing. I know more about it than the average person, sure. I’ve been to Derby and Oaks and to the track in general dozens of times, and there’s one nasty little bit of business I never want to see ever again, and it’s an unspoken secret amongst rail birds. If there’s one equine ambulance, then there’s a chance the horse will live. If there’s two ambulances? They’re putting the horse down.

It’s gut-wrenching to know that there’s a big, beautiful animal suffering, both front ankles shattered. It’s even more gut-wrenching when you’re one of the few people who realizes what’s going on while NBC remains blissfully clueless. I know it has to be even worse for the jockeys, trainers, and handlers there, who have to temper the celebration of the greatest day in racing with the knowledge that somewhere there’s a trainer and a jock who had to watch a horse they’ve grown to know and love be put to rest, especially when she was as talented as Eight Belles.

Congratulations to Kent Desormeaux, Richard Dutrow, and of course, Big Brown. Big Brown’s going to eat the Preakness alive, and given how strong he ran this race, if his trainer can keep his foot problems from flaring up, he’s got gas enough in the tank to win the Belmont. I’m just hoping we don’t see him get hurt, too.

I always figured it’d take a public tragedy like this to get Churchill to consider going to polytrack. We’ll see how that goes after this meet. If anything would cause them to make the switch from dirt, this is it.

Cats get a bad rap these days. Now, there are a lot of dumb cats out there, but the future President Happycat is doing a lot to break down the old stereotypes of LOLcats as ignorant, with a little help from former MST3K writer and Rifftrax personality Bill Corbett. What’s Mabel doing to end discrimination against animals again? Nothing, considering she turned a blind eye to this horror.

We can all has dignity, kitteh.

I was going to do a legitimate post, but while I’m working on that, have a video of a zombie outbreak instead. I could complain about how real zombies don’t have heat signatures, but that would take away from how good the video is despite the logical inconsistencies. Then again, as anyone could tell you, I’m something of a pedant about my zombie attack videos. So instead of complaining, I’ll tell a Yakov Smirnoff joke.

In America, you eat the flesh of the dead. In Soviet Russia, the dead eat you!

It’s strange. Sometimes I’ll send stuff off to Den of Geek for publication, and then when it finally gets published, I won’t actually notice it’s been done. That’s why I may have a piece published on the 22nd, but I’ll only get around to shamelessly whoring the link on the 24th. Such is the case with my article about why I gave up on Reaper.

The show had a great pilot, and I gave it the old college try for another couple of episodes after the pilot, thinking the kinks would work themselves out. Then the wheels came off and not even the brilliant Sam Wise or my dedication to the Den of Geek project was enough to make me finish out the whole season. Of course, I’ve fallen behind on my Terminator reviews, too, but that’s just because I’m incredibly lazy, not because the show is bad.

In Reaper’s case, the show got bad in a hurry.

Warning: this Den of Geek article about the upcoming Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe game contains a lot of irrational hatred directed towards the world’s worst super hero, Aquaman.

Seriously, Aquaman is completely lame. Sure, he’s nice to have around if you’re in the mood for some sushi or looking to score a little mermaid tail (see what I did there?), but other than that? He’s as useful as tits on a fish (or a tittyfish, if you will).

Embiggen the above picture. Den of Geek made it into The Guardian’s Internet section! Plus, we got Farked again last week, which is good news! Shame it was a week with no Rontent, but what’re you gonna do? (other than write a bunch of articles this weekend so you won’t miss out when another tabloid comes by).