Paxton

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AWESOME-tober-fest 2008: Remembering Cracked Monster Party

Posted in AWESOME-tober-fest, Cracked magazine, Halloween, holiday, Monster Party, nostalgia, pop culture, reviews with tags AWESOME-tober-fest, AWESOME-tober-fest 2008, Cracked, Halloween, holiday, pop culture on October 22, 2008 by Paxton

Welcome to AWESOME-tober-fest Week 4. For those that are just joining us, AWESOME-tober-fest is my countdown to Halloween which includes spooky articles each week covering things like scary books/movies, candy, etc. I’ll discuss these things each week until we finally reach “H-Day” as I like to call it (or Halloween, for the layman). Since we are celebrating in October, and this is the Cavalcade of Awesome, the name of this countdown is AWESOME-tober-fest. If you missed any of the first three weeks, here’s a handy dandy list:

Week 1: I review gallons of Halloween sodas
Week 2: Some of my favorite scary movies
Week 3: I Survive Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights

All caught up? Good, let’s get started with today’s topic; Cracked Magazine’s Monster Party.

I was going through an old chest of mine in the garage a week or so ago and found my old stash of Mad Magazines. Along with all my Mad mags, there was also a huge stash of Cracked magazines. Talk about hitting the mother lode. I loved reading Mad and Cracked magazine when I was a kid. I would wait each month to buy the copy and read it endlessly until the new issues came out. I even bought the Super Specials and Collector’s Editions which only reprinted material I already owned, but I didn’t care. I loved the spoofs, parodies and humor of my Mad and Cracked magazines. I saved every issue I bought of these magazines and stored them carefully in this chest when I was about 13 and it was left there until I opened it a few weeks ago. I had found my own personal Arc of the Covenant.

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AWESOME-tober-fest 2008!!! I survive Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights!!

Posted in AWESOME-tober-fest, Florida, Halloween, Halloween Horror Nights, holiday, Orlando, reviews, roadtrip, Universal Studios with tags AWESOME-tober-fest, AWESOME-tober-fest 2008, Florida, Halloween, Halloween Horror Nights, holiday, Orlando, travel, Universal Studios on October 15, 2008 by Paxton

Welcome to Week 3 of AWESOME-tober-fest!!! Hope you’ve enjoyed the first two weeks so far. I started off week 1 talking about creepy Halloween sodas. Then, on week 2, I discussed a few of my favorite scary movies. What’s on deck for this week? Well, as teased to you at the end of last week’s article, Steph and I took the plunge and went to our first Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights this past weekend. Universal Studios theme parks hold this event annually and this year marked the 18th year they have done it. I’ve been wanting to go since we moved down to Jacksonville but we never did and thanks to some cheap, discounted tickets at work, we were able to do it this year. In case you didn’t know, ever since around 1990, during the Halloween season, Universal Studios closes its doors (along with Islands of Adventure) around 5:30 – 6pm and clears out all the people. Universal then sets up the scare zones and haunted houses and opens the doors again for people who bought Halloween Horror Nights tickets (yes, it’s a separate ticket). There are as many as 8 haunted houses that are setup in various parts of the park as well as what are called scare zones. In these scare zones are park employees who dress up in scary costumes and follow around patrons trying to creep them out or scare them. Like the haunted houses, each scare zone has a different theme, usually based around what haunted house is near it. Halloween Horror Nights usually has an overall theme each year, too. Last year, with Freddy, Jason and Leatherface it was called the Carnival of Carnage. The year before that they did a “best of” theme with all the best haunted houses and scare zones from the years prior. This year, the overall theme was Bloody Mary; which included famous myths, legends and fairy tales. Bloody Mary is the spririt that would appear to you in a mirror if you said her name 3 times. She’s in the picture below on the right.

It’s a pretty cool theme if you ask me and I was very excited to see what Universal did with it. So, after work on Friday, the wife and I took off for Orlando and our scary Halloween adventure. Continue reading →

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AWESOME-tober-fest 2008!! Some of my favorite scary movies

Posted in Alfred Hitchock, AWESOME-tober-fest, Halloween, holiday, humor, movies, pop culture, reviews with tags AWESOME-tober-fest, AWESOME-tober-fest 2008, Halloween, holiday, movie review, movies, pop culture on October 7, 2008 by Paxton

Welcome back to Week 2 of AWESOME-tober-fest. Last year I did an article telling you guys about some of my favorite scary books. It surprisingly became fairly popular and has been seeing steady traffic. So, this Halloween (AKA AWESOME-tober-fest) I thought I’d list out some of my favorite scary movies.

Now, this won’t be a “scariest movies of all time list”, that’s too easy. This list is gonna be typically Pax-centric. It’s all about what I like, my friends. That’s the only way I can work, ALL ABOUT ME. So this list will consist of movies that I really enjoy watching but not ones that I would consider the greatest Horror/Monster movies of all time. You can Google “Greatest Horror Movies” and literally get thousands of results if that’s what you are looking for, but this list will be a bit more nuanced. And by “nuanced”, I mean “stuff Pax likes”. If that is also your definition of nuanced, then you’ve come to the right blog.

I’ve put this list in chronological order. Let us begin.

Dial ‘M’ For Murder (1954) – A Hitchcock classic. This one really ratchets up the suspense (well, it is Hitchcock). Also, Grace Kelly is beautiful and wonderful as always. I prefer her in Rear Window, however, as she has more to do because, make no mistake, this is Ray Milland’s picture. Oh my lord, this guy is the balls. Cold, calculating, smart. He never once loses his calm demeanor despite being grilled by a Sherlock Holmes wanna-be detective. Ray Milland plays a husband who recruits a man to kill his wife (Grace Kelly). He has everything planned down to the last detail but something goes wrong and he must try to frame another man for the attempt. The script for this was originally a theatrical play, and you can tell by how the cameras were setup and everything was filmed. Also, it was originally released in 3-D, which not many people know, and I got to see it that way on the big screen at the Alabama Theater during Halloween 2003, I believe. This is a great movie.

Psycho (1960) – Hitchcock, again, at his best. Anthony Perkins pulls a fantastic performance here as Norman Bates. It’s easy to see why he was typecast after this movie. His performance here is so menacing, how could he be seen as anyone else? FYI…stay away from the sequels. They are awful. Psycho II is just embarrassingly bad. Wishful thinkers tend to say that four is not bad, but they are kidding themselves. This is the only movie with ‘Psycho’ in the title worth watching (and I’m including American Psycho in that statement too).

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AWESOME-tober-fest 2008!! I review gallons of Halloween sodas

Posted in AWESOME-tober-fest, Halloween, holiday, Jones Soda, Mountain Dew, Pepsi, soda with tags AWESOME-tober-fest, AWESOME-tober-fest 2008, Halloween, holiday, Jones Soda, Mountain Dew, Pepsi, soda, sodapalooza on October 1, 2008 by Paxton

Happy October, everyone. How crazy is it that it’s October 2008 already? I can’t even believe it. It’s like I was watching an episode of Grey’s Anatomy with my wife back in January and seeing Meredith and McDreamy break up, have sex, get back together, stop having sex, then completely ignore each other, AGAIN, put me to sleep, Rip Van Winkle-style, for 6 months. I got some catching up to do.

Anyway, now that I’m back, get ready for some hardcore AWESOME to come flying at your eyes like Moe Howard and his index finger. Stand back and bask in the warm glow of your monitor and let the rays of unfiltered BAD-ASS flow from it into you. No need to fear, AWESOME-tober-fest is here. That’s right, October has begun, and with it brings the first of three themed months on the Cavalcade of Awesome. I love the final three months of the year. I theme the blog for each month. October is Halloween. November is Thanksgiving, or just fall in general. December is glorious, glorious Christmas. As you can see, I’ve done some redecorating for Halloween. The decorations are up, what do you think?

The new blog banner up top is an homage to a specific Halloween item I will be reviewing later this month. It’s something I’ve loved from my youth and just recently acquired thanks to eBay. From my October blogs of LAST year I’ve been wanting to find and review the items I’m currently speaking of but was unable to find any. I finally have them and will unleash them on you unsuspecting readers later on. I’d do it now, but I haven’t actually written the review. Besides, it’ll work better closer to Halloween.

Anywho, today I’m looking at Halloween sodas. Several have been released over the years, so I thought I’d take a look at a few. Some are old, some are new, let’s see if any made me spew. LOL…that was so awesome that I got that to rhyme. You may as well stop reading now because the article doesn’t get any better than that. Seriously, that was the pinnacle of this article. You have been warned, I can’t top that.

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I’m in Time Magazine. WHAT. UP.

Posted in blogging, Hula Burger, McDonald's, pop culture, reviews, Time Magazine with tags fast food, Hula Burger, McDonald's, personal on September 25, 2008 by Paxton

Okay, I noticed a serious jump in my blog stats the other day and I took a look to see what the hell just happened. Looking at my page views I see this:

A huge amount of traffic was being sent by an outside link to my article about failed McDonald’s sandwiches: The Golden Archives. This article usually gets some hits but it was blowin’ up, yo, sur-iously. So I clicked in to find the sites that link to it and I noticed this.

The most hits were coming from time.com. I was like, “Time.com? WTF? Not THE Time.com?” Yes, THE Time.com. I clicked the link and was greeted with an article on Time.com listing the top 50 Authentic American Experiences. Surprisingly, my blog is NOT one of the 50 Authentic American experiences. I don’t know why. How much more AMERICAN, or more of an EXPERIENCE, can this blog be? And by American, I obviously mean AWESOME. Here’s the page in question.

Within this article they are discussing the Big Mac Museum, which I would agree is an authentic American experience. In the very first sentence Time friggin’ Magazine (I say again…WHAT. UP.) sees fit to link to my blog.

Check out the Hula Burger link. That goes to my Golden Archives article here. How about that, sixth grade English teacher who said I wrote like a blind second grader? HOW YOU LIKE ME NOW?! Actually, my sixth grade English teacher didn’t say that, but she did throw a shoe across the room at a classmate. That is true. But she didn’t say I wrote like a blind second grader…I think she said epileptic first grader. But that’s beside the point because I can now bill myself as if I won an Academy Award. Like Academy Award Winner Sir Anthony Hopkins. I can now call myself Time Magazine referenced Sir Paxton Holley. Well, I added the Sir, but I have no problems going to jolly Olde England for the knighting ceremony. I’ll even pay for my own flight. You hear me Queen Mother? Hello?

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