We're Back from Hibernation.....Roanoke Times Comic Strips Dialogue (2 of 4)

This is our first entry since September of last year, and the only reason we have come back is that there is a loyal blog reader in Riga, Latvia, who kept pestering me about when I would blog again. Ok, so actually Instagram is to blame....all those amazing photos of Lake Van in Turkey are hard to ignore!!! It's hard to believe that in that amount of time we have watched Vladimir Putin became the 45th president of our beloved America (Sorry, but we can't stand Donald Trump, if there was definitely a God, then Hillary Clinton would have won the election...excuse the editorial)

Here are eight lines of dialogue we are stealing from the "Roanoke Times" Sunday comics section which ran on March 5, 2016. The reason we are using an image of starting Washington Capitals goalie Braden Holtby (pictured) is because a hockey goalie is referenced in "For Better or For Worse."

1) That stupid goalie! He just never looks! He misses everything! (For Better or For Worse)

2) "I think I need a hug anyway," (Zits)

3) What do you mean? (Hi and Lois)

4) I know red flowers make me sneeze. (Pickles)

5) At long last...............The Baby Aisle! (Jump Start)

6) I was just leaving for the day (Dilbert)

7) You're going to be late! (Baby Blues)

8) Chef Salad! Lasagna! Fried Chicken! (Blondie)

Now we can finally devote more time to those Mental Floss pop culture quizzes!

http://www.nhl.com

http://www.roanoke.com

http://www.gocomics.com

http://www.mentalfloss.com

Happy Halloween and Happy Anniversary To Us

Happy Halloween to everyone around the world........even in remote parts of Indonesia.........

Today, also marks the 7th anniversary of this blog, and part of the reason why it is called "The Daily Vampire" is because we launched the blog on Oct. 31st, 2008.

Our first image was of Christopher Lee who sadly died earlier this year.

Today's image is of the late Turkish actor Atif Kaptan who played Dracula in "Drakula Istanbul'da" in 1953.

Our other personal favorite vampire actor is Bela Lugosi.

Thanks for checking whenever you can, and we look forward to providing new entries whenever we can, even though there are some pessimists who strongly feel that blogging is dead (no pun intended)!

10 for 10 (9th entry): A Quote from Jazz Great Herbie Hancock

Greetings to our blog readers in Austria, Dubai, and Singapore....

Tonight, we continue marking our tenth anniversary of blogging with an inspiring quote from noteworthy person.

The Quote of the Week and a series of quotes from people in a given, such as playwrights (Arthur Miller and Neil Simon) or punk rockers (Lou Reed of Iggy Pop) used to be standards on our two blogs, so hence we are quoting jazz great Herbie Hancock ("Watermelon Man," "Rockit") with one of his vintage quotes:

"It's a part of life to have obstacles. It's about overcoming obstacles that's the key to happiness."

SIDEBAR: We want to welcome Pope Francis to the United States, and we hope he enjoyed his time in Washington, DC, today. Somehow, we can't imagine that he will go to the 9:30 Club while he is in the nation's capital.

10 for 10 (3rd Entry): Love Those Zoo Animals

Greetings to our blog readers in Saudi Arabia, India, and France....

Alas, we are running way, way behind in our efforts to post 10 entries in honor of our 10th anniversary of blogging, which is on Sept. 21st.

Life has been crazy and zany lately, and I promise our good friend Chris Knight of Reidsville, NC, that it is not due to watching hours of the '70s English sitcom "Are You Being Served?" on Youtube.

Here is a link to the Denver Zoo, the Philadelphia Zoo and the North Carolina Zoo (in Asheboro, NC, near Greensboro) in case you want to see a giraffe or another zoo animal of your choice in real life.

http://www.denverzoo.org/

http://www.philadelphiazoo.org/

http://www.nczoo.org/

http://www.zoo.com.sg/ (A link to the Singapore Zoo for our world audience)

10 for 10: The Nine Countries Outside America Where Our Blog Is Most Popular

Our original blog "Politics, Culture and Other Wastes of Time," which is still up and existent http://www.politicscultureandotherwastesoft.blogspot.com 

....will be turning ten years old on Sept. 21t. So to honor the occasion, we are posting 10 entries on both blogs commemorating the anniversary.

We start here with a round-up of the nine countries outside the United States where "The Daily Vampire" has had the highest number of hits from. We do want to take a moment to recognize people from smaller nations, such as El Salvador, Gabon, and Laos, where we have seen hits from over the years. But, as one would expect larger countries are in the top nine. We have been stunned by how popular both blogs are in Russia and Ukraine, and we are grateful that Turkey, the country of my late father, is in the top nine for this blog.

The images we have chosen to represent three of the countries on the list are of Misha the Bear (or Mishka) who was the mascot of the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics, Karagoz and Hacivat, two beloved Turkish shadow puppets which have been in existence since Ottoman times, and a still from Federico Fellini's 1969 film "Satyrican" for Italy (alas, the Italian director's name is one we have frequently spelled incorrectly!)

While we are at it, let's take a moment to salute Italian female tennis player Flavia Pennetta for winning today's U.S. Open finale.

Here are the countries and the number of hits from each one:

1. Russia 29,585

2. United Kingdom 27,223

3. Canada 17, 098

4. Germany 15,121

5. France 7,495

6. Australia 7,256

7. *Turkey 2,586

8. Ukraine 2,493

9. Italy 2,371

Today Marks Our Ninth Year of Blogging

Greetings to those of you in Dubai, Singapore and the Republic of Istanbul (forgive the Turkish-American humor).

Yes, we count only candles as well, but today marks the ninth anniversary of our very first blog entry on Sept. 21, 2005, on "Politics, Culture and Other Wastes of Time" http://www.politicscultureandotherwastesoft.blogspot.com

In 2005, Zappa the Family Cat was still a one-year-old kitten, it had only been four years since Sept. 11th, and gun wackos only had one Uzi per household.

We have frequently mentioned everything from George F. Will to Zippy the Pinhead and from H.R. Puff N Stuff to Alice Cooper as well as everything from Turkish soccer player Burak Yilmaz to Katarina Witt.

Hopefully, we will continue blogging (when we have time) for years to come even though blogging, which is a product of modern tech, might soon be nullified by modern tech as well....

Today We Mark Our 8th Year of Blogging

It was a very dark and stormy night (apologies to the late Charles Schultz, the creator of "Peanuts"), on that fateful day on Sept. 21, 2005.

Hmmm.....this reminds me.........one of my favorite comic strips is "Sherman's Lagoon" which has underwater creatures, such as sharks, sea turtles and crabs as its main characters; I'm not sure if I've seen an octopus yet (?!)

When we began blogging, there was no Facebook, there was no Twitter, no Miley Cyrus, no Sarah Palin, no "Breaking Bad," no "Mad Men" and no "Parks and Recreation." The oxy-moronic good Samaritan serial killer series "Dexter," which concludes tomorrow night, was on the air but it was a very new show at the time. 

One of our earliest entries on "Politics, Culture and Other Wastes of Time," which is our sister (please visit it, we need the hits!) was a mere shopping list!

I'm sure like all shopping lists I've ever written it included bananas.


Here's to the next eight years............

(We used an octopus for our image because it has eight tentacles; one can see live octopuses at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, Maryland, or the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta).

http://www.peanuts.com

http://www.aqua.org

georgiaaquarium.org

Soccer Week (7 of 8): Dutch Soccer Game Has Three Cards

During domestic weekend action in the Eredivise (Dutch Premier League), one game between Heerenveen and Gromgen featured six goals and three red cards, one of which went to Dutch nationl Tjaronn Chery (pictured).

The game's other two red cards went to Mitchell Dijks of Heerenveen  and Jim Letschert of Gronngen.

Other highlights from Holland/The Netherlands included a two-goal performance form Belgian Steve de Ridder of Utrecht and two goals from Chery's teammate from Iceland, Alfred Finnbogason, who should have made our soccer players with long names list, who kicked in two goals for Heerenveen.

One lowlight which was shown on soccer highlights shows around the globe was Dutch player Maikel van der Werff's unfortunate own goal which helped his team Zwolle lose to traditional Dutch power Ajax Amsterdam 2-1.

Here are the scores:

Utrecht 2 Waalwijk 1

AZ Alkmaar 3 Go Ahead Eagles 0

Heerevveen 4 Gromgen 2

Roda 1 Breda 5

Njmegen 3 Feyrenoord 3 (tie)

Twente 2 PSV Einhoven 2 (tie)

Cambour 2 Heracles 0

Ajax Amsterdam 2 Zwolle 1

http://www.dutchnews.nl

http://www.rnw.nl

http://www.holland.com


SIDENOTE: This marks our 1,500th entry on "The Daily Vampire"...........yes, we are surprised by how long we've stuck with this blog as well.

Blogging in 60 Seconds or Less- the Plural for Octopus is..........

We have to keep this entry short as we don't want to be late for our yoga class at Upper Valley Yoga in White River Junction, Vermont, especially since that state is 14 hours away from here.

But, we can leave you with an image of a stuffed animal octopus (we got the idea from Bing, since they used a jellyfish today).

The plural for octopus is either octopi or octopuses.

Assuredly, one can see a real octopus at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, Maryland.

And, we are wondering if the descendant of the late Paul the Octopus in Germany, who accurately projected Eskisehir's 2-1 win over Antalyaspor in Turkish soccer over the weekend, is picking DC United in its home MLS game against the Portalnd Timber this weekend.

Ok, we need to get in our Subaru Outback now (that is the unofficial car of Maine, not Vermont, actually).


http://www.bing.com

http://www.uppervalleyyoga.com

http://www.aqua.org

http://www.mlssocer.com

The Weekly Grocery List

In the early days of our blogging ventures, we used to simply post grocery lists as we couldn't conjure up anything else back in that stone age era of 2005.

Today, there are simply too many things going on at once and we have more competition thanks to Facebook, Twitter and my friend Chris Knight, who reportedly has the most popular blog in the world (that is a joke, but he gets more hits than we get).

Hence, we are returning to the grocery list. And, these are items that we either need to get at the grocery store or we added to fill space; here we go:

1. Tomatoes (Our friend Bruce Piephoff from Greensboro, NC, has a great song called "Home Grown Tomatoes")

2. Oatmeal

3. Milk

4. Nutella (we went with an image of the Turkish equivalent Cokokrem to be original)

5. ice cream

6. bananas (America's favorite Costa Rican import, after coffee)

7. Sunday Washington Post (Love 'Date Lab' and Keith Knight's Comic Strip "Knight Life")

8. shaving cream

9. apples

10. cat toys

..........There you go!

http://www.theknightshit.blogspot.com

http://www.ulker.com.tr

http://www.facebook.com/brucepiephoff

Tilly Gokbudak is Moving to Bulgaria in August

All of us here at "The Daily Vampire" are pleased to announce that our managing editor Tilly Gokbudak, who happens to be me, is moving to Sofia, Bulgaria, to teach at the American College of Sofia.

He was accepted there for a full-time position teaching English, and Gokbudak will also travel to his late father Mehmet Gokbudak's native Turkey to assist elementary school teachers teach English in the provinces of Edirne, Tekirdag and Kiriklareli.

Turkey and Bulgaria share a common border, and there many ethnic Turks in Bulgaria.

But, we are happy to announce that this blog will not discontinue in any way.

This and That_ Hoping to Post New Entries Next Week

It's been a crazy last two weeks since we posted our last entry...........whew!

We are hoping to post new entries next week........for right now I'm getting set to watch an old Kirk Douglas film, which is airing @ 4:00 a.m., eastern time on TCM.


http://www.tcm.com

Today is Our 7th Anniversary of Blogging

Today, we celebrate the 7th anniversary of our blogging venture, which began as something like weekly lists of what we were buying at the grocery store, to what is now, more or less the exact same thing.

For this special anniversary blog entry, we thought we'd use an entire entry with dialogue from the Sunday, Sept. 16, 2012, comic book section of "The Roanoke Times," a daily newspaper in Roanoke, Va.  Let's begin:

 1) "I'm ugly, that's all"

2) "School is a microcosm of society ..... a puzzle of where everyone is a piece trying to see where they fit in."

3) "Some things just dare to be tried, dad."

4) "Who can answer how much is nine minus seven?"

5) "I've decided that I'm a people person."

6) "Did you poke me on Facebook?"

7) "Where is he? What's going on?"

8) "Has anyone seen a small brown purse:

9) "Why do I always leave it to Sunday night to start panicking about when I should do my homework?"

10) "Your nose piercings look ridicilous."

11) "I'll get right on it, boss."

12) "The weekend is almost over."

(From "For Better or Worse, Agnes, Zits, Mutts, Baby Blues, Pearls Before Swine, Get Fuzzy, Dilbert, Sally Forth and Speed Bump, Blondie and "Hi and Lois;" the image are of Linda Cardellini from the 1999 tv show "Freaks and Geeks, four cards with sevens, and a water cooler, since one was featured in the "Blondie" strip).

http://www.roanoke.com

http://www.dilbert.com

The Top Ten Countries Which Have Viewed Us

Since Russia is one of the top ten countries that have viewed our blog (Yes, we were surprised as well) and I still love dated Cold War humor, I figured that we would use Misha or Misha the Bear with this entry. (In the whoops department, we did spell the bear's name Mishka in some earlier entries!)

For those of who grew up on "American Idol" and "The Gilmore Girls," Misha was the mascot of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, which were boycotted by the United States and many European countries, for the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan.

Here are the top ten countries in order of hits; it should be pointed out that Brazil, which also has over 1,000 hits was in our top ten until India past them a few days ago:

1. USA 77,595

2. UK 12,828

3. Canada 10,604

4. Germany 5,633

5. Australia 4,947

6. Italy 1,536

7. Turkey 1,470

8. Russia 1,197

9. Netherlands 1,097

10. India 1,023

SIDEBAR: We read this short piece in "Wired" magazine which really surprised us. Apparently, back in 1972, Jerry Lewis, made a film called "The Day the Clown Cried." There is a valid reason why few of you have heard of this film and why probably none of you have ever seen it. The film is about a clown is inadvertently recruited to gather Jewish children up in Nazi Germany. According to the IMDB, Lewis has the only copy of the film in a vault and he refuses to have the unreleased/uncompleted film seen by anyone.

Has It Been Six Years Already?

It was on Sept. 21, 2005, when I posted my first blog entry. It was a simple mini-bio talking about how I grew up in Roanoke,Va., my late father was an immigrant from Turkey, and that I had just seen "The Empire Strikes Back" for the 93rd (whoops! I got my blog mixed with good friend Chris Knight's blog "The Knight Shift;" I've only seen the second Star Wars film twice).

Alas, many of my blogger friends have either discontinued or gone on a long hiatus. But, since I saw that there have been people reading this blog and my other blog "Politics, Culture and Other Wastes of Time" from places like Iran, Sri Lanka, the Czech Republic and Israel this week alone, it has certainly been a well worth-while experience.

Although, I am fully aware that I could have written a novel as long as Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" in the amount of time I've spent composing nearly 3,000 entries on two blogs. But, then again, that classic Russian novel has not been checked out of my local library since 2003!

SIDEBAR: Playmakers Rep Theatre in Chapel Hill, NC, is on the verge of their latest stagest production "In the Next Room" by acclaimed playwright Sarah Ruhl, starting tonight. The production will end on Oct. 9. The 2010 Tony Award nominee has an interesting presmise: it is about a new medical device that was designed in the late 1800s to curb 'female hysteria.' That device was a vibrator. And, that will probably get us banned in Iran.

Quote of the Week-Woody Allen

For the first time in the six years that I've been blogging (it seems like some of my pals have given up, and I fully understand why!), I checked my stats. And, it seems like more people are reading this blog than ever.

Though, my most succesful entry, in terms of hits, came from my "Happy Mother's Day from Godzilla" entry back in May. It had 174 hits! Hmmm....perhaps, we need to mention Godzilla more often.

Today's quote of the week comes from Woody Allen. The focus for this month's quotes are from film directors, and it seems given that the tenth anniversary of Sept. 11th has just passed to go with a New Yorker, though many of his most recent films, including the latest "Midnight in Paris," have been filmed in Europe.

Here is Woody Allen's quip:

"His lack of education is more than comepnsated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy."

SIDEBAR: Is possum stew, skunk and potatoes or baked racoon with apples your idea of good cuisine? Well, it isn't mine either. But, if it is, then you may want to head up Marlinton, WV, where they are hosting the "West Virginia Roadkill and Autumn Harvest Festival," which learned about through "Mental Floss" magazine.

Marlinton is in Pocahontas County, which borders Highland County in Virginia, which is known for its annual maple festival.

If you happen to attend the road kill fest, let me know what the food is like. This reminds that it is perhaps possible to eat every kind of animal that can be asociated with a Looney Tunes character as Pepe Le Pew is a skunk. But, I surely hope Speedy Gonzales is the exception!

Today, We Celebrate Five Years of Blogging!

It was on Sept. 18, 2005, when we started with the original version of "Politics, Culture and Other Wastes of Time," a blog which is still active (hmm....free time is beginning to become much like Kuwaiti oil, a thing which once seemed plentiful, but now much less so!).

Today, I run both the new version of that blog and this crazy thing called "The Daily Vampire," which is actually an in-joke about my twisted sleep cycle, but perhaps because of the "Twiligt" film and book series as well as "True Blood," this blog gets about 12 times as many hits per day as "Politics...," yet we seldom post anything about vampires here!

I want to take a moment to recognize my alma mater Glenvar High School's remarkable 3-0 start to their high school football season. Last night, the Highlanders won a home game over the Grayson County Blue Devils by a 27-7 score.

My other favorite high school in Virginia, Floyd County High School, which ironically hosts Glenvar on Nov. 9, won a road game against George Wythe High School by a 17-7 score.

And, of course, I'm equally proud of both the American and Turkish men's basketball teams. The U.S. Team, which featured NBA phenom Kevin Durant and was coached by Coach K from Duke University, won the final game over a very impressive Turkish team which was lead by standout Hedo Turkoglu, who will now play for the Phoenix Suns, in Istanbul last week.

My late father Mehmet Gokbudak hailed from Turkey, and if he were alive today (he would actually be 89 years old!), I'm sure he'd still be telling me to do my math homework even though it's been 22 since I graduated from high school!

PS- I also want to extend my kudos to the NC St. football team. Though I sort of made fun of them earlier in the week, they did win their home game over the Cincy Bearcats on Thursday night by a 30-19 score.

The Vampire is Taking a Few Days Off.......

.........I knew this day would come. I've actually gotten burned out from blogging. Perhaps, it was switching to a new server. Perhaps, it was adding a second blog. Perhaps, it's because I've gotten fewer hits than expected.

At any rate, I am tired of blogging for the moment, but I will be back.

Even my friend Christopher Knight of Reidsville, NC, came to this point and he actually quit blogging for close to a full month.

But, somehow, I doubt my 'vacation' will be that long!