The Cutting Room Floor

If the advent of the DVD has taught us anything, it's that a lot more footage is shot than actually ends up in movies. Virtually every DVD is jam-packed with bonus material: deleted scenes, alternate endings, blooper reels. Whether anyone actually wants or watches this material is, well, immaterial.

So, in that spirit of giving the people what they never asked for, we here provide Sloppists with material from the cutting room floor: Extra tidbits from this week's entries that didn't quite make the cut (or that, frankly, we forgot to include when we wrote the original pieces). Enjoy. (Or, y'know, click to return to the "Main Menu.")

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(From "Butterflies"--July 29, 2009)

(Digression: Memorizing the Rorschach test is like memorizing the eye chart; i.e., if you simply memorize the chart, you can achieve a passing score. This accounts for the majority of driver's-license renewals in Florida. But while we understand why psychiatrists would have difficulty generating and "norming" new ink blots, we don't understand why optometrists and state agencies can't change the eye chart from time to time. Does the alphabet need to be "normed"?EOD)

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(From "Packing It In"--July 30, 2009)

Little Timmy's parents always knew he was destined for a career in packing. At playtime's end, he was a little too enthusiastic about putting his toys away. He screamed at his baby sister when she broke his favorite label gun. And when his mother's sister, who lived across the country, called one day, horrified, to report that she knew what had become of the family's missing dog--it having just been delivered to her doorstep--Timmy apologized but also gave a little smile, pleased at a job well done.

Do failed packers have to turn in their lapel pins?

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(From "Play Roboball!"--July 31, 2009)

During a random test for performance-enhancing drugs, New York Mets slugger K-4000 was found to have an illegal substance in his oil sample. The substance is believed to be a Venezuelan oil additive that increases viscosity between moving parts. 4000 referred questions to his robo-agent Dick V-900, who disputed all allegations before going on a murderous rampage and destroying a large swath of midtown Manhattan.

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(From "The Most Useful Website Ever"--August 1, 2009)

Won't RunPee.com become a victim of its own success? If it catches on, everyone will run to pee at the same time. The website will need to compile a secondary list of slightly more important but still negligible movie moments. Shouldn't be too hard. After all, virtually everything has fat that can be skipped if not trimmed. Even Moby-Dick is really just a five-word story: Man fights whale; whale wins.