Some talented artist out there needs to draw a picture of Cthulhu having a knock-down drag-out brawl with Voltron.
DO IT! DO IT NOOOOOOOOOW!
UPDATE: Also Rex the Wonder Dog is helping Voltron, as suggested by lance lunchmeat in comments.
Look. I know it’s not your fault that DC’s direct-to-DVD movies have been largely mediocre thus far, but come on:
Wonder Woman should not have a face that looks kind of like a horse.
I mean, it is Wonder Woman, she’s supposed to be an athletic paragon of female beauty and stuff. She should not look like a horse. Really, you could put together a list of what not to do when drawing Wonder Woman, and right at the top there would be “make her look like a horse.”
And if you have to make her look like a horse, couldn’t she at least look like a really nice horse, rather than… this?
I’m just saying. Nobody wants to buy Wonder Horseface.
Shocking story from this blog post:
Sunday, a Muslim woman scolded me for inappropriate behavior in her neighborhood. I was running up Bedford toward Williamsburg, following a part of the marathon course I often branch from to go over the bridge into Manhattan for a longer run. That day I elected to just do a fairly mindless 35 minutes out and back, a route I don’t have to think about…
By the time I turned onto Bedford, I was feeling pretty good. My iPod was dishing out tunes that make me dancingly happy and I was starting to feel the effects of the runners’ high, moving at a speedy clip and jogging about in place when traffic lights held me up. I’d just hit my half-way point and turned around when she stepped toward me on the sidewalk, shook her finger and said, with a disapproving frown, “you can’t go like that through here.”
…But then a bit of defensiveness kicked in. This is not Riyadh, it’s New York freakin’ City, and to the best of my knowledge I can “go like that” anywhere I damn well please. I’m not sure what’s on the books legally as far as lewdness and public attire, but I’m pretty sure a jog bra and baggy shorts are well within reason.
OMG THE MUSLIMS.
(Well, except that I changed the text in her original post: from “Hasidic” to “Muslim” and from “Jerusalem” to “Riyadh.” But it’s still valid, people! I mean, come on! Think how much we appeased the Jews! And now they are everywhere forcing their bagels and comedians and bar mitzvahs on us! THERE IS A LESSON HERE, PEOPLE!)
#2,491,017: Spaniards, when they are excitedly celebrating a football victory, will play impromptu games of “toreadoro” with oncoming bicyclists as the bull, themselves as the matador and the Spanish (or sometimes Canadian) flag as the cape.
#2,491,018: If by doing this, a Spaniard causes you to crash your bicycle into something hard and unpleasant when you swerve to avoid the sudden thing in your face you weren’t expecting, they will be very apologetic and immediately offer to buy you a beer or a coffee or a gelato. (I heartily recommend that if you are, by chance, near La Paloma on St. Clair, that you exercise the third option.)
I’ll just let Emma Donoghue say what needs to be said, as she was so eloquent on the CBC earlier this month:
In Ireland, it’s a constant fight for basic civil rights. Chris wouldn’t be recognized as the parent of my children and every day would be a struggle. Here in Canada, though, I can go months at a time without thinking, “hey, I’m a lesbian.” Once you get the civil rights out of the way, you can just worry about your mortgage like everybody else.
Damn straight.
ME: So here we are at the local McDonald’s.
FLAPJACKS: Yes. I look forward to eating these brand new Angus Burgers ™ which are the glorious triumph of McDonald’s new menu.
ME: Wonderfully summed up.
FLAPJACKS: It’s almost as if I have prepared a statement in advance for transcription onto your website.
ME: You always complain about the website. Luddite.
FLAPJACKS: You never capture my good side.
ME: Whatever. So, let us eat these Angus Burgers ™.
FLAPJACKS: Which we only bought because we had a two-for-one coupon.
ME: Otherwise, for the cost, you’d be better off going to a local diner and getting them to make you a burger.
FLAPJACKS: Although we should note that beef is bad for the environment and you should get a turkey burger or a giant mushroom patty or something.
ME: People are looking at us funny now. You shouldn’t have said that so loudly.
FLAPJACKS: All this meta-awareness makes things very difficult!
Burgers are chewed thoughtfully.
ME: Well. This is…
FLAPJACKS: Tolerable.
ME: The bun is nice.
FLAPJACKS: Yes, because when you order a hamburger, you really think, “hey, you know what matters? The quality of the bun.”
ME: You know what a burger without a bun is? Salisbury steak. You know what Salisbury steak is? A trick played on poor people.
FLAPJACKS: So is McDonald’s when you think about it.
ME: Point. But I think we’re getting away from the topic at hand.
FLAPJACKS: Yes. These burgers.
ME: It’s not bad, I guess.
FLAPJACKS: Well, speaking as a connoisseur of beef - don’t laugh - if you hadn’t informed me ahead of time that this was Angus beef, I wouldn’t have guessed.
ME: How does Angus beef differ from regular beef?
FLAPJACKS: It is beefier.
ME: Well, I certainly grant that this isn’t as good as a burger at a “quality” microchain like Hero or Licks. But it is definitely a burger, unlike, for example, a standard McDonald’s burgeresque sandwich.
FLAPJACKS: I can point at this and say “yep, that’s a burger.”
ME: Precisely.
FLAPJACKS: But I feel kind of bad awarding McDonald’s points for tolerability. My food reviewing skills are not like the Special Olympics. This burger is not a winner.
ME: You know what it reminds me of? The Arch Deluxe.
FLAPJACKS: Oh, that isn’t fair. The Arch Deluxe was the same old shit, except McDonald’s went out of its way to pretend that it was special and new. This burger, in comparison, is genuinely different from standard McDonald’s food. The patty is different, the bun is different, even the onion is different.
ME: Yes, but it’s still not very good.
FLAPJACKS: But it’s differently not very good.
ME: All right. So is that our conclusion? That the Angus Burger ™ from McDonald’s is pretty mediocre and it’s not worth buying?
FLAPJACKS: Yes - man, the manager doesn’t look happy.
ME: It’s probably because we’ve been saying all this out loud.
FLAPJACKS: I feel kind of stupid saying “tee-ehm” out loud, incidentally.
Cool is elusive. We all know that. Pursuing cool is difficult because true cool is only achieved by fearlessness without purpose. Arnold Schwarzenegger action movies are not cool; they are loud and stupid and enjoyable at times, but not cool because they are designed to make Arnold look cooler, and as such fail. Chow Yun-Fat action movies, in comparison, are cool, because Chow Yun-Fat is utterly willing to do something that potentially can make him look like a horse’s ass in just about any movie he’s in - and because he does it, with elan and style, he becomes even cooler.
(Or, to put it another way: no way does Arnold Schwarzenegger let a baby piss on him to put out a fire on his leg in the climactic action scene of Hard Boiled.)
However, even people who are honest-to-god cool have their limits. There are activities which can be performed that, unfortunately, will remove coolness. It does not matter a whit how devil-may care or suave you may be: do these things, and you will lose cool points. There is no moral dimension to these sorts of activities, either. (If Ralph Fiennes could make participating in genocide compelling in Schindler’s List… well, you get the point.)
The foremost of these is, of course, drinking from a juicebox.
Drinking from a juicebox has become cultural code for “young” and thus by extension also “callow” and “naive.” And that is the most generous interpretation one can manage. If you want a less generous interpretation, consider that on recent episodes of 30 Rock, we were introduced to Kathy Geiss, the presumably mentally challenged niece of hardass executive Don Geiss (played by Rip Torn, who defines hardass), by seeing her drinking from a juicebox.
Herein lies the problem with drinking from a juicebox: it doesn’t matter that tetrapaks are more ecologically friendly than bottles or cans, it doesn’t matter that juice is better for you than pop. Kids drink from juiceboxes. We consider the abandonment of the juicebox to be a rite of passage into adulthood, and resist the idea of it being suitable for non-youthful things.
Indeed, one might argue that the youthful connotations associated with the juicebox have slowed the rate of acceptance of tetrapak technology into other areas of the beverage industry - tetrapaks are particularly appropriate for wine storage, but only recently have wineries even begun to adopt the technology, and if you don’t think it’s because the tetrapaks look like “oversized drinking boxes,” you’re fooling yourself.
But I’m getting away from my main point, which is that juiceboxes are really dorky in a way that’s just about completely unstoppable. You can’t redeem the juicebox by having a cool hardbitten character drink from a juicebox - your cool, hardbitten character will just become “quirky” (which is Hollywood for “gay but we’re not admitting it”). The juicebox is just about unstoppable as a character killer.
“But Chris,” you say, “these cute Photoshops are funny and all, but action heroes aren’t going to drink from juiceboxes anyway, so what’s the big deal?” And you have a point there, so let me retaliate with the H-bomb of anti-juicebox arguments.
How sexy is Lloyd Dobler now, eh? Eh?
I’m appealing to you - yes, you, the readers! - to answer a simple question: what, if anything, would you consider yourself to be relatively expert in?
I’m not looking for post-doctorate study here or anything. I’m just curious to know what my readership knows a lot about, mostly because there are lots of things I don’t know and I like to write about lots of things, and I’m sure it would be a benefit to all and sundry if, when I decided I wanted to write about, oh, let’s say llama farming, if I could email the llama farmer who reads me and ask him about the everyday minutiae of llama farms, so I don’t get something really basic wrong (”llamas are insects. You heard me. Insects.”).
So spill, people!
Just a heads-up: I am heading into final exams of first-year law school over here in Mightygodkingland, which means that posting frequency will probably drop a tad. Possibly even a peck. I’m gonna try to post at least one item a day, because I’ve got my pride, but it’ll probably be definitely lighter-than-average stuff for the next two weeks or so.
However, once it’s all over, I will have a handy “Guide To Your First Year Of Law School” post for everyone to enjoy and find extremely useful! So there’s that.
I’ve been getting sporadic emails for the last month, all along the same theme: “what are you gonna do for April Fools’ Day? I bet it’s gonna be wild.”
And I have no idea how to say “nothing, really.” Because, come on. This is, by and large, a blog where I post theoretically amusing crap I have written and/or made. I mean, just over the last week, my output has included mockery of Dilton Doiley, Marlon Wayans, Signalman, the Hillary Clinton sniper story, the Viking Commando and Martin Van Buren. How many other blogs are making fun of Martin Van Buren, for crissake? [1]
So if I post just another humour piece, it’s redundant. That leaves the “prank” piece, except those are inevitably terrible and almost uniformly obvious from the get-go, and all that’s left for people to comment upon in such situations is to go the “ha ha you really got me” route and humour the author, or alternately the “I wish this was true because damn wouldn’t that be awesome” route. And what fun is that for my audience?
You can’t even Rickroll people any more because everybody has those browser scripts specifically designed to prevent being Rickrolled. (And dare I say that whoever came up with that script in the first place really has an incredibly low tolerance for silliness.)
So, in short, don’t expect any “special” April Fools’ Day material from me. I don’t see the point. Tomorrow will be Business As Usual here at mightygodking.com, which means probably gay-themed mockery of Archie comics and possibly a longwinded rant about some facet of public policy.
My lack of April Fooling will, in and of itself, become a meta-April Fool as I subvert expectations, even! Yeah! That works! That’s the ticket! Damn, I’m good.
[1] Well, other than ihatemartinvanburen.com, but that guy has issues.
Jon Stewart has been quietly visiting wounded troops at Walter Reed and Bethesda hospitals since 2004.
Hands up, all those surprised?
Okay, look. I understand that there are people out there who are paranoid about germs. I suppose if you’re going to be paranoid about something, germs are as good a thing as any to be paranoid about, so I try to look past this.
And although I know that tissue paper does not, in fact, possess any antiseptic qualities, and that placing a layer of it upon a toilet seat prior to sitting on it will not particularly protect one from the horrible toilet-seat germs that the rest of us somehow manage to overcome - fine, whatever. We all have our own psychological crutches to bear, and if a ring of toilet paper somehow manages to temporarily curb your fear of germ-inflicted death… well, maybe it’s a bit wasteful, but what the hell, I can overlook that too.
But just because I tolerate said tiny piece of everyday insanity should not lead one to conclude that I am particularly interested in sitting on your buttsweat-encrusted paper-pulp barrier-wad, people. If you really feel the need to cushion yourself from the evils of buttgivitis with an ass-crown of white tissue, okay, but for fuck’s sake flush it afterwards.
…which has found the “Vertigo plagarism” post:
I think the Civil War remix is sort of his “Rick James” moment- by that I mean it was the bit he did that was so awesome it makes everything else he does or ever will do not as good by comparison.
Well, ow…
As this site has recently gotten StumbledUpon and Dugg a bit in the last week or so, I felt it apropos to put up a sort of semi-site-index page in my Klassics bar, available here.
Regular readers: this probably affects you very little, unless you want to go back through the archives and see if you missed something I consider worthy of mentioning again.
Number of times “fuck” normally uttered during morning wakeup ritual: 0-1.
Number of times “fuck” normally uttered during morning wakeup ritual when it is really really cold and the building’s radiators are doing an inadequate job of warming it and the hot water isn’t working properly so you have to have a lukewarm shower: 237.
There is a small rock pool right at the top of Victoria Falls in which it is safe to swim.
Most times, I try to avoid donning the tinfoil hat, but all of Iran’s undersea internet cables mysteriously being cut is just too ridiculously conspiratastic not to at least consider the fact that part of the PR problem with the Iraq war has been all those Iraqi bloggers saying over and over “hey, you’re a bunch of fuckups, go away”…
…and that anybody considering a war against Iran might want to take care of that, you know, pre-emptive like.
Come on! Five cables in a month!
