Okay, so I posted all of my old stuff from my Myspace.com profile. Since Blogspot code for making a word bold is apparently different from Myspace code, that took much longer than it should have and now I'm grumpy. But fortunatly, I found this website last week that pretty much makes me laugh whenever I go to it:
http://roxik.com/pictaps/
You basically draw a character, and then get to watch it dance around surrounded by about 100 identical images of whatever you happened to make. I have no idea why it's so addiciting, but God help me, I can't stop.
The best part is that it's actually a showcase for some graphic designer living in Japan, who's profile says the "website offers a happy digital toy!" I love the Japanese.
Jul 23, 2007
Why Spider-man 3 Sucks Donkey Balls, Featuring The Worst Dialogue Ever - 05/18/07
Okay, so I know that I'm supposed to be writing about my recent experiences attending an extravagant Hindu wedding in Daytona, but something happened the other night and I feel it would be remiss of me to not try to write at least a little about it before the memory fades.
I went and saw Spider-man 3 on Wednesday with Noel, who was kind enough to indulge my comic book-geekery and come along. I had told her that it was actually about a young girl who had to choose between two lovers in Victorian England before tragically succumbing to her tuberculosis, but I don't think she really believed me. I was pretty excited; the previews looked relatively cool, and it had a bunch of characters that I was interested to see adapted to the big screen. After sitting through 3 ½ hours of film, however, my opinion had drastically changed.
It's a shitty movie. The plot is nonsensical and cheesy, there are too many characters jammed in just for the sake of having more CGI effects, and all of the actors look like they're phoning in their performances as quickly as possible so that they can get back to their trailers and have gigantic money fights with the cash they've been paid. It's terrible. To show you why, I reconstructed the movie as best that I can, and the sad thing is that I don't even have to really be funny; I can just write down what actually happened and it will look ridiculous.
The movie begins with Peter Parker loving life. The city adores Spider-man, his girlfriend is singing on Broadway and has amazing tits, and even Aunt May has been less incontinent than usual. The only specter on the horizon is a chance encounter with his former best friend, Harry Osborn, who blames Spider-man for the death of his father, the villainous Green Goblin. Quickly brushing off Harry's grim insistence that he's going to kill him and that he knows his secret identity, Peter chooses to ignore this totally realistic threat and happily skips off to contemplate proposing marriage to Mary-Jane. Everything's great.
But across town, there's action afoot! It's two-bit criminal Flint Marko, played by that guy from Sideways! He's on the run from the law, and after briefly stopping to visit his sick daughter (complete with nighttime oxygen mask for maximum sympathy) to assure her that he'll get the money for her treatment no matter what, the audience is convinced enough that he's not really a bad guy to maybe feel sorry for him. Remember that! It kind of becomes a not very relevant plot point later on.
So it's the middle of the night, and Marko is slowly jogging away from the police officers chasing him. According to a radio transmission from the police chief, he's escaped to someplace called "the marshes", and while I'm not that familiar with New York City, I'm fairly sure there are no outlying swampland for criminals to hide in, unless you count New Jersey. He staggers up to a chainlink fence, and after pausing to catch one of the attack dogs that have been sent after him, he stares at it stupidly for a few moments before punching it in the face and hopping the fence. He takes a few steps, only to plunge down into a gigantic hole that he somehow missed directly in front of him. He hits the sand-covered ground with a thud, and then gets to his feet to gaze wonderingly around at the strange, enormous metal arms that he also somehow didn't notice suspended above him. The scene cuts to the inside of a scientific control center, where one important looking guy in a white coat asks another important looking guy in a white coat something about "the particle accelerator". Then a woman, who is far too hot to have anything at all to do with science, leans over to say something about the "molecular deconstructor", noting that the "silica target has increased in mass." Scientist #1 assures her that "it's only a bird", and will "fly away once we start it up." So the audience can now assume that this is the device that Marko is currently staring at, and that based on their dialogue and the fact that they want to test a machine that can destroy molecules at 3 in the morning, the people who are about to turn it on are insane.
The machine thrums to life, and the giant arms begin to slowly oscillate around him. His facial expressions during all of this kind of remind me of a cow chewing it's cud; he doesn't seem especially concerned that he's fallen into the middle of some kind of huge machine designed for obliterating sand particles and run by maniacs, and only makes a half-hearted attempt to jump out of it after the arms are moving around him so fast the human eye can't see them, which works about as well as you'd expect. Long story short, his body is destroyed and reconstituted as living sand the next day, with the added bonus that he's somehow able to perfectly recreate the color and consistency of the ridiculously ugly shirt he was wearing during his unfortunate accident. He then lumbers off to try and save his daughter by using his newfound powers in stupid ways to rob banks.
Meanwhile! Peter is zipping around town on his gay little motorscooter whistling about how rainbows make him happy or something when suddenly, out of nowhere, a mysterious stranger riding a flying snowboard swoops in and throws him into a wall! Wow! Peter looks up, his dazed eyes filled with confusion. Who could this mysterious stranger be? How could he know Peter Parker's barely kept secret identity of the amazing Spider-Man? Oh, right. It's Harry Osborn, that guy from like an hour ago who totally told Peter that he hated him and wanted to kill him, and had not only the means but also the motive and opportunity to do so! He even screams "You knew this was coming, Pete!!", because even though everyone in the audience knew about two movies ago that Harry would want revenge, the thought never seemed to occur to Peter. They battle around in the sky and across rooftops for a while, and I have to say, as bad as this movies dialogue and plot are, the special effects are awesome. The fight comes to an abrupt conclusion after Peter uses some of his spider-webbing to clothesline Harry and knock him off of his radically evil snowboard, and despite the fact that he had previously survived being punched face first through the glass plating of like sixteen buildings, the 100 foot fall seemed to really fuck him up. Peter freaks out and dashes over to his unmoving friend, tries to give him CPR, and the next thing you know, Harry's being loaded into an ambulance and taken to the hospital. After a few tense hours, the doctor comes out, and instead of asking Peter why his friend was knocked unconscious while dressed like some kind of techno-bondage freak, just explains that Harry will be fine and is only suffering from a minor case of amnesia; specifically the type of amnesia regarding the possible identities of any superheroes he happens to know and any involvement they might have had in the death of his father.
This is a stupid plot twist, because now everything can go back to being hunky-dory between Pete, MJ and Harry, but whatever. It actually happened in the comics on multiple occasions, so I'm willing to let it slide. What I couldn't stand, however, is the way that James Franco, the actor who plays Harry, decided to interpret the personality shift. For the next 45 minutes, every time he opened his mouth I wanted to jump into the screen and shove a pencil through his eye. He apparently took the direction "okay, act like you're friends with everybody again" to mean "act like you've had a stroke to the portion of your brain that doesn't cause you to talk like a lobotomy patient on ecstasy." This is an actual sample of his dialogue:
Peter: "Hey there, Harry, how are you feeling? That bump on your head getting better?"
Harry: "Gosh, buddy, you know what? It sure is! Boy, things sure are swell!"
Peter: "That's great."
Harry: "Hey, you know what else is great??"
Peter: "What's that?"
Harry: "PUPPIES! Yeah, they're so cute, I think that God himself must have made them out of sunbeams and happiness. Hey, you guys want to come back to my place? We can drink hot chocolate and wear fuzzy pajamas and have a smiling contest! I bet I'll win! Ha ha ha!"
Seriously, it was horrible. And things don't seem to be getting any better. First, Peter pisses off MJ by making out with hot new blonde love interest Gwen Stacy at a parade in Spider-man's honor before rushing off to get his ass handed to him by Flint Marko, who's been remaining inconspicuous by flying around the city in the form of a giant sandstorm cloud. Then, he gets shot down trying to propose in a hilariously unfunny scene in which he's apparently completely oblivious to the fact that MJ is jealous, although seeing as how he never seemed to even consider that Harry might want him dead, this is actually kind of believable. Finally, to cap it all off, he and Aunt May are called down to the police station to be informed that the guy the cops thought killed his Uncle Ben actually didn't. It was some other guy. Oops! Our bad! And who was that other guy, you ask? Why, Flint Marko, who Peter had just fought that very afternoon and was now running around as an unstoppable sand monster! What are the odds!
Peter goes back to his tiny apartment to brood and wait for Marko to strike again, but thoughts of burning revenge make him sleepy after about an hour and he decides to take a nap. While he's sleeping, the sinister black blob of space goo that hitched a ride on his moped at the beginning of the move crawls all over his body, and the next thing he knows he wakes up outside wearing a black version of his costume that seems to enhance his abilities. I didn't mention the space goo before because literally, that's how it got there. He was hanging out in the park with MJ, a comet fell from the sky, and then space goo crawled out of it and jumped onto his bike. That's it. That's all you get. Peter's surprisingly unconcerned about the fact that his costume is suddenly made out of alien semen and makes him black out, and just decides to investigate a suspicious trail of sand that's crawling of its own accord through a set a bank doors that have been torn from their hinges. I swear, that Spider-man has a deductive mind like a steel trap. On his way in, he's accosted by Eddie Brock, played by Topher Grace, a hotshot new photographer who's trying to take Peter's job at the Daily Bugle. Displaying the negative influence the black suit is already having on him, he throws Brocks camera into a wall and totally breaks it, before saying "Nyah!" and then swinging off.
He finally confronts Marko in the dank labyrinth of subway track and drainage pipes that apparently comprise the majority of New York City's underbelly. Despite the fact that he's supposed to be really good at science, Peter doesn't seem to realize that repeatedly punching a man completely made out of sand in the face really isn't going to accomplish much. Marko finally stumbles into a puddle of water, which, about 10 minutes later, gives Peter the brilliant idea to flood the room they're fighting in by breaking one of the conveniently placed hydro-tanks scattered around the subway. This turns his enemy into a shrieking pile of wet mud, and he's eventually sucked into a sewer drain. Peter then jubilantly goes to tell his Aunt that the guy who killed her husband is dead, and is surprised when it turns out she's not really that enthusiastic about murder. This causes him to worry enough about his fluctuating mental state that he goes to visit one of his science friends, who, despite the fact that he even admits that he's a physicist and knows nothing about alien slime biology, is very assertive when he says that it exhibits "characteristics of a symbiote." Of course, the scientific method he uses to back up this nonsensical claim consists of him sticking a small piece of the goo into a jar and then poking it with a stick, so it's easy to question the veracity of his conclusion.
This is the point in the film where director Sam Raimi was obviously too busy bathing in his gigantic bathtub full of money to care what direction the movie went in, and everything quickly turns even more unwatchable than it already was. MJ, still upset about Peter's insensitivity and uncaring attitude, as well as being a humongous whore, decides to call up Harry to find a shoulder to lean on. The two of them end up, and I swear I'm not lying here, cooking omelets while dancing around to "Twist and Shout" while giggling and staring into each others eyes. The flirting quickly turns into a passionless kiss, with both of them breaking it off at around the same time and profusely apologizing to one another while awkwardly staring at the ground. MJ leaves crying, and Harry, desperate to immerse himself back into the blissful world of magical unicorns and gumdrop fairies that he had previously inhabited, takes a swift gulp of brandy. For some reason, this has the exact opposite of the intended effect, causing all of his amnesia to go away and making him see a reflection of his father in a mirror that starts screaming at him to go kill Spider-man. The scene ends with Harry's face cracking into a sinister grin of pure evil, and the audience is left in rigid anticipation to see what kind of diabolical scheme he comes up with to enact his final revenge.
And so what does he do? Does he get Peter hopped up on ecstasy and then force him to have sex with Aunt May at gunpoint while MJ watches and pleasures herself? Does he dig up Uncle Ben's corpse and wear his skull like a hat before waking Peter up by peeing in his mouth? No! No, it's sooooo much gayer than that.
The first step in his nefarious plot involves capturing MJ and then forcing her to meet Peter in a park to break up with him, telling him that they're so over and that she's met another man. That's pretty rough, and Peter is understandably upset. But wait, it gets even more evil! Harry then meets Peter for coffee, and smugly tells him that, get this….he's the other guy! Oh shit!
Really, this is the best idea that he could come up with? That's his revenge plot? Making Peter think that he stole his girlfriend? That's not a plan worthy of a criminal mastermind, that's something I did in high school to get back at whatever football dick was dating the girl that I liked. Peter, seriously pissed off and wearing his black costume, shows up at Harry's house and then, fueled by alien slime-enhanced rage, proceeds to beat the living fuck out of him. Standing over the body of his broken foe, the true nature of his evil suit comes out and he says some really mean things about how Harry's dad totally didn't love him. Ouch. Harry, enraged at these lame taunts, summons the last of his energy and throws one of his pumpkin grenades at the back of Peters head as he walks away. Peter easily dodges the attack, and then sends the bomb hurtling back to explode right next to Harry's face.
As if the fact that Peter just attempted to murder one of his closest friends wasn't indicative enough of how much the alien suit had corrupted him, he spells it out for the slower members of the audience by brushing his formerly slicked-back hair down into his eyes, making him look not so much evil as like the keytaurist from 80's musical sensation A Flock of Seagulls. What follows is one of the worst montages that have ever been filmed in the entire history of movies. With annoying disco music blaring, Peter is shown walking down the streets of New York with his collar popped up to his ears, grinning nastily and making lewd gestures at any woman that he passes. Tobey Maguire obviously has no sense of rhythm whatsoever, so the whole thing looks like he's suffering from a mild seizure instead of anything remotely cool. He then goes into a hip clothing boutique, and emerges seconds later wearing some kind of awful swing outfit that I guess is supposed to signify how immoral he's become. As if this wasn't bad enough, he then stands in the doorway of the shop and proceeds to place his hands behind his head and furiously thrust his groin around like he's trying to dislodge a rabid wolverine that's intent on devouring his genitals. This goes on for far, far longer than it has any right to, and after the first 7 minutes or so the hilarity was starting to fade and I was just getting uncomfortable.
And then, as if the emo haircut, attempted murder, and pelvic thrusting weren't enough to convince you that Peter is heading down the dark path of iniquity, Raimi decides to hammer it in just a little bit more. Peter's science friend calls him up again to tell him that after more rigorous fake testing, he's discovered that the black goo seems to enhance certain feelings, particularly those of aggression. Thanks, Dr. Obvious. I hadn't caught on to that yet. But Raimi isn't convinced that his audience knows the black suit is evil. The American public is, after all, notorious for needing to be spoon fed even the most blatant of truths, so why not indulge their stupidity? To this end, the camera pans in for a closeup shot through a microscope, to show how the alien symbiote is acting at a molecular level. This consists of a large black dot, I guess representing one of the evil slime's cells, beating up all of the normal, small white cells around it. Thank you, Mr. Raimi. I finally understand that the costume is bad, as well as possibly racist.
Peter, however, still thinks it's great. He takes Gwen, the blonde tart he made out with earlier, to the jazz club where MJ is working as a waitress. To make MJ jealous, he hops onto the piano and plays a snazzy dance number before tapping across the bar, swinging off of a chandelier, and doing this weird little boyband routine with a chair in the middle of the dance floor. He then seductively wraps Gwen's legs around his waist and dips her slowly to the ground, all the while looking straight into a horrified MJ's eyes. Gwen, realizing she's being used like a common street whore, becomes mortified and storms out, prompting Peter to attempt a reconciliation with MJ. She, of course, is less than receptive, and an unhappy Peter takes out his aggression on one of the bouncers who tries to make him leave. As MJ attempts to pull him off of his victim, he turns around and punches her to the ground and then, horrified at what he's become, turns and runs out of the bar like a woman.
Peter finally realizes that while the suit might make it easier to talk to girls and stuff, it's really not worth it if you fly into an uncontrollable rage and beat them to a pulp before you get to have sex with them. He broods on top of a church for a while before going into the bell tower to try and remove the symbiote, but it really doesn't want to leave and fights him. Eventually, Peter is able to tear some of it off of when he accidentally stumbles into the bell, realizing that space clothing, like Chihuahuas, hate loud noises. Coincidentally, Eddie Brock is in the same church, and is praying to Jesus in the hopes He'll reach down His almighty hand and kill Peter after he revealed Brock was trying to pass off a photoshopped picture of Spider-man robbing a bank. Jesus works in mysterious ways, and responds to Brocks fervent supplication by dropping a bucketful of homicidal alien sperm onto his upturned face. Amen!
The movie's been running for a good two hours by now, and it's time for the final pointless showdown. Brock, now looking like a jacked black-suited Spider-man with a mouth full of slavering teeth, somehow finds Flint Marko and convinces him to help crush their mutually hated enemy. This, of course, makes no sense given Marko's previously misunderstood yet relatively altruistic behavior, unless he's still really pissed that Spider-man turned him into mud and flushed him down a sewer. I guess when you put it like that, it's believable. It doesn't get him any closer to curing his daughter, but I'm sure the sand that currently constitutes his body is made of at least 75% fecal matter, so I'd be angry too. They kidnap MJ and suspend the cab she's in high above the ground between two buildings, taunting Spider-man to come out and face them. Peter, despite seeing on the news that his girlfriend is in mortal peril, takes a while to actually go do anything about it. First, he pulls out his old costume and stares at it for about 10 minutes, maybe contemplating the addition of a cape. Then he goes over to Harry's house and pleads with him to help in the rescue attempt, banking on the fact that Harry will be willing to put aside their differences to rescue a girl they both love. Harry, however, turns slowly into the light, and reveals that the entire right side of his face has been horribly disfigured by Peter throwing a grenade into it earlier. Peter, once again displaying his stupidity, seems shocked by this, as if he had no idea that having an object explode right next to you could be harmful. Harry, understandably, is less than willing to help out the guy who blew off half of his face just because he tricked him into thinking he was sleeping with his girlfriend, and politely tells Peter to fuck off.
As Peter swings despondently away, nonsensical plot twist number 84 shuffles forward in the form of Harry's ancient manservant, Jeeves! I actually don't remember what his real name was, but it was typically butler-esque, like Wordsworth or Mr. Slappy or something. Jeeves then tells Harry that he's known all along that Peter had nothing to do with the death of Harry's father, because it was Jeeves himself who cleaned the late Mr. Osborn's wounds, and he was completely sure that they were caused by his own goblin flying thing! So Peter couldn't have done it, maybe! Whoa! Harry takes this shocking news surprisingly well; I know that if it had been me, the subsequent conversation would have been much different.
Me: "God, can you imagine the nerve of that guy? Coming over here and asking for my help to rescue his whore of a girlfriend? That fucker burned off half of my face! And he killed my dad! God, I hate him soooo much!"
Jeeves: "Young master, I need to tell you something."
Me: "What is it, Jeeves? Did you forget to take your pills and get trapped in the closet again?"
Jeeves: "Not today, but thank you for asking. I've seen many a strange thing in this house, sir, and I've kept my silence as a good servant should. But I wanted to tell you that I was there the night your father died. I cleaned his wounds after making out with his corpse a little, and I can tell you for a certainty that he died because he was impaled upon his own goblin glider."
Me: "Excuse me?"
Jeeves: "That's right, young master. Based on his gaping chest wounds hours after his death, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that your friend had nothing to do with it."
Me: "And you're just telling me this shit now? After the last two years of seeing me obsess over the fact that I thought my best friend killed my dad?! Jesus! You just sat there and didn't say anything while you watched me spend hours making a flying snowboard and grenades that look like pumpkins so that I could finally enact my revenge?! Oh, and hey, you know when else this information might have been useful? Right before I made Pete think that I stole his woman and he BLEW HALF OF MY FUCKING HEAD OFF!!! What the hell is wrong with you?!
Jeeves: "Master, I…"
Me: "Jeeves, you are so fired."
Man, that was a stupid scene. Anyway, Peter has gone off to fight the unstoppable sand mutant Marko and evil black Spider-man Brock, and is thoroughly getting his ass kicked. To be fair, the main reason that he's doing so poorly is that he constantly has to keep making sure that MJ doesn't plunge to her death, as it seems like every two seconds the webbing holding her up snaps, prompting her to scream loudly and fall a few more feet. When this movie comes out on DVD, I want to play a drinking game that involves taking a shot every time MJ shrieks during the last 45 minutes, but I'm afraid I might die of alcohol poisoning. Seriously, she doesn't stop. It's like nails grating on a chalkboard in Hell. Finally, Harry shows up in his goblin outfit, and he and Peter proceed to enact every single horrible buddy action-movie cliché in short order. Peter lovingly telling Harry that "It's good to see you, buddy" as they make up? Check. Harry telling Peter that he's "Kind of busy over here!" while facing down Marko by himself? Check. Linking arms and then swinging around to kick the opponent your friend was fighting a la Jackie Chan/Chris Tucker? Check. After about 15 minutes of flying around Marko, Harry finally remembers his Sand Monster Obliteration Missiles, which do their job and crumble Marko to dust. You might wonder why he didn't use them earlier, but don't. It'll only make your head hurt. Harry then turns to help Peter, who's being beaten like a red-headed stepchild by Brock. After a few more minutes of furious battling, Brock steals Harry's snowboard and prepares to deliver a fatal blow to Peter with its jagged edges. Things look grim for our intrepid hero, until Harry leaps out of nowhere and takes his own evil snowboard to the chest, saving Peter! Brock then unceremoniously throws Harry out of a window to crash into the ground 100 feet below them, but Peter, fueled by the rage over his friend's apparent death, gains the upper hand when he remembers that the alien slime hates loud noises. He traps Brock in a circle of steel bars, and then beats on them with another steel bar until the ringing noise is too much for the costume to bear. He pulls Brock out while the suit is going into space convulsions, and then throws a pumpkin grenade into it. Brock, not willing to lose the power and sweet revenge he was so close to obtaining, decides that his best course of action is to leap in after the bomb. This doesn't work out very well for him, and he winds up getting vaporized along with the black goo.
Whew. So, the climactic battle of good versus evil is over, with justice, as always, prevailing. Sure, there were casualties on both sides, but the important thing is that the tide of darkness that was two guys with lame vendettas against Spider-man has been averted. You'd think that the first thing Peter would do is go check on his friend who was impaled on sharp spikes and then thrown out of a building while saving his life, but no. Harry lies on the ground outside and slowly bleeds to death while Peter has a heartfelt conversation with a surprisingly un-obliterated Marko. Marko tells him that he's not really a bad guy, just misunderstood in a giant bank-robbing sand monster kind of way. Oh, and that he did shoot his uncle, but it was totally not on purpose. Peter forgives him, and Marko drifts away on the soft summer night's breeze.
So that's it. There are a few incidental mop-up events, like Harry's funeral and Peter and MJ getting back together, but the best part of the finale is when the credits start to roll. If you're a comic book fan, you'll have to see this movie just because it's Spider-man, but if you're not, I wouldn't really bother, unless you want to go and laugh at how bad it is.
I went and saw Spider-man 3 on Wednesday with Noel, who was kind enough to indulge my comic book-geekery and come along. I had told her that it was actually about a young girl who had to choose between two lovers in Victorian England before tragically succumbing to her tuberculosis, but I don't think she really believed me. I was pretty excited; the previews looked relatively cool, and it had a bunch of characters that I was interested to see adapted to the big screen. After sitting through 3 ½ hours of film, however, my opinion had drastically changed.
It's a shitty movie. The plot is nonsensical and cheesy, there are too many characters jammed in just for the sake of having more CGI effects, and all of the actors look like they're phoning in their performances as quickly as possible so that they can get back to their trailers and have gigantic money fights with the cash they've been paid. It's terrible. To show you why, I reconstructed the movie as best that I can, and the sad thing is that I don't even have to really be funny; I can just write down what actually happened and it will look ridiculous.
The movie begins with Peter Parker loving life. The city adores Spider-man, his girlfriend is singing on Broadway and has amazing tits, and even Aunt May has been less incontinent than usual. The only specter on the horizon is a chance encounter with his former best friend, Harry Osborn, who blames Spider-man for the death of his father, the villainous Green Goblin. Quickly brushing off Harry's grim insistence that he's going to kill him and that he knows his secret identity, Peter chooses to ignore this totally realistic threat and happily skips off to contemplate proposing marriage to Mary-Jane. Everything's great.
But across town, there's action afoot! It's two-bit criminal Flint Marko, played by that guy from Sideways! He's on the run from the law, and after briefly stopping to visit his sick daughter (complete with nighttime oxygen mask for maximum sympathy) to assure her that he'll get the money for her treatment no matter what, the audience is convinced enough that he's not really a bad guy to maybe feel sorry for him. Remember that! It kind of becomes a not very relevant plot point later on.
So it's the middle of the night, and Marko is slowly jogging away from the police officers chasing him. According to a radio transmission from the police chief, he's escaped to someplace called "the marshes", and while I'm not that familiar with New York City, I'm fairly sure there are no outlying swampland for criminals to hide in, unless you count New Jersey. He staggers up to a chainlink fence, and after pausing to catch one of the attack dogs that have been sent after him, he stares at it stupidly for a few moments before punching it in the face and hopping the fence. He takes a few steps, only to plunge down into a gigantic hole that he somehow missed directly in front of him. He hits the sand-covered ground with a thud, and then gets to his feet to gaze wonderingly around at the strange, enormous metal arms that he also somehow didn't notice suspended above him. The scene cuts to the inside of a scientific control center, where one important looking guy in a white coat asks another important looking guy in a white coat something about "the particle accelerator". Then a woman, who is far too hot to have anything at all to do with science, leans over to say something about the "molecular deconstructor", noting that the "silica target has increased in mass." Scientist #1 assures her that "it's only a bird", and will "fly away once we start it up." So the audience can now assume that this is the device that Marko is currently staring at, and that based on their dialogue and the fact that they want to test a machine that can destroy molecules at 3 in the morning, the people who are about to turn it on are insane.
The machine thrums to life, and the giant arms begin to slowly oscillate around him. His facial expressions during all of this kind of remind me of a cow chewing it's cud; he doesn't seem especially concerned that he's fallen into the middle of some kind of huge machine designed for obliterating sand particles and run by maniacs, and only makes a half-hearted attempt to jump out of it after the arms are moving around him so fast the human eye can't see them, which works about as well as you'd expect. Long story short, his body is destroyed and reconstituted as living sand the next day, with the added bonus that he's somehow able to perfectly recreate the color and consistency of the ridiculously ugly shirt he was wearing during his unfortunate accident. He then lumbers off to try and save his daughter by using his newfound powers in stupid ways to rob banks.
Meanwhile! Peter is zipping around town on his gay little motorscooter whistling about how rainbows make him happy or something when suddenly, out of nowhere, a mysterious stranger riding a flying snowboard swoops in and throws him into a wall! Wow! Peter looks up, his dazed eyes filled with confusion. Who could this mysterious stranger be? How could he know Peter Parker's barely kept secret identity of the amazing Spider-Man? Oh, right. It's Harry Osborn, that guy from like an hour ago who totally told Peter that he hated him and wanted to kill him, and had not only the means but also the motive and opportunity to do so! He even screams "You knew this was coming, Pete!!", because even though everyone in the audience knew about two movies ago that Harry would want revenge, the thought never seemed to occur to Peter. They battle around in the sky and across rooftops for a while, and I have to say, as bad as this movies dialogue and plot are, the special effects are awesome. The fight comes to an abrupt conclusion after Peter uses some of his spider-webbing to clothesline Harry and knock him off of his radically evil snowboard, and despite the fact that he had previously survived being punched face first through the glass plating of like sixteen buildings, the 100 foot fall seemed to really fuck him up. Peter freaks out and dashes over to his unmoving friend, tries to give him CPR, and the next thing you know, Harry's being loaded into an ambulance and taken to the hospital. After a few tense hours, the doctor comes out, and instead of asking Peter why his friend was knocked unconscious while dressed like some kind of techno-bondage freak, just explains that Harry will be fine and is only suffering from a minor case of amnesia; specifically the type of amnesia regarding the possible identities of any superheroes he happens to know and any involvement they might have had in the death of his father.
This is a stupid plot twist, because now everything can go back to being hunky-dory between Pete, MJ and Harry, but whatever. It actually happened in the comics on multiple occasions, so I'm willing to let it slide. What I couldn't stand, however, is the way that James Franco, the actor who plays Harry, decided to interpret the personality shift. For the next 45 minutes, every time he opened his mouth I wanted to jump into the screen and shove a pencil through his eye. He apparently took the direction "okay, act like you're friends with everybody again" to mean "act like you've had a stroke to the portion of your brain that doesn't cause you to talk like a lobotomy patient on ecstasy." This is an actual sample of his dialogue:
Peter: "Hey there, Harry, how are you feeling? That bump on your head getting better?"
Harry: "Gosh, buddy, you know what? It sure is! Boy, things sure are swell!"
Peter: "That's great."
Harry: "Hey, you know what else is great??"
Peter: "What's that?"
Harry: "PUPPIES! Yeah, they're so cute, I think that God himself must have made them out of sunbeams and happiness. Hey, you guys want to come back to my place? We can drink hot chocolate and wear fuzzy pajamas and have a smiling contest! I bet I'll win! Ha ha ha!"
Seriously, it was horrible. And things don't seem to be getting any better. First, Peter pisses off MJ by making out with hot new blonde love interest Gwen Stacy at a parade in Spider-man's honor before rushing off to get his ass handed to him by Flint Marko, who's been remaining inconspicuous by flying around the city in the form of a giant sandstorm cloud. Then, he gets shot down trying to propose in a hilariously unfunny scene in which he's apparently completely oblivious to the fact that MJ is jealous, although seeing as how he never seemed to even consider that Harry might want him dead, this is actually kind of believable. Finally, to cap it all off, he and Aunt May are called down to the police station to be informed that the guy the cops thought killed his Uncle Ben actually didn't. It was some other guy. Oops! Our bad! And who was that other guy, you ask? Why, Flint Marko, who Peter had just fought that very afternoon and was now running around as an unstoppable sand monster! What are the odds!
Peter goes back to his tiny apartment to brood and wait for Marko to strike again, but thoughts of burning revenge make him sleepy after about an hour and he decides to take a nap. While he's sleeping, the sinister black blob of space goo that hitched a ride on his moped at the beginning of the move crawls all over his body, and the next thing he knows he wakes up outside wearing a black version of his costume that seems to enhance his abilities. I didn't mention the space goo before because literally, that's how it got there. He was hanging out in the park with MJ, a comet fell from the sky, and then space goo crawled out of it and jumped onto his bike. That's it. That's all you get. Peter's surprisingly unconcerned about the fact that his costume is suddenly made out of alien semen and makes him black out, and just decides to investigate a suspicious trail of sand that's crawling of its own accord through a set a bank doors that have been torn from their hinges. I swear, that Spider-man has a deductive mind like a steel trap. On his way in, he's accosted by Eddie Brock, played by Topher Grace, a hotshot new photographer who's trying to take Peter's job at the Daily Bugle. Displaying the negative influence the black suit is already having on him, he throws Brocks camera into a wall and totally breaks it, before saying "Nyah!" and then swinging off.
He finally confronts Marko in the dank labyrinth of subway track and drainage pipes that apparently comprise the majority of New York City's underbelly. Despite the fact that he's supposed to be really good at science, Peter doesn't seem to realize that repeatedly punching a man completely made out of sand in the face really isn't going to accomplish much. Marko finally stumbles into a puddle of water, which, about 10 minutes later, gives Peter the brilliant idea to flood the room they're fighting in by breaking one of the conveniently placed hydro-tanks scattered around the subway. This turns his enemy into a shrieking pile of wet mud, and he's eventually sucked into a sewer drain. Peter then jubilantly goes to tell his Aunt that the guy who killed her husband is dead, and is surprised when it turns out she's not really that enthusiastic about murder. This causes him to worry enough about his fluctuating mental state that he goes to visit one of his science friends, who, despite the fact that he even admits that he's a physicist and knows nothing about alien slime biology, is very assertive when he says that it exhibits "characteristics of a symbiote." Of course, the scientific method he uses to back up this nonsensical claim consists of him sticking a small piece of the goo into a jar and then poking it with a stick, so it's easy to question the veracity of his conclusion.
This is the point in the film where director Sam Raimi was obviously too busy bathing in his gigantic bathtub full of money to care what direction the movie went in, and everything quickly turns even more unwatchable than it already was. MJ, still upset about Peter's insensitivity and uncaring attitude, as well as being a humongous whore, decides to call up Harry to find a shoulder to lean on. The two of them end up, and I swear I'm not lying here, cooking omelets while dancing around to "Twist and Shout" while giggling and staring into each others eyes. The flirting quickly turns into a passionless kiss, with both of them breaking it off at around the same time and profusely apologizing to one another while awkwardly staring at the ground. MJ leaves crying, and Harry, desperate to immerse himself back into the blissful world of magical unicorns and gumdrop fairies that he had previously inhabited, takes a swift gulp of brandy. For some reason, this has the exact opposite of the intended effect, causing all of his amnesia to go away and making him see a reflection of his father in a mirror that starts screaming at him to go kill Spider-man. The scene ends with Harry's face cracking into a sinister grin of pure evil, and the audience is left in rigid anticipation to see what kind of diabolical scheme he comes up with to enact his final revenge.
And so what does he do? Does he get Peter hopped up on ecstasy and then force him to have sex with Aunt May at gunpoint while MJ watches and pleasures herself? Does he dig up Uncle Ben's corpse and wear his skull like a hat before waking Peter up by peeing in his mouth? No! No, it's sooooo much gayer than that.
The first step in his nefarious plot involves capturing MJ and then forcing her to meet Peter in a park to break up with him, telling him that they're so over and that she's met another man. That's pretty rough, and Peter is understandably upset. But wait, it gets even more evil! Harry then meets Peter for coffee, and smugly tells him that, get this….he's the other guy! Oh shit!
Really, this is the best idea that he could come up with? That's his revenge plot? Making Peter think that he stole his girlfriend? That's not a plan worthy of a criminal mastermind, that's something I did in high school to get back at whatever football dick was dating the girl that I liked. Peter, seriously pissed off and wearing his black costume, shows up at Harry's house and then, fueled by alien slime-enhanced rage, proceeds to beat the living fuck out of him. Standing over the body of his broken foe, the true nature of his evil suit comes out and he says some really mean things about how Harry's dad totally didn't love him. Ouch. Harry, enraged at these lame taunts, summons the last of his energy and throws one of his pumpkin grenades at the back of Peters head as he walks away. Peter easily dodges the attack, and then sends the bomb hurtling back to explode right next to Harry's face.
As if the fact that Peter just attempted to murder one of his closest friends wasn't indicative enough of how much the alien suit had corrupted him, he spells it out for the slower members of the audience by brushing his formerly slicked-back hair down into his eyes, making him look not so much evil as like the keytaurist from 80's musical sensation A Flock of Seagulls. What follows is one of the worst montages that have ever been filmed in the entire history of movies. With annoying disco music blaring, Peter is shown walking down the streets of New York with his collar popped up to his ears, grinning nastily and making lewd gestures at any woman that he passes. Tobey Maguire obviously has no sense of rhythm whatsoever, so the whole thing looks like he's suffering from a mild seizure instead of anything remotely cool. He then goes into a hip clothing boutique, and emerges seconds later wearing some kind of awful swing outfit that I guess is supposed to signify how immoral he's become. As if this wasn't bad enough, he then stands in the doorway of the shop and proceeds to place his hands behind his head and furiously thrust his groin around like he's trying to dislodge a rabid wolverine that's intent on devouring his genitals. This goes on for far, far longer than it has any right to, and after the first 7 minutes or so the hilarity was starting to fade and I was just getting uncomfortable.
And then, as if the emo haircut, attempted murder, and pelvic thrusting weren't enough to convince you that Peter is heading down the dark path of iniquity, Raimi decides to hammer it in just a little bit more. Peter's science friend calls him up again to tell him that after more rigorous fake testing, he's discovered that the black goo seems to enhance certain feelings, particularly those of aggression. Thanks, Dr. Obvious. I hadn't caught on to that yet. But Raimi isn't convinced that his audience knows the black suit is evil. The American public is, after all, notorious for needing to be spoon fed even the most blatant of truths, so why not indulge their stupidity? To this end, the camera pans in for a closeup shot through a microscope, to show how the alien symbiote is acting at a molecular level. This consists of a large black dot, I guess representing one of the evil slime's cells, beating up all of the normal, small white cells around it. Thank you, Mr. Raimi. I finally understand that the costume is bad, as well as possibly racist.
Peter, however, still thinks it's great. He takes Gwen, the blonde tart he made out with earlier, to the jazz club where MJ is working as a waitress. To make MJ jealous, he hops onto the piano and plays a snazzy dance number before tapping across the bar, swinging off of a chandelier, and doing this weird little boyband routine with a chair in the middle of the dance floor. He then seductively wraps Gwen's legs around his waist and dips her slowly to the ground, all the while looking straight into a horrified MJ's eyes. Gwen, realizing she's being used like a common street whore, becomes mortified and storms out, prompting Peter to attempt a reconciliation with MJ. She, of course, is less than receptive, and an unhappy Peter takes out his aggression on one of the bouncers who tries to make him leave. As MJ attempts to pull him off of his victim, he turns around and punches her to the ground and then, horrified at what he's become, turns and runs out of the bar like a woman.
Peter finally realizes that while the suit might make it easier to talk to girls and stuff, it's really not worth it if you fly into an uncontrollable rage and beat them to a pulp before you get to have sex with them. He broods on top of a church for a while before going into the bell tower to try and remove the symbiote, but it really doesn't want to leave and fights him. Eventually, Peter is able to tear some of it off of when he accidentally stumbles into the bell, realizing that space clothing, like Chihuahuas, hate loud noises. Coincidentally, Eddie Brock is in the same church, and is praying to Jesus in the hopes He'll reach down His almighty hand and kill Peter after he revealed Brock was trying to pass off a photoshopped picture of Spider-man robbing a bank. Jesus works in mysterious ways, and responds to Brocks fervent supplication by dropping a bucketful of homicidal alien sperm onto his upturned face. Amen!
The movie's been running for a good two hours by now, and it's time for the final pointless showdown. Brock, now looking like a jacked black-suited Spider-man with a mouth full of slavering teeth, somehow finds Flint Marko and convinces him to help crush their mutually hated enemy. This, of course, makes no sense given Marko's previously misunderstood yet relatively altruistic behavior, unless he's still really pissed that Spider-man turned him into mud and flushed him down a sewer. I guess when you put it like that, it's believable. It doesn't get him any closer to curing his daughter, but I'm sure the sand that currently constitutes his body is made of at least 75% fecal matter, so I'd be angry too. They kidnap MJ and suspend the cab she's in high above the ground between two buildings, taunting Spider-man to come out and face them. Peter, despite seeing on the news that his girlfriend is in mortal peril, takes a while to actually go do anything about it. First, he pulls out his old costume and stares at it for about 10 minutes, maybe contemplating the addition of a cape. Then he goes over to Harry's house and pleads with him to help in the rescue attempt, banking on the fact that Harry will be willing to put aside their differences to rescue a girl they both love. Harry, however, turns slowly into the light, and reveals that the entire right side of his face has been horribly disfigured by Peter throwing a grenade into it earlier. Peter, once again displaying his stupidity, seems shocked by this, as if he had no idea that having an object explode right next to you could be harmful. Harry, understandably, is less than willing to help out the guy who blew off half of his face just because he tricked him into thinking he was sleeping with his girlfriend, and politely tells Peter to fuck off.
As Peter swings despondently away, nonsensical plot twist number 84 shuffles forward in the form of Harry's ancient manservant, Jeeves! I actually don't remember what his real name was, but it was typically butler-esque, like Wordsworth or Mr. Slappy or something. Jeeves then tells Harry that he's known all along that Peter had nothing to do with the death of Harry's father, because it was Jeeves himself who cleaned the late Mr. Osborn's wounds, and he was completely sure that they were caused by his own goblin flying thing! So Peter couldn't have done it, maybe! Whoa! Harry takes this shocking news surprisingly well; I know that if it had been me, the subsequent conversation would have been much different.
Me: "God, can you imagine the nerve of that guy? Coming over here and asking for my help to rescue his whore of a girlfriend? That fucker burned off half of my face! And he killed my dad! God, I hate him soooo much!"
Jeeves: "Young master, I need to tell you something."
Me: "What is it, Jeeves? Did you forget to take your pills and get trapped in the closet again?"
Jeeves: "Not today, but thank you for asking. I've seen many a strange thing in this house, sir, and I've kept my silence as a good servant should. But I wanted to tell you that I was there the night your father died. I cleaned his wounds after making out with his corpse a little, and I can tell you for a certainty that he died because he was impaled upon his own goblin glider."
Me: "Excuse me?"
Jeeves: "That's right, young master. Based on his gaping chest wounds hours after his death, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that your friend had nothing to do with it."
Me: "And you're just telling me this shit now? After the last two years of seeing me obsess over the fact that I thought my best friend killed my dad?! Jesus! You just sat there and didn't say anything while you watched me spend hours making a flying snowboard and grenades that look like pumpkins so that I could finally enact my revenge?! Oh, and hey, you know when else this information might have been useful? Right before I made Pete think that I stole his woman and he BLEW HALF OF MY FUCKING HEAD OFF!!! What the hell is wrong with you?!
Jeeves: "Master, I…"
Me: "Jeeves, you are so fired."
Man, that was a stupid scene. Anyway, Peter has gone off to fight the unstoppable sand mutant Marko and evil black Spider-man Brock, and is thoroughly getting his ass kicked. To be fair, the main reason that he's doing so poorly is that he constantly has to keep making sure that MJ doesn't plunge to her death, as it seems like every two seconds the webbing holding her up snaps, prompting her to scream loudly and fall a few more feet. When this movie comes out on DVD, I want to play a drinking game that involves taking a shot every time MJ shrieks during the last 45 minutes, but I'm afraid I might die of alcohol poisoning. Seriously, she doesn't stop. It's like nails grating on a chalkboard in Hell. Finally, Harry shows up in his goblin outfit, and he and Peter proceed to enact every single horrible buddy action-movie cliché in short order. Peter lovingly telling Harry that "It's good to see you, buddy" as they make up? Check. Harry telling Peter that he's "Kind of busy over here!" while facing down Marko by himself? Check. Linking arms and then swinging around to kick the opponent your friend was fighting a la Jackie Chan/Chris Tucker? Check. After about 15 minutes of flying around Marko, Harry finally remembers his Sand Monster Obliteration Missiles, which do their job and crumble Marko to dust. You might wonder why he didn't use them earlier, but don't. It'll only make your head hurt. Harry then turns to help Peter, who's being beaten like a red-headed stepchild by Brock. After a few more minutes of furious battling, Brock steals Harry's snowboard and prepares to deliver a fatal blow to Peter with its jagged edges. Things look grim for our intrepid hero, until Harry leaps out of nowhere and takes his own evil snowboard to the chest, saving Peter! Brock then unceremoniously throws Harry out of a window to crash into the ground 100 feet below them, but Peter, fueled by the rage over his friend's apparent death, gains the upper hand when he remembers that the alien slime hates loud noises. He traps Brock in a circle of steel bars, and then beats on them with another steel bar until the ringing noise is too much for the costume to bear. He pulls Brock out while the suit is going into space convulsions, and then throws a pumpkin grenade into it. Brock, not willing to lose the power and sweet revenge he was so close to obtaining, decides that his best course of action is to leap in after the bomb. This doesn't work out very well for him, and he winds up getting vaporized along with the black goo.
Whew. So, the climactic battle of good versus evil is over, with justice, as always, prevailing. Sure, there were casualties on both sides, but the important thing is that the tide of darkness that was two guys with lame vendettas against Spider-man has been averted. You'd think that the first thing Peter would do is go check on his friend who was impaled on sharp spikes and then thrown out of a building while saving his life, but no. Harry lies on the ground outside and slowly bleeds to death while Peter has a heartfelt conversation with a surprisingly un-obliterated Marko. Marko tells him that he's not really a bad guy, just misunderstood in a giant bank-robbing sand monster kind of way. Oh, and that he did shoot his uncle, but it was totally not on purpose. Peter forgives him, and Marko drifts away on the soft summer night's breeze.
So that's it. There are a few incidental mop-up events, like Harry's funeral and Peter and MJ getting back together, but the best part of the finale is when the credits start to roll. If you're a comic book fan, you'll have to see this movie just because it's Spider-man, but if you're not, I wouldn't really bother, unless you want to go and laugh at how bad it is.
Why Philadelphia Sucks, Featuring The Mystery Of Barry - 04/26/07
I was recently given the opportunity to go the wonderful city of Philadelphia on a business trip. When I say "business trip", I'm making this sound much more important than it actually was. I was flown there for two days so that I could learn how to use an instrument that measures lung capacity, which, on the surface, sounds perfectly reasonable, until I explain that the way this device works is by having the patient blow into it. That's all. That's all you do. I mean, sure, it's all computerized, and reports the data directly back to the company and maybe fries an egg or something just for fun, but that's still all there is to it. The patient takes a deep breath, then exhales. I wasn't about to turn down two days off from work to travel, so I wisely didn't point out the sheer stupidity of flying someone relatively far away and putting them up in a nice hotel just so you could show them how to blow into a tube, and I soon found myself in the middle of the City of Brotherly Love.
Philadelphia is a dirty city. I apologize to anyone reading this that's from there, or lives there, or simply appreciates it in a historical sense. But it's fucking filthy. And I don't mean it's dirty in the sense that there's trash everywhere, because there's surprisingly few cigarette butts, fast food wrappers, or any of the other usual debris you see rolling around the streets of a major metropolitan area. It just has this sense of underlying griminess, a sort of weird filmy substance that seems to coat everything. I know that it's old; really old, but I've never seen a city that's been around for hundreds of years actually look like it's been around for hundreds of years to such a great degree.
Due to the totally useless nature of my trip, I had a bunch of time to kill, so I decided to wander the streets to see what I could see. I'd been there in the past with my dad, but that was back when I was a lot younger, and at the time I was much more concerned with making sure my Optimus Prime action figure stopped Serpentor's diabolical plot of world domination than my father's earnest attempts to get me to appreciate my nations history. The hotel that I was staying at was on Market Street and literally a block over from City Hall, so I figured that such a central location would be an ideal place to start my adventures.
But when I got about halfway there, I realized that I didn't have any specific destination in mind to go next. The hazy recollections of my youth weren't going to help, and I had done absolutely no research whatsoever on potential tourist spots prior to boarding the plane. I seemed to recall that there was a large bell somewhere that was important, and I think the Declaration of Independence was transcribed here after a burning Englishman spoke to Ben Franklin or something. Oh, and I remembered that part in "Rocky" where Sylvester Stallone ran up a bunch of stairs and screamed something to the heavens about winning an arm-wrestling championship that was also somehow synonymous with his son's love. Or maybe I'm getting my movies mixed up, I don't know.
I also apparently had to, at some point, purchase and consume a cheesesteak.
Cheesesteaks are another reason I'm glad I don't live in Philadelphia. Can you imagine what it must be like to have a greasy sandwich be the most recognizable thing associated with your city? I know, I know. There's history here too. But that's actually the sad part. I can guarantee that if you walked up to a group of five random strangers anywhere else in America and said the word "PHILLY!" followed by an expectant pause, four out of five of them would respond (after the awkward silence brought on by having a stranger yell things at them) with the words "CHEESESTEAK!" And I guess you could argue that this is because most Americans are ignorant of their own history and more concerned with eating mass quantities of oily food, but still. I guess it's not entirely our retarded populaces' fault; the city itself doesn't do anything to dispel this perception. There's literally a cart on every single street corner selling "Authentic Philly Cheesesteaks". They're all over the place. I was in the bathroom at the airport washing my hands when all of a sudden, a surly man in an apron came out of nowhere and handed me a piping hot sandwich smothered in cheese and onions. I wasn't hungry, so I had to refuse, but then he looked like he'd get mad if I didn't tip, so I had to give him some money, but all I had was a five, and I didn't want him to have to get change out of his little basket by the sink, so I just gave him the whole five…. It was awkward. I suppose it could be worse; someone could run up and say "PHILLY!", to which everyone would immediately respond with "GOPHER FUCKING!", but it's still not something I'd want the world to immediately think of when someone mentions my city. And before anyone brings up the fact that when someone says "Atlanta", the first thing that comes to people's minds is "racist hillbillies", I've got two words for you: Fuck off. We have chicken and waffles too.
Oh, so yeah. I bought a cheesesteak from a vendor on my way down to Market Street. It was tasty. Not mind blowing or anything, but you know. Good. Sorry.
I got to City Hall, and began to take stock of my situation. I had no map, which was bad, but also had no real idea where I was going, which was good. This way, I rationalized, I couldn't get lost. Not that the map would have really helped. As anyone who's ever tried to go anywhere with me can attest, I suck with directions, possessing absolutely no internal compass whatsoever. For example, the first week I worked at Emory Hospital, one of the janitors found me underneath a staircase in the basement crying because I'd gotten lost for two days and couldn't find my way out. Which may sound ridiculous, but in my defense, it's a big hospital and I was new. I'd also eaten the bag of breadcrumbs I was planning to use as a trail marker for lunch, but you can't blame me for that. Breadcrumbs are delicious.
Despite this handicap, I still love exploring big cities; because while I may lack any sort of basic navigational skills, I make up for this deficiency by having absolutely no shame whatsoever in asking nearby strangers for directions. Seriously, it doesn't matter. Homeless people, old people, bus drivers, street mimes, whatever. Well, maybe not mimes. Clowns really freak me out, and a mime is basically a chalk-white clown wearing a beret that smiles insanely and doesn't speak while contorting their bodies to make it look like they're trapped in an invisible box, all of which is absurdly creepy. So usually when I see a mime, I've either screamed in terror and run away or reflexively bashed them in the face with a shovel before I can finish asking where a particular street is. Fucking mimes. In contrast, I find that homeless people, as long as you give them a dollar or some change or something first, are especially helpful. I mean, it makes sense; they've got nothing else to do besides wander around a city, so it's to be expected that they have an intimate knowledge of how to get from point A to point B. It does make me a little suspicious, though, when their directions include trips through dark alleys or stopovers at abandoned warehouses, but whatever. I'm inherently trusting, and those times that I've followed a hobo's directional advice and gotten mugged are probably just coincidences.
But thankfully, the city of Philadelphia is kind enough to have provisions set up for idiotic tourists such as myself. While I was throwing away the remains of my cheesesteak, I happened to notice something strange. Emblazoned on the top of the trash receptacle was what appeared to be a diagram of some sort. Intrigued, I looked closer, thinking maybe I'd been fortunate enough to stumble across directions that would lead me to a garbage pirate's hidden cache of gold and jewels. Sadly, it turned out to only be a map of the greater downtown area.
Trashcan Map
I'm kind of on the fence about the practical utilities of these trashcan maps. On the one hand, I suppose people are more likely to throw away whatever refuse they're holding as they come closer to figure out where they are, which helps keep the city clean. On the other hand, I was forced to spend an inordinate amount of my time wandering through Philadelphia pausing to stare at the tops of filthy garbage cans, which I'm sure looked to any passers-by like I was trying to carefully pick out the tastiest piece of trash before I reached in and grabbed it. Although if you think that's embarrassing, you should have seen the looks I got when I took out my camera and snapped a picture of one. Even the French tourists were pointing at me and laughing.
So after holding my breath and carefully perusing the helpful trashcan map, I decided on a few vague destinations. I'd go down to the Historic District and wander around until history got boring, and then if I had time, I'd try to find the stairs Rocky immortalized. I wasn't sure exactly where in the city that scene took place; but I figured that due to the massive number of posters and coffee mugs I'd seen plastered with Sylvester Stallone's stroke-victim face, Philadelphia was sufficiently proud enough the movie was shot there to put a gigantic neon walkway or something equally classy that would lead me straight to where I needed to go.
I won't bore you with a description of the Historic District; it was pretty much what you would expect it to be. All the places of note had enormous lines of screaming schoolchildren being chaperoned by surly adults or vacationing families trying to pretend that looking at an old bell was a totally awesome way to bond that I didn't feel like waiting around. I took a bunch of pictures, but these were the only ones that I thought were worth mentioning, and that's only because I have a weird imagination.
Tomb of Franklin! Danger: Mummies!
This is the solemn and distinguished resting place of famed inventor and statesman Ben Franklin. It was nice; it's tucked away in this quiet, unassuming little cemetery and is actually the only part of the entire city that isn't covered with huge statues of Ben holding a kite or inventing science or whatever. The one thing that did intrigue me, though, was that the whole gravesite was absolutely littered with pennies. I understand that it's symbolic and all because of his famous adage that "a penny saved is a penny earned", but he's also on the backside of the hundred, and I didn't see any of them fluttering around. I guess that we as Americans are willing to honor our forefathers by depositing monetary totems dedicated to their memories on their gravesites, but only as long as it's nothing too extravagant. The Egyptians would laugh at us. I threw a quarter down to remind him that even though he electrocuted himself in the name of scientific enlightenment, people still hate his useless little coin and think Washington was way better because he founded America and is worth 24 cents more. Slightly worried that his corpse might still be energized from his experimentation and angry enough to come back to life and try to eat my brains, I quickly dashed around the corner, only to be confronted with this:
Tranny Franklin
See what I mean? Franklin mania. He's everywhere. This one, though, is unique. Most of the statues differ only in what he's doing; the costume remains relatively unchanged: tasteful pantaloons, stylish doublet to hold in the paunch, maybe a tri-corner hat for the ladies. But it looks like this one was commissioned after he died, probably by someone who didn't like him very much and thought it would be funny to have Franklin commemorated in drag.
Next, on to Independence Hall. Once again, there was a long line even though the place was about to close, so I contented myself with wandering around the outside and taking pictures. And I'm glad I did, because I found what is, without a doubt, the best statue in all of Philadelphia. You would think that in front of a building of such importance there would be a statue of George Washington, or Thomas Jefferson, or maybe even Jesus or Santa Claus. But no. Standing proudly outside in the main courtyard, the site where our great nation came together to denounce the tyranny of the hated British and forever establish our democratic freedom, was a statue of "Barry". That's all it said. "Barry".
"Barry"
I was dumbfounded. I mean, this guy was obviously someone important; why else would anybody waste their time carving his likeness out of a huge piece of rock? My mind began to furiously scan through all of the old history lessons I never paid attention to in school, searching for some reference to "Barry". Unfortunately, I soon realized that my years of binge drinking had reduced my scholastic memories to nothing but vaguely stylized Fraggle Rock reruns, which while amusing, were less than helpful. I had to do something. Any minute now, some Japanese tourist was bound to walk up next to me and start asking questions that I would have no idea how to answer. Why wasn't there any more information included besides his first name? Did he win some kind of pre-revolution raffle, where they carved a statue of whatever townsperson hated the British the most? Was he the first person killed when the war started, and no one bothered to get his full demographics? Maybe he was George Washington's retarded brother-in-law, and Martha made her husband erect the statue so that Barry would stop hiding her powdered wigs and playing with George's wooden teeth. No, those were all stupid. Then, out of the corner of my eye, my worst fears were realized: a tiny Asian man with a huge camera and multiple children obediently trailing behind him was approaching. He had the determined look of someone who would be dissatisfied with anything less than a full explanation of Barry's life and role in the history of America, something I was obviously woefully unprepared to relate. Thinking quickly, I pointed behind him and screamed "LOOK OUT!! GODZILLA!!", to which he responded "GODZIRRA?! RO NO!! RUN FOR YOUR RIVES!!", before sprinting off in the opposite direction. It was a close call, but I was safe. I turned back around to ponder the inscrutable riddle that was "Barry". I looked at him from the left. I scratched my head, then looked at him from the right. Still nothing. Sighing in exasperation, I trudged around to the back of the statue, thinking that maybe his ass might hold the key to unraveling his historical mystery. And sure enough, there it was. A small plaque, on the completely wrong side of the statue. It turns out that "Barry" was actually "John Barry", the founder of the U.S. Navy. That was it. How fucking boring is that?
Thoroughly disgusted, I vowed to make my way to the final destination of my pilgrimage and turned my rage onto a middle-aged guy dressed like Paul Revere and waving a bell on one of the street corners:
Me: "Hey, jackass. I'm looking for that place the boxer with Down's Syndrome ran up a bunch of stairs in that movie about boxers. Also, I think Mr. T was there at some point. In the movie, not at the stairs. Am I going in the right direction?"
Fake Paul Revere: "Verily, young master, you are indeed nearly to your journey's end. Follow this thoroughfare over yonder hill, and then—"
Me: "Wait. Stop. God, you're making my ears bleed. Look at yourself. I mean, it's the middle of a Wednesday. So it's not like you're dressing up in a vinyl colonial outfit and prancing around out here because you like history and this is just your cute little hobby. This is actually your job. Does it bother you that your wife sleeps with other men solely due to the shame your profession brings her? Why haven't you killed yourself yet?"
Fake Paul Revere: (hangs head) "I'm already dead inside."
That cheered me up, so walked around until I found a hobo digging around inside one of the trashcan maps, and armed with not only a derelict to give me directions but a map on the back of a garbage bin to confirm it, I quickly found my way to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It was a long walk, but it was worth it. Directly outside of the museum is a huge statue that attempts to collectively display all of the excitement and wonder that took place during the founding of America.
Chick with sword
Here's a woman crouched over the body of what is presumably her husband, ready to take up his weapon to defend their freedom against the British tyranny.
I'm a shitty photographer
Next, we have a mounted colonial, possibly "Barry", bravely gesturing with his sword point towards the bright and democratic future his beloved country would soon enjoy.
Indian tits
Here we have a picture of some Indian tits, because I, like my forefathers before me, think tits are cool.
Mooseknuckle
This is a mooseknuckle.
And what lay just beyond this massive commemoration to our great nation's history? What else could possibly be included near so noble a monument to the majesty of America?
Adrianne! Yo! And stuff!
It's Rocky! Yay!
I know that the movie was shot here, and it's a great, classic movie and all, but come on. Do you really need to erect a statue of a retarded boxer outside of one of the most historic places in America? Why not just put up a huge sculpture of Will Smith and Bill Pullman in the front lawn of the White House so that we would always remember Independence Day? I tried to run up the steps, hoping that recreating the famous scene would lessen my scorn, but I passed out about halfway up. After regaining consciousness and smoking a cigarette, I slowly made my way to the top. They were doing a whole bunch of construction, so it was kind of hard to recreate the exact scene, but I swear to God there were still about eight idiot people smiling and dancing around with their fists raised while their embarrassed companions quickly took pictures of them. After laughing at a huge overweight woman pretending to be Rocky and almost falling over and breaking her ankle, I trudged back down the steps and began looking for a bum so I could ask directions back to my hotel.
Thus ended my adventures in the magical city of Philadelphia. It had been fun; I'd learned about my nation and now, whenever anybody stopped me on the street to ask me who founded the U.S. Navy, I could look them in the eyes and respond with confidence, "Barry did." So thank you, Philly. You're delicious greasy sandwiches and statues dedicated to both obscure historical figures and movie icons have touched me in a way that I'm sure I'll never feel again, at least until I go to a city that's slightly cleaner.
Philadelphia is a dirty city. I apologize to anyone reading this that's from there, or lives there, or simply appreciates it in a historical sense. But it's fucking filthy. And I don't mean it's dirty in the sense that there's trash everywhere, because there's surprisingly few cigarette butts, fast food wrappers, or any of the other usual debris you see rolling around the streets of a major metropolitan area. It just has this sense of underlying griminess, a sort of weird filmy substance that seems to coat everything. I know that it's old; really old, but I've never seen a city that's been around for hundreds of years actually look like it's been around for hundreds of years to such a great degree.
Due to the totally useless nature of my trip, I had a bunch of time to kill, so I decided to wander the streets to see what I could see. I'd been there in the past with my dad, but that was back when I was a lot younger, and at the time I was much more concerned with making sure my Optimus Prime action figure stopped Serpentor's diabolical plot of world domination than my father's earnest attempts to get me to appreciate my nations history. The hotel that I was staying at was on Market Street and literally a block over from City Hall, so I figured that such a central location would be an ideal place to start my adventures.
But when I got about halfway there, I realized that I didn't have any specific destination in mind to go next. The hazy recollections of my youth weren't going to help, and I had done absolutely no research whatsoever on potential tourist spots prior to boarding the plane. I seemed to recall that there was a large bell somewhere that was important, and I think the Declaration of Independence was transcribed here after a burning Englishman spoke to Ben Franklin or something. Oh, and I remembered that part in "Rocky" where Sylvester Stallone ran up a bunch of stairs and screamed something to the heavens about winning an arm-wrestling championship that was also somehow synonymous with his son's love. Or maybe I'm getting my movies mixed up, I don't know.
I also apparently had to, at some point, purchase and consume a cheesesteak.
Cheesesteaks are another reason I'm glad I don't live in Philadelphia. Can you imagine what it must be like to have a greasy sandwich be the most recognizable thing associated with your city? I know, I know. There's history here too. But that's actually the sad part. I can guarantee that if you walked up to a group of five random strangers anywhere else in America and said the word "PHILLY!" followed by an expectant pause, four out of five of them would respond (after the awkward silence brought on by having a stranger yell things at them) with the words "CHEESESTEAK!" And I guess you could argue that this is because most Americans are ignorant of their own history and more concerned with eating mass quantities of oily food, but still. I guess it's not entirely our retarded populaces' fault; the city itself doesn't do anything to dispel this perception. There's literally a cart on every single street corner selling "Authentic Philly Cheesesteaks". They're all over the place. I was in the bathroom at the airport washing my hands when all of a sudden, a surly man in an apron came out of nowhere and handed me a piping hot sandwich smothered in cheese and onions. I wasn't hungry, so I had to refuse, but then he looked like he'd get mad if I didn't tip, so I had to give him some money, but all I had was a five, and I didn't want him to have to get change out of his little basket by the sink, so I just gave him the whole five…. It was awkward. I suppose it could be worse; someone could run up and say "PHILLY!", to which everyone would immediately respond with "GOPHER FUCKING!", but it's still not something I'd want the world to immediately think of when someone mentions my city. And before anyone brings up the fact that when someone says "Atlanta", the first thing that comes to people's minds is "racist hillbillies", I've got two words for you: Fuck off. We have chicken and waffles too.
Oh, so yeah. I bought a cheesesteak from a vendor on my way down to Market Street. It was tasty. Not mind blowing or anything, but you know. Good. Sorry.
I got to City Hall, and began to take stock of my situation. I had no map, which was bad, but also had no real idea where I was going, which was good. This way, I rationalized, I couldn't get lost. Not that the map would have really helped. As anyone who's ever tried to go anywhere with me can attest, I suck with directions, possessing absolutely no internal compass whatsoever. For example, the first week I worked at Emory Hospital, one of the janitors found me underneath a staircase in the basement crying because I'd gotten lost for two days and couldn't find my way out. Which may sound ridiculous, but in my defense, it's a big hospital and I was new. I'd also eaten the bag of breadcrumbs I was planning to use as a trail marker for lunch, but you can't blame me for that. Breadcrumbs are delicious.
Despite this handicap, I still love exploring big cities; because while I may lack any sort of basic navigational skills, I make up for this deficiency by having absolutely no shame whatsoever in asking nearby strangers for directions. Seriously, it doesn't matter. Homeless people, old people, bus drivers, street mimes, whatever. Well, maybe not mimes. Clowns really freak me out, and a mime is basically a chalk-white clown wearing a beret that smiles insanely and doesn't speak while contorting their bodies to make it look like they're trapped in an invisible box, all of which is absurdly creepy. So usually when I see a mime, I've either screamed in terror and run away or reflexively bashed them in the face with a shovel before I can finish asking where a particular street is. Fucking mimes. In contrast, I find that homeless people, as long as you give them a dollar or some change or something first, are especially helpful. I mean, it makes sense; they've got nothing else to do besides wander around a city, so it's to be expected that they have an intimate knowledge of how to get from point A to point B. It does make me a little suspicious, though, when their directions include trips through dark alleys or stopovers at abandoned warehouses, but whatever. I'm inherently trusting, and those times that I've followed a hobo's directional advice and gotten mugged are probably just coincidences.
But thankfully, the city of Philadelphia is kind enough to have provisions set up for idiotic tourists such as myself. While I was throwing away the remains of my cheesesteak, I happened to notice something strange. Emblazoned on the top of the trash receptacle was what appeared to be a diagram of some sort. Intrigued, I looked closer, thinking maybe I'd been fortunate enough to stumble across directions that would lead me to a garbage pirate's hidden cache of gold and jewels. Sadly, it turned out to only be a map of the greater downtown area.
Trashcan Map
I'm kind of on the fence about the practical utilities of these trashcan maps. On the one hand, I suppose people are more likely to throw away whatever refuse they're holding as they come closer to figure out where they are, which helps keep the city clean. On the other hand, I was forced to spend an inordinate amount of my time wandering through Philadelphia pausing to stare at the tops of filthy garbage cans, which I'm sure looked to any passers-by like I was trying to carefully pick out the tastiest piece of trash before I reached in and grabbed it. Although if you think that's embarrassing, you should have seen the looks I got when I took out my camera and snapped a picture of one. Even the French tourists were pointing at me and laughing.
So after holding my breath and carefully perusing the helpful trashcan map, I decided on a few vague destinations. I'd go down to the Historic District and wander around until history got boring, and then if I had time, I'd try to find the stairs Rocky immortalized. I wasn't sure exactly where in the city that scene took place; but I figured that due to the massive number of posters and coffee mugs I'd seen plastered with Sylvester Stallone's stroke-victim face, Philadelphia was sufficiently proud enough the movie was shot there to put a gigantic neon walkway or something equally classy that would lead me straight to where I needed to go.
I won't bore you with a description of the Historic District; it was pretty much what you would expect it to be. All the places of note had enormous lines of screaming schoolchildren being chaperoned by surly adults or vacationing families trying to pretend that looking at an old bell was a totally awesome way to bond that I didn't feel like waiting around. I took a bunch of pictures, but these were the only ones that I thought were worth mentioning, and that's only because I have a weird imagination.
Tomb of Franklin! Danger: Mummies!
This is the solemn and distinguished resting place of famed inventor and statesman Ben Franklin. It was nice; it's tucked away in this quiet, unassuming little cemetery and is actually the only part of the entire city that isn't covered with huge statues of Ben holding a kite or inventing science or whatever. The one thing that did intrigue me, though, was that the whole gravesite was absolutely littered with pennies. I understand that it's symbolic and all because of his famous adage that "a penny saved is a penny earned", but he's also on the backside of the hundred, and I didn't see any of them fluttering around. I guess that we as Americans are willing to honor our forefathers by depositing monetary totems dedicated to their memories on their gravesites, but only as long as it's nothing too extravagant. The Egyptians would laugh at us. I threw a quarter down to remind him that even though he electrocuted himself in the name of scientific enlightenment, people still hate his useless little coin and think Washington was way better because he founded America and is worth 24 cents more. Slightly worried that his corpse might still be energized from his experimentation and angry enough to come back to life and try to eat my brains, I quickly dashed around the corner, only to be confronted with this:
Tranny Franklin
See what I mean? Franklin mania. He's everywhere. This one, though, is unique. Most of the statues differ only in what he's doing; the costume remains relatively unchanged: tasteful pantaloons, stylish doublet to hold in the paunch, maybe a tri-corner hat for the ladies. But it looks like this one was commissioned after he died, probably by someone who didn't like him very much and thought it would be funny to have Franklin commemorated in drag.
Next, on to Independence Hall. Once again, there was a long line even though the place was about to close, so I contented myself with wandering around the outside and taking pictures. And I'm glad I did, because I found what is, without a doubt, the best statue in all of Philadelphia. You would think that in front of a building of such importance there would be a statue of George Washington, or Thomas Jefferson, or maybe even Jesus or Santa Claus. But no. Standing proudly outside in the main courtyard, the site where our great nation came together to denounce the tyranny of the hated British and forever establish our democratic freedom, was a statue of "Barry". That's all it said. "Barry".
"Barry"
I was dumbfounded. I mean, this guy was obviously someone important; why else would anybody waste their time carving his likeness out of a huge piece of rock? My mind began to furiously scan through all of the old history lessons I never paid attention to in school, searching for some reference to "Barry". Unfortunately, I soon realized that my years of binge drinking had reduced my scholastic memories to nothing but vaguely stylized Fraggle Rock reruns, which while amusing, were less than helpful. I had to do something. Any minute now, some Japanese tourist was bound to walk up next to me and start asking questions that I would have no idea how to answer. Why wasn't there any more information included besides his first name? Did he win some kind of pre-revolution raffle, where they carved a statue of whatever townsperson hated the British the most? Was he the first person killed when the war started, and no one bothered to get his full demographics? Maybe he was George Washington's retarded brother-in-law, and Martha made her husband erect the statue so that Barry would stop hiding her powdered wigs and playing with George's wooden teeth. No, those were all stupid. Then, out of the corner of my eye, my worst fears were realized: a tiny Asian man with a huge camera and multiple children obediently trailing behind him was approaching. He had the determined look of someone who would be dissatisfied with anything less than a full explanation of Barry's life and role in the history of America, something I was obviously woefully unprepared to relate. Thinking quickly, I pointed behind him and screamed "LOOK OUT!! GODZILLA!!", to which he responded "GODZIRRA?! RO NO!! RUN FOR YOUR RIVES!!", before sprinting off in the opposite direction. It was a close call, but I was safe. I turned back around to ponder the inscrutable riddle that was "Barry". I looked at him from the left. I scratched my head, then looked at him from the right. Still nothing. Sighing in exasperation, I trudged around to the back of the statue, thinking that maybe his ass might hold the key to unraveling his historical mystery. And sure enough, there it was. A small plaque, on the completely wrong side of the statue. It turns out that "Barry" was actually "John Barry", the founder of the U.S. Navy. That was it. How fucking boring is that?
Thoroughly disgusted, I vowed to make my way to the final destination of my pilgrimage and turned my rage onto a middle-aged guy dressed like Paul Revere and waving a bell on one of the street corners:
Me: "Hey, jackass. I'm looking for that place the boxer with Down's Syndrome ran up a bunch of stairs in that movie about boxers. Also, I think Mr. T was there at some point. In the movie, not at the stairs. Am I going in the right direction?"
Fake Paul Revere: "Verily, young master, you are indeed nearly to your journey's end. Follow this thoroughfare over yonder hill, and then—"
Me: "Wait. Stop. God, you're making my ears bleed. Look at yourself. I mean, it's the middle of a Wednesday. So it's not like you're dressing up in a vinyl colonial outfit and prancing around out here because you like history and this is just your cute little hobby. This is actually your job. Does it bother you that your wife sleeps with other men solely due to the shame your profession brings her? Why haven't you killed yourself yet?"
Fake Paul Revere: (hangs head) "I'm already dead inside."
That cheered me up, so walked around until I found a hobo digging around inside one of the trashcan maps, and armed with not only a derelict to give me directions but a map on the back of a garbage bin to confirm it, I quickly found my way to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It was a long walk, but it was worth it. Directly outside of the museum is a huge statue that attempts to collectively display all of the excitement and wonder that took place during the founding of America.
Chick with sword
Here's a woman crouched over the body of what is presumably her husband, ready to take up his weapon to defend their freedom against the British tyranny.
I'm a shitty photographer
Next, we have a mounted colonial, possibly "Barry", bravely gesturing with his sword point towards the bright and democratic future his beloved country would soon enjoy.
Indian tits
Here we have a picture of some Indian tits, because I, like my forefathers before me, think tits are cool.
Mooseknuckle
This is a mooseknuckle.
And what lay just beyond this massive commemoration to our great nation's history? What else could possibly be included near so noble a monument to the majesty of America?
Adrianne! Yo! And stuff!
It's Rocky! Yay!
I know that the movie was shot here, and it's a great, classic movie and all, but come on. Do you really need to erect a statue of a retarded boxer outside of one of the most historic places in America? Why not just put up a huge sculpture of Will Smith and Bill Pullman in the front lawn of the White House so that we would always remember Independence Day? I tried to run up the steps, hoping that recreating the famous scene would lessen my scorn, but I passed out about halfway up. After regaining consciousness and smoking a cigarette, I slowly made my way to the top. They were doing a whole bunch of construction, so it was kind of hard to recreate the exact scene, but I swear to God there were still about eight idiot people smiling and dancing around with their fists raised while their embarrassed companions quickly took pictures of them. After laughing at a huge overweight woman pretending to be Rocky and almost falling over and breaking her ankle, I trudged back down the steps and began looking for a bum so I could ask directions back to my hotel.
Thus ended my adventures in the magical city of Philadelphia. It had been fun; I'd learned about my nation and now, whenever anybody stopped me on the street to ask me who founded the U.S. Navy, I could look them in the eyes and respond with confidence, "Barry did." So thank you, Philly. You're delicious greasy sandwiches and statues dedicated to both obscure historical figures and movie icons have touched me in a way that I'm sure I'll never feel again, at least until I go to a city that's slightly cleaner.
WARNING: THIS BLOG CONTAINS 0% HILARITY. ALSO, A FULL HELPING OF FIBER - 03/12/07
So as the title to this blog suggests, it is not funny. After writing however many of these posts that I have, I've realized that I kind of enjoy writing. My mom tells me that I'm good at it, so I must be because she never lies, but writing funny stuff really isn't that hard for me. Honestly, everything that I've written so far has basically been transcribed by the tiny dwarf that lives inside my brain and then typed out verbatim. If you're curious, his name is Trevor, and yes, he's available for parties.
Anyway.
A couple of weekends ago, I had the privelage of being flown to Vegas by a drug company who, for some reason, had decided that if they spent lots of money on me, I would return to Atlanta and furiously campaign for their groundbreaking new cancer treatment. Which I would totally do, except that I'm not nearly far enough up in the oncology chain of command to do anything remotely like that. I mean, it's a good treatment, and I think we should start doing it, but I have a degree in history, what the fuck do I know? So the weekend ended up being an awesome mix of meetings, drinking, and gambling, not neccessarily in that order or exclusive to just one at a time.
While there, I started thinking about writing, and how I really had no idea if I was capable of expressing anything besides my mocking disdain for celebrities or my paradoxical love for the guy with the Emo haircut on Heroes. I was bored on the plane ride back, and since Noel and I had already proved our superior intelligence to the uninterested guy sitting next to us by finishing the crossword puzzle in the back of the SkyMall catalogue, I wrote a story. I've never really written anything like this before (except for that one time in fifth grade when I won a Rotary Club contest with a two page essay on the majesty of banannas or something), so if it sucks balls, please tell me.
This is a story about the power of a gesture. You know what a gesture is, don't you? The pointing of a finger, a wave of the hand; a twitch, a flutter, a shrug. But How, I hear you thinking, Can a gesture have any kind of power? A gesture is nothing, an involuntary firing of neural pathways resulting in a barely noticeable movement. You are thinking this, and people who know about these things are looking at you with scorn, because you are wrong, as wrong as wrong can be.
There was a time when everyone knew and feared and respected the power in a gesture. Back when the world was new, the right person in the right place at the right time could summon a God or banish a Devil with nothing more than a flick of their fingers; and there were men who walked the Earth who could wave their hands and part the mightiest of seas. But soon people began to forget, as people do, and the power of gestures gradually faded away. They retained their symbolic authority, of course; such as when men who wore laurels of ivy like crowns upon their heads decided if someone lived or died by motioning with their thumbs, or when religious fanatics used an outstretched finger to indicate which of the towns women would be burned alive for witchcraft.
But where did this power go? It is an inherent rule of the universe we live in that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but merely transferred from one place to another. This means that it is still there; we have just forgotten how to see it. Would you like to learn how? It's easy, you just have to know when and where to look.
There is a city in the middle of a desert, a city more or less the color of electricity, which blinks and glitters and pulses amidst the red waste of the barren land around it. It resembles a beautiful plastic rose in the lapel of a dead man's jacket; pleasing to the eye but ultimately false and smelling vaguely of decay, and there is no better place in the entire world to witness the power of a gesture. The particular place that we are going to observe is off the beaten path, you could say; in a room far away from the hustle and bustle and bright lights of the games of chance offered to the general public. You must know people who know other people to play the game offered in this room, as the game is simple but the stakes are high; they are as high as the person playing wants them to be.
The room is completely empty except for a small horseshoe-shaped table directly in the center, with a high silver chair sitting in front of it. There is a woman standing behind the table; her white tuxedo shirt is starched and immaculate, and the cone of harsh light that frames her makes it glow. Her face is beautiful but cold, like an ancient statue carved from marble or granite. Her fingers are quick and deft, and if she wanted to, she could rearrange a randomly shuffled deck of cards by number or suit in four seconds without looking. She doesn't want to at this moment, but the knowledge that she could is still impressive. She has been staring at the man sitting across from her since he sat down, and she hasn't blinked her eyes once. The effect is supposed to be unnerving, and it might be. Her hand has moved like a liquid snake four times to send cards spinning across the table with unerring precision, and when she does this, her arm is the only part of her entire body that moves.
So now there are two cards in front of the man, and these cards are decorated with cryptic numbers and symbols. If one were to combine these numbers and symbols, the result would be a different, higher number, for this is the nature of addition. Because she doesn't want to feel left out, there are also two cards in front of the woman, but only one of her cards is visible.
The man's hand is resting on the edge of the table, with his first two fingers poised and ready to tap. If he does, the woman's arm will move faster than thought and another card will appear before him, to be added to the value of his current cards. If this number is greater than another particular number, he will automatically lose and she will win. There is a number that describes the probability that this will happen. If the mans number does not exceed that other particular number, or if he had initially laid those two fingers down flat on the table instead of tapping them, the woman will flip over her unrevealed card and other options will present themselves. If the value of her two cards together is greater than the value of his two cards, she will win and he will lose. There is yet another number that describes the probability that this will happen. If the value of her two cards is less than the value of his two cards, she will make more cards dance in front of her until her collection of numbers and symbols is greater than his. But wait! If this value exceeds that other particular number, she will lose and he will win. There is still yet another number that describes the probability that this will happen.
As you can see, there are a great deal of numbers involved in this game, and as they float and zoom through the realms of probability, their powers (for everyone knows that numbers are powerful and terrifying things) grow and become chained to the raised fingers of the man at the table. So in this potential gesture already is the chaotic essence of chance itself, building in pressure and rage for the mans fingers to move, to release it, to freeze the burning flux of uncertainty that is so hated by the cold finality of logical numbers.
That's some powerful stuff.
And this isn't even the half of it.
There is still this mans personal power; the power of his history, of the situation, of cause. Of why he's here in this dark room at this specific time and what it will mean to him if he wins or loses. There is the power of the other people who will be affected when his fingers make their tiny gesture and the woman's slender hand gently slams her face-down card over with a noise like a silent thunderclap.
For example:
Maybe he is a meek and unattractive man, who is married to a woman so beautiful that on their wedding day, even his own mother had to question why the woman was marrying him. The man has made a large amount of money by successfully manipulating the nebulous world of international finance, but is convinced that his wife loves him for more than the material things he is able to provide for her. But maybe today he found out that she had been having an affair with the man he was always afraid she would have an affair with, that handsome man she works with who makes her laugh but who she always insisted was just a friend. He had to go back home that morning because he forgot his briefcase, and when he got there he went upstairs because he heard strange noises, and his feet are moving him towards their bedroom and he wants to stop because he knows what he's going to see but he can't and then he watches them but they don't see him and then he goes back downstairs and he gets in his car and he leaves. And the man doesn't know where he's driving to or what he's doing until he's somehow arrived at a city in the middle of the desert. And he meets someone who sees the look in his eyes and takes him to that room to play a game and as his fingers are poised to tap or lay down flat he realizes he's decided that if he loses, he's going to go back and talk to his wife, and tell her that he forgives her, and that he's loved her since before he even knew what the word love meant. And then he realizes he's decided that if he wins, he's going to take the money the woman across the table will give him, and he's going to spend it all on a gun, and then he's going to go back to his house and after screaming and howling out all of his pain and rage and jealousy, he's going to shoot his wife five times before putting the barrel in his mouth and pulling the trigger. And his palm is dry and his fingers are steady and he is about to gesture.
Or:
Maybe he is a confidence man, a man who is able to ease his way through life like a snake through an oily tube by using the trust and gullibility of others for his own benefit. This man is likeable, and friendly, and has a smile that could power the electrical grid of a small town. If you met him, you wouldn't think twice about buying him lunch and lending him your car (he said he'd be right back), and you won't even realize that your girlfriend was still sitting in the passenger seat as he peels away laughing. The city in the middle of the desert is a Mecca for someone like him; there are people here with money who have no business having money, and are only too glad to part with it. And although the man has had no formal schooling and couldn't tell you, for example, the average rainfall in the Amazon basin, he can do things with cards that make him seem like he's made of magic. This particular time, he had chosen to tell everyone that he was a visiting prince from a faraway land who of course had no experience in these types of card games but would be more than happy to be taught how. He had only a small amount of money on his person, as there had been a mix-up with his bank statements and passports and other things that he as a prince did not have the time to worry about, but his title and reputation and charm were enough to get him into one of the richest of games with the most important of people. As he kept winning, and winning, and winning some more, one of the other men at the table became angrier and more suspicious, and when the prince who wasn't really a prince stated that he had to take his winnings and leave to go attend to princely matters (you know how these things are, affairs of state, don't hold up the game on account of my leaving, etc.), the angry man grabbed him and searched him, finding a number of other cards that if added to the ones already in play would make the total number in the deck significantly higher than 36. Normally in a situation like this, the angry man would have taken the prince who was not really a prince into a dark room with very good insulation and plastic tarps on the floor, as he was the brother of one of the men who ran the games and considered a very dangerous individual by those people who knew about these sorts of things. He had eyes that were bright and sharp and cocaine crazy, and he had done things to those who had similarly cheated his brother that would impress even the most hardened of criminals with their creativity. But such was the eloquence and charm of the prince who was not really a prince that the angry man found himself seeing his point of view, and how it really would be much more dramatic if he were given the chance to play the ultimate game, with the prince who wasn't really a prince's life as the wager. So now the confidence man sits at the table across from the woman, and he is confident, man, that as soon as his fingers move, his life will change forever. If he wins and is allowed to live, he thinks he'll go back West, and find the girl that he left all those years ago before she found out who he really was, and who he couldn't bring himself to swindle back then and who he can't stop thinking about now. Of course, if he loses, the angry man is standing outside of the room with murder in his heart and a gun in his hands, and will take him away to make sure that he suffers horrifically before he dies. And his palm is dry and his fingers are steady and he is about to gesture.
Or:
Maybe he is a man who is really more of a father, with a daughter who was born six years ago last month and who is, as the saying goes, the apple of her fathers eye. He doesn't make much money working in the warehouse, but he dotes on her, and tries to give her everything she's ever wanted, and is so full of pride and love for her that it's a wonder he doesn't pop like a cork every time he looks at her. But two months ago she began to get sick, with a cough that sounded like it belonged in the lungs of an old man who had smoked three packs of unfiltered cigarettes every day since he was twelve. He took her to their family doctor, and that doctor did not know what to do, so the man took her to other doctors, who wrote notes and ran tests and shook their heads and looked down at their white coats when they told him that she was going to die. Despairing, he read as much as he could about her condition, and began to look overseas for any conceivable way to save her. And then he found one doctor in France, who was the worlds leading expert on this particular disease, and had written a great many important papers that had been very well received by those few smart enough to know what he was talking about. He was offering a highly controversial but so far effective treatment regiment at his clinic in Paris, and the man who was really more of a father was overjoyed. He called this doctor on the telephone, and after trying to make himself understood to a receptionist who only spoke very fast French and very poor English, he managed to get the doctor and tell him what was wrong with his daughter. The doctor listened sympathetically, and told the man that he of course was very sorry about his daughter's condition, but that he could not accept his American health insurance, and that this treatment was incredibly expensive as well as time consuming. The man despaired, because even if he sold everything he owned, he could not afford to continue paying for the treatment if he was not able to work, which he of course couldn't do if he was in Paris. He confided in one of his coworkers at the warehouse, a man that some said had dealings with people who were less than reputable. His coworker told him that if the man who was really more of a father was willing, he could talk to an acquaintance that had a contemporary who could get the man into a particular game of chance in a city that was in the middle of the desert. The man agreed, and sold his house and his car and the ring he had given to his wife before she died and now as he's sitting there at the table across from the woman, the fact that he could lose everything doesn't even cross his mind, because he knows, deep down in his heart (or maybe it's in his soul) that he's going to win and take his daughter to Paris and she'll be cured and they'll spend the rest of their days in the sun on the west bank of the Seine. But then there's that other little voice, the one that lives even deeper down in a tiny crack and that everyone has no matter how much hope is in them, and it's saying that when he finally decides to move his fingers, he's going to lose and the only thing in his life that he's going to be left with is the prospect of watching his daughter die slowly and painfully in a dirty hospital bed. And his palm is dry and his fingers are steady and he is about to gesture.
None of these stories are true. Wait, the first one is. Or maybe it's the third. No, was it the second? It doesn't matter; it is irrelevant, inconsequential, immaterial. All that matters is that in this room in a city in the middle of the desert, there is so much energy collected from the emotions of the man involved and harnessed together by the chains of probability and the furious desire of numbers to once again be ordered as they were meant to be that the very air feels like it's crackling with what could well be pure nuclear fission.
The man does not feel it; or if he does, he simply does not care. But in some primal way he must know that when he makes his gesture, this power is going to come hurtling down like a comet made of dynamite thrown from the arm of a particularly vengeful and very angry god.
But his palm is dry and his fingers are steady, and the man at the table smiles like a knife and his fingers move in the tiniest of ways and in that room in a city in the middle of the desert everything comes rushing together and the power explodes with a fury beyond description and in that one moment everything in the entire world has changed but if you look around you realize that nothing has really changed at all.
And that is the power of a gesture.
Anyway.
A couple of weekends ago, I had the privelage of being flown to Vegas by a drug company who, for some reason, had decided that if they spent lots of money on me, I would return to Atlanta and furiously campaign for their groundbreaking new cancer treatment. Which I would totally do, except that I'm not nearly far enough up in the oncology chain of command to do anything remotely like that. I mean, it's a good treatment, and I think we should start doing it, but I have a degree in history, what the fuck do I know? So the weekend ended up being an awesome mix of meetings, drinking, and gambling, not neccessarily in that order or exclusive to just one at a time.
While there, I started thinking about writing, and how I really had no idea if I was capable of expressing anything besides my mocking disdain for celebrities or my paradoxical love for the guy with the Emo haircut on Heroes. I was bored on the plane ride back, and since Noel and I had already proved our superior intelligence to the uninterested guy sitting next to us by finishing the crossword puzzle in the back of the SkyMall catalogue, I wrote a story. I've never really written anything like this before (except for that one time in fifth grade when I won a Rotary Club contest with a two page essay on the majesty of banannas or something), so if it sucks balls, please tell me.
This is a story about the power of a gesture. You know what a gesture is, don't you? The pointing of a finger, a wave of the hand; a twitch, a flutter, a shrug. But How, I hear you thinking, Can a gesture have any kind of power? A gesture is nothing, an involuntary firing of neural pathways resulting in a barely noticeable movement. You are thinking this, and people who know about these things are looking at you with scorn, because you are wrong, as wrong as wrong can be.
There was a time when everyone knew and feared and respected the power in a gesture. Back when the world was new, the right person in the right place at the right time could summon a God or banish a Devil with nothing more than a flick of their fingers; and there were men who walked the Earth who could wave their hands and part the mightiest of seas. But soon people began to forget, as people do, and the power of gestures gradually faded away. They retained their symbolic authority, of course; such as when men who wore laurels of ivy like crowns upon their heads decided if someone lived or died by motioning with their thumbs, or when religious fanatics used an outstretched finger to indicate which of the towns women would be burned alive for witchcraft.
But where did this power go? It is an inherent rule of the universe we live in that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but merely transferred from one place to another. This means that it is still there; we have just forgotten how to see it. Would you like to learn how? It's easy, you just have to know when and where to look.
There is a city in the middle of a desert, a city more or less the color of electricity, which blinks and glitters and pulses amidst the red waste of the barren land around it. It resembles a beautiful plastic rose in the lapel of a dead man's jacket; pleasing to the eye but ultimately false and smelling vaguely of decay, and there is no better place in the entire world to witness the power of a gesture. The particular place that we are going to observe is off the beaten path, you could say; in a room far away from the hustle and bustle and bright lights of the games of chance offered to the general public. You must know people who know other people to play the game offered in this room, as the game is simple but the stakes are high; they are as high as the person playing wants them to be.
The room is completely empty except for a small horseshoe-shaped table directly in the center, with a high silver chair sitting in front of it. There is a woman standing behind the table; her white tuxedo shirt is starched and immaculate, and the cone of harsh light that frames her makes it glow. Her face is beautiful but cold, like an ancient statue carved from marble or granite. Her fingers are quick and deft, and if she wanted to, she could rearrange a randomly shuffled deck of cards by number or suit in four seconds without looking. She doesn't want to at this moment, but the knowledge that she could is still impressive. She has been staring at the man sitting across from her since he sat down, and she hasn't blinked her eyes once. The effect is supposed to be unnerving, and it might be. Her hand has moved like a liquid snake four times to send cards spinning across the table with unerring precision, and when she does this, her arm is the only part of her entire body that moves.
So now there are two cards in front of the man, and these cards are decorated with cryptic numbers and symbols. If one were to combine these numbers and symbols, the result would be a different, higher number, for this is the nature of addition. Because she doesn't want to feel left out, there are also two cards in front of the woman, but only one of her cards is visible.
The man's hand is resting on the edge of the table, with his first two fingers poised and ready to tap. If he does, the woman's arm will move faster than thought and another card will appear before him, to be added to the value of his current cards. If this number is greater than another particular number, he will automatically lose and she will win. There is a number that describes the probability that this will happen. If the mans number does not exceed that other particular number, or if he had initially laid those two fingers down flat on the table instead of tapping them, the woman will flip over her unrevealed card and other options will present themselves. If the value of her two cards together is greater than the value of his two cards, she will win and he will lose. There is yet another number that describes the probability that this will happen. If the value of her two cards is less than the value of his two cards, she will make more cards dance in front of her until her collection of numbers and symbols is greater than his. But wait! If this value exceeds that other particular number, she will lose and he will win. There is still yet another number that describes the probability that this will happen.
As you can see, there are a great deal of numbers involved in this game, and as they float and zoom through the realms of probability, their powers (for everyone knows that numbers are powerful and terrifying things) grow and become chained to the raised fingers of the man at the table. So in this potential gesture already is the chaotic essence of chance itself, building in pressure and rage for the mans fingers to move, to release it, to freeze the burning flux of uncertainty that is so hated by the cold finality of logical numbers.
That's some powerful stuff.
And this isn't even the half of it.
There is still this mans personal power; the power of his history, of the situation, of cause. Of why he's here in this dark room at this specific time and what it will mean to him if he wins or loses. There is the power of the other people who will be affected when his fingers make their tiny gesture and the woman's slender hand gently slams her face-down card over with a noise like a silent thunderclap.
For example:
Maybe he is a meek and unattractive man, who is married to a woman so beautiful that on their wedding day, even his own mother had to question why the woman was marrying him. The man has made a large amount of money by successfully manipulating the nebulous world of international finance, but is convinced that his wife loves him for more than the material things he is able to provide for her. But maybe today he found out that she had been having an affair with the man he was always afraid she would have an affair with, that handsome man she works with who makes her laugh but who she always insisted was just a friend. He had to go back home that morning because he forgot his briefcase, and when he got there he went upstairs because he heard strange noises, and his feet are moving him towards their bedroom and he wants to stop because he knows what he's going to see but he can't and then he watches them but they don't see him and then he goes back downstairs and he gets in his car and he leaves. And the man doesn't know where he's driving to or what he's doing until he's somehow arrived at a city in the middle of the desert. And he meets someone who sees the look in his eyes and takes him to that room to play a game and as his fingers are poised to tap or lay down flat he realizes he's decided that if he loses, he's going to go back and talk to his wife, and tell her that he forgives her, and that he's loved her since before he even knew what the word love meant. And then he realizes he's decided that if he wins, he's going to take the money the woman across the table will give him, and he's going to spend it all on a gun, and then he's going to go back to his house and after screaming and howling out all of his pain and rage and jealousy, he's going to shoot his wife five times before putting the barrel in his mouth and pulling the trigger. And his palm is dry and his fingers are steady and he is about to gesture.
Or:
Maybe he is a confidence man, a man who is able to ease his way through life like a snake through an oily tube by using the trust and gullibility of others for his own benefit. This man is likeable, and friendly, and has a smile that could power the electrical grid of a small town. If you met him, you wouldn't think twice about buying him lunch and lending him your car (he said he'd be right back), and you won't even realize that your girlfriend was still sitting in the passenger seat as he peels away laughing. The city in the middle of the desert is a Mecca for someone like him; there are people here with money who have no business having money, and are only too glad to part with it. And although the man has had no formal schooling and couldn't tell you, for example, the average rainfall in the Amazon basin, he can do things with cards that make him seem like he's made of magic. This particular time, he had chosen to tell everyone that he was a visiting prince from a faraway land who of course had no experience in these types of card games but would be more than happy to be taught how. He had only a small amount of money on his person, as there had been a mix-up with his bank statements and passports and other things that he as a prince did not have the time to worry about, but his title and reputation and charm were enough to get him into one of the richest of games with the most important of people. As he kept winning, and winning, and winning some more, one of the other men at the table became angrier and more suspicious, and when the prince who wasn't really a prince stated that he had to take his winnings and leave to go attend to princely matters (you know how these things are, affairs of state, don't hold up the game on account of my leaving, etc.), the angry man grabbed him and searched him, finding a number of other cards that if added to the ones already in play would make the total number in the deck significantly higher than 36. Normally in a situation like this, the angry man would have taken the prince who was not really a prince into a dark room with very good insulation and plastic tarps on the floor, as he was the brother of one of the men who ran the games and considered a very dangerous individual by those people who knew about these sorts of things. He had eyes that were bright and sharp and cocaine crazy, and he had done things to those who had similarly cheated his brother that would impress even the most hardened of criminals with their creativity. But such was the eloquence and charm of the prince who was not really a prince that the angry man found himself seeing his point of view, and how it really would be much more dramatic if he were given the chance to play the ultimate game, with the prince who wasn't really a prince's life as the wager. So now the confidence man sits at the table across from the woman, and he is confident, man, that as soon as his fingers move, his life will change forever. If he wins and is allowed to live, he thinks he'll go back West, and find the girl that he left all those years ago before she found out who he really was, and who he couldn't bring himself to swindle back then and who he can't stop thinking about now. Of course, if he loses, the angry man is standing outside of the room with murder in his heart and a gun in his hands, and will take him away to make sure that he suffers horrifically before he dies. And his palm is dry and his fingers are steady and he is about to gesture.
Or:
Maybe he is a man who is really more of a father, with a daughter who was born six years ago last month and who is, as the saying goes, the apple of her fathers eye. He doesn't make much money working in the warehouse, but he dotes on her, and tries to give her everything she's ever wanted, and is so full of pride and love for her that it's a wonder he doesn't pop like a cork every time he looks at her. But two months ago she began to get sick, with a cough that sounded like it belonged in the lungs of an old man who had smoked three packs of unfiltered cigarettes every day since he was twelve. He took her to their family doctor, and that doctor did not know what to do, so the man took her to other doctors, who wrote notes and ran tests and shook their heads and looked down at their white coats when they told him that she was going to die. Despairing, he read as much as he could about her condition, and began to look overseas for any conceivable way to save her. And then he found one doctor in France, who was the worlds leading expert on this particular disease, and had written a great many important papers that had been very well received by those few smart enough to know what he was talking about. He was offering a highly controversial but so far effective treatment regiment at his clinic in Paris, and the man who was really more of a father was overjoyed. He called this doctor on the telephone, and after trying to make himself understood to a receptionist who only spoke very fast French and very poor English, he managed to get the doctor and tell him what was wrong with his daughter. The doctor listened sympathetically, and told the man that he of course was very sorry about his daughter's condition, but that he could not accept his American health insurance, and that this treatment was incredibly expensive as well as time consuming. The man despaired, because even if he sold everything he owned, he could not afford to continue paying for the treatment if he was not able to work, which he of course couldn't do if he was in Paris. He confided in one of his coworkers at the warehouse, a man that some said had dealings with people who were less than reputable. His coworker told him that if the man who was really more of a father was willing, he could talk to an acquaintance that had a contemporary who could get the man into a particular game of chance in a city that was in the middle of the desert. The man agreed, and sold his house and his car and the ring he had given to his wife before she died and now as he's sitting there at the table across from the woman, the fact that he could lose everything doesn't even cross his mind, because he knows, deep down in his heart (or maybe it's in his soul) that he's going to win and take his daughter to Paris and she'll be cured and they'll spend the rest of their days in the sun on the west bank of the Seine. But then there's that other little voice, the one that lives even deeper down in a tiny crack and that everyone has no matter how much hope is in them, and it's saying that when he finally decides to move his fingers, he's going to lose and the only thing in his life that he's going to be left with is the prospect of watching his daughter die slowly and painfully in a dirty hospital bed. And his palm is dry and his fingers are steady and he is about to gesture.
None of these stories are true. Wait, the first one is. Or maybe it's the third. No, was it the second? It doesn't matter; it is irrelevant, inconsequential, immaterial. All that matters is that in this room in a city in the middle of the desert, there is so much energy collected from the emotions of the man involved and harnessed together by the chains of probability and the furious desire of numbers to once again be ordered as they were meant to be that the very air feels like it's crackling with what could well be pure nuclear fission.
The man does not feel it; or if he does, he simply does not care. But in some primal way he must know that when he makes his gesture, this power is going to come hurtling down like a comet made of dynamite thrown from the arm of a particularly vengeful and very angry god.
But his palm is dry and his fingers are steady, and the man at the table smiles like a knife and his fingers move in the tiniest of ways and in that room in a city in the middle of the desert everything comes rushing together and the power explodes with a fury beyond description and in that one moment everything in the entire world has changed but if you look around you realize that nothing has really changed at all.
And that is the power of a gesture.
Why I Love Music, Featuring Cowboy Troy - 03/01/07
I love music. Love it. All kinds, all styles, all genres. I get goosebumps when I hear the violin kick in during the Vox cover of Pachabel's Canon, and have been known to cry when I hear bagpipes because they remind me of a funeral I went to once. Despite this passion, I had not, until very recently, jumped upon the iPod bandwagon. Well, you couldn't really say that I "jumped". It was more like I was picked up and forcibly thrown by my girlfriend. She bought me an iPod Shuffle for Christmas, and despite the fact that I had told her before that I didn't really want one, she had the good sense to know that I'm an idiot and that this would be a perfect gift for someone that truly enjoys music. The only reason that I hadn't gotten one previously, other than laziness, was that I couldn't really think of any time I'd actually use it. It's been a general rule of mine that I only run if things are chasing me, like zombies or the police, which usually only happens once or twice a month, so using it while jogging was out. I didn't think that I'd use it much at work, because I'm only actually at my desk for about an hour at a time, and I didn't want something like this to happen while I was seeing patients:
Dr. McCancercure: "Mr. Patterson, I'm afraid I have some bad news. The results of your CT scan show that you have lung cancer. It's malignant. You have less than a year to live."
Mrs. Patterson: "Oh...oh my God! Jim! No!"
Mr. Patterson: "There, there, Mabel. Don't worry. We'll get through this. I just have to hang in there until little Suzie's college graduation. I...I promised her I'd be there."
Dr. McCancercure: "Fortunately, here at Emory, we have several cutting-edge experimental treatments available for people with your type of horrible, incurable disease. This is Austin Hamilton, from the clinical trials department. He's going to discuss your options with you. Austin?"
Me: (using a tongue depressor as a microphone) "DON'T!....STOP!....THINKIN' ABOUT TOMORROW!!"
Dr. McCancercure: "Um...Austin?"
Me: (taking out iPod earbuds mid air-guitar solo) "What? Oh. Right. Cancer. Yeah, I was just demonstrating through the power of song that you, uh, totally shouldn't give up hope, and always think about tomorrow. The tomorrow where you're still alive, that is, thanks to our awesome cancer treatments! "
Ha ha! I kid, but yeah, my job can be depressing. So anyway, I never really thought I'd use an iPod even if I had wanted to go out and spend however much money they are on one.
But now that I have one, I'm inseparable from it. I have become That Guy. If you've ever ridden in a car with me, you know that if I'm driving, I begin playing air drums on the steering wheel once a song comes on, and will not stop until the car has been turned off. With an iPod blasting music directly into my ears, the desire to frantically play invisible instruments is increased by about a thousandfold. At the gym, for example. I forget that while I might think in my mind that I look like an incredible badass lifting weights while listening to The Soprano's theme, no one else can hear it but me. I've gotten some really dirty looks from people that I've accidentally kicked in the face while doing a furious aerial split at the end of a guitar solo, and anyone trying to exit the gym gets highly annoyed when it takes them 10 minutes to leave because I think I'd look cooler walking out to whatever song I'm listening to in slow motion.
My musical tastes are fairly varied, and because I can play several instruments I think that I can definitely appreciate songs on a technical level as well as a purely auditory one. Well, let me clarify that. When I say that I "play" several instruments, I'm not being entirely accurate. I played saxophone until the ninth grade, when I realized that despite everything my band teacher had told me, playing a woodwind with mediocre skill won't really get you laid. So I promptly learned to play guitar, with the rationale being that if the ugly little toad frontman from Green Day can bang groupies while playing the same three power cords over and over, then hey, so could I! Unfortunately, every other male at my high school had the same idea, and they were all much better than I was. Undeterred, I decided to learn how to play bass, figuring that this way, I could at least be in a band, and maybe get some of the girls that the lead singer and guitarist had decided they didn't want. I've noticed that bands approach recruiting a bass player with one of two methods: they either get someone who's really good, and legitimately contributes to the rhythm with a unique and distinguishable bass line, but isn't much to look at. Like Flea, from the Chili Peppers. He's incredible, but looks kind of like an anthropomorphic weasel hopped up on meth. Or, if the rest of the band is ugly, they get someone who doesn't look like they've been obsessively honing their musical genius in between playing Dungeons & Dragons in their parents basement, but will look good featured prominently on the cover of a CD. I, of course, would fall in to the latter category: no appreciable musical talent, but would look hot in a black and white photograph pensively smoking a cigarette under a bridge in Berlin. Sadly, I was unable to use my looks to coast into a career as a musician, and ended up having to sell my bass after my sophomore year in college so that I'd have money for gas to drive home for the summer. But bass players are still one leg up in the band hierarchy from the drummer, which is unfortunate, because I honestly think playing the drums takes way more skill. One of my best friends is a drummer, and watching him play is fucking amazing. I guess being able to coordinate all four of your limbs to move at completely different tempos and beats is just an innate skill, because every time that I've tried to play on his set, it sounds more like a drunk hobo falling into a pile of metal trash cans than anything even remotely harmonic. And they still get no recognition. Go ahead, name one famous drummer. See? You can't. The only one that I can think of is the guy from Def Lepard, and that's really only because he's missing an arm. I've never seen them live, so I don't know how he actually manages to play, but I'm assuming he makes up for his limb deficiency by repeatedly smashing his face into the cymbals with uncanny rhythm and precision. Oh, and the drummer from Guster, but that's because I was really impressed by the fact that he plays the drums using his bare hands, and when I saw them once in college, he actually managed to shatter his cymbal and send a jagged piece of it hurtling into the crowd, narrowly missing my left eye and coming to rest lodged in the skull of the girl behind me. The fact that there was blood everywhere and she wouldn't stop screaming surprisingly didn't lessen how cool it was. I mean, he broke a cymbal with his bare hands! That's just awesome.
So yeah, I think that I have fairly good taste in music. I've always liked punk, but not real punk, because that sounds like listening to cats being tortured and then replayed at high speeds while a retarded monkey screams in your ear. More like the Bad Religion, NOFX types of punk. Punk that doesn't really have its roots in anarchy and political commentary, but is more concerned with skateboards and hanging out at the mall. I went through a phase in college where I thought it was cool to go to large warehouses wearing pants that completely obscured my feet and dance with highschoolers dressed like butterflies to music that a British guy made on his laptop, which is always fun. Right now, I guess the best way to describe what I like is by saying that it's "Indie" rock, although I'm uncomfortable with that term. I almost feel bad admitting that I really like, for example, the Wallflowers, just because back in the day they enjoyed some amount of mainstream popularity. I mean, it's kind of a catch-22; if a band is actually really good, they'll get noticed, picked up by a major label, and you'll start hearing their songs during the Rick, Pancho and Slappy morning show on the radio. If they're not, they'll fade into obscurity. For example, I've liked Fallout Boy and Panic At the Disco for years, but it's only been recently that they've become hugely popular with angsty teenagers who wear makeup and cry because they aren't allowed to drive their parents Subaru after midnight. And this has, in a sense, ruined those bands for me. I mean, I'm certainly not going to go see one of their shows now, not only because of the high ticket price, but because I'll be the oldest person there by about 10 years and don't want to have to keep sneaking drinks from the bar to surly highschoolers. This does make me wonder, though, what my own musical taste will be like in 15 years. When I look at my parents musical collections, it's like a switch was thrown during a certain year and they didn't even know that people were still making music after that point. Maybe it was when I was born; I was probably a terrible baby, and my parents just didn't have the time to buy records or tapes or whatever because they were always taking me to the doctor after I'd shoved a crayon into my nose or tried to stick my hand in a blender. But one of the things I truly love about music is finding new bands that I like, and because I can illegally download as many songs as I want, I can go ahead and check out the band that a friend said was good without worrying about wasting eighteen dollars on a CD that will end up only having one track that I enjoy. Maybe this is the difference; back then, you actually had to go see a band in concert to know that you liked them, or buy one of their albums so that you could listen to it. I'm sure that even as I write this, Lars Ulrich has risen from his dark throne of human skulls and ordered his elite Music Reclamation Gestapo to ride forth and have me killed for piracy, but whatever. The point is, I don't think that all of a sudden, I'll wake up and say "Well! I'm 40 now! Guess I'd better stop listening to all of that innovative and easily obtainable music that I love!" If anything, I'll probably listen to it more, as music will be my only escape from the harpy-like shrieks of my future wife, in addition to calming me down when I want to throw my child out of a window because it won't stop crying. My impeccable taste is helped, of course, by the fact that I surround myself with friends who also have good taste in music. Take Lee, for example. If it will make you cry and came out before 1998, Lee is your man. He introduced me to the Wedding Present last year at a show at the Earl, and I can honestly say that it was one of the best performances I've ever been to. Or Ryan. "Ryan," I'll say, "Have you heard that new song by the Silversun Pickups? Noel played it for me last week and it's awesome". After casually tossing his scarf over his shoulder, he'll reply "I heard about them like a year ago, dude. I stopped listening to them when I realized their Myspace page had more than 100,000 views. I've moved on. Have you heard of the Orphins? No? Didn't think so. Check them out; they're good." Even Ian will occasionally surprise me by downloading a bunch of songs by some new band that he heard on NPR, although I have to admit that having him earnestly tell me that he really enjoys running while listening to My Chemical Romance was pretty funny.
The one musical style that I'm not really that in to is Country. I don't know why, but hearing a man with a twangy accent lament about how his wife shot the dog and then wrecked his pickup before running off with a fieldhand doesn't appeal to me. I've remained largely ignorant of any happenings in the Country music world, except maybe for when the fat Dixie Chick took a break from eating to announce that she thought the president was an idiot. Which was stupid of her, as the main demographic for her shitty warbling are the people responsible for electing him into power in the first place, but I thought the fact that everyone made a big deal out of it was amusing. Recently, however, I've become aware of a new element in the genre, one that I stumbled upon purely by accident. See, normally when I get home, I throw on CNN so that I have some background noise while I go through the mail, change, and reassure my frantic idiot dog that it's really me that's walked through the door and not some kind of robot imposter wearing my skin. I've had to stop with the CNN, however, as I get home right at the same time that Lou Dobbs Tonight comes on. His show is terrible, because all he's done in the last few months is talk about illegal immigration and how Mexicans are slowly killing our country. Seriously, Lou Dobbs hates Mexicans. HATES them. I think that Lou Dobbs honestly believes that the Mexican people are the root of every single problem that we as a society face in the world today:
Semi-attractive Anchorwoman: "And that was an Indian guy in a labcoat with the latest research, showing with incontrovertible proof that Global Warming is real and will one day kill us all. Terrifying! Ha ha ha! Coming up next on CNN, Lou Dobbs Tonight. What have you got for us, Lou?"
Lou Dobbs: "Tonight, I'll be discussing the hidden Mexican/Nazi/terrorism connection: is Osama bin Laden really a Mexican Hitler who's traveled forward in time to destroy America? The truth will shock you! Also, I'm going to drink a fifth of gin and then go indiscriminately fire a handgun into a crowd of migrant workers while screaming ethnic slurs and crying, live on the air! Don't miss it."
Really, his show has degenerated into this. It's sad. Anyway, I don't like watching a fat, jowly old man turn purple from his bigoted rage, so I've been putting on USA when I get home instead. This isn't much better, as I'm forced to watch Vincent D'Onofrio solve mysteries by twitching and stuttering at a suspect until they confess on Law & Order CI, but it's still better and less disturbing than Lou Dobbs' unbridled hate for immigrants. Also on USA, they have a show called Nashville Star, which I guess is kind of like TV sensation American Idol, only the contestants have sillier hats and less teeth. I've never actually seen the show, but all of the commercials prominently feature the two hosts, and this is where my interest was piqued. One of the hosts is Jewel, the folk-rock starlet who's pretty hot until she opens up her mouth and reveals her terrifying snaggletoothed maw. The other host is what appears to be a black man dressed like a gay cowboy. I'll admit that I'm not what you would call an authority on Country music fashion, but even I can tell that his getup is magnificently hideous. His gold belt buckles are typically the size of a large dinner plate, and sometimes he's wearing a checked scarf or bandanna or something around his neck, maybe with a bolo thrown in for good measure. His hats could easily be turned upside down in the event of a flood and be used as a makeshift canoe for both him and several small children. Seriously, it's like the costume room from Howdy Doody went blind and threw up all over him. The first time I saw a commercial for the show, I was curious about this guy. Then I saw him again in a commercial for Sonic fast food, where he was still dressed in his retarded cowboy uniform, but trying to think up lines for what kind of sounded like a rap song. It was here that I also learned his name: "Cowboy Troy". So who was he? Where had he come from? Was he really a black cowboy rapper? I came to two possible conclusions. The first was that the network executives, in an effort to make their show more diverse, had kidnapped some random black guy and his family and were threatening to kill them unless he pretended to be a cowboy on a nationally syndicated show about hopeful musicians trying to break into the Country music scene. This didn't seem likely, so I went with my second scenario: that this guy was actually an aspiring musician named Steve, but couldn't get his break in whatever genre he was struggling in. He then went to his agent, and they sat down to have a brainstorming session:
Steve: "I just don't understand it. I've been performing at local venues and releasing my own independent records for two years now, and I'm still no closer to getting signed. What am I doing wrong?"
Agent: "Well, Steve, the music industry is absolutely flooded with artists these days. What you need is a hook; something catchy, something that makes you stand out in a crowd."
Steve: "Like what?"
Agent: "Like...like, I don't know...maybe you could be the frontman of a band that sings nothing but thrasher anthems about how great lawnmowers are. Ooh, or maybe you could be a rapper who only wears and rhymes about the color yellow. Wait, what about "DJ I-PEN", a house DJ who only spins beats arranged in iambic pentameter? The kids would love that."
Steve: "No, no. Those just don't feel right."
Agent: "Well, we could always dress you up like a cowboy and have you rap country songs."
Steve: "Hmmm....."
Agent: "Actually, Steve, I was kidding."
Steve: "No no, wait, it'll be perfect! Totally unique! Nobody will see it coming!"
Agent: "Steve, as your agent, and more importantly as a friend who cares about you, I feel obligated to point out that the vast majority of the population that likes Country music have ancestors that used to dress up in white hoods and hang your people from trees. This might not be the best demographic for you."
Steve: "I'll be fine. This'll be great! I'll be spanning both musical and cultural divides with my non-threatening and slightly comical appearance! Wait, I need a new name. Something that rolls off the tongue, but also reminds people that I'm a rapping black cowboy. You know, in case they close their eyes and forget."
Agent: "Sigh....Uh, how about, I don't know...Cowboy Steve?"
Steve: "No, no, it has to flow better. Should it rhyme? Maybe it should rhyme. I mean, my stage name when I was in a band was "Brock Rocker", and everyone liked that."Cowboy Floyd?" No, that's stupid. What about...hmmm...Wait, I've got it! From this point forward, I shall be known as "Cowboy Troy!" Get me wardrobe! I need huge belt buckles shaped like Texas and a hat large enough to store several oversized dictionaries!"
Please be aware that I have nothing against rapping black cowboys; I would make fun of anyone dressed like this regardless of if they were white, yellow, red, or blue. I just think it's a bold move, and one that I don't think any other black musician has taken before. It's the same principle as Eminem; for the most part, I think white people trying to rap look ridiculous, but it's neat to see people say "You know what? I know that this particular genre is typically identified with this particular race, but fuck it. I'm good at it, so why I shouldn't I perform it?" Since I really was curious, I turned to Wikipedia, which I'm convinced will one day become the repository for all human knowledge, for the real story. The ballad of Cowboy Troy is actually pretty cool. It turns out he's just a guy from Texas, who, after getting a degree in psychology from UT, decided to start a music career. He's been performing since 1988, and actually enjoys a large degree of popularity in the Country music world. He describes his unique style as "Hick-hop", which is fairly retarded, but whatever. You have to admire a guy who's willing to face not only ostracization from other members of his race (I'm assuming most hip-hop artists aren't asking him appear on their albums) as well as potential hostility from the people he's trying to sell records to based solely on the color of his skin. Good for you, Cowboy Troy. You're a perfect example of what makes music great.
Dr. McCancercure: "Mr. Patterson, I'm afraid I have some bad news. The results of your CT scan show that you have lung cancer. It's malignant. You have less than a year to live."
Mrs. Patterson: "Oh...oh my God! Jim! No!"
Mr. Patterson: "There, there, Mabel. Don't worry. We'll get through this. I just have to hang in there until little Suzie's college graduation. I...I promised her I'd be there."
Dr. McCancercure: "Fortunately, here at Emory, we have several cutting-edge experimental treatments available for people with your type of horrible, incurable disease. This is Austin Hamilton, from the clinical trials department. He's going to discuss your options with you. Austin?"
Me: (using a tongue depressor as a microphone) "DON'T!....STOP!....THINKIN' ABOUT TOMORROW!!"
Dr. McCancercure: "Um...Austin?"
Me: (taking out iPod earbuds mid air-guitar solo) "What? Oh. Right. Cancer. Yeah, I was just demonstrating through the power of song that you, uh, totally shouldn't give up hope, and always think about tomorrow. The tomorrow where you're still alive, that is, thanks to our awesome cancer treatments! "
Ha ha! I kid, but yeah, my job can be depressing. So anyway, I never really thought I'd use an iPod even if I had wanted to go out and spend however much money they are on one.
But now that I have one, I'm inseparable from it. I have become That Guy. If you've ever ridden in a car with me, you know that if I'm driving, I begin playing air drums on the steering wheel once a song comes on, and will not stop until the car has been turned off. With an iPod blasting music directly into my ears, the desire to frantically play invisible instruments is increased by about a thousandfold. At the gym, for example. I forget that while I might think in my mind that I look like an incredible badass lifting weights while listening to The Soprano's theme, no one else can hear it but me. I've gotten some really dirty looks from people that I've accidentally kicked in the face while doing a furious aerial split at the end of a guitar solo, and anyone trying to exit the gym gets highly annoyed when it takes them 10 minutes to leave because I think I'd look cooler walking out to whatever song I'm listening to in slow motion.
My musical tastes are fairly varied, and because I can play several instruments I think that I can definitely appreciate songs on a technical level as well as a purely auditory one. Well, let me clarify that. When I say that I "play" several instruments, I'm not being entirely accurate. I played saxophone until the ninth grade, when I realized that despite everything my band teacher had told me, playing a woodwind with mediocre skill won't really get you laid. So I promptly learned to play guitar, with the rationale being that if the ugly little toad frontman from Green Day can bang groupies while playing the same three power cords over and over, then hey, so could I! Unfortunately, every other male at my high school had the same idea, and they were all much better than I was. Undeterred, I decided to learn how to play bass, figuring that this way, I could at least be in a band, and maybe get some of the girls that the lead singer and guitarist had decided they didn't want. I've noticed that bands approach recruiting a bass player with one of two methods: they either get someone who's really good, and legitimately contributes to the rhythm with a unique and distinguishable bass line, but isn't much to look at. Like Flea, from the Chili Peppers. He's incredible, but looks kind of like an anthropomorphic weasel hopped up on meth. Or, if the rest of the band is ugly, they get someone who doesn't look like they've been obsessively honing their musical genius in between playing Dungeons & Dragons in their parents basement, but will look good featured prominently on the cover of a CD. I, of course, would fall in to the latter category: no appreciable musical talent, but would look hot in a black and white photograph pensively smoking a cigarette under a bridge in Berlin. Sadly, I was unable to use my looks to coast into a career as a musician, and ended up having to sell my bass after my sophomore year in college so that I'd have money for gas to drive home for the summer. But bass players are still one leg up in the band hierarchy from the drummer, which is unfortunate, because I honestly think playing the drums takes way more skill. One of my best friends is a drummer, and watching him play is fucking amazing. I guess being able to coordinate all four of your limbs to move at completely different tempos and beats is just an innate skill, because every time that I've tried to play on his set, it sounds more like a drunk hobo falling into a pile of metal trash cans than anything even remotely harmonic. And they still get no recognition. Go ahead, name one famous drummer. See? You can't. The only one that I can think of is the guy from Def Lepard, and that's really only because he's missing an arm. I've never seen them live, so I don't know how he actually manages to play, but I'm assuming he makes up for his limb deficiency by repeatedly smashing his face into the cymbals with uncanny rhythm and precision. Oh, and the drummer from Guster, but that's because I was really impressed by the fact that he plays the drums using his bare hands, and when I saw them once in college, he actually managed to shatter his cymbal and send a jagged piece of it hurtling into the crowd, narrowly missing my left eye and coming to rest lodged in the skull of the girl behind me. The fact that there was blood everywhere and she wouldn't stop screaming surprisingly didn't lessen how cool it was. I mean, he broke a cymbal with his bare hands! That's just awesome.
So yeah, I think that I have fairly good taste in music. I've always liked punk, but not real punk, because that sounds like listening to cats being tortured and then replayed at high speeds while a retarded monkey screams in your ear. More like the Bad Religion, NOFX types of punk. Punk that doesn't really have its roots in anarchy and political commentary, but is more concerned with skateboards and hanging out at the mall. I went through a phase in college where I thought it was cool to go to large warehouses wearing pants that completely obscured my feet and dance with highschoolers dressed like butterflies to music that a British guy made on his laptop, which is always fun. Right now, I guess the best way to describe what I like is by saying that it's "Indie" rock, although I'm uncomfortable with that term. I almost feel bad admitting that I really like, for example, the Wallflowers, just because back in the day they enjoyed some amount of mainstream popularity. I mean, it's kind of a catch-22; if a band is actually really good, they'll get noticed, picked up by a major label, and you'll start hearing their songs during the Rick, Pancho and Slappy morning show on the radio. If they're not, they'll fade into obscurity. For example, I've liked Fallout Boy and Panic At the Disco for years, but it's only been recently that they've become hugely popular with angsty teenagers who wear makeup and cry because they aren't allowed to drive their parents Subaru after midnight. And this has, in a sense, ruined those bands for me. I mean, I'm certainly not going to go see one of their shows now, not only because of the high ticket price, but because I'll be the oldest person there by about 10 years and don't want to have to keep sneaking drinks from the bar to surly highschoolers. This does make me wonder, though, what my own musical taste will be like in 15 years. When I look at my parents musical collections, it's like a switch was thrown during a certain year and they didn't even know that people were still making music after that point. Maybe it was when I was born; I was probably a terrible baby, and my parents just didn't have the time to buy records or tapes or whatever because they were always taking me to the doctor after I'd shoved a crayon into my nose or tried to stick my hand in a blender. But one of the things I truly love about music is finding new bands that I like, and because I can illegally download as many songs as I want, I can go ahead and check out the band that a friend said was good without worrying about wasting eighteen dollars on a CD that will end up only having one track that I enjoy. Maybe this is the difference; back then, you actually had to go see a band in concert to know that you liked them, or buy one of their albums so that you could listen to it. I'm sure that even as I write this, Lars Ulrich has risen from his dark throne of human skulls and ordered his elite Music Reclamation Gestapo to ride forth and have me killed for piracy, but whatever. The point is, I don't think that all of a sudden, I'll wake up and say "Well! I'm 40 now! Guess I'd better stop listening to all of that innovative and easily obtainable music that I love!" If anything, I'll probably listen to it more, as music will be my only escape from the harpy-like shrieks of my future wife, in addition to calming me down when I want to throw my child out of a window because it won't stop crying. My impeccable taste is helped, of course, by the fact that I surround myself with friends who also have good taste in music. Take Lee, for example. If it will make you cry and came out before 1998, Lee is your man. He introduced me to the Wedding Present last year at a show at the Earl, and I can honestly say that it was one of the best performances I've ever been to. Or Ryan. "Ryan," I'll say, "Have you heard that new song by the Silversun Pickups? Noel played it for me last week and it's awesome". After casually tossing his scarf over his shoulder, he'll reply "I heard about them like a year ago, dude. I stopped listening to them when I realized their Myspace page had more than 100,000 views. I've moved on. Have you heard of the Orphins? No? Didn't think so. Check them out; they're good." Even Ian will occasionally surprise me by downloading a bunch of songs by some new band that he heard on NPR, although I have to admit that having him earnestly tell me that he really enjoys running while listening to My Chemical Romance was pretty funny.
The one musical style that I'm not really that in to is Country. I don't know why, but hearing a man with a twangy accent lament about how his wife shot the dog and then wrecked his pickup before running off with a fieldhand doesn't appeal to me. I've remained largely ignorant of any happenings in the Country music world, except maybe for when the fat Dixie Chick took a break from eating to announce that she thought the president was an idiot. Which was stupid of her, as the main demographic for her shitty warbling are the people responsible for electing him into power in the first place, but I thought the fact that everyone made a big deal out of it was amusing. Recently, however, I've become aware of a new element in the genre, one that I stumbled upon purely by accident. See, normally when I get home, I throw on CNN so that I have some background noise while I go through the mail, change, and reassure my frantic idiot dog that it's really me that's walked through the door and not some kind of robot imposter wearing my skin. I've had to stop with the CNN, however, as I get home right at the same time that Lou Dobbs Tonight comes on. His show is terrible, because all he's done in the last few months is talk about illegal immigration and how Mexicans are slowly killing our country. Seriously, Lou Dobbs hates Mexicans. HATES them. I think that Lou Dobbs honestly believes that the Mexican people are the root of every single problem that we as a society face in the world today:
Semi-attractive Anchorwoman: "And that was an Indian guy in a labcoat with the latest research, showing with incontrovertible proof that Global Warming is real and will one day kill us all. Terrifying! Ha ha ha! Coming up next on CNN, Lou Dobbs Tonight. What have you got for us, Lou?"
Lou Dobbs: "Tonight, I'll be discussing the hidden Mexican/Nazi/terrorism connection: is Osama bin Laden really a Mexican Hitler who's traveled forward in time to destroy America? The truth will shock you! Also, I'm going to drink a fifth of gin and then go indiscriminately fire a handgun into a crowd of migrant workers while screaming ethnic slurs and crying, live on the air! Don't miss it."
Really, his show has degenerated into this. It's sad. Anyway, I don't like watching a fat, jowly old man turn purple from his bigoted rage, so I've been putting on USA when I get home instead. This isn't much better, as I'm forced to watch Vincent D'Onofrio solve mysteries by twitching and stuttering at a suspect until they confess on Law & Order CI, but it's still better and less disturbing than Lou Dobbs' unbridled hate for immigrants. Also on USA, they have a show called Nashville Star, which I guess is kind of like TV sensation American Idol, only the contestants have sillier hats and less teeth. I've never actually seen the show, but all of the commercials prominently feature the two hosts, and this is where my interest was piqued. One of the hosts is Jewel, the folk-rock starlet who's pretty hot until she opens up her mouth and reveals her terrifying snaggletoothed maw. The other host is what appears to be a black man dressed like a gay cowboy. I'll admit that I'm not what you would call an authority on Country music fashion, but even I can tell that his getup is magnificently hideous. His gold belt buckles are typically the size of a large dinner plate, and sometimes he's wearing a checked scarf or bandanna or something around his neck, maybe with a bolo thrown in for good measure. His hats could easily be turned upside down in the event of a flood and be used as a makeshift canoe for both him and several small children. Seriously, it's like the costume room from Howdy Doody went blind and threw up all over him. The first time I saw a commercial for the show, I was curious about this guy. Then I saw him again in a commercial for Sonic fast food, where he was still dressed in his retarded cowboy uniform, but trying to think up lines for what kind of sounded like a rap song. It was here that I also learned his name: "Cowboy Troy". So who was he? Where had he come from? Was he really a black cowboy rapper? I came to two possible conclusions. The first was that the network executives, in an effort to make their show more diverse, had kidnapped some random black guy and his family and were threatening to kill them unless he pretended to be a cowboy on a nationally syndicated show about hopeful musicians trying to break into the Country music scene. This didn't seem likely, so I went with my second scenario: that this guy was actually an aspiring musician named Steve, but couldn't get his break in whatever genre he was struggling in. He then went to his agent, and they sat down to have a brainstorming session:
Steve: "I just don't understand it. I've been performing at local venues and releasing my own independent records for two years now, and I'm still no closer to getting signed. What am I doing wrong?"
Agent: "Well, Steve, the music industry is absolutely flooded with artists these days. What you need is a hook; something catchy, something that makes you stand out in a crowd."
Steve: "Like what?"
Agent: "Like...like, I don't know...maybe you could be the frontman of a band that sings nothing but thrasher anthems about how great lawnmowers are. Ooh, or maybe you could be a rapper who only wears and rhymes about the color yellow. Wait, what about "DJ I-PEN", a house DJ who only spins beats arranged in iambic pentameter? The kids would love that."
Steve: "No, no. Those just don't feel right."
Agent: "Well, we could always dress you up like a cowboy and have you rap country songs."
Steve: "Hmmm....."
Agent: "Actually, Steve, I was kidding."
Steve: "No no, wait, it'll be perfect! Totally unique! Nobody will see it coming!"
Agent: "Steve, as your agent, and more importantly as a friend who cares about you, I feel obligated to point out that the vast majority of the population that likes Country music have ancestors that used to dress up in white hoods and hang your people from trees. This might not be the best demographic for you."
Steve: "I'll be fine. This'll be great! I'll be spanning both musical and cultural divides with my non-threatening and slightly comical appearance! Wait, I need a new name. Something that rolls off the tongue, but also reminds people that I'm a rapping black cowboy. You know, in case they close their eyes and forget."
Agent: "Sigh....Uh, how about, I don't know...Cowboy Steve?"
Steve: "No, no, it has to flow better. Should it rhyme? Maybe it should rhyme. I mean, my stage name when I was in a band was "Brock Rocker", and everyone liked that."Cowboy Floyd?" No, that's stupid. What about...hmmm...Wait, I've got it! From this point forward, I shall be known as "Cowboy Troy!" Get me wardrobe! I need huge belt buckles shaped like Texas and a hat large enough to store several oversized dictionaries!"
Please be aware that I have nothing against rapping black cowboys; I would make fun of anyone dressed like this regardless of if they were white, yellow, red, or blue. I just think it's a bold move, and one that I don't think any other black musician has taken before. It's the same principle as Eminem; for the most part, I think white people trying to rap look ridiculous, but it's neat to see people say "You know what? I know that this particular genre is typically identified with this particular race, but fuck it. I'm good at it, so why I shouldn't I perform it?" Since I really was curious, I turned to Wikipedia, which I'm convinced will one day become the repository for all human knowledge, for the real story. The ballad of Cowboy Troy is actually pretty cool. It turns out he's just a guy from Texas, who, after getting a degree in psychology from UT, decided to start a music career. He's been performing since 1988, and actually enjoys a large degree of popularity in the Country music world. He describes his unique style as "Hick-hop", which is fairly retarded, but whatever. You have to admire a guy who's willing to face not only ostracization from other members of his race (I'm assuming most hip-hop artists aren't asking him appear on their albums) as well as potential hostility from the people he's trying to sell records to based solely on the color of his skin. Good for you, Cowboy Troy. You're a perfect example of what makes music great.
Why Most Commercials Are Terrible, Featuring Insane GM Salesmen - 02/06/07
It was Superbowl Sunday this last weekend, that wonderful time of year when the absolute best of our nation's gridiron champions test their skills against one another in a grueling physical confrontation to determine who will be the greatest football team in the world. Well, not the world. Mostly America. And just until next year. As anyone who knows me can attest, I'm really not that into football. It's not that I don't like watching large, muscular men in skintight clothing getting sweaty and jumping into piles on top of each other, it's just that I can't muster up enthusiasm for something that has absolutely no effect on my life whatsoever. I don't know if this is a reflection of how self-absorbed I am, but I honestly can't think of any trend that I follow with the degree of obsessivness that some of my friends display with sports. Don't get me wrong, I scream with joy every time I read that there's a new Harry Potter book coming out, and I attended the midnight premiere of Revenge of the Sith dressed like a Robot Jedi (thus combining two things which are awesome; namely, robots and Jedi.) But once the initial euphoria passes, that's it. I don't compulsively check websites every day to make sure J.K. Rowling hasn't been kidnapped by evil wizards because her books are getting too close to the truth, or to see if there's been inside information leaked about how George Lucas plans to further ruin the Star Wars franchise by re-releasing the movies and adding even more annoying CGI space muppets. Maybe it's sad that I don't have things I'm that passionate about in my life, but if the alternative is to be forced to care that "hulking man-ogre #1" was purchased like a pack of cigarettes from "team with racially insensitive name #4", then I don't really care. I guess that there are varying degrees of fandom; for example, one of the only reasons that I ever watch sports with my friends at all is to laugh while Country Mike screams incoherently and throws beer cans at the TV. And that's fine; he gets into the game, and maybe part of him honestly believes that if he yells loud enough, the quarterback will be able to magically sense his devotion with the power of his mind and kick another homerun past the goalie or whatever. But then there's the totally opposite end of the spectrum; like the insane fanaticism that prompts Oakland Raiders fans to loot and pillage after what seems like almost every major game their team is involved in. That kind of manic devotion I just don't get; at what point does "Boy! I sure am bummed that my team didn't win the Superbowl!" turn into "Hey! My fucking team lost! I'm going to follow this cinderblock through a window and steal some televisions!" I can't think of anything that would make me so excited that I have to express my enthusiasm by lighting cars on fire, and to be honest, I'm kind of glad that I don't. I think that liking football is something you have to be introduced to at a young age. For example, my dad never really watched sports on TV at all, so I never had the magical experience of rooting for the home team on Sundays, just me and the old man drinking beer and bonding. I tell everyone it's because he's from England, when actually that's just a clever excuse for me to work the fact that I'm half British into the conversation, which I believe totally enhances my sex appeal. This argument would have more credence if my dad liked soccer, because then he could angrily complain about how we stupid yanks took the word "football" and applied it to the wrong sport, right before he yelled "Oi!" and layed someone out with a crippling headbutt. So I didn't grow up watching sports, and I think that's probably the main reason why I don't like them now.
The real reason that I watch the Superbowl is for the commercials. According to the arbitrary numbers I just made up, each second of airtime during the Superbowl costs roughly six hundred trillion dollars, so you would think that every single piece of advertising done during that time would be a work of artistic genius. Sadly, this wasn't the case at all. I mean, there were a few good ones, like the two lions discussing the correct pronunciation of "carne asada" before presumably mauling an antelope to death, or the one with the sad robot who dreams about committing robot suicide because he's not working hard enough for GM. That one is kind of creepy when you think about it; it's basically implying that every single employee of GM is so incredibly loyal to their company that if they mess up and get fired, they'll spiral down into a crippling depression before trying to throw themselves off of a bridge. This actually makes me more hesitant to buy GM products; I mean, what if my particular vehicle is recalled for some minor defect? Based on the commercial, I would drive it back to whatever dealership I bought it from, and be greeted by something like this:
Me: "Um, excuse me? I called earlier. I'm bringing back in my Pontiac Torrent Crossover. Besides having a ridiculously stupid name, it also appears to have a defect that causes the trunk to become unlocked whenever I accelerate past ten miles an hour. I was planning on killing some hookers and using the Pontiac Torrent Crossover's spacious and roomy interior trunk space to my advantage when disposing of the bodies, but you can see the problem if one of them is still alive and the trunk just randomly flies open. It'd be kind of an awkward moment for everyone involved."
GM Manager: "I see. Yes, that most certainly is unacceptable. Please, accept this as a token of my sincerest apologies while we investigate who is responsible for this...this atrocity."
(takes out knife, slices off right pinky finger)
Me: "Oh...Oh my God!! What the fuck did you just do that for?! Jesus Christ!!"
GM Manager (calmly bandaging bleeding hand): "Ah, I believe that we have found the culprit."
(two GM henchman enter, dragging a third employee, kicking and struggling, between them)
GM Henchman 1: "We found him in the North breakroom, sir. Apparently one of the guards failed to properly secure his ankle shackles after his 3 minute lunch break, and the scum escaped before he finished working on the trunk lock."
GM Employee: "NO! AHH!! PLEASE!! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, HELP ME!!"
GM Manager: "Silence! Your pitiful mewling brings not only further shame upon you, but on your entire family!!"
GM Employee: "AHH!! NO!! NO, I BEG OF YOU, GRANT ME A MERCIFUL DEATH!!"
Me: "Um, you know, all of this isn't really necessary...."
GM Manager: "Ha ha ha! Of course it is, sir. Here at GM, we believe that quality and dedication to our product is the highest priority."
Me: "Yeah, but....I mean...are you all going to, like, kill that guy?"
GM Manager: "Due to his many years of loyal service, I have decided to be lenient and allow him the option of ritual suicide. Although it is more than this piece of sniveling filth deserves."
GM Employee (tears of happiness now streaming down his face): "Oh, thank you sir! I will remember you and your generosity in the afterlife!"
GM Manager: "Take him away."
(Positions knife over left pinky finger)
GM Manager: "Now then, sir, have you been experiencing any other troubles with your GM vehicle?"
Me: "No, I think everything else has been pretty cool. Thanks."
Honestly, who really wants that on their conscience? One of the other funny commercials was for Bud Light, but was only entertaining because it involved people slapping each other in the face, and you really can't go wrong with physical humor. I don't know why we as a society have decided that watching someone fall down a flight stairs is amusing, but I have to admit that I laughed uproariously at the Doritos commercial with a girl faceplanting in front of her car. I guess that if we didn't have this fascination, Bob Sagat's career would have ended much sooner than it did. I'm pretty sure the last two seasons of America's Funniest Home Videos were only variations of "Man Hit in Groin With Object", or maybe "Man Hit in Groin With Object, Falls Over, Is Then Hit in Groin Again, This Time With Heavier Object." And I'm sure that ratings had probably never been higher.
The only other commercial of note was the one with Kevin Federline in it, and I'm amused right now because I honestly can't remember what product it was advertising. It was for a bank or something, right? He's pretending he's in a rap video and has his reality shattered when it turns out he's not actually draped in mink and throwing money around, but working as a fry guy in a fast food restaurant. Then there's some tagline about how life can change quickly, so use our totally safe banking, or something. Awesome. The sheer patheticness of this commercial fascinates me; you can just tell that he's decided to give up any dreams he had of being taken seriously as an artist, and has already consigned himself to pulling in as much cash as he can while people still remember that he's a joke. That's the sad part. Vanilla Ice will go down in musical history as one of the worst things to ever happen to rap music, and he could do a commercial when he's 80 about how goofy he is and it would still resonate. No one's going to remember who the fuck K-Fed even was in the next ten years. The only other thing that I thought about while watching this commercial was thinking how at the end of it, they probably made him give back all of the designer suits and fur coats he was wearing during the shoot, while he stood in a corner in his dirty wifebeater and looked morose.
So these are supposed to be the cream of the advertising crop, the best of the best? Not really. I guess the companies used all of their money to buy the airspace and could only afford a single monkey with a typewriter to script the ads, but come on. Don't get me wrong, they were better than half of the commercials that play during regular broadcast hours. There are two out right now that I find particularly ridiculous. The first is the one for Quizno's delicious new Delectable Italian Whatever sandwich, where they compare it to an inferior yet just-as-rubbery Subway sandwich. The legality of these types of commercials has always kind of intrigued me; I mean, why stop at pointing out that your sandwich is packed with a greater variety of meatlike substances? Why not just tell people that your competition uses discarded third world babies as the stock for its Creamy Ranch Dressing, or seasons its burgers with dirty hobo fingernails? Can you do that? Do they have to go through a rigorous series of blinded scientific studies to determine that their sandwich is, in fact, bigger? That's not the part of the commercial that really gets me, though. Quizno's marketing strategy here involves their "satisfaction guarantee", which states that if you're not completely satisfied with their product, you're eligible to receive another zesty sandwich, free of charge! Yay! Hey, genius, if I wasn't totally satisfied with your greasy faux-lunchmeat the first time, why the fuck would I want you to give me another one, even if it doesn't cost me anything? This is actually a genius plan when you analyze it, because most people, if they're unhappy with their purchase, won't take the trouble to march back into their local eatery and argue with the subhuman counter slave to try and get a free sandwich. Then if they do, an altercation like this will no doubt ensue:
Irate Customer: "Excuse me? I just purchased one of your Delectable Italian Whatever sandwiches, and I have to say, I'm disappointed. The subtle blending of herbs and spices didn't blend quite as magically as I'd hoped in my mouth, the presentation was boring, and I'm pretty sure I bit into what looks like a human tooth."
Subhuman Counter Slave: "Grunt."
Irate Customer: "So anyway, despite my complete disgust with your product, I'd like you to give me another one, only this time, I won't pay for it."
Subhuman Counter Slave: "But you just said you didn't like it."
Irate Customer: "Correct. And that's why I want another one. For free."
Subhuman Counter Slave: "But if you don't like something, why would you want more of it?"
Irate Customer: "Because...I...No, wait, I do like it. Give me the free one."
Subhuman Counter Slave: "Ha ha! Based on the terms and agreement of the Quizno's satisfaction guarantee, you must be totally dissatisfied with our food before we'll give you more of it. Buy a sandwich or get out."
Irate Customer: "Curses!"
The people at Quizno's are brilliant. The other commercial I find laughable is the one for some kind of Herpes medication. I forget which one it is, as commercials for people with debilitating venereal diseases invariably show happy couples strapped into a kayak parasail flying over the edge of a waterfall at sunset, so they're hard to differentiate. I'm sure that life isn't nearly as peachy when you're screaming because it feels like your pee is made of flaming needles as these ads would lead you to believe, but that's not the best part. In an effort to apparently make their ads more credible with the addition of random numbers (numbers mean SCIENCE!), the commercial points out with tremendous gravity that over 70% of the population has been infected with Herpes when their partner was displaying no active symptoms. This is great; it means that if you do happen to get Herpes from having unprotected sex with whatever random stranger you brought home, it's not your fault. The flip side of this amazing scientific fact, of course, means that 30% of people infected had sex without a condom with someone who had red, swollen genitalia covered in weeping sores. In that case, fuck you. You deserve whatever horrible affliction befalls you. Have fun with your kayaks and sunsets.
So commercials, for the most part, either make no sense or are just stupid. Admittedly, if I worked in advertising and was told that my brand new account was for a cream that lessened the pain of a Herpes outbreak, I'd probably be stumped on where to begin. But these people do this kind of stuff for a living. If it were me, I would just follow the cardinal rule of marketing: if you put a monkey, or maybe a midget, or a midget in a monkey costume in your ad, it will be a resounding success. Or at the very least, make just me laugh. And isn't that what's truly important?
The real reason that I watch the Superbowl is for the commercials. According to the arbitrary numbers I just made up, each second of airtime during the Superbowl costs roughly six hundred trillion dollars, so you would think that every single piece of advertising done during that time would be a work of artistic genius. Sadly, this wasn't the case at all. I mean, there were a few good ones, like the two lions discussing the correct pronunciation of "carne asada" before presumably mauling an antelope to death, or the one with the sad robot who dreams about committing robot suicide because he's not working hard enough for GM. That one is kind of creepy when you think about it; it's basically implying that every single employee of GM is so incredibly loyal to their company that if they mess up and get fired, they'll spiral down into a crippling depression before trying to throw themselves off of a bridge. This actually makes me more hesitant to buy GM products; I mean, what if my particular vehicle is recalled for some minor defect? Based on the commercial, I would drive it back to whatever dealership I bought it from, and be greeted by something like this:
Me: "Um, excuse me? I called earlier. I'm bringing back in my Pontiac Torrent Crossover. Besides having a ridiculously stupid name, it also appears to have a defect that causes the trunk to become unlocked whenever I accelerate past ten miles an hour. I was planning on killing some hookers and using the Pontiac Torrent Crossover's spacious and roomy interior trunk space to my advantage when disposing of the bodies, but you can see the problem if one of them is still alive and the trunk just randomly flies open. It'd be kind of an awkward moment for everyone involved."
GM Manager: "I see. Yes, that most certainly is unacceptable. Please, accept this as a token of my sincerest apologies while we investigate who is responsible for this...this atrocity."
(takes out knife, slices off right pinky finger)
Me: "Oh...Oh my God!! What the fuck did you just do that for?! Jesus Christ!!"
GM Manager (calmly bandaging bleeding hand): "Ah, I believe that we have found the culprit."
(two GM henchman enter, dragging a third employee, kicking and struggling, between them)
GM Henchman 1: "We found him in the North breakroom, sir. Apparently one of the guards failed to properly secure his ankle shackles after his 3 minute lunch break, and the scum escaped before he finished working on the trunk lock."
GM Employee: "NO! AHH!! PLEASE!! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, HELP ME!!"
GM Manager: "Silence! Your pitiful mewling brings not only further shame upon you, but on your entire family!!"
GM Employee: "AHH!! NO!! NO, I BEG OF YOU, GRANT ME A MERCIFUL DEATH!!"
Me: "Um, you know, all of this isn't really necessary...."
GM Manager: "Ha ha ha! Of course it is, sir. Here at GM, we believe that quality and dedication to our product is the highest priority."
Me: "Yeah, but....I mean...are you all going to, like, kill that guy?"
GM Manager: "Due to his many years of loyal service, I have decided to be lenient and allow him the option of ritual suicide. Although it is more than this piece of sniveling filth deserves."
GM Employee (tears of happiness now streaming down his face): "Oh, thank you sir! I will remember you and your generosity in the afterlife!"
GM Manager: "Take him away."
(Positions knife over left pinky finger)
GM Manager: "Now then, sir, have you been experiencing any other troubles with your GM vehicle?"
Me: "No, I think everything else has been pretty cool. Thanks."
Honestly, who really wants that on their conscience? One of the other funny commercials was for Bud Light, but was only entertaining because it involved people slapping each other in the face, and you really can't go wrong with physical humor. I don't know why we as a society have decided that watching someone fall down a flight stairs is amusing, but I have to admit that I laughed uproariously at the Doritos commercial with a girl faceplanting in front of her car. I guess that if we didn't have this fascination, Bob Sagat's career would have ended much sooner than it did. I'm pretty sure the last two seasons of America's Funniest Home Videos were only variations of "Man Hit in Groin With Object", or maybe "Man Hit in Groin With Object, Falls Over, Is Then Hit in Groin Again, This Time With Heavier Object." And I'm sure that ratings had probably never been higher.
The only other commercial of note was the one with Kevin Federline in it, and I'm amused right now because I honestly can't remember what product it was advertising. It was for a bank or something, right? He's pretending he's in a rap video and has his reality shattered when it turns out he's not actually draped in mink and throwing money around, but working as a fry guy in a fast food restaurant. Then there's some tagline about how life can change quickly, so use our totally safe banking, or something. Awesome. The sheer patheticness of this commercial fascinates me; you can just tell that he's decided to give up any dreams he had of being taken seriously as an artist, and has already consigned himself to pulling in as much cash as he can while people still remember that he's a joke. That's the sad part. Vanilla Ice will go down in musical history as one of the worst things to ever happen to rap music, and he could do a commercial when he's 80 about how goofy he is and it would still resonate. No one's going to remember who the fuck K-Fed even was in the next ten years. The only other thing that I thought about while watching this commercial was thinking how at the end of it, they probably made him give back all of the designer suits and fur coats he was wearing during the shoot, while he stood in a corner in his dirty wifebeater and looked morose.
So these are supposed to be the cream of the advertising crop, the best of the best? Not really. I guess the companies used all of their money to buy the airspace and could only afford a single monkey with a typewriter to script the ads, but come on. Don't get me wrong, they were better than half of the commercials that play during regular broadcast hours. There are two out right now that I find particularly ridiculous. The first is the one for Quizno's delicious new Delectable Italian Whatever sandwich, where they compare it to an inferior yet just-as-rubbery Subway sandwich. The legality of these types of commercials has always kind of intrigued me; I mean, why stop at pointing out that your sandwich is packed with a greater variety of meatlike substances? Why not just tell people that your competition uses discarded third world babies as the stock for its Creamy Ranch Dressing, or seasons its burgers with dirty hobo fingernails? Can you do that? Do they have to go through a rigorous series of blinded scientific studies to determine that their sandwich is, in fact, bigger? That's not the part of the commercial that really gets me, though. Quizno's marketing strategy here involves their "satisfaction guarantee", which states that if you're not completely satisfied with their product, you're eligible to receive another zesty sandwich, free of charge! Yay! Hey, genius, if I wasn't totally satisfied with your greasy faux-lunchmeat the first time, why the fuck would I want you to give me another one, even if it doesn't cost me anything? This is actually a genius plan when you analyze it, because most people, if they're unhappy with their purchase, won't take the trouble to march back into their local eatery and argue with the subhuman counter slave to try and get a free sandwich. Then if they do, an altercation like this will no doubt ensue:
Irate Customer: "Excuse me? I just purchased one of your Delectable Italian Whatever sandwiches, and I have to say, I'm disappointed. The subtle blending of herbs and spices didn't blend quite as magically as I'd hoped in my mouth, the presentation was boring, and I'm pretty sure I bit into what looks like a human tooth."
Subhuman Counter Slave: "Grunt."
Irate Customer: "So anyway, despite my complete disgust with your product, I'd like you to give me another one, only this time, I won't pay for it."
Subhuman Counter Slave: "But you just said you didn't like it."
Irate Customer: "Correct. And that's why I want another one. For free."
Subhuman Counter Slave: "But if you don't like something, why would you want more of it?"
Irate Customer: "Because...I...No, wait, I do like it. Give me the free one."
Subhuman Counter Slave: "Ha ha! Based on the terms and agreement of the Quizno's satisfaction guarantee, you must be totally dissatisfied with our food before we'll give you more of it. Buy a sandwich or get out."
Irate Customer: "Curses!"
The people at Quizno's are brilliant. The other commercial I find laughable is the one for some kind of Herpes medication. I forget which one it is, as commercials for people with debilitating venereal diseases invariably show happy couples strapped into a kayak parasail flying over the edge of a waterfall at sunset, so they're hard to differentiate. I'm sure that life isn't nearly as peachy when you're screaming because it feels like your pee is made of flaming needles as these ads would lead you to believe, but that's not the best part. In an effort to apparently make their ads more credible with the addition of random numbers (numbers mean SCIENCE!), the commercial points out with tremendous gravity that over 70% of the population has been infected with Herpes when their partner was displaying no active symptoms. This is great; it means that if you do happen to get Herpes from having unprotected sex with whatever random stranger you brought home, it's not your fault. The flip side of this amazing scientific fact, of course, means that 30% of people infected had sex without a condom with someone who had red, swollen genitalia covered in weeping sores. In that case, fuck you. You deserve whatever horrible affliction befalls you. Have fun with your kayaks and sunsets.
So commercials, for the most part, either make no sense or are just stupid. Admittedly, if I worked in advertising and was told that my brand new account was for a cream that lessened the pain of a Herpes outbreak, I'd probably be stumped on where to begin. But these people do this kind of stuff for a living. If it were me, I would just follow the cardinal rule of marketing: if you put a monkey, or maybe a midget, or a midget in a monkey costume in your ad, it will be a resounding success. Or at the very least, make just me laugh. And isn't that what's truly important?
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