Funniest article of 2008

I'm not feeling well today, and I'm going to be lazy. The A.V. Club put up an article listing their favorite self-written pieces of 2008, and I'm linking you guys to the article that Patton Oswalt wrote for them about KFC's Famous Bowl. Patton

Oswalt drives to KFC, buys a Famous Bowl and eats it and reviews it. I really want to go to the KFC that he visited because there's something magnetizing about a KFC that "...had withstood assault by bullets, flamethrowers, Baseball Furies, and a hundred hook-handed whores."

Here you go. Enjoy.

Year-end marathons

I know I recently wrote about The Twilight Zone because of their great Christmas-themed episode, Night of the Meek.  But I really started to get into The Twilight Zone because of the SciFi Channel and their Twilight Zone marathons.  You get two marathons from SciFi a year, one for 4th of July, and one for New Year's.  This blog today is more about prompting you to check out a couple episodes of my favorite show that has ever been on television, The Twilight Zone.  Tune into SciFi at any time today or tomorrow and watch a few.  Some of my favorites you can be on the lookout for are, "One For the Angels"; "Time Enough At Last"; "The Howling Man"; "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?"; "Five Characters in Search of an Exit"; "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet", starring William Shatner; and a personal favorite, "Whispers in the Dark", starring Robert Redford.

Also, as a side note so you don't all think I'm losing my edge, I watched a couple interesting films last night:  Blood Freak and El Mariachi.  El Mariachi is Robert Rodriguez's first film, which he later made a sequel/remake of in the form of Desperado.  El Mariachi has pretty much the same plot, but feels more organic in a good way.  What can I say?  It still holds true that the originals are much better than the remakes...even if you're doing the remakes yourself.  The biggest difference in El Mariachi from Desperado is that there are two guys walking around with guitar cases:  the musician with his guitar, and the assassin with his guitar case full of weapons.  The two inevitably mix up their cases forcing the musician to take up arms against his confused attackers.  It was an interesting twist in Desperado to have Antonio Banderas' guitar case hold weapons, but also have a guitar-top facade for concealment purposes, but in the end, I thought having the two different guys get confused worked better.

Blood Freak was on TCM Underground, Turner Classic Movies' Friday late-night cult movie show.  They always air a couple interesting flicks, some more watchable than others, and none of them ever edited.  Blood Freak is about a drifter who takes up work on a poultry farm and helps the scientists there by being a guinea pig for their experiments.  He also uses some pretty harsh pot, man, and for his trouble winds up with a giant, fanged turkey head and a lust for drinking blood.  I can tell you that the site of someone wandering around in a giant paper-mache turkey head with teeth would give anyone the creeps.  It's painfully obvious that while they were filming, the titular blood freak had no way of seeing what he was doing in that mask. It's all hilarious and severely budgeted.  

How budgeted was it?  Well I'll tell you.  The filmmakers loop the same scream two dozen times and use the same shot of the turkey-headed guy walking slowly towards the camera at least five times.   Also there's a guy who comes on the screen every now and then throughout the movie to dispense wisdom and advice about drug culture and the state of this guy and his life's troubles.  (As if we needed help figuring out that this guy has trouble.  He's got a fucking turkey head!)  The hippie-sage-advice-spouting-old-man looks like a cross between Eddie Bunker and Slim Pickens.  Sometimes we joke about how high a person would have to have been to make a movie, but I have never actually thought it was true about any film until now. The people who made Blood Freak were all definitely stoned out of their gourds the entire time, from pre-production through the editing process.  Blood Freak is a good movie to drink to.  I wish I'd thought of that earlier instead of watching the whole thing sober.

Hot For Words

Trying to find a way to get the most out of the two best assets of the internet, sex and knowledge? Try You Tube channel, HotForWords. In Hot For Words, Marina Orlova takes submission requests from her fans and explores word origins, derivatives, etc on her show 5-7 times a week. According to her bio on her website, hotforwords.com, Marina has two degrees in Russian and English philology and has taught high school level English. She finally decided that her best assets, (like the internet), would best be used in conjunction, and so we finally have Hot For Words.

If you think that the sight of a scantily clad woman is degrading and wrong, then just stop reading this blog because we don't agree on much. Marina is never nude, never vulgar and always pleasant and educational. Not only have I learned a lot this morning watching five episodes in succession, but I also found out that Marina plays GTA IV! That's pretty cool, although, in a situation brimming with politically incorrect with irony, she cannot get her character to successfully throw a molotov cocktail at his enemies. That's like a guy from a hunting show who can't play a game of Duck Hunt. Pitiful, sad, hilarious.

Here is Marina teaching us about how the "molotov cocktail" came to be called just that. If you like words, and want a fun and enthusiastic Russian hottie to teach you more about them, check out HotForWords on You Tube.

Richer, Finer, Truer

So, in case you hadn't heard, Christmas is basically here.  I could write about Black Christmas, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Silent Night, Deadly Night, Christmas Evil, Gremlins; any holiday-themed horror.  But I won't.  I will instead write about something that's too amazing not to be seen, and is very accessible to all of you. (Even the Scarlet Lily...who normally wouldn't go near any of the subjects of my blog with a ten foot pole.)

Last night I watched one of my favorite holiday shows: The Twilight Zone, "Night of the Meek".  The Twilight Zone is one of my favorite shows of all time.  I own the complete collection, and though I don't watch it as much as I'd like ideally, I am pretty familiar with most of the episodes.  "Night of the Meek" concerns an alcoholic man who plays Santa in a department store.  He comes into work drunk and falls off his chair, and gets fired.  All he wants is to be a real Santa, and he's very downtrodden by his alcoholism and failure in life.  He hears some bells jingling, and looks down to find a bag in an alleyway full of toys and gifts.  He runs around town giving gifts to everyone he sees.  

The man assumes that it's just his wish that has come true for one night, but can't explain the bag to the cops or anyone else. When the toys run out, he feels a certain joy, but is sad at the same time.  Walking home he sees a sleigh, with reindeer attached, in the same alleyway where he found the bag.  An elf pops out from behind some boxes and tells him that everyone's waiting for him at the North Pole and he needs to get going.  The guy gets in the sleigh and rides off into the night as Santa Clause.

It's the sappiest Twilight Zone episode other than "The Bewitchin' Pool", yet it still makes me feel pretty warm inside.  Not that the episode doesn't have its own sense of melancholy...thinking about the ending a different way, it's possible that the alcoholic had just let his depression and disease overcome him.  Many people succumb to death around the holidays.  It's the end of the year, there isn't a lot of light anymore, everyone else is so happy, etc, etc.  Maybe, in a delirious state brought on by the tremens, this man hallucinates his last minutes on earth.  That doesn't necessarily make this tale sad instead of happy though.  A drunk with nothing to live for, and who only wants to be able to bring joy to people instead of disgust, has a waking dream wherein he is Santa Clause and can bring that joy to others, finishing off the night with a sleigh ride back to the North Pole to do it all again next year. 

It's a grand thing to get one's most yearned-for wish.  And it's a tender thought to think that for some of us, being able to give and spread happiness is the only thing that we want.  The guy in the show could've just asked for more booze, or he could have wished for his alcoholism to leave him outright.  Instead, caught up as he was in the season of giving, he forgot about his disease as he went about his time playing Santa.  The more he fell into the role of joy-bringer, the more completely his affliction left him.  That makes for a pretty merry Christmas thought to me.

Why so serious?

I finally (after an excruciating day of waiting) got around to watching The Dark Knight. It was the second time I'd seen the film, the first since its theatrical run. The Dark Knight may be coming back out into theaters sometime in early 2009 though. The producers want to give it a chance to break the 600 million dollar mark. Right now, The Dark Knight has taken in about 530 million...70 shy of the mark, 70 shy of tying Titanic for biggest box office of all time. At the same time that people behind The Dark Knight are trying to make even more money from it, the folks at the Oscars are thinking about getting The Dark Knight out front and putting it up for a few awards, one of which is potentially Best Picture.

It makes me happy to see a movie like The Dark Knight getting appropriate recognition. I was watching the special features on our disc at home with the GF and I was amazed at how much functionality exists in the props for that movie. The "Tumbler", Batman's car, the "Bat-Pod", his motorcycle, and his body armor are all functional. That's an amazing amount of work to put into something that might draw enough crowds. It's risky to put that much money and prep time into a movie that, while it has its built-in comic-fan audience, isn't really the most popular version of the Batman story. Kids want to see Batman. Parents want to take their kids to see Batman. Parents might have been able to get away with taking an 8-10 year old to see Batman Begins, but there is no place for children in the world in which the The Dark Knight exists.

Looking for someone to blame for transforming Batman's world into a viscerally evil cesspool of crime and degeneracy? You can blame the Joker. Health Ledger's Joker is one of only a handful of times that I can recall witnessing an actor putting literally their all into a role which could turn said actor inside out. Charlize Theron did a great job of it in Monster, Christian Bale did his own agonizing transformation for The Machinist, and but they pale in comparison to what Ledger did to get his version of the Joker up on the screen. There are a lot of words to describe his performance, but there isn't just one word to do it justice.

My favorite scene of the Joker is right after he's busted out of jail, thanks to the cell phone bomb sewn up inside his fellow prisoner's belly. Gordon (Gary Oldman) is talking about the breakout and then the film cuts to a shot of several cop cars, lights blazing, swerving and speeding down the street. The Joker's head and shoulders are out the window and the wind is blowing in his forever-greasy green hair. He closes his eyes and opens his mouth, flicks his tongue over his red, rough-edged scars and revels in what he's just done. He's happy to have escaped, and it's nice to taste the sweet air of freedom, but he knew he'd get out. That expression of pleasure and near ecstasy is slapped onto his face because he can now fully bask in the glory of all the damage, pain and destruction he's just orchestrated.

I've seen a lot of movies, and if I know you, then you heard me say this before, but here it is again: I know what a PG-13 movie is, and I know what can happen in a PG-13 -rated movie, but every time the Joker came on screen I thought anything could happen. I was not put at ease by the limit of the rating given to The Dark Knight. The presence of the Joker is palpable and disgusting and it truly makes you feel uneasy. At the same time, it is awesome to watch. If you haven't seen it, you must see it. It's gritty movie-making at it's finest, and transcends its comic book origins. If you want a powerful movie with the baddest villain you've seen since Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb, you must see The Dark Knight.

For a good time call your bank manager

boingboing.net reported today that a well-known German financial magazine, MaxPlanckForshung Journal, ran an ad for a Chinese whore-house on the cover of their publication. Apparently they needed Chinese characters to grace the cover of their mag, and thought they were printing a lovely Chinese poem.

The Independent reported that a German Chinese translator was used, and since there are many words in the Chinese language that mean different things depending on how you say them, it was nearly impossible for a non-native speaker to know what the text was actually saying. The article then goes on to describe a few instances wherein drunken Americans have received tattoos in Chinese that mean completely different things than what they think.

Here's the original article in The Independent.
Here's the posting from boingboing.net.

The lesson: If you don't know what it says, make damn sure that you trust the translator completely, or you might end up with a tattoo that says "prostitute."

A Gorey Xmas

Back in 1980, a show started a long run on PBS. This show was called "Mystery!" "Mystery!" is responsible for bringing to the small screen the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes, as well as Miss Marple, Inspecteor Morse and Cadfael. I never watched much of "Mystery!", but my parents were regulars, and never missed an episode. I only needed to see the opening credits, and then my interest waned. Edward Gorey designed the title sequence, which was animated in his style which is very striking and impressionable to anyone who sees it.


It certainly made an impression on me; it draws you in wherever you see it. I always take a longer look at a book cover if Edward Gorey has illustrated it. I'm guilty of buying several books that I may never read, just because Gorey did their jackets. Gorey's books, meaning books of his cartoons and stories, are fantastically dark, sinister and hilarious in turns. He has a great command of the French language, having majored in French Lit. in school, and reading his stuff makes you feel like you're reading long lost stories from Europe. In fact, Edward Gorey was an American through and through, and he never even went abroad. He wasn't interested in visiting Europe at all.

Edward Gorey, who passed away in 2000, made a couple holiday books too. His two books, which are companion pieces, are entitled: "The Haunted Tea-Cosy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas" and "The Headless Bust: A Melancholy Meditation on the False Millennium". Both tales star the Bahhumbug and follow him on a series of probing visits to local folk during the holiday season and during the switch from the year 1999 to 2000. These stories are great, and while not my favorites of Gorey by any means, he certainly ended a career with two successes.

I remember going to the Border's book store in Ann Arbor with my folks sometime in the mid 90's, and seeing one of Edward Gorey's books on the shelf. It became the first book of his that I ever owned and it was "The Gashleycrumb Tinies".

The book is a macabre alphabet wherein each of 26 children, all listed alphabetically by first name, meet their demises in unique ways. The words alone are lots of fun, but combined with the drawings, the book becomes even more entertaining.

Look at the expressions on the kids' faces. No emotion at all. No inclination that they are about to die, nor indication that they feel any fear at all either. I'm not trying to make a point about anything except that effect that those expressionless faces have on the work as a whole. "The Gashleycrumb Tinies" becomes about the humor in those awkward situations, and the fun of making the rhymes with all those kids and their alphabetical names.

Gorey's style is wide in its range. For me I can get into the Halloween spirit or the Christmas spirit by looking at his images. There's a simplicity to it that really makes me feel comfortable. Gorey is good for any season, and even though his work won't make your heart grow three sizes larger, it will give you a hard-to-define feeling of pleasure and interest.