Stunks are a lot like skunks, except they live in your apartment instead of your backyard and they only smell bad twice a day. They cry a lot, but they're so cute that it almost doesn't bother you that you're stuck at home on Friday night and you'll never, ever have sex again.
A CT scan, or "cat scan," is sort of like a really, really slow moving amusement park ride after which you supposedly find out if the giant fucking lump in your throat is due to allergies, cancer, or maybe just an alien embryo. It only takes about 5 minutes for the procedure, during which you get to lie on a comfy plastic table and get a fun intravenous injection of iodized contrast medium. It also costs $800, which works out to about $160 per minute, or $2.67 per second. That's more than the Bill Lynch Show, but less than Disneyland.
This is easily the best Beta Band album, which isn't completely fair since it's technically a compilation of their (you might have guessed) three EP's; Champions Versions, The Patty Patty Sound and Los Amigos del Beta Banditos. But whatever, it's still their best and probably one of my top 25 albums. I don't really feel like writing a psycho-analytical/Freudian review, but my favorite tracks are "Dry the Rain", "Dogs Got A Bone" and "She's The One". Check them out, and do it for the kids or whatever.
Halloween is the best holiday, except it's total bullshit that you don't get off work or school for it. It's great because there are skeletons and gory things on every wall, from the Mexican restaurant down the street (although if they have a really scary life size rotting bride and groom set it might get taken down, just saying), to Target, the new Wal-Mart. You can use it as an excuse to watch a lot of horror movies and nobody will think there is something wrong with you like usual. Halloween candy is not as good as Easter candy, because it's all just miniature regular candy, but you can get major deals on November 1 if you didn't pledge to stop eating candy like I did. One especially creepy thing about Halloween is if you go to a costume store and walk through the kids section, the little girls costumes are extraordinarly slutty. How old is that pumpkin girl supposed to be, anyway? If the Exorcist doesn't creep you out, I'm sure that will, so you're welcome!
Thelma and Louise was a nice surprise, 17 years after the fact. It had a great tongue-in-cheek sense of humour, and the acting was convincing, except for Harvey Keitel as the compassionate cop (he makes a better bad lieutenant than a good one.) It had some nice scenic shots and weird bits of cinematography too, like a shot from the wing of a crop dusting plane. The musical score was horrible, like most movies made in 1991, but I'll take tuneless country and western guitar over tuneless jazz-lite saxophone any day. I was actually moved by the ending right up until I saw that ridiculous shot of the green car flying through the air, but I never felt like I was supposed to take it 100% seriously. 
Basketball is just another amazing contribution America has offered the world. After all, while baseball is America's favorite past time the game is rooted in some culture from across the Atlantic or something. Basketball is so incredibly simple that I'm surprised it took someone until the late 1800's to figure out the idea. It's fast paced and you don't need a huge field to play it on or a lot of equipment. I was really into the NBA as a kid, but now I think it's kind of boring. I guess I can't say the NBA is the predictor of how I should rate basketball because it's now popular all over the world. Oh wait, yes I can.
I can't believe that this is a Marvel book. While it does have the words "Fantastic Four" in the title, and the characters are loosely based on the heroes we know so well, this is not a hero book at all, but rather just a complex analysis of these four flawed characters. It feels more like a Fantagraphics book, something like Love and Rockets or Stray Bullets. It's extremely well written (Sturm does a great job making us care about these characters even though they're mostly jerks-- their realism makes up for that), and the art is great. It's weird that neither of these guys really did anything else big afterward. Anyway, just buy it it's great.
If you need to put a poster or calender on your aparptment wall, or perhaps put an ad for some shitty gig your terrible band is doing on the coffee shop wall, then thumbtacks are the tool for you. They are like small nails that you don't need a hammer for. They sometimes are bad like if somebody thinks it would be funny to put thumbtacks on your seat and then you get a bunch stuck in your butt, or maybe if you have to pull them out of the wall with your fingernails. Both of those occurrences can hurt, but it's like Jesus said: No pain, no gain.
Spoilers. It's hard to write a review of this book; on one hand, it's a classic moment in comic book history that changed the way people looked at superheroes, but on the other hand the 35 year old writing is ridiculous. This trade has two stories, one awful story about Harry Osborn doing drugs (the way the dealers are portrayed is extremely laughable, forcing people to take their drugs after which the people become addicted instantly), and then the title story in which the Green Goblin kills Peter Parker's first girlfriend, Gwen Stacy. That story's pretty good I guess, but it could just be the iconic image of Spider-man's web catching Gwen Stacy's legs as she falls off the George Washington Bridge, causing her neck to snap... diabolical! But also the dialogue is terrible, so what can you do.
#47 on Glenn's Top 100 Movie List
In my opinion resident aliens to the United States are the shit. They come here legally and pay taxes, but they don't muck up your precious elections by voting socialist, because they can't vote. Often they are very handsome and amazing poets who can play the guitar like a genius. If you are lucky enough to have a resident alien as a friend, then you must be the envy of the town. Don't worry, though - if a resident alien ever fucks up too bad by committing a felony or being Arab they can either be deported or thrown into prison for life without being charged so you guys are safe. PS - you citizens can also be thrown into prison for life without being charged so I guess that doesn't set the resident alien apart whoops.
In my opinion space aliens are the shit. I'm pretty sure somewhere in the universe they exist, and learned to travel to Earth through time warps or wormholes. Maybe their God decided to help them out just a little more by sharing the secrets of the universe, but maybe they're just way smarter. Aliens get a kick out of fucking with us by sending their early model pie tin spaceships to Earth so people can flip out and take photographs. Come on guys, you think those are capable of surviving intergalactic travel? Also, every once in a while they'll abduct someone and do experiments on them, but it's all in good fun, and at least you got a free trip to space. It costs $30 million to get the Russians to take someone into space. You got a great deal, so why don't you whine some more about how they took your baby.
Nightmares are a kind of thing that keeps sleep interesting. You never know when you go to sleep if it's going to be a fun restful time, or if you're going to dream that somebody pushes you off a cliff naked and then you wake up sweaty and scared. The nightmare I've had that I remember most is that I paid some doctor to remove my skeleton, and then any time anybody touched my skullless head I would lose memories and get dumber. Naturally all my friends thought it was funny to touch my head over and over. So nightmares are bad to have but funny to explain to people, much like bad drug trips or the 2000 presidential election. See how topical we are here at R3?
I don't care about Superman. He's too powerful, he's too nice, and his comics are just plain boring. But I have to say that All-Star Superman, written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Frank Quitely, is probably the best straight superhero book ever written. Quitely's art is amazing, and Grant Morrison tempers his usual crazy bag of crazy with enough delicate character moments that he actually made me care about this boring guy. There are only 12 issues of this run, so seriously if you like comics there is no excuse to not own this, except for the fact that the second six issues won't be collected until February.
Dogfish head 90 Minute IPA is good stuff, although I'm not sure it's the best beer in the USA like that guy from Esquire said. Since it's an imperial IPA, it has even more hops and balls than usual. The only problem with this beer, in my opinion, is that one minute you're sipping away happily, and the next you're buzzed at 8:00 PM on a Tuesday and you still have to read half of Hamlet. Seriously--you might as well curl up in the La-Z-Boy with a good book and a pint of vodka. 
This is an English candy that looks a lot like large American Smarties combined with the color variety of English Smarties packaged in Life Savers (US Candy) packaging. Instead of referring to the flavors as actual fruits you can just refer to them by their color. If you were to overhear a conversation about Refreshers it might sound like this (except British):
American Smarties are sold as Rockets in Canada to avoid confusion with Canadian Smarties, which are almost like American M&M's, which are exactly like Canadian W&W's. Rockets are easily crushed up into a fine powder which can cause severe burns to the nasal lining, eyes and pancreas. We pretty much only eat them at Hallowe'en, which Canadians call "Groundhog Day." If you have Canadian friends, you might visit them on October 31st for the traditional carving of the chuck-o'-lantern, but be sure to bring some plastic garbage bags!
Smarties (called Lentilky in Czech) have been manufactured by Nestlé since the late 19th century. They're beloved by fat kids around the world, but are inexplicably unavailable in the United States. Forrest Mars actually got the idea for M&M's from some soldiers he saw eating Smarties during the Spanish civil war, and the 2 candies are similar except Smarties are sweeter, flatter, and will readily melt in your sweaty palm. I prefer Smarties to M&M's for political reasons (curse the running dogs of Yanqui imperialism) but they'll both give you diabetes and make your children morbidly obese.
In America, Smarties are a sort of fruit but mainly chalk flavored candy that you pretty much only see around Halloween. I used to really love these, because they are pretty much like sugar pills and you get a major rush if you eat more than one roll. However, my family bought a ton of these to hand out at Halloween right after we moved to Lake "Bible Belt" City, Florida, thinking Halloween would be a huge holiday like in the old country. Wrong! It turns out everybody is scared that dressing up like a hobo or slutty nurse will help Satan wrest souls away so pretty much nobody went trick or treating. So we had a million of these things left over and you guys can probably figure out where this story is going. It turns out I don't have a lot of restraint when it comes to candy and I ate a ton of them over the following week and now I don't so much love them the end. In sum, Americans need to learn how to have Halloween fun already, Jesus.
We are probably all in agreement that George Romero's Dawn Of The Dead is one of the greatest horror movies of all time. Well, I think so. So when I finally got the opportunity to see him do zombies on the big screen I was totally psyched. It turns out the movie is good, but for anybody unfamiliar with Romero's zombie movies I bet it's a confusing mess. For instance, this takes place many years after zombies have already destroyed society with no explanation, so everybody is holed up in this walled off city to protect themselves. That's fine if you've seen Night, Dawn, and Day many times like I have, but if you're just some friend who got dragged to see this by me then maybe you are still angry or something. At least there's a lot of good gore.
I don't have the automatic revulsion for remakes that a lot of people do; John Carpenter's The Thing was great, Evil Dead 2 was basically a remake of Evil Dead and it was good, and there were even some scenes of the Dawn Of The Dead remake that I thought were really terrific. Also, I thought the original Amityville Horror was pretty boring. So I felt that a high budget modern remake of a classic ghost story would be pretty good but I was wrong and it sucks. For instance we see ghosts all the time, even when the characters don't. I mean, we don't go more than fifteen seconds without there being a ghost behind somebody and the sudden loud sound of a midi orchestra. There's more fear in what we don't see, movies these days, ok? Well, I guess the lesson is that real life ghosts are probably scary, but the only scary ghost movie ever made is Poltergeist.
Richardson is crawling with Christians. The people here are nice enough, but there's a definite social gulf between the people who go to church and the people who don't. Personally, I think the Judeo-Christian personal conscience, along with Socratic reason, forms the moral bedrock of Western civilization, and I go to church for weddings and funerals and sometimes at Christmas or Easter. However, I'm pretty sure that to the people around here my own religious beliefs would sound like a cross between witchcraft and science fiction, and are heretical enough to warrant strong disapproval or outright ostracism from Christian company. Also, while I'm not a "liberal" in the current American usage, my opinions on homosexuality, evolution, stem cell research and abortion would go over like a lead balloon at the parish picnic. Several of our expatriate Canadian acquaintances have said that going to church is the best way to make friends in Dallas, but I just can't do it. 
La-Z-Boy chairs are amazing. I don't find them all that good to sleep in because they hurt my back, and the gap between the footrest and the ass-pillow (what you Americans call a "seat") allows a draught to blow up under my blankie. I own 2 La-z-Boy chairs, one in Canada and one in Texas, both of which tend to make me so drowsy that I don't get any studying done at all. I intend to die in a La-z-Boy some day, hopefully of plain old age and not cancer or an asteroid collision, heroin overdose, or bear mauling. Getting mauled by a heroin addicted bear with cancer would be pretty awful too, although I guess I could take some solace in the fact that he wouldn't feel a thing.
Most people in Nova Scotia drink Alexander Keith's, and some of them are fanatical about it--I know a guy who has a Keith's tattoo on his ass and the same Keith's tattoo on his shoulder. I think this is because Keith's marketers have tapped into a strong current of Nova Scotian (pseudo) Scottish sub-nationalism. In reality, Keith's tastes much like every other mass produced Canadian beer, e.g. Labatt's, Oland's, Molson, or Moosehead, which all taste similar to American Budweiser.
Zombies are pretty great but they probably stink. All the best horror movies are zombie movies, and most of the best horror video games are zombie games. A zombie is basically a dead person who has come back to life to eat brains for some reason, who knows. If you date somebody in high school who thinks zombies are sooo cool, omg, then heads up, he is probably awesome. In conclusion if you are good at making a zombie costume for Halloween then nobody should give you any trouble for doing it five or six times, Jesus Christ.
I know everybody hates Brian Michael Bendis now that he writes practically every Marvel comic Ed Brubaker isn't involved with, but back in the 90s and early 2000s when he was doing crime fiction he was pretty terrific. Jinx is a great story following a couple petty grifters and a bounty hunter as they stumble their way towards 3 million smackeroos. The dialogue is great, and even Bendis' traces don't bother me, just because he uses excessive shading to great effect. It gets a bit slow and directionless in the middle, but it's very strong. So if you want to read a pretty decent crime book, check this out and please stay away from anything that has the word "Avengers" on it thx.
If you're English then you probably thought I was about to review what Americans call your Mom, but you only get partial credit because this is about your mother in 5,000 years if she is mummified. See the scary thing about mummies is they're real kids! So if you go to Egypt and think you're going to get rich looting some tomb you better watch out because your shit is screwed. Hollywood gives mummies a bad rap because of movies like The Mummy 1, The Mummy 2 and (here we go again) The Mummy 3; but maybe they deserve their reputation, because in the past 3 out of 4 elections mummies have overwhelmingly voted Republican. Still, in my opinion, mummies look totally cool. My favorite mummy is Mumm-Ra from ThunderCats. My least favorite mummy is your Mom. Oh, snap!
Witches are best known for still being feared all over the south, like in Lake City, Florida. Everybody's always like "Pagan This" or "Witchcraft That" as though they're stealing children and praying to the devil. Witches have only been the subject of awful movies: Hocus Pocus, The Witches, Practical Magic, etc. If you date somebody in high school who thinks witches are sooo romantic, omg, then get ready, I bet they don't shave their armpits and smell like dirt. In the olden days people used to burn independent women at the stake and claim they were witches. We've come so far (sarcasm)!
I hate to review beers seriously because it makes me sound like a pretentious ass, but I can't help it; I love what Dogfish Head Brewery is doing. First, they're American, and second, they make my favorite beer ever (their 90-minute IPA). I bought a six-pack of their Raison D'etre the other night, a Dark Belgian Ale weighing in at 8.0% ABV. Typically, I find Belgian beers to be too sweet all-around and lacking of hops, but this one balances a wonderfully fruity taste of raisins (hence the "raison") and dates with a somewhat sour, but malty taste in the back. It finishes pretty clean for such a complex profile. Because of its' high alcohol content it doesn't make a great session beer, but it'd be a perfect complement to a great piece of steak.
You know what's scarier than a vampire, a Frankenstein, and a werewolf all put together? States where the majority of people vote for Republican presidential candidates! As I shine my fancy voting shoes and prepare for November 4th, I am haunted by the knowledge that whether I vote, don't vote, stand outside the polls bedecked for Obama, or spend the day in an alcoholic haze, nothing I do will change the fact that Texas' 32 electoral votes will go to Senator John McCain. The knowledge that I am surrounded by millions of people who hate poors and immigrants and women is frightening... see? New Mexico looks scared shitless! Spooky Scary! Nevertheless, I will still dress up like a voter on Halloween, in my nice shoes, 4 days early, and wait patiently in line for my chance to not matter.
If I could be anything that's considered a monster it would be a werewolf. Zombies are totally cool, but they're dumb, and oh yeah, dead. Werewolves, however, are people most of the time. They trump vampires because they're not afraid of anything Jesus-related, so don't think God can save you now. You're probably thinking you tricked me because they can be killed by a silver bullet, but not so fast, buddy, a silver bullet could basically kill any of the other aforementioned dudes. A long time ago it was considered a curse in Christianity to become a werewolf, but I doubt it's more fun to be a priest, so who's the sucker now?
Frankensteins aren't great. They aren't really anything except zombies that have been sewn together haphazardly. Sometimes a Frankenstein might fall in love with you but don't fall for it, he either will accidentally drown you because he's dumb or knock your house down around you. Pretty much nobody thinks Frankensteins are soooo romantic, omg, and if you date somebody like that in high school they will probably end up killing a bunch of people so get out now. Q: Did you know that Frankenstein is actually the name of the monster's creator, and not the monster itself? A: Yes, everybody fucking knows that.
Vampires suck. They aren't really anything except zombies with table manners. Sometimes a vampire might fall in love with you but don't fall for it, he either just wants to be let in so he can suck your blood or he thinks you're some broad who's been dead for centuries. For some reason if you google "vampires" you get a lot of pictures of people with big boobs and pale makeup, which is a piece of vampire mythos I am unfamiliar with. Maybe Joss Whedon had something to do with that, who knows. Lots of people think vampires are soooo romantic, omg, and you might date somebody like that in high school but don't worry, there aren't any real vampires in Lake City, Florida. In conclusion I would like to use my vampires suck joke again that I made up, and also reiterate that vampires are the least scary of all monsters and also easiest to kill (cross, stake through heart, garlic, sunlight, silver bullet in coffin, beheading, sadness).
Old friends do things like post hilarious photos of you from the 80's on your blog. They don't care about your political orientation or if you hate every single movie they like--they knew you back when you wore jogging pants every day and listened to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Sometimes they're sure you owned the complete set of seacons and think you must be retarded or something for not remembering, but then again maybe it was them having seizures on the freeway.
Drank is a new "anti-energy" drink based on the popular mix of prescription cough syrup and Sprite (typically) that was first created in Houston. I'm not the kind of person who typically buys into a marketing ploy that highlights the use of natural herbs to obtain a products' effect, but for the sake of R3 I gave it a try. Sure, it could have been the placebo effect, but Drank "slowed my roll" so much I could barely make comprehensible sentences for a few hours. My boss even had to ask if I had been drinking. I just laughed and said I was drank. Anyway, it tasted fine, but now that it's all worn off I'm rolling slower and feeling like shit.
A lot of friends for some reason told me this was good, but I guess it turns out those people were just pretending to be my friends. I mean, there were a lot of scary looking things in the movie, but it just seemed like it would make a better video game. The plot is something about a town in which there are monsters. Also that poster never happens so what a ripoff.
First of all, meteor is short for meteoroid, which means something since a meteor is a relatively small particle of crap floating in the solar system. Once it hits you on the head it's called a meteorite. It's better to get hit on the head by a meteorite than an asteroid because the latter would certainly smash you. That is probably a better way to die because if an asteroid hits Earth it's mass extinction and you'll die of hunger or thirst or something more painful. Sometimes meteors are so small they breakup completely in the atmosphere, so a beautiful dust called meteoric dust falls on you, and that's like being sprinkled by pixie dust which I'm sure is just fine (and probably lucky). In conclusion, of all space things meteors aren't as interesting as you thought when you were a kid, unless they're a badass psychobilly band.
The Nasher Sculpture Center is right across the street from the Dallas Museum of Art in downtown Dallas. Admission was $10 per person, but it's free on the first Saturday of the month. It was worth the trip just for James Turrell's Tending (Blue), the only site-specific piece at the Nasher and one of the most refreshing things I've seen in a long time. There was also a nice Rodin in the outdoor garden, and an interesting piece by Antony Gormley called Quantum Cloud XX. I didn't really care for much of the other stuff: there were a few tumorous Henry Moores, some Picassos (overrated, if you ask me) and some truly nasty De Koonings. I like modern art and even some modern sculpture, but I'm not a big fan of ugly sculpture.
In case you didn't know, Nashville is a city in the United States. It is the supposed capital of country music (debatable), and also home of Pancake Pantry. It's a very pretty city, full of hills and wildlife and such, but one bad thing is that almost everybody there is really unfriendly. Every time we went to some store or restaurant we got the evil eye like we were about to make impossible demands of the people who worked there. Also, if you sing karaoke in Nashville get ready because everybody will be good and actually will get offended if you get up to the stage and are bad. In conclusion, Nashville, much like Austin, would be cooler if it wasn't for the Nashvillains, as I like to refer to them.
Driving is a convenient way to get around locally if you know how to do it. Sometimes you might even drive to a far away place like, say, Nashville, because it is way cheaper than flying. Well, even though it is kind of cool to see some scenery, driving for 13 hours really wipes you out especially if you eat Dairy Queen, which is not as good as you remember it being when you were a kid. In conclusion, if you drive for 13 hours you should not go to a bachelor party right after, because you will be no fun at all.
Canadian Thanksgiving (Action de grâce in French) is celebrated on the second weekend in October and is not nearly as big a deal as American Thanksgiving. We don't send our kids to church dressed as turkeys or Indians or whatever it is you American freaks get up to. We take Monday off and spend Sunday night getting falling down drunk on overtaxed, watery beer like proper fucking socialists. 
In the spirit of Halloween it's important to remember those floating guys and ghouls having a great time out there. First of all, being a ghost is probably pretty awesome because you're never late, there are no dentists and you can go anywhere you want. Then again you can't eat and you probably can't have sex. Maybe you can because there is Casper who either died as a child or is the bastard offspring of some alcoholic ghosts. He's still pretty happy considering the circumstances, which couldn't have been great either way. If I'm ever a ghost I'll spend most of my time scaring people who did something to me when I was alive. So watch out. Also, was Jesus ever a ghost? I guess not, but just something to chew on.
In case you didn't read any novels by Jack London as a child the Iditarod is a wonderful 1,000 mile race throughout the diverse country of Alaska. I hate to rag on Alaska the way everyone else seems to these days, but this race isn't helping the cause. Neither is the new Discovery Channel reality show chronicling the toughest race on Earth. I don't hate the Iditarod because of some bullshit animal rights unless you consider being forced to learn about it in the name of public education abuse.
Hey, it's Halloween season, the best season there could ever be! I always get super pumped, and try to make my life a little more macabre than usually by watching horror movies or having a Halloween party or something, who knows. Well, I got this Lucio Fulci movie a few weeks ago, actually, but I just had time to watch it yesterday. It's not as gory as his later movies, and rather than just being a loosely connected selection of terrifying events (Fulci was actually more interested in cinema's ability to present images that elicited direct emotional responses in the audience than telling any kind of linear story), this one has a somewhat coherent story. It's about some kids dying, then all of the sudden at the end there's a lot of gore out of nowhere. Like all of Fulci's movies, it seems as though there is the hand of a great auteur guiding the film, but the story is tertiary at best.
Okay so this isn't a review, but can all of our reviewers please send me your email? We occasionally get emails regarding our reviews and I'd like to be able to pass them on to the individual reviewer or group. So please send me your email addresses to the reviewsreviewsreviews@gmail.com address. Thanks.
Yes that picture really happens. This episode starts out great, with talking space corpses, space ghosts, space witches, and even a space castle, but then it becomes ridiculous and boring. I like this one part where this space witch/alien holds a toy of the Enterprise over a candle which makes the real Enterprise start to overheat. Anyway, it turns out none of the ghosts were real so this ends up being one of the most reviled TOS episodes of all time.
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