Punisher Vol. 6: Barracuda
Ultimate Spider-man Vol. 6: Venom
Powers Vol. 2: Roleplay
I don't get it - is this a poster for an Academy-Award nominated movie from 2008 or the straight-to-VHS box art for a Tiffani Amber Thiessen dramedy circa 1994?
Here's a movie that got a lot of what's referred to as "critical acclaim" by "critics" who don't like pesky things in movies like "enjoyability" or "likable characters." It's about a psychotic self-centered drug addict who is released from the mental hospital just in time for her sister's wedding two days later, fun! It's realistic, in that everybody gives insufferable speeches for most of the movie/wedding, and also since I know people like Anne Hathaway's character I just spent the whole movie hoping she wouldn't say something embarassing or dumb a million times (no dice). If this were fiction workshop, somebody might criticize the lack of direction, story arc, and moment of revelation, but also if this were fiction workshop I'd be asleep or listening to my crazy professor drone on about some bizarre insect bite she got on her scalp while explaining her half hour tardiness. Oh, now I get it - the movie is about every writing professor when he or she is young, that's why everybody I know loved it.
In the world of edible produce, the tomato definitely wins the "bag of guts" award. I like Roma tomatoes because they're smaller and firmer (there you go, perv), ergo they bruise and splatter less easily and seem to last a couple of days longer in the fridge. Plus they're cheaper than a handjob in a Phnom Penh karaoke bar. Why would you ever want to eat anything else?
As far as I'm concerned, there are 2 criteria for a manly stick of deodorant: flammability, and pit hair stuck to it. Old Spice Classic will burn like a torch if you so much as point a lighter in its general direction, which makes up for the fact that it's rather too wet to rip out a respectable amount of your other short and curlies. Who cares if it smells like your cousin Anthony's bail bondsman and gives you a worse rash than Tijuana did? Once you're done brutalizing your pits you can take it out back and kill ants with it.
Speaking of misogyny, how about 100 minutes of a man relentlessly terrorizing women followed by 13 minutes of women getting revenge? When Quentin Tarantino made Death Proof as part of the Grindhouse double feature/box office bomb, he said he set out to make the definitive car chase. What he forgot to do was to make any kind of coherent or interesting movie to surround the car chase, his bad. I know, I know-- the movie is supposed to be paying tribute to awful movies, so it's awful on purpose, if that's a compliment. It's clear there's an auteur at work here, but I've seen it a bunch of times and all it ever does is make me really uncomfortable which would raise the question "why do I keep watching it" if I hadn't ended a bunch of recent reviews on questions.
Hey Magellan. Please don’t take this the wrong way. I mean, I’m glad you had a good time. I was perfectly fine with your superlative-heavy recounting of the night you and Sven (a distant relative to your cousin Anthony only, you know, with an accent!) took shrooms and stared at a Francis Bacon for hours. I didn’t mind your insistence to tell me, ad nauseam, how European culture is “just so different, you don’t even know.” I think what did me in was the 86th photo on your iMac slideshow of that fjord in Norway. You know, the one almost identical to the 85th photo on your iMac slideshow? Both of which you described as “soo soo magical”? I don’t mind you traveling—I’m kind of glad to have you out of the country—but please, if you happen to experience something deep and transcendent, something that drastically changes your understanding of The Self, please, keep it to The Self. 
What's so bad about hundreds of thousands of Europeans gathering in one place, getting drunk, waving flags and chanting? Is that so terrifying? I give big-ups (do the kids still say that?) for the chanting part. Whereas American fans seem to have only two real modes of cheering—Yay! and Boo-urns!—our overseas brethren (and sisteren) take it to a whole new level. One of my favo[u]rite little ditties is "Two World Wars and One World Cup," sung by the English when their natio[u]nal squad faces the Germans (the chant is to the tune of "Camptown Races," inandofitself a racist song). But if catchy tunes intended to conjure centuries of war and violence isn't edgy enough for you, check out the amount of racy (pun!) jingles these people come up with. On the bright side, it appears as if everybody gets a piece of the xenophobic pie[u].
Let's pretend that back around 1997, a disgusted Jolly Green Giant swore that he wouldn't wash his 
So my Skull Candy Smokin' Buds crapped out yesterday after fewer than 6 months of use, and I found myself in need of a new set of headphones. Rather than go with more earbuds, the last 2 pairs of which have been rather disappointing in terms of sound and durability, I decided to spend an extra $15 at Target and get some real 'phones. I love the colour, but it doesn't really go with my Incredible Hulk t-shirt. The sound is a million times better than my previous buds, although some dude who actually might know what he's talking about says the high and low end of the RP-HTX7's are a little harsh and they need some EQ'ing to make the most of them. Whatever--I don't even need to listen to music, I'll just stand in front of the mirror and imagine myself directing air traffic at some sort of retro-futuristic slime green airport.
In high school, everybody knew the song "Loser," but I didn't know one person who owned this actual album. And that's not surprising - it has an extremely lo-fi and abrasive sound, mixes bizarre electronic sampling with a folk sensibility, and could only be considered a "rock" album because it would have been impossible to classify it as anything else. That Beck ever even made it onto a major label with an album like this is nothing less than astonishing. In other words, it's a pretty good album if I do say so myself. So if you like hiss, sampling, acoustic guitars, yelling, and noise, this album is probably up your alley not to be dirty.
There's nothing sexier than having the woman you love violently shove you aside as she runs to the bathroom to frantically douse her burning nether regions with water and soap. 
Hey, dad, congratulations on that beautiful daughter you've got there! Would it be too much to ask for you to do her and the rest of the gene pool a favour and refrain from fucking her, please? It's hard enough for a bright young woman to make it in today's world without the man who donated half her genes laying up on her whenever he feels like it. Even if you're one of those people waaaaaaay out at the far end of the bell curve who actually finds his own offspring sexually attractive, there's a very good chance that she doesn't feel the same way about you. Wouldn't it be better if she learned what douchebags men are the old-fashioned way, by advancing to sexual maturity and then dating a worthless piece of shit who makes her cry? You can show her how much you love her in other ways, like sending her to medical school or buying her a car. There's really no need to lock her up at home and impregnate her with multiple offspring--that's why God gave you a wife.
This video game is based on the small independent movie series Star Wars. In it, you play as some dude who is Darth Vader's secret apprentice between Episode III and IV (nerdspeak). The story, dialogue, and acting are all immensely better than any of the prequel trilogy, but I guess that's like saying I personally have more hockey ability than a quadruple amputee. Anyway, it's pretty fun to throw stormtroopers around with the force or punt a Jawa, but the game is really short so my professional opinion is to rent it or something, who am I, your accountant?
This movie is about a very short man named Paul Rudd who is getting married, but it turns out he really has no guy friends so who is going to be his best man?!? Well I don't know, how about his fucking brother? But I guess then the movie would only be ten minutes long. As it stands, it feels like it's ten hours long, thanks to endless adlibbing after each and every scene was obviously supposed to end. Look, America, you're better than the comedies you've been putting out lately, ok, and we're never going to get out of this recessiamabob if you don't buck up and produce some laughter, capice (Italian for broseph)?
"Tribunal" - The Cardassians kidnap Chief O'Brien and try to kill him for a crime that they actually framed him for, but then they get caught (whoops).
The watermelon is a delicious, refreshing summer fruit filled with racism. The flesh and rinds come in many different colors, which is why I find their history so ironic. Most Northerners despise Southerners because of our affection for the watermelon. So why all the hate? Well, in the dark, cold North people are too busy with jobs, and living in cramped apartments with rats, instead of drinking cheap beer and sitting out on the porch. Hey, it's not my fault they can't ride bikes or swim, right? Check out a lot of the Mexican art depicting the afterlife. What the hell do you think that is they're eating? Watermelons. Skeletons love watermelons. Especially southern Mexican skeletons.
This big, blue bastard isn't much fun to read, but at 2621 pages, it's heavy enough to kill rats in the basement apartment where you'll scour newspapers and the Internet in vain for an employer who thinks the ability to talk convoluted, academic nonsense about pop-cultural phenomena is a "skill" worth paying for. You can also burn it to stay warm. There you go, college boy.
While some fat cats are drinking Ukrainian Platypus Urine Select IPA 400 yrs., the rest of us have some budgeting to do. My suggestion is to go with America! Go with American beer! It’s like any other beer, only a two-time World War winner; you can drink, like, fourteen of these mothers before you get all vomitous and lame. Of course, Budweiser is now owned by the Belgians, and before it was owned by the Belgians it was all sorts of teutonic plague. But hey, what is this, a g.d. geography exam? Cheap, reliable and tasty; just be sure to chill it. Otherwise, it tastes like piss. 
Everybody in America and on Earth likes cool Action Moves in the movies and on the tv. Action Moves are when a dude might jump from a pile of boxes onto a truck carrying poison in order to kick that poison peddler in the face, or maybe a girl does a spin-o-rama kick while shooting guns akimbo at a bunch of cybernetic werewolves who want to steal our children. Typically you only see Action Moves in fake things like films and shows, but once I was in a parking lot and this car was pulling out of a space, and I guess the driver forgot her Big Gulp was on the roof. It started to fall off the car but she reached out the window and caught it mid tumble, right side up. That's probably as close to a cool Action Move I'll get in real life, but whatevs, you live and learn, am I right Ladies?
"Hey, fatty, I got a movie for ya--A Fridge Too Far."
All the other amendments thus far in the countdown have been super boring, but now we finally get to a good one. After the Civil War, it was decreed by America that black people should be allowed to vote. The South was like "AHHH WHAT" so then they decided they would try to sneak around this new law by saying everybody had to pay a "poll tax" to vote, and it just so happened that a lot of black people were too poor to pay the amount (coincidence). Also, the tax would usually only be enforced when black people tried to vote, and the amount would fluctuate suddenly etc. Anyway, in 1965, a scant century later, America decided to put an end to that and passed this amendment, but you can't please everybody and Wyoming, Arizona, Georgia, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, South Carolina, and *ahem*texas*ahem* decided they'd show their resistance/dickery by never ratifying it to this day (your bad, fellas).
Well that's no good. A shoe is pretty much useless unless you happen to have another shoe, and then you can put them next to each other and they'll kiss and make baby shoes, or you can wear them to the store/bar/mosque/rollercoaster show. If you happen to have a shoe only, then maybe you can smash a bug or hit somebody or put it next to a mirror and make believe after all this is America. One bright side is that at least if somebody wants you to help them get their puppy off of the rocky ledge you can say "No dice, my foot will be all bloody, I mean the one without a shoe and also I'm eating."
Fender is the Ford of guitars--you either hate to love them, or love to hate them. My old Mexican Jazz bass pickups had a nice snarly, nasal sound, but the 60 cycle hum was bad enough to make your teeth hurt and the poles were kind of rusty. So I put in these fancy American custom pickups, which are aren't nearly as noisy but also seem to have less balls. I'm sure there's an ironic and/or racist metaphor here somewhere, but digging it up just seems like so much work. 
The good? Four packs for eight bucks. The bad? Filters whose job it seems is to facilitate cancer. The ugly? Looking totally desperate for nicotine. Once, when I was in a hard place and smoking Pilots, He Who Looks Good in Jeans bought me a pack of Parliaments just so he didn’t have to watch me suffer.
Seeing this is the crowning achievement of my life. Please can we keep it?!
There hasn't been a great Star Trek game in 26 years, since the release of Star Trek: Judgment Rites, and this game from 2006 doesn't really change that. However, I can look past that and the trap of focusing solely on space combat that seems to beleaguer Star Trek games this time, because the graphics are great and skirmish mode is just so addictive. I can't tell you how satisfying it is to blow the Enterprise D out of space with the Enterprise A, but take my word for it, ole baldy and his Brady Bunch of a crew certainly had it coming.
Don't let the name fool you--it's not a bun! Bun dae gi are silkworm larvae stewed in a nasty broth and beloved by Koreans of all ages. In Seoul, you can usually smell them cooking for about 2 blocks before you actually see them--it's a rich, pungent odour sorta like the putrid womb of an insectoid Whore of Babylon. A student of mine told me that bun dae gi get even better if you let them sit for a while in their little paper cup until they're cold and chewy. Want my advice? Get a Big Mac. Yes, it's tacky to eat McDonald's abroad, but Koreans will be so busy looking for your tail that they won't even notice what you have in your hand. 
I'd definitely like to write something pithy about how this really makes a powerful statement about commercialization, postmodernism, America, or obesity. Frankly, this is far, far too awesome. The next step is trying to mod a Super Mario Brothers 3 catridge into an English muffin.
Post-colonialism makes ESL humour problematic, and if Foucault was right about knowledge and power then most teachers are stooges anyway, but goddamn, non-native speakers of English say some funny things. For example...
Copy editing for money is good, because you get money, but it's also bad, because if your customer knows a copy editor is going to clean up her mess, she'll leave a whole bunch of mangled citations and misspelled words with the expectation that the copy editor will fix them. I used to wash dishes in this shitty restaurant, and it was kind of the same deal--cooks would drop salmon fillets and pork chops on the floor and just kind of kick them under the counter because they knew some minimum wage-making sucka (i.e. me) would end up getting down on his hands and knees and picking them up. Eventually, a stack of pans fell on my head and cut my dishwater-soaked hand open and I bled all over the floor so I quit, but not before I had to walk by the lineup of people waiting to get into the Rockin' Rodeo like 50 times in a dirty kitchen apron carrying a bunch of gross, leaking garbage bags. Hey, ladies.
Pat Robertson is a leader of the religious right who owns and runs wonderful institutions such as the American Center for Law and Justice (because no one can argue against law and justice) and International Family Entertainment. He's also known for being a biggot, like the time in 1999 when he described Scotland as "a dark land" teeming with homosexuals. Actually, I think that's kind of funny. And while all men hate feminism we're not stupid enough to say it's a "socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." No, we just say that to each other when none of our bitches are around.
For how crude and obnoxious I often am, it's kind of weird that when it comes to perceived criticism, I'm more sensitive than an 8 month old greyhound's clitoris. One doesn't even have to argue with me--just wind me up, and I'll argue with myself. What can I say? I'm a prima donna. At the end of the day, though, I'd rather have a little storm in a teacup than a different teacup full of, say, a dog's uterus and ovaries. And I'd also rather have the temporary autonomous zone that is R3 than some sort of PC vagtocracy where bourgeois mystifications like "common sense" and "good taste" reign supreme. Freedom doesn't have to be gratuitous, it's true, but I sure fucking do.
Theoretically, I like the game Taboo. But when you have a nearly ten-year-old version, like I do, the game either gets a lot easier or a lot harder. For “Rosie O’Donnell” and “Ellen Degeneres,” one of the words you can’t say isn’t “lesbian,” so you can make someone guess those in like 6 seconds. But then there are cards that ask you to describe things like a “Cyber Café,” and “El Nino.” There’s even a card for Linda Tripp – really took me a few to remember who she is. I am ready for the next generation of Taboo, with cards about Lindsay Lohan (“coke,” “SamRo”), Sarah Palin (“Alaska,” “gun,” “moose”) and Bernie Madoff, who I won't remember in ten years either.
The conclusion to the "Knightfall" saga makes the first two parts all worthwhile. This collection begins with Az-Bat being insane and almost killing criminals while he imagines his dead father following him around, and meanwhile Bruce Wayne must fight his way through seven different martial arts masters to retrain himself. It plays like a samurai movie, and is really well done. Of course, it all ends with real Batman and Az-Bat duking it out over the course of five issues, but the action is tight and well drawn, and there's enough secondary story involving Robin and Nightwing keeping innocents out of harm's way to keep it engaging. It sucks that in order to understand the third part you'd have to read through the bad first two parts, but I guess that's life or something I don't read enough Nietzsche.
Dissonance has it's place in life. It provides a much needed sense of perspective and where would rock music be without it? But at some point, the sounds have to resolve or you just end up with entropy.
Oh, wait. I get it. That is sorta funny.
I don't have the time to go to yoga as much as I'd like, so I was pretty happy to get in a good class this morning. It started a little late because Tom, the instructor, couldn't find the keys to get the closet where they keep the mats and blocks and things open, but a maintenance guy eventually showed up and opened it. So everything was great until I went home and changed my facebook status to reflect that I'd had a good workout, and then some asshole had to come along and talk shit about my status. I think he is jealous because he can't touch his toes. What a jerk.
Recently, one of your knock-kneed readers here at this blog suggested I read the book "Crush," by "poet" Richard Siken.
I tell my students never to cite Wikipedia, but I often use it myself as starting point for research on a topic I know nothing about. However, every single time I've tried to edit a Wikipedia article, even just a talk page, I've been flamed by trolls in under 10 minutes. In fact, if one reads the discussion pages, one will notice that the supposedly neutral senior editors are often the most insulting, partisan, and juvenile posters on them. I've been berated for my lack of education, my apparent young age, and accused of being a sock puppet, all by people who are supposed to be "watching" the articles and protecting them from vandalism, and all for trying to fix errors and problems that even an 8 year old could identify. Lots of articles are pretty good, I suppose, and it's not like anyone's reputation is at stake for the bad ones, but I can't help but wonder if Wikipedia's current system is more about trolling and bureaucratic navel gazing than with actually having good encyclopædic articles that don't read like they've been written by 12 year olds or small town pseudo-activists trying to post their resumés on Wiki Biography.
I hate when the eraser on the end of my mechanical pencil gets worn down to a nub and then I can't get it out to put new lead in. Whose stupid idea was that? Funny you should ask, because I don't know. The guy who registered the first patent for a pencil with an eraser on the end, however, was named Hyman Lipman. If that isn't simultaneously the gayest and straightest name in Anglophone history, I don't know what is.
A collection is a group of things that you might get over time by either buying, stealing, or holding on to (mostly) useless things. Collections can be cool, like my collection of miniature Star Trek ships or comics, or they can be kind of sad, like my collection of state quarters or bottle caps. A collection may also be used to judge a person's character, like if a dude has a collection of comic books he is probably a pretty cool dude, but if he has a collection of Nazi memorabilia then he is probably a Nazi or murderer or both. In conclusion, I also have a collection of rejection letters, a collection of Dia De Los Muertos figures, and a hefty collection of reviews on this very website that nobody reads.
The second collection from Midnighter's solo series is not really that good. It follows everybody's favorite gay Batman/Punisher analog from the Authority as he tries to uncover his past life, of which he has no recollection. Along the way he butts heads with Anthem, a hero-for-hire group that uses terror and patriotism to keep small towns in line. This volume manages to skate by on Midnighter's gruff charm, and he pulls a couple of good moves when he fights Anthem, but largely it's boring, so I just recommend buying an Authority collection instead.
"The Maquis, Part Two" - I don't understand why Quark is allowed to stay in business if he gets caught selling arms to terrorists.
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