Love by "The Beatles"

Love is a remix album of practically a million Beatles songs that was made so some crazy weirdos in leotards could synchronized-jump on trampolines for a lot of money.George and Giles Martin use pretty much only sounds created by the Beatles to make this album, and it's always fun to hear how they're going to change up some classic song. However, the caveat is that they've successfully drained whatever emotion or power existed in the old versions by just making this 70 minute barrage of song clips. I also don't think I believe in the mythology of the Beatles the way this album seems to (a lot of ambient tones and symphonic builds suggest the Beatles are SAVING THE WORLD damnit), but it's a fun listen anyway.

RATING: 63%

Solitary (TV show)

This is by far the dumbest fucking thing ever put on TV. I feel dirty for watching it.*

Rating: HELLNO%

*Thankfully I only watched one episode.

Unemployment

Unemployment is a strange beast, because on the one hand at least I'm not at some fucking awful job for 45 hours a week, but on the other hand I'm almost broke and a few application steps away from food stamps. For some reason everybody feels the need to tell me things like "Well at least you're getting a lot of writing done." No, I'm not getting a lot of writing done, god damn it, unless by writing you mean filling out the same questionnaire endlessly while applying for menial jobs only to get a cryptic response in the email an hour later saying that I'm not qualified. What, I didn't "strongly agree" enough with the phrase "Stealing is always wrong, even if your family is starving?" Speaking of starving, if I have to eat another processed meat sandwich I just might take starvation boulevard instead. In conclusion, never take an adjunct position with the vague promise that there might be more work in the spring, because I bet there won't be chump.

RATING: 12%

Comic Three-In-One

Here's three quickie comic reviews condensed into one in case you don't care:

Star Trek: Year Four

Star Trek: Year Bore

RATING: 41%



Ultimate Spider-man Vol. 4: Legacy

More of the same, which isn't a bad thing.

RATING: 85%



Batman: Anarky

Imagine if that kid you went to middle school with who just found out about the concept of anarchy was a superhero.

RATING: 36%

Reality Bites

I watched about a half hour of this movie because it was shot in Houston, but then I had to stop it before I stabbed myself to death repeatedly. The plot is some counterculture youths finish college but then they have a tough time living in the real world without compromising their radical beliefs, man. It turns out that in the hour that I did not watch they all end up sticking up for their values and saying "fuck you" to the man, but you all knew that already. The most important thing I learned from Generation X is that no matter how much you preach about corporate evil and the horrors of selling out while you're young, there will be plenty of time to sell your music to a car commercial or play an FBI agent on the most right wing show on television when you're older.

RATING: 21%

Tesseracts

Nope, you're not having an acid flashback, it's a tesseract! It is to a 3 dimensional cube what a cube is to a 2 dimensional square: fucking TRIPPY. Apparently, the hypersurface of the tesseract consists of 8 cubic cells, 3 per edge. If you can find them all, you win a tube of airplane glue and a paper bag courtesy of R3.

RATING:

%














(Images from conflusions.com and wikimedia.org. After trying to figure this out for over an hour, I saw a hypercube that wasn't projected into 3 dimensions, and it made a little more sense.)

The Creative Class

I can't decide what I love best about Writers and Artists--their maturity, their Herculean attention spans, or their robust psychological health. Maybe it's their insatiable appetite for intellectual conversation, their reverence for the classic works of Western civilization, their hard-nosed political and economic sensibilities, or their uncompromising work ethic. What ever it is, I think they render self-evident the argument for beating your kids more.

RATING: Snowflake%

(Image from redwing.hutman.net.)

War Of The Worlds (1953 Movie)

Sometimes it's difficult to review a movie that was made a long time ago, because nowadays we have higher standards when it comes to special effects, realism, story, acting, dialogue, music, directing, etc. Sure, there a few gems from fifty, sixty, seventy years ago, but we're even giving some of the so-called greats a bit of a pass. Surprisingly, though, with this version of HG Wells' War Of The Worlds, the special effects are actually decent, but everything else is pretty terrible. The main woman, who is at first presented as a brilliant reporter, soon falls into a screaming incoherent cliche (even at one point being extremely horrified that one of the aliens bleeds?); the film is filled with long stretches of excruciating monotony, which is certainly a feat at 87 minutes; and somehow an infuriating Christian "subtext" is slathered all over the movie's conclusion - all of the scientists talk earnestly and nod about The Creator, the main scientist guy is lost in the streets of abandoned LA until he finds a church, and the aliens die because "God in his infinite wisdom had put bacteria here to protect us from them." But I guess I did get to see some landmarks get blowed up real good, and all of the exterior stuff about the evacuation of LA is really well done.

RATING: 37% by today's standards, probably like 81% in 1953

Retractable Leads

Congratulations! You have just purchased enough rope for your dog to hang itself with. Literally. And while your beloved pet is causing egregious bodily harm to my person, you are five hundred yards away, using your iPhone to set up your next semi-anonymous sexual encounter.

Rating: 10% (points given for the glorious smell of your dog's shit on my front lawn).

This post by Viking Andrew.

(Image from www.petspantry.tv.)

Blackberry Pearl

The Blackberry Pearl is a fantastic device that puts all the features of a Blackberry into a nice little phone sized package, as opposed to other Blackberries that are wider. I like that it's small, but that comes with the downside that the keyboard is also small. I have tiny little girl fingers and I still think it's a little cramped. I've basically decided that when my contract with T-Mobile is out I will either get a full sized Blackberry or an iPhone. (I love Blackberry, but the thought of having my ipod and phone in one convenient package is just too tempting.) But if you can deal with having the size of the keyboard it's a good option for those of us who like to occasionally carry our phone in our pockets.

Rating: 80%

Having a Blackberry

I hear a lot of people bitch about how they hate their Blackberry because it is a leash and everyone expects them to answer email instantly. Well sucks to that. I LOVE having a Blackberry. I see all my email the second it comes in, I can update my facebook status on the go (warning people of the dangers of library pirates), and I get all the R3 comments as soon as they come in, which makes it really obvious when John is alternately posting comments as himself and then Anonymous. The phone also has a calendar/planner, etc. that I don't really use. Oh, and with Google Maps I can always look up a map to where I'm going and usually that gets me where I'm going unless my faggy friend keeps insisting that East is West is vice versa and then we end up walking damn circles around the West Village for half an hour while I'm in four inch heels and knew exactly which way it was from the start but he wouldn't listen thank you very much. Oh and as for the email leash problem, I've found that people will expect you to respond as quickly as your normally do. If you get carried away with your Blackberry and always respond right away they will always expect that, but if you save the quick responses for things that really need a quick response they won't always expect instant gratification. Oh, and yeah it really is addictive. Vive la Crackberry!

Rating (Blackberry): 90%
Rating (Stupid homo friend who doesn't know know East from West): 10%

That fantastic Crackberry photo is from this website.

Instead Cups

Because tampons are great and all that, but you cannot wear a tampon during sex (or you can, but jeezus... you shouldn't), and because you don't want to be the first person in 23 years to die of TSS, there is the Instead Cup. And because you want to save the environment from being buried in a pile of tampons and Instead cups, there is the Diva Cup. But I don't think you can have (hetero) sex with that in. So there is the Instead Cup. Are you following? Condoms will not interfere with the Instead Cup. I know many, many girls who are horrified by the idea of the Instead Cup. I also know many, many girls who are horrified of the idea of the applicator-less tampon. To those girls, I reccommend getting a nice big vibrator, only not this one.

RATING: 72%

The Wrestler

Mickey Rourke is Hulk Hogan or something. No, actually he's Randy "The Ram" Randinski, and he has lots of beautiful blond hair and his face is about to fall off. He's pretty much playing himself, but that's how some of the finest performances have come about.

This movie is SPOILER ALERT pretty good. It's predictable from the moment it begins, but not in a boring way, in sort of a "I can't wait until his daughter rejects him again and Marisa Tomei stops stripping and he dies at the end during this rematch that we've been waiting the whole movie to see" way that makes Oscar-nominated movies stay Oscary. It's worth seeing, but don't expect Requiem For A Dream.

Rating: 64 more lip collagen injections Mickey %

Car Alarms

I don't know why people bother putting alarms in their cars, and I especially don't know why some twat would let his fucking car alarm go off for over an hour and not do anything about it. This one time I was sitting out front of Starbucks with this really old guy, and a car alarm started going off, so he stood up, fished his keys out of his pocket, hit a button and his car alarm started going off too. That was pretty funny, but this isn't funny at all. You know what is funny, though? "SHUT THE FUCK UP" dug into the hood of a beeping car with a screwdriver. I mean, it's not like anyone's coming, right?

RATING: Bad citizen%

(Image from cache.gawker.com.)

Art

Art is totally lame and/or for gaywads. If I had $8,500, I wouldn't give one cent to art it sucks so bad. People are always writing poems that don't rhyme, or painting some dumb picture that looks like it was done by an epileptic three year old, and I'm supposed to hock over my hard earned dough? Hell no this is America. The only things I hock over my money for kill people or blow things up.

RATING: <.000001%, or not-even-$1 million-out-of-almost-$1 trillion

Candles

You probably think of a candle as a source of light or maybe heat, but it's also symbolic of the American Dream. Our forefathers used candles made of tallow to light the room as they penned important documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. But for me, candles conjure images of the Emancipation Proclamation, 19th century classical music, sex and Chinese food. These days candles are used for religious purposes and other shit. Honestly, candles are boring but chicks dig them. So don't sweat the next present for your womyn. Hint: Don't buy her a candle. Just kidding, she'll love it (don't really buy her one).

RATING: 67%

The Office (BBC series 1 & 2)

I was reluctant to watch the British Office because all I ever heard from my hyper-educated white friends was that they loooved The Office -- "but only the British version!" Since, um, none of them were British themselves, I chalked it up to an obnoxious posturing thing. And I was right! This show is great, and really funny. But despite a few differences in character nuances, I really didn't see a huge difference in the two shows that would make one person disdain the NBC version and adore the BBC's. And I've only watched the first two seasons of NBC's Office, so I don't know if it goes wildly off-kilter after that, but I would love it if someone could tell me why people claim to love the British version so much more. The American version seems to make more use of the ensemble cast, who are pretty funny in their own right. So why does all the love go to the Brits?

RATING: 87%

Natural American Spirit Perique Cigarettes

Most pipe tobacco blends that claim to have "perique" in them actually contain anaerobically fermented green river burley, and the reason there isn't enough real perique to go around is because somebody's been putting it all in cigarettes. The good news is, they're the best cigarettes money can buy. You have to kind of smoke these like a pipe or cigar to get the full effect of the perique--if you haul on it like a sailor, it just tastes like a strong cigarette. But all the classic perique notes are there: cracked pepper, plum, cream, and that weird "silver" taste that's impossible to describe non-synesthetically. I wish I loved broccoli and exercise as much as I love tobacco. Damn.

RATING: 95%

(Image from www.sweetmedicineshoppe.com, but don't let the name fool you, kids, it's not medicine.)

Tampons

Wicked women who pop birth control pills, pierce their nipples and smoke pot use tampons to stem the flow of blood and tissue from their sinfully neglected wombs. If they were married and pregnant as God intended, they'd have no need of such unholy paraphernalia. Yes, the Lord created menstruation, but he hates it.

RATING: A bloody 0%

(Image from www.glee.com)

Post by Bjork

Before she developed a fan base comprised mostly of insane wackos, Bjork had a great dark danceable album called Post. It's a lot of angry music, but the kind of angry that makes me want to dance away the anger, not punch it away. It still holds up 15 years later, but one question I want to ask is why does every album feel that the slowest, most boring songs need to be the final songs? I mean, here we have 9 great fun tracks topped off with two boring forgettable numbers, and this is a real trend I've noticed. Anyway, let's cut out that nonsense, but feel free to check out some Bjork songs on youtube and pretend you're 15 again.

RATING: 84%

Arabs

Arabs are from the land of Arabia, which is over the sea next to England or something. They're always doing despicable things like saving the classics of Western civilization from the Christian barbarians during the Dark Ages, or torturing American children by inventing algebra. Lots of racists think Muslim Arabs are terrorists, and I guess a few of them are, but so are Irish people and at least Muslims aren't stinking drunk all the time. If you get blown up by an Arab, it'll likely be because he has a neurological incident on the Houston freeway and crashes his Honda into a propane truck with you in the front seat.

RATING: 90%.

(Image from http://sabbah.biz.)

Leo Quan Badass V Bridge

As near as I can tell, the main purpose of the Leo Quan Badass V bridge is to put $80 worth of Fancy on your bass. Lots of people laud its effect on sustain, or "attack" (whatever that means), but I've been playing bass for 12 years, and I've had the same Fender Mexi-Jazz for the last 5 of them, and to be honest I don't fretboard sometimes now. I guess I'm happy that my bass is all "modded out." If I ever meet Geddy Lee we'll have something to talk about besides whether Rush fans are better categorized as nerdwads or gaywads, so there you go.

RATING: 70%

(Image from farm1.static.flickr.com.)

Punisher: The Slavers

I'm opposed to capital punishment, but I think if there's any crime whose perpetrator's deserve execution, it's human trafficking. So although this is just a fictional comic with a character created for kids in the 70s, I have to say watching the Punisher disembowel, decapitated, and perforate a bunch of guys running a sex slave ring is pretty satisfying. Of course, that doesn't do anything to stop actual human trafficking, but I suppose the more people are exposed to this in the media, the more it will alert them to the problem in reality. Anyway, I just told you the plot, but one additional thing that Garth Ennis does in his Punisher run (since Frank Castle himself is not very three dimensional) is introduce side characters and plots to help inject some humanity into the story. I think it's a smart move, and the side story about the two cop partners and their strained relationship is pretty good, and I guess you can't really have a comic that's 99% murder.

RATING: 83%

Dinner with Immanuel Kant

YOU: Do you think I look nice tonight?

KANT: This explanation of the beautiful can be inferred from the preceding explication of it as an object of a liking devoid of all interest. For if someone likes something and is conscious that he himself does so without any interest, then he cannot help judging that it must contain a basis for being liked for everyone.

YOU: Uh, OK. Thanks, I guess. Are you having a good time? How's your schnitzel?

KANT: [A] judgement of taste is not a cognitive judgement and so is not a logical judgement but an aesthetic one, by which we mean a judgement whose determining basis cannot be other than subjective. But any reference of presentations, even of sensations, can be objective (in which case it signifies what is real in an empirical presentation); excepted as a reference to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure--this reference designates nothing whatsoever in the object, but here the subject feels himself, how he is affected by the presentation.

YOU: ...

RATING: I honestly have no fucking clue. 20%, maybe? 80%?

(Image from www.en.wikipedia.org. Quotes from Critique of Judgement via The Norton Anthology of Criticism.)

Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan soundtrack by James Horner

We all know that Jerry Goldsmith's score for the first Star Trek movie is classic in its own right, but to me James Horner's music for parts II and III always hold a higher place in my musical heart. Maybe it's partly because they're better movies, but a lot of it is because Horner has a knack to build odd instrumentations and chord shifts driven largely by the brass that I love. I could probably sing every song on this album on cue. Aw, who am I kidding, there's no probably about it.

RATING: 92%

John Updike

John Updike is somebody who wrote this story A&P which Professor Jake (he wants us to call him by his first name) made us read and then come to class and he asked us, in that way he does, “So what is this story about? What happens?” So what. I told him what I thought I said “This dude checks out this girls ass the whole time,” and everybody laughed. But the. thing about Prof Jake is he can’t come down on you. He doesn’t believe in that kinda thing he says while straightening his ponytail. So you. He says to me he says OKay lets run with that. This dude checks out this girls ass the whole time and we all laughed cause he says ass. Then Jake-off (we call him that on Facebook) asks us what this tells us about american culture and we all shut up. I mean, what the fuck? Seriously. What the fuck! Plus we all knew Rebecca Chalmers was gonna answer anyway cause she always does cause Im pretty sure I don’t know it but Im pretty fuckin sure she’s giving jake-off all sorts of bjes during his office hours. And she did! I mean she told us. She told us all about A&P and John Updike and shit. But I don’t know what she said[ I was texting my bro Crispin about his lakehouse and jagerbombs. In conclusion, John Updike wrote 61 books, among them A&P and died a few years ago from lung cancer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Updike#Early_life) and the world will never recover.

42%butthat'sjustmyopinionandyoumightdisagreed.

This post by Viking Andrew.

(Image from www.guardian.co.uk. Also, check out this hilarious editorial about John Updike at The Onion.)

Sports Off Center

As if it wasn't bad enough to rip your name from a better sports program on a better network (as opposed to Houston's 55), this crap show found it necessary to mock both the Hudson plane landing, 9/11, and Muslims. On their "Catch of the Day" segment, they showed a picture of geese in the water, then said something about finding more information about what caused the plane to go down last month. The geese were wearing simulated turbans. "Suspicious headgear!" commented that attractive guy above. Thanks. Thanks for calling a turban "suspicious headgear," reminding us all to fear Muslims and Arabs because they're probably all terrorists. Thanks for implying that a freak disaster involving a flock of geese and a crash-landing that mercifully killed no one is similar to several crashes brought on by religious extremist nutjobs that killed thousands. Thanks for feeling, as always, that what happened in 2001 is still prime material for your bad jokes and baseless racism. And thanks, really, to all the checks and balances this little "joke" had to make it past so that it could be broadcast into my home where I really didn't need to hear it. I would love to believe that I am not the only person who saw that segment that was offended by it. But mostly I feel like this post is the most attention the ill-conceived crack will get.

RATING: BLINDIGNORANCE%

This Film Is Not Yet Rated

We all know that the MPAA's rating system is sort of fucked. In the early 90s, the NC-17 rating was established so that non-pornographic films wouldn't have to worry about being automatically labeled as pornographic as a result of getting an 'X' rating. Today, that doesn't work, since most movie theaters and video stores won't rent out NC-17 movies. This movie documents the bizarre history of the ratings system, how it's tied to quasi-religious beliefs, and how sex (especially homosexual sex) gets much harsher treatment than violence. The main problem to me was that it was divided into a more interesting, educational part of the movie in which they discussed rating history and interviewed famous directors, and a less interesting part of the movie in which a private eye tries to track down the secret ratings board and discover who they are in real life (they are supposed to be all parents with kids between 5 and 17, but in actuality only one of them is). It's ok I guess, but you could probably learn everything you wanted by following this link to wikipedia.

RATING: 60%

The Dark Knight Returns

Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns is the definitive Batman story, the best superhero book ever written, and the 2nd best graphic novel/comic of all time. Published in 1986, the pit of the Reagan era, DKR imagines a contemporary Batman in his fifties who has been retired for ten years. Gotham is overrun by mutants who dress like bizarre funhouse versions of 80s punk rockers, news reporters who get giddy at any hint of violence or devastation, and a president (Reagan) who pushes the country to the brink of war by using his charm and the American flag as a ruse. Batman comes back from retirement to ostensibly try to change the hopelessness society is feeling, but more likely because Bruce Wayne is psychotic. Anyway, Frank Miller himself has proven himself to be legitimately insane and a hack in the two decades since DKR was published, but this is still one of the most amazing reads you'll ever have in comic book form. I never cease to be surprised by it, and you owe it to yourself and your economy to go buy a copy of it brothers and sisters.

RATING: 100%

Superbowl

Have you ever had a bowl of cereal or soup? Well, imagine if that bowl was way bigger, then it would be called a superbowl. Also, if instead of generic Captain Crunch with Crunchberries it held 95,000 people and two pro football teams and was broadcast worldwide and American society came to a halt whenever it happened once a year, then it would be called a Superbowl but with a capital 's.' I'm not one of those people who claims to hate the Superbowl, but I've never been able to care about the NFL as much as I care about college football, and that isn't very much to begin with. Football, to me, is about as representative of America as you can get: a lot of stupid people are fans of it, it's entertaining to watch, on the surface it appears to be about mindless violence, but deep down it's hopelessly complex and more about old white men behind the scenes stragegizing their way to victory than anything that happens on the actual field. Go Ravens!

RATING: 59%

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans

I went to this movie looking for one thing and one thing only--to see lots of werewolves fighting vampires. I didn't (and still don't) care about the complicated back story, or the love story, or any of the "lore," and I didn't need this movie to change my life. All I wanted was to see some werewolves tearing apart some vampires and vice versa. And with that expectation in mind, I was not disappointed. With the exception of one particularly laughable angel sex* scene and spurts of talking that were really just there to move the plot onto the next fight, it was mostly fighting, and that suits me just fine.

Rating: 86% (Within the context of my expectations, mostly awarded for violence.)

*Angel sex is the term I use for those campy other worldly sex scenes that you find in movies. The best example comes from the movie Wall Street, where we see Charlie Sheen and Daryl Hannah acrobatically get it on silhouetted in front of a giant picture window overlooking the Manhattan skyline while Native American flute music plays in the background.