California Fires earn state “Hell on Earth” Title

Ravaged by blazes that have consumed nearly half of the state’s entire land area, the prince of darkness himseld, Satan, was happy to announce that California will henceforth be renamed as “Hell on Earth”.

With a trademark rasp in his voice and an unmistakle aura that seemed to scream “don’t trust me”, the man in red had the following to say, “It’s not just the scorching environment that lead us here in Old Hell to finally deem California the recipient of this coveted secular award, but also the hedonistic, self-absorbed, ridiculously amoral and materialistic lifestyle that made the state a virtual shoo-in for 2008 Hot Spot of the Year.  Earth is such a tempestuous place, half in love with idolatry, half in love with God or other gods, and half in love with nothing.  But for years we feel like we’ve been able to count on California as an ally, and now with the fires and everything else, well, the demons and I just felt like it was time to go ahead with the name change.”

The rest of the United States was in shock when learning of the announcement.  In an all too predictable move, the Bible Belt was the first to attempt to hold talks with the devil and convince him to renig on this potentially hellacious decision.  Citing the fall of man, numerous tries at tempting God himself in the desert, and his bottomless apathy for humanity’s attempts to better itself, the spokesman for the Belt pleaded for the Devil to take heed of what happens at the end of the good book itself, warning that such a move could prompt an accelerated slide into the end times.

Visibly choked up over the reference to his eventual 1,000 year imprisonment followed by a total collapse of power, old Scratch cackled and disappeared in a ball of sulphurous smoke.  He did leave a card, however, in case of future attempts at parlay.

Meanwhile, in California, an aging Governator was asked how this new status would affect tourism from otherwordly spirits, denizens of soulless fiends, and other non-corporeal beings, Swarzenegger responded,”It really depends on whether or not they attempt to gain citizenship to the state, what type of voters they become, and if they can manage the transfer from fossil fuels to clean burning natural gas or other alternatives.  If they get out of hand, I will crush them!”

And there you have it.  Californians across the state wait in trepidation as an evil place, fraught with flames, flamers, and fiends all its own, looks to become way, way hotter.

Faceless Alien Couples - Who Dat Be?

WOW!  At first this freaked me out, then I thought about it, got more freaked out and stopped looking at the pictures.

Recently, at a number of high profile events, photographers have captured what appear to be people WITHOUT FACES.  I kid you not.  Go to the Drudge Report and check the article about “Faceless Couples” at Wimbledon.  Are we witnessing the grassroots promotion of a new product, movie, facial obstructing disguiso apparatus, or simply vain celebrities tired of being hounded by the paparazzi?  No one knows…

I have a hunch, though, but it’s pretty weak.  Remember Cloverfield, how odd the marketing campaign was, you never really knew what was going on, right?  Now remember those adds about the hazards of smoking, www.truth.com, I think, where people fell down dead or they rolled out body bags? Yeah?  Well, those have nothing to do with this. 

All I know is that if I had a faceless “alien” mask to wear whenever I felt like not being noticed, the possibilities would be limitless, limitless I tell you!!!!!!

 

 

That’s all I’ve got.  Seriously though,

Tom Cruise is behind it all.

Man Wallops Wax Hitler

Hitler died decades ago.  Yet for a brief instant he was poised to sit, fully clad in Nazi get up, in the heart of Berlin yet again.  Fate would deem the the second go around a far shorter ordeal for the German people than the all too unforgettable first.

Der Furher is head of state no longer.  As if it hadn’t been long enough.  First the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow lore (wasn’t he supposed to be a Hessian soldier?), and now the headless Hitler.  Doubt we’ll get any dreary fantasies composed about old Adolph, however.

Only moments after the opening of the exhibit in a Berlin museum that portrayed a wax likeness of Herr Hitler himself, posed in his bunker under the Reich Chancellory in the waning days of the Third Reich, a German man waltzed up and decapitated him.  Can you blame the guy?  Not that a country shouldn’t be able to acknowledge even the darkest moments in its history, but staring in the cold, blue eyes of perhaps the most diabolical military and political despot ever, a swift beating seems rightly in order.

If I had to guess, I would say that Hitler has to rank in the upper echelon of notorious evil doers who citizens of countless countries spanning nearly eight decades would love to find in a dark alley and beat the living crap out of.

Maybe he’ll get a statue, or a monument, or a wax likeness in the Rhineland someday, but I doubt any of us will be around to see it!

Indiana Jones 4 = Indy 5 - The Drawn out Nap

Indy is back.  Or he was, a few weeks ago.

Yes, there traipsing across the screen was perhaps the most legendary Lucas/Spielberg creation to ever actually exist. Indiana Jones.  The whip wielding white guy who finds stuff that God tries to hide, then to some degree figures out its secrets, then manages to barely stave off annihilation from supreme forces as countless Nazis, chest thumping cave slaves of Rangoon, and now Soviet scum are obliterated from the face of the earth.

Many movies have been made about people who do things they are not supposed to do: eat raw ferrets, scale skyscrapers while judo fighting manimals, and even dudes who go out in a small boat to chase a 40 foot Great White!  But there’s only one Indy.  Where else can you find a guy who singlehandedly finds the cup that Jesus drank from, the personal keepsake (Ark) of God himself, a gigantic spaceship in the middle of Brazil, and who actual bests Molaram in the ancient Malaysian art of “He who stays on latter no get eaten by Croc beasts”. 

Ok, Ok, I could lavish praise on the guy forever, and we all know his best scene was when he shot that scimitar wielding madman on the streets of Morocco, but Harrison Ford is old now, and after years of having drunken wookie’s roaring in your ear, fledgling jedi’s to look after, runaway trains about to crush your skull, being in Clear and Boring Danger, etc., you’d think Ford would be ready to throw in the towel, or Fedora in this case, and call it a career.  But he’s not, and in a surprise interview only days ago, Ford hinted at the next Indiana Jones film already in production..

“Sure, we’ve done some amazing things, gone some amazing places with these films, and with the release of IJ4, it was great to see the cult following show up en masse, but Lucas really wants to push the envelope now.  There’s always been talk in certain factions that I should have been the one to defeat Vader in the first Star Wars, and that I may have perhaps been the Emperor’s stepson twice removed.  Lucas really wants to pursue this by having Indie accidentally stumble upon another spaceship, which will allow him to travel to the Dagoba system and complete the training that Yoda should have rightfully given him.  We’re thinking of having a mangled Molarab, complete with pseudo-Vader costume, command a  Death “Moon” where he has enslaved Ewoks in search of the orginal copy of the Chronicles of Narnia, the version where Aslan is not a lion, but butt-squirrel.  Really, the possibilities are endless.  Lucas has already gotten the greenlight from producers, though Steven (Spielberg) swore to the almighty Father that he would personally beat the everliving sh#t out of him if he ever tried to produce such a film…”

And there we have it, whip in hand, Ford trotted off into the Hollywood sunset, probably to fight a lion, or tame wild street bums to handle his 401K, but either way, the franchise is back and it’s safe, for now.  So until then,

Dun Duh Dun Dun, Dun Duh Dun (or however the music goes)

We’ll be seeing you Indy, We’ll be seeing you!

Barack Hussein Obama, or Mr. President to You

I am not a political man.  Not in the American, or the real sense anyway.  I have never voted in any presidential election, choosing the lesser of two evils is not my cup of tea.  I have read Plato’s Republic, a Brief History of the World, Aristotle, Machiavelli, etc. and I understand the concept of a goverment, and the notion of rule by the people.  The difference between an oligarchy, a monarchy, and a Democracy.  I realize there are different mindsets as to the effectiveness of rule by a few, an elite “chosen” one, the voice of the people and their representatives, the selected best of a society, etc.

I state all the mumbo jumbo above not to say I know much, but rather that I know some and perchance some is enough to be dangerous.

I know some about Barack Obama.
I know some about Osama bin Laden.
I know some about JFK.

The names of three different figures.  All influential.  All controversial.  All secretive.  All powerful.

Osama may be a distant, disguised, misunderstood and misguided evil all to his own, and JFK’s camelot may have been tainted by a number of things, but what of our potential next President, what of the man of the hour himself?

The world is on the brink, as it seems it always is, yet this time the planet is warmer, gas is running out, SUVs sit at lots, the Axis of evil is shifting.  Trouble will always brew as long as more than one human is still drawing breath in their lungs, and perhaps trouble is brewing now moreso than ever.

I don’t know much what to think of an individual from the assortment of information presented in the media.  I have never met Barack.  I have never met John McCain.  They are men who present some information about their lives and try to hide other things.  They are part of a propaganda machine so mindnumbingly overwhelming that to believe what I see on tv or read on a corporate sponsored website is the truth and nothing but, is well, farcical.

Men who choose to lead.
Who choose to buy into the program.
Sometimes these are the scariest men of all.

I fear Osama bin Laden, but if I met him unarmed, in a situation that presented no danger to either of us, I think it would make for perhaps the most interesting conversation of my life.

In the same sense, seated next to Obama, a man who has had all if not more of the privileges I have had in my life, knowing that he may make countless decisions that directly influence my life, would I be more guarded? 

I believe Osama to some degree is evil, and that in some manner he will be punished, not exalted, for his deeds on earth.  Other than the philandering of Bill Clinton, and the seeming ignorance of Bush, I don’t think I’ve ever feared the advent of one individual becoming president as much as the possibility of Barack as commander in chief.

If he is elected it will change things.  Change can be good.  Change can also be scary.  Also bad.  Obama fits less into my vision of what a president should be than McCain, but then I imagine so many had the same view of JFK back in the day.

We fear what we do not understand.  What seems different than us.  And as I said before, I do not know a lot about the candidates, but I do know some.  And a little bit of knowledge can be dangerous.

Who knows, maybe I’ll even vote this time around, for the lesser of two evils, whoever that may be…

The Hulk - He’s Kinda Big…

Green things are big.
And they can kill.
Dinosaurs taught me this.
Godzilla made it cooler.
Yoda added depth to the fact.
And that cheap slime stuff you can buy that feels like snot but really isn’t, made it all real to me.

I watch a lot of movies, too many in fact.   But it’s ok because I learn things.  I learn things from the intricate yarns materializing before my very eyes.  I learn to fear the color green and anything that has anything to do with it, like brown or camoflague, or leafy things on trees. 

As a child I learned of the Hulk, a large, ass-beating, green semi-human beast.  And for a while, a short while mind you, I respected this tortured manthing.   I felt sympathy for him when I myself became enraged by the actions of others and tried to destroy large objects, lift trees by their roots, and punch through the skulls of chipmunks.  But in time the theme of anger wearied me.  I mean really, the Hulk was strong and fierce, but for sheer entertainment value was he any comparison to Megatron, or Yoda, or Alvin and the Chipmunks?  And who came first anyway, the Hulk or Swamp Thing?  Because that dude on the USA series who morphed into a series of interconnected vines and tubers that could somehow articulate themselves and thus impose their symbiotic will onto any being that wished to do evil, now that was cool.

But the Hulk, well, I don’t know.   The concept works for Marvel, but as far as Green beings that will forever hold a place of absolute and permanent awe in my childlike and feeble mind, I think the Hulk falls short.

Could the Hulk kill a T-Rex?  Probably not.
Could the Hulk kill Godzilla? I’m smelling green eggs and ham on this one.
Could he kill Yoda? Does the phrase “Jedi Mind Trick” mean anything to you?
What about a Stormtrooper?  Maybe a biker scout.
Or a Transformer?  Here again his ass is gonna get handed to him.
You or me?  (Sigh) Yeah, but I mean come on, who couldn’t?

Sadly enough, it seems the last question kind of sums it up.  Is the Hulk a hero? Yes, but a SUPER hero he is not.  No my mild mannered green smash beast of Marvel lore, you do rank high on the carnage scale, but quite the forgettable lad you have proved to be.  Sure, you can mangle men and non-animated machines, but with a little goverment produced Red Bull in a needle, who couldn’t?  So you put your pants back on, Bruce Banner, and don’t quit your day job.  Because if you wander too far frome the microcosm that is your Marvel universe, you’ll find naught but Jedi masters and Biologically altered nuclear fire-breathing death monsters waiting at every street corner from here to Osaka.

The Hulk, yeah, he’s kinda big…

Is Hillary Still Alive?

 

I do not mean this in the political sense.

I do not mean this in the metaphorical sense.

I do mean this, however, in the most honest, inquisitive, postulating sense I could ever mean anything.

 

Is Hillary Clinton still alive?  You see, I have been gazing at the television screen and at the papers and billboard ads at the somehow rejuvenated face of what must be a 70 year old Hillary Clinton, and amidst the bland promises, the blank-eyed stares, the comatose handshakes, and the strained robot-like smile, I began to wonder.  I began to question her very corporeal existence.  Was she breathing?  Was the hair real or a Chinese manufactured super wig, able to manifest itself into countless different articulations of humanoid style simply by voice command?

 

Like most humans, I do not like politics.  In and of themselves they are not evil.  Really, they are not.  And I do believe in competition. People should compete against one another, and sports like Shark Wrestling, Midget Hunting, Eastern Romanian Slave Juggling, and WristBot are some of the greatest inventions of the post Triassic age.  But politics have strayed from the course.  Gone is the golden age of wisened rhetors spouting their knowledge ‘oer the towering tree tops from countless wooden pedestals in town squares across the planet.  Gone is the innocence, the eloquent verbiage, the vitriolic vocal musings of man’s greatest minds.  Gone is the lifeblood from our leaders.

 

Which leads me back to Hillary.  The retread Clinton.  Haven’t we been here before, with young Billy Clinton, a Homer Simpson of the real world, committing D’ohs a plenty and living in the public’s hearts, minds, and angered conscience as much as any president before him.  So why now Hillary, through whom it seems no warm, coursing, life-giving liquid even flows?  Why the corpse?  Why attempt to full a nation with a robotic she-male running for the White House’s gilded grandeur?

 

I don’t think anyone really knows if Hillary is alive.  And win or lose, rise to prominence or fade from the public eye, I don’t think we ever really will.  So like a mangled sloth in a BearDeath contest, I say we throw in the towel on this animatronic humanoid from our checkered past, and find a living candidate on whom to throw our vote away.  And for Hillary I leave this simple tip:

 

Cheat not the ones who thought you grand

With mechanized Medusa hands

Smile not with steel

And metal face

Aged robot not of the human race

Politics have passed you by

In the blink of your robo-eye

Unplug your self

Give up the ghost

Yea, to that I’ll make

My final toast

The Reason I am not President

I sat around thinking today, and suddenly, as if out of the blue, I became infuriated.  Like Napoleon on crack, or Socrates with six Red Bulls, a Ho-Ho and some Wheat Thins, my mind surged and drove me on to delusional thoughts of my own grandiose importance.

 Why am I not president I thought.
Why the H#ll am I not president?
In this age of mediocracy and lies and morons leading our nation down a spiraling path of impending doom, why not me?

Why not me?  The words resonated in my head. I was alive.  The air was crisper.  I heard the faint chorus of the national anthem chiming in my head, I envisioned my own 29 year old frame jaunting across the White House lawn, addressing the nation, ordering nuclear strikes on individuals, assassinating musicians, and so on and so forth.  And for one brief instant, for one nanosecond in time, I believed that yes, I should, nay, it SHALL be I.  I will speak out, my voice must be heard.  Democracy must be put to task, the common man must rise up, the voice of the people no longer silenced.  Freedom shall ring deep within the cheesy fry laden vocal chords that I call my own.  The role of commander in chief will be mine.

This infatuation with absolute power engulfed me.  I was slave to the hypnotic musings of dark underlords everywhere.  Waiting for my chance to pounce on power like a drunken housecat lurks for a small child in a cluttered laundry room.  Yet even as I rose from the tattered couch that held me, a single thought passed through my delusional mind, my past, I had forgotten about my past.  I forgotten everything, every misdeed and misstep that would surely prove a political pratfall were it ever discovered.

Thoughts began to race into my head, memories of deeds I prayed were long since forgotten:

-That time I peed on Billy Jenkin’s blanket and blamed it on the gerbil
-The fudge cake I stole from my sister in third grade
-The mass murders when I was 11
-That mullet I had back in ‘87
-The pot, and coke, and hooch, and jibe, and smack I read about in Rolling Stone
-The failed coup in China during freshman year
-My eggnog problem
-The improper creases in my shirt sleeves
-The time I ran a red like in a Buick
-The squirrel I shot, then buried, then dug up and tried to revive

Thought after horrible thought flooded my momentarily ambitious mind, and much as a chicken snake crashed to the ground though it dreams of flight day after day, my own hallucinatory excapade came to a grinding halt.  Plop!  Went my carcass, back down onto the worn couch that was my abode.

Leader…leader…leader… the word resonated faintly in my mind, slowly passing into oblivion, going, going, and then finally gone.

Shortly thereafter I dozed off I think, and later, when I woke, I found I was hungry so I made a bowl of cereal and ate some cheese, and went on about my day, barely troubled by the recollection of my troubled yet delightful youth, the sole reason that I am not, the President.

Ways to Appear Cool - Public Places

 

It recently dawned on me that the single most important thing in the lives of most people is to look cool.  Not simply, hey I bought some name brand clothes and paid $12 bucks at Great Clips for a new doo, type of a cool.  But really, truly, cool.  Like James Dean mixed with part Sasquatch, part Stalin, cool.

 

Now after I thought about this for a minute, I realized that most people, in their sadly pathetic, chronologically linear existence, will probably never experience any ample amount of time actually feeling this cool about themselves.  Or more importantly, they will never have a large amount of fawning, adoring others believing that they are this cool.

 

So how could I remedy this?

How could I turn Joe Schmoe into Joe Camel?

How indeed…

 

Turns out, there is no surefire way.  But if you’re itching for cool, try the following, no guarantees come with any of this advice, but if you happen to find yourself being hoisted upon the shoulders of mobs of people who a week ago didn’t know you even existed, then grin, and remember where you got your idea, because I’ll be expecting you to pay with your soul later.

 

The List:

 

1.)    Go to a packed bar, put a fake roach up your shirt sleeve, after a few drinks, pretend to discover the roach, scream, fight, fall all over the place, then eventually subdue the rubber fiend, carry it to the bar, apologize to the bartender and buy everyone in the place a round, needless to say, you will be a god!

2.)    Light a fart in the presence of someone’s grandmother.

3.)    Wear a shirt that says – Missing Link

4.)    Pretend to commune with squirrels and do their bidding in public places, when apprehended, make continuous chirping and squawk-like noises, then flee.

5.)    Fight some guy way bigger than you, and beat him.

6.)    Buy shoes that no else has, and tie bees to them.

7.)    Walk backwards for an entire week, when asked why, tell people your past haunts you.

8.)    Buy a pet seal, then take it around with you and club it publicly.

9.)    Scream at babies.

10.)                        Smoke ten cigarettes simultaneously, while jogging through your office.

  

Well, that’s it, call me when you’re famous!

  

AVP Reqiuem - The Lie!

AVP Requiem – The Lie!

 

I saw Aliens.

I saw Predator 2.

I played the game.

I saw Alien Resurrection, kind of.

I remember Arnold’s hair was red in that first Predator movie.

And that the Predator only hunted people who were armed.

I know face huggers take days to gestate inside a person.

And that a machine gun can take down an Alien any day.

And that in the immortal words of the ragamuffin hippie child, Newt, “Mostly they come at night, Mostly…”

 

These are things I know.  Things that because I have seen them, because they appeared in theatrically released films that showed before audiences of millions over the span of two decades, can not be reversed.  Film series must hold to the facts of their predecessors, prequels set the stage for sequels like dessert follows supper.  Nature takes its course.  Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.  Or rather, it WAS proceeding as I had foreseen.

 

I saw AVP 2 yesterday.  Or more accurately, I saw what someone would have me believe was an actual movie about intergalactic human slaughtering star beasts of the carbon based genre.  It was not, though.  It was not in fact a movie at all.  Yes, there were Aliens, and Predators, and a Predalien, but these beasts in an of themselves do not constitute a movie, they do not in fact, constitute anything cognitive at all, except a lie.  A media produced lie intended to suck another $7.75 out of every Joe Schmucklick from St. Louis to East Missoula.

 

In the movie, or should I say farce (Spaceballs held truer to the plot of Star Wars than this film could have ever dreamed), a ship crashes to earth and unleashes Predators and Aliens on a small town in Colorado.  Plotline goes as follows: the people are shocked, the monsters replicate, hell breaks loose, some guy loses his keys, pizza gets delivered, bad guys become good, then bad again, then have their face crushed in with the acid dripping steel teeth of an alien, plans are made to combat the creatures then fail, Aliens spawn and fully mature and appear everywhere in a matter of seconds, a few brave souls survive, fight to some degree, and then the town is nuked and the movie ends. 

 

Alright…

Let me catch my breath for a minute.

 

As the movie ended, I cried.  To myself.  Quietly.  My shoulders slumped and my heart sank, and I felt small and vulnerable and unsure of what the future held.  I cried not from fear, or sadness, but because I had just seen a juxtaposition of moving images that only Larry, rambling drunk of the beaver world, would ever even dare to call coherent.

 

Pushing through that steel door into the cold night of winter, my mind flitted with images of a greater cinematic age.  Of Arnold covered in mud dragging his body out of a lagoon, or of Ripley and her flamethrower torching egg sacks while the Alien queen slowly detached her prostrate hulk of a body.  And sure, there’s no way in hell Danny Glover could have ever really killed a Predator, and Aliens 3 was kind of stupid.  But didn’t those films teach us something?  Didn’t they teach us that heroes and heroines should battle monsters that tend to stay the same from one film to the next.  That storylines can be traced back.  That my memory can’t be sold and erased every time some crackpot producer feels like scaring the American Film audience.

 

I cry sometimes at movies, or farces that posit themselves at movies, and I wonder why all the lemmings around me don’t just get up and walk out when they see their memories being sold to the highest bidder.