Input requested?

I'm high-tailing it out of town Saturday, to the New York, despite/because of various events slash party type things that are happening around here. To avoid them. Plus, if you have the opportunity to visit a city that smells very much like garbage the first weekend of the year that the temperature could creep into the 90s, you gotta do it ho ho!

I am considering going to the Tribeca Film Festival while there, because I like movies, and why not? These are the options of what to see, based on time restraints:Metropia, Freakonomics, Spork, or The Trotsky. Any advice? Thoughts? Concerns? There is everything from animated Swedish sci-fi noir to hermaphroditic outcasts redeemed through booty-poppin' dance moves to the reincarnations of legendary Communist leaders to examinations of corruption in sumo wrestling. Also there's this one that says mature audiences only, which intrigues me of course.

To difficult for me to decide really, I'll probably just bike around Central Park a bunch in leiu of picking one(Vidal Sassoon The Movie?). But hey please offer your opinion on what I should do, so I can dismiss and ridicule it when I get back and put something up here about whatever the hell happens this weekend. This is participatory journalism! Plus if anything goes terribly wrong then I can look at your not-so-sage-in-retrospect advice and pass the buck on consequences of my actions.

Don't listen to me BTW

After I wrote that post below, which may or may not have made salient points about valuing one's entertainment-viewing experience and not wasting time on drivel, I spent much of the afternoon watching this video. It's disturbing, yet I can't look away. Does it really need to be nearly seven minutes long? Probably not! The baby's legs are like rubber!

No accounting for taste

A couple weekends back I was at a collegiate-style "house party" at my house, and someone put on Miley Cyrus' "Party in the USA" and I had no fucking clue what it was. My fellow party-goers incredulity could have been embarrassing (FOR THEM) when I asked "Who sings this song?" but I saved face by mumbling something about not listening to popular music, doing 3 or 4 shots of spiced rum in succession and then going outside and smashing wicker furniture in the street.

Interpersonal skills aside, this little episode made several things clear. Let's not focus on those, and instead get into murky thoughts on high v. low culture. Perhaps they will become less murky via this post? Doubtful. Most of the widely-disseminated shit this days is just that. How much thought does watching 'Dancing with the Stars' require? Seriously, I'm asking. How about a little fucking nuance, Tom Bergeron. With near infinite entertainment options these days, its like important to not waste to much time on brainless observing.



I think this is why a show like Lost has some appeal (you knew I'd get there eventually). A lot of it is obvious and stupid and fun to mock, but at least there are obscure parallels between threads of storyline and whatnot. There is some attempt to examine the big questions -- fate v. free will, good v. evil and the like. Sawyer's pretty much a nihilist, which is cool for him. These are some of the reasons why you can't dismiss arguments that Lost is the best show ever on network television out of hand, even though the argument is provably wrong.

The point I may or may not be making is that culture that makes you think=good, brainless tedium=bad. Talk about burying the lead. And also that what is popular is the tedium, because people are dumb. Oh yeah, this post is really coming together now. Elitism and misanthropy, two personality traits I often hide/express via smashing things. Of course there is also something to be said for simpler pleasures, as long as you only enjoy them ironically and or via schadenfreude or they are made by Pixar.

Things I don't care for/about today

Polls
Televised dancing ability
The word "dramedy"
Hockey
The Pope
Icelandic volcanoes, and Iceland in general probably
Snake hunting
The GUNZ R GAY stencil on the lightpost near my house
Rod Blagojevich
Skateboarders
Danielle Steel
'Spartacus' on StarZ (Oh yeah you heard me Sean)
Those clowns in Washington
Leeks
William T. Vollman in drag
The PDF file format
Making this list
7-Eleven brand premium beer at a below premium price

Mocking Creed is Highly Enjoyable

I've got 6 weeks left in Africa and I have basically written off work at this point. Most of my days involve watching pirated DVDs, reading blogs, going to the casino to play hold em, and keeping boda robert, my motorcycle taxi pre-rolled j delivery man in a job. Today I was treated to a video via Ufford's blog. Enjoy.

Fireball!

As loathsome as I may find this place/the guy who cut me off and nearly killed me this morning, at least isn't Trenton, N.J. Thank you Trentonian, for providing me with a bike-rage assuaging chuckle. I especially enjoy the complete lack of context, unless the "Grade School Sex Shock" somehow caused the fireball? Perhaps turning to page "p3" for more information is implied ... even though there is no indication that isn't just a stray left there by the page designer, from this perspective. Anyway.

It runs in the family

"What have you done for feminism lately?"

-the sister, to some decked-out skank at the bar during a night this past weekend when the word party was used as a verb, repeatedly. I found it wildly hilarious. Take that, you cheese-faced bitch! In any case, my sibling's little bon mot was better received than my loud, way-to-detailed descriptions of Accomplice! probably. I don't really remember.

Backwash

See, now I'm looking at that rant from earlier this week and thinking it is embarassing. Stupid brain, so petulant. As a way of amends making, here is a video of some tubby chick grinding on a guy in a hoverround at a Phillies game.



Well. Clearly its no threesome with two black prostitutes at the same time* but I'm not going to look for anything remotely resembling that on youtube right now. Also. I was looking back in the archives for something good and Phillies related - perhaps you would be interested in it? No? Well fuck you here's stuff anyway.

Odds on World Series MVP. I was right!

This photo was something I made. Shark messiah! I forget why. Probably sad about the 10,000th loss.



Or how about this one, where I learn important life lessons about heckling white baseball players or something. Dammit, where is that one where I took a picture of a retarded Mets fan. Oh here it is.

This is way easier that trying to come up with something new, that's for sure. Plus like half the things on here in the summer months have at least some Phillies non sequitor, ie BAAHHHHHHH JOE BLANTON.

Not to say I don't have any ideas for goats bait, but I'm just lazy/hungover/busy/there's soccer on/some new Netflix just arrived/excuse du jour. Also I need someone to take pictures of me running over my phone with my bike. Using the timer option on the camera is too tricky, I've found. So for now, I'll just quote myself out of context. So meta!

Some "baseball purists" might say that fan interference ruins the sport, that the players on the field should determine the result. Pffft, gay. The real problem with this idea is that some might hesitate to part with their $7 beers. But in reality, isn't $7 a small price to pay for the respect of your peers and the broadcast television audience? If there's any genuine truth in this world, it's that everyone loves someone who disrupts a sporting event. Also if you drink half the beer first it mitigates some of the cost, without significant lessening of the projectiles soaking ability.

*Which I have been informed is every man's dream.

OH FOR FUCKS SAKE

GOD DAMMIT. IF YOU PRINT OUT ONE MORE FUCKING E-MAIL AND HAND IT TO ME I AM GOING TO CRUMPLE IT UP AND CRAM IT RIGHT DOWN YOUR FUCKING THROAT. FOR FUCK'S FUCKING SAKE MAN. THERE IS A THING, IT IS CALLED THE FORWARD BUTTON. IT IS COMMON ON MANY IF NOT ALL E-MAIL PROGRAMS! AND ANOTHER THING OF WHICH YOU ALSO LIKELY ARE NOT AWARE: I WAS SENT THE ORIGINAL E-MAIL. ALTHOUGH I SUPPOSE IF YOU STILL PRINT OUT E-MAILS AND DISTRIBUTE THEM BY HAND YOU CAN'T REALLY BE BLAMED FOR NOT CHECKING WHO WAS CARBON COPIED OR WHO IS LISTED IN THE RECIPIENTS FIELD, YOU DUMB FUCKING LUDDITE BASTARD. OH, WHAT'S THIS? ANOTHER EDITOR JUST FORWARDED ME THE EXACT SAME E-MAIL. IT IS OF CRITICAL IMPORTANCE THAT I DEAL WITH THIS SITUATION POST FUCKING HASTE, APPARENTLY. THIS LITTLE EPISODE COULD VERY WELL BE USED AS AN EXAMPLE OF THE TYPES OF HURDLES A NEWSPAPER COMPANY MUST FACE AS IT ATTEMPTS A TRANSITION TO A FUTURE IN MULTI-MEDIA. DEAR GOD FUCK YOU ALL I HATE MONDAY.

Here's a picture I saw on the internet

From left to right, what the dudes are thinking at this exact moment:

Keep it level.

Go!

Look at that fucking turtle. hehheh.

This is truly the culmination of my life's work.

The turtle is either thinking "Weeee" or "Oh Shit" depending on how it lands.

Cat with hands

Not to be confused with Birds with arms of course. Cats with hands, way worse. And yeah, I linked to the that thread before, probably. Fuck you.

pertinent edit: The video is gone, if you want to see it google cat with hands, it's on youtube

Here is a music video

A blatant ripoff of the Smack My Bitch Up vid, or an homage? I report, you decide. Warning: Don't click that link around authority figures.

Possible prank idea?

I'm not exactly sure how an 'Old Gregg' themed prank would work, but it would certainly include screaming 'I HAVE A MAN-GINA' repeatedly in a public place.

Here's some half-baked philosophizing

"My president is black. My lambo's blue."

I had this idea for a post a couple weeks back, possibly while high or riding my bike (not mutually exclusive). "Things, man. We're surrounded by stuff, and that ends up defining us, man," I said to myself in Tommy Chong's voice. No? Well to put it another way, certain items are what best describes yours truly. If I were to abducted by aliens/Mexicans/both and they forced me via technical interview to tell them what I derive the most enjoyment from, these are the like results, in physical form. Also a possible the answer to the question, "When did you realize you might be a hipster?"



Materialism. The only thing that exists is matter. Value, and values formed, by associating oneself with the doodads in life. There is nothing intrinsically bad about this. Being able to acquire some happiness from stuff around you can be a good, simple way to maintain a basic level of mental alacrity and health. At least that's what I think. As a specific example: After a particularly stressful day work, one where the Internet becomes less of a tool and more gaping maw filled with gears and angry illiterates for teeth, that stuff pictured is a kind of balm, for the brain. Even changing a flat tire on the bike is enough sometimes.

I'm not one of those hippy-dippy fucks that says shit like "Kill your television" or whatever (at least not while sober). I actually like technology most weeks. But that's not to say materialism can't be carried to dangerous (American?) extremes through status as competition, keeping up with the Joneses, and so forth. Which brings us to that quote up top. Really Young Jeezy? Hey, rapping about the first African-American president, and the next thing you need to mention is your exotic Italian car? Perhaps its folly to look to a piece of culture that includes a lyric about emailing Jesus (and forwarding to Moses and CCing Allah. So relevant!) as precedent for an argument.

And once again the attempted shoehorning in of cocaine rap* has driven a post here off into strange territory. My point as it stood was that forming attachments to and using objects in one's life is not necessarily a bad thing, but taken too far and you can end up writing a rap song with unfortunate lyrics. Or to put it into a movie quote ... the things you own end up owning you. Brad Pitt said that, and he was just a figment of Ed Norton's imagination. A life of the mind, so it makes sense that he would have a anti-materialist message.

*Blame gifs of popular rappers, probably

5 years dead

In college we used to joke about the "newly dead" versus the "oldly dead" or "freshly dead" or whatever the hell else adjectives of time we could come up with drunkenly to describe those who had passed on. It would make a good web site, even today. Mitch Hedberg is medium-rarely dead.

From the comments

The goats have been slacking off, having meetings about the future of newspapers (bleak), eating cans and what not. But fortunately for those of you who want a new post, Dan offered this video in the comments and I just got back from happy hour. It deserves a view I think, if only because one of my dreams is someday doing a story about a hooved animal that surfs. You win this round, South America. Also who doesn't like the phrase "peruvian surfer." The list of animals he has seen surf is impressively hilarious.

The existential dilemma of the Cornell bear

Look at that bear. So fucking pissed. A berth in the sweet sixteen is no consolation for him. He's all like "Get this goddamn giant C off of me. I find it constricting!" Or maybe he's like "Ge da fuck away fo ma C! It mines." And in case you couldn't tell in the second scenario the bear has a West Philly accent. Either way the bear is frustrated with it's existence, trapped and/or defending a giant red letter C.

And before you get all up in my face in the comments, like "Dude, why you repping Cornell?" "PAC-10 rulz, Ivy League droolz!" (don't deny these were your initial sentiments) keep in mind that I merely enjoy looking at that bear, and laughing at it because it can't get to me with an albatross of a giant letter around its neck (also: imaginary). A scarlet letter, even. Levels!

Pigeons don't have ears

And its a good thing too! Because "competitive pigeon racing" exists and Mike Tyson is involved in some official capacity via reality show. Fun fact: Tyson got into boxing after fighting to defend his beloved childhood pigeon pets, it has been reported. And now he takes that lifelong love of sky-rats to Animal Planet.

I think if there is one word I could use to describe this ... wait, what is this exactly? Grotesque. I didn't even make up that part about the pigeon-defense spurring Tyson's boxing career. It was from a press release/blog, in which an Animal Planet media rep (who I assume also wrote the release) says things like "Tyson’s passion for his pigeons takes my breath away" and that pigeons are the "king of the bird world" for their trainers. No doubt these pigeon fans will be watching in slow motion.

Call it the "lagniappe effect"

One thing that I think is unique to this internetted age, and possibly also unique to my perspective, is how one will find some weirdly amazing site/blog/content online and check back on it obsessively for a while, look up the creators on facebook, do assorted google image searches if they are female (creepy!) and basically stalk the shit out of them in the form of consuming everything visual and aural and sometimes via touch in as short a time as possible. Then later the engrossment trails off and you forget to look at whatever it was for months. Drug related?

But then later still you remember it suddenly, and its like hey, wonder if that weirdo has any new content. And sometimes they do and you are amused/once again enjoy life for several seconds until the attention drifts elsewhere, like Human Taxidermy Services. Poses? But the point is when you go back and see if there is new content after several months of lying fallow and not looking/forgetting it existed, and there is a whole slew of new things there, its fun and almost like a gift for your mind. And unexpected free gifts are the best.

IMPORTANT BREAKING NEWS THAT AFFECTS MY LIFE AND YOU PROBABLY DON'T CARE ABOUT: The bossman who started following me on the twitter just got shit-canned. This was the reason for its swift abandonment (It had nothing to do with laziness) (at all). Oh happy days are here again. There is much rejoicing and dancing in my brain in the form of an recalled image of an old black-and-white cartoon of a cow. And now I'm doing a jig. Literally jigging right now. Sucks for that guy though, the guy that was canned. Time to pawn the Lincoln Navigator.

Anyway. I wonder if there is some "real world" equivalent (or as the kids say: IRL) to that phenomenon I was describing above where you stumble back upon a thing you once liked but forgot about on the Internet. Except that thing had changed/grown slightly. It is thrilling in a way. Like if you had a girl that you forgot existed and then ran into her in the street decided to meet up for drinks at a dive bar and hooked up but she had a new tattoo or had a tattoo slightly altered? These are the things that run through my head it's sunny out. Tacos! No wait, Victory!

Ben Linus, on the nose

Ominous shrubs. That's what I thought of while watching Lost the other day, during the scene where Linus gets seduced by the sweet ankle restraint removing powers of the smokey/evil Locke. It seems a bit stupid now, in hindsight, probably because it is no longer taco tuesday. The blood should be riddled with both booze and mexican food for optimal Lost viewing, I have found through rigorous research. Double blind studies and so on. I think that focusing on the Locke concealing bushes (I'm just going to call him Locke, fuck it) was due to how stupidly obvious and on the nose everything had seemed to that point. And they looked scary and/or smoke-like? I don't know.

Meanwhile, in an alternate reality: Linus is a history teacher, under the thumb of Principal "Jerkass Newsguy from Die Hard" who makes him monitor detention despite his Ph.D. It's enough to make a pathetically single man just puke! Also there was the actress who played his daughter now as a student who is trying to get into Yale and blah blah blah this plotline was limp, except for the part with the always popular double reverse blackmail from Principal Dickless. It was also indicative of the island's powers, e.g. making Linus's daughter no longer his daughter, genetics be damned.

More entertaining was when Jack went all zen-crazy and was like, "There's no way this old-ass dynamite will blow us up because we are destined to do something in regards to the future and also pertaining to the island and Jacob, most likely. Also the smoke monster." This new faith-inspired yet still recklessly impulsive Jack is intriguing, despite the failure of the explosive suicide pact. He saw his childhood home! I did like the part when Richard fondled those slave chains though. Because it inferred his former slaveness -- which he escaped into another form of slavery, this time to the island, via Jacob touching. This show is mad deep, yo.

now point to where Jacob touched you

But boy did does this show lay it on thick sometimes. Lecturing about Napoleon's exile and quest for power, ON AN ISLAND? Subtle. Locke encouraging Ben to act out and make a play for principal? Ben's infirm dad wondering what would have happened if they had just stuck it out with the old Dharma Initiative? There are levels here people. This thing is mildly similar and comparable to that thing! ESOTERIC.

Lingering questions:
What was the deal with that shovel Linus was using to dig his own grave? Could it be more ineffective?
Will I ever delve into whole the "fate v. free will" theme after it got spiked from this post?
How did Ana Lucia Ilana separate the Jacob-derived ash from the other ash in the firepit? A strainer of some sort?
Where the fuck is Sawyer?