Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Twi-LAME
When I travel, I have a ritual that I almost always perform. I stop at the airport gift/book/junk food/drugstore, and purchase a trashy piece of reading material. This is the only time I allow myself to read crappy paperback bestselling works of fiction. I prefer books with murders, sex, and an utterly predictable mystery to solve, particularly the Mother Goose-inspired titles of James Patterson. I’ve also been known to indulge in some Stephen King and John Grisham from time to time. Sometimes this ritual works out well, and by “well” I mean I enjoy this guilty pleasure, I finish the book right around the time my flight is landing, leave it in the pocket of the seat in front of me with the SkyMall for the next passenger to enjoy, and immediately forget about whatever the cookie cutter plot was. Sometimes it doesn’t work out so well, such as the times that I’ve made the foolish mistake of reading anything by Dan Brown. When I read Angels and Demons, I was literally reminding myself that audibly cursing out a book on a plane surrounded by strangers is probably not a good idea, even if said book is as offensively retarded as Angels and Demons.
When I decided that, in spite of the A&D debacle, I was going to read The Da Vinci Code, it was even worse. I had some hippie computer programmer with a fucking ponytail hitting on me via incomprehensible jokes about coding in Perl and inviting me on sailing trips through the San Juans on one side, and The Da Vinci Code pissing me off with every poorly composed page in front of me. I was only reading The Da Vinci Code because so many people, including ones who normally don’t read these types of books, were talking about this shit like it was the best thing since the Bible, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. As I read, I grew angrier and angrier that The Da Vinci Code, which I rated as the literary equivalent of a frost-bitten Lean Cuisine chicken cordon bleu , was something that a significant number of people had recommended to me as both mindblowingly awesome and educational. I was insulted that Dan Brown conned a lot of otherwise intelligent people into believing that a bland, patronizing, Grail Quest-flavored retelling of a Learning Annex art appreciation course is some sort of phenomenal contribution to the canon of great literature. I thought that after enduring The Da Vinci Code without either falling into some state of catatonia or murdering anyone, I had suffered enough. And then last month, I wandered into the Hudson News at JFK and purchased a book that made The Da Vinci Code look like War and Peace
That book, which may be the single worst book I’ve ever read, is called Twilight.
In case you aren’t a fat, ugly, bespectacled adolescent preteen girl and you didn’t notice hordes of the same swarming your local theater a few months back, you might not know about Twilight. It’s a Mormon vampire fantasy with legions of extremely dedicated tween girl fans. I normally don’t read books for children because I hate kids, and I normally avoid vampire stories, because I don’t care about what annoying goth fruitcakes get up to when they’re not exsanguinating random bitches. I assume shopping for crushed velvet frocks or appropriately spooky wine goblets for their decrepit old mansions and castles, listening to "Toccata and Fugue," and practicing their Transylvanian accents. However, several of my friends liked this trash, so I decided to give it a try. After all, I’d spoken derisively at length about Harry Potter, but after reading it became a serious HP nerd so dedicated that I cut in front of children at the Lincoln Center Barnes and Noble TWICE trying to get my copy of book 7 . Maybe I’d likewise be pleasantly surprised by Twilight. At least I expected that it would at worst be solid trashy plane reading.
WRONG. Twilight sucks. Actually, “sucks” isn’t strong enough. Twilight is so bad that the very word should be stricken from the English language. I’d be happy to exclusively say “dusk” just to ensure that nothing could remind me of the mind-numbingly horrific experience of reading this shitty fucking abomination of a novel. I think I would probably rather read The Notebook fifty times without stopping than Twilight once. I hate Twilight so much that I’m tempted to bring my copy into lab and destroy it with whatever kind of hardcore acid we have in our "Corrosives" cabinet. Actually, I’d like to piss on Twilight before burning it and destroying the ashes with acid. In fact, I think the actual paper the book is printed on is begging me to do so. The book is that fucking appallingly terrible.
For starters, the story’s narrator, the protagonist Bella, is the dumbest bitch I’ve ever encountered in the world of fiction, and that includes legendary dumb bitches like Daisy from The Great Gatsby. Daisy looks like a damn rocket scientist next to this hooker. Bella spends the entire book pining away after Edward, her obnoxious vampire boyfriend. In fact, Bella seems to have no interest in anything whatsoever besides obsessing over Edward. Occasionally she takes a break from figuring out how to better craft her entire reason for living around her statuesque undead paramour to do some domestic chores around the house, but that's about it. What kind of a personality devoid loser does fucking dishes and laundry for fun when she's not devoting herself slavishly to some dumbass guy? Not any slag I would be rolling with. The minute Edward and all the other devastatingly sexy vampires roll onto the scene, I was hoping one of them would bite the fuck out of Bella and call it a day, because I was so sick of reading Bella's utterly idiotic musings like "there's no way this godlike creature could be meant for me", "I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him," and (my favorite) "you're exactly my brand of heroin." Oh, bitch, please. Save it for some bad poetry in your diary and get a life, and that's real talk.
When I decided that, in spite of the A&D debacle, I was going to read The Da Vinci Code, it was even worse. I had some hippie computer programmer with a fucking ponytail hitting on me via incomprehensible jokes about coding in Perl and inviting me on sailing trips through the San Juans on one side, and The Da Vinci Code pissing me off with every poorly composed page in front of me. I was only reading The Da Vinci Code because so many people, including ones who normally don’t read these types of books, were talking about this shit like it was the best thing since the Bible, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. As I read, I grew angrier and angrier that The Da Vinci Code, which I rated as the literary equivalent of a frost-bitten Lean Cuisine chicken cordon bleu , was something that a significant number of people had recommended to me as both mindblowingly awesome and educational. I was insulted that Dan Brown conned a lot of otherwise intelligent people into believing that a bland, patronizing, Grail Quest-flavored retelling of a Learning Annex art appreciation course is some sort of phenomenal contribution to the canon of great literature. I thought that after enduring The Da Vinci Code without either falling into some state of catatonia or murdering anyone, I had suffered enough. And then last month, I wandered into the Hudson News at JFK and purchased a book that made The Da Vinci Code look like War and Peace
That book, which may be the single worst book I’ve ever read, is called Twilight.
WRONG. Twilight sucks. Actually, “sucks” isn’t strong enough. Twilight is so bad that the very word should be stricken from the English language. I’d be happy to exclusively say “dusk” just to ensure that nothing could remind me of the mind-numbingly horrific experience of reading this shitty fucking abomination of a novel. I think I would probably rather read The Notebook fifty times without stopping than Twilight once. I hate Twilight so much that I’m tempted to bring my copy into lab and destroy it with whatever kind of hardcore acid we have in our "Corrosives" cabinet. Actually, I’d like to piss on Twilight before burning it and destroying the ashes with acid. In fact, I think the actual paper the book is printed on is begging me to do so. The book is that fucking appallingly terrible.
For starters, the story’s narrator, the protagonist Bella, is the dumbest bitch I’ve ever encountered in the world of fiction, and that includes legendary dumb bitches like Daisy from The Great Gatsby. Daisy looks like a damn rocket scientist next to this hooker. Bella spends the entire book pining away after Edward, her obnoxious vampire boyfriend. In fact, Bella seems to have no interest in anything whatsoever besides obsessing over Edward. Occasionally she takes a break from figuring out how to better craft her entire reason for living around her statuesque undead paramour to do some domestic chores around the house, but that's about it. What kind of a personality devoid loser does fucking dishes and laundry for fun when she's not devoting herself slavishly to some dumbass guy? Not any slag I would be rolling with. The minute Edward and all the other devastatingly sexy vampires roll onto the scene, I was hoping one of them would bite the fuck out of Bella and call it a day, because I was so sick of reading Bella's utterly idiotic musings like "there's no way this godlike creature could be meant for me", "I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him," and (my favorite) "you're exactly my brand of heroin." Oh, bitch, please. Save it for some bad poetry in your diary and get a life, and that's real talk.
The only sensible thing Bella does in the entire book is show disdain for Forks, Washington, where most of the action takes place. I have been to Forks on several occasions, and if given a choice between eternity there or in Hell, I'd strongly consider Hell. It's a tiny, piece of trash town with absolutely no redeeming qualities, which is apparently why domesticated (ie: non-people-eating) vampires like living there. There's not a lot of sun (which just causes the vampires to glitter like a bunch of really attractive disco balls, but it's apparently really obvious and distracting) and the place is populated exclusively with ignorant hicks, so it's clearly a great place for a clan of statuesque Volvo-driving (seriously) Mormon vampires to blend in. Just as a further indication of the type of people living in Forks, the teenagers in the book all take time out from their parents by cruising over to La Push. My family spent a couple summer vacations salmon fishing at this fetid shitshow of a Quileute reservation town, and those were the crappiest summer vacations ever. La Push was always cold, I invariably got seasick from being on the north Pacific in my uncle's 20-foot Bayliner, and the beach was covered with broken glass, because the kids in La Push do what every other bored-ass teenager from a crappy economically depressed town: drink cooking wine stolen from the coolers outside tourist fishermen's RVs and smash the bottles on the beach. This happened like four times before it occured to my aunt to keep her salmon poaching-grade chardonnay inside the trailer...and yes, note that we were the "rich," faincy out-of-towners and we were worried about losing four jugs of Gallo from outside the RV, which should give you an idea of how classy the denizens of La Push actually are. However, that's not the way the kids roll in Twilight. They go to the beach and there isn't a drop of liquor anywhere in sight. They build beach fires and look at tide pools. Those aren't the drunken Forksian/La Push hicks I remember. UNREALISTIC. FAIL, STEPHENIE MEYER, FAIL!
Apart from the lame setting and lead characters, Twilight may actually be one of the most poorly written, relentlessly cheesy novels I've ever read. Half the fucking book is this bitch Bella gushing about how incomparably gorgeous her vampire boyfriend is, and how she literally faints when he pecks her on the cheek. The rest is them exchanging lame dialogue while they smell each other because that's about as hot and heavy as they can get. Apparently, though he is a boring Volvo-driving vampire who only eats random wild animals, making out too passionately with Bella will cause him to lose control and eat her. Clumsy teenage boning is thus definitely out of the question. So instead they just snuggle and sniff each other and have lame exchanges like this:
I could feel his cool breath on my neck, feel his nose sliding along my jaw, inhaling."I thought you were desensitized.""Just because I'm resisting the wine doesn't mean I can't appreciate the bouquet," he whispered. "You have a very floral smell, like lavender...or freesia," he noted. "It's mouthwatering."
Seriously, dumb vampire, that is not the smell of your fucking destiny. It's the smell of a $7.99 bottle of Bath and Body Works lotion. Get with the century, loser. And as long as Edward is learning about modern customs, he might read up on how the women of the present regard STALKING. This moron vampire actually tells stupid-ass Bella that he fucking hangs out in a tree and watches her sleep every night. Instead of being creeped out and ordering him the hell out of her life, Bella, again demonstrating her total and utter lack of any sense or intelligence whatsoever, thinks it's fucking cute and endearing after he assures her that she repeats an endless litany of "Edward" in her sleep. Then again, I would expect no less from a bitch so completely clueless she refers to NyQuil as "gratuitous drug use" and thinks exchanging body odor with her man is hot. Granted, I like a man to be on top of his hygiene and smell nice, but at the end of the day I want a dude who I can blow without him either whining about how dangerous he is or trying to exsanguinate me. That's something Edward can fucking work on, and it shouldn't be THAT hard if he's so "godlike."
I could probably rage on about this abortion of a novel for hours, but I have to get back to work on my thesis, and frankly, I'm not sure the internets are big enough to contain all my anti-Twilight hatred. I'll just try to work on getting my breathing and heart rate under control, and leave you with a reminder that all the bitches who love this trash look like this:
Before you start criticizing me for knocking on these children, let me remind you all that I am a huge nerd. I can tell you that Gandalf's sword is named Glamdring. I know Hermione Granger's middle name. I can tell you who Cthulhu is and that in his house of R'lyeh he waits dreaming. And I've been remiss with the posts lately because I'm on the home stretch doctorate in science. My nerdiness is well-established, and is in fact my profession. However, I am like the fucking captain of the cheerleading squad in comparison to these fugly, custom-shirt-crafting losers. Even when I was a poetry-writing, morbidly depressed, Sylvia Plath-reading baby dyke wearing hideous Eddie Bauer fleece pullovers and ill-fitting Salvation Army khakis I was like a prom queen compared to these bitches in terms of our respective spots on the social hierarchy. These are the bottom of the high school barrel. These are the kids who lettered in band and got jackets made anyway. They were the kids who you thought you would rather be stretched on the rack than kiss. The ones who had bad skin and smelled weird and still wore stirrup stretch pants long after the early 90s were over. They are the ones who read Twilight. Don't be one of them! Leave sexless Mormon vampire romance novels on the shelf (or better yet, the garbage can) where they belong!
Labels: destroy all children, epic geekery, librophilia, nerd alert, pro-apocalyptic zeitgeist, ranting, retard rage, scathing indictments
Saturday, May 03, 2008
The Call of CthONGAY!
I've gotten a few e-mails, comments, and the like asserting that my work in lab is "Lovecraftian." Since–ahem–I am a nerd, I know what this means, and I just don't think it's true. I'm not overwhelmingly ashamed to admit that I've read a few of the short stories penned by one Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and I guess they're okay. Most of them are about someone going nuts because they find out they are either related to or get a glimpse of these gross gods (they all mostly look like slugs, salamanders, octopi, lizards, roaches, puddles of goop, or some combination thereof) from other planets and dimensions. Granted, H.P. writes in a style as old-fashioned and pretentious as you would expect from an overcompensating xenophobe closet homo, and I get a little tired of the whole insanity-is-the-price-of-enlightenment theme, but if not for H.P. Lovecraft, we wouldn't be able to reliably buy Stephen King novels at any airport gift shop or laugh at Tom Cruise for being a dumb alien-worshiping Scientologist. So, kudos to H.P. Lovecraft.
However, while dripping cold virus into a mouse's nose, then gassing said mouse, cutting it up, and making smoothies out of its lungs sounds gross to the layperson, these techniques are pretty routine. Lots of people do similar stuff in the lab, and (with a few exceptions) their sanity remains intact. The only way my thesis project is going to drive me crazy is via boredom or frustration, not my stumbling upon its bizarre connection to slimy space deities. Hopefully nothing I do has anything to do with space-type SciFi nerd stuff. It's not like I'm one of these geeks who watches "Battlestar Galactica" or anything. Okay, MAYBE someone broke into my apartment and held my eyes open and forced me to watch last night's new episode with a gun to my head, but I was thinking about how I'm a badass who doesn't watch stuff like that EVER and not about how the crew of Lt. Kara "Starbuck" Thrace's Earth-seeking garbage ship or whatever were planning a mutiny. I mean, I don't know how I just wrote that...it just slipped out. It was an accident, I tell you, an accident! I DON'T watch "Battlestar Galactica" and I'm amazed you would think such a thing. ANYWAY! Back to H.P. Lovecraft and my thesis project. Talking about microbiology and the Cthulhu Mythos is totally going to make me seem substantially less dorky.
Per Lovecraft: Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come - but I must not and cannot think!
Truly, the thought of Cthulhu rising up and grossing everyone out to death is a terrible one. Too bad Chingy! is already extant and doing just that. Chingy! may not telepathically communicate with the strange cults that secretly worship him to encourage his rising, but he has a sect of devoted followers nonetheless. As Chingy!'s human minder, I have been cursed with the status of high priestess in this cult, and let me say that only doom and sorrow awaits humanity upon spending some time with Chingy!, his bad attitude, and the ungodly smells that he produces. The idea of Chingy! waking up and taking on the world Cthulhu style is a grim one, indeed.
Per Lovecraft: from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters: "Cthulhu fhtagn."
I got to thinking about whether there is anything in my life that could qualify as "Lovecraftian," and frankly, only one thing springs to mind. This thing is disgusting, a source of unearthly horror and nastiness, and routinely drives me mad:
Yes, Lovecraftian horror at its most disgusting is alive and well in the form of Chingy! He is like Lovecraft's space god head-bitch-in-charge Cthulhu, who is basically a telepathic undersea Kraken with a lot of scales and tentacles destined to bring apocalypse with his awakening and subsequent move to dry land, in many ways. Observe the striking comparisons:
Chingy!
Cthulhu
Still not convinced? I'll just break out my analytical skills then.
1. Chingy! and Cthulhu spend most of their time asleep
Per Lovecraft: In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.
R'lyeh is where Cthulhu lives under the sea, and while Chingy! has never been to Lovecraft's version of Atlantis, he assuredly spends 99.99999% of his time "dreaming." And snoring. I assume that with all those tentacles on his face, Cthulhu is a snorer.
2. They're both disgusting, in manner and appearance.
Per Lovecraft: a sort of monster...of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings.
While Chingy! doesn't have scales or tentacles, and the thought of him possessing any kind of flight machinery is laughable given his sheer massiveness, but certainly his head could be described as "pulpy" and his body "grotesque."
3. Activity on either Cthulhu or Chingy!'s part yields tragic consequences for any humankind caught in the crossfire
Per Lovecraft: Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come - but I must not and cannot think!
Truly, the thought of Cthulhu rising up and grossing everyone out to death is a terrible one. Too bad Chingy! is already extant and doing just that. Chingy! may not telepathically communicate with the strange cults that secretly worship him to encourage his rising, but he has a sect of devoted followers nonetheless. As Chingy!'s human minder, I have been cursed with the status of high priestess in this cult, and let me say that only doom and sorrow awaits humanity upon spending some time with Chingy!, his bad attitude, and the ungodly smells that he produces. The idea of Chingy! waking up and taking on the world Cthulhu style is a grim one, indeed.
4. Both emit revolting noises that defy conventional spelling.
Per Lovecraft: from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters: "Cthulhu fhtagn."
As I'm writing this, Chingy! is fast asleep on one of his many personal sofas (thanks to his devoted cult/dogsitters, he has like three personal beds to choose from, as well as a neverending selection of carob-chip and sandwich cookies from the Petco treat bar), and I'm pretty sure he's making a sound that could be characterized as "Cthulhu fhtagn." Either that, or "Cthulhu fhtagn" is an alternate spelling of CHONGAY CHONG!
5. Both emit revolting smells in addition to the aforementioned revolting noises.
Per Lovecraft: The odour rising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight...There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler could not put on paper.
A thousand opened graves? More like ONE opened pug's mouth first thing in the morning. And don't get me started on the smells Chingy! can produce not associated with his breath. They are so disgusting as to defy prosaic description, although I would wager that "intolerable" and "slushy nastiness" give you an idea of what Chingy! is capable of.
6. The reality of Chingy! and Cthulhu are both capable of inducing insanity
Per Lovecraft: this test of my own sanity, wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me.
While Chingy! hasn't managed to fully ruin my appreciation for spring skies or summer flowers, he assuredly has driven me to the edge of reason with his tendencies to eat shit (literally), ejaculate on my apartment floor (thus prompting his neutering), and his love for destroying all of my prized personal possessions. If this dog isn't a test of my own sanity, I don't know what is.
Why Chingy! doesn't have a place in Lovecraft's pantheon of revolting gods, I'll never know. I guess not even Lovecraft's twisted mind could conceive of something so frightening and abhorrent as this beastly dog. Either that, or it was the one vision that finally did H.P. in before he could write a heavy-handed story about it.
CHONGAY CHONG, H.P. Lovecraft!
Labels: CHONGAY CHONG, doggity style, epic geekery, gross, librophilia, nerd alert
Monday, October 15, 2007
Daily Dude I Want to Hit: Cate Blanchett
DOB: May 14, 1969
Occupation: thespian, specializing in portraying virgin and/or elven queens
Hometown: Ivanhoe, Australia
Current residence: Sydney, Australia
Why I Want to Hit that Hotness: I really didn't pay much heed to poor critical reviews when I decided last week that seeing Elizabeth: The Golden Age on opening night was absolutely imperative. Any movie that involves Clive Owen looking all hot and unshaven, the epic struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism that had Europe all in a tizzy during the 16th century, naval battles, and fiery bitches riding around in full armor shouting things like, "Let them come with the armies of hell! They shall not pass!" pretty much falls into my must-see-ASAP category. So I went to see this movie with KatieScarlett on Friday night.
While the original Elizabeth was better, and while approximately 100% of the romantic scenes should have been replaced with scenes featuring Clive Owen sending kamikaze flame ships into the Spanish armada, I have to say that Cate Blanchett is the dope shit when it comes to acting with queenly authority. She's very good at marching around in crazy outfits and even crazier wigs with a regal bearing, and I would hate to be anyone incurring her displeasure. Being that I was PMSing, extremely sleep-deprived, unusually stressed, and hadn't had sex in over a week when I watched this movie, I was fully relating to Elizabeth's problems: overworked, underappreciated, and sexually frustrated. At one point I was getting a little misty-eyed because I could relate so seriously to Cate Blanchett's portrayal of the terrible burden borne by powerful, independent, intimidating, sexually frustrated women whose bitchy Catholic cousins are trying to assassinate them. Okay, none of my cousins have ever tried to pull a Mary Stuart and do me in, nor have I ever worried about charging them with treason and beheading them at the Tower of London, but still. It's as tough being a woman with a commanding presence now as it was in the 16th century. Dudes are threatened by you and thus it makes getting reliable, quality ass more difficult, and you end up with all sorts of responsibilities, and you have to look all hot and sexy while doing all of it. It can be completely exhausting. Then, just when you think that you chopped off your would-be throne-usurping cousin's head and everything is going to be back to normal, some effeminate, tyrannical religious zealot in Spain sends his army to blow your heretical Protestant asses into oblivion.
Cate Blanchett does a good job of getting her fucking act together and making lots of rousing speeches, reminding me that when faced with grave adversity, the true bitches don't run away with their tails between their legs. They execute their enemies, put on fly wigs, stand up straight, and rally their fighting seamen with oratory along the lines of, "Englishmen! That fleet bears in its bowels the horrors of the Inquisition! Stand and fight!" Then they hand the Spaniards a humiliating defeat, break out the mead and the mutton, and party like a rock star while establishing England as the world's greatest naval superpower for the next two centuries. That's some fierceness right there.
Anyway, Elizabeth: The Golden Age may not have achieved its potential for historical epic awesomeness, but I could still watch Cate Blanchett march around getting her order-barking on and having implied lesbian tension with her slutty lady-in-waiting Bess all day long. That is the royal hotness.
Labels: Daily Dude I Want to Hit, epic geekery, History Channel, movies
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Mischief managed
Harry Potter dies!
JUST KIDDING. I'm not telling if he does or doesn't. I've forbidden myself from discussing any spoilers from the book for at least a week, since not everyone is as fast a reader as myself, nor is everyone geeky enough to set aside an entire day and a half to read all 759 glorious pages of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. After a week, I'm going to talk about it to my heart's content, because if you can't get it all down in that time, then you're not a big enough HP fan to warrant protection from spoilers. I'm not going to be that asshole who was probably running around outside the bookstore at midnight in June 2005 hollering, "Snape kills Dumbledore! Snape kills Dumbledore!," but if your number one priority isn't reading HP and the DH within a week, then you don't care enough to have it seriously ruined for you once I start bragging about how many of predictions were correct (and a lot of them were, right down to Neville Longbottom's deft use of a Venemous Tentacula in battle).
From my judgment, most of New York City now has this book in its possession. On Friday night, I got together with FalloniusMonk and JerseyGirl to pre-funk for our trip to the Lincoln Center Barnes and Noble. We knew this was going to be crazy, so we reserved some books ahead of time. JerseyGirl lives right by there, so she stopped by early in the evening to check out the wristband situation, and was told that we would have a separate line which would expedite our getting our hands on the book. We decided not to show up until 12:10, because we were drinking and had to finish our beers.
Once we got there, where exactly our special reserved book VIP line began was unclear. All we could see was a gigantic line wrapping all the way around the block. We all found an employee in a robe outside who gave us wristbands and directed us to the "shorter" reserved line. I realized quickly that this reserved line was not remotely short, and I was already bored. So first, we cut in front of this kid who was the Muggle equivalent of the teenage Severus Snape: greasy, long-haired, and full of smoldering vitriol. He looked a lot like this douchebag:
Muggle Snivellus tried to get our attention to bitch at us with a feeble but snotty "excuse me." We ignored him. He persisted, "EXCUSE ME, there's a line."
"Yeah, and we just got in it," I replied, giving him a challenging look. Fifteen-year-old loser getting his Harry Potter by himself versus drunken Razzy crossing her arms and exuding I-dare-you-to-fuck-with-me,-son bitchy vibes isn't even a contest, so he just started grumbling to himself. However, I realized that our position in the line was still going to get us checking out our books by around 2:30 a.m. More cutting in line was necessary.
I have used the "pretend to be confused and rightfully deserving of your illicitly-acquried spot in line" strategy of line-cutting to great effect in New York. It was taught to me by my friend Dulap Vara at a Giants game one time, when I was too drunk to wait in the long line for buses from the Meadowlands back to Port Authority. "Let's just go blend into the front of the line as they're getting on the bus. That's how we do it in India," he said. We just walked inconspicuously to the front of the line and merged into the crowd boarding the next bus, and were back at Port Authority in 20 minutes. India style works like a charm.
I've done this several other times, like when I went to see Capote and when I didn't want to get stuck in the back of St. Patrick's on Easter at mass one year, and it works beautifully. People will usually notice and get pissed about your cutting, but if you just look at them like THEY'RE crazy and you have every right to be there, the worst that will happen is they'll grumble about it to their friends. They never actually get you thrown out of line, because most people are pussies who don't like confrontation. If you have the "What, motherfucker?" attitude necessary to pull it off, this cutting technique has a very high success rate. Also, when there are large crowds, you can easily escape anyone who is trying to get you in trouble for line-cutting by blending in with the mob. It's so effective.
So our line was at the point where it wrapped around the front of the line leading into the store. The store doorman was about to usher in a new flock of people at the front of the line, and I seized the opportunity. "Fortune favors the bold," I declared (yes, that's the stupid tagline from the shitshow of a movie known as Alexander, but it has a nice ring to it and in this situation it was an appropriate rallying cry), and led my posse alongside the line going into the store, only to merge into it at the very front. A group of teenagers in full Gryffindor regalia behind us began muttering mutinously and I said loudly, "Hey guys, I'm pretty sure we're still in the same line we've been waiting in all night, right? I think this is the line for the people with bracelets." The doorman nodded his assent, and I gave myself a mental high-five for once again orchestrating a successful India style cutting strategy.
"Okay, go!" the doorman said. "Go! Go! GO!" He ushered us in, and the teenagers behind us stopped caring as we were encouraged to not walk but RUN down a literal red carpet, complete with fake paparazzi snapping pictures and people cheering us on to "GO BUY THAT BOOK! GET IT NOW! GO!!!!!!!! YES! HARRY POTTER! GO! GO! GET IT!" I was a little dazed. I bought my copy and was out in less than five minutes. Even FalloniusMonk's order was quickly handled, and she bought a copy for everyone she knew and literally left that place with two gigantically heavy bags full of HP and the DH.
Since we saved so much time at the bookstore getting our copies, FalloniusMonk, JerseyGirl, and myself decided to wait just a little bit to start reading them, and bought a few six-packs instead. We should have all started reading because we're all big Harry Potter dorks. However, because we're also badass line-cutting rockstars who trimmed two hours of bored waiting off our Harry Potter-acquiring schedule, we drank and then went out for cheeseburgers. We are the coolest Harry Potter nerds ever.
From my judgment, most of New York City now has this book in its possession. On Friday night, I got together with FalloniusMonk and JerseyGirl to pre-funk for our trip to the Lincoln Center Barnes and Noble. We knew this was going to be crazy, so we reserved some books ahead of time. JerseyGirl lives right by there, so she stopped by early in the evening to check out the wristband situation, and was told that we would have a separate line which would expedite our getting our hands on the book. We decided not to show up until 12:10, because we were drinking and had to finish our beers.
Once we got there, where exactly our special reserved book VIP line began was unclear. All we could see was a gigantic line wrapping all the way around the block. We all found an employee in a robe outside who gave us wristbands and directed us to the "shorter" reserved line. I realized quickly that this reserved line was not remotely short, and I was already bored. So first, we cut in front of this kid who was the Muggle equivalent of the teenage Severus Snape: greasy, long-haired, and full of smoldering vitriol. He looked a lot like this douchebag:
Muggle Snivellus tried to get our attention to bitch at us with a feeble but snotty "excuse me." We ignored him. He persisted, "EXCUSE ME, there's a line."
"Yeah, and we just got in it," I replied, giving him a challenging look. Fifteen-year-old loser getting his Harry Potter by himself versus drunken Razzy crossing her arms and exuding I-dare-you-to-fuck-with-me,-son bitchy vibes isn't even a contest, so he just started grumbling to himself. However, I realized that our position in the line was still going to get us checking out our books by around 2:30 a.m. More cutting in line was necessary.
I have used the "pretend to be confused and rightfully deserving of your illicitly-acquried spot in line" strategy of line-cutting to great effect in New York. It was taught to me by my friend Dulap Vara at a Giants game one time, when I was too drunk to wait in the long line for buses from the Meadowlands back to Port Authority. "Let's just go blend into the front of the line as they're getting on the bus. That's how we do it in India," he said. We just walked inconspicuously to the front of the line and merged into the crowd boarding the next bus, and were back at Port Authority in 20 minutes. India style works like a charm.
I've done this several other times, like when I went to see Capote and when I didn't want to get stuck in the back of St. Patrick's on Easter at mass one year, and it works beautifully. People will usually notice and get pissed about your cutting, but if you just look at them like THEY'RE crazy and you have every right to be there, the worst that will happen is they'll grumble about it to their friends. They never actually get you thrown out of line, because most people are pussies who don't like confrontation. If you have the "What, motherfucker?" attitude necessary to pull it off, this cutting technique has a very high success rate. Also, when there are large crowds, you can easily escape anyone who is trying to get you in trouble for line-cutting by blending in with the mob. It's so effective.
So our line was at the point where it wrapped around the front of the line leading into the store. The store doorman was about to usher in a new flock of people at the front of the line, and I seized the opportunity. "Fortune favors the bold," I declared (yes, that's the stupid tagline from the shitshow of a movie known as Alexander, but it has a nice ring to it and in this situation it was an appropriate rallying cry), and led my posse alongside the line going into the store, only to merge into it at the very front. A group of teenagers in full Gryffindor regalia behind us began muttering mutinously and I said loudly, "Hey guys, I'm pretty sure we're still in the same line we've been waiting in all night, right? I think this is the line for the people with bracelets." The doorman nodded his assent, and I gave myself a mental high-five for once again orchestrating a successful India style cutting strategy.
"Okay, go!" the doorman said. "Go! Go! GO!" He ushered us in, and the teenagers behind us stopped caring as we were encouraged to not walk but RUN down a literal red carpet, complete with fake paparazzi snapping pictures and people cheering us on to "GO BUY THAT BOOK! GET IT NOW! GO!!!!!!!! YES! HARRY POTTER! GO! GO! GET IT!" I was a little dazed. I bought my copy and was out in less than five minutes. Even FalloniusMonk's order was quickly handled, and she bought a copy for everyone she knew and literally left that place with two gigantically heavy bags full of HP and the DH.
Since we saved so much time at the bookstore getting our copies, FalloniusMonk, JerseyGirl, and myself decided to wait just a little bit to start reading them, and bought a few six-packs instead. We should have all started reading because we're all big Harry Potter dorks. However, because we're also badass line-cutting rockstars who trimmed two hours of bored waiting off our Harry Potter-acquiring schedule, we drank and then went out for cheeseburgers. We are the coolest Harry Potter nerds ever.
Labels: epic geekery, FalloniusMonk, Harry Potter, JerseyGirl, librophilia, nerd alert
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Grandpa Ben would be proud
My Aunt Jesus once told me that my Grandpa Ben was rolling over in his grave in consternation about the content of my website. I have always doubted that, considering not even the cabalistic intrigue of the "Unsolved Mysteries" episode he was watching in his girlfriend's Puyallup double-wide on the night his soul journeyed up to Valhalla (or wherever the guys go who happen to die in a La-Z-Boy listening to the soothing gravelly sound of Robert Stack's voice rather than by being slain in glory on the battlefield) was sufficient to revive him. I think, though, that if he were to be resurrected and shown how to use the internet (which didn't exist when he died in 1991, and his ass did NOT use Prodigy) and waited for him to read my website through his one good eye, he'd at least be proud of my reminding the world of this unimpeachable fact:
NORWEGIANS HAVE BEEN KICKING DANISH ASS SINCE THE 11TH CENTURY AND CONTINUE TO DO SO TODAY!
As usual, something's rotten in the state of Denmark, or in this case, on a boat produced in the state of Denmark. Apparently the Sea Stallion, this replica Viking ship sailing from Denmark to Scotland to study "the seamanship of early Norsemen" got stalled in the North Sea due to calm weather conditions. Presumably the seamanship of early Norsemen was superior to the seamanship of extant Norsemen, especially Danish museum curators and history professors on summer break from the University of Copenhagen. They actually quit because of calm seas. I had no idea that Horse Latitudes existed up there, but apparently on either side of the equator isn't the only place you can experience a ship-stopping lack of wind. Since they were a bunch of unseaworthy wimps, the Danes running things decided to call for a tow to Scotland rather than just crack open a seal bladder full of gammeldansk and pass the time reading some Hans Christian Andersen or something while they waited for the breeze to pick up. I mean, jeez, it probably would have only taken a few days. It's not like they were subsisting on weevils and getting scorbutic.
In addition to their intolerance for pleasant, leisurely sailing conditions and their distaste for doing any actual rowing, Captain Carsten Fvid said that supposedly a couple sissy boys on the ship were also cold. Welcome to Scand-rock, bitches! Did you think you were going on a breadfruit mission to Tahiti or something and forget your Helly Hansen parkas? Some Vikings you are! Throw on a damn reindeer skin, nut up, and quit your bitching, you pussies! If the toughness of your modern sailors is any indication, it's no wonder Grendel busted into your Danish mead hall and went bowling with your ancestors' decapitated skulls without breaking a sweat. You all would have been wiped out if Beowulf didn't show up in the nick of time to save you with some clutch Goth barbarian asskickery.
This kind of quitting on a calm sea bullshit never would happen if Sig "The Hotness" Hansen was skippering the Sea Stallion instead of this Carsten Fvid jackass:
Unlike Carsten "The Boy Who Cried Hypothermia" Fvig, Sig wouldn't have allowed a little lack of wind or some nipply temperatures stop him from barking at the crew to man the oars and row that shit all the way to the North Pole. He'd just stoically zip up his Northwestern jacket and fire up a Marlboro with a contemptuous smirk on his face, holler at the crew to put their backs into it, and try to plot a course that would enable him to swing by the Bering Sea and fill the Sea Stallion's tanks with Red Gold. In fact, he probably wouldn't even have to get the crybaby Danish crew to row. Sig's presence probably generates such blistering heat that a hurricane would spontaneously form and provide the much-needed wind to blow him all the way to New York, much less Scotland. That's how Norwegian seamen do it. Leif Erikson (who was also Norwegian in spite of being born in Iceland...his father was Erik the Red, a Norwegian explorer, outlaw, and all around barbarian pimp who is singlehandedly credited with providing the genetic basis for the redheaded phenotype commonly observed in Ireland) did just that when he discovered North America and settled there with his hot wife Thorgunna around the time the original Sea Stallion was sinking to the bottom of the fjord at Roskilde in the mid 10-00's. Why did the Sea Stallion sink, you ask? Because the pussified Danes at the helm couldn't hold off a fierce fleet of bloodthirsty Norwegians, that's why! They didn't have cannons or gunpowder then, but I'm sure the turn-of-the-millenium Norwegian navy managed to find an effective way for bringing the hammer of Thor down upon those pathetic second-class Vikings. When will the History Channel make an hour-long "Viking Tech" show so that I can watch this sublime moment in my cultural history reenacted in low-budget CGI?
My grandfather might not be proud of my many drunken or depraved exploits (although he'd probably understand; when he died we took a stack of nudey mags as tall as the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree out of his house), but he'd be beaming with nationalistic pride at my Norwegian smack talking. Grandpa Ben had a clever bit of verse for belittling all of his Scandinavian rivals, such as "ten thousand Swedes ran through the weeds, chased by one Norwegian." I can't remember what he said about those fruitcakes from Denmark, but I know that he'd like ALL of what I just said. It would almost be enough to mitigate the sting of the Danes' electing a Prime Minister named Rasmussen (a move I'm pretty sure the Danish people conspired as a nation to make solely to besmirch my family name and piss me off). Here's to you, Grandpa Ben! If your surviving heirs hadn't thrown away your (completely rank from ten years of constant wear) Sons of Norway baseball cap after you passed on to the halls of Odin, I'd put it on and tip it to pay honor to our people's mighty history.
SKOAL! Stolt a bli Norsk!
NORWEGIANS HAVE BEEN KICKING DANISH ASS SINCE THE 11TH CENTURY AND CONTINUE TO DO SO TODAY!
As usual, something's rotten in the state of Denmark, or in this case, on a boat produced in the state of Denmark. Apparently the Sea Stallion, this replica Viking ship sailing from Denmark to Scotland to study "the seamanship of early Norsemen" got stalled in the North Sea due to calm weather conditions. Presumably the seamanship of early Norsemen was superior to the seamanship of extant Norsemen, especially Danish museum curators and history professors on summer break from the University of Copenhagen. They actually quit because of calm seas. I had no idea that Horse Latitudes existed up there, but apparently on either side of the equator isn't the only place you can experience a ship-stopping lack of wind. Since they were a bunch of unseaworthy wimps, the Danes running things decided to call for a tow to Scotland rather than just crack open a seal bladder full of gammeldansk and pass the time reading some Hans Christian Andersen or something while they waited for the breeze to pick up. I mean, jeez, it probably would have only taken a few days. It's not like they were subsisting on weevils and getting scorbutic.
In addition to their intolerance for pleasant, leisurely sailing conditions and their distaste for doing any actual rowing, Captain Carsten Fvid said that supposedly a couple sissy boys on the ship were also cold. Welcome to Scand-rock, bitches! Did you think you were going on a breadfruit mission to Tahiti or something and forget your Helly Hansen parkas? Some Vikings you are! Throw on a damn reindeer skin, nut up, and quit your bitching, you pussies! If the toughness of your modern sailors is any indication, it's no wonder Grendel busted into your Danish mead hall and went bowling with your ancestors' decapitated skulls without breaking a sweat. You all would have been wiped out if Beowulf didn't show up in the nick of time to save you with some clutch Goth barbarian asskickery.
This kind of quitting on a calm sea bullshit never would happen if Sig "The Hotness" Hansen was skippering the Sea Stallion instead of this Carsten Fvid jackass:
Unlike Carsten "The Boy Who Cried Hypothermia" Fvig, Sig wouldn't have allowed a little lack of wind or some nipply temperatures stop him from barking at the crew to man the oars and row that shit all the way to the North Pole. He'd just stoically zip up his Northwestern jacket and fire up a Marlboro with a contemptuous smirk on his face, holler at the crew to put their backs into it, and try to plot a course that would enable him to swing by the Bering Sea and fill the Sea Stallion's tanks with Red Gold. In fact, he probably wouldn't even have to get the crybaby Danish crew to row. Sig's presence probably generates such blistering heat that a hurricane would spontaneously form and provide the much-needed wind to blow him all the way to New York, much less Scotland. That's how Norwegian seamen do it. Leif Erikson (who was also Norwegian in spite of being born in Iceland...his father was Erik the Red, a Norwegian explorer, outlaw, and all around barbarian pimp who is singlehandedly credited with providing the genetic basis for the redheaded phenotype commonly observed in Ireland) did just that when he discovered North America and settled there with his hot wife Thorgunna around the time the original Sea Stallion was sinking to the bottom of the fjord at Roskilde in the mid 10-00's. Why did the Sea Stallion sink, you ask? Because the pussified Danes at the helm couldn't hold off a fierce fleet of bloodthirsty Norwegians, that's why! They didn't have cannons or gunpowder then, but I'm sure the turn-of-the-millenium Norwegian navy managed to find an effective way for bringing the hammer of Thor down upon those pathetic second-class Vikings. When will the History Channel make an hour-long "Viking Tech" show so that I can watch this sublime moment in my cultural history reenacted in low-budget CGI?
My grandfather might not be proud of my many drunken or depraved exploits (although he'd probably understand; when he died we took a stack of nudey mags as tall as the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree out of his house), but he'd be beaming with nationalistic pride at my Norwegian smack talking. Grandpa Ben had a clever bit of verse for belittling all of his Scandinavian rivals, such as "ten thousand Swedes ran through the weeds, chased by one Norwegian." I can't remember what he said about those fruitcakes from Denmark, but I know that he'd like ALL of what I just said. It would almost be enough to mitigate the sting of the Danes' electing a Prime Minister named Rasmussen (a move I'm pretty sure the Danish people conspired as a nation to make solely to besmirch my family name and piss me off). Here's to you, Grandpa Ben! If your surviving heirs hadn't thrown away your (completely rank from ten years of constant wear) Sons of Norway baseball cap after you passed on to the halls of Odin, I'd put it on and tip it to pay honor to our people's mighty history.
SKOAL! Stolt a bli Norsk!
Labels: Aunt Jesus, Deadliest Catch, epic geekery, family matters, History Channel, PWT, Razzification, seamen
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Daily Dude I Want to Hit: Hermione Granger
DOB: September 19, 1979
Occupation: Student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry
Hometown: Somewhere in England
Current Residence: Hogwarts, also somewhere in England
Why I Want to Hit that Hotness: For obvious reasons, I love Hermione and feel her more deeply than any other character in Harry Potter. Look at her in that picture up there, mixing her Polyjuice Potion very seriously, just like I mix up buffers or mouse organ homogenates or PCR reactions in lab! She's such an unrepentant brainiac that I can't help but feel an abiding sense of camaraderie with her character. When I was watching Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone with MillerTime awhile back, and Hermione was raising her hand in class so emphatically that it looked like she might pass out in order to demonstrate her knowledge, Miller Time elbowed me and quipped, "There's you, Razzy." It's true. I too felt the driving need to show everyone how fucking smart I was all the time when I was in school and was always raising my hand (except in math class). My eighth grade teacher Mrs. Dixon actually discouraged me from raising my hand because I answered too many questions. "Can someone BESIDES Razzy explain this passage from The Pearl, please?" she would say. I still resent her to this day for trying to embarrass me for being smarter and/or bolder about being a know-it-all than my classmates. I was, however, vindicated when I found an essay I'd written for her class and noticed that she'd corrected me for using "they're" meaning "they are" by saying that "their" was more appropriate. WRONG, bitch! It looks like the student just became the teacher! I win again. Anyway, Hermione is constantly reading and will go to any length to prove how fucking right about everything she is, and those are priorities I admire.
In spite of using her intellectual bravado to compensate for her fear of failure and feelings of inadequacy (like me as well, but don't tell anyone) and her consequent tendency to unwittingly alienate people, Hermione has a good heart and is fierce in her convictions. In high school, I too would probably have been championing house elf rights despite a complete lack of interest in the matter from my peers. Now I'd just tell the elves to go make me a BLT and clean up my apartment, and I suspect that, if she doesn't die in book 7, Hermione will grow to accept the inherently servile nature of the house elf too. As a commendable rational thinker, she'll realize that there are bigger fish (ie: Voldemort) to fry than those who casually oppress house elves (who want to be oppressed in the first place). I started a club in high school called the Society for Women's Advancement (SWA), which was much like Hermione's Society for the Preservation of Elvish Welfare (SPEW): stupid name, uninspiring agenda, and with a very, very spare membership roster. As pointless as SPEW is, I love that Hermione doggedly sticks to it, if only because she always finishes what she starts and hates being wrong.
Like me, Hermione is also "plain but ambitious," but doesn't let that stand in the way of breaking hearts all over Hogwarts. So far she's already snogged the studly Seeker Viktor Krum of the Bulgarian Quidditch Team, and had a brief dalliance with obnoxious fucktard Cormac McLaggen in Gryffindor (although that was just to make Ron Weasley jealous). It's almost a certainty than in book 7 she's going to start getting it on with Ron in a major way. With six years of sexual tension preceding their hookup, I'm betting they at least make it to second best (it's probably too much to hope that in book 7, Ron does Hermione in a reverse piledriver in the prefects' bathroom, although that would be hot). Given all her reading, I bet Hermione's picked up some magical sex tips in the Restricted Section of the library and is therefore a tiger in the sack. Or at least she stumbled across an Anais Nin book or something during summer holiday while she was kicking it at the Muggle library. In any event, Hermione is getting her choice of ass in spite of her not being a renowned beauty like Fleur Delacoeur, and for that I relate to and commend her.
Another reason Hermione is like me is this:
Labels: alcoholism, Daily Dude I Want to Hit, epic geekery, Harry Potter, hot chicks, Razzification
Sunday, June 24, 2007
The rebellion is incorrectly styled
I could not be more excited because as ads all over bus shelters and subway platforms everywhere are informing me that THE REBELLION BEGINS on July 11!
Man, this is awesome, even though it means watching Harry Potter be a whining, antagonistic, angst-filled teenager for two hours. In the book, Harry was completely intolerable on account of being a typical 15-year-old: temperamental, moody, easily provoked, irrational, and full of piss and vinegar. I suppose it's probably realistic and fair to expect this sort of behavior from Harry, given that he's not only a teenager with raging hormones and what-have-you, but at the end of book four he watched Cedric Diggory get avada kedavre-d by the recently restored to his body Lord Voldemort, barely escaped the same fate himself thanks to a fortuitous use of his favorite Disarming Spell Expelliarmus and the subsequent even-more-fortuitous reverse spell effect on account of his and the Dark Lord's wands having the same phoenix feather core from Dumbledore's pet Fawkes, and then suffering a blitz of bad press suggesting that he's an attention-seeking media whore with a brain-addling scar. By contrast, when I was fifteen and acting like the world's biggest asshole, it was because my dumb ex-girlfriend cheated on and then dumped me and I developed an unhealthy fixation with suicide. I guess Harry Potter's excuse is better than mine was, but nonetheless, his "Boo hoo, nobody understands me, and I'm even going to be an asshole to Ron and Hermione because I have no other outlet for my misplaced rage" routine gets old FAST.
However, I still spent a bunch of time checking out all the screen shots and other assorted Harry Potter geek bullshit at the movie's official site, as well as a bunch of even dorkier fan sites. Sadly, it appears that there will be no full-frontal nude shots of Harry in this film (I can't imagine why). Also, I'm a little unhappy with some of the casting choices. For starters, casting Helena Bonham Carter as Death Eater Bellatrix Lestrange.
I always pictured Bellatrix as having straight hair and being way hotter than this cooch. I'm having the same problems with her as I had with the casting of Gary Oldman as Sirius Black. I realize they're both supposed to look busted from over a decade of having the happiness sucked out of them by the dementors of Azkaban, but they're still both supposed to retain some vestiges of their pre-imprisonment hotness. Sirius Black would have been better played by Clive Owen, who could still pull off looking damaged and beaten down while reminding us why he'd lay waste Professor McGonagall and Peter Pettigrew in the UK's Hottest Animagus Ever contest (if such a thing existed). At least Gary Oldman can pull off crazy and rash, which is also important for Sirius. Helena Bonham Carter, on the other hand, looks like some kind of vampire whore with a bad spiral perm. She should be humping Vince Neil's vinyl-covered leg in a vintage Motley Crue video, not concocting elaborate ruses based on Harry's love for Sirius and his unwillingness to pay attention during Snape's Occlumency lessons to trick Harry and his DA loyalists into retrieving the prophecy from the Department of Mysteries at the Ministry of Magic. They should have shelled out for Cate Blanchett to dye her hair black and do Bellatrix; it would have been better acting and a better look than Helena, who is basically just Britishing up her signature tough but ridiculously needy goth bitch character.
Another bad casting choice is this hooker playing the goofy auror Nymphadora Tonks. According to the book, Tonks is cheerful, clumsy, and has a short, butchy haircut that is either bright purple or bubble-gum pink depending on her mood. She favors Weird Sisters shirts (the Ramones of the Wizarding world) over the standard Wizarding robes. Tonks is also always doing funny shit for laughs in book 5 (she spends most of book 6 pining away for Remus Lupin and consequently is a real drag to be around), like using her talents as a Metamorphmagus to replace her nose with a pig snout and stuff like that. They seriously should have gotten some comedienne to play Tonks, but instead they dug up this hooker:
Where did they find this brooding lezbot, Smith College? She looks like she's just finished overusing the phrases "like, that is so wrong" and "I feel that as a..." at a heated women's studies discussion panel and is on her way to perform a bunch of bad Indigo Girls covers with the Smiffenpoofs at the annual Smith acapella group sing-off. I can just imagine this ho raising her hand in some humanities (let's say for fun that it's "History of the Roman Empire") class and saying, "As an alternative-hair-colored daughter of a commodities trader from Connecticut who likes to sail, I feel that Caligula was probably just misunderstood and it's discriminatory to categorize him as a tyrant, he was a pioneer who fought for women's empowerment, just ask his sister Drusilla" or "As a recently-professed non-sex-having lesbian with a boobmashing partner on the rugby team, I feel that Messalina's nymphomania was fiction created to disparage her, since she was obviously a strong womyn-loving-womyn threatening the patriarchal Roman paradigm." This chick looks like she belongs in some sort of confusing clusterfuck performance art piece with the Dead Gays, while Tonks should be winking at people all the time and saying "Wotcher," whatever that means. BAD CASTING CHOICE!
Finally, I was looking at the poster and I was like, "Who is that hot blonde chick?" I identified every other character. There's Ron, Hermione, Harry, Ginny, Neville, Cho Chang...and who the fuck is that blonde chick? Then it hit me...THAT'S LUNA LOVEGOOD! I'm sorry, but this ho playing Luna is too hot and not even remotely crazy enough to pull off Looney Lovegood:
Luna is supposed to have stringy, dishevelled, dishwater blonde hair and a penchant for accessorizing with radish earrings and necklaces made out of butterbeer corks. She's supposed to be weird-looking and even weirder acting. This girl, however, looks like she's got all the boys at Hogwarts in a dead swoon on account of looking like a proto-porn star. Actually, all three of these chicks look like the Plastics from Mean Girls, and the only one of them who is supposed to be conventionally good looking is Cho Chang. Cho Chang is hot (and check out the ass on her!), but she also gives some serious dominatrix face, and I recall Cho spending most of book 5 crying and being confused. Hermione's look is also a problem, and I hate to criticize Hermione. I identify with Hermione more than any other character (duh), as she's always so eager to show off her smarts that she blurts out answers in class and practically jumps out of her chair raising her hand, she likes to play the field when it comes to boys, she always has her nose in a book, she's intolerant of stupidity and always has a waspish retort for idiotic statements or queries, she's extremely passionate about her beliefs, she doesn't take any bullshit, her vengeance is merciless, and she is not the prettiest girl but works with what she's got. I AM Hermione, or at least her American Muggle counterpart. Because of how deeply I feel Hermione, I have to point out that the movie stylists spent WAY too much time fixing her fucking hair! That shit is supposed to look like birds nest in it!
Of course all this isn't going to stop me from getting my geek on and suffering the presence of thousands of horrible, screaming children at the movie theater on July 11th, but it bugs me nonetheless and will continue to do so. I still haven't gotten over the Gary Oldman-as-Sirius Black thing and that's from two movies ago. Hopefully, the actress playing Dolores Umbridge will be horrible enough (despite not being fat enough) to distract me from all the inconsistencies that I tend to dwell on. At least the trailer is dope enough to make me hyperventilate more than just a little with excitement:
P.S. To everyone who seems to have taken a new interest in this post I wrote last December about how Harry Potter should not have anal sex with Draco Malfoy, YES, dumbasses, I KNOW it's Photoshopped and I did not think it's going into this movie, nor did I think it was approved by J.K. Rowling or Warner Brothers, nor did I think it was anything but a stupid picture that some geek with too much time on their hands made for shits and giggles. I do not expect some kind of gay sex plot twist to occur in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, so quit e-mailing and commenting shit like "loLz, that picture's fake" or "you must be very stupid not to realize that's Photoshop" or passing on your fan fiction recommendations. I KNOW IT'S FAKE! Everyone who calls me stupid should stop congratulating themselves on their superior intellect and take a look in the mirror, because I'd argue that you're not exactly Nobel laureate material if you think I'm always serious when I profess my site to be 100% useless bullshit.
However, I still spent a bunch of time checking out all the screen shots and other assorted Harry Potter geek bullshit at the movie's official site, as well as a bunch of even dorkier fan sites. Sadly, it appears that there will be no full-frontal nude shots of Harry in this film (I can't imagine why). Also, I'm a little unhappy with some of the casting choices. For starters, casting Helena Bonham Carter as Death Eater Bellatrix Lestrange.
Another bad casting choice is this hooker playing the goofy auror Nymphadora Tonks. According to the book, Tonks is cheerful, clumsy, and has a short, butchy haircut that is either bright purple or bubble-gum pink depending on her mood. She favors Weird Sisters shirts (the Ramones of the Wizarding world) over the standard Wizarding robes. Tonks is also always doing funny shit for laughs in book 5 (she spends most of book 6 pining away for Remus Lupin and consequently is a real drag to be around), like using her talents as a Metamorphmagus to replace her nose with a pig snout and stuff like that. They seriously should have gotten some comedienne to play Tonks, but instead they dug up this hooker:
Where did they find this brooding lezbot, Smith College? She looks like she's just finished overusing the phrases "like, that is so wrong" and "I feel that as a..." at a heated women's studies discussion panel and is on her way to perform a bunch of bad Indigo Girls covers with the Smiffenpoofs at the annual Smith acapella group sing-off. I can just imagine this ho raising her hand in some humanities (let's say for fun that it's "History of the Roman Empire") class and saying, "As an alternative-hair-colored daughter of a commodities trader from Connecticut who likes to sail, I feel that Caligula was probably just misunderstood and it's discriminatory to categorize him as a tyrant, he was a pioneer who fought for women's empowerment, just ask his sister Drusilla" or "As a recently-professed non-sex-having lesbian with a boobmashing partner on the rugby team, I feel that Messalina's nymphomania was fiction created to disparage her, since she was obviously a strong womyn-loving-womyn threatening the patriarchal Roman paradigm." This chick looks like she belongs in some sort of confusing clusterfuck performance art piece with the Dead Gays, while Tonks should be winking at people all the time and saying "Wotcher," whatever that means. BAD CASTING CHOICE!
Finally, I was looking at the poster and I was like, "Who is that hot blonde chick?" I identified every other character. There's Ron, Hermione, Harry, Ginny, Neville, Cho Chang...and who the fuck is that blonde chick? Then it hit me...THAT'S LUNA LOVEGOOD! I'm sorry, but this ho playing Luna is too hot and not even remotely crazy enough to pull off Looney Lovegood:
Luna is supposed to have stringy, dishevelled, dishwater blonde hair and a penchant for accessorizing with radish earrings and necklaces made out of butterbeer corks. She's supposed to be weird-looking and even weirder acting. This girl, however, looks like she's got all the boys at Hogwarts in a dead swoon on account of looking like a proto-porn star. Actually, all three of these chicks look like the Plastics from Mean Girls, and the only one of them who is supposed to be conventionally good looking is Cho Chang. Cho Chang is hot (and check out the ass on her!), but she also gives some serious dominatrix face, and I recall Cho spending most of book 5 crying and being confused. Hermione's look is also a problem, and I hate to criticize Hermione. I identify with Hermione more than any other character (duh), as she's always so eager to show off her smarts that she blurts out answers in class and practically jumps out of her chair raising her hand, she likes to play the field when it comes to boys, she always has her nose in a book, she's intolerant of stupidity and always has a waspish retort for idiotic statements or queries, she's extremely passionate about her beliefs, she doesn't take any bullshit, her vengeance is merciless, and she is not the prettiest girl but works with what she's got. I AM Hermione, or at least her American Muggle counterpart. Because of how deeply I feel Hermione, I have to point out that the movie stylists spent WAY too much time fixing her fucking hair! That shit is supposed to look like birds nest in it!
Of course all this isn't going to stop me from getting my geek on and suffering the presence of thousands of horrible, screaming children at the movie theater on July 11th, but it bugs me nonetheless and will continue to do so. I still haven't gotten over the Gary Oldman-as-Sirius Black thing and that's from two movies ago. Hopefully, the actress playing Dolores Umbridge will be horrible enough (despite not being fat enough) to distract me from all the inconsistencies that I tend to dwell on. At least the trailer is dope enough to make me hyperventilate more than just a little with excitement:
P.S. To everyone who seems to have taken a new interest in this post I wrote last December about how Harry Potter should not have anal sex with Draco Malfoy, YES, dumbasses, I KNOW it's Photoshopped and I did not think it's going into this movie, nor did I think it was approved by J.K. Rowling or Warner Brothers, nor did I think it was anything but a stupid picture that some geek with too much time on their hands made for shits and giggles. I do not expect some kind of gay sex plot twist to occur in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, so quit e-mailing and commenting shit like "loLz, that picture's fake" or "you must be very stupid not to realize that's Photoshop" or passing on your fan fiction recommendations. I KNOW IT'S FAKE! Everyone who calls me stupid should stop congratulating themselves on their superior intellect and take a look in the mirror, because I'd argue that you're not exactly Nobel laureate material if you think I'm always serious when I profess my site to be 100% useless bullshit.
Labels: Dumb Smith bitches, epic geekery, Harry Potter, movies, nerd alert, ranting, Razzification
Thursday, June 21, 2007
As God is my witness, my friends are also huge geeks
LL Cool Jew sent me some pictures from her wedding and all the festivities leading up to it. Myself and all the other bridesmaids all got dressed at LL Cool Jew's suite at the Union Square W Hotel, where they have some service called "Whatever, Whenever" or something. Basically this means you can call them up at any hour and be like, "I want a bottle of Strawberry Fields Boone's Farm, an economy sized pack of Rough Riders, a bag of pepper jerky, and a copy of Us Weekly" and they'll send some dude right up with it. We didn't ask for any of that, but we did call and demand a half dozen champagne glasses and a Gone With the Wind DVD. Well, we initially tried to get Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and The Ten Commandments, but for some inexplicable reason they didn't have any of those DVDs in their "epic awesomeness" collection (a major oversight, if you ask me). Anyway, this is how all brides-to-be should spend their last moments of freedom:
God damn, we're nerds. HUGE nerds.
"As God is my witness, as God is my witness they're not going to lick me. I'm going to live through this and when it's all over, I'll never be hungry again. No, nor any of my folk. If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill. As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again!"Clearly I wasn't going hungry. I can't decide if I'm happy with the fact that my tits look absolutely ginormous in that bridesmaids dress or unhappy because it also makes the rest of me look upsettingly on the zaftig side. In spite of that, though, I think this picture perfectly illustrates why LL Cool Jew and I are friends. Nobody else can really get this excited about dorky epics based on excessively long books written by Smith College alumnae, and I really can't imagine who would use this to get pumped for their WEDDING, or who would use this as a third string wedding pep rally option after not being able to watch the Battle of Helm's Deep or the studly bald hunk of steaming sex that is Hot Jew Yul Brynner sneeringly tell Moses to take his plagues back to Goshen and shove it up his sanctimonious ass.
God damn, we're nerds. HUGE nerds.
Labels: epic geekery, holy fucking matrimony, LL Cool Jew, movies, nerd alert
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Two tons of Hobbit fun
Since the films were released on DVD, I have watched each installment of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings about 45 times. I love them. Honor, glory, battle axes, the nine.
And at viewing number 44 on the final chapter in the trilogy, The Return of the King, I have one, burning, unanswered question:
WHY IS SAMWISE STILL FAT?
Sure, fine, the elves are the shit and everything they do is perfect, so they may have created some chemically superior lembas bread that boosts the spirits and sustains for a day. Fine. But first of all, name me a fat elf.
And second of all, there is NO FUCKING WAY that Sam's fat self isn't shedding at least a few pounds on a diet of limited-supply, leaf-wrapped cake for months at a time. Throw in the occasional wiry woodland hare, but still. For 13 months, Mr. Gangi the Gardener fights his way through toward Mordor with Frodo, eating nothing but Elvish Power Bars, climbing uphill, fighting orks, frolicking with Frodo and wrestling with Gollum. This is *more than sufficient exertion to combat his caloric intake and drop some weight.
I'm not hatin'. Samwise the Brave is the MAN in all this mess. I would take him as my wingman in any great quest, and anyway, the forces of evil would be pillaging and plundering the halls of men, elves and dwarves alike at this very moment, if it weren't for his pluck and devotion. Oh. I know. I'm simply mystified that he remains, in the face of toil and starvation, a big boned chunker. I can't understand this. Admittedly, Hobbit metabolism is not a specialty of mine, but Jesus, folks, Sam deserves to be cut after conquering E-vil. Give us a break.
And at viewing number 44 on the final chapter in the trilogy, The Return of the King, I have one, burning, unanswered question:
WHY IS SAMWISE STILL FAT?
Sure, fine, the elves are the shit and everything they do is perfect, so they may have created some chemically superior lembas bread that boosts the spirits and sustains for a day. Fine. But first of all, name me a fat elf.
And second of all, there is NO FUCKING WAY that Sam's fat self isn't shedding at least a few pounds on a diet of limited-supply, leaf-wrapped cake for months at a time. Throw in the occasional wiry woodland hare, but still. For 13 months, Mr. Gangi the Gardener fights his way through toward Mordor with Frodo, eating nothing but Elvish Power Bars, climbing uphill, fighting orks, frolicking with Frodo and wrestling with Gollum. This is *more than sufficient exertion to combat his caloric intake and drop some weight.
I'm not hatin'. Samwise the Brave is the MAN in all this mess. I would take him as my wingman in any great quest, and anyway, the forces of evil would be pillaging and plundering the halls of men, elves and dwarves alike at this very moment, if it weren't for his pluck and devotion. Oh. I know. I'm simply mystified that he remains, in the face of toil and starvation, a big boned chunker. I can't understand this. Admittedly, Hobbit metabolism is not a specialty of mine, but Jesus, folks, Sam deserves to be cut after conquering E-vil. Give us a break.
Labels: epic geekery, FalloniusMonk, fat fucks, nerd alert
Sunday, May 06, 2007
One game to rule them all
So very soon I will be providing a full accounting of the debauchery I've been up to during what seems like a woefully short visit to the P-N-Dub. However, my liver hurts and my mind is currently occupied with my most basal inner monologue ("alcohol good", "Sig Hansen hot", "going back to lab bad", "sex fun", "dogs awesome", "sausage tasty", etc.), so I'm unfortunately not up to regaling you all with my misadventures per my usual high narrative standards. I feel as though I have all the expository skills of Chingy! right now, so epic sagas of boozed-up Razzification will have to wait. Therefore, I'll talk about what I think about when I'm not pondering the earthly delights of booze, threesomes, and "Deadliest Catch": LORD OF THE FUCKING RINGS!
A while ago, El Cyd sent me an advisory that J.R.R. Tolkien's son Christopher had made sense of some of his late father's often confusing and complicated Middle-Earth lore and published a depressing new book called The Children of Hurin. I have to say that I have not yet purchased this, because I'm rather conflicted concerning the works of Mr. Tolkien. I loved The Hobbit when I was a little kid, in spite of the fact that I find hobbits, despite their admirable qualities such as being hardy folk with natural One Ring immunity, to be annoying and provincial. However, I did not like Lord of the Rings much because the characters had too many different and/or confusing names (such as the fact that the two bad guys have to be named Saruman and Sauron, and Tolkien could have explained a little better that Gandalf also answers to "Grayhame" and "Mithrandir"), and I found this troublesome at the age of seven when I first attempted to read it. I gave up on LOTR then, and my disdain and insecurity concerning a book I could not vanquish resulted in my being very anti-LOTR until 2003. That was the year that LL Cool Jew popped in a DVD of LOTR: The Two Towers one Thanksgiving despite my staunch protests, and created a monster.
The following is an approximation of some of the comments I made during my first viewing of this movie:
-Regarding the Uruk-hai disemboweling and eating one of their number to resolve a dispute about consuming hobbit legs: "Already this is a lot fiercer than hanging around those gay-ass elves like in the last movie."
-Regarding the Golden Halls of Edoras, capital of Rohan: "Uff da! Those are Vikings! THOSE ARE MY PEOPLE! SKOAL!"
-Regarding Sam and Frodo's burgeoning romance: "It must make the road to Mordor a lot easier when you have a loyal bottom to suck you off beneath your elven cloak at night."
-Regarding Gollum/Smeagol: "Bring out the gimp!"
-Regarding Gandalf's summarily handing Grima Wormtongue and Saruman their bitch asses with his new head-wizard-in-charge status and white robe to match: "If he weren't a gay old man I'd do him so seriously it's not even funny."
-Regarding Aragorn son of Arathorn and Legolas Greenleaf (the least pussified role of Orlando Bloom's life): "I'd let them make me a sandwich."
-Regarding everything having to do with Gimli son of Gloin: "Dude, I think I'm in love. With a dwarf."
-Regarding the Battle of Helm's Deep: "Oh. My. GOD! YES! Sound the horn of Helm Hammerhand one last time! Sound it!"
-Regarding the end when Treebeard and the Ents lay waste to Isengard: "Finally the environment does something useful!"
Anyway, you can see that I was immediately enchanted, which led to LL Cool Jew and I having many conversations, e-mails, and text messages related to LOTR awesomeness in the years since. We refer to things we particularly enjoy as "the precious," and when preparing to go out will toss around awesome quotes like "muster the Rohirrim!" We describe Chingy!'s asshole using Tolkien's description of the Eye of Sauron: "a great Eye, lidless, wreathed in flame." You can imagine how nuts both of us, as Smith College alumnae, went during LOTR: Return of the King when Eowyn of Rohan (or "the Razzy of Middle-Earth" due to the Nordic features she and I share) shouted "I am no man!" and stabbed the Witch-King of Angmar in the face during the Battle of Minas Tirith. I promptly reread the books and found them much easier to manage at the age of 25 than seven, and I went out and bought all the DVD extended editions upon release, which LL Cool Jew and I would randomly watch whenever we were bored back during our stint as roommates. I have a LOTR edition of Risk that came with a replica of the One Ring, complete with the fell script of Mordor on it (although it does not make me turn invisible or wraith-like), which we would sometimes wear while we watched. It's fucking really nerdy, but I'm not ashamed. I fucking love LOTR.
However, my love for the entirety of Tolkien's work is not so broad-sweeping. I may have read and re-read LOTR and all its accompanying appendices, but I tried to get into The Silmarilion and couldn't. For one thing, it was full of those damn elf poetry, and that shit is indirect, meandering, boring, and generally irritating as shit. Usually when I'd come across the song of Luthien Tinuviel or whatever in LOTR, I'd just skip it, so that correspondingly meant I skipped most of The Silmarilion. I don't really give a shit about the mythology or detailed history of Middle-Earth unless it has to do with great battles, so fuck that. Therefore, I'm waiting to pick up The Children of Hurin until someone tells me that it's worth doing so.
However, I was recently alerted to another new release concerning LOTR that I am much more enthusiastic about. Naturally, LL Cool Jew, my partner in epic geekery, married a man just as nerdy as herself, and he sent us both this e-mail the other day:
To: Razzy (razzy@razzy.org), LL Cool Jew (llcooljew@dirrtydirrtynewspaper.com)
From: BigBagel (bigbagel@pulitzerprizewinningdirrtydirrtynewspaper.com)
Subject: my life would be over
i was wondering what you two would think of this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/arts/04lord.html
there's no doubt in my mind that if my home computer weren't such a flaming
piece of shit i'd be online the second i got home creating my own gimli-like
character and wreaking some Middle-Earth havoc until I got bad carpal-tunnel.
ll cool jew, no offense, but if the game is half as dope as they claim, our sex
life would grind to a halt for a while. so would my good hygiene, diet and
sleep cycle.
If you clicked on the above link, you will see that it is a review of this:
Yes, this is the new Lord of the Rings online multiplayer game, LOTR: Shadows of Angmar. I immediately went to the game's website to check it out, as I was certain that anything BigBagel would so enthusiastically cause problems in his fledgling marriage for was indeed the nerd hotness of the century. I read the description:
I have not been so excited since "90210" seasons one and two dropped on DVD. It's truly a shame that I question my own home computer's ability to handle the system requirements for a game like this, and that it costs $50 plus a $15 monthly subscription, because I'd fully make a character like this dude and start tearing shit up myself.
Yes, that's Eomer, Viking brother of the hotness that is Eowyn aka Middle-Earth Razzy, loyal subject of Theoden King, and Third Marshal of the Horse-Lords of the Riddermark, and in his guise or something similar, I'd be smoting the ruin of nerds on the online mountainside right and left. It's a good thing I can neither afford nor technologically support this game that would probably result in my never getting laid again except in the former of cybersex with some pimple-faced virtual Man of Numenor on an online lice-filled straw tick mattress during a brief stopover at The Prancing Pony in Bree.
Seriously, if I had more time, computer power, or money, I'd rapidly devolve into some kind of nerd addict and end up on that "Intervention" show. Finally, I have a reason to be grateful for poverty. My status as a semi-normal person on the real (not Middle) earth is clearly dependent upon it.
A while ago, El Cyd sent me an advisory that J.R.R. Tolkien's son Christopher had made sense of some of his late father's often confusing and complicated Middle-Earth lore and published a depressing new book called The Children of Hurin. I have to say that I have not yet purchased this, because I'm rather conflicted concerning the works of Mr. Tolkien. I loved The Hobbit when I was a little kid, in spite of the fact that I find hobbits, despite their admirable qualities such as being hardy folk with natural One Ring immunity, to be annoying and provincial. However, I did not like Lord of the Rings much because the characters had too many different and/or confusing names (such as the fact that the two bad guys have to be named Saruman and Sauron, and Tolkien could have explained a little better that Gandalf also answers to "Grayhame" and "Mithrandir"), and I found this troublesome at the age of seven when I first attempted to read it. I gave up on LOTR then, and my disdain and insecurity concerning a book I could not vanquish resulted in my being very anti-LOTR until 2003. That was the year that LL Cool Jew popped in a DVD of LOTR: The Two Towers one Thanksgiving despite my staunch protests, and created a monster.
The following is an approximation of some of the comments I made during my first viewing of this movie:
-Regarding the Uruk-hai disemboweling and eating one of their number to resolve a dispute about consuming hobbit legs: "Already this is a lot fiercer than hanging around those gay-ass elves like in the last movie."
-Regarding the Golden Halls of Edoras, capital of Rohan: "Uff da! Those are Vikings! THOSE ARE MY PEOPLE! SKOAL!"
-Regarding Sam and Frodo's burgeoning romance: "It must make the road to Mordor a lot easier when you have a loyal bottom to suck you off beneath your elven cloak at night."
-Regarding Gollum/Smeagol: "Bring out the gimp!"
-Regarding Gandalf's summarily handing Grima Wormtongue and Saruman their bitch asses with his new head-wizard-in-charge status and white robe to match: "If he weren't a gay old man I'd do him so seriously it's not even funny."
-Regarding Aragorn son of Arathorn and Legolas Greenleaf (the least pussified role of Orlando Bloom's life): "I'd let them make me a sandwich."
-Regarding everything having to do with Gimli son of Gloin: "Dude, I think I'm in love. With a dwarf."
-Regarding the Battle of Helm's Deep: "Oh. My. GOD! YES! Sound the horn of Helm Hammerhand one last time! Sound it!"
-Regarding the end when Treebeard and the Ents lay waste to Isengard: "Finally the environment does something useful!"
Anyway, you can see that I was immediately enchanted, which led to LL Cool Jew and I having many conversations, e-mails, and text messages related to LOTR awesomeness in the years since. We refer to things we particularly enjoy as "the precious," and when preparing to go out will toss around awesome quotes like "muster the Rohirrim!" We describe Chingy!'s asshole using Tolkien's description of the Eye of Sauron: "a great Eye, lidless, wreathed in flame." You can imagine how nuts both of us, as Smith College alumnae, went during LOTR: Return of the King when Eowyn of Rohan (or "the Razzy of Middle-Earth" due to the Nordic features she and I share) shouted "I am no man!" and stabbed the Witch-King of Angmar in the face during the Battle of Minas Tirith. I promptly reread the books and found them much easier to manage at the age of 25 than seven, and I went out and bought all the DVD extended editions upon release, which LL Cool Jew and I would randomly watch whenever we were bored back during our stint as roommates. I have a LOTR edition of Risk that came with a replica of the One Ring, complete with the fell script of Mordor on it (although it does not make me turn invisible or wraith-like), which we would sometimes wear while we watched. It's fucking really nerdy, but I'm not ashamed. I fucking love LOTR.
However, my love for the entirety of Tolkien's work is not so broad-sweeping. I may have read and re-read LOTR and all its accompanying appendices, but I tried to get into The Silmarilion and couldn't. For one thing, it was full of those damn elf poetry, and that shit is indirect, meandering, boring, and generally irritating as shit. Usually when I'd come across the song of Luthien Tinuviel or whatever in LOTR, I'd just skip it, so that correspondingly meant I skipped most of The Silmarilion. I don't really give a shit about the mythology or detailed history of Middle-Earth unless it has to do with great battles, so fuck that. Therefore, I'm waiting to pick up The Children of Hurin until someone tells me that it's worth doing so.
However, I was recently alerted to another new release concerning LOTR that I am much more enthusiastic about. Naturally, LL Cool Jew, my partner in epic geekery, married a man just as nerdy as herself, and he sent us both this e-mail the other day:
To: Razzy (razzy@razzy.org), LL Cool Jew (llcooljew@dirrtydirrtynewspaper.com)
From: BigBagel (bigbagel@pulitzerprizewinningdirrtydirrtynewspaper.com)
Subject: my life would be over
i was wondering what you two would think of this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/arts/04lord.html
there's no doubt in my mind that if my home computer weren't such a flaming
piece of shit i'd be online the second i got home creating my own gimli-like
character and wreaking some Middle-Earth havoc until I got bad carpal-tunnel.
ll cool jew, no offense, but if the game is half as dope as they claim, our sex
life would grind to a halt for a while. so would my good hygiene, diet and
sleep cycle.
If you clicked on the above link, you will see that it is a review of this:
Yes, this is the new Lord of the Rings online multiplayer game, LOTR: Shadows of Angmar. I immediately went to the game's website to check it out, as I was certain that anything BigBagel would so enthusiastically cause problems in his fledgling marriage for was indeed the nerd hotness of the century. I read the description:
ONE GAME TO RULE THEM ALL!Then I checked out some screenshots of the game. Needless to say, after scrolling through shot after shot of chain-mail clad warriors in virtual New Zealand doing epic combat with all manner of orc, troll, and Ringwraith, I had the mental equivalent of a raging hard-on. This one, of an extremely Chingy!fied-looking cave troll in full battle armor, is my particular favorite.
Join the greatest epic of all time!
For the first time, you can immerse yourself in the only authentic, persistent online recreation of Middle-Earth to explore legendary lands, interact with famous characters like Gandalf and Aragorn, and create your own heroic story. The War of the Ring has commenced!
As the Fellowship embarks on their quest to destroy the One Ring, you must defend the Free Peoples against Sauron's evil minion, the Nazgul Witch-King. Adventure solo or forge fellowships, battle hideous monsters, and rise to fame in the most epic MMO ever launched!
I have not been so excited since "90210" seasons one and two dropped on DVD. It's truly a shame that I question my own home computer's ability to handle the system requirements for a game like this, and that it costs $50 plus a $15 monthly subscription, because I'd fully make a character like this dude and start tearing shit up myself.
Yes, that's Eomer, Viking brother of the hotness that is Eowyn aka Middle-Earth Razzy, loyal subject of Theoden King, and Third Marshal of the Horse-Lords of the Riddermark, and in his guise or something similar, I'd be smoting the ruin of nerds on the online mountainside right and left. It's a good thing I can neither afford nor technologically support this game that would probably result in my never getting laid again except in the former of cybersex with some pimple-faced virtual Man of Numenor on an online lice-filled straw tick mattress during a brief stopover at The Prancing Pony in Bree.
Seriously, if I had more time, computer power, or money, I'd rapidly devolve into some kind of nerd addict and end up on that "Intervention" show. Finally, I have a reason to be grateful for poverty. My status as a semi-normal person on the real (not Middle) earth is clearly dependent upon it.
Labels: BigBagel, CHONGAY CHONG, epic geekery, I LOVE IT, LL Cool Jew, nerd alert, Razzification
Thursday, April 26, 2007
My friends are also nerds
LL Cool Jew is the world's most prolific postcard writer, and even on her honeymoon in Tahiti, where presumably she was busy snorkeling and fucking her new husband BigBagel, she found time to send me a postcard featuring a picture of a tranquil South Pacific scene (lush mountains, lagoons, thatched cabanas, etc.). I was delighted to turn it over and see the entire back covered with her distinctive and lovely handwriting.
I should mention here that one thing LL Cool Jew and I bond over BIG TIME is our mutual love for anything having to do with historical maritime exploits, especially those involving pirates, Her/His Majesty's Royal Navy (depending on the time period), exploration, and colonial intrigue. She once tried to convince me to get the "VOC" logo used by the Gentlemen XVII, the aristocrats overseeing the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (AKA the Dutch East India Company), to stamp their official correspondence on my ass. That didn't happen, but it would have totally ruled:
I can only imagine what the expression would be on any random lay's face upon being informed that the "VOC" on my (extremely hot) ass wasn't some ex-boyfriend's initials but the calling card of the seventeenth century merchant guild elite. Anyway, being in Tahiti, site of the HMAV Bounty's ill-fated breadfruit-acquiring mission and Captain James Cook's favorite port of call, she spent most of the postcard regaling me with thrilling tales related to its historical particulars. Not to neglect modern times, however, that clever bitch still managed to work in a reference to a scene from the finale of Vh1's (finest achievement of all time) "I Love New York:"
I should mention here that one thing LL Cool Jew and I bond over BIG TIME is our mutual love for anything having to do with historical maritime exploits, especially those involving pirates, Her/His Majesty's Royal Navy (depending on the time period), exploration, and colonial intrigue. She once tried to convince me to get the "VOC" logo used by the Gentlemen XVII, the aristocrats overseeing the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (AKA the Dutch East India Company), to stamp their official correspondence on my ass. That didn't happen, but it would have totally ruled:
I can only imagine what the expression would be on any random lay's face upon being informed that the "VOC" on my (extremely hot) ass wasn't some ex-boyfriend's initials but the calling card of the seventeenth century merchant guild elite. Anyway, being in Tahiti, site of the HMAV Bounty's ill-fated breadfruit-acquiring mission and Captain James Cook's favorite port of call, she spent most of the postcard regaling me with thrilling tales related to its historical particulars. Not to neglect modern times, however, that clever bitch still managed to work in a reference to a scene from the finale of Vh1's (finest achievement of all time) "I Love New York:"
April 12, 2007~DOOD!! OK, see that little bay inlet between those near-vertical peaks so strictly evocative of the South Pacific? That's where a stinking, syphilitic, and exhausted James Cook pulled in in 1777, greeted in all likelihood by a horde of bouncing brown boobies and massively tatted asses toting roasted pigs and fried breadfruit, and decided then and there that this place would make him famous. I mean, honestly, this place is completely ridiculous. We can jump off our terrace into a placid lagoon chock full of fish, and every time I turn around and see these frickin mountains I just about soil myself. Also, behind our bungalow is the dolphin center, so I can totally look up and see what Chance would call "the water dogs" doing their sweet dolphiny thing. If I could just see one inbred descendent of Fletcher Christian it would be complete. PRESS! Love, LL Cool Jew and BigBagel.I can always count on my friends, and ESPECIALLY on LL Cool Jew, to remind me that I am not alone in my pursuit of useless but fascinating geekified historical knowledge concerning the intrigue of seamen past. Maybe she'll go get that VOC tattoo with me, as a show of nerd solidarity.
Labels: BigBagel, correspondence, epic geekery, I LOVE IT, LL Cool Jew, Razzification
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Episode Whatever: I am a weak-minded fool
A lot of people wonder "how much I paid" for Chingy!, since he's a purebred Pug and all. I've always had German Shepherd mix mutts like my devastatingly handsome Caesar, and I wasn't trying to be like the Angelina Jolie of dog adoption or anything. He used to belong to this creepy doorman at the first building I lived in, and he said that if he couldn't find Chingy! a new home, he'd be euthanized. In spite of my hatred for most living things, including children, plants, and many adult humans, I have a soft spot for dogs so I grudgingly agreed to take him "temporarily." That was four fucking years ago.
Now, when I tell the story of acquiring this little monster, I prefer to do so inventively. Not everyone gets it from the dialogue, though, because apparently not everyone's dad took them to see Return of the Jedi in the theaters when they were four, and had the combination of the Pit of Sarlacc and the noise that accompanied the outer space dogfighting between the Empire and the Rebel Fighters scare them to tears, ensuring that every part of that movie was committed almost verbatim to memory. Anyway, since I'm sick of explaining this to death, I'll try to illustrate the tale of Chingy! via Star Wars analogy with pictures.
EPISODE VI: REVENGE OF THE SHIT (EATER)
[Blah blah blah...background shit about the Empire building a new and terrifying Death Star, and something about Ewoks.]
Meanwhile, on Tattooine...
This is the palace of the vile intergalactic space gangster, Chingy! the Hutt. He terrorizes planets with his rePUGnant odors, arrogant attitude, and powerful aura of generalized affrontery.
Chingy! is inside, sedentary as usual, smoking his hookah and entertaining himself by chewing on dirty socks and feeding tentacle-headed strippers to the monster that lives underneath his equally revolting ass. In strolls a Jedi who looks nothing like my creepy former doorman to make an ill-advised attempt at detante.
Chingy!, in keeping with Hutt tradition of being an obstinate, destructive asshole, responds with scornful laughter.
The Jedi, unfazed, tries a new tactic.
Chingy! sees through this clever ruse. He sneezes disdainfully at his attendants for being so easily hoodwinked by the smooth-talking Jedi.
I have to interject that things would have been a lot better off if Chingy! had managed to successfully rebuff those campaigning to free Captain Solo from his carbonite prison. Then he couldn't have gotten old, fucked Ally McBeal's skeletal ass, and prepared to ruin Indiana Jones by making a fourth movie. How is he supposed to teach archaeology to Smith girls, retrieve priceless religious artifacts, and fight the Nazis for said valuable antiquities when he's older than Sean Connery was in Last Crusade? Is he going to beat them up with his walker, or what? Anyway, digression aside, this ploy on the Jedi's behalf did not work. Chingy! would not have his palace despoiled by the Jedi's cheap parlor tricks.
This is where I come into the story. I was just trying to mind my own business and walk Caesar as usual when this group of Star Wars nerds was blocking the road. I told them to get out of my way.
What?! Obviously THAT came out wrong.
This argument got me nowhere. Before I knew it, the stupid Jedi had tricked me into taking responsibility for the nefarious and despicable Chingy!, thus ending the days of brutalizing alien sex slaves, listening to really shitty music, and otherwise dominating the criminal underworld. A time of peace and prosperity returned to the parts of the galaxy now vacated by Chingy!, but the time of strife for me in Harlem was just beginning.
After months of civil war characterized by the wanton destruction of my personal belongings, I got used to the little asshole and we came to an uneasy truce. Once I changed out of that ridiculous gold bikini, it was a lot easier to command him on the leash. Also, I discovered that so long as he is supplied with ample Beneful and is permitted to sleep in my bed and/or suitcase, he's calm and peaceable to the point of being almost comatose twenty-three hours out of the day. And so the beast was quelled, and I find myself in the situation I'm in today.
And that's how much I paid for Chingy...not a damn cent, but the emotional and material toll has been immeasurable. CHONGAY CHONG!
P.S. Yeah, I know this is pretty dorky, but I had some time to kill this afternoon and my other alternative activity was housework. Sha right! Star Wars and dog Photoshop geekery wins every time.
Now, when I tell the story of acquiring this little monster, I prefer to do so inventively. Not everyone gets it from the dialogue, though, because apparently not everyone's dad took them to see Return of the Jedi in the theaters when they were four, and had the combination of the Pit of Sarlacc and the noise that accompanied the outer space dogfighting between the Empire and the Rebel Fighters scare them to tears, ensuring that every part of that movie was committed almost verbatim to memory. Anyway, since I'm sick of explaining this to death, I'll try to illustrate the tale of Chingy! via Star Wars analogy with pictures.
EPISODE VI: REVENGE OF THE SHIT (EATER)
[Blah blah blah...background shit about the Empire building a new and terrifying Death Star, and something about Ewoks.]
Meanwhile, on Tattooine...
I have to interject that things would have been a lot better off if Chingy! had managed to successfully rebuff those campaigning to free Captain Solo from his carbonite prison. Then he couldn't have gotten old, fucked Ally McBeal's skeletal ass, and prepared to ruin Indiana Jones by making a fourth movie. How is he supposed to teach archaeology to Smith girls, retrieve priceless religious artifacts, and fight the Nazis for said valuable antiquities when he's older than Sean Connery was in Last Crusade? Is he going to beat them up with his walker, or what? Anyway, digression aside, this ploy on the Jedi's behalf did not work. Chingy! would not have his palace despoiled by the Jedi's cheap parlor tricks.
This is where I come into the story. I was just trying to mind my own business and walk Caesar as usual when this group of Star Wars nerds was blocking the road. I told them to get out of my way.
And that's how much I paid for Chingy...not a damn cent, but the emotional and material toll has been immeasurable. CHONGAY CHONG!
P.S. Yeah, I know this is pretty dorky, but I had some time to kill this afternoon and my other alternative activity was housework. Sha right! Star Wars and dog Photoshop geekery wins every time.
Labels: CHONGAY CHONG, creative projects, doggity style, epic geekery, fat fucks, gross, movies, oh the horror, Razzification, ridiculous absurdity
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