Wednesday, March 25, 2009
You're exactly my brand of haterade, Twilight
I thought that my loathing toward the Twilight franchise was going to be like a summer fling, except full of boiling hate rather than hot sex. I figured that after some initially intense, explosive feelings of loathing toward this shitshow, my ire would burn itself out and I'd move on to the next pop culture phenomenon worthy of my dedicated abhorrence. In a few months, my comprehensive dislike for the world's lamest Washington coast-dwelling, Volvo-driving, neutered supermodel glitter vampires would fade just like last year's random honeys and I could train the crosshairs of my hateration elsewhere.
Unfortunately, due to my inability to avoid Twilight-related news, it appears that my hatred has been reduced to a slow simmer and is here to stay. I read the news, and there's Twilight, being inexplicably associated with random gang violence. I read my celebrity gossip, and see that Robert Pattinson is grossing everyone out on the set of the Twilight sequel New Moon because of his dislike for showers and generally disturbing lack of personal hygiene. Oddly, the fact that Robert Pattinson has the bathing regimen of a homeless meth addict on the gay hooker stroll and looks accordingly does not seem to deter a disturbingly large number of my female friends from rhapsodizing about his putative hotness, and I get to hear about this frequently via their Facebook status messages. In fact, Facebook is where I am most routinely confronted with unwanted Twilight-related information. Just yesterday, my news feed advised me that my high school ex-girlfriend is "stoked that her nephew gave her the collector's edition of Twilight on DVD for her birthday." Upon reading that, my eyes started rolling so uncontrollably that it probably looked like I was having a really bitchy seizure.
In fact, the only REMOTELY positive thing I can think of about Twilight is a little tidbit my Facebook wife ElCyd shared with me last night. We were Gchatting about the usual (Jayhawk basketball, the latest honeys on our ho rosters, how awesome we are, how much law school/grad school sucks, fucking girls and/or lesbian drama, our plans for world domination, our inherent Scorpio similarities, and how much my defense party is going to rule), and ElCyd decided to bring up Twilight. I can forgive ElCyd's rabid enthusiasm about Twilight, as she fully admits that it's godawful. I guess it's useful, too, since she came up with the only positive thing I've ever heard about the entire brand:
ElCyd: (p.s. best part of twilight the movie is the shout-out to Vitamin R)
Razzy: i did not see, obv
Razzy: but WHAT
Razzy: RAINIER BEER WAS IN TWILIGHT?!
ElCyd:: YES!
ElCyd: and they CALL IT VITAMIN R
ElCyd: IN THE MOVIE
Razzy: ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!?!?!?!?!
Razzy: NO
Razzy: WAY
ElCyd: seriously
Razzy: ZOMG
ElCyd: i know.
Razzy: okay i might have to see twilight now
Razzy: i'm assuming it's not the sparkle vamps who call it that
ElCyd: no no
Razzy: but the redneck teens from forks
ElCyd: lol
ElCyd: redneck parents
Razzy: of course
Razzy: the teenagers don't drink
Razzy: they just build lame bonfires
ElCyd: in reference to a tallboy 6 pack of cans
Razzy: ah yes, the tallboy sixer of vitamin R
Razzy: soon to be a common sight in my refrigerator
Razzy: trust that
ElCyd: oh, i do.
ElCyd: please believe.
Razzy: those tallboy sixers of vitamin R are like $4
Razzy: so awesome
Razzy: i wonder if that clip is on youtube
Razzy: that will save me from having to watch twilight in its entirety
Razzy: which could result in someone's death
Unfortunately, nobody has yet had the presence of mind to save innocent bystanders from my murderous wrath by posting a YouTube of the scene in which Bella Swan's dad gives a shout-out to the greatest beer ever brewed, the sweet nectar of the P-N-Dub, Rainier Beer AKA "Vitamin R." Now maybe if there's a scene in New Moon in which the characters go pick up a crisp beef burrito and some Mexi-Fries from the Forks Taco Time, or take a detour to my hometown to Do the Puyallup, I could muster the inner strength to tolerate this bullshit. In the meantime, Bella Swan can stay addicted to her unshowered sparkling paramour. I have accepted that there is no escape from my hatred for it, and will just remain addicted to hating it.
Labels: ElCyd, librophilia, P-N-Dub, ranting, retard rage
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
NOT FUCKING FAIR!!!!!!!!!!
Star magazine just advised me that Douchebag of the Geological Epoch John Mayer is planning to write a tell-all about his relationship with Jennifer Aniston.
I think it's now official that John Mayer is the worst human being in the world. Not because he's writing a tell-all, which I'm sure will be excellent reading should you ever find yourself having a hard time falling asleep. I can only imagine what sort of tawdry tales he can tell about how Jennifer Aniston's leathery old ass spends all her time being vain and obnoxious. I'm sure I will be blown away when John Mayer regales us with the scandalous details of how an aging TV actress desperate to sustain her own relevance spends all her time doing yoga with some $400-an-hour private instructor. NO FUCKING WAY, John Mayer! STOP THE FUCKING PRESS!!
Whoever is coughing up $10 mil for a titillating batch of "secrets" like that is paying about $10 million too much. John Mayer is thus an extreme asshole, as I can't imagine he pulled off such a deal without some sort of contract with Satan. I don't remotely understand how this pubestachioed cooing dove (FYI, that's a dude who makes "ooo, ooOOO" disturbingly feminine cooing sounds while he's banging you with as much gusto as the average tampon you insert during your monthly) managed to negotiate a $10 million dollar deal for revealing the most boringly obvious non-secrets in the world. I'm really hard pressed to think of anybody whose secrets I am less interested in than old Human Benadryl Aniston. You'd have to pay me to waste time reading what I already know, because I can tell you exactly what a day in Jennifer Aniston's life entails for free. Observe:
1. Wake up at 10 a.m.
2. Do combo bed/spray tan.
3. Do yoga for 3 hours.
4. Get hair and makeup done for 3 hours. Bitch at them when they fail to give historical props to the cultural importance of "the Rachel."
5. Consult astrologer.
6. Go somewhere expensive for dinner and get photographed by paparazzi.
**OPTIONAL** Do above with Courtney Cox Arquette, assuming you can accommodate her similarly uneventful schedule.
7. Go home.
**ALSO OPTIONAL** Fill out e-Harmony profile, stealing Match.com commercial line "I'm just a goof, looking for my ball," because she's the only one in the entire fucking world who thinks that's cute or sexy. Go to bed, hoping to find an inbox full of many matches based on deep compatibility.
8. Repeat.
I mean, I guess there's probably some whining about how she used to be married to Brad Pitt and is so unlucky in love or whatever in the mix too, but who cares? That shit is boring, and spiking in a little "taking John Mayer's douchenozzle in missionary with shirts on" does nothing to spice it up, unless "spice it up" actually means "simultaneously gross me out and bore the shit out of me." Unless John's "private photo album" includes shots of Jennifer Aniston taking a baseball bat up the ass like Belladonna, I can't see how it would be worth more than the digital camera it's stored in. Frankly, even then I couldn't be bothered. I certainly wouldn't pay $10 million for that, much less news that Jen accidentally confused John Mayer with Brad Pitt in bed. This is hardly surprising, considering that not only is Jen still famously bitter about how her man ditched her for the Baby Collector, but the aforementioned 10-years-ago's Sexiest Man Alive is almost as insufferably obnoxious as the loathsome Mr. Mayer. I would be hard pressed not to confuse them myself, and I'm an internets gossip junkie so addicted that I can tell the Olsen twins apart and know what Peaches Geldof looks like.
I am primarily outraged that John Mayer, who does not need $10 million as much as I do, is getting such a ridiculous book advance for a tell-all about something as soporific as his dalliance with this busted-ass catcher's mitt of a woman. Granted, I tried hard to get a book deal in the sense that I wrote emails to two or three j-school grads I know and talked about wanting to do so and thought really fervently that it would be awesome to get fame and fortune for being Razzy. However, even if I sent the world's most stellar pitch to every publisher in the entire world or actually made the slightest amount of meaningful effort, I wouldn't get a $10 million deal. Granted, I don't have the pre-existing literary chops of writing such profound statements as "I want to run through the halls of my high school," but hell...I've slept with a whole bunch of doctors and lawyers who will surely be important someday, as well as writers for a couple publications even my parents have heard of, and other totally not-famous-but-work-for-famous-places types of people. I even dated a waiter at a famous restaurant, porked a fella who placed 27,945th in the New York City marathon, and publicly dumped a guy who invented the chip that went into Motorola StarTac phones! We all had one of those in like 1999!!!! Okay, he didn't actually invent the chip, but he wrote the mathematical algorithms that made it work, so same difference...you still wouldn't have been able to use your notoriously unreliable flip-phones without him and his state school engineering degree, which has known my vagina. I'm a total star fucker, like John Mayer!
Plus, I've had threesomes and done some hot girl-on-girl stuff and even taken it up the butt with some of these not-famous-but-I-could-maybe-convince-you-they-peripherally-are-type people. I'm not going to write shit about someone's boring obsession with yoga or in-home hairstyling. I'll tell you how big their dick is and whether or not it's worth a sit and spin! Instead of giving you pictures of a couple uninspiring, vain twats walking around LA with giant sunglasses on, I'll give you some straight-up real talk. And I'd be happy with a $10,000 book deal, which is a bargain compared to paying $10 million for something that does what Lunesta can for a mere $30 co-pay. So, assuming Star has its facts straight (which is actually a big assumption), I'm willing to underbid John Mayer and write whoever is paying for this a far more interesting book. So don't pay this tard an AIG bonus worth of cash for his account on what it's like to stick your dick in the human equivalent of a couch. Give it to me instead, and get your money's worth.
Labels: celebrities, John Mayer sucks, librophilia, ranting, Razzification, retard rage, scathing indictments
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
Thursday, December 04, 2008
CHONGingway
The other day, I looked over on the bed and caught my arrogant, obstinate, grotesquely fat Pug Chingy! actually doing something to better himself. My copy of The Sun Also Rises, my favorite book of all time, had fallen out of my bag onto my bed. Since I carry that book around the way some people carry Bibles, it's thoroughly broken-in and fell open to whatever page I'd stopped on most recently. Astonishingly, Chingy! actually pulled himself from his basal state of contemptuous torpor to see what all the fuss was about.
As Hemingway never writes "CHONGAY CHONG" once in the entire novel, Chingy! apparently didn't see anything of interest. He decided he had better things to do than reading about bullfighting aficionados or the tragic wound of Jake Barnes, and promptly passed out on the book.
CHONGAY CHONG, Ernest Hemingway!
Labels: CHONGAY CHONG, doggity style, librophilia
Monday, August 04, 2008
Makaveli in this
The other day I was hanging out with FalloniusMonk and we were talking about our usual nerdtastic selection of topics (ie: history, classical literature, office politics, and lesbian sex), when she suddenly got very excited and said, "Oh my God, DUDE, you have to see this!"
She dove into her hipster bag and whipped out a book. It was a copy of Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince.
"Uh, dude, did you take a history class in high school? Because I've read that," I said. "Several times, in fact."
"NO, dude, I know you've read it. Look at the fucking picture on the front!"
At first I was like, "What? It's just the usual Penguin Classics appropriation of some random Botticelli portrait or something." For a minute I felt like I was playing some European history-oriented Renaissance painting version of Erotic Photo Hunt. Then FalloniusMonk shouted "WEST SIIIIIDE!" and I instantly realized what was going on. I've seen this hand gesture before:
Now I know why Tupac was so into calling himself "Makaveli" and frankly, why he probably picked up his first copy of The Prince from the prison library in his first place. Certainly the Westside Connection's designs on world domination are in keeping with Machiavelli's political theories, although I certainly wonder these days how O'Shea "Ice Cube" Jackson is going to accomplish that lofty goal via films like Are We There Yet? I can't really see it, but maybe it's how he reconciled the question as to whether it is better for a leader to be loved or feared. He's feared by studio gangstas, police, and Jerry Heller, and loved by children under the age of twelve. It's not really what springs to mind when I think of the word "Machiavellian," but I guess it works.
Labels: FalloniusMonk, hilarious shit, librophilia, nerd alert, rap
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
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Daily Dude I Want to Hit: Superhead
Nickname: Superhead
DOB: August 24, 1978
Occupation: serial ho
Hometown: St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands
Current residence: Los Angeles, California
Why I Want to Hit that Hotness: People often ask me if my website has ever impeded my efforts to get laid, because it drives away the honeys with their fear of being written about afterwards. The truth is, I hardly ever write about about the people I sleep with, and when I do it's usually because they either did something egregiously awful to piss me off or because something funny happened during the sex. Either way, I usually go out of my way to protect the identity of the person I'm writing about, because I would like to continue getting laid, and I don't want to be cockblocked by my own blog. However, as much fucking-and-telling as I do, I've got nothing--and I mean NOTHING--on Karrine "Superhead" Steffans.
A former rap video vixen, Superhead became far more famous for her extreme promiscuity than for her video dancing skills. Why famous people are still fucking this bitch is a mystery to me, because now that she's gone to pasture in terms of being solid video hoochie material (she's 28), she's ventured into the realm of writing tell-all books about her various conquests. In her first book, Confessions of a Video Vixen, she had the following things to say:
Shaquille O'Neal "was nothing to complain about." She says that Shaq was so impressed with Steffans that, the day after meeting her, he deposited $10,000 into her bank account. At least she's not shy about being a huge ho. That said, I figure that Shaq's dick is roughly the size of an old-growth Douglas fir, so she probably deserved every penny for actually fitting that into any of her various orifices and not complaining.
After hearing so much about Fred Durst's stature, she gushed, "to actually hold him … felt like a privilege." EWWW!!! Fred Durst's dick is a privilege? That was obviously written circa 1999.
Vin Diesel "was a beautiful man … blessed with an enviable eight-pack and an even more enviable cock." And an enviable ability to drive his career straight into the dirt with some seriously bad movie choices.
After inviting her to his home at 4 a.m., Sean (P. Diddy) Combs kicked his manservant Fonzworth Bentley out of a guest bedroom so he and Steffans could spend 15 minutes making love. "You're one of the best," she says P. Diddy told her. Steffans writes: "I said the same to him, when, in actuality, he was average." No surprise there. I wish she would have told me what I REALLY want to know about Diddy, which is whether or not he goes, "Uh, take that, take that, take that, Bad Boy" during sex. Maybe she omitted that detail because it's a given.
After her book dropped in 2005, Steffans supposedly said she promised God that her days of writing about her hyperactive sex life were over, and she'd be walking a moral path henceforth. However, Confessions of a Video Vixen was such a success that Steffans has signed with Warner Books to write two more tell-alls, except in keeping with her spiritual convictions, she's offering a slightly more subtle discussion of her famous sex partners' dick sizes. She's also sold the rights to a movie about her ho-liness for a cool $7.3 mil. In her upcoming book The Vixen Diaries, she continues her trend of rating various celebrities' abilities in bed.
Usher was originally lauded for his prowess in the sack in her first book, but in the second one, Karrine changes her tune and says she boned him out of pity. Because it was after a concert when we “fucked” and it was smelling like straight up FISH up in backstage in his dressing room. It was NOT me either. So I'm like babes? What's that smell. He tried to make it seem like it already smelled like that when they got to the arena. I'm like whatever, can we get this over with. It was fucking horrible and on top of that it was smelling back there. This man is not packing, his dick is way small and he was having a hard time trying to find my hole. Then ol' boy did something out of this world, he yelled out something Haitian. I was sick to my stomach. I got dressed and ran out of there. The fact that Usher's dick is small or that his nether regions stink is no shock to me. I've had Usher pegged (no pun intended) as a down-low butt boy for a long time now. That woman he just married even looks like a damn man, so consider me unsurprised that Usher doesn't know his way around a vadge.
50 cent and I have had our share of sexual encounters. We kick it every time he comes to L.A.. His dick is not as big as I assumed it would be. It was probably about 7 1/2 inches. But it's not a big disappointment because he can eat pussy like no other. 50 loves tities and ass. I happen to have them both so I guess that's why he immediately came on to me. You have to be sleeping with some serious heavy hitters to think that 7 1/2 inches is disappointing. I've had dicks bigger than that, but most dudes would rejoice in having a 7 1/2 inch dick. Not that I didn't already know about my boyfriend Curtis Jackson's penis size or his cunnilingus abilities. He loves my T&A too.
Young Buck was the best I ever had. His dick was like the Energizer Bunny. It kept going and going. The sex lasted for hours at a time. It was the best I ever had and it got better each time. Don't tell that to 50! That's how motherfuckers get kicked out of the G-Unit...by somehow one-upping "tha don." Just ask The Game. If it gets out that Young Buck is a hotter lay, he's probably going straight back to Ca$hville.
Juelz Santana's really wild in bed, and don’t let the ‘No homo’ stuff fool you, because he is definitely not a homo in bed. His dick is like a baseball bat, but it’s thick too, like an overgrown German sausage. He likes to pull hair a lot, and he actually likes it better when a girl rides. Have you ever seen Juelz Santana? He's kind of skinny and short. I wouldn't have thought he's packing some bizarre hybrid of a Louisville Slugger and a Johnsonville brat between his legs, that's for sure.
Rather than continue elaborating, Karrine just breaks out a long-ass list with some quick ratings of virtually every well-known rapper from the past decade:
Mystikal - long Mystikal?! Is he even still alive?
Trick Daddy - long and full of energy Duh. How else could he keep up with Trina?
Twista - medium So I guess Twista's claim in R. Kelly's "Hit It Til the Mornin" that he is capable of "slid(ing) this dick off in yo womb" is false. Unless, of course, Superhead's standards of "medium" means 12 inches. It's also possible that Twista's dick looks smaller than it really is when contrasted with his corpulent physique.
Will Smith - long UGH! WILL SMITH?! I thought he was gay. Note that Superhead says he's "long" but not "thick." The Fresh Prince is a pencil-dick, for sure.
Xzibit - long but comes too quick Don't they all. But don't hate...he was probably on his way to film a deodorant commercial or pimp someone's ride. Unlike Young Buck, a busy man like X to tha Z doesn't have all day to just lounge around fucking groupies.
Kool G Rap - Long but can't fuck Well, he fucked her enough to be her baby daddy. She had to be nasty since he's charging that she's a lousy mom to their bastard son Naim.
Talib Kweli - medium No surprise there. Talib wouldn't be bitching about social problems nearly as much if he had decent wood.
Redman - hung like a banana Is that good or bad? I'm thinking that's good, but Karrine's standards are so impossibly high that this could well be a diss from her.
Black Thought - medium Again, no surprise there. Black Thought doesn't spend nearly enough time talking about his hoochies and his rims.
Russell Simmons - small NO SHIT! He's a vegan who married a tranny (I'm convinced that Kimora Lee has a Y chromosome), so consider me unsurprised that he's lacking the equipment to please a real woman.
Khujo from Goodie Mob - very long Yuck.
Ja Rule - Long and full of energy DOUBLE yuck. I wonder what 50 thought of that assessment.
Jay-Z - Real thick and juicy but you cant stand looking at him when he’s on top Jay-Z--who I'm also convinced is gay--is definitely a double bagger, meaning you put a bag on his head AND yours for extra protection from his hideous visage.
OutKast - Both big but Big Boi is bigger and fatter Dre’s is long and slim. No surprise there.
Pete Rock - big Who the hell is Pete Rock? Is he somehow related to Kid Rock?
Puff Daddy - medium Or, as she stated before, "just average"
Rakim - Long Quit saying "long"! I want some measurements!
Mobb Deep - Havoc is big but Prodigy is small I guess that's what sickle cell anemia will do to a guy. Also, as long as she's fucking half the G-Unit, why didn't Lloyd Banks and Tony Yayo get a piece?
M.O.P. - Long pipes but Danze has a smelly body odor Be sure to put on deodorant (hence the semi-favorable ratings for Redman and Xzibit) before fucking Superhead, because that bitch has the sense of smell of a bloodhound.
Nas - small I knew it. You can tell from the constant self-aggrandization. Dudes with pharoah complexes are always packing toothpicks.
Nelly - medium But did he take off the Band-Aid before getting down?
Scarface - medium Average and unremarkable, just like his career
Snoop Dogg - too long Snoop is a cervix-slammer, huh? Ewww....
Ol’ Dirty Bastard - may his big dick rest in peace Where thankfully it can't knock any more bitches up.
Clipse - They’re both long but they cant fuck and Pusha T’s breath stinks Again, it's advisable to make sure your personal hygiene is in order before fucking a gossipy ho with a keen sense of smell
Common - Long but too skinny Figures. Common is such a sensitive little crybaby, it's no shocker that he's sporting a Sharpie fine point.
Da Brat - can eat a pussy. One would hope. She IS a big old dyke, after all.
Mos Def - long but his breath stinks You know Mos Def's fugly ass thinks he's too good for a toothbrush.
Timbaland - long and fat but can't fuck and comes too quick And probably says "Uh, uh, baby girl" incessantly, as well. But don't hate. That's just the way he are.
Too $hort - long and thick but talks to much shit in bed He talks a lot of shit everywhere else, too. Why would his pillow talk be any different? She should consider herself lucky that she didn't wind up working the streets of Oaktown or choking on sperm in her windpipe.
Q Tip - long but skinny. He has an asshole personality His name says it all.
Mase - Long but he has an asshole personality too Well, DUH! He's a born-again Christian. They all have asshole personalities.
Master P - nice and long and can fuck Except for the fact that his nasty-ass gold grill is probably always twinkling at you with every "UHHHHH!"-punctuated thrust.
Method Man - Long but comes too quick His methods need some perfecting.
Missy Elliott - pussy has a bad odor Missy, Missy, Missy. As a full-on lesbo, you should know better.
50 Cent - medium/long I already knew that.
Big Punisher - The same size of a can of air freshener Big Pun better be hung like one of those hospital-sized cans of disinfectant, because I can't see any other way you'd be able to extract his dick from all those fat rolls, God rest his soul.
Busta Rhymes - Big and long bit cant fuck. Just because you are left sore he thinks he did something. Man, I HATE guys like that. I feel you, Superhead.
Canibus - real long Canibus? Are you kidding?
Noreaga - Long but he cant fuck What would you expect with those dumb glasses he always wears?
Lil Wayne - nice and long Or not. He probably just shared some of his killer weed with Superhead and thus gave her a far rosier, higher impression of what it's like to bone Tha Carter.
Kanye West - Big but he cant fuck No, but he probably thinks he's God's gift to women's vaginas.
KRS-One - small Obviously. KRS One complains too much about everything. I know where it comes from.
LL Cool J - Nice and fat And gay.
The LOX - All of them are big except for styles. styles is very tiny. And J Hood is abnormally fat. Sounds like Superhead was causing some intrigue behind the scenes of the "Jenny From the Block" video. South, south Bronx!
Ludacris - Just perfect. Long and fat Big things come in little packages, I guess.
DMX - Long and can fuck forever Because he's on PCP!
Fabolous - big dick but comes to fast So it was less than fabolous?
Fat Joe - small at first but when erect he’s impressive. Because his cock emerges from his massive dimpled pelvis like a phoenix from the ashes.
Wyclef - Long but his breath stinks Probably from the lengthy vocal exercises needed to assume other Caribbean accents besides Haitian. For example, on R. Kelly's latest album, Wyclef is pretending to be Jamaican. Previously, he was fronting like he was Cuban with all that "Guantanamera" business. You can't blame him for accessing his tidal breath because he has to fake an accent to lend some Caribbean street cred to some song he's guest performing on.
Ghostface Killah - Long but he comes too quick God, has she fucked the entire Wu-Tang clan???
Anyway, I applaud Karrine's efforts to make money out of her extremely popular vagina without resorting strictly to prostitution and porn, both of which she has dabbled in. Because I'm a sucker for salacious gossip, I also applaud her fuck-and-tell-all policy. I plan to buy her new book as soon as it finds its way to the Barnes and Noble sale rack. What a hot-ass slut.
Labels: 50 cent, Daily Dude I Want to Hit, librophilia, Lil' Wayne, media whores, rap, sex, sluts
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
Friday, July 20, 2007
Daily Douchebag: Nobody
I'm not writing a Daily Douchebag today because I'm in such an impossibly good mood I actually can't think of anything or anybody that makes me mad. This may be a first.
Why the glass-half-full outlook, you ask? In short, this:
YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I'm so excited I could be the fourth Pointer Sister, because not only can I not hide it, but I'm about to lose control and I KNOW I like it. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows drops tonight, and if you want to see me getting my drunken geeky swerve on while waiting in line with ten thousand other people in Gryffindor gear, stop on over to the Lincoln Center Barnes and Noble (67th and Broadway, I think) around midnight. And then get out of my way, because I plan to go home and bury my face in it like a hot lay's crotch.
Why the glass-half-full outlook, you ask? In short, this:
Labels: Daily Douchebag, Harry Potter, I LOVE IT, librophilia
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
The Leaky Internets
I saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on Saturday, and it represents the only time that something so prominently involving children made me so deliriously, outrageously, ludicrously excited. I went to see it in IMAX 3-D with a cadre of geeky friends, and it was completely mind-blowing. Apart from the fact that I still have major issues with Helena Bonham Carter's cackling, I'll-get-you-my-pretty interpretation of Bellatrix Lestrange, I about pissed myself when Dumbledore smoked some Dark Lord ass in the Ministry of Magic lobby. I also noticed a strange watery sensation around my eyes when Bellatrix committed cousin-icide against Sirius, and realized I was dangerously close to actually crying. I was surprised because usually I reserve my spare tears for movies where tragedy befalls dogs. Anyway, the movie clearly shook me to my core, and filled me with an insatiable lust for MORE HARRY POTTER. As soon as the movie was over, FalloniusMonk, Rack, TheOldGuy, and myself made our way to the nearby Barnes and Noble to reserve our copies of book seven. We plan on staking that shit out--complete with covert liquor--to get our books Saturday at midnight (and I plan on staying up all night reading it). However, it seems that braving a crowded store full of children in Gryffindor colors might be unnecessary, because the book has LEAKED ON THE INTERNET!
I was initially alarmed, because I didn't want to download a leaked copy only to find out that it's just the end of the book. As tempted as I am to find out who dies (please, God, don't let it be hot-ass Hermione...she's too smart to die!), I don't want to read the end of the book until I've read the previous seven hundred odd pages. I've got to know how Harry manages to find and destroy all of Voldemort's other Horcruxes first! Besides, I've also made my predictions about what's going to happen in this book, and I have to see every last one validated. These predictions are as follows:
-Harry realizes that Kreacher is hoarding the locket Horcrux stolen by R.A.B.--aka Regulus Black--right under his nose in the damn Hogwarts kitchen, and then breaks his usual tradition of tolerating how fucking annoying house elves are by shoving his holly and phoenix feather wand straight up that godfather-betraying, mudblood-hating bigot's ass.
-Hermione finally gets it on with Ron Weasley, a scene which, given how long the sexual tension has been building between those two, will probably result in them having dirty, ass-smacking, furniture-toppling, owl-mediated ruckus-causing, back-scratching, hematoma-inducing, shrieking orgasm-producing sex on top of Ron's Chudley Cannons bedspread back at the Burrow while Harry, Ginny, and whichever other Weasleys are around are out helping Mrs. Weasley degnome the garden.
-Petunia Dursley finds out she also has magical powers, is nearly killed by Uncle Vernon who fears the neighbors will find out, escapes on the Knight Bus, and finds solace at Hogwarts, where she is appointed the most incompetent Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher in the school's millenium-long history.
-Voldemort storms the Ministry of Magic with a shitload of giants and dementors, and Percy Weasley dies fleeing like the pussy he is. Rufus Scrimgeour then conspires with Rita Skeeter to figure out a way to blame it all on Harry.
-Neville Longbottom gets offed by a well-placed Avada Kedavre curse performed by Narcissa Malfoy (because Draco was supposed to do it, but once again got cold feet), but not before he takes out Bellatrix Lestrange and avenges the permanent catatonic state she put his parents into by torturing them with the Cruciatus Curse. He manages to kill her by harnessing his adept skills at herbology and feeding her to the Venemous Tentacula in Hogwarts greenhouse three, Little Shop of Horrors style.
-Bill Weasley turns into a werewolf on his wedding night and bites the shit out of his irritating French bride Fleur. She survives, and thanks to her Veela heritage, is the most alluring werewolf ever.
-Hagrid dies. Homeboy can hold his own with dragons, acromantulas, hippogriffs, blast-ended skrewts, and giants, but his pink umbrella/covert broken wand is no match for the Imperius Curse placed on him by the former Ministry executioner MacNair that makes him stroll into the Forbidden Forest and stand still while talking mad shit to the angry Centaurs living in there.
-Harry, after spitting some seriously Schwarzenegger-esque vengeance-themed smack talk in Parseltongue to Voldemort's snake (and probable Horcrux) Nagini, kills her, turns her into an extremely pimped-out set of boots, and suddenly is the most popular piece of ass at Hogwarts in spite of the fact that practically everyone he knows ends up dead.
-Tonks discovers that werewolvery, like most blood-borne diseases, can be spread in other ways besides biting when she and Remus Lupin do the nasty in the coat closet at number twelve, Grimmauld Place after a particularly late, oak-matured mead-saturated Order of the Phoenix meeting. She and Fleur start a support group for women who have been infected with an incurable chronic disease by their male partners.
-Madam Rosmerta gets sent to Azkaban, not because she tried to deliver the cursed necklace or the poisoned mead to Dumbledore (she was Imperiused by Malfoy, so that's excusable), but because she's such a damn cocktease that finally the men of Hogsmeade had enough and successfully lobbied the Wizengamot to convict her on the basis of being too sexually distracting to be legal. She is, however, released after the men of Hogsmeade all realize they're now stuck hanging out at Madam Puddifoot's when the Hog's Head gets closed due to health code violations. Madam Rosmerta may be stacked and not putting out (I suspect it's because she likes the snatch, and you can't blame a hot bitch for that), but the closing of the Three Broomsticks is a far more terrible fate than coping with her unavailability for sex.
-Harry gets so sick of hearing about how he has his mother's eyes that he gets purple colored contacts. He goes back to the glasses once he realizes how fucking stupid and unnatural he looks.
-Snape reveals that he's not on anyone's side, and that he killed Dumbledore to get back at him for refusing to promote him out of the Potions dungeon for all those years. Then he moves to Capri and forces Draco Malfoy to swim around naked with him all the time like one of Tiberius's minnows. Consequent to his depraved instincts and the ensuing years of sexual abuse, Draco grows up to be the wizarding world's equivalent of Caligula.
These are just the main predictions I've made. I've got a lot more that I will spare you, because they are indicative of the depth to which my Harry Potter insane nerdiness goes. What it all comes down to is that I couldn't handle reading the leaked part of the book if it just skipped to the big finish without proving to me how right I am about what's going to happen. Besides, reading the end of a book without the rest is like an orgasm without the preceding sex. It's fine and enjoyable, but it would be better with a little context. So fuck the leaked Harry Potter...the wait will make the pleasure of the real thing all the more enjoyable.
I was initially alarmed, because I didn't want to download a leaked copy only to find out that it's just the end of the book. As tempted as I am to find out who dies (please, God, don't let it be hot-ass Hermione...she's too smart to die!), I don't want to read the end of the book until I've read the previous seven hundred odd pages. I've got to know how Harry manages to find and destroy all of Voldemort's other Horcruxes first! Besides, I've also made my predictions about what's going to happen in this book, and I have to see every last one validated. These predictions are as follows:
-Harry realizes that Kreacher is hoarding the locket Horcrux stolen by R.A.B.--aka Regulus Black--right under his nose in the damn Hogwarts kitchen, and then breaks his usual tradition of tolerating how fucking annoying house elves are by shoving his holly and phoenix feather wand straight up that godfather-betraying, mudblood-hating bigot's ass.
-Hermione finally gets it on with Ron Weasley, a scene which, given how long the sexual tension has been building between those two, will probably result in them having dirty, ass-smacking, furniture-toppling, owl-mediated ruckus-causing, back-scratching, hematoma-inducing, shrieking orgasm-producing sex on top of Ron's Chudley Cannons bedspread back at the Burrow while Harry, Ginny, and whichever other Weasleys are around are out helping Mrs. Weasley degnome the garden.
-Petunia Dursley finds out she also has magical powers, is nearly killed by Uncle Vernon who fears the neighbors will find out, escapes on the Knight Bus, and finds solace at Hogwarts, where she is appointed the most incompetent Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher in the school's millenium-long history.
-Voldemort storms the Ministry of Magic with a shitload of giants and dementors, and Percy Weasley dies fleeing like the pussy he is. Rufus Scrimgeour then conspires with Rita Skeeter to figure out a way to blame it all on Harry.
-Neville Longbottom gets offed by a well-placed Avada Kedavre curse performed by Narcissa Malfoy (because Draco was supposed to do it, but once again got cold feet), but not before he takes out Bellatrix Lestrange and avenges the permanent catatonic state she put his parents into by torturing them with the Cruciatus Curse. He manages to kill her by harnessing his adept skills at herbology and feeding her to the Venemous Tentacula in Hogwarts greenhouse three, Little Shop of Horrors style.
-Bill Weasley turns into a werewolf on his wedding night and bites the shit out of his irritating French bride Fleur. She survives, and thanks to her Veela heritage, is the most alluring werewolf ever.
-Hagrid dies. Homeboy can hold his own with dragons, acromantulas, hippogriffs, blast-ended skrewts, and giants, but his pink umbrella/covert broken wand is no match for the Imperius Curse placed on him by the former Ministry executioner MacNair that makes him stroll into the Forbidden Forest and stand still while talking mad shit to the angry Centaurs living in there.
-Harry, after spitting some seriously Schwarzenegger-esque vengeance-themed smack talk in Parseltongue to Voldemort's snake (and probable Horcrux) Nagini, kills her, turns her into an extremely pimped-out set of boots, and suddenly is the most popular piece of ass at Hogwarts in spite of the fact that practically everyone he knows ends up dead.
-Tonks discovers that werewolvery, like most blood-borne diseases, can be spread in other ways besides biting when she and Remus Lupin do the nasty in the coat closet at number twelve, Grimmauld Place after a particularly late, oak-matured mead-saturated Order of the Phoenix meeting. She and Fleur start a support group for women who have been infected with an incurable chronic disease by their male partners.
-Madam Rosmerta gets sent to Azkaban, not because she tried to deliver the cursed necklace or the poisoned mead to Dumbledore (she was Imperiused by Malfoy, so that's excusable), but because she's such a damn cocktease that finally the men of Hogsmeade had enough and successfully lobbied the Wizengamot to convict her on the basis of being too sexually distracting to be legal. She is, however, released after the men of Hogsmeade all realize they're now stuck hanging out at Madam Puddifoot's when the Hog's Head gets closed due to health code violations. Madam Rosmerta may be stacked and not putting out (I suspect it's because she likes the snatch, and you can't blame a hot bitch for that), but the closing of the Three Broomsticks is a far more terrible fate than coping with her unavailability for sex.
-Harry gets so sick of hearing about how he has his mother's eyes that he gets purple colored contacts. He goes back to the glasses once he realizes how fucking stupid and unnatural he looks.
-Snape reveals that he's not on anyone's side, and that he killed Dumbledore to get back at him for refusing to promote him out of the Potions dungeon for all those years. Then he moves to Capri and forces Draco Malfoy to swim around naked with him all the time like one of Tiberius's minnows. Consequent to his depraved instincts and the ensuing years of sexual abuse, Draco grows up to be the wizarding world's equivalent of Caligula.
These are just the main predictions I've made. I've got a lot more that I will spare you, because they are indicative of the depth to which my Harry Potter insane nerdiness goes. What it all comes down to is that I couldn't handle reading the leaked part of the book if it just skipped to the big finish without proving to me how right I am about what's going to happen. Besides, reading the end of a book without the rest is like an orgasm without the preceding sex. It's fine and enjoyable, but it would be better with a little context. So fuck the leaked Harry Potter...the wait will make the pleasure of the real thing all the more enjoyable.
Labels: Harry Potter, I LOVE IT, librophilia, Razzification
Monday, February 19, 2007
Dead Poetic license
Last week, I went out to dinner with some friends to celebrate my buddy Neo's 28th year of existence in this mortal coil. Afterward, we went to this bar on the Upper West Side called the Dead Poet. I got myself a scotch, helped Neo pick out some songs on the jukebox, picked out the choicest quotes about alcoholism attributed to various dead poets hanging on the bar wall, and was generally having a grand time...until I got a look at the drink menu.
The menu had a page devoted to the bar's "signature cocktails", each one of which is named after a notable dead poet. I could not disagree more with some of these drinks. I suspect that the morons who made up these drinks have never read a single word of their namesakes' poetry, because they are dead wrong.
Walt Whitman: "Our famous version of the Long Island Iced Tea. Lemon vodka, gin, coconut rum, and orange liqueur are combined to create a smooth, highly potent potion. Served in a pint glass and garnished with lemons and a cherry."
The fact that their Walt Whitman cocktail is "famous" is news to me, probably because the only thing it's famous for is having absolutely nothing to do with Walt Whitman save the fact that he originally hails from Strong Island. Nothing about coconut rum and orange liqueur bring to mind Whitman's ties to the abolitionist and free-soil movements or his passionate hatred of the tariff. The only way I can see this having any connection to Whitman at all is that it might have been what Monica Lewinsky was drinking when the Silver Fox President William Jefferson Clinton gave her a copy of Leaves of Grass and stained her dress. I think a more appropriate drink would be one reflecting the image of the poet himself:
The mixologists at the Dead Poet should have noted Whitman's obvious resemblance to a cracked-out homeless dude or freight rail-riding stowaway hobo (although in fairness, that was the look in the 1870s), and just served some Mad Dog 20/20 Banana Red out of the bottle in a brown paper bag. People would get it.
Oscar Wilde: "Much like the flamboyant Irish writer, our sour-apple martini is spirited and robust. Ketel One vodka, apple liqueur, and melon liqueur are shaken and poured into a sugar-rimmed martini glass."
I guess "flamboyant" is a better adjective for use on a menu than "big fat homo." I also can't argue with the drink choice here, except to say that Oscar Wilde was probably not swilling appletinis while testifying about "the love that dares not speak its name" as he faced two years in Reading Gaol for buggering Lord Alfred Douglas. The appletini would have been a better choice for Truman Capote, but being that he was more of a novelist, he doesn't have a signature drink.
Edgar Allan Poe: "Poe was both glorified as an angel and maligned as the devil because of his dark, mournful tales and his mysterious personal life. Grey Goose vodka, Chambord, Triple Sec, and a squeeze of fresh lime. Shaken with ice and served in a sugar-rimmed martini glass."
Yes, nothing says "dark mystery" like a drink that tastes like raspberries and oranges served up with a sugar-coated rim. This definitely captures the dualistic nature of Poe, and conjures up the correspondent gloomy images celebrated in such poems as "The Raven". Certainly this drink would make me think of a man who drank himself into oblivion because all his family members kept dying of consumption.
Emily Dickinson: "Celebrate this 'New England mystic' with our pink lemonade cocktail. We combine Bacardi Limon, Triple Sec, sour mix, and a splash of grenadine to create this tart and tangy cocktail. Garnished with a lemon and served on the rocks or straight up in a martini glass."
Emily Dickinson was a sexually repressed, miserable old spinster who lived at the nexus of hell on Earth: western Assachusetts. She spent all of her time and poetry fixated on death and winter, because there's nothing else to do in Amherst unless you like fucking rich, WASPy, lacrosse-playing frat boys with big egos, limp dicks, and white baseball caps (which she did not). Nothing says "undersexed, reclusive, depressed, austere old woman" like pink lemonade!
Dylan Thomas: "Thomas was flamboyantly theatrical, a heavy drinker, and he became a legendary figure, both for his work and the boisterousness of his life. We toast Thomas with the ultimate dirty martini. Ketel One vodka is shaken with olive juice and strained into a chilled martini glass. Garnished with a trio of Queen olives."
My friend LL Cool Jew has a line from a Dylan Thomas poem, "Noli me tangere", tattooed on her shoulder. This was bitten by Thomas from the Gospel of John, and it means "touch me not." That's about the limit of my knowledge about Dylan Thomas, but I'm curious as to whether the Dead Poet's barkeep using "flamboyant" here means that, like Oscar Wilde, Dylan Thomas had a thing for young minor male nobility. The garnish of "Queen olives" certainly supports that theory. I couldn't find anything about that on his Wikipedia page, but I did find that he was a whiskey drinker...so what's with giving him a dirty martini?
John Keats: "Known especially for his descriptions of nature, his poetry also resonated with
deep philosophical questions. Feel free to philosophize the meaning of life while you enjoy a pint glass full of vodka, Southern Comfort, amaretto, sloe gin, Triple Sec, lime juice, and orange juice."
This seems like it could be overly sweet, much like Keats's poetry.
Robert Frost: "Possibly the most popular 20th century American poet, Frost wrote about the character, people, and landscape of New England. Vanilla vodka, melon liqueur, and raspberry liqueur are combined with cranberry and orange juice and served in a pint glass."
This drink is for curmudgeony old New Englanders who get sick of the Emily Dickinson lemonade. It's best consumed surrounded by blazing Yankee Candles. Presumably the melon and raspberry flavors will then evoke images of fall foliage, Nantucket whalers, and the Kennedys.
W.B. Yeats: "This Nobel Prize-winning author was one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century. His intellectual, often obscure poetry focused on the reality of life in Ireland. A mixture of vodka, gin, rum, Triple Sec, melon liqueur, sour mix, and a splash of 7-Up reflect the lush green countryside of Yeats's homeland."
This drink might reflect the Emerald Isle in terms of color, but I don't recall anybody drinking anything involving Triple Sec in Angela's Ashes. In fact, the only thing I remember about that book was that every other chapter, a baby died of starvation and/or typhoid. Presumably, the Dead Poet bar staff felt that accuracy be damned, this tricked-out Midori sour-flavored Long Island Tea was a better representative of Yeats's Ireland than say, a glass of Bushmill's. The drink comes with a bar of Irish Spring, a box of Lucky Charms, and a DVD of the classic film Leprechaun: In Space to really hammer the faux Irishness home.
I was ranting about this to my mom on the phone that night after I got home and she asked a very good question. "Didn't they have one for that depressed woman? You know, Sylvia Plath?" (My mom gets her money's worth on my college education by giving shout-outs to notable Smith alumnae at every turn...you should hear her when she gets going about Julia Child).
"What would that be, Mom? An oven with an unlit pilot light and the gas on full?"
"Judging by what you told me about their menu, I was thinking that would probably be an electric iced tea or something equally inappropriate," Mom said in her half-disapproving Marge Simpson voice.
"You're probably right about that. It IS too bad they didn't include her, because I could totally associate her with a kamikaze shot. 'Let's do a round of Sylvia Plaths, guys!'" My mom shelved her disapproval and laughed along with me.
Tasteless Sylvia Plath jokes aside, the owners of the Dead Poet clearly need to take a fucking poetry class. If I brought Saratoga120, my old English teacher from Smith who secured my acquittal on possession charges, to this place, she'd take one look at the drink menu and probably inform the bartender that he had the literary accomplishments of a brandy jigger. The Dead Poet would be a considerably better establishment if they made like the main character in the crappy movie of the same name and died. Carpe diem, or whatever. Death is the only just reward for any tard who associates Emily Dickinson with pink lemonade.
The menu had a page devoted to the bar's "signature cocktails", each one of which is named after a notable dead poet. I could not disagree more with some of these drinks. I suspect that the morons who made up these drinks have never read a single word of their namesakes' poetry, because they are dead wrong.
Walt Whitman: "Our famous version of the Long Island Iced Tea. Lemon vodka, gin, coconut rum, and orange liqueur are combined to create a smooth, highly potent potion. Served in a pint glass and garnished with lemons and a cherry."
The fact that their Walt Whitman cocktail is "famous" is news to me, probably because the only thing it's famous for is having absolutely nothing to do with Walt Whitman save the fact that he originally hails from Strong Island. Nothing about coconut rum and orange liqueur bring to mind Whitman's ties to the abolitionist and free-soil movements or his passionate hatred of the tariff. The only way I can see this having any connection to Whitman at all is that it might have been what Monica Lewinsky was drinking when the Silver Fox President William Jefferson Clinton gave her a copy of Leaves of Grass and stained her dress. I think a more appropriate drink would be one reflecting the image of the poet himself:
The mixologists at the Dead Poet should have noted Whitman's obvious resemblance to a cracked-out homeless dude or freight rail-riding stowaway hobo (although in fairness, that was the look in the 1870s), and just served some Mad Dog 20/20 Banana Red out of the bottle in a brown paper bag. People would get it.
Oscar Wilde: "Much like the flamboyant Irish writer, our sour-apple martini is spirited and robust. Ketel One vodka, apple liqueur, and melon liqueur are shaken and poured into a sugar-rimmed martini glass."
I guess "flamboyant" is a better adjective for use on a menu than "big fat homo." I also can't argue with the drink choice here, except to say that Oscar Wilde was probably not swilling appletinis while testifying about "the love that dares not speak its name" as he faced two years in Reading Gaol for buggering Lord Alfred Douglas. The appletini would have been a better choice for Truman Capote, but being that he was more of a novelist, he doesn't have a signature drink.
Edgar Allan Poe: "Poe was both glorified as an angel and maligned as the devil because of his dark, mournful tales and his mysterious personal life. Grey Goose vodka, Chambord, Triple Sec, and a squeeze of fresh lime. Shaken with ice and served in a sugar-rimmed martini glass."
Yes, nothing says "dark mystery" like a drink that tastes like raspberries and oranges served up with a sugar-coated rim. This definitely captures the dualistic nature of Poe, and conjures up the correspondent gloomy images celebrated in such poems as "The Raven". Certainly this drink would make me think of a man who drank himself into oblivion because all his family members kept dying of consumption.
Emily Dickinson: "Celebrate this 'New England mystic' with our pink lemonade cocktail. We combine Bacardi Limon, Triple Sec, sour mix, and a splash of grenadine to create this tart and tangy cocktail. Garnished with a lemon and served on the rocks or straight up in a martini glass."
Emily Dickinson was a sexually repressed, miserable old spinster who lived at the nexus of hell on Earth: western Assachusetts. She spent all of her time and poetry fixated on death and winter, because there's nothing else to do in Amherst unless you like fucking rich, WASPy, lacrosse-playing frat boys with big egos, limp dicks, and white baseball caps (which she did not). Nothing says "undersexed, reclusive, depressed, austere old woman" like pink lemonade!
Dylan Thomas: "Thomas was flamboyantly theatrical, a heavy drinker, and he became a legendary figure, both for his work and the boisterousness of his life. We toast Thomas with the ultimate dirty martini. Ketel One vodka is shaken with olive juice and strained into a chilled martini glass. Garnished with a trio of Queen olives."
My friend LL Cool Jew has a line from a Dylan Thomas poem, "Noli me tangere", tattooed on her shoulder. This was bitten by Thomas from the Gospel of John, and it means "touch me not." That's about the limit of my knowledge about Dylan Thomas, but I'm curious as to whether the Dead Poet's barkeep using "flamboyant" here means that, like Oscar Wilde, Dylan Thomas had a thing for young minor male nobility. The garnish of "Queen olives" certainly supports that theory. I couldn't find anything about that on his Wikipedia page, but I did find that he was a whiskey drinker...so what's with giving him a dirty martini?
John Keats: "Known especially for his descriptions of nature, his poetry also resonated with
deep philosophical questions. Feel free to philosophize the meaning of life while you enjoy a pint glass full of vodka, Southern Comfort, amaretto, sloe gin, Triple Sec, lime juice, and orange juice."
This seems like it could be overly sweet, much like Keats's poetry.
Robert Frost: "Possibly the most popular 20th century American poet, Frost wrote about the character, people, and landscape of New England. Vanilla vodka, melon liqueur, and raspberry liqueur are combined with cranberry and orange juice and served in a pint glass."
This drink is for curmudgeony old New Englanders who get sick of the Emily Dickinson lemonade. It's best consumed surrounded by blazing Yankee Candles. Presumably the melon and raspberry flavors will then evoke images of fall foliage, Nantucket whalers, and the Kennedys.
W.B. Yeats: "This Nobel Prize-winning author was one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century. His intellectual, often obscure poetry focused on the reality of life in Ireland. A mixture of vodka, gin, rum, Triple Sec, melon liqueur, sour mix, and a splash of 7-Up reflect the lush green countryside of Yeats's homeland."
This drink might reflect the Emerald Isle in terms of color, but I don't recall anybody drinking anything involving Triple Sec in Angela's Ashes. In fact, the only thing I remember about that book was that every other chapter, a baby died of starvation and/or typhoid. Presumably, the Dead Poet bar staff felt that accuracy be damned, this tricked-out Midori sour-flavored Long Island Tea was a better representative of Yeats's Ireland than say, a glass of Bushmill's. The drink comes with a bar of Irish Spring, a box of Lucky Charms, and a DVD of the classic film Leprechaun: In Space to really hammer the faux Irishness home.
I was ranting about this to my mom on the phone that night after I got home and she asked a very good question. "Didn't they have one for that depressed woman? You know, Sylvia Plath?" (My mom gets her money's worth on my college education by giving shout-outs to notable Smith alumnae at every turn...you should hear her when she gets going about Julia Child).
"What would that be, Mom? An oven with an unlit pilot light and the gas on full?"
"Judging by what you told me about their menu, I was thinking that would probably be an electric iced tea or something equally inappropriate," Mom said in her half-disapproving Marge Simpson voice.
"You're probably right about that. It IS too bad they didn't include her, because I could totally associate her with a kamikaze shot. 'Let's do a round of Sylvia Plaths, guys!'" My mom shelved her disapproval and laughed along with me.
Tasteless Sylvia Plath jokes aside, the owners of the Dead Poet clearly need to take a fucking poetry class. If I brought Saratoga120, my old English teacher from Smith who secured my acquittal on possession charges, to this place, she'd take one look at the drink menu and probably inform the bartender that he had the literary accomplishments of a brandy jigger. The Dead Poet would be a considerably better establishment if they made like the main character in the crappy movie of the same name and died. Carpe diem, or whatever. Death is the only just reward for any tard who associates Emily Dickinson with pink lemonade.
Labels: alcoholism, assholes, librophilia, NYC, people who died, retard rage, ridiculous absurdity
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