Onward
I’ve come over to the Google blog hosting service because it has more features. God knows I love features.
Here is a link to the new blog.
http://patrickmeaney.blogspot.com/
See you on the other side, dudes!
Cost-saving at Fox
[I promise to stop doing bullet-point gags.]
- Switching from Cisco IT software to Reagan-era Disko software.
- Coin-operated bathroom stalls, roll-top doors, desk drawers.
- Selling $12 beers at the commissary, setting a 2-drink minimum, firing workers who drink at work, re-serving untouched drinks.
- Ditching “Going green”; now “Burning whatever burns”.
- Doubling Simpsons output by releasing old episodes with colors swapped, dubbing by Dane Cook.
- Replacing UV tanning lamps with normal fluorescent lights in ceilings.
- Reducing Simon Cowell’s human blood stipend.
- Firing temps who write blogs at work.
- Security camera footage now used as lead-ins for “Prison Break”.
- Trafficking synergy to rogue production firms
“Put aside childish things” means “Quit buying crap you don’t need”
There is no reason for anyone to have any of the following in this economy (going from low- to high-income splurges):
- Lotto tickets: you ain’t gonna win.
- fake jewelry: you’re saving money on looking really stupid
- $200 sneakers: don’t buy shoes endorsed by a celebrity who will never possibly find that you exist
- Billy Mays products: you can bedazzle your oxiclean, but you’re still out $50 (plus S&H)
- cat food: cat will catch mice if it’s hungry, which will also reduce expenses on mouse-gun ammunition
- dog food: dog will settle for scraps or cats
- health insurance: you wimp
- Skymall products: the floor-to-bed pet stairs, and especially the LOTR stuff
- Hypnotiq: find a girl who can drink straight grain alcohol
- Jägermeister: overpriced Fernet-Branca, and that’s saying a lot
- World of Warcraft subscriptions: go to a courthouse and meet real people for free
- coffee table books: glossy, pretentious, useless. Leave out a Norton Anthology instead
- 2nd Russian Bride: good for about a week before 1st one kills it; impractical without a 2nd residence (then just immoral)
- real jewelry: haven’t you seen Blood Diamond? or read “The Diamond Necklace?” by Maupassant?
- Underarmour: work out harder in cotton or wool
- memorabilia: Additionally, I probably hate what you want to remember
- haute couture (on ugly people): either look normal or great, don’t fail on both accounts at the same time
- Brookstone appliances: usually you’re not utilizing it right, nor should you be
- Corvettes: crap sports cars. Buy a Mazda or a Viper
- plastic surgery (except face transplants): things are scary enough lately
- bespoke Bentleys: I don’t know if these are real
- private jets (esp. if you’re John Thaine): the seat of shame at 30,000 feet
- Senatorship: unless two words, and featuring a giant hovering laser
Top Movies of 2008/09
To be honest, I don’t see a lot of movies. I didn’t see the following, but I saw various promotional materials, which are noted after each title. Since these media usually don’t tell you the ending, I’ve interpreted and extrapolated what I think would be a reasonable wrap-up for these movies to save myself time and money.
- MARLEY AND ME (posters and preview): A new yellow lab puppy drives an otherwise-unfettered couple to jump through hilarious hoops. At the movie’s major climax, they face the difficult decision of staying in their small but cozy single-bedroom apartment, or moving to a larger (but no-pets-allowed) condo. They put Marley to sleep and move on. After a fight over income and spending, they realize that they are still strangers to each other and that Marely allowed them to overlook their astounding personal hang-ups. They split up, move out, and start seeing other people, sadder and wiser after their failure in both human and humane love.
- THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON (posters and preview): Brad Pitt is a beautiful man who ages backwards. He walks around with beautiful music constantly playing around him. Cate Blanchet is also beautiful, and they fall in love, presumably because both have eyes bluer than lapis lazuli. Something incredibly symbolic and beautiful is revealed about human nature over the course of their strange relationship, which ends with Blanchet dying a normal death and the newborn Pitt reverting into a fetus, then into a single cell, then a drop of semen on a human ovum, then nothing—until a man passing by (who looks vaguely like Pitt) looks at a woman (also looking like Pitt), and his azure eye twinkles.
- THE READER (production stills): Cate Winslet (the inferior English Cate) lies around naked looking hungover, premenstrual or what she must think is languid. She looks directly in the camera and offers $10 million for an Oscar.
- BOLT (posters): Another slick animated feature offers a neat and non-ethnic plethora of stock characters necessary to family movies. The eponym must accomplish something, and learns about himself by doing so. The movie ends, and Daddy’s eyes are red as we go to the car. Mommy discovers that the only way he got through two hours with his family was a surreptitious quart of rye. After a scary, shouty ride home, mommy and us kids stay with Aunt Edna. Daddy is sick, she tells us, and we’ll see him when he’s better.
- WALTZ WITH BASHIR (preview): Israel wins the War in Iraq. A guy runs around the desert with his arms up, delirious with pain, sorrow or a poignant mixture of the two. Some stray dogs are also running around (see “Bolt”).
- UNDERWORLD: RISE OF THE LYCANS (preview and posters): The William Wallace of Werewolves (played by that hot Eastern Bloc chick who’s not Mila Jovavich, you know, oh, the one from the Scottish Road Warrior ripoff, the chick with the robot eye—you didn’t see that one? Nevermind.) must overcome the Darth Vadar of Vampires. No Vampira means probably the worst vampire movie ever, again.
- BRIDE WARS (poster): Two women face off with California voters as they struggle to be heard in their fight for gay marriage. They lose.
- INKHEART (poster): Brendan Fraser pretends he’s in a Spielberg movie, but to no avail.
- HOTEL FOR DOGS (poster): With Jurgen Prochnow, Max von Sydow, Bruno Ganz. An inner core of Nazi officers plots to eliminate Hitler, in order to save their soldiers and their country. Much of the planning happens in Berlin’s famous “Hundenhotel”, until Tom Cruise gets involved and ruins everything.
- FROST/NIXON (poster): Nixon rises from the dead to retrieve the title of “Most Hated American President” from Bush. He fails by showcasing his sinister cunning, which the modern citizen can appreciate over Bush’s bland obliviosness.
- MILK (preveiw, poster, endless babble from friends): A bunch of handsome heterosexual actors pretend to be gay, to the endless delight of the female viewership. Josh Brolin is allowed to to kill at least one other character, per his contractual rider, to prove he isn’t gay.
- WALL-E (preview and poster): A machine very like the movie’s main character creates an animated film to explore mankind’s foibles. It succeeds in luring mankind into an empathetic era of openness. The cold, unfeeling machine then finds its bloody conquest of such a weakened and ovine species all the more facile.
- DOUBT (preview): Fell asleep during preview, apologies.
- AUSTRALIA! (posters): Hugh Jackman hits fire with a whip. Nicole Kidman runs toward a green camera filter. Baz Luhrman humiliates an entire continent by making it look 100 yards across.
- CORALINE (preview): A young girl with blue hair arouses guilty feelings of attraction in men across the nation. This feeling is exacerbated when men see this picture of 14-year-old Dakota Fanning, the voice of Coraline:
- THE DARK KNIGHT (movie): Saw this one, liked it better when my opinion was informed by promo stuff alone. ALT ENDING: While trying to win a bet on NSA procedures with “I’m-too-principled-to-be-using-cell-phones-as-radars” Morgan Freeman, Batman finds his true calling as a law-enforcement surveillance litigator. He learns in the courtroom that life provides no absolutes, everything is relative, and good guys lose with astonishing regularity. This jaded outlook leads to the realization that simply killing dangerous supervillians is a lot easier than trying to bring them to “justice”, a nebulous term under whose aegis more egregious acts than murder have been perpetrated (if not perpetuated). Joker dies from a “bat-bullet” to the brain, delivered at point-blank range.
Tom shares with me his chili, then his chili recipe, then my prognosis
[I eat the chili and send him this email]:
“Oh shit damn! That’s good chili! Having good meat in it makes a huge difference. Also, the nuclear amounts of spice don’t hurt.”
[He writes back]:
“Thank you. I rolled the spices in a waxy protein material that will dissolve after being in your stomach for one hour. That way it doesn’t taste that spicy going down, but then suddenly, long after the chili has been eaten, your guts will be consumed with a raging fire of cripply, leg-wobbling, spiciness…enough capsaicin to drop a rhino.
That’s why it’s called Trojan horse chili.”
Gamers and Lamers
I consider myself a serious gamer. I’ve killed literally hundreds of monsters in 2-D or 3-D cyber-worlds ranging from Asteroid, Doom II, Doom I (demo only), plus a bunch of old Apogee games I found online for free. I also played Half Life one time, but it was pretty scary, so I went outside. For these reasons, I think I’ve got a solid handle on the mindset of a hardcore gamer.
Or that’s what I thought, until I read this article.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7796482.stm
This article asserts that the fairer (and rarer) sex has an affinity for gaming. “Is that a fact?” I thought as I stroked my stubbly jaw in cool, masculine deliberation. I followed the links to researchers’ webpages and realized immediately that they are nerds, and their research might not be entirely unbiased (see below pictures). I also realized that all the data were collected from gamers who self-reported on the internet. The seeds of doubt were thus sown.
The Professors:
This line cued the bullshit alarm at last: “[T]he survey revealed an unusually high level of bisexuality among the women who took part in the study - over five times higher than the general population.” Wishful thinking all around.
The lead professor, Scott Caplan of the University of Delaware, explained this phenomenon. “These are not people who are following strict gender stereotypes,” said Prof Caplan. Indeed not, Herr Professor, although I doubt you’re seeing the full picture. Consider this as well: “Another unexpected finding was that the online game players - particularly the women - were healthier than the general population, though this was drawn from self-reported levels of exercise and body mass index.”
I’m not going spell to out why, but these findings are absolutely unbelievable. Anyone who’s spent time away from a computer would agree.
So there’s three articles here, at least that I can find.
- The straight-forward one about physically fit bisexual women playing computer games online;
- The one slightly beneath that one about how easy it is to get funding for doing bogus research as a communications professor at U of Delaware
- The third one beneath that about how nerds in academia will continue to delude themselves in spite of being attached to a much larger community of learning.
There’s also the hint of an article about weird MMORPGamers who lie to online surveys and identify themselves as fit bisexual women for God knows what reason. I think any of these articles (save the foremost, and especially the lattermost) would be good subjects for research by any sociologist with half a brain and a sense of humor firmly rooted in the real world.
UPDATE:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7797269.stm
Pope Benedict XVI has the right idea, only he ought to reserve his comments for imaginary worlds where Jesus lives, such as online.
Keep Bush On
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7782422.stm
While the US has suffered greatly under its most irresponsible and inept presidency in recent memory, the Bush administration is finally beginning to turn out some real gold. There was the EU conference where no European leader would look Bush in the eye (let alone shake his hand) as they marched out for a photo op, his kissing Barbara Streisand on the cheek while she was a White House guest, and an assortment of other travails linked to the Obama transition, like his refusal to let the Obamas move into a White House satellite residence so the girls could go to DC schools. Since the election, the Onion have latched onto Bush’s vulnerability by running a series of macabre/humorous “In Brief” stories in which the president inevitably ends up “resting comfortably at Bethesda Naval Hospital’. I think they’re on to something.
I therefore propose that Bush be kept on as honorary “Pressident”, a new position without any power but which gives regular press conferences. The running gag would be that Bush has to answer for real-world events as though his administration were still in office. While this framework might be more or less true for the next 50 years, it will be easier to swallow with Bush still on the spot. Accordingly, apart from national pain mitigation, the other reason for keeping him on would be punishment. Bush would have no choice. He’d have to give press conferences for anyone at any time, from Cindy Sheehan to Al Gore, from to Campbell Brown to the ghost of Tim Russert (via a seance).
Questions like “Why did you send cholera to Zimbabwe?” and “Though you have alwlays denied being a Nazi war criminal, do these recently disclosed documents refresh your memory at all [waves a stapled wad of papers]?” would have to be fielded with a straight face, or Bush would have to answer it again until he got it right.
Either that, or Bush gets sent to El Paso to clear brush for a new trans-border highway without any passport or check stations. He sure loves clearing brush. Maybe it’s because his name is Bush! Or maybe because he thinks he’s making a difference.
Virgin and Child
All religious images re-uploaded in fabulous high-resolution!
My brother pointed out that “tumble” isn’t really a cycle. He ought to get excommunicated.
Deposition from the Cross
This way seems more likely than getting ladders and shit.
Martyrdom of St. Patrick
I think this is how he died. Or a leprechaun turned him into a snake.
Annunciation Scene
The angel dances back-up for the non-virgin Madonna these days.
Last Supper
Jesus didn’t seem to mind when the proprietor banned him for life.
Welcome to Fox, a note from Zorro Reynard, CEO of Fox
As you read this brief note, dear employee, rest assured I am nowhere in your vicinity. I did not craft this note as a mere blind to distract you from some prank or practical joke I am setting up against you. You read this of your own volition, as you are truly a master of what happens to you, a captain of your dignity and fate. Rest assured, everything is in its right place. Your stapler to your right is full of staples. Your phone to your left has not rang all morning. Your coffee cup, almost empty now, was so when last you set it down—wasn’t it? Or did you top off at the pantry down the hall not five minutes ago?
Welcome to Fox, where nothing is quite as it seems. To answer your queries as to the missing coffee, refer to page 19 of your orientation booklet, a table of department dependencies and rankings. In the top left corner of the table, you will find the Fox Guild, a department from which no one is completely safe. I oversaw its creation last year to counter over-productivity and over-achievement around the company. It is responsible for all the mischief that happens on the lot. Accordingly, you will find yourself sitting in your missing coffee. A pair of gnomes poured it into your seat as you stood up to synchronize your wristwatch with the office clock a moment ago. If you could only see the look on your face now. It is on page 24 of the orientation booklet, the reflective sheet captioned “Monkey”.
SVP of the Fox Guild Peter Puck oversees all shenanigans and directs his teams of pixies, elves, laughing crows, talking appliances, terra cotta golems, Faustian demon-servants, walking brooms, and lascivious satyrs on their daily rounds wherever other departments are trying to get work done. He is a hands-on executive, often tying shoelaces together himself to get a job delayed. You may chance someday to see him, but by then you may have already crossed over into the world of Sylmaria, and will be trapped there forever (especially if you accepted the free truffles offered at the orientation meeting).
On that note, I should mention that trying to find the Fox Guild is a perilous task, fraught with labyrinthine hikes through miles of empty office space, encounters with riddler sphinxes and other dangerous delays, and, inevitably, a topsy-turvey sea voyage that ends by descending into a whirlpool. So bring a lifejacket, a change of clothes, plus a sandwich or two.
I’m sure we will have rolicking good times in the months to come.
Yours truly,
Zorro Reynard
PS: Though we’re always watching, it sometimes escapes our notice when someone needs to come down a peg. Think of the old well by the back of the lot as a Suggestion Box ($1 minimum deposit).
PPS: That person might end up being you.
PPPS: Your car is currently sinking off the coast of Aruba.
The year was 2008, and the word on every lip was…
[cue honky tonk piano music]…GOLD! Gold fever! Everybody had it. It was bigger than la grippe, typhus and herpes put together, with similar symptoms to boot. There wasn’t a man-jack east of Oakland who hadn’t wondered at the myths of this magical metal seemingly immune to the feminine ebb and flow of Wall Street. While sub-prime mortgagers and mortgagees roiled in the meanness of their pilferous traffic, the Neo-Alchemists were busy transmuting their savings and services into tangible, fantastical gold.
The boon was felt first in Maryland, where environmental standards were so low that a cottage-industry of smelters sprang up from Cumberland to Ocean City. A shining cloud of mercury vapor hung over the state. Computers and electronics were yanked from various utilities for gold extraction. Grave robbery came into a new vogue. When the rumor got around that the Antarctic continent was rife with gold veins, a fleet of underequipped boats made what would be a one-way trip to the bottom of the Southern Ocean.
While scientists and doctors split on creating a cure for the terrible mania destroying the world versus pursuing the philosopher’s stone, politicians angled to position themselves on top once all reserves were plundered. At the peak of the gold holocaust, Canadian singer Neil Young was elected president of the US on the “My Heart is Made of Pure Canadian Maple Leaf Gold” platform. South Africa had become the preeminant world power with a GDP worth 140 trillion rand (at the peak, 1 rand = 42 US dollars). Socioeconomic effects were deep-felt, as indentured servitude, banking collapse and anarchy became general trends. The fever finally died down when it was revealed that gold is really not useful for anything beyond conducting and being shiny (“bling” value).
The Scorn Scale
FILLS ME WITH SCORN
Ceaseless & pithy irony (hipsters)
“Free” credit report advertisements
Talk Radio (esp. on AM frequencies)
MILDLY INSPIRES SCORN
Vampires
Comic Books as “Literature”
Gourmets
NOT EVEN WORTH THE SCORN
The Christian God
SNL
Sarah Palin (for now)
