Daily Archives: February 16, 2011

16 posts

Confessions: Dreadful TV Edition

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I’ve watched bad TV my whole life; normally, it was always along the lines of Jersey Shore, Real Housewives, and (very, very ashamedly) American Idol.  But recently it’s gotten worse.  Much worse.  In the past year, I’ve watched (in no particular order):

Pretty Little Liars

I have no idea what got me and Roommate hooked on what we fondly refer to as PLL.  I think we missed Gossip Girl actually being good?  I don’t know.  This show is certainly not good, to say the least.  So why do I keep watching it?  I think it has something to do with the (SPOILER ALERT!  LOLJK I know nobody except me watches this crap) fake blind girl, terribly inappropriate ABC Family channel relationship between a 16-year-old student and her English teacher, “unsolvable” murder, and whatever other ridiculous, Agatha Christie-aneurism-for-high-schoolers plotline they come up with.  It may be of note that this is the only scripted terrible TV show I watch. (Is it of note?  I don’t know.  There are so many things about this show that I can answer with “I don’t know.”)

Say Yes to the Dress

I FUCKING LOVE THIS SHOW.  I’d love to say I have no idea why I love this show, but that would be a huge lie and this is not a post in which I lie to you, dear friends.  This is a post in which I come clean over my addictions.  I love this show because Hot. Damn. I love watching uppity bitches acting like the terrible people we all know they are.  And Randy.  And OMG SO MANY PRETTY DRESSES!!11!!!

World’s Strictest Parents

No joke, I’ve cried watching this.  Cried. Go ahead; tear me apart in the comments over my feelings.  But for real, this show takes either redneck shithead kids or spoiled untamed rich kids and sticks them with super Christian families who make the kids, like, you know, work and the bad kids FREAK THE FUCK OUT.  And then they redeem themselves and learn about feelings. And then they go to college and they meet people at parties who are like, “Hey, didn’t I see you on World’s Strictest Parents?” Like teens through the reality TV cycle, so are the days of our lives.

(I couldn’t find any videos with embedding code from the US version of this show so you’ll just have to trust me.   Or go here.)

Kourtney and Khloe Take Miami

When I saw the previews for this steaming pile of Armenian over-sharing, I thought there was no way on Kgod’s Kgreen Kearth it could be worth watching.  But oh!  How wrong I was!  Much like the other programs listed, this show is worth watching because it’s really fun to judge people who willingly put their lives on television in order to feel better about yourself. (Isn’t that kind of the point of reality TV?)  Let me tell you a-something about this family: Kourtney and Khloe used to like to get really shitfaced and hook up with random dudes and it was amazing.  Unfortunately for all of us, the show was pretty much over once Kourtney popped out the spawn of Patrick Bateman, Khloe married some tall guy who loves lakes, and a terrible spin-off set in New York (it violates the acclaimed scientific theorem that only two Kardashians (neither of which being Kim) at a time are bearable) came to be on the air.

I have more terrible TV shows I love but I think I’ve embarrassed myself enough for one day.  Make me feel less alone and tell me what awful TV you can’t get enough of in the comments.

Life, Death and Violence: A Study of February 16

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Good morning little birds!

Today on Life, Death and Violence: Animals! Animals are so precious, except, well, when they’re not. Then they’re not precious. One would not consider the vampire bat or the honey badger to be precious animals, we would suppose. Puppies are precious. Baboons are not. Puppies in teacups broke PreciousMeter, the site used to rank preciousness.  Precious views are down, but that’s not accurate because the new redesign precious levels are just so perfectly precious that PreciousMeter just can’t compute those figures.

LIFE! (or, how we learned to stop worrying and give birth in a teacup)

  • 1804: Jules Janin: Mr. Janin wrote a book called The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman. We here at LD&V had hoped to find out what this amazingly titled book was about, but there seems to be nothing to find other than that it is French horror (frenetique) and that Janin had originally planned the novel as a spoof of the genre, but then fell in love with it and, so, we present to you, an imagining of The Dead Donkey and the Guillotined Woman: A Comedy

Priest: Do you have any final words?

Guilltoned Woman: Forgive me father for I have sinned. I have killed that donkey over there .

SLICE! The guillotined woman is beheaded.

Guillotined Woman: I knew I should have held on to my hat.

FIN

Note: Jules Janin was really fat. Evidence:

  • 1834: Ernst Haeckel: This German biologist, zoologist and philosopher is responsible for such liberal buzzwords like “ecology,” “phylum” and “recapitulation theory.” Burn the witch, we say! He also painted some pretty paintings of animals that we’re pretty sure we saw in ZooBooks when we were 8.

  • 1941: HAPPY BIRTHDAY KIM JONG IL! We can’t believe you’re only 70! Shame you’re no longer the sexiest age possible like Dear Leader Bloomberg (69).  We just sent you a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue and a bobblehead in your image. Here’s hoping it gets through your borders. Remember Kim, don’t arrest the messengers or else they won’t give you the bobblehead. You’ve been asking for it all year, so just do us this one favor.

  • 1959: Speaking of vicious animals with short tempers, a big happy birthday also goes out to John McEnroe, the performance artist credited with founding the Anger at Tennis Balls submovement of 1980s Absurdism. Happy Birthday John! Can’t wait for your MoMA retrospective (or are you going to be at New Museum?)
  • 1967: Like animals, sometimes people just aren’t loved as much as others of their kind. Case and point: Keith Gretzky. We didn’t even know Wayne had a brother, but, then again, we were never huge Gretzky fans mainly because we always got lost in Steve Yzerman’s eyes.

DEATH! (or, how we learned to stop worrying and just succumb to that Spanish Flu)

No one cool or animal related died today, sadly. We do however, have Russian ingénues, French writers (but those die every minute, right!?), Roman emperors, a great American artist and English soap manufacturers! It all sounds so exciting! If we were you, we’d definitely pull up a chair and pay attention.

  • 307: Flavius Valerius Severus: And they said Albus Severus had a bad name! Flavius was emperor of the Roman Empire for a few months before he was murdered like a dog. He was a commoner who rose through the ranks, which is probably why he was murdered although some sources say that he was forced to commit suicide.
  • 1844: Joseph Crosfield: He made soap. Here’s a picture of him:

  • 1917: Octave Mirbeau: Journalist, travel writer, art critic, novelist, playwright. We think he died from an accidental Adderall overdose (can that happen?). He was an advocate of Van Gogh when it wasn’t cool to like Van Gogh, making him an early adopter of the hipster movement. He’d probably be all over Ann Liv Young today, or maybe not since she’s mildly popular. Anyways, he wrote some good stuff that’s still popular and he’s never been out of print. You go Mirbeau!
  • 1919: Vera Khlodnaya: The first Russian silent film star. Only five of her estimated 50-100 films survive. She’s pretty and she died of Spanish Flu during the Great Pandemic of 1919

  • 1990: Keith Haring: That guy who did those outlines died due to complications related with AIDS. Seriously though, we think this is the saddest death today because Keith Haring’s really cool and we totally went as one of his outlines for Halloween last year (amongst other costumes)

VIOLENCE! (or, how we learned to stop worrying and love the jihad)

  • Hezbollah was founded in 1982 sparking decades of violence and war in the Middle East (well, more so than would have occurred without them).
  • BOOM! BANG! SHOOT EM UP! Bombs explode and gunfire is released upon the government headquarters of Uzbekistan in an assassination attempt on the Uzbekistani president. We always thought former Soviet Bloc countries had a weird way of partying like it’s 1999.
  • Also in 1999, Kurdish rebels take over a variety of European embassies after Turkey holds hostage one of the rebel leaders. Said rebel leader is pictured below.

OTHER NEAT THINGS THAT HAPPENED! (or, how we learned to stop worrying and let our toddlers watch Coupling)

  • 1899 – Knattsprynufelag Reykjavikur, Iceland”s first football club is founded. We’ll give 500 monopoly dollars to the first person who can prove that they can pronounce that.
  • 1923: King Tut’s tomb is discovered
  • 1957: The Toddler Truce is abolished! This was a mandatory rule that the British government had placed upon the television corporations that their could be zero programming between the hours of 6p and 7p so that children could be put to bed before the grown up shows came on. We don’t know who the British government thought was going to be in bed that early, but it certainly wasn’t rambunctious little babies like us! We were baby geniuses who had to be up all night working with Toddler’s First Chemistry Lab. Mom would never buy us cesium and we’re still mad about that even though we don’t like science anymore.

  • 2005: The NHL SHUT DOWN and announced the complete cancellation of the 2004-2005 season after months of lockouts. We were devastated by this news as we’re huge Red Wings fans and everyone knows that the Wings are the best and don’t you even DARE to suggest otherwise. WE THROW OCTOPI ONTO THE ICE. OCTOPI! Hardcore. OKAY!? GO WINGS! Go hockey in general, really. Hot, burly men on ice beating each other up with their sticks while chasing some rubber is great television in our eyes. Our father likes it for different reasons, however. Still, hockey is awesome.

That’s all folks. See you next time on Life, Death and Violence. We’re going to go take a trip on Memory Lane with our stash of ZooBooks*. To be honest, we’ll probably order a t-shirt with a toucan on it as well to, you know, wear ironically.

*That Panda is stressing! This is how happy pandas become sad pandas.

Playlist: Five Songs You Are Not Allowed To Judge Me For Liking

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Oh ladies, it has just been been one of those weeks for me, you know? And it’s only Wednesday! I need pop music. And not just any pop music–no, I need the best of the best. Or the worst. I can’t tell which, and frankly, I don’t care.

These songs have a certain magic to them, a timeless uplift that transcends ironic appreciation and nostalgic memory. Paradoxically, one is both reluctant to public admit enjoying these songs and compelled to sing along with them whenever they play on the bar jukebox, emphatic shouts betraying an ingrained love for these decidedly unhip bursts of melody and enthusiasm, pop cultural gift cards charged straight at the soul whose sonic brethren we claim to loathe as they come on the pharmaceutical Muzak radio stations played at CVS and the dentist’s waiting room–yet we inevitably remind ourselves to let curiosity get the best of ourselves and listen to these tunes on YouTube when we get home later, just for old time’s sake. But these rusted old culture-junkie antiques? These are even better than that. You can’t judge me, for as guilty pleasures are concerned, we are all one.

Phil Collins – “You’ll Be In My Heart” (1999)

Starting off your playlist with a Phil Collins song says many things: “I am sufficiently emotionally fragile so as to allow a hackneyed series of chord changes to noticeably lighten my mood,” “I spend a lot of time wearing sweatpants,” and most of all, “I really don’t care what you have to say about my playlist, because I’m too busy being vocally spooned by the lead vocalist of Genesis.”

Just admit it, this is beautiful. “Don’t listen to them, ’cause what do they know,” he assures us during a particularly soaring bridge. “Don’t let soulless detractors diminish your fervent enjoyment of the best male-pop-star-christened Disney song of the 90s.” They’ll see in time. Alone, they’ll be comparing wine cooler prices at Duane Reade one day in the sad future when–just as the hourly announcement touting the benefits of opening a FlexRewards account today are wrapping up–this song starts to play and it soars through the air like Tarzan himself.

Stars on 54 – “If You Could Read My Mind” (Gordon Lightfood cover; 1998)

Here are some of the wonderful couplets this song’s lyrics bequeath to you: With chains upon my feet / You know that ghost is me; What a tale my thoughts would tell / Just like a paperback novel, the kind that drugstores sell; What a tale my thoughts would tell / Just like an old time movie ’bout a ghost from a wishing well,” the latter two establishing a wishing-well motif that sticks with the viewer sticks with a child stuck to the gooey shame of being trapped down said wishing well. And why was that kid even playing by a well in first place? Where are we, fucking Narnia? No, bitches, listen up. This is Jocelyn, Amber, and Ultra Naté’s world–we’re just getting our nails done with our moms in it.

Michael Jackson – “You Rock My World” (2001)

No, it’s not the next “Thriller.” There will never be another “Thriller,” something I think even Michael figured out by the late nineties. So despite the overblown music video that all but throws a veil over Jackson’s supposedly spooky visage and his most nonsensical lyrics since “Your butt is mine,” it’s a testament to how solid the song is, the grooving bass line mingling with mid-90s R&B piano in the smoky bar of Jackson’s psyche, that I’m so readily willing to accept it as MJ canon. But since it came out during the awkward dozen years between Michael’s molestation trials, any potential coolness the song might have offered present-day listeners was forever lost in the black hole of public resentment that only recently–and, unfortunately, posthumously–fell out of favor. And that’s a shame, because Michael’s smoothness here is on par with Frank Sinatra’s. Now, if only the video showed us his face at all so that we could actually watch him sensually lip-sync.

Lonestar – “Amazed” (1999)

The rare song that succeeds not because it attempts to break any new ground but because it does precisely the opposite; it never breaches the perimeters set by the most well-known genre signifiers, but it looks mighty good staying in one place. All of the elements in this song–from the lyrics and the structure to the Chinese-restaurant piano cascades and the piercing high-pitched organ during the grand finale–have been done many, many times before, but Lonestar do all of them really well here. The quickly disappearing mainstream-country market never looked quite as sweet or lucrative as it did back in the late 90s, and “Amazed” lacks the self-conscious ironic detachment it would surely be required to possess in order to achieve mainstream success today. This is also the rare prom ballad that could, once upon a time, be played at any high school gymnasium in the country and receive an equally warm reaction by the couples in attendance.

Céline Dion – “That’s The Way It Is” (1999)

Céline was only a young thirty-something when she released this self-empowered victory lap of a track to accompany her greatest hits release All the Way…A Decade of Song, but boy does she sound wise as she belts out musical epigrams about love and accepting fate and punctuates every other line with a warbling “yeah.” Another song relegated to the pits of the bargain bin because of its singer’s decidedly uncool (at least to young people) status, this is one of the few songs I can play while I work out that distracts me from wondering why the fuck I decided to give these treadmills another try because I just know that I’m gonna get leg cramps tomorrow and you watch, the subway will be running late too, because when it rains it pours, right? Right, and Céline is raining down buckets of gooey, feel-good sentimentality with such flair, such gloire, as though God Almighty were spilling pancake syrup all over my very soul.

So these songs are amazing, but five is never enough. Sare your favorites with the rest of the class, and remember that you get no bonus points for feigned shame.

A Fallout Shelter of my Very Own

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“I saw the new house,” my wife told me. She was looking for houses near her work in Downey, CA and this one, in South Gate, CA, was only five minutes away by car as opposed to the hour plus she was having to commute to and from North Hollywood every day. It had everything we were looking for- three bedrooms, central heating and A/C, a gated backyard with lots of room for the dog to run around. After describing it, she added, “and it has a fallout shelter.”

Yes, the house came with a fallout shelter in the back yard. It was built in the 1960s when people were building them all over the country. Most of them had been removed or filled in decades ago, but this one was still there. I hadn’t seen the house or the shelter due to how far away it was. I was taking care of my daughter an hours’ drive away and my wife checked it out on her lunch break.

Sure, I wasn’t looking for a house with a fallout shelter. Even if I wanted one, we live approximately here-

If there ever is a nuclear war, where my house is now will be replaced by a very, very large smoking crater in the ground, rapidly filling with water. I have no idea why someone thought it would be a good idea to build a fallout shelter in the middle of one of the largest cities in North America, but there it was. I was excited to see it… and why not? What a conversation piece!

I was expecting something like this:

It would be perfect! A little place to get away from stuff. I could set it up as a little lounge, put a new mattress on the bunks, hang out in the hot summer and read a book or have a few drinks and relax. As a friend of mine said to me, “you can turn it into a mancave.”

Well, he was right about the cave part anyway. It’s totally useless as any sort of room. Water seeps in from the ground, so the walls are moldy and musty. There’s no electricity. The only access is by a rickety ladder which isn’t even bolted down. So, it’s a bit of a dismal and useless shelter, but it’s still a conversation piece. Here are some photos:

Here is the hatch to get into the shelter. Note that it is made of wood, a substance guaranteed to keep out all that nasty radiation and ash. At some point, someone tried to paint the wood and failed. As you can see, it’s also rotting. Next to it is a lime from our backyard lime tree- unfortunate because I don’t like limes, but we didn’t get the house for the tree. When you open the hatch, you see…

Yep, scary ladder down the scary hole. Not exactly a place I would want to head down quickly with my wife and daughter when the bombs start falling, but hey, it’s an emergency, right? We don’t need a comfortable way in as long as it’s… oh.

My amazing fallout shelter was a moldy, filthy concrete box about the size of a delivery van. Even though that wooden hatch is there to protect me from the toxic air and the cannibal mutants, I think I might take my chances on the surface. Let’s turn around and climb out…

There’s that horrible ladder. It’s a little slick and also rotting, but I somehow managed to haul my fat ass out of there without being bitten by any of the nasty things that probably live in there now. Note that it is also nearly pitch black in there with the only light coming from the hatch. I used the camera’s flash to compensate.

So… that’s my very own fallout shelter. We have no use for it, we can’t put anything in it that we don’t want covered in mold, we certainly don’t want to hang out in it and it is way in the back of the yard behind the garage, so even if we could put stuff there, it wouldn’t be especially convenient to access it.

I love my house, but the fallout shelter is really only good for telling people I have a fallout shelter. Any suggestions you have for a mold-covered electricity-free concrete bunker under my backyard, feel free to make them in the comments.

“Thurston, what do you wear to a rescue?”

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Lovey Howell spoke these words on Gilligan’s Island, when it seemed that a ship might pass their uncharted desert isle. Ginger immediately leapt to her feet and took Lovey by the arm – “Oh, I’ll help you.”  The next scene shows Lovey in a nautical ensemble, complete with a jaunty hat.

I remember this because it’s precisely the question I would ask.  I don’t always know what I’m doing, but I know how to find out.  Remember, I’m the guy who brought brie, french bread and shrimp cocktail to a cop-and-marine-filled paintball match, was scoffed at, and proceeded to shoot the crap out of everyone.  I will never forget looking John – a Nassau County Corrections Officer with a psychotic gun collection – in the eye, aiming at my friend Chris, and hissing “I’m gonna off that motherfucker.”  He looked at me like he was scared, and he’s 6’6″ and diesel as hell.  I held up some corrugated plastic as a shield, crawled through the scrub brush, and blew my beloved Chris away with a paintball at point-blank range.

The paint was purple.  Not a coincidence.

So work sucks, and it’s time to go.  My colleagues are nice except for the CFO, who is an undermining asshole.   I didn’t know that the SEC was in to do an examination until the day after I agreed to take the job.  The CFO makes a mint while I and my assistant are at the very bottom end of the pay scale.  It’s a 3-person job and there are two of us.  My bonus was inappropriate.  Everyone’s was, including the CFO’s, but his was in the wrong direction.

And ultimately, I blame the CEO – a man I like and respect who has given his trust to the CFO, whom I don’t.  No one does.  If the man Googled himself, he would be appalled.

An international bank wants to see me on Friday – they have a huge real estate trust and a private wealth management division where Compliance work is needed.  I must haircut, manicure, buy new shoes, buy a new belt, pick up my fancy suit pants from the cleaners, and find a way to turn Casual Friday into Froufrou Fund Friday.

I’m a bit unprepared – I can’t find the people I’m meeting anywhere online.  But I will.

I am very sorry that I will be incommunicado tomorrow, but personal business calls me out of state and I can’t be back here before late tomorrow night.  Peace, all.

I might know what to wear to this rescue.  But the fact is… I want to write for a living.  There’s half a novel in the can.  Well, the Ralph Lauren shirt box.