I learned a couple new things about myself the other night, courtesy of pouring fermented hops down my throat, of course. Discoveries are rare as they are, so here are my findings.
There Are Things That I Want
Such as t-shirts that broadcast products that I like…
Hey ladies, guess what I drink?
Hey ladies, guess what I've watched?
And There Are Things That I Need
Such as definitely bullhorns on my Honda Civic…
Tact is not in my boss Paul’s vocabulary. It wasn’t even when while we are friends. In memory of Michael Jackson, here’s some of his favorite depictions… from two shows.
Top 5 Michael Jackson Cartoon Clips
5. South Park
Blanket can fly, “That’s ignorant,” and who has whose nose?
4. Family Guy
The dancer, the legend, and his crotch.
3. Family Guy
Captain EO is “coming right at me!”
2. South Park
“I’d like to show you my wishing tree!”
1. South Park
“You’re so awesome, Mr. Jefferson! I’ve got time, do you?”
I recently found this video of a weird local commercial for, what else, a furniture store:
Consider my mind blown! This couldn’t be real, could it? I mean, was it serious? Did it have lofty goals of promoting racial harmony and couches? Courtesy of my new skill set (BOOM! Research!), I uncovered this…
Ugh. I feel defeated. I wanted that commercial to be legit. I feel duped like most people did with The Blair Witch Project.
(SIDENOTE 1: When I was in high school, parents had to write something great about their kids for the yearbook. My mom didn’t know what to write, so I wrote my own. Some girls in my class had told me they thought what my family wrote was really sweet. For some stupid reason, I told them that I wrote it. The look on their faces must have been like mine when I watched that second video.)
(SIDENOTE 2: When I saw The Blair Witch Project, I took a friend that did not know it was fake. He was relatively unaffected by the flick, but the dude in front of me was freaking out when they found that eye, or tongue, whatever it was, wrapped in gauze. Totally worth it for that.)
So back to the current disappointment. At least this is real, right?
I remember being a lad of about 29 years old, and I finally gathered the nerve to ask my mom, “Where do babies come from?”
I often think back to my childhood, and remember Saturday mornings as a kid. Rolling out of bed from underneath my taped together Garbage Pail Kid posters. Grabbing a box of Cocoa Krispies and the biggest bowl I could handle. Turning on the TV without a remote control because we had none. Zoning out to crappy yet awesome cartoons and the commercials that sold me on Transformers and Star Wars and Centurions and M.A.S.K. with little to no effort. Then there would come along one of these ads:
Granted, it’s not one of the most heartwarming, but very often, they’d catch me by surprise and effect me on a personal level. Gee, maybe I should help my neighbor shovel the snow instead of throwing snowballs at them from my fort, I might consider. What I didn’t realize at the time was that it was a COMMERCIAL FOR A RELIGION! If I wasn’t born and raised Roaming Recovering Roman Catholic, seeing Jesus H. Christ’s name up there might have been a red alert, but I was, so it didn’t. (Also, I wasn’t raised in a way that told me we were the only ones that were right, so at least I had that going for me.)
So now this little vid is making it’s way around the web. I recieved it via a link in an email from frequent idea spurner Dave, and I watched it in similar wonder to the old LSD, er, I mean LDS commercials. It was beautiful, and in fact made me happy to be alive. Damn YouTube and their header captions:
I guess what I’m saying is it’s much more effective than this old thang:
In other words, how can so many inches of Tom Cruise can be wrong? (My guess: 60 of his 67…)
There’s a commercial that plays here in Detroit which uses the record scratch sound to express a shock. I can’t recall the product or manufacturer to present an example, but for those of you born in the *gulp* 90’s, the sound occurs at the 0:52 mark in this excellent mash-up:
iTod Meet Coaster Spinner With Weird Arm Thingee?
And I’m being serious here. Why would any modern advertisement resort to such an out-dated cliche? I’m sure the writers thought they were being funny (as I often do and fail miserably), but a record scratch? A RECORD SCRATCH?
Here’s some other things I’ve been JusWondering about:
1) In the song, Only Wanna Be With You, does Hootie cry about the Miami Dolphins, or about “the dolphins” in general (since he’s friends with “the Blowfish,” you see)?
2) Is l33t speak still called that? Because it seems kinda like that term’s jumped the shark?
3) Has the term jumped the shark nuked the fridge?
4) Is it just me, or shouldn’t She’s a Beauty totally be a song by Chicago or at least Peter Cetera, instead of The Tubes? It should have been in Mannequin, too. (Was it in that?)
Kim Cattrall’s stiffest performance
5) Much ballyhoo has been made about Conan O’Brien being a neophyte in L.A., but didn’t he live there when he wrote for The Simpsons? (Boom! Research! He lived there when he wrote for HBO’s Not Necessarily the News… No specifics on his home whilst he was on his Homer bender, but I’m still pretty sure he was at least in Hollywood. Turn that ballyhoo into boo!)
For some reason, the world was all aflutter in this dream. National news, tabloid shows, late night talk fests… everyone was going crazy about how Rosie O’Donnell ate the Muppets.
(Now let me state this here: I have no problem with Rosie-O whatsoever. I like women in the media like her and Roseanne that speak their minds, even if people don’t really want to hear it. Don’t know why this is so, but I just thought I had to give this disclaimer.)
Anywhatnot, the media jumped all over the story. Word was that she had already devoured Miss Piggy and Gonzo, and that she was well on her way to swallowing Kermit.
Dramatization of my psychosis
But then, against all odds, Kermit showed up at a Hollywood premier. Interviewers pressed him for a what, and a why, and a how, and all he said was that he climbed out of Rosie’s gullet. Overnight, this poster was found in offices everywhere:
On Sale Now! (...nowhere...)
INGREDIENTS: Booze and a patty melt (minus onions) plus garlic mashed potatoes.
Someone check the definition for "brothers" please...
It’s been a short while since I’ve stumbled across something on the TripleDoubleU that’s compable of consuming massive amounts of my time. Congrats to The Gregory Brothers for doing just that.
(SIDENOTE: The group includes a sister, just like how it is with the Warner Brothers – Yakko, Wakko, and Dot, yet I suspect they are not really related, just like how it is with The Ramones. But Kings of Leon are all brothers, which I didn’t initially believe, so who knows? Sarah’s the sister-in-law, married to Evan, oldest brother of Andrew and Michael. Boom! Reasearch!)
Together, they have encompassed a great portion of my weekend by being fantastic on so many levels.
First off – they are talented as all get up. Not just a little get up, or a medium amount of get up – all of it.
Second off – they’re funny as heck. Okay, “heck” might not be as funny as the word “poop,” but I’m not putting that word in any sentence about them. Erm…
Okay, so many levels that include only two, but they’re huge levels, right?
I found out about them through Warming Glow (thanks!) after a post showing this video:
Incredible, right? It skewers auto-tuning, the news in general, and the current state of politics, and still manages to be a good song. Not a classic song per se, but beyond textured for a comedy bit.
After watching the first four auto-tuned news reports on their YouTube channel Schmoyoho amongst other earlier outings, I dove into their Facebook and MySpace pages and was surprised to find they were serious musicians (I really like Butter On My Roll, but who am I kidding… it’s all great.). That elevated their level of a shout out on this page from general to specific. That doesn’t just happen for everyone.
Too bad the 25% of the band that’s “babe” is already spoken for. I love women that can sing. Sarah, if you ever get bored with Evan and are looking for a blogger that tries to be funny on a daily basis, comment on my site and I’ll respond! Srsly, I will comment right back on this blog! (Pourquoi est il que les amours m’échappe?)
In honor, anticipation, and fear of desperate loathing for next week’s release of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, here are some of the film’s stars in what could quite possibly be the best robot song ever…
Vodpod videos no longer available.
Well, maybe that’s the second best. You be the judge.
(There are more tags than words in this post. Hee hee!)
Since this blog is an open book to all my weaknesses, it’s sorta turned into my (NERD ALERT!) Xavier Protocols. Of my weaknesses (vanilla-scented anything falls high on that list), loud noises while I sleep smacks near the top. On the night of these particular dreams, I fell asleep with the television on only to be awakened by a loud lawyer commercial.
Okay, it wasn’t that one, but imagine if the explosions were audible, then you’d get the picture.
Anyambulancechaser, in the first dream, I encountered a new breed of night creatures… the WHERE-WOLVES. How were they different than werewolves? Let me explain with a (NERD ALERT!) toy from the remake reboot whatever second Hulk movie:
You see, in the flick, which I have not seen, the dude on the right mutates into the monster on the left. This toy, called the Hulk Deluxe Mutating Abomination, does not mutate at all. Instead of either really mutating by adding water, or by simply imagining that it happens, the little guy fits into a compartment on the back of the big guy. Dumb? You bet.
Well that’s pretty much how where-wolves worked. Wolves merged with their host humans so both could exist. To recombine, humans hovered over the wolves. Now that you’ve pictured it, moving on…
My other dream involved a (NERD ALERT!) Star Wars character. Growing up, I knew this bounty hunter…
…as Zuckuss and this guy…
…as 4-LOM. But as it turned out, the original Kenner toy line had it wrong in the 80’s, and with the re-releases of the toys in the 90’s, they rectified the problem and named each of them correctly. To me though, Zuckuss will always be 4-LOM and 4-LOM will be Zuckuss. Until I was corrected in a dream. This guy…
…showed up to tell me his name really was Allen.
INGREDIENTS: Turkey and provolone on a bagel and a Mountain Dew. And beer.
Sure… during my month of not boozing, I might have woke up each morning with an extra bounce in my step, but at work, more mistakes were made and more things were forgotten. Yeah, it’s possible I slept better or longer (courtesy of passing out) during the many sauced months that came before, or that the heaped upon hours I spent in front of the boob tube boobed out my noggin and rendered my work performance lackluster.
So I started to wonder… maybe I’m smarter under the influence. I do play a lot of trivia at the bar, and maybe that’s like running with ankle-weights for my brain. Research ensued and I discovered this headline:
Whuuuuhhh?!
Dost thine eyes deceive, um, me?
From the BBC article:
Mice fed moderate quantities of alcohol grew extra brain cells, but also showed a preference for alcohol over water.
Lead researcher Professor Stefan Brene said: “We believe that the increased production of new nerve cells during moderate alcohol consumption can be important for the development of alcohol addiction and other long-term effects of alcohol on the brain.”
Okay, maybe it doesn’t sound perfectly fantastic – or does it?
Alternatively, the extra cells might help with learning and memory, [Brene] said. Another theory, according to the researchers, is that the tranquilising effect of alcohol triggers the growth. All of the new cells developed normally.
My favorite line:
A spokeswoman from the Campaign for Real Ale said: “It is well known that alcohol in moderation is good for your body so it’s no surprise it’s also good for your mind. “Maybe that is why lots of pub quiz teams are so bright.”
Some other favorite lines… from The Legend of Bagger Vance:
Rannulph Junnah: Now, the question on the table is how drunk is drunk enough? And the answer is that it’s all a matter of brain cells
Hardy Greaves: Brain cells?
Rannulph Junnah: That’s right Hardy. You see every drink of liquor you take kills a thousand brain cells. Now that doesn’t much matter ‘cos we got billions more. And first the sadness cells die so you smile real big. And then the quiet cells go so you just say everything real loud for no reason at all. That’s ok, that’s ok because the stupid cells go next, so everything you say is real smart. And finally, come the memory cells. These are tough sons of bitches to kill.
And then there’s always Cliff Clavin’s take:
Well you see, Norm, it’s like this… A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo and when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first.
This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members.
In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells. Now, as we know, excessive drinking of alcohol kills brain cells. But naturally, it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine.
And that, Norm, is why you always feel smarter after a few beers.
monkeyBLOG monkeyDO 