Heroes? More Like Zeroes...

You know why "Heroes" isn't good? Because it peaked when Hiro called Issac, the mysterious painter who would eventually get his brains eaten, "mystery sock" in a vain Engrish attempt to say "Mr. Isaac."

It never recovered from that moment (and I haven't watched it in over a year, when I watched the first half of season 3 just to confirm what I knew at the end of season 1 and the beginning of season 2... Heroes sucks.)

Time Machine Adventures

Today I got in my time machine and killed Rivers Cuomo in 2001, so that everything after the Green Album no longer exists. Thus, Weezer's album "Raditude" will cease to be.

Then, I had to fix this from ever coming to pass: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/news/1853180/

Preview of My Future Career

Is someone going to sue ABC over "The Middle" at some point for copying "Malcolm in the Middle?" I mean, I haven't watched The Middle, but judging from commercials it looks exactly the same. Oblivious dad, uptight bossy mom, crazy kids, living in squalor with everyone being average and that's ok. I mean, I'd sue.

And for that matter, when is Malcolm going to come out on DVD? The first season came out about 5 years ago, and then nothing. Jerks....

Marvel's Super Hero Squad Show

So I'm a 24 year old second year law school student, and that should equate nicely with the fact that I am currently watching a cartoon targeted towards 6-12 year old boys. Whatever, I don't go to your crap website and shit on what you do. Anyway, the new Marvel show "Super Hero Squad Show" premiered on Cartoon Network tonight here in the states. It's based on the cutesy little 3 inch figures of the same name which take popular Marvel characters and "kids" them up a bit, looking all cute with rounded edges and all. The most wildly innapropriate has been the Punisher figure, which comes with a little gun. But I digress. The show...

Things I Like About It:
1. Captain America is all old timey and talking about the Great Depression and is generally a big dope. I love Cap, but man, perfect representation of him for a kids cartoon.
2. Finally a Marvel show that has just about every character you can think of, fighting together and generally just mixing it up. (Well, except Spider-Man. See below.)
3. Fart jokes. Can't get enough of them.
4. The Hulk is all big and goofy and stupid. I never liked the Hulk, but I think he works best as a big bumbling oaf.
5. Thor is also all bumbling and stupid. Case in point, the gang shows up to fight Dr. Doom in a climactic battle and says "We're the Super Hero Squad. And we didn't even need name tags!" and then Thor is all like "oops I didn't get the memo" and takes of a "THOR" name tag. Whatever, it was funny on the show.

Things I don't like but understand:
1. The Silver Surfer talks like Keanu Reeves. Because he's a surfer get it? Bah... I get it but I don't like it.
2. No Spider-Man. Presumably because animation rights to the wall crawler were licensed to Disney months and months before the whole kit and kaboodle was scooped up by the House of Mouse. Oh well.
3. They added a crappy new character called Reptil (yes, Reptil not Reptile) who can "take on attributes of dinosaurs." Really? They have 5000+ characters and they need to make a new one up?
4. Too much Wolverine. Like everything Marvel does.
5. As amusing as I find it, being someone literally more than twice the age of the intended viewer, it ain't as good as Batman: The Brave and the Bold, which also airs on Cartoon Network. Now that's a show that is legitimately good to adults as well AND is batshit crazy (see what I did there?). I doubt there will be a musical episode of Super Hero Squad with Neil Patrick Harris singing and dancing.

iTunes Musings....

If my iTunes is to be believed (and it is, it meticulously captures every thing I listen to anywhere, and is extremely anally refined on daily basis by me. We all have our things...), the only two albums from 2009 that I have really liked and played often are MSTRKRFT's Fist of God and The Thermals' Now We Can See. I thought that was kind of weird and random. MSTRKRFT had a few heavy weeks of play after I got it, but The Thermals, no surprise there as that is just a damn good album and "When I Died" may just be the best song ever. But still, I do get a lot of music (I can't recommend eMusic highly enough, especially since they now have major label stuff), so I thought it was weird.

And then I realized, no, no its not weird at all. In the past year I have mostly gotten and listened to what could be characterized as two distinct spheres of music: old sad bastard/country music (lots of Johnny Cash, and recently, Elvis, Carl Perkins, Willie Nelson, and old favorite Ryan Adams) and 90s rock/indie (including Stone Temple Pilots, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Metallica, Pavement, The Get-Up Kids, and a hell of a lot of Soundgarden).

Clearly this means I am way way off of the pulse of the music community, but fuck it. Too much poseuring for my taste anyway. I'm pretty sure The Thermals are the tops for 2009.

Then again, in a library of 16,000 tracks, the Pokemon theme is the 3rd highest played with 43 listens, so what the fuck do I know.

Side note: The Thermals are great, but since I'm writing about music, I'd be ashamed to not mention The Gaslight Anthem and by far my most played 2008 album "The 59 Sound." If you listened to "Great Expectations" (a track-1 to rival "When I Died") alone, it would change your life.

Oh and as for random one-off songs I have been liking from 2009... I'm ashamed to say I really like that Sean Kingston song about the shorties burnin on the dance floor. And "Hold the Line" by Major Lazer is a solid track, though I haven't had enough interest to get the whole album. At least not yet...

Two Posts, One Day?

Insert universe collapsing.

I just posted a small little thing and then was re-reading the 2 or 3 posts I put up in the past 7 months. Just wanted to clarify a little something about that Simpsons post below.

I have nothing against lesbians or gays or anything like that. By all means, love who you want and do what you gotta do. I'm all for it. That article was merely enragement at the constant shark-jumping and "oh yeah? how about this!" story-telling technique that The Simpsons have employed for the dreck of the past 6 seasons.

Not that anyone complained to me; all two readers seemed to enjoy it. But you never know who is gonna find this stuff, and I just wanted to set the record straight. Also, I will criticize that same episode for planting the idea of Lisa being a lesbian and then going nowhere with it. If that's what you want to do, at least make it a lasting change (even though there are 4 episodes, and a movie, that I can think of off the top of my head where Lisa is in love with a boy).

I'm overthinking it again.

Today in Douchebags

My repulsion from Green Day, Post-2003 is well documented (in fact, it's documented just a scant few entries below this one!). This post is no different in tone or content.

In the September 2009 Maxim (side note: Maxim is a terrible magazine and I do not support or condone it, I merely get it for free [side side note: there is a really great Oral History of Marvel Comics in that issue as well {side side side note: Janelle, the new Maxim came; please don't get overly upset}]), there is an interview with Green Day frontman, Billie Joe Armstrong. Billie Joe was really cool when I was 12 years old, but now he's just another "success has gone to his head douchebag."

I quote, "I hear they're trying to find a new king of pop. I'd like to throw my hat into the ring."

I hear Billie Joe and Kanye West are teaming up to form a supergroup. Their first single, "I'm the Best!" will drop in September and be featured on the upcoming "Lyrical Geniuses and Voices of a Generation: Lots of Beeping and Booping and Grade-School Level Jibberish about American Politics, Volume 1: The Jesus of Suburbia (whatever the fuck that means) Meets A Creepy Giant Teddy Bear That Wears Neon Pink Poser Sunglasses, You Know, Those Ones that Kind of Look Like Venetian Blinds and Do Not Protect Your Eyes at All, But Let Everyone Around Know You Are a Complete Tool."

Needless to say, I don't care for that Kanye West either.

Why Hollywood is Retarded

Janelle will be happy that I actually have posted something (and possibly Andy Whitegiver, if he's still out there).

Look. I get that when certain things get "hot," there's a huge groundswell to jump on the bandwagon (ignore these mixed metaphors!) and make as much money as you can until the well dries up completely. Look at zombies. There's a shitload of zombie things going on, and I haven't reaaaally cared about zombies for years. Sure, 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead are two of my favorite movies, but they both came out 5+ years ago. If it was coming out 4 years ago, maybe I would have any reason to care about this Zombieland movie that's coming out soon (and which a lot of internet geeks are creaming their jeans over), but I just can't muster it. I have plenty to nerdgasm over between Wolverine 2: This Time It Might Not Be Terrible and Green Lantern: This Is a Total Crapshoot and Might Be A Colossal Turd-Bomb being in pre-production.

Then there's vampires, a hot trend that refuses to die even more than zombies. Seriously, look no further than Twilight and you see how apeshit people go over for prissy brooding vampires. (Or look at True Blood, this new CW Twilight knock-off show, the fact that they want to have a Buffy reboot movie for some reason, and about 8 million new vampires movies coming out in the next 2 years - the only one even remotely interesting is the extremely poorly titled Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, and I only care about that because I love John C. Reilly and his chewing of the scenery in the trailer looks pretty good [side note: while I love JCR for Step Brothers, Boogie Nights, and his Brule's Rules segments on Tim & Eric {youtube it} I may never be able to forgive him for the cinematic abortion known as "The Promotion." One of the absolute worst movies I've ever seen.].

Anyway, these are just two recent examples of things that were hits and then immediately had a deluge of knock-offs and also-ran's follow in their wake. I didn't even mention the literally dozens of "boy discovers secret magical world" that came out after Harry Potter or the weird time in the late 90s when disaster movies were really popular, thus causing two nearly identical movies about volcanoes to be released in a short span of time (Dante's Peak and Volcano, and I'll never remember which one is which).

So, people are bandwagon jumpers. This isn't news. Well, I write this today to highlight the excruciating low point that we as a society have gotten to.

We all know that Transformers 2 was a massive hit. In addition to being one of the worst movies I've ever seen (yet, still, worlds better than The Promotion. I'm not kidding. It's really fucking terrible), Transformers 2: Revenge of the Blah Blah made roughly 78 borjillion dollars, and that doesn't include overseas and outer space revenues. Recently, GI Joe was also a pretty big hit and solidifies that we will be seeing GI Joe 2: Tomax and Xamot's Revenge! in the coming years.

Now the problem is, that somehow, in their infinite wisdom, Hollywood bigwigs saw this trend and said "Of course!! Movies based on toys are the new hot thing! Let's start turning out shit based on every toy we can buy the rights to!"

Hence this. http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118007162.html?categoryid=13&cs=1&nid=2562

Listen, I don't want to be a pain in the ass and damnit man, I love me some Legos. But are you fucking serious? And they're making a movie based on the View-Master? The little red binocular-looking things that would make a slightly 3d picture of Ernie and Bert back when I was 4 years old? They're making a movie based on a toy that I'm pretty sure no one under the age of 19 even remembers exists.

I don't even know what else to say. I just. Ugh. I'm tired of this. Go ahead, make movies based on Legos, and Battleship (they're making a movie about Battleship! This is really happening, people! BATTLESHIP HAS NO FUCKING PLOT: IT IS LITERALLY JUST SAYING LETTER AND NUMBER COMBINATIONS AND RESPONDING HIT OR MISS!!!!) and whatever other shit they find in the toy aisle. At least Transformers and GI Joe had a rich history in comics that could be looked at for story ideas (and believe me, they mercilessly raped that gold mine; comic books are the fucking king of the Hollywood bandwagon jumping: every comic ever written has been optioned for a movie, and some mediocre comics are getting movies filmed before the comic has even ended!). Good luck constructing a vivid storyline about fucking Candyland.

Actually, a Candyland movie could be pretty sweet.

I just started watching Darkman instead of doing any sort of homework and I don't regret it for a second.

That kind of sums up what I want to say right there, but man! I'm only 15 minutes in to Darkman and I am LOVING it!

Darkman, if you forgot or never knew, was a 1990 movie starring Liam Neeson as a scientist who invents "liquid skin." When he is traumatized and disfigured by gangsters, he uses the synthetic skin to become a man of a thousand faces and fights the gangster who ruined his life. I remember my brother liking this movie, and I definitely remember seeing it way way back probably when I was 6 years old. And I remember the Darkman NES game which was exceedingly difficult. But anyway...

The major point I want to hit is that Sam Raimi directed Darkman. Sam Raimi should be a pretty familiar name for two things, Evil Dead (all of them) and Spider-Man (all of them, even 3). Also, I did not know that Danny Elfman did the music for Darkman, so that's another sweet bonus. (Also apparently Frances McDormand is in it, long before anyone knew who she was, and six years before Fargo. Raimi is friends with Fargo directors, the Coen Brothers, one of whom is married to McDormand. Speaking of the Coen Brothers, Barton Fink is another great movie from this same time period that couldn't be more different than Darkman but is still great.)

I've lost track of myself.... Ah yes, if you like Spider-Man's action and awesomeness, but not the mopey Peter scenes or having to look at Kirsten Dunst's fug-face, you should go watch Darkman! Or watch it again, since I haven't seen it in about 16 or 17 years and I'm digging it all a-new. And it has Liam Neeson in it! Liam Neeson is a known "awesome guy" and I can guarantee you Darkman is better than Schindler's List, which I have never seen.

Ok maybe not "better" but more fun, for sure.

Green Day

I wish Green Day would stop putting out crap. Remember when Green Day was awesome? Take a listen to Dookie and tell me it isn't one of the cornerstones of the 90s rock sound. Man, that album always takes me back to grade school. I'll never forget this one day in fifth grade when my entire class just started singing "Basket Case." It was so ridiculously surreal that sometimes I wonder if it actually happened.

I'm also really partial to Insomniac, their commercially failed follow-up to Dookie. I have no idea why the album didn't take off like Dookie did. It's a little repetitive of the Dookie vibe/sound, but who fucking cares? Green Day was a poppy punk band. Who the fuck expects them to be all deep and shit?

Well they do apparently. They've got another sure to be craptastic rock opera album coming out this year. Let's just get this down on the internets as a matter of public record... I do not like American Idiot. I think it's stupid, pretentious, not good lyrically or musically, and provides an indelible stain on the pop culture of this decade and certainly on the Bush administration (not that I'm a Bush supporter). Who in the hell ever thought the band that came up with When I Come Around would be writing two EP length rock operas? I didn't, and with good reason. I thought Green Day and I were on the same page. That this is gonna be a band that will rock the shit and bring the shit down, but aren't gonna get all political and hoity toity on you.

Nimrod was kind of their fall from grace in my mind. Some great tracks, but you know and I know that that fucking album was the on with Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) on it, and I. CANNOT. STAND. THAT. SONG. Not only is it the most overplayed song in the history of overplayed songs, played on a seemingly endless loop of graduations in the late 90s [it's called fucking Good Riddance you imbeciles!] but it is the gateway to let Green Day, the SoCal punks, onto shit like Lite FM or some other innocous pop music vacuum station. (PS remember radio stations?)

After that, what did they put out next? Warning? Another underrated album in my book that didn't sound quite like a Green Day record. I'm not sure what it sounded like, but it was passable and not worthy of the scorn a lot of people gave it. Minority was a great song for one. Some of the other ones, yeah I can see how a fan of Dookie's aggressive punk licks wouldn't dig on the mellow somber acoustica of Macy's Day Parade. Anyway they followed it up with stupid ass American Idiot and now they have some other shit concept album coming out and I couldn't care less. Say what you will about it musically and thematically (and I personally say it sucks ass on both levels, with the exception of Holiday which is a damn fine tune), but American Idiot, to me, is the thing that launched Green Day into the eye-liner wearing, Hot Topic poster selling, douchebags putting St. Jimmy quotes onto their facebook phase that they are now firmly entreanched in.

And that is why the best album they've put out in the past decade wasn't a Green Day record. Foxboro Hot Tubs, the infamous Green Day side project from last year, is infinitely better than the American Idiot crap they pumped out 4 years prior. Poppy, catchy, heavy guitar riffs, and not at all serious. That's how I like my Green Day. That and recorded prior to 1997.

Funny how I wrote an entire diatribe about Green Day when all I wanted to say was "I really like the Foxboro Hot Tubs album and apparently Green Day have some new pretentious shit album coming out." Their new album is billed as being in "three acts." Go fuck yourself, Green Day.

Simple Rules For Life

While I won't profess to having followed all of these rules consistently throughout my entire life, here's one guy's thoughts on how to live your life decently enough (i.e. not being a fucking scumbag like many of the people out there) while not being a complete robot/slave to the wills of others.

1. Treat People the Same Way They Treat You - The slogan was always treat your neighbor the way you want to be treated or the way they want to be treated, or something like that. But the fact is, if someone is an asshole to you, you should be an asshole back. It's all well and good to say turn the other cheek and all that, but if someone was really disrespectful to me then needed my help, I wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire. A man (or woman) has a right to some self-respect and that means saying Fuck Off to the people who have wronged you. Of course, if someone wrongs you and then apologizes or it was just a misunderstanding, that's different. A misunderstanding is your own fault and apologies only come out of decent people.

So the flip then is that the good and decent folks out there who have never given you a reason to dislike them... they deserve to be treated well. Pretty obvious really. The important thing to remember though is that people you don't really know, strangers on the street, they default to good and decent. The only people who deserve to be shit upon are the ones who shit on you first. I'm not saying run out and give your kidney to a stranger, but if they accidentally bump into you on the street, don't act like an asshole and get all upset. Straightforward, I think.

2. If You Don't Like It, Fuck You - Or alternatively, Don't Impose Your Own Opinions on Other People. Let people come to their own conclusions about whatever and anything in life. If you're wearing a giant purple hat down 5th Avenue, people are going to look at you cock-eyed and think you're crazy. But if you want to wear a giant purple hate, do it, and fuck everyone else. Who gives a shit in the long run? We're all gonna die some time anyway. May as well let the freak flag fly when you can. People are too judgmental and that's kind of okay. That's going to happen no matter what. The problem is when people get upset about other people's judgments. If someone thinks you're an asshole, but you think you're awesome, well then fuck that guy (and also, see rule 1). Aside from people whose opinions you actually value (your family and friends namely [see below]), everyone else has shit for brains and you shouldn't care about their opinions. Ever.

3. Take Care of Your Family and Friends - This should go without saying, yet people all the time treat their family like shit or disrespect the people they call friends. Look, we're all gonna die, right? This might be it. Your friends and family are the only thing that make this random happenstance of existence on this rock flying through space have any real meaning. If you don't show respect to the people who actually like you, then you are clearly an asshole and don't deserve it in the first place.

I guess this is all common sense, but this is what I have always tried to do in my own life and in my experiences it seems like a lot of people have no common sense. So here it is to whoever will read it. You can sum it all up though with a quote from the good Reverend Jesse Custer's father in the Vertigo series "Preacher": You got to be one of the good guys, cause there's way too many of the bad. Amen, preacher.

Why Was The Simpsons Not Killed Years Ago?

In addition to being one of the worst episodes ever and not being funny at all, tonight's Simpsons episode featured all the hallmarks of its modern craptitude. Nonsensical and inappropriate lines from characters (Principal Skinner reads Facebook? really? fucking facebook jokes on the Simpsons?), awful horribly placed guest stars (someone named Emily Blunt? who is that?), a song and dance number (featuring Josh Groban of all people... twice!!), they had Fall Out Boy inexplicably do the closing theme (ok, sort of makes sense since the name Fall Out Boy is a very obscure Simpsons reference, but still they weren't in the episode at all)... the list goes on.

But. The most important thing.... Well, look, in season 7 they made Lisa a vegetarian. Classic episode and it totally made sense for her character. She's intelligent, outspoken in her ideals, crazy left wing... it ain't shocking that she'd be a vegetarian. Then in Season like, 13, when shit started going downhill, they made her a Buddhist.... okay, I can go along with that. Not one of the best episodes, but you know what, there have been other episodes about religion, like the classic Homer the Heretic in Season 4. It was weird, it's a mediocre episode, and completely forgettable.

Well, now it's Season 2,405, a landmark for a television series. It is clearly a decade since The Simpsons was really culturally relevant (if you think or hear differently, you are fooling yourself. God damn you Matt Groening; couldn't do a Seinfeld and go out on top...). The show absolutely pales in comparison to its former glory, not least of all because they have amped up the wacky, crammed in more jokes (subsequently leading to more mis-fires), and made Homer an actual cartoon character (there was some episode where something completely unrealistic and stupid happened and frankly I'm happy I can't remember it.). They basically Family Guy-ed themselves, and even Family Guy isn't relevant any more (and also, has not been in roughly seven years).

The point is, they have to do new things and tonight was a Lisa episode and guess what? They made her a lesbian. I saw Mike Reiss, former show runner and writer for The Simpsons in its prime talk at Cornell once and he joked about the same thing. That Lisa was a vegan first, then a buddhist, and at some point she'd become a lesbian. It was funny at the time, particularly since I expected the show to end within a season or two. That was five or six years ago, and I guess it wasn't a joke.

Oh sure, they never came out and said the L word or had her kissing a girl and liking it. But when a show is primarily about "best friends" spending too much time together, and they dance to a Josh Groban love ballad in a fantasy world they created for themselves, AND the director goes out of his way to show numerous shots of the two girls holding hands... it doesn't take a Professor Frink to figure out the subtext.

Absolutely terrible. The show has hit a new bottom in terms of horrible episode-ness as far as I'm concerned. This one might be worse than the episode where Bart and Sideshow Bob teamed up to stop Frank Grimes Jr., the illegitimate son of Homer's ex-co-worker who was killed in Season 8, who had been murdering or threatening the family... I don't know, it fucking sucked. I would pay good hard earned money to erase the past eight years of The Simpsons from the collective memories of the world and do not get me started on that fucking movie.

Not that there's anything wrong with Lisa being a lesbian.... It just made for absolutely abysmal television that urinated on everything I held dear watching television in the 90s. Oh well.

Famous Doctors With No Measurable Degree of Medical Knowledge

Doctor Who (the Doctor) - I mean, sure he's handy during a Dalek invasion, but seriously, has he ever taken blood samples? Has he ever set a broken arm? I think not!

Doctor Dre - Pssh. The only drug he's ever prescribed ain't from Pfizer.

Dr. Phil - Liar! He just likes being bald and yelling at people. No medical license whatsoever!

Doctor Doom - Though he is a certifiable mad genius, he was never once given his doctorate! Explain that, Victor!

here endeth the lesson.