Sunday, April 26, 2009
HE WAS LISTENING TO THE FUCKING SONG!
WTF is up with Tortorella here? I've seen better behaved gorillas at the zoo. In fact, EVERY gorilla I've seen at the zoo has been better behaved than this guy. Sorry, gorillas. I didn't mean to cast aspersions on you, or to lower you to the level of a pro level coach that can't even keep it together to NOT THROW SHIT AT THE CROWD. Who does he think he is, a Hanson brother?
(he sure isn't)
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Friday, April 24, 2009
CRACKING THE QUIP
I was at the DMV today, and I noticed that their flag (and not the American nor the Maryland ones) was at half-mast. Nudging my companion, I said "look, someone's car died." Is this:
1. Funny
2. Not funny
3. A Dad joke*
*I myself am leaning towards this one.
1. Funny
2. Not funny
3. A Dad joke*
*I myself am leaning towards this one.
FRIEDA STIFFENED HER KNOBBLY FINGERS, SIGHED, AND FELT THE MOMENT
Has there ever been a common cultural currency as dense and widely recognizable as The Simpsons is for our generation/s (teenagers to the fortyish)? Seriously! The only ones I could think of that could compare (to varying degrees) were The Beatles or The Bible.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
A LESSON FOR OUR TIME
Did you know that you can't drink at a screening of Earth, even if you call the usher a fag?
As my grandmother would say, EPIC FAIL.
As my grandmother would say, EPIC FAIL.
Monday, April 20, 2009
FUN GAME!
Try and find all of the times the writer of this review of Sit Down, Shut Up is an unbelievable asshole. Hint: look for when she gets parts of the show wrong, and when she fails to sift out her own dickishness. It's about as hard as Highlights for Children.
EDIT: I posted this before I finished reading it, and now that I'm done I just feel bad for her. Just because she's a grad student at Columbia and I had to go to a state school doesn't mean she has to pay.
But man, was thing that bad.
EDIT: I posted this before I finished reading it, and now that I'm done I just feel bad for her. Just because she's a grad student at Columbia and I had to go to a state school doesn't mean she has to pay.
But man, was thing that bad.
HINTS FROM MELOUISE
When referring to your third eye, be sure to point at your forehead, because it can refer to another thing and all people are in their hearts twelve-year-old morons. Do not give that part of them any rope.
ERSATZEN
WhichevertheRickMoranisOneIs McKenzie
(in that picture, the one on the right)
Jon Wurster
(not that this applies in real life EVER; RM wishes he was as cute as JW)
APB
Does anyone know of a drama camp or something for teenagers that will not be filled with a bunch of dorks? My brother is an award-winning* actor and would like to do more with it, but he's more the type of kid who plays football and basketball, and high school drama is high school drama.
*Six Tonys and a CableACE.
*Six Tonys and a CableACE.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
ON THAT LAST POST
My brother Matt is very handsome, very talented, and very smart. The latter in a way that schools tend to be negligent in admitting. I don't mean that to qualify his intelligence WHATSOEVER. The school system does not serve young men whom happen to be socially normal/competent/gifted as well as it should.
But to the brass tacks. How great was that line he got out? He might be really special. I know I'm biased, I really do, but then I hear him say something like that, and so what am I to think? It's sophisticated, for god's sake. Verging on world-weary.
So I know I'm biased. Even before our Dad died, I helped as much as I could to raise him. Once or twice I even stayed home from school, if our mom was really sick, to care for him. I made his bottles and changed him and sang him the "Godzilla" theme song (the one with Godzuki--and I changed the lyrics to fit him). But I think he's something special. Or at least pretty great. Pretty really great.
FOURTEEN
(My brother Matt, upon being red carded in MLS 2002) "I don't care if you give me a red card! You're a little man in a game! You can't feel love!"
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
SNAKE 'N BACON
Alt-comics are one of my favorite things, and it's all Michael Kupperman's fault. I read him when I was fifteen and my brain LITERALLY exploded. No one--NO ONE--does it better. His new show is coming to Adult Swim next month.
GOOD MOVIE ALERT
Eagle vs. Shark is REALLY smart and totally excellent. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Even American Hero PAUL FEIG agrees.
(I guess he has Comcast too; weird that we both watched it within a day of each other)
I WILL NOT LIE
This does something to me:
*
It's not sexual. But it does ping at something in me. So does this:
*A still from The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, great movie btw.
*It's not sexual. But it does ping at something in me. So does this:
*A still from The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford, great movie btw.
JESUS DAMN
The ending to the first episode of "Eastbound and Down" was perfect. A monstrous loser mounted upon a leopard-print jetski, whiplashing his topless herpetic blowjob-buddy off, splashing her, then riding off into the North Carolina horizon AS Ram Jam's "Black Betty" plays.
Now, Ram Jam. This song--their biggest hit--is pretty stupid, and very, very great. I assumed that this was the extent of their genius until I saw their "Best Of" cover:
I want to write a novel about how that cover was created, then approved. I want to tell the Ram Jam "Best Of" story.
Now, Ram Jam. This song--their biggest hit--is pretty stupid, and very, very great. I assumed that this was the extent of their genius until I saw their "Best Of" cover:
I want to write a novel about how that cover was created, then approved. I want to tell the Ram Jam "Best Of" story.
"THE KINDLY ONES" WATCH WILL CONTINUE UNABATED
Boy oh boy did The New Republic hate it:
A review cannot convey how deeply unpleasant the experience of reading The Kindly Ones is. This is one of the most repugnant books I have ever read.
Literary Review has a more charitable, if confusing take:
This book has divided the world. The French love it, and gave it not only the Prix Goncourt but the Académie Française’s Prix de la Littérature as well. The British are split - Antony Beevor loved it, Peter Kemp hated it. The survivor-writer Jorge Semprún admired it; Claude Lanzmann, the maker of Shoah, first hated it, then changed his mind. Most Americans and Canadians loathe it.
Why? And who is right and wrong?
That should be a naïve question, since wildly differing responses to the same book are perfectly normal. But here there is, I think, a right and a wrong answer, though not simple ones. Those who admire The Kindly Ones are right, but those who loathe it are not completely wrong. It is half a work of genius and half a work of gratuitous perversion.
The first thing to note is that it is not in any ordinary sense a novel, despite its publisher’s designation. It is 992 pages and dense with argument; hundreds - perhaps even thousands - of characters march across its pages. As many readers will know by now, it comprises the memories of an ex-SS officer whose career took him to all the worst places of the war: Babi Yar, Stalingrad, Auschwitz, Berlin in the last days, including Hitler’s bunker. What is extraordinary about it is the minute and mountainous detail of these events, the making of them as ordinary to us as it was to those who lived through them, by the sheer weight of facts and thoughts, and the time it takes to read them.
A novel follows a handful of characters through a handful of events - few enough so that we can remember them and care. In The Kindly Ones we meet all the people - soldiers, victims, politicians, bureaucrats - whom Maximilian Aue comes across in the course of five years of war; you’d need to be Funes el Memorioso to remember them all. If The Kindly Ones were a novel, therefore, it would be a bad one. But it is not a novel. It is a work of history - animated by Aue’s hate and fear (he has no love, or only one, as he often tells us), but a work of history nonetheless. That is one of the reasons why Antony Beevor admires it; and why I do too. If you want to know what mass murdering was like, from the point of view of the perpetrators - the anguish and the ordinariness, the in-fighting and career-building, the reasons with which they deluded themselves, as men do in every war, just and monstrously unjust alike (the trick is to tell the difference) - read The Kindly Ones. If you want to know what Stalingrad was like for them - how Germans starved and froze there as their victims did in Auschwitz, how they had to wrap their penises in cloth to pee, while others held their frost-bitten hands in the warm stream - read The Kindly Ones. If you want to read some of the best-expressed, most terrible arguments about why people become sadists, or for ‘there but for the grace of God go we’ - read The Kindly Ones.
I'm not totally buying the excuse that TKO (ha) isn't strictly a novel but "a work of history." That seems hopelessly broad. I looked at it at Barnes and Noble the other day, and I got the impression that it was a novel. It sure smelled like one.
(I found the Literary Review article on Cynical-C, and it made me laugh that it called it "A review of The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell from Literary Review," because it sounds like Littel wrote the review himself)
A review cannot convey how deeply unpleasant the experience of reading The Kindly Ones is. This is one of the most repugnant books I have ever read.
Literary Review has a more charitable, if confusing take:
This book has divided the world. The French love it, and gave it not only the Prix Goncourt but the Académie Française’s Prix de la Littérature as well. The British are split - Antony Beevor loved it, Peter Kemp hated it. The survivor-writer Jorge Semprún admired it; Claude Lanzmann, the maker of Shoah, first hated it, then changed his mind. Most Americans and Canadians loathe it.
Why? And who is right and wrong?
That should be a naïve question, since wildly differing responses to the same book are perfectly normal. But here there is, I think, a right and a wrong answer, though not simple ones. Those who admire The Kindly Ones are right, but those who loathe it are not completely wrong. It is half a work of genius and half a work of gratuitous perversion.
The first thing to note is that it is not in any ordinary sense a novel, despite its publisher’s designation. It is 992 pages and dense with argument; hundreds - perhaps even thousands - of characters march across its pages. As many readers will know by now, it comprises the memories of an ex-SS officer whose career took him to all the worst places of the war: Babi Yar, Stalingrad, Auschwitz, Berlin in the last days, including Hitler’s bunker. What is extraordinary about it is the minute and mountainous detail of these events, the making of them as ordinary to us as it was to those who lived through them, by the sheer weight of facts and thoughts, and the time it takes to read them.
A novel follows a handful of characters through a handful of events - few enough so that we can remember them and care. In The Kindly Ones we meet all the people - soldiers, victims, politicians, bureaucrats - whom Maximilian Aue comes across in the course of five years of war; you’d need to be Funes el Memorioso to remember them all. If The Kindly Ones were a novel, therefore, it would be a bad one. But it is not a novel. It is a work of history - animated by Aue’s hate and fear (he has no love, or only one, as he often tells us), but a work of history nonetheless. That is one of the reasons why Antony Beevor admires it; and why I do too. If you want to know what mass murdering was like, from the point of view of the perpetrators - the anguish and the ordinariness, the in-fighting and career-building, the reasons with which they deluded themselves, as men do in every war, just and monstrously unjust alike (the trick is to tell the difference) - read The Kindly Ones. If you want to know what Stalingrad was like for them - how Germans starved and froze there as their victims did in Auschwitz, how they had to wrap their penises in cloth to pee, while others held their frost-bitten hands in the warm stream - read The Kindly Ones. If you want to read some of the best-expressed, most terrible arguments about why people become sadists, or for ‘there but for the grace of God go we’ - read The Kindly Ones.
I'm not totally buying the excuse that TKO (ha) isn't strictly a novel but "a work of history." That seems hopelessly broad. I looked at it at Barnes and Noble the other day, and I got the impression that it was a novel. It sure smelled like one.
(I found the Literary Review article on Cynical-C, and it made me laugh that it called it "A review of The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell from Literary Review," because it sounds like Littel wrote the review himself)
Monday, April 13, 2009
WHAT IS MAKING ME HAPPY RIGHT NOW
That the Orioles are sticing so hard. The Nats haven't won yet (and that REALLY sucks, boo), but at least the O's are holding up their end of it quite nicely.
SELECTIONS FROM MY MOLESKINE LAST WEEK, FROM WHEN I WAS AWAY--WHAT DO THEY SAY? WHAT DO THEY MEAN?
-ebay frog band
-joke--skype on the toilet
-Marman's Septic Care
-She seemed to me, at all times, to be in a state of violent growth.
-Throw money at them! The kind that'll make their babies stupid!
(a lot of toilet jokes here; in my defense I only like them situationally)
-joke--skype on the toilet
-Marman's Septic Care
-She seemed to me, at all times, to be in a state of violent growth.
-Throw money at them! The kind that'll make their babies stupid!
(a lot of toilet jokes here; in my defense I only like them situationally)
I CAN'T EVEN BELIEVE THIS GUY
A little white bunny with a little red leash and little red harness, in a verdant field on a foggy spring morn? Go to jail, Bunnulon. You've clearly raided the cutreasury.
(bunny madoff, perhaps?)
Saturday, April 11, 2009
H"O"PPY EASTER
My cat Benny (a.k.a. Benjamin a.k.a. Benjamin Franklin a.k.a. Frank a.k.a. Cranklin*) just jumped about six feet. This is impressive if you keep in mind that he's so fat he looks like a melted marshmallow.** LOL I guess you could call him the EASTER BENNY!***
*I could go on.
**This is being addressed; please don't yell at me. He isn't really even "my" cat per se; he mostly belongs to my mother and brother.
***I might be r------d.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Monday, April 6, 2009
OMEGLE FAN FICTION
Based on a true chat
Motherfucker. Another Brazilian.
It had only been a few days, but already Omegle had become one of Dustin's favorite ways to while away time on the internet, even more so than Youtube commenting. Actually, Omegle was a lot like Youtube commenting, in that you say funny things like "FAIL" and thirteen-year-old Simpsons quotes, but it was also way better, because the person you were screwing around with was right there, on the line, in real time.
Not that there weren't drawbacks. This was where the Brazilians came in. For some reason there were tons of fifteen-year-old Brazilians who were just as fond of saying "FAIL" as Dustin usually was. The difference was when someone did it to him, Dustin felt like he was going to cry. Because he was different.
Dustin clicked "Start a new conversation" and braced himself. But then Dustin had an idea. In an inspired flash fueled by the pleasurable jolt his brilliant wit gave him, he quickly typed out "THIS BETTER NOT BE A GODDAMN BRAZILIAN!"
Dustin sat back and smiled. God, he was clever. Jeff Dunham clever. He was starting to think about touching himself when The Stranger replied.
"Oh no! I know what you mean! I can't stand them either!"
And then again, a few moments later:
"I mean, what is that?"
The genuine offer of commiseration with an actual human being made Dustin's annoyance at the Brazilians mellow considerably. He didn't need or want anyone to actually connect with anyone, no matter how insignificantly; those energies he got out on XBox Live. He just wanted to say "FAIL."
"Meh," Dustin replied to The Stranger.
"Dunno," he added a moment later.
The Stranger was quiet. Often Omegle had these kinds of lulls. Such was the nature of live chatting. But this one grew and grew, becoming prairie-like and disquieting. It was the kind of gap that made Dustin feel smaller outside of himself, but bigger on the inside, because that was all he had to look at. Even though it was not his turn, he began to hastily compose an "asl" when the reply finally came.
"It's a strange phenomenon," The Stranger said.
"All of these so-called brazilians."
Dustin deleted the "a" and "s" he had already typed as he thought of a reply.
"i guess," he said. "What do you mean so called?"
The "Your partner has disconnected." came about fifteen seconds later. Dustin was glad. He clicked the "Start a new conversation" button and typed "entertain me." Then he leaned back in his chair, took a drink from his widemouth bottle of Mountain Dew Cherry Fusion, and waited to be entertained.
Motherfucker. Another Brazilian.
It had only been a few days, but already Omegle had become one of Dustin's favorite ways to while away time on the internet, even more so than Youtube commenting. Actually, Omegle was a lot like Youtube commenting, in that you say funny things like "FAIL" and thirteen-year-old Simpsons quotes, but it was also way better, because the person you were screwing around with was right there, on the line, in real time.
Not that there weren't drawbacks. This was where the Brazilians came in. For some reason there were tons of fifteen-year-old Brazilians who were just as fond of saying "FAIL" as Dustin usually was. The difference was when someone did it to him, Dustin felt like he was going to cry. Because he was different.
Dustin clicked "Start a new conversation" and braced himself. But then Dustin had an idea. In an inspired flash fueled by the pleasurable jolt his brilliant wit gave him, he quickly typed out "THIS BETTER NOT BE A GODDAMN BRAZILIAN!"
Dustin sat back and smiled. God, he was clever. Jeff Dunham clever. He was starting to think about touching himself when The Stranger replied.
"Oh no! I know what you mean! I can't stand them either!"
And then again, a few moments later:
"I mean, what is that?"
The genuine offer of commiseration with an actual human being made Dustin's annoyance at the Brazilians mellow considerably. He didn't need or want anyone to actually connect with anyone, no matter how insignificantly; those energies he got out on XBox Live. He just wanted to say "FAIL."
"Meh," Dustin replied to The Stranger.
"Dunno," he added a moment later.
The Stranger was quiet. Often Omegle had these kinds of lulls. Such was the nature of live chatting. But this one grew and grew, becoming prairie-like and disquieting. It was the kind of gap that made Dustin feel smaller outside of himself, but bigger on the inside, because that was all he had to look at. Even though it was not his turn, he began to hastily compose an "asl" when the reply finally came.
"It's a strange phenomenon," The Stranger said.
"All of these so-called brazilians."
Dustin deleted the "a" and "s" he had already typed as he thought of a reply.
"i guess," he said. "What do you mean so called?"
The "Your partner has disconnected." came about fifteen seconds later. Dustin was glad. He clicked the "Start a new conversation" button and typed "entertain me." Then he leaned back in his chair, took a drink from his widemouth bottle of Mountain Dew Cherry Fusion, and waited to be entertained.
WHO IS THE BEST DOG IN THE WORLD?
Dig my horrible "Indian feet"*, and my adorable dogs (who never answer me).
*So-called by some jerk at the beach.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
CELEBRITY WATCH
Today I saw NONE OTHER THAN Norm@n* Davis, the guy from a bunch of episodes of the Food Network Challenge! The one where they make the cakes!
Yeah, the guy on the left! In real life he's tiny. TINY TINY. Maybe 5'2.
*Because fuck Google Alerts.
Yeah, the guy on the left! In real life he's tiny. TINY TINY. Maybe 5'2.
*Because fuck Google Alerts.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
NEW ADDRESS, NEW ERA
Hooray! I finally have an address for this site that I don't hate! Actually, I kind of like it! I kind of really like it!
Friday, April 3, 2009
GOOD FOR YOU, IOWA!
And good for you, internet. I've not read one "corn" joke.
(Vermont better get on this if I'm to be moving up there)
(Vermont better get on this if I'm to be moving up there)
Thursday, April 2, 2009
JONATHAN LITTEL: THE WORST?
I haven't read his book yet, but that isn't the point. Man oh man do I wanna rip that thing out of his head.
OVERHEARD AT FSK MALL (BLUGH, WHAT WAS I DOING THERE?)
Teenager Girl: (to older woman; probably her mother) Why are you being like this to me? Can't you see how miserable I am?
I believed her. I always believe teenage girls.
I believed her. I always believe teenage girls.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
ATTENTION PLEASE
Dear all,
I am writing to inform you that as of April 4, 2009, I will be changing this address of this blog to theofficialnational.blogspot.com. Please adjust your bookmarks/memories accordingly.
Best,
Some guy
I am writing to inform you that as of April 4, 2009, I will be changing this address of this blog to theofficialnational.blogspot.com. Please adjust your bookmarks/memories accordingly.
Best,
Some guy
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