Drunk Mail Bag

Readers, it once again is time to dive into the drunken mailbag. That’s right, as you know from time to time I like to read your questions and comments. To give them their full weight I read them while dropping my morning deuce. After long rumination I respond to them here in my column. First up, to gratify my gi-normous ego, fan mail.

Dear Drunken Years,
I have been reading your column since the beginning. I like your funny insight into culture. You’re so witty and you remind me of a younger, handsomer Zack Braff. Keep up the good work, beautiful!

Sincerely,
John E. Gay
(via email)

Thanks John for those positive words. It really motivates me to know that someone out there appreciates me for what I am and not how damned sexy I am. Now, any more fan mail? …

No? Okay, on to hate mail then. Any of that? How many bags?! Okay, we can do one or two.

Dear Drunken Years,
You’re an idiot! You can’t write, you can’t fight, and you can’t hold your liquor!

-Angry passerby
(via him yelling it at me)

Sorry if I don’t remember you, sir or madam. People yell that at me all the time so faces tend to just blend together. However, to address your points: first, I am writing right now. Booyah! Two, I’ll give you that. Ouch. Three, however… I concede to you as well. But last Tuesday I successfully avoided becoming blackout drunk. I drank a pitcher through trivia, switched to a liquor drink during happy hour and alternated that with a coke. Twelve dollars later I walked home. My BM the next morning was the rankest liquid I have ever seen. I really gotta stop drinking well liquor. It’s like eighty proof Draino for the gastro-intestinal track.

Dear Drunken Years,
Why do you suck so bad?
Norma_J1963@bellesouth.not

Words like that do nothing but insult. No understanding can be gained. And coming from you mom, that really stings. Enough hate mail. Any questions? Questions about me. Not about me sucking?

Dear Drunken Years,
Did I see you riding your bike down Baytree?
L00ks@Ubik.ing
(via made up email)

Yes, that was me. I’m like a ninja on my bike. Like a bike-ninja cyborg or something. And I have wings. I consider Baytree my home turf since it lies between home an work, which we’ll call The Turf. I know those side walks like the backs of my hands. That’s a new freckle… the city recently upgraded all the sidewalks, installing ramps at every curb. Maybe soon they’ll do the same to the sidewalks around VSU– some blocks near campus don’t even have sidewalks. My common sense says that in a college town there should be sidewalks on every block within a three block radius of the campus. Most buildings there are either student housing or off-campus college services.

Dear Drunken Years,
I see you at the bar and you always wear cool hats.
Top_of_my_head@fedora.net
(via CIA radio signal to my molar)

Well that’s not really a question, more of a comment, but alright, fair enough. Actually I wear the hats for two reasons. One, to be quirky. You cannot understand how important that reason is.
Two, I used to wear bandanas but finally realized what Brett Michaels hasn’t– I’m too old to pull them off. Not only am I old, ancient by bar standards, on the doorstep of thirty, but I am balding. I’m at peace with the male pattern baldness, I just wish I had a say in the pattern. Consider me an angry gardener with a bad sod job. On a lesser note, the grays are coming. No, not the aliens– they won’t arrive until 2012. No, I’m getting gray hairs, have been getting them for a few years now. Those I’m not worried about. If I ever succumb to utter vanity I can always dye away the grays. Then again gray hair looks dignified on a man. On a woman it makes her look old, or like a witch, or like and old witch.

Dear Drunken Years,
Got any good drink recipes?
N_E_bri8ed@yaeger.bmb
(scrawled in Sharpie on urinal)

Yes! There’s the Miley Cyrus– a double shot of Kentucky bourbon on the rocks with Mountain Dew. Or the Courtney Love– gut-rot vodka up with a splash of coke and three cigarette butts. Makes a great frozen drink as well.

Thank you for all you warm emails, letters, ticking packages, boxes of feces and powdery white substances. You can continue you hate and contempt for me on the interweb.
TheDrunkenYears.blogspot.com, twitter name: john.e.gay, or by cruising over to ValdostaToday.com and clicking on the ‘Entertainment’ tab.

Movie Review- X-Men Origins: Wolverine

I saw X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Since this article prints after the movie’s May 1st premier I can say that without fear of being fired or sued. Since I obviously saw it in theaters the version I saw was complete. It was definitely not missing CG effects nor did it occasionally have dialog notes at the bottom of the screen. Now that we’ve cleared that up, the movie itself was good, a well paced, well acted action movie. Liev Schrieber plays Victor Creed, brother of James Logan. This is Hugh Jackman’s fourth feature as Logan so he has no trouble playing the brooding hero. Logan and Creed are both gifted with enhanced senses, reflexes and rapid healing. They each also have animalistic qualities, such as Creed’s claw-like nails and sharp canine teeth. The long-lived brothers fight through the American civil war and every major conflict after until Creed’s savageness on the battlefield warrants the brothers a firing squad in Vietnam. Their rapid healing ability saves their lives and draws the attention of para-government operative William Stryker. Stryker, played by Danny Huston, convinces the brothers to join his special team of mutant soldiers, played by Ryan Reynolds (Deadpool), Will.i.am (John Wraith), Kevin Durand (The Blob) and Dominic Monaghan (Bolt). Though Creed is comfortable with Stryker’s merciless tactics Logan leaves the program in pursuit of a nonviolent life. In other words, he pulls a Rambo. He becomes a Canadian lumberjack and falls in love with local schoolteacher Kayla Silverfox, played by Lynn Collins. Inevitably Stryker tricks Logan into returning to the program in order to have adamantium, an unbreakable alloy, grafted to every bone in his body including his retractable bone claws. Logan- now calling himself Wolverine- sets out to track down his brother whom he thinks killed his lover Silverfox. Many plot turns and fight sequences later we discover Logan has been a pawn in Stryker’s plan to create a supersoldier mutant to exterminate other mutants. The climactic final fight ends with a nuclear reactor in ruin and Logan an amnesiac. During the credits we see him in an Asian bar, suggesting the series is far from over.
Minor fanboy gripe: continuity is broken from the comics and the previous movies- Sabretooth is a completely different character than in X-Men. Major gripe: clunky plot device. Stryker, knowing he cannot kill the neigh-indestructible Wolverine, decides to give him amnesia, not with a good old frying pan to the head, but with adamantium bullets. Kudos for putting Gambit in the movie. His small but important role is more or less a gift to fans, kind of a ‘sorry about the amnesia with adamantium bullets’ thing. Origins was not a great as the hype, but this happens so often that I automatically reduce my expectations by half for any big budget blockbuster. Going in with my hopes thus halved, I was not let down.

City Gardening

There's a small garden box in front of my apartment and out of some primitive desire to reconnect with nature I've adopted it. My first attempt at taming the wild planter met with moderate success- everything I planted died except for some determined beans and tenacious carrots. I plowed under the abortions of my labor and replanted. This time I thoroughly weeded the garden and am watering it twice a day when there's no rain. So far the outlook is good. I have several rows of corn growing as fast as only corn (and perhaps sunflowers and bamboo) can. As for the rest of the garden, I must admit I made a rookie mistake: I didn't mark where I planted what. In a few weeks I'll have a better guess but for now I don't know if the tiny sprouts I'm fascinated with are squash, cucumbers, onions or what. The determined green beans come up to my knee nearly and have buds that are on this very day opening. In a hanging basket on my back porch the tomatoes I grew from seeds over a month ago have finally produced a fruit. Sure, it's green and the size of an english pea now, but it's drinking milk, so one day it'll be big and strong. Hopefully the radioactive plant food I used won't have any negative side effects, especially side effects that people would enjoy watching in a horror film.

Random News from Valdosta, Ga.

Zombies are having the best week ever! ‘Zombie banks’ are the talk of the town in financial sectors. Like Weekend at Bernie’s 2, these banks goes through the motions of being alive, but you can see in their eyes they’re really under a voodoo curse. Zombie banks, like zombie movies, were invented in America but became huge in Japan in the 1990s. These banks are the walking dead in that most of their assets are in worthless mortgages. Even if they paid off all their liabilities they still would never be solvent.

Voodoo economics may keep the corpse dancing for a while longer, if Congressional Republicans get their way. The GOP is pitching it’s old standard of tax cuts as the silver bullet for our economic woes. Opponents of the bailout bill verbalized worries that the tax cuts in it are too small and won’t have a lasting effect on consumer spending which funds two thirds of our nation’s economy. Another concern is the impact the law will have on future generations. “The average person will get $8 per week in their paycheck and they will pass on to their grandkids $1.1 trillion in debt,” said Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

Zombieland will be wrapping up its filming at Wild Adventures. Word is the production moves to Atlanta next. For those of you who sleep in your closet with the lights off, Zombieland is a comedy starring Woody Harrelson. You may see some of your friends as extras when this movie debuts October 9. You’ll also see Amber Heard, who played the eighteen year old girlfriend of Seth Rogan’s character in Pineapple Express. The movie costars Jesse Eisenberg, whom you may recognize from The Squid and the Whale and Cursed. Abigail Breslin appears in the flick as well. She’ll be playing the precociously cute girl, no doubt.

Speaking of people who won’t die, Sarah Palin, who bills herself as a fiscal conservative/ excellent marksman, is calling for a $268 million reduction in the Alaskan state budget. Declining oil prices has taken its toll on the state’s finances, causing it to finally enter the worldwide economic crisis. Unfortunately the cuts Palin is asking for are mostly made up of unused tax credits to oil companies, so the they will not really add any money to the Alaskan budget. Maybe Palin will sell her wardrobe on Ebay to help make ends meet. That’s what a savvy hockey mom would do. Meanwhile, her daughter is speaking out against abstinence as a viable option for every teen. In an interview with Greta Van Susteran, the new mom reiterated that the decision to have unmarried sex was her choice, and had nothing to do with her mom’s views.

Girls did not go wild in Remerton. Good taste prevailed as a planned visit from the Girls Gone Wild bus was cancelled at The Milltown Groove. Heath Cox, the bar’s manager responding to a Valdosta Daily Times article, said “The newspaper article got it way out of proportion. It really hurt my feelings that people would think that I would do that kind of stuff in public. Once I got wind of everything that was going on from (Remerton Police) Chief Terrell and from some churches, and they expressed their feelings of how they didn’t want it I canceled it for them, for the good of the city and the council.” The GGW visit was scheduled for the same day as the annual Father-Daughter Valentine’s Dance, which teaches girls how proper gentlemen should treat them. I would guess there were no tatas-for-t-shirts at the dance.

We’re going digital– eventually. The government mandated transition was supposed to go into effect in February and many networks will have switched by now, but the FCC pushed the deadline back to June 12 in order to ensure everyone is aware of the change. So if you turn on CBS and are dismayed to discover you can’t watch CSI: Miami, that’s why. The Congressionally mandated end of broadcast television is aimed at freeing up airwave bandwidth for public safety communications and advanced commercial wireless services. Sounds like the government is coming to get our brains– or at least that’s what our editor’s parents think. They also think Elvis Presley shot JFK.

Hillary Clinton visited Japan as she began her American Idol runner up tour on February 17. Besides obviously the world economic crisis, Secretary of State Clinton also spoke with the island nation’s prime minister about it’s neighbor across the bay, North Korea. “The possible missile launch that North Korea is talking about would be very unhelpful in moving our relationship forward,” Clinton said in a joint press conference with the Japanese PM. The visit previews a six party talk aimed at disarming North Korea.

President Obama is on his own tour, of sorts. Beginning in Denver, Colorado the President signed his economic stimulus plan into law. He then flew down to Arizona to unveil his mortgage relief plan. When I say he flew down to Arizona, I do mean by Air Force One– so far as I know, flight is not amongst the superpowers our new president has.

Kids everywhere are opening their brownbags at lunch time to find “and jelly” sandwiches due to the massive peanut butter recall. Six people have died and contamination has been reported in 43 states. The Food and Drug Administration traced the outbreak to a plant in Georgia owned by Peanut Corporation of America. General Mills recalled two products while Kellogg recalled sixteen of its products in February.

Does Facebook own your content? Founder Mark Zuckerberg says no. The social networking site’s new terms of use agreement, updated February 4, went mostly unnoticed until consumer rights advocacy blog Consumerist.com pointed out changes. “On Facebook, people own their information and control who they share it with.” Zuckerberg said that in order to share pictures or status updates with friends, Facebook must have license to allow friends to keep a copy of messages or other information a user shares with them, even if you close your account. This is not the first run in Facebook has had with users– in 2007, Facebook initially defended a tracking tool called “beacon,” which broadcasted information about a user’s shopping habits and activities at other websites. Facebook ultimately allowed users to turn Beacon off.