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.

Sick Piggies

Sizzlin’ Swine Flu Facts

(As of April 29, 2009, 11:00 AM ET)

U.S. Human Cases of Swine Flu Infection
Arizona– 1
California– 14
Indiana– 1
Kansas– 2
Massachusetts– 2
Michigan– 2
Nevada– 1
New York City– 51
Ohio– 1
Texas– 16, 1 death
TOTAL COUNTS: 91 cases, 1 death

A Mexico City toddler who traveled to Texas with family to visit relatives is the first confirmed death in the U.S. from swine flu.

Nearly a week after the threat first emerged in Mexico, Spain reported the first case in Europe of swine flu in a person who had not been to Mexico, underscoring the threat of person-to-person transmission.

Egypt slaughtered the roughly 300,000 pigs in the country as a precautionary measure against the spread of swine flu even though no cases have been reported here yet.

The Center For Disease Control label for this outbreak of swine flu is 2009 H1N1.

Even if the CDC's seed stock of virus were to be released to vaccine makers today, it would take the companies anywhere from four to six months before the first inoculation could be ready for public use.

The World Health Organization (WHO) raised the pandemic swine flu alert level from phase 3 to 4, two levels below the declaration of a full pandemic

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.

Playlist for the day

The Drunken Years

There is a time in every boy’s life when adolescence sets the world on it’s head. Girls (and sometimes other boys) suddenly become interesting in a less-than-innocent way. For the first time a boy starts to think like a young man; inevitably, he fully realizes his role in society. That is when adulthood is truly achieved. The wonder years are those golden few before adulthood’s onus weight burdens man’s mind.

Contrarily, the drunken years are those of prolonged adolescence. Drugs and alcohol relieve us of our need to be responsible in action, in fiscal matters and in relationships, otherwise known as adulthood. At some time my drunken years transformed to something beyond that, beyond just drinking to kill time. If you keep adding fat people to the life raft, eventually you’re going to sink. My brain has been bailing buckets of bourbon out of its inflated rubber dinghy loaded with survivors of the HMS We-Eat-Alot. I’m still in my drunken years, but I’m on the outer edge of them.

Memories are footprints– they tell us where we’ve been. I don’t know where the ‘F’ I’ve been, if you’ll pardon the harsh letter. I’ve walked across a great sand dune. Imagine my dismay when I look back to see that not even my footprints remain. My footprint-eraser takes the form of drunken blackouts.

The first major wave lead to my DUI two years ago. This year, I’ve rode my bike home in that state many times, as my scarred joints can testify. I’ve started two fights– that’s dangerously close to tipping my “fights I’ve been in that I caused” to “”fights I’ve been in that I didn’t cause” ratio. It’s like I’m Dr. Sam Becket on Quantum Leap, except that instead of leaping from body to body hoping the next leap will be the leap home, I go from blackout to blackout hoping that the next one will be the last. The blackouts have brought me many epiphanies of late, as if they transform me into a drunken Delphic Oracle. I’ve grown up more in these drunken years than in any of my sober ones.

I look back at these events not with shame but with curiousity. I’m curious as to what could drive me to go that far. I’m curious about my subconcious, because ultimately that controls those most primitive urges, be they drinking to dull the voices, drinking to dull the pain, drinking to be less inhibited or drinking to be cool. I’m not advocating it as a path to complete self awareness, though. I tried that path and have many blank pages in my mental journal. There are even a few sections I’ve tried to scribble through, but you can still read them. But it is as it should be– some things you have to learn the hard way. For everyone those things differ, but one of mine is and will always be liquid amnesia. I don’t know how many more leaps I have to make, but Al says Ziggy is giving me a 37% chance of being home next time. Tune in next week.

MST3K Version 2.1

I’ve commented before on my generation, Generation Y. We are the late twenty-somethings to mid thirty-whatevers who grew up in the nineties. We spent our most formative years with Clinton in the White House, but not the one in the pants suit. Well, she was there but she mostly kept out of the headlines. She changed her hairstyle a lot. Most actors of the nineties did. The cast of Friends went through sixty five different haircuts, but I digress. Every generation has it’s cult followings. Not actual cults, mind you, like David Koresh’s in Waco (‘90s reference). I rather refer to obsessions with underground pop culture sources, often in the form of a movie. For some it’s Monty Python. Others like Rocky Horror Picture Show. Mine isn’t a movie, per se. It’s a television series that made fun of movies. Mystery Science Theater 3000 was a sarcastic and witty riffing session played over B movies. You know all those funny comments you think of when you watch a movie ? These guys got paid to say them.

MST3K went through many incarnations as cast members departed and were replaced, networks changed and the writers endeavored to reinvent the show. The basic story remained the same: a mad scientist forced an unsuspecting guy to watch bad movie after bad movie to monitor how this torture affected his mind. The hero was played first by show co-creator Joel Hodgson (his character was named ‘Joel’) and later by Mike Nelson (they called him ‘Mike’). Joel/Mike is trapped on a dog bone shaped space ship called The Satellite of Love, in a parked orbit over Earth. Joel/Mike only has the companionship of his homemade robots to preserve his sanity. The ‘Bots are made of parts of the ship (a.k.a. sports equipment, washer and dryer parts and a gumball machine). Gypsy, who looked like a robot pirana plant with a headlight for an eye, operated the Satellite of Love. Crow and Tom Servo assisted Joel/Mike in heckling. Every episode had a plot of some antic with the ’Bots, usually an escape attempt.

When movie time came, the Satellite rocked violently as klaxons blared and warning sirens wailed. The camera raced through a series of gates that counted down to the movie. Passing through the exotically themed doors leads to the darkened theater. Barely visible are the silhouettes of the front row of chairs. Joel/Mike makes his way to the front row from the right. He’s carrying one of the ‘Bots as the other made its way behind him. Now the show begins in earnest.

The B movies they watch would be unbearable without the commenting, but that’s the point. Heckling the screen, Joel/Mike, Crow and Tom Servo made scatological silliness and sarcastic needling a staple of their show. Complex wordplay and obscure references were intertwined with their riotously funny commentary. The series lasted eleven years and moved from Comedy Central to the SciFi network before ending its run in 1999.

Ten years later, the cult following for the show is still growing. Despite protests and innumerable campaigns to return the show to the air, it is now only available on DVD or VHS, or through downloadable sources to those who can find it. Most of the cast has reunited since to create a reincarnated version of MST3K, in two forms.

Rifftrax.com is the brainchild of Mike Nelson (his character was ‘Mike’) Kevin Murphy (a MST3K writer and voice of Tom Servo), and Bill Corbett (Crow during the SciFi channel years). Rifftrax does what MST3K could never do– make fun of blockbuster movies. The crew critiques and ‘riff’ on every epic movie, from Harry Potter to The Lord of the Rings. To get by copyright concerns the website only offers the downloadable audio tracks of the riffs– you must provide the movie. The riff track synchronized to your own copy of Willy Wonka provides you with all the Oompa Loompa jokes you can stand.

As a MST3K fan I’m more impressed with Cinematic Titanic. Almost everyone who wrote for the show came back to do what they do best: make fun of bad movies. The premise is simple: the crew is brought into a screening room to help ‘save’ a bad movie– a sinking ship, as it was– with their heckling. Thus the title. The old crew still has their magic, even after ten years of mothballing their wit. I’ve watched the first movie they tackled, a Roger Corman flicked called Wasp Woman. Without the riffing, agonizing to watch. With the color commentary, hilarious. Cinematictitanic.com has many movies available, all horrible, all funny.

The Watchmen

I was one of the geeks who went to the midnight premier of The Watchmen. If you ever wanted to hack someone’s computer, that night would have been perfect– every nerd in the city was at the movie theater. I read the graphic novel when I was nine, in 1989. My best friend Lucas loaned me his copy and as was tradition I wrote my favorite line from the book on the inside cover. Before me Lucas had written ‘This city is afraid of me. I’ve seen it’s true face.” I think I tried to write a profoundly Buddhist Dr. Manhattan line. What I like most about the graphic novel is captured well in the movie: a story of superheroes that are human– they make mistakes, take sides, have mental disorders, are rapists, psychopaths and ordinary guys.

The first scene, set in the mid eighties, is of a late middle-aged man sitting in his recliner. A masked assassin breaks in and, after a valiant effort by the victim, tosses him through the pane glass window to his death tens of stories below. It turns out the victim is an aged hero called The Comedian. Vigilante Rorschach discovers the crime scene and puts together a conspiracy theory: someone is killing The Watchmen, a group of heroes that fought crime together à la The Justice League or The Avengers.

The film focuses on each member of the Watchmen in turn, filling the viewer in on each hero’s past by way of flashbacks and dramatic monologues. As is the case in the graphic novel, the movie shows the events of each time period believably, be it the Golden Age (read: original) Watchmen, the team’s Viet Nam and cold war era rosters or the vigilante Watchmen during the capitalist cultural revolution. We learn how each Watchman joins and how each ultimately quits the crime fighting gig, including inevitably Rorschach. Dr. Manhattan’s scenes drive the nuclear arms race storyline as he moves back and forth through time to tell us of his origins. Eventually the ‘someone’s killing Watchmen’ subplot unravels and the heroes are pitted against each other. The final Watchman’s death is the coup de gras of the work, the final unexpected blow in a work that delivers unexpected blows more reliably than a drunken boxer. If you haven’t read the graphic novel you won’t miss the giant squids who were replaced in the movie with a more logical plot device. Superfans will complain that the final confrontation’s meaning changes without the squids in the plot.

The movie adheres rather well to the graphic novel storyline, contrary to the indignant over reaction of superfans. As with any adaptation to the screen some of the story had to be compressed or altered for time and ease of understanding. A story simply has to be more action based in a movie, where a graphic novel is more dialog driven. The movie in this case does a very good job of driving the action while ensuring nothing the characters say seems cheesy or overly comic like, a transgression Spider-Man and Superman are guilty of. The Dr. Manhattan television interview ambush, for example, is spliced with Night Owl II and Silk Spectre II’s alter egos fighting would be muggers, signaling the first major crest in action. The scene is action packed, moves the story, and reveals a great deal of plot.

Above all the movie is cinematic. Each scene is detail rich– watch for messages on walls and billboards behind the action. As near as possible, the detailed panels of the graphic novel have been well translated to the screen. For example, where the novel uses black and white photos during the Golden era scenes, in the film these scenes are flashbulbs set to sepia toned flashbacks of the heroes in their yester-years. Even the soundtrack is crafted to reflect the tone and era of each scene– Viet Nam opens with “Ride of the Valkyries” playing in an homage to Apocalypse Now. And you’ll never hear Nat King Cole’s Unforgetable without thinking of the Comedian’s death scene.

The costumes don’t come off as corny as other campy comic film franchises (the pre-Dark Knight Batman series comes to mind). Overall it’s easy to see each hero as a human, with the obvious exception of Dr. Manhattan, the scientist-turned-nuclear-powered-demigod played by Billy Crudup, the only actor of note in the film. The Comedian’s 30’s era uniform is pure Robin Hood: The Broadway Musical costuming, but during ‘Nam he dons fatigues and combat gear. Masks are necessary in that each hero is a celebrity. If Micheal Jackson can get away with wearing a mask in public The Night Owl should be able to. The heroes’ secret identities is one of the central plot devices, so masks are essential for the story to work and thus not as obtrusive as in other hero stories.

A warning to parents, there is full frontal male nudity– Dr. Manhattan’s glowing blue pipe is shown throughout the movie. If you were a nuclear powered superbeing you’d freeball, too. The screenplay is written by David Hayter, who wrote the X-Men screenplay and is the voice of Snake in the Metal Gear Solid video games.

Donald Trump's Million Dollar Comb Over

Secret Reality Show Obsession: The Celebrity Apprentice

In the past I’ve torn relentlessly into people who watched reality shows. I would never admit to those mindless ‘sheeple’ (people who act like sheep) that for all my shouts to the contrary, I find myself secretly liking a random reality show here or there. A few weeks ago I couldn’t stop watching Kitchen Nightmares. Before that it was Project Runway. I feel secure enough in my sexuality to admit that publicly: I watch Project Runway. At various times in the past I have been enamored with Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Big Brother, and Trading Spaces. I even have the behind the scenes book for the latter. Not to say that I approve of people watching only reality television, but I admit I am watching one right now. In my diet of couch potato television, sitcoms are my chips– my staple snack. Then comes cartoons, my M&M’s, if you will. Celeb-reality is like my oversized tin of three flavor popcorn. It’s corny, cheesey, super-buttery over-the-top empty calories. My current fave flavor: The Celebrity Apprentice.
If you’re not familiar with the Apprentice premise, here’s a primer. Donald Trump is the world’s dorkiest egomaniac billionaire and owner of lots of high price real estate in New York (Trump Tower) and Las Vegas (Trump Taj Mahal). This guy puts his name on everything and SNL enjoys making fun of him and his million-dollar comb over. It’s also interesting to note that he lists Rosie O’Donnell amongst his arch nemeses. FOX owner Rupert Murdoch is undoubtedly near the top of the list as well.

Airing on NBC, The Apprentice places people from various professions on teams competing in business and marketing competitions a la Survivor. Survivor creator Mark Burnett is behind this show as well, but unlike on that show, the reward here is not food and bug spray but dollars and cents. Teams pick synergistic names like 'Paragon' or 'Hera' or anything that sounds like a model of car or deity. The Trumpster eliminates one member of the losing team at the end of each episode. The Trumpmeister even has a trademarked catch phrase, “You’re fired!” Try to picture it as Emeril Lagasse’s ‘BAM!’ but with a cheesy Travolta-esque hand gesture. SNL makes very much fun of that, too. In the end the winner gets a PR job for Trump’s company, a nice salary and a two cool titles: Executive Vice President of Public Relations and Owner’s Representative. In reality, the job is little more than a glorified poster child, officiating the grand opening of Trump Mall of America. But if the Don-minator wants to pay a million dolllars in bogus salary as a prize for his show that has earned him and NBC hundreds of kajillions of dollars then more power to him. The formula works, but it gets better. The Celebrity Apprentice takes D list actors, comics, athletes and models and make them the dancing puppets for your, my and the Donald’s entertainment.

I caught most of the first season of The Celebrity Apprentice last year but until I discovered Hulu.com. I couldn’t watch any show regularly– as a server, I work through television prime time most nights. Season two is available streaming free of charge on Hulu. New episodes usually show up there the day after airing on NBC, Sundays at 9 PM EST. I know, I’m supposed to list eastern and central times, so if you’re reading this and you’re in the central time zone, please send me an email and I’ll tell you what time the show is on where you live. That seems to me the simplest way to rectify the matter.

This season features a lot of really awful talent. On the ladies’ side, Team ATHENA, we have human exoskeleton Joan Rivers and plastic daughter Melissa. We also have the prerequisite Playboy bunny, Brande Roderick. No, she isn’t an important bunny. She’s not dating Hef and she doesn’t have her own show on E! She is blond and has decent jugs, and that’s what she’s there for. Someone who is on E! (the network, not the drug) is Kim Kardashian, playboy model, star of a notorious sex video and serial celebrity hook-up. But she’s not on this show– her chubbier sister Khloe is. She’s like Rob Lowe’s brother Brad, or Sylvester Stallone’s brother Frank. More useless than a Playboy bunny who you’ve at least seen naked or the sister of a celebrity you saw naked is a game show model you haven’t. Claudia Jordon is one of the random briefcase holding bimbos on Deal Or No Deal. I assume Donald Trump wanted host Howie Mandel but reconsidered. The Don doesn’t trust bald guys. It’s like they’re not hiding something. Barking commands through most of the show is some female poker champion, which on the celebrity food pyramid appears between female billiards champion and professional female bowler. Rounding out ATHENA’s all-star team is a female golf champion (see: female poker champion) and TLC member Tionne ‘T-Boz’ Watkins. So far T-Boz has been the quiet one, kind of like how Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes has been the quiet one in TLC ever since she died.

The men’s team is just as stellar. Team Kings of the Universe (KOTU) features nearly retarded Heisman trophy winner Hershel Walker, over the hill tough guy comedian Andrew Dice Clay, and male figure skating champion (see: female poker champion) Scott Hamilton. And those are your headliners. Severly mentally ill characters Dennis Rodman and Tom Green add alcoholism and aberrant behavior to the mix, while singers Clint Black and Brian McKnight perform a cross-genre duet in trying to manage their team of madmen. Not to be without a reality show entrepreneur of their own, KOTU has Jesse James, founder of West Coast Choppers and star of eleventy four History Channel shows.

I’ve seen through episode three. Here is a brief recap of each episode to catch you up so you can obsess over the show with me. I play a drinking game when I watch, and you should too! Try to come up with one.

Episode one begins with the celebs on the deck of the USS Intrepid in Manhattan. Donald of course arrives dramatically by helicopter. He would prefer to arrive by jet pack, but he can’t find a flame retardant hair spray. The Don sets the teams to a standard Apprentice task– being street vendors. The D Listers must use their industry contacts to raise as much money as possible in a sidewalk cupcake sale. Dennis Rodman’s social anxiety disorder manifests itself early in the show. He isn’t comfortable interacting with the public and stays in the van while the other celebrities use their fame to sell pastries. The Playboy bunny gets her sugar daddy Hef to make a generous contribution and Team ATHENA easily pummels the men. The Dice Man is eliminated so painfully that he will need Preparation H for years to come. Then again, Andrew Dice Clay is so old that hemorrhoids are an occupational hazard for him, a professional asshole.

Episode two gives the teams an advertising challenge. The CEO of Zappos.com, an online shoe store, asks the celebrities (and the golfer and poker player) to create a super hero to promote the company’s focus on customer service. The ladies divvy up responsibility well and get into zero cat fights– how mundane. The men give quality performances as they quibble and bicker through the task. Best moment of the episode is Hershel Walker telling Tom Green to shut up. The Don says ‘You’re Fired! ™’ to KOTU Project manager Scott ‘straight male figure skating champion’ Hamilton. His idea of naming their heroine ‘EEE’ doesn't make sense to anyone. If Zappos were called EEE.com, however, Hamilton would have been heralded as a genius.

Episode three sees Tom Green stepping up as KOTU leader after two failed challenges. The teams will this time sell wedding dresses. It may seem like the event is stacked in the women’s favor, but don’t forget that Dennis Rodman is known for, amongst other filthier things, wearing a wedding dress. And Tom Green got famous for wearing a tutu and sucking milk from a cow’s teat. Those two have more experience with dresses than the female poker champion and golf pro combined. Unfortunately, Rodman fails to pull his weight and gets plastered throughout the episode. He misses the day of the wedding dress sale, calling in sick with a BS eye infection. Project leader Green shows up late as well and teammates suspect he and Rodman were out drinking rather late the night before.

The girls win again, sans hair pulling. Sadly, we’re not even treated to a trampling of bridal gown shoppers. In the boardroom Hershel and Clint throw both bad boys Green and Rodman under the bus. They have contradicting tales of why Dennis was MIA on day two. Dennis claimed to have had an allergic reaction to a cat, Tom said he had a reaction to a dog. Best line of the episode is when the Don questions them on this contradiction. The ladies, watching via closed circuit TV in another room, know better than to believe Dennis’ cat/dog caca. “It was a girl named Kitty,” says Melissa Rivers, Skeletor’s daughter. “Or some bitch,” retorts the Deal Or No Deal bimbo. Unfortunately Tom Green is off’ed before he can do anything truly bizarre. Like rap, which he does very well. Find the youtube video of him and Xzibit. You’re in for a treat.

To see previous The Celebrity Apprentice episodes, watch NBC Saturdays at 8 PM EST (email me for central time). NBC is airing encore showings of the previous two episodes that night before a new episode every Sunday. Hulu.com has the aired episodes as well as the SNL skits starring Darrelll Hammond as the Trump, or Trumpmaster D as I never actually call him. The one with Dwayne ‘don’t call me the Rock’ Johnson is genius. His Dennis Rodman impersonation is spot on. Little wonder Rodman had a semi-successful crossover into professional wrestling a few years back, teaming up with Hulk Hogan for a few publicity matches. Find a video of that and you’ll spew whatever you’re drinking at the time out your nose, so don’t drink when watching it, for your safety’s sake. Speaking of drinking, don’t forget to work on the drinking game ideas. My game I’m either gonna call Donald Trump’s The Celebrity Apprentice: Drink Til You Drop or Million Dollar Comb Over. You drink every time there’s a product placement, celebrity name drop or someone says Trump. Waterfall when the Don’s on screen. Yaegerbomb when he says ‘you’re fired.’ She’s a harsh mistress, that game.

Nothing Trivial

I’ll be the first to admit it: I’m a dork. No, not your average, run-of-the-mill dork. I’m your atypical überdork. The kind of dork who doesn’t write “überdork” without the two dots over the ‘u’. The type of dork that also knows those dots are called ümlauts, from the German word meaning ‘two dots’. The kind of dork who knows that the word dork originally referred to a whale’s penis. As a self-professed überdork, I admit freely that I like no bar game better than trivia. I’m a lousy shot at beer pong, darts, and beer darts– it’s the coolest new game that’s sweeping all the fictitious bars I frequent! I know obscure facts and I like to drink, so trivia is my sport of choice.

Needless to say I take it seriously. Well, I guess it was needful to say. Every wrong answer is an excruciating blemish on my quizzical record. That’s one of the reasons I have issues with certain trivia practices. I get my trivia fix at Charley O’s on Tuesdays. Hell, I even went through the effort of ensuring I am scheduled off on Tuesdays so I can hit O’ Corley’s for trivia and karaoke, the dynamic duo of drinking. Jamie has been the host of trivia for a while now. His cohost shifts often but for now it’s Antonio and they are a great team. Any gripe I have with trivia is not host related, let me say that from the start.

One of my biggest peeves, coming from a man with peeves visible from space, is a certain team that plays at O’Corley’s. See, some of you don’t realize how seriously competitive trivia can get. I’ve seen people loose their thumbs for cheating. Actually, that was an old Charles Bronson movie, but trivia is competitive, and many teams come back week after week. The truly hardcore teams have matching shirts. In particular, the Chopstick Mafia is a team that, like me, takes bar trivia very seriously. So seriously that sometimes they may occasionally use a piece of technology to acquire the answer to a question that is stumping them. They use their phones to cheat. Hey, Mafia, don’t get all riled up. Everyone knows you cheat! We’re at the bar playing trivia so don’t assume we’re ignorant. But in your defense, Chopstick Mafia, you are not the only team that cheats. The only reason I don’t is because I don’t have an internet phone. I could take the moral high ground and say even if I had an IPhone I wouldn’t use it to cheat, but I would. I take it that seriously, too.

The problem comes when a team of twenty with IPhones answer questions that no other team got because they are cheating, errr, I mean, using advanced data access techniques. So to level the playing field I have devised a few suggested rule changes and additions. I hope every bar that hosts trivia will read this and reconsider their practices.

Rule 1: Team size may be no more than ten to fifteen people, or a tenth of the total bar crowd that night. So if your team has twenty members and there are only fifty people in the joint, you should maybe split into two teams. Why? You tell me– is it really fair for a school of dolphins to swarm three or four tiny mackerel? I’m tired of being the mackerel! I’m nobody’s fish!

Rule 2: Each question has a one minute time limit. If you know the question, that’s plenty of time. If you don’t, it gives your team ample time to compare ideas and brainstorm. It’s also a short enough time limit to kill the ‘google effect.’ That’s what I’m trademarking as the use of internet technology in trivia cheating. Look for the term in Wikipedia any day now.

Rule 3: The Equalizer. Just to make it more sporting, why not give the last place team a chance to catch up? Before the final question, let any team in last place chug against the first place team or teams. If a team in last place beats a first place team in the chug-off, the last place team gets moved up to first place. No one loses any points. This helps teams that are completely out-gunned have a chance, all be it a slim one, to win. The leading team still has an advantage– they’ve proved they know a lot, so they should have no problem answering the last question. Okay, maybe this rule is trivia communism, but I stand behind it, just like I stood behind Marx. Groucho, not Karl. Besides being a great comedian, he’s one hell of a trivia host. He used to host What’s My Line back in the golden years of television.

Rule 4: The Tie Breaker. This method ends the chug-off approach for deciding who wins in a tie. Instead, a question with multiple parts may be used, like asking the teams to name all the signs of the zodiac. Or all the Golden Girls. Still, a few teams may be able to name off Blanche (Rue McClanahan), Dorothy (Bea Arthur), Rose (Betty White) and Sophia (Estelle Getty, RIP). So a tie breaker question doesn’t preclude a final chug off, but it definitively decides which teams watch Lifetime: Television For Women.

I don’t really expect all (or any) of these rules to be adopted. I know that as a group people are resistant to change. So maybe trivia is fine the way it is. Or maybe I’m just a bitter überdork with no IPhone.

The DNA of REM

There was a time when what defined my first impression about a person was the answer to this question: what kind of music do you like? Elitist did not begin to describe how seriously I took that question. Snob was more on the nose. If your answer was “everything,” you were dead to me. I instantly forgot you were even standing there and would often accidentally bump into people who answered “everything.” I sat on a girl once for the same reason. Many months later and after weeks in court we settled it like gentlemen. We Jell-O wrestled. I lost the match and my appetite for Jell-O forever.

Only slightly less egregious than “everything” was “everything but rap and country.” To me that said “I have taste, but very little.” I also thought those people must be the ones who ordered their steaks well done and considered katsup a steak sauce.

Coming up next in my countdown of bad answers, in a two way tie for third, you guessed it, “rap” or “country.” The reason I only slightly disliked people with these responses was that I gave them points for sticking to a genre. At least they knew what they liked. They didn’t like “everything,” just bad music.

My answer? I’d rattle off a few bands that I liked at the time, or I’d try to classify my tastes: I’d say alternative, grunge, emo… whatever genre I thought represented artists I liked. This method was archaic at best. What did alternative mean? If it was the alternative to mainstream rock then it shouldn’t have been on MTV or the radio, but it was. Was grunge limited to only mid-nineties Seattle artists, or was there a sound that any band could create to be considered grunge? Was Weezer emo? Could emo bands have female singers? Does Ann Coulter have an Adam’s apple? What it boiled down to was that this method didn’t describe what I liked about a song, a band or a style of music.

Thank the maker for the internet, whose mysterious artificial intelligence has decoded man’s emotional response to music. Soon the robots will assimilate this program and will try to create music. It will be the most beautiful music any mortal will have ever heard. Until then we have the Music Genome Project. It may sound like a secret government program to genetically engineer a boy band/ superhero team, but I assure you it is probably not that. I’m seventy four percent sure it is not. The project began in 2000 as an attempt to dissect the DNA of music.

Every song has a “vector,” a list of its genes. Things like the singer’s gender, the level of distortion on the guitar and type of background vocals make up the approximately 150 “genes” of a song. There are over four hundred possible genes, though some genres have more than others. Rock songs deal with only around 150 genes but rap uses over 300. Jazz has 400 different genes because, well, jazz is chaotic crap. Listening to jazz makes me want to puncture my eardrums with a yellow number two pencil. It’s like when your alarm clock goes while you’re still asleep, so the alarm is making everything in your dream go crazy and start having a panic attack. That’s what jazz sounds like to me– a panic attack in my dream.

But back to vectors. A complex algorithm called the distance function compares vectors to generate a list of similar songs. (Pay attention, there will be a quiz on this Monday.) The Music Genome Project’s music player application, Pandora (Pandora.com) is free and lets you create custom playlists based on an artist or song. I have a few for my favorite artists, but most interesting are the stations I made based on a single song. I usually like one song by an artist and nothing else they’ve made, but Pandora never fails to pull a rabbit out of her hat.

So now ask me what kind of music I like and I’ll answer with a more scientific and most importantly more accurate response: I like songs that feature basic rock song structure, major key tonality, a distinctive male lead vocal and mild rhythmic syncopation. I also don’t mind string section beds, subtle use of acoustic piano or vocal-centric aesthetics. How about you? Oh… rap and country. That’s cool.

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.

Fire, Ice or Malaria?

John F. Kennedy’s poet laureate Robert Frost wrote:
Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.

I don't know if Frost was speaking figuratively. I never met the guy. Maybe he was just really into fire and ice. It is a well known fact that poets laureate are often pyromaniacs. As for the ice obsession, maybe he meant " ice" as in meth. It's an even better known fact that most poets laureate are junkies. I know for a fact that Maya Angelou used to be heavy into narcotics, but her Wikipedia entry doesn't mention which ones she liked. My money is on heroine. And probably Chips Ahoy. But let's say for the sake of argument that Frost was not chasing the dragon when he wrote this poem. If he was prophesying, then maybe he was predicting how humans would inevitably destroying our home planet.

It all started with Prometheus. In Greek mythology, he is the God who gave man fire. Ever since that fateful moment, we have been doing our damnedest to burn everything we can get our greasy little opposable thumbs around. Some random caveman in some ancient ice age must have seen a lightning strike cause a forest fire and think, "Ooga ooga! Fire good! Me like fire." Shortly thereafter, proto-man harnessed mother nature's most primitive force and created the very first carbon footprint. Sure, that caveman's footprint may have been more troll like than yours or mine, or most likely mine, but it was from that point that humans started adding harmful carbon back into our atmosphere at increasingly alarming rates. It is the nature of our society to burn things. We use fire to bake our bread, heat our homes, and fuel our Fords. Even if we aren't completely aware of it, burning fossil fuels accounts for the vast majority of our energy use worldwide.

So, like Billy Joel said, 'we didn't start the fire -it was always burning since the world’s been turning.’ Is our environment too fubar to fix? I don't know. I'm no psychic. But I do watch movies. If they are any prediction of how our time on earth will end, then mankind is officially boned.

So how will it end? I’m taking bets! Global warming is melting the icecaps. So will we end up like Kevin Costner in Waterworld? Will our world, too, be a featureless sphere with a handful of human outposts floating in an unlimited ocean? I'm not a strong swimmer, and I'm super pasty, so I'm not super keen on that idea. No one wants to see my sun-burned waterlogged corpse floating up to the side of his dinghy.

Or maybe ice is the way we’ll go out. According to my scientist friends (Bill Nye the Science Guy is on my speed dial, right after Stephen Hawking) after the ice caps do melt (and they will, I assure you) we’ll be in for another ice age. Sure, it’s going to get hotter before it gets cooler. Much hotter. Hot enough to, well, melt polar ice caps. When all the cool, fresh water from those glaciers and icebergs joins with the salty, warm waters of the Gulf Stream all currents will weaken and eventually subside. Currents, other than being sea turtle interstates, drive the mixing of hot and cold water across the planet and warm most of North America and Europe. It’s the warm water that currents bring to places like England and New York that prevents those places from being snowbound year round.

With no currents, the oceans will stagnate. Just like when you don’t rinse out your dog’s water dish and you leave it outside for a week, microorganisms will multiply and spread infectious diseases. Mosquitos will travel in packs of billions and pick cows clean in under five minutes. They’ll be more lethal than those shadow beasts in Pitch Black. You know you all saw that and loved Vin Diesel! But as far as disaster movie parallels, it would be more like Outbreak, but on a global scale. Think of Dawn of the Dead, but instead of zombies, masses of lepers, swaying crowds of malaria and bubonic plague infested refugees coughing all over you every time you leave your house.

Then, just when you think things can’t get worse, you realize that it is now getting colder. The ice age has begun. Everything freezes, but c’est la vie. This is a back-and-forth process that has been cycling for millions of years. Yes, we did hasten it this time. All those fossil fuels were good while they lasted. Now we’re in The Day After Tomorrow. The world is a flash-frozen T.V. dinner, except instead of peas, french fries and fried chicken, it’s small bands of humans clinging desperately to the shear edge of life in an infinite frozen tundra. So yeah, exactly like a T.V. dinner.

I abstain from betting on how humanity will go in the end– fire, ice, malaria… I know it will all end, and that’s enough. Ignorance is bliss. I’m just going to stock up on thermal underwear. And OFF!™. And sunblock–just in case.