Doppelganger!

The dude in this commercial looks, stands and talks with his hands in a way that reminds me way too much of myself.  Maybe I’m just a total narcissist but I think it’s striking.

Am I crazy?  Self-obsessed?  I’m not trying to say that this guy is like some total stud (you know, like I am) but I saw it for the first time recently and was taken aback.  I will say though, that while I dig the hat and the pocket bandana, I do not own a pair of pants anywhere near that small.  Maybe I should, and my ticket to commercial stardom will be as good as punched.

It’s Not Delivery, It’s Deception

Not pictured: wings.

Why do DiGiorno’s commercials try so hard to convince the public that their product is indistinguishable from a pizza you’d get delivered from a restaurant?  It’s also kind of strange that the individuals that populate DiGiorno’s commercials feel the need to specifically point out that the pizza they are eating has been delivered (or at least they believe it to have been) but that’s not really my point.  I mean I get that it’s a commercial and that if they didn’t point out the delivered status of the pizza the whole thing wouldn’t really make any sense.  It’s a symptom of what bugs me about it but it’s not the root illness.  What I really think is ludicrous about the whole thing is the premise that anyone would ever actually confuse a DiGiorno’s pizza with a quote unquote ‘delivery pizza’.  I don’t mean to suggest that they have a low-quality product or even that I don’t personally enjoy DiGiorno’s pizzas.  But never, ever, in a thousand years, would I sit down to eat one and think, “Boy, this is just like something I could’ve gotten from a restaurant!”  There are plenty of positive traits that DiGiorno’s executives COULD choose to focus on; they’re cheap, they’re easy to make, they’re readily available pretty much anywhere… why use lies and chicanery to sell a product whose quality could sell itself?  Dubious, DiGiorno’s.

Unrelated, but something I’ve been thinking:  Olivia Munn’s new haircut drives me totally wild.  I’ve never watched that new show she’s in, only seen pictures of her in press materials for it, but that’s enough.  She’s still not Morgan Webb, but the hair alone shot her up several points in my book.

A Commercial I’d Like To See

Have you ever thought about toilet paper commercials?  That they even exist at all is a curious phenomenon; people are going to buy toilet paper whether it’s advertised or not, the stuff practically sells itself.  If you don’t want a buttcrack full of poop, at least.  But what really perplexes me is that no advertisers seem to take that into consideration, it’s almost as if they actively try to distract you from what the actual purpose of toilet paper is with cute animals or cartoons.  I love cute animals and cartoons as much as anyone else, but it strikes me every time I see them advertising what is a pretty necessary part of modern life how little they have to do with the product.  The only time they seem to really focus on what the product can actually do is when it is put through some sort of arbitrary strength test, like holding up a handful of marbles with a wad of paper (as opposed to the unnamed inferior brand, which just can’t handle the weight of marbles)!  I don’t know about you, but I have to say that I honestly don’t think toilet paper would be my first thought as a solution to a marble storage problem.  What I’d love to see is an actual demonstration of a product’s doodoo removal qualities; if showing an actual poop-filled crack is too much for a more delicate viewer, they could easily create a proxy in the vein of that blue liquid they pour on pads and tampons to prove their absorbency (though really they ought to use, like, Ragu or something).  But anyway, if I saw a toilet paper commercial that showed that product scraping away a load of fudge from between two vaguely cylindrical hunks of meat, I’d never buy another brand again.

A Girl’s Best Friend

"Jewelry" or "jewelery"? Spellcheck accepts both (though not "spellcheck" oddly enough).

I don’t want to sound like I’m espousing Dave Sim-level misogyny, but with the Christmas season bringing on heavy rotation of diamond and jewelry commercials I can’t help but feel kind of pissed off that the male of our species is expected to, on several occasions, spend a serious chunk of money for the sole purpose of decorating potential mates.  I don’t think that giving rings is a bad idea; it’s a tradition that’s been around forever and the idea that the male must prove his worth to the female is pretty much omnipresent in animal behavior.  But these commercials seem to want to create this idea that these magic stones will create love, and males are destined to seek them out and tithe them to female deities who will then bestow upon them the joys of procreation.  All things considered though, being a dude is pretty rad.

Grammar? I hardly know her

I have a friend who, when speaking of dates other than the present, refers to them with the preposition “on”.  For example: “This is what we’ll be doing on tomorrow,” or, “On last week I was in Denver”.  I’m not sure how I feel about it, grammatically speaking.  Do words indicating a spot on a timeline bring their prepositions with them silently?  I mean, how would you diagram that second sentence?  Obviously “I” is the subject, “was” is the verb, and “in Denver” is a prepositional phrase modifying the verb, so that would look kinda like this:

 

I apologize for the Paint crudeness

 

So where does a phrase like “last week” fit in?  I feel like it’s more common to hear something like “Last week I was in Denver,” without the “on” at the beginning of the sentence, but how would that look?  Does the word “last” bridge that gap, or is there sort of an understood “on”?

 

...or like this?

 

 

Like this...

 

The second one feels better to me, since the word “last” really modifies “week,” not the verb “was”.  So I guess the question becomes whether or not it’s correct to voice an understood word.  (Just to be clear, I’m not researching any of this, just talking off the top of my head.*  I’m also not sure why there’s this two-level effect going on with these images here, but I kind of dig it actually.)

Anyway, when I think of understood parts of speech I automatically think of the understood “you” in imperative sentences, like “Move the chair.”  In this case the subject is “(you)” as in “(you) Move the chair.”  But we sort of vocalize that “you” when we address the subject, which is fairly common (“Jimmy, move the chair.”) though I guess you could argue that in that case the word “Jimmy” is actually modifying the understood “you,” not taking its place.

I don’t really have a point here, but this was something that I wondered about.

*:  It’s funny how talking “off the top of your head” and “out of your ass” basically mean the same thing.

The Boomhauer Complex

I often worry, perhaps irrationally, that others have a hard time understanding my accent when I talk. When I hear myself speak on recordings, I feel pretty self-conscious about my accent, even though I know it’s really not that severe. It’s definitely nothing compared to a lot of individuals I’ve met throughout my life. But for some reason, especially when I talk to people I don’t know very well or have just met, I can’t help but feel like they have no clue what I’m saying. I also suspect that some of that may be due more to my choice of words than my enunciation of them. There are situations that call for verbosity and situations that call for expressions like “I tell you what,” and I feel like I experience neither with any more regularity than the other. Maybe I just have a hard time telling the two apart.

This propensity for feeling outside of the realm of others’ perception bothers me frequently. I wonder if Boomhauer has that problem.  I’ve lived in what some may refer to as the “Deep South” my entire life, and although I’ve done some traveling outside of that region, I always end up back.  It’s long been a dream of mine to make a new home for myself further north, but not anywhere along the Eastern seaboard (well, maybe Maine).  Out in the Midwest somewhere probably, but I think I’ll shoot for Canada.  That way if I never actually get out there, hopefully I’ll have made it pretty far.  Ideally, when I think about that situation, I’m living way outside of town and have a little farm going on and the whole deal.  But anyway, when I think about that situation (which is obviously kind of frequently), I always wind up wondering what would happen to my accent.  I know it’s pretty common for people to adapt to the accents around them, and it’s not unthinkable that I’d eventually lose my accent, but I wonder if I wouldn’t try to keep using it on purpose.  I don’t know if it’s out of Southern pride, or just because I kind of enjoy, in some sense, being different from the people around me.  When I watch King of the Hill, I never get the sense that Boomhauer sees himself as an outsider, or even that others see him as one, but for some reason I feel this sort of kinship with him.  There is an episode in which Boomhauer, Hank, Dale and Bill all give their own differing accounts of an event, and when it’s Boomhauer’s turn to tell his side of the story, he speaks very clearly while all the other characters emulate his usual colloquialisms.  Maybe this was nothing more than a throwaway joke from the writers, but to me it illustrates what makes Boomhauer such a great character; he does acknowledges on some level that there is something setting him apart from all of his contemporaries, though it doesn’t seem to affect him or his relationships.  Maybe he’s not even sure what it is, but he’s definitely aware of it on some level.

That may be reading way too far into Boomhauer, but really it’s just projection.  I pretty much feel this way all the time.

ADDENDUM:  I’ve read over this a few times, and I think it came out differently than I really intended.  I didn’t want to give the impression that I think there’s a real concrete difference between myself and my peers, as if I thought I was better than everyone else (or worse than everyone else for that matter).  We’re all beautiful and unique snowflakes, and qualifiers like ‘better’ or ‘worse’ can only truly apply in very specific venues or scenarios.  Anyway, all I was really trying to say here is that I spend a lot of time feeling alone, or alienated, because I feel like no one understands me (the fact that I was even compelled to come back and try to further explain my point a few days after originally publishing this thing further shows that I have a hard time understanding myself most of the time).  On the flip side of that coin, I also acknowledge that there’s a good chance I bring it upon myself, subconsciously or otherwise.  I know that’s not a terribly mature thing to go around feeling all the time, but I do, so here I am writing about it.  Maybe other people feel the same way and can relate; it would be sort of ironic if that were the case, but isn’t that why we write our feelings down in the first place?  So people can read them and possibly relate to them?  In any case, I feel better about writing out opinions/feelings/thoughts/whatever than I do speaking them aloud.  That’s all I’m really trying to get at here.

Things That I’ve Thought More Than Once

Sometimes when I watch TV, I feel like I’m really paying more attention to the commercials than I am whatever show it is I’m watching.  I don’t know why, maybe it has to do with seeing the same commercial so many times.  All it really tells me is that I watch too much television, but I’ve found myself thinking these same thoughts on multiple occasions:

– Flo the Progressive lady is creepy.  She’s not really funny but she is kind if scary.

– Old people are really into investing in gold.  At least, whoever is making commercials for gold wants old people to be.  Game shows, too, seem to market almost exclusively to old people.  These commercials seem to play up the fact that gold is something you can ‘hold in your hand’; I wonder if that’s the key to success among that demographic.  I feel that the physical sensation is something that might appeal to the older mindset.  I often wonder what it’s like to be ‘old’.  When do you hit that cutoff point, in the eyes of others, yourself, or a combination of the two?  I guess it’s best to just not think too much about it.

– After at least a month of wondering what the hell was supposed to be funny about this movie Dinner for Schmucks, I finally saw a trailer that made any sort of clear explanation of the premise.  It had really been pissing me off how little I could understand what was supposed to be funny about this movie, even though I usually like most of the actors involved.  It seemed that it was just going to be ‘Look! Funny people doing funny things? Isn’t that funny?’  Which I guess it still sort of is, but at least now I feel like they are trying a little bit to make it make sense.  Sometimes I think I enjoy wondering what movies will be like more than I enjoy actually watching movies.

– The girl from the ‘Yahoo! Rhapsody! Exclamation Points!’ (or whatever that thing is called) commercials is super hot.  She’s exactly the kind of hot that’s like ‘attainable’ hot, but at the very peak of where that extends into the ‘no chance, no interest’ territory.  She’s also very Jewish, but sometimes I think those two facts are in direct correlation to each other.

– Speaking of movies, Scott Pilgrim Vs the World makes me uneasy.  I’ve never read the comic, but from what I know of it, the art is kind of gimmicky and lame.  Plus, (and this bugs me even more) it’s published in that lame half-size bullshit style as if it’s Japanese.  I have no problem with Japanese comics, or the Japanese anime/manga style IN THEORY, except that the subject matter of these comics always seems gay as hell.  Not gay as in overtly homosexual (though that is sometimes a factor) but just silly and uninteresting.  Also, if you walk into a bookstore and you see a section marked ‘Graphic Novels’ (a term I despise anyway but that’s a whole other rant) and there’s rows and rows and rows devoted to goofy Japanese crap and one tiny little half of a shelf with American comics on it, doesn’t something strike you as wrong with that picture?  I’m all for expanding cultural horizons and all that*, but shouldn’t I be able to find American comics here in America?  Anyway, the Scott Pilgrim movie feels like something I would have probably loved as a 15-year-old, and the arrested-development part of me doesn’t like feeling pandered to.  Beyond my own nonsensical emotions about it, I think with the logic part of my brain that it’s exactly the kind of thing 15-year-old kids will love 10 or 15 years from now.  It’ll be old enough to have that unassailable retro coolness that’s a prerequisite of admiration by that age group, and is aimed exactly at the emotions felt intensely by those individuals.  It almost seems that Michael Cera is the neo-John Cusack; playing that same lovable awkward young man well past the age he probably should, but generations of the future will adore him for having grown up with him as the ideal nerdy guy who wins out in the end.  This movie very well may mean to my sons (if I ever have any) exactly the same as High Fidelity or Say Anything… meant to me.  I think all of these things, but none of them make me want to see this movie.

* Most of the best comics of the past 20 years have been written by Brits anyway.

List Mania

I’d like to say (type?) a few words, if I may, about something that has slowly become an internet-based bane of my existence (what a surprise).  I’ve previously made public my thoughts regarding social networking sites, but today I want to voice my displeasure (ie, rant) about another phenomenon that, while unrelated, is approaching similar levels of ubiquity.  All of this hoity-toity polysyllabic buildup is basically just to mask the fact that I can’t come up with a better lead-in than the Seinfeldian, “What is the deal with all these Top 10 Lists?”

When did it become mandated that when anyone in the world sits down to write something humorous, they are required to rank those blurbs and present them in a list format?  What compels people to continue with this tired cliche?  Dave Letterman, perhaps the pioneer of this particular style of rapid-fire related jokes, has long since lost his relevance to the comedy community.  More recently, VH1 attempted to pass off “celebrities” riffing on pop culture events as humor with… well, I was going to cite specific examples, but I guess it’s easier to just say “everything on VH1.”  Even more serious shows on cable news networks often use a countdown as a means of moving through discussion topics, which is actually a bit more alarming than a simple trend in unpaid internet-based comedy.  I don’t expect Joe Blow Internet Satirist to give me comedic brilliance every time I StumbleUpon his website*, just as I hope no one expects me, Joe Blowhard Internet Writer, to update with any sense of regularity.  I do expect, though perhaps illogically, a bit more out of so-called news networks.  When you’re looking for insight or even simple facts out of an individual who uses the same pedagogical tactics as cracked.com, there’s a problem.  But that might be a rant best saved for another day.

What I really wanted to get at with this piece is why it is exactly that these lists bug me.  It’s not the seemingly random hierarchy that one author gets to throw around with impunity, though that is annoying (especially when the title includes the modifier, “… of ALL TIME,” as if this list of Hottest Redhead Actresses was exhaustively researched beginning with the very creation of the stage).  A side effect of this is that is usually makes for a hilarious Comments Section, where people who probably fancy their screen names as incredibly clever passionately argue that Laura Prepon is inappropriately ranked in comparison to Julianne Moore**.  That aside, the whole list fad really bothers me because it just seems so lazy.  Perfunctory, almost; as if the author had no real idea what he wanted to write or had to say, so he/she browsed Wikipedia for a few hours and decided to rank what they read in some sort of context.  I’m not arguing against educational humor (or humorous education), but to me that just sort of seems like a book report with jokes in it.  That didn’t fly for me when I was in school, why should every other wise-ass kid who tried it get to re-publish that same junk on the internet?

Because the internet is completely open for anyone to say anything.  It is freedom of speech at its most basic level (unless its child porn or something).  This seems like a cause worthy of championing, but the more I really think about the socialism inherent in the way the internet currently works as we understand it, the more it starts to bother me.  Like seemingly everyone else I knew, I went through a period of extreme fascination with Marxism, socialism and communism (I also wanted to dreadlock my hair during that time, which probably says something about where my mind was) that I have since strayed a bit from.  There are notions found in those ideologies that I still hold dear:  everyone has intrinsic worth, the needs of many should take precedence over the needs of few, etc.  I have not wavered from those principles, nor do I ever intend to.  I do wonder though if the level of equality afforded to mankind by the technology of the internet is truly in his own best interest.  I’ve often compared the internet to “Lord of the Flies” in conversation, as I feel that the relative anonymity and lack of rules creates a situation in which individuals’ more base tendencies are not only allowed but encouraged.  The kids on that island needed some structure to save themselves from themselves; our online culture is taking us to a point where even supposedly intelligent television programming and current events reporting has been watered down into lists of factoids.

It is not my intention to sound anti-technology, anti-free speech, or like the Unabomber.  And I certainly don’t advocate piling restrictions onto internet usage or rights to publish online.  I wouldn’t even be able to write this very thing you are reading if that were the case.  All I’m really trying to do is lament that what is in theory such an incredible tool for sharing ideas and information has become just a way to subject other people to poor, attention span-deadening excuses for humor and naked pictures of each other.  Actually that part’s not so bad.

*: I’m not sure if this is the correct way to invoke that technology in verb form, as it has the preposition connected to the word itself.  It would be more grammatically correct to say “sites Upon which I Stumble” instead of “sites I StumbleUpon”, but then the issue of capitalization comes into play, further muddying the situation.

**:  As far as I know, I’ve never seen such a list; I’m just using the first names that pop into my head that fit with the category (that I picked at random).  I’m fairly certain such a list exists, though, and as a passionate redhead enthusiast though I’m sure I’d enjoy reading it.

Awesome

I usually hate it when people just publish something that someone else made for no other reason than they thought it was clever. But, being a hypocrite, that’s exactly what I’m about to do.

More Rambling About Sex and Video Games

Nobody partied like it was 1996 in quite the way owners of a shiny new Nintendo 64 console did.  As an impressionable 10-year-old, the brand new gaming platform under the Christmas tree seemed to emanate an angelic chorus and a divine glow that altered my consciousness in a manner similar to the girl of Garth’s dreams at Stan Mikita’s Donuts.  But instead of an impromptu dance rendition of “Foxy Lady,” I simply tore open the box and played GoldenEye 64 incessantly for months.  Looking back, the former reaction may have been the most appropriate, for reasons I shall enumerate below.  You may think to yourself that the always family-friendly Nintendo corporation couldn’t possibly be brainwashing consumers with provocative material, and you’d probably be right, but for a console that defined the adolescence of many you can never go too deep (I’ll resist the urge to make a pun here).  Let’s look closely at a gaming system that not only flirted with greatness, but had a standing booty call invitation.

Live in the now!

We can start by examining one of its launch titles, and what may be the console’s defining game:  Super Mario 64.  Though this may be an overarching critique of the series as a whole, one of the central concepts of the entire Mario library is the playable characters’ mastery of all things pipe.  In this particular adventure, Mario’s thorough exploration of Princess Peach’s castle leads him to jump in and out of paintings, mirrors, windows, even blank walls, all of which transport him to another world of platforming hijinks that would define the genre for years to come.  Your task as the player is to get all up in the Princess’s living quarters, flip her switches, light her candles, open her doors, and essentially leave that place with your marks all over it.  There’s even a level near the beginning that looks like Peach’s bedroom, in which you jump through a stained-glass representation of Peach’s torso and slide down a tan-colored tube full of loot to collect a prize.

Oh yeah.

The following year, Nintendo changed video gaming in an oft-overlooked manner.  With the release of StarFox 64, gamers were treated not only to fun flight simulation, a replayable non-linear storyline, and some of the most hilarious dialogue ever recorded, but packaged in every copy of StarFox was the revolutionary Rumble Pak.  For the first time, gamers could feel all the vibrations of space combat in the convenient format of a controller easily held at crotch level.  The rumble concept has gone on to become integrated into every platform’s controllers since; Sony and Microsoft knew a good thing when they saw it.  Or felt it.

As years started to pass and the PlayStation and Xbox’s disc-based software began overtaking the capacity of the 64’s cartridge format, Nintendo was at a crossroads.  In order to meet the demands of the expanding possibilities that CD-based games opened up, something had to be done about the console’s relative lack of memory.  The solution? 1999’s Expansion Pak, bundled with Donkey Kong 64, which you inserted into the console itself to effectively double the amount of RAM available.  Yes, you had to break the console’s cherry and insert some outside agent in order for it to grow up and compete with the other kids (coincidentally, or perhaps not, the top of the expansion pak itself was a bright red).

Just stick that little red-headed soldier on in there, and get the party started!

Were the members of the 64 generation aware of the subtle brainwashing they underwent every time they tricked out their console with new peripherals or the next in Nintendo’s line of oddly sexed-up games?  Maybe, maybe not.  But I think this scene from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time speaks for itself: