On Unnecessary Bieber

Really, people?

Do we really need to know what your kid would look like if it was fathered (mothered?) by Justin Bieber?

I was all on board with age progression on Shiloh Jolie-Pitt because, frankly, that kid has Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt for parents. It's either going to be some kind of Greco-Roman statuary or the biggest flesh pile of recessive traits since Rodney Dangerfield's mom had to strap a steak around his neck to get the dog to play with him.

I was even alright with this celebrity look-alike craze that comes up every few years. It's fun. I look kind of like some fun people. There are always funny glitches that pop up on humor sites. It's acceptable.

But Bieber? REALLY?

Let me give you a hint. You want to know what your Bieber baby will look like?


It'll look like a fucking baby!

Why? Because Bieber is still a fucking baby.

Look at his cheek bones. Those things haven't grown yet. His eyes are still close together. He doesn't have an Adam's apple, for Christ's sake. This is a boy who obviously has not gone through puberty, hence his ability to sing like a 13th century castrate.

Sweet Jesus, the boy might still have baby teeth and we're popularizing the notion that he can father children? This is exactly the kind of crap that's going to be keeping "16 and Pregnant" on the air for another decade.

Drunken Master and Other Failed Kung-Fu Prodigies and Their Finishing Moves

• Drunken Master - Profuse Vomiting
• Heroin Master - The Shakes
• Weed Master - Sit On the Couch Watching Food Network
• LSD Master - Trip Balls
• Rohypnol Adept - I Forget
• MDMA Master - Rub Up Against Things
  
• Cocaine Sensei - JesusfuckingChristhithiminthefacealreadywhydontchacomeonjustdoitgoddamnitmoveoverIlldoitmyselfheremove!
• The Crystal Meth Monk - Steal Your T.V.

On Dendrology

My mom completely job-blocked me over lunch today.

Grandma found out she needs to have one of the trees in her back yard taken down and it's going to run several thousand dollars, more if the dendrologist has to haul all the lumber away himself.

So I said screw that! Jay just took a tree down at his house a couple weeks ago, and a few months ago I watched some guys on T.V. explain how to properly fell a tree, which I promptly filed away for latter use.

See, what you want to do is cut a smaller V above and opposite your main cut first, horizon on top and at a 45˚ diagonal on the bottom, then your main cut just beneath that on the side you want to tree to fall. This larger, primary cut should be 45˚ on top and horizontal on the bottom, so that when you push the tree over the two cuts form a ledge that prevents the tree from tipping back the way you don't want it to go.

I explained all of this and mom was thoroughly impressed. She suggested my friends and I could take the tree down for far less money. Grandma was then so ecstatic she doubled that price. Now I was ecstatic.

Then sometime while I was dazzled by dollar signs dancing in front of me, mom stepped in and convinced grandma she'd better go with someone who's insured.

COME ON.

I stand to make a bunch of money by using power tools to destroy a majestic maple tree? How could you deny me that? And insurance? You've already got home owner's insurance.

"But what if it falls on the neighbor's house?"

Maaaaan, he has home owner's insurance!

"But then he could sue grandma for using someone without insurance."

JEBUS CHRISTY! Do we really live in a world where every single job has to be conducted by a licensed and taxable professional? Can't a man just chop down a dying tree for his grandma because he's nice and wants money?

Godddamnit, Paul Bunyan didn't need fucking blue ox insurance. You know how I can guarantee we won't fuck up and drop a tree on someone's house? Because we're not incompetent. We have knowledge and experience and are willing to take a substantial pay cut because we are not professionals. You know how a professional can guarantee he won't drop a tree on your neighbor's house? HE CAN'T! That's why he gets insurance! Because he's become lazy and careless after so many years of working with chainsaws. He's absent minded. He has nothing to lose, we have everything. We can guarantee the job because we want it badly enough.

Also, the tree's back in the tree line way the hell away from any house.

On Avocados

Every time I place avocados back into the "FRUIT" bin in my refrigerator, the tomatoes stare at me accusingly.

I don't know why I keep caving to societal pressure and leave them in the vegetable bin, all I know is they've got to be pretty mad at this point.

On Banks

Let me preface what I'm about to say with something else that I'm about to say:

I do not partake of illegal substances.

Now I fully support everyone's right to do whatever they want responsibly, I just don't do certain things because I think my mental state is suitably askew already.

That said, I know a drug dealer who closes up shop at 9 p.m.


Think about that. He sells drugs and he keeps normal business hours. Costco is open later than this guy. "Hey, what time is it?" "It's like 9:55, dude." "EFFFFFFF MEEEEEEE…."

Really? You're really going to stop selling drugs just because it's getting late and you want to go out with your friends? Or sleep? Dude. Those are prime drug trafficking hours.

Kid doesn't even start his day until two, anyway. What kind of respectable drug dealer is gonna stay open exclusively from two to ten? You really want to keep to an eight-hour day that badly? You're like my fucking bank.

I hate banks.

They're only open weekdays in the middle of the day. Everyone else is at work. How the fuck am I supposed to get my money into you if you close in the middle of the fucking day? Seriously.

I mean, yes, I understand that you don't make anything from my money, but from taking that money and–essentially–playing the stock market with it, but man … you could at least do me the courtesy of pretending like my business affects your business hours in the slightest.

Man, help me out, banks. I got drugs to buy and my guy closes at ten.

On the Oil Spill

I was asked tonight to explain the oil spill, not so much how it happened but how so much oil could be coming out so fast for so long.

The way I explained it was like the opposite of when you get a break in your drinking straw. It's fine at first, but then you drink the waterline down below the break and suddenly your getting all this air along with your drink. The BP oil spill is kind of like that but backwards; instead of air seeping in through a break above sea level, oil is spilling out because the break is below.

But how can it come out so fast?

I dunno, man, underground pressure maybe? I mean, we drilled it it shoot oil up out of the ground. Now the derrick is just burned and collapsed into the sea and we put a ring of floaties around it. Like those little hats you give kids to keep the soapy bath water out of their eyes.

But how have we not fixed it yet?

No one's, uh, ever had to deal with one this big before. Pretty much every solution's been failing spectacularly. We put a ring on top of it, the oil's clumping underwater and flowing outside the ring before surfacing as giant goobers. We drop a giant concrete box on it, it's still spewing. We poor tons and tons of mud and cement down its fossil hole, great, now it's spewing a lower ridiculously large amount of oil into the open sea per hour. Great.

I read the other day that the BP oil spill is sending enough raw crude into the ocean now to match the entire 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster every three and a half days or so.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't we go ape shit over that? Weren't there massive repercussions? Didn't we all come together to help clean up the water and, only after containing what we called "an ecological disaster," blame people accordingly? Where the fuck did all that go? Where's Argentina and Russia and all those people familiar with oil drilling to fix this?

But we've never dealt with one this big before!

I know, I said that. That's why you had like, a month to figure shit out. How is no one on top of this kind of thing? Where's Sweden? "Oh, hey, we know we're Sweden and everything but, I mean, we've got this thing? We used it back when our entire nation went solar back in 1975? And, well, we just thought maybe you guys could use it right now."

Thanks a fucking lot, Sweden. Assholes.

Seriously, though, is there some mad businessman just waiting for the last possible moment to gouge us on anti-petrol breathing masks for fish or something? Is someone out there just waiting to Lex Luthor us and make a fortune?

Can't we send anyone to fix this?













"Send me.…GWOAN!!"

On Rookie of the Year

One of my favorite baseball movies as a kid was Rookie of the Year. I was never a Sand Lot kid, nor even a Little Giants man. Frankly, with how ardently my father and grandfather routed for the Mets and Yankees respectively, I grew up firmly believing that sports were, generally speaking, pretty dumb. (This was probably exacerbated by how bad I was at them, although I was vindicated years later after proving to have been going slowly but outrageously nearsighted. Suck it, right field.)

Anyway, somehow I still found one baseball movie I enjoyed. I never got the draw of Angels in the Outfield, in part because the dad was a deadbeat loser and in part because I loved Back to the Future and didn't like mixing Christopher Lloyd movies. But Rookie had a draw to it I could get behind. It was a sports movie about a kid, my age, who sucked at the sport he played. Granted, he enjoyed baseball, but the similarities couldn't run too far beyond unathletic, nasal Jewish boys with single mothers. He's the absolute worst player on his team, but one fractured and mis-healed clavicle later and he's playing for Dan Hedaya and the Chicago Cubs.

But something always bugged me and no, it was not any scene involving Gary Busey.














No, what really, fundamentally bothered me was the very last scene of the movie. Having re-injured his arm, protagonist Henry Rowangartner fakes out a runner on first for a second out and takes down the Mets' heavy hitter with "the floater," a questionably legal pitch once thrown by his mother. Thus the Cubs defeat the Mets, though they have lost both their best pitchers in the process.

Cut scene to a Little League field some months later as Henry makes the game-winning out back in his old right field, now a respectably decent young player coached by Gary Busey's Chet "The Rocket" Stedman, who just happens to now be dating Henry's mother since she beat up her sniveling douchebag ex.

Now look at this:

That's the very last image that appears on the screen.
You see that ring? That's a World Series ring. It says "WORLD SERIES" on it.

Now this is what I never grasped until recently: in the film, they're playing the Division series.The Mets and the Cubs are both in the same division. The Cubs' manager even tells Stedman (unaware of his freshly destroyed rotator cuff), "I'm saving you for the playoffs!"

I never understood why they were so happy at the end of the movie. They won, sure, but they had an even more important series coming up. One which they would have to play without either of their starting pitchers. Yes, the whole team was reinvigorated by the winning streak, but let's be realistic. The only reason the Cubs were doing so well was because of offensive pitching. Hitting and defensive play held their own, but the whole point was that Henry was pitching ridiculously well.

So apparently between the climax and the denouement we are expected to believe that the Chicago Cubs, without their two best players, went on to defeat four times the American League champions, which statistically has better than a one-in-four chance of being the Yankees. Any New Yorker will tell you that comparing the Mets to the Yankees is possibly the largest discrepancy in both talent and luck of any two teams in major league baseball. Are we really expected to believe that this fictitious version of the Cubs which could barely beat the Mets, sans their top men could defeat the juggernaut that is the New York Yankees?

Really?

Or are we just to believe that Gary Busey, likely through high kicks and quoting old Western movies, somehow prevented the continuity guy from making sure the prop department got a Division Series ring?