The Best Things #4
My head is pounding and I don’t know what to say. Lights of the city going out one by one. “How’s your summer gone?” she asks. “Gone,” he says, and is depressed. We’re stacking things up and watching them fall. If all the world is a library, then here we are in periodicals, wishing for microfische.
This is The Best Things Ever for August 19, 2004.
NUMBER FIVE
My head really hurts
Seriously. I don’t know why I’m even writing this. I have a headache the size of circa-1880 Prussia, probably because the climate is an erratic bitch goddess. “Hey, it’s warm outside!” she says with a chuckle. Then, hey, she changes her fucking mind — “It’s cold!” she declares. And I die a little inside.
Keep in mind that the climate does not actually talk.
That reminds me. Remember that commercial for the Guess Who? board game? The game itself was nothing special, notable only for involving no actual skill or talent beyond random guessing, but the commercial was great because it ended with the snappy legal tagline: “Game cards do not actually talk.”
You see, in the commercial, the game cards are all yammering on to one another about how Mr. Smith is going to beat Mr. Jenkins and then have some spicy two-dimensional victory sex with young Ms. Brant or whoever. And, then, at the end, the disclaimer. And WHAT a disclaimer.
It made me smile every time. I could just picture someone rushing out to buy their very own Guess Who? set, smiling real big as they open the box and getting their whole family together for some good old-fashioned fun and excitement. And then, disappointment. “These game cards!” they’d yell. “They don’t actually talk!” And then maybe they’d fly into a rage and start torturing some of the game cards to get the others to talk.
“We have ways of making you talk.”
And then when THAT doesn’t work they go into a deep depression because, oh man, those game cards — they could have been more than just a novelty item. They could have been a FRIEND. So they quietly go into their downstairs bathroom, lock the door, wash their hands with the purple liquid soap mom always bought, back when she wasn’t in the hospital. The gun in the hand feels so right. And then it’s over.
It was a necessary disclaimer, I think. Because when you get right down to it those game cards really did not actually talk.
NUMBER FOUR
The theme song from that Guess Who commercial
Is it Me? Is It You?
Who Knows!
Guess Who?
How the hell did the rest of that go? Wasn’t there more? God dammit I can’t remember - and that’s depressing.
NUMBER THREE
Documentaries
Hey guys, I’m an intellectual. I bet you didn’t know that. You SHOULD know, as all my writing is very scholarly and I think it’s fair to say I exude a certain je-suis-un-grand-chien. I’ve been watching a lot of documentary movies recently, as an intellectual, and I thought it was time to give you my opinion on some of them.
- Super Size Me - This was pretty funny and also made me hungry. All of the fat people and the vomitting and whatnot did not deter me from my love of hamburgers and fries and Mayor McCheese. I didn’t know McDonalds in the states DELIVERED. That’s sorta amazing. I was kind of left wondering what the point of it all was, since no person with an IQ greater than Algernon is going to eat at McDonalds three times a day for a month. It’s kinda like making a documentary about drinking a lot of whiteout and chainsaws and geese and then being like, “Oh shit, drinking a lot of whiteout and chainsaws and geese is bad for you. See my movie about it!”
- The Hunting of the President - This movie is about five years to late to really matter, and that’s unfortunate. Narrated by the lovely and talented Morgan Freeman, the movie tells of the intricate smear campaign that was put together in attempts to bring down the Clinton presidency. The best part is clearly all the Republican higher-ups meeting with backwoods Arkansas bumpkins because they apparently had damaing news about the Clintons. The other best part is the segment with former Clinton business partner Susan McDougal. Hers is a tremendously sad story involving crazy husbands, political corruption, wrongful conviction and a bunch of guys peeing on girls in a cage. It’s just heartbreaking.
This movie would have been really important had it been released during the Clinton presidency, when the attacks were going on, as it pretty clearly shows just how unfounded most of the allegations were. But, alas, it’s too late, and all it really succeeds in doing is making one even more cynical about the state of U.S. politics.
- Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism - Fox News isn’t even AVAILABLE in Canada, so I’m not really sure why I watched this. Canadian news still hasn’t reached the lofty heights of American news, as we’re still a little light on the awesome fly-by graphics and booming taglines and “No-Spin-Zone” segments. No, we just have Lloyd Robertson, a news anchor with eyebrows that are starting to look painted on, and a bunch of people at the CBC writing stories about Stompin’ Tom Conners and Sasha Trudeau. But regardless, this was a pretty entertaining little movie. Some of the documents they unearthed was incredible, especially the leaked internal memos — the higher-ups at the network pretty much tell the anchors what kind of spin to put on stories. Bill O’Reilly’s segment with the guy whose dad died in 9/11 is pretty funny too. “Cut his mic off! Your dad would hate you!” That’s fantastic.
All in all, though, I’m not sure if they built enough of a case to prove that FOXnews is anything more than a right-leaning sensationalist network. Yeah, they suck, but are they terribly corrupting force? I don’t know, but I somehow doubt it.
NUMBER TWO
My head still really hurts
I love these Canadian Tire commercials. The guy — who has had like three different wives now — is always just hanging around waiting for his neighbours to screw up or something and then he just jumps onto the screen with some awesome new powertool. “You should use THIS!” he says. “What is it?” asks the clueless neighbour. And in the end it’s some solar powered, environmentally-friendly electromagnetic garden trowel that somehow keeps your pets in the yard and cleans your gutters. That’s amazing, is what it is.
I’m working my way through Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season One. I don’t know about you guys, but I’d do Alyson Hannigan before I’d do Sarah Michelle Gellar. I don’t mean to sound chauvanistic or anything, but she is a very well-read woman with two very nice academic endeavours.
NUMBER ONE
The Garden State soundtrack
I haven’t seen Zach Braff’s Garden State yet — I will next week! Monday! Or Tuesday! Possibly alone! I don’t care! — but man is the soundtrack great. I’m including one of the tracks as this week’s mp3. It’s notable for being my new favourite driving song. I love to belt out the chorus as I fly down the highway. “And BLUE EYES” I yell, every damn time. It’s fantastic and I think I’m in love.
It’s also nearly 5MB so we’ll see if we can’t up my bandwidth bill this month.
The file: Cary Brothers - Blue Eyes
And Bluuuue Eyes,
Matt
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McDonald’s delivers here in the States? Am I missing something? I’ve NEVER even HEARD of a delivering McDonald’s. I’ll have to see the doc and find out what crazy region the Super Size guy lives in.
And I swear I’m not lying when I say that I started listening to ‘Caring Is Creepy’ by The Shins JUST BEFORE reading your Garden State soundtrack recommendation. Totally awesome. And weird. But mostly awesome.
“When you guess who, it’s a mystery.
‘Not you or you? You’re history!’”
That came next. But while we’re on catchy songs, you can’t forget Connect 4, Operation, or MouseTrap. Even some of the lesser-known ones like Gator Golf were pretty awesome. In fact, someone who’s not as lazy as I am needs to make a poll on the message board based on this.
I got so excited about board game jingles that I forgot to read the rest of the article. Now that I have, I think I disagree on the Alyson Hannigan/Sarah Michelle Gellar thing–based on my extensive research–and I do mean EXTENSIVE research, if you know what I mean. (I mean reading various documents and studying sources relating directly to the subject at hand.)