Moo York City

This commercial is notable for one thing: In an age where everything is made in China, its not enough to buy American: you should buy Texan. Not just Texas, either, but San Antonio, Texas, because those fuckin’ queerbos at the Alamo don’t know shit about salsa.

“Is your salsa made in New York City? Then fuck you, you Commie queer. We’re going to have ourselves a good ol’ fashioned FAG DRAG!”

Honestly, if I had to pick a geographical location where I wanted my salsa to come from, it’d probably be Mexico. The good part of Mexico, that is, if it exists.

In the commercial the cows say, “Moo York City,” because they’re not allowed to say, “Jew York City.” Also, the cowboys immediately lynched the man with the New York salsa, which is their custom. They then proceeded to fuck each other atop Brokeback Mountain.

Super Bro. Bros.

The New Super Mario Bros. 2 for the 3DS has been out for little over a week now. My son received a copy for his birthday yesterday, but I haven’t had the chance to play it yet.

Why is Mario the only franchise that doesn’t get flak for copying the same game over and over again. To the best of my memory, there was only one game in the franchise that seriously deviated from the standard hop’n’bop formula, and that was Super Mario Bros. 2.. That game wasn’t even intended as a Mario sequel to begin with, if legend holds true. The sprites were traded out at the last second to cash in on the success of the first. After that, the true-to-the-original antics of Super Mario Bros. 3 seemed like a quasi-religious experience.

Ever since then, the main cannon for Mario games has been the same. Of course there’s been spin-offs and guest appearances in nearly hundreds of other games. The thing is, no one ever complains when their Mario game feels like a re-hash of the old one. It seems like a joke to be calling it the, “New Super Mario Bros.,” when we’ve been playing the same game for over 25 years.

The “New” Super Mario Bros. for the 3DS added at least one new element: 3D. It wasn’t simply a side-scroller. Mario had to move forward and backwards into the scenery as well. The sequel on the 3DS doesn’t bother with the 3D aspect of the 3DS, and instead is merely a side-scroller with its first level virtually copying the first world in the first Super Mario Bros. game on the NES, but more in the style of Super Mario Bros. 3.

Isn’t it strange how Nintendo can put out the same game every year, but when other franchises, like Madden, CoD, Halo, etc. try to everyone calls foul?

The game focuses on collecting gold coins, which has always been an odd thing about the franchise. Every 100 gold coins earns Mario a new life, but they have no other value. You can’t buy things with them, like it other games. They’re like a second scoring system within the confines of the high score. No one really questions why the coins exist at all, or why as players we spend inordinate amounts of time on our timed courses bopping our heads against blocks to get more coins.

The World Doesn’t Make Sense

I was thinking absently about Sonic the Hedgehog today, which of course led me to think of Furries. Specifically, given the inherent worship of Sonic the Hedgehog in the Furry community, do any of them ever dress up in alternate Sonic costumes like Metal Sonic? I realized that no one would ever dress as Metal Sonic because being metal, he’s the antithesis of being, “Furry.” It at once blew my mind and likely spawned a hitherto unexplored fetish.

Furries, being loathed by every fringe community abound and by society at large, are a mysterious bunch. Why does Sonic the Hedgehog play such a pivotal role in all of their costume designs and, “art,” which is using the term loosely. Are they generally aroused by a pixelated rodent (or is it a marsupial?), or was the style the easiest to emulate for their nefarious purposes? Sonic is the only video game-based character who “enjoys” this sort of fandom. People don’t dress up like Mario and Luigi and give each other moustache rides. Does owning a Sega Genisis somehow mutate sexual development?

Seriously, with the vast resources out there for designing a cartoon animal, with all the movies, TV shows, comic books, mascots and so forth, why was Sonic chosen as the cornerstone?

Furries seemingly originated as a joke. The only reference to them outside the early years of the internet was in a Monty Python sketch about men dressing up like mice and trying to sneak cheese. Today, there’s Furry conventions.

People live their lives as Furries. They’ve completely dedicated themselves. How does that even happen? Who wakes up one day and decide they’re a slutty female cartoon cat trapped in a man’s body? How would a psychologist even begin to unravel that mess? There’s no amount of pills you can throw at that and make it go away.

The Dark Knight Rises (In His Pants)

I’ve only just watched the Dark Knight Rises in theatres, a month since it’s release and I’ve noticed strange things about the plot nobody seems to be talking about. After being one of the last people to see it in theatres, you have no excuse to cry about any spoilers, but I’ll say it anyway: SPOILER ALERT.

1: Robin:

Why is Robin (Blake) hanging around Wayne Industries, or why is he at Bruce’s funeral? There’s only one scene where they’re publically linked together as Blake and Bruce Wayne. That’s hardly enough to get your foot in the door at a multi-national corporation. Alfred has next to no idea who the fuck he is, other than the fact he knocked on the door and he answered. The ass-end of the movie sets up Robin to become… Robin, as he gets 15 seconds of hands-on training from the man himself before earning the Batcave as a type of inheritance. Bruce Wayne is trapped in the Pit for five months, though, where he has little to no time to set up anything for a successor. His only tip of the hat is to tell Robin he should wear a mask to protect his loved ones, which really didn’t work out too great for Bruce to begin with. The entire dénouement is of him hanging around Bruce’s old digs with no real explanation as to why he’s there. How is Wayne’s mansion even standing after the crisis in Gotham? Was it outside the city lines? Every other building was ransacked completely. Also, Bane was out to destroy anything with Wayne’s name on it, and the mansion was the last thing he had. Why not torch it like Ra’s Al Ghoul did?

2: The Motive:

The entire movie is about Bane and Talia’s revenge of Bruce Wayne for killing Ra’s Al Ghoul. Only he didn’t kill Ra’s. They don’t know he killed him, either, they’re just assuming he did. It was actually Gordon who killed Ra’s by blowing up the rail the train was riding along. There were no witnesses to Ra’s death and his body was likely never recovered from under the wreckage. The only evidence linking Batman to the death is hearsay. Based on that, they come up with an incredibly convoluted plot to destroy Gotham out of revenge, well after Batman has gone into retirement. Since he quit, Gotham pulled a 180 and stopped being the evil city Ra’s was out to destroy with his convoluted plot. Its not even clear to outsiders that Bruce even cares about Gotham anymore. Blake certainly doesn’t think so because he stopped funding the orphanage programs. Why attack a city directly to get revenge on one man, then move that man across the planet to a prison where he can only watch helplessly from a black and white TV screen? Bruce even breaks the TV near the end of the five months, so he has no idea what’s going on. With everyone in the prison presumably working for Bane, shouldn’t someone at least be checking on Bruce to see he’s watching? The entire punishment boils down to Bruce watching Gotham being destroyed on TV. Then what? Was someone supposed to kill him? Bane was going to kill himself in Gotham as well. The bad guys had no escape plan in place. They were supposed to be suicide bombers. Bruce could have potentially escaped after the bomb went off and went on to live out the rest of his life. Sure, he’d be living with the knowledge that he let Gotham be destroyed, but it wasn’t exactly his fault.

3: Talia:

Why does Talia fuck Bruce? How did that fit into her revenge scheme? Her plan was to leave Bruce in the Pit for the rest of his life, so he was never going to know who she really was. She was never going to get a chance to betray him, because he would never know, and she was going to die in the suicide attack along with the rest of Gotham. She fucks him seemingly for the sake of horniness. Also, she’s in his lair, and she’s sleeping while he slips away into his Batcave and goes on patrol. Wouldn’t that have been a good time to be evil? Bane wouldn’t have needed to break into the Arsenal because she’d have access to Bruce’s secret stash under Wayne Manor.

4: The Pit:

That one spot in the Pit where Bruce had to jump and kept failing… Why didn’t he bring something up along with him to form a bridge? There’s plenty of spare materials around to use, and he’s fucking Batman. Also, he has a rope. He’s connected by a rope to the top of the Pit. He could just climb up the rope. All that bullshit about being afraid of death, and not being afraid of death, and his father’s ghost was a little unnecessary.

5: The Joker:

We all knew the Joker wouldn’t be back, but what actually happens to his character between the two movies? Presumably, he’s in Blackgate when Bane lets out the prisoners, or he’s dead. With Gotham being Joker-free for eight years, you have to assume he’s dead.

6: The Leg:

Why is Bruce walking around with a bum leg when he has the special equipment he needs to fix it in his Batcave waiting for him, perhaps for eight years?

7: Gordon:

How stupid is Gordon for not figuring out the Bruce Wayne is Batman? Bruce even went into his hospital room wearing a ski-mask, and an Armani suit, and he couldn’t put it together, although in his defence he was probably high on morphine. Then when Batman gives him the last clue, it takes him longer than it took Katie Holmes to figure things out, and it took Katie years to figure out who Tom Cruise really is.

Nettleflix

Occasionally, when I find that the movie I wanted to see on Netflix is not available, I’ll attempt to watch one of their infinite selection of B-list movies instead. I don’t get very far. The only thing these movies have going for them are titles dumb enough to be interesting, and box-art that looks like it was badly photo-shopped from a real movie.

Tonight, I half-watched 12% Nazis at the Centre of the Earth. 

In case you don’t know, Nazis are everywhere. They’re in Brazil, they’re at our beaches, and they’re on the moon. That’s why being Captain America is a full-time job. It stands to reason that there’s Nazis at the center of the Earth, just as there’s reason to believe there’s Nazis at the Center of Performing Arts. As a member of the viewing audience, I don’t need to know how they got there, I just need to see them being impaled on an American flag.

The movie has a few Nazis explosion in a DubyaDubya2 set prelude before advancing to the present day, where a group of yadda-yadda-yadda 20-somethings working at something-or-other have to go to the center of the Earth. I say all this because I don’t care about these people. They’re the same standard snarky nobodies who litter every B-movie, characters that exist simply to be killed one-by-one horror movie style, so why get attached in the first place? It’s not like they’re the cast of Scooby-Doo, although that’s exactly who they are.  I stopped watching just as they were about to go to the center of the Earth, so the suspense is killing me. I presume everything went okay. There were Nazis, but they weren’t all preachy about it. They had ice cream.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, B-Movies often deliver exactly what they advertise. That’s why 2 Headed Shark Attack has a two-headed shark attacking.

The 2 headed shark attacks in the first five minutes, where this box art takes place:

There’s nowhere this movie can take you that’s really going to expand on that idea, ie. a 2-headed shark. Unless of course this happens:

Robolution

Blockbuster isn’t a thing anymore. The near-total collapse came on quite rapidly, frankly. Just as Blockbuster put numerous mom’n’pop video stores out of business by promoting new forms of media, so too were they put out of business by downloadable movies. Ironically, I can find at least three or four independent video outlets around town, while Blockbuster was replaced by a novelty store, which also closed down, and now sits empty, because of Obamacare, presumably.

The new thing now are automated video kiosks. There was a new one right outside Wal-Mart, so the creepy people who hang outside Wal-Mart can gather personal information about you like a hobo-facebook whenever you use it. I assume when your video is overdue, the kiosk will transform into a killer robot and hunt you down, which is probably more entertaining than the movie you rented.

A creepy thing about them is that they literally seem like they’re from the future. They’re chock full of movies that shouldn’t be available on disc, as they just premiered in theatres a few short weeks prior. I saw Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter in one of them when I was sure it was still listed in the theatre schedule. With all the money spent promoting movies to get butts in sticky theatre seats, its strange to think that you can casually pick up a brand-spanking new movie while you’re getting baby wipes.

Stranger still is how they were obsolete before they were even made. Do people want to rent movies? Does physically renting something they’re forced to physically return appeal to people? Are we all sadists? I know a large majority of the population are fond of their DVD and Blu-Ray players, but this is 2012: Ice Age.

Why are we so attached to dead formats, aside from the obvious money invested in them? Are people still using Laserdiscs? I was trying to throw out our old VCR, but was told to keep it because we needed it to watch all of our VHS tapes, which we never watch, and also need to be thrown out. Half our collection is available on Netflix, which we can stream wirelessly to any room in our house. Still, we don’t watch the same old movies, because we’ve seen them a millions times.

The Greatest Movie EVER

I just thought up the single, most greatest idea for a movie ever, starring Samuel L. Jackson as himself.

While filming on location at a secret base for Avengers 3, Samuel L. Jackson blows up a container and releases a virus. This virus copies his D.N.A. and starts turning everyone in the world in Samuel L. Jackson. Now its up to the real Samuel L. Jackson to put an elite team together comprised of Samuel L. Jackson, Samuel L. Jackson, Samuel L. Jackson, and Samuel L. Jackson to stop the virus before the whole world is taken over by the evil Samuel L. Jackson.

The movie, of course, is called, “Muthafucka!”

I’ll wait until you’re done wiping up your jizz to tell you that this will also be the first movie ever guaranteed to be 100% Ben Aflek free. That means Ben Aflek didn’t star, write, produce, direct, make any guest appearances, or fuck any of the cast members. Starring a 100% all African-American cast, there will also be more Blackspoitation than Blackula and Roots combined.

Of course, all of Samuel L. Jackson’s most famous lines of dialogue will be referenced, and he’ll say, “Mother fucker!” exactly 666 times, opening a portal into the Netherworld, populated only by Samuel L. Jackson. And yes, he’ll be eaten by a shark, but the shark will also be Samuel L. Jackson.

For the ladies, there’ll also be a romantic subplot between Samuel L. Jackson and Samuel L. Jackson. It’ll progress into a love triangle, and Samuel L. Jackson won’t know if he should choose Samuel L. Jackson, or Samuel L. Jackson.

You’re welcome, Hollywood.

Fish Jesus

One of my goldfish was lying dead on the bottom of the bowl this afternoon, but when I went to scoop it up to flush it, I noticed its gills were still moving. So I cleaned out the bowl and put it back in to see how it would fare. That evening, it was swimming around as if nothing had ever been amiss. This leads me to believe I might be Fish Jesus.

Being Fish Jesus is like being Regular Jesus, but with fish. For instance, instead of saying, “Turn the other cheek,” Fish Jesus would say, “Turn the other gill.” Additionally, instead of the miracle of the fishes, it would be the miracle of the humans. Instead of walking on water, he swims on land. Instead of turning water into wine, he turn wine into water. Instead of saying, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,” he says, “Glub, glub, glub.”

Baby Beluga

Quite by accident, I may have been one of the few people to see Kavna alive at the Vancouver Aquarium. Kavna was the whale from the song, “Baby Beluga,” by Raffi, a famous children’s singer.

The family and I had gone to the Aquarium on B.C. Day along with a few other thousand people, and we went to go and see the whale show at around 3:30 p.m.. The show was cancelled, however, and the area around the upper viewing area was cordoned and guarded by two female staff members who politely answered questions from my mother-in-law. With nothing else to do and the show cancelled, we hung around the area eating ice cream. Eventually I noticed a group of people coming out of the restricted area, where I first noticed a third whale, Kavna, was being kept in a separate tank. There were maybe a dozen people in total, but I assumed they were a part of some kind of a “swim with the whales” program. It was fairly crowded, and there hadn’t been any mention that the whale was sick up until that point. Looking back, they seemed distressed. One man came out and sat in the bleachers and emptied water out of his boots. Another was shivering in a towel while being held steady by a pair of workers. Then the two remaining belugas came up to the tank and curiously poked their noses out of the water to look and hung around the area for a while. Previously, they’d been swimming around as whales do. They had been on their backs quite a bit swimming upside down, getting exercise, with no one directing them.

The whale had died around the same time we were there, give or take a half hour.

The beluga herself was 46-50 years old, which is more than twenty years the average life expectancy of a beluga in the wild. The same beluga had been there at the Aquarium my entire life, and I’d seen her every second year or so, perhaps fifteen times in total.

We left at around 5 p.m., oblivious that one of the aquarium’s oldest and inarguably most famous residents had died while we were there. One would imagine news like that would send a shockwave through the entire staff, but it was impossible to tell from any of their expressions or demeanour that they knew anything was amiss. I can’t even think of a parallel in the human world where something like that could happen and people not know, or let on that they knew.

A Sad Affair at the Fair

I went to the local Agrifair here in Abbotsford, mainly because I had read on the BC government job search website that there was going to be a Job Fest held there, and I desperately need to find something less demeaning to do for a living. I assumed that a “Job Fest” was similar to a, “Job Fair.” This was not the case. They had a stage with a live local band playing, inflatable props and a booth with some iPad set up. There were no recruiters, postings, or anything of that ilk, making it worse than attending a high school guidance counsellor’s office. The iPads were set up with an app game that suggested a career path for you based on your likes and dislikes. By pressing all the options that would be associated with an excellent worker, I was given the career option of, “Coach,” nature’s pedophile. It gave me this job, and only this job four times in a row. Then it showed me how bad the job market for a coach was, and how little they made. Basically, it told me to go fuck myself. I honestly don’t know what purpose any of it served. One would assume a Job Fest put out by the B.C. government would be there to highlight job opportunities in B.C., which it didn’t. B.C. has a major problem with talented and young workers shipping off to Alberta, because the money’s good. It looked like they invested a lot of time and money into a project that’s a proverbial Bridge to Nowhere.

This was really the only reason I wanted to go to the fair this year. I even brought fresh resumes to hand out. I felt more or less an idiot, considering I spent $10 to get in. This was the saddest I’ve ever seen a country fair. For starters, all the carnival rides were shut down until 5 p.m., because they were too hot. It was around 12 p.m. when I got there. All the people in attendance were sitting around under shaded trees. To be honest, I didn’t think it was that hot out. How would a carnival function in a place like Texas, I wondered, if they had to worry about things like the seats getting too hot? This was Southern B.C.. People from warmer climates visiting on a sunny day have to bundle up to stay warm. Just as people from the prairies always mock us when we complain about a cold winter, we too would be mocked for complaining about a hot day from just about anyone outside our borders.

I walked through the farming equipment museum which is a hot spot for all the old coots, and they were just completely dead. They were laid back in their chairs like they’d just run a marathon. It was lunchtime, and there were no line up at the food carts. Even the lady selling ice cream looked tired and lonely, which didn’t make much sense considering. Looking through the carnival rides, I felt like either the Joker in his favourite hideout, or Scooby-Doo investigating a mystery. A small child wanted one of the toys being offered at the carnival games, but his father was unable to procure it for him because the game itself was closed.

There were multiple musical acts onstage, with no one watching. Listening to them in the background, they sounded not that bad. Like better than semi-professional to professional acts. No one was really paying any attention to them at all, even with their music blaring across the fields. The band playing at Job Fest had only two spectators that weren’t being employed to be at Job Fest, but a gig is a gig.

Babies Everywhere

I was trying to find something on Netflix to watch with my baby, and they just added the movie, Babies.

Having just gone through the initial horrors of having a child, I was wondering how babies fare in the rest of the world.

People were in an uproar when Britney Spears drove her car down her driveway with her baby in her lap. In Mongolia, they drive with babies being carried on the back of motorcycles with their firstborn clinging to the front, over a grassy plain. The mom couldn’t even get on the bike the first try, because she couldn’t balance the baby properly, and the dad’s already revving up the engine like he’s going to peel out. There wasn’t a helmet in sight. Presumably, the grassy earth would cushion any kind of crash they might have.

When you think about Africa, you might think about how impoverished it is. Babies don’t have diapers, or wet naps. There’s not even anything covering their asses, because anything you put on it will immediately become covered in shit, and there’s nothing to exchange it with, and no way to wash it. When the baby shit, it  shits, it shits all over the place. If you’re carrying a baby, the baby shits all over you. That’s why upon first evolving we were all hunter/gatherers. The men folk would go out an hunt and leave the women at home to tend to the babies, because the babies were shitting everywhere. In the movie, the African mother has to wipe up the baby’s shit off her leg with an old corn cob, seemingly used for this specific purpose of wiping up shit. They have to clean other people’s shit off themselves with rotting produce, which they must keep in their huts. If you’ve ever changed a diaper, you’ll know how much shit a baby can produce, and it’s questionable consistency. After a while, you’ll begin to wonder if your own newborn is secretly plotting against you because of the volume of shit coming out of it. Now imagine that shit being all over you and your things 24/7.

Bear in mind this wasn’t one of those starving babies they show you in those donation ads. This is a happy, healthy baby will a full tummy. Everyone’s happy and loving life. This is what’s happening in the good parts of Africa. Imagine the bad parts. Holy fuck.