Storage

The other night I was struggling to find something to watch on TV and was assaulted by two storage auction-themed shows airing at the same time on channels one digit removed from each other. That means that as I flipped through, I saw something that angered me and immediately pressed the button again, only to find a slightly-different show with the exact same premise. It’s like how you’re trying to pick a radio station and they’re playing the same Lady Gaga song. More so: these were both half-hour block programs, and they were playing back-to-back episodes. Back-to-back episodes of any show are a clear indication that the station has completely given up on trying to be original.

The commercials for these shows were for mobile storage containers, which ironically is the worst idea for an advertiser. The shows are about how if you ever decide to place your items in a storage unit you will have your possessions sold off on auction. Basically: you’re paying people a monthly fee to not rob you and should you ever miss a single payment they’ll blatantly rob you then laugh about how much money they’re making off your useless junk. It’s like a mafia protection racket, only your thumbs don’t get broken.

It’s kind of sad how these units end up going to auction. Obviously, the people involved have some sort of monetary source as they’re sitting on thousands of dollars in merchandise. More likely the storage units are being used by people in retirement homes who’ve kicked the bucket. Taking anything from them is like robbing the dead.

Sadder still is how the people in these shows expect to make thousands of dollars selling rusty frames to ATVs. Not the ATV itself: the frame for one: as in a pile of tubes welded together and in quite poor condition as well. There should be a second show where potential buyers tell them to fuck off when they try to hock their veritable junk. These auction shows exist because of trend tied in with the economy. People are going broke. That means they don’t have the money to waste on these junky items the original owners didn’t care enough to spend the $1 to keep.

Cereal Murderer

I bought a three-pack of cereals at Costco that has Apple Jacks, Corn Pops and Froot Loops. Curious, I looked at the nutritional information and found out that Corn Pops has the most nutritional value by far. Apple Jacks is also slightly healthier than Froot Loops, which is shocking because it’s made from real froot. When exactly did Fruit Loops become Froot Loops and why, or was I just a retarded child and never noticed until now? Why the fuck does Froot Loops have to use the fake name while Apple Jacks, which contains no apples, or jacks, get to keep its? Is it because no one eats Apple Jacks? And if we’re so concerned about “trooth” in advertising, shouldn’t Froot Loops contain bits of tucan? There’s a picture of one right on the box. Sometimes it has its young with it. I should be able to pour a bowl and chow down on some freshly hatched, endangered chicks. Why did they ever claim to have fruit to begin with? I don’t know what flavour they’re supposed to be, but it wasn’t devised by nature. It doesn’t smell like fruit either, like the bird in the commercials says. It smells like stale car air fresheners.

You want to know what cereal doesn’t fuck around with the whole pseudo-fruit flavour? Cookie Crisp. It says cookies right on the goddamn box, and that’s what you get. I don’t think it’s even legal here in Canada, because I’ve looked. The only lie is that it’s not “crisp.” You leave that in milk for five minutes, and it’s cookie-flavoured soup. Same goes for Sugar Crisp, or any other cereal. Basically, if there’s more than one word in the name, at least one of those words are lying to you.

While I’m on the subject: why are there five or more flavours of Cheerios? There’s Cheerios, Honey Nut, Apple Cinnamon, Chocolate, Multi-Grain, etc. Same goes for Shreddies and Rice Krispies. In other words: the least flavourful cereals. It’s like they’re admitting to serving you sawdust. Rice Krispies, by the way, do not go, “Snap, Crackle, and Pop.” They hiss at you like venomous snakes. The only way they’re digestible is by putting spoonfuls of sugar and fruit on them, or turning them into Rice Krispie Squares.The three elves pitching the cereal for them are actually adult humans made shrimp-like by a lifetime of eating Rice Krispies. Look at the Chinese and tell me rice eating is healthy for you.

Why are there so many fibre and bran related breakfast cereals? Your biggest dump of the day is supposed to be your morning poop. You’ve already evacuated the premises by the time you pour your bowl. You don’t need another one at 11 o’clock when you’re getting geared up for the big meeting. I think it’s because Dr.Kellogs, who’s been long dead, is a fecalphiliac. The Kellogs company is trying to create a society that does nothing buy eat and shit, and their plan is 50% complete.

Hobonomics

Begging is a secondary economy. Traditionally beggars are considered the poorest of the poor, but that’s not necessarily the case. The Real Canadian Superstore is a case for this. Every shopping cart in the Superstore parking lot requires a Canadian dollar coin to be unlocked. This is to strongly encourage would-be thieves to trade in the cart for the dollar. Bums have picked up on this, and have taken to hanging outside the store to beg for cash. Failing in that, they ask if they can take the cart back and keep the dollar. A dollar doesn’t sound like much, and it isn’t. Multiply that by ten carts an hour, and you’ve got a liveable wage. That’s pretty easy to do considering the traffic going through the store. Housewives, alone and with children, are the main customers at grocery stores, and they’re more vulnerable to “help” from a hobo who possibly might be carrying a knife on their person. In a way, it’s actually a valid service. If you have kids or a baby with you and you’re alone, you’d have to unpack the groceries in the vehicle first, and then head back to the cart corral to get your dollar back, and then walk back with your kids. That’s two extra chances for you and your loved ones to be run over by an S.U.V.. In the rain, it’s even worse. So if you set the goal at ten carts/dollars an hour, you’re actually low-balling your chances. You could probably find one cart every five minutes or so, or even three minutes in some cases. That’s $12-$20 an hour. That’s basically double what the people inside the store are making. Plus, if you’re begging for money as well, you up your profits. There’s no telling how much you could make. You could make an extra $5-$50 an hour on top of what you’re doing in charitable donations.

Compare that with the other money-making past-time for bums: collecting cans. To make a liveable wage, the average bum would have to collect around 4 million cans in a year, and the labour and travel are more involved and the competition is high. Seriously, though: working is for chumps. My comparison to Superstore employees is fairly apt. When I started there, they still had the same dollar per cart system, and I was only making $7.50 an hour, 20 hours a week and had to pay union fees and give up a huge chunk of my paycheque to the government. I would have been better off financially dressing in rags and collecting carts independently in their lot. It’s not like I wouldn’t be worrying about where my next meal might be coming from, or dealing the condescending attitudes from people about my place in society either way.

This is basically what I think of when bums come up to me and ask me for money to make me feel better. It’s obvious they have problems, but there’s no reason why they can’t apply themselves even in their deplorable positions. If the conditions were favourable, I should be asking them for money instead. Take that in your crack pipe and smoke it.

Creep

As anyone knows, there’s more to see at your local mall than the stores. The people there are a spectacle in and of themselves. While visiting yesterday to pick up a few gifts, I saw an old man muttering to himself in the food court. It’s a testament to the progress of the 21st Century when you see a person talking to themselves and the first thing you do is look for a cell phone or bluetooth headset. Of course, people talk to themselves all the time. I do it almost constantly. On closer inspection, he wasn’t talking to himself, but rather a small baby doll he had set on the table in front of him. The doll, by itself, would be creepy, as dolls often are. A doll in the possession of an old man is creepier. An old man talking to a doll puts the creep factor through the roof. I waited to see if he was waiting for his grand-daughter, but he was sitting by himself at a table for two. Technically, he could still be waiting, even if my imaginary grand-daughter was in factually imaginary.

Then there was some freak walking around wearing what he likely thought were wankster clothes, looking strung out on something and too old to still be dressing that way. There’s a short time frame between the ages of fifteen and twenty-three when a white man-child can dress how he thinks stereotypical black people do and only look ridiculous instead of downright pathetic. That’s not the kicker, though, that’s simply an everyday observation. The strangest thing about him was he had an industrial-sized bag of Cheerios strapped to his chest like one might carry a baby in a ghetto Snuggli, and he was snacking on it like there was no tomorrow. Cheerios make a healthy snack, but you typically wouldn’t need to carry around twenty pounds of it on your person like you just finished raiding a Cheerios factory in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. There was a group of teenagers at the food court wearing booty shorts that would likely get them kicked out of school and the dude walks by and practically puts his face in their asses he’s staring so hard. Then he turned around a minute later and walked back with the Pedo-smile on his face, like he was being discrete about his intentions.

Then there was some lady parked next to us in the underground lot. For some reason, as we passed her discount used car, I had a bad feeling about her, like something was off, but all she was doing was looking over her purchases. As I tried to put the baby stroller in the car she immediately stuck her head out her window and said, “I’d hate to tell you, but you just had your last night of sleep,” which sounds vaguely threatening, especially if you don’t immediately latch on to the context. It reminded me of the old lady in that terrible, terrible movie, “Legion,” that makes nice with the pregnant waitress, then tells her, “Your baby is going to fucking burn.” I don’t know why procreating and transporting your ensuing child around make people want to comment. It’s like half the people who ask about your baby have mental farts and panic when they open their mouths.

The second I pulled into the underground lot I saw the strange zombie man that walks around my town. He has some sort of defect that turns him into this hunched, limping thing. It could be that he had a stroke, or that he’s mentally disabled. As far as I can tell from a distance there’s nothing overly wrong with him, except for his entire posture and gait, but if you saw him at night you’d shoot him like he had a bag of Skittles in his pocket.

Teenaged ______ Ninja Turtles

After taking the transforming out of the Transformers, Michael Bay has decided it’s time to take the mutant out of the Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles. Much like the Transformers were predominantly aliens in his movies as opposed to robots in disguise, the Ninja Turtles will now have an alien origin. Which makes less sense than their real origin. When someone tells you the name, “Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles,” you expect them to be four things. Aliens are not one of those things. Their name leaves little room for confusion. Asking, “Well how can a turtle be a ninja?” the answer is, “They’re mutants.” Case closed. If you asked a blind man to draw a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, the scribble he would produce would likely be balls-on. A Teenaged Alien Ninja Turtle, though? That’s just fucking absurd. How can you be a ninja and an alien at the same time? It doesn’t make any fucking sense. Why would aliens pick the names of famous Renaissance artists for themselves and eat pizza in a sewer? The wouldn't. A mutant ninja turtle, teenaged or otherwise, is required to have outer-space adventures by nature of their mutant ninjosity, but an alien ninja wouldn’t necessarily come to Earth.

Why are they alien ninjas? Did aliens secretly create the ancient ninja arts and pass them on to Earthlings through a Stargate long ago? You’d think aliens would have more advanced weaponry at their disposal and abandon their ninja ways. Predators have cloaking devices which negate the need for ninja stealth. A bo staff is a poor weapon to defend one’s self from a ray gun, unless of course you’re a mutant ninja. Then it’s 100% effective. An alien ninja would be space dust in those same circumstances.

At the end of the day, a mutant ninja would beat an alien ninja every time. The 80’s cartoon was concrete proof of that. Krang was from Dimension X, which gave him the added bonus of being an inter-dimensional alien ninja brain in a giant robot suit, and he still lost daily.

Con Air

The B.C. Liberals’ latest idea is Welfare Air: a plan whereby they train welfare recipients and fly them to the remote areas of the province to work in lucrative heavy industry jobs. This is the greatest idea B.C. has had since rounding up the Japanese into concentration camps. I honestly couldn’t decide what was the most apt metaphor for this idea: concentration camps, forced labour camps, or gulags? I’m going with Gulags, because those typically made prisoners work hard labour in frozen, underdeveloped areas like Siberia. The jobs they’re looking to fill are in areas covered with snow for more than half the year, and are severely lacking in new housing. Even hotels and camp sites are unavailable. The only lucrative jobs are with gas, oil, forestry, or mining, which are all incredibly dangerous and requires workers to away from their families for weeks at a time. Applying to these jobs means you’ll be cold, homeless and risking death. In short: the Liberals are trying to kill our welfare recipients.

Sheperd’s Pie

The internet has shit itself over the ending of Mass Effect 3: Electric Boogaloo. This has led to a campaign demanding the company Bioware change the ending post-release, which is like asking them to bring a unicorn back to life with their tears. Not even the much reviled mid-sentence ending of The Sopranos had people asking for a do-over. Imagine if they really had gone ahead and changed the ending of Gone With the Wind ending from, “Quite frankly Scarlett, I don’t give a damn,” to The Simpsons’ version, “Quite frankly Scarlett… I love you, lets remarry!”

Once a product is out the door, it’s considered a done deal. There might be Director’s Cuts versions where the main character turns out to be a robot, etc, but no one takes those versions as cannon. Even George Lucas has only altered the ending of Star Wars by super-imposing another actor over the original. That’s doesn’t make it a different ending. It’s absolutely unheard of in terms of a video game, but through the miracle of paid DLC it can become a very expensive reality.

People who bitched and complained about there being on-the-disc day-one paid content for Mass Effect 3: Tokyo Drift turned around and said they’d pay good money to get a new ending. That blows what’s left of my mind. That’s the reason video games are a multi-billion dollar industry out-grossing Hollywood Box Offices: because “gamers” are goddamn ridiculous. They fought tooth-and-nail against a subscription service for Call of Duty, then paid for it.

Personally, of all I’ve read, I’ve yet to read a single article describing the actual ending due to people being terrified of dishing out Spoilers.

For all I know, it could be awesome, and there’s nothing in the series that guarantees a certain ending. It’s not like your character is “fated” to succeed in one way or another. Mass Effect 2: Meet the Fockers starts with your character dying and can end with your friends and lovers dying, for God’s sake. Beyond that, I’d be satisfied with all the in-game gay sex you’re getting.

It does open up intriguing possibilities. What if we could go back in time and re-write terrible video game endings? Which ending is the worst, anyway?

A lot of games come to mind. For instance:

Super Mario Bros. 2: Luigi’s Revenge. This game was barely recognisable a Super Mario Bros. game, mainly because they super-imposed Mario and friends over the original sprites. It was a fun game, but the ending made people want to punch things in the dick region. SPOILER ALERT! to a decades-old game: It was all a fucking dream, or rather the game took place inside a dream. The game ends with Mario waking up. Super Mario Bros. 2 was Inception. Did I just blow your mind?

Ghosts’n’Goblins: No one ever beat this game, because it was ridiculously hard, but if you did, you’d be rewarded by having to play the entire game a second time to get the ending. Yes: the first run though the game sends you right back to the start, just to fuck with you.

Super Metroid: If you finished the game fast enough, you’d see Samus without her armour on. This revealed the then-shocking twist that Samus had a vagina where her balls should be. It also made thousands of horny teenagers obsessively play the game in the hopes that a quicker runtime would result in seeing the pixelated sprite naked. This was not to be.

Kids jacked it to this.

Final Fantasy X: I could put any Final Fantasy game in here, because all their endings are either baffling or disappointments (with the possible exception of Final Fantasy IX. The original Final Fantasy ended with your heroes being wiped out existence without anyone knowing what they accomplished. Final Fantasy X ended with Tidus being erased from existence as well, as it turns out he was just the whiny dream of a dead civilization that lives inside the body of a giant monster which is made out of essence of his own father who also doesn’t exist. In other words, a Phoinex Down wouldn’t suffice to bring him back. The sequel to the game focused solely on his girlfriend trying to bring him back to life, which is technically impossible because he was never real to begin with. Also: the man she thinks is Tidus is really just an insane organ-playing maniac. You could get a secret ending to Final Fantasy X-2 where she finally reunites with her totally made-up boyfriend, but it takes 100% completion ratio. One mess-up and you have to replay 60+ hours of gaming.

The RPG endings really tend to stick in people’s craws, because they’re not just playing for the fun of it: they’re investing dozens, if not hundreds of hours into the same game hoping to get better results.

What about game endings people liked? They’re still terrible. The #1 voted video game ending according to Guinness? Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Here it is:

I repeat: this is the greatest ending in video game history, according to voters, which proves that many gamers either haven’t beaten a lot of games, or have memories like starving squirrels. Nothing in this ending is the “big reveal” it’s hoping to be. You spend the entire game strapped in a chair and forced to live out drug-induced memories as you’ve been brainwashed by Commie Nazis. Your best friend is imaginary and you killed Kennedy. It’s not exactly the Sixth Sense in it’s subtlety.