So I had a little snafu yesterday.

I was at the gym. They have some new bikes there with monitors on them. They looked kind of neat, so I hopped on one and started looking around at the different modes that it had. There was one where the monitor just showed a racetrack, one that showed a mountain path that I could follow, and a few others like that. There was another mode called “Chase”. It sounded interesting, so I selected it. One of the modes involved chasing dragons. I picked it.

Only an idiot wouldn't be able to tell that this is a game. I am an idiot.

In that mode, you rode around on some mountainous terrain in a little chariot and picked up either red, green, blue or silver tokens. Once you picked them up, you had to find a dragon of that color and ram it with your chariot. I set it for 20 minutes, so I had that time to ram as many dragons as I could. The chariot was aggravatingly slow, so I had to pedal my ass off to get a reasonable amount of speed, but I could pick up speed multipliers to help me out.

I was about ten minutes in, when something occurred to me: Dragons? Tokens? Speed multipliers?

If I didn’t know better, I might think that I was playing a fucking video game.

After the initial flash of panic and shame about breaking my new year’s resolution, I decided to finish anyway (And almost died in the process; that chariot was abysmally slow. I had to pedal like a mad man to have any chance of catching one of those dragons), but I spent a lot of time during the rest of the day trying to decide if I had actually broken the resolution. After a lot of deliberation, I decided that this can probably be counted as an exception to the rule. If I’m playing a game that requires me to pedal a stationary bike as hard as I can, and I’m doing it not because I want to play a game but because I want to get some cardio done, I’m probably in the clear. If I had to get a colonic tomorrow, and I had the option to do it with a machine that let me play “Colonic Hero” while I was doing it, I would do that too. I’m also relatively sure that I can keep my play time down. I don’t think that there’s any way that I will accidentally spend all afternoon pedaling as hard as I can on a stationary bike, because I’ll have a stroke if I do.

So, even though I technically played a video game yesterday, I put a little grey “X” on my calendar marking that I made it another day without picking up a controller.

Ten and a half months to go.

Okay, I have to point this out.

1. I have never read Twilight, or any of the books that come after it.

2. Almost every girl I know has read the books and loves them. It is easier to count the girls I know who haven’t read Twilight than it is to count the ones that have.

3. From what I know about them, the books have several opportunities to be awesome that they completely avoid. If I didn’t know any better, I would think that Stephanie Myers was trying to make a bunch of romance novels for girls and not hilarious action stories for my entertainment. It’s as though instead of trying to appease one 29 year old male who doesn’t read her books anyway, she’s trying to appeal to everyone on the planet who is literate and in possession of a vagina.

Of all of the images that come up when you Google "Centaur", this is, by far, the best. Your eyes don't deceive you- that is, in fact, Patrick Swayze. I used to think that I could never get a tattoo, because nothing would still seem cool to me when I was 40. This changes everything.

I’ve mentioned before that the books should have centaurs. I’m constantly wishing for a scene where Bella is trapped by the vampires that want to drink her blood, and all looks lost until Edward comes charging in on a centaur (And not riding it like a horse – I want him standing on its back, so maybe “surfing” on a centaur would be a more appropriate term) wielding a chainsaw, and then it just rains vampire limbs for 40 or 50 pages. Now we’re talking!

Nobody that likes the books agrees with me on this point. I guess I can understand. It is kind of a reach, and it’s not very romantic. Whatever.

Listen to this, though:

(Actually, if you’re reading the books and haven’t finished them yet, don’t listen to this. It’s a spoiler.)

At the end of the fourth book, Edward and Bella get married. They do it, vampire style (I assume. I also assume that “vampire style” for Stephanie Myers is something really lame and mushy, considering her books are filled with hopeless romantic vegetarian vampires who shimmer in sunlight. In the Twilight universe, Vampires probably have sex by covering the floor in rose petals and then curtsying). Then, she gets pregnant. I guess that the little vampire baby starts sucking the life out of her, and kills her, or she turns into a vampire or something. I don’t remember.

Whatever it is, it’s a wasted opportunity. Here’s why:

A vampire and a human woman fall in love and have sex.

The woman becomes pregnant with a half human, half vampire baby.

Am I the only one who sees the logical direction this should take?

Think about it.

Does any of this sound familiar to anyone?

When she has that baby, who should be born?

Here’s a hint:



That’s right.

Wesley Fucking Snipes.

Blade.

A half-human, half-vampire killing machine.

Blade Cullen's High School Yearbook Photo

It could work! From what I understand, the conflict throughout all seven thousand pages of those books is that everyone wants to drink Bella’s blood. You know what solves Edward and Bella’s problem with the evil vampires that want to kill her and drink her blood? A heavily armed Day Walker that lays waste to anything with abnormally large cuspids. Those enemy vampires are a real problem for the Cullens until Blade is filling them full of buck shot, holy water and deep lacerations.

Not only could it work, it should work. This isn’t like my centaur pipe dream. Blade would fit into the story just fine, he would resolve the conflict of the story, and it opens the door for four more books that I would totally read.

At this point, I feel like Stephaie Myers is taunting me. She takes the story just a little bit in the direction of something awesome to get my attention, and then steers it back to something that makes 13 year old girls swoon. Every time I have a conversation with someone who is reading the book, it always goes about the same.

“‘Have I told you about the 5th book? It starts out with a twist!” The girl I’m talking to tells me. “It turns out that Edward and Bella actually live on a planet called ‘Krypton’. When their planet is in danger, they put their child, who they name Kal-El, into a rocket ship and send him to Earth.”

“And then…?” I ask eagerly.

“He falls in love with a girl and they talk about their feelings, but then in the middle of the book, their romance almost ends in heartbreak because she sees him at the mall foodcourt holding hands with that bitch Carla! Thankfully, it’s all a big misunderstanding and he makes it up to her by flying her to Venice and proposing to her on a shimmering gondola!” She replies, as my face sinks and all of the girls in earshot gasp, smile and clutch their hands to their hearts.

Then, she punches me in the balls and walks away as I crumple to the floor.

Speaking of, I like the new Prodigy album (It’s not actually related. I just didn’t feel like trying to come up with a logical transition, so I threw in the first one that came to mind). I don’t know if I like it because it’s actually awesome or because it reminds me of music that I listened to in high school, but I do like it. I think that there are some arguments either way. I’m always a sucker for high energy techno, and this certainly qualifies, so I think it’s very possible that even if you wiped all of my memories of high school, I would still really like this CD.

On the other hand, they made an effort to make this album sound like their older ones, and I think that it’s entirely possible that a large part of the reason that I like it so much is that it reminds me of their older albums. I don’t know. As I’ve been getting older, I keep getting this stronger and stronger inkling that I’m turning into that old guy who listens to music that sounds like stuff from his formative years and says things like “Fuck yeah! This is when music was music! They don’t make it like this anymore!”

It's like Fred Durst says: "Heartbreak is a headache, Like a toothache or an earthquake". Jesus, I wish I was joking.

Another example of that would be this fact: I am aware of the fact that Limp Bizkit is getting back together. Not only am I aware of this fact, I am vaguely interested to see what happens. Although, maybe that’s not entirely true. I can’t actually listen to Limp Bizkit anymore. The music seems really goofy to me now (remember, this is coming from a man who currently loves a band called “The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza”), and I don’t really relate to that whole “Girls are fucked up, yo!” stuff the way that I did when I was 19. I still have the mp3s on my computer, but it’s kind of like saving a picture of an old girlfriend or journal entries from childhood. They’re worth keeping to remind me of something that I liked a lot when I was younger, but I can’t really listen to them anymore.

Well, I guess that it all comes down to this: I can sit around here and try to figure out why I like the music that I do, or I can listen to the Prodigy some more. I think the choice is clear.

Have a good week.

I’ve owned my desktop computer for about six years now. It still basically works, which is constantly amazing to me. Ten years ago, you could expect about two years of usefulness from a computer before you could barely even use it for word processing. Mine has its problems – I should probably buy some more RAM for it now that a GB of DDR2 RAM costs about as much as a box of condoms (And I think we all know which one I will use more), and I probably need a new graphics card if I want to play higher end games. Other than that, this thing is still chugging along nicely.

The downside to this is that it has gotten incredibly dirty over the years.

I think I’m fighting a mild bout of depression right now, and part of that is doing weird, stupid shit that I don’t normally do in order to avoid doing the things I should be doing. Case in point: I spent about an hour cleaning my keyboard today. This is the first time I’ve cleaned this keyboard in the six years that I’ve owned it, and it was terrifying. I went through a lot of rubbing alcohol and cotton balls, and every time that I was finished with one, it looked like I had wiped my ass with it. I also apparently shed an alarming amount while I’m using the computer – I could knit a sweater with all of the hair that I cleaned out of the keyboard.

I swear that I’m not, but if you looked at everything that I pulled out of and cleaned off of my keyboard, you would probably think that I operate it with my butt. Same story with the mouse.

Good for handcramps, frustration and merciless beatings.

I also broke down and threw away about 25 pounds of electronics equipment that I’ve been amassing over the past 15 years – phone cords, SCSI cable, Zip Disks, two broken walkmans from high school, a 2400 baud modem, the uncomfortable, shitty mouse that came with the first iMacs, plugs to gadgets that I don’t own anymore – It’s amazing how hard it was for me to part with all of it, seeing as none of it will be even a little bit useful to me unless I wake up tomorrow and it’s 1997. Even if that does happen, half of the stuff I tossed doesn’t work anymore – I essentially just refuse to throw away any of my trash if you can put batteries in it or plug it into a wall.

Lastly, I got my hands on a copy of Incredibad by Lonely Planet, and it’s actually pretty good. About half of the songs I had already heard on Saturday Night Live digital shorts, which were kind of nice to actually have. Lazy Sunday is funny, but half of what I liked about it was how god damned catchy it was. Most of the CD is like that. I find myself chuckling, but an hour later, I find myself humming the songs.

Here’s an example. It will more than likely be pulled down in an hour or two, or maybe I’m just saying that because I put a broken link up in the first place. I guess that you’ll never know.

You see what I mean? You’ll be humming that shit all day.

Alright. I need to go find something else stupid to do so I don’t accidentally accomplish something today. Maybe I’ll pluck my eyebrows.

Later.

I got my W-2s in the mail a few days ago. Normally, I put things off until I’m in a huge amount of trouble, but I’ve been trying to buck that trend, so I turned in my taxes last night.

A lot of people bitch about taxes. They don’t want the government taking all of their hard earned money and spending it however they see fit.

First of all, these people piss me off. I don’t like taxes either, but I do enjoy parks, police, roads and public education (now that I think about it, you bitches pay my wages. Thanks, suckers!). There are things that my money gets spent on sometimes that I don’t approve of, but I feel like that’s one of the consequences of voting someone into office who makes the decisions for me while I’m at work.

It’s like brushing your teeth. It sucks to have to do it twice a day, floss and use Listerine, but the alternative is to have a mouth full of rot and a life of solitude because nobody wants to listen to you bitch about how “No god damned doctor is going to tell ME to spend my hard-earned money on a toothbrush!”

I get it. Taxes suck. A lot. I agree. Now man up, pay them and get over it.

That being said, I’ve found a loophole in the system that has kept my hard earned money out of the government’s hands. When it was all said and done, the taxes I owed added up to less than a night at a strip club (Especially if you put a price on my time, discomfort and shame!)

How did I evade Uncle Sam? Here’s the trick:

I made almost no money in 2008.

An artist's depiction of my bathroom in April.

I was startled when I looked at my W-2s and realized just how small my annual gross income was. I managed to make it back below the poverty line again this year. At first, I wasn’t really sure how I had lived as comfortably as I did with the wages that I pulled in – my expenses are low, but I didn’t think I kept them low enough to survive on the income that I earned in ’08. As I thought about it, it started to make more sense, though. Follow these three simple rules and you too can enjoy a great tax season!

1. Have lots and lots of unpaid vacation time. I have summers off. If you throw in Christmas, Thanksgiving, Spring Break and other various vacations, I think I get more than four months off every year. All of that time sitting in my underwear and relaxing leads to lots of free time, low, low wages and big time savings when taxes are due!

2.Have the choice to not work on days when school IS in session, and take advantage of this frequently. If you take all of my vacation time and add in the days that I refuse to work, I probably spend less than six months out of the year gainfully employed, a number that I’m sure I can improve on this year! With hard work, discipline and a waterproof cardboard box, I’m confident that I can cut the amount of work that I do in a year in half!

3. Get paid next to nothing. Even though the government now trusts me enough to put me in charge of a room full of 12 year olds, I make about ten cents more per hour now than I did when I was cooking pot roast and listening to death metal while the my meth’d up coworker was showing everyone his penis whenever they walked by the kitchen. (Yes. That really happened.) Bargain basement wages like that guarantee that my bank account stays profitably empty!

"Plan B".

Learn these three guidelines. Love them. Respect them. NEVER turn your back on them, and in no time flat, you’ll be using hundred dollar bills to wipe your ass, at least for one month of the year! Most of the year, you’re probably feeling pretty good about your income, but come tax season, you’re sweating your meager return or even worse, the amount that you owe the government while I’m using my big-time return on a gold chamber pot so I don’t have to leave my cardboard box and tend to my night soil in the middle of the night. Sure, it’s a little… exciting to pay for basic necessities during most of the year, and trying to eat towards the end of summer when you haven’t received a paycheck in over three months is truly fucking intense, but I’m laughing all the way to the bank at the government’s expense right now!

Unfortunately, I’m trying to quit the game. I have submitted an application to the local college to acquire certification to teach secondary econ. If things go according to plan, I will be bringing in marginally less shitty wages, but I’ll be getting them during summer and Christmas as well. Of course, this is all assuming that the economy hasn’t completely and utterly collapsed by the time I’m certified. If that has happened, I will more than likely be hiding in my house with a shotgun and trading beaver pelts for a living.

—

I just finished a two day stint doing language arts at a local middle school. You know. That job I work instead of flipping burgers that’s worth and extra dime an hour. Anyway, I spent two days trying to explain figurative language to 6th graders. They handled Metaphors, Similes, Onomatopoeia and Hyperbole with relative ease (although they had a lot of trouble pronouncing them.)

Then we got to Personification, which stopped them dead in their tracks.

Well, not exactly. They were able to understand that personification is giving human qualities to things that aren’t human, but at the point where those human qualities had to make sense, they started to struggle. In every class, I would start out by giving them the definition and two examples (“The Snowflake kissed my cheek” and “The icy wind slapped me in the face” ). Then I would ask if someone could give me an example of personification, which is when things always ended up flying off the tracks. Here’s a rough blow by blow of how it went:

—

Me: “The snowflake kissed my cheek”. Can snowflakes really kiss someone? (The murmer of 30 kids saying “no” while shaking their heads) Right! Very good! We’re giving human traits to a non-human object! Would someone like to try making up their own example of personification? Dalton. Give it a shot.

Dalton: The Cu-Cu Clock took a dump in my mailbox.

Me:…Okay. You’re on the right track. Technically, you ARE giving human traits to an inanimate object, but it’s key that those traits are similar to traits that the object actually has. Have you ever seen a cold glass sweat during a hot day? (Everyone nods) Is it actually sweating? (Everyone shakes their head) Right. It just looks like it is. We’re giving a human quality to an object. Someone else give it a shot. Taylor.

Taylor: “Woah! That shit is speedy!” The cinderblock exclaimed after snorting a line of cocaine off of a stripper’s ass.

Me: Okay, again you DID give human properties to an object, but again, I think we’re missing that they have to be properties that are similar to ones the object has. Let’s try again. Yes, Karl.

Karl: The pork chop couldn’t have an orgasm unless its partner was wearing a Richard Nixon mask.

Me: … You know what? Good work. The next type of figurative language we need to learn is Alliteration.

—

I’m changing the story a little bit – The kid’s responses were less vulgar, and I tried a lot harder to help them understand, but other than that, it’s more or less what happened. I’m still not sure that some of them get what personification is. Hopefully, their actual teacher can help them figure it out in a way that I couldn’t.

Finally, I’ll set up the video that none of you will watch with a story:

Last weekend I was at the bar with a friend. “Send me an Angel” by Real Life came on. A table of about 12 people that appeared to be at a family gathering of some sort started cheering and clapping along to the beat. Then they took turns dancing to the song while everyone else at the table would cheer them on. They maintained their enthusiasm for the duration of the song. Before that night, I think that the last time I heard that song was sometime in the late 80′s when I watched “Rad”. I THINK that it plays when the main character and his love interest are in a club dancing on their BMX bikes. (I just checked and I was right. I have no idea why my brain deemed that information useful enough to save for the past 20 years. Also, I guess his love interest is Uncle Jessie’s girlfriend on Full House).

Anyway, watching the family dance off got me thinking about that song. It’s hard not to get excited about something that another group of people find that entertaining, and there’s a recently tenderized soft spot in my heart for 80′s music, even though I never really liked any of it in the 80′s.

The bottom line is, I’ve listened to that song seven or eight hundred times in the four days since I heard it at the bar.

Now I want you to enjoy it.

Now, imagine trying to explain what you’re doing to people when they hear you singing the female part under your breath all day.

Have a good day.

Alright. I think I have all of the formatting problems fixed, at least on the actual site. I don’t know how it will look coming through an RSS feed. Probably still like shit. Oh well. The bad news is that up until about three weeks ago, I was using a super outdated version of wordpress, and all of the captions for all of the pictures in the posts are now gone unless I go back and fix all of the html. Fortunately, the only reason that anyone looks at my older posts is because they’re searching for pictures of David Lee Roth, so I think I’m in the clear.

Let me know, though.

Oh, and I’m sorry the formatting is so shitty on all of these posts. I have them set up so they look fine while I’m editing them, and then when I publish, they look much worse. The images don’t embed correctly and their captions come out all fucked up. I’ll figure it out sooner or later. Or I won’t. You know how I am.

1: Over the holidays, I read “The Chris Farley Show”, which, believe it or not, is a biography of Chris Farley. It was over 300 pages and thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish. Because of it, I decided to head over to Hulu (which is rapidly becoming my favorite site on the Internet) to check out some Chris Farley clips. While I was digging through them, I realized something.

When I was in middle school, I was really gung-ho about a lot of things. Saturday morning cartoons, Umbro soccer shorts, the Macintosh LC, Super Nintendo, Anthrax, boobs and staying up to watch Saturday Night Live. As I’ve grown older, I’ve occasionally revisited the things that I loved when I was 13. I’ll fire up a Super Nintendo emulator, or download an old episode of a cartoon I used to watch, or listen to an old CD.

Almost always, the results are disappointing. I get a quick, enjoyable wave of nostalgia which is slowly followed by the realization that whatever it is that I’m watching, listening to or playing isn’t as cool as I remember it being. I still enjoy it because it reminds me of my past, but there’s no way that I would like it if I hadn’t been exposed to it at an early age.

Whenever I find out that something that I loved as a child wasn’t actually very cool, it bums me out a little bit. It’s kind of fun to think that the things I was into at 13 were as special as I thought that they were when I was experiencing them for the first time. I suppose that in a way it helps me stay young; I don’t spend as much time reminiscing about how much kinder and simpler the world was when I was a kid and bitching about how great music was when I was young as opposed to the trash that kids listen to now, because it keeps me honest; the crap I liked as a kid was just as shitty as the crap that kids like now.

Anyway, as of late, whenever I revisit something from my past, my expectations for it tend to be a little bit lower. I anticipate thinking “This is not very cool anymore, but I can see why I loved it at 13″, because that’s almost always the thought that goes through my head.

Up until tonight, the only real exception to the rule had been boobs, which are just as great as I imagined them being at 13. They’re timeless.

After tonight, though, I think that Chris Farley might be another exception. I spent a lot of time this evening watching clips of him on Hulu, and I think he might actually be funnier than I remember. I spent 45 minutes looking through clips of him, and they’re all funny. Even when the skit is terrible, the parts with him crack me up. Take this one, for instance.

Watch the video. Suffer through as much of it as you can. It’s not funny. Then, skip to minute 5.




I have no idea why the brief moment with Chris Farley is so funny to me. Maybe it’s the beard. Maybe it’s Adam Sandler repeatedly having to jerk his head away from the camera so it won’t catch him laughing. Maybe it’s because he speaks loudly and slowly like the pepper boy is retarded. The bottom line is that no matter how many times I watch those 20 seconds of an otherwise awful skit, I crack up. I was going to try to find the funniest one out of all of them, but I can’t do it. Just click this link and check them all out. It’s worth it.

Riddle me this, Riddle me that, is it worse to get cancer, or watch Ace Ventura Pet Detective?

Granted, this is about a ten year career condensed into some of the funniest things that he ever did, but I’m not sure that matters. I thought that Jim Carrey was really funny when I was 14 too, and you’d be hard pressed to find ten seconds of comedy from him that I respond to with anything but uncontrollable rage.

2: Tonight, after going running, I was sitting at my computer. I stood up to go take a shower.

Suddenly, I felt an intense pain in my groin area. It was a very confusing moment for me. I couldn’t figure out how my forward motion was causing my junk to feel like someone had tied it to the desk when I wasn’t paying attention.

After stopping, slowly moving backward and then examining things more closely, I realized the problem: My headphone cable had somehow wrapped around my goods, and the end of it had ended up on the floor (The cable, of course. You flatter me). I had stepped on the end of the cable when I stood up, which had then resulted in the “your wang is tangled up in a chord that you’re walking away from” feeling that stopped me dead in my tracks. What was perplexing to me was how the chord ended up there in the first place.

What makes it especially perplexing to me is the fact that I was, in an extremely unusual turn of events, fully clothed. I don’t remember stuffing my headphone cable down the front of my pants and looping it around my penis, but apparently that’s exactly what I did.

Oh, and I googled “tied penis” to try and find an appropriate image. After seeing my options, I decided against it. Your welcome.

3: I watched “The Wrestler” last night, and I really liked it. For those of you that don’t know, although I’m guessing that all of you do, “The Wrestler” is about, believe it or not, a fictional wrestler named Randy “The Ram” Robinson. More specifically, it’s a story about a wrestler who was a superstar in the 80′s, but twenty years later is washed up, injured, working behind the counter in a deli and reduced to wrestling in high school gymnasiums and attending small, painfully empty sports memorabilia events to milk the last few dollars out of what’s left of his career. His love interest in the movie is a stripper named Cassidy who is also facing the twilight of a career that probably peaked at about the same time that Randy’s did.

Everyone has been talking about what great jobs Micky Rourke (Randy) and Marisa Tomei (Cassidy) did in the movie (They’re both up for Oscars for their respective roles) and although I’m no expert, I was really impressed by the job that they did. They were both the perfect actors to cast for the roles, and they nailed their parts. Everything coming out of their mouths seemed genuine, and there were numerous times when they weren’t saying anything but it was still abundantly clear what was going through their heads.

"The Ram"

Acting aside, I thought it was a really interesting story, too. It hit on a subject that I seem to find fascinating, which is realizing that the rules of life have changed on someone because something that they thought was a constant was actually very temporary, and so they never bothered to come up with a backup plan. As any of you that know me even casually are aware, I constantly talk about my early 20′s working as a cook. I was relatively satisfied flipping burgers for a living. I was making good enough money to live with a roommate, play video games and buy alcohol, and that was all I needed.

Then one day I started paying closer attention to the 38 year olds I worked with who wanted more than a playstation and one bedroom in a two bedroom apartment out of life, and were having a lot more trouble finding a girl who wanted to hook up with a guy in his late 30′s who sold pancakes for a living. They were ready to move on to the next stage of their life, but they had kind of painted themselves into a corner and didn’t know any other way to do things, so for the most part they just got bitter and tried to pretend, mostly unsuccessfully, that they were still 21.

I saw a lot of that at play in The Wrestler. Randy never prepared for life after wrestling, and 20 years later, when his fame has dwindled down to nothing, he’s almost completely alone, has a bum heart, an estranged daughter that he knows nothing about and is selling potato salad to pay his rent. His big rival from his glory days, “The Ayatollah”, has a used car dealership that pays the bills and more importantly, he seems relatively happy.

Cassidy isn’t old, but too old to have much success as a stripper anymore (Although I have to say, Marisa Tomei looks pretty awesome at 44), and, just like Randy, she’s doesn’t seem quite sure what to make of life now that the rules have changed on her and her looks aren’t paying the bills like they used to. (I would also just like to point out how lucky I am that there is not a market for seeing me naked. If I almost didn’t make it through college because I was just a little bit too comfortable as a line cook, there is no fucking way that I would’ve had the discipline get a degree if I could have been a stripper. I don’t know how much money they make exactly, but I’m nearly positive that it’s way, WAY more than ten bucks an hour.)

Even though it was really depressing, I liked watching the characters struggle with that realization, and it was really interesting to watch them try to figure out how to live now that life had changed on them, and the ending was pretty much perfect.

I constantly bitch about Kevin Smith movies because I hate the dialogue; it’s usually clever, but it doesn’t ever sound like something that somebody would actually say, and so it’s just a constant reminder to me that I’m watching actors recite lines that somebody else wrote.

I can’t take Nicholas Cage seriously in anything that he’s in, because as near as I can tell, he has two emotions: “endearingly confused” and “tough”, and most characters call for a wider spectrum than that. Seriously. Watch “Con-Air” sometime. Listen to his southern accent. Then, spend three hours trying to figure out how he got that role. Doesn’t, like, HALF of America move to L.A. and New York every year to try and make it acting? I just can’t believe that the talent pool is so shallow that they can’t find someone else for a fraction of the cost. As a side note, I picked Nicholas Cage as an example because he was considered for the roll of The Ram in “The Wrestler”. I’m not the only one who thinks that casting him would’ve made for a much more mediocre movie. Everything I’ve read on this subject talks about how much shittier the movie would have been if they had cast Cage for the role. I wonder how that makes Nicholas Cage feel, to see Rourke up for an Oscar and every single review of the movie pointing out what a pile of shit it would be if they had used him instead. I think I would be pissed off.

I’m getting off track. The point is, there are a lot of things that can happen in a movie that take you out of it and remind you that you’re just watching a movie, and none of those happened to me while watching this.

4: Some students at the middle school that I was working at were in gym class and they decided to pat down their balls with Icy Hot while another one of them filmed their reaction. When I asked one of them why he did that, he told me “To see how it would feel”.

Fortunately, they were all clothed, so there were no child pornography charges to worry about.

Unfortunately, it is apparently incredibly uncomfortable to put Icy Hot on your balls, so the students spent a few minutes running back and forth yelling “Ahh! Hot! Hot!” before going to the principal’s office for relief and being sent home to clean up.

I’m sorry. There was a typo in that last paragraph. I put “Unfortunately” where I meant to put “Much to my amusement”. I used to hate middle school, but it’s really starting to grow on me, and it’s all about shit like this. Elementary school kids wouldn’t think to do this. High school kids would think about it, but would be too smart to actually do it. No, you really need to be in the zone to not only come up with the idea to put Icy Hot on your balls, but to convince other people to do it AND to film their reaction. It really made my day. And everyone else’s as near as I can tell. During the day I would intermittently hear hysterical laughter coming from a teacher’s room, and I would know that they had just heard.

Now 120% funnier than Jim Carrey!

Now that I have a better understanding of how the 13 year old mind works, I have decided to start baiting the classrooms that I work in. I’ll put Icy Hot containers all over the place and then look the other way. I’ll place a belt sander on my desk and then conveniently “have” to leave the room to “take care of something”. I’ll put a piranha tank on the floor with a “DO NOT teabag the piranha tank!” sign next to it (I know. This one is almost unfair. Putting the tank at perfect tea-bagging height is temptation enough, but with a sign explicitly forbidding it, most middle school males will be physically unable to resist submerging their balls into the tank.) If they’re going to do this stuff anyway, shouldn’t they at least be doing it somewhere it can make me laugh?

I figure that I’ll be able to do this once or twice before I get called into district headquarters and they start grilling me on the unusually high occurrence of self-inflicted-testicle injury in my classrooms. My response will be simple: “I have no idea how this keeps happening!” I’ll say as I put an open container of Icy Hot on the table, slide it towards the administrator and then deliberately fix my gaze in the opposite direction.

Well, that pretty much taps me for now. I’ll leave you with one more clip of Chris Farley yelling and flailing and cracking me up as hard as he can:




Have a good Superbowl Sunday. Go Cardinals, I guess.