2-27-01

The only money I’ve had in my wallet the past couple of days has been a Canadian $20 bill, which has been cause for much frustration, as I have been unable to purchase anything. Canadian money is essentially amusement park money—in exchange for giving them real money, you get multi-colored pieces of paper which are only redeemable in Canada. They may as well call them “Fun Bux,” because everyone knows it’s not real money. Hell, Canada isn’t even a real country.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Canada just as much as the next guy. But look at their nickel, for example: Apparently, they once had a beaver as President. And on their dime, they have a picture of a sailboat. A sailboat as President! That’s preposterous. And when they do have a picture of an actual person on their money, it’s always Queen Elizabeth II, and, for all I know, the only thing she ever did was probably something lame like cause the liberation of Quebec from the French. Nice try, Canada.

The only time I can ever get some studying done is when I stay up all night, but when I do that, I start going insane. For example, last Monday at 5am I had a lengthy discussion with a ceiling fan. I’m not even kidding. Also, sometimes during these nights I do a lot of things that surprise me later on, such as when I discovered that I had created the first-ever Wickensworth comic strip. This comic makes so little sense that it doesn’t even not make sense, if that makes sense, so don’t read it unless you are retarded.

2-23-01

When people are talking in class, my science professor always says, “I can wait for you people to stop talking.” Next time he says this, I’m just going to be like, “Alright, cool. Just give us another ten minutes.”

Because I hate my science class. It’s such a downer. All we learn about is how volcanoes caused by earthquakes can create mudslides that kill people in Ethiopia, or about how global warming is slowly melting glaciers, which will ruin the ecosystem and kill everyone off. That’s what they talk about in newspapers, too, and so I’m forced to read about all of that to start off my day. Thankfully, there’s the goddamned funnies.

For those of you who don’t know, they’re called the funnies because, compared to them, global warming is hilarious. In today’s Marmaduke, for example, we see said dog yawning while his owner says to his neighbor, “I don’t think he’s impressed with how tough you had it when you were younger.” Oh, Marmaduke, you scamp! That dog doesn’t care who he offends with his ill manners!

The only funny comic strip these days is Mark Trail, which is about a man from 1953 who walks around and discusses the nature of sea turtles while slowly, slowly solving crime. People have told me that it’s intended to be a serious comic, but that doesn’t stop it from being funny. For instance, here’s an example of a strip where Mark Trail must stop some people from pulling a dog’s ears. I’m not kidding when I say that it took him four entire days to get them off the dog. The man takes his time, but he always gets the job done—you have to give him that.

2-19-01

My new favorite line of advertisements are the Sprite commercials where some kids rap about the most inane things that anyone could ever think of. If you haven’t seen them, just imagine some kids looking straight into a camera and saying, “Yo, I was walking down the street and it was real neat, but then some guy stepped up and it made me feel heat. Then the guy said, ‘Yo, I like your beat, shorty.’ Sprite 2001. Peace out, playa playaz.” Then a word like “fresh” fades onto the screen along with the Sprite logo, offering a clever double meaning: Not only are these kids fresh, but so is Sprite. They’re both equally fresh.

In Sprite’s defense, they do most of their marketing research by reviewing middle school yearbooks from 1993 and then paying people who were losers in their high schools 30 years ago to figure out what the cool kids respond to today. Basically, they all sit around an oak table and say, “Well, guys, let’s think about Sprite’s target audience. Today’s kids are really into rap. So how do we incorporate rap into Sprite?” Then some other guy’s like, “Hey, we could have kids rap on our Sprite commercials! That would be fresh!”

These Sprite commercials remind me of the old 7-UP commercials where they presented the question: “Are U N un?” This question translates into, “Are you a slave to the man’s conformist regulations? Or do you drink 7-UP?” Their tagline may as well have been, “7-UP: We double-dare you.”

Does anyone remember the game “7-UP” from elementary school? If I remember correctly, the goal of the game was to put your head down on your desk and close your eyes and shut your mouth while the teacher went into the back room and smoked a cigarette and took some Tylenol to soothe her pounding headache. That game was fresh.

2-13-01

When movie critics see a corporate logo in something they’re reviewing, they love to call that film a “two-hour commercial.” For example, I read the reviews from about four different critics who said Cast Away was a two-hour commercial for FedEx. They all that thought that they were being pretty clever. But do these critics realize that there are corporate logos in real life, too? When they go shopping do they call their experience an hour-long commercial for Meijer? Do they call their drives down the highway a three-hour commercial for exit 19’s Taco Bell? Or are they just retarded?

I think that most professional critics use a specialized set of Magnetic Poetry to write their reviews. They’ll randomly select a word like “wildly” and then add an adjective like “extraordinary.” Then they’ll make some bullshit up about how the movie tries to parallel the Civil Rights movement, and then they’ll talk about how it ultimately fails because the characters are not indelible enough. Then they’ll usually go on a tirade about how movies were better back in the 30s and about how the “kids don’t know what they’re talking about these days.”

That’s why I usually just go to the Internet Movie Database and read user’s comments when I need to figure out if a movie is good or not. For example, here is an actual review somebody wrote for Pulp Fiction:

Pulp Fiction is not a good movie I think. It has some enjoyable moments, but it is actually too confusing, because of the time and place ( they ALWAYS change! ). That is not good for a movie, I think. I do not think that it is one of the best 25 films ever. I mean, what is the great thing about that movie? It is just another piece about drugs and killing each other. Come on?! I rated it a 4/10, because it is quite original and has some funny jokes. But it is definitely not that good.

I know what this guys is talking about. I hate when movies change their time and place during the course of the movie. It’s so confusing! Why can’t we just see a still-frame of one scene and watch that? If a director’s going to be switching the place the characters are at, I don’t see how I can follow what’s going on.

Speaking of movies, I recently saw Reindeer Games, which was really boring, but it did include the greatest line in cinematic history when the obligatory black guys says, “Man, they got a shit load of cookies!” The funniest part was that all of the other characters completely ignored him. Also, the people who he was talking about didn’t even have that many cookies, let alone an entire shit load. Yet, somehow, it was still the funniest thing I have ever seen.

2-10-01

I had a test the other day, and almost every question had about five or six sub-questions. Like, on question 17 they’d ask me, “What causes earthquakes? Where do they normally occur? Why do they normally occur there? Have you ever seen the movie ‘Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels? That was pretty cool. When did Christopher Columbus discover America?” It’s like, “Hey, hey, hey, give me a freaking minute to respond. If you’re going to ask me multiple questions, please give them each their own corresponding number for Christ’s sake.

And that, kids, is the number one thing on my mind today. I guess I’m just not very deep of a person.

Slacker Wannabes has been updated.

2-06-01

I’ve figured out a way to debunk the idea that violence in the media can influence a child’s behavior. If it were true that kids imitated what they saw even just a little bit, our generation would be the most insanely violent group of people in the history of time: we had Garbage Pail Kids trading cards. Basically, these were cards targeted toward kids that featured the most disgustingly bloody and traumatizing pictures ever created. We all thought that they were pretty funny at the time, but if I ever saw a kid with one of these cards today, I’d grab it from their hands and burn it, and then wash out their eyes with bleach so that they may never remember the horrible thing which they have seen.

It’s kind of weird looking back at it, but I remember that in the 1st grade you’d hear kids on the playground say things like, “OK, I’ll trade you the Garbage Pail Kids card where the little boy gouges out his eyeballs with a butcher knife for the one where the girl is eating a baby’s skin.” Then they other kid would be like, “If you throw in Diarrhea Dan’s card, it’s a deal.” If you aren’t familiar with these cards, or have blocked them out of your memory, I have included links to some examples to prove that I’m not exaggerating:

Taped Tate The card manufacturers were concerned that kids weren’t having quite enough nightmares, so they decided to make this card about a kid pulling off his flesh with common household tape.

Boozin' Bruce This card taught us that it was OK for kids to get drunk and wander the streets alone at night.

Tinsel Tim What better way to celebrate the joy of Christmas than to cut up a small baby and place him on your Christmas tree in a mangled mess of vomit-inducing terror?

Trick or Tricia Every Garbage Pail Kids card either dealt with blood, snot or vomit, or a clever combination of all three.

Yicchy Mickey All of the kids depicted in these cards had puns for their names. This one is a picture of the nastiest person in the history of the world, so it’s called “Yicchy Mickey.” See, the cards are funny and revolting!

These are just some of the more tamer cards they made; my basic human morals prevent me from showing most of the others. Still, the company who made this shit didn’t seem to care that small kids were buying the cards, and they even included sticks of gum from the early 1940’s as an added incentive. Additionally, these cards could also be used as stickers, and so kids would peel them off and stick them on their lunchboxes. The funniest part about all of this is that nobody seemed to care. I guess that’s the 80’s for you.

2-04-01

Between not going to my classes and not doing my homework, I've somehow managed to find the time to make this.