Entries Tagged 'Alex' ↓

Better off Ted is a really great show with a really big problem: It has a terrible name.

I only started watching this show after repeated suggestions from my friends. I was hesitant to get into because the stupid punny name led me to believe that it was just a dumb family sitcom, but it’s actually a very clever and smart show with great characters played by great actors.

Why would they give it such a shit name? I hate name-based puns like that because you can just name the character anything you want in order to match your pun. Here are a bunch of horrible name-based puns I came up with in the previous 12 seconds:

Kevin or Hell
Arbeit Mach Fred
Raining Matts and Dogs
Crime Doesn’t Jay

THESE ARE ALL TERRIBLE NAMES BUT THEY COULD BE GOOD SHOWS (SEE: BETTER OFF TED).

Alex

Wrong Kurt, we started Dynamoaf in 2006, not 2007. AND YALL NERDS NEED TO PAY ME FOR HOSTING THIS JOINT.

ALEX

WHATUP NERDS?

I’m just here in Brooklyn living like a boss. Doing kickflips off the the Statue of Liberty’s crown and ollying straight off a UN diplomat into the Hudson River.

AWESOME!

Alex

There are pretty much two things that editorial cartoons are supposed to do: They look nice and they make a point. Ted Rall is incapable of doing either of these things.

Art

Look at this fucking mess. For just a second, let’s ignore the fact that Ted Rall cannot draw human beings well. Some cartoonist do just fine with outlines and inking. Not Ted Rall.

Look at the man holding his son’s hand. The duo is drawn as if they are either two dimensional posters pasted onto the wall or three dimensional human beings who somehow defy Euclidean geometry. Speaking of impossibilities, the door there looks like it has swung outward and through the wall. Also, the sitting part of the church (the nave?) in the background isn’t perpendicular to the vestibule in the foreground. I guess it’s going off in some impossible angle. In addition, the pews are divided as if there were another aisle beyond the one we see in the drawing. I don’t know a lot of churches that have multiple aisles like that. Even if it had multiple aisles, there is no entrance for that other aisle. Also, the photographer is inexplicably taking a picture of the back of the police officer.

Finally, Dr. Tiller was shot once in the head. He was not shot in the stomach, and there were not multiple shots fired requiring all those shell markings.

Point

This cartoon has no point. It’s essentially a quote from an anti-abortion guy about how Dr. Tiller had “his hands covered with blood.” Then it features little captions describing each person. (Of course Rall has the black guy voting for Obama.) Is this somehow saying that we are all responsible for his murder because we take part in the political system and pay taxes and serve in the military ? Because that is fucking asinine and makes no sense.

Alex

WELCOME TO THE PRESSURE ZONE.

So the best Michael Jackson video ever is Smooth Criminal and everyone should know this. Although there was some weird stuff in there like when he shoots a guy and then the guy slides backward and burns a silhouette into a wall, or when all those little kids were looking at the scene through the window. At this point, Michael Jackson had already started going off the deep end so those kinds of things are understandable, but this video is just the best.

Everyone knows Thriller is great but it really is not better than Smooth Criminal.

Black or White. This video I have some problems with. First of all, why are Micauly Culkin and the guy from Cheers in this video? What does this little intro vignette have to do with anything at all whatsoever? Terrible. Then it goes to Arfrica and Michael is dancing there, and then he’s dancing with some Asian people, and then with some Native Americans who are inexplicably dancing and firing rifles wildly into the air. Okay. Then it goes to this rap break-it-down section where little kids are rapping and it really doesn’t make any sense. Then some more stuff happens that I forget about and then it goes to that face-morphing thing which is fine.

Then, a black panther which happened to be hanging around morphs into Michael Jackson. He walks onto an extremely steamy street and starts dancing. Awesome. This rules. Then he gets on a car and starts scream and smashing windows in. This is fucking great. BUT THEN SOME EDITOR CAME AND FUCKED EVERYTHING UP. The windows of the cars have all been digitally altered so that they have swastikas and “NIGGERS GO HOME” graffitied on them. So his random act of violence is now some kind of admirable stand against hatred. He even throws a steering wheel through a window with “KKK RULES” written on it.

WHO WOULD EVER WRITE THAT ON A WINDOW IN YELLOW AND ORANGE AIRBRUSHED FONT? People who are in the KKK for real are too busy holding sad secret meetings and burning crosses and being in a constant state of economic despair to start TAGGING.

The reason they edited all this shit in was because they wanted to make the vandalism “more palatable” (according to Wikipedia). Fuck, the video was made in 1993, by which point Terminator 2 had introduced every American child to the notion of getting a liquid metal finger stabbed through your eyedome. Breaking a bunch of glass isn’t gonna hurt anyone.

Anyway, Michael then falls down and shoots some sparks off somehow and then a big sign collapses and catches on fire. None of this makes any sense.

Scream is good too. Watch that video and try not to be impressed at how it looks. You fail at this endeavor.

Alex

Starbucks has been driving me insane recently. They used to sell this Rice Crispie treat thing that was just a heavyassed brick of taste. It was an extremely dense 4″x3″x3″ matrix of cereal and marshmallow. It had 410 calories (I know this because in New York they have to put the calorie information on everything.) I used to order it by asking for a “marshmallow cube” even though it was not exactly a cube (but I suppose this terminology was more accurate than calling it a “square”) and it used to make the baristas laugh.

Then they went and replaced it with something called a “Marsmallow Dream Bar” which is only 210 calories and the same price. The volume is about the same as the old bar but the new bar is just far less dense. There are also actual entire miniature marshmallows embedded in the thing, making even less fulfilling.

It’s a mess.

Now when I have to use the Starbucks bathroom and am compelled to buy something because the bathroom is for customers only I’ll have to get a bottle of ETHOS Water for like 40 bucks or something.

I dunno I guess that’s something worth noting.

Alex

Oh man, the economy is not good at all. I still have my job but there are layoffs happening everywhere. I work right by Wall Street, and walking around there is a much more somber experience than it used to be. Tourists still go there and happily take pictures but all the people working for the banks just seem tired. There are always news cameras and satellite trucks reporting about something.

Part of me really wants the economy to collapse in major way. I’m talking worse than the Great Depression. Mass unemployment, food shortages, political strife, and ultimately a civilization-wide collapse. I think this would be a really interesting time to live in and I’ve actually been reading way too much about it recently. I’ve prepared a few scenarios for myself:

1) Stationary, urban: I remain in my apartment, barricaded in from the riots and the army. My roommate and I have a three month supply of brown rice and black beans and we live by candlelight. We collect rainwater in a cistern that we mount on the window and take advantage of rare occasions when the gas still works. Manhattan is literally the worst place in the country to grow food, so I suppose after the three month supply is up we will have to go kill people (we will of course have sweet guns) and steal their food.

2) Stationary, rural: Escape from Manhattan is really hard because it is an island and I am really bad at swimming. I guess that if I managed to get out, I would try to go west to New Jersey and then through into Pennsylvania. I will find a plot of land and build a nice bunker into the side of a hill. I’ll grow my own food and all that lame stuff and basically live under the radar.

3) I begin riding the rails: This is probably the most awesome of the ideas, becasue it involves a long term “Children of Mice and Men” esque journey from state to state. Getting into all kinds of crazy mixups and having adventures.

The reality is that I do not want anything bad to happen. The epilogue to all of those options above is “He starved to death.” I have panic attacks when the 4-5 train is late, so I don’t think I would handle myself too well once the race wars begin and I have no access to Diet Coke.

-Alex

Kurt is excited because TV added a 4 episode series to a channel he can’t watch.
Alex