Fuck yes Russia!

Not sitting on their asses drinking vodka has never been a staple of Russian stereotypes but now they are really doing something, freaking out and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to go after asteroids!

John Mayer

John Mayer fits a classic paradigm for me. John Mayer is that guy who is a good athlete, really smart, good with girls, plays music (okay that one is maybe a little obvious), and probably helps old women across the street. John Mayer is a guy I want to hate but just can't because of all of the above. I'm just jealous of John Mayer because when I was in middle school he sang pop songs like 3x5 and that other insanely popular one about running down the halls of high school and I liked it and then when I got older he started playing filthy blues and now writes good music. He is everything.

WTF NYC?

New York City is home to some of the stupidest shit in the world. Being the largest city in the United States, you inevitably have to take the bad with the good. Along with world-class arts, food, and business, New York City also has some of the stupidest people doing the stupidest things imaginable. It's pure statistics, if you put that many people in one place, your stupid fucker count goes through the roof. The problem with New York City is that most people not from NYC move there because they think it is somehow cooler than where they came from, and people from NYC think NYC is the coolest place on the planet. What do you get when you mix a bunch of stupid fuckers thinking they live in the coolest place on the planet? You get hipsters, of course.


I saw this article about some craft fair in Brooklyn, and my immediate thought was "I have never seen a bigger waste of time, money, journalism, or hairspray." It's about a bunch of silly people who, from the looks of the crafts in the pictures, possess no artistic ability but have a sort of half-assed lazy desire to be around other people who possess no artistic ability. The goal seems to be to attract people with jobs and money in hopes they will wander by and purchase some of the stupid crap that the lazy hipsters just poop out on an afternoon of listening to Matt & Kim and drinking PBR. I can't help but imagine a bunch of little kids who set up at a lemonade stand on the street corner, except these are adults, so it's just sad.

French cuffs are amazing

During my travels in the Middle Kingdom, about the best thing I did was get a suit made along with a set of dress shirts with French cuffs, and holy moly have those puppies served me well.

French cuffs are simply amazing. Totally baller. They make anybody look better. Look how much less skanky they make Tara Reid look (no easy task!). They don't even need sleeves attached for godsakes, they're that powerful. I'd go so far as to say they're second only to boobs when it comes to visual power-granting. Which, for a man, makes them first.

Dudes should keep the sleeves though. No, really. You have to keep the sleeves.

Why'd I read that?

The problem with getting your news from the internet is that the internet makes a lot of things "news." Sometimes I don't even realize there is a scandal going on that "the media can't stop covering" because I'm too busy thinking about foot-long corn dogs and how one would go about eating such a thing. Why do I care more about foot-long corn dogs more than I care about some polo-playing couple sneaking into the White House Dinner? I care more about corn dogs because if I'm going to waste my time on something, I would rather waste my time on something I GIVE A SHIT ABOUT. Corn dogs are delicious. You get them at places that usually have interesting people walking around. People that are real. When you see some mom grab her kid by the wrist and start to slap the kid on the butt while balancing a box of chili fries in the other hand, that is real life. The people who snuck into the White House Dinner, they aren't real. They're fake, they're imaginary. They only exist because the media made them exist. I don't know anyone who plays fucking polo. Why not? Those people aren't real people. They don't play polo because they enjoy it, they play polo because others cannot. They tried to attend the White House Dinner because others cannot attend. They are status whores, they had no motivation beyond that. "We thought we were invited," they said. Of course you did. You had to have been, you're better than the people who go to state fairs. You're better than people who enjoy watching movies. You're better than people who mow their own lawns. Those people didn't get invited to the White House Dinner.

Give me a foot-long corn dog any day. Serve it up on the White House lawn. We'll play football with Troy Polamalu.

Appreciation

I'm not one to get sentimental but our blog is getting old. It's been around since 2005 and it's been decently consistent and we are actually about to have more posts this year than last year. But I'm not hear to toot our own collective horn. I've been really impressed lately with Garrett's and especially Drew's posts. I feel like when we first started I could rip out something crazy and funny and unpredictable using my love of the written word and a mind rotted by the earth's factors. Lately Drew has been blowing my mind, I think he maybe should become a full time writer, so props to the guy. I feel like I haven't been able to bring much fire to the blog in the way that I want lately. Are the years of living in an apartment in the city and having a job melting my creative soul? Who knows, but I am going to try to dig deep and start taking glory dumps on this thing! Long Live Viking-era rape and pillaging! Long Live the Monstro Blog!

Enter the Dragon

Okay, Mandel's awesome Bruce Lee video reminded me of what a badass that guy was - like, Teddy Roosevelt-badass. This is a man about whom Chuck Norris said "Lee, pound for pound, might well have been one of the strongest men in the world, and certainly one of the quickest." Norris should know: before he became the "roundhouse God in the face every morning just to let Him know who wears the pants" guy he trained under Lee.

Lee was famous for a bunch of badass ass-kicking stunts, like the one-inch punch that knocked people over and video Aaron showed below. BTW, did you see the position he ends up in right after he lights that match in the guy's mouth? Seriously, go to 1:46 in and watch the amazingness. Holy shit, it's like he's preparing for that guy to go all "you sonuvabitch, you took my only match's honor!" on him or something. Of course he's not going to, but Lee's just ready for it.

Lee's most over-the-top badass moment just may be this story though, which happened while filming his magnum opus Enter the Dragon:

"Lee's famous, running thrust kick into Wall's chest at the end of their fight scene broke Wall's sternum, and broke one arm of each of two extras, into which Wall was propelled and fell. The rest of the fight was delayed for one month, until Wall had healed well enough to perform the choreography. The kick and fall were scripted and rehearsed, but Lee was unhappy that the kick would not look real on screen. Wall exhorted Lee, "Go for it, man. I'm a professional." The result put Wall in hospital."

You know you're in policy school when...

...you don't find this clip funny, because you actually understand what this guy's taking about.

BTW, I've recently enacted a policy that sets a counter-cyclical pricing structure on my balls. Just in the short term, until we get the economy up and moving again. The things I do for my country.

All-protein breakfast.

Out of necessity, not desire, I ate an all-protein breakfast this morning. My refrigerator looks like a post-apocalyptic New York City, all empty, barren, and with cockroaches crawling all around. I managed to locate a chicken sausage in the freezer which I tossed into a frying pan, still frozen, and put on low for about 20 minutes while I prepared my one joy of the morning, french press coffee. After the sausage had sizzled and burned I cracked two eggs into the same skillet and let those cook for a while, until all the grease had mixed and everything in the skillet turned the same color of brown. The all-protein breakfast is a staple of cowboys and cavemen, and like, wolves. So I guess I can count myself among a more simple, primitive, and hardened group than what my normal breakfast of granola and yoghurt places me in. I am almost embarrassed to think about what group that breakfast places me in. I am reminded of how you see all the cowboys cooking in western movies, like Tommy Lee Jones in The Missing. There is a scene where he is frying up some fish he caught out of the river and there is inexplicably a few pieces of bacon in the skillet along with the fish. I guess cowboys had bacon back in the day, but I didn't realize they traveled with it. Not to mention bacon seems like a stupid thing to blow your historical innacuracy on in a film, especially since the bacon wasn't mentioned or even eaten in subsequent scenes. My point is, someone on that set must have known cowboys had bacon, and they threw that little factoid in to make the movie a little more interesting. Now I'm over-analyzing my breakfast choice because Tommy Lee Jones ate bacon with fish in a movie made over ten years ago. Thanks Hollywood.

A new freakin' layout.

I want our blog to be cool, so I keep changing the layout "with the times." As you can see, the blog now has some fancy outside graphics that I totally didn't design but just took off the internet. If you like it you can get it too from the link at the bottom of the blog. I figure if we ever become famous bloggers we can hire some graphic artist to do a really cool blog for us that has elephants running all over it with maybe an asteroid looming in the background (as a reminder of our mortality.)

I hope you like it. If you don't we'll change it to something else. Watch this video and learn why we're not accomplishing anything with our lives:

someone please explain this to me

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo