come on

honestly? Why doth the internet tempt me back into 12 year-old boyhood?

Dammit Stiles, at it again

This article about a moose that got drunk off fermented apples and ended up in the tree reminds me of the behaviors of one of our favorite monstronauts...

What if...

This article about a hypnotist accidentally knocking himself out while his audience was hypnotized got me thinking about other "what ifs" that could potentially have some funny consequences.

What if...the guy responsible for the endless bread bowl at Olive Garden has a gluten allergy and keels over, therefore ending the endless bread bowl!>!!>?

yeah, that's about all I got right now. Ha.

Commercial nostalgia

For no apparent reason other than the unknown subliminal forces acting on me by being alive and present in this world I found my thoughts drifting to commercials from the past.

There is something about a well written jingle that just imprints like tree sap or garlic into your mind that is hard to shake and when its tune comes rambling back down the line it's kind of like settling into an old worn chair, a little scary, but still comfortable.

With that in mind I've made a list below of some of my favorites. What are yours?

1. This Folgers coffee commercial is fucking awesome! So awesome in fact that amazingly originally named acapella band Rockapella did their own cover right here.

2. Gatorade's "Be Like Mike" ad really captured some wild 90's energy. On the topic of Gatorade, they have one of the best recent ads with their "evolve" ad which I think I've linked on this blog before.

3. Fry's electronics- something about the "your best buys are always at Fry's" cracks me up, especially on some of the ads (unfortunately couldn't find any online) where the announcer puts progressively more emphasis into each word.

4. The Men's Warehouse- For a place selling classy clothing, the cheap production values and overly friendly Jewish fellow saying "I guarantee it" has always cracked me up.

5. This Irish Spring Sport soap ad is amazing.

6. Sunny Delight or "sunny d" or as my parents used to call it, sunny pee! All of their commercials are amazing because there is the same 5 note piano loop whenever the sunny d is shown!

I'm going to throw in the Ducktales theme, because WHY NOT, we are having fun here people!

7. Wendy's commercials with Dave Thomas- This poor guy may have founded Wendy's and probably got filthy rich, but did he ever imagine he'd eat thousands of burgers on screen to sell his product?

8. Chevy's "Like a Rock" car commercials. Sadly, this is how most people first come upon Bob Seger's music, instead of finding him playing it himself drunk in a Detroit dive bar, but oh well. Years later they tried again, and succeeded to some degree with John Mellencamp's "This is Our Country" ad series. Oh Chevy.

9 Budweiser frogs- Nothing goes as well with driving good ol' American cars as drinking tons of American beer! In that spirit we'll close with the classic Budweiser frogs commercial. Budweiser has also had some good Clydesdale horse commercials but nothing got a bunch of middle schoolers as excited about trying out copious amounts of beer as this old Bud ad.

What are your faves?

Wow

Yes! No?

Great headline, regardless.

Iceland stand up and make some noise!

For the second time in about a year a volcano erupting in Iceland is about to muck up European air travel.

I can honestly say that except for appearing on some lists of "random places I'd like to travel to one day" I don't think much about Iceland except to occasionally ruminate on the fact that a short little Jewish dude like myself would probably feel pretty bad about himself in a land that is settled by the descendants of the fucking Vikings!

However, when you are a country of 320,000 people you need to find a way to get some attention sometimes. Clearly that means having some massive volcanoes blow the fuck up and shoot their ash into the jet stream headed for Europe.

At least this time the volcano's name is Grimsvotn, significantly easier to say than the last one.

Horseboarding- not what I expected

When I saw this link for a video about "horseboarding" I got excited about learning a new torture technique that Republicans were planning to debut for the upcoming election cycle. I imagined it being, instead of waterboarding, a process where suspects are put into a room with increasingly bigger and more aggressive breeds of horses with their awful horse gas and horrifying horse erections until they spilled the truth. Instead it is a sport featuring a few British people who think they are way more badass than they are. In America we have machines do that kind of thing.

Even more stuff I don't care about

On the theme of my last post about not giving a shit about when dinosaurs hunted for food, this latest article, coincidentally also from the BBC, talking about if the Last Supper was on a Monday or a Wednesday. WHO GIVES A FUCK!>!?>!!> Am I the only one who finds these sort of things so so so so so dumb? I think my main problem is actually more along the lines of "things British people consider newsworthy." Stay tuned.

Something I am now sick of

I was going to write "2 things I am now sick of" and bemoan how the Holocaust has become its own genre for movies and entertainment, but whatever, it keeps deniers on their heels and Daniel Craig in the acting game, so whatever.

What I am really sick of is reading articles telling me about how dinosaurs used to behave. FUCKING SHIT, they went extinct 65 MILLION YEARS AGO. We are bombing the shit out of Libya, which is making way more noise and destruction than anything the dinos ever did, as of one month ago and that has pretty much faded from the headlines. I don't think people understand how long ago 65 MILLION YEARS is. Try this, think about the oldest human stuff you can remember hearing about, it was maybe 1 million years ago.

As cool as it was that dinosaurs had functional brains, did shit at night and either did or did not do other awesome things, they had their epoch, they are gone, get over it. Reptiles don't cry, you shouldn't either.

Creative museum ideas

In honor of me reading about the seemingly awesome-sounding Iceland penis museum I sit here wondering what other crazy museums might be out there, just waiting for me to visit with my mail order bride?

What about:

- Museum of abnormally large boogers or shits

- Museum of ugly pets/children that parents/owners considered cute

- Museum with taxidermy animals that were the last of their breeds before being shot for game and rendered extinct.

Other ideas?

America the Beautiful

I'm not sure what's funnier, the fact that this awesome April Fool's prank happened or that a second degree assault charge is stemming from it!

The anti-therapist

Therapy is a very established yet regimented profession.
You sit on a couch, or perhaps a comfortable chair and talk with someone who is very kind, understanding yet has the not-so-hidden agenda of using that understanding and kindness as a way of analyzing, critiquing and altering you in some way. I believe, however, that balance, a zen-like middle path, is the way to success in life. Therapy as we know it has swung the pendulum too far in one direction and I see it as my duty to re-balance the force. I want to propose that anyone seeking therapy must also sign up for anti-therapy with a licensed anti-therapist.



The anti-therapist would augment what the therapist is doing with a heavy dose of realtalk. Depressed? Probably because you're fat ugly and single. Having trouble with your spouse? Get a job and some disposable income. Considering ending it all? Run a cost-benefit for the world and do the responsible thing.

Out of the therapist/anti-therapist combination will rise a heartier species, coddled yet challenged; ready for the world in all of its layered glory.

Also, this

It's Friday! Friday! Gotta get down on Friday!

So this has gotten so amazing, phenomenal, coincidental, and downright scary that I can't NOT write about it.

It's "Friday," the song by awkward 13 year-old middleschooler Rebecca Black of Orange County, CA. If you've seen it, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you haven't, I've got three things to say to you:

1) it's 2011 now - welcome.
2) what rock have you been under for the past three weeks?
3) what the fuck are you waiting for? Click on the video for godsakes!



This is failure approaching epicness of Odyssean proportions. Just a Brunswick stew of epic fail. I'm truly shocked at how bad this is.

And yet I listened the whole way thought, as I'm sure many have, because I simply couldn't turn away from such a disaster. It's the sonic version of rubbernecking at the scene of a wicked car crash. It's like watching a slightly less funny Charlie Sheen interview, only a tad more pathetic yet somehow not quite as sad.

But at least the new media -- Web 2.0 or "You" or whatever it's called -- has lived up to its billing as a game-changing technology, and in more ways than just delivering copious amounts of every type of porn imaginable.

When I first saw this thing it was forwarded to me by a buddy who's a middleschool teacher in LA county. His description accompanying the link? "Watch this guys. See, teachers should be paid ten fold what they make. Teenagers are so unbelievably goddamned annoying."

That was over two weeks ago, and the video had "just" 4 million hits at that point.

But things happen fast in viral world. As of April 1, this trainwreck of a song has since garnered over 70 million views on YouTube in less than three weeks (it also has over 1.4 million "dislikes," making it the most hated YouTube video ever by quite some margin).

The sheer velocity with which this pile of garbage has spread around the digital globe is remarkable. She's already been on Leno, for godsakes.

At no other time in human history would it be possible to something so utterly worthless to be viewed by nearly 1 in 4 Americans. Hell, for the vast majority of our species' time here on this rock, there haven't even been 70 million of us around at any one given time. Scary when you think of it like that, isn't it?

Take a moment to contemplate the incredible flow of information here: Andrew Jackson killed 2,000 British soldiers at the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812 when the war had actually been over for two weeks; the news hadn't made it to either side.

So yep, it's here: we truly live in the information age now. A brave new world. Just remember: nobody ever said all that "information" wouldn't be worthless, or crappy, or both.

Nothing good can come of this. Trust me, this little girl isn't going to make nearly enough money from this to offset the fact that her life is officially ruined (public ridicule on this scale and intensity never really goes away -- I'm guessing pill overdose in five, ten years tops). The only positive thing about this whole mess is that it's bred some AMAZING parody videos.

Here are some of the best:







Is it just me, or does this actually sound like Andrew W. K.?




Yikes.

And finally, this wouldn't be complete without an epic Dylan cover treatment. Nobody does a better job of actually sounding confused while they're signing something that doesn't really make sense than Dylan:




But even with those great parodies putting a momentary smile on my face, I still couldn't put my finger on what was bothering me about the whole situation. Then I felt the stars align in the form of Satan's Pentagram and saw this:

Rebecca Black's Not To Blame: Meet The Man Who Wrote “Friday”

"You see, little 13-year-old Rebecca actually had very little to do with the notorious song or video. Patrice Wilson, the founder of Ark Music Factory and seemingly random rapper in Rebecca's video, is taking responsibility for this dubious phenomenon…He studied…at Whitman College in Washington state"

NOOOOOOO!!!! CAN'T YOU SEE?!?! THE DEVIL HIMSELF IS FOLLOWING ME, AND HE INTENDS TO COLLECT!!!! RUN!!!! RUN FOR YOUR MISERABLE LIVES!!!! I CAN'T SAVE YOU!!!! RUN!!!!!!!!!!!!!



Well, now that I've got that out of the way: don't worry all you wonkish El Monstro readers, I'll have a nice piece on the societal value of public stock markets in the next couple days.

More Cyclical Compensation Models - A Cure For 'Divide & Conquer' Anti-Labor Strategies?

I know there's been a ton of crazy shit in the news in the past couple weeks (including my accurate prediction of a massive earthquake on the Pacific plate just two days before the Japan tragedy - yikes) but I wanted to address the Wisconsin labor situation for a minute. I am very passionate about the subject, and I have a thought on how to improve the unions' bargaining situation:

It's been well established for quite sometime in the field of behavioral economics that as long as someone's standard of living is improving -- i.e., they're making more money and/or have more buying power -- they tend to not give a shit about how everybody else is doing financially. A rising tide may lift all boats, but even when it lifts some more than others nobody tends to complain (at least not in substantial numbers).

This is part of the rationale behind Reaganomics being a socially-stable economic policy position: yes, the rich may become fantastically fucking richer, but as long as it spurs enough economic growth that even the people at the bottom get a little richer there won't be riots or other forms of unrest.

China's leaders have played this tendency beautifully, papering a 9% annualized growth rate over an incredible rise in income disparity since the market reforms of Deng Xiao Ping began in 1978.

[quick trivia fact] Deng is the source of my favorite quote from a modern Chinese leader (the ancient ones were decidedly more badass, for the record). Once, Deng agreed to take a foreign reporter's questions -- the first example of such government openness since Mao's revolution triumphed in 1949. When asked if moving to a market system represented an acknowledgment that communism had indeed failed, Deng said the following (paraphrased): "No, that is not what is happening at all. You Westerners use too many labels that we do not have use for in China. Command economy? Market economy? Black cat, white cat -- what is the difference so long as it catches mice?" SO EPICALLY CHINESE!!![/quick trivia fact]

But bad shit happens when you don't have economic growth. When the proverbial 'pie' stops growing in total size, people use extra-market means -- i.e., political upheaval, riots, violence, etc. -- of squabbling over who gets what from the newly-set size of the pie. So if you want to avoid civil/political strife and unrest, you better have a growing economy more often than not.



I think this effect may help explain why unions are not supported 100% by the public.

Unions in general -- and public employee unions in particular -- have spend much of their energy and political capital over the past ~30 years fighting for more job security rather than better pay and benefits. As a result unionized government jobs on average pay less than their private-sector counterparts given constant levels of education, but they have a lot more job security when the economy goes through a cyclical downturn (or goes down the fucking toilet like in the Great Recession).

This is why people are upset at unionized public employees. They see themselves hitting hard times -- losing jobs, taking hits on their pay, working extra hours for no additional compensation, benefits freezes, etc. -- but not the unionized public employees.

The proverbial 'pie' has stopped growing, and people are resorting to extra-market means -- in this case, electoral politics -- of squabbling over who gets what from the set size of the pie.

And so we face the following reality: a whole shitload of people who make $40k a year and are sliding backwards are angry at the unionized public employees who are making $45k a year, and a majority of them just got convinced by a couple of billionaire Koch brothers to vote in the interests of the fabulously wealthy because of the more-visible perceived unfairness of the public employees' compensation being shielded from the negative effects of the recession.

Napoleon first termed this strategy "Divide & Conquer." Historically, it's been brutally effective. It's just what we did to the Native Americans: pitting tribe against tribe over comparably petty differences and old rivalries while we were fucking genociding the 'winner.' Dark, but effective. And the corporate anti-labor people are playing it really well.



He's my idea.

The unions need to focus on improving overall pay and benefits for their members, not just on shielding them from the trials and tribulations of the business cycle.

When Joe Six-Pack sees that Joe Gov't-Employee is also hurting, they'll likely feel solidarity rather than rivalry, even Joe G-E is making more money in absolute terms. They won't get taken for a ride by a socioeconomic class that has absorbed nearly all of the economic gains of the past 30 years and now faces no campaign donation restrictions, amplifying their power well beyond their meager numbers. They'll stop this anti-labor charade that actually hurts their own interests and focus on the real problems of economic inequality in a country where the richest 400 citizens have as much wealth as the entire bottom half -- 155 million people -- of the country does.

Just a thought.

All in a name

Let me just say that even though I'm American and speak English and therefore dominate the world in a heretofore unheard of imperialistic way there are some things that will never make sense to me in their authentic form.

Asian languages are a good starting point, although to me they're almost too far gone to be within the realm of reasonable discussion. They seem to me, so different than the Latin-based English and Spanish to which I can exist in that I have immense respect for anyone who is bilingual from an Asian language to a Latin-rooted one.

However, within much closer social proximity to me are some mind-bending languages and words that I have discovered that make me think that I am but dust and ashes upon the world of possibilities.

Borussia Moenchengladbach- This is a name of a German soccer team. Can you say it? I tried, I doubt I succeeded though. Apparently German has lots of long words because they just combine things we in English would normally separate (Dan- confirm?). So maybe this team just means "Near Russia a group of men good with their feet."

Additionally, here is a list of team names in the Ukrainian premier league. Which one of those would most closely associate with "Oakland A's"? I would become a fan of that team but I just can't figure it out.

Let's move to Iceland. Last year a huge volcano erupted and seriously messed up global air travel. However it was only known as "Icelandic Volcano" because it's real name, "Eyjafjallajokull" is COMPLETELY UNPRONOUNCEABLE to English speakers. Wikipedia offers some help by giving the pronunciation guide here.

Still not getting it?

Why not let a real viking motherfucker from Iceland take a crack at telling us. Seriously you must watch this video for two reasons.

1. I'm convinced this guy speaks better English than his own Icelandic.
2. The comically dark ending of the video where he cheerfully announces, "in other news, nothing."

And now that you know what's up here are some other Icelandic volcanoes so you can impress girls at a party the next time one blows.

With my own two hands

I can change the world with my own two hands/make a better place with my own two hands/
-Ben Harper

I'm not sure this angry mob of Indian workers really got Ben Harper's message when, after getting laid off, they trapped the culpable executive in his car and burned him to death. Holy shit, people need, to quote Harper again, to burn one down and chill.

Oscar rant (and one really good moment)

There was a time when this blog was all about movie snobbery, 'twas a simpler time, and now it's time for a stroll down that road again.

The Oscars fucking sucked.

It's possible because I was massively crashing from drinking for the 6 hours preceding the telecast that I was lacking certain brain chemicals needed to have any kind of joy or fun at that moment, but I seriously doubt that was it, they just fucking sucked.

Let's start with the hosts, James Franco would be fun to smoke like 12 joints with, but watching him host was pretty brutal and awkward. Anne Hatheway successfully represented everything annoying about women, being so excited and energetic about everything, no matter what. Maybe next time she shouldn't do all those 5 Hour Energy shots. Together they were the worst possible mix of trying too hard and not at all.

I hate the music pieces, they are dumb, I hate the cheesy jokes they force the presenters to say, I freaked out when Bob Hope returned back to life.

There were some good moments though, I'm not 100% hating.

1. Kirk Douglas did as only a 94 year-old could and came across as awesome for not shitting himself onstage. He does have pretty big balls though to get out at his age and after a stroke, he still had great comedic timing too.

2. Colin Firth, no nonsense and funny.

And BEST OF ALL was Luke Matheny, winner for best live action short film. He wins for a couple of reasons.

- Acknowledging his hair with his opening remark.
- Thanking his mom, who did craft services (i.e. the food) on the set.
- Promising to thank everyone else on a "thank you cam" that may or may not actually exist.
- Calling out an entire state, and that state being fucking DELAWARE! I don't even think Delaware exists!

Don't believe me? watch him here.

So that's that, I wasn't blown away by any movie this year (still need to see Winter's Bone, The Fighter and The Kids Are Alright) so hopefully next year's movies and show will be better.

basic reasoning

you know if you had told me that a bunch of small fish in a small tub of water were going to eat dead skin off my feet and then chill out in their tank for a bit and then eat some more dead skin off a bunch more people's feet I might think to call the health department too.

But I'm just a caveman...

Beautiful Moments in Life

The other day I was posted up at a nasty urinal doin' my thang. When one is at a nasty urinal it's hard to give a fuck about cleanliness because to do so, you'd be bucking a huge trend of no one else giving said fuck. So in that spirit I picked my nose, deeply and passionately, and went to wipe the results on the wall above the urinal.

To my great joy someone had already smeared the contents of their nose in the exact spot I was going for.

In that moment I felt more connected to my fellow humans than I have in ages. We are all one.

Namaste.

Public Service Announcement

Government Warning: (1) According to the Surgeon General, women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects. (2) Consumption of alcoholic beverages impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery, and may cause health problems.

Just thought y'all should know. Cheers.