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Monday, June 30, 2008
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Saturday Miscellany is 'Look How Fucking Angry You Made Me' by Wall-E
It's actually by Travis Helwig. From NewsGroper.com, a site for fake blogs.
Enjoy, and GO SEE WALL-E! IT IS INCREDIBLE!
Enjoy, and GO SEE WALL-E! IT IS INCREDIBLE!
Look how fucking angry you made me
By Wall-E
Honestly. Where did that god-damn PA go? I mean, what is this? I feel like I'm working on Ice Age or like a community college animation assignment or some shit -- God fucking dammit.
This is Pixar. If I ask for a scone or some biscotti, I don't expect to wait ten fucking minutes for some unpaid douche bag with stars in his eyes to get it to me. I don't care if you grew up in Iowa, that doesn't mean you should walk at the same pace as your dead grandmother. Jesus Christ.
Look how fucking angry I am:
Can I ask a question? Honestly, it's not that difficult to answer. How many Pixar films had the name of the star as the title? Hmm? Do you know? Two. Two films. And I bet Ratatouille was helped by people who understood the English fucking language. Listen Juan, I don't want my trailer cleaned right now. Go eat a Taco and get out of my face. Maybe you and the Iowan can be fuckwit best friends. WAAAALL-EEE!
This whole operation is a joke. I'm getting too old for this. I'm trying to be professional. I'm trying to be the bigger man. But how am I supposed to be adorable when I'm surrounded by idiots who would rather stand around jerking off than do their job for once. I am furious:
They wanted me at Dreamworks. Do you know that? I could have done Shrek 5, but I chose to be here.
So how about you be fucking grateful and bring me my latte before the world comes to an end or I learn to say something out loud other than my name. Fuck.
WAAALLLL-EEE!
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Thursday is Recess's "Our Constitutional Values"
Sorry about the lack of content yesterday. I was very busy. Also I'm a fool.
But hey! We're making up for it with a video from GWU's Recess called "Our Constitutional Values: Option C." It is a very funny video.
You will enjoy.
But hey! We're making up for it with a video from GWU's Recess called "Our Constitutional Values: Option C." It is a very funny video.
You will enjoy.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Tuesday Essay: Chris Gethard's "Framsky"
Yes, it's another Chris Gethard post. But hey! He's a funny guy. We could have a Chris Gethard post every day.
This essay, "Framsky," is one of his many wonderful Hump Day stories updated every Wednesday on his blog. While pretty much every story he's posted is great, "Framsky" is a personal favorite of ours. Enjoy.
Framsky
It’s not abnormal for people to get depressed during their freshman year of college. But in my case, a number of factors lined up, which, when looked at in retrospect, make me feel like maybe my depression was a little less generic and a bit more justified.
My parents sold my house just after I went away, so I could never go home again. A few deaths – one in the family, one of a close family friend, one of a childhood playmate – happened in quick succession weeks after I moved to college. On top of this, I was slowly figuring out that I would continue my family tradition of being bipolar, and was not dealing with it well.
What most led to my depression though, was my foolish decision to attend Rutgers University. Rutgers is the state university of New Jersey, and has a storied and proud history. It is one of nine colleges to exist in the United States during the colonial era, and among its alumni are Paul Robeson, Milton Friedman (the dean of modern economics), and the dude who discovered antibiotics.
My tenure at Rutgers has to have undoubtedly come at one of its low points. The place was packed – there were 40,000 students on my campus freshman year, and I did not have a class my first semester with less than 200 people in it. On top of being crowded, it was completely filthy. My dorm was perched up against the Raritan River, so my view was of that light brown, stinking, stagnant mosquito breeding pit. My roommate was an Estonian nationalist known throughout campus as “The Russian Bear.” The very best thing Rutgers had going for it was a group of trucks called “The Grease Trucks,” which sold sandwiches, one of which was called a “Fat Bitch” and had a cheesesteak, fries, mozzarella sticks, and chicken fingers on the sandwich. Let me reiterate – this was the best thing the place had going for it. My main reason for going to Rutgers in the first place was that they didn’t make me write an essay as part of the application. The buildings themselves were a wreck, and the main stretch of campus was a neverending series of construction sites that was book ended on one end by Seminary Place, a street where lecherous gay men hung out at night looking to suck off college kids, and on the other by the campus library, where those same lecherous gay men spent their days, looking to suck off college kids.
So with all of these factors lined up and pushing me into a very depressed corner, I did what anyone who was 18 in 1998 would do – I retreated to the internet. Specifically, to AOL’s Instant Messenger program.
At any moment where I wasn’t in class (my favorite that semester was “Dinosaurs”, because every time it met, the professor would grab at his hair in frustration and shout, “They’re just birds,” over and over again), or at the dining hall (where my favorite meal was four separate bowls of Cocoa Krispies, a plate of cheese fries, and for some odd reason, copious amounts of cranberry juice) I was online, talking to friends. Friends from high school, family members, friends from my own dorm. I was doing anything and everything to avoid dealing with the reality of my actual existence, so I spent hours long chunks of time sitting online.
My name online was Framsky. And Framsky, due to the fact that it’s much easier to hide things in the medium of typing messages on a screen as opposed to let’s say, talking, was not half as sad or miserable as Chris was. Framsky was getting me through many days, and even more nights.
Which is why, when Framsky was taken away from me, I exacted a methodical and swift revenge the severity of which surprises even me, to this day.
One night at about eight, I got a frantic message from an acquaintance of mine, Rob. Rob was a friend of some friends I had met at Rutgers.
“Chris!” his message read. “WATCH OUT!”
Before I could even finish typing and sending the word “why”, over 30 strangers randomly messaged me with no provocation. And while I was trying to sort out what Rob’s message was about, and what the strange feeding frenzy of online messages was for, they all began to warn me.
Instant messenger is like the Wild West. It has very few actual rules or regulations, and its policing is instead left up to its own members. Like a weird, cybernetic form of frontier justice, people who are offended by things other people say to them through the service can click a button marked “Warn.” As one racks up warnings, their percentage goes up. When one’s percentage is high enough, they are no longer able to access the program.
When I found myself unable to access my precious instant messenger, I immediately found myself undertaken by a rage that only a person with Irish blood raised by a melodramatic mother in a neighborhood full of self-hating Catholics can feel. Even though no one else was there – not even the Russian Bear – I let out a scream as I looked up to my filthy, cracked ceiling.
I immediately ran to the phone and called the friends who had introduced me to Rob. They gave me Rob’s telephone number. I called him. He lived right down the road, as he went to Princeton University.
What he told me was astonishing, for its calculated nature, for its senselessness, for its evil core.
Someone who lived on his floor came into Rob’s room earlier that day and wrote down a handful of random names from his Buddy List. It wasn’t until just before he tried to contact me that Rob – or PrfsrFrink, as he’s known online – tried to let me know what was going to happen. It turns out that this kid – Amir – had been perpetrating these “IM Bombs” the entire night for his amusement.
The very first thing that got me angry about what Amir, pronounced Ohm-er, had done was the act itself. The second was that his name was Amir. I am not a fan of anyone with a country club-ish name. No Blakes, Blaines, or Sheffields are ever going to really be friends of mine. One signifier that you have a pretentious name is if it looks like it should be pronounced one way but you insist it be pronounced another. If Amir was Ah-meer, this would not have been a sticking point. Unfortunately for him, it was indeed a sticking point.
Another fact about Amir had already all but sealed his fate in my book. He, like Rob, attended Princeton. Now, being a Rutgers guy, for better or for worse, means that at least a small piece of you must resent and hate Princeton for all they stand for. They are only about 30 minutes apart, driving, yet they could not be more different. Rutgers is almost exclusively attended by people who grew up in New Jersey. Princeton is almost exclusively attended by blue-blooded privileged kids from all corners of the globe. And while their academics are great, their attitude is not, and everyone from Rutgers, even the people like me, who hate everything about Rutgers, knows it and is offended by it.
The next thing Rob told me about Amir further solidified that I was going to act on all of my negative impulses. Amir was Canadian. From Toronto. Now, I have nothing against our peaceful, correct-on-the-health-care-issue neighbors from the north. But I do have a problem with any Canadian who thinks he’s going to walk into my turf – New Jersey – and pull a fast one on me. Simply put, it was inconceivable that some Ivy League, snooty named Canadian of all people, was going to win this battle he didn’t realize was a battle. As a New Jersey resident, as a Rutgers student, and as a depressed lunatic, it offended me on all levels.
I took action. That action was opening my door. The kid across the hall from me was a ridiculously tall and skinny half-Asian guy named Andy Miner. Fate had put us together for this evening - he was the only person more depressed and crazy at the entire college than I was, plus he had a car. On any given evening, both of us could be found sitting in rooms across the hall from each other, both of us on our computers, talking about how we were both lonely and had no friends, never thinking to just hang out together.
“Andy,” I said. He turned around. “Want to drive to Princeton and beat up some Princeton kid?”
Without missing a beat, and without looking confused or surprised, Andy answered yes instantaneously. We called our other friend Jeff, who came running over. All three of us dressed in black from head to toe – black puffy jackets, as it was December, black pants, black wool hats. We got in Andy’s car, and we made our way to Princeton.
When we got there, we quickly realized a number of things. The first was that Princeton was in every way the opposite of Rutgers. It looked beautiful, it was quiet and serene, and most striking to us, it was physically clean. Princeton was clearly not the type of place where you got in without writing an essay.
The second thing we realized was that dressing in black from head to toe was a bad way to try to disguise ourselves. On the Princeton campus, you stand out if you’re not wearing khaki pants. This is the type of place where people see someone dressed in jeans and they’re terrified, let alone people dressed up like James Bond movie henchmen. We knew we had to act fast or the police would be on their way. We knew the name of Amir’s dorm – Rob had given it to us – and we were chagrined to realize it was in the opposite corner of campus from where we parked the car. We sprinted, knowing we probably wouldn’t make it there. Luckily for us, it was as if the Princeton-ites couldn’t even see us. No one blinked an eye. It’s my assumption that we had roughly the same effect on them as Columbus’s ships did on the Indians – none, as they couldn’t even logically fathom that we existed in their reality.
We made our way to the dorm and found it locked. You needed a magnetic swipe card to enter. This surprised us – at Rutgers, anyone can just walk into any dorm at any time. No one cares. We responded in the only way we could think of – we tried to kick the door down. But dorm doors are generally pretty well made, and it wouldn’t give. Luckily for us, a young gentleman in a pair of khakis and loafers saw us in our frustration and walked by.
“Need to get inside?” he asked, smiling. We grunted yes. He swiped us right in, again not sensing that we were clearly up to no good.
Now, when we had left for Princeton, we planned on scaring Amir good. We didn’t really think we were going to do any serious damage to him. But what we saw in the lobby of that immaculate, well maintained dorm changed a lot of things for us that night.
Gathered in the middle of the dorm were a group of about 15 kids. All of them – all of them ¬– were wearing sweaters and/or turtlenecks. They were standing around the dorm’s grand piano. And they were singing Christmas Carols.
To drive from the banks of the muddy Raritan, from the 400 person classes, from the bug infested living areas, from the realization that every day for the next four years was going to be a lackluster one, to Christmas Carols, to the blind, uncaring, unbothered, able-to-belt-out-a-good-Silent-Night world of Princeton and their Christmas Carols, pushed a button inside all three of us. We were real Jersey kids, from a real place, and we walked into a fantasy world where there were very few problems. Without speaking about it, all three of us knew that we planned on doing our damndest to destroy that fantasy world.
The kids around the piano, in what we noticed was becoming a trend, didn’t blink twice at three shady kids dressed in all black lurking around in their background. It was as if they should have been singing “We don’t know that we’re in danger! Fa la la la la, la la la la!”
Rob had told us the number of his floor, which was also Amir’s floor. We made our way there, and were yet again thwarted by the presence of a magnetic lock. We banged on the door for minutes, and as each one passed, we realized what a bad idea it was to come here in the first place. Just as we were giving up hope and coming to our senses, the door opened from the other side.
The boy standing on the other side was pudgy. That was the first thing you had to notice about him. His large eyes blinked behind his glasses, as if this level of human contact was jarring to him.
“Can I help you with something?” he asked.
“We’re friends of Rob’s. From Rutgers. He told us we should come here and wait for him until he gets back,” I said.
“Well, you can wait with me, I guess,” he said, slightly bothered by us. “My name’s Amir.”
I knew Amir knew nothing about Framsky’s identity. In other words, I knew he had no idea who we were or why we were there. He almost seemed tragic to me in that moment, not knowing the level of fear to which he was going to be introduced tonight. I said nothing besides mumbling my thanks for his hospitality.
He turned his nose in the air, than turned his back to us. Without turning around, he said, “There’s some people drinking down the hall. I guess you can come.”
We got to the room in question. There were about ten kids spread out, all with their backs to us, all laughing and drinking. Amir entered and we sheepishly followed. Amir announced us.
“Guys, these are Rob’s friends from Rutgers,” he said.
Without even turning to look at us, one of the young ladies said, “Oh, I thought something smelled funny in here all of a sudden.”
We were furious. I felt bad for Amir again. Whereas we had shown up to scare one person, we were now feeling the urge to snuff out the life of everyone who had ever or would ever call himself a Princeton student.
Amir spun on his heels and led us out of the room. We went down to the other end of the hall. He entered his own room. It was huge, at least three times the size of the space I shared with the Russian Bear. There were chairs everywhere. Amir sat in one of them.
“You guys can have a seat on the floor,” he said with a cocky smirk. This disrespect was my personal last straw.
“Actually Amir,” I said in a voice as calm as could be, “I’m going to sit wherever the fuck I want.”
His head dropped, and he slowly turned around. He suddenly had the body language of someone who realizes that they’re in some pretty deep shit – the type of deep shit where you invite a stranger over, disrespect him a number of times, then realize you know nothing about him.
“I -,” he hesitated. “I’m sorry, I never got your name.”
“My name’s Framsky,” I said.
He went white as a sheet. All color drained from his pudgy face, and without saying it out loud, everything about him suddenly screamed “I want to be back in Toronto right now.”
He tried his best not to let us sense the fear that we could see washing over his body.
“And your friends?” he asked. “What are their names?”
I snapped.
“THEIR NAME IS FRAMSKY TOO, MOTHERFUCKER. DON’T YOU EVER FUCK WITH ME AGAIN.”
All the rage I had at my everyday life teamed up with the massive amount of disrespect I had felt since arriving at this dorm. My voice came forth aggressive, attacking, trying to beat Amir down verbally. He stood up.
“You have to go,” he stammered. “You have to go right now.”
I paid no attention.
“Don’t you ever fuck with me,” I repeated. “You have no idea what it’s like out there - you have no idea who I am.”
He realized I was right. Tears welled up in his eyes. That’s when I said what is probably the coolest, toughest thing I’ve ever said.
“I am in your house, motherfucker.” I grinned. “I am in your fucking house. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”
He looked at me, and the first tear escaped.
“You have to go, right now.”
He took a step towards me.
“I am in your house.”
He took another step.
“Go. Leave.”
“I am in your house.”
He took one more step and he pushed me. I grinned even harder, at this point completely lost in a maniacal rage. I spun around.
“Framsky,” I said matter-of-factly, making eye contact with Andy, “shut the door.”
When I made saw my two friends, I snapped back to reality. For they were looking at me for what I was – a person who had lost control and was about to do something really horrible to another human being. For a brief moment I looked at them and they looked at me. It was Jeff who finally spoke.
“We need to leave right now,” he said. And we did. We took off. We sprinted from that dorm, leaving a fat crying Canadian with a really bright future behind us. We ran down the stairs, through the lobby past a stunning rendition of Feliz Navidad, back across that beautiful campus, and into to Andy’s car. We made it all the way back to Rutgers, where we sat up all night waiting for a call from the Princeton police. A call that, thankfully, never came.
That night had some lasting effects. It still stands out to me as a time where I came closest to completely losing my mind. And even though I, and my friends, had no pride in Rutgers, it did give us some small bit of dignity to be able to defend both ourselves and Rutgers by looking at the have in the face and letting him know that we, the have-nots, could walk right into his house whenever we felt like it.
Two years after my mission to Princeton, I returned there. I had to be in the area anyway, so I headed over to campus to get dinner with Rob. As we crossed over campus, he pointed to a dorm.
“You know,” he said, laughing to himself. “That kid Amir lives in that dorm now.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, actually in that corner… on the ground floor.”
Well, I had to.
I walked over to the window. It was late spring and hot, so there was just a screen. Again utilizing my God given abilities of being a born and raised Jersey guy, I jimmied open the screen and stuck my head in.
Amir was there, sleeping, in his tightie whities, on his back, his crotch splayed towards me. An oscillating fan was pointed towards him.
“Amir!” I whispered, harshly.
He shot up out of bed and reached to the windowsill for his glasses. He fumbled with them for a moment, then put them on and looked my way.
“Framsky?” He said, fear in his voice.
“I’m always watching, man,” I said. “So you be good. You be good.”
This essay, "Framsky," is one of his many wonderful Hump Day stories updated every Wednesday on his blog. While pretty much every story he's posted is great, "Framsky" is a personal favorite of ours. Enjoy.
Framsky
It’s not abnormal for people to get depressed during their freshman year of college. But in my case, a number of factors lined up, which, when looked at in retrospect, make me feel like maybe my depression was a little less generic and a bit more justified.
My parents sold my house just after I went away, so I could never go home again. A few deaths – one in the family, one of a close family friend, one of a childhood playmate – happened in quick succession weeks after I moved to college. On top of this, I was slowly figuring out that I would continue my family tradition of being bipolar, and was not dealing with it well.
What most led to my depression though, was my foolish decision to attend Rutgers University. Rutgers is the state university of New Jersey, and has a storied and proud history. It is one of nine colleges to exist in the United States during the colonial era, and among its alumni are Paul Robeson, Milton Friedman (the dean of modern economics), and the dude who discovered antibiotics.
My tenure at Rutgers has to have undoubtedly come at one of its low points. The place was packed – there were 40,000 students on my campus freshman year, and I did not have a class my first semester with less than 200 people in it. On top of being crowded, it was completely filthy. My dorm was perched up against the Raritan River, so my view was of that light brown, stinking, stagnant mosquito breeding pit. My roommate was an Estonian nationalist known throughout campus as “The Russian Bear.” The very best thing Rutgers had going for it was a group of trucks called “The Grease Trucks,” which sold sandwiches, one of which was called a “Fat Bitch” and had a cheesesteak, fries, mozzarella sticks, and chicken fingers on the sandwich. Let me reiterate – this was the best thing the place had going for it. My main reason for going to Rutgers in the first place was that they didn’t make me write an essay as part of the application. The buildings themselves were a wreck, and the main stretch of campus was a neverending series of construction sites that was book ended on one end by Seminary Place, a street where lecherous gay men hung out at night looking to suck off college kids, and on the other by the campus library, where those same lecherous gay men spent their days, looking to suck off college kids.
So with all of these factors lined up and pushing me into a very depressed corner, I did what anyone who was 18 in 1998 would do – I retreated to the internet. Specifically, to AOL’s Instant Messenger program.
At any moment where I wasn’t in class (my favorite that semester was “Dinosaurs”, because every time it met, the professor would grab at his hair in frustration and shout, “They’re just birds,” over and over again), or at the dining hall (where my favorite meal was four separate bowls of Cocoa Krispies, a plate of cheese fries, and for some odd reason, copious amounts of cranberry juice) I was online, talking to friends. Friends from high school, family members, friends from my own dorm. I was doing anything and everything to avoid dealing with the reality of my actual existence, so I spent hours long chunks of time sitting online.
My name online was Framsky. And Framsky, due to the fact that it’s much easier to hide things in the medium of typing messages on a screen as opposed to let’s say, talking, was not half as sad or miserable as Chris was. Framsky was getting me through many days, and even more nights.
Which is why, when Framsky was taken away from me, I exacted a methodical and swift revenge the severity of which surprises even me, to this day.
One night at about eight, I got a frantic message from an acquaintance of mine, Rob. Rob was a friend of some friends I had met at Rutgers.
“Chris!” his message read. “WATCH OUT!”
Before I could even finish typing and sending the word “why”, over 30 strangers randomly messaged me with no provocation. And while I was trying to sort out what Rob’s message was about, and what the strange feeding frenzy of online messages was for, they all began to warn me.
Instant messenger is like the Wild West. It has very few actual rules or regulations, and its policing is instead left up to its own members. Like a weird, cybernetic form of frontier justice, people who are offended by things other people say to them through the service can click a button marked “Warn.” As one racks up warnings, their percentage goes up. When one’s percentage is high enough, they are no longer able to access the program.
When I found myself unable to access my precious instant messenger, I immediately found myself undertaken by a rage that only a person with Irish blood raised by a melodramatic mother in a neighborhood full of self-hating Catholics can feel. Even though no one else was there – not even the Russian Bear – I let out a scream as I looked up to my filthy, cracked ceiling.
I immediately ran to the phone and called the friends who had introduced me to Rob. They gave me Rob’s telephone number. I called him. He lived right down the road, as he went to Princeton University.
What he told me was astonishing, for its calculated nature, for its senselessness, for its evil core.
Someone who lived on his floor came into Rob’s room earlier that day and wrote down a handful of random names from his Buddy List. It wasn’t until just before he tried to contact me that Rob – or PrfsrFrink, as he’s known online – tried to let me know what was going to happen. It turns out that this kid – Amir – had been perpetrating these “IM Bombs” the entire night for his amusement.
The very first thing that got me angry about what Amir, pronounced Ohm-er, had done was the act itself. The second was that his name was Amir. I am not a fan of anyone with a country club-ish name. No Blakes, Blaines, or Sheffields are ever going to really be friends of mine. One signifier that you have a pretentious name is if it looks like it should be pronounced one way but you insist it be pronounced another. If Amir was Ah-meer, this would not have been a sticking point. Unfortunately for him, it was indeed a sticking point.
Another fact about Amir had already all but sealed his fate in my book. He, like Rob, attended Princeton. Now, being a Rutgers guy, for better or for worse, means that at least a small piece of you must resent and hate Princeton for all they stand for. They are only about 30 minutes apart, driving, yet they could not be more different. Rutgers is almost exclusively attended by people who grew up in New Jersey. Princeton is almost exclusively attended by blue-blooded privileged kids from all corners of the globe. And while their academics are great, their attitude is not, and everyone from Rutgers, even the people like me, who hate everything about Rutgers, knows it and is offended by it.
The next thing Rob told me about Amir further solidified that I was going to act on all of my negative impulses. Amir was Canadian. From Toronto. Now, I have nothing against our peaceful, correct-on-the-health-care-issue neighbors from the north. But I do have a problem with any Canadian who thinks he’s going to walk into my turf – New Jersey – and pull a fast one on me. Simply put, it was inconceivable that some Ivy League, snooty named Canadian of all people, was going to win this battle he didn’t realize was a battle. As a New Jersey resident, as a Rutgers student, and as a depressed lunatic, it offended me on all levels.
I took action. That action was opening my door. The kid across the hall from me was a ridiculously tall and skinny half-Asian guy named Andy Miner. Fate had put us together for this evening - he was the only person more depressed and crazy at the entire college than I was, plus he had a car. On any given evening, both of us could be found sitting in rooms across the hall from each other, both of us on our computers, talking about how we were both lonely and had no friends, never thinking to just hang out together.
“Andy,” I said. He turned around. “Want to drive to Princeton and beat up some Princeton kid?”
Without missing a beat, and without looking confused or surprised, Andy answered yes instantaneously. We called our other friend Jeff, who came running over. All three of us dressed in black from head to toe – black puffy jackets, as it was December, black pants, black wool hats. We got in Andy’s car, and we made our way to Princeton.
When we got there, we quickly realized a number of things. The first was that Princeton was in every way the opposite of Rutgers. It looked beautiful, it was quiet and serene, and most striking to us, it was physically clean. Princeton was clearly not the type of place where you got in without writing an essay.
The second thing we realized was that dressing in black from head to toe was a bad way to try to disguise ourselves. On the Princeton campus, you stand out if you’re not wearing khaki pants. This is the type of place where people see someone dressed in jeans and they’re terrified, let alone people dressed up like James Bond movie henchmen. We knew we had to act fast or the police would be on their way. We knew the name of Amir’s dorm – Rob had given it to us – and we were chagrined to realize it was in the opposite corner of campus from where we parked the car. We sprinted, knowing we probably wouldn’t make it there. Luckily for us, it was as if the Princeton-ites couldn’t even see us. No one blinked an eye. It’s my assumption that we had roughly the same effect on them as Columbus’s ships did on the Indians – none, as they couldn’t even logically fathom that we existed in their reality.
We made our way to the dorm and found it locked. You needed a magnetic swipe card to enter. This surprised us – at Rutgers, anyone can just walk into any dorm at any time. No one cares. We responded in the only way we could think of – we tried to kick the door down. But dorm doors are generally pretty well made, and it wouldn’t give. Luckily for us, a young gentleman in a pair of khakis and loafers saw us in our frustration and walked by.
“Need to get inside?” he asked, smiling. We grunted yes. He swiped us right in, again not sensing that we were clearly up to no good.
Now, when we had left for Princeton, we planned on scaring Amir good. We didn’t really think we were going to do any serious damage to him. But what we saw in the lobby of that immaculate, well maintained dorm changed a lot of things for us that night.
Gathered in the middle of the dorm were a group of about 15 kids. All of them – all of them ¬– were wearing sweaters and/or turtlenecks. They were standing around the dorm’s grand piano. And they were singing Christmas Carols.
To drive from the banks of the muddy Raritan, from the 400 person classes, from the bug infested living areas, from the realization that every day for the next four years was going to be a lackluster one, to Christmas Carols, to the blind, uncaring, unbothered, able-to-belt-out-a-good-Silent-Night world of Princeton and their Christmas Carols, pushed a button inside all three of us. We were real Jersey kids, from a real place, and we walked into a fantasy world where there were very few problems. Without speaking about it, all three of us knew that we planned on doing our damndest to destroy that fantasy world.
The kids around the piano, in what we noticed was becoming a trend, didn’t blink twice at three shady kids dressed in all black lurking around in their background. It was as if they should have been singing “We don’t know that we’re in danger! Fa la la la la, la la la la!”
Rob had told us the number of his floor, which was also Amir’s floor. We made our way there, and were yet again thwarted by the presence of a magnetic lock. We banged on the door for minutes, and as each one passed, we realized what a bad idea it was to come here in the first place. Just as we were giving up hope and coming to our senses, the door opened from the other side.
The boy standing on the other side was pudgy. That was the first thing you had to notice about him. His large eyes blinked behind his glasses, as if this level of human contact was jarring to him.
“Can I help you with something?” he asked.
“We’re friends of Rob’s. From Rutgers. He told us we should come here and wait for him until he gets back,” I said.
“Well, you can wait with me, I guess,” he said, slightly bothered by us. “My name’s Amir.”
I knew Amir knew nothing about Framsky’s identity. In other words, I knew he had no idea who we were or why we were there. He almost seemed tragic to me in that moment, not knowing the level of fear to which he was going to be introduced tonight. I said nothing besides mumbling my thanks for his hospitality.
He turned his nose in the air, than turned his back to us. Without turning around, he said, “There’s some people drinking down the hall. I guess you can come.”
We got to the room in question. There were about ten kids spread out, all with their backs to us, all laughing and drinking. Amir entered and we sheepishly followed. Amir announced us.
“Guys, these are Rob’s friends from Rutgers,” he said.
Without even turning to look at us, one of the young ladies said, “Oh, I thought something smelled funny in here all of a sudden.”
We were furious. I felt bad for Amir again. Whereas we had shown up to scare one person, we were now feeling the urge to snuff out the life of everyone who had ever or would ever call himself a Princeton student.
Amir spun on his heels and led us out of the room. We went down to the other end of the hall. He entered his own room. It was huge, at least three times the size of the space I shared with the Russian Bear. There were chairs everywhere. Amir sat in one of them.
“You guys can have a seat on the floor,” he said with a cocky smirk. This disrespect was my personal last straw.
“Actually Amir,” I said in a voice as calm as could be, “I’m going to sit wherever the fuck I want.”
His head dropped, and he slowly turned around. He suddenly had the body language of someone who realizes that they’re in some pretty deep shit – the type of deep shit where you invite a stranger over, disrespect him a number of times, then realize you know nothing about him.
“I -,” he hesitated. “I’m sorry, I never got your name.”
“My name’s Framsky,” I said.
He went white as a sheet. All color drained from his pudgy face, and without saying it out loud, everything about him suddenly screamed “I want to be back in Toronto right now.”
He tried his best not to let us sense the fear that we could see washing over his body.
“And your friends?” he asked. “What are their names?”
I snapped.
“THEIR NAME IS FRAMSKY TOO, MOTHERFUCKER. DON’T YOU EVER FUCK WITH ME AGAIN.”
All the rage I had at my everyday life teamed up with the massive amount of disrespect I had felt since arriving at this dorm. My voice came forth aggressive, attacking, trying to beat Amir down verbally. He stood up.
“You have to go,” he stammered. “You have to go right now.”
I paid no attention.
“Don’t you ever fuck with me,” I repeated. “You have no idea what it’s like out there - you have no idea who I am.”
He realized I was right. Tears welled up in his eyes. That’s when I said what is probably the coolest, toughest thing I’ve ever said.
“I am in your house, motherfucker.” I grinned. “I am in your fucking house. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”
He looked at me, and the first tear escaped.
“You have to go, right now.”
He took a step towards me.
“I am in your house.”
He took another step.
“Go. Leave.”
“I am in your house.”
He took one more step and he pushed me. I grinned even harder, at this point completely lost in a maniacal rage. I spun around.
“Framsky,” I said matter-of-factly, making eye contact with Andy, “shut the door.”
When I made saw my two friends, I snapped back to reality. For they were looking at me for what I was – a person who had lost control and was about to do something really horrible to another human being. For a brief moment I looked at them and they looked at me. It was Jeff who finally spoke.
“We need to leave right now,” he said. And we did. We took off. We sprinted from that dorm, leaving a fat crying Canadian with a really bright future behind us. We ran down the stairs, through the lobby past a stunning rendition of Feliz Navidad, back across that beautiful campus, and into to Andy’s car. We made it all the way back to Rutgers, where we sat up all night waiting for a call from the Princeton police. A call that, thankfully, never came.
That night had some lasting effects. It still stands out to me as a time where I came closest to completely losing my mind. And even though I, and my friends, had no pride in Rutgers, it did give us some small bit of dignity to be able to defend both ourselves and Rutgers by looking at the have in the face and letting him know that we, the have-nots, could walk right into his house whenever we felt like it.
Two years after my mission to Princeton, I returned there. I had to be in the area anyway, so I headed over to campus to get dinner with Rob. As we crossed over campus, he pointed to a dorm.
“You know,” he said, laughing to himself. “That kid Amir lives in that dorm now.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, actually in that corner… on the ground floor.”
Well, I had to.
I walked over to the window. It was late spring and hot, so there was just a screen. Again utilizing my God given abilities of being a born and raised Jersey guy, I jimmied open the screen and stuck my head in.
Amir was there, sleeping, in his tightie whities, on his back, his crotch splayed towards me. An oscillating fan was pointed towards him.
“Amir!” I whispered, harshly.
He shot up out of bed and reached to the windowsill for his glasses. He fumbled with them for a moment, then put them on and looked my way.
“Framsky?” He said, fear in his voice.
“I’m always watching, man,” I said. “So you be good. You be good.”
Monday, June 23, 2008
Monday Film: The Darryl Strawberry Show: Ep. 3: The Pope
From Chris Gethard, a very funny man who is a very funny performer at the Upright Citizen's Brigade Theater.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Saturday means Tim and Eric: Awesome Record, Great Songs! Review by Sean Rose
From What IS This Shit: Sean Rose's Music Blog 
The faces of genius.
NOTE: THE FOLLOWING IS DIRECTED AT TIM AND ERIC FANS ONLY
We all knew this day would come. I can't pinpoint the exact moment I realized it, but I'd wager that once I heard Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!'s "Sports" theme - a nutty little techno ball-buster featuring a video of Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim, and a bunch of hairy dudes miming their instruments in ridiculous New Wave garb - I knew that Tim and Eric were two of the most talented songwriters of their generation.
Ok, maybe that's a bit of an overstatement. But not much of one. Come on, you know what I mean. I'd wager that the songs on Awesome Show are some of the funniest - and catchiest - to come from a sketch comedy show in a long long time. Hell, Awesome Show is almost more of a musical show than a sketch show anyway. Tim and Eric have produced a shit-ton of various musical bits over the course of two seasons, and I'd wager that about 90% of them are great. And now they're all on CD and claimed for musical history! Huzzah!!
Now, I'm sure I don't need to explain the appeal of these songs to you, fellow fans. If you, like me, consider Awesome Show to be the best sketch comedy show since Mr. Show and UCB, I'm going to guess that you've been passing around CDs of music ripped directly from the show since season one wrapped. So you might be saying, "shit, Sean, why would I need another Tim and Eric CD? I've got all these songs ripped already!!"
Well for one thing, you're a putz. Tim and Eric deserve your money and you fucking know it. Secondly, it's an official CD approved by Mr. Heidecker and Mr. Wareheim themselves! NEAT! And thirdly, there's a lot here that you're not going to hear from the show. Extended lyrics, remixes, covers, guest vocalists - and not only that, but each song is edited down to its very essence, narrowing the tracks down to about a minute-and-a-half each without any unnecessary sketch banter (honestly, if you're a Tim and Eric fan, you're going to know where "Pizza Boy" and "All Of My Life" are from - you don't need context). Also, the sequencing on this CD is very appealing, bucking chronological order in favor of an appeasing mish-mash of various songs from the first and second seasons of the show; it allows for an appealing kaleidescope of Awesome Show's music, showcased in all its glory.
"But what songs are on this thing, Sean?" ("How does it taste, Steve?" - a little in-joke for all you guys, hehe.) That's a fair question. To put it bluntly, this baby's got all your favorites: you've got every Kidz Break, every David Liebe Hart song, and almost every Casey and his Brother; you've got the popular weirdo singalongs of "Do Dah Doo Doo," "Sit On You," "Beach Blast" (yes, that's James Quall's acapella surf ditty), and "Long Legs"; you've got the crazy dance-techno freakouts of "Beaver Boys," "Pumpers and Tumblers," and "Sports"; you've got guest appearances in David Cross's "Pizza Boy," Maria Bramford's "The New You," Aimee Mann's "Hearts," and Bob Odenkirk's "Here She Comes"; and, of course, you've got some wonderful one-off songs, including the inimitable disco-breakdown "Petite Feet," the best-friend vacation theme song "Raz," the weird "Everybody's Talkin'"-takeoff "Lost at the Wheel," and the absolutely disgusting "Love Slaves." If you're in any way a fan of Tim and Eric, the song choices here will not disappoint.
Oh yeah, and they're extended too! I mentioned that earlier! For instance, every David Liebe Hart song is extended, making songs like "Marcama" even creepier (hearing Hart say "You and I can make a nice milkshake together... we can make little whipped-cream babies" to a female puppet is nothing short of life-changing), and other random songs like "Do Dah Doo Doo" and "Dirty Socks" feature extra lyrics that only make them more entertaining. There are some wonderful remixes here as well that you might not expect - "Rolo Tony," for instance, features Tim and Eric's legendary jingle dialogue laid out over a techno beat, finally segueing into the awesome "Rolo Tony Brown Town" credits music (also featured here in its full form as a bonus track). One of my favorites here would be DJ Douggpound's take on the Awesome Show opening theme, which magically shifts from a basic dance remix of the theme into a dense sound collage featuring layers upon layers of various song snippets not featured anywhere else on the disc. These include, but are not limited to:
- The "My New Pep-Pep!" theme
- The "B'owl" theme
- Glen Tennis's "OH BOY!" exclamation
- The "Lazy Horse Mattress" theme
- Eric's "Goodbye!" ringtone from Tim's funeral
- That creepy "OOH MAMA!" music
- Zan's "What Do You Call That?" instructional video
- The "Gravy Robbers" background music
...and many many more. It's like one long Tim and Eric fangasm. Other great bonus tracks here include the Shins' cover of "Wipe My Butt" (I'm not a big Shins fan, but hearing them sing "My brown crusty stains are an environmental issue" with a sweet acoustic backing gives them some major cool points in my book), Built to Spill's crazed rock cover of "Come Over," an 8-bit version of "The Snuggler," two great re-mixes of "Sports," the rock version of "Salame," and much much more that I'll let you discover for yourself. If you're like me, you might be upset with the exclusion of some great songs - including but not limited to the "Tony and Tim" theme, which doesn't show up here in any form (maaaaaaaan) and Tim and Eric's inexplicable beat-boxing from the "Abstinence" episode which only appears briefly in the "Awesome Show" remix. But y'know, that's nitpicking. I will reiterate - if you are a Tim and Eric fan, buy the fuck out of this album and wear the motherfucker out. Throw it on your iPod or Zen or whatever and sneak "Sports" and "Come Over" into your party mixes. Make your friends bow to glory of Tim and Eric. (If they stop being your friends, well, maybe they never were real friends.)
NOTE: THE FOLLOWING IS DIRECTED AT PEOPLE WHO KNOW LITTLE TO NOTHING ABOUT TIM AND ERIC ONLY
OK, I don't know how your tastes run. But lemme ask you this - do you like comically bizarre music? Do you have any interest in the likes of Ween, Frank Zappa, or the Zip Code Rapists? Do you chortle at ridiculous karaoke public-access videos from the late '80s or so? To you have an appreciation for a catchy techno beat?
Well, then you might like Tim and Eric. They're great songwriters. But then again, maybe you won't like them. Their sense of humor is incredibly divisive. I can't really explain why I find a middle-aged woman singing "I've done my chores, I've swept the floor / you make me wet when you come in the door" incredibly funny. Or hearing a a awkward little man-child scream in the middle of a song about hamburgers. Or hearing a chorus of singers chanting "I bet they'll french kiss all night long" and "I wish we knew which hole he's gonna poke her through." Maybe you don't find this funny at all. I can understand that. Kind of.
But you've got to admit, these songs are catchy. They're zippy, fun, and they don't linger too long. Give 'em a try! You might like them, if you like weird shit! Or you might not like them at all, and resent me for the recommendation. That's fair. But honestly, you won't find better music coming from a TV show nowadays. I swear it.
NOTE: THE FOLLOWING IS DIRECTED AT PEOPLE WHO PREFER TO WATCH "FAMILY GUY" OVER "TIM AND ERIC" ONLY
We have nothing to discuss.
View the original HERE!
The faces of genius.NOTE: THE FOLLOWING IS DIRECTED AT TIM AND ERIC FANS ONLY
We all knew this day would come. I can't pinpoint the exact moment I realized it, but I'd wager that once I heard Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!'s "Sports" theme - a nutty little techno ball-buster featuring a video of Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim, and a bunch of hairy dudes miming their instruments in ridiculous New Wave garb - I knew that Tim and Eric were two of the most talented songwriters of their generation.
Ok, maybe that's a bit of an overstatement. But not much of one. Come on, you know what I mean. I'd wager that the songs on Awesome Show are some of the funniest - and catchiest - to come from a sketch comedy show in a long long time. Hell, Awesome Show is almost more of a musical show than a sketch show anyway. Tim and Eric have produced a shit-ton of various musical bits over the course of two seasons, and I'd wager that about 90% of them are great. And now they're all on CD and claimed for musical history! Huzzah!!
Now, I'm sure I don't need to explain the appeal of these songs to you, fellow fans. If you, like me, consider Awesome Show to be the best sketch comedy show since Mr. Show and UCB, I'm going to guess that you've been passing around CDs of music ripped directly from the show since season one wrapped. So you might be saying, "shit, Sean, why would I need another Tim and Eric CD? I've got all these songs ripped already!!"
Well for one thing, you're a putz. Tim and Eric deserve your money and you fucking know it. Secondly, it's an official CD approved by Mr. Heidecker and Mr. Wareheim themselves! NEAT! And thirdly, there's a lot here that you're not going to hear from the show. Extended lyrics, remixes, covers, guest vocalists - and not only that, but each song is edited down to its very essence, narrowing the tracks down to about a minute-and-a-half each without any unnecessary sketch banter (honestly, if you're a Tim and Eric fan, you're going to know where "Pizza Boy" and "All Of My Life" are from - you don't need context). Also, the sequencing on this CD is very appealing, bucking chronological order in favor of an appeasing mish-mash of various songs from the first and second seasons of the show; it allows for an appealing kaleidescope of Awesome Show's music, showcased in all its glory.
"But what songs are on this thing, Sean?" ("How does it taste, Steve?" - a little in-joke for all you guys, hehe.) That's a fair question. To put it bluntly, this baby's got all your favorites: you've got every Kidz Break, every David Liebe Hart song, and almost every Casey and his Brother; you've got the popular weirdo singalongs of "Do Dah Doo Doo," "Sit On You," "Beach Blast" (yes, that's James Quall's acapella surf ditty), and "Long Legs"; you've got the crazy dance-techno freakouts of "Beaver Boys," "Pumpers and Tumblers," and "Sports"; you've got guest appearances in David Cross's "Pizza Boy," Maria Bramford's "The New You," Aimee Mann's "Hearts," and Bob Odenkirk's "Here She Comes"; and, of course, you've got some wonderful one-off songs, including the inimitable disco-breakdown "Petite Feet," the best-friend vacation theme song "Raz," the weird "Everybody's Talkin'"-takeoff "Lost at the Wheel," and the absolutely disgusting "Love Slaves." If you're in any way a fan of Tim and Eric, the song choices here will not disappoint.
Oh yeah, and they're extended too! I mentioned that earlier! For instance, every David Liebe Hart song is extended, making songs like "Marcama" even creepier (hearing Hart say "You and I can make a nice milkshake together... we can make little whipped-cream babies" to a female puppet is nothing short of life-changing), and other random songs like "Do Dah Doo Doo" and "Dirty Socks" feature extra lyrics that only make them more entertaining. There are some wonderful remixes here as well that you might not expect - "Rolo Tony," for instance, features Tim and Eric's legendary jingle dialogue laid out over a techno beat, finally segueing into the awesome "Rolo Tony Brown Town" credits music (also featured here in its full form as a bonus track). One of my favorites here would be DJ Douggpound's take on the Awesome Show opening theme, which magically shifts from a basic dance remix of the theme into a dense sound collage featuring layers upon layers of various song snippets not featured anywhere else on the disc. These include, but are not limited to:
- The "My New Pep-Pep!" theme
- The "B'owl" theme
- Glen Tennis's "OH BOY!" exclamation
- The "Lazy Horse Mattress" theme
- Eric's "Goodbye!" ringtone from Tim's funeral
- That creepy "OOH MAMA!" music
- Zan's "What Do You Call That?" instructional video
- The "Gravy Robbers" background music
...and many many more. It's like one long Tim and Eric fangasm. Other great bonus tracks here include the Shins' cover of "Wipe My Butt" (I'm not a big Shins fan, but hearing them sing "My brown crusty stains are an environmental issue" with a sweet acoustic backing gives them some major cool points in my book), Built to Spill's crazed rock cover of "Come Over," an 8-bit version of "The Snuggler," two great re-mixes of "Sports," the rock version of "Salame," and much much more that I'll let you discover for yourself. If you're like me, you might be upset with the exclusion of some great songs - including but not limited to the "Tony and Tim" theme, which doesn't show up here in any form (maaaaaaaan) and Tim and Eric's inexplicable beat-boxing from the "Abstinence" episode which only appears briefly in the "Awesome Show" remix. But y'know, that's nitpicking. I will reiterate - if you are a Tim and Eric fan, buy the fuck out of this album and wear the motherfucker out. Throw it on your iPod or Zen or whatever and sneak "Sports" and "Come Over" into your party mixes. Make your friends bow to glory of Tim and Eric. (If they stop being your friends, well, maybe they never were real friends.)
NOTE: THE FOLLOWING IS DIRECTED AT PEOPLE WHO KNOW LITTLE TO NOTHING ABOUT TIM AND ERIC ONLY
OK, I don't know how your tastes run. But lemme ask you this - do you like comically bizarre music? Do you have any interest in the likes of Ween, Frank Zappa, or the Zip Code Rapists? Do you chortle at ridiculous karaoke public-access videos from the late '80s or so? To you have an appreciation for a catchy techno beat?
Well, then you might like Tim and Eric. They're great songwriters. But then again, maybe you won't like them. Their sense of humor is incredibly divisive. I can't really explain why I find a middle-aged woman singing "I've done my chores, I've swept the floor / you make me wet when you come in the door" incredibly funny. Or hearing a a awkward little man-child scream in the middle of a song about hamburgers. Or hearing a chorus of singers chanting "I bet they'll french kiss all night long" and "I wish we knew which hole he's gonna poke her through." Maybe you don't find this funny at all. I can understand that. Kind of.
But you've got to admit, these songs are catchy. They're zippy, fun, and they don't linger too long. Give 'em a try! You might like them, if you like weird shit! Or you might not like them at all, and resent me for the recommendation. That's fair. But honestly, you won't find better music coming from a TV show nowadays. I swear it.
NOTE: THE FOLLOWING IS DIRECTED AT PEOPLE WHO PREFER TO WATCH "FAMILY GUY" OVER "TIM AND ERIC" ONLY
We have nothing to discuss.
View the original HERE!
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Thursday is Friendz Video Updatez
On Mondays, we'll bring you the freshest comedy videos from the pro's-but on Thursday, we throw caution to the wind and bring you cutting edge, underground stuff from our pals and buddies.
This Thursday, we're proud to present Bleak! Dating, a video sketch from our good friends at Bleak! Comedy, a sketch group out of NYC's School of Visual Arts. We go way back. So here we go: Bleak! Dating:
Thanks, Bleak!
See you in the future,
Stephen Winchell
This Thursday, we're proud to present Bleak! Dating, a video sketch from our good friends at Bleak! Comedy, a sketch group out of NYC's School of Visual Arts. We go way back. So here we go: Bleak! Dating:
Thanks, Bleak!
See you in the future,
Stephen Winchell
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Wednesday's Comicxsz-PHIL!!!!
Hello, and welcome to Wilhelm on the Web's Wednesday Comics. Generally, every Wednesday, we'll update with a handful of fresh and funny comics. However, there's a lot to work out for that; cartoonists demand internet money, they have to discuss things with their agent, and if sexual favors aren't exchanged, then the whole deal may be lost completely.
So, in the interim, I encourage everyone to visit a website I run with my friend Ben called Have Your Phil. PHIL was the smash hit of the Daily Campus last year, and Ben and I love writing it so much, we just HAD to keep going this summer!
HaveYourPhil is updated EVERY MWF with a brand new strip, and has a full archive if you want to start from the beginning. And, hey! Here's TODAY'S comic!
Next week we'll have all sorts of comics for you. But don't come back until you've Had Your Phil!!!!!
-steve
So, in the interim, I encourage everyone to visit a website I run with my friend Ben called Have Your Phil. PHIL was the smash hit of the Daily Campus last year, and Ben and I love writing it so much, we just HAD to keep going this summer!
HaveYourPhil is updated EVERY MWF with a brand new strip, and has a full archive if you want to start from the beginning. And, hey! Here's TODAY'S comic!
Next week we'll have all sorts of comics for you. But don't come back until you've Had Your Phil!!!!!-steve
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Tuesday Essay: My Plans Concerning a Time Machine by Ben Vigeant
From Astounding Essays:
Sliced so delicately that when your tongue touches it, each fiber of meat collapses into pure flavor. Slathered with the finest barbecue sauce, it tastes like what man has killed to put into your mouth should. Most places they would just get some crap Wonder Bread for their rolls, but these rolls are authentic. Cooked by the wisest old man baker in the back using a baking stone which doubles as the Tablet which God handed down the commandments from on high to Moses, the bread is a celebration of carbohydrates. Unless you get the all wheat one, which calls to a wild animal past which only those who have a bit of the jungle in them still dare put into their body. The sauerkraut was made by a quiet German, a tentative Hun who lives in a shack out back. He doesn’t speak any English, or really at all. His life is his sauerkraut, what might have once been known as Liberty Cabbage liberates your mouth from the dull grayness of ordinary life. Barry’s BBQ made the best pulled pork that you could find ever. It closed three years ago. If I had a time machine and only one use of it, that’s where I’d go.
I’ve been looking into time machines. I find traveling generally tedious, a whole lot of waiting for no real payoff. Some people think that sitting in a cramped little corner for nine hours and walking out to a place where everyone talks funny is a great thing to do with your time. I am a little more realistic. Traveling like that is just a waste of time. Time traveling, by definition, can’t be a waste of time. I’m no big sci-fi geek. I don’t worship Kirk action figures or anything like that. I just want to travel through time; it seems like something that would really help me. Time machines are essentially miracle workers. A time machine can take something that was once destroyed and make it live anew, like Barry’s pulled pork.
I don’t know the first thing about building a time machine. I have had a few thoughts. Most of them involve hooking clocks to things. I know it’s stupid. I don’t see anyone else making a serious effort though. We have the smartest scientists in the world working on lip gloss that tastes like fruit, not advancing us to the next plane of existence. There should only be two things that qualified scientists work on in the world, yet they’re the most ignored. The first is time machines. If we got all of the scientists in the world, do you know how quick we’d have a time machine set up? Second we’d need some sort of device to make sure that nobody would ruin time, which scientists can work on concurrently. Until the day when scientists realize that control of time is what will save us all, humanity is just going to have to put up with my stupid clumsy attempts.
There are so many days that I would consider if I were going back in time that it would make this one use extremely difficult to pick. January 16th, 2003 a day after my first son was born. Barry’s was having a two for one pulled pork sandwich sale. I went in and sat at one of the tables while Barry smiled and winked at me. He called back to his friends in the kitchen and told them to put together two pulled pork sandwiches for his best friend. I laughed; I knew I wasn’t his best friend. Barry was secretive and shifty. You could never quite trust him. There’s only one thing that I have learned to trust in this world, and it’s the reliability of pulled pork. Looking back, I doubt that Barry had any friends. He sure was friendly though, and in the end that’s what counted when you were running the best BBQ the planet had ever seen. I ate the two sandwiches, and I was satisfied.
Maybe I’d go back to the hot June 17th of 1996. I was younger then, and my palate wasn’t terribly advanced. It was advanced enough to know that this was the best that I ever was going to do. It was a day after that first steamy love session I had with the woman who eventually became my wife. Frankly it sold me on the whole deal. This is before Barry had gained too much weight, and he had a lot more hair then. I can remember now, but he had green eyes. It wasn’t something you noticed in his more jowlier days. To get to the point, Barry’s BBQ was having a free sample day where you would get just a cup with the pulled pork, and no sandwich. I took it home and made a pulled pork shake. It was the first of many.
If there was ever a time that really screamed to go to Barry’s BBQ it would be the first time I went, September 18th, 1990. I can remember that day clearly, because the next day my father would die in an entirely unexpected car accident. You can understand though why I never got to see him that day, because I spent the better part of it experiencing Barry’s BBQ. They say that the first time is the best, and let me tell you the truth that when my mouth had first contact with that food I fell down on the floor. Barry had to call an ambulance because he thought I had passed out. I had. When I came to, I was in an emergency room, and I was pissed off. I knew that there was only one thing I wanted and it was a pulled pork sandwich. As soon as I could, I got out of that damn hospital and back to Barry’s where he was waiting with the rest of the sandwich for me. I bet mom was pretty mad she had to go to the emergency room twice in two days.
I start to salivate when I think about going back in time to go to Barry’s. I start to worry, though. What if something goes wrong? Maybe I shouldn’t go back in time on those dates because if I come in contact with myself I’ll toss the entire universe askew. I don’t want to permanently damage anything, I just want the most succulent meat this side of the universe in my mouth slowly melting. Is that too much to ask? I want my salad days of meat. In 2007, no one understands how to make a good pulled pork sandwich anymore. I hate being weighed down by this linear time system which sees that all things must age and be destroyed while we humans sit and watch… as the same things happen to us.
I know that I’m crazy to have theories like this. I already told you that my method of just sticking clocks onto heaps of metal is dumb. I am not a scientist; I can’t make the world a better place just by putting glasses on. Read this though… would you give up everything to experience one moment again? A moment of clarity. A moment where everything in the world seemed just right and you didn’t care about war, death, or any of the other horrors of existence? That’s what I felt when I was in Barry’s. I felt a gasping existential weight being lifted off my shoulders. The only way I will ever be at peace again is if I feel that, at least one more time. I would sacrifice everything I owned, everyone I ever knew, just for it once more. Time travel is the only way. Have you ever loved so much it hurt and tore you apart? That’s how I feel every moment since Barry left town.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Saturday means Deutsch-Österreichisches Feingefühl
For your weekend, we leave you with Deutsch-Österreichisches Feingefühl's CODO, a lovely piece of Austrian Pop music from the 80's. And yes, this is real.
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