Guess what aggressively mediocre, yet bafflingly popular CBS sitcom has just secured the most lucrative syndication deal in TV history? So get ready America, starting in the fall of next year, the offensive nerd equivalent of "Amos 'n' Andy" will be blasting at you from at least three different networks (Fox, CBS, TBS); that's almost "Family Guy"-like levels of television saturation (speaking of "Family Guy" I actually have to note their relatively recent spot on Big Bang Theory parody, definitely one of their occasional hits).
Also interestingly the article mentions that the show broke the previous syndication record held by "Two and Half Men", another illogically popular sitcom created by Mr. Chuck Lorre, who created other such classic fare as "Dharma and Greg", "Cybill", and "Grace Under Fire" (although "Grace" wasn't really all that bad, sort of a poor man's "Roseanne"). This extended string of perplexing success only furthers my pet theory that Chuck Lorre sold his soul sometime around the second season of "My Secret Identity".
Since it's always so close to my birthday, May 7th, especially years like this and next year where it gets dangerously close, there's always been a bit of tension between me and Mother's day (and to a lesser extend V-E Day). I'm sure other people with birthdays near major holidays feel similar discord; those near Christmas birthdays must be the worst. However, I am on the record as saying I am not opposed to mothers in general and the celebration of motherhood. I'll probably call my mother sometime today, I suggest you should too; it's a totally overpowered move for impressing your mom, like M. Bison's psycho crusher. Flowers? Straight up broken.
So today is April 15th, "Tax Day". Maybe if I ever actually held down a job and earned enough income this would mean something to me. Until that terrible time, the Ides of April will continue to remind me of large chains giving out random free stuff and, of course, legendary WWE heel Irwin R. Shyster, better known as IRS.
I understand that since he's a heel the tips above are supposed to be unfair and unconscionable, but really from what I've learned in my basic federal income tax every one of those "tips" seem to be fairly accurate. You shouldn't be claiming your pets as household dependents. Tips from work and money made from garage sales are generally gross income and should be reported. He even includes the forward thinking green message of getting rid of your gas guzzler.
It's quite an admirable commitment to accuracy when compared to the outrageous antics of contemporary heels like the Repo Man (who would arbitrarily reposes random items from other wrestlers without any cause) or The Goon (just because he claimed to be a former hockey goon didn't explain why he would come to the ring in a full hockey outfit, complete with skates). For me, the only questionable move by IRS was teaming up with the Million Dollar Man to from Money Inc. Sure, it turned out to be a highly successful tag team partnership, but I always figured a tax stickler like IRS would always be at odds with an unscrupulous millionaire like the Million Dollar Man who you knew was working more angles than Exxon and GE to avoid paying taxes.
To the dozen or so people who actually read my ongoing Lockhorns Blog regularly, your silent prayers have been answered. After falling behind for most of March and the beginning of April, I can now proudly announce that as of April 10, 2010 the site is completely updated. The last three days have been long, taxing, and the overwhelming bleakness of the material might have put me in a disturbingly dark place during the process; but what's important is that it is finished. Priority-wise I probably should have just given up on the site after fulfilling my original year long commitment and focused on pressing "real world" deadlines (finals, graduation, the bar exam, job hunt), but I found that I couldn't fully focus on any of those other activities until I took the moral imperative to continue updating, at least for this year.
Will I allow the site to lapse as egregiously as before? I'll try my best not to but probably yes. Am I still glad I didn't give up on it? Absolutely. So to help everyone pace themselves and ease on into this flood of updates, here are five standout panels (at least in my opinion) from the previous month to start off with:
"Judging by that contemplative look in his his eyes, he's probably wondering if his current saw has the tensile strength to cut through human bone and various layers of fat."
April 7, 2010 "...I really hope Leroy's mustachioed buddy is just another frustrated husband waiting for his wife to finish shopping rather than some creepy pervert who purchases women's shoes for his own sick pleasures."
"Perhaps when he's looking through the phone book Leroy can also find someone to finally install doors in their kitchen cabinets and slots in their gigantic cinder block of a toaster."
"We all know that between the bad driving and shopping addiction, Loretta is far from the contemporary liberated woman but in this scene she makes Cathy look like Gloria Steinem."
It's not exactly the death of Michael Jackson, perhaps not even up to the notoriety level of Jim Marshall (I always found "famous rock and roll photographer" to be one of the most intolerably pretentious distinctions around), who also died today, but I found the passing of classic oldies crooner Johnny Maestro a particularly sad and notable passing.
All this is based almost entirely (we also share the same birthday, May 7th, so it's always a bummer to lose a cosmic brother) on my absolute love of his signature 1968 smash hit "The Worst That Could Happen" (as Johnny Maestro and the Brooklyn Bridge); a cheesy, horn laden, over-the-top pile driver of a ballad that hits all my guilty (then again do I even have a sense of guilt when it comes to the music I like?) pop music pleasure centers. Aside from the sublime joy of karaoking the song and the ridiculous amount of needless gravitas the singer puts on the situation (labeling the target of the song's marriage to be "THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN!"), it places the listener in a really intriguing (possibly confusing) situation with regards to the protagonist's intentions. The song goes along that extremely rare "I love you so much that I want to see you happy with another man...but really I still want you" route. The only other famous hit song I can think of off the top of my head that goes along that sort of conflicted path is Freddie Fender's 1975 country crossover #1 "Before the Next Teardrop Falls".
Actually before today's untimely death, I was bouncing around the idea of doing a post where I did an in-depth look at whether the protagonist from "The Worst That Could Happen" was actually being a romantic hero or just an unbelievable douche by telling his long time love about his feelings and how her marriage to another man would essentially ruin him (at her wedding no less). My view was that a positive or negative assessment would likely correlate with how much one was a fan of romantic comedies, since essentially the entire genre is distilled into the song's three minutes. The listener finds themselves at the tail end of a classic boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl story with the boy desperately attempting to complete that last step at the wedding . People who either actually wholeheartedly believe in the romantic comedy conceit or people who enjoy and appreciate the rule of the romantic comedy would find the protagonist's actions to be romantic and justified. People who despise the manufactured prefabricated nature of the rom com or who don't really believe in the concept of romantic love would think the protagonist's actions are whiny and unreasonable. I'm for the former but no perspective is inherently wrong.
Needless analysis of the song aside, "The Worst That Could Happen" also has a particularly special significance to me as I enter that point in my life where all my friends and peers are starting to get married. For perhaps the next decade or so, I'll likely be attending the marriages of various like-aged friends, acquaintances, relatives as they transition from their unhindered 20s to the domestic stability of their 30s. I may even end up as one of them before the decade is out (hey, anything's possible). I would be forever regretful that if, during this dynamic period of martial transitions, I didn't get at least one opportunity to sing what may possibly be the most inappropriate wedding song ever written (with the possible exception of "If You Wanna Be Happy" by Jimmy Soul) to the bride-to-be at an engagement party and have the entire reception fall into horrible awkward silence as I profess my unknown, burning love for them.
...Donna Simpson, hopefully the next world's fattest woman. Sure the idea of rigorously attempting to become the grotesque living embodiment of gluttony and excess by consuming as many calories as possible while inversely limiting your movements down to the mere act of shoving more food down your gullet may seem unspeakably appalling. Perhaps it may be seen as an unconscionably obscene affront to all the millions upon millions of people going hungry around the world, and does nothing to shake off the ugly global perception that Americans wallow in fat, lazy, decadence let alone speak well of the kind of people that come from New Jersey. You may view the fact we as a society are not only allowing this occur, but are actually facilitating it by paying her through the internet; and thus should be considered silent but willing accomplices in her self inflicted death should her heart eventually explode in a supernova of cheese and butter.
All these would be valid initial reactions to reading the story, but after thinking about it for a second I'm starting I see the odd logic behind it all. As a morbidly obese, immobile, 600 lb woman you're just a fat person. As a morbidly obese, immobile, 1000+ lb woman, you are a world champion! After you reach a certain degree of bigness, really everything else is just (literally and figuratively) gravy. If you're going to be a lardo, why not be the biggest lardo. There's no denying that she's going to have a whole lot more fun gaining 400 lbs than losing 400 lbs and it's not like anyone's going to pay to see her eat right and exercise. If I were in her strained, gigantic shoes, I would do the same thing. So despite what doctors and other naysayers may say, you just keep on packing on those pounds Donna Simpson and to quote the inspirational words of the late Jim Valvano (replacing the struggle to survive a terminal illness with the struggle to eat more) "Don't give up, don't ever give up."
I guess I should throw in a cursory warning that the following blog post does indeed contain plot spoilers for the classic, controversial music video for The Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up". So if you're some time traveler from the distant past or have been frozen in ice for the 90s, maybe you should just watch it beforehand if you don't want to be denied one of the best twist endings of the 90s outside of the "Sixth Sense" (spoiler: Bruce Willis is dead).
So anyways, "Smack My Bitch Up", one of my all time favorite music videos. It really has everything I look for in the music video medium (and really all media in general): action, displays of violence, adult situations, sex (preferably girl on girl), and twist endings. As an additional bonus, I even enjoyed the music on an independent basis (my freshman year of high school purchase of "The Fat of the Land" is definitely the height of my explorations into "electronic music"). The controversial elements of the video are obviously what gives it is lasting legacy, but for me it's really the ending that I find the most shocking of all.
All the violence, sex, misogyny, drug use, etc. are really generic elements that the jaded 21st (or even the late 20th) century observer has seen countless times before. The big final reveal that the video's protagonist, with whom you've voyeuristically shared the whole chaotic video through their eyes, is actually a woman and thus subverting all your perceptions about everything that just happened; now that's shockingly unexpected! I'm sure someone can also make a up big feminist analysis of the whole thing, with lines about empowerment and gender roles in media as well. I just really dig it for the same reason I like reruns of the Twilight Zone and O. Henry short stories: those clever twist endings.
Watching the video again recently I realized that a lot of contrivances (some more subtle than others) had to go into the video to maintain the gender charade until the end of the video. Some of the more obvious contrivances are: the lack of mirrors and opportunities for reflection, the unisex clothes, the sparse bedroom, the ambiguous attention from both female and male characters throughout the night. However, I noticed that most of the entire video's ruse depends on the fact that the actress playing the protagonist has subtle "man hands".
While obviously nowhere near the comical effect of Jerry's date from the "Seinfeld" episode that coined the phrase, our protagonist clearly has a pair of mitts that would at least be considered gender neutral. They lack any hint of the telltale daintiness, delicateness, and refinement one would expect out of a young, swinging 90's, British woman's hands. These are some sturdy looking paws: no manicure, no nail polish, no rings, no signifying bracelets; and since they are basically our only physical clues to the character it's absolutely essential for the video that they are that way. Any trace of femininity would have given the ending away or at least raised questions and diminished the effectiveness of the ending. So therein lies the key to the video's greatness, whether it's taking a shower, preparing lines of cocaine, eating takeout, knocking back shot after shot, assaulting a DJ, recklessly driving drunk, or making love to a stripper; our protagonist never tips their hand.
I noticed that you've recently decided to abandon your core principles of being a channel to provide information about the weather and decided to occasionally air feature films tangentially related to the weather (Perfect Storm and Twister I understand, but Deep Blue Sea...really? Are you just counting any movie that shows the weather on screen?). I personally don't really have a huge beef with this new programming direction, since I don't really watch the Weather Channel. For years, I always found the Weather Channel to be one of the more needlessly roundabout ways to get information about the weather. It seemed like every time I flipped over to see what the local weather was like I'd be getting the five day outlook for Duluth, MN or Scottsdale, AZ. I've always found it far quicker and easier to just check the internet, the paper, the local news, or even the nearest window.
Also, it seems like it's the general trend of current cable channels to be compromising their original narrow programming objectives. MTV and VH1 hardly show any music videos, ESPN started making their own made-for-tv films, Bravo and A&E used to be about the arts and culture, and the only thing I'm "learning" on TLC is what the current lowest common denominator is for reality programming. So, really I can't fault the Weather Channel for merely trying to stay relevant in this shifting cable landscape. I figure in a few decades all cable television will just be slightly different flavors of TNT/TBS.
With that said, I have a dynamite idea for your channel that I'm willing to give away free of charge. Seeing as how today is Groundhog Day, the premier (and so far only) holiday devoted to weather forecasting, the Weather Channel would benefit greatly by capitalizing on this massive promotional opportunity. Given this and your recent decision to show movies, I think you know where I'm going with this: 24 hours of "Groundhog Day" marathon!
Frankly, I'm shocked that this hasn't already. It's an absolutely perfect synergy of weather forecasting and weather entertainment. TBS's decision to run 24 hours of "A Christmas Story" each year has become an undeniable hit and has now firmly entrenched itself as a holiday television tradition in its own right along with airings of "It's a Wonderful Life" on Christmas Eve and "The 10 Commandments" on Easter. For the small price of obtaining the rights to "Groundhog Day", the Weather Channel can gain that valuable, long lasting cultural cache. In addition, if you think about it, given the unique narrative structure of "Groundhog Day", a repetitive marathon is more than apt.
I understand that this is the first year Weather Channel is showing movies so the missing of this golden opportunity is somewhat forgivable. However the channel should not find themselves on Groundhogs Day 2011 repeating this mistake. They should immediately set out on obtaining the rights, lest some other rival network like USA or TBS or maybe even SpikeTV comes in and steals your thunder and leaves the Weather Channel out in the cold (dig those weather puns I threw in there?)
Fellow friends of Victor Sells Out, I want to first start off with an apology. It has been well over an entire month since my last post. Although this blog is no stranger to extended posting delays, that was inexcusably long hiatus even for the extremely low standards of this blog. For that I am sorry.
Compared to my banner year of 2008, the previous year has been a clear letdown. The blog regressed from 130 total posting with a minimum of 10 per month to a mere 76 total posts overall with December registering an all time low of 1 post. In addition to the quantity, I felt the quality of the posts were a bit off. There were more than a couple posts that were either too brief or were questionable departures from logic. In pushing a lot of my time and energy into completing my yearlong Lockhorns project (and to a lesser extent: school, work, personal life, etc....) I unfortunately gave my flagship blog the short shrift. Also, I think I'll blame the recession too. For a blog that entered 2009 with high expectations of growth and greater success, it was a great disappointment on par with the 2009 Mets or Season 3 of "Sliders" (you can probably lump the rest of the series run in that category).
However, take heart; it is a new year (and even a new decade)! It's the perfect time for improvement and everyone's on a redemption kick. What will this mean for Victor Sells Out in 2010? Well, if there's one thing I learned in law school thus far is never to definitely promise any future action or result, lest you open yourself up to liability; but I will promise that I will attempt to churn out a significantly improved blog for the upcoming year in terms of both quantity and quality. I will try to not procrastinate too much about posting. I will give my best efforts in trying to post prompt entries that are more current and relevant.So basically my tentative non-binding promise to you is that at the very least it'll be better than last year.
So Happy New Year follow readers and get ready for another year of (slightly less) spotty updating courtesy of Victor Sells Out!
The other night I just zoning in and out of another predictably underwhelming new episode of Saturday Night Live when I can across one of the most interesting sketches in a long time. Aside from being pretty funny (a most definite rarity in this the third decade era of the show), it surprised me with its acute esotericness. I certainly didn't expect this sort of random Gathering of the Juggalos bashing coming out of the SNL writer's room.
When it came on I was briefly taken back a couple of summers ago when I first came across a youtube clip advertising this surreal Insane Clown Posse themed Woodstock. Everything about it just seeming mesmerizingly terrible and fascinating at the same time. From the seemingly endless list of "underground" (i.e. obscure) random psychotic clown rap, horrorcore, rap rock, death metal acts, to the bizarre yet strangely fitting integration of backyard wrestling, carnival games, camping, and stand up comedy; it all seemed like some sort of mythical event of unfathomable suck. Even the venue city, Cave-In-Rock, IL, seemed like a fantasy location. Despite it being the Faygo soaked polar opposite of every musical, cultural, artistic aesthetic I enjoyed, deep in the back of my mind I kind of wanted to go just to see how much worse it could be, to really embrace the pure unadulterated awfulness.
Looking at the latest, psychotic, mud caked infomercial for the 2009 gathering below, I am pleasantly disturbed that even though the SNL sketch was obviously exaggerated for comic effect, I still find the real thing to be even more surreal and nonsensical.
So anyone up for a road trip to Cave-In-Rock the 11th annual next summer?
After recently watching the music video for "Red Skies" by the Fixx, I came to two conclusions. One, while the whole video is laughably outdated (the bassist in the cape seems particularly out of place) and stylistically looks more like one of those embarrassing "music videos" you once shot with your friends at Six Flags; it was was probably viewed as totally, unironically, slick and awesome in 1982. Second, the lead singer, Cy Curnin, bears a striking resemblance to...
Leading summer blockbuster cinema auteur and generally "awesome" guy, Michael Bay.
You know for a guy who prides himself on being at the cutting edge of cinematic special effects and technology, his hair cut has been firmly frozen in time since the mid 80s.
So I just found out that Ken Ober suddenly passed away over the weekend. While I was far too young and cable-less to have seen his work as host of "Remote Control" on MTV, I will forever remember him for his role as the main protagonist in the music video for Blues Traveler's "Hook" and to a lesser extent as the sleazy manager in the video for "Run Around". I hate to admit it but "Four" was one of the definitive albums of my youth; a key touchstone of my early development as a music fan. For about a year and a half, that album was inescapable. When VH1 wasn't playing the hell out of the videos, I got my daily dose it from the school bus driver who firmly planted the bus dial on WEBE 108, the local Adult Contemporary station where it was basically played on the hour.
While I'm not going start wearing a KO patch on my shirt or anything (in fact, I'm actually more bummed out by the other recent death of Edward Woodward aka The Equalizer), it is still a little sad nevertheless.
Anytime I see a fairly respectable, Academy Award winning actor with a history of generally prudent film choices star in some questionable high concept fare or carry a one week and done cheapie or some mindless live action Disney drivel or have a pointless role in some creatively bankrupt sequel, I always suspect that they secretly have some severe financial problem. I'd like to think that these are generally intelligent people with enough aesthetic discretion to know what is a decent script and what is a total embarrassment. Maybe it's serious tax issues or ruinous divorce judgments or severely misplaced investments or a cripplingly costly cocaine addition; whatever the unknown reason it may be I give them the benefit of the doubt that at the end of the day their hand is being forced by the overwhelming need of the paycheck.
How else could you explain Sir Ben Kingley in "BloodRayne" or "Lucky Number Slevin"? Something had to give when Jack and Diane signed up for "Something's Gotta Give". Was Dame Judy Dench really that blown away by the script for "The Chronicles of Riddick" that she had to get on board? How desperately in debt was Jon Voight in 2004 that he was forced to play the villain in both "Superbabies: Baby Genisues 2" and something called "Karate Dog"? Have you seen what Kathy Bates has been up to for the last five years? What sort of extended financial quagmire could be the reason for the last ten or so years of Cuba Gooding Jr.'s career?
So with the recent news of the staggering financial problems of one of the biggest Oscar winning offenders, Nicholas Cage, my pet theory may actually have gained some credibility. Looking at his career after winning the Best Actor Oscar for "Leaving Las Vegas" in 1995, it's pretty obvious that he had drifted away from his more humble cinematic roots (pretty sure he won't be doing any Coen Brothers movies anytime soon) and fully embraced his new career as a blockbuster actor. Sure every once in a while he'd flash some of his acting chops like in "Adaptation" but for the most part it was popcorn action flicks ("The Rock", "Gone in 60 Seconds", "Con Air", the "National Treasure" movies) or slick studio comedy-dramas where he essentially plays himself on auto-pilot ("The Family Man", "Matchstick Men", "Lord of War", "The Weather Man").
On the whole it was a pretty fine career, the sort of generally accepted work that you'd expect from a popular a-list actor. You knew he was in it for the money but he obviously had enough clout to choose his scripts. However as his spending started to spiral out of control and his financial troubles started to mount, you can clearly see that his discretion was starting to take a severe slide as more and more questionable roles kept trickling in. It think you can trace it back to his all time ludicrous performance in the completely unnecessary "The Wicker Man" in 2006. Next came "Next" in 2007. His lone feature for 2008 was the offensively terrible "Bangkok Dangerous" (was he supposed to be an Asian guy here?). 2009 has thus far shaped up to be another banner year with "Knowing" (Cage sees into the future yet again) and voice over work in "G-Force" (that guinea pig movie) and "Astro-Boy".
As his serious financial problems grow, the fear is that he will really start to lose more and more discretion with his movies choices and eventually be driven completely by the needs of his mountainous debt. According to IMDB 2010 and beyond already don't appear all that promising (looks like "Ghost Rider 2" is in development). If Mr. Cage doesn't start taking better care of his personal finances and cuts back on the dinosaur skull bidding wars, he might perhaps one day find himself actually making a snuff film for 8mm 3 (yes they actually made a 2!).
It's downright inexcusable that I have gone through most of today, completely oblivious as to the historical significance of the 5th of November (and no, I'm not talking about Guy Fawkes Day, you limey). On this night, November 5th, 1955, 54 years ago, noted German-American Scientist/Inventor Dr. Emmett L. Brown, after a serendipitous slip off his toilet seat while attempting to hang a wall clock, ultimately uncovered the secrets of time travel.
As we all remember from his famous recollection of the event to his young friend Marty in the parking lot of the Twin Pines Mall on the historic eve of the first manned trip through time:
"I remember it vividly. I was standing on the edge of my toilet hanging a clock, the porcelain was wet, I slipped, hit my head on the edge of the sink. And when I came to I had a revelation, a vision, a picture in my head. A picture of this...this is what makes time travel possible. The flux capacitor!"
Little did the we know what sort of monumental Biff Tannen-related implications this discovery would end up having on mid-80s suburban California...and the world.
Now I've got to go home and hang my ceremonial clock over my toilet.
Today, with a relatively quiet whimper that hardly does justice to its lasting legacy, Yahoo! finally pulled the plug on longtime web hosting site Geocities. In an instant millions of long ignored, aesthetically bankrupt, badly formatted pages suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. Perverse slash fiction websites, "unofficial" celebrity fan pages, esoteric web rings and clubs, countless web counters; all now the forever lost recorded ephemera of the primordial era of the Internet.
As part of the generation that was born with and grew up concurrently with the personal computer and eventual evolution of the Internet, the death of Geocities is definitely a somber moment. For many of us our crappy personal Geocities page was our first innocent baby steps into this omnipresent force in our lives called the Internet. One can only look back with wistful pixelated nostalgia about a time when having a scrolling marquee or a three frame animated gif on your page was a big deal, where you could find an AOL trial CD in your mailbox every week, when a thirty second wav file took half an hour to download and a thirty second lo-res porn clip took half a day, when "The Net" seemed like cutting edge futurist cinema. Simpler times, indeed.
Although I lost track of it nearly a decade ago and I doubt that it even survived this long, when I heard the news of Geocities imminent demise I still wondered if one of those doomed long abandoned pages was my first web page made back in middle school. Like a great majority of Geocities sites I spend all of an hour setting it up and nothing more afterwards. It was basically a single homepage with some generic background wallpaper, a picture of Mr. T (I used to love watching reruns of the A-Team growing up, some neon scrolling font welcoming people to what I called my "Super Fun Happy Website", and some random greeting message to anyone fortunate enough to come upon my site. In a way it can be viewed as the proto-Victor Sells Out.
While we'll never know if my site still existed up to today, for the benefit of all you readers out there, I have managed to create a crude artist's rendering from memory of what it may have looked circa 1997, right down to the Netscape browser:
That counter should be closer to 10.
Misty poorly coded memories, of the way we were...
Does it make me a callous, warped person that the first thought I had after reading the breaking story about the lost six year old child being trapped inside a homemade hot air balloon was "Up Up and Away" by the 5th Dimension?
Actually what would really make me a bad person would be if I referred the kid as having pulled a "Steve Fossett" (which I sort of just did I guess...). If only the kid was old enough to have read the classic Choose Your Own Adventure Book "By Balloon to the Sahara". That story completely turned me off the romantic myth of free form hot air balloon travel. Every other ending had my party and I getting killed or abducted.
*UPDATE: It looks like the kid was the real villain in all this; little shit was hiding in the attic the whole time. He'll probably get a Today Show appearance out of this.
I just have two minor points to add to my previous post. First, it is nearly unforgivable that I had completely forgotten to reference, in an article about America blowing up the moon, the completely apt "Mr. Show" sketch about America blowing up the moon. Second, to the exhilaration of some and the dismay of others, President Obama was surprisingly awarded the Noble Peace Price today. The official reason stated was for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples", but given that this prestigious award comes on the same day as America's dive bombing of the moon, it doesn't take much to see through that ambiguous diplomatic double talk and realize that the real reason is "hey, thanks for taking a shot at the moon on behalf of the earth".
Under the thinly veiled guise of conducting "research" our nation's best and brightest minds over at NASA will be conducting a small bombing run on the moon Friday morning. Ostensibly this planned collision is to take a series of scientific measurements with regards to the surface and erupting debris in an effort to seek out possible buried ice water on the barren satellite. However, let's really be honest with ourselves about this whole affair. This is just the latest chapter in man's ongoing quest to stick it to the moon; and really there's no more worthy an endeavor out there for mankind.
Since the dawn of human history our old gray nemesis, the moon, has menacingly circled us, like the Death Star, constantly looking for new ways to wipe us out from Mother Earth. It attempts to drown and purge us by manipulating the tides. It tries its best to block our access to the sun and have, in the past, drove many of our primitive civilizations into mass hysteria. It saddled us with an unreliable calendar system before we changed to solar. It gives us endless swarms of werewolves that continue to plague humanity. It has provided a fertile home for alien races that are hostile to us. It inspired a certain creepy fast food mascot from my childhood that still continues to haunt my adult dreams.
With no immediate end in sight, the unwavering battle between man and moon rages on, with this latest salvo being the most significant strike at the satellite since Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and some other guy first shoved an American flag down its throat for all mankind. It appears that this seemingly eternal war of attrition will continue until the day when either the moon smashes into the Earth and causes a planet-wide mass extinction of all life or when we tame and colonize it and proudly build a Moon Walmart on the lunar surface.
So godspeed on your kamikaze mission LCROSS probe. We will never forget your brave sacrifice for the ongoing effort. I just hope NASA has planned for the obvious counter attack from the moon that awaits.
You ever have one of those lousy days where everything is just ever so slightly off kilter, and nothing seems to work out the way you expect despite your best efforts, leaving you feeling ultimately powerless and impotent as you suddenly develop a heightened sense of your own mortality and begin to question if your own actions have any meaningful influence in your life as you sink deeper and deeper into a sort of existential funk where you find yourself at the end of the day staring at your bedroom ceiling while desperately pondering the question "why?" over and over again kind of like that famous footage of Nancy Kerrigan surrounded by reporters and doctors after her attack?
Yeah, I guess I could consider today a bit of a wash. Well, it's probably nothing a couple of late night syndicated Seinfeld reruns and a good night's sleep won't cure.
50 years ago this evening, Rod Serling took America on a journey through a fifth dimension beyond which was known to man -- a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, where the boundaries were that of imagination. Indeed, is the 50th anniversary of the television debut of...the "Twilight Zone".
Anyone who knows me is well aware that I am a massive "Twilight Zone" fan. Watching the "Twilight Zone" marathon on TV was one of my earliest childhood television memories and it still continues to be a bi-yearly ritual for me to catch the 4th of July and New Years marathons on the SyFy Channel (typing out that new name will never stop feeling ridiculous). I have my dog eared copy of the definitive "Twilight Zone Companion", a drawer of full tapes of random episodes I've gotten over the years, and I always make it a priority everytime I'm at Disneyworld to ride the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror (despite the fact that they totally nerfed the initial fall to the point of boredom). As a lifelong fan of the show, I really can't add much to say about it that hasn't already been said. It's like a writing a blog post about the Beatles, what more praise can you add?
I could have done some obvious and tedious tribute to mark the occasion like giving my top 10 Twilight Zone episodes, or reviewing the mini-marathon they had on SyFy (still ridiculous) earlier today, or writing about what a pioneering genius Rod Serling was, or how mind blowing this show must have been in 1959, etc. However, I figured in the same unexpected, twist tradition of the "Twilight Zone", I'd go a different route.
While Rod Serling is obviously known for his "Twilight Zone" work, many don't know that he co-wrote the screenplay for possibly the greatest twist ending movie in history, "Planet of the Apes" (if you're actually wondering what this twist I'm referring to is, please exit the cave you've been living in and check out the movie. It's been over 40 years, I figure there's been enough of a spoiler warning). The 1968 movie was actually adapted from the book and it was Serling who came up with the new classic "it was earth all along" ending. The book itself, which I remember slogging through back in high school, was literally about a guy landing on another planet of apes where apes evolved over humans who then went back to Earth hundreds of years later to find it also had become run by apes (it's sort of like the Marky Mark ending from the 2001 remake). It was a mild twist, but far inferior to Charlton Heston screaming in frustration on the shore at a ruined Statute of Liberty.
From the setup to the payoff and the moral message in between, the movie itself really comes off as a feature length "Twilight Zone" episode. It was so much like a standard "Twilight Zone" episode that a few years back one intrepid fan actually edited the entire movie down into a classic half hour, black and white, episode complete with title sequences and introductory and closing narrations. The whole thing comes off as a completely inspired piece of editing. Although things get expectedly a little choppy in the second act of the story, the perfect fit of the opening and closing narration from previous Twilight Zone episodes ("Elegy" and "The Shelter" respectively) alone makes this a classic.
So to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the "Twilight Zone", here's the unofficial "lost" episode:
Guess what aggressively mediocre, yet bafflingly popular CBS sitcom has just secured the most lucrative syndication deal in TV history? So get ready America, starting in the fall of next year, the offensive nerd equivalent of "Amos 'n' Andy" will be blasting at you from at least three different networks (Fox, CBS, TBS); that's almost "Family Guy"-like levels of television saturation (speaking of "Family Guy" I actually have to note their relatively recent spot on Big Bang Theory parody, definitely one of their occasional hits). 
