VSO's 100 Blogs...100 Typos: 20 - 11

The penultimate edition of the VSO 100 Blogs...100 Typos countdown is upon us. Can you believe it? Eighty entries have been exhumed and desecrated as we now enter the terrible teens. Of course if everything went according to the timetable I laid out in the previous post, the countdown should have had its glorious finale yesterday and this entry would be about Urklebot or me ranking the tracks from "The Nylon Curtain." If you were holding your breath for the past two days based on my promises then you obviously don't know me that well (and you're most likely dead from asphyxiation). One of my defining characteristics is not living up to the promises I make, to myself and to other. This will probably also lead me to become the worst, most disappointing, "Cat's In the Cradle" father ever.

When I'm gonna blog again? I don't know when, but we'll have the blogs out now!:

20. King of the Road?

January 24, 2008

In fulfilling the FCC's yearly quota for public service announcements for pop culture blogs with moderate to light daily readership here are a few tips (derived from my recollection of Law and Order: SVU episodes and random wikipedia entries) for...Determining If Your Child Is A Potential Serial Killer:

Does your child display one or more of the "Macdonald triad" of warning signs?:

• Fire starting, interest in arson.
• Cruelty to animals, involving torturing or killing of larger animals.
• Bed wetting beyond the normal age when they grow out of it.

Are you a prostitute, a physically/psychologically/sexually abusive parent, alcoholic, or any combination of all three?

Does your child have rich fantasy life centered around rape, torture, and murder?

Does your child suffer from feelings of inadequacy, worthlessness, arising from humiliation and abuse?

Do your child have the inability to determine right from wrong?

Does your child display lack of sympathy and empathy for others?

Do you suspect that your child is wearing a "mask of sanity" during periods of non-psychotic behavior?

When asked what they would like to be when they grow up have they ever responded, "a person who murders three or more people with an initial 'cooling off' period between each murder and whose motivation for said murders are based mostly on psychological gratification"?

19. Smell the Glove

April 14, 2008

I once read that according some researchers (the kind who don't want to waste their valuable time finding cures for cancer or solving global energy problems) the most powerful female aphrodisiac is baby powder since it subconsciously triggers in their minds that inherent female need to get knocked up and continue the species. On the male side it was cinnamon, for reasons I can't recall (inherent male need to chew Big Red?). For me, the scent I always dig is the smell of sunblock. I'm not a fan of the beach, pools, and most activities that involve long periods of being exposed to sun but I do enjoy chicks in bikinis and that unique sunblock smell that you can't find anywhere else. I'd wear sunblock all the time if I didn't despise using lotions of every sort. If they'd bottled that scent and made a super concentrated cologne to just dab behind the ears I'd get on board. It'd kinda be like Kramer's idea for "The Beach" except without that sea smell.

18. Sometimes a Fantasy...
May 23, 2008

If anyone is still wondering, I still haven't forgiven that bitch! I know that in America one is innocent until proven guilty; but in the kangaroo court that is the court of Victor's opinion, Mariah Carey is still guilty of pissing on my childhood until she or an agent working on her behalf provides me definitive proof that she did not sabotage my outing to Rye Playland in the mid 90s. Failing proof of innocence, I will also accept a heartfelt sorry letter and a DVD of "Glitter" signed by Ms. Carey. Until that time, this blog and I will never endorse any creative output by one Mariah Carey, even all her awesome, mega hit, pop classics from the 90s.

17. How many of you are familiar with the concept of a "tontine"?
July 16, 2007

As of the posting of this entry none of the surviving cast members of the five movies/television series have passed on. This is especially astonishing considering the main cast of the "Golden Girls" is still going strong. They even showed up (sans Estelle Getty) to receive "The Pop Culture Award" at that TVLand Awards (one of the most bizarre and nonsensical award shows ever created). While their tontine will remain unresolved for decades to come, I think the more relevant question would be who will be the first girl to go? Bea Arthur and Betty White are the oldest at 86, Estelle Getty is right behind them at 85, while Rue McClanahan is 74. The safe money would be on Getty since she unfortunately has been in ill health in recent years but she was also in "Stop or My Mom Will Shoot!" so we know she's a tough broad. We all know Bea Arthur will, along with Angela Lansbury, be forever 70 and Rue McClanahan has more than a decade on the rest of them. By the process of elimination my vote goes to poor Betty White to be the first to meet St. Olaf.

16. The Victor Abroad, Part I, 6/12: Do You Know the Way to San Jose?
July 6, 2007

Before the VSO 100 Blogs...100 Typos, my Costa Rican Travelogue was suppose to be my big ten part anthology. Unfortunately due to getting caught up in the hoopla of the airing of the "World Series of Pop Culture", this series suffered an "Emily's Reasons Why Not"-like brief run. To my defense I did mention that sudden cancellation would be one of the things to possibly look out for when the series started. I regret not getting at least an entry or two into the project since I did write out a fairly extensive amount of observations and insights in my journal while traveling. I could restart it now but it will be even more fictitious and unreliable than a year ago. Perhaps that may actually end up making my travel story even better.

15. Victor's One Time Special March Legal Madness Acceptance Pool!!
March 9, 2007

One shout out for an abruptly canceled series deserves another. While this series and the series above were both technically failures, there is still much credit to be given (by myself to myself) for ambitiousness. There's really nothing more I can say about the VOTSMLMAP that hasn't been said in the three previous ranked entries (#67, #66, and #65). My parting insight on law school is that, regardless of if you really want to be a lawyer or not, the experience of law school will uniformly suck.

14. The "quarterlife" Experiment
February 28, 2008

I remember the words just effortlessly flowing out of my mind, down my arms and my fingers perfectly syncing them to the keyboard, making reality both my unexpected rage and satisfaction to be forever immortalized in the aether and broadcast to the world. Waxing poetic aside, "quarterlife" was SHIT! Like I wrote in the entry, I and everyone that was in the "quarterlife" of their lives was or should have been offended by this minstrel show of supposed mid-twenties, post collegiate life. It was a relieving example of the system working when the show immediately got axed after episode one (a la "Emily's Reasons Why Not" and my Costa Rican Travelogue). I should feel similarly disgusted with "Young American Bodies" which is essentially the same series, but I give it some slack since it's actually made by people of my generation and it's really just a forum to show sex and nudity (which redeems any flawed work of art in my book).

13. We've got the team work to make the dream WORK!
May 9, 2007

With the current turmoil and under performance of the Mets, it seems less and less likely that there will be another World Series run like '86 in the cards this year. A lot has been said and written about the the failure of the Mets after 1986 to live up to their potential and become a dynasty. I agree it was a great disappointment for the Mets to have never won another title and an even greater disappointment for two Hall of Fame caliber talents like Doc Gooden and Daryl Strawberry to have had their careers wrecked by off the field troubles. However, a part of me still wonders if they had won another three or four championships, would they have been as memorable? Dynasties are well and good, but with a few exceptions many are boring and forgettable. I recall being consistently bored by the Yankees' late 90s string of World Series victories. When people recall the most memorable Super Bowl, they'll more often recall the Jets' lone victory in SB III than any of the Dallas Cowboys' five. The same can go for any of the Spurs 4 titles. So while it is sad that the 80's Mets turned out to be a one hit wonder, in the end perhaps it made that championship all the more special (although they really should have made it past the Dodgers in '88).

12. Victor's Ten Random Thoughts on Tecmo Super Bowl
February 8, 2007

No top ten list of the greatest games ever made for the NES (possibly for video games consoles) should not include Tecmo Super Bowl. When I hear a Beatles song I can kind of understand that while it seems a little simple by modern standards it still holds up and it must have been mind blowingly original when it originally came out. This is the same way I feel about Tecmo Super Bowl, it's obviously completely outflanked ten times over by the the modern incarnations of Madden, yet it still has all the essential elements of the modern games (licensed teams, players, statistics, injuries) and other football games of its day when compared to Tecmo were literally generic pixels moving across a green background. It dominated like Bo Jackson against the Patriots.

11. In the white room...
March 7, 2008

I don't know what the "I Love the New Millenium" trainwreck on VH1 will do for memorable music videos to look back and snark about. As ridiculous and dated the 80s and 90s were in terms of music videos, at least they had an original vision, an earnest ambition to take the medium in a specific direction. By the 2000's everybody gradually stopped watching videos and pop culture in a large part started to become this faceless, postmodern, rehash, reinterpretation of past trends and nostalgia (kind of like this countdown). Eight years into the 00's and I can't think of any videos that captures and defines the "2000's" like all the white room views captured the late 80s, early 90s. I refuse to accept Fall Out Boy as the definitive music video artists of this decade.