Do unto others, as long as it’s consensual.

When the going gets tough, go to the movies.

The lion and the lamb will lie down together, although they may be forced to eventually adopt.

The journey of a thousand miles begins and ends with surprisingly few frequent flyer credits.

Life is a meaningless accident of an uncaring universe; therefore, never turn down a second helping of dessert.

Always answer when opportunity knocks, unless it’s just another Mormon.

You actually can get more mileage from a cheap pair of sneakers.

A man’s worth is not determined by the number of things he possesses, but rather, the value of those things.

Life is short but awkward pauses last for eternity.

Oh my savior!  Keeper of my immortal soul!  How hast thou been lately?  Perhaps we can hang.

Baby Fear Factor.
Potential situations:

- Forcing them to eat spinach

- Forcing them to walk before they’re ready

- Let them listen to Wiggles records but only backwards

When ratings start to dip:

- Force them to walk across perilous rivers swimming with crocodiles

- Force them to make gourmet dinners for elite society using only commonly found household ingredients

World’s Most Dangerous Babies.

Potential stars:

- Baby who spits

- Baby who pukes

- Baby who throws food around

When ratings start to dip:

- Baby with machine gun

- Baby with poison darts

- Al-Qaeda babies

The Real World: Montessori Pre-School

Potential character types:

- Artist baby (ace at fingerpainting)

- Aspiring rapper baby (M.C. Babyface)

- Volatile baby that causes all the conflict--grumpy, refuses to take naps (possibly still breast fed?)

When ratings start to dip:

- Celebrity teachers (The Coreys, Haim and Feldman, drop in for a guest lecture; hilarity ensues)

- Celebrity baby Show-and-Tell (Britney Spears’s baby, Sean, can show the others his scars from the many times he was hurtled out of his car seat and through the windshield; Tomkat’s baby, Suri, can show everyone the special gills implanted into his skin as a gift from his alien godfathers; Brangelina baby shows hot pics of Mom)

Bored blog, sick of the same old stats, seeks discreet encounters with random readers. Please no fly by night commenters--looking for long-term commitment leading to RSS feed subscription.  Be willing to try exotic, unusual sentence formulations.  Open to anything but flame wars are a hard limit.

About me: Four years old but feel only a few months at heart.  Friends tell me my graphics are cute.  I take up more bandwidth than I’d like but I’m working on slimming down.  Party days are long behind me but still enjoy occasional linking and group blogrolling.  I do have Google ads but otherwise financially self sufficient. 

Bonus points if you have a fetish for black text on white background.

Your pic gets my screenshot.

A colleague at work had some advice in regards to the topic broached in the post below: she said “You should exfoliate.” I told her I never expected anyone to suggest that; usually whenever I do that, people get upset and ask me to leave the room.

But she said “No, exfoliation means that you get rid of the dead skin on your face.” I begged her pardon.  My skin is not dead.  It may be sleeping, though. Or just drowsy.  How many people, after all, are comfortable in their skin?  I’m very comfortable in mine, and sometimes that causes my skin to take a little nap. But that’s not the same thing as dead.

The fact of the matter is, I resent the whole push to get men to buy makeup and become participants in the billion-dollar makeup industry. And it’s not just because that and a shaved back will turn me into a meterosexual.  It’s that I have no wish to contribute to an industry that experiments on peacocks just so cover girls like Nicole Kidman can pay their mortgage.

There’s only one person in the history of the known world who has been able to significantly slow the aging process: Goldie Hawn.  I saw Private Benjamin on TV when I was a kid, and years later I saw Soapdish, and her face hadn’t budged an inch.  I later speculated that she was using the time to grow a daughter in a laboratory--Kate Hudson--and when the time was right, she would implant her brain into the young girl’s body and gain the gift of eternal life.  At least, this was my theory until I realized that Kate couldn’t act and wasn’t funny, so the person who actually did the brain transplant was her stepfather, Kurt Russell. Creepy, isn’t it?  It’s all there if you look into Kate’s cold, aged eyes.  This theory was confirmed when, this past Father’s Day, the paparazzi took a photograph of Kate giving herself a tie.

Anyway, the point is that I’m not touching any of that crap until they make some sort of makeup magic wand that I can wave at my face and shout “EXFOLIATE!” Until that time, I will continue to expose the makeup industry for the greedy, bloated empire that it is.  I’m currently working on an arthouse documentary about the subject entitled An Inconvenient Rouge.

Buying a bottle of wine:

SHE: Can I see your I.D.?

ME: (smiles knowingly--face turns into a potato chip)

SHE: Oh.  Okay.

ME: Yeah.

SHE: See, you look really young, but then when you smile--

ME: I know.

I realized the other day that you can buy a special edition DVD of Smokey and the Bandit, but there’s still no full-featured version of The Breakfast Club.  This movie is beloved by millions and it’s on TV everytime you turn around--how can someone have not bothered to put together a special edition?  Wouldn’t it be fun to listen to a commentary track that reunites the entire cast--Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Anthony Michael Hall, and Emilio Estevez?  Wouldn’t they get along great after all these years?

-------------

EMILIO: Hey, everyone, it’s great to be reunited with all my friends to do this commentary track for the Breakfast Club special edition DVD. We hope you enjoy it.

MOLLY: Hi everyone.

ALLY: Does anyone have any cocaine?

EMILIO: Ally, shhh.  So, here we are with the opening credits. You know, as I reflect on making this movie, one of my most cherished memories is when--

JUDD: Oooh!  Oooh!  I have a trivia fact about the movie!

EMILIO: Judd, do you mind, I’m talking.

JUDD: Come on, let me say this one thing.

EMILIO: Okay, what?

JUDD: This is a little-known trivia fact.  John Hughes, director of this movie, Sixteen Candles, and Pretty in Pink, is the only director in history to give Molly a speaking part.

(Collapses in laughter)

ANTHONY: Oh for--

MOLLY: You bastard.

EMILIO: Judd, come on. We all agreed we weren’t going to make a lot of obvious, stupid jokes about our careers.  And that’s not even true.

MOLLY: Yeah.  I was in Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, and--

JUDD: Hahahaha!  I’m sorry, but c’mon. That was pretty funny.

MOLLY: You’re an ass.

JUDD: Lighten up, princess.

ANTHONY: Uh...well, back to the movie--we’ve just seen that famous quote by David Bowie, and now we see the high school for the first time, thanks to that cool shattering glass effect--

JUDD: Shattered kind of like your dreams of stardom, eh, Tony boy?

EMILIO: Judd, shut up.  I’m warning you.

JUDD: What are you going to do, tough guy? Sic The Mighty Ducks on me?

ANTHONY: I’m the only one in this room with a steady job right now.  Or perhaps you’ve never seen The Dead Zone?

JUDD: Is that the name of your show or its time slot?

ANTHONY: Listen.  When you get out of bed in the morning, do you go directly to DVD or does that happen sometime after lunch?

JUDD: Hey, I was in a sit-com with Brooke Shields.

ANTHONY: That was ten years ago.

JUDD: I kissed her.

ANTHONY: Chicks with post-partum depression will kiss anyone.

MOLLY: My god.  Do...do we have two hours of this to go?

ANTHONY: ...

JUDD: ....

EMILIO ....

ALLY: Does anyone have any cocaine?

---------------

On second thought, I can see why no one’s bothered.

Hey!  In the Bay Area? Getting married?  Got a corporate function? Need a band?  You should hire my co-worker’s band Busta Groove.

Their lead singer has been our Internet Marketing Manager for a while now, and I knew he was in a band but I didn’t know if his band was actually any good.  I went with some people from work to find out for sure, and discovered that Busta Groove is an outstanding 9-piece dance/party outfit. I’m sure that other bands jump back and forth between up M.C. Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This” and Rick James’s “Superfreak,” but these guys do it beautifully.  They lay down an absolutely tight rendition of Prince’s “Controversy.” They hop from “Lady Marmalade” to “Hollaback Girl.”

They put pictures of all their shows on their web site.  Here’s me and my co-workers inbetween sets.

I said to the lead singer, “You guys seem pretty polished. Is there any room for improv or jamming?”

“Oh sure,” he said.  “But it depends on the song.  For example, you can’t really do much with ‘Brick House.’”

“I could see that,” I said. “Either you’re mighty mighty, letting it all hang out...or you’re just not.”

“That’s it exactly.” He looked at me conspiratorially.  “Actually, I am really sick of singing ‘Brick House.’”

On a completely unrelated note, do you know that former chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan received an $8.5 million advance to write his memoirs?  I’m not sure how Penguin Books expects to recoup that investment, but I recommend marketing the book as a college drinking game: take a shot whenever Greenspan says either “And the next quarter we raised the rates” or “And the next quarter we lowered the rates.”

- Greg, did you see that guy talking to me over there?

- Yeah, Amy, it looked like he was into you.

- Well, he wasn’t. He was interested in talking to Michelle.  He was just using me as a wedge!

- Wait, a what now?

- A wedge.  He wanted to talk to Michelle and I was hanging out with her so he started talking to me first.

- Whoa...hey...you can’t do that. You need a partner to do that--someone to talk to the friend while you launch an initiative against the primary target.  This guy was trying to be his own wingman!

- Hey...you’re right.

- That is a complete violation of bar etiquette.  I know not of this “wedge,” but I absolutely know that you can’t be your own wingman. It’s like O.J. Simpson saying he’s going to track down his wife’s killer--it’s just chasing yourself around in a circle.

This week my hosting service went down for over a day, and I was unable to access or write in my blog.  The break in routine caused me to ponder several important questions, such as:

Does it really make sense to make dumb jokes about pop culture minutiae in front of complete strangers?

Then I found out that the new Batwoman was a lesbian and I realized that the answer to these questions is a resounding “YES.”

A bit of background: DC Comics is making a concerted effort to diversify their characters and appeal to a wider demographic.  Their strategy is to take some lesser-known (but already established) superheroes and then shake up their backgrounds.  For example, the new Atom will be Asian; the new Blue Beetle is hispanic--and Batwoman, a character who dates all the way back to the ‘50s, is being reintroduced as a gay woman.  (The New York Times ran an article on the subject.)

Personally I think it’s nice that comics are making an effort to be more inclusive.  You might say it’s just politically correct bean counting, but listen--have you ever actually heard of the original Blue Beetle?  Of course not, because he’s just another white, straight superhero.  Boring.  Doing different kinds of characters will have the effect of not only broadening the audience, but also enabling different kinds of stories.

Second, a gay Batwoman is a huge improvement over the ‘50s version.  Back then, Batwoman was a straight female with a crush on Bruce Wayne and she fought crime with--I am not making this up--a “utility purse” with items such as charm-bracelet handcuffs, sneezing powder, and an expanding hairnet.  Now that’s feminism!

Third, it amounts to huge cost savings for me personally.  In the past, I’ve had to pay hundreds of dollars in order to experience the exploits of a hot chick wearing spandex and boots who likes women but beats up men.  The comic book is bound to only be a couple bucks, tops.

The problem is that racial and sexual considerations aside, the new Batwoman still falls into the cliche as every other superheroine--she’s smokin’ hot.

All characters in comic books, male or female, are perfectly sculpted athletes with, uh, often unrealistic proportions.  And it’s not just comics. Buffy the Vampire Slayer a feminist icon?  C’mon--she’s so thin that she probably needs to wear snowshoes in the shower in order to avoid slipping down the drain. 

If comics and these other media fantasies really want to represent the real world, they need to stop forcing unrealistic body images upon their protagonists.  And doing so would open us up to many interesting new characters. Here’s a few ideas:

Jellyroll Girl. By day she’s a normal townie who wears a too-short shirt that allows rolls of flab to collect around her belly.  But little do people know that those rolls of flab contain gamma powered energy ready to strike down evildoers and protect the innocent.

Captain Crowsfeet.  Oh sure, he looks like a wrinkled onion because he never wore sunblock as a kid.  But when he smiles, those crowfeet suddenly release the power of the sun itself and wage war on crime.

Not Especially Well Endowed Man (and his crime-fighting partner, Flat as an Ironboard Woman).  Okay, so the names aren’t as catchy as, say, Superman. But whereas fans of Supes have been known to jump off roofs in an attempt to imitate their hero, you probably wouldn’t have kids running around saying “I want to be just like Not Especially Well Endowed Man when I grow up.” And if they do?  Well, they’ll know that they can still be a force for justice--even if they’re not, y’know, necessarily a force anywhere else.

Posted by Greg at 07:31 PM on 06/01/06

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