Nip/Tuck becomes reality

Wow...anyone who watches Nip/Ttuck knows that the show continually tries to outdo itself in terms of outrageousness Some of us were recently discussing a hypothetical Nip/Tuck episode where the doctors implant boar tusks on a patient. Well, turns out, IT ACTUALLY HAPPENED!!!

http://writ.lp.findlaw.com/commentary/20070823_stempel.html

The Bear Grylls Accusations

Some of you may know that everyone's favorite adventurer/explorer, Bear Grylls, has recently been accused of lying to the public on his show: Man versus Wild. Specifically, the accusations include (1) that Bear received assistance from camera crews in carrying his supplies, (2) that his production crew constructed a raft he built on the rainforest episode and (3) that instead of spending a week in the Tundra, he took a break in a five-star hotel and ate blueberry pancakes for breakfast. I would like to address each of these accusations in turn.

1. So at the beginning of each show, Bear is left in the wild with only a few supplies/trash that he recylces into amazing survival supplies. For instance, a shoelace becomes a snare to catch rabbits, a camera lense is turned into a laser to hunt elephants, and a tic tac becomes a grenade capable of taking down an entire pride of allegators. Is it any surprise that Bear used his pocketknife to force the camera crew to carry his stuff??? I mean, come on...you're stuck in the wild, a camera crew is mocking you with their well-fed attitude and insect repellant, and you have a knife. In a survival situation, the sensible thing to do would be threatening to shank the camera crew if they didn't carry your meager belongings. Afterall, calories in the wild are precious and few, and can't be wasted on carrying things that can be carried by an indigenous camera crew.

2. What if Bear had been stranded on a beach with a bunch of giant lincoln logs...would we have faulted him for combining the logs in their natural grooves to form a raft? He had no control over the production crew's ability to leave the scattered components of a raftlike structure crafted by chainsaws and twine, why should we fault him for taking advantage of it? Blaming Bear for refusing to take advantage of his surroundings is like blaming Tom Cruise for telling us all to take vitamins...both are just trying to make us healthier. If you say otherwise, you're asking Americans to die, and that makes you a terrorist.*

3. Again, this "accusation" is easily explained by Bear's natural resourcefulness. If the camera crew left him with a plastic bottle, shattered lightbulb, and coffee grounds, it's safe to assume that Bear could have constructed a five-star hotel overnight. Just like he teaches, the most important task in a survival situation is to construct a reliable shelter. Expecting Bear to ignore a basic survival situation is just like blaming him for walking into civilization then running back into the woods because it was too easy to get rescued. It would be much easier for Bear's haters to question his common sense if he happened upon a Ramada and said "well, I could walk into the hotel, get breakfast, and call for a ride...but that could take days, days I don't have. Instead, I'm going to swim across the Atlantic Ocean, hike through the Ardennes forest, and beg a Frenchman to come to my rescue." Good luck with that scenario.

So in sum, it's easy to make accusations, but with a reasonable explanation, Bear's critics are all exposed as unmitigated dumbasses. If this leads to the cancellation of Man versus Wild, I swear to God I'll make it my life mission to plant trees, close factories, save endangered species, and otherwise make the world an unbearable wilderness that all of Mr. Gryll's haters will not be able to survive. Since that's a world none of us want to see, I'd strongly suggest calling the dogs off**...or Bear will have to eat them raw.

* Unless you are encouraging foreigners to die. That would make you an American.

** Is it too early for a Michael Vick joke?

Homeless at Bayside

I get up pretty early nowadays, and one of the few true pleasures I have left in life is watching an episode of Saved by the Bell with a pot of coffee. Today, I saw an episode that I had never seen before: "A Bayside Christmas Carol."

Essentially, the gang all gets jobs working at a mall during the holiday season to raise a few bucks. On the way in, they see a homeless man. Instead of roundhousing him in his insolent, indigent face, they give him some change and feel sorry for him. Screech broke the serious moment by remarking that he also eats from the trash.

Later on, Zack meets a girl who looked way too good to be homeless in the mall and starts to lay down his patented Zack Morris mack. The twist turns out (unsurprisingly) to be that the homeless man is her father, and they live together in a car. Of course, they had a textbook "liberal" version of how they became homeless...a big computer company laid the father off, they moved out to California to start a new job and that company went bankrupt. So they fell behind on rent, and since there was no money to do laundry, he didn't look presentable enough to do well in an interview. I've used the same excuse myself during OCI.

Eventually, Zack asked his new woman's father what he wanted from life. This pissed me off. What kind of stupid ass question is that? However, what irritated me more, is that the father answered "a home and good life for my family," instead of the real answer that every homeless person is thinking" "motherfucking crack."

Eventually, Kelly let it slip to her boss that her coworker and Zack's girlfriend was homeless. The boss, who was supposed to be the Bayside version of Ebeneezer Scrooge replied "Well if I had known THAT, I wouldn't have hired her. Those people steal!" Score one for the good guys! Don't get me wrong...I love Saved by the Bell, but the stark lack of reality sometimes makes it unbearable to watch. In the real world, people make assumptions, others are less than altruistic, and most people are responsible, at least a little bit, for their own mistakes. The fact that Zack and his mother took in a couple of homeless people as their long-term guests after knowing them two days, had the air of a public service announcement that shuns me for not inviting the average crackhead on State Street to sleep in my spare bedroom. My message to you, Saved by the Bell, is that when I want a sermon, I will go to church.

On the other hand, I'll be watching tomorrow morning.

Houston, We Have a Problem

Suffice it to say: I am in deep, deep, deep shit.

UPDATE:

To quote the Great Phil Helmuth Jr., "I can dodge bullets, baby." I'm taking this as clearance to be the biggest asshole in the universe whenever I feel like it from now on.

Happily Ever After

Last weekend was my former roommate's wedding. I've known him since grade school and to see the wedding was weird, to say the least. Apparently, I won the award for being the loudest. And the drunkest. My parents refused to leave amidst strong hints from my brother and I that we would be getting drunk soon. So yeah, I'm disowned for the time being.

If you would have asked me when I graduated from high school which of my friends was least likely to wed, it would have been him. Mainly because he had an amazing ability to repulse women that surpassed even my own. But if there was one thing he was good at, it was persistence. As another friend of mine explained, technically, it's not stalking if the girl eventually goes out with you. They're going to live happily ever after, be affluent and respected, have neighborhood cookouts and go down in history as all-around solid people.

One might remark that I should be happy, even ecstatic for them. I am. However, as a human being, I feel compelled to indulge my neurotic, narcissistic tendencies every so often. The rest of this post, therefore, is about me.

I was the only one in the entire wedding party that showed up sans date...and every one of the guests at the reception had to comment on it. One of the girls in the wedding party was someone I had every opportunity to date [in fact, an open invitation] for a long time, but since my roommate and I were fighting for several months, I turned it down for the sole reason of not wanting to owe him any favors (she was friends with his wife). Seeing her there with a date was like a staunch kick to the junk...I really wished I would have asked her out. In the context of a wedding, I wondered if I was one of those tragic characters in a movie that others are supposed to feel sorry for...the one everyone is supposed to learn from because he had some stupid excuse and missed out on someone who might have been the love of his life. And my steak was overdone.

Quickly I reminded myself that I did not possess female reproductive organs and discarded such Hugh Grant sentimentality. Yet, I still find myself wondering why I was the only one there that never grew up. Now, I know that growing up isn't contingent solely on finding a woman to take to a wedding. I'd like to believe that had I applied myself, I could have done so. But I didn't, and the lack of application seems to be the distinguishing factor between my life and those of everyone else at that wedding.

Some of you might try to argue with this logic and point out the things that are good in my life. Yes, I have a job. I'm competent and ethical and like to think that my dumbass clients respect me for it. But the truth is, I only fight when I feel like a fight, the rest of my clients are mashed together in a stew of competent apathy and devoured by the judicial system. Yes, I can probably succeed in the "traditional" sense...move up in the employment world, get a house, mow the lawn, join the Rotary. But the truth is I have no idea what the hell I really truly want to do. I might fit in better living in the woods with the bears. Yes, I have a respectable character in World of Warcraft. But the truth is, Christ, I actually play World of Warcraft.

Sometimes I wonder what TV character I look like through another person's eyes. I was recently compared to John "J.D." Dorian from Scrubs. Amusing, but it's kind of sad when someone looks at your life and is amused...kind of the way you feel when you see a place advertising "Taxidermy and Cheese" on the side of the freeway. You can't help but smile at the chump behind the counter when you ask for a block of Colby Cheddar and a stuffed hawk.

So in sum, I don't know what to think. Maybe I'll live happily ever after as well, or maybe the janitor will get the best of me for the rest of my life. Or perhaps I'm waiting for my "J.D." phase to end and move on to a more badass role in The Fastest and Most Furious of All: A Street Racing Story. All I know is, if I don't make some changes, I could end up like Screech. And that wouldn't be happily ever after.

Holy Crap!

I grew up near the twin cities, and spent alot of time there. When I flipped on the news tonight, I saw that the I-35 bridge collapsed, plunging at least 50 cars into the river and resulting in several injuries and at least three fatalities. I'm guessing the television coverage lost something in the translation, because I couldn't even recognize the area I can navigate by instinct.

As the 35W bridge is adjacent to the Metrodome, people won't be able to get to the Twins or Vikings games. Nobody went to the Gopher football games to begin with, so that won't be a problem.

Some reporter on CNN just asked if the Mississippi river was a "big river." Wolf Blitzer said "there are casualties, and I think people are hurt or killed as well." Thanks Wolf. Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security has reported that this was probably not an act of terrorism. Granted, I don't work for the CIA, but haven't they ever heard of Magneto? As I recall, he was able to lift the entire Golden Gate Bridge and use it as a weapon. Just because he's not Middle Eastern, doesn't rule out the possibility of terrorism. Racists.

In all seriousness, the scene looks pretty unbelievable. 35W is to Minneapolis what Iceland is to the game of Risk: It's the crux of the map, and when it's down, nothing can move. I can only imagine the months of nightmare traffic that will plague the twin cities. So in sum: Wow.