Macbeth

This may not make a whole lot of sense to anyone who isn't familiar with the musical Sweet Charity and a religious watcher of the hit television show Lost on ABC, but...

Here's what you do:

1. Start watching episodes of Lost on the ABC full episode player (in HD where available) beginning at the pilot episode. (Make sure to only pause the minimum amount of time (15 or 30 seconds) before clicking the "click to continue" button at the top of your screen. Time is a factor here.)

2. Simultaneously, start playing the CD for the Sweet Charity recording starring Gwen Verdon as Charity - that's right, original Broadway cast - in iTunes, on repeat. (iTunes 7.6 required.) Not song repeat, but so it repeats the whole album endlessly.

3. Wait 2.3 days. Zone out if you have to, but do NOT STOP CLICKING CONTINUE.

4. Tune back in after the 2.3 days, and in the episode where they bury Nicki and Paulo alive at the end (oops, spoiler alert. Sue me.), from the moment the opening titles of the show run, the song "Too Many Tomorrows" synchronizes perfectly with the beginning of the next act.

5. Freak the fuck out, and enjoy.

This is so much better than that whole Dark Side of the Moon thing with The Wizard of Oz. I could never get those to synch up.

I am quite aware, readers, that this may already have been obvious to some of you.

You're gonna get yours too, reruns of Who's the Boss?

There are three things about me that everyone who knows me already knows: 1) like everyone else, I breathe air and drink water; 2) unlike everyone else, I do not put my pants on one leg at a time; and 3) I have a deep mistrust of American daytime television programming, especially, but not exclusively, public television.

Seriously, take one look at Mr. Rogers sexy hair stylings and tell me the man didn't have some kind of freakish agenda. He wanted your children*! He would stop at nothing to get them*! All his songs and puppets and sweaters were part of an elaborate plan to reprogram them*!

*(to be better people when they grow up)

Network daytime programming is no better. Live with Regis and Kathie Lee/Kelly is obviously a not-so-subtle play on the term "Life with Regis and Kathie Lee/Kelly," as in "life sentence," as in being forced to watch these people drone on endlessly, day after day, about fruit and manicures and diarrhea or whatever it is they talk about. (I've never actually seen more than six minutes of an episode.)

So I was gratified to find out that Michelle Obama repaid some of the horror inflicted on the American public by daytime television, by going on The View yesterday and holding those five women - and a guest or two - hostage. Just look at her terrorizing those "women" with her frightening fists of feminine fury:


Bully for you, Michelle. No one likes you anyway, so why not just terrorist fist jab them into submission? Bravo.

You're next, Big Bird, you pretentious fuck.

Note: the foregoing commentary on daytime television is presented without inclusion of Oscar the Grouch, who may be the lone trustworthy voice gracing the American airwaves during regular business hours. Also, Big Bird, please bear in mind that threats made against presidential candidates are investigated by the Secret Service pending felony charges. Stick that in your big, yellow beak and light yourself on fire.

Did you know?

Did you know that when you look up a Major League Baseball ™ player on ESPN.com, there's a phonetic pronunciation for that player's name toward the top of the page? Except in the cases of players like Milton Bradley (yes, there really is a baseball player named Milton Bradley, and obviously his parents knew about the game manufacturer), when ESPN assumes you know that it's pronounced "BRAD-lee," so they don't bother telling you.

I, on the other hand, assume nothing. For when you assume, you make an ass out of "um" and "e," and that is an insult that I cannot forgive.

I say, the fact that you found this website might at all might mean that you are an extremely lonely 13-year-old sitting in a basement somewhere, pouring over the depths of the internet in search of something funny, and that you might also have very poor reading skills. Notice that I don't assume that, but I have to allow for the possibility.

ESPN, however, assumes you know "BRAD-lee," is prounounced "Bradley." That's a pretty gutsy call, if you ask me.

They are just as incautious about Grady Sizemore (SIGHS-s'more), Joe Mauer (MAH-whirr), and Chipper Jones (FLOW-rinse HEN-dur-sin), which makes you wonder why they offer such a half-assed, half-implemented pronunciation guide system in the first place.

I have figured out the answer, though. It's the setup to a joke. And I bet Manny Ramirez (Ruh-MEER-ez) and Carlos Guillen (GEY-un) can tell you the punchline to the joke. So can Alex Rodriguez (Rod-RI-guez) whose pronunciation guide isn't even written phonetically, it's just the syllables of his name broken up and the middle one put in capital letters.

What's the punchline, you ask? Three words: Albert Pujols.

(Oddly enough, a search on the ESPN.com website for "poo-holes" yields no results.)

My theory on the LOST season finale

Television critics and quantum physicists alike have been debating the television show Lost for the better part of four years now. Some of the more common questions: What is the island? Who owns and operates the DHARMA Initiative? How did the slave ship Black Rock crash inland, completely away from the beach, and what was it doing with all that dynamite? Will Jack, Sawyer, and Kate ever have the three-way that everyone is dreaming of? When the Skipper gets angry enough to finally kill Gilligan, will the Professor somehow devise a way to imprison the Skipper in a force field constructed from two coconuts and a palm leaf, or will he just fucking repair the hole in the S.S. Minnow like he should have done all along?

The experts have all had their say during the two weeks since the season 4 finale, floating ridiculous theories involving Purgatory and time looping and other similarly bizarre ideas. They're all wrong, obviously. You Are the Only Person Not Reading This Blog got the inside scoop, not from talking to notoriously loose-lipped producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, but from plain old woman's intution.

Here's the deal:

It's a television show.

The characters obviously don't know this. They think they were actually on a plane that crashed on a mysterious island, and that the island has some outrageous scientific/magical properties that allow the dead to come to life and crippled people to walk. None of that is true. What's really going on is that a group of writers got together, set down a bunch of weirdo, sci-fi, nerdy plot lines, picked six numbers out of a hat, and VIOLA. Instant television classic.

Sorry kids, but there is no Jack and Sawyer and Kate, and there will therefore be no threesome.

I hate to be the one to break it to everybody. But after four long seasons, it finally dawned on me that, in real life, there are no smoke monsters, and islands don't suddenly disappear, leaving nothing behind but tiny ripples in the ocean. Sorry.



As for what caused the writers of Lost to perpetrate such a nasty prank on the viewing public, I have a theory about that too. Think about the timeline of the events of the show: the plane crashed on September 22, 2004. The Oceanic Six were rescued 108 days later, on January 8, 2005. Between their crash and rescue, the Red Sox won the World Series, and George Bush got re-elected. I imagine the subsequent conversation went something like this:

WRITER/PRODUCER 1 (LINDELOF): What a terrible year! What could be worse than a year when the Red Sox won the World Series and George Bush got re-elected?

WRITER/PRODUCER 2 (CUSE): I'll tell you what could be worse than that.

WRITER/PRODUCER 1: So tell me already!

WRITER/PRODUCER 2: I will!

WRITER/PRODUCER 1: Quit stalling!

WRITER/PRODUCER 2: It's not me, man, I'm not the one writing this dialogue!

WRITER/PRODUCER 1: Well, whoever IS writing it, let's make sure we never hire him!

WRITER/PRODUCER 2: Amen to that. Anyway, here's what would be worse.

WRITER/PRODUCER 1: I'm all ears.

WRITER/PRODUCER 2: What does that even mean, "I'm all ears?"

WRITER/PRODUCER 1: It means that you should tell me what would be worse than a year when the Red Sox won and George Bush got re-elected.

WRITER/PRODUCER 2: Oh, okay. Here goes. What about crash-landing on a desert island with a hostile indigenous population, a fifty-foot pillar of black smoke, and a bunch of people named after philosophers? And then when you try to leave the island, it makes you go crazy and eat pills until you have to come back?

WRITER/PRODUCER 1: Hmm... Throw in a polar bear, and I think you've got something.

WRITER/PRODUCER 2: Oh my god, let's call J.J. Abrams!

You're welcome, America.

Jesus 233, Santa 180

I'm not one to complain about the weather, but I am one to write a blog post about how I'm not one to complain about the weather and then complain about the weather. If that doesn't make sense, ignore it and move on. It's sort of a "duh" joke, like "what's the difference between a hamburger and a cheeseburger?" (Answer: the cheese!) or "why does it frequently smell like fine smoked Gouda on the blocks surrounding Grand Central Station in the early evening?" (Answer: also the cheese!).

Getting back to the topic at hand, though, I'd like to take a moment to complain about the weather.

I don't mind the heat. True, my apartment lacks options for ventilation on two sides, which makes things extra steamy. But it's a small price to pay to avoid having the neighbors see me gallivanting around in my underwear and screaming "Another One Bites the Dust" at the top of my lungs while they walk down the hall. And let's face it, the nuanced art of imitating Freddie Mercury is bound to make a person a little sweaty regardless of whether it's 19 degrees outside or 90.

Of course, the art of imitating Freddie Mercury is also the kind of thing that's bound to cost me major points with the ladies. So if you're a lady, please ignore everything you've read so far and start reading after this paragraph.

(LADIES, START READING HERE)

Hello, ladies. As the men in the audience can tell you, I'm in the midst of a complaint about the weather. So far, I've established that I don't have a huge problem with the heat.

My problem is with the, quote, "severe thunderstorms," end quote. And yes, I am aware that I just wrote the words "quote" and "end quote" in addition to writing quotes around "severe thunderstorms." It was to emphasize that I'm being sarcastic when I say "severe thunderstorms." Because I don't see how 30 minutes of thunder, lightning, and 60-mile an hour winds can possibly be considered severe.

Let's see if we can make a hypothetical analogy. Okay, say there's this President of the United States who is a Republican. Then say one day, his brain starts working for like half an hour, and he has a GOOD IDEA. (I know, it's unrealistic, but bear with me. This is fiction.) Does having his brain work for half an hour automatically disqualify him from the Republican party?

All right, that was a severely bad example.

How about this instead: say there's this one area of midtown Manhattan that periodically experiences incidents of "severe Gouda cheese aroma," and that the incidents last for somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 minutes. Does that mean that, during those 30-minute instances, that the entire island is once again under the jurisdiction of the Netherlands, and that all the spellings revert to their original Dutch (Nieuw Amsterdam, Breuckelyn), and that weed and hookers are temporarily legal? Because if so, a) sign me up, and b) I think we can get Eliot Spitzer reinstated as governor.

Wow, that's also terrible. There's no analogy to be drawn between legal weed and the weather at all. Sorry. And not apropos of me at all, I have somehow ranged off topic again. Which begs the question, if I managed to avoid digressing for 30 whole minutes, would that make me a severely better writer than I am now? It doesn't seem like it could hurt...

When I was a kid, we had SEVERE STORMS - the kind that threaten to rip the roof off the house and land it on the playground of a nearby elementary school. We had storms that made the sky turn yellow and sent people racing for basements and jumping out of moving cars to hide in roadside ditches. We had storms that blew beach balls and tricycles onto our lawn that belonged to kids who lived three blocks away. Those storms lasted for hours, or sometimes, entire days.

My parents used to tell us the storms were Jesus and Santa Claus bowling, and when the storm got loud, it was because One of Them just bowled a strike. (We always assumed it was Jesus, since Santa bowls like Barack Obama.) And when the storms lasted for a long time, my parents told us it was because Santa kept getting drunk and wanting a double-or-nothing rematch so he could get his money back. But, of course, Santa never won his money back because Jesus never had any money. Jesus was just a Broke Hustler.

My point is that, for all the damage wrought to power lines, rail systems in Connecticut, and my friend Laszlo's house in New Brunswick, New Jersey, I'm not sure I'm sold on the word "severe" for last night's thunderstorm. It sounded more like a handful of practice frames, or maybe a single game where Jesus wiped the floor with Santa, 233 to 180. Mathematically, Santa couldn't have had more than like three Miller Genuine Drafts. Ergo, not severe.

But check out these pictures of Laszlo's house anyway. This could happen to you four years after I move out of your house too:





Rumor has it that Laszlo might end up with a new bay window when all is said and done. I don't know, that sounds pretty "not severe" to me.

Dear Jesus and Santa,

Try harder next time. Your bowling matches are lame lately.

Turkey,
Smokey.

Sixteen down, only two to go!

True, the Oscar the Grouch for President '08 campaign can't claim a single state primary victory. Nor can it claim a political affiliation with, or an endorsement from any major or minor party. True, the Oscar '08 campaign has underperformed even the most modest financial expectations, managing to fund raise a paltry $0.0004 to date (3/4 through our website, www.ilovecheese.com!). True too that the Oscar '08 campaign strategy is essentially relying on this blog, which you are the only person not reading, to spread the word.

Sounds pretty bleak, no? But the Oscar campaign can still claim this:

It's still going.

Now that Hillary Clinton has suspended her campaign, allowing for Barack Obama to knuckle-tap and shoulder-brush his way to Denver (that's where the Democratic National Convention will be held, also where I ate at a Sonic restaurant for the first time), the total pool of candidates is down to 2, not counting Ralph Nader, Ron Paul (now available in libertarian flavor!), the late Sonny Bony, Carrot Top, and John Kerry '04.

But is the media talking about any of them? No, sir, the media is not talking about them. Instead, sir, the Jew- and Gay-run media only has the names of TWO presidential candidates on its coverage agenda these days, and boy, sir, is Jim Henson (a white, deceased, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, or WDASP) pissed off.

So what though, because my point is about electoral math. Not the kind where people are winning states and counting delegate votes though, just math relating to electorations, or elections, as the kids say these days. (Hey, by the way, are you enjoying all these parenthetical asides? I'll bet you're not!) And going by the math, we have experienced a steady attrition in the number of candidates for President during the last 18 months. At one point, there were as many as EIGHTEEN! Now, we're down to TWO!

Think about it: where once we had EIGHTEEN candidates, we now have TWO. If the pattern holds (and they wouldn't call it a pattern if it didn't), we're likely to be down to ZERO candidates long before Barack Obama gets a chance to test out his dance moves on stage in Denver.

This is great news for Oscar the Grouch. (I know, I know, another parenthetical. They're annoying, right? Not surving any purpose?) With zero other candidates, all Oscar has to do is keep his name in the running.

American voters are like robots (Clinton supporters in particular), so they most likely won't know what to do if they see a ballot with no names on it in the major party slots. They will probably step out of the voting booth without voting for anyone. Which means that if Oscar can get anywhere near 50% of the Kenny Crandall write-in vote, he might win a plurality, and be swept into office. (Probably not though. Oh, god, another parenthetical aside!)

I know, it's a long shot. (Who do I think I am, Stephen Colbert?)

I'm just saying, that at least we have a plan, which is more than you can say for all those primary dropouts like Bill Richardson whom I miss terribly. (It's almost it's own little conversation, completely separate from the heavy politix talk going on OUTSIDE the parentheses. Which is so stupid, I could, like, gag, right?)

Honestly, this all still goes back to juggs rimshot the blah (previously known as "Judge Reinhold." see also, Benedict Reinhold) and his failure to re-endorse after Bill Richardson dropped out in February. My mind is like a rudderless ship, and I, a mere robot standing on the deck of that ship, awaiting my voting instructions from my evil Sesame Street overlord. All hail the Oscar! All vote for the Oscar!

(So, it's been a little hectic at the Fruit Plant lately. Company volleyball is in full swing, and since they decided to hold our last game at 5:15PM on a Tuesday - in California - we basically had no shot of making it there on time, even with the time difference AND the express Holiday Inn shuttle to and from the airport. Anyway, sorry about not blogging.)

So I think it's worth suggesting to Barack Obama and John McCain that they follow the lead of their former rivals and quietly drop out of the race for president too. Write them letters and tell them so. Send them emails. Stalk the candidates personally, if you must. Just get them to quit. It's the perfect plan.

(Oh, hey! Remember when I mentioned eating at Sonic in Denver?


Technically, it's a short distance outside of Denver, but still within the greater Denver metropolitan area.


Okay, the guy in this photo is not me. It's my friend Drew who recently got married, who was also at Sonic, and who is wearing a Rutgers shirt to prove that he's from faaaaaar away. Also, the girl in the picture is not me either. She's a Sonic employee, which can be hard to tell. Even harder is why Drew isn't being more chivalrous and taking the tray for her.)