When In Drought

Earlier this month, Governor Brown issued an executive order for Californians to reduce water consumption by 25% across the board. This made big news, but I didn’t really give it that much attention. I mean, it’s very much a necessary step for our survival, and I'm going to comply as best I can. But just because it's a necessary step for our survival is no guarantee that Californians as a whole are actually going to take it. Best case scenario, I'm predicting a 25% increase in griping and finger pointing. 

There’s a Change.org petition protesting Brown’s order that's making the rounds on Twitter and Facebook, and it shows exactly what I mean. “STOP PUNISHING CALIFORNIA RESIDENTS!” whines the petition, addressed to the governor and legislature. “We have done our part. We have installed water saving toilets, showerheads, sprinklers, faucets, etc… Enough is enough! YOU have done nothing to prepare the state for water shortages... Time for YOU to get to work. Find ways to bring water to the state.” The petition goes on to helpfully list some solutions, the highlight being a “Waterpipe to Oregon/Washington States” to capture water from the Columbia River and bring it to California.

There’s so much to love about this stupid idea. The use of the term “waterpipe” in a non-marijuana related context, the author’s blind assumption that people in Oregon and Washington are just so fond of California that they’ll happily share the Columbia River… But what I love most is that when faced with an unprecedented drought of Biblical proportions, Californians think building a 900-mile interstate water pipeline is a better solution than watering their lawns only once a week.

The petition, by the way, has picked up about 60,000 signatures in ten days.

I know the drought is serious, but it doesn’t feel serious. Part of that is probably because I moved here right about the time the drought began, from a state where it rained constantly for most of the year. When LA would go for six or seven months between rainstorms, I just assumed that was what life was like everywhere outside of Oregon.

It also helps that all the really scary drought stuff isn’t happening in LA, a city that only exists because of fierce and unscrupulous acquisition of water rights. Lawns here are green. People wash their cars. Business owners in Hollywood still hose bums’ piss off the sidewalks in front of their stores. About the only noticeable difference is that the Venice Canals have become a foul smelling mossy swamp surrounded by multimillion dollar beach houses.

Then I go onto bleak news sites like The Guardian or Vice, where I typically read depressing stories about catastrophes in other countries, and instead see full size pictures of towns a couple hundred miles north of me that would look more at home in a trailer for Mad Max: Fury Road.*

*Yes, I know Obama and his anger translator Luther did that joke at the White House Correspondents' Dinner last night, but I wrote the joke on Wednesday. Look, all I’m saying is, I am at least as funny as the president/the guy writing the president’s jokes. 

I’m living in the middle of a catastrophe, but I’m also living in the middle of a big concentration of money and voters, so it doesn’t feel so much like a catastrophe yet.

When people here talk about the drought, the conversation usually starts with an acknowledgment of how serious things are (“Did you see that thing on BuzzFeed with the before and after pictures of the reservoirs? We are so fucked.”) before moving on to why we all secretly feel like this whole mess isn't our fault: Almonds.

Yes, as pretty much everybody in California knows by now, it takes an entire gallon of water to grow a single almond, because I guess almonds are the Hummer 3 of nuts. California, thanks to its perfect climate, produces 80% of the world’s almonds, and thanks to surging worldwide demand for more, farmers have been steadily pumping their aquifers dry to grow as many of these water-hogging nuts as possible. Statewide, each year’s almond harvest consumes enough water to supply every home and business in Los Angeles for three years.

This is what I think about whenever I don’t want to get out of the shower. Yes, the drought is very, very serious and we all need to come together to survive – but if I get out of the shower right now the water I save is just going to get dumped onto some extremely absorbent almonds. Not corn or potatoes or wheat, but almonds. Nobody out there is starving to death because of almond shortages. If you’re eating almonds it’s because they’re either thinly sliced on top of your salad or because the airport bartender gave you a ceramic dish full of them along with a black paper napkin as he handed you your $13 cocktail.

This is what I tell myself as my showers creep closer to the ten minute mark. I don’t see why I should have to make any sacrifices just because half a billion middle class Chinese people now have the disposable income to buy expensive imported salty snacks.

Does China know about pretzels? How much water does it take to make pretzels?

Mad Max jokes aside, I really don’t think this drought is going to be the end of all California civilization – such as it exists in the first place. That’s not a prediction that the drought is going to end anytime soon; some scientists are saying drought could become the new normal. But I think there’s enough human capital and just regular old money-style capital floating around in this state to make the new normal about as comfortable as the old one.

Most of California’s water goes to irrigating its vast agricultural operations - and since these irrigation systems were built when water was cheap and widely available, they're extremely inefficient. There's never been an incentive to build expensive desalination plants, or to try and convince squeamish people in the suburbs to drink treated, recycled wastewater.

When those ideas were brought up pre-drought, Californians balked at them. Now, faced with the mandatory 25% reduction in water use, everybody seems a little more open minded. And that’s how progress happens in California: We let our selfish culture of conspicuous consumption work us into a corner, and then we improvise our way out again.

Simple Gifts

My roommate and I grew up on opposite sides of the country, but like most other guys our age we wasted countless hours of our childhoods playing an extremely popular first person shooter for the Nintendo 64 called Goldeneye. Multiplayer battles in that game were intense and addictive; unlike the punks playing Call of Duty these days, back then we were actually in the same room as the people we were playing against, which forced you to be a little more careful with your trash talk. Plenty of times he and I would swap 64-bit war stories and gas on about picking up an N64 to try and recreate some of that old magic.

With my roommate’s birthday bearing down earlier this month, and the rest of our friends planning extravagant surprise gifts for him (blindfolds, scavenger hunts, Disneyland, etc) the pressure was on for me, a particularly inept gift giver, to find a present that matched up. A few days before his birthday, it dawned on me: I could get us a Nintendo 64 and a copy of Goldeneye to play on our big screen TV.

This was an uncharacteristically good gift idea coming from me, and I knew it. What could be more fun and nostalgic than playing the video game of our childhoods on our 55 inch plasma TV? Best of all, it was simple – all I had to do was dig up an N64, a copy of Goldeneye, and the right cable to hook it up to our TV.

I love simple.

The guy at the vintage game store scanned the tag on an old cardboard box with a Nintendo 64 in it, and I handed him my card.

“I’ll take a copy of Goldeneye, too.”

“Oh, yeah, we don’t have that.” The sweaty guy behind the counter said.

I looked around the store, filled with games for the NES, Super NES, Sega Dreamcast, old equipment from the original Rock Band, Castlevania players guides, sun faded posters for Tomb Raider II, and seemingly every Nintendo 64 game ever made – except the one that sold eight million copies, apparently.

“Okay. Do you know anyplace else that might have it?”

He was struggling to work a credit card swiper that predated some of the store’s younger employees. “Maybe check the Internet?”

Woah, thanks for the tip! Check the Internet! Never would’ve thought of that on my own. “Hey, one other thing – do you guys sell an adapter I could use to hook this N64 up to our bigscreen TV?”

He handed me the console and my receipt. “Yeah, we don’t have anything like that here. Also, N64 games barely run on those big new TVs. The technology just isn’t compatible. Lot of frame rate issues.”

“Uh huh.” I said, staring at the N64 I’d just bought with the express purpose of hooking it up to our bigscreen TV.

ALL SALES FINAL, the sign behind the counter said.

On my way home I called my friend Sabba to gripe about the unplayable, gameless N64 I’d just bought my roommate.

“Maybe I’ll just give it to him like this, and the real gift is the personal journey he goes on trying to find a copy of the game and a TV he can play it on. Do you think that works?”

“Oh!” She chirped from the other end. “I’ve got an old TV that would work with an N64! Do you want it?”

“Yes! That’s perfect. We can have a special 90s TV to pull out every time we want to play our 90s video game. When can I pick it up?”

I reached Sabba’s house and she took me back to her room where the TV was waiting for me. I tried to pick it up and found that it weighed eighty-seven billion tons.

“So… There’s something else.” She said. “It turns out this TV doesn’t have any input ports you could plug the N64 into. But it does have a port we can plug this old VCR into, and this old VCR has ports you can plug your N64 into, so you can run the N64 through the VCR.”

It took me a second to make sense of all that, but eventually I did. “Okay. That’s cool. That adds a whole new dimension to this gift – now we’ve got a way to play N64 and a way to watch old VHS tapes.”

“Well, no. See, the tape deck on the VCR doesn’t work.”

“Uh huh.” I looked at the nest of cables snaking from the TV to the VCR to the N64 to the wall. “So the VCR is broken.”

“Except for the part that you need to use to hook up the N64, yes.”

It took about 20 minutes for Sabba, her father, and her brother to explain to me which cords had to be plugged into which holes, as well the myriad of input settings I had to configure on each device in order to get the N64 to display. Then it took all of us to lug everything into my car.

I called around to other game stores. None of them had Goldeneye. Maybe the game was just so good that none of the millions of people who bought it wanted to sell their copies? “You should check on the Internet,” virtually everybody I talked to said.

The first Amazon listing I saw for Goldeneye was a guy charging over $200 for a single copy. I closed the browser, called my parents, and asked nicely to air mail my old copy of Goldeneye down to me – the one that they’d scoured every game store in Salem to buy for me new on my birthday in 1997.

So now I was officially re-gifting.

The plan that had begun with me adding one new piece of audio/visual equipment to the apartment had now metastasized into three, along with two new remotes and four additional cables, all very old and heavily used. My roommate’s once-simple gift now had so many attachments that I needed to find a rolling cart to keep everything on so we could easily move this monstrosity into and out of the room when we wanted to play.

I had no idea how hard it is to find a rolling cart until I tried it for myself. At every antique shop I got the same apologetic look when I asked. “Oh, I’m sorry – whenever we get one of those in it’s gone right away.” One shopkeeper explained.

“So are carts always in demand like this? Or is it just a fad, and in six months everybody is going to go back to putting their possessions on stationary objects?”

She shrugged. “Have you checked on the Internet?”

I’ve lived in my neighborhood for close to three years, but it took me until the day before my roommate’s birthday to realize there was an Office Depot a five minute walk away from my apartment. What’s more, they were having a going out of business sale on the day I went in looking – everything in the store, from merchandise to shelving, was for sale. 

A polo-shirted employee led me back through the store. “I don’t remember if we’ve got any media carts… If we did they’d be right… Here.”

He led me around a corner to a blank section of shelf where there were no carts.

“Ah, too bad.” He said. “Sorry about that.”

Turning to leave, I froze. There in front of me were two completely perfect carts, loaded down with clearance erasers and pencil cups. I pointed.

“I’ll take one of those. One of those would be perfect.”

He sucked air in through his teeth. “Oh, yeah, those aren’t really for sale. Those are part of the display.”

“But it’s a going out of business sale. The signs say you’re selling everything in the store.”

“I don’t think we can sell those carts yet.”

“Listen: I want to give you money. Do you want to take money from me or not?”

We went and talked to a manager who had a better understanding of capitalism than his employee, and two minutes later I was walking up Ventura Boulevard pushing a media cart purchased at a steep discount.

I kept the monstrosity in my room for two days, towering over my bed. In that period there were three minor earthquakes and every time I took cover on the floor I was sure the TV was going to topple off the cart and crush me.

By the time my roommate’s birthday rolled around, my gift had grown to be as extravagant – although not as aesthetically pleasing – as everybody else’s. My dogged pursuit of a simple solution wound up creating a five foot tall obelisk of pre-9/11 technology. His reaction was worth it, of course, as will be the Goldeneye tournaments we’re going to host. But I’m scared this may have taken up all the gift-giving competence I had left in my body.

So just a heads up to everybody I know, including my roommate: For every subsequent birthday, Christmas, wedding, baby shower, or other event, just plan on receiving a Border’s Books and Music gift card from me. Yeah, I know they went out of business. After this, that's going to be about the best I can do. 

Take Manhattan

How many movies have made comic hay out of a tough, no-nonsense New Yorker visiting Los Angeles and clashing with the laid back hippy-dippy West Coast lifestyle? Off the top of my head there’s Die Hard (“Fuckin’ California!”), Annie Hall ("They don't throw their garbage away, they turn it into TV shows.", and Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang - all fish-out-of-water stories in one sense or another, where the water is the straightforward, no-bullshit city of New York.

I’m having a harder time thinking of movies where the LA-based protagonist struggles to adapt to New York life and culture. But that’s probably because those movies would just be two hours of, “What’s that smell? It’s so cold! My feet are tired! Why is that man masturbating on the subway platform? These apartments are all so small!” Life in LA is pretty laid back, whereas life in New York is like an eight million person Hunger Games with bagels.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

*

I’d been to New York twice before – a week in middle school about six months before 9/11, and a week in high school just before graduation. Both trips were with my parents. We knocked out all kinds of must-see attractions like Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, and the Empire State Building, all of which were breathtaking in spite of my parents’ attempts to ruin it all by repeatedly belting out the opening number from “On The Town."

On this go around it was just me, my college roommate Jeff, and my other college roommate Josh, who’s finishing up at NYU Law and generously donated all 36 square inches of floor space in his dorm for Jeff and I to crash on. Having already seen most of the tourist attractions, we were able to spend this trip focusing on the truly important things, like red wine and unhealthy food from every world culture.

*

Josh has lived in New York for nearly a year now, which is apparently the length of time it takes to develop a full-blown death wish. As he led us around the city I lost count of the number of times he nonchalantly jaywalked across busy streets, inches away from getting pancaked by any number of delivery vans and Citibike-mounted yuppies. Fortunately, everyone else in the city seems to have the same death wish, and the streams of people threading their way across narrow streets keep traffic moving slow enough to prevent any hit and runs.

As I spent more time walking around the city I felt myself developing a death wish as well – not for myself, but for the 1500 or so people occupying my immediate personal space at all times. There were moments where the sidewalks were so choked with people walking in every direction, wayward strollers, umbrellas, and entire families stopping dead in the middle of it all to take a selfie that I found myself wishing I could do some sort of Mortal Kombat-style spinning kick maneuver to clear some space around me. A lot of the time Manhattan felt like living in a small house with several dozen cats, Chihuahuas, and toddlers – no matter where you’re going or what you’re trying to do, every time you turn around somebody’s going to be directly underfoot.

One night we ate dinner at Café Habana in Nolita, which according to various newspapers and the Internet has the best Cubano in the city. Our server was friendly and cheerful, the wine was on point, and the Cubanos were everything New York magazine said they would be – but the restaurant was so unbelievably tiny and packed with people that every movement was a carefully coordinated ballet. Our table (which was two inches away from the table full of Germans next to us) was so small that there was scarcely room for our sandwiches; as it was we had to stash our water glasses on the windowsill.

See that leg on the far right? Complete stranger. 

That moment sums up my experience in New York pretty well – at all times I was either jockeying for space and ducking selfie sticks or being completely blown away by the culture, spectacle, and scale of the city. There was a constant baseline of both crowd anxiety and awe for the entire trip. It was kind of exhausting.

There was also a constant baseline of cheese. 

*

Friday night our friend Shelli, an Oregon grad now living a bohemian actress lifestyle in Brooklyn, took us out for drinks in Crown Heights. This neighborhood was apparently pretty dicey a few years back but is now in transition – the street we were on was home to several wine bars and organic markets as well as a mobile NYPD guard tower and posted signs telling bodega customers not to wear hoodies in the store.

After stuffing our faces, Jeff and Josh and I headed for the subway. While waiting on the platform we played a rousing game of Spot The Rat (we spotted five, but Josh still holds the standing record with six) and then got on a crowded train back to Manhattan. One stop after we sat down, a young, drunk black guy got on and sat down next to a couple of girls opposite us.

“Yo, Bieber.” He said. “Bieber! Hey, Bieber!”

“I think he’s talking to you, Truman.” Josh murmured.

I looked up, and the guy was pointing to the two girls next to him. “Which of these two girls is prettier? C’mon, which one do you think?”

Both women seemed as mortified by this question as I was. “Sorry man,” I said. “I think you’re barking up the wrong tree.” (Yes, I’ll gladly pretend to be gay if it gets me out of a conversation with a drunk stranger. I used to use the same trick whenever I got approached by military recruiters in high school.)

He gave Jeff and Josh the same question and both of them demurred as well. At the next stop the girls got off and a bunch more people got on – several more black people took seats around us, and a gaggle of white college girls got on the other end of the train.

“Hey, hey, ‘scuse me…” The guy said, standing up, addressing everyone. “So why is it that all the black people are at this end of the train and all the white girls are over at that end of the train? I thought segregation was over, c’mon!”

The trainload of no-bullshit New Yorkers ignored him en masse. A black woman standing with her friends nearby glanced at us and murmured to her friend, “This is probably pretty awkward for those three guys.”

*

So there’s this famous bronze statue of a charging bull on Wall Street. And like most famous things in New York City, it’s ringed three-deep by tourists at all times, selfie sticks protruding from the mass at all angles. Unlike most famous things in New York City, this bull has a gigantic set of bronze testicles, and people of every race, nationality, gender, and age seem united by the desire to pose for a picture of themselves touching them.

That, to me, became the real tourist attraction – not the big anatomically correct bull, but the cross section of humanity on display, all jockeying to be photographed touching a bronze replica of a barnyard animal’s scrotum. I guess it makes sense. You’re standing at the heart of American economic power; you may as well cup its balls while you’re there.

I just hope the city has somebody wipe the nuts down every night with Purell. Bronze or not, thousands of hands from all over the world touching the same set of genitals is bound to spread some diseases.

A New Start

Right? This feels like an improvement, doesn’t it?

It used to be that I’d write the entire update on the evening that I posted it. Nowadays I chip away at updates over the course of the week, adding to them bit by bit as inspiration strikes, and then sit down sometime on Sunday to try and pull together all of my different opinions from the week into one cohesive update. This system works for me because it doesn’t require me to think all that hard until the very end of the process.

When I created the old blog I was just looking for an online repository for dick jokes and the Dave Barry-style comedy I was doing at the time, so the silly name and primitive layout kind of made sense. It was like saying, “I’m not taking this all that seriously, and neither should you.” But in recent years, as the dick jokes have tapered off and the social and political commentary has ratcheted up, now I actually am taking this seriously. It’s past time I start posting my work in a space that makes it easier for other people to take it seriously too.

The wraparound is getting a facelift, but the content itself isn’t going to change that much. I’m not going to start writing shorter, more digestible updates. I’m not branching out into gif-based listicles the way less reputable outlets like BuzzFeed and the House Judiciary Committee have. I’m not going to start superimposing the text of my updates over pictures of Taylor Swift and SnapChatting them out to my readers, no matter how many people keep asking me to.

All the barriers to entry that have held my readership at 30 to 50 people for the past eight years aren’t going anywhere. I’ve long since given up on broadening my audience – I just focus on doing work that I can be proud of. That’s definitely a struggle, but it’s going to be a lot easier now that my work is living somewhere free of HTML errors and a color scheme that causes clinical depression. 

To those wonderful 30 or 50 people who have hung with this thing for this long: Thank you. Now you should probably all run off and update your RSS feeds. 

Hot Mail

The great thing about Hillary Clinton’s email scandal is that it really perfectly showcases so many of the reasons why I don’t like Hillary Clinton. It’s more than just her chummy connection with Wall Street, or the fact that her husband was already president, or the fact that she isn’t Elizabeth Warren. I’ve come to accept that just about any politician this big is going to be kind of a corrupt shitbag – I don’t like Hillary Clinton because she’s not even trying to pretend that she isn’t, and she gets awfully testy whenever somebody points out that she is.

This much was clear in her press conference at the United Nations last week, where she tersely explained to a group of reporters that the reason she conducted all of her State Department business through a private email account on a private web domain stored on a server in her own home was simply because that was "more convenient" than carrying a second Blackberry. That’s a laughable excuse on its own; nevermind the fact she told a crowd she has two iPads and two phones less than a month ago.

But Hillary Clinton doesn’t care that her explanation sucks, because she doesn’t seem to believe that she even owes us one. It’s like she’s angryat the press for not believing her unbelievable story, or for questioning the questionable method by which she determined that half of her emails could be deleted before handing them over to the State Department. It’s not enough for her to be wealthy and powerful – she thinks she’s above suspicion.

But despite what a nasty and generally untrustworthy person she is, Hillary Clinton is still going to be president. Her entire career has been pointing to this moment, and if anything is going to derail all of that momentum (and money), it’s not going to be a flap over her email. And it’s certainly not going to be whoever winds up running against her.

There’s a full clown car-load of Republicans posturing for a presidential run, basking in the spotlight as every media outlet makes a big show of talking each one up like he (or she, but in most cases "he") could be our next president. The reality is that each one of these clowns is less electable than the clown who came before him, and all of them are wayless electable than Hillary Clinton.

Chris Christie is ass-deep in scandals, and for a scandal to fully submerge that man’s ass it has to be a lot larger than 30,000 deleted emails. Rick Perry isn’t very smart and America has at last figured that out. (He's also currently under indictment on felony charges.) Wisconsin governor Scott Walker talks a good game about stimulating the economy by cutting everybody’s pension, but the math doesn’t back him up. Dr. Ben Carson has made a habit of saying a new stupid thing about gay people every March for the past three years.

Now, these clowns might perform well with the extremely conservative primary voters in Iowa and South Carolina who choose which Republican gets the party’s nomination. The problem for them is that after getting the party’s nomination they then have to act sane enough to get moderate independent voters in Ohio and Virginia to vote for them in the general election, which Mitt Romney discovered is not easy to do after spending several months pandering to the nuttiest reactionaries in the country.

Jeb Bush, the most electable clown in the car, is attempting to navigate those waters right now, trying to be just anti-immigration and anti-Common Core enough for his party’s wingnuts to nominate him. And whether or not he can successfully walk that tightrope, he’s still going to have to answer for his role in the Terri Schiavo case when he was governor of Florida ten years ago. The Cliff’s Notes version is that Governor Bush bullied judges, passed unconstitutional bills in emergency legislative sessions, and eventually called in a favor from his brother in the White House all to try and prevent a man from removing his braindead wife’s feeding tube.

When you want to talk about government overreach, it doesn’t get much more egregious than a sitting governor trying to supersede the court system in order to gain legal authority over a man’s bedridden wife. Bush’s actions were unpopular then, but today, when people all over the political spectrum are up in arms about the ways the government intrudes into their day-to-day lives, they’re a serious liability. Terri Schiavo is going to hurt Jeb Bush one hell of a lot more than Hillary Clinton’s emails are going to hurt her. 

Because at the end of the day, no matter how shady and secretive Hillary Clinton is, no matter how much crony capitalism she engages in, no matter how downright nasty she is, she’s still the most credible candidate with the best chance of winning. If the election happened today, she’d win it. When the election happens next November, barring some sort of catastrophic meltdown, she’s going to win it.

I don’t have a lot of faith in Hillary Clinton to seriously tackle income inequality, run a transparent and accountable White House, or heal any partisan divides in this country. Regardless, I’m probably going to wind up voting for her anyway because she’ll nominate pro-choice Supreme Court justices and won’t try to fuck with the federal program that lets me buy cheap health insurance. That's more than I can say for anybody else who's running.

Hillary Clinton is a corrupt D.C. shitbag, but unfortunately she’s currently the least dangerous shitbag gunning for the presidency. Maybe that’s really what’s got her pissed off – she knows that, emails or no emails, she’s still the safest choice for president. She’s probably just wondering when the rest of us are going to get used to that, quit asking questions, and fall in line. 

Happnings

LA may be critically short on parking spaces, green left turn arrows, and people who know when to shut the fuck up about yoga, but we’ve got more attractive women in their 20s per capita than pretty much any other city. You see them buying kombucha at the supermarket or in line in their workout gear at The Coffee Bean – every time a gag on a TV show calls for a pretty girl, this is the pool that she gets cast from. Sometimes I wonder how many of the flawless powerwalking blondes I pass on my bike trail are Ted Mosby’s ex girlfriends.

Every time I’m in close proximity to one of these dayplaying basic cable goddesses, the part of my brain responsible for finding ways to get me to embarrass myself flies into action. Go talk to her! Seize this opportunity! This beautiful woman with everything in the world going her way is probably both single and totally into unemployed guys who haven’t showered yet today! But I always ignore this voice. I don’t want to accost some poor woman in the middle of her day, and the only pickup line I can ever think of is, “So, have you watched The Wire?”

It was after one such encounter that I spotted an ad for a new dating app called Happn – because Lord knows your app will be a failure if you don’t arbitrarily remove at least one vowel from its name – which is intended to function as a more effective version of a Craigslist “missed connections” page. Happn’s gimmick is that it somewhat creepily monitors every member’s location through their phone and keeps track of which other members you’ve crossed paths with during the day. If that certain someone you made eye contact with on the street is a Happn member, the app gives you the opportunity to send a message after the fact.

Having tried it both ways, I’d much rather have a woman reject me online than in person. Like ordering takeout or buying toilet paper, it’s just another thing the Internet has made easier. Happn looked like the best of both worlds: A way for me to approach women I see on the street without having to, y’know, approach them. Plus, on the off chance that women have been surreptitiously checking me out on the street all these years, this would finally give them an opportunity to get in touch. 

So I downloaded the app, uploaded the three good pictures of me that exist, wrote a quick and to the point bio (“I’m not in ISIS.”) and then went on with my life, trusting the app to work its magic. At bars and restaurants or just walking down the street, I tried to guess who else around me was on Happn and which ones I’d be exchanging messages with later.

After more than a week with no activity I’d just about forgotten that I had the app. When I finally opened it to see what was up I found no messages, but an extensive list of the other Happn members I’d bumped into over the course of the past week, along with map images and timestamps to show exactly where and when we’d come into contact. I scrolled through the profiles, wracking my memory to try and remember if I’d noticed any of these women when we passed by one another. I couldn’t remember seeing any of them in person, but I’ve also got plenty of Facebook friends who I can’t remember ever meeting in person, so I figured it was on me and not the app.

I realized something was up while scrolling through the profile for a cute fashion school student who Happn told me I’d bumped into the previous weekend. Her pictures looked fine and her bio was par for the course (every woman on a dating site in LA loves Netflix and hiking. This is a fact.) But according to the pin on the map image, we’d encountered each other at 10:30 PM in the middle of a northbound lane on the Hollywood Freeway.

The Silicon Valley matchmakers who created Happn obviously envisioned a romantic utopia where shy singles in coffee shops make fleeting eye contact, connect on the app, get married, have a whole pile of kids, and teach them all C++ coding from an early age so they’ll have a viable skillset in a 21st century knowledge economy. Their ad campaign, dominated by pretty women on the street glancing flirtatiously over their shoulder at the camera, creates the same fantasy. My experiences haven’t quite matched up to that yet. 

At least 70 percent of the women Happn tells me I’ve “crossed paths” with have simply driven down a nearby surface street. Yesterday I “crossed paths” with 13 different women while driving home from breakfast – they were either in nearby buildings or cars going the opposite way. I’ve crossed paths with one woman 9 times without even leaving my apartment because she drives up my street every morning on her way to work while I’m still asleep.

If you’re interested in modeling the traffic patterns of single young women, Happn can give you plenty of invaluable raw data. But if you’re trying to get laid you should probably use a different app. Or, y’know, just go talk to women.

American Exceptionalism

The most challenging, rewarding, and invigorating educational experience of my life was the AP United States History class I took during my junior year of high school. The class was grueling, to be sure – we met daily and were assigned an impressive amount of homework. But we were blessed to have as our teacher a man named Mr. Nickel, who was so passionate and energetic about teaching that he could’ve been the subject of an inspirational education movie like Stand And Deliverwere it not for the fact that his students were mostly college-bound upper-middle-class kids who wanted to learn the material anyway.

Mr. Nickel often reminded us that American history is really all about peoples’ stories, and that hooked me early on. Day by day for an entire year, in 80 minute increments, Mr. Nickel told us an epic story spanning more than two centuries, featuring a cast of millions, political intrigue, war, geopolitics, and complex characters whose actions continue to shape the course of an entire goddamn country. America is the biggest, grittiest prestige cable drama of all time.

The class was far more difficult than anything I’d taken before or any class I would take at the University of Oregon after. I refer back to things I learned in that class on a daily basis. If you asked me to list valuable educational experiences in my life, AP US History tops the list, closely followed by the discovery that every fancy hotel has a clean bathroom in the lobby that pretty much anybody can use if you walk in like you own the place. That should say a lot about how influential Mr. Nickel’s class was, because I take advantage of hotel lobby bathrooms a lot.

Unfortunately, Oklahoma’s House of Representatives doesn’t feel as warm and fuzzy about AP US History as I do. Recently one of their legislative committees voted to advance a bill that would cut funding for the new AP US History curriculum, which sponsor Dan Fisher claims emphasizes, “what is bad about America” instead of teaching students about “American exceptionalism.”

It stands to reason that Oklahoma doesn’t like American history curriculum. It’s hard enough to get people psyched about living in Oklahoma already; telling residents that, A) there was something called the Trail of Tears, and that B) it led to Oklahoma probably won’t make the job any easier.* Any student of American history knows that President Andrew Jackson had more than a passing distaste for Native Americans – the fact that he decided to give them what is now Oklahoma speaks volumes for just how historically unimportant that area is.   

*The trail that led to Oregon, on the other hand, got its own video game. Advantage, Oregon.  

Under national scrutiny, Fisher meekly withdrew his bill. But debates about supposedly un-American American history curriculum are raging all over, from Colorado to Texas to Georgia. Conservative school board members everywhere seem very concerned that students will wind up hating America if they learn its actual history, so instead they’re seeking to replace it with their preferred narrative, wherein Ronald Reagan created this exceptional country out of a lump of free enterprise and then spent 200 years defending it with an AR-15 that shoots tax cuts.

I couldn’t believe less in American exceptionalism – the notion that America is the world’s only superpower because we’re somehow more special than everybody else on Earth. Teenagers already think that about themselves; I’d just as soon we don’t start teaching them that the same applies to the country they live in.

What really makes America exceptional is that we’ve got lots of natural resources and have ports on both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, which makes it really easy to sell those natural resources to the rest of the world and amass huge amounts of wealth. I think it’s important for students to learn that much. It gives a context for why so many of our forebears were willing to kill, brutalize, displace, lie, cheat, and steal in this country’s name – in one way or another they recognized this country’s potential and they would do anything to defend their place in it. It’s not like that makes Manifest Destiny okay or anything, but it helps you understand what has historically motivated powerful Americans to be such huge pieces of shit.

We’re not special. Our ancestors just happened to land on a really sweet continent and then spent the next hundred or so years killing the people who were already living there, as well as anybody else in the neighborhood who started to make a fuss. Since we kicked Mexico’s assin 1848, all of our enemies have been on the other side of huge oceans, which gave America breathing room to get rich and build the most powerful military in history.

You ever play Risk with somebody who starts in Australia and spends the entire game fortifying his little island with a massive army while everybody else fights it out? It might make you a dick on family game night, but it’s been a winning strategy for America for nearly 240 years.

Nobody on the ideological spectrum is debating that America is the most powerful country in the world – the disagreement just over how much we want to tell our students about the terrible and inhumane things we had to do to get this powerful. Dan Fisher and his ilk seem to believe that AP US History, as it’s currently taught, is encouraging students to hate America. Like many Republican state legislators in the Midwest, they’re wrong and have no idea what they’re talking about.

I’m pretty well versed in this country’s nasty history and none of that has stopped me from loving it. Part of that is because it’s my home, and part of that is because US history, when taught accurately, is littered with inspiring and patriotic moments where the country briefly puts dysfunction and scandal on hold to do one or two really great things. You really can’t appreciate this country’s high points until you see the low points that we had to climb up from.

When you take the bad out of American history, you’re not just misrepresenting the facts; you’re taking a fascinating story and removing all of the dramatic conflict. That makes the story boring - and good luck getting a classroom full of teenagers to actively engage with a boring story. 

Chopper Whopper

I want to take a second to congratulate those brave souls in the media who went above and beyond in coming up with a name for the scandal surrounding Brian Williams' lies about a nonexistent wartime helicopter adventure. Sure, it would’ve been easy to follow the playbook and simply append “-gate” to the end of something (Choppergate, Williamsgate, Credibilitygate), but instead they went above and beyond and now the whole scandal is known as Chopper Whopper. I give that name an A+. It sounds like the name of an English candy bar. America’s media establishment doesn’t get a lot right, but when it comes to tearing down one of their own, they pull out all the stops.

I like Brian Williams, I do. I think he’s charming, funny, intelligent, and a good newsman – of course, he’s also been peddling a variety of lies intended to beef up his credentials for several years now, so he’s really not that good of a newsman after all. And come to think of it, maybe he’s not as intelligent as I’ve been giving him credit for, either.

After all, how dumb do you have to be to risk your fundamental credibility as a journalist for the sake of a couple of anecdotes? What exactly was his endgame there? It’s not like he was trying to beef up his resume or something. Brian Williams has been lead anchor on the NBC Nightly News for 11 years – as far as TV journalism is concerned that’s about as much prestige as there is. He was the 23rd most trusted person in America. (Was.) He’s done plenty of real things he can brag about, so why keep coming back to a lie?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m upset that he lied, but I’m almost more upset that his lie wasn’t better constructed and covered up, y’know? If I had Williams’ level of clout and fortune I’d construct a lie that matched my travel schedule for the day and bribe a couple of key witnesses through shell companies to corroborate my story just in case. Then, I’d scatter just enough evidence to suggest that I had a drinking problem at the time, so if the story ever came out I could do a big public tell-all redemption story about how alcohol nearly destroyed my career.

Yeah, if I was going to let America down, that’s exactly how I’d do it.

You’d think that if anyone would be aware of how easy it is to fact check public figures these days, it’d be NBC’s number one newsman who's covered five elections. The fact that he felt like he could lie to his audience with such impunity should be a reminder to everyone that national TV news is, in most cases, a towering pile of unwatchable elephant shit.

If you don’t believe me, pay attention to TV news (particularly cable) between now and November 2016. If this upcoming election is anything at all like the last one or the one before that, you’re going to see a lot of handsome, square jawed men and gorgeous leggy women sitting at desks on expensive sets, talking about things that the presidential candidates said and did. From time to time, these beautiful people will report on what the “fact checkers” at the network have to say about some of the claims the candidates are making.

Here’s the thing: When I think of a person whose job is to verify that public figures are telling the truth, the job title that comes to mind isjournalist. If the responsibility of finding out if powerful people are lying to us has been pushed off onto fact checkers, then what the hell are all these beautiful people at the fancy desks getting paid to do?

I understand that any major news organization needs to employ a lot of people to make sure what they’re saying is correct. I understand that it’s unreasonable to expect Anderson Cooper or Megyn Kelly to personally check every fact in the stories they report – they’re on-air talent and they have a different set of responsibilities. But the way it’s presented on most TV news programs, the amount of time spent repeating and discussing what public figures are saying is far greater than the amount of time spent reporting on whether the person was even telling the truth in the first place.

That’s the most important part of the story. That’s what journalism is ultimately about. But I feel like these days most national TV news programs treat that as a secondary concern, at best. The anchors – their looks, their personalities, their onscreen chemistry – are the brand, and the relatively small portion of the newscast dedicated to what the actual facts are is just there to give the anchors more to talk about.

This isn’t just my opinion, by the way – I did some fact checking about TV news fact checking, and the fact of the matter is that there just aren’t all that many facts getting reported on TV news to begin with. PolitiFact has scorecards tracking the percentage of true and false statements made by journalists and pundits on NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, and Fox, and unless you like being lied to it’s not pretty.

34% of the statements made on ABC’s news programs are either ‘False’ or ‘Mostly false.’ On CBS it’s 44%. NBC’s number is the same – and when you factor in the 22% of statements that are only “half true”, 66 fucking percent of the things being said on NBC are at least kind of lies.

Looking at these numbers, you have to feel a little bad for Brian Williams. Yes, he lied to his audience and totally compromised his credibility, but he was also working for a news outlet that only tells the complete truth approximately one third of the time. Maybe we should at least give him a little credit for not lying more. 

American Griper

In spite of Seth Rogen’s assessment, American Sniper did not remind me of the Nazi propaganda film in Inglourious Basterds, and unlike Michael Moore it didn’t fill me with the irrational urge to verbally shit on the very institution of sniperhood. Leaving the theater, I didn’t feel as though I’d been shown some sort of sort of pro-war propaganda film based on Donald Rumsfeld’s Call of Duty fan fiction. I just felt like I’d watched an average at best movie with a below average script. 

I don’t have a side in the whole controversy over Chris Kyle’s record that broke out last month. From what I’ve read I get the impression he was fairly racist and engaged in some shady conduct overseas, but he also saved countless American and Iraqi lives and dedicated himself to helping injured veterans. I went in with no opinion, expecting to see a movie about the inner conflict between the two sides of this fascinating figure. But that's not the kind of story this movie was interested in telling. 

American Sniper consists of mostly three types of scenes: Scenes where Kyle shoots people in Iraq, scenes where Kyle is nonresponsive to his wife’s pleas for him to stop going to Iraq, and scenes where people tell Kyle how great he is. The Marines he’s protecting call him “Legend,” passers by stop him so they can tell him he’s a hero, superiors, squadmates and even medical professionals keep him updated on how prolific his kill count is.

Chris Kyle doubtless received considerable (and well deserved) praise from the people he protected, but as far as the plot of the movie is concerned, these scenes don’t go anywhere. American Sniper is littered with moments that indicate that Kyle is being deified by the enlisted men around him, and I wanted to see him grappling with the mythic status thrust on him. Instead he shoots people, or doesn’t talk to his wife, or politely demurs when told how great he is.

The story of what Chris Kyle represented to the people he served with, and how he tried to reconcile his human failings with that image, is a story that I’d really love see. It was frustrating to watch American Sniperknowingly turn away from any real complexity to just keep serving up stuff that feels good.

The closest we get to a peek into Chris Kyle’s psyche is a lesson from his father a few minutes into the movie, which establishes that Kyle is compelled to defend the weak from bullies. When he sees news of al Qaeda embassy bombings in 1998 he scowls at the television and dramatically stands up, apparently signifying his decision to spend the next 15 years fighting terrorism, in a moment that feels cribbed from The Young And The Restless. In Iraq the camera lingers lovingly on the Punisher skulls Kyle and his squadmates have stenciled onto their armor and Humvees. Kyle’s PTSD manifests primarily in a couple of scenes where he sits alone in his living room brooding, and appears to be magically cured after a doctor reminds him that he’s killed 160 people and sends him on a shooting trip with some disabled veterans. 

This movie isn’t a biopic; it’s a tribute to Chris Kyle. A good biopic presents both sides of a person’s character – the light and the dark – and leaves the viewer to do the messy work of making their own decision.American Sniper presents Kyle’s light side as a protector, a loving husband and father, and proud American but stops short of addressing the controversies that came with his battlefield notoriety. I think that made this a much weaker and less interesting movie, but I'm also not really who American Sniper was made for. 

I love my country in spite of its endless faults and I’m thankful for people who serve in the military, because that’s something I'm not brave enough do. But I also grew up pretty well removed from military culture and hadn’t heard of Chris Kyle before I saw the first trailer for this movie. I was no more the target demographic for American Sniper than for Madea Goes To Jail or Step Up 2: The Streets. Chris Kyle is revered among people who have served and their families, friends, and communities, and this movie is a celebration of his best qualities, because it’s made by and for people who care for him strongly.

And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Judging by how muchAmerican Sniper is raking in at the box office, Chris Kyle’s story is inspiring to a lot of people, and that's great. That's exactly what the movie was meant to do. 

But American Sniper shouldn’t be nominated for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, because American Sniper simply is not that good of a movie.

No, it’s not a bad movie, but it’s also by no stretch of the imagination one of the eight best movies of the year – it doesn’t hold a candle toBirdman or The Grand Budapest Hotel, or movies like Interstellar, Foxcatcher, and Gone Girl that didn’t even get a nomination. And the screenplay, which at times feels like it was adapted from a lengthy email forwarded by someone’s grandmother, is such a trainwreck of clumsy characterization and on-the-nose dialog that it’s kind of insulting to see it considered against Paul Thomas Anderson’s script for Inherent Vice.

I don’t have a problem with Clint Eastwood simplifying details to make a compelling tribute to Chris Kyle; I have a problem with him getting Oscar nominations for it. In directing this tribute he had to make a lot of artistic choices that make the movie less challenging, complex, and innovative than others – so why the hell are we nominating it at the award ceremony that’s supposedly there to recognize movies that make bold artistic choices and advance the art of cinema?

American Sniper succeeds at painting a glowing portrait of Chris Kyle and fails at just about everything else. I don’t say that because of my politics or Clint Eastwood’s politics or the illegitimacy of the Iraq War; I say it because I’ve seen a lot of good movies in my life and this was not one of them.

Working

The handy thing about a 9 to 5 job is that it’s a perfect excuse to not do the thing that you’d supposedly rather be doing. Sure, we all say we’d rather be pursuing our passion projects, but the actual nuts and bolts of that pursuit are more complicated because it involves motivating yourself to sit down and actually do work. That’s especially difficult after a full day of doing work for somebody else, especially with Netflix right there calling your name.

For me, getting any appreciable work done on my scripts during the workweek was a lot like getting pandas to mate. I mean, I guess it wasn’tthat much like it because at no point did large Asian bears fuck in my apartment. But much in the same way that it takes a very specific and carefully controlled set of conditions to conceive a baby panda, it also takes considerable effort to get me to be willing to write anything of my own after getting home from a day of writing things for The Man. I could usually count on guilt tripping myself into working on one of my scripts one or two times a week – and whenever I did I’d be battling a self-congratulatory voice in my head the whole time:

“Woah, look at all the progress you’ve made tonight! That’s almost half a page – which is an awful lot to write after spending the whole day at work. You need to pace yourself, champion; why not hang up the spurs for the night and fire up your PS4?”

That whole “pace yourself” logic doesn’t make a lot of sense when it’s applied to one of your passion projects – “You better pace yourself; God forbid you should achieve all of your dreams at once or something!” And yet, I kept listening to it, and my scripts ground along at the pace of approximately one page per week. I've managed to convince myself that I’d be a prolific and energetic writer were it not for this lousy job sapping all of my creative energies and holding me back. But now I've been given an opportunity to find out if that's really true or not. 

Last week at work I found out that the open ended full time freelance job I’d been doing for the past eight months had just gotten a lot less open ended, and Friday wound up being my last day at the office for the foreseeable future. As of this Monday I have returned to funemployment’s welcoming embrace; another Summer of George is upon us. But I’ve resolved to do things differently this time around.

I treated my last stretch of unemployment as sort of a social experiment designed to test the human capacity for leisure. I was a fearless laziness pioneer determined to find out just how much sleep the human body could tolerate, how long and how deeply a man could immerse himself inGrand Theft Auto V, how much peanut butter and Baja Fresh my system could tolerate.

While many of my high school classmates had begun raising children, I on the other hand nearly became nocturnal over the course of a 13 month stretch of funemployment – going to bed at 4:00 AM, sometimes not getting out of bed until 2:00 PM, and writing absolutely zero new scripts in the time between. I reached something resembling Total Leisure and found that it was a pretty hollow achievement – waking up knowing that I had absolutely nothing to do all day besides feed myself started to become less freeing and more depressing. When I landed another 9 to 5 job it was practically an intervention; now that I’ve lost it I’d just as soon not repeat that whole experience.

I’ve heard a few stories about people who quit their jobs to work on their passion project full time, waking up early, taking half an hour for lunch, grinding through until 5 or 6 at night, every day. The story ends with this yuppie folk hero saying something ruggedly individualistic enough to be in a commercial for designer jeans, like: “I was willing to do that every day for the man – why wouldn’t I do it for myself?”

I always wondered where I’d be in life if I’d had that attitude the last time I was unemployed. How much good work could I have produced if I’d spent the better part of a year devoting five – hell, three – full days a week to working on the thing I wanted to do? How much closer would I be? Close enough to never have to write “CUT TO an exciting montage of gameplay footage” again?  

Raymond Chandler had a really elegant system for motivating himself to write, wherein he’d set aside a period of time in each day where he had to abide by two rules:

1) You don’t have to write.

2) But you can’t do anything else.

This past week I’ve been waking up at 9:00 every day so I can practice Raymond Chandler’s system. My PS4 stays off, as does my WiFi, leaving me to spend extended periods of time sitting in front of an open FinalDraft document either writing or staring at my ceiling. Sometimes I take a long lunch, and on Friday I knocked off a little early, but already I’m taking this way more seriously than any job I’ve ever had.

We’ll see how sustainable this is. I was able to stay motivated for this first week, but it’s always easy to motivate yourself to do something new and interesting for seven days. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep this up before falling victim to the siren song of Total Leisure again – so I guess I need to finish a script and get famous before that happens.

Deep In The Heart

I saw one of the top ten greatest things I’ve ever seen in my life while strolling up the San Antonio River Walk with my friend Danielle.

Floating among the mallards in the river was what appeared to be a completely black duck, different from all the others. When we stopped to look it dove beneath the water and didn’t resurface for such a long time that I started to question whether there had even been a duck there in the first place.

Then the duck resurfaced several feet away – except now it had its beak wrapped around the midsection of a sizable catfish it had snagged from the bottom of the river. The catfish, unwilling to go without a fight, was flopping back and forth violently, jerking the duck’s long neck around as it swam back and forth in the river trying not to lose its grip. This continued for a solid five minutes until at long last the catfish suffocated – but the duck’s battle was only halfway over, because now it had to find a way to ingest this not-small dead fish without the benefit of teeth.

We could've sold tickets. 

We could've sold tickets. 

Danielle and I spent the next ten minutes transfixed as the duck painstakingly worked the fish into its mouth head first, tilted its head back, and tried to use gravity and a near-constant neck-shimmy to get it to slide down its throat. We were all but certain it couldn’t be done – the classic Oregon Trail conundrum of killing more meat than you can bring back – but finally the duck’s beak closed around the catfish’s tail and a bulge lurched down its long neck. We hung around for a few minutes after that, hoping against hope that we’d get to see a duck vomit up a dead catfish into a river, but Adam Richman’s waterfowl equivalent just drifted contentedly down the river toward an inevitable food coma.

It was amazing, kind of disgusting, and unlike anything I’d ever seen before in my life. And that’s more or less my impression of Texas, too.

Before visiting Texas, my reaction to Texas was always, “Yeah, Texas. We get it.” The cowboy hats, the cowboy boots, the guns upon guns, the whole notion that their way of life was so starkly different from the rest of America’s that serious people there could entertain the notion of going it as their own country… I just didn’t buy it. It felt like they were trying too hard.

I’m a huge King of the Hill fan and while I don’t want to toot my own horn I did ace the AP US History test, so I knew Texas had its differences from the rest of the country. But every state is different – you don’t see Delaware making a fuss about how their unique Chancery Court system, revered by corporate lawyers the world over, makes them eligible to be their own sovereign nation. You’ve got great barbecue and you’re the biggest state besides Alaska – get over it, already!

But then I actually went to Texas. And holy shit, guys, it is kind of like they’ve got their own country down there!

This either means that they'll charge you $100 if you fight, or that $100 is a perfectly reasonable amount to fight over.

If you asked a bunch of French, German, and English people who’d never been to the United States to describe what they thought America was like, I feel like they’d probably describe something a lot like Texas. There’s gigantic freeways full of veritable monster trucks, there’s water towers and gun shops everywhere, there’s endless, empty prairie five minutes from huge malls, everyone is extremely friendly, the food is nothing resembling healthy but so incredibly good that you don’t give a shit… It’s just all of the best and worst things about America dialed up to ten, happening at once, with a side of mac and cheese.

Because San Antonio is 65% Latino, pretty much every restaurant in town winds up being Mexican fusion, and because San Antonio is in Texas, just about every restaurant also will put brisket in just about anything. When we went to a trendy new Chinese restaurant, the fried rice had gobs of cheddar cheese and tortilla chips among the chunks of scrambled egg, and my ramen was garnished with two strips of fatty brisket that each weighed more than my car.

Looking back at these pictures I'm trying to pinpoint when exactly my arteries threw up their hands and said "fuck it." 

Maybe it was here. 

As a San Antonio resident, Danielle's arteries were better prepared than mine.

I take pictures like these so when I'm on my deathbed at the age of 45 I'll know exactly how I got there. 

When people said that everything was bigger in Texas, I guess I thought that “everything” was an exaggeration and they were referring mainly to geography, personalities, portion sizes, and waistband sizes. But no – even things you never really think about are bigger in Texas. Like the signs outside of businesses along commercial strips, which in San Antonio are routinely taller than any of the buildings in the surrounding area. I saw intersections that appeared to occupy more space than football fields, and an H-E-B supermarket large enough to have its own weather patterns. Unlike LA, San Antonio hasn’t got mountains or an ocean to hem in its sprawl, so there’s really no reason not to make everything large enough to be seen from space.

Before I visited Texas I based a lot of my impressions about the place on the actions of their elected officials. I realize now that that’s unfair – most elected officials everywhere are terrible people, and you can’t in good faith reverse engineer some sort of judgment about a vast and heavily populated area based on the actions of a few bigots wearing designer glasses and cowboy boots. Pretty much everybody I interacted with was friendly and talkative, from CVS clerks to the overwhelmed bartender in a crowded country bar who still smiled and made small talk as she got my drinks.

The one exception was the hostess at a hipster brunch restaurant who gave away our table 20 minutes after telling us there’d be an hourlong wait – and judging by how many nose piercings she had her politics were probably pretty close to mine anyway. And even she was polite about it! The closest thing I experienced to actual hostility was a couple of dirty looks after I tasted Big Red for the first time and said it tasted like Smurf piss. (It really does. I’m sorry, Texas; your soft drink is disgusting.)

Big Red is terrible, but every consumable item besides Big Red makes up for it. 

For how much fun I had and how much red meat I ingested, it was still a relief when I landed in Burbank on Monday. The wide suburban boulevards and chaotic traffic of the San Fernando Valley had at one time seemed overwhelming to me; after three days in Texas everything in California seems to be a much more manageable size.

Every Step You Take

When I finally updated my phone’s operating system last month I noticed right away that a new app had been installed. But I didn’t open it up, because that app was called “Health” and I noticed it right in the middle of the holiday binge-eating season, when any information being gathered about my health would probably paint a pretty bleak picture. I didn’t know if my phone had a way to track how much béarnaise sauce I was dumping on my roast or just how quickly I ate a bacon wrapped chicken fried steak sandwich, but I figured it would be better for my mental health overall if I didn’t find out.

My approach to diet and exercise isn’t all that scientific, because the amount of exercise I get is determined by my diet, which I’m pretty sure isn’t how you’re supposed to do it. Responsible people in the real world incorporate exercise into their lifestyle, but I prefer to approach it the way the Catholic Church handled indulgences in the Middle Ages, where you can screw around as much as you want so long as you pay for it at some point.

Every time I say yes to a steak sandwich or a late night bag of peanut M&Ms ostensibly meant to be shared by two people, I promise myself that I’ll make up for it by doing some sort of physical activity in the near future. My system differs from the Vatican’s in that half the time I just don’t follow through on the promise, and the other half of the time I generously overestimate just how valuable the physical activity I’m getting is.

God, did I really I eat four slices of Domino’s last night? Okay, instead of taking the elevator I’ll just climb up these two flights of stairs! That ought to make up for it.

I’m well aware that this system is bullshit and I didn’t need an app telling me that too. Unless it had the ability to deliver an electric shock to my nuts every time I order fries instead of a side salad at a restaurant I couldn’t see it affecting positive change in my life. If anything, it would just give me accurate and up to the minute data with which to feel shitty about my life choices. I pictured it sending me regular push notifications:

TRUMAN – YOU WILL BE FAT IN YOUR 30S.

It was desperation that finally drove me to explore the Health app. I was stuck on the subway without my headphones, surrounded by people who looked like they were angling to strike up a conversation, and decided it was worth confronting some uncomfortable information about the state of my health if it meant I didn’t have to talk to anybody.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the only thing the app was tracking and graphing was how many steps I was taking every day. Even more pleasant was discovering that I actually do a fair amount of walking, somehow averaging close to two and a half miles a day. I really appreciate that the app only tracks the thing I’m doing right.

I got off the subway without anybody talking to me so the Health app already felt like a win. But even after I’d put my phone away I kept thinking about the information that it was gathering about my walking habits. Once I knew that every step counted toward a total, I found myself making excuses to walk further so I could make my numbers look more impressive.

It’s amazing how your behavior changes when you know you’re being watched, even if it’s just by your phone. Now that I know there’s a machine in my pocket creating a graphical representation of my lazy Sunday afternoon, I’m more motivated to go walk to Trader Joe’s just to juke the stats and keep my weekly average up. Nobody likes knowing they’re at the low point on a graph – unless it’s a graph of something bad, like hospital admissions for kinky sex accidents.

It makes me wonder how much better of a person I’d be if my phone recorded, averaged, and graphed every responsible thing that I’m supposed to be doing. Flossing, cleaning, responding to emails – I want my number of completed chores to be tracked as closely as pro football players’ number of completed passes. I want FinalDraft to graph how much progress I’m making from one day to the next so I can more effectively guilt trip myself into writing. I want to know exactly what percentage of my day I spend staring at Reddit in lieu of finding something else to do. Since I can’t convince myself to do these good things for their own merits, maybe a computer’s silent, unblinking analysis will light the necessary fire under my ass.

I guess what this means is that I’m finally warming up to the idea of surveillance. Government surveillance is still on my shit list, but if personal surveillance is what it takes to make me act more like an adult then I’ll gladly be my own Big Brother.

The Interview, Reviewed

I felt a wide range of emotions as I watched The Interview from the terrorism-proof safety of my apartment. There was boredom, there was embarrassment, there was occasional laughter, but by far my strongest emotion was one of regret. It wasn’t regret that I was watching the movie – although I can say with total confidence that The Interview is just a fucking terrible movie all around – but regret that this comedy about assassinating Kim Jong Un had been made and cast by this particular set of people.

Two bumbling Americans trying to assassinate Kim Jong Un is a solid concept for a thought provoking black comedy, and I had faith in Seth Rogen to take this opportunity to provoke at least some thought. Instead it’s yet another slapstick movie about two idiotic, co-dependent bros for life; now the bros just happen to be slapsticking through the most oppressed country on Earth and the jokes aren't nearly as funny as they were in previous movies. It’s frustrating on its own as a crappy movie, and even moreso when you think about the movie they could’ve made instead.

Go ahead and make a movie about killing an existing world leader; that’s a bold creative choice. But if you’re going to stir up all that controversy and attention with your movie’s subject matter, at least try to elevate the content above Lord of the Rings jokes and James Franco complaining about his ‘stank dick.’

My favorite part of The Interview was Kim Jong Un, which is both a testament to the quality of Randall Park’s performance as well as just how unlikeable the protagonists in this movie are. While Rogen and Franco mug for the camera through extensive ad libbed sequences about bodily functions, Park portrays Kim Jong Un as a shy, awkward brat struggling to reconcile his love of margaritas and Katy Perry with his state-manufactured image as a living god and champion of the Korean people. His scenes hint at the smarter, better movie The Interview could have been – and then they end and we cut to Seth Rogen shoving spy gear up his ass.

The Kims are a pretty goofy dynasty of psychotic evil dictators. Kim Jong Un is a Chicago Bulls superfan; it’s likely that Dennis Rodman is the first American he ever met. Kim Jong Il was obsessed with Elizabeth Taylor and 80s slasher films, and even went so far as to author a guide to filmmaking. Kim Jong Un’s brother was once arrested trying to sneak into Tokyo Disney on a forged Japanese passport. This family stays in power by posturing themselves as warriors against the excesses of Western capitalism when it turns out they can’t get enough of the stuff. There’s a whole movie’s worth of comedy to be mined in that hypocrisy, and The Interview largely ignores it so Rogen and Franco can spend extended periods debating the merits of “honeydicking.”

Most of the time The Interview settles simply for being bad, but from time to time it veers into extreme cultural insensitivity. I think if you’re careful it’s possible to make a comedy that mocks North Korean leadership without trivializing their human rights abuses; Rogen and Franco simply weren’t all that careful at times. The most glaring example is a scene where Kim Jong Un brags to Franco that as supreme leader he has no trouble getting laid, followed by a rap montage where he and Franco sing, dance, and strip with a dozen lingerie clad concubines who come running into the room.

The thing is, women are routinely abducted from all over North Korea to serve as sex slaves for members of the leadership. There’s an entire government division dedicated to seeking out and training these women for their life of sexual servitude. This is the sort of thing that makes headlines occasionally, and I’m perplexed as to how nobody involved with the production of the movie figured this out and raised the concern that maybe this wasn’t the best subject matter for a mid-movie sexy montage.

It’s just another sign that this was the wrong set of filmmakers for this subject matter. A sequence where beautiful topless women spray one another with champagne would be right at home in any number of frathouse stoner comedies these guys have already made, but it’s out of place in a movie that is purposefully set in a very real and very brutal dictatorship.

I made the case before that the real value of The Interview is that it will undermine the legitimacy of the Kim regime for North Koreans who watch it, and I still believe that having seen the movie. The movie’s broad slapstick and potty humor should translate pretty easily, and it pulls no punches when it comes to making Kim Jong Un look bad. In the titular interview, Franco challenges Un with accurate statistics about North Korean human rights abuses and accuses him of lying to his people; Kim Jong Un cries and sharts himself. This scene may not make Western audiences laugh, but it may make North Korean audiences reconsider what their government tells them.

I won’t go so far as to say that The Interview has no value whatsoever. But if your media diet consists of more than state sanctioned propaganda and public executions, it probably won’t show you anything you haven’t seen before.

Christmas Without Christmas

From the age of five until I was 11 or 12, the period between late September and December 25th was probably the closest experience I’ll ever have to doing heroin. Almost as soon as the bitterness at having to go back to school had faded away, I’d feel a tiny spark of excitement and anticipation that would steadily begin to glow brighter and spread with each passing day. By Halloween it was like a campfire. By mid-November it was a bonfire. And by early December, when the city of Salem pulled their mildewy old candy cane decorations out of storage and started hanging them on streetlights all over town, the bonfire had gotten out of control and was burning the entire forest to the ground.

I’m never going to experience that particular brand and intensity of joy again. It’s not that I’m unhappy or I think my life is getting worse; it’s just that the sort of joy I felt in the weeks leading up to Christmas as a kid does not occur naturally. That intense, all-consuming anticipatory glee only happens because of several factors working together:

1)   It’s easier for children to get extremely excited about things because they haven’t experienced enough crushing disappointments to teach them the importance of realistic expectations.

2)   Because kids have virtually no disposable income, there’s no shortage of things they want to have but can’t get for themselves.

3)   For the same reason, they’re not expected to get gifts for anyone else, so the holiday is simply no strings attached free stuff.

4)   Family members, schools, and religious groups actively encourage children to be excited for Christmas.  

5)   Corporations spend millions on R&D to develop toys that kids want, and millions more on advertisements to get kids so excited about those toys that they make their parents’ lives miserable.

Call me a pessimist, but I don’t think there’s going to be another time in my life when Western society as a whole makes a concerted effort to see to it that I’m as happy and excited as can be for several weeks. Maybe if I was the first person to walk on Mars, or if I kicked Vladimir Putin in the beanbag or something – but even that wouldn’t happen every year.

You can look at this and say that my childhood was warped by capitalism run amok, that Christmas is too commercialized, that I missed the point of what Christmas was actually about, but I think you’d be wrong. My parents weren’t Christians and neither was I, and for several years I paradoxically didn’t believe in God but did believe in Santa Claus.* Even though I didn’t buy into the theology of Christmas, I did buy into the concept of people buying things for me on Christmas, and that alone made it my favorite time of year

*I guess there’s a beautiful sort of kid logic to that – Santa Claus rewarded me for good behavior up front whereas God wanted me to wait until I was dead.

The thing is, when I look back at those childhood Christmases, I don’t really remember a lot of the gifts I got. I remember getting a Christmas tree and decorating it with my parents, the house smelling like pine needles, the lights on the tree glowing in the darkened living room at night. I remember watching It’s A Wonderful Life on Christmas Eve and eating Mom’s Finnish korvapuusti on Christmas morning, the only ethnic thing my family ever did. I remember Dad endlessly quoting A Christmas Story as we opened presents: “Oh wow, a PDA organizer, THAT’S MIIINE! Hey, a beer machine, THAT’S MIIINE!”

The fact that somebody who’s had virtually no religious influence in his life could have so many fond recollections of Christianity’s biggest holiday is a pretty big win for God, all things considered. My childhood Christmas memories are some of my happiest, and yeah, a lot of that happiness was contingent on me getting free stuff, but a happy kid is a happy kid, damn it.

*

Our past 14 or so Christmases have gotten progressively more low key. Much of the reason my parents made a big deal out of Christmas was for my benefit, and as I got older and less susceptible to wonder, there were fewer reasons to go to all that effort. First to go was the practice of stringing Christmas lights on the house; this year, a week or so before I flew home, my parents broached the subject of doing away with another tradition.

“Would you be terribly offended if we didn’t bother with getting a tree this year?” Mom asked me gently over the phone.

“No!” I said. “Not at all!”

I hadn’t been Christmas tree hunting with my parents since high school – the tree was always just set up when I came back from college or LA. I loved decorating the tree when I was six, but 20 years later it had lost some of its zest. And when you think about it, it’s already weird enough putting a dead tree in your living room – doing it out of a sense of obligation when nobody is particularly interested is downright crazy.

Midway through dinner on my second night home, the other shoe dropped:

“Yeah, by the way, we’re not really doing gifts this year.” Dad said, practically as an aside.

I slumped back in my chair. “Oh, what a relief. I didn’t get you guys anything either!”

I had a kickass Christmas this year – I’ve been sleeping a lot, hanging out with my parents, eating the incredible food my Mom makes, drinking the incredible wine my Mom buys, and watching our Christmas movies (the one family Christmas tradition that will never die). It wasn’t preceded by several weeks of excitement so powerful that I was unable to sit still, but that’s okay, because I’ve also been spared the devastating childhood letdown of December 26th.

Christmas comes every year whether you make a big deal out of it or not. Tree or no tree, God or no God, presents or no presents, it’s a damn good excuse to eat rich, buttery food with people you love, and that alone is worth getting excited about.

The Interview

Whether you find Seth Rogen endearing and hilarious or you think he’s a stoner doofus, understand that that man has achieved all of my wildest dreams. He started working as a TV scriptwriter when he was 17 years old, the raunchy comedy he and his best friend wrote in high school actually got made, he’s wealthy, his wife is gorgeous, and to top it all off his movieThe Interview has egregiously offended Kim Jong Un. If nothing else, that should at least make you second guess some of the things D.A.R.E. told you about the life-ruining effects of marijuana.

I’ve wanted to offend Kim Jong Un for as long as he’s been in charge – and before that I wanted to offend his pouty, tracksuit-clad daddy. You see, every visitor to North Korea is required to go pay their respects to twogigantic statues of Kim Jong Il and his father, and government minders insist that every photographer include the entire statue in every picture they take. Every North Korean citizen is issued pictures of the Kims to hang in their homes, as well as special cleaning cloths for them. It’s against the law to deface in any way an image of one of the Kim family, to the point that citizens must fold bank notes in a specific way so as not to crease the leaders’ faces. Entire generations of North Korean families have been sent to gulags because one member threw away a newspaper with one of the leaders’ pictures in it – proper procedure is to carefully clip the leaders’ images out of the newspapers and return them to the government before throwing the paper away.

To me, knowing that Kim Jong Un is willing to inflict innumerable horrors on his people to make sure nobody says or does anything remotely critical of him is pretty much an open invitation to say as many nasty things about him as possible just to try and even the score a little bit.

For instance, it might interest you to know that not only is North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un extremely grotesquely overweight, but he’s also incapable of sustaining an erection unless he’s wearing a pink My Little Pony costume. What’s more, his body odor and flatulence is widely regarded to be some of the most potent in Northeast Asia. In fact, the CIA has credible evidence that Kim Jong Un has eaten an entire bowl of wax fruit on four separate occasions because he’s so cripplingly stupid. Here's a picture of him in drag: 

                                                                                      Not that there's anything wrong with that. 

The government of North Korea goes to great lengths to make sure nobody says stuff like that, but fortunately there’s an ocean between me and them and they have a hard enough time building a missile that doesn’t explode on the launch pad, let alone make it all the way over here. They’ve got a huge army of stunted, malnourished soldiers using rusting Soviet era equipment that they don’t have enough fuel to run. The sad fact is that the only people who really need to be scared of North Korea are North Koreans.

So I was pretty much apoplectic last week when Sony capitulated to the people who have no capacity to harm us. And I’m still pissed at Paramount for refusing to redistribute a movie they released a decade agobecause they were scared the Kims would remember it existed. Hollywoodinvented the phrase “We don’t negotiate with terrorists” for fuck’s sake, and it was a bitter pill to see them hand a huge win to the worst human rights abusers in the world because they released some emails and said “9/11.”

Now, had I finished and posted this update late last week as I’d originally intended, I could’ve spent the next 400 words taking Sony to task for not releasing the movie. Instead, I woke up this morning to read that Sony now plans a limited Christmas Day release of the movie. That’s bad news for me, because now I can’t claim that my blog convinced them to change their minds. But it’s pretty good news for freedom of speech, and in the long run it may be one of the only things we in America can do to help North Koreans.

You need only watch the movie Argo to see that Hollywood has an inflated sense of its importance in world affairs – it was Canadian diplomats who did most of the work of helping the Americans escape Iran, but the story was rewritten to cast Hollywood movers and shakers as major heroes, which is convenient seeing as Hollywood movers and shakers decide which movies win what awards. But if there’s one international crisis that Hollywood’s glitz and glamor actually can fix, it’s North Korea.

North Korea’s state propaganda machine tells citizens that they live in a utopia that is the envy of the rest of the world, a claim that’s difficult to fact check in a country where contact with the outside world is all but forbidden. Over the past decade, various religious organizations and NGOs have been trying to change that by smuggling DVDs and thumbdrives full of South Korean soap operas and Hollywood movies and TV shows into the country, sometimes floating packages of them over the DMZ in special balloons.

Foreign content is both extremely illegal and extremely popular – DVDs of Desperate Housewives are reportedly hot commodities on the black market, even though people caught with them are summarily executed. For North Koreans, this show about horny backstabbing Americans is more than entertainment; it’s proof that their government is lying to them. Half of the defectors who escape North Korea have seen outside programming. The State Department has found that North Koreans who watch outside media are less likely to inform on one another to the government. One defector says she was convinced to flee after watching the movie Titanic, because she’d never considered that someone could sacrifice himself for love instead of loyalty to a pot bellied man in a tracksuit.

That was a movie about a 100 year old shipwreck. The Interview is a movie where Kim Jong Un is portrayed as an oafish Katy Perry superfan who is comically killed by a pair of clumsy journalists. Whether the movie is a laugh riot or another Funny People, it’s a direct challenge to Kim Jong Un’s authority, which is unlike anything any North Korean has ever seen before.

One Seth Rogen movie isn’t going to topple the most brutal authoritarian regime on Earth, but it could help a lot of North Koreans realize that their gout-afflicted god king really isn’t so much of a god. Or maybe it’ll just convince North Korean teenagers to start smoking pot.

The Worst Movie On Netflix

When I say that I love bad movies – and I truly do love bad movies – I’m not talking about your Sharknados, your Transmorphers, your Mega Sharks versus Giant Octopi. For me there’s no fun in watching those movies because they aren’t bad by accident – being bad is their whole schtick. If you want to have a really good time watching a bad movie, you need to find one where it’s clear that at some point during production, at least one person was absolutely convinced they were making a movie that the world needed to see. Halfassing a shitty movie on purpose is boring; setting a high bar and falling far short of it is good fun.

At least, that was my belief until last week, when I watched what is without question the worst movie on Netflix, and possibly Earth. This is a bad movie that a number of rich, famous, and powerful people believed in very strongly, a movie that fell far short of whatever it was supposed to be, but it could not be further removed from good fun. The movie was made in 1992, and it is called Cool World.

If you want to have a good time watching a bad movie, you should not watch Cool World. If you want to have a generally good and happy life, free of any undue anguish or suffering, you should not watch Cool World. No one should watch Cool World. Animals should not watch Cool World. I would not show Cool World to my worst enemy. Cool World is an enhanced interrogation technique. Cool World is the video in The Ring.Cool World contains substances known to the state of California to cause birth defects. Cool World is vast, angry darkness without end.

Also, Brad Pitt is in it.

*

                                                                                           Welcome to Cool World, everybody.

Cool World is plainly a knockoff of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, except that while Roger Rabbit was consistently fun and appealing, Cool Worldis like a Frankenstein monster of things nobody likes stitched together into the shape of a movie. It's too dark and raunchy for children and too incomprehensible and sleazy for adults - but I guess it’s a bonanza for people who get sexually aroused by cartoons, for what that's worth. 

You see, Cool World is a movie about exactly one thing, and that one thing is humans having sex with cartoon characters.

And I don’t mean that’s just a subplot or a running gag or something that characters talk about – the entire plot of the movie is Brad Pitt trying to stop Gabriel Byrne from having sex with a cartoon vamp voiced by Kim Basinger. And when (spoiler alert) it happens, you see an awful lot of it happening, and from the choppy editing I suspect there had been a lot more there until some sane person had it taken out.

Let me point out that this was not some overambitious student film. Paramount Pictures spent $28 million making this movie about cartoons and humans fucking. There was a tie-in video game for Super NES. They even installed a 75 foot tall cutout of Kim Basinger’s character on the Hollywood Sign. Executives who get paid millions of dollars to determine whether a movie will be good or not felt very strongly that this movie would be good. 

The gist of it is that there exists a world populated by crudely drawn and animated cartoons (“doodles”) called Cool World, and in the 1940s Brad Pitt gets sucked into it by way of a portal that opens for seemingly no reason. Unlike Toon Town, which had a whimsical sort of internal logic, most inhabitants of Cool World seem to spend every moment of their lives either hitting each other on the head with sledgehammers or having anvils dropped on them. Gabriel Byrne plays an incarcerated cartoonist who, 50 years later, gets lured into Cool World by blonde doodle temptress Holli Would.

                                                                                                    What a fun, whimsical setting!

There seems to be only one rule or governing principle in Cool World, and that’s that humans (“noids”) aren’t allowed to have sex with doodles, because for some reason that makes doodles turn into noids, and for some reason that’s bad. Holli, who desperately wants to be human, plans to seduce Gabriel Byrne so she can enter the real world. 

Over the past 50 years Brad Pitt has become a detective whose job is to keep noids and doodles from getting busy, which seems like both a poor use of Cool World taxpayer funds and a pretty serious conflict of interest seeing as Brad Pitt has a cartoon girlfriend who, like every woman in this movie, spends most of her time trying to seduce him. Still, he diligently abstains from sex with her, but despite his best efforts he fails to cockblock Gabriel Byrne. Holli enters the real world, transforms into Kim Basinger, and tries to take over the world with an army of doodles. Gabriel Byrne turns into a doodle and stops her, Brad Pitt turns into a doodle and can finally have sex with his girlfriend, and on that wholesome, cheerful note, the movie finally ends.

                                           Well, at least this gives us an idea of what "Fight Club: The Animated Series" might look like.

*

Any movie can have a nonsense script, bad acting, and glaring technical difficulties – SyFy Channel has been churning them out for years. What sets Cool World apart from the bad movie pack is that it doesn’t settle for simply being an affront to good filmmaking; it’s also an affront to basic human decency. The movie takes every opportunity to be sleazy, cruel, and misogynistic, to the point that I started to wonder if maybe the Men’s Rights movement was started by guys who saw Cool World at an impressionable age. There’s one scene in particular where everything wrong about this movie is firing on all cylinders:

Early on, Detective Brad Pitt visits Holli Would at her house, where, as usual, she’s doing a provocative dance. He questions her about Gabriel Byrne’s recent appearance in Cool World. and cautions her against having sex with Gabriel Byrne. She protests, sucking Brad Pitt’s fingertips and humping conveniently placed pillars as she giggles and coos about how she wants to see what sex is like for real women. 

Brad Pitt shuts her up by roughly shoving her to the ground a couple times, then gives her one last charming piece of advice – “Keep your legs crossed and forget about the real world!” Watching him exit, Holli then defiantly opens her legs as wide as she can while a group of cartoon wolves appear out of nowhere to catcall her. That's not the sort of .gif I want to embed on my blog, but if you think I'm making this shit up, click here to lose a piece of your humanity. 

I’ve been wracking my brain all week trying to think of who looked at this scene – first on the page, then while it was being animated, then in post production – and said, “Oh yeah, people are going to LOVE this! Look at this movie we’re making, so full of nice things that people want to see.” Someone was aware that the world had not yet seen Brad Pitt roughing up a cartoon nymphomaniac, and decided that that needed to change.

The fun part about watching bad movies is questioning their bewildering artistic choices, but with Cool World those questions will take you to some pretty dark places. So stay well away. Watch anything else. Maybe even watch a good movie. Just don’t watch Cool World. 

Won't Get Fooled Again

I don’t know about you guys, but I loved the trailer for the newTerminator movie! At first I was worried, because the last one was awful and it’s not being directed by James Cameron, but based on that trailer I think that this movie is going to capture the gritty punch of the original movies!

That was more or less what I said to everybody within earshot when the trailer for Terminator Salvation first came out. Because it was a great trailer! It had the flying robot ships, it had robot motorcycles, it had Christian Bale jumping out of a helicopter and shooting a Terminator in the face. I was sold immediately, and when the movie turned out to be utter, absolute garbage, the last of my innocence died forever.

What Terminator Salvation taught me is that it’s really easy to make a cool trailer for a Terminator movie. No matter how bad the script for your Terminator sequel is, it’s guaranteed to have some scenes where humans and robots beat the shit out of each other – and the beautiful thing about a trailer is that you can just show those scenes out of context set to a grungy rock song and the movie pretty much sells itself.

I got tricked into wasting money and time on a shitty movie, and the experience has haunted me since. So when I watch the trailer for Terminator Genisys – henceforth referred to as Terminator 5 because I’m not going to commit that crime against grammar again – and I start to get excited that it’s set in the 80s and making innovative new use of time travel, I have to rein myself in as quickly as possible.

Making a cool Terminator trailer is easy enough, but circumstances here make it even easier. Terminator 5 appears to be kind of a mishmash of familiar settings and characters from the first two films, so in addition to rhythmically edited shots of rock 'em sock 'em Terminators you’ve got sawed off nostalgia to the face every time they cut to that department store, or the ugly 70s LAPD cruiser, or the way bullets look when they hit liquid metal.

“Hey! This doesn’t look like those bad Terminator movies they made a few years ago! This looks like those good Terminator movies they made 30 years ago!”

I’ve got to say, it’s awfully convenient that the upcoming Terminatormovie is made up of scenes and settings from the only two movies in the franchise that anybody has liked. Why, if I were a coldhearted cynic, I might even venture that Universal conducted focus tests to determine the most popular aspects of the first two films, then handed the results to several dozen writers to try and reverse engineer a script from there.*

*Those focus groups are probably why feathered hair and squeaky-voiced Edward Furlong aren’t included in this throwback.

It’s difficult to get large numbers of people to spend money on something if they aren’t convinced they’ll like it. That’s why pretty much every big movie is either a sequel, a prequel, or an adaptation of some other franchise (usually a dystopian young adult novel.) What’s worth noting about Terminator 5 is that right now it appears to be both a sequel and a prequel as well as an adaptation of the first two movies in its own franchise.

There’s an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 where two characters in a crappy sci fi movie watch a lengthy recording of a previous scene in the movie. This prompts Mike in the theater to quip, “When the movie starts showing you parts of itself, you know you’re in trouble.” We’ve finally reached that point with the Terminator movies: Striking out in new directions didn’t work, so instead the franchise is just trying to re-create previous iterations of itself with all the desperation of a middle aged man trying to connect with his teenaged stepkids.

“Hey, remember how we used to say ‘Come with me if you want to live?’ You liked that, right? Well, we’re doing it again, but this time Sarah’ssaying it! Remember how much you loved that evil liquid metal cop? We’re doing that again too! And even though nobody likes long winded speeches about preventing Judgment Day, you’re getting another one anyway!”

Pretty much every line in the trailer is either a throwback to a previousTerminator movie (“Come with me if you want to live,” “I’ll be back,” Sarah screaming “Now, soldier!”), retreads ground from a previous movie so closely that it may as well be a throwback (“We can stop Judgment Day from happening!” “The machines sent a Terminator to the time before the war!”), or is such a bland piece of writing that it could be a throwback to pretty much any mediocre action movie from the mid 2000s (“I look at each of you and I see the marks of this long and terrible war!” “If we die tonight, mankind dies with us!”)

I don’t have a crystal ball. Maybe this is a great movie being promoted poorly. But I think it’s a safer bet to assume this is a poor movie being promoted well. There have now been as many shitty Terminator movies as there were good Terminator movies; the chances of this one returning us to the glory days are pretty slim, even if the director did a coolDeadwood episode and the pilot for Mad Men. Good movies take chances and break new ground; this movie’s financiers are playing it so safe and taking so few chances that we’re getting the theatrical equivalent of a sitcom clipshow.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on you. Fool me three times, still shame on you - because if you really want to make aTerminator sequel reminiscent of the originals, ditch the focus groups and just make it good!

Seasons Greetings

You know what I think? I think it’s pointless to get up in arms about the grand jury verdict.

Depending on the number of middle aged white men in your news feed, you may have seen the video of Michael Brown shoving that guy in the convenience store multiple times by now. That five second clip seems to be the lynchpin of the case against Michael Brown in the court of public opinion – since every teenager who acts like a dick while high in a convenience store obviously has cop-killing murderous intent. It’s worth noting that Michael Brown had no criminal record, and in a town where the nearly all-white police department would arrest and extort black people for just about any reason, that’s quite an accomplishment.

Michael Brown was probably an asshole to some people, and probably a great and loving friend to others. I know this because I’m the same way, as is every other person I’ve met. If your entire assessment of my character was a couple of Facebook pictures and a grainy three second clip of me screaming obscenities at the traffic terrorists who use the right turn lane at the top of Laurel Canyon to try and zip up ahead of the line, you would believe anything about me. Somebody could tell you that I planned 9/11 and you’d believe it if all you had to go on was a few unflattering seconds of my entire life.

Darren Wilson was probably an asshole to a fair number of people in his professional capacity and a great and loving friend to others. I don’t think he wakes up and goes to bed hating black people. I don't think he stopped Michael Brown with the intention of shooting him. I do think he was working in tightly knit power trip bro culture which we know for a fact was extremely racist – this is the police department that beat an innocent black man within an inch of his life and then charged him with destruction of property for bleeding on their uniforms. Before Ferguson, Wilson was a cop in a town three miles away until the all-white police department was officially disbanded by the city council because of overwhelming tensions with the mostly-black citizens.

For what it’s worth, Darren Wilson had a clean disciplinary record, and the fact that he was a cop who had spent his career working in corrupt, racist departments does not mean he was a cold blooded killer who would execute a young man in the street. But it also doesn’t seem likely that he was a particularly good police officer – a former commanding officer toldThe Washington Post he was “average,” which isn’t much of an endorsement in a police department deemed too racist to exist.

I don’t know what happened on that street, but I know that it happened between a teenager who happened to be acting like an asshole on that particular day and an average police officer working for his second consecutive racially troubled department. Large patches of Officer Wilson’s statement don’t really make a lot of sense, nor do large patches of the statement from Michael Brown’s friend and eyewitness Dorian Johnson – so pretty much the only logical assumption is that people on both sides of the case are telling the truth about some parts and lying about others.

Based on what I’ve seen of how the Ferguson police do business, it seems pretty likely that Officer Wilson yelled at Michael Brown to “get the fuck on the sidewalk”; based on what I’ve seen of Michael Brown’s behavior that afternoon, it seems pretty likely that his response wasn’t as cordial as Johnson’s statement suggests. Based on what I’ve seen of how the Ferguson police do business, it seems pretty likely that Officer Wilson would respond in a way that escalated the situation.

I’d be really, really surprised if Michael Brown charged “like a demon” at Officer Wilson with intent to kill him. I would bet money that that was not why he turned around. It’s doubtful whether he was even really lunging –pretty much every eyewitness described it a different way, because as it turns out, human memory is extremely malleable and susceptible to outside contamination the likes of which you might find in the middle of a polarizing national media frenzy. This is why eyewitness testimony itself is notoriously unreliable.

Whatever Michael Brown was doing, I believe Darren Wilson took it as a threat to his life and fired in self defense. And that’s the only question the grand jury was trying to answer, because it’s legal to kill people when you genuinely think they’re trying to kill you – especially when you’re a cop in Missouri.

The grand jury wasn’t looking into militarized police departments, racial oppression, a fundamentally unfair criminal justice system, or the other controversies that have taken center stage since Michael Brown’s death. They weren’t tackling the root causes of why young black men are 21 times more likely to be shot by police officers than young white men, or why86% of the drivers stopped and searched by Ferguson police last year were black, even though whites were more likely to be carrying contraband. They weren’t deliberating over why white people can freely point assault rifles at federal agents to defend a tax evading racist, but black men and boys holding toy guns get shot on sight.

The grand jury wasn’t ruling on whether neglected, failing schools, limited economic opportunities, and communities destroyed by punitive enforcement of anti-drug laws have created an environment where it’s extremely difficult for black people to escape poverty and get ahead in life.

The grand jury was just trying to determine whether a police officer feared for his life during an aggravated tussle with an unarmed black man, and regardless of all the very real racial injustices taking place in Ferguson and everywhere else in this country, it seems pretty likely that he did. In light of the fact that his department responded to peaceful protestors with tear gas, machine guns, and trucks built to withstand bombs made by the Taliban, I think it’s abundantly clear that a lot of cops in Ferguson and beyond seem to be very scared of black people.

Real justice for Michael Brown is asking what it is they’re so scared of.

The Seven Year Itch

I don’t know why Kim Kardashian wanted to break the Internet. The Internet has been nothing but good to her. For someone who made 43 million dollars in three months by putting her cartoon likeness in a freemium game distributed over the Internet, who gets paid $10,000 per 140 character tweet sent through the Internet, breaking the Internet is the 21st century equivalent of killing the goose that lays golden eggs.

I’ve never made money off the Internet. In fact, it costs me money to use the Internet, not to mention the opportunity cost of the time I’ve wasted there, and I still don’t want to break it. Kim Kardashian has way more skin in the game (giggity) than I do. In fact, without the Internet, Kim Kardashian wouldn’t exist.

I mean, sure, there would be a woman named Kim Kardashian, and she would have large breasts and a big ass, but there wouldn’t be a way for her to distribute images of them instantaneously to hundreds of millions of people, and as a result she would not be Kim Kardashian. Kim Kardashian’s identity is rooted in her ability to show her private parts to large numbers of people.

This is, after all, a woman whose initial claim to fame was a sex tape. That in itself is remarkable – I’m not the foremost expert on sex tapes or anything, but usually the reason a sex tape goes viral is because at least one of the participants is famous. This was just a video of Snoop Dogg’s cousin balling OJ’s lawyer’s daughter, and it made her famous. There was a time when a sex tape could end your career. More recently, celebrities have used sex tapes to prop up their careers. But the fact that a sex tapestarted Kim Kardashian’s multimillion cult of personality is a sign of how skilled she is at being naked on the Internet.

I just don’t know who thought that more pictures of her body were going to break the Internet. In the years since her sex tape, the Internet has withstood the weight of a steadily increasing number of selfies, photoshoots, and paparazzi photos, to the point that it feels like 10% of all pictures taken since 2007 have been of Kim Kardashian’s ass. There’s already hundreds of thousands of terabytes of scantily clad Kardashian coursing through the Internet’s veins – a few more pictures here and there aren’t going to make that much of a difference.

Nude pictures of Kim Kardashian might have broken the Internet a few years ago. But we’ve had so much sustained Kardashian content on the Internet for so long that she’s started to become background noise. I’ve lived near a freeway for so long that I don’t notice the sound of the cars; anyone who’s spent time on the Internet has by now been conditioned to give Kim Kardashian's oiled up goods as much scrutiny as those pop up ads about how to become a work from home millionaire. If the Internet is a fishbowl, we’re the fish and Kim Kardashian is the water – she surrounds us at all times, to the point that we don’t even notice her there.

This, I believe, is why Kim Kardashian’s bare, shiny ass got upstaged by a space probe landing on a comet. I don’t want to sound like I’m dissing Philae or anything – that was a landmark scientific achievement that was by every measure more deserving of attention than an Armenian dilettante’s badonkadonk. But historically, the Internet is always more interested in asses than anything else going on in the world. The fact that the Internet in this case prioritized science and technology above masturbation means that either the Internet is growing more mature (unlikely) or the Internet is growing tired of seeing Kim Kardashian with her clothes off.

If you ask me, this is a case of the seven-year itch.

Since her 2007 sex tape, the Internet has more or less been married to Kim Kardashian – we’ve seen her, every day, in every outfit and compromising position, whether we wanted to or not. And anybody who’s been married will tell you that it can be difficult keeping the excitement alive over the years. Once you’ve been with someone for long enough, the mystery is gone and you’ve got to try hard to rekindle that spark.

Kim Kardashian wasn’t trying to break the Internet with her ass. She was trying to save her relationship with the Internet – and a full frontal nude photoshoot was a lot easier than taking all three billion global Internet users to a bed and breakfast in Vermont for a romantic weekend getaway.

I’m no great fan of Kim Kardashian but I’m pretty enthusiastic about naked women in general, so I checked out the pictures when they made their debut last week. To me, the most shocking thing about them was how little impression they made on me. I just scrolled down the page, thought, “Yep, Kim Kardashian sure isn’t wearing any clothes in these pictures,” and then closed the tab so I could get back to the New Republic article I was reading about campaign finance law.

It was a valiant effort on her part, but when your nudity is less interesting to a 25-year-old man than election funding, it’s probably time to call it quits. The Internet has moved on, Kim Kardashian. If your ass ever lands on a comet, though, please do give us a call!

Stampede

I think we can all agree that democracy is a crappy way to run a country – unfortunately, it’s still a lot better than every other way we’ve tried so far. Maybe in 50 or a hundred years we’ll figure out that the best way to do it is have a computer rule everyone, or decide elections by having the candidates fight with butterfly knives in a K-Mart parking lot. Until we reach that enlightened age, though, we’re stuck with a system where between one third and one half of us choose which millionaires we want writing our laws. The problem with this system is that rich people are dicks, and sometimes people vote for the biggest available dicks.

The Republican Party has for years now been little more than a country club pissing contest where everybody’s trying to out-conservative everybody else to appease the oldest, whitest, and craziest of their constituents. How that plus an official anti-gay marriage stance remains an attractive prospect for voters in this day and age, I’ll never know. But I’ve also spent my life working my way southward from one West Coast blue state to the next, so I’m probably pretty out of touch.

The economy is doing well, unemployment is dropping, the deficit is shrinking, healthcare sucks less than it did, and people still hate President Obama. I’m not the starry eyed groupie I was in 2008, but scandals and human rights abuses aside the guy is doing a decent job of running the country. Yes, there’s ISIS and Ebola and a host of other disasters, but unless you work for Breitbart it's pretty tough to pin those on him.* If anything, he should get some credit for running one of the few countries on Earth that is experiencing no more disasters than usual.

*If you were about to say that it was his idea to pull troops out of Iraq, you should be aware that you would be making an incorrect statement.

I mean, for fuck’s sake, America. Everybody blames Obama when gas prices go up, but when they go into free-fall for weeks before the election this is the thanks you give him? 

But to be fair, the Democrats ran a bunch of crappy candidates in difficult states. And there was the NSA business. And the IRS business. And the VA business. And the Obamacare launch business. Some of these scandals are more valid than others. Some have since been fixed. Some of them were a long time ago. But they were all scandals that happened while Democrats were in power, and to lots of voters, none of the other subtleties matter.

If you shit yourself in front of 316 million people, it doesn’t matter how quickly you get cleaned up afterwards. They’re not going to forget that you shit yourself. And they’re going to remember that later in the voting booth, when it’s time to choose between the people who shit themselves or the people who want to take away everybody’s birth control.

I would definitely prefer it if the Democrats had not lost control of the Senate. But you know what? That’s what happens when you fuck things up. If the Democrats really wanted to stay in power, they should’ve built a better website and made sure the IRS wasn’t doing shit that made them look incredibly guilty.

Yes, running the country is an extremely complex task and it’s unfair to expect our leaders to get it right all the time. But lots of voters do nonetheless, so if you want to win a lot of elections in a row you have to fuck up as little as possible or be able to spin all of your fuckups so they look like successes. The Democrats, who six years ago were able to get Indiana to vote for a black guy with the middle name “Hussein”, were not up to this task, and as a result Congress is going to be run by a bunch of white trash dipshits who can’t agree on anything other than the fact that they’re not scientists.

But that’s not necessarily bad news. I mean, Republican control of Congress is definitely bad news for pretty much every American who isn’t a white man with a high paying job. But in a way, it’s also good news. The Republicans have spent years making huge promises to their senile, blue haired base about what they’d do if they were in power. Now that they’ve actually got the power to deliver on those promises, they’re fucked.

Even some Republicans admit they can’t get rid of Obamacare. First, any bill they pass to completely repeal the president’s landmark legislative achievement would require that same president’s signature to become law. Second, regardless of how Americans feel about the law, it’s given healthcare to millions of people, and even the dimmest GOP politicians know that taking something away from millions of eligible voters is a bad idea.

They can’t come up with a more conservative healthcare system that works better because it turns out you can’t make Obamacare much more conservative than it already is without breaking it. About the most they can do is repeal a 2.3% tax on medical devices, and if they’re able to pull that off I’m sure they’ll talk it up like they traveled back in time to kick Karl Marx in the dick.

With a slim majority, a Democrat in the White House, and five or six senators trying not to look too crazy in advance of a 2016 presidential bid, the GOP won’t have much more luck on any of the other issues that your grandma sends you racist email forwards about, either. Individual tax rates aren’t going to change. Welfare and unemployment systems won’t go anywhere. Eleven million illegal immigrants will not disappear overnight.

It’s going to be the same dysfunction and gridlock as before, only now the people causing the gridlock and dysfunction will be taking the blame for it because they’re in power. For the next two years, a divided, out-of-touch, and radicalized Republican Party is going to repeatedly shit itself in front of 316 million people. And it is going to be a mess. 

And then, in 2016, an assload of ethnically diverse young people who sat out this election are going to be voting because they want to elect the first female president – and they’ll succeed, because regardless of what you think of Hillary Clinton, everybody else likes her more than anybody who could conceivably run against her. Senate Republicans are facing a nasty electoral map that year too.  

The stupid coming from Washington in the next two years will be a meaner, more destructive, worse-informed sort of stupid than we’ve ever seen before. But I have full confidence that we’ll be back to a more familiar level of stupid by early 2017.