Tag Archives: Mr. Blog’s Tepid Ride

My Review of My Summer, Part One

19 Nov

from September 11, 2009

Summer never did arrive, at least not in terms of temperature, and that was good enough for me. Who wants 90 degree weather? We had about three days of really hot and humid weather but I was in California for two of them so they don’t count. (More on California later.) Were you here for those days? Go write your own blog. If I want 90 degrees and humid I’ll stick my head in Michael Moore’s armpit.

Temperature aside, not-so-summer was a pretty unusual one. Like, just for one example, I did stuff. Oh sure, I had plenty of days where I slept until noon, but I also had plenty of nights where I didn’t get to sleep until 4 am. Partying? No, you obviously don’t know me. Insomnia, which even the magic of Ambien was unable to conquer. What did I do on those nights? IM Liz on Facebook. (More on Facebook later.)

I traveled to San Diego for ten days, Massachusetts for a few hours, Rhode Island for a dinner, and broke into an abandoned asylum on Staten Island during a tornado. (More on all that later.)

I went to a dinner where I learned far, far too much about how Maria lost her virginity. (Perhaps no more on that later or at any time at all.)

I was snubbed by Bonnie, who did not invite me to a wedding I did not want to go to. Sounds like a favor, but I wanted to be invited before I didn’t go. (More on- oh you get the idea.) I’ll start here.

Can’t say why I was snubbed. Bonnie seems to be under the opinion that I stopped talking to her. This despite my sending her (with Michelle, more on her later- sick of that yet?) a condolence card and planting a tree in Israel after a death in her family weeks before the wedding. Do you have any idea how hard that was? Michelle and I flew 18 hours across the Atlantic to Tel Aviv and trekked across the Gaza strip, dodging PLO missiles, avoiding car bombs, and getting sand in places people should not get sand just to plant that tree. And the worst part?  Once we got to the memorial park I realized we had left the tree in the airport back in New York. Michelle was not happy when she had to fly back for the tree.

I also sent Bonnie a couple of messages to her email address that, unbeknownst to the entire world, she had changed six months previously. Bonnie, in her zeal to get married (she was engaged for about a millennium) updated her email to include her married name, as well as copywriting it on her official letterhead and tattooing it on her uterus. Here’s the fun part- she didn’t tell anyone. So while I sent my condolences to her old address, she thought I was snubbing her by sending nothing to her new address, despite no one knowing her new address. I’m sure, somewhere in her old mailbox, is my email, along with Nigerian money come-ons and plenty of unwanted spam for Viagra. (I assume it is unwanted, I know nothing about her sex life.)

Eventually, when she got married, she announced to the world that she had changed her address. Thanks.

It was tit for tat (so to speak, I have never seen Bonnie’s breasts) when I got a thank you card for the tree that was non-personalized (ex- no “Dear Barry,” or even a “BEN! THANKS FOR THE FLOWERS! I THOUGHT YOU HATED ME! LOL!- I have been waiting for weeks to work that into something). Could have been worse- Michelle didn’t even get that.

So I was not invited to the big Price-Altman soiree. This despite hearing for months and months “you better go to my wedding” and me lying “of course I’ll be there!” For those of you who don’t know me, I tend to be anti-social to the point that I won’t go anywhere unless I can drive across four states and trespass on government property. Then its party time! (HONEST DISCLAIMER- Had Michelle been invited I would have gone. But she was snubbed for reasons that probably make even less sense than my snubbing. Bonnie, if you are reading all this, I still don’t know why you snubbed me before, but I guess this blog gives you a good reason to now.

I burned one bridge, let’s continue the fun.

Just a day or two into the summer I was parking my car around midnight when I heard someone yelling at me. I did what I usually do when people yell at me, flipped the bird. Turned out it was Liz, in her car across the street. (BTW: Liz was also snubbed by Bonnie. Liz thinks it was because Bonnie’s new hubby doesn’t like her. Doesn’t like Liz, I mean, I assume he likes Bonnie. If Bonnie’s husband kept her from inviting a friend to the wedding, I’d like to think he was taking Snoop Dogg lessons and keeping his pimp hand strong. But on the other hand, the non-pimp hand, he allowed her to invite Alex to the wedding, and that’s the guy Bonnie really wanted to marry. I knew them for years and they were really the perfect married couple. Alex dumped on her; Bonnie hated Alex but came back for more. But I digress. A lot.)

Anyway, Liz was double parked across the street and I went across to talk to her. She was coming home from a family dinner, I was just getting home, and I hung in her car window and we talked for a few minutes before Liz got right to the point- “want to go to a motel?”

I’m a gentleman so I let her down easy.

This, however, was just the first of our late night summertime chats. Typically, I’d be on Facebook (Their Motto: Too Many Farm Games) and I’d see she was online, or she’d see I was online, and we’d IM each other. I know that sounds dirty but it isn’t. (At least it wasn’t on my part. I have no idea what Liz was doing when she wasn’t typing. This was late at night.) What did we chat about? I don’t remember. Something about high scores on games, her daughter sleeping on the couch, fluff mostly. Same as our emails. I’m not sure Liz and I are capable of exchanging more than two serious emails in a month. I ask her how she’s doing, she says fine, asks how I’m doing, I say fine, make some joke or witty (sure, right) line, Liz emails back and tops me, etc etc etc. It is a little disheartening, honestly. If I want to send goofy emails I have all of the internet and eighteen false names and phony email addresses to do it from. I used to think Liz and I were a little closer than that. Oh well, I can always poke Bonnie on Facebook. But I won’t because I’m snubbing her. Liz, BTW, has changed her settings so I can’t see when she’s on Facebook anymore. Hmmm.

And speaking of Facebook, what a waste of time. A waste of time I am totally addicted to. I have a farm on Facebook. I grow crops. I harvest the crops and sell them to buy buildings or animals. Then I buy seeds and grow more crops so I can harvest and sell them and maybe buy a banana tree or a windmill. Then I plow the fields, sow more seeds, harvest more crops. Yay! I’m on level 27! WHY HAVE NONE OF YOU STOPPED ME YET? I have been invited to join three other farm games, and guess what? They are all the same, except that on one I can buy a pig that sniffs out truffles. I am NOT making that up.

I also play a zombie game on Facebook. I am a zombie. I bite other people and turn them into zombies. I fight other people. I go on quests. All this takes about three minutes. Typical quest: CLICK! You’ve done a quest and earned ten points. Typical fight: CLICK! You’ve beaten XYZ Zombie and gotten ten points. That’s it. Really. No animations, no clever sounds, not a single graphic. Just a message. (If I get bored I can fight a vampire.) This is all of Facebook in a microcosm. I’m up to level 13. Watch out 14, I’m on my way!

What I really want is to get my zombie to run my farm and harvest brains. That would be cool.

Facebook has quizzes. Ever wonder which serial killer you are? You can find out. Want to know which part of Minnesota you should move to? There’s a quiz for that. Facebook has a quiz for everything, from what your name would be if you were a puppy to which color boot you should wear to hunt rattlesnakes. (For the record, my puppy name would be Snuggles and I should wear brown boots when hunting rattlers.) I’ve taken them all. The funny ones I post on my page, the unfunny ones I skip.

And who looks at my page anyway? Facebook has an app to tell you that too. The number one person who looks at my page is my old pal Marc. The number two is a former student, Yafo. How odd. I bet Yafo won’t snub me for her wedding.

TO BE CONTINUED

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My Review of Up

19 Nov

from July 20, 2009

Up is Disney/Pixar’s sequel to last summer’s Down, the ill-advised animated biography of Satan.

This is the first Disney film aimed squarely at the geriatric set. It opens in 1939. Young Carl Flopsweat is at the movies seeing the latest installment of his favorite serial, The Air Adventures of Stuttgart Nazi. This was the ninth and penultimate chapter. Reich colonel Stuttgart Nazi, in his zeppelin The Spirit of Valhalla, had finally reached the fabled Plateau of Leng. There, following clues laid out in the Pnakotic Manuscripts, he hoped to travel to lost city of R’lyeh and resurrect the Old Ones, which would lead to the Thousand Year Reich. However, in the cliffhanger, Stuttgart Nazi found himself face to face with the ancient Jews of Abraham. Would  Stuttgart defeat the Jews and bring about the Aryan glory of Germany? Come back next week for the final exciting chapter.

Carl Flopsweat was very moved by this. It was 1939 and you could go to the movies all day on one nickel. You’d see a newsreel, a serial, some cartoons, a B-movie, and the main feature. It was possible to stay in the theater all day. This led to long, long lines for the bathroom. It was while waiting one of those lines that Carl’s imagination would soar. “Wow,” thought young Carl. “I wish I could be a Nazi.”

Carl didn’t become a Nazi but he did beat up a man named Goldfarb. However, that was still in the far future.

Young Carl was imaginative and would often pretend to be his hero. He would dress in the official Stuttgart Nazi helmet and junior Nazi Air Ace uniform, goose-stepping his way across town. It was on one of these jaunts, where Carl would pretend to round up “undesirables,” that he met the girl he would love forever, Eva.

Eva was everything Carl was not. She was smart and strong, while Carl was puny and stupid. In fact, on their wedding night, she made him ride reverse cowgirl. The one thing they shared was their love of The Air Adventures of Stuttgart Nazi and a desire for racial purity. Carl pledged that one day they too would fly to the fabled Plateau of Leng and found a nation of racially pure Aryans. However, Eva soon died after a night of autoerotic asphyxiation, leaving Carl old and alone.

Flash forward 70 years. Carl is still alone and racist, living life one heartbeat away from death. Ironically, only his hatred of life kept him alive.

One day Carl was informed by his local council that his house was going to be torn down to build a vitally important shopping mall and that his bedroom was slated to become a Pottery Barn.

“Fuck that,” Carl said. “I’m going up.”

So Carl did the only logical thing.

Did he:
A- get a lawyer and fight the city?
B- move to Florida?
C- die of a heart attack?
or
D- fill a gazillion helium balloons and float away?

The answer is C, he died.

No, he didn’t die. He launched his house into the air in an attempt to reach the Plateau of Leng and fulfill the promise to his dead wife, the same promise he had totally ignored for seventy years. At any time he could have bought a plane ticket to South America, but I told you he was stupid.

Along for the ride is Mungo Jerry, a Junior Platypus Ranger. Mungo has every badge the troop has to offer. He earned the Camping badge, the Squeezing Lemons badge, the Bathing the Elderly badge, and only needs the Befriending the Near-Dead badge, which he hopes to earn with Carl Flopsweat.

The ride was anything but smooth. First, Carl had badly over-estimated the power of the balloons and he shot up to the stratosphere. He barley managed to cut away some of the balloons and come back to a manageable altitude before he blacked out. Secondly, NORAD picked him up on radar and shot an ICBM at him. Only some fancy flying kept the house from being blown to smithereens. Lastly, he left the plumbing unconnected and anytime he or Mungo flushed the toilet, the refuse shot straight down and out the house, hurtling to Earth at speeds usually not reached by feces.

Little by little Mungo Jerry got on Carl’s nerves. “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” “Where are we going?” “Why do you have so many balloons?” “Who is ‘Adolph’ and why do you have his autograph?” The only thing that kept Carl from firing Mungo out of a window was the question of who would give Carl his sponge bath.

Eventually, what goes up must come down, and come down they did, somewhere near, but not quite on, the Plateau of Leng. The plan was to tether the house to Mungo (he was a bit rotund) and walk it over to the plateau and set it down. However, before they had traveled a yard, they were set upon by the savage Hounds of Tindalos, minions of the mad god Ithaqua, the Wind Walker. Carl, fortunately, was well-versed in ritualistic combat and displayed the five-pointed star of C’thulu, from which the hounds turned and ran.

“Gee,” said Mungo.
“Shut up and pull the house, monkey,” said Carl.

Unbeknownst to either of them, a shoggoth, which is the spawn of the Elder Gods, had settled on the roof of the house.

Also unbeknownst to Carl or Mungo, but very much beknownst to anyone who still followed this predictable film, Stuttgart Nazi was also on the lost Plateau of Leng, and he very much wanted to capture a shoggoth for his own arcane rituals. (This despite Stuttgart being well over 100 at this point.)

As you may well imagine, it isn’t too hard to track a floating house, and Stuttgart Nazi tracked Carl and Mungo and invited him to his Floating Lair of Doom. Of course, he didn’t call it that, he called it Ernestine, but with all the evil Hounds lurking about and the stench of blood in the air, well, Carl should have known better.

Stuttgart took Carl on a tour of his Museum of the Arcane and Eldritch while Mungo ate some candy.Stuttgart showed Carl his human ear collection, the Hall of German Experimentation, and his own private and very personal collection of German shizer porn. Carl was impressed.

Well, one thing led to another, and the film soon degenerated into your standard “who can get the shoggoth first and use him to summon The Lurker on the Threshold?” You’ve seen it a thousand times.

In the end, Carl killed Stuttgart Nazi, proving that even an old man can still kick ass. He captured the shoggoth and sacrificed Mungo in a ritual to bring forth a creature of the Dark dimension, but accidentally turned himself into a banana.

Disney/Pixar’s Up was a hit at the local senior center, where I viewed it with some of the inmates, er, residents. Those who remained awake by the end were both envious and appalled by the characters, with many curious about the shizer porn. Others had just had their meds and were made happy by the pretty colors on the screen.

Pixar is hard at work on Sideways, the stirring story of a man, his pet rat, and a crazy plan to burrow to Mars. It is due out next summer.

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