BLACKJOHN.
08/22
Muah. Damnable computers. Take them apart for just a few seconds and they'll give you a few days worth of misery. Such is the case with my pain in the ass, which not only now has a very touchy video card slot(which is loads of fun when you have to tweak the stupid card just right to get it into place) but has an irritating problem with the sound card whereby my right sound channel crackles like a bitch... although only when it's using certain sound formats, such as the ones I chiefly like to listen to. Add to that general whorery inherent in any computer I own and you can see why this is a teensy bit late. As I've said on numerous occasions, however, the only schedule I keep is the one that impels me to finish these within 7-8 days, so I'm still on that, handily enough.
RECENT COLUMNS: READ US.. WE'RE PEOPLE TOO!
Note that these haven't changed. That's because a new and better archive system will soon arrive.
PIRATES
By sheer coincidence, a couple of days ago my friends and I were talking about pirates for some reason and then happened to see a cartoon on TV called Redbeard. On at 4 in the morning, this cartoon was quite possibly the worst I've ever seen. A co-production by France and Canada, it was topfilled with tasty moral guidelines, some lousy action, and generally unpiratelike activity. You see, Redbeard is a nice pirate, a fellow who, although he presumably makes his living off of rape, pillage, and plunder, seems to be remarkably unpirately, aside from the occasional "ARR!" uttered in a lousy seaman's accent. Redbeard had a nice guy sidekick, and even a buxom wench on board his ship. This is, of course, a bit of an anachronism(not unlike the rest of the characters) since taking women along on ships was considered bad luck in those days, but hey, we have to remember, this is a pirate with the principles of affirmative action firmly entrenched in his mind. Certainly, nowhere are they more firmly entrenched than in the mind of the buxom wench, whose opinions, somewhat vastly unsuited to the time period, include the horrible injustice of slavery, fair treatment, and of course, chastity(like there's any other reason to bring a buxom wench on board a pirate ship... remember Yellowbeard? I think the character Mr. Prostitute should come to mind here) At any rate, the lame plot of this particular episode, something or other about the slave trade on a remote island, was barely enough to maintain interest. The station probably knew this, since they were the only ones with advertising during the show. Gotta love Canadian content. Since it's a Canadian station, it's just got to play a certain portion of lousy, lousy, Canadian television. This is not to say all Canadian TV is bad, but Canadian cartoons, by and large, suck, and none sucked more than this one. Even the computer-generated battle sequences were lousy, because the water looked so fake. The worst part by far, however, was the theme song, which ran 5 minutes at the conclusion of the show, and was basically one long repetition of a few words. Yeuch!
A cannon. Somewhat more impressive than its CGI counterpart, which made extensive use of repeated footage to sink the evil slave trader's ship by splitting the mizzenmast with a single shot.
ARRR!
WE LOVE TO SEE YOU SPEND
I hate McDonald's advertising. They go through slogans like water, each seemingly more annoying than the last. None is quite so cheesy and generally putrid as their newest slogan, "We like to see you smile". That's pretty much a bald faced lie, for one thing- the only thing they really care about is money. The worst part, however, is how the food never looks like it does in the commercials. The first danger sign in a food commercial is the word "marinated". You can be sure if you see that word, it means not marinated lovingly over a hot oven, but deep-fried. You can also be sure you won't get a tender chunk of meat, but rather a flat, dry little slab. You'd think they could at least make the buns stay nice, but even those get crushed a little, and don't look a thing like the commercial versions. I don'treally expect that, however. What I do expect is honest advertising. Just once, I'd like to see a sloppy, leaning, drippy, runny, crammed-together, drooling ketchup ooze out the side onto your lap, burger, splatted onto the screen in all its glory. Then again, that probably wouldn't sell nearly as well as the cardboard and glue agglomerations that are the standard fare of such commercials, and hell, other restaurants do exactly the same thing. They just have different gimmicks, like a fat old man who's had quintuple bypass surgery or Pokemon. That said, neither of these are nearly as vomit-inducing as "we like to see you smile", which is pure, unadulterated tripe.
Resident brainwashed victim of McDonald's, and long-standing second-part-of-column picture.
THE RUSSIAN SUBMARINE
Good old Russia. Just when you thought the Cold War was over, they go and wait 5 days before begging for international aid, already far too late, when one of their best submarines suffers some sort of colossal failure and drops to the bottom of the ocean. Why even bother with the notion that you're a world superpower when it's abundantly obvious to both your citizens and the rest of the world that you're just a burned out shell, unable to pay back wages to your military and overrun by crime, corruption, and a few dozen (or hundred) missing nuclear weapons? Russia's time as a superpower was during the Cold War, so I guess that's one reason to want to get back to that sort of mindset, but even then, as throughout much of recent history, most of their citizens were living in abject poverty. None of this, of course, is any excuse to leave 120 men at the bottom of the ocean, pretty much doomed from the beginning, as it turns out. There's just no logic in not asking for assistance in the matter. How much less embarrassing a fiasco would this have been had they asked for help in time to save the lives of the doomed crew members? Certainly, the country would look much better than it does now. Well, there's no point in dwelling on the matter; provided no nuclear disasters result from a submarine moldering away at the bottom of the sea, it's pretty much done with. It just boggles the mind that they can still consider themselves a superpower when they lack the resources to travel through 100 metres of water in adequate time to save over one hundred lives.
Where was THIS group when they were needed? Just another example of Russian xenophobia...
AND IN CONCLUSION
Almost school again... argh! I don't have a particularly strenuous schedule, but there'll probably be a bit of a delay in updates while I get settled in. After that... well, I'll probably have slightly more interesting stories, if nothing else.
If you're sending email, make sure it's paragraphs for that other section!
Go Home! Inmediately!
INTREPID BABY SAYS:
Muah! I have absolutely nothing to say! Now go. I must prepare.
No, not for world domination! For a new jumpsuit! Now leave me in peace, or I'll intrepidate you into the dirt!
Thanks, Starwars.com! Please don't sue me :)