On the Internet, a “White Knight” is someone who rushes to defend a stranger they perceive as slighted, usually for attention. The most prodigious example is lonely men, who sniff out drama in women’s online profiles like pigs hunting truffles. These guys engage in a “Backhanded Courtship”, where instead of paying compliments on a woman’s appearance, they announce that they accept her flaws, unlike “the others”.
This is because White Knights are absolute psychopaths. Continue reading
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I’m not going to bore you with more boasting about how I can draw better than any contemporary “web comic” artist out there. I’m going to bore you with an explanation why.
From INVISIBLE LEGENDS (unpublished)
I’ve got The Jizz.
You could set out right now to be the greatest cartoonist in the world, spend billions of dollars, and you’d still never top me. You don’t have The Jizz. I do. Continue reading
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Gwar, often styled as GWAR, is an American heavy metal band formed in Richmond, Virginia, United States, in 1984, composed of and operated by a frequently rotating line-up of musicians, artists and filmmakers collectively known as Slave Pit Inc. [Wikipedia]
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Filed under Bad Influences, Comix Classic & Current, Faint Signals, Girls of BIUL, Idiot's Delight, Magazine Rack, Nostalgic Obsessions, Robot Toy Fetish, Saturday Movie Matinee, Thousand Listen Club, Unfairly Maligned
Next month marks the second anniversary of the BANDS I USETA LIKE website, and here we are; the 200th post. I’m sure you couldn’t care less, but you helped make this possible, and in the 13 years I ran Mike The Pod online, I maybe cracked a hundred actual articles.
So let’s mark the occasion with a peek at the cover of BANDS I USETA LIKE III, yes?
That’s the magazine that will complete your summer, heading your way around the time you start buying fireworks in bulk. So buy this too. It would be a crime if you didn’t.
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As the venerable Star Wars imprint slowly transforms into an empowerment series for little girls who wear costumes and bitter old fanboys, one of my favorite aspects is being scrubbed from the narrative:
Weird, stupid aliens.
He attempts to eat that dead Woodring monster.
I’ll never comprehend the segregationist nature of the “Star Wars fan”. Watching the fandom dismiss George Lucas, the creator of everything they care about, has been like observing a schism of zealots. Since general audiences weren’t born in the 80s, when ripoffs of Star Wars abounded, they gladly accepted a ripoff from J.J. Abrams. Continue reading
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(The following report originally appeared on Mike The Pod in December of 2007, and was written in the Pod studio.)
Around this time either last year or the year before, I acquired four bottles of absinthe from a company overseas in a republic that may no longer exist. My confusion over the exact year will make more sense after you’ve read this; also I’m too lazy to look up the dates on the pictures. Rest assured however, that what you are about to read is, embarrassingly, the truth.
I’d always wanted to try absinthe, after enjoying the work of so many followers of the “green devil” since childhood. Van Gogh? Picasso? Hemingway? You got it. In fact, it’s often speculated that absinthe made Vinny the unbearable beast he was in his final days, and shit, Hemingway became so determined to kill himself late in life that he was restrained from doddering into a whizzing plane propeller. Some claim absinthe has hallucinogenic properties, but nobody disputes that it tastes like bile hot from Satan’s fucking spleen. Continue reading
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When was the last time the name “Pearl Jam” sounded weird to you? Can you even remember when it didn’t sound like a band?
Eddie Vedder
Vitalogy, Pearl Jam’s experimental third album, was finally released in November of 1994. By that time, the record store I had assistant-managed was consumed by Blockbuster. Originally, I worked at “Tracks”, which was where I experienced Pearl Jam’s debut disc Ten, around ten times a day for several months. This resulted in a loathing of that album that burns to the present day. Continue reading
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The FOX sitcom Married… With Children ran for eleven seasons, five of them good, from 1987 to 1997. It was created by Ron Leavitt and Michael G. Moye, who were inspired by the Norman Lear classic All In The Family. On the surface, the two shows appear similar; a middle-aged ignoramus, his obnoxious yet well-meaning family, contemporary social topics. But since these kind of programs invariably get into hot water for their dialogue, they share a more subtle connection.
Not only do they resemble a real family, but Kelly looks vaguely like Al, and Bud looks like Peg. That’s either serendipity or super-human casting.
During All In The Family‘s run (1971-79), “lovable bigot*” Archie Bunker, played by the great Carroll O’Connor, would go upstairs and flush the toilet to portray his disapproval. Bathroom noise on television was verboten before this. As you know, the home of the titular family on The Brady Bunch lacked a water closet, even though the father was an architect by trade. Early in television’s lifespan, it was believed that the sounds related to using the restroom would trigger the urge to defecate in viewers, driving them from the screen to the loo. Continue reading
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Caddyshack is a rare film for me, in that I’ve been afforded a relationship with it since childhood, based purely on the timing of my birth, and the easy-going nature of my parents. When I was 8, and parties at the public pool were as common as skinned knees, one scene from this 1980 comedy was legend.
The doody scene.
I’m not here to talk about that scene, and how it changed the way the world looks at a Baby Ruth, however. I’m talking about that other thing.
The thing with Smails. Continue reading
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Filed under Bad Influences, Eatable Things, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Movies You Missed, Nostalgic Obsessions, Saturday Movie Matinee
From 2002 to 2010, two childhood best friends competed for dominance in a Toronto apartment house. Those friends are Kenny Hotz and Spencer Rice, and on the Canadian reality show Kenny vs. Spenny, these competitions and their outcomes would be recorded for posterity. Each program, the loser would be subjected to a humiliation of the winner’s choosing. It provided a clearer picture of the male psyche than anything on television before or since.
Men think in terms of winning and losing. We see humiliation as undesirable but often inevitable. This runs counter to the “everyone gets a trophy” mentality. You want a trophy? You better walk through fire to earn it. Otherwise, what does it mean? And why should your trophy be on the shelf with the others?
Even though the competitions in KvS are often simple, they become psychological endurance tests, and because Hotz and Rice have such magnetism as a team, we get a complex picture of the struggle for victory. Kenny is conniving and will resort to cheating; Spenny is guileless and strives to compete honestly and respectfully. They’re a compelling yin and yang, and since they’re Canadians, they are to funny what birds are to flying. There are cameras trained on them because they are funny simply being. Continue reading
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