Let’s take a look back at 2016. Not in anger. In relief, that it’s done. I beg you all not to tempt fate as far as 2017 is concerned. Spoiler alert: more death.
Get down with your bad self!
2016 reeked so badly that even the lead singer of Motorhead wouldn’t go near it. 2015 was no plum, either, as it became obvious we were living in the alternate timeline from Back To The Future II. 2016 was worse. Continue reading
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Filed under Comix Classic & Current, Girls of BIUL, Idiot's Delight, Late To The Party, Nostalgic Obsessions, Site Stuff, Uncategorized
Everyone loves a gingerbread house. Even South Park’s hate campaign against the “ginger” couldn’t dull the sugary luster of the beloved cookie-built domicile. You probably remember the first time you saw one, right? Or the first time you smelled one?
How to make me put a ring on it*, chapter one. (*the robot.)
Sometime in the late 1970s, at my local church, I spied and smelled a real, elaborate gingerbread house for the first time. It was during an Advent festival, with apple-cheeked residents of my snowy hometown selling pinecone ornaments and weaving fragrant holiday wreaths budded with hollyberry. Someone had knocked themselves out on the centerpiece, a resplendent dwelling of gingerbread with all the confectionery trimmings, the kind that lured the likes of Hansel and Gretel to their near-doom.
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Filed under Don't Know Don't Care, Eatable Things, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Nostalgic Obsessions, Worst Of All
From BIUL #2.
It’s no secret that I’m an enigma wrapped in a riddle inside a burrito or some such. Wrap your head around this:
I like to smoke. I have a psychotic aversion to burning tobacco.
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Filed under Bad Influences, Comix Classic & Current, Don't Know Don't Care, Magazine Rack, Worst Of All
Like the lawn dart, a true line of demarcation between Then and Now is the Thumbsucking Baby. In cartoons and comic strips of the 20th century, if there was a baby, it was depicted with a thumb in its mouth. Maggie Simpson delivered the combo breaker, in the form of a pacifier, doing infants the world over a huge favor.
Suck this.
A pacifier has the advantage of being unattached to a heavy arm, which slowly pulls at the front teeth and palate, resulting in buck teeth. Buck teeth tell the world you suck dick like a champion. Depending on who you are, that can be inconvenient. Most people correct it with braces, to prevent this assumption. Continue reading
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Filed under Bad Influences, Don't Know Don't Care, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Nostalgic Obsessions
The world is tough on young people, especially when there are forces trying to control them, often by coddling them. Every awkward feeling teenagers have is commoditized and acknowledged, no matter how insignificant. Their bad moods are notated with special emoticons. Their hormonal bullshit is all validated as worthy expression.
This gag’s humor outlived the technology that inspired it.
Coincidentally, almost everything sucks.
I make an effort to be unprejudiced about millennials, I really do. I refuse to become the stereotype of the old man screaming at the kids to get off his proverbial lawn. But you have to understand the frustration. 20 years ago, I had to argue with people my age who claimed Quentin Tarantino was God. Now I’m dealing with the children of those people. Continue reading
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Filed under Animation Analysis, Bad Influences, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Late To The Party, Nostalgic Obsessions, Unfairly Maligned
For the past ten years, one Rhode Island company has made me so deliriously happy, I’ve considered corporate personhood, so I could ask for its hand in marriage.
Hasbro.
They even threw in a rubsign. Hasbro is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
2006 was the year this little toy company had a subline of their Transformers toys called “Classics”; new figures of favorite characters from the 1984 cartoon. And a funny thing happened- these robots from an old show sold very, very well. Characters like “Bumblebee”, “Megatron” and “Optimus Prime” were familiar to a enviously broad range of people. They had staying power equal to Superman or Batman. The world was on the cusp of finding this out. Continue reading
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Filed under Animation Analysis, Bad Influences, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Movies You Missed, Nostalgic Obsessions, Robot Toy Fetish, Saturday Movie Matinee, Thousand Listen Club, Unfairly Maligned
30 years ago, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off came out. If you build a time machine and go back to 1986, you might just enjoy that movie.
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Filed under Comix Classic & Current, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Movies You Missed, Nostalgic Obsessions, Saturday Movie Matinee, Thousand Listen Club
Answering machines were a form of technology in use before telecommunication was monopolized. At first, they were huge, then they used micro-cassettes, then regular cassettes, then a computer chip, then they went in the garbage. Telephones were not generally mobile prior to the year 2000. The average home had a room where the phone and answering machine resided.
The answering machine was the predecessor to the ringtone, in terms of personal expression through phones. There was even a default recording of a robot intoning “please leave a message after the beep”, which is how you knew your dad or grandpa wasn’t at home. Older relatives were confounded by the damn things, and would require the aid of sons or nephews, just as with smartphones today. A family would retain an answering machine until the tape wore out, meaning that for much of the 1980s, there was a phantasmagoria of wood-paneled plastic boxes, varying in quality. “Wireless” meant “unreliable”, which meant that the telephone station generally resembled an improvised bomb, to 21st century eyeballs. Continue reading
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Filed under Bad Influences, Faint Signals, Nostalgic Obsessions
I don’t hate karaoke. Really, I don’t.
I don’t do it myself, either, but I don’t equate it with actual performance. Karaoke is for fun; a diversion. Plus, I’m old enough to remember the first karaoke joke on The Simpsons, when the gag was that it was something Japanese people did. It was the successor to the camera strapped around the neck.
Now, not only is karaoke available in a home version, but late-night talk show hosts burn air time “lip-syncing” “popular” (corporate-backed) songs. The boring blond from Amos & Andy For Nerds, excuse me, I mean The Big Bang Theory, lip-synced her way through a Ludacris song where almost every other word is “bitch”. The idea being, look at this little white girl act “gangsta”. As long as the star is corporate-backed, this is “empowerment”. What do you imagine happens if someone without a hit show* tries this? Continue reading
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Filed under Don't Know Don't Care, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Worst Of All
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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Filed under Bad Influences, Don't Know Don't Care, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Movies You Missed, Nostalgic Obsessions, Saturday Movie Matinee, Unfairly Maligned
BIG BOOK OF COMICS (SIGNED)
Original price was: $15.00.$10.00Current price is: $10.00.
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