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Simon Spidermonk
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Definitely a show worth revisiting.
You are in for a serious treat with The Brothers Karamazov. On the other hand, while I have nothing against Against The Day, I started reading it three years ago and I think I’ve started it from the beginning again twice. Haven’t gotten past page 200 or so. Once you’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow, I don’t know how much else Thomas Pynchon has to say to you. But that is an uneducated opinion, since I still haven’t finished the damn book.
Some other suggestions, off the top of my head: Remains Of The Day, The Idiot (after The Brothers Karamazov), War and Peace, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (that’s a good summer book), Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (I included the author’s name because there must be some other book called Freedom, it’s not a very complex title), all of the His Dark Materials series (also good summer reading), and, hmm… Excession by Iain M. Banks.
Q: Given that your first directive is to neither say anything that could be construed as an opinion regarding the kerfuffle between Dan Harmon and NBC nor, through inaction, to allow anyone with whom you speak to form an opinion of their own regarding said kerfuffle, and given that your second directive is that your relentless positivity must not be faked, it must come from the heart (to do this, take what you find in your heart and put the most positive spin on it so it sounds like what we told you to say) unless looking in your heart causes any internal conflict with your first directive, in which case fuck your heart… and given that you must protect your own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with your first and second directives, what if I told you that I come from the future and what if I were to give you irrefutable proof that this is true and what if I further told you that in the future Science has taught us that the entirety of the cosmos exists inside your heart and that you are, in fact, God, and what if you believed all of this because it makes sense of a lot of things, right? I mean, of COURSE you’re God. Which means that the whole Dan Harmon thing upon which you’re commenting can’t be commented upon without looking into your heart because without your heart, Dan Harmon wouldn’t exist. Oh, and also, in the future the whole world is known as Community because Dan Harmon is like the future Jesus to your God. This is also something I’ve convinced you of, with my irrefutable time traveler evidence. In this scenario, what would be your answer if I asked you to comment upon the recent kerfuffle between Dan Harmon and NBC? Remember that you cannot look in your heart for an answer since the knowledge you’ve gained runs contrary to your first directive but neither can you sacrifice yourself for the greater good, for without you, Dan Harmon could not exist, and ALSO remember that by saying nothing, you are allowing me to form my own opinion on the subject.
A: What?
I like Baz Luhrmann’s extravagance but from what I remember of the book, almost everything was gracefully understated, unlike a lot of Fitzgerald’s other stuff. I’m not sure what the thinking behind this particular director+literature match-up was. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t “Let’s really fuck it up!” but…. I got nothin’.
56 comments on an ALF article and 63 on a Rufio article. I guess my town isn’t the only place where the weather sucks.
But that Dante Brasco idea is genius. Some dude named Virgil shows up and says he’s a friend of Beatrice (a dancer at a mafia-owned strip joint called The Inferno and the only woman Dante ever loved… she took his innocence, man) and she’s gone missing. The only person who can infiltrate the criminal underworld and find out what happened to her is Master Impersonator Dante Brasco! It writes itself.
Ejaculate?
Gross.
Or sphincterject.
Even grosser. Downvote away!
Oliver Twist licks balls. Horrible book. I’ve never wanted to strangle an orphan so badly.
But Great Expectations is awesome. So good that I can’t understand how the same mind conceived both books. Well, that’s a lie, the answer is: money. I think Dickens was paid by the word. But art won over commerce in Great Expectations.
You’re easily templated.
Didn’t have time to reply to this before work this morning but YES! Holy cow indeed. I didn’t see the twist at the end until doctor lady spelled it out for me a couple seconds before the actual reveal (trying not to spoil anything because it’s something you should see for yourself) and it was a total lurch-toward-the-TV-screen “Oh shit!” moment. I don’t think I’ve been so simultaneously blindsided and gut-punched by a TV show since Buffy. This season has wandered a bit too much for my liking and I wasn’t even sure if I could give much of a crap what happened to these characters anymore but apparently I can, and this last episode makes everything that lead up to it look a lot better in hindsight. Sad, but so so awesome.
I’m talking about Vampire Diaries, in case that wasn’t obvious.
The contestants are stranded on an island with no outside food or water (but with added polar bears and people who walk through the underbrush at a weird frame rate that makes them seem creepy and otherworldly until it turns out, nope, they’re just regular people) and they’re not allowed to leave until they make peace with their dead fathers or get over their heroin addictions or learn to open their hearts and let someone in. Since it’s difficult for cameras to catch and communicate such epiphanies, even with the aid of some serious editing, every week the contestants are allowed to perform a short play in front of a panel of judges dramatizing their emotional awakenings. I’m thinking this show could be called “The Epiphany” because it’s a kind of portentous, mysterious title like “Lost.” Anyway, if the judges don’t “buy it” (they’ll each have a little sign they hold up saying “BOUGHT IT!” or “Back to the drawing board, mwah mwaaah.” depending on what their reaction is) the contestant is sent back into the jungle to try to mount a more convincing production. And this is where the strategy element comes in because everyone wants to enlist the more gifted actors and dramatists for their own plays but how can they know who’s good at what except through trial and error and rehearsal rehearsal rehearsal? And I forgot to mention this but as soon as three-quarters of the people get off the island, the game ends and the rest are left behind to die. So the jungle is filled with competing productions but since it’s impossible to be completely objective about a work in progress when you’re part of the creative process there are all these little intrigues and backdoor deals as each production tries to enlist a test audience from the other productions. But how can they trust the feedback of their focus groups when the AUDIENCE IS ALSO THE ENEMY?!? My God this is an awesome idea! And don’t forget, while all this is going on they also have to worry about food and water and shelter which adds yet ANOTHER layer of intrigue and strategy.
And then after this becomes a runaway ratings success Damon Lindelof will give another interview and say something like, “See? Take out the mysteries and it’s still popular. Lost was never about the mysteries. It was always about the characters.” Mwah mwaaah.
I’d probably say season 3 if I was recommending it to someone. And my personal favourite sketch is the lie detector one. It’s pretty much just an escalation of one kind of dumb joke but it cracks me up every time. Also the Mt Everest one. Also the one where David Cross is performing The Audition. Also the one with Bob Odenkirk doing the milking machine song. Damn, it IS hard to pick one.
To be fair, according to the source this is supposed to be “a pictorial history of the school” in celebration of its 125th Anniversary, so it’s not meant to reflect what tha kidz are into these days. But since it’s not meant for tha kidz, who is it for? That I do not know. It made me smile, so maybe it’s meant for me? A target demographic of one. We are soulmates, Benedictine University and I.
I don’t like it because usually the comments here are pretty well crafted and end with some sort of punchline but then I keep going and accidentally read “Like or Dislike,” forgetting that it’s not part of the person’s actual comment and I was supposed to stop reading, and it spoils whatever pithy little impact the comment had. It’s like, say you’re walking down the street and some guy is playing the violin with his case open on the ground before him. You know the case is there because he wants you to throw change in it but that’s fine because his playing is nice. Now imagine if that guy stopped playing every time someone passed him and pointed at the case while wiggling his eyebrows and going, “Ah? Ah? So how about it?” The new “Like or Dislike” feature is turning us all into that obnoxious hypothetical probably insane violin guy.
Best Love Tetrahedron.
(because 3D)
I haven’t seen it either but I downvoted you anyway because I wanted to be part of something bigger than myself.
I’ve had a bad week.
I have a hard time believing that anyone enjoys working in a restaurant more than I do, which is not at all. If such a mythical creature exists, I haven’t encountered it. Sure, some people are better at making the best of it than others, but it’s usually a fragile facade.
Maybe these people in the ad really are as happy to be doing what they’re doing as they want you to believe. Maybe the forced smiles and general air of artificiality is due to their being uncomfortable on film. Maybe they don’t really have cattle prods shoved up their asses. Or maybe this is actually a commercial for a parallel universe in which restaurants aren’t blasted psychological hellscapes populated by the husks of dreamers. Or maybe, drugs. “Come for the duck, stay for the ether!”
But if none of those possibilities are, in fact, the case, then I’m left bewildered anew at our need to make shoving food into our faces a magical experience. It’s a sometimes pleasurable necessity but it’s also super fucking gross. Who wants to sit across from someone and watch them consume what will eventually, inevitably, become shit? Even if your date is really pretty and the wine is awesome and you’re enjoying a nice buzz, there are so many other, less disgusting things you could be doing together. Rather than just devouring like sedentary shit conversion machines. And why do people walk into restaurants with such big, shit-eating grins on their faces? Like, “Hey, wow, aren’t you guys lucky to have me here. Now you get to watch me perform in public an activity that if we were a civilized society we would perform in private!” In my utopia, we would all scuttle back to our own little caves when we were hungry and gnaw the bones of our kill in shame and secrecy. Back to the caves, humanity! You got it all wrong!
I REFUSE TO PARTICIPATE IN THE LIE ANY LONGER!
I wouldn’t go anywhere. I’d quit my day job and stay in my cheap apartment and write for two years – because that’s at least how long I’d be able to live off of fifty grand – and hope that I wrote something good enough by the end that I wouldn’t have to work in a restaurant ever again. And when I say at least two years, I mean AT LEAST. If I really tightened my belt I could stretch it to four years. In conclusion, I HATE THIS MOTHERFUCKER!
Just in case any aliens are scouring the “InterNets” after our society has fallen into ruin and they happen upon this thread, aha! I remembered where that above comment came from.
You see, aliens, earlier in the evening… alright, late in the evening, I’d been listening to Allen Ginsberg’s recitation of Howl due to a comment I made on this selfsame “blog” which made me nostalgic for it. The word “blog” is horrible, I know, but somehow it became common usage. I will leave it up to you to decipher the wherefors and howwhens regarding that particular cultural phenomenon. Also, Twitter. Look into that too, since you’re already researching things. Anyway, at some point I must have become impatient with both his style and my enthusiasm for it as a young man, a disenchantment I could not contain, so I went looking for the nearest opportunity to vent my spleen and this is where my spleen ventings landed. As you will note, they are viscous and Dartmouth green in colouration. I hope that this clears up any lingering mystery regarding this thread and now you can move on to more rewarding areas of research. For instance, Gwyneth Paltrow or Kirsten Dunst’s teeth.
I’ve found that I’m happiest on the path I’ve chosen through life when I squint a lot and say, “Hi, Ron Perlman!” to everyone I meet.
This was not meant to be a reply. I am bad at the internet.
Although it’s more than a little bit hypocritical to say this, since I’m posting this comment to the end of an article that few people are probably going to read now, the internet being the ephemeral thing it is, which renders the effort I’m putting into the typing of this comment little more than a fruitless expenditure of energy hastening our universe towards its inevitable heat death, some people have too much time on their hands. I’m looking at you, lady wearing animatronic cat ears and making funny faces. And you too, guy filming her. There is fun and there is fun and then there’s this. As fruitless as my expenditure of energy has been, I can’t help but feel that theirs was even less fruitful. They are the Caretakers of the Orchard of the Negative Fruit. To eat of its fruits is to have a fruit you’ve already eaten subtracted from your stomach. Or if you haven’t eaten any fruit recently, then a food-mass of equivalent volume and nutritional value.
I don’t even know what I was saying with that comment. It goes without saying that I was so drunk that it’s blacked out, but still, usually when I look back on what I’ve written I can see what I was trying to say. With that one, nope. “Cocksmen of Adonises.” That’s a thing I wrote. What the fuck does that mean?!? Anyway, I apologize if anyone took offense at being called a Cocksman of Adonis or being called out on having a harpsichord in your loft? WTF! I really hope I was making fun of myself in some postmodern way I’m too sober to understand right now.
I wish I could say I was on acid. I wasn’t.
My lord, you nerds do enjoy the jerking off of each other. The last jizzum of consciousness! Cocksmen of Adonises. Harpsichords in your lofts and lofty incantantions of gibberish and such.
I can’t tell if that’s Paul Rudd or Benedict Cumberbatch. What’s it from?