Double Review: 'Jigsaw' / 'Boo 2! A Madea Halloween'

It's a double shot of leftover Halloween movie crap as we take a look at 'Jigsaw' and 'Boo 2!' Huh - would it be improper of me to call the double feature Jig-Boo? 

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

Hey kids, remember back in August when that James Fields fella' at the Charlottesville Unite the Right protests plowed into a crowd of counter-protesters and one morbidly obese white woman died on the scene from a heart attack and nobody in the media floated the idea that maybe, he wasn't intentionally trying to kill anybody but just trying to escape the mob of people who surrounded his car, bashed out his windows and we're trying to literally yank him out of the vehicle and beat the shit out of him, possibly to the point he died? 

Well, for a whole month, the media wept. This was proof positive that Nazism and the KKK were back in action, even though the people who actually put together the protest are neither Nazis or Klansmen. Nor was the problem that state investigations have since found that the counter protesters who outnumbered the first wave of protesters nearly 100 to one where indeed the ones who instigated the bulk of the violence at the event, and that the city of Charlottesville is MOST at fault for the violence because they LITERALLY threw the protesters off public property and FORCED them headlong into a wave of pro-diversity jihadists who were champing at the bit to beat them into submission with blunt objects and the occasional homemade blowtorch. And of course, worst of all was President Donald Trump getting up there on stage and bemoaning the violence perpetrated by both the protesters and the counter-protesters, which is a 100 percent true statement for anybody with even halfway decent vision but was nonetheless roundly condemned as "white supremacist apologia." Indeed, so irked by Trump's brazen refusal to say that just one side of the conflict is evil incarnate and responsible for all the bad things happening in the world that a whole slew of congress-people, Republican and Democrat, drew up a proclamation condemning racists and ethno-supremacists and forced him to sign it or else they were going to keep calling him a "Nazi doo-doo head" until he finally capitulated.

Indeed, so caught up in the culture war against the alt-right - which, if you're going to be a stickler for details, simply means you're a conservative with the social views of Pat Buchanan and the economic policies of Ron Paul - that Hollywood and Silicon Valley both hopped on the bandwagon to non-ironically exterminate all alleged "white racists" from the face of the earth. MTV's entire awards show gala in August was more or less a three hour "fuck whitey" hootenanny interspersed with Taco Bell commercials and anti-smoking ads, while servers like Go Daddy and Google did their part to ensure Andrew Anglin's The Daily Stormer would never, ever be allowed to spew its hateful rhetoric ever again - this, despite the U.N. declaring two different edicts in 2011 and 2012 condemning ISP censorship of non-illegal Internet postings as a human rights violation.

And then, on Oct. 31, it happened again. Only this time, the devastation was quantitatively and qualitatively worse. This time around there were eight people run over and killed by a murderous, ethnocentric ideologue, including five whom were Hispanic. Except this time, the media, Hollywood and Silicon Valley didn't go into full-fledged culture warrior mode. Why? Because - despite doing the EXACT same thing that James Fields did at the "alt-right" protest, only producing a body count that was eight times deadlier - the mass vehicular murderer was doing it for Allah.

There was no condemning or criticizing of Islamofascism the same way there was seemingly universal condemnation and criticism of "white supremacy" in the wake of Charlottesville. MTV didn't air a special concert to virtue signal against Islamic supremacist violence. Nobody in congress demanded the president sign a special proclamation slamming Muslim extremists. Those squawking vaginas on The View didn't spend two whole weeks bemoaning rising Islamic ideological violence or criticizing legislators who refused to describe Islamofascism as a grave, existential threat to civility and democracy itself.

Indeed, NBC News legitimately declared the Oct. 31 truck-o-caust in New York to be a "success" since it proved Muslim extremists here couldn't kill 100 people at once with a truck like they do in Europe. Rather than mull the fact that militant Islamists are responsible for more than 13,000 murders a year (including door-to-door ethnic cleansing of Christians in the Middle East and exploding more than 200 black people in Africa with truck bombs, which effectively make them everything American liberals are afraid so-called "white supremacists" might become in these United States), the academia-entertainment-Silicon Valley hydra instead turns its focus towards fighting stereotypes and protecting Muslims from retaliatory - if not flatout justified - criticism and condemnation. That a radical Muslim runs over eight people in New York or another one shoots up 49 people in a gay club in Orlando or a fugly-ass couple in San Bernardino tag team their way to a dozen-plus bodycount at an office Christmas party doesn't mean a goddamn thing to them, what's REALLY stressing them is people on the Internet calling 'em "rag heads" and "camel jockies." Let's make no bones about it; in the eyes of today's demented liberals, non-violent racism and ethnocentrism is considered an EQUAL sin to violent Islamofascist bloodshed, if not considerably worse. To them, mass violence is only worth calling out and combating if the perpetrators are white, and if there isn't an explicit "racist" angle to their violence, rest assured, these assholes will find a way to wedge one in there.

Which raises another good question: how come the media and academia don't raise a stink whenever black supremacists commit acts of mass, anti-honky violence?

Just a few weeks ago a black identitarian killed just as many people as James Fields, only this time around he left police explicit proof that his homicidal shooting spree at a Tennessee church was a.) planned and b.) motivated by racial hatred. But the New York Times doesn't declare open season on black power groups in the wake of the murderous hate crime - instead, they spend the entirety of their news write-ups regarding the incident talking about how Dylann Roof's shooting spree was so much worse.

Why wasn't there rampant condemnation and criticism of black supremacist ideology after Fredrick Demond Scott shot and killed five Caucasians around Kansas City, leaving behind such cryptic social media messages as  threats to "kill all white people?"

Why wasn't Congress and all those daytime TV talk shows demanding people disavow Black Lives Matter after Kori Ali Muhammad shot and killed a motel security guard in a mad scramble to kill as many white people as he could earlier this year?

And come to think of it, why did the media turn Adam Lanza, James Holmes and Stephen Paddock into Internet folk heroes while completely glossing over black mass murderers like Alexis Aaron, George Emil Banks, James Edward Pough, John Allen Muhammad, Omar Sheriff Thornton and Cedric Larry Ford? Indeed, it's rather interesting that the media posits "mass murder" as a white man's hobby, seeing as how black men account for 75 percent of all mass shooting perpetrators (and victims) in these United States.

And considering the handiwork of Seung-Hui Cho, Jiverly Wong, Elliot Rodgers, and One L. Goh, doesn't it make just as much sense to frame mass shootings as the aftermath of "Asian privilege" as it does "white privilege?" Actually, it makes more sense to do exactly that, since Asians are the most overrepresented ethnic group among mass shooters in the U.S. Hell, even the Jews have their fair share of mass shooters to call their own, including an American-born spree killer who wiped out 29 Muslims in 1994 and a guy who opened fire on commuters in Houston last year while wearing, of all things, a full-on Nazi uniform.

Funny how every time a white dude goes on a shooting spree, the perpetrator's whiteness is ALWAYS drudged up as a factor, but whenever a black dude, or a Muslim dude, or an Asian guy or a Jew opens fire in public, their ethnoracial qualifiers are just coincidental, even when they explicitly leave behind evidence that their crimes were borne out of group tribalism and rabid, radical, hatred of the racial other.

Because in that case, we know EXACTLY what to blame for their identitarian, ethno-supremacist homicidal actions: all those guns being too damn easy to get, that's what.

Yep - it's pretty much the same as the last movie. Which was the same as the last movie before that ... which was the same as the one before that, which was the same as the one before that, which was the same as the one before ...

Speaking of things that'll make you wanna' pull all yer hair out 'til you look like Sinead O'Connor's crazy ass, we've got a double shot of Halloween leftovers to drudge through this week, startin' with Jigsaw, which I think is the 17th movie in the long, long running horror franchise. Believe it or not, I've only seen the first movie that came out in 2004, so if there's a whole bunch of plot that happened in parts two through 28, it's stuff I definitely ain't privy to - just a heads up before any of you cantankerous assholes start sending me angry emails about those pivotal story details I missed out on in Saw 3D.

We start off with a high speed chase. The crook fleas the police, runs into an abandoned warehouse, pulls out a remote control device and says five people will die unless ... well, he's not really clear about it. So he gets his hand shot off by the po-po and then he says "the game, it's started" and then we cut to a buncha' people holed up in a room with these high-tech slop buckets chained to their heads. Jigsaw comes in over a P.A. system and gives them the old rundown and then a whole bunch of buzzsaws start yanking the people towards 'em. Basically, the victims have to cut themselves on the blades to free themselves, except for this one guy who's stoned or something - he gets chewed up by the gear works. Apparently.

As for the cast, it's pretty much the most formulaic assortment of cannon fodder ever assembled for a movie like this. You've got the tough brown-haired girl, the meek and frail blonde girl, the black dude who says things only white people think black people say and the Chad-bro asshole that tries to be tough all the time. Then we cut to the police finding one of Jigsaw's victims hanging from a bridge with his face carved out like a punch bowl, with an MP3 hidden inside it for the coroners to find. We cut back to the cannon fodder and the asshole guy makes jokes while being yanked by the chains into certain death while the black dude "confesses" to selling a crappy motorcycle to a clueless customer. Next trap up, Jigsaw says he injected one of them with a lethal poison, but there's an antidote mixed in with a saline solution and a really, really nasty acid. As it turns out, the blonde girl is a drug addict and a thief and yep, she got the hot dose and she keels over with blood leaking out of her ear like a busted ketchup packet. Then they go into this room where piano wire wraps all around 'em and then they find another tape recorder and Jigsaw drops another corpse off and all the autopsy people keep calling the victims "bucket heads."

The the asshole dude is trapped in a different room while everybody else is getting buried alive by Bran Flakes, and he has to get up while his leg is all fucked up and pull a handle to free 'em. Cut to the detective asking the autopsy chick about her sexual fetishes and alibis. The detective says they ran a "dark web IP trace" and found out one of the doctor's proteges is uploading autopsy footage to a Jigsaw fan site. We go back to the grain silo and pitchforks and knifes and nails and shit start falling out of the ceiling. The guy pulls the handle, and sure enough, his leg gets yanked off. 

The lead mortician guy goes to his protege's "studio," which has this huge assortment of death trap "replicas" THAT ARE CERTAINLY JUST PROPS AND NOT THE REAL THING, FOR SURE. They find another tape, and the black dude finally tells the whole story about the motorcycle and LOL he sold Jigsaw's nephew a bike with faulty brakes and he got hit by a truck. So he gets dropped into some death funnel contraption that's powered by ... what else ... a motorcycle on a treadmill. Anyway, he ends up getting Cuisinarted to death, but they cut away from the gore so you really can't see HOW he dies, precisely. Then the guy who voices Jigsaw shows up and he says the asshole Chad was responsible for a car wreck that killed three people back in high school. Oh, and the brunette chick was Jigsaw's next door neighbor and he knows she suffocated their infant and put it under her husband's flab and framed him for crushing it to death then he went to a loony bin and hung himself. So the detective and his mortician Jigsaw fangirl buddy go to the farm where Jigsaw trapped everybody (apparently, it got shuttered because of a nasty pig virus outbreak) and Jigsaw lays a shotgun on a table with one shell in it and walks out of the room. But LOL, he rigged the gun so it fires backwards, so the brunette chick blows her own brains out.

Then the detective and the mortician guy from earlier wake up in a room with laser cutter necklaces wrapped around their neck. The doctor confesses to messing up Jigsaw's X-rays on purpose, and then the contraption slices his jugular open. But the doctor's not really dead, you see. He gets up, 'cause his contraption was a fake. Then we learn the doctor WAS the stoned guy who got yanked through the machinery at the beginning of the movie and he's working with Jigsaw and he's trying to get vigilante revenge on the detective for letting a criminal walk free after killing his wife and that Jigsaw helped him with his PTSD when he got back from the Iraq War.

And sure enough, the detective gets his head lasered open like a blooming onion, and that, folks, is the movie.

We've got six dead bodies. No breasts. Two hangings. Multiple autopsies. One fiery head-on collision. Legs roll. Two exploding heads. Drag strip fu. Hydrofloric acid fu. Piano wire fu. Saw blade fu. Grain engulfment fu (perhaps the first time we've seen that at the multiplexes since Witness.) Giant blender fu. Laser death ray fu. And the thing more or less responsible for this movie existing in the first place ... way too much backstory fu.

Starring Matt Passmore as the Iraqi vet mortician who cooks up the most convoluted revenge scheme this side of Oldboy; Callum Keith Rennie as the detective who thinks it's a good idea to sexually harass witnesses; Paul Braunstein as the Chad-bro who says "I confess that this is fucked up!"; Mandela Van Peebles (yep, the seed of Mario Van Peebles) as the black dude who gets Hamilton Beached to death; and Tobin Bell as the psycho cancer patient who just won't die. 

Written by Peter Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg (the latter of whom penned the screenplay for that Academy Award winning opus The Hungover Games) and directed by the German-Australian duo of Peter and Michael Spierig, who also helmed Daybreakers and Premonition, two movies I guarantee NOBODY reading this have ever heard of before.

Sorry, guys, but you're not just beating a dead horse, you're practically committing necro-beastiality on the corpse of this franchise. Sheesh, even the people who made fuckin' Jason Voorhees decided to give it a rest after nine movies - it's long past time this series got put out to pasture, too. The best I can give it is one and a half tofu dogs out of four. Jimbo says - well, in this case, I'd say don't check it out.

If you thought the first movie tried to get a lot of mileage out of a one-joke premise, just wait 'til they do it again without the joke.

While we're tossin' out all the seasonal cinematic leftovers, I figured we might as well take a look at the latest Madea movie while it's still playing in non-dollar theaters down here in the exurbs of Atlanta. Now, I was actually a pretty big admirer of the last flick in the LONG running Tyler Perry franchise, but this follow-up - the clumsily titled Boo 2! A Madea Halloween - ain't HALF the B-movie that one was. Instead, we've got a super-rehashed, slight redressing of the first Boo!, which for all we know could actually be leftover clips from their first movie cobbled together and shat out in multiplexes for a quick Halloween cash-grab.

And I assure you, the editing in this one is amazingly bad, with some visible rough cuts and this weird phenomenon where the word "damn" is poorly dubbed out for "darn," and you can practically hear the dead air from the Final Cut Pro edits on the actual soundtrack. Hell, there's even a couple of clearly flubbed lines LEFT in the movie, with some of the worst scene transitions I've seen at a real movie theater in ages. Clearly, this is a movie made by a man who doesn't give a shit if the movie is technically competent, because it only cost about $1,500 to make and they prolly filmed the whole thing in one week two months back and they know they're going to recoup their budget about ten-fold, regardless. 

If you've seen any of the Madea movies before, you know what to expect here. The movie starts off with Tyler Perry not in drag playing a lame-ass, overprotective dad who buys his daughter some headphones when she really wanted a new car and then her mama and her new boyfriend pulls up in her 18th birthday gift, which what do you know, is a brand new car. Then she runs off to the fraternity from the first movie and tells everybody she's legal now and she wants to par-tay with 'em and they invite her to a kegger at an abandoned campground where a whole bunch of teenagers got axed to death a couple of years' back. But Tyler wants to give her an old-fashioned birthday party, complete with a petting zoo, and of course she thinks he's goofy as hell and then Madea, Joe and her two elderly friends not played by Tyler Perry show up and crack wise and tell a lot of jokes about "bitch juice" and pimping and stripping and when Tyler's ex-wife shows up, the old man Perry portrays compares her to Candyman and we all share a hearty chuckle.

So we get most of the characters from the last movie returning, so all of those annoying-ass, one-dimensional frat boys are back and so are all the former jail bait and they are ALL some thirsty-ass 18-year-olds and they keep talking about doing the nasty, but wait up, apparently, there's some dude with a chainsaw up there chopping people up entirely offscreen. And also, there's a zombie in the lake and a double pair of The Ring ghost ripoffs, because that shit ain't dated at all. But you see, unlike in the first movie where all of the supernatural tomfoolery was all an elaborate prank, this time around the monsters and psycho killers are REAL, complete with a grim reaper analogue whose face is an astral black hole.

So you've got the elderly people running around talking about drugs and sex and cursing each other out and the kids running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to avoid all of the ghouls and ghosts and at the very, very end, non-drag Tyler Perry shows up and lets them know "LOL, it's all a prank again," except he soon finds out that not all of the macabre figures on the premises are his hired hands and we end with Joe, Perry's crotchety alter ego, trying to make a deal with a Jason Voorhees analogue to off Madea. 

Sure, sure, we've seen all this before - as a matter of fact, we saw it just last year - but this time, Perry's given us a hell of a variable. You know who plays his best pal in this one? None other than TITO FREAKIN' ORTIZ, and all I'm gonna' say is that if you thought his takedown defense in the cage was bad, just wait 'til you see this guy try to do comedy. 

We've got two dead bodies (both offscreen.) No breasts. One zombie. One grim reaper. Gratuitous The Ring ripoffs. Gratuitous weed references. Gratuitous psycho ex-girlfriend subplot. Chainsaw fu. And the thing more or less responsible for the movie existing in the first place - some of the most spectacular phoning it in fu I've seen in AGES.

Starring Tyler Perry in a triple role as the uncool daddy, Madea, and Joe; Diamond White (whose birth name is already her porno name) as the hot-to-trot daughter willing to risk dismemberment for some frat boy cock; Taja V. Simpson as Tyler's bitchy ex-wife; and the one and only Tito Ortiz as Victor, which is something he certainly wasn't called a lot during his final years in the UFC. 

Written and directed by Tyler Perry, who should be commended for not only having the audacity to make the exact same movie twice, but do it this time around without an actual script.

Yeah, this one is a HUGE step down from the first movie. The best I can give it is a lackluster one and a half tofu dogs out of four - Jimbo says check it out, but only when it's playing on BET a year for now for free.

Read More

A Round-Up of the Seasonal Foodstuffs of Halloween 2017!

Yep - it's time for our seventh annual wrap-up of the best, weirdest and ickiest seasonally-appropriate, limited-time-only foods, snacks and drinks of the Halloween season. Warning: your eyes may get diabetes from reading this.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

It's officially Halloween, which means I am required by Internet law to wrap up the month of October with an article highlighting the miscellaneous, seasonally-appropriate foodstuffs I've been chewing on and slurping up since late August. 

I've been doing this pretty much every year since 2011, and at this point, I'm kinda' burned out on the concept. For one, there just doesn't seem to be as many out-there, limited-time-only Halloween foods making the grocery store rounds these last couple of years, with many manufacturers simply pumpkin spicing their regular products instead of giving us something worth going out of our ways to try, like solid black Whoppers and Starbucks drinks modeled after Dracula.

Still, there was no shortage of kooky and kitschy seasonal products glutting store shelves and fast food places this Hallow-season, and it would be a disservice to the Internet as a collective to not recap, recount and reminisce on the wacky, whimsical foods and drinks that were. Pry open those trick or treat bags, kiddos - it's time to chow down on last slice of Halloween ephemera 'til next year.

Brach's Football Candy Corn!

OK, so maybe it's not technically Halloween-related, but come on, football and Halloween are pretty much inseparable aspects of the same season, and if we're going to include a whole bunch of random pumpkin spice flavored shit on the list, we might as well include these, too. Some people have a deep aversion to candy corn, but I've always enjoyed it, and for my money, nobody makes it better than Brach's, whose LTO football-shaped candies are certainly no deviation from the brand's overall quality. What's really cool, though, is that each candy tastes different; the brown ones have a milk chocolate taste, the dark brown ones have a dark chocolate flavor and the orange-looking ones have a noticeable caramel tinge to 'em. The visuals are pretty impressive too - I mean, just look at all those divots embedded on the candies, just like a real football! 

Sonic's Pumpkin Pie Master Shake!

So this is an annual seasonal offering from the brand, which I've somehow missed out on the last few years. I've never really tried a pumpkin pie flavored ice cream that tasted even remotely authentic, and this, unfortunately, is no exception. It does, however, get some bonus points for the extra layer of whipped creme and those crunchy, pecan-like flakes up top. All in all, it ain't a bad little shake, even if it is a little bit too subdued - conceptually, aesthetically and nutritionally - for the season.

Apple Pie Oreos!

To be frank, I've gotten tired of writing about LTO Oreos, and I have no earthly clue how apple pies directly tie into the fall theme, but I will be goddamned if these aren't some of the best special edition Oreos I've ever tasted. I'm not sure if I would call the interior creme an authentic apple pie facsimile, but it's nonetheless one of the better tasting twist-top cookies I've tasted in a long time. If these things are still on shelves near your neck of the woods, definitely give 'em a try - Halloween gimmick or not, these things are just A-plus junk food.

Cookies & SCREEM M&Ms!

So I take it these things are supposed to taste like Oreos-flavored M&Ms, right? Eh, I didn't really feel it, but I definitely dug the LTO product's aesthetics. While there is this thin layer of cookie wrapped around the interior chocolate core, the overall taste is actually kinda' negligible. All in all, it pretty much tastes like your run of the mill M&M, only it looks more like a scuffed up bowling ball than usual. Which, yeah, is probably worth the slight up-charge in price. Maybe.

Starbucks Dark Mocha Frappuccino!

Starbucks actually released a number of limited-time-only drinks for Halloween this year, so it's not really surprising that the Dark Mocha Frappuccino kinda' fell to the wayside. I mean, there were drinks released by the chain this fall that were supposed to mimic fuckin' zombies (yeah, more on that in just a bit) and something like this just can't compete in today's Instagram-driven culture. As you'd imagine, the super-sugary beverage was one part iced coffee drink, one part whipped creme orgy and one part crunched up Oreo cluster-fuck. Which, for what it's worth, isn't that bad - 'tis a shame the whole thing devolves into a hyper-saccharine mush by the time you're halfway through it, though.

Starbucks Limited Edition Bottled Pumpkin Spice Latte!

Thanks to the PSL, Halloween has more or less turned into three months of companies making every product they manufacture taste like pumpkin spice. And while Starbucks has been producing bottled pumpkin spice frappuccinos for wholesalers like Costco and Sam's for quite a few years now, I'm pretty sure this is the first time the company has sold bottled versions of its' PSL as standalone offerings at gas stations and big box mart freezers coast to coast. Unfortunately, this cold-version of the iconic Starbucks drink doesn't taste anything like the marquee, season-defining beverage. Instead, it tastes like chocolate milk with huge chunks of cinnamon and nutmeg in it, and I'll be Allah-damned if the soup itself doesn't look like liquid diarrhea with pencil shavings in it. Seriously, once you see it, you can't unsee it. 

McDonald's McCafe Pumpkin Spice Latte!

This PSL imitator has been around for years and years now, but I didn't get around to trying it until this autumn. To be perfectly honest with you, I thought it wasn't that bad. In fact, it's probably one of the better PSL wannabes out there, a beverage that's quite clearly above grade for most gas station pumpkin spice coffees and maybe only a notch or two below the stuff being hawked at Dunkin' Donuts. That, and it goes WAY better with Buttermilk Crispy Chicken Tenders and Sriracha dipping sauce than you'd expect. Significantly better, actually.

Pillsbury Grands! Pumpkin Spice Rolls!

First off, apologies for not including a shot of the can - I forgot to take a snapshot before I exploded that motherfucker, and I am NOT rummaging through the garbage like a raccoon just to show you people the fragments. These things were pretty much what you would expect - sumbitches were extra flaky, and the proprietary cinnamon dipping sauce was gooey as all hell. Oddly enough, the sauce itself didn't taste all that pumpkin spicy, while the rolls themselves had a very noticeable Starbucks-esque cinnamon kick. Anyhoo, it's good stuff all around, if not a bit boring, aesthetically.

Aldi's Lunch Buddies Halloween Fruit Flavored Snacks!

You know it's a weak year for Halloween-themed comestibles when you've reduced yourself to scouring the aisles of Aldi for decent-ish, seasonally-thematic goods. Anyhoo, these artificial fruit chewy snacks are all modeled after miscellaneous Halloween iconography. You've got grape witch hats, lemon spiders, cherry skulls and my personal favorite, the orange Jack O Lanterns. Overall, these were quite a bit better than I thought they would be, and the sculpting on the individual snacks were pretty impressive. That said, it took me forever to realize that one piece was supposed to be a cat - I spent about half an hour thinking it was some kind of half-man, half-monkey hunchback at first.

Pumpkin Patch Orange Pop Rocks!

I've been seeing these things at every Dollar Tree in a 50-mile radius for the last four Halloweens, and oddly enough, that seems to be the only time I see Pop Rocks (or as Sonic and Taco Bell have to call 'em for legal reasons, "popping candy") on store shelves at all these days. It's been years since I've tried the candies, and I have to admit, that tingly sensation is still one of the most idiosyncratically unique experiences in the wide-world of junk foods. These "pumpkin patch" candies came in a pseudo-citrus combination of orange and green, although each seemed to have the exact same off-orange artificial taste.And yes, I know dumping them atop a geode makes them look just like a big old pile of crystal meth, but maybe that was my intent all along. Really, the flavor is negligible, and it's all about that foamy, tingling sensation - which makes me wonder what it would feel like to get a hummer from my girl with a packet of these in her mouth. Anybody out there already tried it and want to give me the lowdown before going all 50 Shades here?

Starbucks Zombie Frappuccino!

Well, you knew this was going to make an appearance at some point on the countdown. This is the limited time only beverage the chain chose to replace the Frappula, which - as we all know by now - is one of my favorite seasonal, LTO gimmick products ever in history. So naturally, I'm going to be just a smidge bitter about this thing bumping my beloved Dracula-themed frappuccino off the menu, but on the whole I'd consider it a pretty enjoyable little drink. The combination of mint green creme and sludgy brown chocolate syrup immediately brings to mind Frankenstein's monster, and the humongous purplish-pinkish swath of whipped topping mimics exposed brain tissue way more accurately (and disturbingly) than you'd have imagined any dairy product doing. More or less, it tasted like a fusion of the chain's cult favorite Unicorn Frappuccino from earlier this year and McDonald's Shamrock Shake, which, yeah, is a bizarre combination of flavors, but one that's nonetheless fairly palatable to this reviewer's tongue. It's not something you would want to chug down on a daily basis, but for a one and done seasonal tie-in drink, it ain't too shabby. And as an added bonus, by the time you're almost done with the beverage, the purple, green, brown and white juice all merges together into this ghastly water-logged corpse-like hue. I'm almost certain the suits at Starbucks didn't plan on that, but if they did? These motherfuckers are on the goddamn ball.

CVSHealth Pumpkin Spice Cough Drops!

And lastly, we come to the moment in time and space in which the long, long-running pumpkin-spice-everything trend officially jumped the shark. At this point, the only way to top CVS' pumpkin spice cough drops is to roll out pumpkin spice flavored birth control apparatuses, which hell, might be right around the corner, considering the way our modern Sodom and Gomorrah society is headed. I actually bought these things in early September and kept 'em in the back of my car for the better part of two months, and I expected the cough drops to come out looking like heat-mutated pieces of glass candy. Thankfully, the individual wrappings kept the package from amalgamating into a giant orange blob, and I will be god-damned if these things - around 60 days after I purchased them and drove all around the coastal southeast, with temperatures in excess of 80 degrees Fahrenheit most of the damn time - STILL packed a palpable PSL flavor. In fact, this is one of the best imitations of the trademark Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte flavor I've ever tasted, which makes me wonder if I can create my own offseason PSL by ordering a regular latte and dropping about three or four of these fuckers in there as home-brewed flavor add-ins. And yes, the menthol-coated drops (which are about 10 calories a piece) do indeed work as efficient and effective cough suppressants, just as advertised.

So, after doing this stupid round-up for seven years now, I reckon I've finally hit the apex of limited-time-only, seasonal edition foodstuff journalism. Not only did I test taste the veritable zenith of the PSL cultural tsunami that's been rolling around for the better part of the decade, I actually managed to conclude my annual round-up of Halloween foods not with an actual food or drink, but a motherfuckin' over-the-counter pharmaceutical product. If that's not a perfect sign it's time to abandon ship, I don't know what is. I mean, by this time next year, CVS could buy out Aetna outright, which means, retroactively, these pumpkin spice cough drops would be a novelty Halloween candy (sorta) produced by a fuckin' health insurance company.

And in a world getting more and more insane every day, if you can't accept health insurance provider-designed, mass-marketed autumnal cough drop gimmicks as the point of no return, you're just living a lie, my friend. A terrible, terrible lie.

H A P P Y  H A L L O W E E N

F R O M  T H E  I N T E R N E T

I S  I N  A M E R I C A , Y O U  

M O T H E R F U C K E R S!

Read More

The 2017 L5P Halloween Parade: A Spiritual Oddyssey Into Adulthood

The sights and sounds of the most hipster-tastic Halloween festival in North America ... and further proof that I'm getting WAY too old for this shit.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

I'm not sure the exact moment - maybe it was in between the Rick and Morty float and the proud march of the pro-marijuana activists waving cannabis flags - but there was this downright revelatory moment at the 2017 Little 5 Points Halloween Parade and Festival in Atlanta where my girlfriend looked me in the eyes and meekly quipped "are we too old for this?" 

And I knew, right then and there, that we were. It's been about four years since I last visited the L5P parade, and since then, the event - and apparently, myself - has grown up immensely. The last time I was at the parade, maybe a couple of hundred people showed up. It was crowded, to be sure, but it was absolutely nothing like what me and my gal saw a couple of weeks back. Not just hundreds but thousands of people were there, clogging up the sidewalk to catch a glimpse of people cosplaying as Wayne and Garth and driving homemade Ghostbusters-mobiles. Whatever quirky intimacy the event may have had just a few years back was now a distant memory. The new Little 5 Points parade - and really, Little 5 Points itself - was now just another over-commercialized, painfully mainstream social phenomenon. Whereas it was once a kooky autumnal rite for the Drive-Invasion set, the festival has now become an addendum to Dragon*Con weekend, drawing every pop-culture-worshiping, mass consumption-addicted dork, dweeb and geek within a 100 mile radius.

Very, very early on, me and my GF both realized these are not our kind of people. In between the 400 pound women dressed like dinosaurs and the small armada of Walking Dead cosplayers carrying around plastic axes and the people in rainbow wigs smoking pot in public and the menagerie of homosexuals literally playing with each other's buttholes in broad daylight, there was really no country for me anymore. The whole thing had devolved into a celebration of urban fantasy crosspolinated with the official state religion of the 21st century, nerd culture. It's an event where people, obviously dissatisfied with who they are as individual members of society, try to subsume their identities into the guises of more famous, more beloved and more important figures, almost all of whom are either wholly fictitious or brazenly stylized re-interpretations of real (and much more important) people. You don't have to be Freud of Jung to pick up on the cultural subtext here. This isn't a "parade," it's a mass catharsis for unhappy, unfulfilled people to vicariously experience "popularity" and "significance," with the added hope of garnering a surfeit of virtual affirmations through the inevitable wave of Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat photos taken from said festivities. Oh, and it's also a great opportunity to wait three hours in line at Starbucks and hop over homeless people while being pushed through an endless wave of costumed weirdos who reek of pot and deodorant-devoid armpits, just like fish caught in a whirlpool, of course.

But it's not just that the parade changed, the entire environs has changed, too. Just three years ago Little 5 Points was still a scummy, fairly creepy hippie-homo-dope-addict-communist utopia with great pizza and at least one really good used records store. But today, the inescapable wave of gentrification - most palpably demonstrated by the emergence of the "Belt Line," a giant, taxpayer-subsidized bicycle path wrapping around the perimeter that, despite being built for affordable housing, has actually led to property values skyrocketing and poor black people getting tossed out of town en masse - has transformed the Virginia Highlands section of Atlanta into a neo-yuppie hipster nightmare made flesh. Not too long ago these were the kinds of streets the Fabulous Freebirds wrote odes to, the kinds of neighborhoods it wouldn't be uncommon to see the likes of Curtis Snow prowling about. But today, it's almost like an apartheid Bernie Sanders supporters city-state unto itself, this miniature Vatican of upscale, transplanted white liberals who make $100,000 a year doing social media management and I.T. work for designer dildo upstarts and don't mind paying $2,000 a month for studio apartments because it gives them the luxury and privilege of being able to say they live in the "happening" part of town. It's going to sound facetious, I know, but I really did like the neighborhood back when it was seedy and scummy and littered with crackheads and paranoid schizophrenics and people named Chauncey trying to sell me LSD out of a Diet Pepsi bottle. Authentically dangerous, I can do, but artificially sanitary is out of the damn question.

I've never been one for big events, these spectacles where you have thousands upon thousands of people who all believe the same thing and celebrate the same ideals and hold the exact same set of values and principles all brushing up together and tooting each other's horn. And that hive mind was on full display at the parade, for sure. I just knew that the brains and the innermost thoughts of most of these attendees were practically interchangeable. I was stuck beside this one fat, bearded, late 30s/early 40s fedora-wearing asshole who kept spouting catch phrases and one-liners every time somebody dressed up like a famous pop cultural figure passed by. "Party on, dudes!" he yelled when Saturday Night Live doppelgangers in a baby blue AMC Pacer drove by. "Who you gonna' call!" he yelled when a facsimile of the ECTO-1 pulled through. "I'm pickle Rick!" he screamed - literally screamed - as a small platoon of Rick and Morty cosplayers strolled down the road. It soon dawned upon me that this dude's whole vernacular - the very way he perceived the world - was only in terms of pop cultural reference points. Without those pre-existing entertainment anchors, he wouldn't have anything to say, nor have a means to even analyze and process the world around him. Four decades of cable television and Internet memes had rendered the poor sap a consumer class imbecile, a sorry sort incapable of making heads or tails of his own subjective experiences without framing it around the pre-existing template of pop culture. Interestingly enough, my girlfriend was saddled side-by-side with his gender swapped-analogue - the vapid, 20-something social media queen who genuinely had no clue who or what the costumed characters were supposed to be, but was nonetheless snapping photo after photo simply so she could show it to the great Internet hoi polloi and score a deluge of likes, tweets and shares in her honor. And of course, the two great sins of the post Obama-age - pop culture-borne solipsism and social media-fueled egotism - came to a head to celebrate the ultimate American transgression, vapid consumerism. Who knows how many bank accounts were needlessly drained for useless tchotchkes and knickknacks. the sort of instant-nostalgia baiting superfluity that comes in the form of key chains and tee-shirts and crappy Etsy-caliber jewelry bearing only the slightest resemblance to particular pop cultural characters. Spending IS experience, the cycle continues. Spending IS experience. 

Hoo-ray, I get to breathe in other people's carbon dioxide and shit!

But the thing that really got me the most was watching the woefully confused five and six year old kids - many of whom were dressed by mom and dad like famous fictitious psycho killers a'la Chucky and Jason - trying desperately to make sense of all the nonsense in front of them. There they were, basically sitting in the front pew of the Great American Church of Consumer Culture Assimilation. The lines between reality and fantasy blurred, as did the lines between the space of the individual and the space of the collective. From this early age they are learning the value of aesthetics and the significance of role-play, completely confusing the notions of self-as-is and self-as-idealized. I can only imagine the questions these poor, impressionable tykes were mulling as the watched throngs of stinky, smelly and overweight people yell "LEGALIZE IT!" while dressed like pot leafs, or wondering what the hell was going on as 40-year-old men in belly shirts gave each other amateur prostate exams in the front of God and everybody. It's just too much for a mind so fragile to be forced to interpret. Weaned on a steady diet of identity-politics-informed pop culture, I can only imagine the uptick in teen suicides once these kids realize how abysmally shallow and pointless the ways of their parents are. Kids may not be able to understand much about the adult word, but they understand the ugliness and wastefulness of their elders. Which begs the question: when the morality of your parents is smoking weed and hating religion and celebrating gay marriage and promoting sex-changing hormone therapies for kindergartners and lite-socialism and Star Wars, when it comes time to rebel against the old order, what counter-ideology will they call their own?

It's going to seem like a stretch to say that witnessing one hipster-baiting parade caused me to reevaluate my entire life, but I assure you, it did. What kind of life is being a shameless slave to the pop cultural master ideology, anyway? What's so great about living in an overcrowded, multicultural utopia where everything is overpriced, it takes 20 minutes to walk a quarter of a mile and the roadways are glutted with bicyclists and speed walkers and Lyft drivers on the prowl for fresh pieces of meat? Is this the new America, where we're all corralled into a drive-by of absurdities while security guards in tight blue shorts do a terrible job guiding traffic? If all you're doing is just sitting there in the dirt, vaping and drinking beer and chowing down on $6.25 enchiladas out of a food truck operated by a guy that doesn't wash his hands or wipe his ass - and that's all you're doing - is it any wonder you're depressed and unsatisfied with the way your life is going?

The spectatorial life of the Little 5 Points flock might be fine and dandy for a 22-year-old, but at the ripe old age of 31, this kinda' shit doesn't appeal to me anymore. There are too many people, too much traffic, and the backbreaker, too much waiting. There's no reason for anybody in the year 2017 to spend three hours waiting in line for a pizza, and there's no reason why anybody who is over the age of 30 should be screaming "look, it's Cousin Eddie!" with the glee of a retarded eight-year-old while some mute cosplayer holds a sign reading "shitter's full." There are only so many skanks in weird lipstick colors and so many people dressed up like zombies and so many people only communicating in the tongue of a common pop cultural ancestry that you can trudge through before you grow tired of all the insincerity. It reminds me a lot of visiting Music Midtown (for which I spent more than $200 to attend) a few years back, and having buckets of rain pouring down my underwear while muddy pot-heads and literally shit-covered drunk dudes kept falling down in front of me over and over again. No, this was not worth it to hear Weezer or Tegan and Sara, I thought to myself. These are not my people, this is not my type of event and this is most certainly not where I want to be in life. 

And this much, I know: whatever the Little 5 Points parade (and by default, Little 5 Points itself) represents these days? I don't want any damn part of it no more. Like Roger Murtaugh, I'm just too old for this shit. I always dreaded being that guy, the old fuck who doesn't have "young people fun" anymore, but now that the moment has finally arrived, it almost feels like deliverance of sorts. 

Today, I, one Jimbo X. American, am officially unhip, uncool, and no longer, as the kids say, "with it." And instead of bemoaning my "loss" of coolness, I'm going to celebrate my newfound crotchetiness, that almost pathological revulsion of the mainstream, the popular, and most especially the emblematic of the youthful. Today, I embrace the natural state of idiomaticy, that compelling desire to steer clear of crowds, wasteful spending and spectacle events. You young 'uns can enjoy your unthinking immersion into in-group imperialism and your hyper conformity to cultural-collectivism; I reckon I'm just going to have to be a real individual, and a real being-in-the-world, instead.

But then again, since we are already here, howzabout we take a good long gander at a whole buncha' photographs of miscellaneous people dressed up like hoochies, goofballs and assorted assholes of all, shapes, sizes, colors and creeds? Yeah - I figured that's what you were really here for, anyway.

These things are going to play out like Where's Waldo books. There's a lot of stuff to take in at once, and at first glance, you're liable to overlook the real money shot. For example, in this photo, you're probably getting an eyeful of that one blonde chick twirling her hair. Of course, all you have to do is scoot over a couple of centimeters to the left and BAM! It's bicycle shorts-clad ass, right in your fucking face. 

So here, we've got adult Elvis and child Elvis. And also, a really pale blonde girl with a camera and a biracial sorta' chubster with nearly knee high tube socks. And then there's that profound ass, right there at the bottom right hand corner of the screen. But you know what I'm gawping at? How fucking small that dude in the blue hat front and center's head is. Motherfucker's gotta' dome so tiny, he could probably inspect the inside of a pipe cleaner.

Now I'm kinda' proud of this shot. You have to remember, all of these guys are moving targets, and using my ghetto-ass camera with the built-in stability feature I can't turn off, most of the in-motion photos I take just look like a blurry ass light show. Alas, using my split-second reflexes honed from years and years of playing SHMUPS on the TurboGrafx-16 and Sega Genesis, I was nonetheless able to land this (relatively) in-focus shot of the red-robed Misfits skeleton motherfucker. Granted, it's no Pulitzer candidate, but considering the technological restraints here, I still reckon I deserve a pat on the back.

You know, you really don't see that many black dudes fronting shitty alt-punk bands that will never, ever make money in their lifetimes. So cherish this moment for as long as you live.

And here's an alternate shot of shitty alt-punk black guitar man. Only this time, his head is a tree limb. Personally, *I* consider it an improvement, but your mileage may vary.

Of course, a Conehead was sure to show up at some point. You know, like the one that just fucking showed up in that one Cyndi Lauper video, for literally no discernible reason. But let's not discount the other visuals of note here, including unspecified ethnicity Georgia Bulldogs supporter, statistically representative overweight black woman, that scrawny geek in the "Fort for Atlanta Mayor" shirt and the presumably Hispanic dude, who may or may not be perpetrating an active sex crime against the pink haired chick.

Of course furries would show up at some point. They always fucking do whenever you THINK you're about to have a good time.

I can't remember what this float was promoting, but I do vividly recall the guy down in front dressed up like a banana receiving a hug from somebody in a Minion costume, which was genuinely one of the most adorable things I've ever seen. Man, I really hope neither of those guys are sex offenders. I really, really do.

So we've got a dude dressed up like Rick from Rick and Morty carrying his kid (I assume that is his kid, anyway) in a papoose while some (presumably Muslim) woman in a head scarf grabs his hand. Oh, and black Wonder Woman is in their somewhere, along with a guy dressed up like a zebra apparently accosting a young Hispanic child. Ironically enough, there's a guy wearing a Penn State shirt directly in the background, which may or may not be hideous, hideous foreshadowing.

Not a whole lot to say about this one. Except of course, "why are the pink wigs so dadgum popular?"

Naturally, your eyes wanna' steer towards the Elder Scrolls demon giving Minnie Mouse a staredown, but don't overlook the literal Pedo-Bear in the top right hand corner, neither.

Dude dressed his car up like a demon. Alas, the effect is kinda' lost if the driver is just some fat guy in an Atlanta United jersey ...

This being an election year and all, several Atlanta mayoral candidates were on hand to celebrate the festivities. Needless to say, it looks like Cathy Woolard has the city's gay vote in the book.

More Cathy Woolard supporters. Or maybe it's just somebody holding up a Cathy Woolard sign in front of a wholly unrelated float. Like anybody cares, though.

And here come the pro-marijuana lobbyists marching down the street with their pot-leaf inspired flags. I can only imagine the conversations this sparked for hipster parents and their precocious elementary-aged students on the ride home.

Hey, it's some tall asshole, and for once, he's not participating in a NBA game!

With the outdoor temperature an easy 80 degrees Fahrenheit, I take it the individual underneath the dinosaur astronaut costume immediately regretted the choice after about ten minutes on the prowl.

Looks like a fake medicl dummy is about to get torn asunder by some S&M leather freak. You know, because it's good, clean fun for the whole family.

Here's the thing about hosting a Halloween parade in Little 5 Points; you really can't tell if these people are wearing costumes, or if that's how they *choose* to dress on any given day. Also: get a load of that one bitch in the lower left hand corner digging for gold like there's no tomorrow.

Nope. I still have no idea why Hocus Pocus is so beloved either, folks.

If that guy looks vaguely familiar, he should. That's Shane Morton, a.k.a. Professor Morte, who is a regular at any and all horror-themed events in Atlanta. As to whether or not he's an abuser and molester of children, though, I can't give you a concrete verdict one way or another - all I know is that if he has, he hasn't been caught yet.

Members of the actual Satanic Temple had their own float for the event. For those of you not in the know, these are the people who are always trying to take local governments and public school systems to task for promoting religious programming. So naturally, they decided the best way to get normies to think of them as decent, upstanding people was to dress up like background characters from The Devil's Rain ...

... and then promote their anti-gospel gospel by doing a live, public S&M act in front of children. Shit, these people know public relations like a motherfucker, don't they?

I noticed a lot of people had Atlanta United gear on for the event. Note: if anybody has anything with the Atlanta United logo on it, rest assured, they are white hipster pieces of shit and fuck them. Hard.

But is it the same inflatable dinosaur from last summer's Southern-Fried Gameroom Expo? Eh - maybe.

So these guys dressed like rockets sang "American Girl" by Tom Petty. It wasn't that great, but compared to the screeching beluga whale rape-sounding cover of "Search and Destroy" an earlier band performed, it was manna for the eardrum.

No idea who the papier-mache head guy is supposed to be, but for whatever reason, he reminded me of Steven Spielberg. Which means the young 'uns best steer clear of 'em if they know what's good for 'em ...

Sorry, but the only Blue Meanies I care about are the ones that used to be in ECW.

Oh, this bitch. Outside of sporting some very Euro-tastic armpit hair, she also felt they need to interpretive dance to Michael Jackson's music, nearly poking out a couple of passersby eyeballs in the process. Shit, if this is the kinda' person that voted for her, no wonder Hillary Clinton lost.

You know, it takes a lot of guts to dress up like He-Man in public. No, wait, that's not true - all it takes is a profound lack of shame and a father who clearly did not give a shit about raising his son right.

Take note, Instagram skanks - if you REALLY want to whore it up for attention, skip the trampy clothing and bring a goddamn python with you everywhere you go. Shit, the last time a guy had this many kids touching his snake, Disney wound up giving him a three picture deal.

And lastly, we end with the only photo you could possibly end such an article with - morbidly obese black Jason. So does that mean he passes out from oxygen deprivation after half a minute of sprinting after his prey, or do the cops show up five minutes in the movie and shoot him 450 times before he can even pick up his machete?

Pic, most definitely related.

Of course, there were a lot of other things that happened during the parade that forever turned me off to ever going back to another one of these fucking things, ranging from the guy who ran up to me, put his arm around my shoulders and told me a long, rambling story about purportedly designing the t-shirt I bought from Kohl's and being stuck behind this monstrous party truck that kept blaring War's Greatest Hits Live for half a goddamn hour. I think back to the last festival I went to, where me and my gal pal had to walk down Auburn Avenue right at sundown, half expecting to be attacked by a roving gang of identically clad thugs a'la Streets of Rage. As terrifying as journeying through the heart of urban hell to make it back to the Toyota Corolla may have been, I'd much rather experience the legitimate seclusion and peril of that to the unbearable syntheticness that the L5P parade - and really, the whole L5P/Virginia Highlands area - has become these days.

This is one of the reasons why I LOATHE Atlanta. Even over the past ten years I've watched it grow into a grotesque furuncle of transplanted, liberal white assholes who are hell-bent on razing the whole downtown area and rebuilding the ashes into their elitist, faux-socialist, weekend bicyclist utopia. I keep telling concerned people of color, the alt right isn't the kind of white people you ought to be afraid of, it's THESE kinds of white people, the ones who hail from overwhelmingly white suburban strongholds and have no qualms about evicting blacks en masse to found their new Bernie Sanders hipster shangri-la where YOUR affordable housing used to be. Who wants to live in a neighborhood where the biking lanes are bigger than the actual roadways and a studio apartment costs $1,300 a month, and it takes three goddamn hours to get ONE slice of pepperoni pizza from the local pizzeria? That's right, only one kind of people, and that's asshole white liberals, that's who.

After the parade, me and my other of significance were so pissed we drove 50 miles out of our way to get some Aurelio's Pizza and pumpkin spice coffee at a Kangaroo gas station. You see, in an era where the mythology of the urban hipster stronghold reigns supreme, the most countrercultural (mayhap even revolutionary) thing you can do is embrace the unhip and the contrived and the commonplace. It's a bit of an overbroad generalization, but pretty much everything the revelers at L5P celebrate and believe in, it's probably a good idea to embrace its exact opposite just out of spite. If they're into goofball Stranger Things and Star Wars pop cultural religions, you hit 'em right back by reading the works of Stoic philosophers and systematic theologians. If they're all about smoking weed and Whole Foods, you retaliate by watching a whole buncha' 1980s vigilante action movies and eating nothing but Dollar Tree inventory for weeks at a time. If they think bicycling and voting for democratic socialist wingbats are the be all-end all, you stick it to them by starting no-fee community vale tudo clubs and reading every goddamn thing F.A. Hayek's written front to back, multiple times. And if they're extolling the virtues of craft beer and taxpayer subsidized hybrid cars, you drive your shitty ass 1987 Chevy Blazer to Sonic and you get a full-sized, Route 66 jug of Diet Dr. Pepper with the .35 cent extra vanilla add-in flavor and you drink it with pride, poise and dignity. And most importantly, if they're vaunting "new urbanism" and "walkability" as driving dogmas of the day, you celebrate the McDonaldization of society like a mother fucker and enjoy paying half as much money for twice as much living space in the exurbs. Hey, if they're willing to live in objectively shittier living arrangements just because it gives them a false sense of cosmopolitan identity, I say rub their financial illiteracy in their faces as much as you can.

Outside the perimeter is the best perimeter, you classist cocksuckers.

Maybe this newfound resentment of new-wave hipster urbanism/professional class Milliennial supremacism isn't all that newfound, though. My whole life I've grown up on the outskirts of society, and one of the great tragedies of my lifetime is watching the dual slow creep of urbanization into the sticks and the de-ruralization of the exurbs by money hungry developers and Yankee transplants. On one end you've got white liberal gentrification pushing poor people into neighboring counties (who aren't even remotely able to serve the influx of social service cases and don't even have the housing stock or readily available jobs to keep 'em all off welfare) and on the other end, you've got carpetbaggers from out-of-state coming down here and buying up all the grassland and churning up the former farmland and woodland so they can have houses that would cost $3 million in San Fran or Chicago for just $250,000 about 50 miles north of Atlanta.

When you go to events like the L5P parade, you realize the redneck rapists in Deliverance were actually THE GOOD GUYS. What were they doing, besides defending their home turf from people who wanted to take their property and force them out of their own backyard?  Well, that's the story of Atlanta right now. The poor blacks inside the perimeter are getting forced into the exurbs by fly-by-night SEO marketers and Aurora Coffee sippers from Indiana named Chad and urban supremacist-idolizers from Alpharetta named Rachel, while all of the poor whites in the borderlands around the perimeter are being dispossessed by Hispanic and Asian migrants if not flat out thrown out of their homes by U.N. mandates demanding more 'diversity' in the zip code. Meanwhile, all of the rural communities are literally dying before our eyes ... if not from rapid depopulization, then because of legislators redirecting state funding to the more populous (and ever expanding) urban nuclei.

And THAT, ultimately, is what the L5P Halloween parade - and, by default, Little 5 Points itself - actually celebrates now. It's a great big, ideological circle jerk in which "the enlightened" get together and suck each other's "new urbanism" boners and vicariously piss on the "uncool" and "unclean" denizens of the unheard and unseen majority living beyond the confines of I-285. There's is very much a post Obama Wiemar Republic, a mega-capitalist, hyper-ethnocentric and brazenly class-obsessed in-post sustained on a steady diet of smug, self-absorbed SES supremacism and all the false idolatry - the medical marijuana, the Rick and Morty references, not to mention the woefully hypocritical embrace of pseudo-socialism and multiculturalism, when they themselves are wealthy as fuck and actively strive to push poor minorities out of their own neighborhoods -  that comes attached with the whole Nu-Yuppie ideology.

And that, naturally, is something I don't believe is worthy of celebrating. Enjoy your craven, ceaseless worship of all things mass commercialized pop culture and self-espousing zip code elitism and unacknowledged reverse-segregation ideals, kids. I'll be too busy being an adult OTP, and unlike you, able to breathe easy and stretch my legs without stepping in a pile of somebody else's bullshit.

Read More