Make Your Own Thai Pizza!

So, Who's Up For A Pie That May Or May Not Give You Extraordinary Knee Striking Capabilities? 

Before we talk about the many, many fine points of Thai Pizza (arguably the most delectable Franken-food I’ve yet to concoct), I think we need to address the Pinterest Revolution first.

I’ve always been the jealous type when it comes to people thinking up oh-so-obvious, multi-million dollar earning ideas. For example, have you ever seen those plastic spigots that you can snap onto an opened can of cola and sip like a bottled beverage? Well, the first time I saw that, I almost wept in the aisle. “Anybody could’ve thought of that,” was the comedy, “the fact I wasn’t that person that did” was the tragedy. Regarding Pinterest, I feel a comparable sorrow - anybody could have come up with a female-centric version of Reddit, but by golly, I just wasn’t that dreamer.

Pinterest is no doubt going to become a social phenomenon for years - perhaps even decades - to come. Forget YouTube, forget Facebook, forget Twitter, I think Pinterest is the only one of them that will have consistent value throughout the next 20 years. Whereas just about all of our other social networking sites have been targeted towards young males (even if older females made up the heaviest composition of users), Pinterest is the first major networking site I’ve stumbled across that caters specifically to a female audience - and not just a specific subset, I mean the entire female population of this planet. Since more females are being born AND outliving their male cohorts (not to mention that in the U.S., at least, females have purchasing power that FAR outweighs that of men), Pinterest’s long-term success is pretty much guaranteed, whereas the audience bases for stuff like Sherdog and IGN can only shrink as the gender gap widens.

In short; if you’re aiming for sustainability in this ever-changing world (wide web) in which we live, you better offer up some recipes and instructional arts and crafts projects. Or at the bare minimum, a sidebar with a link to wool wholesalers. I’m telling you, yarn is going to be worth its weight in gold if these trends continue…

…so, uh, yeah, what again? Oh, that’s right, Thai Pizza. I’ve got to say, this is perhaps the yummiest thing I’ve ever cooked up based on pure value of whimsy, and that INCLUDES a brownie graveyard (complete with Sour Patch Kids zombies) I made for last Halloween. It’s also the most preparation-heavy mega-food I’ve made this far, so bachelors, you might want to hold off on this project until you figure out how egg beaters work.

I really can’t tell you every ingredient that went into the recipe, so this photo will have to do you as far as making the peanut sauce base goes. Needless to say, you’re going to need some peanut butter (I’d go with creamy, but that’s just my inclination), some ginger sauce, some teriyaki and soy, some honey, and whatever that red stuff in the bottle is over there. Um, I’ll get back to you on that one in just a sec.

Once again, I really can’t give you a fixed amount regarding measurements and proportions and things of that nature, so let’s just reduce this equation by saying take all of the stuff I said before, throw it into a blender and hit puree for about a minute. The end result should look a lot like peanut butter, only more Southeast Asian looking. 

For once, I decided to actually make a pizza crust instead of just using a cheese pizza from Domino’s as the base for my pie, and I think that’s were this project went unpredictably right. Now, I’m no food dictator (a real Pol Kitchen Pot, have you), but I simply implore you to avoid a tomato base here - primarily because the peanut sauce (which, admittedly, looks a lot like Baconnaise when you first slather it on) really gels with both the crust and the veggies were about to heap on it, so…yeah. 

As far as veggies go, I’d say just get one of those mixed value baggies at Kroger and call it a day. As long as you have broccoli stems and something that kind of looks like snow peas in there, you are in good standing. And of course, just to make sure we cancel out any possible nutrients we may get out of the dish…

…it looks like it’s raining mozzarella in Bangkok right now. Set oven to 15 minutes at, um, hot degrees, and this is what you’ll be staring at in a good quarter hour: 

A lot of you will think I’m yanking your chain when I tell you that how delicious this is, but seriously, this stuff is phenomenal, and filling as all hell to boot. Normally, I’m a guy that, on a good day, can eat at least seventeen pizza slices in one sitting, but I was only able to muster two wedges of Thai Pie before falling over into a blissful food coma. There are local paramedics that can back me up on this one. In fact, several.

Admittedly, a lot of the food-crafts I’ve built over the last year have been made with very acquired tastes in mind. You’d have to be a very, very specific kind of person to even think of making a Pop-Tart sandwichwith seasonal Little Debbie snack cakes as the filling, let alone be one of those poor, contemptible souls that actually find such culinary abominations palatable. That said, this Thai Pizza is probably the first thing I’ve made that I would actually consider a legitimately great food mash-up, the kind of dish that is not only tasty as all hell, but something you might actually want to share with your friends and colleagues at some point. Heck, you might even manage to convince them that it was something fresh out of a Wolfgang Puck restaurant, and most folks would never be the wiser. 

The difficult part is in describing what the things tastes like. You’ll just have to take my word here and accept that it’s yummy, because I really can’t give you a one hundred percent accurate account of what it's like. Ultimately, the pie tastes more Thai than pizza, which is probably why I liked it so much; you really don’t feel like you’re eating pizza toppings as much you are a full fusion plate with each bite, and that, my amigos, is most definitely a good thing and then some.

All in all, there’s not much to say about Thai Pizza, other than the fact that it kicks all kinds of ass. In conclusion, it’s probably the 354^th best thing that’s ever happened to me, ranking mildly ahead of that time I found a copy of "Tecmo Super Bowl" on the original Game Boy at a thrift store for 89 cents and slightly behind that time I yelled “You suck!” at Michel Bolton when I saw him at the Georgia Dome, and he kind of acted like he heard me.

SUPER DUPER BONUS GOOD HAPPY FUN ACTIVITY TIME!

Your Friendly Neighborhood Jimbo’s Favorite Content-Relevant Food Jokes!

Q: What do you call a Thai Pizza-eating chicken?

A: A Bangcock! (get it, because Bangkok is the capital city of Thailand, thus making the joke an allusion to the city in question!)

Q: How many pieces of Thai Pizza can a Malay eat?

A: A Kuala Lumpur Two! (Because “Kuala Lumpur” sounds somewhat like “quite a lump or two!”)

Q: What does King Bhumibol Adulyade think about Thai Pizza?

A: It’s SUCHINDA good dish! (Because General Suchinda Krapayoon was the name of the general that seized power in Thailand in 1991 and killed a whole bunch of people!)

Q: What’s the difference between a Thai Pizza and a Tie Pizza?

A: THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS A TIE PIZZA, THEREFORE IT’S AN ABSURD POINT TO COMPARE SOMETHING THAT CLEARLY DOES EXIST WITH THAT WHICH IS HYPOTHETICAL.

Q: What do you call former UFC Light Heavyweight Champion Mauricio “Shogun” Rua while he eats a Thai Pizza?

A: A MUY THAI SPECIALIST! Wait…that’s what you would call him even if he wasn’t eating Thai Pizza, I suppose. Uh, never mind then. 

Read More

My Five Favorite, Absurdly Underrated Movie Villians

 Hailing the most horrendous (and underrated) cinematic antagonists of the last quarter century 

Hey! The Oscars are coming up next week, and I, for one, don't really give a hoot. Between the eight hour long acceptance speeches and those pointless musical interludes and the fact that dry, boring ass Hallmark movies are nominated as opposed to truly great flicks like "The Raid" and "Elite Squad: The Enemy Within," my interest in the Academy Awards is pretty much limited to whether or not somebody will try to make a really misguided, awkward political statement a la George Clooney or Mikey Moore while on stage (My bet? That dude that made "A Separation" will say something about the Israelis, pending he's picked up a little more English since the Golden Globes.)

One thing that really struck me about this year's acting nods was the complete and utter lack of ANY traditional villainous roles getting nominated. Granted, not every year can we have Daniel Plainview and Amon Goethe up for awards, but I have to say, I am really starting to get disappointed by the lack of refined villainy in our movie-going experiences in general. When was the last time you went to the local googol-plex and said to yourself "damn, that dude is all sorts of evil?" and really, you know, meant it?

The hyper-relativism of modern cinema makes the great movie villainy of yesteryear a fairly outdated ideal. Nowadays, the only times you're presented with straight-up, distinctly evil antagonists is when you're dealing with Nazis or racists. Even our serial killers are typically presented as multifaceted, quasi-sympathetic figures whose proclivities were borne of prior emotional abuses. If Freddy Krueger were a modern advent, they would probably turn him into a janitor with ADHD that was beat up by his dad and inadvertently offs tweenagers instead of a hideously burnt "To Catch a Predator" forerunner. The humanities are killing the fine arts, I tell you what.

Of course, that's not to say that there aren't some great movie villains out there, including some fairly recent ones. Everybody and their mom can rave about Heath Ledger's Joker or Alex Delarge, but what about those cinematic bad guys that just never got the respect the deserved as iconic movie villains? Even though they may not have gotten the approbation of a Hannibal Lector or a Darth Vader, there are quite a few movie baddies that I think deserve equal footing in the pantheon of celluloid immortals - in fact, I can name five of the top of my head that ought to become the archetypes for film evil from hereon out.

I don't know about you, but I'm feeling sort of listless this afternoon; now, who's up for a walk on the dark side of film with me this evening?

Doyle Hargraves in “Sling Blade” (1996)

For some reason, nobody ever talks about the absurd brilliance of Dwight Yokam’s performance in “Sling Blade.” Granted, Billy Bob Thornton was pretty captivating as the mustard-biscuit chomping, pig-pecker avoiding Carl Childers, but not only did Yokam steal the show as Doyle Hargraves, he put on what I consider to be one of the all-time greatest cinematic villain performances in the process.

To this day, I am convinced that Yokam wasn’t so much acting as he was reliving specific moments from the 1980s on camera. There’s such a subtlety and realness to his evil that I’m pretty certain that, at one point in his life, he probably did have a ferocious alcohol problem while cohabitating with a Dollar Tree employee, her son, her homosexual best friend and a recently released, mentally-retarded serial killer that lives in a garage outback.

It’s the smoothness of Yokam’s evil that really drives the movie. Take the scene where he gets rip-roaring drunk and throws his band (including criminally underappreciated alt-country legend Vic Chesnutt) out of his girlfriend’s house; after dropping ninety seven thousand permutations of the “f-bomb” in three minutes of undiluted raging, he falls to his knees and proclaims to his girl “I’m hurting’ Linda,” before responding to her son’s criticisms with “I hate you too, you little prick…no, I don’t, I love your mother” with a sneer on his face more Satanic than anything you’ll see in a Freddy Krueger or Hannibal Lector movie. Attention, all first-year drama students: if you’re looking for a clinic on how to display reverse pathos, that performance right here ought to be your new north star. 

Lotso-Huggin’-Bear in “Toy Story 3” (2010)

I’ve said it countless times, but it bears repeating: Hollywood might as well just stop making movies after “Toy Story 3.”

Odds are, we’ll never see a mainstream, mega-money-backed project that awesome ever again (and clearly, never again from PIXAR, as the tremendously disappointing “Cars 2” most definitely demonstrated.) During “Toy Story 3,” I ran the gamut of emotions, from nostalgic bliss to abject horror to almost pissing myself during the trash compactor scene - and for those of you that doubt the power of the narrative, when you want to scream “NO, YOU SON-OF-A-BITCH!” towards an anthropomorphic teddy bear, you KNOW you are no doubt witnessing one of the greatest villain performances in the history of American cinema.

Lotso-Huggin’-Bear, the strawberry-scented, Ned Beatty-voiced overseer of Sunnyside Daycare’s toy room, is one of the most nuanced villains to come along in quite some time, a hyper nihilistic although strategically cool sumbitch scarred by aging, longing and his own egomania. He straddles that line between pity and evil so expertly that you wonder how Beatty didn’t get an Oscar nod for his voice work alone. Cultural studies scholars often tell us that illustrative evil is transcendent from the cultural text from which it is born - and if that’s the case, the multifaceted vileness of “Lotso-Huggin’-Bear” is destined to become one of those multimedia exemplars of evil that we’ll be citing and imitating for years to come.

Billy Mitchell in “The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters” (2007) 

In my quarter century of movie going experiences, I have never encountered a figure in a film that I have wanted to punch in the face as much as I did this prick. Billy Mitchell, the Donkey Kong world champion and Florida hot sauce baron, is a real-life figure so comically evil that you wonder how close the guy is to turning into a real life Batman villain. I’m guessing one dip into a pool of volatile chemicals, and we’ve got a major social blight on our hands.

Mitchell’s evilness is almost inherent. Before the guy even speaks, you know he’s a grade “A” douche, and by the five minute mark of the film, you want to see him ran over by a wheat thresher. Mitchell is probably the biggest megalomaniacal narcissist since Hitler, so if there’s a silver lining anywhere to be found in the miserable thunder cloud that he is, I suppose it’s the fact that he took up arcade games as opposed to eugenics as a hobby.

Mitchell is very much a technocratic form of evil. In the “King of Kong,” he maintains his world record high score on “Donkey Kong” via an elaborate, bureaucratic network and, according to the hero of the film, breaking and entering into people’s homes so he can send saboteurs to mess up their Donkey Kong, Jr. cabinets. By the time the film’s over, you’ll marvel in the real life majesty of the man’s innate messed-up-ness, concluding that, yeah, there’s a pretty good chance he may end up killing someone to preserve his unblemished Robotron 2040 win loss record.

 Precious’ Mom in “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ By Sapphire” (2009)

I’m likely to catch a lot of flak for saying it, but it’s something we are all pretty much thinking immediately after screening “Precious”; holy crap, was that movie hilarious.

Granted, it’s not hilarious in the traditional sense, but hilarious in the oh hell, I need a defense mechanism to protect me from the abject horror of the situation kind. You may be wondering how a film about an AIDS-infected, morbidly obese illiterate girl raped by her own father can be construed as comedic, in any regard. Well, I can summarize that in one word for you: Mo’Nique.

There’s “over-the-top” performances, and then there’s Mo’Nique’s performance in this film. Precious’ mom isn’t just the embodiment of evil in the film, she’s the kind of evil that most of us refuse to even exist in real-life - you know, the I’m-going-to-throw-my-newborn-grandson-at-my-daughter kind of evil. I’m still waiting for somebody to come up with a drinking game for this movie, in which you have to take a shot every time Mo’Nique throws an inanimate object at her daughter. Granted, you could model one around the number of times she drop’s the f words (the other one’s “fat,” in case you were wondering), but I’m pretty sure you would die from alcohol poisoning before the twenty minute mark of the picture. Mo’Nique deserves a spot on the list just for the scene where she tries to find her wig before the social worker comes in…based on her effectiveness in this role, I think she can legally claim the right to the next ten Best-Supporting-Actress awards.

The Warden in “Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky” (1991)

“Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky,” is the greatest bad movie of all-time. The early ‘90s Hong Kong action-splatter film has long been trumpeted as among the all time masterpieces of garbage cinema, and I reckon it’s pretty hard to disagree with the experts here: “Riki-Oh” sucks better than any motion picture in the annals of the art form.

For the most part, the protagonist of the film - this karate master that no-sells bullet wounds and has the ability to punch his way through people’s flesh like tissue paper - is a pretty uninteresting character; thus, the burden of the film is placed on the shoulder’s of the movie’s primary antagonist, the Warden of a futuristic mega-jail with a gaggle of aesthetically interesting cronies that put the entire James Bond series to shame.

It’s sort of hard to pinpoint what makes the Warden so interesting in the film. Perhaps its his coolness and reserve, which is sort of hard to maintain when you’re watching a three hundred pound inmate get disemboweled by a guy that looks like Liu Kang from “Mortal Kombat” just three feet in front of you. Perhaps it’s the profound absurdity of his decision making skills, as it one point, he promulgates burying the main character alive instead of, you know, killing him - and even more irrationally, he just lets him go after a week of rotting in the ground. Hell, maybe it’s even his relationship with his son, the heir apparent to the meg-jail (apparently, the idea of father/son bonding in Hong Kong entails plucking out peoples’ eyeballs with walking sticks.) But ultimately, the thing that puts the Warden WAY out in front of the pack regarding underappreciated film villains is the (OH MY GOD, SUPER SPOILER COMING UP) fact that, at the climax of the film, he just turns into a hulking, Play-Doh faced Muppet monster without any explication from the film itself to do battle with the titular character. 

So there you have it, an illustrative look at the refined concepts of cinematic evilness for us, the post-post-modern generation: alcoholic construction workers, nihilistic teddy bears, narcissistic Pong champions, hyper-abusive chronic welfare recipients and poorly dubbed jail overseers with the ability to turn into Beaker's roided-up monster form in times of great duress.

Now, let’s see your lame-ass Darth Vaders or Magnetos top ANY of those afore-mentioned feats of neo-cinematic villainy.

Read More

The Six A-Holes You’ll Meet in EVERY College Classroom

A field guide to the jerks, pricks and puds you’re bound to encounter on U.S. campuses

By the time you’re a senior in college, you unwittingly become a sociologist of sorts. After four years of people watching, you become quite well-versed in the behavioral patterns of your cohorts, and by the time you graduate, you’re probably able to tell just about everything about a fellow student by the way he or she holds their notebooks, or waits in line for coffee, or even stands next to the water fountain. But most importantly, you learn a skill more valuable than just about anything you’ll pick up in your general ed courses: primarily, how to tell what kind of asshole the guy sitting next to you is just by looking at ‘em.

The American university is a veritable breeding ground for assholes of all sorts. Per capita, there’s probably more assholes per square inch within higher education in the States than there is anywhere else in the world, and rest assured: there are a LOT of assholes out in Croatia, I hear.

Perhaps the only thing more surprising than the sheer quantity of assholes you’ll meet in college is the regularity in which you’ll meet certain assholes. In fact, I am almost 100 percent certain that, in any college class room in America, there are six specific types of asshole you will find, no matter which region of the country you live in. It doesn’t matter if you go to Cornell or a community college in Iowa, the presence of these half-dozen jerk wads is absolutely unavoidable, and the sooner you are able to expertly identify and avoid said pricks and prickettes, the smoother your collegiate experience in general is surely to go.

Current and future college students alike, consider this your bestiary on butt holes for the foreseeable future.

#001

Conspiratorial Asshole Man

Remember: it's an international conspiracy's fault that you can't get laid.

Conspiratorial Asshole Man is usually pretty easy to spot - if you see a kid wearing one of those Depression-era newsboy hats, odds are, he’s one of them.

In high school, the Conspiratorial Asshole Man was most likely one of those kids everybody thought was going to shoot up the school at some point. Once they get into college, they probably turn even creepier, as you’ll see them muttering things to themselves while pacing back and forth around campus. Not surprisingly, Conspiratorial Asshole Man usually keeps to himself, primarily because he thinks everyone on campus not named him is a part of the Illuminati or something. In class, he rarely says anything, but if you say something that irks him, he will then proceed to stare at you for ninety minutes straight.

Periodically, you may see him reading some form of agitprop in the cafeteria, and you might even see him handing out fliers that warn other students about the “evils” of the Federal Reserve Board. Most likely, however, his communication with the rest of the student body is limited to his crude etchings posted on the bathroom walls, condemning the Bilderbergs for secretly putting poison nanobots in our water supply.

NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH: The Loudmouth Libertarian Asshole, which is effectively a more sociable mutation of the Conspiratorial Asshole Man strain, which is also known to infect female students that, perhaps coincidentally, you would never, ever want to sleep with anyway.

#002

Angry World of Warcraft Player Guy

What your average Starcraft player considers "getting some."

Angry World of Warcraft Player guys comes in two distinct forms: there’s the acne-scarred, squeaky-voiced Caucasian version (which, incidentally, almost always resembles Dustin “Screech” Diamond), and there’s the acne-scarred, squeaky-voiced African-American version (which, incidentally, almost always resembles Jaleel “Steve Urkel” White).

Generally, the Angry World of Warcraft Player Guy is clearly suffering from a number of behavioral/developmental disorders, including autism, Asperger’s disorder, Tourette’s syndrome, ADD and whatever they call that disease that makes you sweat inordinately during winter.

You will never see Angry World of Warcraft Player Guy without his laptop in front of him. It doesn’t matter if the teacher forbids it, they’ll go to the Office of Student Services, claim they need it for disability reasons, and lug it into class anyway. As the nomenclature implies, Angry World of Warcraft Player Guy is prone to periodic bouts of rage, typically due to lost Internet connections or batteries that get sapped quicker than they originally planned. Although it goes without saying, the Angry World of Warcraft Player Guy does not, and perhaps never will, mate with another living human being.

NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH: The Perpetual Tablet Device Checker, a unisex variety notable for their inability to go more than five minutes without pulling their iPad out of their backpack so they can try to outdo their all time high score on Words with Friends.

#003

The Kid That Can Barely Speak English That Clearly Does Not Give A Shit, Either

"No umlauts, no deal."

The Kid That Can Barely Speak English That Clearly Does Not Give A Shit, Either (henceforth abridged to “The Kid That Can Barely Speak English”) is a genus of student that includes an almost endless rainbow of hues, tones, inflections and intonations. The common element, however, is that despite the student’s gender, race, age, ethnicity or shoe size, he or she a.) has a noticeably limited grasp of the English language and b.) despite being in a college setting, really doesn’t give much of a shit about the fact, either.

The startling notion about The Kid That Can Barely Speak English is the general amount of success they have on the University level. Despite having vocabularies and enunciation skills substandard to that of the basic third grader, they have somehow managed to not only make it into an United States college, but get past Freshman English Composition, a feat comparable to a one-legged man somehow winning a break dancing competition.

The Kid That Can Barely Speak English rarely, if ever, speaks in class, for what should be fairly apparent reasons. In the unlikely scenario that the student is asked to speak by the professor, he or she will most likely begin sputtering out random vowel sounds, concluding with the last proper noun he or she heard followed by an arbitrary “yes” or “no” to turn the statement into something of a rhetorical rephrasing of what the teacher just said. Typically, the professor will congratulate the student on his or her response, probably out of fear that Jesse Jackson is sitting in the classroom somewhere.

NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH: The White Student That Turns EVERYTHING Into An Issue of Racism, a unisex variation preoccupied with bringing up institutional white oppression whenever the opportunity arises, despite the fact that their forerunners were most likely the very people they are chastising.

#004

Mr. I-Must-Defend-The-Free-Market-At-All-Conceivable-Junctures

The man idolized by thousands of college students that think working at Starbucks constitutes "private sector" employment.

Mr. I-Must-Defend-The-Free-Market-At-All-Conceivable-Junctures is an almost entirely Caucasian mutation, with students in the subset resembling either the bastard love-child of Bill O’Reilly and Napoleon Dynamite or a grown-up version of Bobby Hill.

Mr. I-Must-Defend-The-Free-Market-At-All-Conceivable-Junctures is easily identifiable, primarily because he never, ever shuts the hell up. Every time the professor issues a declarative statement, especially one pertinent to United States economic policies, he immediately inserts himself into the discussion, usually with the opening salvo “Well, according to Tocqueville…” or “As clearly demonstrated by the Austrian School…”

The mutation has a strong tie to neoconservatism, although he will perpetually state that he isn’t a member of the Republican Party, even though he actively campaigns for Republican candidates, incessantly quotes conservative authors, and is registered as a county Republican in the immediate area. Following graduation, Mr. I-Must-Defend-The-Free-Market-At-All-Conceivable-Junctures usually evolves into That-Guy-At-The-Office-With-The-Not-At-All-Ironic-Mustache-That’s-Always-Forwarding-Quasi-Racist-Chain-E-Mails-To-Everybody.

NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH: The Second Generation Farm Boy, a shockingly intellectual Caucasian strain often seen in cowboy boots and lawnmower store jackets, that, despite being relatively deep cognitively, is automatically discredited because his accent sounds funny.

#005

The Really, Really Old Person That Has Absolutely NO Idea Why He Or She Is There In The First Place

The happeningest fraternity on campus. Note the second guy from the left, apparently experiencing a heart attack while his picture is being taken.

“The Really, Really Old Person” is the kind of student that looks more like a college student’s grandfather than your typical co-ed. Aesthetically, they are very easy to pinpoint, and traditionally, they tend to sit in the very front row of the class. The male variation smells like shoe leather, while the female variation puts off a scent comparable to lavender and Tootsie Rolls.

Generally, “The Really, Really Old Person” does quite poorly on exams, and when asked questions in class, they tend to simply stare vacantly into space for a few moments, exclaim that they have no idea what the teacher is talking about and proceed to emit a nervous giggle that sounds creepier and more pathetic than just about anything you would see, hear or whiff at a traveling sideshow attraction.

Almost always, “The Really, Really Old Person” attempts to rationalize his or her perpetual academic failings on the grounds that they’re “trying to prove it to themselves” or “their children.” Oddly enough, had they not decided to enroll in college at 48, they probably would have an extra $9,000 on them to feed and clothe said children, but eff it - that freshman geometry class isn’t going to fail itself, you know.

NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH: The Really, Really Old  Person That’s In College Simply Because They’re Trying To Line Up Potential Organ Donors For The Not-Too-Distant Future. If they ever poke you in the liver and tell you that you “must have an excellent endocrine system,” yeah, you’re probably sitting next to one of them.

#006

The Girl That’s On The Verge Of Falling Into A Coma At The Beginning Of Every Class Period

Simone de Beauvoir's dream has finally become a reality. 

“The Girl That’s On The Verge” is pretty identifiable, usually due to her loud declarations of “Oh…my…GAWDDDD” and “This is BuLLLLshiiit” as she collapses her head on her desk as soon as she plops down in her seat.

Although “The Girl That’s On the Verge” rarely, if ever publicly identifies why she’s so tired each and every class period, her guttural moans and utterances usually clue her classmates into every single aspect of her social life. Perhaps unbeknownst to the “Girl That’s On The Verge” herself, her stretched out complaints seem to paint linear narratives which may or may not serve as mea culpas. “Jee-Suz, that’s the last time,” she may growl, followed up by “damn Dr. Pepper bombs” five minutes later.

Her in-class activities are extremely limited. She never takes notes, and only moves her head enough to meet the bare minimum of expressing consciousness. She may periodically check her cell phone, although outside of popping a birth control pill at the halfway point of lecture, she does very precious little for the entirety of the session.

NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH: The Girl That Has To Put On Chapstick Every Ten Minutes, a mutant strain biologically noteworthy due to her empirical inability to self-moisturize.

Of course, there are virtually endless strains of asshole within America’s colleges, and it’ll take a far more dedicated soul than I to make a comprehensive list of all of them. That stated, the afore-mentioned six are the most likely asshole strains you will encounter in your day to day doings, and as such, will prove the most immediate risks to you and your patience.

Be you a naïve first year student or a sage fourth-year man, never forget: it’s a real jungle (of bungholes) out there in modern academia, so prepare accordingly.

Read More

The Absolute DUMBEST Alternative Rock Lyrics of the 1990s

Counting down the grunge era’s most idiotic libretto

You know, I really like 1990s alternative rock. I mean, a lot.

The thing is, even though it’s probably my favorite style and chronological point in music, that doesn’t absolve the genre from a few shortcomings, the most obvious of which was that, for the most part, the lyrics where incomprehensible, pointless, or  in many instances, just flat out stupid.

Sure, it’s pretty easy to look back on, oh say, the music of Cake or The Presidents of the United States of America and retroactively say that they were singing about some fairly stupid shit, but at least bands of the like tried to incorporate a little semblance of structure and narrative to their tunes. Granted, it may not have been exquisite poetry, but when you heard that bald a-hole singing about moving to the country so he could eat a lot of peaches, you kind of knew what he was talking about (presumably, he wanted to move to the country, most likely so he could eat a lot of peaches.)

Looking back on the alt rock standards of twenty years ago, finding songs that are even remotely that narrative-driven is a pretty daunting task. I guess we never realized it at the time, but the songs of our youth may very well have been the most oblique recordings in the history of recorded music. In more blunt terms: good lord, was our music stupid as all hell.

It wasn’t so much that our alt rock favorites were irreverent and irrelevant as much as they were stubbornly non-concrete. Abstract is one thing, but it seemed like in the 1990s, alt rock radio was ruled by refrigerator magnet poetry. Not only did the lyrics make zero sense most of the time, the stringing together of words to make those lyrics seemed an affront to English itself. I don’t care how much smack you have flowing through your veins, word jamming of the like is something that’s inexcusable even for such all-time juiceheads as that dude from The Brian Jonestown Massacre and that guy from Blind Melon that kicked the bucket before he could even collect his first royalty check from “No Rain.”

As such, I’ve decided to turn the dial back to two decades ago, and yank out the five worst examples of dumb, idiotic and irritatingly pointless lyrics that the NAFTA years had to offer. Some people call these tunes classics, and others call them stupid, absurd and intelligence insulting pieces of shit. And today? Buddy, we ain’t celebrating nothing for being “classic.”

Number Five

“Creep” by Stone Temple Pilots

Stone Temple Pilots were/are arguably the worst band to come out of the 1990s with the initials STP. While originally decried as a poor man’s Pearl Jam, Scott Weiland and his unfortunately non life-destroying heroin habit managed to parlay their success into a now twenty year plus career of being a poor man’s Pearl Jam, proving those egghead critics wrong as wrong can be.

The inherent awfulness of “Creep” is pretty self-evident. Granted, it’s kind of unrealistic to expect a band to churn out some high quality, Chaucer-like prose every time they enter a recording booth, but with lyrics like “feeling uninspired / I guess I’ll start a fire” and “everybody run / Bobby’s got a gun,” it kind of makes you wonder if the band even comprehended how rhyming works. It seems like Weiland is trying to make some sort of altruistic point with the chorus of the song, but he follows up “take time with a wounded hand / ‘cause it likes to feel” with “’cause I like to steal” which is followed up by a secondary chorus in which he bemoans being “half the man” he “used to be.” Using daily conversation as a framework, that’s like saying “nice weather” and “I’m a neurotic scumbag” without even bothering to throw in a comma somewhere.

Radiohead covered the same subject better, IMHO. Hell, even TLC trudged the same ground with more sure handedness. And as an eff you to English teachers the nation over, STP was ultimately saddled with a platinum selling record and even more drug money, proving that you can’t spell “success” in modern music without a fair amount of “suck” first.

Number Four

“Loser” by Beck

In the 1990s, a lot of music critics considered Beck to be something of a post-modern, generation-defining lyrical artisan. Also, a lot of music critics were high on angel dust all the time, so I think those two aspects might just be correlated.

As far as ‘90s standards go, they really don’t get anymore standard than “Loser,” a song that has been played so many times on modern rock stations that by now, Beck could probably buy his own archipelago and spend the rest of his days trying to hop from island to island on stilts made out of woolly mammoth bones. Some people say that the beauty of “Loser,” and by extent, Beck’s entire oeuvre, is in its disjointedness and absurdity. The reality is, Beck’s word salad is nothing that you wouldn’t hear spouted out of the mouth of your typical homeless schizophrenic, and when the works of Wesley freaking Willis have more substance than what you’re singing about, you know you’re just going through the motions.

“The forces of evil / in a Bozo nightmare,” Beck proclaims at one point, before going into a whirlpool of “phony gas chambers,” “burning down trailer parks” and random things “hanging from a chicken wing.” It’s like giving the play-by-play for a Luis Bunuel film to a blind person - yeah, you can condense the gist of it, but it’s a gist that will never, ever make any damned sense to anyone or anything. Beck was undeservingly hailed as a post-structuralist champion following the release of 1994’s “Mellow Gold,” which spawned this, his most popular track: incidentally, that was the same year SAT scores began a downward trajectory, wasn’t it?

Number Three

ANYTHING written by Rob Zombie 

Solo, in  a band, on a boat, with a goat, beside a moat, it really doesn’t matter: if you give Rob Zombie a microphone and/or an ink pen and a blank sheet of paper, pure bullshit is certain to follow suit.

Zombie doesn’t even ATTEMPT to make his “music” remotely lyrical. For one, to create lyrics, there has to be a sense of flow, intention and meaning, which are all alien terms to Mr. Zombie. Rather, he substitutes those things most people call “words” with random references to B-movies compacted with phrases that rhyme with the last word in those B-movie references to create the illusion of structure.

“El Phantasmo and the Chicken Run Blast-a-Rama.” Honestly, how much lyrical depth can anybody expect out of something with a title of the like? Meanwhile, half of “Thunder Kiss ‘65” is just the names of movies that came out in the 1950s, and “More Human Than Human” is almost entirely comprised of disjointed, unconnected things that kind of have stuff to do with “Blade Runner.” Not only does Zombie eschew composition in his work, he even found a way to eschew imagery in his lyrics, instead turning incoherent allusions and references to pre-existing texts into a literal formula for success. Virtually everything Zombie recorded in the 1990s, from “La Sexorcista Vol. 1” to “Hellbilly Deluxe,” followed the exact same pattern; self introduction, yeah, oblique nod to B-movie, yeah, a direct reference to a B-movie, yeah, chorus, rinse, repeat.

Man, it’s a good thing a guy that prone to the repetitive and formulaic never got into the business of making movies, huh?

Number Two

“Everything Zen” by Bush

Bush is everything wrong about the 1990s in one band. Really nothing more than a dime a dozen Brit-rock group, they were scooped up by Interscope Records following the death of Kurt Cobain and puffed up into the latest, greatest alt-rock stewards, based primarily on lead singer Gavin Rossdale’s Tiger Beat-ready hairdo.

Say what you will about Nirvana being overrated and over-celebrated (please do, because they were), but their influence on the market of alternative rock music is absolutely monumental. How many bands with wooly haired lead singers on heroin with rhythm sections composed mostly of feedback and wobbly drum noises can you recall from the years of 1993 to 1997? As long as you had something static sounding in the background and some guy just rambling on and on about incoherent nouns, odds are, you were mass marketed to the jaded, apathetic fifth-graders of America, the kinds of culture-deprived youths that would gladly save up two months worth of lunch money just so they could purchase the latest Sponge album.

Really, you can pick ANY song by Bush and label it as one of the most idiotically constructed lyrical abortions of this, or for that matter, any other year, but “Everything Zen” stands out because a.) it was the single that introduced the band to the masses, and b.) holy hell, are these lyrics super-duper-confoundingly-stupid.

There isn’t a single line in “Everything Zen” that makes a lick of sense. The structure of the lyrics simply do not connect from verse to verse, or even word to word. “There must be somewhere we can eat,” the song begins, already establishing the fact that we’re not in store for some Bob Dylan shit for the next three and a half minutes, before colliding into the couplet “Maybe I should find another lover.” And that’s probably the closest the song gets to anything resembling lyrical cohesiveness.

“Should I fly to Los Angeles?” the lead singer immediately follows, with the even more confounding line “and find my asshole brother?” Four lines into the song, and we have four separate narratives going on…and of course, the singer never ever returns to any of them throughout the rest of the track. Instead, we’re treated to complete nonsense about “faking with saints,” “rain dogs howling for centuries,” and in a line that brings Rossdale’s status as a non-retard into serious question, “Minnie Mouse has grown up a cow.”

Admittedly, it’s pretty hard to think of anything stupider than that…that is, until you take into consideration the virtual Rosetta Stone that paved the way for all of this lyrical absurdity to begin with.

Number One

“Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana

Without question, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is the single most important song of the 1990s as far as lyrical composition influence goes. While obviously less heralded for the fact, it’s also far and away the stupidest song of the decade, an observation addressed by the guy that wrote it in several interviews.

What a lot of people never understood about “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is that the entire thing was an elaborate joke. Kurt, presumably under the influence of some more potent smack than usual, wanted to produce a song that was nothing more than “Louie, Louie” and “More Than A Feeling” merged together, with bullshit, exaggerated lyrics about angsty, disaffected youth staging a revolution against…well, stuff they really had no clue about. With a little, ahem, inspiration form Sonic Youth and The Pixies and the off-handed suggestion that he name the ditty after a line of deodorant, Smells Like Teen Spirit was birthed, inadvertently kicking off the greatest mainstream musical renaissance since the heydays of AOR.

People often call “Teen Spirit” a revolutionary anthem, which is sort of odd, since the lyrics of the song are about absolutely nothing. “Load up on guns, and bring your friends,” the song begins, before crashing into some junior high-quality, proto-emo poetry, “I’m worst at what I do best.” The structure of the song is incredibly disjointed, but it’s not until we get to the chorus where things get really, really idiotic.

“A mosquito, an albino, my libido…yeah!” Cobain yells, clearly indicating a countercultural call to arms against…uh, malaria, maybe? The song ultimately concludes with Cobain forgoing words altogether, spitting out a long, drawn out line of grunts that sort of rhyme with “sayonara” for about a full minute.

And like that, the great alternative rock movement of the 1990s began. With that in mind, is anybody really surprised that it was a decade dominated by half-hearted, nonsensical and chopped-to-all-hell fifth-grader prose afterwards?

Read More