Dallas Buyers Club: Best Picture Nominees in 60 Seconds

WARNING: spoilers & sarcasm

Dr. Mrs. Ben Affleck: I’m sorry to tell you that you have HIV, Mr. McConaughey.
McConaughey: Horseshit! I ain’t no fucking homo!
Dr. Mrs. Ben Affleck: Okay, then maybe you had unprotected sex with a scabby lady who looked like she was about to die in a dirty bullpen?
McConaughey: That’s just the rodeo lifestyle, toots! Anyway, I don’t need your medical advice; I’ll just prescribe myself some drugs, booze, and strippers.
Dr. Mrs. Ben Affleck: Actually, now that you’ve taken such poor care of your body, you have full-blown AIDS. But whatever, it’s not like the medicine we can give you at the hospital is of any use anyway.
McConaughey: Huh, well I got me a liberry card and I learned all about better medications for AIDS that the U.S of A refuses to permit, so now I’m thinking of starting some kind of drug smuggling business. If only I had a business partner… say, what is that queer man doing in a dress?
Jordan Catalano: I always wished I had been cast to play either Rickie or Rayanne instead, so I figured why not try both at once? Despite your animosity towards me, I’ll be your business partner. We may not find the antidote for AIDS, but I think I’ll find the cure for your homophobia.
McConaughey: Whatever, you’re just a junky transgender prostitute; I wouldn’t care if you die.
Jordan Catalano: [Dies.]
McConaughey: [Cares.] Hey, sorry for stealing all your patients with my sketchy drug empire, Dr. Mrs. Ben Affleck, but you know I’m prolonging lives better than the medical community ever would.
Dr. Mrs. Ben Affleck: What you lack in ethics, you make up for with savant-like scientific knowledge. Our relationship is such that I would probably have sex with you if you weren’t my patient… and you didn’t have AIDS.
McConaughey: That’s okay, I’ve lost so much weight for this role that I barely want to take my shirt off for once.
The Government: Stop giving drugs that work to people who would die otherwise! It’s illegal!
McConaughey: Looks like I’m gonna have to sue in order for justice to prevail.
Judge: Although the FDA is clearly corrupt for allowing its rich friends to make a profit by promoting the wrong drugs while also forbidding you from using and sharing the medicines that actually help, our Constitution protects the FDA’s right to be dicks and slowly let you die, so case dismissed.
Gays Everywhere: Oh well, you’re a hero for trying, McConaughey!
McConaughey: Shut up faggots! [whispers] …who I’ve developed a soft spot for. [Dies… not immediately, but eventually because, you know, AIDS.]

Best Picture Nominees in 60 Seconds: 2013
Best Picture Nominees in 60 Seconds: 2012

Beck's Boo

I'm listening to the new Beck album via NPR and the beginning of his song "Don't Let It Go" sounds more than a little familiar.

 

 Sing over his words with "Boy you should know that I've got you on my mind..."

 Like most days, now I'm just jamming to "My Boo" instead:

Friendship Essay

In elementary school, every student had to write a persuasive five paragraph essay about why their best friend was literally the "best" friend. One of my friends, we'll call him Ronald, wrote his essay about me.

I wouldn't have known I was the subject of his essay except that Ronald's mother mailed my family a copy. She thought it would be nice for my parents to see all the nice things Ronald had to say about me. While I found it flattering, it also put me in an awkward position because I couldn't exactly return the favor seeing as I hadn't written my essay about him.

I hadn't written my essay about anyone in particular, actually. I made up a phony friend for the purpose of the essay. I had friends, I just didn't think of any of them were going to seem awesome enough on paper to earn a good score on the essay. It was much easier to persuade the graders that my friend was the "best" when I could make up any attributes I wanted. I fully acknowledge that this says a lot of sad things about me, but I maintain that I wasn't entirely awful… and I have Ronald's essay to prove it! 

Nevertheless, I've always felt a little guilty about that situation. That guilt is only compounded by the fact that last I knew, Ronald was in a halfway house.

Ryan's Time of the Month

Ryan cut his finger open pretty badly on a mussel shell at a restaurant last night. He used the accessible paper napkins to sop up the blood for a while, but the bleeding persisted, so Allison jumped in with a better solution: a tampon from her purse.

Ryan unraveled the tampon and wrapped it around his finger to absorb the blood. It was a pretty genius move in a pinch. That didn't stop me from cracking jokes, though. I told Ryan he had finally become a man and that just because he used a tampon, it didn't mean he wasn't a virgin anymore.

At one point, the 'pon (or "tamp" if you're a rube) fell off his finger and rolled under the table. Ryan told us that it was "all right" and that we shouldn't bother looking for it, but we insisted that leaving a bloody tampon on the ground was inappropriate regardless of the extenuating circumstances.

Once the fallen tampon was recovered, Ryan realized he was able to secure it to his finger better by tying it on with the tampon's own strings. Genius again! Why are we even bothering with bandaids anymore?

Ghost Bikes

When I visited Preston in Chicago five years ago, he was highly involved in the city's bike scene and told me all about it. Apparently, unsafe drivers had killed a number of cyclists in recent months, so he said bike activists would put a painted white bike at the scene of the accident as a rogue memorial of sorts.

Unsure of what he meant, I decided to look out the window as we rode in the car to see if I could witness any of these "ghost bikes" for myself. It was only seconds later that I spotted the first one. Not long after, I spotted a second, a third, a fourth, and a fifth…

"Oh my god, you're not kidding!" I said. "I've seen so many white bikes already!"

I prepared to plead with him to stop riding his bike in the city since the roads appeared to be a literal slaughterhouse given the number of white bikes I was seeing, but then things were finally cleared up for me.

"Ghost bikes", it turns out, are literal bikes painted white and locked to street signs to commemorate the cyclist. I didn't actually see any of those. Instead, I was looking at bikes painted on the road in white…

… in other words, symbols for the bike lane. I honestly thought for a bit that cyclists were getting plowed down by cars every 100 yards or so.

Guys, I'm kinda the smartest person I know.

Too Soon!

This is why I blog. I realize that I shouldn't take pleasure in intentionally baiting people into getting indignant about a Hunger Games pun I made yesterday, but they make it so fun.

As for the joke being "too soon" - of course it's too soon, it's not even worth saying a day later. Plus, I'm a proud member of Team Too Soon, so I take it as a compliment.

Speaking of which, that's another reason I blog. That previously linked post about the Urban Iditarod from 2010 has subsequently provided even more laughs than the event itself thanks to Google's algorithm. A fairly raunchy photo of a friend included that blog entry has been, for quite some time, the #1 google image search for both girl touching dick and girl touching penis.

Realistically, it's not even an accurate description of the photo. If anything, it's the opposite that's occurring: a guy is touching a girl's dick. And by dick, I mean a baby doll's arm. Still, it brings me a lot of satisfaction knowing how disappointed some horny web-searchers must be when they come across that picture instead. (They're going to be disappointed on the whole anyway since other top Google images for those phrases are Carol Brady touching a man's crotch over his pants and Sarah Palin appearing to go down on John McCain thanks to a weird camera angle.)

Should she/we be more embarrassed about this distinction? Maybe! But like my good-humored friend's mom pointed out, she wishes she were #1 on Google for something, so it's really kind of an honor.

And if it's not porn, it's probably not getting searched for at all, truthfully. The #1 search result that leads to my blog is some variation on "porn on hulu". Indeed, I did recount how I accidentally found soft core content on Hulu five years ago, but it's not that exciting. With the whole sick internet available to you, you want to know where there's a flash of a boob on Hulu? Whatever floats your boat… but hopefully it's a trench-coated man stroking a doll arm attached to a woman dressed like David Carradine that does it for you, 'cause we actually got that here!

DID JENNIFER LAWRENCE KILL PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN?!?!?!

I hear he had a heroine problem.

KONY 2012... Pizza

So this pizza place opened up in Koreatown just one month after the whole KONY 2012 thing went viral (and then immediately imploded) and like… seriously, dudes? You stuck with this name? And put the logo on a similarly red background?

Kings of New York would ordinarily make for a cool acronym, but post Kony-gate, the number one association people will have with the name is either a notorious child murderer or a cringe-worthy internet marketing campaign that ended with some guy masturbating in public… and I'm not sure which of those is worse.

Rebrand, rebrand, rebrand!

Every Moment at the Grammys Is a #GrammyMoment

So, how many Grammy Moments did YOU have last night? I had a few… but one of them was in my pants :(

I can still taste Ringo's taint on my breath after all that secondhand Beatles ass-licking that I was exposed to.

I appreciate Daft Punk for giving us a hint of the future. Hearing humans having to repeatedly say, "The robots want me to thank…" foretells a time when humans will be doing the robots' bidding.

I didn't realize it was possible, but LL Cool J is even worse at hosting an event than he is at writing a song about race relations in America.

I came in 6th out of 870 people at predicting the Grammy winners because that shit is really easy to figure out. When in doubt, bet on the lamer, mainstream option.

I can think of no less romantic way to get married than with an impersonal, mass ceremony conducted by Queen Latifah sandwiched in between Macklemore and Madonna performances. At least they validated the point that gay marriage is equal… ly stupid to any other kind of marriage.

I've defended Macklemore previously as a guy who is conscious of his white privilege and where he fits into the music scene, but I'm done, he's a sell out. Any points he gets for acknowledging societal ills are lost when he starts milking these flaws for his own gain. Like, dude wrote a really thoughtful song, "Wings", about consumerism and violence in the name of high priced sneakers, then sold the song to the NBA who edited it into some Nike celebrating nonsense. Fuck that noise.

I, too, am tired of being told to throw my hands up in the air, Lorde, but let's never forget that she's not even the best "Lordi" in the music industry.

Did you all swoon real hard for Kacey Musgraves, too? Memba I toldja about her at least twice now, so no excuses for not being a rabid fan. Seeing her singing about kissing girls, toking, and not giving a fuck about your judgmental neighbors and then pick up two awards was my personal highlight. Forget gay marriage - conservatives should really be up in arms about liberals coming for their precious country music!

I'll Take That as a No

• Allison:I saw Varsity Blues on my first date ever. I met Kenny at the mall and he gave he a Beanie Baby.
• Me:Did it last?
• Allison:I don't know, I'd have to check my closet.
• Me:[makes a horrified face while considering the notion that Kenny has been tied up in a closet for 13 years] Oh, I meant the relationship, not the Beanie Baby.

Movie Math

All Is Lost = (Life of Pi - the tiger) x (Gravity - the excitement)

A Miscarriage of Word Choice

For the record, "Did you hear about Patty*? She's not pregnant anymore," is not the best way to convey to me that Patty gave birth to her baby.

Damn, CareerBuilder, You Got Me Pegged

I honestly wouldn't know the first thing... I can't even dress myself.

Obnoxious

While attending a wedding, I decided to be polite and reintroduce myself to an older woman I've only met once or twice and haven't seen in about 20 years.

"Hello, I'm Kev…"
She cut in immediately. "I remember you, you were such an obnoxious kid."

I froze in panic and checked her face to see if there was a hint of humor in this accusation, but it was genuine contempt. "Uh," I stammered. She either didn't pick up on my discomfort or didn't care.

"You were the most obnoxious kid. I was just thinking about you the other day and how obnoxious you were."

I didn't even know how to respond to this woman. Did she want me to apologize for some unspecified "obnoxious" thing I did in my early childhood? Her adult children seemed mortified but didn't come to my defense, so I just stared back at the woman, my mouth slightly agape, long enough for her to add one more, "Just so obnoxious!" I couldn't decide whether I was more disgusted with the words she was saying, or the fact that she spit when she spoke.

At this point, the woman had called me obnoxious four times in just fifteen seconds. As tempted as I was to call her out, I wasn't about to get in a fight at my friend's wedding.

Instead, I simply said, "I have to go" and walked away. Granted, it was pretty dumb because I obviously had nowhere else in particular to go at a wedding reception that had only just begun, but how much longer did I have to put up with a woman who was insulting my youthful former self? And "obnoxious" four times? Bitch, get a thesaurus.

Whatever, her unpleasantness spared me the trouble of having to make pleasantries with her. I may have been obnoxious as a kid, but at least I'm not an obnoxious adult.

I Like My Women

I like my women like I like my similes: condescending and unintelligible.