Video du jour

Jake's sent me a sweet little music video he made for a Lost fan site. In said video, Lost's Jack is continually beaten down by the failures of his existence to the tune of "I Need Some Sleep" by the Eels. I like the way he synched up drumbeats with fistfights, nicely done.

If you're coming here from one of the Lost fan boards Jake is no doubt plastering with links to here, my advice: come for the video...stay for the uninformed opinions!

A Holiday Message from WM

Like a snarling pack of ravenous wolves, the Christmas season is now upon us. Every year we run the same stupid gauntlet of shopping crowds, cloying Christmas songs, perverted mall Santas, and fawning over bastardized pagan mummery like decorating trees and hanging mistletoe while putting up signs that say "Jesus is the reason for the season". Like androids, we're all supposed to be programmed with some kind of joy/merriment circuit that activates on the day after Thanksgiving.

Well I must be a factory reject, because all Christmas fills me with is HATE. Hate for the assholes at the mall. Hate for 24-hour Christmas carols on the office radio. Hate for the Very Special Christmas Episodes. Hate for ornaments. Hate for endless diamond commercials. And hate hate HATE for "Wonderful Christmastime" by Paul McCartney.

If you're still with me by this paragraph, you probably share some speck of what I feel. The following points/gentle requests/tortured wails may be familiar to you then - spread them far and wide.

1. The first, and this is an important one, is don't lie to your kids about Santa. If you must partake in this nonsense, tell your child that it's a nice little folk tale. Do not under any circumstances give your kid the impression that it's anything but harmless bullshit. My reasoning is two-fold:

A. Your kid, when he/she finds out the truth, will never believe anything you say ever again. Seriously. Why do you think I'm an atheist? And if they don't find out the truth, sign 'em up for the short bus to school. Any child with even a mild grasp of Einstein's theory of relativity and thermodynamic principles knows that it's just not possible to visit all those Christian rooftops in one night.

B. Take some friggin' credit. You worked for the money. You put up with your child's incessant whining. You stood in line at 7 AM in the cold at Toys R Us. You calculated how much giftwrap it would take to cover an 18-cubic-foot box. So why would you want to give some rotund 19th-century Thomas Nast caricature the props for the Big Wheels you bought little Hunter?

The world is full of enough mystery and wonder that you don't have to make up slave-driving Arctic Nintendo distributors to impress your child. Lie to your kids and they'll stop asking the important questions. Like: Why is the sky blue? How can bees fly? What's in Spam? Why does Hollywood keep letting Roland Emmerich make movies?

2. Quit bellyaching about the "over-commercialization" of Christmas. I can't believe I even have to explain this. If you're one of the pompous douchenozzles who spout this crap every year and think it makes you sound really intelligent, allow me pop your balloon. In America, we live in a service-based economy that's increasingly driven by retail - Wal-Mart didn't become the nation's largest employer by accident. Entire sectors of the world economy require a strong Christmas shopping season just to stay afloat; how many toys are made in China now, by Chinese people who need you to buy it to keep them in rice? Do you hippies have any idea what would happen to our global economic system if everybody just stopped buying gifts one year? How's a little economic meltdown sound to you? Hope you like the taste of dumpster chow and the slimming effect a burlap sack has on your thighs.

Do your part to ward off the apocalypse: buy a gift.

3. If one more person calls me a Grinch I'll start kicking asses until my knees give out. Heads up to you cultural illiterates: the Grinch wanted to ruin Christmas for the people of Whoville. I do NOT want to ruin Christmas for anyone. I just want it out of my face.

4. This isn't a request, so much as an incontrovertible fact: "Jingle Bell Rock" is the least rocking song ever made. In your entire life, I guarantee you will never hear somebody yell "FUCK YEAH! JINGLE BELL ROCK! WOOOOO!".

5. Stop with the automatic "Merry Christmas" to everyone you see. It used to merely be insincere, but now it's just creepy in a Stepford Wives way. There's a precious few people I sincerely hope have a Merry Christmas. They know who they are, and they know I mean it when I say it and that I'm thankful when it's said to me by them. To the other 99.44% of you who chirp "Merry Christmas" to me and expect the same in return every time I walk into a store/restaurant/bathroom/whatever, the words "rat's ass", and my personal failure to give said rodent anus come to mind. The attendant at the gas station can have an Extremely Mediocre Christmas for all I care.

So there you have it. From the staff at Wicked Machine, we wish you an Average Christmas; an Acceptable one if the opportunity presents itself.

Timeless Sentiment

Please feel free to steal it and use it to adorn your message board rant response post, refrigerator or CD cover. Prints suitable for framing may be purchased in the gift shoppe.

The creation of this image was aided and abetted by the use of Google's image search engine. Curiously, my search for large images using the word "crucifixion" looked like this (notice the number of hits):


Google, of course, rates a score of 57% Evil with the Gematriculator. I wonder how much higher my Gematriculator rating will go up after this post.

Chillin' with Dylan

Things I learned from watching the 60 Minutes interview with Bob Dylan on Sunday night:

• Bob Dylan is humble to the point of neurosis. It drove me a little nuts, and I'm not even that big a fan. Every answer he gave was something to the tune of "Well, y'know, I wrote a couple of songs, people liked 'em, whatever." There's such a thing as having too much perspective.
  
• Bob Dylan doesn't sound like any Jewish senior citizen I've ever met. Dude, kvetch a little.
  
• Even Bob Dylan doesn't really understand "It's Alright Ma". As a matter of fact, I don't think he really gets any of his own songs. Rather than divine inspiration, I get the overwhelming feeling that a rhyming dictionary was the best gift a young Robert Zimmerman ever received.
• The real reason he hasn't been interviewed on TV in 20 years is because, uh, he doesn't really have anything to say. I mean, apart from spending 15 minutes deflating his own image to the point where he was ultimately indistinguishable from Rupert Holmes, I didn't really learn anything new about the guy I couldn't have gleaned from reading his entry in my Rolling Stone encyclopedia.
• Well, except that he kinda sorta explains his whole bizarro stint as a proselytizing Orthodox Jew as an elaborate practical joke on the media. To my way of thinking, a kooky Jew pretending to be a different flavor of kooky Jew is hardly mind-blowing. Now if he'd shown up to concerts in a sailor suit, shoved his harmonica up his ass and farted out "Masters of War" on it, that would have been genius.

Bob Dylan, if I were you, I'd ratchet up the Ego-meter to somewhere between "Bono" and "Prince". Why not start believing your own hype? Instead of downplaying the significance of the new Rolling Stone poll which picked "Like A Rolling Stone" as the greatest rock song of all time, do some trash-talking! Start referring to yourself in the third person! If you're going to fill three volumes of memoirs, dish some frigging dirt - I wanna know what noises Joan Baez makes in bed!

At least tell me you play the whole "Voice of His Generation" card to get out of speeding tickets.

I been distracticated

I'll be real here: my mind has not been in a blogging kind of place this last month. Directly after the election it was in a "crawl into a cryo-tube for the next four years" kind of place, which led directly to the "refusing to leave the house whilst curling into a ball" frame of mind. So I just sorta dropped out for a bit. But don't fear, I've been keeping myself entertained. Here's what's had a hold on my brain banana lately:

1. Netflix. I watched the Dawn of the Dead remake, some Buffy episodes, Sealab 2021, and Kentucky Fried Movie. I think I'm becoming a zombie movie fan. This surprises me as much as it does you, no doubt.
2. That new U2 album. It's really good. My mom bought two copies at 8 AM on release day and met me in a parking lot on my way to work to give me mine. To non-existant bystanders it would have looked like a really sad drug deal. So anyway, Bono sings some songs about God on this album, kind of a change of pace. Bono sings about Jesus the way Hunter S. Thompson writes about bad trips; I don't really want to try either one, but I get off on them getting off on it.
3. "Lost". Hmm, title doesn't really jump out when I write it like that. How about, FUCKING "LOST" ON A-B-FUCKING-C. Here's all I know about the show's creator, J.J. Abrams: I watched one sucky episode of "Alias" once. I watched "Felicity" because it was the ironic, postmodern thing to do and I could laugh at its soap opera absurdity and oh god I'm so full of shit I'm drowning in it and Keri Russell's hair from the first season should be in the Smithsonian and I think I'm a little queer. And he's a kinghell TV genius. "Lost" is like having a gorgeous call girl slowly shoot high-grade heroin into you over the course of a long weekend, only it's broadcast in HD so it's really much better than that.
   
4. Thanksgiving. The high king of holidays. I haven't had turkey with my dad's family in a long time (generally eschewing it in favor of my mom's BBQ turkey, which is the greatest thing ever cooked), but I'm glad I went. The turkey was decent, the pie was great, and the company, well, what can you say about the Gerrys that hasn't already been said in cautionary tales told to frighten children since the dawn of the atomic age? We ate ourselves stupid and then sang Johnny Cash songs. Maybe I'll put up the video someday.