Wednesday, February 4, 2009

This Week in Nelson, volume 3, number 5

69 dudes! That’s right, for those of you keeping score at home, this is week 69 of This Week in Nelson! Please enjoy it with your face buried in the crotch of someone you love. This week we’ve got the Superbowl, ancient Chinese secrets, dumb motherfuckers and prophecies of the future. No time to waste. Let’s do this thing!

Birthday shout-out to no one I know of. Although apparently it was Mimi’s birthday last week, so belated birthday shout-out to Mimi! Ryan/Chad, feel free to convey my shouting-out.

Moustache shout-out to Andy Stowers who is rocking the dopest cop stache in town right now. Visit him at the Pig and bask in the golden rays of awesome emanating from his face!

Victor Continental update: Apparently last time I fucked up the dates by a day. The show will be July 17th and 18th (Friday and Saturday) at Liberty Hall at 10 pm. Mark your calendars! For real this time! Further details to come! Stay ever vigilant!

Books read this week:
-Still reading The View from the Seventh Layer by, Kevin Brockmeier
-The Romantic Dogs by, Roberto Bolano
-Started reading Smoulder by, Mark Cox

The Bolano book is his poems. I was a big fan of his short stories, and he mentions poetry a lot in those, and always identified himself as a poet, so I figured they were worth a look. There’s a blurb on the back of the book that says: “With Bolano, we encounter not only ‘fist-fucking’ but ‘feet-fucking’ in a poem that also mentions Pascal, Nazi generals, Shining Path bonfires, and a teenage hooker.” To live up to that blurb would be difficult, but Bolano performs admirably.

Random out-of-context quotes of the week:
--“I ate all my chili, Dad. Can I have some wine?”
--“When it comes to Rod Blagojevich and his hair, the sky’s the limit.”
--“Now that’s a sophisticated fucking taco.”
--“Let me just borrow from W.C. Fields: The news in the anticipation of our death as a political party is misspent. And premature.” (That was newly elected RNC Chairman Mike Steele. I feel the need to break this quote down. First of all, the actual quote he butchers is from Mark Twain, and it’s “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” a response he made to a false obituary. To my knowledge, and I did some research to check, though a lot of people have referenced it (and much more correctly) over the years, W.C. Fields never did. There was W.A. Rogers, the political cartoonist for the tabloid New York Herald, who drew a cartoon in 1912 of the G.O.P. elephant being buried alive in a ditch while saying the Mark Twain quote, but that’s the closest thing I could find to what he may have thought he was referencing. What a resplendently dumb motherfucker. Mindblowing. Sorry, I have a problem with people being stupid about Mark Twain. And speaking.)

The O’Reilly Factor for Kids book quote(s) of the week:
-I let O’Reilly have the week off so I could focus on leaving countless sexually explicit hate voicemails on the Sean Hannity hate-line. Just kidding. I only left two. But they were pretty classy, I assure you.

Interesting news articles of the week:
-“A former British Ministry of Defense official revealed that the Royal Air Force has fired upon UFOs several times ‘with little effect.’ Nick Pope said RAF planes had had numerous encounters with mysterious aircraft, and had only fired when a UFO was ‘deemed to be a threat.’” (At what point is a UFO deemed to be a threat? And if you observe it to the point where you can make a determination as to its intent, shouldn’t you be able to give a fairly accurate description of it? Damn, British pilots. Your egos are writing checks your bodies can’t cash.)
-“A Florida company is scrapping plans to sell a doll named after murdered toddler Caylee Anthony. The 18-inch ‘Inspirational Caylee Sunshine Doll’ was to retail for $29.99 and would sing ‘You Are My Sunshine’ just as 2-year-old Caylee was known to do. In response to public outrage, Showbiz Promotions canceled the doll, insisting that it had simply hoped to raise awareness of child predation.” (Wow, America. Just wow. And check out the name of the doll. Did they outsource that to a Japanese ad agency? Inspirational Caylee Sunshine Doll! Super Happy Sing Time!)

Something I’m tired of/ mad at:
-Motherfuckers not paying their taxes. Seriously, pay your fucking taxes. Cause someday, the President’s gonna ask you to be on his cabinet, and you’ll say, yes, of course, and then the news is gonna be all, like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Motherfucker didn’t pay his capital gains taxes when he inherited his dead father’s collection of bejeweled cockrings. Then the President looks like an asshole. Seriously, pay your fucking taxes.
-Motherfuckers not knowing what a camera phone is. Seriously Michael Phelps, there’s these things that everybody over the age of five has in their pockets that they use to make phone calls and take pictures of things they want everybody to know they saw. Like a record-breaking Olympic gold-medalist taking bong rips at a house party. I mean, it’s a sad world where we can’t take bong rips wherever we want to, but that’s the world we live in.

Something I’m delighted by:
-That I can take bong rips at any house party I want because nobody knows who the fuck I am. Until thirty years from now where the President wants me to be on his cabinet, and someone comes forward and says, “hey, check out this picture of Nelson taking bong rips thirty years ago.” And I’ll say, “Yeah, but at least I paid my taxes. And pot’s totally legal now, so let’s go take my Senate Confirmation bong rips so we can get to work on that new treaty between us and our robot allies so we have their full support in defeating the rising zombie army.” The future is gonna be CRAZY!

Something I found really kind of odd:
-My vision of the future. Because there’s no way it takes thirty years for the zombie apocalypse to begin. It’s coming people! Repent! Repent, for the hour of our doom is at hand!

This Week in Answers to Your This Week in Questions This Week!
-“My friends and I received the moon fortune as well (“Maybe you can live on the moon in next century”). They think the implication is that the reader will have a long, awesome life. I believe it is an insult, the Chinese equivalent of telling someone to take a hike, but a hike not yet technologically possible, suggesting some sort of undesirable future-hike. Obviously, the Chinese plan on turning the moon into an old-folks home. Can you verify this?”
-To my knowledge, there are two valid interpretations. The first is in fact an insult, a polite Chinese way of telling someone to take a flying fuck at the moon. The second is much more likely and far more diabolical. As everyone knows, China has been secretly ruled for the past 800 years by a shadow government headed by the immortal Dr. Fu, a nefarious master of science, kung fu and dark wizardry. It is a little known fact that he possesses hidden lairs in the Chinese countryside, in a hollowed-out volcano, on an uncharted Caribbean island, at the bottom of the sea and in the basement of a P.F. Chang’s in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The next logical step in supervillain hideouts is a moonbase, which intelligence gathered over the last six years tells us is in fact Dr. Fu’s ultimate agenda. So, the implication of the fortune is actually that there will in fact be an operational moonbase in the not too distant future and that the reader of the fortune may soon be indoctrinated into Dr. Fu’s Blue Dragon Society, either as a lowly henchman, a scientist, or another person with a specific skill set which the Doctor can twist to his own mad ends, and that said reader will find himself stationed on the Doctor’s moonbase to further whatever machinations the Doctor has upon the lunar surface. To that effect, receiving this fortune has a bittersweet connotation, at best.

Speaking of Asian people, has anyone else played this game Hidato? It’s another one of those Japanese non-math number puzzle games, like Sudoku. It’s pretty sweet. It’s a puzzle that kind of has a crossword construction with a bunch of random numbers scattered around it and a lot of blank spaces and you have to fill in the blanks with numbers so all the numbers progress around the puzzle in order, from 1 to whatever, where each number touches the number before it and after it horizontally, vertically or diagonally. It’s a good time. Check it out if you like puzzles. There’s books, and places on the internet, and if you get the LJW there’s one every Monday in that weird “Go” insert. I recommend it.

That was a pretty sweet Superbowl on Sunday, from what I remember through the haze of PBR and corndogs (awesome corndogs, Dave!). A hell of a fourth quarter. But damn if the refs didn’t fuck up the end of it. I admit I was pulling for the Cardinals from an underdog, hadn’t won a championship since 1947 when they were in Chicago, I like Kurt Warner standpoint, but ultimately I had no dog in the hunt. The Steelers winning was fine by me. But two things happened at the end there that bugged me. First, Santonio Holmes not being penalized for using the ball as a celebration prop. It’s not a rule I agree with, I like touchdown celebrations, but it is a rule, and for as many penalties as the refs were calling all game, the fact that they didn’t call that is kind of bullshit. So, the Cardinals should have been fifteen yards further downfield than they were. And then, the Kurt Warner “fumble” with five seconds left which looked pretty clearly like an incomplete pass, which has been called an incomplete pass before under much more dubious circumstances. And I don’t necessarily have fault with them calling it a fumble on the field, but you absolutely have to review that. A fumble with five seconds left in the Superbowl, even if it’s the most clear-cut, obvious fumble in the world, it’s the last five seconds in the Superbowl. You have to review that play. Even talking to Brent, a huge Steelers fan for those who don’t know, after the game, he admitted he had kind of a sour taste in his mouth over winning on that play without it even being reviewed. And not to say it cost the Cardinals the game. They still would have had to throw a pass into the end zone with five seconds left to win, which is an unlikely outcome even with Kurt Warner and Larry Fitzgerald, but still, they should have had that opportunity, and ultimately should have had it with fifteen fewer yards to go. Great game. Bullshit ending.

Went and caught Taken with Loren on Monday. I watched the movie Taken in the presence of Loren. There isn’t a movie called Taken with Loren. At least, not yet. Pretty good stuff. Liam Neeson was badasstastic. Apparently he’s equally able to kill droids with a lightsaber as he is to kill Albanians with all manner of things. It was a good time. And it was nice to actually see a movie again. It had been, like, two and a half months. On a side note, IMDB lists Taken’s main Plot Keywords as: Spit In The Face, Abduction, Held At Gunpoint, Kicked In The Crotch, and Female In Bra And Panties. I love the Plot Keyword section at IMDB. It’s always fucking hilarious.

All right. We’ve gone on for long enough, so I’ll see you next week.

In the meantime, your fucking taxes. Pay them.

–> N.

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