Michael Gay

Is it just me, or does Michael Bay suck ass? Seriously, how does this guy keep getting work? He is so goddamn rich off of shitty movies with underdeveloped plots, that use excruciatingly long action sequences and over-the-top special effects as a crutch. Every one of his movies looks exactly the same. Let me guess: there's gonna be tattered American flag, waving gently in the wind, with the sun peeking through it from behind, as the hero slowly and defiantly stands up, as we look up at him from the ground while spinning around him. Get a new trick, jackass.

No Offense

I hate when people preface something by saying, "no offense," because you know they're probably about to say something that's pretty offensive. Nice try, but I'm not falling for your clever misdirection.

Food Feud

Pretty ironic that my last entry was about how I hate that food that tastes good is bad for you, because I just happened to see Food, Inc. the other night, and thought it was pretty excellent. It's one of those documentaries that says a lot of what you kind of already suspected but chose to ignore . . . and will probably still ignore because it just requires too much effort to do anything about, but is still very worth seeing and enlightening: http://www.foodincmovie.com/

The movie doesn't try to shock your system with gratuitous, graphic slaughterhouse footage, though there is some hard-to-watch animal abuse, but rather focuses on the fact that like almost everything else in our country, control of the food we consume has been taken by enormous corporations who edge closer and closer to monopoly-like scale, further ensuring that we can do little to stop them. The corporations consciously keep the average citizens in the dark about what they (the consumers) consume, and many of these corporations' former employees now hold powerful positions in the FDA and USDA. (If you ever saw Fahrenheit 9/11, then think Halliburton.) It's pretty crazy, and pretty infuriating when you watch it. One great point that's made about the types of food we consume is that the food companies essentially trick us by pushing our evolutionary buttons, by saturating our foods with fat, sugar, and/or salt, all things that occur rather rarely or in very small doses in nature, but trigger our evolutionary sensors which, before processed food, told us these three tastes are good because they provide valuable nutrients.

The hero of the movie, to me, was this Joel Salatin guy, who was totally and utterly awesome. A little crazy, but in a good way. He and his family have a farm, with their own animals, that they raise organically, slaughter themselves, and sell to the public. They only have one location, to which people come from extremely far away, but the family has zero interest in expanding or putting their meat in stores. It would be a pretty cool way to beat the corporations, if little farmers' markets cropped up locally all over the country, and people actually chose to frequent those instead of supermarkets . . . but good luck with all of that. Anyway, here's his website. Worth checking out if you're bored and have some time: http://www.polyfacefarms.com/

Hate in An Elevator...

I hate when you're waiting for an elevator and someone walks up at the same time as you, and sees you press the button, and then leans forward and presses it again anyway. By seeing me press the button and then pressing it yourself anyway, you're basically insinuating that I wasn't able to perform this action properly, something even a monkey or retarded child can do. Why don't you spit in my face and call me stupid while you're at it?

Even more infuriating is when they press it repeatedly. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap! How fucking obnoxious are these people? It's not a video game. Pressing it multiple times doesn't suddenly make the elevator travel faster. I'm not an electrician or anything, but I'm pretty confident the elevator's not going, "Oh, shit. This guy's really serious. I'd better hurry up!"

If you come to an elevator and someone's already pressed the button, do us all a favor and just relax, continue talking unnecessarily loudly into your blue tooth, and stop trying to be a hero.

Xenophobia

I hate when the English language integrates phrases from other languages into the vernacular. Examples:

I hate when people describe a movie as a "tour de force." Those people should be shot.

People who describe a novel as a "bildungsroman" should be publicly flayed.

People who have a "laissez-faire" attitude toward things, or are "blase" about anything, should be slowly killed using only a cheese grater.

And finally, anyone who describes any art as having a "jes ne sais quoi" quality about it should have his/her "joi de vivre" mercilessly beaten out of him/her.

Whatever Works

If you want to know what I'll be like in about 30 years, go see Woody Allen's new movie, Whatever Works, starring Larry David. To be fair, the movie, as a movie, is actually pretty crappy, and Larry David is not a good actor. That being said, he is still hilarious, and makes the movie entertaining and funny enough to watch. Also, he is me. I am him. We are one. (I realize I said the word "movie" a lot of times in this paragraph, but I didn't want to vary my diction by substituting the word "film," because calling a movie a film makes me feel pretentious.)

While I'm at it, go see Up. It was actually hilarious, and I'm not necessarily a big animation fan. Ten times better than Wall-E.

Furthermore, while I'm on the topic of movies, I'll be extra generous and recommend five movies (no longer in theaters) that are a little more obscure, and you may not have even heard of. Obviously, there are a lot of great ones, but these are ones you may have missed that you should make the effort to see, if only to encourage some good film making amid the sea of brain-numbing, soul-sucking, unoriginal, sensibility-offending shit that somehow makes it into our crappy theaters:

1. Children of Men - Probably the least obscure of this bunch, but just incredible. Stars Clive Owen in a not-too-distant future in which all women, in the entire world, have been unable to get pregnant for 18 years, seemingly marking the imminent end of humanity: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206634/

2. Roger Dodger - A 16-year-old kid, Nick, from Ohio visits his uncle in Manhattan in the hopes of learning some valuable life knowledge, especially with regard to women. Really good, and has some Catcher in the Rye elements as Nick meanders through New York City's endless night: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0299117/

3. Flirting with Disaster - Ben Stiller before he was Ben Stiller. Before he got his front teeth fixed, even. Hilarious movie in which an adopted Ben Stiller embarks on an epic search for his birth parents, accompanied by his wife, baby, adoption agency case worker, and eventually two gay cops. Directed by David O. Russell, who gave us the also very underrated Three Kings (I never thought it was possible for a movie co-starring Ice Cube to be underrated, but there you have it): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116324/

4. The Baxter - Another funny one, starring Michael Showalter, former co-star of one of the best sketch comedy shows ever, The State, as the guy who always comes close, but never actually gets the girl. You know how in movies when the wedding is always broken up at the last minute in some romantic display by a guy who's seen the error of his ways and can't allow the girl he loves to marry someone else, and the girl is always relieved as she runs to him with open arms, tears streaming down her face? Well this movie's about the guy who gets left at the altar: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401244/

5. The Last Supper - Not a religious movie. Religion's retarded. An interesting philosophical movie about a slippery slope. A group of grad students live together in a house, and every Sunday night, they invite a guest for dinner, to engage in impassioned intellectual discourse. Well, one night a local tow truck diver is the guest, and the question of, "if you had the chance, would you have killed Hitler before he had actually done anything wrong?" comes up. Things snowball from there: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113613/

Bonus section (as always). My two favorite horror movies in recent years:

The Orphanage - This is actually in Spanish, and therefore subtitled, which can sometimes be a daunting task, I know. But I assure you, this one is well worth it. My brother and I were holding each other like frightened schoolgirls when we saw this in theaters two years ago. Not a pretty sight. Possibly the best horror movie I've ever seen: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0464141/

Jesus Camp - Okay, so technically this is a documentary and not a horror movie, but I dare you to watch this thing without shitting your pants. Dare you. Kids are shipped off to be brainwashed and essentially abused at severely right-wing, evangelical Christian summer camp. Right here in America. Be very afraid: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0486358/

Expressions

I hate idioms that don't really make sense (yes, I'm sure they all have their humble etymologies, but I don't care). Here are a couple:

1. "There's more than one way to skin a cat" - What the hell does that mean?! Is there more than one way to skin a cat? How? Are we talking different starting points when inserting the blade that will be doing the skinning? Different skinning patterns, perhaps? This seems like an awfully graphic way to say that there are different ways of doing the same thing, don't you think? I don't even want to know one way to skin a cat, let alone more than one.

2. "You can't have your cake and eat it too" - This one's pissed me off for years. What the fuck good is my cake if I can't eat it?! (Curmudgeon's note: the one exception to this is if you get one of those fancy cakes that they make on Ace of Cakes on the Food Network. Those are awesome and probably worth holding on to.) The whole point of having a cake is eating it. Everyone knows that. How about this: how about you have the cake, and I'll just eat it? Sound good? You have, I'll eat. Stupidest expression ever.

There are tons of good ones (and by good, I mean bad) out there, but these are the two that most immediately occurred to me. Feel free to suggest other ones for me to bitch about.

PMS

Ahhh, the Premenstrual Syndrome. Unlike the female orgasm, this is not a myth; it's all too real. It sucks for the girl, it sucks for the guy. No one wins, and there's pretty much nothing anyone can do about it.

Here's a hypothetical conversation between a guy and his premenstrual girlfriend:

Guy: Hey, shmoopie. How was your day?
Girl: Oh, so all of a sudden you care about my day?
Guy: What do you mean? I always ask you about your day.
Girl: Yeah, but you never actually listen.
Guy: What're you talking about? I know the names of every person you work with and every female office rival you've ever had.
Girl: Of course you're going to say that.
Guy: What does that even mean? Look, what's wrong? Is there anything I can do?
Girl: Why does something have to be wrong with me? And why do guys always think they can fix everything?
Guy: Okay, then. Well, I'm just gonna go sit in the corner in silence and try not to blow my brains out. Let me know if you need anything . . .

Now, that never actually happened, but it is very typical of the no-win situations that PMS can engender. Like I said, we're powerless against it. All you can really do is hold on tightly, and wait for the storm to pass. Godspeed.

The Big Crapple - An Appendix

Having just returned from a trip to New York, I was once again reminded of what a crappy city it really is.

--To reiterate, the weather is awful. It rained nearly every single one of the 10 days I was there. It was miserable. Every day, at multiple times throughout each day, I had to check the hourly forecast in the hope of finding a window of time where I could actually walk the streets umbrella-free, and without having the bottom third of my jeans soaked with disgusting, New York puddle water. Then, whenever I complain about the weather, I inevitably hear, "Oh, it was so beautiful two weeks ago." Or, "well, it's supposed to be nice next weekend." Yes. That's my point. It sucks. There's never consistently good weather. You spend the majority of your time remembering the nice day you had a couple weeks ago or looking forward to the next sunny day, instead of enjoying yourself in the present. Fun.

--The noise! The sirens are incessant! It's out of control. You can't sleep, you can't have a conversation on your cell phone while on the street, you can't even maintain a conversation with the person you're with on the street without being interrupted by an ambulance, fire truck, or police siren. Then there's the perpetual construction, which is no picnic either. All the drilling and yelling at the ass-fuck crack of dawn. And there's also the constant beeping of delivery and garbage trucks reversing down narrow one-way streets, adding insult to injury as they further clot New York's already-too-clogged traffic arteries.

--The High Line Garden. Check it out for yourself ( http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/09/arts/design/09highline-RO.html ). Yes, this is real. There's an old railroad line in the Meatpacking District, that New York City has decided would be an ideal location for a lovely garden. And by garden, they pretty much mean, some grass and a flower here and there. People literally line up, in the rain, to then walk in the rain, along an abandoned elevated railroad line, that now has grass growing out of it. That's it. Greenery is so hard to come by in this city, that this is what people have resorted to. There's even a quote in the article I just linked to that says, "it really does live up to its highest expectations." Really? Way to go New York. Way to set the bar high. Great use of the taxpayers' money, too. "Hmmm, my husband can't find a job, and we can't feed our kids, but can you please go ahead and use the city's money to grow some grass out of concrete so that middle and upper class people can feel good about themselves? Thaaaanks." Seriously. People getting drenched so that they can walk around and look at grass. It's ridiculous. How about getting out of The City for a change? The last time I saw grass growing out of railroad tracks was when I toured Auschwitz. I'm not even joking.

Ultimately, I think what it comes down to is an issue of cognitive dissonance. New Yorkers have been raving about their city so much for so long, now, that even the slightest acknowledgement of its shortcomings, of which there are many, would make their heads explode. And accordingly, they're so scared to leave and try living somewhere new, because they won't be able to justify all those wasted years spent living in such a crap-hole. That's why whenever you travel anywhere outside of New York and meet a New Yorker, he's constantly talking about how much better everything is in New York. The sad truth is, he's not trying to convince you, but rather, trying to convince himself.

Employees Only?

I was looking at one of those Employees Must Wash Hands signs in a restaurant bathroom the other day, where it lists all the state laws about cleanliness, or whatever, and it made me think: How about everyone must wash hands? Can we make that a law? The amount of degenerates I see exiting stalls and walking right out of the bathroom is unacceptable. These people should be removed from general population and injected with whatever disgusting diseases are contracted through fecal matter. This is still the number one argument for having a bathroom attendant...

God Loves Athletes...Some of Them, At Least

I hate when athletes invoke God as the cause of their victories. "First and foremost, I'd like to thank God/Allah/our Lord and savior Jesus Christ..." for apparently hating the other team? There's another team on the other side of that equation, and you're basically saying that God likes you better than them. You're being an asshole.

Unconditional Love

I hate unconditional love. I think people throw this term around way too freely. That's a pretty extreme statement. Unconditional? Really? Maybe this can develop in some rare cases, and more likely between parents and their children, usually with the parents doing the unconditional loving in that scenario, but I think that's a pretty unhealthy ideal for what love should be. I love my brothers, and I love my parents, and I'm sure if I had a kid I'd love him, but if one of them decided to stab me in the face with a pen or lop off my penis with a meat cleaver . . . that'd be a pretty big "condition" for me to ignore. I genuinely believe I would stop loving that person, and I think I'd be justified in doing so. That makes my love conditional, and I'm fine with that.

"Summer Nights"

I hate girls who sing "Summer Nights," from Grease, when they do karaoke. Hate. Passionately.

Guys' Guys

I kinda hate 'em. I say "kinda" because I respect the handy guys' guys. The ones who can, like, saw wood, and hammer nails, and build shit. And the ones who can fix electronics or rig "things" to do "stuff." I'm always impressed by that because I'm totally useless around the house.

I'm talking about the other macho aspects of being a guys' guy. Like talking about beer or being drunk all the time. "Bro, they're gonna have beer there!" Okay, great. Calm down. You realize you can buy this at pretty much every corner, right? There's also the cursing. I know I sound like a pussy, but I'm not anti-cursing, it's just, I'm anti using "fuck" in the place of "um." It's a little excessive and sounds dumber than it does tough, no? "Yo, so, fuckiiinnn', I'm at this bar and, fuckiiinnn', this chick is . . ." Blah blah blah. You know how the story ends: boringly. And then you have to like golf, and smoking cigars, and grilling. Eh.

But the worst, to me, is the automotive obsession. Is this stuff really that interesting to these people or are they just pretending? Who gives a shit how many cylinders my car has, or how quickly it can go from zero to 60, or what the torque is? What the fuck is torque?! If it drives, has a CD player, and has air conditioning, I'm good to go. And I love this question: "Whaddaya got under the hood?" "A fucking engine, jackass. Chill out."

TSA

I'm about to travel this Thursday and it reminded me of another thing I hate: airport security. What a ridiculous sham this is. Take off your shoes. Why?! Because one asshole snuck a shoe bomb onto a plane once?! If it's small enough to fit in your shoe, couldn't you just put it in your back pocket? Or sew a secret pocket into your jeans? Or just stick it in your backpack with your cell phone and iPod and Sony PSP, and any other of a million electronic devices that could seemingly be much more easily transformed into something more explosive than a shoe! Are the morons watching that screen really trained well enough to be able to identify these tiny explosives in the tangled mass of headphone wire, toiletries, electronics, condoms, anal beads, and whatever other crap you shoved into your carry-on bag? That seems highly unlikely.

And what about this liquid rule? No more than a certain weight is allowed on? 3.5oz. containers only? Because my 4oz. toothpaste tube is just excessive, apparently. And god forbid you try to pass through security with these liquids not in a Ziploc bag. I don't understand this portion of the faux security. What exactly is the Ziploc bag protecting us from, other than possibly faulty manufacturing on the part of the companies who make the bottles that contain aforementioned liquids, in which case we'd be protected from spills that could ruin our own stuff...but shouldn't that just be up to us? Seriously. I enter security with my liquids in a Ziploc bag, I pass through security, and I take them out. I'm genuinely asking: am I missing something?

The bottom line is, these security measures that annoy and inconvenience everyone, are essentially pointless. That's not entirely true, actually. Their purpose is to lull the idiots (i.e., almost everyone) into a false sense of security so they feel safe traveling. But if you think the obese woman perched behind the carry-on conveyor belt, with her skin-tight uniform pants, two-and-a-half inch acrylic nails, and G.E.D is really going to save you from potential terror threats, then you are a mental retard and we shouldn't be catering our security measures to you. Sorry. And you know what? Fuck you TSA and whatever other office of the US Government is responsible for implementing these restrictions. They're annoying and pointless, and I don't appreciate paying my hard-earned (kind of) money to be treated like a moron.

Al-Qaeda! Taliban! Bomb! Death to America! Fuck you! Red flag me. Hopefully that means you read this...