Irritation of the Non-Biological Type

Welcome to Jerksville, population YOU, or, yet another list of words that tend to annoy me.


"delish" (it does not magically translate into "delicious" to intelligent people. Only to imbeciles obsessed with "saving time," whatever that might be. Do they save time for later? Do they save it for the winter, when -as we all know- the Time Banks are shut for months? I wonder.)

"schedge" (only a class D ignoramus would use this word, as if it was actually that much shorter than the original, "schedule." At least, I assume the original is "schedule." I hope it is.)

"celeb" (trust me, if you are in that much of a hurry, simply avoid using the word altogether, or even avoid talking about celebrities, for that matter, rather than dropping last bit and turning the idiotic "celebrity" into the even more imbecilic "celeb.")

"it girl" (only to be used when referring to the girl from the Information Technology Department. In which case, the "it" should be capitalised and, thus, "IT." If referring to a model, super model, and/or glamour model, please use the old-fashioned "whore.")

"star quality" (which solely applies to vast, luminescent balls of plasma. And, no. Not even the brilliant John Goodman fits that description accurately enough. Are we clear?)

"push the envelope" (what?!?! That's just plain weird. Why not "shove the stationery"? "Nudge the wrapper"? Or, "thrust the package"? Well, that last one actually works better than the original. At least it makes some sense.

"think outside the box" (if, for whatever reason, you find yourself inside a box in the first place, forget about the entire concept of thought. It is clearly beyond your intellectual grasp. Give it up. You've lost. You're lost. You are obviously not philosopher material, which is the main reason why it doesn't seem obvious to you. Fool.



Why am I such an angry person?

Easy Ways To Ruin Good Literature

Bad Choices... Bad, bad, choices. You've been a bad choice.

This Week: Audiobook Accidents

When looking for someone to read Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy -consisting of All The Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain- for its audiobook version, some halfwitted executive at Random House who could not have possibly read McCarthy's works threw -for reasons both unexplained and unexplainable- Brad Pitt's name into the mix. Unfortunately, it stuck, and -thus- we can now safely assume that Brad Pitt has read at least -and quite possibly only- three books in his life. Needless to say, all three audiobooks are abridged versions of the original novels. One must wonder whether the width of Mr. Pitt's vocabulary -one hundred and two words, by my calculations, counting the word "yeah" no less than three times, to bump up the numbers- had anything to do with the aforementioned abridgement. (Pst, Brad... Hey, sorry, I should probably explain what both "aforementioned" and "abridgement" mean, right? "I said it before" and "shorty-shorty short-short," respectively. And "respectively" means "each one, in the aforementioned order.")

Communicating with morons is harder than it might seem from afar. Audiolibrarians all over the land shall despair at the sound of these, as much as cinephiles despaired upon hearing that Matt Damon had been cast as John Grady Cole in the film adaptation of All The Pretty Horses.

Sighing in the Rain

"I love the smell of Naipaul in the morning. It smells of... victory." New Literary Remakes of Old Illiterate Films.


The Big Bukowski - After having been successfully sued for copyright infringement by "the other" Lebowski, "the Dude" Lebowski changes his family name to Bukowski... with hilarious consequences. Most of the action in the film takes place in a badly-lit dive inhabited by barflies who -time and time again- refuse to go home at closing time. A cautionary tale, rilly.

The Grapes of Roth - The tale of a deprived family being forced to face a drought in rural Oklahoma during the Great Depression. Of course, John Steinbeck's creation - the Joad family- is slightly altered so as to include the lasciviously Rothian Nathan Zuckerman. Expect explicit scenes of masturbation and ejaculation every five minutes, or so. But done tastefully, surely.

Dial M for Murdoch - A Hitchcockian thriller starring Iris Murdoch as either the protagonist, the antagonist, or some other character. A terrifying whodunnit. Was it the butler? Or was it the Judith Butler? Or the big bad wolf? Or the big bad Virginia Woolf? We all know -after all- that someone is afraid of Virginia Woolf. We simply don't know who.

Rimbaud: First Blood - Arthur Rambo -or, for that matter, Joe Rimbaud- is back from either Vietnam or Abyssinia and encounters a certain amount of trouble when he meets the local sheriff. Guns, guns, guns. And a tiny bit of French symbolist poetry here and there, perchance?

Wilde At Heart (or should it be The Wilde One?) - A rather Lynchian take on the life and works of Oscar Wilde. Or a Brandoesque biker gang, with homoerotic undertones and allegorical poems. I don't know. So... either cars or bikes. But a lot of Wilde. Ooooh, yeah.

Re-writes, Corrections, and More!

The Rapes Of Garth: Re-writing of The Grapes Of Wrath and other Classics, the Hollywood way.



Tolstoyry, or, Tol Stoyry - The story of Count Lev Nikolayevich (Leo, to his friends) Tolstoy's favourite childhood trinkets and playthings, and their feats as they come to life and embark in countless adventures. An epic tale of tormented souls and the never-ending quest towards honesty.

American Were-Woolf in Paris - Few literary critics are aware of Virginia Woolf's trip to Paris, France, during the winter of 1927. Even fewer know that during the aforementioned trip she was bitten by -and subsequently turned into- a werewolf. This film chronicles her tale of lupine redemption. With lotsa gore, by the by.

D.H. Lawrence of Arabia - "Never trust the artist. Trust the tale." With said epigraph begins this epic fantasy, set in an alternative reality in which D.H. Lawrence and T.E. Lawrence are -for some reason unknown to the general public- one and the same person. Set during World War I and having Modernity as its general backdrop, this is a tale of poetry, betrayal, the Arab Revolt, and sons and -of course- lovers. Eff, you, enn, spells FUN.

Bend It Like Beckett - 126 minutes of two adolescent girls who just happen to be obsessed with football sitting on a typical Adidas truncated icosahedron ball, pondering over the meaning of life, the absurdity of going on, the nature of artistic creation, and making out with boys. All in a bare, very minimal theatre stage.

I'll just go wait for the Coen brothers to phone me. We really should make these films.

C'mon, I'm waiting.

This is a Warning.

People That I Don't Really Like often employ these words and / or phrases in conversation.

"Wow factor"

"X factor" (and the X Factor ©, for that matter.)

Most other factors, unless we are referring to algebraic expressions by which others are exactly divisible, genes that determine hereditary characteristics, and / or any of a number of substances in the blood which are involved in coagulation.

"My / Your / His / Her / Our / Their Comfort zone"

"The next level"

"Blog" (used as a regular verb. Silly, rilly.)

"Tweet" (used as an irregular verb, conjugated tweet / twit / twat.)

Post

The Humour of The New Yorker, also known as unfunny jokes and other non-sequiturs.

Animal Humour, like The Far Side, but not humourous.

An ant wearing a surgical gown is lying down on an operating table. A duck wearing a stethoscope, surgical mask and operating theatre scrubs bends over him with a worried look in his eyes. The caption reads:

-What did you say your specialty was, Monsieur Fourmi?
-Ant-hropology, Duck-tor Canard.

New York Humour, whatever that maybe.

A Catholic priest, a Rabbi and an Ayatollah walk into a cafe. The latter is murdered pre-emptively by the other two, who go on to eat bagels with cream cheese.

Self-Referential Humour. (The New Yorker? Yes! The New Yorker.)

An uneducated workman boorishly walks up to a Manhattan newsstand not wearing a tie and asks for a copy of The New Yorker. End of joke.

Ouch

Silly Words and Stupid Phrases that only Olympic-size morons and Brobdingnagian dickheads use. Particularly on television.
"The thing is is that..." (the thing simply is, you commoner!)

"110%" (and any other silly percentages, including 101%, 99.99% and seventy-fuck percent.)

"The best of the best" (if you are the best, then you are the best of the best, the worst and everyone in between, including those treading water in their puddle of mediocrity.)

"Yum-o-metre"

"The next... / The new..." (as in: "Rufus Wainwright is the next Elton John, in that they are both really annoying," or "Nickelback really do wish they were the new Nirvana, but they are just -well- utter shite.")

"The myspace Generation" (which normally sends shivers down my spine, as I consider the prospect of future age groups being sponsored by multinational corporations, as in the following nightmares: "the Nestlé generation," "the Age of Coca-Cola," "the Year of the Cadbury," or "Life, sponsored by Marlboro.") See also: "The facebook Faction" / "The iPod iDiots"

"-ista" (suffix, normally added to words that are on their own already asinine, such as fashion, to produce a surplus of asininity, as in "fashionista," meaning "silly person wearing even sillier clothes.")

Life and Other Discomforts

Ideas For Television Shows, that are quite unlikely to ever get picked up, really. Shame.

The Pitch: Ashton Kutcher travels through the U.S. visiting different cities and their unsuspecting inhabitants. In a fashion similar to that of Kutcher's previous series Punk'd, the presenter would surprise random women by punching them in the crotch whilst yelling the programme's catchphrase: "You've Been Cunted!" Needless to say, the name of the show would be spelt with the iconic apostrophe that made Kutcher's seminal masterwork such an international success.

Name of the Show: Cunt'd! (Pronounced "Cunted!")

The Pitch: A special episode of Wife Swap involving O.J. Simpson and some couple. Some poor fella spends a week in a damp crypt in a cemetery in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, his wife has been raped and murdered by a man whose only redeeming quality was a small role in the Naked Gun series. On the last day of the exchange, O.J. denies all charges repeatedly saying: "I didn't do it... but if I had..."

Name of the Show: Wife Swab

The Pitch: A Christmas Edition of Come Dine With Me, featuring Beth Ditto.

Name of the Show: The Huge L-Word

Rawk & Rawl...!

Plausible, yet fictional, news... Music press headlines for the new millenium

This Town Ain't Big Enough For Th' Both Of Us

Brian Adams and the Cardigans join forces against Ryan Adams and the Cardinals. Hilarity ensues. Both super-groups meet for one final showdown performance, which is eventually cancelled due to poor ticket sales. Both Brian and Ryan go on to co-write and co-produce a modern day re-imagining of the Adams Family.

What's that floating in my latte... I mean... errrr... my beer?

Independent icon, sound engineer Steve Albini fights blues musician siblings Johnny and Edgar Winter -who just happen to suffer from albinism, of course- over a misunderstanding involving a half-eaten muffin and a double-decaf, skinny, [insert random italianate word], mocha, frappuccino, latte with cinnamon, cream, and two sugars. Albini challenges the Winter brothers to a Mexican-style wrestling match, to which they both decline saying something along the lines of "[A] wrestling match? (...) Ya freak! (...)" Hilarity does not ensue.

"Thë Äcë öf Spädës, thë Äcë öf Spädës...!"

Imagine an island on which people had to kill other people to survive. No, not Manhattan. Think more along the lines of Battle Royale. But with rock stars...! Yeah! The first episode would consist of diaeresis-ridden artists fighting for umlaut supremacy, whatever that may mean. In any case, Motörhead leader Lemmy Kilmister, Mötley Crüe's Tommy Lee, Eric Bloom from Blue Öyster Cult, the funny-looking dude from Maxïmo Park, Bob Mould from Hüsker Dü, those weirdos from Röyksopp, all members of Spinal Tap, and all ex-members of Queensrÿche would fight for their lives and -ultimately- diacritical superiority.

Yeah!

Brideshead Revisited Revisited

Different Takes on a Classic of 20th Century Literature, or the many, many ways in which idiots mutilated high art, turning it into fodder for the uneducated masses.


Birdseed Revisited

Big Bird from Sesame Street, Edgar Allan Poe's pet Raven, Noah's Raven, Noah's Dove, the Dodo bird from Alice in Wonderland and the sexually explicitly named Woody Woodpecker from the Walter Lantz cartoons re-enact portions of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. Expect homoerotic undertones, 1920's style debauchery, and aristocracy excess. With the text's poetry replaced with poultry.

Bridewell Revisited

A Brideshead Revisited / Oz crossover. Oz as in the gritty, HBO prison drama, not the dull, inane children's book about a pack of cowards sticking together due to their aforementioned cowardice. The romance of the original could here be replaced with sordid prison sex, whilst the sacramental references in the text could evolve into incarceration-induced religiosity of the born-again kind. Fun, fun, fun. Sodomy, breaches of human rights and a dark, damp, dirty mise en scène. What is there not to like?

Bridesmaid Revisited

Starring with Richard Gere and Julia Roberts, obviously. Runaway brides and drooling, powerless, omega pseudo-males, of course. A Hollywood re-interpretation of Brideshead Revisited, meaning that the original text would be gutted, disemboweled and its insides filled with fresh dung, clearly. Dung of human origin, possibly. Put a happy ending and the rest will write itself. Join-the-dots type of pseudo-art, unquestionably. The type that makes me want to cry out of frustration, naturally.

Dang!

Enigmatic Essay Titles

Suggestion for Theses on Coetzee that should not be taken seriously, as a life of failure, constant humiliation and opprobrium would surely soon follow.

"The Easter Bunny as Organic Metaphor in John Maxwell Coetzee's Disgrace."

"Disempowering the Empire or Disempiring the Empower?: Confusing Ideas and Idealizing Confusion in the Novels of J.M. Coetzee."

"Panem et Circenses: Cakes, Muffins, Scones and Bakewell Tarts as Symbols of Phallocracy in Coetzee's Early Prose."

Bandwagonesque

Rock 'n' Roll Melodies for the myspace, facebook, pitchfork, bebo, emo generation. Thoughtlessness for the thoughtless, so to speak.

Nine Inch Snail

Industrial rock infused with syncopated drum machines and angst-ridden, anger-soaked lyrics about characters from children's book, including snails with low self-esteem, frustrated turtles, grinning cats, orphan puppies and ghastly-looking poultry. Songs that help adolescents deal with the pain of comfortable existences lived in suburbia.

Creedence Clearwater Survival

Survivalist folk-rock. An amalgam of Peace-Love-and-Understanding Southern Rock-influenced popular music and paranoid delusions, absolute libertarianism and ultraconservative derangement. Tunes to hum to from the darkness of a bunker in the depths of Waco, TX, as the End of Days predictably takes place outside.

Ironic Maiden

Sarcastic, highly amplified, rather distorted, harsh-sounding modern rock music with pounding beats and cryptic lyrics, often -yet not always- about serpent-like dragons, ice-clad mountains, flaming swords and blood-drenched skies. Sardonic heavy metal.

Manic Street Poachers

Political songs about revolutionary topics written in first person singular from the perspective of men and women who hunt, fish and catch game illegally. A sort of pro-hunting foil to Rage Against the Machine and all the other pseudo lefty rock bands whose idea of supporting communism is buying overpriced, sweatshop-made Che Guevara T-shirts from High Street boutiques.

A Short Film

Music For the Masses

Discovering Imaginary Covers, musical variations, melodious alterations, euphonic permutations, and discordant deviations.

Sexual Helium

Marvin Gaye meets That-Stupid-Bloody-Frog-That-Everyone-Except-Me-Loved-A-Few-Years-Ago. Maybe it could even be a duet for the Post-Thought Age. A helium-voiced Sexual Healing for the new millennium. Also a step-by-step guide on how to ruin a perfectly good song with unnecessary post-production.

The AAA Took My Baby Away

The Ramones' classic punk rock tune is re-imagined, replacing the barbaric KKK of the original's title with the somewhat more threatening American Automobile Association. It could -in the future- be used on convertible and sports car magazine adverts and television infomercials. The future is dark, the future is black. Scary thoughts, the stuff of nightmares.

Californicaragua

The same old, boring, unimaginative Red Hot Chili Peppers songs with latin rhythms added to them. The Contras-themed rhythms of Nicaragua's capital city, Managua. Perhaps now the song will have a vague scent of revolution and change? "Dream of Ca-li-for-ni-ca-ra-gua... Dream of Ca-li-for-ni-ca-ra-gua... " Don't expect much, though. I bet Anthony Kiedis' substandard lyrics will still manage to ruin the song once again. A second-rate lyricist if I ever heard one.

Hostile Makeover

Children's Literature + Hollywood = many an appallingly written, poorly directed, incompetently acted piss-poor excuse for a film.

The Ruffalo

The life-story of American actor Mark Ruffalo synchronized to the plot and story of Julia Donaldson/Axel Scheffler's unforgettable The Gruffalo. The monster becomes an incompetent actor and acts in a string of flops.

Where The Wilde Things Are

Part Maurice Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are, part bio-pic describing the troubled life and troubled times of literary mammoth Oscar Wilde. It would almost certainly include monsters, betrayal, sodomy and pederasty.

The Chronicles Of Arnie

The Chronicles Of Narnia meets Arnold Schwarzenegger. Need I say more? Maybe I need, I suppose. Why, I hear you ask? Why not? For the money, of course. Why else, right? C.S. Lewis, but with no moral message and -instead- a bunch cars blowing up, buildings burning, and dudes getting shot. Maybe we'll squeeze some robots, some time-travel, some sex, and lotsa, lotsa violence. Yeah!

Market Forceps

Elasticity of the Man, Adversary Selection, Anti-Anti-Trust, Debt Mercilessness, Deadweight Cost/Less, MonopSONY, and whatnot, and on and on, and the rest, etcetera, yadda, yadda, yadda...


Heinz© might try to start marketing their own brand of humous, the name of which will be a portmanteau blending both the name of the brand and that of the commodity, thus, Heinous®.

Microsoft© are believed to be on the verge of creating their own in-house system of Orders, including their version of the Order of the Garter and the OBE, the latter named Microsoft© OBEs or -for short- MICROBEs®.

The Coca-Cola© Company could attempt to break into the market of calligraphy, by designing, copyrighting, and promoting their own Coca-Cola© style apostrophe under the trade name Catastrophe®.

Firestone© and TRESemmé© may one day merge and combine their mastery of rubber engineering, wheel design, and cosmetics to make more durable, better-looking tires. TRESemmé© + Firestone© = Tiresomé®.

Tiresome as this post has now become, I am sure. My apologies.

Philately, Numismatics, Trainspotting, etc.

Relatively Boring Pastimes, rather dull hobbies, comparatively stale interests, and somewhat uninteresting amusements.

Metrophilia

Metrophilia must be the most boring member in all the -philia family. C'mon. Necrophilia is frowned upon, but sounds more fun -even if also more disturbing. Even Hemophilia seems like it'd be a blast by comparison. It makes Coprophilia look like a charming, solemn endeavour, let's face it. How can anyone call him/herself a "railfan" or "rail enthusiast" and not realize what an amazing social faux-pas that is? The only interesting things about trainspotting are: a) the novel (Irvine Welsh) and b) the novel's film adaptation (Danny Boyle), which -by the way- have absolutely nothing to do with the act of spotting trains, other than it is used in the novel as a metaphor for the tedium and cyclical nature of a junkie's existence. Or, rather, nonexistence.

Numismatics

Numismatics...? Yawn. Who was the first person that decided collecting coins would help him/her kill time? Isn't the whole point about money that it was created to be spent? Honestly, what a waste of time. I could see how having money might improve someone's quality of life, and even help someone move towards happiness -not money in itself, but rather not having to worry about money. But collecting the damn thing? Really? Rilly? Oh my...

Philately

Philately? I'd rather watch telly. I suppose sometimes people simply do not have any friends to writes letters to, so they simply buy postal stamps and put them in boxes. I bet they also buy postcards, and end up not sending them. There they go, off to boxes too. Classified, categorized, rated, grouped, grade, systematized and catalogued. The many, many, many taxonomies of boredom. And they don't even keep them in boxes, that was simply my own poetic license, they -in fact- buy albums to provide accommodation for them. How exciting, I hear you say. You moron. Philately makes Philanthropy sound exciting. At least then you are simply getting rid of you money, not both your money, your self-respect, AND your life.

Dang!

Confusing Acronyms

Letters for the illiterate, confused initials, alphabetisms, abbreviations, nomenclatures, and orthographic stylings...


WWID: Is this meant to be an egocentric variation on WWJD (What Would Jesus Do)? Something along the lines of What Would I Do? Or simply an ominous forward-thinking anticipation of World War 499 (roman numerals, of course)?

INRI: History and Theology both tell us that this acronym, inscribed at the top of the cross, stood for IESVS NAZARENVS REX IVDÆORVM (Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews). But, could it be possible that it did not mean this at all, but rather that Jesus was in fact called Henry, and those bloody Romans could not spell foreign names? Thus, Inri? I'm just saying...

SOA: I think this is meant to be decoded as Service-Oriented Architecture. Although, I do not know anyone (or even of anyone) -dead or alive- who has a clue what this means. Feel free to have a look what Wikipedia has to say on the matter. It's quite unintelligible. Something along the lines of "a nano e-pod de-duping and virtualization, constituting versioning cloud-computing and green washing, yet not excluding a reasonable amount of petaflop and words clouds. Nano, nano, buzzword, water-cooler, cubicle arsehole, Web 2.0, nano, nano, 3G amorphous solution, flash cookie i-business, plasma megapixel fuck LCD HD VCR PVR DVR SLR DVD TV ISP ESP JPEG MP3 CEO VoIP HTTP GUI USB? IBM? GFY! Yeah?"

Plump Fiction

Pulped Fiction, bits and pieces from the Hollywood Archives. An assortment of film script leftovers.


Honey Bunny [About to rob a diner]: I love you, Pumpkin.
Pumpkin: I love you, Honey Bunny. [Standing up with a gun in his hand] All right, everybody be Rob, this is a coolery!
Honey Bunny: Any of you fucking pricks move, and I'll execute every motherfucking last one of... [Turning to Pumpkin] What did you just say?
Pumpkin [Clearly embarrassed]: Not now, Honey Bunny... Not now...


[from a private conversation between Quentin Tarantino and Ving Rhames]

Ving Rhames: But why Marsellus Wallace, Q-man? You are making my character sound like a pimp, and you know how I feel about stereograms...
Quentin Tarantino [henceforth referred to as Q-man and/or the Q-man]: ...types. Stereotypes.
Ving Rhames: What?
The Q-Man: Stereotypes. Stereotypes are widely held, fixed, oversimplified images of someone or something. Like saying "Canada is like the U.S., but filled with nice people," or "blondes have more fun, but less brain." Stereograms are optical illusions of depth created from flat, two-dimensional pictures. You know, those images you stare at for a while before you get them...
Ving Rhame: Oh, yeah... I dig 'em.
The Q-Man: Your point being...?
Ving Rhame: Why can't my character be nice. A nice, friendly black man. Without a name like "Marsellus Wallace," Q-Man. It sounds threatening, you know? Why can't the character be called something like "Wally Marseille" or "Marcel Wallaby," instead?


[from the Original, Unrevised, Unedited Screenplay for the film]

Jules: What does Marcellus Wallace look like?
Brett: What?
Jules: What country you from?
Brett: What?
Jules: What ain't no country I ever heard of! They speak English in What?
Brett: What?
Jules: English, motherfucker! Do. You. Speak. It?
Brett: What?
Jules: Sphincter says what?
Brett: What?
Jules: Ha, you're the sphincter, dude. Now, seriously, English, motherfucker! Do. You. Speak. It?
Brett: Yes!
Jules: Then you know what I'm saying!
Brett: Yes!
Jules: Describe what Marcellus Wallace looks like!
Brett: What, I-?
Jules: [Pointing his gun at him] Say what again. Say. That. Again! I dare you, I double dare you, motherfucker. Say what one more goddamn time.
Brett: He is b-b-b-black...
Jules: Go on.
Brett: He's b-b-b-bald...
Jules: Does he look like a bitch?
Brett [Breaking into song in a husky Louis-Armstrong-type voice]: What a won - der - ful world... And I think to myself...
Jules: Does he look like a bitch?
Brett [Again, breaking into song and attempting a choreography]: What if God was one of us...?
Jules: Man... Not Joan Osbourne, I hate that bitch! Joan Osbourne and Melissa Etheridge are out of bounds. It's in my contract, man. [Jules shoots Brett in shoulder] Entirely unacceptable. [Looking at Vincent] D'you know where the Q-man is? I need to sort some shit out.