In case you didn't know, the universe consists of three fundamental truths.
The first: during the Olympics, some of your friends will become overnight Olympic experts. They will annoy you with tidbits about the 200-meter butterfly and predict tennis victories until you zone out into a coma. Only last week, they smoked weed while watching Golden Girls reruns, stuffing their head with mustard sandwiches in their dank, creepy basement. Today, they can tell you why a young Chinese gymnast named Yi Ling was robbed of valuable points for an incomplete dismount.
Ha. Incomplete dismount.
The second: people will always fear terrorism. Even if they live in Toronto. Canada. A few days ago, our city suffered a horrible explosion at a local propane facility. Afterward, I spoke to a young lady who thought that "like, maybe the Taliban" were the culprits. The Taliban! She was of the viewpoint that the Taliban had targeted a propane facility in innercity Canada to show the world that their rogue terrorist faction had enough of Canadian hegemonic tyranny.
Outrageous.
The third: people will always not believe me when I say I cannot stand Will Smith and LL Cool J. They will say something akin to "WHAT!? How can you not like Will Smith!? Have you seen Fresh Prince?! And LL Cool J!? Do you not like rap? LL Cool J is legendary." And then I will have to explain why I hate them. I have to explain why I think Will Smith sucks in every movie he's in, and why LL Cool J glosses his lips up with carmex and that's just not what good rappers do. As Jamie Foxx once said, "no rapper should have some glossy-ass lips."
But now there's a fourth. A fourth fundamental truth.
If you say you hated Batman: Dark Knight, people will be outraged.
And that's a shame really, because the movie was entirely horrible. I perfected five reasons why it was bad while drinking shitty cider at a Mississauga pub. Here they are.
1. Batman's Pervy Voice.
So Bruce Wayne has a normal voice. He parades around the city and speaks at a pleasant volume. But then, when he turns into Batman, he immediately sounds like he's combing recesses for Prom Dates. What the fuck is that about? Does he really need to sound like that? All gargily? I couldn't take anything he said seriously.
2. 3 Fucking Hours.
Batman is based on a comic book. It shouldn't take 3 hours to tell a story I could have read in a comic book in, maybe, 1 hour and thirty minutes (I was a slow and mildly retarded reader). When my badonkadonk started hurting in hour 2, I was like, can somebody just run over Batman?
3. Maggie Gylenhaalal was the wrong choice.
She looks like a basset hound. And, I know that if Maggie read this note, she may look at a picture of me and say, "oh yeah? Well, you look like a malformed pilsbury dough boy if he were lightly baked to a golden brown. Also, you're fat." Well that's just mean, Maggie Gylenahahalal, thank you for shattering me emotionally.
But really? You're just absolutely awful.
4. Two Villains Were Unnecessary.
Adding Two Face to the mix just complicated the plot. It got so complex I had no idea who was good and who was evil. Four days after watching the movie, I finally realized that Two Face was evil. The startled young ladies at Tim Hortons were confused when I yelled at them that I finally got it. Just having Joker should have been enough.
5. You know the Bat Bike Thing? Yeah. That sucked.
Whoever designed the new motorcycle that Batman rides across town was devoid of any creativity. It was literally just Batman hanging on to two huge-ass wheels. It was like those Big Wheels that we had when we were kids. 'Member those? Well, you may have had them. Not me. I had to ride around on my sister's gold bike with streamers hanging down the sides, praying nobody would kick my ass while my rich Greek neighbour got "bored of his Big Wheel" and started playing with his "train set".
These are the reasons why Batman: Dark Knight sucked tremendous amounts of ass.
Actually, you know what? It could have been much worse.
If one were to recall the most significant divorces of modern times, a bevy of examples arise.Consider the marriage of Rupert and Ann Murdoch, which ended in a $1.7 B dollar settlement.How about Princess Diana and the big-eared buffoon she married and divorced? That turned a nation inside out with fury and annoyance.Remember Sesame Street’s Ernie and Bert? After their twenty-four year run on television’s most famous children’s show concluded, the gay power couple parted ways in a messy and sordid feud.Bert allegedly said, “Ernie’s a little bitch.Why do you think we had separate beds?”
None of these divorces, my friends, is more important than little Gary Coleman’s, who a few weeks ago, divorced his 22 year-old wife on national television.First, let us all remember tiny Coleman, the former child star featured on Diff’rent Strokes.Most famous for his line, “whatchatalkingabout Willis?,” he was a beloved national treasure.Then he grew older, not taller, and devolved into a horrible washed up actor that not even infomercials could use.
Recently he announced a marriage to a full-sized female and promptly, his divorce.Some of the most disgusting details of their marriage were displayed when they appeared on Divorce Court.Here are a few quotes I have copied and pasted from an article I read.
“(Problems) build and then we don’t talk to each other for a week. It gets as bad as it needs to be to get her to listen. If I have to throw something or break something, that’s what’s going to happen…I’m not a controlling husband. There’s no leash on her.”
“I promised her one [a baby]. I just don’t know when it’s going to happen. I know that once I made that promise I committed myself to a life of hell because now I have to be a father. I have to make more money to take care of this second person. I’m not gonna want to be a daddy all the time. We don’t know what kind of child we are going to have. I’m hoping her genes are stronger than mine.”
"If he doesn't get his way, he throws a temper tantrum like a 5-year-old does, he, like, stomps the floor and yells, 'Meehhhh,' and starts throwing stuff around. He bashes his head in the wall, too."
Our
story opens at Lester B. Pearson International Airport in Toronto, where a brown
man you may know was caught in violation of the no-liquid-policy at the security
counter. In front of me stood a chubby security officer wearing wide-brimmed
glasses. He had just retrieved three varieties of contraband from my carry-on
baggage and waved them violently in front of me. Gilette shaving cream, Got2Be
Squeaky Clean Shampoo and Vichy Men’s Facial Scrub. He said I could return to
the massive line up at check-in and check my baggage or he could deposit them
all in the trash. Since I was in a hurry, I elected the latter option and
watched my traveling essentials disappear behind a counter. The chubby asshole
smiled. He had stripped me of my necessities.
A declaration. A
fatwa, if you will. If anyone sees a member of airport security with a
freshly scrubbed chubby face, and squeaky clean hair, ensure that he knows he is
a tremendous asshole.
I’m locating my seat in the aircraft now, hoping to sit
beside somebody normal. Somebody that doesn’t ask me about my personal relationship with Jesus. I find it. At the window
sits a pleasant-looking blonde girl, blue eyes, with daddy-long-leg legs. By my
rough, rapid estimation, I approximate that she is forty-four feet tall. I sit.
We make small talk. Where she’s going (home, to Vancouver), what she does
(dental hygienist), what she likes to do in her leisure hours (read, patronize
various Toronto lounges). I notice a tongue ring. Is it just me, or do all
individuals that feature tongue rings tend to show them off? She made a lot of
“oooooooh’s” and “awwwwww’s” during our conversation. Fish gaping facial
expressions. Between you and I, I believe it was to totally show off her tongue
ring. Nobody gapes anymore.
Our flight departs. I monitor world news in a
variety of publications, drink some shitty wine and slip into my air travel
coma. I wake, hours later, and watch an old episode of Seinfeld. The one where
George buys that Goretex jacket that is extremely large for him. Oh, George. How
amusing you are. Tongue Ring strikes further conversation. This time, it’s all
about me. An hour passes. I’m still not done. As we touch down, I ask Tongue
Ring why she’s taking such a brief trip to Vancouver. The cost must be enormous.
She says it’s at her boyfriend’s expense, and he needs to see her frequently.
Perhaps to talk, I figure. She stands and I realize I grossly miscalculated her
height by close to thirty-eight feet. She is roughly my height. Five ten and
three quarters.
We exit and say our goodbyes. I browse items in the gift
shop, mostly shampoo, shaving cream and facial scrubs. A few minutes later I’m
descending on an escalator. I hear a familiar voice. It’s Tongue Ring. She
stands in front of me conversing with her boyfriend about the flight. She
doesn’t notice I’m behind her.
Welcome to the most awkward social
situation you can find yourself in. A stranger that you just met will now speak
of you, not knowing you are listening. And it’s not like I could retreat
backward on the escalator, to escape hearing her talk about me. I can’t just
power off my hearing as well. And, of course, I need to know what she
says.
The boyfriend, who is much shorter, more compact than Tongue Ring
asks about the flight.
“It was good! We had an empty seat in the middle,
which was soo good.”
The boyfriend agrees. Tells her that he’s happy for
her. Really? You’re happy for her? She didn’t do anything, dumbhead. It’s an
empty seat. The dolphin boyfriend now pivots to the long-awaited question.
He asks Tongue Ring who they sat her next to. This is her time to speak of me.
Here it comes.
Pause.
This could unfold in a variety of ways. To
placate the dolphin boyfriend, she could discount my subtle charm and elegant
suave and disparage me. We all know this would be intellectually dishonest, but
I can see why she would not want to emotionally shatter her boyfriend with the
powerful truth. Another way this can unfold is she could really not have liked
me. She could say I was doughy faced and mislabel my confidence for
conceitedness. At worst, she could say I smelled. Like curry. Any of these
outcomes would result in a highly uncomfortable trip down the escalator, and we
were not even one quarter of the way down. If her comments about me were
negative, and then she saw me behind her, we'd have to awkwardly stare at each
other as we all traveled downward. Tongue Ring, Dolphin, and Curry
Boy.
Ready for her answer? Let us delay no further.
“Oh I sat next
to this guy who was soo cool. He was so funny and really nice!”
I smile.
The dolphin was silenced. Personally, I think she left out good-looking, but
only because the dolphin may have broken down into uncontrollable sobbing. Okay,
perhaps I push too far. Tongue Ring delivered.
When I got to Vancouver,
I repurchased my toiletries. I tucked them away in the tiny enclaves of my
luggage. When I went through security at the Vancouver airport, I watched as my
luggage rolled into the x-ray machine. The security officer asked me if I had
any liquids. Oh my. Perhaps again, I would be stripped of my prized possessions.
“Nope. None. No shampoo is worth the risk,” I said.
“Have a nice
flight,” he waved me forward, laughing.
I wrote a note last week about Facebook’s People You May Know window and how it was a tragic miscalculation to affront us with the sad, sunken faces of the people we dislike on our homepages. Immediately after I posted that note, my People You May Know window disappeared forever. However, you may still be plagued with yours. This leads me to believe that FaceHitler read my disparaging note. Perched high in his autocratic palace, he must have said to himself, “This person is tremendously angry at me, perhaps I will extend to him the olive branch of peace.” And then, he swiftly deleted my PYMK window. Today, I am no longer infected with the PYMK window and the tiny pictures of people from losernessdom.
Thank goodness!
FaceHitler, if you are reading this, I appreciate your warm token of kindness. To reciprocate, I will now take a moment to write the following administrative preface to my note in the most politically-correct, non-controversial manner I can muster.
Some of you kind readers own an African-AmericanBerry device. I do too! I have noticed that on our African-AmericanBerries we have a fantastical, free service called Messenger. If you would like to add me, so we can converse about puzzles, OREO cookies and the delightful merits of Facebook’s benevolent executives, please feel free. Message me for my PIN.
Wow, that was fucking painful. Let’s never do that again. Onwards now, to the issue at hand.
Horrible Travel Stories.
It may strike you to know that I have not always lived in the lowly gutters of inner-city Canada. For a three year period, I lived in San Antonio, Texas, and worked for a high-tech organization. Why a high tech organization would hire me, move me to the United States, pay for my MBA, and compensate me more than minimum wage is a mystery you are probably pondering right now. Don’t worry, it stumps us all. This high tech organization produced tiny chipsets that, if I explained them to you, would bore you into a deep, horrible coma. Instead, I’ll just say I got to travel a lot.
Today, as I plot my summer travel plans where I will holiday in Prague, Vienna and Berlin, with a brief, eight-day layover in Amsterdam (it’s a connecting flight), I recalled a collection of my horrible travel stories. Here’s one that begins with me on a Delta flight to Ireland, before a brief connection in Atlanta.
7am, just after take-off. I’m in that wicked REM sleep that you can only hope for. My head’s cocked back, bouncing off the airplane window pane, neck contorted, and I’m dreaming about Microsoft Excel macros and PivotTables. I feel a nudge. It’s the middle-aged lady next to me, yelling at me about beverages.
Yes ladies and gentleman, the word with a thousand meanings depending on how it's used, placed in a sentence, the tone of your voice when you use it, and of course, facial expressions. I am slightly fascinated by its versatility, which gives you a deep insight into the inner workings of my mind. Also, I obviously have nothing better to ponder. I like to wonder about obscure things, such as how many staff of the suicide hotline would commit suicide? You would think quite a few seeing as they would listen to depressing stories all day long. And how would they measure their success rate in stopping people from committing suicide??? I just learnt now from my esteemed colleauge sitting next to me that there is a suicide encyclopedia in the reference section next to me. I must check it out. Anyways, let's get back to shit....
