Worst Day of My Life

I just found out that Anne fucking Hathaway is playing Catwoman in "The Dark Knight Rises", the movie I have been looking forward to for my entire life. There's two problems with that. First, Catwoman is not an epic superhero. The Joker is epic, Dr. Crane is epic, Ras'al Ghul is epic, Harvey Dent is epic. The Catwoman? Not epic. Not epic at all.

Seriously, I have a fucking cat that's a woman, and all she can do is scratch people who come over, roll around and meow, and knock everything over. How the fuck is she supposed to take on Batman?

No, no you cant.

Secondly, Anne Hathaway has no place in a Batman movie. She is probably my least favorite actor of all time.

"Batman? I'll just get my Royal Guard to take care of it"

OK, so I've only seen her in Princess Diaries. But that's more than enough of a basis for me to make conclusions on. The only thing that is keeping me from crying right now is my faith in Christopher Nolan. He must've known what he was doing. He's probably just going to heavily costume her and give her very few, if any, speaking lines.

I think that was her in Lord of the Rings too

Thankfully, she's not the main villain. The main villain is some guy named Bane who's apparently a cross between the Incredible Hulk and Hannibal Lecter.

Notice the sad Batman in the bottom left. Very epic.

If the movie isn't as epic as I expected it to be, I'm blaming Anne Hathaway. If it is, or surpasses all my expectations, then that's solely because of the genius of Christopher Nolan and the brilliant acting of everyone besides Anne Hathaway.

Good day.



Edit: I found out that Catwoman isn't a villain..... This is slightly embarassing, but my hatred for Anne Hathaway has yet to diminish

The Maury Show: America's Finest

If this post turns out sad or depressing in any way, then there's something wrong with me.

Never before have I seen a show that has the same amount of excitement, drama, and plot twists as the Maury Povich Show.

Maury reruns are on every day at around 12 PM. I get out of school at 1:40 and usually make it home around 2 PM. School has many inconveniences, but none are greater than it hindering me from watching Maury on the daily. However, on my calendar, there are a few days (around once a month) circled. Most people I know call these "Early Release Days", but I call them trailer trash days.

"Bertha! Get the kids! THE PATERNITY TEST RESULTS ARE IN!"

That's because I go home, grab a bag of Cheetos and watch Jerry Springer and Maury until the cows come home (that sentence was amazing because it combined a common stereotype of people who live in trailers with some slang that the stereotypical people in the trailers probably use). So, Jerry Springer is good, but sometimes you just get tired of bitches ripping each other's hair out or the "Midget Fighting Championships" (real event). Sometimes you just want a little more drama, a little more suspense.

BRING OUT THE PATERNITY TEST!

A lesson in probability statistics

Poor lady, she seems like such a good person : (

People have been vying for the title of "the Great American Novel" for centuries. Some say it's Huckleberry Finn, others say it's The Great Gatsby or Walden. But there's no competition for "the Great American TV Show". It's Maury, hands down. Maury is everything that's great about America. A women can sleep with 11 different men and still have the opportunity to find out who the baby daddy is. That's right Canada! We look out for our people!

Who the fuck needs healthcare and peace when you have Maury?

 Paternity tests are a huge part of the Maury show, and one of its most compelling components, but my personal favorite segment is when Maury helps people confront their fears. Now, Maury may not be a psychologist, but he sure knows the best way to help people get over their fears. It's a multi-step process.

1) Publicly humiliate them in front of a studio audience
2) Show them a picture of what they fear, driving them to the point of insanity
3) The Boggart step-- actually bring out the thing they fear, causing them to run around the studio like a chicken without its head while their phobias converge on them until they finally go huddle in a corner and cry
4) Here, Maury yells at the people who are converging on the scared man or woman and tells them to "leave him/her alone!" The raucous audience seems to forget that it was he who ordered them out in the first place.

Fear--cured! oh, wait..... 

These methods are currently being tested for effectiveness at Guantanamo Bay.

Maury is a great show. It symbolizes everything that is right about America. When I come home at 11 o' clock on a trailer trash day and I open my bag of Cheetos and flip to Maury, I always remember Sri Lanka and the poor, depraved people there who wonder whether it was the 27th man who got them pregnant or the 28th. You see, world, in America, this question no longer needs to be asked. Thank you Maury.

Poems

The interest that a poem generates is directly proportional to the number of rhymes it has.

As you can tell, I'm not a literary purist by any means. With poems, I tend to share Edgar Allen Poe's opinion that didacticism isn't very enjoyable and aesthetics should be the ultimate goal. My favorite poems, almost without exception, are ones that rhyme frequently, if not at every line.

Immortalized in The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror special

My absolute favorite poem is Poe's The Raven. Grim, ghastly, macabre, and filled with epic rhymes, The Raven has everything I, as a superficial poetry reader, ask for in a poem. If right now, you asked me to rate my vocabulary on an arbitrary scale of 1-10, I'd give it about a 6. If you asked me what it was before reading The Raven, I would've said it was a 1-- if you're wondering how the scale works, it's logarithmic... that didn't clear anything up, did it?

The first time I heard the word nepenthe was in this poem, and never before had I experienced the tinkling foot-falls of Seraphin on the tufted floor. It hadn't crossed my wildest fancy to ask whether there was balm in Gilead, yet I found myself imploring the answer to this question along with the narrator. I felt the wind rustling through the curtains, the bust of Pallas watching morosely as the scene unfolded, the whispers of the lost Lenore. It's a testament to Poe's writing ability that he was able to make a 13-year old boy feel all this, and even now, 4 years later, sustain that feeling of apprehension and terror.

"Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
`Doubtless,' said I, `what it utters is its only stock and store,
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore -
Till the dirges of his hope that melancholy burden bore
Of "Never-nevermore."'

Another one of my favorite poems is Walt Whitman's O Captain, My Captain!. I never heard this poem before watching the movie Dead Poet's Society in English class. I slept through most of it, but woke up in time to see the children stand up on their desks in a show of solidarity and recite the opening lines to Walt Whitman's famous ode to Lincoln.

O Captain my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up--for you the flag is flung for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You've fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

See. Lots and lots of rhymes. Walt Whitman was pretty much a genius. He makes me feel epic just reading his poem, as if I had accomplished something. Rarely do I feel such joy in proving my literacy. 

The 20th century version of Lil' Wayne

These poems are a lot better than the emotional, sappy poems that pervade today, that have no appreciation for the beauty of the English language or any of its intricacies. I'm not saying it's necessary to rhyme when you write a poem, that's just a matter of taste for me. But if you're writing a poem, don't think you're the shit because you wrote something along the lines of:

Death,

     It consumes me

Even Emily Dickinson couldn't pull off that shit. I've got no problem with people writing these poems or sharing them with the world, but it's the pretentious attitude behind a lot of them that is so unappealing to me (yeah, I know, this rant is making me seem pretty pretentious myself). A lot of great writers didn't know the technique behind their writing (more did), but they were able to communicate ideas effectively. Don't write a poem that has a lot of random spaces and no capitalization and think you're a Poet Grand Master (third highest rank in poetry hierarchy behind Poetry Wizard and Poetry God) just because you've made something "different". Maybe the reason no one uses those techniques is because they suck for getting ideas across or giving your poem meaning. If you're open to criticism about your writing, then none of this is for you. I guess this applies to "poetry douches", the equally arrogant counterparts of the "music douches" my friend knows so well.

All rants, please slow to a halt, then turn around and go back into the dark caverns from whence you came.

  

As of late, my blogs have started out happy, then ended up more serious. I should plan these out more instead of just writing. 

Read Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, it's a great poem.

As a side note, this has nothing to do with you, the two people who actually read this blog. I'm sure if I read your poems, they would be both interesting and enjoyable.

Batman

Have you ever wanted to be someone else?
That's a stupid question, of course you have. Everyone's wanted to be someone else at some point in their life. I mean, I wouldn't trade my entire life for anyone else's, but when I'm at the grocery store and there's one item on the top shelf that I can't reach, boy do I wish I was Yao Ming. Or when I'm trying to mount a successful rescue mission and some asshole wearing heavy makeup comes in and ruins my plans, I really wish I was Batman.

I'm serious because you kill everyone, asshole

Well actually, I kinda always wish I was Batman. Just so no one is confused, I'm talking about Christopher Nolan's Batman, not the monstrosities that Joel Schumacher created.

Currently enjoys a 3.5 rating on IMDB, which,as everyone knows, is the most reliable source for all movie information.

No, I don't want my parents to die and leave me to be raised by my butler. No, I don't want the love of my life to be blown up by a psychopathic clown. No, I don't want to go through years of training in some remote mountaintop in Bhutan. But ignoring all that, being Batman would be pretty awesome.

He's the best superhero, mostly because he's actually a fucking human. Every trait you ever wished you had, Batman has. He's motivated, athletic, cool, and rich (for the sake of this blog, being rich is a character trait ). Everything he does is epic.

He could be on the brink of death, facing odds that seem insurmountable and fighting villains that seem invincible, but deep in the recesses of your heart, you know it's going to be OK. You know that Batman can't die; he can't be defeated. He's more than just a man in a suit, he's a symbol of everything we want to be, but for some reason can't.

This post just took a turn from lighthearted to serious, so I'm going to end it abruptly with a picture of the inspiring effects Batman has on people.

"Evil? I laugh in the face of evil!"

Calculus Class and my Near Death Experience

I was at school one day when I saw someone walk through the halls with a Hitler moustache. I gave him a wide berth and kept on walking to class. Now, it's not every day that you see people wearing Hitler moustaches around, so I decided to text my friend about it.

Me: I think I just saw a guy with a Hitler moustache at school....

He could've just been trying to pull off a Chaplin

She didn't respond right away so I went to class. The class was a Calculus 2 class; one of the best classes I've ever taken. The teacher was an elderly Russian man, who, through many anecdotes, had managed to relay his life story to us. He was a Jewish boy growing up in the Soviet Union. His father had been taken by the KGB for mentioning Democracy in a local pub and was sent to a gulag. Our teacher, let's call him Dr. X, had grown up with a deeply ingrained sense of hatred towards communism and the injustices it had dealt to his family. He received his education, then left for Israel, one of the only places accepting Jewish immigrants at that time. He eventually ended up in the US and taught at the school I go to. He was an extremely amiable and funny man, but behind every joyful Russian anecdote he would tell us, there would be a deeper, anti-communist meaning.

Unrelated picture of Kim Jung-il

So I walked into class that day, and everything started out well. We had to solve a problem on second order differential equations and he gave us a few minutes to do that. I solved it pretty quickly and checked my phone. One new text! My friend, who we'll call C (I don't want any lawsuits), had responded. This is (basically) what was said.

C: Yay! Hitler's my hero!!
Me: Me too! I feel like we would've been best friends if I had lived back then.
C: Yeah! We would've been a tremendous trio!
Me: We would've been tighter than the three musketeers!!
C: Oh, and it was a good thing he killed all the Jews.
(cue record scratch)
C: But everyone knows COMMUNISM is the real way to go!!
(cue another record scratch)

Now obviously, my friend was joking, but given the place I was in and my teacher's past experiences (of which my friend had no knowledge of), I felt like I was in a pretty precarious situation. I quickly flipped shut my phone and looked up. Big mistake.

As I looked up, my eyes met Dr. X's, and they locked for a brief moment. Quickly, I snapped them away. Too late. I felt him begin his approach to my desk. I knew I was in trouble. He didn't care if we texted, but I knew his anti-Semitism/pro-Communism alarm had gone off. Each step he took towards my small desk reverberated through the floor and into my already trembling heart. He would take my phone, then proceed to murder me on the spot. I knew it.

He walked up right next to my desk and looked at me for a second. I kept my eyes locked on the work in front of me. The phone began to vibrate in my pants. I felt like I was locked in a 21st century remake of "The Tell-Tale Heart". My moment of doom had arrived.

He began to speak, but I smiled blankly ahead, revisiting the happiest moments of my life. I had already resigned myself to my fate, but I refused to die with the images of an angry Russian burned into my retinas. I was brought out of my reverie by the word "integral". Integral? That didn't sound like something someone would say before feasting on the innards of their victim.

"Vat is ze integral you found?' repeated Dr. X. I looked at him. Never before had I realized how kind and how understanding his gaze was. Oh, how amazing it was to be spared by this great man! What had I done to deserve forgiveness? I would get the integral wrong and he would openly mock me in front of the classroom, but I was alive! I was alive!

It's a beautiful world we live in.

Invitation to a Beheading

I read Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov over the summer. I've got this habit of finding extremely famous authors and then reading the books that didn't make them famous. I learned this summer that that was a habit I needed to stop. It was one of the hardest reads of my life, and not because it was dense or overly wordy. It just didn't make sense.  It was probably the trippiest book I've ever read in my life, and that's saying a lot, seeing as how I've read ridiculous amounts of Kafka. It was like simultaneously injecting yourself with methamphetamine, mushrooms, and rainbows.

 

 

"We likes methamphetamine, yes we does, precious"

So if you're one of the 13 people in the world who've read it, I'm sorry, I feel your pain. If you  haven't read it, please don't, for your sake.

And the real reason I made this blog post was so that I could post a picture of Gollum saying something.

Pizza, Trust, and Runescape

So today, I was at Pizza Hut when my parents decided to call my sister and I out for not accepting them as friends on Facebook. I tried explaining to them that Facebook was basically a chronicle of my illegal and abhorrent activity and that I didn't want them to read about/see my adventures with methamphetamine, prostitutes, and Buffy.

Fine, she's hot..

They thought this was a joke, so my sister chirped in saying we needed some privacy in our lives. They smiled like they had just stolen Christmas. My dad said he was giving us privacy by giving us open access to the internet. He reminded me of the dictatorship days when he had secret monitoring programs on our computers, and would check up on the things we were doing and saying. Then he brought up one of the less proud moments of my childhood.

"LOL!! WUTZ PRIVACY??"

To all those who don't know what Runescape is, it's an MMORPG, an online game where people play in real time. A very addicting online game. I was probably in 5th or 6th grade and I played it A LOT. It was the summer and I wanted to pretend to be a wizard because it was a lot better than pretending to be a 6th grader. One day, I was walking around my fictional world doing fictional things when I crossed paths with another character. I saw hundreds of other characters every time I played Runescape, but this one gave me a funny look. My pixelated heart filled with rage.

"Hey, you cocksucking whore!" I yelled.
"Wut?" came his confused reply.
"You motherfucking bitch fucker!" screamed I, in a fury that wiped out my ability to form coherent sentences.
"Hey man, calm down," came his nervous reply.
I began typing up more furious profanities.




Just then, I got a call from my dad.
"Hey dad," I said.
"Son, what are you doing?"
"I'm just browsing stuff on the internet, dad," I said, putting on my most innocent voice.
"I've been watching you on the computer for 10 minutes. Why did you just use those words?" He asked.

I felt as if his voice penetrated into the deepest recesses of my soul. I shrunk from the telephone receiver in fear. My dad had installed a program into my computer which allowed him to monitor everything I was doing at any time from his computer. The game was over, and my dad had won. It was time to do damage control.

"Dad, I didn't know what those words were, I heard them on TV"

As an immigrant himself, he was likely to believe this story. I learned early on always to blame American culture for all my shortcomings. It didn't fail this time either. My dad told me never to use those words again, and my Runescape character went on to a long and prosperous life.


Now, inside this dark, hot, Pizza Hut, this moment was being revisited. Humiliated, I was about to show my dad what other words I had learned from TV, but the waitress came, and I had to laugh it off. But my heart was filled with rage. That is, until I got the pizza. Pizza solves all problems. In summary, I'm never adding my parents onto Facebook.