After making the grave mistake of checking my book through with the luggage over the holidays and having nothing to look at but feral children and the collection of gum wrappers and barf bags in the pocket in front of me, it was all the better to recently discover Kasper Hauser's Skymaul :Happy Crap You Can Buy From A Plane.
This is your one stop source for all those things you had no idea you needed so desperately that you might drop dead at any moment. Here you'll find the ipod shredder, adultery detector, and who could live without inventions like these?
There's really something for the whole family here. Don't forget baby this x-mas!
While this site appears to be on a dangerous precipice of plummeting into full time abstract late night commercial analysis, i find myself inspired yet again. And, as OJ Simpson well knows, when inspiration knocks, sometimes you gotta break that whole door down and wave your glock all up in someone's nose to get something done. Now where was I? Oh yes. Commercials like this new one from Johnnie Walker remind me why i make whiskey my drink of choice, and also teach us so much about American history! Did you know any of these monumentally important historic events were remotely related to the simple consumption of Johnnie Walker? Take a looksee.
It's really little known fact that the Wright brothers used all their empty bottles of Johnnie Walker red to counterbalance the ailerons on the first flight in Kittyhawk. If they hadn't drawn up the plans to the airplane while hamboned on whiskey, we wouldn't be sitting in airports across the country today as American Airlines cancels our flights. Thanks, Johnnie Walker. I've obviously been wasting my time drinking Jack Daniels, because all that makes me want to do is set fire to my golden deer and put my head through a TV when America's Funniest Home Videos is on to see if Bob Saget's really inside.
In reality, i think we can all come to the agreement that if Johnnie Walker whiskey were responsible for the invention of an airplane, it would be the one featured forty seconds into this video. That one has always been my favorite, although the mutant seagull bicycle car early on is a contender. That's far too imaginative, probably a product of the Smirnoff team.
And how could we all forget the civil rights movement in the 1960's? While many historians contend that was the work of fearless leadership and human sacrifice, it was actually Johnnie Walker whiskey that opened the doors at the University of Alabama for desegregation in 1963. Who knew! Can your vodka tonic say that? The only thing vodka was there in history was Stalin's death march, and, more recently, the Girls Gone Wild dvd series "The Wildest Bar in America." You think you can hold a candle to the significance of Whiskey in American history? Look at that astronaut just floating around fixing things with his wrench. You think that astrophysicist is going to celebrate tightening that lugnut with a glass of merlot? Wrong.
As clearly shown in this commercial, New York city was built by guys pushing huge steel beams around in the 1930's, obviously plowed on Johnnie Walker. Really, its a miracle that city is even still around, considering. I urge each and every one of you to pick up a bottle of this liquid magic, which is remarkably easy to get, i might add. It's a wonder we haven't gotten wise to the pattern in visionary American accomplishments until this year of 2008, when the economy started looking like a urinal cake. Thank god this thing aired in the nick of time. Now get out there!
Granted, there's a lot to worry about these days, what with the housing market and the economy and the fire ants and the glayyyvin. Personally, all i can focus on in times like these is how much more money we have to pump into advertising to convince us all to get back out there, and continue buying things like shoes. Now, i recognize that saying something along the lines of "nike ads are always cool" is about as profound as saying "thriller was sweet in 1983" or "cameron turner is a fruitbat."
When nobody has any more money at all, and we're all breaking into our five gallon buckets full of nickels we've been saving for that nsync reunion tour we all know is so totally waiting to happen, we'll be leaving the house for that last trip to the grocery store to stock up on ramen and thunderbird for the apocalypse, and sure enough, one foot out the door, we'll see something like this:
You're obviously buying. I'm buying. We're buying. In this corner, you've got the heir apparent to michael jordan, black barbershops, powdered donuts, and a hip-hopized song from the 50's. How could adidas ever respond to something like this? Yes, of course:
Here, you've got the only reasonable response to an ad of nike's caliber: scooters, kevin garnett, asian rappers, a hip-hopized song from the 50's, missy elliot, david becks, and blurry footage easily recognizable as taped at my most recent birthday party. Right about now you're wishing you'd made it out, aren't you.
But really, how much could this commercial have cost? In the grand scheme of things, Nike is probably going to sell more shoes and have spent less (a paltry 90 million for Lebron) thus giving them the upper hand. When thriller was tearing through car stereos in 1984, Jordan was making 2.5 mil over 5 years. So, obviously, our concept of worth must be on the right track. By those standards, shouldn't all of our parents working in '84 now be making 40 times more? Let's try dad at the office regarding that one.
Try and wrap your mind around how bad Keith Richards must be feeling during this shooting of his duet with Chuck Berry's band. He botches the song a hundred times, and the piano player looks about as happy as i was to find a hypodermic needle two blocks from my house this morning. There goes the neighborhood, tee hee!
Plus, is that Steve Jordan on drums or not? He looks like he's about to throw Keith in a woodchipper just after 2 minutes in, but when they finally get it together thirty seconds later he looks happier than a pig in shit. Could it be he's masking his true feelings regarding Keith's abilities? That would be wrong. Chuck's obviously thrilled.
Good thing i'm getting this out there before tomorrow afternoon, lest anyone was considering violently throwing a half-thawed turkey into a vat of overflowing 500 degree oil to celebrate our first harvest at Plymouth in 1621. Personally, i was planning on tying a turducken to a tree and just firing rockets at it with my new Panzerfaust III (thanks, ebay!) until i saw that the turkey had been sufficiently defeated, upon which a circle of my closest friends would sing "do you believe in magic" and pick through the assortment of bones and tree bark to put together some pretty unique necklaces. Tradition, you know? It's what America is all about.
Folks, there's a lot of danger out there, and a large amount of it happens to be lurking. In fact, in a google search for "danger lurking" you'll find it's currently residing most in: bottles of red wine, the tour de france crowd, your clothes dryer, public wi-fi, barack obama's tax policy, and flu shots. Really, you're best off not trusting anything. And that means you, old people, small lizards, and snow.
One of my personal favorite aspects of the holidays in America is the inevitable horror news coverage of holiday-related subjects. We're talking about live from the situation room, kids choking on tinsel, people starving in line at the mall, and this great obsession we've developed over the last couple years, with no explanation whatsoever:
We're talking of course about tryptophan, the most silent of killers. Standing in line at Bank of America, where they've recently set up flat screen televisions to counterbalance the long lines of people waiting to hear about their housing loans being eaten by giant sandworms, i overheard the first of what will surely be an endless slew of threat embellishments. As a news segment ended, we saw the stereotypical anchorwoman making banter with her weatherlady, wishing her good luck on Thanksgiving in coping with the scariest sounding amino acid on the planet. Though i don't recall it word for word, it went something along the lines of "be careful getting behind the wheel on thursday night after all that tryptophan..." Tryptophan. It's an amino acid, and an essential protein builder in the human diet. There are high levels of it in chocolate, bananas, milk, yogurt, eggs, fish, poultry, red meat, spirulina, and peanuts. So for the jury still out on whether or not it's the turkey that's going to make you fall asleep on the drive home from aunt mildred's and plunge your car full of children off an overpass and NOT the ten corona's you drink watching the Detroit Lions get pummeled like a demented tether ball, you've got a few things mixed up.
In fact, it's overstatements on small scientific findings like this that make me think we're better off as a christian fundamentalist society. Science is way more scary than useful to the general public, and so are all the amino acids, for that matter. Allow me to be the first to suggest we place all amino acids on the FDA-prohibited list, and protect American families from this atrocity this Thanksgiving. Drive safe everyone, and avoid the benadryl green beans.
Since my last post was unusually enjoyable to put together (imagine that, me wanting to talk about 90's rock ((or sports!)) i've decided to dedicate at least one more to someone i feel is deserving of a real haranguing. This is also an issue i've managed never to flip-flop on, unlike such infamous claims as:
a) i'll never eat guacamole so long as i live or b) oh, if i could only just sleep with that britney spears!
No, i've consistently disliked Carlos Santana for a good 20 years, and have never, never once, not ever so much as nodded my head in a hotel elevator or mongolian barbeque when "black magic woman" came on the radio. Santana was terrible enough leading up to the 1990's, but the album he put out at the end of the decade featuring "Smooth" with Rob Thomas really sealed the deal for me then and there. That song might go on my all-time most hated songs mixtape, to play when Bristol Palin is sworn in as president in the year 2040, or if the Royals ever move to a city like Albuquerque.
From there he went on to (successfully, now) collaborate with every other crappy artist under the stars, and received nothing but praise and money for doing so. Really, collaborations with Sean Paul, Everlast AND Nickelback? Really, America? All the while making headlines for doing things like curing bad breath by forgiving child molesters and being saved by christ from committing suicide 7 times.
Honestly, if you need to be saved 7 different times by Christ himself from killing yourself, how much confidence can you have going into your next solo that there isn't going to be an 8th? I feel for Carlos about as much as i miss O-Town. And Crazy Town. All the towns, really. Sugah. Baby.
