The Stinker

In this post, I introduced my blogroll as it existed at the time (March 7, 2008). As I mentioned, I only put my own personal favorites, i.e., my “daily reads,” in my blogroll.

Today I want to pick one of these blogs to highlight to the attention of my readership. No particular reason for this, other than that I’ve got nothing else to post since I’m still without a humor mu… What do you mean, that excuse is getting old? Well, pissoff then, I’m not getting paid to blog. Go read Dilbert or something. Asshole.

Anyhoo, the rest of you: I want to pimp Can O’ Whup-Ass today, because it never ceases to make me laugh hard enough to spit coffee all over my monitor. (I also get an immature little chuckle over the fact that the proprietor, who is gay, goes by the nickname Whup-Ass Master, or just WAM for short. Dunno why, it just strikes me as ironically apropos.)

If you’ve never visited his blog, you should do so at once. The “Ask Aunt Betsy” posts are outrageously hysterical, but there are many other great regular features as well, like the Foxy News Channel and This Week in Poop. This guy is a comedy genius.

I also did a post (here) wherein I described a parallel universe I found where Mr. Fab and WAM are actually one and the same person, and his blog in the parallel universe looks like a strange mash-up of Pointless Drivel and Can O’ Whup-Ass from our universe. You should read that post again, because recycling is good for the environment, and hey, still no humor muse.

Tags: Humor, Parody, Miscellaneous, Blogroll // Add Comment »

If I was going to invent an evil mastermind persona for myself, I would be a bit more circumspect about it than other evil masterminds have been. Take Sauron, for instance. In the Third Age of Middle Earth, he took the form of a giant red eyeball floating atop a mountain spire in Mordor. You can’t get much more obvious than that. One glance at him and you’d be all, “hey look, an evil mastermind!” No subtlety at all. Other evil masterminds are almost as bad: Darth Vader wears a sinister black robot life support system, the emperor wears a Grim Reaper style hooded cloak, and Lex Luthor wears the loudest, cheesiest suit ensembles you could imagine. These guys are just getting way too much into their evil mastermindedness. It’s like they’re just in it for the trappings that come along with the role.

If I was going to be an evil mastermind (and who knows, maybe I will someday), I would go about it differently. I would disguise myself as an absentminded professor type — which would really require very little disguise at all, since that’s practically what I am — and then carefully craft all of my sinister plans so they could be attributed to my bumbling forgetfulness. “Oh dear,” I’d say. “My research experiment in subliminal mind control was accidentally patched into the university television channel? And now hundreds of young co-eds have been put into a hypnotic trance-like state where they are highly susceptible to suggestion? How dreadful! I must have forgotten to unhook my prototype beta-wave generator from the network. Oh, those darned Campus IT people make everything so complicated! You’d better send those co-eds over to my office so I can see what can be done to reverse their condition.”

It’s all about avoiding calling attention to oneself until one’s plans for complete global domination have come to fruition. Try to stay below the radar and keep a low profile until it’s too late to be stopped. I mean, who’s going to suspect Fred MacMurray? Just sayin’, is all.

* * * * *

This post was brought to you by Subliminal Software, Inc. “You won’t know we’re there… until we’re already gone.”

Tags: Observational Humor, Humor, Miscellaneous, Satire // 5 Comments »

In 1970, when I was five years old, my family moved from Los Angeles to Cincinnati, forever separating me from my beloved kindergarten sweetheart, a young brunette lass named Jackie. Sigh.

But it all turned out okay, because Cincinnati’s then-independent TV station, WXIX Channel 19, introduced me to a new cartoon that I had never seen before. It was called “Speed Racer.”

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

My life was forever changed.

“Speed Racer” was, and still remains, the greatest cartoon ever made. What’s not to love? It has everything:

• Action. The Mach 5 is The Coolest. Car. Evar. It has saw blades, it jumps, it can go underwater, it’s just BADASS. And you are guaranteed that virtually every episode will have at least one race, sometimes two or three, wherein Speed and the Mach 5 kick some serious ass.
• Drama. As if the races weren’t dramatic enough, there’s more. The ongoing tension between Pops and Speed over the latter’s fledgling racing career… The good-guy versus bad-guy conflicts… The whole mystery surrounding Speed’s older brother Rex Racer, who is missing and presumed dead, but is actually the mysterious masked driver known only as Racer-X… You can’t name any soap opera that has this kind of drama, bucko. The scene in “The Trick Race” episode wherein Racer-X reveals his secret identity to Speed was selected by TV-Guide as one of the most memorable moments in television history. And rightly so, bitches.
• Comedy. If Spritle and Chim-Chim can’t make you laugh, there is something broken inside you.

I was instantly hooked, as were all my 5 year-old peeps in my new neighborhood. We all pretended to be Speed, and we each had little paper buttons labeled “A” through “G” taped to the center consoles of our Big Wheels — except the one asshole rich kid in the neighborhood whose parents bought him the Green Machine (which has no center console to which to tape the buttons). And we would all run home as fast as we could after school, to make sure we didn’t miss the daily episode. I distinctly recall one time in the first grade when my mother had to come to school for a parent-teacher thingy at the end of the day, and she chatted with my teacher long enough to make me miss “Speed Racer.” I was so pissed I didn’t talk to her for a week.

My kids inherited my penchant for “Speed Racer” (or at least I tell myself they did), giving me the excuse to watch the old episodes on DVD. Sometimes the kids even watch with me. And for my oldest son’s final year in Cub Scouts, the car I made we made for entry into the Pinewood Derby was — guess what?

And in case that doesn’t sufficiently establish my creds as a “Speed Racer” geek, here’s what sits on my desk at work:

It’s a 1:18 scale die-cast model by Ertl. Okay, so this isn’t an actual picture of the one sitting on my desk; it’s just a picture I lifted from the innernets, because I’m too lazy to go out to my car and get my cell phone so I can use its little camera to take a picture. Anyway, if I did, it would pretty much look just like this, except my desk is more of a light blonde color of wood, and there’s a bunch of crap all over it, including a huge pile of mostly illegible post-it notes, a half-used box of Tylenol® Sinus (my drug of choice, yo), a phone the size of a Buick, about 12 coffee mugs (none of which are particularly clean), and several stacks of papers ranging from 5″ to 12″ high, the contents of which you really wouldn’t care about. Also, my plastic figure of Chim-Chim guards my Mach 5 model for me. He is perched atop the hood with a bug-eyed look on his face that hints at an imminent dung flinging for any passerby who gets too close.

Now… let’s talk about the movie.

I had been tracking the progress of the on-again, off-again “Speed Racer” movie for many years now. At one time (circa 1994) Speed was going to be played by Johnny Depp (please, God, no!), then both Depp and then-director Julien Temple bailed (yesss!). At least four other incarnations of the project occurred, including a Vince Vaughn-led revival of the effort that would cast himself as Racer-X. (Glad that effort died!) Finally in 2006 the Wachowski brothers (of Matrix fame) were brought on to write and direct the movie, and filming started in June of 2007.

But… would the film be faithful to the original, or would it mercilessly rape my sacred childhood memories? The available information on the planned movie gave me reason to be optimistic. It was to have a “retro-future” look and be a family-oriented movie to “reach a wider audience.” With a real chimpanzee for Chim-Chim rather than a lame CGI stand-in. All sounded promising.

Spoiler alert! Read no further if you haven’t seen the movie yet!

So, we (me, Mrs. Stinker, and the three little stinklings) went to see the movie Saturday afternoon. And other than a few minor gripes which I’ll get to in a moment, it did not disappoint. It was a brilliant and witty combination of intentionally campy cheesiness and high-tech Disneyesque eye candy that captured even my five year old’s attention for the entire 2 hour and 15 minute duration. It was faithful to the original in all but a few ways, and most of the changes were reasonable, given the transition from a 1960’s voice-dubbed Japanimation to a 2008 live action movie. So the critics and naysayers can all pissoff.

The high points:

• The Mach 5 was very faithful to the original. Thank you, W-brothers. If you had messed with my sacred icon of childhood, I would have had to invent interesting ways to kill you both slowly.
• The flashback scenes showing a young (~9 year old) Speed Racer were sheer genius, even though the cuts back and forth between present and past were sometimes a bit hard to follow.
• Matthew Fox (Jack on “Lost,” or, if you prefer, Charlie from “Party of Five”) was the PERFECT casting choice for Racer-X. An Academy Award nom for best supporting actor should be coming his way. He was ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT in this role. I cannot stress this enough. This guy has become one of my favorite actors — and I don’t really have any favorite actors, other than maybe Clint Eastwood because, well, he’s CLINT FUCKING EASTWOOD. Okay, I’m gushing, I’ll stop now.
• Spritle and Chim-Chim provided some great comic relief.
• The special effects and cinematography were very daring — some have called this an “experimental” film — and were absolutely stunning. I think it succeeded dramatically.
• The “retro-future” look, while not faithful to the original (the race tracks in particular are very futuristic), worked very well in the context of a 2008 live action film.

The low points (which are definitely outweighed by the high ones):

• The “races” are too much like demolition derbies: an endless series of rapid spin-outs and recoveries, cars knocking into each other, outlandish high-tech weaponry and defensive systems, and so on. It’s as if the goal was to parody the original cartoon to intentionally comic levels. Methinks they went a bit too far here. If I wanted to see a good parody of Speed Racer, I’d see this one.
• For the final “Grand Prix” race of the movie, the Racer family must finish building a new car — the Mach 6 — in less than 36 hours. Now, if you are going to replace the beloved and revered Mach 5 with a new and improved version, you have some ’splaining to do first, Lucy. You need to give us a reason why the Mach 5 could not be used in the race (this was never explained!). And you need to take the time in the story development to convince us Mach 5 fan-boys that the Mach 6 is at least the shit-hot car that the 5 was. It all happened too fast, through a rapid montage of short little scenes showing the Racer family throwing this new car together all of a sudden. They also passed up a great opportunity to have Pops hide the plans for the next generation car in invisible ink on the Mach 5’s windshield, a gimmick which many fans of the original would have remembered fondly.
• In the movie, Rex Racer becomes Racer X after getting plastic surgery to change his appearance and protect his identity. Thus when he unmasks himself to Speed, he isn’t revealed as Speed’s long-lost brother, as he was in the original cartoon. They dicked with one of the greatest scenes in television history. Definitely the low spot of the movie, right there.
• The movie was 2 hours and 15 minutes long. It would have been easy to edit out some unnecessary dialog (there was plenty of it!) and get the movie down to 1:45 or 1:50.
• I didn’t expect to hear words like “ass” and “asshole” in a movie being touted as a family flick. I also didn’t expect to see Spritle flip the bird to the corporate bad-guy. Funny? Hell, yeah! But perhaps inappropriate for a family movie?

Okay, so there you have it. Summary: a really great movie, mostly faithful to the original, and you need to see it at once.

Hmmm, what’s that? Oh, what about Trixie, you ask? Well, they played up her status as Speed’s girlfriend just a teensy bit more than in the cartoon. She was really good in the movie, and looked pretty close to the cartoon Trixie even though she didn’t wear Capri pants.

Say, come to think of it, Trixie reminds me of my old flame Jackie from kindergarten. I wonder why I never noticed that before.

I also wonder what a psychologist would make of that.

Tags: Observational Humor, Humor, Miscellaneous // 2 Comments »

Note, when browsing by category (”Motivational Poster Parodies”), you must click on the post title to see the images.

Okay, since I’ve been gone most of the week and didn’t get a chance to do my weekly motivators/ LOLs post, I thought I’d just post a batch for both this week and next week together. Here ya go.

And finally, my entry in Mr. Fabulous’ I can has contest? contest:

Tags: Motivational Poster Parodies, Humor, Parody, Satire // 1 Comment »

Greetings, dum-dums. Having been exiled to the hellishly boring backwaters of your second-rate galaxy with nothing better to do at the moment, I have decided to grace you with my towering intellect in a guest post here on — oh, I hesitate to even write it — The Stinker. What a disgraceful name for an electronic media forum.

Purely to pass the time on this droll planet, I’ve agreed to answer the proprietor’s astoundingly stupid and banal interview questions.

1. What is your greatest strength? It’s a two-way tie between my 400+ IQ and my saint-like tolerance of dum-dum humor bloggers. But I can also do a killer impression of Harvey Korman.

2. What is your biggest weakness? I will admit to having a penchant for creating universal doomsday machines. I have never used any of them, though, as evinced by the fact that you still exist and are reading this blog post.

3. Where do you see yourself in 5 years? In long-term cybernetic cryosleep, if things don’t start getting more interesting on this rock pretty soon.

4. Why did you leave/are you looking to leave your last job? My last job was serving as a sort of high-tech fairy godfather/mentor-figure to a couple of prehistoric dum-dums. They were both eaten by a pack of saber tooth tigers around 30,000 B.C. and I’ve been in cybernetic cryosleep until about a month ago. The world doesn’t seem to have changed very much since then, either.

5. What would a good song parody be? For reasons I should hope would be obvious, I’d do a parody of The Beatles’ “Across The Universe” called “Stuck On This World I Curse.” Or maybe a parody of “Back in the U.S.S.R” called “Back At Zatox, My Home Star.”

6. Do you prefer to work alone, or in a team environment? Given the relative differences in our respective IQ’s, I am, for all practical purposes, alone, when among humans.

7. What is your salary requirement? 300,000 Outer-Galactic Credits per Zatox annum. If there was an actual exchange rate between OGC’s and your earth “dollars” it would be beyond your means to pay me for more than a nanosecond of my precious time. But since I have nothing else to do I’ll take the job until I get bored.

Well. That was not particularly interesting. I’m afraid you’ll have to do better than that if you wish to secure my services as humor muse. Please come up with some interesting challenges for me. Like, how to make a universal doomsday machine out of a time portal. Say, by sending the time portal back in time, and then putting the time portal through its earlier self, thereby creating an exponentially expanding rift in the space-time continuum. Hey, that gives me an idea…

Later, dum-dums!

Tags: Humor, Miscellaneous // 3 Comments »

I’m on travel for work all week, so posting may be rather light (i.e., practically non-existent) until next week.

Coming soon: guest posts from some of the other candidates for the humor muse position. How did you think Humor Muse Barbie did? She’s a bit too bubbly and extroverted for me, I think.

Tags: Miscellaneous // 6 Comments »

I use StatCounter to track my web stats here on The Stinker. Today’s post summarizes some of the interesting things StatCounter has been telling me.

First, the long-term trend. Since I started The Stinker about 4 months ago, my stats have been steadily climbing:

Now, I’m clueless about how to promote my blog. The only thing I do is ping Google, Technorati, and Ice Rocket whenever I put up a new post. So I guess this trend ain’t too bad, considering. (The Stinker actually surpassed the hit count rate for my other blog, The Thinker, in February, and now gets almost three times as much traffic.) If this rate of increase continues, by this time next year I’ll be getting somewhere around 14,000 unique visitors per month. But notice that my number of returning visitors is remaining pretty flat. More on that in a bit…

Now, about my daily hit counts. During weekdays, I’m currently averaging about 130 unique visitors per day and about 250 page loads. But on weekends, these rates drop faster than Paris Hilton’s panties in the men’s room at Hyde’s. This tells me a couple of things: first, at least a significant percentage of visitors must be clicking on some category links and surfing multiple pages; and second, most of the visitors to my blog are probably surfing the web while at work. So it’s gratifying to know that I’m likely contributing to corporate inefficiency. Everyone likes to feel they are having an impact, you know.

But who are all these people? Where are they coming from? How are they finding The Stinker?

StatCounter provides the details. I can find out what search terms are being used to find my blog, and I can see what pages visitors are coming from to get here.

Over 90% of the visitors arrived here by googling. And of those visitors, over 70% used search terms that are variations of “motivational poster parodies.” (Other interesting search terms I’ve noticed include “do women actually like the stinker?” and “how to annoy a dog.”) And for some reason Google is sending them to this post, which is my first and lamest effort at a motivational poster parody. Just great. No wonder I’m not turning any of these one-time visitors into regular readers. Why the hell has Google so prominently indexed my first motivator parody, but none of my subsequent and much better ones? Fuckers. Wonderful all-knowing sages of knowledge (in case one of them reads this).

So. One more stat to briefly mention: my returning visitors count. On weekdays I’m averaging about 12 or so returning visitors per day. If I (optimistically?) assume that every “regular reader” of The Stinker checks in once every other day (since that’s about my rate of new posts), that means I may have about 24 regular readers. I’m not sure exactly how RSS feeds work, but I suppose it’s possible I may have additional regular readers who receive my new blog posts via RSS aggregators and it doesn’t show up in my web stats. Probably half or more of those regulars are other humor bloggers who visit my blog because I visit theirs. Which is fine.

And which also gives me the seed of a potentially great idea for increasing my blog traffic. DRAMATICALLY.

<evil_mastermind> MWUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA </evil_mastermind>

More on that idea in a future post. This post, like Atlas Shrugged, has already grown too long and boring.

Tags: Miscellaneous // 8 Comments »

Like wow. My very first guest post evar, I’m soooo excited!

So I’m supposed to use this post to like answer some questions that guy at The Stinker sent to me. Wish me luck, k? OMG, I’m like sooo nervous! If I do really really good I might get the job as humor muse, that would so rock! Humor is like the bestest, right?

1. What is your greatest strength? Um, fashion accessorizing and stuff. Totally.

2. What is your biggest weakness? OMG, I have a complete weakness for Prada shoes.

3. Where do you see yourself in 5 years? I would soooo love to run like my own little boutique. OMG, I had to google “boutique” to spell it, LOL!

4. Why did you leave/are you looking to leave your last job? Well. My last job was Full Hijab Barbie over in like the Middle East? Which is like across the ocean and then even further. OMG, it was so repressive and degrading. They tried to make me wear like this long black robe thing with a mask, in like 100 degree weather. I was all, like, no way. Halter top and shorty-shorts for me, peeps. So they banned me from Iran, can you believe that? How hurtful. Mean people suck.

5. What would a good song parody be? Oh. Um… I had to google “parody”, I admit it! LOL again! K, so like that wikipedia thingy says a parody is used to “mock, comment, or poke fun at an original work, its subject, or its author, by means of humorous or satirical imitations.” OMG, are u serious? That is like so hurtful and abusive and bullying. Forget it.

6. Do you prefer to work alone, or in a team environment? Oh definitely team. I’m a people person!

7. What is your salary requirement? OMG, I can has salary? LOL!

Wow, that was fun! Oh, I do hope I get picked as humor muse, we’ll have like such a fun time together!

Cya!

Tags: Humor, Miscellaneous // 3 Comments »

Today’s post is just some random notes and rants on various topics, some funny, some not. It’s hit or miss without a humor muse, you know. (Is this excuse wearing thin yet?)

On my blogroll…

I’ve been meaning to add some entries to my blogroll for quite a while, and I finally got around to doing it. I also relabeled the blogroll “Sites the Stinker Likes” rather than “Other Humor Sites,” because a couple of these, strictly speaking, aren’t purely humor blogs.

Oh, and if any of you cared to reciprocate and add me to your blogroll, well, I wouldn’t complain.

On rockets and musicals…

According to this article, the much acclaimed novel “Rocket Boys,” written by retired NASA engineer Homer Hickam and already made into the excellent hit movie “October Sky,” is now going to be adapted into a Broadway musical: “Rocket Boys, The Musical.”

Gay.

But not unexpected, given the kind of lamesuckery that passes for a musical these days. Have you seen that Disney channel abomination called “High School Musical?” And the one scene when the kids are doing this retarded “Get’cha Head In The Game” song where they make a rap beat by bouncing basketballs? I think this would go over great in the “Rocket Boys” musical. Homer will be arguing with his dad about coal mining versus college, and it will segue into a musical production where all the coal miners start coughing up coal-dust loogeys in syncopated rhythm.

Or something like that.

On stupid people…

Don’t hate the person; hate the IQ.
– The Stinker

On the seven deadly sins…

Apparently the Vatican has added seven new deadly sins to the original list of seven deadly sins.

The original seven are lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, anger, envy, and pride. The new ones are polluting, genetic engineering, being obscenely rich, drug dealing, abortion, pedophilia and causing social injustice.

This is, of course, complete and utter bullshit.

It smacks of political pandering. The only sin in that list that isn’t at least partly politically motivated is pedophilia, and even that one is probably just a public relations damage-control ploy, given the source. Okay, upon second read, maybe drug dealing is bad, too. And abortion, definitely abortion. Fine, so my premise actually sucked. But still: genetic engineering? What’s wrong with coming up with ways to cure diseases, develop drought-resistant crops, and the like? And being “obscenely rich?” Who gets to decide what level of wealth is “obscene?” What if you came by the money through hard, honest work and wise decisions? Why is that a sin? And who gets to decide what a “social injustice” is? The 40-year “war on poverty” was a social injustice in my opinion, because it fostered humiliating dependency and created friction between social classes. But it was started with good intentions, so was it a sin? Really, many of these “sins” are way too subject to interpretation and misuse.

I would like to offer a more compelling list of seven new deadly sins. These ones are clearly evil. Practitioners of the following sins are committing abominations in the eyes of God.

Driving slow in the fast lane. Using the 12 item or less check-out aisle at the grocery store when you have more than 12 items. Wearing spandex in public when you are fat. Driving slow in the fast lane. Extremoversion. Having a web site with gratuitous flash animations and/or that automatically plays music when it loads. Driving slow in the fast lane. There, I think that makes seven.

On global warming…

On my “serious” blog, The Thinker, I’ve posted numerous times (see here) on the subject of global warming. In a nutshell, my opinion is that global warming is real, it is happening, it is probably caused partly but not necessarily predominantly by man-made CO2, and the consequences will be nowhere near as dire as the alarmists are predicting. I’ve pointed out how the alarmists are dramatizing the situation, how the climate models can’t and shouldn’t be trusted to support the predictions being made, how there is no “consensus” on the issue as the alarmists claim, and how an ever mounting body of evidence is revealing that natural negative feedback mechanisms will serve to increasingly attenuate the impacts of further CO2 addition to the atmosphere. I haven’t really touched on what should be done about global warming, but in my opinion, the answer would be to go after the low-hanging fruit — those things that are fairly easy to do with little or no impact that will provide obvious benefits, such as alternative energy research, legislative reforms that will enable our refineries to be modified and new ones built, etc. There’s no justification whatsoever for the extreme measures the alarmists are suggesting we take.

But now, I’ve just been won over to the dark side.

According to this article, global warming can be expected to impact beer production worldwide.

Holy mother of God, do you hear me? BEER PRODUCTION. WILL. BE. IMPACTED.

This is a calamity of Biblical proportions. It no longer matters whether or not global warming is caused by humans. The secondary consequences of a draconian response to global warning are now insignificant compared to the potential impact to beer production. We need solutions, and FAST, people. We need to ration electricity, ban SUV’s, shut down polluting factories, and confiscate Al Gore’s fleet of private jets. All factories should be retooled for the production of dry ice. Dump that shit in the ocean as fast as we can make it, hopefully things’ll cool down by a few degrees and the barley and hops crops will be saved. Also drop a hint to Ted Kennedy that global warming may impact gin production as well, and that should get things rolling on the legislative front. Any other ideas?

Tags: Observational Humor, Miscellaneous // 3 Comments »

Note, when browsing by category (”Motivational Poster Parodies”), you must click on each post title to see the images.

Tags: Motivational Poster Parodies, Humor, Parody, Satire // 4 Comments »