Truman Vs. The Poster For Nim's Island

You brought this on yourself, poster.

There’s a Hollywood Video a few blocks away from my house, and I go there often to rent video games and DVDs. Hollywood Video, like most other video stores, advertises new releases by way of gigantic posters in their windows. This is fine by me – advertising is advertising, after all – but for pretty much the entire summer, one poster has dominated the window that I must walk past to enter the building. It’s the poster for Nim’s Island, a children’s fantasy movie that was ever so briefly in theaters and has now been deposited on the filthy doorstep of the home video industry. Indeed, I feel like the poster has been up in the window for longer than Nim’s Island was in theaters at all, because I’ve been walking past it for weeks upon weeks. I can only assume that the producers of Nim’s Island are trying to make me care about Nim’s Island, something that I resolved I would never do. But alas, my utter disdain for this movie’s poster has finally spilled over, so I hope you’ll join me for the next 1200 or so words as I dissect everything I dislike about the poster for Nim’s Island

Let me begin by saying that this poster is just too damn silly. I understand that this is a children’s movie – I know that nobody went into this expecting to win an Oscar, and that the screenwriter(s) probably didn’t bring their A-game on the dialogue as this film’s target audience seldom sits still for more than 5 minutes unless they’ve been medicated. That being said, I think that children – noisy, detestable little urchins though they may be – still deserve a somewhat greater level of respect than this poster is giving them. This poster attempts to pander to the young child’s love of silliness, but it tries so hard that it goes way, way overboard, and the result is a poster positively dripping with silly, which is about as enjoyable as eating a sandwich positively dripping with Dijon mustard. Please do follow my numbered talking points as I attempt to support my thesis:

Yes, I know this image is hella pixelated, but there's only so much I can do. Feel free to consult the original image.

EXHIBIT 1: LIZARD WEARING SOMBRERO RIDING OTHER LIZARD

So what the hell is going on here, exactly? What I’m seeing is a lizard astride another lizard, riding it as one would a horse, and the equestrian lizard is wearing a sombrero. Now, I can’t imagine why a lizard would want to wear a sombrero, as a sombrero is a hat designed to keep the sun off of the wearer, and the lizard is an animal that relies on the sun for energy. The fact that the lizard, by wearing the sombrero, is depriving himself of energy, explains why he has to ride another lizard to get around, but it doesn’t explain why the other lizard appears to be a beast of burden. This question is a lot like the age old puzzle of, “Why, if Pluto and Goofy are both dogs, does Pluto have to live in a dog house and eat dog food while Goofy gets to act like a person and talk to the other characters?” It implies that there is some sort of lizard hierarchy at work here, that the horse lizard is at the bottom of it, and that the riding lizard is at the top – a member of the lizard bourgeoisie, perhaps, with such an easy life that he can afford to wear a hat that saps his energy. Is this really the sort of thing you want your kids to watch?

EXHIBIT 2: SEAL CARRYING BINOCULARS

Let’s forget about wondering where he even found binoculars in the first place. Let’s not ask how he manages to grip them using only his wet, smooth flippers. Let’s take it on faith that he’s found some way to adjust the focus using those big, floppy appendages of his. What I want to know is this: What does a seal need with a pair of binoculars? What possible position in life, even in a magical fantasy world such as the setting of this film, could a seal be in that would require him or her to own and operate a pair of binoculars? A seal is a water dwelling creature; it eats lots of fish. Binoculars don’t help it find fish because fish are almost always underwater, and binoculars aren’t much good down there.

EXHIBIT 3: SEAGULL WEARING FLIGHT GOGGLES

Flight goggles? Okay, I will admit that they’re fairly practical for a seagull (certainly moreso than a pair of freaking binoculars), but it makes me worry that, if one seagull needs to wear eye protection when it flies, maybe all other seagulls need eye protection too, but simply don’t have access to it. Are their eyes getting all dried out while they fly around? Suddenly I want to start a trust fund to buy flight goggles for underprivileged seagulls, which is far from the intended purpose of this poster.

EXHIBIT 4: STACK OF TURTLES

Why are they doing that? What does it mean? Why are they stacked up like that? Is that a thing they do in the film, or did the design team just whip that up in PhotoShop to create something good and silly for the poster, so all the kids would badger their parents into seeing the turtle stacking movie, perhaps under the misconception that it was related to the Dr. Seuss book that dealt with similar subject matter. Also, I’d like to point out that at this point, all the elements I’ve criticized have been animals standing on one another. The movie could just as well be called Island Of Anthropomorphic Animals Standing On Top Of Other Anthropomorphic Animals.

EXHIBIT 5: GERARD BUTLER

Pardon me Gerard, or should I say King Leonidus, but what exactly are you doing to your career? You were pretty much the baddest motherfucker on Earth in 300 - the John Shaft of ancient Greece, if I do say so myself. All my friends and I, man, we worshipped you in that movie. And all the girls I know? They wanted you! In all sorts of nasty, obscure ways! And then you turn right around and make P.S – I Love You, and now you’re sharing space with a stack of turtles and a seal with binoculars? It’s like the captain of the football team joining the swing choir and starting the Tolkien Club.

EXHIBIT 5.1: ABIGAIL BRESLIN

Pretty much the same thing here. You started really strong with Little Miss Sunshine, and then you did No Reservations, which I hear they’re permanently screening in Hell, and now you’re starring in this? You’re aiding and abetting Gerard Butler’s downfall, not to mention hastening your own, and I don’t like it one bit.

EXHIBIT 6: JODIE FOSTER

This isn’t a complaint – I just wanted to say, Ms. Foster, that you’ve aged really well. This lady got nominated for her first Oscar when my parents were getting married, folks. Let’s give her a big hand! I mean, shame on you for being in this movie, but still – your bright smile and thoughtful eyes are by far my favorite part of this poster.

EXHIBIT 7: NAME ARRANGEMENT

You’ve got the names of the film’s stars at the top of the poster, and you’ve got all three stars below the names – I see little reason to not put each name above the relevant actor. There’s no joke here. This is just a guy pointing out principles of freaking design.

EXHIBIT 8: MISSING COMMA

There ought to be a comma after “Media”, so that the reader gets a second to breathe. As it is right now, I feel sort of like the poster is so eager to mention that these are the same people that made Charlotte’s Web that they’re rushing their words, shouting to you like a greedy hobo trying to get your attention before you get on the bus. “Hey! We made Charlotte’s Web, so this movie is going to be really good too! Hey! Buy this movie! Where are you going? No! Listen!”

Now, I’m not making any comment on the quality of the movie itself (although, from the Wikipedia summary, it looks like a mess) but I’ve got to say that the poster isn’t doing Nim’s Island any favors. It’s so dedicated to conveying a sense of whimsy and silliness that it becomes visually busy to the point that it’s distracting – so distracting that I could write an entire blog entry about core elements of the poster without even knowing what the movie is about. Compare this to the posters for excellent children’s movies and you’ll see that they all convey a similar sense of lighthearted fun, but without contributing to the ADD nature of our media.

So are you satisfied, Hollywood Video? That’s what I think of the poster. Feel free to take it down now.

Truman Capps apologizes for writing a blog about such a narrow subject, but that poster had been challenging him every day, and he will not back down when faced with a picture of a stack of turtles.

I Want To Ride It Where I Like

"Paint my chopper-bicycle green, please!"
"What shade of green?"
"LIME green!"

As a child, I was slow to do just about everything. For instance, I took my sweet time learning how to crawl: According to my mother, in my pre-crawling days I simply dragged myself around on my stomach using my arms – any upper body strength this action potentially gave me quickly melted away after I discovered television. I was slow to talk, as well - I didn’t learn to speak for a good long time, which gave my parents cause to wonder if I had some sort of brain damage, and then, when I finally did start talking, they knew for sure. But the delays in those areas weren’t especially out of the ordinary – worrisome, sure, but I was only late by a matter of months in each category. The fact that it took me 19 years to learn how to ride a bike, however, is a little more troubling.

I was not the five year old whose knees were always banged up and who was always covered in mud. I was almost painstakingly cautious in everything I did, and I washed my hands whenever I even suspected that I had dirt on them. I was like the Adrian Monk of my kindergarten class, and I mean that right on down to my social skills. The point is, I had a really strong sense of self-preservation back then. If I sensed that something would hurt me, my response was to stay as far away from it as I could, because back then I could see no way in which a thing that hurt me could do me any good whatsoever. Take, for example, my chicken pox vaccination. Yeah, I knew that I didn’t want to get the chicken pox, because it sounded like a horrible, horrible sickness. However, I also didn’t want to get pricked in the arm, because as far as I was concerned, the cure was worse than the disease – if I didn’t get the shot, my arm wouldn’t hurt and there was a good chance I wouldn’t get chicken pox. However, if I did get the shot, there was a 100% chance that my arm would hurt, and I didn’t like those odds one bit.

So take that kid and tell him to sit astride a two-wheeled machine that requires 1) Physical coordination and B) Speed to balance, and just see how enthusiastic he is about your proposition. More likely than not, he’s going to politely excuse himself and go watch The Brave Little Toaster.

It didn’t help anything that all my friends were learning to ride bikes at this point, and they had spectacular cuts, bruises, and casts to show for their efforts. With the benefit of hindsight I realize that most of my friends were pretty big fuckups anyway, but at the time my impression was that grievous injury was just as much a part of learning to ride a bike as vomiting is a part of the college party life. It’s like the scene in the Vietnam War movie where the new recruit gets off the plane at the air base in Saigon and sees a bunch of body bags and guys with their arms and legs cut off getting on the plane to go back home, only for me that scene lasted for about seven years, and the dead bodies and horribly injured veterans are laughing at the new guy for not wanting to learn to ride a bike. Or, I mean, go get shot in the jungle. Shit. Let’s move on.

There came a point in high school where I realized that learning how to ride a bike probably wasn’t as dangerous as I thought. This was most likely in those magical years before I had my driver’s license, when I was eager to find any form of transportation that didn’t involve my mother* in some way. It was then that I started reconsidering the whole bike proposition and weighing the benefits of finally doing what countless people one-third my age were doing.

*No offense Mom – it’s just that I’m still haunted by memories of the time you had to drive that poor girl and me on my first date. You didn’t do anything embarrassing, but… But you were there. And you were my Mom. And it was a date. I… I just can’t talk about it right now.

At that point, though, the problem lay not with my fear of learning to ride a bike but my fear of being seen learning to ride a bike. The thing is, everyone looks just about the same when they learn to balance on two wheels. They start out wobbly and scared, and then gradually they get their balance, and next thing you know they’re grinning broadly and riding down the street, and Mom and Dad are standing a few yards back, arm in arm, Mom wiping away tears and Dad firing up his pipe. And all that is fine if you’re six, but at the time that I was getting over my fear of bicycling I had been shaving for a few years. These sorts of heartwarming scenes do not work well with teenagers – teenagers are clumsy and oafish, and seeing them attempting to do things that are heartwarming for youngsters gives the impression that they had been really cute as a kid and aren’t cute anymore, but are still trying to capitalize on some former cuteness. I didn’t want to be seen as one of those guys, so I simply continued to not learn how to ride a bike, waiting until such time as I had a private gym in which to learn, where nobody could watch my relentlessly heartwarming coming of age story.

Now that I’m living off campus next year, though, I really can’t afford to find excuses not to ride a bike anymore. This was why, a few days ago, my parents and I took one of our bikes and went out behind a nearby middle school where there was a gentle asphalt slope, and I spent the next 20 minutes or so coasting down the slope on the bike before eventually working up my nerve to start pedaling, grinning broadly and riding down the street, Mom and Dad standing a few yards back, etc, etc. It was undoubtedly one of the most heartwarming things to ever happen behind a middle school, and fortunately the only people besides my parents who had to bear witness to this disgustingly precious affair were two nine-year-old girls who watched quietly the whole time, and afterwards mentioned offhandedly that they’d learned to ride when they were four.

A lot of my self-preservation instincts remain – for example, I’m still absolutely terrified of needles. I was so keyed up about my tetanus booster shot that after giving it to me, the nurse made me keep lying down for another 10 minutes because she thought I was going to pass out. But, looking back, the whole thing was pretty stupid, because I got really worked up and anxious over something unpleasant that took, at best, maybe 15 seconds. I can say the same for bicycling – I was scared of it, for one reason or another, for 19 years, and when I finally decided to sack up and just do it it was really nothing at all.

The sad thing is that I find that I actually kind of enjoy bicycling; this is great on its own, but most of my friends have known how much fun biking is for a good 15 years, and so at this point me trying to talk to them about how cool it is to ride a bike is like me asking if they’ve seen Toy Story yet.

Truman Capps had two options for the title of this update: "Bicycle Race", by Queen, or that stupid, overly literate hip hop song about riding your bike with no handlebars. He feels he made the right choice.

Greyhound 2: Tokyo Drift

Why can't Greyhound be like this? Yeah, I know what you're saying - "BLARG THAT'S A PARTY BUS GREYHOUND CAN'T DO THAT". I humbly disagree, for I believe that a party can happen anywhere. Even on an inter-city bus. Inter-city buses are where they need parties the most.

I’d like to formally apologize for last week’s update. If you’re thinking, “Good – it wasn’t particularly funny and had very little of the form or structure that makes your blog The Greatest Non-Pornographic Thing On The Internet”, then you’re wrong, because I’m not apologizing for that. I’d had perhaps 4 hours of sleep in the past 24 at the time that I wrote that update – four hours of sleep on a friend’s lumpy green couch in the slums of Eugene whilst he engaged in delights unimaginable at his girlfriend’s house across town, the sort of soiree to which I had not been invited, the strength of our friendship notwithstanding. I’d had a long day after my long night, and so when I returned to the apartment at 1:00 AM, the last thing I’d wanted to do was write a blog entry about my experiences on the Greyhound coming to Eugene. It’s really hard to be witty and verbose when you can barely stay awake; this is why most comedy writers abuse amphetamines instead of sedatives.

But I digress – that’s not what I’m apologizing for.

Last week’s update wasn’t just mediocre, it was an outright slap in the face to what little journalistic integrity I pretend to have. It wasn’t hard hitting and it wasn’t of any use to you, the reader – for that I apologize. Last week’s update was a Friday insert in the Flihova County High School Newspaper, a tongue in cheek essay about the eccentricities of bus travel that, in some circles, could be seen as an advertisement for Greyhound. Nowhere in my update did I attempt to smack the reader in the face with the slimy dead salmon of The Truth; nowhere did I dig deep into the Subject Matter soil with my Word Shovel and painstakingly excavate the much heralded Story Behind The Story, nowhere did I grasp that glistening, ambiguous mass and hold it upward toward the light for all to behold. You must accept my apologies for subjecting you to such one dimensional, lazy, I Love The 80s Strikes Back material. I hope that I can somehow remedy the situation by finishing today the job I started this past Wednesday. Allow me to open with a joke:

The Greyhound Bus Company walks into a bar. The bartender says,

“Hey! We’ve got a drink named after you!”

The Greyhound Bus Company says,

“Wow! You’ve got a drink named ‘Bunch Of Good-For-Nothing, Limp-Dick, Pissant Motherfuckers’!?”

“Ho ho,” You chortle to yourself. “Truman’s using hyperbole once again to prove his mild dissatisfaction with Greyhound.” No, sorry, that’s not it at all. I choose my words carefully (not enough people say pissant anymore, wouldn’t you agree?) and I mean every one of them – Greyhound is a wholeheartedly corrupt entity which ought to be destroyed for the good of all mankind, preferably by sending a couple of pro wrestlers to infiltrate their headquarters and blow shit up a la They Live.

Maybe my understanding of capitalism is flawed. I will admit that I’m not good at economics, but I thought that it was reasonable for me to expect that, when I spend $24 on a bus ticket from Eugene to Portland on August 20th, 2008, departure time 6:20 PM, that I can expect to end my day on a Greyhound bus heading north. That’s how I think it works. I didn’t spend $24 to not ride a Greyhound, and yet, that is exactly the experience Greyhound provided me with. So maybe that’s what they’re doing now; maybe, instead of being a company that gives people rides on buses, Greyhound is a company that doesn’t give people rides on buses. Maybe that’s their thing. Perhaps Greyhound just really likes dicking good people over, and when there are no good people left to dick over, then they dick people like me over. I suppose that business plan has some merit – God knows it works for Wal*Mart.

My friend dropped me off at the Eugene Greyhound station at 5:00 PM, well over an hour before my bus was due to leave, as the pissants at Greyhound advised. Things got off to a bad start right away when I saw a sign explaining that the 6:20 Greyhound to Portland was going to be two hours late. And yeah, that sucked – it sucked like a chest wound inflicted by a gun that shoots black holes – but I realized that complaining loudly to everyone in the bus station about it would do nothing to get the bus there any faster. Thereafter, when I complained loudly to everyone in the bus station, I did it purely for my own entertainment.

I sat in the Greyhound station for an hour and a half until the ticket agent received a phone call and announced to us that our bus had stopped in Medford – a full two hours away – and the driver was refusing to go any further, saying that there was something wrong with his bus. Now, I’ve got to agree with the bus driver, because there was something wrong with his bus: It was being operated by Greyhound. Never before have I encountered a company this old that still sucks as badly at what it does. I mean, I’m not going to go and say that it’s easy to run a bus line, but I imagine that after doing it for 93 chuffing years I’d have most of the kinks worked out.

So, at this point, Greyhound has made a pretty big fumble. They’re operating a bus with mechanical problems driven by an employee lacking the suitable Man Parts™ to shepherd his malfunctioning eight-ton rolling freakshow through the rest of his route – clearly, affirmative action has forced Greyhound to start hiring mega-weenies. Sometimes the cooling unit in the soft-serve machine breaks, but do I stop making milkshakes? No! I sack up and I do my fucking job!

Greyhound went for damage control, and shortly thereafter we were informed that a replacement bus was being sent out. However, since the Oregon Greyhound headquarters is in Portland and the malfunctioning bus (and its passengers) was in Medford, some 273 miles away, the replacement bus would have to travel south all the way across the state to Medford, pick up the abandoned passengers there, and then resume the route all the way back up to Portland. The ticket agent helpfully told us that this would mean our bus would be here in “about eight hours, at 3:00 AM”, and then reminded us that the bus station closed at 9:00 PM, so we’d have to wait outside.

And, oh yes, it was raining.

I cashed in my ticket for a refund, used the money to buy a ticket on the 5:30 AM Amtrak train to Portland the next morning, and then walked 12 blocks in the rain to a Courtesy Inn near the train station and, thanks to my parents’ willingness to part with $60.00, got a room for the night. The next morning I walked through downtown Eugene at 5:00 AM to the train station, and was mercifully not eaten by hobos. The train arrived right on time, there was plenty of space, and nobody had vomited/urinated/given birth in my seat within at least the last month. While I arrived in Portland well on time, it’s not unreasonable to assume that the other Greyhound passengers in the station are still waiting for their bus to show up.

Here’s the moral of the story: Greyhound is absolutely the worst way to get anywhere. If you have a choice between taking a Greyhound to your destination or riding a unicycle made out of flaming velociraptors, I’d advise you to think carefully – both options have significant drawbacks, but I have yet to post an update deriding unicycles, velociraptors, or fire. Simply put, Greyhound will not get you where you want to go in a timely fashion; in some cases, it won’t even get you where you want to go.

Here’s a fine alternative for you: Use Amtrak. The only reason I wasn’t using Amtrak in the first place was because none of their trains or buses ran at convenient times for me. At first I was pissed at Amtrak for forcing to ride Greyhound because they’d scheduled all of their trips for the late afternoon on the day that I wanted to arrive early, or the early morning on the day I wanted to leave late, but in light of my recent experiences I’m actually okay with what they did. I’ve come to accept that, if you choose to travel somewhere, you’re basically asking to get dicked by a corporation at some point. Airlines dick you with security, car travel dicks you with fuel prices, and Greyhound dicks you with false advertising. Amtrak, however, dicks you with inconvenient scheduling, and while this still constitutes being dicked, I find it the most preferable way to be dicked in the travel process. Amtrak does not force you through draconian security measures or cost you an arm and a leg, and in my experience it’s been pretty clean and reliable, unlike Greyhound. Yes, they do schedule their trains and buses at times that aren’t necessarily convenient for me, but I can deal with that. It’s not a last minute surprise dicking that leaves me stranded in Eugene for the night – it’s the sort of dicking that I can anticipate and have time to prepare for, and if you’ve got to get dicked, that’s the best way to have it happen.

So that’s what I think of Greyhound.

Truman Capps will admit that Amtrak also dicked him with a $2.00 bagel.

Greyhound

These guys are never late.

Why does the Greyhound bus line call itself Greyhound? If you’ve ever ridden a Greyhound bus, I think you can agree with me that the name is not only highly inaccurate, but also a major insult to greyhounds everywhere. A greyhound dog is a slender, oddly beautiful creature that moves with incredible swiftness and grace. A Greyhound bus is a giant, unsanitary monstrosity that moves about as fast as Congress and is always chock full of angry, mentally unstable people – once again, a lot like Congress.

The problem with Eugene – home of the University of Oregon – is that it isn’t in Portland – home of Truman Capps, Internet Celebrity – and thus when I want to go from my home to my college I’ve got to travel for two hours. Since I hate driving and I can’t find a Pegasus to ride, my only real choice is to take a bus to and from school. If you’ve never traveled by bus before, everything you’ve heard about it is true. Everything.

The simple fact is that a Greyhound bus is the cheapest way to get from point A to point B short of jumping into a passing boxcar, which means that everybody else on the bus is either going to be a cheapskate college student or (infinitely more likely) someone who is dead set on saving the rest of their money to buy crack. You may think I’m exaggerating, but you don’t hear about people getting beheaded on a train, now, do you? That’s because train tickets are more expensive, and the sort of guy who will just as soon cut off your head as look at you is inclined to be thrifty about his travel arrangements.

This is the main reason that, when I’m looking into a bus ticket, I usually look for a bus operated by Amtrak. Despite Amtrak bus tickets being identical in price to Greyhound tickets, the other passengers are almost always a lot less colorful, and by “less colorful” I mean to say that nobody has ever tried to cut my god damned head off. Whenever possible, I try to buy Amtrak tickets, both because I appreciate the cleanliness and overall sanity of the Amtrak experience and because I appreciate not using the preferred transit system of psychopaths.

However, it’s not always possible for me to ride Amtrak. Recently, I needed to book a ticket to Eugene and found that all the Amtrak buses were full up. Reluctantly, I bought a seat on a Greyhound, and the next day I cautiously entered the Portland Greyhound Station, hoping that perhaps Greyhound had stopped being disgusting of its own accord since my last experience with the company.

Yeah, well, not so much.

I’ve got to say that I really applaud Greyhound for their commitment to lateness. With other services, be they air, train, or sea, you get the idea that maybe falling behind schedule is just sort of an accident. But I can only assume that Greyhound employees are loving students of the art of being late for things, as evidenced by the fact that my bus arrived at the Portland station on time, but then proceeded to sit there, unattended, for 15 minutes before we were allowed to board, and then another 10 minutes once everyone had been loaded. Sure, you can go ahead and take Greyhound’s side and argue that they were probably busy doing very important bus driver things while we were all waiting to get on the road, but I think it’s quite clear that Greyhound assumes that its riders, by deciding to travel by bus, are too stupid to see anything wrong with spending a full 25 minutes waiting for nothing, and thus they get away with it. Judging by some of my fellow busmates, I’ve got to say that Greyhound knows their clientele really well. Regardless of the reason for it, the delay gave me a lot of time to observe my surroundings.

I don’t know if any of you have been on a Greyhound recently, but have you noticed that the driver’s seat is now surrounded by plexiglass? I’m not kidding. He’s all enclosed, save for a door that opens in such a way that it blocks the passenger isle so that the driver can get out first. When I noticed this, I was suddenly afraid that I’d accidentally boarded some sort of prison bus in a situation reminiscent of Con Air. Not long after, an infinitely more terrifying thought occurred – what if the driver was the crazy one, and the plexiglass was there for our protection?

“Bus 56? Oh, yeah, Crazy Duane’s drivin’ that one. He decapitated a kid back in ’87 – looked a lot like you; hair’n everything! – but he’s never been late to a stop, so we kept him on, provided he stays in his little pen in the driver’s seat there. Don’t tap on the glass.”

Presently we got underway, and Crazy Duane mumbled a brief itinerary into the P.A. system, summarizing the bus’s upcoming stops in towns like “Woodbrn”, “Saluhm”, “U-Geen”, “Wheed”, and “Sagamendo”. That or he could have just been coughing and wheezing – it’s tough to tell with Crazy Duane. I suppose that’s what makes him so crazy; that and the decapitations, of course.

In Salem, we picked up a young guy in a flannel shirt with a cigarette tucked behind his ear and a garbage bag filled with all of his worldly possessions. Because the bus was full up he had a seat in the isle a little ways behind me, and proceeded to explain to his neighbors the circumstances that brought him to this particular Greyhound. Since this man was an Asshole in the highest degree, he did his explaining very loudly, and so the entire bus got to hear about how he stole a car two years ago and did time in some of the roughest prisons in Oregon and just got released yesterday and was still a bit drunk but really had to get down to Klamath Falls to see his family and how most judges will give a guy two days in jail and three years community service except when they saw him coming, and then it’s always the toughest sentence possible, because the world is so very, very, very cruel.

In Corvallis my seat partner got off and was replaced by a young man with a finance book who clearly wanted to have a long conversation. Our relationship got off to a rocky start:

“Hey,” He said, removing one of his earphones as I looked up from my book. “Do you ever watch the roasts on Comedy Central?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Oh.” He said, putting his earphones back on.

As we pulled into Eugene, a few more fetid gobbets of conversation came dribbling out of him:

“You ever hear a song called Short Skirt, Long Jacket, by Cake?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“Oh.” He said, disappointment written across his face in 32 point Comic Sans font. “It’s a song about the perfect woman. You should listen to it.”

With that, I got off the bus, having reached my destination. There are few things I find creepier than having a complete stranger try to recommend me music. How would you feel if some guy in the elevator tried to convince you that Crest was a much better toothpaste than Aim? It would be weird, wouldn’t it? Now imagine he’s trying to explain that Crest is the toothpaste that describes the perfect woman, and for some reason is very interested in what you think of it.

As I walked through the filthy bus station (AIDS originated in the Eugene Greyhound Station’s bathroom, in case you didn’t know) toward the street, I realized that the plexiglass wasn’t there because the driver was afraid of psychopaths, or because the driver himself was a psychopath – it was there because the People in Charge of Greyhound not only know their clientele, they’re scared of them too.

I have to say, I see where they’re coming from.

Truman Capps also doesn't quite know what the deal is with airline peanuts - but that's a story for another day.

My Incredibly Successful Friends - A Treatise

This is Robert G. Ingersoll, a 19th century orator best known for his quote, "Happiness is the only good." But, I don't know... Does he really look all that happy?

Every so often, I’ll stop whatever I’m doing and start to fantasize about my 10-year high school reunion. I think that the 10-year-reunion was invented by geeks like myself as a means to finally stick it to all the people they hated, to shout, “Haha, Biff Eagleton! Sure, you may have been banging cheerleaders while I was running the Dungeons and Dragons Club, but now I’m a millionaire comic book dealer and you still work at your Dad’s dealership! Suck on that!” What makes this fantasy difficult for me is that it has two phases: 1) Being a geek in high school (Mission Accomplished!) and 2) Actually becoming successful in real life as opposed to just fantasizing about it (Not So Much).

This past weekend, I made the perilous trek to Salem for an informal one-year high school reunion of sorts. This reunion didn’t really satisfy my fantasies, though, because I liked everyone there and didn’t feel a pressing need to rub my meager accomplishments (“You damn bet I’ve got a blog!”) in their faces. In fact, you could almost consider it the antithesis of a standard high school reunion, because most of my friends (who had been considerably more popular and considerably less in the marching band than I was) have done wonderful and life affirming things in the past year that made my life look lame, instead of the other way around. Yes, I know it’s not hard to feel lame when your typical Friday night consists of coming home from work and catching half an episode of What Not To Wear with Mom and Dad, but my friends have done some strikingly awesome stuff.

I think the main lesson I learned from reconnecting with my high school pals is that I screwed up big time by being bad at math and science, because apparently that’s where all the money is these days. One of my friends, a civil engineering major at Oregon State University, is making $15.07 an hour working full time this summer for the Oregon Department of Transportation. And that’s impressive enough on its own, but it turns out that there’s so little work for him to do that he spends roughly half of his time either teaching himself how to play the guitar or catching up on sleep. He gets overtime (which comes to about $22 an hour), he has authority over people more than twice his age, and he gets to drive one of those pickup trucks with a flashing light on top.

It really breaks my heart to write that last part down, that part about the truck with the flashing light on it. You see, most of my idle daydreams somehow involve me being behind the wheel of a car with a flashing light on it, because in my estimate there are few things cooler than driving a vehicle with a doohickey on top that basically says, “Get the fuck out of my way, I’m more important than you”. It’s arguably the only car that accurately conveys my feelings toward the rest of the world without the use of a large billboard. I would pay good money to drive one of those trucks for a day, and here’s one of my friends, a guy I talk to, who’s actually getting paid to drive around in one of those wonderful, wonderful machines for months at a time. He could drive around in his flashing light truck for just a little more than two hours and make more than I do in an entire night of milkshakery at Carl’s. The only way I could stop being seriously green with envy is if it turns out that my friend hates driving the flashing light truck and secretly longs to make milkshakes for cranky retirees. But no, of course, there’s no way that can be the case. The only way the deal could get sweeter for him is if the flashing light truck has a tip jar, and at the rate his luck is going I’m pretty sure it does.

Not present at the party was another one of my scientifically gifted friends, Michael Snively. Now, the very fact that he’s going to MIT is enough to make my college experience pale in comparison, but the reason he wasn’t at the party is because he’s too busy following his dreams by taking part in a competitive summer internship at Hasbro’s world headquarters in Rhode Island. I remind you, I’m making milkshakes at the moment, except when I take a couple days off to pour water instead, and in neither one of my jobs am I making as much as the guy who gets paid to drive around in a flashing light truck, nor am I following any particular dream. Michael Snively, it seems, is seizing his summer – every day he commutes across state lines and does what he’s wanted to do for years, whereas I cut across a middle school soccer field and find new and exciting ways to combine dairy products. Might I add that I’m lactose intolerant.

And then, of course, there were the “Through the grape vine” stories of the other people I’d known in high school. There was The Drama Guy who is currently with a traveling theater troupe somewhere on the East Coast, or The Math Whiz who is being aggressively courted by Ford, or That Girl Who Really Liked Horses who is currently reigning as the Linn County Rodeo Queen. All of these people are my age, and they all just hit the ground running and haven’t looked back. As I play my Xbox 360 and bemoan the gradual descent of my talent as a musician, it’s tough to look at my overtime-earning, dream-chasing, rodeo royalty friends and not feel a bit depressed.

But I keep it in perspective by remembering that, while I may not have a high paying job or rodeo aristocracy (sorry, Nicole, but I’m probably going to make fun of that forever – perhaps until the cows come home, if you know what I’m saying?), I do have one thing in common with the rest of my friends: I, too, am happy. Sure, maybe not when I’m sweating out 100-degree heat and mopping up the kitchen at Bella Fresca, but when I’m hammering away at the blog or writing scripts for campus TV or parading around in a yellow and green jumpsuit in front of thousands of drunk people, I’m about as happy as the proverbial pig in shit, and let me tell you, that’s pretty happy.

I really do hope that I’m successful in life, and making a lot of money would sure be fine too, but in the end, if I can work out an arrangement in which I have consistent happiness for the rest of my days, I think I’ll be in pretty good shape. To quote my friend Alexander (who has been invited to attend West Point, yet another school that is considerably better than the one I’m going to), “Being happy is my favorite.” And, as much as I’d like to have flashy accomplishments and happiness, I suppose just happiness will do in a pinch.

Truman Capps hopes that his very dear friend The Conspiring Leader is catching onto all this “don’t worry, be happy” bullshit – you see, she just recently turned down a job at a large accounting firm when she realized, after two years as an accounting major, that she hates accounting, and is currently under a bit of duress to figure out what she’s going to do with her senior year of college. Truman is sure we can all agree, regardless of what happens next, that she made the right choice. Also, since this stinger hasn’t been all that funny: UNDERPANTS.

R.I.P. Creativity

That shit's creative, yo.

I started on the long, downhill slope of writing early in elementary school, when I would spend most of my class time idly daydreaming about Nintendo characters reenacting plots from various James Bond movies I’d seen. Each day I would run home and try to put all the fabulous stories I’d made up onto paper, and since writing by hand was a very laborious and painful process for me, I would pretty much just try to draw all my stories instead. When we moved last year, I discovered a box in the attic full of confusing, crudely drawn pictures of Yoshi firing a machine gun at Russian terrorists, accompanied by misspelling-laden captions attempting to connect all the pictures into a cohesive storyline (most likely The Living Daylights). For a second, I thought I’d stumbled onto the magnum opus of some highly disturbed, culturally backward autistic savant – a moment later I remembered with some disappointment that, no, I had dreamed all of that up while my classmates were learning how to do fractions.

I did a lot of the same stuff in middle school, writing what they call “fan fiction”, wherein I took characters from popular video games that I was a fan of and writing fictional stories about them. Sure, it was a cut above the people who write erotic stories about Star Wars, but I was still just playing around with pre-developed characters and settings, which is sort of like playing with Barbie dolls in a really time consuming, lonely way. On the Internet. And you’re a 14-year-old boy. It’s sort of embarrassing when I look back and realize that all that time I’d spent feeling so creative was really just time spent rehashing stuff I’d already seen. Of course, I’ve grown out of all that, and now I’ve written 400 or so pages of a novel that, if not good, is at least original.

This is one of the many reasons that I am infinitely better at everything in life than the tank full of horny, violence crazed sea cucumbers otherwise known as Hollywood. Let’s take a look at some of the new shows debuting in the coming TV season:

Kath and Kim is a new comedy on NBC about a family of self absorbed suburbanites who get into various compromising situations as a result of their own character flaws. This may sound like a fairly bland, stereotypical idea at first, but here’s the hook: It’s the American version of a very popular Australian show. Yes, God forbid we should think of our own shows – creativity is a lot of hard work best left to foreigners. That’s the sort of arrangement we have going in America today – we send our jobs overseas in exchange for their television shows. Big Brother, Survivor, ABC’s upcoming Life on Mars, and considerably more shows that I don’t particularly want to look up were all created out of the country and bought by American producers after they proved themselves popular. The problem with this is that foreign television audiences seem considerably more mature than their American counterparts, so in a lot of cases, buying a popular foreign show and attempting to broadcast it in the US with American actors is like responding to Oscar buzz by staging an elementary school theater production of There Will Be Blood.

The Cleveland Show gains points from me for not being a cheap foreign transplant, but then it loses them again for being a spin-off, and then it loses all possible points for being a spin-off of Family Guy. Now, I make no secret of the fact that I think Family Guy has set sitcom writing back 10 years by lending credence to the idea that you can cobble together 30 or so dirty jokes and maybe the occasional ridiculously long set piece and call it an episode. With a spin-off created by the same production company, I can only expect more of the same – it’s like the guy who punches you in the throat every day just had a kid, and now the kid is going to punch you in the balls every day, and as you massage your sore throat and balls, you slowly start to realize that this sort of thing is going to catch on, and soon there’ll be thousands of unoriginal little tykes coming out of the woodwork to punch you whenever you let your guard down. Sleeping, you realize, will be very difficult. I’d say that The Cleveland Show has no chance, because Cleveland is pretty much a one dimensional character, but then every character on Family Guy is one dimensional, so I’m sure the show will do fine for as long as the writers can keep up a steady stream of gags starting with “This is almost as bad as the time…”

Knight Rider is the worst of the bunch, though, because it’s a remake. I feel that remakes are both an insult to audiences, because they attempt to sell them a story they’ve already seen in a slightly newer package, and also an insult to the creator of the original product. Imagine that you’ve just made a remarkably tasty ham sandwich for your best friend, but then somebody else comes along and says, “What, you call that a ham sandwich?”, and then proceeds to make a new one on ciabatta bread with avocado and Shia LeBouf. Wouldn’t you feel bad? You poured a lot of yourself into that ham sandwich, but then some interloper comes along and starts using your ingredients to make his own kind of sandwich, and… Well, okay, I guess the original creators usually get a pretty healthy royalty check for the use of their characters, and I don’t suppose anybody can really claim to be the original creator of the ham sandwich, but… Look, I just really like using the sandwich metaphor, okay? The point is, when you’re watching Knight Rider, you’re going to be watching a show that had a full broadcast run and was eventually cancelled due to a decline in ratings - the only reason it’s back is because Hollywood has run out of foreign, spin-off, or (God forbid) original cash cows and is now rooting through its own garbage can in search of the fabled “candy bracelet with a little candy left on it, Mom why did you throw that away there was still candy on it”. In fact, Hollywood has gone Dumpster diving three times before now, resurrecting Knight Rider in two movies and another short lived TV show. Perhaps Knight Rider isn’t so much a candy bracelet in the garbage as it is a broken Pez Dispenser: Hollywood keeps shaking it in hopes that a few more bits of chalky, vaguely bitter hard candy will fall out. So don’t get your hopes up, KITT – Hollywood doesn’t really love you again, it’s just rattling you around to see if you’ve got any more candy in you. Yeah, I think the candy metaphor works a lot better than sandwiches.

I can already hear the telltale rustling of my readership putting on their Angry Pants and preparing to debate me into submission, and I’ll beat you all to the punch by saying that there are most definitely some excellent foreign transplants, spinoffs, and remakes. I love The Office in both its British and American incarnations, I think Fraiser is genius without ever having watched Cheers, and I positively worship the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. The problem, of course, is that for all these good examples there are always quite a few more failures. And to be honest, I have a certain kind of respect for a sucky show that is bold enough to suck in an original way where no sucky show has sucked before as opposed to a show that sucks while riding on the coattails of another show’s success, be it a show from overseas, a show featuring some of the same characters, or a show from the past.

Even a show like The Pitts, which many critics consider one of the worst sitcoms of all time, holds a special place in my heart, because it was its own kind of lame and unfunny, not someone else’s. We can't give the creators of The Pitts credit for making something good, but let's at least give them credit for making something original. The Pitts wasn't a foreign transplant or a spin-off or a remake - it was a 100% unique crappy show. The producers were trying to do something new; they risked it all by not following in the footsteps of some previous show and, in the end, wound up becoming the laughing stock of the television community. But it's okay, because bad original shows like The Pitts are the necessary byproduct of a creative process that has led to amazing original shows like Arrested Development, Freaks and Geeks, 30 Rock, and, (say it with me, folks), Firefly.

So, should I ever find an ending for my novel, and should I ever be able to find a publisher stupid enough to distribute it, I will have already won. Sure, the critics may pan it, but so what? No other creative achievement will suck quite like mine, and that’s one thing I’ll always have over Hollywood.

Truman Capps will beat you with a sack of Valencia oranges if you try to argue that Family’s Guy’s ADD scripting is in some way original, because really all it’s doing is taking chunks of 80s pop culture and throwing them into a script like so many marshmallows in a disgustingly juvenile carton of Rocky Road.

Memo To Hair Guy Staff

Hair Guy Writers' Meeting, June 2008

From: Truman Capps (the Hair Guy)

To: Staff writers for Hair Guy (Bizarro Hemingway, Robo Faulkner, Zombie Fitzgerald, Toni “The Hammer” Morrison, Truman Clones 1-4)

Subject: Possible content adjustment?

Hey gang,

First of all, I’d just like to tell you that you’re doing a fabulous job. I imagine it’s not easy cranking out two updates a week, but you guys deliver, time and again. Looking at some of the stuff you’re writing, I can’t believe I used to do all that myself, back before the rigors of maintaining the Hair Guy brand name took up so much of my time. Point is, I’m damn glad I hired you. You’ve all shown remarkable growth, both in your writing style and in your ability to overcome the crippling genetic defects caused by the highly illegal and dangerous Brazillian cloning operation that created you (I’m looking at you, Truman Clones 1 and 3 – reading your work, sometimes I forget that you’ve got feet growing out of your shoulders). So before I say anything else, I want all of you to take a minute and pat yourselves on the back. Truman Clone 2, I understand that the flippers make the act of patting somewhat difficult, so instead, maybe just rub your flippers together. Until further notice, that’ll just be your own special way to pat yourself on the back.

Now that the backs have been appropriately patted and the flippers well and truly rubbed, I figure we should talk some business. Let me start by saying that I hate coming down here to tell you guys how to write the blog. I mean, hey, I used to write this stuff myself, and it was hard, and back then nothing would have chapped my caboose more than some astonishingly successful internet celebrity coming along and telling me how to do my job. You guys are the writers, and your job is to write the blog for me; I’m the name on the blog, and my job is to manage the considerable cult of personality that has sprung up around that follicle Xanadu otherwise known as my hair. This system has worked well for us for a good long time. Remember all the posts on the comment page where people told me I was hilarious? Or all those people who’d say, “Oh, and your blog last night was pretty okay” at the end of a conversation? Or the half dozen or so raving fans at Sprague High School? Those were the fruits of our labor: Sweet, delicious attention, all for me, and nobody else.

However, those were the good times; our salad days, as the culinarily gifted might put it. Back then, Hair Guy was wildly popular. It was insane. No, I’m serious – I would literally just sit there looking at the hit counter and say, “Wow. This must be what it’s like to be insane.” Hell, who can forget those days, just a few short months ago, when we’d clock in at, like, 90 hits on update days! Do you guys remember when you wrote that thing about Cosmopolitan and we got something like 100 hits in one day? That was just… I mean, eat your heart out, Huffington Post! Y’know? And then I bought you guys that keg to celebrate, and Poe 2.0 had a little too much, and then he said he was cool to drive home, and…

Well, okay, maybe that’s our problem. Maybe we got a little too cocky. We got too big too fast. It was like the roaring 20s (are you with me, Zombie Fitzgerald?) – we were steppin’ large and laughin’ easy, but then out of nowhere the bubble bursts. In the 20s it was the stock market or some lame crap like that, and for us it was the cops calling at 4:00 AM to tell me that a drunken cyborg poet had just wrapped his Honda around a tree and that he wasn’t going to pull through.

The saddest thing about that whole mess is that Poe 2.0 will never be able to realize his dream of finding out what love is.

We can all agree that things have gone downhill since then. Sure, the quality has been the same, but our readership has been steadily decreasing. And hey, I’d love to blame it all on losing Poe 2.0, because between his poetry and his attempts to destroy humanity he generated a lot of publicity that eventually made it back to the blog. But it’s not just that. For some reason, even though we’re keeping up the high quality content, we’re getting fewer and fewer hits every week. Fewer and fewer people that want to read about my delusions of grandeur as a Milkshake Technician or my open letters to various celebrities and government agencies. Now, I don’t know about you guys, but I think that stuff relating to me is about the most interesting stuff in the world, and ordinarily I’d say that anyone who doesn’t share in that opinion is probably too stupid to read in the first place, but… Well, we got 60 hits on the day of the last update, and about 25 of them were people who’d Googled terms like “Hair tips for guys” or “Guy hair color” or “Hairy guys”. Something has got to change.

We need to market ourselves to a hipper and younger audience. I’ve got some pretty interesting ideas on my end – for example, I might rename the blog Baseball Cap Turned Backwards Guy, because I hear that sort of shit is really popular with the kids these days. Thing is, if I’m going to change our image, the content is going to have to change with it. So I’m going to need you guys to start writing about more interesting things – yes I know, more interesting than me, is that even possible? I’m going to push you guys further than you’ve ever been pushed before. So I want you all to start thinking about topics that would really pull the readers in – real juicy stuff, stuff that jumps right off the Internet and gets all up in people’s bidness. I was thinking that maybe we should start doing more pictures in the updates – everybody likes pictures, right? And maybe the pictures should be of boobs, regardless of what the update is about. Like, it could be an update about the Magna Carta, but we could just spruce it up with boob pictures. That being said, maybe we should do a regular update where it’s just talking about boobs the whole time.* Like, Wednesdays. We’d call them Boobnesdays. I dunno, it’s just an idea, but I think it’d look great on a T-shirt.

*If any of you think this is tacky, you can go right ahead and quit. It’s a scientifically proven fact that boobs create instant publicity – this isn’t chauvinism, it’s advertising that capitalizes on chauvinism, which I’m pretty sure is OK. If you’re squeamish or awkward about this, just get over it; keep in mind that you all spent a good deal of time with boobs in your infancy (except for the Truman Clones – you guys only nursed at the cold, unfeeling teat of Science).

Now, some of you might be resistant to the thought of seemingly “cheapening” this blog by adding gimmicks to draw in readers. Admittedly, I was too, at first. I mean, it makes you start to wonder why I’m even doing this in the first place. Here at Hair Guy are we writing for the readers, or are we writing for ourselves? The proper answer, the one that I always fantasize about giving if I get interviewed by Rolling Stone or, better yet, NPR, is that I only do this blog thing to please myself, and the fact that other people like to watch me please myself is just a happy accident. But that’s simply not the case – as much as I enjoy doing what I do, the fact is that having an audience makes it that much more exciting. There’s the pressure to put on a good show lest you let everyone down; it’s exhilarating and it’s high pressure and it’s a wonderful excuse to use heroin. We’ve had a taste of the spotlight on those 100 hit days – it’s a good feeling, and I’m hooked, and I’m willing to do anything to get that feeling back, as heroin sure as hell isn’t doing the trick.

Frankly, if I were only doing this for my own benefit, I would never have got a blog in the first place – I’d just write all this crap myself and then save it on my computer. But no; deep down, it’s really about making people laugh, and I want to make more people laugh. So while you’re thinking about ways to make this blog popular, keep our nonstop quest for humor in mind. Don’t be afraid to try new, different, or even absurd sorts of updates – eventually we’ll find something that’ll catch on, and before we know it we’ll be riding high again.

Just remember Poe 2.0, and learn from his mistakes.

Sincerely yours,

Truman Capps
Internet Celebrity

Truman Capps would like to remind you that Hair Guy Take Your Daughter To Work Day is next Friday.

007 Grows Up

Ladies, are your hearts racing? Gentlemen, do you feel inadequate? Then he has done his job.

Quick flashes of improbable stunts in British-manufactured sports cars while an overly bombastic and brassy theme plays? Yes, children, it’s that time of year again – they’ve released the teaser trailer for the new James Bond movie, and it follows the formula perfectly. 85% explosions and fight sequences, 10% sex, and 5% vague and ominous voiceover hinting at the inevitable fact that James Bond will once again fuck y’all’s shit up. Oh, it’s all there. Is there a plot? Who the hell cares! It’s a big budget, well photographed movie, and, why look! It’s Daniel Craig, all muscular and Aryan and eager to be forgiven for his part in The Golden Compass. Are you getting pumped up? Because I’m sort of pumped up.

You may think I’m being-

Oh, actually, let’s put this on pause for a second just so I can go on record and say Yes, that was a diss on The Golden Compass, and No, I don’t want to argue about it with you in the comments section. Yes, I know, I alluded in an earlier, terribly unfunny update that I was eager to see the movie based on the fact that it was perceived as atheist propaganda, but if that’s the best we atheists can do then I’m going to cash in my chips and find a religion that knows a thing or two about filmmaking. All I’m saying is that if a movie featuring a race of armored warrior bears can still find a way to be boring despite the gallons of inherent liquid Awesome at hand, there must be something seriously wrong with it. No, for your information, I didn’t read the book, but I doubt that reading the book is going to change my opinion of a movie that could have been two hours of awesome armored bear fights but was instead not two hours of awesome armored bear fights. Good day, sir.

Anyway,

You may think I’m being sarcastic in my analysis of the new James Bond trailer, but to be honest, I am truthfully quite pumped up. Ordinarily, action movie trailers of this sort don’t have much effect on me, because I’ve seen enough crappy movies with awesome trailers to fill a Hollywood Video and at this point I know to look past the glitz and explosions for the characteristics that really matter, like story and boobs. However, the James Bond franchise and I have sort of an agreement: They release a trailer, I think it’s awesome, I see the movie, and I may or may not be satisfied. But that’s cool, that’s cool, because at the very least there will be explosions and boobs.

As a kid I was a raving James Bond fanatic. The first movie that I ever remember calling my Favorite Movie Ever was Goldfinger - I’d seen that movie hundreds of times before I reached an age at which I could understand why a name like Pussy Galore always made my Dad snicker under his breath. My fanaticism continued throughout elementary school as I devoured as many of the films as my parents deemed appropriate for my young eyes (to this day I have not seen Octopussy). There was one week in fourth grade when I rented The Living Daylights on Monday, and then proceeded to watch it after school, every day, until the five day rental period was up. I have no idea why I decided to watch the same movie five times in as many days, but I do know that by Wednesday the act of coming home and chilling out with Timothy Dalton for two hours was more a matter of habit than choice. Picasso had his Blue Period, I had my The Living Daylights Period – both were major turning points in the cultural landscape of the 20th century.

Every few years, much to my childish delight, they’d release a new James Bond movie, and I’d eagerly badger my parents to take me to see it with all the ferocity of a crackhead who has just found out that his dealer is having an all-you-can-smoke crack buffet. Two Bond movies came out during the height of my craze - Tomorrow Never Dies and The World Is Not Enough. Now, while Tomorrow Never Dies didn’t gain quite the same fanbase as its superb predecessor, Goldeneye, I still considered it to be a thoroughly entertaining movie, and between 4th and 5th grade I watched it with the same zeal with which I’d approached The Living Daylights. It had explosions and gunfights and all the things I liked; I felt at the time that it could’ve done without all the sappy romance stuff, and looking back I think I really didn’t understand the plot too thoroughly either, but that was okay – it had the explosions and gunfights, and as we all know, a spoonful of violence makes the medicine go down.

However, after I saw The World Is Not Enough, something strange happened that I had never experienced before: I realized that I’d just watched a really sucky James Bond movie. Imagine, Christians, if archaeologists unearthed a new gospel belonging to The New Testament, and it was verified as 100% legitimate, and you, having devoted your life to Christ, were understandably eager to find out what else old J.C. had to say. But then imagine, having read it, that it was really boring and had terrible dialogue and was hokey to the point of being melodramatic. How would you feel at that point? Well, that was pretty much how I felt. It was almost as though my childhood ended on the sorrowful day that I watched a movie featuring a female lead named Christmas Jones,* a role that was apparently far too deep for Denise Richards to play convincingly. After The World Is Not Enough, I wisely decided to start growing out of James Bond, lest he break my heart again.

*Really? Christmas Jones? Come on. I know you’re out there, whoever wrote this festering turd of a movie, and I want you to know that I really, really hate you for that. It’s a time honored tradition of the James Bond franchise that the women have ridiculous names; however, they’re supposed to be weirdly suggestive, not weirdly stupid. But look at you – you mashed the name of a major holiday together with a bland, common last name, and then you took another hit of whatever drug turns people into horrible, horrible writers. How hard could it have been to think up a name that wasn’t just ludicrous but also suggestive? How about Lady Jameswill-Havesexwith? I came up with that right off the top of my head. Come on, people. She could be, like, British aristocracy, or something. They always have weird last names.

And then a few years later, came Die Another Day, and, enticed by the trailer, I cautiously let James Bond back into my life once again. I was treated to a film that begins with James Bond surfing into a North Korean military base completely undetected and just goes straight downhill from there until he’s parasailing across ice floes while being chased by a giant diamond-powered laser beam. I was 13 years old at the time and I considered that movie an insult to my intelligence; perhaps the target audience was people with ADD, or masochists. As I left the theater, I turned over my shoulder and sullenly bade a final farewell to James Bond. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Theme song by Madonna, you should be put on trial for war crimes.”

James Bond and I didn’t speak to one another for a good four years after that. It was early in my senior year of high school when I saw the trailer for Casino Royale and fell right back into the franchise’s metaphorical arms as placidly as the literally hundreds of women James Bond has taken to bed. The filmmakers had finally struck the perfect balance – a movie with all kinds of explosions and gunfights that also gives us credit for our intelligence and provides with James Bond more depth than just a walking penis with a gun.

This sort of thing has been happening a lot recently – a respectable, time-honored series goes on for too many installments and becomes embarrassingly silly and overblown, and finally somebody with considerable talent comes in and reboots the franchise in such a way that you don’t have to remove your brain and put it in a Mason jar just to sit through the entire film anymore. The other franchise to do this that comes to mind is Batman, which Christopher Nolan turned around by rebooting the series, adding realism, and subtracting nipples from the Batsuit. And yes, in case you were looking for my opinion, I have seen The Dark Knight, and it is decidedly groovy-pants.

Realism seems to be the key to success these days. Nobody wants to watch movies about James Bond coolly surfing into a warzone or a caricatured, fanfiful, nipple-y Batman – they want gritty, raw stuff that’s packed full of character development, movies where James Bond shows vulnerability and Batman has to deal with stuff like identity, ethos, and the greatest film villain in recent memory. And of course I use the term “realism” lightly, because in Casino Royale James Bond runs through a wall completely unharmed and in Batman Begins the Gotham City Police are somehow completely fooled when Batman turns off the headlights on the Batmobile, but these are acceptable discrepancies in the name of Awesomeness.

So I hope you’ll join in my excitement for Quantum of Solace - yes, the title may be kind of silly, but it certainly doesn’t suggest a woman with eight vaginas.

Truman Capps shamelessly stole the phrase “groovy-pants” from Zero Punctuation, hence why it was funnier than everything else in this update.

Fear and Loathing At The Flugtag

This can would probably fly further than a lot of the Flugtag entries.

From time to time it’s comforting to have a reminder that, no matter what happens, you’re still gravity’s bitch. Oh, sure, it’d be plenty handy to just turn gravity off whenever you want to make a slam dunk or seriously mess with the kids down at the skate park, but, for better or worse, that’s not your decision to make. Nope, gravity’s been chugging right along for literally hundreds of years, keeping us pasted to the ground and making car chases considerably less awesome than they could be, and it shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. I learned yesterday that there is no better way to celebrate gravity’s complete stranglehold on our lives than by dressing up like idiots and riding slapshod flying machines into a heavily polluted body of water in front of 40,000 people.

I speak, of course, of the Red Bull Flugtag (German for “airshow”) that took place in Portland yesterday, a yearly event in which contestants build and decorate human powered “flying” machines and attempt to launch them off of a large ramp over water. Now, I put The Quotation Marks of Incredulity around the word “flying” because the Flugtag is not especially concerned with flight, as evidenced by the fact that the first three contestants in yesterday’s matchup were a cardboard faux Lego spaceship, a particle board Winnebago, and a giant beaver on wheels. Oh, sure, there were a few contestants who had spent a great deal of time and money on aerodynamic contraptions that actually did glide for awhile, but the general consensus was that these guys had sort of missed the point of the whole thing. The Flugtag isn’t so much about flight as it is about looking silly while you crash into the water. Besting all of the competition by building an aesthetically unappealing machine that actually does fly is like playing a game of Candyland with a no-holds-barred, cutthroat attitude: You win, but you wind up looking like a glory-obsessed tool in the process. The general atmosphere was one of light hearted fun and games, and even I, the angry liberal who never trusts major corporations, enjoyed myself as a major corporation encouraged its loyal customers to jump into dirty, cold water from a great height.

Overall, the Flugtag was a very entertaining event. It didn’t cost anything, and you got to see things crashing – my only complaint was that nothing exploded, and perhaps that there weren’t free donuts. I wasn’t the only one who thought from the outset that the Flugtag sounded entertaining, though, because as I previously mentioned, 40,000 Portlanders all jostled their way onto the waterfront to watch the proceedings. I feel like this was the event’s greatest failure – the sheer amount of publicity it attracted. When you mash 40,000 people together in one place, an afternoon of simple fun and games and costumed swimming will inevitably become political.

These days it seems that a gathering of more than two people is easy pickins’ for any yokel with a clipboard and a cause. Proponents of all sorts of political agendas floated through the mobs around the waterfront yesterday, searching for petition signatures with the same sort of tenacity that my dog used to show when she’d look for fresh raccoon crap to roll in. The tactics, however, vary depending on the cause being promoted. For a cause that has very little chance of ever gaining momentum, such as an act of Congress that would make it legal to sell marijuana in liquor stores, the signature collectors tend to forego all tact and simply start throwing words at you, hoping that your disgust at their lip ring and your desire for them to go away will motivate you to sign their petition that much faster. On the other hand, more legitimate causes such as voter registration have employed the time-honored tactic of using attractive women to make men jump through hoops. I was approached by several cute girls yesterday, all of them smiling and eager to know how I was enjoying the Flugtag. This is always a wonderful and captivating experience; however, within less than 30 seconds the relationship always takes a turn for the worse when the girl starts asking really serious questions like “Do you agree that President Bush should be impeached?” or “What county are you registered to vote in?” My answer to both questions is yes, but what offends me about it is that the signature collector seems to think that I’m stupid enough to believe that she wants me for anything besides my ability to sign my name. It’s considerably harder to enjoy slapstick flying accidents when you have to keep being polite and pseudo flirtatious to nonstop waves of cute activists feigning interest in your life.

I think that the Flugtag is a pretty interesting promotion, because Red Bull’s slogan is “It gives you wings”, and yet they sponsor a competition based entirely around conspicuously not flying. Perhaps the Flugtag is meant as a cautionary event – “These people didn’t drink Red Bull”, the event organizers are saying, “And if you do you’ll be much better at not falling into the river than they are.” Regardless of what the company’s intentions were, the event was a big hit, and they sold quite a bit of Red Bull from kiosks placed around the park. However, what the event organizers didn’t seem to understand was that selling high octane energy drinks to people packed together so tightly that they could barely move was not a good idea for overall public safety.

When everyone is trying to find The Perfect Spot from which to watch everything go down, emotions tend to run a little high, and when a lot of them are wired on an intense mixture of sugar and caffeine, well, emotions run a little higher. There were plenty of nasty looks exchanged as the throngs attempted to find a suitable space with a commanding view of the event, but by and large everyone handled themselves with a suitable amount of decorum. However, there was one point during the day when things looked a bit ugly, and when I say things looked a bit ugly, I mean that I was very nearly at the epicenter of a race riot. The matter started when a large black lady in her late 50s muscled past a group of skinny white teenaged girls, no doubt well-to-do visitors from Lake Oswego. The black lady shoved the girls aside, grumbling that they needed to hurry up or get right out of the way. In the black lady’s defense, I agree – people really should hurry up or get out of the way; in fact, I may well adopt that as my motto. But on the other hand, the teenaged girls were moving at about the same speed as everyone else, so maybe what the black lady meant was that everyone should hurry up or get out of the way, which, once again, is an opinion I often share while stuck in traffic or waiting in line. In any sense, things escalated quickly.

“You bitch!” One of the girls shouted.

The black lady whirled around, and suddenly her eyes were the size of cue balls and her face was contorted into a leathery mask of rage. Thunder rumbled in the distance and I’m pretty sure one of her arms turned into a laser gatling gun.

“What didyou call me!? WHAT DIDYOU CALL ME!?” She screamed, stalking back toward the girls.

It was at this point that I realized I was standing practically in between the woman and her opponent, and at that moment the space between the angry black lady and those teenagers was officially The Worst Place In The Universe™. I dove into the crowd (I would have dove into a volcano to get out of that situation) and hastened away from the scene of the shouting match, but as I left I was distinctly aware that the teenaged girl had shrunk down to about the size of a quark and that the black lady turned back around with a satisfied “Yeeah.”

Red Bull – it gives you balls.

Truman Capps has used the “Fear and Loathing” title twice in one month – this is a surefire sign that he’s slipping.