My Surprise 2012 Calendar

Back in the summer the wife and I finally found a Chinese takeout restaurant that made good-tasting food and delivered quickly. It's not something to take for granted in DC or any major metropolitan city for that matter. They offer a nice range of food with excellent prices, and the best part is that you can order online with ease, and they always have the food there within 30 minutes and the delivery guys are nice and friendly. You'd think I would do a testimonial for them.

After all this time, I'd have gladly been a strong supporter, but just before we left for the holidays things got a little harried.

We ordered dinner and they delivered what looked like a rolled-up 2012 calendar, which I thought was nice. Something for customers that had the menu attached and would engender customer loyalty and so forth.

Then I opened the calendar, and honestly was a little blown away.


So maybe I was just expecting something a tad more Chinese new year/traditional. So, OK, it's a girl in a bikini. Nothing to necessarily be alarmed about. But then I started to page through the following sets of months, and it got bleaker and bleaker.


Red light! Red light! Now it went from a girl having fun in the sun to straight message parlor territory. Now I had to start to worry about toeing the line between laughing my ass off because of how comically inappropriate this was getting, to really hoping there wasn't some happy family of five whose 12-year-old was the first to open up the calendar. This is why I fear having children: you can be the best parent you can, but you can't prepare for weird shit like this showing up.


Good grief. We've left massage parlor territory and veered directly into full-blown advertising for sexual favors. Not sure you can look at that photo and think anything else. Plus, it's no longer worrying about some kid seeing this; it's just straight creepy now. You're a delivery restaurant and you're handing out suggestive 2012 calendars to your customers? Hey, if I were back in college and 22 years old, I'd probably think this was hilarious and funny and I'd throw more money at them. But that's because I was young, probably drunk and a lot dumber than I am now. In 2011, it's just uncool, people. Damn them for having such good food, but there is a really strong chance we're going hunting for a new Chinese takeout restaurant.

What I've Read (sorta): The Affair

I didn't get a chance to read Lee Child's new Jack Reacher novel before the annual trek back to Kentucky, so I figured it'd make a great book on tape to bide the time through the mountains as we made our way home for the holidays. Typically we've ended up listening to books we don't know much about or just things to pass the time, but now we had the opportunity to catch up on one of our favorite fiction authors and kill the time of the long drive all at once.

How could this possibly go wrong?

Well, it yes ruined when you end up with the worst book narrator I've ever heard. This dude, Dick Hill, reads a book like a crusty old man who puts periods after every word he says, which makes comprehending the action nearly impossible. I. Mean. How. Could. You. Understand. What. Is. Happening. If. Every. Word. Such. As. I. Walked. Through. The. Door. And. Turned. And. Closed. It. Silently. In. Order. To. Go. Undetected. Be. A. Way. To. Listen. To. A. Novel. I thought this was something wrong with the audiobook quality or something, but apparently tons of other listeners had the same reaction, all bashing Dick for being a horrible reader. He then took it up a notch when the book got to the sex scenes, which he read in a way that had me convinced he drives a white panel van on weekends. It was creepy and I just had to fast-forward past them. Creepy, dude, creepy.

The book itself isn't bad, since it's a prequel or sorts to the Jack Reacher legend, but having it read by Creepy McCreeperston means I need another Reacher novel out soon so I can burn the sound of Dick Hill from my mind.

Friday Funnies

A bonus Friday Funnies for you. Because it's Christmas, and if Clark W. Griswold is who I can aspire to be as a grown-up, life will at least be full of adventure, and that ain't so bad.

Friday Funnies

Suddenly it seems that 30 Rock is on every channel at night, where you can flip from 6-11 p.m. and chances are strong you'll be able to find the show somewhere. I think it's replaced Law & Order as the show everyone can't avoid, and I couldn't be happier. It's a genius show. This episode showed up recently and I love it when Jack goes 'method' on Tracy and starts acting like his whole family. Good times.

Idiot of the Day

When I was back in Florida for my friend Molly's wedding, there were lots of good memories and reminders that I got about the things I liked about my time in the sunshine state. But naturally there were other reminders, once you looked past the warm weather and endless golf courses, of the bad things that state births. Like some annoying idiots.

At a golf tournament I attended with my pal Donna, I noticed this lady rolling herself around in one of those scooters that injured or extremely old people use. Except this lady was neither exceptionally old or remotely injured. She would roll her lazy ass up and down the fairways, then park the scooter wherever she damn well pleased. It was annoying to say the least, because she didn't give a shit for whose foot she ran over or shin she rammed into, as long as it meant she didn't have to walk to the garbage can or wait for people to get out of her fucking way.

The classiest move was parking her scooter in the pathway, walking up to watch someone tee off, then hauling ass in her scooter to the green to score the best seat possible. Oh, and she made it easy to hate on her, since she made it abundantly clear that she didn't exactly need the scooter for health reasons.


No, she didn't need it. She was just being an idiot.

Game On: Week of Dec. 16

My recent column reviewing Aliens: Infestation and Tekken: Hybrid. Surprised how many papers published this one, since I thought the previous week was a better pairing of consumer-friendly games, but this column got picked up by a slew of papers, but I'll continue to give the tip of the hat to the Ventura County Star and Seattle Times for publishing.

This was also my last column for the year, so thanks to all the papers that published me in 2011 and I hope to gain some more outlets in 2012.

What I've Read: Inside of a Dog

As a big fan of dogs, my two in particular of course, it was about time that I read a book about dogs. Yes, I did read " The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time" but I thought it completely sucked, so I'm acting like that book never happened.

Instead, being the dork that I am, I decided to read this nonfiction book about dogs and how we perceive them and (perhaps, more importantly) how they may be perceiving us. The woman who wrote it is a cognitive scientist, and she approaches the subject of dogs more knowing that they rely on the five senses in a completely different way then humans do. She's a dog owner herself, which also benefits the reader because she doesn't come off as a lab coat-wearing stick-in-the-mud with no feelings whatsoever.

Inside of a Dog traces the lineage of dogs back to their days as wolves, but makes the big distinction that nothing about dogs in the 21st century should be compared to wolves, because the domestication of dogs has completely sapped most wolf-like tendencies from man's best friend. Once she breaks that down sufficiently enough, it's off to the senses, and why dogs act so differently than we think they should.

The main reason is because, obviously, we anthropomorphize dogs way, waaay too much. We expect human responses from dogs when we are nuts to think such things. On average they see the world from two feet in height (think about walking around on all fours not just in your house but in grocery stores, etc.), so their perspective is vastly different. While we humans place a priority on the sense of sight, for dogs smell is the most important. It is a myth that dogs are colorblind; they actually see with yellow-tinted view (imagine life as the drug dealer scenes from Steven Soderbergh's "Traffic", you know, without the violence). There are a ton of other great dog insights she gives, but revealing them all would be stupid when you should just read the book.

I'm not saying I know my dogs specifically better because of reading it, but Inside of a Dog did help explain a lot about why they are who they are, and how dogs interact and communicate with the world that we take for granted. Definitely a great book for anyone who wants to get to know a little bit more about our four-legged friends.

Friday Funnies

Not much to laugh about this week, but I'm dedicated to bringing you laughs even when my life lacks them. This week, it's a short clip from Park and Rec, where my worlds collided. Here was one of my favorite comedy shows doing a riff on the kind of law the wife does for the government. Great stuff. She couldn't have asked for a better send-up for why she exists, especially since it involved Ron Fucking Swanson.

Game On: Week of Dec. 9

My recent column reviewing Mario Kart 7 and Super Mario 3D Land. Thanks to North Jersey for publishing. I got emails from people in Colorado and Texas who read my column in their respective states, but I can't find links. Damn Interwebs.

Friday Funnies

A belated Friday Funnies for you ("being sick" can go to hell). Here's another good one from the movie fail department. The backstory here is that Bruce Lee died before they finished making this movie, so what the producers and director "thought" decided as a solution was to use B-roll, lookalikes and in this case, still photos printed and mounted onto cardboard, to fill in the gaps. They also thought it was a good idea to give shitty actors long speeches to help stretch the movie into it's full running time. All of this resulted in a tremendous movie fail, and this clip is just one scene highlighting all of the shortcomings. The cardboard cutout, of course, taking the cake.

My Childhood, Bastardized

I'm honestly not sure yet where I come down on this trailer. You see, my mom can vouch that I watched an unhealthy amount The Three Stooges when I was a kid. Not sure why I loved it so much, but I did and that's all that can be said. Didn't matter that it was in black-and-white, didn't matter that it was three grown men acting like the age of the kids watching them. It was three distinct personalities always getting themselves into hijinks without much hint on controversy. Great song, great physical comedy.



Well now in the continuation of Hollywood's creative malaise, someone decided to make a Stooges flick set in the present day. At first it was bad when they signed Sean Penn (Larry), Benicio Del Toro (Moe) and Jim Carrey (Curly) to play the parts, which I think would have been a nightmare. Once that failed, they downgraded to Sean Hayes, Chris Diamantopoulos and Will Sass. I really don't have a comment for this. My head won't stop shaking.



It looks both awful and decent at the same time. Awful because it honestly should never have been made in the first place. But decent in that, at least from the trailer, it eschews trying to reinvent the formula and instead delivers exactly what the Stooges did back in the day, only with modern-day actors and in color. These gags would look horrible if Eddie Murphy was trying to do them in a movie (oh, say, some horseshit like this), but if I don't focus on Larry being played by the guy who was the ultra-gay stereotype in Will & Grace, it looks and sounds like classic Stooges skits.

I probably still won't see it, because chances are the trailer is selling the only true Stooge-like parts of the movie (and the fact that there was a reason the original Stooges show was only 30 minutes long and not 90 minutes). So it still rings true as another piece of my childhood bastardized, but maybe only partially so.

Game On: Week of Dec. 2

My recent column reviewing Saints Row: The Third and Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Thanks to the Seattle Times, Ventura County Star and Northern New Jersey Papers (among others) for publishing.

Shit that Should Not Be

Just click on this link and let it roll for about five minutes. Let's just say, this guy (pictured) is heavily involved. And he hopefully got punched a lot by the cameraman and anyone else in the studio where this was filmed.