Awesomest/Shittiest Things of 2013

It’s that time once again, people. Time to look back at the awesomest and shittiest things of 2013. As always, it remains a struggle to find things for the awesome category, and to keep the shitty category to a minimum. Check it out:

Awesome

1. Stephen Colbert Snubbed by Daft Punk – One of the biggest highlights from the world of music this year was the long-awaited release of a new Daft Punk album. I’ve always been a big fan, and I happily welcomed their new work. The most popular song from the album was titled Get Lucky It was one of the most popular songs this summer. Daft Punk is sort of notorious for being camera shy (which I whole-heartedly endorse for all celebrities), and rarely make public appearances. I was shocked (and excited) to hear that they were going to appear on The Colbert Report to play their “song of the summer.” And then they didn’t show up. No, they opted out and left Colbert high and dry. Fortunately, the episode we got was much funnier than what had been intended. Cobert danced to a recording of Get Lucky and had his famous friends join in. Hugh Laurie, Jeff Bridges, Jimmy Fallon, Bryan Cranston, Matt Damon, and more showed up to join in the fun. It was absolutely fucking hilarious. By a stroke of good luck, Robin Thicke was in New York promoting his new album and hot summer song Blurred Lines at the same time. Colbert managed to snag Thicke, and he performed the real “song of the summer” live on-stage. All in all, this was the music/comedy highlight of 2013.
2. Horse Meat Scandal – I wrote a post on this earlier in the year. I find it totally, outrageously crazy that this scandal ravaged Europe. In case you didn’t hear, the basics boil down to this: people thought they were getting the same old processed meat in their foods as always, but as it turned out, they were getting beef mixed with horse. And in some cases, 100% horse. My thoughts are still the same. If nobody can tell the difference, then what’s the big fucking deal? The only reason people care is because horses are cute and cows aren’t. I’m still a long way from finishing my quest to eat every cute animal in the world. Hey, it’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it.
3. Dennis Rodman Goes to North Korea – The world was stunned to learn that former NBA star Dennis Rodman visited North Korea in February. Apparently, that was the start of a beautiful friendship, as Rodman has gone on record several times talking about new BFF Kim Jong-Un. Rodman stated that Kim was a “friend for life”, a “great dad”, and that Obama should give him a call sometime. Rodman has gone again since then, and he plans to return in January 2014 to help coach a series of basketball games. This news story ends up in the Awesome category because it is so completely insane that it has no choice other than to be awesome. I can only imagine what it’s like, seeing a 6 ft. 7 in. tall, black, green-haired, face-pierced guy being best friends with a chubby Korean midget. They have to make a sitcom out of this. How can they not? Hilarity would ensue. On a more serious note, I hope that Rodman could potentially open Kim’s mind a bit about relaxing the human rights atrocities his country is notorious for. But I’m not going to hold my breath.
4. Manti Te’O’s Fake Girlfriend – Super-genius football player Manti Te’O played at the collegiate level for Notre Dame. He entered the national spotlight when he stated that his close girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, died after battling Leukemia. Or was it in a car wreck? I’m not sure. Neither was Te’O. As it turns out, she wasn’t his girlfriend at all. She wasn’t even a girl. In fact, she wasn’t even a real person. Kekua turned out to be completely fictious, dreamed up by a man named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo (no doubt a true humanitarian), because he had fallen in love with Te’O and figured this was the only way they could be together. They had met through online dating and became very serious, despite never having met in person. While the story was pretty awesome and hilarious on its own, it does speak to the dangers of our online world. People can be duplicitous, and just imagine how much damage could have been created if Tuiasosopo actually had a vendetta against Te’O. Humanity is doomed.
5. Dog Butt Jesus – This summer everyone got a little hysterical when a picture surfaced of a dog’s butt (and hind legs) that looked like our lord and savior. If you search for the image online and check it out you’ll see that, yeah, it kind of looks like Jesus. It’s amazing that a dog’s butt could be such a holy thing, when usually all its good for is taking dumps and shitting out random objects like plastic and strings. If the Virgin Mary could show up in a grilled cheese sandwich and religious people would cheer, then I don’t understand why they’d be upset about Jesus showing up in a dog’s butt. Dog is man’s best friend, after all, and humans spend a lot of time around dog butt. It seems like the most logical place for Jesus to show up.

Shitty

1. NSA Scandal – While the horse meat scandal was hilarious, the recent United States NSA scandal was horrendous. There’s nothing like learning that the U.S. government spies on all of its citizens’ communications 24 hours a day. I suppose this should be expected, but I was hoping that the government still favored privacy and rights of people over HURR DURR WE HAVE TO DO THIS TO PROTECT US FROM TERRORISTS HURR DURR. President Obama promised to have one of the most transparent presidencies ever, but when this revelation came out, that was all blown to shit. And the guy who let us know about all this, Edward Snowden, is now forever on the run. Obama has actually lobbied hard to protect the rights of whistleblowers. Everyone is encouraged to speak out if we see that something is amiss (“If you see something, say something”). However, that’s a sham. If you see anything the government is doing illegally, you are supposed to keep your goddamn mouth shut. Things got even more ludicrously out of hand when we later found out the NSA was tapping the phones of high-ranking official of other governments, like the Chancellor of Germany. Great job there, NSA. Keep on monitoring those damn Nazis, never mind the fact that WWII ended in 1945. We are sliding down that slippery slope that will lead us into a total surveillance state. And with the godforsaken Xbox One monitoring us at all times through the Kinect, well, George Orwell’s predictions were proven right after all.
2. The Royal Baby – Ugh. For fuck’s sake, nobody gives a shit about the royal baby. Okay, sure, maybe the British do, but nobody else does. Why was the U.S. media insisting on making this a story? Prince Baldy and Princess So-Beautiful-She-Only-Married-Baldy-for-the-Status had sex and reproduced. They only did what everyone else on the planet is capable of doing. I’m sorry, but this is not a news worthy story. Now, if the baby had developed the theory for cold fusion, then, yes, I would be interested. But it didn’t do that. It did what all babies do: shit and cry. I have nothing against the baby, not at all. But the fact that the media insisted everyone should care about these do royals procreating was totally annoying. This was the year 2013, why do we care about royalty at all? They don’t do anything but collect taxes from people for no other reason than they used to be in charge a long time ago. And that makes them interesting? Didn’t we fight the Revolutionary War so we could ignore these assholes? Ugh. For fuck’s sake.
3. Action Stars’ Failed Comebacks – 2013 was the year that Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Bruce Willis all staged magnificent comebacks to the action movie genre. Of course, they all failed spectacularly. They unleashed some of the cheesiest, hammiest (now I’m getting hungry), most generic action movies in a long time. They wanted to recapture the magic of the 80s, but you know what? The 80s are over. I love those old movies, but they are a product of their time. The kind of stuff they did then just doesn’t work today. And I don’t think another 20 Expendables movies is going to change that.
4. U.S. Government Shutdown – The U.S. government is so completely fucked up that it managed to land not one but two spots on this year’s shitty list. The two party system is completely broken. The entire government, and the hundreds of thousands of federal employess, not to mention millions of citizens who depend on services, were held hostage over an ideological hissy-fit. Republicans got most of the blame and rightfully so. They kept trying to block the Affordable Care Act, despite their attempts at blocking it were denied countless times by the courts and the voters themselves. Democrats came out looking pretty good at the end, but they are not without blame. The fact that they play such a massive role in the perpetutation of the broken political system leaves them just as culpable. No government should have to shut down because the players are stuck in a pissing contest. They have proven definitively that they don’t give a shit about the American people. They only care about their personal legacies and catering to radical groups of voters who make up the minority of the public. Maybe the NSA should think about monitoring the politicians and arresting those assholes for crimes against the country. They would have no shortage of suspects, that’s for sure.
5. Miley Cyrus was Everywhere – I don’t have a problem with Miley Cyrus. She’s a kid, and she is acting like a kid: stupid. The only problem is that she’s a kid celebrity, and therefore her antics are plastered across our TVs and computers for all the world to see. I don’t need to see a vacuous bimbo shaking her ass with her tongue sticking out. I’ve been to college, I know what that’s like. We don’t need to keep recycling it over and over again. The shitty part about this was how the media kept trying to make her antics into a news story. No matter how expected her behavior was, the media kept trying to make it into something big, something it was not. Nobody cares about kids being stupid. That’s what they do best. Can we please stop paying attention to this nonsense?

Well, another year has come and gone. 2014 is just getting started. I’m sure there will be many more awesome and shitty things happening during the Earth’s long trek around the sun. Let’s hope, no matter what happens, we can ridicule them with reckless abandon.

Facebook Movie – The Social Network – dismissive wanking motion

I recently had the (dis)pleasure of watching the critically jizzed upon film, The Social Network. Essentially, it’s just The Facebook Movie, or perhaps more accurately, The Thefacebook Movie, although it should really be called, Filling Two Hours with Mark Zuckberg’s Passive-Aggressive Bullshit. Seriously, what the fuck was this movie supposed to be about?

I guess it’s supposed to tell the story of the founding of internet juggernaut Facebook. But it’s not really about that. Actually, very little time is spent on Facebook itself. Half the movie is spent watching Zuckerberg obsess about how to create/improve his website, and the other half is spent in depositions as Zuckerberg defends himself against two simultaneous lawsuits. Obviously, you can’t make a movie about the actual Facebook webpage, but there could have been a more interesting angle for the filmmakers to take. Actually, either angle alone would have been fine, they should have just picked one or the other and gone with that, instead of taking this schizophrenic approach, trying to cram both stories into a two hour running time. Neither version works nearly as well as it could.

I appreciate that Zuckerberg is not a hero in this movie. It is a rare thing for a Hollywood movie to actually have a morally ambiguous, or perhaps villainous, central character. They could have gone the cliche route and have the movie be about cuddly Zuckerberg’s triumph against adversity to become a multi-billionaire. But they didn’t, so at least they succeeded in that aspect. Unfortunately, they still managed to drop the ball, because, let’s face it, most Hollywood screenwriters are idiots.

Zuckerberg’s personality is given to us at face value. He passive-aggressively interacts with people, he shadily sides with Napster Dude to cockblock his former business partner Eduardo, and he speaks like an abrasive jerk to people he feels are beneath him (i.e. everyone). Zuckerberg’s motivations are left completely up to the imagination of the viewers. A more in-depth look at his psyche is not offered up. Most likely this is because the writer exhausted all of his creative juices dreaming up ridiculous scenes where computer programmers do shots while having underground coding competitions. God forbid they try to actually EXPLORE the main character’s motivations and social failings. Does he have Asperberger’s? Was he abused as a child? Is he stuck in a bi-curious phase? We’ll never know. The way things are presented, we are expected to accept that Zuckerberg’s character is a total douche just because he is a total douche (maybe that works in real life, but not in movies). That’s weak ass writing. I would expect nothing less from Hollywood assholes.

Awesomest/Shittiest Things of 2010

It seems like every year brings nothing but 365 days of non-stop shit. Awesome things are much harder to come by. It would have been a piece of cake to write a top 10, top 20, or top 500 list of shitty things that happened in 2010. Choosing just a few was quite a challenge. An even greater challenge was finding an equal number of awesome things from this year. With a little bit of scrounging, I realized that there were some cool things that happened in 2010, after all. This list is the best and worst things of the year, as I see it, which means it is 100% right. If you disagree with any of them, you’re 100% wrong. So here you have it, a list of the awesomest and shittiest things of 2010.

Awesome

1. Large Hadron Collider – It’s the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. From smashing atoms it is expected to help answer some of the universe’s greatest questions from the Big Bang Theory to the Mystery of Oprah’s Fluctuating Weight. It had countless delays but finally got up and running this year. Scientists are already using it in the hopes of analyzing Dark Matter. Doomsday-nutjobs predict that the LHC will atom-smash its way into the complete destruction of the universe. Sweet!
2. Inception – It’s actually pretty rare for Hollywood to make a good movie, let alone a great one. This film had it all. From cast to music to action to directing to plot, this movie shines in every department. It is a rare and wonderful thing when a movie doesn’t dumb itself down to pander to the billions of mouth-breathers who will inevitably watch it. I suppose it’s rare because movie studio execs are mouth-breathers, too. While the story about dream-stealers wasn’t particularly confusing if you actually paid attention (most people didn’t), it was innovative enough to draw you into its world. It was intelligent, with overlapping dream sequences, and fun, with the incredibly entertaining rotating hallway scene. Director Christopher Nolan worked on this for nearly a decade, and his love for it and detail to attention really shines through. Probably the best movie of the year.
3. Goldilocks Planet – Scientists discovered a planet about 20 light years away which, like Earth, has all the right factors to sustain life. Better yet, scientists hypothesize that there are many more planets like it in the universe, meaning there could be a lot of aliens out there. Hopefully, they are all super hot and look exactly like humans except for weird shit on their faces just like in Star Trek. Can someone say alien porno?
4. Russian Spy Ring – Earlier this year the FBI busted a Russian spy ring that was operating in the U.S. Some of them had been spying for Mother Russia since the mid-1990s, while others came on board later. They had spied on various facets of the U.S. government, and had a complex, covert means of communicating with Russia. They were eventually caught, and traded back to Russia in a large-scale prisoner exchange. Best of all, one of them was definitely supermodel material. There’s nothing like a beautiful Russian agent to bring out those James Bond fantasies in all of us.
5. Winter Olympics – It always seems like the Winter Olympics is the ugly half-sister of the super-hot Summer Olympics. This year, however, things were different. People were genuinely excited for the games, and I found myself watching it often. For some reason, everything was captivating from Snowboarding to Speed Skating to Bobsleigh to Country Cross Skiing. Yes, that’s right, even Cross Country Skiing was awesome. I had always remembered it as some boring guys doing a leisurely snow-walk across a flat surface. What I saw this year was a bunch of totally crazy dudes racing full force through a mountain of snow with a couple of skiis attached to their feet. It was hardcore, and they looked like they were putting way more energy into it than any Summer Olympics track star. I will definitely be tuning in to the Winter Olympics in the future. It is the ugly half-sister no longer.
6. Psychic World Cup Octopus – Paul the Octopus lived humbly in Germany. During the 2010 World Cup, he had accurately predicted all of the winners of 8 matches, including the final round. Food (a mussel) was placed in two boxes, each with the flag of a country. Whichever mussel Paul ate first was predicted to win the match. And he never got one wrong. The undefeated octopus was indeed psychic. Now all I need to do is kidnap the little guy and take him on a roadtrip to Vegas.
7. Flight Attendant Quits – Jet Blue flight attendant Steven Slater quit in a blaze of glory that I certainly hope to live up to someday. When a passenger gave him some attitude, he decided he had enough. He used the intercom to let loose a tirade of four-letter words, grabbed a couple of beers, and commandeered the emergency escape ramp to slide out of the plane. There are very few things more awesome than cursing at someone and downing some booze while you’re at work.
8. Daft Punk – This is by far the most talented electronic music group working today, and probably of all time. This year Disney made a smart move by allowing them to do the entire soundtrack to their movie Tron: Legacy. It only makes sense to have a electronic soundtrack populating a computerized world. It’s rare for such a perfect match to happen these days. Apparently, one of the two robots of Daft Punk stated he was heavily influenced by the visual aesthetic of the original Tron film. I guess that means things have come full circle. Oh yeah, and the soundtrack fucking rocked.
9. Colbert Testifies – For some reason, Congress decided to call Stephen Colbert to testify in front of a House of Representatives subcommittee on illegal immigration. Apparently Congressmen don’t watch TV. Either that or they are completely retarded for thinking that Colbert was going to give earnest testimony. And why would a TV comedian be qualified to testify on such an issue? They wouldn’t, but that gives you an idea of how in-touch with reality U.S. politicians are. Colbert appeared in character and immediately showed anyone who watched it what a farce the whole thing was. He kicked things off early with this line, “As you heard this morning, America’s farms are presently far too dependent upon immigrant labor to pick our fruits and vegetables. Now the obvious answer is for all of us to stop eating fruits and vegetables. And if you look at the recent obesity statistics, you’ll see that many Americans have already started.” And later, “Because my great grandfather did not travel across four thousand miles of  the Atlantic Ocean to see this country overrun by immigrants. He did it because he killed a man back in Ireland. That’s the rumor, I don’t know if that’s true, I’d like to have that stricken from the record.” And finally, “For one thing, when you’re picking beans, you have to spend all day bending over. It turns out – and I did not know this – most soil is at ground level. If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we make the earth waist-high? Come on, where is the funding?” It takes a lot of balls to walk into Congress, who is 100% serious and 100% stupid, and make fun of them right to their faces.
10. This blog – rules.

Shitty

1. Bristol Palin – The evil spawn of Sarah Palin has already had more publicity than any vapid, obese teen mom should. The biggest insult to humanity in 2010 was subjecting us to her antics on TV’s Dancing with the Stars. For the love of god, who would want to watch her ineptly gyrating on stage week after week? And I really do mean week after week, because she lasted until the final episode. Making matters even crazier is that her bitch mom forced her to go on DWTS because she “owed” it to her after she caused her to lose the 2010 election. Yeah Sarah, I’m sure the fact that you quit your first term as Governor, and you can “see Alaska from my house” had nothing to do with it. If you didn’t think it could get worse, well it does because Bristol is also the only contestant on DWTS history to actually gain weight! Yes, all those hours of dancing must have been off-balanced by the extra Big Macs and Twinkies she shoved in her face every night. Finally, her dancing was so awful a Wisconsin man made national headlines when he was so enraged by Bristol’s terrible dancing that he blasted his TV with a shotgun, resulting in a standoff with police. You see, Bristol, look at what you’ve done. I think you “owe” it to us to never appear on TV again.
2. iPhone4/Steve Jobs – The iPhone 4 was supposed to be like the Jesus of telephones. It could perform miracles and come back from the dead. It could do anything… except make phone calls. Apparently they changed the antenna so that when you held the phone a certain way, the calls would get dropped or not go through at all. Fan-fucking-tastic engineering, Apple. Of course when people started complaining, the incredibly humble and consummate everyman Steve Jobs told people, “Just avoid holding it that way.” Thanks, Steve, next time I make a call I’ll try to avoid holding the phone with my hand. Asshole.
3. 3D – Will this trend please, please die already? It worked well enough in Avatar, but only because director James Cameron essentially built a whole new 3D camera rig from the ground up. Of course it still gave me a headache while I was watching it, but it was OK for just that one movie. Unfortunately, now everything is in fucking 3D. Most of it is shitty post-converted 3D, which means it wasn’t filmed that way, so it looks extra terrible like The Last Airbender. It seems like every movie is being made in 3D now, and Hollywood is charging extra for the ticket prices. It’s a shitty gimmick that allows them to continue to get away with weak ass stories and shitty acting. Hey Hollywood, how about this for a gimmick: make good movies for a change.
4. U.S. Republican Party – To quote Obi Wan Kenobi, in Capitol Hill, “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.” Never before have I seen a group of people so adamantly opposed to doing absolutely anything. For the last two years, Republicans have cockblocked every bill brought to Congress by Democrats simply because they were brought to Congress by Democrats. That’s right, they opposed everything simply out of principle. And we aren’t talking heavily partisan politics here, we are talking bills that would do things like help decrease the world’s supply of nuclear weapons. Yeah, we can’t have enough of those. (Eventually they did pass that one, but only after bitching about it for months ahead of time.) Republicans, however, are amazing in their ability to use Jedi Mind Tricks on the American public. They brainwashed everyone into thinking that lowering taxes on the richest citizens (while not giving a fuck about anyone else), and effectively decreasing the flow of revenue into the government, would somehow decrease the giant deficit. Bravo! I am genuinely impressed. Democrats are idiots, too, because they essentially just laid down and allowed this shit to happen to them despite having control of Congress with a super-majority. Nice going, dipshits. I think that the Republicans should attempt to do something in order to get things moving along in the U.S, and Democrats should stop being such pussies. If nobody does anything, then how do they expect anything to change? On the bright side, former Republican Congressman and world-class asshole Tom Delay, was convicted of money laundering in 2010. So at least we have that to smile about.
5. Bieber Fever – It’s not Justin Bieber that I have a problem with. To me, he’s like… eh, whatever. What pisses me off are his ridiculously obsessive, moronic fans. They actually remind me a lot of Twilight fans. While Twilight fans are sickening, obese, middle-aged housewives who fantasize about dreamy guys who don’t have sex, Bieber fans are sickening, obese, pre-teen/teenage girls who fantasize about an androgynous guy who probably hasn’t developed pubic hair yet. His songs aren’t that good, yet they flood the radio. As a teenage generic love-song factory, he was rightly given a multi-episode guest starring role on the TV show CSI. Yeah, that makes sense. His performance was… hilariously amazing. And now Bieber fever has catapaulted him to star in his own movie Never Say Never, which of course is a movie about his life. Ah, I can’t wait to see all the arduous trials, his long slow struggle through his career, and the sage wisdom he accumulate over all of his 16 years.
6. Kesha – The fact that this bitch can’t sing, can’t dance, can’t write coherent songs, is drunk 99% of the time, isn’t attractive, and can still be a major music star is the reason why I have shunned popular music. Since she can’t sing she just pseudo-raps or “sing/talks” throughout each track with heavy auto-tuning to make up for her wailing voice, which is akin to the cry of a dying cat. Her songs are horrible, but the music industry wants them to be hits, so they just force radio stations to play them over and over again until they eventually become hits. Between her braindead “music” and Kanye West getting credit for rapping over Daft Punk’s hard work (i.e. Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger), the music industry should just burn in hell.
7. BP Oil Rig Leak – This one seems like an obvious choice, I realize that. But it doesn’t make it any less shitty. For months oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico. Nobody seemed to give a fuck, and the oil kept coming and coming. And of course it happened to New Orleans, who seems to have still not quite made it out of the Hurricane Katrina clusterfuck. Poor New Orleans seems to be a magnet for bad shit. Pretty soon Bristol Palin will fly down there to dance for them, causing their next natural disaster. At the very least the oil leak seemed to have a decent resolution. Unfortunately, Obama seemed to care about this as much as Bush did about Katrina. It’s not like Obama was going to personally dive underwater and plug up the leak, but he could have at least pretended to give a shit.
8. Full Body Airport Security Scanners – There’s nothing better than having a creepy, bald-headed, nude photograph taken of you at the airport for TSA to drool over and inevitably jerk off to. I’m glad that this is what airport security has come to. Either have a public naked picture taken of you (With bonus radiation zapped through your body!), or get a public groping instead. Decisions, decisions. Benjamin Franklin said, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” I agree with him, and people who complacently agree to be scanned should go fuck themselves.
9. Jay Leno/Tonight Show Debacle – Last place network NBC made a great move earlier this year by firing Conan O’Brien from his 6-month-long hosting stint at The Tonight Show and replacing him with former host Jay Leno. Conan put up a fight, and NBC went straight to a child-like tantrum by threatening to block Conan from appearing anywhere on TV for the next three years. Leno, of course, was backing NBC’s decision, so he looked like a complete tool. Soon, everything went entirely to shit, and NBC fired Conan. Conan fought back with his last week of shows by spending exorbitant amounts of money, just to stick it to NBC as a final “fuck you.” So now that Leno is back as the host of The Tonight Show, how did it all work out? Well, The Tonight Show has the worst ratings in the series’ history, NBC is still the last place network, NBC’s jackass president resigned, and Conan’s new show on TBS is getting better ratings than The Tonight Show. You see, NBC? That’s what you get for being douchebags.
10. Any blog that isn’t this one – sucks.

Well, the year 2010 has given us plenty of awesome things, but way more shitty things. I suppose every year is like that. Let’s see what happens in 2011. I’m sure there will be no shortage of shit that will piss me off.