Untertainment Weakly (3-11-11)

By Jake 

Phil Collins quits music!

Tomb Raider reboot. Your prayers have been answered.

Charlie Sheen was fired from "Two and a Half Men" by text message. Yet, that does not mean that show is going away. Maybe they are going to get Emilio Estev to replace him.

IAM Entertainment is developing a movie about the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons. Finally, a movie about balloons!

Movies Out Today

Mars Needs Moms - Hey, here's something that doesn't get released often: a movie for children! This one is about the mom draught that is currently happening on Mars. I usually do not like political movies, but I think Glenn is going to enjoy this one. I would think this is one to skip, but I say that about pretty much every movie released. This one, in particular, has a very bad title. Hey, at least it isn't a remake, based on a fairy tale or Shakespeare with gnomes.

Battle: Los Angeles - Yet another feature film that is based around the war between LA and aliens. It is supposedly awful, but I get my movie reviews from a dying man. Roger Ebert said that it is chaotic, ugly and stupid. So if you are ugly and stupid, this movie will probably be relatable and chaotic enough for you. If you are handsome and brilliant go see Gnomeo and Juliet. Making these dumb ass movies is a much better use of money than feeding homeless people. Those idiots don't even see movies!

Red Riding Hood - The classic fairy tale springs to life in this sexy thriller starring Amanda Seyfried. I am going to use the success of this film to judge whether the end of the world is a good thing. If people will see a movie version of Little Red Riding Hood, then maybe we are better off being swallowed up by a Japanese whirlpool. Roger Ebert's review of this is great because he sounds like the old man that he is. Yeah, people are stupid, especially young girls. They want to fuck monsters like vampires, werewolves and frankensteins. I will not be surprised to see this movie make $100 million, and I will weep $100 million worth of tears--which is a lot more than ? and the Mysterions sang about in their big hit song "96 Tears," due to inflation.

I Like Some Things, Too

Elvis Presley - I have become a fan of Elvis, much to Kaleena's chagrin.

Parks and Recreation - If you are not watching this show, you are doing yourself a great disservice. It is possibly the funniest show on TV right now besides The Simpsons. The characters of Parks and Recreation are all likable. My biggest problem with 30 Rock is that basically none of the characters are likable at all. Community has some likable characters and some unlikable ones, but that show is great, too.

Enjoy your week and don't see Little Red Riding Hood in 3D.

Existential Meditations 3: Tokyo Drift


By Bub 

The nuclear blast was the most terrifying and beautiful thing the bomber pilot had ever seen, until the day he saw two nuclear blasts go off at once.

An abortion doctor assassin, on trial for murder, upon being sentenced to life imprisonment says a Jewish racial slur under his breath directed toward the judge.

The sketch artist showed her patron his portrait and was confounded when he then evaporated into a mist, fogging up her glasses.

The door-to-door computer salesman misguidedly went to Crate & Barrel seeking treatment after contracting tetanus from a rusty kitchen knife.

The janitor emerged from the women's bathroom after cleaning it to discover a single foot long turd floating down the hallway.

A tornado sucked a pregnant horse out of a barn and deposited it onto the roof of a McDonald's two miles away. The foal was stillborn and dozens of frozen burger patties were destroyed after defrosting during the power outage.

The Ojibwa halfback carried the ball for over one hundred yards but dropped the winning dream in the end zone.

A mouse gnawed its own paws off in a futile attempt to escape from a misfired mousetrap. It bled to death four millimeters from a small hunk of plastic cheese.

A Mandarin speaking permanent U.S. resident suffered a stroke and lost all language capabilities. Then, spontaneously, understood Arabic for five minutes before dying.

The walking tree developed a severe limp and was subsequently ridiculed by a row of hedges.

A firetruck loaded onto the back of a barge in order to transport it to extinguish a lake fire, runs out of fuel halfway to its destination.

As a camera crew ate silently while the father at the next table berated his son for being 'inconsiderate' for ordering 'the steak', the restaurant's hostess refused to seat a high school soccer team.

Debate: Child Limits in America

By Glenn & Jake 

Children are the future...or are they? This is the question that philosophers and theologians have been pontificating on for centuries and yes no definitive answer exists, at least according to askjeeves.com. Some say that we should have a child limit like our red Chinese masters. Others feel that the current no-limit system is the cat's pajamas. And some just enjoy having careless, unprotected sex and making as many accidental babies as their sperm and ovaries can produce. Whichever group you fall in, you can be assured that this debate is for you. It offers two sides on the subject of child limits in the United States of America.

Glenn: I don't have children and I probably never will. I approach this issue from a theoretical perspective, like a non-Mormon sociologist. There is nothing outrageous with having three, four, five or even fifteen children. This country was founded on large families - Genghis Khan's family was (and is) larger than the entire county of Bhutan! Parents used to have tons of kids to work on a farm or in wage slavery urban factories supported by the modern Republican Party. These were all good reasons to have a big family, but modern times have produced modern reasons. We will discuss these as the debate continues, but one of the strongest is to emulate those we see on television. Our society is spiritually bankrupt (using the term "spiritually" in a completely non-theistic way) and we are forced to mimic behaviors we see in the media. The biggest shows on television in 2010 were all about having giant families. Jon and Kate Plus 8, 17 and Counting, and others display how couples can be if they keep having sex over and over again until the woman's uterus falls out. You already have your own football team assembled!

Jake: Here's my opening remark: fuck you, Glenn! Children are awful. Children are the cause and most of the casualties of wars. Hitler was a child at one point. Even your hero Genghis Khan was a child! Even having two children is kind of crazy, but if you are allowed to have one, you might as well have two--one of each. People are not responsible enough to take care of their children. If I were a parent, and hopefully I never will be, I would make sure my children would never watch the Beetlejuice cartoon or smoke crack. Parents have Beetlejuice babysit their children and then shotgun crack smoke into their mouths to watch them freak out. They think it is funny. The only thing that I find amusing about this all-too-real scenario is that this is what passes for good parenting these days. Now, I'm not saying we should put birth control and salt peter in the water supply, but I would not oppose a plan that did say that.

Glenn: That was a rude opening remark and if that is how you will raise your children, maybe you shouldn't have so many! But for the rest of us, have children. Have many children. You talk a lot of shit about children - some deserved - but you haven't addressed the main point, which is the number of children. For every evil person who was once a child - Hitler, Genghis Khan, Kate Gosselin - there exists a similarly good person who began as a teenager. If Andy Warhol's parents had twenty-five children instead of three, there would be much more art in this world. We are so thankful for all the Baldwin children and damn it if we wouldn't be better off with more. Every couple has to make the decision about how much they want to contribute to over-populating and killing the Earth, but I think there's nothing wrong with putting more and more CO-producing entities on this planet. Hong Kong has small families and a very low birth rate (~7.5). They have also been absorbed by China in the last twenty years. If you want us to keep having small families and be annexed by China, that's your right. But damn if I'm going to sit here and let it happen.

Jake: Two children is plenty. I did address it in my last point, but I will say it again: one boy, one girl or any other combination you choose via your genetics. We should be happy with that many. In the world of Aeon Flux, the full-length feature film, everybody is a clone. In the film Gattaca, you cannot become an astronaut if you have bad genes, or whatever that movie is about. I feel like it is vaguely about population control, but I could be wrong, and if I am, strike that point about Gattaca. Children are terrible. My dad has seven children and he keeps having more. That is crazy, isn't it? Think about all of the food he has to buy to feed his four babies right now. Now think of that food going into your mouth for free. Which world do you want to live in? We are running out of space and pretty soon we'll be living in 500 story high-rise apartments like in Neo-Tokyo.

Glenn: I think we have our next debate: Hong Kong or Tokyo. But before then, we have to finish this one. Your dad has seven children but you love all of them (except yourself). There are so many awful right-wing people in this country, due in part to highly religious families procreation practices. If we want to prevent the United States from becoming a Mormon theocracy, we have to match their birthrates. Good, hard-working liberal Americans like myself should feel compelled to create as many similarly minded children as possible. When the upcoming ideological civil war tears this country apart, we want enough people on our side to make it a fair fight. I'm not Peter King so I don't hate Muslims, but many Europeans do. They hate them because their population is growing so quickly and they make up a bigger and bigger portion of countries such as Germany, France and Turkey. If some families decide to turn on the uterine spigot and some families don't, the former will be the ones who demographically dominate the next generation. Personally, I welcome the new Hispanic majority that will seize power in the US by 2040 - in fact, I'm even re-learning Spanish in honor of it - but let's not pretend like family size has nothing to do with it.

Jake: Glenn's racially charged point has done nothing to convince me that it should be mandatory to have over two children. I am worried about spacial issues, not racial issues. The only race I'm concerned with is the Kentucky Derby and that's because I bet $800 on Comma to the Top. I think I have a strong chance of winning, but I also think that America is quickly running out of room in the states people actually want to live in. Sure, there is plenty of room in the country and Wyoming, but we need to be able to farm vegetables, fruits, livestock and sand. Without any of those our economy would collapse like a house of cards in a wind tunnel. Glenn's hatred of Mormons is matched only by his love of large families. I find his opinion on both to be repulsive. Now, I may have at times said in jest that I think abortions should be mandatory and that mother's should give birth directly into meat grinders, but now I am saying it seriously. I want my country back, and unlike Glenn, not from the Muslims and Mormons, but from the children who do nothing but play Space Invaders, have sex, graffito tag everything in sight and steal and murder everything and everybody in sight. As Thomas Jefferson once said: "If children are the future, then somebody better build a time machine so I can hang out in the past."

Shut up About Charlie Sheen Already

By Jake 

You cannot leave your house or turn on any media delivery device anymore without some asshole droning on to you about Charlie Sheen. It seems that Mr. Sheen was recently "busted" for doing cocaine and hanging out with pornography starlets. Then he went onto a lot of TV shows and said things like "tiger blood" and the word "winning." Now, his hit TV program, 2.5 Men, is on hiatus and may never return.

So where does this leave us, the general population of the world? I guess this separates us into three categories: 1) those of us who are obsessed with Charlie Sheen and eat his TV interviews, movies and 2.5 Men for breakfast 2) those who hate or simply do not care about Charlie Sheen in any way and 3) Charlie Sheen. I would fall into the second group, I suppose. I am more annoyed by all of this Charlie Sheen talk than I am by Heidi Montag not being on TV anymore.

I have nightmares about what Jay Leno's current monologue must be like. As he squeeks away "Charlie Sheen is on drugs and likes sex jokes" like a mouse, I wake up in a cold sweat. If he does "Dancing Charlie Sheens" I will drive to Burbank, California, and shoot Jay Leno in his throat.

I feel truly lucky at this moment because I do not have Television and I just won the lottery. Before this Charlie Sheen incident happened, I had planned on buying a 100 inch 3D TV, but now I will just donate that money to a stripper with the smallest chest at the local gentleman's club. I will be buying a gun, though, if I find out about any sort of Dancing Charlie Sheens.

What can we ultimately do to escape the Charlie Sheen jokes, opinions, discussions and town hall meetings?
1) Suicide. It's always the answer.
2) Read a book that is not about Charlie Sheen.
3) Meditate. Try to clear your mind of Charlie Sheen.
4) Cyber bully some kids to death.

There's a lot we can do to escape the white noise of Charlie Sheen and talk of Sheen. We just have to want to escape it first.

Coming Home


By Bub 

He came right in the front door. He scanned the place over and took a seat next to Charlotte on the couch. The room swelled with silent confusion. Carroll O'Connor said something satirically racist on television. The studio audience laughed.

"What the fuck are you doing?" Darrell, in the recliner, asked of the man - emphasizing 'the fuck' as if it were the subject of the question.

The man sat watching 'All In The Family' while Darrell and Charlotte stared at him in disbelief. He finally realized they expected an answer from him.

"Just enjoying some television. Is this a bad time?"

"Who the fuck are you? Of course it's a... Get the fuck OUT A HERE!"

"I'd rather not, actually. But it's OK if you would like to leave."

"If I'D like to leave?!?!" It was too much for Darrell.

"Honey, it's alright. Be a good host..." Charlotte said tentatively. "Maybe our guest would like something to drink." She then turned to the man and raised her eyebrows.

"That'd be terrific."

"I just brewed Darrell some iced tea this afternoon, would that be alright?"

"I would love some iced tea. That would be fantastic! Unsweetened, plea..."

"Be a good host?!" Darrell clipped off the man's request. "Iced tea?!?! FANTASTIC!?!? GET THE FUCK. OUT. NOW.!!"

"Dar-rull!" Charlotte scolded. "He's sorry, he doesn't mean anything by it. I apologize too, but I forgot to mention that it's sweet tea, is that alright?"

"No worries. I'm trying to cut out sugar - water from the tap would be fine."

"Oh we have bottled, let me go get you one." Charlotte got up to go to the kitchen.

"CharLOTTE!" Darrell threatened.

"Now Darrell, that's enough!" Charlotte brushed him off with a gesture of her hand and went to retrieve the water.

The man contentedly watched the television as Darrell watched the man, vexed, and bewildered. Finally Darrell gathered himself, leaned over, extended his index finger in the man's direction and whispered, "Listen buddy, I don't know who you are or why you're here but you'd better be gone by the time she gets back in here with that water."

The man, exasperated, raised his voice, "Sir, I have suffered enough of your rudeness!"

"What's that Charles?" A woman's voice, not Charlotte's, called from down the hall.

"Nothing dear!" The man answered.

Footsteps, then a woman in an evening dress appeared in the living room. She observed a room occupied by only Charles. She clasped an earring in her ear as she asked, "Who are you talking to, dear?"

The man looked sideways at Darrell. Darrell clenched and bared his teeth at the man.

"No one, dear."

"Alright then, come get dressed our reservation is in forty minutes."

"Alright dear."

Darrell traced his extended thumb horizontally across his throat threateningly toward the man.

"Alright, dear..." the man muttered uneasily to himself. He could not decide what to do next.