Holy crap, that was the most fun I’ve had getting drunk and humping a girl dressed as a sexy penguin this week.

ORLANDO, JUMP AWN IT, JUMP AWN IT, JUMP AWN IT!

That’s as Sir Mix-A-Lot as I get.

I come from four hours of partying, as apparently there was a "Super Bowl" today. Something about bears and horses fighting so we drink beers and drunk drive home. While enjoying the bosoms of a Julie Andrews impersonator pummeling me into a light coma, it was brought to my attention that Jess Fink is a great artist. I was also reconnected to my love Fantastic Plastic Machine and Bruce Haack.

Who is Bruce Haack? What is a Fantastic Plastic Machine? I tell you now!

Bruce Haack is a man who composed a series of poems and songs that are thought to have given birth to synth pop and modern techno. He is most notable for several appearances on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, along with his partner, Esther Nelson. While Bruce used several home made devices to give himself a sort of robotic twang in his music, Esther’s voice was crazy all by itself. The cadence of his performance makes you feel like you’re tumbling down a hill with him. He often rhymed words with the same word over and over again, and spoke on drum beats so you would have no choice but to go along with whatever he said.

I’m Ms. Nelson, how are you?
I’m here to sing and dance with you!
My name is Bruce, I’m feeling great,
You can join the party, have some birthday cake!
So if you want to know what to do,
And if you want to join us, too
Your mom says that a thing to do
IS DANCING! Children, clap your hands!

Bruce was a social shut in due to being abused as a child, and lived a hard life of alcoholism and depression. Like all of my heroes, except for William Shatner, Bruce died before he got too old to be cool, clocking in at around 57 in 1988 due to heart failure.

Fantastic Plastic Machine is actually the pseudonym of a rotund Japanese man who remixed some samples of Bruce’s music and took part in a documentary about it. If you want to hear the spirit of all of Bruce’s work in his less than sixty years on this Earth, that’s the only song you need to hear. FPM’s other music sounds like it was contemporary in the early 60s, which makes it fun for white people to move to. Oh, hey, there’s a penguin at my door…

Its tough to pretend to be insane and get a girlfriend. Then again, how do I know if I’m pretending or not? Maybe that’s what crazy people do, they just act weird as a practical joke on the rest of us; or is that, "the rest of you?" Maybe seemingly normal people just pretend to be sane, and really, they’re the ones that are crazy. Just as maladjusted and discontent as the rest of the world, but they can’t have fun like everyone else. Maybe they’ve got exactly the wrong idea.

Oh, how many girls have slinked off on me after I randomly started dancing in public to music only I could hear… or after I had an entire conversation with a potted plant about how I arrange my shoes upside down to hide embarassing foot odors in front of them, ignoring them all the while… or after I cover one eye with my hand and start sneaking around the room, discreetly chasing after my eternally rolling missing eyeball while mumbling like a drunken Popeye… Its not easy being me.

This is me, in my head.

However, there is hope for myself and Mini-Me. For every ten times that I do something weird while off on a date, WHICH I HAVE NO CONTROL OVER, MOTHER, one time there will be a crazy girl who will start helping me chase my eyeball. My favorite moment on a date, so far, has been when a girl and I erupted into a 1920s jazz dance number in the middle of downtown Bakersfield, California, to a very loud, very long radio jingle for a local bail bondsman/state certified unitarian minister who was running for board of county commissions. We had no audience, we had an empty street – it was 3 AM on the white side of town, and except for a local teenage band that was desperately trying to become KoRN, there was not a bright spot to the city except for us. It was twelve minutes of intense cardio that included and was not limited to the Batusi, the Macarena, a high speed hand jive, and then a race between the Rodger Rabbit versus the Moonwalk from one end of the block to the other. That’s right, I may yet contribute to the gene pool. Watch your future end.

Dramatic recreation of that night.

Another great memory was on a beautiful Halloween night, wherein I was dressed as a mime. I love face paint, I carry some around with me where ever I go. Its makes your face a canvus and the crayons and hairspray into a mobile mask. I fell in love with a beautiful kitty-clown at a party that night. She was wearing a hideous orange and green smock that went down just a little bit lower than her hips, Cheshire cat underwear, and one of those a poofy purple ruffle thing around her neck. Cute little black cat ears, and whiskers and nose painted on. She mimed pouring her drink down my pants while I was busy trying to get my hand away from the invisible monster who lived between a pair of couch cushions, and things just went on from there. And we told eachother corny jokes and did prat falls and set my bowler hat on fire and threw it at some kids and it was an amazing evening and I never saw her again after that night but I left streaks of white make up on her cheeks, neck and breasts.

Dream girl

Another one. She’s a scared little mouse, raised to be aware of her shame constantly and to stay quiet and be angry at the world. She looked to my friend down the hall in my dorm as a councilor, and he was so certain that she had a crush on him even though he was engaged. It was funny, but she had a crush on me. She’d come over to my room while I was drunk from the night before and lying around in my underwear, hair poofed into a manfro, demanding an escort to Blockbuster or something equally mundane. Each time she’d tell me about crushes she had on cartoon characters like Inuyasha, or Beast Boy from the Teen Titans. I’d laugh and laugh, and she’d wait until my guard was down to ask me questions about why I seem so reclusive, why I’m always telling jokes, asking what my real name was, where I was really from, where I’ve been, and, the things that I’ve seen, the people I’ve met, what my aspirations are. It was weird, because I try to turn that stuff around in basic conversation, always thinking that, unless I’m blogging, I shouldn’t talk about myself.

It’s rude.

I didn’t have a lot of answers for her, anyway. So one night, she had a nightmare and came looking for her councilor. He’s busy screwing his girlfriend, so she comes to see me and I ask her to go for a walk with me. She’s never danced before. You don’t dance? No, just, in my room, by myself… Well, come on, beautiful, I know exactly where we should go. Wait, should I change? No, you look fine. Where are we going? Doesn’t matter, we don’t know anybody there.

We hang a right when we get outside and end up at a fraternity party. AW, SKEET SKEET SKEET, MOTHERFUCKER! You know that song? That’s our song. We danced together amid every cultural heritage America has to offer, I even got her to grind on me. I picked her up and slammed her in my lap, turned her upside down, threw her over my shoulder and buzzed right on her belly button. She was in love. I invited her out the next night to go see a movie – Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. She’s wearing a bluejean jacket and cute stretchy pants, I’m wearing a Star Trek original series security uniform. Yeah, I was so skeptical about how the night would end, I wore the red shirt. There are some slow parts in the movie, so I reach under her shirt and tickle side. I go directly back to eating popcorn while she stifles tortured giggles in a very sensitive crowd dedicated to hanging on to every word of this, the final Star Wars movie ever. She returns fire, and I did not expect it. My five dollar cup of Sprite goes flying at the screen, and I think Jar Jar was doing something at the time, so my actions were forgiven. Bam, right in the armpit. This girl plays dirty, so I decided to play as well. I put my nose right in her armpit and breathed in hard, she freaks out and starts squealing. We proceed to have a tickle fight right up to the point that Padme croaks. She sniffs and lets out a single tear, and I’m the big strong arm she needs to sniffle into.

She’s still in California. I may have a wait to get back into the gene pool yet. Goddamn wild oats.

[ Currently: CRANKY ]
Call of Duty 3

This game, like real warfare, is a chore to play that will often make you feel like there is no hope of winning, cut down your morale constantly, and make you feel like stabbing yourself in the knee, just so you’ll feel something other than frustration. War is not a game, it is hard work. So is this game. It is not fun.

While earlier Call of Duty titles were bloomed with patriotism and had interjections by real veterans telling their stories of dead friends and lost limbs to pull on your heart strings, Call of Duty 3 is a light character piece. It feels more like a weak WWII movie that was shot after John Wayne died than a deeply emotional first person look into what World War II was, why our grandparents and great grandparents had to fight, and how every single man’s death was a tremendous tragedy, not only to their comrades, but to the family and community they had left across the Atlantic to do their duty for their country. Your comrades have their own personalities and identities, but there is no emotional attachment to them because the game is a constantly oppressing series of assaults. Your fellow soldiers are a lump of pixels that get in front of your shots occasionally, not a human being and fellow American/Pole/Canadian/Brit whose life you want to help preserve.

As a mindless FPS that focuses heavily on stop and pop elements to get through the level, Call of Duty 3 is a meager portion of more of the same. As a historic testament to a great and dying generation, it is a total failure.

X-Men: The Official Game

I did not finish this game. That’s how bad it was. They spent all of their money getting Alan Cummings, Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart and John P. Guywhoplaysbobbydrake to do voice acting on this game, and skipped out on cinematics, a storyline, and gameplay. This is a tedious and unrewarding game that represents everything that is wrong with licensed games. Another strike for Marvel’s games division, which not long ago kept cranking out great games, like The Punisher and The Incredible Hulk. Now, it can’t get a truly good game out to save its life.

Stubbs the Zombie

Just as Conker’s Bad Fur Day before it, Stubbs is a genius and beautiful game that took full advantage of the hardware it came out on – just before it died. Considering that this game was made for the original X-Box, it’s a little more salt in the wound that it looks a lot better than X-Men: The Official Game. The gameplay mechanics are a little tedious, and basically boil down to striking an enemy twice and then eating their brain. But its a lot of fun to create an army of undead to just unleash upon all of your enemies – particularly during one segment of the game which is nice and wide open, and as you steadily amass fellow zombies from the corpses of your fallen foes, they sort of go off to do their own thing and you get to watch as your legion multiplies exponentially.

The game falls apart when it comes to a story. There really is no hint at who Stubbs is, how he died, and why he crawled out of the ground until the final chapters of the game, and the end of the game? Well, it isn’t very satisfying. Until that final hour, it just seems like a mindlessly violent parody of 1950s American drive in movies. And disgusting, too – Stubbs has a sizeable shotgun wound in his left side, and you can see some decaying organs bouncing around inside him throughout the entire game. On the plus side of the campy 50s angle they took on, there are some great updated classics of some old pop tunes, especially the new "My Boyfriend’s Back" and "Lollipop." Hearing them every once in a while throughout the game is a great reminder as to how the generation after Call of Duty 3’s contributed to good ol’ all American rock and roll.

Unfortunately, Stubbs is way too short to merit a purchase, and has no enticements for a second or third play through. It is still a great rental, especially if you have a friend to play co-op with. Or if you just want to see a zombie eat Fonzie’s brain.