Tha Captain Swears By:

You've got to be solid in the kicking game!

Halfway through the quarterfinals. You know you're interested. To keep things fresh, I'll describe the games through nothing but soccer/sports cliches.

Villareal 1 - 1 Arsenal
Appropriate Cliches: Anything you can do I can do better! Brilliant goal by Villareal answered by brillianter goal by Arsenal. Slight advantage to the Gunners heading back to London. But anything can happen!

Manchester United 2 - 2 Porto
Appropriate Cliches: Against all odds, the scrappy underdogs looked like the more motivated team against the overwhelming favorites. Mistakes will cost you! Three of the four goals came from egregious defensive errors! You can't hurt yourself!

Liverpool 1 - 3 Chelsea
Appropriate Cliches: The Comstock Lode of cliches. These two teams seem to play each other every year in the Champions League! It's so crazy! The games in question haven't always been the most entertaining affairs but today's game was up and down the field. BASKETBALL ON GRASS! Also too: krazy komeback! Liverpool scored first then Chelsea went bonkers! Also too: Who is this guy?!?!?!? Fringe player and only occasional starter scores two for Chelsea. And if that wasn't enough of a heartwarming story, he's Serbian! It doesn't get any better! Liverpool faces an uphill climb!

Barcelona 4 - 0 Bayern Munich
Appropriate Cliches: The best team in the history of sports? Indubitably. Barcelona are putting up video game numbers. They took their foot off the gas in the second half. You can't stop them, you can only hope that they don't plow your wife after they're done scoring lots and lots of goals.
BONUS CLICHE: Garbled internet text comment from uefa.com regarding game! "Barca players they are not human I thinking there are ufo man ;) playing great!" Nice.

The best news you've heard all day: Only one week to wait for the second legs. Pencil Chelsea and Barcelona into the more interesting of the two semifinals. Admit it, you're erect.

I need this clip readily accessible at all times

Funnier than it should be.

Seriously people

So I see that Fast and Furious made over 70 million dollars last weekend, plus God knows how much internationally. This apparently was the best April opening ever.

Okay, listen. They already made this movie, and it was pretty bad, plus they made two others. You have seen Vin Diesel drive a fast ugly car before, and if you haven't, watch TNT any two consecutive weekends. The only excuse for this is that 10 million people got drink on their way to the theater in the last four days.

Playa shoulda hit that.

"Be careful that your regrets do not weigh on you so greatly that your hands can no longer hold up your hanging head."
- Martin Heidegger

Oh, High School Tha Captain, you must have been dumber than I remember if you thought minge like this was just going to float along again.

The story, one we've all heard before, goes something like this:

1. boy meets girl on internet
2. boy tells girl about other girl he loves
3. girl tells boy she loves him
4. boy tells girl he loves her
5. boy and girl become a couple
6. boy tells girl he doesn't love her but instead still loves the other girl
7. girl reacts appropriately
8. boy lives with regret
9. girl marries a dude named Master Acid

Reservoir Dogs Muppets

Just what it sounds like, playas.

Flattire

It also illustrated a pattern which that excellent veteran critic, Philip French of the Observer, identified with his lethal coining "flattire". He meant films which are ostensibly satirical but which really flatter the audience by ingratiatingly reinforcing all their prejudices. One of the direst had "American" in its title but was by a British director. The venerable Pauline Kael was still alive when American Beauty came out, to ask sharply why the middle-class liberals who were drooling over this tripe couldn't recognise the way it sucked up to them, with its catalogue of cliches and every punch telegraphed.

When we meet the morose former marine colonel, he might as well say straightaway "I'm a neo-Nazi", and when he mutters something opprobrious about Jim and Jim, the insufferably sweet gay couple, you know for sure he'll grab another man's groin by the last reel. Had American Beauty been a really clever satire, we would have learned at the end that one Jim worked in undercover dirty tricks for the tobacco industry, and the other was an arms dealer who had been supplying the Serbs.

Even by those standards, Curtis is grim. Anyone who sees a film which dares call itself Love Actually has been warned (it stars an excellent actor, but Bill Nighy has gone awry). Martin Amis described one of the bleakest evenings of his life as sat watching Four Weddings, desperate to leave but unable to. He had gone to the cinema with Salman Rushdie, whose life was in danger and who had to stick to the timetable he gave his police guards. And so they were forced to endure every last minute. Not the most zealous Wahhabist could have wished such a punishment on the poor man. Four Weddings isn't a bad movie, it's a crime against humanity for which all concerned should have been indicted at The Hague.

"Our knack for dire romcom"

Wow! Totally together!

Thunderbird tastes so bad, and it causes a hangover to anyone who even handles the bottle.

why all the haters?

Wait, people don't like puns?

Puns are the feeblest species of humor because they are ephemeral: whatever comic force they possess never outlasts the split second it takes to resolve the semantic confusion. Most resemble mathematical formulas: clever, perhaps, but hardly occasion for knee-slapping. The worst smack of tawdriness, even indecency, which is why puns, like off-color jokes, are often followed by apologies. Odds are that a restaurant with a punning name — Snacks Fifth Avenue, General Custard’s Last Stand — hasn’t acquired its first Michelin star.

I'm a bit insulted. 3E was founded upon and lives by the noble pun.

It's only Monday if you let it be Monday.

And when you're rocking the Friday Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, it's never Monday.

Hey! Don't cuss in front of my pipe!

Now I am walking saying, "Suffererrrrrs, come out to plaaaa-aaaay!" over and over.

Don't worry folks, Tha Captainz back at the helm.

...but he certainly enjoyed his stay in the sticks.

Pretty much lived out the song, really:
1) Didn't use my cell phone.
2) Nailed a cat/bear/woman.
3) Killed a stranger.
4) Drank moonshine until I went blind.

Not moonshine, actually. To balance out all the hickishness, we went with the most city-fied liquor we could find. And it doesn't get more city-fied than Wall Street:

Tha Captain takes shore leave: Head for the Hills

Upon my return: moonshine and pork shreddings for all.

Finally!

A Milhouse blog, with the only possible name:

Everything's Coming Up Milhouse

Although it does kind of seem like a rip-off of Eye On Springfield.

Tops ten reasons to procrastinate

1.

Over the weekend, put this in your mind-pipe and smoke it

WARNING: The movie is actually much weirder than this trailer makes it seem.

Viral videos

I think I have mentioned in this space before how much better the Cracked website is than its analog magazine ever was. Recently: 6 "Stars" of Embarrassing Viral Videos. I had seen all of these but the "Impossible is Nothing" one, which is just stupid. My favorite story is for this guy:



I don't know if it's his ridiculous tan or the quality of the video, but I thought this guy was black. So this part was a surprise:

A few years later, Scott left KAXS (the Dallas TV station where he was the anchor) and eventually wound up at WAAY in Huntsville, Alabama, presumably because there are fewer lizards there. At that point, things again took a turn for the strange.

According to The Huntsville Times, Scott was let go earlier this year after a "dispute with a producer." The Huntsville Times has a serious gift for understatement, because in this case "dispute with a producer" means "committing an act of career self-immolation so complete that he's unlikely to ever get hired in his field again."

According to BET, the "dispute" was that during a commercial break, Scott referred to a co-worker as a Negro. When that co-worker asked him not to use that word, Scott, in an act of mind-blowing asshattery, decided to use the, um, other N-word and was fired shortly thereafter.

Of course this is the best actual video:

But if you tried it then you might agree

From the YouTube description:

From Peter Jackson's surreal masterpiece Meet the Feebles, which has been described as 'the Muppets on acid'.

In this scene a homosexualist fox sings about 'sodomy' while a manic bipolar hippo runs the rampage backstage with a machine gun.

Interesting fact: The M-60 used in this scene is loaded with real rounds and results in the majority of the sets and puppet models being destroyed.

Suck it, everybody else.

"War Damn Eagle."
-Robert E. Lee

Real all about it. Pascal Wallach is a student of mine. I feel largely responsible for the achievement.