Issue 201

News: The Ten Best Books of (the many I read in the second half of) 2011.
Well, it's been a total of two months since I last posted, so I've decided that I'll write another list of books: this time, I'll cover the ones I thought were the best I read in the last six months of last year. Admittedly, the selection pool this time is much shallower than last time; I've had much less time to actually read, due to my new life in Columbia: I've had to turn in a 5-page story every week for four months, so I had much less leisure time to just read. For what it's worth, in my reading queues, I have two books which I hope could put into the next year's queue: The History of Love by Nichole Krauss, and The Life of Pi by Yann Martel.

10. I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President by Josh Lieb.
For some reason, I wound up getting interested in this book during the summer even though I didn't get it in the previous year plus it was out. Anyway, when I was in Door County, I actually found a copy of the book in a bookstore in Bailey's Harbor. When it finally came up in my reading queue, I wound up enjoying it, as I knew I would; in the way Josh Lieb portrays his main character as being dim to everyone else, but is, in reality, an evil genius, he recalls, of all people, Jim Thompson's Lou Ford, the sheriff who seems a bit slow on the uptake, but is, in reality, a genius prone to going off on tangents related to people who are obscure to the target audience (well, at least more teenagers know who Captain Beefheart is than pulp fiction readers in the 1950s knew who Emil Kraeplin was.) The reason I put it so low on the list? The ending. In the end, instead of giving a speech explaining why the main character wants people to vote for him, he goes off on a big speech talking about how he's realised that all elections are just one big popularity contest. True as that may be, Josh Lieb has been building up a big climax, and all we get is this speech? This has to be the most disappointing ending to a book that I've ever read.

9. Silas Marner by George Eliot
I first read this book when I was a kid who loved the way Wishbone did it, but for whatever reason, I decided to revisit the book in October. I must admit that the big reason that this book made the list at all was because it was there for me at the right time: around the time I rediscovered it, I had to find a way to make a photo-roman: a selection of images that tells a story, and I was at an impasse; my previous two assignments were difficult enough, but to add to that, I had to create a big story; I decided to create a very loose adaptation of this book. Silas was a private accountant, Eppie was a dog, and Silas did end up getting his money back.

8. The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson.
A couple years ago, I saw a film called The Men Who Stare at Goats, and, as it turned out, it was based on a true story chronicled by a journalist named Jon Ronson. Recently, he wrote another book, in an area I find very interesting: mental illness. He wrote this relatively short book about psychopathy, and looked in a lot of places; from old psychological experiments, to Bob Hare and his split with the psychiatric community, to a young McMurphy type who is a psychopath, to the Scientologists who want him freed to possibly psychopathic CEOs to 9/11 Truthers who claim to be the Messiah. He ends up with more questions than answers, but even still, it is very informative.

7. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
I have a great variety of sources that I consult to see just what books I should put into my reading queue, and one of them is from the Art of Manliness, which has a list of 100 books every man should read. I've read 72 of them, and one of them is Into the Wild. What I found truly interesting about this book is the fact that Krakauer is able to spin the tragic story of Christopher McCandless in a way that is somehow both detached and sympathetic; Krakauer, as an outdoorsman who would, a couple years later, climb Everest, can definitely feel what McCandless sought in the Alaskan wilderness, but, at the same time, he knew that he was a fool for trying with so few supplies.

6. Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
I have a book recommendation service online and, for a couple months, the program had decided to put this in my recommendations list. I decided to give it a miss until I decided to listen to the audiobook, and I was quite impressed, although if not for the fact that I had been assigned another multi-generational Latin American woman family saga (Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban) made me realise how good it was. The characters are interesting, a lot's at stake, and the plot was interesting.

5. Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I'd been thinking of reading this book for a while, and when I decided to actually get it, I was really amazed. I had read three of Garcia Marquez' books this year (the other two being Memories of my Melancholy Whores and One Hundred Years of Soliutude), but this is really his best work. It's no wonder that the year after he had this published, he got the Nobel Literature Prize. In fact, I am seriously considering, if I ever end up as a filmmaker, adapting this into a film, and not just any film, a Spaghetti Western. The deconstruction of conservative values and unsympathetic main characters do seem like they would work well with the genre.

3 and 4. Look Me In the Eye by John Elder Robison, and Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet.
The Autism Spectrum: its forms are legion. That's one thing that really makes autism spectrum disorders interesting to me (apart from the fact that I have one), and certainly what makes reading about Autism Spectrum Disorders interesting; it can have very different effects on the lives of different people. For instance, in John Robison's story, he wound up as a high school dropout who made a living working on electronics and touring with KISS. Meanwhile, there's Daniel Tammet; he has a savant syndrome, and broke the world record for reciting the digits of pi, and runs a language learning software. And then, there's Christian Weston Chandler, and the less said about him the better. As for the books, on the one hand, it's easier for me to identify with Robison (no doubt due to the fact that Tammet is both gay and Christian, and I can't see the point to memorising pi to several thousand digits when 39 digits is enough to calculate the circumference of a circle the size of the known universe with a margin of error the size of a hydrogen atom.) On the other hand, Tammet does have an extremely clear and concise writing style that does the job of describing what goes on in his head extremely well.

2. The Essential Schopenhauer by Arthur Schopenhauer.
I think I've mentioned before that I consider Arthur Schopenhauer to be my favourite philosopher. If I haven't, well, now you know. There's not much material that's new to me; indeed, there's quite a bit of overlap with Penguin's Essays and Aphorisms. But the fact is that there's not a lot of Schopenhauer's writing that's publicly available in book form (at least not in a form that you don't have to pay far out the ass for), but this is definitely one of the better compilations.

1. The Instructions by Adam Levin.
It's a book I've been wanting to read for a while, primarily because the sheer size of its paperback edition struck me. But then, I looked into the plot synopsis. In essence, it's sort of like Lindsay Anderson's If, if that were set in a  Chicago-area primary school. And the idea of a revolutionary drama set in a public school is an idea I have long considered toying with, but after reading this book, I know that I can find a way to make such a story work without having the story remind one too much of Columbine.

Chick Tract Review: Here Comes the Judge. So, it looks like Jack's come full circle. In one of his early tracts, he put a "Here Come de Judge" reference (which shows how long he's been in the game), and now it's the title of his latest tract. It's a really incoherent tale of corruption. A judge hires a man killed for reasons never fully explained, and frames his wife on both murder and drug charges. For some reason, the governor has a guy put a hit out on the judge through video monitors. It's like The Wire, but even less coherent. But then, the judge's butler goes into his hospital room and talks to him about Jesus, including the bit about Revelation. After being rebuffed, the judge finally gets killed.  Overall, it's a goddamn mess of a tract.

1. You, too, can be a rebel with neither a cause nor an effect.
2. Never take anything the Ultimate Warrior says seriously.
3. There is no such thing as a “Siamese Pecker.” Nor should there be.
4. Just because Debbie Gibson and Tiffany have made a movie together does not mean they'll finally make the video of them going gay that Bill Hicks suggested they do 20 years ago.
5. Just because Bill Hicks' material has aged better than any comedian who dealt with topical issues 20 years ago has any right to doesn't mean that he is a physical manifestation of some God.
6. It is too late to seek out Billy Mays and have gay sex with him.
7. If David Icke is right and the world is secretly ruled by lizard men, they must be headquartered in Los Angeles.
8. Some people apparently can sleep without showing any signs of life.
9. People tend to take the news that you have a history of going into fugue states and threatening people's lives pretty well.
10. Regardless of what Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon may imply, The Chinese are still subject to the laws of gravity.
11. No self-respecting American film studio will ever pick up a film made in Esperanto, specifically designed to make as little sense as humanly possible entitled Death To America, no matter how steeped in cinematic history the script may be.
12. Charlize Theron is the only real African-American star in the film business today.
13. Telling white people who have done good things for you that they are a credit to their race will not get them to think critically about race relations.
14. If Trent Reznor can win a Grammy for singing a song about fisting, who knows how long it'll be before necrophilia becomes mainstream.
15. Film was at its best in the 1970s.
16. Happiness is smoking hashish out of a human skull.
17. The platform of the Republican Party is not “The Gun is Good, the Penis is Evil.”
18. Back up your hard drive.
19. It is, in fact, possible for an author to completely screw up even the most basic aspects of Earthly existence.
20. It is still possible for a thirty-year old Jewish Princess to become the very embodiment of lolicon.
21. Just because something really absurd happened in real life doesn't make it automatically believable fiction.
22. Owning a Hutu machete is not braggable.
23. Somdomy of the dead stall be the whole of the lawr!
24. Sometimes, theatre directors really just don't care.
25. To some people, any sentence spoken in German is indistinguishable from the words “Sieg Heil!”

Issue 200

There will be four parts to this piece. The first part will be a response to something I've recently discovered, the second part of this will be the latest installment of my list of favourite books, and, as a breather, I will include a review of Jack Chick's latest tract, and the next 25 in my list of life lessons

Part 1: William Lane Craig.
You may not know this guy's name, but apparently, he's considered a leading evangelical theologian. Granted, he's not responsible for any bestsellers on the order of Rick Warren's Purpose-driven life, people have recommended his writings to me in the hopes that I would believe in God again. From what I've heard, he's as well-respected as C.S. Lewis. I recently discovered that he wrote an Op-Ed piece on the morality of the accounts of genocide that are described in Exodus. He actually defended the genocide of neighboring tribes because, in his words, "the death of these children was actually their salvation." This is not a paraphrase. This was not taken out of some crucial context where Lane Craig almost immediately shoots down this strawman. If you copy those words into Google, and click "I'm feeling lucky," you will get the article in question, and there's a very good chance that you will be as shocked by this as I was. Even the Lutherans who made my formative years a living Hell at least had enough sense to know that there's something very wrong with that argument. And it gets better. In his view, it was okay to kill the Caananites because they were guilty of disobeying God's laws, and were basically bad people. When you kill innocent people (like babies or other children), they go to Heaven. From this, I must ask: when isn't it morally right to kill people? I must reiterate that William Lane Craig is not just some wild-eyed Fred Phelps wannabe who goes around the country spreading a gospel of hate, shouting down everyone he sees as being hell-bound reprobate just because they're not him or his extended family. This man is a well-read, well-published, sophisticated modern theologian that people accuse atheists of ignoring because it's more fun to pick on the whackos. Given the fact that he's fond of claiming that the existence of "objective moral values" proves the existence of God, I must ask where are the objective moral values in his own values system? He says that, if there is no God, everything is permitted, but with God, at least murder is permitted. I'd like to close this with a link to a song by John Lennon. It's not Imagine, but it's from the same album and it expresses my views of this man's moral system.

Part 2: The  best books of (the many I read in the first half of) 2011.
I tried, a few weeks ago to try to see if I could get a shortlist of books I could use to create my annual list of "The best books (of the many I read in) 20XX." Including the audiobooks I've been listening to, I must have been reading no less than 100 books over the course of the year. But the shortlist had no less than 40 books as I was starting it. As of right now, there's 47 books on it, including the book I'm reading right now, World War Z. So, I decided to divide the list into two parts divided at a rather convenient point: July 1, 2011. Granted, the first part of the shortlist was still rather ungainly (28 books), but I've still been able to whittle that down to a managable number. So, without further ado, here are the top 11 books I've read in the first half of 2011.
11. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
While the book's pacing is quite glacial, especially in comparison to the many film versions that have been obstensively based on this book, what really struck me about the book was the fact that it had a very different tone from the movies. The fact was that the book really has a great sense of tragedy that seems to be missing from the film version. Viktor Frankenstein tampers in God's domain by reanimating dead tissue and escapes responsibility by fleeing from his creation, and his monster, named Adam being the well-read (seriously; he reads Plutarch, Milton, and Goethe) monstrosity that he is, cannot be expected to be able to fit in society. Given how well-known the character of Adam is, the sheer amount that got lost in the sands of time is simply staggering. Since I've frequently mentioned the films, I should probably recommend the original 1931 James Whale film for its fame, the 1957 Hammer film for its thrills, the 1974 Mel Brooks film for its humor, the 1994 Ken Branaugh film for its fidelity (and its unintentional humor), and the Andy Warhol version for its utter insanity.
10. Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith
I have not bothered to read Seth Grahame-Smith's other works in the Pride and Prejudice with Zombies series. As a man who has a lot of stuff he'd like to read, and as a man who thinks that Mark Twain's assessment of Jane Austen was too nice (her wit is nonexistent; all praise of her character-building ability are rendered pointless when one reads Dostoevsky, whose novels routinely contain almost the entire spectrum of thought and behaviour; and everything else about her works is insufferable to the point where playing Russian Roulette seems like a be a valid, sanity-preserving alternative whenever my mother drags me to an adaptation of her works), reading those books just hasn't been that high a priority. With this book, however, I knew I had to read it, especially after Linkara gave a shout-out to the book in one of his reviews. I've been interested in Lincoln most of my life, especially after all the times I went to Springfield with my family and toured Lincoln's world. What's really impressive is how, not only is the plot interesting, the supernatural events are linked to the events of the real world in such a way that it's almost likely that there was a big coverup to hide the fact that vampires walked the Earth, but the fact is that Seth Grahame-Smith gets so much of the history correct. Granted, he may get the dynamics of slavery a little over-simplified, but in this regard, he's almost as good at historical fiction as George MacDonald Fraser was.
9. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
When I was a member of Newspeak Dictionary, I had somehow managed to get through several years on a board devoted to politics and dystopian literature without having read Brave New World, and only having read 1984 once. For whatever reason, in February, I decided to give it a look. It was really much better than I thought it would be, and Aldous Huxley is brilliant in the way he not only builds this world where humans are born through cloning, humans are conditioned to be sex-crazed from preschool age on, and art is limited to interactive pornography, he is also brilliant in the way he is able to link those with contemporary culture. Of course, on occasion, the book shows its age: Huxley refers to the interactive skin flicks as "feelies", no doubt as an analogue to "talkies," a term that was still in parlance when the book was written, in 1931, and even the music that Huxley talks about seems to be an extension of the big band music that was popular when the book was being written. He does, however, manage to pull off the "false protagonist" device pretty effectively, even if it's not as clear as it could be when Bernard stops becoming the main character and John does.
8. Barney Ross by Douglas Century.
When the Borders stores were closing, I decided to pick this book up. I was impressed with it. I wouldn't think that I would be interested in this story of a real-life boxer, but there was really a lot to be interested in: this nice Jewish boy from Chicago starts a career as a boxer, retires after a particularly bad loss, joins the War effort, fights in Guadalcanal, gets addicted to morphine, recovers with the help of Hashem, and even tries to advocate a relatively sane drug policy. For what it's worth, his grave is in the Rosemont Park Cemetery. I'll be sure to find a good pebble for his grave before I visit.
7. Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams.
Unlike every other item on this list, I had to read this play for an Intro to Drama class in Oakton. I'm now in the process of writing a big essay about it in another class at Columbia. Despite the fact that I read it for class, I really loved it to the extent that I had to include it on my list. Why? Because this play is composed in such a way that it's almost perfect. Why? Just read it.
6. The Visit by Freidrich Durrenmatt
All right, I must admit that, after calling one play "almost perfect," it does seem odd putting another play immediately above it, but just hear me out. Another book I bought when the Borders stores were closing, this play is really just one that really appeals to my sensibilities even more than Tennessee Williams' does; the play is a meditation on the nature of capitalism: a small town is in the throes of poverty when a favourite daughter comes back and offers the town $1 billion on the condition that they kill a man who wronged her in her childhood. How long does it take before the town finally kills them? How much is it possible for us to laugh at the way the townspeople try to deal with the offer? Durrenmatt is one of my favourite authors for two reason: one is that he's that rarest of creatures, a postwar German novelist who doesn't talk about the Nazis, and the second is that he's basically German's Kurt Vonnegut.
5. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
It's very hard for me to explain just why I love this book. The fact is that it covers a lot of subjects, and does all of it in this very wry sensibility. All I can ask is why do I not read more Vonnegut?
4. Popular Crime by Bill James.
I first read about this book in an issue of Wired that was lying about my workplace. What really struck me was the fact that not only was this guy attempting a truly far-reaching history of man's fascination with crime, but the fact that he had decided to create a scale of evidences that could establish guilt. I have had no interest in his previous work, since I don't care about sports (at least I don't care about the ones that involve balls), but this book I just had to get. I wasn't disappointed. His book covers 200 years, and, although he does often gloss over serial killers, he's only got 400 pages to cover. One thing that really did disappoint me was that he didn't include a full version of his checklist of the evidence that he kept talking about and applying to criminals. Perhaps the reason this was done was because he was a little uneasy about the consequences that applying the list to the modern justice system would be. After all, he created a scale where 100 points was guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and that was sort of like the old, medieval system, where one or two well-chosen pieces of evidence was incontrovertible proof of guilt. However, according to Bill James, even the most glaring smoking gun, DNA Evidence was only worth 80 points on a possible 100.
3. J.D. Salinger by Kenneth Slawenski.
I heard about this book soon after it came out. My parents checked it out of the college library for me, and I only got around to reading it by the time we took the train ride to New York. It's rather fitting that I spend much of the time going to New York reading about one of my favourite New York authors. With regards to the biography itself, it really does put a lot of Salinger's writings into their proper context. He even manages to summarise stories that were either unpublished, or stories that Salinger never bothered to put into book form. And, furthermore, it even puts what I did know of Salinger's life into an even better context. His habit of seclusion really made a lot of sense when you realised how much his life was ruined by paparazzi trying to intrude on it, much to the point where he actually gave out a red herring on the jacket cover of Franny and Zooey. Slawenski even made clear just why Salinger stopped publishing; after his Glass family stories were met with a collective cry of "They changed it, so now it sucks," he just got tired of it all and stopped publishing.
2. Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
I read this in audiobook form (mainly as a result of some speculation that one section of Thirty H's was a shoutout to the book) during the big blizzard that happened in February. Even without Jules Feiffer's illustrations, I loved this book. On the one hand, it's a book that's rather heavy-handed with its "learning can be fun" message, but, unlike a lot of pieces that are this heavy-handed, Norton Juster really does make this book really fun to read; its characters are zany personifications of different concepts, and words and numbers are things you can eat. And now there's going to be a 50th Anniversary edition published in hardcover and that's definitely something I'd like for Christmas or my birthday.
1. Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

This is just the single best novel I've read all year. You're probably aware of the novel's plot, you probably know how much wit is packed into it. Just go out and get it. I've already got two copies; one in paperback with an introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides, and one in hardcover that I got in a Barnes and Noble Leatherbound Classics edition.

Part 3: The Awful Truth (Tract Review)
And, once again, Jack Chick puts out his conspiracy theory of everything, and it's funny as all hell. From unintentional shout-outs to Pinky and the Brain, a scoffing Dudley Moore, he quickly goes into blaming Catholicism for all the world's woes (seriously; he believes that Islam, Communism, and Naziism were created by the Catholic Church to enslave the world). Perhaps most insanely, the Catholic Church apparently ordered the death of JFK because he chose the Constitution over Canon Law. I should probably do my own dissection of this tract, but I've currently got too much work at Columbia to try it.

Part 4:

1. Myxomatosis is not funny, except when it is.
2. Bruno Mars' “The Lazy Song” does not contain Insane Clown Posse levels of sex and violence.
3. Queering doesn't make the world work.
4. Catholic Priesting doesn't make the world work.
5. “Queer” is not a verb.
6. If not for prison rape, some people would never get laid.
7. Rape is never funny, except when males are the target.
8. If you are only attracted to men when they're unwilling, that still makes you bisexual.
9. U2 is the most overrated band on Earth.
10. The Zombie Apocalypse is the most viable political system known to man.
11. The Zombie Apocalypse will only work if the dead first rise in Colma, CA.
12. Calling yourself a lesbian trapped in a man's body does not entitle you to any of the benefits afforded to either gays or transsexuals.
13. This still applies no matter how many times you will admit to seeing D.E.B.S., But I'm a Cheerleader, or Heavenly Creatures, or how many times you've read Annie on My Mind.
14. Deutsche Kultur ist durch Amerikaner sehr interessant und unterschätzt.
15. Sam Shepherd once killed a man with his butt cheek power.
16. Some people really are that stupid.
17. Speaking with all the gentility that can be expected of an OxBridge professor can still be construed as rabid radicalism if the other guy disagrees with you.
18. “Fagpoles” is not recognised as a word by any reputable source.
19. Nobody who is easily offended or in any way surprised by the presence of the word “nigger” has any right to be reading novels about The South.
20. Cali is not short for Caligula.
21. Getting strung out on Heroin, listening to Joy Division, and throwing machetes at nothing in particular is no way to spend a Tuesday.
22. Even if you regularly get intimate with strippers of the same sex, flirt with same-sex coworkers and offer to marry a particularly butch one when Illinois legalises gay marriage, you can still consider yourself completely heterosexual if you occasionally go out with a boy you never look in the eye and align yourself with Team Jacob.
23. Sex and Death are both two things which happen only once in a lifetime.
24. Nothing improves the quality of one's music like dying.
25. Don't trust the judgment of anyone who seriously believes that the addition of an infant to one's life will solve any of their problems, with the possible exception of fertility.

Issue 199

Note; Posting Frequency. Remember what it was like earlier? I used to post every Sunday. By the time I graduated from High School, I had posted only about three times a month. Soon it dwindled to two posts a month. Come 2011, it came down to one post a month. Now, due to my work at Columbia College, I'm somewhat surprised at the fact that I'd be able to do the one post a month. I write three 3-5 page papers every week, and I often have a major project's due date hanging over my head. If a month goes by where I don't post, dark lord forbid, don't be too surprised. Now, on to another of my rants...

News: Wanna totally lose faith in humanity? Since I started my work at Columbia, I've discovered a few stories that catch my radar. One story was about a Dutch shipbuilder who has been trying to show that the Bible is literally true by trying to build a life-sized model of Noah's Ark and taking a massive amount of measures just to make it seaworthy, including having it towed by smaller boats. Another is that, after 18 years in jail, the West Memphis 3 have finally gotten released, but only after releasing a statement that said that the prosecutor had a lot of damning evidence against them, even though, in real life, the best the prosecutor could do was that they listened to Metallica, dressed in black, and dabbled in paganism, all of which, to an extent, are qualities that apply to me. However, there's one thing that really makes my blood boil that I recently discovered: Josef Mengele Fangirls. Yes, you read that right. There are girls who are getting all hot over a Nazi War Criminal who created medical experiments so unspeakably disturbing that it even makes me wince. And yet, all over Deviantart, there are people who make fanart that makes him look like a cute little boy and photoshopped photos of him saying things like "I (heart) JM" that just serve as a place for his fangirls to drool over this monster. I can understand if there's art of him saying "Trust your doktor" with him grinning like Jack Nicholson. That's actually somewhat amusing in a Dead baby sort of way. What really disturbs me about all this is that it doesn't seem like these are just white supremacists who would deny the reality of Mengele's crimes against humanity. These seem, by all accounts, to be just normal people who seem to have a crush on a guy who liked to sew Jewish twins together. Suddenly, the mentality of Twilight fans seems less unsettling. And so, I leave you with a Bill Hicks quote:

"You know, we're f***ed up here. I tell you, Satan's gonna have no trouble taking over here 'cause all the women are gonna say: "What a cute butt." "He's Satan!" "You don't know him like I do." "He's the Prince of Darkness!" "I can change him." And I bet that's true, man. I wouldn't give Satan a snowball's chance in Hell against a woman's ego."

Film Idea: I had a dream. And it included a remake of David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers that is more utterly unhinged than the original, and in the roles that Jeremy Irons and Jeremy Irons originated, the Olsen Twins.

Link of the Day: The home of the most insightful and disturbing look into George Lucas' Star Wars Prequel Trilogy.

Meditations of Dirkus Aurelius: 51. Human relationships are often more trouble than they're worth.
52. Blood Drive workers are pretty blasé about the prospect of being a pawn in a Catholic Church-sponsored hoax.
53. The more the list goes on, the probability that anybody understands all the references I put in the first time dwindles.
54. The Doctor Clown Club will not allow you to base your clown persona on John Wayne Gacy.
55. The Doctor Clown Club will not allow you to base your clown persona on either member of the Insane Clown Posse
56. The Doctor Clown Club will not allow you to base your clown persona on Pennywise.
57. The Doctor Clown Club will not even allow you to base your clown persona on Mr. Jelly from Psychoville.
58. Audiences are not ready for a story where several plot lines hinge on an act of bestiality.
59. Do not talk about the Armenian genocide with a Turkish man.
60. Whistling Shania Twain's “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” does give away too much of the plot of The Wasp Factory.
61. Tom Waits will never get back to me about my numerous requests for him to cover “Barbie Girl” on his next album, whenver it comes out.
62. If whittling down a film idea to a few sentences, “This leads to sex” should not be the second one.
63. You cannot have sex with everything in the universe, so don't try to do so.
64. Justin Bieber is, in fact, male.
65. Colin Firth will never willingly strap a chainsaw to his groin and go hog wild in a movie.
66. Too few people appreciate singers with deep voices.
67. Sex in a car going over 90 miles an hour is just asking for trouble.
68. Sex with a car going over 90 miles an hour will not end well.
69. The number 69 is not, in and of itself, funny.
70. James Bond likes his martinis with vodka. He has also been pistol-whipped enough times that, if he was real, he would be brain-damaged. This link should be investigated further.
71. Even when we do get to the point of cloning humans, it will still take a long time to get people to have sex with their own clones.
72. The Bible does not tell you to smoke lots of pot.
73. I should not expect to have a piece of paper saying “Harry locked his mother in the closet” stay taped to the linen closet long just because my mother had a Jane Austen quote painted to the bathroom wall.
74. This applies even if the closet is too small to fit anyone in it and has no lock.
75. Religion doesn't change people. It just makes them more of the same person they already were.

Issue 198

News: My Mensis Horribilis. Things have not been easy for me since my family and I got back from Door County. A few days after we left for our yearly 2-week vacation in Door County, we heard reports about flooding around where I lived. The woman who was house-sitting for us at the time claimed that our house was not affected. However, it turned out that she only said that because she couldn't actually access the house itself. We arrived to find an odd smell coming from the basement, and we managed to find that the carpet was moist, there was mold on the walls and that some boxes of magazines that I had put on the floor had gotten damaged. Fortunately, I managed to get them all into the attic and I managed to save them all, with nary a sign of mold on any of them. That said, it seems like at least one magazine is M.I.A.: A 2005 issue of Guitar Player with Paul McCartney on the cover, which leads to another unfortunate thing that happened: It turned out that on August 1, we had two important things happening the same day that we had to go downtown for, but with all that was going on, we could do neither: One was to go to my orientation for Columbia College and the other was to go to the Paul McCartney concert that was happening at Wrigley Field. We had to reschedule the orientation (they had a last-ditch orientation date on the 29th, and I managed to get a class schedule put together in the meantime), and I had to miss out on seeing Paul McCartney live for the fourth time in my life. Given that, in all likelihood, I would have been dragged to the Chicago Diner (a place of which I have made my views abundantly clear a few blog entries ago), I think it might not be as bad as I thought it would be. Later, we had to move everything that was in the basement into the POD that we had rented specifically for the occasion. It was difficult directing a crew of six on the right way to clear the basement, and it was shocking to see them removing the carpet and large parts of the walls, and it was even more difficult getting everything in the pod by myself. Of course, even getting the basement in a condition where we could clear the pod was difficult, considering my mother's changing ideas on how to paint the floor, and the paint company's apparently giving two different shades of blue the same name. At one point, I managed to get a DVD copy of the play of mine that had been performed while I was in Wisconsin, and while I must say that the cops did pretty well, the homeless man somehow managed to think that the character was supposed to be a leprechaun. I have since revised this play in the hopes that this mistake is never repeated. Then, after all that was done, two things managed to break down. The first was my clothes dryer, which was fixed easily enough by a repairman, and then the second was my laptop: I accidentally dropped it and, while at first, it seemed to be fine (even if my internet browser did stall occasionally), it kept asking for a diskcheck, and so, I decided to do it. The diskcheck wound up going on for almost two days and, by the end of it, Windows managed to stop working completely on the computer, and we had to remove the hard drive. At work, some guys that Dad worked with claimed that nothing could be removed from it, but, as of now, he has managed to move my emails, my bookmarks, my MP3s, and my documents (although I haven't uploaded the former two on my backup laptop), and even though he has yet to get several folders, (the downloads [which contains the complete Ricky Gervais show podcasts], the pictures, and the videos) off the hard drive yet, this means that, unlike what I feared, the new feature I had put on the blog will not be stopped after just one installment. I honestly hope that, in the next few days, Dad can get everything else off of the hard drive that needs to be taken off it. Film Review: The Guard. This is the film debut of John Martin McDonagh, the brother of Martin McDonagh, a playwright/film director whom I think may be one of the greatest living playwrights (certainly one of the best under 50), and the film is still in very much the same style as his brother's work: Irishmen curse up a storm and commit violence. Hilarity and Tragedy ensue. In this case, Brendan Gleeson (Harry Potter's Mad-Eye Moody) plays a sleazy cop with a tendency to steal from dead people (his opening scene has him raiding the pockets of the victim of a car crash for a tab of LSD), play arcade games instead of working, and taking days off to have sex with hookers. He is paired with a straight-laced FBI agent (played by Don Cheadle) to capture the drug smugglers who (we eventually find out) killed his partner. Meanwhile, despite having a subplot about the lead character's mother dying, the movie is actually quite hilarious. One scene in particular had me in stitches; on Gleeson's day off, Cheadle sets off to Connamera on his own to question the locals. Nobody told him that in Connamera, nobody speaks English, and he doesn't speak any Gaelic. In a moment of desperation, he actually questions a horse whether he saw anything or not. Meditations of Dirkus Aurelius Part II: 26.Just because there are no laws on the books against necrophilia doesn't mean that you are immune from getting stuck with some charge. 27.I cannot convince anyone that any incident that I do not wish to hear about is a dream. 28.Any film that has two girls snogging automatically has one redeeming feature. 29.Filling an artificial vagina with hair chafes like hell. 30.Australians do not need you to remind you that every living thing on the island can kill you, the sheep included. 31.There are better things to make fun of the Mormons for than long underwear. 32.Renee Zellweger is, in fact, female. 33.“Try the cock, you know where it's been,” is not one of the ten commandments. 34.It takes hard work to create a Black Ops squad to do things that make no sense whatsoever. 35.Sam Shephard is the Chuck Norris of American Playwrights. 36.The more improbable the deed, the less likely you are to be punished. 37.The thin breadknife in the basement is not a machete. 38.If crossdressing, please try to make as little sense as possible. 39.“Fuck Robots, dahl-ink” is not a good slogan for anything. 40.More of this is true than you want to know. 41.If we take the time to get to know them, we would all find a lot of reasons to hate everyone else. 42.Nobody knows who Alexander Nevsky is, so try to not reference him too much. 43.Fish are not a lethal weapon when used on dry land. 44.Unless otherwise noted, all bishops will be presumed to believe in God. 45.Having a big pecker is not necessarily a good thing. 46.Anything that makes my mother uneasy is automatically a good thing. 47.Mentioning Richard Gere's Breathless in front of a film buff may be hazardous for your health. 48.Just because I can legally perform marriages doesn't necessarily mean I have to approve of them. 49.Lesson #2 still applies even if it's put in a phial with the directions to the nearest sperm bank attached to it. 50.Americans do not tend to get British spelling.

Issue 197

News: Laurel and Hardy are finally coming to DVD.
You may remember that last month, I made a list of the funniest movies, in my opinion. Of course, I made a few mentions of comedians/films I loved that I omitted from the list, and five stick out in my mind.
1) Woody Allen. As I mentioned, I had a lot of trouble narrowing it down to one good, representative film, and I was torn between five of these films.
2) The Ruling Class. I removed this film from the list mainly because it was unavailable at the Skokie Public Library, and, for a 1-disc, $40 DVD, it's pretty hard to find in the flesh world, but I strongly suggest that my readers seek it out.
3) Mel Brooks. I honestly don't know what happened there. I would have chosen Blazing Saddles if I managed to get it on the list, and recommended virtually all of his other films (except for Life Stinks.)
4)Buster Keaton. I love his works, but I still think that Chaplin is a better comedian. I still recommend The General.
5)Laurel and Hardy. Why did I forget to put them on the list? Because of their checkered history with DVD.
Until fairly recently, there were only a few DVD releases of their films, and here are my summations of what was available on Disc:
*TCM Archives: This two-disc set contains Fra Diavolo and Bonnie Scotland. Unfortunately, these films are definitely not their better works. Unlike the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy's films do not work as well when they're not the main focus.
*Laurel and Hardy Collection Vols. 1-2: These films are, in fact, widely considered among the worst of their careers. Somehow, these films were given a big boxed set treatment before their classic works with Hal Roach.
*March of the Wooden Soldiers: This film got a colourised DVD release from Legend films. Unfortunately, the nursery-rhyme themed work does not at all jibe well with the rest of their filmography.
*Flying Deuces. This film is in Public Domain, and, as a result, it has been given quite a lot of DVD releases, and the best one is, without a doubt, the edition by Kino, at a cheap (for them) $15. However, the film is not really that good, and the film's darker tone (they narrowly escape execution by firing squad only to have their plane crash) just doesn't work well with their pure slapstick comedy.
*The Lion's Gate edition of Sons of the Desert. This, unlike the others does contain a lot of the duo's best works, including Sons of the Desert, which would have been my own pick, if the film was on DVD, and Music Box, one of their best shorts. The problems? One: The picture quality of the DVD is abysmal, bordering on unwatchable. Two: It's out of print, and it sells for obscenely high prices (the lowest price I've seen on Amazon is $31 used, despite selling for $15 new.)

All this has changed with the recent announcement that RHI entertainment is putting out a 10-disc boxed set which covers all their films (except for the films in the first four DVD editions described) from the advent of sound film in Hal Roach Studios in 1929 to their last feature film for Hal Roach, Saps at Sea in 1940. For what it's worth, there was another DVD boxed set of all of their films until 1940, which, curiously enough, also omitted the same feature films as the new set, but also included the silent shorts they made together and colourised versions of the sound films, which, of course, made the European boxed set heftier. Of course, the loss of the silent films isn't too bad for me, because I, and, indeed, most fans, prefer the sound films.
However, I am still somewhat miffed by the fact that they removed the colourised versions, and unlike a lot of film buffs, I tend to have a nuanced view of film colourisation, and, while I know a lot of old Black and White Films don't work well in colour (I saw a colourised version of The Maltese Falcon, and the colour worked about as well as you would expect.) However, some films don't really lose much when colour is added, and Laurel and Hardy's films are among them.
Going back to the original topic, lack of colourised versions aside, it looks like this boxed set would, in fact, be an excellent addition to anyone's DVD collection.

In the meantime, if anyone wants to know my Laurel and Hardy Recommendations:
Shorts: Night Owls, Another Fine Mess, Berth Marks, Laughing Gravy, Helpmates, The Music Box, Them Thar Hills, Tit For Tat.
Features: Sons of the Desert, Chump at Oxford, Saps at Sea.

Film Idea: A sitcom about a high school academic bowl, specifically about the relationship between the coach (I'm currently thinking of an actor with an Estuary accent for some reason) and the five eccentric members of his team:
*A biology/life sciences specialist with a habit of dressing in odd costumes.
*A chemistry/math/physics guy who sleeps with anything that moves.
*A Generalist with Asperger's syndrome who struggles to fit into society.
*A hot-headed History guy with a specific love for the American Civil War who is prone to threatening violence on anything.
*The sports person, a chirpy lesbian with a love for bunnies.

Meditations of Dirkus Aurelius

I, Derekaxe, being of sound mind and body (as far as either of my parents care to know), and having reached the age of 21, have decided to share some of the many lessons I have learned in my life. Be forewarned that many of these lessons get dark and downright insane.

1.Never underestimate the possibility that both sides of a given conflict are beyond redemption.
2.Very few charities will accept sperm as a donation, even if it is worth more than they've raised all day.
3.There is no such thing as “The Song that Ends The Earth,” so quit trying to write it.
4.Using rabies to go back in time to become your entire male line of ancestors only works in Chuck Palahniuk novels.
5.Using rabies to go back in time to become both your entire male and female line of ancestors doesn't even work in Chuck Palahniuk novels.
6.None of Van Morrison's songs have actual lyrics.
7.Jumping into the shark tank at the Shedd Aquarium is a bad idea, especially when you're nude and fully aroused.
8.Stephenie Meyer will never allow a spin-off to Twilight where Bella dies and Edward and Jacob bond over drinks and realise how much they've been wasting their times with her to exist.
9.Do not expect people to agree with you that Thirty H's is one of the great short stories of all time, right up there with “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “The Overcoat,” “Hills like White Elephants,” and “A Perfect Day For Bananafish.”
10.It was not Aquinas who said that the best things in life were “to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.”
11.The stars and planets do not heave through the void just to be “skewer't bypon ourn fagpoles.”
12.No matter how similar their shows are, HLN will never combine Jane Velez-Mitchell's and Nancy Grace's shows into one show called “Two Hours' Hate.” That would make too much sense.
13.Whenever you are in a hurry, the hounds of Hell will come to do everything they can to slow everything down.
14.Do not expect to be able to get a vegan to eat meat.
15.This goes triple if you've baked somebody who wronged them into a pie.
16.The Olsen twins will never sign on to a remake of Dead Ringers with themselves in Jeremy Irons' roles.
17.Doing a bad Billy Conolly impression somehow causes people to understand you more than speaking normally. Nobody knows why.
18.80% of all transvestites are heterosexuals. Don't expect anyone to acknowledge this fact.
19.Some people are sexually attracted to anything, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, many of whom are Dwarfs.
20.Drilling a hole in the ground and humping it does not count as having sex with the planet Earth.
21.“Devourer of Worlds” is not a title that you can add to the end of your name.
22.Do not expect to be able to get away with saying anything is against your religion if you just created it.
23.There is No Spoon.
24.Do not claim that you have come up with things that cause David Lynch to scream like a little girl until you've actually met him.
25.No matter how much you may think your life sucks, there is always somebody who has it worse. His name is Christian W. Chandler and he lives in Ruckersville, VA.

Issue 196

News: Top 15 funniest films (with honorable mention).
Last week, I met someone I knew from school at the library. We were in the video section, specifically comedy section, and he asked if I had any recommendations for comedic films. I ended up choosing "Serial Mom." As of that moment, I decided that I would create a list of my favourite comedies in case I ever met with him again. I have chosen one film from each of my favourite comedians because, otherwise I would never have been able to narrow it down, but in some cases, other recommendations by the same people are given.

Honorable Mention. Sophie's Choice.
Yes, I do genuinely love this film, especially because it is genuinely disturbing in ways that so many Holocaust films fail to be (even Polanski couldn't help but try to spin an inspiring tale of survival out of one of the most horrific events in human history. You may well ask, Why am I putting a film where a woman is forced to choose which of her kids should live in a list of my funniest films? The answer is actually relatively simple: The sections about the Holocaust only occur in about the last third of the film, and it is for its first two thirds that I put it on this list. There are two characters whose performances are funny enough to put it on this list: Kevin Kline, whose performance as Nathan is almost exactly the same as the performance he would use a few years later in A Fish Called Wanda (which I will cover later in the list), and Stingo's erstwhile love interest Leslie, who is a woman who puts up a pose as a foul-mouthed sex maniac to hide how frigid she really is, wouldn't be out of place in a Woody Allen film (He is not covered later in the list, as I couldn't choose between five of his films: Manhattan, Annie Hall, Sleeper, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Love and Death.)

15. Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters
I must admit that I am a big fan of Adult Swim, and when it turned out that one of their flagship series has been given a film, I knew I had to see it. As it turned out, unlike a lot of TV shows that got adapted to film, very little of what got into the film would seem too out of place in the series itself, and, impressively for a show with 11-minute episodes, it doesn't feel like there's any real attempt at padding. That said, it's pretty much impossible to recommend it to people because, on the one hand, if you're not already a fan of the series, you won't become a convert, but on the other hand, if you are already a fan, you'll probably have either seen it or want to do so.

14. Kung Pow: Enter the Fist
In 2002, Steve Oedekerk found an old kung fu flick where a guy managed to weather several kicks to the groin. He liked it so much that he decided to insert himself into the movie (it actually kind of works, believe it or not), and create a whole new script which consists of the characters making odd noises and saying the most insane lines imaginable. Just one example: "I have been called bad before. Many have said I do things that are not correct to do. I don't believe in talk such as this. I am nice man, with happy feelings. All of the time. First, a joke. What do you get when you cross an owl with a bungee cord? My ass." Warning: This film is incredibly polarizing. People either love it for its complete insanity or hate it for those exact reasons.
Other recommendations: All Thumbs. It is a collection of several short films that Oedekerk made around the same time as he was making this film, where several famous films were parodied with a cast made entirely of thumbs.

13. The Butcher Boy
This movie is shelved in the "Drama" section of my local library, and it would seem, for the first half hour, anyway, to be like a lot of Neil Jordan's other films, about life in Ireland during the Troubles, but after Francie, our hero, breaks into his friend's house, the film goes completely off the rails as he starts hallucinating and pretending he is a pig, getting caught by his friend's mother crapping on the floor. By the end of the film, he is on a first-name basis with the Virgin Mother, has survived a nuclear holocaust, and killed said friend's mother Charlie Manson-style.
Other Recommendations: While I did mention that the director made other works, none of them even come close to this level of hilarity or insanity, although many of his other works, including The Crying Game, are quite good.

12. Catch Me If You Can.
I'm normally not that big a fan of Steven Spielberg's movies, but I actually like quite a few of them, but quite honestly, this film, one of his more underrated films, is probably the only one of his films which I really love. Unlike the previous three films on this list, it's not really that insane. What I really find interesting, and even quite amusing, is how easily a sixteen-year old manages to gain a job as a pediatrician, lawyer, and airline pilot simultaneously and even manages to hold on to all three for several years. Of course, having Christopher Walken as the dad really helps make the film funny. Also, this includes one of my favourite court scenes in a film.

11. A Shot in the Dark.
Peter Sellers is widely considered to be one of the funniest people to ever maintain a presence on the silver screen, and, as it turns out, The Pink Panther series is one of the best showcases he was ever given for his comedic talents. Of all the films in the series, the second, A Shot in the Dark, is, hands down, the best, because, among many other reasons, Sellers is, in fact, the star of this one (the first one has him only as a relatively small character). In theory, there were nine films in the series, but four of them were made without Sellers, and three after his death in a desperate attempt by Blake Edwards to prove that he was really the one responsible for the film's popularity, and not Sellers. For what it's worth, there was a reboot a few years ago, but it's not really that good.
Other Recommendations: The other four Pink Panther films that Sellers made (including The Pink Panther, Return, Revenge, and Strikes Again), Dr. Strangelove, and Being There.

10. Bratz
When I saw the trailer for this film before Harry Potter 5, I knew that this had to be utterly ridiculous, but eventually, I managed to see it, and only then did I manage to notice how utterly insane this film is. Like Buster Keaton's featurette Sherlock Jr. (A film which is not on the list as a consequence of shortening the list down), almost every second is either devoted to something utterly hilarious or is leading up to something. Of course, in the case of Bratz, the laughs are almost entirely unintentional. What kind of things am I talking about here? Here's a few: a Hispanic family which inexplicably has a live-in mariachi band, a girl changing her outfit out in the open, students who dress like dinosaurs, the popular girl brandishing a sword in her own office (which she apparently has), and, as you might expect from a movie based on fashion dolls, insanely unnecessary makeovers. No, I'm not making any of this up.

9. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Is there anybody who doubts that there is really much of a point to explaining why I would be into this sort of film? In essence, the film is roughly two hours of Johnny Depp and Benecio del Toro acting completely out of their gourds. How could that fail? It may be possible, but it certainly doesn't happen.
Other Recommendations: An adaptation of Hunter Thompson's novel The Rum Diary, also starring Johnny Depp has actually been made, and is currently scheduled for an October release. It may be saner, but it may be quite good.

8. Plan 9 From Outer Space
This film is widely considered to be one of the worst films of all time, and also the epitome of "So Bad it's Good." I tend to lean towards the latter, because the movie is way too entertaining to be considered the worst film ever. Here's the plot: two aliens in a spaceship made of paper plates decide to avert the creation of a bomb that can blow up particles of light, which would lead to the destruction of the universe. They do so by going to a cemetery and resurrecting two dead people, one of whom is played by Bela Lugosi except when he's not. All those two dead people do is wander around that cemetery and kill a police officer, and make him one of them. Eventually, two other cops go up to the spaceship and the aliens explain everything. Shortly afterward, they leave.
Other recommendations: Glen or Glenda and Bride of the Monster were made by the same guy, and a biopic titled Ed Wood was made by Tim Burton about the making of those films. Of course, a similarly ridiculous film is 1938's Reefer Madness, which is probably a better companion piece.

7. Modern Times
I must admit that this film holds a particular hold on my heart (reading about him made me want to get into film), but the main reason I only gave it #7 is that, according to many people, Chaplin's own sentimental style doesn't hold up very well. Although, that said, he actually does sentimentality much better than most filmmakers, even Steven Speilberg, and even then, he manages to put a lot of priceless bits into the film, from his going into a machine to tighten the nuts on the inside, while it's still operating, stopping a jailbreak while on cocaine that he accidentally ate, and even the rollerblading scene where he manages to evade falling off a ledge blindfolded several times.
Other Recommendations: While any of his films between 1921-1952 (with the possible exception of The Circus and the definite exception of A Woman of Paris), are, in my opinion, essential viewing, only Modern Times and The Great Dictator (wherein he takes on Hitler) are currently in print.

6. Borat
Of the many comedians I've talked about here, Sasha Baron Cohen is one of the very few (with the possible exception of Williams Street, who made #15, and Edgar Wright, who will be talked about below) who appears to currently be in the prime of his career. The fact is that Baron Cohen made his name on television giving interviews with three different alter egos: Ali G, a wigger who is incredibly dense, Borat, a Kazakh journalist whose humour derives from the vast differences between his culture and that of the West, and Bruno, an Austrian fashionista who interviews mainly show business figures and people who would not be very comfortable with his homosexuality. Each character is known to use their personae to paint a less than flattering portrait of the people they interview, and each character had a film devoted to them. Ali G's was, hands down, the worst, due to its complete genre shift, and Bruno's film was still quite funny and far more psychologically revealing for American Culture (as the commentary for that film will underscore), but in terms of sheer funny, Borat's film was definitely the best, and part of the reason for this is, despite all the bigotry that Borat displays towards blacks, women, and Jews (which Baron Cohen is), it's evident that the character is actually pretty good-natured. And despite the fact that all three characters have been retired, it seems like he's still going strong.
Other Recommendations: As mentioned before, I also liked the Bruno movie, and as it turns out, he's also making a film based on a novel by, of all people, Saddam Hussein.

5. Hot Fuzz
This film was the third collaboration of Edgar Wright (director and writer) and Simon Pegg (Star and writer), a team which has probably been the most popular and best thing to come out of British comedy since Monty Python (and any of its spin-off projects, which I will talk about below). This film's particular target is police movies, and what really struck me about this film was that, not only did they reference many cop movies, and deconstruct many of the elements that are in them, but that they managed to do a lot of research about what the police actually do, but that they managed to incorporate an insane amount of things that they learned about it(Yes, Nicholas Angel is probably one of the only movie cops who would actually do well on the force). And considering that around the same time, Seltzer and Friedberg were working on several films which focused on "parodying" movies without doing any more research than watching their trailers, so, considering that Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg managed to do all the work that they did and still make the whole film a laugh riot shows that filmmakers like Seltzer and Friedberger have no excuse.
Other Recommendations: Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright have also collaborated on the zombie film Shaun of the Dead, and the TV series Spaced, and will both work with Steven Spielberg on the upcoming Tintin film adaptation. Wright went solo on the Scott Pilgrim movie, which I also recommend.

4. Harvey.
This is probably one of the most well-crafted comedic plays of all time (many of Shakespeare's works included). The film is about a man who appears to be best friends with a 6 1/2-foot tall invisible rabbit named Harvey. It's really hard to put my finger on just one thing that makes this film so funny, but I think that a large part of the humor comes from how nonchalant Jimmy Stewart's character is about everything, and another part of it comes down to how something as simple as getting a stoic man who appears to be hallucinating a large rabbit to get committed goes so disastrously wrong.
Other Recommendations: This film is not available in the library, but Jimmy Stewart and the director Henry Kostler reunited twelve years later to create a very different film called Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation. The film is definitely a product of the early sixties, when Hollywood was beginning to let its hair down, but not to get so risque as to actually break the Production Code. That said, Jimmy Stewart's roles in Harvey and Mr. Hobbs couldn't be any more different, but he makes them both work well.

3. A Fish Called Wanda
Of all the many projects that featured members of the Monty Python troupe without actually being part of the canon, this is without a doubt, the best of them all. It starts off as a heist film, beginning with the theft of several diamonds, and, after trying to collect the loot, Jamie Lee Curtis decides to seduce John Cleese so she can discover the real location of the loot, her boyfriend Kevin Kline (in one of his better performances) gets jealous, and while all this happens, Michael Palin tries to kill the only witness to the crime, but only manages to get her dogs. How funny is it? Well, it caused a guy to literally die of laughter several years ago.

2. Monty Python and the Meaning of Life
Monty Python is probably my favourite comedy troupe, and, for what it's worth, it's probably everyone else's favourite troupe as well. It was really difficult to choose which of their three films were the funniest, but I decided to choose their last film, Monty Python and the Meaning of Life, due in no small part to their retaining the format of their classic television series. In fact, one of my favourite moments comes from this film. In one animated sequence, a leaf falls, but just before that happens, it appeared to be going into a suicidal depression. The same cycle happens for the leaf's "Wife and kids", but after the kids fall, there is a pause, and every other leaf on the tree falls off simultaneously.

1. Duck Soup
Of all the films that the Marx Brothers made, this was probably the funniest. If it was certainly good enough to bring Woody Allen out of a suicidal funk in Hannah And Her Sisters, it's certainly good enough for you. As Roy Blount, who recently wrote a book-length analysis of the film, wrote, there is, at most, one dead spot in the entire film: and it appears when Groucho references a recently popular song entitled "That's Why Darkies Were Born." Yes, this song really existed, and it's just as patronising as you would expect it to be. What really makes the moment is that just after he drops that title, Groucho lets out a single "Huh!" that is pretty much the sort of reaction somebody who actually gets the reference would react to the scene. That said, every other second of the film is hilarious.
Other Recommendations: Any of the Marx Brothers' other films from 1930-1935 are highly recommended, and that includes most of their other Universal films which are only available on the same boxed set as Duck Soup.

At any rate, it's pretty difficult to analyse humour, and I honestly hope I did a pretty good job.

Issue 195

News: Derek the Restaurant Critic.
Normally, I do not review restaurants. Normally, I'm just content to eat whatever the menu has that fits within my tastes. However, I recently (twice, as a matter of fact) got dragged to a restaurant so horrible that my experiences simply demand that I have to do so. That restaurant is the Chicago Diner. The restaurant's major sell is that it is a vegan restaurant which apparently manages to use vegan cuisine to mimic diner cuisine to the extent that it is indistinguishable from the real thing. However, is it? The fact is, that it's not. To test and see if this is possible, I ate a "bacon" cheezeburger. (sic) To analyse both of the major meat components, the "burger" was made out of seitan, which is essentially a fancy word for dough. The fact is that it tastes like it, with a lot of spices that are, in theory, supposed to help it taste more like beef, but, apart from failing, that will not sit well with your intestines. As for the bacon part of it, it tastes like nothing. Simply put, it has no taste, and I mean this in the sense that Jean-Baptiste Grenouille had no scent. I had to force myself to eat the entire thing, due to my being malnourished to the point where my own faeces would have been equally appetizing if the smell could be neutralized, but there was no point whatsoever wherein any part of the burger tasted like bacon, cheese, or beef. However, we can probably lay this down to the fact that making dough actually taste like meat is impossible, but this does not excuse their other crimes against cuisine. Both times I was dragged there, I ordered a side of Mashed Potatoes, and somehow, even this was really off, particularly due to it looking neither like a potato nor mashed to any particularly meaningful degree. The taste itself was bland, different from the flavour I'm used to with potatoes in its sheer lack. After the Bacon Cheezeburger fiasco, I decided to order a salad. Surely if there's anything that a vegan could make palatable, it's salad. And yet, I was wrong, especially with what passed off as ranch dressing, tasting like a sub-par variation on the dill dipping sauce that is served with vegetable platters that are supposed to be sold for parties. Of course, the serving staff are kind, as you can expect from people who seem to be incapable of that most basic of human thought processes: rationalising the death of other beings for one's own desires. All that said, would I recommend it? Well, on the condition that you have no sense of taste whatsoever, or all the common sense of Madeline Bassett, then I would. If you don't fit those two criteria, I would guess that it would be the best argument for eating meat, especially human (or at least veal, which is supposed to taste exactly like human flesh). By contrast, if you're looking for a vegetarian restaurant that doesn't decieve, try Sweet Tomatoes. It makes no pretense of claiming that anything in it is supposed to taste like meat, and, for what it's worth, its food actually tastes good.

Quotes:
"Vegetarianism is harmless enough, though it is apt to fill a man with wind and self righteousness."
- Robert Hutchinson
"Veronica forces herself to go through a great deal of labor and preparation just to make her food taste more like meat, with weird-ass spices from around the world sprinkled atop "exotic" (and mandatory) sauces, curries, fungus, Boca burgers, textured vegetable paste, Tofurkey, and other processed blends of soy and gluten."
___________Rotten Library on Eating Disorders.
"It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable."
___________William Seabrook on Menschenfleisch.
"In a post-apocalyptic world, one man is transported from the microwave dimension to feast upon the remains of those who once lived. Rated R."
_______________Meatwad