Funny because it's true

DJ Pica Pull: so I see STL had a big explosion this week
DJ Pica Pull: I figured it was Boeing, blowing up the last vestiges of McDonnel Douglas
Pat: bits and pieces were flying for a good quarter of a mile
DJ Pica Pull: either that, or American blowing up what was left of TWA out at Lambert
Pat: nahhh
Pat: This was in the city
Pat: where those corporate types wouldn't dare to go
DJ Pica Pull: oh
DJ Pica Pull: the "hood"
Pat: What I find more interesting is that they needed to borrow task forces and ambulances from two or three different suburbs
DJ Pica Pull: Id like to get down there this sumemr
Pat: and it wasn't even all that hood-y
DJ Pica Pull: yeah well, they have to panic and make it a national emergency
DJ Pica Pull: good PR for the politicos
DJ Pica Pull: "Look, we pulled in all this help, blah blah blah"
Pat: well my thought is why doesn't the city have any ambulances it could use?
Pat: why use a suburb 25 minutes away?
Pat: i thought it could be a funding issue
DJ Pica Pull: "For the answers to those questions, we go live to Patrick in the Newschannel 7 van on the scene..."
Pat: Seriously man
DJ Pica Pull: haha
Pat: I should be on this shit
Pat: like white on rice
Pat: The graphics they did were bad-ass, though
DJ Pica Pull: i'm sorry, i'm in love with long grey lines of copy
Pat: well you'll be in love with my foot up your ass
DJ Pica Pull: of course, since readers all have ADD, we have to have graphics

Yup. Sad, because it's true. But funny.

Kumar: All right. Awesome. Then listen, listen - no matter what, we are not ending this night without White Castle in our stomachs. Agreed?
Harold: Agreed.
Burger Shack Employee: Wise choice. You guys might have wanted to stay away from our special sauce tonight. Me and Pookie, we added a secret ingredient. I'll give you a hint. It's semen.
Harold: Semen.
Burger Shack Employee: Animal semen.
--"Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle"

On the way home tonight, Janelle and I agreed we could use some McDonald's. Scott was on his way to meet us at the house, so I dropped her off at the house before going to McDonald's. When I got to McDonald's, I ordered for all three of us, but ended up receiving only Scott's order. I told the woman this and ended up getting our order along with the bag she originally gave me. Turns out the person ahead of us left and we got his order. Or something like that. I'm not exactly sure what happened, but we ended up getting two more orders of fries than we needed, as well as an extra burger.

We're not sure what that burger's story was, and now Janelle and I are curious as to what was in it. As we are both feeling pretty good right about now. But when Scott left to go home, he was in rough shape. Rough shape, indeed.

So now we're thinking that the burger we got was tainted in some way. Thank goodness Janelle and I got chicken selects and chicken nuggets. No way you can add animal product to those without it being totally obvious. Or so I would think.

Dear Kazaa/Kazaa Lite,
You suck. All I get is corrupt files, WMAs or fake files that are silent and 23 minutes long. Thanks a lot.

Love,

Pat

Dear Limewire,

Can I have a uterus? Because I want to have your babies. Because you rock.

Love,

Pat

Dear Lindsey Lohan,

You're not a file-sharing program. But will you eat something? Please?

You're shivering, because you're hungry. Get yourself some chicken and a biscuit, bitch.

Love,

Pat

"Wait, we talking Burton or Schumacher?"

Christopher Nolan's "Batman Begins" is, bar none, the best movie in the Batman franchise. The only one that comes close, of course, is Burton's movie from 1989. Nothing else has a chance.

This movie shows the inner conflict of Bruce Wayne. All the movies hint at the struggle to keep his identity a secret, but what the Joel Schumacher ones didn't do was dig at his character. This movie shows his evolution quite well. For all the people who complained that Anakin's morph into Darth Vader wasn't believable in "Revenge of the Sith," "Batman Begins" should be your next movie. Bruce Wayne's journey from rich boy to shit-disturber to Batman is laid out quite nicely. He's confused, conflicted, and without a real master. He's a samurai. Not just a samurai, but a ronin. With wicked sword fights and hand-to-hand combat.

And NO NIPPLES ON THE BATMAN SUIT. Awesome.

Darren Aranofsky ("Pi," "Requiem For a Dream") was supposed to do this movie, but Nolan ("Memento," "Insomnia") worked out swimmingly well.

Other directors who could direct a Batman movie, any historical time period, alive or dead:

Kurosawa ("Seven Samurai," "Yojimbo," "Rashomon," "Hidden Fortress")

That's it. And he's dead. Keep Nolan doing these. Don't let Joel Douche-macher make another movie. Ever.

"Question: What color is a firetruck? Ya know, a RED firetruck?In the spirit of stealing things from Erica, get ready for...

P.M.G.: The Quiz.

Coming soon.

santorum: (san-TOR-um):
1. The frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.
2. Sen. Rick Santorum

-- From Dan Savage's Santorum

Have you voted yet for the hottest U.S. senator? Voting ends Monday.

The site has created such a buzz that it was featured on Wonkette. But who made the site? Someone I know!

Boo-yah.

Dan has gone for a write-in approach and I like this idea. I don't know who I'd write in. And I got to thinking about senators past and present, too. I think Jim Talent looks like Stephen Hawking, but a little fatter. And I'd never vote for Jim DeMint, even if he looked like Christian Bale. Of course, if he looked like Christian Bale, he'd probably not be so conservative.

And speaking of that, a vote for Santorum is a vote for Satan. Just thought I'd warn you all. Not that you didn't know that already.

"He made this flick 'Sixteen Candles.' Not bad. There's tits in it, but no bush, but Ebert over here don't give a shit about that kind of thing 'cause he's, like, all in love with this John Hughes guy. He goes out and rents, like, every one of his movies. Fuckin' 'Breakfast Club,' where all these stupid kids actually show up for detention. Fuckin' 'Weird Science,' where this chick wants to take her gear off and get down, but oh no, she don't 'cause it's a PG movie. And then, 'Pretty in Pink,' which I can't even watch with this tubby bitch anymore, 'cause every time we get to the part where the redhead hooks up with her dream guy, he starts sobbin' like a little bitch with a skinned knee and shit. And there's nothing worse than watchin' a fuckin' fat man weep. Anyway all of John Hughes movies take place in Shermer, Illinois, where all the hunnies are top shelf but all the boys are whiney pussies-except Judd Nelson man, he was fuckin' harsh. So me and 'Lunchbox' here figured we could live like fatrats if we were the blunt connection in Shermer. So we collected some money we were owed and boarded a bus. But you know what we found out when we got here? There is no Shermer in Illinois! Movies are fuckin' bullshit, man!"
-Jay, "Dogma"

So, even if you haven't seen one of the 900 re-airings of the MTV Movie Awards, you probably know that the cast of "The Breakfast Club" was honored with a big tub of silver popcorn. The award, to me, at least, demonstrated the positive and negative things that have resulted from that movie. It's inspired some stuff that's really good, but also inspired some real shit.

The movie is up there with pizza, ice cream and chocolate in terms of universal likes. That's a big strength. Hilary Swank waxed about how ingenius it was to make a prison noir movie set in high school, examining the various personalities who all were pretty similar by the end of the day. It showed that the jocks and the dweebs and the goths and rich chicks and the loners could all get along on some level because, well, they all have the same insecurities, fears and problems, even if the circumstances might seem slightly different. In making five distinct characters, John Hughes ensured that viewers would be able to identify with at least one of them, and so even if you felt left out of your own high school, you didn't feel left out of "The Breakfast Club." And thus almost every high school kid goes through a phase of loving that movie, and that gives you something in common with your classmates. The tall gangly kid whom everyone else labels as effiminite might seem foreign and mean to you, but hey, you both liked "The Breakfast Club" and you both thought Ally Sheedy was, in some ways, hot. And so, you had something over which to bond.

So for those reasons, "The Breakfast Club" was genius. Nothing short of awesome.

But it also spawned a whole side industry of teen marketing, and John Hughes' most-copied trait was also his biggest short-coming: self-seriousness. So, you ended up not only having more teen movies than before, but they all seized on John Hughes for the wrong reasons. You can see it in Kevin Williamson's movies and TV shows. You can see it in Kevin Smith's movies, too, but he mastered the balance better than Williamson did. Because Kevin Smith is a bad-ass. It's not to say I don't love Kevin Smith or "Dawson's Creek," because I do. But some of that stuff really tried to imitate "The Breakfast Club" but had dialogue so bad that it could have been written by George Lucas.

So you can blame John Hughes for any moody high school girl who goes to open mic night with her shitty poetry about Sarah MacLachlan and the universe and all that shit. Why? Because the hypothetical moody high school chick grew up on "Scream" and "She's All That" and other shit that mistakenly identifies with the self-seriousness of it rather than the unity aspect of it. That, and those chicks usually grow up to like Dar Williams or Jack Johnson. Or worse, Michelle Branch or The Calling. With that fucking Alex guy as the lead singer. :)

And then there's the music that tries to throw back to the John Hughes era. At the Movie Awards, Yellowcard played a live cover of Simple Minds' "Don't You Forget About Me" and it was all slow emo-y. Which I guess makes sense because the teen music of today is slow emo just in the same way that the new romanticism of the 80s (Simple Minds, Psychedlic Furs, etc) were the teen music of twenty years ago. But I'd take Simple Minds or Psychedelic Furs over emo any day of the week.

The real teen angst movies that have been good lately were "Donnie Darko," "The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys" and "Igby Goes Down." We need more stuff like that. Forget Rachel Leigh Cook or Melissa Joan Hart or Hunter Hearst Helmsley or whatever other three-named people they'll throw at us. Give us more Jake Gyllenhaal and Kieran Culkin.

But why are those movies good? Because they got teen angst right. And I can't help but think they got a lot of "it" from "The Breakfast Club." So let Molly Ringwald have that silver tub of popcorn. She deserves it. Even if she is crazy.

Hi there

So, it's been an interesting week of blasts from the past. I've gotten back into The Facebook and added a bunch of people from high school. That's always interesting. Also interesting is getting e-mail updates from people you haven't talked to in a while, like Nick B., whose cousin Kristi V. was also a friend. Always good to hear what people have been up to and what they're doing.

"A flaw ain't nothin' but a unique characteristic... You got a belly, you rub that motherfucker... Just remember, there's someone who loves you... You got buck teeth? I bet you there's a brother here tonight who wants nothing but a bitch who can bite an apple through a picket fence... Remember, someone loves yo ass."
-Adele Givens, "Original Queens of Comedy"

Now, I'm not a svelte beach-goer, but then again, I'm in the south, and so not everyone at the beach is going to look like Eva Mendes. Sigh. No, there are tons of people just letting it all out, and I am glad to see it. It makes me feel better about my new handles.

I think there's a good middle ground to find. And that ground is knowing you want to be healthier but without being so obsessed that your self-image is determined by your body and nothing else. Stephen Hawking has a pretty shitty body and Cameron Diaz has a fabolous body. However, Stephen Hawking is a genius and Cameron has had shits that are smarter than she is. I'm not saying that pretty people are dumb because they are pretty, because I know several people who are good-looking AND smart. And the most beautiful people people realize that they don't have to have zero percent body fat. Perfect hair, sure, but not zero percent body fat.

Kim Coles was on that horrible VH1 show, "Celebrity Fit Club," and Janelle and both marvelled that she was hot. We were glad she got to finally get a date with Harvey, even if he did look like Mush-mouth.

So, you got a belly?

You rub that motherfucka.

More reasons to love Dan "A."

D.A.: joke for ya
Pat: oh yeah?
D.A.: how do you keep the story "50,000 people die" off the front page?
Pat: how?
D.A.: add the words "in india"

I thought that was pretty funny. He elaborated:

D.A.: i heard it after we ran a big story about a couple hundred pets dying in a pet store fire ... and i said if it were that many people, but in a poor country, we'd maaaybe mention it in a brief
Pat: sadly that's true
Pat: very true
D.A.: kittens > poor people

"It's 947 miles to Chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses."

In the last week, we've had a golconda of visitors hailing from the windy city. Actually, not a golconda, per se, but three: Janelle's parents, and Derek.

Now, for months, Janelle's mom and I have been talking on the phone (read: drunk dialing). But I had never met the woman. Still, we were BFF before she even got off the plane. Anytime you can include "drunk dial" in a story about someone's mom is a treat, and she seemed like a nice lady when sober, too. So before I even met her, I already liked her.

But Janelle's dad I had not talked to, and I didn't know much about him before they got here. No worries, though, because we quickly were BFF, as we talked music and baseball. I, everso precocious, took pride in knowing most of the bands and songs he referred to in our "quizzes." And were both designated "coat-holder" at the outlet mall.

So I tagged along with them as if I were their long-lost son. Margaritaville, Salsarita's, the winery, etc. Another sign of "the G-Unit" being good people is that Janelle's mom and I shared a love for Corona, and she gave me her limes. Similar to when I give Janelle my pickles from sandwiches. It was as if the circle was complete.

Pictures will be up soon (of their trip, not of the limes). Will let you know when Janelle's dad I form "Kool and the OTHER gang."

"Stylin' and profilin'"

So the G-Unit was here until Thursday, and Derek came down on Friday. He came with a friend from the station, whose friends were visiting another one of their mutual friends. It was a friends fest.

A thing I'm learning in my inaugural summer here is that the tourist seasons bring out the weird locals. Not that the weirdos don't go out year-round (I do), but I've been meeting more recently. It makes sense, though, because a big staple in Myrtle Beach is its variety of bars, and so you'll meet a nice mix of pederasses, thugs, good-ole-boys, manics and alkies.

We met a guy who looked like G. Gordon Liddy (read: fit the description of a child molester) and he was pretty friendly. Drunk, but friendly. It was raining a lot that night and so we were all staying under the awning of the bar. Well, the Liddy twin (bald man with a mustache) starts asking us our names, and someone in our group says, "And what's your name, sir?"

That, he explained, made him limp. And he then made his fingers into a mini-penis and dangled it from his crotch. "Hi, sir!"

I guess if you know that none of the girls you're talking to will go home with you, you've got to figure out how to make your mark. Of course, he had done that by asking us to go skinny-dipping. We declined, though Derek, Stephanie and I did go for a midnight walk in the waves. In a lightning storm.

"To be the man, you gotta BEAT the man! Woooo!"

So, there was good times beaching, barring and dancing, but the best part of the weekend came at a piano bar.

We had been at a retro dance club and then went to a dueling piano bar. This bar is always packed, and there's usually five chicks running around wearing wedding veils, signaling bachelorette nights, wedding parties or girls who still never got over not being prom queen and wanted something "special." Usually, it's the bachelorette parties.

So we're there, watching these bridezillas try to get the guys to sing white boy classics and there's a murmur in the crowd. A group forms near the stage and the announcement comes that right by the stage is none other than...

RIC FLAIR.

I know a lot of you won't know who Ric Flair is (read: Erica, Sarah and a few others), so I'm linking to a fan site as well as his WWE profile.

Yes, Ric Flair was a wrestler, and I'm sure he still makes appearances. I was 12 the last time I followed wrestling, but that's when he left the WCW for the WWF and started beefing with Macho Man. I loved Macho Man and I thought Flair was a punk! He even used PhotoShop to put himself in photos with Miss Elizabeth. That was around the time Jake The Snake let Lucifer bite Macho Man.

Ahhh, youth.

So, this was a funny return to our youth for me and D. Freshman year, D and I got out my old wrestling figures and put on a show for Courtney, Lindsey and Jiffy.

Ric Flair is probably a sleaze, associated with a scumbag "sport" and doesn't really promote good values, but to say you saw Ric Flair at a bar? Awesome.

As soon as we get those pictures, we'll get those online.

"Wooo!"

I was thumbing through the sports pages and saw something about "race car driver Carl Edwards." For some reason, the name was familiar. The photo was small but I looked at the face and it triggered a memory of a Carl Edwards who had been in my sophomore year biology class. He was an interdisciplinary studies major. I knew that from talking to him a few times, but what I remembered most was that he said he and his dad raced cars. He even gave me his business card, because I wanted to do a story about it for the MOian. Never did, of course.

I Googled him tonight and saw that sure enough, it was the guy. I totally believed it for sure when I saw that Carl Edwards the NASCAR driver indeed was born in Columbia, Mo. Ipso ergo facto, the guy from my class forged out a pretty good career for himself (he's being hailed as the new "it" in NASCAR).

And before tonight, the only person that stood out from that class was Kate. Of course, she doesn't race cars. Or maybe she does, and that's just something she hasn't told me. I doubt it, though.

Anywho, thought I'd share. I'm not really a racing fan (read: not a fan at all), though I was cheering on Danica Patrick. I just think it's cool that I can point to yet another semi-celebrity and say, "I went to school with him!"

Don't worry, I'll still think of Kate when I think of that class, even if she didn't give me her business card or tell me she raced cars.