Darth Maul, whose character development begins and ends with his evil Southwestern facepaint
GateHouse — Went to see the new, 3Dmafied version of “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace” this weekend, and I didn’t hate it. I should’ve hated it. I didn’t hate it. What the hell is going on right now.
Like most “Star Wars” nerds and nerdesses, I have a love/hate relationship with “The Phantom Menace,” and by “love/hate” I mean “Just the hate, with a side of grilled This Sucks and a mug of What Is This Horse Poop?” I saw “Menace” in 1999 with a cadre of fellow nerdlingers (and, inexplicably, our fiances) and we spent the next two weeks struggling to think of nice things to say about it, fighting to justify the emotional investment we’d made, an investment that had been returned to us in the form of jokes involving flatulent space horses and the nuanced drama of intergalactic trade route taxation disputes.
It's shocking how much time was not needed to locate this image
GateHouse— You know what Facebook could use is an increased level of unprovoked information about people’s kids, and before any of you jumpy gophers who leave a Facebook tab up “at work” to pounce on posts/comments like rabid animals get all “snarky” and “sarcastic” and “busy with quotation fingers” I know I put kid pictures on Facebook all the time too; I am not saying that I never do it or you should never do it, particularly if hypothetically your child was all sweet pushing his baby brother around in a stroller or that baby has a particularly lively reaction to your eerily accurate Swedish Chef impression. I am just saying that oh my God seriously if I see another child I don’t know sitting on a toilet I am definitely canceling the Internet service of the elderly neighbor/nonprofit I’m stealing wifi from, which is either “rutner house” or “Beaufort County Orphanage” or “linksys” or “linksys” or “linksys” or “linksys.”
(Incidentally this is where my 8-year-old would roll his eyes and go, “Don’t listen to him, Dad’s being sar-castic,” not that I would put that on Facebook or anything EVEN THOUGH IT’S UNBEARABLY CUTE AND YOU SHOULD ALL KNOW ABOUT IT.)
And yet here we are, thanks to the Consumer Electronics Show, an annual gathering of people to whom I would normally ascribe a dumb, nerdworthy nickname like “coding goobers” or “zittlywankers” or “Parrotheads” except I’m sure that any one of them is capable of building a nanorobot 14 molecules high that could kill me in my sleep using an endoplasmic reticulum. If you haven’t read up on this thing take a look online; seriously, it’s like a “Star Wars” convention for nerds.
Well, make that nerds and their parents: Because of CES we will soon have access to a device that will weigh your Precious Little Angel and auto-fire the results to Twitter and Facebook, saving you the trouble of weighing your child on some vintage hand-cranked lead-painted off-the-grid scale from Service Merchandise in 1983 and using a whole separate app to bore everyone to tears manually.
GateHouse — If you have ever been a parent and/or subjected to one on Facebook, you know that child-rearing is filled with people doing strange and terrible things, such as affixing leashes to their children in theme parks, motoring to a Walmart at 10:45 p.m. on a Tuesday to purchase Harry Potter costume components or posting six-minute videos of sled rides on the Internet, and trust me when I say I have only done two of those things so I CAN CLAIM MORAL SUPERIORITY HA HA HA oh my God why aren’t more people liking this picture of my son’s Harry Potter costume.
(It also, according to the coffee shop at which I am currently quote-fingers working, makes grandparents do things like attempt to facilitate a conversation with a 6-year-old on a speakerphone in the out-of-doors because it’s not like anything could remotely not work in that scenario, which reminds me: If you take someone else’s iPhone and then throw it in a parking lot and then drive over it and back over it and then then drive over it again until it is dead is that still illegal?)
Anyway, because parenting is filled with strange and terrible things it is ripe for people selling stranger and terrible things, which brings me to the idea of the “Daddy Shower,” which I learned of via one of those caffeinated press releases (“THE LATEST TREND IN BABY SHOWERS!” it lies) that indicates that Brooklyn, Paris and Dubai have been secretly hosting underground Daddy Showers for months and is written in such a way as to indicate the author had been viewing adult human males for years with binoculars from behind trees but had yet to risk approaching one.
“Think baby showers are just for moms?,” it continues, addressing a problem that no one has ever complained about ever. “Not anymore!” And it is here that I offer ALLELUIA because seriously you guys I had just gotten through telling my friends “I mean it’s nice that we make more money and never deliver babies and have totally invented a way to wield phrases like ‘Strategic Content Financial Control Analyst’ as though they have any meaning at all, but dammit why do all the gurlz get to sit around rooms full of matching centerpieces opening presents for three hours at a time? INEQUITY!” And then I pounded my table importantly and sipped Scotch and I think harumphed? I can’t be sure, that was a really long sentence to remember.
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Springsteen’s father’s baby shower gifts: disapproval and detachment, and maybe a rattle forged from human pain.
All of these objects will one day fall out of space onto your house, but try not to worry too much.
GateHouse — I think if we can agree on anything, it’s that none of us have ever had to worry about satellite parts raining on us from space.
Oh, sure, there’s a lot we have had to worry about this week — George Lucas adding more stupid crap to “Star Wars,” panther attacks, our ridiculous doomed “government,” that stupid ticker on the new Facebook that just keeps yapping away about what my friends are listening to on Spotify which is about 500 kinds of obnoxious and also I need to talk with my friend Aaron about what is evidently some kind of Sunday morning Phil Collins fixation — to name a few.
But if there’s anything that brings us together as a people and binds us as humans, besides football, it’s the ability of the American people to band together, join their figurative hands and say, “None of us need worry about being whumped by plummeting space satellite debris, because when our broken space junk starts raining home someone with a computer will know what town it will be-crater.”
It would be easier to make fun of kids' boxing if this picture WAS NOT SO ADORABLE
GateHouse — Well, the chances are pretty good that if you’re the type of person who is moved to reflection by the headline “Pediatricians put the kibosh on boxing for kids,” you are already PRETTY WELL IMMERSED in the world of boxing for kids.
This is the sort of headline that only a country where half of the Major Presidential Candidates are still wobbly on this confusing “science” situation would require, the sort of news that’s news only if your daily planner includes the words “Nancy Grace” in pink bubble lettering, yet here we are: Last week the American Academy of Pediatrics and its Canadian counterpart, Rush, issued a joint report that came out against the sport of boxing for children and adolescents. Reasons included: a high risk of injury, potential for possible concussions and Listening To The Instincts Burned Deep Within The DNA Of Every Human Alive Over Millions Of Years Of Evolution.
What could turn A Lady on more than doughy fiftysomethings with exposed white fishbellies and facepaint?
Metromix — Spoiler alert: This list is going to end with a 1996 Bryan Adams song called “I Wanna Be Your Underwear.” It was Adams’ inexplicable panties-transfiguration compulsion that got us thinking: Any website can hope to rack up page views by putting the phrase “songs about sex” in a headline, but it takes a site full of trained professionals to do the exact opposite. As such, our criteria here were simple: The songs had to be directly sexual in nature, they had to not be by comedians or parodists (i.e. Lonely Island doesn’t count) and they had to be at least partly designed for the actual seduction of a human.
Pictured: Basically what all Scientists look like.
GateHouse — So, just to straighten this out, just to quell the controversy, there’s a new study that says watching TV is a drain on your lifeforce somehow? WELL THANKS FOR KEEPING ME CURRENT, SCIENCE. What’s next on the list? Is it teleporting? I hope it’s teleporting.
To jump back to before the previous paragraph (yes, I have solved COLUMN TIME TRAVEL), a recent study published in Australia revealed that watching too much TV increases your chance of dying early from health problems. It also apparently reveals that science is out of things to study. No no, guys, thanks, since we’ve got all of our other problems so skillfully figured out, I guess it’s OK for you to start going back to the mid 1950s to CHECK YOUR WORK. It’s a good thing our Future Republican President is planning to make sure all your textbooks are flamethrowered.
See, people, this is why Brave Patriots like Rick Perry and the additional 400 GOP presidential candidates are so wisely poking holes in Science things like “evolution” and “global warming” and “Avogadro’s number” and “the atomic weight of cobalt” (the “Periodic Table” will tell you that it’s 58.933, but that’s just a theory that’s out there): Not because Science is filling our children’s precious spongebrains with facts and empirically proven evidence instead of merely our own desperately held belief structures, because it’s MOSTLY REHASHING THINGS WE KNEW ALREADY. Last week saw another round of stories about how eating processed meats made from the feet of animals you would hit with a subway train if you could might not be so good for the ol’ Heart. WELL THANKS A HEAP, SCIENCE. I suppose next you’re going to report some bungling nonsense about how easy access to “guns” increases “the rates of violence in America.” Science is such a loser.
Pictured: Boehner and, I don't know, Cantor? Harry Reid?
GateHouse — Good morning, America! Or at least the small percentage of you who have successfully avoided the impulse to beat yourself silly every morning with a box of Lucky Charms (or whatever kind of cereal box is most damaging, it’s up to you, although I find the purple stars pretty hurtful).
I have found myself drawn to the Debt Ceiling Negotia — well, Negotiations is an incorrect word, because it indicates on some level the involvement of adult humans, so let’s go with Pathetic Caterwauling By People Who Sound Like Ralph Wiggum — for the same reason that I was once drawn to pro wrestling: Because I like listening to silly cartoonpeople in costumes read from goofy scripts in an attempt to emanate impressions of grave importance.
Also, I like my house, and with Sunday’s deal/compromise/fiesta of Democrat giveaways I’m glad to know that in theory I can keep it through September, or until my mortgage is sold to China or Cobra or the evil Thundercats or whoever. Wait, were there bad Thundercats? I can’t remember now. If there were bad Thundercats, someone please email about them, in the precious last few days before your Internet bill jumps to $450/mo and you pay it directly to a Koch Brother. .
Tatooine = Preferable to America this week, for two reasons: 1. Vaporators. 2. Droid sales.
GateHouse— As a licensed Reformed Humor Professional — having graduated from a monthslong Comedy Immersion Program led at a secluded Wisconsin camp by Dr. Marcus Bachmann, who helpfully compelled me to Pray The Grim Away (incidentally, it’s basically just 12-hour “Growing Pains” rerun marathons, save your money) — I can confirm that it’s currently too blank-wording hot to be funny. Go ahead and fill in your own expletive there; the newspaper has rules about such things, though I’m guessing that most editors are too sweaty to care. (If you are having trouble finding just the right bad word, go outside in a pair of sweatpants and jog to the end of the block. By the time you return you will have thought of dozens.)
There is hot, and then there is slap-your-belly-and-run-to-your-mama hot. I don’t want to turn this into a game of Heat Dome Story Trumping, but I live in South Carolina, where we routinely enjoy the kind of heat that makes grown conservatives go running to the government for Oscillating Fan handouts, the kind of heat where you go to get the mail and then stop on your way back to hallucinate.
Within 12 seconds of going outside in South Carolina your clothes grow damp and heavy enough to make you feel like you’re wearing a used beach towel. I recently saw a Facebook experiment in which some a friend’s kids tried to literally fry an egg on the sidewalk, a plan that unfortunately foiled when the sidewalk liquefied. On the plus side, when it’s this hot, you feel less weird having your morning margarita at work.
Writer/editor at Nickelodeon's Nickmom.com, syndicated humor columnist for GateHouse, music journalist and speedily graying dad based on the coast of Carolina. Bio/Clips.
second! and not in his usual creepy old-man-at-the-park way RT @jefito The new @GalacticFunk LP makes me want to jump up and down and yell. 9 hours ago
