Category Archives: McClatchy-Tribune

April 6, 2010

Scrabble allows proper nouns; a nation mourns its lost innocence

By Jeff Vrabel

Thanks to Change, this letter can now be used to score points on everything from Zappa to Zoltar to Zombie

.Island Packet — Not to sound like a jerk, but I am better than you at Scrabble. And I can prove it with shocking mathematics: In March I played a single word for 117 points, 117 nasal passage-melting points, a startling, Bob Huggins’ head-sized accomplishment that is difficult to process with your mortal human brain, so I will pause here to let you absorb it with reverent silence.

Go on. It’s OK. I’ll cool myself with tropical foliage while being hand-fed cheeses and star fruit while you stand slack-jawed with wonder.

OK, now that your heart rate has relaxed and most of the major sweating has slowed, I will tell you that the 117-point monster I conjured with my brain-wand was DOOZIES, a word which is far too cartoonish for the verbal firepower and childish gloating it unleashed. If you are not a Scrabble player, this is the equivalent of Albert Pujols hitting a home run that counted for 30 runs, or Duke’s championship victory coming in part because Jon Scheyer hit a 75-pointer (which NCAA officials would happily allow, incidentally, but whatever).

Indeed, at any given time, I am engaged in three or four games of Scrabble, mostly on my iPhone, where I play the free Scrabble app called Words With Friends (a name which no doubt resulted from Lawsuits Among Companies), a diversion that helps exercise my mind while causing considerable terror in the drivers behind me.

But this has all taken place under what will soon be known as Old Scrabble Rules, the board-game equivalent of the pre-’roid era. Because a new edition of the game will for the first time allow proper nouns — including the names of celebrities, places and companies — because a board game adored by language enthusiasts for 62 years can’t possibly navigate the rocky transition to the iPad Age unless it can somehow work in “Beyonce.” (I note with no small degree of pleasure that the person who established the anti-proper noun rule was Alfred Butts, whose name is now worth a great many points and immeasurable awesomeness.)

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• Cameo – Word Up!

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74 comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Culture And / Or News, Humor Columns, McClatchy-Tribune

March 18, 2010

Art painted by dogs = Indulgent, sententious and smells like kibbles

By Jeff Vrabel

"You call that early 20th-century Fauvism, Cody? Get in your bed! GET!"

Island Packet — The dog we had while I was growing up was a scatterbrained, overcaffeinated Ewok named Cutty who had thick black fur, dragon breath and what could be generously described as scant bladder control. (Seriously, loved her, but the downstairs carpet was like a minefield of long-dried puddles. If I ever had a girl over, it would have been a problem. It was generally not a problem.)

Cutty could do a lot of things: She could smile on command, she could catch mice and she could consume an entire box of 12 chocolate Santas in one sitting, although the rest of that particular evening is something I’d like to forget.

But for all her positive traits, Cutty was a really lousy painter.

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27 comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Culture And / Or News, Humor Columns, McClatchy-Tribune

February 26, 2010

Enjoy your final days before we’re all devoured by murderous pigs, or, Porky’s Revenge

By Jeff Vrabel

Pictured: Babe, age 54

Island Packet — We have had, it can be argued by most good people, a fairly colorful few months here in the swamps of Carolina. Our governor vanished for a week, another guy lost track of his Red Bull allowance and yelled something at President Kenya O’Islam on the TV, another dude and his grandma called poor people farm animals and then whined about being made fun of, some hilarious representative person introduced pointless nuisance legislation about banning paper money to make a point about small government and it’s still legal to marry your first cousin. There is also a story about a horse my editor won’t let me write about.

But even these many terrible people are mere hors d’oeuvres when compared with the greatest problem facing residents of South Carolina, which is that we are all going to be eaten and probably killed by feral wild pigs, which are running wild throughout the state and cannot be stopped at all, by anything, except maybe feral wild dragons, and I’m pretty sure we exported most of those already.

Indeed, according to a story right here in the Newspaper written by my cubicle-mate, Patrick Donohue, who spent all of Feral Pig Infestation Reporting Day growing increasingly unhinged by panic, “There may be no slowing the state’s booming wild hog population, experts say.” Moreover, it turns out our state is home to the nation’s sixth-largest population of wild hogs. (It is also home to the nation’s fourth-largest collection of owners of the DVD of “Wild Hogs,” which is equally troubling.)

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Bessie Smith – Gimme A Pigfoot

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4 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Humor Columns, McClatchy-Tribune, Vicious Animals

February 12, 2010

So long, and thanks for all the suicidal fish

By Jeff Vrabel

Fly away, Stanley, be free!

Island Packet — You try to be nice, you try to be a good parent, you put a fish tank in your kid’s room because you think it’ll teach valuable lessons about nature and pet care, and then the fish more or less all try to kill themselves. Great. THANKS, FISH.

Indeed, due to a recent flurry of housecleaning, the Little Man was given a fish tank from his grandparents, a large and serious-looking 30-gallon deal that required more effort than I’d ever put into a fish tank before, such as cleaning. In fact, quite a bit of preliminary work was required, as the current tenant was a sole and sickly-looking wretch named Booger who looked like a special new hybrid of goldfish and death. Booger needed help, and by “help” I mean “to be put out of his misery and onto a sandwich as quickly as possible.” (Sorry, but I really like seafood.)

Anyway, after a thorough scrubdown and comprehensive water replacement treatment, we set out to repopulate the tank at Wal-Mart, which was convenient, because we also totally needed sweatpants and a 70-gallon tankard of Tide. (Scoff if you will, but have you ever checked out Wal-Mart’s assortment of fish? It’s like those walls of TVs they have in NORAD, only instead of TVs, it’s fish. They have more fish at Wal-Mart than they have $5.50 horror DVDs from 1974.)

So with a sack of new fish in one hand and a piping hot new copy of “Santa’s Slay” in the other, we headed home to surprise Booger with some much-needed friends.

It’s around this point that the dying started.

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4 comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Dad Stories, Humor Columns, McClatchy-Tribune

February 5, 2010

If I wanted to live in this much cold, I would have never left Reykjavik

By Jeff Vrabel

Pictured: The worst remake of "The Adventures of Milo and Otis" ever.

Island Packet — Let’s be honest with each other, Lowcountry people: A major reason that we expatriated ourselves here in the swamps — in addition to retirement, golf and/or the realization of our dream of opening a makeshift bar in a storage facility — is so that we could spend no small amount of time gloating at all of the slushy saps who have elected to live in the North, on purpose, despite considerable scientific evidence pointing to the fact that winter has been known to occur nearly every year.

Over the years and in my two separate stays here in the Lowcountry, I have done this a lot. I did it last week. I’ve done it enough so that I have been occasionally disinvited from important family gatherings. Now and again I’ll load up the weather forecast for Chicago, gasp in farcically overwrought Glenn Beck-ian horror at the shockingly low figure before me, do a genre shuffle for “Reggae” on the iPod and sit back and drink my morning margarita.

One afternoon in 1998 I mentioned to my absurdly talented photographer ex-roommate that I was heading out to finish my Christmas cards by our apartment complex’s pool; he responded, “Shovel the sidewalk while you’re out there!” chortling with a good-natured what-ho as we patted each other on the back and enjoyed the sort of convivial laughter you’d expect of very old criminals, smirking inwardly at our friends and family who had, very likely, spent a good part of their morning chucking a Tootsie Roll-brown mixture of slush, road salt and small former animal chonks off of their wheel wells. (Karma being a jerk, three weeks later I found myself stranded in Chicago’s O’Hare airport — I can’t remember exactly how long it was, but I do know I began to make vague plans about which fellow travelers should be eaten first — but that’s probably for another story time.)

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2 comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Culture And / Or News, Humor Columns, McClatchy-Tribune

January 28, 2010

Read this, then wash your hands thoroughly and down a quart of Zicam

By Jeff Vrabel

Shower with this, for health

Island Packet — If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent the last month engaged in some combination of coughing, sneezing, cough-sneezing, whining about cough-sneezing, amassing a pile of tissues large enough to suggest you’re constructing a border wall out of them, waking up feeling like someone poured a couple of gallons of vanilla pudding mix into your lungs and, of course, the always-delightful snort-sneezing, which is something that can make you get a cramp in your sinuses while sounding like you’ve briefly turned into a rhinoceros who is giving birth inside a submarine.

I say this not to turn readers off, but because there’s a good chance that most readers are sick, because everyone is sick, because apparently this area has been made ground zero for a nefarious federal Cold and Flu Experiment of some kind, like a “Lost” thing, only with fewer aliens and infuriating asides.

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8 comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Culture And / Or News, Humor Columns, McClatchy-Tribune

January 21, 2010

Kind of blue: Attempting to fuel the ‘Avatar’ backlash (you got my back, Holy Father?)

By Jeff Vrabel

Papa Smurf, left, and his girlfriend prepare to fire an arrow into a rainforest full of metaphors.

Island Packet — ‘Avatar” is lame. You know it, I know it, portions of James Cameron’s animatronic exoskeleton know it. By contrast, though, and in the interest of objectivity, here is an incomplete list of people who seemingly don’t know it: billions of moviegoers all over the planet, the lucrative international market and the important movie-industry people who will spend the better part of the next two months passing expensive awards around crowds of themselves.

Whatever. I am no stranger to standing alone when it comes to the hating of highly popular movies — seriously, two rum-and-cokes and one mention of “Forrest Gump” and I am not responsible for whatever happens to your carpet — so let me take this opportunity to start the local post-Golden Globes pre-Oscars “Avatar” backlash.

Well, technically I can’t start it, as I am already behind the Vatican, whose movie reviewer — who incidentally has the cushiest gig ever, except for having to see all those Kirk Cameron films — called the sci-fi throwdown “simplistic,” adding that the film “cleverly winks at all those pseudo-doctrines that turn ecology into the religion of the millennium.” This officially marks the first time in about 20 years me and the Vatican are totally eye-to-eye on something, which means the introductory brunch at the 2010 Vatican City Humor Columnists Seminar should hopefully be a little less awkward.)

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14 comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Culture And / Or News, Humor Columns, McClatchy-Tribune, Movie Reviews

December 23, 2009

“Dinosaur Train”: All I want for Christmas is to be like the argentinosaurus

By Jeff Vrabel

Island Packet — The Little Man has become interested in, and by “interested in” I mean “deeply consumed by,” a PBS show called “Dinosaur Train.” And while I can’t claim to be a mass-media expert like all those interesting people on TV, I can say that I find “Dinosaur Train” to be public television’s best-ever example of PURE AND UNRELENTING GENIUS. There are mornings where I will literally pour a fresh bowl of Cocoa Pebbles on top of my head because I did not think of the idea for “Dinosaur Train,” which is absolute perfection: Take the world’s two most awesomest things for a male 5-year-old, smash them together and make a show out of them. It’s amazing. This would be like if they suddenly launched a program for me called “Springsteen KeylimeShakiravideos.”

I have plenty of time for self-immolation, luckily, because we watch a metric truckload of “Dinosaur Train” these days. I obtained my first-ever DVR a few weeks ago, which has essentially become an external storage unit for episodes of “Dinosaur Train” — something that is required, because as you might imagine there are some pretty dramatic differences between episodes. In one, for instance, they take the Dinosaur Train to the Jurassic to meet Tyrannosaurus rexes. In another, they take the Dinosaur Train to the Cretaceous to visit  argentinosauruses. In literature, narrative structure can be established and then amended to novel and dramatic effect, which is something that almost never happens on “Dinosaur Train.”

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4 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Dad Stories, Humor Columns, McClatchy-Tribune

December 10, 2009

“The Polar Express”: An unrelenting hellscape of hideous terror, with hot chocolate

By Jeff Vrabel

This creepy simulacrum of Tom Hanks will make you believe in Santa, at all costs.

Island Packet — I have put off writing this column for three years now, because at some point its publication will jab a lengthy and irrevocably infectious splinter into the relationship between my son and me, probably even more than the horrible truth about what really happened to his fish when we got back from vacation. (I am afraid, little man, they did not go to the ocean for a visit.)

But I cannot let another holiday season pass without sounding a whistle of warning about what is possibly the third-weirdest Christmas-themed show ever (right behind 
“Carrie Underwood: An All-Star Holiday Special” and “A Left Behind’ Christmas,” in case you were wondering): “The Polar Express,” which is soulless and inorganic and creepers and depicts a world populated entirely by CGI robot Tom Hankses and is also partially responsible for my having to call 911 in late 2008, but more on that later.

“The Polar Express” was made by computers and Hanks plays everybody and it still cost $165 million to make, most of which ostensibly went to determining how many dead-eyed Talking Metaphors with leathery alien skin could be installed into a quiet 32-page children’s book.

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3 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Dad Stories, Holidays, Humor Columns, McClatchy-Tribune, Movie Reviews, Music Writing

November 19, 2009

The Great Comedy Recession has affected us all

By Jeff Vrabel
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Pictured: AM radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh.

Island Packet — Despite what I’m sure it looks like to people with real jobs, it is not easy to come up with funny ideas these days, especially in a writing landscape where anyone with an inside-joke phrase and a working knowledge of the Bloggers can more or less become a published columnist, circumventing the old methods of getting published, which was either getting someone in management super-drunk or waiting until everyone else on the copy desk had gone home, and surreptitiously swapping out some other loser story with your column, and then, the next morning, acting all like, “That could have been anyone who put my extremely handsome mug shot on there, I AM NOT GOING TO STAND FOR THIS INTERROGATION!”

But in what may be a historic first for this column space, I’m going to be perfectly honest (although I’m pretty sure Farrell was honest in her piece about screaming at the checkout dude at Publix, which, by the way, shame on her): It has become more and more difficult to think of Funny Column Ideas with the soothing regularity to which my readers have become accustomed, and by “readers” I mean my Mom and the folks who scour each line looking for anti-Rush Limbaugh jokes looking to write blog comments about, such as this one: Rush Limbaugh sweats canola oil, rocks 38 lbs. of neck fat and bleats feeding-trough noises like the Walrus Man who mouth-snorts at Luke in the “Star Wars” cantina scene. No, Rush, I don’t like you either.

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3 comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Awful Political Things, Culture And / Or News, Humor Columns, McClatchy-Tribune

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