The Whackest '80s Rap Lyrics Ever

Ahh...the '80s. Apparently this was "the day" rappers keep telling us to remember back in. Many purists say hip-hop's golden age was also it's glory days, but this article says it wasn't. Sure, lyrics are a lot more violent nowadays, but at least when Eminiem tells us his headless mother is in his trunk, he lets us know exactly how many times he stabbed her and then raped her eyesockets before he put her there. All '80s rap told me was that Salt N'Pepa's here, and they're in effect. In no particular order, here are more of the worst rap lyrics NOT said by Dan Akroyd and Tom Hanks during the end credits of "Dragnet."


"Basketball"
- Kurtis Blow

"Basketball is my favorite sport
I like the way they dribble up and down the court
Just like I'm the King on the microphone so is Dr. J and Moses Malone
I like Slam dunks take me to the hoop
My favorite play is the alley oop
I like the pick-and-roll, I like the give-and-go,
Cause it's Basketball, uh, Mister Kurtis Blow"

Kurtis Blow really likes basketball, according to the recording studio janitor's 8-year-old retarded nephew who wrote these lyrics three minutes before the recording session. Does he like it in a boat? Does he like it in a moat? Does he like it in a can? Does he like it Sam I Am? I like slam dunks take me to the hoop...my favorite play is the alley oop? Jesus. Last night's Subway sandwhich order was a better rap than that.



"Dopeman"
- Ice Cube

"If you smoke cane you a stupid mother fucker.
Known around the hood as the schoolyard grucker."

Trust me...the last thing I want to do is call AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted a liar. However, I'm willing to bet that NO ONE in Ice Cube's hood is calling the crackheads "schoolyard gruckers." You know why? BECAUSE THERE'S SO SUCH GODDAMNED WORD. Unless "grucker" is ebonics for "mountebank," I'm not buying it. Sources close to ebonics say it isn't. My rewrite of the line:

"If you smoke cane you a stupid mother fucker.
Fishin' for the blow just like Darius Rucker."

Is genius. Pure genius, and it took me less than a minute to think of. Since I really liked Three Kings, I'm not even going to point out to Ice Cube that I'm white. And from Wyoming.


"The Fuck Shop”
- Too Live Crew

“The Fuck Shop…it’s where it’s at.
The Fuck Shop…the place to splat!”

The place to splat. I see. Don’t get me wrong—this line is shittier than a Taco Bell bathroom, but what bothers me most is the lethargy with which it was written. Let’s be honest—the “at” sound isn’t exactly the hardest sound to find a rhyme for. The Fuck Shop could’ve just as easily have been "Where I chase the cat,” “Where I fill my Jimmy Hat,” or “The place to play Combat.” But the place to splat? That’s awful. Unless they actually meant to say that The Fuck Shop is the happening place to make fart noises. Then I totally apologize.


“The Freaks Come Out At Night”
-Whodini

“Hut one! Hut two! Hut hut hut!”

Nobody will ever really know why Whodini decided to call football plays in the middle of their rap. I think it’s one of those things that mankind isn’t supposed to understand, like Jesus or The Next Karate Kid. What cracks me up is that Whodini’s not just calling for a snap here. Hut one? Hut two? Whodini’s calling plays. Are they going deep? Are they taking it up the middle? For whatever reason, they don’t want you to know. They want to keep you guessing. I guess that’s why they call themselves “Whodini.”

The Decepticons: The '80s Most Disfunctional Terrorist Organization

The Decepticons suffered from the same ailment as every other cartoon terroristorganization bent on world domination in the ‘80s: misdirected focus of resources. That blame falls entirely on the shoulders of Megatron, their leader.

Megatron was a 25-foot tall robot with a cannon on his arm that was two-thirds as big as he was. Remember WWF’s Andre The Giant? I wouldn’t even want to get bitch-slapped by that guy, much less shot by a laser gun as big as two of him. But that’s not all. According to the bio on the back of the box the "Megatron" toy came in, that cannon could tap into black holes for power. Not your car's cigarette lighter... black holes. Plus, Megatron was in charge of an entire army of similar robots, with similar weaponry, who turned into things like tanks, jets, and thirty-foot long flying laser guns. For an idea of how lobsided the battle between the Decepticons and Earth should’ve been, imagine Daniel LaRusso in a dress trying to stop 30 charging steamrollers by pointing his finger at them and screaming "pow!"

So why is Megatron's face not on our dollar bills right now? Terrible implementation of even worse plans. Instead of simply ordering his men to shoot to liquify, Megatron thought his time would be better spent building a satellite that could somehow seize control of Earth’s weather, allowing him to freeze the oceans, thus cutting off our tuna supply and punishing us into submission by forcing us to eat dinners that weren’t quite as tasty with lemon juice. Sure, he thought of other ideas, but when it came down to it, they were really just kind of variations of that first idea.

Megatron, if you are reading this right now, pay particular attention to this next sentence: you and your army have laser guns. Use them. To add insult to insult, Megatron transformed into a gun himself, and he still never shot anybody. I’m not saying that’s inexcusable, I’m just saying that if I had the power to turn into a time-travelling poontang attractor, you damn well better believe that I’d be making more than a few trips to 2027 with Halle Berry and the closest thing I could find to her lesbian twin sister.

Fast-forward to Transformers: The Movie, which was the ONE TIME Megatron and his army used ther guns. They took out about ten of the good guys in less than a minute. They even did it over a kick-ass ‘80s metal song and talked a little yang while they were doing it. I’m assuming the cartoon TV series took place in the 1980s. The narrator on the Transformers movie says the movie takes place in 2005. That means it took Megatron 20 years to realize that one of the ways to win a war is to actually cause causalities on the other side. Hell, we lost more Americans in the Gulf War than we did in our battle vs. the Decepticons, and Iraq didn’t even have a twenty foot tall robot that transforms into a twenty foot long robot alligator on their side, as far as I know.


“Wow…who would’ve thought the President, the Pope, and Bono would all be in the White House on the day we decided to destroy it. Alright, America! Prepare to EXPLODE!!!"


“Wait! Cease fire! My mechanically malvolent mastermind has concocted the ultimate plan to take over the world!”


“First we taint the earth’s water supply using the shit launcher we built with the money we stole from Fort Knox!”


“You mean the one we built with the money I suggested we use to build a robot dinosaur ninja with Death Stars for hands?”


“That’s the one! Secondly, I’ll need…uh...a giant bowl of soup! Speaking of...why are you still standing around listening to me talk about it? MAKE IT HAPPEN!”


“When that’s in place, I’ll use this golden stop light changer to cause traffic jams AT EVERY INTERSECTION IN EVERY STATE IN EVERY COUNTRY AROUND THE GLOBE!!! HA HA HA HA HA!!!!


“I’ve spent the last three months building this nuero-helmet to protect me from the humans' deadly mind control powers! There will be no stopping us this time!


"But humans don't have..."


"When the time to strike is upon us, I’ll finish mankind forever with this…something something cube!”


“Megatron, you are aware that I’m a thirty foot tall robot, and according to this picture, you turn into a pistol that’s at least half that size? And according to the box that your toy comes in, you can tap into black holes for power?”


"That bowl of soup isn't going to cook itself."


"For fuck's sake."


"When you're done with that come help me point this thing at the ocean."

My favorite Decepticon was a guy named "Soundwave." He looked the coolest, but his very existence negates my entire previous argument about the Decpticons and their bad-assness, because Soundwave transformed into a cassette player.

In a war for galactic supremacy, a tape player is the most useless thing you could possibly turn into, except for maybe a toilet bowl, or a smaller, less functional toilet bowl. Hey Soundwave—it doesn’t matter how cool you look—until they make a guy who transforms into headphones, you’ll always be the Decpticon who the other Decpticons tie to the flagpole and pop in the ass with their towels after gym.


Actually, there was a group of Decepticons that had it worse than Soundwave: the guys who turned into Soundwave’s tapes. At first, all I could think about was the endless shit these guys got from the other Decepticons, but then I realized they probably didn’t get any at all, because transforming into a tape was probably the equivalent of being a "special needs" Transformer. I figure the other guys just avoided eye-contact with them in the hallways and that was it.

What the animators didn’t think about in the ‘80s was that in 2005, when the Transformers movie supposedly takes place, tapes will be outdated. That means that by 2005, the tape squad would have no reason to even leave Decpticon headquarters. They’d be hanging out in the back room playing Connect Four with the guys who transformed into DeLoreans and Frogger machines. The only time they’d ever see action is if Megatron devised a plan that involved taking over the world one music store discount bin at a time. Holy shit—I was kidding around just then and I still came up with a better plan for world domination than Megatron ever came up with. And I don’t even have an intelligence rating of "10."

On a side note regarding the tapes, I couldn’t help but notice how the producers would use the exact same song whenever they needed rock music on the cartoon. Apparently it was awesome, because whoever was onscreen when it played, human or robot, would break into the Molly Ringwald Breakfast Club dance the instant it came on.

[thanks to www.transfan-asylum.org for the pictures]

Another AUDITION I Didn't Get

[It's always cool to know that people read my site. Here's a massive movie review for Beth, who requested this way back in October. Thanks for reading. ]

The Japanese film Audition made one thing obvious--Japan has absolutely no interest in building foreign relations between themselves and me. I'm trying, Japan. I eat at your restaurants. I play as you guys in Axis and Allies. Hell, one of my favorite movies is about a ninety-year old janitor who beats up a bunch of teenagers in skeleton costumes using your most rad and lethal export, but I guess that's not enough. I've sent Japan my ambassador, but Audition was the peacemaking equivalent of their ambassador punching my ambassador's grandmother in the face.

Audition opens in a hospital room where our hero and his son watch their mother die. Cut to seven years later--the son, now seventeen, notices that his dad has been upset lately and mentions that maybe he should consider remarrying. The hero, who we'll call Aesop, thinks this is a good idea, but soon gets discouraged because he can't meet any nice women. His strategies for doing this, by the way, have so far included not dating, not talking to women, not making eye contact with women, and making sure to never appear in a room with anyone who has ever met a woman. It's then that a movie executive friend of his comes up with the genius idea (I'm not being sarcastic. I seriously think it's genius) of holding a fake audition for a fake female lead in a sort of real movie, in which the hero could sit in on to screen applicants for a wife. I think.

Something really needs to be pointed out here before I continue. See how my review was able to get to this point in the story in one paragraph that probably took you less than five minutes to read? The movie took 45 minutes to get me to the same place. I was even kind enough to toss a few jokes into the opening paragraph. All Audition gave me was 45 minutes of this:


(Reviewer Re-enactment)

Another thing I noticed is that in Japan, their horror movie characters are just as fucking moronic as ours. After the hero picks a shy, soft-spoken girl as the winner, his movie executive friend checks out some of the cryptic answers she gave during the audition. He's even nice enough to point out that she lied about her:

- address
- family
- studio contact
- place of employment
- favorite food not being "people."

He goes so far as to beg the hero not to call her, but I've seen enough horror movies to know that things just wouldn't be right if directly after this plea, the camera didn't instantly cut to a close-up of the hero smiling while on a date with the girl anyway. Which it did.



The guy and the girl go out on two or three dates, and somewhere around this point in the movie was THE GREATEST SHOCK SCARE I'VE EVER SEEN IN A MOVIE EVER. The movie had been completely docile up to now and I never NEVER fall for the shock scare, but in all the horror movies I’ve ever seen, I've never been scared as bad as I've been at that moment. If I sound kind of ambiguous describing exactly what happened and why, it's because it didn't make any damn sense at this point in the movie and makes just as much sense today, but that doesn't mean it was less scary. Just ask my underwear.

Anyway, I guess that doesn't really matter though because nothing else scary happened for the next thirty-five minutes. Nothing. I'm not kidding. The guy even confesses that the audition was less than genuine, and the girl is totally cool with it. They even go on another date, and at this point I realize that this Japanese doughboy has squeezed three more dates out of a fake audition than I've gone on in the last six months. I'm an hour and twenty minutes into the movie, which, disregarding the above paragraph's half-a-second, has been a fucking love story. It might as well have been your common chick-flick fare with Hugh Grant as the hero, Sandra Bullock as the girl, Haley Joel Osmont as the son, and my middle finger as the film's most honest critic.

It's not until the man has sex with the girl at a beach getaway and wakes up the next morning to find her gone that the movie starts to get a bit weird. As he walks around town looking for her, discovering where she lied about working, lied about living, and lied about not making sandwhiches out of peoples faces, he starts to uncover bits of her shady past, but still nothing too shocking by horror movie standards. By the way, according to the timecode that's been on top of my TV screen the entire time thanks to me losing my VCR remote years ago, we’re an hour and forty minutes into the movie.

At the 100-minute mark the girl sneaks into the guy’s house and poisons his drink. The guy passes out, and for the next ten minutes…

I’m not a cultured man at all, but by the time this movie’s end credits finished rolling I had learned something very important about Eastern civilization that they don’t mention on those Zodiac menus they hand out at their restaurants: The Japanese don’t play by the same rules we do. Case in point: our cartoons make people laugh. Their cartoons give people seizures. I was about to learn the hard way that Japan wasn't all Mogwais and Bonzai Trees, which, until tonight, I totally thought it was.

…for the next ten minutes we get a first-person look into this girl’s past through a sequence that, unless you’ve happened to catch a glimpse of the aerobics class at the Steele Creek YMCA, will be the most disturbing thing you’ll ever see. Although I can’t find any screen caps on the Web, you can turn this into an interactive review right now by shoving your finger down your throat. Without giving too much away, we find out what really happened to her family, her studio contact, her place of employment, and oh yeah...a guy eats vomit.

So after this dreamy montage the man awakes on the floor of his house, fully aware and concious but unable to move, to find the girl standing over him in full Catwoman regalia. Apparently she's decided that this time, saying she can't go out because she has to wash her hair tonight, asking if they can still be friends, and then later giggling with her friends about the size of his genitals won't be sufficient enough of a breakup. True story: in 10th grade, this girl I barely even dated was so mad that I liked her best friend instead that she wrote that I was an asshole in huge letters on her locker. I thought this was a little extreme until I saw the Audition chick slowly sink acupunctue needles into the guy's stomach. Again. And again. And Again. And Again. And Again. Apparently the Japanese haven't developed "zoom out" technology for their cameras yet, because every one of these are shown in excruciating close-ups. Do you know what the worst part about all of this is? The guy didn't even do anything wrong. He hooks up with her, and the next thing I know, he's getting acupuncture needles shoved in his gut, which is why I came to the conclusion that this must all part of the natural Japanese courting process. Next she shoves one in his tongue. It's also very possible that she put one in each eye, but it's around this point that I quit watching.

I don't consider myself a pussy by any means. I've jumped out of moving automobiles, broken concrete blocks with my hand, and even had a stripper give me her phone number, but I'm not ashamed to say that as of press time, I've still never seen a girl in oversize prophylactics put needles in a Japanese man's eyes. So now I'm literally laying there with my face under the covers listening to this girl's creepy chirpy dialog when I hear a strange noise. "Hmmmm," I say to myself. "That noise sounds a lot like...a Japanese man getting his feet sawed off with piano wire? Could it be?" I pull down the covers. Yep.

The guy's son finally bursts through the door to find his footless, pin-filled father lying on the floor who, if he could talk, would say "About fucking time, Captain Punctual!" After a brief struggle the son pushes the girl down a flight of stairs, and that's Audition. No, really. That's it.

Audition was, without a doubt, the most whacked out thing I've ever seen. It didn't make any damn sense from beginning to end. Unless, of course, the two end sequences were visual metaphors illustrating what the man feared would happen if the relationship failed, and his equally horrifying fears of what would happen if the relationship actually worked out. In the reveal of what really happened to the girl's ex-boyfriend, the horrific severity of the imagery was necessary to convey the severity as it existed in the hero's head. If things didn’t work out he's worried she'll go batshit--an understandable conclusion drawn by the vague answers and cautionary advice he constantly received when asking others about her past. Of course, his mind went to work, inflating just how batshit she went in the past to hyperrealistically horrific levels like our minds always do. If things DID work out, he’s so in love with her that he knows she’ll get under his skin "deeper and deeper" (the transration of the Japanese word she says as she pushes the acupuncture pins into him) until it will be painful to even look at another girl (the needles in the eyes). He’d gladly surrender his very independence over to her without thinking twice about it, living every moment of his life for her (his paralyzation). The problem is, he realizes that once he does this he won’t have enough power over his overwhelming emotions to ever walk away (his amputated feet), and he doesn’t know if he’s absolutely ready to give up that independence. The reason Audition sucked as a horror movie was because it was not a horror movie at all. It was a When-Harry-Met-Sally type guy-meets-girl love story with an unprecedented, unique, and dare I say genius plot denouncement that American cinema would never allow or understand.

But what do I know?

-GONG!-

The Assters: A Slice Of Americana

When you’re Charlotte’s most celebrated and lusted-after Internet personality you’re going to have a huge social circle. To satisfy the masses I try not to focus on a certain group of friends, but what I found on the Internet yesterday was so hilarious that I had to break the first two rules of HF. I apologize in advance to everyone reading this who isn’t one of the two people who will find it funny.

I have a group of friends who golf, differentiated from my other group of friends who golf on XBOX and only XBOX. The previously mentioned group is hilariously retarded, "retarded" being extremely conservative and generous. Every year they have a three-day golf tournament between themselves called "The Assters" (get it?). It’s a huge event, the agenda consisting of three days of beer, golf, and beer. Of all the excuses we give ourselves to drink for three days straight, The Assters is certainly the most regal.

Anyway, I was on the Internet yesterday, checking out http://www.worldofquotes.com/ to find the best phrase to use to tell people to reach for the stars, believe in themselves, and take the "I" out of team. As I was browsing the list of quote topics I was shocked to see that one of them was, you guessed it, "Asters."

I knew The Assters was huge among my friends, but I had no idea it was so grand that it inspired a handful of America’s literary superstars to immortalize it in timeless prose. I clicked on the link, curious to see what Ralph Waldo Emerson had to say about a golf tournament named after the area from which farts come.

As was expected from such renowned artists, the three quotes listed on the site perfectly captured the heart, the glory, the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat that one could only find at The Assters. Here are the three quotes, analyzed, interpreted, and broken down into their true essence by the historians here at Homemade Fireworks.


Quote #1
"Chide me not, laborious band! For the idle flowers I brought; Every aster in my hand Goes home loaded with a thought."
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

To realize just how poignant and prophetic this quote rings, one has to break it down and examine it phrase by phrase. Like The DiVinci Code, the story isn’t told by the quote: it’s hidden in the quote itself. Let’s take a look:

"Chide me not, laborious band! For the idle flowers I brought;… -- Okay…this sentence doesn’t really belong here. Take it out.

Every aster in my hand goes home loaded…: Exactly.

…with a thought." That part doesn’t belong either.


Quote #2
"The Autumn wood the aster knows, The empty nest, the wind that grieves, The sunlight breaking thro' the shade, The squirrel chattering overhead, The timid rabbits lighter tread Among the rustling leaves. "
Author: Dora Read Goodale
Source: Asters

This sentence is a gay as a sentence can possibly be without actually including the words " hot butt sex." What interests me here is the source. Apparently this quote was spoken at The Assters itself, which means it could only have been said by one of six people. Read the quote again. Grieving winds? Squirrles chattering overhead? Only one man talks like that.

Quote #3
"The aster greets us as we pass with her faint smile."
Author: Sarah Helen Power Whitman
Source: A Day of the Indian Summer (l. 35)

Ah yes. "The aster greets us as we pass with her faint smile." The Assters is indeed a glorious spectacle to behold. No sporting event captures the gamut of human emotion quite like this, and no words could capture its royal prestige better than these eleven. Like America and the Millennium Falcon, The Assters is definitely a girl. She faintly smiles upon us and welcomes us as we walk from hole to hole, a PBR in one hand and a big old bunch of the American Spirit in the other. When you look upon The Assters and its noble participants, you are gazing upon a little something I like to call "beauty." The Assters is a gift from God. A drunken, dick-joke filled gift from God.

The Hotlist, 1-13-05

(Last week's position, movement, weeks on current list)

Hot

1) Stereophonics "Just Enough Education To Perform" (2H, +1, 2)
What John Mayer would sound like if he was Scottish and cool.

2) Gameboy Advance (3H, +1, 2)
This Christmas gift was so rad that it almost edged out Jesus as the reason for the season.

3) Industrial
The new trance

4) Amy Cobb
Hey Amy...I scored 145,000 on Galaga.

5) Patrick's New Crew
Now 50% metrosexualer!

6) Trance (5H, -1, 2)
7) www.totalrock.com
8) Boxing
9) Glamorama
10) Liquor

Cold

1) Getting cast
5 auditions. 0 callbacks. 1 more case of Ramen Noodles.

2) Dating
I totally got dumped last week…

3) Interest (1C, +2, 2)
...but don't really care.

4) Steele Creek YMCA (10C, -6, 2)
Everyone there is fat. Either they’re coincidentally filming a secret "before" commercial every night I go, or the damn equipment just doesn’t work.

5) The Man
Starting next week I’m gonna spend all my time looking for ways to stick it to him. Figuratively.

6) VHS
7) Uptown Charlotte (2C, +7, 2)
8) Volleyball (6H, -5)
9) The Tailgate Union Bulletin Board
10) Da Ali G. Show (9H, -2)

Part Stoplight! Part Cameraman! All Hero!

Say "cheese," crime! You're photo-finished!

Anyone who knows anything about crime knows there's only two ways to legitimately stop it. You can either get bitten by a radioactive animal and use that flipper that used to be your hand to bitch-slap crime in the face yourself, or you can leave the job to your city’s police force. I recommend the latter, because there’s a good chance the police force just might build a Robocop. Now, I know this is America, and you’re free to choose either option you want, but I’ve seen movies about both, and based on them I can tell you with authority that only one of those options will result in gratuitous shower nudity and rad-as-shit toxic waste head explosions.

The city of Charlotte chose option "B" because, like me, the lawmakers of Charlotte realized the unstoppable fusion of man and machine was the only logical answer to cleaning up the Queen City. However, in true Charlotte fashion, good idealization gave way to poor execution, and they didn’t quite get it right. Instead of turning our policeman corpses into invincible cyborg badasses with awesome catchphrases, they turned our stoplights into photographers. At the risk of editorializing here: pussy retarded photographers.

I recently received a blurry picture of the number "4" in the mail, stapled to a bill for $50, courtesy of "Project Safelight." The project is rumored by the NCDOT to promote safety. It’s rumored by me to promote laziness. Think about it. How many jobs would let you turn in photos of things instead of actual things? I can think of one. Photographer. That’s about it. Man, that shit doesn’t even work for made-up professions. Remember Return of the Jedi? What if Boba Fett would’ve shown up at Jabba’s palace, shrugged, and handed him an 8" X 10" Harrison Ford glossy? Remember that beige guy in the alien band whose face looked like a fat person’s thigh? That guy would still be picking parts of Boba’s blown-up ass out of his clarinet every time a Jawa requested "My Way."

I’ve never received an envelope from the city of Charlotte containing a picture of me helping an old lady across the street, a sheet of G.I. Joe stickers, and a pack of McDonald’s gift certificates, but I run one red light (allegedly) and all of a sudden the light at South Tryon and Arrowwood is motherfucking Annie Lebovits. Installing cameras in stoplights?! Hey NCDOT, if you want to see some really illegal shit install lip-readers in mailboxes. I’d still be paying for all the things I said I was going to turn sideways and shove in NCDOTs ass as I dropped in my check to pay my project safelight fine.

The other thing that kills me about Project Safelight is the ambiguity of the photos. Confession time: I have never run a red light in my life, but I run yellow ones all the time, which is about as illegal as me eating lunch at Taco Bell only ten times less dangerous. This leads me to believe the picture of my plate was taken in that instant the light turned from yellow to red. Of course, the light could’ve been mauve for all we’ll ever know, what with that close-up shot of the top half of one of the numbers in my license plate. It took me an extra year to graduate college, from the U. of S.C. no less, and even I know the reason that picture is of just the license plate is because that’s the only part of the car that was just barely an inch in the intersection when the light turned from yellow to red. But they say the picture in question is of me running a red light? That same logic inspired me to put a picture on my refrigerator of just my leg.

"Why do you have this picture of your leg posted on your fridge?" my friends ask.

"Why do you think?" I say. "Because it’s a picture of me karate chopping through a stack of flaming concrete blocks with one hand and giving Jack Nicholson a high-five with the other. All while launching through a city of cyclopses in my rocket shoes, asshole."

My point is this: if the Queen City is going to spend tax money to combine one thing with something else that will help it fight crime, why not spend it on something awesome, like a boxing glove on a spring that shoots out of an ATM to punch criminals in the groin when they try to rob it. Trust me, Charlotte. I’ve been all around this country, and from what I’ve seen, nothing, and I mean nothing, rallies a community quite like watching crime being punched in the sack real, real hard by the powerful spring-loaded fist of liberty.


Since my computer blew up last week, I can't scan the actual picture of my "truck running a red light," but for a visual aid just imagine a huge black-and-white blur of the top 1/8 of what may be the letter "Y." However, I can post:

This picture of me on top of Mt. Everest holding the head of Ohmar Kadhafi…


…and this one of me two seconds before jumping out of Air Force One with a parachute made completely out of Rebecca Romijn’s bras.


BONUS PHOTO FUN!!!: Hey Homemade Fireworks fans! Guess who that is to the right of me! Initials will do. Winner recieves a 12-pack of PBR c/o me. Hint: It's someone I went to high school with.

Homemade Fireworks Gets Serious About Comedy

I’m going to break the first two rules. I’m going to talk about Fight Club.

I think Fight Club is a very funny movie, but Roger Ebert thinks it’s "…a celebration of violence in which the heroes write themselves a license to drink, smoke, screw, and beat one another up." So who’s right?

Well, we both are. Fight Club is violent in the literal sense, but the violence is so absurd in logic yet taken so seriously (and outlandishly far) by the characters that it becomes funny. Fight Club is a satirical commentary on the state of American consumerism and vanity. The very last thing Fight Club is about is a club for fighting. It’s not about men beating each other up, it’s about men wanting to be beaten up. Really really wanting to be beaten up. That’s comedy.


Look! Brad Pitt thinks it's funny!

If I remember correctly, Fight Club had a body count of 1 (one more than Children of the Corn). The reason it’s singled out instead of, say, the exploding heads and melting Marines of Starship Troopers (which is also a hilarious satire), is because the violence isn’t cartoony and faceless. It’s real, raw, and true. So true that it forces us to laugh at ourselves out of spite for living in, and maybe even personally adhering to, a culture where we place physical beauty on a pedestal and judge our success on how expensive our bed spreads and kitchenware are. Like it or not, Fight Club is making fun of us. Our laughter may be nervous as we realize that, but its laughter nonetheless.

American Psycho is Fight Club polarized. It’s equally violent and equally hilarious, except this time the spotlight is on a man so self-conscious that he breaks into a dousing sweat when he discovers that a colleague has a better font on his business card. As an actor I understand the preparations one has to go through while preparing for a role— makeup, wardrobe, and mental exercises are all used to assume the identity of a certain person from a certain background in a certain situation. American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman undergoes this same series of transformations every morning to prepare for everyday life. From the "exfoliating facial gel scrub, followed by the herbal mint facial mask, followed by an anti-aging eye balm, and then another protective moisturizer," to the rows of Armani suits hanging in his closet, Patrick becomes a caricature of a person every single day of his life. It’s the only way can cope with the world he’s immersed himself in. He even admits that he doesn’t have any real emotions, and that the real Patrick Bateman "simply is not there." He spends hours becoming the man he thinks the world wants him to be, when in fact the world couldn’t care less. That’s comedy.


Jared Leto thinks it's funny, too!

Patrick Bateman axes up a colleague, drops a chainsaw on a hooker, and shoots a cop or two, so, like Fight Club, American Psycho is violent in the literal sense. But, and I’m not ruining the movie here, all the violence, while depicted in full glory on screen, is really only taking place in Patrick’s head. It’s his only escape from the mundane superficiality that he has grown to depend on to survive—and it’s so over-the-top that you didn’t have to get your masters degree from the university of the fucking obvious to realize that. It’s in the violence’s over-the-topness that it becomes non-violent—absurd, even. American Psycho is telling me a joke, and I’m laughing because I get the punchline.

Not everyone always gets the punchline. I imagine in any other movie, a guy getting axed in the head would be pretty disturbing. Trust me, I fucking hated when the rich 15-year-olds behind me at Regal Cinema laughed through The Ring, but the difference between American Psycho and The Ring is the context in which the violence occurs. People who blast American Psycho for being violent must have stepped out of the theatre for a piss when Patrick delivered the line "As we arrive at [restaurant] I'm on the verge of tears as I'm certain we won't get a decent table. But we do; relief washes over me in an awesome wave," or when he went into a five-minute monologue about Huey Lewis and the News before the previously mentioned axing. Patrick Bateman is not a killer. He’s a bigger pussy than the biggest pussy you know—even bigger than Daniel LaRusso. He’s just so engulfed in a self-induced social stigma that he can’t escape from if he wanted to or not. The effects of that social stigma, while traumatizing to him, are hilarious to us. At least, to me.

If you take anything from this article, I want it to be this: that all comedy can easily be interpreted as non-comedy if the viewer chooses to take it too literally. Hell, according to the AFI’s top 100 comedies, Some Like It Hot is the funniest movie of all time, and that movie is about a couple of guys who dress up like women, which, if taken literally, is pretty fucked up in itself.

It’s very easy for Homemade Fireworks to fall victim to the same misjudegement of character as Fight Club and American Psycho, even though any of the previously mentioned obviously shouldn’t. Homemade Fireworks is NOT a site about a guy who uses video games to pick up girls…it’s a site about a guy who uses video games to pick up girls. When I read that article I don’t see a player looking to score chicks. I see a guy so lacking in game that he does what may be the dorkiest thing ever to prove that "game" isn’t really what’s important, and fuck if we don’t laugh at his (my) expense. I know I did. I shook my head in disbelief a couple of times while I was doing it. The Galaga article was my humorous commentary on the retardedness of "club guy" and their laughable desperate attempts to impress girls with their huge wallet, hair product, and black leather jacket. If you’re still not convinced, I should point out that that article appears directly above an article about the career merits of William fucking Zabka and directly under something that lists the Gameboy Advance as the third most important thing in my life.

If you’re offended by anything on this site, well, while you’re on the Web, stop by Merriam-Webster online and look up "satire." While you’re there, you may also want to look up "uptight."

Hard Drive Down

And it went down like the Hindenberg. I came home yesterday to find my computer literally smoking. Everything on it is gone. The greatest collection of '80s music ever Molly-Ringwald-in-Breakfast-Club danced to--gone. Over three hundred old school arcade, Nintendo, and Intellivision ROMs--gone. My Bea Auther photo collection. Gone.

Luckily, Dell customer support is on hand 24 hours a day. Unluckily, the support turned out to be the same support I gave my friends when they’d call me because their Atari wouldn't work. Anyone who’s ever had a Nintendo knows the classic universal fix I’m talking about…check out how Dell suggested I fix my hard drive in this actual conversation with their customer service guy, who was either "Apu" from The Simpsons or the guy who does the voice for Apu.

Dell Guy: Turn off your computer. You can do this by pressing the power button on the tower.

Me: Done.

Dell Guy: Now unplug your computer by removing the plug from the wall socket.

Me: Alright.

Dell Guy: Now open up your computer. Do you know how to open your computer?

Me: Yeah.

Dell Guy: Now locate the hard drive.

[So I find it and it’s the most technological looking thing I’ve ever seen. It’s surrounded by wires and cables and computer chips and I’m thinking "Not even Tron could figure this thing out, and that guy lives in one of these."]

Dell Guy: Now locate the (some fancy name for a cable). It’s the ribbon-like cable leading from the hard drive to the mother board.

Me: Got it.

Dell: Now dislodge the cable and the corresponding something something cable from the hard drive.

Me: Done.

[At this point I’m excited because I’ve got my hands in the computer "dislodging" shit like a S.W.A.T. team guy and I feel like the shit I’m about to do is going to be seriously high-tech. Until the guy says…]

Dell Guy: Now blow on the connectors to remove any dust, and re-fasten both cables.

Me: What was that?

Dell Guy: Blow on the connectors to remove any dust, and re-fasten both cables.

Me: Blow on them to remove dust?! That’s it?! Dude, don’t you think I should first blow on my hard drive to remove fire?! Did I mention my hard drive is smoking right now?

Dell Guy: Yes sir. Three times.

So that’s that. Goodbye, old friend. We’ve wasted many a year together.

What this means for Homemade Fireworks fans is that you can expect a shitload of pictureless articles. Or articles featuring whatever random pictures I have on CD, like this one of me getting my degree in "badass."

The Homemade Fireworks Hotlist 1-2-05

Hot

1) Kenny Chesney's "Anything But Mine" video.
The most beautiful thing you'll ever see.

2) Stereophonics' "Just Enough Education To Perform"
The Stereophonics are the new Shins.

3) Gameboy Advance
Though the miracle of modern technology I can now play video games even when I'm nowhere near video games.

4) American Psycho
The book, the movie,...and the medicine cabinet.


5) Trance
Thanks to Internet radio every second of my day, from the time I get up to the eight hours I spend at work, can be like I'm in The Matrix.

6) Volleyball
7) The Feeding teaser trailer
8) The Tinderbox at Southpark Mall
9) Da Ali G. Show
10) The Karate Kid

Cold

1) Interest
I really don't care about much of anything anymore

2) Uptown Charlotte
I don't care about uptown Charlotte

3) "The 2-day rule"
I really don't fucking care about the 2-day rule

4) The Craig Shoemaker Show
I don't care about the Craig Shoemaker show anymore, either

5) Grid Iron Waitresses
And I would totally not be into the Grid Iron Waitresses anymore...if I cared.

6)Playstation II
7)Dixies
8)Jim Rome
9) "Playing four quarters"
10) Steele Creek YMCA