Posted by Craig on Monday, April 30th at 6:09 am One of the problems with a tossed-off reference to a long-dead character actor, as in the preceding post, is this: Not everyone will know who you re talking about (like, say, one s lovely bride-to-be).
Here at the Y Chromosome, it s not enough to make semi-obscure cultural references. Hell, there d hardly be a point to any of this if we weren t also willing to fill the gaps in others knowledge, helping them to become better Trivial Pursuit players and better citizens.
With that, we give you arguably Slim Pickens greatest performance, as Major Kong in :
My friend Mike Van A and I once spent an entire evening reconstructing Slim Pickens dialogue, a pursuit that led us to a late-night rental of the otherwise-unwatchable just so we could see Pickens scene-stealing turn as a handyman kidnapped by a Japanese submarine. It was, perhaps, the highlight of our friendship, and that ain t too shabby. Posted by Craig on Saturday, April 28th at 6:04 pm Sixty-seven regular-season victories, the No.
1 seed in the Western Conference, and the are in against the haven t-been-in-the-playoffs-in-13-years .
As the late, great said on : I am depressed.
Posted by Craig on Friday, April 27th at 5:38 pm This will take you back to your teenage years.
(Or maybe it s just me.)
Stop, Look, Listen, a landmark in filmmaking:
Thanks to Jeff at for the tip! Posted by Craig on Friday, April 27th at 12:42 pm A buddy of mine shared this joke.
Enjoy:
Upon turning 40, this guy figures that he s pretty healthy, but he hasn t seen the doctor often and decides he should get a checkup, just to make sure everything s in working order.
After about an hour of poking and prodding by the doctor, the guy starts to wonder. He says, Doc, how am I doing?
The doctor says, Not bad for your age.
That inspires more questions than it answers, so the guy says, somewhat jokingly, So how much longer do you think I have?
Well, it depends, the doctor says, completely serious.
Do you smoke tobacco, or drink beer or wine?
Oh no, the guy says. I know all about the danger of that stuff.
Then the doc asks, Do you eat double cheeseburgers or ice cream sundaes?
No, the patient says, My last doctor told me not to eat things that aren t good for me.
The doctor nods his head slowly and then looks sharply at the guy.
One last question, he says. Do you gamble, drive too fast or chase women?
Nope, none of that, the patient says.
Well, then, I have to wonder, the doctor says, eyes wide. What difference does it make? Posted by John on Thursday, April 26th at 5:45 pm No matter what your political persuasion, I think everyone can agree that is just fun to watch.
I mean, it has it all. Anger, triumph, questionable language and a slow clap. It s just a nude scene away from being a great R-rated movie.
After watching it, I went on the internet in search of some more great political blowups. After I watched former Sen. Zell Miller express his desire to duel with Hardball s Chris Matthews I got to looking for Will Forte s impression of Miller from SNL.
If you haven t seen it, you must. Forte is able to turn his face the deepest shade of red likely ever produced by a human. Add a bulging vein or two and it becomes a must-see.
But don t look for it on the internet. I already did. YouTube, Google video, Break, Collegehumor, etc.
You name it, I was there looking. No Will Forte as Zell Miller anywhere. At first I was quite disappointed because the clip is quite hilarious and would ve made for a great link here on the blog.
Then I thought about what had transpired and became proud. I stumped the internet. I mean, how many times have you wondered anything and had an answer within minutes of starting your search online?
If I had just .00001 cents for every time someone said just look it up on the internet and found their answer there I am sure I would be quite wealthy.
I know the folks NBC are like hawks when it comes to monitoring the internet for what little worthwhile programming gets on without their permission, but I still think the video has to be out there SOMEWHERE.
Does anyone think they can find it? Gold stars for any successful person. Posted by Craig on Wednesday, April 25th at 9:54 pm By now, you ve surely heard about .
I m not here to discuss the politics of it; I ll leave that to the estimable Gazette crew in Helena.
But I was struck by this declaration from House Speaker Scott Sales, when asked about Lange s outburst: I loved his passion and I really appreciated what he had to say in terms of content. I would have chosen some different adjectives.
Here at the Y Chromosome, our mission is to engage in a better brand of discourse than you ll find at your average legislative caucus, so we ll spare you the exact words Lange used. Instead, here are some milder descriptions:
* He said that Schweitzer can go to H E double hockey sticks.
* He also called the governor a name that calls into question Schweitzer s ancestry.
* He said his message to the governor is to stick it up (his place where things should only leave). He said this twice. I think we need to be thorough, if nonoffensive, here.
* He also said he doesn t give a (substance that should escape the place where the governor should stick it, as alluded to in the previous point).
What do all these things have in common? Well, let s just say that Lange s adjectives weren t the problem.
He could tidy up his nouns, though.
Fire up the school-funding bill, Speaker Sales! We ve got grammar deficiency in Helena!
Update: also notes the wayward parts of speech, plus several other salient points.
Note: I should point out that the grammatical touches in this post and the one below it don t represent some exciting new initiative for the blog. We ll be returning you to our regular schedule of beer, wings, sports and general manliness soon.
Posted by Craig on Tuesday, April 24th at 1:30 pm I really hate to plop this post on top of John s excellent observations about Alex Rodriguez, but the truth is (a) this is way more important and (b) there s still something like 8,421 games left in the baseball regular season. Whatever s going on now will go on for a while, is what I m saying.
Without tooting my own horn too much, I ll just say that my friends and I have been at the forefront of ice-cream* discovery for several years now.
I ll never forget the time my buddy Teeb came into the office, breathless, and announced what he had found at the Gas n Sip down the street.
It s a Toll House cookie, he said, and already some of the less disciplined folks in the cubicle were drooling.
With ice cream he continued.
AND ANOTHER TOLL HOUSE COOKIE!
We didn t get any decent work done for at least a week after that. Too many Gas- n'-Sip runs.
Well, this is better.
At my friendly neighborhood grocery store last week, I found Dreyer s Slow-Churned (yeah, slow-churned) Yellow-Cake-flavored Ice Cream with Frosting and Sprinkles.
I ll let you salivate over that for a minute.
Yes, it s yellow-cake-flavored ice cream with frosting AND SPRINKLES! The little subtitle on the container says take the cake, and, boy, does this stuff ever do that.
(And get this: It s 1/3 the fat and 1/2 the calories of regular ice cream.
If ice cream could be a renaissance man, this concoction would be Leonardo Da Vinci.)
For a while, I wrestled the idea of announcing this discovery. Once word got out, it would be a bummer, indeed, if I suddenly couldn t find this stuff nestled in the freezer section of the grocery store.
Finally, I decided to share because I think the Dreyer s people (who, by the way, have not paid me for this testimonial) need to move enough units of this delicacy to see that it s worth continuing. Now that yellow-cake-flavored ice cream is in my life, I m not sure I can deal with the heartache of losing it.
(* doesn t it seem stupid and pedantic to hyphenate ice cream in its adjectival form?
But that s what the dictionary expressly calls for, and so I do it. You don t go around defying the dictionary. You could get sent to bed without dessert.
) Posted by John on Tuesday, April 24th at 1:22 am I hate the Yankees. Nay, I despise the Yankees. Why, you ask?
Well, what non-New Yorker doesn’t, or at least shouldn t? Also, they stole the 1996 World Series from the Orioles on the worst piece of officiating of all time. I tried to find a link of Jeffrey bleeping ing Maier reaching down over the wall to steal a fly ball from Tony Tarasco, but I literally started feeling sick to my stomach as soon as I did.
That said I absolutely love what Alex Rodriguez is doing right now. Last night he hit two more home runs in the Yankees 10-8 loss to Tampa Bay to bring his total 14 dingers in 18 games. That puts him on pace for 126 on the year.
Granted, he is likely to slow down, but come on. He could realistically hit 80 home runs this year. And I think that s exactly what the game of baseball needs.
In a year when Barry Bonds is going to desecrate Hank Aaron s career home run record, the talk is most certainly going to be about how Bonds is this huge jerk who may or may not have used steroids. The game s most loathed figure will be put front and center to the chagrin of baseball fans everyone but San Francisco. Wouldn t it be great, though, if after all the self-congratulating Barry Bonds gives himself for getting juiced and breaking the game s most sacred record, his single-season home record is demolished?
What s great about A-Rod is that there s nothing to genuinely hate about him. Sure, you may hate him because he plays for the Yankees or left the Mariners, but from all accounts he s a pretty great guy off the field. He is also the guy Yankees fans love to hate, despite how undeserving he may be of that role.
Sure, he stinks it up in the postseason, but without him who s to say they get into the postseason in the tough AL East? Furthermore, nobody deserves the public humiliation his teammates laid on him last year. It s not like he was the only guy struggling last October.
Through all of this he has kept his head up, bore far more than his fair share of the burden and carried on.
Sure, he may be doing all of this to get a nice big new contract when he opts out after this season. But I think he s already learned that lesson once before and when he jets, he ll jet to a place that will appreciate him and, more importantly, win.
And he deserves all that. Just as he deserves to smash the single-season home run record in August or September (barring injury, of course, and keeping up his pace of .7 jacks per game).
But I really hope they keep coming in 10-8 losses.
Posted by Craig on Friday, April 20th at 6:09 pm There you have it. Through a process as democratic as we could make it which means I can still be upset about Bill Hicks first-round loss we have established that George Carlin is the greatest standup comedian in the known universe.
In the end, it wasn t even close. Carlin picked up the title by a 3-to-1 margin against Eddie Murphy, who is no slouch himself. ( Don t sell yourself short, Judge.
You re a tremendous slouch. Ha! That s our next tournament best line from the movie Caddyshack.
I figure we ll need a 128-team bracket. I also figure I m digressing slightly.)
So, in honor of Carlin s honor, here s one last clip from the master.
I ventured onto his Web site today, looking for a contact link, thinking the man might like to say something to his nine or so admirers here in the greater Y Chromosome metroplex. True to a standup comedian s nature, the communication goes only one way.
Enjoy!
Posted by Craig on Thursday, April 19th at 12:12 pm A mighty decision is in your hands, folks.
* Born: May 12, 1937, in New York (still time to wish him a happy 70th birthday!)
* Style: Can be caustic and profane, but the underlying comedic points are pretty heady.
He takes on language, religion, philosophy, etc. If you re a denizen of modern America, comfortably numb with your iPod and multifunction cell phone, you re in Carlin s cross-hairs.
* Media empire: He s a successful author and a character actor, with a fondness for appearing in good Kevin Smith movies and bad Kevin Smith movies
* Notable comedy bit: His routine is a landmark in American comedy.
* Did you know? Comedy Central declared Carlin the second-greatest standup comedian ever, trailing only Richard Pryor, who didn t make it out of the second round of our tournament.
* Born: April 3, 1961, in Brooklyn.
* Style: His standup career is very much in his past, but at the height of his popularity onstage, he would touch on childhood memories, scary aunts, shoe-throwing mothers, the trappings of fame, and raunchy suppositions. Two feature-length standup films, and were huge hits.
* Media empire: These days, he s best-known as a movie star (nominated for an Academy Award in and voice actor His career on film has been wildly hit-and-miss, with monumental successes like the series and subterranean lows (we ve mentioned here before, but we shan t mention it again).
* Notable comedy bit: The ice cream man routine that was included in an earlier round of our tournament is one of his more famous bits.
* Did you know? Murphy won his breakthrough role on Saturday Night Live by repeatedly badgering one of the show s producers for an audition.
He was 19.
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