"Then the musical score, which has been boggarting about in the background of every shot, hits its mark, and all you want to do is eat cookies and hug a cat to displace the charcoal-flavored I.E.D. that detonated in your guts."

The Fountain, the saddest movie of the 21st century, is one that we've seen a dozen or so times. It's also not that great of a movie the first dozen or so times you watch it. It begins with a badly-lit scene (on purpose? maybe?) featuring a Spaniard in Central America, fighting some natives at the foot of a Mayan pyramid. His buddies get stabbed to shit, but the natives spare the Spaniard himself, instead forcing him up the impossibly vertical stairs. Convenient. This is what the conquistador wants, and is also the last convenient thing to occur in the entire movie, him scrambling haggard towards whatever is at the top. He has an ornate, important dagger, and the audience has no other details. Inside the pyramid, there's a silhouette of a disgusting motherfucker with a flaming sword. There's something gigantic and beautiful growing behind him far off in the background that we won't see clearly until the very end of the movie.

"The audience just took their massive erections home and did stuff that would still be sung about in the halls of Valhalla come Ragnarok. Stuff that would make you and your partner experience the full repercussions of the Coriolis Effect."

We need to talk about stylistic consistency. As a framing device, we'll begin by describing why The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is a piece of shit.

In 1998, the Greatest Video Game of All Time was released, and it was better than good. This was, and is, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (* * * * out of 4), the game that made all the other games ache with envy. It was a new flavor of ice cream, and while you ate it, somebody played a fun snare drum beat to keep you in rhythm. It stunned with its setting, its latitude, and its focused minimalism. Seeing it today is like watching a 1964 Aston Martin DB5 drive by, windows down, radio playing a familiar tune, and you suddenly get thirsty. From beginning to end, it knew what it was doing, quietly going about its business, tightening screws, adding spice, and cracking its knuckles at all the right moments. It even stopped for smoking breaks once in a while, because you suddenly realized you wanted to smoke cigarette, if only one time. The best smoke of your life -- why ruin it? It was restrained and had a keen edge, making its precise blade strokes when it needed to, and then returning without a drop of blood back into its sheath. The game was a 5-movement orchestra, and every piece of that orchestra complimented the man (or woman) in the chair next to them while the concert was in progress. And then they complimented each other again later, with words, at the after party.

"People talk about the distribution of wealth in modern times. Imagine that, except a double-kujillion times worse, plus religious control, times XFINITY! The bosses of religion were the equivalent of Isaac Hayes in Escape From New York."

I recently read a report that a nail -- roughly 3.5 inches long and pretty intimidating as far as nails go (overcompensating, Trent Reznor? (I kid, you fucking rock (I fucking hate Kid Rock))) -- was discovered during a dig on a tiny island off the coast of Madeira. Madeira is a decent-sized island that's technically part of Portugal, and is actually located in the Atlantic off the coast of Morocco. Now, the tiny island had a fort on it, and inside that fort was a box, and in that box was where they found the 3.5 inch nail. What's interesting about the nail is that it's not all that rust, and is in fact quite smooth and well-preserved. And do you know who once held that fort? The Knights Templar! Really? The same Knights that occupied Jerusalem during the first Crusade in the 12th century? Of course. Does that mean... oh, holy (!) shit!! This nail is significant! It may, or may not, but it just might, have been used to crucify somebody. Know anybody important in history not named Brian that was crucified?

"I'm a fucking transcendental spirit of an intangible nirvana. My soul is carved out of Italian marble. I don't have issues, I eat lions! Why don't you realize that? You don't realize that because I'm a fucking trans-dimensional whale-god among plankton! Paul Atriedes ain't got shit on me!"

Know what's weird? We feed on the misery of others. Idolatry is no more. We are too aware. Knowledge of everybody can be found anywhere (Hi, pop culture! Hi, Wikileaks!).A space occupied half a century ago in America by baseball heroes, war heroes, and The Splendid Splinter -- who was both! -- our admiration of the famous, skillful, and merit-worthy has become an obsessed dependence. Heroes are too much like us, flaws enhanced because we asked them to be magnified mortals, we have unwittingly bestowed the kiss of death on our former aspirations -- because our own dreams were killed years ago. Our heroes disgust us now. We share their pain and co-opt their drama, nodding assuredly at one another at their unenviable lives. We quite literally pay them to dance and then mock them for being self-indulgent twats.

"When asked to think of something, we usually can't think of anything. If you're told that you're trapped in a room with haunted, spiked wraithwalls closing in on you, you'd MacGuyver the situation faster with a pincushion, a ream of paper, two 9mm bullets, and a hairbrush. . ."

OK, we withheld posting strip over Thanksgiving because it was just way too fucking dark for the occasion. Five days have come and gone, and the joke's been hanging in the smokehouse, letting flavor microbes affix themselves to it's aging hull. Mmmm. . . delicious, smokey dark comedy.

(Tangentially, why don't we have foods that contain vapor or smoke or something? Bite into a tangerine scone, inhale, shoot some flavored smoke out of your nose. It'd be a one-shot thing -- how hard could it be?)

"...you want your next actions to be recalled using the following words: 'I realized there was an attraction when...' "

Doberman and I try to keep each other honest. The understanding is that we've had a lot of influences on our style, comedically and dramatically, and that we need to own up if we're borrowing materials. Therefore, we should address these influences here and now so people don't shout "hey, motherfucker, you stole that from _____!" No shit, Sherlock. The Simpsons already did it. But, as Chef points out, this was already a riff on an old Twilight Zone episode, so everything is stolen, and people that go out of their way to be 'original' usually do it more for the sake of desiring an identity, not because it's a meaningful piece of work.

On to the actual post!

". . .but right now, in this Shaw's organic food aisle, one of them -- could be either the man or the woman -- hates their existence right now."

A lot of grad students live near Doberman and I, and they are fairly funny people to observe, actually. To preface this story, there's a shopping plaza near the house, with a bookstore and an Ace Hardware and a (fucking. . .) Radio Shack and a Dunkin Donuts (with chairs inside! (so you know it's classy)). And most relevant, there's a Shaw's in there, and that Shaw's charges painfully high prices, ostensibly forcing you to pay Whole Foods prices for Star Market merch, which is like being bludgeoned with an Alaskan King Crab while trying to shop at a Star Market. Fuck, whatever, we get the student discount at Ace Hardware because we show them a student ID from ages ago. The photo on the ID is just a little scary, because it looks like it's of an moonlighting EMT that only took the job because of an unhealthy desire to steal people's organs and store them in jars. It's an emphatically bad photograph. But we digress.

". . .fuck the Greek System with its first-rites and birth-rites and. . . night. . . lights(?) The Internet is the congealed collective unconscious, and for all its inane stupidity, it can spot the creative and the original, and a frat brother is neither of those things!"

We want to start a new feature. It's called sponsorship!

Today's entry (which we'll get to in just a sec) is brought to you by something the Internet loves and something the Internet hates. It's fairly self-explanatory.

The Internet Loves: [Nikolai Tesla]
The Internet Hates: [The Greek System]

"You'll go in for a bite and it has the texture of a tomato but it tastes like re-barfed worms that a mother bird evacuates into its baby's mouth. Suddenly the skin on this plant you're eating will puncture and a carcass of seeds and whatnot will flop onto your tongue."

I had a conversation with Doberman earlier today about how much soup can weird me out. It's tasty and all, but it's also a mystery. A grisly murder mystery made of parts of things. It's an underwater cave that heroes of Greek myth can only swim to when the tides are right. And who the fuck knows what you're going to find in there! Your local soup vendor may warn you of the soup's contents. Tortellini and cheese. Well, OK, that sounds good. We'll order it and instantly regret not asking the standard follow-up question: Are there going to be any cave monsters or minotaurs in there once we dive in, searching for tortellini? Wait, the water is what color? The plants in there look like what? We get the soup, look into its depths, and we start imagining the self-sustaining eco-systems that live inside the mouth of a whale, with microscopic worlds and their amber waves of strange, vag-shaped plants. We hope for the best, we inject a tiny bit of optimism.