Ironic banner ad placement:

An ad for a clairvoyant website on snopes.com.

Not to mention the casino ads.

Now, I may not be one to talk, but the new Masters of the Universe action figures seem to be a very slouchy bunch, (save Mekanek) . Beast Man's head is practicallly protruding from his chest.What is this going to be teaching our children about good posture?

Then again, I highly doubt that children will be much interested in the the new MOTU figures. Primarily becuase they do not seem to be designed for children. Now, the old ones may have looked as gimpy as... well... an acutal body builder, but at least their legs could go in all sorts of crazy directions. The new figures, while much more highly-detailed, do not seem as poseable. Admittedly, I haven't played with any of them yet, but how far could you really spread he-man's legs with that plastic loincloth in the way?

Errrr... that didnt' sound quite right, anyhow, the point I'm failing to make is this: It seems that ever since McFarlane's Spawn series of action figures, there has been a growing tendency among toy designers to not so much consider children when designing toys, rather, they are considering the collector. I.E. action figures are becoming less play-with-able and more cool-looking. They're more like display pieces than actual toys one would knock around and decapitate in the sandbox. With an original MOTU figure, you could yank their heads off and put them back on again, no problem (or better yet, trade heads with another figure to enact some sort of horrible medical experiment). These days, if you bust something off, there is no way you're fixing it without a degree in action figure repair from DeVry.

I think this is mainly due to the designers being of the age where they played with 80's action figures as kids, but are now "beyond" playing with their toys. So, they design these more respectable figures that, while looking very detailed and finely crafted, would not survive for 10 minutes with an actual 5 year-old. They appear to be designing for folks like themselves, rather than children. Perhaps toy stores should divide their stock into "Action Figures" and "Display Figures".

Now don't get me wrong, I think the Spawn figures and their ilk are quite cool. I like articulated fingernails as much as the next guy, but I appreciate them as one does a sculpture, rather than a toy. I think about 50% of Spawn toys purchased are ever actually opened and 75% of those are put on a shelf or cubicle wall and never moved again. A truly great action figure, however, must survive both as a functional toy, and as a work of art. This is another reason why Transformers kick so much ass and will dominate for all time. Additionally, as robots, they need not worry about the chronic scoliosis that will soon cripple the entire new Masters of the Universe series.

Fun things to do at work on a Saturday when you're sick and testing memory card errors.

1. Hold down the A Button when powering on your GameCube, listen to the soothing IPL (the GameCube's operating system, if you will) music (It sounds like the new wave stuff that masseuses have in their CD players, minus the whale sounds).
2. Pinch both of your swollen lymph nodes on your neck until you feel fairly close to passing out.
3. Release.
4. Groooooooooooveeeeeeeeeeee....

I don't know what's up with all this empty space. That's what I get for dabbling in the dark art of HTML tables, I guess. The table in question is below.

If I had a...	It would be named...
Swing Band	Max Padd and the Heavy Days
Brothel	Whorezone, or Kingdom Come
Dog	Dozer (short for Killdozer)
Hot Sauce	Shitfire
Child	Turok

I believe that Mr. T and Grace Jones should have a child. This child should then defend the Earth against an invasion of hostile aliens, while wearing groovy clothes and rocking out.

This I believe.

Tales of Ghetto Fabulosity:

The other night, I had no more bottled water, and I was out of juice. Therefore, because I ain't about to drink San Jose tap water (now with 100% of your RDA of flouride, iron and er.... lead.) I took a wine cooler to bed with me.

That's essentially like drinking water, isn't it?

When I was in high school, I augmented my ability to avoid other students by volunteering to run the high school BBS (For the kiddies, that a Bulletin Board System, ask your grandpa), which was a primitive little thing hosted on Apple IIe's and held together with duct tape and brontosaurus femurs. This was back in the day when it was a big huge deal for the class to send a group e-mail to a whole 'nother country! And then get one back! Holy !@*#^%ing shit!

So, the "community" that made up this BBS consisted pretty much entirely of students who were fucking around during class or coming in on their lunch break to avoid their fellow students. Hence a lot of the posts were not exactly, shall we say, of the utmost quality in terms of their sensitivity to minority groups. Since it was run by the school I had the task of deleting said posts, which earned me a lot of angry expletive-laced posts from their authors, which were promptly deleted as well. Nyah nyah nyah.

Anyhow, one such post I had to delete consisted of the following joke, reproduced here with spelling errors intact:

Q: What do you call an Ethiopian with a pet dog?

A: A vagitarian!

Needless, to say, this serendiptious typographical error sent me into paroxysms of mirth as I unfortunately deleted it. The implication, of course, being that this word describes a person who subsists on a diet comprised solely of Vag. Since then I have found the phrase utterly indispensible.

"Would you like to suck my dick?"
"No, thank you. I am a strict vagitarian."

Of course, one must wonder what the complement to that would be. Cockivore perhaps?

Well, at least I can take comfort in knowing that no matter how fucking retarded our government can appear to be, another will always prove itself to be even fucking retardeder. Yes, video games were totally banned in Greece. I don't even know where to begin. Now, I'm not 100% positive on my history, but I'm pretty sure even the Nazi party let people play Bejeweled.

This ruling is so totally and completely ludicrous that I really am at a loss for how to mock it. If any sense of decency or common sense is to be had amongst Greek government, this won't last the week. The law was intended to curb electronic gambling, and thus they have made all electronic gamign of any form illegal under penalty of heavy fines. If I were to slap my forehead in a manner that truly describes how knuckle-headed I feel this legislation is, I would fracture my skull. I find this law akin to an attempt to stop people from smoking crack by making it illegal to inhale.

Well... at least Bush is seeking congressional approval before starting the third world war.

Well, it looks like Lance Bass's space shot plans have been N'sunk.

Ha ha ha ha heee heee hee! I should write for Leno, oh man, whew!

There was a lot of naysaying when it came to Lance's attempt to be the youngest person ever to fly into space. Since he you know... never went to college or anything and less like a cosmonaut than say... a prancing little nancy singer washed-up pop star. I agree with them completely.

They should so totally have sent Justin.

Seriously though, it was a dilemma for me, on the one hand it may have revitalized the interest of America's youth in the space program. I mean, I missed out on the whole NASA heyday of the late 60's. We put a dude on the face of the moon, for crying out loud. The fucking moon! Do you even realize how much ass it kicks to put somebody on the moon?

Sadly, I missed all that, but the whole space shuttle thing was pretty exciting for a kid in grade school who was intrigued by astronomy and spaceflight and booster rockets. I got to raise tomatoes from seeds that had germinated in space. None of the other kids seemed terribly excited by this prospect, but they obviously were obviously unaware of how cosmic rays grant living things superpowers. And then we learned they were going to put a teacher into space! I was so psyched! And then... well, you know what happened then. Plus my tomatoes did not mature into hyper-intelligent supertomatoes. NASA never really made it up to me. I didn't want to be an astronaut any more, or a farmer, for that matter. I won't even get started on the Hubble telescope.

It used to be a stereotype that you could ask any kid in America what they wanted to be when they grew up and alarge percentage of them would claim that they wanted to be an astronaut. Not so any more. Astronauts used to be explorers and pioneers, going boldly where no one had gone before. Now... it seems like astronauts are essentially glorified delivery men or mechanics. They ship the satellites into space, and they fix them when they're busted. As long as the Bush administration is into consolidating governmental agencies, they may as well merge NASA and the USPS.

Needless to say, the American public, by which I mean myself, has lost interest in the space program. It's just not exciting any more. At least with the whole Lance Bass debacle, it was something. Arguably, it was something stupid, but something nonetheless. Even though I am not too thrilled about Lance, the kids seem to think he's alright. Maybe it would inspire some children to develop an interest in the space program, or a singing career. I haven't spent a whole lot of time in any grade schools recently, thanks to that stupid restraining order, but it seems like the kids are just not excited about space any more. NASA is letting them down. It should be that hard to make space exciting. It's space for crying out loud! SPACE!! It wasn't even NASA doing the Basstronaut thing, it was the Russians. We were first to put a man on the moon. Are we going to let them be the first to put a celebrity in orbit?

Well NASA, to run with the combining washed-up entertainment concepts and space travel theme, check this out. I have got an idea for you, and it'll be cheap, easy, and you can even split the cost with the former USSR, I call it:

Perfect Space Strangers

A Russian cosmonaut, and American astronaut, stuck on a Russian space station together. It's all real and real-time. You place cameras all over the ship, and occasionally stir things up by letting the power go off, or having them run out of oxygen or...

What's that? It's already been done? Oh...

Okay, how about this then:

Did you see that episode of The Simpsons where they send Homer up in the.. well.. that didn't work out so well either.

Hmmm... how about you grab a piece of that pie the pentagon is cooking up with Hollywood? A film in which the Earth is saved by an astronaut? Or amybe a film about a normal guy going up into space? Like.. um... like if there was this asteroid hurtling towards Earth, and you needed to drill a hole into the center to blow it up with a nuclear bomb and... oh... oh yeah. That's been done too. God that movie sucked ass.

Sorry NASA, I can only help you so much. Maybe you could try sending a Backstreet boy into space?

And leaving him there.