The Internet - It Has a Dark Side??

So, it turns out that the internet is bigger than you think it is.  And the worst part is, everything is linked to everything else with little innocent clicks, so you can start out on a site like reddit.com or some other link aggregator and end up somewhere very, very horrible.  That has happened to me a bunch of times.  Now, I realize I will sound like a secretly gay Republican who KEEPS getting caught trying to bang dudes in public bathrooms over & over, but I swear that through no fault of my own I ended up today at (for God’s sake don’t click any of the following links):

1) My Balls - A photoblog where the artist submits a new photo every few days of his testicles doing something amusing.

2) Got Cum - A photoblog (linked from My Balls, oddly enough) of promotional photos of attractive female celebrities full clothed.  Oh yeah, the photos have been printed out & ejaculated on, sometimes quite voluminiously.

3) PopThatZit.com - A videoblog of people filming their own zits (actually, usually a friend or relative is holding the camera) being popped.  This one, for me, was the weirdest.  I mean, I don’t film my balls, or masturbate onto printed out photos of The Olsen Twins, but even if I did, I’d have the good sense to do it alone in the privacy of my secret shame chamber.  The zits one seems to be a social collaborative affair, and that is perhaps its most creepy aspect.  I have a bunch of friends (no seriously, I do), but I don’t have any friends I feel close enough to that I would film them in popping their zits.

So, I just want to warn you all, the internet is not all about meeting delightful childrens authors & placing delightful sports wagers.  There’s balls out there, people.  Strange, hairy balls.

T.R.A.N.S.I.T.

T.R.A.N.S.I.T. is, by a wide margin, my favorite animated short ever produced. Set in the art deco Europe of the 1920’s and (and released in 1997) it tells the story of a journey throughout several major vacation destinations of a wealthy tycoon, his young wife with wandering eyes, and a murderous turn of events. The story is told in reverse, from the final stage of the “vacation” back through each prior stop, and the artwork for each segment is painted in the style of the luggage travel sticker for that stop.

Peter’s Friends - The Way You Look Tonight

Dr House & two of the professors from Hogwarts sing an incredible version of one of my favorite older songs.

Is It Possible That I’m Retarded?

As part of the liberal elite, a good portion of my life is spent openly sneering at the things other people enjoy, like NASCAR or Larry The Cable Guy.  But upon reflection, it’s not like I spend my nights reading Dickens & watching Masterpiece Theater.  In fact, as I went to Amazon.com and read the following synopsis for the upcoming Bob Lee Swagger novel, a book I am actually salivating at the prospect of reading, I’m not sure I have much intellectual high ground from which to snark at others.  I wish I could pretend to only ironically enjoy the Swagger novels, but the truth is I just loves them so.  Even if they do get made into corpse-rapingly awful movies.

In The 47th Samurai, Bob Lee Swagger, the gritty hero of Stephen Hunter’s bestselling novels Point of Impact and Time to Hunt, returns in Hunter’s most intense and exotic thriller to date.Bob Lee Swagger and Philip Yano are bound together by a single moment at Iwo Jima, 1945, when their fathers, two brave fighters on opposite sides, met in the bloody and chaotic battle for the island. Only Earl Swagger survived.

More than sixty years later, Yano comes to America to honor the legacy of his heroic father by recovering the sword he used in the battle. His search has led him to Crazy Horse, Idaho, where Bob Lee, ex-marine and Vietnam veteran, has settled into a restless retirement and immediately pledges himself to Yano’s quest.

Bob Lee finds the sword and delivers it to Yano in Tokyo. On inspection, they discover that it is not a standard WWII blade, but a legendary shin-shinto katana, an artifact of the nation. It is priceless but worth killing for. Suddenly Bob is at the center of a series of terrible crimes he barely understands but vows to avenge. And to do so, he throws himself into the world of the samurai, Tokyo’s dark, criminal yakuza underworld, and the unwritten rules of Japanese culture.

Swagger’s allies, hard-as-nails, American-born Susan Okada and the brave, cocaine-dealing tabloid journalist Nick Yamamoto, help him move through this strange, glittering, and ominous world from the shady bosses of the seamy Kabukicho district to officials in the highest echelons of the Japanese government, but in the end, he is on his own and will succeed only if he can learn that to survive samurai, you must become samurai.

As the plot races and the violence escalates, it becomes clear that a ruthless conspiracy is in place, and the only thing that can be taken for granted is that money, power, and sex can drive men of all nationalities to gruesome extremes. If Swagger hopes to stop them, he must be willing not only to die but also to kill.

Man.  Someday I can only hope to be in at the center of a series of terrible crimes I barely understand but vow to avenge.

Exciting Zombie-Related News

World War Z, Time Magazine’s pick for greatest book of the millenium* is being made into a movie.  Now, astute Jonsonblog readers will remember the frenzy of excitement & trailer boners that occured the last time I found out that one of the great works in the history of western literature was being adapted for the screen, and the fury & rending of garments that occured when that movie turned out to be Shooter, with Mark Wahlberg.  But this time, it’s TOTALLY going to be different.

I’m like Charlie Brown & Hollywood is like Lucy, with movie adapatations of my favorite written materials being the football in this increasingly strained metaphor.  You’d think I’d learn, and in a way, a part of me has.  I mean, I did say a decade or more ago, “man, if they ever make a movie of Spider Man & it features Venom, I would run over a busload of nuns to go see that movie,” and yet by the time they DID make that movie, and it sucked,  I was guarded enough to avoid seeing it in theaters, preferring to steal it & complain bitterly to my iphone as I watched it alone in my room.  I like to think I’ve really grown up over the years.

But here I go again.  The next 18 months will feature movie versions of Stardust, World War Z & The Watchmen, and I can totally see all of them sucking before a frame of footage has been shot for any of them.  On the plus side, I saw the early trailer for Iron Man, and it looks pretty bad ass.  I think the Robert Downey Jr casting may pay off overall.

P.S., bonus note to the super nerds out there: the guy adopting WWZ to the big screen is the dude who created Babylon 5, a show so nerdy that even I never watched it. But that’s got to be a good sign, right?  Why would a heralded nerd with a cult following (like a Joss Whedon or JJ Abrams) come in & fuck up something like the greatest work of zombie literature ever written?

*In a perfect world this would be true and not just more of my lies.

World’s 29,000 laziest sex offenders identified, banned

This PR nightmare released by Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace cites the banning of 29,000 registered sex offenders who had MySpace pages.  In addition to being 400% more sex offenders than MySpace had originally claimed were using their service, it’s important to note when reeling at the vast number of rapists on MySpace that this is

1) only the REGISTERED sex offenders, meaning the ones who had been caught and tried and convicted and served their time and released back into the wild, and

2) only the not very bright registered sex offenders who used their real names when creating their MySpace pages. 

You used your real names?? Get your head in the game, sexual predators!  Hell, even I know better than to use my real name on MySpace - after all, the damn thing’s full of rapists, I’m no fool.  So, there’s probably WAY more rapists who haven’t been caught, or who got caught & acquitted, or caught, NOT acquitted, but using a fake name still out there on MySpace. 

This, when coupled with the recent reports that everyone is fleeing MySpace because it’s SO lame in exchange for Facebook accounts makes me think that MySpace in 2007 is like the island of Manhattan in Escape From New York, only instead of a wide swath of criminals, the community is pretty much nothing but rapists, all of them pretending to be horny teenagers, hoping to lure in other teenagers. 

Poor rapists… for a while, this new rapist-only MySpace has got to seem like a garden of Eden - “Jesus, there’s NOTHING but horny teenagers here!  I’m going to have to start using viagra to keep up with all my sexual assaults!”  But then slowly the horrible truth dawns, as they begin to realize that the only non-rapist on MySpace is Chris Hansen, saving up for sweeps week.

BTW, this entry has set a new personal record for most uses of the word “rapist” in a non-work related document (I work in marketing, you’d be surprised how often the term comes up).  There’s a good reason for that - I noticed that the jonsonblog is nowhere near the top of the results returned for the word rapist & I was hoping to change that.

Wow… even just writing that last joke creeps me out.  Hey, I learned something new about myself.  I can creep myself out with my own damn jokes.  Freak.

Least Credible Apology Ever

In a follow up to a story that I didn’t even notice at the time, the chairman of the Roger Williams University in Providence has had to step down after accidentally using the word “nigger” during a meeting about the difficulty of finding appropriate African American candidates to work on the University board.  Leaving aside the irony of a man using a racial slur to describe a group of people he was having trouble getting to work with him, his apology is a spectacular gem of comedic baldfacedness. 

The ex-chairman, 80 year old Ralph Papitto, claims to have never used the term before in his life.  In fact, he was only recently introduced to the phrase, apparently, saying “The first time I heard it was on television and then rap music or something.”  Kudos to you, Ralph Papitto.  If the jonsonblog handed out awards for best racism, you would win all of 2007, and we’re only in July.  It’s 100% believeable that you never heard the word before, that you don’t secretly refer to all blacks by that word, and that you’re a totally colorblind, judge men on the content of their character type of guy.

Crazy new google feature

So, look up any local service on Google Maps, which for me has replaced the yellow pages, and there’s a new link in small letters that just says “call”.  When you click the call link, it asks for your phone number, then it calls the service & you simultaneously, so that you don’t get charged for the call and so that you don’t have to dial.  I don’t get the business strategy at all, but I kinda feel that way about 80% of Google’s products.  Gmail, Maps, Search & Advertising all make sense, but every other one, and there are like 50 or more, seem just kooky.

I’m not normally aroused by corpses

So, in the past I used to write about wacky news stories like the septugenarian hitwomen, or the bear that was tree’d by a New Jersey housecat, etc, but I’ve been trying not to do that anymore, since there are just so many of them that it’s kind of a waste of time, and what can you really say about these kinds of things that isn’t readily apparent in the story?  But I admit, I’m fascinated by this story of the couple found naked & dead at the foot of an office building, with their clothing up on the roof top several stories above.  Currently police are operating under the theory that the couple, in their early 20s, were having outdoor sex on the roof and rolled off to their doom - no foul play is suspected.  But really, if I wanted to kill a guy in his early 20s, isn’t this just about the best possible way to do it?

After all, who among us didn’t risk their life for sex when they were in their twenties, either in the big picture via an unprotected poking, or more immediately, via sex while driving or sex on a conveyor belt that was feeding a giant shredder or sex at the end of the gun shooting range?  That’s right, none of us.  Which is why this is THE PERFECT CRIME. 

The weirder thing is, though, that when you look past the crushed remains of bones & sinew at the foot of the building, there’s something weirdly sexy about the whole scene.  I mean, we’ve all gotta die, right? But these two died about three seconds after the wildest funnest times they’d had recently.  True, those last three seconds really sucked, but it beats dying after nine months on a ventilator when you’re 87 years old and everyone you know has passed on.  I’m just glad I wasn’t the coroner, frankly, because the unsexy part of the story, the whole mashed bloodied corpses part?  I bet coroners get totally used to that.  So if I was the coroner, I wouldn’t even be grossed out by the human remains, and I would be unable to avoid focusing 100% of my attention on the “sex” part of the story.  So when the crime scene investigators got there and saw me masturbating, I’d probably have a lot of explaining to do.

…Of Mice & Men

50 Years ago this Friday, the city of Tulsa Oklahoma buried a time capsule of life in the middle of the great American century, including a glorious Plymouth Belvedere, tail fins & all.  The purpose was to give people in the future a glimpse at what life in the 50s was all about. 

The vault was built sturdy enough to survive a nuclear attack (which should give you an idea of what life in the late 50s was all about right there), but unfortunately it was not built water tight.  Over two feet of standing water had seeped in during the intervening decades, and the Plymouth and the Time Capsule materials were sitting in the middle of it, potentially rusting away (although city officials claim the car may still be salvageable due to a protective wrapping, possibly they used the ClearCote(tm) sealant from Fargo).

Regardless, the whole fiasco made me wonder what of my life I would collect today to give the people of the future a snapshot of what turn of the century life was all about.  I narrowed it down to the following five things:

1) A photo of the sexiest naked people I can find.  Here’s my thinking - with the rise of the internet, and pornography & niche fetishes & all sorts of desensitization, super hot naked people will be as sexy to the citizens of 2057 as photos of Betty Grable in a one piece bathing suit are to people today.  We’ll vaguely recognize that the images have an intended purpose, some sort of arousal, but no one will really actually be turned on by looking at just plain old naked people any more.  Based on my research, at least one of the participants in all future erotica will have to be dressed as a bear, or a clown, or some sort of bear-clown hybrid.

2) An ipod shuffle, one of the new super tiny ones that are smaller than a money clip & hold 100 songs.  In the future, music, and really all digital data will not be stored on a physical medium, but rather wiped directly on to your skin with a series of wet-knaps, like the kind you get at KFC when you are done with your chicken.  In fact, KFC will likely be the world’s largest data distribution company.  People will be hard pressed to remember a time when KFC sold chicken. This situation is already becoming commonplace.

3) A Hydrogen Bomb, the most powerful one I can get my hands on.  This is not to illustrate our war-mongering ways, or to show the people of the future what barbarians we were.  Rather, this will be a live bomb, with a countdown initiated by the first rays of sunlight hitting the weapon.  The bomb will have a large note taped to it reading “Press this button to stop your annihilation.”  If the people of the future can’t read English, fuck ‘em, is what I’m going for here.

4) The dead body of Ann Coulter, or possibly Sean Hannity.  Or both.  I’m not particular.  No identifcation need accompany the remains, nor should any steps be taken to preserve the corpses.

5) A box of things confiscated by the TSA, collected randomly at the end of one travel day from a major metropolitan airport.  The people of the future will be completely fucking stumped as to why we left them half bottles of shampoo & tubes of toothpaste & mouthwash.  If only they knew that this box contained what passed for a legitimate threat in 2007, they would have a good laugh before they went back to defending themselves from the never-ending ferocious onslaught of zombies.