Bailouts, Brits, and Explosions!

It is no secret that American car companies are hurting. Fiat just bought a portion of GM, Chrysler is declaring bankruptcy, and Ford is trying to change its name.to Honda. However, I think I may have stumbled upon a solution.

A British Invasion.

For my fellow Yanks, the silver-templed man with the bald spot is called Jeremy Clarkson, and in the metric system, he is a bad ass. Rageoline introduced me to Top Gear while I was in London, and I didn't really think much of it at the time. In my mind, a formula one racer on British TV seems a contradiction. However, after watching him feed Gordon Ramsay a rack of lamb cooked on the radiator of a Subaru Outback, I changed my mind.

I'm not entirely sure why they haven't tried to make an American version of this show yet. I guess crashing cars and having celebrities do silly things just isn't our cup of tea.

It seems as though the land of Country Music and NASCAR has fallen out of love with cars. If you really loved your pick-up you would drop your trailer on in. Car ads in this country are a barren landscape of computer generated hyperbole and hamsters. Watching Tiger Woods drive around Mars doesn't get me excited about Range Rovers, but watching one burst into flames just might. People really only watch NASCAR for the crashes, so let's cut the foreplay (in Daytona a series of left turns constitutes foreplay, Hiyo!).

What Barack Obama needs to do, is hold a nationally funded demolition derby. Buy a bunch of Chevy's, Fords and Jeeps, and put them through absurd tests! Like "Which Pick-up truck can destroy the most Ford Focuses before stalling." who wouldn't want to watch that? We could have a contest to see how far you can drop a full sized sedan before its axle snaps, or how many soccer moms it takes to flip over a given SUV.

Not only would this give ridiculous amounts of money to car companies, but it would also create a lot of jobs! Someone has to be selling cold flat American beer while this is happening. Also people would have something to brag about with their cars. Next time an uppity Touareg cuts you off in your Explorer, you can say "Sure, his car has all that low end torque and extra vowels, but can it barrel through 18 outhouses in a row? Mine can!"

An Expression of Words

So, I was doing my bi-weekly reading of the nytimes.com blogroll to see what is making me mad/who is not featuring me this week, I stumbled upon a little of both.

Schott's Vocab is a blog that is dedicated to vocabulary. How did the grammarians get a blog? I thought the internet was like kryptonite to vocabularists... yes, in this metaphor I am considering correct punctuation a superpower. You have to be psychic to figure out where the comma will be next. It took me a good fifteen minutes to read this eight line blog post, Schott managed to use at least three words I'm pretty sure he made up -- vocabularist, assemblage, Schott (notice the blog isn't about spelling).

The Grammarians would be a great name for an indie rock band BTW.

This blog presents weekend-ly competitions fo the readers to talk about their favorite words. Today's contest asks readers to make up their own favorite words for  "modern assemblage."  You know how there are ridiculous words for groups of animals: gaggle of gease, murder of crows, turmoil of porpoises. Well, the idea is that a bunch of people who read a grammar blog will make up modern versions of these words.

Grammar enthusiasts are traditionally not funny. Entries range from the pedantic "google of searches" to the alliterative "Twitter of twits" (which would have been funnier the other way around) to the somewhat anger tinged "deceit of Cheneys." To be fair there are only multiple Dick Cheneys so that the first one can harvest organs from them. However, this article does answer one question I have held for a long time: "Who the hell comes up with this crap."

Does anyone know where I can apply for a poetic license?

Things that make you go hmm...

Every so often something will catch my attention that makes me wonder what on earth the person responsible was thinking. Some of these things are simply obnoxious and others seem wildly inappropriate. Yet somehow, they are supposed to pass as being cool, or professional, or even creative. Here are a couple of things I came across today:

Wikipedia's use of the word "orphan" in regards to Wikipedia articles. According to Wikipedia, an orphan is "A page with no links from other pages." Wikipedia decided that it was okay to use the word "orphan" to describe an isolated article. Maybe I'm just being a bit sensitive here, but doesn't it seem a bit odd to use that word? What if an actual orphan wants to look up something on Wikipedia and sees the following message:

"This article is an orphan, as few or no other articles link to it. Please introduce links to this page from other articles related to it." 

That orphan will now cry because Wikipedia has just reminded him or her that he or she has few or no links. Just when he or she overcomes the painful memories and is able to scroll down the page, this heading appears:

"Suggestions for how to de-orphan an article"

The other thing appeared BBC's website, an article entitled, "Are there women paedophiles?" 

I don't want to get into the subject matter of the article, but hasn't that question already been answered? Click on the link and take a look at the picture BBC decided to use for the article. It's a blonde woman and a possibly Asian boy walking down a beach. They are walking away from us so we can't see their faces. What do I find creepiest? Her arm is around his neck and her sleeve is positioned in such a manner that we can't see her hand. WTF BBC? Clearly the photo suggests that this is not supposed to be a mother and son walking down the beach. But why would a paedophile be going for what almost looks like a romantic stroll down the beach with her 9 year old hottie? Can you imagine being the people posing for this picture?

"Now, yes! Hold that position, that's perfect. Just put your arm around his neck but don't pull him too close! Oh, what's this for? Um, you know, something about paedophilia." 

The kid will look at this picture many years from now and have nightmares. But are there women paedophiles? Maybe. Perhaps Wikipedia will have an orphan on it. 

FX (UK) shall face the wrath of none other than ME!

While living in the UK I am, for the most part, able to dismiss many of my American cravings. I get used to smaller containers of shampoo, eat different candy, and forget about major sporting events (to some extent). But one thing I will never be able to forget. That one thing has given me inspiration in my rage and makes me laugh until I can no longer breathe. What is it, you ask? This.

STEPHEN COLBERT! (and the Colbert Report)

I just heard him make a series of swine flu inspired puns (a-pig-alypse, oinkmaggedon). Remember when he almost had a Hungarian bridge named after him? How can you not love him? 

Apparently FXUK does not. They claimed that the show did not have enough viewers and so they have not renewed its contract. Hmm...no viewers. When was the show on? After midnight! No wonder it didn't have any viewers. Even I have to record it every day. We can't watch the show on Colbernation.com because we're not in the US and now we can't watch it on TV. 

You know what FXUK? FU! Do you want to fight about this FX? Bring it. I need Colbert to survive. Let me guess, FX, a network owned by FOX, a typically right leaning organization, realized a bit too late that Colbert isn't actually a republican? 

I guess it's time to turn my good ol' buddy, Hotspot Shield on again (which you didn't hear about from me). 

Join the twitter fight with #saveourcolbert!

Was That Movie Supposed to Be Funny?

Last Friday, it dawned on me that the last time I had been to the movies was to see Tropic Thunder back in September, and even though Robert Downey Jr is a meal of an actor, I decided it was time to see something new.

I threw a dart at the newspaper, to decide which movie from the post-Oscar nightmare-scape to go see. The dart landed fortuitously on Sunshine Cleaning, the remix of the movie Little Miss Sunshine, but with Amy Adams instead of Steve Carell.

I suppose I should put up one of this obnoxious warnings: IF, FOR SOME REASON, YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW THE PLOT OF THIS EXTREMELY ORIGINAL MOVIE, STOP HERE. Seriously, you have never seen anything like it before... That is, if you haven't gone to the movies since 1924.

The idea is simple, two sisters come together to pick the last scraps off the rotting carcass that is their shattered lives. And there is plenty about fifteen minutes of black humour along the way. A solid fifty percent of this movie is close-up shots of Amy Adams about to cry — This movie is an actor's wet dream.

In hopes of making more money, Amy Adams and Emily Blunt (the sisters) open up a crime-scene clean up crew. In going around cleaning up the remains of other people, they learn to cope with the suicide of their own mother, who died like 20 friggin years before the events of the movie. I'm not particularly a huge fan of movies which are about people overcoming a traumatic life events which happened a long time ago... I'm looking at you, Wes Anderson! I will admit, that some of the cleaning scenes were pretty funny, but there are only like two of them in the movie.

The movie follows in the footsteps of Little Miss Sunshine, in its wry humour, and its themes of suicide and following your dreams despite the fact that you screwed them up years ago, and they are pointless anyway. It does tack on new themes like letting go of the past and abusive relationships, and Emily Blunt not noticing that the moderately attractive girl from 24 totally wants to get into her pants.

To sum it up, this movie might be worth seeing, if you are into emo crap (or if you like laughing at emo kids). I spent most of the movie not sure whether I was laughing with the movie makers, or at them. So if you are looking for a good cry, wait a week to see that not even Hugh Jackman looks good in sideburns. Oh, topless Hugh Jackman makes everything better.

The Worst Post Ever

This winter just won't quit. While driving to vist my family for Easter, I was pelted with a "wintery mix,' which is not the assortment of holiday candy my sister thinks it is. I guess God must be pretty mad for the death of his son/self (alternate joke for Jewish readers: Yahweh must be mad at the whole slavery thing). I don't know if you have ever encountered sleet, I'm not sure if people have it outside of New England, but imagine if the weather can't decide which it would rather do: rain or snow. Instead, soggy wads of snow cascade from the sky, spattering on your windshield while you hydroplane.

But I survived, which is the important thing, especially when there are pirates out there. Why are there pirates!? Sure, piracy has been rampant in other parts of the world, but Americans haven't seen pirates in decades (unless you count privateers, which I don't). How can I maintain my blissfully ignorant image of pirates as people who wear eye patches, search for treasure, and occasionally walk into bars, when I am forced to face the fact that there are real pirates out there?

Anyway, I figured I'd get that off my chest. At least there is going to be a new Matthew McConaughey movie, and I'm totally not going to embed a trailer because they won't let me.

Stinkerton out!

Rage Down: Fake Fake Doctors and Women with Balls

I haven't posted a while, so today I bring you a fast breaking rage straight to whatever you kids are tweeting with these days.

First, Dr House M.D. completely defied me with who they decided to kill off this season. I won't give anything away, but it suffices to say that I assume they made this decision because the actor left to pursue his career (and only one actor on that show has a career). Now I'm not counting myself out just yet, maybe the writers on House will take a page out of J.K. Rowling's books and keep one-upping themselves. So this season, two people will die. Next season, a character people actually care about will die. Finally, for the series finale, Hugh Laurie will have to diagnose patients while dodging the frightful curses of Lord Voldemort, who has been brought back from the dead with the blood of Omar Epps.

Now, completely changing pace, lets talk about basketball. This weekend, the Huskies (men) were kicked out of the NCAA finals by Michigan State University. If you ask me, Detroit needs to spend less time training basketballers and more time teaching them how to make cars that run for more than four years. What are we here at Uconn going to do without our boys! All we have left is the best womens team in NCAA history. Great! That is like being the winner of the talent portion of the Miss America Pageant! I don't care how smart, beautiful and talented they are, if they aren't going to run off to the NBA before graduating, I'm just not interested.

Finally, I'd would like to take a second to say: Banana Nut Cheerios... teehee.