Independence Day – 1996

Critical Analysis: A movie star (Will Smith) kills a bunch of CGI aliens and stuff in order to save us from the end of the world as we know it.

Godzilla – 1998

Critical Analysis: A movie star (Matthew Broderick) battles a huge CGI monster and its CGI offspring in order to save us from the end of the world as we know it.

The Patriot – 2000

Critical Analysis: A movie star (Mel Gibson) fights off the evil Red Coats to save Americans from the end of their way of life as they know it.

The Day After Tomorrow – 2004

Critical Analysis: A movie star (Dennis Quaid) attempts to save his movie star son (Jake Gyllenhall) in the midst of a CGI holocaust of effects that signal the end of the world as we know it.

10,000 BC – 2008

Critical Analysis: A bunch of nobodies battle horribly-rendered CGI animals and travels to horribly-rendered CGI locations in a quest that will determine whether life for their tribe will end as they know it.

2012 – 2010

Plot Analysis: A movie star (John Cusack) and his family try to survive a horribly-rendered version of the end of the world as we know it.

Final Analysis: Emmerich’s got some set of balls on him.

 King’s 10 Best

10.

This is probably going to be a controversial pick. I think King is at his literary best when his novels have deeper themes intertwined with the horror. And that’s where Cujo is brilliant: it’s really a book about Small-town life vs. Big-City, as well as a huge slobbery dog that kills people.

9.

Same goes with Christine, a novel that deals with difficulties of being a teenager, growing up, and finding your own way in life. Genius.

8.

King’s first collection of short stories remains his best. With little to no filler, and alternating from humorous to skin-crawling terror, this is a master storyteller in top form.

7.

I decided to pick just one Dark Tower book to represent the whole series. It was a toss up between this one and Wolves of the Calla, but I decided to choose this one because to me, the ending was just so bizarre and ultimately satisfactory. The Dark Tower series as a whole is a tour de force of fucked-up imagination.

6.

Excellent themes, fantastically executed. Human greed knows no bounds.

5.

From just a pure writing standpoint, this is King’s best novel. A real page turner, with tight, gorgeous prose and a stellar plot.

4.

This collection of Novellas yielded the movies Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption. Nuff said.

3.

Epic, epic stuff. While the ending may be somewhat of a disappointment, the 1,000 pages of symbolic struggle between good and evil is most assuredly not.

2.

When this came out in serialized installments, I was jonesing hard every month for the next one. This book, perhaps more than any other King book, deserves the mantle of “Literature.”

1.

The best Stephen King Book, hands down, and one of the best books of the 20th Century, horror or otherwise. King brilliantly takes the themes of growing up, losing your innocence, and leaving your childhood behind, and embodies them into a clown that kills children. King will never top this one.

 King’s 10 Worst

10.

King rips himself off in this one, borrowing themes from It and Tommyknockers, among others. I gotta say though, there are some stunningly nasty little passages in this book. Ass Weasels anyone? The bathroom scene is burnt into my mind forever. That being said, the book is a big, bloated, unruly mess (no pun intended). It’s King’s first attempt at fiction post-near death car accident, and the pain killers REALLY show.

9.

Rose Madder is King’s attempt at “feminist” fiction, and while it succeeds on some levels, it is just a little too bizarre for my tastes. The whole painting angle I found to be annoying, and the prose stilted. I will say this though: a very scary villain.

8.

While I feel Desperation is a pretty darn good book, it’s Richard Bachman companion piece reads like a bizarre, ultra-violent dream. While the theme of suburbia under attack by outside forces is intriguing, the messy plot and writing ruins it in the end. The two-book “mirror” thing was a very bold move, so I’ll give King that much.

7.

This collection of novellas is like Different Seasons……accept it blows. The four novellas within for the most part read like throwaway ideas, which I’m guessing they are.

6.

This book is a sloppy mess. While King does end up tying it into the Dark Tower series, and thus saving it a little, to me this is a book that couldn’t decide WHAT it wanted to say, do, or be.

5.

Now we’re starting to move into really foul territory, so put on that gas mask. King wrote Tommyknockers while in the throes of alcohol and cocaine addiction, and BOY does it show. It’s a confusing mess of a read, with a horrible ending. King returns to a similar theme a few years later with MUCH better results in Needful Things.

4.

I’m not sure what possessed King to write a 300 page book about a woman handcuffed to a bed….alone, but the results are as boring as they sound. You know it’s a bad King book when no attempt has EVER been made to turn it into a movie (much like other books on this list).

3.

I actually wasn’t a huge fan of the Talisman, but this sequel sucks ass!! I actually didn’t even make it all the way through. Pure shite.

2.

What the F was he thinking with that title? King stretches what should have been a 50-60 page novella into a 200 page novel. Like Gerald’s Game, we’re forced to spend time with one boring character – a little girl lost in the woods. I’m actually falling asleep just writing about it, so let’s move on.

1.

I challenge someone to make it all the way through this book without needing to go to the emergency room for vomiting and rectal bleeding. Torturously boring, pointless, and derivative, this book almost made me give up hope that King would ever put out anything good again. After 200 pages, I put the book down and wept many bitter tears, never to return to it.

Don’t believe me, well consider the totally scientific evidence:

1.  In earlier times, African American men could never aspire to the heights of serial killerdom.  Go ahead, name three African American serial killers.  Can’t do it, can you.  That’s because the elitist White Man reserved this most heinous of crimes for himself, guarding it jealously.  The inherent self-esteem issues caused by years of racial bigotry meant that no African American male would have dreamt that someday he too could slay a dozen hookers and hide their bodies in a crawlspace.  The Anthony Sowell case smashes this long-held relic from the Jim Crow days and promises to ring in a new era where all men, black and white alike, are free to chop women to bits and store them in freezers, basements and makeshift crypts.

Anthony Sowell: The Rosa Parks of Serial Killers

2.  The very fact that Sowell could get away with killing 10 people serial style represents a huge leap forward in terms of the relationship between African Americans and law enforcement.  Time was when only pasty white dudes could go undetected as they slaughtered and cannibalized their way through a community.  20 years ago Sowell would have been locked up years earlier for some serious infraction such as a broken tail light or dating a white woman.  Certainly he never would have made it out of jail after his first rape conviction.  Point is: finally, FINALLY, law enforcement has evened the playing field.

So even as we mark this dark deed, it’s a bright day indeed for America.  First a black president, and now a black serial killer.  “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last.”

6. Chester Arthur

Height: 6′ 2″

Weight: 220 pounds

Chester is a lightweight compared to some of the fatties on this list, especially considering his height.  But still, check out the double chin on the Chestmeister.  Thank God he added the muttonchops for that…slimming effect.

Fun Fact: In a tragic accident, killed White House cat fluffy when he mistook her for an hors d’oeuvres.

5. Bill Clinton

Height: 6′ 2″

Weight: 236

Slick Willy used to take a lot of heat for his weight back in the day, until his heart exploded and he was forced to drop some pounds.  Fact is though, he’s really not that much of a chunkster.  To use a talk show analogy, he’s more Tyra than he is Oprah.

Fun Fact: Stuck a cigar in a tubby intern’s cooch.  Sometimes this shit just writes itself!

4. John Adams

Height: 5′ 7″

Weight: 200 pounds

This cute little tub of guts was the full package: chunky, bald, moody, and emotionally unstable.  But WTF, he was the leader of the free world, so bitches, stand in line for you tiny sliver of John Adam’s sweet meats.  Adams had the last laugh too: he ate whatever the hell he wanted and STILL lived to be 90 years old.  SNAP

Fun Fact: John Adam’s 100 year old corpse was offered a role as one of the munchkins in The Wizard of Oz.  It declined.

3. Theodore Roosevelt

Height: 5′ 8″

Weight: 220 pounds

It is true that Theodore was a very active man throughout his life, but he went through long stretches of time when he ballooned up into a bonafide chubster.  Ted may have been fat, but judging by his obsession with killing things, chances are pretty good that he had a really, really small penis.

Fun Fact: Theodore’s most famous quote was actually misheard.  What he actually said was “Speak softly and carry a stick…of butter.”

2. Grover Cleveland

Height: 5′ 11″

Weight: 305 pounds

Forget chubby, Cleveland was just a straight up fat-ass.  Here are some true facts:

• His nieces and nephews called him Uncle Jumbo
• His weight caused him to suffer from sleep apnea
• He developed GOUT for chrissake.

Fun Fact: An entire team of workers was employed to clean the shart stains out of Cleveland’s parachute-sized undergarments on a weekly basis.

1. William Howard Taft

Height: 6′

Weight: 335 pounds

Holy Hell was William Taft fat.  He too suffered from gout and sleep apnea, but that was just the beginning of Taft’s health woes.  He also suffered from hypertension, constipation, and (here’s a shocker) heart problems.  Despite all this, he somehow managed to live to a ripe old age of 71.  William Taft, America salutes you.  Your next double quarterpounder’s on us brutha.

Fun Fact: As the above picture shows, Taft was the first and only president to have a gock.

In Memory of

LiL Pac

1984-2002

“Don’t Hate the Playa, Hate the Gizzame”

Damn that was some funny shit to see on a sunny Saturday afternoon, wasn’t it?  Still is.  Problem is, now these stickers are EVERYWHERE.  You can’t escape them.

As it turns out, Ricky wasn’t Army Strong (look carefully)

The memorial window sticker craze gives rise to a few pertinent questions.

1. WTF?  Other than to bum out all of us complete strangers and serve as a constant, depressing reminder to yourself and your loved ones that someone close to you has died, what exactly is the point of these things?

2. How ironic would it be if you died in a fiery car crash while driving around with that sticker on your car?

3. Are you retarded?

But why stop with announcing the death of your loved ones on your rear window?  Here are some other ideas for you.

• My Marriage – 1990-2004
• I Have Crabs
• I Was Once Accidentally Blown by a Transexual
• On Several Different Antidepressants Since 1997
• Have You Ever Thought About How Pointless Life Really Is?
• Will Someone Please Shoot Me in the Face

1. Cy-Kill

Cy-Kill was the leader of the evil “Renegades.”  I don’t know what’s scarier about old Cy-Kill, his vaguely penis shaped head or his spindly arms and legs.  And can we talk about names for a second?  Cy-Kill Tonka, really?  Cy-Kill?  That’s the best name you could come up with for an evil robot motorcycle?  Laughable names are another recurring theme with the Gobot line.

2. Leader-1

OK, so how is it possible for Leader-1, the head of the good guy Guardians, to effectively fight evil when he has what are apparently huge cement blocks attached to his lower legs?  And his pea-sized head is not exactly giving me a ton of confidence in his leadership abilities.

3.Turbo

While Turbo is certainly far from the worst example of Gobot ridiculousness, I hated the piss out of him as a kid.  There was just something about him that made me want to slap the taste from his mouth.  His douchey smile maybe?  His big block of a head?  The fact that he was getting so much robot poon?  I don’t know, but whatever it was, it was enough for me to later build a tiny concentration camp, buy up all of the Turbos on Ebay, and imprison them there.

4. Pocket

Hahahaha.  Leave it to the Gobots to take perhaps the coolest car of the 1980s, the Lamborghini, and turn it into this travesty of a robot.  Poor Pocket.  The other Gobots teased him incessantly, calling him such cruel names as “Tyrannosaurus arms.”   A lack of creativity is a theme with Gobots: Pocket “transforms” by pulling down his legs and pulling out his little gimpy arms.

5. Mr. Moto

OH.  MY.  GOD.

6. Zeemon

Zeemon is sporting some dope-ass ostrich legs there.  I mean from an engineering standpoint, I’m SURE those legs can support the weight of his body.

Tonka designer 1: Shit, we forgot the head.

Tonka designer 2: Ahh fuck it, just like make the head the windshield or something.

Tonka designer 1: God I love you.  Make love to me.

7. Treds

So like how does Treds climb a set of stairs?  Put a pair of jeans on?  Live with himself?

(we know … it is a transformer…. our bad.)

8. Psycho

My God Psycho, just look at those saddlebags.  You are an embarrassment to the Renegade cause.  I mean would it kill you to lay off the Ho Hos and do some squat thrusts?

9. Screw Head

Screw Head and I have a love/hate thing going on, as he may or may not have been the first and only inanimate object I put into my anus as a child, leading to months of reconstructive surgery and awkward explanations to my parents.

10. Gobot Command Center

Tonka couldn’t even get the Gobot storage case right, as this travesty looks like a cross between an At-At and a pregnant Dachshund.

Dried peach or Maya Angelou’s vagina?  You decide

Yeah, I know what some of you are thinking, and yes there are a couple of slang words for it.  Button, for example, or Little Man in the Boat (worst slang term ever), maybe a couple of other obscure ones here or there.  But that’s just about it.

How can this be, you ask?  I mean the penis alone has 12,462 slang terms associated with it.  And yes, I counted.  So how can it be that the clitoris has nary a dirty word used to describe it?  I’ve given this some very serious thought and the answer is simple: the female clitoris is a myth.

I base these findings on more than just the above evidence.  Consider the following collection of data:

1. I have yet to witness an actual female orgasm.  Who amongst us has?
2. If there was such a thing as a clitoris, then it would almost be like a mini penis, making me gay for stroking it tenderly.  I am not gay.  Therefore, the clitoris doesn’t exist.
3. Female genetalia is already impossibly complicated.  Would Mother Nature REALLY cock block us guys further by adding a tiny nub of flesh that none of us knows how to use?
4. For thousands of years there was no such thing as the clitoris.  Then suddenly in the past 100 years the feminist scio-nazis declare that there is one, and that it is possible for women to “derive pleasure from sex” and suddenly it’s a reality?  I think not.

So in conclusion, FACT: the female clitoris is a myth.  Discuss amongst yourselves.

All I could do was laugh as I was repeatedly tut tutted, pooh poohed, and in some cases anally raped by these bespectacled Geek Squad employees.  The following are some of my favorite comments, along with my response.

“Vectrex rocked. Epic idiocy to put it on this list.”

There must have been 100 comments about how I was an idiot for putting the Vectrex on here, it was awesome, blah blah blah.  Fair enough folks, I guess I was wrong, I guess this:

is not only a great looking console, but was great gameplay for 1982, the same year that consoles like Atari were out.  My bad.

“LOL at calling the Odyssey 2 an Atari ripoff. The original Odyssey was the very first consumer video game console, and Atari are the ones who ripped off that. Yet you attack the Odyssey 2 for being an Atari ripoff. Hardly fair.”

I got a lot of similar comments to this one as well.  And while yes, it’s true, the Odyssey 2 came first, anyone who owned one in the 80s (especially those of us like me and Bobby, whose parents bought them at a yard sale long after their glory days were over) know that pretty much all of their later games were Atari or arcade ripoffs.  They couldn’t afford a licensing deal, so you ended up playing fucking KC Munchkin instead of Pac Man.  I mean look at this embarrassing little shit:

No 5th grade kid in the 80s wanted to say to their friends: “hey, wanna come over and play KC Munchkin?”  You were liable to get a swift kick to the taint.

“terribly unfunny article.”

Concise, to the point, and 100% accurate.  Kudos mate.

“‘The Studio II veritably SCREAMS fun and excitement. Is it just me, or does it look more like something you’d plug one of those old-fashioned hair dryers into (the kind you wore on your head) then something you’d use to play Pong?’

Why “veritably”? “Then” is incorrect. It should be “than.” The word order is clunky and the sentence could be more evocative.”

Do you think this person has any fun, like ever?  I mean imagine you are trapped in the type of OCD perfectionist hell that forces you to correct minor grammatical errors and question the word choices on a little wisp of a blog that is about ugly computer consoles.  Are you imagining it?  OK, now take the gun out of your mouth and forget you ever tried to walk in this poor bag of douche’s shoes.

“Not only are they wrong about the Vectrex, but they used the phrase “epic fail” to describe it. I swear, I am sick and damn tired of people saying “epic fail.” Please, let that die already!”

You know what, this guy is totally right.  The phrase is played out and that was lazy writing on my part.  Consider it retired.

“What HAVE you done in these times that’d be *that* much more beautiful, smartass? Please, fukofandiemoron!”

Heard of a little thing called the Polio vaccine asshole?  Huh?  How about space flight?  Oreo cookies?  Tanning beds?  Scientology?  All me pricko.  FACE

“You should probably give up blogging, dude.”

Point taken.  But then how would I pay for my 3 mansions and my fleet of yachts?

annnnnnd, drumroll please…..

“Seems like this post was written by a spoiled prima donna whining bitch. Back when most of these systems came out, they looked good. They fit the trends of the days; in this case, the 70’s and early 80’s. Instead of appreciating what some of these systems did for the industry (if anything), you decide to whine and complain about the least important thing about a console: how it looks. They were designed to fit the designs and trends at the time. Browns and yellows were popular for decor back in the 70’s/early 80’s. While you may think the 360 and PS3 look good today, in 15 or 20 years you’ll be bitching about those too. “Oh, they’re too big. What kind of crap technology did they have to make them so huge. The PS3 looks like a black George Foreman grill”. Fuck off, you dummy. Stop wasting people’s time with stupid posts by knocking what was technologically advanced and affordable at the time they were released, you spoiled cunt.”

You’re not going to believe this, but using advanced Internet tracking tools, I actually obtained a photo of this pleasant young man:

OK, so maybe that’s just how I picture him, and all of these other kooky commentors.  Is it wrong that when I picture them in my head, I get just a little hard?

Philips Tele-Spiel 1975

Can you imagine the HOURS of fun to be had by sliding the knob up and down on your joystick?  The gameplay must be outstanding.

Fairchild F - 1976

Fact: The Fairchild was the first and only console to come with its own set of breast milk pumps, pictured above.

RCA Studio II – 1977

The Studio II  veritably SCREAMS fun and excitement.  Is it just me, or does it look more like something you’d plug one of those old-fashioned hair dryers into (the kind you wore on your head) then something you’d use to play Pong?

Magnavox Odyssey 2 – 1978

Alright, so maybe the Odyssey 2 looks more cheesy than straight-up ugly, but the fact that I owned one has given me a lifelong grudge against this piece of shit Atari knockoff.  Fuck you Odyssey 2, fuck you and your Pac Man wannabe KC Munchkin right in your digital cornholes.  OK, I feel a little better now.

Epoch TV Block – 1979

I’m sorry, but pink is not a good color…for ANYTHING, much less a game console.  And what’s with the huge washing machine-looking knob?

Voltmace Database Games – 1980

Any good designer will tell you that the perfect color pallette is brown, gold, yellow, and sea green.  I mean that’s just common knowledge in the industry.  I love the name of this one too.  VOLTMACE!  It’s bold, but sounds more like a personal safety product.

MB Vectrex – 1982

The Vectrex’s big idea was to add its own monitor so you wouldn’t have to connect to those pesky TVs.  Of course the tradeoff was that their games looked like they were straight out of 1977.  Epic Fail.

Philips Videopac – 1983

Um, is that a video game console or a microfiche reader?

Rollet Videocolor – 1983

Early working name for the Videocolor?   The SeizureMaster 5000.

Nintendo Virtual Boy – 1995

Ya know, if you’re going to force me to wear a gigantic, douchey-looking set of goggles, your games better deliver the goods in a big way.  Luckily, they do.  I mean check out this totally totally rad screenshot:

In your face Sega.  In your face.

As with my first blog, be sure to check out www.old-computers.com

My question stands: dare I go back?  Dare I?  And if so, what awaits me?  This?

or this?