We lost a few celebrities this year. One guy that molested children and owned a chimp…  then there was some other people that did some stuff. All of them though couldn’t hold a torch to a man… no a legend… that we lost over the weekend.  (Except maybe Bea Arthur.)

Ken Ober the former host of one of the single greatest TV shows ever on MTV, “Remote Control” died over the weekend.

I’ve professed my love of “Remote Control” before. The show taught me that my encyclopedia like knowledge of pop culture was worth something. My sense of humor was shaped a little bit by the show. Teaching me that apparently sarcasm was funny and it led to Kari Wuhrer sitting next to you.

(Note: Being sarcastic does not lead to Kari Wuhrer sitting next to you in middle school. Just a girl with green boogers in her nose and a kid that you made fun of for shitting himself on the bus in the forth grade.)

Also the show introduced me to Colin Quinn, Adam Sandler, and Dennis Leary.

Half the time I missed out on the double entendre because I was like 10-12 when the show was on but whatever, at least I was learning stuff about “I Love Lucy” and music videos. Ober was the ultimate game show host. He deftly cracked wise, talked to his mother upstairs, and managed a three ring circus of people that routinely showed up half in the bag for every show.

Next to Chuck Berris he was the single greatest game show host of all time.

(Take your Richard Dawson and Bob Barkers and jam them up your ass.)

The Labor Day edition of Remote Control where they did a telethon for gingivitis:

All class… Trying to fight for a disease that doesn’t get talked about enough…. (If only he could have had more time.)

I always secretly hoped that I could host a new version of “Remote Control” or the “Gong Show”. Now I know that isn’t going to happen and I have to just learn to appreciate the genius that was Ken Ober.

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.

You dying does not help me out. That means less traffic, less fame, and me one step further away from making a sex tape with Carrie Prejean entitled, “We All Mistakes: Breast Implants, Sex Tapes, and Screwing Bobby Finstock are all Christian-like”. In order to prevent the slide that could happen I have decided to take matters into my own hands and copy the strategy of Saturday Night Live and the Country Music Awards to attract a younger audience…. More Taylor Swift.

Now I know some of us older folks are sitting there saying, “Why not Miley Cyrus?” I thought she was the teenage girl of the moment. Oh it couldn’t be further from the truth there are three simple reasons why Taylor Swift is the way to go:

1) She has better teeth.

2) Her father isn’t Billy Ray Cyrus.

3) Taylor Swift shits unicorn tears mixed with fairy dust and baby laughter. While Miley is a bratty Disney stooge that will be pregnant before she is twenty and will be yet another cautionary tale of why we don’t let rednecks get famous. (See the Spears family.)

So from here on out each blog post will have a gratuitous Taylor Swift mention and picture. Perhaps even throwing in a video a week.

Additionally there will be other changes.

1) More Boy Talk- Who ‘s hot and who’s not? Who is your weekly crush object? You can’t say the werewolf from Twilight because he is mine.

2) Increased news about “sexy vampires”- Between True Blood, Twilight, a new movie that I have zero desire to see, and a show on a network that I didn’t know existed except for it having three-way sex on the Gossip Girl. Nobody is sick of the sexy vampire thing… Hot? You bet. Brooding? Of course. Mysterious? No doubt. Logical stories and a replacement for all your failed relationships? YES!

3) Sparkles. Lots and lots of sparkles.

What is your level of excitement when it comes to these changes?

 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.

I have to say I completely love the entire Balloon Boy thing and I hope his dad doesn’t go to jail. There aren’t enough hoaxes pulled off anymore. Saying that whatever celebrity, one that is probably either slightly washed up or unheard from for a while, is dead doesn’t constitute a hoax. However faking your son’s disappearance coupled with an exciting balloon chase totally kicks ass.

Everyone is piling on the guy because of his blatant attempt to use this to gain a reality show yet we celebrate Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian for flashing their beavers and taping their sexual escapades with people that most girls hammered in a bar wouldn’t let touch them. At least this guy did it with some gusto and the threat of the death of a preschooler. That takes talent, working a video camera and acting like a whore doesn’t.

Actually I think the whore path to fame has totally worn out. America has grown tired of these antics and really craves for something pure. So we have turned to children, which has led to Octomom, Jon and Kate, and Balloon Boy. (So much for pureness.)

Now that I can’t fuck my way into the spotlight and the fact that kids take too long to develop I need to think about what is coming next and how to become the leader in that category. I know being a complete idiot and walking around with an extra chromosome while looking for a date is cool (see any VH-1 show) that won’t last long either. So I have to figure out how I can land a reality show:

1) Exploitation of animals- I have decided to wear an all kitten coat this winter. The kicker is that the kittens won’t be dead; they will just be attached to the coat. People will pet them and feed them… There might be an issue with feces but what the hell you can’t smell through a television. Each week I could find a new way to exploit an animal for personal attention… I can’t wait for Rhino week.

2) Race baiting- We are supposed to be living in a “post racial America” but anyone that has turned on cable news or watched five minutes of a tea party video knows that is far from the case. “Our use of the term coon is totally humorous.”

So why don’t I try to recreate the movie “Soul Man” and use it to prove that we don’t live in a post racial society? What is that I smell? An Emmy in the reality category or maybe that is the potential cross burning on my lawn?

3) Drug Trafficker- For some reason when people do something on reality television the law doesn’t apply to them. How many times have we witnessed someone driving drunk, punching, and other things where the people have no repercussions? So why can’t we do something super illegal and film it the entire time with the logic that we are taping a reality show? Murder for hire? Drug Mule? Prostitute? Wall Street CEO… The possibilities are endless.

Personally I am a big fan of the drug mule one. When I am at the border and the drug dogs are going ape shit I can just explain that the 75 condoms that I swallowed full of H is for a reality show. Genius? I think so.

So now that whores and children are out of the picture as a way to become a reality star what is next?

This week an Ohio amusement park prepared for their annual Halloween decoration including a celebrity graveyard with the likes of Michael Jackson, Teddy Kennedy, and…

Steve McNair.

Nothing says Halloween like recreating a murder suicide.

Do you think for the Michael Jackson one he had an IV going to his arm and was surrounded by a bunch of little boys?

So far that really hasn’t happened. Instead we have… uh… I guess Christian Bale?

I totally could kick his ass

Bale isn’t really lame enough to be a proper action star. He has a track record of actually being able to act which eliminates him from true action star status also he is from another country. (We will get into that later.) Bale is also kind of on the small side. Sure he is ripped but I want to believe that the action star could rip my head off, pull out my bladder through my esophagus, and then replace my bladder with the testicles of an evil henchman. I don’t feel like Bale can do that.

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of options right now for action stars. I don’t think Matt Damon can kill me either. He has to be 4 ft tall. Of course you have all the comic book movie actors like Toby McGuire who is an older Michael Cera (aka the awkward soft spoken dude) who I think I could kill with a fart. Then you have Hugh Jackman does musicals, which automatically makes him either gay or a pussy. (not that there is anything wrong with that)

And not to be xenophobic but I can’t get behind Daniel Craig or Clive Owen because they are British. I like both of them but I need my action stars to be an American citizen. I like to think that even though they could kill me with their bare hands that I am smarter than them and would probably make for a good arch villain with high odds of defeating them. British people don’t make me feel that way because whenever an English person speaks I automatically think they are intelligent because of their accent.

The lack of a true action hero might be the biggest disappointment of my adulthood.

I was really looking forward to renting action movies for my nephew to watch where the hero rips off a steam pipe from the wall and throws it into the chest of the bad guy that was made in the last ten years. Death by a foreign object is so much better than some CGI lightening bolt or other computer generated special effect. I need implausible deaths compounded by horribly written lines.

Looks like I am going to have to break out “Total Recall” and let him see what a chick with a third breast looks like.

Great.Uncle.Ever.

Don’t you miss shitty action movies?

When “The Real World” launched on MTV almost two decades ago I pretty much watched every season. It wasn’t that I would commit and watch every week or anything, I just knew at some point I would be lying in bed hung-over on a Saturday or Sunday and there would be a marathon that would catch me up on it.  We’ve all been there.

Eventually my interest began to wan when they started assigning jobs to the cast. Also the trend of each season having someone goad another person into a fight because they knew if the other person touched them that they would have to go home was lame. If there is violence in the real world why couldn’t I have violence in my fake real world set to a soundtrack of crappy songs? The days of throwing stuffed animals into the water and bitch slaps were over…

After at least a 5-7 year hiatus from the show I have been dragged back in to the Real World Cancun.

Is it still fake? Yeah.

Is it still staged with people getting lame jobs so they “do stuff”? Uh huh.

Do I feel like I have zero connection to the cast? No doubt. Yeah I don’t even know who the hell the people are on the show. I just refer to them by the stereotypes they fill… The gay guy, the slut, the black chick, the asshole, the rocker, the player… You know the same tired people they have been rolling out for years.

The gay one, the black one..... Everyone fits into their stereotypes...weeee

Then why watch it you ask… Four reasons.

1) Fight A: Two girls get into an argument, they have barely been housemates for two months and one drops the, “Well at least I wasn’t adopted” line.

That is like bringing a machine gun to an after school fight between two sixth grade girls. Who the hell drops that on someone they hardly know? I love it.

When you are getting to know someone and they open up giving you little pieces of their lives explaining who they are the last thing you do is turn around a week later and use that piece in a fight. It is such an over the top response that it defies all logic and reason. You are supposed to save that for the ultimate fight between you two when you want to send them into a massive and dark depression, hopefully making them contemplate ending it all… Speaking about ending it all.

2) Fight B: The girl that dropped the adoption comment wasn’t liked in the house and it was discovered that she was a cutter. So what is one to do with that information? Post signs throughout the house inviting her to cut herself including diagrams to show her how to finish the job.

Petty? Yes. Horrible? No doubt. Funny as hell? UH YES.

When you find someone has a horrible affliction and dealing with a mental disorder what should you do? If egg them on is your answer… well we need to become friends.

I can’t wait until next season. “Hey I heard Jessica loves crack… Maybe we should just leave mounds of it around the apartment hoping she goes on a binge and overdoses.”

3) A guy got kicked off for launching a fire extinguisher off of a hotel room balcony. Total destruction of other people’s property with no regard for human safety or other’s well being? Oh I am a fan. When you come home drunk from the bar one of the first things you should always consider doing is breaking something… right?

4) The preview for the show tonight mentions a three way….

Really what more do you need in summer television viewing… Nothing I say.

Yesterday was the second time ever that I have been accused of plagiarizing something and I take it pretty seriously. I rank plagiarizing accusations up there with baby killing, being an accused Yankees fan, and being an accused fan of Twilight. The comedian in question said I bit off of his Harry Potter act and sent his handful of fans over to comment on the post accusing me of lifting his act. Besides the fact that there are very remote similarities between the blog post and his standup clip what I find funny is that they are arrogant enough to think I would have ever heard of the guy to see the bit in question in the first place.

douche

First off his website blows and gets no traffic, he has a small social media presence, and the video in question got a whopping 845 views over the few months it has been up on YouTube.  I posted a video of me eating pudding and it was viewed over 5k times… Oh and the YouTube version of this blog post for Pop Crunch has had 14K views in ten days. Whatever… this isn’t about how much better I am than him or funnier or how much of a bigger penis I have…. It is about me allegedly stealing content.

(Redacted)  also performs in such major places as Appleton Wisconsin and resorts in the Bahamas. You know he is the crappy cruise ship comedian that can’t land a real tour or book real comedy club shows. So I can’t say that I have stumbled across him doing a set while I lived in LA or here in Boston. However if I lived in Bumblefuck West Virginia the odds are pretty high that I could catch his act along with goat herpes.

(I removed the video clip because the comic in question didn’t send people here.)

Here is the link to the blog in question.

What they have in common:

1) The general concept that the Harry Potter series is racist.

2) A Klan mention

3) And that there are no black kids or teachers in the school. Actually he said there are two I said there are none.

Holy crap they must be the same because they shared one general concept and mentioned two of the same words/phrases!!!!

So the accusation that I actually watched his content and then stole it is akin to me writing a joke about Jessica Simpson calling her fat on a piece of toilet paper in my bathroom and then seeing a Jessica Simpson is fat joke on the Tonight Show. After seeing that joke I send my lawyers after them accusing Conan O’Brien that one of his writers got a random ESP like feeling that I wrote a joke about Jessica Simpson, flew to Boston, broke into my house when I wasn’t home, shifted through my collection of toilet paper jokes and copied down my Jessica Simpson is fat bit. All of this even though the only thing the joke had in common was the name Jessica Simpson and the word fat.

In other words this is the dumbest fucking thing I have ever been accused of doing.

An apology would be nice, but I know I am not going to get it. So instead I am just going to blow up, give (redacted) some undeserved attention, and let you guys all soak in how absolutely ridiculous this all is.

Update: I removed the comedians name in question so it wouldn’t show up in search and removed his name from the comments.

Wow look at me I read “Fox in Socks” from cover to cover in a morning that makes me smart…. Losers.

I have to say that Harry Potter sucks, I think I have made that clear. I want to update my thoughts on why. It now boils down to two simple reasons.

Reason number one is that the bad guys are kind of lame. The villains in the batman television show had their shit together more than these guys. How hard is it to kill a kid? Apparently not that hard because that redneck whore in Florida Casey Anthony (who I wold totally bang) could figure it out but not these acclaimed masters of the dark arts? What gives? I can’t take any bad guy seriously if he can’t take out a kid.

The second reason is that the entire movie series is racist. Think about it. How many little black Hogwarts students do you see running around? Yeah… none. Sure they have whatever the fuck Hagrid is running around but not a little black dude rocking some nikes and a magical New Era Yankees hat? If there WERE some black students you know Harry wouldn’t have his honkey ass on the quidditch team. No instead his position would be held by little Lebron who is thinking about skipping University to go right to the pros, all while tapping Hermoine’s ass. Of course she would be four months pregnant with their bastard child and angling to get on MTV.

That isn’t enough for you to prove that this entire series is racist? How about this, what do you become when you finish Hogwarts? A wizard. You know what else has wizards… The Klu Klux Klan. That’s right… They have robes too. Let me guess on graduation day at Hogwarts you get a white robe with a hood.

Hogwarts Class of 2014

What about Sirius Black… Sure a white guy plays him but where does he end up? Prison. How racist is that? A black guys ends up in prison. How come he isn’t President? At the very least the school could have a “cool urban teacher” that was also the kids friend. Kind of like Mark Curry in “Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper” in fact I am sure he would be available for the roll.

And what type of magic do the bad guys practice? Dark arts… hmmm why don’t they just call it “black people aren’t welcome at our school and we hate them so much that we named the most evil magic after them” arts?

All I am saying is that if you like Harry Potter you are racist.