How many Sleeping Beauty characters are stupid? All of em.

I mentioned yesterday how insanely idiotic Sleeping Beauty's characters were. Okay, so I said they were stupid, same thing. I'll start from the beginning; The happy kingdom has a kid, and fairies show up to bless her with beauty and song, because apparently genetics weren't enough to gamble on her being ugly. Or maybe her mom was hideous at birth and the faeries wanted to stack the deck in her favor. Anyway, Maleficent, an evil faerie, shows up pissed and crashes the party because she wasn't invited. Probably because she is the kind of person that crashes parties simply because she wasn't invited.

So she curses the kid; on her 16th birthday, she will prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die. Nice, curse a baby because her parents snubbed you, probably because you shit in the punch bowl once. Your name's Maleficent, for Christ's sake.

So Merryweather, who apparently is not as powerful as Maleficent (evil is always stronger in these things. Great message for the kids.) tweaks the curse so that the girl won't die, she'll just go into a coma until the man who loves her gives her a smooch. Remember this; it's important later.

So what do you think her parents do? Sit on it for the next decade and a half and then work on protecting their kid? Maybe help her find that special someone (they had already arranged her marriage to the kid from the next kingdom) so she could prick her finger and then immediately get a kiss? No, those would be simple solutions that a non-idiot might consider. Instead, they do what any reasonable parents would do; they order every spinning wheel in the kingdom burned (how many livelihoods did that destroy?) and send their brand new baby daughter out to the woods to be raised by the faeries that were already not strong enough to stop the evil one in the first place.

The three faeries then proceed to raise her to be afraid of any and all strangers until it is time for her to go back to the kingdom and become the princess and marry the prince. On her 16th birthday. Now, think about this for a second; the curse says she will prick her finger on her 16th birthday. Not the day after, the day of. So why not wait 1 day? Nope, bring her out of hiding the fucking second she is actually in danger. They had 15 years, 364 safe days leading up to that day, and the rest of her life after it.

This is like going back in time and telling everyone involved with President Kennedy's drive through Dallas that he was going to get his brains blown out, they believe you, and wind up closing some libraries and sending him out anyway.

Sorry, dude. It turns out that a kiss from Marilyn Monroe would have stuffed your brain back into your melon. Guess you should have rethought that whole "shutting her up" thing.

So they wheel her out on the day she is fated to almost die (but not really) and Maleficent finds out and lures her into the castle tower and, because the girl is in a trance, makes her prick her finger on a spinning wheel she conjured out of nothing. Hmm. Seems like hiding her for her childhood was kind of a waste time. Maybe if they had waited one fucking day, that would not have happened. Shit, they could have lied about what day her birthday was and the evil one's plan would have been fucked. Apparently, the kingdom was slaved to stupid.

But don't worry, to spare the parent's grief of their daughter being asleep until they could find someone who really liked her, the good faeries put the entire kingdom to sleep.

What?! Wait, hold on a second. You mean to tell me they can knock out an entire country, but they can't lift a curse? So they find out that the princess has indeed found a true love and it's the prince she was arranged to marry. Sweet! But he's been captured by Maleficent. So no biggie, the y just teleport in and free him.

What the fuck? They can teleport? And they give him a magical shield and sword. I think they were holding  out the whole time. Either that, or they spent the princess's childhood in the woods killing boars and gaining XP.

So the prince rides to the sleepy kingdom to give the princess a kiss, and Maleficent shows up and turns into this:

Wait a godamn minute.... What was that shit with the spinning wheel? She clearly was acting purely out of spite, why not turn into a dragon and bite the princess in half? If you wanted to crush the parents emotionally, I think bisecting their kid would do that.


You can see how this all worked out; the entire story is filled with dilemmas with a clearly right decision and a clearly wrong one, and they all choose the wrong one. The prince is the only non idiot in the whole thing, once he is done being fucked with, he simply goes and stabs the dragon, kisses the girl and saves the day.

Instead of "Sleeping Beauty", it should be called "The Prince in the Sea of Stupid."

The Queen from Snow White

First off, if you are still following this blog, holy shit, and thank you.

Next, my kid is watching Snow White, and a thing occurred to me; why does the queen try to have Snow White killed? Because she is younger and more beautiful? She was a sorceress and presumably had the political power to treat the princess of the kingdom like a peasant and the magical ability to polymorph into an old woman and brew apple poison that would have made the princess sleep forever; that is some serious shit.

 Not to mention the fact that she had a sentient omniscient mirror at her disposal. Speaking of the mirror...

Did Snow White suddenly blossom into a woman that morning? Was she a troll until that day, somehow waking up with porcelain skin and beautiful hair? Did she suddenly grow boobies? I ask these things, because as the story goes, at least what we see in the movies, the queen was apparently the hottest piece of tail around until that fateful morning at the beginning of the film.

Or maybe he was lying to shut her up. Or just a dick who nearly got a kid killed because he was tired of saying "Oh, you're totally hot still... You're what? 50? What are you hoping for? Bo Derek had wrinkles at 50 and Demi Moore looks like a fucking dude now. But yeah, you're a total dish."

She is so vain, she has her huntsman take the girl out into the woods to not just kill her, cut out her heart and bring it home in a box. Seriously? What the fuck, Disney?! My 5 year old daughter watches this. For perspective, the last movie I watched on the very same Blu-Ray player was Rango, which had exactly 0 heart-murders, even inferred. Before that? Equilibrium, which has a face sliced off and a shitload of shooting, but still; no hearts being cut out of girls.

So we've established that the queen is a wizard, a powerful one, and President for Life. Why not slip some ugly potion into Snow White's oatmeal? Or have your maid throw some battery acid in her face? The point being, literally every alternative to "Trust a third party to go somewhere that I can't see to do something that would have made Hitler pause" would have been better. But she does, and what does a woman so self absorbed she'll sentence a royal child to death because she was better looking do?

Turn herself into this:

That makes sense. That's like fancying yourself the best smelling lady in the land, and then rolling around in cow pies to get revenge on the person judged better smelling. Never mind the fact that the mirror sees fit to tell her the next day that she still isn't the fairest. He knew Snow White was still alive, yet slept on it because, you know... He's apparently a big fat dong of a mirror.

That dress doesn't make your ass look fat; your ass does. 

And the wrinkles on your forehead look like a scrotum. How's it feel to be second best?

Then there is the fact that despite being the ruler of a kingdom, she opts to go take out Snow White herself. Okay, I will grant her that the last person she sent fucked her pretty good, but at this point she knew where the princess was; living with dwarfs. Keep in mind, these weren't "Little People, Big World" dwarfs that are just people, these were fantasy dwarfs. Like Gimli.

Hi-ho, motherfucker.

Okay, so Peter Jackson won't be hiring me to pen shitty one liners any time soon, but the fact remains that the 7 dwarfs wind up being what I have come to expect from dwarfs after over 20 years of Dungeons & Dragons; they grab pickaxes and chase the old bitch to her doom. And by doom, I mean, struck by lightning, falling off a cliff, and a giant boulder falling the same distance on top of her. (Seriously Disney... What the fuck?)

I guess what I am getting at is that if she had kept away from stupid knee-jerk reactions, she could have saved herself a lot of grief. I mean, Jeffry Dahmer was a bit of an idiot, and even her managed to kill 17 people. You're in charge of a country, exercise some creativity for Christ's sake.

On the other hand, at least she didn't reach the magnitude of stupidity displayed good and evil alike in Sleeping Beauty, but that's a different post for a different day.

Buy a book, donate to a worthy cause

If you have a Kindle or an iPhone, go grab The Four Humors, a collection of short stories by some of the best writers Cracked.com has to offer, plus original artwork and a foreword by none other than JDATE's David Wong.


I had nothing to do with this particular book, but most of the team is also working on a book I helped write and edit, so I am showing my solidarity.

Just call me "Darth"

I was perusing some articles over on Wired.com and came across this:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/st_dropdownmenus/

And here is the final line:

So come up with something good. Grand Vizier? Empress Regent? Darth and Mr.? It’s your box, and it’s achingly blank.

It got me thinking; why do I insist on going by "Sir" or "Mr" (not that anyone calls me either)? I now proclaim I shall be referred to as "Darth" from now on. "Can I fill your cup, sir?"

No!

"Can I fill your cup, Darth?"

Yes! (and it's "may I", punk)

So, from now on, it's no more "Mr Dietle", it's "Darth Dietle."

Some BK: Part 2 of what will be a continuing thing on Fast Food

As previously mentioned in this very blog, I love fast food. Today, I decided to extol a little on the virtues of Burger King. It's been years now that fast food restaurants have made their menu's nutrition information transparent to us; if you want to know how much a McNugget is giving you in fat and calories, just Google it, or even check the bottom of the box they came in. No doubt, when this first went into practice, more than a few fast food executives probably thought it would spell the end of fast food as we know it.

Fortunately for our race, we collectively aren't that stupid; this is why society as a whole has not choked to death on it's own spit. Our world is full of morons, but even though they are loud, they are not in the majority, so for every 1 person who looked at the nutrition information on a fast food meal and screamed "That greasy slab of beef covered in mayo cheese and bacon was bad for me?!?! AHHHHHH!", there were about 10,000 who shrugged as he ran off, because they weren't surprised, they knew that shit was bad for them.

So here we are with BK. Supersize Me was biased aimed at McDonald's, but Ronald and company has nothing on the King. In fact, while Mickey D's was dropping Supersize from the menu, and Morgan Spurlock frolicked in a field somewhere, feasting on self-righteousness (which is Vegan and low in cholesterol, I hear), Burger King was not only not in the "They're killing us with saturated fat and sodium!" spotlight, they unveiled the Enormous Omelet Sandwich, which I believe the Japanese refer to as "Fuck you health breakfast" or something like that.

Note, while searching for the Bk sandwich link up there, this is what Google's autofill came up with:

The third one down made me choke on my drink.

Anyway, that attitude carries on to this day, and their cavalier attitude towards your ability to not have your arteries seize on fat is admirable and obvious. Just look at the Flash intro to their nutrition menu. I wish I could link you directly to it here, but they probably have some security in place preventing hot-linking, as they should. But if you don't feel like clicking, it looks like this at some point:

That, boys and girls, is completely unapologetic food porn. Whoever is the Ray Crock of Burger King is the Larry Flint of fast food. I suppose that makes McDonald's the Playboy of fast food; they never show you everything, the pictures are doctored and the food is less whorish, but it's really just a watered down version of the other.

Once you actually get into the menu, the fun starts in earnest. I made this:

I wanted to show it in full size because I wanted you to be able to read the nutrition info on that monstrosity. See, the menu configurator thing apparently lets you design a meal that you can order for real at any one of their fine BK locations. That started off as a Quad Stacker. Then I added 4 more kinds of cheese, onion fries, a whopper patty, an Angus patty, a Tendercrisp Chicken fillet, a fish fillet, a veggie burger, extra Stacker sauce and ketchup. Oh, and pickles. I think maybe a goldfish or a baby wound up in there at some point, I am not sure; I got a little carried away adding stuff.

I also added lettuce and tomato, but whether it was because of the sheer amount of garbage I crammed onto the bun or a sign of Burger King's continued war on health, they disappeared out the top of the configurator. They literally let you build food too large for the food builder to display properly.

Kudos to you BK. Kudos for not caring what others think, even when that means people have inadvertently committed suicide with your food. I love you all the same.

Burger King; Don't fuck with us, or we'll make you eat here.

Minivan rear doors: The hidden danger

That right there is a picture of a brutal pummeling instrument. Now, that is just a picture I found on Google image search, not my wife's minivan, but the design is pretty similar. I have walked into those fucking things plenty of times in the past, but this morning I had an incident that convinced me they are pure evil and must be stopped, like a much more boring version of the machines in Maximum Overdrive.

I had opened the back of the van to remove a bunch of boxes and to put trash in the back because we have to take our trash to the dump (every day is trash day for us!) and as I stepped around the back of the van with 2 large bags of garbage, the rear door leaped out and punched me in the forehead. I swear this; I did not just walk into it, because I have suffered several head injuries, some traumatic (like the time a 50 lb table hit me in the head and I had to get 7 staples in my scalp to close it up. That made me dizzy and bloody.) but this morning, my vision went black, then I saw stars.

That's "getting attacked" behavior, not "stupidly walking into an inanimate object" behavior. My head has been swimming all morning and I want nothing more than to crawl under my desk and sleep, which I am pretty sure is a symptom of a concussion. Or maybe a symptom of not enough coffee, but I will go with the more dramatic option because it make me feel like a TV character instead of some random idiot who didn't look up.

This is not the first time I have walked into the rear door of my wife's van, although it is (so far) the most painful and the only one to give me a lasting headache, so if I should happen to not wake up tonight, I would like to say "kiss my ass" to everyone on planet earth for not making my stay here more comfortable and loaded with beer and lap dances from my wife.


If I don't die, then I am totally kidding, I love you all and keep following my blog because I need the attention. And always keep your eyes peeled for low-hanging mini van doors; you never know when one may be lurking nearby, just waiting to brain you and doom you to an eternal sleep.

I've heard they even sneak onto airplanes.

And if there is a Hell, I am going to it.

Death in Kid's Movies

I recently (finally) finished watching Toy Story 3. There is a long story about my daughter freaking out during the daycare scene because it was fucking loud and terrifying, (okay, so it's apparently a really short story) but basically we went to go see it in the theater on Father's day and I only saw the first hour. Well, my mother in law just gave us the DVD, so I finally got to see the whole thing, and Holy Shit... Spoilers to follow. (for Toy Story 2 and 3, Transformers the movie, and some other kid's movies. You have been warned.)

Believe me when I say this; 

this movie will likely scare the shit out of your young child.

So, my wife and I were watching TS3 (which is what I will refer to it as from now on 'cause im lzy) and realized that even though it is rated G, there was no way we could let our daughter watch it. You see, these movies all have some pretty disturbing implications when you think about them; Toy Story 2 (TS2) for instance; Jesse has some horrible abandonment issues, and Prospector Stinky is messed up, way messed up. But he gets his, right? He winds up in the hands of a child who mutilates and paints up her toys. For toys, I am pretty sure that is like living a Saw sequel, but I guess that's fitting since he threatened to take Woody apart piece by piece. (speaking of Saw...)

The third one is several times more disturbing, but comes with some pretty useful lessons for small children, like "growing up will emotionally destroy your once-loved toys" and "new people are terrifying sociopaths under the surface, especially the friendly ones who smell nice."

Kids, that there is the face of evil. once you get his back-story, he is even more frightening than Big baby, who combines the already freaky-ass imagery of a baby doll that speaks entirely in baby sounds, it combines it all with a shriek-inducing Paris Hilton quality lazy eye:

Honestly, Big Baby scared the hell out of me when I first saw him, and pretty consistently for the rest of the movie, until it turns out he was lied to. Oh yeah, Lotso Huggin Bear is a royal shithead; he is accidentally forgotten, and then because he was replaced, he turns into a bastard who lies to the other two toys that were left because, you know, fuck everyone if he couldn't be happy.

But the awful doesn't end there; by the end of the movie, he is revealed to the other toys for the asshat he is, and after he is rescued by Woody and friends from a garbage shredding machine, he is given a chance to save them all from a fiery death, and runs off. You hear that kids? If you help people, they will screw you. I say that because he is saved by Woody and Buzz because they hope he will stop the conveyor belt that is dragging them and tons of shredded trash into an inferno.

Losto is repaid for his douchebaggery by being lashed to the front of a garbage truck, presumably until he shreds after years of exposure, or until , well forever. In Toy Story, toys have their own Hell. But the worst part is when the hero toys from the series wind up in a huge, slow moving whirlpool of flaming garbage, drifting inexorably toward a fiery end. After some ineffective attempts to crawl against the falling trash, they start holding hands. Cute, right?

Nope, they are grimly accepting that they are all going to burn to death. In a kid's movie! Holy Shit! Pixar! What the fuck? Did your dad die while making this? Jesus, that part was dark for an adult movie. It's not like the scene was horribly inappropriate; it would have been fine in an adult movie, and was actually one of the few non-idiotic scenes in Armageddon but God....

I also mentioned Transformers: The Movie. I am, in fact, referring to the "kid friendly" animated film from the 80s. I still remember it vividly; it was one of the first movies I went to myself. I lived on Grissom AFB in Indiana and was about as die hard a Transformers fan as there could be at the time. In the opening of the movie, after we get past the cheesy 80s guitar music and the "Hey, we're fun-loving! Something awful is just around the corner!" scenes, and after the ominous planet eating-planet-opening, we get treated to some good old fashioned Transformer fighting! Yeah! Robots! Lasers!

Death!!!

Wait, what? What the hell?!

Do you recognize this guy? I do; that's Ironhide. He was a Transformers staple in the 80s. He is also dead less than 15 minutes into the movie. It turns out that a lot of the cartoon's plot-lines could have been trimmed down to Starscream using Megatron as the gun he was. He kills every god damn Autobot on a spaceship in under a minute with Megatron as a gun. Boom. Dead.

EDIT: I Found the video on Youtube:

The worst part is probably Prowl buying the farm; it's a kid's movie, yet we see the light fade from his eyes, and smoke pour out of his mouth as he tumbles to the floor. And I forgot that Ironhide and the ambulance jerk spasmodically as gunshot after gunshot rips through them. No wonder I'm so screwed up.

Then they did the equivalent of murdering Transformer Jesus for fun Hostel-style; they kill Optimus Prime. I mean seriously. Why not make a My Little Pony movie and shoot Pinky Pie in the face 20 minutes in. Seriously people, that's fucking brutal.

Disney is pretty bad about this kind of thing. It's like Mickey and Goofy hang out and snort coke, then laugh while bathing in the tears of terrified children. Have you seen the end of The Little Mermaid? After Ursula loses her shit because she killed her own eels, she grows huge(r) and gets rammed by a ship. The prow pops her like a balloon! AHHHHH!

Let's also not forget, they gave us Bambi, where a young child's father is an absentee and mom gets fucking shot. It's only a matter of time before Dora finds the remains of several kittens who were burned in a forest fire and has to bring the arsonist to justice, is what I am getting at.


Holy Hell, Hollywood. Let the kids get fucked over by their classmates in high school to get their innocence ripped away, I guess I am saying.

Oh, the ironicness

I have not posted anything in weeks, and when I finally do, it's because I wrote an article about Immortality, and then linked it to my blog about Death. As Bart Simpson said, the ironing is delicious. Basically, science is offering us several alternatives to dying in the coming century, which is pretty cool. Except...


The world is still filled with bullets, rogue waves and scary foreigners who apparently want to kill us all (every country has someone who hates them for no apparent reason. Like to fucking Lilliputians.... God I hate those smug, Gulliver kidnapping assholes....) Of course, why would anyone want to live forever? After all, movies like The Highlander and Wolverine show us why it could suck, but there is an important consideration to be had here; those movies involve that one-off guy who can't die, as opposed to an entire society that decided not to. There's a pretty big difference.


In the second case, there is not that heartbreak because the love of your life turned into a feeble old coot who once baked the cat in a flurry of utter culinary confusion brought on by senility; she is right there with you, outliving trees and marveling that when you were in your first century of life, dogs didn't yet control Haiti and speak fluent Esperanto. It completely changes the game.

Add to that, we have huge advancements in military tech that is significantly increasing the survivability of our troops, on those odd occasions that we wind up actually having to send them. We have UVS and unmanned ground vehicles in the works, not to mention power armor and DARPA trying to make genetic enhancements to our guys and girls in the military that will turn them into super-humans.

So, it looks like immortality will probably A. happen (and soon. ish.) and B. not be the Highlander type where you can jump off a sky scraper or play RoboCop cosplay with actual criminals, but at least that whole peeing yourself and forgetting your kid's names thing will be a thing of the past, or at least only a problem after your weekly drinking binge.