After looking around my new apartment complex (see story below), it seemed quite obvious to me that many people have no idea what patio space is meant for. And while there are plenty of sources for critical analysis of movies, digital cameras, or even interior decorating, there are not a lot of paid professionals ridiculing people who put a bench press on their porch. This is too bad – maybe it would happen less if there were. So I’ve decided to try. The first part of this effort involved taking pictures with my camera often pointed into someone’s apartment. Only one person stopped me so I told him I was writing a college paper on “The Application and Consequence of the Modern Patio.” He seemed confused just long enough for me to turn the corner and start walking faster. News flash buddy: I’m making fun of your shit on the internet!

*live tours available upon request

All four years in college I lived with roommates. After college, I spent a lot of time at my parents’ house. Here and there, I located myself in South Carolina, Seattle, and Cambodia, but mostly I stayed home because I had a nice room on the other side of the house with free cable and a weird girlfriend who didn’t seem to mind. Now, I am faced with all sorts of problems like bills and rent with only my name on them. Then there is laundry – I imagine it will be much harder to sneak a load in with someone else than it used to be. You see, I now share the laundry room with roughly 30 other strangers, 8 Mexican children, and two rodents. Most of the adults look like they wouldn’t take kindly to finding someone else’s workout socks in their washer, and one looks like he might take a little too kindly.

Another problem is that I have no roommates to complain to about the "little quirks" of my living space. I have to broadcast them over the internet instead. For instance, the cooling system has one lone dead spot in the entire apartment where it doesn’t reach – the area where my head hits the pillow in my bedroom. This means I wake up in the morning with my head sweating from the heat and my body sweating from the night chills. I hate mixing types of sweat.

And even though the apartment is quite spacious by lower-class standards, I still feel like it’s crowded. After all, I even have wrestling space, but for some reason, I feel like I will soon be overwhelmed by crap. I always fancied myself the kind of person to simplify (excluding CD’s and DVD’s, of course). Yet the life work of Walden or Thoreau or any of those naturalists (if I'm even getting their philosophy straight) never seems applicable in real life. What am I supposed to do with all my Xena action figures, collection of universal power adapters, and box of 49 envelopes? Throw them away?! I don’t think so. At least in this solitary crowded existence, I can make my computer wallpaper a pornographic picture without the fear of getting grounded at age 28. That makes up for a lot.

Batman Begins tells the story how the man became the bat! It reveals to us one of the ways Bruce Wayne trained in his early life was to visit remote countries and beat the hell out of prisoners in snowy slave camps. This immediately reminded me of a scenario I imagined myself doing when I pretended to go to Europe a few years ago. I told everyone I was taking a flight there and backpacking around something I read about in National Geographic called “Italy”. Every Thursday, I would go to the Starbucks down the street and write a mass e-mail detailing my adventures which ended in the country’s capital known as The City of Light…

That was my first e-mail home. As you can see, I opted to forego fantastic tales of beating up slaves and stuck with what I believe what would’ve really happened. All in all, it would have been a great trip, though not as cool as the new Batmobile – that thing is one angry-looking metal head away from being a Go-Bot! I give Batman Begins 4 stars.

THE MAGICAL PANTS OF NARNIA
by Nathan Fuller - 07.11.05

Other than the fact it was being called a “breezy-fun and profound… take on girls growing into women,” I had no idea what is was about. After trailers for both the Chronicles of Narnia and the new Harry Potter before the movie, I figured they were targeting the same demographic as this film, and it would be a lighthearted fantasy epic. At the very least, I expected the “Sisterhood” to be a teenage group of sanitized new-age Wiccans casting spells on the lame jocks at their high school. I was wrong - there was no witchery at all. And while the movie did have a pair of “magic” pants, they were probably the worst pair of “magic” pants in the history of super-powered clothing. All they did was fit anybody who put them on. I actually own a pair of pants like this – they’re called spandex shorts and they feel great on a summer day!

With no actual enchantment bestowed upon them from their pants, the four main characters, who all went on separate summer vacations, were left to progress in their individual storylines with no supernatural ability – one tried to do anything to sleep with her soccer coach, one tried to do anything to sleep with a Meditteranean lothario, and another one tried to do anything to sleep with some random dude playing video games at the Amco, but in the end she was too distracted by a dying little girl. The remaining Sister was too busy (read: too fat) to be into boys; so she tried to do anything to convince her adopted Aryan family that she was more than a stereotypical Chicano, mostly by launching into typical angry-Hispanic-female rants about how white everyone acted.

I was kind of bothered by the fact that a family movie was geared towards having so much sex with strangers. I was even more bothered by the fact I did not ignore the previous fact and enjoy the X-tina clone running around in Puma shorts on the beach more than I did, which was hardly at all. My favorite part was actually when the senior citizen next to me, up way past his bed time, blew his nose at the end of the movie. I don’t know why – it just was. On a scale of super-clothing, where Green Lantern’s ring is a 1 and Iron Man’s suit is a 10, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants rates a pair of extremely comfortable boxer briefs I bought at The Gap, the numerical equivalent of a 1.9.

As a freshman in college, one of my roommates, Kevin, and I would often play a game as we lay in our beds falling asleep at night. The game had a simple premise - one of us would ask which would be scarier between two things if they were spotted right outside our bedroom window. The purpose was to eventually find that one thing which we both found so incredibly frightening that we had no choice but to seek comfort in each other’s warm embrace… errr… I mean, just to figure out what the scariest thing ever is. An example of this was, “Which would be scarier: if you looked up and saw the Predator right outside the window or Darth Vader?” Although we both feigned fear at this one I think we both realized that the Predator posed us no threat since their alien culture prevents them from killing unarmed non-threats. As for Lord Vader, I think both of us imagined Vader sensing the Force was so strong within us that he would have no choice but to take us on as his pad wan learners and try to lure us to the Dark Side only to eventually realize the folly of his ways and himself rejoin the forces of good in order to protect us, his prize pupils, from the fury of an angry Emperor.

Anyway, over the course of the year we imagined many scenarios, from Dave Foley (News Radio, Celebrity Poker Showdown) sipping at his ever-present cup of coffee to the simple notion of our other roommate, Nathan. Although neither of those reeks of impending danger, one must realize that we lived on the second story, so any creature directly outside our window held a certain innate sense of scariness about it. Seriously, imagine Dave Foley hovering outside your window, just sipping coffee and starring that Dave Foley stare with those eyes… always with those eyes. Nathan on the other hand, proved to be a tough challenger to beat, if for no other reason than the thought of him floating out there with his own crazy eyes… an eerie X-Files-like glow emanating from behind him... and the great possibility he would be unleashing one of his patented verbal tirades at any moment. For anyone unfamiliar with one of Nathan’s verbal tirades, imagine a long-haired, frustrated 18 year old male with an IQ and a vocabulary both roughly three times greater than average, yet who spends all day on campus silently hating on his mundane 100 level courses, the poseur pseudo-intellectuals or frat-boys that populate them, and pretty much every thing else collegiate. He then spends an hour waiting for and riding the city bus home in 100 degree heat, arriving at our apartment hoping to catch the last half hour of Brian Krakow’s antic’s on My So Called Life, only to find Kevin and myself watching an episode Star Trek: The Next Generation. Now imagine Nathan unloading all that rage in a nonstop three minute stream of multi-syllabic words (of which only the swear words seem familiar) with references to authors, poets, musicians, and the like so obscure that Dennis Miller would be like , “Damn, this kid makes ‘Mien Kampf’ look like a flyer for Tiny Tot’s Day Care. Also, I find his references obscure, babe.”

Luckily for him he had a computer for us to play games on and write our term papers; otherwise we might have beaten him with soap-stuffed socks as he slept. This is where I got my first taste of Doom, a game so scary that Kevin and I often played in tandem; partially so I’d have a shoulder to bury my eyes in during the scarier parts of the game, but mainly so one of us could keep an eye out for Nathan as he came home. Hell (and Doom) hath no fury like Nathan if he came home to find that we had progressed further in the game than he did.

Those who know me best know two big things about me. Actually, they probably know several small things about me, too, like that I enjoy professional wrestling a little too much, but that is not relevant. What is relevant is that I don’t like to watch scary movies and that I have ulcerative colitis. Typically, I don’t watch scary movies because, well, I get scared, not just during the movie, but for years afterward. During that time of night when people lay in bed waiting to fall asleep, thinking of the day’s events and how they should have punched that guy and how maybe they’ll do it tomorrow, I think about how scary it would be to look over to the window and see the alien from Signs standing there, clutching my cat. That’s part of the reason I make my fiancé sleep between me and the window. As for the ulcerative colitis, I’ll get to that soon.

Between late December and early April, there weren’t a lot of video games released that I felt compelled to buy. That was until a few weeks ago when both Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Doom III were released for the Xbox. After a twenty minute phone call with my old game buddy Kevin, I realized he didn’t really care which of the two I bought. I also discovered that Kevin firmly believed that the upcoming Conquer the Squirrel game was going to be the best game ever because “it has a squirrel [insert girlish giggle] that swears!” If it was a game about a monkey that swears, he probably would have shit his pants mid-sentence, which brings me back to the second fact about me- the ulcerative colitis. Medically speaking, it means I’m prone to frequent shitting, and during the severe flare ups, it comes without warning. Apparently, I forgot the two big things about myself because I went with Doom III. As everyone knows, the true level of scariness in any medium is measured not by the amount of screams or gasps caused but rather the amount of pant shitting.

I can’t say for certain how long it took to beat the game as I was often forced to play in ten minute increments separated by panicked phone calls like this one to my friends: “Oh Jesus, I walked into the bathroom and there was blood everywhere, then when I caught my reflection in the mirror… oh my god… the screams… the screams…” While Kevin tried to soothe and calm me, Nathan usually responded by saying, “Don’t tell me, fucker, I haven’t gotten that far yet!” Well Nathan, I no longer fear your verbal tirades, for I have played Doom III, the scariest thing ever, and I’m going to tell you how it ends. That’s right, you want to know? Huh? I’ll tell you. I shit my pants! That’s how it ends.

Blade II was awesome! It had just the right combination of ass-kicking and Wesley Snipes’ teeth-baring to go down as one of the best vampire movies of all time. Of course, I first experienced it in Thailand last summer on my honeymoon (no, I did not try and surf the waves of the tsunami- that happened after we left). Evidently, Thailand gets “new release” movies a little bit later than we do. Anyway, while other vacationers were enjoying the beaches, I was sweating out my hangover in a bungalow watching Blade II somewhere around a thousand times. No doubt this led to my increased, even rabid appreciation, for this cinematic masterpiece. Well, I am about 150 words into this review and I have not yet mentioned the words, “Blade Trinity.” Let’s just say that the only trinities that I am down with are the leather clad biker bitch from the Matrix and the Holy Trinity (thanks again for postponing the tsunami.)

As an aside, I blame the Rock for meatheads like this even being allowed near the script of a major motion picture… but that is another article for another time. Even the beatings in Blade II were much better, especially when the reavers (bastard offspring of the Predator and Dr. Evil) were slicing and dicing the members of Blade’s vampire posse. The final indignity is that Whistler, an older gentleman actor who apparently sang “Dust in the Wind” or something like that, gets smoked in Blade: Trinity. This would not be such a big deal if they had not spent two awesome movies developing his character. So in Blade II Whistler kicks some serious ass only to be punked out by some incompetent cops in the first 15 minutes of Trinity?! I would have sent Van back to college before giving Whistler a dirt nap. Besides that, “Dust in the Wind” is a great song. It should have been played over the end credits at the very least.

Evidently Van and hot-ass Biel are being groomed as franchise successors because Wesley Snipes is sick of getting paid 10 million to snarl and slaughter mass quantities of the undead. Unless Biel decides to go undercover to hunt vampires in a strip club, you can count me out for Blade: Quadrinity. My final recommendation is that you go out and immediately purchase Blade II. From viewing number 1 to viewing number 1,000, I think you will agree that it rules! As for Blade: Trinity….it just suc….it was unsatisfactory.

…and if I had to do it all over again, there’s a couple things I would still do and recommend to everyone. Take a new picture. Don’t use the same picture you had taken for your license in high school, especially if you are a long-hair and pissed at the world. This combination is overly conspicuous and it is fairly easy to cut your hair. Also, for your fake name, pick an unfamiliar lead singer for a well-known rock band. I chose Chris Barron (who?) of the Spin Doctors (yes!). This is always amusing.

There’s a few things I would not recommend. Don’t use a 1995-era computer that you don’t really know how to work. Make sure your photograph has been cut so it has 90-degree angles. Don’t use a magic marker to fake the hologram. Don’t use your 1993-era dot-matrix printer to print it. Even after you’ve successfully used the ID in Chili’s and Red Robin despite doing all the aforementioned things, don’t try and use it at a bar. If you’re lucky, like me, the bartender will laugh and give you free diet cokes. But you could also go to jail.

Don’t be fooled, though, Vick didn’t just create an alias. Vick crafted Mexico into a persona. He’s a blue collar guy. He’s done time but not in this millennium. He’s worked plenty of odd jobs over the years and currently is a mason. He loves beef jerky. Vick quickly found that ladies love Mexico and would have changed the name legally if not for his impending sponsorship deal with Rolaids.

As soon as this story became internet-prevalent fans began to purchase Vick’s number seven Atlanta Falcons jersey custom made with the name Mexico on the back. The NFL has currently suspended that practice, which has broken the heart of little Jorge J. Mexico, a nine year old Vick fan from Dade County, Florida.

One good thing that has come out of this story is that it’s given us regular guys insight into developing aliases for when our own genital herpes or warts break out. The equation: pick any monosyllabic first name that no normal parent would name their kid anymore. Like, say, Fred, George, or Rick. Then attach it to the name of any third-world country, preferably from Central or South America. My alias? Stan Argentina. It worked like a charm last Friday if you know what I mean.

Faced with the prospect of spending 24 hours in Tent City, Arizona’s jail for severe traffic violators and the semi-violent, I asked around for advice. Many told me to bring a book because it’s boring and hot. One guy I met in a bar told me he spent 30 days in Tent City for beating up his best friend and I needed to punch the first Mexican who makes eye contact and say, “There’ll be none of that.” I’m hoping my stay involves more of the “boring and hot” stuff than any race riots in the yard. So I have to decide what book to bring. I have a whole pile of unread ones because I love the idea of books more than actually opening one up late at night when Seinfeld reruns are on. If you have an opinion or suggestions, please e-mail me. These are my current options, provisionally ranked from least likely to most likely:

Bone – An unfortunate title, as I don’t want anyone to think it is what I am searching for in jail (or any derivatives made from adding a suffix; -er, -ing, etc.). It is also a graphic novel, which is just code for a comic book that certain adults fool themselves into thinking is OK to read past the age of 13. If geeks are treated the same way in penitentiary as they are in high school, I think I’ll pass.

How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale – This autobiography of Jenna Jameson includes pictures. The negative consequences of this are many. Even if it is not taken away from me as contraband I imagine many inmates would want me to “share” it. I don’t even want to “share” it with my friends because I’ve seen what they can do to a magazine when they work together.

Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind – This is a comprehensive history of large cats and their cultural impact through time. I don’t know why I bought this since I’m sure it is probably required reading for a college course out there. I don’t read books that could easily be found in a classroom (unless maybe the classroom is used to teach a course on Jenna Jameson).

Among the Thugs – This book about English soccer fans certainly has the most ironic title of the bunch. I don’t think irony fairs well when pitted against a shiv fashioned from the springs of a bunk bed, though. Plus, the guy on the cover looks like someone who I have been seeing enough of in my pre-incarceration nightmares.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers – This book has the second most ironic title of the bunch (especially if I die from heat exhaustion in tent #3A). But I also have to imagine that my “prison mood” would not be enhanced by anecdotes of medical cannibalism.

Under the Banner of Heaven : A Story of Violent Faith – This is a book about Mormons. I do not expect to find and offend any members of this particular faith behind bars, plus it is a hardback, which means it would make a better weapon.

Moneyball – This is a highly acclaimed book about the quest for success in baseball. I figure the subject of sports will signify me as a “normal dude” who is at least behind the “fish that smells like fear" as a candidate for the lifers to make their wife. I should say a “lifer” is equivalent in Tent City to doing the 10-30 day stint.

The Best American Short Stories 2004 – As you can probably tell, I don’t read a lot of fiction. On the other hand, if I don’t like one story I can quickly move on to the next, which may be the most important thing when your stuck with only one book. The decision by a friend in the same situation as me to bring “Ghost Ships” was a big mistake. He thought it was a sequel to the classic horror movie Ghost Ship starring Julianna Margulies, when it was really an epic love story involving figures of the surrealist movement. The day after getting out he had a weird look in his eyes and couldn’t stop talking about Salvador Dali. Well… that and the shower raping.

I learned much more about a college roommate of mine without ever looking that closely into his eyes. I was using Google one day to find a website dedicated to one of my favorite television shows named Perfect Strangers. As soon as I typed in the first letter a list of previous searches beginning with “P” arose, the first being penile enlargement. He was the only other person to use my computer and so I put two and two together. I mean, it could possibly have been me on there drunk and I erased it from my memory, but really, I have no need for penile enlargement. I’ve heard that the average erect male penis is three inches long and let me tell you I am definitely slightly above average.

Our friendship improved thereafter. I became much more sympathetic to his usual depressed demeanor and I never had to look deep into his eyes. Oh yeah, I’m sure you’re wondering what became of my Perfect Strangers Google search: I found a ton of fansites dedicated to Bronson Pinchot, who played Balki on the show but not one dedicated to Mark Linn Baker, Balki’s long-suffering cousin, Larry. That’s not cool.

Yes, ok, Studdard’s new album is fictional as of now, but a fan can dream, right? Fans write fake scripts or “fan-fiction” of their favorite TV Shows and movies all the time. In fact, several years ago, I wrote several treatments for an entire mock series called “Our Three Dads” a new-millennium morph of “My Three Sons” and “My Two Dads.” The twist in that idea is that one of the dads is black. Also, one of the sons is an adopted Chicano who only speaks in Spanish catch phrases like, “¡Qué tiempo tan malo!” Anyway, I don’t see why creepy celebrity worship can’t be extended from television to music. Studdard’s real album may be in the pre-stages of development, but I know that when it hits it will be the bomb.

I have a friend named Steve who likes to pour honey-mustard on everything he eats. “It just makes things better,” he says. When a screenwriter sits down for the first time to work on a new script, he is beginning at square one. The only way he can make it better immediately is with a decision to put zombies in as many scenes as possible*. As such, it is also that much harder to screw up a movie after a positive “zombie verdict” has been reached. Actually screwing it up? That’s just like giving Steve a plate of ravioli, waiting for him to smother it in honey-mustard, then taking a huge spit on it . That’s how I felt when watching Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Except it felt like the spit was directed at my face. And since I made someone else watch it with me, it was kind of like I was responsible for the spit on her face, too. And that was barely the worst movie I saw that night.

The script of Resident Evil: Apocalypse is not so much an “adaptation” of the video game as it is a “photocopy somebody made at a Kinko’s somewhere between the offices of Capcom Games and Sony Pictures”. It has something to do with Milla Jovovich fighting zombies, devil dogs, and a monster named Nemesis that is armed with a bazooka and urinates flaming acid. Though Milla is the tacit heroine, the movie really belongs to the character who goes through half the film playing the role of “Nameless Black Pimp”. He eventually tells somebody his name is Leroy (but he will always be a nameless black pimp to be). Like any worthy post-Grecian protagonist, he has a tragic flaw and it is a predeliction for prostitutes of the walking dead. Early in the movie he crashes his car because he can’t take his eyes off the topless zombies and he is forced to walk through the rest of the movie blasting with his gold-plated pistols. The only encouraging aspect of the this entire ordeal is that there will probably be a sequel, and if anyone in Hollywood knows what America wants, the subtitle will be Leroy Jones Takes Manhattan.

As far as subtitles go, the second movie I watched that night may own the most useless ever: Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid. I guess they not only wanted to attract the “crappy horror movie crowd” but the “botanists who love quests for rare flowers crowd" as well. Where zombies are the equivalent of Steve’s honey-mustard, this movie has the equivalent of Heather’s Italian dressing. This particular friend doesn’t like Italian dressing on everything, but she likes it on a lot of things. Anacondas has something that a lot of movies would be better with - a pet monkey who gives a reaction shot to everything. For instance, when the boat’s captain (piloting down a river in an Amazon forest infested with man-eating snakes) proclaims he’s “taking the shortcut,” we know the shortcut is not a good idea when the monkey slaps his forehead in exasperation. The monkey also masters the expressions of fear, surprise, jocularity, intense rage, and sadness (pictured left). It is all the more tragic that the monkey is the best actor in the film, especially considering the original Anaconda featured a flawless B-Movie cast of Ice Cube, Owen Wilson, and J. Voight!

It used to be that a midnight double-feature of movies featuring bio-engineered mutant zombies and snakes the size of freight-trains would yield something other than annoyance; maybe at the very least, some guilty amusement. I guess that’s not the case anymore. On a scale of salad dressing, where peppercorn is a 1 and honey-mustard is a 10, the combined rating of Resident Evil and Anacondas is lemon dill, the numerical equivalent of a 3.9.

* While I have not verified this theory with any scientifically accepted method like case studies or philosophical proofs, just imagine how boring Dawn of the Dead or Return of the Living Dead would be without the zombies. Conversely, there is an endless list of movies, including the Oscar-caliber likes of Rain Man and Chariots of Fire, that would be much better with a few zombies.