I was bitten by a rooster, Blacula, and Count Chocula, all on the same day. Transforming me into the most terrifying of all monsters: Cock Blockula.

My first victim? Myself. Actually, I didn’t even need that assortment of animals and monsters to bite me, I was already cock blocking myself at a professional level.

Have you ever had a homeless guy come up to you asking for change, and the person you’re with is like, “Don’t give him any money! They’re just going to spend it on booze!”

First of all, that’s rude. The homeless guy doesn’t get to come to your office and say, “Don’t give him that paycheck! He’s just going to spend it on bills, rent, and groceries! Also, adult websites where you finally get to see what happens when college girls lose their inhibitions behind closed doors, but your wife doesn’t know that you have a subscription to it because it shows up on the credit card statement as Wayne Enterprises, not THAT Wayne Enterprises, though the CEO does dress like Batman, but it’s a fetish thing.”

Wow. That homeless guy knows a lot about your spending habits and the CEO of Wayne Enterprises.

Second of all, there is no need to keep a homeless man sober. He is not taking the SATs later. He is not giving a TED talk. He is not making hand-crafted tiny furniture for dollhouses. His day is wide open.

I guess people don’t like giving beer money to people who don’t have houses. This is why when I give a homeless guy money, I make him promise to make an appointment with my realtor. Fortunately for him, my realtor is also a homeless guy. Which is why I live in a refrigerator box.

I love my George Foreman Grill. I cook everything on it. Hot dogs, hamburgers, you name it. If I could cook a Cadbury Creme Egg on it, I would. Another thing I like about the George Foreman Grill is that George Foreman’s signature is on every single grill. What this means is, you can write whatever you want on a George Foreman Grill, and George Foreman is legally obligated to honor it. It’s a binding contract. Also, in the state of Georgia, grills are admissible in court as legal documents. I now have 75% of George Foreman’s estate and full custody of all five of his sons named George, except for the youngest one, who I renamed Cadbury Creme Egg, which makes what I said at the beginning of this paragraph much creepier.

I like living in Atlanta, but it is a very expensive city. Every time I leave my apartment, I spend twenty dollars. Twenty dollars for drinks, twenty dollars for parking, twenty dollars to eat. The last time anyone wanted this many pictures of Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren was putting together a scrapbook to masturbate to. That’s right. A joke about an old dead president jerking off to another old dead president.

In fact, that’s all they do in old dead president heaven, is jerk off to each other. It’s why they ran for office!

As improbable as it sounds, my cat recently competed in a drag race. I like to point to his little cat-sized car that he built in my garage and say, “Look what the cat dragged in.”

Actually, I don’t have a cat. I made him up for the purpose of that joke. As well as the concept of cat drag racing. I do have a dog, though. She’s a French Bulldog. I’m a little worried she might be too French— she only shits on wine lists from four star restaurants. Actually, that’s not true, she’ll shit on anything. And that’s what makes her so French.

Sorry, people of France.

I have a problem with the Elton John song “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” from the movie The Lion King. First of all, I’d like to say that whatever two consenting adult lions want to do with their genitals is fine by me. The issue I have with the song is the line, “It’s enough to make kings and vagabonds believe the very best.”

Who cares if a king believes the very best? Things are going really well for him at this point. He’s already going to believe the very best going into the situation. Because he is a king.  Vagabonds, on the other hand, give handjobs under bridges for nickels. For them to believe the very best is a much bigger deal. Elton John should change the lyrics of the song to, ”It’s enough to make even vagabonds, those filthy tramps, believe the very best.” He needs to go full vagabond!

Elton John, you can have that for free.

I read a news article about a man who was killed by his pet hippo. For years, he and the hippo got along really well, with no problems. One day, the hippo just freaked out and started biting him. In the hippo’s defense, the man’s pockets were filled with white marbles.

A lot of rock stars are getting older, especially hair metal bands. Poison, Mötley Crüe, and Whitesnake are all starting to show their age. In fact, due to changing dietary needs, Def Leppard would now prefer that you pour some Splenda® on them. Their bodies just can’t handle the sugar.

I was eating at an Atlanta restaurant and I overheard a woman at a nearby table say, “I liked Eat Pray Love, but I don’t go in for all that meditation bullshit.” And I was thinking, what if she’s the Dalai Lama? Like there was some huge mix-up and the 14th reincarnation of Buddha is an ex-sorority girl in a North Face jacket with a designer bag who hates the shit out of meditation. Just hates her superpower.

Finally, the actor Timothy Olyphant is in town. You’d think he’d be able to afford his own hotel room, but he’s been crashing on my couch. In fact, he’s kind of overstaying his welcome. It’s getting a lot harder to ignore the Olyphant in the room.

King courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Vagabond courtesy of Russell-Morgan via Wikimedia Commons.

J: Wow, this movie has it all. Little girls in bird costumes, old compasses, kids writing notes to each other on custom stationary and Ed Norton in a Boy Scout uniform. It’s like the deleted scenes from The People vs. Larry Flynt in an alternate universe where Hustler magazine is about the top sellers on Etsy. According to its synopsis, Moonrise Kingdom is about two twelve-year-olds who fall in love at summer camp, make a secret pact, and run away together into the wilderness. I had a crush on a curly haired girl at 4-H camp when I was twelve. She never smiled and got pregnant in the tenth grade. I guess she would have gotten pregnant even sooner if she hadn’t scowled so much.

K: I bet that girl smiled a lot before you knew her, like right up until age 10. Because when I was in the fifth grade, every once in a while, some nice girl would suddenly and unexpectedly turn into an awful, mean girl—I guess like how vampires do—but, like a vampire, you wouldn’t be aware of the change until she struck. When she did, it would be very confusing, because this was someone who had always been friendly to you in the past. At first you would assume you must be misunderstanding the horrible things she was saying, and that she must somehow have meant them in a sweet way, because a nice girl like this would never say things like that or kick you in the neck unless she thought she was being helpful. That’s how I feel about this trailer. I want to trust all these actors, but I’ll soon wake up to the reality that no, this really is another Wes Anderson movie that’ll leave me feeling deeply annoyed and a little left out. Too bad, because I like the bird costumes.

J: I think liking bird costumes was what got Tom Cruise into that whole Eyes Wide Shut mess in the first place. One minute you’re at Party City picking out a parakeet mask, the next thing you know you’re at a gothic mansion attending an orgy with Nicole Kidman. Anyway, I think this Wes Anderson movie might have too much Wes Anderson in it. Or too much Wes and not enough Anderson. Or maybe it’s all Anderson. Which part of Wes Anderson is the one that is entirely comprised of illustrated wallpapers with animals in sweater vests, tennis headbands and Bill Murray?

K: I think the wallpaper and animals in vests must be the Wes part and Bill Murray and tennis headbands are Anderson. Also,  Jason Schwarzman and Owen Wilson. That’s some more Anderson. I would take a movie that was all Wes, though, like The Fantastic Mr. Fox. I imagine what saved that movie was that Bill Murray, Jason Schwarzman and Owen Wilson were all too big to fit in it. No, I’m mistaken—not Owen Wilson. He was in Night at the Museum and he was only small. I think if tiny Owen Wilson had been in Fantastic Mr. Fox, it would’ve been okay, and not just because he probably would’ve been killed.

J: I want to make sure I’m following you, did we just agree to kill a tiny Owen Wilson? Are we in a murder pact right now? We are going to need a shrink ray. And access to Owen Wilson. And a matching set of murder gloves. Which are actually just regular gloves with skulls on them. I think we might be the only people on the internet who aren’t charmed by this trailer, the response has been overwhelmingly positive as far as I’ve seen. I’d say my reaction is a cautious optimism, mixed with skepticism, mixed with an unrelated but overwhelmingly positive feeling of goodwill toward cake. Earlier today, I misheard my friend and I thought he said he was preparing his “cake resume”, which I took to mean a resume written in icing on a cake. “You’re hired!” I thought to myself.

Everyone has a wheel.

For some people, the wheel is a grindstone, an oppressive force pushing them down into the dirt as it turns, squeezing the air out of their lungs as it spins against their back. For others, the wheel is a puppy in a velour tracksuit, massaging their shoulders with a tender professionalism, because it is a certified massage therapist in addition to being a soft, wiggly puppy. And for some, their wheel is a grindstone in a velour tracksuit that dropped out of massage school to become a cashier at Target, a place notorious for not giving massages.

But make no mistake. No matter who you are, one day your wheel will spin off its axis and roll you into your grave.

Even Bryan Adams would have to admit that the summer in which he got his first real six-string and gawked at some girl on her mama’s porch paled in comparison to the one I was having in the Summer of 2011. I was living off a a modest inheritance and a generous severance package from having been laid off earlier that year. I was never going to have to work again, for any man. My life was full of limitless possibility.

You see, I had $30,000. I was, for lack of a better term, hillbilly rich.

I had decided to take an honest crack at making a career out of my two passions. Namely, co-hosting a science fiction podcast and writing sarcastic reviews of movies I watched on Netflix Instant with low Rotten Tomatoes scores. “By the time I run out of money” I said to myself, “I’ll have built a media empire.”

Meanwhile, my wheel had turned into a Nerf gun in the sky, the Excalibur of Nerf guns, raining down on me with soft golden pellets of alcohol and Xbox Live points. If I was the Baby Jesus, then surely Apple products were the swaddling clothes and sweet hay in which I lay. I bought an iPhone 4. I bought an iPad 2. I bought a Macbook Pro. I bought an iPhone 4S for the unsubsidized full price, guided by my own Star of Bethlehem, MacRumors.com.

I spent hundreds of dollars at the famous Atlanta strip club The Cheetah. Which, by the way, if a stripper confides in you that she considers the men she takes to the VIP room “suckers”, and you later see her leading an earnest young man to said VIP room, do not give her a hearty wave and yell, “HEEEY, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!” You and she are not a two-man team pulling a long con.

All this will have earned you is a scowl and squandered stripper goodwill, which is worth twice as much as goodwill from women who do not take their clothes off for money. That having been said, the highlight of my time at The Cheetah was getting a lap dance from a stripper who looked like Baroness from G.I. Joe.

I ate Croque-monsieurs at Atlanta restaurant Empire State South, surrounded by wealthy businessmen. Incidentally, if the members of the Occupy movement had really wanted to get up in the faces of the super-rich, they would have made reservations there, instead of pitching tents in city parks full of hobos, who have to eat regular ham and cheese sandwiches toasted over a trashcan fire instead of Croque-monsieurs.

And finally, I bought the world’s cutest French Bulldog, who I named Gotham, because she looked like Batman.

The Summer of 2011 was so incredible that it protected me from the realities that I was not yet brave enough to face. Like an internet that was hugely indifferent to sarcastic movie reviews and science fiction podcasts. Like the fact that I had lost the best job I’ve ever had in my entire life. Or that my mother passed away after a long battle with cancer in the Spring of 2011. Or that these things happened within weeks of each other.

After losing so much, so quickly, an irresponsible Summer of strippers and bourgeois sandwiches was the only thing that stood between me and a feeling of total oblivion. So I would say to you, appreciate your amazing summers while they last. They are important, finite events.

Now that Summer has turned to Fall and eventually Winter, I am no longer living high on the hog. If anything, I am being lowered into a deep dark well by the hog. I am now so broke, I can only afford a lap dance from a stripper that looks like Cobra Commander from G.I. Joe.

In the meantime, I write. I bring home bones for Gotham. I play a game on my iPhone called Tiny Tower. My tower has an aquarium, an architecture firm and an ice cream parlor called Scoops, all in the same building. Ironically, it also has a 100% employment rate.

I do not know when I will see another Summer like the Summer of 2011 again. Like a more pragmatic Little Orphan Annie, my philosophy is now, “The sun may come out tomorrow, but don’t bet your bottom dollar, because you will need it to buy the least expensive box of Hot Pockets.”

And my wheel continues to spin.

J: The good news is, Ewan McGregor and Eva Green fall in love. The bad news is, the world is ending. There’s a virus that’s robbing people of their senses, starting with smell. Although I guess this means that Oscar the Grouch is finally going to get to have sex. I hope he gets to have sex with Ewan McGregor, come to think of it. Ewan McGregor will be all, “Listen, Eva Green— I know you’re a beautiful woman, and our love transcends the apocalypse, but now that I no longer possess the senses to determine if this grouchy puppet who lives in a trashcan stinks or not, I am really going to lay into him with my penis.” That’s what people who have sex usually say, right? “I’m going to lay into you with my penis.”

B: Yes, that’s correct, Jason. “I’m going to lay into you with my penis,” is the accepted nomenclature of our people here on Planet Sesame Street. Also, “I’m fittin’ to drop some dick science into your fart tube, Elmo” works equally well. Now, as for the people in this movie Perfect Sense, their love making seems to be preceded by a conspiracy theory-induced apocalypse. Not unlike my love life. I too like to pretend/believe that the Illuminati is poisoning my brain with chemtrails and other unseen chicanery before asking, “May I take off your pants, please? It’s urgent because at any moment, ‘they’ might detonate the nano-bomb in my nutsack.” When she says “no,” that’s when I pretend/believe that the nano-bomb indeed is exploded, causing me to fall to the floor clutching my genitals and whining, “Aaaargh!! Look what you made ‘them’ do!!” But alas, all is not lost. At least not according to this trailer.

J: You know who else has a nano-bomb in their nutsack? The Jason Bourne of squirrels. He has a tiny messenger bag filled with acorns, nuts and a nano-bomb. Also, like most squirrels with squirrel-sized messenger bags, he has a miniature copy of Little Women. And the latest issue of bitch magazine. I once dated a girl who subscribed to bitch magazine. She got mad at me for taking a photo of myself with her Polaroid camera and asked me why I wanted to kiss so much. I bet that little squirrel with the nano-bomb is a passionate kisser. Oh, have I been saying nano-bomb this whole time? I meant iPod nano.
Anyway, you know what else makes perfect sense? Making tender love to Ewan McGregor on your last day on this planet, apparently.

B: All I have to say is, you could do a lot worse. Imagine all of this horrible stuff going down in real life and it just so happens that you’re in the middle of a rebound relationship. A fling. A six-week joyride, at best. And perhaps it’s with someone who looks more like Ewan Dobson than Ewan McGregor. Sure, he’s everyone’s favorite Canadian fingerstyle guitarist, but when it comes to grinding out some hardcore, end-of-the-world, bonded-in-death-and-eternity copulation, he’s just kind of like, “I don’t know. Things are moving kinda fast, eh?” Kind of like your bitch friend, Jason! If the two of you were in this movie, I imagine her saying something like, “Oh look. It’s the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse stampeding through our bedroom. Could you hurry up and get that Durex on?”

J: I appreciate that you assumed I consummated my relationship with this girl, but anyone who works that hard to keep our kissing to a minimum is not going to give me the keys to her maidenhead. And by maidenhead, I mean the wooden lady at the front of most 19th century ships. Which is where most hip twenty-something girls keep their valuables these days. Oh, has anyone seen my Tie-Neck Sweater Dress? Never mind, I found it. It was locked beneath the bared wooden breasts of the mermaid on the deck of the Snow Squall.

B: Well, that really does make Perfect Sense, Jason. Which reminds me: oddly enough, I was thinking about filming a movie of my own about a budding romance cast in the midst of the end of the world. Except my film was going to be called Perfect Cents, and it would be about the most parsimonious prostitute on the planet who, despite it being the Final Judgement and all, refuses to sleep with what is certain to be her very last “john” ever until he can come up with the exact price in dollars and cents for her services. Here’s a sample from the opening scene of my current script:

Prostitute: “This is only $84.43. I need $15.57 more, you cheap bastard.”
John: “Are you crazy? We’re all about to die and you’re nickel and diming me?”
Prostitute: “I don’t give a shit. I’ve got costs to cover.”
John: “What costs?! Where are you going to spend this money, anyway!? At Zombie WalMart???”
Prostitute: “That’s none of your goddamn bizness, dude. Now go find yourself $15.57 or go jerk off in a bomb shelter.”
John: “Okay, fine. Just wait right here. I’ll be back.”

INTRIGUED MUCH??

James Franco steals a super-smart baby chimp from his lab! He takes the chimp out to a state park for the first time and the chimp holds his hand out and looks down. James Franco takes this to mean the chimp is taking a submissive pose and asking for permission to climb the trees, but actually it is customary to tip your monkey when you bring him to the woods for the first time.

There’s a scene in Rise of the Planet of the Apes where James Franco takes his baby chimp into a steamy shower to make him feel more comfortable. So ladies, you might want to consider disguising yourselves as uncomfortable baby chimps if you want to trick James Franco into taking a steamy shower with you. Then again, I’m not sure how sexy it is to have a lady jump out of a baby chimp suit while you’re in the shower together.

At one point in the movie, James Franco is giving a presentation on projected stock earnings when a chimp escapes and smashes through his charts and graphs. Coincidentally, I use an ape jumping through stock market predictions to do all my financial planning for the year.

John Lithgow plays James Franco’s father, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. James Franco injects him with a virus he created that makes monkeys smarter. The next thing you know, John Lithgow is playing the piano with the skill of seven Harry Connick Jrs. He also has the strength of seven Harry Connick Jrs., which is the same as the regular old man strength he had before.

James Franco’s chimp has to go to monkey jail because he bites off a man’s finger. If this is what happens to James Franco’s super-intelligent ape, I’d hate to see what his apes of average intelligence go to jail for. Probably secretly filming women’s feet at Target and uploading the videos on the internet.  Anyway, Franco’s chimp becomes king of the apes in monkey jail by giving the other chimps free cookies. This is also how you become king of a high school auditorium full of people who just gave blood.

James Franco’s chimp leads the apes in a monkey uprising against the humans. Not only do these monkeys rise up to defeat their oppressors, but they also shine on the field of battle. And it is these monkeyshines that will one day lead to an entire planet of the apes.  The ape rebellion breaks in to James Franco’s lab and when his boss arrives at the office, he is surrounded by monkeys, inspiring several one-panel Far Side rip-off newspaper cartoons.

The apes have a final showdown on an enormous steel bridge against a battalion of police officers. The apes are able to gain a tactical advantage against the police by climbing to the top of the bridge, which is also an excellent vantage point from which to throw barrels and fireballs down at any local plumbers who might intervene. A gorilla leaps onto a helicopter, causing it to crash. He is later revealed to be a man in a gorilla costume who was late to a fancy costume party and wanted a ride.

James Franco tries to convince his chimp to come back home, but the chimp tells him that his home is with the other apes in the forest. James Franco is like, “Fine, enjoy your filthy monkey house out in the dirty woods. I’ll just go home to my beautiful wife and comfortable furniture and indoor plumbing.” The movie ends with the human-killing virus that James Franco created spreading around the globe. Also spreading around the globe as a result of Jame Franco’s body of work: women in baby chimp costumes. Planet of the Apes!

J: Wow, the trailer for The Hobbit has all kinds of stuff going on it. Pigs in harnesses, dwarves with spider webs in their beards, threadbare antique furniture—it’s essentially the video for the Nine Inch Nails song “Closer”, if Trent Reznor had eaten second breakfast on his eleventy-first birthday. The dwarves in this movie are short, hairy and have enormous ears. Looks like there’s going to be some a cappella dwarf singing as well. I usually feel uncomfortable if someone starts singing in front of me without musical accompaniment, but the other dwarves just put down their pipes and start singing along like the cast of Glee, if everyone on Glee was my grandfather.

K: If everyone on Glee was your grandfather, I probably wouldn’t have quit watching two years ago. That is, unless they kept the story lines all the same, and your grandfather was yammering about sectionals all day and trying to sleep with his teachers (also played by your grandfather), whilst coming out as a gay man and also as a lesbian and also as a surprise virgin. On second thought, even that might be better than regular Glee. But I’d definitely need them to tone down the kissing, and I’d like to see more subplots involving newspapers and butterscotch. Basically, they should start with the blueprint of Glee, but let it move in its own direction—much like they will with the inevitable American version of The Hobbit, starring John Krasinski.

J: In addition to pipe smoking and fence hopping, looks like there will also be a good amount of suspender tugging in The Hobbit. I know there’s also sword fights and magic rings and whatnot, but Martin Freeman will be undeniably be sporting some nice thick suspenders to hook his thumbs into. I’m afraid people who were wishing for some bottomless hobbit nudity or a peek at Martin Freeman’s digitally miniaturized bare ass will just have to go wanting, because those hobbit trousers are going to be firmly locked in place. Also firmly locked in place: people who wish for bottomless hobbit nudity.

K: Funny you should mention suspenders. I was just thinking about suspenders today, and how in England-English, when you say suspenders you mean garter belts. So if anyone reading this is British, you’ve just filled their polite little heads with all kinds of sexy hobbits in stockings, hooking their thumbs seductively behind the satin straps on their hobbit thighs.

J: What ruins the imagery of Bilbo Baggins in satin stockings for me, other than everything about it, is that in my imagination he’s chewing a piece of straw and looking very pleased with himself.
Speaking of risqué underwear on diminutive fictional characters, I once went into a Victoria’s Secret to buy lingerie as a Christmas gift for a girl I was dating at the time, at her request. As an unaccompanied man amid all those women’s undergarments, I felt a little like an unaccompanied Cookie Monster in a store that sold cookie jars. Sure, there aren’t any cookies anywhere, but you’re still not entirely sure he isn’t getting off on this.

K: Are you describing Cookie Monster as diminutive? I think of him as pretty big for a muppet, like the size of a large woman, but that’s probably wrong. I was wrong about Smurfs for years, too. I thought they were a few inches tall, but they’re three whole apples high! Coincidentally, three apples is also how much Hello Kitty weighs, but she’s five apples high. Apparently that’s how you measure fictional characters. I wonder how many apples a hobbit is.
Well, hang on, I went to school. The average height of a hobbit is 3’6″ and the average red apple is five inches tall, so a hobbit must be a little more than eight apples tall, if you can stack them that high. Unfortunately, I can’t find a record of hobbit weight averages. But according to Tolkien’s maps, the Shire is right about where England is, and the average Englishman is about 5’10″ and weighs about 185 pounds, which—assuming the weight of men and hobbits is similarly distributed—means that a hobbit might weigh, in pounds, only around 108. If the average red apple comes in around five ounces, the average hobbit might weigh the same as 345.6 apples. But I don’t like that number. It’s too big to mean anything to anyone. How do they do apples? In bushels? A bushel is roughly 9.3 gallons, and if the average person contains 16 gallons of blood, and we apply the man-to-hobbit ratio we’ve already determined, a hobbit must contain about 9.3 gallons of whatever is in a hobbit. That’s one bushel! Eight apples high, one bushel heavy. There. Now there’s no reason to see the film; all your questions have been answered right here. Everyone owes me $12 ($10 if you’re reading before 4 p.m.). PayPal is fine.

The Starship Enterprise has a new crew and it’s going on its maiden voyage! Captain Kirk and Scotty and Chekov are there visiting, but the new captain makes them sit in little plastic chairs over by the wall like they’re waiting on their girlfriends to get done shopping at Anthropologie. Later, the new captain emerges with a cute scarf and a pewter spoon with an owl on it.

Suddenly, there’s a distress call because two starships are being crushed by a mysterious energy ribbon. Also, the crew members aboard are crushed because they didn’t win the “Best Starship” ribbon at the county fair. If only a spider had written “Some Starship” in her web, they might have had a chance.

Scotty takes over the warp drive and saves forty people from the energy ribbon by beaming them aboard the Enterprise. Captain Kirk goes down to fix the deflector shields, gets sucked into space and is pronounced dead. Guess he shouldn’t have dropped out of Deflector Shield Technical College with only two semesters left.

Seventy eight years later, the crew of Star Trek: The Next Generation is having a grand old time on the holodeck pretending they’re 19th century sailors. To celebrate his promotion, they make the Klingon Worf walk the plank and jump in the air for a hat. Then they make him take off his top for a Girls Gone Wild shirt. The android Data gets in on the act by pushing Beverly Crusher into the ocean, kicking off the Enterprise’s first wet T-shirt contest. Commander Riker cuts his uniform pants into Daisy Dukes and dances to “Cocktales” by Too $hort.

Judging by the metallic pallor of Data’s face, he’s been huffing more spray paint than a ne’er-do-well Banksy from a parallel universe. Data puts a chip inside his head so he can understand human emotions. Unfortunately, it’s just an SD card loaded with pirated Tyler Perry movies. After installing the chip, Data decides that he can do bad all by himself and begins writing a diary from the perspective of a mad black woman.

Captain Picard gets an email that upsets him, and storms out of the holodeck in his sailor suit. Normally, the only thing that can make Picard rush out dressed as a sailor is half-priced drink specials at his favorite male strip club, The Anchor.

Meanwhile, a solar probe blows up a nearby sun and sends out a shock wave. Turns out Malcolm McDowell was in league with the Klingons, two of whom have amazing breasts. I once saw a dancer with a tattoo on her leg that read “100% USDA Grade A Beef” at a rundown club called Lucifer’s Follies. She had an amazing body and a face that looked like an orc from Lord of the Rings. It was probably her tusks that gave me that impression.

Picard beams down to a planet where Malcolm McDowell is about to shoot a rocket into the sun so he can redirect the energy ribbon and get back into the nexus. He’s got a force field up, but crafty Picard sneaks through a hole in the rocks. Incidentally, “sneaking through a hole in the rocks” costs an additional $200 at Picard’s favorite male strip club, The Anchor.

Picard gets pulled into the nexus, where he meets Captain Kirk, who is living in his own private heaven with his favorite dog and his ex-girlfriend, and where $#*! My Dad Says was a critical and commercial success. Picard convinces him to go back in time to fight Malcolm McDowell. McDowell turns his rocket invisible with a remote control. Picard and Kirk struggle to find the remote and then the rocket prematurely explodes, both of which are common problems for men their age.

Picard stops the rocket and saves the Enterprise, but Captain Kirk dies under a bridge, like a troll or a dancer at Lucifer’s Follies. Picard buries Kirk under some rocks and Data finds his missing cat. Star Trek!

J: In space, no one can hear you scream. Which is why it is so difficult to get ice cream in space. I mean, I screamed, you screamed, we all screamed for ice cream. And the void of space was indifferent to our collective calls for sweet iced cream. Now gelato on the other hand—very easy to get in space. You can’t throw a moon rock in space without hitting a gelato stand, usually with some kind of gloopy tentacled monster trying to sell you a mint raisin sorbet. Speaking of gloopy tentacled monsters, looks like there’s a little space trouble happening for the characters in Prometheus. There are a ton of shots in the trailer of people looking dismayed in space helmets.

B: Yes, they do look dismayed in their space helmets, Jason. You could also say they look completely terrorized, filled with spacepants-shitting fear and not a little like Chaz Bono after finding out she had to grow her own dick instead of having her father’s penis exhumed and grafted on. I know that look well, Chaz. It says, “I don’t got you, babe.” Speaking of confusing creatures from Hollywood, I’m not exactly sure who or what’s doing the attacking in this trailer, which is always an encouraging sign. It shows that the director has the courtesy not to whip his proverbial dong out on the first date, and wave it around in our faces moments after blurting out, “I’ve got something to share with you.” Indeed, I’m intrigued. I’m not a huge sci-fi/horror person; I’ve always thought Blade Runner is an excellent movie to fall asleep to. But I am intrigued. You have my attention this time, Mr. Ridley Scott!

J: What a gentleman! I’d say you are correct in your assessment that Ridley Scott is not the sort of man to show you his cinematic penis moments after introducing himself to you like some frantic wild-eyed OkCupid user in the parking lot of an IHOP that he lured you to with promises of Atlas Sound tickets. He teases his proverbial moviemaking penis like a burlesque dancer in an H. R. Giger crafted codpiece. I also couldn’t help but notice the trailer had a shot of a man with his hands in some green slime. When I was a kid, you could buy little cans of green slime to pour on your The Real Ghostbusters cartoon action figures. Is it possible that a character in Prometheus is just sliming a plastic Peter Venkman? “Slime my Peter Venkman” is also how I start most of my Craigslist personal ads.

B: I know you do. But I still have to ask, “Who you gonna call?” I mean, when people answer your Craigslist personal ads, they usually just leave you with a Hotmail address and detailed instructions on which Honda Accord they’ll be parked in underneath IKEA, right? Speaking of “foreign” places, is there ever going to be an alien planet as presented by Hollywood that isn’t some black hole version of the Vietnam War? Everybody’s always helplessly bumbling around in the dark in these movies, getting poked, prodded and prolapsed from every unseen angle by some hyper-evil army of E.T. octopi that gets off by impregnating people’s brains with thought worms or some crap. Wait. Now we’re right back where we started: at your Craigslist personal ads. Which is apropos since this trailer seems to be setting us up for a Planet Of The Apes-like return-to whence-we-came kind of story.

J: Coincidentally, one thing that separates us from the apes is IKEA. Literally— there’s an IKEA between my house and the zoo and the monkeys are always jumping up and down because they’re furious they can’t live in monkey houses with Swedish ready-to-assemble furniture. When I was a kid, I saw a monkey mom give her monkey baby a bath in a claw-foot bathtub at the zoo. True story. Monkeys had more elegant furniture back then.

B: Ah, yes. Monkey mom bathes monkey baby in claw-foot bathtub. That ol’ ditty.

Monkey mommy, monkey mommy
What are you doing now?
Just gettin’ my lil’ baby all cleaned up
At night I sometimes dream of IKEA furniture.

Yes, that was the number 1 song in 1998. In that particular section of the zoo. If I remember correctly. I believe I heard someone humming it once. There. Never did understand why that monkey mommy was so particularly proud of washing her lil’ snookums in a bathtub. Hey Auntie Anthropoid, why don’t you come back next year when you’ve proven you can give her a Shellac manicure?

Isn’t that what Prometheus seems to be about? Us silly humans getting in way over our heads while trying to imitate and investigate our higher selves? No? Am I reading too much into this trailer? Is anybody listening to me???

The first thing I did in Skyrim was join a group of warriors called The Companions. They turned out to be werewolves. Then I became a werewolf. Then I was cured of being a werewolf by cutting off a witch’s head. Later, I realized I’d misread the instructions and the cure for being a werewolf is cutting off a witch in traffic.

I was so obsessed with werewolves as a kid I tried to convince a girl at summer camp that I’d made a wish during the full moon and was now part werewolf. That same girl pressed my hands together and told me that the lines in my palms connected to form the horns and goat face of Satan. Later that summer, we saw lightning strike the surface of a lake. She wore faded Ozzy Osbourne shirts and thick mascara. Much like Skyrim, with its vikings and dark gods asking for ritual sacrifices, she was so metal she made carving “Slayer” into your arm for the devil look like carving John Mayer lyrics into a devil’s food cake.

After The Companions, I joined the Thieves Guild. They mostly wanted me to steal gold candlesticks and whatnot. Guess they were getting ready to decorate Elton John’s piano. Every once in a while, I’d fight a dragon that would swoop down and perch on villagers’ houses and breathe ice on everything. To be fair, the dragon had just swallowed a Snoopy Sno Cone machine and was just trying to give the townspeople a frosty treat.

I hired a wizard who was hanging around on a bench by the door of an inn and gave him a powerful staff. Then we went down into a cave and killed some bandits. Usually, when you pay a man who’s been loitering in a motel lobby to take your staff, he charges extra to go deep into a dark hole, but this guy wanted a flat rate of 500 coins.

Then I joined The Dark Brotherhood, who gave me Shadowmere, a magic red-eyed horse who rose up from a pool of bubbling dark water. He’s one of the fastest horses in the game, probably because he’s so relaxed from smoking all that pot in a jacuzzi. I once watched the director’s commentary for the Method Man & Redman movie How High, and they were talking about how a scene with a donkey who got drunk and passed out was incredibly difficult because they “couldn’t get that donkey to lay down for shit.”

I also became the arch-mage of a college for wizards after destroying a sphere of magic electricity that was too powerful for its own good, which is also why I was kicked out of Spencer’s Gifts after kicking over a whole display of plasma globes.

Finally, I killed an ancient dragon who was hell bent on eating all the souls in the world. If souls taste anything like deviled eggs, I can’t say I blame him. The other day I went to a restaurant in Atlanta and ordered deviled eggs and they only gave me three deviled eggs in a big red basket. I guess they were trying to avoid putting all their eggs in one basket. Anyway, I learned a magic shout from some dead vikings (in Skyrim, not at the restaurant) and yelled at the dragon until he fell on the ground. Which is also the only way to get me to stop eating deviled eggs. Skyrim!

My new female Commander Shepard in the game Mass Effect (also known as a FemShep) looks like a girl who got a standing ovation at a poetry slam I hosted years ago for reading a poem about humming The Star-Spangled Banner while giving a blowjob in a public park. My FemShep also looks like a girl who broke up with me in college because I was “like a brother to her.” A brother that has sex with you and takes you to see Ben Folds Five in concert, I guess. My FemShep is completely ruthless. She shot a Salarian in the face even after he begged for his life. To be fair, the Salarian was wearing a Ben Folds Five shirt, so you know he was going to try to have conservative, missionary style sex with her.

And it is this combination of ruthlessness and resemblance to women I have known who were willing to give carefree patriotic blowjobs in the park or have unadventurous sex to the tinkling piano keys of Whatever and Ever Amen that makes me feel a real connection with my FemShep. Though I wish she had a more ample bottom, which I can’t fault the game designers for not including an option for.

If games like Mass Effect started including ass-widening menus, I think we’d be living in a world where the wrong time travelers saved the wrong historical figures from dying. Namely, our ninth U.S. president, William Henry “Pull Over Girl, That Ass Is Too Fat” Harrison, who was rescued from pneumonia by futuristically dressed strangers and later passed several laws requiring mandatory descriptions of women’s bottoms in all forms of art, performance and literature.

Incidentally, I was hosting the poetry slam because I’d been driving around delivering pizzas and listening to enough pirated Saul Williams and Blackalicious mp3s to make a senator in favor of a draconian anti-piracy bill fall to his knees and shake his liver spotted fist. I’d also delivered enough pizzas late to make a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fall to his knees and shake his liver spotted fist. So, I fancied myself a slam poet.

I later gave up my slam poet dreams after finishing in last place at a New York poetry slam for incorrectly using the phrase “dirty south” in one of my poems. Even though Andre 3000 gave my ex-girlfriend’s (admittedly enormous) breasts a long, lingering look at an Atlanta music festival while I was shaking his hand, so I’m practically a member of Outkast.

Another thing I like about my FemShep is that she reminds me of the character Roland from Stephen King’s The Gunslinger series, about a gunslinger who travels through time and alternate dimensions to find the dark tower at the center of all existence. So take that, cartoon owl trying to find the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop. That owl didn’t even go out and buy his own Tootsie Pop, he took it from a child by fraudulently claiming to work in academia. Just because an owl is wearing a mortarboard does not mean he’s a professor. The fact that he’s essentially nude except for the mortarboard confirms he’s either a dirty grifter or posing for a sexy owl professor website.

The appeal of games like Mass Effect is that the protagonists end up being hollow vessels that the player can invest with as much emotional weight as they want. When you can control so many aspects of your character, down to the width of her cheekbones, filling in the little details can add an extra layer of depth even though the story of the game itself is more rigid.

So if I’m reminded of a girl I once dated who smoked joints rolled with tobacco while dipping her toes in the bathtub, as I blast Krogan Warlords in the face with incendiary ammo, it is because the best types of stories leave room for our own little stories. Except for the alternate dimension where William Henry Harrison survived and the best stories are mostly about women’s shapely rear ends, and where the national anthem is ”Poison” by Bell Biv Devoe and the words “Never trust a big butt and a smile” are written on our currency. Beware, she’s schemin’, she’ll make you think you’re dreamin’! You’ll fall in love and you’ll be screamin’ demon, HOO!

Article image incorporates a photo by Flickr user ewen and donabel.

J: First of all, it’s evident that we’re going to see some handsome men in New Year’s Eve attire with white scarves casually draped over their shoulders. Is that even warming their bodies at all? If I was the inventor of scarves, I’d be spinning in my no doubt yarn-lined coffin. And then my scarf would probably get wound around my skeleton throat. Unless the inventor of scarves is still alive. But maybe he still sleeps in a yarn lined coffin. This is a pretty dark way to start this review of the trailer for New Year’s Eve.

K: It’s not as dark as, for instance, an objective reaction to the trailer I just saw. The 6,215 people who “liked” this on YouTube must’ve been pretty drunk, because the trailer I saw took two whole minutes to watch and didn’t begin to hint at a plot, except that (1) I guess there must be some kind of New Year’s Eve party, (2) the girl from Glee is probably going to kiss raggedy Ashton Kutcher even though his wife is old enough to be her granny, and (C) obviously Sarah Jessica Parker ends up wearing that stupid dress. I’m a little pissed at the trailer for wasting my two minutes, so I can’t imagine how I’d feel if I actually saw the movie. Each and every one of these 43 celebrities owes me a seriously kickass art film this year. Otherwise there is no excuse for agreeing to be in this pointless swirling eddy of melted idiocy. Unless I’m missing something.

J: I actually keep a raggedy Ashton Kutcher in my field to scare off crows, and also Bruce Willis crows. Or crows who are wondering where their car is. “Caw, where’s my Car?” I think you might be right about Sarah Jessica Parker ending up in a stupid dress, which is a shame, because I really had my fingers crossed that Robert De Niro would end up in that stupid dress.

K: That sounds like a better movie. It would also have been nice to see Alec Baldwin in the stupid dress even though he isn’t in this movie (or is he? hell, he probably is), because one time on 30 Rock, Jack Donaghy did a Robert De Niro impression and it was pretty good. Why is it everybody thinks they can do an awesome Robert De Niro impression, though? I can see that he has distinctive mannerisms that are easy to mimic, but lots of less-imitated people have distinctive mannerisms. Ashton Kutcher has webbed feet. That’s pretty distinctive. I’ve never seen anybody try to show off with a waddling Ashton Kutcher impression. Come to think of it, that sounds like a better movie, too.

J: There’s a stand-up comedian around Atlanta who does an amazing Al Pacino impression, followed by a horribly upsetting impression of Scooby-Doo having sex with Donald Duck while Mickey Mouse sits in the director’s chair. Midway through his set, he also does an impression of Shaggy kicking the door down to join this orgy of beloved and heavily copyrighted cartoon characters. What bothers me about this (other than the obvious) is that Shaggy is such a laid-back guy that it’s hard for me to imagine him breaking down a door to get to any scenario except a sandwich. Also, if you’ve fallen on hard enough times that you’ve gone from hanging out with the Harlem Globetrotters to making a seedy Kardashian-style sex tape, it seems like you wouldn’t want to upset the cast and crew of your last-chance porno by destroying the set.

K: That’s the character, though, not the actor. It’s like the way JLo plays the same sweet lady in all her movie trailers, but by all accounts is a terrible monster in real life. This Christian Bale-esque audio clip gives me the impression that Shaggy wasn’t even a real stoner. At first it’s off-putting, but I think seeing that side of Shaggy really highlights the quality of his performance throughout the Scooby-Doo ouevre. I’m going to start imagining that kind of depth to every actor from now on, starting with the New Year’s Eve trailer. It can only help. Maybe all those actors are horrible and despise one another, and Katherine Heigl really slapped that other dude in that one scene with the slapping. It’s hard to believe because her acting is so awkward, like she’s reading Winnie the Pooh to armed, non-English-speaking children, but maybe that’s how she always talks. And maybe none of the couples in the movie were able to shoot any of their scenes together, like those jerks from X-Files. Maybe half the actors in the movie are super famous and the other half are just back-of-head doubles standing in for part of every shot. I wonder if it could’ve been a better movie if they’d just let the back-of-head doubles do the whole thing. Sure would’ve been cheaper. I don’t even think they have a union.

A woodcutter named Claus goes out in a blizzard and nearly gets himself killed trying to deliver a bag full of toys to the village children. He and his wife eventually get lost and succumb to the cold, clutching a sack full of carved wooden horses and dolls with yarn hair. Looks like the Dolly Parton Country Christmas Special is going to need a new set dresser.

Then some elves rescue him and take him to their toy factory at the North Pole. The elves are like, “The good news is, you’re immortal. The other news is, you’re locked in an eternal cycle of gift giving until the Earth crashes into the sun. Also, your name is Santa Claus now. Here’s a sleigh that operates outside the laws of space-time. It’s essentially a TARDIS with reindeer tied to it.”

Centuries pass until the 1980′s. An adorable street urchin presses his filthy hands against the window of a McDonald’s. People eat Quarter Pounders right in front of his smudged orphan face while he looks on hungrily. The homeless kid is then casually pepper sprayed by Officer Big Mac and locked in a cramped McDonaldland police van for six hours with no bathroom breaks.

Santa flies over the Statue of Liberty and says, “Merry Christmas, pretty lady!” After several centuries of making love to Mrs. Claus, even the judicially robed green copper physique of Lady Liberty is sexually attractive to Santa.

The homeless kid warms himself with a trash can fire. Santa appears and invites him to ride along and deliver toys. Like Sisyphus beckoning from behind a boulder of tinsel on a hill made of mistletoe, Santa doesn’t hesitate to involve a child in his timeless, deathless errand.

Later, Santa ditches the homeless kid and promises to meet up with him again next Christmas. “See you later, unprotected minor with no legal guardians, who is incapable of feeding or clothing yourself, and who lives on the streets with pimps and transients and sex perverts. I’m going home to my magic workshop where people are constantly sleeping in warm beds and drinking cocoa and making toys.”

Meanwhile, an elf played by Dudley Moore implements an assembly line manufacturing process at Santa’s workshop. Unfortunately, all the toys he makes fall apart after Santa delivers them, and a generation of tearful 1980′s latchkey children look on in dismay as their toy wagons disintegrate in the street faster than their parents’ marriages.

Dudley Moore is fired and goes to work for John Lithgow, a sleazy toy baron on trial for violating safety laws and manufacturing highly flammable toys. In Lithgow’s defense, the only toys that burst into flames were Bratz dolls that had been handled by children who were pure of heart.

Dudley Moore designs his own magic sleigh to deliver toys with on Christmas. Guess Santa should have had him sign a non-compete Claus. He delivers lollipops that give children the ability to hover in the air. He bases the technology on nerds’ hands when they come within two inches of a Slave Leia’s bare shoulder or arm in a comic book convention photograph.

Santa returns to visit the homeless kid and gives him a carved wooden statue of Dudley Moore. “Thanks,” says the kid, “I’ll put this right next to my signed VHS copy of Arthur 2: On the Rocks.”

John Lithgow pressures Dudley Moore to develop candy canes that grant children the ability to actually fly. Turns out the candy canes explode when exposed to heat, so the police arrive to arrest John Lithgow. He jumps out of the window with a mouth full of candy canes and flies away, and is later seen screaming in space, flailing in the cold void of an unfeeling universe.

And presumably his business-suited skeleton still floats through the black, uncaring cosmos to this day, his grinning skull a testament to the perils of capitalism, skeletal teeth clenched around a pair of magic candy canes. Merry Christmas!

It used to throw off sparks. Not big ones, but like the sparks from an empty cigarette lighter. Presumably, this was by design and not some overlooked safety issue. In retrospect, it’s probably a good thing that there used to be a solid month between Halloween and the beginning of the Christmas season, given the flammability of the store-bought plastic Halloween costumes that I would continue to wear for weeks after the holiday.

It is, perhaps, best described as a tchotchke, at least insofar as a Yiddish word can describe a Christmas toy. Without the tin tree on top, it would be virtually indistinguishable from any number of tiny dime-store doo-dads. It radiates such cheapness and frivolousness that it makes people who have never lived in a world with extant dime-stores use the term. Earlier versions of the toy first appeared during the Great Depression (according to a seller on Etsy, whose later 1970s-vintage one can be yours for four dollars), but as a kid I didn’t give much thought to its provenance. It was merely the kind of disposable novelty that occasionally used to be made in this country before we lost our disposable novelty sector to overseas competition.

The little Christmas tree sits atop a metal frame with exposed gears at one end and a yellow plunger labeled “push” at the other. If you followed this instruction (repeatedly and quickly, for best results), the tree would spin, and as it accelerated, centrifugal force would peel back four sections to reveal Santa Claus, or a red and white plastic lump which served as a pretty close approximation thereof. When you stopped pressing, the tree would decelerate until the inward pull of a rubber band overpowered the outward tug of inertia, and it would snap back together like a saint-eating Venus flytrap.

Amazingly, it’s still in one piece, and, aside from no longer sparking, it still kind of works. Mostly. The Christmas tree doesn’t snap back firmly to fully enclose the Santa nugget. This could be blamed on thirty years of material fatigue or enthusiastic use. It could, more accurately, be blamed on a five year-old kid testing, by force, how far the tree would spread apart.

My mom puts the toy out on the coffee table every Christmas, and I’m always afraid that each spin will be its last. The first spin each year puts me in my grandparents’ house a few days before Christmas, circa 1981.
It was probably a gift from one of their friends: someone who was in the Lion’s Club with Pop, or played bridge with Nan, or golfed with either. They all hastily picked up a few cheap toys every December to give to each other’s grandchildren. Odds are, it was selected by the wife of one of the Jims; I think there were several of those. Before I unwrapped the gift, Pop probably made me recite the Pledge of Allegiance for them, something he always insisted I perform for friends and acquaintances, well past the age when it was still cute or even remotely impressive.

I miss having a lot of these people around; many of them are dead now. Nan isn’t. Pop is. There was something about the way they all dressed and talked and carried themselves that I will always identify with these World War II vets and their wives. The standard historical explanation is that this was a generation that emerged from the crucible of war with a certain, well-earned swagger and a ring-a-ding-ding optimism. The Greatest Generation, it is a cliché to call them. To me, they are the It Seems Sensible to Put Astroturf on the Porch Generation.

Whether it was a small strip on Nan and Pop’s front steps, or a slightly undersized artificial lawn on the back porches of all their friends, Astroturf was omnipresent. In my mind, their reasoning went something like this: science beat Japan. It might as well cover the patio, too.
This, of course, doesn’t hold up to historical examination. I’ve imagined young veterans spreading plastic turf simultaneous with starting families during the Eisenhower administration (“Fake lawn is done, Honey. Let’s have kids!”), but as it turns out, Astroturf wasn’t invented until the mid-60s. It probably didn’t make it onto small-town patios until well into the 1970s.

But, why did my grandparents’ friends take to it so? Obviously, no one was fooled into thinking grass was growing on the porch, which, come to think of it, would generally be perceived as a sign of poor maintenance. Was it a signifier of opulence? Of conspicuous consumption? As in, “Check it out. I can afford the best plastic grass that American know-how can invent, and it’s relegated to my porch, of all places.”

I don’t know why a patio decor trend of the past has stuck with me, but strangely, it has. There’s a street on the far side of my neighborhood now that I have no reason to visit. It’s not particularly attractive, and a dead-end requires you to backtrack up a steep hill. But, I walk to its cul-de-sac anyway to feel the nostalgic twinge I get from one house: the one with Astroturf on the porch.

It’s weird, I guess, that I crave the wistful feelings conjured by ephemera from my childhood so much that I will go far out of my way to see a few square yards of green plastic.  It’s not unlike the pangs I feel upon seeing a house with particularly dated holiday décor – big, pear-shaped, colored Christmas lights (rather than the small, allegedly more tasteful, white ones) or a faded, hard plastic Santa on the lawn (as opposed to the more contemporary inflatable ones which, by comparison, betray a real lack of basement-space commitment).  Where slightly melancholic nostalgia is concerned, I’m an addict: not necessarily a junkie, but more like a college kid spending summer abroad in Europe, with Christmas the somewhat regrettable weekend excursion to Amsterdam.

Nostalgia is palpable in the holiday season. Even as a kid, I would pine for my previous Christmases. All five or six of them.  And aside from specific ones, I would also yearn for our family Christmases in aggregate: for the tree, for my favorite merry-go-round ornament, for the presents, for eggnog, for the ceramic angel with the late-1960s Mia Farrow hair that would always reside on the same shelf in our living room. I still think about the holidays of my childhood, but now, mostly, I think a lot of what I get nostalgic for is that feeling. As someone rapidly approaching middle-age, it’s certainly hard to get as excited or invest as much energy and joy into Christmas as I used to, no matter how hard I try or how much eggnog I drink.

There’s a certain vagueness to my nostalgia now. I’m wistful for this mythical notion of a grand, post-war American Holiday Tradition centered in the amorphous Heartland: Iowa, let’s say, or some other fictional Hollywood placeholder for a real location, much like “555” subs for actual phone numbers. Good cheer abounds, and big families in sweaters gather, alternately, in retro-hip mid-century ranch houses or in toasty, brownish living rooms that look like the TV set where Bing Crosby and David Bowie taped their duet. Sometimes the tree is noticeably fake, but usually it’s real. There’s music on the hi-fi. There’s probably a dog. A spinning-tree toy sits on the coffee table, long forgotten, having been offered as appeasement to an anxious kid two days earlier on Christmas Eve-Eve. Now, the kids play with something bigger and shinier but similarly low tech, the adults discretely sneak a few drinks, and later, some members of the Greatest Generation will excuse themselves for a smoke on the Astroturf covered patio.

This Christmas is, of course, the product of an immense reservoir of nostalgia coupled with 35 years of exposure to cheesy holiday-related pop culture that has little basis in reality. This Christmas never happened. Right? Right? Then, why is that spinning tree toy still on the coffee table?

As a kid, the toy never meant as much to me as the groovy ceramic angel or the carousel ornament. But now, when I see it each year, it’s like a holy relic: something tangible allegedly proving the mythical to be real.  I don’t intend to put the spinning tree on par with the Holy Prepuce or the finger bone of a Magi. While considerably less gruesome, in truth, the toy is merely crap. But, this is vintage crap, from a time when people didn’t realize that such things, if they survived, would be collected, even fetishized, for their retro kitsch value. They certainly didn’t imagine that this toy could be viewed as an artifact from a Christmas that may or may not have existed, let alone treasured by one person as an unlikely keepsake of the generation that kind of saved the world.

In Limitless, Bradley Cooper plays a failed writer who takes magic pills and becomes a genius. For a movie that’s supposed to be about a writer and a man of godlike intellect, this movie actually seems to hate writing. As soon as Bradley Cooper gets his smart pills and doubles his brainpower, he ditches writing to play the stocks. “So long, dumb book I’ve been laboring over for years!” He might as well throw his laptop out the window and hit some willowy bucktoothed nerd in the retainer with it.

Oh man, and then there’s the montages of Bradley Cooper spouting off “smart” things in front of amazed onlookers at parties and bars. It’s like watching Superman’s halfwit clone Bizarro give a speech to an auditorium full of RealDolls with diplomas from fake online universities stuffed into their cleavage.

Not to mention Robert De Niro, as a powerful businessman, is supposedly very impressed with Bradley Cooper’s stock choices. He arranges a meeting, and Bradley Cooper says, “Uh…orr…me use algorithms. Stocks?” Then he dips his tie in a sippy cup of apple juice and puts it in his mouth. Robert De Niro is like, “Okay, you drive a hard bargain.”

There’s a scene in Limitless where Bradley Cooper seduces a woman in a nightclub by speaking different languages and quoting Shakespeare. Now, I know you wanted to booty dance to Young Jeezy, heavily made-up nightclub lady, but how about a few choice selections from the Bard of Avon instead?

This guy is supposed to be the living incarnation of man’s untapped mental potential, and he spends all of his time trying to live the shittiest life possible. He seeks out dumb women to have sex with, and bends over backward to impress insufferable rich white people. For anybody with above average intelligence, being around people obsessed with money and leisure is like biting down on a dunce cap made of tin foil. But Bradley Cooper’s character acts like getting some Wall Street jerk-offs and generic hot girls to think he’s awesome is like biting down on a dunce cap made of filet mignon and blowjobs.

Anyway, there’s this whole big thing at the end about how Bradley Cooper didn’t earn his power, and how you need to temper intelligence with experience, and how he’s actually limitless now that he has both. Which would have been a thoughtful way to end the movie. Except in the same scene, he diagnoses Robert De Niro with a heart condition by putting his hand on De Niro’s chest and detecting a serious cardiac problem through a layer of clothing. I understand that it wouldn’t make sense to ask Robert De Niro to get topless just to impress him with your ability to use your hand as a stethoscope, but even a goat chewing on the hem of a backwoods hillbilly doctor’s combination overalls and lab coat knows that you can’t use your fingertips as a Holter monitor.

Unless the goat is chewing on Limitless pills, and then he’ll treat any medical ailment with a tin can and hubris. That’s it, everybody. Limitless!