Habitual Child Molster Actor Cast In Non Child Molesting Role

This is an outrage. I don't know if you know this guy, Eric Stoltz, but I've never seen him play a role in a movie or TV show that didn't, in some way, find him molesting children or being an accomplice to a similar act. There are at least ten episodes of both Law & Order and E.R. in which Mr. Stoltz was seen to be running a child pornography ring or having sex with three-year-olds or something, and he was the famously gross Child Molester Dad in The Butterfly Effect.

Now, apparently, some lame show on SyFy (or SciFi, for those of us born prior to 2008) has the gall, the nerve, to cast Eric Stoltz in a cop show... where he's a cop, and not a child molester! There had better be a plot twist where he turns out to be a child molesting cop, because if not, this is in clear violation of my previously declared law about how some actors just shouldn't ever be allowed to break out of their archetype role, no matter how hard they try. Like Newman trying to lose weight--preposterous.

This is a short post, and in no way related to Christmas, which it almost is, so sorry about that. I just had to get this out of my system. *deep, furious exhale*

Jonesy's big break

Let's see if I remember how to do this. Yes, friends and almost lovers, I am making a blog post. My e-heart still beats, somehow, even after months and months of crippling separation anxiety induced by my not having written words at you, all 16 of my semi-loyal readers, since something like July. But rejoice! 'Cause here I am, making up for lost time.

My return from the dead, or my lurch, rather, was induced by a recent influx of awesome alien stuff I've been into. As the hopelessly unhip and behind-the-times young man that I am, I only recently was able to watch all of Alien. Someone Netflixed it the other day and I watched it from start to finish for the first time. It was pretty decent, especially for a movie from the '70s that was basically the same exact plot of Event Horizon except with an alien instead of ghosts and Doctor Grant. The only part I thought needed revision was the ending, in which Ripley escapes in her pod, defeats the pesky alien one final time by somehow convincing him to go into the thruster, and lives happily ever after. Here's what I thought should have happened:

RIPLEY: I got you, you bastard. I got you.

The exploding ruins of her ship are seen through the window as her pod flies away from it. For some reason, the self-destruction algorithm on the ship caused it to explode three times.

ALIEN (coming out from the shadows and adjusting his monocle): Listen, I know we just did this enormous "battle" thing and I killed nearly all of your friends, but now that we're on this escape pod, we're stuck together. You and I. For ten bloody years, or however long it's going to take for this thing to float to the nearest sequel-ripe planet.

RIPLEY: No! Nooo!

RIPLEY begins to fire wildly at ALIEN, who sighs and dispenses her with a single flick of his tail. RIPLEY dies. ALIEN looks distraught.

ALIEN: Well, bollocks. Perhaps I should have simply tried to subdue her. I mean, who am I going to play Risk with now? Oh... oh! What's this?

ALIEN moves to the sleep pod that JONESY the cat is sleeping in.

ALIEN: Good lord, an adorable little orange thing!

ALIEN opens the pod and removes JONESY.

JONESY: Reeow?

ALIEN: I must teach this creature to speak! To appreciate Mozart, Hemingway, and how to play Risk! He shall be my only respite in the countless hours of meaningless, Kafka-esque drifting that threaten to consume my soul!

JONESY: Reeow?

ALIEN: Yes, friend, yes! I shall educate you! You and I shall be... roommates!

years later...

ALIEN (holding up a large card depicting a letter 'B'): Alright, Jonesy, what letter is this?

JONESY: ...X?

ALIEN (enraged): NO, JONESY, GOD DAMNIT! IT'S B! B! WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS? WHY DO YOU REFUSE TO LISTEN? I'VE TRIED TIME AND AGAIN TO HELP YOU, BUT IT'S ALMOST LIKE YOU DON'T WANT TO BE HELPED!

JONESY begins to meow sadly.

ALIEN: Jonesy, I'm--I'm sorry. I know I've been difficult lately, but it's just that these are simple concepts. They're so simple! There are only twenty-six letters in the English language! Don't you understand? Why would humans have kept your species as pets if they couldn't even teach them the alphabet?

JONESY: Reeow?

ALIEN: Alright, let's move on to something else. This is the book I asked you to read for today's session: Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger. Toward the end of the book, Zooey tells Franny that the "Fat Lady" concept their late brother Seymour created was actually Seymour's interpretation of Christ himself. Can you explain to me why this is significant, and why both Franny and Zooey had the same mental image of the Fat Lady?

JONESY: Reeow?

ALIEN: GOD DAMNIT JONESY, GOD DAMNIT, I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU'VE DONE THIS--

ALIEN begins to move about the cabin, smashing various things with his tail and causing a general ruckus.

Well, you get the idea. Basically I thought it needed a more cerebral twist at the end, instead of just throwing the alien into a big fiery engine. Really, what does that say about creatures that could not only learn to fight like mofos and survive all kinds of hilarious booby traps after only having been alive for a few hours, but are technically related to the awesome Face Sucker species? Totally selling them short, if you ask me. Plus, Jonesy needed a more central role. For one of the few surviving characters in the film, he was pretty much sidelined the majority of the time.

Anyway, I am back, will hopefully be returning to making semi-frequent posts, and am sorry to have been gone for so long. Cheers!

There must be some way I can use this

The past couple weeks, people keep telling me that I look 17. Actually, the record low was 14, but that one was an outlier that was almost definitely the booze talking. I mean, I know you can't really tell what I look like from that picture I put up of me with the Kleenex in my nose, but if you were my Facebook friend or knew me in real life, you'd know that I have a serious five o' clock shadow no matter how closely I shave and the relaxed walking posture of someone who is obviously allowed to buy alcohol in the United States with his real drivers license. I own my own car--not exactly a good example of automotive perfection, that '96 Chevy Lumina of mine, but I proudly have a set of fuzzy Care Bear dice hanging from the mirror, and what 14-year-old would have fond memories of watching that show when he was little?

On the plane home from the Chip Burns thing, I was seated next to this woman who kept poking and making me take off my noise canceling headphones so she could tell me that she was awake or about to go to sleep. I naturally had her figured for a nut right from the start, but she sealed the deal when the plane started its final descent and she woke up and we started having one of those awkward plane conversations where you happen to glimpse the other person's name on their boarding pass but you aren't sure if you can call them by it because they haven't properly introduced themselves. It was one of those. She was being really flirty, and I knew she'd believe almost anything I said, so when she asked me what I had been doing in Atlanta, my world paused. I knew this was it. I had the opportunity to tell a ridiculous, once-in-a-lifetime lie about who I was, what I'd been doing in a strange city, and what I was returning to. My mind raced with possibilities. I've always wanted to convince a total stranger that I do something totally out-there for my job (like dog catching or a that I'm a writer for some unpopular sitcom they probably wouldn't have seen, like How I Met Your Mother), or that I just got out of jail, or that I was a high profile witness in a mafia murder trial. But all that cool stuff tripped over itself on the way out of my head, fell down, and snowballed out my mouth in the form of:

"Uh, business trip."

I wanted to smack myself in the forehead. That was almost the truth! Lifting boxes and making name tags at a trade show for nine days isn't exactly a business trip, but it isn't a sightseeing excursion either. I totally blew my chance to lie my ass off to a stranger on a plane. But it might not have mattered, because a few minutes deeper into our awkward plane conversation, she smiled and said, "So what kind of business do you do?" I told her I was in graphic design, which I guess is more or less accurate, and she gave me this weird, skeptical look.

"I was gonna say, because you look kinda young for a business trip! Like 17 or 18!"

"I'm 22!" I said, semi-defensively, before realizing that to this woman, who was obviously 30ish, I must have sounded like the little kid sucking on a lollipop and insisting that he's seven and a half.

And that's when it hit me; I knew that I look a little younger than I am. I could've used that in my lie! I could've been playing a guy holding a Nerf gun in a Nerf commercial that was filmed in Atlanta. I could've been taking part in a study about how young people are more approachable or something. But the window of opportunity for that had passed, and I had to finish the rest of the conversation using truthful stuff about myself, where I live, the college I attend, and what my cat's name is.

Next time, plane lady. Next time.

A wicked dream and a wicked burn

Everyone dreams every time. Some people just don't often remember, and some hardly ever do, prompting them to believe they do not dream. But they do.

Probably because of this weird summer cold I recently came down with and how I decided to go ahead and assume that it was the onset of Captain Trips, which was the apocalyptic strain of influenza from The Stand, I had a dream last night that was a mix of the book (version of The Stand), the movie version, Life After People, and I Shouldn't Be Alive.

I don't remember much of the beginning, but it eventually became apparent as I was getting off an airplane with a group of other people and walking through a huge, deserted airport, that most of the people on earth were gone. There weren't tons of bodies around, but everything looked to have been abandoned suddenly. Forks stuck in pieces of cake, knocked over trash cans, etc. We wandered outside and were talking about how it must have been the flu that everyone was suddenly coming down with a week ago. Outside was a jungle beach type area with pure white sand and a heavy network of vines serving as the ground near the beach's edge. We walked through the jungle and saw a snake attacking a dog's tail, which naturally offended all of our good senses, so we taunted the snake, which released the dog, turned into a dog itself, and leaped at me. Luckily I had a back pack to knock it out of the air with. This was far and away the most satisfying part of the dream. For some reason, I've always wanted to slam a flying, snarling wolf dog out of the air with something heavy. When we finally reached the end of the jungle, we came out on the beach. Tall, elegant skyscrapers could be seen on the far end; they were white and shaped like Sydney Opera House pieces. Plants were growing unchecked from all their windows, and suddenly I had a helicopter's view of the city, and everything was like that. Cars parked at crazy angles in the street, fire hydrants toppled over and spraying freely, and thick ivy growing through the tops of nearly every building. And the sky was so ridiculously, beautifully blue, which somehow added creepy points to the whole scenario. Then the scene faded to night, and I was out by some mermaid statues contemplating the future of the human race. As far as anyone knew, we were the only survivors of the plague. My boss from work came up to me and explained that we could eat as much as we wanted, because somehow our food supplies never went down, no matter how much we ate. It seemed to make sense to us both, since the only way we could have survived the plague was to have been chosen by God, that our food would also be powered by God and be endless. Then some people who were apparently my friends from before the plague came up and my boss left, and we were walking. And weirdly, my dream self managed to rattle off this giant monologue about what dangers might soon visit us. It was something like...

"There could be more survivors in other parts of the world, or even nearby. They're probably scattered and disorganized, and they might believe they're the only ones left, just like we did. They might trickle in slowly and join us, or they might form their own communities. The problem is that two communities that are large enough to lay claim to the same thing could eventually emerge. And even though we're all humans and have miraculously survived the end of the human world, fossil fuels or some body of water could prove more important in everyone's immediate minds, and there could be war. And since everyone is dead and all the measures of security that were previously enforced are now abandoned, all of mankind's most deadly weapons are just lying around, waiting to be picked back up again. Nuclear bombs could be lying ten feet below the ground, free for the taking, with no one to raise a hand in protest."

As our leader was passing out horribly fitted t-shirts so we'd all recognize one another, I was trying to trade the one I got with the one that had been given to Mya from Just Shoot Me, who also happened to be in the movie version of The Stand. Suddenly I realized that she was looking really good. And then we all looked around and realized that, in fact, everyone was somehow looking much more attractive than before. And it wasn't an "I'm drunk, you look hot all of a sudden" kind of thing, it was a much more legitimate "everyone actually does look leaner, more cleaned up, more bright-eyed and better dressed" type of thing. It seemed to dawn on everybody at the same time that this was probably to encourage us to mate and repopulate the world (and while this would surely be a bonus points part of the dream to many, it creeped me and everyone else on the beach the fuck out). So we took some awesome boats out on the water back to our jungle camp, and they kept scraping against the bottoms of the ivy-owned skyscrapers. This was somehow a tragedy to me, and I cried uncontrollably. When we finally got back into the jungle, there was a repeat of the dog scene (much to my excitement).

Then I woke up.

Total dream length: all night. Total dream estimated length during dream: three days.

TL;DR It was an awesome dream.

In other news: some wiener peeled the registration stickers off my license plate. You know, those '08, '09 things. I noticed yesterday when I was walking back to my car that there was a bright orange sliver of the '07 one laid over what remained of the '06 one. Neither of which, I feel I should mention, is the currently required '09 one. So now unless it's suddenly 2006 again, I'm not even legally allowed to drive to the DMV to get new ones. What a sick, unprovoked burn. It's a good thing I don't have any kids, because I would for sure be grounding them out of spite right now if I did.

The business world

I recently had an experience that made me feel super old. Way too old to play video games or eat Popsicles. Too old to steer with just one hand. Too old even to enjoy Band-Aids that have Peanuts or Scooby Doo characters. For those who don't know, I was just in Atlanta for ten days working as a grunt/peon at a trade show. My basic job responsibilities were to spend 12 hours a day making name tags, laminating name tags, scanning RFID tags to put into name tags, not breaking any name tags, and finally distributing the name tags. The last part required that we dress up nice, so naturally, I put on a tie for the first time in my life. Anyway, I was getting some coffee in the break room, and as I looked down to put the sugar in, I noticed that I could see my tie, dress shirt, and name tag in the same field of view as my hands putting sugar into coffee. And it hit me: I'm at work doing crappy office work, making coffee, and wearing business clothes including a name tag. I am old.

To combat my oldness, which seems to have visited me a bit prematurely at 22, I promptly set to work finding things which are funny. One of the best, funniest things was a name we discovered hidden deep in the name list. That name was Chip Burns. While not inherently all that funny, it did have a sort of Indiana Jones-esque quality. It seemed to us that Chip Burns would wear a monocle, a top hat, have an excessively masculine jawline, piercing eyes, a cape, possibly a jet pack, and certainly the power to throw things with his mind. When Willy picked up the untorn, unfolded name tag paper and said, "Dude, check this one out: 'Chip Burns!'," we all knew that we'd stumbled upon something that was going to get us through the next week and a half. And he did.

The days leading up to Chip Burns' arrival to collect his name tag were tense. We all wondered what he would look like. I drew up a wanted poster of him looking like a burnt-out college kid with a pimp hat and a monocle, but we all knew in the backs of our minds that Chip would never let his hair get shaggy, for he needs to be aerodynamic while jet packing through the Amazon rain forest. Someone suggested we try to get high fives from Chip if he seemed even the slightest bit cool, but I kept quiet during this conversation. Truth be told, I was a little afraid that Chip Burns would pack a high five x-treme enough to permanently cripple any hand unprepared to receive him.

Even our supervisors were amped for Chip Burns. Other sweet names like Dominique Homo, Connie Concon, and John Pimpo, while awesome, were not as consuming to us as Chip Burns. We had just built him up too much and put way too much stock in his awesomeness to trust any other convention-goer to satisfy. We imagined him walking up to the counter playing a full orchestra's worth of instruments with Godlike talent, possibly juggling at the same time, and saying in a booming voice, "TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: THIS... IS CHIP...... BUUUURNS. I BELIEVE YOU HAVE A NAME TAG FOR ME!" He would be able to sink the sun if he wanted. All the women would want him and all the men would want to be him.

Eventually, on the final day that name tags would be available for pickup, he came.

I was reading Nine Stories, which is perhaps Salinger's greatest work, when he showed up. It seemed almost fitting, since I was on the last story, "Teddy," which is about a boy with a startling mental capacity and a rich history of past lives (which we all assumed was also the case with Chip Burns). I remember flipping one of the final pages in the book as I heard a voice, gentle but somehow cunning, say to the girl seated beside me at her booth: "It's, ah, 'Burns.' Need a photo ID?"

My mouth fell open. We knew that Chip Burns would probably be coming to get his name tag today since it would be his last opportunity to do so, but it happened at exactly the right moment. It wasn't busy, so we had all the opportunity in the world to meet and greet. I stood up and looked at him. Although he didn't have a top hat or a monocle, Chip Burns was still somehow exactly like we thought he'd be. He had a massively cleft chin, sparkling blue eyes, a buzz cut, and was just the slightest bit muscular. He looked like someone who might strangle a boa constrictor just to prove he could do it.

Willy approached him. "Excuse me, sir," he said. "This might seem... really weird. But a few days ago, we chose a name to place on a pedestal and think was incredibly awesome. That was your name, sir."

Chip Burns turned to him and smiled. "You guys must be really bored back there!" he roared mannishly.

"We are, sir," Willy replied. "Would it be okay if we got a picture or two with you?"

Chip Burns seemed to ponder this for a moment. Finally, his eyes twinkling, he shouted, "Let's do it!"

I couldn't run around the booths to the lobby fast enough. I thought about cartwheeling over the window, but I knew Chip Burns' cartwheels would probably put mine to shame. Eventually, when we had all assembled behind Chip Burns and the camera was ready, we struck our Chip Burns poses and the flash went off. We took two or three more, and one girl got one of him hugging her, but everything after that first moment when he showed up is a bit of a blur for me. The adrenaline, you know.

We also stole his business card. You were supposed to get one from each convention-goer and staple it to the form they had to sign to pick up their name tag, but we kept Chip Burns'. We also photocopied and laminated it. Now it's stuck in Nine Stories as my bookmark.

Considering this epic office adventure, which might not sound as amazing in writing as it was in person, I think I'm finally ready to grow up. I might not ever be able to kick my Peanuts Band-Aids habit, but I think I can handle the white collar world. With a little help...

...from Chip Burns.

The future looks bleak, yo

Waking up with "We Are The Champions" by Queen stuck in your head is more than enough to get the gears turning and the wonder machine working on trying to figure out whatever happened to heartwarming, clever, well-written kids sports movies like The Mighty Ducks and The Sandlot. Airbud does not count, nor do the many sequels where Airbud has to play soccer or football. Somehow Beethoven is close, although that didn't really involve sports in any way. But seriously, where did these films go? When and why was it decided that all kids movies must be some type of animation? (And on that note, why are all animated movies now done in that Pixar style rather than drawn? Sorry, I just don't like that stuff. It feels effortless and generic, like the bad Flash animations Flash tutorials have you make.)

I think maybe part of it is that the actors who rocked those old school kids sports movies have all grown up into gross adults and stuff. For instance, I rented this awesomely bad-looking horror movie a while back because it had the fat kid from The Sandlot (he was also the goalie in The Big Green) in it, but it turns out he lost weight when he grew up. LAME. There are some people who just shouldn't be allowed to not be fat; Wayne Knight, better known as Newman from Seinfeld, is another one. That guy just would not be hilarious if he was thin. Who would want to see a dilophosaurus maul a thin guy? Not me. Not even if they played the same scream three times in a row.

Somewhere along the way, the sincerity in kids movies just evaporated. Oh sure, there are probably some good ones that came out in recent years, but I seriously doubt that people will still be making t-shirts of their catch phrases twenty or thirty years from now. I bring that up because I saw an awesome "You're Killin' Me, Smalls!" shirt the other day and wanted the crap out of it, but I had to pass it up because I am poor. But that's okay, because I've got my memories, unlike today's kids. When they grow up and go to college and be poor, there's no way they're going to see shirts of Bolt or Cars and want them. There's just no way! I would seriously bet my roomie's right pinkie against it.

The year in review

As of 12:15 this afternoon, all of my lectures, labs, and studios were finally completed for the academic year. Finals week is still left, but that almost doesn't count as class because the schedule becomes so random and weird and there isn't really much work left to do. I'd like now to recap a few of the more memorable things that happened this year.

• In the big art history lecture hall, which was very dark and silent as we took an online test, someone's computer suddenly began blaring porno music and impassioned moans. Whoever it was took nearly thirty seconds to close the video.

• I saw a guy get kicked out of my intro to logical thinking class for replying "recess" when the professor asked him what his major was.

• My terrible theater professor, who was a pudgy, socially awkward jerk, was met with muffled laughter when he tried to casually toss it out there that he had had a girlfriend at one point. (Unrelated, but another funny thing with this guy was when we Googled him and found out he has a Geocities portfolio website that's done entirely in Papyrus.)

• In painting, our friend Stan's tradition of reading to the class from his Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark 3 book was eventually integrated into the course's official schedule as a 15-minute block every Tuesday and Thursday that became known as "Homeless Stan's Illicit Story Time."

• One of Jon's most recent offerings of foamcore (the musical genre), known officially as "Transcendence," became more affectionately known as "The Neighbor Song" because it was what we always blasted with the subwoofer face-down on the ground at 3am when we were feeling mischievous.

• Jonathan Taylor Thomas was named the King of the Mid-'90s Fadeaway Into Obscurity by President Obama as part of one of his lesser known campaign promises.

• The phrase "jive ass bitches" was inducted into the official vocabulary of our apartment one afternoon after Jon and I watched a especially enlightening episode of Fresh Prince.