Were you thinking you’d like to be Christopher Walken for Halloween but didn’t know how to pull it off? You are in luck! Someone has made a mask that you can print off, cut out, and attach to your face.
Here it is in action. Either it’s meant for small heads, or else my head is abnormally large. Either way, fun times!
One of the categories of “Snide Remarks” columns is Columns That Eric Finds Much, Much Funnier Than Anyone Else. This week’s “Snide Remarks” Classic, from Aug. 8, 2001, is a prime example. It’s called “It’s All True,” and it’s a list of interesting trivia items similar to those e-mails people used to forward around all the time. Most of those e-mail trivia items aren’t actually true, which annoys me, so I made up a list of things that are also not true in the hopes that it, too, would circulate.
For some reason, this list really makes me giggle. I like how some of them almost sound true at first, for just a second, until you think about them. Sort of like 9/11 conspiracy theories.
Just as my review of Tyler Perry’s “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” elicited angry letters, so has my review of his latest, “Why Did I Get Married?” My conversations with other film critics lead me to understand that I am not alone. The e-mail’s sender line says “Latricia Latricia Jenkins,” so apparently she’s named Latricia twice. Good for her! Here’s what she says:
Your review of Tyler Perry’s Why did I get married, is why talented Black film producers will always have a hard time trying to break through mainstream. [It's even harder when they're not talented, which is why Perry's success is so impressive.] Your comments were absolutely ignorant and not true. [Not true? You mean I got my opinion wrong? I actually DID like the movie?! Crap.] But what can you expect when you still have ignorant and pathetic people in 2007 still hanging nooses around trees. You critic are unbelievable, especially when it comes to Black folks.
We critic may be unbelievable, but what’s even more unbelievable is that someone with enough brain power to read a review and write a response could actually think that disliking a Tyler Perry film automatically makes a person racist. I didn’t like Woody Allen’s last movie, either. Does that make me an anti-Semite?
(When I wrote back to Latricia2 and asked her that, she did not reply.)
Hey, taco fans! Don’t forget that tomorrow (Tuesday) from 2-5 p.m., every person in America is entitled to eat a free taco at Taco Bell! (Note I said “entitled,” not “obligated.”)
This is because Taco Bell pledged that if someone stole a base during the World Series, they’d give everybody a taco. And sure enough, someone named “Jacoby Ellsbury” on a team called the “Boston Red Sox” stole second base during Game 2.
There are a couple of downsides. One, it’s Taco Bell. Two, it’s only for the regular hard-shell taco, not the better-tasting soft taco. But hey, it’s free, and while you only get one, there’s nothing stopping you from going to every Taco Bell in town, or as many as necessary before you’re not hungry anymore.
I like the legal mumbo-jumbo they had to put at the bottom of the web page promoting the giveaway. It’s pretty elaborate for a taco giveaway. One of the main points is that if you suffer harm from the taco, you won’t hold Major League Baseball liable. Your beef (ha!) is with Taco Bell. Duly noted.
This week, “Snide Remarks” tackles the very important topic of pants, and the wearing thereof, in an entry entitled “The Saggy Bottom Boys.” There are some important visual components, as well as an audio element, so at least two of your senses will get a workout!
Audio version of the column is here, though you can also listen to it on the page with the SnideCast player. If you wish to subscribe to the “Snide Remarks” podcast, you can do that with this URL.
Sign up for the “In the Dark” e-zine here.
Listen to this week’s podcast version here.
Subscribe to the podcast’s feed here.
Here’s why I’m sick of the “Saw” movies.
In the pre-”Saw” days, you could usually count on one seriously lousy horror film to come out the weekend before Halloween. Scrolling through my review archives I see gems like “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2″ (2000), “Thirteen Ghosts” (2001), and “Ghost Ship” (2002). In 2003, there was “The House of the Dead” on Oct. 10 and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (which I kinda liked) on Oct. 17.
Then “Saw” arrived for Halloween 2004, made a pot of money, and started monopolizing the weekend. Now nobody releases crappy horror movies the last week of October because they know they’ll be competing with the latest “Saw” installment.
Yeah, the movies were usually terrible — but at least there was a variety! Now it’s always “Saw.” It’s even on the poster for “Saw IV”: “If it’s Halloween, it must be ‘Saw.’” In other words: “We didn’t make this movie because we had a great idea for a story. We made it because it’s Halloween.”
Anyway, they didn’t screen “Saw IV” for critics; they quit doing that after “Saw II.” But there were midnight showings last night, and my long-time friend and occasional “Snide Remarks” character Rob (you remember Rob) braved the late hour to attend with me. We were just about the oldest people in the theater, given that we are in our early 30s and most of the people who would go to a “Saw” film at midnight are about 18.
Also this week, two movies whose titles sound alike: “Dan in Real Life” and “Lars and the Real Girl.” The former stars Steve Carell as an advice columnist whose personal life is in a state of upheaval; the latter stars Ryan Gosling as a shy man who falls in love with a life-size rubber sex doll. Both are surprising — “Dan” for being smart and funny despite its premise, and “Lars” for being sweet, wholesome, and uplifting despite its premise. (He doesn’t actually, um, “use” the doll.)
The eye-opening Darfur documentary “The Devil Came on Horseback” is making the rounds before its DVD release, so you might catch that on the big screen if you get a chance, and if you want to feel outraged and horrified, and really, who doesn’t?
We also have late reviews of last week’s “The Comebacks” and Tyler Perry’s latest “Why Did I Get Married?” In neither case is a review useful, since both movies are approximately as bad as you thought they would be.
A 33-year-old middle school principal in Houston is being accused of having an inappropriate relationship with one of her 14-year-old students. There are about 10 news stories like this every day, so I’m not very interested in the details of this one, except when it comes to the principal’s name:
Cimberli Johnson.
She probably thinks her name is pronounced “Kimberly.” No doubt that’s what her parents had in mind when they named her. But there’s a problem here. “Cimberli,” spelled that way, would be pronounced “Simberly.”
English has rules, people! Many of those rules have exceptions, yes, but there are rules!
The letter “C,” when followed by an “I,” “E,” or “Y,” will always make an “S” sound: circus, cinema, cinnamon, Cynthia, century, censor, prophecy, concentrate, calcium, principal, officer, etc. (Words like artificial and special have a “sh” sound rather than “sss,” but the “C” is still functioning as an “S.”)
If you name your daughter Cimberli, you are not being original or clever or unique. All you’re doing is failing.
I haven’t read a lot of scary novels. Not intentionally; it just hasn’t turned out that way. So maybe it doesn’t mean much when I tell you that Joe Hill’s “Heart-Shaped Box” is the scariest book I’ve ever read.
It is the story of an aging heavy metal superstar named Judas Coyne who, owing to his carefully crafted public image, has developed a habit for acquiring morbid things. This includes a procession of pale Goth girlfriends, groupies who become lovers and think they’re the one who will tame the beastly Judas.
Then Judas buys a ghost online. A woman says she’s selling the suit that belonged to her stepfather, and that the man’s ghost is now “attached” to it so that whoever buys the suit will get the ghost, too. Stupid, of course, but hey, it’s only a thousand bucks, and Judas is rich, and the public eats it up when he does morbid things like buy ghosts. So why not?
Well, I’ll tell you why not. BECAUSE THE GHOST IS EVIL AND MEAN AND HE WANTS TO MAKE JUDAS KILL HIS CURRENT GOTH GIRLFRIEND AND HIMSELF!!
I’m not embarrassed to tell you that this book made me poop my pants a lot. The first half, in particular, is fiendishly creepy and spooky, the kind of chilly ghost story you read only during the daytime and in public. The second half gets bloody and is more horrifying than terrifying (if you catch the difference), but no less thrilling.
It is the first novel from Joe Hill, who had previously written a collection of short stories. I just discovered that Joe Hill’s real name is Joe King, as in son of Stephen King. It’s good that he keeps that fact hidden. It would create unfair expectations of him. Also, it might make some people think that the glowing reviews heaped on “Heart-Shaped Box” are occurring automatically because of his pedigree. No sir! Joe Hill stands on his own. I’m terrified of him.
(Time magazine has a review of the book here, and Entertainment Weekly has one here.)
This week’s “Snide Remarks” Classic column might just make you stand up and say “¡Olé!” I mean, probably not, but you never know. It’s about illegal immigration, and it’s called “(His)panic Attacks,” and it was originally published on May 8, 2006. That’s recent enough for you to vaguely remember it, maybe.
TV has the Nielsen ratings. Radio has Arbitron. But how is Internet viewership measured? The closest thing we have is Alexa, which ranks websites in order of popularity. The catch: It only monitors the activity of people who have the Alexa toolbar installed in their browser.
To their credit, Alexa readily admits that this skews the findings somewhat. They have millions of users, but obviously there are millions more who aren’t being counted. Then again, there’s no reason to assume that Alexa users’ web-surfing habits are terribly different from everyone else’s. (For a while, the Alexa toolbar wasn’t available for Macs. During that time, I would assume Mac-related websites were woefully under-counted in Alexa’s rankings. Alexa still can’t be used with Mac’s Safari browser.) Alexa says its top rankings are pretty accurate; it’s only after about #100,000 that they think the sample size is too small to be completely reliable.
I became interested in all this a few months ago when I installed the Alexa toolbar in my Firefox browser. It includes a nifty extension that displays, down in the corner of the browser window, the Alexa ranking of every site you visit. I love that, because I love ranking things. It’s fun to discover that sites you assumed were hugely popular are less-trafficked than you thought, and vice versa. It’s also nice for me personally to notice sites ranked lower than my own.
My site, EricDSnider.com, is currently at #167,273. Whether that’s high or not depends on how you look at it, I guess. Considering there are more than 80,000,000 websites on the Internet, 167,273 is pretty good. On the other hand, that also means there are 167,272 sites more popular than mine. Coming in 167,273rd in a contest is not very impressive.
If you don’t already have Alexa installed, why not install it? You don’t provide them with any personal information; no one is monitoring which sites YOU, Eric D. Snider (if that is your name), are visiting. All Alexa tracks is that someone from a particular IP address went to a particular site. Plus, if every single EricDSnider.com visitor has the Alexa toolbar installed, it will artificially boost my ranking, which is directly tied to my self-esteem.
By the way, Alexa says the top 10 most visited sites on the Internet are:
1. Yahoo
2. Google
3. MSN
4. YouTube
5. Windows Live (Hotmail)
6. MySpace
7. Facebook
8. Orkut (Google’s Facebook rip-off, which I have never heard of)
9. Wikipedia
10. Hi5.com (yet another MySpace clone, and one I’ve never heard of)