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Princess Rodeo - Round 1

I got tired of the Superman thing. If anyone out there is dying to know the ending, then let me know and I'll follow through.

Now we're onto a more grown up topic, profiles of the Disney Princesses. Daughter is just at the right age to be entranced by Disney's Princess marketing campaign. So that means that on most days I'm knee deep in fairies, musical numbers, and puffy dresses. As a coping mechanism for this, and every other little jab life sends my way, I twist things around in my head until they amuse me.

Lets start with my least favorite princess,

Snow White

It's pretty obvious that Snow White is, by a pretty wide margin, the stupidest of the princess crew, and that's a pretty low bar to limbo under. She'll eat anything you hand her and will gladly walk off into the woods with creepy armed men. Like most of the early princesses, she contributes absolutely nothing to the victory over evil, and is, in fact, asleep during the final conflict. She's basically everything you hope your daughter doesn't turn out to be.

Hobbies: Naps (this will come up often with princesses), eating treats from strangers, tricking woodland animals into doing housework

Dialog that translates most easily into porn: "Why, you're seven little men."

Strengths: High pitched wheedling voice exerts complete mind control over anyone under 4ft tall.

Weaknesses: Crippling stupidity. Holds conversations with echoes.

Secret Shame: Left the dwarf's cottage with a new perspective on life... and a positive pregnancy test. Doesn't know who the father is. Hopes it's Doc, pretty sure that it's Dopey

Conversations

Daughter and I are watching a Disney Princess Sing Along thing and the narrator, a kindly old grandma type, says, "a place where everyone's dreams always come true"

So, in my ongoing effort to educate, I say to Daughter, "You know that really can't work. See, what if my dream is that everyone else's dreams never come true? That's a logical flaw in her plan."

Daughter looks back at me, "Shh, Cinderella."

The World Will Never See Another Man Like Him

Continued from this:

We left off with Punchy McSpikyhead (Doomsday) facing off with the army and a sexually frustrated Superman flying back to the city with Lois.

Superman's trip takes just long enough to let Doomsday demonstrate how little he cares about being shot in the face and how much he cares about administering punches to everything in sight. Superman gets there just as the army is pretty much punched out. What follows is about 15 minutes of back and forth punching. It's actually a pretty decent scene. I know I enjoyed it the first time I saw it when it was in the Matrix. One high point was Doomsday's use of the patented Kirk double-overhand-chop. Aside from that, lets cover some of the fun stuff.

See, Superman can shot beams out of his eyes. Depending on what the plot needs at the time, these beams either cut, burn or just blast things. These beams worked pretty well against Doomsday. Which kind of makes you wonder why Superman didn't actually USE the damn things more than twice. Maybe he liked the sensation of his super-kidneys being forced into his super-spine. Either way Superman was kind of getting his super-ass beat. The climactic moment in the fight came when Doomsday used his fist to convince Superman to cough out his stomach. Superman collapsed, no doubt regretting not ignoring the sex-interrupting robot-roommate.

This is about as much fun as it looks.

GASP, but wait. A crying little girl (I'm not kidding) has wandered out into the street behind Doomsday. I have a two year old daughter. She has exceedingly poor-judgment, but I have no doubt that given the same situation, my daughter would run the other fucking way from the big blue spiky thing that's punching down buildings.

Anyway, Doomsday's readying a punch for the kid when Superman gets up and tackles him. Now here's where Superman almost does something smart.

Almost.

Superman flies Doomsday (who can't fly himself by the way) up and into space. Now I'm thinking, "Good for you. Throw the bastard into the sun and go get a back rub." In fact, I think throwing things into the sun should be Superman's default option. Killer comet, sun. Supervillian, sun. Car wont start, sun. But no. Superman does not dispose of the big psychotic punching machine in a logical and effective manner. Instead, he chooses the more dramatic, "Ride the freak back to earth" option.

It's like that scene in the Bourne movie where Matt Damon throws a guy over a balcony and rides him down the fall letting the bad guy take the brunt of the damage. It's like that, only from orbit, with more spikes, and with a hell of a lot more sexual subtext. You'd think Superman would be smart enough to aim for something like a sharp rock out in the middle of nowhere, but no, he hits right back down in the city probably killing another few hundred people.

Superman and Doomsday are in a post-impact cuddle at the bottom of the crater. Doomsday's glowy red eyes fade out and he goes to big punching fields in the sky. Superman lives long enough to climb out of the crater and toss off a line asking if the 'people' are ok. Hint: they're not, you killed lots of them. He then dies with as much dignity as possible while wearing blue tights.

Yes it's dramatic, but where the hell did the stick come from?

A year passes and the city's been rebuilt enough to spend time building a full memorial to Superman. Yeah, that's what I thought. It turns out that it was a couple weeks. The city was fixes and a three-story marble S was built in two weeks. Lois is sad, and that is a 100% accurate description of the depth of her feelings. We're shown a news report telling us how crime has skyrocketed. Then the tv on which we watched that report was stolen... yeah.

We've finally got into the meat of the story. It's an hour and forty five minutes about the death of superman, so now we're going into the real in depth consequences... oh, he's back. Forget it.

Yeah, for the movie about the death of Superman, Superman is dead for four minutes.

Four

Fucking

Minutes

To be concluded...

And Sometimes I Despair

So I'm watching a Superman cartoon on netflix online. This is about the time when Superman dies, but, like soap operas, no one in comic books ever really dies. So don't get all weepy.

There are more absurdities than you might expect.

We start out with Lex Luther (bald white guy who's the standard villian) set up as a philanthropist. Don't worry, comic books don't bother with multi-dimensional characters. We quickly learn that Lex is a bad guy when he randomly kills subordinates, is rude to old people, kicks puppies, etc.

Superman's been busy since the last time I saw him. He's dating Lois Lane, a mini-skirt wearing reporter. I mentioned the mini-skirt right? I'm kind of uncomfortable with how much I liked that on a cartoon. She either has or hasn't figured out that Superman is actually Clark Kent. The story meanders around that point. While Superman and Lois are vacationing in Antarctica with Superman's gay robot pal, Lex is busy tunneling down to the center of the earth. To be perfectly clear, he's got a full company of no-name flunkies drilling for him, and we all know what happens to no-name flunkies performing esoteric tasks while the hero of the story relaxes...yeah.

So they're drilling away, complaining about the heat, when DUN DUN DUN, they find something. Being flunkies, they establish the dramatic video link to Lex, then promptly decide to shoot the big scary looking thing with a fucking laser. So it starts spraying some strange gas and a goofy hologram movie of an alien pops up. It's screaming gibberish at them, which everyone but the flunkies are smart enough to figure out means, "You dumb fucks. Why the hell did you shoot this thing? You idiots are screwed now."

Sure enough a big spiky thing punches its way out of what we now know was a prison and kills all of the flunkies in the exact same way. Seriously, like 20 flunkies get done in with punch after punch. Seems like we could have expressed that more concisely. It's like making brownies. The instructions say, "Stir until evenly mixed." They don't say, "Stir. Stir. Stir. Stir. Stir..."

Anyway, flunkies are dead, and Lex's view screen has dramatically gone to static. The big bad thing 'Doomsday' wanders out of the cave and starts killing everything.

I can't emphasize this point enough.

It kills everything. It stops to kill a deer for Christs's sake. Now here's the first big absurdity. This thing is literally trying to kill every living thing it see's, and it's doing it with its signature punch to the head.

I figure it could have kept itself busy in the forest for months. Rabbits, squirrels, beetles, worms. He's an unstoppable killing machine, but he has no ability to prioritize.

In spite of that, Doomsday somehow makes it to the city overnight. Somehow or other the army has decided to stop him with a whole bunch of tanks even though no one else seems to know he's coming. Right about now Superman should be getting nooky, which you can only assume he has to realllllllllllllllly careful about, but his robot friend interrupts them to let them know that the city's being a little messed up. Here's absurdity number 2. We learn that in addition to basic butler and sex-interruption skills, the robot knows everything about everything. He tells Superman all about Doomsday.

Doomsday was created as a super-weapon as an alien race, but it turns out that he couldn't tell friend from foe. Can you imagine being on the engineering team that developed this guy?
Project Sponsor, "Hey I hear you've got some good news on that teleportation system you've been working on."
Engineer, "Well, we went another way. We actually created a weapon."
"Like a teleportation gun? That'd be cool."
Engineer, "More like a guy."
"I don't really..."
"Here, just take a look. It's really great."
Sponsor, "Wow, he's big... and blue...and he's a little spiky. He's supposed to be spiky?"
"Oh yeah, we calculated that it makes him look 14% scarier."
"So he carries the teleporter? I'm still a little confused on that."
"Oh no, he's the weapon. He's completely unstoppable and he punches really, really hard."
Sponsor, "That's ... well that's ... you know that we as a society evolved past the need for war like, 10,000 years ago right? What are we supposed to do with this thing?"
Engineer, "Oh god, you can't 'DO' anything with it. The thing's crazy. See, it can't tell friend from foe, so it will just kill everything it sees."
Sponsor, "There has never been someone more fired than you are right now."

Back to the robot who knows all this. Somehow he decided not to let Superman know. They've been roommates for who knows how long and he never mentions that the one thing in the galaxy that can kill Superman is buried under a farm in Jersey?

To be continued...

You're Always the Last to Know

I started this post in a completely different direction. It was going to be about how I generally manage to keep my weirdness pretty well under wraps, but that it sometimes sneaks out at odd, no pun intended, times.

There's a problem with that though. See, I think I'm 100% wrong. Not the "I'm an odd duck" part, that's definitely true. I really don't think I keep it any where nearly as subdued as I thought.

I think what I really manage to do is to make my weirdness more amusing than creepy. So, it looks like those times I was going to use to illustrate my odd-duckiness getting out, was really just a list of times that it got out without a filter.

A Very Special Episode of Weary Drum

I was watching Finding Nemo with Daughter today and I remembered something from when I was a kid. This was remarkable in two ways:

1. I hardly ever remember anything from my childhood. I really can only remember a handful of stuff before I was 17.

2. Pretty much anything I actually do remember is the kind of thing that, while I can make jokes about it, most people find pretty horrifying. This memory was Beaver Cleaver compared to everything else.

So, here's the actual memory. In the movie, two bully fish had stolen a young sea snail's shell and were playing keep away with it. Basically throwing it back and forth to each other over the head of the snail. Two kids did that to me one day.

Now before I get into details, lets do a little background on the situation. You're thinking, "Poor Mikey being bullied all through his young life." Well, not so much. I got some shit of course, but I was always tall for my age and I never really stayed in any one place long enough for the kids to work up any kind of bullying project-plan. So I didn't really have a big issue with that. Also, these kids were smaller than me...and I'm fairly sure they were younger. I'm positive I was smarter.

Anyway, they'd kind of randomly been pestering me. I'm fuzzy on details but I remember waiting in one line while they were waiting in another. One of them walked over behind me and pushed me, then ran laughing back to his place in line 20ft away. It took me a second to figure this out. Not the mystery of being shoved and oh the cruelty of man and all that fun stuff, but why the little dumbass decided to piss off someone bigger than him, then run away only to stop 20 damn feet away. Once I was able to assimilate the stupidity, I walked over to his line, smacked him in the head a couple times and walked back. Honestly, what the hell was he even thinking?

I also can't remember why they even want to to start up with me in the first place. I've never been the kind of person to pick on people and I can't remember pretty much anything about these guys. I'm really at a loss for their motivation, but their astonishing lack of skill and judgment is kind of funny in spite of that.

Ok, so back to the first memory. I was playing basketball I guess, or at least I had a basketball and somehow one of them got it. They started doing the keep away thing. After a couple half-hearted attempts to get the ball I ran at the guy holding the ball. He, all smiles, threw the ball over my head to his friend. His smile broke when he figured out that I wasn't going to change direction. I grabbed him before he had a chance to get away, pushed him into a fence and smacked him around. His friend ran away and dropped the ball. I'm not sure how they saw that little adventure ending, but I'm pretty sure that wasn't it. I guess they weren't really thinking that far ahead anyway.

I'm proud of that moment. Not because I smacked a kid or overcame some personal demons, but because I found what is probably the optimal solution to the 'keep-away' gambit.

Also, before anyone gets too upset about the graphic violence contained herein, please note that when I say 'smacking around' I mean that. These kids were smaller than me and just little idiots. I wasn't even using closed-fists. It was more of a physical form of punctuation on the backs of their heads.