Habitual Failure Pt. 2: Fuck, Jamarcus Russell

Ah, it's been a bit of time since I've been able to write about this subject, examining the fuckhole that is Ryan Leaf's life really took it out of me. However, there are sports douches to be berated, so I must return to my ever noble profession of emotionally decapitating these bastards. On we go, then.

Jamarcus Russell, with standard glazed look of stupidity.
Photo by Brit.

If you are an observant reader, you might have noticed the (perhaps misplaced?) punctuation between Fuck and Jamarcus (and the only thing that gets in between those two concepts is usually just Jamarcus' fat ass). This simple comma denotes much more than its banality implies. I would say simply Fuck Jamarcus Russell, but that really wouldn't depict the great deal of hope I had for him at the beginning of his career. My family's from Louisiana, so, that gave me an excuse to root for them (and you need everyone you can get in the fuckfest that is Bowl season), and I saw a bunch of L-State's games, but the notable one in my mind, of course, being the '07 Sugar Bowl. He was a beast with a Manning-esque laser rocket cannon of an arm, before draft day I could already see him chucking 60 yard bombs to drag the Oakland Raiders out of a Davis-fueled coma.

Brad Neely: This Guy is Funny as Fuck!

Brad Neely, in front of a mysterious plant.
Photo by bobafred.

There are many things from my days in middle school I would gladly leave behind: the pre-jock bullies, the straight up primadonnas, the hellish social atmosphere, the inability to do anything except sit inside and play video games (...maybe that wasn't so bad), and just the general depressing douchebaggery inherent in all middle-schoolers. However, there was one gleaming moment of cultural production that just sings to me from that time in my life, like some fucked up nine-year-old parakeet, singing to me "Wizard People! WIZARD PEOPLE!"

For those of you unfortunate enough to not know the instant nostalgic ramifications of this phrase, let me enlighten you. "Wizard People, Dear Reader!" was a shortly popular but intensely hilarious comedic romp through the land of spoof and parody, taking a much more comfortable viewpoint with the Harry Potter mythos than perhaps most were comfortable with. Created by web-comic artiste Brad Neely in 2004, this comedic masterpiece is simply Neely's narration, on two discs, which are played in sync with the film "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone", using the base plot movements but completely changing the characters and their actions into ideas so much more worthy than some piddling JK Rowling book about emotional preteen wizards.

Hellraiser: The Engineer

Horror and hedonist hallmark Clive Barker published his novella entitled "The Hellbound Heart" in November of 1986 as a part of the masterful horror anthology Night Visions. However, this work was far too prolific to be confined to the pages of a mere anthology, spawning itself into a horror franchise so absolutely in touch with the darkest parts of human suffering and eroticism that is takes a sort of magnanimous position to all other horror which precedes and follows it.

The Cenobites, on what is just a lovely VHS
cover. Photo by Jesper Wiking.

What I am speaking of with this perhaps wordy introduction is the well-known film series Hellraiser, the first of which was directed by Barker, the rest of which passed through the hands of numerous B to Z list directors. However, even when the production of the sequels was questionable, the pure power of the base story has provided each subsequent film with the ever seductive intonation of the first, the deep fulfillment promised by a world of pure torture. The characters of the Cenobites, the primary hellish force facing the protagonists of these films, and their General of Sadomasochism, horror all-star Pinhead, are creatures which touch the very base fabric of what human fright is based on, as well as the deeper and more mysterious points of human desire. A sadomasochistic feeling envelopes each film in a particular way, though always intriguing, bringing to question the viewers comfortableness with such "sights" as the ritual skinning of man, the penetration of chain into flesh, the sundering of man into a quivering beast of ecstatic pain.

Habitual Failure Pt.1: Fuck Ryan Leaf

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I'm Locking Out The Lockouts

Alright, I'm gonna try to keep this post short, as I admittedly do not know much about the labors lockouts pending in the NBA and NFL, but I feel they worth some form of discussion. I mean, hell, I can barely manage the payroll for my simulation Nationals team: it's halfway through the season and I am somehow twenty million in debt to the District of Columbia already (Jake Peavy is fucking expensive, man).

This man is a completely impotent leader.
I can't be funny about how much I hate
David Stern. Photo by Eric Richardson.

My interest can merely just not stay tacked to such a meaningless issue, meaningless in that it is a bunch of fucking-absurdly-rich people arguing for more control and revenue from a bunch of more-fucking-absurdly-rich people. That might sound uneducated, sure, but sports is about putting balls into goals, reaching the endzone, or any other of the various signs of physical and technical dominance that rile us up and make us proud to be fans. Sports is not about having the entire construction of teams altered to fit markets, punishing an area not for its lack of love for a team, but for its lack of something as basic as population.

This is how areas like Florida get two World Series winning Marlins teams, an appearance at said monumental sports occasion by the Rays, as well as one of the most dynamic groups of basketball players the last few decades has seen. And how does the area reward these amazing accomplishments? THEY STILL DON'T GO TO FUCKING GAMES. These attendance struggles by the MLB are confusing enough, this isn't even the USA's sport any more as much as it is Latin America's, a population certainly prevalent in Florida.

Kool Keith: Kooler Than You

Hip hop is a lot of things these days, but rap, not so much. Producing is where the real groundbreaking is done, hell, the advent of rap came about through the constantly evolving role of the disc jockey. The two roles, rapper and DJ, were not mutually exclusive, but rather worked with each other to create new ways of combining poetry and music. There seems to have been a split somewhere however, and now the two are rarely excelled at in conjunction today, the former if at all.

Fuck it, I'll say rappers suck nowadays, There, it's out in the open at the beginning so I don't have to ease you into the notion of a white guy complaining about rap music, shocking as it is, I know. I don't even really have a problem with the music, hip hop production has been constantly evolving with new sounds and rhythms. And back in the day, sure, there was something crucial to be said in gangsta rap as it evolved out of the early stylings of Stetsasonic and what have you, it's political message being violent and cathartic if a bit ill-wielded. However, this dual progression seems to have been left behind in the good-ole-days of hip hop and rap, as it were, the path of Double Dee and Steinksi influencing such innovative acts as DJ Shadow (such a Bay legend people forget he's form the Bay, but just listen to The Outsider), NWA and Ice T have left us with the poor legacy of Fitty and Eminem. Later, with De La Soul and Tribe we get the feel good rap: music about getting fucked up and fucking bitches in a nice way, or just about how great of a rapper you are. Even later comes the political hip hop, touched on by Tribe and Soul's Afrocentrism but really outplayed by guys like Immortal Technique to the point whiny bitchiness. (Oh and if you want point for genre reference, Kanye West is dance music, nothing more.)

It's either this... Photo by QXZ.

... or this. Well, fuck, not much of a choice. Photo by Dan Figueroa.

True Blood: Uh... What?

True Blood made an impact in my life far before I started watching it. It seemed to spurt up from the veins of society as a cultural phenomenon directly related to the ongoing vampire craze of the time, one that seemed to have reached its peak upon True Blood's beginnings. Hell, True Blood debuted on September 7, 2008 with the oh so infamous Twilight movie premiering two months later in what seemed a clusterfuck of shitty vampire melodramas.

There was hope, however! True Blood's first season got absolutely rave reviews, I mean fuck, it won a Golden Globe and an Emmy! Maybe I was wrong about this whole vampire thing being a smorgasbord of shit and blood. So when an opportunity to explore the show came up at a local science fiction and fantasy conference, I checked it out, got a full first season review and even had some fairly enlightening conversations about how the nature of the show could be related to issues of social justice.