Vic and Bob re-enact the whole of 2016.
Category Archives: Whingegasm
Anecdon’ts
Sometimes there’s just nothing to talk about. Sometimes, you can go days and days with plenty of things happening, thinking all the while that these events and stories would make great anecdotes. And sometimes, like, you know, always, nothing happens and you just have to tell short, pointless Anecdon’ts*.
Here’s a list of things that have happened to me this past week, some true, some not so true. See if you can spot which is which.
- I punched Chris Hemsworth in the buttocks.
- I fed the fish.
- I watched an entire season of The Wire whilst eating nothing but cake.
- I ignored Scarlett Johansson’s text. Again.
- I was abducted by a creature from the Upside Down.
- I water flossed my teeth.
- I ate the fish.
- I had to water floss my teeth again.
- I caught the young Han Solo giving himself a Han Solo.
- I realised some music at the Olympics sounded a lot like the Newsradio theme.
- I realised that the numbers at the Olympics are written in a typeface that looks suspiciously like Comic Sans.
- I took this photo.
- I then tweeted that photo with the caption, ‘this air freshener smells like yoga farts’.
- I made that noise you make to call a cat, but no cat came.
- I caught the young Boba Fett giving himself a Boba Fett.
- I realised that the tune stuck in my head for the past two months is the theme tune from the sitcom The Thin Blue Line.
- My friend found a picture she drew of me eight years ago.
*© Sundays Supplement
Insta-Topical Reacto-Post
I have an opinion on current matters. It’s impossible for me not to have an opinion, and opinions always need airing in public forums, so this is a vehicle for the opinion to be expressed in a pithy/controversial/satirical/moderate/extreme manner.
The Opinion is sacrosanct. The Opinion is too big for a tweet, but The Opinion is not big enough for an entire book. And so The Opinion is here, and it is right and correct and worthy until the facts change and alter The Opinion. The Opinion will never be altered.
But more importantly, it is THE OPINION of me. And me type opinions are the ones that need most to be aired, expressed, shouted, bellowed, whispered, thought, or burped.
THE OPINION might make you angry, it might make you applaud, it might make you think, it might confirm everything you hold dear, or it might be counter to everything you think about everything. THE OPINION will never make you change your mind.
Ultimately though, THE OPINION is what’s important.
It is THE OPINION.
Ferris Bueller TV Series
Last night I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off for the first time in a long while, and it was fun doing so with the view that the whole thing is going on in Cameron’s head as he stays in bed.
I thought the worst thing that ever happened to Ferris Bueller was the Honda Superbowl Commercial, but I was wrong. It was this:
The NBC television series, from 1990, starring Charlie Schlatter and Jennifer Aniston, followed The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and rightly got lost under its shadow.
If you can get more than a minute past the opening titles, you’re a more patient person than I. Don’t. Watch. It.
It opens with crap Ferris addressing the camera, saying he can’t change his life because the movie put it up on the big screen … and then immediately sets itself up as a prequel to those events. Hmm.
But what’s worst is that it takes a vicious stab at the movie whose success and goodwill the series is trading off. That, I believe, is called a Dick Move.
Imagine if the TV series of Buffy, instead of opening with a genre-busting moment that set up the tone brilliantly for the coming show, had Sarah Michelle-Gellar telling us she thought the movie sucked, and then said some unpleasant things about Kristy Swanson, before slicing through her cardboard cut-out with a chainsaw.
That this abomination got past the script stage is amazing, and that it ran for 13 episodes is depressing.
One of them’s a righteous dude …
Thought Vomit #138: ft. A Car Wash
I’m nostalgic for a car wash.
Of all the things to drag me free from the fug of a self-destructive whingegasm, a car wash is at once the most and least surprising.
When I was even littler than I am now, I used to drag my mother across the street, so I could hold her hand whilst we watched the mechanical behemoth. Its brushes span wildly, chucking water into the air, and spraying my beaming little face. It was the best thing in the world, with its giant blue foam rotary brushes and fading red metal frame.
And with each passing summer, new wonders were bolted to it; the wheel scrubbers, the wax hoses, and the air dryer that came down and miraculously followed the shape of the car trapped within.
But then I got a little older, and the wonder faded. I even began to resent it somewhat, especially if it sprayed me on my chocolate run to the shop.
It’s never as fun from the inside
A few years ago, I wandered past the car wash and saw a boy. He wasn’t young, but he wasn’t quite a teenager – maybe about eleven or twelve. But he was stood by the car wash, alone, grinning wildly as it swished and swooshed around a nondescript Ford. And each and every time he was sprayed with the fine cloud of water, he bounced up and down, and clapped his hands with a loud laugh.
I kept seeing him there for the next few days, and his excitement and joy always made me grin.
That’s when a group of three boys, who couldn’t have been much older than him, maybe just a year, wandered by and saw him too. They jeered at him. It was upsetting to realise that I saw more of myself in their cynical sneering, than in his giddy wonderment. That feeling was only made worse as I watched his head drop in embarrassment, and his shoulders slump with a realisation that perhaps he was a little too old to be enjoying himself like this.
The surly teens slouched away, dragging his final throes of childhood with them.
It was horrible.
And then the car wash drenched him once more.
It would have been a fitting metaphor.
Except that the water shook him from his own fug, and once again he bounced and clapped and giggled.
The teens turned back and sneered.
He ignored them.
He stood and played there every day for the rest of the summer.
Good for him.