Happy 4th of July!

Flashback: Turn Your Crank to Swank!

I was combing through the Wayback machine, slowly reconstructing our archives, when I came across a forgotten Talmudic commentary from World O' Crap Chaplain, the Very Reverend J. Grant Swank, and it occurred to me that you heathens are probably in serious need of some spiritual counseling. So be seated, and open your hymnals...

[Originally posted by Scott on August 11, 2008]

Death to life 

As Jesus Christ gave Himself every minute to the Father agenda, so Jesus died out to His own zeal.. He was human, as we are human; therefore, He was tempted in all areas like as we. But He did not sin. He did not yield to the allurements of self-governance.

Remember kids, Democracy = Sin.

Jesus made certain that at every turn — especially when applauded by the masses for miracle producing — that He did not permit Himself to be fooled. He refused the forbidden fruit. He would not bite into that which was hanging on the forever tree in the center of the world’s garden.

I remember when my folks were landscaping the yard, my mom wanted to to plant forever trees in the front garden, but fortunately my dad convinced her to go with the Chinese maple and the weeping spruce.

Jesus allowed His very being to be baptized into a sanctified plot outside Himself. He would know nothing until it was revealed to Him.

Jesus was a big believer in spoiler alerts.

This same Jesus has become our Model.

And his swimsuit calender is selling extremely well.

He invites us to be baptized into the death to our own zeal.

Um, gee, I’d love to accept, but we've got this progressive dinner that night...

How many within the courts of religion are overcome with their own zeal? Their energy drives are at fever pitch daily. For what? For the praises. They even hunger for audience approval in the name of Jesus Christ. They have become accustomed, even addicted, to this explosive feeling of ego achievement.

Let me just say, Pastor, how very glad I am that you’re taking the time to expose these attention whores in one of your five daily columns posted on eight to ten different web sites.

The purpose of the cross is to teach this lesson of zeal submission.

Unfortunately, the WWE has ruled “zeal submission” an illegal hold.

Consequently, spiritual leadership must scour their motives to make certain that death to personal drive is real, that they have been baptized truly into the death of Christ in order to know His holiness in life.

Okay…

God has already proven Himself two thousand years ago. Death was followed with life. Jesus was there to reveal it. Disciples saw and handled it.

Some people freaked, but the disciples, they were totally chill.

Life! “I am the. . .the Life.”

I don’t meant to be critical, but the guy spends three days in a tomb, nothing to do but rehearse, and he still forgets his line?

We then have hope. It is the believing that makes the glory possible. Faith is power in that it propels component into component according to heaven’s scheduling.

But reserve your components early, because heaven’s always overbooked for the Labor Day Weekend.

Yet we want to mix things up so as to be wiser than heaven. We have a plan and it should be thus and that.

Well I think it should be this and those, and I’m willing to schism over it!

We also have a calendar on which to pin the plan. Therefore, we bring this blueprint to heaven for heaven’s smile. We even beg for heaven’s approval. Sometimes we ask other believers to engage their intercessions with yours in order to convince heaven by our amassing numbers.

In other words, you've been cooking the books, and just praying that God doesn't send down the archaccountant Gabriel to audit you.

All this is “of the flesh.”

Our special tonight is Zeal Veal.

Indeed, the gracious God is kind in permitting certain glimmers of life even in the baptism to death. Jesus saw the life even while dying.. He saw the life come into the repentant thief’s eyes, then his soul. That was encouraging to Jesus even while tied to the tree.

Wait. I thought he was nailed to a cross…?

Jesus saw the tearful allegiance of mother Mary, crumpled at the cross’ hole in the earth. As Jesus, Son, looked on at mother’s woe, yet mother not leaving her Son to desertion, Jesus was consoled even while in the last agonies of Golgotha.

Lucky him. My mother would have gotten bored after half an hour and gone home to drink Riunite and watch The Dinah Shore Show.

Jesus saw the Roman soldier begin to move away from a callused empire-loyal heart toward recognition that the hanging One might be the long-awaited Messiah.

Yeah, but the Roman soldier thought the same thing about the dangling cat in that "Hang in There, Baby" poster.

There is the newness of life budding even now in your distress. See it. It is there. Then it vanishes.

Newness of life is clearly fucking with you.

At least in this brief time frame, there is more for you to learn from the awful cross cut into your soul’s shoulder.

So, my soul is into self-harm. That's a relief, I thought it was bursitis.

Nevertheless, the newness is birthed where you are now. It will come into full life in heaven’s calendar. 

Have faith. 

It is true just as it was true in the biography of Jesus Christ.

I’ve got to stop watching A&E. It’s starting to make no sense whatsoever.

Post-Friday Beast Blogging: The Foot Fist Way

RILEY: I was just thinking: I'm getting older -- aching bones, creaky joints -- but you know what? I'm still pretty limber! Then I realized: That's not my foot!

MOONDOGGIE: I'm trying to make shadow puppets with my hands but they all look like Abraham Lincoln.

Random Scenes of Hollywood

Offer or Threat? YOU Make the Call!

The last time I heard from RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, he was scolding me for failing to pay my party dues ("I'm disappointed to see that you haven't renewed your RNC membership for 2014").  I don't actually remember joining or donating money in the past, but perhaps the Republican Party operates on the same principle as those heroin dealers who haunt the rusty chain-link perimeters of urban schoolyards -- "first one's free, kid" -- which would also explain these dunning emails I've been getting from Super Fly. Anyway, even though I'm apparently a welsher and a deadbeat with no disposable income or money management skills, Reince would still like my advice on retiring the national debt.

Scott, 

We know that Washington has some serious problems when it comes to spending and debt.

All the other synecdoches are laughing at Washington's inability to get a Discover Card.

Barack Obama and Democrats leading the Senate don’t like to pass budgets and they certainly don’t like to live within a budget.

To be fair, the budget has one of those William Rehnquist-style covenants forbidding members of "the Negro race" from living in it.

But together, we can turn things around. We can fix America. We know we can.

But we suspect we'll fuck it up like we always do, then we'll speak in the editorial we to diffuse the blame.

At the heart of it all is a great American idea. And we know the best ideas don’t come from Washington—they come from you.

Finally -- someone willing to listen!  Okay, here's my idea -- my best idea: Take two Frosted Chocolate Fudge Pop Tarts, spread Kraft Jet-Puffed Marshmallow Creme on the back of each one and smush 'em together to make a sandwich, then put it in the Toast-R-Oven for two minutes. Bingo! Super-S'mores!

That’s why we’re launching our Fix America Challenge.

It's long past time we fixed America. You ask me, we should have had it neutered in 1789 (although I'm not crazy about making it competitive; I mean, how's that even supposed to work? Do Red America and Blue America each grab one of the country's testicles and starting pulling with all their might like they've got the greasy end of the wishbone?).

We want your best and brightest ideas on how you’d cut spending and reduce the debt.

Well, we could always downsize the branch of government that takes 239 days off a year, and outsources the remainder of their job to the puzzled recipients of spam emails.

Also, in the name of brute efficiency and cost-benefit ratios, we might replace the RNC's current spam email author with someone who realizes "The Best and the Brightest" was supposed to be ironic.

And the individual with the best idea will have an opportunity to discuss his or her idea with the top policy leaders who can do something about it: Congressman Paul Ryan and Senator Rand Paul.

"Do[ing] something about it" doesn't actually include "sponsoring a bill," since Congress has evolved beyond its original legislative business model in order to meet the challenges of a changing market, and has recently diversified into fields such as "repeatedly if ineffectively voting to repeal laws it previously passed when it used to pass laws" and "ginning up scandals on TV," since that seems to work nicely for TMZ, and Paul Ryan is much cuter than Harvey Levin.

Still, the Republican House is more likely to vote my Super S'morewich into law than, say, a jobs program, or extended unemployment benefits, so I expect to at least get a Post Office named after me. And not one of those crappy ones in a grocery store, either.

We’ll fly the winner and a guest to Washington, D.C., to have lunch with Congressman Paul Ryan, Senator Rand Paul and me.

A practice otherwise known as "extraordinary rendition."

Together, we can fix America. We just need you to share your best and brightest ideas on how you think we can. 

Thanks, 

Reince

Okay, you heard it, folks -- Reince has committed to the long, difficult process of saving our imperiled nation by buying lunch, so don't let him down. What are your best and brightest ideas for fixing America, and thereby preventing it from spraying its musky scent all over the couch?

Top Ten Google Searches

I'm attempting to work my way through an incredibly painful movie at the moment (two words: Stephen Baldwin), and looking for any excuse to put the thing on pause; so I thought I'd check through the referrer logs and see what search strings had been bringing people to World O' Crap lately:

1. he yelled stop sex tube: Meanwhile, in the midnight hour, she cried more, more more. Finally, we had to call the manager.

2.  miley cyrus thicke erection: I already know way more about Miley Cyrus that I ever wanted to, and yet, oddly, I still can't speak to her girth.

3. amancipation approxipation: Go home, Abe Lincoln. You’re drunk.

4.  court jester face: When your "O Face" isn't enough, add motley and a cap with jingly bells to really make your orgasm convincing.

5.  milf in clear bath water: Man, Starkist is really cutting corners. I remember when milfs were canned in spring water like albacore.

6. nazi posters that make people vote: Fox News continues searching for that one effective gimmick to mobilize the base.

7. naked chick looking into fridge: where she will presumably find her dead superhero boyfriend. Don't you just hate that old comic book trope?

8.  Two consecutive search keywords:
      a.  monster horse cock in ass
      b.  super large shoehorn
Yahoo! Answers comes through again!

9.  inflatable pony: Because it's lonely being a Bronie.

10.  handjob in curlers: Yeah, Honey, thanks for going all out on my birthday.

Man of Steel

Man of Steel (2013)

Directed by Zach Snyder

Screenplay by David S. Goyer, Story by David S. Goyer & Christopher Nolan

Superman created by Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster

A woman lies on the table in a high tech delivery room, yowling as she gives birth. Nothing unusual about that, except she’s wearing an elaborately embroidered Renaissance gown, so apparently her water broke during a Game of Thrones cosplay event and she probably feels a lot of pressure to commit infanticide in order to stay in character. But then she pushes out her progeny, and suddenly Russell Crowe appears between her thighs to field the baby!  Cut to the countryside, where a computer generated Kryptonian musk ox lifts its head and bellows a birth announcement to the sky like it’s the frigging Lion King.

After he towels off the amniotic fluid, Russell addresses the government, and we realize he must be Jor-El, Superman’s biological father, because he’s telling lawmakers the planet is about to implode and they must act immediately! But since three percent of Kryptonian scientists disagree with him, Republican members instead demand they “teach the controversy.”

General Zod bursts into the hearing room, guns down several members of the Permanent Sub-Committee on Impending Planetary Implosions, and suggests they use the imminent catastrophe as an excuse to purify the racial bloodlines, so I guess he symbolically represents a Tea Party primary challenger.

Russ-El objects to this plan, so he beats up Zod’s men and escapes on a dragonfly.  Then he dives into a municipal pool where babies in plastic hamster balls are being harvested by robot crabs, and surfaces in Hef’s grotto. He steals an ape skull engraved with the Kryptonian genome, downloads it into his newborn son, then puts the kid in a faster-than-light infant car-seat and shoots him into space.

Zod arrives to arrest Russ-El for monkey skull theft and breaking the laws of physics.  But Russ-El won't go quietly and dons his battle-armor, which certainly looks cool, but is basically a Frank Frazetta-style chain-mail bikini and doesn't cover his tummy, so Zod just stabs him.

But even though the world is literally falling apart, the Kryptonian council upholds their tradition of making really crappy decisions by sentencing Zod and his troops to exile, and then helpfully shooting them into space in a massive star ship that probably could have been used to evacuate a whole lot of non-murderers.

Cut to Earth, where Superman’s life has taken an unexpected turn. Instead of Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, he’s a bearded crab fisherman on the reality TV show Deadliest Catch.  But when a nearby oil rig catches on fire, he lends a hand by getting blown up, then drifting around the ocean having self-indulgent flashbacks about how hard it was to be a boy with x-ray vision, even at a time when the other boys were spending up to 75 cents and three proof-of-purchase seals for X-Ray Specs that didn’t even work!  Fortunately for us, a whale comes along and tells him to stop being a wuss and shake it off, so he swims to Dutch Harbor, Alaska, finds a poor, but honest working man, and steals his clothes.

As he makes his getaway, Superman notices a school bus, and because there aren’t any humpbacks around to request he keep the plot moving, Clark treats himself to a long flashback about the day his school bus drove off a bridge into a river, and how he rescued all his classmates -- including the bully who was tormenting him and calling him “dick splash" -- and how his father, Kevin Costner, became the true north of Superboy's moral compass by telling him he should’ve let those kids die.  Because Clark is really an alien! And if the world found out, the government would show up, and they'd probably get a lot of tourists driving out to the farm and trampling all over Kevin’s cornfields and haunted baseball diamond, and who needs the aggravation?

A logging truck pulls into a diner in Canada, where Clark works as a busboy and has implied alien-on-Canadian sex with the waitress.  The trucker promptly accosts Clark’s girlfriend, then pours beer on Superman’s head, which scores a 9.7 on the Jim Croce Scale.  But our hero remembers the words of his father, and when the trucker goes outside, he finds his 18-wheeler has been shish-kebobbed by trees.

Cut to the Arctic, where Lois Lane steps out of a helicopter.  Lois is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Daily Planet and an insatiable adrenaline junkie. “What can I say,” she explains. “I get writer’s block if I’m not wearing a flak jacket.”  (Interestingly, I have the exact same problem, if you replace “flak jacket” with “flannel bathrobe and torn boxer shorts,” which made things awkward when I was a technical writer, at least according to the guy who shared my cubicle.)

Lois meets the commanding officer, Colonel...eh, I didn't catch his name; he's that guy from Law & Order: SVU -- and immediately challenges him to a "dick-measuring contest" (by the way, I'd like to be the first film historian to note that Man of Steel contains more penis and semen references than all previous Superman movies combined. Guinness Book take note).  The military has found a 20,000 year old spaceship buried in the ice and Lois has arrived with great fanfare so she can go sneak around in it. But she only succeeds in getting gut-shot by a robot. Fortunately, Clark arrives to save her! Sort of. Actually, he just tortures her, cauterizing the wound with his heat vision while she writhes and screams and gags at the smell of her own burning flesh.  Pa Kent would be proud.

Clark dumps Lois and her internal wound on an ice floe, then steals the space ship and flies away, flipping the Earthlings the bird.  He goes to the Holo Deck, where his computer-generated birth father tenderly bathes him in backstory in a scene that's eerily similar to the Fortress of Solitude sequence from the 1978 Superman, except the Huge Disembodied Marlon Brando Head has been replaced by Russell Crowe, so it's less like a reimagining and more like downloading a novelty voice for your GPS.

Back at the Daily Planet, Perry White won’t print Lois’s scoop about Superman because she’s been handing in the same story for the last seventy-five years and he’s getting sick of it. So she slips it instead to a sleazy blogger, because she wants Superman to see it and know she knows, thereby making her story a truly fresh new addition to the Superman Mythos: Super Clickbait.

Lois travels to Smallville and hangs around Kevin’s grave until Superman shows up and gives her an exclusive flashback: Clark is a wizened-looking teen riding in the car with Ma and Pa Kent and whining, “I don’t have to do what you say! You’re not my real parents!” Suddenly, Kevin spots a tornado in the distance, so he stops the car, and tells his wife and indestructible son to go cower under the overpass while he wanders through the stalled traffic looking for a stupid way to die.

Everyone else in Kansas makes it to the overpass safely, but the twister catches up to Kevin while he’s taking his impromptu constitutional. Clark is about to rescue him, when suddenly Kevin holds up his hand in a gesture that says, “Wait. Let’s just see how this plays out. I’ve got a bet with your mother.” Then he gets sucked up into the tornado like a dust bunny into a Dyson, so I guess Ma owes him a Coke. (Good grief, I just checked the time code, and there’s still 90 minutes of this thing to go! Glenn Ford had been dead for an hour by this point!)

“I let my father die,” Clark confesses to Lois, who gazes back at him with a tender expression that seems to say, “Yup. Sure did.”

Meanwhile, Zod arrives in the solar system thanks to that massive starship the Kryptonian Council punished him with, and goes on the air, issuing threats of genocide over every form of communication on earth --  television, radio, cell phones, and the Internet (to be fair, Zod’s Twitter feed is pretty funny).

The Army grabs Lois, so Clark puts on his circus acrobat costume and surrenders to Zod in order to free her.  But Zod knows about their tender, two-minute long romance, and abducts her too, then proves he’s every bit Superman’s equal by hitting him where he’s most vulnerable – right in the flashback.

Zod gives a long, boring presentation about how he and his troops came to Earth, then reveals that he wants the monkey skull engravings so he can repopulate the planet with Kryptonian hamster ball babies. But Superman thwarts him by secretly passing Lois the spaceship keys, knowing that she’ll eventually be thrown in a prison cell equipped with an ATM. Sure enough, she is, and after checking her balance, she boots up Holo Russ-El, who not only helps her escape, but tells her how to destroy these last few remaining members of his species because he’s really got no hometown pride.

Zod goes to the Kent farm to get the monkey skull from Clark’s interstellar bassinette, but it’s not there.  He threatens Ma, which enrages Superman so much that he knocks Zod into the heart of Smallville, and then picks a fight with the Kryptonian troops that demolishes half the town, and sets the other half on fire.

Zod activates a pair of giant machines designed to terraform (or Kryptoform) Earth so it’s more like their home planet, because who’d want to live on a world where you’re invulnerable and have the power of flight, when you could get papercuts and scrounge exact change for the bus instead?

Superman destroys the first kryptoformer, but it’s not easy; it involves punching Christmas lights and air pollution, and wrestling with a liquid metal Water Wiggle.

Meanwhile, Colonel Meloni destroys the machine hovering over Metropolis in a kamikaze attack, while Lois does her part by falling out of the plane so Superman can save her and they can neck in the ruins of the city.

But Zod survives, since there’s still a half hour to go, and at least some of Metropolis left standing. So let’s get ready to RUMBLE! And by “rumble,” I mean the sound a skyscraper makes as it topples after having been knocked over by Superman who couldn’t be bothered to move the fight to an uninhabited wilderness, or at least the Meadowlands.

After racking up so much collateral damage I began to suspect Superman was trying to beat the Chicxulub asteroid's high score, he gets his opponent in an illegal submission hold, and when Zod refuses to tap out, Superman snaps his neck.  Cut to Kansas, where Clark and Ma are visiting Kevin’s grave. “He always believed you were meant for great things,” she says, assuring her son that Pa would be so proud of him, now that he’d gotten his first kill.

Ma asks what he’s going to do now that he’s destroyed his home town and can no longer hang around the Dairy Queen. Clark announces that he’s figured out the best way to "keep [his] ear to the ground" so he can help people -- get a job in the dying print news industry, proving that he’s not only violent, but stupid.

The end.