Good Blogkeeping (Session 2)

I've been told by many a reader that my blog posts are a little lengthy. They sardonically tell me that if they wanted to read a novel that they'd join a book club. What am I to do at this point? I could shorten my blog posts. But then the terrorists win. I could tell them to Shut the Hell up and mind their own blog. Oh, wait, they don't have one because they are functionally illiterate and can't handle more than a few paragraphs at a time. But that doesn't endear readers to oneself. Or I could just embrace the novelette format of this blog and give them a Table of Contents. So here's what today's session of Good Blogkeeping is going to discuss (feel free to skip what you don't want to read:

1. The Lush Life 5: I'll discuss what's new of note in Ray's life since the last session of Good Blogkeeping
2. Bucket List Update: I'll discuss how Ray's Bucket List is going
3. 40 Movies Update: I'll discuss how Ray's movies selections are doing with an emphasis on The Roommate and Source Code
4. Where Do I Go From Here?: I'll give you a preview of future blog posts

 The Lush Life 10

So, it's been a long time since I've talked to some of my readers. Here are the ten biggest developments in my life since the last Good Blogkeeping on March 2nd.

5. I got an Alyssa Leona original. I've never been a person who cared for fancy things or non-essential luxuries. But I always thought that it would be nice to have expendable income and buy art. I don't need art, but I surely do appreciate it. I will often walk through the Burbank Art Festival and see several swank pieces, be they canvas or sculpture, while I think would look nice in my pad. So imagine my delight when I received a meticulously crafted via my Federal Express provider. Alyssa sent me one of her paintings from an occasional endeavor that she undertakes called Canvas and Cocktails. It's a business with multiple locations in the Denver area (I think multiple is 2) where people can get together, get drunk, and paint some pictures. This just sounds like a snazzy idea. She was explaining it to us recently and Nick and Erin started brainstorming how to rip off the idea and bring it to other cities (Brushes and Brews, Art and Ales, Watercolors and Winecoolers [my contribution]). Nick might even franchise a similar venture in Puerto Rico under the name Cervezas y Colores. To the right is the painting that will adorn my new apartment.

4. So...Osama Bin Laden died. It's not necessarily news that is overtly relevant to my life...unless I'm allowed to bring mouthwash on airplanes now. But it's big news that means a lot to a lot of people, so I'll discuss it. I'm not normally not one to rejoice at somebody's demise...so I didn't go out and cheer in the streets. But this guy needed to go and without question I think that our world is a better place without him in it. However, what I had really hoped would happen is that we'd get to see some of that American spirit that shone so brightly in the wake of 9/11. I knew that it wouldn't be the same and that it wouldn't last as long, but I just wanted a little of that sweet "compassion for your fellow man" afterglow. Osama's death was announced on May 1st in America. Could we make it one month with this new sense of unity that our President was hoping for? No...we couldn't make it one hour. Unity is a natural human reaction in the wake of of tragedy and hardship. We need to lean on each other so we do. In the wake of victory humans are afflicted with something that Bill Simmons has referred to as "the disease of more". As soon as the announcement was made there was widespread Twitter and news reports pointing fingers and patting backs in regards to who was responsible for bringing Osama to justice and who's fault it was that it took so long. Democrats started blaming Bush and lauding Obama for 2012, which put the Republicans on tilt forcing them to dispute the role of Obama's administration. It was going really smoothly for a brief second. Boehner and McCain had congratulated Obama. Obama had thanked Bush for his contributions. And then things got too chirpy on the interwebs so each side had to bring in Olberman and Palin to ruin things. But as long as we're hoarding credit for Osama's death, I'll tell you who is responsible for bringing down Osama Bin Laden: the homosexuals. That's right, I say that the gays finally got him. Doesn't it seem just slightly too coincidental that after over nine years of looking for this man, we finally got him within a measly few months after repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell. I think that once our fighting servicemen were able to admire architecture and neighborhood gentrification without fear of reprisal...that compound stood out like a sore thumb.

3. I got invited to the Blake Johnson / Jennifer Downing nuptuals. I'm going back to Cincinnati later this month to witness Xavier Senate's very own Czar Downing get married. No matter how good of friends I am with a person I never take it for granted that I will be extended a wedding invitation. I was very honored to receive this invite to their special day and can wait to get back to Cincinnati. I was worried that I might get blackballed from the wedding list because I was the Senator who gave Jen a "Sexy Men of Xavier Senate" Calendar for Christmas which featured all 12 male senators posing in underwear (or less). And rest assured that if I had not been ridiculously behind the times 5 years ago when I took these photos with a camera that requires you to develop film...you would see a picture of Senator Shigeki Tanabe wearing nothing but a well-placed map of the world accompanying this post. God damn you, Ray, for being a late adapter. However, due to shitty flight schedules by Delta (who owns CVG airport for all intents and purposes), I will have less than 36 hours in Cincinnati and will be making it in on a red-eye only about 4 hours before the ceremony. So, I've got my work cut out for me when it comes to planning my time there. However, I am thinking that Max & Erma's chicken tortilla soup, a Kelli haircut, and a podcast with some Cincinnati friends all have to be on the agenda. I also have to get the happy couple a stellar wedding gift. I'll surely get them something off the registry, but you can't follow up a "Sexy Men of Xavier Senate" Calendar with something as bland as a waterproof/fireproof safe or a set of 12" stainless steel woks. There needs to be a kicker for the gift...so feel free to shoot me ideas.

2. I went to Denver. And it was thebomb.com/yourmom. It is truly one of America's great under-rated cities. I don't know that it's going to crack my Top 5 American cities yet...but it surely cracks the Top 10. I had one of the best weekends that I've had in a long time. Rosie and I flew in from LA and Nick flew in from Puerto Rico to visit Alyssa, Glen, Erin, and Ben. We were also joined by Alyssa's friend from Minnesota, Angie. I got into Denver at about 2AM Saturday morning after numerous flight delays, and shortly after that "shit got real". Whatever that means. Seven hours later we were at an IHOP enjoying steak and eggs and a clown was making us sweet ass balloon animals. I was debating between a scorpion and a penguin while the clown was still well out of earshot and decided that scorpion was the way to go. When the clown came over she asked what I wanted and when I asked for a scorpion she responded, "I'm scorpion-impaired...how about a penguin." Holy F-ing ESP, clown lady! There is no way you heard me talking from over 50 meters away while you were making some other couple an alien. Then we proceeded to the Coors brewery tour in Golden, Colorado which is one of America's great untapped resources. It's a free tour, which is now done by audio. This means that it lasts anywhere from 3-45 minutes (your choice). And at the end you get four free beers. However, since the tour is free and can only last 3 minutes if you briskly run/walk through it...what stops you from just getting new wristbands all day and blasting yourself to oblivion on free beer? Anyway, thanks to some pre-Coors Coors at Alyssa and Glen's apartment and a lot of Coors Coors at the brewery, some people got a little blitzed and may have made some intentionally and unintentionally hilarious inappropriate comments that left me actually crying on the floor with laughter and may have been found particularly offensive by some members of the Golden, Colorado community. Whatever. Worth it! The big loser on this trip was Nick's liver. Thanks to all day and night drinking followed by waking up for morning mimosas and drinking some more...I think that he at least was buzzed for at least a period of 60 straight hours. Whatever. Worth it!

1. I am a bone marrow match for some guy. This is an exciting yet scary development at the same time. It's something that I really hope I get to do, but I've also done my research and I am aware that the process is no picnic. There are two ways of collecting marrow cells. The first one usually involves only a one day recovery, but requires you to give blood out of one arm, have the marrow cells filtered out in a machine, and then have some blood returned to you intravenously through your other arm. And to avoid me vomiting and being scarred for life...I'd rather they just knock me out, go into the bone surgically, and I'll deal with the two week recovery. I might even get to miss a day or two of work to catch up on my blogging. Speaking of blogging, I think that my mom is proud of the fact that I might be a marrow donor because she wants me to blog about it...on another blog! Blasphemy!! This is her way of saying that I should have good writing samples on wholesome subjects for employers to peruse when I try and switch over to a writing job. But you guys know that I would never cheat on you, right? I'm not going to try and trick people into thinking that I'm a good person, so posts about the bone marrow donation process will go right here and be surrounded by posts about porn, immigration and Christmas specials. And that's the way it should be. I want to donate marrow to save somebody's life because it's the right thing to do and that's the way I was raised. But let's not pretend that I'm not going to be getting anything out of this whole deal. My self-satisfaction will go way up and I might even have your respect now. And I haven't even really let the horny area of my brain think it over yet, or he'll start preparing for his seven day window for pity sex. So...Now that I threw away all of that uncomfortable respect that you might have been developing for me, let's talk about how the process has gone so far.

I was contacted a few weeks ago by some lady with a Minnesota area code saying that I was a potential match for a man with some sort of lymphoma leukemia. I had originally registered for the Bone Marrow registry when I joined Xavier Senate and the Community Affairs Chair ran a registration drive for a local fire fighter who had cancer. They tested my swab and wanted to get a blood sample from me for testing. No sweat...I gave a small sample and was sweet for the next couple weeks. Then I got another call telling me that I was indeed a match. They had my fill out a survey to ensure that I didn't have a debilitating heroine habitat and that I hadn't had sex with strangers from Central Africa in the last 3 years. They were confident that my marrow would work, but they wanted another blood sample to ensure that I would be the "best possible match". This sounded like so many a job interview that I'd been to. How many times have I heard: "We like you, but we have to look at a few other candidates first."? A lot. And the job never comes my way...so we'll see if bone marrow is any different.

So I went down to La Palma to give some more blood. I was told that I would be giving 100ml which isn't too much to sweat, but it turned out to be 350ml and that sucked. That's basically 2/3 of a pint. And my hematologist was a 4' Vietnamese woman who barely spoke English. I was pricked in at least seven different places because they couldn't find a vein and they had to actually drain me from two different points because the blood wasn't flowing very well. I have given blood over half a dozen times and I have never had the perfect hematologist. My friend Jessica Hummel always asks for the best and thus has gotten some great ones. I don't have a sense of entitlement that allows me to ask for someone other than who I'm given...so I have never had a spectacular one. All I want is a hematologist who meets all of the three C's (and yes I know that one of them is a K). I want a hematologist who is kind, competent, and cute. Competent is the most important one. I want you to stick me one time, find the vein properly, and ensure that it's done as painlessly as possible. Kind is the second most important. I want them to put me at ease and not call me a pussy because I can't look at the needle. This also encompasses a good bedside manner which means being attentive to me as I'm donating and not freaking me out by telling me how cold, clammy, and pale I am. And cute would just be a bonus. However, it's probably best that they not be too good looking because I don't want the vein in my arm to have to compete for blood with other parts of my body.

So, I'll know in 5-6 weeks if they need me to give up some marrow and I'll update you from that point on.

Bucket List Update

Items That I've Crossed Off Since We Last Chatted:

• #21: Have business cards. That's right, I have business cards. Not from my employer, who I won't besmirch by naming here, but rather for this blog. Just ask and I'll give you one. 
• #58: Visit my Denver friends in Denver. I technically did this during the first week of February, but it was while I was en route moving from Cincinnati to Los Angeles so it was rushed. However, I went back and it was legendary. I'm already planning another trip for July.

Items That I'm Closing In On:

• #30: Purchase something at a live auction. So, Burrows lost a bet to me over a round of golf that we played (of course he did, I'm money!). Since he lost he has to help me complete a Bucket List item within 18 months. This is what we've chosen. So if you know of any good live charity auctions, let me know. Because Burrows and I will be rolling with some straight cash.
• #31: Make the perfect omelette. I've already given it multiple attempts with dozens of different ingredients and during the last trial run I made an important breakthrough: the perfect omelette definitely contains cumin. I'm coming for you, perfect omelette.
• #88: Donate an organ. I know that bone marrow is not technically an organ. But the point of this Bucket List item is not to go through life with one kidney...it's to try and save somebody's life. So, I'm counting it. It's my Bucket List, so I make the rules.
  

Items That Are Next on My Attack List:

•  #16: Be published as a reader's letter in a magazine. TIME, Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly, and MAXIM should all get ready to receive letters me. Hopefully some of those thoughts will be coherent enough to make the cut. 
• #54: Reach my sex weight (estimated to be 190). I can't say that I'm closing in on this one because I was spotting my sex weight around 50 pounds. However, I've made a good dent into that recently. I'm eating healthier, exercising more, and I think that I can get close to my goal within a year. 
• Go geocaching. And find a 5/5 cache. So apparently this one is significantly more difficult to achieve than I thought when I put it on the list. Apparently 5/5 often involve scaling mountain faces with ice picks and trekking through chupacabra-infested jungles. However, I welcome the challenge and I'll be warming up with some 3/2 and 2.5/4 caches in the coming weeks.

40 Movies Update

Certified Awesome (So Far) -- These movies all have the Ray O'Brien Thumbs Up

Unknown

Gnomeo and Juliet

The Adjustment Bureau

Rango

Cedar Rapids

Paul

Hanna

Scream 4

Source Code

Certified Lame (So Far) -- These movies have made Ray O'Brien concede a Thumbs Down

The Dilemma 

The Roommate 

Sucker Punch

The Jury Is Out (For Now) -- These movies will require further investigation (i.e. watching them) from Ray O'Brien

No Strings Attached

Take Me Home Tonight

Your Highness

The Conspirator

[Please NOTE: Ray O'Brien will be discussing in greater depth two of the above movies and why one wasn't very good and why the other was. So this is your official SPOILER ALERT! for THE ROOMMATE, SOURCE CODE, SUCKER PUNCH, and SINGLE WHITE FEMALE]

The Roommate - A Critical Review

The Roommate was a film that I thought had promise. I feel pretty damn positive that most people looked at this movie and knew that it would be a whole lot of nothing special. And even when it came out to very underwhelming reviews I thought that it would be a movie that could be enjoyed simply for the massive amount of sexy that was injected into it. However, having seen it I will concede that it fails as a film and I'll tell why. This was a film that I was heavily leaning on the fact that it was going to be sexy as hell. It starred Minka Kelly, Leighton Meester, and Daneel Harris. One of these characters was playing a lesbian (Harris) and another one was basically playing a lesbian without it ever being explicitly stated (Meester). It took place in college, which in Hollywood films means a Mecca of drugs and sex. All of the pieces were in place for this to be a sexy movie and it decidedly wasn't. They would continually walk in the direction of being sexy and then at the last second they would swerve away or change shots. That was the true horror of this film.

I recently saw an interview where the films of Quinten Tarantino were discussed. Tarantino apparently has a large foot fetish and includes gratuitous, lingering shots of women's feet in several of his films.  Since these shots aren't of breasts most people who don't have a thing for feet will barely notice them. So they won't offend or weird out anybody who isn't already offended by Tarantino's gratuitous violence or racially insensitive dialogue. But if you have a thing for feet (which I'm finding that a surprising number of people do - men and women) that would endear Tarantino's movies to you. It was estimated that he pulls in probably an extra 1.5 million dollars per movie just on people who know that if they see his movies they are going to get some solid foot action. So why don't more movie makers take advantage of this. I'm not saying to go overboard. I'm going to notice if you're trying to please the golden shower community. However, I feel fairly confident that you could work blood, inter-racial coupling, feet, guns, midgets, handcuffs, or mud (yes mysophilia means sexual arousal towards mud and dirt) into your script without creeping out mainstream America as long as they don't use them in an overtly sexual way. This brings me to the largest paraphilia in America which The Roommate failed to properly capitalize on: girl-on-girl.

Let it be stated here that every heterosexual man is attracted to girl-on-girl. Any guy who says that he isn't is either lying or has brainwashed himself with some heavy moralizing and actually thinks that he isn't when his body is telling him that he is. You might think that this is small-minded of me and that's fine...but girl-on-girl turns on straight men with almost no exceptions. Of the female population in the 21st Century, there are three categories. The first is made up of girls who are aroused by girl-on-girl. I'll estimate that to be at about 10%. The second is girls who are severely offended by girl-on-girl portrayals in the media. I'll estimate that to be around 15%. The other 75% know that it turns men on and that they have to live with that and will abide by it on their screens as long as their kids aren't around. My mom doesn't like it when two girls make out on screen but if she's enjoying a movie and it happens...well, she stopped changing the channel when I was 15. Most women will live with it. So play to your percentages, Hollywood. Sex sells. And you really didn't in The Roommate. The opportunities were there and you blew it. You had a 2 Girls 1 Shower situation and instead of getting soapy and horny, the only thing of note that happened was that one ripped out the other's naval ring. Which, to be fair, probably did arouse some guys with stigmatophilia. However, it almost made me vomit (which would have aroused other people with emetophilia). And let me just add that this movie also criminally underused the beautiful and talented Daneel Harris.

The second problem with this movie was that for a ridiculously unrealistic horror movie, the production value was too high. Many critics said that it was poorly-made and lacked suspense. This wasn't true. The suspense and direction was fine. They were just dealing with an unrealistic, not very punchy script that fell flat and took the viewer out of the movie too often. When you have a premise that is not very believable you have to beg for the audience's suspension of disbelief in advance. And The Roommate did not beg for my suspension of disbelief at any point. This begging should start pretty early on, usually in the film's trailer. Any movie trailer that begins with with the phrase "In a World where..." is begging for your suspension of disbelief. Sometimes it rewards you (i.e. Children of Men), and sometimes it rips you off like a big fat Ponzi scheme (i.e. The Postman). Movies that are campy, or off-kilter and let you know that they are going to be that way beforehand oftentimes get a pass with plot-holes. However, this movie asked to be taken seriously. So when non-observant characters made dumb decisions as though they were wearing blinders all movie until the convoluted ending that employed a couple ridiculous deus ex machini (is that the plural?)...it was just too much for my suspension of disbelief. Get Zombie Don La Fontaine to do the voice-over for your trailer and then I'll spot you some of your absurdities.

You also have to know what you're competing against. Your movie is going to be compared to other movies of it's ilk. If you're coming out with a war movie you had better be prepared for it to have to go toe-to-toe with Platoon, Apocalypse Now, and Saving Private Ryan. This movie knew what it was up against and it failed in surpassing similar films or even adding anything to the conversation on almost every level. This film was a rip-off of Single White Female in so many ways and that was generally accepted. However, it needed to realize what made Single White Female a success and build on that while advancing the formula for such a film. It did neither. It copied certain scenes from SWF almost ver batim. Killing your roommate's kitten instead of her puppy doesn't really count as switching up the formula. And other shockers from the original were stretched in ridiculous ways. One of the earlier creepy moments from the original is when we find out that Jennifer Jason Leigh got a haircut and dye to mimic the look of her roommate Bridget Fonda. Well, you can't really do that in this movie because you cast two girls who look remarkably similar in Minka Kelly and Leighton Meester. The only casting decision that would have made this plot device less plausible is if they cast Amy Adams and Isla Fisher (seriously...the same person). So, the only thing that they could change that was along the same lines was to have Meester's character get the same tattoo that Kelly's character has of her dead sister's name on her chest. And that just skips the whole subtly creepy thing that SWF was going for and jumps into obviously psychotic too quickly. Try the "slow burn" approach, The Roommate. It's the backbone of great film making.

The ending was also infuriating because it was predictable and ridiculous at the same time. Obviously Cam Gigandet comes to save the day at the end, but they never really address how he knew the day needed to be saved. It just seemed like dumb luck that he happened to be in the neighborhood when shit went down. I'd understand if he happened to be trying to see Sara (Minka Kelly) and just happened to show up at her dorm because she's his squeeze, but there is literally no reason for him to find his way to Irene's (Daneel Harris) apartment unless there was a deleted scene that I missed. And SWF didn't have the obvious good-looking love interest save the day. They went with the sleazier character played by Steven Tobolowsky who had tried to sexually assault Bridget Fonda earlier in the film. This role could have been filled by Sara's philandering professor (Billy Zane). Seriously, how do you have Billy Zane in a movie and use him to as little effect as The Roommate did? He's awesome and makes every movie better, so if you have a crappy movie...layer in some more Billy Zane scenes. Sara's closing line after she stabs Rebecca (Leighton Meester) with the box cutter is also pretty lame. It pales in comparison to Amanda Seyfried's classic line "This is a box cutter. It's for cutting boxes." right before she stabs Megan Fox in the vagina during Jennifer's Body. When you can't even write the best "Teen Girl Stabbing Another Psychotic Teen Girl With a Box Cutter" line of the year...it's time to pack it up and go home. This coupled with the fact that Sucker Punch wasn't really good and just ripped off Terry Gilliam's Brazil means that this is going to be a very disappointing year for sexy films.

Source Code - A Positive Review

So, I finished up work earlier today and headed over to West Hollywood to go to dinner and a movie with Rosie at The Grove. And let me tell you that Source Code is a real winner. I cannot recommend this movie highly enough. However, if you are pondering this recommendation because you haven't already seen it: STOP READING RIGHT NOW. And please proceed down to the Where Do I Go From Here? section of this blog to avoid me spoiling this movie for you.

So a few paragraphs ago I expressed my opinion that suspension of disbelief is something that a movie has to ask for in advance. Sci-fi and time travel films are somewhat exempt because you know that when you walk into one of these movies you are surrendering your adherence to a few of Newton's Laws as soon as you purchase that ticket. There are two major missteps that most time travel movies can take at this point. The first is to fall head-first into time travel paradoxes (I'll explain these at length in a post in July...but you probably are already aware of what I'm talking about.). Film makers play fast and loose with time travel and don't realize that when all of the dust settles there narrative makes no sense. Films like The Time Machine and Back to the Future were marginally successful at explaining these away by taking liberties with the rules of time travel but at least addressing them allowing audiences to enjoy the movie. The Bill and Ted movies just decided to be so campy and ridiculous that if you criticized their use of time travel...you were really missing the point. Other movies lack a coping mechanism for time travel and therefore lose the more intelligent half of their audience. The second misstep is to over-explain your time travel so that it makes perfect reasonable sense to middle-America. However, by doing this you've boxed yourself in to an explanation which while it sounds plausible, now has clearly defined holes and every physics professor in the theater starts sobbing at how you're misinforming America. Source Code fell into neither of these pratfalls. They used very light scientific explanation about human brain chemistry, afterglow, and short-term memory. They addressed the potential paradoxes and eliminated them efficiently via the multiple universe theory (Way to work in some light string theory!). And then they didn't box themselves in by never really fully explaining how the Source Code works or showing you the whole apparatus. So now with their scientific credibility intact...they just had to proceed to make a sweet film.

Because it appeared on the Hollywood Black List, I knew that Source Code was going to have a good script. The question was how the cast would mesh with that script. I think that the casting job was superb. Jake Gyllenhaal and his sister are clearly in a battle of wills to see who will be the best Gyllenhaal actor. And the competition is heating up. Jake took the early lead with the cult classic Donnie Darko and the phenomenal Brokeback Mountain. However, Maggie responded by getting frisky with Heath Ledger in her own way and joining her brother in the "I should have been in a Best Picture if the Academy had any balls" Club when she starred in The Dark Knight. However, this might put Jake back into the lead. He plays the role well, using a good deal of range to show why he is a sought after leading man for both action films and romances. The guy also has an unbelievably good track record. Some might choose to debate on films such as Prince of Persia and Love and Other Drugs, but I would like to state that I think that his only two really "bad" films are Bubble Boy (2001) and Josh and S.A.M. (1993). That's pretty good for somebody with his body of work. They also had me from Day 1 when they cast Michelle Monaghan. This former Top 5 member of the Hot 100 will get me into the theater to see literally anything that doesn't contain the words Human Centipede or Hard Candy. I would watch a three hour film of her doing the dishes after Thanksgiving dinner. And she showcases her usual charm in this film. If there's one problem with her performance, it's that she plays Christina as unrealistically perfect. Some people may have had a problem with the fact that Colter (Gyllenhaal) is besotted with her after only a few eight minute runs through the Source Code. They might find that unrealistic. However, I don't see how you couldn't be. She's the perfect girl by almost every conceivable matrix. And Vera Fermiga continues her streak of fine acting. She now has at least five great films to her name and has showed me her very nice breasts in over half a dozen films. So it's only fair that I stop confusing her with Famke Janssen who hasn't done anything for me since the X-Men movies and only showed me her breasts briefly in one episode of Nip/Tuck. No word yet on whether I'll stop confusing Michael Keaton/Kevin Bacon, Amy Adams/Isla Fisher, Jamie Lee Curtis/ Sigourney Weaver, and Renee Zellweger/Mickey Rourke.

I'm not really going to re-cap the premise here because if you're reading this you've seen the movie. Because clearly I told anybody who hasn't seen it to skip this section. Despite the fact that this was a great movie, I still have a few comments about questionable plot points. I just can't enjoy nice things! (Ask Mike and Ike Red Rageous about that...more on that in a later post.) First, I'd like to know why they were so sure that the bomber was one of the passengers on the train with Sean Fentress. They seem to know very little about the bomber. They don't know where the bomb is on the train, they don't know what the motive is, and they don't know where the next target is. However, they seem to be betting all of their chips on the bomber being a passenger on that train. I realize that the bomber had to be on the train at some point to plant the bomb and that they thought the bomber was close enough to the explosion to time it for when the train was passing another train. But if I was placing a bomb on a train...I like to think that I'd get off more than one stop in advance of the bomb actually detonating. Shit could go haywire. Also, how did they know that Sean Fentress wasn't the bomber? It's going to be pretty hard to find the bomber through investigation if your host body is the bomber and the bombs are simply set to timers. When I was trying to anticipate the twist ahead of time I thought that Sean may have been the bomber.

I also was a little confused with the whole present reality time vs. Source Code time throughout the movie. Goodwin and Rutledge were getting very perturbed with Colter when he would ask questions claiming that he was wasting time when he needed to be going back into the Source Code to find the bomber. However, when he complained that there were over 100 suspects on the train, Rutledge told him that he could eliminate suspects 1 by 1 if he needed to. This led me to believe that his 8 minutes in The Source Code must be only a few seconds in the current reality...since clearly they were acting as though there weren't 800 minutes to stop the next bombing or evacuate Chicago. However, during Colter's final trip into The Source Code we can clearly see that there is an analog timer with 8 minutes on it counting down the time until the train is set to blow up. This means that eight minutes in the Source Code is equal to eight minutes in present reality. So Rutledge is basically just being a whiny bitch when he chides Colter for trying to get a little background information in present time.

And while I applaud them for fully addressing the neglected aspects of the multiple universes theory, they did leave out one important revelation when it comes to his host. I was worried when Colter went back into the Source Code for the final time that he was going to somehow save Christina from the train explosion and save himself from his helicopter accident and everything would be honky-dory. And I knew that to do this he was going to have to invoke some convoluted deus ex machina which would completely rupture the well-established rules of the Source Code. It turns out that my fears were unwarranted and he realized that this was futile. He basically said the following: "Fuck present time Christina and all of those people on the train. And fuck present time Colter Stevens and his dismembered torso. I fell in love with Source Code Christina so I'm going to spin off my consciousness into that new reality and live happily there. I realize that hundreds of people will still be dead and thousands will still be suffering in my original timeline...but I don't really care about that anymore because they're not my problem. My consciousness is in a happier place." And isn't that what multiple realities time travel is all about?

However, they never really addressed what happened to Sean Fentress's consciousness in the Source Code reality. I didn't feel that bad for him when I thought that it was just an afterglow of the current reality because his alternative was that he was already dead. However, once we established that you can spin off an alternate reality through the Source Code...you realize that Sean really gets the short end of the stick. His consciousness/soul either was a) completely obliterated, b) died and went onto the afterlife, or c) was trapped in a body that was hosting Colter and was forced to live as a back-burner consciousness with no control over his speech or movements for the rest of his life. All of those kind of suck. But at least if he's rocking option C, he'll probably get to see Michelle Monaghan naked on a regular basis. So...whatever. Worth It!

I also want to pat Source Code on the back for a very crafty cameo which absolved them of any sort of creative rip-off accusations while failing to take anybody out of the movie except for me and a couple hundred other super-nerds. There was no question that the plot for this movie borrowed heavily on the physics of a little show called Quantum Leap. Every super nerd in the theater knows this and some of them are probably a little miffed that this has not been acknowledged and will not be appreciated by the movie-going public. So when Colter calls his dad within the Source Code...who is the voice on the other end of the phone? None other than Quantum Leap star Scott Bakula! The man who played Sam Beckett for all of Quantum Leap's five seasons. Nice shout out, Source Code.

Where Do I Go From Here?

I'm very much excited for some future blog posts that I have coming up. I've already got some fun ones planned well into the fall, along with some format changes that I think will spice up the blog. However, I'll just clue you in on some of 7 the upcoming posts that will arrive during May, June, and July.

The Ray Way: Weddings - Ray will tackle how he would like to do his wedding

Mr. Fix-It: Economic Whoas!  - Ray will discuss his plan for fixing the economy

No Man's Land: Questions with No Consensus - Ray will discuss hot button issues that people are deeply divided on

HBE Confidential - Ray will perform a PI-style noir-themed investigation into seedy subject matter

The Season of Getting - On Ray's half birthday, he'll give out ideas for those who think he's hard to shop for

Better Know a Ray's Friend: Matt Burrows - Stephen Colbert will sit down with Matt Burrows for a one-on-one interview

Guest Blogger: Chris Swietlik of Notes From the Narrator - My friend Chris Swietlik will lend his services to this blog (hopefully exclusive content)

Thanks for reading. See you next time.

April Guest Blogger -- Eric Duncan

 

Eric Duncan of E-Dunc's World

Hello Followers of The Hot and Bothered Effect:

As has been promised to you, once a month I will have a guest blogger from another blog come and post on The Hot and Bothered Effect so that you can get an appreciation for different writing styles, points of view, and blogs. It will also give other blogs operated by friends of mine a chance to get some more exposure for their blogs. This month's Guest Blogger will be my friend Eric Duncan who operates E-Dunc's World. Much of his blog involves analyzing pop culture and lamenting the utter disaster that is his beloved Buffalo Bills. But there's also some good social commentary to be had. He also has a string of posts that follow the Bills week-to-week known as "E-Dunc Misery Watch". That is what you'll see in this excerpt from E-Dunc's World:

E-Dunc Misery Watch: Day 3,917

One of the most important things in the world to me is the Buffalo Bills. This explains three things about me: where my sense of humor comes from (defense mechanism), why I'm so pessimistic, and why I'm constantly on the verge of a homicidal rampage (joking ... mostly).

Anyway, the Bills made a decision this week that perfectly sums up our front office: we cut our Week 1 starter and our 13th "Quarterback of the Future" Trent Edwards. Now, if you polled Bills fans before the season, roughly 99.9% of them would have ranked Trent's performance last year somewhere between "unbelievably terrible" and "Rob Johnson" (NOTE: for Bills fans, there is no playing worse than Rob Johnson).

Despite all of this evidence the Bills front office decided to give ol' Captain Checkdown one more shot at the start of the year. After two games of dropping back in the pocket, pissing his pants and throwing the ball to the physically closest receiver for a gain of two on 3rd-and-12, the Bills caught up with the rest of Bills fans and benched Trentative in favor of former Bengals-great and Ivy League-standout Ryan Fitzpatrick (who has the third highest Wonderlich score in Combine history, which I think we can all agree has a direct correlation to Super Bowl titles).

Fitzpatrick played well against Belichick and the Cheaters leading the Bills to a less-embarrassing-than-expected loss 38-30 this weekend. The Bills responded by cutting ol' Fraidy Cat loose on Monday because apparently you can go from starter to worthless in a week.

Finally, the Bills can get some
payback against the Jags for Rob Johnson,
seen above in his natural position, sacked.

Edwards was scooped up less than 24 hours after he was cut suggesting that there might have been some sort of trade market for him (which the Bills naturally didn't even explore). Where did he land? Jacksonville. I'm personally hoping they make him their quarterback of the future and we can finally have some karmic retribution for them hoodwinking us into trading for Rob Johnson (granted, the Bills organization isn't exactly difficult to hoodwink).

I'm just excited for by the Bills' current QB depth chart:

Ryan Fitzpatrick: 58.3 PCT, 23 TD, 29 INT, 68.6 RAT
Bryan Brohm: 58.6 PCT, 0 TD, 2 INT, 43.2 RAT
Levi Brown: 7th Round Draft pick out of Troy, cut after Training Camp

Bills Football: Feel the Excitement!

E-Dunc Misery Watch: Day 3,923

Sure, the team is better looking now,
but is it actually better without
Marshawn Lynch?

The Bills got a lot less ugly today. The Brain Trust traded away one of the few Pro Bowlers left on what is still generously being called a "professional football team." Now granted, you cannot have three high caliber running backs on your team. There just aren't enough carries to go around. So at the end of the day, somebody had to go and Lynch made himself the most expendable by his off the field indiscretions (he got caught smoking pot in an SUV he had inexplicably removed the license plates from and got arrested on gun charges).

This of course brings me back to last year's draft. On a team that had no quality offensive tackles, no starting-caliber quarterbacks, and no pass-catching tight end, the Brain Trust took a running back, something that we already had excellent depth at. Spiller is a phenomenal talent and is a big play waiting to happen, but in my opinion his ceiling is Reggie Bush: an exciting contributor who will never be able to carry a team. By trading Marshawn, we are essentially left with Fast Freddy Jackson as our only serious run threat. I hope that Spiller can break a few big runs the rest of the year, but he's shown no indications that he's ready to do that as a running back (he's showed a lot of promise coming out of the slot and on screen passes, not to mention kick returns but has been less than impressive on run plays).

I wouldn't have thought it possible, but the Bills offense is going to be even more terrible down the stretch as we now lack any semblance of a power running game.

A look into the Bills draft room minutes
before the CJ Spiller pick.

"But E-Dunc," you may be saying, "you have to build for the future and I'm sure you got some good draft picks for him!" Good point, although I would hesitate to say a fourth round pick is the solution to our problem (although it's probably the best we could do). It's clear that the Bills have so many needs that we need all draft choices we can get to fill them. The problem is, given how badly the Brain Trust botched last year's draft, I'm terrified what we're going to do with them. I could see us doing something inexplicable like drafting A.J. Green and then having to trade Lee Evans for a fourth round pick (or as I call it, deja vu) while again refusing to take any tackles for the 83rd year in a row (NOTE: number of years may be an exaggeration).

So good luck in Seattle, Marshawn. If you become an All Pro again, I may have to go all Dexter on One Bills Drive.

E-Dunc Misery Watch: Day 3,950

Half way through the season, and I thought I'd give a shot at breaking down the worst season in Bills history. But first, my thoughts on the Shawne Merriman signing.

Is it worth $1.73 million to
make sure Tila Techila doesn't
set foot in Buffalo? I say yes!

Outside of ensuring that Tila Techila will be staying out of Buffalo for at least four months (a HUGE plus), this is a fairly confusing signing. This is Merriman's final year on his contract so essentially, all we are doing is renting him for the rest of the year, something that's normally reserved for teams looking for a playoff push. My guess is this is a move by a general manager to prove to a very disgruntled fan base that the franchise is in fact trying to win games (despite evidence to the contrary). At the end of the day, the Bills were going to win a game either way so this doesn't really accomplish anything unless we somehow manage to sign him to a long-term deal (which I put somewhere between impossible and Sarah Palin becoming president).

Anyway, let's get to the breakdown of the season using the best Western of all time.

The Good


Ryan Fitzpatrick
Now let me be clear. Ryan Fitzpatrick is not good enough to lead a team to a playoff victory. He's just not. He can win you between six and nine games a year but he seems to have a problem coming through with the game on the line (see: the KC game last weekend).

Having said that, I'm excited that it doesn't look like we're going to have to start our rookie QB next year. Fitzpatrick can play Kitna to our rookie's Carson Palmer (side-note, Fitzy has a similar skill set to Andrew Luck so I think he would make a good caddie for him).

2011 NFL Draft
This upcoming draft class seems to be deep at the positions we need (most notably quarterback) so if ever it was a good year to have the #1 overall pick, it's looking like 2011 is that year.

The greatest Bills player of the last 15
years? Our punter! Bills Football: Feel
the Excitement!

Brian Moorman
Moorman continues to be the lone bright spot in the utter darkness of Bills fandom. There are two reasons Bills fans get excited when the punt team is on the field: we don't have to watch our offense any more, and we get to see Brian Moorman's golden right boot kick the ball 90 yards.

The Bad


The Offense
After simply an abismal start, the offense has actually looked pretty decent the last two games. The reason it stays in the "Bad" section is because we simply don't have the horses to run the offense that Gailey wants to run. Spiller is coming along, but just isn't an asset yet (not to say he won't be). Jackson continues to play well but behind this offensive line, Barry Sanders would only look like a Pro Bowl running back instead of an Alltime Great.

The Secondary
The best unit on our defense (note that it's still in the "Bad" section, that should tell you something), the failed-wide-receiver corp still has a problem with catching the ball. Normally not something you worry about from the secondary, but with a defense this bad, you need turnovers to get them off the field as quickly as possible. The problem is, we have so many other dire problems that I don't see this being fixed any time soon.

Guards
Eric Wood and Adam Levitre are both passable NFL guards, which is the best compliment you can pay anyone on the worst offensive line in the NFL. Special kudos to Woods who is in his second year and continues to improve.

The Ugly


Offensive Tackles
There really isn't much to say. They're terrible. Awful. The worst I've ever seen and we've had a ton of bad tackles in Buffalo in the past. Maybe in the future we should steer clear of illegitimate children of NBA Hall of Famers who couldn't win titles in their sport either.

Run Defense
I could be the slowest, least athletic person who has ever attempted to play football. Ok, that might be an exaggeration, but I'm certainly in the bottom five. Anyway, I am confident that I could rush for 20 yards behind an average offensive line against the Bills.

By the way, it took me a while to figure how to adequately describe how terrible this defense is. I went with the ridiculous statement over an unbelievably complicated metaphor based loosely on the plot of Inception.

"What do you think, AJ Green? I
mean, he's an exciting playmaker!
We can't have too many of them,
right?"

Front Office
The team the Brain Trust threw out onto the field at the beginning of the year is nothing short of pathetic. The in-season moves have been just as bad, letting Trent Edwards go for absolutely nothing and allegedly jumping on the first serious offer for Marshawn Lynch without shopping him around. While I'm pumped for all these early draft picks, I'm terrified at what these bozos are going to do with them.

The Lush Life Chronicles - - Volume 8: The Sounding Board

Way back in March I introduced you to a Pillar of The American Dream that I called The Clark. I told you that it was not to be confused with your best friend. I'll tell you the same thing applies here in regards to the person that you call The Sounding Board. However, if The Clark and The Sounding Board are the same person, it might be fair to assume that they are your best friend. Because when a person helps you fulfill two Pillars of The Lush Life...well, that's what best friends are all about. The Sounding Board provides a service that everybody needs and thus people will pay obscene amounts of money in order to obtain it. The services that The Sounding Board provides form the basis for a billion dollar industry. But I don't know if I can stress fervently enough that The Sounding Board cannot be purchased. Attempting to purchase such an item will devalue it of all that makes it a worthy Pillar of the Lush Life. No, The Lush Life mandates that the person who acts as your The Sounding Board does so because they care about you.

Whenever somebody experiences something that is comedic yet traumatic at the same time they are often able to joke about how much their future therapy will cost. Therapy is ridiculously expensive, but it's also a human necessity. Therapy is not a frivolous luxury. The need for humans to talk about their problems is real and necessary. If your rich you can afford to pay a professional with "expertise" to do it. If you're poor you can hope to find people generous enough to help you deal with your issues for free, or you can bottle them up until you pop off a few shots from an upper floor of the book depository. Your mental health depends upon your ability to release your frustrations and anger in a cathartic manner. Other Pillars of The Lush Life including The Bubble, The Hobby, and The Kelli can all help with this, but nothing has been as proven a tried and true method for solving your problems as talking about them with somebody who wants to help you.

I don't have any problem with therapy whatsoever. It helps a lot of people and a lot of people really need it. However, it's not The Sounding Board. The Sounding Board is free by it's very nature. Therapy requires you to schedule an appointment. The Sounding Board should be there for you whenever you need it. You have a professional therapist-patient relationship with your therapist that likely does not get crossed outside of sessions. The Sounding Board requires an extensive level of trust in comfort in companionship that is built out in the real world. And most importantly a therapist wants you to be happy out of the vested interest that you are a client and that your well-being reflects upon them. The Sounding Board wants you to be happy because they care about you on a deeper level and in a way your happiness is there happiness. At it's simplest level The Sounding Board is just somebody that you can talk to and share anything with. They should be a good listener but also capable of giving you honest and constructive feedback. At it's most complex level The Sounding Board is a mentor who challenges you to be the most creative, healthy, productive person you can be.

The Sounding Board doesn't have to be your best friend or a close family member, but it should be somebody who you have confidence in and who you feel comfortable talking to. Oftentimes, this results from a sense of shared personal experiences. Your AA sponsor is somebody that you can share your personal fears and shortcomings with because they have likely had similar issues and can understand things that your friends or family would not. Listening is probably the most important part of the job for The Sounding Board. However, it shouldn't be passive listening. A good The Sounding Board will make the speaker feel like you are engaged, but more importantly that they are not being judged. They have chosen to share something with you because they feel like you are a safe haven. Don't misplace that trust by placing judgment upon that persons choices, feelings, or beliefs. However, this is a two-way street. Don't tell The Sounding Board things that they should reasonably have to pass judgment on.  If you find that you have an insatiable desire to strangle young, blonde prostitutes...don't tell The Sounding Board. Tell your therapist, which you should probably have.

However, The Sounding Board is more than somebody who listens to your problems. They should also want to listen to your successes. The Sounding Board is just a good, comfortable conversationalist. The conversations don't have to be heavy or about problems. They're just somebody that you can talk to about anything. You can tell them about the hot new guy/girl you like, your frustrations with your new job, or request their advice on buying a new car or home. And advice is also a very important dimension of your relationship with The Sounding Board. Sometimes, what you're telling them is just about you needing to vent and all you need for them is to nod and respond with things like "Right on" and "That's understandable". However, sometimes you're confused about a situation or occurrence and you need the recommendation of a person who is sound of mine on what course of action you should take. This is why The Sounding Board should be more than a good listener. They should also be somebody with good sense who can competently impart advice. You don't want a "Yes Man" as your The Sounding Board. It's important that The Sounding Board is willing to offend your delicate sensibilities in order to make sure that you don't do something stupid or reckless.

Sometimes The Sounding Board doesn't even need to speak their piece in order to give you advice. I have a lot of ideas and usually talking them over with people will allow me to gauge their value using only that person's body language. Oftentimes I realize that I have a great idea on my hand's and significantly less often I might realize that my idea is incredibly stupid. However, somebody to talk to who's a good listener and can offer you meaningful feedback is significantly harder to find in today's America. Our attention spans are dropping to near record lows with all of the technological advances that have put whatever we want within our reach whenever we want it. We have also become a more self-concerned society. We are less interested in listening to other people when we could be talking about ourselves. But the biggest obstacle might be that social networking has made it so that friendships are easier to come by and thus require less effort. I'm sure that most of you reading this have a lot of friends. But how much effort do you put into those friendships? And how many friendships do you have where they would work awkwardly if you were the only two people in the room? Too many acquaintanceships require other people or mutual friends to sweeten the pot in order to make conversation flow.

I've stated many times that these Pillars of the Lush Life are something to be "achieved" or "attained". However, achieving a Pillar of the Lush Life isn't like getting 3 stars on a level of Angry Birds. You don't just attain it and then move on. Lush Life Pillars are something that have to be worked on consistently and indefinitely throughout your life to be maintained. There should never be a sense of complacency that you ever have too much success within a certain realm of The Lush Life. However, Pillars are also judged on a spectrum. I might think that I have a Pillar pretty well handled, however, I might not have nearly as firm of a grip on it as a friend of mine. Everybody has some semblance of each of these Pillars, but few people have mastered all 12 of them. I like to think that I have The Sounding Board in my life and to some extent I do. I have friends who are willing to listen to me and who will respond frankly to my problems, ideas, and stories with incites of their own. However, I don't have a single person in my life who I can talk to about anything. There are always things that I will keep to myself in the deep, dark recesses of my heart. And part of this means that I may have not found the right person who I can share anything with. The other part of this means that maybe I have, but I'm just not ready to.

This is because The Sounding Board is also about you and your willingness to open up. You can have the most enthusiastically helpful circle of friends and family ever, but if you are not willing to open up and share what needs to be shared to put yourself at ease then The Sounding Board will never work at full capacity. This might be my biggest issue with attaining The Sounding Board. I have trust issues. My thoughts on keeping secrets is: two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead. I don't know that I am capable, at this stage of my life, of telling a person something that I'm not comfortable with the whole world knowing. And that's no way to live The Lush Life. Luckily for me, I have very few things that I'm not comfortable with the whole world knowing. And this philosophy helps me in a couple of ways. Firstly, I almost never say mean things about people that I wouldn't say to their face and never things that I wouldn't be okay with them finding out that I said. And I think that this makes my world a much kinder place. Secondly, I say a lot of wildly inappropriate things which are less than half of the wildly inappropriate things that I think. Thirdly, I think that I converse better with people who are more excited to talk to me because I don't have a history of saddling them with my problems and personal feelings.

However, having to hold things inside isn't especially healthy. It's socially necessary, but everybody should have that The Sounding Board who they can share anything with. This is the person with whom you don't have to feel any shame for what you think or say. And that person is a very rare person indeed. It's a built in defense function within our society for people to judge you based upon what you say. It makes most people watch what they say so that we're not just spouting ignorant shit all day. Some people (e.g. Charlie Sheen, Sarah Palin, Michael Moore) ignore this function, but that doesn't mean that the function doesn't exist. People are still judging. To have somebody who won't pass judgment on you or think less of you for what you say is a beautiful thing. It means that even when they don't agree with you and your ignorant half-assed logic, they still care enough for the greater aspects of your person that they don't let it taint their opinion of you. Treasure that...for it's a very important step on the road to The Lush Life.

Union Jack-asses: Why Ray dislikes the British

In honor of the Royal Wedding that is coming up at the end of this month...Ray is dedicating two posts to the happy couple. Consider a wedding gift for their blessed union. The first is this post explaining in full Ray's dislike of British people which has been openly stated in multiple podcasts. The second will be a The Ray Way: Weddings edition early next month. However, it's time explain at length my feelings of aversion towards British people as this discussion will never happen in full during a podcast. Every time I bring it up it creates an awkward tension in the room as people start to stare at me for the jingoist bastard that I am being. But I don't particularly see anything wrong with it. Racism is bad. But as long as the people who's culture you don't like are white it's socially acceptable. It's like hating Texans or New Yorkers or Canadians...they aren't marginalized enough for my criticisms to be out of line. So now that we've gotten all of this uncomfortable "Ray is being intolerant" nonsense out of the way...let's start the Brit-bashing.

What's up with their pomp and circumstance?

 I don't think that there exists a culture whose very existence is predicated on fance and shmance quite like the British...and that's saying something because I'm including the French. There entire society is so adorned with bells and whistles that it's hard to see the substance through the frills. They are pretentious and whiny and look down there noses at everybody else. There is no question that the British think that they are the best...but I don't know that I have that big of a problem with that. Thinking that your country is the greatest is only natural. Americans think that way. What is highly unnatural is making sure that everybody in your country gets put into their place. The whole country is just one giant caste system with the Queen on top and some little cockney street-sweeping moppet on the bottom and everybody else is supposed to know their role in between. The sensible in American society find it ridiculous that there are people here in America who expect to be treated differently because they have money or fame. Now imagine a culture where it is a societal norm to pay deference to somebody because they're the descendant of some lord who married his second-cousin and burned some people at the stake for being witches.

What a fuckin' crock...am I right? But yet somehow being born in West Sussex or the like makes you inferior to people born in East Yorkford Hampshire. And let's not even start with University standing. I have to imagine it gets pretty awkward at job interviews for prestige jobs when you didn't attend the upper-crust universities. And everybody has titles. It's hard enough to keep up with the all the titles when we know what they mean like Duke, Earl, Countess, or Viscount. I don't even want to know what It-Girl, diary secretary, or lady-in-waiting is. I had always thought a lady-in-waiting was a girl who was in your bedroom that was preparing to have sex with you, but apparently the British think that it's a female royal consort's personal assistant.

Every culture has certain cornerstones and values which define that culture. It has nothing to do with stereotyping...they are often well-established and actively enforced by society. Some cultures value cooperation while others value competition. Some value tradition while others value innovation. Some value private property rights whereas others value communal sharing. The British value primness, properness, snark, elitist dignity, and representing your country with honor when abroad. And God forbid you violate that last hallmark of British society. When you're within the confines of the United Kingdom you can get shit-faced drunk and go to the most debasing sex clubs because that's your right as a free citizen. However, when the world is watching you had better not take the bronze medal in double sculls rowing behind Australia and Estonia or you risk having your citizenship revoked. British people are put under such immense pressure to represent the UK with class that it just makes them look uptight. The great thing about America is that we know that other countries see us abroad as "The Ugly American" and while we don't necessarily support ignorant behavior while abroad, we don't put undue pressure on our own to avoid it. In short: we mind our own god damn business.

Why does their government make no god damn sense?

Seriously. Just type British Parliament into Wikipedia, start reading, and let me know when you're confused beyond any semblance of understanding. When it is politically advantageous a party can disband Parliament in the middle of a session and call for new elections? What the hell...how can you possibly get anything done with that sort of system? You can't and they don't. Our politicians don't make much headway on policy, but at least they have the common decency to put on a show of it. At the State Opening of Parliament the monarch reads the speech from the Throne which outlines the government's agenda for the year. Now they don't go full-ludicrous and have some old bat who's just a member of the Lucky Sperm Club write it...it is written by her advisers. But that is still too ridiculous. Isn't establishing a government agenda and determining policy what the British people elected Parliament to do? But in defense of these "elected officials"...they might not have really been elected by that much of the population. In America we can only get 50% of the population to vote and we tell them over a year in advance when election day is. I can't imagine what happens to voter turnout when you throw surprise elections at them all the time because you disbanded Parliament for God knows what reason.

Much like America's Congress, the British Parliament also has two houses: the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Alright, this is already starting to hammer home the giant caste system argument that I made earlier. The House of Commons is elected by the people, but the House of Lords is just handed out either to high-ranking officials within the Church or along hereditary lines to heirs of men with proper titles. Unacceptable. Now America isn't perfect in this regard and nepotism still runs wild in politics, but we at least know how to play our cards right. Sure Jay Rockefeller wouldn't be a Senator if he wasn't related to John D. Rockefeller but at least we made him pay gobs and gobs of money to run a campaign to get his Senatorship thus stimulating the West Virginia economy which badly needed it. We didn't just hand the position to him and get nothing out of the deal the way that hundreds of British Parliament seats are handed out every couple of years. I still can't get over the sense of entitlement that the British see with being a member of the Lucky Sperm Club. In America, "Do you know who my father is?" is a line that young spoiled villains say in our movies...in Britain it's the calling card of the upper class douchebag.

Aside from disbanding the government as they see fit, Private Member's Bills, the notion of Royal Assent, and the ridiculous number of purely ceremonial votes that take place which basically allow for something that's going to happen even if they all say "Nay"...there is still another confusing aspect of government in the UK. It comes down to this basic question: "Is Scotland a country?" Answer that question. And then allow me to say: "You are WRONG!" I'll bet you think I don't even know how you answered. Well if you answered "Yes" you're wrong, and if you answered "No" you're wrong, and if you answered "I don't know and neither does anybody else"...well then I'm sorry that I prematurely shouted at you. It won't happen again. But this was a great point of debate between my co-worker Sharon and I and even when we asked the British guy who came in all the time we couldn't get a straight answer. So we eventually looked it up and found out that both of us were right and that neither of us were right. It depends who you ask. According to NATO and the United Nations they are not. However, according to FIFA and the World Cup they are (so they've got that going for them). But to counter that according to the IOC and the Olympics they are not. They have their own flag, but so does Oklahoma. And when you overlap the Scotish flag with the English flag you basically get the Union Jack.  Wikipedia refers to them as a country within a country (BOOM!, Inception!) but when asking Wikipedia to define country they say: "Commonly, the term is used in the sense of both nations and states, with definitions varying." Thanks for nothing, Wikipedia. So I'm going with the true decider of decisions on this matter: Sporcle.com. Therefore, Scotland is not a country. But America doesn't try and confuse people like this with Puerto Rico. We just say "Not a Country" and don't leave any lingering confusion.

What's up with their celebrities and paparazzi? 

Back in November I wrote an extensive expose (read as: rambling rant) on the nature of celebrity and introduced you to the Pyramid of Celebrity. Well, the British just chucked my Pyramid against the wall like British pop singer Adele does with dishes in her new music video. They shattered it. They decided that they would make their own rules regarding what constitutes a celebrity...and then they would put those people in a house together and call it Celebrity Big Brother UK. I have encountered my fair share of "celebrities" in my time and I'm not very easily wonder struck. That doesn't mean that I won't ever be. It's just that I have a different level of expectation than most people when it comes to getting wonder struck. I am not impressed that people know who you are. Meeting Taylor Lautner or any Kardashian or Larry King is not going to impress me in the slightest, because there are two ways that celebrities can intimidate me. The first is for me to think that they are very good at what they do. I would be significantly more impressed by meeting Michael Chiklis or Michelle Branch than I would be by meeting Shia LeBouef or Brittney Spears. And I would only be as impressed as I would be if I were meeting the best carpenter or brain surgeon in the state. I appreciate people who I think perform there craft well and would get generally excited to meet them. The second way to impress me is to be exceedingly physically attractive. Do I think that Kirsten Dunst is that great of an actress or that Ke$ha is a phenominal singer? Not really. They're both pretty good, but if I ever met them I might be a little flabbergasted because inside my head I'm thinking "Hummina Hummina Hummina Hummina". But now that you know what impresses Ray, let's see what impresses the Brits.

 
• Ex-husbands of Page 3 girls. (Example: Alex Reid) I'm not even sure that Page 3 Girls should be considered celebrities, but since I don't want to do anything to discourage glamour models from posing for topless photos...I will allow it. However, why does being related to somebody automatically make you the bee's knees in Britain. Sure Alex may be a mixed-martial artist but seeing as he's lost his last nine fights and never won anything of note he shouldn't be a celebrity.
• Graffiti artists. (Example: Banksy) I'm not saying that he has no talent, but I'm just saying that he uses his mystique to fuel his celebrity. I have to think that if he'd showed his face to the world by now that they would be done with him. And when that's the case I don't know that your celebrity is justified.
• Tabloid columnists. (Example: Carole Malone) Somehow somebody who made a career out of making up shit about celebrities for a living became one. She wrote for a British tabloid and then somehow jumper her way onto UK's Celebrity Fit Club and Celebrity Big Brother. Don't ask me how this happens...ask the British.
• Racist former reality stars. (Example: Jade Goody) I really do hate to speak ill of the dead, but exceptions have to be made. And I'm not alone, in a recent poll she was voted as the 4th Worst Briton on a BBC special and everybody knew that she was dying of cancer at the time. She is in no way talented. She is not pleasant on the eyes. She apparently harbors intense hatred toward people of Southeast Asian descent. And somehow she managed to turn a stint on Big Brother into several other shows for herself and her talentless family.
• Paris Hilton look-alikes. (Example: Chantelle Houghton) Apparently not only can you be famous in Britain for being related to somebody who once did something...you can be famous for looking like somebody who is related to somebody who once did something. The only thing sadder than the fact that she was on a Celebrity Reality show was that she beat Dennis Rodman. The man has 5 NBA Championships and is one of the greatest rebounders to ever play the game of basketball. Respect.
• Rappers named Maggot of unknown age. I don't know what to say. The guy's name is Maggot and apparently people don't know if he's in his mid-20's or his mid-30's.
• Antiques experts. (Example: David Dickinson) He was on the UK Version of I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here. Now I just feel bad for the British. Should we stop this post? I mean this is getting pretty bad.
• Scandal makers. (Example: James Hewitt) This is the man who had an affair with Princess Diana. And I see how that would make him big news for a while, perhaps even a name to remember. But Monica Lewinsky sucked off the Leader of the Free World and three to five years later we were more than done with her. This guy has an affair with a royal consort and close to 30 years later (really only about 20 since the scandal broke) and Britain is nowhere near done with him. He's had well over a dozen television reality appearances and counting...not including news and tabloid appearances.
• Former royal butlers. (Example: Paul Burrell) His resume literally consists of two jobs: footman to Queen Elizabeth II and butler to Princess Diana. However, due to the immense fascination that the British have with the royals, he has managed to spin this career into numerous television appearances and promotes Royal Butler wine which retails for six pounds a bottle.

• Nightclub owners. (Example: Fran Cosgrove) The guy owns a night club (or night clubs...I'm really not sure), was the bodyguard for a band called Westlife that nobody in America has ever heard of, and knocked up a singer for Atomic Kitten who nobody in America has ever listened to (we may have gawked at them on the internet). And somehow he took that and made himself a household name in Britain.
• Journalist/Feminist. (Example: Germaine Greer) Those credentials are enough to get you on a British television show who's average draw is about 10% of the nation. That's 30 million in American. So move to Britain and blog about why men suck and you to can have a television cameras on you.
• Sylvester Stallone's astrologist mother. (Shaking head.) Sad. Just sad.
• People with beehives. (Examples: Amy Winehouse and Adele) Alright, so these two actually have fame that translates to America. I'm pretty sure you've never heard of more than one of the dozen people from above. However, these two (one of whom is very talented and the other of whom looks as though God spilled a human being) are trying to bring back a hairdo that I have tried long and hard to banish to the 1940s and The Simpsons where it belongs. But hey Britain is on board so it's here to stay for now.

And I didn't even bother with mentioning all of the ridiculously popular singers and actors who can't even make the slightest blip on the American landscape. But what's ten times as pathetic as all of these non-celebrities that are masquerading as celebrities are the people who go out of their way to stalk down and harass them. I am of course referring to the paparazzi. The American paparazzi is bad. I never judge a celebrity when I hear that they punched a TMZ employee. However, they are but mosquitoes when compared to the rabid wolverine that is the European paparazzi. Those people are downright homicidal in their lack of regard for all human life. And while we're talking about lack of regard for all human life...I think that it would have been best if one of them died at the hand's of an angry fan of Princess Diana's, Jack Ruby-style, just to send a message that there is no impunity for their reckless abandon for a scoop. I'm not going to go as far as to wish for that...but it might make Europe a better place if they were made to be more cautious. They have near unlimited-means in their ability to stalk you. They get leaked flight manifests for Christ's sake. Let's do something about that, whatever the British equivalent of Homeland Security is. And the problem is that everybody in Britain gives them credibility over there. Tabloid or scandal-rag in America means cheap impulse-buy papers that only trashy people and lonely housewives buy. Out there the British make them their equivalent of the New York Times or USA Today. And what bothers me more than famous British people are the anonymous sources that these tabloids use to talk about them. Every quote that I heard from an anonymous source close to the Middletons during this latest wedding coverage was so ridiculous and spiteful that I honestly think that Kate and William should purge every cowardly friend in their life right now and start over.

What's up with the Royal family?

I've grazed upon this issue multiple times above, but there is no question that they deserve their own section for me to bitch about. Britain allows itself to pay deference to a particular family based solely upon the fact that there bloodline used to rule by the divine right of kings. I've asked an English person about this and they seem to think that the British royal family and their celebrity isn't that much different than America. So I asked for an example. I asked what the American equivalent of Prince William was in America. And I shit you not, here was the answer: Brody Jenner. So most people hate Prince William and think that he's a douchebag? They responded by saying "No. He's generally very well liked and respected." This person clearly has no clue what American sentiments are towards Brody Jenner. And I constantly hear that the monarchy is only a figure-head and that the Parliament and the Prime Minister really has all of the legislative power. That's not true...but that's for next paragraph. What's for this paragraph is that you are paying these "alleged figureheads" extravagantly with tax payer dollars. Where did you think the Queen's income is coming from? Photo ops and collector's plates? The British state pays for that extravagant lifestyle? I know that Mr. Middleton is that father of the bride, but I feel fairly confidant that he's not picking up the tab for the wedding of the decade. Tax payers are paying for a wedding that they are all deemed too common to warrant an invitation to. Hey British Taxpayers, what did the monarchy's five fingers say to your face? SLAP, Motherfucker!

Now let's talk about this figure-head status for the monarchy. The monarch has real power. A lot of it. If you read British law, the monarch can do amazing things. She's just expected never to use these powers and to defer to the Prime Minister and the legislature. These powers are just left in ceremonially. Well, I say that you had better take them out because if I know anything about international contract law it's this: If the law says that I can do something, and I do it, it gets done, whether I was supposed to do it or not. The Queen has the power to select the incoming Prime Minister. Now she's allegedly supposed to take the nomination from the outgoing Prime Minister...but what if she doesn't? And even if there is something saying that she has to...she still has meetings with the Prime Minister, at her place, on a regular basis. Tell me that that isn't undue influence on government! If current British Prime Minister David Cameron is the British equivalent of Barack Obama, then I want you to imagine that Barack Obama was made to go once a week to meet with some octogenarian lady at her home. That lady would be pretty damn powerful if you ask me.

I was reading up on the powers of the throne and their relationship just to make sure I had my ducks in a row and that maybe they weren't as ass-backwards as I thought but it turns out that they are more so. This is an official statement in writing taken directly from the official website www.royal.gov.uk: "After a new Prime Minister has been appointed, the Court Circular will record that 'the Prime Minister Kissed Hands on Appointment.' This is not literally the case. In fact, the actual kissing of hands will take place later, in Council." What. The. Fuck. Britain. Don't tell me your Queen is a figurehead. Another piece of hullabaloo that I find interesting is that the aforementioned James Hewitt who had an affair with Princess Di (even though Charles was also letting it soak in other British birds) could have been tried for treason. Really, adultery with a figurehead's consort is treasonous? And this isn't even the monarch's consort, it's the monarch's son's consort. If I were to have an affair with Michelle Obama, I have no doubt that Barack would disappear my ass using his super secret government powers. However, there is no way that they could try me for treason in front of the whole country and give me a good old public hanging.

What's their specialty?

I mentioned earlier that the British look down on every other nation as inferior to them because they are the mighty British. I said that I didn't really have a problem with it because America does the same thing. However, I think that I should have a problem with it because America doing it is justified. America isn't the best at everything...but there are many things that we are the absolute, undisputed best at and nobody from Sweden to China is even going to pretend that we're not. We are a bona-fide world superpower who brings the goods to every gathering of the World and shows what a driven, intelligent, free market society can produce. Sure the Germans might arguably have the World's best beer, the United Arab Emirates might arguably have the World's best architecture, and Belarus might arguably have the World's best pornography...but America does pretty well for itself in several important and diverse endeavors. What does Great Britain do best? Thinking....thinking....nothing? I know that they think that they do a lot of things well but that's typical British arrogance. The Rolls-Royce might be a fine car but Italy does better and when we talk about mass-producing a fine car Britain starts to suck wind. They think that they brew great beer, but just about every country around them (Belgium, Ireland, Germany, etc.) does it even better. But I think that there are two things that Brits will argue to the death that they are the best at and I will debunk those in the next two paragraphs. Those are literature and football.

I was tempted to give the Brits literature. They've been pretty good. Lots of countries have literary masters. Colombia has Gabriel Garcia Marquez. France had Alexander Dumas. The United States had Mark Twain. But Britain has had possibly the granddaddy of them all: Big Poppa Willie Shakespeare. And they've had a ton of other greats: Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Lewis Carroll, J.R.R. Tolkien, H.G. Wells, Mary Shelley, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, George Orwell...the list goes on. I think that that list just brought some of my high school literature teachers to orgasm, if my horrendous use of punctuation didn't ruin the mood. The British have done literature pretty damn well. But I didn't ask "What did the British do best?". I was asking "What do the British do best?". And in the last 50 years British literature is predicated almost entirely on the Harry Potter series. And while the tween in you might want to let them keep the title for that alone...I don't know that Harry, Hermione, Dumbledore, and friends are going to cut it. I know, blasphemy, right? But British literature is no longer dominant in the 21st Century with authors like Cormac McCarthy or the United States, Haruki Murakami of Japan, Victor Pelevin of Russia, and Carlos Fuentes of Mexico pounding out numerous masterpieces. You were the best Britain, but we live in a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately world.

The British might put out a collective hit on me for implying that their football (read as: soccer) is inferior on the World stage...but it absolutely is. Their private league, the EPL, is a mighty power on the world stage and along with Spain's La Liga and Italy's Serie A has to be considered one of the three best. However, it's stocked with foreign players and therefore that won't necessarily translate to success on the World Stage. America does not hang it's hat on the soccer hat rack. Basketball, baseball, swimming, gymnastics, track and field, golf, and tennis are all sports that we think we do pretty well on the World stage. England totally hangs their hat on the football hat rack. They think that they own that god damn hat rack. But over the last decade has Britain really done any better than America at soccer. Both have gotten to the quarterfinals of the World Cup but neither has gotten further. We really can't compare continental play because we dominate and inferior confederation (CONCACAF) whereas they have been sufficiently manhandled in a superior one (UEFA)...so which of those is better. They've never done anything in a Euro Cup of note. They haven't even made a final and it's been contested since 1960. They've made the finals of one World Cup and that was back in 1966. Once again, what have you done for me lately? And I don't foresee them going anywhere until possbily 2066 because Spain, Italy, Germany, Brazil, and Argentina all own England in football and the British people browbeat their players in the media until they are cowering broken shells of their former confident selves. And lay off the hooliganism, Britain. Killing people over sporting rivalries doesn't make you any better of fans and it certainly doesn't make your teams any better. It just makes you idiots.

However, I don't want it to be said that I dislike all British people. I just dislike their society as a whole. So I should probably provide some examples of Brits that I do like. 

Ray's list of approved British people:

David Beckham - He's classy, avant-garde, personable and slays the ladies. I respect him and I want to be him.

La Roux - I don't find most British women to be that attractive and Eleanor Kate Jackson of La Roux is no  different. But they rock a good jam and thus are "bullet-proof" in my eyes.

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje - He played Simon Adebisi on Oz and Mr. Eko on LOST. That equals badass. There is no way that this guy does tea time.

Gordon Ramsey - Sure I have an intrinsic problem with the way he rates food too heavily on presentation as opposed to taste...but I like the way he calls people "donkeys" when they overcook a simple risotto.

James Bond - Ian Fleming wrote the perfect spy to be something that few, if any, Englishmen could live up to. So is it any wonder that only two of the six actors to play James Bond were actually English.

Well, now that they know how I feel about them...best of luck Will and Kate.