Richie Rich is Kind of a Jerk

Websites like this one expose Superman and Batman as the jerks they really are, but what about America’s “poor little rich boy”, Richie Rich? Let’s find out!

Wow, what a smarmy fellow. Not only does he live at 5,000,000 Money Lane, not only does he have his own yellow brick road MADE OF GOLD, not only are his light bulbs just really big rubies, but look at that hair. Would you trust a man with that hair?

Oh, hey guys. Here I am in the park looking at birds with my novelty-sized solid gold binoculars. Clearly that makes me the superior ornithologist.

Not only does my fabulous wealth give me enough time to play golf at age 8, but I’ve taken the time and money to build a machine that will help me cheat in this very unlikely scenario. Take that, poverty!

Who cares if my volcano ends up destroying a nearby town and devaluing the international gem market? I’m Richie Freakin’ Rich!

Who needs steroids when you can blatantly bribe a giant hulk of a man to pitch on your little league team?

Batman had some pretty lame villains, but I think we may have found the crappiest one yet.

The most interesting part of this cover isn’t the art so much as the art in conjunction with the subtitle. The silent witness? Is he planning on killing Gloria with that giant lollypop because she witnessed some of his illegal financial transactions?

Oil bet it does.

I was right – and only two issues later.

I’ll say it again: I lost a wallet full of comically oversized money that somehow implies massive wealth. Are you SURE you don’t have anything like that?

There are plenty more, but I think I’ve made my point.

Click

This morning, for the first time since I can remember, I was absolutely thrilled to be shaken out of sleep by the obnoxious buzz of my alarm clock.

Why? Because I had a dream that I was watching Click.

Seriously. My list of films that I could never sit through again is stunningly small. I’d even be willing to give Johnny English, the only film I’ve ever walked out of the theater on, a second shot if I were dared to or something. Click, however, is a film that I will never, ever watch again. Ever. Here’s why:

(Note: in the following entry, I will spoil this film for you. I am doing this deliberately, so that you will never have to see it.)

1. It was my idea first.

One fine afternoon in, oh, probably November of Two Thousand and Five, I was walking back from class when I came up with a brilliant idea for a movie. I ran upstairs, burst into Pat’s room, and told him the news.

“Pat!” I shouted. “So what if I write this movie, and it’s about this guy who finds the remote control for the DVD of his life. He can suddenly access the main menu, and watch the special features and director’s commentary and stuff!”

“Dude,” he replied, “I think that’s the plot for the next Adam Sandler movie.”

Sure enough, I went online and first learned about Click. From then on, I was always resentful because, somewhere deep down, I still feel a little bit of propriety toward that idea.

2. It messes with time in a way that scares me half to death.

If you talk to my friend Eric, he will tell you that time is his nemesis. He and time have never played well together, and his epic struggles aren’t really against much more than the screwed-up way that he and time seem to interact.

While I don’t share his animosity, my deepest existential fears mostly have to do with eternity, with the future, and with the slow, endless sway that time has over all living things. Having experienced blackouts at different points in my life, I now know what it’s like to have lost entire swaths of memory: it’s not as though what happened during those points in time didn’t take place, but those actions and thoughts are swirling in an inaccessible morass of fragmented grey matter and faulty neurons.

Click brings all these fears to light. Once Sandler’s remote control starts skipping through his life, usually forcing him to miss any crucial moment during which he might get to redeem himself in the eyes of his rapidly-distancing family, time is completely out of his control. Sandler becomes trapped in his own sinking life, his body performing only the most basic functions for years as his mind “skips forward” and his wife and children grow old and resentful of what they simply view as a vacant, lazy, unloving family member. This is a fate worse than death, worse than anything – watching everyone you love kill themselves to try and snap you out of a trance that you only wake up to for a day or two every decade, watching the brutal results of your lifelong inactions.

I don’t want to change the world, but I would rather die than be a bad husband to whomever I marry, and a bad father to any children I may have. Click makes me scared that somehow time will come after me, suspending me in this lifeless hell as I watch my world burn.

3. It is the only movie, to date, that I have seriously cried during.

For all the aforementioned reasons, this one gets to me in a way that no tearjerker can. And having to tell people that the one movie you cried at was a dumb Adam Sandler film is kind of lame.

4. I watched it in the Spring of 2006.

Enough said, I suppose. Coming out of the end of a relationship where I was desperately trying to “save” someone, trying to preserve the flame of a romance that was rapidly dying as well as feeling helpless in the face of her then-progressing mental illness, the sheer futility present in this film really hit home. I felt powerless to do anything to improve that situation, and watching this film multiplied that feeling tenfold. Do not watch Click if your life in any way resembles mine at that time. Actually, don’t watch it no matter what.

5. Because all of that existential angst is bookmarked with a bunch of dumb jokes about dogs humping things.

Which is exactly what you don’t want to see right after the emotional climax of such a bleak film. It cheapens the whole experience, and reminds you that you’ve just been drama’d by an Adam Sandler film! Take that, film nerd credibility!

Anyway, that’s probably enough reasons, but if you need more just let me know. Friends don’t let friends watch Click.

Sex and Violence and Kids and More

First, a correction from yesterday: I said that the Iraq war only cost around 90 billion dollars. I meant 90 billion per YEAR, or more like 400-500 billion total. Yow.

Today, though, let’s talk about something else silly and confusing: how sex and violence are treated in modern American culture.

Here’s a little experiment for you to try: take a 10-12 year-old child, boy or girl, and sit them down in front of a movie they’ve never seen before. There’s no need to make it an R-rated film, or even a PG-13 flick. Find a PG movie that has a fair amount of fighting and a mild romantic subplot and see how the kid reacts to different parts of the film. I guarantee that the result for most children will be the same – they won’t bat an eyelash during the violence, no matter how bad it is, but the minute two people even think about kissing they will be asking you if this is an appropriate movie for kids to see.

Now, I am not advocating the censorship or further regulation of violence on the screen, but why is destruction viewed as a more culturally acceptable sight for an adolescent than creation? Why has sex become taboo to discuss to the point that the instant a child suspects they might see a kiss they begin asking for reassurance that the film is rated PG?

This is especially interesting in contrast to a culture that seems to be hypersexualizing on all cylinders, from advertising to celebrity worship to the way images of women are presented in order to tantalize the male postpubescent demographic. Plus, we keep getting told by the media that kids are having sex earlier and earlier – I mean, how many reports have you seen that wails about how 13-year-olds are blowing each other in the closet in between language arts and fourth period gym?

So which is it – are kids becoming sexual earlier, or is sex viewed by our youth as something scary and weird while shooting each other to death is seen as normal? And would either of these things be a good thing? Let’s tackle this one piece at a time.

I’m no expert, but it seems as though the perpetuation of violence in media targeted at children has had absolutely no negative affect on the violent crime rate in America. In fact, if you take a look at this page of statistics that cites various FBI sources on the trends of violence among teens, youth crime is down SIGNIFICANTLY since the proliferation of video game systems, the internet, and other forms of instant, modern communication!

On the other hand, as less and less information is discussed with children about sex, things on that end of the spectrum keep getting worse. According to a recent CDC study, more kids are having sex and using fewer condoms than ever before.

If I had to make a guess at how the behavior I’ve noticed in children 10-12 so rapidly turns into reckless promiscuity, I’d like to make the following metaphor:

Let’s pretend that humans don’t have to eat until they reach puberty. Until then, they can survive happily on nutrients found in air and water. Adults eat in secret, late at night, every night after the children go to bed. Food is seen as slightly shameful, and isn’t discussed much – though it’s alluded to in nearly every film and television show.

Children grow up learning that eating is bad – that they shouldn’t try it under any circumstances until they are old enough. They grow up sort of in fear of it, and their parents encourage this. After all, it’s better that they fear it than that they get too curious and break into the food supply late at night.

And then, one day, the kid gets a craving for a cookie. He (or she) knows it’s taboo, so one night when his father and mother are off at work he sneaks into the kitchen, opens the locked cuppboard, and tastes sugar for the first time.

It takes amazing.

If you were this kid, at this point, why wouldn’t you taste everything in sight?

…

It’s not this simple, I know, and I also hate placing sex and violence in the same sentence as one thing is natural and beautiful and the other thing is…well, it’s also natural, but it’s certainly not beautiful.

It’d love to hear some more thoughts about this, as I wonder what is to be done. Do I, as a media writer, have a responsibility to try and correct this cultural blooper, or is this a matter of parenting and education? Or are things really just as they’ve always been?

Spaceflight

I just watched the first part of When We Left Earth, the new Discovery Channel miniseries about the early days of the space race. It’s not often I get all excited when I’m watching something random in the background as I do random stuff in my room, but tonight I found myself punching the air and cheering whenever something cool happened, which was pretty much the whole time.

Honestly, there’s nothing too special about it compared to other space race documentaries (except for a few bits of really breathtaking, remastered footage), but I had forgotten just how much I love learning about that part of American history.

Seriously. If you can’t get excited about America’s quest for the moon, then your sense of adventure needs adjusting. It’s got absolutely everything: espionage, subterfuge, heroes, villains, explosions, risk, reward, and the culmination of humankind’s quest to tame the heavens, control our own destiny, and reach beyond the fragile confines of our home. It may have happened 40 years ago, but in many ways the moon landing holds more magic and wonder than anything we do now.

It’s too bad we didn’t continue on, and that NASA has fallen by the wayside. I understand why most liberals are against the space program, as it is ideally much more important to help those of us on Earth who are starving and dying each day than shooting men to the moon, but there is a genuine sense of progress, of accomplishment, of true pride and patriotism that space travel provides. It also has the ability to bind us together in a species in a way that nothing else does – after all, what could bring about peace on Earth faster than joint missions to colonize and vitalize other planets?

And in terms of the money, I know this is no justification, but the entire Apollo program cost 25 billion in 1968 dollars – and that includes a bunch of the secret military cold war missile tech stuff that was going on concurrently. In contrast, the Iraq war has cost us almost $90 billion.

Even still, I can’t sit here and say that we should be spending all our money flying to Mars, but I very few things will ever be as romantic a notion to me as manned spaceflight.

Let’s Take Myers-Briggs Personality Tests!

The link is here. Once you’re done taking the test, check your ‘compatibility’ with someone else here.

I scored as an INFJ, the Idealist Counselor. This is the writeup:

Counselors have an exceptionally strong desire to contribute to the welfare of others, and find great personal fulfillment interacting with people, nurturing their personal development, guiding them to realize their human potential. Although they are happy working at jobs (such as writing) that require solitude and close attention, Counselors do quite well with individuals or groups of people, provided that the personal interactions are not superficial, and that they find some quiet, private time every now and then to recharge their batteries. Counselors are both kind and positive in their handling of others; they are great listeners and seem naturally interested in helping people with their personal problems. Not usually visible leaders, Counselors prefer to work intensely with those close to them, especially on a one-to-one basis, quietly exerting their influence behind the scenes.

Counselors are scarce, little more than one percent of the population, and can be hard to get to know, since they tend not to share their innermost thoughts or their powerful emotional reactions except with their loved ones. They are highly private people, with an unusually rich, complicated inner life. Friends or colleagues who have known them for years may find sides emerging which come as a surprise. Not that Counselors are flighty or scattered; they value their integrity a great deal, but they have mysterious, intricately woven personalities which sometimes puzzle even them.

Counselors tend to work effectively in organizations. They value staff harmony and make every effort to help an organization run smoothly and pleasantly. They understand and use human systems creatively, and are good at consulting and cooperating with others. As employees or employers, Counselors are concerned with people’s feelings and are able to act as a barometer of the feelings within the organization.

Blessed with vivid imaginations, Counselors are often seen as the most poetical of all the types, and in fact they use a lot of poetic imagery in their everyday language. Their great talent for language-both written and spoken-is usually directed toward communicating with people in a personalized way. Counselors are highly intuitive and can recognize another’s emotions or intentions – good or evil – even before that person is aware of them. Counselors themselves can seldom tell how they came to read others’ feelings so keenly. This extreme sensitivity to others could very well be the basis of the Counselor’s remarkable ability to experience a whole array of psychic phenomena.

Mohandas Gandhi, Sidney Poitier, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Goodall, Emily Bronte, Sir Alec Guiness, Carl Jung, Mary Baker Eddy, Queen Noor are examples of the Counselor Idealist (INFJ).

This seems fairly accurate, no? At least a good chunk of it does.

Please post your results in the comments! I’m curious what it says about you.

Doctor Who: Fun, absolutely. Brilliant? I’m not so sure anymore.

Last summer, I discovered Doctor Who and declared it the best show ever. I mean, it had everything! It was a time-traveling love story for gosh sakes! The Doc was quippy and clever, the monsters were cool, and the story arcs were often breathtaking. While the Series 3 finale may have ended on a bit of an awkward note, I was still on board 100%

Now, after series 4 has come and gone, I’m not too sure. Oh, sure, it’s still a consistently fun time and I will be psyched for the Christmas episode just like always, but…I don’t know. I guess my expectations have disappeared almost entirely.

You see, the thing I loved about the reboot of Who was the emotional depth that Davies and his crew infused into what used to be nothing more than an adventure show. In the old Who, the Doctor was a classic cowboy figure. He road his TARDIS around time and space, finding lawless places that needed a ’sheriff’ and solving their problems with as little violence as possible. He may have had traveling companions, but their emotional bond was always platonic and the Doctor always seemed satisfied just by looking forward to the next adventure.

The new doctor was very different. He had the same pacifist, hero streak and wanderlust as the old, but he was far more fallible, far more human. He fell in love, and that love caused him great pain and vulnerability. He made mistakes – some that cost innocent people their lives. For the first time, he started looking around the TARDIS and seeing how empty it was without anyone to share it with. He became an empathetic figure, and for that I loved him.

Series 4 tried to change that as much as possible. Oh, don’t get me wrong – David Tennant’s acting was still top notch and even his companion, Donna, ended up having a really neat character arc, despite how much crap I constantly gave her. What suffered, though, was the overall writing. I mean, there were stinkers in previous seasons, but not a whole crop of ‘em like this year. They were still enjoyable for the most part, but they lacked any emotional resonance whatsoever. The Doctor became a Mary-Sue that could change the course of history just by showing up, macguffins were the rule of the day, and you could count on a Deus Ex Machina to rewrite space and time itself and undo the cliffhanger every single time. I mean, when everything goes right (and things that don’t are telegraphed sometimes two, three episodes in advance), where are the stakes? Why should I care? And don’t even get me STARTED on how Russell T. Davies resolved the Doctor/Rose saga, something I cared DEEPLY about and which came to a conclusion in yesterday’s episode that felt as though it were scribbled down by a twelve-year-old fanfic writer.

Also, there were no cybermen this year. Of course, if there was a series 4 cyberman episode, it would have gone a little something like this:

RAGE OF THE CYBERMEN

A PROPOSED SERIES FOUR EPISODE OF DOCTOR WHO BY CHAS R. ANDRES

FADE IN:

EXT. LONDON – DAY.

An IMPERTINENT LONDONER is walking around somewhere near the Thames, talking on his bluetooth headset.

IMPTERNINENT LONDONER
Yeah, yeah, I’m faxing the forms over right away over the wireless uplink. I’m sure glad that my crippling addition to technology will never act as a blunt metaphor for man’s dependence on machines.

Suddenly, a CYBERMAN whacks him over the head, killing him instantly.

ROLL CREDITS

EXT. LONDON – DAY.

The Doctor and Donna exit the TARDIS in a back alley behind the same apartment complex that most of the companions live in.

Cybermen are everywhere, whacking people over the head and turning them into cybermen, too.

DONNA
(huffy)
You told me that the cybermen were trapped in an alternate dimension and could never, ever, EVER get free. Ever!

DOCTOR
And yet here they are. Brilliant!

The Doctor runs off.

DONNA
Doctorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

EXT. FRONT OF BUCKINGHAM PALACE OR SOMETHING – DAY.

The Doctor walks up to a cyberman and knocks on his breastplate.

DOCTOR
You there. Care to tell me what’s going on?

CYBERMAN
We came from the alternate dimension that you closed up forever because in this series forever is equal to about half a season. Also, the fabric of space and time is rapidly deteriorating.

DOCTOR
That’s no good.

CYBERMAN
Don’t worry. There’s probably some glowing red crystal that destroys us and resets the universe. I bet it’s really easy to find, too. Just bluster around until you find the cybercontroller.

DOCTOR
Awesome, thanks!

INT. CYBERCONTROLLER’S HUT MADE OF SILVER TUBES – DAY.

The Cybercontroller is about to make Donna into a cyberman. The doctor glares really angrily at the cybercontroller.

CYBERCONTROLLER

AND THAT IS HOW MY LASER WILL DESTROY EVERYTHING IN EVERY UNIVERSE – EVER!

DOCTOR
You can’t do this! Surely there is some little bit of humanity left inside you!

CYBERCONTROLLER
NEGATIVE. I AM PROGRAMMED ONLY TO KILL.

DOCTOR
What if I bat my eyelashes?

CYBERCONTROLLER
BEEP BOOP CONFUSED WHAT ARE THESE EMOTIONS?

Donna uses her guile to escape and runs over to a console next to where the Doctor is standing.

DONNA
What button should I press?

DOCTOR
You’ll have to reroute the positronic membrane to set up a feedback loop of argon-helium antlions in the cybermen’s discrete memory.

DONNA
How do I do that?

DOCTOR
Press that big red button and lift that really convenient switch.

Donna DOES.

CYBERCONTROLLER
NOOOO! MY BRAIN IS TOO FULL OF ANTLIONS. WHY DOCTOR WHY?

DOCTOR
You don’t have to die, cybercontroller. Even though you tried to destroy humanity, I will spare your life because I’m that sort of righteous dude. Just take my hand.

CYBERCONTROLLER
(shorting out)
TOO. MANY. ANT. LIONS.

DOCTOR
(yelling)
TAKE. MY. HAAAAND!

The Cybercontroller EXPLODES. The Doctor and Donna get back on the TARDIS just in time.

DONNA
You saved everyone, doctor! You were brilliant!

The Doctor stares off into space, darkly.

DOCTOR
I was brilliant…real brilliant.

He looks down at the floor.

DOCTOR (CONT’D)

But not brilliant enough.

END.

You Might Be Living In A Sitcom If…

Warning: if enough of the following applies to you, check your reality for holes. If you find that most of your dialog consists of quippy one-liners and many of your problems can be wrapped up within a 22-minute half hour, get help immediately.

- If you are male, you tend to date 8-10 absolutely beautiful women each year, but your relationships don’t last more than a week or two and usually end due to some wacky bit of miscomminucation.

- If you do have a serious relationship, it tends to reach some sort of apex each may before a summer of treading water and a big resolve in September. (Note: this is also perfectly normal for college students)

- You have a local bar/coffee shop/restaurant where you and your hang meet up at twice a day. The food is absurdly cheap, and you either have a crush or a playful antagonistic relationship with the waitress.

- You work 9-5, but for some reason you never feel like you’re actually at work. Your entire life happens on weekends and evenings.

-If you’re straight, you’ve had some crazy misunderstanding where everyone – including your long-term girlfriend – thought that you were coming out of the closet.

- If you’re gay, half of what you say is wise fashion or relationship advice, and the other half is about what you’d do if that hot man sitting right over there weren’t totally straight.

- You have a buddy who is almost totally irredeemable, but you keep him around because he’s really funny.

- Most of the people in your group of friends have either slept together, want to sleep together, or are so adamant about NOT sleeping together that you know they sorta want to do it.

- You have an adversarial relationship with a blue collar worker at your white collar job. You can never seem to do or say the right thing around him/her.

- Things that only happen occasionally in most people’s lives happen often in yours. Examples include jury duty, senior prom, casual bowling leagues with matching uniforms, flat tires, overnight company outings, etc.

- Your living quarters are WELL above your means.

- For some reason, you always come up with a clever word to use in place of a swear.

- Relationships aren’t over until your ex has come back into your life at least two or three more times – usually at the absolute worst moment. Bonus points if it’s right when you were about to sleep with your new mate.

Feel free to add your own!