Jingus

Or they just prefer Batman going solo without a kid sidekick, like me. I've read plenty of good Robin stories, but I just like it better when Batman's out there by himself in a fight. I never really felt it was believable that this kind of dark loner character would take on a preteen partner in the first place.

What other kind of force could they have used? This kind of reminds me of discussions about shootouts when somebody goes "well why didn't the cops just shoot the gun out of the suspect's hand?". Reliable but non-lethal force against any enemy, especially an enemy consisting of several individuals who are heavily armed, is essentially not possible with our current technology. I doubt the Royal Marines had any kind of weapons to use besides deadly ones. What were they supposed to do? Challenge the AK-47-toting pirates to a round of fisticuffs, preferably under the Marquis of Queensbury rulebook? For all the talk about the pirates' gentelmanly behavior and possibly legit motivations, they're still committing armed robberies with machine guns and rocket launchers. In pretty much any country in the world, deadly force is a legally accepted defense against that level of crime.

I think it would only make the story better if the kid's full legal name was Fucking Adolf Hitler.

Mojo doesn't say anything about where it's going to be playing in the future. At the moment it's in a grand total of four theaters, two in LA and two in NYC. Does anyone know if it's getting any kind of wider distribution, or are we gonna have to just wait for the online bootleg DVD release?

Or any crappy WCW ever. When the hell are we starting the chat club back up? Complaining about that shit was more fun than it had any right to be.

One weird thing: the new special editions are missing at least a couple of special features which were on the box set version. I know part 3 had a filmmakers' commentary track, for one thing. As for the 3D aspect, I wouldn't get my hopes up. I've never seen a home adaptation of a 3D movie which really got the technology to work properly.

Oh. Right. Duh. What the hell was I thinking, I have that album. I think he played something by Waits too, but can't remember what offhand.

The number was posted on the website. I thought I was close enough geographically to pick up the signal on the air, I wasn't, I went to the website to get their online feed, the # was there, I couldn't resist. I think I startled him in a "oh shit, is some internet dude stalking me?" sort of way. Actually half the reason I called was because he played Tom Waits' "Stagger Lee", which I marked out for, that was one really uncensored broadcast.

And oh yeah, Brian Lee once told me a story about Haku killing a police dog with his bare hands. Probably bullshit... but... you could almost believe he could actually do that, couldn't you?

I liked the comedic aspect of it. For once, they weren't pretending like they took all this shit seriously. Plus they actually had some real actors in the cast as opposed to the usual "hire the cheapest twentysomething "teenagers" you can find", which helped. And the end sequence where Jason was shrugging off all those gunshots 'n stuff was fairly badass. As for reanimating Jason, well they had to do something after part 5 was so roundly hated by many of the fanboys because it didn't include him. Bolt of lightning, sure, why not, it was good enough for Frankenstein and Johnny 5, right?

You didn't like American Gods or, more importantly, Neverwhere? Okay. Stay the fuck away from Anansi Boys, then, you'll hate it even more. It's like the others, but even more so, if that makes any sense. Plus it feels like Gaiman really started blatantly repeating his material there. (Admittedly part of my love for Neverwhere is an inherent fascination I have for stories about underground tunnels in urban environments. Preston & Child got me unfortunately hooked on their books with Reliquary via that method.) I never read the original version of Coraline, but did catch a graphic novel adaptation which seemed fairly generic and middle-of-the-road. Is it pretty safe to say that The Sandman stands on a plateau far above all of Neil's other work? I can't think of anything else he's done that approaches it. His beginning to Books of Magic wasn't bad, but I don't think I'd state it any stronger than "wasn't bad".

He got banned for... uh... something, I don't remember. He showed up at the Pit briefly a couple years back, but vanished again. IIRC, didn't his name come across someone's desk at their day job as being a guy who passed a bad check or had outstanding loan collections or something like that?

I'm not certain why, but somehow I ended up meeting Big Poppa Popick in person like three different times. Just coincedentally happened that way. He was kinda geeky, but cool enough I suppose. That's the only one I've seen live, not counting a few guys like FK Teale/Feddy who I knew previously and got to come to the boards. I've talked on the phone with a couple folks, Inc and Milky specifically, though there might've been some others I'm forgetting.

I thought 3 and 5 were easily two of the worst ones. Aside from Jason Goes To Hell, which is in a league of suckitude of its own. Truthfully I shouldn't dump on the F13 series too hard. I've got a strange fascination with them, even while I completely admit the movies are total crap, I'm still oddly addicted to it. Part 6 and Freddy vs Jason are the only ones I'd say are outright good movies, but if almost any of 'em happen to be on Cinemax I'll usually watch it. And I didn't mind X that much either. I didn't understand all the complaining about moving Jason to a scifi environment. So what? He was always a ludicrous character, especially with the infamously confused backstory which seemed to be rewritten with every installment in the movie. X wasn't great cinema, but at least they were trying to do something a little different with the franchise, which is laudable. On a similar note, I didn't hate Jason Takes Manhattan nearly as much as most people did. Sure, most of it took place on the boat, but I thought the one scene we got of Jason in Times Square was damn near worth the price of admission all by itself.

The first live wrestling show I ever went to was a WCW house show. The crowd was small, most of the matches sucked, and the main event was a Flair/Nash debacle that I've ranted about several times here. However, there were some positives. For one, that's when I totally fell in love with Daffney. But more relevant was the shockingly entertaining Meng vs Lex Luger match. Meng was the unstoppable babyface badass and Luger was playing the chickenshit heel, and it was way better than it had any right to be. I'm generally a mark for most of the Samoans in the biz, and Mengku always seemed like he tried hard even when he didn't have much to work with. Also, anyone else remember his late run as the WCW hardcore champion? He did some fun stuff with Crowbar and Terry Funk, iirc. Of course that was right before he showed up at the Royal Rumble, which was a great laff at WCW's dumbass expense.

In the early days the OAOAST was a parody of e-feds. We had the most ludicrous gimmicks and matchups possible. My character J*INGUS was a Kane ripoff, a giant 7-foot-tall serial killer who got that big by imbibing radioactive steroids after being Bradshawed in the shower by the whole roster. It was that kind of fed. Later on he made out with a zombie chick, killed about a thousand of MarioLogan's horror movie goons, feuded with a guy who had a drunken fish for a mascot, and won the women's title. Yeah, it was that kind of place. Eventually however it turned into kind of a more serious and generic e-fed, and my attention waned.

I will say I thought the regular theatrical version was better than the unrated/workprint one. The rape escape and cop ending were both fairly inferior to the alternatives. They're re-releasing F13 Part 3 in 3-D? Well, that would be just about the only reason to see it. What a bad movie. Let's face it, the vast majority of the old Friday the 13th series was total mediocrity, even by slasher-horror standards.

Cena. I disliked him right from the start, I'm not one of those who jumped on the haterade bandwagon in '05. Nash. Do I really need to specify? Okay, he'd already succeeded by the time I started watching, but I'm amazed every time a company brings him back for another run in which he puts nobody over. Chris Masters. I'd love for some person with more guts than myself to go back and count exactly how much time was wasted on the Masterlock Challenge. Couldn't wrestle, couldn't talk, wasn't over, tended to injure people. Yet he was given a big push just because he knew his way around a weight bench and a syringe. The perfect storm of things I hate most in a wrestler.

I've seen a bunch of different versions on exactly what relative it was (sister/son/niece/etc), but basically they all agree that it was Maff doing something sexual with a close relative of Homicide's who was underage at the time. But yeah, they have apparently made up at least somewhat, there's a picture of the two of them posing together sometime recently and seeming fine with each other, plus iirc they've worked a few shows together.

Based on you guys' talk, I finally picked up Infinite Jest from the library. They'd had a copy, but it was missing. Then outta nowhere, it shows back up on the shelf, minus its barcode and security chip. Which means someone stole this book from the library, ripped off the library labels, and then returned the stolen merchandise to its proper place. Fuckin' weird. But anyway, point is: jesus christ I had no idea how long it was. Not just page length, I can handle a thousand-page book, done it many times. But it's also a thousand big pages of small type. If you made this into a paperback, you'd have to separate it into two separate volumes. The first couple pages are interesting, but didn't really grab me. Should I soldier on here?

The funny thing is, if Godzilla somehow really could exist, we totally do have the ability to kill him. Even aside from the nuclear option, the US military's offensive technology is so advanced that it's unreal. We've got real working rail-guns and lasers, fer chrissakes. They're expensive as hell, so we don't bother paying a hundred billion bucks for a death ray when the 9mm bullets we have now work just fine on the threats we have now. But if a real rampaging monster ever showed up? We'd find a way to blow its head off. Ain't nothing alive we haven't found a way to kill.

Yeah there was, an ECW title match they had a couple years ago. I still remember it because, well, you see a Show/Kane match that doesn't suck, it's a memorable thing. A few more that come to mind: -CM Punk vs Chavo Guerrero. How the hell were these matches so boring? It's gotten to the point where people now think of Chavo as a bathroom-break segment guy. Looking back over the years, how did that become possible? -Rock vs Undertaker. If these guys ever had any match which wasn't 20 minutes of endless punching and punching and punching and punching and punching and punching and punching and punching and punching and punching and more punching, I haven't seen it. -Candice Michelle vs Beth Phoenix. Ugh. Couldn't have a good match to save their lives. And sometimes Candice was so fuckin' sloppy that she looked like she was indeed trying to kill herself. -Bret Hart vs WCW. Seriously, in two years, he didn't have enough worthwhile matches to count on two hands. What happened to that guy. Some of them were even shockingly bad, like that jaw-dropping abortion he and Sting shat out in the ring at Halloween Havoc 98. -Mike Knox vs Tommy Dreamer. This feud stunk up many a Tuesday night. -Road Dogg vs Billy Gunn. Any time they've done this match, it's always blown. Doesn't matter if it's 97 or 99 or 05 or 08, it's inevitably horrible.

I graduated in spring of '98, so my high school years were before the real high point of the boom. Since I didn't watch wrestling back then, I certainly never talked about wrestling with anyone. But I don't remember anyone wearing the t-shirts, and literally only remember one guy even mentioning that he watched it. This was kind of a preppy sort of school in an upper-class neighborhood, so the demographics were against it in the first place. In college, however? It was huge. That's how I first saw wrestling in the first place. Every one of the dorm buildings had a big-screen TV in their lobby, and every Monday night they'd always be tuned to Raw with a dozen guys sitting around watching.

I find it funny that they nominated foreign and indy flicks to such a heavy extent that they only had a grand total of 9 films that both got full nationwide releases and are up for an award here. I don't know exactly why I find that funny, but I do. Even the Oscars aren't this heavily biased against big studio pictures. In fact, lots of the stuff which has been nominated hasn't even been officially released yet, they've only played at festivals and such. Those are some odd rules there. Anna Pacquin and her awful "southern" accent in True Blood is worth a nomination, while her infinitely better co-stars get nothing? From what I've read btw, Bob's right, within the industry the Globes are seen as being on the approximate same level as an MTV Movie Award in terms of legitimate celebration of artistic greatness.

Hey, just curious, are you the same Psycho Penguin from the Gamefaqs boards? One I've noticed: the whole gang on Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Okay, part of that isn't growing character stupidity, it's the entire show's nature getting more and more aggressively bizarre and non-sequiter as time goes on. But still, many of the guys on there are WAY dumber now than they were at the beginning. An interesting example of a countertrend: the main characters on Venture Bros. Most of them actually seem to have gotten a little smarter since the show started.