You mess with Harpo Marx, you get the horns.

Friday, May 19, 2006

We've got Potter, We've got Potter... Erm, I mean Henry!

Thierry Henry is staying with the Gunners! Brilliant!!

I realize this isn't a football blog, but it's nice to know that Barcelona didn't win that match. Thanks Thierry!!

Normal silliness now resumes on the blog.

Update: Just in keeping with this week's theme, I have it on good authority that Thierry Henry is indeed "Five Times Better." I wonder if he and Nuffy are accquaintances?

Thursday, May 18, 2006

So close...So bloody close...

Well, most of you know by now that Arsenal are NOT European Champions. Go ahead Spurs fans and rub it in (Although I should note that WE are in the Champions League qualifiers and can hold our lasagna). Some modest little team from Catalonia, Spain (Barcelona is their name I think) improbably hoisted the trophy. It was rather dizzying, given their hallunication-inspiring team colours of purple and blue stripes.

It was an insane Final. From Lehmann reaching out and touching someone - Eto'o on the ankle - and getting the first red card EVER at a Champions League Final, to the bizarre inability of the referee to understand the advantage rule, to Eboue's dramatic flop and the glorious goal that Henry and Campbell fashioned from it. Even the day before, one of the linesmen assigned to the game was photographed in a Barcelona shirt and was promptly replaced, lest the footballing world mistake the Champions League Final for the Serie A, or as I like to refer to it these days, "Juventus and their well-paid lackeys."

Oh, and Eto'o was offsides. He was offsides the whole night. He was offsides when he walked into the changing room. He lives offsides. If the linesman were competent, he'd simply stick his flag in the back of Eto'o's jersey. Eto'o is Cameroonian for "I play offsides."

Lehmann wouldn't have let that shot go through his legs either. He would have stopped it and then verbally taken Beretti to task for having a shot at his ghoulies. He probably would have shoved him in the head too, and glared at the referee just for good measure.

No, it was a miserable, five times worse night for Gunners supporters. If only Arsene and Henry got goals for complaining at the end. We'd have won easily.

Congratulations to that little Catalan side. I hope we replay this one next year.

Five Times Better -- Phase One

People seem very dissatisfied with motion pictures from Hollywood these days. When they go and see a film, they tend to nitpick and groan about certain scenes. For example, they might say, "Why did there have to be giant head-eating slugs in King Kong? And why did they have to eat that one-eyed guy with their giant creepy flesh-mouths?" And so instead of 100% enjoying every single motion picture they ever see from first scene to last, they find things not to like, they whine, they disagree with certain cinematographic choices, they leave not-completely-satisfied. They hide from crummy scenes and poor acting behind a seventy three gallon barrel of oil-soaked popcorn. Well, tea and biscuits, people, that's no way to achieve the high status of Five Times Better! Keep on your current track, and you'll be lucky to approach One Time Better, you bunch of rubes!

A Five Times Better person has a five times better experience at the motion pictures than the average person, so every single movie becomes a glorious cornucopia of perfect experiences.
How do we achieve this, especially in light of remakes of The Poseidon Adventure, where the Shelly Winters character is played by Kurt Russell, or endless computer animated movies about zoo animals wanting to be free (Madagascar, Over the Hedge, Milton Tastes like Meat, Donkey Jones On A Rampage, Oliver Cromwell and Orson Welles the Escaping Pygmy Hippos) or movies based on video games (Doom, Silent Hill, Pac-Man Burns People, Frogger and the Amazing Gun Rampage).

You achieve it by a form of mental projection, where you impose your own dialogue and visions upon the movie screen, thereby filling in the gaps to make every movie the sacredest best movie in the history of time. So you can sit there in your One Time Betterness and pick apart the flaws and bad dialogue, dribbling Junior Mint juice from swollen hate-lips while whispering Roger Ebert-style grotesqueries. Meanwhile, the Five Times Better person will be floating in a golden sea of cereal-flavored joy.

This is Phase One, people. If you can't perfectly enjoy every scene of every movie ever made, emotionally rolling about in salty excitement as if inside a giant vat of warm lima beans, then you are never going to multiply your betterness beyond one. When other people see and hear angry Kurt Russell, with sweat beading on his concrete-ish forehead, drawl, "That giant wave is not going to destroy us here today! We're getting off this upside down boat if it's the last thing we ever do! Giant rogue ocean wave, I'm coming for you, and you're gonna die!" the Five Times Better person sees instead a young Orson Welles riding the waves on Rosebud. When a One Time Better person sees The Rock wielding a gigantic gun and shooting fourteen eyed latex-face aliens while his pants are slowly falling off, a Five Times Better person sees instead free ten dollar bills floating out of the screen and into his pocket.

Don't you get it? This is Phase One of the Five Times Better program! And the only way to begin the process is to go and see so-called, quote-unquote, "terrible movies" and to make them, to force them, to reimagine them into the bestest, most perfectest motion pictures in the whole entire history of human civilization. If you can't do this, you might as well just go home and crawl under the bed and encase yourself in cobwebs and transform into a butterfly and then break out of the cobweb cocoon and fly away to a perfecter galaxy where the flowers give off a pale light and the grass is made out of candy.

There, I said it. I know I stepped on toes, but it had to be done, for your sake, for humanity, for Betterness, for the world.

I've been Five Times Remiss

In not welcoming our newest blogger, poster, member (oh, that doesn't sound right), writer (that's a little better), and cashcow Nuffy Noe. Is Nuffy any relation to Puffy? One must wonder, mustn't (pronounced mooosssnnnd) one. Anyway, I have been reading his posts concerning being Five Times Better and really think he's on to something there. Why shouldn't we want to be Five Times Better? Oh sure, many of us strive to be Four Times better, but isn't Five (5) more than Four (4), and indeed Six (6) would be a little bit pretentious don't you think.

I bring all of this up, not only because I need something to write about, but also because my family and I are making our, now almost annual, pilgrimage to Disney World. I hereby pledge to you our reader that when I make it to Orlando (or is it Kissimmeeeeee, or Lake Buena Vista), I will strive to be Five Times Better and enjoy myself Five Times More. In a perfect world, where all of us are Five Times Better, we would all live in peace and harmony. That is exactly why I am sending the following letter to the Walt Disney Corporation explaining to them the ways in which they can make themselves Five Times Better:

Walt Disney Corporation
Attn: Robert Iger - or minion
100 Mickey Mouse Avenue
Havana, Cuba 11111

Dear Robert,

Thank you for taking the time to read my letter or for sending it to the department that can best implement my ideas. A friend of mine, Mr. Nuffy Noe (Ret.), has brought to my attention a new program which promises its devotees the chance of becoming Five Times Better. I don't know about you, Mr. Robert Iger, but I think we all could stand to be Five Times Better.

It is in this vein that I give you some suggestions that I hope you will review, which I believe will make your Disney properties Five Times Better. Just think, Five Times Better might mean Five Times the income and you being a business man will appreciate that. Remember these are only suggestions, you might have some of your "Imagineers" go to work to improve them.

  1. Five Times more monorail trains so people don't have to wait 2 hours between rides.
  2. 505 Dalmations
  3. Five Times more deodorant for Captain Jack Sparrow attraction.
  4. Five Times larger steins at the Beirgarten in Germany at Epcot.
  5. 35 Dwarfs (I'm sure Verne Troyer and Warwick Davis need work)
  6. Five Times the fun (not a suggestion, this is what you'll get!!!!!!!!!!)
  7. Five Times faster drops on Tower of Terror (you might want to install a grate system to sluice off the vomit though)
  8. Five Times the Mickey's (not in the drinks though)
  9. Five Times fewer sweatshop workers making overpriced Disney apparel

I hope these helpful suggestions are taken to heart because I think they will add to the already wonderful ambiance of your various Worlds.

Sincerely yours,

Stew Miller

I really hope they take my suggestions for making Disney World, Five Times Better. I'm sure I would enjoy it at least five times more...especially the Biergarten.

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

OK, Nuffy, but...

You still haven't explained when Stew and I see a cut of this advert money, or the explanation money. I just don't want to hear any crap about you getting "five times better" payment. When I sent the invite to you yesterday for the blog, it was all, "Nobody loves Nuffy," "Nuffy is sad," and "I'm tired of the stinking news media." (Wait, that last one was either Tom Cruise or Donald Rumsfeld.) Now, it's, "I'm raking in the dough and proclaiming my superiority complex X 5!!!!!"

Oen of the reasons we invited you was to help you with the whole "depression" thing, but I think we've created a monster. As long as you're bringing in the loot though...

I wonder where Stew is? You'd think he might see some potential income for "the driver that hits 300 yards."

Explanations that are Five Times Better

The following is a paid commercial explanation of a paid commercial advertisement:

All across the fruited plain, confusion has ensued at my use of the phrase "paid commercial advertisement." The public is clamoring for an explanation. Other people are sort of wandering around with ideas popping off like rockets from the brain part of their heads, as they plunge into the deduction pond. Who paid me, they wonder? Why does a Dictionary, of all things, need to pay advertisers when everything is so much better in the state of being wherein it is without paid commercial advertisements?

Look, you're all thinking without the benefit of being Five Times Better! So just take a deep breath, take another deep breath and then take another one, sit down in the softest chair in the history of time, button up your suit, loosen your tie, and enter a trance-like state as I explain. In the mindset of a person who is Five Times Better, the concept of being paid cash money to tell people about becoming not one, not merely two, certainly not only three, and not just four, but five, count 'em, Five Times Better is an alien and a Martian concept beyond bearing. I don't operate in the realm of getting money from people to tell other people about some kind of stuff so they will in turn put money back unto me for telling them about it. I don't need any such garbage, see, because I am Five Times Better. Think for a moment about how much better you are. Picture it in your head. Envision it as if it were a painting by Rembrandt hovering just beyond reach, a painting called "How Much Better You Are." Now multiply that Betterness by a factor of Five. Yes, that's how much better I am.

Anyway, so my use of the phrase "paid commercial advertisement" was actually a borrowed line of dialogue from the movie "Angry Answers for Str8 Trippin" starring Verne Troyer as Maxi-You the Gangstuh, who, in the pivotal scene where Kash Munny (played by Tyrone Power) and B'n Jah'mins (played by Ben Kingsley) go into City Hall and demand justice for the spilled brain materials of young Eyegot Shotte (played by Tim Curry) who in a previous scene is gunned down by government agents using a prototype weapon called the Armageddon Agenda, which fires a magnetized tube of radioactive glass that explodes upon impact, turning the target of the weapon into a melting fiend monster with glowing poisonous skin. Okay, wait, that sentence is too long. I got lost. Anyway, Verne Troyer, during the knife fight with Kash Munny, takes a bullet in the thigh and cries out, "That's a paid commercial advertisement," and stabs the villainous Tyrone Power in the very soul of his body.

So that's what I meant by "paid commercial advertisement." I hope that clears everything up. So please quit sending me harassing Hallmark cards. That is all. You may return to your attempt at becoming Five Times Better.

The preceeding was a paid commercial explanation of a paid commercial advertisement.

Paid???

I don't know about Stew, but I haven't seen so much as a quatloo from that advert Nuffy referred to.

Still, you have to appreciate the new talent bringing in the quid, even if it's unaccounted for.

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

This is a Paid Commercial Advertisement

The following is a paid commercial advertisement:


T
he dream of a thousand generations of humanity have arrived, and, yes, your hope is within reach! Now, at last, you, too, can be five times better! For centuries upon decades, people of every stripe and creed have had one united desire: to become five times better! But nobody has been able to achieve this goal. Shree Ghupta Ghee managed to become two and a half times better in the middle of the seventeenth century, yes, and some say that Ron Popeil is approaching three times better. But all of these accomplishments fall way below the mark, leaving us all soaking in the bath of disappointment.

Now, at last, like the thunder that proceeds from the eastern sky unto the western sky, the possibility of becoming Five Times Better is here! Nuffy Noe, after many dozens of man hours of study and research, has stumbled upon the secret of becoming NOT one time better or two times better, not even three times better, and NO not merely four times better but FIVE, count 'em, FIVE TIMES BETTER!

Some of you might read this and naturally conclude, "Oh, he's in this for the money," and that's just a disgusting lie from the pits of Sin. Don't make me sit here and hate you for lying about me! I am NOT in this for the money. A person that has become Five Times Better does not need money from the likes of you people. I have Five Times the resources of other people for the obtaining of items which I need. Thus, the use of money is highly optional for me.

I just feel a deep-sinking need to share with you the secrets of becoming Five Times Better. I promise it doesn't involve Thetans or mysterious floating objects. It just involves a rigorous pursuit of particular news items and celebrity gossip and unkind satire. Are you ready to sign up for the Dream of All Mankind? Are you ready to put your Reginald Hancock on the dotted line of the Contract to Become Five Times Better? I know I sure am, and I already did, because here I am being Five Times Better than you even as we speak.

Let go of all the sort of mysterious unpleasantness that is hovering 'round about the head parts of you and get in the Boat, the secrety boat in the River of Possibility which is on its way to the land of Five Times Better!

The Preceeding was a Paid Commercial Advertisement for Five Times Better.

Come on You Gunners!

And yes, for those of you wondering, I am incredibly psyched for Arsenal's match tomorrow against Barcelona in the Champions' League Final.

I'm also incredibly nervous as I have to work through the thing and am praying that no one will tell me the result prior to my watching the tape (which had better work or the VCR is going to get torched).

Henry, Ronaldinho, Fabregas, Messi, Bergkamp's swan song, Eto'o, Toure, Eboue, Campbell, and Cole at the back...It should be a cracking match.

Nuffy Noe to join DOUI

Don't know who Nuffy Noe is? Well, join the club.

Not that I'm in the club. No, I know exactly who Nuffy Noe is and I'd tell you too, if he didn't have a bazooka pointed right at my bean.

(Note to all aspiring humour writers: "Bazooka" is a natually funny word.)

Nuffy Noe is a writer of outstandingly peculiar talent, which means he'll fit right in here. He is a state of mind, a cosmic wanderer with a penchant for distilling the unusual and occasionally unpleasant truths of life into a steady stream of bracing, if fictional prose.

Nuffy Noe is not, nor has he ever been a member of the John Birch Society, a Communist, or a hermaphrodite.

Nuffy Noe is the only DOUI member who has a appreciable amount of alliteration between his two names.

Nuffy Noe is not a tree, nor is he a small, furry chinchilla with an appetite for cannoli.

Nuffy Noe is ambidexterous, but we're not sure whether this refers to his feet, hands, or some other part of his body.

Nuffy Noe is non-toxic, or so he claims.

Please welcome Nuffy Noe to DOUI, in the hopes that he will blog significantly more than Zimpter Fiforg, who was last seen at a Starbucks in Burbank panhandling for film treatments.

Welcome Nuffy! We look forward to your posts.

Sunday, May 14, 2006

DaVinci Code Madness

Stew...Sorry it's taken me so long to chime in, but I was having to fight my way through a throng of Dan Brown's admirers outside a local cinema on my way home from MI:III. These subservient agents are members of a cabal known as "Opie Dan", who as it just so happens are planning to take over the world and impose their very own brand of religion on us, one that apparently involves a lot of heresy and graphic R-rated sex and violence. Of course, producers can't wait to adapt the story to film and plan to cast Cameron Diaz as "Naked Woman #3."

As I understand it, the dark, secretive, and historically documented (by someone who claims to have been every bit as dilligent and accurate as Mr. Brown) story of this mysterious sect goes all the way back to 38 AD when a branch of Judas' family, quite upset at the fallen apostle's black sheep reputation, decided to start spreading rumours that Christ was married to Mary Magdalene, Paul was a secret agent of the Carthaginians, Peter wore Roman-made sandals, and Matthew liked to eat his soup with dessert spoon.

The organization Opie Dan was formed, "Opie Dan" being Aramaic for "make up a lot of nonsense and get stinking rich," and they swore that they would do just that, even if it took nearly 2000 years and the worst mullet Tom Hanks has ever sported.

This organization managed to genetically engineer an author who would cement their story in popular crackpot-conspiracy theory-literature, and the original of the man who we now know as Dan Brown was in fact created in 1503 and went by the name Nostradamus. He wrote several best-sellers, including the famous Vague Predictions About Men with Tiny Mustaches. Many people say that book is about Hitler, but it's hard to reconcile that conclusion with the passages describing his funny walking cane and penchant for eating boiled shoestrings like spaghetti. There is also as strange prediction about a man known as "Gump" with an unusual hairstyle.

Nostradamus, or "The Dan" as he was known to this cult, was cloned again in 1736, where he took the name Betty and had a really difficult time getting people to buy into his tall tales, because it was the Enlightenment, and most people didn't go in for that kind of B.S. Anyway, Betty had an affair with Thomas Jefferson, and then died in penury, which is a suburb of Luton. Strangely, Betty had a pet mullusk named "Tom Hanks." (Mullusk...mullet... more than just a coincidence!)

Finally, sometime at the beginning of this century, the latest Dan Brown was cloned and given the insidious moniker of "Dan Brown." Not only was he charged with writing the entertaining load of tripe known as The DaVinci Code and ensuring Tom Hanks hairstylist had a steady supply of mescaline, but he was also mysteriously present at a number of key twentieth century events. Strangely enough, he was occasionally mistaken for Joe Garagiola. Below is photographic evidence of Mr. Brown's mysterious ability to turn up where tragedy, scandal, and a chance for large book sales occurs:

**********

Dan turns up in New Jersey when the Hindenburg goes up in flames.



Dan was also present when Lee Harvey Oswald was shot.



Dan was even photographed aboard the Titanic, just hours before its tragic demise.



Finally, and most damning of all, Dan turns up on the deck of the ill-fated S.S. Poseidon, the morning before she turned over.



Clearly, this man and his diabolical organization must be stopped (especially if Kurt Russell is to survive the remake of Poseidon)! Obviously, his plans to spread unsubstantiated rumours about Jesus and New Testament authors (and their footwear) is bearing its devious fruit, even as I write this. What's next? The Apostle John wore Birkenstocks?