TNC Podcast: Episode Dos

On slate this week:

• Quick Oscar talk and my disapproval of denigrating celebrity attire…
• Michael Clarke Duncan and Neal McDonough’s inexplicable basketball “spat”…
• My terrible weekend on the court trying to get back in decent shape…
• Obligatory Tyler Perry hate-fest…
• The Octuplet mom is still in the news… why again…?

Also, as mentioned in the podcast, here’s the link for Ice Cube’s “Today Was a Good Day” video where he claims he got a triple double. Check out the shot at the 1:28 mark. Stories persist that Cube can actually ball, but I have trouble believing that. 

And what the hell, while we’re here, was that really how the gangstas played ball in L.A. back in the 90’s? Is that still how it is?  Was that a low-rider right there on the court? Was it legal to use a ‘64 Chevy as a screen? Was it necessary to hoop in the same gear you’re going to wear to somebody’s cookout later in the day to maintain OG status? Would it have killed you to throw on some Nike shorts and some Air Forces?

Confessions of a Fear Junkie: “The Golden Arm”

“Who’s got my Golden Arm?!”

This is, to my recollection, my earliest encounter with a ghost story, antedating my ongoing, abusive, unhealthy love affair with horror (for those keeping score, I’m the henpecked, downtrodden party in this particular relationship). It’s not the clearest memory, I was only five-years-old, but it’s less opaque than other memories from that age.

“Who’s got my Golden Arm?!”

My kindergarten teacher’s name was Mrs. Nina and one day she decided to introduce the class to a classic, chimeric spirit. If I am to relay this accurately, I must confess to not remembering much of the story, but here’s the briefest of synopses:

A man has a friend who has a prosthetic arm made of solid gold. Friend dies and the man decides to disinter his friend, remove the 24-karat limb from the corpse and sell it for money. The friend takes offense, crawls out of his grave, hunts down his buddy and then…

Well, you could Google “Golden Arm” and find a number of variations to this slice of folklore. Some give you a formal, Victorian rendition; others give you the chitlin’ circuit interpretation. Its central characters are alternatively friends, brothers, or man and wife.

In most portrayals the returned friend/brother/wife stalks through the thief’s house, crying out repeatedly, “Who’s Got my Golden Arm?!” until finally they happen upon the terrified thief, cowering in his bedroom, and then the ghost screams “You’ve Got it!!!” That’s where the story abruptly ends, but it’s intimated that some grievous demise awaits the one who stole the arm. I’m sure that the ghost didn’t just say “You’ve got it! And I just want you to know that it’s not cool man. Stealing my golden arm: not, cool! I’m gonna go re-bury myself, but I just want to let you know that I am seriously, seriously reconsidering our relationship right now, bro.”

It wasn’t the vengeful spirit’s return from death that disturbed me most. It’s that he had a golden arm in the first place. You’re meant to sympathize with the dead person’s plight, but the surrealistic, abominable image of this character stands frozen in my mind, unchanged in the 20+ years since I first heard the description. Actually there’s not much description in the story, but I managed to chart the unexplored areas and mapped out a loathsome figure. One with jaundiced, spoiled eyes and skin the color of the ocean at night.

This was a bad person, the man with the golden arm. A burgeoning lunatic with a combustible temperament, hoping that someone will steal his precious arm just so he’ll have a reason to terrorize them. Today I can apply some semblance of logic to the conclusion I’d drawn as a kid; a golden arm would be terribly heavy and cumbersome, and only a troubled mind would dream of grafting such a gaudy, useless artificiality to their body. In short, you’d have to be crazy to want a golden arm, and not the good, comedic kind of crazy, or the tolerable, fearless-when-it’s-not-necessary kind of crazy, but the seething, malignant kind.

That special brand of crazy potent enough to wake the dead.

And… now we’re podcasting…

Why? Because, as I state in the audio, I like to talk dammit. Btw, in case you didn’t already know, I use profanity. Liberally…

So what am I talking about in there? The Chris Brown business (update: he finally a released a statement… I still say fuck him), which is under my skin just a bit. NBA All-Star weekend in all its sadness. The dismaying Friday the 13th numbers (42 mill? My Lord…), and the even more dismaying fact that the Madea character spawned by Tyler Perry is still alive and featuring in films. Then wrapped up with a quick opinion on the trailer for the new Tarantino flick, Inglorious Basterds.

Jordan’s 63 – Greatest Offensive Performance in NBA History?

This past Thursday marked the 2-year anniversary of Kobe Bryant scorching the Toronto Raptors for 81 points. This, combined with a recent conversation amongst acquaintances about Kobe vs. Lebron (and by default either of them vs. Jordan) on the greatness scale inevitably led me down the path of looking up classic Jordan highlights.

And along this familiar road I noticed something: Insufficient praise for Jordan’s 63-point game against The Celtics in ‘86–still an NBA playoff record. If you type in “Kobe 81″ in a Google search you get all of the videos you’d expect plus articles about the performance, but that’s understandable given that it’s more recent.  You type in “Wilt 100″ and it becomes immediately evident that it is an established piece of NBA Lore, with many articles and remembrances of the accomplishment.

But, while there are video highlights of Jordan’s 63, there isn’t much to find in written praise and analysis.

And honestly, I’m definitely not the best guy for this assignment.  I was six-years-old at the time and only really remember rooting for Michael because I hated the C’s, because I was already a Laker fan–like my father before me.  This is an argument that deserves to be made by a basketball scholar, preferably one who was there in Boston Garden to see it in person.  But since I can’t find any such argument made for it beyond a two-page Google search (why does Google even list anything beyond page 2?  If you’re not on at least page 2 nobody’s finding your link, sorry…) I’m going to make the case.

Michael Jordan’s 63-point game against the Celtics is arguably the single best offensive performance in NBA History.

Obviously there are many arguments that can be made against this, and it would be foolish of me to ignore those valid points.  For instance…

It isn’t the highest single-game point total in NBA history.

In fact, it’s not even top 10 (instead it’s tied for fifteenth highest, with seven other dudes who also got to 63). In fact it’s not even Jordan’s highest single-game point total.  He once scored 69 against the Cavs and 64 against the Magic.

It’s not easy to make a case for this being the greatest performance when it’s 31 points shy of the NBA record, 18 points short of second place, and 15 points behind the bronze medalist.

And yet…

Stats aren’t everything.  Mind you, I’m hardly one of these stubborn traditionalists who rails against new-millenium stats such Player Efficiency Rating; I just think statistics are a factor in determining greatness, not the ultimate answer.

If stats were the end-all be-all, we wouldn’t need people to vote for Hall of Fame inductees or MVP awards. Just plug a guy’s numbers into a computer and let it figure it out for you.

David Klingler once threw for 732 yards and 11 touchdown passes against hapless Eastern Washington University.  Is that really the greatest performance by a collegiate quarterback? 15 different Major Leaguers have hit 4-homeruns in a single game.  Are any of those performances greater than Reggie Jackson’s 3-homerun game in the World Series?

Again, stats are a factor, but not the factor.  You have to look at the overall picture before making a final determination.

“Okay,” you say.  “Let’s look at the overall picture, like the fact that…

Jordan lost that game to the Celtics.”

The final score, Boston 135, Bulls 131. Despite Jordan’s incredible efforts Boston was simply too much for him. If he had gotten his teammates more involved could the Bulls have won? We can speculate on that all day but never really be certain, but losing the game does diminish the accomplishment. You simply can’t bring up this performance without mentioning that he lost. Kobe won when he hit 81, Wilt won when he hit 100, but Jordan couldn’t get the W.

And yet…

His effort was all about trying to win. In many of those single-game efforts where someone put up more points than Mike’s 63, winning wasn’t the primary objective. David Thompson hit 72 points once, on the last game of the season and solely for the purpose of winning the league scoring title that year (he lost to George Gervin, who hit 63 the same day also for the purpose of winning the scoring title).  David Robinson hit 71 in a season finale to take the scoring title away from Shaq. While no footage of the game exists, all eyewitness accounts of Wilt’s game seem to point to the fact that the Warriors made a deliberate effort to get Wilt to 100 (while the opposing Knicks make a concentrated effort to keep him from the milestone, even to the detriment of actually winning the game).

Jordan was doing what he had to do to win.  He was leading a woefully over-matched, 8th seeded Bulls team that had the worst Defensive Rating in the NBA that season against perhaps the greatest NBA team ever in the 1985-1986 Celtics.  In the playoffs.  In Boston Garden, where the C’s had an NBA all-time best record of 40-1 that season. The only reason the Bulls were even competitive in the first two games was because Mike exploded for 49 in Game 1 and then went Chernobyl on that ass in Game 2 where he dropped the 63.

Yeah, but he… wait a minute, he had 49-points in Game 1? Why didn’t Boston do more to stop him in Game 2?

They tried. After Game 1, Kevin McHale came out and said that they would not allow something like that to happen to them again. These were the Celtics, dammit–the best defensive (and overall) team in the NBA that season, possibly the greatest team ever–playing on the hallowed parquet floor of the Garden, and they had just allowed a 2nd year guy who had missed almost 80% of the season due to a broken bone in his  foot to come on to their home court and damn near put up 50.  No way this would happen again.

They went back to the drawing board defensively, knowing that the only hope the Bulls had of stealing a win was if Jordan went nuclear.  So they game-planned to prevent exactly that, and he did it any-damn-way.

Not to a pathetic Raptors team that was  scraping the floor of the NBA in Team Defense and Human Dignity in 2006 (sorry Kobe), and not during a time when there were zero defenders physically capable of stopping him from exerting his will (sorry Wilt).  No, Jordan did this to a Boston team that had 4 Hall of Famers on the floor, a  fifth guy in Dennis Johnson who many people think should be in the Hall, and a very strong set of role players like Ainge, M.L. Carr, Cedric Maxwell and Quinn Buckner.

Yes, it matters. It really does…

Okay, maybe you have a point here, but still Jordan needed double-overtime to get to that 63.

Truth. Other guys managed to get higher totals in only 48 minutes, including the man whose playoff-record he broke:Elgin Baylor.

Not only that, but Jordan missed a pretty open look for a go-ahead bucket during the final seconds of the first overtime.  If he hits that jumper and the Bulls win, he only ties Baylor’s 61.

And yet…

Again, you have to look at the overall picture.  Yes this game went to double OT and Jordan missed the potential game-winner in the first overtime.  But he also sank some crucial free-throws to take the game to overtime in the first place.  Free throws on a three-pointer where McHale fouled him at the end of regulation.  It was just Jordan–a second year player–on the line by himself facing nothing but the basket and the rowdy Boston faithful.  Even in the second overtime, with Boston seizing momentum to take a quick four-point lead, Jordan came down and hit two crucial buckets to tie the game up and keep the fans tense until the welcome sound of the buzzer came at last, with Boston clinging to a narrow victory.  For the rest of the playoffs, Boston lost just three games and didn”t let another team come within single digits on its home court.

So what’s the verdict?

I think you can figure out where I stand on this by now.  Michael Jordan, in an injury-shortened second-year of his career, went toe-to-toe with the mighty C’s on their own turf and gave us a glimpse of what was to come.  He got this 63 in classic fashion (this was before he developed a solid three-point shot and he didn’t hit one the entire game), without a hell of a lot of help from teammates (the second-best player on that Bulls team: Orlando Woolridge.  Orlando Woolridge* for God’s sake), going against virtually impossible odds.

Maybe the raw stats don’t agree with me, but again I think the other factors have to count for something.  What’s more impressive, a man who runs a mile in perfect weather, or a man who runs half a mile through a raging storm?  Michael didn’t have the benefit of being a physical phenomenon like Wilt was at the time, he didn’t have the benefit of playing against the NBA’s equivalent of Glass Joe like Kobe when he roasted the Raptors, and he didn’t have the freedom of not being concerned with winning the damn game like David Thompson or David Robinson when they hit their highs.

I can’t really say for certain that this is the greatest offensive performance in NBA history, but it damn sure deserves more discussion in that regard than it currently gets.

*It really isn’t fair for me to do the brother Woolridge like that, he was actually one     of my favorite Lakers when he played for them.  Still, if Orlando was your second best player, you weren’t winning a title–especially not in the Great 80’s.  As a consolation to him, though, I give you this Orlando Woolridge Dunk from the ‘84 Dunk Contest to show that J.R. Rider actually wasn’t the first to give us the between-the-legs dunk…

Monday Movie Whatnot: Twilight, Why Fanboys are Lame-tacular, and IMDB Quotes…

Welcome back to Monday Movie Whatnot here at The New Cool.  I’m your host, J.C., and I’ll be taking you through a brief tour of some movie stuff that I personally deem important enough to write about.  Starting with…

Twilight takes a massive “bite” out of the box-office…

Wow, I even put the quotes around my terrible pun – it’s like I’m a professional entertainment beat writer! 

But back to the lecture at hand, Twilight, the movie about the weird, allegedly handsome looking vampire dude and his enthralled teenage love interest, based on the mega-selling novel(s) by Stephanie Meyer, pulled in $70 mill over the weekend. 

To quote Krusty the Clown, “Holy shamola!  What’re you gonna do with all that kablingy?”

Why, green-light the sequel, of course. 

Which could lead to some interesting developments down the road.  I’ve never read the books in the series because I’m not a teenage girl and I prefer fictional vampires that are less broody / pure-souled and more murderous / psychopathic, but from my diligent, impeccable research I’ve gleaned that by book four there’s copious blood-vomiting, violent, furniture-breaking vampire sex (I’m sure the book calls it “lovemaking” or “intertwining of kindred souls” or some other crap, but dammit, if furniture’s being destroyed and bodies are being bruised then that’s fucking), and literal back-breaking labor.  That certainly seems to have all the necessary ingredients for an awesome vampire movie.  Hell, I didn’t even know some of these were ingredients – much less necessary ones – until just now finding out about them.

How was I ever before entertained by a vampire film that didn’t have fountain-of-blood vomiting and borderline bodice-ripper style sex? 

Makes you wonder how they’re going to make that work on-screen while still keeping the flicks PG-13 though.

Anyway, enough about Twilight.  No really, movie-fanboys everywhere…

Enough About Twilight…

…and Sex and the City, and High School Musical 3, and other movies that you have not seen and have no intention of seeing and are obviously not aimed at you.  This might come as a surprise to you, but there’s an entire world full of people who don’t fit your specific demographic.  I know that many of you have so little interaction with women that you may believe they are a myth (oh snap!) and therefore have zero chance of fathering children (daaaaaaaaaaaannnnnggg! *starts doing the wop*) so you think they too do not exist, but I assure you, you are mistaken.

It’s one thing to casually throw jabs at movies outside of your viewing preference, or to be upset about a shitty film series sullying the reputation of a genre you actually give a damn about, but you can go to post-forums and see cats ranting about High School Musical taking the top spot at the box office like Disney killed their father and should prepare to die.  Motherfucker, it’s not intended for you.  You might as well be in Toys R Us standing in the Barbie section talking about “These are the lamest action figures I’ve ever seen!  They don’t even come with guns, or tanks, or a scale model dancefloor that I can use to reenact prom night as it should have… er… I mean… um… a scale model… planet… monster… bot…”

These are the same types of dweebs who might get lucky enough to get a girl to come home with them only to be befuddled as to why she’s so apprehensive about seeing a poster of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre hanging above the sofa with mysterious stains all over the seat.  At least flip the cushions, gotdammit!

If you look up these kinds of movies (or 90% of the movies with a majority black cast… yeah, I said it) on IMDB you’ll see the rating grossly deflated because internet dweebs who shouldn’t care went out of their way to vote it down because they can’t stand the idea that there might be people out there who liked Twilight enough to rate the movie above a 6 out of 10. 

I wish there was some way to build a program that caused an android hand to reach out of your monitor and smack you for being stupid on the internet.  (Of course, somebody would find other, nefarious uses for such a program I’m sure… Rule 34 and all.  But I digress…)

Speaking of IMDB…

Something Has to Be Done About the Quotes…

…and several other things on the site as well, but baby steps, right?

Here’s an actual quote from the movie Closer as it appears on the Memorable Quotes section on IMDB…

Dan: You think love is simple. You think the heart is like a diagram.
Larry: Have you ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist, wrapped in blood! Go fuck yourself! You writer! You liar!

Nothing wrong there.  That’s the actual exchange.  But then, right underneath that you have this…

Larry: A heart is a fist covered in blood!

Whoever typed this, wherever you are out there in internet-land: Fuck.  Your.  Life. 

This is just one example, but IMDB is full of this.  There might be two or three versions of the same quote on the same page.  They might as well make a game out of it: “Which Quote Isn’t Complete Bullshit Misremembered By Some Stupid Fan?” 

On top of this you get “From the trailer” quotes for shit that hasn’t even come out yet (does the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still really have “memorable” quotes already?  Really? ) and quotes that aren’t all that memorable after all (I love the movie Swingers, and it’s absolutely loaded with quotables: “Eat, eat, you fucking jackals!” though?  Not one of ‘em.  Not something anybody needs to be walking around quoting.  Even if you’re a zookeeper and it’s your job to feed the jackals daily, you still shouldn’t be saying that line.  If you ever did say that line to a bunch of jackals, I would hope that they’d surround you and do you in like Scar in The Lion King.  No, that’s not harsh, it’s what you deserve.)

Finally…

Just something I noticed the other day… the Hancock Unrated DVD cover (and matching poster plastered all over rental stores across America)…

I mean… the movie has one twist, you know?  It seems like you’d want to guard that plot point from people who haven’t seen the film yet, not smack them in the face with it like some awesome robot-monitor-arm that I’m about to invent…

Al Qaida No. 2 Man Calls Obama Racial Epithet… oh, and he’s also known to murder people…

See, stuff like this is why I sometimes have a problem with the media .  Is the racial epithet really the headline material here?  Shouldn’t it be more like Terrorist Psycho Unmoved By Election Results: Says, “I Thought I Told You That We Won’t Stop.” 

It’d be different if al-Zawahiri called him something harsher and followed it up with, “You know, I’ve never liked black people.  I just might put out a hit on the entire race.”  That’s some shit I need to see in the headline (in no small part because certain elements in America might hear that news and say, “Well gol-damn, dem ol’ terrorist boys may not be so bad after all.”)  Highlighting al-Zawahiri’s use of the term “house negro” is like running a headline saying Satan Calls Jewish People Greedy in an article where he also reveals himself as the cause of all human misery.  Sure the terminology’s offensive, but it’s Satan.  Is this a surprise?  Isn’t the continuing hostility of a known madman the real news here?

The headline makes it sound like al-Zawahiri is a corporate exec who let an n-bomb slip around the wrong people.  Like he’s going to hold a press conference later talking about, “I deeply regret my choice of words.  It was obviously inappropriate.  Clearly I was mistaken in thinking that prefacing the word with ’What’s up my’ would make it acceptable, and I apologize to anyone who I offended.  I’m not a racist.  I’ve slept with many, many black women.  I would marry Beyonce in an instant.  Rhianna too.  And Terrence Howard.  Oh wait…”

The basic gist of the article is, “al-Zawahiri calls Obama a house negro.  And it looks like he still wants to kill everybody, too.”  Maybe I’m nuts, but the latter seems more critical than the former.  I just can’t imagine that Obama heard al-Zawahiri’s recording and responded like, “What did that motherfucker just say?”

“He insinuated an escalation in violence if we increase the number of troops in Afghani–”

“No, no, no, before that.  The shit about me being a house negro.  Do my ears deceive or is he basically calling me a sell out?  Is he calling me an Uncle Tom?  Is Barack Obama gonna have to choke a bitch?”

“Uh… no sir, I doubt you’re gonna have to.  You can certainly choose to, though.  You are going to be President after all…”

“Right, right.  Thanks for the clarification, that’s why I keep you around Steve.  So, I guess this all boils down to America’s relationship with Al-Qaida remaining unchanged?”

“That’s pretty much it, sir.”

“Thought so.”

Movie Whatnot: Star Trek trailer, Bad Remake Ideas, and… you know… whatnot…

That’s an absolutely terrible title, first of all.  “Movie Whatnot?”  That’s the best I’ve got?  Jeez…

Anyhow, I’m going to seize Mondays as my opportunity to go over random, movie-related thoughts bouncing around in my skull.  None of this is exactly “hot off the presses,” but it’s on my brain like Wu-Tang, so here’s the run down…

Star Trek Trailer: Holy Shit!  (Or… Maybe Not…)

If you haven’t seen it yet, here it is.  The big bad Star Trek trailer that was attached to Quantum of Solace.  This is not a sequel, this is an official re-boot with all new actors, all new adventures, and all new nerdiness. 

My first thought seeing this was “Wow, that actually looks kind of cool.”  I’ve never really liked Star Trek.  It always seemed like a series for dweebs.  I mean, liking Star Wars is pretty nerdy, granted, but it has swordfights and telekinesis and space ninjas and shit.  That made it cool to like when you were a kid, and then as you grew up, if you still liked, it was more about you hanging on to a shred of your youthful innocence as opposed to being a dork. 

Conversely, I don’t remember a single cool kid from elementary school liking Star Trek.  Everybody loved Star Wars, but if you liked Star Trek you weren’t getting asked out for the Sadie Hawkins dance.  Don’t even bother showing up.  Girls didn’t dance with Trekkies. 

But this trailer, on first sight, looks sort of fresh.  People are engaging in hand-to-hand combat, girls are taking their shirts off, there a space-battles and explosions… wait… actually, that’s not all that fresh.  Damn it… after re-watching it just once more I realized that I was already off-board.  Just like that.  Not even Zoe Saldana looking scrum-diddly-umptious as Uhura can pull me in.  I can’t even really put my finger on it, but something about Star Trek, no matter the incarnation, just strikes me as somewhat bland.  The Enterprise is shaped awkward, the set looks too white, the uniforms look like onesies… Star Trek is like cheesy bread at the buffet line of a pizza place.  If that’s ALL you’ve got then I suppose I’ll go for it, but if there’s a pepperoni or sausage joint anywhere in sight then why would I bother with this?

Plus, James Kirk has to have the most dweeb-tacular middle name any iconic hero has ever had.  Tiberius?  I know, it’s the name of a Roman emperor, it’s supposed to convey an air of some sort of authority.  It doesn’t work.  Ironically, it sounds like the name a Trekkie would give a an alien scientist supervillain in some lousy fanfic if not for the fact that it was already taken by their hero.

Tiberius.  It sounds nerdier than Spock.  Think about that…   

Will Smith and Spielberg Considering Remake of Oldboy…

…all while my heart gently weeps.

Look, I like Will and Steven.  They’re both great at what they do.  But nothing in their exhibited repertoire gives any indication that they are the right fit for this material.  In case you missed the picture in the above linked article, this is what the main character in Oldboy looks like…

And this is what Will Smith looks like…

Please note that any picture of Will Smith not smiling is photoshopped.  Any scene from any film where he wasn’t happy and charming and looking like someone you’d love to invite to your Super Bowl party was done with extensive CGI.

Will is talented and cool, but he aint’ edgy.  Oldboy, on the other hand, is beyond edgy.  It’s kicking you in the face with knife-boots and then skating off into the night, laughing maniacally.  Will has range, but can he do quiet, simmering madman?  Can he convincingly beat down a freaking platoon of thugs with a Home Depot claw-hammer? 

Likewise, Señor Spielbergo has never directed anything close to this before.  There’s nothing cuddly or heartfelt or relatable about this movie.  If there’s a one-word description for Oldboy it’s not “dark,” ”cruel,” “violent” or “nihilistic.”  Any of that can be manufactured.  Oldboy is simply relentless.  It spares you nothing because it doesn’t know how.  It doesn’t “cross the line”–it doesn’t even know what the hell a line is. 

It exists in a world where lines don’t exist, Stephen!  Where lines don’t exist!  Can’t you see that?  Don’t do it Stephen, you too Will.  We all like you.  You two stepping out of your element to do this movie is like the people in The Mist stepping out of the supermarket with rope tethered to their waists.  It’s not impossible for you to make it, but there seems to be a good chance you could get eaten the fuck up…

Ridley Scott to Direct a Monopoly movie…

Yes, that Monopoly.

A lot of people are already skewering this as one of the worst film adaptation ideas ever.  I’m inclined to agree, though I’m kind of hopeful for it.  The board game already has elements of deceit, sabotage and ruthlessness–hell, you pretty much can’t win without exhibiting those three traits.  A movie about warring land tycoons seems like it would just apply the logical story of warring land tycoons to the undefined framework that drives the game.

I’m hoping it’s a surprisingly brutal, dark-comedic thriller that sort of satirizes the idea of making a game out of driving competitors into bankruptcy and essentially ruining their lives.  Then they could release a new board game based on the movie–Monopoly: Cutthroat Edition–with Chance cards like “Advance token to St. James Place.  If owned, pay local police $200 to raid premises, plant incriminating evidence of a meth lab, seize property and then sell it back to you for cheap at a local auction.  Pay addtional $100 to police to have current property owner shanked in jail.”

That’s the Monopoly game we’ve always wanted to play, isn’t it?

A Basic Guide for Trick-or-Treatees

So, with Halloween just days away, this might actually be a little too late to reach some of you who need to read this the most.  Still, I would be remiss to completely skip this very important topic.  I’ll forego the more obvious stuff like don’t give away dental floss / toothpaste / apples / raisins / hard bubblegum/ candy corn / Bibles / Playboys / etc., and cover some things that might be a bit lesser known to the public.  For instance…

1. Do NOT Just Go With the Brach’s “Party Bag”

There are seriously at least ten damn peppermints immediately visible in the above picture.  Come on!  You have to know that this is no good.  Unless you’re giving away candy in a neighborhood where all forms of sugar are expressly forbidden, no kid considers this a legitimate “treat.”  If this is all you can afford you’re better off just not giving away anything, the kids would rather skip your house anyway.

Giving nothing but hard candy to trick-or-treaters is like selling talcum powder to a cocaine addict.

Chocolate* is the actual product, that’s the goods, hard candy should only be used to “cut” the product, so to speak.  If you’re not giving away any chocolate you might as well lock up the house, turn off the porch light.

*Note – Tootsie Rolls Do Not Fucking Count. They are impostors.  It’s a stretch to even call Tootsie Rolls chocolate-ish. Tootsie Rolls are the Bizarro Chocolate.  The very existence of Tootsie Rolls is a crime against flavor, and snacking, and joy.

Also…

2. Don’t Get Cute With the Candy

That salty licorice you discovered during your trip to the Netherlands, the one you fell in love with and thought, “I’m going to introduce this to kids on my street at Halloween and be remembered as the neighbor with the cool international candy!”

Nobody wants that shit, all right.  Maybe it’s delicious, maybe it isn’t.  Doesn’t matter.  It’s unfamiliar, and its name and packaging make it look like some sort of antacid…

Don’t try to get cute or fancy with the goods, okay?  Candy shouldn’t look like it should come with a prescription, and it should have a name I recognize.  Halloween is not the night to debut some crazy rice-candy you picked up in Japan.  It’s not even the night to bust out with perfectly-American-but-still-freaking-weird stuff like Dove Tiramisu or Snickers Almond Dark.  You’re doing too much.  If you had to order it online or travel more than thirty minutes just to get it then it shouldn’t be in your damn bowl…

3. Don’t Hold the Kid Up

So… one year my mom decided to make my costume instead of buying it from the store.  For most kids this would’ve had them looking like Ralph Wiggum with the word “Idaho” written on a sheet of paper taped to their shirt, but my mom was actually pretty outstanding on the arts & crafts, so what came out was the illest werewolf costume any kid has ever worn.  I ended up winning the Halloween costume contest at school that year, and it wasn’t even supposed to be a contest, just all the kids getting acknowledged in the auditorium for wearing nice costumes, but then one of the nuns saw me and said, “Holy Moses!  Give that kid a trophy!”

Did I mention I went to Catholic school?  Yeah, my evil werewolf costume was so awesome even nuns were admiring it.

Grown men saw me in costume and committed seppuku rather than risk being attacked by me.

It was the greatest costume in history…

The costume was too good in fact, bringing me, at long last, back to the point: Don’t Hold the Kid Up.

By the end of the night I ended up with my worst Halloween haul ever because every other place I went to the lady answering the door would fall in love with my costume and demand to take pictures, and sing my mom’s praises when they found out she sewed it, and drag their disinterested husbands in from the living room so they too could see this great costume, and spend the next twenty minutes unsuccessfully trying to talk their husband out of committing seppuku, and then finally giving me a motherfucking Twix.

Listen, kids are only dressing up to get the candy.  That’s it.  If they wanted to show off the costume they’d go to a costume party.  The candy is the objective.  If they could just show up in their regular school clothes and still get some free candy from you, they would.  So don’t waste the kid’s time telling him or her how much you love the costume.  Show your approval with the candy, and then keep it movin’.

Related to this rule is…

4. Don’t Ask “What Are You Supposed to Be?”

This is at least as much for your sake as the kid’s.  Believe me.  Cartoons and comic books have changed since you were young.  There are a LOT more of them now, so just get used to the fact that for every little Batman and Spider-Man ringing your doorbell, there’ll be some spiky-haired kid with a headband wearing a some sort of goofy, karate-ghi / tracksuit hybrid thing.  Don’t ask who that kid is supposed to be.  You’re not going to be happy with the answer…

“Naruto Uzumaki, ninja warrior? ” Who the hell…?

“Who the hell” indeed…

But… ninjas wear masks.  You can’t be a ninja without a mask.  You just can’t!

You’re preaching to the choir, brother.

It doesn’t make any sense!

See, this is why I told you not ask…

5. Don’t Demand That the Kid Actually Say “Trick or Treat”

They’re at your door with a mask on and a bag in hand.  Just be happy if they don’t say “Your money or your life,” pitch a few snickers in the bag, and keep it movin’.

6. Don’t Go Overboard Trying to Scare Kids

My mom would probably kick me in the shins for sharing this stuff because nowadays she’s devoutly Christian and doesn’t really get down with Halloween, and I respect that.  But I’m so sincere when I tell you that there was a time when my mom’s Halloween-skills would punch your mom’s Halloween-skills in the face.

Our crib used to be decked out for Halloween night.  We had the fake tombstones in the front yard with dry ice soaking in water behind the graves to produce mist, ultra-creepy recordings playing through the stereo that weren’t even creepy music, but unsettling sound effects and people screaming and shouting out bizarre warnings like “Don’t cross the bridge!!!!”**

One year she also created and dressed these life-sized, mouthless, straw-stuffed dummies with black-button eyes and would have them sitting out on the porch in rocking chairs, waiting for the kids to come pick some candy from the unattended bowl.  Mind you, this was all before these Halloween Depot stores that pop up once a year existed, so you couldn’t just go someplace to buy a complete Home Haunting Kit.  Most houses had a few cotton-cobwebs strung out over the doorway at worst, and might have a dad dressed in a bad Dracula costume hop out from behind the shrubbery to say, “Blah!  Blah!” when you went up to get candy.

My house, we didn’t rely on jump scares.  My mom was Alfred Hitchcock with it.  She understood atmosphere and suspense, and how to let kids walk away wondering, “Why didn’t the creepy straw-man jump out at me and let me know he’s just someone in a suit who doesn’t really mean me any harm?  Oh no, it’s because he’s real.  He’s mad I took his candy and he’s going to take my parents away in their sleep as revenge and leave straw-stuffed versions of them behind for me to find in the morning.”

Kids on my block had crazy vivid imaginations…

Anyway, yeah, we’d frequently encounter groups of kids standing at the edge of the driveway, parents trying to reassure them that it was safe to go up and get some candy.

KID: Can you just go up and get the candy for me, mom?

MOM: NO!  You can’t make me go near that house!  I want to live!  Liiiiiiiiive!!!!  *ahem* I mean, you’re being very childish, but fine, let’s move on to the next house.

Hilarious when you’re watching this play out from inside the safety of the haunted straw-people graveyard-house, but in hindsight, we always had exceptional candy to give out–at least a 2:1 chocolate-to-hard-candy ratio–so we were cheating those poor kids out of a great haul.

And, you know, potentially scarring them for life as well.

**Note – That is an actual quote from one of those recordings.  Twenty years later I still remember exactly how it sounds and let me tell you something, this dude was earnest.  I don’t know what was on the other side of that bridge, but he really did not want you to cross it.  To this day I’ve yet to cross any bridges at all because the bastard never told me which one he was talking about…

Posted in humor. Tags: candy, funny, Halloween, humor, trick or treat. 2 Comments »