Ravis: May 2008 Archives

1. Change that outside light bulb that's been burned out for, like, four weeks.

2. Pretend like it didn't matter, that it's just a stupid TV show, dammit.

3. Go to Push Ultra Lounge to see Palantine and Experimental Pilot.

4. Shower, for Chrissakes. I smellz like dieing.

5. Finish reading the Sex And The City issue of Entertainment Weekly, so it doesn't look like I'm stretching it out until the premiere.

6. Walk the dog. Milo is, seriously, a box of bon-bons away from being the sane young male dog version of a crazy old cat lady shut-in.

7. Edit Crider's Dethklok story.

8. Finish writing that song about the chick that dumps her boyfriend's body into the Bay, but it's not what you think.

9. Wash all the dishes, as opposed to just enough to make the dish rack seem kind of full.

10. The hustle.

"They're racist against tall people."
-- Some girl on the season premiere of So You Think You Can Dance that didn't make the cut.

This week's good goes to having both superlative Pensacola pop-rock act Deadly Fists of Kung Fu and Tampa expatriates Joe Popp and Brian McCabe back in town for the weekend. Popp was in Tampa for a friend's wedding, and dragged the rest of the guys in his band The Hornrims down from New York City for a New World Brewery appearance; the Fists did that one too, as well as a Saturday night stint at St. Pete's Emerald Bar that included a Replacements cover, a money shower, and us bouncing some jerkoff in a Hawaiian shirt. (Look, dude, if you're going to threaten a girl, don't point at your cane and plead your limp when her male friends come over for a chat.)

This week's bad goes to bad family news. My mother will be having a fairly serious surgical procedure next week. She's a tough lady, though, and in pretty good health. Plus, they'll be doing that new minimally invasive thing where they just teleport the stuff out of her body through her bones and skin and stuff, or whatever. But if you could spare a thought for Mom Ravis, I'd certainly appreciate it.

This week's ugly goes to, oh, I don't know ... Speed Racer's confirmed flopness, I guess. Or no, wait - let's go with that whole thing about how the price of seeing crappy movies in the theater is going to go up even higher, because all the corn is getting used to make ethanol. Yeah, that's it; corn. Screw you, corn. If I still watched movies in the theater, there'd be trouble.

Dear Television,

Please stop airing the following commercials immediately, on every channel, between 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. EST:

The one where the giant stream of urine arcs into the frame to strike the tip of the pregnancy test.

The one where the giant roach tries to get into the house by posing as a pizza delivery guy.

The one where Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe crawls under the condemned house and holds the dead rat up by its tail.

The one for the new Discovery Channel series Verminators.

The one where the cartoon parent bear cleans all the little balls of used toilet paper out of the cartoon baby bear's ass hair.

The one for Speed Racer. (What? All that color and motion can be a little nauseating.)

Any one for anything a woman might or might not wear inside her panties during a certain time of the month.

All of the ones for No Reservations that show Anthony Bourdain eating, like, wild boar anus or bone soup or whatever.

Thank you in advance for your prompt and considerate action,
Ravis

This week's good goes to Martin's tres de Mayo party. His place is like an oasis of chill, given the incestuousness of the St. Pete scene (and the fact that the asshole who hosts some other parties in town tends to chase people off with a canoe oar when he wants to go to sleep). Musicians, media types and legitimate artists traded sangria recipes and scarfed Carrie Waite's seven-layer dip without rancor.

This week's bad goes to the former high-school soccer champion who (allegedly) shot a St. Pete cop while robbing a fucking Blockbuster Video. Why go to college on a scholarship when you can be easily influenced by dirtbag local gangs and knock over pharmacies? Does that sound like a viable alternative career? Check my last post - your parents must be proud, you fucking cuntwiffle.

This week's ugly goes to my mindset, which doesn't bode well for my first week at a new job.

So the newest iteration of the Grand Theft Auto gaming franchise is upon us, and it comes with all the violence, immorality and indiscreet bonage we've come to expect. Also expected: The never-ending argument about whether or not fake violence begets real violence.

People like me, who revel in simulated gore, excessive cinematic violence, gratuitous boob action and vulgar one-liners we'd never say in public (as long as they're integral to the plot or character development, naturally), but who would never actually go out to kill, skin and bugger a wino, insist that those things don't negatively influence culture in real life. We call it cathartic. We claim that it actually sublimates our more barbaric lizard-brain instincts; it's a harmless outlet.

On the other side of the argument are a bunch of the people that people like me tend to not like very much anyway - nosy, religious, well-to-do (read: often, white and insufferable) people who are deathly afraid of crimes that are rarely committed against them. They're the sort of people who, when entreating us to think of the children, are rarely thinking of their own children specifically, but are canny enough to know that every once in a while, one or two of those boarding-school kids get their wires crossed and make an awful mess. They say that the culture is eroding family values, that God is the answer, that the movies and the TV shows and the video games are encouraging a culture of selfishness and sociopathy.

And they're right about the last thing. But the truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle. And if people of all races and social strata would stop producing such easily influenced, selfish, sociopathic, dumb-assed kids to begin with, maybe I could enjoy and then forget a Saw sequel without having to consider its sociological ramifications.