On the Subject of Impaired Avods...

Tried something very strange today - recorded an Avod despite still being quite ill. I think it went over fairly well, although, and this is the unusual part, I've already forgotten almost everything I said in the show, despite wrapping it just under two hours ago.

I suppose there's an upside to finally having an Avod that I can listen to 'fresh', but I'm more troubled than anything else by what horrible things I may have said in my state of diminished faculty. Well, it's not like the Divemistress stopped the show due to offensiveness or anything...

Tell you what, right-click to download here, and judge for yourself! I apologize in advance for my 'sick guy' voice. That literally could not be helped.

Fun Fact about this Week's Episode: The Zatoichi series that was mentioned this week featured both 26 films and a television series that ran more than one hundred episodes!

The Thirty-Fourth-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics!

This isn't a superhero torturing a criminal for information - which is a pretty common sight in the golden age, truth be told - it's a superhero taking a criminal to the police, then offering them advice on the best way to torture him for information.

Join us next time for more adventures of The Clock - Enhanced Interrogation Consultant!

Tales From the Darkside 112 : In the Cards

The episode opens with a saucy woman tempting fate - how, you ask? She's flirting with, and dismissing, a man on the phone, while placing an ad for her new fortune-telling business. Which she clearly doesn't believe in! Man, is uppance coming fast.

In the form of an old lady, it would seem!

Saturday Night Live RapeWatch: Gwenyth Paltrow Edition!

This week got off to a rocky start, with an opening sketch about Fox News' attempts to tone it down following the Tucson shootings, then quickly spiralling until the hosts were talking about how Health Care was raping America's freedom. Yes, the sketch was about satirizing Fox News' hyperbole, but the SNL writers could have toned it down slightly and still had the same effect.

The rest of the show was far less offensive, with the only other example of rape-themed humour being a joke about Will Smith's inability to express the correct emotions while filming a hypothetical episode of 'Fresh Prince of Bel-Air' in which Carleton was assaulted by a male teacher.

The only sign of homophobia-based humour was in a sketch that featured a questionable impression of Cher by Bill Hader. The only joke in that sketch? That Cher's daughter recently had a sex-change operation and became Cher's son. Which is apparently icky, and therefore funny.

The lack of truly offensive content gave me a chance to focus on the skteches themselves, which turned out to be something of a mistake, as they were by and large terrible. There were the truly mis-begotten, like a Bar Mitzvah sketch in which the characters sang Jew-themed versions of popular songs. A sketch about Spanish-language SportsCenter only featured half a joke - that the anchors speak flawless Spanish and then sound odd and discordant when using English names and terms. I say 'half a joke' because while the cast member playing the male anchor really sold the premise, Paltrow's accent was so weak that there was no measurable difference in her speaking voice when moving between languages.

Yet another visit to the set of 'Fake Password' reminded us why that sketch needs so badly to be retired. At least with celebrity Jeopardy there were new categories each week, the fun of seeing real celebrities try to be other real celebrities, and the escalating war of wills between Trebek and Burt Reynolds, then later Sean Connery. All Fake Password has to offer is Kristen Wiig saying she's not going to say the password, and then saying it. Mildly diverting once - majorly infuriating the sixth time. What Up with That (which was mercifully absent this week) understands the need to up the ante with each show - Fake Password is the exact same sketch every time.

When not even a cameo appearance by Pee-Wee Herman can save your show, it's time to rethink your priorities, SNL. Now, on to the numbers!

Rape-Themed Humour: 2
Homophobia-Themed Humour: 2

A fairly inoffensive week, as I mentioned above - while I'm not shocked to see them backing off of rape-themed humour (hopefully this isn't just a statistical aberration, and someone actually thought better of it), the downturn in homophobia-themed humour is heartening. With any luck the less awful SNL will become the new norm!

Oh, and if you're making a sketch about Will Smith's inability to act during the first couple of seasons of Fresh Prince, maybe you could drop in the most famous aspect of it: His habit of mouthing all of the other actors' lines while he was waiting for his turn to speak.

That stuff is gold every time I see it!

Also, what kind of world are we living in when Smuggy Smuggerson has the best line of the night? It's anarchy, people!

Frightmare's War With the English Language - Part 1!

You probably haven't heard of the movie 'Frightmare', or if you have, you're thinking about this British movie from the 70s:

The Frightmare to which I'm referring concerns a group of teens who attempt to build a charity haunted house, only to have murder ensue. It's a standard enough plot for a slasher film, and the film as a whole may well warrant coverage down the line, but right now I want to simply present something that happens at the film's outset - with less commentary than I'm generally known for.

What is going on in that speech? I understand that this is a low budget film, but were they unable to find anyone who spoke English, requiring phonetic pronunciation? Had the writers never seen a news broadcast? I assure you the rest of the film doesn't evince a complete lack of understanding of how the English language works.

With one exception, although that can wait until next time...

Criminal Minds 406: The Instincts

The episode opens with the team rushing through a series of dark, unfurnished rooms while swinging around flashlight-enabled handguns. The whole thing suggests a training exercise - at least it until Spencer goes off alone and the angles go all impressionistic - which looks more dream-sequence-y. Spencer wakes up from his nightmare on the plane, then shows off his perfect dream recall - they found a six-year-old boy stabbed to death. Why is he having the dream? Could it have something to do with the case they're on, which involves a killer who abducts children, keep them alive for a week, calls the parents to taunt them, and then leaves the suffocated child in a field.

The ticking clock is established right away - a new child went missing yesterday, so just six days to save his life! Not that he's in a lot of danger - they've already got one dead body, and while the structure would have this kid dying before they finally saved the third victim, Criminal Minds is really, really nervous about killing off children. I don't think there was even a second onscreen victim in that 'red-headed child loves murder' episode. Although I'd obviously have to go back to check that. Maybe I should do it during the opening credits!

The Mystery of Grape Nuts Solved - At Last!

As someone raised in North America in the 1980s, I was around for the resurgence of Grape Nuts cereal marketing, and the attendant increase in stand-up comedians' jokes about same. “It's not made of grapes, it's not made of nuts... what is it!?” As a child I'm sure I just accepted these jokes at face value, understood the nature of Grape Nuts as being one of life's little mysteries, and then moved on to watching another episode of Gummi Bears.

It wasn't until this year that I, quite accidentally, discovered the explanation for this enduring puzzle. Handily enough, it was in one of the comics I was reading to look for stories about Captain Marvel doing something spectacularly crazy or racist!

That's Volto, the man from Mars whose powers include promoting Post's new Grape Nuts Flakes - seeing this ad made me realize for the first time that Grape Nuts had been around long enough that my grandparents might have eaten them growing up - so I swung by Wikipedia to discover just how old they actually were. The answer - that they began production in the 1890s - was something of a shock, but immediately I was presented with the obvious answer to my query!

Seedless grapes, while extant, were not as common in America during the 19th century, so a worker in a cereal factory could well be expected to observe the visual similarity between this crushed grain:

and the seed (or nut) of a grape:

The stand-up comedians of the 80s, by comparison, grew up in an America completely devoid of both seeded grapes and simple electronic means of finding out why things are called things - so of course they were confused!

So there you have it, stand-up comedians of fifteen years ago - they're called that due to a physical resemblance between the cereal and the seeds of grapes.

You're welcome.

Next up? Finding out what, exactly, is up with airline peanuts, and why the bags are so hard to open.

TheAvod Episode 100: Episode 100!

That's right, two years (and a bit) later, theAvod (the internet's sole audio-only Vodcast) has finally reached its hundredth episode! To celebrate this fact, I've decided to resume posting about the show I co-host.

Really, there's no excuse for me not having been doing this for the past two years other than sloth and uselessness, but whatever, right?

Topics discussed this week include 'The Cape', 'And Soon the Darkness', and 'Platoon of the Dead', which is neither a George Romero movie, nor a zombie parody of the film Platoon. If you'd rather download it, just right-click here and save the .mp3!

The Thirty-Third-Greatest Panel in the History of Comics!

Dwarf vs Old Lady... who am I supposed to be rooting for here? Either one makes an effectively surprising Golden Age hero or villain...

Tales From the Darkside 111: All a Clone by the Telephone

It seems like we've finally reached that Harry Anderson episode that I mistook for 'Word Processor of the Gods'. Let's see what this one is about!

Harry plays a frustrated writer who, in the parlance of the industry, 'can't get arrested in this town'. Insult is added to injury when it turns out that his agent (genre stalwart Dick Miller!) is more impressed with the funny message on his new answering machine than anything Harry's written in the past six months.

The problem? Harry doesn't remember leaving any funny message... uh-oh, this could be trouble...

Saturday Night Live RapeWatch: Jim Carrey Edition!

If you're wondering where the RapeWatch has been this season, its absence has owed to a combination of my own lack of attentiveness and SNL's complete lack of rape themed humour!

That's right, in what I like to call a victory for the Castle (and human decency), after three long years of rape-themed humour soiling SNL, we've now gone half a season without so much as a visit to 'Scared Straight' territory!

Now that I'm ensconced in the challenging arms of the one a day project, however, I thought this might be the perfect time to resurrect one of my most beloved recurring features. With that in mind, let's take a look at this week's SNL!

Jim Carrey was in poor form tonight, although the level of the material was doubtless responsible for at least part of his lackluster performance. After all, this is a man who used to Ride the Snake - it must be awfully dispiriting to be be in a sketch whose only joke is that people say they don't break down crying in public, right before video evidence proves that they do.

When the high point of the night is Jim Carrey breaking out a (legitimately wonderful) Alan Thicke impression, SNL's certainly scraping the bottom of the barrel.

So now, let's move on to the numbers!

Homophobia-themed humour: 1 - A Black Swan-inspired sketch ended with the lame tag of Carrey being outed as a female impersonator, rather than just an extremely mannish ballerina. Also, Hader's Vincent Cassel leaves something to be desired.

Rape-themed humour: 0 - Wish I could take credit for this, but far more likely S&P finally hired a censor who was able to stay up past 9:30.

Good work, SNL! Hopefully you'll keep this record up in the coming weeks!

Can we talk about Christ?

Jason Christ, that is. I bring him up because, while attempting to remember the name of a movie I was trying to buy so that I could review it here at the Castle (Harvest of Fear! Look for it soon!), I stumbled onto the similarly-titled 'Savage Harvest 2'. To begin approaching the point, I'll just suggest you tab open that link and glance around the page a little - it's one of those small-budget pages on IMDB where the writer/director/producer submits a synopsis as well as an array of trivia factoids.

How can I be so certain that Jason wrote all this himself? Well, first off, the fact that low-budget horror filmmaker Jason Christ wrote and directed a movie about 'Tyge Murdock, a successful director of low-budget horror films' suggests a certain level of narcissism that would easily lead one to fill out their own imdb page while hiding behind anonymity. Not that I feel comfortable diagnosing someone's mental problems based on a single webpage (despite all appearances to the contrary).

The reason I bring this up is to ask why people feel the need to hide behind anonymity when filling these things out? Do they worry that we'll take a synopsis less seriously if we knew the filmmakers were responsible for it? If anything, I feel like that would make it more helpful and authoritative - it's not like anyone considers the synopsis to be a review. Why try to hide it when the trivia section makes it abundantly clear that the imdb page was written by "someone" with intimate knowledge of the production, along with an fixation on minutiae that no one but the director and editor cares about - such as scene numbers.

Really, I guess I'd just like Jason Christ to come forward and take credit for Savage Harvest 2's imdb page. You made a movie, you're proud of it, you're promoting it - there's nothing to be ashamed of, as long as you're not responsible for the sole (super-positive) user review at the bottom of the page. Which, of course, he isn't.

Oh, and for the record, Jason Christ looks EXACTLY like you think he does:

And a quick trip to his own imdb page reveals that in addition to writing/directing Savage Harvest 2, Christ also produced Deadwood Park, one of the most confusingly-structured movies I've ever seen! (note that in the review linked there, I misremembered the title - just in case you'd mistaken me for an authority or anything...)

Criminal Minds 405: Catching Out

A train runs through a dark city, making this the second week in a row to open with a vehicle headed somewhere. No traffic fatalities this week, however, just a crazed homeless man who sees everything in psychosis-vision:

Or, based on that screenshot, maybe Van Gogh-vision. Has he come to this random town to kill someone? Of course he has - and then he takes a shower afterward, and sniffs some glue! Okay, this guy is clearly barely functional - how is he going to get away with this? Not that he'll get away with it in the long run, of course - obviously they're going to catch him by the end of the episode, but how is not going to get caught the next morning, when neighbours see a disheveled black guy walking out of an old white couple's suburban house?

Meanwhile, Derek indulges in his favorite passtime: hitting on every attractive woman he comes across. Which, I'll take a moment to remind everyone, the rest of his team sees as a harmless, even borderline-comedic personality trait, rather than a symptom of underlying trauma caused by all the times he was raped as a child.

The twist in this little flirtation is that the woman already knows who Derek is! Is this because she's a serial killer stalking him? Well, she looks like this:

So no. Let's move on to the briefing, where the team discovers that the hobo already has six victims in addition to the two he just murdered the night before (remember, all serial killers are spree killers!) and the team must rush out to California to stop him! Interestingly, the biggest problem they have so far is that he's been dubbed the 'Highway 99 Killer' - why does Greg object to this? I'm guessing we'll find out after the opening credits!

Jeopardy is Suprisingly Fair! Or Badly-Designed!

I don't know if Jeopardy's writers have been getting sloppier with their research lately, but I've noticed a couple of questions in the past few months where more than one answer would have been acceptable - which seems like kind of a no-no for a quiz show. Like if the Jumble letters were 'CDOLU' - it just doesn't work.

The first one I noticed was under the category 'change one letter', where the contestant is asked to come up with two words that are one letter apart and conform to the dictates of the 'answer'. This 'answer' was "Elmer's and Morose". I immediately hit the imaginary buzzer and exclaimed 'Glue and Blue!' I was already halfway through the self-congratulatory high-five when I realized that the correctly-answering contestant had given a different 'question': 'Glue and Glum'.

Chided, I wondered whether I would have been given the cash anyways, had I been on the show that day. I'm fairly certain that another episode, some weeks later, provided an affirmative answer to the problem.

The category: "Starts with A". The Answer: ~"5 Letters - a commonly-held wise saying". Again I jumped, this time with 'Axiom' - and I was proven right, but not before a contestant was told that their guess 'Adage' was incorrect. A post-commercial ruling by the judges overturned Trebek, which was all well and good, but this is the kind of sloppiness you don't expect to see from the good people at Jeopardy.

Which raises the question - are these imprecise 'answers' the result of a culture of inattention fostered by the dumbing-down of the show's questions? This is my suspicion, but unless I'm somehow contacted by a Whistleblower inside the Jeopardy organization, I fear I'll never learn the truth.

Still, there's always that genius robot to look forwards to, right?

(If this seems like a more digressive post than usual from me - and I'm aware that's saying something - it's because I've decided to attempt the One a Day Project, and as I sat down to write something about something, I found myself totally and utterly blocked - which is exact opposite of the point of this thing. So hopefully it looks up from here.)

Unsurprisingly, Mark Millar's Nemesis doesn't hold up well in the final analysis.

Nemesis, Mark Millar`s latest successful attempt to have Hollywood studios pay him for the rights to unfilmable projects, recently published its fourth and final issue, and now that the story has been resolved, it`s a good a time as any to look back at the deficiencies within that identify it so clearly as a Millar product.

First, the good: Unlike his last anti-hero themed project (Wanted), Nemesis wasn't about the adventures of a group of super-criminals who primarily concerned themselves with raping women and children.

That was pretty much it.

Although that alone makes Nemesis less completely worthless than Wanted, which is certainly a plus. Now for the bad stuff...