Clyde's Place

by Clyde

Saw this over at Vote for the Worst and had a good laugh. I thought you might like one two although my newest biggest fan Crappucino Girl won't like it. I'm certain to get more comments.

Ever since Adam was last seen running around naked as a jaybird in the garden of Eden, middle aged men have been undergoing a mid life crises. As a matter of fact, it was Adam’s mid life self doubt that enabled Eve to convince him to take a bite out of that damn apple. What? You don’t believe me? How do I know this? It’s because I’m a true scholar and you’re not.

Way back either a gazillion years ago or two thousand years ago depending on your religion and which bible you have handy, Adam was pondering, questioning his values, and wondering if there was more to life than hanging around the Garden of Eden watching Eve horse assing around with that damn snake in the grass. He wondered if the rest of his days would be spent doing nothing more than eating bananas and oranges, watching his hair get grayer, and trying to figure out what it was about a certain snake that captivated Eve. So when she told him that the serpent said taking a bite of the apple from the Tree of Knowledge would make him feel better and open up a whole new life for him, Adam was ready and willing to change his hum drum life. And ever since that fateful day when Adam suddenly discovered that Eve was indeed one hot mama with boobs, Hollywood has found the subject of men and their mid life crises to be the stuff of box office gold. Okay, so my bible is a little different from yours. Let’s not nit pick.

For a long while, most of the stories Hollywood concocted revolved around the one man one mid life crises at a time dilemma. Sometime the plot would center around one man’s lust for another woman, sometimes another man’s woman, or sometimes his daughter’s best friend. For instance, in 1955 Tom Ewell lusted happily after Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch while his wife was away on vacation. Could you blame him? But the film ended with Tom heading out to join his wife and kid on vacation with his many fantasies in regards to Miss Monroe remaining unfulfilled. Well, it was the fifties so what did you expect?

The film did not end so happily for another person approaching their mid life crises though. It seemed Joe DiMaggio just didn’t much care for billboards showing his wife Marilyn’s skirt billowing upward above her panties being plastered all over New York City.

Forty-four years later, Hollywood was still at it. The man was still middle-aged but the gal was much younger as Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) went completely bananas while having a lustful eye for teenager Angela Hayes (Mena Suvari). And unlike old Tom Ewell and his Seven Year Itch, this time the ending wasn’t at all cheerful for poor old Lester, may he rest in peace.

Lester’s undoing was that he just never took the time to realize that the best way to discover yourself after forty is to go on an outing with your best buddies forever. I mean, didn’t he at some point see City Slickers where Mitch (Billy Crystal) and his pals Phil ( Daniel Stern) and Ed (Bruno Kirby)went on a Cattle Drive to rediscover and reinvent their sad and pathetic lives? If Lester was that horny, he could have gone on a Cattle Drive, found himself and possibly a nice looking cowgirl like Bonnie Rayburn (Helen Slater) to lust after just like Phil did. And let me tell you, I would have taken Supergirl over Mena Suvari any old day of the week. At any rate, it’s way too late for Lester but not too late for our newest group of fifty somethings plus one. Plus one? Well, you’ll see.

Although Lester was never lucky enough to go on a buddy driven cattle drive, Hollywood knows a good thing when they have one and once again have brought to the silver screen another saga of middle aged men feeling as if they have wasted their entire lives without doing anything interesting or exciting and are just biding time until old age, arthritis, and low box office receipts, sink them once and for all. For this 2007 replay of the men in flux plot, Touchstone Pictures lined up four familiar names that have all had big screen successes at various times in their careers. Our would be explorers this time around are Dougie (Tim Allen. Age 53), Woody (John Travolta Age 52), Dudley (William H. Macy Age 57) and Bobby (Martin Lawrence (Age 42), thus making Bobby the aforementioned plus one.

Since Billy Crystal and his gang of rootin’ tootin’ cowboys had already done the cowpoking horse riding scenario twice, writer Brad Copeland decided to send this aging quartet out west to discover the Pacific Ocean by way of motorcycles. Of course, to go out west our quaint quartet has to have a reason to go, and as always the case in movie land, each of the four friends are coping with a different set of circumstances.

Dougie is a Dentist who does nothing but clean and pull teeth all day and has trouble relating to his kid who thinks the old man is a total bore.

Then there is shy and timid Dudley, who has never had a steady girlfriend, and quite possibly has never dated any woman more than once. Old Dud is also a major klutz, so if the script calls for pratfalls and physical humor, he is ready willing and able to provide it. Woody is a rich guy who unbeknownst to his BBF’s (best buddies forever) is now broke and in the middle of a divorce. He is nothing more than your every day All-American Jerk. And Bobby? He lives in a house with his wife, his two daughters and his mother-in-law and is totally henpecked by all of them. We find all of this out in the first few minutes of the film when we are quickly shown about two minutes, maybe less of each sad and pathetic life. Think of it as a cram course in getting to know your movie characters. And shortly after that we find out that the foursome gets together on weekends and ride their motorcycles, except for Dudley who spends a lot of time being knocked off of his by stop signs and anything else that might happen into his path.

So were they all once members of a motorcycle gang when they were younger? No, they weren’t. The reason they are the Wild Hogs is because Dougie’s wife sewed the Wild Hogs emblems on their leather jackets to make them feel better. To feel better about what exactly we are never told.

After having lost everything and now having nothing, it is Woody who comes up with the idea for a cross country trip. And after quite a bit of coaxing and one panic attack, our fun bunch are on their way to entertain us and keep us rolling in the aisles with their humorous but touching story of four men out to rediscover life. Well, not exactly.

As it turns out, you’ll be hard pressed to find too many humorous moments and the only touching that is done has nothing to do with your heart strings. It comes early in the film when the feckless foursome are discovered sleeping together by a gay state patrolman. Yes, it’s the same scene you’ve already seen dozens of time in the preview, and have seen in countless other films that try to turn homophobia into high camp or comedy.

Later, we get another comedy bit where the guys go skinny dipping, and shortly after that they meet up with what turns out to be their main antagonists, a real genuine practicing over-the-hill motorcycle type gang called the “Del Fuegos,” who spend most of their time sitting in their favorite bar. The gang is led by Jack (Ray Liotta Age 53), and he and his bbf’s (best buddies forever) wastes no time in sending the Hogs on their way but not until after they’ve stolen Dudley’s motorcycle. Shortly thereafter Woody decides to sneak back to the bar to reclaim Dudley’s cycle, and in the process accidentally burns the bar down, an important detail that he fails to mention to the guys, just in case doing so might muck up the plot or the suspense if there really were any.

All of this happens before the movie is even half over, and that’s not a good thing. Soon the boys end up in a small town and we spend the rest of the time waiting for the completely predictable and obvious to happen. Will Jack and the Del Fuego’s find the Hogs? Will the Hogs find out the truth about what happened to the bar? Will Dudley find a gal (Marisa Tomei) and fall in love? Will the Hogs find their manhood and stand up against the Del Fuegos before its too late? Will Woody tell the guys his wife divorced him and that he is broke? Will we be entertained for the rest of the movie? Will we even care about all of this? I can answer the last two questions for you by telling you that the answer is a very emphatic no.

The problem is not that the entire second half of the film is so predictable because that can be overcome with a witty script and putting the guys in some humorous or even semi-humorous situations. But it never materializes. Once the guys are finished with their skinny dipping which isn’t all that funny in the first place, the rest of the movie is dead on arrival. I did not laugh one time. In City Slickers, much of the humor was derived from the fact that the Billy Crystal and his bbf’s (best buddies forever) had never been on anything like a cattle drive thus making each situation new to them so that they could be easily milked for as much humor as the script called for. In Wild Hogs, other than the fact that these guys are on a cross country trip, they already know about all there is to riding a motorcycle down the road just as millions of other people do every day. The only obstacles they really come up against within the film are the gay motorcycle cop, a family swim meet, and the motorcycle gang. That’s it. And since the whole motorcycle gang plot takes up more than half of the running time, there’s not much time to have fun with anything else. Even the big climactic confrontation with the Del Fuegos at the end fails to generate any humor or excitement.

To make matters worse, never once during the film do we really have any sense of fun and adventure. There’s something romantic and adventurous about a cattle drive, but nothing remotely resembling that seemed to have entered the writers thoughts when they were putting the script together of our four motorcycle riders. In a trip across country, you would think they could have come up with something more than what we have here. At one point the writer must have become so desperate for something funny to happen these guys, he randomly throws in a bull slapping scene that has absolutely nothing to do with what is going on in this film. Yes, I know that was in the trailer also, as were most of the so called comedic scenes. So if you’ve seen that, you have in fact seen the movie.

Another reason City Slickers succeeded where this film fails is that it took the time at the beginning to help us connect with the characters. In Wild Hogs, we are escorted through these guys life problems so fast that we are never really given the chance to care if they go on some damn motorcycle trip or not. It doesn’t help any that Travolta plays Woody first as a jerk, and then later as a simpering, whiny, coward. Nor does it help that although we see that Martin Lawrence’s Bobby is henpecked, it seems to be a problem of his own making. When you compare that to Daniel Stern’s extra-marital affair being exposed in front of his wife in City Slickers, it pales by comparison. Not to mention the fact that just that one scene in City Slickers is worth way more laughs than all the scenes in Wild Hogs put together. The best I can say about Martin Lawrence though is that in this film, he is at least tolerable and this is the first film I’ve seen him in where he acheived that dubious distinction. Not so John Travolta, who seems to be on another one of his many downward career slides.

Tim Allen on the other hand, just doesn’t have the knack to make you sympathize with his character the way Billy Crystal has always been able to in his films. Tim Allen’s film career has been totally dependent on putting him in some outlandish situation and seeing how well he copes with it. In other words, he can only be as good as the script is, as was the case in Galaxy Quest. The strange thing is that although Allen seems to have top billing and is used extensively in the first twenty minutes to set up the premise, once the trip gets under way he just as well had headed off in a different direction considering how much he is given to do.

Bill Macy, who is the best of a very sad lot should have known better than to get involved or at least should have read the script before signing on the dotted line We like him, we like Dudley, but like everything else we just don’t care. And his impending romance with Marisa Tomei is never anything close to being believable. There are times when both of them looked as if they wished they were somewhere else.

When I first heard of the idea for Wild Hogs, I thought it was something that had considerable possibilities if done right. I guess a lot of other people thought so as well as it did boffo box office in the first weekend of release. Inexplicably, even after that opening week when word of mouth should have killed it, Hogs went on to gross $168 million in the U.S. alone. And if that isn’t enough, the film seems to be making another killing on its recent DVD release. The only explanation that I can offer is that there must be an awful lot of kids out there under the age of 12 who for one reason or another, find the inane antics of the Wild Hogs simply mesmerizing. Sort of like watching the Three Stooges on two wheelers. Wait a minute. I take that back. That’s an insult to the Stooges and Stooge fans everywhere.

But for anyone older than 10 or eleven, I advise that you only watch this at your own peril. And maybe I just figured out what really was bothering Lester in American Beauty. Perhaps he had seen the future and saw himself riding a motorcycle to the west coast with a gang of misfits. That would be more than enough to depress anybody. And because of that I have no choice but to offer Wild Hogs my grade, and that would be a D+. If only they could have figured out a way for a motorcycle to give birth to a baby calf, it might have all worked out in the end. There’s always the unfortunate possibility of a sequel to accomplish that though.. I dread the thought.

Rob Riggle continues his reports from Iraq.

I love this. You can tell these guys don't think a helluva lot of the Iraqui Parliament. You can almost sense the anger through their sarcasm. Do you think John McCain would ask them what they think about the Iraqui Parliament and then come back and report the truth? I didn't think so.

Rob Riggle shows us that indeed, a day in Iraq is like an average day in Indiana. His satirical take on Bubba from Forrest Gump is hilarious....Hint: He ain't talking shrimp.

Since I haven’t done one of these articles in a number of months…well since Monday May 1, 2006 to be more exact, I decided it was high time to roam around the internet, get busy, and start it up once again. With a presidential election stampeding towards us, there is an endless number of things out there that could use my own personal well thought out commentary. So let’s get started.

There are some out there that believe that the campaigns for offices such as Congress, the Senate, or the Presidency should be entirely publicly financed the way it is done in many countries. This would aid a great deal in not only stopping big money from influencing the electorate or the policy of the candidates, it might also mean people would have to actually find out what a candidate stands for instead of depending on a mass of thirty second commercials. Yes, it would cost tax dollars but so what? You don’t think your taxes should be used to help give you the kind of government that should be working for you and not just Wall Street?

As it is though, it seems some of your tax dollars have already been put to good use in an election campaign….helping Republicans get elected. AZ Central

Top Commerce and Treasury department officials appeared with Republican candidates and doled out millions in federal money in battleground congressional districts and states after receiving White House political briefings detailing GOP election strategy……

The House Oversight Committee is investigating whether the White House's political briefings to at least 15 agencies, including to the Justice Department, the General Services Administration and the State Department, violated a ban on the use of government resources for campaign activities……..

During the briefings at Treasury and Commerce, then-Bush administration political director Ken Mehlman and other White House aides detailed competitive congressional districts, battleground election states and key media markets and outlined GOP strategy for getting out the vote.

See there. The Republicans are already endorsing using your tax dollars for campaigning. Does that now make them progressive?

Ah, Melanie (Malady) Morgan! One of the Radio Wing nuts that the 30 per cent of the goosesteeping Bush Worshippers have dreams about. Sometimes I wonder if that 30 per cent don’t even have fantastical wet dreams of Malady and Rush Limpbutt doing “it” or better yet, maybe they conjure up visions of Malady, Limpbutt and Sean Hamitup from Fox Noise having the Republican threesome to end all threesomes. It seems Melanie only has kind words for our servicemen and women who agree with her and Bush’s Grand Plan for conquering the world. When you’re someone like John Solz of Vote Vets however, who actually thinks the president has his head stuck up his butt, something most Americans would agree with, then Malady Morgan believes you are nothing more than a hypocritical cockroach and you need to be defamed with as many lies as possible that she can dream up in her empty Republican head. From Media Matters

In an August 17 column at the conservative news website WorldNetDaily, right-wing radio talk show host Melanie Morgan falsely asserted that she had "pointed out" in a column the previous week that VoteVets.org co-founder and chairman Jon Soltz is "actually violating the spirit of Army rules and regulations" by engaging in political activism while serving in the Army Reserve. She also complained of being attacked by "[c]rackpot organizations such as Media Matters for America" for making that claim. In fact, as Media Matters documented, Morgan did not accuse Soltz of violating the "spirit" of the law in her August 10 WorldNetDaily column; rather, she accused him of violating the letter of the law, specifically claiming that Soltz had committed "a violation of the U.S. Military's Uniform Code of Military Justice" by his actions

And of course, Melody who believes in honoring servicement and women regardless of their viewpoints about the war had this to say about Soltz:

Jon Soltz is still a hypocritical cockroach. He needs to be stomped on and neutralized before he and his ilk can silence military support for the mission in Iraq.

Oh Malady, you do love all the freedoms your country gives you don’t you? Or should I say that you believe in them as long as it’s all about you and that 25 percent of the dunderheads supporting your fuehrer. Well, maybe just spouting off is good as long as it keeps you you and your intellectually incurious minions out of everybody else’s business.

Reading stuff like this: Priceless

The price of a blank plain T-Shirt: $10.00
Cost of making homemade decals to place on shirt: $20.00
Cost of gasoline to drive to rally for George W. Bush: $50.00
Cost to Federal Government for violating your rights for wearing those shirts: $80,000

AmericaBlog has the details

Have you seen those commercials and infomercials on TV where they will try to sell you some nifty little gadget at a price that’s dirt cheap? Or maybe you’ll remember a site on the internet that was giving away free software CD’s but you had to pay shipping and handling. And that’s what the catch turns out to be. The shipping and handling charges turn out to be way more than what the item you are getting for free or practically nothing is worth. If you happened to fall for one of these scams don’t feel too bad. It could have been a lot worse as the military can now tell you.

2 Metal Washers @ 19 cents: 38 cents
Shipping and handling: Approximately 1,000,000

We'll let the people overseas at the Guardian tell you all about it. But before you do, I want to tell you about this fine set of glass ware that you can have for free just for reading this column. That’s right, FREE! All you have to do is pay the shipping and handling charges of $12.99 per glass.

I’ve written lately about the “intellectually incurious” among us quite a bit but maybe I shouldn’t blame that 25 percent too much. After all, millions and millions of dollars are being spent every year to keep many of us as blissfully ignorant as possible. With all that money being spent to turn us into zombified parrots for the corporations, it’s a wonder we aren’t all walking around like we’d been replaced by the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Boston.com News explains:

Time said the US Army Corps of Engineers understands that protecting New Orleans from hurricanes like Katrina or worse will require not just bigger and stronger levees. It also means preserving and restoring marshes, swamps, and barrier islands that offer natural protection against winds and high water.

"But for all the talk about restoring wetlands," Time wrote, "almost every dime of the $7 billion the Corps has received since Katrina is going to traditional engineering: huge structures designed to control rather than preserve nature."

On global warming, which is predicted to pound our coasts with a higher percentage of Katrina-like storms, ExxonMobil pumped $19 million into conservative causes dedicated to pooh-poohing the science. Those causes paid tens of thousands of dollars to those who doubt climate change. In 2003, Republican Party consultant Frank Luntz wrote a memo saying, "You need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue."

When I read a lot of this stuff these days or watch the news, I often wondered what our forefathers would have done when writing the constitution and bill of rights if one of them could have traveled through time to the future and seen what a mess we’ve become. I could see Adams, Jefferson, and Frankling going back and saying, “Okay, we gotta fix it. The freakin’ thing doesn’t work 230 years from now. They got some idiot ass named Shrub from some la-la land known as Texas who along with his two sidekicks turdbucket and Dickhead are screwing things up for everybody. And when we’re done fixin’ it, we’ll tell you about those crazy assed 21st century women. They got a couple of doozies named Lindsay and Paris”

What ever you do, don’t hold a sign up when you’re in Asheville, North Carolina. The police will be certain you are up to no good, handcuff you, and haul you back to the station to make sure you aren’t some commie or something like that. Yeah, I’m sure still use words like commie and hippie a lot down there in old Asheville, in between listening to the Malady Morgan and Rush Limpbutt shows. From Mother Jones:

Jonas Phillips, a native of Asheville, North Carolina, sometimes stands at an Interstate overpass near his workplace and holds a sign that reads Impeach Bush-Cheney. Wednesday morning, he'd been standing there about ten minutes when he was approached by one Russell Crisp of the Asheville Police Department. Crisp asked Phillips how long he intended to stay in his spot, and Philips said not long--he had to be at work shortly. The officer then asked Phillips for his ID. Phillips asked if he had done anything wrong, and Crisp said only that a sergeant was on the way.

Sergeant Randy Riddle then appeared, told Phillips to put his sign down and to place his hands behind his back. He then arrested and handcuffed Phillips, and—when asked—informed him that he was in violation of County Ordinance 16-2, and that he was obstructing the sidewalk. Phillips replied that Officer Crisp had witnessed a man walk by him and his sign and could therefore attest that the sidewalk had not been obstructed.

Let that be a lesson to all of you bike riders, trike riders, and skateboard riders down there in Asheville, Get off the sidewalk where you’re obstructing pedestrians and go play out in the traffic where you belong.

But Ohio is no better. Putting up an anti-Bush sign can lead to charges of littering.

If you watched the funny Olbermann clip about Wikipedia that I put up the other day then you may have had a good chuckle and know what I’m talking about. If you didn’t watch it, go do it and come back. Now it turns out that someone from the Democratic party has been changing those Wikipedia entries in particular one about Rush Limpbutt.

The site also indicates that a computer owned by the US Democratic Party was used to make changes to the site of right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

The changes brand Mr Limbaugh as "idiotic," a "racist", and a "bigot". An entry about his audience now reads: "Most of them are legally retarded."

Whew! It had me worried for a moment. I’m glad they were truthful in the changes they made. That makes me feel better. But if you want to also read an in depth article about the Wikipedia mess, go to the New York Times.

You say you're thirteen years old and you just love your classmate Bettie Sue? Do you sit and study hall and just dream of her all day? Or maybe you're a young fourteen year old gal who's boyfriend just asked you to go steady. Well, why stop there. Just grab your parents and head down to Arkansas where at least for a while, anyone regardless of age can get married with parental consent. Better hurry though as it seems to be a limited time offer.


And finally, what’s with this little girl here on the left? If you want to know head over to Jesus’ General to find out. As for me, I’m outta here until next time. We’ll do it again soon.