Monthly Archives: November 2006

Team America: World Police (2004)

Posted on November 30 2006 by Matt

Here’s the pitch:  “A bad action movie—with puppets!”  Here’s the result:  a bad action movie with puppets.  Team America, ostensibly a superhero supergroup, destroys a plethora of UNESCO World Heritage sites in order to save them.  This irritates the Film Actors Guild (F.A.G.), the members of which, led by Alec Baldwin, organize world leaders against Team America and for peace.  But this plays right into the hands of Kim Jong Il, who plots to destroy the world while its dignitaries are enjoying a stage show starring the likes of Janeane Garofalo and Sean Penn.  (Which raises the question, “When’s . . .

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Our cat is like a kid, only more dumb

Posted on November 29 2006 by Kris

Our cat, Hank, decided at 5:15 this morning that my wife and I should definitely get out of bed.

He communicated this by repeatedly jumping on the bed, meowing, and scratching my wife’s face. Normally, I would think this was no big deal, except she insisted on giving a running commentary of it to me which interfered with my sleep.

After a few minutes of this, Pulao got up and closed the door to the bedroom, which was a good idea, but Hank doesn’t quite grasp the closed-door concept. He scratched the door, rattled it, and meowed; all much more . . .

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One good cliche deserves another

Posted on November 18 2006 by Kris

While teleconferencing at work, I jotted down a list of actually-used platitudes and business speak. I think if you take all the “real” words out of the conversation, you can still tell pretty much what’s going on:

Left holding the bag
Dealt a bad hand
Coming on board (many times)
Troubled spots
Didn’t let the ball drop
Coming on board (many times)
Break bread
Swimming upstream
Full-court press
The bad guys have our money in their pockets — we’re going to go after it
Coming on board (many times)
. . .

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Birth Announcement

Posted on November 13 2006 by Matt

Matt is proud to announce the birth of 1999 Chevrolet Prizm.  Prizm has his father’s headlights and power locks, his father’s automatic transmission, parking brake, glove compartment, and rear-window defroster, and also his father’s air conditioning and AM/FM stereo.  A mutant gene resulted in power windows and a CD player.  The mother declined to identify herself or her contributions, but may have had something to do with Prizm’s 62,000-mile odometer reading.

After a month’s hard labor on Matt’s part, the birth attendants decided to extract Prizm surgically through the checking account.  Fortunately, there were no complications, except for a continued checking-account discharge . . .

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Marmaduke much more complicated than you ever imagined

Posted on November 13 2006 by Kris

At work, we just got done with a 134-minute teleconference meeting where absolutely nothing was decided. I mean no one decision could be said to have been made, per se.

It’s times like these, which is pretty much every workday, when I like to read a daily helping of meta-Marmaduke, where Joe Mathlete explains today’s Marmaduke cartoon (in 500 words or less).

I’ve always joked that every Marmaduke cartoon, throughout histroy, could be paraphrased with the same 6 words: “That is a really big dog.” But Mr. Mathlete proves that there is much more going on in those single-panels . . .

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