Five Pseudo-OCD Quirks That Control My Life

Oh hey! Are you still here? Man, you have some dedication in you, don’t you? Or are you just too drunk to find your way home? I mean, really, it’s been nearly two months since my last blog post. Most folks have taken the hint that I’m an undisciplined, unmotivated, uninteresting writer who would rather spend his lazy summer days watching entire seasons of The Wire on DVD and snacking on EZ Cheeze and Ding Dongs than to even bother to put together a couple humorous, cohesive sentences.

That said, I thought I’d throw you a bone since you keep coming back to peer through the cobwebs and see if anyone is home in this haunted house I call a blog.

Honestly, I meant to write more. I just never did. I’m not going to make any excuses or promises, but I will say that I’m offering this quick update and that I have three other drafts sitting in the queue for whenever I get around to them.  By that time, I’m hoping that people are still actually reading things on computers and not just telepathically absorbing information. I mean, I’m not the most reliable person when it comes to timeliness. You never know what could happen between my blog posts. Heck, just last year a black man was elected President of the United States while I was too busy betting on college football games to pay any notice.

Americans are a crazy bunch, huh?

And speaking of crazy, how about those people with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder? What’s with all that hand washing, chief? Do you spend your days inside an elephant’s rectum? Or what about the folks who have to touch things a certain number of times in order to feel better about themselves? I don’t think that’s going to improve your standing at your fast food gig, Dorothy. Is alcoholism a version of OCD? Wouldn’t it have to be? If you can’t help yourself, that’s the textbook definition of compulsion.

Now, don’t start firing off nasty comments about me making fun of OCD sufferers (Unless, of course, that’s your OCD thing. And if it is, you should really stay off the internet before your hands fall off or your keyboard explodes.).  I’m merely setting things up to reveal my very own versions of the obsessive-compulsive lifestyle, albeit to a much lesser degree. I never noticed it before, but there are a lot of things I do covertly that could garner me some funny looks if I were a bit more flamboyant in my behaviors.

Just off the top of my head, here are five things that make me quirky:

1. Eating Things According to Size. This mostly applies to potato chips, but I’ve also caught myself doing it with pieces of fruit, popcorn and even slices of pizza. If you dump a bag of Cheetos out on my plate, the first ones I will reach for are the tiny broken bits. Gotta clean them up first. Then I move on accordingly until only the biggest pieces remain. Same with any kind of chip or snack food. Hell, just last night I sliced up a nectarine. I had eight segments lined up on my plate from thinnest to fattest. And it wasn’t a casual judgment call either. I studied each piece until I could determine exactly which one was next in line. That’s weird. But you want to know the strangest part? With popcorn, I do the opposite, eating the biggest kernels first and saving the runts for last.

2. Star Searching While Watching Film Credits. This one is a bit harder to explain and probably didn’t crop up until I started enjoying film as an art form…okay, that’s pure bullshit. I just like to watch movies, but never appreciated the actors until I was old enough to determine who I liked and/or didn’t like. Anyway, I watch the cast credits of movies and look for the most recognizable name I can find the furthest down the list. I may not be explaining that well, so I’ll give you an example: Larry Drake (Dr. Giggles) was in The Karate Kid as “Yahoo #1 at Beach,” a role for which I’m sure he’s quite proud. But when I say “Karate Kid,” you think of Ralph Macchio and Arnold from Happy Days, because Larry Drake was near the end of the cast list and also because no one knows who Larry Drake is. It’s a stupid game I play in my own head that probably arose from watching a bunch of 70’s and 80’s movies in college. But it’s also a fun way to find out that some of your favorite actors started off in really shitty roles. Hey, did anyone know that Tony Todd (Candyman) was in Platoon?

3. Goosebumps From Opening Star Wars Theme. This one isn’t so much a quirk as it is a weird Pavlovian reaction. I don’t care how shitty the prequels were and I don’t care how many times I’ve seen the original trilogy, I still get goosebumps every single time I hear the opening theme music to Star Wars. It is a warm and vivid childhood memory that will never leave me. And I have no shame about it. I will shed blood to defend my nostalgia.

4. Television Volume Settings. We have a fancy new flat panel LCD television that I take great pride in. We have one of the top tier cable packages that supplies hundreds of channels for me to watch, many of them in high definition. And we have hundreds of DVDs that I could pop in at a moment’s notice to view groundbreaking cinematic works. However, we will never watch that television with the volume set at 11. I just can’t do it. In the morning, I usually have CNN on, set at a reasonable level of 8. During the day, the volume increases to 10 or 12 depending on the channel and the environment. Occasionally, if the kids are being rowdy or if college football is on, I push it up to 15. And, for some reason, my Blu-Ray player is very quiet and needs to be set at 20, 25, or sometimes as high as 32 for optimum enjoyment. However, I can’t bring myself to set the volume at 23 or 14 or 17 or 9. Those numbers just seem off to me. They’re not even enough, or incremental enough or something. My television time must have structure…or else! Or else WHAT, I don’t know, but or else nonetheless. This one is definitely a psychological thing.

5. Tissue After Shower. This last one is something that I can’t remember starting, but for some reason I can remember a time when I didn’t do it. As soon as I get out of the shower, I grab a tissue or some toilet paper and clean out my ears and my nostrils. It’s a bizarre pattern that I got into at some point in my life and I feel completely weird if I don’t do it. There’s no explanation really. I just don’t like having water in those places after a shower. I could go swimming all day long and it would never bother me, but once I’m fresh out of the shower, I need to be dry inside and out.

So there. Enjoy your brief insight into my real life. In the near future (or some vague time that isn’t right now), I’ll be talking about things that have nothing to do with me and you’ll dream about the days that you thought you knew me better.

I’m such an enigma.

Is Green Screen The New Black?

I used to bemoan the rise of reality programming on television. In my all-important opinion, “reality” should be limited to game shows and the news (with a crucial nod of the head to The Daily Show). When I turn on my television at the end of a long day, I want to be entertained by clever situations, interesting characters and compelling dialogue. Transport me to different eras. Show me the future. Or at the very least, give me a good fart joke and some canned laughter.

However, there’s a new phenomenon that has arisen from the incestual orgy of reality television. And that mostly unnecessary invention is: the commentary clip show. You know the ones I’m talking about, the “host stands in front of green screen and gets snarky over clips of other shows” shows.

Modern scholars of television will tell you that the “look at how stupid people can be” shows have been around for a long time. Classics include Candid Camera with Alan Funt, TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes with Dick Clark and Ed McMahon, and anything on Fox News that involved Geraldo Rivera’s mustache. And here’s where I make the crucial distinctions between those shows and the plague that is consuming my cable provider’s on-screen guide.

See, Candid Camera took ordinary innocent people off the street and made fools of them for the twisted pleasure of the home audience. This wonderfully unique television breakthrough was, of course, all douched up by Ashton Kutcher when he appropriated it for his celebutard retelling in Punk’d. The pretense with Punk’d was that it relied on celebrities to act as normal people, which they invariably never do. It was like one big televised inside joke amongst the LA elite, but instead of surprising a run-of-the-mill civilian who was just trying to put a quarter in a parking meter, Punk’d displayed such classics as Zach Braff vulgarly berating and threatening bodily violence on a 10 year-old for spray painting his $100,000 Porsche. What a dick.

You may say: But Mr. DeadbeatJONES, didn’t Dick Clark and Ed McMahon pull similar stunts on unwitting celebrities during their TV’s Bloopers run? Yes,dear reader. Yes, they did. However, that was in the 80’s when celebrities weren’t such fame-obsessed asshats. Pulling a practical joke on the chick from Remington Steele never ended in a fistfight. And the majority of that program was dedicated to revealing bloopers from television shows. It was fun to watch your favorite actors screw up their lines or act up on set. Plus, Misters Clark and McMahon were always cordial in their commentary. And the Sergio Aragones cartoons were cute.

Geraldo Rivera’s mustache has no excuses.

But let’s get back to the current crop of green screen marvels. The granddaddy of them all is E!’s The Soup. First appearing as Talk Soup back in 1991, The Soup is best known for making fun of the weird things that happen on television from the most obvious sources. They delve into daytime talk shows, game shows, home shopping, public access, entertainment news shows and all kinds of reality programming. The show is also known for its very funny hosts, including the Oscar-nominated Greg Kinnear and the current comic genius Joel McHale.

I don’t begrudge The Soup its success. I watch it every week. It’s consistently one of the funniest things on television. And, with the horribly misguided things that get airtime these days, The Soup has a very large pool from which to fish for funny.

No, my problem (and finally the reason for this rambling post) is with all the Soup spin-offs and clones that continue to pop up. First we had Sports Soup, hosted by the relatively unfunny Matt Iseman.

You may be surprised to learn that the basis of this show is greed. Let me explain. See, cable giant Comcast owns E! and they also own Versus (network home of Sports Soup). I imagine a big staff meeting full of suit-clad older gentlemen took place in a giant glass-lined conference room on the top floor of a large building in downtown Philadelphia where one gentleman said “The Soup is quite popular” and another gentleman replied “We should put a version of that show on every other channel we own.” And thus, Sports Soup was born. Sports Soup, as the title suggests, shows sports-related bloopers. Yawn.

By extension, The Dish is the female version of The Soup. It is also pinned to a Comcast-owned channel, in this case the Style network. The show is hosted by Topanga from Boy Meets World. She’s cute and all, but the writers on the show must drink a lot of decaf coffee because I was yawning through most of the segments I forced myself to watch. They seemed to focus more on shopping and dating, topics that make me cringe. They also shake up the accepted norms by being the only green screen show that positions the host on the left side of the screen. Crazy women!

Web Soup is the newest stepchild of the Comcast empire, making its home on G4. The host, Chris Hardwick, is best remembered as the guy who no one remembers as the cohost of Singled Out, the seminal MTV dating show. I say he isn’t remembered not because he’s unfunny (I find him humorous but geekily awkward) but rather because anyone who watched that program only did so to either gawk at Jenny McCarthy’s rack or watch in horror as she finally decided to sate her hunger for human flesh and tear into the cheek muscles of a hapless contestant with her animalistic fury (and oddly alluring burping and farting). Web Soup covers the snarky commentary of online videos and poorly planned internet stunts.

Oddly enough, Web Soup debuted a few weeks after Comedy Central’s version of the green screen phenomenon, Tosh.0…which also exists to skewer online tropes, but is hosted by the much funnier Daniel Tosh. Sadly, the show isn’t all that original in the first place and seems to be scheduled whenever Comedy Central has a hole to fill in their lineup.

So what’s my complaint? Just laziness really. I will not criticize The Soup, like I said previously. Its home is subtitled “Entertainment Television,” so it makes sense for the show to exist. The other ones? Not so much.

And, honestly, I don’t begrudge Comcast their short-sighted programming solutions. You work with what you have, right? No, the one that really irks me is the Comedy Central thing. Aside from The Daily Show, the last relevant thing Comedy Central actually contributed to comedy was the endless reruns of Office Space back in 2002.

At first I thought that Viacom (Comedy Central’s owner) was going to launch a plan similar to Comcast…a green screen on every channel! I mean, VH1 used to have their own version of Web Soup with the clip show Web Junk 20 and the green screen snark has invaded a good portion of their lineup, from I Love the 80s to Best Week Ever.

But could Viacom stretch the green screen magic to all of their channels? Would a clip show work on Nickelodeon? I don’t think the kids would get it. We already know that MTV hasn’t produced anything watchable since Remote Control (for the young’uns, that was a hilarious game show that helped launch the careers of Denis Leary and Adam Sandler). Hell, half of The Soup’s humor comes from poking fun at The Hills and The Real World. Although, I have to admit that a green screen show on BET could be hilarious.

But with sports clip shows and female-oriented clip shows and web-based clip shows, why not exploit other niche channels? Let’s throw a green screen and a host in front of Food Network and make hilarious jokes about recipes and beating eggs. Slap someone in front of a screen on Travel Channel and make fun of foreigners. Build a green screen on HGTV and have a host make fun of people’s horrible design sense. Better yet, give Bravo a green screen show to accommodate all those Housewives, pretentious fashion designers and reruns of Will & Grace.

You know what, I just had an epiphany! I’m off to scribble down my idea for a green screen show that exclusively shows clips of other green screen shows. Yes, my program will make fun of the shows making fun of the shows. How meta is that?

See you in Hollywood, suckers!

Olivia Munn: A Birthday Haiku.

No matter how old

You still look better than me

When I was your age.

Seven Deadly Spots on the Human Body

Here’s a weird one that I was thinking about the other day. When I was a kid, my dad and I used to watch professional wrestling together. Went to some live shows. Even had one of them spit on my shoe.

But this isn’t about that. I’ve outgrown wrestling. Seriously. I haven’t had a friend put me in a figure-four leglock in at least 24 years.

See, back in the day, USA Network used to have Sunday programming that featured a show called All American Wrestling at 11am Eastern time. And that was triumphantly followed by the totally awesome Kung Fu Theatre at noon.

Kung Fu Theatre was usually on in the background as I acted out the wrestling moves I had just seen on my dad. I do remember one or two of the movies though. There was that one with the brothers with the really long ponytails that they used as weapons. And there was one with a girl and a fan (or was that just from the videogame Yie Ar Kung Fu?).

Anyway, the movie I want to focus on featured a crazy old man who was teaching some sort of orphaned dude the secrets of Kung Fu so that he could exact revenge on the evil warlord who murdered his family. Pretty typical plot for those movies.

The cool part was the old man detailing the “Seven Deadly Spots” on the human body and showing the kid how you could immobilize someone by utilizing these body locations. I’m not sure if I remember them all correctly, but I know at least four of them are from the film. My dad and I still laugh about this list…

1. Temple
2. Philtrum
3. Armpit
4. Liver
5. Solarplexus
6. Groin
7. Big Toe

Look, I can understand the temple. The skull is thinnest at that point, right? And punching someone in the philtrum can jam their nose cartilage up into their brain (urban legend?). The armpit has lymphnodes that I guess can cause a lot of pain. Maybe? A liver shot actually can lead to internal bleeding. A fist to the solarplexus is gonna knock the wind out of you. And the groin shot is a much-loved tradition of Home Video Submission Shows. Plus, it makes a man cry.

But the Big Toe? Really? What’s a punch to the toe gonna do? Make you bend over, grab your foot, and do that “heavy breathing through clenched teeth” move that you orchestrate when you get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and accidentally stub your toe on the cat?

We all know that hurting the knee will just make your opponent go into that hilarious Crane pose from Karate Kid. I guess the guys from Cobra Kai should’ve aimed a bit lower to take out Daniel-san.

The Big Toe. Protect it or die.

…

As a brief aside, if anyone knows the name of the movie I’m talking about, PLEASE let me know. I’ve been looking online but can’t find anything.

Olivia Munn: Haiku Memories

Dear Olivia

Stop winking at me on screen

My wife gets jealous

Comics For Sale!

Hey there, lurkers. I’m just dropping in to say that I’m exorcising my comic book collection and you could benefit from it!

I’ve listed 37 auctions on eBay. Bid on something. Own a piece of my life. Become one with deadbeatJONES.

Claim your piece of my pop culture childhood HERE.

Flashing Back to Innocence.

When I was probably 12 or so, I got a television for my bedroom.

I know that isn’t a HUGE revelation for today’s prepubescent cell phone holders, but back in the day, that was a BIG deal.

My grandmother got one of those original video cameras…y’know, the kind you practically needed to hoist on your shoulder and hold with two hands just to get a fuzzy shot of your dog pissing on your slippers? Well, she let me borrow it for a while and I was able to rent videos for my viewing pleasure.

Around the time I was 14 or 15, the local 7-11 started a video rental aisle (Not too long after this, the local 7-11 ceased to be. Coincidence? Yeah, probably.).

I don’t really have any revelation to make here. Just wanted to give a preamble for one of those “writing exercise” lists that I spoke about a while back.

So, without further ado, here’s my list of Movies I Remember Renting From My Local 7-11 When I Was A Teenager:

Hiding Out

Can’t Buy Me Love

Chopping Mall

Class of Nuke ‘Em High

Fraternity Vacation

C.H.U.D.

Dead Ringers

Action Jackson

The Principal

Surf Nazis Must Die

Summer School

Hamburger…The Motion Picture

Stewardess School

Private Resort

Rappin’

Johnny Be Good

A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon

Evidently, my formative years were buffeted by horrible scripts, awful acting and unbelievable amounts of cheese. Perhaps that explains my current level of cynicism. Or my fascination with pop culture.

Cloudy With A Chance of Boner.

Sometimes the weather is HARD to predict.

ZING!

Never Mind, Hitler.

Regarding that last post: I apologize for getting all emo. Turns out the situation isn’t as dire as it seemed. I’ll be getting unemployment after all. In fact, I may be able to live at the expense of the state for up to a year!

So…now I can go back to talking about homophobic beauty pageant contestants, Earth Day and this:

and this:

and this:

and this:

and this:

and this:

and this:

and, in some sort of bizarre double-meme ironic twist, this:

The Near Future of deadbeatJONES.

As some of you may know, I recently lost my job. I think I may have mentioned it once or twice. Unfortunately, I do not qualify for unemployment benefits either…blame it on the Byzantine process that the state of Pennsylvania puts you through…or the fact that I was unemployed for most of last year too…but what it all boils down to is that I, ironically, did not make enough money to qualify for unemployment. I was too poor to be poor.

Funny.

My wife returned to full-time work about a month ago, after being unemployed herself for nearly a year. Sadly, she isn’t making as much money as she used to and with only her salary coming in, we still fall nearly $1500 short of just paying the bills every month (that doesn’t count gas, food or any surprise expenses). My two sons are too young (even if you add their ages together) to go out and find meaningful employment. And I’m in some sort of job-finding limbo right now.

I’ll be able to reapply for unemployment in July, but our monthly deficit may not let us keep our house that long. Joy.

So, I decided to drag out a couple screenplays I had written years ago, polish them up and see if I could network a bit and try to sell them. Luckily, a few of my college pals are doing well out in LA-LA land and, long story short, one of them offered to read one of my scripts.

That being said, blog posts will be few and far between (or, most likely, completely nonexistent) here at DBJ headquarters for the next few weeks as I rewrite and reformat my screenplay in hopes of impressing someone somewhere at some time.

And, hopefully, this activity will distract me from the guys who will soon be showing up to repossess our house. I hope they don’t let the dog out. She tends to run away.

Wish me luck!