Gilbert Gottfried reads 50 Shades of Grey. Not even remotely SFW.

So I had my physical the other day, complete with all that entails. The worst part for me isn't the body cavity search or the ripping out of hairs when the EKG sensors are removed, but the fact that I have to starve myself. I'm a morning person, and I usually eat breakfast by 5:30. So when I'm sitting there at 8:30 without having eaten, I'm starving and grumpy. And then they take my precious blood.

So, naturally, I walked next door to the Burger King, as it was the only place I could count on getting food in my system before falling down. The sandwich was fine for what it was, but the coffee? Holy crap, that was the worst cup of coffee I've had in years. I've gotten spoiled now that McDonalds is offering Newman's Own (and at $1 for a large), and with McD's, Dunkin, and Starbucks all on my walk to work, I'm generally guaranteed at least a decent cup of coffee. Hell, even the occasional 7-11 cup is passable.

But that cup I got at Burger King? Unbelievably awful. It's basically the same crappy coffee BK and McDs were serving years ago (although the cup claims that the beans are from Seattle's Best, which I suspect borders on libel). In fact, it might actually have been brewed years ago. I suspect that BK treats coffee the way folks in Flea Bottom treat vats of brown, letting it simmer for years and occasionally adding a stray pigeon or corpse to add some flavor.

So, yeah. I'd forgotten how bad coffee can be. In The Killing Dance, Anita Blake says, “I'd never met coffee that wasn't wonderful. It was just a matter of how wonderful it was.” I used that as my sig file for a while (back when sig files were a thing, which was back when email was a thing, but before Facebook was a thing*). I don't think I could utter that with a straight face now.

*Also back when Anita Blake books were kind of a good thing.

(/shatner)

If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation.

A liberal wonders who is going to take care of him.

There can be no question our country is in the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes. I also think there can be no question that it falls on us, the individuals, to find a way out of our own personal crisis, as we can.

Both of those come straight from Curt Schilling's blog.

Curt Schilling, who this week has announced he wouldn't be able to pay back the big government load from Rhode Island, stiffed his employees by not paying any of them, and then bounced the check he used to pay Rhode Island (which was the supposed justification for stiffing the employees in the first place).

Stay classy, Curt.

The Avengers started because of "the imagination of one man -- Stan Lee."

Thanks to CNN, I now know that all that stuff I thought I knew about Kirby was wrong. Yay, journalism!

Okay, after three episodes, I've given up all hope on the wretched Ultimate Spider-Man series. It's appallingly awful, manages to be ludicrously untrue to the characters, and has no idea how to pull off good fantasy sequences. Literally, the only thing good about the show is the occasional remix of the old Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends at the end (in fact, both DC and Marvel are doing a great job with shorts, but that's a topic for another post).

Between this and Krypto the Super-Dog, can we agree that anointing Paul Dini with a "genius" tag for creating one awesome update of an Infinity Inc villain and a few (admittedly awesome) Tiny Toons and Freakazoid scripts was a little premature?

And no, that doesn't mean Dini's a hack or untalented. Just that we seem to have a habit of deciding that one great work (or a handful) puts someone on a pedestal (it's a cult of personality thing not dissimilar from the genre/geek fetishization discussed here). Very few artists (in any field) never release a mediocre work. There's nothing wrong with that, but too often, folks seem to either assume a creator must be perfect (and how dare you criticize that later work, because that first one makes them bulletproof), or a sense of stunned shock that such a genius could have fallen.

It's not just Dini, of course; Neil Gaiman could have stopped writing comics last millennium, and no one would lump Sandman and Miracleman in with 1602 and The Eternals. Alan Moore's been ludicrously inconstant for his entire career, but works like Necronomicon are so masturbatorily awful that I want to walk into the store and paste "Alan Smithee" over his name.

And it happens in every medium -- witness Joseph Heller's final six novels, none of which were even in the same league as Catch-22. None of them, of course, make Catch-22 any less of a great novel. Hell, Orson Scott Card's willingness to keep going back to the Enderverse (assuming he's not just letting his "co-authors" do all the work these days) to the point of literary strip-mining doesn't make Ender's Game any less of a novel than his ludicrously reactionary columns do.

We (as fans, readers, critics, whatever) love to hail artists as geniuses, but we forget that A) even geniuses make mistakes, B) a great work can come from someone who is merely "talented," and C) and, of course, many such works come from more than one person: editors, cinematographers, musicians, and others affect works, too.

tl;dr Ultimate Spider-Man continues the Marvel streak of less-than-stellar cartoons.

Okay, I don't know anyone who actually likes Domino's Pizza anyway. Between their dodgy politics and their less-than-edible ingredients, it's pretty much the pizza equivalent of a McDonald's hamburger.

But their cynical attempt to hornswoggle celiac disease sufferers (during celiac awareness month, no less) is still pretty damned low.

Domino's has proudly announced that they've released gluten-free crusts. Sounds awesome, right?

But the crust -- which costs more than the standard crust, of course -- is cooked in the same over as the regular pizzas, with no special trays or anything else. In other words, the pizzas will be fully cross-contaminated. The ONLY people who this would appeal to would be the idiotic folks who view gluten-free as a trendy diet (spoiler: it isn't). Folks with celiac or with major wheat allergies? They're basically screwed here.

Of course, Domino's acknowledges this in the fine print. Which only goes to show that their lawyers had some input. But this is a cynical move designed to pretend they give a shit about their customers when instead, they're likely to send thousands of folks who don't read the fine print to the bathroom or the hospital.

Put bluntly, their use of "gluten-free" to describe this is consumer fraud. Fuck them with a dull pizza cutter.

Current Mood: pissed off

Spoilers ho!

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that he's not only a bigot, but a dishonest one.

Yeah, I know it's no surprise, but the audacity the man has still manages to surprise me. He is truly a disgusting excuse for a human being.

(Wanring: Link contains bigotry, idiocy, and dishonesty. You've been warned.)

The Blu-Ray Deal of the Week is The Coen Brother Collection (with Blood Simple, Fargo, Miller's Crossing, and Raising Arizona) for $24.99 (64% off).

The TV Deal of the Week is Firefly -- by the guy what did The Avengers! -- for 62-69% off. That's $18.99 on DVD and $27.99 on Blu-Ray. Speaking of The Avengers, Captain America: The First Avenger is $19.96 (56% off) for the two-disc DVD/Blu-Ray combo pack with a digital copy.

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete on Blu-Ray is only $7.88 (71% off).

Other good deals include the unrated Bridesmaids on DVD for $9.99 (57% off), the 15th Anniversary Edition of Stargate on Blu-Ray for $5.96 (60% off), J. Edgar on Blu-Ray (with digital copy) for $9.99 (67% off), Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close on Blu-Ray for $9.99 (67% off), the Blu-Ray version of Terminator 2: Judgment Day for $5 (75% off), District 9 on Blu-Ray for $9.54 (65% off), and The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.: The Complete Series for $22.49 (78% off).

In video games, Ninja Gaiden 3 is $39.99 (33% off) for PS3 and Xbox, Rage is $14.99 (25% off) for both systems, and the Fallout 3/Oblivion combo pack is $19.99 (33% off) for Xbox.

Adam Yauch has died. I love the Beasties, of course, but within the group, Yauch/MCA was always my favorite; his voice just contrasted so sharply with Diamond's and Horovitz's.

I was going to post a long tribute, but between work and still being sick, writing anything more than fifty words takes energy I just don't have. So here's No Sleep 'Til Brooklyn: