Respect Authority

Kira was nice enough to ruin my day with the following segment, a British PSA warning about texting while driving, which was specifically designed to disgust and horrify… so basically it’s just like VH1’s Celebreality line up.

Seriously though, if you ever wondered what it would be like if some depraved sadist directed a mashup of Death Proof and Crash, your deranged, nightmarish prayers have finally been answered. This shit is truly putting the “viral” back in “viral video” — so, yeah… vomiting is definitely a likely side effect.

My co-host, however, was remiss in watching the video without sound. It would be a mistake akin to eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without the peanut butter — a jelly overload, and this short exercise in scaring the shit out of teenagers has more than enough “jelly” as it is.

By jelly, of course I’m actually referring to blood.

In fact, it kind of amazes me that this video is as gory as it is, including the cringe-inducing brittle cracks of 16-year old necks breaking, considering you can’t even say the word “bomb” on MTV anymore. Indeed, somehow, this manages to tug on every dangling heart string at once with its inspired orchestra of manslaughter, dead babies, and orphaned children. A real feel-good film.

Anyway, I wrote this post on my Blackberry while in traffic, so you’ll have to excuse me as I need to Twitter about that 18 car pile up behind me. There are just too many irresponsible drivers out there on the road these days.

It’s tales like these that really emphasize how important good communication is in a relationship…

…particularly when you’re in a relationship with a person who has shaped their personality around horrifying archetypes of high school girls typically portrayed in teen comedies.

Or, for that matter, when you’re dating a guy with high-functioning autism. This whole video reads like Mean Girls crossed with Adam, which sounds like a movie I’d really like to never see. Basically, this relationship was all kinds of fucked from the start — it’s really one of those stories where all of the characters are completely unlikable so you’re not even upset at the end when nothing works out. Which I guess is a lot like real life.

During my daily travels across the world wide web, I stumbled upon this optical illusion. The problem? To me… it isn’t one. The only thing it’s been able to trick me into is eye strain.

I get the vague sense that something is happening, but its ethereal and lurking in the shadows of my mind. I don’t know if I just need to take another hit of this optical illusion shit or what, but I feel like I’m missing out on the party.

Can you see it? Am I a big loser for not being able to? Or, perhaps more importantly, am I just a big loser for caring?

So what if it’s been sort of a squirrely week here at RA… eat my nuts.

There is an extremely high probability that this is a fake — but my god, just imagine how incredible the world would suddenly be if it wasn’t? And that’s exactly why this is the best science fiction film to come out all summer. Forget Star Trek, and Terminator, and Transformers — not even a huge pair of swinging Decepticon testicles tea-bagging preteen audiences in face-melting IMAX theaters all across the country can match the level of fun contained in a mere 24 seconds of this streaming video.

Now… if only it was in Disney Digital 3D, this would be setting major precedents in the genre for the first time since The Matrix. And honestly, at this point, I’d gladly trade quarter-mile-long crocodile miles in all of my big-budget action films over dudes barrel-rolling their way past a barrage of bullets all the goddamned fucking time. At least it’d be something new.

Take a good look at the above photo. Is Kanye just signing an autograph for an awestruck fan, or is he pulling off a daring modified dick-through-the-popcorn-bucket maneuver, perhaps forever redefining the term “sneakerhead”? The world may never know… or, at least it won’t until TMZ finds out anyway.

When they’re not being predominantly creepy or smelly, the mentally ill are often quite interesting to behold. Russel Fong, an amateur videographer from the more-clean-than-mean streets of Brooklyn apparently agrees, as he recently sat down and interviewed Lawrence LaDouceur, more commonly known as The Bedford Ranter or just “that guy who yells in the middle of the street.” Heck, he’s as much a Williamsburg fixture as plastic wayfarers or a crushed can of PBR.

Considering his litany of felony charges and various bouts of institutionalization, the man can’t exactly get a job at the closest Mickey D’s, so Lawrence spends most of his time ranting about the sad state of our society in his own special breed of psychosis-addled English. Of course, some have contended that psychosis is merely an extreme state of consciousness that falls beyond the norms experienced by most — and one would be hard pressed to argue that Lawrence doesn’t experience the world in quite the same way as the average complacent cog walking down the street.

His ideas are incendiary, occasionally veering into the dangerous gray areas surrounding xenophobia; nonetheless, his story, albeit tragic, is consistently fascinating, especially as a rare view into the actual life of one of the so-called nutcrackers we regularly dismiss on our daily commutes to our arguably insane 9 to 5 routines.

As the old quote goes, “It’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” And while Lawrence might not be exactly well adjusted in… fuck it, just about any society, at the very least, I would hope we could all agree that the amount of attention paid to whether or not the stars of Twilight are doing it is quite demented in its own right.

Having a particular day of the year set aside for skateboarding (June 21st) seems about as pointless as having a special day reserved for smoking copious amounts weed. If you really profess to be a skateboarder, every day should be a celebration of your slow, glorious decent into perpetual adolescence. Similarly, 4/20 is a great idea and all… except that most of us truly dedicated wastes of life smoke almost every single day of the year anyway. I guess it’s the thought that counts after all… so, thanks to whatever anonymous committee first took the whopping ten seconds to think of that idea.

However, if Santa Claus jumped down your chimney at the stroke of midnight every night like clockwork itself, wouldn’t Christmas just be business as usual? Indeed, if it was always Halloween, wouldn’t the skeleton king grow weary and bored, eventually seeking out different forms of holiday cheer, going on to inspire a claymation musical which would then make Hot Topic ludicrous sums of money for an entire decade?

Nonetheless, there are always those who try to make the special specialer, such as SLAP magazine, Adidas, and skate shop FTC who collaborated this past Go Skateboarding Day in San Francisco to put on the 7×7 Video Contest. The contest featured entrants from shops such as FTC SF, HUF SF, 35 North, and Skateworks, with each five-member team heading out into the streets of San Francisco to create a video part recreating iconic photography from the pages of SLAP’s past.

HUF just posted their finished video, which, admittedly, looks a little more fun than your average flat-ground session in the parking lot.

Now, if only they combined Go Skateboarding Day and 4/20 to form a massive black hole of slacker delights we might finally be talking about a real holiday. Hell, you might as well throw Talk Like a Pirate Day into the mix while you’re at it, just to make it that much more intolerable for the mundane majority. Ha ha, people with ambitions are dumb!

It’s interesting that even after all those uptight health officials put an end to inspiring (but mostly misleading) cigarette advertisements like the ones below, a sizable portion of young people still think smoking is a cool thing to do. Unfortunately, what the Surgeon General will never truly understand is that the deliciously poisonous nature of cigarettes that makes them such a modern scourge in the first place is the very basis of their cool factor. When you’re young and have plenty of life in front of you, or, conversely, have little to no “life” at all, coming up with fun ways to kill yourself seems like pretty much the bee’s knees. Just ask James Dean about it sometime, he started it.

Personally, I’m in favor of loosening up cigarette advertising restrictions just so we can have some extra entertainment piled on the night stand next to our death beds. Actually, Is it even possible to laugh when you have an iron lung?

In a time when “pointlessly weird” is nearly synonymous with advertising in general, this vintage Benson & Hedges ad could nonetheless easily give The Burger King himself not lung cancer, but fucking brain cancer if he dared to try wrapping his mind around this strange artifact from marketing’s deranged past. The longer you look at it, the more hopelessly lost in its senselessness you fall — it’s like the quick sand of soft sells.

Is the sentient cosmic sea cucumber trying in vain to burn a hole through the astronaut’s helmet with his cigarette? Are we to assume Benson & Hedges smokes are so good that they can actually burn in an oxygen-deprived environment? Not to mention… is the alien an American citizen? What does his enjoyment of a smooth, flavorful cigarette on the desolate craters of the moon have to do with them being America’s favorite brand anyway? Is it simply that their sweet plumes of toxins are so irresistible, even vastly advanced space-faring civilizations that should surely know better just can’t say no? Or maybe sentient cosmic sea cucumbers just want to be cool too — and who are we to begrudge them that?

Seriously though… somebody actually thought this would help sell cigarettes. That’s probably the single craziest thing about it. Fortunately, it wasn’t long before Big Tobacco learned to better apply the sciences to peddle their deadly wares. Read More ›

I’m hesitant to say that the new Tron Legacy trailer is the latest entry in the dark realm of things nerds inappropriately masturbate to, but only because nerds really never stopped whacking off to Tron in the first place.

Now, due to my ongoing crusade to fill the gaps left in a world without Michael Jackson (which so far has involved far too much babysitting), I decided to share an alternate version of the Tron Legacy trailer instead, which features a perfectly synced up “Beat It” as the soundtrack — making this suddenly much cooler… in a homoerotic digital gang fight kind of way.

Plus, now any overexcited Comic Con attendees won’t even have to feel bad about their dirty little CGI fantasies considering the King of Pop himself is essentially ordering them to “just beat it.” Then again, it is a movie about a video game so… take that as you will. Not everything in life is about masturbation after all. Just most things.

It kind of redefines the concept of an 80s classics mash-up — it’s just as surprising and nostalgically amusing as Girl Talk, but didn’t require nearly as many half-naked hipsters to get there.

However, if I had to choose a classic sci-fi mindfuck to be recreated, I’d go with Total Recall. Unfortunately I think that title has already been reserved for the upcoming documentary about Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger’s career as Conan the Governor.

Yeesh… this post is dripping with so many movie references you’d think I crossed the streams.

Damn girl, where'd you get them Crocs?

The Washington Post seems to believe Crocs won’t have the longevity of the species’ they’re named after, but more likely the lifespan of something they more closely resemble — rotten Swiss cheese:

The company swung from a profit of $168.2 million in fiscal year 2007 to a loss of $185.1 million last year. In its annual report, Crocs said that an independent auditor expressed concerns about “conditions that raise substantial doubt about our ability to continue.” Its stock price has plummeted 76 percent.

In other words, even when common sense, self-respect, and, uh, a working pair of eyes couldn’t do it, something finally managed to kill the Crocs. Some may be quick to blame it on the recession, although I’d put my remaining few pennies on the shoes themselves causing their own demise. That’s right fellow fashionistas, just like that horrifying cyclops baby, some things are just too ugly to be allowed to live. Read More ›

The August, 1985 issue of Ebony — curiously the last issue of Ebony to know a world without my iron will’s influence rippling through it — ran a feature by Chicago artist Nathan Wright, depicting what the day’s black celebrities would look like in the murky, far-flung reaches of our future… yes, of course I am referring to the year 2000.

Click for full size

The artist presumed that “time will be kind to today’s black stars,” however, this was undoubtedly assuming 1985’s black stars didn’t turn themselves into circus sideshows entirely on their own. Indeed, it would have been hard for Wright to picture a future where Michael Jackson had actually transformed into a white star. But it’s hardly his fault, Terminator 2: Judgment Day wouldn’t come out for another six years, hell, George W. Bush wouldn’t even be elected as president until the year 2000 — there was simply no way to know that the future would be such a dark fucking place.

So Wright understandably missed the mark when he said, “At 40, [The Moonwalker in question] will have aged gracefully and will have a handsome, more mature look.” Yeah… it would be kind of difficult to say he got that right, unless “a handsome, more mature look” means “resembling a living animé character made entirely out of porcelain.”

Anyway, this one probably should have been left to rest, but it was just so gosh-darned, um, thrilling I couldn’t help but raise it from the dead. Although now methinks I may just be beating it to… er… death. Aw jeez… does anyone know any good Farrah Fawcett or Billy Mays jokes?