I read a statistic today. This statistic was that 1 in 11 kids in either MN (or the US, doesn’t really matter where) do not get enough to eat. That means, almost 10 percent of the adolescent population does not get a full meal all the time, or sometimes, not at all. This is lame. Hungry kids do stuff. They steal, beg, and do whatever they have to do to get some chow. This in turn teaches them that no one is going to help them. No one is going to bring them a warm dinner, a blanket, a shoulder to rest their heads on when they’re sick. This is lame. Because as adults, we tend to use what we learned as children in our decision making as adults. Meaning, if you stole so you could get a loaf of bread or some green beans as a kid, you would likely steal again as an adult. Not completely your fault, as it’s all you’ve ever known. Hopefully you’d be smart enough to think that MAYBE theivery was a bad idea, and go on to better ways of making money, like a job. A lot of times, this doesn’t happen though, and we start breeding criminals. Sure, it seems innocent enough. Kid swipes a frozen dinner for him and kid sister. Next thing you know, he’s graduated to stealing video games from Best Buy. From there, you got your auto theft, your home invasion, on up to white collar crimes. Embezzlement is fun everyone! Wait, no. No embezzling. That’s bad.

Now, what do we do about this? Sure, there is the work food drive, the home food drive, the donations from big corporations. Everyone pitches in dough around the holidays so that single and underpaid parents alike can feed their kids the typical Thanksgiving meal, complete with a turkey and stuffing. This is great, for that one night of the year. Maybe even a few nights, as turkey leftovers tend to go a long ways. But, what happens after that meal? Kids go right back to starving, having to rely on an already overrun food supply system that is seeing increases in need from the economic fallout on an exponential basis. And then I got to thinkin……

Child obesity is at an all time high. More and more kids are turning off the bike, and on the Xbox. Less and less are our kids getting out there for exercise, and sitting in front of the TV longer. There are many contributing factors to this. More parents are afraid of kids getting injured or kidnapped, forcing them to limit the childs’ activities in the interest of safety. So, no more going out to play until the street lights come on, but if you’re lucky, you’ll have a play date next month. There is also the increased stress on parents, where instead of making a decent dinner, they stop at the McDonalds and get the kids Happy Meals. All in all, less activity all around. When you do less, realistically you should eat less, right? I mean, you could simply say, run around the back yard for a while, but we all know better than that. So that brings us to less food. Maybe you don’t eat that box of Twinkies, or maybe you only eat a serving of Hamburger Helper instead of 3.  Suddenly, we have a surplus of food sitting in our cupboards, doing nothing. So, what do you think we do with this food? How about…. we give it to the starving kids? It all works! Starving kids get to eat chow, and not steal from me. Fat kids eat less chow, and stop workin’ over my tax bill for health programs to make fat kids less fat!

I tell you, sometimes, I’m a genius.

So several months ago, there was a chili contest at work. Me, having a sick sense of humor, entered. Now if you’ve ever met me in real life, I take spicy food as a challenge. I’ve completed the Buffalo Wild Wings Blazin’ challenge. I was going to attempt back to back, but everyone else got bored. Safe to say, I like it hot. Anyhow, we had this chili contest, and I came in second. Normally I’d have been ok with this, but I swear, it was rigged. EVERY judge from that contest had stated that I had the best chili, even if I had made them sweat a bit. My reply to this was, I ran out of peppers.They cried. Anyhow, I came in second, to some sort of bland, chili-ish mixture. It had beans, it had some sort of flavor, there was meat, but yeah. TOTALLY forgettable. Shortly thereafter, it was announced that due to the WILD success of the first chili contest, we would be having more cookoffs. My plan was set.

I was going to make the single HOTTEST batch of chili I could muster. I wasn’t going for the win here, I was going for pain. The kind of pain that makes you question the sanity of the creator. The kind of pain that comes with warnings. The kind of pain that requires 3 bottles of milk and a shot of Novocaine to get over. Freakin’ PAIN. What happened next was a little odd. I won. Somehow, out of 4 contestants, I came in first. I was the recipient of a Walmart gift card, which is going to buy me a video game in the next hour or so, once I leave work. Probably Fallout 3, unless my car slips and I get Gears 2 instead.

But what was in this chili, you ask? Well, here is the recipe, in its entireity. Not one bit of it was plagairized from another chef, hell, I made it up as I went along. And yes, there really is bacon in it.

Keep in mind, this is directly from the email I sent to a co worker, and is officially the first recipe I have ever written. Total cost, about 30$. Watching my supervisors sweat, priceless. And I have an excuse to spend money on me now!

You’ve all seen a beater. A car that is usually quite rusty, has a lot of body damage, or both. Often it smokes, leaks/burns oil, and is probably unfit for travel. Loud, mismatched tires, no hubcaps, doors that don’t always open, close, lock, or all of the above. Cars that in all reality, should be crushed. But there they are, clogging up our roads with their laughable acceleration, frequent breakdowns, and let’s not forget, the questionable characters behind the wheel. Often single men, they look scruffy, dirty, and downright dangerous. But why are they driving these cars? Are they in some sort of financial trouble? Can they not obtain a job due to their anti-social appearance?

All of those are distinct possibilities, but I find it’s for another reason. There is a very zen experience to be found in a beater. My 89 Escort was the perfect example. This car was TERRIBLE. The rear suspension was completely shot, sagging much like the ass end of a dog trying to take a poop. 3 of the 4 doors worked, sometimes. You couldn’t lock the driver door, and you couldn’t open the passenger door. Both rear doors worked well, strangely. It was a wagon, and of course, the the liftgate didn’t work. At all. The hood latch was sticky, when you could get it to pop (This was accomplished by a lot of force and a pair of pliers.) It leaked gasoline, oil, coolant, transmission fluid, and I’m fairly certain there was some pancake syrup under there at one point. It only had 3 hubcaps, and the tires were mismatched as much as humanly possible. The interior was just as good, featuring a drivers seat that was shredded, a radio that didn’t work most of the time, and interior lights that didn’t work at all. The car wasn’t a total loss though. The heat worked, it got decent mileage, and it started every time. This gem cost me 350$.

Why was I driving such a lovely machine? Well, I had wrecked my other car, and needed some wheels to get me by until it was repaired. It was either rent a car, borrow a car, or buy a car. Buy a car was the cheapest option. Bought a car I did. At first, I hated it. I didn’t want to be seen in this pile of garbage. I was driving WAY below what I thought should be my level. And I was still trying to impress the ladies. I was never very good looking, so my car was all I ever had. But now, I was stuck with the Escort. And then….

It happened. I started enjoying this car. I savored the time I had with it. Why? Could be any number of reasons. I know I never cared about where I left it, or what was left in it, simply because I never left anything good in it. I think there may have been 47 cents in the ash tray, But other than that, there was nothing of value in that car. The car was actually an automatic, which was rare, so there wasn’t even a shift knob to steal. I also didn’t care about the exterior. I once came out to the car, and found a bonus dent in it. I actually kicked the car on the other side to make it match, and called it good. There was something special about driving a car like that. Something about hooning it around in the winter, creaming a snow bank, and continuing on my merry way. It made me feel….. at one with the car. The car understood me. It knew that it was basic transportation at best, and MAYBE some fun, when it wasn’t falling apart. But it was very liberating not caring about a car. Knowing that without question, I always had the worst car in a given situation. No one ever wanted to ride with me anywhere, which meant I was never tapped to be sober cab. My hatchback didn’t work, so no one ever wanted me to move stuff with it. It was the best thing ever. I never had to worry about it.

Sometimes, even now, driving either the Mini, or the Speed, I miss those days.

This one is going to be short. Who is Perez Hilton? I turn on my TV one day and see this mincing little moo cow flooped all over MTV and VH1. Somehow, he’s the reigning king (queen?) of gossip media.  Somehow, this guy has got his face splashed all over TV, and has made a bucketload of cash. I’m all for cash, but I cannot fathom what the hell Viacom sees in this guy enough to give him a contract. Really. Someone tell me please?

I’m going to say this right now. This is going to be rife with spoilers, simply because there is no way to properly convey how crap this movie is, without the addition of spoilers. If you still want to see it, turn away now.

Let me start out by saying, I had high hopes for this one. I have always been a fan of apocalypse style- everyone’s gonna die type movies. So when this was in ye olde Redbox at Walmart, I thought, “Hey, this might be good.” Oh but how wrong I was.

The movie starts out in Central Park, innocently enough. A random breeze blows through, everyone stops, rewinds about 10 steps, and offs themselves. Rather creatively too. We see one woman in particular that chooses to tap into her jugular with the metal chopstick that had previously been holding up her hair.

This is the last time the movie is any good. What follows is a 90 minute trainwreck of terrible acting, poor scripting, and possibly the DUMBEST twist M. Night has chosen to use. To his credit, Mark Wahlberg is a solid actor. If you’ve ever seen Three Kings, you know what I mean. I usually will give ol’ Marky Mark the benefit of the doubt with his movies, since for some reason he is not really A-listed like I believe he should be. What he did in this movie however, is inexcusable. I’m fairly certain a pair of Mr. Potatoheads could have done a better job of phoning this one in that he did. His “wife” for the movie, was so terrible at acting, I couldn’t be bothered to look up her name. The rest of the supporting cast was marginal at best, with John Leguizamo doing whatever it is he does, crazy hippy plant man really liking hot dogs, and possibly the single best/worst generic army private character to hit the screen. Characters with absolutely no ties to the plot flow in and out of the movie, as if a small child is repeatedly filling a toilet with GI Joes and flushing it. You see the character, are aware of their existence, and as soon as they are gone, forget what they were doing there in the first place. The one remotely amusing part of the movie was Mrs. Jones. You see, our intrepid heroes are on the run from this “threat”, whatever the threat might be. They come across a small home in the middle of nowhere, that has no electricity, no phone, no anything. The driveway hasn’t been driven on in YEARS, according to Mr. Marky Mark. They are greeted be an elderly woman who is sitting on the porch, and regards them with much disgust upon meeting them. What follows this interaction is the BEST bipolar acting in decades. This woman was nuts, and not like movie nuts, like truly freakin goofy. She invites them in for dinner, which is “the polite thing to do” according to her. The little girl that Lead Actor Marky Mark is charged with guarding, reaches for a cookie that has been placed on the table, supposedly for dessert. Mrs. Nutjob slaps the shit out of her, stating rather abruptly that “She should not take what is hers”. Ok, I get this, maybe the cookies are for someone else, and Mrs. Nutjob had left them on the table by accident. But no, that must not be it, as Mrs. Nutjob hands Generic Little Girl Protagonist a cookie! And it only gets better from there, as she invites them to stay the night, and then wanders around like a raving lunatic saying that Marky Mark is out to rob her and steal her stuff. The next morning culminates with more of these incoherent accusations, and then Mrs Nutjob catches the threat and offs herself by bashing her head into every window and door in her wonderfully creepy little cottage. The movie ends not far after, with Marky, Generic Little Girl, and Miscellaneous Wife surviving the “threat”. At this point you may ask yourself, where did M Night go with his trademarked twist? Was it space aliens? Was everyone really dead and seeing things, Was it a terrorist threat? I’ll let you think about that one a moment…….

IT WAS THE FREAKIN’ TREES. You read that right, the trees did it. And the grass too I s’pose as well as any other organic plant matter that was outdoors. According to our director, the trees perceived humans as threats. They communicated with other trees, who then decided it would be a good idea to systematically off all of humanity on the Upper East Coast. I’m not making this up here. A news report towards the end of the movie confirmed it, stating that the trees were inducing people to kill themselves in creative fashion by excreting some sort of neurotoxin. So no terrorists, no nothin’, just the damn trees. The best part? It was all a ploy by the trees to get humans to knock off with the global warming. I found this to be so out there, so ludicrous, that I can only imagine how the sale of this movie went.

[Phone rings]

Movie Company: Hello? This is Superbig Movie Company how can I direct your call?

M. Night: This is M. Night Shyamalan, I have a new movie. With a TWIST!

Movie Company: OH! Mr. M. Night! Let me forward you to our lead producers, so they can get you your bucket of money.

[Insert hold music here]

Lead Producer: This is Lead Producer.

M. Night Shyamalan: Yes Mr. Lead Producer, this is M. Night. I have a new movie. With a TWIST! Your audiences will love it!

Lead Producer: I’m sure they will M. Night. Where do you want me to send your bucket of money?

M Night Shyamalan: Wait, don’t you even want to hear the TWIST?!?!? You see, There is this park, and everyone starts acting all odd and then they kill themselves then Marky Mark goes on a quest to get away from the threat and.. (Lead Producer checked out of this conversation 5 minutes ago, preferring to play Minesweeper) the best part? It’s the TREES! The Trees are killing society! Your audience will LOVE IT!

Lead Producer: Mmmnmnmmm (muffled voice) Yeah, I’ll have a chicken wrap and those little… oh. M. Night, you’re still on the line? Yeah that plot sounds awesome. We’ll start production immediately. You want to use Joaquin Phoenix again? No? Mel Gibson?………. Mark Wahlberg. Ok, we can do that. He was good in Three Kings. I’ll have your bucket of money sent over immediately.

What followed after that, you’ve already read. I cannot stress enough how terrible this movie was. I for one, am going to take a MUCH more critical approach after this one. If M. Night pulls this crap again, I’m going to fly to Hollywood and smack him in his stupid twisted head myself.