Month: January 2008

Here, my friends, is the latest Bigwig film, YouTubed for your convenience! Please feel free to give it anywhere from four to five stars.

One Take Johnny (YouTube)

This post is not about cartoons. It is not about video games and it is also not about tinker toys or junk food films. Allow me this brief deviation from the JLR norm as I boast the outcome of today’s men’s college basketball contest; one that pitted Louisville (this is the team you should love) against Kentucky (this is the team you should hate).

Each year, be it basketball or football (it is always both, of course), these two state-sharing rivals battle it out to decide which fans get to be bigger assholes to the other for the following year. This is fruitless, however, because Kentucky fans can never not be loafing roustabouts; it is a genetic trait sewn deep within their alcohol-thinned life fluids. Let me first establish why Louisville is better than Kentucky, regardless of their close vicinity to one another. I will explain this in terms that even the most sports-loathing of nerds will be able to understand.

The city of Louisville is a shining golden nugget in the state of Kentucky. It’s as if King Midas sought to touch the whole state, but could only reach its northernmost region. The rest of the state, as sprawling as it may be, is essentially a desert of fools. Lexington, the University of Kentucky’s home base, is like Mos Eisley in that— and I’m sure you could complete this sentence with little effort— it is a wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Kentucky fans hate Louisville fans because the latter walk upright. They uncovered the ancient “maths” and “books” of their forefathers and have taken to their studies like any good, advanced civilization would. This angers the Kentucky fans to the point of spoken slander and physical violence, both of which are usually hindered by the blinding amount of alcohol and/or meth in their systems.

To make a long story short, it’s red lasers (Louisville) versus blue lasers (Kentucky). Though blue lasers are generally considered the “good guys,” everyone knows that Cobra was much cooler than G.I. Joe.

In today’s game, Louisville, under command of their coach Rick Pitino, emerged victorious with a final score of 89-75. This puts Kentucky’s current season at a reeking 6-7. Residents of Kentucky are no doubt busy turning over tractors and driving their strange primordial auto-buggies around in circles, hoping the subsequent donuts and DUIs will be the salve to today’s poisoned wound.

Oh, I also won a 25 dollar bet with my old man (who snapped the above photo). Beans to you but means to me!

Enjoy my “final word” on Contra 4 over at the Otaku USA site.

Unless I’m taking special care to secure myself in the bunker below, my general writing area is one that faces a window directly looking out into my backyard. Obviously, greater forces are imploring that I stay confined to get all of my work done today, because the typically distracting wildlife television screen I face daily has been encrusted in a shell of pure crystallized ice. Here is the day’s view from the eyes of Joseph Luster:

Will he ever escape his frigid tomb? Will his work day prove productive, or will he perish like an arctic mummy, hand forever frozen in the midst of typing his death throe pleas?

Find out!

Much to the chagrin of potentially hilarious storytelling, I didn’t spend my New Year’s Eve boozin’ through the ball drop. I didn’t spend it doing the “mashed potato” or the “alligator” (though if such an opportunity had presented itself to me, I surely could not turn it down). I did not party, even though I can assure you my “momma wasn’t home.”

Rather, my lids dropped along with the ball, like a time-addled watchman living long enough to ensure that this young Planet Earth would make it through just one more year. Smiling, my body fizzled into stardust, and the blanket keeping it warm slowly sagged with nothing more to keep it alive and inflated. My dog began to chew on the remains, thinking them spoils.

I did get to see my very favourite episode of Twilight Zone before passing, though.

“Time Enough At Last,” as I’m sure the majority of you are aware, stars a thickly bespectacled Burgess Meredith as a veritable Omega Man, not unlike Mister William Smith in the film I Am Legend (You will find such popular relevancies a common occurrence on this weblog). There are no monsters plaguing his loneliness, though, just more loneliness. What he finds in this rocked and rumbled world is, aside from a lack of company, endless supplies of food, comfortable couches to sleep on, and the promise of a full life that nobody would want to live.

Then he finds a gun. Thinking, like many of us would, that ending it all would be best, he puts it to his temple. His would-be final sight is that of a crumbled public library, a vision so shocking as to erase all thoughts of suicide. He runs to it! Books, books and more books: collected works of his most beloved authors, bound tomes of sublime poetry; enough material to, much like his food supplies, last a lifetime.

So he organizes them into monthly and yearly towers of knowledge, preparing to terrorize their faculties like a mental Godzilla. The best part? Just as the title proclaims, he has “time enough at last” to devour it all. Just as he begins to dive in with a grin that would take a lifetime to sour, his glasses fall to the concrete below! The lenses shatter on impact, leaving worthless decorative frames in their absence. “No, no. It-it isn’t fair” he says. “It’s just not fair!”

Most of the episode, for those of you that have never seen it, is comprised of Meredith walking a bomb-torn MGM set, reeling out his internal monologue aloud, just as I’d like to imagine anyone in this situation would. Even as I wake up in my room, no longer a watchful, elderly caretaker for this planet, I am reminded of why these are probably the stories that influence me the most. You can even see their ghoulish control over something as brief as a Slamm Dunk cover.

That’s all folks, Happy New Year. No related YouTube links or scintillating images here, because it’s 2008 and you’ve time at last to indulge fully in The Joseph Luster Report!