nathansmart.com

All Russians - listen up.

You’ve been trying to spam me for the last few months and I’ve thwarted all of your efforts.  In doing so, you’ve inconvienced me by making me sign up to my site and actually do work on it.  As a result, I will now punish all of your precious country.

Effective immediately, anyone trying to comment on my blog that has even a remotely sounding Russian name or talks about anything Russian will be banned not allowed to comment on my wonderful blog ever again.  I will also report you to Al Gore and he will make sure that you never work on the internet ever again.*

*That’s right.  I’m so flustered over this that I’m making Al-Gore-invented-the-internet jokes.

How much of a douchebag do you have to be, to be the douchebag in a Vanilla Ice movie - and your name’s not Vanilla Ice?

BTW, I didn’t know this (from Wikipedia):

Cool as Ice is a 1991 film loosely based on Rebel Without a Cause, and often referred to as the Vanilla Ice Movie.

I had no idea that the alternate title for Cool as Ice was “The Vanilla Ice Movie.”

Thanks to Matt.

How vain can you be about yourself when you’re shopping for clothes in a food court?

One day I’ll make it in the big city…
And I’ll be lookin’ for a girl who’s pretty.
One day I’ll make a play,
And she will say ‘OK,’
‘Cuz I plan to be a cool kid.

-Tevin Campbell, Round and Round

R&B stars have long since flirted with rap music and none more so than the stars of New Jack Swing.  It’s only natural that they would try to rap over hard hitting beats and keyboard stabs.  What isn’t natural, however, is their ability to rap.

Bobby Brown rapped about the dual-temperatured Ghostbusters in On Our Own. Biv showed us what it takes to get a production deal with him in Motownphilly. In Round and Round, Tevin Campbell takes us into the dreams of a 13-year old that just wants “to be a cool kid.”

I was doing a search on this song and somewhere on the net I found a blog post that implies that Tevin is a homosexual just because of this specific rap.  I don’t know what links have to be made in the mind of a homophobe but I have to admit, the rap certainly doesn’t scream, “F*ck yeah, I’m a hetero!”  Or maybe that’s exactly what it screams, because who, in defending their sexuality, would ever scream, “F*ck yeah, I’m a hetero!”

I admit, I’m not exactly being fair to Tevin.  He didn’t even write the song.  Prince is the mastermind behind this stable of rhymes - and NO ONE would ever call Prince gay.  A little fey, maybe, but certainly not gay.  (my thoughts on adults writing love song lyrics for children I’ll save for another post)

In reading the rest of the lyrics, it seems as if this song is all about making shit happen!  It talks about people who dream and talk big but never “go for it.”  That’s where the bridge comes in.

Apparently, Tevin’s big dream is to get laid.  He plans to accomplish this by being a successful city guy and an all around cool kid.  I’m not sure what he means by “make a play” but it sounds pretty easy.  All you wannabe players should heed this advice and keep this poem on a card in your money clip.

Whatever your aim is in life, we can all be certain that it isn’t to shame yourself by recording such an awful sequence of words.  If there’s one thing you take away from Tevin’s example, it’s to never agree to such rubbish even when propositioned by the biggest little star in the universe (and no, Kanye, I’m not talking about you).

By the way, if you’re curious, Tevin hasn’t really talked about it since, but in 1999 he pleaded no contest to soliciting sexual acts from an undercover policeman.  Is that what he means by “make a play?”

How long must we endure this verbal terrorism in the form of character names in video games?

I’m of course talking about Ryu, the top left character choice in all of the Street Fighter games.  He’s kind of like Daniel-san on steroids (if steroids were a more current reference) except that he’s Japanese and not from Reseda.  Ryu is your average, everyday karate fighter who can also shoot colored fireballs from his hands.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Ryu.  In fact, I usually go for him when I play this game (mostly because it took me too long to master the Shoryuken as a child not keep using it over and over again).  My beef with him is the pronounciation of his name.  In God’s language (which has been shown time and time again to be English) it’s pronounced rye-yoo (or ree-yoo if you’re a little retarded) and that makes for such an easy, roll-off-the-tongue feel.  In fact, it almost makes my tongue nod off from the sheer comfortableness of it.

But, of course, nothing in Japan is easy - although a lot of their food has rolled off my tongue out of disgust.  In Japan, you’re supposed to pronounce it as dyoo or some impossible way to type out (with God’s keyboard).  The ‘r’ sound in Japanese is non-existant and so they just made up their own way to say it (why they still use it when there’s no sound attached is beyond me - probably some dumb samurai code left over from gay-ncient times).

I looked all over the net for a good explanation on how to pronounce ‘r’ words in Japanese and all I could find was people saying things like, “It’s just a ‘d’ sound,” and, “It’s a combination of ‘r,’ ‘l’ and ‘d.’”  That’s ridiculous.  Then, I tried to listen to actual Japanese people say it and whenever they use it, it just sounds like a ‘d.’  Why not frickin’ just use a ‘d’ then?  Is ‘r’ just the raw version of ‘d?’  I mean, these people eat everything raw.  Is it so weird to think they have raw versions of our alphabet as well?

I propose a change for the Japanese linguists.  I propose that we either get rid of the ‘r’ altogether and just use a ‘d’ or we compromise and just start pronouncing things the way God intended us - in this case, Rye-yoo.  I mean, it’s not like we all haven’t been saying it this way since Ninja Gaiden back in ‘89.  How long did it take you guys to start including shy-guys in your Mario games ever since you tricked us into playing Doki Doki Panic?  Pretty much right the frick away.  So why not cut us some slack and let us enjoy your games without sounding like assholes at the arcade.

“Who are you going to be?”

“I’m going with.. um.. Ree.. Rye..  I like Guile.  I’ll use Guile…  Or is it Geel?”

Here’s a quote from one of my favorite comedians right now.  He’s genius!  His name is Alistair Bottlesworth and he’s one of the edgiest, but still proper and upright comedians working the road today:

I do believe that this proposition 8 is quite a nasty ordeal.  What does proposition 8 even stand for?  I thought I was voting no on 8 chaps propositioning one another!

I’m conflicted on the material.  On one hand he’s just so offensive and homophobic but on the other hand he’s got such a proper demeanor!  What’s more important in comedy, I ask you?

No, of course not.

Unbelievable.

I went to see the Glow in the Dark tour on Friday night and wow. If you thought rappers had egos, Kanye West makes them look like shy 4 year-olds. The stage looked like a desert landscape and it was supposed to be another planet like Mars or something. He had huge moving screens, including a floor screen that had hydraulics on it.

The story is, while on a space trip home to Earth, there is a crash and Kanye is stranded on this planet. His spaceship has a computer named Jane that talks to him giving him encouragement and advice. He talks back and forth to it though out the show and it keeps the story moving between songs.

And speaking of, every song is treated like it’s the last song he’ll ever sing. I’ve never seen such importance being flaunted in a rap song. The intensity Kanye infused into every performance made a song like Gold Digger sound like “I have a dream…” or “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do…”

Highlights:

1) Kanye getting eaten by a (and I don’t use this word much) F*CKING dragon and then spit out.

2) A creepy mannequin, calling itself a shooting star, telling Kanye that he is the biggest star in the universe.

3) Kanye: I can’t do this anymore Jane. I need more in my life. I need a woman. I need P*SSY Jane!
Jane: I can help you with that.
Kanye: How can you help me? You’re just a stupid computer!
[GOLDEN BIKINI WOMAN appears]
Next Song: Jesus Walks

4) Kanye tells Jane that he’s going to give up and then a woman appears and sings the first verse and chorus of Don’t Stop Believin’ by Journey (and if it wasn’t clearly a woman’s voice (and body), you would’ve thought they were just playing an MP3 of the song it was so accurately played by the band).

5) Jane telling Kanye that the only way he (and really us) can get home is with the power of his shining star, as all the other stars have just come and gone. He’s the only one left.

6) Kanye addresses the Bonnaroo incident and says he had done 45 shows before then and hadn’t been late once.

All in all, it was very entertaining - but it just made me despise his own image of himself even more than I already had. I just hope that his ego never gets in the way of making good music because he’s done an OK job so far.