Ready Player One

Wow, what a giant, loud and busy, colorful noise fest this movie is! When it comes on TV, it can be sponsored by some brand of abusable cough syrup. There are so many pop culture references especially to movies and video games that it seemed like the new kind of product placement. After all, media conglomerates are grabbing up more and more slices of the pie of movie, music and video game content, so the more references there are to other movies and songs and video games they own there are, the more likely they will spur viewers to go and buy or stream that stuff after watching this thing, and so on. So instead of characters in a movie drinking a coke, they're listening to some song the movie company owns, or playing some video game they own, or they've got a movie poster, or some action figure from a movie or comic book the company owns, and on and on and on, and $$$ more for the conglomerate. Pretty soon underground movies will have to try to see how many things they can try to leave out of their movies to deny big conglomerates free advertising that generates more revenue for them to go acquire more and bigger pieces of the media content pie. (Mmm, I'll bet that's good pie! Can you have it and eat it too? I think this movie proves that if you own enough stuff, you can cram it all into a self-referential geek fest and essentially have it and eat it and even bake and sell more and more pies and cakes of it too on and on forever until you give everyone Type 2 Diabetes.)

NORAD Tracking Santa

I see on the news that NORAD is tracking Santa Claus this Christmas Eve. During a government shutdown NORAD still gets funding for tracking Santa Claus, when other agencies do not get funded? Well, this really shows where our government's priorities lie: spying. They're tracking Santa Claus's activities, probably covertly via satellite. Do they have a warrant for this surveillance activity? They probably already know what Santa is bringing them for Christmas too, those cheaters. I want a congressional investigation!

Rudolph’s Rhinoplasty

In this (joke) ad for a (fictitious) plastic surgery office, we hear the part of the well-known song: “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” that goes:

Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer had a very shiny nose

And if you ever saw it you would even say it glows

All of the other reindeer used to laugh and call him names

They never let poor Rudolph join in any reindeer games

Then the song continues with the altered lyrics:

Then Rudolph got a reprieve through plastic surgery

Rudolph’s nose now looks so good that he moved to Hollywood

Now all the reindeers love him and he stars in big movies

Rudolph the nose-job reindeer got Rudolph’s Rhinoplasty!

Then the announcer chimes in, saying: “Yes, Rudolph got his nose fixed, and you can too, at Rudolph’s Rhinoplasty!”

Trump Attacks Institutions Handed Down to Us

Last night on Real Time with Bill Maher, Republican strategist Steve Schmidt said President Trump is constantly assaulting the institutions that have been handed down to us as part of our American inheritance.

Of course: Trump is rich, so he doesn't like hand-me-downs. He only likes new things that were made especially for him.

Adidas Samba OG Shoes

I just got a new pair of Adidas Samba OG indoor soccer shoes. They don't have the annoying overly long flip-over tongue, so they cost an extra $30. I guess that's like when Fender used to charge $200 more for a fretless bass because then they wouldn't get to have to go to the trouble to measure, fret, and add inlays to the fingerboard, and not doing stuff like that costs money, don't you know?

I wonder if the "OG" in the name stands for: "Own Goal"? (An own goal is when a soccer player accidentally scores a goal against their own team.)

Barbasol Jurassic World Collectors Can

In cleaning out my bathroom recently I ran across an old collectors edition can of Barbasol shaving cream branded for the Jurassic World movie. It has pictures of dinosaurs on it. I remember thinking, when I bought it: "I want to use the shaving cream dinosaurs use."

But of course there was a Barbasol shaving cream can in the original Jurassic Park. That duplicitous dweeb guy used it to smuggle out the dinosaur DNA. But that can didn't have dinosaurs printed on it or it may have caused suspicion. As if a guy who can barely grow facial hair bringing a can of shaving cream to his desk at work isn't suspicious enough already.

It may seem strange that a shaving cream company would be involved in a corporate espionage scheme to steal dinosaur DNA from a high-tech theme park, but I remember reading once that scientists claim shaving cream was way better 100 million years ago when it was in a more primordial state. Of course, because it was so good, the dinosaurs used it all up, causing their extinction. Barbasol's thinking when they tried to steal the dinosaur DNA was likely that if they could clone a dinosaur with the stolen DNA, maybe they could ask it how to make shaving cream like it was back in the dinosaur era. That way they would save the money it will cost to send Duck Dodgers to Planet X to wage war against the Martians for control of its vast natural resources of the shaving cream atom Illudium Phosdex. (It is said that on Planet X, shaving cream deposits are in a primordial state similar to how it was on prehistoric Earth.) But then the dinosaurs will obviously conquer the planet in order to get back the shaving cream supply they lost so they can use it up again. They just never learn, with those teensy brains.

It's pretty funny that there are collectible cans of shaving cream commemorating movies. Do people actually collect them? I wonder if Barbasol made commemorative cans in 1931 for the movies Dracula and Frankenstein? Dracula would have been in the original red can, and Frankenstein in the soothing aloe green can, obviously. I'd be interested in having those cans, maybe, if they exist, which they don't. I kind of doubt Jurassic World will be remembered as fondly 85 years from now as those movies are, but of course, I could be wrong.

The Hanoi Hilton

With the passing of American hero and Arizona Senator John McCain last weekend we've heard a lot about the "Hanoi Hilton", which was the prisoner-of-war camp John McCain suffered in for numerous years during the Vietnam War. I've often wondered how much the Hilton Hotel company paid Ho Chi Minh for the rights to name it the Hanoi Hilton. They must have had a bidding war with Hyatt and Holiday Inn over who got to add their company's name. Nowadays corporations like to sponsor sports facilities, but back then I guess it was stuff like prison camps that were available to name. Maybe the Hanoi Hilton is the earliest example of such a corporate sponsorship in exchange for naming rights.