Oz Monroe's Blog, page 4

I want to write for South Park!

If you are not watching this season of South Park, you are seriously missing out. Once again Matt Stone and Trey Parker have hit a cultural nerve and attacked it with insightful abandon. And if you are offended by the cartoon, you can take that stick out of your ass and replace it with some form of motorized phallus, because you need to go fuck yourself.

God damn I want to write for that show. Maybe I should start a Gofundme to fly me to their studio so I can camp out in front like Huike waiting to learn from Bodhidharma. My mind is still, oh masters of irreverent comedy. Let me learn at your side.

I know I said that my ultimate life goal is to write a 10 part mini-series of Tolkien’s first age, and that would still be awesome, but to write for South Park I would do unspeakable things to myself, or anyone willing. Well, unspeakable until it was time to write a script for the show, then it’s balls out (literal and figurative) and pedal to the metal.

Matt Stone and Trey Parker have a gift for pointing out the absurdities of extremism. Time and time again they take both sides of an issue and drive it to its utmost, and in so doing they reveal that no matter where we stand, if we take ourselves too seriously we become a caricature of our own ideals. And if they have fourth graders jacking off a dog or a tiny Cartman/Cupid pissing in sleeping people’s mouths now and then, all the better. The obscenities act like a shoehorn, prying your mind open just wide enough that maybe a new idea can slip in.

No one, and I mean NO ONE, has better comedic timing. The first time I watched South Park it was of the first six shows, and with episode one I was sold. There was a scene where Cartman is… you know what? Watch it for yourselves.

See that silence that lasts a couple beats? Fucking Genius! And they’ve only gotten better.

Now that I think about it, my whole life has been in preparation to write for South Park. Every disgusting comment, every timely insult, even my Throw Oz Under The Bus Blog Challenge, has been to better equip me for South Park.

Please Matt and Trey, give me a chance. Comedy is my life, and pointing out stupid shit people do is my passion. Give me a glass of wine, throw me in the room with the other writers, and watch me soar.

Share this blog if you think I should write for South Park. Maybe they will hear.

~Oz

But why?

I’ve been asked why I have chosen to forgo even the attempt to pitch my novel to be traditionally published.

I had lunch with a couple of agents at the most recent writer’s conference I attended, and when one asked for me to give her a pitch, I simply said “No thank you.”

I don’t need an agent, because I don’t need a publisher. The only thing a publisher can offer me that I can’t do, or have done, for myself is to give me the street cred for belonging to a once prestigious club.

Advances are at an all-time low, most of their editing staff is gone, marketing support is all but nonexistent, and they take the lion’s share of the profits. To top it all off, if I sell to a publisher I lose any say for the title and cover art. I have to work with whatever teem the publisher provides. My novel has to pass through and be approved by a panel of “experts” before being put on a shelf. Really? Art by committee?

Fuck that. This is my art, my love, my story, my vision. I don’t need a bunch of people sitting around a desk to tell me if my novel has marketability. What the hell do they know about marketability anyway?

Only 10% of what they sell makes money. That means that they are wrong 90% of the time as to what readers want. Not only are they wrong with what they do buy, they often miss the mark on what to not buy.

How many times did Harry Potter get rejected? Here is a list of 20 famous authors and how many times they were rejected.

Look, I get it. It must be immensely difficult to try to guess what people want. Publishers are trying to predict the future, and like palm-readers, fortune cookies, and telephone astrologers, the best they can do is give some vague advice and hope they get lucky.

They say they are looking for the next big thing, but in reality they are looking for a copy of the big thing that sold yesterday. They are running so close to failure that they can’t afford to take a chance on something new or innovative.

My biggest problem with publishers, the thing that really gets my blood boiling, is that Publishers have conflated their “authority of position” for “authority of knowledge.” Just because they have the power to say what gets on the shelf doesn’t mean they have the knowledge of what gets bought. In fact, the evidence plainly shows that they do not.

That isn’t to say I’m doing it all myself. I may be a control freak when it comes to my art, but I’m not stupid. I know full well I don’t know everything. Joss Whedon, Christopher Nolan, and Peter Jackson didn’t do it all themselves. They hired a kick-ass crew of special effects artists, cinematographers, etc. to help achieve their vision. But through it all, they were at the helm.

As am I.

 

Self-publishing is expensive, and scary. An editor can cost 3-6 dollars a page. Cover art can be anywhere from $100-$1,000. That’s for starters. And the time and effort it takes to find the right people to work with is daunting.

When I’m asked by other authors if they should self-publish, I ask them if they are willing to bet $5,000+ on their novel. Are they willing to risk thousands of dollars on their story? If you believe in your art enough that you are willing to throw down that kind of cash, knowing full well that you may never make it back, and you have the time and drive to put in the work, then I say go for it.

If you aren’t, what makes you think a Publisher will?

 

The Prestige

The first time I held my wife’s hand it was magic, and I fell in love.

I was a sophomore in high school and she was a junior. Heather was (is) short, blonde and busty, just my type. Her best friend (to protect her identity, we’ll just call her Cora) was tall, brunette, and beautiful, also just my type. To clarify, my type then (and now) is female and willing to talk to me. As it turns out, that is a woefully small percentage of the population.

My best friend, (for the sake of protecting his identity I’ll just call him Andy) and I had crushes on them both. They were smart and had wicked mean senses of humor. We had a thing for women that could hold their own with the insults. A vicious quick wit is sexy.

Andy and I did everything we could to gain their favor, like primates rolling around to impress a potential mate. Now, I have a higher level of competency than the average person. I am generally good at everything I try, not the best, but good. But Andy was always better. His jokes were faster and funnier, his flips and handsprings better, he walked on his hands farther, he could talk to them without almost throwing up, you know, all the things that teenage boys think teenage girls like, he did them all better.

Because of all these things (really, just the ability to talk to them) Andy always got the girl, and since we had the same taste in women, I never did. There was never any animosity or jealousy, it was a challenge, like wanting to finally beat a friend at Mario Cart.

The one thing I had over Andy when it came to Heather was my slight academic advantage. I read books. Not the thing boys of my generation thought of as a turn on for girls, but in this case, it worked. Heather read book too. Better yet, we both read books about dragons. We spent hours talking about Dragon Flight and The Dragon Prince

My infatuation with Cora was put on the back burner, which was a good thing really. She was tall, and tall women scare me even more than the short ones. Don’t get me wrong, given half a chance I would still have tried to climb that tree. Thankfully, I never had to give her a reason to shoot me down.

So, on to the magical night I first held Heather’s hand, and fell in love.

Andy and I were hanging out with Heather at her place, a large ranch out in the country. The three of us went for a walk. We did this a lot, and as was normal, the three of us ended up laying side by side with Heather between us, just bullshitting the night away in some secluded part of the ranch. It was cold so Heather had brought a blanket, ‘cause she was smart like that.

I saw my chance, and I took it. I reached under the blanket and grabbed her hand. My heart was racing, and when she began to slowly caress my hand with her thumb I thought my heart would explode. She liked me!

Andy, the bane of my dating life, was right there. She had her pick of the two of us and she inexplicably choose me. It was glorious. It was like magic.

We had been laying like that for about an hour when Heather showed me and Andy just how magical she was, and how all magic was just a trick. She lifted both hands up and out of the blanket to ruffle her hair and stretch. Only, I was still holding and caressing her hand under the blanket. Did she have three hands? Oh, no…I slowly lifted my head to look over Heather at Andy, who was also lifting his head to look at me.

We both figured it out at the same time.

We had been holding each other’s hand for the better part of an hour.

We jerked our hands away and both looked at Heather. SHE. KNEW. THE. WHOLE. TIME!

She had let us make complete fools of ourselves in an incredibly embarrassing way, all for her own enjoyment. It was in that moment, when I saw that mischievous twinkle in her eyes, and that knowing smirk on her face, that I fell in love.

Andy went on to marry Cora, and Heather and I have now been together for over 20 years.

But every now and then, I think back to that hand I held that fateful night…and I wonder….

Pay to Play

I’m getting a late start on this week’s Throw Oz Under the Bus Blog Challenge. I was up until 3:30am with my nine month old. He has decided that sleep is for chumps. Then I had to get up at 7:00am to dive several hours away and spend too much money so both my daughters can have matching ponies. So if I’m not overly articulate with this post, you know why.

On with the Challenge. This week’s winning suggestion is:

“If the state requires something (i.e. vaccines), then should the state be required to pay for it? Ad for extra credit: how much more safety legislation would be acceptable just to encourage the paranoid types to leave?”

My answer is No, and for extra credit, whatever it takes. Thank you and good night. I’m going to go catch up on some sleep…

Ok, I can feel your disdain through the temporal continuum. Longer answer? Right, longer answer.

First, the State has required things they shouldn’t have to pay for, for a long time. Auto insurance, smog check, uh… and a bunch of other stuff I can’t think of.

Oh, and I’m not sure when the government came together on the whole child neglect and reckless endangerment stuff, but when they did it became a lot less legal to starve your children and let them die from fixable injuries. You are legally obligated to feed your children, no matter how late the little bastards keep you up at night or how many times in a row they sing that fucking song from Frozen, or how much they hate everything you cook even when it was their favorite thing just last week, or if the peas touched the sauce on the chicken, AAHHHHHHH JUST PUT THE FUCKING FOOD IN YOUR MOUTH!!!………sorry, I touched a nerve there. Where was I? Oh, yes, you are required to feed your children but we don’t expect the State to pay for the food.

Same thing with medical care. If your child gets injured from falling off that religious high horse of yours, and you just keep trying to pray away the intracranial hematoma until your child dies, your ass is going to jail. Your ass SHOULD go to jail.

You are legally required to provide medical care to your children, but the government isn’t required to pay for it. And Vaccines? Oh don’t get me started on the anti-vaxxers. I don’t have enough time or Valium to deal with how much those uppity, brain-deficient, crunchy cocksuckers piss me off. I’ll just say that vaccines should be a requirement to live in our society, like a price of admission. A price the parent should pay, not the State.

Oh, and about the extra credit; I’m willing to go to just about any length of safety shenanigans if it would mean getting rid of the paranoid types. I’ll encase myself in bubble wrap, caution tape, and one of those suits people wear to train attacks dogs. Those people spread insanity and fear like chimps flinging handfuls of shit. Man, I wish there was an inoculation for stupidity.

As always, these views I spout are just off the top of my head. They are to be treated like the half-cocked, easily discounted, theories that they are. It’s like a starting point of a discussion. I say something stupid, you say something equally stupid, and we go back and forth until we agree on something far stupider than either could have come up with on our own.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Tell me how I got everything wrong in the comments.

 

Christa Yelich-Koth: Blog Champion

This week I decided to try something new for my blog challenge. I have invited a special guest to take a crack at writing an insightful post on a topic chosen by my Facebook friends in 24 hours.

Without further ado, I present Christa Yelich-Koth’s take on:

Which is a better role model for children: Drag Queens or Beauty Queens?

vs.

I have accepted Oz Monroe’s “Throw Me Under the Bus” challenge as part of my blog tour for my new science fantasy novel, ILLUSION. Of course, it seems as though the topic I’m discussing has nothing to do with my book or science fiction, but it DOES have to do with identity, self-actualization, and faith in oneself, and those themes are as real in my book (the main character is in a completely unknown environment without any of her memories) as the core of any human being.

So here we go!

First off, what are the major distinctions?

Drag queens are traditionally men who dress in over-exaggerated female clothing, hair, and makeup to create a distinctive persona/character.

Beauty queens are women who have entered a contest where the main focus/ one of the main criteria, is physical beauty to be judged.

So as a child, which one is a better role model?

This is a tough one for me. When I was younger, I always enjoyed movies where the meek, shy, “ugly” woman comes out of the shadows, lets her hair down, and we all see how beautiful she really is. She gets the guy (even if he was only a cartoon at the time), she wins the dance contest, she becomes a woman. Etc.

I do remember not liking beauty contests in particular. I didn’t like the idea of beauty being the only thing people cared about. But beauty pageants have evolved. (Cue Miss Congeniality.) They became more about the whole package—physically fit, talented, smart, goal-oriented, and interested in charity. They became a representation of the best of what women could offer—though there was still mainly an emphasis on their physical beauty being part of that. (The male equivalent would become body-building.)

When I was in high school/ college, I became aware of drag queen culture. I attended shows, I knew people who dressed in drag. It seemed an expression of what I believed was their true selves.

But drag does not necessarily mean the individual WANTS to be female.

I learned more about different aspects, about being transgender, a cross-dresser, having a fetish, being homosexual, being an entertainer. It got a little confusing, so I learned to ask the person if I wanted to know more about them.

It comes back to “don’t judge a book by its cover”. (Unless it is a book, because let’s face it, most people won’t pick up a book if it has a crappy cover.) In children, we strive to teach them equality, and yet every person is unique. We want them to understand beauty, but not judge others by our definitions of beauty. We try and show them boy vs. girl, body parts that are different, and yet we want them to find out who they are, regardless of what their physical being shows.

Poor kids! Talk about brain-fried!

So here’s what I think. Children are amazing. They are resourceful, curious, and absorb things like sponges. If you expose them to both beauty queens and drag queens, showing them the positive qualities and negative qualities of both (negative can also include reactions from the public, money spent, emphasis on appearance, etc.) they will ask for more information on their own. They will choose their own role models—you just need to provide a plethora of ones and make sure they are following them for the positive reasons and are well aware of the negative ones.

Learning to be yourself, find yourself, and explore what that means is the toughest job a child can have. Showing them all the options out there will help them do that with more ease. And, guess what, whether they know it or not, it makes the parent a pretty great role model, too.

In conclusion, I don’t think either is a “better” role model. Each is unique, will bring different aspects to different children, and can influence individual children in different ways.

Christa Yelich-Koth is the author of graphic novel HOLLOW, comic book series HOLLOW’S PRISM and upcoming science fantasy novel ILLUSION from Buzz & Roar Publishing. She has staffed and led a workshop at the Southern California Writer’s Conference, been a panelist at MiniCon, and was co-founder of Green-Eyed Unicorn Comics. She can be reached at cyelkoth@gmail.com. Her website is www.christayelichkoth.com.

ILLUSION can be purchased for pre-order (with an exclusive pdf schematic of the Horizon spaceship), at www.buzzandroarpublishing.com/our-books.

Pigssss Innnnn Spaccceeeeee!

Before we get started, I’d like to let you all know that next week we will have a special guest blogger, the multi-talented and super-cool Christa Yelich Koth. She has several graphic novels/comic books out, and her sci-fi novel Illusion will be out this August. Take a jaunt over to her website to pre-order now. All the normal rules for the challenge will apply, only it will be her you throw under the bus.

Speaking of the bus, I can’t believe it, there is actually a four way tie for this week. The winners and their topics are as follows:

Scott: Poop

Chris: The secret to happiness

Jennifer: Racism in America

Kit: Three reasons why “Pigs in Space” is a reasonable name for my artistic endeavor.

The artistic endeavor Kit is referring to is my plan to form a club/group of artists, writers, musicians, dancers, etc. that are dedicated to creating works that will inspire humanity to travel to the stars. Our first trip will be an overnight observation at the 100” Hooker Telescope, the very one Edwin Hubble used to prove our universe is expanding. Message me if you want in. Seriously, I need more people to make this work.

Kit’s (semi) facetious suggestion of naming the group Pigs in Space is not without merit. If we were to travel to another solar system with current technology, it would take generations to get there. We would need a steady source of protein, and pigs would be a fantastic source. They would eat all the scraps of crappy space food that no one really wants to eat, and give us bacon in return. BACON IN SPACE! Maybe that should be the name of the club. We’ll get hipsters to ironically donate their parent’s fortunes in minutes.

However, one issue with having a drift of pigs in an enclosed capsule hurtling through the vacuum of space is, as Dr. Rachel Armstrong of Project Persephone (seriously, check it out) said to me a couple years ago, “What do you do with all the shit?” As she pointed out, you can’t just jettison it all out an airlock. Over time you will lose all your biomass and will have nothing left to grow new food. The shit is important. The shit is vital. Everyone’s shit, not just the pigs. You can tell someone’s health by their shit. You can fertilize your crops. And, according to Inspiration Mars, you can even protect yourself from the ravages of solar radiation if you smear it on the walls of the ship like a petulant toddler.

As far as pigs are concerned, shit is the ultimate path to happiness. Hence, the phrase “As happy as a pig in shit.” Pigs know about happiness. They have no worries. They live in the moment without concern for the past or worry for the future. The only thing happier than pigs in shit, is Pigs in Space, which is yet another good reason for that to be the name of the club. It is well known that the happiest time in a child of my generation’s life was when Pigs in Space was on TV.  If ever you want to know the key to happiness, look to the Muppets. They have it figured out. Friends and laughter. That’s it. Surround yourself with happy people that don’t take themselves too seriously, aren’t afraid to be the butt of a joke or two, and know the joy of a good pun. Sure, the Muppets have their issues. They fight now and then, but at the end of the day, they have nothing but love for each other no matter the color, or texture, of their fur. They don’t judge one another based on how they look. Pigs love frogs, rats are best friends with weirdos, and there is even a hippie in a band that DOESN’T suck.

The Muppets should be role models for all of America. Which is a third reason Pigs in Space is a good name. It’s time we learned to accept one another as they do, because everything we strive for will be for naught if we can’t learn to work together. America was founded on the principle that all humans were created equal. I know, I know, a bunch of the founders had slaves, and it took the bloodiest war in American history to disallow people owning other people, and after they were freed they only got 3/5 of a vote, but that was because of a simple problem, easily explained. Half of the country was (is) made up of legit stupid people.

Thousands of years ago some dipshit named Aristotle came up with a thing called the Great Chain of Being. Basically, it’s a listing of life and matter that starts at the top with God, down through the angels, humans, animals, and then rocks and minerals. This concept was one of the major early arguments against Darwin’s Great Idea. According to this chain, Europeans were the only fully human creatures on the chain. Africans, Asians, Native Americans, and so forth, were somewhere lower on the chain. Africans, they figured, were about 3/5th of the way between primate and white people. Fucking dipshits. If only they realized that Africans were the true humans and everyone else were subsets that evolved after the second great diaspora, things in Baltimore might be a little less fucked up.

Muppets, I say. Look to the Muppets. Kermit will lead us to the promise land of acceptance.

 

Now, having said all that, Pigs in Space is a dumb fucking name. No way in hell will I name a serious endeavor to inspire people to travel to the stars something so fatuous.

 

Thanks for reading, and, as always, let me know in the comments how I got everything wrong.

 

~Oz

P.S. Stay tuned for next week’s special Throw Christa Under the Bus Blog Challenge.

Diary of a Grandiose Introvert

The last winning suggestion for the “Throw Oz Under The Bus” blog challenge was by my friend Dot Caffery, who just released her second book Cursed Power in her Trilogy of Power series. Click on the links to go to her website and to find her book on Amazon. I’m a week and a half late with this one, so I failed the deadline for the challenge, but I sacrificed speed for quality. I hope it pays off.

“The ins and outs of navigating Las Vegas as Oz Monroe.”

This will meander for a bit, but bear with me.

Writing is difficult, getting your point across, having people understand the layered nuances of your carefully chosen stream of words, is one of the more challenging tasks one can undertake. The written word is a form of communication, but in a strange and relatively new way to humans. Communication can only occur when the message has been transmitted AND received. Humans have cultivated complex systems of sounds and gestures to transmit messages to one another and subtle ways to respond with “message received”. You can tell right away if the joke you tell is taken badly when face to face if the other person furrows their brows. Misunderstandings and mistakes can be quickly rectified.

Not so with the written word. It is delayed at best. It is difficult to know how others interpret your words without that instant feedback. Writers have to resort to critique groups, friends, family, beta-readers, and anyone else willing to be honest and forthright, while not being cruel, to get an inkling as to how others will perceive what they have created, and still it goes awry. I have often used the analogy that being a writer is like being a colorblind painter; I can mix colors any way I wish, but until I ask others I have no way to know if I in fact made green. This step, asking for feedback, is vital if you want what you say to be what is heard.

Well, my life is like a story told one second at a time, and I’m colorblind (not literally). It is difficult for me to know if what I say and do is looked upon by others in the way I hope unless I get trusted feedback. I don’t always know if that person is being overly sensitive, or was I just being a dick (again), and I rely on my friends to let me know. Sure, I could follow the advice to not care what others think and to always “be myself.” I could follow what is in my heart and strive for what I know to be right no matter the opinions of society. The trouble I have with that is I am sure Stalin, Pol Pot, Manson, and Dahmer all followed that advice to the letter. Often the villain is unaware and the torturers consider themselves the saviors. Everyone is the hero of their own story.

What does all this have to do with navigating Las Vegas as “Oz Monroe”? To me, every new person I meet is like a having a new viewer to my show after they missed the first 36 season. I have a strange and desperate fear of being misunderstood by people that are unaware of my story arc and I have no idea how to catch them up. To make matters worse, I am baffled by small talk. I don’t see the point and I’m really, really bad at it. When people ask how I am, I’m inclined to tell them the truth, when really the question was just meant to be a way to say hello. To me, quips about weather and sports are just a way to fill the uncomfortable silence. The problem is, I wasn’t uncomfortable with the silence, the other person was. But now that I’m supposed to respond with some trivial cliché, I’m the one that’s uneasy, making the entire social interaction a slow awkward game of who can stand it longer. I usually lose and go slink off to a corner to hide.

This is all to say that navigating somewhere like Las Vegas, or any place full of friendly talkative people, is tiring.

This post may not be what you were expecting, but what can I say. Small talk just isn’t my cup of tea.

Thanks for reading.

 

~Oz

Dante’s Infernal Tri Tip

Episode 2.4 of Throw Oz Under The Bus Blog Challenge. For the second week in a row the winner is Rachel. This time, however, she has to share the spotlight with her husband Kit. For the first time in this blog’s illustrious history, there has been a tie in the voting. For a moment I considered being the tie breaker vote, but I decided against it. It seemed far more fun to do them both, mostly because Kit’s suggestion throws his wife under the bus too.

Grill-detonating wives, and the threat they pose. Also, how to safely respond to a flame-engulfed grill.

I loved that grill. Four propane burners under the hood and one on the outside for large pots and such. It had little cabinet doors to hide the tank and keep the various BBQing implements accessible yet out of the rain. I loved that grill. We had an understanding, I wouldn’t infringe on its personal space by cleaning it, ever, and it wouldn’t burn my food. Sure, the relationship was a bit dysfunctional. I broke my word a time or two and gave it a good scrub down. Sometimes it would passive-aggressively overcook my chicken if I didn’t pay it enough attention, but it worked for us. Until I let Rachel use it.

She showed up with a positively Bedrockian size Tri tip with a fat layer thick enough to keep a walrus warm and toasty under the northern ice caps. “We’ll cook it over indirect heat with the fat side up,” she said. “It’ll take a couple hours,” she said. “Nothing bad will happen and I definitely won’t blow up your barbecue,” she said. Actually, no, she didn’t say that last thing, and that should have been my first clue.

After about an hour, hour and a half, it happened. Rachel and I were standing in my kitchen when, what sounded like, a black powder hand gun went off in my backyard. My neighbor and good friend Josh is way into black power, so I know what that sounds like. We immediately turned to look, her out the back door and me out the widow over the sink. Completely obscuring the poor BBQ was a pattern of thick billowy smoke that I quickly deciphered, through my intensive smoke signal training, to mean “Help me, my ass in on fire.” Rachel and I quickly leapt to action, closely followed by Kit. Rachel reached into the dense smoke, blindly groped for the lid handle, lifted the hood with a heroic flourish, and jumped back with a less than heroic “eeepp”. The tri tip was completely engulfed in a raging inferno hotter than the flames surrounding Pope Nicholas III.

Now, fire doesn’t scare me, not even a little bit. Some would call it overconfidence. Others, those that know my history as a professional fire performer, would call it dumbassery. I reached in with a woefully short pair of BBQ tongs and pulled forth the fleshy ball of fire, singeing my arm hair for my trouble. No joke, we had to blow out the flames on the tri tip. It was so burnt I swore I heard Liam Neeson say “I’m Darkman.”

As for safely dealing with a flaming BBQ, don’t do what I did. Don’t, I repeat don’t, reach into the flames unless it is to save your baby or your porn collection. If the fire is small, turn off the propane at the tank. If the fire burns through the hose it becomes a spectacular flame thrower. If it is a big ass fire, or the fire is already at the tank, leave it open and just get the hell out of there and call 911. A flame thrower is WAY better than a propane bomb.

 

And now for the suggestion brought to you by Rachel, the BBQ assassin.

Who is worse Michael Bay or M. Night Shyamalan

This is truly a tough call. I could easily skew it in either direction by careful selection of works, but, as the Muslim scholar Al-Biruni said “We must not compare the best of ours to the least of theirs, for each has its extremes. We must compare best to best, and least to least.”

What then is the best work of Michael Bay? Top three in ascending order of those I’ve seen: The Island, The Rock, and Armageddon, with the last being the only one I don’t mind watching again.

The best by M. Night Shyamalan is undoubtedly The Sixth Sense, with Unbreakable a clear yet distant second. I’d put the Sixth Sense in my Top 100 films. I really dug it.

If I stopped there I’d declare M. Night the best, but I wasn’t tasked with which was better.

The worst from Michael Bay? Unequivocally, without reservation or doubt, Transformers, all of them. Not only were the fight scenes blurry and undecipherable, and the voice-over work unintelligible, aside for Peter Cullen (he can do no wrong. He’s Optimus Prime AND Eeyore!), but Mr. Bay made Bumble Bee a midsize car. I’m a small guy, and I was an even smaller child. Bumble Bee was the little badass of Saturday morning cartoons and he was turned into a Camaro? Really? I get it if you couldn’t get VW to sign on, but why not some other small car? How about a Mini Cooper? That would have been SWEET! I had such high hopes for this movie. I feel like I extended my hand with the universal greeting “BAH WEEP GRA NA WEEP NINNY BONG!” and instead of reciprocating, Michael Bay shit on my childhood. Fuck you Michael Bay!

As egreeous as Bay’s sins are, they are nothing compared to M. Night. The Happening was one of the worst movies I have ever seen, and The Last Airbender? Un-Fucking-watchable. Bay may have shit on Bumble Bee, but you Mr. Shyamalan, shat on Aang. No one fucks with Aang. That little dude saved the four nations from Fire Emperor Ozai! Every episode of The Last Airbender, from the opening sequence of episode one, to the final battle three seasons later, were fucking GOLD! Worst of all Mr. Shyamalan, I would have thought someone with an easily mispronounceable name would have been a little more sensitive. IT’S AANG, with a long A, not OUNG, you fucking dick-swizzle.

My conclusion—M. Night Shyalaman is worse, but also better, than Michael Bay. M. Night has had higher highs and lowers lows, but at least he is an artist. He took chances and created things he felt would resonate with people. Michael Bay is just in it for the money.

But you know what? Neither one of them blew up my Barbecue.

 

Thanks for reading.

 

~Oz

 

Let me know what you think in the comments.

The Advice In Our Stars

For those that don’t know, every week I ask my Facebook friends to suggest a blog topic and the one with the most “Likes” is the winner. I have 24 hours to write about 500 words on whatever wins, no matter what it is. Sometimes it gets…weird. Other times it is a serious social issue. Last week was a poem (please god no more poems). Whatever it is, I write it off the top of my head at the time and it may not be well thought out.

Anyway…this week’s Blog Challenge is brought to you by my friend Rachel. Her suggestion won by a single vote. I damn near had to write about Zombie Jesus. Instead it’s:

“How social media has made parenting more challenging.”

Once upon a time, when humanity was young, we had villages to help raise the children. Every village had grandmothers that had been through a few births to help ease the fears of young women newly pregnant, grandfathers to tell young men that the emotional demons possessing their wives will likely leave after they give birth, “uncles” to teach the boys how to flirt with girls (and explosives), “aunts” to teach girls sarcastic rejections (and culinary retaliation), and older children to teach how to not get caught with firecrackers and ipecac. Parents had a full support crew. For every issue there was someone that had dealt with the same thing, or near enough. And best of all, everyone knew who the village idiot was, even the children. If Uncle Dingus told you that getting bit by a rattle snake would cure your acne, you knew it was bullshit simply BECAUSE it was Uncle Dingus that told you.

At some point we eschewed the village. We pushed away our neighbors, isolated ourselves from the varied opinions and beliefs and disciplinary tactics. Now we lose our freaking minds when we find out some dude taught our children how to make a frag grenade with a shot gun shell, a bee bee, tape, and a stick.

Now we can’t tell who Uncle Dingus is anymore. How do new parents know to not listen to the reasonable sounding friend that diagnoses any quirk with autism which was caused by vaccines, or milk caused the ear infection, or that because pineapples contains (a minuscule amount of) bromelain that they are five times more effective than cough syrup, or even to not shake your bottle of breast milk because it can denature the proteins. Social media gives every Dingus an equal voice with the wise grandmothers. Unfortunately, on social media the Dingus to grandmother ratio is skewed strongly in favor of the ignorant over the wise.

When the villages were disbanded the idiots went online, found articles written by other village idiots, and spread misinformation with the confidence that only the truly ignorant can muster. Parenting is so much harder now because we can’t see the dunce caps on the people advising us to never (or always) let your children out of your sight, or always (or never) give antibiotics.

A few weeks ago I saw a parent post on Facebook that her child had a fever of 101.5, and that she felt sorry for the poor little thing. Within moments there were a dozen responses with (unsolicited) bad advice. One person even suggested, in all caps, to CALL 911 NOW! Really? Are you shitting me? I’m on my fourth child now; I don’t even let my kids stop tilling the fields until their temp reaches at least 102. (I’m kidding, stop it with the hate mail.)

We need a special font, or text color, for people that don’t know the difference between causation and correlation, or know what peer-reviewed means, or how to look for cited sources.

Or perhaps a star rating for each child successfully raised to adulthood. And by successful, I don’t mean simply “survived”, I mean your adult child is not a bigot, or racist, or sexist, or homophobic, isn’t a zealot and will fight for what is right and is willing to concede when wrong. I’ll call it The Social Media Parenting Advice Star Rating. Next time someone says everything (or anything) you are doing is wrong and will cause irreparable harm, ask them their star rating. If it is less than one, tell them to fuck off*. If it is one or two, maybe take a moment and reflect on what you are doing. If it is five or more, stop everything you are doing because you might be turning your child into the next Jason Voorhees , or worse, Ted Cruz.

*Partial points will be awarded to those without children that are wonderful people because (or in spite) of the actions of their own parents.

Thanks for reading,

~Oz

Oh, and let me know in the comments how I got everything wrong, and don’t forget to find me on Facebook if you want to play next week.