Reviews
- Chris reviews GATORLAND: ALLIGATOR CAPITAL OF THE WORLDOctober 21st, 2005View
-
“Get up-close and personal with gators & crocs, birds & bears, parrots & turtles, goats & llamas and much more at the Alligator Capital of the World!
Ride the new Gatorland Express train and kick back and relax at Pearl’s Smokehouse.
Explore the Miniature Water Park, Petting Zoo, Bird Aviary and the 10-acre alligator Breeding Marsh, at Orlando’s Best 1/2 Day Attraction.
Enjoy the one-of-a-kind shows including the Gator Wrestlin’ and Gator Jumparoo Show, the Up-close Encounters Show, featuring snakes, insects, and all things unexpected plus live hand feedings of huge crocodiles.”
- Full-color GATORLAND pamphletOf course, I’m kicking myself for forgetting my camera. Every instant at GATORLAND screamed out to be photographed — every llama, every snake, every goat buckling nervously in a gator’s jaws. Fortunately Orlando’s Best 1/2 Day Attraction (1992-1994, 1996) publishes a hell of a nice color pamphlet complete with splendid full-color photographs; as a companion to my written remarks, this pamphlet (which is sculpted along the top to match the contours of a gator’s brow, so that if you close your eyes and touch the top of the pamphlet you could literally swear there’s a gator in the tub with you) will serve marvelously.
Pictured on the front is the magnificent main entrance to GATORLAND.
What they’ve done is crafted a huge gator head for you to walk through to get into GATORLAND (pretty appropriate, actually!), and the thing is so well done it gives you the creeps. As the shadows of those 5-foot teeth darken your shirt, you start to understand what Judas must have felt like when, in the Bible, he was swallowed by the alligator (you just hope that, as in Judas’s case, God will wrap his mind control around the gator’s brain and cause it to expel you after a reasonable period of time for you to think about what you’ve done).
Once inside, there’s plenty to do. I hopped right onto the Gatorland Express Train and took a tour of the grounds. It was a lot of fun because the train truly is an “express” — it zips around GATORLAND at over a hundred miles an hour. We hit an old man!
Next I checked out the Gator Jumparoo Show, which was not up to GATORLAND standards, in my opinion, as it’s literally just a bunch of gators competing for points in jumping-related track and field events — long jump, high jump, and hurdles. I haven’t been so bored since the last summer olympics!
The Petting Zoo was great, chock full of all the animals advertised. Amazingly, they’re paired just as the pamphlet says they will be: birds and bears in one pen, turtles and parrots in another, even gators and crocs. But this is the “Alligator Capital of the World”, and crocs seem to know it; they tend to slink around on the periphery of things, minding their own business, obviously sort of watching their step, well aware that they’re merely tolerated oddities in this, the international epicenter of gator culture and civilization.
At GATORLAND’s south end lies the 10-acre alligator Breeding Marsh, which I explored. Shit it’s terrifying. Just ten solid acres of gnashing teeth and pale rubbery bellies and gnarled gator cock and splashing mud and shrieking turkey vultures and tall grass and churning marsh and buzzing insects and sticky sunlight and gaping gator cunt. It seemed like days I spent in there but when I found my way back to Pearl’s Smokehouse I learned I had only been gone for a little over a day.
I was further enervated watching the “hand feedings of huge crocodiles.” There I sat with half a dozen other dazed tourists as brave, brave men fed their hands to huge crocodiles, to no apparent purpose.
But the main attraction at GATORLAND is The Magician, shown front and center on the pamphlet in his trademark khakis and straw hat.
The Magician’s specialty is gator-based magic; in the photo we see him at the culmination of his most popular bit, in which he borrows a baby from the audience and turns it into a caiman, and then extorts money out of the parents, assuring them that yes they will pay if ever they want to see their baby in human form again; but it’s all just a trick — The Magician doesn’t know how to change the caiman back into human form (you can bet the parents aren’t let in on the trick aspect until they’ve handed over the five grand).
On the back of the pamphlet, at the bottom, The Magician displays his command over the animal will with ‘The Guillotine’. This gag blew me away. What he does is he holds open a gator’s mouth and then applies mind control to an egret kept handy by The Magician’s assistant. The egret walks slowly, deliberately toward The Magician, a look of profound concentration on its face; clearly somewhere in the deepest inner core of its mind the egret is leveraging all its remaining might in an epic attempt to expel the possessing magician — but The Magician is far too strong.
Almost daintily the egret walks to the gator and places its head inside the gator’s mouth, holds it there. The Magician looks around the audience smugly, a sarcastic “uh oh!” expression on his face. Once he’s milked what seems like all available tension from the scene, he ratchets everything up a notch, pretending that his hand, his hand that holds the top of the gator’s razor-lined mouth open, is starting to slip. The “uh oh!” expression widens. The egret remains still, the point of its beak disappearing down the gator’s throat. Horror mixes with anticipation on the audience’s faces. Children are heard to murmur, “Mommy, no…” And then suddenly there’s a great snapping sound as The Magician lets go and the gator’s jaws clap shut; the egret’s headless body sways for a moment then slumps onto the grass.
My favorite part of GATORLAND, though, was finding out that all of it was in my imagination. Because if I can imagine a place like GATORLAND, then why not PUMALAND or COWLAND?
Walking to my car to leave GATORLAND, I was filled with a sense of contentment, secure in the knowledge that all I would ever need in order to turn a boring rainy afternoon into an exciting adventure is the kernel of a good idea, the rich farmlands of my imagination in which to plant that kernel, and some acid to use as a sort of fertilizer for the kernel. - Chris reviews THIS TIME MACHINEOctober 20th, 2005View
-
It doesn’t work. - Chris reviews GAS STATION MARKETINGMarch 13th, 2005View
-
One bag? No. No, it’s not. What the hell can you do with one bag of ice? You can’t do anything. There’s not enough ice in one bag of ice to cool down anything. You couldn’t bring down the temperature of a luke-warm beverage even one degree with a bag of ice. If you put only one bag of ice in your pants, right inside your underwear, you wouldn’t feel anything — it’s not cold enough to make a difference. If you took a gerbil out of his nice warm burrow and packed him into the middle of one bag of ice, that gerbil would assume he was still snug in his burrow, such an ineffectual chiller is one bag of ice. No, you’re going to need far, far more than one bag of ice. You’re going to need at least six bags. Six to fifty. Fifty bags of ice should just. BARELY! be enough for your intended use, whatever that may be. Whether it be to put into your cooler or even just into a cup of scalding coffee in order to bring the temperature down to a nice drinkable “hot”. For these and other things, you will be relieved to have one hundred bags of ice on hand. Now, head over to the register with these four hundred bags of premium ice and we’ll get you on your way.
- Michael reviews HEARTBREAKJanuary 31st, 2005View
-
I would wish it on my worst enemy.
- Chris reviews NEW YORK CITY’S WEATHERJanuary 18th, 2005View
-
Holy sweet narcoleptic jesus, what the sonofabitching fuck is going on here? We’ve returned from recording to find that the temperature in New York is literally 50 DEGREES LOWER than in LA.
IQ quiz, first question: These two major cities have a temperature difference of 50 fucking degrees. Answer: Um, Baghdad and Camp Shackleton, Antarctica? Wrong!
As I shuffled down the sidewalk today, I heard a guy bluster to his friend, apropos of the cold: “It actually doesn’t bother me. I actually find it invigorating.” That’s a lie. This weather is deadly. This weather is invigorating if you’re a seal, not if you’re a man. If you’re a man, this weather is the grim reaper’s icy breath, and you know it.
Thermometers fear this weather. Here is a graphical representation of what the weather is doing to thermometers:
Small dogs don’t freeze in this weather, they explode. You come in from a ten minute walk to find that your body is full of blood-flavored slurpee. Meteors that have just had 80% of their mass burned off squeezing through earth’s atmosphere land cold to the touch. In this weather, the most ardent, anguished, burning love turns into a small bowling ball. - Chris reviews A SMALL SIGN HE SAW AT THE REGISTEROF THE DELI A BLOCK AWAY FROM KEITH’S HOUSE (HERE REPRODUCED USING COMPUTERS)January 7th, 2005View
-
Wheedling and disingenuous. Passive aggressive. Just say “NO CREDIT that’s all”.
- Chris reviews HIS MUSTACHEJanuary 7th, 2005View
-
My mustache possesses the simplicity of elegance. As a statement it is assertive and concise. But it is not a statement.
My mustache demonstrates a preternatural wisdom. It is fledgling, yet it speaks with assurance, with the creaseless authority of the eternal.
My mustache, were it a sandwich, would be a club. Were it a plane, it would be a MiG-28.
Many ask, of my mustache, “Does it make you better than other people?” I admit that it does. Because of my mustache I can go into a grocery store and collect the items I need, pay, and get out of there without being distracted by the colorful packaging of the hundreds of thousands of products I don’t need. Because of my mustache I can run a mile in two minutes forty seconds. At least, before I couldn’t and now I can. Because of my mustache people are more suspicious of me, and rightly so.
One thing I have to hand to my mustache is that it knows sports. I don’t follow sports at all, so when a sports buff tries to make conversation it’s usually a nonstarter. But now with my mustache on board, somebody says, “Oh, Barry So-and-so of the Pistons got into that amazing scrimmage with Dwight D. Whomever of the 49ers and shot two for two off the line or whatever,” and I’m just like, “Yeah? No shit! That’s hockey?”
An aspect of my mustache that I’ve never been totally at peace with is its ability to accurately predict the future. It almost always withholds from me the fruits of this ability, so my problem is not that I have to deal with knowing what’s going to happen in the coming years and centuries; my problem is more general than that. Specifically, do I have an ethical responsibility to try to convince my mustache to be frank with the world about where things are heading? So that we can all try to band together and avoid any grave repercussions of our current environmental, political, and religious habits? Does my mustache owe it to us to divulge details about imminent climatic tragedies — large scale earthquakes, etc. — so that we can better prepare for them? Should I try to prevail upon my mustache to give us the answers to “the big” questions: How did the universe begin? Is there non-human intelligent life on other planets? Does God exist? If so, how best shall we make appeals to him, and what is his intention for us? - The location of George W. Bush's heartSeptember 13th, 2004View
-
Highly unusual. When he passes, it is imperative that science be allowed to dissect him and learn more about this wond’rous anomaly. - The sweetest, most heartwarming thing he's seen in years, maybe everAugust 26th, 2004View
-
Awwwww… that’s sooo nice! How thoughtful of Coca-Cola to remember Delta’s 75th birthday! And to commemorate it with these tasteful cocktail napkins that Delta customers can actually get some good use out of! And okay, Coca-Cola’s name does kind of stand out up there, so it’s not necessarily the most selfless gift ever, but if you had seen the 60th anniversary napkin they did, you’d realize Coke has come a long way in terms of learning where the spotlight belongs — on the birthday boy! On Delta Airlines, the adorable birthday boy! - The lessons of KrullJuly 21st, 2004View
-
Krull, the 1983 action/sci-fi spectacular, is a film that can be watched simply as an unparalleled piece of entertainment, yes, but the attuned viewer will pick up some terrific lessons as well, guidelines to help him or her live a happy, full life. Krull is a film that, like The Bible and the books of Hermann Hesse, was written with ideas in mind, very powerful ideas that the author not only wanted to share, but maybe on some level felt compelled to. Here are a couple of my favorite Krull lessons. What are yours?
- Good warriors do not make good husbands — Yes, really: this saying, which is by now a well worn, widely trusted maxim of western culture, actually began with Krull. Lysette, the princess, is told by her cranky yet obviously quite wise father that… well, you know what he tells her. And of course he’s right � Prince Colwyn, about whom the wise king warns his daughter, is a very solid warrior and, we have to assume, turns out to be a really terrible husband. Of course exactly how he’s bad is beyond the scope of the film, which ends shortly after the two young lovers are re-united, but certain very obvious hints are dropped that leave little doubt in a viewer’s mind what kind of husband Colwyn will be: at one point, after camping in the swamp with his motley band of crusaders, Colwyn refuses to help pack up camp, asserting that his time is better spent practicing his sword moves, honing his bow & arrow moves, practicing his wrestling, or, at worst, shining his sword, bow, and arrows; another time, during the long perilous trek to find the Dark Mountain and his princess, Colwyn totally spaces the birthday of a fellow crusader because he’s too focused on how their tiny squad of scrappers will overcome the massive Slayer army and its leader, The Beast; and finally on one telling occasion Colwyn is asked to watch his brother-in-arms’s three and five year-old kids for 10 minutes while he [the brother-in-arms] spends some rare quiet alone time with his [Colwyn's] wife [just kidding, it's the brother-in-arms's wife], but Colwyn gets distracted by some maps he wants to look at, gets all caught up in speculating aloud to himself on the possible location of the Dark Mountain, and totally misses the fact that the kids are sinking in a nearby pool (pit? patch?) of quicksand, even though they’re screaming for help, and so the kids die, or possibly go to live in the wonderful world below the quicksand, as Colwyn tries to explain to his brother-in-arms, but as the brother-in-arms tearfully argues, that seems like a real longshot.
- The future will be a tasteful blend of cool new stuff and really old stuff — I think Krull is right on with this. Is the future going to be like Minority Report or Bladerunner? With essentially all the same stuff we have today but just developed and improved at a pretty consistent rate? So there are still cars, but they’re faster and safer and sleeker; and there are still houses, but they are all glass and steel and have robot butlers; and there is still Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford, but just slightly younger? No, I think Krull‘s vision is far more interesting, far more revolutionary. The future will have a couple of totally new things, like a really sleek, metallic main gate on the castle, and bad guys that fly around through space in mountains, mountains that can also teleport. But in the future we’ll have moved away from some of the stuff that we currently think of as useful: it’ll be back to horses and bye-bye to cars, hello again to Robin Hood-esque clothing made of leather and rope-belts, and lots of city planning based on a castle in the middle and houses spiralling out from the castle walls. Jesters will probably come back into vogue. We’ll return to hamfisted plays full of exaggerated archetypes instead of complex tableaux of human drama like Krull.
- If you used to be the Spider Woman’s lover, she will pull certain strings to protect you from the huge murderous spider — A valuable thing to know. Let’s say, for example, that you learn the Spider Woman has a wonderful type of candy in her room, and you want to get some of this candy, to taste it, yet you know that the Spider Woman’s room lies at the center of a massive web that is the hunting grounds for a huge, huge murderous spider. How will you get at the candy? If you used to know the Spider Woman — I mean, like, know her — then you should go to the edge of the web and call out to her some telling bit of carnal knowledge to identify yourself (“You used to purr like a monkey when I slid a cherry popsicle between your glasses and your eyebrows!”). Once she realizes who it is, she’ll turn over an hourglass with roughly 2 minutes of sand in it. The huge spider knows not to attack you while that sand is running � hell, he’s a spider, not a monster! So you’ll be able to safely get across and root around in that bowl of candy like a hog in a truffle patch (pile? plot?). When you’re ready to go the hourglass trick won’t really work, so you’ll need to beam out of there or something. Maybe just shoot the spider. Something.
- After defeating your main enemy, get the hell out of his lair fast, because it was his life force that was keeping the roof from collapsing and the walls from crumbling — This is something that only fantasy movies seem to be onto, and yet it’s something that D.E.A. and F.B.I. agents and various military personnel probably need to be told. The fact is, if you are going to kill a person on their property, you need to be ready to run like crazy the moment that person takes his last breath, because everything is going to start coming apart at the seams as soon as the bad guy’s life-force isn’t holding his house’s bricks and beams in place. Notice what happens to the Dark Mountain when Colwyn kills the Beast: it not only crumbles to pieces, but those pieces are sucked up into space. So yeah, you killed the main bad guy; now you can just sit there and gloat . . . in space, idiot!
