No More Parents!

ok ok, ok ok

2009-04-27T09:49:00.003-05:00

look guys. how many times can i let you down. i really feel bad about it. at the same time, the distractions of actual life and virtual life (internet) has made it difficult to get some of my projects off the ground. they are not over but i am reorganizing.

IN THE MEANTIME: if u been missing me, feel free to follow me on twitter. critics say my tweets is like the comics without the pictures (jk i aint got no critics). but its not like u gotta pay for it or anything. plus i would imagine that when i do get my shit together my twitter gonna be the first to know.

u may still be one of those people who's all "twitters lame i dont get it" but realize that it is bigger than us. eventually u will have to come around just like with facebook so u might as well get started now instead of looking like a failed late adopter that has to friend their own parents. jesus.

Made For These Times

2007-11-14T10:44:00.000-05:00

hey i was going to write about something else today but i just discovered this on gorillavsbear and it was too good not to share. a british producer/dj named bullion has created an incredible work entitled "pet sounds in the key of dee." you clever ones may have already put together that this is a mash up of sorts (though once you hear it you'll agree that mash up is not an adequate description) of the beach boys' seminal album and pieces of late beatsmith j dilla/jay dee's entire body of work. the result is something pretty spectacular- not in competition with pet sounds or j dilla themselves but certainly greater than the sum of its parts. is it the new grey album? not really... it's not as tied to the original songs as danger mouse's work was to jay-z's, or as accessible, but artistically it's leaps and bounds above. if you are into the beach boys or j dilla or beats or interesting things, i cannot recommend this highly enough. alright i am going on and on when you should just hear the damn thing for yourself. this is my favorite track so far, but choosing one to rip out of the whole was not easy.

and by the way, THE WHOLE ALBUM IS FREE TO DOWNLOAD ON BULLION'S MYSPACE.
download that shit right away and make your day better than it was.

Videos All Over The Place

2007-11-12T17:59:00.000-05:00

yoyoyoyo, firstly, thanks to the channel 4 evening news, who showed my cartoon on the news for like 10 ridiculous seconds last week in a feature about internet productivity (or lack thereof) related to that lifehacker article. i cant get the video to embed on the blog so you'll have to watch it there if you care enough. who knew the channel 4 evening news even had a website, i assume they made it just so people could upload photos of their dogs in halloween costumes.

in other news, my boys vampire weekend just released their first music video, for the "mansard roof" single. congrats guys, i think it's great. just some dudes yachting on a saturday off the coast of new jersey, ain't nobody got a problem with that. also my cousin ezra is sporting some sweet shades that he may or may not have picked up during the motown portion of my bar mitzvah party ten and a half years ago. enjoy.

War Dance

2007-11-07T11:06:00.001-05:00

Hey people, sorry for being slow on the updates, but I got something a bit serious that means a lot to me and I want to share with you... I need you to see this movie, WAR DANCE, made by my family and friends. It is an amazing documentary about children living in Uganda. It's beautifully shot and really moving and involves a pretty excellent country-wide children's music competition. IT OPENS IN NYC AND LA THIS FRIDAY (NOV 9). THE OPENING WEEKEND IS CRITICAL TO THE SUCCESS OF THIS FILM, PLEASE PLEASE TRY TO SEE IT THIS WEEKEND. It's been making all kinds of oscar buzz-worthy news already:

18 film festival awards (check out all those golden leaf parentheses!) including the Directing Award at Sundance

“Heart-rending.”
-Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“Striking. A hopeful message.”
-Anthony Breznican, USA Today

“Very moving.”
-Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

See the trailer and get more information at www.wardancethemovie.com

TO MY NEW YORK CHILDREN:
OPENING THIS FRIDAY, NOV.9 AT THE ANGELIKA AND LINCOLN PLAZA CINEMA

TO MY LOS ANGELES CHILDREN:
OPENING THIS FRIDAY, NOV.9 AT THE ROYAL THEATER

Again, please try to see the film this weekend. I and a lot of people I care about have been involved with it since the beginning, and it would mean a lot to me if you supported it. If you need more info let me know. I'm going Saturday night (probly to the Angelika) if you want to go on a date or whatever. And thanks a lot.

TO MY CHILDREN ELSEWHERE:
Future “War/Dance” Theatrical Run Release Dates

16-Nov —Pasadena—Playhouse 7

16-Nov —Washington—E Street Cinema

30-Nov —Boston—Kendall Square Cinema

30-Nov—Seattle—Varsity Theater

30-Nov—Philadelphia—Ritz Theater

14-Dec—San Francisco—Lumiere 3 Theater

14-Dec—Berkeley—Shattuck 10

14-Dec—Minneapolis—Lagoon

When You Hear That

2007-10-23T11:55:00.001-05:00

in case you haven't heard the news, oink, your likely source for unreleased free music on the internet (whether you realize it or not) ended this morning in a very dramatic raid in amsterdam which may or may not have included the following: monster trucks, assault rifles, speedboat chases, night vision, scuba gear, nicholas cage, large animals, ninja robots, topless dancers, radiohead, and nazi mutants. if you don't know what oink is, you have nothing to worry about. if you had an oink account, well fingers crossed you will not end up in a mexican prison begging for seventy five cents so you can get a bottle of sprite for the week. and if you like free music that gets released early, shits gonna suck from now on. this calls for an emoticon... :(

Nobody Is Not Lovin' It

2007-10-21T08:38:00.000-05:00

advertising a fast food restaurant is hard. you have to constantly come up with new and exciting combinations of cheddar goo and rubbery mushrooms, you have to make sure that your happy meal toys don't suffocate the many dumbass children that will inevitably try to swallow them with their nuggets, and you have to basically live in the denial that you are not catering primarily to stoned college students at 3am. plus, when you run a classy place (or 30,000) like mcdonalds, you've got to make sure that your advertising is hitting every possible audience. so what do you do? you make custom websites for everyone- or at least "everyone" as is defined by the ethnicity identification survey at the beginning of the sat's. so let's throw some micky d's on this bitch and see how they're advertising to YOU:

ASIAN AMERICANS:
www.i-am-asian.com

you know right off the bat that something is wrong with the pr of the asian american community when i-am-asian.com leads to a mcdonalds website. regardless, you go to the site and you see that mcdonalds has created a mirror of your very own room, mr. asian american! but wait, how did mcdonalds know what your room looked like? how did they ever figure out that you, as an asian american, love lava lamps and video games? don't worry, they have plenty of authentic things too, like godzilla action figures, some year-of-the-pig thing, and enough paper cranes for a fourth grade classroom. also, they have a fun minigame involving the spiritual journey that every asian american must make at least once in his or her life- crossing a makeshift wooden bridge from the mcdonalds in hawaii to the mcdonalds in los angeles.

AFRICAN AMERICANS:
www.365black.com

from the intro line alone, you know that mcdonalds took absolutely no chances with the black community. i found this site by clicking the "havin' fun" category on the mcdonalds homepage, but as you can see, this site is the opposite of fun.

i dare you to look for a minigame.

LATINOS:
www.meencanta.com

parrots! fuzzy dice! ay yay yay! this website has so much latin flavor, it makes me want to run out and grab some taco bell. you've got soccer, graffiti, music, everything! plus they have some really awesome minigames involving these totally wacky characters:

this website is the polar opposite of 365black.com.

CHILDREN:
www.happymeal.com

say what you want, but nobody thinks more of the children than mcdonalds. games, coloring, social networking... there is so much fun 2.0 to be had on this site, you almost forget the friendly reminder ronald has left for you in the top right-hand corner:

WHITE PEOPLE:
basically anything that has the mcdonalds logo on it and hasn't already been covered in this post. but if you need to see the absolute whitest example it is definitely this:

HOMELESS/CRAZY PEOPLE:
.....huh? there's no advertising directed towards the homeless/crazy? but they are some of the most frequent visitors to mcdonalds! i guess we will have to change that.

Lifehackerz

2007-10-18T11:11:00.000-05:00

big thanks to the folks at lifehacker for giving me some unexpected publicity yesterday- it's weird to be reading a blog and suddenly come across a drawing you did three years ago, but that's the wacky internet for you...

anyways, since they linked me, i'm gonna link them, and we're all gonna link each other. read the article, it's actually a very useful guide on how to keep yourself from getting distracted on the internet (which, if you're reading this blog, is a problem you definitely have).

more writing on the way... hope at least some of you are having fun at cmj this week.

and also there's a new comic up.

With the Beatles

2007-10-11T12:03:00.000-05:00

i'm not done with my big post, but the beatles (or more specifically, their music) have been popping up more than once during my week in notable ways so i figured i might as well write about it.

firstly, i saw across the universe, mostly because i was with my parents at the time and they dragged me to it, and because a friend of mine had a small role in it. regardless, i can safely say that it was one of the worst movies i have ever seen in my entire life. it was like a comic book version of the sixties combined with a vh1 countdown of the twenty cheesiest music videos of all time. julie taymor accomplished what i thought was an impossible feat—making the beatles seem uncool. the point where i would have walked out if i had come in my own car was a scene in which a girl named prudence locks herself in a room and then her friends sing "dear prudence" to get her to, uh, come out and play, and then when she opens the door everyone is standing in a room with cgi clouds painted over the walls lisa frank style:

so really, don't see that movie.

secondly, i came across a new work by artist steve mclaughlin called "run for your life," in which he compressed all of the beatles' uk lp's by 800% to fit into one hour-long mp3. i wasn't able to listen to too much of it before getting a headache, but it's kind of cool when you're able to figure what song is actually playing (i caught on towards the end of revolver). here it is:

steve mclaughlin- run for your life

some fans of the work went in and decompressed some of the songs back to their original tempo to produce some seriously bizarre reconstructions of the originals:

julia
revolution
and my favorite, i will

even though it's easy to write this off as someone with too much free time on their hands, and i will probably never have the willpower to listen to these again, i really like the idea of taking something as ubiquitous and influential as the beatles' catalogue and distorting it to the point where its original intentions are lost. it makes you wonder if there's a certain transcendent quality to the music itself (or any work of art, for that matter) that holds up regardless of its manipulation. also, the project instantly brought to mind one of my favorite works of graphic art ever, by the design firm Foundation 33. they took the lyrics of every beatles song and typed them out in chronological order, creating one massive body of text. i think the point is basically the same, but the experience of seeing the beatles' entire body of work as one concrete visual entity is even more thought provoking to me.

on the Foundation 33 website, they even have all the lyrics as selectable, copy-able, cut-able, paste-able text, so you can have your own conceptual fun...

In the Meantime

2007-10-10T09:50:00.000-05:00

sorry for no updates y'all...and sorry for writing "y'all" back there- i was researching some vacation for a few days up in vermont, where foliage is apparently more important than food and water. anyway, i've got one of those big ridiculous posts on the way, but i need some more time on it when i'm not at work. so in the meantime, if you haven't heard the new radiohead i think it's pretty good but probably not their best but not really disappointing and this is my favorite so enjoy:

Radiohead: Reckoner

and if you need one more thing to keep you going how about justice's d.a.n.c.e. performed by imitations of everyone in the world that you hate to love (that would be michael jackson, prince, rod stewart, and rick james.)

Hulkamania at Webster Hall

2007-10-04T17:00:00.000-05:00

just to keep you up to speed on your favorite wrestler/rapper/balladeer , this went down at webster hall last night, in between sets by pissed jeans, celebration and man man. the two dudes spreading the hulkamania are comedian jonah ray and fat-dude-who-likes-man-man darren mabee. things get rowdy pretty fast... but then again, this is hulkamania we are talking about.

i hope everyone in the audience understood that this was a dying child they were singing about.

Oreo Pizza: The Verdict

2007-10-04T09:05:00.000-05:00

alright, i let my curiosities get the best of me last night and had to order the oreo pizza. after what i'm sure has been a riveting week of anticipation, all your questions about it will now be answered...

first of all, the oreo pizza is not very good. that's not to say that it doesn't taste ok and sound awesome, but combining oreos and pizza is like combining ice cream and pie- there should be no possible chance for failure. and yet, something's amiss.

the main problem is definitely the crust. there are so many ways this could have worked better- a graham cracker crust, a sugar/cinnamon crust, an oreo crust, hell even a pizza crust would have been ok. instead they created some kind of thin chewy tortilla thing that is not unlike the time when i accidentally cooked digiorno pizza in my oven with the cardboard packaging still attached to the bottom.

the other big problem, i am surprised to say, is that there are just too many damn oreos on the thing. everyone assumes that they could eat an endless amount of oreos, but the human brain simply cannot handle it. on top of that, the oreos are warm and thus substantially mushy, so it kind of tastes like you are eating cookies that somebody else has chewed up and spat out onto a shitty crust. on top of that, there's all this white icing marshmallow goop that tastes ok but looks more than a little gross.

final thoughts:
like oasis, y2k, john kerry, lindsay lohan and kid nation, the oreo pizza has been thrust upon it the responsibility of altering the path of our civilization, and has ultimately failed to deliver (pun intended, you jerks at dominos). perhaps we as human beings are not ready for the oreo pizza. or perhaps they should have just made it not suck.

All Tyrants and Chickens Fall

2007-10-03T10:00:00.000-05:00

yeah, that's right, kid nation. no matter how boring it is i'm not over it yet.
just to catch up, here's what happened in episode two:

they killed mad chickens.

i think there was a challenge and prizes and some cheering, but i wasn't really giving it my undivided attention. i did, however, catch the craziest line on television i have heard in a long time. it came after 95% of the kids decided they couldn't live for more than four days without chicken soup, and the other five percent freaked out and locked themselves in the chicken coop to protest. surprisingly, cbs knew exactly how ridiculous this girl in the green jacket's question was, and subtitled it to make sure nobody missed this shit:

they don't show what happened next in the conversation, but i hope the chubby girl slapped her.

Welcome to the Future

2007-10-02T11:36:00.000-05:00

well, it's finally happened. oreo pizza.

i honestly don't know what to say, but the Southern Maryland Community Forum does.

should someone be blamed or thanked for the oreo pizza? is it going to divide nations or unite us as one people? does it taste mushy? HAS ANYONE TRIED THIS THING?

Wes Anderson's Summer Vacation in India

2007-09-30T21:40:00.000-05:00

i saw darjeeling limited yesterday. out of a scale of 0-5 tweed jackets, i'd give it a solid 3.5. definitely one of wes anderson's more boring films to date, but boy did it look pretty. in the end, a disappointing wes anderson film is still better than 95% of the other films that come out over the year, and if there is ever an academy award for best perfomance by luggage in a feature film, it will most certainly win. thank marc jacobs and louis vuitton for this shit:

check it out in person at the louis vuitton store at 57th and 5th, and if you're feeling particularly rich you can bid on it and save all the children in the world (proceeds go to unicef). also, you can't mention a wes anderson film without also mentioning the soundtrack, which disappoints less than the film, especially since it includes "this time tomorrow" by the kinks (listen to the song in my brand new playlist on the right, or go to the film's website to listen to the whole soundtrack).

Dying is Fine

2007-09-28T16:45:00.000-05:00

Ra Ra Riot, my buddy wes' band, made a music video with nicholas gurewitch, excellent artist and creator of the very funny competition to my cartoon site, The Perry Bible Fellowship. below is the result. congrats to all involved, its charming. wes plays an orange-tinted zoologist quite convincingly. for a more long-winded explanation, go here.

Pretty Much the Best Thing Ever

2007-09-28T13:11:00.001-05:00

Faces in Places
i usually don't plug (no pun intended!) other people's work, but this blog is too good to not mention. a coworker tipped me off to it this morning, and i plan on checking it every seven seconds for the rest of my life. it basically sums up everything i love about being alive.

this is my favorite so far:

A Nation Without Lasers Cannot Stand

2007-09-25T07:13:00.000-05:00

so last night i finally got a chance to see kid nation, the "most talked about reality show of the upcoming season" (i'm not exactly sure what the competition is there, but whatever). well, its a little early to tell if the show will be bad or worse than bad, but seeing as my blog is called no more parents and this is a show about a world with no more parents it didn't really seem like the choice to blog about it was up to me. i'll just say right off the bat that the only cool part of this show was when three eight-year-olds went into the desert to hunt for jackrabbits with a bag of rocks.

and here are the problems that i have with kid nation:

Number One:
the show takes place in a ghost town called bonanza, made to replicate living in the wild west. this clearly should have been a space station, as there are no lasers in the wild west.

Number Two:
the kids talk like adults. a ten-year-old said the word egregious in a casual sentence. egregious.

Number Three:

the host is like a combination of a douchebag and a child molester. he should have been a hologram or a computer or just not there.

Number Four:
there is no slime. if there really could be a world without grownups, the first thing that these kids would do is invent slime and then slime each other and then probably give up on the whole thing. let's be a little realistic here.

Number Five:
the hardest working kid of each episode gets $20,000 in the form of a solid gold star, but their parents get to decide what to do with it. why does everyone in the world stand in the way of kids wanting to make a slide that goes from their bedroom into a giant swimming pool filled with pennies?

Number Six:
nobody gets kicked off of kid nation. there are already at least five kids that i would like to see kicked off of kid nation.

Number Seven:
again, no lasers.

(note that none of these points have to do with the fact that although they say the nation is run by kids, magical invisible adults from heaven gave them money and food and water and challenges and prizes and a recipe book and a caste system, though i guess it's worth pointing out.)

but am i going to watch the rest of the season? yes. am i going to blog about it? probably. in case you haven't seen the pretty boring first episode, you can watch it for free (does anyone still pay for tv?) on your computer here.

Make It Up Like a Uhaul Truck

2007-09-24T09:49:00.000-05:00

so i was walking to work the other day and i saw something that reminded me of a blog post i never ended up doing, but now that i'm in the mood for blog posts why dont we make up for past regrets. many or few of you may have seen the art that has appeared on the side of uhaul trucks since 1999. the idea is basically that there is a different illustration for every state (and a few provinces/territories), highlighting the most interesting thing about that location. oftentimes, they are predictably boring, like a picture of a crab or mountains or this:

but every once in a while, you see a crazy one. the other day, i happened upon a truck with the illustration for arkansas. i guess they were worried that arkansas wasn't spectacular enough to just show a picture of the state or something, so they tried to spice it up. now i've never been to arkansas, but i think they may have gone overboard. either that or arkansas is by far the most awesome place on the planet. i'm not even going to try to describe the picture to you. it looked like this:

if i visited arkansas and found that it did not, in fact, look like the sweetest trapper keeper i could have imagined, i would be seriously disappointed. i decided to do some research. i came upon a uhaul website which had way too much information on what i was looking for, including pictures of all the illustrations. here are a few of my personal favorites...

oklahoma: the rainbow laser state

iowa: the apocalypse/graphing calculator state

colorado: the alternate dimension ball of lava state

nevada: the video game state

illinois: the... uh...

idaho: the zebra state, for some reason...

manitoba: land of the 5 trillion-headed snake

after my research, i have been lead to believe that either uhaul's corporate headquarters is based in williamsburg brooklyn, or their creative director is a ten year old from 1993. either way, i don't want my children learning u.s. geography from these people.

Back Like Scoliosis

2007-09-20T13:35:00.000-05:00

whoa! where did this come from? i know, blogging is so january to february 2006, but i thought maybe it was time for an update. maybe i'll keep at it and maybe i wont... i made the mistake of starting a blog two weeks before my job went crazy and i ended up not having enough time to post things, but maybe i can strike a balance. anyways, let's check out what happened since we last spoke...

1. all my visitors left!

well not all of them, but almost all. in fact, the site counter says i still have an average of 30 people coming here every day. i'm kind of shocked and impressed that anyone is still here. i haven't updated in seven months. seven months and you still believe in me. then again, 30 people may be the average amount of random visitors to any address on the internet these days...

2. britney spears fucked some stuff up!

i also heard that she killed one of her children. i also heard that she invented aids.

3. nope, that was about it. oh yeah, the iphone. that too.

stay tuned... all 30 of you.

Making The Hypothetical Band

2007-02-28T12:51:00.000-05:00

well well well, where have i been. i got mad sick and i had mad work and it all made me very mad and i had no time to tend to the blog. which is sad because i've totally missed the boat on making fun of britney's terminal illness–chic makeover. anyways, you live and you learn...

so, moving onwards and upwards, we're going to talk about a favorite past-time (hyphen? wtf spellcheck) of mine. it's no secret that everyone in the world wants to be in a band (just ask hulk hogan). i myself have never been in a real band before, but that has not stopped me from coming up with approximately seven thousand names and album covers for my imaginary band over the past eleven years or so. laugh if you want, but if you don't have at least four hundred hypothetical names under your belt than you are a robot with no soul and please leave me alone. for the rest of you, you know what i'm talking about. you've always wanted to say you were in a band with a sweet name and an iconic album cover, but real bands require things like rehearsing, songwriting, arguing over creative differences, and musical talent. who needs that. here's your one-stop guide to creating everything for your band. minus, you know, the music.

the first step to any hypothetical band is a name. what makes a good band name? is there a science to it? the easiest way to name your fake band is to open a dictionary, encyclopedia or forest survival guide to any random page, pick any random word, and add "the" to it (just trying it now, i got "the moss"...could be worse). if that doesn't work, you can almost always get away with combining an animal with a body part (suggestion- please stick to horses, wolves, frogs, bears, and deer. fish are not allowed.) if you still don't think you've found that genius name that you know is out there, you can always get away with nonsense words, as long as they are not funny sounding, contain some kind of fucked up punctuation and appear to be icelandic.

for the sake of this post, let's call our name...mmm...how about sister wolf. so, the next step is to come up with your album name and cover art. now, this can be an extremely daunting task. you've just spent the last three weeks and most of your pre-calculus notebook space finding the perfect name, and now you have to do it again? and art? you cant draw! well fear not, little ones. in 1979, a team of scientists from around the world got together to create a nearly endless supply of perfect album names, as well as the accompanying cover art, just in case the world faced nuclear apocalypse and only the perfect blend of lofty melodrama and lighthearted nostalgia could save us. the project lasted twenty years, and was titled the "choose your own adventure book covers" (anyone still need a band name?) below are just a few examples of the hypothetical albums waiting to be released by gorilla hand or whatever you're called, and for your convenience, i've summed up what you should tell people you sound like for each choice.

serious drama. your band is mostly strings, organs, and big ass marching drums, preferably recovered from a major war. you record your songs in abandoned caverns behind waterfalls in the woods of canada. your songs are about churches on fire and dying children. you make more than one reference to the game of chess.

you are a solo act that goes on stage with eight machines that nobody has seen before and that all make basically the same noises as a broken nintendo. your songs have no beginings or endings, and you play with your eyes closed. you wear a neon green backpack everywhere you go. your audience desperately tries to figure out if they are supposed to be dancing.

you sound like the strokes.

you play happy, pleasant, unthreatening pop. you whistle in most of your songs, hand clap in all of them, and you have a xylophone player. you are the musical equivalent of lawn games.

you are a sensitive, poetic, acoustic singer-songwriter. you whisper songs into the microphone about the civil war and family members that you saw cry when you were little.

so that's to get you started. for literally hundreds more, go here and waste a perfectly good afternoon. you may never make it to that stage, but who can blame you for meticulous daydreaming. plus, now all of us who never got to be in bands and/or gave them ill-conceived names (i'm an ex-member of radioactive blue jellyfish myself) can name and design our blogs, which is nowhere close to the next best thing.

The World Just Lost Another Hulkamaniac

2007-02-17T20:00:00.000-05:00

alright, today we are going to talk about music. maybe someday we will talk about actual good music and/or live shows, but that day is not today. instead, i'd like to focus our attention to an album that came out in 1995 and has remained in the dollar bin of my heart ever since.

it can be argued that hulk hogan, america's most realistic action figure, redefined the american dream for the 80's generation: getting rich by destroying tank tops and pretending to wrestle. for any other person that may have been enough, but not for the hulkster. it's true, no dream is complete until you've recorded an album.

so here we have hulk rules, mr. hogan's whirlwind tour across the musical landscape of the early nineties, in honor of himself. in 29 minutes and 40 seconds, hogan manages to completely obliterate music as we know it- but before we get to how the album sounds, let's talk for a minute about what it looks like (click for a larger image):

ok, the cover is obvious enough. hulk hogan taking an imaginary shit on a gigantic american flag is probably what you already had in your mind, and it sums up the album more or less perfectly. on the back, you get to see the wrestling boot band in action- we've got the hulkster (bass/vocals), his wife (who got stuck with percussion and being hulk hogan's wife), and two guys competing for most insane shirt choice/ most insincere thumbs up of the decade. alright, on to the music. sorry but we're only doing the three most notable tracks on the album (especially since three of the others don't even have hulk hogan on them), but i think you'll get a good feel for the boot band once we're done...

"i want to be a hulkamaniac"
i know what you're thinking, "buying this album on blind faith/ poor judgement proves that i already am a hulkamaniac, so why would i need to listen to a song about wanting to be one?" well, you may think you're a hulkamaniac, but it's going to take a hell of a lot more than tank tops and shitty taste in music... you're going to have to do your homework. you're going to have to say no to drugs. you're going to have to go swimming with a buddy. that's what it takes. i know, its almost as bad as having to kill a prostitute to get into the crypts or run around campus with a beer bottle in your ass cheeks to get into a fraternity, so think twice before you have fun with your family and friends.

"beach patrol"
apparently when he's not in the ring, mr. nanny is a part-time lifeguard that beats the shit out of people who talk to his girlfriend. what i don't get is that they're the beach patrol, but they want to party. who's going to party with the beach patrol, their job is to stop parties. but the most serious offense in this song is the post-song banter: between the "whoop there it is" and the "slap it to me, homeboy" hulk surpasses all expectations and goes for a "hey girlfriend!" in case you were curious if hulk hogan was partially black, you now know he most certainly isn't. but if he was, he'd be a black woman.

"hulkster in heaven"
this song is about a kid hulk hogan theoretically met once and who died in the hospital. let it be said that i mean no offense to the dead kid (though i couldn't do worse than the song dedicated to him), but this is a little out of the hulkster's range, both sonically and symbolically. the chorus kind of sounds like a retarded james taylor, but at least the boot band knows the first rule of music production- if a ballad is lacking, you can always make up for it with a soulful choir. unfortunately, said choir happens to be constructed by the same casio keyboard demo that the rest of the instruments are from, and they never actually say the word "hulkamaniac" so it's entirely possible that the recording wasn't even done for this song. also the song is about eight minutes long.

final thought: this is what happens when a great man flies a little too close to the sun. still, he's got everything you could want in an album- parental guidance, old school hip hop, and a child with a terminal illness, so i'm going to give mr. hogan's overall effort a b+, (which translates to an 8.3 with the curve.)

My Dumbass Twin

2007-02-13T17:14:00.000-05:00

so some of you (like the four people who didn't get here from the comic site) may be wondering, "ok so the url to this site is either nomoreparents.blogspot.com or nomoreparents.net... wait a minute... .NET?? but isn't that for assholes and old people?"
well i'll tell you. it wasn't my choice to be nomoreparents.net. some other person took nomoreparents.com. but it's not one of those people that buys a thousand website names just so you have to pay a million dollars to get it from him (or her) later. it's not some giant corporation or government organization or other blog or other cartoon site or dungeons and dragons forum or animal porn forum or any of those things. in fact, i can't really tell you what it is. sure, you could type in "nomoreparents.com" or click the link i just gave you to see for yourself, but that would defeat the purpose of this post: making fun of whoever ruined my domain name.

so this is what you get when you go to the website:

nothing going on so far- except for the seriously unhappy emoticon in the title bar...

and then, as if by magic (flash), words in hot topic t-shirt font start to appear... but not just any words. words that question faith. words that question science. words that question our very way of life. this isn't just some website. this is serious. so what does it say? well, many things. i've been reloading the page for quite some time here at work and i'm still seeing new messages. but don't waste your own time, here are the highlights in order of their pertinence to modern day society- prepare to reevaluate your entire method of human understanding...

intense...

think about it. would we even know how to love? would we even know the names of our family members? this must be what canada is like.

what monsters? oh, those monsters... wait, is this about terrorism? we're the terrorists? the internet is terrorism? the monsters are iraq? interesting...

what does this one say? something about cell phones? no more cellphones? this doesn't make any sense.

this may have been the stupidest sentence i had ever read. until i read this one:

so by the end of my journey i had discovered that not only was this the worst website on the internet, but there is considerable chance that this is part of a larger viral marketing campaign to promote a blockbuster movie or video game or magazine or website that will suck at least as much as whatever this is. so don't go there. i'm going to leave you all with one more thing mr. :( wants us to ponder:

Get Out Your Graphing Calculators, It's Dinner Time!

2007-02-12T23:30:00.000-05:00

so having graduated from college last may, i am still getting used to living in the real world. i would say the most difficult aspect, or the one i have the most trouble with, is cooking for myself. fancy dishes (those that require heating something) either require their own trips to the grocery store (not the dishes going to the store themselves, that would be silly) or some kind of supernatural emeril-like (or rachel ray, what have you) mastery of the culinary arts. not really my bag. so my first idea was to eat jelly belly's for the rest of my life, making combinations according to the entirely scientific formulae printed on the inside of the box.

this was going pretty well for a while. but the problem was that while eating a bunch of jellybeans will certainly make you sick, it will not fill you up. plus, there are only so many nights you can eat fruit cocktail and blueberry muffins for dinner. i needed something more. something savory. something that was a little closer to real food. and then i realized, there is only one other food besides jellybeans that comes in as wide an assortment of shamelessly artificial flavors...

so here you have the ramen cookbook (or rather, algebra II book). since you will be using so many flavor packets and noodles, i'm going to say each recipe serves approximately 4 people (or 3 people and 2 miniature people). and even though you may have to use eight packs in one meal, it's still gonna cost less than a box of jelly beans. enjoy responsibly (and don't forget to factor!)

portobello stuffed boneless chicken breast:

glazed pot roast with pickled orange chutney:

spicy crawfish gumbo:

asian-marinated pork loin with gingered squash and 5-spice apples:

mama's old fashioned sweet potato pie:
alright, you can't really make this one with ramen noodles.

GOT A SECRET FAMILY RECIPE? SHARE IT IN THE COMMENTS...

Baby It's Cold Outside

2007-02-09T20:58:00.000-05:00

so it's wintertime, and you know what that means for everyone that lives in the real world (read: above the equator, away from los angeles)- COLD WEATHER. this week in particular has been very very cold in nyc. elsewhere, i have heard that in the midwest, where my brother goes to school, it is so cold that schoolchildren (yes, it's a compound word) are no longer allowed outside. this is purportedly because one kid was so cold that he cried and then the tears froze his eyeballs and they fell out of his head and shattered on the floor. i don't know if this is true or not, my brother has told me lies before (when's hook 2 coming out, jesse?), but if it is i feel bad for that kid that has to glue his eyes back together- it's going to take a long time without eyes to see the pieces... anyways, getting back to the point, here are some suggestions of how to keep warm based on the trials and errors of past civilizations:

the aztecs:

the aztecs lived in mexico, where it's hot and everyone drinks daiquiris. they don't count.

the native americans:

to brave (pun intended) the winter nights, the native americans set buffalo chips (dried poop, in spicy nacho or cool ranch) on fire. it's not so easy to do this today because all of the buffalo were killed by the native americans.

the pilgrims:

in order to keep warm, the pilgrims set the native americans on fire. it's not so easy to do this today because all of the native americans were killed by the pilgrims.

the jews:

matzo ball soup.

the qin dynasty:

does it snow in asia? can someone find out for me? dammit, i need an intern...

the russians:

the russians don't know what heat is, so they have nothing to compare their everlasting winter of misery to.

the impressionists:

when it got too cold for their fancy shmancy berets, the impressionists painted a nice spring landscape and jumped right in. they were never heard of again.

the beats:

who cares about the beats. regardless, they had turtlenecks.

so i hope you learned something: it's the twenty-first century and we're still fucking cold.

You Would Cry Too If It Happened To You

2007-02-09T13:27:00.000-05:00

get off the phone bitch, here's the news:

anna nicole smith died. the world reacts to the news with a collective "that's weird..."

so these are some facts i dug up (wow, no pun intended) about her that will make you sound a little more cultured when discussing dead d-list celebrities at your next wine tasting:

-1985: she was voted most winning smile at Jim's Krispy Fried Chicken.
-1987: she worked at Wal-Mart and then Red Lobster.
-1993: she was the cover girl of New York's White Trash Nation issue.
-1994: she remarried (for like the 12th time) to an octogenarian. i don't know what that is.
-2006: starred as Lucy in Illegal Aliens, which she also produced, a sci-fi/comedy about beautiful space aliens saving the earth from evil. i haven't found out if this is a porn or not yet.
-All the time: She made a lot of money, or lost a lot of money, or both- i forget, the wikipedia article is way too long for a woman who didn't even work at arby's, much less friendly's or dunkin' donuts.

so that's anna nicole smith. she's dead now.

Cookies...FOR BREAKFAST?!

2007-02-08T22:18:00.000-05:00

so i'm not going to pretend that i know what i'm doing here. to help keep things interesting, i'm going to pepper my posts with pictures of things that may or may not have to do with what i'm talking about.

over the past two years, many a people have asked me why i don't have a blog, and I've always had the same response, "if a pilgrim was a puritan, it would be a puritan. but its not. it's a pilgrim."

well not anymore. today a pilgrim is a puritan. today is the first day of the elephantitis of the mind blog.

the main reason i never had a blog before was because the only blogs people read are ones that are written by people that think they're experts, or experts that think they're people. i am not an expert in anything. i can't even spell very well. luckily for all of us, however, 2007 affords the internet-viewing public a wide spectrum of crap to keep us interested for three and a half seconds. i promise you this: if you give me three and a half seconds of your time, i can show you a good three and a half seconds. believe you me.

so if you managed to make it this far, you're probably thinking, "what the hell is this blog about?" let me explain. we're going to be having serious discussions about serious things. like sexually transmitted diseases. and global warming. and iraq. especially iraq. do any of you remember nick news with linda ellerby? its going to be like the episode where all the kids hang out in a set that looks like a safe inner-city alleyway and they listen to magic johnson talk about aids.

its going to be like that. also we will be talking about indie music.

so, to summarize, the main reason for creating this blog is because i want money and hot bitches and the iphone. i'll still do the cartoons, but since everyone gets so antsy about when the next one is gonna pop up there, now you have something to read while you're waiting: a "highlights" for the dentist office of the internet, if you will.

note: there will be no hidden pictures section.