Huffy Flounce

'Now wait whilst I move my head totally unconvincingly to one side.... Oy vey!'

That's why I went there, Mal. Even went to the trouble of making sure I was spelling "fakakta" and "tchatchke" right.

Don't know why I assumed the Jewishness would take over in his old age. Just seemed right.

This is, to my knowledge, the first full-length feature based on a Chick Tract.

I noticed that the credits said it was "based on the graphic novel." They're counting a Chick Tract as a graphic novel? Good show, guys.

Here's the source material, by the way. It shouldn't take more than a few minutes to read.

Holy shit. I missed my opportunity to enter this. It has me bummed.

What would you have crushed?

This SNL skit always stuck with me. It's only sort of funny until you get to the punchline, which is the actual funny bit. I guess it's kind of funny to listen to Nic Cage's character come up with increasingly ridiculous objections.
https://screen.yahoo.com/baby-names-000000664.html

For some reason, it's only available on Yahoo and they don't allow conventional embedding of videos.

Mal Shot First wrote:What would you have crushed?

A guy dressed up to look like the Tiananmen Square Tank Man.

http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/s4z9il/-mcconnelling

The segment of last week's Daily Show that introduced the concept of McConnelling was pretty funny, and as soon as I saw it I knew someone was going to match it with the Guile theme. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Guile theme does not go with footage that seemed tailor-made for it.

At around the one-minute mark, Stewart does the generic dopey voice I mentioned in "Current Annoyances."

Has anyone paired it with Nightwish's "Ghost Love Score" (the Epic X Maneuver music)? It wouldn't surprise me.

This could go in the gaming forum, but it fits in here as well. It's one of the funniest AVGN episodes in some time, but mostly because the game is so bad. James doesn't even have to try that hard because the game speaks for itself.

That fucking Daily Show embed keeps autoplaying. It starts with commercials. It took me a while to figure out where the sound was coming from.

This was on the front page of YouTube today. My favorite quote is at 1:05: "When music videos used to be normal... there's nobody stripping in this one." [in reacting to "Smells Like Teen Spirit"]
I don't know to what extent this girl was aware of what she was saying, but I have a feeling that she doesn't realize that this video was regarded as provocative at the time.

It's obvious that the kids they picked were in some way familiar with Nirvana, so they probably had some preconceived notions about who the band was and what they stood for (some of them didn't, of course). Somehow, the video feels as if it was manipulated in order to show how teens connect to Nirvana's music even 20 years later, which may be true, but the way it was done made it feel a bit insincere.

I also find it problematic that they mythologize Kurt Cobain as this artist who couldn't deal with the paradox of his fame and committed suicide because he had become what he hated. You hear this story over and over again when people talk about Cobain's life, and there is truth to it, of course, but he was also a man in constant physical pain. It wouldn't be surprising if he was just tired of everything after self-medicating and dealing with it for years.

They mention the chronic pain in the "Kids React Fact" at the bottom, at least. They also quote the bit from the letter he left where he says it had been years since he had felt any excitement when listening to or creating music. It would have been nice if they'd incorporated some of that into the actual video. Sometimes the Fine Brothers end up with a lot of extra material, and they often post said material. It looks like they have one for this video, too. (It's the "Bonus Reactions" hyperlink at the end of the video.) I haven't watched it. They probably don't go more into depth, but maybe they do. Their videos are usually mixed bags for me--especially when I know a fair amount about the topic at hand.

It always bugs me when people speak knowingly about why so-and-so committed suicide. Even when a note's left behind, you can't trust it. If I were ever to write a suicide note, I can almost guarantee that it would be full of lies. Suicide notes, like funerals, are often more about the living than the dead.

Sometimes you just want to be dead. Not everybody wants to be alive. (Check out this beauty of a suicide note George Sanders left behind: "Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.")

That one kid brought up the Dark Knight about either dying the hero or living long enough to see yourself become the villain. It parallels "It's better to burn out than to fade away"--the Neil Young lyric (from "Hey Hey, My My [Into the Black]") Cobain included in his note--on some level. He also had that play on the Who lyric in his journals. "I hope I die before I get old" was the lyric as written by Townshend. Kurt's subversion: "I hope I die before I become Pete Townshend." Was he fixed on the idea of dying young? I dunno. It should be noted that he had already attempted suicide before he actually managed to pull it off.

I don't think it's exaggerating to say that the teens of today have at least as much exposure to Nirvana as the teens of my era had to the Beatles. One of the kids mentioned that one of the songs was in Rock Band or Guitar Hero. I think Nirvana's simply a part of white suburban teen culture at this point. If a white kid is even slightly interested in the history of rock, he probably knows about Nirvana. They're seen as the gold standard of their generation and genre the way the Sex Pistols are seen as the gold standard of their generation and genre. Ditto the Beatles. And like the Sex Pistols and the Beatles before them, a too-young-for-his-time death helped them secure their legacy. (Of course, in the case of the Sex Pistols, the guy who died didn't play a single note on their one-and-only studio album, and in the case of the Beatles, the band had been broken up a decade by the time Lennon was shot.)

It occurs to me that we're about as far removed from Nirvana's breakup as my generation of teens was from the Beatles' breakup. It's a twenty-year removal. Yikes. That's a long time.

It also occurs to me that Nirvana's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (on 10 April 2014) will happen eerily close to the twentieth anniversary of the discovery of his corpse (8 April 1994). It just worked out that way. Bands are eligible twenty-five years after the release of their first album. Bleach came out in 1989. Not every band gets in during their first year of eligibility (the Pixies, for example, have been eligible a couple of years and have yet to get in), but I think it was pretty much understood that Nirvana would be getting in immediately. The Beatles got in immediately, too.

If you shout at them, they will get off your lawn too.

My other favorite reaction is at 3:42: "They sound the same when they're live!"
Considering the strained raspiness Cobain has to put in his voice, that is actually pretty impressive.

I remember him saying in an interview (maybe it was in the Kurt Loder book) that his voice had a pretty limited shelf life and that the band would eventually have to break up because there'd be no way for him to keep singing.

He just couldn't wait.

We've become kings of the callback here on Huffy Flounce.

I simply must do this stuff:

That mash-up of cartoon themes is pretty cool, but it's not quite as good as I had hoped. I was hoping that they had figured out a way to have the songs merge into each other a bit more seamlessly, but for the most part, they play the melody of one song and then abruptly switch to the next. There are a few in there that do blend quite nicely.

Jubbers was also disappointed with it.