Dumbidity

21st Century Travel Game

Do you remember the lame games the old folks use to make you play when you went on long trips?

The "Find the 50 States" license plate game is way too complicated now with all the specialty plates the various DMVs have developed. "I got everything from Maryland except Hearing Impaired-Iwo-Jima Campaign-Terrapin-Retired!"

"I Spy" is the stupidest game ever devised. Politicians play a variation of that every election cycle.

"Road Sign Bingo" isn't too bad, but if you've finished the 2nd grade, it hasn't got much appeal.

The ever-popular "Punch/Pinch Your Sibling Until He/She Strikes Back and Play the Victim" will never fade away.

But there is a new game for the Post-Nuclear Generation: Name the DVD. This game requires the conspicuous consumption of others, namely that they have a DVD player in their car; it's playing a DVD; and they're burning more gas than you because they're in front of your car.

It's easy to play. Once the tiny screen is spotted, players squint and strain to see what's on it and the first person to correctly identify what it is gets 3 points. The first person who says "uh-uh it's 'The Goonies', dooty-head" gets hit by the driver's flailing arm.

The driver should not participate. I missed my exit because the SUV in front of me was playing a really cool vintage Popeye cartoon - the one where he beats up Bluto to save Olive Oyl.

Subway - Eat Neat or Else

I go to Subway for a sammich fairly regularly, not like Jared or Sherman and Herman, but mostly because it's close, a more sensible food choice than McChubby's and not terribly expensive.

Most of the time they overload it with the veggies, though occasionally I'll have to explain to the Sammich Construction Technician that they're not gonna hurt me by putting jalapeños on it. It's fun to see what all falls out and then enjoy a small dropout salad for afters - which entails getting one's fingers messy. I must say that the young lady who recently assumed the SCT duties at my regular spot is a bit tight with 'em, which brings me to my point:

Subway is the fast-food spot with, bar none, the STINGIEST napkin policy. They give you * a * napkin and shoot you the meanest look if you dare to ask for another - for any reason. They don't even have the little napkin dispensers that look like Coke machines with those worthless, tissue-thin generic napkins that most places have on the tables (where the idiots stuff 'em in backwards so they shred when you try to get 'em out).

The silly part is that these napkins are like a six-inch square hunk of ad space for Subway, with the logo and heart-healthy data on 'em. If they were sturdier, they could bulk mail 'em to "Occupant" and get a tax write-off.

It gets even sillier: you can have all the top-grade straws (each encased in its own logo-imprinted, hermetically sealed, protective cellophane wrapper) that you can stuff in your pockets, throw on the floor and pass out to various panhandlers you meet on the way back to work...

...but you can't wipe your greasy fingers on 'em.

I'm Glad I Know How to Quit You, Oscar!

This is me, not watching the Oxcars®©™.

There are a lot of reasons why I have no interest in them any more. It used to be fun to critique them afterwards, but they’re so pathetically introverted now that it’s no fun.

I was particularly unimpressed with all the pre-Oxcar®©™ hype on Ang Lee and his oh-so-avant-garde gay cow sheepboy movie, Bareback Mountie.

Fooey. Anglee had it easy. These days anybody can make a movie in any genre with overtly gay characters, and to the extent it causes a fuss, the fuss is free publicity.

Back in the old days, directors had to be real subtle with their closet caballeros and homo Hondos, but nobody gave Sergio Leone an Oxcar®©™ for the gay gunslingers in his spaghetti westerns. Leone hired Clint Eastwood, the most butch actor available, to camouflage the gay-romantic triangle, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly between the tragic Tuco (Eli Wallach) and his two lovers, Angel-Eyes (Lee van Cleef) and Blondie (Eastwood). Those in the know cried as Tuco discovers, too late, that Blondie has killed Angel Eyes out of vengeance and is abandoning him for his infidelity.

Eastwood continued to play repressed gays, notably in the campy musical, Paint Your Wagon, and as the dark, mysterious stranger in High Plains Drifter. How obvious could it be, what with him being so nice to the midget Mordecai and so anxious to play the overt hetero by raping Sarah Belding (the future Mrs. Vernon Wormer).

But Clint’s closeted capers weren’t confined to Westerns. He portrayed a queer WWII lieutenant, demoted to a private after being caught enflagrante dilecto , bent on revenge by bucking the Army and leading the more obviously gay, longhaired tanker Oddball and his fellow merry men to steal German gold in Kelley’s Heroes. His Dirty Harry series pushed the über-macho character to the limit as he sublimated forbidden desires by using his huge .44 magnum as a violent Freudian substitute. And in a few years when Hollywood has further lowered America’s mores, recall that Clint was ever at the forefront of loves-that-dare-not-speak-their-names with Every Which Way But Loose and his disgusting orangutan-love movies.

And what about John Ford? He took on the challenge of using the formidably macho John Wayne as his gaytagonist in dozens of movies. So often the code was a trusted sidekick like Victor McLaglen’s Sgt. Quincannon in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (the film’s coded acronym is “SWAYR”) or a young upstart – or several young upstarts – as in The Cowboys (the film’s tagline: “The youngest was nine. There wasn't one of them over fifteen. At first, he couldn't stand the sight of them. At last, he couldn't take his eyes away.") Yeccch.

Wayne wasn’t the only one who used a “second-banana” to codify his latent-love in a long string of films – the venerable Roy Rogers and Andy Devine as “Cookie” and “Jingles”. Really, I’ll never go to Arby’s again.

The list goes on and on – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (which won four Oxcars®©™ for, among other things, Best Music and Best Original Score); The Magnificent Seven (nominated for Best Music), Guadacanal Diary… even The Seven Year Itch – who else but a fairy’s gonna pass a chance with Marilyn Monroe?

No, Anglee is a poser who's merely gleaning low-hanging fruits where others have blazed the trail long before him.

[Crickets, My Left Foot!]