Cruise Your Daddy

All right, monsters. I know a lot of meetups get thrown around, but this is going to be the meetup by which all others are measured. There will be a monster meetup in Heaven in 2012, and Mans will be like, "meh...it's no cruise of 2011." BE THERE OR BE SQUARE!

Just kidding. Those who are there may still be square. Being there will be no indication of squareness. "GET TO THE POINT, TEACHERMAN!!!" A fair comment. Here's what I'm talking about:

BOOM! Imagine this: You, teacherman, and BabyFriday sitting poolside, enjoying a roast beef sandwich and a large glass of Vodka. TEMPTED??? "Kind of! Is this some sort of contest?" -- You. "Nope." -- teacherFriday. Here are the details

I'd Hit That: Paul Newman & Robert Redford

This week, we are kicking it old school...


Paul Newman and Robert Redford were two very sexy, rugged men in their prime. Let's discuss.

Poem of the Week: Auld Lang Syne

Just a brief commentary on this week's poem. Given that today is New Year's Day, it seems appropriate to post these song lyrics which were originally transcribed by Robert Burns. In lieu of my own remarks, I will provide a link to a great article published in the Wall Street Journal today. Enjoy! http://on.wsj.com/gjnrxl

Auld Lang Syne
Robert Burns
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and days of auld lang syne?
For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll take a cup o' kindness yet
For auld lang syne

You Can Make It Up, Ghostdad Edition: Hanging Out With Marcia Gay Harden On New Year's Eve

So I'm sitting at home, just doing nothing...watching a "No Reservations" marathon on the Travel Channel when this guy I "know" Derek calls me up and is like "hey, man...you gotta come to this party with me tonight. It's going to be epic". And so I throw some Brut on and a cummberbund and I'm out the door.

When I get there it's more like something from "The Big Chill" than "Can't Hardly Wait". I mean, there's white wine and appetizers with scallops in them and young dudes in tuxedos cleaning up after people. So I see Derek and am all "WTF, D? I thought you said this party was going to be live. Where's all the honeys? The Moet? You know?". And he goes "patience, my good man...patience" and before I know it some of the old foggeys take off and some glitterati type motherfuckers start showing up. The dude who played Urkel comes in with a big group of ladies (whom he calls "bitches") and Kato Kaelin is even there. So I'm thinkin'....ok, cool. This could be ok. I can finally find out if it was hard for that dude to play both Urkel and Stefan Urquell simultaneously and if OJ uses fancy soaps in his guest bathroom and stuff. As I'm in the middle of talking to one of Kato's groupies...trying to make some time...I feel this tug on the back of my cummerbund strap and I turn around real angry like.

"What the fuck, man? What are you-"

2010 Concert Round-Up Part 2

Here's part two (July - December 2010) of my best concert moments of 2010. I'm just going to jump right in.

July 18, 2010 - Swell Season, She & Him, and Bird & the Bee @ the Hollywood Bowl
Cool story about this show: I almost got run over by a golf cart carrying Jenny & Johnny. Opening up the night was a band already mentioned in Part 1: The Bird and the Bee. Inara looks to have already lost all the baby weight in like 2 months. Jealous!



She & Him was the next band up. I'll save the She & Him video for later in the post.

Closing out the show was the Oscar winning duo from Once: The Swell Season. Glen Hansard puts his heart and soul into every song. I have been known to shed tears at Swell Season shows before and this show was no exception. Here is a video of Glen and Markéta performing Lies.

The Worst Movie of 2010

By: Dafs

Around the Monster blog and pretty much every media site on the Internet, people are trying to pinpoint the best movies of 2010. But for my money, there’s not enough talk about the worst movie of 2010. Many of you know that I recently saw The Little Fockers with my fiance's family. This was NOT the worst film of the year. It was not good, by any stretch of the imagination, but it was exactly what it advertised itself as. Yes, there is a horrible scene where Ben Stiller injects medicine into Robert DeNiro’s pharmaceutical enhanced erection in front of his screaming child, but that scene was also in the trailer. People who paid to see The Little Fockers went knowing full well (some even excited) that they would see such a tableau. Such was the not the case with the worst movie of 2010, a science fiction film called Splice.

2010 Concert Round-Up Part 1

I'm back again with a round up of some of my favorite moments at concerts this year. I couldn't rank the concerts so instead I am just listing them chronologically. Believe it or not, this is just a best of and not every concert I attended this year. So enjoy the videos and mp3s below and maybe I'll convert a few new fans for these bands.

Jan 22 - Cold War Kids @ The Wiltern in LA
Great local LA band that has been getting pretty big the last few years. They were cool enough to record a bootleg of the entire show and gave the link to everyone who attended. Here's "We Used To Vacation" off their bootleg:



Jan 23, 2010 - Pee Wee Herman @ Club Nokia
I know this is technically not a concert but it was one of the best shows I went to this year and he did sing. I wish they would bring back the tv show.

Brett Favre contest & NFL coverage announcement

Seeing how the NFL playoffs are coming up I think it's time we have some foot-ball coverage round these here parts. We could go negative and fill the blog the crappy/stupid things NFL players do, but that is not the way of the monsters so we will try something different. For the playoffs I will cover the storylines behind the matchups in a column titled Behind the Grunts: Tights & Pads & my good Efriend, Yourhscoach, will cover his favorite football games on The Best Football Games of All Time(that I can remember). Both these columns will try to cover the NFL in a way that's friendly to all readers (yay inclusion!) 

Anyways, remember when i said we would have no negative stuff on the blog? 

Inside The Monsters Studio: Lawblog

We need to talk.

Now listen: I would LOVE to interview each and every one of you. I really would. But sometimes life doesn’t quite work out the way you want it to. So far, I’ve mostly (completely) interviewed regulars in the chat room, due to convenience. But I realize that not everybody can completely ignore their real-world responsibilities in order to come talk about wings and sitcoms all day. I REALIZE THIS. So if you DO want to be considered for an interview, shoot me a DM on Twitter. If you can’t guess my Twitter name, you get no interview. I’ll compile a list, and throw a dart at my monitor to decide each week’s subject.

This week, the dart landed right the hell on everybody’s favorite contest runner-up, Lawblog. Mr. Blog and I sat down over a cup of nothing and had a chat that could almost be classified as interesting. See for yourself:

Videogum name: Lawblog

Videogum avatar: Previously a cute bulldog, now Scott Baio in suspenders

Real name (optional): Dan Trash

Location: NYC

Favorite sitcom (excluding Arrested Development): Currently Community, all time The Simpsons (seasons 3-9)

Favorite wing flavor: Hot Buffalo, but really all wings

Karaoke song of choice: "Roll Out" by Ludacris and "Lightning Crashes" by Live

Worst movie you’ve ever seen: Eagle Eye

Q. Before we get started, I just want to clear something up: You DO know you’re only being interviewed because you gave me a shoutout in “We Monsters,” right?

Announcing the Monster Fat Club

I don't know about this weight loss stuff, but it sounds pretty lame. So I'm making my own club here. Pretty much, we just eat wings and cake ALL THE TIME. All you have to do to join is eat wings and cake. That's it! Who's with me?!

Announcing the Monster Fit Club

Everyone knows that Monsters are the sexiest people on the Internet. Some of us want to be sexier and some of us want to stay sexy. Now there is a place to make that happen. We like to call it the Monster Fit Club!!!

MFC will meet here every Monday to report on our weight loss, seek new tips and most importantly support and motivate each other.

This is what you need to do:

My Life Is Twilight: Informed Hatred

People hate Twilight for the wrong reasons. It's totally worthy of hatred, don't get me wrong. It's maybe the most worthy. But if you really want to be informed with your hatred, and I sense that you do, you've got to get past the sparkly vampire thing.

Yes, in Twilight, vampires sparkle in sunlight. It is presented, in Twilight, as a kind of joke about vampire mythology. Vampires are aware of the rumors that they burst into flames in the sun, have an aversion to garlic and crosses, and so on. Within the reality of Twilight, those are exaggerations of the truth. One could easily see how a human seeing a vampire sparkling a few hundred years ago could have been distorted by oral tradition into the whole bursting into flames thing. People who complain about faggy sparkling vampires seem to be implying that Twilight is not totally self-aware about this (Here's a complaint I hear constantly about zombie movies: don't the people in these movies see zombie movies? Don't they know how to deal with a zombie invasion? Yet here is Twilight, a world in which vampires have seen vampire movies, and those same people [unknowingly] complain about it. Be more ideologically coherent with your objections to pop culture, people). But they sparkle! It's so gay! WE KNOW. Get over it.

Characters I Hate In Movies I Love: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

(In this feature I will discuss characters I can't stand - justifiably or not - in classic or personal favorite movies. Mostly these aren't the characters you're supposed to hate, like villains or romantic rivals, but rather characters that offend me personally.)

Ugh. You know who I hate? Casey Jones! Don't get me wrong, there are lot of really hateable characters in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) - Raphael (blugh, go to your room) and Danny (stop being a turd) - but Casey Jones takes the cake. What an idiot! What an asshole! This bitch.

The People's Gummies: The Best Films and Albums of 2010

Hey all. I've calculated results from http://mobfd.blogspot.com/2010/12/announcing-peoples-gummies-mans-bes.html Books were very diverse, and songs and viral videos got tepid reponses, so at least for now I'm just calculating films and albums.

For each entry, 1st place awarded five points, 2nd four points, and so forth. If entries weren’t ranked, I gave each entry 3 points.

(I’ve only listed entries that totaled at least six points)

FILM

The Monsters are coming to Philly!

Hey, E-friends, tired of NY, Chicago, Austin & LA having all the cool monster meetups? Do you feel tired at night & full of energy in the morning? Does alcohol take away your social inhibitions? GREAT!! come join the monsters as we celebrate Rain's 29th birthday in the number 1 US city for Rain fans!

RSVP here or on FB at:

Philly Meetup

Poem of the Week: Osso Bucco

As it is the week of Christmas, I wanted to post a poem that had to do with kith and kin and hearthfire and all that stuff. My mind immediately went to Billy Collins as he is king of quaint -- but what poem? He actually has a poem that deals with Christmas ("Christmas Sparrow" which you can find here: http://bit.ly/fdgcZ6) but it is not all that good. So I decided on "Osso Bucco," one of his more famous works and one that I absolutely adore. Those who know Billy Collins know that he is extremely accessible and wonderfully nostalgic, though I personally do not feel like he gets enough credit for his complexity of composition. In "Osso Bucco," for example, Collins does a marvelous job vacillating between the cultured ("the candles give off their warm glow, / the same light that Shakespeare and Izzac Walton wrote by") and the feral ("a creature with full stomach"). Add the this that the poem contains one of my favorite images when Collins describes the satisfaction of a full stomach as "the lion of contentment / [having] placed a warm heavy paw on my stomach," and this poem is a winner. If you don't want Osso Bucco after reading this poem, you are either a vegetarian or you're not reading it right. Bon appetit!

Monter Movie Club: True Grit

You know how it works; go watch a movie then nerd out with us here. We will have the open thread sometime this week. If you have any suggestions for movies which will not likely be covered by Videogum, gives us a heads up & we shall start an open thread. SHALL I say!!

Also, don't forget to vote on on the People's Gummies. today is the last day to do so.

Now THAT is funny. Boxing Day Edition.

Because I spent two weeks travelling through Europe mostly talking to other Americans about Dave Matthew's Band about 11 years ago, I consider myself to be incredibly more worldly than the average bourgeois American. This worldliness enables me to know that in the non-American English speaking countries of the world (or "the problem" as I like to think of them) today is known as "Boxing Day." According to WikiLeaks Boxing Day has something to do with giving alms and charity, but to me Boxing Day is the day of the year, out of shear exhaustion and fatigue, you desperately want to pummel everything and everyone around you. "Boxing Day is about the sport boxing? Ahahaha, so funny! You totally just made that joke up! Brilliant, Kel" - No one ever, not even my own mother.

I am so tired I can barely see straight. I screamed at someone yesterday. I do not like having to feel like the kind of joyless dirtbag who would scream at a loved one on Christmas Day. I am happy to have just made it through to the easy side of the holiday season where all you have to do is return stuff to the Gap and drink champagne. You know what I need? I need me some funny videos! Warning - the second video below makes me cry with laughter but it's also more than a bit off-color.