Day: December 19, 2008

MasterChugs Theater: ‘Scrooged’

Ebenezer Scrooge saw no profit in Christmas. How quaint. Scrooge would have a field day today, taking advantage of the many ways to make a buck off the holiday and taking sentimental suckers for everything they’ve got. If Dickens were alive today, he’d probably write an even more potent Christmas Carol in which Scrooge doesn’t ignore Christmas but actively works to subvert it.

Would he have written Scrooge? No. Would he have written The Muppet Christmas Carol? Good lord no, and stab your eyes for even suggesting as such. Truth told, he probably would have written something like Scrooged, an 80s, greed-isn’t-good update of the Dickens classic. The wittiest satire of television since Network, Scrooged gives us Frank Cross, the “youngest president in the history of television,” a man who also happens to be the completely maniacal — and megalomaniacal — head of the IBC TV network. IBC’s holiday programming runs toward action flicks like The Night the Reindeer Died and cheesy variety shows like Bob Goulet’s Old-Fashioned Cajun Christmas. But Frank’s pièce de résistance is Scrooge, a live-from-around-the-world Christmas Eve special, featuring Buddy Hackett as the old skinflint, Mary Lou Retton as Tiny Tim, and a bevy of scantily clad, oh-so 80s Solid Gold Dancers.

“We’ll own Christmas,” Frank announces gleefully.

But will it own your heart? Hit the cut, true believers, to find out the answer to that question. Continue reading MasterChugs Theater: ‘Scrooged’

WE DID IT: WE SAVED THE US AUTO INDUSTRY!

Still-president George Bush has granted $17.4 billion to GM and Chrysler. Ford was apparently told to suck it. (The Bushman is a huge fan of Degeneration X.)

To thank us, the taxpayers who funded their bailout, GM and Chrysler executives have announced that we will all receive a brand new 2009 Corvette.

That’s one for all 301,139,247* of us. To be fair, though, only 242,677,887 of us — at most — are eligible to drive it.

*Source: The CIA World Factbook, December 18, 2008.

You Missed It: Break out the champagne edition

Welcome to the final You Missed it of 2008. (Normally abbreviated as YMI, but also known as TMI to iPhone users.) If you are expecting a grand review of 2008: The Year That Was–Numerically Inevitable After 2007, then you will get your wish. Technically, it’s only covering April on, since that is when this feature started, but nevertheless, let’s take a look back on the stories that would have changed your world if you had read this the first time around.

If you were busy getting engaged while still a suspect in your current wife’s disappearance, odds are you missed it.

FLAME ON! And off … and on again
The 2008 Beijing Olympics was one of the most overarching themes of the year. Things got off to a great start when human rights protesters in cities around the world caused the Olympic torch run to be done in secret in some places and extinguished temporarily several dozen times. Then it was the concern over pollution in the city, so China shut down all of its factories in the area for a few months, driving up the prices in just about everything for the summer.

As the games went on, we learned that the Olympic Village is basically a huge orgy, due to the fact that everyone is really fit and exercise raises hormone levels. Michael Phelps swam his way to eight gold medals and other athletes–uh oh, I said the M-P words. I can’t resist, must chant! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! Continue reading You Missed It: Break out the champagne edition

Sounds like the basis for a blue movie

OK, picture this: it’s a sleepy Saturday night. You find yourself sitting at home with nothing to do, having watched all the shows on your backlog. It’s soooooo boring. There’s nothing to do! What will you do with your down time? Well, if you’re bored over at the Ebara Branch of the Tokyo Fire Department, you break into a girl’s apartment and steal her underwear. Or at least, attempt to.

The vice captain of the Ebara Branch of the Tokyo Fire Department was held by police after entering a woman’s Suginami Ward apartment (doesn’t anyone lock their doors anymore?) around 4 a.m. and taking two pairs of her underwear. The woman awoke hearing the noise and was able to accost the fireman until the police showed (oh yeah, a real tough guy). The fireman informed the police that he had unintentionally wandered into the wrong house, thinking it was a friend’s. This now raises the disturbing question of just what had he intended to do with the underwear of his actual friend.

Of note is that the fireman in question was as apparently described being “intoxicated” as well. Seriously, someone needs to hook up Japan with some Victoria’s Secret already. You people are crazy.

Charles Dickens is a huge jerk

We know you’ve been wondering it since you were a child, and the results are in. The answer is no, Oliver Twist would not have needed more gruel, thus asking for more would have been unlikely. Thus, he never would have been kicked out of his orphanage and set on an adventure filled with thieves and murderers eventually coming out on top and being reunited with relatives.

Take that, Dickens!

Just in time for Christmas, scientists figured out that recipes of gruel that have been lying around since the first have of the 1800s actually provided good nutritional value and had a pretty decent serving size. You may know Dickens’ work from his attempt to rob a famous magician of his stage name with his book David Copperfield.

Until recently, Dickens was regarded by historians as the creator of the modern Christmas. As recently as a few years ago, he was given credit for instilling the spirit of giving to others and creating the Victorian version of Christmas that spread throughout the Western world. Today, we know his Christmas books, A Christmas Carol in particular, were nothing more than communist propaganda.

Think about it, an old rich business owner against a worker who demands health benefits and paid vacation. Much less the fact that a welfare state must be created to support Tiny Tim, or the ghosts of Christmas, which are obviously Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin.