Day: February 13, 2012

The McBournie Minute: History gets the ‘Twilight’ effect

Yesterday was Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, even though we don’t celebrate it as a national holiday. Not even President’s Day is in his honor, because Congress refused to celebrate the man who saved the Constitution while freeing the slaves, because they didn’t want to rile up the South. This was decades after his death. The holiday is legally known as Washington’s Birthday, even though it’s not on George Washington’s birthday. Abe just can’t get respect. Did you remember to get him something? No matter, Hollywood did.

The trailer for Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter was just released, and the movie looks to reboot one of America’s most-treasured action heroes, Honest Abe. (Also in the Pantheon of American Heroes Who Need Reboots: Superman, Tiger Woods, Natty Bumppo and Jesus.) It’s got everything you need for a blockbuster movie based on a book with a cult following and a vampire movie trend that just won’t die.

So why am I just not excited about this?
Continue reading The McBournie Minute: History gets the ‘Twilight’ effect

Hovering: one giant, sustained leap to animal dominance

It’s taken years of advocating by the Guys, but it appears that the nation’s greatest minds in engineering and science have finally agreed to study our most innumerable foe in the War on Animals: insects. Researchers from NYU’s Courant Institute discovered that the ability to hover is actually hindered by a lower weight distribution, while a top-heavy weight distribution enables more stable flight while hovering.

The U.S. military has announced that this research will aid the war effort by improving the design of existing and future hovering aircraft and by ushering in the timeline from Back to the Future Part II, in which the only animal threat existing by 2015 is a holographic shark.

Manliest sport in the world comes from … Canada?

Oh Canada. We make jokes and jests about you because you’re fun. Sure, people may say that you’re “too nice” in a pejorative manner, but really, how can being “too nice” actually be a bad thing, hmm? When people say that you’re a simple folk, they don’t mean it in a negative way, they just mean that you’re too innocent to have to dirty your hands in the slightly harsher elements of world politics.

Yes. Sure.

You might have come up with hockey, but curling? A sport that involves brooms? That’s not exactly strong of muscle, and as such, the world knows (but has not castigated) you’ve been trying to compensate for that.

But seriously? Ultimate Tazer Ball? Was the inexistant “Mid-level Tazer Ball” not enough? You do know that Jackass and Mountain Dew are products of the United States, right?

Don’t dye your squirrels

It seems that February is when all the freaks come out. We’re not talking about people who really enjoy Valentine’s Day, we’re talking about mankind’s sworn enemies, the animals.

First, there was evidence of radioactive spiders, and now we’ve got a purple squirrel, whose powers and agenda have yet to be declared.

The squirrel was trapped by a couple in a town called Jersey Shore, which is for some reason in Pennsylvania, so there’s more than one puzzle in this story. The squirrel appears to be normal in every other way, but it’s just freaking purple. Somewhere, Grimace is recalling that wild night years ago with a squirrel in a tree behind a McDonald’s.