You Missed It: The Devil’s due edition

You can smell it in the air, can’t you? It’s the smell of hot dogs, freshly cut grass, beer, and vomit. Yes, baseball season is here once again. It’s time to break out the tar, scratch yourself and spit often and for no apparent reason. If you were busy massacring The Beatles’ best work this week, odds are you missed it.

The end of March Craziness
In a case of David vs. Goliath, Good vs. Evil, Justice vs. Crime, Black vs. White, On vs. Off, Up vs. Down and Peanut Butter vs. Jelly, Butler and Duke squared off in the NCAA men’s basketball final. Missing a buzzer-beater and down by two points, Butler fell to Duke, a decision that pleased virtually no one. In other news, someone beat someone else in women’s basketball the other day.

Don’t mess with the perks of a job
Working at a brewery isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, just ask the staff at Carlsberg. Warehouse workers and truck drivers are on strike for the second day in a row. Why? It’s not because of a wage cut, or a mandate for longer hours. No, the bastards are ending their free beer policy. And this, Republicans, is why we have unions.

It took three days–seriously
A man in Oregon beat the world record for points in the video game “Asteroids” during a webcast attempt. We know what you’re thinking. Yes, ladies. He’s still available.

Eat My Sports: If I were a bettin’ man …

As you may have heard, Bryan Schools leading a protest against his hometown’s new AA baseball team, the Richmond Flying Squirrels. He’s at their field The Diamond (this play oozes originality) saying he doesn’t want a mascot named Nutzy. Last we heard he climbed one of the light posts armed with a bottle of whiskey and is refusing to come down.

So until next week, I, Bryan McBournie, will be filling in, which makes sense, since a power outage yesterday kept me from posting my own weekly column. I’m here with all the regular sports expertise I am known for (none). Since there’s really only one thing that matters right now in the sports world: March Madness.

I’d like to be clear on this point: I know nothing about college basketball. I don’t much care about basketball as a sport, and the whole March Madness thing had been lost on me–until this year. Due to some peer pressure, I made a bracket for my office pool. Now, I’m sitting in 13th place out of 25, and have the highest potential points left. How did I do it?

Continue reading Eat My Sports: If I were a bettin’ man …

MasterChugs Theater: ‘G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra’

We’ve had comic book movies, superhero movies, and video game movies; but G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra is something slightly different. Call it action figure filmmaking, a movie poured straight from the same mold as the ones used to create Hasbro’s legendary toys. A story ripped straight off the back of a G.I. Joe card and plopped down in front of you. The heroes are fully poseable and the bad guys are as stiff and contorted as they are evil. In fact, this sensation is almost palpable, as you can honestly feel it in every frame of Stephen Sommers’ film. It’s as if were you to remove the clothing from the movie’s characters, you’d see nothing but anatomically incorrect plastic and crudely put together ball and socket joints.

Now, G.I. Joe doesn’t have a lot going for it, at least initially. The movie’s director is, as mentioned earlier, Stephen Sommers, a man known for creating one of the worst movies in cinema history, Van Helsing. The trailers have been laughably bad at best, and quite frankly, the inclusion of work done by Kid Rock into anything is not exactly a good move. In fact, Paramount chose not to test screen the movie for critics–that’s almost always a bad sign for a movie. What’s scary is that this tale of woe and misfortune just stems from the lead-up to the movie, not the actual movie itself. So, how is the movie?

Think of that old phrase: “It’s a mystery found in an enigma, wrapped up in a conundrum.” Continue reading MasterChugs Theater: ‘G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra’