Remember last week when I posted some sort of troll picture or something? Well I don’t have anything else to write about, so here’s some more of that sorta stuff. For those of you who don’t read my stuff, the idea is that I “work” at this internet college thinger where I go around and look at classes on the internet made by community college teachers who have no idea how the internet works. By this point, I’m used to that, but the one thing I still can’t get over are some of the just plain awful design choices. For instance, here’s a picture I found in a course that was actually really well designed. It was mostly flash-based, but only to the point where it made it easier to use and not annoying as hell to even look at, but this was one of the better images that serves as an example of what most of their pictures looked like:

If I remember correctly, this was from a mass media class or something like that. And I agree with the retarded hipster with a sore neck who isn’t even looking at that sign, those dark grey vertical lines and the Times New Roman “Cola” really seem interesting. Excuse me, they look interesting!!! I’d like to think that he’s looking at some banner being dragged by a passing plane and that explains why he’s looking far above the poster, but we both know that isn’t the concept behind this picture. What does interest me, however, is what that poster to the left might be for. No words, just three pictures of somebody’s (or somebodies) face(s) with little purple dots floating around. Hell, now that I look at it, it’s actually part of the enticing Cola ad! I guess COLA IS MADE OF PEOPLE!!!

Of course, this is a rare exception, and most of the time I’m not faced with glaring idiocy, but there’s more humor to be found than in just stupidity! (I know, weird, isn’t it?) Here’s my other picture to share:

This one is taken completely out of context, and is actually from a Greek course. I’m pretty sure it’s illustrating how to say the conjugations of some word with this handy little mnemonic device, but jesus, just look at that thing. There’s a bear sitting legs akimbo in front of a fire, holding a pan between his two hands while a head pokes through a closed tent with no end to it. I can’t tell if the guy is supposed to be screaming because a fucking bear’s about to smack him with a frying pan or if he’s ecstatic about the fact that his good friend the bear has woken up early to cook him breakfast.

So there you go, a couple funny pictures I found while at work. Next thing you know I’ll be putting captions on cute pictures of capyburas and sending them out in FW: FW: FW: RE: FW: FUNNY PICTURES!!!! emails.

2008 has been a bad year for heroes.

Before we start today’s Ad Vs Ad, there’s something that bares mentioning. Last week, one of the best, most iconic and certainly most versatile actors in history passed away. Paul Newman was in movies, television and radio programs for over fifty years, giving us such landmark works as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Torn Curtain, Hud, The Sting, The Color of Money, The Hustler, and of course Cool Hand Luke, one of the few films that can legitimately contend for the crown of “best movie ever made”. Mr. Newman’s career spanned films of all types, and broke through two of the hardest barriers in film history: the first being able to continue and excel through the fall of the studio system in the fifties and into the more independent and internationally influenced films of the sixties and seventies. That simply didn’t happen, but it happened to him. The second barrier Paul Newman broke was that of age- very few actors, only those of extreme talent, have ever been able to segue from being dashing young leading men and sex symbols to playing the roles of elderly men, and none did it so gracefully as Mr. Newman. The difference between a character like Brick Pollitt from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and a character like Sidney Mussburger from Hudsucker Proxy is staggering, and in his later years the man brought professionalism, class and artistry to several such roles, from his frighteningly powerful portrayal of aging mafia patron John Rooney in Road to Perdition to his friendly, wise turn as the voice of small town judge (and anthropomorphic classic race car) Doc Hudson in Pixar’s Cars. In his later years Mr. Newman donated an estimated 250 million dollars to charity, the entirety of profits from his “Newman’s Own” line of organic foods and condiments. All in all, one of the last truly great class acts, and a master of his craft. He is sorely missed by film lovers and salad eaters alike.

To honor (in perhaps the most bizarre, convoluted way possible, go us) Paul Newman’s accomplishments and gifts, this week’s Ad Vs Ad is all about eggs! I was gonna review fifty ads about eggs, but ain’t NO MAN can review FIDDY ADS! If you don’t get this joke, you’re dead to me. Go get a fucking cultural education you charlatan.

Ad #1- So-Nineties-It-Hurts Incredible Edible Egg Commercial

Synopsis: A skateboarding, hyperactive cartoon child extols the virtues of eggs to us as Clarissa Explains it All letters and Mark Mothersbaugh music fly at us from the terrible, terrible past. Squiggly lines? Syntho sound effects? Claymation? Bodaciously yes on all fronts, dudarinos! This ad is like Beakman’s World if Klasky Csupo animated it and Howie Mandel did all the voices… ugh, too many references at once, my brain hurts.

Thoughts: Oh nineties, I remember you fondly with pogs and broken action figures… and eggs, I guess. The copy of this ad that Youtube has uploaded into its giant mess of a brain is of pretty low quality, but honestly I can’t imagine media from this period in any format BUT wavery skipping VHS resolution. Every time the video ends I immediately expect it to be followed by some ad for those really old space lego sets when they were all brown with blue windows, or that christmas honey nut cheerios commercial where the honey bee meets Ebeneezer Scrooge. Or some Isatoner glove ads, or an NBC promo saying that the weird sequel to the muppet show where they all worked in a television studio was coming up next, I dunno. I watched my VHS copy of PeeWee’s christmas special way too many times, apparently. Mega Pegasis for Reindeer! Hale-Bopp! It’s the Billy Baloney show! (Someone help me, I can’t make it stop!)

On another note, advertising for eggs seems a little silly, doesn’t it? Sure, we all made the joke when advertising for milk was big around that time too, but it warrants revisitation- do we really need television commercials telling us that the absolute most basic foodstuffs exist and are good for us? Eggs have vitamins and shit in them, okay. I’ve… kind of known that since before I can remember thanks to… you know… my early-onset familiarity with a thing called breakfast. What I didn’t know was that feeding your dog an egg makes him explode into wavy lines and hearts and craziness like he’s the Pointed Man. Yes, I know that’s more of a seventies reference, but I remember seeing The Point! on the Disney Channel in the 90’s and it immediately jumps to mind whenever I talk about old VHS copies of stuff… christ, I gotta stop assuming that just rattling off references to my childhood is the same thing as comedy. Knights into Dreams! Stomp 442! The Oslo accords! SERIOUSLY I CAN’T STOP AAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH!!!!

Oh, one other thing- this ad asks kids to go scream at their dads about eggs. For that alone, I love it.

Ad#2- More Recent (and Confusing) Incredible Edible Egg Commercial

Synopsis: An egg competes in a triathlon. Oh wait! It was a lady, who is apparently protein. THE HELL!?

Thoughts: This ad is about 4 seconds long and all it really tells me about eggs is that they can ride bikes and have athletes inside them. If you took out the narration and the shot of a little bitty omelet at the end of this, it could really be selling anything. Nike stuff. Pro-life legislation. Woody Allen’s “Sleeper”. Use your imagination!

I guess I can’t really blame this ad for not having any actual data in it- we are talking about eggs here. If I made a commercial about how awesome blankets are (not a particular brand or type, mind you, just the concept of blankets in general), it would equally effective to show some people snuggling up in comforters as it would be to show a quilt with shark teeth devouring a giraffe in Time Square. Once you’ve reached the point of “everybody knows what this thing is, just remind them about it or something”, anything goes, I guess. I will say that from my perspective HERE IN THE FUTURE, this ad makes me think that the running egg is going to get angry and blast me with a laser if I don’t give it a boot with a beansprout in it. MUST… STOP… REFERENCING POP CULTURE…

Ad #3- Australian Ad for… I’m Assuming Eggs

Synospis: Peter Russell Clarke, a guy who looks like the cover of the first Gentle Giant album, shows us how to make a cup of stuff for breakfast, part of which is an egg. Other than the word “egg” and I think “ripper”, everything he says is completely indecipherable.

Thoughts: Is the entire Australian dialect like Jabberwocky, just words that sounds like they might be in English but really aren’t? I guess their word for egg is “Asasifog’dolgimaggiechudgerfubamazookerbanjawobblie”, or else I have no idea what’s going on here. Towards the middle of the ad you can kind of tell what he’s saying, something about his mom making breakfast out of stuff she had lying around, but Mr. Clarke’s exclamation of surprise at the end is complete and utter nonsense. “EH! RIFPOKKLE M’ GOFFER REPPEGOOPY EH!”. This is what happens when you let a country grow out of convicts that eat nothing but the animals God tried out first and abandoned as “too weird”.

The recipe he makes in the ad doesn’t look half bad, though. Soft boiled egg, something called “battered bread” (which I imagine is like the southern dish “beans n’ beans”), toMAAAAAHto, celery and tuna in a coffee cup. That sounds like something I’d make and eat while too drunk to even walk to the grocery store for real ingredients, which is fairly often. Perhaps this is how they eat downunda? If so, I’d fit right in, making oyster cracker nachos and split pea chorizo omelet loaves and whatnot. I’d just have to give my creations names like a stroke victim attempting babytalk, and they’d sell like hotcakes! I mean, sell like boggerwonkazzooties.

Final Thoughts: What I’m going to take away from today’s smattering of commercials is that eggs are the most mysterious, magical things ever. They explode dogs, hatch dinosaurs, run marathons and cause dwarves to speak in tongues. What daily practical purpose they have is beyond me, since nobody seems willing to say. At least, say in English. REAL English. I’d make some kind of over-easy or sunny-side-up joke here, but I’m just too tired. Take it away, cool-hand-Dumfy (he’s got a smile like an alligator and a bite like a baby, that one).

The chemists of the world have brought the rest of us know-nothing puds some amazing stuff over the years. Fireworks, pesticides, Tupperware, motor oil; almost every product or service we utilize every day was thought up, at least in part, by a chemist. Whether you want to paint your car yellow or make a pregnancy go away, chemistry is there for us, turning anything into anything like some kind of magic genie made out of math and labcoats and hard work that I was no good at in high school. Chemistry gives us fuels to launch us at insane speeds over land, sea and sky, and then it turns around and provides the various plastic devices the hospitals use to treat us when we crash those fueled vehicles into walls. And THEN it gives us pills to make our families less sad when the plastic hospital devices fail, and our corpses get embalmed in even MORE chemicals and buried underneath a lawn fertilized with… well, you get my point. Chemistry is pretty amazing shit, and you might even start thinking that it’s just completely without limits to what it can do.

Well, I’m hear to tell ya, folks, there definitely are limitations to the magic of chemistry. Stupid limitations that don’t make much sense. Frankly embarrassing limitations. Like feeding sad baby whales.

“Abandoned Baby Whale Might Be Put to Death”. I could not come up with a more pathetically depressing news headline if I tried, and trust me, I have. “Fuzzy Pet Bunny Forced to Run on Treadmill for Nazi Sympathizer Amusement Until its Heart Explodes as Entire Kindergarten Class Watches in Horror” was as close as I could come, but fuck, rabbits aren’t an endangered species or anything. Thank goodness CNN.com is around to outdo me at crafting abysmally sad sentences about baby animals suffering, or else I’d have nobody to look up to. I mean, hell, listen to this-

“An abandoned baby whale that has been trying to suckle from yachts in an Australian harbor appeared to be weakening Wednesday as wildlife workers considered ways to save it. Unless rescue workers can come up with a plan soon, the starving 2-week-old calf might have to be put to death.”

Cheery, eh? Apparently two months ago a baby humpback whale was spotted in Sydney harbor trying to get milk from boats, and ever since people have been trying to figure out what to do about it. Their leading theory right now- shoot it. In human terms, this is like an emaciated baby crawling up into a manikin’s arms and trying to survive by mouthing at nonexistent fiberglass nipples through a Gap sweater while mall cops scratch their heads and wonder, then reach for their holsters with a shrug.

And if that’s not  a sad enough mental image, here’s an even sadder headline to a more recent article on the whole affair: “Yacht Suckling, Nuzzling Baby Whale Euthanized”. For fuck’s sake, did we need the “nuzzling” part, were you worried people wouldn’t be horrifyingly depressed enough by this!?

“Officials reached out to stroke the calf before others hoisted it onto a tarp. The whale was then pulled into a tent on the beach and gray tarps were hung to cover the operation. Sally Barnes, deputy director-general of the New South Wales Department of Environment and Climate Change, said the whale would be given a sedative to relax it, then a lethal dose of anesthetic.”

Gaaah. According to MSNBC, yes, the whale was put down. The Australians named him Colin, and as close as they can figure it he was abandoned by his mother because he was too sick after being attacked by sharks. So let’s revise our human counterpart scenario here- baby in manikin’s arms, check. But also the baby  is covered in scars from being mauled by a cougar, after which mommy said “screw it, he’s dead anyway” and just let it loose at the mall. Instead of shooting it, the mall cops drag the baby underwater and give it a lethal injection. Wow.

So, all very sad, yes. I’m not even gonna touch on the subject of the Aboriginal shaman they had come out to “commune” with baby Colin before stating simply that “he’s missing the big fellas”. And Colin is dead now, after maybe the saddest fucking childhood you can get as a marine mammal… but you know what folks? That’s not what disturbs me about all this. THIS is what disturbs me, from the first article before Colin had to be euthanized-

“Some Australians have suggested that wildlife officials take the animal into captivity, but that is unlikely to yield results, said Chris McIntosh of the National Parks and Wildlife Services. ‘As the calf is still being breast fed, we have no way of feeding or socializing it… Unless it can go out to open water and find a mother, I don’t really know what’s going to happen.’”

Ah, there lies the rub. Apparently, whale milk comes from one place- whales. And not captive whales, just wild whales. We can’t harvest it, we can’t synthesize it, we can’t even come close. Which begs the question- WHY THE FUCK NOT!?

We can make metal that’s stronger than steel and ten times lighter, we can program bacteria to excrete plastic goo in the shapes of gears the width of human hairs, we have peach flavored soda and spermicide condoms and plexiglass bowling trophies and those things are all chemically different by ONE FUCKING ATOM EACH- there is NO reason why humanity can’t at least give a shot at making some goddamn whale milk and feeding it to an animal that’s already apparently willing to suckle at something artificial. As I’ve talked about before, I’m not much of an animal rights activist, but I’m still pretty pissed off about this turn of events. Not just because an orphaned baby whale is maybe the most sympathetic thing you could possibly think of (except maybe, I dunno… twin baby pandas that have learned how to spell out “we love you” with fingerpaints and are slowly being cut apart by circular saws or something. Nah, orphan whale still wins). I’m pissed because humans have found ways to make just about EVERYTHING out of chemicals in labs, yet as soon as an order comes in for a couple drums of whale milk we just throw our hands up and walk away from the problem. Hell, I don’t even give a shit about the baby whale, animals in the wild die all the time and it’s generally not a happy thing but it happens. On the other end of it, this is a scientific pride issue we’re talking about here! Heat up some fucking bunson burners and break out your graphing calculators, you’re making the species look bad!

“Oh, but milk is very complicated!” I hear you say. “It’s like honey, the biological processes bla bla bla”… fine, whatever. Maybe we can’t make whale milk exactly from scratch, but for fuck’s sake we can’t make human milk from scratch either and that doesn’t stop us from feeding our squealing larvae a mismatched conglomeration of food additives and other horrible things. It’s called baby formula, and yeah, it’s not that great for kids, but at least they don’t starve- the point is, it didn’t have to be perfect and at least we fucking tried. I’m no scientist but maybe a big-ass funnel poked through the bottom of a yacht and a truckload of Carnation Good-start would have been a better option than just watching the baby whale die in open waters because nobody could be bothered to even try fabricating a giant rubber nipple. This is the age of the internet, people, those probably already exist.

So there you have it, chemists of the world- get your goddamn acts together! If you can turn crude oil into plastic wrap and fake penises, then you can fucking make something moderately close to whale milk. Don’t hand me this “oh, it’s impossible” bullshit- if the chemists can’t do it, then hand it off to the chefs of the world. The cooks can probably do something- they’re a lot like chemists except unlike pharmaceutical companies restaurants actually have to participate in fiscal competition without bail-outs (and also in that if a chef makes a product that causes babies without limbs to get born, it’ll probably take less than twenty years to hold somebody accountable for it). For fuck’s sake, SOMEBODY has to at least step up to the plate on this, or else we’ll look like fools in front of the other species. It’s retarded that we have no idea how to feed a baby whale but obviously SOMEBODY knew how to anesthetize one- who the hell did THAT research!?

Long story short- get to fucking work, chemists. I want to see synthetic whale milk in my neighborhood grocer’s freezer section by this time next month, or don’t come crying to me when for some strange reason we need a whole lot of tiny whales to ride into battle with Atlantis or something but nobody laid the groundwork for the underwater ranches to work properly. YOU’LL ALL BE SORRY THEN, I BET.

Let me tell ya, folks, nothing feels quite as good as anticipating something really good that’s about to happen. You know, like that great feeling you get when you’re waiting for the unbathed man in the ice cream truck to find your prepackaged ice cream confection in his bucket of all the same thing, or the ecstasy of waiting for your favorite commercial to come on TV. Those might both seem really depressing and horrible, but my point is that I reviewed a game called Anticipation today! And if that isn’t the true meaning of Christmas, then I’ve totally misplaced my script for today’s NRF. Hm… yep, wrong script, this is Flashdance. Turns out I don’t write a script before I write an article. That would just be really weird.

So there I was, anticipating playing Anticipation, wondering what sort of game it would be, and then I realized that I was pretty much required to make some stupid anticipating the anticipation joke. Once I was done with that, I found out that it was some sort of video board game, possibly based on a real board game of the like of Pictionary or somesuch thing, but I really can’t bring myself to care enough to look it up. I started out by choosing a pair of high heels as my piece (as always) and choosing the easiest difficulty mode I could to defeat my evil nemeses, ice cream cone, trumpet and teddy bear. NEFARIOUS FOES ALL! 

The actual play of the game involves a little pencil that connects dots to make a picture which corresponds with the category it says it is. You move around on a very tiny game board, and you have to beat a puzzle of each of the four puzzles before you can move on to the next level… and do the same thing again. By the third level, the starting dots go away and you have to wait an extra… second or two before you can figure out what it’s supposed to be. After the third level, the game is over and you’re declared a winner because none of the computer players ever even tried! Hooray for winning!

It’s a simple enough premise, sure, but there were a couple problems. For instance, if nobody guesses the correct answer, you never see what it is. If you get a letter wrong while spelling out the answer once, it tells you you have one more chance, and if you miss again, you get “I WARNED YOU” and then I think robots come into your home and murder you. For instance, I was trying to figure out what this big circle was under the category “math.” Circle? No… Oval? No… Degree… fuck. Zero? GOD DAMMIT WHAT’S A FIVE LETTER WORD FOR A MATH CIRCLE?! This and the fact that the pictures are all really bad NES line drawings, sometimes things just make no sense. Like what I’ve done wrong in life to get me to the point where I write about twenty year old games on the internet…

Since I was actually able to beat this game, obviously something was wrong. So, I took it up to the next level! Actually, I took it up to the highest level because I wasn’t about to waste anymore time playing pictionary- er… adamantium… whatever this game is. On the very hard difficulty, not only do you not see the dots, you don’t get a category or the number of letters involved in the guess. Also, your computer opponents are able to do things like guess that something is a cannon from seeing a circle with a tail on it. So yeah, stupidly easy or impossibly stupid. That’s the way I like my video games! Raggin’ fraggin’…

Hey, look what we’re doing on the first of the month for once! Wow! Anyway, let’s hop straight to this thing. I have thousands of fancy parties I have to be getting to this afternoon, and if my hair isn’t werewolf perfect, there’ll be a lot of crying children tonight, that’s all I’m saying.

Our top search was for breakroom rules, which is one of the several funny updates we had about our expansive confpound, which I never go into and therefore know nothing about. I just sit in my ivory tower and laugh at the PEONS as they go about their PATHETIC JOBS! BWA HAHAHAAAA!

Next we have, of course, dmitry povolotsky pal/secam. Uh… Which I guess is some guy’s russian friend? I’m just going to go ahead and blame Ian for this one because it sounds just close enough to something he might’ve mentioned in one of his fancy pants movie festival journal entries. Remember Dmity Povolotsky? He was a… director who filmed… uh… the world! Yeah!

Sigh… it’s been a while since this one made the list, but welcome back on old favorite, ritzcrackers.com. FUCK. YOU. RITZ. CRACKERS. Look people, you don’t even have an excuse for this anymore, if you’re using Google Chrome (which you should be. The standard nerd browser has changed from firefox to chrome.) you just type everything into the address bar, so this would actually send you to the website. Which… doesn’t exist in this case, but at least it’d… Never mind.

Batting cleanup is stalker clear sky crash, which is apparently something that happens a lot in some video game or other that John talked about. Either that, or these people were looking for information about that 90 bajillion dollar stock market buyout and are INCREDIBLY bad at spelling.

Oooh, top 15 rpg games! We actually kinda wrote something similar to that! Wait… why was someone specifically looking for the top fifteen rpg games? We only chose that number because we were going to do 20 but we couldn’t think of five other characters. Seriously, there are basically only 15 good rpg games.

Up… uh… nintieth is my dulcinea, which I think was the last thing Rob ever wrote before he vanished into a black hole that tore off all his fingers one by one. Hear that, Rob? Take it like a man and learn how to write with your toes! Zach did, and look at his stuff! Wait… does he still write for us?

The next search is zoologic, which seems like it should have several thousand better sites to hit upon instead of us. Unless I’ve been living a lie and it isn’t an actual word. Hm… let’s see… 1) of, relating to, or concerned with zoology; 2) of, relating to, or affecting lower animals often as distinguished from humans. Yep, Mirriam Webster thinks it’s a real word, too. This is like someone finding our site looking for the word “corporation.”

Ah yes, the infamous telluride helen. Wild west bandit and infamous outlaw, ol’ Telluride Helen made her living attacking trains and selling overpriced vegan food to the innocent travelers. What a tale…

Here’s an interesting random string of words: wars role playing game ian lizard. Well… “role playing game” is a string, but the rest of it doesn’t really compute. Maybe he was looking for an rpg with a character named Ian Lizard who… fights in wars? Maybe our Ian is actually a warlike lizard, and this whole site is a big game to him where he’s role playing a comedy writer! We’ve found you out, IAN LIZARRRRRD!!!

Finally, I’d like to end this top ten list (which has been lacking numbers for a couple months now) with bullwhipped breasts. Yep. Bullwhipped breasts. It’s pretty obvious what this guy was looking for… It’s not very obvious what this guy FOUND here that interested his particular fetish. Has Ian been reviewing more Japanese sex stuff? DAMN YOU IAN LIZARRRRRRD!!!

Speaking of IAN LIZARRRRRD!!!, he made a fancy new wallpaper about LOVE that can be found in our downloads section! Hooray for love!