Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!

Geoff was under the weather (pun intended), so Dave, Matt, and I were on our own for Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! 

Fin sprints through DC trying to… save someone? Escape? Make it to BOGO sushi? No, he’s gonna be late to a ceremony at the White House honoring him for all his shark-related heroism.

Cut to Florida–Tara Reid is pregnant! And walking with her mom, Bo Derek, who looks bored.

Fin not only makes it to the ceremony in time, but he finds?/buys?/borrows? a tux for the occasion. President Mark Cuban knights him or something–I can’t concentrate because the vice president is ANN FUCKING COULTER. 

The mayor of New York also inducts him into the Order of the Golden Chainsaw, which feels a bit of a letdown after the president’s thing. 

Despite the festive air, Fin can feel it: DC is not safe. Moments later, sharks precipitate–on the streets, into the mall pond. One lands like a baby in Abraham Lincoln’s lap. 

Back in the White House, Mark McGrath and ANN FUCKING COULTER remove portrait paintings from the walls and surf down sharky stairwells on them. Because.

The president and Fin shoot sharks with all manner of firearm. The president tosses a grenade into the mouth of an incoming shark.

Matt: “Ceviche.” 

They jump out a second-story window and suffer no ill-effects just before the Washington Monument demolishes the White House! This is very exciting.

Then Finn, the president, ANN FUCKING COULTER, and somebody else recreate the Iwojima photo but instead of raising the flag they impale a shark. 

Me: “Fish kebab.” (Actually, I didn’t say that–I’m just jealous of Matt’s ceviche joke.)

On the phone, Tara Reid urges Fin to hurry up and get to Florida before she gives birth, which feels doable because it’s like a two-day road trip and she looks like she’s got like four months of gestating left to do, but he hitchhikes the hell outta there.

Some reporter is interviewing Michelle Bachman about the increase in sharknados, and Dave was like, “Remember when we thought she and Sarah Palin were bad?” And we all took a moment to comfort our sweet-summer-inner-children. 

Fin arrives in a ghost town. It’s too foggy to see. Suddenly, people run past–the budget allowed for at least nine extras on this day of shooting! You’ll never guess what they’re running from. It’s sharks! Fortunately, who shows up but a hot ninja-kicking chick with absolutely gorgeous tits and also Frankie Muniz. They take Fin into their vehicle, which is an armored-car-slash-lab with a dissected shark corpse that looks like it was made from Legos. I think they discuss science?, but Frankie Muniz is a significantly better actor than anyone else in this production, and tbh, it’s distracting. 

In Florida, a shark drops in the hotel pool. Tara Reid revs her chainsaw hand and then doesn’t use it for anything at all. Come on, Tara–didn’t you learn about Chekhov’s chainsaw hand in English I? Then Tara and Bo[red] Derek sit at the hotel bar and have a drink. The choices these characters make are just wild.

Fin and Hot Tits are going to fly an old army plane to Florida, while Frankie Muniz stays back to…I’m not sure. Frankie says goodbye by leaning his head lovingly on Fin’s pecs for longer than you would imagine.

Matt: “I WOULD.”

Me: “SUBSCRIBE.”

Fin and Hot Tits crash the plane into a river and COME OUT ALMOST NAKED??? THIS IS VERY SEXY.

Fin calls his dad, who is David Hasselhoff, and he is acting, and he is an astronaut, naturally. He and Fin are going to fly a space shuttle into the storm and use a laser? To blow it up? Fin nods at himself in the mirror. You know what, we should all nod at ourselves in the mirror more often. Then he walks through steam in slow motion in his astronaut suit. We should also do that.  

Tara Reid–pregnant–catches up to her non-pregnant husband and accidentally ends up in a (maternity?) space suit in the space shuttle as it’s taking off, as one does. The spaceship looks like it was made from dollar-store craft supplies. Like, I saw an improv show a month ago where the improvisers were in a “space shuttle” made of four office chairs, and it was more realistic.

Anthony Weiner is in the control room. Every sequel gets its own sex pest

David Hasselhoff pulls an Armageddon-Bruce-Willis and says he’s going to sacrifice himself to fulfill the plan because he wants to be Fin’s hero, and this whole couchful of queers is legitimately tearing up about it. 

Tara goes into labor and gets eaten by a spaceshark. Fin jumps inside another one, and both sharks fall earthward and get fricasseed upon reentry. Fin cuts through the side of the one who swallowed Tara and out pops HIS BABY. Tara climbs out, and three is the magic number. 

What an oeuvre! The writer, producer, and director were definitely on cocaine for the entire process, and I approve. 

I’m Crying and Dying Because of This Budweiser Commercial

See, that puppy just wants to be with her horsey best friend and even goes through the RAIN to say hi, and that hot rancher just keeps takin her back (sigh—ha ha), and the puppy lady is like *sorry about that*… *again*, and *hey, quit escapin under the fence!*, and then the puppy gets adopted and put in that fancy car, but that puppy is not a fancy car city type, she’s a *ranch dog*, and that Clydesdale does the horse equivalent of running through a crowded airport to stop a loved one from boarding a plane for that internship in Paris because it LOVES that puppy, and it jumps over that fence RIGHT AT THE SWELL OF THE SONG, and its posse is all *Yo back that ass up, city slicker*, and the city slicker’s like WHOA WTF, and the puppy goes back to the hot rancher and her horsey BFF, and I’ve watched it seven times.

Eight times.

OK, eleven times.

30 Days

I’ve been attempting to focus on the abundance in my life, rather than participating my usual Trance of Scarcity. The meditation (see Day 25) definitely helps, but I also thought I’d tweet one of those annoying 30 Days of Thankfulness things, except try to make it not-annoying.

The most difficult part was not coming up with things for which I felt grateful—I got plenty. The most difficult part was staying within 140 characters. You know how I like to babble on. The teacher of a writing workshop I took last year said, “You’ve got 25-30% too much fat.”

I was like, “DON’T I KNOW IT. Wait, you mean my writing?” He was right. I need to trim it down…

Arg! If I wanted to go on a word diet, I would’ve been a poet!

But I did it for thirty days. (NB: The following is not poetry. It’s just skinny prose.)

That 4-year-old, man. She’s dramatic and sassy, she wants what she wants, and she’s in the 8th percentile for height. In other words, she’s me. Hahaha. No, she’s not. She’s her. She’s her own person. But kind of me. I yub her.

This girl. She does something to my heart.
This girl. She does something to my heart.

This goes for both my parents. My parents showed the fuck up.

I’m still bad at crying (i.e., I need to do more of it and less eating/checking Facebook/self-flagellation/etc.), but I have good role models (namely, Cat, EJ, and Melissa).

(Typo: That was supposed to be Day 13.)

When the doc actually felt it, she goes—I shit you not, “Yeah, you got a lot of lumps and bumps, and this one doesn’t feel any different from the other ones.” :/

Also, if they do hate me as a result, that’s their own goddamn problem.

It’s a good job. I just wish I got paid more and didn’t have to deal with so much bullshit. I guess that’s everybody, right? Except I really should get paid more.

Every so often I consider it, dry-heave, and un-consider it.

I’m hosting the StorySLAM on December 11, folks! Come on out!

So, in today’s ironic news, when I need to unplug, I use an iPhone app. It’s called Get Some Headspace, and I highly recommend it. The dude who leads the meditation is a former Buddhist monk, and he sounds a tiny bit like the Geico Gecko so everybody wins.

Terrified of jinxing it, but there’s an amazing woman who has created a passion project, and we met, and it was awesome, and she’s invited me to be part of her team, and I hope I can keep up.

I watched 5 episodes of Game of Thrones in the middle of the day yesterday, true story.

As you can see, I’m thankful for a lot of things, including those of you who’re reading. Happy rest-of-your-holidays!

Signed,

Lumpytits

Road Trip Soundtrack, Part 3

It’s the 4th of July, and I promised you ‘Murrica, so I’ll start with Track 9, “Watching You” by Rodney Atkins:

You heard right.

Drivin’ through town just my boy and me
With a Happy Meal in his booster seat
Knowin’ that he couldn’t have the toy ‘til his nuggets were gone.

Thank god he’s teaching his young son that he’ll get a prize when he ingests all of his toxic meat-byproduct bites. Good parenting.

Oh, and isn’t that hilarious, how the boy says, “Shit,” because he wants to be just like his dad? That’s hilarious!

Now, did you listen to the whole song? You really need to. Right after he said, “We got back home and I went to the barn [course he did]/I bowed my head and I prayed real hard,” I was like, “Oh no. Oh NO. NO THE KID’S GONNA SEE HIM PRAYING AND THEN PRAY JUST LIKE HIM AAAAAAAAHHHH HELP ME MY EARS.” And that’s exactly what happened.

Worst.

Actually, I thought it was the Worst. It’s not the Worst. The Worst, found when I landed on another country station, is Track 10 by the same jackass called—can you guess? I bet you can guess. That’s right. It’s called “It’s America”.

I mean, aside from the banal melody and the grating hyperbolic hur-hur-hur of his Southern (patriotic) accent, there’s the lyric. Do you want to know what America is? I’ll tell you. It’s:

  • a high school prom (by which he means, teen pregnancy after abstinence-only education);
  • a Springsteen song (wonder how Bruce feels about being name-checked here);
  • a ride in a Chevrolet (funny, I still feel American when I drive my Mazda);
  • a man on the moon (is this our most recent victory?);
  • fireflies in June (fuck you, Alaska—where are your June lightning bugs?!);
  • kids selling lemonade (capitalism!);
  • cities (them places with liberals?) and farms;
  • open arms (aw, hugs!);
  • a kid with a chance (unless you’re born poor and/or of color lol);
  • a rock and roll band (he’s probably thinking Creed);
  • a farmer cuttin hay (sure);
  • a big flag flyin’ in the summer wind over a fallen hero’s grave (there it is); and
  • (most importantly) one nation under Gaaaaaaaaawd.

At one point, Atkins sings about how grateful he is to live in America after he witnesses people collecting canned tuna for “twister” victims. Because did you know that in other countries nobody does that? If your yurt gets swept away by a tsunami anywhere outside the U.S. borders, people (foreigners) just stand there and buff their nails. That’s all those ferners do is buff their fucking nails.

He does admit “we might not always get it right” in one line. One line. He dedicates one line to: slavery, the displacement of Native peoples, Jim Crow, eugenics, Japanese internment, corporate personhood, Monsanto, fracking, and Michele Bachmann.

But you know what? There’s nowhere he’d rather build his life.

You could change absolutely nothing about this song except have Jim Carrey sing it, and it would be a parody.

I wanted to put my car into the Susquehanna.

Fortunately, there were also Tracks 11-14:

Bonnie,

Shumann’s Symphony No. 1 in B Flat,

Prince squealing “Ain’t no particular sign I’m more compatible with!”,

and the new one by Daft Punk,

so I kep on truckin. Through America.

/endroadtrip/