Wheel of Why

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Please Pick Up Your Horse Poop. Thanks.

Equestrian enthusiasts: the fact you all don’t pick up your horse’s crap is, well, horse-crap. It is entirely unacceptable that I have to dodge massive piles of dung on my favorite hiking trails because you fatuously believe riding an animal up a hill qualifies as “exercise.” It’s disrespectful, discourteous, and, most of all, utterly gross. For the sake of society, it would behoove you to change your ways.

In the name of being unbiased, I’d like to begin by saying that I have no problem with horses. For example, I love Jell-O and glue. Both of those horse-derived products were staples of my childhood eating and artistic habits (though I’d rather not reveal which item was associated with which activity). I don’t even begrudge people who own horses on their expansive ranches; I’m pro-2nd Amendment and there are enough horse-attack videos on YouTube to indicate that owning a steed is about as dangerous as owning a shotgun. If you want to run the risk of being bitten, kicked, or Mr. Hands’d by a hateful stallion, that is your Constitutional right.

No, what I have a problem with are the jerks who feel too entitled to clean up after their precious ponies. Read the full, poopful article over at Wheel of Why.

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Mustard Varieties: A Top Five List

Mustard rules the kingdom of classic condiments with a delicious iron fist. Sure, BBQ sauce conjures up memories of backyard cookouts and horseradish conjures up memories of appalling mammal-vegetable genetic experiments gone wrong, but nothing can really contend with the versatility of mustard. Of course, not all kinds of mustard are created equal (though I’m sure all are loved equally in the eyes of the Lord). In order assist your next trip to the grocery store, I’ve decided to compile a top five ranking of mustard styles. You can thank me later when you’re masticating on a delectable sandwich, but make sure not to talk with your mouth full. The Top Five of mustard varieties, whether you agree or not, here at the Wheel of Why.

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Forget Batman: Give Me Darkwing Duck!

It’s no secret that Warner Brothers is going to be forced (by the coercive power that is potentially astronomical profits) to reboot the Batman franchise. Personally, I can’t wait. As someone who likes but doesn’t love the Christopher Nolan trilogy, I’m excited to taunt and harangue the guaranteed-to-be-irate fanboys who will flock to theaters in angry droves to participate in the classic American tradition of watching something just to complain about it. No matter what the box office gross ends up being, Warner Brothers is screwed; without the gravelly voice of Christian I’ve-Never-Smiled-Once Bale and the glaring ignorance of a nuclear bomb blast radius, the rabid fans of the Nolan trilogy can’t possible be satisfied.

All is not lost, though. The best plan for the studio is to entirely ignore the whole “gritty,” humorless, Batman-is-a-SYMBOL shtick Nolan went with. That level of self-seriousness is untouchable. Some folks are suggesting that maybe the new director should go a more “campy” route (you know, make a movie that’s actually, heaven forbid, fun), something more akin to the earlier Batman movies. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s going to be good enough. The studio needs to bring back Bruce in an entirely anti-Nolan fashion. They shouldn’t reintroduce Batman as merely “more fun.” That’s not good enough. Instead, they should reintroduce Batman as Darkwing Duck. Want to know why? Read the full reasoning at the Wheel of Why.

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Sriracha: The Alpha and Omega Condiment

When you’re on a tight budget, buying condiments is an understandably low priority. Have you seen how expensive mustard is these days? You’ll have to start selling your body for sex/science/sexy-science to afford something classier than French’s (related note: if your mustard doesn’t have seeds in it, you’re doing mustard wrong. That’s a convo for another time, though). Enter the savior to all condiment woes: Sriracha.

The best aspect about Sriracha is its adherence to the a-little-goes-a-long-way maxim. It’s like how, when I was far younger, the little bit of female skin shown in Maxim went a long way towards fueling my adolescent fantasies in which Anna Kournikova was my lover (we’d hold hands or something). Yes, a bottle of Sriracha may appear expensive when sitting on the grocery store shelf next to its inferior competitors, but that bottle will last you ages unless you have some sort of masochistic spiciness fetish. A dab here and a dollop there is all you need (in case you aren’t into math and/or foreigners, both of those are metric units of measurement). Yeah, you can buy multiple bottles of Frank’s or Tabasco for the price of one bottle of Sriracha, but you’ll be forced to use half their contents on one meal just to equal the hell-fiery goodness of a single squirt (also metric) of Sriracha. It’s just more efficient, like when the assembly line replaced however we manufactured things before the assembly line. Read the full article at Wheel of Why: Sriracha: The Alpha and Omega Condiment

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March Madness: A Guide for Disintersted People

March Madness, which is not the vernal equivalent to seasonal affective disorder, is upon us. Instead of breaking out the light-boxes, people choose to vegetate in front of television sets as countless hours of B+ quality basketball unfurl before their glazed-over eyes. It’s sort of beautiful (if you find extreme sloth poetic in a Se7en kind of way). Forget the Super Bowl, this is the true American sports holiday.

If you’re a person who doesn’t care about basketball, this month is torturous. Everyone in your family or office or group of kidnappers is probably discussing “brackets” and “bubbles” and other such nonsense. Don’t break out the holy books and the purified water; these people aren’t speaking in demonic tongues. As crazy and irrational as they may seem, they’re still the people know and love (and/or Stockholm syndrome love). When the insanity of the tournament is all over, they’ll return to normal.

My goal isn’t to convince you that March Madness is glorious. If you haven’t cared about it before, you aren’t really going to start now. Instead, I’d like to give you five coping mechanisms to survive the next few weeks. Even if you don’t really like the sport and don’t plan on watching a bajillion hours of games, there’s no reason to eschew cultural literacy. You don’t have to become fluent in basketball, just passably faux-intrigued. (At worst you could take advantage of one of the many vasectomy discounts—hey, I dunno what’s on your to-do list—that coincide with the tournament, because evidently nothing says I-enjoy-watching-nineteen-year-olds-shoot-a-ball-at-a-hoop quite like genital surgery). 5 Steps to Surviving March Madness.

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Flowers for Algernon: A 5 Question Review

Oh man, I had to read this back in high school. It was such a drag and entirely cut into my awkward flirtation and solipstic rumination time. If I read it once, why should I bother reading it again?

Have you been around high school kids recently? Do you think they are remotely intelligent? Do you think you were smart “back in your day?” That’s laughable. Just because a book has been pigeonholed as “high school lit” doesn’t mean your average fifteen-year-old can comprehend it. Kids are dumb. I blame the GMOs and the cell phone radiation and the Kardashians.

People remember this as “the book about the mouse,” which is probably because it was their first introduction to symbolism and the correlation between protagonist Charlie Gordon and Algernon became seared in their minds. The thing is, it’s not about a mouse. That’s like saying Of Mice and Men is about a mouse. Don’t say that. It’s wrong. You’re probably thinking of The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary. Full review of Flowers for Algernon.

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Girl Meets World: Six Ideas for a Better Show

I am an unabashed Boy Meets World fan. By “unabashed,” I mean that if you just so happen to dislike the show and if you just so happen to mock me about it, I’m going to spend the entirety (eternity?) of my afterlife haunting your family bloodline as revenge. Trust me, you don’t want a spectral version of me forcing your great-grandchildren to wet the futuristic space bed. I would say the depth of my knowledge regarding Boy Meets World rivals what P. Bateman knows about Genesis.

That said, the fact I haven’t been consulted about the Girl Meets World spin-off is not only a travesty but also a crime against humanity (or at least the portion of humanity that owns televisions and watches Disney shows). We all know that remakes and re-boots are destined to disappoint the hardcore fans of the original material. It’s inevitable. However, that doesn’t mean an effort shouldn’t be made to avoid mediocrity. While I can’t say my ideas guarantee an Emmy-winning program, I will say that the producers better ready themselves for some serious hate mail (or a ghostly haunting) if none of these suggestions make it into the show…

1) Stuart Minkus as a main character. He deserves it. That kid was absolutely shafted on the first go-around. Bringing him back when Cory graduated high school to let them know he was just “on the other side of the school” was a disservice and a disgrace to his nerdy excellence. Make him one of the teachers in GMW, or a creepy next-door neighbor who has a Very Special Episode about him (like that episode of Smart Guy when T.J and his friend buy pirated computer games from a pedophile). Curious about the other five? Check out Wheel of Why.

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Speed-the-Plow: A 5 Question Review

Wait, you read a play? Seriously? Who does that? Or is it “whom” does that? Doesn’t matter. Theatrical productions are pretty lame, bro.

Let me get on my liberal arts high horse here and say if you enjoy watching television or movies, by logical extension you shouldn’t mind reading pages and pages of dialogue. I’ve never understood peoples’ aversion to it. Is it purely based on the fact the theater is perceived as a dorky escape for the socially awkward and incessantly pretentious? I think Darren Nichols proves otherwise.

If you like your comedies with witty, wry, and snappy conversations, you’ll like David Mamet. Plus, Madonna was in the original Broadway show. That has to be a ray of light.

The only thing I know about David Mamet is that his daughter is an actress on Girls. Is that relevant?

So she’s the one who isn’t Kat Dennings?

You should know that he has a Pulitzer Prize for his writing. Like Kanye West and the Clipse say, it’s kinda a big deal. Full review of Speed-the-Plow by David Mamet.

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Taylor Swift vs. Jayceon Taylor (aka Game)

As my first series of entries into this blog’s in-depth, highly academic musical analyses, I will be comparing two albums: Taylor Swift’s “Red” and Game’s “The R.E.D. Album”. Why these two albums? Well for one, they both have the same color in their titles, so, you know, they must be similar. Also, I’ve been on tour for the last month and my friend insisted on playing Swift’s album on the way to every show, so I’ve become intimately familiar with it (not intimate in like a sexy way, more like how you become intimate with the bathroom when you have the flu). Today, I’ll be comparing the title songs from each album: Game’s “Red Nation” and Swift’s “Red”. To read the complete match-up, check out Wheel of Why.

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Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell: A 5 Question Review

So this book is about magic, huh?

Yes, although you shouldn’t expect ogres or wand duels or anything of that nature. The book focuses on the social utility (and danger) of magic, especially when supernatural powers are confined to the hands of a very select few from the ruling class. Mr. Norrell wants to keep magic as a purely academic study, an endeavor that can only be embarked upon by the worthiest and most scholarly of pupils. He also happens to own 99% of all the available books on the subject, therefore granting him a monopoly in terms of access to the secret knowledge. Jonathan Strange would rather see magic be used for practical purposes, such as helping England achieve victory in the Napoleonic Wars (he also doesn’t mind the celebrity attention and political power bestowed upon him due to his status as a magician).

As the two former friends become embittered in their petty rivalry, they fail to notice that their experimentation with magic has led to some insidious side effects. Full review of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.