Dolphins and Pumpkins and Halo, Oh My!


In case you missed it, Halloween just passed last month. It’s no secret how I feel about the holiday: I think it’s basically a terrible showcase of nitwits. I subscribe to the teachings of the great Lewis Black when he said, in summation, that if you are an adult who dresses up for Halloween you are a moron. Why? Because you are a grownup and can dress up like a superhero anytime you want. You want to be Batman? Then go be freaking Batman at the grocery store, or whatever. You needn’t wait for one day a year to do so. You don’t wait for Christmas just to give somebody a gift all the time, right? You don’t only eat turkey on Thanksgiving…

Adults can celebrate life whenever they want. We don’t need holidays to use as excuses to exercise absurdity or good will. Go ahead; put up an American flag in front of your house in February, fellow patriots! Buy your girlfriend flowers just because, ye lovelorn souls! Fire up that Menorah whenever you please, my He-bros!

Where was I? Oh yeah: making you feel bad about yourself for participating in Halloween. Read it and weep.

A 2006 report by the United Nations concluded that there were about 852 million people worldwide that don’t have enough food every day to sustain a healthy life. This is about thirteen percent of the world’s population. In case you didn’t know, death by starvation is indescribably slow and horrible, and tends to only punish those that cannot take by force and violence the sustenance that they need. In other words, starvation often kills the peaceful, the downtrodden and the weak.

Farmers grow one billion pounds of pumpkins for Halloween every year. A pumpkin contains thirty calories per 116 gram serving. The average carving pumpkin - the kind most families use a few of to make overly complex candle holders indicating the resident of the house displaying said candle holder is happy to give away free high-calorie, sugar-based foodstuffs to fat children who will just waste most if it anyways – weighs about ten pounds. There are 453 grams in a pound. 453 divided by 116 is about four. Four times thirty is 120. That’s 120 calories per pound of pumpkin for a total of 1,200 calories wasted for every pumpkin you used last year to make a Jack-O-Lantern out of.

Five billion divided by 852 million means that every starving, fly covered, on the express lane  to Corpse City-looking man, woman and child out there could - if Americans weren’t so selfish and wasteful and overly obsessed with dressing up like a sexy cop or a blood-covered doctor or the Heath Ledger Joker – have 5.8 pounds of nutritious pumpkin flesh. That’s 696 calories, assholes.

Hope you enjoyed your stupid holiday.

Up next on the Agenda of Rant: dolphins!

I had no idea, but it turns out that dolphins are total dicks. Seriously. And why am I thinking about dolphins, you ask? Because of that recent South Park episode that totally rocked twenty-two minutes of my brain. HERE’S A LINK. Watch and laugh.

Yeah, so, dolphins – those adorable puppy-dogs of the sea – are currently slaughtering porpoises. You read that correctly; your favorite sea mammal is really a violent, racist, xenophobic bully. A recent research expedition by the Superfluous Oceanographic Studies Organization (I might not have that name right) showed that seventy-four dead porpoises have in the recent past washed up on California shores were probably beaten to death by mobs of sexually frustrated dolphins, dolphins who “appeared to lose interest” in the porpoises once they had been killed. The SO-SO researchers know this because they caught an incident on video, wherein the pack of dolphins presented to them the mutilated corpse of their victim. What this means: dolphins are about as cute and cuddly as a pack of serial rapist frat-boys.

I’d like to take this opportunity to point out that it’s not my full intention to whizz upon your childhood via the presentation of cold, hard, irrefutable facts. It is, however, my intention to whizz upon your childhood via the presentation of THIS LITTLE BIT OF SATAN’S DOING.

The third thing I’d like to touch upon today is that I can’t stop playing HALO:ODST and it’s starting to become a detriment to my sanity. We all know I love the Halo series. So it was summarily requisite that I adore ODST. And adore it I do. First off, it’s got voiceover work by Nathan Fillion and Adam Baldwin. If you don’t know who those two actors are then either drop what you are doing and go watch the entire Firefly series or fling your soulless corpse off the nearest bridge. Second, ODST has a super cool, film-noir-esque detective story and mood going on. And, really, who doesn’t love that? Nobody doesn’t love that (did that make sense?).

Why was Roman Polanski allowed to be a fugitive child molester for so long? I’ll tell you why: he directed Chinatown, the best movie ever made.

Go ahead and try to argue with me.

There is unfortunately one significant problem with ODST: the goddamn terminals. There are thirty hidden data terminals in the game that unlock some sort of mini-game or something when the player finds them all. The problem is that they are IMPOSSIBLE to find on the first play-through of the game… or in the second. I’m now on my third effort, and rapidly losing my mind. If I don’t find the final terminals soon, I’m going to throw myself to the raping, murdering dolphins. I only even wrote this so that I’d tear myself off the couch for a minute.

Help me. Please.
 
 
HOME