Underpants On The Outside

I joined Weight Watchers.  Let’s not mince any words.  To those of you who know me, I’m hoping this is a puzzling decision on my part - “How could Z possibly look at that Adonis-like figure and think he’s fat? He looks so good, it makes me wish I hadn’t passed up all those times he begged me to sleep with him or at least allow him to rub up against my thigh… [women only]”I’m not fat - I know that.  What I am, however, is awfully fat-prone.  This is a natural result of my fundamental principles:

1)      It is rude to walk by Girl Scouts without purchasing at least three boxes of Thin Mints.  The true gentleman additionally purchases Samoas.

2)      It is wasteful to turn down an offer of free food, and indicative of America’s excessive consumerism.  Much better to stuff your face, even if you’ve just eaten.

3)      One should sample every dish at the table, lest they inadvertently exclude themselves from conversation about said dish.  If they don’t like sweet potatoes, they can just scrape the marshmallows from the top.

4)      Reverse racism is to be encouraged in the case of poultry.  White meat sucks.

5)      If a friend asks you to split fries/onion rings/nachos/buffalo wings/a side of beef/mozzarella sticks, it is selfish of you to decline.  Even if you’re not in the mood, you don’t want to deprive your friend, do you? After all, he’d do it for you…  Trust me, you’re doing the right thing.

6)      Cakes are only considered caloric when eaten in slice form.  In circular cakes, a “slice” is defined by a cut terminating at the perimeter of the cake and extending a distance equal to or greater than the radius of the cake.  Anything shorter than that and it’s practically a salad.

7)      A twenty-piece Chicken McNuggets is the economically sound choice, compared to a six-piece.

8)      When young girls are selling lemonade and/or cookies from a sidewalk table for a quarter, it’s charitable to ostentatiously offer to buy their entire stock for $50.  This will also make people think you’re loaded.  Bonus.

9)      Order the lamb.

Basically, one dip in my metabolism and I’m a corpulent sack of goo.

In the past, my efforts to keep my weight in check have had mixed results.  For instance, due to a rounding error, I always believed that walking two miles was the caloric equivalent of a Super-Sized Quarter Pounder Extra-Value Meal.  (I mean, it makes sense - thirty minutes walking vs. four minutes, 37 seconds eating.  Do the math.)  One could argue that a Quarter Pounder is exercise in and of itself, going by how much one makes me sweat.

So in a pre-emptive strike against my impending endomorphism (see two posts ago), I joined Weight Watchers.  I’m not ashamed - it’s actually kinda cool, and I’ve learned a couple interesting things.  (Note: For those who don’t know, while Weight Watchers is basically a diet based on lowering calories, they make it simple for the mathematically challenged by reducing foods to single-digit point values. Me add one plus six good.)  One thing I never knew is that when I go out for Indian food, I take in more points (32) than I need in an entire day (26).  Gorging myself during a recent barbeque dinner, I almost doubled that amount (44 -   Bizarrely, I’m kinda proud of that.)

Why am I telling you all of this?  Mostly because I’m bored - whatever.  But also because when some of you guys see me at the wedding, pointing at my emptied plate and counting, “47, 49… uh, 54… oh, and then there was the cake…”  I don’t want some half-baked jokes about me fitting/not fitting into my dress.  Get those all out of your system now.  I want some real fucking hilarity, at the expense of my insecure (but skinny, goddamnit!) ass.

As I mentioned in the comments yesterday, I finally got around to seeing the new Batman movie Monday night, four days too late. And today, I’m going to do without the lengthy unfunny preamble (don’t get me wrong - I wrote it, it just sucked, so now I need to justify having no intro whatsoever.)It wasn’t the greatest comic book movie of all time.  The first one (Batman Begins) was much better.  Moreso, IRON MAN was better.  That’s right!  I went there!First of all, let me say that any negative reviews do not stem from the fact that this movie absolutely TERRIFIED me.  Heath Ledger is so freakin scary that I would have probably pissed myself if I hadn’t already sweated out ever available ounce of water in me.  It reminded me of when I used to tutor people for the LSAT.  During the practice tests, people sustained such a high level of anxiety for so long that their natural body odor transcended itself, reaching a level of rank nastiness that might have qualified the testing room for “oubliette” status. I mention it because I left The Dark Knight with LSAT-funk.  Again, though, I don’t hold that against the movie, no matter how little I slept Monday night.

Before the nerd police break down my door, let me say for the record that this was also not a case of me going in with the typical fanboy paradox of both lofty expectations paired with tremendous skepticism.  Everything I expected from The Dark Knight delivered in full.  Unfortunately, the producers took a Windows-like approach to the movie: they gave me everything I needed, but loaded it up with a bunch of crap that slowed it down to a crawl.

[THIS IS WHEN I SPOIL THE MOVIE, SO IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS, LEAVE.]

- This movie is long.  LONG, long.  The only movies that should be that long are Victorian-era period pieces filled with social intrigue and epic romance - that way, I know not to watch them in the first place.  The thing is, TDK really didn’t need to be that long.  There are some bits in the beginning about modifying the Batsuit that never come into play later; they end up being nothing more than some meaningless, witty banter between Morgan Freeman and Christian Bale.  I don’t need to see that. When I see other people share witty conversation, it makes me wish I was wittier, and then I try and think of witty things to say, which results in blank, empty stares.

- There’s also a segment about a guy who figures out Batman’s identity and attempts to blackmail him, which goes nowhere. Again, the only function it serves is for Morgan Freeman to have a (pretty damn) funny moment.  It makes me wonder if Morgan Freeman has a certain number of comedic moments mandated in his contract.  If so, someone should tell him that we (by which I mean, the entire population of America) really are convinced that he is a charming, sage old man with a good-natured sense of humor.  We got it; he can relax.  In fact, now that Paul Newman is busy making salad dressings and Robert Redford looks weird, he’s pretty much got the Charming Old Guy market cornered.

(On the other hand, I really like imagining Morgan Freeman yelling at the writer/producers: “TWO??? Two funny lines?!?  You’ve written that limey cocksucker Caine so he’s practically Monty fucking Python, and I’ve got two funny lines?!?  Now fix this before I shove an Oscar up your ass!”)

- Can someone please convince Christian Bale to change his Batman voice?  He’s so good as Bruce Wayne, but then he puts on the mask and starts growling all the time.  When you’re up in a mugger’s face it’s intimidating, but when you’re trying to talk to someone across the room it just sounds silly.  But that’s just my opinion; I’m no Batman expert (correction: I absolutely am a Batman expert.  Recognize.)

- There’s a moment when Batman, riding the Bat-cycle, needs to make a quick 180.  What he does is run the bike straight into a wall, which kicks up the front wheel so the bike is vertical, then he pivots the bike on the back wheel and brings the front down, facing the opposite way.  Bear in mind that he was doing around 80 mph when he hit the wall.  That’s not Batman; that’s a friggin Darwin Award.  Just because I accept that Batman can fly using a cape made of “Memory Cloth” doesn’t make me an idiot.

- Speaking of the Bat-Cycle, having it eject from the Bat-Mobile like that was freakin awesome.  It just needed to be said.  When I have my midlife crisis in a few years, I hope I’m rich enough to buy a car that does that.

[SERIOUS SPOILERS NOW]

- Why’d they have to kill Two-Face?  They had a perfectly good Joker movie already - if you can squeeze in the origin of Two-Face, that’s all gravy.  And their Two-Face graphics looked AWESOME, but then they go and kill him, and a perfectly good bad guy is wasted.  Y’know, there are starving kids in Africa who would just love a perfectly good villain like that…

- On the other hand, two thumbs up on killing the girl. Batman can’t be in love.  Crime doesn’t stop just because Thursday is Date Night.  More importantly, I base all of my fantasies on life of Bruce Wayne - if he enters a monogamous relationship… what’s the point?  It’s like Groundhog Day.

New Superhero Diary up.  Enjoy it, or else.

And yes, I’m working on the Batman review.  I’m trying to keep it under 18 pages.

Lately I’ve been reading some essays written by David Mamet (Writing in Restaurants and Three Uses of a Knife).  He’s much much smarter than me, and so far it’s paying off in spades: just the other day Wonder Woman and I were discussing why lawyers must dress in suits for court, and I let loose with a BRILLIANT (read: bullshit) theory about how the court has come to adopt the ritualistic nature, not to mention function, of religion - us having elevated our judges to the status of gods by proxy.  (Fuckin’ brilliant, right? Sheeeeeeeeit.) Of course it was ripped off from Mamet almost to the letter, but so what - as far as WW is concerned, CHECK OUT THE BIG BRAIN ON BRAD! (In fact, I’ve found the “[fill in the blank] as proxy-god” is applicable to a tremendous variety of groups.  In the past five minutes, I’ve already developed a rudimentary theory on how the Disney cartoon characters could be seen as an analogy for the Greek pantheon, though my Minnie/Athena corollary needs some work.)

Mamet’s intellect is obvious, but I can’t help but feel that if I ever invited him to a cocktail party, I’d eventually find myself trying to assure all my friends that, “He can be really cool, I swear.  He just gets like that sometimes.”  He’s really intense; sometimes I feel like I’ve been browbeaten by the pages themselves.

Aside from my fear of disagreeing with an inanimate object, the most annoying aspect of the book is that it serves as a persistent reminder of the limits of my vocabulary. (So far I count 6 instances of overcompensation in this post - see if you can find them all!)  The other night I read a passage referring to a film crew’s members as “endomorphs… the Dungeons and Dragons type.”  I didn’t know what it meant, but I thought, “Hey, he’s talking about me!” (In fact, I must admit that I never got into D&D - way too wordy.)

On my way to get the dictionary I thought I’d engage in a bit of amateur etymology, because after all, I’m smart, and I know that endo means internal and morph refers to changing. Combining the two, I decided that to be an endomorph one must have a fluid, dynamic, multi-faceted personality. An endomorph must be able to adapt to any situation, and while they may be a bit introverted (from the bit about D&D), but it is obvious that they are highly imaginative, and certainly very smart.  All you have to do is add on “short and bald” and you’ve described me to a T!

Nope.  En·do·morph: n. An individual characterized by relative prominence of the abdomen and other soft body parts developed from the embryonic endodermal layer. In other words, here’s a twenty-sided die, you fatty.

That oughta teach me to look up the definition of a word before putting it on my business card.  I don’t care though; endomorph is still my new favorite word.  See, it has a geological definition as well: “A mineral enclosed within another mineral, such as rutile or tourmaline in quartz,” and there’s something in the relationship between the two definitions that I love.  It cracks me up to imagine how that one word could refer to two such different subjects.

In one scenario, I imagine a bunch of geologists on a dig.  Two of them are sitting around having beers, when a third geologist (a bit on the tubby side) walks by…

GEOLOGIST #1: Look at Fredrickson. God damn he sweats a lot.

GEOLOGIST #2: What do you think is in that gut of his?  What percentage of it is gravy?

GEOLOGIST #1: I don’t know.  Let me ask you this: at what point can sausage be considered an endomorphic mineral?  [Followed by much snickering, giggling, and poorly-aimed high-fives.]

But maybe it didn’t happen like that.  Maybe “Endomorph” was just how the ancient Romans said “lard-ass.”  Now I imagine that geology dig going a bit differently…

GEOLOGIST #1: Hey, check it out!

GEOLOGIST #2: What?

GEOLOGIST #1: So I broke open this one rock, right?  And there was a totally different rock inside!

GEOLOGIST #2: Neat!  I’ve never seen that before.

GEOLOGIST #1: Me neither.  Do you think we get to name it?

GEOLOGIST #2: Of course!  What are you going to call it?

GEOLOGIST #1: Don’t know.  It’s got to be clever, though.  Not like, “rock-in-a-rock.”

GEOLOGIST #2: What if you call it something like, “hungry rock,” because it’s kind of like that one rock ate the other one.  “Hungry rock” is obviously a working title…

GEOLOGIST #1:  Yes. A particularly stupid working title.  Still, I like where your head is at.  What if its name had something to do with being overweight?  I mean, because it’s all fat from having eaten rocks.

GEOLOGIST #2: Fat rock?

GEOLOGIST #1: …No.  It needs to be more obscure. What are other words for fat?

GEOLOGIST #2:  Tubby rock?  Rotund rock? Portly rock?

GEOLOGIST #1:  No, no, no.  We need something much more clever.

GEOLOGIST #2: Reubenesque rock?

GEOLOGIST #1: Getting warmer…

GEOLOGIST #2: I got it: what about “Fredrickson rock?”  [giggles, snickers, missed high fives]

GEOLOGIST #1: Okay, okay, okay… though that does give me an idea…   Hey, Fredrickson!

FREDRICKSON: What?

GEOLOGIST #1: What’s the most clever way anyone has ever called you fat?

FREDRICKSON: Why do you always have to be a dick?  I’m trying to do my work over here.

GEOLOGIST #1: No, no, seriously!  We’re naming a new kind of rock!

FREDRICKSON: Really?  Well, let me think about it… I don’t know if this will work for you, but my old Latin teacher used to always pinch my sides and call me a big ol’ “endomorph.”  I don’t know what it means, but-

GEOLOGIST #1: Perfect!  That sounds great; it’s just what we’re looking for. Thanks!

FREDRICKSON: I’m glad I could help.  Listen, if you guys want to go into town later and have a couple beers-

GEOLOGIST #1: Jesus, Frederickson, just because I say thank you doesn’t make us buddies. Though it does remind me:  yo momma is such an endomorph that I was pouring Kool-Aid and SHE came through the wall!

GEOLOGIST #2: Oh, BURN! [giggles, snickers, missed high fives]

FREDRICKSON: You guys are assholes.

In other news, this post ended up a lot longer than I originally thought it would. What can I say?  I’ve just learned a brainy way to call people fat, and I want to share it with the world.

One of the biggest indications that wedding planning had taken a turn for the worse was when Wonder Woman stopped watching wedding shows.  She used to love those things, long before we were even engaged.   But then we started planning a wedding, and suddenly she didn’t feel like watching those anymore.  Then again, I don’t imagine the TV’s in hospices are often tuned to “ER.”

Recently, though, Wonder Woman has started watching wedding shows again.  On the plus side, it’s a signal that we’re finally out of the weeds.  The downside is that these shows are utter crap, and what’s worse, three or four channels have conspired to keep wedding programming running 24 hours a day.

A sampling:

- Celebrity weddings: it’s always tempting to laugh at the absurd measures celebrities go to in order to integrate their personas into the wedding.  But if I’m being honest with myself, if I was rich and famous, I’d do that shit too.  My entire wedding ceremony would be modeled after the X-men Wedding - including dying WW’s hair red and making my insanely hairy brother attend the wedding naked and painted blue (someone’s gotta play Beast.) I’d serve steaks cut into the shape of the Bat-Signal.  I’d hire Weezer as my band.  There would be a fishbowl filled with Ecstasy by the front door and a trampoline. That shit would be SWEET.

- Rich People weddings: It is a fact (as far as I’m concerned) that as soon as you go from planning a party to planning a wedding, your costs go up by 66%.  Weddings are a fucking racket.  You know it, the vendors know it, and yet it doesn’t matter.  Worse, nothing will emasculate you quite like handing over several thousand dollars to someone for BAKING CUPCAKES.  They might as well just call it a testicle tax.  But as much as it sucks, it eases the pain somewhat when you see rich people getting fleeced for ten times as much.  Yeah, you could buy a Price is Right Showcase Showdown for what you’re paying a guy to press play on his iPod’s “Wedding - Young Jewish Couple” playlist… but somehow, watching a titan of finance lay down a hundred grand for the same DJ makes it a little bit easier.

- Bitches and Fondant: Let me take one quick second to apologize to my mom.  (She doesn’t like it when I use the b-word.)   But if you’ve seen the shows I’m talking about, you know what I mean.  You can’t even blame the networks for making them. The formula is just too easy.  If you film five weddings, you will find one or two involving two women suffering from the disease my brother diagnoses as “crazybitchitis,” and the show will be a success.  It all boils down to two universal truths.  One: weddings drive women out of their fucking minds.  (so I’ve heard.)  Two: chick fights get ratings.

Basically what I’m saying is that while I’m happy that we’re in the home stretch of this wedding planning nightm- err… barrel of laughs… I could really go for some of the Jack Bauer Power Hour right about now.  I don’t care how stupid that last season was.