Underpants On The Outside

It’s been a while, but the fine (and assuredly attractive to whatever gender they want to be) people at Yankee Pot Roast have published another piece of mine.  Enjoy!

I believe it’s a common experience that when people hear themselves on an answering machine/voicemail they think, “Oh my God do I really sound like that?” Well, as I watch these videos of me at the Comic-Con, I can’t help but think, “Oh my God do I really sound like that… AND look like that???” [update: make sure you click to watch all three videos - the video that initially loads is something different.]

At first I was wondering why the camera guy kept filming me from slightly below waist level, because, as you can see, it kinda makes me look fat. (Then again, so do my eating habits.) But I also realized that shooting me from above would show off my bald spot, so it’s kinda damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

I also want to take a second to add in some highlights that didn’t make the videos. In the musical intro, there’s a shot of me holding a sword, as some guy walks past and pats me on the head. First of all, I killed him in a duel minutes later; no one condescends to me. But second of all, that was a booth selling genuine samurai swords at a comic book convention. Like, real swords. With edges. This is a place where a lot of kids think they could totally be Batman, at a booth a hundred feet where they could play Quake 3 until their adrenaline is sky-high from fake killing people, and five feet from where they could play fight with light sabers. (I do this as well.) This seemed like a poor idea to me. I mean, I’m 29 and I was half-tempted to buy one and serve some justice and/or try and cut hot women’s clothes off. When I asked them what sort of measures they took to ensure people’s safety, they assured me that all of their swords were wrapped in cardboard boxes. With tape. In other words, we’re safe as long as those 18-year olds don’t have their house keys on them.

There was a booth belonging to a consumer advocacy group that defended violence in video games and other entertainment, saying it did not necessarily make kids more violent in reality. Their booth was located in direct sight of the Quake 3 trailer, directly next to the light saber seller, and right across from the guy selling swords. They didn’t feel like commenting on the irony.

Neal Adams, who appears in the intro, is a pretty famous comic book creator. I wasn’t expecting to get interviews with anybody, but in our random wanderings we started talking with his wife, who naturally controls his schedule (just as my fiancée controls mine) and told us to come back in about 45 minutes. While he was a really nice guy and talked to us for a lot longer of a time than we expected (until his wife told him to stop, naturally) the material he covered wasn’t really what Crave was looking for. But I got him to talk shit about Stan Lee*, and I can’t believe they took it out. Oh yeah - it happened.

The editors showed the really cute blonde who kept trying to get on camera. What they didn’t show was how blatantly she was hitting on me right before that. In fact, just about all of those fine fine women you see doing the promotional work (the belly dancers, the Bodog girls in vests, the two girls playing video games) were flirting with me. Needless to say, that’s never happened before, and I’m fatter and balder than ever. I wish that ten years ago someone would have told me that all I’d need to get hot women interested in me was a camera and a mic cube…Dad.

There was a booth where original transformers were on sale next to a copy of the Playboy featuring some chick from Battlestar Galactica. Someone call Disneyland and tell them they’re now the second happiest place on Earth.

I could probably go on for pages, but I’ll stop here. Needless to say, I had a blast, and I owe a gigantic thanks to the guys at Crave Online for the opportunity (you guys know where to send the check, right?)

*When I asked him what the problem was with good ol’ Stan the Man, Neal said that Stan was really bad at remembering names. When I said “talking shit”, I was using the term a bit loosely.

Awesome.  Now I’m just slightly below average! 

Also, I didn’t post these earlier to avoid innundating you all with my geekiness, but there are two new Superhero Diaries up, here and here.  If I may follow Wednesday’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels quote with one of my favorite John Candy lines, I’m rolling like a hunchback doing somersaults!

[Update: Over the weekend, Cracked also published this article of mine about sexy robots.  Enjoy!]

Most people think I’m a big ol’ geek, but I would say I’m much more of a dork.  While geeks and dorks both enjoy games involving dice having more than six sides and exhibit the same sweaty panic when faced with sports equipment and girls, geeks are more knowledgeable than dorks.  Geeks read Wired; dorks just look at the pictures.

My friends - now those guys are some geeks, and I say that with all due respect.  Keeping up with the conversation requires applied knowledge of fluid dynamics, nuclear physics, materials science and/or search algorithms… of which I have none. (In an unfortunate coincidence, all of those were classes I was taking during my “weed helps me think” days.)  But while I may be a dork, I’m a chameleon dork: I can APPEAR like I know what everyone’s talking about as long as I nod at the right times and keep an eye out for an opportunity to make a joke involving either the transitive property or “bubble sort.”* 

Which brings us to the good news of today: I have been published on The Science Creative Quarterly (the article can be found here.)  The SCQ is a terrific site for geeks, and I think many of you Underpants readers will enjoy it - the articles are intelligent and funny when they want to be.  But as far as my own article goes, I can only hope you think it’s funny because it sure isn’t intelligent. You won’t know anything after reading it that you didn’t before; you will just be a minute or two older. So yeah… big thanks to the editorial staff for publishing it.

*I couldn’t tell you what bubble sorting is with a gun to my head.  But it sure sounds funny…

Some of you - very, very, very few of you - have read my comic book blog “The Superhero Diaries.”  It was a labor of love that required a whole lot of labor and didn’t get me any kind of love, so I kinda let it fall by the wayside.

Until now. 

The fantastic people at Crave Online saw it in their hearts to nurture this poor, dying bit back to life, and I will be publishing Superhero Diaries every two weeks on the site until the joke gets old. Check out my inaugural article here. 

Another publishing credit!  COUNT IT!

I tried to come up with some cutesy intro for this, but like most things,the best way to say it is the simplest: if you go to Google and search for “penis wonder woman road head wizard”, the Underpants is the number one site.

I owe a big thanks to my friend Miya for this. I don’t know what sort of genius-juice she was drinking late last week when this occurred to her, but I can’t even remember the last time something this cool happened to me!

The ugly guy who looks like me is Big Brother. The vicious-looking mammal beside him is his son. According to my mom, I looked that cute when I was his age, but there is absolutely no photographic evidence to back this up. Nevertheless, if it’s true…well…he’s got about eight more years before things turn south. Sorry, kid. Welcome to the family.

While I hope he’s got his mother’s genes when it comes to preserving his good looks, I have no doubt that his predatory instincts come from his dad’s side:

You see that? You can’t teach that. You either have it or you don’t. And the men in our family have it. (I’m told by Wonder Woman that this is almost exactly how I first “made my move”, even down to the same landing spot on her scalp.) We are a carnivorous and merciless species. Frankly, I was amazed at my brother’s good fortune at getting these shots (not to mention surviving the experience); nature photographers spend years waiting to capture that kind of action. I called him to find out what sort of high-speed sports-photography settings he was using on his camera.

“I was just hitting the button manually every two seconds or so.”

Assuming an initial distance of 6 inches, (I measure everything in six-inch lengths. Wink-wink, ladies.) that means my nephew has a takedown speed of three and one-third feet per minute. It would appear the gazelles can rest easy for now; the boy isn’t so much a leopard as he is a Venus Fly Trap. Nevertheless, he should still have success hunting human females, who are mesmerized by adorability and can be lured into his open, waiting maw…

Go on in, sweetheart, he won’t hurt you…

(For those of you looking for more hard-core cute-on-cute action, go to www.twosloths.com)

I’m on a roll, baby! 

Today, Cracked.com has once again been kind enough to publish an article of mine: the Seven Most Terrifying Celebrity Transformations.   I cannot say enough kind things about their editorial staff; not only do they accept my work - and pay for it, the suckers! - they do quite a lot of work on it.  Their contributions are like the 90% of artificial sweeteners that make my 10% cranberry juice into an enjoyable beverage.  (For instance, they probably would have edited that simile out.)

Just by living there, Los Angelenos have implicitly agreed to accept earthquakes and fires in exchange for disproportional amounts of beautiful women and never needing snow tires.   As such, growing up there gives one a fairly high acceptance for acts of God.   When you wake up and the ground is shaking like the Earth suffers from some galactic epilepsy, it can be a bit disorienting, but you need to keep your wits about you if you’re going to find a way out of that waterbed.

Apparently Los Angeles went to sleep with a lit cigarette again - half the state is on fire. My sympathies and best wishes go out to anyone affected by this*, though personally I’m not too nervous about my own family and friends.  I probably should be: after all, I have a friend, a grandmother, an uncle and my father who all live close to at least one of the fires.  Worse, my dad lives in a trailer, which don’t have the best success record against mother nature; their reactivity to fire and wind leads me to believe that they’re made of two parts tumbleweed and one part propane. 

But like I said, these fires happen, so I’m not getting upset until I hear something.  Plus, I’m confident everyone’s okay at the moment; if you look at the Google Map below, you can see that there’s no way my that fire’s getting to my dad’s place.

I mean, do you know how bad traffic’s gotta be on PCH right now?  That fire’s looking at a three, four hour drive.  At least.  It’ll take twenty minutes just to make the left onto Temescal Canyon Rd.  And if that fire thinks it’s faster to take Sunset…well, we’ve all made that mistake once.

There’s even a Google map tracing all of the fires. 

I know there are legitimate uses for this, but I can’t help but wonder: do you think that the inventor of the modem ever imagined that we’d one day be able to (or want to, for that matter) look up driving directions to a fire?  Or nearby places to eat (e.g., “pizza”)?  Hell, I can look up some local movie times if I feel like making a day of it.   It’s like if the inventor of sliced bread were to find out that it’s good for both sandwiches and roofing insulation.

*For serious.  Particularly firefighters.  They’re fuckin’ rad.

Two weeks ago, friend and Underpants commenter Roscoe P. Coltrane found out that his wife is pregnant with a son.  I’m sure he would have been thrilled to find out he’s having a daughter, but you can tell he was rooting for a boy – he’s still walking around with this smug smile like he’s hiring his dick out for Bar Mitzvahs and weddings.   

I want to be happy for him; I really do.  And I know it says a lot about me (nothing good), but I can’t shake the fear that my first child is going to be a girl and his son is going to have sex with her.  See, we like to kid each other, and of all the things you can’t REALLY get mad about, that might be the worst.  What possible comeback is there?

“Hey, your mom’s so fat, that-”

“My son fucked your daughter.”

“…Dang.”

Unless I was somehow able to have sex with his mom, in his car, while lying on his television, I think I’d have to move.

Yes.  These are the things I think about.