Roeper & Me

Recently I did an interview with Richard Roeper of the famed thumbs-up, thumbs-down show. They wanted to call the piece "Rick on Dick", but I didn't want to get pigeonholed as a someone who writes book-length essays on the various penises (or, is it penii?) found in the wilderness.

It doesn't look like the article's going to be online, so if you want a PDF file of the whole thing (not that long) email me at the address on the right and I'll send you one. As long as your online service doesn't block it like my mom tried to do with CDs containing the Parental Discretion label. Also, if you happen to be in the Chicagoland area, feel free to get a copy from ... somewhere its available.

And, while you're at it, here's another something I wrote about the baseball trading deadline. But this one sucks.

EDIT: Also, that Roeper article DID end up going online.

Stranger Than Fact?

Those who know me know that I have a problem with a lot of the conspiracy theories going around today. I believe that the 9/11 Commission Report is accurate, or at least that they didn't intentially mislead people. I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK. I don't think the government is hiding aliens in Area 51. And despite all of the known recorded oddities surrounding the Ohio election of 2004, I don't think there was an top-down conspiracy in play.

That being said, I love conspiracy theories on their own. And it's time for me to offer one to you. One with no evidence other than my pure speculation.

Grizzly Man is fake!

Watching this movie tonight, there was a strange feeling I got during it. Not so much the footage of Timothy himself amoung the bears, but whenever Herzog interviewed family members, friends, coroners, pilots, and the other folks who explained Timothy's life (and, spoiler alert, death), they all seemed like they were acting. There was something off. Their emotions. Their crying. The way their voices cracked in perfect places. The strange construction of their sentences. Basically, it felt like a scripted movie performed by bad actors.

How would you go about doing something like this? Technically, it wouldn't be a problem. Every whose seen Waiting for Guffman, Reno 911!, Blair Witch or any porn movie knows that it's easy to blur the lines between fiction and reality. And with the technology available today, you could fake anything. All you'd need is an actor willing to act on film this one time, and never be seen again. (Maybe using a bright blond wig would help disguise him post-movie.)

All you need left to do is somehow leak the story of his death a few years before you release the movie. Then, when the movie finally comes out, the media will have news stories to reference, proving the accuracy of the documentary itself. And that, as any conspiracy theorist would advocate, is pretty easy to do. All news organizations need is a few sources (easily faked), some visuals, and a nice story and they'll print anything.

And that's really the only important part. After leaking the story, your job is done. Just work out a story, complete a script, videotape some adlibbed footage, edit it together, and you're done. You have an ultra-acclaimed blockbuster documentary.

Herzog himself has been known to blur the lines between fiction and reality for his entire career as a filmmaker. In his movie Fitzcarraldo, about a man who wants to pull a steamship over a mountain, uses no special effects. In essence, Herzog made the actors actually pull the steamship over the mountain.

And just a few years ago, he wrote and starred in Incident at Loch Ness, a funny mockumentary about a group making a film about the Loch Ness Monster who stumble on the actual monster itself. In fact, at the end of his three-star review of that movie, Roger Ebert had this to say:

Rather than say exactly what I think about the veracity of "Incident at Loch Ness," let me tell you a story. A few years ago at the Telluride Film Festival, Herzog invited me to his hotel room to see videos of two of his new documentaries. One was about the Jesus figures of Russia, men who dress, act and speak like Jesus and walk through the land being supported by their disciples. The other was about a town whose citizens believe that a city of angels exists on the bottom of a deep lake and can be seen through the ice at the beginning of winter. Wait too long, and the ice is too thick to see through. Crawl onto the ice too soon, and you fall in.

Herzog has made many great documentaries in his career, and I was enthralled by both of these. He's a master of the cinema, with an instinct for the bizarre and unexpected. After I saw the films, he said he only had one more thing to tell me: Both of the documentaries were complete fiction.

Is it too much to wonder if these "documentaries", never released to my knowledge, were just practice for his greatest trick of all time, Grizzly Man?

Final Note: Now again, I don't really believe anything I just typed. There's obviously no evidence. But it's a fun theory. Now all of you crazies, forget about 9/11 and JFK. Go do something worthwhile, like find evidence to back this one up. And then give me credit. And money.

(Oh, and after doing a Google search, I found this interesting, yet short article.)

Self-promotion is awesome!

New baseball article up at McSweeney's. High-five!

My fantasy? Well, since you asked ...

My fantasy is being pleasured simultaneously by the three main anchors on network TV's three main morning stations (CBS's Hannah Storm; NBC's Katie Couric; and ABC's Diane Sawyer). Then, after hours and hours of feather-tickling, full-body rubdowns, and toe-cracking, Maria Bartiromo from CNBC's Closing Bell comes waltzing in, wearing white lingerie and packing two double-dildos.

I'm sure you can imagine the rest.

Unlike myself, who's already in fantastic shape

The only place you see Dean Cain anymore is the All Star Legends & Celebrity Game. Maybe the rest of the year he's just getting in shape for it.

Seamus vs. the Walnuts

My next script is going to be about a time traveler from the 1930s, who was sent forward into the present in order to save the world from a threat. Let's go ahead and say that the threat is the advance of supersized walnuts on the masses, upset with the encroachment of man on their fields.

But the problem is that the time traveler (whom we'll call Seamus) is a very heavy smoker. And everytime he goes inside a building, further and further diving down the rabbit-hole of the giant conspiracy behind the production of the supersized walnuts (spoiler: it's a company profiting from Anti-Walnut poison gas), he lights up a cigarette and is immediately taken away by security.

First, the mall. Then, an office building. Then, a plane. And so on. In each case, Seamus is always trying to understand the change in policy from when he was alive - and when smoking was legal and encouraged everywhere, even hospitals and churches - to now, where smoking is only legal is a small ten-foot-by-ten-foot square five miles outside of Boise, Idaho.

At the end, the delay by the security proves costly and the world falls to the Great Walnut Crisis, except the executives of the Anti-Walnut poison gas company, who jet off on a spaceship, trying to find another place for humanity to exist, smoking in zero gravity the whole way.

Inevitably they'll land on some seemingly deserted planet, do a little exploring, and come upon the creatures featured above. But no, it's not Earth years and years in the future. It's just another planet. With monkeys who smoke.

Now ... where was I?

This goddamn bum.

What the fuck? Every time you're standing outside of Walgreen's, with your bottle of window cleaner (or maybe just blue-tinted water) and sign proclaiming your services to wash my car's windows for tips, I give you a dollar. Even if I walked. I don't mind that I'm not getting anything out of it, I'm just proud that you took initiative to work, so I reward you.

But everytime I do, you start talking about how you grew up in Gary, Indiana and moved out here in 1969. And then I say I lived in Chicago, which Gary is somewhat-a-suburb of, so you start chatting about how it's changed since you've been gone, and blah-blah-blah.

Look. I don't mind talking to you, in fact I'd enjoy to hear a little more of your story, but goddamn it, every time we talk you tell me the same exact thing. Yeah, you're from Gary. Yeah, I'm from Chicago. But c'mon. Let's move on from there.

But what's worse than being bored by stories I've already heard, is that you don't even remember me. What the fuck? I'm the guy who's been giving you probably a dollar a week for the past few months, just giving it away to you, and you don't remember me?

I mean, this whole act of charity isn't about helping people just to help them. There's no such thing as true altruism, and this is no different. All I want in return for my dollar (when I don't get a free windshield wash out of the deal) is for you to remember me. That way, I will feel like I've made a difference in your life, oh, goddamn bum, and it'll make me feel happier. As it stands, it just feels like a wasted dollar.

If you're not thinking about that wise, handsome, nice-assed man who gave you the dollar when you use it to buy a McDonald's double cheeseburger, that what's really the point?

Killer Roster, dude

Ever wonder where Michael Myers would bat in a lineup? Where Freddy Kreuger's bladed-mitt would be best in the field? Where Chucky or Norman Bates would play? And who would coach this rag-tag bunch of misfits?

Look no further than this link, with my latest article for the McSweeney's folks.

Thanks, everyone. Hope none of you blew your thumbs off lighting illegal fireworks as a way to set off car alarms and celebrate America's birth simultaneously.