Well, I suppose saying I “accomplished” anything is debatable. But I’m not one to let a few disappointments get in my way. If anything it’s an excuse to start working on newer, better projects. What are those projects you ask, well person who I imagine would be reading my blog, here’s what I got cooking up.

SPEC SCRIPTS

I’m in the process of compiling a Writer’s portfolio that I can present to an agency. I’m presenting one, maybe two treatments for original pilots I had originally considered turning into a web series. For the most part I feel very strongly about these pieces and I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from them… so in the immortal words of Carl Spackler “So I got that going for me.” But to get into this agency you also need to present specs for existing shows to demonstrate how you can work with already-established premises and how well you can essentially “play with others.” I’ve already started work on a spec for a 30 Rock episode and I’m slowly building my ideas for an American Dad show. I’m comfortable with those two choices because they’re popular-enough to be recognizable but not hugely conventional so they won’t have mounds of competition. Plus they usually stick with standalone episodes, making it an easy way to get started without worrying about an established continuity. Hopefully I’ll be ready to send my samples to the agency by the end of the month.

FILM

I’m collaborating once again with the good friend who directed me in the Awkwardness Survival Guide for another straight-to-youtube production. This time on my fully original work Video Games and You. By Me. Once again shot to be live action, this one will once again prominently feature me in front of the camera, but with a much MUCH larger speaker role. Like, narrator/ host-level speaking role. I love the project and once we’ve ironed out the few remaining kinks in our otherwise completed shooting script we’ll be ready to shoot. Estimated release date, summertime.

ANIMATED SERIES/ GAME

Ooh boy…while I was working on The 50th Cartoon, I had an idea for another animated series. The only problem is I swore to myself that The 50th Cartoon would be my absolute last animated project…at least one that I would do for free and on my own. Well, the wheels never stopped spinning for this new project, and I’ve caught myself on more than one occasion doodling characters and tinkering with Flash again. I really don’t want to make any promises on this but I’ve already talked to some amazing collaborators about this. Oh man, we’ll see where this goes. I think we’ll know what I’m up to by August.

MISCELLANEOUS

Oh god, what else…

-Got another idea for an original screenplay. I will definitely begin working on it in the fall, by which time I’ll hopefully have an agent I can commune with about these projects of mine.

-Moving into a new apartment. The place I’m at right now just isn’t doing it for me anymore, need a change of scenery. Meaningful hunting will commence when I get final word from my boss how long their going to keep me here. ETA on that is… this week.

-My big plan was to go back to school last spring. That fell through. Then it was to go back to school this winter. Then this spring. Now it’s this fall. One of these days I’m going to raise my skill set at one of our fine BC institutions. You’ll see.

-I’m still extremely keen on making my web series. To accomplish this I’m actively looking to drum up money, an interested team of crew and actors, equipment and most of all, money. It’s a longtime coming but I’m confident it can be done one way or another.

And that’s it from me. Wish me luck…and wish for me to stop procrastinating. Good lord I need to work on that.

Robots attempt to hide all around us. Are you skilled enough to spot them? Hollywood and robophiliacs everywhere have made robots and robotic creatures into the most fearsome things in our immediate future. The next time you see a robot in a toy store or greeting you with a hearty “Ho ho ho” as you enter my house, please, smash it with a hammer before it can turn on all of humanity!

Confused yet? You are? Dang. Alright, allow me to elaborate. Every December I’m forced into our attic to retrieve a robotic Santa Claus once it becomes clear to the family I hid it a little too well the last time I put it back. It has the height of the average nine year old and it yells one-to-three Christmas Carols with its 32bit sound audio processor every time the slightest breeze is detected by its motion sensor. It’s like a festive security system, except it only alerts the people in the house and it’s meant to make MY life difficult.

But it doesn’t stop at Satan Claws; this time of year it’s harder to find electronics in my house that DON’T break into song and dance. You know how everything was alive in Beauty in the Beast? It’s kinda like that except instead of everything being a lovable French servant they’re just French. No, my mechanical wintertime rogues gallery includes such nemeses as The electric train that keeps falling off the tracks, The wire-framed and animatronic reindeer that don’t stand up properly, The bell choir of toy soldiers that are hopelessly out of tune, and Metallo.

I’m told Christmas is supposed to be a joyous time of year, but gosh darn it these robots are aiming to ruin it for everyone. Right now they’re earning our trust as harmless Christmas decorations. Satan Claws in particular, in a twisted move to ensure easy assimilation of future generations into the robot collective, has adopted the guise of Santa Claus to earn the trust of children. Well in the immortal words of a great seafaring man “That’s all I can stands and I can’t stands no more.” It’s time to form the resistance!

I’m going to assume that, like me, you’ve never had to fight a robot. Well In reality we have little to be afraid of. You will need no Gatling guns, metal crunching machines, or any sort of jockstrap to combat the oncoming robocaust. I’ll tell you why, have you ever seen a robot crying tears of oil as its tubing flies out all over the place like intestines? Have you ever ripped out the circuit brain of a robot and eaten it? These types of moments make you realize the fragility of robot kind. Robots are just like the people who make them!

People fear robots because they don’t like the thought of cold, lifeless killing machines hunting them down as they scavenge a desert wasteland. Have you ever seen “American Idol”? Neither have I, but I hear the judges on that show are real jerks. The similarities are astounding!

Since you are still reading this you are either interested in learning the ways of robot annihilation or some other thing. If you are a robot scanning for clues, be sure to put into your memo-banks that your days are numbered. Not just with ones or zeroes, but with blood or oil or whatever you’ll leak as you die. If this is my Mom reading, will you please stop calling me “your baby boy” in front of my robot slayer friends? No one can respect a robot slaying master when his mom claims she loves him all the time.

Now then, the first thing a potential robot slayer must learn is that no one but humans built these robots. Even if robots start making themselves, humans made robots first and they also made the robots that will make the other robots. The very creatures of destruction that you fear and use laser chainsaws on your tender flesh are going to be built by the same species that made everything else in life possible. That’s our in to understanding the robots.

Realize that the people who will program these robots will not walk around with giant bazookas strapped to their rippling backsides and fight enemy commandos everyday. While experienced soldiers bred for combat would be ideal to engineer effective killer robots you’re forgetting the fact that most military recruits aren’t required to know how to build a toaster much less a Blastotron 5000. No, the people who will build the future death gods of the world are the same ones who own box sets for every Star Trek series (Yes, I mean every single one) and can’t make a decision without rolling a twenty-sided die.

Seriously, how fearsome is a robot overlord when it quotes Deep Space Nine as it launches missile grenades at you? Expect it to be able to efficiently destroy your opinions about what the best video card is, not your spine. From now on, when you’re confronted with a robot, defend yourself by getting in its face and telling it that Playstation 3 sucks or that Greedo shot first. These will be direct hits to the core robot processors and “Laws of robotics”, by using key phrases we will be able to cause momentary logic fluxes for the robots, if not complete self destruction. A creative alternative for attractive women is to say “I don’t get it” “Loser” and “I have a boyfriend”

“But sir,” you plead, “I’ve played Counter-strike before and there are plenty of guys who can headshot me – even behind cover!” It’s true that not every robot built by obsessive compulsives will be completely worthless. Some will be able to fire guns with pinpoint accuracy. Some will be able to withstand untold temperatures. And some may even be able to talk to girls without crying. One who fights robots will have to be able to battle against all of these robotic skills and more. Do you believe you have the mental capacity to accomplish this? Let’s run through a few robotic combat scenarios to find out.

A robot appears and stabs your girlfriend with a gun. You throw your spoon at it but it bounces off its metallic body with no damage at all. Ducking behind a table does little to hide your location from it. It shoots you in typical hero injury location #2: the shoulder. What do you do?

A) Run around crying.
B) Let it kill you because it won’t stop quoting Family Guy
C) Confuse its infrared vision by wearing cold packs and say Firefly deserved to get canceled.

If you chose C then you have some potential. Robots, like the humans that built them, are easily confused and emotional. Unless it was built with the ability to comprehend specific subjects and opinions, anything else you do will confuse it and make it run away to a nearby comic shop. Keep in mind that these robots may be preprogrammed to recognize basic types of maneuvers and be fully prepared to combat them. An army of cold-blooded sloths with missile launcher backpacks who were on the varsity rugby team would not only render its infrared vision useless but also confuse its motion detection sensors. Learn from this.

A robot army emerges through the skeletal rubble of your recently nuked civilization. You only have a stick of dynamite or bubblegum to fight with. Do you:

A) Imagine a world of peace built by robots without pollution. Maybe these robots aren’t so bad…
B) Fall to your knees and fondly remember how if you had only been nicer to the guys in the AV club this all could have been prevented.
C) Lure them into a club downtown and crush their flimsy bodies with a beaver nailed to a stick.

Once again, C is the correct answer. The people who design robots have probably never been to a club, much less know what it is. Closest thing a programmer has been to a rave is the last time they degaussed their monitor. Utilize this. And I would be amazed to find a robot that is capable of understanding what it’s like to be beaten with a beaver nailed to a stick. All the logic and mathematical reasoning in the world couldn’t come up with a solution to that one. Why, I can see it locking up with confusion and begging for mercy right now! If you’ve ever begged for mercy from a man holding the tattered remains of a beaver nailed to a stick – you’ll know mercy is not a thing in their vocabulary. According to my pocket dictionary and jewelry making reference guide, the word “several” means “more than two.” I’m going to include one final robot combat (or as I like to call it, “rombat”) scenario.

As you deliver a blast from your laser gun the robots fall over in a heap. The robot is dying now, and it begins to recite to you the types of things it has seen throughout its short existence. It asks you, how can it not be human if it can appreciate the beauty of nature? As you slump down after your exhausted battle, you say…

A) “Who are the real monsters, the humans or the robots?”
B) “Legolas doesn’t die.”
C) Nothing. Your slumping was just a distraction, giving you more than enough time to pull out your futurevolver and unload. You then set it on fire while humming the Robocop theme correctly.

The correct answer is all too obvious. By now you should realize your caliber amongst the robot slaying ranks. Creativity and ingenuity are the tools of the robot slaying trade, not lightning bolt swords or plasmid riffles — these types of things are what robots will be looking for. They’ll be ready for you to come around a corner carrying an electric sledgehammer; a robot can be preprogrammed to fight someone with laser claws… but the chances of an android being equipped to handle hearing someone who doesn’t care about its opinion on anime are slim to nothing. And those odds are good enough for the human race!

Merry Christmas!

It’s become apparent to me that I’m going to die someday. Could be today, could be tomorrow, could be yesterday, it could be whenever. Though it saddens me I mustn’t concern myself with the When, How and Why of it all. I need to do as other pre-stiffs have done before me and consider the What. Specifically, what am I going to leave for a layout of my funeral arrangement?

In the free time I’ve gained in the weeks since I lost my job, I’ve drafted a “proper-soundin’-enough” document to be consulted and carried-out upon my death. Which, considering how long I’ve been out of work, should be any day now. Please note that if I should someday enlist a real lawyer to draw-up a legitimate will and testament, and it sounds better than this one, consider this document obsolete and you vultures don’t do/get anything.

So without further adieu, har she blows!

*****

If you are reading this, I am dead. I have prepared this document to settle my affairs in the case of my death, and I’m sure glad I did, because it is now apparent that I have died. In the event that I have died and this document can’t be found, please refer to Appendix A of this document, “What to Do if This Document Can’t Be Found.” Otherwise, read on, and follow these directions carefully or risk shaming my memory and awakening my curse. For details of my curse, please refer to Appendix B, “My Curse,” or to the film “Thinner,” which is about a fat man who becomes really thin. It’s worse than it sounds (the curse, not the movie).

Section One: Disposing of my Body

If my body is in any undesirable or unsavory position, such a nude on bicycle or cowardly fetal pose plus grotesque rictus of terror, please dress me as necessary and snap me into a pose that will reflect well upon me. Maybe you can make it look like I died working the fruitless, red clay earth with my scarred and calloused hands, because then my old boss will think that I worked myself to death and they’ll feel bad that they let such a hard worker go. Or, if I’ve recently done something pretty bad, you could pose me on my knees and make it look like I died praying, because that will probably score me some points. Actually, you know what? Let’s go for a Conan The Barbarian thing, standing before my throne, heroically, maybe a sword in my hand pointed skywards. If any girls died with me, put them up against my leg so it looks like they’re adoring me.

However, if my body has expired in a peaceful, dignified state of repose, just leave it that way, because I guess I’ll settle for that. I wouldn’t be mad if you still did the Conan thing, though. Far from it. Actually, just do the Conan thing either way.

Section Two: Arranging my Funeral

When my body is prepared to my satisfaction, gather my people around it to weep and mourn and say their farewells. In the unlikely event that by the time of my death I have not become the leader of a people, please find those who love me best. Maybe they’re my disciples, or my kinfolk, or perhaps just hangers-on. Please shoo away any who are eyeing my rings and baubles, because I will not tolerate grave robbery among my disciples, and I thereby expel them from my order.

Anyway, allow anyone who wants to see my body a good fond look at it, and then shuffle them out of the room to a room filled with snacks, so that they can chat and eat and remember the good times. Please do not allow any snacks near my body, because if I should awaken in death before my ancestors to be judged, I don’t want to be covered with crumbs and chocolate fingerprints.

Among my people, find someone willing to do a eulogy. If it turns out everyone wants to do it, narrow it down to someone trustworthy who liked me best of all. Failing that, pick the person that had the least to drink that day.

If you have been selected to perform the eulogy, I don’t need anything fancy, but make sure you hit the following basic points:

• “A certain quiet dignity.”
• “Winner of bronze medal in the “2006 Californiadonis Bodacious Beach Bod Contest, sponsored by El Tropicoco brand cocoa butter.”
• Tell everyone that my nickname was “Hammerhead,” but think of a good reason for it, because I don’t want them to think it’s because my eyes were too far apart.
• “Ruthless, but not unreasonable.”
• Mention that I could “Rock the house like nobody’s business.”
• Throw in that bit from the Kipling poem, “The female of the species must be deadlier than the male,” even though I don’t really know what it means in my context unless a girl killed me, but you have to throw one in for the guys (they’re all going to elbow each other and go “right, fellas?”)

Section Three: On the Non-revelation of My Terrible Secret

If you know my terrible secret, please don’t tell anybody my terrible secret, and make every attempt to conceal my terrible secret. If you are aware of the fact that I have a terrible secret but don’t know what my terrible secret is, please make no attempt to discover my terrible secret, and if you do discover it, please don’t tell anybody about it. If you didn’t know I even had a terrible secret, please ignore that last passage, because I don’t have a terrible secret and I was joking, but on an unrelated note, you should rent a cement mixer and fill up my house entirely full to the top with cement.

Section Four: Distributing my Possessions.

First, I want to make it clear that if you skipped to this section without reading the other ones, you’re a real jackal and you should drop dead. But here’s what I’m giving away:

• Adam Plowman gets my pants, which would probably mostly fit him. Not the pants that I died in, though, because I don’t want his grief to be furthered by the burden of washing my final pants.
• I was about to say that you should give all my money to the best looking girl you can find so it would impress her, but that seems pretty frivolous (because what if I’m broke?), so I’ll leave it to Plowman and he can just see what he can do with it in terms of girls.
• Hang on, Plowman is older than me. What if he’s dead too? In that case, see if that good looking girl is still around.
• Either way, Plowman also gets my stuff, which I define as anything that I own which has no real value to women, such as my navy blue sweat pants (but I guess Adam already got my pants, unless I died in my navy blue sweats, in which case paradox from beyond the grave!

Section Five: Special Amendments and Circumstances

A) If you killed me…
If you killed me, just calm down and don’t panic. I am not going to pass judgment on you, but you’re going to need to sort this one out on your own. Did I deserve it? Was it legal? Were your motives just or unjust? Are you wanted by the police? Are you a police officer yourself? If so, what did I do? Was killing me maybe just a little bit excessive? Oh, really? I did that?Well I guess that is pretty bad.

B) If I was terribly mutilated…
Please take me to a mortician who will use all his powers of reconstruction to make an open-casket funeral possible, because weeping at a box is way too abstract for my liking. If my mutilation is too severe to make an open casket tasteful, please flip me over so that only my legs and feet show through the open part.

C) If I died far too young of an incurable disease…
Please cryogenically freeze me until such a time as the disease has been cured, or until people lower their Popsicle standards far enough that I would be more useful as a confection.

D) If I died in a really stupid or embarrassing way…
Please confuse me with Bob Hope, so that I will always be remembered as a billionaire comedy entertainer to the stars & presidents, and Bob Hope will always be remembered as the guy who took his lawnmower swimming.

E) If the cause of death is unknown…
Tell everyone I died battling Doomsday to the death in downtown Metropolis.

Thank you, and may I rest in peace.

With the recent booming economy, landing a swell job has never been so easy. New career opportunities await us at every turn, ready to pounce on legions of unsuspecting and innocent bystanders like a hungry panther– ready to maul you into a life of wealth and prospect. CEO of a major insurance company, Probation Boss, Lemonade salesman and Thief are all but some of the many paths available for your choosing. And rest assured that no matter which direction you take, merely narrowing down your career options to one is the most difficult step in the process.

If you’ve already set your mind on one particular job, congratulations, the hard part is over. While you may be well on your way to full-time employment, there is one obstacle that stands between applicants and the jobs they are so astonishingly qualified for: The job interview. Ooooooooooohhhh.

All great companies conduct interviews for hopeful employees; they are a useful formality meant to dissuade candidates from perusing the opening any further. This is done because executives and managers are greedy; they cherish their positions and only want the jobs for themselves. Let nothing stand in the way of your career; meet the interviewer at their challenge and nail that interview like it’s a cheap whore.

If you are reading this on your iPhone or through your powers of cyberkinesis, then you are no doubt yourself on your way to an exciting job interview. Because it’s so easy to get hired in today’s go-get ‘em world, you may fall prey to over-thinking your interview. Doing so puts you in danger of giving your potential boss any reason to doubt your qualification, no matter how much of the job is actually yours. For this reason it’s important to know how to razzle and dazzle your interviewer with a resume, behavior and attire so impressive he won’t be able to resist letting you have sex with his wife and barely legal daughters.

Step one: The Résumé

The only difference separating you from the animals is the amount of lies you put on your résumé. Over the years, companies have grown accustomed to the fact that employees invariably fib throughout the interview process, so nowadays they expect this behavior. The critical point is to provide lies that distinguish you from the lies of others vying for your coveted position.

For example: By taking simple “liberties” with previous jobs, you can instantly add a zing to that banal work experience section. Does the interviewer know that you were the first man to walk on the moon? That you hold the record as the fattest man on Earth? Or that you were the first manned aircraft to travel the Atlantic? If not he does now and he’ll never forget it.

Another suggestion is to make up facts that connect you closer to your employer. Find out personal information about your potential boss and just roll with it. A good start would be something along the lines of “So your father was Ted Reynolds? What a coincidence, he was MY dad too!”

Now that you’ve added some minor embellishments to your previously dull background, it’s time to tell your boss a little bit about yourself. Add in some colorful descriptions that show you’re a real devoted worker with a “can do” attitude that really wants to grab this job. Feel free to use any of the following statements on your résumé:

• “In my free time I enjoy screaming”
• “Have you ever seen ‘Alligator II’? I was the third guy who got killed by the alligator.”
• “My goal is to eventually destroy this company from the inside.”
• “Waking up in a pool of vomit is common with me.”
• “I’m contagious.”
• “I don’t have a permanent residence; the cops keep busting up my joint.”
• “I am easily amused by other people’s pain.”
• “I am part of the underground resistance.”
• ” I’ll steal anything that isn’t nailed to the floor.”
• “If I found a hypodermic needle lying on the ground, I would probably inject it into my arm. I think that shows you what kind of a devoted worker with a ‘can do’ attitude I am.”

You should now have a pretty beefy résumé with one noticeable exception – you’re missing any previous schooling experience. This is a piece of cake to change; simply open up the sports page of your local newspaper and write down the first college name you find. Make sure the headline isn’t anything along the lines of “UBC PROFESSOR CAUGHT MOLESTING STUDENT” or you might face an uncomfortable conversation topic.

So you think your resume is done? You could not be further from the truth my ill-informed ignoramus. The crowning touch, or “jeannu me eloui quaea” (I just made up that phrase), is a little thing that could truly make the difference between not getting the job, and being forcibly kicked out by security. Yes, I’m talking about clip art of course. Adding a large number of clip art pictures to your resume will help grab the boss’ attention while simultaneously impressing him with your “extensive computer know-how.”

Step 2: Behavior.

I remember my first attempt to land a golden position as a bellboy at an illustrious hotel near the big “Asian only” mall in Richmond. I was a churlish lad at the age of 17, unwise to the ways of the world. I reveled in my ignorance, and visibly showed my naivety like a badge of honor. I approached the owner of the fine establishment looking as an unkempt, slovenly lout, stuttering my words and tripping over my sentences. After the humiliating interview concluded, I was ejected from the premises and henceforth banned from ever setting foot in Richmond again.

Let my tragic tale be a warning to you all: Walking into an interview unprepared, hoping to wing-it, is ill-advised. A good interviewer will be looking to see how well you’ve crafted your fabrications in advance; they’re interested to know how convincing your lies are and how well you’ll stick to them. Remember: If you can’t keep track of your numerous lies, how can they expect you to commit to a critical and demanding job?

If memorizing easy-to-remember bullshit for later isn’t your thing, an easier way to deter such catastrophes is to project yourself with a winner’s attitude. Prove to the interviewer that yes, you have carefully thought out your choice of words and that you are convinced the job is already yours. This technique goes a long way to proving yourself in an interview, allow me to illustrate this point with the following scenario:

Joe and Bob are about to be interviewed for the “Associate Advisor” at IBM’s nanotechnology research department. Joe shows up at the interview on time, presenting himself as an educated, intelligent man with a strong background in the nanotechnology field. He is relaxed, polite, well-spoken and confident. He compliments the boss on his company, and stresses his excitement to work for such an established corporation. Bob on the other hand barges in drunk in the middle of someone else’s interview. He spouts incomprehensible gibberish like a mad man, steals all the pens from the waiting room, and punches the closest woman in the face shortly before lighting the office on fire.

Who do you think got the job? If you guessed “Bob”, you’re absolutely wrong, my friend. However, if you guessed “Joe”, you’re wrong as well. The boss promoted his nephew to fill the position.
So, in summary, unless you’re related to the boss of a large company, you will have to “dress for success” Which brings us to our last step.

Step 3: Attire.

The first step in “wowing” your potential employer rests in choosing the appropriate wardrobe for the interview. One of the most important things your boss notices is the garments which you chose to festively adorn yourself with. Allow me to explain some of the “do’s and don’t do these do’s” of preparing for this crucial moment of your life.

1. Bathe BEFORE dressing yourself. I cannot stress how important this step is as it is written. Nothing screams out “unprofessional” quite like a person wearing a wet, soapy mess of an outfit! Take some pride in how you look and remember to bathe BEFORE dressing!

2. Resist the temptation to enter the interview barefoot and procure yourself some footwear. Any kind of footwear will do: Tap shoes, flippers, roller blades, stilts, anything that will keep your bare feet from touching the floor. Shoes can offer a quaint ice breaker and starting point in interviews, so be sure you’re wearing something eye-catching when you put your feet up on the interviewer’s desk.

3. A general rule of thumb for shirts is to find an appropriate middle ground between your finest garment and that old XL Tshirt you’ve occasionally slept in ever since your dad first brought it back from that air show he went to in 93. Shirts with popped collars are advisable if you want to send a message that you mean bizznaz, provided the collar is starched and crisp.

4. Woe be to the boss who hires the candidate wearing stained, wrinkled pants. A good idea to keep in the back of your mind while assembling an appropriate wardrobe is a “dressing theme”. For example, choose to apply a “pinstripe” theme to your pants, which accentuates horizontal lines. These soothing, predicable patterns create a positive response to all those that see it, undoubtedly exuberating an aura of responsibility and confidence to the potential boss. Failing that I recommend a nice pair of tear-away track pants, in the likely chance the interviewer asks why they should hire you prompting you to quickly reveal your underwear and perform a festive dance.

If you have been following these steps, then by now you should be looking as sharp as a thumbtack, and ready to show your future boss who indeed will be the boss around here.

But before you begin destroying everything in your wake, take pause and remember that the interviewer will unleash a barrage of questions at you. These mind-bending riddles are meant to distract you from your goal, and without a sound strategy to defend yourself with, you will surely succumb to madness.

In this situation we can turn to the late, great Johnny Carson for guidance. Distasteful of press interviews, Johnny famously provided journalists with a comedic list of stock answers that they could use with the questions of their choosing: “Yes, I did. Not a bit of truth in that rumor. Only twice in my life, both times on Saturday. I can do either, but prefer the first. NO! Kumquats. I can’t answer that question. Toads and tarantulas. Turkistan, Denmark, Chile, and the Komandorskie Islands. As often as possible, but I’m not very good at it yet. I need much more practice. It happened to some old friends of mine, and it’s a story I’ll never forget.” Memorize each and apply this same technique to navigate safely through the questions of your interview.

By this point, you’ve undoubtedly left a very strong impression on your boss, and with the interview concluded you’ve begun your first day on the job. You can now begin the rewarding task of choosing and decorating your corner office and penciling-in Power lunches (A term which attracted you to this position in the first place.)

With a name like Yor: Hunter from the Future, you can tell already that the movie is just guaranteed to be ridiculous. But one thing you probably wouldn’t expect is just how fucking ambitious this movie tries to be. You see, Yor is the story of a barbarian, who romps through a seemingly endless series of cheap mishaps and horny women, eventually ending up in some kind of Flash Gordon knockoff. Along the way, Yor destroys four civilizations, fights some dinosaurs, fulfills several prophecies and drowns a few hundred women and children. This movie also touches on controversial topics like nuclear annihilation and genetically-engineered master races. Seriously.

The movie has a pretty interesting way to introduce us to Yor, the titular Hunter from the Future. Against a mountainous badlands, we find Yor running down a rocky hillside, stopping five or six times along the way to look both ways and smile like an idiot. Right off the bat I just couldn’t help but notice how Yor looked really stupid. Not stupid in a foolish or comical kind of way, but in that classic dimwitted “Duh” way. This turned out to be a good call on my part, because Yor does some pretty retarded things throughout the whole movie. And by the way, this whole opening sequence is underscored by the movie’s theme song. The song informs us that this is Yor’s world, and that he’s the man. So with that complicated back story out of the way, I’ll continue.

As the credits end, we witness some ritual of a peaceful caveman tribe. The cave-elder says some vague bullshit about how the gods have blessed them with this fertile valley, and then he tells his people to “pay homage to the gods by raising their children to the heavens.” At this point, everyone lifts their bored, confused kids up by the armpits and kind of holds them there until they decide it’s been long enough.

We switch to a hunt, where we meet two of our supporting heroes: A cave-babe named Kala, and a grizzled dude named Pag. What’s great about Pag is that every time his name is heard, it sounds like people are calling him “Fag.” As in, “Hold this, Fag!” “Look out behind you, Fag!” “Thank god you’re alright, Fag!” Anyway, these two hunters stalk an armadillo for a while, until they are attacked by a triceratops that can’t move too far away from a large bush obscuring its puppeteers. Just when all hope seems lost for Kala and Pag, Yor hops down from his beloved hills and clubs the shit out of the dinosaur until it stops moving. With the battle won and the hot chick saved, Yor howls victoriously with a mighty “Yay” and proceeds to drink the blood of the dinosaur, which as he reminds us, makes you stronger.

A polite round of Q&A is held, and we learn more about Yor that wasn’t covered in the opening song. It turns out Yor doesn’t live with a tribe, he doesn’t remember his past, and he wears an amulet similar to one worn by a sorceress who lives somewhere else. After all that, the tribe invites the stranger to their celebration back at the village. And at the party, Kala gets up to dance seductively for her rescuer, while Yor smirks at her like a big idiot.

The party is interrupted when some evil cavemen bumrush the event, burn everything down and carry off the women. Pag commands Kala to travel with Yor for safety, and then returns to the village to speak with a groaning, dying elder, who tells him he must travel with Yor as well, because his fate lies with him. If I were Pag in that situation, I’d be pissed. I mean, he was just with Yor, he tells him and Kala to escape, he runs aaaaaaaaaaalllll the way back to the village, and gets told he should have stayed with them. And its quite clear he has no idea where they are now. Fuck!

Later that day, Yor insists he and Kala rest for the night inside a big tree. Yor says they’ll be safe in there because he claims he used to hide inside it a lot when he was a kid. But wait…a few hours ago, Yor told Kala he doesn’t remember anything about his past. So either the filmmakers forgot about that line, or Yor lied to Kala about his past so he could come off all mysterious, and just now found some random tree and figured it was as good a place as any to bone her. I’d say it’s 50/50.

Anyways, the following morning, they have a skirmish with the evil cavedudes. Yor is beaten up and Kala is captured and taken to the bad guy’s HQ. Pag arrives just in time to shoot one of the bad guys with an arrow and watch another one toss Yor off a cliff. Yor hits the ground hard and quite obviously dies.

The next day, and because he’s the man, Yor climbs his way back up the cliff. There, he finds Pag waiting patiently for him. I’m left to wonder if Pag thought Yor was dead but stuck around all the same, or he knew Yor would be alright but didn’t try to help him up? Whatever. The two have the world’s shortest argument over whether or not they should help Kala before they run off to do just that.

It turns out the evil cavemen have a cavern full of women prisoners from other tribes, and Kala is their latest prize. Yor and Pag survey the area from above and devise a plan that’s just too perfect for words. Yor shoots down a giant cave-bat, grabs it by the haunches, and uses it as a hang glider to float down into the bad guy cave. The moment is such an awesome display of Yor’s greatness that the score of the movie itself is interrupted, jarringly and absurdly, by the song: “Yor’s world, he’s the man!” And, at this moment, he is the man.

Yor beats up some baddies, steals Kala and hoofs it outta the cave as quickly as possible. Miraculously, he discovers an underground lake in the cave, and with his amazing Super Yor Strength, he pops open the dike that holds it up, sending a crashing flood into the enemy lair. All the jerks drown, and their underground city is ruined. So once again Yor’s the big hero, right? No. Not at all. You see, Yor never rescued the other prisoners. In fact, the movie makes a point of showing you he drowns every single person that had been kidnapped from the good guy village. Yor saved Kala and left everyone else to die. Of that entire tribe of people, Kala and Pag are the only survivors.

So anyway, our merry band of heroes wander into a Tattooine-style dust area. Kala warns Yor not to go there, because she had a prophetic dream that showed him helpless, surrounded by fire. This is the first and last time the movie mentions Kala having any kind of divinatory abilities. Despite the warning, Yor goes anyway, the big goof. Soon enough, he’s attacked by people armed with fire-tipped pitchforks. Yor is captured and taken to this fire-tribe’s beautiful butter-face queen.

The Queen wears the same type of amulet as Yor, and I guess she’s meant to be the sorceress the cave-elder mentioned earlier in the movie, and I think we’re just supposed to go with that. She explains to Yor that their amulets are some kind of special thing, and through some more fate bullshit, Yor decides that he and this lady represent the last of some kind of special race (Blond white people with blue eyes) and that they should high tail it out of there. The queen is totally cool with that, but they’ll need to escape from her subjects before they execute Yor. I’m not sure why she simply can’t order them to release him, but I won’t dispute that. Because otherwise we wouldn’t get to see the scene where Yor kills all her subjects with a flaming sword. How does Yor get a flaming sword? Simple, his captors take him to one and let him grab it.

The fight with the flaming sword ranges the gamut of both awesome and lame. See, every strike against the enemies’ causes them to burst into flames, but every once in a while there’s such an obvious, “stage-fighting” distance between where the sword is swung and how far it is from the stunt men, that it looks like the guards were taken out by a cool breeze. All is forgiven though, when at the end, Yor lobs the sword underhand at an enemy thirty feet away, driving the weapon through his torso… while the theme song plays. So Yor destroys yet another cave and murders yet another population of people.

Yor and the Queen meet up with Pag and Kala, who is obviously jealous of the new lady. In fact, while Yor and Pag are busy making a raft to cross a river in a later scene, she offers the new lady a big fuckin’ ball of moss because she hates her. Later on, Yor gets his mack on with the new lady. Pissed off, Kala complains to Pag about it, but he says “why can’t Yor have two?” Pag is a mack, too.

When Yor isn’t looking, Kala grabs a knife and tries to kill the new lady, which quickly turns into the two of them rolling around on the ground together. The sexy fight is quickly broken up by a less sexy fight; the bad cave dudes from the beginning are back, and they get in a little rumble with our heroes. Yor kicks their asses, but not before they mortally wound the new lady. Before she dies, she lays some jive on Yor about how their race comes from an island in the middle of the ocean. Which really narrows it down.

The best part about this scene is that as she’s dying, the new lady tells Yor to give Kala her amulet, because she sees now that Kala is the one who truly loves him or something. But while she says this, no one seems to notice that Kala is actually unfastening the amulet from around her neck to take it, like, before the new lady even brought it up or said it was okay. For Christ’s sake, Kala, it’s pretty clear you’re going to be the one who ends up with Yor now. Just chill out alright?

After a really shitty transition to the next scene, our heroes finally reach the beach. That dumb bitch Kala tries to drink saltwater and everyone laughs at her. They celebrate their apathy over the death of what’s-her-face with a nice little fish-fry on the beach. I think we’re meant to assume Kala caught the fish, but I really hope not. Even though we can see her spear-fishing in the background, she’s doing it from the shoreline…and she’s facing away from the water.

The cookout is interrupted by a giant rubber lizard. Yor, Pag and Kala find the monster attacking a group of children. Everyone runs around screaming for way, way too long, and the rubber lizard scene ends only when I finally decide to skip ahead. When I resume, our heroes are chilling in a beach-side fishing village with a group of kids, including one barely legal girl who really digs Yor. Her dad is the village chief, and he says that rescuing his daughter entitles Yor to take her as a mate. The girl is really into the idea, and already you can see that Kala is getting that murderous glint in her eyes again, but Yor comes up with a flimsy excuse about how he already has a woman. But really, we know the only reason he says he’s not interested is because her dad is right there.

The dad shows Yor a mysterious talking box (a radio) left by “the gods” (spacemen, obviously). He warns Yor not to touch it AFTER he picks it up, turns it on, and inadvertently sends out a homing signal. They quickly forget about that and that night, a party is held. During the festivities, the chief’s daughter and a few of her hot friends invite Yor to join them behind some rocks. Because he’s the man, Yor invites Kala to tag along… and she fucking DOES. Everyone else at the party is oblivious to what might be going on, except Pag. He knows EXACTLY what’s going on and he laughs his head off. Then the village is blown up by lasers.

Distraught at the deaths of her father and village, the hot teenager offers Yor her dad’s flimsy wicker boat and tells him that he must seek an island in the middle of the sea, which is always surrounded by violent storms. Yor, being a big, stupid idiot who comes from the mountains of the desert and who has never sailed before, decides that he’ll take the wicker boat out into the violent storms. Now, this is where Yor: The Hunter from the Future stops being the movie it was and turns into an entirely different movie.

The violent storms cause Yor to fall off the boat, and he washes up on the mysterious island we keep hearing so much about. But what’s this? Somebody is watching him through an electronic crystal ball! This ominous character is the Overlord, a maniacal villain made up of bits and pieces from villains who are not only better than him, but from totally different genres. He looks and sounds like General Zod from Superman 2, he commands an army of robots who look like a cross between Darth Vader and a cabbage, and he has the lair of a James Bond villain. Anyway, he sends his bored and unmotivated Darth Vader bots to round up Yor.

Yor stands motionless on the beach, looking in bewilderment at a big rock, plotting his next move. His trance is interrupted when he’s startled by one of Overlords robots. He knocks the robot’s head off with a rock, which is kind of uncalled for when you think about it. I mean, we as the audience know they’re bad guys, but Yor doesn’t. Was this just a good call on the part of the man, or does he decapitates anyone who startles him? Nearby robots decide to retaliate against the attack and incapacitate Yor with a Casiotone laser.

Meanwhile, Overlord, the villain of this new plot, keeps his creepy crystal ball gaze fixed on Kala and Pag, who have just waded onto the island from the shipwreck we didn’t see. “I want them both captured and brought here alive” he says in the time it would take any other super villain to monologue about their plan, their tragic origins, initiate the doomsday device and catch a movie. All I’m saying is that it takes Overlord a long goddamn time to say anything.

Yor is brought in alive, and stuck on a menacing lab table, James Bond style. Some lady, who works for Overlord but is actually good, explains to him that he’s a native of this strange sci-fi subplot island, and that his special amulet tells them all they need to know about him. His name is Galahad, he’s the son of some rebel hotshot whose ship was shot down years ago while he was flying Star Wars rip-off runs over Beggar’s Canyon in his T-16. Yor was on board the ship; he survived, and grew up a barbarian. Jesus Christ, this movie is looooong.

Overlord’s pissed because he can’t find Kala and Pag, so he allows Yor to be released from his James Bond table, hoping he’ll lead the baddies to his buddies. By this time I’m already sick of Overlord and his brutal line delivery, so I was pretty happy when Yor just casually walked away while Overlord was chewing scenery in the same room as him.

Meanwhile, Kala and Pag have been found by some rebel group, who explain that their once-great civilization was destroyed by an atomic blast, and now the Overlord is leading what remains of their people toward further destruction. At this point, I am seriously pissed off at this movie for trying to cram an entire second plot into the last half hour of this movie. Kala slips away from the group to look for Yor, and Pag is told to stick with the rebels, apparently lead by the woman who moonlights for Overlord as his lone human servant. For the next five minutes, Yor sneaks around. His buddies sneak around. Overlord sneaks around them. And eventually, they all meet up in the same room in which they started, and Overlord reveals his fiendish plan.

He wants to eradicate human life from the planet and replace them with his robots. But he doesn’t like the robots he has so he wants to use DNA from Yor and Kala and implant them into newer robots. And it turns out they’re cool with it because in the very next scene, Yor and Kala are strapped to the medical table and have to be rescued by Pag and the rebels. Which goes off without a hitch.

Now they have to escape the Death Star or wherever the hell they are. Yor risks his life by planting a bomb on a suspended reactor and has to be trapeze-d to safety by Pag. I don’t understand that part myself, but the theme song plays while it happens so we’re told it’s awesome. Elsewhere, a blind rebel fighter sneaks into Overlords command centre, right in plain sight of the robot soldiers, and deactivates them all with the push of a button. Deactivation is apparently done one by one, because a lot of running and battling happens between the time he pushes the button to when the last robot stops.

The blind rebel goes on the PA system and just wont shut up about mans’ misguided trust in technology and the sins of our ancestors. Yor hops in a spaceship with his homeboys and splits the scene, blowing up the entire sci-fi island behind him, killing everyone. Can’t Yor go anywhere without the blowing up the place he just left? Anyway, from out of nowhere, a totally random narrator speaks vaguely about how Yor will try to use his knowledge of mankind’s past errors to protect the future. He ends it with the open-ended “Will he succeed?” What kind of fucking way is that to end the movie?

Alright, I’m going to try and wrap this up as best I can. The first half of the movie, the barbarian half, felt like three movies in one. The second part, the sci-fi part that didn’t start until the last half hour, tells you that no, that whole first part WAS one movie and that THIS is when the second one starts. At first, Yor is about the misadventures of a serial killer who gets laid a lot, but then it turns into this wacky adventure where cavemen help spacemen stop some random dick one of them works for. This is a world where killing dinosaurs grants you a woman, where flaming swords are handed to prisoners, where you can survive falling off a cliff, where bats are hang gliders, where saving one life justifies sacrificing many others, where robots can have human babies, and super villains employ people trying to bring down their organizations. This is Yor’s world, and he’s the man.

-QUOTE CORNER-

Pag: The box speaks!
Radio: Eagle to L1, Mission completed. (Repeated)
Yor: This is why they’ve come. Damn talking box!

Yor: “First we must find Kala. Where is she?”
Pag: “You lost her in battle. Kala now belongs to him. That is our law.”
Yor: “No Pag, I don’t recognize your laws.”
Pag: “Alright, let’s go!”

Pag: We will need a lot more hemp before we’re through.

You know how Steven Spielberg walked away from Jaws after finishing the first one but the studio went ahead and churned out a lot of crappy and unnecessary sequels anyway? Well, Shark Attack 3 appears to be the third chapter in a series of low-budget, direct-to-DVD rip-offs of those movies. I’m guessing the initial premise of being poor knock-offs of the Jaws sequels were exhausted with the first two Shark Attack movies (assuming there are any), so the filmmakers must have thought this third outing needed a clever hook to entice audiences. Luckily, they struck creative gold when they decided to turn the franchise on its head and make it about gigantic, prehistoric sharks instead of the regular kind. Trust me what I say that logic fits quite nicely with the rest of the production’s “Ah fuck it, we’ll do it anyway” attitude.

The movie begins at night in the Pacific Ocean, near the Challenger Deep. A wisecracking diver named Porter performs maintenance on an underwater cable while being supervised by another wiseass aboard a ship. Their curmudgeonly captain is stressing out about how long the delicate repair operation is taking and orders Porter (or as the horrible actor manning the radio calls him, Poor-Door) to hurry up and not to try anything sexy. I’m serious. Suddenly, the support ship’s underwater radar picks up a large red dot that is rapidly approaching the diver’s position. When the red dot arrives at poor Mr. Porter, he is viciously attacked by what appears to be National Geographic footage of a great white shark attacking a seal– NOT a prehistoric shark as one might expect given the movie’s premise.

We cut to a few months later at a Mexican beach resort, one where bikini tops are conveniently optional. I remember hearing about this unwritten law in cinema where a movie’s crapiness is directly proportional to how quickly it takes the director to throw in a superfluous shot of a topless woman to spice things up. This is the second scene of a movie about a giant killer shark and already the director thinks he’s losing his audience.

Anyway, here we meet our story’s hero: Ben. Ben’s job is to patrol the beaches for the resort and flirt with everyone he sees — especially the guys. Bear in mind, Ben isn’t gay, and no one in this opening sequence genuinely flirts with anybody else, but they all greet one another with hearty grins and knowing looks that makes me think they all went to some orgy the night before and had a real fun time.

We follow Ben as he introduces us to the motley crew of lovable resort employees. There’s Chuck, the mini-sub pilot/Ex navy officer/ All American hero and resident Old man. And there’s Ramirez, the sunbathing manwhore who gets all the young vacationing hotties and may or may not actually have a job at the resort. We also meet Hector, the helicopter pilot, who I’m convinced is played by the movie’s director in some sort of vanity role. I say this because he’s a bad actor, doesn’t have a lot of lines and is only in two or three scenes but winds-up saving the day twice and is mentioned a lot by the other characters. The last character we meet is Ben’s fellow beach patrolman, Esai. For whatever reason, Esai is Ben’s least favourite person in the world. He seems friendly enough but Ben treats him like a slave and lovingly refers to him as “his bitch.”

So it’s about noon when Ben finally shows up for work. The diligent and by-the-books Esai calls him out on being late, to which Ben responds by deciding now would be the perfect time to abandon their duties altogether and steal the patrol boat to go lobster fishing. This is also the perfect time to realize this resort is horribly guarded and unprepared for the looming threat of giant dinosaur fish.

We inexplicably cut to an old fisherman aboard a boat, trying to reel-in a feisty marlin. With him are a couple of young lovers who can’t keep their hands off each other and offer no help beyond muttering fishing instructions between dry humps. Sure enough, a regular-sized great white shark creeps up on the marlin and bites it in twain. The old man reels in the severed head of the marlin and frustratingly moans “30 years” for no reason. My theories are he hasn’t been able to catch a whole marlin in 30 years, or he was struggling with that particular fish for that long. Either way, it’s an isolated incident and not something the movie bothers bringing up again.

Elsewhere, our happy-go-lucky beach guard and his meek comrade take the patrol boat to a special place offshore where they can find the best, already cooked lobster in the sea. Ben dons his SCUBA gear and is “jokingly” shoved in the water when a defiant Esai decides he’s had enough of his shit. While collecting his dinner, Ben discovers that an underwater communications cable laid by this APEX Company has a giant bite taken out of it. He finds a shark’s tooth embedded in the cable’s protective covering, but before he can investigate further he is accosted by two corporate divers working on the cable and given the “You didn’t see nuthin” treatment. He quickly surfaces, where Esai lectures him once more about going out of bounds. Ben promptly tells him to cram it and commands him to drive him home.

That night after dinner (lobster, in case you were wondering) the inquisitive playboy lounges in his swank apartment and ponders the tooth. Unable to find an exact match on some random online marine biology forum, Ben takes a picture of the tooth and posts a message asking if anyone knows what kind of shark it came from. Now, there are a lot of things wrong with how this happens: Ben uses a digital camera that is sitting next to his laptop to capture a quick image of the tooth, and the manner in which that works can only be described as magic. You know what turns up in the photograph? The tooth. You know what else gets captured in that still? Absolutely nothing! No hand holding the tooth, no Ben, no rest of his apartment, just a big, blown-up shot of that tooth against a white backdrop. So either that camera is broken or it’s actually the worlds’ strangest scanner.

We cut to a natural history museum on a lovely summer afternoon. We then cut to the interior of that same museum after hours. An old security guard makes his rounds and comes across our female lead and paleontology expert, Cat. Cat is burning the midnight oil and the elderly guard s-l-o-w-l-y suggests she take a load off, but she has work to do and politely declines his advice. Personally, I think she was just freaked out by the guard’s Forrest Gump-like way of talking, because as we’ll find out later, it doesn’t take much to convince this chick to do anything. Anywho, Cat goes onto the website Ben submitted the shark tooth to and she recognizes the mystery tooth for what it is.

A new day has begun at the resort, and Ben has been summoned to meet with the film’s two human villains: Ruiz, the resort manager who speaks with such a heavy Spanish accent that its nigh-impossible to understand anything he says, and Tolley, the president of APEX Communications and most extreme case of bad movie voice dubbing I have ever witnessed. The gist of this scene is that APEX is unveiling some big project at a private party at the resort, and neither Ruiz nor Tolley want Ben and his outlandish theories about sharks to get in the way. At least that’s what I think is going on, while Tolley and Ben are talking we keep cutting to identical shots of Ruiz caressing the legs of his trophy girlfriend throughout the scene. One thing we do learn from all this is that the reason regular-sized sharks have been attacking the cables is because they are attracted by the electromagnetic fields from the fibre optics. Alrighty.

We cut to a scene of the lecherous Ramirez and a harlot skinny-dipping and bumping uglies in the ocean. All is going swimmingly for the couple when suddenly, we hear the ominous grunting of the dreaded megalodon. That’s right, it grunts. The megalodon has got to be the LOUDEST shark in history. I mean it really grunts. Like a pig. Alerted by all the grunting, the couple race back to the shore but to no avail. The shark catches up with Ramirez and in a violent attack, kills a second shark that had somehow always been right beside them the entire time. The very next scene shows Ramirez and the girl alive and well on the beach.

Cat arrives at the resort with a pair of cameramen. The cameramen are the typical “goof ball, sexual harassment cases waiting to happen who’ll likely windup dead” characters in these kinds of movies. This is made clear when they remind themselves which one of them is the “breast man” and which is the “ass man” while ogling Cat. Frankly, I don’t know what they see in Cat, neither one of them is a “lazy-eye-meets-bad-face-l

“Laser Mission” tries to capitalize on nuclear paranoia toward the end of the Cold War, but it runs into a few small problems, such as massive logical holes, dialogue that would make George Lucas blush, and actors who seem to be largely unaware of what country their characters are supposed to be from. In fact, there aren’t even any lasers in the movie. But on the upside, the movie does feature a repetitive song about mercenaries which it plays over and over again, so things can’t be that bad!

We begin with said power ballad – with shots of a man suiting up in black commando gear as the mercenary song plays. We cut to a formal gathering where a man in a tuxedo unveils a 526 karat diamond to the crowd of onlookers. As one would expect from a group of privileged individuals who probably had to pay thousands of dollars apiece to get a seat for this unveiling, the diamond is received with hooting and whistling. Before the tuxedo guy can make a toast, someone shoots a canister of crazy black knockout gas into the room and a single commando busts in, fires a warning shot at something (most likely nothing) off camera, and is quickly joined by a bunch of other commandos who swarm in and steal the diamond!

Now that the first part of the plot has been established (and don’t expect to hear about that diamond again for a while), we make a rickety transition to the second part, starting with a shot of an airplane landing filmed from underneath the airplane. We don’t actually get told at any point which country this is in, even as people go through customs. There are several allusions to Cuba, and a number of the bit players speak Spanish, but for the movie to make any sense at all, it has to take place in Africa. So, to avoid confusion, we’ll just say that it’s in Cubafrica. Michael Gold, professional American (played by Brandon “I got killed during ‘The Crow’ but they made two sequels anyway” Lee) scoots through customs by using unnecessarily coy banter with a customs officer and putting up with the snide remarks of a nearby Russian soldier. Afterwards he heads to the beach — keen listeners will notice that the same Mercenary song from the beginning credits stops playing around this time.

That is where Gold finds Professor Braun (Ernest “I won an Oscar for ‘Marty,’ what am I doing here” Borgnine). I’m sad to say it, but Braun is the first in a series of actors who absolutely cannot maintain their accents. I think he’s supposed to be German – he says some German words every now and then – but his accent really just falls under the category of the ever-popular Generic European Dialect. Braun and Gold chat for a little bit before Braun is struck by the realization that he has absolutely no idea who this American guy is. Good catch, professor. Gold explains that the Americans sent him to see how much it would take to get him to defect. The professor is hesitant, fearing his dreams of melting men will come to fruition. Gold consoles the professor by reminding him “You are fond of birds.” Their conversation is cut short, however, when a dick named Eckhardt shoots a dart full of poisonous synthesizer music into Gold’s neck and captures Braun. The plot thickens, and the bad accents are just beginning!

Gold wakes up in a Cubafrican prison. There, a military officer by the name of Kalishnakov (we’ve gone from Cubafrican to Cubafrussian) informs him that he will be executed the next day for being a filthy American spy trespassing on good, hearty Socialist soil. The guard, who definitely looks Spanish, tells Gold, “Ha ha. They going to cut off your head manana.” This doesn’t sound English but the thing is, his accent is so horrible that I’ve got the impression he doesn’t speak any Spanish, either. In any event, you can’t tell what’s happening in this scene because the echoes inside the cell make everything sound like it was recorded in a tin can.

We skip to the next morning, which has precisely the same lighting as the previous day and the transition is so weak that it ends up looking like the director just filmed this scene five minutes after they wrapped up the last one. Gold overpowers the same guard, then proceeds to enact a ridiculous escape. He takes out at least twenty armed guards with either a single shot, a single knife, or a single punch or kick. There are a couple shots where he just waves a rifle back and forth and an entire line of bad guys just fall down at random. At one point a guard leaps through the air at Gold, but Gold pats him on the back as he flies by, causing the guard to, you know, hit the ground, where he promptly dies. At one point Gold stumbles upon a man and a woman having sex somewhere on the base. It’s not clear whether or not these two are soldiers, but after scaring away the woman he gives the guy one of his guns, and look that seems to suggest “Alright partner, we’re in this together” and then knocks him out with the butt of his rifle. At some point it dawned on me that for this escape to occur, the entire camp of soldiers would have to actively want to be killed.

The action and music stop and we cut to an American government installation. Two CIA guys who may or may not actually have names bust Gold’s chops over not bringing back Professor Braun. The one guy is worried that the Soviets will use Braun’s scientific expertise to plan “some sort of laser mission.” Get it? “Laser Mission?” Now that’s writing! The CIA guys are also nervous about sending Gold back in to retrieve Braun because he’s a freelancer. Well, not exactly. It turns out he’s basically a CIA agent who works on commission. But whatever. The CIA guys decide to send Gold back in. Now, the country they send him to is definitely in Africa, although it’s still possible that they made it up entirely. Gold claims that they want him dead there, suggesting that it’s the same country where he just killed a bunch of army guys. But that place was supposed to be Cuba! In addition, the CIA guys tell Gold to meet up with Braun’s daughter Alissa, who is a veterinarian as well as being a KGB agent. And of course, it makes perfect sense that the CIA would want to partner a man they don’t trust with a KGB agent.

Gold disguises himself as a Cuban military officer in order to avoid being caught in Africa. Yes, you read that right. So as a Cuban military officer, he leaps from a plane and manages to parachute right into the middle of a Cuban army camp. In Africa. When he addresses the troops there, Gold is sure to be loud and intimidating so that no one thinks there is anything suspicious about an officer dropping out of the sky, speaking English with a godawful attempt at a Cuban accent, barking out some totally random orders, displaying a complete lack of any knowledge about what is going on at the camp, stealing their only jeep, and driving away. He addresses two members of the Cuban military, Manuel and his commanding officer Sgt. Roberta. They are there to provide the comic relief in this movie, but sadly they are probably the only characters in the movie audiences won’t be laughing at. That’s right, the only funny thing about the comedic characters is that they aren’t funny at all.

We then cut to some lion cubs feeding and at last we meet Alissa, the veterinarian KGB agent. There are a few observations that spring to mind after watching Alissa for a few seconds. First, she has a high, squeaky voice that makes her sound like a twelve year old girl. However, she has the hair, mannerisms, and cleavage of a porn star. Also, she tends to find any way she can to make her lines suggestive, so she actually sounds like a twelve year old girl who wants to hump until she passes out, and that’s just not okay. What’s also not okay is that she is about to become the co-star of this train wreck of a movie, and that voice of hers is really goddamn annoying. She has a lot of lines that are supposed to be strong and assertive and put her male counterparts in their places, but she’s too freaking squeaky to take seriously. She’s like a chew toy, but with boobs.

As she walks to someplace or other, a beggar in 14th century Arabian garb hobbles alongside her pleading for alms. Shock and awe, it’s really Gold in one of his trademark disguises and crappy accents! Thankfully, he drops the beggar voice once he knows that he’s got the right woman, although one would have to think that would blow his cover. Oh well. They arrange to meet at a restaurant later on.

If there’s one thing I can say in Michael Gold’s favor, it’s that he’s excellent when it comes to time management. Rather than dilly-dallying until dinner, he stays in the beggar disguise and sneaks into Professor Braun’s apartment. The apartment is guarded by Manuel and Roberta, who are on the lookout for Gold, but no one ever said anything about stopping 14th century Arabian beggars, so you can see why they’d let him pass. Unfortunately, Gold sets off a silent alarm while snooping around the apartment and Kalishnakov himself shows up on the scene in a wafer-thin bulletproof vest. Together with Manuel and Roberta, he gives chase to Gold, but they can’t catch him. No one can. He’s the Crow.

After donning a spiffy suit, Gold heads to the restaurant. Alissa is already there waiting for him, and so is her chest. She’s wearing a blue dress that emphasizes the fact that yes, she does have cleavage. She will conveniently enough be wearing this same dress from the rest of the movie. They talk briefly about finding Braun, but it’s tough to fit in too much about that boring old plot stuff when there’s so much halfassed flirting to be done. The high point of the conversation has got to be when Gold whips out the classic line, “I don’t like to put price tags on women. I prefer taking them off.” WHAT? What does that even mean? I mean, I know what it’s supposed to mean, but it really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when you think about it. When do women have price tags on them? I guess if they just bought an article of clothing and forgot to take the tags off.

Gold and Alissa go straight from the restaurant to the residence one of the professor’s colleagues who just so happens to look at LOT like the professor in question. When they find him, the scientist is already dying from some invisible injury. In fact, now that I think about it, it’s sort of strange that they don’t even try to help him. There’s nothing to suggest that the bad guys killed him, although that’s clearly what we’re supposed to think. It’s possible the guy was just having a heart attack, in which case Gold and Alissa probably could have saved him. Anyway, on their way out of the building, they spot two armed guards waiting for them. Gold shoots one, then is struck dumb with surprise when Alissa pulls a gun out of God knows where and kills the other. I’m not really sure why he’s surprised, though. After all, she’s KGB, remember? I mean, we all heard this. Well, Gold and Alissa really hit the jackpot on this one. It just so happened that the armed guards were there to guard a VW bus full of assault rifles and explosives. Because you’d need a bus full of major firepower to kill two people. So Alissa hops in the driver’s seat, Gold climbs in back, the mercenary song flares up on the stereo, and it’s time for a terrible chase sequence!

The chase is the centerpiece of the first half of the film, which is a shame, because it’s really quite bad. It’s sort of like the driving scenes in “Terminator 2,” where one person is driving and the others are shooting out behind them, only this sucks. Kalishnakov and a nameless soldier chase after them in one car, Manuel and Roberta chase after them in another, and about a hundred other random soldier give pursuit in all sorts of other vehicles. Naturally, every bullet Gold fires kills somebody, but Alissa and Gold make it through without so much as a scratch. At one point a car full of enemy soldiers drives directly into the water. I don’t mean the car swerves into the water or doesn’t make a turn in time or anything like that. The car isn’t even chasing after Gold and Alissa. There are no shots fired and nobody else in the shot. The car starts on a one way course into the water and it’s actually more of a surprise when they don’t turn at the last second and do actually drive right over the edge of the dock. While Gold is shooting people and blowing them up, Alissa is driving like a maniac while closing her eyes and writhing in ecstasy at the feel of the wind rushing against her bosom.

Manuel and Roberta also crash in the water and when they come out, Roberta’s shirt is clinging to her unsupported breasts. This is when Manuel apparently discovers that his sergeant is a woman. This is supposed to be funny, but it really isn’t, because she’s obviously a woman and has been a woman throughout the entire movie. Well, “obviously” may be a strong term, since they haven’t said her name yet at this point in the movie, and working alongside her, Manuel certainly never would have heard it. Anyway, Manuel spends the rest of the movie hitting on her.

In his desert stronghold, Eckhardt meets with the captive Professor Braun. Eckhardt wants him to build a laser with the giant diamond that they stole at the very beginning of the movie. Yeah, that diamond. Braun refuses, but Eckhardt has another method of persuasion. He takes Braun into a room filled with incredibly fake looking severed heads. We’re talking fifth-graders and paper mache-fake, here. Nonetheless, Eckhardt swears that if Braun does not do as he says, his daughter’s head will join the others in that room. I don’t know, maybe he feels it’s finally time to put a real head in there or something.

Having escaped from Kalishnakov and the others, Gold and Alissa drive on through the desert together, exchanged shitty dialogue that doesn’t advance the plot whatsoever. It does, however, bring up the point that Gold is suspicious of Alissa really being Braun’s daughter. He’s also suspicious of whether or not she’s really just a civilian. The obvious answer is, “of course she isn’t. She’s fucking KGB. The CIA told you that already.” But whatever. As they near the border of Namibia (finally, a real country!), they spot an army outpost in their path. Granted, they’re pretty much out in the middle of open space, so they could probably manage to drive far enough around it that they don’t run into any problems, but since time is of the essence they instead decide that the only course of action is to drive straight through and kill anyone who tries to stop them.

In a basic repeat of the car chase scene, Alissa drives while Gold sits in back with a gun out the side of the bus and lays waste to everyone in a two-mile radius. Once again, neither Gold nor Alissa suffers the slightest scratch or gets so much as dust on their clothing, but every soldier in the freaking base is annihilated. At one point a group of soldiers rush out of huts in front of their path, and while we hear rapid gunfire, they fall down dead as quickly as they came onscreen. Now that just chaps my caboose. With a gun out the door on the driver’s side, there is no way that Gold could shoot people directly in front of and to the right of the bus. He can shoot behind them through the rear windshield and he can shoot to the left of the bus, but he’d have to shoot past Alissa’s head to get people ahead of them, and the front windshield of the bus remains completely intact. Ergo, that shot is one hundred percent impossible.

This time, though, a couple soldiers finally do some damage. Once Gold and Alissa are out of the camp, a jeep follows them and a soldier manages to hit them with a rocket on his third try. The bus explodes. However, by that point, Gold and Alissa are at least a hundred yards away on foot. Don’t ask me how. We never see them leap from the bus, and someone is clearly driving through the hail of rockets. Man, you know you’re a good secret agent when you can bend the time-space continuum to give your enemies the slip. They’re right out in the open, but the soldiers in the jeep completely miss their quarry running away on foot, so they pull off another miraculous escape after all. Oh, and they’re still completely unscathed.

So, they walk through the burning desert when they stop for a quick break, Gold finally screws up enough courage to point out that she can shoot like a pro and can out-drive an entire army, so she must be with some sort of government agency. Of course, it’s a silly point to bring up at all since he was told long ago that she’s with the KGB. Nonetheless, Alissa becomes indignant and storms off calling him an asshole. ‘Thats Mr. Asshole to you’ Gold retorts.

Apparently reconciled, Gold and Alissa continue to walk and soon come upon a random drunk in the middle of the desert. The drunk knows who they are and who is after them, because that’s the sort of thing that random drunk British guys who hang out in the middle of deserts just know. He lets them camp with him for the night, and they do, because an unfamiliar person who knows everything about them but reveals nothing about himself can clearly be trusted.

Elsewhere, Kalishnakov instructs his partner Eckhardt and his team of assassins to find our heroes and make them not quite as alive as they currently are. The next morning, Gold and Alissa wake up – still perfectly clean and beautiful after a day of fighting and a night of sleeping on the sand – but the drunk is nowhere in sight… and will never be seen or mentioned again. They start walking and soon come upon what looks like a long-abandoned outpost of some sort. They stop for a moment, which is just enough time for the first of Eckhardt’s men to miss both of them with an arrow. That’s right, he is able to find two people in the middle of a massive desert and get the drop on them, but he’s not smart enough to bring a fucking gun. If he had an automatic weapon, they’d both be dead right now. But no, he had to bring a bow and a freaking sword. Gold and Alissa both pull out their pistols and kill the ever-loving crap out of the guy when he lets out a battle cry while trying to sneak up on them. Then Alissa steals his sword. That’ll teach him.

The second assassin finds them as they’re walking again. This guy is on horseback, which gives him a definite speed advantage. However, those of you who have ever ridden on a horse at full gallop know that it’s not very conducive to aiming a rifle. Gold and Alissa actually come to a complete stop when they see the guy coming, but he can’t hit them at all. Gold, however, has no problem shooting him square in the chest with his pistol at a distance of at least a few hundred feet. The horse gets away clean.

Gold and Alissa spot the third hitman not too long after that. He’s just walking after them. They pretend to ignore him and keep going straight ahead. Gold hides under the sand, and when the guy gets close, he pops out and trips him. We don’t actually see Gold getting into position, so I have to wonder just how he managed to accomplish that feat without the hitman seeing the whole thing. Just one of many mysteries that surround “Laser Mission.” Gold and the hitman get into a fistfight, which Gold naturally wins. He gets the hitman to confess that Eckhardt sent him. Gold turns away, prepared to just leave him there, which could be the dumbest move in the history of secret agents. If a bad guy can’t be knocked out or killed with a single blow, he’s obviously too powerful to turn your back on. Luckily Alissa shrieks like a schoolgirl before the hitman can take out Gold from behind. She leaps onto the guy’s back lamely and he quickly dispatches her. The KGB may have trained Alissa to shoot and to drive in combat situations, but she can’t fight worth shit. Once she gets flung off, she does go and find the second guy’s horse somehow, so she’s not entirely worthless in this scene. Meanwhile, Gold gives the hitman a sound walloping. After beating a man to death Gold and Alissa embrace randomly, then climb on the horse and abandon the body in the middle of the desert. Oh, and they’re both still spotless. And Mercenary song starts playing again.

They ride the horse into the nearest town, wherever that might be. They check into a hotel, where they pose as a husband and wife for absolutely no reason. They retire to their room, where they recover from a full day of travel and fighting for their lives with a nice five-hour block of sex. It didn’t have to be, mind you, Gold just asked room service to take three extra hours to clean their clothes, equaling five hours of love making. He’s a mercenary man! What’s amazing is that it was daytime when they fought the last hitman, it was still light when they got to the town, and five hours later it was actually still bright out.

While Gold is sleeping, Alissa peers out the window and notices Kalishnakov and a lackey pull up outside the hotel. She puts her favorite blue dress back on, sneaks outside, and hotwires Kalishnakov’s car. Kalishnakov and his companion steal another car and chase after her, but she’s far too good of a driver for them to catch. Gold wakes up some time later and finds a note on the pillow next to him that informs him that Alissa has merely gone shopping. I don’t know exactly when she wrote that note, considering we saw her leave, but at this point I’m not going to nitpick over a tiny little distortion of the laws of reality like that. That night, Gold gets a phone call from Alissa in the hotel room. She says that she has killed Kalishnakov, then hangs up. The shot switches to Alissa, where we see that she didn’t so much kill him as he did capture her. Gold decides that now would be a good time to take Eckhardt’s fortress by force, so he heads out there, shoves a lone guard into an electric fence, and breaks inside. Sadly, he falls into a trap shortly after and is captured. He then finds himself bound to a chair, face to face with Professor Braun.

The two of them discuss their unfortunate situation. Braun claims that Eckhardt can force him to use his laser technology and the giant diamond to create a nuclear weapon. My question is, uh… how? I mean, I’m no physicist or anything, but that doesn’t sound even remotely plausible. Now if he said that he could create a really freaking powerful laser weapon or something, that would be one thing, but a nuclear bomb? And if Eckhardt and Kalishnakov wanted a nuke so badly, why did they go about getting one by stealing the only diamond in the world big enough and the only scientist in the world smart enough to make one with a laser? If they’re that good at stealing stuff and kidnapping people, why not just steal a freaking bomb? Or at the very least kidnap some people who could build one. That seems like it would be a lot easier. Anyways, Eckhardt and Kalishnakov enter and reveal that they have captured Braun’s daughter. Kalishnakov takes the diamond and leaves for their diamond mine (which they have now) to finalize some evil plans of some sort.

Eckhardt releases Gold from his chains and takes him at gunpoint into the next room. The walls of the next room, as it so happens, are absolutely covered with weapons. Guns, rifles, knives, swords, it’s all there for the taking. It seems to me that if you’ve got the secret agent who has singlehandedly killed like half the military of the continent of Africa in your custody and you want to kill him, the one thing you shouldn’t do is take off his chains and bring him into a room full of readily available weapons. And then Eckhardt puts his own gun on the wall, too! This is like an instructional video for prospective supervillains everywhere. After all that, Eckhardt is still surprised when Gold punches him. Even with all those weapons around, the two of them resort to hand-to-hand combat. The battle each other up a flight of stair and onto the roof.

When I say fight, I mean the worst stage fighting probably ever filmed. I mean, this is the son of Bruce Lee and he swipes his fists like a bear trying to slap salmon out of the air. After the short, remarkably lame battle, they both topple off the roof. Gold lands on the grass, but Eckhardt is impaled on some spikes. Gold gets to his feet and starts to walk away, but is instantly attacked by a ninja! That’s right, a completely random ninja just leaps out of nowhere and starts fighting him. There is absolutely nothing in this movie that could in any way be viewed as precedent for a ninja, but there you go, there’s a ninja. He’s not a particularly good ninja, though, (Gold gives him a good old fashioned backbreaker over his knee and that’s that) but now no one can say this movie doesn’t have a ninja.

Back to the movie, we transition to the diamond mine, where our old buddies Manuel and Roberta are now being used as slaves. They have a short conversation which basically cements the fact that they have no idea what they’re saying! Dear sweet Jesus in heaven, get them out of this movie! Their discussion is cut off when some soldier or somebody calls them away for no reason at all. Kalishnakov, meanwhile, has Alissa tied to a chair inside. He amuses himself by tossing diamonds down her cleavage. She moans like a slut when one makes it down, which somehow seems all too appropriate. He tries to get physical with her but she somehow resists his robotic Soviet charm. Back outside, the soldiers round up a group of the slaves and execute them. Just then, Gold and Braun arrive on the scene.. Gold forms a plan while Braun decides that now would be as good a time as any to change accents altogether.

Manuel and Roberta escape and start a slave revolt against the soldiers. The ensuing semi-chaos gets Kalishnakov’s attention, and he leaves Alissa alone in the room with a box cutter a few feet away from her. This one wouldn’t be a tough escape for anyone. I don’t know why he expects a freaking secret agent to stay put. I guess he works on the honor system. So, yeah, she escapes from the incredibly flimsy binds and finds a pistol. She then kills two guards outside by gesturing at them vaguely with the pistol, which they take as cues to fall down. Kalishnakov actually manages to shoot Gold in the back. However, unlike every other person in this entire movie, getting shot doesn’t kill Gold instantly. In fact, it doesn’t even slow him down. To the movie’s credit, he does get a little dirty, though. As Kalishnakov closes in to finish him off, Alissa comes up from behind and presses her gun against his head. Gold rushes off into the mines to try to disable a bomb that has been planted there. One would think he would have learned by now that he has to do all the important stuff on his own, and that he wouldn’t then leave Alissa alone with the bad guy. But he does, and surprise surprise, he gets free and ends up actually taking her hostage in return. Kalishnakov takes her into the mine, where he yaps at Gold about how in the movies, the hero would kill him with a well aimed shot, even though it would mean risking the girl’s life. He is cut off, however, when Gold shoots him. Six times.

Alissa and Braun finally meet face to face, and would you believe it, she’s not really his daughter! And she’s not really a civilian! She’s with the CIA! That’s right, the CIA sent her in to keep an eye on Gold. So now instead of a KGB agent who can’t fight, she’s a CIA agent who can’t fight. That’s much better. The whole KGB thing is never explained, and I think we are just supposed to pretend it was never said. Gold and Alissa also catch up with our elusive comedic duo Roberta and Manuel, but what’s this? Kalishnakov isn’t dead! Protected by his wafer-thin bulletproof vest, he rises from the ground and shoots at Gold from the entrance to the mine, missing horribly. Oh, and Gold never actually got around to deactivating that bomb, so it, you know, blows the hell out of the mine and Kalishnakov. So that’s that.

A helicopter lands and the two CIA guys from earlier get out, accompanied for no particular reason by Braun’s actual daughter who’s clearly not KGB material. It’s nice how they managed to time their flight so that they could bring a civilian woman into the area the moment the danger was gone. The CIA guys explain Alissa’s allegiances again and say that Gold will get his money, but he’ll have to split it with Alissa. That’s when Kalishnakov attacks again. Gold climbs into a jeep, runs him over, and rams him into a brick wall. Manuel and Roberta steal the CIA helicopter and everybody enjoys a good hearty laugh as the two Cubans slowly get away in a hundred million dollar piece of U.S. government property. So that just leaves one loose end. I could tell you what happens, but there’s no way to make it and funnier than it actually is, so here is the real dialogue:

Alissa: “Do you have the diamond?”
Gold: “That depends who’s asking.”
Braun: “Well whoever has it will have a strong bargaining position.” (He grins like an idiot)
Gold: (Holding up the diamond) “I got it.”
Alissa: “But who’s the rightful owner?”
Gold: “You’re looking at him!”

That’s right, Michael Gold, the big hero, ends the movie by declaring that he is going to take possession of the most valuable diamond on the face of the planet. He’s not going to give it back to the museum or whatever that place was in the first scene, he’s not going to give it to the government for safekeeping, he’s just going to take it. What a rolemodel. What a movie. The credits start to roll, underscored by -yep, you guessed it – the mercenary song.

Well, this movie is great. I think that much is pretty clear at this point. The camera shots are all pretty steady, and there is definitely money behind “Laser Mission.” But that’s just about all I can say in its favor. The overall story arc makes sense, as long as you never question anyone’s motivation, but once you get into the slightest level of detail, this movie just falls apart. The dialogue is overly cheesy ninety percent of the time, but it’s almost easy to ignore that, since most of the acting is so freakishly horrible anyway. There are language barriers at work in this movie that I don’t even begin to understand. Most of the cast seems to have no idea what they’re saying or doing, and seeing Ernest Borgnine fumble with an array of laughably phony Germanesque accents is just painful. The fact that basically the only music in the entire movie is that mercenary song doesn’t help matters too much, either. So what does this movie have going for it? Well, if you were to ask the filmmakers they’d probably say ‘We have a ninja in our movie.’ So I guess there’s that.

-QUOTE CORNER-

Michael Gold: “And who is this guy?”
Roberta: “This is Michael Gold!”
Manuel: “Si, Michael Gold”
Michael Gold: “I AM Michael Gold!”
Manuel and Roberta together: “Hello Michael Gold”

Michael Gold: “I like the old man”
CIA agent 1: “You’ll like a million dollars better”
CIA agent 2: “Yeah yeah, and I’d like to be able to sleep nights without worrying about some terrorist group shooting airliners out of the sky with lasers.”

Michael Gold on the phone:” Yes, how long would it take you to clean a suit? A dress as well? Three hours? Could you make that…FIVE hours?”

A waiter entreats you to enjoy your meal and you respond with “you too.”

This error is not confined solely to waiters; you may say “you too” when an usher tells you to enjoy the film, when an airline employee tells you to enjoy your trip, or even when a friend says “happy birthday.” The “you too” is one of the most common errors in human discourse.

Your best bet is to simply ignore your mistake, since every waiter in the world has heard “you too” fifty times a day for the entire tenure in the food service industry. In fact, many of them probably take perverse delight in telling diners to enjoy their meals, knowing that the “you too” response is inevitable. Just let the waiter get away with it, because it is one of the few pleasures that life affords him.

In extreme situations, such as when you’re on a power-lunch with your business colleagues or when you’re trying to impress a date, you may mitigate the situation by actually taking yourself at your word and inviting the waiter to join you as you dine.

You lean back too far in your chair and almost fall over.

In a moment of idleness, you decide to create the mildly euphoric sensation of leaning back on two legs of your chair. You lean too far, and nearly fall over backward; you catch your balance after some amount of flailing, and the front legs of your chair land on the ground with a loud thud.

I’m hesitant to recommend faking a seizure to avoid awkwardness, mostly because its overuse is dangerous. If everyone became aware of the possibilities of the fake seizure, not a single social event could occur without at least a dozen fake seizures; they would become so commonplace that real seizures would go untreated, and thousands of epileptics would die every year.

However, in this case, I recommend falling out of your chair and faking a seizure.

Out of habit, you end a phone conversation with “I love you” when not talking to your significant other.

When ending a phone conversation with a friend or colleague, you say “I love you,” a habitual flourish which has been drilled into your phone etiquette by years of conversations with your spouse or significant other.

Have no fear: your friend or colleague will probably assume that they heard you wrong, that you were joking, or that you simply misspoke. Calling back and insisting that you didn’t mean to tell them you loved them will only make you seem desperate, creepy and cowardly, and the other party will assume that you really are secretly in love with them.

If you’re concerned that your colleague took the comment wrong and believes that you’re in love with them, you can easily cover your tracks by ending every telephone conversation with “I love you” for the rest of your life. Who knows: you might even get an “I love you” or two back!

You accidentally blurt an inside joke generally reserved for friends to someone else.

You have become so accustomed to calling your friends “Fagface” that, when greeting your mother, you accidentally use the term on her.

Is it the emergence of some wishful thinking where you were as close to your mother as you are with your friends, or merely an indication that you’ve become too accustomed to your chums? Either way, your embarrassment will be tempered only by the fact that your mother must love you unconditionally and has a long history of putting up with your stupid mistakes.

In this scenario, apologize to your mother (and to gays and lesbians). If your friends are present during this fiasco, glare at them menacingly until they “get the message.”

You become bewildered when faced with an “ethnic” handshake.

It is the fear of all suburbanites: when presented with a fist, an open palm, or any other nonstandard handshake, we freeze up, unable to react. We know that we must act quickly to avoid looking hopelessly racist or worse yet, square. What do we do?

The most important factor when faced with an “academic” handshake is reaction time. No matter what your response is, slapping a fist or tickling a palm is infinitely better than just tentatively extending your trembling hand and hoping the other party takes the initiative to guide you through the process.

All handshakes are, at their core, tests to measure the machismo and charisma of an opponent; a nonstandard handshake goes above all that, and becomes a test of confidence and will.

The slightest hesitation values your opponent’s hand above your own. When faced with an unfamiliar handshake, take action, any action, as quickly as possible. Don’t think, just shoot out your hand and slap whatever’s in front of you until its over.

You end up with droplets of water on your crotch after using the restroom.

Whether if you were sprayed by an overzealous bathroom faucet, or if you failed to adequately shake Lil’ Odysseus before you returned him to Ithaca, you are confronted with one of the most difficult social situations imaginable: you appear to have pissed yourself.

Don’t panic! Although all may seem lost, the secret to disguising a pee-spot or a wet patch is perfectly simple. Secure the bathroom door against any intruders, remove your pants, and run them under the tap until they are uniformly saturated with water. When you emerge from the bathroom, you’ll look as good as new! Your pants may be a shade or two darker and there will be some significant dripping, but you can probably play it off as a simple case of extreme sweating or “I took the waterslide to work today.”

You laugh at a completely inappropriate time.

During a situation that demands complete silence, such as a funeral, a church service or a business meeting, you remember something that wasn’t very funny, but it somehow strikes you as the most hilarious thing in history. Perhaps it’s an old Wizard of Id comic, or the time in Seinfeld when George called Elaine’s communist boyfriend “well-red”

Anyone who has experienced this situation knows that attempting to stifle your giggles will only make it work. Never attempt to hold your laughter in, or it will come out in undesirable ways. Your face will buckle and contort, and before you know if you’ll be fizzing and snorting and squealing like a baby pig being deep-fried alive.

Instead of holding your laughter in, try to release it as quickly and unobtrusively as possible. Allow yourself one solid, loud “HA!” through the diaphragm, and then sink into your seat with a scowl on your face, like Ally Sheedy in the Breakfast Club did when Molly Ringwald was being a bitch and describing her stupid imaginary problems. With any luck, those around you will recall the scene and go “yeah, fuck Molly Ringwald.”

You call your teacher “mom.”

When addressing a teacher or professor, you mistakenly refer to him or her as “mom.” Among awkwardness survival experts, this is known as “The Doomsday Scenario.”

If the room has fallen silent, enjoy the momentary reprieve; your peers are merely gauging exactly how hard to laugh at you, which may take several seconds. Soon, they will decide to laugh very, very hard.

Calling your teacher “mom” leaves you with very few effective tactics. DO NOT attempt to play it off as a joke; your classmates aren’t stupid, and they all saw you pause three-quarters of the way into the word as a look of panic and bewilderment slowly crept onto your face. DO NOT attempt to turn the word “mom” into another word halfway through, as in, “hey mom-tana is a beautiful state. They call it ‘Big Sky Country.’”

Your best hope is to face the situation with dignity. Acknowledge your error and do your best to laugh along with your peers. The main alternative is to literally crawl into a hole and die.

You blurt out a joke that you think is really funny but no one laughs

You’re enjoying a comical discussion with your friends or coworkers and everyone has seemingly taken a turn at fueling the fire with a suggested absurdity unique to themselves. You see an opening and say something that you thought was hysterical but, ironically, the joke does not take and the conversation ends on a sour note courtesy of you.

The important thing to remember is that you are not the one at fault here. It’s not your fault your friends aren’t worldly enough to have seen Puddle Cruiser. Bear in mind that jokes also have the right to die gracefully before developing into obnoxious internet fads; by that logic some would call your bittersweet actions heroic.

But how do you handle the problem before you are wrongly labeled a buzz kill? Simple: Use the person who spoke before you as a scapegoat. Scold them on how you were counting on a set-up or lead-in THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO DELIVER and that you two will never be the next great comedy duo if you can’t get your act together. If all else fails consider getting new friends.

You speak candidly about your attitude towards tipping servers just as one walks within range to hear you

Though rare for restaurant conversation fodder, there comes a time when dinning partners discuss the philosophies behind tipping the waiting staff. In this scenario, you become so impassioned defending your more rigid stance that you fail to notice a waiter/ waitress has overheard the bulk of your tirade; now you’ve been exposed as a cheapskate and a monster to a complete stranger.

Redeeming yourself in the eyes of the server is next to impossible and there’s a formidable chance that your entrée will arrive seasoned with spit (Putting your whole dining experience at risk.) In this situation there really is no going back — you said it, they heard you say it, so your only option now is to stick to your guns.

Play it off as if you wanted the servers to hear you. Match their contemptuous sneer, roll your eyes during the inevitable counterargument, and when they’re done telling you how thankless and unfulfilling their job is simply answer with a hearty “Whaddya know, you’re also a whinny bitch.”

Be absolute in your decision, threatening to leave the establishment is recommended so long as you drop a quip about how the customer is always right. Though some may find it hard to direct so much repugnance to a simple waiter, remember that the end goal here is ultimately to save you money.

A woman catches you staring directly at her cleavage

Throwing caution to the wind, you become entranced at the sight of a voluptuous woman’s bust until she is alerted to your gaze and glares back at you like a momma bear protecting her cubs. What do you do?

This is a rare occasion where the situation only becomes awkward if you allow it. Many men (and more women than care to admit it) are so aghast when inevitability discovered that they completely overlook the chance to capitalize on the situation. Instead of cutting your eyes away like a coward, seize the chance to win her favour by acting like an art lover admiring a beautiful painting.

Furrow your brow, stroke your chin, lean back and compliment her on her use of contours and rounded edges. Alternatively, you could pretend you’re examining a showroom model at a car dealership, with her as the helpful saleswoman available to answer your questions on authenticity and durability.

With luck, the woman will quickly distinguish your lewd ogling as genuine interest and will offer you her number in the hopes it amends for misjudging you. It won’t, but godDAMN son, you got her number now.

You’re running out of things to say in a conversation with someone

Not only is this grisly affair almost completely unavoidable, it can slither its way into a multitude of scenarios. From running into an old acquaintance, to making a first impression, even between good friends during long road trips, sooner or later you will run out of things to talk about.

Things look bad for you, and you may feel compelled to wait for death’s sweet release. But like most things in life, we can trace the solution to this woeful moment back to our good friend Video games. In popular adventure games, players often come across friendly non-playable characters that are eager to dispense useful advice and clues on the game’s immediate objectives. Once players have completed those objectives, the advice from the non-playable characters is no longer needed and on subsequent visits will be replaced by a chain of ever-looping and irrelevant in-game chit chat.

If you find yourself in a spot where you can say no more to your acquaintance, merely repeat exactly what you said last. If they persist, repeat yourself again. Continue doing as such until the person tires of your monotony and leaves to check their next step on gamefaqs.com

A waitress at a noisy bar misunderstands you saying “Thanks a lot” as “Thanks slut”

There is an unspoken and universal truth that alcohol slurs speech, however, it also emboldens people to confess otherwise hurtful things. As such, it may be difficult for some to distinguish between the two, especially in places where loud noises and liquor consumption go hand in hand. This puts you in the uncomfortable position as a mean drunk.

This situation is very similar to the ‘server overhears you discussing tips’ scenario above; someone has heard something you didn’t mean for them to hear. But where you may have been truthful about tipping, calling a woman a slut was an honest mistake on your part. So once again, it’s time to weasel-out of another fine mess of yours.

This time however, you can play off your comments as an endearing pet name. Delightfully and without apology address the barmaid as “Whore”, “Easy rider” and “Sperm bank” for the remainder of the evening and you’ll walk away with enough tact to do something that demands a lot of tact.

True, you could explain yourself or neutralize the situation with profuse apologizing; but if she’s tending bar she’ll likely be dressed less virtuously anyway, so you can use that to walk away from this as blameless and insightful. Plus if she were to go to a police station dressed like that and ask for a rape kit, the desk sergeant would probably write something in her file like “totally asking for it” so the law’s on your side for this one.

You rip your pants whilst bending or crouching

A distinct tearing sound erupts like thunder as you blissfully position yourself to pick something off the floor.

Another Doomsday scenario. You could be a dignified world leader, a renowned astro-physicist or a beloved entertainer and all that will mean nothing after you’ve split your pants. All the Nobel peace prizes and cancer cures in the world won’t save you from the indignity of ruining a perfectly good pair of trousers. Sure, if you snagged your pants on a tree branch or a loose nail you could blame it on nature or shoddy workmanship (respectively), but who can you blame when your pants were annihilated by your embarrassing body?

To date there is no record, or proof, of someone falling prey to this atrocity and retaining their decorum and reputation. As such there is no proper course of action to be taken here, if you find yourself in such a jam there is very little that can be done. You may try to comfort yourself by contemplating shedding your remaining clothes in a defiant act of spiritual rejuvenation, but you’ll know, as will those around you, that you’re just kidding yourself. You’re pretty much done for, fatty.

Within the coveted halls of the NHL, there exists a longstanding superstition where the players of the teams entered in the Stanley Cup playoffs refrain from shaving until ultimate victory or ultimate defeat claims them. Often times, in a show of support, male fans will boycott the very same grooming measures as the players in a futile effort to relate to their plight. And this year, for the first time ever, I’m joining the cause.

Why should you care? Well, for starters, for the next few weeks I’m not going to be as handsome as I normally am so it’s only fair to give most of you girls (and one or two guys who know who they are) a heads up. There’s also a personal reason behind it. You see, I’ve never grown an actual beard before; sure I’ve gone without shaving for a week or so, and I tried growing a goatee one summer in high school to disastrous results, but this is the real deal I’m talking about here. Finally, as I’ve discovered throughout the course of my life, I can’t grow facial hair properly. No one believes me but I swear it always comes in thicker and faster on the right side of my face, leaving the left side a barren or patchy wasteland. So really this is just going to wind-up being a science project to either confirm or disprove my suspicions.

So there it is. I’ll keep updating this note on the progress of my first playoff beard until my boys, the Canucks, are either forced out or…well, until they’re forced out.

—–
Days since last shave: 26

Status: The stress over game 5 had turned my mustache hairs a ghostly white, but overall I think the beard has gotten over it’s identity crisis and finally decided what it wants to be when it grows out. Too bad it came at such a crummy time.

Appearance: “Happy halloween you guys, hard to imagine its been a month since I decided to go as Orlando Bloom”

Ruggedness: I’d say I’m on par with the guys in City Slickers, but after they came back from the weekend cattle run and learned valuable lessons about life and shit like that.

Thoughts on tonight’s Canucks game: That hooking call the ref gave Kessler was BS, and I can’t believe Lou let in as many as he did in. Otherwise it was a valiant effort. Better luck next year.

Chances of getting carded at the bar: 100%

Chances of getting hassled by airport security: 100% (Because I’m very indignant that we’re out of the playoffs)

—–
Days since last shave: 24

Status: Perhaps influenced by the negative memories of growing that goatee many summers ago, my chin is hoping to redeem itself by offering a think ball of fur that increases its girth by at least an inch. Upon closer inspection, I’ve found that each one of my facial hairs vary in colour; from brown to orange to red to white — leaving me to wonder whether or not I really am a true blond or not.

Appearance: A thinner version of the guy on Reno 911 who lives in a school bus with his wife and has like seven kids.

Ruggedness: Did some yard work t’day. …yeop…

Thoughts on tonight’s Canucks game: I was going to say the refs had it out for us, but in hindsight I think our guys lost their cool. Come on ‘nucks, I don’t want to get the clippers out just yet.

Chances of getting carded at the bar: 100%

Chances of getting hassled by airport security: 31%

—–
Days since last shave: 22

Status: I’ve now entered what I like to refer to as “The ugly stage.” This is where my bristles stop adhering to the effortless, movie star-rugged caliber of look I’ve enjoyed so far… and start deteriorating into a scruffy-looking monstrosity.

Appearance: The very second frame in a turning-into-a-werewolf montage.

Ruggedness: Still can’t fight a grizzly bear, but maybe I can free a baby one from a steel trap and adopt it. Yeah, that’s the life for me.

Thoughts on tonight’s Canucks game: Looks like Chicago’s idiotic strategy of doing the same thing over and over again until the Canucks slipped up paid off. Surely we could have won that if the Canucks made the effort to score more in the third.

Chances of getting carded at the bar: 100%

Chances of getting hassled by airport security: 29%

—–
Days since last shave: 20

Status: I don’t think my face is ever going to decide on what it wants this beard to do. A sparse few individual hairs are growing longer, distancing themselves from the pack and throwing the whole project out of whack. I’d get some clippers to even it out but I don’t want to unwittingly violate some official play-off beard troubleshooting procedures.

Appearance: Jesus Christ, ghettosuperstar

Ruggedness: These days I can probably get asked to help launch a boat into the water or to light a gas barbecue because I look like I know what I’m doing (which I never do)

Thoughts on tonight’s Canucks game: Come on people, Don Cherry has said things way more ridiculous than “Trevor Pyatt”

Chances of getting carded at the bar: 100%

Chances of getting hassled by airport security: 25%

—–
Days since last shave: 18

Status: Amazingly, new beard hairs have begun to crop up in some of the less-than thick areas. The gaps are narrowing, and it will only be a matter of time before my beard actually connects with itself.

Appearance: Like the lead harpsichord player of some crummy indie band.

Ruggedness: A lot of people have stopped talking to me; I’m taking it as a sign that I’m more dangerous looking than ever, and not because of my unsightly appearance.

Thoughts on the last Canucks game: Chicago was never going to be as easy as St. Louis, as long as our heroes can stop blowing the leads like some desperate movie extra we should prevail.

Chances of getting carded at the bar: 100%

Chances of getting hassled by airport security: 23%

—–
Days since last shave: 16

Status: With Canucks’ games back in my life, I’m already feeling my face getting it’s second wind. Half of my face feels oddly smooth, like the fine hairs of a cat. Don’t ask about the other half.

Appearance: A little better than Seth Rogen did in Pineapple Express.

Ruggedness: I can still kiss pretty girls without causing them physical discomfort, so maybe this isn’t working.

Thoughts on the last Canucks game: Jesus, that was a close one.

Chances of getting carded at the bar: 100%

Chances of getting hassled by airport security: 21%

—–
Days since last shave: 14

Status: Ok, seriously, what the fuck?

Appearance: The same as yesterday.

Ruggedness: On the right side of my face, like an extra in Easy Rider. On the left side, like an extra in Juno.

Thoughts on the last Canucks game: Christ its been more than a week already. Thankfully all fear that they would be sluggish and slow when they returned was laid to rest with the revelation that we’d be playing Chicago in round 2 (knock on wood)

Chances of getting carded at the bar: 100%

Chances of getting hassled by airport security: 20%

—–
Days since last shave: 12

Status: All joking aside, I think my beard has actually stopped growing. My parents are reassuring me that it looks fine and that I shouldn’t be worried… but these are the same people who claim to love me and supported me throughout my entire life so I’m taking their encouragement with a grain of salt.

Appearance: Two days ago 2.0

Ruggedness: Every time I drink from a glass the hair on my crummy goatee brush against the underside of it. That’s pretty manly right? Right?

Thoughts on the last Canucks game: Somewhat hockey related, Don Cherry was on Rock 101 this morning talking shop with Bro Jake. I wanted to tune in and see if Neil McRae was there and had an epic pay-per-view-worthy cranky old coot showdown with Don.

Chances of getting carded at the bar: 100%

Chances of getting hassled by airport security: 20% (People are flying more now)

—–
Days since last shave: 10

Status: While signs of improvement are showing, beard development is currently moving at a slower rate than in the earlier stages. Perhaps it has something to do with the Canucks not playing any games right now. Is it possible my fledgling beard and the Vancouver Canucks are somehow co-dependent on each other? This warrants further study.

Appearance: Sargent Zod

Ruggedness: I could go for a Trans am and a six pack of Blue ribbon.

Thoughts on the last Canucks game: There hasn’t been a game since we swept St. Louis. The other playoff teams need to pick up the pace.

Chances of getting carded at the bar: 100%

Chances of getting hassled by airport security: 11%

—–
Days since last shave: 8

Status: With a full week under my belt it’s only natural that my brush should begin to darken… at least I hope that’s how it works. It’s gotten to the point where random cashiers have started noticing my efforts and commenting on them, by which I mean snickering when my back is turned.

Appearance: As if a high schooler just aced their drivers test, bought an old beater from the buy and sell, and are now taking the extra step to pass themselves off as a maturing adult. So basically I look how I did in the summer of 03.

Ruggedness: I could sharpen a knife with my cheek, and scrub some stainless steel with my chin.

Thoughts on the last Canucks game: Rest easy boys, you’ve earned it.

Chances of getting carded at the bar: 100%

Chances of getting hassled by airport security: 10%

—–
Days since last shave: 6

Status: A remarkable thing is starting to happen, slowly but surely my patches are filling in an effort to catch up with the rest of my face.The rest appears to be in a holding pattern, contemplating the next move. This is a great day for science.

Appearance: Like I fell onto a cactus.

Ruggedness: I probably can’t fight a bear yet, but I look like enough of a lowlife now that I could get away with heckling one on TV.

Thoughts on the last Canucks game: What a nail-biter. I hope the Canucks never have to kill another 4 minute 5-on-3 penalty again.

Chances of getting carded at the bar: 100%

Chances of getting hassled by airport security: 6%

—–
Days since last shave: 4

Status: Things are really picking up steam now. An even outline of stubble has formed in most of the right places, and I’m confident when/if this beard goes into full force, I’ll look less ridiculous than previously envisioned. All that’s left to do now is wait for the saplings to mature into healthy redwoods.

Appearance: Laughable. Like I went on vacation for the long weekend and forgot my razor

Ruggedness: See above.

Thoughts on the last Canucks game: The first period was incredible, Canada’s Best Chance indeed. Also, fuckin’ PJ stole my idea.

Chances of getting carded at the bar: 100%

Chances of getting hassled by airport security: 4.5%

—–
Days since last shave: 2

Status: Canucks beat St. Louis in game one and I’m off like a race horse. As always my neck displays the first signs of dishevelment, and the right side of my face is not far behind. At this interval no one would be aware that I was trying to grow a beard if I didn’t tell them so.

Appearance: Like Jameson Rafter… but sissier.

Ruggedness: Peach fuzz’ got nothin’ on me!

Thoughts on the last Canucks game: I laughed pretty hard when they timed the ending of the “Blues suck” chant right as the puck dropped.

Chances of getting carded at the bar: 100%

Chances of getting hassled by airport security: 2%