PZ Meyers, a Biologist from the University of Minnesota, Morris, recently tried to attend a screening of the Creationist film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, but was himself expelled.
I was having myself a little Star Trek marathon today, so I compiled this list of episode titles from all the different series that sound like they could be porno movies.
The Man Trap
Mudd’s Women
What Are Little Girls Made Of?
Space Seed
The Naked Time
This Side of Paradise
Mudd’s Passion
The Naked Now
Manhunt
Peak Performance
The Bonding
Booby Trap
Sins of the Father
The Most Toys
Menage a Troi
The Best of Both Worlds
First Contact
Violations
The Perfect Mate
Liaisons
Invasive Procedures
Indiscretion
Body Parts
Strange Bedfellows
The Chute
In the Flesh
Inside Man
Bound
A weird flavor, snowflakes on the package and the phrase “limited time only” spell holiday edition to you, right? They sure do to me, and that’s why I feel justified in calling a pointless blog about Pomegranate 7Up a Christmas post. I have a pretty fierce obsession with Christmas editions of food. Christmas Crunch is perhaps the finest thing ever devised by cereakind. Slap Santa on the label and I’ll eat a can of Dinty Moore Hippo Anus In Its Own Juices. And so I must now sample Pomegranate 7UP, a thing that I would never ever try if it didn’t have those tantalizing snowflakes on the label. I have no idea what a pomegranate tastes like and I assumed I’d never find out. But the Christmas season, with its miracles and magicks, can surprise us all.
Care to hear a dumb, semi-Christmas related story from my youth? Of course you do!
See, what happened was there was this Christmas play. Thankfully, I wasn’t actually in the play this time, I only acted as an observer. The particularly exciting thing about this play is that it wasn’t sanctioned by any school, church or other organization. Far from it. Rather, it was put on by my cousin and one of our friends—a friend who is the most creative, fearless and batshit insane person I’ve ever had the pleasure to know. A number of years have gone by and I can now remember almost none of the details of the play. But I do remember this much.
The main characters were some kind of tough, hip, urban folk named Jameela and Sinatra. But you have to say them as “JAM…eela” and “SIN…atra.” And they were having some kind of Christmas something or other. I don’t know what. I do know it involved fabric softener. You see, one of the characters, in true Grinch-y fashion, had stolen the other’s only Christmas present: A bottle of Downy fabric softener. This scenario gave rise to an immortal quotation, still quoted in my house to this very day:
Before long, laundry baskets and bottles of Downy were flying through the air like spring-fresh-scented meteors. I don’t have any idea what the point of all this was, unless it was all an elaborate excuse to throw things at people and call it theater. It’s possible that the whole play was some kind of statement on race relations, because I have some sort of recollection of a fight between the characters being prompted by some kind of racial slur. But I think the “excuse to throw things” explanation is a lot more likely.
In conclusion: I and my associates have always been really stupid, even around the holidays.
Rating: 
Oh my god! Ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod! OH…MY…GAWD! Futurama’s back in a big way! Compared to this, Family Guy coming back is like a turd coming back when the toilet overflows. I’ve perhaps never been so excited in my life. Holy cow do I love Futurama; I’m even prepared to call it a better show than The Simpsons.
Bender’s Big Score is the first of four direct-to-DVD Futurama movies, and if the quality of this one is any indication of what’s to come then we’re all about to add the four greatest DVDs in history to our collections. For fans of the TV series, it’s got just about everything you could want.
The biggest movie news these days is that everything is go for launch on the long-awaited new X-Files movie. At any rate, that’s the biggest news for people like myself, who only care about nerd stuff. A bigger fan of The X-Files than me there never ever was. I’m practically bouncing off the walls in anticipation. I mean, there’s the new Indiana Jones and Star Trek movies to look forward to, and now The X-Files too! The only thing to say about it is: Hot diggity damn! In celebration of this momentous news, here’s a list of my ten favorite episodes of The X-Files.
10. HOLLYWOOD A.D. 7.18 The one where they’re making a movie about the X-Files and Scully, Mulder and Skinner talk to each other in bathtubs.
9. JOSE CHUNG’S “FROM OUTER SPACE” 3.20 The one where Charles Nelson Reilly is a kooky writer and Alex Trebek and Jesse Ventura are shady characters.
8. WAR OF THE COPROPHAGES 3.12 The one where cockroaches invade a small town and Mulder tells Scully she smells bad.
7. MUSINGS OF A CIGARETTE SMOKING MAN 4.07 The one where we learn the extent of the Cigarette Smoking Man’s involvement in everything that’s ever happened. It’s also the only time we ever feel sorry for him.
6. BAD BLOOD 5.12 The one where Mulder and Scully each tell their own version of events in an investigation of a town full of vampires.
5. PAPER HEARTS 4.08 The one where Mulder thinks a captured serial killer is responsible for the disappearance of his sister. Freaking great.
4. CLYDE BRUCKMAN’S FINAL REPOSE 3.04 The one where Peter Boyle has psychic powers and implies that Mulder will die from auto-erotic asphyxiation.
3. HUMBUG 2.20 The one with a whole town of circus performers. It was the first episode to go heavy on the comedy, and they pulled it off in a big way.
2. THE POST-MODERN PROMETHEUS 5.06 The one in black and white with a Frankenstein dude who loves Cher.
1. SQUEEZE 1.03 The one with a stretchy dude who eats people’s livers. It’s the first episode I ever saw and it scared the living shit out of me.
Mark and I were talking recently about various Christmas movies we’d like to watch. We talked about all the obvious ones, of course, but we were also coming up with some movies that take place around the holiday but don’t immediately spring to mind when you’re thinking of Christmas movies. I brought up the movie Batman Returns, which is set at Christmastime and uses tree lightings as set pieces and mistletoe as a plot device. Mark agreed that it undeniably fit the criteria we were looking for, but he added: “I don’t really enjoy watching Batman Returns at all.”
That’s a fair statement, granted, and I essentially agreed with it. We’re talking about a Tim Burton film, after all, and that’s always something to be wary of. Even so, when I was in junior high there was a period of several months where I’d watch either Batman, Batman Returns or Batman Forever every day after school, in lieu of doing homework or making friends. Eventually I grew out of my Batman phase. I mean, I still have Batman sheets, but I’ve hardly seen those movies at all since middle school. So I decided I’d give Batman Returns another look.
And hey! It’s a lot more entertaining than I remembered. It’s not like it’s Citizen Kane or anything, but it has enough there to make it a little fun. It has more than people give it credit for, I’d say, and that’s what’s important. It’s certainly the best of that run of four Batman movies (the three mentioned previously and Batman and Robin, if you can even call that a movie), and while that’s a little like saying it’s like passing the smallest of four kidney stones it’s still saying something.
So I’ve decided to go to bat (GET IT?), however tenatively, for Batman Returns. Give it another chance, people. You may well like it better than you remember.
And consider that evil supervillain the Penguin has big frizzy hair and wears a top hat, making him sort of a dumpy Slash. That alone is worth the price of admission.
Plus, hey, Michelle Pfeiffer.
Well, today’s the busiest shopping day of the year, it is. And I’ll certainly be a part of the mad rushing hither and thither to get a jump on the Christmas season. I’ve got quite a list of people to shop for this year, so I need to get a good start. Here’s my shopping list for the holidays.
1. Alvin - Hula hoop
2. Bart - Bonestorm
3. Susan - House
4. Freddy - Tie
5. Tom H. - Reynolds pen
6. Tom P. – Chuck Berry Songbook
7. Lucy - Real estate
8. Ralphie - BB gun
9. Billy - Mogwai
10. Oswald - Parents
11. Bonnie - Hopalong boots
12. Ben - Pistol that shoots
13. Janice & Jen - Dolls that’ll talk and go for a walk
14. Gayla - Hippopotamus
15. Hermey - Dentistry for Dummies
Rating: 
Could The Princess Diaries be any stupider? Objectively, the answer is no. Instead of a more traditional review, I’m just going to give you a list of some things that I like way better than The Princess Diaries.
Dropsy
Coprophagia
Being eaten by a Bengal tiger
Being eaten by a Cincinnati Bengal
Drying off with a damp towel
Swallowing a bug
Chronic naked grandparents
Tongue sandwiches
Skull crushed by a ball peen hammer
Apartment fires
Apartment fires on Christmas
Dropping my glasses in the toilet
Chronic dingleberries
Synchronized swimming
Child abuse
Synchronized child abuse
Jerking off in front of second grade teacher
The Phantom Menace
Wearing wet socks
Richard Simmons
Papercuts on the taint
Necrotizing fasciitis on the taint
It wasn’t my favorite movie, that much is for sure.
So because of Kathy Griffin’s now infamous comments upon receiving her undeserved award, a lot of people are pretty outraged that someone would have the gall to downplay the importance of Jesus in everything that we do. At least one group of Christians has started a petition to get people to not be so sassy about Jesus, because we all know how effective petitiononline.com is and how seriously everyone takes it.
The petition reads:
