Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Top Video of the Unspecified Time Period

This video is from Mr. Adrian Chen who is too nerdy and cool for one blog so he has two: worldoftoday.org and craigslisting, which you can find the link on the right. We link blogs so we're like best buds.

This new segment, Top Video of the Unspecified Time Period, will be what the title says it is. Expect the unexpected. Be afraid.

Anyways on to the video already:

Extended Car Warranty from Adrian Chen on Vimeo.

Win.

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

A Review of the Entire Lower Upper Midwest (Part 1)

(This post is coming out too long, so I decided to split it up).

Iowa.

Many people choose not to think of it. Good for them. Us unlucky ones are forced to. Some assholes proactively defend Iowa.

They're just dumb, though.

Regardless, Iowa sucks. I can tell you that having spent a good portion of the last (the time of writing) weekend (what would have been a kickass 3 day weekend) in said state. There are so many bad things about Iowa, I don't know where to start. That is convenient, however, because I can then introduce this article more thoroughly and buy time. I spent the 31st of October through the 4th of November allowing myself to be dragged through Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri, and then back through those in the reverse order in exactly one night. I feel the need to detail just exactly why that was a terrible, terrible idea.

That brings us back to Iowa. The easiest place to start (or so I have decided) is that it smells like shit. Pure and simple. I don't know how anyone could live there. The stench never ends. I guess I could get used to it, but then I would probably kill myself from the knowledge that shit smells normal to me, and that I probably now smell like shit. But I don't think I could get used to it anyway, and here's why: Iowa has managed to make different shit smells. For some reasons, all the terrible stenches are slightly distinct. It's like the gourmet of shit smelling. I suppose the better analogy would be the Old Country Buffet of shit smelling, although I'm sure its probably less analogous and more directly comparable to Old Country Buffet itself. Whether it is a paper plant, a pig farm, a trucker, meth labs, or even Cedar Rapids' unique Quaker Oats factory shit smell (which I at first thought was alright, but then not later when I actually stepped outside), it is unbearable. Now, I know that I'm not the only one to make this point in a humorous blog post, but it just can't be stressed enough.

Funnily enough, they still try to make it livable. This brings me to my next point: department stores. I guess its to give people a way to buy the essentials/do stuff on weekends/buy too much shit from Ikea, but looking at West Des Moines is so disheartening that it makes me want not only to have an existential crisis, but to star in a rotoscoped movie about having an existential crisis. This is coming from me, a person who wholeheartedly embraces commercialism and actively defends McDonalds. It is so intensely suburban and commercialized, it could make the directors/whores of Scary Movie 4/Epic Movie/etc. cry like little bitches. Let me try to convey to you West Des Moines. Picture a booming metropolis, for example Minneapolis. Imagine it at night to emphasize the lights coming from everywhere. Now make everything a department store or restaurant chain, and fill those in with the kind of people who like going to department stores, who are either insane or my mom. Applebee's, Buffalo Wild Wings, Home Depot, Target, Walmart, and the works. All boxed into a perfect square made by roads, outside of which is flatness, suburbs, and apartment buildings. West Des Moines is a metropolis of a lame mall. Damn.

But aside from all that, using stores like that to make a place fun works just about as well as the time Billy's baseball playing cousin took steroids.

That's all for this update. Next, in what is hopefully less a boring rant and more funny, we might cover the flatness and the people who live in this literally God forsaken (God got the hell outta there right quick) place. Or whatever. It's not like anyone cares about those places. To drive the point home, I shall conclude with the bold statement I opened with.

Iowa.