Wednesday, November 21, 2007

CELEBRITY BUCKET O'DUMB: Sesame Street and Overprotective Parents

Recently the owners of Sesame Street released the first season from 1969 on DVD. They have curiously placed a warning label on the DVD stating that some of the content is dated and now not suitable for young children. As many of us know that when you make DVD's out of classic programs from the 40's, 50's and 60's sometimes you get some politically incorrect material that is either racial or sexist or just downright mean spirited. The Looney Toons vault set comes to mind.So the New York Times listed a few of the scandalous things going on at Sesame Street in the late 60's. In the 60's there was a popular show hosted by English actor Alistair Cook called Masterpiece Theatre. Sesame Street's version was Monsterpiece Theatre hosted by Alistair Cookie or as we lovingly know him Cookie Monster. This is bad people, really bad, "Cookie Monster is making fun of America's favorite old fart sitting next to a fireplace, reading a book!" (Scrooged) What really makes this bad is that Mr. Monster is holding, gasp, a pipe! Call the Police! Then this insane crazed monster does the unthinkable he eats the pipe! Oh my god this should be x-rated no child should see an imaginary blue creature eating a fake pipe. Honestly I don't think little children today would know what a pipe is, do you see people smoking pipes anymore, but that is beside the point. What the hell is wrong with these people!!? It's Sesame Street!! I grew up on Sesame Street I would like my son to grow up on Sesame Street there is nothing controversial about it, plain and simple.We live in a very reactionary country now, where everything, no matter how innocent or non-threatening somehow appears nefarious if taken from a slightly skewed perspective. I mean one of the other complaints was that Oscar the Grouch was too grouchy. That Big Bird plays with an imaginary friend Mr. Snufalufagus and the kids make fun of him for it. Cookie Monster eats too many cookies and it apparently sets a bad example for children. It came to my attention now that Cookie Monster doesn't eat cookies at all anymore he just eats vegetables. WTF? He's the Cookie Monster!!! You see this is very simple, as parents we show our children these things to entertain them and sometimes to educate them. No responsible parent that I can think of would just hand a kid a giant cookie jar and tell little Junior to act like the cookie monster and feed his fat little face!! Parents and especially these damn action groups need to stop nitpicking every little thing in children's programming. Be parents, set rules for your own kids but stop ruining the experience for others because their parents are actually involved with their kids lives. There is nothing wrong with Sesame Street except that now, apparently, it is so PC that it sounds like it lost the fun and wonder that it used to have. This is really sad, I will admit that Sesame Street was created in simpler times, before Columbine type horrors but why do we have to shield children from that innocence of old? Our children are young and impressionable but they aren't stupid unless we as parents make them that way.So I want to give this Celebrity Bucket O' Dumb to Sesame Street and Overprotective Parents everywhere! Because life is too short and the world is filled with real issues and problems that we, the normal ones, in this society are forced to just put you in your place and tell you to relax and enjoy the damn show!

Saturday, November 17, 2007

3 Men and a Baby--Does it stand up to the smell test of time?

Now that I'm a father I find I have less and less time to do the things I want to do, and you can't even talk to my wife about this unless you want to get something thrown at you or hear grumbled epithet's spouted with contempt. A few days ago I expressed this problem to my friend Cody and of course he interupts me from my long winded whiney rant with a completely random thought. He says to me, "Do you think 3 Men and a Baby is an accurate depiction of grown men trying to take care of an infant?" I myself hadn't seen the movie in like, 15 years or so, so I wasn't sure exactly how to respond to that. Who cares about 3 Men and a Baby, my wife and I haven't a had a full night's sleep in months and we constantly have some kind of fluid evacuated onto us in one form or another. What does 3 Men and a Baby have to do with our little challenge? So I thought about it some more, we actually got our little guy into his swing sound asleep, so we thought what the hell let's watch 3 Men and a Baby and see if Cody's question is in any way relevant to our situation.We started the flick and I began to curl my lip at the opening credits as it played the very syrupy and cringe worthy song Bad Boy by Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine. This was going to be dated and awful, I thought, as they did the typical 80's montage showing Guttenberg as the effeminate and sensitive artist, Selleck as the no-nonsense architect and Danson as the actor/man whore. They are painting their plush NY apartment and date various women to this awful pop tune. If you know the story then you know that Danson's Jack character has a package delivered and in true screw ball style a second package ends up complicating their lives to almost a ridiculous extent. So the baby is dropped off old school style, and of course, it's the man whore's child. To complicate matters Danson's Jack is out of the country on an acting gig, so more hilarity can ensue.

Diapers with extra abosorbency, does it really matter? - Peter (Selleck) discovers the baby and after a few minutes of confusion between Guttenburg's Michael about what the hell they should do Peter decides to go to the store to buy a few things to care for the child. Here is a funny exchange about all of the different formulas, baby food and diapers the poor guy has to pick up. The problem is that Peter doesn't know how old his little tyke is which causes him some problems. Tamar and I, luckily, didn't have this problem cause we got our first batch of diapers from the hospital and because we knew the actual age of our child we were able to buy accordingly. Although I will have to say if I had to buy some of this shit on my own I definitely would end up buying too much stuff and it would almost all of it be the wrong size. Thank God for Tamar! In regard to the diapers I enjoyed this funny little exchange between Michael and
Peter:

Michael Kellam: Whoa, these diapers are way too big!
Peter: They're ultra absorbent! The more absorbent, the better if you ask me.

Which brings me to my second point on the diapers, Peter and Michael both seem to have a lot of trouble with the diaper tabs. I know the filmmakers probably thought it was really funny but it just made these supposedly intelligent guys look kinda dumb. I mean maybe the diapers in the 80's were complicated to use but it's a pretty simple idea you pull the tabs at the hips and pull it around and stick it to the front, simple, it ain't rocket science. Of course diaper tabs aren't for everyone, apparently dumb as a post Brittany Spears had to explain to equally moronic Heidi Klum what the sticky tabs were even for. (She explained this on Ellen last week.)



Wow this pic says it all--effeminate indeed!
Obscure theories - Tamar had an objection with one of the theories that Peter brings to Michael to try to determine the age of baby Mary. He tells Michael that he had heard that if you feel her teeth or in this case gum line you can tell how old the baby is. Tamar thought this part was crazy and stupid. But for the sake of the experiment I did try to feel his gums and I couldn't really tell how old he was by feeling them. Must be another 80's out of date thing. I mean he doesn't even have any teeth yet and honestly I can't even tell you at this point when exactly he will be getting said teeth. We did appreciate the late night feedings where Peter almost falls asleep while trying to keep a bottle in the kid's mouth. That is very much a reality, even more so for my wife cause she is nursing.







How to Calm a Baby without really trying
- Throughout the film Michael and Peter are always trying to soothe the baby and keep her from crying. This is most definitely an aggravating and time consuming task. You find yourself saying the most idiotic and retarted things just to get a few minutes of peace. Michael tries to comfort the baby with his cartoon character puppet. I tried puppets, stuffed animals my son doesn't seem to really care about any of them. Although the three of them seem to have some success singing to Mary which of course becomes the hallmark scene of the film. So finally you have something that seems to work for five minutes and so you think, "hey maybe this is the trick that'll work all the time!"--that's where you go wrong. You start thinking maybe if I go louder or with a little more pizazz, then you find yourself in complete and total anarchy as the kid, now no matter what you do, will cry at the top of his/her lungs until you have to leave the room to calm yourself down.

How Much Can This F****** Kid Eat!!? - The most true statement that is made in the film is by an exasperated Peter who is trying to explain his confusion about feeding Mary. He says something like this, "The book says to feed them every two hours but it takes her sometimes two hours to eat so I end up feeding her all the time!" Tamar and I are still dealing with this. We feed him. He eats. he spits up. Rinse and repeat. Over and over again and it never seems to end. It's even worse when they are nursing cause you can't really see how much he is eating. So most of the time, especially when he's crying consistently, she gives him the boob and we mostly just pray that he's getting enough from each feeding. I mean you can time him but he's starting to go at his own pace now, so it's even harder to tell. Honestly I don't know how you can ever tell.These were some of the main points that we took away from the film, Tamar and I both really enjoyed watching it now that we are parents and can relate to many of the situations. Of course the later half of the film devolves into the screw ball style as I mentioned before as the gang of three find themselves in the middle of a heroin exchange. This, Tamar and I find, does not happen in our daily lives as we raise our child so we'll just skip over that part. But I will leave with you with what has to be one of the best quotes in the movie:

Peter Mitchell
: There's a quarter of a million dollars in heroin in the diaper pail and the new baby wipes are in the hall cabinet.

Overall it was still cute and funny, and a little strange to have three grown career men swimming with this baby at her swim class when at least two of them are not even related to the kid. Yes there are many sequences here that are dated and make you squirm at it's cheesiness but I think it does stand up to the smell test. Tamar did also ask if at some point I would try to do something similar with the film Baby Boom. I feel confident that we covered everything anyone would need to know to probably avoid having children altogether.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

SPORTS: The Top 10 Completely Irrelevant Reasons Why I'm Happy A-Rod is Back in The Bronx

Everyone knows by now that Alex "A-Rod" Rodriguez (or Mr. Rod, as I like to call him) is back with the Yankees, on the cusp of signing another record setting deal that should keep him in pinstripes the for rest of his career. And, of course, everyone has an opinion - the sports fans, the sports writers, the sports pundits, the sports bloggers. A veritable vomitous eruption of viewpoints. Does it make A-Rod look bad? Does it make the Yankees look weak? I've come down with a severe case of vertigo from watching the back and forth from both sides, each end at the ready with a laundry list of "facts" to back up their side of the argument.

I say, who gives a shit about the "facts"? If you want "facts" go over to Wikipedia! This is The Bucket, bitch, and we don't deal in facts. So with that said, I present my list of The Top 10 Completely Irrelevant Reasons Why I'm Happy A-Rod is Back in The Bronx:


1). He's the best looking man in Baseball.


2). Not afraid to appear in homoerotic photography.


3). Continued hilarious "A-_(blank)_" headlines on the back page of The Daily News.



4). Stripper fucker!



5). He can take a joke.



6). His wife is a real firecracker.



7). Top notch oral hygiene.



8). Can coordinate an ensemble like one helluva snazzy sonofabitch!



9). Reinforces the old adage that cheaters never win.



10). He literally eats baseballs for breakfast!

Saturday, November 10, 2007

DAILY CELEBRITY ADVICE (11/10/07):

Britney Spears says:

"Shaving your head bald is the only way to stop the demons who sneak into your bedroom late at night & try to eat your hair while you're sleeping.
Stop trying to eat my dang hair you demon sonsabitches!!"

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

DAILY CELEBRITY ADVICE (11/6/07):

Billy Dee Williams says:

"My top three music selections when making sweet love to a fine lady - 1). Let's Get It On. 2). Sexual Healing. 3). anything on The Weather Channel."

The Darjeeling Limited

It's been at least a month or more since my wife Tamar, and I had seen anything at the theatre and we were having difficulties deciding which film we wanted to see. Our time, since the birth of our son, has of course been very limited so we had to plan our choice of film very carefully. Tamar has consistantly nixed all my ideas about action films or gangster dramas. So it fell between Dan in Real Life and the Wes Anderson Indie The Darjeeling Limited. As much as I love Steve Carell, Tamar has an equal amount of disdain for him for some reason, so as the above title suggests we ended up seeing the Wes Anderson flick.
I have always considered myself a Wes Anderson fan. I loved Rushmore and the Royal Tennenbaums, but I admit I still have not seen The Life Aquatic. It's not like he has a whole lot of film that you can make that claim but two out of three I think classifies you as a fan. Anyway I will say that you can actually add a third film to that list because I did enjoy Darjeeling. The film is fairly simple. Three brothers, Jack (Jason Schwartzman), Francis (Owen Wilson) and Peter (Adrien Brody) re-unite in India a year after the death of their father. That's about it really plot wise. The great thing about the film was watching these guys interact with each other, taking an odd assortment of Indian painkillers and medications, and making a fine mess of things for themselves as they take this spiritual journey. Francis is controlling and kind of obnoxious, Peter uses the trip to escape the realization that he is going to be a father soon, and Jack is a womanizer who seems to be involving himself in doomed relationships so he can find a reason to run roughshod around the world. There are the little Wes Anderson moments throughout the film where one of the brothers looks blankly into the camera with some strange french song playing in the background. These little touches of Wes Anderson that were once funny and strange kind of get on my nerves in this film. Like for instance Jack for some reason or another is barefoot through the entire movie. Now one would think who cares if the guy is wearing shoes or not, but they seem to make a point of showing the audience this repeatedly throughout the film without ever addressing it and so it started to annoy me. I mean they are running around India with snakes, and well, there are snakes damnit and this idiot is running around without any friggin shoes and no one stops to say hey dude, where the hell are your shoes? I mean even in Die Hard everyone asks why the fuck McClane is not wearing shoes--it becomes kind of a punchline, y'know. Anyway, the film as a whole was entertaining and funny and there were some great moments from the main cast as well as the group of supporting actors like Irfan Khan, Anjelica Houston and Natalie Portman. Natalie plays Jack's ex-girlfriend in a fifteen minute short before the film begins. She also appears briefly in the film but if you blink you may miss her there.The film pokes fun at the French New Wave which is always a good idea in my book and you also get some great visuals as they trek across the Indian countryside. I doubt that this film will get a wide release so unless you live near a large city you might have to wait for dvd. But if you do it's a fun film with some great individual performances and it's pretty funny too.

Grade 3 Buckets


Monday, November 05, 2007

DAILY CELEBRITY ADVICE (11/5/07):

Dave Coulier says:

"J.K. Rowling's outting of Professor Dumbledore has inspired me to finally come out and admit that Uncle Joey was, in fact, a homosexual. And I hope my admission will give other closeted gay fictional characters the strength to come out, as well."

Sunday, November 04, 2007

DAILY CELEBRITY ADVICE (11/4/07):

Andreas Pavel, inventor of the Sony Walkman, says:


"New research** shows that iPods make you sterile. So, come back to the Walkman for the sake of humanity."





** Research conducted by Andreas Pavel - the data, results, and conclusions of which are unsubstantiated and unconfirmed. The ideas and opinions expressed by Andreas Pavel, in the above post, do not reflect those of Troy's Bucket, Blogger, or Google.



Saturday, November 03, 2007

DAILY CELEBRITY ADVICE (11/3/07):


Kirk Cameron says:

"You know, a lot of people say to me ,
'Kirk, loved you in Growing Pains & Like Father, Like Son,
but aren't you just exploiting Christianity for profit now? Is that what Jesus would do?'
Well, they didn't have DVD players 2,008 years ago, so the point is moot."