The Best he is at what he does, and what he does is... so terribly pretty!!

Let me walk you through the last few minutes of your life. First you set your computer to internet, after a few minutes of checking your favorite sites you somehow came across this blog, a blog that has been a barren wasteland for the past year. Just as you are about to leave you notice something. Here are your exact thoughts: “What is this? A new post on the fifth column/element of surprise blog! Is it Christmas already? No wait Christmas alone can’t be special enough for something like this, maybe it’s my birthday too! Awesome I get presents now!!!”
Well let me tell you something: it ain’t Christmas, and it certainly isn’t your birthday. (Unless if it is Christmas, and your birthday, but there’s like a 1 in 48,000,000 chance of that happening, so the odds are in my favor puny humans. MOO HOO HA HA!!!) Point is neither you nor Jesus was born today, and instead today is special, because I am bringing the fifth column back into style (just like I did with laser tag). To begin the festivities I am going to write about X-men comics, specifically Grant Morrison’s recent take on the x-men. Surely you’ve seen me allude to it before, I think I titled one of my blogs with the name of a story-arc from his new x-men run, and I’ve been dying to encapsulate my thoughts on what he did over the 50 issues of new x-men that he wrote. But I ain’t going to review fifty comics in one post, that would be insane… “right?”
“Yes Rabbit-man that would be insane”
“Thanks Rabbit-man that would be very insane of me to do!”
“Yeah I know I already said that stop repeating yourself”
“Good show you always were quick to catch on to the metatextual jokes weren’t you”
“Yes now shut up, and start writing”

First and foremost I think I should present a brief history of the man who wrote these comics Grant Morrison: aka King Mob, aka The God of Comics. Basically from what I can tell Morrison pretty much lived the life of a straight edge until he reached his thirties at which point he decided to do every drug he could get his hands on. Also he was abducted by aliens in Katmandu. Yeah you read that right, the dude either was or thinks he was abducted by freaking aliens. He also lived as a transvestite for a little while, and basically came up with the idea for the matrix movies at least three years before the first matrix premiered. God forbid, If his life was ever translated into a biopic movie, it would probably win all the Oscars in the world. Needless to say he is either crazy, or everybody but him is insane, and if there is one thing that’s true about writers it’s that the crazier they are the better their work. I mean look at Kafka, or even Emily Dickinson, the both of them obviously had some debilitating self doubt issues, and how about Hunter S. Thompson, or Shakespeare. Ok I don’t know if Shakespeare was crazy, but could a sane person make up as many words as him? I don’t think so. Dude made up like half the freaking English language. He was probably plotting to take over the world too, all he would have to do is get everyone to talk with his words, and then he could control their thoughts. Straight out of 1984 I tells ya. Thank god he died of (quick break to check wikipedia) unknown causes… UNKNOWN CAUSES!?!? What the fuck, the dude invented half the freaking language, and we don’t know how he died. What have historians been doing? JEEZ!
Ok this column ran long, and I didn’t get to reviewing x-men, but don’t worry I’m gonna do it soon. Think of this as the precursor, and next post will be full of x-meny goodness, and wolverine too. Yeah Wolverine. (Actually BOO Wolverine, his movie sucked ass. I mean they screwed up deadpool big time. I guess I can rant about that some other time though.)

NEXT GRANT MORRISON’S WORK ON NEW X-MEN: REVIEWED!?

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, and Other Important News

Now if you are a regular reader of the good parts of this column, namely all the contributions from people other than me, you are probably still buzzing over the big news stories of the past week, and there is a chance that you missed out on a very important story while you were busy discussing the threat to Barack Obama's testicles, or the inactivity of John Mccain's testicles. This news story that I speak of will probably already be a well worn topic of discussion to those types who read the life section of the newspaper first. Naturally I don't fall into that category, since I read the sports section of the paper with my morning breakfast of razor blades, sulfuric acid, and napalm, but after I finish my exercise regimine of wrestling with a bunch of bears that I set on fire in my backyard, I do enjoy perusing the life section of my paper for the latest celebrity gossip, and home decorating tips. I should probably cut the suspense since the title of this blog already gives away the topic of this writing, and say that "You all should probably watch Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog". In fact I recommend that you watch other things on the internet too, but first let me sell you on the idea of donating 14 minutes to the good Doctor.

Firstly Doctor Horrible is unlike any internet show you have ever seen!!! It has relatively well known actors, like Neil Patrick Harris (of Doogie Houser, and Harold and Kumar fame), and Nathan Fillion (I only really remember him in Firefly/Serenity, but he was awesome in that show/movie), and Joss Whedon is involved in some way, I don't know how exactly, but I'm going to assume he created it, wrote it, and hopefully directed it. However, the key selling point of this production is that "It's a musical with Supervillains". Now I bet you all are excited now, huh, and you should be, while the show does have a pretty cliched framing story, it makes up for it with good jokes, and catchy musical numbers, and cliches can be forgiven if they are as well executed as they are in this production. Overall I give this 37 Rabbit-man points which translates to 340 Element of Surprise points.

----UPDATE----

Well I just saw the ending of Dr. Horrible and you can take away all the stuff I said about cliches and forget about it. Man I was expecting an ending similar to the way every Jennifer Lopez movie seems to end (not that I have ever willing watched a Jennifer Lopez movie), but shit they pulled a fast one on me with that one. Good stuff all around, and there's just a hint of ambiguity to leave you guessing, and fuel debates on message boards. This whole thing seemed like one great big setup for something else, an origin story if you will, so I wouldn't be surprised if there was more of this to come (Especially since Dr. Horrible has kind of become a media darling). Not to say that there needs to be more. Oh well you people have like a day left to watch this for free on the internet so get to it. I did have one gripe, spoiler alert highlight to read, if you think you can handle it punk. Why did they show bad horse? it worked better when his appearance was a mystery.. Jeez. End Update

Now if you liked Dr. Horrible then I'm sure you'll love Time Warped a musical romp through time that represents some of the earlier work of Trey (South Park) Parker (Click here for part one, Click here for part two). It's kind of obvious from the South Park movie that this man has a gift for entertaining musicals, and the first episode of Time Warped helps to solidify his place as a pretty decent musical writer. Without spoiling too much I will say that Time Warped probably presents the best version of the Moses escapes from Egypt story that I have seen. Unfortunately the show was drastically changed in its second episode, and it really sucked. So don't watch the second episode, it starts around the middle of part two of the link up there FYI LOL BYOB.

While those are two examples of good musicals I would like to take the time to address musicals that aren't good, namely musicals that don't have original songs, but force their stars to lip sync to well known pop songs. Everybody knows these things are bad, hell Viva Laughlin was canceled after one episode, but somehow Hollywood keeps shoveling this crap in our collective plate. I can see why executives would place Mama Mia, the latest example of this genre, opposite the Dark Knight this weekend at the movie theaters, they are obviously hoping for a repeat of the Devil Wears Prada (Which was released opposite Superman Returns, and stole business from that movie), but why was this movie ever greenlit? I vow to never ever learn more about this movie than I learned from staring at Mamma Mia's poster for about 15 minutes, and watching one trailer for the movie before Wanted, but it seems to me that the whole conflict of Mia is moot (for those of you not in the know the plot goes like this: some girl is about to get married, and she finds out that her mom was a huge whore, along the level of cartman's mom, and she doesn't know who her father is. Apparently this is a problem because she wants her dad to give her away at her wedding, even though the fact that she doesn't know who her dad is means that he probably doesn't care enough about her to want to be involved in her life anyway. Somehow the field of candidates for her father is narrowed down to three, and the fact that she could get a paternity test is either dismissed or not brought up at all, so the girl has to figure out who her dad is by singing ABBA songs.) since it is easy to tell who fathered a child, Jerry Springer does it all the time. Oh well I guess the moral to the story is to watch the Dark Knight this weekend, and if you watch Mamma Mia instead I will come to your house and cut you.

Rabbit-man's guide to reviewing

Hello kids it’s me your uncle rabbit-man, and I’m here to lecture you all on the process of writing a review! I know you all are disappointed that I have abandoned my classic blog post structure of a paragraph justifying an insane rant, followed by an insane rant, but just like an insane homeless man without a recent acid trip to describe, I can’t think of a rant today. So instead I am going to discuss the process of writing a review. I promise it will hurt less than being eaten to death by a herd of ravenous puppies.

Alright if you are going to write a review you must make an important choice before you even put pen to paper, or finger to keyboard, or piss to snow, whatever the analogy is these days, and that choice is whether you will write a review with a numeric score, or grade at the end or not. Now both of these methods have their advantages and disadvantages, for example writing a review with a grade will allow you to simply rant about whatever you want as long as it is tangentially related to the subject matter, and you can just put a grade at the end to tell the reader what you meant. This also has a drawback, because most readers are either smart, busy, or illiterate, and will simply skip to your score and ignore the rest of your review. The flipside of this choice is writing a review without attaching a score, when writing one of these you must be careful to make sure that you convey a judgment on the subject that you are reviewing since you don’t have the luxury of just writing a score. Naturally not including a score will force those lazy bastards who read your reviews to actually read your review.

Now that we have gotten that out of the way let’s get to the next most important part of writing a review, coming up with an opening line. In today’s society of fast food, 24 hour news, and instantaneous access to internet porn, people do not have the attention span to read a long review about any subject, and the first line is probably the only thing that many readers will read in your review. In other words take care to write this it will literally make or break your review. Fortunately writing a first line is easy: just make a vague and generic observation about the subject “The conflict of profiting off of war, is explored through the lens of a superhero origin story in the summer’s first true blockbuster Iron Man.” Feel free to describe the plot of what you are reviewing, if there is one, but just make sure that whatever you are saying is vague. The first line has to be vague because you want to confuse the reader into reading more of your writing. Another method of doing this could be to use a question. Normally “who would have thought…” works pretty well, like “Who would have thought that an asshole could be so entertaining to watch?” and then write your review.

Now you get to the meat and potatoes of your review the part where you judge something. Now let me tell you judging stuff is fun, there’s no better way to make yourself feel good than putting something down. Next time you find out that your pet fluffly died make fun of some little kid’s drawing, or next time you find out that your track time doesn’t qualify you for the special Olympics, make fun of a little kid’s sandcastle. Don’t you feel better? It’s pretty much the same thing with reviewing. Think, if you get that much joy out of making fun of a small child how much more joy will you get when you make fun of a $100 million dollar movie? Now I know what you are thinking “Rabbit-man reviews aren’t always negative, critics do write a lot of positive reviews.” Which brings me to my next point: If you are going to write a positive review, write it so that you get your name on the movie poster or DVD cover. Just put in a bunch of sentences that end in exclamation points like “Iron man is a laugh a minute thrill ride of intense pleasure!!!” or “I count two moments in my life as my happiest my marriage, and the birth of my son, and the two hours I spent watching Iron man has surpassed both of them!!” or the classic “Iron man is better than sex!!!” See it’s easy, and if the movie is particularly bad like Uwe Boll’s In the name of a king a dungeon siege tale, then you can write a glowing review and know that your quote will make it on the DVD for sure, seriously there was only like one good review for that movie.

So I have now taught you dear reader everything that I know about reviewing. Be sure to use your powers for good, and never stray from the righteous path I have outlined for you. Oh and I actually wrote this article so I could review Iron man but I got a little bit side tracked. Yeah it was a good movie, but the ending fight kind of sucked, the movie would have been better if it just focused on Tony Stark, and not Iron man. I give it 11331 points.

Rabbit-man Manifesto

Arrogance is a common folly of professional bloggers like me. Essentially we are translating the events of the world into easy to process segments so that you the proletariat may have a chance, however small, of understanding what’s going on around you. Blogging is a thankless job that leads to long hours and intense loneliness, and the only rational compensation one can seek through blogging is a false sense of superiority. One of my countless responsibilities is to remain constantly vigilant, so that my columns do not dissolve into a virtual pissing contest between me, myself, and I. So I have decided to expunge all the false arrogance I can muster into one column. You lucky bastards are reading that column right now.

Please enjoy a list of fictional characters that I could totally beat up. First I think I should add that these fights wouldn’t be a straight up fistfight, I would be bringing my trademark weapon, a baseball bat with a rusty nail hammered through the end, to counter my lack of physical strength, and to add even more range to my long wiry arms. Now let the listing commence.

1. Mario, Mario: This video game icon has starred in numerous games, which the nerds at Wikipedia have numbered to around 200. So why do I think I could beat up this asshat? Well I’m getting to that point right now. Let’s look at the facts: the story of the Mario games revolves around an obese plumber who takes a trip to the mushroom kingdom to rescue a princess from a dragon, while eating magic mushrooms that give him super powers. Nintendo got two things right, one that Mario is an obese plumber and two that he is tripping out on magic mushrooms, or shrooms as my gang friends might call them. I wouldn’t even need my awesome bat to beat up a barely conscious plumber.

2. Bambi: Now I realize some of you may be horrified by my inclusion of Bambi on this list, but let me reassure you when I imagine fighting Bambi I don’t imagine fighting the cute little deer, and his animal friends, I usually have a certain scenario in my mind. You see in my mind Bambi has been infected with a particularly violent strain of rabies, and has taken to terrorizing a small town. Eventually I am called in by the town leadership with the promise of two comely lasses if I am able to rid the town of this beast. Now since this fight is part biological warfare, I would probably wear a mask or maybe some goggles to protect against infection. When I eventually confront Bambi and he lunges in to attack me, I would whack him with my bat, and hopefully since he is so small and adorable he will go down in one hit. If not I will just repeat the process.

3. Fred Flintstone: This would probably be my greatest battle, I mean have you seen him power that car with his massively powerful legs. However, Fred Flintstone has one notable weakness, he is especially susceptible to concussions. I mean have you seen any episode of the flintstones, he gets hit on the head by a bowling ball or a rock every other episode, and as everyone knows it’s easier to get a concussion when you have already have had one. I would have to do my best to avoid his crazy Neanderthal strength, by keeping far away, and bash him on the head whenever I get a chance. I’m pretty sure one decent hit would put him down for the count.

Also I'd like to extend a warm welcome to our new colleague "sheep rapist", I think you'll fit right in.