Door Hinge

Bj Penn looks like this guy from an Amp'd mobil ad

2007-04-12T10:21:00.000-04:00

Frank Dux' Sensei Deeply Disappointed By Souvenirs

2007-01-09T21:06:00.000-05:00

The Lovers, The Dreamers

2006-08-17T10:46:00.000-04:00

"Why are there so many... lazy black people? And why
don't they all get jobs? I've had -"

Ok Kermit, I'm gonna have to cut you off, luv. Very
good chops, very post-Bee-Gees. 'oweveh, it's supposed
to be about rainbows, me cranberry. Not a bloody
race-riot anthem. Roight?

*SHTWANG!*

Real mature, mate, throw your banjo at me and hop
away. Just hop away like always! Hop back into your
bottle you bloody 'ack! Leave me to clean up the mess
you made! Like always, mate!

Anybody Remember "Yu-Gi-Oh"?

2006-07-27T13:22:00.000-04:00

Well Yugi boy, it looks like I just about have you bent over a barrel!

Pegasus is right! I better start playing good cards!

Don't even bother trying, Yugi boy, it's my turn and I'm going to thoroughly violate your defense points.

Oh no!

Just relax and take it as me and my Millennium item play- The One-Eyed Spitting Cobra!

Oh no! That's a powerful card!

Think fast Yugi boy, you better play a card in defense mode before my one-eyed snake spits warm yogurt all over the small of your back.

What does that mean? Pegasus is right though- I need a strong defense card!

Well Yugi, may I suggest you present the Spread-Cheeked Brown-Eyed Cave Dweller?

Oh no! Pegasus can see my cards somehow! But he's right- that's my only hope! I'll play it!

Ohhhh yeah... that's the one.... Well Yugi...uh... I can't play anymore, I'm spent. You win.

I did it! Thanks, Brown-eyed cave dweller!

Superman In Mexico

2006-07-16T20:46:00.000-04:00

Thrown sock hits door jamb; helicopters

2006-06-18T13:34:00.000-04:00

Someone should make a sink so large that it's unshippable

2006-06-01T23:14:00.000-04:00

Mocked-Up Nutrition Facts Label On Board Game Strangely Unenthusiastic

2006-05-26T10:07:00.000-04:00

Invention

2006-05-13T19:19:00.000-04:00

Matt Mullett Presents: Annotated Bullshit

2006-05-03T21:37:00.000-04:00

Ok, so, I was reading an interview in a magazine that someone left in the bathroom, and it was so rife with inaccuracies that I felt like writing about it. So why not put it in the old blog? Whenever I think of something interesting I might as well put it on here, I figure, even if it’s not five times a week anymore.
Anyway, the article is an interview with “original thinker and longtime social entrepreneur” Nina Simons in the Nov-Dec 2005 Utne Reader. I reproduce some of it below with commentary.

Nina Utne, the Interviewer: I’ve heard you say that you see the world thought gender-colored lenses. Why do you see things that way?

NS: About 10 years ago (I learned that there was a) 500-year period(1) throughout most of Europe when many women were accused of being witches and killed. Huge numbers of women were tortured and burned at the stake.(2) I was shocked to the core to learn about this momentous event, which I saw as a root cause of our culture’s disease.(3) It seemed to awaken an ancient memory in me.(4)
Prior to this period women owned more property and had more wealth. Before, women were the healers, the midwifes, and the herbalists. After only men were permitted to practice medicine.(5) …all the characteristics, values, and qualities that have been associated with the “feminine” have been systematically devalued and denigrated in our culture. Attention to process, relationship building, empathy, intuition, and the collective wisdom of groups have all been chronically derided.(6) …many of our challenges, including environmental degradation, social injustice, and corporate globalization, (are) expressions of the gross imbalance between what our culture defines as “masculine” and “feminine” qualities. …a greater emergence of the healthy feminine (qualities) throughout our world might help achieve the balance that can restore our social and environmental systems.

1. It was 300 according to Wikipedia.
2. This is vague enough to not be actually incorrect, but it’s misleading. To quote Wikipedia: “Modern historians have shown that the victims of the witchhunt were not always female (in Iceland, for example, 80% of those accused were men)… Generally accepted figures amongst historians today range from …around 60,000 (victims) to …around 40,000.” And that was between 1450 and 1750. Hardly the “female holocaust” Nina Simons seems to be imagining- even low-scale wars kill far more people, generally in 5 years or less, mostly men.
3. I doubt it. She only heard of the witch trials 10 years ago and was shocked? Didn’t she attend 3rd grade? Come on.
4. …what?
5. This is ridiculous. I won't even bother with the retarded "women had more income and property before this" claim (retarded, anyway, if she's saying they had 'more' than men- it's not clear what she means), but women have been prevented from practicing medicine since 1750? I typed in “female doctor” and found, for example, Susan Smith McKinney-Steward, who became a doctor in 1870- not notable for being the world’s first female doctor but for being New York’s first black female doctor! And 1870 is after 1750.
6. This “female qualities” stuff is crap. If someone said “black qualities, like dancing and talking jive and basketball” they’d obviously be racist; to list a bunch of positive qualities as “female” is no better. Not to mention that the list of qualities is dumb. “Attention to process”?

I don’t even know what the hell she’s talking about most of the time but it’s such nonsense I felt like shitting all over it so there you have it.

Blog

2006-04-14T12:07:00.000-04:00

Well, as you may have noticed, I stopped updating this. It was becoming a little too much effort to write something every day for the 4 people who were reading it. I do, however, want to thank those people, and I consider the project to have been a success, as I wrote a lot more in the last 5 months than I would have otherwise. I'm going to leave the blog up in case any talent agents stumble onto it and immediately start stuffing 10,000 bills in my face, and I may return to it in the future. Oh, and I returned to the "classic Doorhinge look". Vaya con Dios!

Impersonal Space

2006-04-04T10:23:00.000-04:00

You know what I like? The staircase landings in office buildings and hotels. Cold and impersonal. And it seems like a lot of wasted space- they should let me live on one. Somewhere up at the top of the building where no one would take the stairs unless there was a fire. There’s enough room for a twin bed, small television, and hotplate, I’d say. Not a lot of privacy, but you’d get used to it. Also, I’d like to live on a highway median.

Old Joke Perfected

2006-04-03T10:39:00.000-04:00

A boy walked into his 2nd grade classroom rather disheveled and quite late. “All right,” his teacher, Mrs. Bloomquist, said. “What on earth were you doing?” The boy shrugged. “How did you get so muddy?” Mrs. Bloomquist asked.
“I was just in the backyard, running around, blowing bubbles,” the boy said.
“Well how did you get that nosebleed?” Mrs. Bloomquist asked.
“I was just blowing bubbles,” the boy repeated.
“And,” Mrs. Bloomquist asked incredulously, “how about the two black eyes?!”
“Blowing bubbles,” the boy insisted. Just then a clown burst happily through the classroom door, laughing and honking his bicycle horn.
“All right!” Mrs. Bloomquist demanded. “And just who are you?”
“I’m Bubbles!!” the clown said.

Redesign!

2006-03-31T00:19:00.000-05:00

Blogging about your blog is the lowest form of human experience, but I think a complete redesign after 4 months warrants a little self-indulgence. Plus, you may notice I’ve taken down the ads for the time being. Any thoughts? Questions, comments? Advice on how I can get “Name: Door Hinge” actually under “About Me” instead of floating in the middle?

NFL Japan, Season One

2006-03-30T10:12:00.000-05:00

Uh, herro, very nice to meet you Mr. new American foot-boru teamuh-mate. May I ask, are you quarterblack?

A quarter black? Hell no! Man, what the fuck! Get outta here with that shit.

Ah, my very most apologies, foot-boru teamuh-mate. Are you- …halfblack?

HALF black!? Damn niggah! You best get the fuck OUT wit’ dat shit! I ain’t playin’, dawg. Really.

My most sincere apologies once again sir! Are you….fullblack?

Yeah, damn right, niggah. FULL, BLACK. Write it down, son. By the way, what position are you? I'm the quarterback.

Women and the NFL

2006-03-29T00:58:00.000-05:00

Some women like football. They make sure you know this. “I know about football,” they say, “!”. I find it annoying. Not because people are horning in on my club- I hate the whole atmosphere of creating some club, inventing jargon, and keeping people out- but because they are just so strident in making sure you know they are your equal in football enjoyment. Who cares? It’s not hard to sit on your wide ass watching football from 11am Sunday to 1am Monday. It’s not like proving you are a nuclear technician.
But anyway, I doubt most of them really are, they just can’t stand to be left out of anything. You don’t see men getting in your face about knitting. It’s really easy to fake knowledge about a subject- gain an enormous depth of knowledge in one specific area, then casually talk about the cover-2 defense. But it’s the breadth of knowledge that’s hard to fake. Which one is closer to the quarterback, the tackle or the guard, huh? How come some teams have a DRT and a DLT and others have an NT or two but neither of the others? What ever happened to split ends? The answer is, it doesn’t matter.
Another NFL related post tomorrow. Stay tuned!

Everyone Loves A Parade

2006-03-28T10:20:00.001-05:00

The most obvious target for a magazine parody has unfortunately already been parodied by too many people. I'm referring, of course, to Parade. As anyone who's ever leafed through a Sunday paper in America knows, it's the most egregious waste of newsprint in publishing history. Yes, even more so than Maxim. But, as I said, it's been done, so I'll just run down what's wrong with it in list form. First of all, the cover story is always the same pointless garbage- some (often minor) celebrity either with a disease (Michael J. Fox- Life Is A Gift!) or some vague charity effort (Whitney Houston Gives Something Back!). I can honestly say I've never read one of the cover stories, however, so maybe they are completely brilliant. Then we have the worst set of cartoons anywhere, ironically titled "The Laugh Parade", and written by two people who combined manage the massive output of three cartoons a week. These often focus on such current issues as women making bad drivers and doctors who won't do house calls. Throw in the baffling "ask a woman with a 200 iq what the biggest tree in the world is when you could just look it up" and there you have it- it's not even good enough to read while taking a dump.
Also, last week's issue actually had a recipe for a tuna sandwich in it. I can just picture the millions of Americans who had been fruitlessly banging unopened cans of tuna against jars of mayonaise in a vain effort to make one before that came along.

Breaking News

2006-03-27T00:12:00.000-05:00

Help Me, I’m Uncomfortably Dry

2006-03-24T09:14:00.000-05:00

Apparently my ancestors were a very moist people, living in a very moist land- perhaps traveling from rainy season to rainy season around the globe, or maybe they were actually aquatic mammals. Whenever the humidity around here drops below 99% (and from November 1st to June 1st it drops to about 0.4%) my skin cracks and bleeds. I’ve had 3 nosebleeds in the last 24 hours, and that’s not significantly above average. I gave up on chap-stick a long time ago and just keep a tub of petroleum jelly around, scooping out big double-fingered portions as needed, and enduring the “is this a tub of Vaseline with lip marks in it?” jokes. Today presented a new challenge, though- as I slept last night I was aware that my heel hurt, and I thought I had bruised it yesterday somehow. When I finally got up, I realized my entire heel had cracked open from the dryness and was bleeding. Excellent.
The irony is, I don’t like humidity, although I suppose no one does.
P.S.: My nose began spontaneously bleeding before I finished typing this.

Cops! …in Boston

2006-03-23T09:30:00.000-05:00

All right, buddy, ya gonna have ta move ya caah.

No hablo inglés. ¿Qué usted desea?

Ya caah is paahkd heea incorrectly on these train tracks. Ya gotta move it there pally.

¿Qué? Planeo quemarme mi coche con las llamas para destruir el tren.

All right- what he said was, he’s gonna have his llama come and pull the caah off the tracks. Hurry up with that llama, buddy. Let’s go.

How you get “llama” from what I pronounce as “yamma”, even if it is spell llama? Make no sense, meng.

I see anything anyone says in speech bubbles. It’s like a supa powah. Anything anyone says I see it in big speech balloons. If they think it I see it in like puffy clouds with dots trailin’ back to theah heads. More of a curse, really.

Ding ding ding ding ding ding! WHAM!

Theahs the train.

Ignorance on the bus

2006-03-22T09:22:00.000-05:00

I ride the bus a lot, and I see some ignorant shit. The bus seems to breed and multiply the ignorance that is naturally bound to the heart of the average citizen; or, perhaps, people who can’t afford a car are generally assholes. There’s a wide range of bus stupidity, but most of it involves failing to take into account the existence of the literal busload of other people that will be waiting as the one casually creates inconvenience for them all. For example, a person will stand at a bus stop for fourteen minutes with their thumb up their ass, accomplishing nothing, and then when the bus arrives, they will climb the stairs, walk right past the fare-box, set their belongings down, sigh, look out the window a moment, whistle a jaunty little tune, and then finally begin to gather the bus fare from where ever they keep it, allowing the bus to actually move again. Someone today did just that, and then she got off at the very next stop, some 1/10 of a mile away.
On there other end of the spectrum, there are ignorant bus behaviors that don’t inconvenience anyone, they are just ignorant. I saw someone- non-retarded and past the age of 30- get on with his bus pass on a lanyard around his neck. Unless your mom made you, you just can’t do that.

Gender Politix: He or She?

2006-03-21T08:17:00.000-05:00

So what do you call someone who is a transsexual- he or she? The nicest solution would seem to be to call the person whatever they say they are- if they want to be a she, call them a she. However, there’s an obvious flaw in that. What if someone says they are the king of Antarctica, am I supposed to call them Your Majesty? Which wishful delusions are we supposed to support and which not? Niceness conflicts with accuracy. A man wearing lipstick and a skirt is not a woman. A man wearing lipstick and a skirt and announcing that he is a woman is still not a woman. It is not the idea of gender-reassignment I have a problem with, just the feeling that I am being forced to use inaccurate terms. I saw a show recently in which a young person was surgically altered from male to female, and all the people around him forced the word “she” into the conversation every which way possible- She’s a big girl, she’ll do well in surgery, won’t she? It sounded to me like an attempt to say something so often that people start to believe it- propaganda, in other words.
But then again, if a man in a skirt is a man, what’s a man in a skirt with implanted breasts, no penis or testicles, and a surgically sculpted vulva?
A common genderless pronoun would help- as you can see I improperly but effectively used “they” at the beginning of the post- but it really only hides the problem. And I reject the idea that gender is a societal construct that doesn’t really exist and therefore needs no words to describe it- yes there are people born with chromosomes mixed up in such a way that they are neither male nor female; this no more invalidates the other 6 billion people’s gender than people who’s mixed up chromosomes result in them having no arms invalidates the concept of arms.

Crabs and Boxers

2006-03-20T08:53:00.000-05:00

There was this guy in my homeroom in high school, considered to be cool and well-liked but a few IQ points shy. He told the same story about 400 times over the course of 150 homeroom periods, in which he had been in juvenile detention, and he and his roommate had sat on the edge of the tub in their boxers, picking crabs out of their own pubic areas, and making the crabs fight, on the edge of the tub. The plausibility of this seemed remote to me even at the time; it was no doubt something he had heard other people claiming could be done with sexually-transmitted vermin rather than done himself, and in fact the possibility that it could be done at all seemed doubtful. Meanwhile, it gave him the double-edged coolness sword of having spent time in jail and having indirect proof of sexual activity. Unfortunately, he seemed not to realize that it also made him sound very, very gay. Every time he told this story of sitting on a tub in his underwear with another lad, both reaching repeatedly for their own genitals, I winced. Not because tales of confused but sexually adventurous boys away at a boarding school don’t appeal to me, but because I knew eventually someone would call him gay and start a fight if he told it enough times, and I sat right next to him, so I’d have to get up. Well, eventually, someone did- someone new to the homeroom class, as I recall. You can imagine the scene that followed.

National Geograffix

2006-03-17T10:20:00.000-05:00

If there’s one thing besides children’s programming that we are critical of here on the Door Hinge, it’s magazines, and today I was thinking about National Geographic. I know the cliché joke- that everyone looked at National Geographic when they are 11 to see some big floppy brown titties. Well, so did I, but that is not the point.
I actually would have had more complaints about it when I was 11- they have solved many of their more problematic issues over the years. At the time, I was always flummoxed by the fact that they pretended the page numbers extended across magazines to an entire year’s worth; therefore you’d open to page one and it would say “page 1112”. Also in the past is their policy of actually forcing prospective customers to be recommended to be a member of their society by another member if they actually wanted to purchase the magazine. Nowadays, you open it and twelve business reply mail index cards fall out begging you to subscribe just like, say, Swank. Another thing they used to do, and they now admit to this, was stage and pose many of their famous Pictures of Indigenous Peoples. They even had their cameramen carry around a red shirt, which they would then tell the subjects of potential photographs to put on, under the theory that a red shirt looks good in a picture. If you look at some old National Geographics you can occasionally see someone wearing a red shirt, with some other shirt peeking out beneath it.
Today, however, if you see a picture of an African with his dong hanging out spitting a blow dart at a monkey, you can bet it’s genuine.

New Recruit

2006-03-16T09:49:00.001-05:00

What’s your name, new recruit!

Private Jackson, Sir!

You get your eyes off my ass, Private!

My eyes off your…? Yes Sergeant.

Excuse me, Private Jackson?

No, nothing sir.

PRIVATE JACKSON DO YOU WANT ME TO HAVE ORAL COPULATION WITH YOU AT THIS TIME?

Uh, good God no, Sergeant? I mean… are you talking about receptive oral copulation, or…. You know what, it doesn’t even matter.

Oh, look here, gentlemen, we have ourselves a comedian! Private Jackson, I ask again, do you want to engage in any sort of intercourse with me?

I’m sorry, did I join the… gay army? It’s ok if you guys are the gay army… we just need to shuffle some paperwork around and get me transferred, you know, to the non-gay part of the… army.

Well guess what gentlemen? Private Jackson has bought you all a nice morning run with his comedy routine! That’s right, complain all you want, but we are going for a nice long jog, ladies. Prepare to fall out! An eighth of a mile jog and then back here for oral.

Uh, couldn’t we go a little further? An eighth of a mile is like once around this building.

Private Jackson, we all get it, you’re the company comedian. Now get moving.