the rise and fall of dane cook

dane cook vexes me. i'm not sure what to make of him. at alternate times i either love him or loathe him. right now i'm kind of feeling sorry for him. i want to hold him, nurture him.

"dane, buddy, what the fuck are you doing?"

i guess that i first discovered dane cook around this time last year. i mean, i knew who he was long before that, largely due to his ubiquitous presence on just about everyone's myspace profiles, but i had never caught his act until last summer when a girlfriend of mine practically demanded that i download two of his comedy performances onto my ipod.

i listened to each, about 2 hours of dane cook comedy in total, and laughed my ass off. who am i kidding, i just love jokes about dicks, blowjobs, vaginas and anything else off-color in between. i was enraptured with his "somebody shit on the coats" routine. i also fell hard for "itchy asshole" and "creepy guy at work." i was officially a dane cook fan. an evangelical one at that. every chance that i got i implored upon people that they just HAD to listen to his comedy. dane performed at madison square garden a short time later and i, along with a large group of friends, many of whom having been coerced by me into dane cook fandom, attended the show.

and then something happened.

the dane cook tide began to turn. his tourgasm show premiered on hbo and was nothing short of a painfully unfunny, narcissistic abortion. then came his starring turn with jessica simpson in a movie that was bad, even by romantic comedy standards, employee of the month. towards the end of the year, time magazine named dane one of it's "most influential people of 2006," which is probably the precise point at which dane cook jumped the fucking shark. i mean, the cool kids, that being the pretentious uber-hipster types that revel in anointing themselves as the cultural zeitgeist, had probably issued an anti-dane cook fatwa long before i had even discovered him, for he had gained a considerable following prior to that time and the aforementioned cultural zeitgeist types love to hate anything that is popular on a grand scale, but i still held out as a fan. i would even occasionally argue with friends over dane cook's funniness or lack therof.

next came the seemingly ubiquitous advertisements for his new film with jessica alba, good luck chuck (by the way, and i'm the last person to have any license for pointing out the grammatical errors of others, but shouldn't there be a comma between the words "luck" and "chuck" in the film's title?). not only are the constant ads for the film annoying beyond even the head-on commercials, but the film that is previewed in the trailer looks shitteous! i pride myself on being able to predict with almost absolute certainty the quality of a film based solely on it's trailer and this film looks god-fucking awful. take into consideration that the trailer is the centerpiece of an expansive marketing campaign for any film. the scene snippets that are shown in that brief window into a film are generally agonized over in boardroom meetings and are supposed to be a montage of a film's finer moments. taking all of that into consideration, not only would i not pay $11 to go see it, i would pay $11 to insure myself against not having to ever see it at any point over the course of my life. the trailer just makes me want to punch myself in the balls. it's that bad.

further, the mere sight of dane cook just grates on me.

if it couldn't get any worse, cook now apparently has john mayer/james blunt emo musician aspirations. and it's bad. i'm not sure if this is a serious attempt at becoming a musician or if he's mocking that particular genre of music, but if he's being serious, god help him because he's lost his way. if he's doing this in jest, it's funny and i applaud him. regardless, the folks at VH-1's best week ever created a hilarious video spoof of the song by taking it and running it on top of some selected moments from dane's comedy act. i had tears in my eyes from laughing.



seriously, who could watch that and not feel a wee bit sorry for the guy? well, okay...don't answer that!


proof positive that lsu football fans are certifiably insane

this is, one of the best things like, ever. i'm a HUGE lsu fan, but i can't ever imagine going to these lengths. dude turns his backyard into a mini-tiger stadium. then he spray-paints his cat to resemble a bengal tiger, places him in a cage and then has a remote controlled mini-suv do a few laps with him just like they do at lsu with mike the tiger.

P.E.T.A. is not going to be pleased with this!




WTF saints?!?

i found this last night on dr. ashley morris' blog. it pretty much sums up my bewilderment and exasperation with the new orleans saints right now.

http://ohnowesuckagain.ytmnd.com/


ayn rand's atlas shrugged

i read atlas shrugged in college and hated it. i've been considering rereading it of late. this ny times article that ran over the weekend tempts me further for some reason.

ny times on ayn rand's atlas shrugged


cajun douchebaggery

in an effort to both prove that my skewering of douchebags isn't just limited to the guido and the northeastern preppy variety, i just have to run this photo that came to me this morning in an email from a reader in louisiana named lanie. she writes...

In my time reading your blog, you’ve made the disdain you hold toward the “guido” quite evident. So when I had the pleasure of encountering the lovely gentleman pictured, I immediately thought of you.

Aside from the obvious douchebaggery, I find it even more laughable that before taking this picture, he asked me to “wait a second” and moved the sunglasses from atop his head to his face, grabbed the mic (he was MCing a CD release party for a local radio DJ) and posed as such.

congrats to you mc douchequake, prosecution exhibit a that the douche epidemic does run deep in the heart of my homeland.

i blame nagin and blanco!