Hello. Good to see you, and Happy Friday. Now, if you sit down we can get started. You may feel a cold sensation when we attach the electrodes to your skin, and a brief tingling when we begin introducing the Friday Post into your system. There’ll be some mild discomfort when the sarcasm starts to bond to your meninges: the best thing to do is try to relax. The entire process should only take about ten minutes. We’ll give you a prescription before you leave to help manage the hilarity. Don’t be alarmed if you notice any irony or cynicism when you go to the bathroom for the next 24-48 hours, that’s completely normal.
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Here we are, at the end of the second week of may, and there’s only one reasonable question to ask of ourselves and our fellow humans: what are the plans for this summer?
Whether it’s learning to surf, hangin’ by the fireside with some bros n’ brews, finding summer love, or just sitting on the beach getting blasted by ultraviolet rays for literally hours just to meet society’s expectations for your skin color, it’s important to squeeze every bit of enjoyment out of everybody’s favorite time of year: summahtime!
Thanks to contemporary technology, we can finally stop worrying when it comes time to make that perfect list of summer activities. Now, we can simply consult G.O.O.G.L.E. (Great Opportunities for Our General Laboratory Experiments), an online “search engine” that has become popular in the past few years. Boy oh boy, what’ll these scientists think of next? A machine that does children’s homework for them!? LOL!
Here’s how GOOGLE works: first, simply use the Input Grid on your Personal Computer to spell out what you want GOOGLE to find for you. We’re going to use the term “summer” for our GOOGLE demonstration:
GOOGLE then displays four suggestions for the word “summer.” Let’s begin to “surf the Web” by selecting the first item: summer pictures.
Let’s see what GOOGLE came up with:
Neat! I think we have the first item on our summer list! Get out a pad, a pencil or pen, and some crayons, glue, glitter, markers, and a selection of colorful stickers if you’re creative! At the top of your list, write #1. SEX ON A DYING TREE.
We’re off to a good start! Let’s see what other suggestions for our Summer Lists GOOGLE gives us when we pick “summer pictures:”
#2. WORSHIP STONE IDOLS
#3. AMBUSH AN OLD PERSON
#4. PUSH YOUR FRIEND OFF A CLIFF
Not impressed yet? Well, let’s not forget GOOGLE’s other suggestions from before! Let’s try selecting “summer infant.” Take a look at some of GOOGLE’s recommendations, and add a few to your list. Here’s what we picked for our demonstration:
#5. BIRTH A POD CHILD
#6. ELECT A TYRANT BABY
#7. MAKE YOUR OWN “BABY EXPERIMENTS KIT”
This summer is already shaping up to be a real blast! Let’s try one more of GOOGLE’s suggestions, “summer jam 2012” and see what it comes up with:
#8. MAKE NEW FRIENDS
Golly jee, GOOGLE sure does make life easier! Thanks to GOOGLE, we’re going to have a whole lot of fun in the sun, but not before we have even more fun in front of our computers, siphoning all our focus and mental energy into a plastic box full of wires and mediocre ideas.
Be sure to keep exploring the world of GOOGLE, and add some exciting items to your own Summer List.
We’ve done it again, everyone who didn’t die this week! We made it to another Friday. This post is dedicated to everyone who died between last Friday and now: the millions of innocent people whose lives were claimed by illness, hunger, and personal catastrophe… and even to the people who deserved to die. Yeah, I’m GOING there: this post is also dedicated to everyone who died this week that squandered the gift of human life— people who were zapped by the electric chair for killing old ladies, people who threw trash out of the window on the freeway then got their head chopped off by some plywood that fell off the back of the truck in front of them— this post goes out to you, and to remembering that some dead people were the worst and we ought to be grateful that the universe has finally destroyed them.
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Let’s get down to business.
The Avengers comes out today, and everyone has worked themselves into a rip-roaring tizzy about it. Forget about those people though, because this is my blog and we’re here to talk about my thoughts.
I’m a little worried about The Avengers. It will either definitively prove that director Joss Whedon’s amazingness increases proportionally with the budget of the project, or it will just be an over-hyped cinematic milkshake of overwrought Marvel tropes.
I know that’s harsh, but believe me, I want this movie to be good. I love explosions and robots and people getting punched through planets just as much as the next American. Even so, I can’t help but notice a pattern in the recent slew of Marvel films: a surplus of delightful heroes, such as…
Robot Downey Jr.
The Handsome Hammer
Latex Johansson
The Star-Spangled Frisbee
Nick Furious
The Incredible Risk
The Hunger Gamester
…and a lack of what we all know really makes a great superhero movie: great VILLAINS. The main antagonist in The Avengers is this pallid, uninteresting pagan:
Low-Key
Here’s what happened back when Thor was written:
“What if Thor had a brother who is like, WAY smarter than him but emotionally immature?”
“Yeah… that’ll do. Hey, do we have a main villain for The Avengers yet?”
“No.”
“FUCK. I told marketing we’d have one by the second quarter. Can we, like, just teleport Thor’s evil brother into the next movie instead of killing him at the end of this one?”
“I guess we have to now… God, I wish we had left some of the other villains alive, like…”
The Iron Lebowski
The German General
“What If The Hulk Was Evil” Man
I know that the better villain= better hero principle has been trotted out plenty of times before, but that’s because it’s totally true. You know it’s true. Which Batman reboot movie was better: Batman, or The Dark Knight? Oh, excuse me, I meant to ask “Qui Gon Jinn or the Joker?”
And with that, the Friday Post is over. I certainly hope everyone has a pleasant weekend. Go see The Avengers, and make sure you tell everyone who your favorite Avenger is before someone else picks that guy as their favorite. “No I’M Iron Man! I already have the costume!”
Bye guys.
[video]
The fresh scents of dew and coffee sweeten the springtime air. Peter Pianisimo charts the quickest way out of the office on a stolen fire escape plan. Your phone buzzes with life as texts loaded with movie showtimes crisscross the cellular cyberscape.
-excerpt from “Friday,” by Darrel Krack
What? Who? Wh- wha-?
Close your mouth, you gibbering fool. Your eyes deceive you not: the Friday Post is back! Once again, I am Tumbling through the Internet like a great, sticky ball that picks up tidbits and widgets along the way and posts them on a social network for your social pleasure.
Am I back to stay? Who knows! I had some time on my hands and I thought I’d see what was going on in the Tumblrsphere and maybe make a contribution for the first time since January.
HEADLINES ME LOVE
Well, there’s my contribution to society for today.
[video]
[video]
Braught to you by the letter F, the letter E’s twin brother who stepped on a landmine in ‘Nam.
JANUARY 27th, 2013.
This Friday Edition is being beamed to your eyes from my cousins’ house, where I am dog-sitting their rambunctious three-month-old German Shepherd while they’re away for the weekend. The pup has already tried to pull my laptop off the table and eat it. Come on, dog, you didn’t think this through. There are no benefits to eating a computer. Oh to be a free spirit, desiring the aluminum flesh of rectangular electronic servants.
Thank God this dumb month is almost over. I feel as though everybody genuinely wants to love the new year, but the experience of trudging through January changes our mind. We should move January to between July and August. That way, all the “J” months are in one group, as they should be, and January gets to be that month that used to be a bummer but is now the coolest kid in school. The other months will be like “hey, did you guys see January? He’s, like, totally changed.”
THE NEWS.
CONCLUSION.
Ah, “conclusion.” In Spanish, it means “with clusion.” I just realized that the last three items in the news that I posted were all about fast food, if you count pizza as fast food. I guess it’s not, really. Pizza is kind of its own category, its own realm within the greater dominion of things that are not that good for you. Hmm… now I really want pizza.
Let’s recap: the first news item was about divorce, the second was about drunks, the third, fourth, and fifth were about greasy food. No surprises, for we live in a terrible world full of wretched people!
Speaking of wretched people, what are you doing this weekend? Is the Superbowl this weekend or next weekend? I love that I don’t know! How liberating. And yet, I need to know: as a proprietor of a blog, I can’t miss my cue to make fun of people who like sports. If that game is this Sunday, and I haven’t made one offensive comment about the connection between the “heroes” of the field and game night spousal abuse, I’ll be remiss!
I hope you got your fill of blog, because this Friday Edition is over. I know, I know: it feels like we just began! But don’t worry. I’ll see you again next week. Now get out, before I change my mind.
[video]
Oh, I’ll imply what kind of person I bet New Gingrich is behind closed doors. I’ll open up Photoshop and I’ll imply it so hard.
Friday, YOU’RE here!?
JANUARY 20th, 2011.
I’ve got the Today Show on right now, as I am wont to do on Friday morning while I sit in the kitchen and write this post, and I can tell it’s a slow news day already: the banner at the bottom of the screen reads “ZEBRA BITES WOMAN AT TEXAS RANCH.” The woman is being interviewed right now, and they’ve got video and everything to prove it.
Seriously, this zebra just leans into a car, kind of sniffs this portly young lady for a minute, and then nips her shoulder, leaving a bruise that she is making way too big a deal out of. This is an exotic beast we’re talking about, you guys. I can understand wanting to see a zebra in person (they do seem mythical). I can understand luring the zebra, which your average Texan probably thinks is just a “striped horse,” into your car, and I can understand being upset that the zebra bit you.
Again, I can understand if you’re upset. But I can’t understand if you’re surprised. Surprised? When this foreign creature, its beauty forged in neighboring the Earth’s mightiest predators in the harshest of climates, decides its going to bite you?
THE NEWS.
CONCLUSIONS.
Hey you guys: it snowed last night! Allahu Akbar! The Admiral, not the Arabic elative of the word “great.” Yeah, I know what that means because of Wikipedia.
Speaking of Wikipedia, did all y’all enjoy that SOPA/PIPA blackout this week? You still don’t know what that is? Come on, now, people. You’ve had enough time to read up on this by accident. If you’re still looking to take your mind sponge out and sop up some wet knowledge, here’s educator Salman Khan’s explanation, one of the best I’ve seen.
If you want to see the Internet’s funniest reactions to SOPA, head over here, to Ranker. If you still can’t figure out why Wikipedia was down and there was a black box over the Google logo, maybe your on the list! Hey: I guess your stupidity was good for something after all!
This Friday Edition has a’flown the coop! Have a good weekend, everybody. See you later.
The Rise of the New Groupthink -
Conjure in your mind the dreadful moment when a teacher turns away from the board or podium and out from their lips dribble like a frothy poison the words “alright, now we’re going to form groups…” -the rest of the sentence doesn’t matter. It’s all downhill from there, for that noble educator has loosed from their arsenal that most unappetizing way to kill class time: GROUP WORK.
My favorite comedian (and indeed, one of my favorite humans) Paul F. Tompkins spars with an idiot on Facebook over the invalidity of SOPA. This particular fool linked to one of Paul’s albums, available as a torrent, in an ill-conceived attempt to subtly justify the passage of these threatening “anti-piracy” bills. By the way, if you still don’t know what SOPA and PIPA are or why they’re very bad, give some of the links here a ‘clickin. Inform thyself!
Well, here you go.
I love the smell of Friday in the morning.
JANUARY 13, 2012.
It’s not just any old Friday, ladies and gentlemen: today is Friday the 13th. I personally suffer from explicatriskaidekaphobia, which is a very real and debilitating fear that some fool in my life is going to take today as an opportunity to show off that the word “triskaidekaphobia” is part of their vocabulary. I am, and shall continue to be, unimpressed!
Superstition aside, is everyone enjoying their new year so far? There’s already as much in the news as I can barely keep up with, or care to, for that matter. Nonetheless, here I am writing a brand new Friday Edition just for you.
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Those three stars mean that some time went by between when I wrote the first two paragraphs and this current paragraph. I spent about fifteen minutes reading the news to see if there actually is a lot going on in the news, but there’s not, unless you count ravens learning how to snow tube. I unintentionally lied. Not a big deal, but if I was a samurai I’d have to kill myself to restore my honor. Do you have those moments, as I do, when you think to yourself, “thank GOD I’m not a samurai?”
THE NEWS.
Taxanomic Item: Sashae fiercae. An Australian researcher has styled a previously unnamed species of horse fly Scaptia beyoncae after, you guessed it, singer Beyoncé Knowles. Or is it Beyoncé Z? He was reportedly inspired to bestow the fly with such honors by the dense, golden hairs on the insect’s back.
Dictatorial Item: Me So Mourney. Rumor has it North Koreans who haven’t been acting sad enough about the demise of Kim Jong Il are being rounded up and sent to labor camps. It’s just like how you can grab cranky guests with those giant pincers in Roller Coaster Tycoon and drown them by placing them in a lake, in order to drive up the park rating.
Fast Food Item: McLiteracy. McDonald’s restaurants in the UK are “doing their part” to help kids learn to read by including short children’s books in their Happy Meals now in place of choking hazards. Of course, I’m sure extra-dumb kids can figure out some way to choke on books. Extra dumb children need to be eliminated anyhow, so this works both ways.
Presidential Item: Vermin Supreme. You may not have heard of actual presidential candidate Vermin Supreme. Well, I guess you don’t think every last one of your fellow Americans deserves a free pony (actual presidential campaign promise). Just watch the video.
Racist Item: Good Ol’ Fashioned Southern Education. A school in Georgia (the backwater dump, not the country) was caught giving math students suspiciously bigoted (actually, obviously bigoted) homework problems. Yes, folks: somewhere in this country, a teacher handed a student math homework that actually read “If Frederick receives 2 beatings per day, how many beating does he receive in 1 week?”
CONCLUSIONS.
This week saw a few fun stories, and I didn’t even get to write about the Papa John’s cashier who wrote Lady Chinky Eyes on a woman’s receipt, or Wolf Blitzer’s wonderful rant against politicians.
Ah, what a terrible world we live in! Just kidding. It’s not so bad. After all: the weekend is here, so now we all have a great excuse to- I dunno- watch movies? What do people do on the weekend that makes it so great? Let’s see… you don’t have to go to work if you’re in a 9-to-five deal, so I guess you don’t have to wake up in the morning, so I suppose that you can stay up later? Is that it? Is that the only difference? Is that all you can conjure, stupids?
This Friday Edition has slaked its lust for flesh once more, and now it slinks back into the the steamy, dark crevices of the Earth to await the passage of another week. Ta ta!
It’s January 6th, 2012. The Friday sun / o’er the eastern ridge it rides / and funny News Stories come beside.
It’s the first Friday of the year 2012! How are your resolutions going? Are you skinny yet?
Of course not. Unless you ingested some rare, hyper-metabolic worm which is hijacking your intestines as you read these very words, you’ve probably got at least six months left of avoiding saturated fats and whatnot. “Whatnot” is not a food, by the way; it’s a word.
Let’s see: so far, I’ve written a weird poem about Friday, I’ve made fun of you for your petty resolution-making, so now it’s time to talk about something else… Say, how was your New Year’s Eve? You know what I love about New Year’s Eve? It’s the END of the God-forsaken holidays. The entire holiday process begins the day after Halloween and trudges woefully along a rough, unforgiving path through Thanksgiving’s Tunnel of Caloric Self-Flagelation, then climbs all to swiftly the cold, bitter hill of December toward Christmas, a raging storm at the pinnacle of Holy Greed, and finally passes downward into the narrow valley of New Year’s, spitting the weary traveler out into the gray, chilly Forest of the Forsaken Resolutions.
Did you enjoy the way I compared the Holiday Season to a miserable hike through some awful wilderness? I feel like you did… I feel like your joy, which takes place in the future (relative to when I’m actually writing this), is radiating through the screen of my laptop and washing over me.
Gosh gee willikers, this Friday Edition has already gotten way
out of hand. Before I do anything rash, let’s get to this week’s News.
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Evolutionary Item: The Rise Of The Sharks. The world’s first hybrid shark, a mix of two distinctly different species of black-tips, was discovered in Australia this week. Scientists insist that there is still no threat of a “Jaws-style mega shark” coming into being, and yet one cannot help imagine these soulless predators working their wiles on progressively more adorable species until they become just appealing enough for some demented human to make love to. The coming of the Manshark Lord is at hand.
Internationalé Item: The Sacred Art Of File Swapping. The Missionary Church of Kopimism, which holds the keystrokes CTRL+C and CTRL+V as sacred symbols and takes file-swapping to be their religion, is now officially recognized by Sweden. Since my first car, an un-killable Volvo station wagon, and Minecraft both come from Sweden, I, your humble author, will be officially recognizing this religion as well.
Criminal Item: To Catch A Predator (While Trying To Catch A Mouse). While trying to blow a mouse away with a 9mm handgun, some poor drunkard accidentally shot his roommate. 911 was called, to their residence came the po-lease, and what to their wondering eyes did appear but a thirteen-year-old girl locked in the basement by the third roommate. Or maybe the mouse was the one who trapped the girl… clever fail-safe to set up in the event of your demise, Mouse Lord.
Carbonated Item: Jelly Pepsi Mouse. What’s this, another mouse-centric story? Is there a Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy joke in here somewhere? You, the reader, can decide. In 2009, a man claimed that he was drinking a can of Mountain Dew and when he tasted something repulsive and spat the soda out to reveal a dead mouse. Supergross already, but it gets worse: PepsiCo wants the case thrown out, asserting that any mouse who got trapped in a can of Mountain Dew would have been dissolved into a jelly-blob version of its former mouse self and would never have been detected in the soda.
Art Item: Definitely Defiled! A 36-year-old Denver woman was arrested this week for leaning on, punching, rubbing her butt on, and urinating on a $30 million work of art by 20th century abstract expressionist Clyfford Still. The museum says that the painting can be repaired, but didn’t comment on the exact nature of the damage… presumably because they didn’t want to say “well, there’s poopies and peepee on it” at a press conference. Very unprofessional. Oh, and make sure you check out the offenders mugshot: doesn’t she look like a bandit from Fable?
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There were quite a few charming news stories this week, most of them very hard to take seriously. People rubbing their butts on priceless works of art? Abstract expressionism being priceless? Disintegrating soft drink mice? Mansharks? Or do they prefer to be called “Menshark?”
I didn’t even get to write about the guy who tried to pass off a $1 million bill as authentic at a WalMart, or the woman who found her long-lost wedding ring on a carrot growing in her garden.
Did you enjoy this illustrated version of the Friday Edition? I’ve been wanting to do that for a while, now. Make this thing up all pretty like, spend WAY too much time on it… I enjoy writing the Friday Edition; it’s part of my routine now. Readers who are not blind (which is ALL readers. Brail doesn’t count. Those people are called “feelers” in my world) will have noticed that I have not been posting on Monday through Thursday like I used to. Fear thou not, readers: there are changes coming, I just don’t know what they are yet. I might be dedicating the blog to a better, possibly more elaborate Friday post since that’s what I enjoy most, or I might just go back to posting things during the week, or I might do something completely different altogether. The possibilities are endless, and that is both a blessing and a bane!
Don’t worry about the future. The future is stupid, worry about the present. Mind your breathing. Go skydiving. Learn archery. Buy a bird-watching guide and some binoculars. Use these props to cover up your obvious spying on your naked neighbors. Just kidding; nobody has attractive neighbors in real life. That’s in movies.
You’re still reading this? Hey, this Friday Edition is over! Ya bitter git now, y’hear?
The coming of Friday: it’s an Auld Lang Sign of the Apocalypse!!!
If you’re living in Samoa, then you’re totally boned, because they are skipping Friday this year. Yes, you read that right: a whole country is skipping your favorite day of the week so they can change time zones to match their neighbors’. How will those poor Samoans read the Friday Edition? It will just be the Saturday Edition for them… Oh, you didn’t know that if you read this post on a different day of the week, the word Friday actually changes to whatever day you’re on? Man, now you’ve got to question everything you know about, like, reality, man. It’s biodigital jazz.
I know what you’re thinking: “Nobody’s reading this blog in Samoa.” Well, you don’t know that. You haven’t talked to every person in Samoa to figure out whether they read Mondofacture. Next time you bring these so-called “facts” into the conversation, maybe you should check three sources like you pretended to do for those papers you all wrote in college.
Forgive my accusatory tone. It is the Friday before New Year’s Eve, and this is the last Friday Edition of the year! Did I plan anything special for it? Nope! But I will improvise!
——————-2011: ELEMENTS TO REVIEW——————-
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That’s it, you guys. There are only a matter of hours left of the year. Once again, you had 365 days to learn the words to Auld Lang Syne, and once again you FAILED. Say, what are your New Year’s resolutions this year? My New Year’s resolution is 1024 x 768. GET IT!?
So many things happened this year, and much disagreement and debate was had. Where were you when Rebecca Black’s Friday went viral? What convinced you that hip hop is now irrelevant: the Kia hamsters or Kreayshawn? Is Netflix still the best deal for streaming content? Is Nicki Manaj the Lizard Queen? These are definitely questions.
I hope everyone had a smashing 2011. It was a way better year than 2010, because it was a higher number. That’s math. With the blessing of myself and all the other Time Lords upon you, I bid you go forth and enjoy 2012.
This Friday Edition has ended. You know the way out!
