September 20, 2012 · 9:51 am

Pamela Anderson

Pamela Anderson made her living by being the sexiest slut on the planet. She was the star of Baywatch (no offense to David Hasselhoff, but her bouncing breasts are better than yours). She had not one, but two sex tapes released to the public. Even Paris Hilton has more discretion. Pamela Anderson oozed sex appeal, and she was one of the few celebs that were sleazy enough that you though you had a shot with. But now she’s old and plastic and you feel dirty when you jack off to old pictures of her. It’s like wanking it to Britney Murphy. She’s dead and you’re a pervert. Pamela Anderson is long past attractive and a few miles past used. The sad thing is that most guys would still fuck her just to say they have. And you get the feeling she embraces that fact.

Critically Rated at 6/17

Written, Rated, and Reviewed by Brendan H. Young

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September 19, 2012 · 9:56 am

Crop Dusting

Crop dusting is the art of discreetly farting at a specific target as you casually pass by. You can crop dust an empty area (but that’s not fun). Most of the time you’re aiming at a specific person or a group of assholes. It’s pretty easy. Just build up some gas, nonchalantly walk by, and as you approach the target you let ‘er rip. Just make sure it’s silent and you don’t shit yourself. Don’t get caught. If they know that you just farted on them, you failed, and they will rightfully get pissed at you.

If you’re new to crop dusting, you should probably start off by crop dusting babies and dogs. Babies can’t narc on you and they’re crying all the time anyway. Dogs can’t talk and have a heightened sense of smell, so it’s the perfect crime. Practice makes perfect, but don’t get carried away.

Critically Rated at 13/17

Written, Rated, and Reviewed by Brendan H. Young

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September 19, 2012 · 9:54 am

Balding

Hey buddy, you’re balding. Accept it. Shave your head and free yourself of the follicles that betrayed you. Combovers aren’t hiding anything. Growing your remaining hair long to make up for your shiny dome is a lost cause. Stevie Wonder’s head is a punchline. I’m glad he can’t see this. There is nothing more pathetic than someone clinging to the few precious mammal strands on their head. They style it, they dye it, and they know each one by name. No matter what you do, it looks bad. Just let it go. It’s better to be accepted than laughed at. Bald heads are badass. Michael Jordan. Jason Statham. Jason Alexander. I rest my case.

Critically Rated at 8/17

Written, Rated, and Reviewed by Brendan H. Young

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September 18, 2012 · 10:05 am

The Sandman: Dream Country

Dream Country is the third and shortest volume of The Sandman series. It collects issues #17-20 and each of the four stories is self-contained. Calliope is about a writer who imprisons a Muse. A Dream of a Thousand Cats explores how our feline friends experience dreams. A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream shows the premiere of Shakespeare’s play performed in front of an unusual audience. Façade is about a former hero who desperately wants to die but can’t. Morpheus is almost a secondary character in the first three stories and doesn’t even appear in Façade. Dream Country deviates from the main storylines somewhat, but it is thematically relevant, and it has some of the most memorable moments of the series.

Calliope is the first story. Richard Madoc is the author of one successful book, but he is suffering from writer’s block and is way past the deadline for his follow-up novel. He makes a trade with another writer. He gives the writer a bezoar in exchange for Calliope, who is one of the Muses from Greek mythology.

Madoc spends the next few years spending his days writing and raping his secret prisoner. Madoc gets more and more success and fame, and Calliope becomes more and more depressed. She’s able to get a hold of Morpheus and you can tell that there’s some history between the two of them. Morpheus tells Madoc to give her up, but Madoc doesn’t want to because he needs ideas. So Morpheus gives him what he wants: ideas that never stop coming. The flood of excess ideas drives Madoc crazy, but you can’t feel sorry for a rapist.

A Dream of a Thousand Cats is one of the most memorable stories in The Sandman. It’s about a secret cat meeting with a special Siamese cat keynote speaker. The Siamese cat tells an epic story about falling in love with a Tomcat, which resulted in a litter of kittens. Her owners didn’t want the kittens and killed them, and the Siamese cat grows disillusioned with being a pet.

She has a dream where she goes to the Dreaming, and finds Morpheus in feline form. Morpheus tells her that back in the day cats were in charge and humans were subservient. But then man found out that dreams shape the world and a thousand humans dreamed that they were in charge and the world became what it is now. The Siamese cat goes around spreading her message, hoping that she can convince a thousand cats to dream of a world where cats are king again. You’re gonna love this story if you’re a cat person. Dog people might also find it interesting.

A Midsummer’s Night Dream is one of those comics that gets accepted as genuine literature. It even won a World Fantasy Award, the only comic to achieve that feat. It’s probably accepted by the mainstream because it deals with Shakespeare. And it does it in a clever way. Shakespeare and his theater troupe perform A Midsummer’s Night Dream for Morpheus and some notable guests from Faerie. Gaiman makes it meta because Robin Goodfellow (Puck), Titania, and Auberon are audience members and also characters from the play. Robin Goodfellow even takes over playing himself at one point. It’s one of the most creative takes on Shakespeare to date.

Façade takes an obscure and forgotten DC character named Element Girl and shows what happens to a hero that has given up. Urania Blackwell has been forced to retire, she has no friends or family, and no reason to live other than the fact that she can’t kill herself. Her superpowers won’t let her die, and she wants to. It’s a short and depressing story that ends on a happy note when she finally dies. Death can be a good thing for some people.

Dream Country is a great introduction to The Sandman. It’s short, it’s memorable, it’s significant, and you can see if you want to read the other volumes without spoiling the main plot. You can try the flavor of The Sandman and see if it’s right for you.

Critically Rated at 15/17

Written, Rated, and Reviewed by Brendan H. Young

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September 18, 2012 · 9:58 am

Early Morning Construction Work

If you use a jackhammer at 9:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning, you are a jackass. Early morning construction work is bad enough during the week, but it should be a crime on the weekends. People have the right to sleep in. They should have the right to kill an early morning construction worker. I know they are just doing their job, but there are a lot of jobs that don’t require waking up the entire neighborhood. Silence is golden so shut the fuck up.

Critically Rated at 4/17

Written, Rated, and Reviewed by Brendan H. Young

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September 17, 2012 · 9:47 am

The Marauder’s Map

The Marauder’s Map is one of the most important and magical objects in the Harry Potter Universe. Harry first comes across the Marauder’s Map in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The Weasley twins give it to him out of pity because he can’t go to Hogsmeade to buy candy. The map shows the entire blueprint of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and everybody’s exact location on the grounds. It is an extremely valuable and useful tool.

The Marauder’s Map is like checking in on Facebook. They know where you are and what you are doing. It’s an invasion of privacy, but no one gives a fuck. Everyone with a Droid or iPhone already has a personal Marauder’s Map in their pocket.

Back to geeking out. The Marauder’s Map was used multiple times throughout the remaining books to advance the plot. The only thing that bugs me… Why the fuck would the Weasley twins give it away? Why would anyone give it away? You can use it to see where everyone is around you. You could use it to steal, rob, rape, and kill. Or you could use it for good. Either way is cool. But you wouldn’t ever give something like that away for nothing. That’s the most unrealistic part of the Harry Potter saga.

Critically Rated at 12/17

Written, Rated, and Reviewed by Brendan H. Young

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September 17, 2012 · 9:44 am

Asking Someone What Ethnicity They Are

Both of my parents are multiracial and I am a mutt, a mixed breed with multiple ethnicities. I don’t look white. And I’ve noticed that if you aren’t white or black, it’s apparently an open invitation for people to ask what race you are. What the fuck does it matter? I’m American. That’s where I’m from, that’s what I am. Unless you are a census taker, you should never ask someone what ethnicity they are. You shouldn’t even care. That’s why Latinos and Asians never ask white people what ethnicity they are. Because they don’t give a fuck. It doesn’t matter what a person looks like. You wouldn’t ask an elderly lady how old she is. You wouldn’t ask a guy in a sailor suit if he’s gay. So why would you ask what race someone is? Don’t be a census taker. If you’re going to be asking personal questions, ask about hobbies, goals, and dreams. Not about the color of my skin.

Critically Rated at 7/17

Written, Rated, and Reviewed by Brendan H. Young

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September 16, 2012 · 10:09 am

Unsynchronized Sound

You’re watching a video on YouTube or maybe you’re still using a VCR and you notice that there’s a slight delay between the audio and the visuals. It’s not that obvious at first, but then you notice that his lips are still moving but he stopped talking a second earlier. You can’t ignore it once you’re aware of the unsynchronized sound. It’s annoying, it’s distracting, and it’s slowly driving you crazy. You can’t even enjoy porn if the sound/audio isn’t aligned. And if you can’t enjoy porn, you can’t enjoy life.

Critically Rated at 8/17

Written, Rated, and Reviewed by Brendan H. Young

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September 16, 2012 · 10:07 am

Losing a Pet

Losing a pet is like losing a family member. Except your pet never judged you, talked back to you, or insulted you. They might have shat on your floor and pissed on your clothes, but they never did anything to hurt you. Unless they bit you. But I digress… losing a pet sucks. The love and bond you share with a dog or a cat is enough reason to wake up and get out of bed each day. Having something to love and care for is a reason to live. But dogs and cats don’t live that long in the scheme of things, and they die for one selfish reason or another. And it hurts, and you feel devastated, depressed, and alone. People who never lost a pet don’t know the agony. They ones who have offer you sympathy. I’d rather have my dog back.

Critically Rated at 1/17

Written, Rated, and Reviewed by Brendan H. Young

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September 15, 2012 · 7:42 am

California Closing Time

California is legit. We have mountains, movie stars, the Pacific Ocean, really good weed, beaches, lakes, rivers, snow, and sunshine. We also have bars that close at 2:00 a.m. That part’s not so cool. They actually close earlier than 2:00. Most bars set their clocks ahead 15 minutes so they can close earlier. So they pretend to close at 2:00 but it’s really still 1:45. That’s fifteen minutes of drinking that they steal from you.

Most cool kids don’t even get to the bar until after 10 or 11:00 p.m. So you have less than three hours to drink and socialize before they kick you out. That’s not much time for fun on a Saturday night. When the bar closes it is time for the afterparty or to go home. California is awesome. California closing time is not.

Critically Rated at 4/17

Written, Rated, and Reviewed by Brendan H. Young

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September 15, 2012 · 7:40 am

Smoking Circle

If you are smoking a blunt or a joint with people, there is a certain amount of etiquette involved. First off, you should form a smoking circle. One, two, or three people supply herb, someone is chosen to roll it, and someone supplies a lighter. The person who rolls it gets to spark it. The people who supplied the filling get the next few hits. If you supplied the fire, you’re next. Some people are adamant about which direction the joint/blunt is supposed to go. It doesn’t matter if you pass to the left or the right. Just don’t break rotation. Hit it, pass it along and let the next one in line hit it. Stay in your spot and keep from moving around. And shut the fuck up when it’s your turn to smoke. The conversation can wait but the weed can’t, it’s still burning, and you’re wasting it. And I wanna hit that shit.

Critically Rated at 12/17

Written, Rated, and Reviewed by Brendan H. Young

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September 14, 2012 · 10:36 am

The Sandman: The Doll’s House (comic)

The Doll’s House is the second volume in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. It collects issues #9-16 and focuses on Morpheus trying to track down a Vortex that would destroy the Dreaming. While Preludes & Nocturnes is just establishing the basics, The Doll’s House story arc shows you what The Sandman is capable of doing.

Dream does a census of the Dreaming and discovers that four of his creations have escaped his realm. He must track down Brute and Globe, the Corinthian, and Fiddler’s Green.

Meanwhile a young lady named Rose Walker is learning some things about her family. Like she has an English grandma named Unity Kinkaid. It turns out that when Dream was imprisoned, Rose’s grandma was stuck in a slumber. Someone raped her, she became pregnant and the child was adopted without her ever knowing what happened. Now that Dream is back, Unity is awake and wants to make up for lost time with the family she didn’t know that she had. The family reunion is not complete; Rose has a little brother named Jed that’s been missing for a few years. Rose decides to track him down.

Rose moves into a boarding house temporarily as she starts following Jed’s trail. Her landlord, Hal, works nightclubs as a drag queen. There’s a disgustingly preppy/yuppie couple named Barbie and Ken. There’s Chantal and Zelda, an ambiguous lesbian couple with a collection of stuffed spiders. And there’s Gilbert, an older gentleman with a knack for helping Rose when she needs it the most.

Rose’s quest coincides with Dream’s quest when we find out that Jed is being held hostage by Brute and Glob. They kept Jed in their own Dreamland. Morpheus comes to reclaim Brute and Glob and Jed is free, but is soon picked up by the Corinthian.

There’s a break from the main storyline and we learn about Dream’s friendship with an immortal named Robert “Hob” Gadling. In 1389, Dream and Death stop by a small tavern and hear Hob telling his friends that he doesn’t believe in death, that we only die because we think we have to. He decides that dying isn’t for him. Dream grants him the gift of immortality and the two of them meet in the same tavern every hundred years. Hob’s story is an intriguing distraction.

Rose and Gilbert end up staying at a remote hotel that happens to be hosting a convention for serial killers. The Corinthian is one of the guests of honor. Dream’s creation has been roaming around killing people and eating their eyes. He has a thing for eyes, probably because he doesn’t have any. He has eye sockets lined with sharp teeth. He’s a nightmare and enjoys what he does. Gilbert recognizes the Corinthian and tells Rose to call for Morpheus if she’s in trouble.

Rose gets attacked by one of the serial killers and she calls for Morpheus and he comes and saves her. Then he destroys the Corinthian. Gilbert finds Jed in the Corinthian’s trunk and he’s somehow still alive.

Morpheus tells Rose that she’s a Vortex, and that she will destroy the dreaming unless he kills her. Gilbert shows up and offers to take her place instead. And it turns out that he’s not really human, he is the missing fourth creation. Before he was Gilbert, he was Fiddler’s Green. And he’s not a person, he is a location. Fiddler’s Green in a place. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Rose is resigned to her fate when grandma Unity comes strolling into the Dreamrealm. Back in the day, she would have been the Vortex, but shit got messed up when Morpheus got himself captured. Unity becomes the Vortex; Morpheus destroys her and saves the Dreaming. Rose gets to go and live with her mom and brother.

At the end of The Doll’s House you find out who raped Unity while she was sleeping. And even though I told you everything that happened, you still don’t know how it happened and that’s the interesting part.

Over the course of the book, you start seeing Rose’s reality crashing down all around her. Reality and Dreaming crash and collide and start to merge together. And you can already tell that Neil Gaiman has a master plan for his series. You can tell that he has everything planned out and that there’s no such thing as a minor character. It’s a very complex comic. Every character and every event is relevant to the overall story in some way.

I’m gonna keep saying that The Sandman is one of the best comics of all time until you read it. So get on it, because I’m tired of sounding like a broken record.

Critically Rated at 16/17

Written, Rated, and Reviewed by Brendan H. Young

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September 14, 2012 · 10:27 am

Getting a Bad Phone Call

Everyone texts these days. So when your dad calls you, your mom calls you, and your sister calls you all in rapid succession, you know that something bad has happened. Either Grandma just died or they finally found her body. Chances are that someone is hurt, sick, dead or dying when you get that many calls from family members. Maybe they have to put your dog to sleep. You sure as hell didn’t win the lottery. You know you’re probably getting bad news, you try to prepare yourself, and it still doesn’t help. At least it’s a phone call so nobody can see you cry.

Critically Rated at 5/17

Written, Rated, and Reviewed by Brendan H. Young

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September 13, 2012 · 10:10 am

The Miracle of Life

The miracle of life is not that you exist… It’s that you exist despite impossible odds. Think about it. Every single living organism came from another organism before it. In the case of complex life, you only exist because your parents existed and copulated and you popped out. You go back further and your parents only existed because your grandparents existed and they copulated and popped out your parents and somehow your parents met and out of all of his sperm and her eggs, you were the end result. And you go back further: your grandparents came from your great-grandparents, and on and on it goes. You can trace your fucking family tree all the way back to amoebas in theory.

It’s amazing to think that everything alive is only alive because their parents fucked and their parents before them fucked and all life is derived from the successful fucks that end up in births. So if you die a virgin, you might go to heaven but you didn’t contribute to anything down here.

Critically Rated at 17/17

Written, Rated, and Reviewed by Brendan H. Young

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September 13, 2012 · 10:05 am

Five Hundred

Five hundred is a pretty decent number. It is halfway to a thousand. That’s what this is. It’s the landmark 500th post on Critically Rated. Before this, I didn’t know that there were 500 things worth Critically Rating. Now I don’t know if I can stop judging the world. Five hundred posts is kind of a milestone. And you’re reading this too, so you are a part of history now. Congratulations. We did it.

Critically Rated at 13/17

Written, Rated, and Reviewed by Brendan H. Young

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September 12, 2012 · 10:25 am

Dead Bird Roadkill

Mankind created the wheel and then we created roads. And then we ran over animals and started calling it roadkill. Most of the time the roadkill in question is a creature like a skunk or raccoon, sometimes a deer, and occasionally a dog or a cat. They are mostly animals that walk to get around and they have no choice but to cross over highways, roads and streets.

So if you see a dead bird roadkill, that bird either was trying to die or deserved to die. That fucker can fly over the road, safely out of harm’s way. It’s a fucking bird. It should be in the sky, not on the fucking street anyway.

I know there are flightless birds that don’t have a choice, but I think they are just being lazy. They have wings, I can see them right there. So flap them and fly, you stupid penguin.

Mama ducks parading their ducklings into traffic doesn’t impress me either. Ducks are waterfowl. They should be in the water, not playing in the street. My mom taught me that what I was a kid. The mother duck isn’t setting her kids up for success pulling stunts like that.

A bird that ends up as roadkill is a failure. It literally failed at life and got hit by a car and died. I don’t feel sorry for dead bird roadkill and neither should you. You can’t reward stupidity.

Critically Rated at 8/17

Written, Rated, and Reviewed by Brendan H. Young

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September 12, 2012 · 10:20 am

“That’s What She Said!”

A lot of things get old. Not “That’s what she said!” jokes though. The brilliance of “That’s what she said!” is that it is a spontaneous reaction to a victim of awkward phrases. In the old days if someone said something that was vaguely sexual nobody would acknowledge it. Now you have to say “That’s what she said!” It’s a habit, it should be an impulse, and you shouldn’t even have to think about it. If someone says, “That won’t fit,” or “I’m still sore from the weekend,” your immediate response should be “That’s what she said!”

Critically Rated at 14/17

Written, Rated, and Reviewed by Brendan H. Young

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