Am I a stereotype?

I find a lot of wasps tend to think of second generation Italian Australians as loud, violent, clubby, sexist, illiterate midgets. These people are not right, but neither are they entirely wrong. In fairness, I’m 5’6’’ and have never been arrested for a violent crime.

Also the idea of Italians slitting throats en masse is a myth largely based on The Sopranos, The Godfather and Joe Pesci’s role in the Home Alone franchise. You can’t rely on films to fill in all your cultural gaps. I don’t think of all Asians as living in fetid huts and selling gremlins to children. Some of them manufacture illegal software. They’re a varied people. That said my own grandmother wants to bludgeon a relative of hers to death with a piece of rotted wood. That was something she just announced. We don’t dwell on it. She also wants to exhume the body of her mother-in-law, so we think her interests are more broadly morbid, not just restricted to butchering extended family. I think she also predicts still births. Not with any accuracy — she just likes to put the prediction out there. She’s essentially anti-life. Almost immediately after her daughter (my aunty) gave birth, she asked: “Has the doctor mentioned you’re too fat?” Wow, just had a fetus ripped from my vagina, now I’m “too fat”, thanks Mum, it truly is a wonderful life.

In fairness, I don’t catch a lot of what she says. My family speaks a very crude Italian dialect. They’re essentially bogans. This also explains why first generations are generally known as illiterate, misogynist dogmatists. Many had limited education. They rule in their own way. These traits are rarely inherited by the second generation, although many are very Catholic. I’m also Catholic, but in the residual sense, i.e. not at all. Also unlike the first generation, I have never been teased because of my bloodline, except for my first boyfriend, who as I recall once said, “You’re a stupid dago bitch.” I said, “Dago? Dago is Spanish, you fucking moron.” What a relationship. It was only later that I discovered “dago” is actually Italian. Even so, it’s pretty fucking outdated. I don’t call the French “republican scum”. I call them “stinking frogs”. I kid, I kid, they’re a varied people.

Another difference between the generations is fiscal wealth. The prime directive of the first generation is to work extremely hard and bank thousands of bones. These people value “saving” unto itself. This trait is less common amongst the second generation; I, for example, prefer to throw money down the toilet. I would say my father has a strongly developed understanding of “rich versus poor”, but this implies I believe he “understands” anything, which I don’t. I accept that my father is some kind of genius, since he obviously is, but this is largely eclipsed by a kind of gleeful psychosis. I recall dining at a restaurant with a cousin of ours, when after my father loudly recommended he (the cousin) kill his ex-wife, a waiter asked my father whether he was finished eating his plate of chocolates. My father winced, waved his hand in exasperation and said, “Give them to the poor people.” The waiter looked around the table for some kind of explanation; we gave him nothing. Then, as the waiter backed slowly away, my father shot out a menacing finger and screamed, “Those with a sweet tooth.”

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Sharpest tools in the box (razor reviews)

Gillette Daisy

Product claims that “spring mounted blades adjust to [my] curves”. Is this product calling me fat? What an awesome start to a non-existent relationship. The blades, in any case, do not spring; the head merely pivots. Its function is satisfactory in this regard. “Lubrastrip” allegedly contains “grapeseed oil”. Unnoticeable. “Tear drop handle designed with a woman in mind”. Indeed? I see it is merely a pointed, rubberised stick. Apparently Gillett had a woman with very low standards “in mind”. Results are nevertheless pleasing.

Gilette Venus Vibrance

The selling point of this product is its battery-operated vibrating function. Necessary? By no means. “Exfoliating”, as the product itself claims? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I can prove nothing on this point. But I find these matters largely extraneous. The razor allows me to believe I am shaving in the not too distant future, or at least in an alternate 1985; this alone satiates me. It is an operation unto itself, granted, and relies on you having the patience to insert a battery, but it’s still more fun than killing yourself. The head glides fluidly along the perfect curve of my sculpted calf. I work out, don’t judge it.

Schick Intuition Plus

The “Intuition” alleges it “lathers and shaves in one easy step”, by means of its “all-in-one” razor blade wedged in a bar of soap — the idea being that the entire shaving process can be executed in a single, ongoing stroke. Reality differs. Although the motion is relatively fluid, the handle is fat, thus the head cannot be accurately manipulated. Further, the soap is merely soap. A small chunk rubbed on the skin does not foam or lather; it merely produces a thin, sud-like film, thus sharing the qualities of spit. When the soap chunk withers, the razors tend to sit proud of the head, but can be retracted by means of force.

Coles Women’s Twin Blade

“Twin Blade” appears simply too cheap to do anything other than spill blood. The handle is crude and brittle; the head is un-cushioned. These matters, however, are cosmetic. Product alleges a “perfect shave”. And indeed, assuming the legs have been immersed in bubbling water and smothered with a foaming gel, and assuming the strokes of the Twin Blade are short, gentle and strategic, “Twin Blade” does yield a perfect result. Pack of five allows the slow-witted woman to lose blades without consequence. And look, the product is even rendered in pastels. How unpredictable.

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The water myth

Listen well, my moist-faced friend: if you believe that the endless consumption of water will cultivate and preserve your soft, dew-like complexion, if you believe that two litres of water a day is an eternal truth, if you believe that too much is never enough, if indeed the precious Evian is delicately poised at your lips even now, stop, calm down, breathe, go to your safe place, because what I am about to tell you threatens to destroy your worldview.

The notion that you must consume two litres of fluid water a day is a myth, unsubstantiated by actual scientific proof, the product of lay persons latching onto the fact that we pass roughly two litres of water a day in the forms of sweat, urine and stool, thus perpetuating the belief that these two litres must be replaced in the form of pure water.

“There is no evidence to support this,” Kidney Health Australia experts say. “The best way of knowing how much to drink is to drink enough to satisfy your thirst.” Dermatologist Dr Belinda Welch agrees: “It is not necessary to be continually drinking water if you are not thirsty.” She maintains that “around a litre a day” should normally suffice. “If you are passing a lot of urine, you are probably drinking too much.”

But surely if water hydrates my skin, more will only moisten it, no? No. Firstly, a normally hydrated person will not develop better hydrated skin by drinking more water ad infinitum. There will be no significant change beyond what is achieved by a basic level of hydration. Secondly, there is a little thing called “water intoxication”. It means you die. I happen to know a certain person, a friend of a friend, who is rather enthusiastic about his gym-based activities, whom over the course of a dinner party I discovered drinks so much water every day that he is unable to sleep through the night, due to his chronic need to urinate. (Incidentally, this was pretty much all he had to talk about. Great party.) I advised him against this demented sleeping pattern, mentioning amongst other things the long-term hazards to the brain which his behaviour poses. He replied: “Water is more important.” Such is the cult of water. The lay media has drilled the dictum “drink more water” into society’s collective brain so frequently and with such vigour that this person actually believes he is vital. Yet he and the many others who share his worldview are actually engaging in behaviour that is dangerous and possibly fatal. The balance of the body’s electrolytes can be so disturbed by excessive water consumption that the heart can be brutalised, and the brain can in fact uncontrollably swell, thus attempting to crack open the skull, which it can’t, and will therefore terminate. (It happened last year in the US when a woman was forced to “hold her wee” for a radio competition. She died crying in her car.)

This is only the beginning. The water myth runs deeper still. The common understanding is that these two litres of water must be consumed in the form of pure water. Yet water exists in so many forms other than pure water. Milk? 84 percent water. Watermelon? 85 percent water. Diet Coke? 99 percent water.

But wait, I can’t drink a caffeinated beverage. That will dehydrate me, no? No. Again, the lay media has obsessively claimed that every cup of coffee and tea carries a burden of guilt, acting as a diuretic (a substance that tends to increase the discharge of urine), and thus must be followed by an additional glass of pure water, lest one dehydrate and prune. “A short-term diuretic does not equal dehydration,” says US Professor Larry Armstrong, the first scientist to conduct laboratory investigations in caffeine consumption and hydration status. “Think about how much caffeine Americans consume. If the myth is true, why aren’t hospitals filled with severely dehydrated people?” All fluids count, and Kidney Health Australia agrees: “From the kidney viewpoint, all fluids, including those containing caffeine, should count towards the daily fluid total.” Indeed, Armstrong’s research has proven that caffeinated fluids “contribute to the daily human water requirement in a manner that is similar to pure water”.

There is an associated myth that high water consumption facilitates bowel movements, which has been echoed to me personally by colonic hydration therapists. There is reason to doubt even this. A recent study at the University of Texas medical school has shown that additional fluid intake will increase urine flow, but found no “significant change in stool output”.

Of course, the eternal benefit of water over everything else that exists is that it contains zero calories, which is of course rather convenient, but since drinking it in superabundance will not improve the skin any more so than consuming less generous quantities, what will then successfully moisten one’s face? It is first critical to appreciate that the exterior layer of your skin is dead. It therefore cannot be saturated by water consumed internally. It simply will not reach it. (Although recent studies published in Allure have shown that omega-3 fish oil tablets can soothe particularly dry skin, and thus sounds rather worthy of investigation.) Your outermost facial skin is largely the product of your external world — the wind, the sun, the air conditioner that modulates the temperature of the workspace or classroom into which you have snuck this magazine — and thus must be moisturised in an external fashion. And indeed, as we in Australia are even now being bitch-slapped by the dehydrating hand of winter, the external world threatens one’s dewy face more so than usual.

Skin experts advise that hot showers, one of winter’s sweetest luxuries, pervert the skin and suck its moisture, and should thus be militantly short, lest the shower rob you of your moisture. Skin should be scrubbed when dry, according to Marcia Kilgore, founder of Bliss Spa New York, a sentiment shared widely amongst the beauty community — indeed, those of you who are exfoliated professionally (in day spas, for example) will be well acquainted with the exquisite agony of dry scrubbing; I recommend this personally. Beauty experts also counsel the use of moisturising cleansers — yours should contain glycerin or petrolatum. And moisturiser, as you are no doubt already aware, should be applied to damp skin — water encourages the absorption of the lotion.

So there you have it. Water. Drink it less neurotically. You may keep your Evian on hand, my moist-faced friend, just don’t obsess. Chin chin!

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When Star Trek isn’t awesome

Because Star Trek: TNG is the greatest franchise, not just of Star Trek, but of anything whatsoever of all time, it’s easy to forget just how many episodes of this series actually blow.

Let’s take a random example: the episode “Lonely Among Us”. It’s a typical day on the Enterprise when they pass through some gas and pick up a sentient being, which becomes trapped in the ship’s circuitry, and somehow breaks down the ship’s helm. When the sentient being leaves the helm’s console, the helm completely recovers power, leaving Wesley to ask LaForge, “Hey, what gives with the helm recovering power for no reason whatsoever?” To which LaForge says, “Yeah, whatever.” Hmm, thank you Chief Engineer Brain Squad, remind me to ask you nothing ever again.

The sentient being then enters Picard, so Picard is possessed (hmm, that old nugget, when is he not), so he redirects the ship back to the gaseous cloud, because the sentient being wants to return to its gas home. When the crew starts to complain, Picard electrocutes them so they’re all temporarily dead, convenient, then Picard beams himself into the cloud, somehow turning himself into a gas on the way. Then the crew regains consciousness, and Deanna says, “Oh, yeah, Picard is fine, he separated from the sentient being.” He separated? Wow, that was convenient.

So Frakes shrugs and says, “Well, let’s go home,” when someone else says, “Hang about, check out this big P being spelt out in LEDs on the helm’s console.” “P?” Frakes says. “P for Picard?” No, P for Poo. Yes, of course, P for Picard, you idiot! Good to know you’re in command of a vehicle that can destroy worlds.

So now everyone wonders how they can release Picard’s gas, when Deanna says, “Hey, maybe he remembers that the transporter stored his DNA and he’ll go and meet us back there?” I don’t know, Deanna. Would Gas Picard remember a thing like that? On the one hand, he’s able to spell out his name in annoying places, but on the other, what’s the memory span of gas?

So they run to the transporter room and hit the button that says “reconstruct Picard into a human being now”, and the process is instantly successful. Then Tasha Yar comes in and says the aliens from the B-plot are still fighting. Then Picard says to Frakes, “Actually, I think I will have that rest now!” What? Okay, you just resolved nothing, other than “Picard has naptime”, which satisfies no narrative requirements of this episode whatsoever.

The thing that probably struck me most about that episode was how little I cared whether Picard lived, died or lived on as a gas in space. “Lonely Among Us” is obviously not the worst episode of Next Gen, but it comes pretty fucking close. No. That particular fetid egg would come six seasons later in the form of a Beverly-heavy episode known as “Sub Rosa” (Latin, trans: “under the rose”).

The episode opens with Beverly Crusher’s grandmother’s funeral, taking place on a random M-class planet, which happens to be a reconstruction of Scotland, circa ye olde. At the funeral, Beverly notices a bad actor lurking around the coffin; he throws a rose on Old Lady Crusher’s death box and walks away.

Meanwhile Picard is doing what he usually does — ineffectual bullshit. This time he is chatting with an old man alien who explains why the planet is a reconstruction of Scotland. “People wanted it to be the real Scotland, so we transported whatever shit we could find from the actual Scotland and dumped it here.” If people wanted the “real Scotland”, why wouldn’t they, I don’t know, go to Scotland? But no, I forget, you destroyed it in order to create this theme-planet, congratulations.

So Beverly wanders around the old lady’s home when generic Scottish idiot blasts through the door and screams, “Bah bah! You have to destroy the candle!” Beverly, apparently taking no interest in ways to save her life, runs away, taking the old lady’s diary back to the Enterprise. Then Beverly runs into Picard and tells him that, according to the diary, Old Lady Crusher had a “lover”. Picard, his attention apparently piqued by the old woman’s sex life, discusses Old Lady Crusher’s “libido” until Beverly leaves him to stand alone in the corridor musing about old lady sex. News flash, Picard, you are in command of a war vessel, this isn’t the time to daydream about sex with the elderly and make everybody sick, you are so useless, I preferred you as a gas.

Back to the episode: we watch Beverly sleep while a voice says “Beverlyyyyyyy!” Beverly then tells Deanna that she had an explicit sex dream. Wow, that’s interesting, I thought you ran the surgery, apparently that can wait for bullshit like this. When Deanna pushes for details, Beverly says, “Well, I did fall asleep reading a particularly erotic entry in my grandmother’s journal!” Really? I assumed a mental image like that would make you throw up, Beverly, but no, apparently you actually enjoy conjuring mental pictures of your own family nude and mating, interesting, thank you, that’s knowledge I really want to bank.

So Beverly, now obsessed with the voice, discovers that it belongs to a ghost called “Ronin”. When Ronin takes corporeal form, we discover that yes, he is indeed the same bad actor from the funeral, and that not only did he plough the old lady’s meat tray, but he has in fact been ploughing all the Crusher women for the last thousand years. “I live in the flame,” Ronin says. Yes, I see. And the puffy shirt you wear, does that live in the flame too? Tell me this, Ronin, how have you been laundering a puffy shirt for the past thousand years? “In the flame”? In the little washer and dryer “in the flame”?

So anyway, Beverly is so in love with Ronin at this point, she resigns her post as ship’s surgeon (hmm, big loss) so that she can move in with Ronin on Scotland The Planet, at which point Picard comes after her and says, “So show me this guy, since he’s so awesome.” Ronin gets extremely pissed by this, so turns into a bolt of lightning and electrocutes Picard. Picard plays dead for a while (wow, I take it back, he does have a skill), then some other stuff happens that I forget, but no doubt contained the same level of bullshit as the rest of this episode, and then we somehow reach the point where the only way to solve the “Ronin” mystery is by exhuming Old Lady Crusher’s corpse. Do they have permission to do so? They check with the old man alien, he tells them to go for it!

So LaForge and someone else are whistling away, digging up the rotting corpse, when Ronin, still in his bolt of lightning form, blasts himself into the old lady’s fetid remains and makes her arms fly out, shooting bolts of electricity into LaForge and the other guy, leaving them temporarily dead. BTW: since when is LaForge in charge of digging up corpses, seriously? Surely the Chief Engineer is needed, oh, I don’t know, somewhere on the vessel, maybe near, I don’t know, the engine — but no, sorry, I forgot, when you need someone to exhume a corpse in a hurry, you can always lose the Chief Engineer. Hey, LaForge, can you scrub my toilet?

So anyway, then the old lady’s head swivels on its axis and says, “Beverlyyyy! It’s me, your grandma!” Then Beverly suddenly gets a clue and says, “No, you’re Ronin, and you’re a parasite alien who requires a plasma conduit, i.e. this candle, in order to stay alive!” Okay, that fundamental information was delivered extremely quickly and came out of nowhere whatsoever. Then Ronin resumes his corporeal form, and tries to fly off (oh, he can fly now, why fucking not) so Beverly phasers the candle (i.e. his conduit), he dies, the end.

Why does this episode even exist? Apart from the fact that it features Star Trek cast members, it bears no actual resemblance to Star Trek. Star Trek is a big show. It asks big questions: what it is to be human, what it is to be moral, what is reality, what is the universe, what is an alien, who am I, who are you — not what happens when stupid Scottish ghosts nail old women. Obviously someone needs to carry the blame for this episode, and before you go wagging your fingers at Frakes (who receives this episode’s directorial credit), I would counsel you to consider who is credited as the episode’s “source material” author. That’s right, Jeanna F. Gallo AKA Anne Rice, who I don’t actually hate, but does serve to explain why this episode of Star Trek plays out nothing like an episode of Star Trek.

Read more about this issue of Nerds Gone Wild!, available to buy here.

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Don’t get chumpatized

King of Kong was originally conceived as a documentary in the tradition of Spellbound — a handful of obsessive social retards gather together for a seminal event relying on meaningless skills, this time starring competitive arcade gamers — but filmmakers Cunningham and Gordon “always held out hope to find some form of man versus man, mono-e-mono competition”. They rapidly discovered that in the classic arcade gaming community microverse “all roads lead to Billy Mitchell”, Donkey Kong world record holder, Pacman world champion, a captain of industry, hot sauce baron, the greatest arcade gamer alive, and omnipotent totem to the scorekeeping collective known as Twin Galaxies. (Also looks like Nick Cave. Sort of. They share an evil beard.)

Cunningham and Gordon heard Mitchell’s solid gold legend echoed by classic arcade gamers throughout America. “If you could hack into the machine, and program it to play itself, you couldn’t even program it that well,” one said. But interviews with Mitchell at his hot sauce company base in Hollywood, Florida, revealed something more intriguing to the filmmakers; it seemed that irrespective of which direction the interview veered, Mitchell refused to mention a certain name, the name of the man that challenged Mitchell’s Donkey Kong world title, the man poised to threaten Mitchell’s eternal legend, the man whose home was just broken into — Steve Wiebe.

The documented byproduct of the following two years would portray the mortal combat between these two men, Billy Mitchell as gaming overlord and Steve Wiebe as beaten dog — Twin Galaxies having broken into his home, torn apart his Donkey Kong machine, and accused him of board tampering (thereby manipulating the outcome of the high score, which would have crushed Mitchell’s enduring legacy), ultimately accepting Mitchell’s scores over his own. A tear rolls down Steve Wiebe’s cheek. Audiences wipe away their own.

“I try to promote Twin Galaxies as integrity above all,” referee Robert Mruczek says onscreen. “I will do that with my dying breath.” Yet time and again, King of Kong shows the Twin Galaxies collective deny Wiebe any glory in order to restore and maintain the legend of Billy Mitchell. They reject Wiebe’s high score video tapes after months of speculation and breaking into his home; they accept Mitchell’s within minutes. The injustice appears gross.

“The stuff [Mitchell] did to keep tabs on Steve and control him was far greater than we could actually show,” Gordon would repeat to press. “He is a true puppet master, and really rules this whole group of guys [Twin Galaxies]. He tells them where to walk, where to be, what to do, what to say — it’s unbelievable. Billy is such a good gamer that when he’s finished beating the games, he moves on to play games with people. And even we became a part of that.”

Irrespective of Mitchell’s gameplay, the film would paint a vivid, unconstrained portrait of both men — Steve Wiebe, tender, innocent, defeated man with wife and adorable children, and Billy Mitchell, Machiavellian turd. “I have a bit more sympathy for him that most,” Gordon told Ugo.com. “I think he’s driven by a profound desire to be perfect and live up to the guy that he was when he was seventeen. He got an unbelievable amount of attention at a very young age. Now he’s sort of fossilised and petrified, sort of frozen in time.”

Since the film’s US release, the blood within the competitive arcade gaming community, which was already soiled, has turned aggressively fetid. Those depicted as Billy Mitchell’s peons in the film, Brian Kuh and Dwayne Richard, have turned up at US screenings of the movie to scream at audiences and denounce the film as bullshit. “They bought their tickets, I think,” Quint from AintItCool.com recollects. “I know they weren’t invited to be part of the evening; they just decided to show up and shit on Wiebe’s day. It’s okay, they were hissed. And Dwayne Richard was threatened with expulsion from the theatre because he wouldn’t shut the fuck up during the first early showing. So, yeah … class act.”

Meanwhile at the Twin Galaxies base, founder Walter Day has made a series of official statements, which undermine the film’s credibility in every conceivable detail, beginning with the fact that the film ignores another Donkey Kong record holder — Tim Sczerby. “Billy Mitchell scored 874,300 points [on Donkey Kong in] 1982. His record stood until 2000, when Tim Sczerby scored 879,200. A few days later, Billy himself phoned Tim and congratulated him. At no time did Billy Mitchell, in a fit of desperation, attempt to wrest back his world record. In fact, he hardly cared about the loss and went about his normal life as a father of three children and hot sauce manufacturer.”

Given this information, Walter maintains, why would Billy now seek to specifically crush Steve Wiebe? Indeed, why would Twin Galaxies seek to facilitate Billy’s crushing of Steve Wiebe? “Filmmakers are expected to use fiction to tell a story,” Walter says, “however, the public expects a documentary to tell a true story, based on all the facts. In the case of The King of Kong, an exclusive set of facts were favoured that supported a particular storyline, while other facts were carefully omitted or overlooked.”

If this is the case, if Gordon and Cunningham did overlook or misrepresent certain facts, if in fact Billy Mitchell is not the turd and puppet master The King of Kong portrays him as, then what exactly was overlooked? One man. One grudge. Two words: Mister Awesome.

“I’ve got news for you. Bill Mitchell’s a lot worse than that movie makes him look,” Mister Awesome (birth name: Roy Schildt) tells me on the phone from his home in California. “He claims he was the first guy to get a perfect Pacman. What a lot of people don’t realise is that he was in a contest with Rick Fothergill. They were competing for the first perfect Pacman at Funspot. Neither one of them got it. At the end of the contest, they made an agreement that they were going to play for it again next year. Bill Mitchell snuck up there a month later, played and won. That’s how he got to be the first perfect Pacman — by sucker-punching the other players and conning them into not playing, so he could play unopposed. That’s a true story. I actually caught up with Rick Fothergill and he didn’t want to talk about it. Bill Mitchell’s been sucking up to him for years, sending him money, sending him hot sauce. He’s an idiot, what can I tell you.”

Mister Awesome, former professional body builder and Hollywood fitness trainer, set the world record on Missile Command in 1985, thus earning not only the world title, but the first ever place in the “Video Hall of Fame”, a laurel Mitchell considered misplaced. “He had five world records, and I only had one world record,” Awesome says. “I told him, ‘Sure, you have five records, but your records are mediocre. My record is a super record.’

“After I had the argument with Bill over who was more deserving to be in the Hall of Fame, while I was playing a game, he took my gym bag and he threw it in the trashcan. He was 19 years old at the time. He just did it to upset me. That’s the way he does things. Nothing was stolen. I had my wallet in there. They were all laughing at me. I was like, ‘Where’s my gym bag?’ I was really upset about it. Then Bill Mitchell was laughing and said, ‘I think I saw someone put it in the trashcan.’ So I went over to the trashcan and sure enough my gym bag was down there. I even had my plane ticket in there. You don’t forget something like that. The guy’s evil, what can I tell you.

“After Bill Mitchell threw my gym bag in the trash can, it was just all downhill from there. Every time I’d turn around I’d have an argument with somebody about something.” Awesome’s relationship with Twin Galaxies would continue to rot to the present day and lead ultimately to the withdrawl of Awesome’s Missile Command high score from Twin Galaxies’ records.

When I ask Ed Cunningham to explain the dispute over Awesome’s score, he explains the matter thusly: “There are six digits that keeps the score in Missile Command, so you literally cannot score more that 999,999 points. When you hit 1,000,000, it rolls over to zero, just as it does in Donkey Kong. If someone’s not specifically watching your screen for basically the entire game, your screen can read 695,000, and no one can know that you’ve actually scored 1,695,000. Roy [Awesome] claims that he did in fact roll it over and that his world record is 1,695,000. There are people [Twin Galaxies] who have claimed that he in fact didn’t roll the score over and that he only scored 695,000.”

I relay this story to Awesome. “Oh, Walter Day claims he didn’t see the rollover, is that what he says? He’s a liar. He lies all the time. I met him at California Extreme in 2007, and I asked him, ‘What’s your official reason for taking down my score?’ And he said, ‘For bad behaviour.’ He changes his story like the weather.”

Awesome acknowledges that his catalogue of published work may be considered crude. “It’s not exactly family entertainment,” he says. Indeed, Awesome’s comic book autobiography, The Comic Book Life of Roy Schilt, details a methodology for picking up and inseminating women en masse. The method is based on Awesome’s own empirical findings, having publishing photos of his own naked form in Playgirl magazine, alongside his vital statistics including sperm count, and home phone number. Awesome’s forthcoming autobiographical sequel will include a “Rich and Famous Fellatio Hall of Fame”, which catalogues all the Hollywood celebrities Awesome has captured giving him blowjobs on a secret video camera lodged in his trouser pocket. “Roy Shildt will lead the USA,” Awesome’s website states. “His Eight Year Mission: To seek out and expose new scumbags, with a camera hidden in his jockstrap.” Such behaviour, Awesome maintains, is a feeble reason to invalidate his score.

“All this bullcrap about me not having that score is complete crap created by Bill Mitchell. Let me tell you something: Billy Mitchell is the true owner of Twin Galaxies. Walter Day is just a puppet. He owns that company. He owns all the people. He basically controls everybody, and when he wants something done, he’ll just find some excuse to do it. Walter Day is just point blank lying. He. Is. Paid. To. Lie. Can I prove he’s lying? Well, I’ll leave that up to you.”

For Awesome, Steve Wiebe was a tool that allowed him to crush Mitchell’s Donkey Kong legacy, thus avenging over twenty years of fetid blood. Wiebe accepted Awesome’s financial support and indeed, according to Twin Galaxies referee Robert Mruczek, his legal representation. (Mruczek maintains that Awesome issued legal missives to Twin Galaxies demanding that Mitchell challenge Wiebe to Donkey Kong at a certain event, or Awesome himself would declare Wiebe champion by default; “The scheme failed miserably,” Mruczek says.)

The King of Kong makes clear that Wiebe’s alliance with Awesome was a “death sentence” to Wiebe’s perceived credibility to the Twin Galaxies collective, but does not make clear that it was this — specifically this — that Mitchell found so repugnant. Indeed, before Wiebe’s alliance with Awesome was revealed, Mitchell and Wiebe enjoyed amicable relations, participating in joint interviews and shared stagetime at assorted arcade celebrations.

“It’s funny, if ‘funny’ is the right word, which it isn’t,” Billy Mitchell says in an interview with MTV, after viewing The King of Kong. “I don’t have a problem with being a villain,” Mitchell tells MSNBC. “I have a problem when they criminalize others and show good people to be corrupt or dishonest or incompetent.” Mitchell claims he is seeking legal representation to avenge his honour and “quest for the truth”.

“Yeah, we’re not buddy-buddy,” Cunningham tells me. “I’m not getting Christmas cards from him, but my conscience is clear. I think going forward I would like to keep an open dialogue with him. I don’t know that we’ll ever be friends. I don’t know that he wants to be my friend, but that’s not really what it’s about. It’s complex. And in his way, Billy is a very complex individual. When I called him, I expected him to yell at me, and I was fully willing to listen to him and let him vent, and that’s not what he did. We had a very analytical discussion about the film. It was a very interesting conversation to say the least, but not what I expected, which is what Billy consistently does. Billy is consistently more interesting than you think.”

More interesting than perhaps any of this, perhaps more interesting than even the truth, is the fact that so many people’s lives can be defined by a score, the fact that so many lives can be made so miserable over Donkey Kong — indeed, the fact that anyone cares.

Read more about this issue of Nerds Gone Wild!, available to buy here.

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Atreyu: what became of thee?

People born in the early-eighties, and those eras that shoulder it, tend to recall children’s films of their time as unusually dark and awesome. And, in their own minds, they are correct.

The key releases in that canon, as you will no doubt recall, were: Dark Crystal (1982), The Neverending Story (1984), Return to Oz (1985), Labyrinth (1986) and Willow (1988). Others would try and put a film like Ladyhawke (1985) in there; I will not on the grounds that it is the worst film I have ever seen (Michelle Pfeiffer is a woman by night and a hawke by day, Rutger Hauer is wolf by night and a man by day, some bullshit happens, the whole thing is explained in a speech I couldn’t be bothered listening to by Leo McKern in the role of annoying old man who lives in a hole and waits to deliver critical information at inconvenient times).

You will notice that the key releases catalogued here all have something in common. Indeed, they have everything in common. Despite the fact that each of these films takes place in a slightly varied medieval fantasy land, they are almost exactly the same story — child or midget requires the help of other midgets or local mental defects to defeat a totalitarian government, wins. I fancy this paradigm was established by Dark Crystal since it preceded all other aforementioned key releases, and was perpetuated on the basis that Dark Crystal grossed billions, thus establishing both the anatomy of the “dark midget” genre and its cash potential.

Viewing these films as an adult tends to crush one’s inner child. The ending of Return to Oz is one of the worst narrative resolutions I’ve ever seen — the evil overlord eats an egg, turns out he was allergic to eggs, dies. He might as well have had a terminal reaction to eating Dorothy’s shit. The Neverending Story’s narrative closure is possibly even worse — after Bastian saves Fantasia by giving the empress a new name (“Moonchild”), he assumes control of the universe, and demands a ride on Falcor, whom he careens into the streets of the real world in order to chase his school yard tormentors into a garbage bin. I recall enjoying this revenge sequence as a child, but as an adult cannot buy it conceptually, nor the voiceover that follows — a man’s voice manifests out of literally nowhere and announces, “Bastian had many other adventures, but that’s another story!” Yes, another “neverending” story, no doubt. This conclusion owes something to the fact that director Wolfgang Petersen chose to adapt only half the film’s source material, the 1979 novel Die Unendliche Geschichte; in the original text, Bastian, after using Falcor as a weapon of terror, becomes consumed by his lust for power, beats Atréyu and launches a coup d’état against the Childlike Empress, Moonchild, or “Mondenkind” in the original German.

Narrative chasms notwithstanding, The Neverending Story is an unspeakably awesome production, the emotional intensity of which does not dwindle with time. Owing much to the work of Italian composer Giorgio Moroder (also composer for Scarface, makes sense, the synth-work is conspicuously awesome on both counts), Neverending Story was the most expensive German film ever produced — its legend would spawn a franchise, attract an unusual amount of morbid crap (the film’s editor, Jane Seitz, also editor on Christiane F, would commit suicide shortly after the film’s release; the sequel’s star, Jonathan Brandis, would hang himself as 27, allegedly depressed by his lagging career) and would immortalise Atréyu in the eternal dark midget cosmoverse.

Of course, the dark midget genre boasts an epic sexual pull. Those raised on it will no doubt recall which character they themselves held precious — Sorcha, Sarah, Jareth, Jen, Kira, what have you — but for so many younger women, it was Atréyu, his perfect skin, his soft ropes of hair, his sad and devouring eyes, that seized their tender hearts. Not me. No, I fear my own tastes were a little more mature, a little more Val Kilmer-based. But the power in the young Atréyu’s performance did not escape me, as indeed it does not escape me now, for the young actor’s performance has not been spoiled with time.

Inheriting natural charms from his paternal Native American bloodline (family photos reveal a staggeringly handsome old man Atréyu), actor Noah Hathaway, 13 at the time of the film’s release, gave unto the role, performing all his own stunts, as per the demands of director Petersen. In more recent years, Hathaway has been eager to disparage Petersen’s methods, recounting the injuries he sustained for the role; Hathaway was stood on by a horse (presumably Artax), was stabbed in the face by The G’mork and became trapped in an elevator, pulling him into the Swamps of Sadness (he was unconscious once finally dragged to the surface). Hathaway has stated he would need to be paid a “ridiculous” amount of money to do another film with Petersen.

The film seemed to consecrate Hathaway, or at the very least guarantee employment. His rendering of Atréyu had been epic, his resume was sound (Hathaway had enjoyed guest roles in Battlestar Gallactica, Mork and Mindy, Eight is Enough and Laverne and Shirley), he was successfully directed by Petersen, despite the fact Petersen spoke only German on set (“I speak French fluently, so that really helped,” Hathaway says), and by 1986 the Munich-based Noah International Fan Club exceeded 1000 members. Following a brief appearance on Family Ties, Hathaway swiftly signed on for the Italian production of Troll (1986), co-starring Sonny Bono, but the film was disturbingly bad, and Hathaway’s career seemed to terminate almost immediately after the fact.*

For years, Hathaway has maintained that a “serious injury” has prevented him from accepting further acting roles, leading him to concentrate on motorcycle fabrication, after a short-lived appointment as a mortgage broker. “I have always rode [sic] motorcycles,” Hathaway attests on his MySpace profile, which identifies his general interests as “fire” and “porn”, his preferred music genre as “anything that fucking rocks”, and his mood as of writing this article as “high”. “My wife is a tattoo artist, makeup artist and all around amazing woman,” Hathaway explains. “She does makeup for such porn companies as Evil Angel, Red Light, Elegant Angel, Shane’s World, etc.” Hathaway himself is richly tattooed, exhibiting skulls, Japanese ornaments and weed.

Disappointed? Confused? In your heart, did you believe that Noah Hathaway was still riding Artax through the beckoning, sunlit valleys of Fantasia, somehow, somewhere? Well, he’s not. He’s watching porn and he’s high. But you can’t blame Hathaway for killing the dark midget genre; it was already dead.

* The name of Hathaway’s character in Troll was “Harry Potter Jnr”, thus leading many to suggest that the writer Rowling stole the name. I doubt this. Firstly, Troll is unwatchable. Secondly, I doubt Rowling cobbled her books together from names, places and plot devices she picked up from F-grade Sonny Bono movies.

Read more about this issue of Nerds Gone Wild!, available to buy here.

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If you could rid the earth of one thing, what would it be?

“Rid the earth”? Seems a little excessive. As I recall, some people tried to “rid the earth” of some twin towers, and that didn’t exactly go down like honey. I don’t know; I guess I’m just not a fan of mass execution. You know, even if I said, “I want to kill all paedophiles,” I still don’t exactly come off looking like Anne of Green Gables. No, I’m still just publishing a list of “people to kill”. Great, that’s sane. Let’s see, who else has tried that nugget? Hitler? Timothy McVeigh? Uh, I don’t know, every known psychopath in the history of time? The Manson Family?

I think there is only one answer to this question that acts an effective safeguard against character assassination, and that answer is “cancer”. But for the sake of the argument, I would like to wipe out every pretentious person in the universe, beginning with Fenton.

Yes, Fenton. I was twelve, as I recall; he was eighteen, or close to it. Son of parents’ friends, long story, not interesting. Unusually fat, face is a blur, wore moleskin trousers, parents kept some kind of fucked up ceramic dogs. Rich. Parents claimed they bought Fenton a bicycle so expensive it had to be insured. What the fuck? I remember sitting there at the time thinking: the only people who should be insuring their bicycles should be actual cyclists, I mean, look at your son, this is obviously not money in the bank.

We then discovered Fenton had an English accent. Fuck knows why, it literally just came out of nowhere. We then heard some laboured story about how Fenton was in a foul mood because he was unable to golf that week. Again, I remember sitting there thinking: why is you NOT golfing a problem? Who cares? Why do you have the interests of a billionaire geriatric anyway? What unfathomably boring realm do you people live in? What even motivates you people? Money? Golf? Dogs? Insuring your son’s fat arse against hitting the ground when he careens his solid gold bicycle into the Seven Eleven?

Fenton was the first pretentious person I ever met. He also bled me of the will to live.

There is a natural beauty in everything that exists on earth, and pretentious people ruin everything; I would go so far as to say that they ruin life itself, possibly the universe. They certainly ruined my entire tertiary education, inasmuch as they were running it. They also seem to have wormed their way throughout the globe, including a certain local record store, where the staff are visibly disgusted by every single purchase I make. I once went in and asked for a certain Dimmu Borgir album; the guy on checkout refused to face me, closed his eyes, audibly groaned and shook his head. “We don’t stock Dimmu Borgir,” he spat over his shoulder. Of course. God forbid I try and make a purchase at your store. God forbid I try and give you my money.

“Well, what are you doing there?” I asked, gesturing towards his notes.

“I’m compiling my top ten albums of the year.” He stated this as if it was ridiculously obvious.

“Cool. What are they?”

Still refusing to face me, he slid the paper across the counter.

“Oh. So Amon Amarth didn’t make the cut for you?”

He looked at me as if I had just shat in his store. “Uh, that album came out in 2006.”

“Of course.” Kill me.

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What happens when you purge your long-term boyfriend part three: die harder

Why am I having relationships whatsoever? I see no point. I see nothing. I have spent the last six years of my life ceaselessly and habitually attached, monogamous, deranged, deluded, dealing with pointless, unremitting bullshit, and what, exactly, have I achieved? What do I have? A house? A child? A solid gold telephone? No. I have vague and spasmodic depression — a condition I could have acquired by running into walls or trapping myself in a mine.

I don’t recall being a child wishing I could grow up and date a string of controlling jerks, any more than I recall being a child wishing I could grow up and shit my pants, yet here we are — I want to bury another boyfriend alive, another boyfriend wants to drive a pitchfork through my arse, and look, I’m back where I started, confused, fucked, lost, spent, desperate to simply understand — Holy Christ — why I am doing this. Remember: I once dated a man who sweated in his sleep like a champagne ham. I woke up every day for three years smelling like a glazed pig. Somewhere in there lies an answer.

All relationships begin as a concept, or more specifically, an ideal. Reduce any ideal to flesh, blood and crusted underpants, and you are ultimately rewarded with the same, sick prize — disappointment. Note: I dated a man who lived in a shed. He kept rats, crates of porn and a dog with eczema of the nuts. Do you think I built any of those disgusting facts into the “concept” of our relationship? Do you think he introduced himself by firing rats into my face, or waving around his dog’s chronically infected balls? No. The concept of our relationship was based on his poetry and hilarious intellectual banter, one. Two, I didn’t expect our relationship to end up in his repulsive shed and terminate due to his clinical alcoholism; I expected it to end like the three billion romantic comedies I’ve seen in my lifetime — he wins the election and we get married, we graduate high school and drive off in a flying car, he collects me from a psychiatric ward and convinces me I’m the mother of his four rambunctious sons — WHATEVER. Everyone, on some level, thinks of their life as a movie, but life is not a movie, relationships are not movies, relationships do not run for ninety-three minutes, relationships don’t solve problems, relationships create problems — so why am I having relationships?

Two years ago I underwent a major operation to save my life. The operation itself was potentially fatal — a fact unknown to me until moments prior to surgery. An anesthetist happened to mention the odds of survival versus death to me, I explained I was unaware death was on the menu, at which point he looked confused and left the room, where I remained, lying on a metal cart, crying, alone. I spent the following three weeks in hospital throwing up. I was unable to walk, as walking also made me throw up. My then boyfriend (the boyfriend that inspired this series of articles) spent every day insisting I try and mobilise. This process mostly involved carrying me around the room; unaided, I was only able to curl to the edge of the bed. When I finally stood, it would be clutching his arm, as he held my throw up bag. Extremely slowly, he would lead me out of the room and into the hospital’s corridor. As I walked, I gripped his hand, to try and quell the tears stinging my eyes. “I love you,” I said. He glanced up at my face, and seeing my tear-tracked cheeks, he hugged me.

Whatever, we’re broken up, one day you’re in love, the next you want to BBQ his face. I have now withstood five long-term relationships, each of them broken, and they collectively have broken me. I consider these relationships retrospectively and all I can see is a pointless trail of destruction. Logically, I see no point. Logically, there is no reason why I am having relationships. They do not meet the ideal I create in my mind, they bear no resemblance to movies in which we are driven to believe, and they leave me — without exception — depressed, destroyed and fucked up. But, you know, life is fucked up. And, you know, those relationships were also pretty fucking amazing. And regardless of whether I’m in love, depressed, crying, at least I know I’m fucking alive. Am I going to have more relationships? Yes. Will they also self-destruct? Probably. But fuck it. Die harder.

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Bathing beauty

I recently asked thirty of my peers, “Do you like to bathe?” Their responses ranged from mild indifference to active loathing, one claiming to shower while microwaving a cheese-based Kraft meal, another limiting her shower to the length of a Simpsons ad break. No one expressed relish, no one used a tub, and no one involved Mister Bubbles.

I have no doubt these people register as scientifically clean, I have seen them and detected no visible stains, but then we are not laboratory rats or brains in jars, we are people, and it seems truly strange that we should choose to briefly fire boiling water into our faces and then carry on about our day.

It was with this in mind that I set about on a journey — a journey to rediscover bath time, the concept. I began by filling a bucket with milk, and sinking my feet inside. As this was the habit of the most allegedly beautiful woman of all time, Cleopatra, it seemed the logical blastoff point. Modern dogma dictates that honey, salt and bicarbonate soda should be added to the milk base — salt to strip the skin of its dead cells, honey to soften it — but the milk itself proved offensive once brought to room temperature, and the footsies in question, while sweetly tenderised, demanded a secondary bath to purge traces of the first.

The legend of Kate Moss involves bathing often in Evian and once in champagne with Johnny Depp. Both baths are speculative. Depp has repeatedly denied the champagne episode, stating to press “I wish it were true,” although such a bath would have certainly rendered him rancid. And whilst bathing in Evian is quite credible (note: Perrier facials exist), the difference between mineral and tap water in a domestic tub seems slight if not totally void.

If pleasure was to be sought in tubs, I was not finding it by paddling in beverages. Seeking at this point professional help, I reached Island Day Spa, a softly-lit underground fantasy cocoon, lined with candles, laced with silk drapes and set to a gentle soundscape of panpipes, Kenny G and simulated ocean noises.

The hydrotherapy process begins with one’s total nudity, which is protected with a fresh, cotton robe and disposable pantaloons — although these more or less resemble standard-issue underpants, they seem to only come in one size, that size being jumbo (they may or may not have had a specific front and back, this remained unclear to me).

Once inside one’s private hydrotherapy chamber, the robe is discarded, but the pantaloons retained, and a modesty bosom towel poised for the taking. The hydrotherapy tub itself is more or less a giant pod; one lies on the flat and steaming bed, then, once exfoliated, the lid is lowered, much like a clamshell or hamburger bun, totally encasing the body, omitting only the head, at which point the body is steamed and bathed with a series of alternating Vichy shower-heads — small but potent jets that tend to shoot into one’s ankles, knees, torso and, most directly, crotch.

My own treatment at Island, “Body Polish”, running just shy of an hour, began with a sea salt exfoliant, quite chunkier and more abrasive than a domestic exfoliant, stripping the skin of dead cells with an erotic intensity, followed with an enduring Vichy shower, during which the scalp was massaged, concluding with a delicate rinse and a succulent glaze of lavender body lotion — a precious experience.

But more is, of course, more. Seduced by the promise of steaming lashings of Dead Sea mud, I reached Orchid Day Spa, eagerly pursuing the “European Seaweed and Sea Spa Vichy”. Once nestled into an identical hamburger bun hydrotherapy tub, I was exfoliated with another savage yet luscious cocktail of sea salt and essential oils, then smothered in the anticipated mud and seaweed combination, scraped from the base of the Dead Sea (known as an unfathomably potent regenerative agent). Once fully glazed, I was encased and steamed, inviting the pores to open wide and drink in the manifold Dead Sea juices, and finally showered to perfection. Note: the rich and opulent Dead Sea fragrances will linger on the person for several hours.

But of course such a treatment is a seasonal indulgence, and while hydrotherapy had stirred in my loins a passion, deep and throbbing, I had still not discovered that which I do not understand — the bath at home, a ritual I continued to resent and consider a waste of time.

The domestic tub is rarely in charming condition, and I submit that erotic bathing is impossible in any such tub. I may have seen giant home tubs in movies, but never in actual life have I physically seen a home tub that could painlessly contain a couple, let alone a full orgy.

But then, what if I could recreate the fantasy day spa cocoon in the home? Of course I had no handy clamshell tub or giant, vicious salts, but could some precious products and a well-poised candle melt my frigid loins? They had come this far, had they not?

I gathered random magnificent items at this point — L’Occitane en Provence “Bath Tonic”, a sweet, light bubbling agent, the Roger & Gallet “Shiso” range, including a particularly delicious body cream, and finally MOR’s “Flower of Narcissus”, an epic collection modeled on ancient Roman neo-classical architecture, which aroused my quivering heart and uncloaked the true meaning of bath time. With each piece in place — the bubbling elixir, the lush black candle softly licking the walls with golden light, the grape seed exfoliant swept gently across my body — everything became clear. The ritual of bathing is romancing one’s self.

Perhaps after this journey I would still re-engineer myself to stew in my own juices. I continue to resent my body’s unremitting needs, and it is true, I could use that time. But it is clear the beauty in bathing lies not in its function, but in its mood, its fantasy and in one’s own personal love affair, and this much I cannot reject, for I cannot reject baths of glory.

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I like big bibles and I cannot lie

GodTube is the semi-known American Christian video-sharing site that functions on basically the same principles as YouTube and is flawed for exactly the same reason: for delivering eternal shit.

Granted, YouTube may be reasonably all-encompassing, but it ultimately solicits the same kind of suffocatingly tedious cultural bitch fuck as, say, an episode of Funniest Home Videos. (You’ve seen the dramatic squirrel, and you know exactly what I’m talking about.)

I’m guessing that as a species we have never watched such a massive quantity of shit ever. Actually, no, that’s probably a fact; let’s call it a fact.

But where GodTube differs is that it promotes a certain breed of shit peculiar to certain American Christians that I happen to be a really big fan of, for the singular reason that it is so unfathomably bad.

And bad videos are, of course, funnier than good videos, because genuinely bad videos sincerely intend to be good, and watching their failure is bad, and in turn really funny.

But Christian videos — and specifically the kind I’m discussing here (that is, those that enjoy residency in the highest tier of GodTube’s manger) — don’t actually fit into that category. This is weird.

Some of GodTube’s most viewed videos are, of course, just bad. “Funny Church Moments” is just shit, obviously, and short films like “What will you do the next time porn strikes?” (in which a man notices an explicit pop-up, then blows up his computer, the film then literally ends there) seem to exist purely to waste everybody’s time, including presumably His.

No; these are extraneous.

I am referring specifically to extremely popular videos probably best illustrated by “Baby Got Book”, which is a fairly detailed parody of the 1992 Sir Mix-a-Lot song “Baby Got Back”, and can be found with the tags “funny” and “christ”.

The video begins with a man emerging from what appears to be a small hill of bibles, then performing the song in full (and reasonably well) with vaguely amusing Christian lyrics (“I like big bibles and I cannot lie […] I’m tired of heathen guys / Sayin’ they like pocket-size” and so on and so forth in this fashion).

At first, “Baby Got Book” seems so impossibly bad that it is of course funny, but it then rapidly becomes apparent that “Baby” is intended as a parody, and is thus in on its own joke. But is it?

“Baby”, on some level, a very real one, obviously, is a sincere expression of Christian values, and thus occupies a place somewhere between intentionally bad and actually bad (not by virtue of the fact that it is Christian, but by virtue of the fact that is sincere).

And this is a place that (as far as I know) only Christian parody rock and hip-hop can seem to reach. And if this wrong, then I don’t want to be right, ’cause you, you light up my life.

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