Wolf Gnards

Our friends at the Masters of None Podcast ask:
Why did Bernie (from Weekend at Bernie’s) never rot or start to smell?

Let’s take a look at the stages of death, shall we…

Decomposition begins the second the heart stops beating, but actual rotting—as in falling off the bone tenderness—shouldn’t happen for about a week. Dead body smells happen pretty fast and in that warm weather Hampton environment, probably even faster. Still a dead body takes around 24 hours to get a nice beefy rotting smell going. Unless they refrigerated Bernie or embalmed him at some point, he would be working up quite a stink by day 2. The trick of the movie though is the title of the film, a weekend with Bernie suggests two, maybe, even three days with Bernie, or a 72 hour period. The reality of the film, however, is they only spend 24 hours with a dead Bernie corpse. Bernie died late Saturday afternoon/evening (lethal injection), they spend the night with the corpse sitting at the party, then the next day running away from the mob, until Bernie died again the following evening (shot). The title should be “One Day at Bernie’s.”

So, we can say emphatically that the film Weekend at Bernie’s does not stink (from his corpse rotting, at least). Meaning the movie could have theoretically missed the smell window, or did not go on long enough for the smell to be noticed. However, there are still some minor issues with hauling around a dead body. Rigor mortis would have been at full stiff tilt within 12 hours, making madcap hijinks the next day highly unlikely. And after 4 hours, blood would pool giving him purplish skin, in fact, his hands would turn blue after 30 minutes, making it hard to pass Bernie off as a tan and happening party goer. Plus Bernie was submerged in water twice throughout the film, which would have made him a bloated, purple mess by the final scene.

And perhaps most importantly, Bernie would have released his bowels mere minutes after death. And remember Bernie was wearing the same outfit the entire time, the same soiled pants for an entire day. So, Bernie does smell, but like shit, not like death. There really needed to be a scene of Andrew McCarthy wiping Bernie’s ass with a wet nap, doing a load of laundry, or scrubbing away brown trails through the entire summer home.

In passing a stiff, bloated, purple, poo covered corpse off as being alive, the rotting smell is the least of Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman’s problems.

Everyone’s doing it. No, one’s watching, the coast is clear, go ahead, do it. Get up on that beach stump, raise up your knee, and strike your best karate bird pose. It’s human nature (or is bird nature)… if you’re at the beach and you see a stump, you’re going to try the crane kick. It’s no use trying to deny it, it’s what we do. Yet early reports say that the new Karate Kid film has gotten rid of the crane kick… how can this be? How can they get rid of the single greatest fake martial arts move in history. Every fight I have ever been in has involved a well timed crane kick at some point (also with that song “You’re the Best” playing in my head). If do right, no can defend, but how does the crane kick from The Karate Kid work?

The Four Parts of a Successful Crane Kick

Misdirection
The first part of the Crane Kick is simple misdirection. Your foe is busy looking at you fluttering your hands in the air, then he sees the knee, and thinks, “What’s this guy up to? Is he going to slap me, is he going to knee me, tickle fight? I don’t know?” Which means he is completely missing the leg you’re standing on, i.e. the deadly foot.

A variation also known as the modified crane kick involves jazz heads. This move goes like so: jazz hands, jazz hands, jazz hands, KICK. An almost unstable fighting style, this is why Jackie Chan got his start as a dancer, and was the original choice for the lead in Footloose (in my mind, at least. I just insert Jackie Chan into most movie roles).

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Ridiculous problems deserve equally if not more ridiculous solutions. If an asteroid is barreling toward the Earth, the only sane answer is to send untrained deep sea oil drillers into space to blow it apart (and not to blow it into smithereens but into two equally sized pieces that will barely miss the planet much like Larry blocking Moe’s eye poke). There is almost nothing I’m not willing to buy about the movie Armageddon.

Liv Tyler going 18-years on an oil rig filled with desperate and lonely men and never getting raped. Bought it. Ben Affleck going 18 minutes on an oil rig without being stabbed. Bought it. Super experimental spaceships. The Russian space station with artificial gravity and enough rocket laying around for two spaceships. Slingshotting around the moon. A mole-man like super drilling machine. Bought it. Bought it. Bought it. Bought it. I was fine with landing on an asteroid, drilling on an asteroid, and taking off from an asteroid. Sounded like one hell of a genius/retard plan.

Part of this was because Billy Bob Thornton does a first rate job of making this ridiculous plan sound absolutely plausible, most likely because like so many scientist out there he’s a folksy down home kind of scientist. Pretty much Foghorn Leghorn with a degree from MIT. “This here asteroid is what we call in mah neck of the woods a global killer, I sah, I sah.” The plan was fine, the whole blowing up a giant asteroid from the inside is like blowing up your fingers with an M-80, cool with it. It’s the execution of the plan and this impossibly huge asteroid that I have a problem with.

Deep Impact hit theaters 2 months before and had a comet that was 6 miles long… How do you make Armageddon better? Make a bigger asteroid. How much bigger? How about the size of Texas. First, the size of Texas (or any state really) is not really an acceptable unit of measurement, that’s like saying my house is the size of a 10000 glasses of water. What does an asteroid the size of Texas really mean? Is it as heavy as Texas, the same volume as Texas, as long as Texas? Texas is 790 miles long and 773 miles wide, which would make for one hell of a giant asteroid and really questions how we could miss a small moon heading right for us. I assume the asteroid has the same surface area as Texas, meaning 268,820 square miles. Given the asteroid’s spherical shape, it would have a radius of 150 miles or a length of 300 miles. However, the asteroid is more oblong, so it probably has a length of 450 miles with a width of 150 miles. Still a hell of a big asteroid (take that Deep Impact), and that’s the problem. The drilling concept was fine, but given the size of the asteroid it would have failed.

Bruce Willis and his rag tag crew only had to drill 800 ft into the asteroid. 800 ft barely cracks the surface of an asteroid hundreds of miles wide. At the most, planting a nuclear device in a hole that shallow would caused a giant crater, but it would not have broken the asteroid apart. The only way this would have worked was if the asteroid was flat and only a few 1000 ft thick, giving it a nice potato chip like outline, or something resembling the Phantom Zone from Superman II.

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What the Government Doesn’t Want you to Know

There is a conspiracy of fat men on television. Why did Kevin James, Jim Belushi, and Mark Addy have TV shows? Talent? Hardly. Most would attribute the phenomenon by the simple equation fat equals funny and, of course, the fatter the funnier, but this does not work in pairs. The classic fat duos are traditionally the fat and the fat inverse ie someone skinny, creating fat & skinny comedy teams like Laurel & Hardy, Farley & Spade, Jay & Silent Bob. You can’t have two fats because instead of wacky hijinks they would just eat a series of progressively larger sandwiches throughout the movie. On a marriage related sitcom the fat man stands in the for the husband and a hot chick stands in for the skinny sidekick. One would think it’s just the regular comedic fat formula, but one would be wrong. The fat guy/hot wife scenario was created for one purpose: the subjugation of woman.

There’s nothing funny about the abuse of women through some of the world’s fattest men. Great examples of fattitude include: Just the 10 of Us, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, According to Jim, King of Queens, Grounded for Life, Still Standing, and even animated shows like Simpsons and Family Guy are designed to keep women down through male obesity. These television shows all have fat men, all with women who would never date fat men let alone commit their lives to vacuuming under their stomachs. Coach from Just the 10 of Us needed an entire hot family to support is fat ass. Is this just male fantasy run amuck, or is there something deeper? Here’s how the media fat cats are manipulating women: A single woman watches one of these shows and thinks, “Hmmm, if Stacey Carosi could only get Kevin James, and surely I’m not as good looking as Stacey Carosi, could I possibly do better than Kevin James?” Of course not, better settle for that mutant over there. Likewise if Courtney Thorne-Smith could only pull down John Belushi’s less talented brother, could you ever hope to be with a more talent brother? Not at all, fat dude sitcoms tell us better to be with a loser than no one at all.

The consolation prize for that slob on the couch is, at least, he’s funny. As if that’s something women want. Women then don’t actually like funny men, but are conditioned to settle for personality by the media. Uncle Phil from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air has the added bonus of also being wealthy. Sufficient money and humor will get you a Leah Remini or a Jami Gertz, or whatever B List actress you want. And who’s to benefit? Fat comedians, fat politicians, and your fat boyfriend, of course. Our entire entertainment industry is based on the concept of helping less attractive men get laid. That’s why underdog’s always get the girl in the end, to increase the potential of this actually happening in real life.

The conspiracy goes back to the early 1950’s in a possible underground meeting between Colonel Sanders, Winston Churchill, Fats Domino, the ghost of Fatty Arbuckle, and a 3-year-old Jerry Mathers (as the Beaver). Remember women’s suffrage was still fresh on the minds and the Women’s revolution was well on the horizon, the government had no choice but to come up with a plan. The question was put forth: How can we both stunt women empowerment and get hot women to date us? The answer was The Honeymooners. Jackie Gleason is the alpha fat man to Audrey Meadows’s omega hot chick. The Honeymooners was devised to keep women at bay through fear and intimidation, but in the funniest ways possible. Gleason was essentially asked to promote domestic abuse, but in a hee-hee sort of way. The lesson of every episode of the the Honeymooners: no matter how fat, dumb, and belligerent your man is, you better stick with him because there’s absolutely no alternative.

And if she doesn’t like your beer gut then it’s bang, zoom, to the moon.

Who is the Kindle Girl and Why do we Love her?

Nerds like books. Nerds like cute girls who would never like nerds. All making the Amazon Kindle campaign a win/win situation for nerds and unrequited cute girls everywhere. The girl we’ve all fallen for from the Kindle commercial is Annie Little and is a geek girl through association. Like all beautiful people, Little found bigger nerds to stand on the shoulders of and propel her to greater heights. Photographer Angela Kohler and producer Ithyle Griffiths—both big Kindle fans, both big geeks—asked Annie to participate in a stop motion project for an Amazon Kindle video contest. Annie also co-wrote and performed the Kindle’s theme song “Fly Me Away.”

Three factors aid in Annie Little’s major nerd appeal. The first being stop motion animation. Some of the greatest moments in geekery involved stop motion animation: King Kong, Star Wars‘ AT-AT’s, ED-209 (Robocop), and pretty much everything by Ray Harryhausen (who many believe to be just a fantastic special effect himself). So, we think, if I talked about Star Wars to Annie, she won’t possibly roll her eyes because she understands my pain and joy… and my stop motion. Not only that though, we think that if she’s willing to sit for a seven hour photo shoot, what else is she willing to sit through? Any number of impossibly nerdy movie marathons perhaps? My Klingon poetry?

The second thing we like is her uncanny resemblance to Kristen Bell (an actress familiar with many a nerd project—Flatland, Assassin’s Creed, Fanboys, Heroes). But it’s her work on Veronica Mars that she’s remembered best for. Veronica being a sassy high school detective is a sure fire way to get any Velma loving nerd’s heart a flutter. Jinkies. Although, it could be her distinct ability of not being Bell though that is even more attractive. While, the allusion of an actual Kirsten Bell may be gone, this is a fresh Kirsten Bell clone with all new allusions.

A second commercial has just cemented her in those hearts. Which brings us to the third reason, the possibility of nerd love. This is because the second commercial also starred a vaguely nerdy guy, Ryan Curry. Notice the glasses and the sciencey tubes, that’s to let the consumer know he’s a nerd, and notice Annie not running way and performing a new song, “Stole Your Heart” which vaguely alludes to possibly loving this nerd with the glasses and the bunsen burner (and the Jell-o pudding pop). Which brings us back to believing this girl will lay on the floor with us for several hours. She probably won’t but it’s fun to imagine.

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Fame is not measured in accolades or success. In money or movie premieres. Fame is determined by one thing and one thing only, proximity to Matt Lauer. If excrement is measured in Courics then fame is measured in Lauers. The closer you are to Matt Lauer, the more famous you become. If you’re in the same building you’re a kind of happening person, if you’re in the same room then you’re probably sort of somebody (you can order someone to get you a latte at the very least), and if you’re sitting in Lauer’s tender embrace then you just might be a celebrity. As my mom has always said, “If Woof Gnats is so famous, how come you ain’t on the Matt Lauer?” Touche, Mother, touche. Matt Lauer distributes everyone’s allotted 15 minutes of fame, a fame fairy if you will.

So, if you’ve been interviewed by Matt Lauer you are definitely more famous than the vast majority of us. But how do you separate the people who have been interviewed? Quantity of interviews for starters. So, the more you’ve been interviewed by Matt Lauer the more famous you are. However, not only is there the Lauer interview to fame ratio, but there’s different degrees of Matt Lauer. The lowest level of fame is a Matt Lauer thought, you’ve crossed his mind but not his lips. The second level is Matt Lauer has spoken your name, even a passing reference counts. The third and fourth levels are the interview, which is split between the via satellite interview and the live interview. The live Matt Lauer interview is the holy grail of fame. Each level of Lauer is then weighted differently with a live interview being roughly equal to 8 Matt Lauer thoughts, 4 Lauer mentions, or 2 via satellite interviews.

Fames Creamy Liquid Core

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