Mr. Derivative On...

Newspaper Editor: "This can't be the real article...right? You use words like 'pasghetti' and 'momatoes', you make several threatening references to the U.N, and in the last paragraph you repeat the words 'Screw Flanders' Over and Over Again"
Homer: "Awww...It's hard to reach 500 words"

The Simpsons ep. AABF21: "Guess Who's Coming to Criticize Dinner"

Hello esteemed readers, I think there are like five of you right now, welcome to the latest edition of Mr. Derivative.

For those of you who enjoy my blog, you owe a big debt of gratitude to my sister. This blog wouldn’t happen if it wasn’t for her. Not only was she the inspiration for my blog with her superior cooking/Gabi blog OUT OF THE PANTRY, but she also sends me nudging g-chats every week to remind me to write new entries. Whenever she sends me these I try to blow her off by saying I have writers block; but she doesn’t let me off the hook. She even goes as far as to hold me accountable by giving me ideas for blogs. Her suggestions this week? One was a gender issues blog inspired by a drunken text I sent her (I won’t go into too many details, but the first sentence was “What the F--- is wrong with women?”), the other was a “10 things I would take in an emergency” list inspired by the recent rash of fires in Santa Barbara and LA. Both fantastic ideas, however I have opted instead for a miscellaneous/random blog inspired by my favorite columnist of all time: Bill Simmons.

So without further ado....

Mr. Derivative on.....

MOVIES

I may lose my status as a Jew by saying this, but Annie Hall was the worst movie I had ever seen. Woody Allen is annoying, I hated that surreal talking to the camera crap, and maybe I'm too dumb to get the humor, but is it really funny for Shelly Duvall to say, "Sex with you is a Kafka-esque experience...I mean that as a compliment" ? Because I don't think so.

In current movies, Quantum of Solace: Uh...What? This was by far the worst James Bond movie I have ever seen, if you can even call it a James Bond movie. Where was Q? Where were the cool gadgets? James Bond didn’t even bang the main girl, a lackluster effort indeed. Daniel Craig’s previous performance of Bond as more sociopathy, less suave was fantastic. However this time around he decided that by not saying anything, looking intense, and killing people, it was the same thing, it most certainly was not.

As for the villain Dominc Greene (Worst Bond villain name ever), I’ll let my friend David Cygielman take this one...

“The villian wasn’t even that bad, he was just a shady businessman. What he was doing was very unethical, but it wasn’t supervillian evil, not worth James Bond killing 40 people. Bond was kind of a dick in this one.”

The only redeeming part of this one was the theme song, Another Way to Die by Jack White and Alicia Keys. Which brings us to....

MUSIC

Dear DJ Khaled,

I really enjoy your music. Now please shut the f--- up and let me listen to my song.

Dear Kanye West,

Love Lockdown was awesome, but you are not so famous that you can rerecord the song 11 times and call it 808'S and Heartbreak. Bad form Kanye, Bad form.

I defy you, no matter how bad your day is, to ever listen to Ini Kamooze’s Hotsteppa, and not feel better about life.

Rape Me by Nirvana has my favorite guitar intro of all time. That intro is just NASTY!

Congratulations to Leather by Tori Amos for getting a second mention in a Mr. Derivative Column. I was pretty drunk at the time, but I'm pretty sure it's a great song to make out to.

I cannot get enough of this song.

I’ve decided that Lil’ Wayne can do whatever he wants. If Lil’ Wayne held a press conference tomorrow announcing that he short sold the entire Dow Jones and used the profits to fund Al-Qaeda, but then started freestyling, I’d forgive him, all of America would forgive him.

TV

This has been a year of redemption for some long running television shows. Both Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons have been showing signs of age lately. It’s hard to blame them, when a show runs for multiple decades its hard to find new material. But this year both show’s have been on point.

Saturday Night Live gained alot from the election, mainly with Tina Fey’s hilarious impression of Sarah Palin. However the non-topical stuff has been great too. In a recent episode, Mad Men’s Jon Hamm hosted and was uproariously funny. Hamm played himself; his Mad Men character Don Draper...twice; JFK; 60’s actor James Mason; and Pat Finger, a man running for city council in perhaps the worst city a man with that name could choose to run in. If you are not peeing your pants in laughter by the end of that list clip, than you have no sense of humor.

The decline of The Simpsons has been particularly upsetting to me as it is one of my favorite shows. It had been on so long that the show had begun to run out of ideas and the characters had become parodies of themselves. However this season has been on par with the show’s best. This year’s Halloween special, once a highlight but as of late a bore, was one of the best episodes I’d ever seen. The cold opening where Homer attempts to vote for Obama on a crooked voting machine was gold. Hearing Homer Simpson scream “C’mon It’s time for a change!” was worth the price of admission alone.

One of my new favorite shows, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia has been experiencing the issues that The Simpsons was having. After starting strong, it seems that this year they have been trying too hard. However, this week’s season finale “The Nightman Cometh”, where they make full-scale musical based on the hilarious "Nightman" and "Dayman" songs of last year, looks promising.


If I could have a threeway with any two characters from current TV shows; I would pick Tara from True Blood (played by Rutina Wesley) and Jane Holloway from Mad Men (played by Christina Hendricks). However, from watching the show, I think Jane is slightly racist and wouldn’t go for it, but a man can dream.

WOMEN

The next time I have girl problems I am going to make my Facebook status say “Jeremy is being felt bad for by Jay-Z”.

My sister sent me a quote today from J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye that she felt described my taste in women. I’m not going to print the quote, other than the fact that it contained the phrase “Pain in the ass”. Ladies and Gentlemen, My Sister!

MY IDIOT FRIENDS

I was working on a section where I was going to recount the time my friend Aaron Schiff ordering a double shot of Jack on my tab before I could close out and weighing 160lbs, it got him so drunk that he went home by himself at 11:00pm. However my recollection of the night is pretty hazy myself, so I can’t make fun of him as well as I’d hoped to. But I told Schiff I was going to mention him in this blog, so I will just say, if Zach Morris was skinny, Jewish, thinning hair, and had game except for when he actually likes a girl, he would be Aaron Schiff. Love ya buddy!

IN CLOSING:

Since a good 90% of my blog is dedicated to ripping off Bill Simmons, I want to do a "mailbag" issue sometime down the line. Please email me questions/comments/insults to jgmosko@gmail.com to contribute a question. Unless you are my Mom, then don’t bother, because I’m not printing anything you send me. Love ya Mom!

Take care esteemed readers, until next time...


Screw Flanders.

Untitled Obama Blog

“Yes We Can”

“It’s Time for a Change”

Obama Campaign Slogans

“Well, Let’s see ya do it!”
Uncle Jack, Gallipoli (1981)

Well it happened, Obama won and it feels so good. To bring out a cliche, my generation is always going to remember where they were on this day.

I am going to remember Ese calling me, of course quoting Muhammed Ali, screaming “We Shook up the World! We Shook up the World!”

I am going to remember my Mom calling me from Grant Park, holding the phone up saying, “I’m here with Barry, Jeremy. Barry is talking to Me!”

I’m going to remember texts from Gabi, Adam, Josh and Hali.

I’m going to remember my Facebook status on election day (Jeremy Barack’s with Obama but he ain’t no politician---If you don’t know it listen to Jockin' Jay-Z).

And I’m going to remember my status once he won (Tupac was wrong, we ARE ready---If you don’t know listen to Changes).

I’m going to remember thinking “Oh My God, I have to see what Fox News is doing” and flipping over to see them speaking about the impact that had been made. Which was the classy thing to do...but I couldn’t help but feel it was a tad disingenuous.

I'm going to remember, despite the joy of the night, being shocked and disappointed in California voters over Prop 8. Really?!?!?

I’m going to remember how classy McCain was in defeat; his class as cheesy as it sounds helped create a feeling that it was the UNITED States of America.

I’m going to remember the feeling I got during THAT SPEECH.

About a month and a half ago, I was in Washington D.C. for work. While I was there I visited my cousin Christine. We had just gotten coffee, iced coffee considering the mind-numbing humidity we were experiencing, and I saw a man selling T-Shirts on the corner with images of Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama on them, my reaction at the time was..."That seems a BIT pre-mature."

Well tonight, during THAT SPEECH, the one thought I couldn’t get out of my head was, “This is how it must have felt to see Martin Luther King Jr.”

Which made me happy and afraid. I got a lot of scary, morbid thoughts as an aftermath of that thought, but I am not going to go into them.

Instead I am going to focus how tonight, Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) appeared to be everything we want in the aftermath of the last 8 years. He was excited, but not exuberant. He was aware of the historical impact he had made, yet focused on the challenges that lie ahead. He was a family man, a man of the people, but most of all he was Presidential. He had the air of a man who knew he had a huge challenge ahead of him, but knew that he could get it done because of who he was. If I would compare Obama’s election to a sports event, I am praying for my generation and future generations that it is Kevin Garnett getting traded to the Boston Celtics. If KG can get the ‘Celts a ring, than I hope to G-d that Obama can bring America back to the country I grew up in during the Clinton Years, as said in my last attempt at a political blog, when life was simple and cool.

I am confident in Obama: a dynamic speaker, fresh ideas, and ready and willing to shake things up, I am putting my faith in him based on that.

I have a friend who is a voracious Republican, who frankly paid more attention during our Poli-Sci classes than me, who is very anti-Obama. He thinks Obama’s going to destroy the economy by raising corporate taxes and that his tax program is a redistribution of wealth. That Obama is too inexperienced to negotiate with our enemies, that an early pull-out from Iraq will make it fall to Iran. As a Poli-Sci student, I see the theoretical place he is coming from. However, I also believe that theories don’t always translate to real life. That though I didn’t go to Professor Crouch’s Econ class enough to combat his arguments, that the system that his arguments are based on has to have failed, otherwise we wouldn’t be in this mess. That the old way wasn’t working, so it’s on us to do what we got to do...to survive.

He is probably gong to scoff at that paragraph if and when he reads it.

But it doesn’t matter, because It’s Time for a Change, Yes We Can, and....

“ANYTHING IS POSSSSIBBBBBBBBLLLLLLLLLLLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”