Squirrels Eating Pizza

Squirrels kind of terrify me. They're skittish, rabid, and just have a general creepy attitude I really don't appreciate. But I am delighted to report that something has changed recently. They have begun to endear themselves to me. They have begun to eat pizza like humans.









Like, get the fuck out of here squirrels! You are fucking killing me. In the best way! Let's have a party. Imma buy you some Papa J meat lover's special. Y'all want cheesey bread? Do you think you could dip your pizza crusts in that garlic butter sauce? That would make my year. Luv u squirrels.

For more articles about animals doing specific things, see this post!

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The Back Catalogue: Radiohead's "OK Computer"

The Back Catalogue is a column that attempts to plug the holes in our pop-culture knowledge, and then write about the results. It is probably the column on this site with the least appeal to anyone besides its author. I will try not to write too many of these.

Every music dork has a weak spot, a band or even a genre they just know nothing about. Sometimes it's something well-established, so it's embarrassing, something you just try to ignore and hope it goes away. For me, that's Radiohead.

I'm not sure exactly what happened to keep me so thoroughly in the dark; most of my friends went through a serious Radiohead phase, worship OK Computer and Kid A and pay hundreds of dollars for shitty tickets in stadiums (ugh, stadiums) to see them live, even today. But I never really listened to them. I think I might've been going through a jazz fusion phase while my friends were listening to music that's actually pleasant to listen to. It took me longer than most to get really heavily into interesting pop music (indie or otherwise), and by the time I did, it seemed like everyone was already a long-established Radiohead fanatic. I just kind of let them go, listened to other stuff, and by the time I graduated from high school, just after the release of Hail to the Thief, I probably couldn't have named one Radiohead song.

For the sake of full disclosure, because such ethereal ethics are definitely important while writing a self-important article about listening to an album everyone likes, I listen to In Rainbows sometimes. I heard one of the songs on the radio or something and realized maybe Radiohead isn't as epic/angsty as I thought, because both "15 Step" and "Bodysnatchers" are pretty great pop songs. OK Computer still kind of made me nervous, because it's one of those intimidating career-making epic albums that I don't usually like for the same reasons I don't like hardly any of those sweeping Great American Novels, and also it's from 1997 and basically nothing from 1997 is any good. Still, I'm really curious about this thing I know nothing about that means so much to everyone who's my age and also white and upper-middle-class and from the suburbs, so here are my track-by-track impressions.

Track 1: "Airbag"
This is real alterna-rock sounding. Distorted power chords, simple 1-5 progressions, "I'm not trying too hard" vocals, slurred delivery. Seems like it's building but it never really goes anywhere--I was expecting some kind of anthemic chorus that never came. Pleasant enough but this is a very familiar sound to me and there's nothing about this song that really sets it apart.

Track 2: "Paranoid Android"
I know this riff. Where did I hear this riff? I feel like some other band played it in the middle of one of their songs and everyone around me was probably like "oh I get that reference, I will nod knowingly" and I probably stood there with my neck stock-still, like an idiot. Anyway this is okay. Better than the first track. Has that late-'90s thing that I always associate with Everclear where they play the riff kind of softly and acoustically and you just know at some point the guitarist is going to stomp on a pedal and all of a sudden that little acoustic riff will become a big rock riff, and then he does it and you're like yeah! and maybe you nod your head harder.

But I'm also starting to think that I wouldn't have liked this in high school very much. I'm still waiting for hooks; I know from my limited listening of In Rainbows that this band can write a hell of a hooky chorus, but I haven't heard one yet and it sort of sounds like that's not what they're going for. I can't imagine why someone would withhold hooks if they are capable of writing hooks. It's like a chef saying "No, this dish is experimental. That's why there's no salt."

Track 3: "Subterranean Homesick Alien"
Lololol at that track title. I like Thom Yorke's voice in this one a lot more. The wavering whiny thing is kind of grating and he's doing a lot less of that here. This sounds like an Eels song to me. That's a compliment; I like Eels a lot. Think it'd be better if E from Eels (my god, let's just lololol at the '90s in general. E from Eels!) sang it, though. If I don't get angry comments for that it'll definitely mean that nobody is reading this site.



Track 4: "Exit Music (For a Film)"
Sounds like Eels again. Which band came first? I guess Beautiful Freak came out the year before OK Computer, but Radiohead had certainly been around longer. Who here was not a basically a fetus in the early '90s and can answer the question of Eels vs Radiohead? I like the fuzzed-out bass in this song a lot, and I like the way it builds, but it peters out way too soon. I don't like this tendency to just elevate the volume and distortion but not really change the melody--it makes it sound like the song is going somewhere but it's ultimately not very satisfying.

Track 5: "Letdown"
I like this! This is a pop song! I could definitely have played this at night while 16 years old and thought about how terrible my pretty great suburban life was. It sounds like that band Keane decided to make an entire career out of ripping this song off twelve times per album.

Track 6: "Karma Police"
This is an important song, right? This is like The Song from this album, I think. It immediately sounds different than the other songs--tighter, more cohesive, not rambly. It's a thoughtful, structured pop song, which makes it way more up my alley. I know the chorus, too. I didn't recognize anything up until then but I know that chorus. It's pretty catchy. If "chorus" is even the right word; Radiohead isn't doing traditional verse/chorus/verse/break structure, but they're also not breaking it in any kind of experimental way, like Soul Coughing or even Neko Case does. They just kind of take an eight-bar snippet and repeat it, building in volume and instrumentation, then break, then do the chorus. I'm not sure I'm sold on that being a better way to do things than verse/chorus.

Track 7: "Fitter Happier"
"Hey guys I just found this tangerine iMac, let's make it say my shitty poem out loud. Now put that cat on the piano keys and hit record while it stomps around."

Track 8: "Electioneering"
Where did this song come from? It sounds like an electric La's song or a noisy Blur song or something. It's okay I guess but a song with that kind of classic electric guitar riff has to have a hell of a catchy melody and this one doesn't. Also somebody shut that fucking cowbell up.

Track 9: "Climbing Up the Walls"
I hate this song. There's not a single thing I like about it. It's everything that was wrong with amelodic alterna-rock: it settles into a painful screeching groove and repeats for the entire length of the song, with various distorted elements swelling and shouting and scratching behind it. If I wasn't trying to do this professionally I would have hit the next track button after 20 seconds.

Track 10: "No Surprises"
I know this song too. Again, sounds like an Eels song. It has that sweetness, that nod to classic pop, that makes Eels great, but the pacing and tones of the guitar and bass are total late-'90s, which is a good thing. Thom Yorke's voice is maybe at its best here. My favorite song on the album so far.

Track 11: "Lucky"
Mopey, man. This whole album is mopey. I was expecting it to be more, I dunno, sad/soaring, I think, than straight up mopey. A lot of people were depressed in the '90s, I guess. This whole album has a really low beats-per-minute rate, which probably contributes to the mopery. Really hurts the songs when they try to do a breakdown at the end, like in this song. Hard to rock out when you're stuck at like 80 BPM.

Track 12: "The Tourist"
This song is boring.

I'm sort of confused by OK Computer as a whole. I didn't really like it very much, to be honest; like a lot of music in the late '90s, it's got this slow trudging sadcore thing going on that I guess is hard to connect with outside of that era. I don't really know what else was going on in 1997; I was 11 years old at the time, so it's not like I was aware of broad shifts in alternative rock music, and that kind of thing is hard to rediscover afterwards. Maybe the fact that it sounds quintessentially '90s is testament to its impact.

In their review of Radiohead's followup album, Kid A, AllMusic wrote, "multiple plays are necessary just to discern the music's form, to get a handle on quiet, drifting, minimally arranged songs with no hooks." OK Computer isn't really quiet or minimally arranged, but I'm starting to understand why I never got into this band in the first place. There is nothing about that description that sounds like something I'd be interested in--it sounds like a demonstration, not an album that you want to listen to. There are a couple of nice pop songs on this album, but even if I had listened to it back in high school, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have liked it much. I'll just stick with my pop music, thanks.

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House of Fuck You

House of Lies, Showtime's newest comedy, is the worst new show I've seen this year. That might not make it the worst new show of the year; I haven't seen either of those shows about how hard modern American life is for straight white males, or that other show about how hard modern American life is for straight white males that also includes improbable cross-dressing, because I know those shows are bad without having to suffer through them. But House of Lies stars Don Cheadle, and Ben Schwartz (Jean-Ralphio from Parks and Recreation), and Kristen Bell (Veronica Mars from Veronica Mars), and it's on a premium channel that theoretically has less restrictions and is able to take the medium of television in new and exciting directions. The reality is, it's on Showtime, America's channel for people saying "fuck" and also for tits, and holy christ it is terrible. Its crimes are as follows:

Tits and Fuck.
Showtime is allowed to show nudity (female nudity, obviously, and maybe a male ass cheek as a punchline or something) and broadcast whatever foul language they want. This sounds like it'd be freeing but apparently all of Showtime's writers and showrunners are forever trapped in a lucite prison of FuckTits from which there is no escape. I have the total tit count at 12 in the pilot episode, which I should add is only 30 minutes long. The first use of the word "fuck" comes at 1:30, the second at 2:45, and then I stopped counting until the first time a child says fuck (30:45). There are lots in between, though, so for all of you living in the as-yet-unreleased third Crank movie in which you cannot survive unless someone says "fuck" every 60 seconds, this is a good show for you to watch.

Other stats:

1. First reference to drugs: 1:35
2. First tit shot: 0:45
3. First girl-on-girl sex scene: 19:55
4. First HILARIOUS use of a risque sexual term in a public place in which everyone around stops eating their fine white-person meals and falls silent and stares at the utterer of said risque sexual term: 22:25
5. First non-ironic use of the word "panties," further made useless by the fact that this is applied to two men and one woman, the latter of whom (without getting into heteronormative undergarment theory) probably is actually wearing them: 7:08

Nobody Cares About Your Premise.
There are many jobs or situations that are inherently interesting. Drug dealer! Lawman! West Wing staffer! Doctor! Chef! Professional rich English countryperson! All interesting. House of Lies is a show about management consultants. Problem 1: nobody knows what the fuck that is. Problem 2: once they figure it out, nobody will care about it. And yet House of Lies treats the who-gives-a-shit world of management consulting like it's a secret world we've all been curious about. It gives us the structure of a typical job. It explains pay grade. It reveals what kind of person gets into this kind of work. And it defines the terms of the trade, even though the terms are not interesting or funny and actually have very obvious cognates in regular English that everyone would understand.

After someone says "We really can't afford to get counseled out on this job," Don Cheadle pauses time (yeah.) to say "Counseled out. That's consultant for 'fired.' It's not good." Let me break that down for you. That phrase adds nothing to the show. It is already useless. But it's also not hard to understand in its current form. Literally everything that is said on any British show is harder to understand than that. But okay, Don Cheadle explains that it means "fired." Fine. BUT THEN HE EXPLAINS THAT GETTING FIRED IS BAD. He defines the phrase, then defines his definition! Fuck you, Don Cheadle's writers.

As far as I can tell, this job, which nobody cares about, seems to mostly consist of "trying not to get fired" and "billing lots of outrageous expenses," which in the laziest possible way is demonstrated by having our noble leads go to a strip club. There's sort of a bigger problem here in that the show can't really decide if it's satirizing these characters, sympathizing with them, or glorifying them, Entourage-style. Really it's the latter, with a couple of nods to the former two options I guess out of recognition that in 2012, or 2011, 2010, 2009, or 2008, for that matter, it is ridiculously tone-deaf to have a show about useless bajillionaire management consultants who help despicable companies overcome their crimes to become successful enough to presumably commit more crimes and be despicable once again. But that's a bigger discussion, and I am too angry to remember any of those helpful terms I learned in my cultural studies classes in college that might be useful in discussing this, so I will keep my focus instead on how fucking awful this show is.

The show makes the mistake of giving its characters long soliloquies about business strategy, two lines into which every single viewer will be reaching for their iPhones, but which also make no sense and which would fool no reasonably intelligent humanoid businessmonster. That strategy to make one of those evil subprime mortgage lending firms a paragon of business ethics? THAT WOULD NEVER WORK. Because 1. it won't work, and 2. those businessghouls don't even want it to! They are the soulless riverbed-dredging catfish of our society. They make lots of money and they basically can't get arrested because nobody besides Matt Taibbi understands which crimes they've committed and his job is to come up with new fun similes to describe these people, not to arrest them or whatever. The strategy is obviously bullshit and nobody would ever fall for it. And yet that plan is the sole evidence we've seen that these consultant idiots are good at their job and thus the masters of the universe.

Sheer Laziness.
1. There are constant music and sound effects, like we're watching a Dreamworks animated picture about an anthropomorphized river otter who just wants to see the ocean even though river otters, despite their name, often live in coastal areas, which Dreamworks would know if they read Wikipedia once in awhile. When Don Cheadle tosses a cardboard sign aside, there's a whooshing sound. When a man bites into an eclair, it goes SQUISH. There is never not music playing. It is tremendously distracting.
2. At one point, in the strip club, Don Cheadle is supposed to take a shot off a stripper's ass. It sounds like the kind of thing someone who has never seen a stripper or an ass would think you would do in that situation; from a practical perspective, it seems really difficult to balance, and after a second Don Cheadle just picks the shot glass up and drinks it. You can practically hear him think "fuck this stage direction."
3. Jean-Ralphio, as he writes his name on a sign-in form, says "and this is my mobile, feel free to call." Then he literally makes one small circle and taps the paper twice with his pen. I have deduced that his phone number is "0..". Feel free to call and ask about the logic of that shit.
4. The show uses the word "paradigm" as an example of "indecipherable jargon," cribbing from Dilbert comic strips circa 1998.
5. There is an uptight blonde society woman who hates her husband, with tight pulled-back hair and a big chunky pearl necklace. Because that is a new type of character that I am definitely intrigued by.
6. Somebody crashes through a dinner table.

7. The final shot of the episode is Don Cheadle staring at himself in his bathroom mirror while shaving, in the cold fluorescent light of morning, wondering at last if the choices he's made have oh jesus fucking christ
8. Don Cheadle's son has some HILARIOUSLY ambiguous sexuality. In case you didn't understand that from his, you know, purple tights and neckerchief and miniskirt and you know what everything he's wearing is shades of purple, he does the least balletic twirl I've ever seen within the first 90 seconds of the episode. Then he mentions musicals, Olivia Newton-John, and shoe-shopping, and is catty towards another child in his children's school for small children, within the next 90 seconds. Later he will sing beautifully.

Wasting Talent.
There is only one brief glimpse of Jean-Ralphio dancing. It is the most transcendent moment in the entire show. Ben Schwartz was basically hired to be, like, a successful version of Jean-Ralphio, or like what Jean-Ralphio thinks he is, except the writers of House of Lies are, as we know, really bad at their jobs, so the only time he doesn't look like a grainy photocopy of Jean-Ralphio is when he's dancing.

Veronica Mars is utterly wasted, as she has been in just about everything since Veronica Mars.

Don Cheadle, I don't really have many thoughts about him, since he has a knack for picking movies other people like and I am not interested in, but I just saw him in Ocean's 13 and now it sounds like he's doing an American accent even though I'm pretty sure he's American. All those hard growled Rs, I think. "It was harrrrd worrrrk."



Oh, Right. That.
This show fucking has a time out conceit. Don Cheadle will turn to face the camera, and the world will freeze behind him as he explains what exciting business terms like "after-work" mean. Then someone calls "TIME IN!!!," silently, and the world begins to move again. Yes, it is just like Zack Morris on Saved by the Bell. But with weirder sound effects; at one point, he calls time out and birds flying overhead freeze in mid-air. Then when time in is called, the birds continue flying, only now you can hear them flap-flap-flapping, really loudly. Clearly there are some things I don't understand about the science of freezing time in order to explain things nobody cares about.

The entire episode is available on YouTube, for free, with the tits and cursing taken out. Showtime clearly thinks that they are losing nothing by doing this; you can practically hear executives say, "Don't worry about it, bro. If they can't see the tits, they'll only watch for a minute or so. Then they'll come crawling to their cable service provider." I do not recommend watching it. It is infuriating. But here's the episode, for completeness's sake.

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List Without Comment: The Noir Revival

Love this shit. Pithy wisecracks, mysteries, dark worldviews, destructive alcoholism, action, style, tough-minded philosophy, overt sexism. Good stuff. The genre never really went away--The Big Lebowski, Chinatown, and Blade Runner are all noir too, and came long enough after noir's heyday to be labeled neo-noir. But in the last five years or so there's been this new revival and it's been done in such a cool and respectful way that I thought I'd make up a little list of some of my favorites. These are all great. I wouldn't put them in a list if they weren't great. Or, I might, but I'd have a reason, and I'd tell you what that reason was. Anyway there's no reason here because these are all great. Stop asking for a reason and just read/watch these.

Books.
1. Icelander by Dustin Long.
2. Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon.
3. The Yiddish Policemen's Union and The Final Solution by Michael Chabon.
4. Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem.
5. Misadventure by Millard Kaufman.

TV.
1. Veronica Mars.*
2. Bored to Death.
3. Sherlock (BBC, 2010).*
4. Terriers.*
5. The Hour (BBC, 2011).

Movies.
1. Brick.*
2. Mystery Team.*
3. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
4. Gone Baby Gone.
5. In Bruges.

An asterisk means this title is available on Netflix.

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The Pop of 2011

I like end of year music lists! Not because they are objective markers of what is good, because that is objectively impossible. And not because I like thinking about which album is better than which album, or even because I like discussing things like that, because that's the kind of thing people who comment on blogs do, and I do not comment on blogs because I do not have whatever chemical imbalance propels people to comment on blogs and think that it's socially acceptable behavior. I like the lists because at the squooshy overripe age of 25 I have basically completely lost my desire to trawl through music blogs, like rummaging for change beneath a car seat. Sometimes you come up with a quarter, sure. Quarters are great! You can use them in snack machines and laundry machines. But most of the time you come up with a half-eaten cough drop, or a used tissue, or a clump of hair that does not recognizably belong to anyone you've ever met, or a penny (don't even get me started on pennies hoo boy), and I don't want to listen to those. And these end of year lists save me from doing that. Or at least they restrict the area I have to search through to a manageable two square feet under the passenger seat where quarters have been known to fall.

I am unqualified to write any kind of comprehensive roundup list, of course. Do not expect qualifications or experience or professionalism here at Oh Em Gee. But this is a pop culture blog that updates more than once a year [ed. note: barely more than once a year] [ed. note: I am the ed.], so we are contractually obligated to make some kind of halfhearted traffic-grabbing attempt at a top whatever list. I have decided to make this about pop music, because that's all I listen to, really. I'm not picky about genre--the list includes country, rock, punk, hardcore, hip-hop, and comedy--but I am picky about music being as hooky and catchy as possible. I demand hooks! So here's a list of things like that that I liked over the past year or so.

Some of these are albums, and some of these are songs. It's all in one list because who cares. If I didn't like the album as a whole, or didn't bother listening to it because it's by Britney Spears, I will list the song I want you to listen to specifically. Also it is literally in the order that I thought of it, which is probably as good a way as any to order something like this.

1. Cloud Nothings
Album: Cloud Nothings
This is my most-listened-to pop album of the year, by a long shot. Sometimes people call it lo-fi, or noise pop, or other music critic names like that. But really it's just slightly unpolished pop-punk, crammed full of monster, monster hooks. One of the catchiest sets of songs I've ever heard. Oh also it's really just one dude and he's from Cleveland and he's about nineteen years old. Facts!
Video.

2. Ha Ha Tonka
Album: Death of a Decade
Ozarks country-pop. It is very good.
Video.

3. Josh Rouse and the Long Vacations
Album: Josh Rouse and the Long Vacations
I love Josh Rouse, but he's been on a little bit of a rough streak, releasing maybe two or three kind of crappy albums before now. This one is his best since Subtitulo for sure, maybe since 1972. Summery!
Video.

4. Chiddy Bang
Album: Peanut Butter and Swelly
I like Chiddy Bang because I like poppy party hip-hop, which is deeply uncool in the sad headphone-rap year of Drake and Shabazz Palaces and The Roots' Undun, the latter of which is pretty great but not too poppy so it does not make this list. Also I am probably racist if the only hip-hop artists on my list either sample Sufjan Stevens or are actually jokes.
Video.

5. Rihanna/Britney Spears
Songs: "We Found Love," "'Til the World Ends"
These are great songs. Listen to them while you are very drunk, or put them on at a party when you and other people are very drunk. Or yell their names in the direction of the DJ booth at bars in Sillyamsburg. All good suggestions. You're welcome.
Video.

6. Pepper Rabbit
Song: "Rose Mary Stretch"
These guys kind of suck. But this song is really really great.
Video.

7. Beirut
Album: The Rip Tide
The Rip Tide is definitely Beirut's least ambitious, least sonically interesting album to date. It is of course my favorite of his, because I am also unambitious and uninteresting. Oh man, "Santa Fe." I could listen to that song forever.
Video.

8. Fucked Up
Album: David Comes to Life
I AM YELLING LOUDLY
Video.

9. Sloan
Album: The Double Cross
Sloan is one of those Canadian bands like the Weakerthans (or Americans like Fountains of Wayne) that kind of does what they do and have been doing it so long and at the same level of very-goodness that they've achieved this mysterious level of mid-range success where they aren't really "cool," and probably won't ever will be cool, nor will they ever really be popular unless some freak single of theirs catches on, but they can just keep making the music they want to make until they don't feel like doing it anymore. They don't have to pay attention to trends, or worry about backlash, nor will they get tons of press or unwanted attention. But it doesn't matter: they just release their old-school power pop and it's great and I will listen to it a lot and then forget about them until their next album comes out.
Video.

10. The Lonely Island
Album: Turtleneck and Chain
Home to one of the best Justin Timberlake songs ever written. The line between serious and parody JT songs is basically invisible at this point, and "Motherlover" is flat-out one of his best songs. The songwriting is surprisingly strong on this album; there are like four or five songs that are actually great stomper modern pop-hip-hop songs. It's got really funny stupid lyrics about premature ejaculation and other weiner problems too but the songs stand alone pretty well.
Video.

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QB Hot or Not

A Note From the Founder/Editorial Director: Oh Em Gee. does not normally post about sports, due to them being the worst. But their inexplicable popularity does not seem to be waning, so to please the masses who like this sort of thing, I have asked our Senior Art/Sports/Words Editrix to write a tasteful little essay on the bangability of the various quartered-backs in the Nationalized Footballing League.

I am a lady who watches football. And because of the horrendous affliction I have called heterosexuality (Men Are Disgusting), I find myself peepin extra hard at the QBs. Football quarterbacks come in all shapes and sizes...of nerds. Here I've featured the hottest and nottest of current NFL QBs.

Hottest!

Note: Tom Brady did NOT make this list.

Tom Brady looks like a Ken doll. He is married to like the #1 supermodel in the world and he just looks like a huge fucking asshole. His teeth are clearly fake, he has a chin like a hard ass, and people call him "chiseled."

Fucking. Ew. Also ugh, The Patriots. Anyway I'm just bringing him up to let you know he did not make the list. He sucks. Ok here we go!

5. Tim Tebow. Denver Broncos.

Tim Tebow is a Jesus freak. He starred in a really lol pro-life ad during the Super Bowl last year with his mom:

Also he writes bible passages on his football war paint. Sometimes he cries.

                                          
He's just a sensitive, Lord-praising, lovable juicehead goofball virgin (he is saving himself for our wedding night) and he's totes cute in the face.

4. Cam Newton. Carolina Panthers.


Cam Newton I could just eat you up.

Look. At. That. Smile.


                                                   

Smile again.
                                                  
Luv u Cammy

3. Sam Bradford. St. Louis Rams.


I barely even know who this guy is but he is so adorable. Look at his lil teef! And his messy hair!
                                                      


He's 1/16th Cherokee, that is fucking adorable!! 1/16th, you guys. My lil' Cherokee.

2. Ryan Fitzpatrick. Buffalo Bills. I could settle down with Ryan Fitzpatrick.

I want to start a fire and go fishing with Ryan Fitzpatrick.

I'm gonna go ahead and admit most of this is beard. But what a lush honey brown beard it is.


1. Mark Sanchez. NY Jets. Look at this beautiful man and his cute little noodle arms.

I will excuse pictures of Mark Sanchez like this:

for the pictures of Mark Sanchez like this:

Check this FUCKING ADORABLE collage his nephew made: Love you tio Mark!

A 17-year-old girl took that pic inside his apartment after she presumably gave him a blowie (IT'S LEGAL IN NEW JERSEY OK). REGARDLESS, I would def lick all the moles right off his scruffy Mexican-American face. [Ed. note: This sounds rapey to me. The 17-year-old thing, I mean. The mole-licking is gross but legal.]




Ugliest. This was difficult because "goofy" is the word I would use for pretty much every quarterback. It's when goofy mixes with ugly that you get the following list:

5. Drew Brees. New Orleans Saints.

Drew Brees and The Saints won the Superbowl in 2010, which is Wow, Great! But Drew, let's be real here, what is with your hair. Your combover looks SO STRINGY when you get all sweaty. Stringy is like, the worst hair adjective. Get a damn haircut, it might help your face. Maybe. Probably not.

4. Eli Manning. New York Giants. Eli Manning looks like a 15 year old who wears light wash carpenter jeans from Old Navy and plays Zelda all day long. [Ed. note: I see a distinct Zuckerberg thing happening in this nerd's face area.]


He led the Giants to a Super Bowl victory against the undefeated Patriots in 2008 (epic burn suck on that Brady), but I think we should congratulate him more for losing his virginity and his acne clearing up.

3. Kyle Orton. Chicago Bears.


I just, cannot.

2. Peyton Manning. Indianapolis Colts. Peyton Manning looks like an uglier version of The Situation from MTV's The Jersey Shore (The Situation is ugly).

Peyton has inherited the same doof face and smushy nose as his brother Eli.

Technically he's out for the season now with some neck injury (I guess that tree trunk holding up his head gets in the way), but he's there on the sidelines every game grimacing.

Not a good look, Pey!

1. Ben Roethlisberger. Pittsburgh Steelers.
Ben Roethlisberger rapes women.

Blah blah innocent until proven guilty blah blah RAPELISBERGER


Coincidentally your fat fucking face matches your ugly rapist soul. Fuck you.

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#12: Toast Sandwiches

Stuff That's Lame About England is a column about a grey, rainy island (or possibly archipelago) in the North Atlantic. The column is comprised of articles with no factual basis, composed without the benefit of any research whatsoever, and with any luck will contain several half-truths, misconceptions, and flat-out lies per article. It neither knows nor cares what the difference is between the British, the English, and the residents of the United Kingdom. It is a travelogue written out of pure guesswork with a dash of irrational xenophobia.

For the record, the closest any of us editors have been to experiencing that Sceptered Isle is Graeme's three hour layover in Heathrow on his way to Africa or whatever. But we've all listened to Oasis so we're basically experts.

Sometimes in America, where our major news outlets are staffed variously by monsters and goblins, we hold up the socialist public news organizations of other, more successful countries as evidence of their superiority and our descent into competition for 80th Best Country slot (we're coming for you, Tajikistan!). And sometimes the BBC and CBC are great! But sometimes they are not. Sometimes they reflect their country's sadness and greatest faults right back at them. And we all know that one of England's greatest (of many) faults is...food. And so the BBC, world-class news outlet, presents this story on toast sandwiches.

Are you perhaps thinking that a "toast sandwich" is something like a panini? Or a toasted hoagie? Stop thinking that. England is not advanced enough as a civilization to understand that sandwiches are supposed to include other ingredients besides bread. This is despite possibly having invented the sandwich? Is that true? In honor of the journalistic achievements of the BBC I will choose not to look that up, not even on Yahoo Answers where the answer will be misspelled and incorrect and probably racist somehow.

The toast sandwich is, and here I quote that venerable malignant tumor that is the BBC, "two slices of bread around a slice of toast." The Biebers then continues the story by explaining the many benefits of such a non-sandwich sandwich: it is cheap (well, yes), it is healthy (this is why the English will be extinct as a race in fourteen years, the island taken over by squirrels or pheasants or some shit as the residents of Dull Grass Island become ever more pale and sickly and anemic and wither away into nothingness), it is "surprisingly nice to eat" (bet it's not) and "quite filling" (not compared to sandwiches that are actually sandwiches). The other ingredients are butter and salt and pepper, because I suppose the British have seen enough Top Chef to know that you season everything, even if your meal is a Dickensian short-stack of bread and nothing else.

The article also calls for the toast to be cooled before being smothered between its brethren. This is an important step. The idea of HOT materials touching COOL or ROOM-TEMPERATURE materials? This is shocking to the residents of the Lesser North Atlantic Ocean Rocks, who all have the palate of a ten-year-old white suburban boy with no mouth.

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There is a recipe for a toast sandwich in this article.

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What's weird here is the utterly earnest way this news is presented, although I do detect a hint of embarrassment in the fact that no specific writer is bylined. That will not halt the blame, BBC! I now blame ALL OF YOU.

I read the first few comments to see if other Druids would be like "um you are out of your goddamn mind, BBC? This is not a real thing and people that write hateful ignorant articles about our admittedly awful country should be aware that people don't actually eat this because there is no way English food is this cartoonishly awful in real life." The first comment does in fact note that this is a "boring, tasteless sandwich," but then notes that he'll "stick to his favourite, cheese on toast."

Pictured above: the best of English fine dining.

THAT IS ALSO NOT A SANDWICH. That is the first two steps of several other steps necessary to create a meal fit for god damn adults. This I looked up, because unlike the history of the word "sandwich," I made a wager with myself that any further research of the phrase "cheese on toast" would result in just total humiliation for the Grand High Wizard Queen's Islands of Sadness. And I won that wager! Facts learned during 25 seconds of research in which I did not even finish the three-paragraph Wikipedia article of the subject:

1. Under the "recipes" section: "Cheese on toast consists of toast, either buttered or not, with cheese on one side." Do not be fooled into thinking there is more to this dish than the words in its name! There is not, for the English are a race blessed with neither imagination nor tastebuds!

2. There is a "National Cheese on Toast Day." I believe this is also the day where any Englishperson fortunate enough to have left the Archipelago of Cold Precipitation kills themselves, thus performing a crude but effective form of population control.

3. This dish/object is included in English cookbooks. This bolsters my theory that the British are actually functionally illiterate, since the phrase "cheese on toast" is itself a recipe.

It is possible that the BBC's investigation of the toast sandwich is actually an extension of the population control experiment indicated in Reason Number Two, above. How else to explain this passage?

"I would emphasise that toast sandwiches are also good at saving you calories as well as money, provided you only have one toast sandwich for lunch and nothing else."

This is how England dies, people. This is how it all mercifully ends.

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