Listen: I have hardly posted a thing because the zombie COVID pandemic was the crazy, and working from home is both hard and easy, in that it’s easy to work harder and write far more speeches and such when you are in your pajamas at midnight and not wasting two hours a day on the highway.
So here are some thoughts.
Myth: Writers and editors are solitary creatures.
Reality: Many wordsmiths may be introverts, or extroverts, or whatever. But working with words does not make you anti-social. Not at all. I know people who bang on the keyboard for monies in a variety of ways–reporters, speechwriters, novelists, screenwriters, editors–and 5.6 metric tons of them are some of the most charming and social people I know.
The truth is, WRITING is the solitary part.
You need peace and quiet to do the creative bit, even if you work in a social setting like me with people everywhere. A ton of folks need to close the door, put on headphones, and go.
I can’t close the door and get solitude at work 99 percent of the time, so I’ve learned to tune out the rest of the world and bang on the keyboard faster than light, going back in time to before sound was invented, then returning to the social world when the draft is done.
Writers are different, and there are other folks who like doing amazing first drafts that take a lot longer. My belief is editing and polishing is a lot easier, and you can do a lot more editing and such with people around and noise. Yet that creative part, the hardest and most fun bit, usually takes some intense focus and solitude.
Myth: Working from home will (a) disappear along with COVID or (b) is the future for all possible workers forever and ever
Reality: There are some jobs that have to be done in person. Though I actually kinda believe (b) is true–though only for the workers with the leverage to fight and keep it. Folks were just as productive as when they drove into the office.
A ton of companies and organizations are probably feeling completely befuddled about this now. Maybe they’re jumping up and down that they don’t have to pay massive amounts of cash to rent office space, or freaked out because they aren’t renting and just built a giant building that’s empty.
Middle managers are likely losing their minds because they’re designed to operate in person.
I think this will be good for the workplace, especially people with kids and dogs and long commutes. Pretty good bet that a lot of workers who can Grab a Laptop and Do the Job Anywhere may want to come into the office one day a week for all those in-person meetings.
How well this whiskey pairs with coffee
It’s technically a whiskey creamer, and I am technically on vacation, as is my sister-in-law down here visiting. So we we are trying all these itty bitty bottles of different whiskey creamers in our morning coffee. YOU SHOULD DO THIS, but only on vacation or weekends because if you drive hammered you get wrecked, that is my PSA, kthxbai.
Today’s little bottle is: Sheelin White Chocolate Country Creamer, a product of Ireland, rated a 93 by the Beverage Tasting Institute and silver medal winner at the San Francisco Spirits Competition, where it excelled in the high jump.
Is it good? No.
It is great, and you ask yourself is there any alcohol in this at all, and you wonder why everything is second-person now, like it’s a bad detective novel, until you look at the tiny print on the tiny bottle to realize this adorable bit of cream and white chocolate is not kidding, and does contain whiskey, and is 28 proof.
Technically, this isn’t a music video, and technically, I don’t care.
IT IS THE GENIUS.
Watch, then let’s discuss.
Perfect, right? The music matches the scene.
Not a little, not a lot, but so much I want to marry it.
It’s a slow burn. Tension keeps rising and rising, until it breaks and the drums kick in and it’s like Phil Collins song except Denzel Washington is slaying bad guys with severe amounts of style.
What I love about this action sequence, and the entire movie, is how Denzel’s Washington character keeps surviving and thriving despite being outnumbered and outgunned.
In 99.9 percent of action movies, the hero wins because he’s bigger and stronger (Arnold Schwarzenegger), flexible enough to do the side splits on different planets (Jean-Claude Van Damme), has better gear (IRON MAN, BATMAN), or has superpowers.
Denzel’s character wins by being clever. It’s so much more satisfying than mowing down acre after acre of faceless bad guys before confronting the Final Boss Villain on a rooftop, at night, while it’s raining, then listening to his maniac monologue and chucking him down a chasm to get impaled on something long and sharp.
There’s no creativity in showing us that again. We have seen it 329 times.
Denzel’s character in this movie, and the sequel, wins by being smarter than the bad guys. And he does it without getting repetitive, which is refreshing and entertaining. Even the first real fight scene of this movie, he’s planning things out and out-smarting the villains.
The final Home Depot-ish fight is the most creative of all. I love how he chains his traps together, starting with the stuff on the floor to use his barbed-wire and cement bag trap, then the next thug getting speared with a gardening tool when he stops to check out the body of his buddy.
Without music, this would be a wonderful scene.
With this music, it’s iconic, and I’ve watched the thing, like, five bazillion times. Do I rewatch Schwarzenegger mowing through 200 extras in baggy uniforms again and again? No.
Hat’s off to the director and the songwriter for pulling this off.
And yes, I have seen THE LITTLE THINGS, and yes, we will chat about it later this week. A beautiful film.
Listen: there are tons of prepper blogs, YouTube channels, slick magazines, and Facebook pages.
They all want you to like and subscribe, because that means more eyeballs and ads and monies in their pockets.
But is any of it smart?
Let’s get real. Would any of that stuff have helped you get through 2020?
You don’t need to close your eyes and imagine a world full of zombies, an invasion of Tentacle Aliens from Planet Xenon, or for all your kitchen appliances connected to the interwebs to get sentient and totally inspired after listening to you watch TERMINATOR 2 for the fifth time.
The Year 2020, which will forever suck, featured a global pandemic and a worldwide recession. Two epic disasters.
Let’s do a little cost-benefit analysis of common prepper items, most expensive to free, and ask ourselves if helped anybody get through 2020.
Personal space in converted missile silo
PRICE TAG: $1 million.
VERDICT: Could sorta be useful, if you were the only person inside and really didn’t want to catch COVID. Totally useless if anybody in there with you had COVID, since all y’all would be guaranteed to get it. Somebody would have to deliver food and water and such.
Out of the price range of all but the 1 percent and pretty useless anyway. You could do the same thing while saving a million bucks by working from home and getting groceries & Chinese takeout delivered.
Underground bunker
PRICE TAG: $50,000 to $400,000 or more.
VERDICT: Same thing as the fancypants missile silo. Meh. Waste of your precious cash.
A garage full of ammo, AR-15’s, and MRE’s
PRICE TAG: $10,000 to infinity, the way ammo prices are these days.
VERDICT: Again, not a help during 2020. Wrong way to prep for a pandemic and/or recession.
Survival sailboat, a la Kevin Costner (legend!) in WATERWORLD
PRICE TAG: Depends on size, new or used, plain or cushy. Tiny and used might be as much as a lightly used Camry, nicer and bigger ones will cost three times as much as your house.
VERDICT: This would actually keep you nicely isolated, safe from COVID and mortgage payments if you sold your house and lived on it. Better have WiFi to keep working, though. And yeah, if another apocalypse decided to pile on, you would be safe from zombies. This is our first semi-winner. Not great, but not useless.
Survival SUV or muscle car, a la MAD MAX
PRICE TAG: How much guzzleline will the engine use?
VERDICT: Actually a bad idea during a real apocalypse and absolutely useless during 2020. Nope. But you’d scare everybody pulling into Safeway.
A collection of survival gear, bug-out bags, and blades
PRICE TAG: Grab the pre-packed camo bag at Costco, some firestarters, and a great machete–all for around $100. Or you can go nuts and err on the opposite end of cheap r/MallNinjaShit, spending the firstborn’s college tuition fund by filling the garage with primo gear from REI and a collection of blades that each cost more than my first car.
VERDICT: Never a bad idea to have some camping and survival gear. Earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and wildfires can always happen. They might have done their thing where you live, just to make 2020 suck more. So sure, not a bad good idea. Just don’t blow the college fund.
Skills, skills, and, for variety, more skills
PRICE TAG: Nothing, unless you sign up for classes, which you’re not doing because there’s a freaking pandemic and people are all broke.
VERDICT: Absolutely useful. Survival Lilly on YouTube is super informative, and what she does in the woods doesn’t require any money or fancy equipment. Do it.
Sweat and veggies
PRICE TAG: Nothing but time, though you can get all fancy and suckered into the idea that virtual coaches and Peloton bikes are required. They aren’t. Hiking, walking, running, punching things, flipping tires, hiking–whatever you’re into, do it.
VERDICT: Insanely good. We will all die, and chances are it won’t be after zombies go nom-nom-nom on our legs or plasma vampires arrive from the seventh dimension to eat the sun. It’s pretty much a 95 percent chance you or I will die to what everybody else tends to die from: a car accident (seatbelts!) or a health problem. Heart disease, diabetes, cancer, COVID-19. And the best way to avoid all that is to get in shape and eat healthier.
Bottom line
Your time, money, and health are all precious and limited.
There’s no shortage of people who’ll try to scare you into buying their stuff. Except 2020 showed how useless a lot of that stuff is.
The smartest way to prep for any given apocalypse is simple: Sweat a little more. Eat more veggies and fewer chocolate chip cookies. Learn as much as you can.
And yeah, if you want to go wild, look into living on a sailboat, you know, more like Don Johnson in MIAMI HEAT than Kevin Costner in WATERWORLD, though you’d be ready to go all WATERWORLD if stuff happened..
Listen, I usually (1) make fun of wealthy stars spending insane amount of dough on CGI for a music video full of cringe, or (2) explore the depths of the interwebs and sometimes go back in time to discover the obscure and bizarre.
This video is completely different.
Somebody you never heard of is playing in the park, banging on bongos, and singing words from a 1930’s song that you will not understand unless you’re from the northern parts of Finland.
Even crazier: the melody goes back to the 17th century, according to something on the series of tubes called Wikiwand, which says: “The song is sung in very heavy Eastern Savonian dialects spoken in North Karelia. It takes the point of view of a young man and a woman named Ieva/Eva/Eeva in Finnish, who sneaks away to where everyone is dancing to a polka, and dances all night.”
Who can’t get down with that?
Also: although I’m Swedish, you have to admit Finland rocks. Best education system in the world. Beat the Soviet army and their tanks during World War II with a bunch of folks running around on skis with rifles. Wrote songs about people sneaking away to dance all night way back in the 17th century. Get on with your bad self, Finland.
Here’s the original footage.
Cool, right?
Then another man who’s not a household name takes that footage, uses some video editing magic, and turns some folk polka bongo goodness into an Epic Club Remix that I have happily listened to FIVE BAZILLION TIMES.
I mean, this thing is my new jam. I could not love it more. Crank up the volume to 11 and listen.
You’ve got the sound guru, a woman dancing like nobody’s watching, Vibing Cat–and to top it, a Random Horn and Strings Section.
I could not love this more. It’s impossible. Tried to. Didn’t work.
Oh, it seems like a beautiful idea: turning an abandoned missile silo into a super-secure doomsday shelter. Such a great thought that a number of people have done it, written about it, or put it in video games and movies.
Check out a story about one such Missile Silo of the Apocalypse:
Okay, you’ve got a giant, underground concrete structure that’s already built to military standards. Level after level that you can divide up and effectively defend. Add drinking water, fuel, generators, fridges, ginormous 4k televisions, a swimming pool, and stores of num-nums–bam, you’re set, as long as you can write a check for up to $3 million, right?
Here’s why all of that is, to be technical, a towering pile of stinking poppycock.
Reason No. 1: Your secret hidey hole is not secret
If they can’t find you, they can’t sneak into you secret bunker or cut you off from sources of food, fuel, and water. This is why being deep underground is so appealing.
This advantage is completely negated by having so much press and video online all about your Missile Silo of the Apocalypse.
No, they don’t reveal the exact location. Don’t need to–there are only so many missile silos in the United States, with a bazillion of them in Southern Canada (North Dakota and South Dakota). Oh look, here’s a map.
Sure, there are silos in other states, and the Pentagon will not let you walk around active missile silos. They probably have land mines and razor wire and soldiers with rifles protecting those.
Old missile silos that got sold, now, will not be secret at all.
There will be all kinds of paper trails showing when a surplus missile silo went on sale, who bought them, and the location of that property. Even if all you knew was the name of the company selling missile silo condos, it would be easy to see what real estate they owned and exactly how much they pay in property taxes and where such properties were. In my little rural county, we have all that info available via a google maps thing and such. It’s fancy.
Even if you assume all of that isn’t true, the interets are powerful, and five random peoples on Reddit could watch some promos videos like the one above, examine them frame by frame and figure out exactly where the secret bunker is.
So yeah, your secret bunker is not so secret. Which makes it far less safe.
Reason No. 2: Giant target on your back
Imagine the apocalypse hitting tomorrow, and you are not wealthy enough throw a random million or three on a missile silo bunker.
Say you’ve got a family with two kids and no food. But you read about these silos, and there’s one twenty miles away, packed with drinking water and hot food and rich people who don’t have callouses on their hands and probably never served a tour in Afghanistan or Iraq, like you have, and yeah, you’re getting desperate.
Plenty of people will look at these missile silos as a great place to loot or take over.
With all the press and attention, the locations will not be a secret to locals. They will have known about the missile silos back when the military ran them, and chances are a lot of people have family and friends who worked to build these monstrous stuctures, or worked inside them before retiring from the service and settling down nearby.
Locals won’t just know about your bunker. They will be coming for it.
Reason No. 3: You won’t reach the missile silo
I will bet you my first-born and the title to my house that 99.9 percent of people who can afford to drop a bazillion dollars on a missile silo bunker 10 miles west of Nowhere, North Dakota, do not actually live anywhere near that place.
When things are normal, sure, they can fly in and spend a long weekend play-acting their Mad Max fantasies in the bunker before flying back to a mansion or yacht or vacation home in Palm Beach.
Once an apocalypse actually hits, those planes will not be flying. The highways will become impassable. You won’t be able to hike through 500 or 1000 miles of wilderness with your Louis Vuitton go-bag and make it all the way to Nowhere, North Dakota.
The zombies will feast upon your corpse before you make it 30 miles on foot.
Reason No. 4: Best-case scenario is still bad, you die, the end
Say all of the above doesn’t happen. The locals have their memories of all local missile silos wiped from their brains by the Men in Black, and Scottie transports your rich butt straight from wine tasting in the Hamptons to the living room of your fancy bunker.
Congratulations. You delayed death by months, maybe even a year. Two if you’re truly lucky. Because the fuel will run out, meaning the electricity–hot water, hot food, hot showers, all of that–will also run out. Your bright, comfortable bunker will turn into a dark and cold hole in the earth.
Reason No. 5: Better uses for a mountain of money
If you are part of the 1 percent, and have money to burn on a missile silo condo that you’ll never use, there are smarter ways to blow a million or three.
As we said before, the wealthiest people–in America and around the world–tend to live in large, coastal cities. New York, LA, Miami, London, Tokyo.
There’s an ocean, and beaches, and boats.
A boat is a great idea for the apocalypse. Especially if it’s (a) a sailboat, which would work even after fuel ran out, and (b) you live nearby. Which you likely do.
If there’s an apocalypse, you have zero worries about zombies and such after sailing out and dropping anchor. Easy peasy, lemon squeazy. Fish for your protein. Get into eating kelp and such. Grow some lemons or whatever on board to ward off scurvy.
Your main worry, long-term, will be pirates. Invest some of that one to three million into pirate-proofing measures. A flamethrower or three, and some long-range guns. Go wild.
Reason No. 6: This entire option is not an option for 99.99 percent of us
I started writing this series with the intention of being brutally practical.
Blowing one to three million on a missile silo condo is not just impractical, but wasteful and not an option for regular human beings like you and me.
If you can casually lay down a few million like that, email me and let’s spitball other fun ideas for spare cash sitting around. I HAVE MANY.
So what is smart?
Multiple options. Chances are, you drive to work. Could be 5 miles or 50 miles. You need an option near home and another option near work.
Cheap or free is best. Your options don’t need to be fancy. They need to be close enough and good enough.
Sustainable is key. Any solution that relies on fuel, ammunition, or electricity is not sustainable.
Let’s work though the problem. You need shelter, fire, food, tools, and medicine. Enough to get you through the transition from civilization to Barter Town.
Yet any such shelter is temporary.
Surviving any sort of apocalypse means returning to a nomadic life of hunting, gathering, and looting. Yes, the looting part is the most fun in movies and books. Just think about this, though. The only way you avoid nomadic life is to master farming. Unless your secret bunker has a working farm, stocked with crops and animals and equipment, you’re gonna be on the move.
Here are three examples of what would work for somebody on the move. First is a log cabin in the woods, hopefully near running water, as a long-term home base maybe to survive the winter after you stock up all spring and summer.
Second is a cheap sailboat, letting you be a nomad from the start. Get your WATERWORLD on.
Third is mountain bikes, backpacks, and tents, letting you and a team be mobile and able to set up camp anywhere.
What’s definitely not smart is a missile silo bunker. Though this story does tempt me into selling spots at my secret series of Survival Cabins in the Olympic Mountains.
As I’ve been married for FIVE BILLION YEARS, and have never used this thing people call “dating apps,” which sounds like an appetizer made from dates and possibly wrapped in bacon, I am unfamiliar with the Tinders and the Matches and the Bumblebees and such.
What I do know is that this new ad for Match is brilliant.
Here, watch it, then we’ll talk smack.
Okay, that’s perfect, right? The actors, the meet-cute scene, the montage. ALL OF IT.
What’s especially great to me is Ryan Reynolds was involved, and whatever he touches is inevitably funny, along with Taylor Swift letting him use Love Story, her best song, always will be, and no, I have ignored most of her pop songs and actually like the country stuff better, and the new indie piano album, understated, under-rated.
Taylor, you keep innovating instead of pumping out the same songs and albums for 40 years. No, I am not looking at you, AC/DC.
Okay, these dudes have a point.
Also: I would listen to the entire DOG ON THE ROAD parody album. Make it happen. Send me the link and I will send you monies to Australia via horses, dolphins, and finally drop bears wearing cute little ’80s fanny packs, Chris-Pine style, and yes, you want to see the full footage instead of three seconds of a teaser, here you go.
Note: I hope you are all surviving 2020, and I wish you all the best during the last few weeks of the Worst Year Ever–and my promise to you is that 2021 will be far, far better.
Now, weird news has happened forever. We just didn’t have CNN, fark.com and Wonkette around to shoot video, take notes, and tell us about when Billy Bob the Caveman drank that fermented berry juice and tried to kill a sabre-toothed tiger with a spoon. Pour one out for Billy Bob.
Florida Man has always been when us, even before there was a Florida.
HOWEVER: Perhaps the greatest local news video of all time, when it comes to weird news, is the Exploding Whale.
I’ve written about this before. The reporter who covered the story wrote an entire book after the event.
All we could see, though, was grainy footage. Clear enough to witness the cray-cray, just not up to our standards.
Today, however, for the first time, we can view the build-up and the carnage in glorious high-definition, because the reporter found the original footage on this stuff called “film” and technical geniuses turned that film into digital goodness.
Here, watch and share, and raise your glass to celebrate the 50th anniversary of what I believe should be a national holiday: The Day the Whale Exploded.
Documentaries can be amazing, or put the B in Boring–it all depends. Kinda like straight-to-streaming movies. YOU NEVER KNOW.
This, now, is completely educational while being insanely good and hilarious. I could not love it more. Seriously.
Take a look, then we’ll talk snail smack.
What’s so good about this?
The best thing is how the narrator doesn’t skimp on the science. At all.
It’s easy to do a Honey Badger video, where you go all SNL skit and continue to riff on the same joke. Still funny. Just not a ton of science there. We learned that honey badgers are tough, resistant to cobra venom, and willing to take on anything. A classic video, but that’s pretty much it.
This killer snail video, now, crams in tons of science. An amazing amount. The full Latin names of species, the specific names of weird snail body parts, the chemicals involved in digestion and such. It’s crazy.
You truly learn about tons of different species of snails, and in a way that would help you remember those details on that BIO 245 test. If I had to study for that thing, I’d be watching and rewatching this video at 3:30 a.m. in a dorm room instead of staring at the same pages of a textbook trying to memorize the differences between all these snails.
The real trick is how skilled the narrator is at interweaving joke after joke–unique ones, not the same solitary riff–in clever ways.
He never stops informing you, and entertaining you. Which is an incredibly hard thing to pull off.
Also, it’s shocking how violent and crazy these snails are, and how they’ve developed all these different methods of surfing and preying on things. Did you ever think of snails as being secretly badass? I never did. Thought they were slow little vegetarians. NOPE.
VERDICT
I’ve always loved the True Facts series, and this one is an unlikely treasure, a total gem.
Please keep making these. It’s a public service to get us stoked about science, which kinda matters if we want to (a) survive the covid zombie apocalypse, then (b) beat climate warming without (c) giving up and building WATERWORLD-style sailboats like Kevin Costner.
Michael Jai White is one of the best action movie stars, period. I put him up there with Jason Statham and Scott Adkins.
His fight scenes are always inventive, and he’s simply fun to watch whether it’s a straight thriller like BLOOD AND BONE or a comedy like BLACK DYNAMITE.
So what felt off about WELCOME TO SUDDEN DEATH, which is a sort-of sequel to a Jean Claude Van Damme movie with the same premise: DIE HARD in a sports arena.
Check out the trailer before the customary smack talking begins.
The Good
There are good fight scenes in this movie, and Michael Jai White is totally likeable in here, as usual. There’s also good comic relief his cowardly sidekick, another arena employee who is super reluctant to take on a bunch of professional bad guys.
The Bad
Something seems off through the whole movie.
It looks fake–too well-lit, too in-focus. Maybe they shot it with some kind of cutting-edge 4k camera and we’re used to some film grain. Dunno. Worth thinking about, seeing how I remember they had the same sort of problem with THE HOBBIT movies being shot in 60 fps or whatever.
Compare that first trailer to a scene from probably the best Michael Jai White movie of all time, BLOOD AND BONE.
Notice how the camera moves, how it puts certain characters in focus while blurring the background, and how things don’t seem perfect without being clunky?
It just feels more real. Like you’re somebody in the crowd watching the action.
The Ugly
The other thing that bugged me was the villain, who was a little too jittery and on-the-nose with his dialogue to be truly scary. One of his minions, a fighter with a shaved head who said hardly anything, actually was super scary. Make that guy your baddie and we’ve got a better movie.
VERDICT
But hey, things to quibble with in a movie during the global zombie apocalypse are far less important than the only question that matters: Should you fire up the Series of Tubes and watch it?
Yes. Anything starring Michael Jai White is basically (a) Watchable, (b) A Popcorn Fest, or (c) So Knowingly Bad It Circles Back to Good.
It’s a cheesy action movie, not two hours of a black-and-white French existentialism flick that you talk about with your bestie until the sun comes up at Denny’s and the waitress gets sick of you drinking endless coffee and ordering your fifth side of fries because it’s been five hours and she knows you’re a starving college student or starving artist/writer type and the tip is going to be a joke.
Fire it up and watch this thing. Then watch BLOOD AND BONE for the first time, or the second, before closing your eyes later this week and picking a Michael Jai White movie totally at random, as required by law.
The Red Pen of Doom 