Even Michael Bay, director of the highly-anticipated Transformers, thinks that his upcoming film will suck. He was recently quoted in Maxim magazine saying, "we had a test screening in Arizona, and I'm thinking "This movie fucking sucks. It's stupid.' But then we get our highest numbers ever." That's the first good thing that I've heard about the Transformers movie. If Michael Bay thinks it sucks, it just might have some merit.

Granted, Bay has previously said that he wants the Transformers movie to be as realistic as possible, which would make it a dramatic departure from his previous films such as Bad Boys and Armageddon. But who wants to see realistically displayed transforming robots, anyway? I want to go to the movies and relive my childhood, not investigate the inherent fallacy of gigantic, nearly invulnerable alien robots who feel the need to disguise themselves as automobiles and dinosaurs. I'm sure that if Bay made a G.I. Joe film, he'd be investigating the economically oppressive political climate that could give rise to a depth of hatred powerful enough to inspire a man with a severe speech impediment to don a mask and attack the same group of international soldiers again and again as an exercise in self-loathing.

Michael, I want characters that look and act like the toys that are still on my mantlepiece. If I wanted gritty realism, I'd get Eastwood to direct, alright?

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Have you ever played the Milton Bradley board game Aggravation? Fundamentally, it's the same "race around a track game" as Parcheesi, Sorry! or Trouble, but without any of the fun associated with those other games. (Granted, Trouble's fun stems entirely from it's addictive Pop-O-Matic Bubble and television jingle. The bubble itself would always bounce the dice without actually turning them over, but chanting "Trouble, Trouble" somehow made it entertaining.) I had once sworn never to play Aggravation again, but I had forgotten why. Well, I played it and I remembered.

Fortunately, the game doesn't quite live up to its name, producing very little actual aggravation. Really, the game fails to summon any emotion at all. After playing it again for the first time in over a decade, my brother and I agreed that it is the least exciting board game ever. The only thing aggravating about it was that it was still in our game closet after all of these years. So I threw it away. Now, thanks to me, there is one less Aggravation in the world.

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Hell, it's my blog I can bitch if I want to. And it's Friday the 13th, so I'll kill someone with a machete while wearing a hockey mask if I want to, too.

PayPal really knows how to get my goat. One month ago tomorrow, I shipped a 24 pound package via USPS Economy Parcel Post to Argentina. (The contents were some Masters of the Universe figures I sold for a friend on eBay.) The buyer has grown impatient after a mere 3 weeks of waiting for an international Economy Parcel Post (read as "slow boat") package and has earlier this week opened a dispute with PayPal for the cost of the item. Of course, this means that PayPal has put a "temporary hold" on my account in the amount of the payment. If this were a $29.50 item, that's be no big deal. But it's not. It's a $295.00 item.

So now, my Paypal account is essentially useless to me until PayPal realizes that I did ship the item, the buyer is just being incredibly impatient, and I'm in the clear. My past experience with Paypal tells me that this will take about 90 days. Meanwhile, PayPal will be hassling me to pay them what I "owe" them (HA!) and I will be unable to take eBay payments through PayPal. As anyone who sells on eBay knows, this means that it is pointless to try to sell anything on eBay. Therefore, no income for me for 3 months.

Once again, let me say to you people out there: PayPal sucks. If you use it, learn to enjoy the sensation of someone grabbing you by the balls and squeezing while ramming a Louisville Slugger up your ass. Fuck you, PayPal.

(Granted, I am well aware that the problem in this case is not actually PayPal, but the dipshit who decided that economy international postage should arrive on his doorstep within 3 weeks of shipping. But since I'm not currently in the mood to travel to Argentina to avenge this disruption in my life, I'm attacking the messenger. PayPal doesn't care.)

On a completely unrelated note, why do MLB and the NFL have Breast Cancer Awareness Months? Exactly how many players in either of those leagues are female? In 2002, only 3,000 more women in the U.S. were killed by accidents than died from killer breasts. (That's less than 10 a day in a country with 300 million people.) When was the last time you heard of an Accident Awareness Campaign? Breast cancer isn't even the largest killer of women in America. It doesn't even make the top 5. Alzheimer's Disease is credited with killing more women than breast cancer. (However, a Alzheimer's Awareness Month wouldn't make much of an impression, as everyone who cared to promote it would forget about it by the time it arrived.) I suggest that breast cancer is so widely championed these days simply because it is the only one of the top ten killers of women that doesn't also kill large numbers of men.

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[The Batman Coloring Page blog entry for September 15, 2006, has been relocated here.]

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Another update today, though this one is minor. I uploaded the Star Trek Communicator Happy Meal toy with sound. (The previous version had no sound.) There are still a few things to fix for the site intro, but I'll get around to that later.

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Today's entry is brought to you by the letter "R" and the number "10." (And the Burger King, who sold me this Super Powers Meal Pack in 1987.)

You know, being the Riddler can't be all bad. Sure, he's got a psychopathic need for attention that always causes him to get caught, but the guy otherwise lives a pretty good life: he's clever, he's dapper (not so much in the green-footed jammies he's wearing above, but his suit and question mark cane are really quite stylish), and he has a lot of fun. The guy laughs a lot! He gets a lot of healthy exercise, so he's in pretty good shape. And he gets to spend a lot of money on creature comforts (when he's not in Arkham Asylum, which is frequently the case). Come to think of it, he lives pretty good in Arkham, too, as one of the less violent offenders in the joint he must get the run of the place.

Look at him up there, stretched out on a beach waiting for Superman to bring him to justice. That's the life. Pretty flowers, good music, tranquil waves, Pat the Bunny... maybe crime does pay.

What, exactly, is going on in the picture above? I wonder, just who is Batman's "pal"? Is Batman coming to Superman's aid or the Riddler's? Or for that matter, maybe the Dark Knight is rowing in to help that poor roller skating android who seems to have been caught completely unawares by Superman's left hook. Clearly, that is not Metallo, The Man with the Kryptonie Heart, out there. That ferrous fellow doesn't stand a chance against the Man of Steel. It doesn't even know any better than to wear roller skates on a sandy beach. Silly robot, roller skates are for kids.

For the record, the 10 things beginning with the letter "R" are rabbit, radio, robot, rock, rocking chair, roller skates, rope, roses, and rowboat. Hmmm.. I'm missing one... what could it be?

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I'm sitting here, working on preparing eBay listings of Happy Meal boxes and toys that my mother has collected from various restaurants over the past 30 years. I'm also listening to BBC News on NPR cover the growing crisis with the Italian presidency. These two separate and completely different activities have led to this:

Perhaps Sir Shakes-A-Lot should be the new president of Italy, the country whose Supreme Court recently declared that it's ok to rape women if they aren't virgins. He may be spastic, but at least he understands the Chivalric Code.

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In the past few days I've spent many hours learning to solve a Rubik's Cube. (Don't have your own? Play with a virtual cube online. Thank you internet!) I'm not interested in solving for speed, but I would like to be able to pick a scrambled Cube up and solve it. I'm not quite there yet.

Will this make me any money? No. Will this make me a better person? No. Will this impress the ladies? Hell no. But it has certainly been more entertaining than watching the Olympics.

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Selling my old 3-3/4" G.I.Joe figures on eBay has got me thinking: What the hell was Cobra Commander doing?

The stated goals of Cobra were to destroy the American Way of Life on their way to total world domination. I'm not exactly sure how those two goals go together. To rule the world you have to overthrow Coca-Cola and Apple Pie? Rednecks and hillbillies are crucial obstacles to global monarchy? Microsoft seems to be doing fine, and Bill Gates doesn't wear a stupid blue handkerchief on his head.

On TV Cobra Commander was a coward with a speech impediment, which sort of explained why he would want to take over the world. But why did this loser have any followers? You can understand how Dr. Mindbender could combine a bunch of corpses to create a more charismatic leader. And worse yet, in the comics Cobra Commander had a son ("Billy"). Who would sleep with a freak like Cobra Commander? I'm sure Billy had some great genes; 1/2 from a sociopath megalomaniac, 1/2 from a blind, alcoholic hooker. We'll definitely be seeing Billy on Dr. Phil one of these days.

Could Cobra really have been so powerful that the entire U.S. military couldn't stop them? The solution: create a very, very small band of quasi-elite soldiers in useless specialized fields (Muskrat on Swamp Patrol?) to combat the titanic global juggernaut that was Cobra. Regular U.S. hardware and hundreds of thousands of well trained soldiers weren't good enough so the brass hired Canadians to help out in the fight. They never turned to any other country for help. (I always thought that Dial Tone looked a little French with his little mustache, but that's beside the point.) Other countries had to fend for themselves against a cohesive global menace. Russia had it's own anti-Cobra force, the October Guard, who employed even fewer members than the Joes did. Great military powers no doubt think alike. World War 3 breaks out, and the countries of the world decide that 100 soldiers with specializations in "Deceptive Warfare" and "Pirate" are going to hold the line. I feel safer already.

On a side note, the well-groomed chrome-domed Destro was supposedly a master weaponsmith and exclusive weapon supplier for Cobra. You would have thought that he could have made a laser rifle that could hit something. And yet the genius that Cobra Commander was, he kept buying from him.

I played with these toys for years and never once realized how ridiculously stupid it all was. To think that I simply accepted all of this at face value during my formative development. At least no one ever tried to pitch me on the concept of an omnipotent but impersonal universal architect when I was a child. *shudder*. Knowing is half the battle.

Yo Joe!

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Finally, I put content on the Bio pages. It took 3 versions of this site, but now my adoring public will have some scant knowledge about the evil genius behind this site. Not that they really care. (Rule #1: no one cares about your site.)

On a much more interesting note, I just sold a set of Crossbows and Catapults on eBay for $100.00. As much as I'm going to miss those l'il plastic vikings, the cash sure helps to cushion the blow. A lot.

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