Author: The Captive Lion

Summer is here and we all know what that means. It’s that special season where all Netflix addicts hang extra thick curtains in the windows to block out the natural light. Thankfully, I didn’t take my window treatments down last summer so all I had to do was update them a bit for the new year. (Rubberstamp Madness magazine has some great tips on how to spice up last year’s window treatments, if you haven’t seen the latest issue yet!)

One of the best parts about being a Netflix member is how fast the service is evolving. I feel like I am a part of movie distribution history. I’m no Rosa Parks but by adding my voice to the chorus of other Netflix members’ voices, I feel like movies will continue to arrive to me in unique and varying ways. This is empowering. It might just be the biggest social movement I’m ever apart of. Today it is through the mail, tomorrow it will be downloaded. In five years, I’m pretty sure I will be Netflixing Woody Allen’s DNA and just creating the movies for myself in my centrifuge.

But the absolute best part of being a Netflix member is the goal we all share, the one thing that brings all of us members together; our insufferable desire to scam, scrimp, rob, cheat, copy, burn, and screw over Netflix. By god, we really make them earn that $20 a month, don’t we! I’ll be damned if I ever have to put a movie on my queue twice. No, I would rather buy a hundred hard-drives, a thousand blank dvds, and laboriously spend hours following the hacking career of Jon Lech Johansen than reorder my fucking queue! All to squeeze every last movie I can out of the service!

OK, I am not joking anymore. I will tell you some of the things I have done in the past to prove my point.

1. Bought a DVD burner, blank DVD discs, and got the software for my mac from an illegal file-sharing network in order to burn a copy of every Netflix that arrived. Total cost: $150 and possibly my freedom. I was going to build a personal library that would rival Netflix’s own collection. This lasted about 2 months. None of the burned DVDs play now. Apparently, human breath scratches a blank DVD. Eventually, I realized Netflix is the library. I am just paying for my library card. And with all the new movies that they offer, I rarely want to rewatch a movie I’ve already Netflix’d.

2. Entered into a movie sharing pact with two friends who were also Netflix members to “pool our queues” if you will. That way, we wouldn’t have to all get the big blockbusters that we all wanted to see, just one of us would get it and then share it around. Total cost: $0. Total number of days this lasted: 3. My friend sat on the movie I gave her and didn’t watch it or return it, therefore effectively logjamming my precious queue for almost a week in Netflix time*. (*Netflix time is defined as regular time + the amount of time it takes to receive the next movie in your queue after you put the old movie in the mailbox.)

3. I’ve tried it all concerning the Netflix envelope. I’ve shoved three movies in one, one movie in three, and everything in between. I drop them in boxes all over Brooklyn, fold them, tear them, and write on them. I’ve soaked them in water, burnt off their edges, and every once in awhile I even find one that is two years old and I’ll stuff a disc in there and send it back. At this point, I am just fucking with the people at Netflix. I want to get in their heads. I am not a number baby!

Yet time after time, my new DVD arrives in the mail just the same. I’m convinced that without junk mail and Netflix, the postal service would have been abolished just minutes after email was invented. Before Netflix, I would only get one piece of mail a year and that is the birthday check from Grandma (that $25 is always appreciated, Gigi!) so I probably wouldn’t even have been the wiser had it been shuttered. But now I sit and wait for the mailman like he is delivering my college admissions acceptance letter, all in the name of quick turnaround.

Despite all this praise, I have found one person who can’t join the Netflix revolution. I bring it up now because, invariably, I know Netflix is listening and is poised to solve my friend’s dilemma. You see, he is a touring musician without a stable address. He can’t reliably have movies mailed to him. But I think I have come up with a solution. Think of an airplane flying a time sensitive mission over a very long distance. Classic scenario for a little aerial refueling also called air-to-air refueling. In the same spirit, I want to see a fleet of Netflix vehicles that roam the highways and byways performing vehicle-to-vehicle Netflix transfers.

“Sir, I see on your myspace page that you’ll be playing in Vermont tonight. I’ll be pulling up along side you shortly as you make your way to the venue and I was wondering if you had any last minute changes to your top three choices on your rental queue this evening?”

Knowing Netflix, the fleet is already being gassed up as I type this. We are making movie distribution history after all.

I hate cooking for one.

Although, I don’t know if Bobby Flay would call this cooking.

I doubt a pizza boat and intermittent swigs of juice out of the carton qualifies.

It feels more like grazing or gathering, something lower on the civilization scale.

Why is it so hard to find the right portion sizes?

There should be a section for singles food next to the baby food.

It would basically be the same as the baby food just less ground up.

I should have a cooking show called Dining Alone with Pat Malone where I go by the name of Pat Malone and I just make all types of pizza boats.

Instead of wine, I would pair them with different cocktails you can only make with the gimmicky colas and “fruit” drinks that you find at the corner store. Example menu: Pat Malone’s Pepperoni Pizza Boat with ice cold Rummy D’s*.

My sign off would be classic. “That’s it and thanks for watching Dining Alone with Pat Malone. Until next time, remember don’t get too down on yourself. Things are looking up, I swear.”

Then it would fade to a black screen with next week’s menu on it. Pat Malone’s Plain Cheese Pizza Boat with Cream Soda Champagne.

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*If you aren’t familiar, the recipe for a Rummy D is as follows:

Rummy D
One bottle of Captain Morgan’s rum.
One bottle of Sunny Delight original flavor or “California Style”

1. Pour out 3/4 of the bottle of Sunny Delight.
2. Yell out to everyone around that as the doctor at the Rummy D hospital you are proud to welcome the birth of a new litter of Rummy D’s into the world. This gets everyone excited.
3. Now pour the whole bottle of rum into the Sunny D bottle. Remember, Sunny D already comes in gel form, so the rum, in fact, just helps with the consistency and dilutes the flavor of the D a little.
4. Watch out! After you finish one glass, you will inevitably do something so stupid that a friend will end up pouring the whole concoction down the drain.

On some days, it seems like I live solely to banter. It’s almost indescribable how much it delights me. Truly. It’s very strange.

Before Netflix I used to get butterflies in my stomach on my way to the video store. Video store clerks are incredible at bantering with the customers and I always used to look forward to it. On the walk over, I would hope that Carl was working because I could always count on him to insult my taste in movies, lie and say I owed him late fees, or just generally cut down my appearance. But he called me by my name when he said I was his laziest customer and that was everything.

Ever encouraged, I, of course, always questioned how he could still be in business, told him of my growing customer satisfaction at the other major video rental chains, and whispered loudly in my girlfriend’s ear (so he would overhear) that I would never be caught dead wearing any t-shirt or merchandise that promoted his establishment. It was the best of banter, it was the worst of banter.

It makes me think the Netflix website should really focus less on trying to recommend movies I would like and instead make fun of me for liking the ones I do.

By far, the worst medium to banter over is the text message. You might be thinking who banters over text message? Trailblazers, that’s who. But I’ve found the odds of hitting a doozie via texting is about 1 in 4 for me, yet on the email I am good for a 1 to 2 doozie to dud ratio. Sure, if you are patient you will eventually uncork a doozie but I’m all about firing doozie after doozie. My goal, after all, is to beat you silly with doozies and then steal your wallet.

However, the crucial ingredient in the recipe for witty banter is not the medium but the messenger. Some folks are just plain better at it than others such as:

Single Ladies
Bantering with single girls is the highest form of banter. When it goes right, it’s the closest thing I’ve known to speaking in tongues. Something about it feels so right, yet so dangerous. Perhaps because I know how quickly friendly banter can turn to firing squad bullets.

Dudes On Greyhound Buses
If there was a professional league for banterers where you sat at the back of a crowded bus and just chewed off every person’s ear off who went back there to use the restroom but you didn’t get paid a cent, these guys would be all-stars.

Video Store Clerks
The best of the best. I often want to have a t-shirt making device on hand when I go to a video store because I know the clerk will utter an amusing catch phrase laced with just the right amount of insider knowledge and irony that, if printed on a shirt, would make me seem cooler than I am.

Grocery Store Checkers and Baggers
These folks get the nod because of sheer volume. Anyone that can even half-ass banter for as long or with as many buffoons as these robo-humans have to know a thing a two about turning a phrase.

People In Line For A Comedy Show
They aren’t funny enough to perform, but they think they are. Shamelessly, they treat the line forming outside the comedy club like it’s an open mic night and shower us with sophomoric banter-fodder. Did I mention I’m not only the president of this club, I’m also a member.

When I get right down to it, I think I’ve picked all my closest friends and lovers based on their banter. Of course, they had to like the cut of my gibberish too. I guess that’s why it’s so important to me, it’s a game I only play with those I cherish.

Dinosaurs are more famous now than when they were alive and ruled the planet. They are the Elvis of the Animal Kingdom. This is in large part to the Discovery Channel which promotes and disseminates a pro-Dinosaur agenda nearly 24 hours a day. Surely, no advertisers are demanding this content. The target audience is extinct after all. Who is really behind this Paleozoic propaganda and what are they not telling you? I turned off my TV and started doing some of my own research about dinosaurs and have had some very disturbing revelations. Are these really the kind of creatures we want to dig up and display in our museums? Should we be giving them cute voices in animated movies so our kids fall in love with them? The following facts might change your mind.

Dinosaurs had slaves.
Not human ones, of course. Their version was much more insidious, in fact. They enslaved anything with tusks. It would turn your stomach if you saw how the tusked were treated back then.

Dinosaurs were illiterate.
Not a single one ever learned to read in 160 million years! Guess that college degree is a few more years off! And it also explains why we aren’t studying the writings of the great Hemingwayasaurus Rex.

Dinosaurs were atheist.
The majority of Pterodactyls were followers of Ragzor, Beast-master of the Skies, but by and large nearly all other dinosaurs were godless. Jesus has been suspiciously quiet on this topic, however, suggesting some sort of cover up.

Dinosaurs were pedophiles.
Archaeologists have found skeletons of male dinosaurs perched suggestively next to nests of young, unhatched dinosaurs, still in the egg even.

Dinosaurs were nudists.
These perverts didn’t wear clothes by choice, not evolutionary circumstance.

With these facts, one thing is clear.  The Discovery Channel is only giving us one side of the story.  The only question now is just how much dirt should we dig up on the dinosaurs?

And the winner is:

The Centaur called me last night and asked me if I’d bit off more than I could chew with this contest. I told him I only ate one of the hot dogs seen in the picture below.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said.

He was referring to the quality of the entries I presume. And the difficult task of picking a winner. And he was right. There was a snow-globe flurry of entries on the last day and they ranged from the completely obvious to the total left field. Just what I had hoped for. So thanks again everyone for playing along at home.

But in the end there was one entry that had me baffled initially. On first read, it was neither clever nor funny. I wondered why someone had submitted it at all. Then, 24 hours later as I was looking back at this caption and studying the photo, it all became clear. Big bonus points for having the guts to play such an understated hand.

So congratulations Tom! If you contact me, I’ll hook you up with that invite.

When you see this many hot dogs on a grill, you instinctively pull out your camera, snap a picture, post it on your blog, and wait for the clever captions to come pouring in. It’s a pretty tired formula. But this time, there is a twist for the music lovers, nerds and geeks out there. On Monday at Midnight (EST), I will award an Oink (oink.me.uk) invite to the most clever, funniest caption as deemed by me and me alone. And if you don’t know what Oink is, do as the King James Bible says and “Ye, go forth and google it.”

But I can’t just leave it at that. I have to set some sort of bar, however low. So here are my top 5 captions for the photo:

1. I guess if heaven is a grill, then all dogs do go to heaven. I don’t think I want to go to grill heaven though. Good thing I am not a dog.
2. {To the tune of the Reading Rainbow TV theme song} Take you one, it’s in a bun-Weiner Rainbow.
3. How many lips and assholes are we looking at here?
4. Is it just me or do all the dogs in their buns look like turtles in various poses? The third one from the top left looks like it’s trying to whisper a secret.
5. 99 hot dogs in buns on the grill. 99 hot dogs in buns. Take one down, pass it around. Why are we passing around hot dogs in buns?

Yes, I just wasted your time with those captions. They were purposely bad. The real fun is now in your hands. Put yourself in my shoes. Spend a few minutes thinking about it. Be brave. Throw something out there. There is nothing to lose. Don’t worry if it’s not spectacular. Who cares. You can hide behind the great invisible walls of the Internet just like me. It’s kinda cool back here.