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This Lost Recap Is Just a Link

jeffrey — Mon, 24 May 2010 17:38:35 +0000

My ongoing application process for the U.S. Special Teams prevents me from explaining the Lost finale in explicit detail, but since you're all hungering to know what Awkward Press thinks about the "Show that Has America Clucking," I shall refer you to this. This is what I think about the Lost finale. How convenient that Gabe from Videogum was kind enough to break into my mind and write it all up for me! Thanks, brootha!

An Hilarious Prank

jeffrey — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:27:40 +0000

Now I'm doing research on pranks. My days are filled with fascinating work. I did a Google search for "best pranks" and the third page that came up was one of those pages on the Internet that have been around since 1991, just sitting there waiting to lure hapless Googlers like me into their suckery. Here's one of their suggestions:

Prank Party!

One day get together with a couple of your friends for a sleep-over. Choose one friend before the party and tell everyone you're going to pull a prank on them. Tell your friends to bring ANY prank stuff that they have. When your friend falls asleep, pull a series of pranks such as:
# Sleep-makeovers,
# face fart spray,
# gum in hair,
# and fingers in cold water.

When you run out of pranks, get a CD and put it in your CD player. Turn the volume all the way up. Tell one person to turn on the light when the music goes off. Tell 2 people to dance on the bed, tell some people to blow whistles and scream. Turn on the music and watch your friend go nuts.

Clever! I am especially a fan of the "face fart spray" prank.

Now Accepting Submissions for Awkward Two

jeffrey — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:00:18 +0000

That's right, we want your words. 1,500 of them or less, to be exact. We are now looking for stories for our second anthology, Awkward Two. The theme of this issue is Brevity. In honor of the theme, we will keep it brief. You can investigate further by clicking here.

Put On a Red Light

jeffrey — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:33:33 +0000

From Matt, who is in Amsterdam:

The best part about the red light district is listening in on all the dudes egging each other to go in. One Australian guy was doing everything to get his friend to go in at the same time as him. Lots of back and forth later, the guy goes in alone and the rest of his friends go to a pub to wait. 15 minutes later the guy comes running up to the pub:

Guy: Give me €50.
Friend: Why?
Guy: I've done something bad. Give me €50.
Friend: What?
Guy: I'll tell you later. Give me €50. Give me €50!
Friend: What?
Guy: Give me €50. I'll pay you right back. I'll go to the ATM. Just
give me €50. I'm not going back in. Just give me €50.
Friend: What is going on?
Guy: Just... Basically, I need to get my watch back.

La Roux – I’m Not Your Toy

jeffrey — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:12:33 +0000

Kitty Purry, my absolute bestest Twitter friend ever, just sent me to this video. I do what Kitty tells me, so here we are.

I gotta say, I'm really digging the revival of 80s futuristic disco pop. Whether or not I'm going to run out and pick up La Roux's album is debatable, but I see nothing wrong with shaking one's tail feather every now and again to some lightweight pop. All hail the reemergence of the tongue-in-cheek disco diva!

herpes and wrestling and Mark Sanford

Kyle Jarrow — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 20:48:22 +0000

I am really bad at posting things on this site. Last night Jeffrey made me feel guilty about this. So now I'm posting. Take that, Jeffrey!

Here are the things I'd like to say in this post:
a) Our release event last night was a lot of fun;
b) I want to echo Jeffrey's thanks to everyone who helped out, and everyone who attended;
c) The story Clay read, about high school wrestlers contracting herpes, was amazing and more than a little disturbing;
d) Also, for no other reason than it is kind of interesting: the full transcript of Mark Sanford's affair confession speech. There's something very fun about reading it written out, with all the stumbles and stutters and verbal tics in there.

Light Posting Encore

jeffrey — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:40:55 +0000

More light posting today, kiddos ... work and what not. Did I mention we have a book for sale?

The Best Search Terms Ever

jeffrey — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 15:05:18 +0000

Watching the detectives.

As part of the nonstop barrage of information I get about the Awkward website, I am able to check the Google search terms that people used to get to the site. The lengths that people will go to to find that perfect answer to their Google search request is both beautiful and sad. In no particular order, here are the best search terms that people used to find awkwardpress.com over the last month:

Search Term: giant boners. Analysis: Now, it is true that I was engaged in a little mock battle with Awkward Boners awhile back (a battle in which we were miserably defeated ... we've moved to page 5 of the awkward Google search since the last posting. Sad smilies all around.) The deal is, I wanted Awkward Press to dominate the "awkward" google search. If you type "awkward" into Google right now, the third highest result is awkwardboners.com. In my quest to blow awkwardboners.com out of the water (pause), I ended up incessantly dropping the phrase "awkward boners" for a few weeks. So I can understand why someone might land on us through that term. (And 10 people did .. take that, awkwardboners.com!) But how in the hell did 4 people find us through the search term "giant boners"? I had no clue, until I did a search myself and discovered that AWKWARD PRESS IS NUMBER TWO ON THE GOOGLE GIANT BONERS SEARCH!!! Don't believe me? See for yourself.

My theory is that it's because I entitled a post "Giant Boners" and then filled it with the word "Boners" in giant type. I won't even link to it, because god forbid we move up to number one in the "giant boners" search. As a fun experiment in search engine optimization, I'm going to try it again with the word Awkward and see if that has any effect on our Awkward standings. Here we go:

Awkward Awkward Awkward Awkward

Cross your fingers, kids!

Search term: zardoz boobs Analysis: This one's pretty easy, because we did an Awkward Movie Challenge about the movie Zardoz, and I was pretty fascinated by the sheer amount of boobs in the film. Unfortunately for whoever found us through this search, there are no actual boobs on our site. Sorries!

Incidentally, the exact same number of people found us through a search for "zardoz boobs" as found us through a search for "kyle jarrow," who is one of my partners in this venture. If it's any consolation, Kyle, more people searched for both you and "zardoz boobs" than searched for me.

We are currently the number 3 most popular site on the Internet for "zardoz boobs."

Search Term: animal boners. Analysis: Okay, I knew this Awkward Boners battle was a bad idea. If they didn't have such dominance over the "awkward" Google search, they never would have even come on the radar screen. And now this? I don't even want to repeat it, for fear that we'll now become forever linked in Google's mind with the term ani**l b**ers. Just for kicks, I looked it up to see where we landed on the search. I got through 10 pages without seeing Awkward Press anywhere on the list. Clearly, whoever found us through a search for ani**l b**ers was on a deep, deep search for ani**l b**ers. Far be it from me to pass any judgments, but if you're looking for ani**l b**ers, you're in the wrong place.

Search Term: another awkward day goats Analysis: I don't know and I don't care. If you're the person who found us by searching for the term "another awkward day goats," you really should be writing this site instead of me. Genius.

Search Term: awkward public erection moments Analysis: Fantastic. We're becoming the go-to site for anyone looking for erect penises. Just what mom always hoped for me.

Search Term: "shirt"+"20 comment" Analysis: Total mystery.

Search Term: explanation of Zardoz Analysis: Great question, Google searcher. I wish we could have helped you.

Search Term: gostbusters 2 hol movi Analysis: I'm not kidding. Just like that. One person managed to find our site by typing in the term "gostbusters 2 hol movi." That dude might be the exact audience member for whom Ghostbusters 2 was designed.

Search Term: memeparty grandma Analysis: Amazing.

Search Term: prince jerks off guitar in purple rain Analysis: Thanks a lot, Segretto. Thanks to you, we are the current most popular search result for "prince jerks off guitar in purple rain."

Search Term: the godfather apollonia weird breasts Analysis: Whoever you are: I love you.

Plugs Not Drugs

jeffrey — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:17:13 +0000

Anyone get their copy of Awkward One yet? If so, whaddya think? Please grade it on a scale from 4-5, 4 being "loved it," and 5 being "planning to marry it."

The Awkward Movie Challenge: Gremlins

segretto — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:47:50 +0000

According to Netflix, Mike and Jeffrey agree with each other on movies 84% of the time. In their weekly feature, The Awkward Movie Challenge, they search valiantly for that sweet 16% that results in big arguments and big laughs.

Unfortunately, this week Jeffrey is being a very, very small baby, and he says he does not have time to provide his contribution, so Mike is taking over the Awkward Movie Challenge, making it considerably less challenging, but a whole lot more awkward.

Mike:

In many ways, I’m a sad specimen. When Gremlins debuted in theaters 25 years ago this past June 8th (the same day as Ghostbusters, incidentally), my friend from down the block asked me if I wanted to see it with his family. I backed out because… well, I was a great big chicken (for more evidence of that, check out the regular feature Things That Scare Me on my site Psychobabble). I was not fooled by that fluffy Gizmo thing being hawked at the local Toys ‘R Us. I knew that he was just the cutesy-pie bait used to lure impressionable 10-year olds like me into some sort of traumatizing orgy of disemboweling and face-slashing.

When I finally saw Gremlins after it debuted on HBO a year later, I didn’t find it particularly horrifying, although I did find it to be highly entertaining. Still, I wasn’t completely wrong in my initial assumption that Gremlins might be disturbing; I was only wrong in thinking it contained material that would disturb me (I was more frightened of humanoid creatures than the kinds of scaly beasties in this film, and I lived in terror of seeing any kind of graphic eviscerating).

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An assortment of Gremlins merch.

In brief, the film finds absent-minded professor Randall Peltzer (Hoyt Axton) giving a teddy-bear-esque Mogwai (voiced by the mega-annoying Howie Mandell) to his son Billy (Zach Galligan) as a Christmas gift. The creature, which Billy names Gizmo, is just a widdle-biddle huggy-wuggy buggy with googly eyes and a lovely singing voice, but there are three caveats to caring for him: keep him out of sunlight, because sunlight will kill him (like Dracula!), never get him wet, and never, ever, ever feed him after midnight. Naturally, a visit from Cory Feldman leads to disaster. Feldman pours water on Gizmo, who consequently gives birth to a bunch of fuzzy back-babies. The nasty Gizmo-spawn then trick Billy into feeding them eleven-pounds of chicken after midnight, which causes them to mutate into scaly, sharp-toothed horrors with perverse senses of humor. Mayhem ensues.

Seeing Gremlins as an adult, I’m pretty shocked by the nastiness of the picture, especially considering how aggressively it was marketed towards kids. All that cutesy Gizmo crap notwithstanding, this is one gruesome kiddie flick. Don’t believe me? Well, how about Polly Holliday vaulting through a closed window on her chair lift? How about an attempt to murder a dog by stringing it up with Christmas lights? How about the numerous revolting ways the evil gremlins are dispatched, not the least of which is the pop-a-gremlin-in-the-microwave sequence? How about the truly awful story about how Phoebe Cates’s dad bought the farm when he got stuck in a chimney while playing Santa (a scene that the studio desperately tried to exorcize from the film)?

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Spoiler alert: This guy totally croaks in Gremlins.

Norman Rockwell paints his masterpiece.

Gremlins is like an E.C. horror comic illustrated by Norman Rockwell, and like an E.C. comic, it does not spare the graphic violence just because it’s aimed at the kids. On a more self-reflexive level, the film makes mincemeat of classic Christmas movies (particularly Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life), saccharine creature features like E.T. (directed by Steven Spielberg, who executive-produced Gremlins), and small town idealism. The people in the neighborhood are a rogue’s gallery of misanthropes: there’s Polly “Kiss my grits” Holliday as a truly rotten combination of Mr. Potter and the Wicked Witch of the West (she even threatens to “get” Billy’s dog!); the great Dick Miller as Billy’s xenophobic neighbor; Glynn Turman of “The Wire” as Billy’s science teacher, a sadist who gets off on jabbing a mogwai with a syringe; and Judge Reinhold as a generic douche who exits the film far too early (he had more scenes, but director Joe Dante cut them as a concession to Warner Brothers. The cuts guaranteed that Cates’s controversial monologue would remain in the picture). And if all of that isn’t enough to ruin the summer of any tyke, there’s the revelation that there isn’t any Santa Claus.

If any of this sounds like criticism, you don’t know me very well. In fact, I think I enjoy Gremlins a lot more as an adult than I did when I was a kid. The film’s gleeful sadism is balanced wonderfully with off-the-wall humor out of a Tex Avery cartoon, beautifully unrealistic sets, dreamy cinematography, and tons of fun references to the kinds of sci-fi and monster flicks that inspired Gremlins (Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet makes a memorable cameo, there are multiple references to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, etc.). There are Hollywood in-jokes guaranteed to delight movie geeks (a theater marquee displays the films A Boy’s Life and Watch the Skies… the original titles of Spielberg’s E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, respectively). I also love the way the film plays with clichés and viewer expectations. When we are introduced to Phoebe Cates’s Kate Beringer, we expect her to be nothing more than the bland girl-next-door taxed with little more than standing by the hero and looking pretty, but she reveals a real feisty attitude and a genuine dark side. The Chinese shopkeeper that owns the mogwai (Keye Luke) is presented as a creepy— and possibly nefarious— foreigner, yet he proves to be the conscience of the film with some harsh but all-too-true parting words about his adopted country. Billy’s mom (Frances Lee McCain) may be my favorite character in the film. At first, she comes off as a June Cleaver stereotype, but when she realizes that the gremlins have taken over her home, she bumps them off as swiftly and inventively as Rambo.

And then there are the title critters. The gremlins are testaments to the power of three-dimensional monster props, which are so rarely used in this age of slick computer-generated special effects. The gremlins are marvelously executed, extremely articulate puppets, and watching them run rampant through Little Town U.S.A., impersonating Christmas carolers and film noir anti-heroes, and shooting each other with pistols is a blast. Gizmo is a bit insufferable, but he actually has a lot less screen time than I remembered. I’m also impressed by how timeless the film is; aside from its synthesizer-driven soundtrack and a brief break-dancing sequence, Gremlins barely feels like it was made in the ‘80s.

So, in conclusion: Gremlins? Yes, Gremlins!

Mike gives Gremlins… 1 Lake Huron!

Well, Jeffrey, I guess it took a mean-spirited movie to keep me from making mean-spirited comments.

Oh, wait a minute, I do have some mean-spirited comments! Way to cop out on your own web site, jackass! Before I know it, you'll be asking me to shower for you.