Moorezilla

Tag: Silbergleit

  • Joanie Phone Home!

    phone
    Artist's drawing of Joanie's ideal phone.

    Pretty much everyone except Matt H now realizes that the Android operating system is the best platform for a mobile phone, but getting the right phone is just the beginning. Joanie, like much of the Generation V demographic, still needs a little help parenting her new Droid. In the hopes that it will be of use to others, here’s the transcript of our latest smart phone discussion.

    Joanie: wow… the iPhone truly does suck but the Motorola Droid does so damn much! I hate overachievers! Simmer down, you crazy phone of doing stuff!

    Andy: just keep deleting apps until all it does is sit like a brick on an end table.

    Joanie: this thing has GPS? I’m not sure I want my phone knowing where I am all the time. What if I pick up another phone and the Droid asks me about it later? Sometimes I’m tempted to fondle the pink iPhones, but now my Droid could ask me in its little Droid voice, “why were you in the Apple Store? When did you stop loving me?”

    Andy: you can turn the Droid off… or… you could turn it AND the iPhone on by holding both phones to either ear at once! Remember… Droid does, so “no” always means “yes” for the Droid. If you let an iPhone and a Droid mate, the iPhone gives birth to a little V baby handheld… kind of a Blackberry with an alien tail.

    Joanie: the Droid’s font is soooo tiny! Tee Hee! It’s got a little teeny tiny font!

    Remember… iPhones are for babies!

    Andy: probably don’t want to embarrass your phone like that or it might start faking incoming calls on you. It’s not the size of the font that matters; it’s the quality of the connection!

    Joanie: I live in New York. Could smartphones be too difficult for me?

    Andy: it’s quite possible.

    Joanie: hey! There’s an opening in Verizon University’s 12-step Fundamentals of Texting class! I’m signing up!

    Andy: sweet! Let me know if you need a sponsor.

    Joanie: Kenny and I want to buy one of those new-fangled 4-slot toasters. Want to come with us to Bradlees to pick one out?

    Andy: ummm… Bradlees?

    Joanie: yeah… the department store in Manhattan; it’s right down the block from Socrates’ Retreat!

  • Kenny Marches… ummm… in.

    Kenny's people rise up!
    Kenny's people rise up!

    Unfortunately for me, the New Orleans Saints have postponed their late season swoon this year. As they’re practically assured of a first-round bye at this point, we’ll have to wait until the second round of the NFL playoffs to watch them crush the tiny hopes and dreams of a below-sea-level, eyesore city not yet recovered from the whims of category four hurricanes and category considerably less emergency response teams.

    Author’s note: the Jets and the Mets and the Orangemen and all New Yorkers still respectively suck and Rex Ryan (the Santa job at the mall is open when you get fired, Rex!) is now an obnoxious crybaby, instead of simply being an obnoxious bore. None of this is pertinent to the Saints, of course, but these facts should not be misplaced even during the brief Kenny euphoria brought on by an overachieving Drew Brees who couldn’t quite throw enough interceptions to derail the clownish, bayou pretenders.

    Victory is sweet... and small!
    Victory is sweet… and small!

    I’m thrilled there’s at long last a mosquito’s appendix-sized bit of joy in the Silbergleit athletic spectator ranks, even if Kenny needed to travel to Louisiana to support a questionable American quasi state foolishly named after a European Monarch… a buggy, boggy burg where biting someone with your own teeth is considered simple assault while biting someone with your false teeth is prosecuted as aggravated assault. Who knew?

    I’m not calling Kenny unAmerican; but if anyone else wants to do so, I think they’re certainly entitled and on firm footing to make such an aggressive claim. In any case, he’s certainly no fan of Patriots and his fries are apparently French, not Freedom.

    I’ll never understand how these backward, fall-behind at the start of every frickin game but then come back people ponied up to win 10 NFL games in a row, but fair is fair, so here’s a life-size picture of Kenny’s legitimately earned prize… an elixir he can quaff quietly as the Pats exact swift revenge on the Saints Monday night.

  • STFD! versus GTFO!? There can be only one!

    War-painted Header!
    War-painted Header!

    STFD! was incomplete and outplayed this week at Tin Whistle Trivia. We offer no excuses; we do offer an explanation.

    Since the Silbergleit Summer Carnival pulled up its tent pegs and hoofed it out of town, we expected fewer/weaker competitors and we handicapped our varsity team accordingly. Our magnanimous, parity-seeking actions (we left both Abigail and Emily off the roster!) were horribly misplaced, as five fully-staffed rival teams ponied up and came to play harder than megashark and giant octopus combined.

    We did not know who won the first ever Monday Night Football game, we did not know all of the monthly birthstones, we were not familiar with Jay-Z’s catalog of crap, we did not know Vince Vaughn’s sundry Hollywood aliases, and there were absolutely no questions concerning the wingspan of fowl.

    Homework must be done!
    Feel lucky, punk?

    Andy also proved to be, in the words of one observer, “pretty damn useless” during crunch time, since the final round was a puzzle variety akin to the brain-wrenching rebus riddles to be found beneath the evil caps of Lucky Lager. This is an area where Andy has never performed above the .08 percentile, and he once again folded before the challenge like a house of cards assembled by a kindergarten class.

    A few Tin Whistle Trivia final round puzzle examples:

    1. 18 H I A R O G
    2. 200 D F P G I M
    3. 8 S O A S S
    Would-be utensil usurpers?
    Would-be utensil usurpers?

    But perhaps more troubling than our third-place finish was the emergence of a new trivia team named Get The Fork Out!, a team clearly parodying the legendary success of Shut The Front Door! with admirably postmodern, mock homage.

    This new team (which finished in forkly fourth… heh heh!) will undoubtedly polarize trivia fans, since it makes sense to either Shut The Front Door! or to Get The Fork Out!, but to do both is unnecessarily redundant.

    Next week we will field a complete, well-conditioned, motivated team. We will listen to additional crappy music, we will drink and solve several cases of the Lucky Lager, and we will arrive early to Shut The Front Door! before the fork folks even arrive. We’re curious to see if Get The Fork Out! turn into Lettuce The Fork In! when faced with a blocked entrance.

  • Wolverine-powered Header win on tap?

    The Headers are winning!
    Headers are beating the infidels!

    Since a Harvard-educated team member has proven insufficient to topple the juggernaut that was STFD! and is “The Trivia Team to be Named Later,” The Headers are now reaching out to Michigan alumni (just as the Sith reached out to young Anakin Skywalker) to aid their trivial cause.

    Oh no! I hope there’s not a question about Michigan football’s record in 2008 (3W+9L = ouch by my math!), or whom they ripped off for their football helmet art work (thanks Coach Fritz!), or how much a cured wolverine pelt is worth in Saskatchewan (half a case of Molson and a carton of Benson & Hedges!).

    No matter… at least one dead desert dictator’s spokesman has predicted a Header win this Thursday. Too bad he broke into song; we deduct A LOT of points for that.

    Baghdad Bob’s Song of Silbergleit Victory

    What hit me?
    What hit me?

    Who’s the family on the team
    That loses to Andy!?
    S-I-L B-E-R G-L-E-I-T!
    Hey there! Hi there! Header there!
    Your losing streak is a bad dream!
    But this week brings a win by…

    Silbergleit! Silbergleit! Silbergleit!

    For once they’ll hold a stranger’s twenty
    High! High! High! High!

    Come along and sing Bob’s song
    And belly to the bar!
    S-I-L B-E-R G-L-E-I-T!

  • Jacksonian 20 Dollar “Damn You, Kenny!” Dirge

    (Sung to the tune of any major musical but Oklahoma!)

    First the national bank and now Kenny!
    I'll miss you, Kenny!

    I used to live in Kenny’s pocket,
    But now ride a different hip!
    No one told me it was down on the docket,
    My move to Moore’s tight money clip!

    I used to hang with kite-flying Bennies!
    I used to live with Ulysses S. Grants,
    I’ll never forgive that damn Kenny,
    Now my bunkmates are small bill pissants!

    This move, dear friends, got me thinking,
    My life now will always be hard!
    I’m lucky to see an Abe Lincoln,
    As I’m crushed by a blue debit card!

    At Kenny weep tears and shout curses,
    Since Headers get trivia wrong!
    Other 20’s should start penning verses,
    Of their own sullen Silbergleit songs!

    Beware tenants of Kenny’s wallet,
    Thinking lint and life wonderful bores!
    Keep a bag packed, as nothing can stall it,
    When a lost bet moves you in with the Moores!

    I used to live in Kenny’s pocket,
    But now ride a different hip!
    No one told me it was down on the docket,
    My move to Moore’s tight money clip!

  • Blogwall of Shame #1

    Wearing it well!
    Might want to cut eye holes next time!

    We may be misers when it comes to praise, but here at Moorezilla LLC we are quite generous when it comes to illuminating flaws, shortcomings, and other imperfections. At times, our righteous vitriol rises quicker than the water levels in Zion National Park during a thunderstorm, so we’ve adopted the bullet point emergency shame list to release the negative pressure when we feel deluged by a host of underperforming targets.

    Shame on YOU:

    • The Headers, for coming in last place on trivia night 8/20/09. That wasn’t a poor showing; that was a non-showing. If you were strippers, you’d have gone home empty handed, so I guess that means you might be strippers, because you went home empty handed after showing everyone nothing, instead of showing some people everything, or something like that. In short, next time, keep your clothes on but try to show people something. Your lousy performance has, frankly, damaged my control of the English language, so try to get your act together before my blog suffers.
    • Mainstream media, for praising Ted Kennedy, a guy who should have been in the state penitentiary (see here, or here), not in the Senate.
    • Red Sox, for (a.) signing Billy Wagner (bad enough!) and then (b.) CONTINUING to praise Ted Kennedy during the White Sox game. Eunice good… Teddy bad. Schmucks!
    • Ron Paul. You know what you did.
    • Gourmet Gardens, for putting your sushi/sashimi columns right next to each other on the ordering sheet. It doesn’t matter if every other sushi restaurant does the same thing; I hold you to a higher standard.
    • Tropical Storm Danny, for planning on coming to New England on a Saturday.
    • Don Draper. You know what you did.
    • General Electric, for cutting your share dividends, moving sideways, getting caught lying to the SEC, and continuing your lackluster performance despite NBC being a mouthpiece for Obama health care programming. You should be up to at least $20 a share by now!
    • The Headers, again, for trying to break up STFD! after STFD! already kind of broke up. Some of us will be beating all of you… TONIGHT!
    • Whatever phantom leftover stinks in our fridge right now, for stinking in our fridge right now and not having the guts to show yourself on trash day.

  • STFD! opens the mailbag and closes a chapter…

    With our fourth consecutive victory, it’s time for Shut The Front Door! to answer a little fanmail. We like getting fanmail, but it’s laborious to answer it, and if we answer it at all, it will only be through electronic media. When the Tin Whistle trivia people ask how much a stamp costs, we will have to guess. The last time we bought stamps they were 18 cents.

    Audrey from Cambridge, MA asks, “what is best in life according to STFD!?”

    I said it was chicken, fool!
    I said it was chicken, fool!

    Well, Audrey, our team philosophy is very similar to Conan’s. There’s really nothing we like better than “to crush our trivial enemies, to see them driven before us in shame, and to hear the lamentation of their women.” We also like our bar tab to be subsidized by inferior competitors. What’s the best tasting drink in the world? For us, Audrey, it’s a free one provided by some schlepp team snatching a loss from the jaws of victory when we use our Joker Double in the third round.

    Glen from Worcester, MA asks, “if you guys are so smart, how come you don’t order appetizers when the appetizers are half-price, since they’re half-price on the same night as trivia?”

    I could just say that it doesn’t matter, since we’re buying pizza and entrees with the money fleeced from other teams… actually… that’s exactly why it doesn’t matter. You go ahead and watch your wallet, Glen, but STFD! plans on spending money like drunken sailors until some other team steps up its game.

    Reverend Cherrycoke offers, “pride cometh before the fall. You should be humble in victory as you will eventually taste defeat.”

    Sounds like loser talk to us. Perhaps your unsolicited spiritual musings could be better spent comforting “not winning teams” like The Headers. We’ll dig up an address for them and send it along.

    Three shall replace one!
    Three shall replace one!

    John from Methuen, MA asks, “now that John is leaving to start a trivia team fork in Los Angeles, California, who will replace John and will you change your team name?”

    How can you adequately replace a team member who combines the incredibly destructive propensity to blurt out correct answers loud enough for other teams to hear with the incredibly positive propensity to come up with Dale Earnhardt’s car number? Wait… Addison reminds me that John got that freaking question wrong. But what about the greatest carrier of salmonella… err… Rachel reminds me that John got that wrong too. Emily also feels bitter that John vetoed her wish to go with “middle of the country” instead of LA for the locale of George Clooney’s failed baseball tryout. Still… John has supplied many, many correct answers (both to us and to other teams!), so we will have a very difficult time replacing him.

    Short term, we will replace John with a revolving trio of Michael Jackson, Bubbles the Chimp, and Lucy the Bulldog (Lucy checks out as all English, no French, per John’s demand for AKC papers!).

    We do not yet have a new team name, but I like Anti-inglorious Bastards.

  • Joanie Implicated!

    It’s never a comfortable situation when family members face indictment, but recently surfaced psychoanalytical art evidence suggests Silbergleit foul play in the death of Emily’s undeniably ugly, yet once functional designer sunglasses.

    In Exhibit #1 we see what appears to be an innocuous, demi-nouveau, pastoral/expressionist/dadaish, chair-in-the-wayish scene that Joanie is well-known for producing. The style is unmistakable (see Joanie’s Lime in Repose series numbers 1-29), but this particular painting, Solitary Break-fest, also betrays a clue to Joanie’s criminal intent if you concentrate on the area highlighted by the red arrow. Don’t be distracted by the chair, the Capn Crunch, or the pop tart; they and the rest of the breakfast are nothing but red herrings! The action, my friends, is on the water colored floor where you can clearly see the future crime scene!

    Exhibit #1
    Exhibit #1

    In Exhibit #2, we see a close up of the floor section of the painting and upon careful inspection the evidence mounts like a bloody leather glove left behind a pool house. The injured and gasping spectacles are an obvious allusion to future nefarious plans, but note also the angry azure pebbles and the Daliesque warping of earth patterns culminating in ferocious flesh-toned stones; these “flesh” formations suggest that the eyewear will be bludgeoned physically, brutally, haphazardly, yet in a seemingly accidental manner.

    The malevolent minerals foreshadow menacingly, “maybe you’ll be stepped on… or maybe you’ll be sat on… but in any case, you won’t see it coming. You might allow other people to gaze into the blinding sun, but you’ll never see your own death coming.”

    Everything about this painting warns like the yellow and black stripes on a wasp’s abdomen, “DANGER! MY ASS IS A DEADLY WEAPON!”

    Exhibit #2
    Exhibit #2

    Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “nice try, buddy, but where are your culturally-established art critic/historian credentials? You may draw a mean stick figure, you may even be the master of the crayon and construction paper greeting card, but that doesn’t make you any Robert Hughes. Great artists do not necessarily make great art critics! For all we know, you could be completely off-base (if not patently postmodern) in your interpretation, and your ‘evidence’ looks largely contrived, tenuous, and circumstantial. Why should we believe YOU!?”

    Is Joanie guilty, Mr. Eight Ball?
    Is Joanie guilty, Mr. Eight Ball?

    No problem, doubter! I understand that some of you put faith only in narrow-minded specialists, believing perhaps that Renaissance men of genius no longer walk the earth in this day and age. But you don’t have to take my amateur word for it. I’ve set up an unassailable test for confirmation. Earlier today, coffee mug in hand, I formally asked the unquestionable, omniscient oracle perched on my desk, “did Joanie intentionally destroy Emily’s sunglasses with her derriere?” The eight-ball’s second answer (his first answer was a disappointing and inconclusive “concentrate and ask again”) pretty much removes any question of Joanie’s guilt.