
I guess the editors couldn’t include “LOL!!!” and a bunch of smileys in the headline like they wanted to.
I am Jack’s dated movie tie-in
Coming soon to your pretentious “anti-establishment” best friend’s smoke-filled rec room: Fight Club: The Game from that bastion of anti-authoritianism, Vivendi Universal Games. (FOX must’ve passed on it since it destroyed Bill Mechanic‘s career.)
So put down that dog-eared Hunter S. Thompson book and pick up your PS2 controller, you rebel. It’s time to tear this whole fucking system down: from your couch!

Yes, in fully-pixelated glory, it’s a recreation of the dilapidated yard you grew to love so much with your repeated DVD viewings of David Fincher’s Fight Club…you remember the film, right? It came out in, ummm, 1999?

And there’s that beautifully grimy, dimly-lit basement! It’s almost as if Chuck Palahniuk himself is getting all up in your face, ready to pummel it into oblivion.

God. There’s Meat Loaf, in what surely has to be his first-ever appearance on an X-Box or PS2.
And in the vein of a good self-help group session, video game fans are congregating and clamoring for changes to the way in which this particular one is played. From the manufacturer’s forums:
“Wouldn’t it have been awesome if, after the fight, both fighters, completely covered in bruises and blood would hug each other? That would have been so much funnier and different than all the other crappy fighting gmes target to pre-adolescent rap-boys with Girls, Money and Power on their minds.
VU, you missed your shot to create something truely [sic.] special.
Hey, man! The first rule of Fight Club is you do not reveal the queer subtext of Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is you DO NOT reveal the queer subtext of Fight Club. The third rule of Fight Club is take off your shirt and let’s grapple.
Eh, Not So Much
Is this another prank from those tricky Canadians at Vice?
If it is, it’s not so funny, but it’s better than the whole “We’re white supremacists” thing.
If it’s not… I guess that’s why it’s not funny at all.
Golly gee. Who’d have ever thought that a few hundred tons of weapons gone missing in some Middle Eastern nation-state would have such an effect on the waning days of the race for the White House? Certainly not the American military unit that apparently wasn’t told to search the weapons-storage facility from which these munitions were presumably taken. Realistically, if their bosses had known there were weapons floating around Iraq, they’d have been on high alert over this sort of thing, right?
From “Spokesman: Unit Didn’t Search Al-Qaqaa”, Associated Press, October 27, 2004:
The Kerry campaign called the disappearance the latest in a “tragic series of blunders” by the Bush administration in Iraq.
Vice President Dick Cheney raised the possibility the explosives disappeared before U.S. soldiers could secure the site, and he complained that Kerry does not mention the “400,000 tons of weapons and explosives that our troops have captured.”
OK, there you go. This is how war works, and politics, too. It’s that classic Cheney tactic: accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative. To wit, regarding the administration’s now-very-clearly-fucked-up invasion of Iraq, the Vice President said in June:
“After decades of rule by a brutal dictator, Iraq has been returned to its rightful owners, the people of Iraq,” Cheney said in a speech in New Orleans, which made the case that Bush had reversed a terrorist threat that grew unchecked before he came to office. “America is safer, and the world is more secure, because Iraq and Afghanistan are now partners in the struggle against terror, instead of sanctuaries for terrorist networks.”
You see how that works? He plays up the good things that have come from the invasion and overthrow of Iraq and Afghanistan, and doesn’t act like a certain senator from a certain state in the Northeast might, by focusing on, say, the fact that 3,000 Americans died three years ago, or that well more than a thousand American soldiers have died in military action since then, or that much more than ten thousand Iraqis and Afghans have perished at the hands of American weaponry in that interim…see, that’s meaningless, folks.
Because at the end of the day, those hundreds of millions of Americans who don’t fall into those “irrelevant” categories of deaths detailed above are, of course, safer. It’s about positivity. Optimism. And that’s the Cheney way.
At least I think that’s how it works. Though I’m probably overlooking something. I can just feel it…
Oh, shit, I’ve got it! This, right here!
“The biggest threat we face now as a nation,” he said, “is the possibility of terrorists’ ending up in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever before been used against us – biological agents or a nuclear weapon or a chemical weapon of some kind – to be able to threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.”
“You have to get your mind around that concept,” he added.
You go, Dick! For a few fleeting moments up there I’d somehow managed to convince myself that you’d gone all Disney, all “hakuna matata” and “circle of life” and shit, but thanks for grounding us in the bare necessities: Vote or die.
Notes Towards an Election Week Mix Tape
“The Final Countdown,” Europe
“Political World,” Bob Dylan
“Power to the People,” John Lennon
“It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” REM
“Welcome to the Terrordome,” Public Enemy
“Help!,” The Beatles
“The Power,” Snap
“I Started a Joke,” The Bee Gees
“Whistle When You’re Low,” Cancer Boy
“Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind,” Lovin’ Spoonful
“Manic Depression,” Jimi Hendrix
“Heroes,” David Bowie
“A Change is Gonna Come,” Sam Cooke
“Authority Song,” John Mellencamp
“You’re a Big Girl Now,” The Stylistics (for Dubya)
Question: What’s on yours?






