That Gets My Goat 25: My Unfunny Valentine

So, Valentine's Day has come and gone, so Rish asks Big what he did for that auspicious holiday. Unfortunately, Big asks Rish the same thing, and it's all downhill from there.



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Rish on "Guru Showdown"

Friend o' the show, Lizanne Herd does some kind of twisted online game show called "Guru Showdown," in which she is the Animal Guru. If you defeat her, you live. If she defeats you, she gets to decide what animal in her menagerie you are fed to.

For some reason, I ended up a contestant on their latest show, which can be found here.

Turns out a rhinocerous horn is made of hair, not nouget.

Liz mentioned afterward that I sounded uncomfortable and nervous. Well, I don't know if I was nervous, but I certainly wasn't funny, and I was thoroughly thrashed by the competition most of the time. If you care to give it a listen, check it out at www.gurushowdown.com.

Perhaps we can get Big on there as a contestant in the near future. That' oughtta wipe that smile off his smug face.

Known?

It takes a big man to admit when he's wrong, the old saying goes.

I've never been a big man. Even at my fattest, I don't know that I could be considered "big." But last night at the Anklevich house, when we were recording for the show, I meant to make an admission as part of an episode. Then we ran out of time, so it went unsaid.

But why not use the blog for it?

My sister was over for President's Day, and she wanted to see a movie. Try as I might, I just couldn't convince her to go see The King's Speech, which I've been unable to get anybody to accompany me to.

So, I asked her what looked good to her. She told me Unknown, the film with Liam Neeson. She said it looked a lot like Taken (and certainly the TV spots and posters have done all they can make that true).

My sister is the only sibling who will go to the movies with me, so I said I'd accompany her. And I guess that makes me something of a hypocrite, because didn't I do an entire episode of That Gets My Goat decrying the trailer to that movie, and proclaiming it so spoilerific as to obliterate any need to ever see the film proper?

Yes, I did. But she's family, and I don't exactly have people breaking down my door to spend time with me. Were the right girl interested, I'd probably go see Transformers 3.* So we hopped in the car and went to see Unknown.

And here comes the uncomfortable part. I quite enjoyed it. Even having seen that damned trailer . . .

(this is extremely difficult to get out)

. . . which didn't give away as much as I'd originally decided.

In that rant about that preview, I compared it to infamously bad trailers for Double Jeopardy and the last one they did for The Sixth Sense, and I stand by my condemnation of those and others like them. They truly do a disservice to the film they advertise. But the Unknown one . . . well, it was somewhat misleading, and some of what it shows turns out to not be what it appears.

So, I was wrong. I said so when Avatar came out, and I'm saying in now. But while I have you on the line, let me take the opportunity to condemn the TV spots that I've been seeing for Unknown the last couple of weeks. They end with a line--one so contrived to be reminiscent of Taken you'd almost think it was from a deleted scene--that is truly and utterly spoilertastic, just as I decried the initial trailer for being. All through the movie, I was waiting for that line, putting the pieces together in my head so that I had figured everything out before the audience was supposed to, and when that line did come, I thought, "Well, there it is, roll credits."

I still quite dislike the initial Unknown trailer, and heartily despise any advertisement that spoils, ruins, reveals, or dumbs down the movie its promoting, but I'm admitting I was wrong about the movie itself not being worth seeing.

I'll leave you now to your regularly scheduled life, but not before anticipating that I will be wrong--AGAIN--about The Social Network winning Best Picture. Not only was I hasty in that assessment, it appears I will be financially punished for it by Las Vegas bookies.

Ah well. Always in motion is the future.

Rish "Big Man" Outfield

*Of course, that'd have to be some woman, and her intentions for after would would have to be awfully unsubtle.

That Gets My Goat 24: The Lost Episode Part Two

Big and Rish continue their shelved episode about the Lifetime Movie Channel and seeing men as monsters. Once again, this show may be even more offensive than usual, so keep at arm's length.


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That Gets My Goat: The Lost Episode

Last year, we recorded an episode where Rish complained about the Lifetime Movie Network and its depiction of men, among other semi-related topics. When all was said and done, however, Rish was afraid that he might--once again--offend somebody with the discussion, and shelved it. But it's 2011, a more enlightened age, so here it is, that fabled lost episode.

Of course, he may have been right not to air it, so if you are easily offended, go ahead and skip this one. Or not-so-easily offended. Or offended ever, just to be safe.



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If This Is To Be Our End . . .

". . . we will make it such an end as to be worthy of remembrance."

Big and I finally did it last night. We made sure to use protection, though.

No, no, sorry. What I'm talking about is . . . the final episode of The Dunesteef Audio Fiction Magazine. If our first, intro show was episode zero, then this would be--according to Big--episode triple-zero. In the can.

More than a year ago, I got the idea for us to record our final episode, edit it, and have it set aside for use sometime in the future. We had been told about this phenomenon called pod-fading, where . . .

Well, let's have Big define that for us, since he was the one who introduced the concept to me.

Hi, everybody.

Okay, well, Pod-fading seems to be the way most podcasts out there end. One day they're chugging along at full steam, and then something happens, maybe it's something severe, like the podcaster gets injured, or there's even a death, or something slightly less severe, like a job change or loss. The real problem with pod-fading is that you never really know what happened. But the show will simply fade out. They have episodes that are further and further between, until one day they are gone. They never say goodbye, they just disappear.

Thanks, Big. So, I didn't want to go out that way. I knew--as Big did--that someday, the show would end, and it would be better to have a tearful series finale than to simply pass away unheralded and unmourned. It would be better to have it ready for that fateful day, than just fade away, like so many snowmen (or clones).

For months, I pestered Big about recording that show, but he resisted the idea. Why?

I dunno, Rish. I have no memory of doing so. I think it was always this and that and nothing in particular that got in the way of us doing it. I probably seemed to be resisting the idea, because I wanted to record shows that were for use right away, not something that was going into the Disney vault and not coming out for seven years or something.

Well, fate intervened, in the form of a big-boobed, bug-eyed pop star. I heard, for the first time, a Katy Perry song last week, and it really affected me. Or rather, one particular line in her song (the 2010 hit "Teenage Dream," in case anyone cares), struck me as both sadly naive and craftily profound. I told Big I wanted to talk about it on the show, and he assumed I meant in an episode of That Gets My Goat.

But no, I wanted to talk about it in our Final Episode Ever.

I brought up the subject in our weekly walk, and reluctantly, he allowed it to proceed.

Let me know your thoughts from beginning of that show, Bigglesby.

I just figured I'd lay back and think of England. You seemed to have a lot of things you really wanted to say, and I just wanted to finally hear the story about how you took your pants off in front of Ryan Reynolds that you've been promising for so long. But I guess that wasn't in the cards you were holding to your vest. Right, Rish?

Well, I didn't have an exact itinerary in mind. My thoughts were that this needed to be a really good show, with several points brought up (including the possibility that one of us was dead and/or that we had become enemies), and a nice, satisfied melancholy goodbye at the end. So we started to record.

We speculated what had brought us to this point--Big being much more optimistic, as usual--talked about our favorite shows, and thanked a few folks. Then I brought up that song lyric, and tried to end the show on a "nothing lasts forever" note.

And you know, even though it was long and somewhat painful, I think it ended up being a really good, really poignant episode.

And really strange, according to Big.

It was. It was a little surreal. Because there we were giving a sendoff to a show that wasn't going anywhere. We had to try to drum up the feelings that we would feel were this really the last episode. But it wasn't. It was the middle of it all. I suppose all the shows we do from now on are all prequels to that one. We've become what we most despise!

It was strange the next morning though. I woke up feeling as though what we had done the night before would change everything, because, you know, we'd said goodbye and all that. But we actually hadn't.

It was kind of like having a dream in which you break up with your girlfriend. Then you wake up and go to school, and she walks up and kisses you like nothing has changed...because it hasn't. It was just a dream. And I guess that is what our final show will be. Just a dream.

What, Rish? Oh, you didn't understand my analogy? Well, judging from the dating advice bit we recorded last night, you probably never will.

Sadder, truer words have never been spoken. I pray there are groupies at World Con this summer. But I digress.

So, it's done. And over the next few weeks, I'll edit the episode down to a more manageable length. Then I'll give a copy to Big for safekeeping, and when the show does end (hopefully far into the future, and hopefully due to my death and not his), it will air, episode 000, for us to go out with.

On a high note, if I may be so bold, sir.

That Gets My Goat 22: A Tangled Web Part 2

Big and Rish finish their conversation about going to see TANGLED, leading me to wonder why this was split into two episodes.



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