Dear Marvel Comics

Posted on October 24, 2008 by Rob Reuter

Hi. My name’s Rob, and I’m a lifelong fan of your work. My comic addiction started with Spider-Man in Marvel Team-Up in 1976, and continues to this day. Your books have entertained and inspired me even though they prevented me from getting laid until I was twenty years old. Which, strangely, is a sparkling endorsement of your stuff; I guarantee you that if watching crime movies made girls think you were a freak, Quentin Tarantino would be quoting Kurosawa dialog for nickels on a South Central street corner right now.

Anyway, as much as I love your books, I feel duty-bound to tell you about a disturbing trend I’ve noticed in your books over the past few weeks: double-page spread advertisements.

Now, I don’t begrudge the fact that you need to make money on your books, and I love them enough to generally overlook the fact that apparently you can’t make a profit on a thirty-page monthly magazine that costs only a buck less than Rolling Stone, which is twice the size with four times as many pages, yet somehow nets Jann Wenner enough to keep him stocked with blow and confused young men.

However, in a comic book, a double-page spread ad means a complete break in the story. It sucks you completely out of the experience while you turn a second page to get back to the story. It’s like the film breaking at a movie, or an Emergency Alert System test in the middle of a TV show, or your sex partner asking you to hold up for a minute while she changes out her colostomy bag.

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Economic Stimulation

Posted on October 23, 2008 by Rob Reuter

In just under two weeks, voters will be presented with an election that will change the course of recent history: after forty years of mostly Republican rule, they will be able to choose to change San Francisco, the city where the Summer of Free Love was born, into the City of Reasonably-Priced Love. That’s inflation for you.

Part of me wants to decry prostitution as dead tech, much like other ancient inventions meant to titilate us, because I personally have never engaged the services of a prostitute. Don’t get me wrong; the thought’s crossed my mind, but I find that I’ve never been so horny and / or drunk that I didn’t realize that I was no more than one computer and about 20 megabytes of shifted video packets away from being down one kleenex and up one overwhelming sense of relief that I didn’t piss away 200 clams and an hour scrubbing my junk with Dran-O Max.

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Battle Not With Monsters

Posted on October 21, 2008 by Rob Reuter

I love my girl desperately, but sometimes I’m convinced that she is Loki the Trickster, spinning me off on fools’ errands to wind me up, turn to her side, and eventually do her unquestioned bidding. I secretly fear that someday she will show me the Queen of Hearts, and when my head clears I’ll find myself standing over the body of Rachael Ray with a shotgun and a rapidly-wilting erection.

A perfect example of this happened this morning when, as we were staggering toward Dunkin’ Donuts in the pitch dark to get coffee while I had been awake maybe seven minutes, she casually mentioned, “I was checking out one of my food blogs, and there was a big thread asking whether or not people liked to put ranch dressing on their pizza.”

“…What?”

She giggled shortly and said, “Yeah, I guess down south, a lot of people dip their pizza in ranch dressing.”

My mind recoiled in horror, as if after a long night of drinking a sharply-dressed gentleman smelling faintly of sulfur had shown me a cocktail napkin with a short, hand-scrawled formula proving that Pi was actually 11. When I tried to picture it in my head, my throat would close to choke back the dry heaves. The very concept was the Two Girls One Cup of food.

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Demilitarized Zone

Posted on October 20, 2008 by Rob Reuter

A poster from my run for President in 2000. Click the picture to check out the ol' campaign platform.

While I’ve been pretty vocal about how negatively all this campaign shit’s been affecting me, it turns out that I didn’t really know how good I actually had it until I went to New Hampshire for a buddy’s party this weekend.

I didn’t take my camera with me to document it because a) I wasn’t expecting to see what I saw, and b) any evening that starts with Guinness and ends with liquid dynamite White Russians so powerful that The Dude would find an excuse to beg off isn’t something you want to have evidence of lying around. But as soon as I got off the highway into Nashua, I found that every single lawn had at least one campaign sign stuck into it. Most of them had two or three, including some so big that they could have acted as emergency stop barriers had I gone off the road from gaping slackjawed at such fervent politicking.

Lawn campaign signs are one of those thing that I’ve never understood. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve never had my mind changed on an issue because of a sign planted in front of even a nice-looking house, any more than the stoners in high school decided to forego the Grateful Dead because of the enthusiastic Van Halen logo I’d Sharpied onto my Trapper Keeper. The best I can figure is that it’s a way to say, “Neighbors, I support (insert candidate here) so adamantly that I wish you know know this fact, so that in the event you are considering supporting (insert opposing candidate here), you will know whose car to key.”

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Dear Mythbusters…

Posted on October 18, 2008 by Rob Reuter

Dear Jamie and Adam:

As you might be aware, I’m a big fan of your show. It’s the only show I personally like that’s allowed on my TiVo, and my girl is happy to have it on our television every Saturday morning, keeping me occupied while she’s in the bathroom dry-heaving and praying for recovery or death, whichever comes first.

I’ve learned many important things from you, such as the volatile and explosive nature of non-dairy creamer, which I have begun compulsively hoarding in my garage, so I will be prepared in the event of a zombie apocalypse, or if I get one more snide look from the counter bitch at Dunkin’ Donuts that leads me to believe that she’s instructing the coffee kid to jack off in my Big One.

However, I’ve got to be honest: you guys have slipped in the past few years. This morning I watched your second special on ninja myths. Ninjas? Are you fucking kidding me? I don’t want to be the voice of doom fellas, but of course everything they say about ninjas is bullshit. After all, they were mercenary contractors. Of course they were gonna tell people that they could walk on water and yank arrows out of the air; they were padding their resumes. A ninja saying he can disappear is no better than when I tell women that I’m a sixty-minute man: technically it’s not a lie, provided you include six minutes of looking for my pants and forty-five minutes of apologizing.

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