tough questions

Tough Questions: If You Were On Jeopardy! What Would You and Alex Trebek Talk About?

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Every week we ask everyone who hangs out around here to answer a tough question. This week:

If You Were On Jeopardy! What Would You and Alex Trebek Talk About?

Rules are simple: When it finally comes up. When you are finally selected. When you start your ten-day run on America’s favorite game show. When Alex walks over to you and prompts you to tell your life’s story in a few moments. What will you say in the last moments before you make your first million?

Alex Russell

Trebek: You had an interesting run-in overseas?

That’s right. I was 13 and I was lost in Italy. I needed to figure out how to get back to the hotel where my family was, but I didn’t remember anything except my mom’s cell phone number. This is back when pay phones were everywhere, but it’s also so old that Italy was still on the lira. I needed to find some — I guessed about 50 cents worth — of lira. I was really worried and freaked out, but then I found a big bucket of change. I grabbed a handful and went to go make a call when I realized this bucket of change belonged to a lady of the evening. So… that’s how I accidentally robbed what may have been… a professional.

Stephanie Feinstein

Trebek: Stephanie Feinstein, a teacher, comes to us today from humid Memphis. Stephanie, it says here that you made a working loom as a child. Tell us about that.

Me: Well, Alex, as a child I wanted a fully functional, room-sized loom to make small blankets for my dolls. Both expensive and impractical, it was not something Santa was going to bring any time soon. [I laugh, so does Trebek.] So, after watching a PBS special on the Industrial Revolution, I tossed a footstool on its side, set up a weft of acrylic yarn through the legs and handle, and made a shuttle out of cardboard. Then, while watching The Frugal Gourmet, I wove a small lap blanket for Barbie to use on carriage rides. I was about six or seven at the time, and my parents were pretty impressed.

Jonathan May

Trebek: I hear you’ve been editing Wikipedia for a while now. Care to elaborate?

Jon: I’ve been editing seriously on Wikipedia since 2006. Most of my articles cover Austrian and German authors, but I find myself entertaining more and more obscure projects as I go. A lot of people think Wikipedia articles just appear out of the aether, but I probably spend a few hours gathering reliably-sourced material on each subject before I get started. Actually writing the article, putting it into Wiki specifications, and creating citations takes about an hour all together. My next article project is an obscure Japanese silkscreen artist from the early 20th century, so I’ll be hitting the library and online resources hard this summer. Wish me luck!

Mike Hannemann

Mine would be the time I made Barack Obama laugh. He came to my college in… I want to say 2005? He gave a speech in our campus library about the importance of education. It was a pretty decent speech, as I recall. When walking out he shook everyone’s hand and asked for feedback. When he got to me he asked me what I thought about it. I replied with “It was great! But if it gets me out of my American Lit class, I couldn’t care less what you say.” He laughed and said “You missed the point, didn’t you?” This is my Jeopardy! story and I hope, if Obama were on Jeopardy 500 times, he would be reduced to telling the story about some smartass kid he talked to once in Peoria, Illinois.

Andrew Findlay

I have never in my life watched a full episode of Jeopardy!, so to even understand this question, I had to use Google. I ended up reading an NPR article about what it’s like to be on the show. I felt like an alien spy doing desperate pre-landing research to insinuate himself into the cultural life of America. Included in the article was a list of prompt questions you are requested to answer to supply Trebek with banter before appearing on the show. One of them was Brushes with greatness and secret ambitions? We want to hear it. I guess I’ll do that one.

I brushed the greatness of George Saunders. He is the greatest living short story writer. Reading him hits you deep, makes you think, changes you. It is not entertainment, and it is not decoding. It is fresh and harsh and full. It is hard to say how great he is or why he is in so many words. He’s like if you put in a blender the amused old man part of Mark Twain, the “aw shucks let’s discuss mind-shattering truths in real simple talk” part of David Foster Wallace, the hopeful cynicism and tragic humor part of Kurt Vonnegut, and the stark social commentary of all three, then set the blender to amazing.

One of his funniest quotations, just to give a taste (inner monologue of a not-so-bright child):
Dad had once said, Trust your mind, Rob. If it smells like shit but has writing across it that says Happy Birthday and a candle stuck down in it, what is it?
 
Is there icing on it? he’d said.
 
Dad had done that thing of squinting the eyes when an answer was not quite there yet.

Anyway, he came to the Folger Theater in DC to accept the PEN/Malamud award, and I bought tickets. I got drunk beforehand because it’s a good night, cause for celebration, when you meet someone so talented. Attendance was so high that they moved the reading to the church next door, so I ended up schlockered in a church listening to a literary luminary read an excerpt from his latest book (which the New York Times has said is “the best book you’ll read all year”). When he finished reading an excerpt from his book, he took audience questions. He uses a lot of sci-fi in his work, and I asked him a question about it. He said that he wasn’t a superfan, but he enjoyed writing sci-fi stuff and that it was fun and helped break you out of lame writing and bad habits. I swooned. Afterwards, everyone returned to the front hall of the Folger to buy wine and stand in line to have this man put ink in their books. While he was signing, we talked a bit, and I told him about how I read so much now that most of what I think is “Ah. I see what you did there,” but that one story of his in particular took me so completely along with it that I did not have time to think, and it hit me right in the emotional nads (not exact quote). Seems like a really cool guy, but it’s so strange how little I know him and how much I know through his stories.

Brent Hopkins

I think my story would have to be based around moving around so much over the course of my life. Not necessarily living in new areas, but always at least in new apartments and things. I haven’t lived in a place for two years since I was in college and that was because of squatting. I am at about 12-14 different home addresses between two countries so I could carry a conversation about it for awhile.

Backup: My collection of pogs, trading cards, and video games. I would play up the pogs being my true addiction by bringing a carrying case and mat in my coat pocket to challenge Trebek and the other contestants to a commercial break duel.

Tough Questions: If You Had to Do Something Every Day for a Year that You Don’t Already Do, What Would You Pick?

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Every week we ask everyone who hangs out around here to answer a tough question. This week:

If You Had to Do Something Every Day for a Year that You Don’t Already Do, What Would You Pick?

Rules are simple: When are you gonna finally shape up? This tough question forces you to collect your aspirations and put them into one actionable damn thing. What would you fix about the crumbling house that is your life, if you had to pick one daily thing? Would you do good deeds? Or would you at least stop doing evil ones as often? Look, it’s rough out there. You don’t know my life.

Alex Russell

Pete Holmes (comedian, TV host, and fictional advertizing baby) often talks about the idea that to create an hour of stand up you only need to write a minute a day. It’s an easy idea, but we’re all terrible at compartmentalizing ourselves. We don’t think in chunks; we think in finish lines. I would want to write one joke every day. I’m a weird obsessive about stand up comedy and I liked the (VERY, VERY) brief experiences I had trying to sell my own bullshit on a microphone. A kick in the ass every day to do some more would do me some good and a lot of audiences a whole lotta bad.

Jonathan May

Since there’s no way I’m going to start doing CrossFit or yoga on the regular, I’m going to have to go with prank-calling people from the payphone in the mall. The calls will be short, so I really just need a little spare change every day. Now you may say, “Jon, the mall isn’t open every day,” and you would be right. So on days following holidays, I would make up the calls I’d missed. Heading into my thirties, it seems like I should pick something more sensible like doing crunches or household chores, but honestly, this will be much better for the soul.

Andrew Findlay

I would go to bed by 10:30 every weeknight. This is just the lamest personal goal ever, but six hours versus eight hours of sleep makes a huge difference in overall levels of happiness and effectiveness in life. The problem is, I never, ever recognize that at 10:30, 11:30, or 12:30. It always seems like reading a little bit more, watching some television, or wasting time on the internet will make my life better, then I wake up very sad in the morning. Seeing as how the phrasing of the question is if you had to, this unfortunate pattern probably won’t change anytime soon.

Austin Duck

If there was something I could commit to for a year but haven’t yet, it’d definitely be doing something every day that I’m proud of. I spend so much time making stupid fucking mistakes, but if I could exercise, read, and write every day (if I had the fucking willpower), I’d love to commit to it. 

Brent Hopkins

The one thing I would commit to would be some flavor of art. As a kid I always wanted to learn an instrument but after failing repeatedly I completely gave it up and it has been a chip on my shoulder for years. With the time to do it every day, I think I could will myself to stop being awful and at least learn something simple to play like the recorder or ukulele. That being said, I am also terrible at general art, so I wouldn’t mind learning to draw or learning to paint either. I like solo relaxing activities so these would meld best with my personality.

Mike Hannemann

The easy answer here is exercise. But if I went with the easy answer, this wouldn’t be a tough question.  I would probably commit to reading War & Peace, every day, for 30 minutes. Being able to claim that I have read that monstrous tome has been on my bucket list for years. However, when a book has over 130 characters and you’re used to consuming media with a character called “The Ice King,” this can be extremely daunting. At the end of the day, doing this every day for a year may not get me to the end of the seventh longest novel ever written, but maybe I’d be able to tell who at least four of the characters are. That’s something I can’t boast about the recent season of The Walking Dead.

Scott Phillips

I read every single day. No, I’m not talking about Twitter and Facebook and other internet material, I’m talking biographies and a lot of nonfiction books. As a career sports writer, I tend to be fascinated by nonfiction writing because I want to mold my writing to emulate some of my favorite authors that have followed sports teams or athletes like Jeff Pearlman, Jack McCallum, or David Halberstam.

But between my job(s), my social life, and those nonfiction entries it doesn’t leave me a lot of time to read great works of fiction. I wish I read fiction every single day; it pains me deeply that I don’t. Most of my fiction reading comes in the form of the television shows that I digest while I work around the house or to give myself a break from writing or researching. I would love to dive into George R.R. Martin or Stephen King, or even re-discover Tolkien after my childhood hobbit fixation.

So I know I could easily commit to reading great works of fiction every day for a year, I just wish there was more time in a day.

Tough Questions: If You Had to Use AOL Instant Messenger in 2014, What Would Your Screen Name Be?

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Every Monday we ask everyone who hangs out around here to answer a tough question. This week:

If You Had to Use AOL Instant Messenger in 2014, What Would Your Name Be?

Rules are simple: Imagine a world where everyone is back on AIM. It’s easy, if you try. Imagine conducting every important conversation (and let’s be honest, every not-at-all important conversation) with someone named SoxGuy2020 or xXQTAngelXx. We were really, really close to that reality until Google replaced AIM. We almost lived in an even dumber world than we do now. If AIM had crushed Google in the battle for relevancy, who would you be in 2014?

Alex Russell

I have no shame about my absurd choice of alex is so loud in my teenage years. It is amazing to me how long I once agonized over this concept. Now, I’m just Alex Russell. That’s boring. That’s simple. That isn’t an unfunny joke, like I like so much! RussellAndFlow, clearly.

Jonathan May

My screen name back in the day was thenjonsays, the concept of which I shamefully stole from a friend in high school. If AIM were alive and kicking now, I would probably go with whydidn’tyoujusttextme or markwahlberginfear. The more that I look at screen names though, the more I think they’re a precursor to hashtags. You try to evoke a whole mood in a hashtag, and the screen name was, like, your total identity on AIM. Yeah, you thought you were funny too in the late 90s.

Andrew Findlay

My AIM name would be mygchatnameisafindlay.recess@gmail.com, and whenever anyone messaged me I would reply with a frowny emoji and wait for them to contact me on a non-defunct messaging service.

It’s dead – leave it buried. Although it was beautiful while it lasted. My first substantive conversations with my current wife took place on AIM, and nearly every member of our generation is an amazing typist because they practiced on AIM for at least an hour every day during high school.

Alex Marino

xXxDaTaGuY03xXx

Because I work in data analysis and I graduated high school in 2003. And if you don’t have your birth or high school graduation year in your AIM screen name you’re a basic bitch. Throw triple Xs on the beginning and end (before the landmark Vin Diesel film) because people need to know how fucking cool and edgy I am.

Austin Duck

TQ: I would stick with my screen name from the way-way back: ADCloWnLoVE. Sure, the Insane Clown Posse have come out as closet Christians hiding behind some super-bizarre carnival misdirection, but shit. I grew my heart on clown love. (Note: This is not an endorsement of the Insane Clown Posse or its music).

Brent Hopkins

Not sure what he means by had to use AIM in 2014. I still am logged onto AIM 24/7/365. I also am on ICQ at all times as well. Screen name: Soulcalibur74, ICQ 161590484. Feel free to message me. If I were to change the screen name, though, I would go with my adult movie name obviously… Onyx Monolith. I am not a discreet man.

Tough Questions: What’s the Worst Thing You’ve Ever Eaten in a Restaurant?

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Every Monday we ask everyone who hangs out around here to answer a tough question. This week:

What’s the Worst Thing You’ve Ever Eaten in a Restaurant?

Rules are simple: What’s the worst of the worst? Everyone had that phase as a kid where you filled a glass with all the grossest stuff in the kitchen and dared your friend to drink it for a dollar, but then they didn’t want to so you drank it yourself? Nope? Just me? Anyway, what is that one special absolute worst dish you’ve ever been served by a supposed professional?

Alex Russell

I can eat just about anything, but I can’t eat mayo. It’s everything: the texture, the smell, the taste, everything. It’s almost “food-hack” at this point to hate mayo, but I stand my ground that this is something I cannot abide. Every time I order anything that might even conceivably have mayo on it as an option I essentially plead for them to not put any on it. Asking for no mayo seems to activate some secret bonus round of mayo in which you win the mayo lotto and get six times the mayo it would be reasonable to get. At a Hardee’s in Peoria once I got a burger that was more mayo than not mayo. It was mayonnaise that maybe, if you held it right, could hold beef and bread.

Brent Hopkins

I think the worst thing I have eaten in a restaurant is something called Gaebul (개불in Korean) which is a pretty common seafood dish. It is served raw with salt and sesame oil and it looks a lot like a dog’s penis. The full creature is disturbing enough, but the sliced bits are considerably worse to prepare your mouth for as they still move and are a two-tone wonder of brown and blood-red. The texture is somewhat crunchy (imagine constantly biting through the skin of an apple) and tough, and it is supposedly good for a man’s sexual stamina. I have had this on multiple occasions (not gonna turn down free stamina) and probably will have it again in the future, having just moved to a coastal city. But man, it just isn’t something I would like to see on a plate, ever. Pics are included of before and prepared. [Editor’s note: GROSS WARNING.]

Jonathan May

I visited my sister in Vancouver, BC, Canada last July while she was working there in her third of three years. We had a great time exploring the city, taking pictures of ourselves with the city’s faux terracotta Chinese statues. But one day, two of my sister’s Chinese friends (a married couple) took us to lunch in the Chinese mall. We were the only white people in the restaurant for sure, probably the entire mall. They asked us what we liked and then proceeded to order, quickly, in Chinese. Pots of deliciously hot white rice arrived, followed by plates of curried chicken, garlic noodles with black bean curd, and shredded lamb. I was quickly overwhelmed by the intense and glorious flavors raving inside me. But halfway through the meal, a plate of thick, bone-white slivers arrived in a light sauce without explanation. The couple looked expectantly at me and my sister. “Beef lung,” the wife said. “You’ll like.” Horrified, I saw my hand clutching the chopsticks, picking one of the biggest, whitest, most unnatural pieces from the pile, and stuffing it in my mouth. It felt like my tongue was wrestling a stingray. I was sure I would vomit right there onto the table. But I didn’t. After my sister ate a piece as well, the couple, satisfied, returned to their meal.

Andrew Findlay

This is not a story about something that tastes bad. This is a story about poor choices and dire consequences. It’s not so much what the food tasted like as what it did to me. I was in Switzerland last summer, and Switzerland is the home of fondue. I ate like three buckets of fondue during the few days I stayed there. I do not know this for sure, but I’m close to certain that the Swiss don’t pasteurize some of their cheese. The cheese tasted pretty good, and the only drawback at the time was feeling like you’d eaten about 10 pizzas after the meal. The aftermath was horrendous. Something was living in and feeding on that cheese as I ate it. Something colonized my insides so thoroughly and with such reckless abandon that it fundamentally severed any link between my intestines and proper function. Right before a 13-hour plane ride home. On which the only movie available was The Hobbit. I spent half a day in a tube of misery and despair, I hate The Hobbit more than I already would have, and I couldn’t eat solid food for about a week.

Mike Hannemann

Red Robin is a wonderful establishment. Let’s preface my experience with that. I used to eat there once every two weeks when I was working out in the suburbs. Until one day. And I haven’t been back since. In high school and college, I always resisted peer pressure. I didn’t drink or anything until I was ready to. But, for some reason, I gave into it when it came to The Wiseguy. The Wiseguy was a “special” burger that month (and I use the word “special” very loosely here) that was only offered for a limited time. It was a cheeseburger that had cheddar and mozzarella cheese, marinara sauce, pepperoni slices, and three fried mozzarella sticks sandwiched together. I was convinced by co-workers that this was going to be the best burger I’d ever eaten. It resulted in a weekend of being violently sick and a lifelong distrust for one of America’s more popular restaurant chains.

Alex Marino

If anyone here has tried Balut, they win.

As for me, I fucking love sushi. Whenever I’m home I make sure to go to my family’s favorite sushi spot with my dad and devour more rolls than is permitted by the FDA. One time we put in an order for so many rolls that the waitress asked if more people would be joining us. We’ve tried almost every piece of sushi on the menu but there’s only one I’ll never have again: eel roe with a raw egg yolk on top. I don’t know what possessed my dad and me to believe we were some kind of Japanese Rocky but it was a nightmarish mistake. As soon as the roll was brought to us we knew it was going to be terrible but we had made our bed and now we had to lay in it. We decided to eat it first because if we looked at it any longer we weren’t going to make it. Eggs, slime, salt, seaweed, and rice just don’t mesh well. I gagged a little as I forced it down and my dad was stone-faced as always. The only thing he said about it was “We won’t be ordering that again.”

Tough Questions: What’s the Dumbest Thing You’ve Done to Yourself Lately?

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Every Monday we ask everyone who hangs out around here to answer a tough question. This week:

What’s the Dumbest Thing You’ve Done to Yourself Lately?

Rules are simple: everyone does stupid things and everyone does things that aren’t in their own best interest, but when have you last combined the two mistakes to form a delicious fusion mistake? You do it to yourself, you do, and that’s what really hurts.

Alex Russell

I went to Dallas last weekend on a last-minute trip. I booked the tickets just a few days before leaving because I originally wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to go or not. In my haste to do so I apparently booked a trip that left Chicago on February 20th and returned from Dallas on March 24th. I discovered this when the helpful woman at the Spirit Airlines desk alerted me to what month it is. Turns out that I don’t know what month it is, and Delta Airlines was happy to take $200 from me to fix my stupid mistake. I briefly considered lying when retelling this to make myself look better, but no, I sincerely just booked the stupidest plane ticket of all time. No need to sugarcoat it. I can’t believe I can dress myself (most days, kinda, debatable).

Scott Phillips

I’ve done some stupid stuff in my life. Most of it as a result of drinking. But since I’ve slowed that down and started to become an adult, my dumbest thing I did was probably go through this ridiculous Chicago winter without a hat and gloves. I got a new winter coat courtesy of my girlfriend and I never decided it would be necessary to cover my hands and head for the rest of winter. Which was really smart, because it’s February 26th and we STILL had subzero temperatures when I left the house this morning. Definitely not the brightest move in my book, but now it’s nearly March and I’m too stubborn to get them at this point.

Austin Duck

Recently, shit got real, and I started smoking again. Worst. Mistake. Ever.

Alex Marino

Thrillist put out a list of the best pizza places in Chicago by neighborhood and I was dumb enough to read all the idiot fucking Yelp reviews about them. Yelp reviews are the smallest step above right-wing blog comments sections except I rely on Yelp for restaurant ideas while comments sections are mostly avoidable. I read this one particular review that gave a place two stars because it wasn’t as good as the pizza they grew up with in NYC and what they had when they traveled to Italy. The person that wrote it should have their Yelp posting privileges revoked by court order, their computer thrown off the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and the pieces of the computer baked into a thin crust pizza they can shove up their ass.

Brent Hopkins

I think if there was a way to win the tough question I actually may win this one. The dumbest thing I did to myself happened right before I came home from Korea and I was going to my new job to maybe meet my new employers. I was cleanly shaven and honestly fresh to death, as they say, but I had one problem… My nose. Specifically, my nose hairs had grown to unruly lengths as my trimmer had broken and I hadn’t picked up another one. I was alone in my apartment and — I have no idea why I thought this was a good idea — I decided that the best way to to handle the problem was to channel my inner military tactician and “burn the fields,” so to speak. I grabbed a lighter and proceeded to burn the nose hairs in one nostril and then, as the smell of seared hair filled my nasal passage, I dropped the lighter and said “What the hell is wrong with you? Are you an idiot?” Luckily, I managed to hit only the nostril and didn’t sear off my eyebrows, but I had the smell of cooked nose hairs for a few hours to remind me that spending that much time alone can be dangerous to your health.

Jonathan May

Of the myriad dumb things I’ve done to myself recently, I’d have to say pissing off the checkout lady at my regular Walgreens takes the cake. I simply asked if they had more iced tea, but after ten minutes of searching, she said she could look in the back. As I was on my way to school, I blurted out, “No thanks, I’m in a hurry.” I realized as I said it that I had officially pissed her off. A blizzard passed between us in those ten seconds following. Fuck, I thought. So now I have to go to Walgreens the night before, when all the weirdos are out.

Andrew Findlay

I recently went to a movie downtown. Finding parking in DC is usually mildly time-consuming, not terrible. I found a likely spot, left my car, and walked away as I pulled up the parking meter phone app. When I clicked “pay,” the program said “parking not available in this location at this time.” I have no idea why this information simply made me shrug my shoulders and keep walking to the movies, but it did. Come time to go home, my car is gone. My wife calls the number on the parking meter, and the dispatch lady tells us it was deposited at 10th and G, a block away from where we are standing. We walk down a ways, find it, and there’s a 100 dollar ticket for parking in a rush hour lane, a 100 dollar charge for the tow, and a pink sheet itemizing the damage the tow truck did to my car. You know the amazing scene in Forrest Gump where he tells Jenny that he’s not a smart man, but he knows what love is? The first part of that, only the first part, was playing on repeat in my head for a while after that night.

Mike Hannemann

The dumbest thing I’ve done to myself lately was to take what I like to refer to as an “unfamiliar bus.” The bus is terrifying to me, but I figured what the hell, I can do this. I decided that I would take a bus route home from work, rather than the train, so I could stop off at a Best Buy to get a new video game. I had the entire thing planned out hours beforehand (I Googled several routes) and knew what I was going to do. Then I ended up on the wrong bus. So I got off after one stop and got on another one. It was also the wrong bus. Five minutes later I realized this and got on another bus. Spoiler alert: It was not the right bus. After a total of five buses I got where I was going. The best part of the story is that, at 30, I got this lost trying to buy a Donkey Kong game. At the very least, I earned the adult equivalent of a participation ribbon.

Tough Questions: What Do you Keep Recommending that No One Will Believe is Good?

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Every Monday we ask everyone who hangs out around here to answer a tough question. This week:

What Do You Keep Recommending that No One Will Believe is Good?

Rules are simple: what do you find yourself telling every person you come across to check out that no one will listen to you about? What would totally be someone’s favorite show/book/movie/Chinese food menu item that’s being overlooked?

Mike Hannemann

The thing I love that I find myself never able to convince anyone is good is the tacos at Burger King. I normally hate the guy that goes to a Mexican restaurant and orders a burger but these are LEGIT. They cost $1.19 for two and yet no one takes the chance despite my urging. They’re fried, filled with a meat-like substance, a half piece of Kraft american cheese, and a slice of lettuce, all topped with a weird taco sauce. I can’t explain why they’re amazing. I can’t explain how an airplane flies, either. I just know two things: a plane can fly and these tacos are good.

Alex Marino

I swear if you’re still using that shitty shower head that was there when you moved in you need to get rid of that shit right now. Get on Amazon and order yourself one of these. Yes, it’s expensive. Yes, it’s completely worth it. You’ve probably spent $100 on some shitty sweater you wear once every few weeks. Why not spend that on something you do every day? Instead of a shower just being that thing you do before you go to work, you actually enjoy it. You’re fucking WELCOME.

Alex Russell

The funniest thing you don’t listen to is My Brother, My Brother and Me. It’s a podcast on the Maximum Fun podcast network that’s hosted by three brothers. They answer questions from Yahoo! Answers and from people who email them their pressing questions. Want to know what to do if you think you’re in love with a goose? Need to learn to box but refuse to learn how to block? Unsure if shoplifting is really illegal? You need to listen to the brothers. I’ve suggested this to every single person I’ve met that likes comedy in the last two years. “You need to listen to this podcast” is tantamount to asking someone for both of their kidneys, but seriously check out the sampler. 

Austin Duck

Poetry.

Andrew Findlay

I have been asking my coworkers to watch Breaking Bad for a year and a half. To my knowledge, only one has taken me up on the offer. This is frustrating. The worst part is that a guy I work closely with kept recommending The Wire to me, and I kept recommending Breaking Bad to him. We would have arguments over which was better without us having seen an episode of the show we were putting in second place. I have since watched all 60 episodes of The Wire, and he has not watched the pilot of Breaking Bad. I’m sure everyone believes it’s good, but a disheartening number of people don’t believe it’s good enough to actually sit down and watch.

Brent Hopkins

The thing that I always recommend to other people that no one seems to think is good is a series called The Mistborn Trilogy by Brandon Sanderson. This is a fantasy series that keeps you engaged from start to finish and has enough twists and turns to keep you in the dark until the final few pages. There is plenty of action, romance, and mystery in these books and it was one of the best things I read over the last year. I am not necessarily huge into fantasy but I found myself reading until I passed out with my Nook on my chest. I have quite a few friends I think would love it when they started it but they always come up with other things they need to do. READ THIS SERIES, SERIOUSLY!

Jonathan May

Two words: Big Love. That Bill Paxton love-bonanza had its crazy ups and downs. Even Chloë Sevigny described the fourth season (of five) as a telenovela. But fuck if I didn’t cry consistently during the last episode. This show, as Stefon from Saturday Night Live would say, has everything: polygamy, Jeanne Tripplehorn, home goods superstores, Memphian Ginnifer Goodwin, Indian casinos, conversations with God, running for State office, and polygamy (you have to say it at least twice). But no one, besides me and my friend Kyle, seems to have given this gem the time of day. It’s only five seasons, people. I get that polygamy and Mormonism are “sensitive” topics, but the character arcs you experience are incredible. I was blown away by how the women ended up. Utterly blown away. So watch it.

Tough Questions: What’s the Worst Movie that You Love?

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Every Monday we ask everyone who hangs out around here to answer a tough question. This week?

What’s the Worst Movie that You Love?

Rules are simple: “worst” means the one the critics hated the most. We’re using Rotten Tomatoes for critics, and we want to know your great shame. What’s that one movie that you love and defend constantly? What is your guilty pleasure that really ain’t so guilty in your eyes?

Austin Duck

Unfortunately, I’m not really a movie guy. I used to be, but my wife’s not that into them, so I don’t see new movies very often. My favorite bad movie is easily Pacific Rim. Now, I know it was a steaming pile of crap, but it was one of the most exceptional dumps I’ve ever seen. Watching a movie like that, you can so clearly see directorial intention, it’s exciting. You see a man who, known for quality and intelligence in film, tries to make the perfect dinosaurs vs. robots movie. And he does. There’s not one saccharine-y second wasted in that movie; from the building of the universe, the establishment of the problem, the execution, it’s perfectly articulated. And while a lot of people trash it for failing to transcend its genre, I disagree. Well, I don’t disagree that it didn’t transcend its genre, but I don’t think it was about that. It perfected the genre and, as such, created a work from which the Syfy network might never recover.

Rotten Tomatoes: 71% (!)

Mike Hannemann

It was a December night. I was at a Target. Not one close to home – it was one by my office in Naperville, IL. It should be noted that this was a good hour’s drive on the highway away from my apartment on the south side of Chicago. I saw a DVD for a movie I had never seen before. I purchased it immediately and I will never be able to explain my reasoning. It sat on my DVD shelf for about two weeks. I never gave it a second thought, let alone expressed any desire to watch it. Christmas came and went, and I found myself alone in my apartment Christmas night with a bottle of Scotch. This was the only time I ever watched Paul Blart: Mall Cop. But it was glorious.

Rotten Tomatoes: 33%

Alex Marino

If you’re not down with Hook you can go to hell. Dustin Hoffman puts on one of the greatest villain performances of all time. There’s no green screen or camera tricks, just elaborate sets and memorable moments. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been drunk at a bar and have awkwardly quoted this movie only to have no one recognize it. It’s basically the perfect movie when you’re 14. So all the 14-year-olds out there reading this should really see it.

Rotten Tomatoes: 31%

Alex Russell

There’s only one answer to this: Pootie Tang. This movie is misunderstood. If you really read about people’s response to this movie they are furious about it. It’s a weird homage of a movie made out of love for a long-gone genre at the time. It’s all about the character Pootie Tang who is supposed to represent a kind of cool that’s unobtainable. I have no problem with someone not getting what they were trying to do with a movie where the greatest line is “Sine your pitty on the runny kine” but you know, not everything is for everyone. Y’all just need to get slapped with a belt.

Rotten Tomatoes: 29%

Andrew Findlay

There isn’t so much a single terrible movie that has won my heart, more a genre. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra stands as one of the greatest ambassadors of that genre: the stupid action movie. I respect and understand Tycho’s response to this kind of movie, but if there are enough explosions I honestly do not care. The plot is weak and the dialogue is shitty? They use bionic suits to jump through an occupied trolley, your argument is invalid. This reasoning extends to most kung-fu movies as well. Oh, this plot has been done a quintillion times before? Who cares, that dude just got kicked in the face, and it was awesome.

Rotten Tomatoes: 35%

Brent Hopkins

I actually have two terrible movies that I love but I chose the one with the worse score on Rotten Tomatoes. The two movies are 1997’s Volcano and 2002’s Juwanna Mann. Guess which is lower rated based on the titles with a chart-searing 10% compared to 44%?

Juwanna Mann is a film I saw in theaters in 2002 with a bunch of my friends and a visitor named Alex whom you may have heard of [Editor’s note: Alex Russell, on here, sadly. I want to deny this, but cannot.]. This film came out after Eddie Murphy popularized the multiple characters played by a single actor in The Nutty Professor. The story is extremely simple: It follows a basketball superstar who is kicked out of the league in his prime and loses everything. This would be a normally sad tale except he is the stereotypical jock archetype who is rude and misogynistic. With no place else to go he decides to conjure up the character Juwanna Mann to play basketball in the women’s professional league and all sorts of hilarity ensues. I know in my heart that jokes didn’t actually ensue but I loved watching this movie because it is a black film (Kevin Pollak being the only white actor of note in it) and I watched it with a few white friends and an Asian friend of mine. I found myself laughing extremely hard because of the sheer amount of awkwardness caused by jokes. My friends looked genuinely uncomfortable because I could see a laugh start to form on their lips but the immediate reaction after that was… is it racist if I laugh? I am sure this makes me a terrible person but I still have fond memories anytime it happens to be on TBS and I let it play in the background.

Rotten Tomatoes: 10%

Scott Phillips

The Brothers Solomon is my favorite bad movie to watch. It’s so stupid, it’s somehow funny to me. This film bombed so badly that it has a 15% score on Rotten Tomatoes, recouped only $900,000 of its $10 million budget in theaters, and is the first movie that Richard Roeper ever walked out on.

I can see why people would hate this movie, though. Most of the comedy bits could potentially work in an extended Funny or Die bit, but they’ve spliced about 10 of those ideas together to form this movie.

Ever wonder how funny a scene would be if two brothers were racing to the hospital to see their dying father only to stop at a video store — because it’s on the way to the hospital — to dispute a late fee for the movie Ulee’s Gold [Editor’s note: 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. Certified fresh.]? This movie has that in there.

Ever wonder how funny a scene would be if two brothers wrote a prolonged apology via SkyText from a plane? This movie has that in there.

And so you get my point. There’s some amusing stuff in here — that is just downright weird — and for whatever reason I’ve never been able to shake it. Most of it makes me laugh, for some reason?

The opening credits are fantastic, so that doesn’t hurt.

But fuck Richard Roeper. That dude doesn’t hold a candle to Siskel or Ebert so his opinion means pretty much nothing anyways.

Rotten Tomatoes: 15%

Tough Questions: What Are You Most Excited for in 2014 That You’re Sure Will Disappoint You?

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Every Monday we ask everyone who hangs out around here to answer a tough question. This week?

What Are You Most Excited for in 2014 That You’re Sure Will Disappoint You?

Rules are simple: what do you have hope for that you know you’re wrong about? What are you fired up for early in the year that you will be miserable about once it happens? As a note here, Brent answered before the game. His pick of the Seahawks flopping in the Super Bowl looks hilarious for that reason.

Alex Marino

I speak for a lot of people when I say that I was hoping George R. R. Martin was going to release the next book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series called The Winds of Winter.  But it’s looking more and more like it’s not going to be released anytime soon. With his last release A Dance with Dragons, his original goal completion date was late 2006. Then his publisher said it would be released in the fall of 2008. Then in early 2009 he said he would get it finished by June of the same year. By July 2010 he had yet to have the book finished. It wasn’t until July 2011 that the book was finally published. And in 2011 with regards to The Winds of Winter Martin said that he could have it finished in three years at a good writing pace. But given how everything went down with A Dance with Dragons, who knows how accurate that is. It’s now to the point where people are getting worried the TV show is going to catch up to the novels before they’re all finished. I still believe that the remaining books are going to be excellent, but my biggest 2014 disappointment that I’m most excited for is Martin’s eventual statement that things are taking longer than he anticipated.

Alex Russell

Every year I set four basic goals for myself. They’re simple but important, and keeping them in mind all year allows me to keep my year on track. It’s easier to quit smoking when it’s one of four things to do in a year than it is to “quit smoking.” I quit last year and haven’t had a cigarette in just under a whole year. This year? The one I’m going to miss is losing 20 pounds. I was rail thin growing up and time caught up with me in my late twenties. Through portion control, salads for lunch, and just outright misery I’ve managed to get my diet under control, but there’s just no damn way I’ll make it to 20 pounds. It’s fun to live in a world where that’s still possible, and that’s where February finds me. Oh, and stand up. There’s no way anyone can follow 2013, which had some of the greatest album releases of the last decade. The only way to go is down.

Andrew Findlay

The University of Tennessee’s football season. God. Damn. It. Go Vols.

Brent Hopkins

This is strange (because by the time this is posted it will already have passed) but I think the thing that I am most excited for this year is the Super Bowl. The reason I am so into the Super Bowl this year is because I am a huge Seahawks fan and have been for years. I got to sadly watch the last Super Bowl they were in where Pittsburgh benefited from less than stellar refereeing (yes, I know the Seahawks had quite a few games go their way unfairly this year, also). The reason I think this year will disappoint me is two-fold. One is I have work. Like any sane company though, we aren’t allowed to just sit and watch TV so I’m probably not going to be able to watch it. I will be sitting at work, doing nothing, in Korea. Second is this sinking feeling that the Manning two-headed dragon needs four rings to satiate the football gods in their family. One for the father and one for the unknown brother as well. The stars seem to be aligning for them to place their fists together in this strange Planeteer formation made with four Super Bowl rings  and Mr. Football will come down from the skies  and erase rugby and soccer from history and the new sports chairgroup will be the Mannings… or maybe I am a smidge neurotic. WOOOO HAWKS (if they won).

Scott Phillips

I always get fired up for the Olympics, but I just know that I’m going to be disappointed by this year’s Winter Olympics in Sochi. I mean, can Russia do anything right? There are still Olympic structures that have yet to be completed. There’s the fiasco about stray dogs and whether Russia actually believes if non-heterosexuals are “people.”

And we haven’t even gotten to the actual playing of the games. In the summer of 2008, I had the time of my life playing drinking games to the Olympics nearly every night while I was living at my Mom’s house and hanging with my friends from high school. It was fantastic. But, ever since, I can’t find good drinking partners for these games and the Winter Olympics, in particular, are a difficult sell.

Drinking games during the Olympics are fantastic and I encourage people to join me at any point during the Sochi games, I just know I’m going to be disappointed while doing it.

Mike Hannemann

The event in 2014 I’m most looking forward to being disappointed by has boiled down to the third and final Hobbit movie.  I don’t mean that in the sense that I thought the prior two were particularly bad films. Quite the contrary, in fact. They were flawed and directionless at times, but they still were fun. And as a nerd who made that large transition into adulthood during the original Lord of the Rings trilogy, any chance I get to return to that world is already a win in my book. Hell, I’m going to fight kicking and screaming to hold onto that belief when an inevitable sequel to the original trilogy comes out in 15 years. The disappointment is instead going to come from longing to return not to a place, but a time. I’m going to see this movie with my best friend at midnight in the same theater we saw the original films in, and I’m going to hope beyond hope that it’ll feel like I’m 19 again, and there’s still a whole lot about the world I haven’t figured out yet. But in the end, I’ll probably just end up mildly entertain and thinking that maybe taking the next day off of work just to see a movie was a bad idea. Also that I probably shouldn’t have drank 64 ounces of Mountain Dew at one in the damned morning.

Tough Questions: What Do You Hate That Everyone Loves?

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Every Monday we ask everyone who hangs out around here to answer a tough question. This week?

What Do You Hate That Everyone You Know Loves?

Rules are simple: what’s that one thing that you just can’t sign off on? What is the thing that you just cannot wrap your mind around? What does every damn person love that you just can’t even find it in your dark heart to like?

Austin Duck

Aside from people, there’s really not a whole lot that I hate. But, being a big metropolitan area, one thing everyone seems to love is fancy cocktails in fancy cocktail bars and it drives me up the fucking wall. Why would I pay, like, $8 extra for fancy bitters or elder flower liqueur when I can go to the shitty bar that I go to and get whiskeys for $3.50. It doesn’t make any sense to me. Food, I get. Drugs, ditto. But it’s not like the booze is any better when it’s mixed by mixologists; it’s exactly the same. I want something that I can drink a lot of on a meager salary. 

Mike Hannemann

This goes back and forth for me, but it all boils down to sports. Personally, I blame being the only member of a (somewhat) big family that wasn’t physically capable of any of this. To get more specific: basketball. I could probably name less than 10 players currently in the NBA, including general descriptions like “that one guy with weird hair who’s an asshole.” I know I’m wrong in not caring, but I just can’t access it. I went to a Chicago Bulls game a few years back and the only details I remember are that it was Benny the Bull’s birthday and the Bulls scored over 100 points (but I only remember this because it meant I got a free Big Mac if I brought the ticker to a McDonald’s).  I never even redeemed my Big Mac.

Alex Marino

I fucking hate Twitter. I also don’t like Facebook a whole lot but I hate Twitter more because it could be this awesome community and instead is a giant pile of word throw up. The wild popularity has forced it to become a place where people have to rush to make the first shitty joke about whatever show is on TV so they can get the most retweets. Last week was a bunch of dumb fucking Justin Bieber jokes and tonight it’s a bunch of garbage about the Grammys (which are also garbage). And then tomorrow there’s going to be a bunch of miserable Buzzfeed articles about “ZOMG 13 Awesomesauce Tweets About the Grammys.” There’s another polar vortex coming through this week. Are you as excited as I am to see Twitpics of everyone’s weather apps?! Twitter is a place that breeds lazy journalism where you can see entire news articles written about two tweets from someone famous. In politics it’s just another medium where the competition is to see which side is louder rather than right. Twitter was awesome when its users were authentic and engaging rather than brand-focused and politically correct. And there still are a lot of those users out there. There’s just way more shit you have to wade through to get to it.

Alex Russell

This has to be How I Met Your Mother. There is a commercial for this show where a character says “It’s going to be LEGEND. DAIRY.” with a deliberate pause between the two words. It may sound petty to be caught up in one silly commercial, but this is what I hear when I’m falling asleep. I think of how thousands and thousands of people don’t watch Parks and Recreation but do watch this show and I wake up. This is why I haven’t slept in five years. LEGEND. DAIRY. I’d pay ten American dollars for this show to never run again. It’s not the worst show on TV by a long shot, but it’s the worst one that smart people like.

Andrew Findlay

The Game of Thrones TV Show

This is not so much a matter of hatred – I just won’t watch the show. I watched the first episode and thought “this is boring, I know everything that happens already from the books.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m not neglecting to watch it because of some “the book is just better” snob factor. It’s just that I read the first four in a single month, and then when I got to the end, there were no more, and it was painful. Then there was one more, I read it, and then there were no more, and it was painful. I fully support GRRM doing whatever he wants to with his time. Understandably, he got pissed off once when fans complained about his liking football and him spending precious writing time watching sports instead of finishing the books they loved, but for some reason I sort of irrationally see the show as a direct competitor to book completion. In addition, I’ve built up this world in my own mind, and don’t want all the actors’ stupid faces messing up how I see people. I’ll circle back and marathon it once the books are done or after enough people yell at me for this stupid decision.

Brent Hopkins

This is actually a really simple answer for me. I absolutely hate peanut butter and I have had to deal with that shame my entire life. Most people instantly ask “Are you allergic to nuts?” which is a valid question. When they find out that isn’t the case and that I just don’t like peanut butter it turns into an interrogation. “Do you like other nuts?” “Do you like peanuts?” “How about peanut butter cookies?” I actually like all nuts including peanuts but the smell and flavor of peanut butter has been off-putting to me since I was around five years old. I think I got it from my dad because he hates the flavor just as much as I do. Living in Korea has been interesting because they don’t really eat it here either but when talking about Western food it always comes up and they always assume I like it and act just as surprised when I explain how much I hate it.

Tough Questions: Which of Your Last Twenty Status Updates Would You Want to Be Your Last One Ever?

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Every Monday we ask everyone who hangs out around here to answer a tough question. This week?

Which of Your Last Twenty Status Updates Would You Want to Be Your Last One Ever?

Rules are simple: take one of your last twenty Facebook or Twitter updates and have that be your last one, forever. If someone looked you up on the Google, they’d find your social media. What would you want them to find that represents you FOREVER?

Scott Phillips

My Facebook statuses usually alternate between being appreciative or silly — and sometimes salty — observational humor. Since I don’t want to go out looking like a chump for thanking Luol Deng or my Facebook “friends” for a great 2013, I’ll go with my Facebook status about the worst NFL player of the year: Chicago Bears starting safety Chris Conte.

In case you don’t know who Conte is, he’s made blunder-after-blunder throughout the 2013 season, missing tackles, being out of place in coverage and generally getting burned by faster receivers on a regular basis.

Don’t know what any of that football jargon means? That’s okay. You do know what a tackle is, right?

So, when Conte made a crucial blunder against the hated rival Green Bay Packers that pretty much cost the Bears the game, and the season, in their final home loss — among many other blunders, but it was the pinnacle moment of a particularly pathetic season for Conte — Chicagoans naturally took to social media to ridicule Conte.

He received death threats. Seriously.

I hate Chris Conte, but it’s a sports hate. I’d never say anything bad to his face because I’ve certainly fucked up a job before and never wanted anyone giving me shit about it, let alone death threats.

So, I made a Facebook status at 7:45 p.m. on December 29th that doubled as a Conte joke:

“Chris Conte probably misses when he attempts to give hugs to family members.”

It’s non-offensive, topical, shows my hatred of Chris Conte in a subtle way and I think that most people can generally understand the gist of the joke.

Plus, did I mention how much I hate Chris Conte?

Mike Hannemann

This is easy because I use Facebook solely as a joke machine (with the occasional spot of sentiment if something so important the moment truly warrants it).  I was especially pleased with “Ah, TBOX. The one special day a year that people of all faiths and denominations set aside their differences and gather together to agree that people are just the worst.” because, well, I’m vain and laugh at my own jokes.  It’s funny and mean spirited just to the point of not offending any one particular person. Which I think that is the closest representation to the type of humor I try to bring to my very important social media platform.

Alex Marino

“The Subway-Hunger Games commercial is our advertising Icarus moment.” Remember the days when a fast food movie sponsorship just meant you got a shitty collector’s cup or some toy in the kid’s meal that your child can choke on?  Now everyone tries to make some awful pun or compare a product to the themes of the movie.  In the NBA they promote some action movie by showing an explosion from the movie and then a dunk from LeBron James because they’re just so explosive (kill me).  So when the marketing execs at Subway sat down and tried to come up with how their brand related to The Hunger Games: Catching Fire they realized the word “Fire” was in the movie’s title and also they had a spicy sandwich.  It’s the laziest marketing I’ve ever seen.  And let’s not overlook the irony of a fast food company sponsoring a movie where one of the main plot points is that the people of Jennifer Lawrence’s district are STARVING.  Go to hell Subway.

Alex Russell

“WHY CAN’T I BE FOURSQUARE MAYOR OF THIS PLANE?”

I don’t know why I use Foursquare. I have no idea why I care about this thing. I checked in at a fucking grocery store today. I think there’s no better way for someone to get a sense of what I’m all about than to see just how stupid my whole world really is. Most of the rest of it is all jokes, but you better believe I went to that Trader Joe’s. You don’t even have to ask me. You’ll just fuckin’ KNOW.

Andrew Findlay

“Faulkner used the word “dingdong” in his Nobel speech. #fuckyes #thesouth #whuskey”

I guess I’d want this to be my last tweet because it would serve as a good epitaph. I was born and raised in Memphis, but I don’t live there anymore. Coming off of the Christmas family visit back home, I am suffering through a heavy nostalgia attack (listening to B.B. King as I write this). I claim Faulkner as part of my home city’s cultural heritage. People in Oxford probably have a better claim, but I’d like to remind them that Faulkner once said that Mississippi begins in the lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee hotel, and that many of his novels, most notably The Reivers, feature Memphis as a central setting. I also love the rumors that he gave his Nobel speech while blind drunk. Finally, I love whiskey, any and all types. I draw the line just this side of Kentucky Gentleman, but respect those who go beyond it. Besides, this tweet makes me look a hell of a lot classier than the ones about my wife preventing me from eating a Cinnabon or me puncturing my foot by stepping on an earring.

Brent Hopkins

Looking over my social media history I think I would have to pick my Facebook post from New Year’s Eve / New Year’s Day. (“Got to watch the first sunrise of the year about as far east as I will ever be.”) I live in South Korea, so when the New Year rolls around it is pretty common for people to pack up and travel to the eastern coast to see the first sunrise of the year (romantic, I know). I tend to have a mediocre time on New Year’s and I really do think it is a bit overrated in terms of importance but I had a terrible 2013 so I thought this would be a nice “reset” of sorts emotionally. I went there and pretty much froze to death because it is the middle of the winter on the coast. I happened to go with my ex-girlfriend whom I am still quite close with because we are both gluttons for emotional punishment and we took pictures and posted them on Facebook. The aftermath of this trip was a nice lady I had been dating (not my ex) seeing this post on Facebook and angrily calling me stating how much she hates me and how I wasn’t honest with her (untrue as I told her about my the trip and my ex) and how bad a guy I am. I usually am a bit of a fighter for women but I just agreed with her and said have a nice life. Looking back on that it really sums up my love life and just general living. Good intentions with explosive and somewhat comical results. I wouldn’t mind leaving that as a warning beacon to all women that search for me.