Fifth Annual Murphspot Mascot Bracket: Final Four and Championship

#10 Xavier Musketeers vs. #10 Virginia Cavaliers

Oh damn,  you guys. Not only do we finally have two human mascots going up against one another, and not only are they both at least presumed to have some sort of elite military training, but they both represent very specific factions serving close to their king at the same point in history. Roughly!

The Musketeers of the Guard (Mousquetaires de la garde!) were formed under Louis XIII in 1622 and spent most of their time protecting nobles, shooting things (nominally in the name of protecting nobles, but I’m sure that there was a 17^th century French equivalent of canned goods on a fence at some point) and waiting around for Alexandre Dumas to be born so that their story could eventually be romanticized, and then summarized by Wishbone.

Caution: If you actually ask Wishbone “What’s the story?”, he will cut you.

The Cavaliers, on the other hand were the loyalist component of the English Civil War, starting in 1642 and hung around through Oliver Cromwell’s rule and the Restoration of the Monarchy. They both had their own military problems to be concerned with (the Musketeers with trying to make sure the Huguenots didn’t kill the king; the Cavaliers fighting a civil war), so it’s difficult to say how they’d have done actually fighting each other. The Musketeers lose on numbers, but win on fancy hats and keeping kings alive (Louis XIII died of tuberculosis, and Louis XIV was a king for longer than anyone’s ever been a king in Europe). The Cavaliers had that period where the kings they supported were executed, but did mount a come-from-behind victory in that the Monarchy did show back up again.

I’d say this comes down to overwhelming force against a smaller, though better trained opponent, but honestly I keep reading “Musketeer” as “Mouseketeer” and I’m not going to make it to the end of this post if that keeps happening. So overwhelming force takes it.

Virginia advances.

#13 Montana grizzlies vs. #15 Detroit Titans

The Grizzlies have gotten here mostly by virtue of being 700 pounds and having razor sharp claws and murder in their hearts, along with a little help from the fact that Monte the Grizzly in particular rides a motorcycle and wears a bandana and is probably eventually going to be the subject of a critically well-received drama on FX. There’s a problem that comes up when your main advantage is size, though, and that’s when your opponent is something that serves as the base of synonyms for “really, really big”. 

 Oh dear.

The grizzlies have the advantage over most mortal things that aren’t several hundred pounds, but the Titans don’t exactly go down easily. Hell, it apparently takes a whole new set of gods to come in, which only really serves to imprison the Titans, and even then, you’ve got myths wherein Zeus overthrows Cronus by getting him drunk and putting him in a cave.

There’s simply no way a grizzly bear is walking out of that alive.

Detroit advances.

Fifth Annual Murphspot Mascot Bracket Championship

#10 Virginia Cavaliers vs. #15 Detroit Titans

 So we've established that the Titans are somewhere between a ridiculous man with a ridiculous smile in ridiculous armor and powerful (though explicitly not omnipotent) deities. The Cavaliers had, well, horses. And swords. And their own creepy smile. And a reputation for drinking and carousing and having plumed hats, which I sympathize with. Basically all they've got on the Titans is that the Cavaliers existed, whereas the Titans didn't, except as a moon of Saturn (or moons, if we're counting things named after individual Titans as part of that set).

Even there, we're conflicted. Titan's got an atmosphere, but it's got sort of a yellow haze to it. There are oceans, but they're made of methane. There might be microbial life, but that's not terribly threatening unless we're going to give the Cavalier some sort of terrible infection. 

And while, as I mentioned, the Titans are powerful, they also have a history of failing pretty hard. I'm not sure whether the Cavaliers have Zeus' contact information, or if they've got the ability to summon an iceberg, but it's not as though the Titans are unstoppable. It's merely really hard.

What it really comes down to is the interaction between a guy with a horse, a sword, and a rifle and a Titan with a tendency to be overthrown. I'm not finding a lot about human-Titan interactions in myth, and the Titan that keeps popping up is Prometheus, who would probably have just handed the victory to the Cavalier and then gotten tortured for it. 

 Honestly, I think that's it. I'm going to say that Tommy Titan is merciful toward CavMan and allows him the victory, based solely on his humanity and his facial hair. Tommy Titan will be OK. Clint Eastwood will make a commercial for him.

This may have been unduly influenced by hat plumage.

Ladies and Gentlemen, your Fifth Annual Murphspot Mascot Champion

 

The Virginia Cavaliers.

 

4th Annual Murphspot Mascot Bracket -Southeast, Round One, Part Two

#6 St. John's Red Storm vs. #11 Gonzaga Bulldogs

I've written before about how the idea of Jupiter has always been unnerving to me, primarily because of the Great Red Spot. I'm not an inclement weather kind of person. I like nice, moderate temperatures with some occasional rain but mostly clear skies. The idea of a storm larger than the planet I'm on doesn't sit well with me. The bulldogs, on the other hand, are bulldogs. There are approximately 80 other schools that have entered bulldogs into this tournament, and I don't see them advancing more readily against a giant meteorological event. St. John's advances.

#3 Brigham Young Cougars vs. #14 Wofford Terriers

I think I'm giving off the impression that I have something against dogs. I really, really don't. I like dogs. Dogs are awesome, and I wouldn't want to piss most of them off. Even the tiny, yippy ones. It's just that they're not very formidable when going up against something that lives in the mountains and has giant claws, and survives by killing things pretty much constantly. Most dogs I've known got their food by waiting for a bowl to be filled, not by ripping out anything's throat. I think. I hope. It'd be really odd to find out that most dogs I've known are actually much more capable than I'm giving them credit for. But if they are, they're doing a good job of hiding it, so I've got no choice but to go with the obvious result here. Brigham Young advances.

#7 UCLA Bruins vs. #10 Michigan State Spartans

On one hand, Spartans probably have some sort of armor and weapons and presumably some level of strategy-making ability, and even against bears, I've got to think they've got a fighting chance. On the other hand, bears are terrifying and as far as I know never became a tourist attraction for the Roman elite. Bears, on the other hand, were never narrated by David Wenham.



Though not Spartan, I have to believe that Gondor would have been fine against bears.

Michigan State advances.

#2 Florida Gators vs. #15 UC Santa Barbara Gauchos

The Gauchos were last year's Murphspot Mascot Bracket champions, and I've got a feeling they're going to be a force to be reckoned with again. Yeah, gators can eat you (and were inexplicably my alma mater's mascot, despite the fact that I don't think alligators are exactly thick on the ground in northwestern Pennsylvania), but I can't think that the whole "gator wrestling" thing would have become a thing if it weren't possible to outsmart them. Plus, a close look at the Gauchos mascot reveals he's possibly Meta Knight.


Separated at birth.

So we've got a reptile that eats puppies and a guy with probably a sword and bolas and a fantastic hat. UC Santa Barbara advances

Resolutions

Honestly, I'm not even sure what I want from this anymore. I started this (after several failed attempts) because I was bored at work in undergrad, and only really stuck with it because I was working the overnight shift at a McDonald's and needed something to keep me from snapping.

I'm not sure that last part has changed significantly. I work eight hours, have some sort of terrible meal roughly in the middle of it, then spend an hour getting angry at traffic. I still have long stretches where I'm not actually doing anything, but I'm not writing because I don't want to be confrontational or because I've set this huge road block for myself where I've got to come up with something brilliant because I haven't written since last year.

That's ridiculous. There are somewhere around five blogs for every person on the planet, and no one's reading this. So to hell with it. This "only writing for March Madness" thing isn't cutting it anymore. The confrontation thing doesn't make sense either, except that I'm hypersensitive to it. When we moved in to this apartment, we nailed something to the wall at 10pm, and our downstairs neighbor came up and asked us to knock it off. Totally reasonable request. Since then, I've been terrified of making noise and have been sneaking around this place like an overweight, lumbering, ineffective ninja.

It's ludicrous.

That's not to say I haven't been trying to get myself to get back to this. I'll record half-assed attempts at notes on my lunch break at work and buying these tiny little notebooks that are annoying as shit to write in because I've convinced myself that if I carry paper and a pencil around I'll become creative and turn this nonsense into something read and fawned over by millions.

The only time I update reliably is when I set some sort of schedule, like I'm forced to with March Madness. Which is great, and I can get myself worked up over a theme, but then as soon as I'm done, it flames out and I'm left with nothing again. I'm not even sure why I'm so reluctant just to relegate Murphspot to the pile of half-journals I've had over the years that go nowhere. It's probably some nonsense about a crippling fear that I've become unremarkable, which I have. And that's fine.

That happens to almost everyone.

Jesus, Peter Francis Gerasi. Could your commercials be any louder?

I thought about doing some sort of list of resolutions challenge to myself. Given
that I never posted it and it's nearly February, that's failed. It was too concrete and too ambitious and changing everything because it's mid-winter and we're out of holidays is completely arbitrary. The upside of that, I guess, is that there's nothing particularly wrong with claiming a resolution and starting it whenever you want.

So then. Let's start now? I guess? The original idea was to use this as a sort of checkpoint, so that I'd give myself goals and then could write about the progress. I'm not sure that's a terrible place to start, but at the risk of jeopardizing the chance that I'll get anything done, I think I'd like it to be less restrictive than I'd thought at first. I'll still post bits of progress on various goals I've got for myself that I'd like to make progress on before next year, but I'm going to not try to set something up that I'll fail at, which'll just lead to me stopping all posting because hey, I've already fallen behind.

At the moment, I'll just resolve to stop insisting that I have fully formed and brilliant posts as a prerequisite for writing, and I'll try to stop holding myself to some kind of unattainable standard. When I posted most often on this, it was primarily because I was getting off of work at 7am and no one was awake, but I don't see why I can't get back to the sort of mindset I was in when that was happening. The first post after a long break is always the most difficult, and maybe I'm still being too ambitious with this, but to hell with it.

3rd Annual Murphspot Mascot Bracket - Final Four and Championship

#15 UC Santa Barbara Gauchos vs. #14 Oakland Golden Grizzlies


It's a testament to the degree to which I make this up as I go that this is what we've wound up with in the Final Four. I've been talking up the honesty of the Golden Grizzlies lately, but I think the wildcard here is the ingenuity of the Santa Barbara Gaucho. I mean, their job is subduing animals, to an extent. Further, a friend of mine works at a Brazilian Steakhouse, and her restaurant refers to the guys that come around with the giant skewers full of meat as "gauchos", so they've clearly got something going on. In the end, I'm going to defer to the UC Santa Barbara Gauchos' stealth and meat-powers.

UC Santa Barbara advances to the final.

#9 Wake Forest Demon Deacons vs. #4 Purdue Boilermakers


I've been way too big on the Demon Deacons. The Boilermakers have practical knowledge and would be pretty damn useful in an emergency. I'm not sure what a Demon Deacon would do. Read the bible from a motorcycle, I guess. Which is, you know, impressive, but not precisely useful. I'm going to say that this match ends when the Boilermakers use their boilermaking abilities to knock out the lights, then attack the Demon Deacons with an acetylene torch.

Purdue advances to the final.

FINAL

#15 UC Santa Barbara Gauchos vs. #4 Purdue Boilermakers


The Gauchos have come pretty far since defeating Ohio State back in the first round. Purdue's been steady; a high seed that kept on keeping on, what with being (as far as I can tell) a train full of welders. It's an epic showdown with hammers and lassos and welding masks. I wasn't sure which way this was going to go upon first inspection. But then, the answer revealed itself. Nerdiness solves all problems.



That is El Gaucho. He's a member of a group called "Batmen of All Nations", a story that appeared in Detective Comics #215 and revisited during Grant Morrison's run on Batman. The Batmen of All Nations are various heroes from across the world inspired by Batman to fight crime locally. That solved it.

Batman (or in this case, a Batman analogue) always wins.

Your 2010 Murphspot Mascot Bracket Champions.

University of California - Santa Barbara Gauchos

Day of the Dead, 2008. A Review

I haven't been writing in here at all lately. Part of the problem is that it seems like something you have to sit down and do, and nothing seems like it'd be interesting enough for me to bother commenting on. That isn't to say that my commentary is in any way unique or insightful, but by the time I hear of something and convince myself to write about it, it's been written about by everyone, everywhere.

That isn't to say that there hasn't been anything to write about. I could have written a review of the new Indiana Jones movie (better than Temple of Doom, not as good as Raiders or Last Crusade) or yammered on about the fact that if you get into a car-on-bike accident with a laptop (which wasn't my fault, other than biking in Chicago at night, as opposed to me doing something like riding my bike down the wrong side of the road) and then trying to get home in the rain a few months later will eventually kill it, followed by a review of my new sort-of-cheap laptop which is better than what I had. I could have commented on the whole “Lesbians At SafeCo” thing, but that would have been a rather predictable “People shouldn't be so frightened to talk to their children to explain what's going on, but the Mariners are a private organization and can tell anyone to leave for any reason, but they probably wouldn't have done it if it were a straight couple, but I'm bored of this and desire nachos.” I could have continued blogging about the whole “let's try not to be such a fatass now, shall we?” but given my penchant for nachos, that seems sort of hypocritical.

Thankfully, there are things that exist explicitly to get me to break out of these blogging slumps. And those things are really bad horror movies.

I don't think I've seen enough bad horror movies actually. The worst, I think, has got to be House of the Dead, which might be in my top three for worst movie I've ever seen, but that's Uwe Boll and hardly controversial. The worst premise has got to go to The Mangler, adapted from a Stephen King short story in which a laundry folding machine is possessed by a demon and starts killing everything. My standby, even for bad horror, is the zombie genre. There are a lot of terrible zombie movies (the copies of Undead and the more ancient and MST3K friendly Revolt of the Zombies remind me whenever I go by my DVD rack.) But there have also been a lot of fantastic ones. In what can be an abused genre, there is the basis of a terrific story. George Romero's Living Dead movies (at least the original three, and arguably Land are rich studies in social commentary. Ben's level-headedness and fate in Night and the Hari Krishna/Nun zombies as well as the dissatisfaction inside Monroeville Mall in Dawn are what make those movies terrific to this day. Day as well has some interesting insights into the authoritarian mindset and asks, essentially, “Who is a person?” with the Bub subplot.

So when I heard there was going to be a remake of Day of the Dead, I got excited. After all, the remake of Dawn in 2004 was a pretty good horror movie. They discarded more of the social commentary of the original than I would have liked, but overall, it's a fun zombie movie, done really well and very much in the style of 2002's 28 Days Later. Surely, I thought, this Day remake will be along the same lines, and I'll enjoy it and not spend the entire movie wishing for the sweet embrace of death.

Not so much, it turns out.

Netflix, which is my primary source for entertainment given that I don't subscribe to cable, had Day of the Dead on their “Instant Viewing” service, meaning that I could watch it streaming online without having to wait for it in the mail, wasting an actual mailing. I have never been more glad about that. I watched it last night while I was stuffing pipette tip boxes (a tedious task that's relatively mindless, and therefore something during which it's ok to watch a movie) and ... my God.

It's bad enough that it's the first movie that's compelled me to write a Netflix review. Let's start there.

Actually, let's start with this. There are going to be spoilers following this disclaimer. If you haven't seen Day of the Dead (and why should you?) and want to keep things a surprise, by all means, stop reading now. And then don't ever watch Day of the Dead.

It turns out that Day 2008 was initially supposed to be a theatrical release, but after poor reviews during screening, became a straight-to-video project. It discards everything about the original except very superficial concepts, like “the military is involved” and “Bub”, whose role is diminished and is confusing. It starts off as many zombie movies do. The military is quarantining an area in Colorado (which we eventually learn is because there's a virus that kills you, causes you to grow bad makeup and leap across the room, searching for a victim that's been released). There's initially no explanation as to why. People start getting sick. The family members of the protagonists start getting nosebleeds, and we all know what that means.

They'll turn into zombies within five minutes or so (though the timing seems to be kind of arbitrary, with some having enough time to be admitted and given a hospital bed and others, prominently “Bud” being left in a humvee for all of a minute). All hell breaks loose because, apparently, dying and reanimating now gives you goddamn super powers. It looks a bit cartoonish as zombies leap after their victims, but it's basically all lost when they start climbing bare walls and running along the ceiling like they're Spider-Man. I guess this is the next step after “fast zombies”.

Characters we don't care about (Mena Suvari and her brother, who have some sort of dispute in the past that's never actually explored, Ving Rhames, who was in the Dawn remake but is playing a completely different and unrelated character here, Nick Cannon, whose primary function is to run around playing bad-ass and making the lamest puns imaginable, and a motley crew of other survivors that are completely uninteresting) have to try to make it out of the town to, well, someplace that doesn't have zombies. What follows is about an hour of jumping out of windows, Nick Cannon getting a machete, Ving Rhames turning, getting up to eat his own eyeball for some reason (which raises the question of why zombies wouldn't eat other zombies, since apparently they're just really hungry) and Mena Suvari's boyfriend-that-she-met-literally-a-few-hours-before being bitten and reanimating and, for some reason that's not actually explained, being allowed to hang out in the back of the Humvee. There's a handwaving explanation as to why he's docile (“They must retain some bit of what they were, and Bud was a vegetarian”) and they never adequately explain why he's the only one in the town who doesn't immediately tear the flesh off the nearest person. They make it to a barn, then go down the road to the enormous military/medical bunker that's apparently in the side of the mountain in the middle of the woods to find a doctor who deserted them earlier and is working for the government, who released this on everyone. He explains that “certain people are immune to the virus, but if you're bitten that immunity goes away” (which I'm almost certain is now how viruses and immunities work) and shows a video which introduces Patient Zero, the doctor who was working on the virus. The protagonists try to kill him, but he dodges bullets. Because, you see, they retain something of what they were, and all biochemists are Neo from The Matrix.

Trust me. I work with a few and they're always going on about the struggle against the machines and the Architect and it's like whatever, man. Play around with your plasmids and let me eat my bagel in peace.

Anyway, yes. Neo Zombie and a horde of others chase our heroes (minus Nick Cannon, who thankfully finally gets killed by something) to a broom closet full of gas tanks, and what follows is an affront to both physics and special effects. One of the characters knocks the valves off of the canisters to release all the gas (which I'm almost certain would send them rocketing through the wall, not just sitting there slowly releasing their gas, given the pressure those tanks are under), while another lights a spark and the Magical Oxygen follows the zombies around, melting them the way nothing melts while leaving our heroes unscathed to go back outside, where everything's magically ok now. Somehow.

Which brings me to my final complaint. Ok. It's a terrible movie. Whatever. It's even got nothing to do with what it was claiming to be a remake of. Fine. But, and this is the same complaint I had with House of the Dead where there is no House, all of the events take place over about ten hours at night in Colorado.

So, Day of the Dead is not even set during a Day of the Dead.

There are a few “what the hell, why not” moments, mostly comprised of zombies flying over things or, the only decent scene in the film as far as I'm concerned, emerging from a bunker with automatic weapons firing wildly into the air (because you're damn right that's what I'd do if I were a zombie), and at least one memorable line (“What a dick!”, which is actually the most convincing part of the whole endeavor), but overall, it was miles and miles of awful.

So yes. Maybe I'll start writing here again.