Cru Jones Society

 

Welcome to Friday. We’ve got a fresh batch of time-killing goodness baked up inside (it smells like cookies in there!) for you to waste away the last day of the working week. If you’re where we are as we write this, it’s snowing like a bastard and you’re dreading the prospect of brushing off your car when you go back outside because someone stole your fucking good snow brush and left you with the cheap, wooden piece of shit that doesn’t fucking work. Goddammit.

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First order of business: The Cru Jones Society celebrates its One-Year Anniversary next week! We officially launched our daily updates on March 31, 2008 and have been going strong ever since. We thought long and hard about how to commemorate the occasion, and we successfully narrowed it down to three things. Item #1 promises to potentially enhance how you enjoy the Cru Jones Society and will provide you with even more new ways to slack off while you should be productive. Item #2 lets you show your love of the CJS outside the Internet and helps motivate us when we start to get lazy. And Item #3 is so freaking cool E Dagger squealed a little bit when we nailed it down. Let’s just say we’re called the Cru Jones Society for a reason, and Wednesday is a radical miracle.

But that’s next week. We’ve got Friday (and Monday) business to tend to.

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Given the alcoholic flavor the Cru Jones Society has taken on lately, it’s not surprising that this week’s Confessional topic  follows suit. We asked you to tell us your alcoholic kryptonite. We’ve received a fair amount of responses thus far – each one more gag-reflex-triggering than the previous – but we want more. Tell us what you can no longer drink and why in your email to staff@crujonessociety.com. We promise not to make you drink whatever it is you write about ever again, but we can’t promise you won’t get a tinge of queasiness writing about it. But that’s what the Confessional’s for. Cleanse thyself and exorcise those alcoholic demons. You’ll feel better if you do.

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One last item before we get to the links. We’ve been writing about some of the drinking-based products we tested while in Tucson, as Senor Limon, Lee S. Hart and myself all bought one of the products for group trials. Well, Lady E was also in Tucson with us, but didn’t bring a product. In all fairness, she wasn’t told she had to. We wish she would have found this before we left, so we could smuggle some merlot into the Rockies game. Sure, drinking red wine in the hot Arizona sun sounds unquestionably awful, but the looks from the old people in the surrounding area as we all took turns drinking from a tube that led directly to Lady E’s bra would have been worth it. In fact, I think I know what we’re testing next year.

 

That is… until Lady E reads this.

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Let’s start off this Happy Friday with a brilliant new time-waster we stumbled upon this week preparing for our big CJS First Anniversary Surprise. It’s no secret that Cru Jones Society writers love semi-obscure cult classic movies from the last three decades. This also applies to television as Senor Limon and I spent the better part of 45 minutes during our first CJS Rendezvous arguing about which girlfriend was which on “Perfect Strangers” and successfully alienated everyone else we were with and basically everyone in the bar in the process.

However, Natuskashi deals exclusively with the movies we love. The site’s proprietor solicits suggestions from his readers about which movie to watch, then partners with said reader and discusses the agreed upon movie with one of that film’s prominent players. He’s already hit The Warriors, The Great Muppet Caper, Freaked, a certain seminal BMX film we adore above all others (more on that next week), and a shitload of other movies we grew up loving.

But by far and away our favorite so far has been his podcast about Ski Patrol with none other than the film’s star, Roger Rose. If you love this movie, I guarantee you will love this podcast as Rose tells some of the most pants-pissingly hilarious stories about Martin Mull, Leslie Jordan, and the hot Brotislavian blond chick from the film. This is exactly the kind of thing you want from your nostalgic bull sessions about the movies you loved as a kid. Fabulous site!

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Hey, are you fat? Wanna know why? Here’s why. Big ups once again to CassieB for passing this along and making our Happy Friday lives easier. And if the food featured on this site doesn’t make you at least a little bit hungry, or at the very least a little bit curious, you’re clearly not American.  Likewise, if this burger isn’t featured on the site, it certainly will be soon.

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In nearly a perfect segue from the website linked above, we… wait a minute… There’s something wrong with this story… it smells like farts all of a sudden. You should call maintenance.

Seriously though, kids getting suspended for “passing gas” on the bus and “breaking wind” in class? What is this world coming to? The world is being taken over by Fart Nazis and we don’t like it. Farts are funny, dammit, and everyone needs to mellow the hell out. The only reason we remember seeing Stuck On You in theaters is because of an impeccably-timed fart during a dramatic moment. Had the Fart Nazis been there, our collective comedic parade would have been rained on and we wouldn’t have such a fond memory of such a profoundly mediocre movie. Fuck the Fart Nazis!

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Moving from gluttony and some of the most horrifyingly delicious-looking food ever dropped into a deep fryer to fart jokes, there’s really only one place for this Happy Friday to go as it barrels forth on its Pulitzer Prize winning path… PORN!

The Internet has apparently found your dad’s closet stash of back issues of Playboy in the garage behind those old paint cans and scanned them all into this website (FOR THE LOVE OF GOD NOT SAFE FOR WORK) for your enjoyment. 

Thank us later as we’re sure you’re busy, um, reading all those articles from the last 50 years of Playboy. Just don’t blame us when your significant other checks out your browser history. You clicked on this of your volition.

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We all know the economic crisis is bad. We had no idea just how bad it had gotten until we read this article about how a uniquely complete skeleton of a Jurassic-era dryosaurus failed to meet bidding expectations at a recent museum auction in New York.

Wait, what the fuck?

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On a quasi-related note, with seemingly every asshole you meet on the street eager to tell you how to fix our economy, it’s important to take a step back for a moment. When people get louder – and the voices in our society have reached psychotically cacophonous levels – I like to shut the hell up and observe. And that’s why I found this piece written by a former Bank of America employee so enthralling. She discusses the irony of showcasing an exhibit of atheist Francis Bacon’s art designed to express the life of man in a world without God on the same day Bank of America announced it would purchase Merrill Lynch for $50 billion.

As a fellow wage slave often frustrated by the existential boredom of office monotony, I find it amusing (and a bit tragic) that we often fail to step outside ourselves and recognize when the universe is pimp slapping us with a dose of brutal mockery we’re unable to internalize due to the trappings of white collar existence. Our jobs have meaning, but that meaning is most often not geared toward self-fulfillment, rather toward perpetuating the system we don’t even fully understand. But hey, it’s a job, right? And we got bills to pay, so we persevere because what the hell else are we going to do?

And then something comes along like a collection of Francis Bacon paintings with zombie-faced cubicle drones trapped inside a box and we don’t even recognize the symbolism. I don’t know how to fix our banking crisis, get the housing market back on track, or restore confidence in the stock market – but perhaps that’s not even the real problem. Or maybe it is, and I’ve just moved on from post-adolescent sexual angst and collegiate economic angst and graduated to mid-20s existential angst.

Sorry, I think I was channeling my inner-Chuck Klosterman for a minute there.

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Shifting gears completely, here’s a Denny’s commercial Lady E and I find inexplicably hilarious. You’d be surprised (or more likely you wouldn’t) how much we say the lines from the commercial to each other on a day-to-day basis.

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Only two sports-related links this week, so if you have no interest in either legendary CSU football coach Sonny Lubick or pitching great Curt Schilling, feel free to skip down to the next section.

We usually have very little affection for the coaches of my favorite teams. Having sat through some truly god-awful Chicago Cub managers – I love Lou Piniella though – and having spent the last 15 years watching Mike Shanahan look like he’s trying to pass a peach pit on the sidelines, we usually just hope our coaches get out of the players’ way and don’t screw up too badly. Sonny Lubick is a different story.

He turned our once sorry football program into a Top-25, Conference Champion powerhouse. And he was a swell guy to boot. We’re glad to see he continues to do well in Fort Collins and wish him nothing but continued success. We’ve gotten in some spats with CU fans about football, but none of them have ever had a disparaging word to say about Sonny. When even your chief rivals have good things  to say about your coach, you know he’s a truly remarkable man. Continued success, Sonny!

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In other retirement news, Curt Schilling retired this week. We know Yankees fans hate Schilling, but the world hates Yankees fans, so who gives a fuck? We’ve never had anything bad to say about Schilling as he’s never been anything but enormously entertaining and a clutch pitcher. If he continues his outspoken ways, he’ll be a wonderful television personality and hopefully injects some life into the braindead automatons over at Fox. ESPN’s pretty good, but good God is Fox’s baseball coverage awful.

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We might have been a tad premature in inviting the women back into Happy Friday after the sports links because we’re pretty sure they’re not going to care about this story either. CJS learned this week that a Three Stooges remake is imminent from the Farrellys. If anyone can do the Stooges in all their slapstick glory properly, it’s the same guys responsible for Dumb & Dumber, There’s Something About Mary, and Kingpin.

And in a weird/awesome turn, guess who’s on tap to play the Stooges? If you guessed Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, and Jim Carrey, get the fuck outta here because you’re a big fat lying liar. But you’re absolutely right. It’s difficult to picture any of those gentlemen playing any of the Stooges, but goddamn if we’re not stoked at the prospect of watching ‘em try.

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Juxtaposing that news with the following item is not intended to imply anything, but take away whatever you want from us discussing The Three Stooges and immediately transitioning to news on President Bush’s autobiography. It’s probably what Bob Ross used to call a “happy accident.”

It’s old news by now, but we heard President Bush is considering writing a book about his presidency. Can you think of one person on earth who would be interested in reading that? Us neither. Therefore, we think it’s still worth linking to this scathing commentary on books by politicians by libertarian columnist David Harsanyi. Mr. Harsanyi is right on the money here, and I quote from the linked piece: “Is it conceivable that a politician could write a candid or fascinating book? The answer, I submit, is hell, no. Politicians are inherently risk-averse, obsessed with message control, legacy building and revisionism.” Boy howdy, doesn’t that sound a recipe for curling up by a fire and losing yourself in the magic of prose?

We suspect President Bush is likely to open up more than noted snake oil salesman Bill Clinton, but his perception of reality is just so ridiculously skewed, he might as well be bending the truth for all the insight we’d gain from his writings.

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And the segues just really write themselves here in Happy Friday as we learned that New Jersey considered banning Brazilian style waxing (if you didn’t pick up the connection, we’re not going to spell it out for you – we’re not Jay Leno) in all of its beauty parlors throughout the state. Thankfully lawmakers came to their senses and dropped the legislation before a horde of douche baggy Jersey Shore trash had the opportunity to flood the Playboy advisor with complaints about hairy-bushed Ginas.

Plus, seriously, does the government have nothing better to do? We’re in the worst economy in most of our lifetimes, and these idiots are worried about pubes. Get a life.

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We’re not generally pro-union around here, but a few more commercials like this and we might change our minds. It’s fucking AFSCME!

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And finally, with the weekend here, remember to consider your dignity in every situation. Ladies, a little help?

 

Happy Friday, bitches! See you next week when the Cru Jones Society celebrates its 1-Year Anniversary. Or haven’t you heard?

See you then…

edagger@crujonessociety.com