When I saw the headline “Liv Tyler’s Leaked Lingerie Pics,” I freaked. I freaked because I am a patriot, and nothing is more fundamentally American than freaking out over nakedness.
Nip-slips and leaked nudie pics are two celebrity trends that, for the most part, I am down with. I can’t lie: I’ve been loving every new wrinkle in this whole Blake Lively scandal. And you can’t keep Blake down! Now she’s on a boat! Now she’s strutting around the MTV Movie Awards! Now she’s at Disneyland with Leonardo DiCaprio! The girl has undeniable moxie.
Oh, my God, and then there’s Khloé Kardashian, who took to her blog yesterday to all but outright admit that she manufactured her own nip-slip on Fox & Friends. How bad does Khloé want you to see her nipple? She flat-out refused to wear a bra, even after her stylist insisted she put one on. If that isn’t hustle, what is?
And let us never forget the ongoing saga of Representative Anthony Weiner, who only recently copped—in a press conference—to posting pics of his junk onto his own public Twitter account. By accident. Ah! It would be tragic if it weren’t soamusing.
But Liv Tyler? Sweet, all-American, intensely private Liv Tyler? Leaked photographs of Liv Tyler?
“A desperate bid for relevance!” I thought to myself giddily.
Punk’d again, self! Here are Liv Tyler’s alleged Leaked Lingerie Pics:
Oh.
The truth is, I’m not disappointed, exactly. How could I be disappointed? These are most hilarious leaked pics I have ever seen. Liv is so fresh-faced and cute, so anachronistically covered-up, so endearingly not titillating, I just want to pinch her cheek and pat her G-rated shoulder.
And now I feel like I have to reassess. Maybe Liv Tyler is onto something. Maybe I don’t want to see nip-slips and crotch shots at all.
Maybe I would prefer:
“Oh, no, High School Musical darling Vanessa Hudgens! ANOTHER leaked photo??”
“That Miley Cyrus is tweeting from the shower AGAIN!”
What a beautiful springtime Saturday we had! The sun was shining, the birds were tweeting, and people seemed unsure whether to don scarves or skorts. But it was Free Comic Book Day, and if Craigslist Chicago is to be believed, romance was in the air.
When I first opened the door at challanger’s today it was packed because of free comic book day but you were standing right in front of me and we both just smiled at each other. I noticed you kept looking at me while I was waiting in line to get a sketch. You were so cute and I couldn’t help but look back.
Aww! And another, this one for a Comix Revolution employee (I think):
You helped me choose a Vertigo comic book after I turned down the half zombie girle tale. I thought you were cute and sweet, and I’m enjoying the comic you picked out for me. Maybe we could grab coffee or a drink sometime?
And finally, some darling young fellow has this prose for his dream bookworm lady:
You were in the fiction section at Myopic Books. I was with my friend, who was wearing a ridiculous hat, when I saw you. We walked past and you smiled. I carried that smile with me all day. I’d like to see it again some day.
I’d had influenza for exactly one week and was beginning to feel the symptoms of crazy, and I think that is why I accidentally double-booked myself for bar trivia. I’d never done trivia in a bar before, and then somehow I managed to join two different quiz teams, each playing at 8PM CST on opposite sides of the city. Whoops! But I was very committed to meeting my friend Robyn for the quiz because, put together, we are a dainty, shrieking Ken Jennings.
I read somewhere that pub quizzes are more stressful than first-person shooters. I think I read that somewhere, anyway. (No, I just checked. It’s an actual video game called Pub Quiz, I see, that is so stressful, as opposed to a digital pub quiz.) But this sounds believable, right? Studying for the GRE is stressful. Taking tests is stressful. Public speaking is stressful. If I could only be on Jeopardy!, I could at long last fulfill my dream of vomiting on television. Without Robyn to steel me, I am not much like Ken Jennings at all. I have a numb brain and a slow trigger finger.
I felt both social and bloodthirsty, so I started my shit-talk well before the quiz began. But then, as our competitive spirit waned, Robyn and I decided to combine forces with our friends Brian and Ben. They let us join their team even though I had been emasculating them for an hour. That was a pretty shrewd move by all of us, though: Brian and Ben are versed in politics, movies, and history, but especially sports. They both are writers, too. Four writers at a table! And for as smart as we are, we are awfully loud and awfully good-looking.
I don’t mean to be a creep, or smug, but I did announce that we had the best-looking team by miles.
The quiz started. Guess what! Just one member of the team had two thumbs and zero idea who Clarence Darrow is: this gal!
The actress from Saving Grace? I started to write down “Brenda Blethyn.” Robyn slapped my hand. “Holly Hunter!” she hissed. Oh, a TV show! Not a movie!
“Oops, there is also a movie,” I told Robyn. Which I took my parents to see! Eleven years ago! I picked it! I drove us there! I’d already seen it once before! It’s about marijuana! And! My parents loved it!
Midway through the quiz, Robyn and I, who do not have the sports streak or zeal for self-improvement and exercise that Brian and Ben have, admitted that we each had become incredibly competitive. We had gone from giggling and slacking in round one to MIGHTY by round three.
“I have tasted blood, and I liked the flavor!” I said to Ben.
“See?” Ben said. “Now you are thinking like a winner.” Ben high-fived me.
“I think I should keep this feeling!” I said to him. “I don’t know when I stopped being competitive, and I think it’s my biggest problem. Content with my station in life.” Robyn and I nodded at each other, then, frowning.
What I remember best about trivia night last night is me-not-knowing-things, but the truth is, combined, our team knew almost everything. Brian knew the names of both Chicago restaurants (Alinea, L20) with three Michelin stars. Offhand, he knew! Fuck that guy! (I’d thought Brian was saying “Millennia,” also, so even after I’d been told the answer, I still did not know the answer.)
Robyn: “What’s a Michelin star?”
Me: “It’s, uh, the highest top honor. That you can give… food.”
The highest top honor you can give food. Great.
My high school drama coach signed me up for competitiveextemporaneous speaking once. She had done it without consulting me, and then she assured me that I was smart, confident, composed, polished. She had a hunch about me. Isn’t that nice? And I had honestly never realized how inarticulate, blubbering, and gaspy I am, and then one day I am 16 and standing, frowning at the ceiling, in front of a human nightmare of smirking faces, and I feel myself turn red with watery eyes, and my voice is trembling violently. And also, I am twitching. This is crying in public! I would rather vomit in public, bleed in public, or be naked in public, than cry in public. And this was domestic extemporaneous. Can you imagine if it were foreign extemporaneous? That was when I learned to write down what I am going to say before I ever make a phone call. Not an outline; a real script. I will even plan my responses out. I will plan my responses to the AT&T service representative on the other end of the phone. Do you know what is more stressful than even the most stressful video game? The phone! Defusing a bomb! The humiliation that is making a show of your own incompetence! A pub quiz!
Robyn: “Oh, OK.”
Me: “Chef’s food. French?”
Robyn: “Michelin stars.”
I was on the verge of explaining the history of the Michelin Man, Bibendum, using gestures and magnetic poetry diseased brain pidgin alcohol word salad hemodynamism. And instead I ruefully clamped my jaw shut, in case another infant thought tried to fart out. Do you see why I picked Robyn as my teammate? Do you see how splendid and patient she is?
Brian successfully deduced that Madagascar is the fourth-largest island. He did this by pointing at nothing and counting on his fingers.
What tree uses all five vowels? Sequoia.
What’s the ‘G’ in “G-spot” for? Gräfenberg.
“Gräfenberg,” Robyn and I whispered together.
“What?” Brian asked us. He had the pen.
“Gräfenberg,” we whispered simultaneously, louder.
Brian wrote a ‘G’ on the page. “What?” he asked us.
“Gräfenberg,” Robyn hissed.
“Gräfenberg,” I repeated in the same hiss.
Brian balked. “How do you spell that?” he asked me.
“How can you spell something that doesn’t exist?” Ben howled, slapping the table.
Then I needed help with celebrity gossip. “The star of Edward Scissorhands plus Kate Hudson’s son. Brian? Kate Hudson was married to a musician, but who, again?”
“Kate Hudson was married to Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes,” Brian replied. He is so cool and you would never know he is a dork, because he is unkempt but sharply dressed (my friend Whitney is accurate when she refers to the phenomenon as passing), but Brian almost gives himself away socially, because he uses complete sentences. Like, in casual, spoken conversation, he uses subjects and predicates. Isn’t that strange? Weird, right?
“WINONARYDERROBINSON!” I said. “Wonderful!” Other answers from that round: Holly Hunter S. Thompson, Daryl Hannah Montana, Pee-Wee Herman Melville, Jennie Garth Brooks, Soulja Boy George, et cetera. That last one, “Crank That rap artist and Karma Chameleon singer,” I did not even have to think about. I had command of the pen for that round only, and I’d just started writing.
“Whoa, whoa. Wait,” Ben said. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, OK, no yeah, ha ha. I know the words to ‘Crank That,’” I said. “It is the worst song. So I’m very sure.” I’m sure that it is an entire song about splooge.
“Wow!” Robyn said.
One question stumped us all, however: “What 1981 Journey album includes the song Don’t Stop Believin’?”
We sat there, staring into our drinks.
Brian regretted aloud that the question wasn’t about Foreigner. He would’ve had the answer for sure! That’s a pretty good joke.
After another terrible silence, I whispered, “If we can’t think of anything, try Self-Titled. No! Wait! I know! Write in ‘Greatest Hits’!”
Ben roared. I was a genius! “1981,” Robyn sighed. Then we all sighed. I was not a genius.
Robyn made little invisible circles on the table with her green glass Woodchuck bottle. “I can sort of see the album cover in my head. It’s blue.”
She said that, and it jogged my brain. If my brain is a constellation of neurological lights, a too-small Ursa lit up. “If only this question were about the Journey game for the Atari,” I frowned, “I’d be useful.”
Can you believe that I said that aloud, even. About a videogame from 1982. Can you already see how I am an imbecile?
I played through the whole game in my head. There is a discordant, chippy version of “Don’t Stop Believin’” playing, and then the game really begins. You are an actual member of the world-famous rock band, Journey. You have just played a show, and because you are so famous and good-looking, you now have to escape your lovestruck fans (represented by hearts with legs), escape from conniving unscrupulous concert promoters, and escape the paparazzi flashbulbs. It’s an entire video game about having social anxiety! So you are racing toward your spaceship, yes, spaceship, which is shaped, hmm, is it shaped like a trilobite?
No, no, it is shaped like a plain old beetle type of bug. Or like a scarab beetle, that’s what I had been trying to think of. Your sprite is running toward a big scarab. You would never know that the bug icon is supposed to be a spaceship, judging the television screen itself, but if you had taken the time to look at the box, you would know that there is a scarab-shaped spacecraft on its cover. Ha, ha! That’s right! The whole game concept is based entirely on the nonsensical cover art fantasy painting of a bug-shaped spacecraft exploding—I’m sorry, escaping—from a, uh, a, uh, a big blue spherical orb. Blue. Blue.
Oh.
I clapped a hand over my eyes.
“Oh my god, I’m sorry,” I whispered to my teammates. “I’m so sorry. I am so dumb. The Atari game is called Journey Escape, and it is based on some weird album art, and I bet that means the album is called Escape.”
Everybody was amazed.
The point is, we won. We won first place! And we didn’t just win by a handful of points. The distance between first and second place was incredible. We amazed even ourselves. We were the greatest butt rock metal band ever. We agreed that our team was made of magic and that we would meet the very next week to DESTROYSOMEMOREDREAMS and also, to spend our gift certificate.
We also won koozies.
Outside, a man was belittling Robyn, so I walked over and stood next to her. He introduced himself as a member of team Third Place. Then he was mean to me. I was grinning so big, just the sorest winner ever. His ire was like a high five and a slap on the back. His ire was greater reward than any piddling gift certificate. ALL IS FAIR IN ROCKANDWAR, MISTERTHIRDPLACE.
(Reprinted from Infinite Lives, a website about video games)
Hi! If you don’t already suffer from pediophobia, just give it time.
Here are some video clips to get you started:
Twilight Zone, “The After Hours” (1960)
A young lady, while shopping, discovers she has been locked into a department store overnight.
Kolchak: the Night Stalker, “The Trevi Collection” (1975)1
A roomful of enchanted fiberglass ladies take their revenge on a fashion designer. (Swift edits almost make the scene work, except that the woman in the red dress can’t help wiggling a little.)
Hey, kids! There must have been some magic in that newsboy’s cap they found, for when they put it on Jeff’s head, he REANIMATED, which is BATSHITTERRIFYING
Twilight Zone, “The After Hours” (1986)
I was four years old when this remake of the 1960s classic aired on television. I have been petrified at the sight of mall displays ever since.
I am almost certainly, without question, a geek—as far as I can tell I’ve always been one. But I’m no computer geek. I’m not tech savvy or up on the latest gadgets. I’m pretty okay with that.
Sometimes I wish I were as computer savvy as some of my technologically advanced cronies, but while I excel in language and math, I’m still baffled by things like Foursquare, Twitter, and programming. I was competent in DOS, but that’s eons ago in computer eras.
Throughout most of my academic career, I was a PC girl. While my boyfriend at the time thoroughly tried to convert me to the Mac-world, I would have nothing of it. I understood PCs; they made sense to me; they were all I’d ever really worked on. But when I moved in with my boyfriend, I started exploring the wiles of the boxy and colorful iMac. It was just too cute not to learn how to use.
I fell in love. Not with my boyfriend—instead, with the Apple platform, with the iMac G3 and, soon, with my favorite geek-game of all time, Sid Meier’s Civilization (II Gold was my first version).
My boyfriend and I would totally geek-out with our “state-of-the-art” airport wireless and play Civ tête-a-tête on our individual Macs. (Obviously, I finally caved and bought a Mac.) I usually won when we played, which always annoyed him. I had gotten into Civ after he did. He didn’t see me as ‘into’ the computer-game thing. How could I beat him?
Well, my competition with the boy ran deep, and even though he may not have seen me as a gamer, gaming was old hat. While during solitary play I focused primarily on building the most culturally advanced and educated empire, when in direct competition, my bloodthirst was insatiable. All I wanted to do was annihilate him. In retrospect, I probably should have been concerned by this desire and seen it as a the omen of things to come. But, c’est la vie.
Now, twenty years after Civilization‘s first release and over a decade since our introduction, I no longer have a relationship with the boy who introduced me to it, but I certainly stay close to the game. It is a wonderfully anti-social guilty pleasure. Admittedly, I’m so behind the times, I haven’t even played Civ V. I’m still working on Civ IV, after all. But I’m completely content being a generation out-of-touch. I think it’s probably part of my charm.
Why have I continued to play this time-consuming, pretentious, and ridiculous game? Probably for the same reason that so many people play World of Warcraft. Civilization offers an escape from my anxieties, an alternate reality where for a moment I can literally control the world. I suppose everyone has a bit of a blood-hungry totalitarian buried in them somewhere.
Everyone, at some point, needs to feel in control of something. Civ provided that outlet for me. When the world seemed as though there were no logical answers, when nothing I did in my real life provided me any pleasure, when I just wanted to reel everything in, Civ allowed me to create a world in which I was in control of it all. I had the power to create or destroy entire cultures. I had the will and the desire to make my world in Civ work. I wanted to be the best, even when in my everyday life I felt as if I would never again achieve that goal. Civ reminded me, even in the darkest of times, that I was powerful, I was important, and all I had to do was do something—even if that something was as simple as creating a single settler who, in turn, would build me a city.
