Stupid Things Noel Gallagher, some idiotic washed up British Rocker, said in his GQ interview, ranked.

Noel Gallagher is apparently some part of Oasis, which apparently was some sort of band, which a certain sort of person (jerks) idolized because they made a record once that was like number 3 on the British charts, which is like being number 477 on American charts.  This "Noel" person gave an interview to GQ back in 2013. I read this interview here, two years later, because Drew Magary, a writer I previously respected, linked to it on Twitter and said to elect "Noel" president.

I read it and as I tweeted to Drew Magary:

...@drewmagary I mean jesus that guy deserves to be locked in a barrel full of eels.

— BrianePagel (@BrianePagel) November 8, 2015

Here, from least-stupid to most-stupid, are all the stupid things Noel Gallagher said in this interview.  Mixed in are AMAZING FACTS ABOUT NOEL GALLAGHER, like this one:

AMAZING FACT ABOUT NOEL GALLAGHER: his brother hated Noel so much that he started a band without even telling Noel!

14. "Banal pop music... what I think is: everybody's winning out of it... The geezer who's writing the f***ing shit tunes-- he's winning."

QUOTE FROM WIKIPEDIA ABOUT NOEL GALLAGHER:

Be Here Now (1997) became Oasis' most eagerly anticipated album to date. As with the previous two albums, all the tracks were written by Gallagher. After an initial blaze of publicity, positive critical reviews, and commercial success, the album failed to live up to long-term expectations, and public goodwill towards Be Here Now was short-lived. The album was ultimately regarded by many as a bloated, over-indulgent version of Oasis

13. "I'm all right when I'm drunk."

12. "I've seen seeds in Coldplay's dressing room... Where's the parrot?"

11.

Interviewer: Who would you build a statue of?

LIAM: Les Dawson.

10.  "I only read factual books...novels are just a waste of f***ing time. ...I just end up thinking 'this isn't f***ing true."

AMAZING FACT ABOUT NOEL GALLAGHER: 

He used his earnings from that band he was in to buy numerous cars and swimming pools, despite being able to neither drive nor swim.

9.  "Book sellers, book readers, book writers, book owners-- f*** all of them."

8:

NOEL: "Novels... I'm not having it.... that doesn't happen in real life."

Interviewer: But do you like films?

NOEL: Yeah I love films.

INT: But films aren't real. Do you sit watching them, thinking 'oh this isn't real'? 

NOEL: Well you've presented me with a dilemma there. But say my favorite film The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, now that might've happened.

AMAZING FACT ABOUT NOEL GALLAGHER: He said that if he championed a band they were guaranteed success, calling them Noelrock. The bands he championed? The Boo Radleys. Ocean Colour Scene. Cast. Go listen to your Boo Radleys Greatest Hits album right now man!

7. "Novels and the people who write them... my 68 million records beat your one book."

6. "The root of all that is bad in the world. Religious... preachers....when you see these people standing on soapboxes banging on about religion or politics."

QUOTE FROM WIKIPEDIA ABOUT NOEL GALLAGHER:

throughout his career, many of his songs have mentioned God ("Carry Us All", "Gas Panic!," "The Hindu Times" and "Little by Little"), and all the tracks he had contributed to Dig Out Your Soul,,,, have lyrics and references to God and other biblical terms. Dig Out Your Soul has been described by Gallagher as a "religious Armageddon".

QUOTE NUMBER 2 FROM WIKIPEDIA ABOUT NOEL GALLAGHER:

Gallagher has spoken about his political views on several occasions, most notably when he visited Tony Blair at No. 10 Downing Street in 1997. In an interview in 1997 when he was asked about why he visited Blair he replied, "I've taken a lot of flack for going to No. 10 Downing Street but the thing about that is, I never considered myself a rebel anyway. 

[WIKIPEDIA HAS WAY MORE NOTES OF 'NOEL' 'banging on about... politics'.]

5. "Don't ask the man on the street. He's a c***. That's why he's the man on the street, not the man eating f***ing mini sausages at four in the afternoon." (NOTE: The interview was in a fancy restaurant over mini sausages.)

SPECIAL NOTE SHOWING HOW DUMB IT WAS OF THE INTERVIEWER TO SUCK UP TO GALLAGHER:

Noel: ...what f***ing winds me up about books...

INT: This is already the best sentence I've ever heard.

...

Noel: People who write... books are f***ing putting themselves a tiny bit above the rest of us.

INT: Thing is, I write books and...

Noel: Hey, I know you write books and all that shit....Do you write novels? Don't tell me you write novels.

INT: I've written a novel.

Noel: What was it about?

INT: About a guy who sees a girl...

Noel: Here we go. Already the shittiest book of all time. 

4. [On his brother Liam trying to ride a dog at a bar]: "Liam's got a touch of the Red Indian when he has a drink. When the Europeans went to America they got the Red Indians pissed and bought Alaska off them for a f***ing milk bottle top. Wahoo! Firewater!"

3, "I don't like litter... you get caught dropping litter you get your head chopped off."

AMAZING FACT ABOUT NOEL GALLAGHER: 

He thinks litter is comprised of doughnuts: 

"If you're going to buy a doughnut, eat the f***ing doughnut. Don't have a bite and then chuck it on the floor." 

2,  "I'd have made a brilliant assassin. Sniper. Sitting in a tree for four months on the off chance."

1. "People shouldn't work weekends unless they work in the service industry and they're getting paid double time....That's how wars start.... if terrorism had the weekend off, eventually they'd have a year off. Eventually they'd go F*** this, blowing up shit? Football's on."

Rankings: McDonald's Burgers, etc.: I am an incomplete glutton.

The other day, after we walked down to the McDonald's a mile away, I did something I rarely do at McDonald's: I ordered a burger other than the McDonald's Cheeseburger.  I mean, I also ordered a Cheeseburger, too, but I two cheeseburgers meal.
ordered another burger to go with it, mixing up a bit the classic two-burgers meal McDonald's has made the standard.

Thinking about that, and slightly regretting the not-a-cheeseburger I paired my Cheeseburger with over lunch, I decided to rank the McDonald's Burgers, Etc. (Not the breakfasts. That'll be for another time.)  These are (mostly) just the sandwiches I have tried.  SPOILER ALERT! You can probably guess what's number one.  

13. Filet "O" Fish: I told Sweetie I was going to do this ranking and said "You can probably guess what's at the bottom of the list," and she preceded to guess hamburger, McRib, Egg McMuffin, and Quarter Pounder while I grew more and more amazed at how little she apparently knew about me, and McDonald's sandwiches. Finally I just told her which one.

This is the only sandwich on this list that I've never eaten, but I'm including it to emphasize just how terrible the idea of this sandwich is.  EVERYTHING about fish grosses me out, period, and the thought of fish masquerading as fast-food sandwiches, fish with tartar sauce on them, makes me hate America.  (Don't try telling me, either, that 'tartar sauce' is just mayo and relish, which people claim frequently.  It doesn't matter.  Have you ever seen anyone put tartar sauce on anything but fish? You haven't, have you. EXPLAIN THAT.  There's something weird about tartar sauce.)  

Plus, they put cheese on the Filet "O" Fish.  I'm not sure why that makes it worse but it does.  Breading and deep-frying things is a wonderful idea well worth giving up an extra 10 years of life for.  Doing it to fish is a sin.

12. Premium Crispy Chicken Bacon Clubhouse Sandwich: We had some coupons for these once and so I got one free and it was okay.  I've never ordered it again, so I guess that's your review, there, although if it were available someplace besides McDonald's I might get it, if I ever ate at fast food restaurants that weren't McDonald's, which I increasingly don't, and the reason is that you never know what you're getting into.  Could be great, could be awful, could be confusing.  Here's a true story: last year I had to go to Rockford, Illinois, for a deposition. We finished up around 5:30 and it's like a two hour drive back home, so I decided to get something to eat on the way.  My go-to restaurant is always McDonald's, but I thought Why not try something different? So I went to a KFC, thinking I'd get some popcorn chicken, which I always like.

ONLY THEY DIDN'T HAVE IT. It wasn't on the menu, in some kind of weird warp-space where KFC doesn't sell one of the greatest things they ever invented, a bucket of pure chicken skin.  So I had to get some sort of "strips," and potato wedges, and a soda, because KFC doesn't have much food that can be eaten while you drive and because I thought it would be too much to say Oh, well, I don't need you then and go to McDonald's, where I should've gone in the first place. Then, to top it off, the potato wedges were gross and the chicken strips sort of rubbery.

Even my all-time favorite restaurant, Kopp's, in Milwaukee, once messed up our burgers so bad that Sweetie and I still talk about it.  I don't go to fast-food restaurants for gourmet food. I know fast food isn't necessaily haute cuisine. I go to fast food restauants because I want to get the thing I order and I want it to taste like it should.  Fast food should be uniform. The quality should not be up and down, as though there is a chef experimenting in the back room.  "Today, we'll try making everything soggy!"  I know you've got 16 year olds cooking it, fast food restaurants. That's why you've got to have the entire process automated and reduce the amount of discretion you give that 16 year old: so I am never surprised by what I pull out of that paper bag.

When other restaurants can get their act together and have their stuff be the same -- and good!-- every single time, I'll trust them more.  McDonald's has done this.  I respect that.

11. Ranch Snack Wrap: I tried one of these out of curiosity once. It wasn't too bad.  I suppose I've never gotten it again mainly for the same reason I almost never get anything other than the Cheeseburgers at McDonald's: because mostly when I get something else, I end up regretting not getting the Cheeseburgers.

Wrap sandwiches kind of feel like a hangover from that brief era when people worried about carbs.  They're sort of embarrassing, like having a Spin Doctors' CD in your office.

10. Double Cheeseburger This is a surprising place to find this on the list, given the fact that I love McDonald's Cheeseburgers so much that I actually started writing an epic poem about them. (I almost said that I am writing an epic poem about them but I am trying to pare down my goals and not have too many projects going on at once and so if I am being honest with myself I will admit that I will never finish that epic poem. Which only puts me 1 poem behind Homer, so I'm pretty close.)  

You'd think if I like the Cheeseburgers so much, I'd doublelike the Double Cheeseburger, but it doesn't work that way, in part because you know that feeling you get on December 25th after the presents are opened and you go to the 'fridge and you see egg nog there and there's Xmas cookies on the table and the kids are watching Rudolph AGAIN and you're like OK, Xmas, we're all done here? There can be too much of a good thing:

AND, an important part of the McDonald's Cheeseburger is that, as I mentioned early on in this post, we as a society have decided that two of them = 1 meal, which means that after you finish the first one, you get to have a second one immediately after.  How often do you get that, in life? How often do you get to say that awesome thing that just happened to me? I'm going to do it again immediately. Not very often.  Once, we rode a roller-coaster and because there was nobody else in line behind us we got to go right back around a second time.  EVERY McDonald's 2-Cheeseburger lunch is exactly like that, only they have cheese, too.

9. Grilled Onion Cheddar Burger: This is the other burger I got today, part of my 2-burgers=1 meal meal.  I'm not a complete glutton; I didn't get the fries, and I had a Coke Zero, so as McDonald's lunches go, it was fairly healthy.

I tried this one because it was also only a dollar, like the Cheeseburgers, and so if I'm going 'off the board' to order a la carte rather than just blurting out a number for a meal, I might as well jazz it up a bit.

Here's the actual exchange Sweetie and I had about this burger, which I ate first so that I could look forward to my Cheeseburger second:

Sweetie: How was it?
Me: OK. A little salty, I suppose.
Sweetie: Oh, sorry.
Me: I didn't say that was a bad thing.

Sometimes I find myself really craving salty foods.  This article says that people (well, women, who are people too I guess) who crave salty foods might be doing so because they're low on calcium, but the article also says that food craving say a lot about your personality, and so also such women

go with the flow. Hirsch's research describes salt lovers as having an "external locus of control," meaning they believe that outside forces, not their own actions, determine their fate.

The Hirsch in that sentence is

Alan R. Hirsch, M. D., head of the Smell &Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago and the author of What Flavor Is Your Personality? Hirsch should know: He's studied the cravings, food choices, and personalities of more than 18,000 people for over 25 years.

You may know Hirsch as the man who was ordered by the Federal Trade Commission to stop claiming that sprinkling "tastant" crystals on your food could help you lose weight without dieting or exercise.

Here's a true story, too: I googled an article to find out what it says about my body that I sometimes crave salt. I read that Hirsch was a doctor who thought food cravings showed what type of personality you have, and I instantly thought to myself: I bet this guy's gotten in trouble for scams, and googled his 'Foundation' to learn that it was true! I wonder what kind of food cravings doctors who use their medical degree to fleece gullible people have?

Then again, if you exist in 2015 and think you can lose weight without dieting, exercising, or doing both, you probably deserve to have someone take your money away from you.

Apropos of that, I saw this morning a tweet which announced again that eating celery is "like exercise," because you burn more calories eating it than you get from the celery.  I HATE when people say something is "like exercise." What you are saying when you say "X is like exercise" is that X is not exercise but is somehow similar to it, which means that if you are doing X you are not exercising.  "X is like Y" is proof that "X" is not "Y."  Take it from someone who spent years doing things that were like exercise until he ballooned up to 260 pounds: things that are like exercise are not doing you any good.

On a related note, if you exercise too quickly after eating certain kinds of vegetable dishes, you can get exercise-induced anaphylaxis and die. This is why I constantly remind people that no good can come of eating vegetables.  I searched for "Doritos-related-anaphylaxis" and came up with nothing.  JUNK FOOD 1, HEALTH 0.

8. McChicken: Let's just call this one: A chicken sandwich is the same every single place you go. They opened up a "Chick-Fil-A"  here in Madison not long ago, and a bunch of crazy people camped out to get free sandwiches for a year, and then one day I took the boys there for a lunch.  Not because I wanted to go there for the food, but because they had a playland in it, and the boys saw that from the road and wanted to go there.  If you want people to come to your business, especially in Wisconsin, where winter lasts 17 months of every year, put in a playland, because parents are desperate for things to do with their kids.  I would patronize any business that had a playland: restaurant, grocery store, insurance agency, etc... If they want people to vote more, they should put playlands at the polling place.

Anyway, we went there and I ordered the basic "Chick Fil A" sandwich, using my theory that if you are in doubt you get the thing the restaurant put their name on, because that they will probably not screw up. It tasted like a chicken sandwich.  There's not much you can do, right or wrong, with chicken. Same goes for the McChicken, which I had once, I think.

7. Chicken McNuggets: I am old enough to remember when these first came out and people were superexcited about bits of chicken being available.  I look back on that now as the harbinger of a great era in humanity's time, because that was the beginning of developing foods without bones.  I don't know why people bother eating chicken off the bone anymore.  Do they know they don't have to gnaw on an animal's skeleton like hyenas, I wonder, when I see people doing that. The worst kind of chicken is 'wings,' which are literally garbage that a housewife decided to cook up to make some extra money (Here is The New Yorker backing me up on that).  That is quite seriously how 'wings' became a food, and I think people who buy actual 'wings' are among the dumbest people who exist.  "I would like to pay you for the part of the chicken you used to throw away because there was no actual food on it," those people are saying, before they take their bucket 'o' wings and slurp barbecue sauce off the bones.  There's no meat and precious little usable skin on 'wings'.  You'd be better off just dipping your finger into barbecue sauce and licking it. You'd look  less stupid, for one thing.

Anyway, I don't really ever order McNuggets because they're kind of soggy, but they're better than everything that has come before them on this list.

6. McDLT: I worked at McDonald's when these came out, 'back in the day' as I like to say so that that saying becomes so uncool nobody will ever say it again.  That's one of my missions in life: to take dumb sayings that my kids use, and say them earnestly, so that my kids then associate that saying with their uncool, Blobfish-esque, parent, and never use those sayings again.  I once sent all the kids a picture of me and the boys standing in front of the spot where the idea for the Gideon Bible first arose, with a caption explaining where we were and the phrase "#turnedup" on it.  I haven't heard any kids use that phrase since then. #Victory.

I think we don't mark enough spots in America where people had the idea for something.  I would like to see a series of markers saying where everything was first thought up, like "This is where So-And-So was standing when he first thought of putting eggs on a hamburger." (Have you tried that? It's delicious.)  That would be a very inspirational way to travel around the country, seeing those signs.

One day, at McDonald's, my job for the entire day, was putting the stickers on the outside of the styrofoam clamshell containes McDLTs were served in.  There were two sides, joined together:

And when McDonald's first came out with the sandwich, they didn't have those sides pre-stamped on, so someone (me) had to get paid ($2.35 per hour) to put them on.  For 6 hours.

Also, I did it wrong: I got bored just putting them on and began doing them 'creatively.' Like I would put them head-to-head, or flipped 180-degrees.  My manager had to come and tell me not to do that.  I was apparently messing up the brand. #turneddown.

The McDLT eventually became the "Big N' Tasty," according to various people who what does it matter if it's true or not, it's about a fast food sandwich's history, so go with it.  The "Big N'Tasty" in Australia is the "Big Oz" and it has beetroot on it.  "Beetroot" is just beet.  So it has beets on it.  Another reason I probably won't go to Australia, although the fact that every animal in Australia is superpoisonous is still number 1, and their having spiders as big as my car is number 2.  But beets on burgers is number 3.

5. Hamburger: this only ranks this high because everything else so far is worse than it, but what's the point of getting a burger without the cheese? I don't get you, America.

4. Quarter Pounder With Cheese: For some reason, these taste totally different than the regular cheeseburger.  How does that work? It's the same exact thing, only bigger.  The SAME.  Only they taste completely different to me.  Imagine if everything else worke that way.  Maybe I wouldn't like it.  In fact, I think I wouldn't. I don't want life to be more random.  I like a little uniformity.

The other reason I don't get the Quarter Pounder With Cheese is that it's too much.  A regular burger patty is 1.6 ounces, pre-cooking.  A Quarter Pounder, then, equals 2 1/2 burgers.  It's already been established that two cheeseburgers is the optimal meal.  So with a Quarter Pounder, not only do I not get the enjoyment of anticipating another burger after I finish this one, but I'm getting 2 1/2 burgers in one swoop.  That's too much. I may be able to eat, as I recently did, 12 slices of Rocky Rococo's pizza in 12 hours -- there were extenuating circumstances!-- but even I have my limits, and eating 2 1/2 burgers for a single meal exceeds those limits.

3. Big Mac: A Big Mac is delicious, and totally obnoxious, because they are too sloppy.  That's why nobody wants lettuce and mayo slopped all over their burger, unless they are eating it at home or in a sit-down restaurant, and that's why Burger King will always be number two.  Who wants to take their fast-food burger home? Time kills fast food.  Wait 10 minutes to eat any fast food and it's like eating the stuff that's left in the bottom of your garbage can after you left them out in the rain.

Sometimes I get a Big Mac, though.  Sometimes.

Also, fast food restaurants are not 'sit-down' restaurants. The only reason to be sitting in a fast-food restaurant is because your kid are in the playland, or because you have a brief to write, can't stand the people in your (old) office, and want to take advantage of Wifi with free soda refills.  Everyone else sitting in a fast-food restaurant is probably on the run from the law.  If they wanted you to sit down in their restaurants, the decor would invite you, not terrify you.  Fast food restaurants' insides look like psychological experiments you always heard existed.

2. McRib: The internet has accelerated the pace with which I hate things because things become so popular so quickly that I have barely enough time to enjoy them before I have to hate them because everybody won't shut up about them.  That is what is going to happen to the McRib, which is caught between the two tidal forces pop culture exerts on me.

On this side: the tug of Internet love, as people annually go nuts over McRibs and blog about them and make jokes about how they're having them for their wedding or probably create a Tumblr, "McRibs Throughout History" or somehow combine them with Shakespeare.  I bet all of those things have already happened.  I bet there is a Tumblr out there called "Zombie Shakespeare McRibs Get Married," and I hate my brain for being able to come up with that concept.  Once the Internet gets hold of something, it's like a pit bull with a baby.

It made me want one for breakfast.

On this side, though: the McRib haters showing videos of frozen McRibs and talking about how the Keystone Pipeline, when it's not causing 9/11 or whatever, is secretly full of McRib Pulp (TM) gushing onto buns to be freeze-cooked using ions superheated by smog in Chinese factories by 3-year-olds making a penny a year.  THAT group makes me want to use whatever it is they hate this week, which is what nearly caused me to pre-order 32 Apple Watches before I remembered that I can't stand Steve Jobs because he's a colossal jerk, even in death.  Somewhere in the afterlife, Steve Jobs is being a complete A-hole and people are lauding him for it. #turneddown.

Those two forces counterbalance each other perfectly and let me get the occasional McRib whenever it comes out, which I never know is happening because I reflexively look away from any Internet page which mentions McRib to avoid causing a power imbalance.

Also, did you know that the guy who wrote Pride & Prejudice & Zombies somehow makes a living writing, instead of having to work in the coffeeshop that isn't Starbucks in his hometown? It's true.  He's got a movie deal for his latest terrible meme-grabbing 'book'. I'm going to be sad all day. His entire career is based on Tumblr jokes, and yet he somehow has a career. I hate everyone.

1. Cheeseburger: In addition to the aforementioned epic poem, I have written a short story in which cheeseburgers played a prominent, and symbolic role, compared them (favorably) to The Dark Knight, managed to squeeze them into a review of The Odyssey (hands down the worst epic poem I ever read part of), and even derived a formula for proving that the McDonald's Cheeseburger is, hands-down, the greatest thing ever in the history of the world.

They are perfection, in a bun, and the best part of it is: you get two.  How can you go wrong with double perfection?

PS: If you go into a McDonald's and order anything but ask for even a single change -- even so much as "can you leave the mustard off of it" I will hate you forever.  That is NOT what McDonald's is about.  GET IT THE WAY IT IS MADE.  

Rankings: Hotel Amenities, From Worst To Best

Sweetie and I, once or twice a year, hire the older kids to come babysit and we head out for the day to get some R-and-R away from the house and the kids and the house full of kids, etc. etc.  We used to, before the boys were born, go farther away, but since the boys we've tended to stay closer to home, in case of an emergency like last year when the emergency was that we couldn't remember if we'd left one of the windows open in the living room, and couldn't get back to sleep for fear that Middle Daughter hadn't closed them and that after she fell asleep Mr F would sneak down from his room and crawl out them and drown in the lake.  That is an actual story of an actual fear we had, which actually resulted in us checking out of the hotel at about 2 a.m. and coming home, to find that the window was open but that Mr F hadn't yet figured that out.

We don't really open the windows in our house anymore, after that.

Anyway, going to hotels is expensive for us, not just because the hotel is expensive but because we get takeout to take to the hotel and we have to pay the older kids (who volunteer to do it but I pay them anyway) and, lately, we have to buy a present for Mr F and Mr Bunches, some sort of toy or book, to help them get over the extreme anxiety that having a babysitter causes them.  Which means that when we get to the hotel, I expect (a) amenities, and (b) at the least a restful night's sleep, the former of which I sometimes get and the latter of which I rarely do, not just because of the aforementioned-numerous-boys-related worries, but also because hotels have hard-to-figure thermostats, and terrible pillows, and, as of last night, smoke alarms that malfunction in the middle of the night, jarring you awake and 2:20 a.m. and requiring that you get dressed and await a security guard who will come and look at the alarm and then step out in the hall to radio that she doesn't know how to turn it off, and then it'll stop because apparently they can turn it off at the desk or something, and your wife will eventually go back to sleep but you will stay up until 5 o'clock a.m. because once you're woken up like that, you're really awake, and so you quietly watch the 1978 Invasion of The Body Snatchers on your phone and then grab some sleep from 5 to 8 before working out with the manager on check out that you'll probably get a free night sometime in the future.*

*Details pending.

That all left me with a lot of time to think about hotel amenities, and hence to rank them in what is now my longest-running themed series of posts.  TWO WEEKS IN A ROW HUZZAH!

I didn't include things like "blankets" and "art" and "desks" and other furniture in here, and I only realized that I maybe should have after I finished and proof-read it.  For the record, blankets aren't an 'amenity.' That's like counting 'floors' as an amenity.  If I'd put 'desks' on here it's be around number 18, because I don't use the desk in a hotel room.  I also didn't include 'art' like paintings on the wall because I can't think of a single painting I've ever seen in a hotel room.  I know they've all had them, but I can't remember any of them. They're basically just wallpaper and if you took them out, nobody would notice.

So here's the ranking!

24. Malfunctioning smoke alarms.  Or smoke alarms, CO alarms, or alarms in general.  I understand that there is a desire to be safe in this world. But we have to balance that against the needs for society (e.g., me) to sleep. That will not happen when they go off at all hours and/or can be pulled by any stupid fratboy or businessman who got drunk but didn't get that girl to come up to his room. When 'science' comes up with an alarm that can only go off in a real emergency and, if it must, only malfunctions during normal business hours, we can re-install them.  Until then, if you opt to sleep in a giant building filled with transient strangers bound together by nothing more than the thin fabric of commercialism, you take your chances on making it through the night alive.

23. Community hot tub: Who wouldn't want to take a bath with strangers, only no soap is involved? Every public hot tub is 90% strangers' body hair.

22. Minibar: Last night was the first time we've stayed in a hotel room fancy enough to have a 'minibar.' This consisted of a large(ish) bottle of water in the room 'fridge, and a sign that informed me that the bottle of water cost $4.95, or 1/2 the total we spent at the convenience store on the bag of snacks and drinks we brought with us.  If you're too lazy to stop at the 7/11, or too proud to bring a plastic bag full of Doritos (TM) into your hotel room, you deserve to pay five bucks for water.

21.  Ironing board.  Almost every hotel room I've ever checked into has one of these.  None of them have also had irons. And I'm pretty sure nobody's needed an ironing board since 1921.  So to use this amenity, you would need to bring your own iron, and you would also have to have clothes that wrinkle, which means you probably bought them at an estate sale and you are wearing a dead man's socks.  Gross.  If you do find yourself with wrinkled clothes, steam them in the bathroom by running the shower on hot the way we people living in the future do.

20. The Safe:  Not every hotel I've stayed in has offered a safe, which used to cause me a great deal of stress when our civilization still used paper money, and I would travel with a stash of traveler's checks and cash.  I had the option, then, of carrying every penny I had in the world with me at all times, which is unwise given that in any city larger than Hartland, WI, everyone is a pickpocket/rapist, or leaving it in the hotel room, where the maids would no doubt root through my luggage and find it.  Back when I had to travel with cash, I never could afford to stay in a hotel that had a safe.  My solution was to divide the cash into envelopes and hide them in various unsavory parts of my clothing, like tucking the envelopes into the plastic bag that held previously-worn clothing.  On vacations, my money used to be smelly.

But now, I travel with a debit card, and so I never have anything I need to put in the safe.  Plus, we don't really leave the hotel long enough to worry about storing valuables in the hotel room while we're gone, plus I don't own 'valuables.'  The most valuable thing in my hotel room last night (AFTER MY WIFE I LOVE YOU SWEETIE!) was the leftover pizza on the endtable.  Mmmm. In retrospect I wish I had stored it in the safe overnight.

If you're rich enough to bring things with you that need to be under lock and key while you're out and about, you should probably just stay in the type of hotel where people can't easily steal things and the staff is paid well enough to avoid temptation.  Plus, do you think someone at the hotel doesn't have the combination to that safe? I bet they're posted in the assistant manager's office.

19. Clock radio:  These would be great if (a) you knew the radio stations in the area and could set it to a station you like and (b) if there was some standardized method of setting all the various kinds of clock radios so that you wouldn't be just taking a wild stab in the dark as to whether it was going to wake you up at 7 p.m., at 3 a.m., or never, and (c) if it was 1978 and 'clock radios' still were a thing people used.  If you must be up at a specific time, bring your alarm clock from home, or use your phone like a regular person.

18. Wake-up call. Only slightly better than the clock radio, in that it's at least easy to figure out how to set it up. Good for you, making sure that the only thing between you and oversleeping is the kind of person who can't find a better job than night-desk clerk at a hotel. You might be a bit too trusting. That guy worked at McDonald's last week, and he doesn't care any more about your life now than he did then.

If you really must use a wake-up call, why not phone your Mom and have her call you in the morning, as long as you're being immature? She'll appreciate being part of your life. I bet she won't sleep all night, just to make sure she's ready for the call.  Moms are awesome. In a ranking of family members, Moms would be Top 3, for sure.

17. Exercise room: Thanks for making me feel extra guilty about having eaten 9 of the 16 slices of pizza, hotel! I used to exercise on vacation before I remembered what 'vacation' meant.

16. Hot tub in your room: This is a feature of every 'romantic' or honeymoon suite I've ever seen.  Here is what happens when you use the in-room hot tub:

STEP ONE: Fill up and imagine the romance!

STEP TWO Oh my God Is it hot!

STEP THREE: *don't think about all the other gross people who sat in this before you, with their bodies and their hair and the hair on their bodies*

STEP FOUR: Water's a little cold.

STEP FIVE: Gosh, it smells like chlorine in our room.

15. Valet parking: Last night was the first time I'd had valet parking offered at a hotel.  I was completely unprepared for it. The valet opened the door and said "Valet, or self-park?" I said, reflexively, "Self-park," because I was raised to automatically turn down every good thing anyone offered me, even if totally free.  That's manners, to my family.  Then I thought I don't even know where parking is or how far away it might be and we've got a pizza to carry plus those sodas... so I went for valet parking, and gave the guy my keys, and as he drove away, I asked if Sweetie had money to tip him.  Then, when we realized that between us we had only $4, cash, because we don't carry cash because we aren't drug dealers, we also realized that he was not going to come back to us with the keys, and so we couldn't tip him at all.  Then I thought maybe I tip him tomorrow when he gets the car, but of course he might not be working then (he wasn't.)  So we instead watched to see if he came back while we checked in (no) and if he was there when we went exploring the hotel last night (no) and this morning (no), and the guy who got our car for us this morning got the four bucks.

14. Bathrobe. I don't own a bathrobe. But they had one in the hotel, and this morning after I showered I wore the robe for a few minutes to see what it was like. I don't get it.

13. Crummy hotel pillows: I was kind of thinking that since this was a fancier hotel (we could afford it after an online discount, I'm not rich [yet]), the pillows might be better than the usual Sack'O'Mush (TM) at the hotels we used to stay at. They were not. Shouldn't pillows hold up your head at least a little? I could get the same neck support from a washcloth.

Our hotel last night also had the emergency blanket/pillow sack in the closet, in case you do that thing everyone does where you lie about how many kids are staying with you so you don't get charged more.  Why should hotels charge more for more people in the room? If you want to cram 35 people into a hotel room overnight, that's your business, not theirs.  The emergency blanket/pillow package is at least helpful in creating the necessary stack of 17 pillows you have to put together to equal one real-world pillow, and the extra blanket helps if you mis-set the air conditioner to "Post-Apocalyptic Ice Age", which you will.

That is quality hair.

12. Shampoo: At home, my shampoo costs 99 cents a (large, gallon-sized) bottle, which is the level of quality I need for what is left of my hair.  Our shampoo at this hotel smelled like mint, which I guess demonstrates luxury, if your hair smells kind of like a Girl Scout cookie?

It's good that they give shampoo, though, because I already don't like schlepping my toothbrush and toothpaste in a plastic bag in my backpack.  I get kind of grossed out if my toothbrush leaves the general area of the bathroom sink.  Toothbrushes don't need to expand their horizons. It would be worse if I also had to bring shampoo with me. I'd probably just wash my hair in the public hot tub, then.

11. Other toiletries: I will pass on the mystery goo that can be rubbed on my body/face/hair. And the tiny packet of Qtips only makes me wonder whether people before me were rubbing their ear wax on things, and after I think that I can't touch anything in the room anymore.

10. An ice machine.  I suppose if you are traveling with a cooler like we used to... in 1981... this makes a lot of sense, but who ever supposed that, living in a world where ice could be made by machines, travelers would need ice in such large quantities, in their air-conditioned hotel rooms, that ice machines would be necessary?  The one we stayed in last night, a fancy hotel, had a fancy ice bucket and these little highball-esque glasses next to it.  It looked like it should only be used for the Senator's annual end-of-season-bridge-party-and-fox-hunt.  I can't picture anyone who regularly stays in that hotel padding down the hall in their bathrobe to get ice in a bucket just to make sure that $4.95 bottle of water doesn't ever hit room temperature.

9. Pool (outdoor): These are always too cold, and an outdoor pool is useless for 10 months a year everywhere north of Florida but a hotel has got to have a pool or it's not a real hotel, so in a pinch a hotel should at least put in an outdoor pool.  Our hotel last night did not have a pool. I will be downgrading it in my Yelp! review for that.

8. Pool (indoor, but no slide): Indoor pools for hotels are usually disappointing. Again, you have to have a pool because that's how people clean up after a hard day of driving and sweating against each other's elbows in the car: swimming in the pool.  That's what my parents used to tell us on vacations.  We'd unpack the car, and Mom and Dad would say "Go swimming to clean yourself up before dinner." 

But indoor pools at hotels are usually too small and shallow to do much of anything, other than stand there.  That's the trouble with swimming in general: once you've splashed around, and done a headstand, and gone underwater, what's left to do? Only little kids like swimming.  If you are in or around a body of water and you are bored, congratulations: you're a grownup. Now go find your kid.

7. Pool, indoor with slide: This will entertain you for three minutes longer than a pool without a slide.

Some hotels have pools with waterparks in them, and in Wisconsin, hotels have started to be built expressly for the purpose of housing a waterpark.  I wholeheartedly support these, except that they all cost $300 PER NIGHT, which is more than anyone should pay to slip a disk and require back surgery when they forget that adults aren't meant to play at waterparks.

Is it just me, or has everything everywhere been priced out of the range of families? I cannot afford, and if I could I couldn't justify spending, the money it costs to do anything with our kids. Sporting events, concerts, amusement parks, water parks, everything that isn't the public library costs $47 a person to get into. How do families do things?  When I see families out and about and having fun and all carrying souvenirs and drinking giant sodas and going to petting zoos or whatever, I get this horrible feeling that I am failing miserably at adulthood.

6. Free newspaper: One of the things I used to really enjoy when we'd travel somewhere was getting a local newspaper and reading it and being pleasantly confused by all the local references.  Every place you go on vacation seems so great, mostly because you are there on vacation instead of living your crummy life (if you lived there, it would be your crummy life and would be less great), and I liked imagining what it would be like to live in the place where we were vacationing.  (It was always awesome, except for Tampa.)

Now, I get 100% of my news from my phone, and it is the same news everywhere I go.  I haven't seen a newspaper in a hotel in years, and if I did I wouldn't stop looking at my phone long enough to read it.  I picked up the local free indie paper that I used to read every week, just to see what I'd been missing. I read it in 4 minutes. There literally was nothing of any interest in it, other than the letters to the editor (NO LIE I SWEAR THIS IS TRUE) complaining that the free paper had taken out the movie listings and what were they supposed to do, look online for them? There were THREE letters like that printed in the paper.  THREE PEOPLE felt so strongly about reading their movie listings in newsprint the way God intended that they actually wrote to the editor of the paper about it. I wonder if they emailed the letter.

5. In-room refrigerator: Those gas-station Coke Zeroes aren't going to keep themselves cold.  And I don't want to keep having to go get ice in the ice bucket, and having sloppy water-soaked tops of dressers.

4. Continental breakfast: We're hitting the top of the list here, and not surprisingly they mostly deal with food.

"Continental breakfast" is supposed to include "cold meat," according to Wikipedia, but mostly when people use this phrase they mean "doughnuts and coffee in the lobby while they last."  Continental breakfasts should be required by federal law.  Every time I stay in a hotel that doesn't offer it (like ours last night!) I feel like I've been ripped off and want to call a local news show to investigate it on one of those dopey segments where they expose locksmiths.  I am paying you $100+ to use 30 square feet of flooring for 12 hours. BUY ME A DOUGHNUT.

With that said, hotels that are run by civilized people now have 'continental breakfasts' that are actually breakfast bars or breakfast buffets, and so I can include a SUBRANKING of those items!

               viii. Fruit: Look, I only eat fruit because I want to pretend I'm not going to turn into Gilbert Grape's mom by 50, and I'm not deranged so I never touch vegetables. When I'm on vacation, I'm not likely to eat fruit at all, let alone sad warm fruit in a bowl that I have to pick out with tongs.

               vii. Cereal: I have never seen anyone ever get cereal at a hotel breakfast bar. If I did I would instantly hate that person for sucking so much.  Cereal is what you eat at home, plus they never have Cap'n Crunch-based brands. But seriously: it's for at home. You are on the road. You are in a public room, wearing a pair of pajama bottoms and an old t-shirt while a room full of parents traveling with their kids' soccer teams slowly loses their minds around you. Live it up a bit and ignore the Raisin Bran.

               vi. Eggs: I'm in the middle of an egg renaissance, and I make a lot of eggs these days. Hotel eggs, though? I'm skeptical. I'm pretty sure they're not eggs so much as they are "eggs", which wouldn't affect me at all if they also didn't have some sort of watery juice on them, like the people who prepared them were crying. But I like that they come in patties, pre-made, so that I can assemble my own breakfast sandwich.  Breakfast sandwiches are one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century.  It's sad that it took humanity so long to take the genius of a sandwich and apply it to eggs and sausage.

               v. Sausage: I am deliberately leaving bacon off this list entirely because bacon is just okay, here and there, and I wish everyone would shut up about bacon already. It's not even funny anymore.  But sausage? Sausage is phenomenal, and as I am the only one who likes it in our house and as it's kind of difficult to cook it at home, and as we rarely have big breakfasts, I have sausage mostly on vacation.  I love picking up the lid of the sausage thing and seeing like fifty of them lined up. I want to dump them into a box and spend my day eating them.

               iv. Toast: Again, a home-food, but what puts it higher up the list is hotels have bagels and English muffins and several breads all available at once. Do you have that kind of variety at home? We do, but I'm too lazy to take advantage of it. We have had English muffins in our 'fridge for two weeks and every time I think about toasting one for breakfast I think about how I'd have to take the package out and get that little plastic nub off and then get a fork and split it... I'm exhausted just typing that. In hotels, they're all right there for the taking so you don't have to move last night's leftovers just to get a bagel. Plus, hotels have those toasters with four slots. Those are awesome.  It's like you're the king of toast.  TOAST ALL AROUND! 

               iii. Waffle maker: We have a waffle iron at home, but making waffles at home is even worse that making toast at home.  At the hotel, though, they pre-make the batter, and the waffle iron is extra-complicated, usually with a thing that makes you have to close it with levers and flip it over and stuff.  It's like being in a steampunk version of my life.

              ii.  Various juices: most hotels have OJ, of course, but they also put in some apple juice and cranberry juice, making me feel like I won the juice lottery.  I pour three cups, one of each, and pretend I have three kids who need vitamin C. But it's all for me.

             i.  Pancake machine: I have only ever seen one of these, in Paducah, Kentucky, 5 years ago, and I would honestly drive to Paducah -- it's only a day away -- to stay in that hotel and use this machine again.  You pour pancake batter in one end and a little conveyor belt moves it along while it cooks and then it falls off the belt on the other side onto your plate.  That is honestly the exact conception of the future my 10-year-old self had, and it is every bit as wonderful as I imagined.  Mr Bunches and I made ten pancakes that morning and it was the highlight of that vacation.

Back to the rest of the rankings!

3. Maid Service: My in-laws used to have a time share, which was both more expensive and less luxurious than a hotel, the latter part because nobody cleaned your little set of rooms every day.  Going to a hotel is all about getting out  of your regular life, which means leaving the beds unmade, towels on the floor, pizza boxes on the table, and having someone be paid to pick it up.  I don't go out of my way to make a mess in a hotel room, but I don't worry about it if I do, either. No matter what fun thing you're doing at home, at the back of your mind is "After this is done someone's going to have to pick up all this junk." In hotels, maids are those someone.

2. Cable TV.  We stayed in a bed-and-breakfast once.  I bring it up here because this is a good time to demonstrate how awful B&Bs are in comparison to hotels.  In bed-and-breakfasts, there are no televisions, and screw you, I like TV.  That is just one of the many ways B&Bs are terrible, but it is the worst of the many ways.

In regular hotels, I can live without the porn on the cable TV. I'm not a prude or anything. It's just that that's what the internet is for. Did you somehow go on a business trip and not bring your laptop or phone?

Also, there should be premium channels, hotels. This might be my only chance to watch HBO.  Again, I am paying by the minute to use some space you have lying around.  At least make it nice.

And the best amenity of all: 1. In-room coffee maker:   Another way bed-and-breakfasts are nightmares is that you are expected to get up and mingle with total strangers at breakfast, so  if you just want a cup of coffee you have to go down to the kitchen and be introduced to a bunch of people you don't even know, all before you've had even a bit of caffeine, and that is terrible.  I don't even want to know the people I already know; the thought of meeting new people makes me want to run screaming to the hills, and the thought of doing so in my sweatpants and t-shirt with my hair sticking up is even worse.

In hotels, you get the anonymity that I want.  Not only does nobody look anybody else in the eye in the lobby, but there's no feeling like you should be friends just because you're all occupying space near each other.  But even before I wander through the lobby to load up a plate with fourteen toasted English muffins and tiny little boxes of boysenberry jam, I get to make my coffee in the privacy of my own hotel room, and that hotel room is my bedroom, too, which means that I'm practically making coffee in my bed, getting to prolong the best part of any day, by which I mean the part of the day when you are awake but don't actually have to get out of bed yet.  I know technically I have to get up and fill the coffeemaker with water from the bathroom (GROSS! DON'T THINK ABOUT IT!) sink and then wait a minute for the coffee, but it's all done within sight of my bed and so it's like I'm still there.  It's such an awesome setup, I am considering right now moving my coffeemaker up to my bedroom.

Maybe Sweetie would let me install a pancake machine there, too...

Rankings: The Best Best Picture Winners I've Seen

There is a writer on Kitchenette, which is kind of a sub-blog of Gawker, who has been ranking various kinds of foods and things, and I have both enjoyed those rankings, and been inspired by them to start doing my own rankings from time to time.

Since tonight is the Academy Awards, which Sweetie is taping, and since I am sitting in a chair in our basement just inside the garage door while Mr F sits in the hatchback to my car-- sort of a long story -- I decided to rank Best Picture Winners I have seen.  Hence,

The Best Picture Winners I Have Seen, From Worst To Best

24. The Godfather: From time to time, people who really like a movie will tell you how great that movie is, and the more people tell you how great a movie is, the less likely I am to like it.  That is why I avoid nearly everything that captures pop culture, from Breaking Bad to... well, Breaking Bad, I guess.  The first Godfather movie I saw was The Godfather III, which I saw when it came to the theaters, and I liked it.  I was surprised to hear everyone say how terrible it was and how great The Godfather was, so one time about a decade ago I rented The Godfather and watched it and nearly fell asleep because it was so slow and boring and terrible.  I wish everyone would shut up about how great this movie is.  I'd rather go rewatch The Godfather III again, although odds are I am misremembering that movie and am thinking about The Devil's Advocate instead. No matter; either was better than this one.

23. Dances With Wolves: Back in the 1990s I lived in a studio apartment furnished with used furniture and my old bed from when I was a kid, and I bought a VCR from my friend Jimmie for something like $35, which was a lot of money to me then.  Then I rented Dances With Wolves and tried to watch it, but never made it through the whole thing.  All I remember is Kevin Costner running around a campfire or something.

22. The English Patient: I am about 90% sure Sweetie and I watched this on a date once because I remember spending most of the movie thinking why is his name pronounced "RAFE"?  The only reason this movie even ranks this high is because of how bad the other two were, and because it inspired a rarely-seen but great episode of Seinfeld:

I hope that in the future all the geezers who go on about how I Love Lucy die of senility and everyone realizes that Seinfeld should be one of the two things we try to preserve from the 20th century for future generations to know us by.

21. West Side Story: I like to have background noise while I work, so I usually have Netflix playing something; this prevents it from being too quiet in my office, because if it is to quiet I will be able to hear what my mind is thinking and I do not need to be introspective.  Usually I have sitcoms that I've seen on, but I went through this phase last year where I streamed musicals, thinking that was something I could do.  I couldn't.  Pirates of Penzance was nothing like The Simpsons promised, and this musical was awful.  Possibly the only reason for this to exist is so that schoolkids don't have to try to actually read Romeo And Juliet but could instead watch this play.  That would spare them the awfulness of Shakespearean English, while still allowing them to watch an incredibly dated, somewhat trite story.*

*In my 8th grade class we got to watch the 1968 version of the play, in which there was a fleeting glimpse of Juliet's boob.  Our parents were pre-warned about this in case they wanted to remove us from class.  I got to stay!

20. Crash: In terms of 'interlocking storylines that all come together,' Babel was a more interesting movie and Love, Actually had better looking women.

19. Shakespeare In Love: I remember liking this movie but now I don't know why.  I went to look up who played Shakespeare, and when I saw his picture I thought he was in Lost, too, but it turns out he played the Monsignor in American Horror Story: Asylum, which was by far the best of the three seasons of American Horror Story I've seen.

18. On The Waterfront: We watched this as a film in class in high school, or maybe grade school? For school, anyway.  I think we were learning about unions.  It probably shouldn't rank this high, but the movies above it were way worse and/or more forgettable.

17. The Hurt Locker: You know why people are so upset about American Sniper? Because in nearly every war movie the heroes are presented as either super-reluctant to be at war or are not even there to kill people.  Great war movies have them do both.  In Saving Private Ryan, for example, the troop is trying to rescue a guy.  In this movie, the soldier doesn't try to kill people, he saves lives by disarming bombs.  I just went and looked at a list of the top 20 greatest war movies of all time, and 5 of them flat-out are about rescue missions, or other feel-good-ish types of topics  A bunch of the rest of them have people killing only clear-cut bad guys -- generally Nazis and the Japanese during World War II.  So it's okay to have your guys be cold-blooded killers if the people they're cold-bloodedly killing are cold-blooded-er.  Fun fact: Jeremy whatshisface was also in Avengers, as a hero who never fights anyone either!

16. Gone With The Wind: Actually I never saw this movie but I read the book when I was in Morocco back in 1995 and it was one of the only English books at the used bookstore near the dorms.  I also read Les Miserable, and of the two, this one was better.

15. All Quiet On The Western Front: Since I'm counting movies if I read the book I thought I'd also count movies if I was supposed to read the book for school but didn't and still got an A on the test.  This one probably shouldn't rank this high but I didn't realize it was here until now and I'm too lazy to go back and re-number all these things, plus I want to make people mad by ranking a hundred-year-old movie higher than The Godfather even though I never saw the movie or read the book.

14. Titanic: Remember when movies used to be in theaters for, like, years? Sweetie and I took my mom to see this when it had been in the theater for nearly a year.  My mom had seen it once or twice already.  I liked the movie, but my enjoyment of it was somewhat diminished by the fact that I bought one of those 80-ounce sodas you can get, and developed a strong need to go to the bathroom right about as the ship started to go down, so for about 1/3 of the movie I was a bit distracted and at the end [SPOILER ALERT?] I just wanted Jack to let go of her stupid hand already.

13. The Silence Of The Lambs: This movie once seemed sort of destined for greatness but I think all the sequels and prequels and isn't there a TV show about it now? And then there was Dexter, which was ridiculous and which I avoided because: pop culture, and now I think of this movie and just sort of move on.

12. Gladiator:We watched this because my Dad recommended it; he said he liked it but (and I quote) he "didn't like all the sex." We watched it, noted the complete lack of sex scenes, and thought "Did we watch the same movie as Dad?"




11. American Beauty: Wasn't Kevin Spacey dead at the end? I think he was.  This movie was totally ruined for me by that cutaway from Family Guy.

10. A Beautiful Mind: I think I'm probably ranking this so high because I read the book and saw the movie and I can't remember whether I'm thinking all the good parts of the book were in the movie or not.  Also: Russell Crowe has two movies on this list? Remember when Russell Crowe was a thing, before Hugh Jackman became the only Australian we can like? Australians make it into American fame like warriors become The Highlander.

9. The Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King: The first two movies were totally garbage, right, which is why this one is the only one that won best picture?  Think: if it hadn't been for this Academy Award, The Hobbit might not have become a bloated parody of itself, and I might have seen it.

8. Chicago: I have this soundtrack and listen to it all the time.  I like to sing along with it. I'm cool that way.  This is also the only movie musical worth watching, period.  Musicals on stage are great; we saw The Producers touring production in Chicago (which is the only musical I've seen by professionals, on stage, and is what I base that opinion on).  Musicals on film are awful and should not be allowed, but because this one worked we get about 1 or 2 a year.

7. Forrest Gump: I remember being mad, like really mad and for a long time, that this beat out Pulp Fiction. I remember when I used to have opinions about football games, too.  Now I look back and wonder how I ever cared so passionately about things that don't even matter while they're happening, let alone after they're done.  Once you've had actual things (good and/or bad) happen to you, you don't care about fake things like football ref's calls and Academy Awards.  Those things matter very much to the people competing for them, and not even the tiniest bit to fans.

6. No Country For Old Men: I liked this movie so much I wanted to read books by the guy who wrote the book this was based on, but then I heard that he writes kind of weird, so I'll probably just stick with having watched this movie.

5. Rain Man: I mean, I loved this movie long before I actually had two sons who are autistic, and now I can watch it and be amazed at just how much Dustin Hoffman actually nailed what autism is like, but even beyond that this is one of those rare movies that I can watch again and again even though I know the words by heart by now.  The scene where Tom Cruise has to talk his way into a house to let Raymond watch TV is heartbreaking, and I would absolutely do that for my boys, who might need it.



4. Platoon: I'm pretty sure Charlie Sheen wasn't rescuing anyone and didn't have any false modesty and there wasn't a single Nazi in it.  This was the second-best war movie ever made, right behind Three Kings.  I'd like to go watch it again, right now.  Charlie Sheen is amazing for his ability to make you like him; he's like the anti-Tom Cruise.  You like Tom Cruise despite the fact that every cell in your body is screaming at you not to like him, because Tom Cruise is an amazing actor who is superlikeable when he acts like Tom Cruise.  You like Charlie Sheen, because every cell in your body is saying Yeah we like him too forget all that crazy stuff because Charlie Sheen is the big brother nobody ever had and everybody should have, so that Christmas parties with our families will be chaotically fun again.

3. Argo: Think about this: How many movies have you seen that were based on a true story and you knew the ending and you still were tense as it was happening? Ben Affleck deserved two Oscars for that.

2. The Departed: I remember two specific things and one general thing about this movie.  The two specific things are that scene where Leonardo DiCaprio smashed the glass against that guy's head and I was like WOW I THINK HE REALLY SMASHED THAT GLASS, and then the ending scene.  The general thing I remember about this movie is thinking that every movie should be like this movie.

1. Schindler's List: I saw this movie in the theaters. The theater was packed, and at the end of the movie, the lights came up and the entire audience just sat there, stunned and silent, for about five minutes,but it felt longer.  Then everyone stood up and just walked out, silently.  There was no talking and no smiling and no laughing.  We didn't even start talking until about 10 minutes into the ride home.  Nearly three decades later, I can still feel how this movie was like a punch to the stomach, but one that you totally deserved.  Everyone should watch this movie.  I don't think I could watch it again.