What is the big deal about Downton Abbey???

I haven't watched Downton Abbey. Several people have actually told me that I shouldn't watch it, because I'll hate it and make fun of it and make them feel silly for liking it. But I'd never let a little thing like never-having-watched-the-show get in the way of a good, solid mocking, would I? OF COURSE NOT!!!! And so without further ado, here is my take on Downton Abbey:

Downton Abbey is a British period drama set in the 1910-s-1920's (period drama like a drama set during a certain period. Not a drama about periods). 

Hahahaha period drama. NOBODY STEAL THIS IDEA.

According to Wikipedia, Downton holds a Guinness world record for being the most critically-acclaimed television show ever, as well as being one of the most-watched shows ever throughout the world. This is probably because Downton bravely takes on the tough problems everyone on earth can relate to -- things like finding an acceptable male heir to the title of Earl of Grantham, and marrying into enough money to pay for a house full of servants.

So true.

You see, problems started at Downton Abbey right from the get-go, when the estate was running into financial problems. The Earl of Grantham got through this by wisely marrying some rich American broad. The arrangement was mutually beneficial: he got to take all her money, while she got to brag about being a Countess. 

Your dream is the world's worst nightmare.

But as you can probably imagine, the Dowager Countess isn't the world's biggest fan of her new daughter-in-law, who, being an American nouveau-riche, is always a-hootin' and a-hollerin' and starring in reality shows and releasing sex tapes just to get attention.

As if the Countess weren't already bad enough with her hollerin' and her sex tapes, she also pissed everyone off and ruined everything by only giving birth to girls.

Girls are just the WORST.

Oh, and then when they finally had some male heirs sorted out and everything was going to be okay, the goddamned Titanic sank and killed them all, so they were back to square one.

It's like they forgot they were rich or something.

WHAT A F**KING NAIL-BITER, AM I RIGHT?!?!

Yes, yes, the folks at Downton had a lot of strife to deal with. Other troubles they faced included things like:

Should I boff the help, or should I not boff the help?

How can I prevent this annoying War to End All Wars from affecting my life in any way?

Ugh, my stupid family members keep marrying down! Why can't they just marry the aristocracy for god's sake?!

Literally marrying down. Haha because he's tall, get it? GET IT?!?!?

Yeah, I was struggling on this one.

Which of these cousins should marry each other?

Does anyone care? I mean, does ANYONE care?

Ugh, get these wounded soldiers out of my mansion.

YOU TELL HER, CORA.

Should I marry the man I love, even if it means I'll only be kinda rich from here on out?

The old "I'll tell you I don't want your money so you let me do what I want and still give me a pretty good amount of money" routine. Daughters have been manipulating their fathers with that one for generations.

By the way, Dad, I DON'T NEED YOUR MONEY TO FOLLOW MY DREAMS AND GO TO CLOWN SCHOOL. IT'S NOT ALL ABOUT MONEY, YOU KNOW. But seriously, clown school is kind of expensive, so maybe you can just pay half? Or are my dreams worth nothing to you???

So there you have it. Downton Abbey. Take "Keeping Up with the Kardashians," set it in the early 20th century, cast Maggie Smith as Kris Jenner, and presto, you've got the most critically acclaimed show EVER.

I can't believe I've been missing it.



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The truth about fake fingernails: a confession

Confession time: I am a finger-picker. For pretty much my entire life, I have picked at the skin around my nails whenever I get bored, stressed, or concentrate too much. Sometimes, I would pick the skin to the point that it bled, and my fingernails grew in all warped because I would mess with them down at the bottom where they're still soft.

It was gross.

Then it was time to get married, and I picked my fingers so badly on the way to a dress fitting that two of them were bleeding. I realized this had to stop -- getting blood on my white dress wasn't going to be very awesome, and I'd have to somehow hide my hands in every wedding picture. Not good.

It was time to take drastic action. And that drastic action was to go to the drug store and buy a package of glue-on artificial nails. I sat down and glued those bitches on, then painted them because they were super ugly, and went on with my life. And f**k if my fingers weren't completely healed in a few days.

26 years of finger-picking, cured in under a week. Now it's 9 months later, and I still sit down once a week to take off the old and glue on the new nails. Any time I stop wearing them, even for a few hours, I'll catch myself picking at my fingers again. So it looks like me and the acrylics are bound for life.

So, as I face down my life sentence, here is the straight dope on what it's like to wear acrylic nails all the time. Hint: THEY ARE THE SATAN. I HATE THEM. But I hate them less than having mangle-fingers, so I guess it's worth it ... ??

1

THEY WILL ALWAYS BE TOO F**KING LONG

My nails do not qualify me for employment at the DMV, because I buy the short ones. They are pretty much the exact same length as normal human fingernails, to the point where people are sometimes shocked when I tell them the nails are fake. If I do not sufficiently clip my real nails before I put them on, you can see my nails poking out from behind them. They look normal.

Now THIS is a set of DMV-worthy nails!

But here's the thing: they come in packages with a bunch of different sizes, and if you want to get full use out of each box, you're going to have to compromise a little. For each finger, there is one size that fits perfectly and one size that is too big and will annoy the sh*t out of you. Inevitably, a couple of fingers are stuck with the too-big size.

The fingers with the too-big nails on them will click against the keyboard as you type.

If they are on your thumbs, they will make it much more difficult to text.

If you enjoy playing guitar (like me), they will make you look like a talentless hack who cares more about their appearance than their ability to function properly in the world.

This is embarrassing.

Also, they will make you want to chop off your fingers entirely.

2

You will have hideous bruises on your actual fingernails

I don't know how this happens. Perhaps I press too hard when I glue the new nails on, or perhaps I'm too rough when I take the old ones off, but the result is nasty green bruises on my real nails. Whenever I take the fake ones off, I am greeted with a horrible kaleidoscope of color that absolutely should not be there. If I ever decided to stop with the fake nails, I would have to paint my nails a dark color for like six months until the bruises grew out. It's that bad. It looks like I slammed every finger in a door one by one.

They're beautiful, I know.

3

"Breaking a nail" is actually excruciating

You attach these suckers to your real nails with what is essentially Gorilla Glue. They're on there pretty damn tight. By the end of the week, the glue will start to weaken and you run a chance of one popping off when you try to open a soda can with it, but for the most part, they stay on.

So ... you know that old female complaint of "oh man, I broke a nail!" like it's nothing?

SHIT BE DIFFERENT NOW. The glue is super strong, yo. So here we have a piece of plastic stuff that is super-glued to your real fingernail. In order for it to break, it has to catch on something and be yanked so hard that it actually RIPS THE ACRYLIC. WHICH IS SUPER-GLUED TO YOUR FINGERNAIL. AND IT IS STRONGER AND THICKER THAN REGULAR NAILS.

We're talking about a force nearly strong enough to rip off your nail, which, as you may recall, is TORTURE STANDARD FARE. It f**king hurts. I managed to catch the thumb nail on something the other day and ripped it, which led to me rolling around on the floor screaming.

Okay, so it didn't actually bleed or anything, but STILL. A little sympathy, if you wouldn't mind.

4

The rounded ends will thwart you at every turn

The reason acrylic nails keep me from picking at my fingers is because the ends are rounded. They have no good sharp point to dig into anything. This is good when you want your poor cuticles to heal; however, if you have one of those pesky itches on your back, or your leg, or ANYWHERE AT ALL, you can forget satisfyingly scratching it. The nails make this impossible.

You will want to invest in a mmmmmmbuttttttt-scratchaaaaa!

For the same reason, they also take all the fun out of picking your nose, if you were wondering. Not that I would know, of course.

5

After a week, they're prone to popping off

There is nothing more embarrassing than losing a nail somewhere and hoping it doesn't turn up in the stuffing at Thanksgiving. As I said, the glue is strong, but after a week it degrades to the point where the nails may pop off without too much trouble (don't worry -- you can feel them come off, so it'd be pretty hard to lose one without noticing).

I keep nail glue in my purse at all times, and it's a good thing, because I've had to surreptitiously glue a nail back on at work, on the train, in a restaurant, in the car, in the bathroom, on a boat, in a house, with a goat, and with a mouse.

It was a giant, radioactive mouse.

So, in conclusion, F**K YOU, STUPID NAILS. I HATE YOU WITH THE PASSION OF A THOUSAND FIERY SUNS. ESPECIALLY THE PINKIE NAIL ON MY RIGHT HAND WHICH KEEPS CLICKING AGAINST THE ENTER AND SHIFT KEYS ON MY KEYBOARD.

But don't they look fabulous? My fingers, I mean. Which are not bloody. The nails are okay too, I guess.

But come on; why couldn't I just have a regular addiction, like heroin or something? I bet heroin addicts can pick their noses just fine, even without a buttscratcher.

Sigh.

Terrible Movie Reviews: Twister

Twister is the kind of movie that I will always watch when it's on TV, because it's Twister and my brain has plenty of neurons to spare.

Twister tries to act like it's a movie about tornadoes, but that is nonsense. Twister is so much bigger than that. It is a beautifully-crafted tribute to TRUE LOVE and the STRUGGLE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL. It's like the Bible, told allegorically through a movie about destructive funnel clouds. Let's take a look:

Twister stars Helen Hunt as a crazy storm-chaser who tries to fill the hole her father's death left in her soul with scientific learning about the thing that killed him: a big ol' fat F5 tornado. 

Fact: This is why 95% of storm chasers choose that field.

She and her lovable band of loser storm-chasers have invented some kind of machine called Dorothy that, if they can place it exactly in the path of a tornado, will enable them to learn enough about tornadoes to predict them more accurately in the future and give better tornado warnings -- the kind of thing that might have saved her father (except it totally wouldn't have, because the movie opens with her father's death scene and we can all see that they have plenty of time to get to their tornado shelter; it just turned out the shelter was a piece of crap and the door flew off, taking her father with it. So maybe she should be studying how to not build shitty tornado shelters where the doors can just fly off and suck people out like a giant vacuum).

Enter Bill Paxton, Helen Hunt's estranged husband. He shows up with his new beau, needing Helen Hunt to sign their divorce papers so he can go off and marry the other chick. Helen is busily signing here and initialing there when --ALL OF A SUDDEN-- a TORNADO appears nearby!

Bill Paxton, who used to chase storms with this crew, is like a recovering alcoholic reunited with his old drinking buddies. He forgets all about the divorce papers and his fiancee and takes off with everyone else to go chase down the storm, trying to put their stupid Dorothy machine right in front of it. This activity seems to be approximately as dangerous as hand-feeding a grizzly bear, but these guys aren't afraid because SCIENCE.

Naturally, they fail the first time around, because they have four Dorothys so if the first one worked, the movie would be over in like twenty minutes. Some might consider that an improvement, but not me. You'd miss out on so many magic movie moments if it ended in the first twenty minutes.

WE GOT COWS, Y'ALL.

After the first Dorothy fails, we meet THE BAD GUYS of the movie (because a movie about tornadoes obviously needs a villain. Tornadoes can't be the villains because NATURE IS NATURAL and therefore CANNOT BE EVIL). You can tell the bad guys are bad because their hair is slicked back, their equipment is nicer, and they drive a scary fleet of all-black vehicles like some kind of presidential motorcade OF DOOM.

Also, Darth Vader's theme music plays whenever they drive around.

What makes the bad guys bad, you ask? Do they want tornadoes to kill more people? Are they trying to genetically engineer a more deadly tornado?

This is what I would do if I were a tornado supervillain.

Of course not, silly! The bad guys are bad because they are CORPORATE SELL-OUTS.

Ummm ... okay wait. Let's dissect that a little bit:

The bad guys have nicer equipment and a fleet of black vehicles because they "sold out" and got corporate sponsorship for their storm-chasing activities. What ... the f**k? Does f**king Pepsi sponsor them or something? What the hell kind of corporation would pour money into some crazy tornado-chasers, and how exactly would this investment pay off for them? 

The movie presupposes that pretty much anyone can "sell out" at any time, and the only reason any human being on Earth has not accepted endless funds from corporate sponsors is because they're too morally sound. Oh how I wish this were the case.

Anyone? No? Nobody wants to sponsor me?

Anyway, the bad guys are very, very bad, and they try to steal all the ideas and equipment from the good guys, including their own fancy version of Dorothy. They are seen showing this invention to a local news crew, who of course are very interested because who wouldn't want to watch a special news report on some scientists who invented some boring machine for measuring tornado wind speeds or whatever.

The rest of the movie is just one ridiculous scenario after another. Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton find themselves within ten feet of a tornado like five times in two days, which of course causes them to fall back in love with each other. They eventually succeed in launching Dorothy into a tornado -- an F5 tornado that they survive by tying themselves to some pipes. The bad guys all get killed by various tornadoes, because they're bad guys and that's just how it goes.

And then at the very end, after Dorothy collected all the data the storm-chasers were looking for, Red Bull showed up and was all "hey, can we sponsor you?" and they were all "F**K YOU, RED BULL. WE DON'T WANT YOUR TAINTED CORPORATE MONEY AND YOUR GREED." So Red Bull was like, "fine, suit yourself. We will get some guy to jump out of a space capsule instead," and that's exactly what they did.