Do you have a special idiot in your life? Are you in fact an idiot? Do you like blindly throwing money at things early every December? Then man do I have the listicle FOR YOU.

Remote Control Oscar Meyer Wienermobile

Are you and your loved ones serious about your wieners? Are you seriously serious about your vehicular wieners? Do you maybe have a dauchshaund you want to torment? Well only $25 separates you from motorized bliss.

Other things representative of how seriously we are taking gift giving this year after the jump.

In which I willingly ignore ISIS and/or Trump.

• Let’s start with something not dumb: today is Give Miami day. Maybe open your wallets or something. I’ve already received 5 emails from the non-profit I used to work at and I might send them marketing advice in lieu of cash, but w/e.
• The CEO of Tinder gave a really stupid interview that revealed that he doesn’t know what the word ‘sodomy’ means. Also I learned Tinder was owned by Match, which also owns OkCupid, which congratulations you’ve nearly cornered the market on online dating yet still can’t figure out how to make money off it? Not that that’s stopping you from taking the company public, except whoops you can’t even do that right.
• The IPO might be too little too late, anyway – Wall Street’s tech ardor seems to be cooling off.
• Related: Founder of project management software darling Basecamp says maybe calm the hell down already with the unicorns and stuff.
• Self absorbed achievement obsessed people who are trying to live the sort of life you only see on celebrity Instagram accounts are awful and I hate them but they need to keep existing so that by comparison I seem normal. Here is an advice column addressed to one such horrible person.
• Speaking of terrifying levels of personal drive: Learning To Be Beyonce From Her Terrible Father. Seriously Bey’s dad sounds like a dick.
• It’s ISIS versus Anonymous! Everybody loses.
• Bill Simmons versus Obama! Everybody wins.
• Apparently a bunch of companies are trying to start the “Uber for food.” This Atlantic article tries to use two as a metaphor for the capitalist idea of decentralized replaceable labor versus Marxist collectivism. Or something? Honestly ordering food from randos on the internet is just creepy and I’m sticking with Seamless.
• Or y’know maybe not – 10% of NYC’s highest rated Seamless restaurants found to not exist.
• A surprisingly well researched article on the history of Duran Duran’s Bond single A View To A Kill. Listen to this and ask yourself how a James Bond movie featuring Grace Jones and a young Christopher Walken could be so bad.
• I’m going to a Friendsgiving this weekend that will be filled with proud new parents and their brood and all I can think about is this old WVUM station ID by John Pookie.
• Fallout 4 came out this past week and reviews are all over the place but whatever nerds like me will play the heck out of it anyway. Here’s my review: if spending $60 on something that takes about 30 hours for you to get to a point where it can be described as “fun” sounds good to you, then by all means knock yourself out. I think I’m selling my copy this weekend.

Yeah we’re over this week too.

• Silently crying in front of your wife not considered privileged marital communication. The “tell that to my WIFE” jokes write themselves here.

• A dude in India price gouged the Nebraska Department of Correction for banned drugs used in lethal injections that never actually reached Nebraska.

• If you’re going to basically be a grumpy old man and write a long article talking about how Millenials don’t know how easy they have it, maybe don’t illustrate the whole thing with shitty stick figures. Just a thought.

• Gorgeous photos of a midwestern pinball arcade in 1968.

• Tenugui are strips of cloth that were traditionally to Japan what the bandanna was to the American west – versatile, always accessible, and useful beyond just tying something up or drying your hands. As time passed, Tenugui’s prints became more complicated and their role shifted from utilitarian staple to fashion accessory. Read more about their history here.

• 54 year old Michael J. Fox looks exactly as awkward in a brightly colored puffer vest as you’d expect.

• New Yorker gets customary Oklahoman greeting – aka a fat lip from a dude in a pickup truck who then goes on to kick down a door and attack people with a bat and oh god just read this weird thing.

• Guy in your MFA, the twitter parody of the tortured genius manchild lurking in every creative writing program, interviewed.

• John Hodgman thinks Florida has gotten a bad rap; still not coming to Miami.

• The market for zero-day software exploits is exactly as cyberpunk-dystopian as you hoped/feared.

• Hurricane Patricia is now the strongest storm ever recorded and I look forward to this record being broken in like 2 weeks thanks to global warming p.s. we’re all dead.

Tuesday night, I laid alone on my tiny couch and browsed the channels till I settled on E!’s Keeping Up with the Kardashians. After a minute of shedding any self-judgement, I seriously thought: If I die tomorrow, I’m OK with having spent the final night of my life watching this. Perhaps it was a form of reality show foreshadowing.

As it turns out, that was probably the last conscious night for basketball player Lamar Odom, the almost ex-husband of the youngest Kardashian, Khloe. His basically lifeless body was found at Dennis Hof’s Love Ranch “brothel” in Nevada. Since then, what I can gather is that he’s in some stage of multiple organ failure.

^{Image courtesy of Ivy League Boys}

The following are 27 responses to 27 Ways To Be A Modern Man – published in the Men’s Style section of the New York Times 09/29/15.

1. When the modern man buys shoes for his spouse, he doesn’t have to ask her sister for the size. And he knows which brands run big or small.

The modern man is married and obsessed with women’s feet. His wife is ok with this most of the time – his wife’s sister, less so.

Rest are after the jump.

Allow me to recount a conversation Liz and I recently had:

Me: Is there a show based in Miami that’s funnier than Golden Girls?
Liz: There is no funnier show ever.

So in honor of the show’s debut 30 years ago this week, links ahoy!

• How Many Men Did The Golden Girls Sleep With, Exactly? (answer: a lot)
• 30 Years Later The Golden Girls Is Still the Most Progressive Show On Television
• The Ten Best Golden Girls Related Artworks
• ‘30 Isn’t a Drag’ – RuPaul’s Drag Race Golden Girls homages + marathon this weekend on Logo
• The OG t-shirt I never got off my ass and ordered for Liz’s birthday present
• There is a new porn parody and no I am not linking that you can google it yourself, perv
• Here, watch this instead: Clueless parody from the 1996 MTV Movie Awards featuring Estelle Getty, Rue McClanahan and Betty White.

“The transition of film,” says Oddball Films owner and eternal archivist Stephen Parr, “and its 100-year plus longevity, to the ever-changing formats of digital media bring speed, lower cost and worldwide distributability though the trade-off is now everyone is an archivist, constantly migrating data from format to format, device to device.”

This lament might sting purists who long for streamlining and clarifying the ever-increasing muck of hubris clogging up the binary pipes of the modern, digital world like a dutiful librarian. But it is especially topical coming from a man who began archiving bizarre, oddball, one-off, and just plain eccentric moving images a little over 30 years ago.

Introduction:

The label states WARNING: CONTAINS COCONUTS, MILK. Which is to say: what? Do you mean coconut milk or both coconuts and milk? Because if the latter, that might explain a few things in regards to its awfulness.

Nose:

Mistolin, bartender’s friend, a heavily powdered abuela.

On the tongue:

You know how alcohol burns? This is not that burn – this is the burn caused by someone not knowing what they’re doing and then trying to cover up failure with aspartame. Notes of accidentally spraying sunscreen in your mouth.

Crunkness:

I’m confused how this is 8% alcohol? I’m also confused how these guys haven’t gotten sued yet by whoever actually owns the rights to Miami Vice nowindays? Anyway I couldn’t finish the 24 ounce can so I can’t confirm whether or not this actually gets you drunk. I get a headache long before I actually get girl drink drunk so I’m maybe not the right person to judge.

Verdict:

As smooth as Don Johnson’s chest. Today, I mean – not in 1986.

So John has a new cat. A new nameless cat who is still recovering from a head injury, thus the Victorian neckskirt.

Won’t you help John name this cat?

John’s friends, who happen to all be completely insane, have already started the ball rolling with 70 or so suggestions. Vote on them to your heart’s content here or feel free to add additional suggestions at the bottom of the form.

Please, won’t you help name this cat?

Can Florida’s private rail link between Orlando and Miami possibly work? (No, no it cannot – yay free market!)

I once referred to The Grammys as the celebrity zoo because it represented a room full of people whom contribute very little to anyone’s life save for giving them something to look at.

I’m not sure there was ever a point in time where this wasn’t the case although I’m sure it’s more true now than it’s ever been given the nature of pop music spectacles and the respect doled out for personal brands rather than artistic output. For some reason I saw the democratizing influence of the internet eventually changing that equation somewhat.

Meanwhile Drake is feuding with someone in this extremely internet savvy meta way while at the same time we’re at something of a nadir for artists actually being able to get paid for their work. I think it’s safe to say I was wrong?

With the release of what appears to be a terrible new Marvel film, let’s just go ahead and run down everything unbelievable about Marvel’s mismanagement of its own film properties.

• I can’t believe how goddamn long and inscrutable the Avengers: Age of Ultron wikipedia page is.
• I can’t believe we need an article detailing ‘Where Are They Now?’ questions for the Marvel universe.
• I can’t believe that in 2015 the best we can do in these movies for an antagonist is the same crappy stand in for nazis we’ve been using since 1965.
• I can’t believe how shitty the new Fantastic Four movie looks. Oh wait yes I can.
• I can’t believe anyone gave a shit about having a black Johnny Storm? I mean come the heck on.
• Actually wait Susan Storm (Invisible Woman) is Johnny Storm’s (Human Torch) sister, and one is black and one is white in the new film, so did they shoehorn an adoption story in here or what? Also why is a dude traditionally depicted as a gray templed scientist being depicted by a doe eyed childish goof?
• I can’t believe Grantland beat me to writing about how weirdly incongruous the above casting is.
• I can’t believe I KNOW SUCH USELESS CRAP.
• I can’t believe they won’t cast Donald Glover as Spider Man.
• I can’t believe they’ve rebooted Spider-Man twice already and are now gearing up to do it a third time.
• I refuse to believe that this dingus will have aged enough to make me care about said third reboot.
• I can’t believe I just insulted a kid? Oh wait he’s 19 now, ok everything is cool.
• I can’t believe how much money all these movies are going to make despite being not good.
• I guess I can be excited about a Deadpool movie.

^{$13,900.00 gets you all this!}

• $10 bottled water from Kentucky specifically for mixing with whiskey and bearing the painfully lumbertwee name “Old Limestone.”
• $6 for a bottle of water with two sprigs of asparagus in it. Whole Foods is claiming this was a communication error but I really think they’re just trying to see what they can get away with at this point.
• $5k for an electric moped. You know – like the skater kids tool around on, only powered by electricity rather than a shitty two stroke. Personally this makes it less cool.
• $13.9k for an imported Japanese 1986 Nissan Skyline GT. I mean just look at this interior and imagine what kind of fresh hell it’d be to drive a car with the steering wheel on the wrong side in Miami traffic.
• $80 for a mask from a deleted scene in Saw wherein someone gets their eyes pecked out by hummingbirds.
• $18 for wool drier balls. These are not sheep’s testicles – just balls of wool. You put them in a drier for some reason.
• $15 for seeds you can plant after the apocalypse. I mean assuming there’s non-irradiated ground to plant them in.
• $1.6 million for Jesse Pinkman’s house. I’m surprised this isn’t on GoFundMe/Kickstarter/whatever yet.
• $50 for toy gun that shoots dimpled foam balls at 70 mph and requires six C batteries. It’s also hellzaloud. Damn I’m glad I don’t have kids.

I woke up this morning to a faucet the cat had turned on and left running. I heard it from my bedroom and for a moment thought my roommate was taking a shower but instead walked into the eerie sound of quickly flowing water in a dark kitchen. I hit the switch praying it wasn’t a leak and instead found a sink that had been running hot for so long that the entire fixture was warm to the touch.

I fed the cat and sat down with my coffee to read about the rents that were recently disclosed for new affordable housing being constructed in Brooklyn. A 2 bedroom is approximately what I and my roommate (over)pay for my apartment now.

Searching Kickstarter for the word ‘smart’ returns 14000 Google hits. In the first 10 pages we had doorlocks, TVs, “home interfaces,” irrigation controllers, suitcases, office desks, water bottles, screen protectors, bike locks, homes, plates, lamps, outlets, bags, badminton rackets, phone batteries, belt organizers, baby seat alarms, skipping rope, paddleboards, energy sensors, shoe insoles, herb gardens, pens, a trashcan/vacuum combo, thermal imagers, nannies, earplugs, kegel excercise aids, thermometers, bedding, toys, laptop stands, and wallets.

Meanwhile no one can afford to live anywhere and my “dumb” faucet was defeated by a cat.

We’re living in the future, people. Hope you’re having fun.

Doonesbury – April 5th, 2015. Somehow this has only gotten worse.

• Two dolphin species form alliance and have sexytimes. It’s like an oceanographic key party out there.
• ‘Why I Deleted Your Band’s Promo Email’ – via The Morning News
• Cosby’s people seem to be confusing ‘proof of criminal activity’ with ‘proof of being a sociopathic predatory skeezwad.’ What I love most about this is that there’s really no need to editorialize the statements here – they’re so plainly indefensible that only someone getting paid an insane amount of money by said skeezwad could defend them.
• The theme of this week’s news seems to be “assholes who won’t shut up.” I don’t have a link for this as I’m going back to pretending Donald Trump doesn’t exist.
• The last time I was in San Francisco I got kicked out of a bar in the mission in the early evening. As I walked down the street giggling drunkenly with friends, a lesbian couple glared at us as they were taking out their recycling. One was wearing a jeweled bindi on her forehead and a look of utter disgust on her emaciated, presumably vegan face. I have never felt more despised and cared less about it. Anyway San Francisco is where good ideas go to die and is more than a little fucked.
• In closing I worked real real hard on this mix and you should listen to it, dammit.

The Heat Lighting – Summer 2015 Mix by John S. on Mixcloud

Fancy a little weekend music? Featuring Plaid, Boxed In, Tame Impala, Ratatat, Beat Spacek, Michna, Chrome Sparks AND MORE.

Full track listing after the jump.

• I get what this NY Times article is saying about being romantically involved with someone uncute, but I still want to be the ugly one in my relationships. (Maybe this is why I’m single?)
• Congrats to Lindy West on her marriage. She looked beautiful in the photos. I have to say that you don’t have to have ever been properly “fat” to relate to this nonsense: “I’ve dated men who relished me in private but refused to be seen with me on the street, or who told me, explicitly, that we had no serious future because they were afraid their friends would laugh at them.” Men are just despicable generally. (No, wait. This is why I’m still single.) Also, I’m both offended and now hungry thanks to the hot dog ad in the middle of this article. WTF?
• I don’t have time to read this Tim and Eric interview, but you should. Then tell me about it after.
• Finally, researchers have taken on the heavy (or unfortunately light) topic of what makes a wiener attractive.
• This is why you’re poor, your mama was poor, and your kids’ll be poor: “‘Following your dreams is dangerous,’ a 31-year-old woman who runs in social entrepreneurship circles in New York, and asked not to be named, told Quartz. ‘This whole bulk of the population is being seduced into thinking that they can just go out and pursue their dream anytime, but it’s not true.’”

Tallahassee is so close to being great as to be unbelievably irritating. Like a mistake in an otherwise beautiful painting you can’t take your eyes off of.