Greatness

Trudging onto an 8am A-Train on a beautiful (re: above 40 degree) spring morning only to face the prospect of wanting to commit suicide for the next 9 hours can put a damper on any one's day.

But once in a while you come across a gem to put a smile on your face. Courtesy of nougatiest, peanuttiest, chocolate bar out there: Snickers. And it's new language: Snacklish.

The company's ads (via agency TBWA\Chiat\Day) are pure New York City sub-terrestrial perfection. Anyone who has ridden the subway has also seen the multitudes of ads. It's a smorgasbord of ways to improve your life. Enlist in this college. Partake in that medical study (Are Painkillers a problem for you?). Have this procedure done to you. And so on. It's like the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) sold their soul...and still came up $1.2 billion short of the needed operating budget.

Like this ad for random college #1.
Off the top of my head there are ads for: Monroe College, Mercy College, Borough of Manhattan Community College, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, NYU School of Continuing Studies, etc...

Then there's this:
Hilarious.
These ads are barely clever, not particularly witty, and feel like they could have been created by any 14 year old kid. But I'll be damned if these aren't some of the funniest things I've seen. They're puns. The best and funniest literary device available. Hungerectomy? Shit man hysterectomies aren't even something to laugh about. But I did. Out loud.

If you do decide to leave this venerable website and google more ads, you'll find a variety of other ill-informed individuals (bloggers) taking offense to these ads. They can go eat a dick. They're obviously not from New York and can't appreciate the genius of an ad like this:
At least the Times can appreciate it. Don't get it? If not, you're not a NYC straphanger. It is a lampoon of this:The ubiquitous Dr. Zizmor ads for better skin and facial complex. Available for viewing on any 4,5,6,A,C,E,B,D,F,V, 1,2,3,N,R,Q,W, or L train. Maybe on the J,Z, M (ha, the Jizzz-'em train line) and G trains too. But I don't fuck with trains that go to Brooklyn. Jizz-'em train, that has to be made into some sort of sexual deviance. Kind of like Angry Dragon or Donkey Punch.

This guy promises better skin w/out surgery or botox or whatever. You can't see it in this ad, but he also allows for walk-in consultations with no money down and he accepts most credit cards.

So my question is, how is this guy still in business. This has to be scam, right? Doctor's don't advertise. Only sketch-holes who want to smear their baby juice on unsuspecting faces advertise...on subways no less. Anyways, here's a NY Times article on "the new Gatsby" Dr. Zizmor. Legend has it that his face appears in every 5th subway car.

Even the TV ad is hilarious. I'm still laughing.

April 25th

Boston, MA. 12:39 pm

• First sighting of skirts and sundresses in calendar year 2009

New York, NY. 4:51 pm

• First incidence of ball sweat

Bring on the summer.

Brooklyn, We Go Hard

There's been a heaping helping of hate over the last two posts. It's okay, though. Pickle Surprise just can't recognize truly great 6th grade literature, beauty, or mediocre music that gets you hyped. Typical Northern hip-hop elitist. But as long as I'm here, I'm going to take a sip from my Haterade bottle and piss it out all over this site. All in another rambling, non-sensical, but well-written post.

Thanks to Biggie, Jay-Z, and other rappers one can almost always find someone yelling out "Broooook-lyyyn" at any random event. Not just from Brooklynites, but from random people who probably have never been there but aspire to live the Brooklyn life. No, not the life of Jiggaman who grew up "having holes in his zapatos" but the life of the resident hipster. Those kids riding the L train back and forth from BK to Lower Manhattan - thank God they don't come north of 14th street. You often see them wearing their skin-tight, testicle smothering size 24 American Apparel jeans (I'm skinny as fuck and still wear a 33), pointy-ass shoes, un-washed dredlocks, and fedora all in creating a look that can be mistaken for "Avenue A homeless bum." Damn those fedoras. Those things crossed the line from being cool to incredibly played out in a heartbeat. It probably doesn't help that you can't walk past a single street vendor without one of those Arab immigrants trying to push one on you.

The worst is when you meet someone who should be in Brooklyn but somehow made it to Manhatten. You'll find these hipsters in hiding in the Lower East Side. Like that dbag bouncer at Thor. The anorexic gay guy who used to man the door was a badass. But he has been replaced wish some Adidas Samba wearing, Fedora adorned asshole. An asshole who calls people out for wearing Chucks (way higher on the night club sneaker acceptibility list) when he's wearing clunky ass sneaks. Those hipsters like the Haterade too, apparently.

All in all, I can't hate on the way someone dresses. Even if by non-conforming in their wears they are just conforming to the hipster dress code. Anyone else see the irony? What I do find hilarious, however, is how much one pays to look like a broke ass bum. You're doing well, you have money, you can't spare $5 to put some Pert Plus in those follicles? But somehow find $300 to spend on jeans that have more holes than continuous denim...And do you insist on not showering to show off you're natural musk?

This article from the New York Observer on the gentrification of the Hipster mecca, Williamsburg, made me physically laugh out loud. Highlights?

"It's funny," Mr. Hoch said via phone from his home in Williamsburg. "There's a guy about a block away from me – an old school Puerto Rican cat – and there's a new ATM machine on Grand Street, so he's like, 'Yo man, I be seeing these kids, man, they go to the ATM machine and they forget and they just leave their receipts in there, and I go and I get them because I want to see how much money they got in their bank account.'

"He's like, 'Yo, these kids be lookin' bummy, I mean the bummiest, motherfucking, cheap looking kids and they got like $150,000 in their savings account, $280,000 in their savings account. This one motherfucker never takes a bath and he got like $400,000. He just leaves his receipts there in the machine.'"

Yes.

Finally. my unfounded theory has a piece of statistically insignificant empirical data with a horrendously small sample size to back up my claim. That is, they spend egregious amounts of time, money, and effort to look poor. That and this website:

Look at this Fucking Hipster

More Yes. Someone decided to break out the camera phone on the subway and document these "I have money but buy all my gear at an expensive ass boutique when it looks like I got it from Goodwill and spend all my free time doing intravenous drugs at Indie concerts and being better than you" type kids. The best part of the site: most of the people pictured are either riding the L or waiting for it at the Bedford Avenue stop, more evidence they all share the Brooklyn milieu... comical.

“It’s actually really hard to be a pimp when all your bitches have trust funds.”

This week's bumblefuckery from Texas

*Note: From now on I'm posting immediately after Baby J, solely to bury his posts. Can't stand the motherfucker.


I know, there are thousands of reasons to hate Texas, it's a relatively easy target. But every so often, even the most horrendous entities outdo themselves and it's actually worth reporting. Not because the story is surprising, but just because the event falls below the low standards I already set for it. And besides, now that Bush is gone and Texan stupidity has been upstaged in the media by the idiotic ramblings of All-star dumbasses such as Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, it's good to see our dear Texan morons back in the news.

In the past week both Rick Perry, the governor of texas (I'm no longer giving it the dignity of capitalization) and a representative from its state legislature (Betty Brown) managed to make complete asses of their state (or I suppose their soon to be nation according to rick perry). Impressively enough, Betty suggested that Asians change their names so that they are "easier for Americans to deal with." Whoa!

And no, I don't care if what she said was offensive. In fact, not to be outdone, I'm going to counter Betty Brown's racially insensitive quote with a racially insensitive point of my own: Can you think of a single Asian name that's more than one syllable? I mean, try it off the top of your head... just write down the first 5 Asian surnames that come to your head (ignoring Japanese names):

Cho
Lee
Zhang
Sung
Ming

See? I just did it, not one exceeded a syllable (In fact, two of them double as English Words!!!!). And if you want, try the same thing with english names. I bet you'll have at least one pretty dense 2+ syllable name like Stephens or Hamilton in there.

Conclusion: the problem with Betty Brown isn't that she's racist, had she simply said something such as "We can't understand you! Go back to yer country! White power!" to Asians THAT would be perfectly acceptable, even encouraged. She is a texas republican after all, we know she's thinking it. The problem is that she's a complete idiot, and quite possibly, illiterate.


Although, in her defense, she probably ain't never met none of them yeller' people and therefore doesn't know any Asian names first place. But I'm sure she's walked by plenty of Chinese restaurants... and them crazy characters they be writin' with are intimidating.

Would I...

So....I was thinking. Would it be sweeter to be a Greaser or a Soc. Sure, the Greasers were glorified in The Outsiders but if you think about it, they were nothing but a bunch of leather jacket wearing Emilio Estevezes. The kind of cats who don't shower for a week at a time, spits in your cheeseburger and inexplicably drinks Mike's Hard Lemonade. But a white tee and a leather jacket, such a clean look.

FYI, the cast of the movie reads like a who's who of 1980s superstars. Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Rob "Sex Tape" Lowe, and the aforementioned Estevez. It's like a 16 year old girl's wet dream. Funnily enough my wet dream, Diane Lane, is also in it. She is a fine piece of hot, hot, 40 year old cougar. I almost sat through all of Unfaithful just because of her. Damn that movie sucked.

Anyways, the Socs may be preppy douchebags, but they get a bad rap. Can you really hate preppy? It's the classic American look, like Polo. Stylistically, my caridigan wearing ass would probably be in this camp...until I got kicked out for banging in my white tee....and for being black.

But the best part of being in either posse would def. be the rumbles. I would love to roll up a fight with Crunk Inc. by Crime Mob blaring from the 4Runner. Ahhhhhhshit, this song makes me want to fight. It's be like my own version of a police siren. When people hear it, they'd know shit is about to go down. Listen to it. How could you not want to go Chris Brown on a ho after hearing this.

Crunk, Inc. - Crime Mob

Highlights?

I personally like the refrain of "fuck that shit that you talking." No matter how many times it's repeated it remains terse. Concise. Full of hate. Hate hate hate. I've only heard two other hooks as blunt and rage inspiring: "fuck them other niggas" from Snoop Dogg's song Down for my Niggas (those No Limit years were rough on Snoop) and "nigga, fuck you" from Lil' Jon's Put Yo Hood Up. "We hate Pastor Troy" from We Hate Pastor Troy isn't angry enough to be included on the list. But, if I were ever to make a rumble-throwdown-mixtape - which I definitely would if I were a character in the book...I could be "Blackguy" kind of like "Ponyboy" but more obvious and callous - those four songs would definitely comprise it.

Also, the alliterative string in the first verse, where the rapper will "beat yo bitch with a baseball bat." That right there is pure genius.

Obama loves Fried Chicken

...or at least the proprietors of a couple fried chicken joints love Obama. Two fried chicken restaurants, in Brooklyn and Manhattan, have renamed themselves Obama Fried Chicken after our beloved negrident. I just made that up, I think its clever.


I like this story. It's got everything to make your day a better one: New York. Fried Chicken. Black people doing black things. It's really like watching that episode of The Boondocks where they try to explain what a nigger moment. It's kind of hard to tell what it entails, but when you grab your morning paper to see OFC on the cover (it's got a nice ring to it), you know you're in the midst of one.


I can't wait for the Obama Watermelon stands this summer.