Martin Pease

I have to stop eating frozen pizza. Every so often my mouth tells my brain that what it really wants is the salty, crispy, cheesy goodness of pizza, and my brain says, "No problemo, I prepared for such an occasion by whispering into The Idiot's subconscious while in the frozen food aisle that we're gonna need some pizza. Like he always does, he put one in the cart, and now it's in the freezer. Pizza hoy!" But this is my stupid brain, giving bad advice again. Frozen pizza is almost uniformly terrible. If the universe is truly just a simulation, then frozen pizza is undoubtedly a double-simulation, an Inception-level hologram of actual pizza. But gross. Frozen pizza is bad enough to give one strange thoughts, such as, "Maybe I'll vote Green Party next election, if it promises to shut down whatever monstrous system of injustice foists such awful pizza on the public. To the barricades, comrades!" My brain just can't help itself. I think there...

Here it is, what you've been waiting so long to see. The perfect tomato.

A refreshed Lincoln Continental might get suicide doors! The best Continental ever First we heard that the slow-selling Continental might get the ax after only a couple years on sale; but then this news comes out, indicating a completely new body structure to support rear-opening "suicide" doors. It's hard to believe both things are true; unless the Continental is leaving the US market and staying alive in China. That would really be a sorry state of affairs.

Jim looked out his front door, and waddling down the street came a fat man. This man was uncommonly fat, by Jim's reckoning the fattest man he had ever seen in person, of course there were real fatties on television sometimes in those shows meant to entertain you with grotesqueries.  Jim bent down to pick up the newspaper from the stoop, stood up and looked again at the man slowly shuffling his globular flesh along the sidewalk in front of Jim's house. What a whale, thought Jim. How is he even capable of motion? The fat man was looking at Jim now, watching him. He came to a stop in front of Jim's house, rotated slightly, facing Jim now head-on. This unnerved Jim. The eyes of the fat man, so surrounded by the puffiness of his face, beetled into Jim. "Good morning," the fat man said. "Uh, good morning to you," Jim replied. The fat man looked with his little eyes right into his own. "Is that today's paper?" asked the fat man. "W...

It's officially been 3 months since ordering the new car. We've got a VIN and an estimated delivery date in the second week of April, but it may arrive sooner than that. The salesman called me down to the dealership today to look at a model they just got in stock, to see if I wanted this one instead of waiting. While I didn't decide to take this one (wrong color, wrong seat configuration) I was pretty relieved that I still find the car very cool and now I'm even more excited. Hopefully I'll have a write up of the new vehicle soon!

O Winter! Our frosty friend It's time to depart My love for you is at its end You were quick to start November chill, December snow Long since your charms did depart Time's up, time to go Back to sleep, so Spring can wake And I can wear the Speedo To the lake- a double-take As I swan along the beach Even the waves themselves do quake! So Winter, we beseech Let March alone to thaw and warm Send back the ice, park the plow Our backs are bent from shoveling harm Our ears are blue from the frost that bites Our visages grimace from your icy storm Your endless blustering, your petty spites Enough is more than enough Simmer down, go home, by all rights Your constant presence is like a rash The ointment doesn't relieve As unwelcome as fried Spam hash Leave!

Toyota, what the hell is going on? The new Lexus LS. Hey, remember when Lexus was for older, wealthier people with taste? Now it's for ANGRY, older, wealthier people with SHUT UP AND GET OUT OF MY WAY. The new Corolla. Economy cars never looked so MEAN and HANGRY. ADDENDUM Almost forgot the "best" one: Sweet sassafras!

When you see someone drive a Range Rover down the street, what do you think about him? Is he wealthy- yes, obviously. How much does he earn- is he a lawyer, pulling down $350k in his 5th year of practice? Or does he make $3.5 million a year as a hedge fund manager? Or is he in fact one of the super rich, the sort of person for whom money has lost all meaning? I say he could be any of these, or perhaps even a drug dealer or football player. Or both! The fact is that a Range Rover both reveals and conceals the status of the driver. You know he is a man of some means, but how much? It is a mystery. He could have a garage full of super cars; maybe the Range Rover is his only car. But the car intrigues the passerby all the same. Not being a shadowy oligarch rolling in Bitcoin millions, I bought this 2012 Range Rover in Luxury trim (yes, really) used. "Certified pre-owned, Standish, not used!" I say to my butler, as he irons my Dockers. There is only really one option you ...

The Boomers have a lot to answer for, and surely the career of Bruce Springsteen is among the crimes of this generation. My cohort, Gen X, is guilty of making Kurt Cobain into some sort of icon, but at least he's been dead for a few decades- the stink has dissipated. Springsteen continues to linger. He can't write lyrics. He can't sing. He's a big phoney. He is a less talented Meatloaf. Have you listened to Born to Run? He sounds like a guy trying to remember the words to the song; it is cartoonishly terrible. The idolization of this guy boggles the mind. Sure, we all have our guilty pleasures- everything by INXS for example. But nobody walks around claiming they were anything other than a minor band for 6 months in 1988. Bruce Springsteen is some sort of voice to the worst generation.

This post is book-ended by two pictures of Keanu Reeves, the actor who has presided over two major shifts in the visual language of action in film. I had the chance to watch The Matrix recently, with my teenage son. He didn't know anything about it, and I wanted to see if he had the same experience I had when I first saw it. Remember, the marketing for the movie played the story very close to its vest, and the major plot point was a complete surprise to me. Sitting in a theater with some friends, we all sort of thought it would be a computer hacking movie, similar to Reeves' earlier (forgettable) Johnny Mnemonic; but from the opening action scene to the revelation of the truth about the Matrix, my jaw was literally wide open. My son was impressed, but not overly so, which makes me question my judgment. Many things about this movie don't hold up today, some that are inherent to the film itself, and others extrinsic to it. For one, the drum and bass techno soundtrac...

Blue shirt guy, how did you find yourself here? The spiritual destitution of modern society is no more evident than in the increasingly strange enthusiasms grown adults indulge in, trying to find a "culture" and "identity" through pop culture ephemera. Mass culture today is the logical endpoint of the youth culture created by marketing in the 1950's. Prior to this era, childhood was a time for parents to instruct their children in right behavior and responsibility, so that they would enter their majority well suited to adulthood. The fantastical stories of imagination and the youthful play of early adolescence was age-appropriate acculturation that gradually gave way to deeper intellectual and emotional understanding of the real world and their place in it. But post World War II, with the advent of universal mass media, clever capitalists realized there was a huge, untapped source of revenue from children, and especially those individuals previously known ...