After Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen came out this summer, there was a lot of talk about how terrible it was. It was not merely bad, the reviews claimed, but a two-and-a-half-hour display of everything wrong with Michael Bay’s ideas about filmmaking. Beyond that, it (quite unintentionally) exposed our culture’s fucked-up ideals, on subjects ranging from race and gender to the relationship between the military and civilians. Or so I had read; I wasn’t about to pay money to watch it, and downloading a crappy cam version seemed like a huge waste of time.

Well. It’s out on DVD now, and I decided to undertake a project. I would obtain a copy of the movie, force myself to watch it, and then review it. But instead of writing another bad review in a field of thousands, I decided to analyze the entire movie. That meant full write-ups of everything wrong with every scene, every character, every insufferable joke — every single thing that helped to make this move so terrible.

Of course, before I could dissect the movie, I’d have to understand it, and that meant sitting down and watching the damned thing. The movie is 150 minutes long; I made it to 150 seconds before I needed a break. I needed several more breaks throughout, not because I had anything better to do, but because I just needed to get the fuck away from this movie to gather my thoughts. Unwilling to return, I would assign myself little tasks during my breaks — emptying the trash cans, writing emails, preparing some surprisingly tasty BBQ pork sandwiches (a process which takes up the better part of a day) — and spent much of the actual movie on my feet, pacing around and occasionally glancing at the screen when something seemed to be happening.

And Revenge of the Fallen isn’t just long; it’s slow. Once you’ve been watching it for a while, it becomes difficult to remember a time when you weren’t watching it, and just as hard to imagine that it will ever end. All the action sequences seemed to drag on for days, but in reality they rarely took more than a few minutes. Every so often, I would pause to see how much time I had left, and it was always a lot more than I expected.

When I started watching this movie, I was already planning this review series. But if I hadn’t, I’d be planning it now, because there is simply no way I can hold back all the righteous fury I have for this steaming pile of shit posing as entertainment.

Actually, no. If I hadn’t been planning this project, I never would have watched the movie in the first place, and I’d still be happy. As it is, I am not happy, and the first review will be arriving shortly.

I have seen Transformers. The world will pay.

September 30 is International Blasphemy Day, and I celebrated the occasion by making some blasphemous shirts for the Bulletproof Heeb, and then keeping one for myself. I’ve been wearing it around town, and people have largely ignored it. Good for them.

But this day isn’t really about protesting the angry fire-and-brimstone types. Those people are easy enough to offend; we don’t need a day for it. It’s about protesting the well-meaning but suicidally stupid belief that everyone’s religion should be respected at all times. I’ve been guilty of this in the past (less so recently, I’m happy to say), and most of the people in my life are guilty of it as well. I know that if I write about atheism — and who are we kidding, we all knew that’s where I was going with this piece — it’ll alienate half of my friends, and so I’ve avoided writing much of anything for months.

Well, fuck that. It’s Blasphemy Day, and there are no renowned religious leaders in sight. Luckily, I’ve got lots of other shit to blaspheme. Time to get out the ol’ Book of Grievances, and go over some actual arguments against atheism made by my friends and acquaintances, who totally think I’m great except…

“If you’ve actually given it some thought, that’s fine. But if you’re just a kid rebelling against Christianity, then I don’t think that’s a good enough reason to reject religion.”

I will remind you that we’ve all gotta start somewhere. Teenagers don’t rebel in a vacuum; if a kid hates sitting through church, that same kid probably disagrees with the values of his community, or at least those of his parents, and has spotted the parallels. Although surly teenage arguments against conformity are unsubtle and inarticulate, they still reach a level of sophistication that many adults never achieve. They are still a form of inquiry, and express a desire for something beyond the obedient and incurious mindset encouraged by religion. If they seem to unfairly target Christianity over other faiths, it is only because you’re limiting your focus to the United States, where Christianity is nearly unavoidable. I’m sure if another religion managed to get the same level of influence over Congress, teenage goths would be just as angry at them.

“Evangelical atheism is just as bad as…”

I’m gonna cut you off right there. Yes, it is “as bad as” evangelical Christianity, or anything else that goes out and tries to convert people. But my position is, those things aren’t all that bad. Many sects of Christianity consider witnessing or evangelizing to be a major part of their faith, like attending church or ignoring all but four Gospels. I can complain about it, which achieves exactly nothing, or I can offer a counterpoint, which might achieve slightly more than nothing. I have no holy obligation to make my case, nor am I working in the service of any organized group, but if I see bad ideas or faulty logic, I’m going to point them out. If a belief works for you but not for me, I’m not going to pretend that discrepancy doesn’t exist. If a religious system appears to have a set of coherent rules, I am going to ask about those rules, and yes, I am going to attempt to examine and critique them. If I’m evangelizing, that’s because I’m pressing believers to make their case. They have a hypothesis about the nature of the universe, and I’d like to know it.

“Well, I think all efforts to convert people are wrong.”

No, you don’t. In all likelihood, you adopted that position defensively after someone called you out for making fun of Christian evangelists, as a means of deflecting future accusations of intolerance. We all say this — even I say it sometimes — and we are all full of shit. So go nuts. Mock whoever you want, and feel free to focus on things that are relevant to you (angry street preachers), rather than abstractly criticizing things that will never, ever come up (angry street rabbis).

“If science is so certain that [religious/mystical belief] doesn’t work, why don’t they test it?”

Okay. You ever see Cosmos? Carl Sagan? Go watch it. All of it. It’s on Hulu. Pay special attention to the part where he says that modern astronomy exists because of scientific inquiry into astrology. It won’t be hard, since he says it in almost every episode. Likewise, much of modern science rose out of the failures of alchemy and similar systems. We, as a species, came up with science because the alternative wasn’t working. Books have been written, studies have been published, and science has no obligation to start over from square one just because some random dude who wasn’t paying attention asked them to go over the old material again.

“Well, that doesn’t mean you have all the answers.”

That’s true, but I won’t just assume there’s a supernatural explanation until someone proves otherwise. I believe we are capable of finding any answer, as long as we have half an idea what the question is. Some people consider that view reductive, but come on — don’t you want to say you were there when they discovered something? Really give those great-grandkids a legacy to live up to? We can’t let that thieving prick Edison get all the glory!

…And that’s about it. I suppose if I had planned this better — or just had Blasphemy Day to inspire me last year — I could have turned the above text into a whole series of posts, and spent today writing about the actual value of blasphemy instead. If anything, it’s a good excuse to celebrate again next year.

This afternoon I was inspired to grab an old burlap sack, stitch some little eyes onto it, fill it with dog shit, light it on fire, and leave it on Shane Acker’s doorstep. I didn’t actually do it, but it would have been an adequate expression of my profound disappointment with his new film, 9.

I’d been wanting to see 9 since I first saw its trailer at Coraline way back in February. It looked fucking awesome, with gritty little steampunk robots running around a post-apocalyptic world devoid of life. Hell, it looked a lot like WALL-E, and WALL-E was brilliant. But imagine if WALL-E had sucked. Imagine if the robots hadn’t acted like robots, and the action hadn’t been well-paced, and they threw in a lot of inane metaphysical bullshit. That’s 9. Oh, it looked as beautiful as promised. The landscape was indeed littered with the tragic remains of an annihilated human race. Corpses were strewn throughout the streets. Cars were tipped over and rusted out. A sunless sky hovered over bomb craters and gutted cityscapes. It looked every bit as brutal as I could have wished. But that’s the only good thing I have to say about the whole bloody thing.

Spoiler alert: I’ll probably do some spoiling in the paragraphs below. But I won’t spoil your fun half as much as Acker spoiled a good idea.

So. It’s World War III (or whatever) and in its zeal, the scary generic future government (probably a corrupted version of the U.S., though the film never gets that specific) builds a supercomputer that can design and build giant battle robots, and the robots eventually turn rogue and destroy all organic life on Earth, including humanity. There are shades of the Terminator series here, and there are also shades of an anti-science stance in the exposition, and both are handled with about as much grace as a T-1000 employed as a dog catcher. As the film opens, a dying scientist has just finished building 9, a rat-sized anthropomorphic robot with high-tech eyes, wood-and-metal steampunk arms, and burlap skin. 9 soon learns that he is the last in a series of similar robots built by the doomed inventor, and gradually encounters his eight mechanical brothers and sisters. Each robot displays a one-dimensional caricature of a personality (one robot craves battle, one craves power, one is a coward, etc.), and each reacts to stimuli with far more emotion and empathy than any real self-respecting robot ever would. They react to corpses with revulsion, to sunshine with awe, to perils with fear, and to death with ceremony. In other words, they react like poorly-written humans, rather than cleverly-designed homunculi.

The dialogue is vile and mostly unnecessary, and the reason is made clear by the film’s origin. Before it became a 90-minute disappointment, 9 was originally a 10-minute short film released in 2005, which is still available for viewing on YouTube. It still contains some of the same elements that annoy me in the long version, though as Varius pointed out to me, in this version they, “don’t fuck it up by talking.”

I don’t want to give away too much of the film’s action. Luckily, there’s not much to give away. You know how, in almost every action/adventure movie you can think of, one of the main characters gets captured at some point in the middle? The rest of the characters always say, “we have to go rescue them!” and, heedless of Spock’s assertion that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, the whole crew hurries off to endanger themselves. Well, this happens in 9, too, only it happens over and over and over again. “Oh no, so-and-so was captured, let’s rescue him! Oh no, such-and-such got captured while we were saving so-and-so, let’s rescue him! Oh no, now whatserface got lost on the such-and-such mission, let’s go back for her!” And so forth. That’s ninety percent of the goddamn movie, though the action does pause briefly so that the robots can dance to a Judy Garland record.

But no amount of repetitive action or clichéd dialogue could have prepared me for the ending. As Jhonen Vasquez said on Thursday,

“If there was one good thing about 9’s ending is it was so stupid it roused me from the impending sleep the rest of the movie brought on.”

Yeah. You want to know how stupid that ending was? Fuck it, I’ll tell you. Souls. The goddamn robots had souls all along. And their souls were saved. The end. To quote the words immediately spoken by my girlfriend as the credits began to roll, “What the fuck?” Does a story about the shabby remnants of a doomed society need a messianic element tacked on at the end? The answer is no. Does a cool science fiction idea need a bunch of metaphysical bullshit glued to its ass like tits on a fish? Again, the answer is a resounding no. Did WALL-E have a soul? No, he fucking didn’t, and we liked him that way.

Forgive me if I have a hard time forming coherent sentences, but holy fuck.

Ho. Lee. Fuck.

And if you want a little more context for that link, here it is: Barack Obama plans to make a speech to America’s schoolchildren, urging them to stay in school. But, as I linked above, conservatives are freaking the fuck out. They are seriously saying this is some kind of effort to indoctrinate children, possibly to prepare them for some kind of Hitler Youth scenario. I am not making that up. Even I have some standards, and I would not joke about that, partly because it’s offensive, but mostly because it’s so fucking stupid that there is just no way anyone would believe me.

Okay, couple of points here. First, this is the least controversial thing a human being could possibly do. If you went on TV and announced that kittens were cute, that would be more controversial than telling kids to stay in school, because you’d be excluding all the people who prefer puppies. But talking about kids? That’s safe. Most people love kids, and even the ones who don’t (e.g. me) still want them to go to school, so they can grow up to not be fucking dumbasses. Smart kids = smart adults = less bullshit for me to deal with.

Second, the whole thing is actually pretty insignificant, and we can’t stop it. You know why we can’t stop it? Because the technology to do it exists, and someone’s goddamn well going to use it. Remember on election night, how CNN had those fancy Star Wars-looking holograms? Guess what? They did not have fucking holograms. They had a green screen and some extra cameras pointed at a reporter. Wolf Blitzer could not see the hologram. Wolf Blitzer was talking to the reporter on the phone while staring at an empty spot on the floor. He was pretending. It’s like when Elmo is a presenter at the Emmys, and everyone just pretends like they don’t see the dude squatting behind the podium with his hand jammed into Elmo’s legless torso. The point is, they could do it, so they did. Compared to fake holograms and tuxedo-wearing Muppets, broadcasting a speech to thousands of schools is a fairly simple affair, so why let the technology go to waste?

And you know how I know it’s simple? Because George Bush did that shit in 1991! That’s old George Bush. Daddy George Bush. Shit, when I was in elementary school, I saw Old George Bush all the fucking time. Every other week, the janitor would wheel in one of the school’s sad little television sets, and the teacher would pop in a tape, and there would be Old George Bush, telling us to say no to drugs because otherwise Slimer and Mr. T would be very disappointed with us. You wanna talk about indoctrination? He had fucking Slimer. Our tiny child-brains didn’t stand a chance against that. Most of us already had Ecto-Cooler in our lunches. Bush could’ve told us to steal all the money out of mommy’s purse and mail it to 123 Suspicious Ave., Cayman Islands, and we would have done it as long as Slimer showed up after the speech and did something wacky.

Also, indoctrination? Isn’t that a bit dramatic? I mean, maybe if he was saying something really controversial, like “Racism is bad” or “I’m not evil,” because at least there’s a hint of ideology there. But “Stay in school”? Fucking seriously? The only thing kids will learn from this speech is that the President was on TV for a few minutes, and it was boring. Is that what we’re trying to hide from them? Are Republicans trying to somehow prevent their children from finding out that Obama is President, as though simply seeing him or hearing his name will be enough to ensnare them? Do they think he’s fucking Voldemort or something?

For fuck’s sake, can we wait until the guy does one evil thing before we start talking about all the other evil shit he’s planning? It wouldn’t even have to be big. If he gets on TV and tells the kids to rat out their Republican relatives to the Secret Socialist Robot Police, fine. Then you can have your little revolution and homeschool your kids in the art of teabagging or whatever the fuck you people are always going on about. Until that happens, please calm the fuck down and assume that nobody is trying to recruit your slow-witted and presumably ugly children.

We at the Beak are not role models. We drink to excess. We use coarse language in front of children and ladies. We “forget” to post for months at a time. And, perhaps most shameful of all, we smoke.

Like all smokers, we’d grown accustomed to paying more than we’d like for cigarettes. It was unpleasant, but you lived with it. Until a few months ago, when the President — himself engaged in an on-again off-again affair with tobacco — signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. Mostly standard stuff, bigger warning labels and all that, with one nasty catch: it bans flavored tobacco products.

As a fan of fancy-flavored cigarettes, I was understandably alarmed. And not long after that, Horatio informed me that readers had been asking if we could post something about the situation. And why shouldn’t we? If I can build a robot at home, I can sure as hell figure out how to roll a cigarette. Luckily, I didn’t have to, since Horatio’s lady-friend (and all-around bon vivant) Ms. Monsterface has set up a blog dedicated to the making and smoking of your own homemade clove cigarettes. You can even follow along at home! It’s like a cooking show for your lungs!

I admit I haven’t tried any of her experiments yet, but only because I’ve been conducting my own. Unfortunately, I’m not able to write a guide as thorough as hers, simply because I forgot to take pictures of all the steps of the process. Also, I’ve already smoked most of my supplies, so that’s an issue as well. Luckily, I had a chance to talk with Ms. Monsterface a couple weeks ago, and gave her permission to steal my ideas. So for all I know, my clove-making techniques could be showing up on her blog at some point in the future.

And if they don’t, then I’ll just take some pictures and write about it here. This definitely seems like the sort of thing that could become a recurring feature; people love to learn indie-friendly ways to be unhealthy. In the meantime, though, we should all be grateful that Ms. Monsterface is on the job, bringing tastiness to the masses.

In November, I had the distinct pleasure of staggering into the emergency room, half-blind from the worst pain I had ever experienced. The doctor took one look at me and knew what was wrong: a dental abscess. She examined me to make sure, but I didn’t need any tests or surgery. I walked out an hour later with a prescription for antibiotics, another for painkillers, and the phone number of a dentist’s office. My face was swollen and scary for another day or so, but all in all the ordeal ended quickly and happily.

And relatively cheaply, as it turns out. For my hour in the hospital, and my ten minutes spent with a doctor, I was charged a measly little $664, presumably because I hadn’t asked for any luxuries like tests or medicine. I didn’t learn that until January; apparently, the hospital likes to wait a couple months before sending the bill.

Nevertheless, the relatively small price tag made me happy. I’d dealt with this hospital once before, with a much more substantial sum of money involved, and although everything got taken care of, that resolution only came after six months of paperwork, phone calls, and general bullshit to which all uninsured people are subjected. This time, it would be easy. I could pay $664.

I just couldn’t pay it right that second. So I called the hospital and set up a payment plan: $55.33 a month for 12 months, with no interest if I paid on time. They were extremely gracious about it. I put my feet up and awaited my first bill.

Two days later, I got an angry call from a collection agency. I explained that I had just set up a payment plan, and they decided to give me the benefit of the doubt, but threatened to call back if it didn’t show up in their records. They didn’t call back.

And my first bill didn’t come. I made sure to check the mail several times a day, but no bill. Perhaps the billing cycle started later than I thought it did? Perhaps it was one of those ridiculous “no payments for three months” situations, because they went to some seminar that told them treating health care like a used car made patients happy? After the second month without a bill arriving, I decided to call them. They scolded me — quite angrily — for calling the wrong number, and directed me to the billing department. The billing department wouldn’t let me do anything without entering my 13-digit account number, which could be found on my bill. I did not have a bill. The automated answering service was not interested.

Last week, I finally received my first bill — for the first three months of payments. I also received a call from my bank, telling me there was some kind of problem with the magnetic strip on my card, so they’d be sending me a new one which I would have to call and activate, and could I please try to avoid using either card until that happened? Fine. I’d pay the bill after I got the new card.

This morning, I got a very stern call from a collection agency. I owed them the full balance of $664. “This seems sudden,” I said, “considering I just got the bill last week.” I was informed that, no, I had owed them money since November. I extracted myself from the situation as delicately as possible (which is to say, not delicately at all), and called the hospital again, this time armed with my 13-digit account number.

The hospital was just as friendly as the collection agency. I was once again scolded, this time for an even more outrageous crime: I had failed to take my original balance, divide it by 12, and send a check for the resulting amount to the hospital despite having never actually received a bill. I was not simply expected to pay my bills, but to write them and send them to myself as well. They assured me they had sent the first two bills, and if I didn’t get them, that wasn’t anyone’s fault — technically true, but dickish.

Frankly, I’m not sure they did send them. In my life, I have seen a lot of bills with several months’ worth of charges on them, and none of them have looked like this. Nothing was itemized. There was no menacingly bolded PAST DUE BALANCE printed above my total balance. There was a single, tidy charge for $165.99 — three months’ payments, conveniently added together — listed by itself.

Luckily, a solution presented itself: I put the whole goddamn $664 balance on my credit card, and will make monthly payments there instead. I could have done that in the first place, but it seemed like a fucking terrible idea at the time, what with the interest, and the threat of insurmountable debt, and the generally evil practices of banks. But now that I’ve seen how the hospital does business, an unethical interest rate seems a small price to pay in exchange for a bill that arrives every month, an operator that is happy to take my call and my money, and the knowledge that my billing cycle lasts a whole month, just like clockwork, and that collection agents won’t threaten me until I’ve done something to deserve it.

Thank you, hospital. You taught me to trust the banks again.