Saturday Night Hot Topic Roundtable

By Bub, Glenn and Jake

[A trip behind the curtain as the OYIT editorial board discusses possible article ideas for the upcoming week. What better way to spend a Saturday night?]

1. THE PLANNING MEETING FOR THE WAR IN IRAQ

Bub: Saddam had killed those people fifteen years earlier. If the US didn't invade, then the international mechanisms for justice would have lost all legitimacy. I'm gonna guess that Don Rumsfeld wanted a stuffed crust pepperoni pizza, Collin Powell wasn't hungry and Condoleeza Rice brought her own matzo soup.

Glenn: Condi brought her own matzo soup because her expertise is in the former Soviet world and she didn't know anything about the Middle East. Yassir Arafat was at this meeting and he brought macaroni and cheese pizza from CiCi's.

Bub: And that's what started this whole mess in the Middle East - Mac'N'Cheese Pizza from CiCi's.

Jake: Being as the only current events reporting periodical I indulge in is MAD Magazine, is Iraq anything like I-blech?

Glenn: Iraq is where your children and grandchildren will go on vacation.



2. HOW MANY TIMES THE TALLEST MAN IN THE WORLD GETS ASKED TO PLAY BASKETBALL FOR COMPANY TEAMS?

Bub: I'm gonna guess it's a pretty big number, but not as many as you'd think. Jake?

Jake: As a tall man, I would guess a lot. I've been asked to play basketball hundreds of times, but my jump shot is horrible.

Bub: You turn every question into something about you. Can't it be about the world's tallest man for once?

Jake: I think he does get asked a lot. Better?

Bub: Not in the least. NEXT!


3. GERALD FORD INTENDING TO PARDON RICHARD NIXON FOR WATERGATE BUT ACCIDENTALLY PARDONING CHARLES MANSON AND THE MANSON FAMILY INSTEAD.

Bub: I read about this on www.whatreallyhappened.com. It was a travesty. I read it was Gerald Ford that was the one who actually murdered Sharon Tate because she wasn't on board with his script for a sequel to Valley of the Dolls. Anyway, Richard Nixon found out about this and committed Watergate to cover Ford's tracks. That's when the Manson family was accidentally let out of prison and released the hit single "Helter Skelter".

Glenn: This, of course, begs the question: what was worse - subverting our Constitution or brutually killing Roman Polanksi's wife and other humans?

Bub: And forcing a great film-maker into statutory rapehood.

Jake: Polanski is the real monster-- not Nixon, Manson, Tate, Ford or Horace Pinker (from Shocker).


4. THE SCRIPT FOR A THIRD SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS MOVIE, BASED ON THE LATER THREE BOOKS, INCLUDING THE PARTS THAT WERE NOT INCLUDED IN SISTERHOOD 2.

Jake: This would be a great movie. I like when they sing songs they would sing in Las Vegas, but about God. This script would have a lot of that I bet.

Bub: Yea my favorite part of this movie would be where Whoopi Goldberg dresses up like a nun to teach inner-city youths how to dance. That way if they're off the streets and dancing, then they don't have time to muck about and get into trouble.

Glenn: I think that Whoopi Goldberg character should be white in the third movie, to show how far we've come as a nation.

Jake: Like a mash-up of White Chicks and Sister Act 2.



5.GERALDO OPENS AL CAPONE'S VAULT AND SPRING SNAKES POP OUT SCARING HIM.

Glenn: How did Geraldo travel back in time to when Al Capone still used a locker to keep his spring snakes, tommy gun, and money he evaded from paying taxes upon?

Bub: I know! It was awesome. It was definitely a seminal moment in TV history. I remember watching it on the Sally Jesse Raphael show even though I was only seven years old. When Geraldo opened that safe and those snakes popped out, I yelled my first swear word. That was the day I became a man, but it wouldn't be the only day I became a man because of something Sally Jesse Raphael did.

Jake: I was literally glued to the TV set. I missed it because I had to go to the hospital.

Glenn: I forgot what you were referring to at first. I realize now that he didn't travel back in time - it was just on an episode of his talk show in the early 1990s.

Bub: No, he did travel back in time to film it, and then showed the film on SJR. I don't know why people were so disappointed when he opened the safe in the 90s and nothing was in it, they all missed the point - it was there the first time he opened it back in the 30s, what did they expect?


6. A GUY IN HIS LATE 30s IS STILL USING NAPSTER TO DOWNLOAD MUSIC FOR FREE IN 2009, AND ONLY SURFS THE INTERNET USING WebTV.

Jake: My aunt searches the internet on AOL.

Glenn: No way. I haven't even used AOL since 1996.

Jake: That's not true, she searches the internet on a graphing calculator.

Bub: I was just thinking about that graphing calculator game where you were a drug dealer and it wasn't nearly as fun as you'd think it would be.

Glenn: We switched from Prodigy to AOL because it had a more competitive package in the mid 90s, but I never had as many internet girlfriends on AOL as I did when I first got the internet with Prodigy in 1994.

Jake: We used AOL discs as currency in my remake of Mad Max.

Bub: Haha!


7. JABBA THE HUT PLAYS STRIP POKER WITH CHEWY (THIS WOULD JUST BE A PICTURE).

Bub: I read this in Mad Magazine. I loved it then and I LOVE it now.

Glenn: Jabba doesn't have any clothes to take off and Chewey just has that band he wears around his torso.

Jake: Jabba wins, by the way. He cheats at cards.


8. JAKE WATCHES STATE AND MAIN AND REGRETS IT AFTER THE FIRST TEN MINUTES, BUT DOESN'T TURN IT OFF.

Jake: I just turned it off after 30 minutes. That movie is so bad. I even watched all of Shocker.

Glenn: What was it about?

Jake: It was a satirical look at film making. Who doesn't love movies about making movies?

Bub: David Mamet is such an asshole.


9. A DYSTOPIAN FUTURE WHERE JOKES ARE ILLEGAL AND OYIT IS THE LAST BASTION OF FREEDOM IN THE WORLD.

Bub: It's already here. I can't go to the majority of countries in south east Asia because of stuff I wrote for OYIT.

Jake: I can't get employed anywhere, not even Burger King, because I write for OYIT.

Glenn: Being in complete denial, I have blamed George Bush's reelection in 2004 on the sole reason that OYIT existed two years earlier (and would once again exist four years later).


10. TWO WHITE RACISTS RAPE AND BRUTALLY ASSAULT A YOUNG BLACK GIRL. AFTER THEY ARE ACQUITTED, THE GIRL'S FATHER KILLS THEM IN THE COURTHOUSE AND THEN IS TRIED FOR MURDER. HE IS REPRESENTED BY A YOUNG WHITE LAWYER WHO HAS TO OVERCOME THE RACIAL PREJUDICES OF THE ALL-WHITE JURY IN A SMALL TOWN IN THE OLD CONFEDERACY. (THIS WILL BE ALMOST EXACTLY LIKE THE JOHN GRISHAM NOVEL A TIME TO KILL.)

Jake: I loved A Time to Kill and I love this idea.

Bub: I remember seeing this as a young boy when it was called "Song of the South". There was an old bear who sang a song about how great Dixie was.

Glenn: I almost cried when Matthew McConaughey's character gave his closing argument the first time I saw the movie. I didn't mean that to sound like he only gave the closing argument the first time I watched the movie - I think he gave it every time.

Jake: The only thing that would have made that closing argument better is if Matt Mc would have tore his shirt off in a fit of rage and passion.


11. AN IN DEPTH DISCUSSION ABOUT THE CHARACTER COTTON MATHER IN THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS. WAS HE THE REAL KILLER?

Jake: I couldn't believe that it was really Mathew Lillard and that other guy. It seemed like it was going to be Cotton for sure.

Glenn: Though I don't know who Cotton Mather is, I feel he was motivated by his desire for normalcy in 17th century colonial America.

Bub: It was never Matthew Lillard, for anything.


12. A THOUGHTFUL DISCUSSION OF HOW THE SHOOTING AT VIRGINIA TECH HAPPENED AND WHAT COULD HAVE BE DONE IN THE FUTURE TO AVOID SUCH TRAGEDIES.

Jake: They happened due to mental illness. To avoid similar tragedies we could imprison or kill people with mental illnesses.

Glenn: But what about the people who have mental illnesses but are less likely to kill upwards of 30 people, such as swimming star Michael Phelps or former Reagan assassin John Hinckley Jr?

Bub: Just because someone is barely able to talk to other people face-to-face, is diagnosed with a mental illness, and goes on a murder spree that kills more than 30 people, doesn't make them mentally ill. He is just like the rest of us that are barely able to talk to other people face-to-face and have gone on murder sprees that kill more than 30 people but haven't been diagnosed with a mental illness. It's really an arbitrary distinction if you ask me - we are all on a spectrum just at different places along it, for there to be mental illness some Ph.Dick has to draw a line wherever he feels like one ceases to be 'normal' and becomes 'abnormal'.