My Favorite Part of the Holidays

These days celebrity voice-overs are all over commercials. From Gene Hackman and Jeff Bridges lending their trustworthy tones to Lowe’s and Duracell ads to Queen Latifah’s sassy Pizza Hut spots, you can’t turn on the TV without hearing a familiar voice. While some of these celebrity voice-overs can never save a bad commercial, others simply make the ad. With that being said, I present to you my favorite part of the holidays: Steve Buscemi and Norm MacDonald as gingerbread men.



Anti-Bears: 4.2. This ad is pure marketing genius! I still laugh every time I see it.

Bears: 2.3. What happened the these guys’ careers? The most common comment on Youtube is, “HEY isnt that the voice of Death from Family GUy!? LOL.” O-M-G. fo realz.

Surely this disproves the impending apocalypse

For years I've occasionally taken a minute out of my extremely mundane trips to Target for shampoo and shaving cream to take a trip back into childhood, or to at least consider how much more fun I'd be having if the purpose of my trip were to buy toys and not toiletries. After the very first of these trips I even became a bit jaded on these fantasies, because, let's face it, toys these days suck. All of the airplanes are made of cheap plastic, the action figures are too gimmicky, and there are many media reference points I just don't get.

When I was a kid, the only toys I really really actually cared about were Legos. There's no need to explain why they were so great because it's become something of a common ground for my generation. My brother, Danny, Danny's brother, and I would spend entire days and sometimes weeks doing nothing but constructing and deconstructing modern towns, pirate towns, and space towns, and sometimes combining for hybrid modern pirate space towns with airplanes battling the Caribbean Clipper and some crazy Blacktron soldiers using laser beams to restore order. I don't actually think we deviated from the themes that much, but hey, anything's possible.

If you go into the Lego aisle at Target today, there's still some town stuff but for the most part all the sets have stupid movie tie-ins. I don't give a shit about Star Wars or Indiana Jones or Harry Potter; just give me the classics. Unfortunately, it was beginning to look like the classics were done for. In the spirit of Christmas and holiday cheer and all that I fought off something like forty two shoppers and their nine million kids just to get into the aisle and I almost broke down and cried because of how terrible the sets were. Indiana Jones and Star Wars.

As I fought my way back out of the crowd to price-scan one of these abominations ($39.99 for a Spongebob house thing) I saw something on and endcap that made me weep for almost the exact opposite reason. I present to you, the Charz2k readership (and more importantly, directly to the contributors herein), the triumphant return of Lego Pirates:


Anti-bears: 5. 5 fucking anti-bears.

Bears: 2.6. Lego, what took you so fucking long?

SNL's Andy Samberg (kind of) endorses the Charz2k rating system

Copied from Pitchfork:

Samberg: It's funny, I was having this discussion the other day about how, on Pitchfork and Stereogum and likeminded places, the best and the worst of the year are always pretty much the same bands, which is so indicative of sort of the tone of it all.

Schaffer: It was "Most Overrated slash Best."

Samberg: Oh right, on Stereogum, all the overrated bands were also the top bands of the year.

Pitchfork: People confuse the overrated bands for the most underrated as well.

Schaffer: They were literally saying, "This was the best!" and giving it its overrated quality and then going, "Unh, it's so overrated" like on the very next page.

Pitchfork: But then the next day, since everyone said it was overrated, it's now underrated.

[Laughter.]

Schaffer: As if someone is keeping it on a scale, the "rated" scale, ready to knock shit down when it gets too big and ready to build it up when it gets too small.




Ed.- I'm not exactly sure our rating system combats this phenomenon. It definitely clarifies things though. See we are totally objective -or at least we rate art without considering anything else but the art itself- in rating things (The Anti-Bear scale) but we still leave room to paradoxically subjectively rate it in an unrelated,objective scale(Anti-Bear Scale). Nah, see I think Stereogum and Pitchfork and shit kind of have to be self-referential...they're the source of overratedness. honestly they need to stop shitting on things they helped build up. I mean we don't have to be all meta and whatnot. We rate the content and then we rate the bullshit surrounding the content, the content's effect on the community, etc. We can call something good and then hate on the people who like it and then just leave it alone. We can quantify the unquantifiable. On one hand it seems like we're perpetuating Andy's complaint. But on the other hand, we're doing it more objectively. Does any of this make sense? My mind is fried; this is an infinite regress. I'm so confused.

And Andy Samberg and the Lonely Island's new SNL Digital Short "Jizz In My Pants" is funny enough to earn it 3.2 Anti-Bears.

But my girlfriend has a crush on Andy Samberg and, let me tell you, that's kind of a bear! 2.4 Bears to be exact.

Happy Birthday Garz!

The single funniest moment in the history of The Simpsons

Am I right?

To be clear I'm talking about the very moment we see the pogs, not the dialogue preceding it.
Could Alf be doing more perfect poses?
Could the expressions be any better?
"Look at me I'm shaving!"
It's Alf.

The only thing wrong is being left with the insatiable desire to see the pogs below.