By CHRIS PACKHAM
I heard 'round the way that the Dow dropped below 10,000 this morning for the first time since 2004, and nobody's really surprised. At least I'm not. When I was five years old, my dad sat me on his knee and said, "Son, as long as you live, you will never, ever have to see Gene Hackman go down on a floozy." 
And I think we all know what happened with that whole thing: A lot of time passed, one thing led to another, and in 1997, Absolute Power came out and I knew that my innocence was gone like the last shreds of toilet paper, leaving behind a cardboard tube through which I could hoot disconsolately, like a megaphone. Thanks, Clint Eastwood, I wasn't using that "faith in my dad" for anything important, like for instance as an emotional buttress against the ravages of a grim world. On the other hand, Million Dollar Baby was great, seriously, way to go with that.
Now that civilization is finally winding down, we can move on to something else, like model railroading or teaching crows to use vending machines. It was great, y'all, loved the strong central government and all the bootstraps I could use for pulling on. After the jump, consumers react to the end of the world, some penny pinching tips, and a seriously unfunny movie. Click here, or the good, clean humor of a bygone era:
End of Days penny pinching: Regular shlubs like y'all have quit spending their money in restaurants. Things sure change fast in a deregulated and deindustrialized supply-side economy. One minute, y'all are the 2006 Time Person of the Year and credit is cheaper than the secondary-market cow meat they grind up and feed to cattle for the consumer market and the next, y'all are shopping for life-giving diabetic supplies at the Dollar Store. Both the references to secondary-market cow meat and the Dollar Store are today's "Smart Shopper" tips from your old pal, Daily Briefs at pitch.geocities.com. As a cost-cutting measure, I've stopped buying music and started getting all my borderline-illegal downloads via the Hype Machine. It's so impossible to keep up with that I finally dumped it from my RSS reader, seriously, it's like I subscribed to firehose aimed at my face dot com.
Finally, as a service to cash-strapped moms, here is a link to "Royal Swan" by hardcore combo Fucked Up in m4a format, because Daily Briefs is affirmatively pro-mom, you guys.
Next time, give your money to Paul Thomas Anderson, Hollywood: I'm not saying there aren't completely legit reasons to make fun of liberal America, you guys. It's just that if you're going to cash in all the komedy kredibility you earned with Airplane and Police Squad!, why not make fun of actual liberal attitudes instead of premising your unfunny movie on the well-known liberal goal of "abolishing the fourth of July?" An American Carol, y'all. Jesus. Because that's what American liberals want, to "abolish the Fourth of July." What's not true at least has to be funny, I think it's the immutable Second Law of Thermodynamics of Comedy. Given that as a premise it is (A) not true and (B) not funny, did they write this movie for babies? I know Beverly Hills Chihuahua was written for and marketed to babies because it has talking dogs in it. Plus, it kicked the living dogshit out of An American Carol this weekend, which points to the disposable income and spending power of babies in today's declining economy; hey Motley Fool dot com, where's all the baby investment advice?
Since the whole stupid plot of An American Carol is based on the used-up, dried-out plot of A Christmas Carol, David Zucker is presumably banking all his creative energy and original ideas for another Scary Movie sequel. He should totally go write for Mad magazine. Like Dennis Miller, Zucker is one of those self-proclaimed "9/11 conservatives" who want you to know that they used to be liberals until jihadists came along and crashed jet planes into their liberalism and blew up all their naivete and idealism. You guys, unless your beliefs were forged in the flames of 9/11, you cannot truly write fart jokes.
Leslie Nielsen fall down now!
FUNNY!
That'll show the lbruls!
is it true that in one of the flashbacks Zucker includes a slave named Barack?
Posted at: October 6, 2008 11:44 AM