I should be able to get out an update for Monday the gosh eleventh, unless something stupid has already happened.

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I was going to speak today about some of the election day signs I had seen recently but news with more bearing on society has come to my attention: Another Air Buddies sequel.

You might be aware that “Air Bud” was a real dog who could do a simple trick that involved jumping and assisting an already tossed ball through a basketball-themed hanging hoop, and a more impressive trick that involved tolerating John Stamos. You might also recall that through a trail of events too stupid to be analyzed without special protection (imagine a solar eclipse of inanity; you cannot take it in all at once without taking permanent damage) , a fictionalized version of Air Bud begat 5 offspring dogs who could legitimately play all manner of sports and also talk, which these days is no longer in itself an adequately impressive skill for a fictional dog to have.
Consider that the Air Buddies first appeared in Air Bud 3: World Pup, released in 2000. Or don’t, and I will in your place. The original Air Bud dog was 9 to 12 years old when he became dead. The air buddies are now older than their father was at the time of his death, but are still puppies. Never mind that Air Bud was dead before Air Bud 3 entered production, and these puppies must then be children of the replacement Bud. That does not matter.

oh pog, does anything matter?

What matters is that these puppies could speak human language, play every sport, and never got old, and that wasn’t enough. Now, these dogs are superheroes, with [additional] magical powers, and costumes to match.

These dogs have secret identities. Nobody must know that these 5 talking dogs with magical powers that are puppies permanently are in reality the 5 talking dogs that magically can play sports and also never mature into adulthood. Because that would compromise the safety of their families of non-magical, regularly-aging dogs (even the replacement Bud stopped appearing after 2008’s Snow Buddies, which is ironic considering all the puppies that did not survive production). Mysteriously, their new powers such as the ability to create dogsized clothing, since letting anyone else do it would give up the secret identities) are granted by rings, but nothing is said of the other mystical devices that grant the power for pawed quadrupeds to comfortably and effectively equip jewelry designed for human fingers that do not regularly bear one fourth of the owner’s weight.

This film carries the insipirational message “you don’t need super powers to be a superhero,” despite the premise conspicuously and deliberately contradicting that.

Its true power is making a 3d-animated movie titled “epic” in 2013 seem original and inspired by comparison, so that I don’t even acknowledge it for three paragraphs, although super buddies tempt fate by making certain to use the word anyhow. Or maybe that is simply a condition for gaining financial backing now.

You know (for if you did not previously I now alert you), after five Police Academy movies they stopped making money. The problem with those is that they didn’t target a demographic that would gladly watch the same movie repeatedly, over and over until the sun turned into a prune. A demographic whose choices are commonly made for it, whom nobody is concerned about insulting or utterly blotting out the intelligence of. The formula is perfect: a parent, or a friend (enemy?) of a parent will see a movie like this and buy it with no thought and imagine a child will want to watch it. One less gift to buy later, right? It will not be vetted for quality or originality, ever, and this can be repeated every single year, even though no child should stay that easily entertained for so many years as to risk running out of these. But that could be pre-911 thinking on my part; the more kids are raised on limitless quantities of trash, the more likely they are to grow into adults who think trash is good, which is very good for business, because trash is easy to create. Those people who made all the hacky Cinderella and Lion King sequels must feel like idiots now, wasting all that time and effort redoing the same schlock repeatedly but with different sets of characters in different environments when but 1 done with minimal effort would suffice.

This is the seventh Air Buddies film, which does NOT include the first Air Bud series, which included five films . This also does not include the two Santa Paws films [that we know of], which are themselves spun off from the air buddies spin off series. Almost all of these were directed by somebody named Robert Vince, who seems to have literally come from nowhere.

Outside this series, he directed four movies with chimpanzees as main characters (three of them about a chimpanzee who can also play every sport, while the fourth one is a ninja) plus a single movie about a dog who neither speaks nor plays sports, but does fulfill another standby of the nobody cares if a g-rated movie is dumb genre by having kids keep the dog a secret from their parents for [maybe a] reason. They probably keep the dog a secret because he can’t talk or play sports.

As best I can figure out, these all make heaps and beeps of money, but criticism is subdued because they aren’t released to theaters, and are “for kids” anyway, though that Smurfs sequel still made a profit of 200 million dollars, and that was 200 million dollars LESS than the first one. There is literally no financial incentive to make a movie –or any manner of product– for children that is not idiotic, tacky and proud of itself.
If you add in 3 Beverly Hills Chihuahuas and Raise the Woof, The Disney company has, since 2006, put out twelve talking dog films. Talking dog movies are nothing new, but there has never been this much nothing new at any previous point in history. I exclude Bolt, because that is legally a cartoon, in which it is not significant that a dog speaks, though it also carries the message that you don’t need super powers to be a hero, and also does not consider the dog’s speech to be a super power. I consider a “talking dog film” to be one in which real dogs, or computer puppets meant to be thought of as real, are presented as if they speak English and do extraordinary deeds in situations that are meant to be remotely plausible. Three of theses were released just in 2012. There are adolescent-age children growing up who think this is normal. They have no memory of a time when there wasn’t a new canine enunciation fest every single year. Additionally, there are five editions in a Tinker Bell series, with 2 more already in production. The sixth was going to be released this year, but was shoved aside to make room for Planes (about talking, celebrity-voiced airplanes), a spinoff from the Cars series (about talking, celebrity-voiced cars), which Disney doesn’t even own, and also aims to have its own series.

What does all this mean? It means that I need to stop bringing my camera into Wal Mart. Even if I only go in there three times a year it is statistically probable that there will be a “new” bad talking dog movie for sale and I will have to write about it. Even this website object is an uninspired sequel. No more talking dogs!

Now if’n you ask Ol’ Roy, this is a classic example of what happens when you try and sweep a cat under the bridge. Early to bed, early to bird, after all. It’s the elephant in the corner, if you will.

I will not. I want you to leave.

If you want a ballpark figure, birds of a feather weather wisely. Unless you’ve been living under a duck, it’s high time of month. Ol Roy’ll tell ya.

You’ve got food on your back
You’ve got clothes in your mouth
You should be FVCKIN’ HAPPY

I was concerned that the “ol roy” interlude in my previous item was underinspired and dull, but I forgot how much uninspiration inspires people, and so he has already been promoted to Southern Connecticut State Universitti grafitti creative consultant.

whatsamatter with ya? ya got food on your back and a penny on your roof. You got a smile on the dial the wind at your willows, by gumbi. In Ol’ Roy’s time you had to get while the got it, good. John F Kennedy. There was a man. He knew not to cover thy neighbor’s labor. You know what he used to say? “Ask not, want not. You have nothing to fear but country bears.” And he meant it, too!

Apart from the prominent FUCKIN’ this seemed too consciously peculiar to be written by a student here without an outside source, and sure enough, it is a lyric from some song that I suspect is meant to be a facetiously daft take on traditionally daft oversimplifying “message” songs, although regardless of sincerity it is musically awful. Awfulness strengthens the experience. And so what might be my initial assumption, that taking the line out of context of the bad song might improve it, seeing it scratched into a wall is less awful than hearing it sung and so, in fact, it is worse. It reminds me of another good old time, however.

I took a number of pictures from a car that day. Almost none looked like anything afterward. Somehow I have two totally legible shots of this sign. It must be my destiny to document this. Or maybe the car stopped and we got out here. I cannot decide which is worse.
Common Man, first of uh, is a sellout shill. The interior of his domain is filled with “common man” branded merchandites. While no doubt the marketing and quality of product was nothing beyond common, you don’t get to pretend you uphold the interests of oppressed, hardworking people when you charge them $20 for a mass-produced shirt that provides the most rudimentary insulation with a logo on it. I don’t have pictures of that, either!

alright, it probably wasn’t as lazy as this one.

It really isn’t hard to make a terrible shirt! This is outside of relevance!

More important than common man or his awful wears or what’s worse than them is his slogan. When I passed the sign the first time, I was certain the letters spelled up “drink in sand, feet in hand.” I wondered how anybody driving could see that and that not get into a horrific accident trying to make logical sense of it. Anything else it might say would be corny and pointless. I was so taken that I had to commemorate the experience with a tiny drawing in a notebook. Somewhere I could find it again but that less enlightened folks would never come across and make a quarrel over out of jealousy. Today I scanned it and traced it. Aren’t you proud!

Who needs good food and down home cold hard ice cream when they have feet in hand? What more do you need? You’re all but set for a good long while. A tragic existence, to never know the possibility of feet in hand.

My sister formerly had a section of her facebook account detailing “one night in hand,” a yearly event for graduators at the Daniel Hand High School of Madison, Connecticut, including all manner of chaperoned mischief that I have no idea about because I never attended that school and my sister deleted that account months ago. Perhaps out of despair of night in hand not comparing to feet in hand.

Remembering that my camera was borrowed occasionally back in those times, I searched for evidence and found none. Here is, however, a picture that I discovered in my collection from the approximate period when night in hand would have occurred. I think it tells you just as much.

According to an internet, the actual title is “nite in hand.” It is conducted under an alias so that I will not find out. For, you see, Nite in Hand is alcohol free, so it is likely students will have neither drink* nor feet in hand. Just nite, which doesn’t even exist. Truly bleak!

*unless they consume something highly deviant, such as water.

Oh thank gupin. You saved me from having to put a liquid inside me that didn’t contain an artificially flavored science experiment. Flavored water is a great replacement for something that only isn’t called that because it sounds sleazy.

Pet products fascinate me, because they are, generally, a total frivolity marketed at the buyer but not the consumer. I do not have pets. I have probably said so before, but I dislike somebody who is needy, erratic, unable to be reasoned with and can never be expected to grow out of that. That job is already taken in my house.

I am jealous of dogs. I have to brush my teeth constantly but dogs just get to eat meat flavored cookies shaped for some reason like pieces of dead bodies and apparently that’s enough.

Hey you listen to ol’ roy now. He’s a gonna be settin’ you straight on a few matters.

Ah, wonderful. What can you tell me, Roy?

Yepsir, Roy’s been around the block a few times and he knows a thing or two.

Lovely. Like what?

Yeah Roy’s just about seen it all, but every so often something or another comes along that sends Roy for a loop so to speak

Is that so! How does it pertain to this situation.

Sometimes you just gotta remember what ol Roy tells ya: you gotta know when to hold em, when to get while the getting’s beating around two in the bush like the Romans do, if’n you be getting my meaning.

Please don’t talk to me anymore, Roy.

This bag contains little dogs to feed to your big dog.

Similarly, the anthromoporphic dog here wants to eat his normal dog deputy. I assume. I hope he’s not mouthily lusting over that big peanut on a fork. That would be weird, and then this product would need to be recalled.
If it WAS recalled, and discontinued, that certainly would not be because thousands of people reported that their dogs became sick/dead from kidney failure after eating these things because they were made from imported Chinese poultry meat. The New York state factory just happened to flunk the antibiotic test and the owner has no intention of using meat that does not contain antibiotics (or letting one of its factories outside New York get inspected), because these are legally considered SAFE, in China, even though the investigation only happened because of people reporting that the product was harmful and the discovered health code violation was entirely coincidental. Do you understand? Explain it to me after class.
This is the Nestle corporation, after all. It only inadvertently kills human babies [in the 1970s].
You can also buy Waggin Train products in Canada, because the dogs there really culturally identify with the covered wagon mythos. Also, they are more humble and less likely to complain than American dogs when they get poisoned.

Still, getting back on topic,

It has been my experience that peanuts are weird, at least.

And some peanuts are totally normal and pleasant.

Just like Life Water. Legally, you can call anything “all natural” so long as the claim is totally ridiculous. Somebody should make Life Peanuts.

And a reasonable reader would know very well that’s not what I meant and that nobody should do that.

Now there’s something you’ve got to understand here, young’un. Back in my day we had to put it all out there, we had to stand up and be counted and sometimes… well heh heh sometimes you just know. Get the picture?

You are atrocious.

You gotta put your back into the elbowstone to save nine. Take it from Ol’ Roy.