Steve Likes to Curse Writing, comics and random thoughts from really a rather vulgar man. Statistics Unique Visitors: Total Unique Visitors: Outgoing: Total Outgoing: 32 1566 3 9662

Articles from Steve Likes to Curse

The Astounding Spider-Man: "A Modest Response" 2007-05-13 08:45:17 ...

I say as long as he promises not to make the movie, let him keep the money 2007-05-12 17:57:38 Washington County is considering several possibilities, including a lawsuit, to collect $300,000 from filmmaker Ron Maxwell, which he borrowed a few years ago when he was planning on filming parts of the Civil War drama The Last Full Measure here. If they do take him to court, any chance I could join in to get my money back for Gods and Generals? Hagerstown?s answer to the Springfield Shopper, the Herald-Mail, has the story here. The gist of it: In 1993 Maxwell adapted Michael Shaara?s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels into a film which he rather unimaginatively titled Gettysburg. It wasn?t anywhere near worthy of the praise heaped upon it by Civil War enthusiasts, but it was a decently good movie with some stirring moments, and it was reasonably successful in theaters and especially on cable channel TNT, which ran it ad nauseam throughout the mid-1990s. So about ten years later Maxwell, with the backing of Civil War buff and billionaire lithium addict Ted Turner, set out ...

My girlfriend is better than yours because . . . 2007-05-11 08:49:00 My girlfriend is better than yours because . . . . . . for my birthday last week she ordered me something I?ve wanted literally since I was six years old. And yesterday it arrived. And now I am happy. So very, very happy. Motherfucker, that girl got me Cosmos, all 13 episodes on DVD. We watched the first two last night (well, I did ? Ashley fell asleep like ten seconds into the first episode, bless her heart), and it?s just as awe-inspiring as it was when I first saw it, when I was a little kid still wondering if everyone else had a penis or if it was just me. Cosmos was no help on that question, but it made me wonder about the universe as a child, and now as an adult I?m still wondering. How did I luck out and get such an awesome girl, who is smart and hilarious ? and oh yes, fellas, easy on the eyes ? and is willing not only to tolerate my childish nerdy interests, but to enable them? She?s a keeper. ...

Stupid owl, that'll teach you to gather food for your young 2007-05-10 10:46:53 When Ashley and I got back from Borders last night, Doug, her upstairs neighbor, was standing in the parking lot next to his truck. ?Hey, ya?ll want to see something crazy?? he asked us. We joined him next to his truck and he pointed inside. Perched on top of the driver?s seat was a brown barn owl. Doug had been on his way home from a buddy?s house when he saw the owl lying motionless in the middle of the road. He stopped to check on it, and found it still breathing. A friend of his suggested she was a mother out gathering bugs for her offspring, and had been hit by a car. Doug picked it up and placed it on the passenger seat of his truck and drove home. ?It was laying there not moving at all, except you could see it breathing,? he told us as he stood outside his driver?s door with an empty Tidy Cat bucket, the lid, in which he had carved several large air-holes, sitting nearby on the hood. ?I went in to get a bucket to carry her in and when I came back out she was revived and sitting ...

Went and took myself a walk 2007-05-09 12:27:19 I?d had this ever-expanding crack in the windshield of my truck for the past two months. This morning I finally dropped it off at Cindy Rowe to be replaced. It took three hours, and with Ashley and everyone else I know unavailable to pick me up, and not wanting to sit in the office all morning on such a gorgeous spring day, I walked to the Wal-Mart shopping center with a book under my arm, found a nice spot and read for most of the time I was waiting. The walk from Cindy Rowe?s location on Salem Avenue to Wal-Mart is not a short one and the route was not designed with pedestrians in mind. There were several on- and off-ramps to the interstate to cross, and a bridge to walk over with cars whizzing by beside and underneath me. Then a left turn and a trek up Broadfording Road the rest of the way. From the parking lot on Salem Avenue to the bench where I sat reading The Demon-Haunted World took about twenty minutes ? shorter than I would have guessed, and I was in no hurry. Just as I start ...

The Herald-Mail's 2,450-hour news cycle 2007-05-08 09:09:06 Here was the headline, accompanied by a full-color photo, on the front page of yesterday?s Herald-Mail: Seeing double deliveryTwo sets of twins born same day doing fine Dr. Dave Solberg delivered two sets of twins on the same day, just over an hour apart. How exciting. How thrilling a reminder of the miracle of life. So why am I annoyed that it?s on the front page of our august local paper? Because Dr. Solberg delivered the two sets of twins in January. This, for those of you who got the Wiis and Playstation 3s you wanted for Christmas, is May. Am I seriously to believe that there was nothing else in the world that was more important to people in Hagerstown yesterday than checking up on two sets of twins born nearly four months ago? Apparently the war was ended, the myriad scandals of the Bush administration resolved themselves, President Ahmadinejad of Iran determined to play nice from now on, no local politician or businessman or law enforcement officer or sports figure did anything ...

The Muppets Ride the Tiger 2007-05-07 13:54:58 Last week I saw a plug in Ashley?s Rolling Stone for a YouTube video featuring Kermit the Frog singing ?Hurt.? It was as funny as it sounds. (Actually to some people it might not sound that funny, so let me be more direct: it was really very fucking funny.) Anyone who can see that shot of Kermit about to snort a huge pile of blow off a copy of The God Delusion and not laugh has officially sold their soul to Milhouse. In case you haven?t seen it, it?s embedded below. Watch it while you can ? the humorless Jim Henson Co. has been having YouTube yank down copy after copy, lest some poor innocent fan of the Muppets watch it and take it for the genuine article. Nevermind that neither the company nor its Disney owners have produced anything with the characters in years, so there probably aren?t any Muppets fans left that are young and stupid enough to mistake this for a lost episode of The Muppet Show. Enjoy:  Then over the weekend I found another one, this one a Muppet-ized version of Pulp ...

Home-school kids always make the varsity 2007-05-06 12:24:09 I?m a glutton for punishment in many ways. Driving to and from school in the mornings and afternoons, I listen to Bill O?Reilly and Michael Reagan (the former president?s semi-retarded son) on the radio; Saturday nights I watch the weekend edition of Glenn Beck?s show on CNN Headline News (though last night I turned it off after about thirty seconds ? I have my limits); and every Sunday morning at 11 I click on TBN and watch The Coral Ridge Hour, hosted by the most pompous, intellectually vapid bloviator in all the nation, D. James Kennedy. Why do I put myself through this? Why am I so maliciously self-loathing? What the fuck is wrong with me? This ain?t about me, G. Coral Ridge always follows the same format: the first half is a sermon given by Kennedy at his massive Presbyterian church in Fort Lauderdale; the second, a pre-produced mini-documentary on some vital church-related topic. My favorite game to play during the first half (which has continued the last four months despite Kenn ...

Ready to ramble 2007-05-05 22:08:26 Ashley and I went to the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts at City Park today. The school art exhibit was up, with drawings and photos and sculptures from students in elementary school through high school all over the county. Some of it impressed me.  A few girls from Boonsboro High are eerily talented; they might have futures as great artists or airbrushers of motorcycles. They were also pushing this event called the Museum Ramble, described as a ?self-guided tour? through the various museums and historic points of interest in the county. One of the ladies at the fine arts museum gave Ashley a pamphlet which lists the participating sites. Some are legitimate museums and historic sites, and others on the list sound like places no one in their right mind would ever step foot in. Number three on the list is the Christian Heritage Museum. The blurb for the Christian Heritage Museum, which is twice as long as the one for Fort Frederick, the oldest state park in Maryland, reads: A priva ...

Film Review: Spider-Man 3 2007-05-04 14:24:43 Film Review:Spider-Man 3 Fans of superhero comics must have done something extraordinarily good to deserve the Spider-Man series. I don?t know if comic geeks have been helping old ladies cross streets or volunteering in soup kitchens in large numbers, or if the guy who invented the artificial heart was a big Steve Ditko fan, but the continued excellence of Sam Raimi?s Spidey films suggests they?ve been racking up good karma in some way or another. Spider-Man 3 is big. It?s the biggest of the series by far ? the biggest visually, the biggest emotionally, and with the biggest runtime (nearly 2½ hours). The difference between this and other bright, loud, but ultimately vapid would-be blockbusters is that Spidey 3 utilizes its epic scope and more epic budget to tell a story that?s character-driven and sincere. Whereas most other superhero films are as shallow as a kiddie pool (including the grossly overrated Batman Begins; last year?s overlooked Superman Returns being a very notable except ... Film

Walter Schirra: 1923-2007 2007-05-03 13:38:02 I just read that Walter Schirra, one of the Mercury Seven, passed away of a heart attack earlier today at a hospital in San Diego.  There's a proper obituary here.Wally was the fifth American in space and the third, after John Glenn and Scott Carpenter, to orbit the Earth.  His Mercury flight was in October of 1962; three years later he commanded Gemini 6 as it docked with Gemini 7 in orbit, the first ever orbital rendevouz between two spacecraft.  In 1968 he flew in space for a third time and orbited the Earth for 11 days as commander of Apollo 7 ? the first space mission of the Apollo program, and the first NASA launch since the capsule fire that killed Ed White, Roger Chafee, and Wally's fellow Mercury astronaut Gus Grissom.  Wally was the only man to fly in all three American space programs in the 1960s.During the Apollo 7 flight, he caught a cold and took Actifed, which was a standard component of NASA's onboard medical kit during Apollo, to relieve his symptoms.  Years later w ...

Don't know much ufology 2007-05-03 11:08:01 Shitting on tax protesters and reading the feeble rebuttals from kooky folks like Anonymous the last two weeks has been so much fun that I want to chase that feeling. So I did some reading, some web research, and it turns out there?s a huge area of nutty conspiracy theories that I have barely touched on, but which definitely warrants some attention. I refer, of course, to Little Green Men. Or are they gray? Whatever ? the point is, they?re here and they?ve been here for a long time. Their highly advanced technology provided the basis for our development of stealth airplanes, and they even signed a treaty with the United States government in the 1950s to allow them to legally abduct cows and citizens to conduct experiments. How do we know so much about these aliens despite the fact that their existence has never been proven nor acknowledged by the government or any reputable agency? We know from the testimony of a few brave men ? patriots, heroes, citizens of Earth willing to stand in t ...

The Cat Who Made Its Author Stinking Fucking Rich 2007-05-02 15:19:49 That Lilian Jackson Braun's The Cat Who . . . series is the some of the most insipid commercial fiction to be found on American bookshelves ought to go without saying.  But apparently it doesn't, as the series is at 29 titles and still going.  Through a series of shadowy contacts within the publishing industry, I have obtained images of the covers of several upcoming entries in the series.  Keep in mind as you view them that several agents were killed in order to bring me this information, which I now share with you at great personal risk.  Sic semper tyrannis!!! ...

Erma Bombeck wasn?t talking about dreams like this one . . . 2007-05-01 14:12:37 Let me tell you about this dream I had last night, then judge for yourself if I might benefit from psychoanalysis. The entire dream is a television commercial in the form of a phony trailer for a new film supposedly coming to a theater near you. Don LaFontaine, in the happy voice he uses to narrate previews for shitty family comedies, announces: Coming soon, America?s favorite hitmen are back! And this time, they?re hitting Las Vegas! Cue ?Misirilou,? and the horrifying realization that this is a preview for Pulp Fiction II. Sure enough, here come Vincent Vega and Jules Winfield (Travolta with the long hair, Jackson with an incredibly phony looking afro and sideburns), sporting their familiar black jackets and ties ? and Wranglers. Yes, I realize as Vincent and Jules argue while searching for Vincent?s lost car keys near a dumpster, the phony trailer for Pulp Fiction II is actually a blue jeans commercial. The commercial cuts to a black screen where the words, ?This hell never happened ...

The Shittiest Films Ever Made, No. 8: Star Trek: Nemesis 2007-04-30 11:09:14 The Shittiest Films Ever MadeNo. 8: Star Trek: Nemesis There?s a misconception about the Star Trek films that tells us the odd-numbered ones will be a waste of fucking time and the even-numbered ones will at least be worth the price of a ticket or a rental. The notion falls to shit almost immediately:  it holds true for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a portentous piece of nerd-porn that?s 90% slow-tracking beauty shots of the Enterprise; and for the first sequel, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, still the easy pick for best Star Trek movie; but after that the movies stop cooperating. Star Trek III has gotten a bum rap from Trek fans for years, I think because they were so put-out by the destruction of the Enterprise; it?s actually a pretty good movie, written and acted with wit and skill ? not a masterpiece, but definitely superior to the next two episodes in the franchise. Star Trek IV is the most overrated of the series, with its ?Greenpeace in Space? premise, and its endless and lam ...