"Oh my god. Three times?"
"I'm sorry. That's never happened to me before. I must be tired."

- Jack Bernstein, Tom Shadyac & Jim Carrey, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective

"Death Takes a Holiday"
We're sorry. "The Death of the Little Black Duck" will not be posted as scheduled. Instead, please enjoy this special presentation with a strange subtext of Courtney Cox sex scenes.

"Blast from the Past"
I was going through old cast-off pages of The Unhappy Duckling, and I came across this botched flashback sequence of the Little Black Duck's senior prom in which Daisy Sparks, his beloved high school sweetheart and oftimes vampire slayer went with his most hated rival, Karl Bloomsday. I'd totally forgotten that Karl and Danielle went to prom together, or at least, I'd totally forgotten how much that had really bothered me at the time. Everyone said Danielle was just going because Karl asked, and that really was the only reason she went, but they were always playing hearts in homeroom, and they did that marriage project in Mr. Peters' class and I swear, they went to a Lenten Fish Fry together. I thought the sky was falling or something. What a colossal spaz.

"Almost Famous"
Labor Day Weekend 2000, way back when I was a young college freshman, I went to see "Almost Famous" by myself. It was to be the only time I would ever view the film without the company of Kate Jeffries, and while I enjoyed it, I never thought I'd see the movie again.

Six months later, they started playing it on RHEN, and I ended up watching it three times a week for probably two months straight. And we had to sing along to "Tiny Dancer" every time. Nobody forced me to do it, but it had to be done. I can't explain it to you. You had to be there.

I love Almost Famous. One day decades from now, I'm going to be at a video store (though they'll call them DVD stores by that point) with my teenage kids, and I'll pick it up and say "Have you guys seen this? This movie was a staple of my college experience," and Kal-El will shout "Piss off, old man! You're not our real father anyway," and little Kirsten will say she wants to watch Dick! or Mona Lisa Smile or something else Mommy was in other than Spider-Man 3.

...

Where was I going with this? Oh yeah! Zooey Deschanel.

Ten or twenty minutes into the movie, while Simon and Garfunkel are singing "America" on the soundtrack and William's sister is bolting to live out her dreams as a sexy stewardess, she takes him aside for a moment, looks into his eyes and says "One day you'll be cool."

She'd say this three times a week for two months, and somewhere during Week Three, it started to feel like she was really talking to me. And in that time and that place, in the midst of my freshman year with six or seven sure-to-be endless semesters ahead of me, I started to believe it. I was sure that by the time I graduated, I was going to be the mack daddy of all hip kids.

And now here it is, three years later, I haven't seen Almost Famous in a year, and from my use of the phrase "mack daddy" alone, we can conclude that I'm not cool in the least. I'm looking forward to a life in Jersey living with my granny and (God-willing) writing 200 word blurbs about Brian Michael Bendis' upcoming relaunch of Nellie the Nurse.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm content to be the man that I am, but let's face it, this cat ain't cool.

You can never trust the pretty dreamers.

"Commandments"
I was thinking about the movie Commandments the other day, which I watched once in high school and haven't really considered since. Aidan Quinn plays this guy whose wife dies and shortly afterward he loses his job and his house is destroyed. Feeling like he's been given a total Job job by God, he decides to retaliate by breaking each of the Ten Commandments -- I can't remember what he hoped to achieve by this, but I do remember his sister-in-law (played by Courtney Cox) helping him really beat the shit out of the Seventh Commandment. I think at the end, he tries to kill himself by jumping off of a light house, and ends up getting swallowed by a huge fish and saved or some such shit, and things turn out okay, but I really can't remember how. Did anyone else see this, or am I going to have to rent it again?

"Close Encounters of the Third Kind"
I would regale you with an amusing little anecdote about me on the job and a twenty-two minute struggle to tear through the thin plastic wrapping of a printer cartridge, but I'm all out of time, so consider yourself lucky. Jeffries and I are going to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, my third viewing in its first week. I wish I was cool, too, sometimes.

Wait up, Mary. I'm coming...

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