"As close to verbatim as I can remember a Mr. Mark story (listened to so many times that it plays nearly automatically in my head)":
On last week's show we showed you kids how to call up a demon for show-and-tell. This week, we're going to teach you how to make a pumpkin-headed scarecrow wake up and come alive. Most of you already have a large collection of pumpkin-headed scarecrows which you've stolen throughout the autumn. Pick your favorite and lay him out on your examination table. At this point you'll have to wait for a bolt of lightning to course through your mad-genius equipment. Let's check today's weather -- clear and sunny, what a bad break. Plan B is to clip on a set of jumper cables, one to the pumpkin-head, and the other to your own earlobe. When you step on the gas, your mind will go into the scarecrow's body, which is the next best thing. Now, run amok, and terrorize your neighborhood. Remember to take your pumpkin head off and throw it at people for a quick thrill. And remember to avoid fire, the living scarecrow's deadly enemy. Listen to your local fire chief when he says: Attention arsonists. Keeping you people from burning your own homes down out of sheer carelessness is like trying to stop the tides. They're cutting our budget again, and you oily-rag-saving, cigarette-tossing barbeque chefs and trash-burners are breeding like rabbits. Soon we'll be outnumbered, and the united planet of earth will go up like an origami paperweight.
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"OK, just one more. I had to go back to the tapes for this one (thanks, Bill) and transcribe. But realize also that reading it and listening to Mr. Mark read it are two different things altogether."
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Hello, folks. I’m Mr. Mark, with a wintertime riddle: how many giant-sized cyclops vultures could hatch out of a forty-foot egg, in your opinion. The answer can be found through a close examination of our nation’s freeway system. Socrates observed more than two thousand years ago that snipers may kill passing motorists in order to get their unborn babies through a crude cesarean section. But the motorist may then behead the sniper and write REDRUM in blood all over the turnpike, making the roadway slippery, and causing a 13-vehicle pileup at rush hour.
On the other hand, when a wealthy rock star choked on a hamburger in Philadelphia yesterday, a team of medical experts arrived to take him, via helicopter, around the world on a sightseeing trip to take his mind off it. Sure enough, somewhere over the Cayman Islands, the piece of burger in his throat dislodged, but he died anyway of a broken heart when the engine died and they fell into a munitions factory.
I’m Mr. Mark, with a wintertime riddle: what do you get when you sneak into a discount drugstore, after hours, dressed as a priest, and try to buy a prescription oriental slave girl over the counter without legal I.D.?
If you know the answer, you could win a major Allentown dairy, lock stock and barrel. Or a dog food cannery – the whole business, including all debts and liabilities. Listen and win.
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Hey folks.
This is Mr. Mark with a public service announcement from the Department of Motor Vehicles in Harrisburg. Once upon a time, there was a gun-packin’ maniac who had a crazy grudge against mooses. Now this particular maniac had never seen automobiles before, because he stayed indoors, and didn’t have a TV set. So when he saw a car for the first time, he thought it was a square blue moose and shot at it, whereupon the gas tank exploded and knocked the maniac up into the sky, through the radiation belt, and back down again.
Well, the radiation affected him, and after he landed he became a criminal genius and organized a gang of juvenile delinquents. With hi-tech weaponry and computers, they sought the arrest and execution of all mooses on earth. The FBI ambushed these crazy extremists after they blew up a plaster of Bullwinkle in a miniature golf course, and placed them in suspended animation until a future age when there’d be enough jail space to sentence them.
Well, when the maniac thawed out ten centuries later, he found intelligent grasshoppers had taken over the world, and they sentenced him to go back in time to the twentieth century, as an Allentown dog food executive for twenty years with no hope of parole. But when he arrived, the scent of moose meat in the slaughterhouse sent him off on another one of his spells, and he killed three fourths of the stockholders, after which the value of the shares skyrocketed, and the company gave him a bonus, and a percentage of the gross.
Little did the maniac know that all the while a trap was being laid for him by a vengeful moose, who had human hands grafted onto his front legs. The killer moose caught him in the booth of an adult bookstore, and plugged all the holes to adjacent booths, and the maniac died of loneliness, and lack of air. This has been a public service announcement from the State Department, and your local division of police informants.
And there’s no factory.
He does seem to have a mean side. This can be seen in the chilling relish he displayed in an interview with Talk magazine when imitating death row inmate Karla Faye Tucker's voice ("'Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, 'don't kill me'") and the alleged Fourth of July incident in which he dismissed a man who said he disagreed with his policies, saying "Who cares what you think!"
space saving tip: rip out the inscription page of all misguided gifts, stash in draw, give books to housing works....
one person whom has eaten all over the world said that its the only restaurant thats better than my home away from home Grand Sichuan Int'l.....
guess i have to go....
by Michael Atkinson
Village Voice, July 18 - 24, 2001
An exploding plastic inevitable, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within dares you to be amazed by its soulless mimeograph of humanity. In a dystopian future, this is the only type of movie we'd get to see: manufactured by hard-wiring, stamped from market-proven narrative templates, ostensibly distracting in the sheer bulk of its preprogrammed mayhem. All digital, all the time, Final Fantasy is not a cartoon, but rather a simulacrum of live-action Bruckheimer-ness so factory-pressed it should have an I'm-recyclable triangle embossed on every frame.
Think photo-realism without purpose, ironic or otherwise—and painted by nanotechnology. The movie's conspicuous artillery of faux details is its only Power Point, but today digital imaging is so ubiquitous that the achievement is authentically redundant. (Indeed, the masterfully imitated landscapes evoke the similar wonk-craft of "serious" live-action epics like Gladiator, The Messenger, and Contact.) It is said that a full third of the film's budget was spent on making the heroine's wispy hair convincingly wispy; how many heads of organic hair they could've bought is apparently irrelevant. The exercise is so elaborately pointless you'd think the Pentagon had bankrolled it.
Actually, it's a product of the same Japanese codeheads for whom the eponymous game series has been a spurting cash cow. The story itself is reheated Arthur C. Clarke: As giant alien "phantoms" (resembling microscopically photographed mosquitoes) besiege the earth, Identikit humans rally. There's a digital Ben Affleck (with Alec Baldwin's voice), a digital Neve Campbell (with Ming-Na's voice), a digital Jason Priestley (with Steve Buscemi's voice), etc. In this New Age, everything is helpfully color-coded: Silvery blue is good Gaia, leathery red is bad Gaia. For all of the monumental attention paid to visual fidelity (even a few lens flares and moments of handheld shakiness), the techies still can't manage to make two characters look convincingly into each other's eyes—it's like watching Disney World animatronic figures do soap opera.
The ultimate justification for Final Fantasy, it seems, is the wholesale subtraction of people from the entertainment equation; the games triumphed without the wetware, didn't they? But of course, they didn't: First-person electronic gaming revolves around and happens to a very human player, and without him/her, it's just machine love.
