LUDICROSITY

Enjoy, friends.

As we close out 2007, I think back to all the things that made this year so mementous:

- I started using a whitening toothpaste.
- I went an entire month without purchasing a new ska album.
- My shoelace broke.
- I bought a new pillow and pillowcase.
- I watched “Evan Almighty”, perhaps one of the wost movies of 2007.
- My girlfriend told me I should buy some new underwear.
- My favorite deodorant/anti-perspirant was forever discontinued by Gillette.
- My new Gillette deodorant proceeded to give me an armpit rash.
- My band finally finished our debut full-length album after working on it for 14 months.
- My apartment started to collapse because of construction nextdoor.
- I made guacamole at home for the first time.
- I learned that if you trim backhair, it really does grow back faster.
- I found out that eating Shredded Mini-Wheats for three consecutive meals is not conducive to proper gastro-intestinal health.

And finally, I learned the true spirit of Christmas while making Puppetbox’s first-ever Christmas song & video, featured in amazing 2-D on youtube. The song was written by John Payne, with the video editing done by myself. (clips courtesty of public domain footage of 1964′s seminal classic, “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians”)

From all of us here at Ludicrosity, LLC, we wish you and yours a Happy non-denominational Holiday Season!

Enjoy:

I am rarely a fan of the horrendous youtube videos that get passed around the internet, but this one is so brilliant that I had to share it with the world. (i.e. – the five people who occassionally check this blog)

I think it’s one of the funniest things I’ve seen on the ‘net in a long time. You tell me.

I believe that I can safely say my job lacks any real excitement. Due to this fact, it isn’t exactly uncommon for me to yawn quite a bit in the afternoon as I sit in my office. (this is also partially due to my lack of sleep during the week)

It being 5:14 on a particularly slow day, I just yawned.

After the yawn was complete and I closed my lips, I had the distinct taste of butter in my mouth. Yes, you heard me correctly. Butter.

I have not consumed anything consisting of butter as an ingredient in over 24 hours. Hence, it’s quite suspect that I would be tasting butter after a yawn. What’s even more suspect is that it’s always butter. It’s never any other type of food or condiment. It’s always butter.

Has anyone else experienced this bizarre yawn phenomenon? Am I alone on this one? I mean, it’s not that tasting butter is necessarily a bad thing. Hell, it’s actually quite nice when I’m hungry. It’s simply that I don’t know why the taste of butter appears after a small percentage of my yawns.

I’m going to go home now and ponder this for a while.

Respectfully yours,

Mark J. Annotto
www.armedandridiculous.com

As I was crossing Broadway this afternoon to hit up a Duane Reade drugstore for toothpaste, I was trapped on the narrow pedestrian island between Broadway and 7th Avenue in the heart of Times Square. (I work in Times Square, so I’m forced to fight the throngs of humanity on a daily basis)

Anyhoo…while stranded on the concrete island as traffic zipped past on both sides, I was privy to an absolutely fantastic conversation between a family of tourists. (I’m assuming they were tourists because they had fanny packs on, the parents wore matching I HEART NY t-shirts, and all four spoke with southern accents)

What follows is a brief transcription of their enlightening conversation:

Father: How big is Times Square?

Mother: It’s pretty big. It’s the capital of New York City.

Son: No, it’s not. 42nd Street is the capital.

Daughter: New York City doesn’t have a capital. It is the capital.

Mother: Capital of what?

Daughter: New York.

Father: New York City is the state, so it has to have a capital.

Son: Exactly.

Daughter: New York City isn’t the state? So maybe New York “City” is just a nickname the locals gave it.

Father: I don’t think there are any locals. Almost everyone just visits.

Mother: I’m sure some people live here.

Son: I don’t know where they’d live. The city is just theatres, hotels, and restaurants.

Daughter: Maybe they rent rooms in the hotels?

** At this point, I actually walked in the wrong direction for two blocks so I could eavesdrop a bit more.

Mother: I’m sure they must. But I wonder where they do their laundry?

Father: Look at all the signs. It must be weird to have a big part of the city owned by stores.

Daughter: Dad, I don’t think stores own Times Square. I think they just rent space for their signs.

Mother: Oh.

Son: Where are all the homeless people we saw at the bus station?

Mother: I think they all get sent to Central Park during the day, so they don’t get in the way.

Daughter: Mom, that can’t be true. I think they just hide in the sewers.

Mother: That makes sense. I doubt they like sunlight.

Son: They live in the sewers? Ewww! That’s gross.

Father: I think this is the subway. We can buy tokens downstairs.

They then descended the staircase at 42nd Street outside the Gap, and I bid them a silent adieu. If I didn’t have to get back to work, I would have loved to just follow them and gain even more amazing insight into the minds of my fellow Americans. It was an extraordinarily educational 3 minutes that I won’t soon forget.

If I didn’t hear it myself, I wouldn’t believe it.

-Mark Annotto
www.armedandridiculous.com

Greetings friends,

It has been a long while since my ridiculousness has graced these pages. For that, I am sorry. I will be remedying that problem with at least one post a week from now on. (it will likely be more, however, as I have lots of stupid things that need to be said)

Regardless, I’m not here to talk about my lack of blog-posting dedication. Instead, I’m here to show you the newest music video from my post-geek-synth-rock band, “PUPPETBOX.” The song was recorded in 2006, and the video was filmed in Brooklyn on March 11th. This track is from our forthcoming full-length album, due out this summer.

Enjoy! (And by all means, forward this to everyone you know!)

And for those of you who wanted to know what the inspiration for the video was:

I just ate a handful of candy corn, and it was by far the most heinous thing I’ve placed in my mouth in a very long time. I received it as part of a Halloween gift bag from a coworker, whom I assume had no idea what filth she had just handed out. The bizarre thing is that I was looking forward to eating it, as I hadn’t had candy corn since middle school. Needless to say, my eagerness to consume this awful variety of candy disappeared after my first swallow.

I’m not quite sure what has happened to my palate over the years, but I distinctly remember eating candy corn as a child and enjoying the ever-loving hell out of it. Hence, I can’t even begin to fathom why it tastes like stale rhinoceros testicles at the age of 28.

Regardless, I highly recommend to anyone over the age of 10 that they avoid candy corn at all costs. It is a truly vile and disgusting candy, and should be wiped from the face of the earth.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

-Mark Annotto
www.armedandridiculous.com

I do.

Really.

I was thinking about it yesterday, and aside from a few black friends at work, a few black friends from college, and a few black acquaintances I’ve met through other friends, my life is seriously lacking as far as black people go.

I mean, don’t get me wrong…it’s not that I want to be cool, or hip, or that I want black friends so I can up my street-cred. As anyone who knows me would attest, my street-cred has been nonexistent for practically my entire life. Well, excluding the time I punched a kid in the face who was trying to steal my bike in Brooklyn.

Anyhoo…

What I’m trying to say is that I like black people. And black people seem to really like me. It seems that they find my limited knowledge of black culture very amusing. For instance: I can recite the lyrics to “Fu*k The Police” verbatim, but I couldn’t tell you the name of a single Puff Daddy song. Nor could I sing the chorus to any hip-hop song released after 1998. They also seem to find it funny that I speak fluent ebonics. Seriously, I do. Rarely does a day go by that I don’t drop a “Fa shizzle” or a “No diggity” into a sentence. It’s just part of who I am.

Damn, son.

Essentially, I’m writing this blog entry to see if anyone out there knows some black people who want to hang out with a comedian/musician with an Italian, Irish, & English ancestry. We can listen to my Onyx and Fu-Schnickens cd’s, and then watch Boomerang or In Living Color. We can even bring out my middle-school collection of Cross Colours t-shirts and have a little fashion show. It will be a phat time had by all.

Word.

-Mark Annotto
(a.k.a. DJ Mharque)
www.armedandridiculous.com

I haven’t written a new entry for this blog in a long while, so I figured I’d start it up again with a very simple, short post.

Yesterday, while walking down Carroll Street after a jog through a few Brooklyn neighborhoods, I passed a large gaggle of old Italian women chilling on the sidewalk. If you walk through a typical Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn during the summer, it’s extremely common to see groups of old Italians just lounging on the sidewalk on patio furniture. Basically, they’re escaping the oppressive heat of their homes while sharing gossip with and about their neighbors. Since this was an especially hot, humid day in Carroll Gardens, the group was rather large.

As I was walking by a particular cluster of women that looked to all be about 70 years old, I overheard one saying to her friend, “She misused the labia piece.”

? ? ? ?

“She misused the labia piece.”

I immediately paused, swung my head around, and tried to hypothesize what subject in the world this old women could possibly be discussing. Momentarily, I was ridiculously intrigued by her bold statement. Moreover, I really wanted to ask her what exactly a “labia piece” is.

As I turned around, however, I saw her pointing toward the “Our Lady of Peace” Roman Catholic church across the street. Unfortunately, she had actually said “She misused the Lady of Peace.” Reality set in, and my intrigue disappeared. Needless to say, I was severely disappointed.

Regardless, I spent about 15 minutes after the encounter yesterday trying to imagine all the different ways a labia piece could possibly benefit the world.

As of right now, I haven’t come up with any.

-Mark Annotto
www.armedandridiculous.com

I recently had the dubious honor of viewing “A Night in Paris”, the infamous Paris Hilton sex tape that appeared back in 2003. Like most people, I was under the assumption that this tape had some level of erotic quality to it. Unfortunately, I was mistaken. I am here today to dispel that notion, as this tape can best be summarized in exactly two words:

Sexually Fallacious

This tape is by far one of the dumbest things I’d ever seen. How this dark, grainy piece of film ever attained such a level of pop culture prominence I’ll never know. First off, the male in the video, a Mr. Richard Salomon, is a dirty frat boy through and through. He’s chewing gum for most of the video, all the while saying some of the most idiotic things ever captured on video. A choice quote of Mr. Salomon’s from the movie is assuredly the point at which he asks Paris to assume a certain position. In one of the most romantic lines uttered on film since Humphre Bogart’s “Here’s lookin’ at you, kid”, Mr. Salomon says to Paris, “I want you to get on top of me. Face that way. So I can see how pretty you are.”

There is also, of course, the blaring fact that a television is on in the background. At one point, you can clearly hear the following lines of dialogue from the TV, in what MUST be a blacksploitation film of some sort:

TV (in background): Yo honey’s shot! Proud African black man motherFU*Ker!

Paris: Ohhh. Mmm. [Slurp]

TV: Shit! [Laughter]

Paris: Mmmm-mmm …

TV: Call me Steve!

Paris: [Quick slurp]

TV: Call me Todd! What’s in a mothafu*kin’ name? ‘Cause blame will make you forget shit. That’s alright Caucasians, yo time is coming. [Laughter]

Paris: Mmm-mmm.

TV: Look around. We ain’t gonna use no whips. We just gonna knock y’all the FU*K out! Bowwww! [Uproarious laughter]

Funny? Yes. Erotic? Not so much.

While all of this appears to make for a very entertaining piece of cinema, it is actually not those aspects of the film mentioned above that make this video so humorous. The best part, by far, is how utterly detached Miss Hilton appears to be while engaging in the act of intercourse. It is as if she might as well be reading a book or watching a re-run of CSI. She hardly makes a noise throughout much of the video, except at one point to answer her cell phone. (Yes…she answers her cell phone in the middle of sex) And to top it all off, near the end of the video she engages in one of the most artistically bankrupt displays of oral sex the world has ever seen. Awful, folks. Simply awful.

The whole video comes together to form a solid piece of evidence which proves beyond a single doubt that sex with famous people is completely and utterly lacklustre. Therefore, I would recommend that you try to avoid it at all costs.

One would probably derive more joy from a really good pastrami sandwich on rye.

-Mark Annotto
www.armedandridiculous.com