Manchester United vs Grimsby Town: A not so live blog from Wednesday

As much as I decry our culture of convenience and immediacy and pine for the days of payphones and pagers, I do have to acknowledge how neat it is to have all of this technology present in every day life. If I wanted to watch Manchester United play a cup game in the 90s, I would have needed a satellite dish and some random, prohibitively expensive pay-per-view service. Today I can watch it on ESPN+ which is part of my Disney+ package which comes included with my cell phone plan. So I downloaded the Disney+ app and, aw shucks, I don’t remember the password. That’s okay, I can just search through my text history by typing in Disney and finding the time I asked my wife for the password 16 months ago. Now I can just watch a soccer game played in England on my phone! If you look past the numerous atrocities and civil rights violations happening around the country, modern life is pretty cool.

(Later that day...)

No matter what I do, the Disney+ app won't let me log in. They spend all these billions of dollars on this technology that they insist is essential to our way of life and can't even be bothered to make it run properly. And don't even get me started on Paramount! I just loooooove watching Champions League knockout games with the sound out of sync by several seconds! Wankers!

(A few hours later...)

OK, so the game was actually on a different streaming service that I already had on my phone and I was already logged in and my team had one of its most embarrassing losses in modern history. Fuck me, I’ll just go back to being 12 and my team winning all the time.

I don't like the idea of Hot Sauce with Everything having two Broken Arrow posts in one comeback

(Note: This was written a little more than four years ago. I don't remember what compelled me to write it, especially considering it was the first thing I'd written in several years. I guess it was just a fun exercise to see how it felt to once again put words down. It feels oddly quaint to have this random rant to look back on now that everything is so aggressively... downward spiral-y. Anyway, here I am, once again talking about Broken Arrow, sittling idly by while everything I took for granted fades away. One thing I wrote here made me think about today. The bad guys won yet insist on still acting like the good guys. Why bother? Can't you just pat yourselves on the back and stop pretending to care about the common man? Anyway, Broken Arrow is a good movie.)

The movie villain I most identify with is Major Vic “Deak” Deakins. You might be asking yourself why I chose such an obscure character. Or, perhaps you’re scanning your brain for John Travolta jokes to make me feel bad about myself. Fuck that. My dude is rich and I bet he can still dance. Anyway, what you’re most likely really thinking is: Vic who? That question is valid. Broken Arrow is mostly forgotten to history and I had to google Deak just to know his full name. 

Like all great villains, Deak has a nickname, attitude, and modus operandi that transcend the need for legal names or sound decision-making. Deak doesn’t need that shit. Deak has more important things to attend to, like killing Bob Gunton just because. That “just because” is at the core of what makes me so Deak. Like sure, Deak is in it for the money. But nobody reflects on great villains because they were trying to get paid. Hans Gruber’s mission was entirely about money, but we all love him because he was cool as hell. (He also looked outstanding in his John Phillips suit)

Deak understands that true villainy is about the panache. When his escape helicopter is blown up, forcing him to choose between: a) giving up and going to all of the prison, or b) die fighting, he chooses c) fuck that, if I lose, I am literally detonating a nuclear warhead and murdering as many humans as possible on my way out. With about to be dead but still 100% alive Howie Long* by his side, Deak decides three minutes is plenty of time left to live his life, arms the bomb, and declares “fuck em if they can’t take a joke.” That’s my guy.

If I ever cross the line into comic supervillainy, you better believe I’m in it for the lolz. In all seriousness, what’s the point in being an objectively terrible person if you can’t have fun with it? I genuinely don’t understand people who do unspeakable things and try to act like the hero. Your movie does not have a happy ending. You’re the bad guy and… congratulations, you got away with being evil! If that’s me, I’m pulling a Deak and leaning into it hard. Like way too hard. Like killing my sole investor with a karate chop to the throat because that’s more efficient than kindly asking him to shut up hard. Deak knows what’s up. He already committed to a much shorter lifespan. If you’re gonna be the guy who fucks everybody’s shit up, you might as well ruin as many days as possible. It’s called commitment. 

It’s not that I’m trying to die in three minutes; neither was Deak. Deak made his decision a long time ago. (Certainly more than three minutes, at the very least) Now that he’s lost, there’s no point in playing to the whistle. He’s a mercenary, not a small forward. So what to do now that your dastardly plan has been foiled? You’re god damn right I’m gonna be a sore loser about it. 

* Consider this the start of my petition to change that character’s name to Howie Long. This was way before football studio landmark Howie Long and right before Firestorm, that one cool movie Howie Long made when he tried to be an actor. My point is, this was just stunt casting of a football player who wasn’t quite ready to read lines. He made some funny faces and acted cool about killing people. The message the filmmakers were trying to convey with this character was “Hey, it’s Howie Long!” So I really don’t feel bad calling the character Howie Long