johnnyhongkong says…

Mary Milan and I are are calling it a year. We are shutting down California operations for 2006 and we are headed to the Mid-West (it’s in the middle) for the holidays and for new year. We’re gonna spend some time in Chicago before heading down The Farm and then back up to the Windy City for New Years.

Though the year started off with a bang – we got engaged! – it slowly went downhill as unresolved health problems and all the other things we hated on last Saturday came to bear as the year went on.

There’s hardly any use recalling that shite – we’re already dysthymic here.

So it is in the spirit of looking back on the funny that we offer you for your reading pleasure (and forgetful ass) a look back on the highlights of the year that was on johnnyhongkong.com. Get your read on while Mary Milan and I get arrested eating illegal foie gras in Chicago (seriously, if I find a restaurant serving foie gras, I will order it AND call the police on myself) and get fat consuming nothing but carby, country, cheesy holiday goodness on The Farm.

These were my favorites:

• Looking back on it, this was an omen for the coming crap year
• Mary Milan is still on the hunt for that 80-year old who grabbed my ass
• We chased a burrito truck for Valentine’s day
• What is the future of cinema?
• Shopping Lists!
• Likely the beginning of my vomit saga
• Why’d the optician have to go and make it all racial?
• Shitty ring tone choices
  
• This is why we’re going to get arrested in Chicago
• Rocky IV is the bomb. Rocky Balboa might be a bomb.
• There’s a dick in my phone
• The King wuz here
• The EPA wuz here

Various subsidiaries of Nick Denton’s Gawker Media Empire loved these posts:

• Almost Live Blogging Super Bowl XL
• Grammy 2cent
• David Stern, Where U At?
• Rotten Fruit Percentage
• An Infernal Movie Date

Take a ride through the live archives and tell us your favorite posts.

Happy holidays and have a great New Year. See you bitches in 2007.

If I told you that I was working on a screenplay about a pregnant, small town girl who is coaxed to go to New York City to support her big sister during some pretty intense medical treatments and on their last night in the city, after a magical week in the city, topped off by a trip to the top of the Rock and ice skating, on their way home, three blocks away from the apartment, the sister gets hit by a stolen bus and is about to get killed because the bus is rolling towards her and will crush her head but she is saved because a cabbie thinks quickly and crashes his cab into the bus just as the crackhead who stole the bus jumps out of the bus and runs away with angry citizens and a New York City SWAT team hot on his trail, eventually cornering him in a parking lot but he somehow gets away, you’d tell me, get the fuck out of town because that shit’s unrealistic; it doesn’t happen in real life.

Well it did – last week to Mary Milan’s pregnant sister. She’s really beat up and has a crushed elbow which will require surgery, but all things considered, she’s okay. According to the ultrasounds, the baby has a strong heartbeat.

And you wonder why our holiday party on Saturday has such a bad attitude.

I hate it when you’re driving along, minding your own business, when someone pulls a ridiculously dangerous, obtrusive, ill-advised lane change or other driving manuever and while they’re giving you the stank-eye when you honk or try to show them the error of their ways, you see that they were yapping on their goddamn cell phones.

I keep meaning to make a sign which would have “Get off your damn phone and drive!” in big bold letters above a picture of a car accident scene and a stick figure broken in half with x’s for eyes, holding a cell phone to its bloody head, so that I could stick it out of my window, like a billboard, whenever I see people driving while talking on their cells.

As if we needed more proof after the Mythbusters confirmed that driving while talking on the phone is just as dangerous as driving while intoxicated, this study conducted by Dr. David Strayer, shows that it actually makes you stupid.

Not stupid as in “a manner of speaking” but stupid as in it literally reduces brain activity.

Here are some of the other findings in Dr. Strayer’s study:

• Talking on a cellphone cuts a driver’s brain activity in half in a key area of the brain needed for noticing traffic conditions.
• Eye-tracking studies show that when drivers eyeball objects on a road, they’re much less likely to recall seeing something if they’re on the phone at the same time. “They’re as blind to dumpsters along the road as to a child running across the street,” Strayer says.
• The brain has a limited capacity for attention, so whatever is siphoned off by a phone conversation is subtracted from attention for driving, he says.
• Twentysomethings on a cellphone have the same reaction time as 70-year-olds.

Dude.  You soooo don’t want to be that 70-year-old you hate and want to ban from driving because she’s a terror on the road.

But “WAHHHHHH!!!” you say, “It’s not me.  It’s the post-post-modern-post-millennenial-MySpace-social-networks condition that makes me talk [and text] on my cell phone while I drive.  I can’t help mys…”

Shut the fuck up.

Look, I get it. But please, drive straight.  And drive sloooooow.  And if you happen to miss your turn because you’re “as blind to dumpsters along the road as to a child running across the street,” don’t try to make some stupid, asshole lane change to make up for it, just go an extra block – it’s not like you have one shot at that turn to go through a once in a lifetime wormhole – because there might be bitches behind you that you might hit.  And that bitch might be me and if it is, don’t be surprised if the first thing you get before you can put down your cell phone to say, “Oh my god, did I do that?” is a headbutt.

(yes, this is directed at you in the silver Saturn this morning on Santa Monica Blvd.  If I had thought fast enough I would have snapped a picture of you as you gave us your ugly face, apparently angry that we somehow disrupted your cell phone conversation, and posted it here)

I think the Adjuster’s plan to get me in touch with my anger is working.

Indeed, ’tis the season for the holiday parties. And while most will ask that you gather to celebrate love, life, lights, and the like, Mary Milan and I are having one this Saturday where we will not raise our glasses to such banalities. Instead, we will be raising our fists to give the motherfucking bird to 2006 and all of the things that jacked us up this past year (this is in no way a complete list):

• Doctors
• Health issues
• Health insurance companies
• Big oil
• Muscle pain
• Dysthymia
• Writer’s block
• Crackheads
• Stolen buses
• Perfectionism
• Social anxiety
• News about Tom Cruise
• Harvard Law School
• Death
• Whole Foods
• The Industrial Organic Complex
• The Climate Crisis
• Identity theft
• Acid reflux
• Matthew Barney
• Data organization
• TMJ
• Britney Spears’ crotch

Seriously, enough is enough! I’ve had it with all this mortherfucking bullshit in our motherfucking lives!

Earlier in the year, I posted about how Billy Joe London had branded 2006 as the Year of “I Can“:

Returning from a holiday cruise, bleary eyed and land sick, Billy Joe London, an expert in consumer intelligence, proclaimed to Mary Milan, Bender and me on January 1st at Bar Tabac in Brooklyn, “I’ve done the focus groups and the brand identity for 2006 is “assertive,” there’s going to be more “I can” and less “I can’t.”

He was totally right. 2006 has been totally assertive in messing with us. “I can fuck you up,” seems to be 2006′s slogan.

I’m thinking that I’m going to make the “Fuck You 2006 Salmon Wellington” and the “I’ll Be Drunk Until 2007 Egg Nogg.” There will be no cake – cake is so 2006. Nor will there be cupcakes. That shit is sooo 2005.

But donuts? Now donuts are 2007.

It’s been a harrowing end to bachelor week. As the last post mentioned, some really bad stuff happened and thankfully, it has all turned out well, so far, all things considered. Anyway, I’ve sort of been on the verge of tears at various points over the past few days.
Well today, the floodgates opened.ÂWhat happened?

Rocky III on TNT.

I cried started crying when Mickey died and pretty much cried all the way through. I’ll admit that Rocky still touches me in my bathing suit area but Rocky III?
At around Rocky and Adrian’s fight on the beach, at Rocky’s nadir of self confidence where he admits how scared he is and Adrian tells him to get over himself, it finally occurred to me that it wasn’t about Rocky III (great as that scene, and Rocky III, may be), it was of course about the ill shit in real life (as a side note, do you know what they call Mr. T in Mandarin? “Strange head T”).

Anyway, the Adjuster better get ready cuz there’s some shit to talk about for next week.

I’m so over bachelor week….

Whatever, I’m so over 2006. The New Year can’t come any sooner. And if the bad shit doesn’t stop happening and the good shit doesn’t finally start happening, it’s gonna be somebody’s ass.

Fo’realz.

I am sad to report that thus far in bachelor week, I have failed to get strippers. It’s not for lack of trying, though. I think Mary Milan and Conrad Connecticut are working in cahoots to put a kibosh on my stripper action.

As for Mary Milan’s part, she probably doesn’t want me to get strippers to party down here in West Hollywood while she’s in New York.

And Conrad Connecticut? He just started the Crossfit workouts and turned me on to them.

So instead of getting strippers these last two nights, I was at the gym doing these workouts:

Yesterday: The Murph which begins with a mile run, then followed by 100 pull ups, 200 push ups, 300 squats, ending with another mile run.

I came home with the full intention on calling strippers but fell asleep. As a side note, the workout should be renamed the Ralph because I seriously almost threw up.

Today: The Filthy 50′s which consists of 50 reps of each of the following: 2-foot box jumps, jumping pull ups, 36 pound kettleball swings, walking lunges, hanging knees to elbow, 45 pound overhead push presses, back extensions, 20 pound wall ball shots, burpees (which begin in a squat position, kick back to a push up position, kick back to squat position, and then a jump in the air), and double unders (while jumping rope you have to pass the rope under the feet twice).

After those workouts, I’m not entertaining strippers in the near future. I’m going to have a hard time entertaining myself and by that I mean moving to get the remote control to turn on the television.

Ugh. I’m hurting.

Bachelor week sucks.

I miss my baby. She’d have the good sense to tell me that these workouts are ridiculous.