The world is being taken over by fattys.

I recently read a post by lotta_valdez describing how super skinny people aren't the problem, but people becoming too fat is. It's hard for me to disagree, especially with my recent experience.

2 weeks ago, I had a $50 Wal-Mart gift card. One of the many things I wanted to buy was a graphic t-shirt. Of course, I'd completely forgotten about it until my sister and I had reached checkout. I ran for the men’s shirts and turned into the graphic tee area. The shirts all pretty much sucked. I saw two funny ones and chose the ones I liked better. I took it out of the bin and unfolded it to see its size.

It was a large. A fairly normal size that I would reach in maybe less than a year. Right now, I’m a medium, so I refolded it and put it back in the bin. I took another shirt from the bin and saw that it was an XL. I looked to the register my sister was standing at (thankfully it was close enough), and saw that there was one person between her and the conveyor belt. ‘No worries,’ I thought. ‘Plenty of time.’

I began to pick through the shirts, not bothering to refold them. L, XL, XXL. There wasn’t an M in sight and I was running out of time. For the record, there wasn’t an S in sight either.

My sister reached the belt and began to load the things from our cart, seeing as she had both of our gift cards. I could’ve abandoned the shirt and gone for the second-funniest one, but the way I saw it, why should I suffer because America’s gone overweight? I was determined as hell. I wanted that shirt.

I attacked the bin. I pushed the shirts I’d already seen to the right and kept the unexplored ones on the left. My hands were flying like some cartoon character’s as I unfolded shirts and added them to the mountain on the right.

Finally the viewed mountain became too tall and fell over like an avalanche on the last shirt. I reached to the bottom and took out the folded shirt. I hurriedly went to the neckline and read the letter there. Or should I say letters.

XL.

I wanted to yell, but instead I grabbed a large shirt. I didn’t care if it sagged off of me like a hobo. McDonald’s wasn’t going to get the best of me. I walked to the register and saw me sister slowly pushing the cart towards the exit, her eyes searching the aisles. We made eye contact and she motioned that it was time to go. I gave the shirt to the cashier to restock stormed ahead of my sister. I felt like a six year-old throwing a tantrum, but it really wasn’t fair.

I had to really fight the urge to smack the next obese person I saw.

Hey, you know what’s great? When people attack you and yet they don’t have an argument to back themselves up with. Example:

“Stem cell research is wrong!”

“Why?”

“….because.”

Great argument. I suppose that gravity is a myth and we are pushed to the Earth by the invisible force of ‘because’ as well. Posers are everywhere, believing and fighting for things they know absolutely nothing about. It’s insane! It’s almost as bad as people who think opinions are facts.

“What’s your favorite color?”

“Blue.”

“Blue sucks, asshole! Yellow for the win!”

On a small scale, these types of people are just mildly annoying. But picture it on a bigger scale. Let’s say there was a politician with these attitudes. His meeting would go a little like this:

“Senator, is it really a good idea to leave the homeless people be? Shouldn’t we help them?”

“Uh, no.”

“Well, why not?”

“Because…eventually they will die off.”

“How do you figure?”

“Shut up, we’re going ahead with my plan. Who put you on this board? You’re fired.” Then he’d look around with a challenging look in his eye.

“Anybody got a problem with that?”

And do we really need politicians to be worse than they already are? Today these posers are mosquitoes buzzing around our ears; tomorrow they’ve taken over the world. It’s nearly impossible to be tolerant of retarded, self-involved morons who don’t know the difference between defending gin and defending genocide (though it would be quite amusing to watch that person’s argument fall to pieces).

If the people of Earth don’t get some brains, I’m going to Mars.

P.S. This is my Angry font. grrr. i wish my sister would stop playing the jonas brothers....

Watch it here! But be careful, it's a continuous stream. After Part 1 there's 2 seconds of blackness and then Part 2 and so on. Press stop or pause after Part 1 if you want to wait for the next post to watch. And there's no need to favorite/bookmark the page. There'll be a link to the movie every post at the beginning, just like this one.

Welcome to chapter one of Bloggin’ Barbie. Today I’ll be bloggin’ part one of Barbie of Swan Lake. If you don’t know already, most every Barbie film starts off with Barbie and her little sister Kelly.  Kelly usually has a problem that Barbie relates to in her story. Barbie always plays the main character. Don’t be fooled. Whether she’s called Liana, Ro, or Genevieve, it is the Barbie doll. The plastic, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Barbie doll. So let’s jump into the Barbie world full of castles and princes and unicorns, eh?

The movie begins with one minute and thirty seconds of credits with nothing but blue waters and the silhouette of a dancer as a background. I found this almost as boring as Spiderman’s opening credits. I don’t know if any of you have ever seen Spiderman 3, but that movie had the longest opening credits I have ever seen. They crammed a trillion scenes from the last two movies into the beginning while the opening credits were rolling and…I should probably get back to Barbie.

After the credits end, the screen fades into a forest at night. The camera pans down through the forest to a lone figure walking to a cabin with a lantern in her hand. Once I saw her blonde ponytail and bright purple jacket, my Barbie senses began to tingle. She enters the cabin and looks around at all the sleeping little angels in their beds, smiling. However, one bed is empty. Yet Barbie continues to smile. I think her smile got wider.

“Looks like the bears got her! Oh well.”

Barbie goes to the porch where you can see Kelly’s unnaturally chubby face in pout mode. Barbie then asks the Kelly doll a question that completely throws me off.

“What’s wrong, Shannon?”

Woah. I’m pretty sure that that’s a Kelly doll. Yup. Just asked my sister. That’s Kelly. She’s probably just an undercover agent with a double life. To answer Barbie’s question, Undercover Kelly starts complaining about how unhappy she is and how her bed is uncomfortable. Kind of like Goldilocks. Barbie tries to be comforting by showing her the constellation Cygnus, the swan constellation. Kelly, er, Shannon gets excited once she can see it and Barbie says, “Did you know there was once a girl who turned into a swan? Her name was Odette.”

And so it begins.

We are brought to the family bakery where Odette works in old France. Instead of working, she’s pirouetting across the shop. Isn’t that kind of dangerous to do in a bakery full of delicate pastries, hot ovens, and the occasional person?

Odette nearly knocks into an old guy holding a platter of sugar cookies. My point proven. The old guy is her Papà and he suggests that Odette goes to village dances with her sister. Odette declines, saying she doesn’t want to be stared at. That’s not like you, Barbie! 

Odette is now holding the platter of sugar cookies and her father says, “Sugar cookies, your favorite!” Then, out of nowhere, “Shannon” says, “Make them chocolate chip. That’s my favorite!” Two red flags go off in my mind. First, if it was me telling the story, I would probably backhand slap Undercover Kelly across the face and say, “They were sugar cookies.” But Barbie just chuckles and agrees to change the cookies.  Second, the platter of cookies shimmers, sparkles, and transforms into the chocolate chip cookies Undercover Kelly requests.

This might just be me, but if I was Odette, I would probably drop the platter and run to get my holy water while screaming, “Demon cookies! Demon cookies from hell!” Still, I’d love to use that power on this year’s birthday gift…

Her sister, Marie, invites her to come horseback riding. Odette turns Marie down so she can work. Marie accepts this and promises to come back soon to help. She’s not coming back.

As Marie rides away, a bluebird takes off from the roof of a nearby house. An insignificant part of the movie, right? WRONG. The camera begins to follow the bluebird out of the village. At first, I questioned the relevance of a bluebird to the story of Swan Lake. Was it because they’re both birds? Then I saw a castle in the distance and it all made sense.  Every good Barbie movie needs a handsome prince, right?

The bird lands on a bale of hay that is standing upright with a target painted on it. An arrow hits the bullseye and the bird flees. It turns out the arrow was shot by a man. He’s hanging out with another guy who congratulates him and calls him ‘highness.’ Ah, it looks like we’ve found the love interest. Now all we need is for his mother to be the evil queen.

A woman steps out from the castle in a huff. I assumed by her clothing and crown that she was the queen.  My assumption was proved correct when the prince called the woman mother. She tells him that she has received many R.S.V.P.s from princesses for the royal ball. Prince rolls his eyes as she stresses that they are eligible princesses. Prince says he doesn’t want to marry at the moment and wants to travel. She says, “And so you shall. After my grandchildren.” Silly Queenie!  You can’t explore the world after having kids! Everyone knows that!

We flash back to the village and follow that same bluebird back to the bakery. There we see Odette pirouetting again, this time with a tray that has three tallish, wide rectangles that I’m guessing are cakes. Heavy cakes. How she’s pirouetting with such grace and ease is a mystery. She sets down the cakes and the bluebird begins to chirp a tune and twirl around on the windowsill until it falls into a bowl of flour. Odette saves the bird and sets it free outside.

Music begins to play that basically screams, “Woah, look over there!” Odette gets the hint and looks in the opposite direction to see a purple unicorn whiz by with an angry mob behind it. Only in Barbie. A man comes up in front of the unicorn with a whip. Animal cruelty! The man whips at the unicorn with probably the least expertise in the animated world. The unicorn turns into an alley. An archer takes aim at the unicorn, despite Odette’s protests, and expertly…misses.

The unicorn flees up stone steps and sees a man with a wheelbarrow full of logs. The unicorn charges the man and knocks the wheelbarrow over. By this time, the man is long gone. The logs fall out of the wheelbarrow and roll down the sloped street, making the mob run away in fear. The unicorn struts around, doing the weirdest victory dance I’ve ever seen. Why the animal would prance around rather than run from the village I don’t know, but this is why we’re at the top of the food chain. Although I don’t see myself eating a unicorn any time soon.

 The unicorn is then lassoed in the middle of its dance. It spots a nearby ax and runs the rope across it, escaping with half of the rope attached to its neck. The lasso man lands in a crate of fruit and three people come to mock him. Yet, for some reason, it sounds like the entire village is laughing uproariously.

The unicorn runs past Odette, who has been cowering in fear for the unicorn this entire time. The rope attached to the unicorn gets caught in some brambles as it flees the town. Odette leaves the bakery to follow the pretty horsey, leaving the bakery door wide open. When she comes back, her bread will be gone.

The unicorn is racing through a forest. The camera focuses on the rope dangling, so I’m guessing that’s important. I won’t know until later, because that is where Part 1 ends.

I’m guessing that Odette will befriend the unicorn, hug it, and then turn into a swan by touching its magical hair. Then it will turn out the Prince is actually a swan in disguise and Odette is the only one eligible for him. Finally, “Shannon” will reveal to Barbie that she is Kelly, her little sister and run away with all the cookies in the cookie jar.

Now for the desperate plea I promised. One of the five Barbie movies I was not able to reach was Barbie in the Nutcracker. If you have a Barbie-obsessed little cousin or sister in your family and they just happen to have that movie (or Rapunzel, Princess and the Pauper, Fairytopia, or Mermaidia), just rip it onto your computer and message me. Please and thanks!

Part 2, comin' right up!

Your Barbie girl,

                Nathaniel Charles