Return of Project Yancey: Doug En Vogue

To the surprise of myself and likely many other people, the students of the Bluffington School actually do care about fashion (which is obviously reflected in their everyday dress.)  This is shown off by Doug walking by Bee Bee, Connie and Chalky looking at a teen fashion magazine during what is presumably their recess period.  After Bee Bee does her typical insult at Doug for being regular, Doug lets us in on his secret wish of wanting to be more like Dylan Farnum from the hot new teen drama, Teen Heart Street.  The next scene finds all of Doug's wishes coming true as he is watching Teen Heart Street, and sees the heartthrob, Dylan Farnum himself, wearing the same exact green vest and shorts that Doug always wears, and it's all while Judy does some mindless counter-societal blabber that Doug obviously pays no mind to.  As we lose ourselves in Doug's imagination, some fashion show is talking about how cool Doug is and how he is a total trendsetter.  With this perception of his new-found coolness in mind, Doug goes to school planning to not say anything about it, but everybody else is wearing the same clothes and point out how he is wearing the "Dylan Farnum look", obviously forgetting that Doug wears the same thing every day.

Dylan Farnum, such a hunk

 He decides to confide in Patti about his plight, but for lack of a better term, she simply doesn't give a fuck.  As Doug's frustration works it's way toward critical mass, even Skeeter is wearing the Dylan Farnum look.  Since Doug is more than a little insecure, he invites all his friends over to see how his closet is full of the same clothes, but it backfires and everyone thinks he is just a crazy Dylan Farnum fanatic.  We are now interrupted by another awesome daydream, where we see the same scene from Teen Heart Street featured earlier, except with Doug saying all the lines, and Connie and Patti get creeped out how Doug thinks he is Dylan Farnum, and that is because he is a marionette being controlled by Dylan Farnum himself.  Now critical mass has been found so Doug goes shopping for some new clothes, and the guy at the store tries to hook him up with the hippie look, a rapper's outfit and even a disco suit, but Doug hates all of them.  Now things get really interesting, another clerk (looks Jamaican but has a deep Indian accent) comes over and tries to figure out what the deal is then short stubby Jewish-sounding guy comes to help out as well and Doug does his patented "scream and run away" move.  Having decided to fuse elements of all three styles from the store Doug comes out wearing one of the most amazing ragtag sets of clothing I've ever seen (don't worry it will be pictured below) and keeps kicking a soccer ball against a picture of Mr. Farnum on the wall.    Now we find out three more things about Judy, first that she reads crazy magazines where people dress like Doug is now, second that she actually has some understanding about how copying moves things forward, and lastly that she has some soccer skills.  As she runs away to plan what seems to be a performance piece where people get naked and grunt at each other (too young to know what porn is I guess.)  Doug soul searches and realizes he doesn't care if he is trendy or not he just wants to be himself, which is just in time for him to not be trendy anymore because the new style is Skeeter's typical clothes.

I just found my Halloween costume!

It seems kind of strange that I would choose this episode, but stick with me because I have some interesting things to say about both the world of teen dramas and the world of fashion, so enjoy the ride.  The first topic I'll touch are the hilarity of teen dramas.  The trendy and cool kids would watch all kinds of these shows when I was in my younger days, but i was neither trendy nor cool, so I never was able to get myself inundated in the worlds of such shows as Dawson's Creek, Seventh Heaven or The OC.  I found myself preferring to stick to cartoon and typical sitcoms that would be conveniently timed when I got home from school.  This does not mean that I never watched and enjoyed a teen drama, because that is completely false.  I am a lifetime fan of the show Boy Meets World, but rather than having watched it when it was a new show, I got into it when it was syndicated years later.  It would be easy to say that being able to connect to the geeky little brother Corey Matthews was the reason why I was able to get into the show (mainly because I am, in fact, a geeky little brother).  It would also be easy to say that I like the show because Mr. Feeny is the Atticus Finch of television.  Yet, neither of these were the reason I found myself so interested in the show, the truth is that I watched nearly every episode of the show because I am in love with Topanga Lawrence.  She is a geek's dream girl, she is very smart, can hold a conversation, is very attractive yet approachable and to tell you the truth the weird name thing kinda turns me on.  We would just have to do something about the whole saving herself for marriage thing.

Oh Topanga, you tease...

The next topic to touch on is fashion, which shouldn't be too long of a discussion as I am still daydreaming about Topanga.  My typical day-to-day dress isn't very flashy, I would usually be found wearing a tee shirt with the partially zipped or unzipped hoodie, jeans and my trusty Adidas sneakers.  I've recently found myself taking a little divergence between given days, for some cases I have been starting to attempt to look nicer and wearing collared shirts more than typical (I'm still not "cool" enough to pop the collar), but have also found myself delving into looking at and even buying some more geeky tee shirts.  My favorite geek shirt was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt I was able to get for $10 at www.teefury.com, which has become one of the sites that I make sure to check once a day.  Other than that I really haven't noticed any particular fads in fashion as of lately, everything seems to just stay the same all the time without any drastic changes.  It isn't like what you are wearing sets you apart as much as people make it seem like, the real world isn't like The Warriors where you obviously know who knows who just by a quick look at their garb (for the record I would choose to be in the Baseball Furies if I had to choose, sorry Warriors, you are the best but leather vests aren't my style.)  So, that is that, I am going to go back to fantasizing about Topanga Lawrence now.  Until next time.

The Furies in all their face paint and glory.  Watch this movie.

Alternative Universes

A week or two ago I was watching The One with Jet Li, on the whole it was a pretty crappy movie with a few kinda cool fight scenes, exactly what I was expecting to see.  The best part of the movie though was that the premise revolved around the existence of alternate universes, which is a topic that always seems to find itself running through my head often, usually in humorous ways.  An alternate universe can take on all sorts of different personalities or traits, for example one of my friends is always very proud of his creation of the "Sombrero Universe" in which everything is exactly the same, except everyone is wearing a sombrero.  So I will continue to talk about some of my thoughts on alternate universes.

Only in the Sombrero Universe!

My first creation of an alternate universe myself was to imagine what all the people I know would be like in this alternate universe where everyone's personality is the complete opposite of what it is like in real life.  The perfect example of this came when I was talking with a friend about a professor, we were discussing her getting help from him at his office hours, and how in general he was just a fantastically nice guy.  I started asking her how she would respond if instead of being his own nice self, when she went to his office hours he all of a sudden became a total sleazebag who makes awkward sexual advances toward all the girls struggling in his class for improved grades.  This is when his alternate universe alter-ego was created, he still would become a professor, but he would be a horny bastard who has a reputation for a lenient policy on extra-credit.  It is left to assume in this alternate reality he gets all the dirty student-teacher sex he could ever want, but enough about that, lets see who else exists in this alternate reality.  Jennifer Aniston is still America's tough-luck sweetheart, but its only because she is a massive whore, and Angelina Jolie is a complete sweetheart who just happened to find her true love in Brad Pitt when he was with slutty Jen Aniston (oh what a twisted web we weave).  But by far my favorite character in this alternate reality is alternate reality me, who actually writes quality material (other than bullshit about sexually deviant alternate universes), and gets loyal readers.

For your extra credit assignment you must play with my dingaling.

I also had a dream about a lost Chappelle's Show sketch.  The idea of the sketch was about how our cultures came to be the way that they were, and how weird the world would be if things were only slightly different.  The most prominent difference in my dream was the change that would occur in a Chinese Food Restaurant, nothing would be aesthetically different except instead of serving the same delicious MSG-packed Chinese food we are used to, all Chinese restaurants are instead, burger joints.  It truly was entertaining to watch all the Asian people standing in front of grills and flipping burgers and putting limitless amounts of ketchup and mustard on everything while yelling in their native language.  The only problem with this dream was that I am unsure if they also served french fries, and would have loved to hear them ask if I would like fries with that.

My thoughts exactly.

Thinking up different alternate universes can be tons of fun, and also finding what people would be like in the opposite world alternate reality.  The possibilities are endless, we could have an alternate reality where everyone is a surfer dude, so all the anti-society people would rebel by saying they prefer to ride small waves over the giant swells, and apparently there will be no such thing as a vegetable as all of the good farmland is a lot further from the ocean than any surfer would ever want to be.  There could also be the awkward silence universe, where everybody is expecting everyone else to speak next, so every time you converse with someone it is just a long awkward silence while you wait for the other person to think of something to say while they wait for you to think of something to say, and the length of these awkward pauses contain some kind of meaning in themselves so things can get done.  There are infinite possibilities of alternate universes, so if you have any good ideas comment with some good ones, and if I like your ideas I may expand upon them in a future post.  I'll leave you now with this interpretation of an alternate universe, courtesy of Mail Order Comedy, who now make the show Workaholics on Comedy Central.