Where Have The Headphones Gone?

If you’ve been on a bus/train/to the gym/grocery store/airport bathroom (no joke, man was in a stall blasting some show about rocks) ever, you’ve been apart of this. Someone listening to music/a podcast/ impeachment hearings/straight phone conversations/death threats/terror plots/screaming/by taking the speaker at the bottom of the phone and jamming it into their ear. Or just holding the phone by their side, and letting the tiny speaker blare into the openness. NOT ONE headphone in sight. Not a strand. Not a bud. Not a wireless. Nothing. Just their tiny speaker, blaring, and the open air. WHERE are the headphones of these people? What happened? Here are some reasons that HUMAN BEINGS who have PHONES (which is a more EXPENSIVE ITEM than headphones) could not have HEADPHONES.

1. Your Headphones Got Caught On A Child

   You’re a good person. You see trash on the ground? You pick it up. You see a woman in trouble? You yell from across the street, ‘Hey miss, are you okay?’ wait for a few seconds for her to respond to you, and when she doesn’t because she’s being beaten mercilessly in the head by a psychotic person wearing only a diaper, you continue on your way. You’re walking down the street one day, headphones in, and you come across a flaming building. People hanging out of the windows. Screaming and crying. You take your phone out to record the whole thing. Not for likes, but to let investigators know EXACTLY what was going on. As you’re doing the lord’s work, recording other people’s misfortunes, a child falls from the building, and crashes directly onto you. As you stand up, brush yourself off, you reach out to the child in need.

   ‘Hey kid! Are you okay?’

   ‘AGHHGHG! Ahhhhhh!’

   Waiting for a few seconds for an AUDIBLE response and not getting one, because this flaming child has just fallen from a window, you turn your phone to the fire kid writhing in pain on the ground. And this is when you notice that your headphone cords have been sliced in half by flaming kid arm.

   ‘No! I was listening to a four and a half hour podcast about fishing that for about three and half hours sidetracks to the hosts doing things like ‘Would You Rather?’ and ‘If A Tiger Attacked You What Would You Do?’ while EVERY ONCE IN AWHILE mentioning fishing! Noooooo!’

   Now what will you do? Hold a phone in your hand while finishing the last hour of ‘Fishing For Complaints’ through the tiny little speaker while others endure it as well? Although fire children burning through your headphone cord is a decent excuse, it’s still not enough. Buy another pair.

2. Your Thousand Dollar Phone Is The Only One That Didn’t Come With Headphones

   So you’ve bought/leased a new phone. You open the new phone, excited to use the same three apps that you did on the old one but now THIS PHONE has A FEW MORE FEATURES that you will NEVER USE.

   ‘Hey there’s a feature on here that tells me how to be rich!’

   ‘You use it?’

   ‘Not yet. Instagram!’

   You open the phone, expecting to find what you always find. A little book that says, ‘Hello, I am phone. If you’ve opened me and don’t know, you must be an idiot or a very smart baby. Here is what I do’ and HEADPHONES. You throw the little booklet aside, and realize, NO HEADPHONES. Not. One. How are you the ugly duckling? Why in the HELL did you not get headphones that are GUARANTEED to us all? Why is your phone the ONLY ONE that doesn’t have them? Do you go back to to the store and find out where they are?

   ‘I don’t have time to go all the way to the store! I want to listen to something RIGHT NOW!’

   That’s fine. Surely you have another pair of headphones from the dozens of sound playing devices you’ve operated over the years?

   ‘No, I don’t. I got scared of them and burned them all!’

   Well… why would you d…

   *A door is heard slamming. The faint noise of music playing through a phone speaker is heard.*

   … Well… there’s that…

3. Someone In Your Family Hung Themselves With Headphones

   So you come home after a long day at the office. The whole way up to your front door you’re thinking, ‘Man, I wanted to hang myself all day, but thank GOD I’m not home.’ You open the door, and boom! There’s your grandmother. Hanging from a pair of Beats headphones. Slippers falling off of her cold, dead feet. Note attached to her that says ‘I had these noise cancelling headphones on and I actually HEARD A NOISE that wasn’t the SICK beat I was listening to. I can’t go on in this world if even Dr. Dre, of rapper/producer/NWA member fame, can lie to me and the public like this. So I decided to cancel all noise! I can’t hear a thing now! P.S. Turn up the base. Love, GranMommy Mom Mom’

   After you untie your grandmother’s dead swinging body from a beam (which is really hard to do with the quality of the Beats by Dre headphones cord), screaming ‘No! GranMommy Mom Mom! But you didn’t even bake one last batch of cookies before you left us! WHY?!’ you decide that you can NEVER AGAIN use headphones. How can you wear something on your head that took the life of a loved one? You can’t. Understandable. What you also can’t do, is listen to anything publicly without them. This is the trade off. Just silent phone games from now on.

4. You Don’t Know Headphones Have Been Invented

   In 1910, you were a blacksmith. You had two pairs of clothes. One dressy, one slightly less dressy but still very dressy based on today’s standards. You ate beans out of a can and avoided being in photos because they’d ‘steal your soul.’ One day while re-shoeing a horse named ‘Pre World War,’ you slip and accidentally jam the shoe into PWW’s ass. ‘Pre World War’ kicks you in the head, sending you flying into a wall. You are rushed to the hospital and fall into a coma. There’s a mix up at the hospital, and instead of people thinking you’re in a coma, they believe you’re dead. You’re supposed to be taken to the morgue, but these men, who just mixed up a person in a coma with a DEAD guy, don’t want to take you ALL THE WAY to the morgue, so they toss you in a freezer and decide they’ll take you there tomorrow. Unfortunately for you, the room the freezer is in is thought to be haunted, and is cemented over. So there you are. In a freezer. Behind cement. 109 years go by, and then a contracting company buys the land the hospital is on to build condos.

   ‘All right, the contract is signed. Push these disgusting sick people into the street.’

   ‘What?! But we need time to move thes…’

   ‘No time! I want lobby furniture and a movie theatre that no one will ever use in an overpriced building NOW! Wrecking balls will be swinging through here in less than an hour. Hurry up!’

   People in wheel chairs are pushed into the street. Full hospital beds with patients in them attached to IVs are tossed out of windows to save time.

   ‘But I was just about to have my beef bro….. Whoa!’

   A wrecking ball is thrown into the side of the building, and the freezer you have been in for 109 years flies through the air, crashing hard into an alley. Your ice body rolls out, and for four days you lay there, thawing. You finally come to. Look at all these cars! What is all this noise?! The buildings! The people! You’re in… the future! You walk into the street in a hospital gown. You see everyone with these THINGS attached to their heads. What IS that?! Demons? Aliens? You try to stop someone, but nothing. Everyone is holding SOMETHING in their hands that is ATTACHED TO THEIR HEAD. Scared, alone, unaware why these monsters have attached themselves to people’s heads, you sit on the street, and wait to die.

5. You Lost Your Headphones

   If you lost ALL OF YOUR PANTS would you just walk around without pants?

   ‘Yeah these are boxer briefs. I lost my pants, okay? What do you want me to do? Buy MORE PANTS? No. BEST I can do is paint my leg.’

   Headphones are pants for your music. Your music/podcast/phone call/temple run game needs pants. They are the private parts of your phone, and they need to be covered up by SOMETHING. NOBODY needs to see/hear your phones music/podcast/phone call just swinging in the breeze. BUY more. STEAL more. MAKE more. But Jesus, get some headphones.

Twitter/Instagram @nathanmacintosh

The Irishman

The movie made by the man who said “Marvel movies are not cinema” is finally out out and some people are pretty angry about it. I saw it before it came on Netflix because I knew that if I watched it at home I would check my phone seven hundred times with my entire dick in a tub of butter.

‘Wow! Look at this video of a UPS guy waiting at a door! I mean, it’s great! See, this psycho has a camera on their doorbell because they NEED TO KNOW who is at the door! They couldn’t possibly just go to their goddamn door and see. And better than that! They POST the videos that the doorbell takes! Isn’t that great? They don’t ask permission or anything they just DO IT because they are creative geniuses wh… wait, who the hell is Pacino in this thing? Hoffa? Who the hell is Hoffa? Whatever, I’m gonna warm up this butter.’

Now that it’s on Netflix? A LOT of people have a LOT of opinions. And if you like or do not like the movie, completely fine. But these are my favourite reactions to The Irishman that I came across multiple times.

1. Not Enough Action

   ‘The Irishman didn’t have enough action.’ Not enough action? Who told you this was going to be Sudden Death? Above The Law? This is not an ACTION movie. Never was described that way. I mean, I get it. Scorsese is known mostly for his big action sequences. Remember that scene in Goodfellas where Henry Hill takes down a helicopter shirtless with only a handgun as cars explode all around him? Or that GREAT scene in Casino where Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein fights fifteen Yakuza members in a steam room wearing only a towel? Remember when he broke that one guy’s neck and yelled ‘You’ll never take my Casino, you dirty Yaks!’ I mean THAT was action. OR in Raging Bull, when Jake Lamotta walks into a boxing ring holding a grenade, says ‘1st Round KO’ then THROWS the grenade at Sugar Ray Robinson who disintegrates into dust?! I personally will NEVER forget the scene in Taxi Driver where Travis Bickle oils himself up, travels to Vietnam and wins the war HIMSELF.

   ‘Are you looking at me, complete Vietnamese army!’

   You just CAN’T beat action scenes like that. This is a departure from that for Scorsese. This is a well-told story with great acting. If you’d like some more action from this movie, bang your head off your fridge.

2. The de-aging looks ridiculous! I mean LOOK at it!

   ‘I mean, why not get a younger person to play these guys! They look so OLD!’ Interesting that this is a problem for some people but nobody has an issue with filters on Instagram.

   ‘Wait, I know Jeff and he’s NOT Perpetua! He’s a NORMAL at BEST!’

   People have a problem with DeNiro with a younger face beating up a man with his seventy six year old body. This type of CGI bothers you but two raptors FIGHTING in Jurassic Park? Nothing. Two RAPTORS are FIGHTING. Doesn’t look ridiculous at all? Maybe nobody noticed.

   ‘I can’t BELIEVE that not only are there still two raptors alive today, but that they trained them to fight in this movie! This thing deserves an Oscar.’

   ‘Those are CGI raptors.’

   ‘No way! They are right there!

   Or how about Captain America wearing a one piece leotard while talking to NOBODY on a screen. Acting with so much CGI there is NOTHING around him at all. Not an issue? Okay so a man, who is ON SCREEN, acting while his face is younger than he actually is, is WORSE than an adult wearing a mask talking to a not-there-at-all raccoon?

   ‘But his body is OLD!’ Yes. It is. And unless you’re a twelve year old who posts five Tik Toks a day, you should be able to deal with this. If not? Maybe banging your head off of your fridge will help.

3. It’s SO Long. Like SOOOOO Long.

   Were you the only person who didn’t know how long the movie was? If so, yes, I feel for you. I would feel AWFUL as well if I was the ONLY PERSON ON EARTH who wasn’t aware that this was a long movie. It must have been devastating to think you were getting into a sitcom length Scorsese movie only to find out that it was longer than a REGULAR movie! You thought you were about to watch Frasier, and someone threw The Ten Commandments at you.

   ‘No! I was just hoping to hear a ‘Oh for god sake, Niles!’ and now Charlton Heston is telling me not to covet my neighbours wife!’

   The rest of us, not wanting to leave you behind like this again, will make a CONCERTED EFFORT to ALWAYS make sure YOU are aware the EXACT LENGTH of a movie that the REST OF US know. No cinephile left behind, as they say. It’s on US, as a SOCIETY, to make sure that EVERY psychotic monster who can’t read the play time at the bottom of the screen is well informed as to the length of a movie that the rest of us are aware of. In this case, it’s our fault. It’s on us that you were left ALONE in this cold world where great acting and a great story go FARTHER INTO TIME than you were told about.

   MAYBE, the director, Scorsese, gave us a longer movie because there is NO WAY that you will EVER see Pesci, DeNiro and Pacino together again on the same screen. Never. If YOU’D like to see them together again though, if you’d like this vision to go through your head without it BEING SO LONG, try putting your head in your fridge and slamming the door.

'Mamava' - Breast Feeding In Peace

There are a lot of frustrating things happening in the airport. Kids crying. Boarding passes being checked thousands of times. Some psycho late for a flight who STILL needs to buy a danish from Auntie M’s then argue with the gate agent when the gate has been locked with crumbs in their mouth ‘but it’s right there! The plane is RIGHT THERE!’ But this is the FIRST TIME, I saw this.

A trailer for mothers that allows for ‘breastfeeding and pumping in peace’. This mobile home that was brought inside is for mothers, to BREAST FEED in peace. This tool shed found in backyards hidden in by sad dads who ‘tinker with nuts and bolts’ while they’re actually ‘thinking about their entire life and the wrong turns they’ve made’, has been brought INSIDE so that moms can PEACEFULLY feed their babies.

Now of course, there would be a lot of mothers who love this, and that’s fine. Own space. Privacy. Makes sense. Some of that would come from mothers not WANTING to have to sit in a chair openly because SOMEONE might glare at them like like they’re microwaving a bowl of cereal. But some would be excited about this, because there are some complete criminals who have a problem with how babies feed. Oddly repressed psychos who instead of dealing with their own feelings have to make a face or a comment because ‘ugh! A tit! And a baby attached to it! Not in my town, buddy!’ So this milking RV would make them comfortable. There have been many articles and think pieces over the years about women breast feeding in public.

‘Should It Be Done?’

‘Is It Gross?’

‘Why Can’t I Also, If Hungry, Ask This Mother If I Can Suck On The Left One?’

Many people think it’s insane that a woman would breast feed in public. So this bungalow for breasts seems to be trying to hide the fact that babies eat. But, if people can argue that feeding a baby in public is somehow wrong or gross or shouldn’t be done, how are there PLENTY OF OTHER THINGS that people should ONLY be doing in the comfort of a rolling family room that are never talked about? There are MANY other things people do very publicly that should be done incredibly privately.

EATING AN EGG SALAD SANDWICH - Egg and MAYO?! Together again for the never should have happened to begin with? Eggs shouldn’t be eaten in public. If someone had a tablespoon of mayo and was just sucking on it we’d all want them locked up. Why is THIS not a caged option? Why is there not a ‘EggAva’ Caravan where you can ‘Eat This Disgusting Lunch Option In Peace’? If babies only ate egg salad that came from tits, there sure as hell would be.

PEOPLE PICKING THEIR NOSE - THIS HAPPENS WAY TOO MUCH. People, in PUBLIC, with their entire hand in their head. Their ENTIRE HAND is in their face as if they are trying to push the button on their brain that would shut off the need to PICK THEIR NOSE IN PUBLIC. Is THIS not disgusting? Why is there no ‘PickYourNoseAva’ covered gazebo where you can ‘Dig Into Your Skull In Peace’? WHY NOT?! Breast feeding needs to be hidden but this doesn’t? How are people less upset about THIS?! EVERYONE tells their kids not to pick their nose. Anyone tell their kids not to eat?

ARGUING WITH YOUR SPOUSE - Happens daily. People bringing their trash into the street.

‘You were supposed to NOT cheat on me!’

‘Today? You didn’t say today!’

‘It’s everyday!’

‘Okay well NOW I KNOW! FINE. Starting now, I WON’T cheat on you on Tuesdays…’

‘No EVERY DAY! Not just every Tuesday!’

Some how THIS is better than a baby having lunch. SOME magic way it’s more wrong for some to see a woman feeding a baby with her chest but it’s COMPLETELY okay for two people who shouldn’t be together screaming at each other.

‘Man that couple is REALLY going at it. She just called him an asshole and through her phone at him!’

‘At least her boobs aren’t out giving milk to a child! Now let’s go tell these people to speak American!’

Get them a ‘YellAtYourSoonToBeExAva’ closed UFC cage type thing that they can climb into and go at it.

To the mothers that are happy about this thing, great! Happy for you. To the weirdos that are happy about it because ‘I don’t want to see that’, nobody wants to see you wearing sunglasses on the back of your head with boot cut jeans and running shoes tied too tight either. But here we are.