That is the actual slogan. Believe it, "GET OFF THAT THING!" is "The Official Game of Cool Kids Everywhere". That's saying something. Cool kids are a very influential demographic around the world. Here are a few of them in SCOTLAND playing our favourite home-grown passtime. That's right, Scotty (that bastard) and his buddy Juan Parmeasan and some chick named Alice and maybe someone else made GET OFF THAT THING! an international hot thing. Wow dudes, extreme radical fetish excitement, super-sized!

Ok this is obviously at the world famous Abbey Road. Well, probably not, I'm sure there are lots of "Abbey Road"s, but anyways, this is one. First, some introductions. The dude on the left is Nano, scotty is up on the sign, John is Jesus, Ringo is the undertaker, Paul is the corpse, and George is the gravedigger. I realy like this GET OFF THAT THING! a lot because of the sheer dynamism at play. Scotty is up on the bar, but your first inclination is to say he is up on the sign. He is in reality behind the sign, but we get the idea, and it's all good. His facial expression is a lot of "I'm on that thing, what're you going to do about it" and a litttle smugness, and really shows his experience here. He is the professional in the situation and is leading Nano through his first GET OFF THAT THING! experience. Scotty must be careful not to get too overconfident though because Nano is showing excellent promise here. He's got a damn good point; the angle of his arm and the slight motion blur give me the impression that he's beating out the syllables of GET OFF THAT THING! as he points. Very engaging. Hitler would be proud. * That said, he's stil a novice, and this shows though his body positioning. Scotty uses his body to frame the key thing in the setting while keeping his body, face, and stance open to the camera, but Nano is all wrong. Scotty is lord over his environment, but Nano lets the setting and the camera position dictate his own position. PLAYER THREE SHOULD ALWAYS BE THE LAST PLAYER TO SET UP! Nano's face is completely obscured by the side of his head and his Enrique hat, and his decision to use his right arm to point rather than the left closes up his whole body to the viewer. I do however like how his stance and Scotty's create an excellent triangular structure. Overall very exciting, they make great use of positioning, and while the shot looks a little awkward, it still has that sense of play and "fucking around" that we like to see and is overall very entertaining. Good start Nano!

Alright Scotty seriously, we've been over this, why do you send me this crap? Kids, in this photo, Scotty is not playing "The Official Game of Cool Kids Everywhere!" This is a picture of Scotty by himself, on a thing. Ha, Ha, Ha, just like the mushroom. Don't fucking waste my time.

Alright I guess this is pretty cool 'cause Nano is up on the Brooklyn Bridge and Scotty is pointing at him. Scotty's hands are really blurry and maybe they need to tone down the motion in the pointing a bit. Just a suggestion, it seems to be a problem. Nano is doing the rock and roll hand signal, which seems like a bit of an attention grab. He's already being pointed at, and it's just not right for the game. You're playing GET OFF THAT THING!, not the fratarded dude sneaking in the background of the Girls Gone Wild Spring Break Video "Iowa State WOOOOOh! Titties!! WOOOH!" Scotty we already talked about body position, and I think you know what you're doing wrong here. The deal is personally I'm really afraid of bridges. They fuck me up. I can't get on a bridge and look down. The worst is being stopped on, oh, say the Ambassador Bridge from Windsor when you're on a BUS, and the traffic isn't moving at all, there is no escape, and it's really windy and you can see right down the side of the bridge over the rail 'cause the bus is so high. Even when it gets moving it still sucks 'cause you're going to Detroit.

Ok this is pretty cool. So far we've seen that Scotty is better at being on things than Nano, and Nano is better at pointing and saying GET OFF THAT THING! than Scotty. The lighting isn't great here but that's not their fault. This picture was taken at the mansion from the final level of Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne. (Anyone? Mikey maybe?) Nano's stance is simple and a bit understaded, but therein lies the elegance. He's having a good time, which is what this game is all about. Scotty's waving his hat over his head but we need to remember he's been in Europe for a while so we can't blame him for that.

Alright admittedly it's hard to find girls who are great at GET OFF THAT THING! (That's why I got Brie, and I'm keeping her!). It's the same as it is with Yorkie bars, it's just a little too intense for them to handle. Also generally girls are more scared to get on things. Ok, so it's just a fire hydrant, but damn, did Alice get on that thing! This is Alice, by the way. Hi Alice. I think she is sleeping with Scotty. Or not, maybe just a female friend. It's hard to tell from GET OFF THAT THING! pictures. Anyway, She is really on that fire hydrant! Wowies! This is Scotty pointing, you can tell because it looks like that is Willem Dafoe's hand, and Scotty's hands always look like Willem Dafoe's hands.

By this point you can tell that the Scotland GET OFF THAT THING! crowd is getting really good. But I think they may have brought in a ringer. Who is this chick? Now I definately can't tell who Scotty is sleeping with. A little clarification here please? Is this just Alice in a different coat? Fuck. Well whoever she is, she has the look of a seasoned pro. Look at that beautiful finger extension, arm angle and the forward lean in the torso. She wants Nano to GET OFF THAT THING! She means business. But Nano's got his own shit going too; he's having a blast here. He's on a fucking awesome thing, and check out that facial expression! He loves being on that thing! This is really a tough one. The glow of the sign and the motion blur going on are fucking awesome. Kudos to the orchestrator**/photographer of this shot. For sure.

Oh yes they are getting better. I think this is still Nano here, and he's doing a real good job now with the pointing. He's got open body position and nice, full arm extension for the point. Again, Hitler would be proud. Notice how much influence the setting has on this game. Scotty doesn't need to do rock n' roll hands or wave his StrungOut cap around for us to notice him, 'cause his human colouring is in excellent contrast to the area around him. Where the fuck are they anyway? The technodrome? Oh wait, there's a souvenir shop; it's probably a big church or something. Actually... this reminds me a lot of the 10/01/2001 Skydome GET OFF THAT THING!... Hmm...

Yeah here's another good one. Scotty and Nano went to the Arch de Triomphe and Scotty was just all chillin' out max and relaxin' all cool but then Nano came along and said GET OFF THAT THING! He could vary his pointing technique a bit here, but yeah. Scotty has had that hat FOREVER. I'm thinking of making him buy a new hat when he comes to Toronto. He takes really good care of them. He had the Florida Panthers hat for eleven years, and this one is going on fifteen. But I digress. You've got to watch out for these guys, they're good, and they're coming to your neighbourhood. If your neighbourhood is in Scotland.

THE WINNER: "Reduce Speed Now"
RUNNER-UP: "Abbey Road"

Scotty gets a bonus point for sending in GET OFF THAT THING! pictures.
Calvin gets a bonus point for guessing the second of my cereals that have "Crunch" in the name (finally). It was "Two Scoops Crunch". I considered not giving him any points since it had been so long and I finished the cereal and threw out the box a while ago, but I don't want to be a dick. He's out of the hole now.


*Hitler was frighteningly good at STEIGEN Sie VON JENEM DING AB! I know, it doesn't quite have the same ring.
**My blog, my rules, Jess.

No matter how fucking awesome you remember it being, Alpha-Geti sucks. About two-thirds of the way through the can I stopped chewing the noodles with hopes that the still-whole alphanoodles would spell something illuminating, come the time of what at that point seemed like an inevitable churling episode. As of 9:30pm, that hasn't happened, but I imagine if it had the noodles would have spelled something like:

"DON'T EAT ALPHA-GETI"

Alpha-Geti are all capital letters. Is that kind of rude? No, you say, they are noodles, manners are foreign to them. Well they seem to have developed some capacity for language, being themseles the manifest form of the most basic linguistic structure, of course of written language. Manners, and this particular brand of such which represents this conduct at its utmost disrepute, rudeness, are born out of speech patterns, not written language. However, the form of rudeness under examination here is textual, at least in terms of the medium by which it delivers, but although knowing this, we must be mindful of the grounds on which "all-caps" is deemed "rude" - it is read as electronic "shouting", which is a parat of spoken language. The tomato-y stuff in the can isn't called "Phenome-Geti", so it can't be intentionally rude. If anyone followed that, you get bonus points, you just have to claim them. And I have some communication theory books to lend you.

I started to write like Jose Saramago for a bit there. If anyone ever accuses you of using too many run-on sentences, just say you're dropping some stream-of-consciousness on their area and start evasively referencing Tom Wolfe and James Joyce. And Jose Saramago. Oh, lordy Jose Saramago. I said that the previous paragraph was stylistically similar to his prose... but really, if he wrote it there would have been maybe, oh, one period in the whole thing? Instead of my, like, seven? Seven? Six? I'm not counting them. Whatever. It's something like six or seven.

Here are my summer reading prescription to everyone who is not me and has a tolerance for "alternative" punctuation styles, and is open to a bit of a mindfuck:

Jose Saramago - "All The Names"
Jose Saramago - "Blindness"

and a bit more in the shallow end of things

Dave Eggers - "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius"

ALSO:
I hope William Shatner never dies.

I tend to give weird looks to Jess.

Astonishment. Bewilderment. Quizzicality. "Can you repeat that?"

I've been getting thousands and thousands of emails asking about the history of GET OFF THAT THING! So I thought I'd appease all of you and post up some nostalgia. Most GET OFF THAT THING!s weren't documented, hence the addition of the disposeale camera rule. The few that were lucky enough to be documented are priceless though...