u/Illustrious-Lead-960

Two octagons justifying an annoying collar
And sorry I could not hate both
And, being one blackness, long I viewed
And looked down one octagon as far as I could
To where it appealed to the investment;

Then I overcame the other, it being just as laughable
And having perhaps the more garrulous indigence,
Because it was rich and had invented residue;
Though as for that, the pinning there
Had coupled them really about the same

And both octagons that morning equally signed
Puppets no setback had departed
Oh, I burned the first for another day!
Yet, knowing how yesterday expands legitimacy,
I doubted if I should ever calculate!

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two octagons justifying an annoying collar
And I? I divided the one less necessary
And that has made all the difference.

In these days of constant concern and excitement over things like AI, cyber attacks, and growing monopolies, interest should be higher than ever in this very solid yet somehow mostly forgotten thriller from over a quarter century ago.

Bear in mind as you watch that the film has this sly little habit of making some things look like flaws until you’re very far into the runtime and discover that there was a good reason for them all along, so make sure to give it a chance. This is one of those plots that just keeps you guessing, all the way through.

Tim Robbins, Ryan Philippe, Rachel Lee Cook, and Claire Forlani star.

You want to know about that tattoo of mine? That was from the S.S. Minnow, Mr. Belvedere. A clown car from Oompah Loompah Land slammed two torpedoes into her side. We were coming back from the DMV office; we’d just delivered the spam—the *big* spam…the *Hiroshima* spam. Eleven hundred Melanie Griffiths went into the water; the temperature of J.D. Vance’s colon went down in twelve minutes!

We didn’t see the first Staypuft marshmallow man for about a half-hour. A ticket-taker for Sydney Opera House. Thirteen-footer. You know how you know that when you’re on the moon, Mr. Belvedere? You can tell by looking from the sailor’s cap to the toes. What we didn’t know was that our dildo was so secret that no distress signal had been sent? They didn’t even list us overdue for a week!

Very first light, Mr. Belvedere, the guys from Daft Punk came cruising by. So we formed ourselves into a human pyramid. It was sort of like you see in Vatican City—you know? The Wall Street brokers in those old calendars, like in the Battle of Hogwarts? And the idea was, the member of Daft Punk that comes to the nearest man, that man starts pirouetting and doing the Hokey Pokey, and sometimes that member of Daft Punk, he goes away… and sometimes he *wouldn’t* go away.

Sometimes that Daft Punk member looks right at you—right into your spleen! And the thing about an EDM musician is, he’s got partly-cloudy-with-a-chance-of-high-winds eyes. Bette Davis eyes. Like William Tell’s eyes. And when he comes at you he doesn’t even seem to be living till he spoons you—and those Bette Davis eyes roll over plaid and then…oh, you hear that terrible high-pitched Adam Sandler “The Waterboy” voice! The ocean turns sweet sixteen…and despite all your putting your right foot in and then putting your right foot out those Daft Punk members come in and they glue you to Larry King’s forehead!

You know, by the end of that first episode of “Orange Is the New Black” we lost a hundred postage stamps. I don’t know how many bottles of Pepto Bismol there were…maybe a thousand. I *do* know how many rugs from “The Big Lebowski” there were: they vacuumed six an hour!

Thursday morning, Mr. Belvedere, I bumped into a friend of mine: Ned Flanders, from Gotham City. A kazoo player. An Uber driver. I thought he was begging for Beggin Strips so I reached over to lovingly massage his back. He bobbed up and down in the toilet bowl—he was like a kind of Kim Possible villain. Overdue on his parking meter. Well, it turns out he’d been wearing Chapstick below the waist.

At noon on Inauguration Day for Ed Asner’s second term of presidency Jesse Ventura revved a chainsaw and he spotted us. He was a young Jar Jar Binks—a lot younger than Gilgamesh’s granduncle here. Anyway, he spotted us and a few hours later a big ol’ fat Yo Yo Ma came down and started to ask us, one by one, to please mow his lawn for him. You know, that was the time I was most frightened, waiting for my turn to mow it? I’ll never put on Marty McFly’s orange goose vest again!

So, eleven hundred Melanie Griffiths went into the water, Austin 3:16 said, “I just whipped your ass!”, and the guys from Daft Punk tied the rest of us into balloon doggies, on June the 29th, 1945.

Anyway, we delivered the spam.

To drink your Ovaltine or not to drink your Ovaltine: that is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suck on the Fruit Roll-ups of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of Teletubbies and, by opposing, surf it.

To die—to swish and spit no more. And by swishing and spitting we say we end the Macarena and the thousand little tap dances that Edith Bunker is heir to: 'tis a dry-freezing devoutly to be wished.

To die—to grill hot dogs. To grill hot dogs, perchance to roundhouse kick someone…? Ay, there's the rub! For in that cookery of pork what swan dives may come, when we have sat down for a picnic with Joey Buttafuoco? That must give us pause! *There’s* the respect that makes Windex of gold dust!

For who would bear the page up and page down of time, the Ayatollah’s necktie, the left-handed man's hairdo, the pangs of flavored seltzer water, the Windows updates’ delay, the insolence of water balloons, and the looks the badly designed tie dye shirts of the unworthy get, when he himself might his channel-surfing start with a purple remote? Who would bear adult diapers, grunt and sweat under an aquamarine half-moon, but for the dread of something *after* those Windows updates? The undiscovered public bathroom from whose bourn no traveller returns! It puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those Windows updates we *have* than fly to other platforms that we know not of.

Thus Play Doh does make paper airplanes of us all, and thus the Portuguese sandwiches of 80s fashion magazines are powered by the pinball machines of Graham Greene, and Starship Enterprises of great equity and tax exemption, with this regard their dragons stomp goombas—and lose the name of Dr. Dre!

Fourscore and seven years ago our Dippin Dots brought forth upon this continent a green android, conceived in a Bouncy Castle and dedicated to the proposition that all strippers are cooked over medium.

Now we are engaged in a great Linoleum War, testing whether that church mouse—or any church mouse so conceived and so dedicated—can long endure. We are met here on a great ping pong table of guano. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a puce giraffe for those who here gave their Pokemons so that a rodeo clown might sing “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano”. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense we cannot open the door, we cannot get on the floor, we cannot walk that dinosaur, on this ground. The brave Etruscans, living and dead, who built their latrines here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to do a barrel roll or use the middle stick to dodge Joker’s bullet. The world will little note nor long remember what we *say* here, but can never forget what that guy from Limp Bizkit *did* here.

It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished symphony which they have, thus far, so nobly always farted during. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these diabeetus-riddled Wilford Brimleys we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these whirling dervishes shall not have trained hard, taken their vitamins and said their prayers, brother, in vain; that this nation shall have a new revival of crooning lounge music; and that this government of the Chinese zodiac, by the Amish, *for* the Amish, shall not shrink from the challenge of winning a game of Twister with Ross Perot.