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Psycho-Ex www.psychoexgirlfriend.com
Fifty-three voice-mails from an enraged, emotional and neurotic
ex-girlfriend form the premise of www.psychoexgirlfriend.com.
Site founder Mark was looking to vent after an unpleasant
experience with a former girlfriend and thought the World Wide Web
would be the place to do it. The main attraction of the site is a
barrage of voice-mails from his ex, Jill.
Listening to this poor woman crying, screaming and choking on
her own bitterness could only appeal to those with a taste for
emotional voyeurism. Visitors to the site can also post their own
tales of woe or take a more active role in the not-so-private lives
of Mark and Jill by pointing out what each side did right or wrong
via the message board.
If visitors feel they haven’t devoted enough energy
wasting their time listening to Jill, they can enter a chat room
with other losers who have nothing better to do than discuss the
people they hate but still can’t talk enough about.
Furthermore, the links the site offers are, for the most part,
only applicable if one lives in Mark’s hometown, Dallas. The
site cleverly suggests that, if one is from Dallas, he could take
his “psycho” out to eat at one of the restaurants the
site recommends. Cute, huh?
Visitors can also document their pathetic preoccupations with
the past by sporting the line of fine clothing the site offers. One
shirt quips, “What do you do when your ex-girlfriend goes
psycho?” The answer is, “Simple. You booze it
up.”
Obviously, Jill wasn’t attracted to Mark’s sense of
humor. Which brings up another point: just to what was Jill
attracted? Based on the pictures of Mark, viewers will likely agree
that he wasn’t worth five, let alone 53 voice-mails.
The one redeeming quality of the site is a sideline promotion
for finding a cure for leukemia. However, a miniscule rah-rah for a
devastating disease does not counteract the fact that people cannot
get back the moments of their life they wasted visiting the site.
Get over yourself, Mark.
Darcy Lewis Rating: 2
Red Meat www.redmeat.com
Meet Milkman Dan. He’s a clean-cut fellow with an
all-American grin and a pristine uniform to match. He enjoys
delivering milk, talking to his neighbors and turning kitties into
hamburger meat with his milk truck while consuming narcotics in
rock star proportions. By golly, Milkman Dan sure reflects the
post-war prosperity and friendly values of your average American
town.
Milkman Dan and all his wholesome antics can be found at
www.redmeat.com, where cartoonist Max Cannon creates fun-filled
comics populated with such characters as Bug-Eyed Earl, Ted Johnson
and family, Johnny Lemonhead, God and of course the inebriated
milkman himself.
These strips are wicked down to the core. Take Ted Johnson,
whose idea of “a dynamite fishing trip” actually
involves dynamite. Then there’s God, who allows a priest to
view the world through His “infinite and all-encompassing
love.” God describes the moment as “Kind of like
sniffing a couple hundred thousand magic markers while getting a
slow sheet-lightning enema.”
Such material lends itself to a rather grisly style of
illustration, like something Steve Dillon would splurge out in the
latest issue of “Preacher.” But Cannon’s work is
largely, well, dialogue-driven. The images are pretty static;
Cannon seems to have drawn each character once and used the same
illustration, with slight modifications, for every comic strip,
which adds to the hilarity.
Most of the fornicating, butchering, vomiting, nude bathing,
flame throwing, sweat swilling, fecal freezing, road killing,
hamster draining, puppy pulverizing and Chihuahua blasting takes
place off-panel so the strips aren’t repulsive, but are still
bowel-crunchingly funny.
This means that, given the neat and tidy images, it’s okay
to peruse redmeat.com at the family get-togethers, just as long as
Little Billy doesn’t read the disgusting, sledge hammer-blunt
dialogue, which would traumatize his young, innocent self. The
upshot, of course, is that jolting a solid volt of emotional
distress through a young-un would make a memorable family
reunion.
The site’s primary showcase, the comic strips, resides
within its “meatlocker.” Unfortunately, most of the
meat in there is relatively rancid, and Cannon seriously needs to
start nail-gunning more cows to stock up on the fresh stuff. The
archives claim to be updated weekly, but this statement is erratic
at best.
Redmeat.com, with its edgy humor, is madder than mad cow disease
and bone-saws the funny bone. Too bad there isn’t more of
it.
Ryan Joe Rating: 8