Dance Magers

It looks like HBO is teaming up with Interstellar writer and Person Of Interest showrunner Jonathan Nolan to adapt the highly revered and beloved Foundation books into a TV series. Wow.

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Mountain Dew recently conducted taste tests for new flavors at Kent State University. The flavors included Lemon Ginger, Mango Habanero, and "Mountain Dew Dewitos." Thankfully, Redditor joes_nipples was there to try the abomination. Man, why can't my nipples have a Reddit account? SPOILER: because my penis is always hogging the keyboard.

According to joes_nipples, the liquid Doritos drink tasted "like if you shoved a handful of Doritos in your mouth and chugged some Dew at the same time." "It honestly wasn't that disgusting," wrote joes_nipples on Reddit. "It tasted like orange with a doritos aftertaste. It tasted like straight doritos afterwards though. Weirdest thing I've ever drunk."

Oh joes_nipples, if Doritos flavored Mountain Dew is honestly the weirdest thing you've ever tasted, you have NOT LIVED. I don't even think that would make the top twenty weirdest drinks I've ever tasted. You bet me a dollar, and I'll drink pretty much anything you put in front of me. Just make sure to put it in front of my good eye though, because I have tried antifreeze before. Thanks to Jillian, who agrees each bottle should come with a packet of Doritos dust to season the rim of your glass.

OK has been traced to a 19th century Boston Morning Post article where a writer was satirizing the "new" craze of abbreviations. The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess.

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The Stuxnet worm was the first known example of a digital weapon developed by the U.S. government — and it actually worked. Discovered in 2010, it had already destroyed several nuclear centrifuges in Iran. Now, veteran computer security reporter Kim Zetter has an action-packed book about it. We've got an excerpt.

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FX has put in a development deal for his new scifi comedy series Daedalus 6.

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No? Really? Oh. Well, since you're here, it looks like this.

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Walter George Bruhl Jr., pictured here, died on March 9th of this year. Every line of his death notice, which he wrote himself, is outstanding.

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This is an already funded Kickstarter project for the BeerLoft storage system ($20 for one, $35 for two). Each strip adheres to the top of the fridge with a piece of 3M adhesive and can hold up to the three beers (or other metal-topped bottles) using neodymium magnets. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like they got the spacing right to hold 40's. Also, you might have to lower the top shelf in your fridge to be able to actually fit anything under the bottles, since beer bottles on the top shelf of my fridge almost reach the top already. Still, your beer-drinking friends will think it's a cool idea, which, let's not kid ourselves, is the only reason you bought them in the first place. Keep going for a couple more shots. Thanks to me, for being humble enough to admit I don't even have a working fridge and keep beers cold in one side of the kitchen sink filled with ice.

Tombstones piled up in Brest-Litovsk Fortress. All photos by Debra Brunner. 

Back in May, construction work for a new supermarket began in the center of Brest, a city in Belarus on the border with Poland. In a turn of events that wouldn't seem out of place in a horror film, more than 450 Jewish gravestones have since been discovered in the foundations of the houses that have been demolished to make way for the store.

Central Brest was once home to the Warburg Colony, a housing estate that was built to accommodate Jewish orphans after the First World War. When the Nazis arrived in 1941 the Brest Jews became victims of the Holocaust-ghettoized, moved to camps, and killed.

After the war, with Brest's Jewish community devastated, the Communists set about getting rid of the remnants of Jewish culture in the town. In 1959 they dismantled the Jewish cemetery-one of the oldest and largest in Belarus-and turned it into a sports stadium. As the dismantling process got underway, Communist Party members, along with enterprising locals, recognized the high quality of the headstones and "recycled them." As well as in the foundations of houses, these Jewish graves have since been discovered in the makeup of Brest's road surfaces, pavements, and gardens.

Tombstones at the site of the new supermarket

In May, with diggers churning up the ground to build a new supermarket, more recycled headstones started popping up. Debra Brunner, co-director of the Together Plan, a UK-based charity supporting community empowerment in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, told me, "I can't even begin to explain what it felt like to actually stand among the graves. Picture a huge mound of freshly dug mud with Jewish headstones coming out at all angles. It was a macabre sight."

It would be impossible to restore the headstones to the cemetery they were stolen from, as the original site is still a sports complex and the particular location of each stone is unknown. At the moment, due to a lack of space and resources, many of the headstones are lying in a pile by the 19th century Brest-Litovsk Fortress, an important Soviet Second World War monument. It is feared that opportunists will try to make money off of these rediscovered headstones by conning unsuspecting visitors to the Fortress into making "charitable donations" toward a fictitious "memorial fund." In their present condition the stones are vulnerable to the weather and to the whims of the public, as they remain freely accessible to passersby.

A digger on the site of the new supermarket

Minsk-based Artur Livshyts, who heads up the Together Plan in Belarus, said that the reaction in Brest to the morbid finds "is mostly a positive one." He said, "The Jewish community care deeply that the stones come to rest in a place dedicated as a memorial, and the wider non-Jewish community generally show concern and really do care for these stones too. Even the builders on the supermarket site stopped work to move the stones to one side and took the time to alert the Jewish community."

Fifteen hundred headstones have been found in Brest over the past six years, with the rate of discovery escalating since work on the supermarket began. Graves are being discovered on an almost daily basis now, and often as many as five men are required to excavate a single one. According to Brunner the stones are "rough to touch but some are in really good condition considering what they have been through."

Brunner told me about her recent trip to Belarus and how "minutes" after arriving she "received a phone call from a local man." This man told her about a farmer who, earlier that day, had been digging in a field in order to erect a new fence and had come across a gravestone lying face down in the ground. He lifted it out of the earth and wiped it down, before quickly realizing that the stone's inscription was in Hebrew," she said.

Tombstones piled up in Brest-Litovsk Fortress

"We went to collect it in a van and moved it to a safe storage site. The members of the Brest Jewish community who came to help us unload the headstone were deeply concerned about the welfare of the stone-the delicacy and care of the unloading process showed us how much it meant to them."

Belarusian native Regina Simonenko is the go-to woman when a new headstone is discovered. Head of the Holocaust Center in Brest, Simonenko arranges the pickup driver every time there is a new find. "Each headstone tells a story," she told me. "One headstone was found in the garden of a village house. It had been used to grind flour and a hole had been worked into it over the years. Another grave we found recently was dedicated to a woman named Golda. It was badly damaged and the dates of her life were missing, but there were clear tracings of gold in the engraving of her name."

Simonenko and the Together Plan hope to create a memorial out of the headstones "so they won't be used for anything else in the future," or at least to construct a protective fence to secure the graves preserved by the fortress. So far, the Together Plan has managed to pay for 400 headstones to be carefully relocated. But until more money is raised, the ultimate fate of the stones remains unclear.

Follow Kate Samuelson on Twitter.

If you look up into the blue sky long enough, and with enough attention, you should be able to see tiny blue-white dots flashing around the sky.The phenomenon was so well-known that it acquired the nickname "blue-sky sprites," but they're actually white blood cells moving through your eye.

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Alkaline Trio: 18 Years, Eight Albums, Four Nights, and a Ton of Heart Skull Tattoos

I... I have no words. I can barely process the rumor that Joel Schumacher, director of the infamously bad '90s movie Batman & Robin, will return to the bat-nippled universe to continue the saga to make a 12-issue comic, that DC will apparently publish. On purpose! Here's everything you need to know.

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This is the polygonal skull mask design created by Etsy seller Wintercroft that can be cut and folded out of cardboard or heavy card stock. You can purchase the instantly-downloadable PDF template HERE for $7. Oooooor convince yourself that's entirely too much to pay, and try to find a pirated torrent of the design online. I couldn't, but I do have like twenty p0rnos downloading now. Keep going for several more shots plus the BONUS animal masks available from the same shop. Thanks to Catherine, who made a Grim Fandango reference in her tip and earned herself a gold star sticker.

I'd honestly never heard this stat before, and it's pretty amazing how well they tightly fit together.

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Here's renowned actor, director, and reader of children's books delivering a stirring narration of Go the F**K to Sleep. For charity. In a Captain Planet t-shirt.

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Toys R Us has announced it will pull the Walter White and Jesse Pinkman action figures it's stores have been selling after Florida mom Susan Schrivjer started an online petition to have the Breaking Bad figures removed. You know, despite the fact the toys were only sold in the adult action figure section of the store and not alongside Barbie and Transformers. Hey, everybody needs a worthless cause in life. *runs to Twitter to see if anybody's started a 'FloridaMom' satire account yet*

Schrivjer's petition had picked up plenty of media coverage. Even Walter White himself, actor Bryan Cranston, weighed in, tweeting, " 'Florida mom petitions against Toys 'R Us over Breaking Bad action figures.' I'm so mad, I'm burning my Florida Mom action figure in protest." Using the name Susan Myers on Change.org, Schrivjer had noted the store's "selection of toys for children of all ages." However, she added, "their decision to sell a Breaking Bad doll, complete with a detachable sack of cash and a bag of meth, alongside children's toys is a dangerous deviation from their family friendly values." "Kids mimic their action figures, if you will," she told the station. "Do you want your child in an orange jumpsuit?"

It's weird FloridaMom took offense to Breaking Bad but doesn't care that the store sells horror movie action figures (but they'll make me want to kill my friends!) and Grand Theft Auto. I suspect the Breaking Bad figures just hit a little too close to home. "Because of the meth?" I bet she or a close friend had a drug problem at some point. This is Florida we're talking about, after all. Which, FUN FACT: no matter where you travel in Florida, you're never further than 8-feet from a bag of meth. Thanks to Derek, but not my roommate Derek, because my roommate Derek is fictional and only lives in the pages of Geekologie. I mean, he used to be real, but I killed him.

Note: Turn on the closed-captioning if you don't speak Dutch. This is a video of Dutch organic food purveyors ("experts" is the video maker's word, not mine) being tricked into trying a McDonald's Big Mac and McNuggets after being told they're actually new unnamed organic burger and nugget products. They love them. Of course, it's kind of unfair they lied and told them they were organic. You probably just gave these health nuts cancer. Besides, I guarantee these people haven't eaten McDonald's in years, it's not like they really remember what it tastes like. Of course they're going to say this tastes better when you ask them how it compares. I guess I'm not really sure what I was supposed to learn from the video. That people think McDonald's is delicious, especially if you tell them it's organic? That's like giving a bite of filet mignon to a vegetarian and convincing them it's a new vegetable. They're going to ask for seconds. Keep going for the video. Thanks to Nathan, who agrees somebody should go get me a couple Jr. Bacon Cheeseburgers and some chili with fingers in it for lunch today.

Image via Flickr user Bludgeoner86

I’ve been writing about video games for close to nine years now, and I’ve never been able to write about my favorite game in a way that satisfies me. It’s become my white whale—every so often I go after it, catch a bit of flesh, and the sea stinks of hot blood until it passes again.

Metal Gear Solid 3 is about hunting. And eating. It’s a game where you lie in the grass with your knife out and watch the pale green blades flatten in the distance, a rustling of something moving ever closer. You must not be found. You have to hold still for long stretches, the enemy’s footfalls incidentally retreating while you think about dinner. While the snake comes within your arm’s reach.

It’s also about the low ache of human bones and how a big man’s body can break and bruise inside, with deceptive ease. How I have to fix it, with splint and styptic. This big, big man, this military machine—and it’s me who has to dig out the slugs and sew up the holes.

It’s about how he wants his mama.

It’s a Japanese game about the Cold War between America and Russia, about the fear of nuclear proliferation. Your adored mentor, an elite military agent, unexpectedly and inexplicably defects to the Soviet Union, and you have to go and kill her. You have to; it’s an order, and the third World War will start if you don’t. 

At the end of the game’s prologue of sorts, our hero, Snake (a.k.a. Naked Snake, later Big Boss), a CIA operative who’s just had the world yanked out from under him, lies battered and addled on the bank of a river as a rogue mushroom cloud blooms into the sky. We have just been put in charge of nursing him. We feel the shudder of hellfire flickering over his eyes and skin. We feel the heat of humanity’s capacity for evil against itself, and we feel for our burly and brutalized young charge. We can pledge to bring him nobly through this—not because he’s a hero, but because he is breakable.

Here’s a thing I tell everyone: It’s the only war game where mastery is dictated not by how many people you shoot, but how few. You wanna be a badass? Play it only with a tranquilizer pistol, an Mk22 “Hush Puppy.”

Metal Gear Solid 3 is an indictment of patriotism, about the grim manipulation that underlies most of the duties publicly marketed as noble. It’s the salute that hurts, the handshake you don’t want to return, the grave you planted yourself.

The Metal Gear Solid 3 trailer, as shown at E3 2003

Until I played it for the first time, a few years after 9/11, I didn’t actually know that nukes do not just go away. That their rods and their fetid coolants remain thrust into the guts of this planet forever like bad cells—the fear of them freezes us all forever, leaves us counting our breath, lying there and thinking of our countries.

It has a doomed Russian cosmonaut walking in systematic circles, immolated by his own memories, still wearing his space suit, counting grandly down to a takeoff that will never happen. That boss fight is such a fucking pain.

MGS3 has secret frogs, and you get a special outfit if you shoot all the frogs in the whole game. From someplace in this dead-serious Russian wilderness, the frogs sway back and forth in response to your attack. Bleating loudly, they’re toys. Remember: Games are toys. MGS3 also launched with a brand tie-in to Sony’s Ape Escape. You can play a little optional mini-game where you catch cartoon monkeys. “Gotcha!” Snake gloats. “You’re mine.”

MGS3 is a ridiculous parade, a silly and off-putting video game. It has interminable cutscenes and bad dialogue—detached jawing about the movie Godzilla, about microfilm containing the secret fortune of nations, about bipedal tanks that hurl warheads; nerdy sci-fi garbage. It has weak sex jokes, heavy-handed references to James Bond and Austin Powers alike in the same self-satisfied breaths. I couldn’t exactly tell you to play it. I couldn’t tell you to sit through it.

I mean, I feel like you just wouldn’t be able to appreciate it, mostly.

Like all of director Hideo Kojima’s work, it’s a game about video games—the ambitious, rebellious act of taking "level design" outside of the familiar military buildings and molecular structures of the previous two games and depositing you, the eager player, into the wilderness. At the time MGS3 was unveiled, we’d never seen a character’s crawl physics adapt to uneven land before, to weave, snakelike, over its peaks and hollows rather than to skim along its geometry superficially. The tech is the thing; the onward march. The grass physics. It was Kojima’s idea of an innovation, and it also meant to be a message about how climate and environment shape intent.

You could crawl across grasslands, through logs, into swamplands full of Indian gavials (in Russia?) and dangerous mushrooms. Bright, poisonous frogs. You must always watch your camouflage index—a percentage that changes based upon what you’re wearing in what kind of biome, your clothes and face paint. Thrill: Russian soldier rooting around in the grass just a few feet away, unable to see you hiding in plain sight.

You have to kill to eat, because your nation has abandoned you. Everything you kill goes bad if you save the game, shut the machine off, and come back later. You are not protected from the passing of time.

If you die you don’t get a “game over” screen, you get a “TIME PARADOX” screen.

The best part of the whole game is a long, slow climb up a ladder, to music.

The ladder climb

It’s all a lot of nonsense, actually. Make sure you get the Crocodile Cap and the Poop Camo. It’s funny. In this game about patriotism and how climate shapes intent, you will have to listen to interminable cinema puns and weird bathroom jokes.

Actually, I don’t know what to tell you any more about Kojima’s sense of “humor.” MGS has a stupid gay joke, and in its PlayStation Portable sequel Peace Walker, you can have sex with a 16-year-old girl in a cardboard box. In the recently released Ground Zeroes (which VICE covered here) you can find a bomb planted in that same character’s vagina. I’m not going to try to solve this cognitive dissonance—my loving Metal Gear Solid, my hating this shit—with another good old Western swing at “othering” the Japanese. I don’t know what to say.

See, I love answering these kinds of questions, but I don’t know what to tell you when it comes to Metal Gear Solid. It moves sinuous and dark and slimy ahead of me in the water. Yet MGS3 remains the only war game where I can aim perfectly, hover the weapon sights perfectly—even quickly, if I have to do it quickly—and, pew, my silencer, my tranq dart, the choke and crumple of my enemy.

Very rarely when I’m playing, I’ll forget that I’ve accidentally equipped the real gun, the one that causes red-brown blossoms of blood to explode unexpectedly on the bodies of foreign soldiers. A BANG that causes me to panic and reload. I mean, reload the entire save file and go back. I want a no-kill game.

There isn’t really a game that knows me as well as this one. Where I cry at the end every time. Where I love this sad, grim, muscled man named “Snake.” Like, really love him. Maybe because I’ve been entrusted with his care. Maybe because he doesn’t have answers about love and country, like I don’t have answers.

MGS3 is a perfect video game. Just perfect. Well-paced, well-plotted, technically flawless, meta as fuck.

OK. It’s not perfect. But it’s perfect to me.

But come on—you should play it. You should see if you’re up for it: a no-kill game. You should see if you can feel the flicker of history over your wrists and arms—chilly gooseflesh—when they talk about Cold War, and the little tiny role video games can maybe play in teaching you what that means. The nobility of de-escalation, of invisibility. The sick, spoilt vein that throbs inside patriotism’s animal.

There’s this one boss fight, several areas wide, where your enemy is a man who’s a hundred years old. He’s been saving his energy for this final battle. This sniper—can you find his scope glittering in the jungle? Can you sniff out his heat signature from his footprints? Can you sneak up behind him and whisper, "Freeze," into his brittle, wrinkled earlobe?

The end boss battle

Can you? Instead of just beating the boss, can you do this? Are you able? How does it feel?

Come on. Come on. I can’t do "game criticism" about MGS3. But I have nothing else to tell you. This is the end.

OK, actually, what if I tell you it’s really fun? You spread your spider-fingers all over that Japanese-made Sony controller, and you attain silent mastery. It’s up to you if you wanna think about Lyndon Johnson and Nikita Khrushchev when you pull those video game triggers. Think about the walls between “East and West.”

Aim and let go—pew. Succeed in perfect silence. Hush, puppy, here’s mama.

I mutter at the siege I’m simulating, when my aim is perfect: “I’m the fucking Boss.”

Never forget: nukes are still pulsing deep in the body of this planet like slugs, like bad veins. My favorite game about it is made in Japan, full of stupid jokes and long, distended periods of embarrassing dialogue.

Just play it, though. War games are your language. You can do it, right? Don’t move. Don’t make noise. Just aim, then believe. Pew.

Missed. Shit. Unsatisfied. Cold.

Follow Leigh Alexander on Twitter

This is the Zing Double Down King, a wonderfully named sandwich from KFC South Korea that features not only bacon like the Double Down available here in the U.S., but a burger patty as well. Meaning it includes all three major carnivorous food groups: chicken, beef and pork. No word on the nutritional information, but rest assured it will kill you. Shhhhhhh -- can you hear that? "I don't hear anything." Exactly, that's the sound of my heart not beating after I stuff two of these f***ers in my mouth. *BRAP!* That was my death fart. Thanks to JONES, who is already on a plane to North Korea to try one. AHAAHAHAHAH, WRONG KOREA, HOMIE.

When you take a sip of water it doesn’t just slake your thirst. It literally becomes you. The water that runs down your gullet will, within minutes and without processing of any kind, become some of the dominant fluid in your veins and your flesh. Most of your blood is simply tap water with cells, salts, and organic molecules floating in it. Some of the rubbery squishiness of your earlobe poured out of a bottle or a can just a short time ago. And much of the moisture in your eyes only recently f

Congress to the FBI: There's 'Zero Chance' We'll Force Apple to Decrypt Phones

When it comes to ice or candy, I'll choose candy every time, even if I'm dying of heat stroke. At least I died chewing sugar. This is a portrait-mode video of Youtuber Deric Peace demonstrating how well an automatic ice dispenser works at dispensing candy. SPOILER: it works VERY WELL. Sadly, I don't have the luxury of a refrigerator with an automatic ice dispenser, and filling the ice cube trays in my mini-fridge with candy has only proven to make me deeply, deeply depressed. At least I have candy so I can eat my feelings. Keep going for the video. Thanks to Luc, who filled his automatic ice dispenser with LEGO bricks and had a roommate nearly choke to death.

Whenever people are asked to name the greatest atrocities of the 20th century—while making small-talk at a dinner party, say, or on Family Feud—the usual suspects will invariably be trotted out: Nazism, the Stalinist pogroms, the Khmer Rouge, sundry African dictators, and Latin American juntas. All fine, of course, but somewhat missing the mark. No, the single greatest atrocity of the 20th century was without question the Virgin Film Guide’s decision to award the Coen Brothers’ comic masterpiece The Big Lebowski a one and a half star rating out of five.

Only four movies—four—of the hundreds and thousands in that rainforest-devouring tome were given a lower score: Pokémon: The First Movie, Babe: Pig in the City, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, and Howard Hughes’s The Outlaw. Films considered to be Lebowski’s equals include such cinematic high points as Smokey and the Bandit, Showgirls, and The Blob. “What a reversal of fortune,” begins the wisely anonymous critic, “two years after Fargo, the film that will probably stand as Joel and Ethan Coen’s finest moment, they followed up with what is, without question, their worst.”

Well, Virgin Film Guide, you are wrong.

The story—which, I think you'll agree, ticks most of the boxes of classic Aristotelian Poetics—is set into motion when our protagonist, a happily unemployed stoner and keen amateur bowler, Jeff Lebowski (Jeff Bridges), a.k.a. the Dude (or El Duderino, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing), has his valued rug peed upon by debt-collecting thugs in a case of mistaken identity. After inveigling reparations from his millionaire namesake, he’s subsequently embroiled in a ransom handoff for the return of the eponymous Lebowski’s trophy wife and part-time porno starlet, Bunny (Tara Reid), who may or may not have been abducted by some techno-pop purveying German nihilists. Anyhow, Dude’s somewhat volatile Vietnam vet bowling compadre, Walter Sobchak (John Goodman), hatches a plan to keep the dough that backfires more than Dude’s soon-to-be-stolen banger, forcing these two unlikely detectives to track down the whereabouts of Bunny, money, and car. It’s a very complicated case.

Not to worry, for the plot of Lebowski—much as with life, despite our vain search for the safe anchorage of meaning—is entirely secondary to the ride, a fact that seems to have escaped our establishment-development-resolution of a reviewer, for whom “the Coens’ vision of LA’s kooky underbelly is simply convoluted, and desperately so.” Ludicrously, this human traffic cone finds no leavening humor in the shaggy-dog-stoner-farce-hardboiled-detective-noir-pastiche, dismissing its nod to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep as the film’s “one and only joke.” Fuck you talking about?

Lebowski’s comedy froths from every pitch-perfect moment in a script as taut as catgut. Scarcely can two dramatis personae (three, if you include Steve Buscemi’s hapless Donny, the other member of a bowling team built on short fuses and cross purposes) have been so well rendered through such absurdly fatuous dialogue. And, at bottom, this is a buddy movie, with Walter and the Dude—hothead and pothead—forming a symbiotic yin-yang of calmness and rage in the face of the workaday intrusions of the world.

While first (and second and third) viewing was a symphonic hoot of curveball narrative twists, screwball set-pieces, and oddball characters—Julianne Moore’s glacial conceptual artist, Maude Lebowski, rasping “coitus” at an imperturbable Dude; John Turturro’s pedophile bowling artist, Jesus Quintana; Philip Seymour Hoffmann’s button-down factotum, Brandt—this was only the courtship in my relationship with Lebowski.  

Later, when watching with popcorn rather than pot, the belly laughs rippled out to a less visceral, more cerebral response, and I came to appreciate the film’s hidden depths, its oblique sociopolitical satire, its allegorical richness. Or perhaps I projected all this. Anyway, I wasn’t alone—the film’s cultic status can be averred from its having spawned a fan site, dudeism.com, where you can be ordained as a Dudeist priest (who may or may not have a fatwa out on the Virgin Film Guide’s publishers) while perusing esoteric essays untangling the movie’s homespun wisdom. For instance, the film’s Taoist lessons, its complex use of the F-word, or what it teaches us about cricket (disclosure: by yours truly).

What had not occurred to me, I came to realize, was its subtle skewering, its soft subversion, of the American Dream, the greatest control mechanism yet devised. Keep working, keep striving, and you will ascend the social strata. Zero to hero. We can all win! Of course, Dude eschews the stress-inducing hamster wheel of aspirationalism, happy to drive around, bowl a little, have the odd acid flashback. Indeed, he rejects the very idea of social hierarchy, showing no uneasiness in pornographer Jackie Treehorn’s palatial Malibu pad and no deference to the Chief of Police (“fuckin’ fascist”), while remaining blithely unimpressed by the other Lebowski’s “various awards, commendations, honorary degrees," to the extent that, when forced to endure Brandt’s parroted commentary, he repeatedly touches what he’s been asked to leave alone, transgressing those invisible yet real social barriers. And it turns out that the film’s model achiever, its self-made man, is a sham, embezzling money from the charity he’s been appointed to manage. Behind the meritocratic mythos of the American imaginary lie corruption and cynicism.  

At the time of figuring all this out, I was doing a Master’s or PhD—to tell you the truth, I don’t remember a lot of it—and sinking slowly into a personal crisis, an unhappy tumbleweed drifting toward a future I didn’t particularly want or couldn’t ever see being useful. Motivation was an issue—where others merely procrastinated, I meta-procrastinated: I was always working on working on working—and I’m sure the Virgin Film Guide would tell you that without motivation you have no character development. Yet Lebowski was teaching me to “just take it easy, man,” to live life enjoying the journey, not fixating on the goals. Even so, such lessons were only the nuptials. The lifelong bonds, the film’s absorption into my very being—my "becoming-Dude," if you will—would only be sealed a few years later.

In July 2006, a few weeks after my laptop was burgled—and with it, 65,000 words (that is, 100 percent) of my PhD thesis, as well as all backup copies—three months before a deadline I was never going to make, I found myself in Turkey selling advertising to real estate companies on the website of a cable TV channel under the amateur tutelage of a best friend teetering on the edge of a break-up-induced breakdown who had taken a sabbatical from his job in video production after making $2,730 commission on his first day in sales. As you sometimes do. I was in a deep funk, pretty sure the goddamn plane had crashed into the mountain, yet "Mr. Sling" (not the handle his loving parents gave him) airlifted me from my three-match-a-day, wake-and-bake World Cup vigil with the promise of either making some clams or, at worst, having a free vacation on him. Nothing is fucked. 

As with Dude’s reinvention as a sleuth, I was distinctly out of my element—what salesman “flown out from London to solve an urgent problem” does so in $16 Matalan strides and George by Asda shirt?—and yet, despite this, I "earned" $5,940 in eight days, no mean windfall considering I’d spent the previous 12 months, my "writing-up" year, collecting a fortnightly $175 from the state in return for the charade of job-seeking so as to maximize the time available for getting further behind with my work. Next thing I know, I was in Altinkum, selling the sizzle (not the steak).

Both Sling and I were staunch Lebowskites, and, despite our affectionately chipper interactions, lived out a cathartic buddy movie there on the Aegean coast. There was, it seemed, a line (verbatim or tweaked) from Lebowski to fit almost every scenario: a sarcastic “that’s fucking interesting, man” (our "paddle of rebuke," if you will); “new shit has come to light,” when a stalling client registered interest; “who’s in charge of scheduling?” or “do you have any promising, uh, leads?” when the day’s appointments came through; and, when we thought we’d be taking 25 percent commission from a $160,500 TV ad deal ($2,000, man!): “our fucking troubles are over.” 

See, Lebowski’s quotability is unlike the geekery you get with many other cult movies, where the banal repetition of circle-jerking fanboys is designed only to out-aficionado other devotees, to be the alpha male of the omegas, akin to catching butterflies and pinning them to a cork board. Essentially dead and deadening. Here, the lines emerged from, and enhanced, a new context, putting the butterflies to flight. 

Anyway, one of Sling’s first deals was with a waiter-turned-property developer called Deniz, in which he’d bartered us up from the boxy, apologetic, coarse-toweled functionality of our package-holiday twin room at the Seabird Hotel into a spacious duplex apartment. Trouble was, the washing machine didn’t work—that, and the fact that Deniz was being evasive about writing out the check. So, after six days hand-washing shirts, six days being fobbed off, six days wheelin’ and dealin’, we swaggered into his office and asked: What the fuck? Sling went the full Walter Sobchak, dropping a few F-bombs, at which point Deniz lost his shit, turfing us out of "our" pad, threatening to notify the police that we didn’t have work visas, and informing us he’d be complaining to the TV channel.

We skulked out of there in a reduced, sick-stomached quiet, a little vexed that the party was over, the consequences of our frankly unnecessary bravado slowly sinking in. After a long beat, I broke the silence: “I dig the way you do business, Jackie.” Back he flashed: “Fuck it, let’s go bowling.” And that was it: the hardest laughter I ever knew. We made our way back to the Seabird, abiding.

That day I understood that it’s not what happens to you that counts; it’s how you perceive and process life’s strikes and gutters. Having a nervous breakdown? Lost 15 months’ work? Nothing is fucked…

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