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[apocalypsos]

Let's kill time. Tell me the worst song you've ever heard, the worst movie you've ever seen, the worst TV show you've ever watched, and the worst book you ever read.

EDIT: Just so I answer ...

Worst song: "King of Wishful Thinking". Not because it sucked, but because I was once subjected to it over and over again in a continuous loop at a mall and ever since then ... NO.

Worst movie: House of 1000 Corpses, probably. Blech.

Worst TV show: A tie between Mutant X and Seventh Heaven.

Worst book: I can't remember the title, but before Titanic came out in the theaters, before it was cool to be a Titanic geek, I was so starved for Titanic lit when I was in high school that I bought this romance novel I saw at CVS that was set on the ship. It was horrendous. Not only were the female characters annoyingly Mary Sue (I believe they were hotie teenage twins named Smoke and Swan or Shindig and Salmon or some stupid twin alliteration like that) but the author gave real people on the ship entirely different histories. The one that pissed me off the most was that Captain Smith ended up having a mistress living with him on the ship in his freaking quarters. *eye roll*

Comments

[octopedingenue]

Worst song: Well, this is not the worst song, but it's insanely popular right now and is driving *me* insane--"Mister Mom" by Lonestar. BECAUSE OF COURSE ONLY WOMEN CAN GIVE PROPER CHILDCARE AND SHOULD STAY HOME BAREFOOT IN THE KITCHEN YAY SEXISM AAAARGH. *breeeeathes*

Worst movie: For Christmas last year, my friends, who love me dearly and know me well, gave me a DVD of Simply Irresistable (which they in turn got for free), because someday I will think "C'mon, was Simply Irresistable *really* that bad?" and will want to rewatch it, and now I won't have to spend actual money on it to do so. Because it really is that bad. Laughable wooden acting, mediocre soundtrack, and woeful attempts at a Like Water for Chocolate homage aside, the entire plot hinges on the deus ex machina machinations of a MAGIC PUPPET CRAB.

Worst TV show: Hmmm. Well, "The Mullets" was both spectacularly awful and UPN KILLED "JAKE 2.0" FOR IT, so it's automatically going to burn forever in TV Show Hell.

Worst book: Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser. I hate this book sooooo muuuuuch that my loathing for it is engraved into my soul. There are college classes here I will never, ever take because I've seen Dreiser somewhere on their reading lists. Garrison Keillor wrote an essay about Sister Carrie titled "Why Did They Ever Ban A Book This Bad?" Some sadist made it the official UIL Literary Criticism novel for my junior year of high school, so I had to re-read it *four times* for various academic competitions that year, and I hated it more intensely every time both for being horrible and for making me pretend it wasn't horrible when taking tests about it. Nothing even remotely interesting happens in the entire novel, the prose style manages to be both pathetically limp and wildly over-the-top, and the characters (especially the damp washrag of a protagonist) are pathetic cardboard cutout caricatures of actual people.

I could write a 40-page analytical essay detailing just how AWFUL Sister Carrie is, but that would require reading it AGAIN, which I will stab myself in the hand before doing. Instead I will just quote my pet passage from Chapter X, "THE COUNSEL OF WINTER--FORTUNE'S AMBASSADOR CALLS", in which Dreiser stops the narrative dead in order to go off on a philosophical rant:

In the light of the world's attitude toward woman and her duties, the nature of Carrie's mental state deserves consideration. Actions such as hers are measured by an arbitrary scale. Society possesses a conventional standard whereby it judges all things. All men should be good, all women virtuous. Wherefore, villain, hast thou failed?

For all the liberal analysis of Spencer and our modern naturalistic philosophers, we have but an infantile perception of morals. There is more in the subject than mere conformity to a law of evolution. It is yet deeper than conformity to things of earth alone. It is more involved than we, as yet, perceive. Answer, first, why the heart thrills; explain wherefore some plaintive note goes wandering about the world, undying; make clear the rose's subtle alchemy evolving its ruddy lamp in light and rain. In the essence of these facts lie the first principles of morals.

"Oh," thought Drouet, "how delicious is my conquest."

"Ah," thought Carrie, with mournful misgivings, "what is it I have lost?"

Before this world-old proposition we stand, serious, interested, confused; endeavouring to evolve the true theory of morals—the true answer to what is right.