Oliver Miller

Alien 3 is a movie that is actively trying to break your heart. The director wrings pathos from the oddest of images: a shot of a dog’s eyes; the image of water running over a knife…

(1) Girls wearing six-inch tiny black leather backpacks to clubs. ( 2) Going to clubs. (3) The use of the term “Psych!” in middle school. As in, “Oliver, dude, you’re really awesome…” (beat) “…psych!” Totally annoying.  If you can’t trust a simple declarative sentence, then what can you trust? (4) Techno.

Around the time I turned 22, things changed for me and my name. …Girls would have this response when I told them my name: “Oliver?  I love that name.  That’s such a cu-uuuute name.” And/or: “I love that name!  I have a cat named ‘Oliver’!” According to my independent, unverifiable research, about 34% of the girls in the New York City metro area have cats named “Oliver.”  I have been unable to figure out why this is or what this means.

Hot suicidal female poets: we all want to sleep with them. They’re like the sexy crazy girls who talk too loud and smoke clove cigarettes and who drink grain alcohol in the back room of the party. Or at least, I personally always want to sleep with these girls. But the question is, how to choose? Which one? Which one?

And yes, we all hate being told what the best book ever is. And we all hate lists made by experts. But in this case, the experts actually happen to be right, for once. “Ulysses” actually is the best book ever written. And I’ll prove it to you, sort of. And so I present…

The interesting thing about porn is that people are actually having sex in it. This in itself is weird. If you watch a movie about an archaeologist with five o’clock shadow who is trying to recover the Ark of the Covenant, well, he’s not actually doing these things. If you watch a movie about a plucky band of rebels who rescue a princess and blow up a moon-sized space station, well, that’s not really happening either.

I must reassert here that I wasn’t just a nerd, I was a SUPER nerd. I didn’t only spend my teenage years playing video games in a basement; that would have been nerdy enough, but in-between that, I would do other absurdly wholesome activities – like, for example, I would bake bread. I would bake bread from scratch. While reading a recipe from a cookbook.

Most people are a thousand times more interesting when they’re talking than when they’re writing. Why is this? Because people panic when they start writing. People instantly revert to memories of 10th grade English class, and memories of No. 2 pencils, and lined notebooks. And then they freak out and tense up. Don’t tense up. Just relax. Seriously.

Wow, so it’s like “TWO UNPLEASANT PEOPLE AND A TRAIN: THE MOTION PICTURE.” Groovy. And boy, these two people really like trains, and more trains, and metal… and metal-based alloys. Gosh, but it’s all so exciting. (By the way, if you haven’t read the book — the guy who says “My only goal is to make money” — well, he’s the good guy.) Trailer’s inside.

There are novel one-hit wonders (The Secret History, A Confederacy of Dunces). There are poetry one-hit wonders. (Quick! Name a poem by Robert Frost that doesn’t start with “…Whose woods these are I think I know.”) There are movie one-hit wonders (“Fletch” — the only funny Chevy Chase movie ever!) But the area where the art form of the one-hit wonder most excels is, of course… music. And musical one-hit wonders can be divided into three categories…

So when you attempt to heat “American Slice!” to make a grilled cheese sandwich it… inflates. Somehow hot air gets between the two layers of soy and the whole thing inflates, so that it looks like a pillow. A sad pillow made of plastic-y soy. This is never what you want from a grilled cheese sandwich.