This week we’re taking a look at Family Guy: The Freakin’ Sweet Collection. I received this DVD one year as a birthday present. Yeah, it’s not much, but since my birthday is so close to Christmas, my family usually saves all the big presents for then. I’ve gotten used to it. Except when they bought me a dog for my birthday and decided to hide it with all the other presents in the attic.

These days, though, I’ve stopped watching Family Guy because it’s gotten terrible. It may have been saved from cancellation, but the team behind that rescue mission forgot to throw quality a life preserver. This DVD came out before it came back, though, and it does have a decent episode or two. But now the question is this: do these episodes still hold up from when I originally watched the show? We’ll see if they’re cut from the right cloth, and not just the stuff they used for Lady Gaga’s fire bra.

Open the DVD up and you get the disc (which is hopefully a standard feature of DVDs) and a simple flyer. Static picture of the Family Guys on front, episode descriptions on back. I’m surprised they even sprung for a piece of paper in this thing. I mean, the show had tons of fans after its cancellation. They could’ve thrown anything in there and fans would’ve bought it, even a Post-It that said “IOU 1 More Season”.

The DVD has an attractive and colorful menu, and offers special features for each of the five episodes, handpicked by Seth MacFarlene as his favorites. One episode, “Road to Rhode Island”, even features Seth in-character as Brian and Stewie doing commentary. It’s a good touch. And for 15 bucks, you could do a lot worse. Here’s a hint: go to Amazon.com and type in “rob schneider”.

But enough about that. Let’s take a look at the episodes themselves.

When You Wish Upon A Weinstein
After Peter realizes that he’s bad with money, he gets a Jewish man named Max Weinstein to help him out. Noticing how successful Weinstein is, Peter decides to make Chris Jewish on the hopes that he’ll become successful, too. This episode was unique at the time because it hadn’t aired on TV due to how it mocked the Jewish faith. The fact that Peter wishes for his own Jew doesn’t help, either. Look, Peter, you’ll have to be creative to get a Jew. This isn’t World War II. There are no more one-stop shops for your Jewish needs.

Road To Rhode Island
Brian flies out to Palm Springs to take Stewie home from a visit to his grandmother. When they lose their luggage and flight tickets, they have to travel across America to get back to Rhode Island. This is a parody of those old “Road” movies with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, and it’s actually pretty funny and well-written. Not sure who’s supposed to be Crosby and who’s supposed to be Hope, though. Let’s see…does Stewie comes out holding a golf club or does he take it to beat family members with?

To Love And Die In Dixie
Chris IDs an armed robber who breaks out of jail. To make sure he doesn’t get to Chris, the family moves down south as part of the Witness Protection Program. By this time in Family Guy history, the offensive train has rolled in – Southeners are portrayed as hillbillies who put on a play where the Confederacy wins the Civil War. Me, I’m more offended that they’re still using the tired hillbilly gag. Still, I’m willing to forgive them and bury the hatchet…preferably in the organ they use to pee.

I Am Peter, Hear Me Roar
Peter is forced to go to a women’s retreat after making sexual comments at work. Unfortunately, he gets in touch with his feminine side too well and becomes a prancing man wuss. Only a catfight between Lois and another woman gets him to snap back to normal. Again, there’s nothing inventive about making Peter act like a prissy woman, though there’s a disgusting bit or two to throw you off. I just wish the cat fight was more interesting. Personally, I want to see two women fight with mixed martial arts. They’ll still be moaning, but only because it’ll take months for that arm to look normal again in a long-sleeved shirt.

Lethal Weapons
Peter makes Lois feel useless, so she takes up Tae-Jitsu to become stronger. This brings anger into the household, so the family tries anger management to calm down. It fails and the family beats the crap out of each other near the end. This is all very tasteful, I said with dripping sarcasm. “Lethal Weapons” would be the worst episode on this disc if it didn’t have a few great scenes, like Brain and Stewie’s exchange during anger management. So it’s like you’re eating ice cream full of syringes. Mmmmm! Ben and Jerry’s “Tetanus Sea Salt”!

And now we return to the question I asked earlier: did these episodes hold up NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Most of these episodes are terrible. “Road to Rhode Island” is the best, and even “Weinstein” manages to pass, but the other three just suck. It’s amazing that, even this early in Family Guy‘s life, it was already sliding downhill into a big pile of I Am Not Trying Anymore. The Simpsons might be running out of steam now with over twenty seasons, but even some of their worst episodes DESTROY the stuff on this disc. And The Simpsons is a franchise where they decided to flash Bart Simpson’s penis, even though his little general had clearly never won a battle.

Now, with the advent of free episodes online, there’s no reason to buy this DVD for a taste of Family Guy. But assuming you saw this in Best Buy and you had no idea what the show was about, is this a good introduction? Well, yes, it is if you think your life is too positive and could use some misery to balance out the equation. Besides that, you’d get the same effect if they ever came out with a DVD made of physical hate.

The Freakin’ Sweet Collection is anything but. If you enjoy wasting money on DVDs, at least buy a used copy of this. Otherwise, save your money to waste on something more important. Like a charity fund that someone loses between the cushions of a couch.

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Renting games was risky business, though. A poison-tipped adventure. This was before the widespread use of the Internet. These days you’d pop on Google and look for game reviews before you plunked down cash. But in the 90s? All you had was game magazines and word of mouth, so I never knew what to expect. Would this game be awesome? Would it be terrible? Or it would be MORE terrible, like the Cold War if making nukes earned extra lives?

Guess which category The Gadget Twins falls into!

Published by GameTek and developed by a group of barnacles, The Gadget Twins stars two cartoon planes named Bop and Bump. You’ll know these planes well because the extremely creepy title screen will never let you forget. The plot is that the planes have to chase down a guy named Thump who stole an artifact called “The Magic Gem”. What a boring idea for a plot device. Maybe I’d care more if the artifact was something interesting. How about “The Magic Gem That Turns Into A Spaceship With Free Taco Bell Inside?”

The Gadget Twins uses a weird attack system. You have a gadget equipped to each of the four cardinal directions. Boxing gloves, claws, what have you. By pressing B, you switch clockwise to the next gadget. With some quick switching, you’ll be able to attack in different directions and fight enemies from all sides. Unfortunately, several things will make this more difficult, one of them being that you are currently playing The Gadget Twins.

Another is how you take damage from enemies. Unlike better Sega Genesis games, you don’t have any invincibility time between hits. This means that an enemy can run into you and drain your health bar in seconds as long as you touch. Since enemies are constantly flying at you, this will happen 300% of the time. It’s so bad, you might as well replace your health bar with a sign that says “OUT OF ORDER”.

And even if you actually kill the normal enemies, bosses are a different story. Below is a diagram of every potential weak point you can hit on the first boss in the game. Where do you think you’re supposed to hit this boss in order to do damage?

The true answer is that you can hit this guy in several places, but it seems like he absorbs tons of damage before losing health. Either that or you have to hit the boss in a certain pixel for it to work. This quickly becomes an equation of crumminess, considering you’ve got a dinky claw and the boss is jumping around with a claw attack long enough to strike children that haven’t even been conceived yet.

And if THAT wasn’t bad enough, the peppy music endlessly rages in the background, only changing SLIGHTLY for a boss. You’ll get caught on walls, coins spiral away like Scrubbing Bubbles if you don’t pick them up, and sometimes you’ll glitch and drop to HALF of your movement speed. “Did anyone TEST this game?” I questioned rhetorically, knowing full well the answer was a resounding “NO”. Nothing works here. The game is playable, but it’s like playing with a GI Joe after Cobra threw his arms in a prison camp near the driveway.

Fortunately, The Gadget Twins is an obscure game. I actually take a bizarre pride in discussing it on this blog. Like an ugly child that will make you millions on the sideshow circuit, without being bundled by crutches such as “compassion”. This doesn’t mean you should play it, though. The Gadget Twins sucks the big one as well as its children. Do something better with your time. Preferably away from the creepy child-sucking video game. I think John Walsh wants to talk to this guy.

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A few years back I quit drinking soda, in a feat of endurance I’ve had trouble duplicating since. Now, once you get used to drinking water, it becomes a lot more delicious than you’d expect. But variety is the spice of me, and every now and then I desire a drink with some seasoning, if you know what I mean. Something that fits my current mood, like Snapple mixed with chili salt for bronchitis.

Enter Vitamin Water, a handy line of flavored water that gives me a burst of flavor without the calories of Comrade Coca-Cola. Well…they used to, at least. A few years back they offered Vitamin Water with only 25 calories per bottle. But the American people wanted more flavor and ran back to support Pepsi, Duke of Getting Fat. Unsurprising. Why do you think McCheese, a guy with a burger for a head, became the mayor of McDonaldLand? There’s a reason his campaign team scheduled the voting around lunch.

Anyway, there are now two styles of Vitamin Water to choose from. You can either go for Vitamin Water Zero – which you can make at home by tossing a pack of Kool-Aid into the Pacific Ocean – or you can stick with the normal variety. Of course, a normal bottle of Vitamin Water is 125 calories while a can of Coca-Cola is 140, so any benefit you might gain from the water is minimal. Sure, it’s got vitamins, but who cares about those? Nobody likes them. The only reason I ate Flintstones vitamins is because I liked to bite off Betty’s head and pretend her lawn mower finally had enough.

Despite that, though, I still indulge in Vitamin Water. Even though I don’t drink the stuff obsessively like I did with Coca-Cola, Vitamin Water is tasty enough to make me demand more, with a bigger sack and knife each time. And if you haven’t tried Vitamin Water yet, now’s the perfect time for a crash course. Here are all the flavors I’ve tried and which ones are superior.

Focus (kiwi-strawberry): This is a pretty nasty flavor. If Vitamin Water flavors were beloved TV characters, Focus would be a mailbox. Kiwi-strawberry sounds like a fruit combination that should work. Unfortunately, this flavor tastes like they ignored the kiwi fruit in favor of the kiwi bird. They’re endangered, you know. Maybe that’s why I feel bad whenever I drink this.

dwnld (berry-cherry): “dwnld”? What the hell kind of word is that? This isn’t a spelling error, this is the Alphabet Sniper picking off victims one-by-one. I had big hopes for this drink, too. Berry plus cherry sounded like a flavor match made in heaven. Instead, it was a match that lit a middle school on fire.

Revive (fruit punch): I can understand why people might not like this flavor. It’s very plain. I think if you go to Purgatory, this is the drink they serve with Nilla wafers. But I rather like this flavor. If I can’t find anything better, I’ll use this one to quench my thirst. Sorry, Sprite. I don’t drink stuff named after things from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Why do you think I stopped buying donkey’s blood?

Essential (orange-orange): This flavor is basically Tang, but it has one advantage: it’s not called something asinine like “Tang”. As such, this is a pretty interesting flavor. Nothing cleanses my palate more than a rush of artifically created orange goodness. Just goes to show that two oranges are better than one, unless that metaphor can describe your wife’s rack.

Multi-V (lemonade): This is the flavor that got me hooked on Vitamin Water. The gateway drink, if you will. It’s watered down lemonade, yes, but in the sense of watering down a chocolate cake mix with M&Ms. Unfortunately, I can’t find this flavor anymore where I live – only the Vitamin Water Zero variety. This annoys me, but not nearly as much as Lady Gaga.

Spark (grape-blueberry): I would be depressed over the loss of Multi-V if it wasn’t for this great replacement. Spark isn’t as strong as Multi-V, but the grape/blueberry combo still resonates with my heart. Together they make a company called Delicious Inc., who will hopefully serve my taste needs for many years to come. Here’s hoping they merge with Ben and Jerry’s and change Americone Dream into a sports drink.

Connect (black cherry lime): I’ve recently discovered this lost ark of flavors in the dusty halls of Wal-Mart, and it does not disappoint. With a pleasing lime scent in each sip, it’s a novel of taste I can’t put down, which wouldn’t be true if the drink was by John Grisham. Of course, it has the downside of being assosciated with Facebook. According to Internet complainers, that makes this the only bottled water who wants to look through your W-2s. Time will tell on that one!

Of course, Vitamin Water is no substitute for real water, but it’s a rewarding change of pace. That’s why I always try to keep my Vitamin Water intake limited. You should, too. Drink Vitamin Water sparingly. Treat it like a one-night stand – grab a small taste of her, then keep her in the fridge until a few hours later, or until you forget that she’s still there.

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This week we’re taking a look at The Now Habit, a book by Neil Fiore on how to stop procrastination. I’ll admit that I used to have a problem with that. I used to put off so many things, and I the only reason I did that was to finish all the OTHER stuff I put off. I mean, my father threw a tantrum ten years ago and it took me that long to get all the soy sauce out of my hair.

Anyway, the book starts off by telling us why we procrastinate, and it says that procrastination helps us find relief from difficult work. Trust me, that’s true. The longer I put something off, the more afraid I get to finish it for good. Eventually I get so freaked out that I have to rebuild my confidence before I can get back into action. By the way, quick way to feel better about yourself – watch someone fail a driving exam. Your self-esteem will skyrocket.

The book also talks about how free time is a better way to motivate yourself to work instead of forcing yourself to do it, and that you should actually take time off more often to be more productive in the long run. Now, that might be true if you’ve got a BORING job, but if that’s the case, you should be more like me. I get paid to write humor for a living, and it’s the BEST job in the world. I have fun all the time. And I’ve learned a lot, too. For example, when you can’t sell any of your work and all you’ve got is ten bucks for food at the dollar store, just remember…you’re not buying food past its expiration date. You’re just buying food and eating it fashionably late.

Now, to help you take more time off, this book has a really good tool called an Unschedule. How that works is that the only thing you schedule is stuff like free time, chores, things like that. You leave everything else blank, but you color parts of it in whenever you do work. And that adds up. I tried it for a while and it felt really good to see all the work I did that week by looking at the spaces I colored in on my schedule. The only problem is that you have to draw up a new schedule every week. I don’t got time for that, I’ve got fart jokes to make, okay?

The book also covers how you talk to yourself. See, when we talk to ourselves using words like “I have to do this” or “I should do this”, it causes resentment, which makes us slack off. The book shows you about words you can use instead to make it easier. I needed this more than I thought, because I’ll agree with whatever my voice says. I love my voice. If it was real, I’d give it a half-naked nelson in a pigpen if I could.

But like I said, some of the self-talk exercises are helpful. I had a speech I was working on and I kept telling myself, “I have to work on my speech, I have to work on my speech.” But then I started using better self-talk, and I started telling myself things like, “I have to work on my speech…but I can’t play Mass Effect 2 until I beat the first.” And now I just finished Virmire, so it’s been really effective.

All in all, though, this is a good book. If you’ve read up on procrastination, you’ve seen some of these ideas before, but the book packs it all together in a usable way. If you’re just getting started at trying to improve your productivity, this book is a good place to begin. On the back, it says that it’s “simple, effective, and immediately useful”, and that quote is definitely true. In fact, I liked it so much that I wrote it down for future reference, under a little section I call “Quotes That Accurately Describe Me”.

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