Tag Archives: gossip

May 19 2016
2 Comments
Daily Discussion with BQB

Daily Discussion with BQB -Blake Lively’s Butt

Good Morning 3.5 Readers.

For our very first daily discussion, we’re talking about Blake Lively’s butt.

The Blakester popped this picture on instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BFhx9lGR4Jj/?taken-by=blakelively

So you can see in the caption she says, “LA face with an Oakland booty.”

As you butt rap song aficionados may be aware, that’s a reference to Sir Mix-a-lot’s classic tune, “Baby Got Back” in which the world’s premiere rapping knight proclaims his love of large butts to the world.

Blake took a lot of heat.  People said this was a racist comment.  I guess if I think about it, I can sort of see the point.  (If you say you have an LA face and an Oakland booty, aren’t you saying that white faces are better than black faces and black butts are bigger than white butts?)

And then I suppose people might complain isn’t this too superficial? Is she seeking attention, like “Hey everyone look at my face and butt!”

I don’t know.  I understand people are trying to be more sensitive about racial issues these days.  But if you want my two cents, you also have to consider the speaker’s intent when analyzing these comments.

I don’t believe she intended to make fun of black people.  If anything, I think she was making fun of her own butt.  She is married to Ryan Reynolds so she must have a healthy sense of humor.

And if she was seeking attention…well…that’s what celebrities do, isn’t it?

What say you, 3.5 readers? Was Blake Lively in the wrong or should lonely male nerds the world over thank her for posting a picture of her fabulous badonka donk and move on?

Or heck, don’t move on. Just stare at it with your jaw dropped for awhile and drool like Homer Simpson.  “Mmm Age of Adaline heiney…”

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Aug 09 2015
3 Comments
Pop Culture Mysteries

Pop Culture Mysteries: Informant Zero (Part 2)

PREVIOUSLY ON POP CULTURE MYSTERIES…

Part 1

AND NOW THE POP CULTURE MYSTERIES CONTINUE…

The Anything Goes Club.  Armand wasn’t kidding.

I’d never seen such a disgusting display in all my life.

shutterstock_71510056

“How is it possible that I’ve been scraping the fungus off of LA’s seedy underbelly for years and this is the first I’ve heard of this place?”

“We hide ourselves well, sir,”  Armand said.  “We cater to all manner of, interests, and our more famous clients appreciate our…discretion.”

Indeed, there were a number of celebrities in our midst.  Lucky for them, I was new to this time period and while I recognized many of them from seeing them in passing on Ms. Tsang’s television, I didn’t know any of them by name.

I was fairly certain one of the gals slathering herself up in the jello fighting pit was the same skirt who pointed to prizes and smiled on Ms. Tsang’s favorite game show.

And that guy who was tripping out and dancing on the pool table? He looked a lot like the actor who plays the father on that sitcom Ms. Tsang always watches.

You know.  The one where the wife and kids do everything right and never make a mistake and they all have to suffer through the constant incompetence of the family’s idiotic paternal figure?

Yeah.  I know.  That describes every sitcom so it’s hard to narrow it down.

Ms. Donnelly was a bit more hip than I was.

“Is that NAME REDACTED playing the banjo in his underwear?”

“Sure is,”  the bartender said.  “That son of a bitch sure can wail.”.

“Ms. Donnelly, I wonder if we might move this along?”

“Of course,”  she said as she turned to Armand.  “I was told it would be possible to meet with Informant Zero?”

Armand’s beady eyes lit up.

“Informant Zero?”  the butler asked.

“Yes, Informant Zero,”  Delilah repeated.

Armand looked at the bar keep.

“Informant Zero.”

The barkeep nodded and rang a loud dinner bell.

He then shouted, “INFORMANT ZERO!”

Across the room, there was a DJ wearing a furry gorilla costume, though he didn’t wear the mask.

Abruptly, he shut his turntables down, cutting off the music entirely.

“INFORMANT ZERO!” the DJ announced through his microphone.

All of a sudden, in a room full of sickos, Delilah and I were the ones being stared at.

A man with a ripped six-pac road over on one of those two wheeled Segways.  He wore a cowboy hat and a pair of leather pants.

Segway.  What an interesting machine.  I wanted one myself.

“Who seeks Informant Zero?”  the cowboy asked.

“These two seek Informant Zero,”  Armand answered.

I recognized the cowboy from somewhere else, but couldn’t put a finger on it.  In a room full of twisted behavior, a man who was just pretending to be a Southerner didn’t seem so bad.

The cowboy chewed on a toothpick for a bit, giving us the once over.  Then he had a question.

“What is the slope of the rope?”

It was a test.  I was stumped, but when Ms. Donnelly reached for her cheat sheet, I realized her contact must have prepared her for this.

She raised a finger in the air and read from the paper ever so triumphantly:

“It is equally proportionate to the angle of the dangle!”

I love it when Delilah gets tricked into talking dirty.

The cowboy looked at Armand.  Our butler nodded.  The cowboy wheeled away toward the back of the room.

“This way.”

We followed but he was going fast on that thing.  It was hard to keep up.

Suddenly, I noticed the cowboy was weirder than I had originally surmised.  From behind, I noticed he wasn’t wearing leather pants at all.

He was wearing assless chaps.

“What have I seen you in, buster?”  I asked.

“Nothing,”  the cowpoke said, keeping his face forward, refusing to look at me.

“You in show biz?”

“That’s none of your biz.”

“I do believe he’s NAME REDACTED,”  Ms. Donnelly whispered to me.

“THE GUY THAT PLAYS ROLE IN SUPERHERO MOVIE REDACTED?!”

Oops.  I was less than discrete.

The cowpoke wheeled around and leered at us.

“You know,” he said.  “You non-famous people have no idea what kind of pressure I’m under.”

“I’m sorry pal,”  I said.  “Forget it.”

“No,” the cowboy said as he scooted his scooter so he could get in my face.  He leaned over the handlebars and I found myself leaning backward just to give him some room.

“Sure.  You all look at me on the big screen in my costume and think, ‘Now there’s a guy with a great life.  But you don’t know what’s involved to keep my career going.”

He leaned back and got out of my personal space.

“Everyday I wake up at 5 am.  I run for miles, do sit ups, crunches, squats, pecs, lats, delts.  I work out until dusk and ALL I ever get to eat is a bag of baby spinach and three almonds.”

Delilah hanged back, realizing we were in for it for awhile.  I’d unleashed a monster and was now doubling as his impromptu therapist.

“That’s actually in my contract!  My lawyer and the studio banged out a deal that specifically states I can only eat three almonds a day or risk losing everything.”

Delilah couldn’t resist.

“You should have hired me, Mr. REDACTED.  I’d of gotten you five.”

“Whatever,” the cowboy replied.  “All I’m saying is when I work as hard as I do and provide as much joy to the world as I do, I don’t think it’s too much to ask for me to be allowed to hang out in a private club during my free time and dress up like a cowboy while a pair Czechoslovakian dwarves slather me with cottage cheese and read me the collective works of Ayn Rand.”

I repeated the phrase that I found myself saying a lot in response to this new world.

“What the?!”

“Oh,”  the cowboy said as his face turned red.  “What are you, one of those uptight right wing jerk-holes who thinks that everyone who suffers from Curdoslovakiandwarvishrandism should be swept under the rug and denied their basic civil rights?!”

I had no idea how to respond to that.

“Well guess what, pal?!  I’m here!  I love it when small people from Eastern Europe smear me with spoiled dairy products while they read me tales of an alternative dystopian future, SO GET USED TO IT!”

“OK buster, take it easy.”

“You have no idea how I’ve suffered because of an affliction I can’t control!  It’s not my fault, you know!”

Delilah’s intervention was welcome.

“Pardon us,”  Delilah said to NAME REDACTED.  

She pulled me away and confronted me.

“Mr. Hatcher, you’ve committed a very serious social faux pas.”

“I have?”

“Yes.  You mocked his condition.”

“Condition?”  I asked.  “That’s a real thing?”

“Every thing is considered a real thing now,”  Delilah said.  “No matter what bizarre fetish a person has, society expects you to listen politely and nod as the individual explains to you why this nontraditional interest is the cause of all problems in his or her life.”

“So I can’t just tell him to man up and knock that shit off?”

“Certainly not,”  Delilah said.  “Especially not if you don’t want Mr. Battler to have an anti-Bookshelf Battle campaign launched against him on Twitter demanding that he fire you.”

“This is going to be hard for me,”  I said.  “My generation was too busy fighting a global onslaught of evil to worry about being slathered up with, by, Jesus, I lost track of what this guy has.”

We returned to our guide.

“Sorry fella,”  I said.  “I didn’t know you had it so bad.”

The cowboy nodded and extended his hand.

“That’s big of you to admit you were wrong.”

I looked at his hand, then at Ms. Donnelly.  Her look convinced me I had no choice but to shake it.

The cowboy did a 180 degree turn and led on.  I wiped my hand on my trench coat.  Was that rude?  Sorry.  I didn’t know where his hand had been.

Probably on a Czechoslovakian dwarf.

For legal purposes, Delilah tells me I have to say there’s nothing wrong with that.

Copyright (c) 2015.  All Rights Reserved.

Image courtesy of a shutterstock.com license.

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Jun 07 2015
3 Comments
Pop Culture Mysteries

Pop Culture Mysteries – Enter the Blonde – Part 6

PREVIOUSLY ON POP CULTURE MYSTERIES:

Part 1   Part 2   Part 3   Part 4   Part 5

“Are you sure?” Delilah asked. “I’m not sure you understand that in 2015, five dollars is not considered a lot of money. It doesn’t go as far as it did in the 1950’s.”

I felt my smile muscles get some exercise for the first time in forever.

“Lady,” I said, “I don’t care. I’ll solve one hundred mysteries for this chump, take his five hundred bucks shutterstock_246824179back to 1955 and live like the King of Siam!”

“You could live like the Emperor of the Universe in 1955 with fifty dollars an hour, which is really a more fitting wage for a private investigator today, especially one with your training and skill.”

Delilah slinked back into my chair.

“Oh,” she said. “Please forget I said that. Mr. Battler will be very cross if he learns I spoke ill of him.”

“Ma’am,” I said. “I doubt a fella who wastes his life away watching the boob tube and making with the typey typey on the beep beep bop machines has much money. Does that big galoot even have fifty bucks per case to spend per case?”

“Between you and I, I don’t think so,” Delilah confided in me. “I wasn’t even sure he had five hundred bucks until he put the sum in an escrow account to pay you upon the completion of one hundred pop culture mysteries.”

“Then it’s settled,” I said. “Although, I have to say, I’m not sure I’m the right man for the job.”

“How’s that?” Delilah asked.

“I slept for nearly sixty years,” I said. “How in hell am I going to be able to answer cultural questions for a man of the modern era?”

Delilah slapped her hand down on the desk.

“That’s precisely why you ARE the best man for the job!”

“How do you figure?”

“You’ll come at these mysteries with no preconceived agenda,” Delilah replied. “You won’t have already formed an opinion. You’ll be able to provide Mr. Battler’s 3.5 readers with full, detailed, unbiased reports!”

“True enough,” I said as I clanked my shot glass against hers. “And I suppose it will be nice to solve a case without having anyone shooting at me for once.”

“Oh my,” Delilah said. “Now I can’t provide you with any guarantees on that, Mr. Hatcher. Hollywood folk are very sensitive about their art, you know.”

It's all about the Lincolns.

It’s all about the Lincolns.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a stogie. It was one I kept close to my heart, ready to be smoked on special occasions. I couldn’t think of anything more special than the chance to become a five hundred-aire.

“Don’t worry about me, doll,” I said. “Whatever those showbiz folk fling my way, I’ll catch it and put it up on my mantle.”

“Very well,” Delilah said as she handed me a pen and the contract.

I signed it. Instantly, I felt a strange sensation. A chill took me over and squeezed me to the very depths of my soul. It made me feel nauseous. I doubled over and grabbed my stomach but then as quickly as it came, it was gone.

“Are you all right?” Delilah asked.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Suppose I’d better lay off the hooch du jour.”

Delilah stood up and extended her hand. I shook it. It was silky smooth, like touching God’s butt cheek.

It’d been awhile since I’d touched any part of a woman. It was nice.

“A pleasure doing business with you,” Delilah said in an authoritative, business-like manner.

“Likewise,” I said. “What now?”

“Ahh,” Delilah said. “Well, we’ll need to make some changes around here. Some men will be by your office within the next few days to set you up with equipment you’ll need to research your cases, namely a T194 Alpha Desktop Unit, High Speed Transmission Cable, WI FI uplink, and of course, a top of the line Android cellular phone.”

“Come again?”

“We’re going to set you up with a couple beep bop machines.”

“OK,” I said. “Those things make me more nervous than a cat in a sack on laundry day, but hell, if five hundred big ones are on the line…”

“We’ll be in touch,” Delilah said as she snapped her briefcase shut and sashayed her way out of my life as fast as she’d dropped into it.”

Now that she was out from behind the desk, I was able to observe that her black dress went down to just above the knee, revealing the sweetest, smoothest, sultriest pair of getaway sticks this side of the Rio Grande.

To my dismay, she was using them to get away from me as fast as she could.

And who could blame her? No high society dame was ever going to be caught dead with a bum like me. It was a fact I’d learned to accept a long time ago.

I never learned to like it, only to accept it. Drinking helped with the acceptance process.

In fact, it was time for another.

It would go well with my moo goo gai pan.

This concludes Pop Culture Mysteries: Enter the Blonde!  Join us next time as Jake Hatcher, Private Eye tackles his very first pop culture mystery!!!

Copyright (c) Bookshelf Q. Battler 2015.  All rights reserved.

Detective and money photos courtesy of a shutterstock.com license.

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Jun 03 2015
5 Comments
Pop Culture Mysteries

Pop Culture Mysteries – Enter the Blond – Part 2

PREVIOUSLY ON POP CULTURE MYSTERIES – ENTER THE BLONDE:

PART 1 – Detective Jake Hatcher returns to his office to find a mysterious blonde dame sitting behind his desk.

That dame was all class, but a bit snooty – like an exceptionally attractive school marm.

Detective Hatcher prefers old school typing.

Detective Hatcher prefers old school typing.

She read from the file of poop she’d scooped on me with all the enthusiasm of a professor giving a lecture on transcendental metaphysics.

“In 1920, you were born one Jacob Ronald Hatcher in Bayonne, New Jersey,” the dame said. “Parents Gus and Mitsy, a barber and a housewife, both solid citizens who never did you wrong, unlike your conniving brother Roscoe who…”

“Yeah do us all a favor a skip over Roscoe, lady,” I said.

“In 1938, you turned eighteen and moved to Hollywood, deluded by the misguided hope that your handsome face and macho physique would be more than enough to provide you with a career as a movie star…”

“People have done more with less,” I interrupted.

“Alas, like most newcomers to Tinseltown, you were turned away by every producer and found yourself on the streets,” the dame continued. “You made your living as a prize fighter, taking on all comers and throwing matches for a fee under the names of ‘Punchy McGee,’ ‘Take a Dive Dan,’ and ‘The Down for the Count Kid.’”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, it’s not my fault that was a rigged racket.”

“War broke out three years later and in your early twenties, you found yourself in Europe, fighting on the front lines,” the dame said, studying the file like it was the Old Testament. “I see you fought in D-Day and marched with Allied Forces all the way to Berlin.”

“You ‘aint just whistlin’ Dixie, ma’am.”

“There’s a notation here that you were involved in a special mission?” the dame asked.

I gulped my drink and poured another.

“That’s right.”

“Care to share?” she asked.

“Hitler,” I said. “I punched him in the face.”

The dame’s big blue eyes widened with shock. “Excuse me?”

Adolf Hitler - historians agree that the last words he heard before Detective Hatcher's fist collided with his face were,

Adolf Hitler – historians agree that the last words he heard before Detective Hatcher’s fist collided with his face were, “Sprachen zie punch?”

“I infiltrated a secret Nazi bunker and punched Adolf Hitler square in his stupid face,” I said. “Knocked the son of a bitch out colder than your demeanor.”

I could tell by the look on the dame’s face that she was impressed.

“You punched Adolf Hitler in the face?”
“Yes ma’am.”

“Adolf Hitler…Der Fuhrer of the Third Reich?”

“That’s the one.”

“I thought he committed suicide,” the dame said.

“That’s what the powers that be want you to believe, ma’am,” I said. “Truth be told I delivered Hitler to General Eisenhower, who had Old Adolf hauled off by a bunch of G-Men to a secret government lab. They did all kinds of experiments on him. They wanted to see what made an evil lug like that tick in the hopes they could prevent another monstrous dictator from popping up ever again. Given the headlines these days, it doesn’t seem to me like they were very successful.”

“And you’re telling me this…why?”

“You asked,” I said. “I’m not a liar, ma’am. A lady asks me a question, I give her an honest answer. Mitsy Hatcher raised a gentleman, I’ll have you know.”

“But the dishonorable discharge?”

“The brass didn’t want the public to know about Operation Fuhrerpunschen and I was a loose end,” I said. “They booted me out on a bunch of trumped up charges that weren’t worth the paper that they were printed on. Ordered me to keep quiet but hell, all of those bums are long dead now so it’s not like there’s anything they can do to me.”

“I see,” the dame said, turning her attention back to the file. “You returned to LA in 1945 and joined the Los Angeles Police Department.”

“Seemed like a shot at a steady paycheck,” I said. “Didn’t realize it was an invite to every two-bit thug to declare war on me…and honest cops? They didn’t last long back then.”

“I’m not sure they last long now either, Mr. Hatcher,” the dame said as her sad lips curled up into a rare smile. “Now, after the incident vis a vis your wife’s infidelity with your partner, you quit the force and went out on your own as a detective for hire, is that right?”

“That’s the long and short of it, ma’am,’ I said. “But what gives with the twenty questions anyway? You writing a book or something?”

“No,” the dame replied. “I just like to make sure I know everything there is to know about a man before I hire him.”

“Speaking of,” I said as I looked at my watch. “It’s been longer than five minutes and you’ve yet to explain to me why you’re here.”

Why is this dame here?  Find out in the next part of Pop Culture Mysteries: Enter the Blonde!

(Yeah, I know, we really need to fire the guy who writes these post titles).

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Jun 01 2015
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Pop Culture Mysteries

Pop Culture Mysteries – An Introduction

FROM THE DESK OF BOOKSHELF Q. BATTLER

World Renowned Poindexter, Reviewer of Books, Movies, and Cultural Happenings, Champion Yeti Fighter and Blogger-in-Chief of the Bookshelf Battle Blog

Dear 3.5 Readers,

Let’s face it.

I’m not a very important person.

Does that come as a shock? I’m sorry, but it’s true. (Oh, it didn’t come as a shock? Thanks, but play along anyway, OK?).

Out in the wide world, tragedy and terror loom large on the horizon, peaking their ugly faces out from every corner.

BQB's soap box

BQB’s soap box

Every day, people are being killed by hurricanes, blown away bytornados, zapped by lightning, swallowed whole by monsoons, kidnapped by pirates (the billowy shirt kind, not the Somali kind), burnt up in wildfires, or carried away by hideous hungry trolls.

And that’s just in the world outside. At home? Why, you could be moseying along, minding your own business and WAMMO! You spill your ice cold glass of Diet Shasta Orange, slip on the puddle, crack your knogan on the way down and it’s good night daisy.

Did you know the home is the number one place where an accident can happen?  Why, you could drown in a bucket, get a paper cut while opening bills and develop a raging staff infection, or do a jumping jack in an effort to get healthy only to lose your squash to the overhead ceiling fan.

I’m not even going to get into the invisible bacteria growing on your feet, the latest hybrid monkey/bird/alligator/giraffe flu virus outbreak to hit the headlines, how your golf game is going to be interrupted when a celebrity crashes a vintage World War II fighter jet right in the middle of your back swing, or god damn it, the literally millions upon millions of spiders that are crawling up your nose each and every night, laying eggs, and throwing a massive disco dance party in the epicenter of your brain.

I’m not not going to worry about any of that anymore and neither should you.

Why?

See the beginning of this tirade where I did or did not shock you when I informed you I am not an important person.

As such, I have no ability to do anything about the vast multitude of problems that plague the world like a bad haircut on yearbook photo day.

Could I run for and win an elected office and use my wit and wisdom to cure all of society’s ills?

No.

Why?

First, I hate to break it to you, but I’m not all that handsome. I know ladies, I know. I’m sorry to devastate you with this news.

What? You figured it out? All men who spend a lot of time blogging look like a cross between Gollum and a chupacabra? Well, hey, let’s not go that far…um…yeah yeah, all right, that’s fair.

Second, I’m not a gifted public speaker – partly because my tongue ends up tied in more knots than a bag of Rold’s Gold and partly because I speak the truth people need to listen to, not the BS that John Q. Public wants to hear.

Third, I can’t be bought by the man – unless the man represents a prominent book publisher. In that case, then yes sir, my character can die, be reborn, wear a pink tutu, and/or kiss a goat. Whatever you want, sir. You just tell me how hairy you want that goat to be.

The average politician has to be good looking and photogenic, with a million dollar toothy grin. He needs to speak eloquently, with the ability to charm the pants off the room and a soul dark enough to allow him to spoon feed a heaping helping of horse manure with a side of fries to the masses – extra chunky, just how the masses like it.

Yes, if you wish to become a politician, you’ll be forced to compromise your principles in the name of campaign contributions. Those boku bucks come with a zip string that gets attached to your back, allowing the donor to yank on it and force you to regurgitate his agenda, turning you into one great big walking, talking Chatty Kathy doll.

The common man who cares about the average joe has no place in today’s political system. I’m not taking a side here. Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, that weird party that insists on passing a law that would require everyone to wear shoes on their hands and walk upside down…they’re all just a bunch of heads attached to one great big bloated smelly hydra.

To quote the late great Douglas Adams of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame:

“The major problem – one of the major problems, for there are several – one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

Be honest folks, do you think good old Abraham “Born in a Log Cabin and Educated Myself by Candlelight” Lincoln could ever get elected today?

No. Those losers on twitter would have a field day with him:

Tonight on Campaign 2016 News Coverage - Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator. Sure, he freed the slaves and held the union together - but can we really be expected to follow a man with a face that craggy?

Tonight on Campaign 2016 News Coverage – Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator. Sure, he freed the slaves and held the union together – but can we really be expected to follow a man with a face that craggy?

My friends, I guarantee you somewhere out there is an Abraham Lincoln-esque individual whose heart is in the right place, whose common sense and can do attitude could lead the world into a new dawn of peace and prosperity but….he’s too fat…too old…has a crooked nose, bad hair, a hella craggy face, or has been plagued by never-ending reports of a third grade scandal during which he picked a booger out of his schnozola and flicked it at an unsuspecting classmate who ended up traumatized for life.

In short, we’ve become a nation of dummies that focus on nothing but insignificant crap and then wonder why our leaders provide us with the same insignificant crap in return.

I don’t know. All I know is that our best possible leader has some problem that he knows the media would use to run roughshod over him and therefore he’s like, “Screw politics! I’m going to sell used Sonatas at the Hyundai dealership in Tulsa!”

“3.5 READERS: BQB – do you have a point?”

Yes! Over a thousand words later, I have a point! I really do.

I DO NOT CARE ABOUT THAT WHICH I AM POWERLESS TO CHANGE.

And if you’re a follower of this blog, then chances are, you don’t either.  (Though if you do, you’re still more than welcome).

What do we do when we can’t change the sad state of affairs the world finds itself in?

We tune out and turn on the TV.

We pop in our earbuds and crank up the Top 40.

We purchase an overpriced bag of popcorn and take in the latest over the top, special effects laden blockbuster.

Hell, I heard a rumor that some people even poke their noses into a book once in awhile.

Pop culture. Open up our gobs and shovel it straight down to the deepest, darkest recesses of our bellies, Hollywood. We can’t get enough of it.

As the world gets worse and the average citizen becomes less able to change things thanks to Larry Lobbyist and Carl Corporation, we find our minds becoming more and more immersed in fictional, fantasy worlds – worlds where we can pretend we’re people that we are not, men and women we could never be, people with a voice, people who can make a difference…

…PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY MATTER!

I don’t know about you, but I devour pop culture like a fat guy at an All You Can Eat Big Mac Buffett because the worlds developed by artists are a thousand times better than the world I live in.

As fans of those worlds, do we matter?

Yes…and…no.

Yes, we matter because Hollywood will occasionally listen to us when we bitch about how they screwed the pooch with our favorite franchise, how they dropped the writing ball and steered our most beloved characters into an impermeable corner, or how sometimes they just do something out of left field (Dexter=Lumberjack??? Why???)

No, because like the other people that Holden Caulfield would call a bunch of phonies, Hollywood is also run by big corporations and CEOS who view you as one more schmuck to plunk down your cash and put your butt in a theater seat. Whether or not you are actually entertained is all too often an immaterial issue.

Can we change that?

No.

But we can ask those elusive questions – “WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN AND THE EVER IMPORTANT, WHY?”

What happened to Mr. and Mr. Brady’s first spouses?

How the hell do Doc and Marty know each other?

Why couldn’t Rose have just gotten on that damn lifeboat like she was told?

Why does Miley Cyrus insist on sticking out her tongue and making a face akin to a weasel suffering from an epileptic seizure?

What time is Hammer Time?

Questions. Like you, I have so, so very many questions about pop culture.

I want to take the plot holes of my favorite movies and TV shows and spackle them over with putty, apoxy, glue, and dare I say, the finest caulk in the land.

I want to analyze celebrity meltdowns and learn why fame, fortune, and adoration of the masses wasn’t enough to keep our favorite stars from hitting the silly sauce, popping the goofy pills, or getting on social media and ranting with all the eloquence of a bull roid raging its way through a china shop.

The long and skinny of it?

I want to learn as much as I possibly can about the fantasy worlds in which my mind temporarily resides from time to time because the powers that be have made the real world around me so utterly unbearable.

ALIEN JONES: Jumpin’ Jupiter, BQB. You sound like you’re reverting to that 1990’s phase where you wore nothing but flannel and played Smells Like Teen Spirit on a continuous loop.

BQB:  Not now, AJ.  I’m on a roll.

My friends, my followers, my 3.5 readers, my dear, dear Aunt Gertrude…it is my great honor to announce a new feature on the Bookshelf Battle Blog:

Pop Culture Mysteries.

I have questions about pop culture and I’m sure you do too.

To that end, I have retained the services of a hardboiled 1950’s Sam Spade-esque, film noir style private detective to investigate all the questions we have about our favorite movies, TV shows, music, and yes even books.

Stop by every week as Jake Hatcher, Official Bookshelf Battle Detective takes our questions, sniffs out the clues, snoops around the suspects, chases down the leads, and reports back here with his findings.

It’s going to be one helluva ride, readers. Along the way, we might even learn how a 1950’s sleuth ended up in modern times.

As we speak, Detective Hatcher is hot on the trail of the questions listed above and more are on the way.

For reasons that will soon be made clear, he has committed to investigate no less than one hundred pop culture mysteries for the benefit of my readers before he’ll be able to renegotiate his contract.

Do you have a pop culture mystery that my resident gumshoe needs to unravel?

Tweet it to @bookshelfbattle or leave it #popculturemysteries

Leave it in the comments or on my Google Plus page

You’ll have to use me as an intermediary because, you know, Jake’s from the 1950’s and is still getting up to speed on computers.

Noble readers, as always, thanks a million for stopping by.

I don’t know why, but I have a feeling in my gut that this feature will be the one that makes bookshelfbattle.com blow up.

ALIEN JONES: I have that feeling in my gut too. It’s the after shocks of that rancid seven layer dip you bought at the quick-stop and served during Scandal night.

BQB: Can you…not tell the audience that Scandal night is a regular thing at BQB HQ? Please? OK

AJ: What? The Yeti already knows. And everyone knows that the three forms of mass communication are telephone, telegraph, and tell-a-yeti.

BQB: He is a relentless gossip. It’s true.

Thanks folks. I’ll let Jake take it from here.  Stop by bookshelfbattle.com for the the first episode of POP CULTURE MYSTERIES!

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