by Mike Covers

The events of this story took place back in 2002, during my senior year of college. I dubbed it worthy enough for not only documentation, but also for inclusion in the university’s newspaper. Perhaps that is why the newspaper never earned any awards/recognition/readership.

On that day, I took off from classes due to a mild sickness which involved a stuffy nose, sore throat, and a massive splitting headache (imagine having a bowling ball dropped on your skull; I would have preferred THAT over the type of headache I was suffering). Fortunately, Ny-Quil, Excedrin, and several straight hours on America Online’s Instant Messenger (again, it was 2002) proved to be just the remedy I needed to feel over 15% better the next day.

I was not prepared for the phone call I received.

Usually, weekday calls to my family’s house were limited to telemarketers and my parents calling to remotely play the saved messages on our answering machine, which mainly consisted of 5,211,080 calls beginning with “This is Verizon AT&T Sprint Arctic Bell calling with a special offer…”, which were all promptly deleted (and, when it was my dad calling in, cursed at).

Around the middle of the day, I received a phone call from my friend Bill. This somewhat surprised me, for none of my friends even WOKE UP until the middle of the day and didn’t really possess a clear voice or coherent thoughts until later on in the evening. Bill cleared up why he was calling at what would otherwise be an ungodly hour for him: he and our friend Brian were getting ready to leave Atlantic City, where they had spent the past few days. This excursion to the popular (meaning “only”) New Jersey hotspot was a result of both of them having a lot of money and nothing better to do.

“Dude, we’re gonna be on the news,” was his greeting.

Again, I was not prepared for this greeting. 

First of all, the only statements I’m used to my friends greeting me with over the telephone are “Wanna go to the mall?” or, simply, “Food. Now.” Also, my friends have never exactly done, or even been involved with, anything newsworthy. To them, “newsworthy” would not be something like the kickoff of World War III, but rather the announcement of a new Final Fantasy game.

“Why were you on the news?,” I asked, still not sure whether I had heard him right. Just how strong was my latest dose of Ny-Quil?

“There was some assault under the boardwalk last night and they asked us if we knew anything about it,” he explained. “We were pretty hammered last night but we kinda remembered hearing something about it so when they asked us if we knew anything we were like yeah.”

Verbatim quote. Probably. 

Next, you will witness the real, authentic reason that Bill and Brian were enthusiastic about being interviewed. This is evidenced by the fact that they began to pass the phone back and forth.

BRIAN: “Dude, I said ‘shit’ on the air.”

BILL: “Dude, Brian said ‘shit’.”

BRIAN: “I don’t think they’re gonna use that part though.”

BILL: “Brian doesn’t think they’re gonna use it on TV.”

BRIAN: “Hey, wanna go to the mall when we get back?”

And so on. They finally got around to the part where they requested that I record the 5:00 PM news that afternoon. So I accepted, mainly because there was nothing better on at that time. Had the request interrupted my mandatory viewing of syndicated “Simpsons” episodes between 6:30 and 7:30 PM, I would have heartily declined.

At 5:00, I pressed “record” on my VCR (yet again, 2002) and sat through the obligatory opening stories of murders, fires, politicians, politicians committing murders and setting fires, etc. Finally, footage of the Atlantic City boardwalk and the sub-boardwalk sand dunes popped onto the screen. After an interview with a police officer (who managed to make an entire speech about the incident WITHOUT saying “shit”), Bill and Brian’s segment appeared.

The first clip showed them, in a city full of casinos, live entertainment, a beach, strippers, etc. standing next to a railing doing nothing…a stance that they regularly assume pretty much anywhere they go. Both stood expressionless, looking around (Bill later remarked “I did some good standing around, didn’t I?”) as the reporter narrated. The shot next cut to an interview with Brian.

“There’s not a lot of people under there…and it’s a pretty shady place at night.”

And that was it. Although there was some speculation over whether Brian’s pronunciation of “shady” sounded like “shitty,” nothing came of it. 

However, the news managed to once again do its job of entertaining two hungover suburbanites and one ill suburbanite at home with ten seconds of TV footage. We still talked about the incident…excitedly…for years.

For the record (meaning for the college professors whose classes I missed that day who might be reading this), I did not go to the mall that evening. After all, not a lot of people go there and it’s a pretty shady/shitty place at night.

by Mike Covers

In our 20s, as long as my friends and I could remember, our eternal restaurant of choice was a local Dennys near the Philadelphia International Airport. Its 24-hour operating style and ability to serve good food (to us, “good food” meant anything that did not require the staff to ask “For here or to go?”) consistently drew us to its non-smoking sections each time hunger or general boredom struck…which was rather often, due to our dull suburban surroundings. Of course, over half a decade of going to the same eatery took its toll on us in the forms of food losing its taste and the Dennys staff knowing our names better than those of their co-workers. We attempted variety in the forms of Applebee’s, Ruby Tuesdays, our houses, etc. but nothing really stuck.

Then my friend Bill went to Hibachi.

Hibachi is a hyper-local version of the more popular Benihana, which is of course renowned for being among the best in (Americanized) Japanese cuisine. None of us had EVER seen Bill as excited about ANYTHING non-video-game-related as he was about his maiden trip to Hibachi. Taking a cue from our trusted confidant, we joined him on his second trip to the restaurant.

All it took was that trip for it to replace Dennys as our most-visited dining locale.

Despite having more expensive prices and, well, a closing time, Hibachi managed to win over the hearts and stomachs of my friends and I. We made the switch not only because Hibachi’s fried rice, chicken, and even iced tea surpassed all taste tests with flying colors, but also because of how the food is prepared. At Hibachi, guests are seated on three sides of a rectangular table that has an actual stainless steel grill built into it, taking up the fourth side. The grill is used by a Hibachi chef, who actually prepares everyone’s order RIGHT THERE AT THE TABLE. This was quite a switch from Dennys, when we could have passed the time between ordering our food and actually receiving our food by doing something such as, I don’t know, constructing a skyscraper. You know how, when food is taking too long to prepare, people always believe they are witty by saying “are they still killing the cow back there?” 

In Dennys’ case, the cow hasn’t even been BORN yet.

Hibachi patrons get to see raw ingredients turn into edible delicacies approximately two feet in front of them at the hands of a very trained cook. It is all kicked off with a towering wall of flame to get the grill ready for cooking. This made for the following entertaining (to me) exchange with my friend Nikki on her own maiden trip.

ME: Uh oh, are you wearing hairspray?

NIKKI: Yeah, why?

COOK: (Lights the grill with a flame taller than Mt. Everest)

NIKKI: (Jumps back in terror so far she lands in Dennys)

Once the grill is hot, the chef proceeds to cook the meal via a series of elaborately-performed maneuvers that are not commonly seen outside of martial arts flicks. Eggs are tossed and broken on the side of a spatula IN MIDAIR. I have trouble breaking an egg on an even surface. Huge piles of rice, vegetables, and meats are continually–and evenly–flipped with the spatula and a fork ONLY. They even manage to make ONIONS entertaining, with raw onion rings of placed on top of each other and then doused in flame, creating Hibachi’s signature “Onion Volcano.” Even though I like onions about as much as Donald Trump likes cohesive sentence structure, I have to admit that I find the Onion Volcano much more entertaining than ANYTHING we ever witnessed at Dennys…and this even includes the time we saw a bloody fistfight take place in the dining room.

Among other Hibachi memories over the years: 

–The chef spilling a platter of shrimp onto the grill with the cry “Holy Shrimp!”

–The chef flipping an egg into his tall chef’s hat and remarking, “Where did it go?”

–The chef tossing the spatula in the air and, upon failing to catch it, remarking, “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

–That time when, as we waited to be seated, a patron was wheeled out of the restaurant on a stretcher, followed by very concerned family members. Glancing into the dining room, our friend Bruce remarked “Hey, a table opened up!”

–The day when my friends Jon and Shelly and I visited the place about an hour before they closed for the night. We were the only three people at the table, probably in the entire shopping center, and the chef STILL did the full “show” for us.

As we got older and discovered that post-20s life does not afford you opportunities to eat out with your friends 8 nights a week (or much of anything else, really), our trips to Hibachi became less frequent. Our trips to Dennys became MUCH less frequent. The closure of several area Hibachi AND Dennys restaurants could very well be blamed on us getting older. 

Completely eliminating the wonder (and worry) over what the hell is going on with our food in the kitchen, it is safe to say that this and many other reasons will cause us to continually dine at this fine non-Dennys business forever. Or at least until the fried rice loses its taste in six years.

by Mike Covers

Awards Season 2024 concluded this past weekend with the pinnacle ceremony that has been celebrating cinema for millions of years now: the Razzie Awards. 

And–rightfully–Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey took home the coveted Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Picture.

There was also some kind of encore event the following day, the “Academy Awards” or some nonsense like that. Quite obviously a rip-off of the far more notable Razzies ceremony.

However, for some reason likely involving cocaine or decades of lead in the water, more people tend to pay attention to the “Oscars.” This is because the ceremony purports to celebrate excellence in cinema but, year after year, fails to do so because, again, year after year, they do not think of consulting me for my picks. Instead, they tend to nominate movies that some would call “arthouse” and (most) others would call “I’ve never even heard of these.” Most Oscar winners–and even nominees–are not the kind of movies you will find playing at sprawling neon-festooned AMC or Regal multiplexes, where the scent of $65 popcorn (when it’s on sale) is everywhere, including the restrooms. This is because, god forbid, these places don’t dedicate 20 of their 24 screens to hourly showings of Kung Fu Panda 4. No, Oscar-winning movies are only screened in “indie” theaters: located in hidden, likely dangerous, parts of cities in dark, crumbling, possibly condemned buildings that are a single greased palm away from being a condo complex. People who willingly wear clothes with elbow patches on them, drink nothing but top-shelf bourbon and hot tea, even when they’re brushing their teeth, and have British accents even if they’re from Indiana are the only ones who go to these theaters. 

And, as they do every year, the so-called Academy doled out most of its trophies to some arthouse flick called Oppenheimer that no one at all saw (except every single person who saw Barbie). I personally was unable to participate in the “Barbenheimer” double feature this past summer due to a bad spell of light sensitivity in my eyes; seeing bright-pink Barbie in a pitch-black theater would have killed me. I still have yet to see either one, because I refuse to watch one without the other behind it in rapid succession (and Oppenheimer JUST RECENTLY became available on one of the streaming services I have).

So until I get to those movies, let’s try to focus on the GOOD 2023 cinema that the Oscars didn’t even bother sending entry forms to. In other words, the movies that *I* feel deserve Oscars.

COCAINE BEAR: This is seriously the Academy’s biggest snub since it awarded Best Song to Phil Collins for that godawful “You’ll Be In My Heart” tune from the godawfuller movie Tarzan instead of to Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s timeless musical classic “Blame Canada” from South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. Very few movies outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe sell me on their TITLE ALONE, but “Cocaine Bear” succeeded in this feat. You could have slapped this title on ANYTHING–Kung Fu Panda 4, Oppenheimer, the State of the Union address–and I would have paid good Moviepass points to see it. And its plot–a bear getting high on cocaine and violently mauling people–deserves, at the very least, the Best Screenplay Award. Besides, this was the late Ray Liotta’s final film before he died. Doesn’t that get it any kind of sympathy Oscar, like the one they gave to Heath Ledger for playing the Joker?

DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES: My friend Jon and I caught a special sneak preview of this movie after I found out about it from–seriously–a fundamentalist Christian Facebook friend who swears she is giving up Facebook FOR GOOD about once every 5 days. Among the other audience members was a dorky-looking kid, who very well could have been me and/or Jon from the past, clad in a wizard robe, obviously the duds of their favorite D&D character class (“Ranger”). Chris Pine plays a lovingly wise-ass Bard who manages to team up with one of every other D&D class (Halfling, Paladin, Obligatory Sarcastic Woman, etc.) in order to defeat Hugh Grant’s Rogue character, whose historically good looks have apparently recently rolled a 1. This movie deserves Academy recognition just for putting a decent, enjoyable, and honestly funny Dungeons & Dragons movie out there, which was certainly NOT the case the first time Hasbro tried it back in 2000. Current and former nerds know exactly what I’m talking about.

THE SUPER MARIO BROS. MOVIE: Yes, we’ll overlook the fact that this movie was the latest thing for Chris Pratt’s voice to appear in; the guy seems to be the go-to for ANY voiceover role these days, including schoolgirls in anime series. While the 1993 live-action Super Mario Bros. movie was good, presuming you were stoned while watching it, the 2023 animated version just improved upon the popular video game franchise it is based on (The Legend of Zelda). Brooklyn plumbers Mario and Luigi (or “Green Mario”) find themselves sucked into the magical Mushroom Kingdom, where Mario teams up with Princess Daisy/Peach/Toadstool/Zelda to rescue Luigi from the clutches of evil King Koopa. I think this is a perfect contender for Best Adapted Screenplay.

SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE: Don’t worry: it isn’t necessary to have seen the first 57387608978768069 Marvel movies to understand what is going on in this movie, as it takes place in a separate universe. However, there is a single line that refers to the Marvel movie Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, so maybe you should see those 57387608978768069 other movies to truly appreciate that dialogue. Anyway, it probably IS a good idea to have at least seen Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse to understand this movie. Miles Morales, now s powers as Spider-Man, meets Gwen Stacy (Spider-Woman) and a host of other Spider-Beings including, seriously, Spider-Ham, who is a Spider-Pig (which was first predicted by–what else?–The Simpsons Movie). Since the Academy apparently has to legally give the Best Animated Feature award to a Disney property every year anyway, can this movie at least have that award since Disney now owns Marvel, in addition to 99% of other entertainment?

JOY RIDE: This was a fun, colorful, and exceptionally raunchy tale about two Asian adoptee best friends who travel to China in search of one of their biological mothers. Along the way, they injure an entire basketball team, become a K-Pop group, and save Luigi from Bowser (wait, wrong movie). The story itself is award-worthy, plus there is a line of dialogue where one character describes how she masturbates to Splinter from the Ninja Turtles. That alone should be an automatic win. As far as I know, Oppenheimer did not have such dialogue.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOLUME 3: Another movie year, another Marvel movie (or 13). Unlike Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the third iteration of the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise DOES require that you see the other 57387608978768069 Marvel movies that came before it (and those are just the ones that came out in 2022). Starring a live-action version of Chris Pratt (who, unfortunately, is also voiced by Chris Pratt), the Guardians continue their adventures after the events of Avengers: Endgame and Thor: Love and Thunder. The movie exemplifies utter “movie magic,” however, when it makes you feel actual feelings–real feelings–for what is, seriously, the tragic backstory of a CGI raccoon. Forget a single Oscar; this deserves its own damn CEREMONY.

THE MARVELS: The Marvels is a historic piece of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in that it was its first-ever bomb, meaning that it made only a meager $206 million. I mean, pfft! ANYONE can make that kind of money, can’t they?! In it, Captain Marvel teams up with two other women who share the “Marvel” superpower (no one–including the cast themselves–are quite sure what that even is) to stop the evil Dar-Benn from destroying several planets and thus worsening the movie’s intergalactic box office take. I feel that it deserves an Oscar because it is the last movie on my list this year and I am too tired to think of any better reason. If my research is accurate, this is how Titanic also won Best Picture.