Here at pleasantfluff.com, we’re all massive fans of Fight Club and today marks the 10th anniversary of its general release in cinemas. In order to celebrate, we’re going to publishing Mr. Bailey Smith’s article on it and (one of) its Japanese counterparts, Battle Royale. We had hoped to get it out by today, but we’re all bogged down in the end of semester quagmire.

Enough bleating! Happy Birthday Fight Club, may you inspire many more young men to adopt an iconoclastic stance in our increasingly alienating world.

Oh hai. Now that we’re a proper website and all, with a proper address and everything, we have proper website fees to pay. It’s sad, I know, but inescapably, we needs the monies. Now, don’t panic, we’re not going to be flooding the page with penis enlargement banners or sending you truckloads of spam. There are better ways to go about this nasty business. We’ve managed to snare Amazon.com as a sponsor and they’ve agreed that anytime somebody goes to Amazon.com via a link from pleasantfluff.com (or from any of the articles hosted on pleasantfluff.com) and purchases something, they’ll give us a little bit of dough. We figure that Amazon sell pretty much everything we talk about on this site, making it a nice, central, one-stop shop for all your cultural needs. Now, by no means do you have to shop at Amazon but, if you do, and you read this site and like what you see, please go to them through us and earn yourself the nice, warm, gooey feeling that you’re supporting a little website that just wants to entertain you.

You can now share any article (or the whole page itself) from Wonderbread on over 100 different social media sites including Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Technorati and Delicious. So, if you like what you read, tell your friends by hitting the ‘Share’ button at the bottom of the article!

Also, if you’d like the latest Wonderbread goodness delivered straight to your friendly RSS reader, click the ‘Subscribe’ button and select your preferred service.

Thanks to everyone who’s been following us so far, we really appreciate your continuing interest in the many and varied ways we choose to waste our time.

Steven Weber looking ready to steal Christmas

The Shining is, at its core, a story about “human monsters”. The phrase is used more than once in King’s novel and deserves its place as a pivotal concept to his story because it is not a horror fable with social subtext, but one about social horrors with a supernatural backdrop. To those who are only familiar with Kubrick’s version, a brilliant film but poor adaptation, one very fundamental difference between the two should be addressed. In King’s vision, Jack Torrance is not The Madman in a Horror Film. He is a damaged, alcoholic, unfulfilled writer with a history of anger management, one who tries with all his might to be a good man and fails. The Shining is his story, and it’s a tragedy. Read the rest of this entry »