First of all, I should clarify that this movie, Enthiran – a three-hour musical epic halfway between Bicentennial Man and RoboCop – is a Tamil film. That’s a region in Southern India with many of their own unique beliefs and styles, and it’s a very different thing than Bollywood. For example, while both Bollywood and Tamil place a lot of filmic importance on music and dance, the latter places equal importance on the kick-to-flight ratio of dudes with shitty mustaches. Seriously, you can’t pass the salt in a Tamil movie without accidentally sending somebody’s creepy uncle hurtling through a window.

For example, here’s one of the disposable slapstick comedy characters getting fist-catapulted across the room in the very first scene:

That’s how the movie introduces itself: by launching a series of screaming tech support missiles across the room. And you’d better suspend that disbelief from the ceiling, friend, because Enthiran is going to spend the rest of its run time taking wild, blind swings at it with a bat. Tamil cinema in general thinks that the laws of physics are for frail, weak men who lack enough cushioning bloat to take a good beating, and Enthiran is their God-king. It makes sense: You work as a dishwasher in a busy restaurant all day, you sure as shit don’t want to do the dishes when you come home. Well, the hard sciences are a booming industry in India, so when they head out to the movies, the last thing they want to do is understand some bullshit kinetics.

Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s the main character being Frisbee’d into the roof by a malignant android that looks like a cross between Wayne Newton and Pepe Le Pew:

 u know how you can always tell when a tech manual has been outsourced to India because, while it’s obvious that they have a firm grasp on the English language, there’s some bizarre flourish hidden in every other sentence that simply defies understanding? Well, Enthiran has taught me that the same thing applies to physics: In India, slapping isn’t just an insult, but an economic method of travel, probably because somebody fucked up the translation on Newton’s Laws of Motion.

Enthiran is a hell of a long movie. Like I said, it’s a three-hour musical epic, and as we all know, adding the term “musical” to anything makes it at least four relative hours longer. But even the term “epic” is not doing this monumental bastard any sort of justice, because in addition to the unwieldy run time, there isn’t a single slack nanosecond in Enthiran. Characters move fast, talk fast and walk fast, and if you want crap like atmosphere or time to process, then you’re a disappointment to your grandparents; why can’t you be more like Ishwar? He has two doctorates, three jobs and four ulcers, and he just turned 12.

Every shot in Enthiran watches like a blind editor came in and chopped the first and last third off of the scene, regardless of consequence. The movie switches locations before you realized the conversation ended, and new characters pop in for lines, even though you had no idea they were in the room in the first place, or else they leave the scene entirely and the film doesn’t bother to show you. The end result is the implication that this entire society has mastered the art of teleportation, but mostly just use it to nag each other across a span of continents.

“W-wait … what? I was just on a beach. Where the fuck did you come from? WHERE AM I RIGHT NOW!?”

So when I say it’s a three-hour epic, you need to understand that means three Tamil hours, which translate to American chronology in roughly the same ratio as dog years. This is 20 hours of movie shoved into 168 frantic minutes. Watching Enthiran is like learning kung fu in The Matrix; there’s just no way this much information should be delivered to your brain that quickly. It’s unnatural, and there are sure to be repercussions. So if you make it all the way to the end and you find yourself hemorrhaging cerebrally, or that some of your loved ones have long since died, try to take some solace in the knowledge that there was truly no more efficient delivery system for bloated Indian men getting kicked in the groin by the Terminator.

Enthiran thinks “context” is some sort of intraprison messaging service. Whereas Bollywood movies will often segue into relevant musical numbers, Enthiran will slam on the brakes to make you watch random music videos at the drop of a Haatim (that’s the mustachioed fellow who just got booted through the cinder block wall behind you). For example, what happened after our heroes escaped the attempted rape by Indian Lennie Small back there? I mean right after — what was the very next frame that followed that scene?

The movie cuts away, mid-manic-PTSD laughter, to a musical number about the highest mountain in Africa and how it’s crazy that this chick is totally the same thing as fruit. Because Enthiran has absolutely no borders. It’s not even firmly situated in any one genre, but rather rapidly oscillates from Short Circuit to Fist of the North Star to the video from Hall and Oates’ Maneater.

I literally could not tell you which is which. I think I may be white-blazer-blind.

Early on in the film, the affable robot, Chitti, embarks on a wacky, cartoonish task to capture a mosquito, which he accomplishes — obviously — by speaking Mosquito to it:

Now here he is starring in a cutesy music video about innocent love with a cast of dancing Cylons.

Now here he is popping a man’s head like a blood pimple.

Roughly 90 percent of this movie is written and performed solely for young children who love sci-fi/fantasy, and the other 10 percent is random sex crimes and gruesome murder. It’s like if Labyrinthplayed out exactly the same for the first 70 minutes, but then when Jennifer Connelly reaches the Goblin City, David Bowie hangs Hoggle with his own intestines while the puppets take turns sodomizing Ludo.

If I’m to conclude something about Indian society from the contextual void that is Enthiran, it is that one thing does not follow another in any semblance of logical order there, and that life in Tamil is something between an Alzheimer’s ward and an old Doctor Who episode. But, you know, with bitchin’ little mustaches drawn over everything.

Yes, he is surfing that man down the highway. Why ever do you ask?

That was just straight up bad in the general ass area. By shunning such archaic constraints as “reality” and “coherence,” the fight choreographers were free to reenact whatever bizarre impulse popped into their heads, and the end result is fantastic: It’s like the collaborative work of Bruce Lee, Stan Lee and a 5-year-old with a mismatched set of action figures. Chitti first engages in a painstakingly arranged kung fu battle, then he gets flung from the car, so he sprouts Rollerblades out of nowhere, activates his magnetic boots and sprints sideways along the entire length of a passenger train all the while hurdling other, oncoming trains, then resumes the battle suspended from the commuter handholds like a tubby Indian Spider-Man.

It’s storytelling brilliant enough to provoke Shakespeare into shame-suicide, clearly. But this scene isn’t the climax of the film; it’s barely the start. It occurs roughly 45 minutes in. Jesus Christ, when you’ve set the bar that high, where do you go from there?

And the answer, of course, is “totally insane.”

Apropos of nothing, Chitti turns evil halfway through the movie and starts reproducing himself. Andevery fight scene from that point forward features a clone army of slightly overweight Indian dudes. Picture the infamous “thousand Agent Smiths” scene from The Matrix, only mentally replace all of the Smiths with a set of tinker toys shaped like Bizarro Neil Diamonds.

Hey, don’t take my word for it. Here’s a bloated, middle-aged clone battle sphere:

Here they are in deadly tube form:

Here’s a gargantuan cobra — its very cell structure comprised of leather-clad fat guys — eating a helicopter:

Now here are the Chitti clones bolting together, Voltron-style — each limb a thousand jiggly Indian dudes; each joint lubricated by butter and hair wax — into a giant recreation of my own fever nightmares after dosing up on cough syrup and falling asleep to a city council meeting on public access. In case the following picture is unclear, this is a giant robot made out of 200 tubby Indian men giving a thumbs-up with his thumb, which is also a tubby Indian man who himself is giving a thumbs-up.

You have now seen everything. Die in peace.

In short, this movie is the best thing that I, or anybody else, has or indeed ever will see in the aggregate of human history. And if this masterwork is at all reflective of the society that produced it, then I am forced to conclude that India is a terrifying, time-skipping, physics-defying amoral chaos dimension.

Which … sounds pretty much right, actually.

Webster’s defines the placenta as: “the organ in most mammals, formed in the lining of the uterus by the union of the uterine mucous membrane with the membranes of the fetus, that provides for the nourishment of the fetus and the elimination of its waste products.”

Urban Dictionary would describe it (if there was such and entry) as, “The lumpy, blood-soaked terror that comes out after the baby and will visit you in your nightmares for years to come.”

This is a blobfish. A real placenta can be found here if you dare.

The upside of witnessing the birth of a placenta is that the image it burns into your soul will make you thankful for the six sex-free weeks you have ahead of you. The downside is that you will forever wonder if your baby had a previously unnoticed twin who could have went on to make you a fortune as the star of untold numbers of b-rated horror films.

Picture a vagina blowing a meat-bubble. Now imagine someone surgically attaching that meat-bubble to a newborn via a pulsating sausage casing.

Modern medicine is full of examples of “cures” that seem worse than the condition they are designed to treat (or in the case of episiotomies, prevent). For instance, the dreaded episiotomy. The word itself comes from the Greek “epison,” which means “pubic region,” and “-tomy” which, one can only assume, means “to cut the fuck out of.”

In an episiotomy, a scalpel is used to create an incision that starts at the bottom of the vagina, and goes downward towards the rectum. As if this wasn’t hard enough to watch without crying like the little girl that our high school gym teachers always knew we would turn out to be, the procedure is carried out at the same time the baby’s head is forcing its way out.

This, but with scissors. And a vagina. And imagine a screaming baby coming out of the box.

Why would a highly trained, and over-paid professional do such a procedure? To keep the vagina from tearing, silly. To the layman (and by “layman” we mean weeping, trembling onlooker), this seems like breaking your own windows with bricks to keep the neighborhood kids from breaking them with baseballs.

So why do they do it? Remember that time Barney the dinosaur locked his keys in his car and tried to get in by climbing in thru the exhaust pipe? Well childbirth can be just like that. But in reverse. And with blood. And instead of an exhaust pipe, it’s a vagina.

Yeah, just like that.

You might be tempted to think all the time you have spent watching clips of poo-porn on the internet would prepare you for this, but you would be wrong. We’ll spare most of the smelly details since Cracked is a family site (as long as your family consists of alcoholic pop-culture junkies) but be assured that after the birth experience your view of poop will never be the same.

First off, the mom-to-be is going to take a big fat dump on the hospital bed. Yes, Hollywood tends to leave that part out.

Apparently, passing an 8-pound canned ham through your hoo-ha compresses the intestine and has a tendency to push any fecal material inside of it out of the body. Also, there will probably be no fewer than 10 people in the room watching it happen. Oddly, mom may not even know it has happened, and those who witnessed it will probably be too polite (or horrified) to say anything.

Secondly, the baby is gonna poo too. That isn’t news. In fact, “baby-shit yellow” is a color available on the new Chevy Camaro. Oddly, that same color is not an option available for the baby’s first duke. For the first few days the baby’s bowel movements will be black, and have the consistency of fresh roofing tar. Also, it will be about as easy to clean as fresh roofing tar. They may also taste like fresh roofing tar, but who wants to eat fresh roofing tar just to make that comparison?

To put it in perspective: Have you ever spent a night drinking cheap beer, only to wake up with a headache, and a serious case of black diarrhea? It’s a lot like that. Which begs the question, “How did the baby get Budweiser in the womb?” The answer of course is: Through the umbilical cord. Duh!

By “alien,” we’re not talking about the guys you picked up at The Home Depot to help deliver the baby. We mean the “Sigourney- Weaver-fighting” kind (whose birth scene prepares you for the gore, if not the pooping).

As it turns out, babies’ heads are soft, and don’t become hard until months or years after they’re born. This explains why you don’t usually see them at college parties, crushing beer cans with their foreheads. Well, this and the fact that they weren’t invited since they cry all the time, and puke all over the place before the drinking even begins.

Either way, having a soft skull comes in handy when you’re trying to be born without killing your mother in the process. Unfortunately, their heads don’t instantly regain their shape once they pop out. It takes a day or two of looking like a butt plug before you can take your little-one hat shopping.

If the doctor feels that your baby is at risk of anything (juvenile diabetes, low birth-weight, high birth-weight, medium birth-weight), or if he just feels that he can charge you more, he may elect to hook up a fetal monitor. That doesn’t sound so bad, right? Well, that is because “fetal monitor” is just a nice way of saying “a twisted metal thingy with wires coming out of it that we’re going to screw right into your baby’s freaking unborn head.”

Now, the fetal monitor itself isn’t all that scary looking. But the fact that they jam this thing into the babies soft spot while it is still in the womb, and they stick it in there far enough that it stays inside the skull until after the baby is born, will bring back vivid memories of that baby getting hooked up to the Matrix in the first movie.

“OK, now, nurse, hand me my power drill, please.”

Couple that with the fact that a baby’s heart slows way down during every contraction, which sets off a little alarm on the monitor similar to the one that goes off when a patient flatlines on Scrubs, and you may find that you have shit your pants before the whole thing is over. Don’t feel bad though. Like we said, there is a lot of pooping going on at this point, so if you do let one slide, just motion towards the mother when she isn’t looking, and plug your nose as if to say, “Yeah, I smell it too. It was her.”

Births are really expensive. Even a complication-free birth is likely to cost upwards of $10,000 and if your baby comes out and so much as sneezes in the delivery room, this number is likely to start rolling up like a pinball score. Sure, maybe you’re one of those fancy-pants families with this New Age “health insurance.” But tack on the cost of the car seats, baby clothes, toys, diapers, bottles, play pens and aforementioned placenta memory-erasing Belgian ale, and you can plan on having spent more than your burger-flipping ass makes in a year before you even leave the hospital.

“Is it really worth it?”

So basically it’s you letting another man touch your wife’s private parts, then writing him a check. Then you watch him speed away in a Lexus on his way to a round of golf being played at some country club that you are now too poor to even clean the toilets of, let alone get a tee-time at. OK, we’re probably taking it too far. We’re sure they’d let you clean their toilets.

Regular readers know that I used to work at a truck wash for big tractor/trailers. In 15 years of employment there, there wasn’t a single day when I was proud to tell someone what I did for a living. In fact, if I was meeting a stranger for the first time and I knew that there was no chance of us ever seeing each other again, I’d flat out lie. “Oh, you’re a lawyer? That’s awesome. I build nuclear warheads with my penis.”

I did it because I knew the reaction my job produced wasn’t one of interest. It was one of sympathy. “Well, hey, at least you have a job, right? Not many people can say that in this economy.” As if I needed the reassurance of a stranger to justify my occupation.

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“I appreciate you saying so, sir. Now if you don’t mind, I have some of your food to shit in.”

Of course, we’ve all felt that satisfying mixture of pity and superiority that comes from seeing a stranger doing a crappy job. When we see a middle-aged woman working the McDonald’s drive-through, we immediately assume she’s uneducated and barely employable. She’s “stuck” working a fast food job. It never occurs to us that she may be intentionally working her way up the ladder to become a manager — a job that pays an average of $40,000 a year. Or that this isn’t her only job, and she’s busting her ass, doing whatever it takes to survive. Or that, of the 50 applications she put out over the last half a year, this was the only job that replied.

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“So that’s a No. 4 with a large go fuck yourself? Anything else I can get for you, you arrogant cocksucker?”

Instead we scoff, because it makes us feel better about where we are in life. “Yeah, I may stack boxes in the dildo factory, but at least I don’t flip burgers for a living.” In doing that, we’re justifying our own occupations to ourselves. And since it happens so often, we know for a fact that those in better careers are looking at us through that same judgmental lens. No matter what our level of employment, scoffing at others for how they make their money is our means of comforting ourselves, because at least we’re not that poor bastard who picks up my trash.

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“All it takes is for me to slip one human hand in here and we never see you again.”

And God help you if you work the night shift, because you’ll definitely be getting shit for …

I’ve always been a night person. Some of my best writing happens at three in the morning when the house is totally silent and I don’t have daily chores looming over me like paparazzi at a celebrity funeral. It feels like the whole world is asleep except for me. It’s peaceful, and I need that feeling of isolation to help me concentrate and create.

But even when I was working manual-labor jobs, I still preferred the night shift. I got in the habit of staying up until daybreak and then sleeping until early afternoon, and that schedule has worked for me ever since. But holy shit, did people ever look down on me for it.

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“Goddamnit, leave me alone!”

People assume that late sleepers are lazy and unproductive. They’re lumped in with people who stay up all night partying, dancing in a drug-fueled craze while wearing aluminum foil pants and stuffing glow sticks in their asses, then sleeping away the day because of the ensuing hangover. Or teenagers on summer break who spend the night playing video games, shouting racial slurs at each other over headsets and ignoring the importance of getting up at the crack of dawn like a “normal” adult. Or worse yet, they picture us going to bed at the same time as them but just choosing to sleep for the next 16 hours because we think our body deserves more sleep than theirs.

Of course, most of us night people sleep the same amount of time as people who keep more regular hours. We’re just shifting our active schedule to a different time of day. While they’re asleep, we’re working just as hard as they did when the sun was out. We’re equally as productive — just not at 9 a.m.

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My yearly clock budget is in the thousands.

But still they scoff, because to them, we’re immature. Real adults start their day when the local businesses open and go to bed when late night talk shows are over. People who are just getting started when Letterman ends might be more productive than them (and in creative industries, that’s often the case), but the sight of someone in their bathrobe any time after 11 a.m. is just too much for some people to deal with. It’s automatically assumed that we’re sleeping our day away while respectable society carries us on their back.

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“I’m sleeping because I just hate responsibility that much.”

But before you decide to try out the lifestyle of the Daywalkers and invest in a fancy computerized alarm clock to help you wake up, be warned that you’ll be scoffed at for …

When I was in high school, I bought my girlfriend a necklace from Walmart. Of course, I wasn’t able to buy something flashy and expensive — I was 16 and raked lawns for a week to come up with the money. When I gave it to her, she was overjoyed. She asked me where I bought it, and I told her. I had no sooner said the name of the store when she just sort of deflated — her expression changing from an ear-to-ear smile to that look you get when you’re pretending to laugh off a joke that actually offended you to the point of inducing vomit. It didn’t matter that she was still holding the same necklace in her hands that made her smile five seconds ago. Everything had changed.

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God, I still remember that look.

I learned growing up that if you buy your clothes from Kmart or Dollar General, people will give you so much shit, you’ll recategorize the word “humanity” as a nonsensical sci-fi term like it was fucking Klingon. Buy a new couch from a furniture store, and your friends will compliment you on it. Tell them that you got it at a secondhand store, and they’ll look at you like you picked it up from the curb outside of a crack house. At the very least, you’ll hear, “Really? I’d be too afraid to buy furniture there. You don’t know what’s been on that.” Ironically, if they knew what I’d done on it, they would burn my entire house down out of sheer moral obligation.

However, I’ve found a really bizarre twist to those secondhand stores. If you’re buying what you need from them, people will scoff. But if you tell people you’re “antique” shopping, it’s perfectly acceptable.

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“Wait, you’re just decorating your house with it? Phew, for a second there, I almost thought you were a poor piece of shit.”

What will never be acceptable to anyone outside of your like-minded circle of friends, however, is your …

Last November, I wrote a piece on the Occupy Wall Street generation, and the first point was about how we’ve made the current generation of workers ashamed and afraid of taking certain jobs. A week or so later, Newt Gingrich started bringing up the same point in interviews as a platform for his campaign. When I told friends and family about this, the reaction was baffling.

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My family is comprised of nothing but teenage girls.

The general response was, “Wait, so you support Newt Gingrich?” What? When did I say that? I was just shocked that a political figure was using one of my article points as a campaign strategy. I thought it was interesting, and I got a laugh out of picturing him using other article points like referring to his ridiculously large penis or coming up with creative uses for the word “asshole.” That doesn’t mean that he and I share beliefs. But since my friends now associated me with that crossover, I had to explain my political standing at the risk of them assigning their own assumptions.

Where politics are concerned, the average citizen tends to choose a side and then meticulously pick apart the opposition’s values until there’s nothing left but toenails and ass hair. We laugh with our like-minded friends over silly statements the other side made, much in the same way that we’d discuss the antics of a rebellious 13-year-old — slightly angry that they’re acting out, but trying to keep in mind that they don’t know any better because they’re not as smart or experienced as we adults.

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“Hahaha! He believes things!”

The danger is that we’ve let that spill over into our everyday life. Seeing a George Bush bumper sticker back in 2001 told you that the occupants were flag-waving, gun-toting, all-American ass kickers — you have to remember that after 9/11, his approval ratings were around 90 percent. Seeing the same sticker in 2009, we’d generally perceive those people to be blind sheep fooled by the government conspiracy machine. Without knowing a single thing about the actual people inside that car (including if it’s just some guy borrowing it from a friend), we’ve defined them by what we assumed to be their politics, and we use that to fuel our scoff missile. It’s almost entertaining for us to look down on people because of their political standing. Just ask Jon Stewart — that is if you can make it through his money moat.

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Careful, though. That tower contains cannons that shoot servants at you.

Oh, speaking of which …