Pop Chart Lab breaks down the taxonomy of movie monsters, from oogly to googly, from the classic to the very weird. Look at a larger version (like, huge) here.

If you like it, buy the print here.

Learn to insult like Shakespeare, thou beslubbering, fen-sucked wagtail. You artless, boil-brained, apple-john. You pribbling, tardy-gaited, bladder. I could go on.

There’s also an app for that.

Yeah, that one. There was one more left in the series. And it was, we humbly think, the best of the bunch, so we aptly saved it for last: book blogger extraordinaire Maud Newton summarizes the classic novel Crime and Punishment in 60 seconds.

Because we thought the challenge wasn’t hard enough, we asked filmmaker Adam to summarize the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy in one minute.

Some reimagined Kerouac’s masterpiece for bros. Do you think this will reignite the love of reading in the contemporary gorilla juice head?

Some samples:

1 – Epic Beginnings

I first met Dean not long after Tryscha and I hooked up. I had just gotten over a wicked fucking hangover that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with a six-foot-five douchebag and a beer bong. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the bro’d. Before that I’d often dreamed of going West to see hot LA actress chicks and try In N’ Out burgers, always vaguely planning and never taking off. Dean is the perfect bro for the road because he knows how to fucking party. First reports of him came to me through Chad King, who’d shown me a few Facebook status updates written by Dean from the Arizona State Beta Phi Omega house. I was totally stoked about Dean’s status updates because they were funny as shit, asking Chad to rate some pictures of girls he hooked up with the night before. At one point, Carlo Marx and I texted about the status updates and wondered if we would ever meet the epic Dean Moriarty. This is all far back, when Dean was not the crazy fucking jagoff he is today, when he was a young Communications major shrouded in Axe Body Spray. Then news came that Dean was out of ASU and was transferring to OSU; also there was talk that he was bringing some slam piece named Marylou.

2 – Flipcup and Phoenix

One night I was playing flipcup at the Delta house and Chad and Tim Gray told me Dean just got in and was staying at the Holiday Inn Express near East Campus. Dean had arrived the night before, the first time in Columbus, with his hotass stacked trixie Marylou; they got out of his Land Rover and cut around the corner looking for some grub and went right into Buffalo Wild Wings, and since then B-Dubs has always been a bitchin symbol of Columbus for Dean. They threw down cash on fucking tasty wings and brew-dogs.

All this time Dean was telling Marylou shit like this: “Now, babe, we’re at OSU, and even though I haven’t laid down the plan for you, we gotta forget about whatever stupid shit happened between us in Phoenix and fuckin’ cowboy up and start thinking about how we’re gonna pregame tonight…” and so on in the way that he had in those early days.

3 – A Natty Light-Slugging Hero of the Southwest

I went to the Holiday Inn Express with my buddies, and Dean came to the door in his lacrosse shorts. Marylou was jumping off the couch; Dean was totally getting his bone on, for to him sex was the one and only clutch thing in life, although he had to work part time at Foot Locker to cover tuition and so on. You saw that in the way he stood bobbing his head, always looking at his Samsung Galaxy, nodding like a young boxer to instructions, to make you think he was listening to every work, throwing in a thousand “Hell yeas” and “right ons.” I went to the Holiday Inn Express with my buddies, and Dean came to the door in his lacrosse shorts. Marylou was jumping off the couch; Dean was totally getting his bone on, for to him sex was the one and only clutch thing in life, although he had to go to the gym and do laundry and so on. My first impression of Dean was of a young The Situation—ripped, funny as shit, with spiked hair—a Natty Light-slugging hero of the Southwest. In fact he’d just been in the hospital for alcohol poisoning before hooking up with Marylou and coming to OSU. Marylou was a nine-out-of-ten with a Mystic Tan and a crazy rack; she sat there on the edge of the couch with her iPhone in her hands and her oversized Dolce and Gabana sunglasses on, waiting like a less-hot Megan Fox in that first Transformers movie.  But, outside of being pretty hot, she was a total bitch and capable of being a defcon-one psycho hose-beast. That night we all slammed Bud Light Limes and pulled stop signs out of the curb till dawn, and in the morning, while we sat around hung over as shit and watching Sportscenter, Dean got up like a total pimp, paced around, and decided the thing to do was have Marylou get some grub. “In other words we need some breakfast burritos, babe.” She had some kind of bitch-out about it and I peaced out.

The latest in our “classic novels in 60 seconds” series. Enjoy!

With so many different styles of writing in the world, it’s completely possible that two people can call themselves writers and not even be in the same ballpark. There are poets, essayists, journalists, novelists and bloggers, not to mention reporters, short-story writers, reviewers, and playwrights.
Everyone has strengths and weaknesses; I personally love writing fiction, although it’s sometimes difficult for me to create it. My sister is excellent at writing blurbs. Another friend of mine is great at spoken word poems. I consider myself to be good at a few things, but blurbs and spoken word poetry aren’t part of them.

But it’s the new year, and we’re all about challenges! So, I want to know what your literary kryptonite is.

What writing style makes you curl up with fear and cry?

Your challenge (if you choose to accept it) is to come up with something in that style and post it below. I’m going to come up with something too.  Winner gets my love, and the satisfaction of knowing that you are awesome enough to break through everything you ever thought about yourself.  Right on!

Photo courtesy of HubPages.com.

A Shore Thing, literary equivalent of Comic Sans and the debut novel of popular circus show reality show star Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, heralded in 2011 last week with its release, among other signs of the apocalypse.* If you haven’t read an excerpt, trust that it’s far from a work of literary genius. She appeared the other night on the David Letterman Show to present “top ten reasons to buy the new Snooki book.” I thought of some other reasons.

(The Real) Top 10 Reasons to Buy the New Snooki Book

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The robot voices add a nice touch.