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Vice Blog

Can we get some bat equality please?

With this weekend’s release of the new Quentin Tarantino movie, the obnoxiously spelled Inglourious Basterds, much is going to be made about the ending.

With this weekend’s release of the new Quentin Tarantino movie, the obnoxiously spelled Inglourious Basterds, much is going to be made about the ending. And that makes sense, because it’s bat-shit crazy. But much is also going to be made about Eli Roth’s character, Sgt. Donny Donowitz, specifically his fetishistic method of killing Nazis by smashing them over the head with a Louisville Slugger.

The baseball bat has long been an icon in films, sometimes as a symbolic stand-in for Americana and other times for the sole purpose of beating the shit out of someone. For every homemade all-maple Wonderboy from The Natural, there’s the bat Robert DeNiro uses to beat the shit out of someone in The Untouchables. Anyway, it should read:

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For every cheap gimmick-bat used to give “depth” to a character, Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men for instance, there’s the one that’s used to beat the shit out of Joe Pesci in Casino.

But what about the bats out there that aren’t used to either stand in for America or to beat the shit out of someone? You know, there are other bats out there. This is just plain bat racism. For the sake of bat equality, let’s go down the list of today’s best non-baseball clubs, in no particular order:

Bat wings
An unfortunate side effect of male-variety swamp crotch. While this experience is indeed awful, there’s nothing better than getting out of everyone’s line of sight, tucking a finger into the crease in your jeans, and slowly unpeeling your sweaty scrotum from the sides of your thigh (no rain, no rainbow). It’s the same feeling of pleasure/success you get after finally popping your eye open after a night of pink-eye infestation. If you need a visual aid, take two pieces of bread, spread some peanut butter inside, let sit in the sun for about six hours, and unpeel. Slowly.

That Billy Batts scene in Goodfellas
An old reference, sure. But who doesn’t like the scene where Frank Vincent gets his comeuppance for telling Joe Pesci to “go get his shinebox”? The answer: no one with a driblet of taste. I recommend watching this back-to-back with that scene in the final episode of The Sopranos where Phil Leotardo gets his skull crushed by a rolling SUV. Apparently, there’s something about Frank Vincent that makes directors overkill the fuck out of his characters. My guess is it’s his face.

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The saying “bats in the belfry”
Your aunt-who’s-not-really-your-aunt-but-instead-some-kind-of-vague-family-friend’s favourite phrase for someone who’s just “not right in the head”. It’s probably the right time to bring this phrase back into recognition before the awfuls subjugate it for their own ironic purposes. This one’s too good to lose.

Vampire bat
Vampires are a forbidden topic now, along with pirates, kooky list blogs, and references to the “financial crisis” (do you see bread lines? Then shut up, because it doesn’t exist), but the actual vampire bat remains unscathed. It is a leech with wings and fur and pointy little teeth. You can’t do much to take the badassness out of an animal whose sole source of food is blood.

Bat Mitzvah
For many years, my understanding of Jewish traditions had morphed to the point where I thought a Bar Mitzvah was when a Jewish boy “became a man” by undergoing a ceremony when he turned thirteen that concluded with the boy getting circumcised in front of his friends and several adults. This made me extremely happy I was not Jewish. I could never figure out what went down at Bat Mitzvahs, the female version of this event. Performing the act of female circumcision seemed a bit extreme, even for a culture ascetic enough to keep from eating delicious, succulent pork, but it didn’t matter since I was completely wrong anyway. There’s no penis-cutting at the various Mitzvahs. It’s just a party!

The descriptive term "bat-shit crazy"
This phrase has amazingly stood the test of time. Unlike any word with the suffix or prefix of "douche", this one's still very fun to use on a regular basis! Did you not fully enjoy its placement in the opening paragraph of this piece? I rest my point.