LD started the meme, so don’t blame us for tacking well off-course with this one, but something has to fill the empty pages between now and September. With that, we answer LD’s “Worst of the Worst” challenge.

1) What is the worst DVD/video you own? Hmm…not to be too Clinton-esque, but it depends on what you mean by “worst.” We know that Joe Vs. The Volcano isn’t what you’d call a good movie, but we love it nonetheless, especially the scene where Tom Hanks buys his luggage. (”May you live a thousand years, sir,” never fails to crack us up.) It’s got Abe Vigoda! And Meg Ryan, pre-infected collagen deformity lips, in three roles! And Robert Stack! And Nathan Lane, dressed in little more than a suit of crushed orange soda cans!

Luggage, sir. Luggage.

Even the kitsch value–the whole movie sounds like it was pitched as a joke that no one caught onto until it was far, far too late into the process– we’d never inflict it on anyone we liked (besides the Conscience of a Nation, who’s seen it at least five times.) The worst DVD in our collection is Ass Lickers 4, a piece of horrid pornography we “won” at a party. It’s mostly human trafficking victims being forced to service huge, demanding men in degrading yet uncreative ways. We once attended a party at college where they only had beer and huge bowls of M and M’s for sustenance. Missing dinner, we cranked through six to eight beers and several pounds of M and M’s before settling down for a multiplayer game of Goldeneye. The nauseous, disorienting sensation of being very drunk, near insulin shock, and getting the shit blown out of our virtual selves every three seconds by proximity mines comes very close to describing what it’s like to watch even fifteen minutes of Ass Lickers 4.

2) What is the worst concert you’ve ever seen in person?

If we posited this, would you believe us: that a Garth Brooks concert kicks the living daylights out of a Tribe Called Quest Concert any day of the week? Because it did. Tribe played for seven and a half minutes, rolled through 18 different shittily done songs in that time period, and then sprinted offstage before the audience had a chance to rip them limb from limb and post their heads on the city gates of Gainesville.

Left their concert in El Segundo.

Garth, on the other hand, was an arena-rocking, flame-shooting dervish, and we don’t even like his music. He had women literally licking his boots at the edge of the stage. Pimp comes in many flavors, and one of them tastes a lot like that, we guess.

3) What is the worst experience you’ve ever had at a restaurant?

It involves pepper spray. We were settling in for a beer and boiled peanuts at The Local on Ponce in Midtown Atlanta on karaoke night. Some large black guy was ripping through a calamitous version of “Sweet Child O’ Mine” when two guys who looked just like they’d gotten off pizza delivery shifts sprinted through the door. We’re going to use the verb “bum rush” for the first time in our lives here, since that’s exactly what they did to one of the waiters: they bum rushed him, with one holding him and spilling the tray full of drinks he was carrying and the other setting off a can of pepper spray directly in his face. The guy dropped to the floor, the huge black guy kept squawling away, and the two pizza boys darted through the bar and disappeared out the back door and into an alley.

Pepper spray smells just as you’d expect: peppery. What you can’t quite imagine is the nasty tickling feeling it leaves in your chest, which we don’t have to imagine since everyone in the bar got a good, strong dose of it, including us. It’s as if you inhaled a handful of tacks, a sensation lasting well past the twenty minute mark.

That would be the worst, followed up only by the time in China when a waitress served us a bowl full of noodles with open sores all over the hand holding the plate. But using China stories is cheating, right?

Johnny knows the joys of pepper spray.

4) What is the worst movie you’ve ever seen in the theatre? Self explanatory.

The Scarlet Letter. Demi Moore Version. Made us want to dig up Nathaniel Hawthorne’s corpse and kick it in the nuts for making it possible. The deaf black slave masturbating with a candle did it for us, and no, we don’t mean it in that way. The only movie we’ve ever walked out of–and our first date in high school was to see King Ralph.

5) What is the worst book you’ve actually finished? You can’t say “I read a few pages and it sucked so bad I put it down…” You have to have finished the book. Fiction or non-fiction. No matter.

Angels and Demons, Dan Brown. The last line of the book is, “You’ve never made love with a yoga master.” My ass, given a brain, couldn’t fart out worse crap than that.

Special nomination made here for Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, which has a scene where a man, swimming through a flood, tries to climb onto the bloated body of a dead cow and its bitten by a rabid dog floating on the cow. Scenes in wired kung fu fight scenes test your credulity less.

6) Who is the worst looking or least appealing celebrity you would have intimate relations with “just to tell the story”? Assume marital or other obligations did not exist. Assume no consequences arise therefrom. Here’s where we find out just how disgusting my readers are. The person must be a celebrity though - as in needs no introduction or explanation. The opposite gender is not required.

Terry Schiavo’s out, right? There goes our first answer. How about Rachel Ray from the Food Network, if only to avenge all the waiters she’s fucked in the ass with pisspoor tips by doing the same to her. We’d only do it if we got sodomy rights, though; otherwise we revert to our perpetual default choice on this one…Oprah.

It would only be fair.