On New Year's Resolutions

I've never been good at New Year's resolutions.

Frankly, I never saw the point. You want to change yourself? Do it. Don't use a day as an excuse. This year, my "resolution" is to join a local gym because I want to start working put again and it's just getting too expensive to buy weights to use in my house, especially when I don't have the room to store them. My friend Zac's even pushing me to actually do it. Good man.

Then again, let's look at some previous years' tentative resolutions:

"Get the girl." - Failed spectacularly, repeatedly.
"Loose your virginity." - Alright, in fairness, that was a resolution and a birthday wish and a daily game plan for a number of years, actually.
"No crazy chick's in oh-ten." - This after oh-eight and oh-nine failed to live up to the same demand. Oh-eleven I expect to fail just as well.

This year, though, I think I've got the right idea. I'm just going to demand from the universe the following: to be in a romantic relationship wherein I am neither the skinny one, nor the pretty one, and maybe not even the smart one. Basically, I don't want to have to bring anything to the table, is what I'm saying.

On Holiday Good Taste

I drove past a cafe yesterday that still had it's menorah up in the front window.

I'm not saying you have to take your Chanukah decorations super fast. Hell, I love my Christmas decorations to stay up until New Year's. Even the Halloween junk stays up for weeks. I just take off the spiders and cobwebs and leave the pumpkin and cornstalks for Thanksgiving. Seriously, store, go ahead and leave your menorah up as long as you want.

I'm just saying if you're going to do that for weeks on end, maybe you should light up the last four nights too.

On Art

This is a story my father told me, one I only now recollect hearing firsthand.

Years ago, much as this past week, there had been a terrible snow storm. My mother, still getting her master's, rushed out of the house one day to take a test. Driving towards a frighteningly tough contemporary art history essay exam, she happened to drive past a Mercedes, haplessly adrift in a, well, a snow drift.

Suddenly, inspiration struck her. What was once a looming dissertation of unknown topic became an obvious solution. Art is, after all, that which has no intrinsic use to society. Having lost all functionality intended for a mid-sized German coupe, the Mercedes had stopped being a car and become a work of art.

On Piercings

Friends of mine have been asking me when I got my ear pierced for a while now. For over five years, actually. They've been asking when I had it done for five. Years. The same friends, sometimes. It's getting kind of ridiculous.

I was never big on the idea of getting my ear pierced. Partly because I could never remember which ear was the "gay" ear, but that was always regional and time-sensitive. Mostly, I just didn't want to do it because I liked how smooth my earlobes felt and because my mom really liked the idea. If you mom really likes the idea, obviously it's not cool.

Then again, my mom was a burnout and a rocker, so in retrospect I probably should have listened when she offered to pay for an earring when I was in second grade.

To be fair, I really like girls with ear cuffs or gauges, brow, bridge or lip rings.

That's why I got my dick pierced with magnets.

Jo is a pretty cool chick.
She lets me use her photo when Google Images suck
and doesn't afraid of anything.

On Kids Today and also Teen Moms

Kids today are weird as hell.

I really mean it. I call them the "Little Brother" generation. They have such a sense of entitlement, even over what I grew up with. Like us, they innately desire and are adept with using technology, but something's off: because they never grew up blowing into Sega and SNES cartridges, these kids don't know how to boot in safe mode to run diagnostic programs and filter out their porn viruses.

It's a direct line of succession, really. Kids don't grow up learning how to make their toys work when something goes wrong, then they grow up to never know how to fix their computer when the software gets buggy. My father had to wipe a hard drive twice because it was more virus than data at one point. That's like the Darth Vader of HDDs.

Soon as something stops working, kids toss it aside and ask for a new one. Bitch, do you have any idea what it'd cost me just to get a working copy of "Battletoads" these days? No, you wouldn't, because you just think in numbers. You have no concept of the time put into cruising eBay and Craigslist for a working Sega 16-bit with the original controllers and a working RF adapter and a copy of one of the most cultish, rare second-hand gamed available. You don't understand how fucking awesome it is that you can jailbreak an iPhone and make it do damned near everything. It's Batman's utility belt. Hell, the new Nanos are DickTracey's watch, with the wristband accessory.

And yet they show no signs of interest in understanding how any of their best toys work, so of course there's never any thought to upgrading existing tech rather than buying up to the newest shiny. Still, they're obsessed with whatever their new thing is for a couple weeks, to the exclusion of all else, like a kid on Christmas.

This Christmas I saw my cousin's two year-old playing a game I'm pretty sure was inappropriate for his age group on a Nintendo DS. He was in the living room of his great-great-aunt's house, and Return of the Jedi was playing on TV.

Return of the futhermucking Jedi. Do you know how many muppets are in that movie? Like  247. Muppets everywhere. And they sing! And dance! For God's sake half of them are giant teddy bears. What is wrong with a kid that Return of the Jedi is on and he's engrossed in a video game he doesn't understand with questionable educational value? (I think he was killing 'bad guys.')

Honestly, this is what happens when teenagers have kids. No respect for the classics. I swear to the force ghost of Sebastian Shaw, if I ever have kids, they don't get to see the Star Wars prequels until they run around the backyard yelling "IT'S A TRAP!" every five minutes.

Baby It's Cold Outside

Weather reports predict a huge storm for today. 6"-10" of snow, all day long, into early tomorrow, grandma sleeping over to avoid her horrible slanty driveway and everything.

You know in movies–I really want to say movies but I think "jewelry store commercials" is more accurate–where a cute, early-thirties upper-middle class white couple is cuddling on the couch through a bad storm, snuggled up under a blanket with thick sweaters and a fire and an assortment of good books and fine tea/cocoa/red wine?

That's my plan for today. Except I'll be relatively poor and I'll be cuddling myself, in the least euphemistic way possible. (Hey, my grandma will be here. Jeeze.)

On Fire

So I sort of set the store I work at on fire yesterday. Just, like, a part of it, though. A small part.

You see, I had just sold the last of a certain product that's kept in a display on the floor and I thought, "This is a really sweet display. We'll probably keep this and use it when we get more in stock." So obviously I decided to stow the case right nearby, under a covered table like we do with everything else. It's goof feng shui, apparently.

Well, I went to lift up the two tablecloths and a throw that were covering the table and I saw that underneath was another huge display, but for something completely different and actually holiday themed. Since yesterday was Christmas Eve Day, I figured it'd be best to try and sell those out on the floor since they'd have to be boxed up for the next ten months if we didn't.

So there I am with one big thing to take out of storage, one to go back in and no hands to hold the tablecloths with. Like we always do in such situations, I just tossed the ends of the cloths up on the table and was pleased to see they didn't fall. As I was swapping the displays, the cloths began to fall, but having mostly completed my chore I caught it with my hand and held it in place while I wrapped everything up.

That's when I noticed my hand was warm. I looked up to make sure I hadn't moved the back of my palm too close to one of the scented candles we usually keep burning throughout the store and, lo and behold, no I hadn't. Instead, the corner of the tapestry through had landed atop the candle and smoldered itself to death, melting the rayon tablecloth and catching the cotton one ablaze.

A small blaze.

I only had to blow on it three times and smother the little embers that were left, but that was my cherry popping ceremony. Everyone who's worked in that store has set something on fire, what with all the clutter and candles. Everyone was actually really nice about it, even the customers who stuck around for like an hour after.

Of course, Hot Woman In Plaid, Glasses, and Hipster Jeggings totally saw it, which didn't feel so great. At least she'll remember me, now.

Pre-Christmas Mini Blog: On Vegetarian Pizza

Truthfully, there's no such thing as bad pizza. Like sex, there is
only that which is amazing and that which is amazing drunk.

I got free pizza today. I was very hungry. So hungry, I didn't even care that there was spinach on the pizza.

And that brown squiggly bit? Well, I kind of hoped it was sausage and not eggplant.

It was eggplant. Damnit.

Do you know how many more animals I had to eat over dinner to balance out eating that kind of crap on a pizza? What a waste of perfectly good junk food. Those toppings aren't even food. They're what my typical food eats.

Good thing when I got home I made myself a salad with delicious chopped up bits of salted boiled pig intestine. Hurray meat.

On Famous Last Words

When Pancho Villa was assassinated in 1923, he is reported to have died saying to his (useless) bodyguard (in Spanish), "Don't tell them it ended like this. Tell them I said something." This might be the cockiest thing any man has ever said.

I'm sure someone has said something inherently cockier. "I am a golden god," popularly attributed to Robert Plant after the based-on-a-true-story looseness of Almost Famous, certainly comes to mind. However, if Villa really said this, it meant he was consciously aware that he was nothing but a man, far less than what his image made him out to be. Hell, even El Che died saying (again in Spanish), "Shoot, coward! You are only going to kill a man." Even he knew he was superfluous to the cause. Villa was just like, "Oh, snap, I'm important. Make sure I don't look like a bitch when I'm gone."

Granted, the dude was assassinated in what was widely believed to be a conspiracy. In fact, that's probably true since by all reports Villa would have died instantly from nine bullet wounds to his head and chest.

Image used in non-profit fair-use
courtesy of Wondermark.

'Tis The Season

A lot of people don't know this about me, considering my usually dower, sarcastic demeanor and the widely known information that I was raised Jewish, but I am all about Christmas.

Not the Jesus-y stuff, mind you, though my mom was Christian and he was at the bare minimum a wise Jewish scholar with some pretty sweet ideas about Buddhism. No, I tend more to prefer the pretty commercial aspects of Christmas more firmly routed in Danish, Germanic, Roman, commercial and Coca-Cola-ist culture. Trees and presents and big parties and the spirit of giving and whatnot.

How adorable is that?

I enjoy the spirit of the holiday. I'm trying this new thing where I'm nice to everyone and start personal interactions with the premise that people are intelligent, interesting and inherently good natured. I know, I'm surprised too. But the amazing thing is that around Christmas, people just start accepting this kind of behavior as a seasonal blessing, much like a good harvest or the breakup of an icy river which prevents roving packs of wolves from thinning your herds come early Spring.

Or those pesky ewoks eating up your campy berries.

Christmas is the one time of year when random acts of kindness aren't seen as something duplicitous. Sometimes they're even passed on. I like to think every time I flag down a passing car to receive the choice parking spot I am about to vacate, somebody has a pleasant surprise and that makes them happier throughout the next portion of their day. Maybe then they do something nice for someone else, or maybe they just won't be dicks to other people like usual. Even monsters can be nice at Christmas time.

I named him Bruce.

So this is my promise to you, Internet: I will honor Christmas. It's past, present and it's future, both in my heart and all the year long. And should I turn into some kind of deranged, soul-searching Charlie Brown, well I've already got that covered and I'm okay with it:

On IRL Trolling

There once was a man named Philip R Greaves II who wrote an e-book he published to Amazon's self-publishing service. He called this book "The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: a Child-lover's Code of Conduct." It was about exactly what you think it would be about. Colorado police arrested Greaves for violating Florida obscenity laws, finally finding a legitimate charge with which to charge a child molester who was shielding himself with lofty ideals of free speech.

At least, that's the story the media's spinning.

Oh, I have no doubt that this book was a horrifying thing. Obviously the book itself is protected free speech up until the point it encourages and actively incites others to commit crimes. I say "obviously" because that's how free speech works. Don't believe me? Ask the supreme court. Or Jack McCoy. Alright, I learned constitutional law from watching Sam Waterson on Law & Order. Shut up. I learned medicine from M*A*S*H and ER. I also learned cooking from Good Eats and how to make love from internet porn starring your mother. Piss off.

But I digressed a bit there. What I was originally getting at was this:

I don't believe Philip R. Greaves II is a human being. But he's not a monster. Actually, if I had to make my guess, I'd say he's Paul Giamatti.
This thing just reeks of an Andy Kaufman styled practical joke with a vague political point. Free speech is being pushed, I don't think anyone has actually read this supposed tome which no reasonable person couldn't consider an awful thing and–frankly–even the name sounds incredibly fake. It seems like a manufactured controversy, somewhere out there Jim Carey is waiting to switch places with Paul at just the right moment to make us think that Greaves is an actual person. They're the only ones who are going to get the joke, anyway.

Either that, or Jimmy Hetfield only founded Matellica for the sweet, sweet underage groupies.

Alright, maybe both.
(Sorry, James.

EDIT: Greaves was sentenced Wednesday, April 6, 2011 after pleading no-contest to charges of "distributing obscene material depicting minors engaged in harmful conduct." He will not have to register as a sex offender, which is great since I still don't think he's a real person.

On Smartphones

As more and more of my friends adopt smartphone technology, I have to tell you there are certain things that just change forever. It's like losing your virginity all over again. You're never going to get back that innocence.

• You will never poop the same way again. I don't know if you'll spend more time in their playing Angry Birds or if you'll just start looking forward to every daytime poop as another opportunity to check your non-work email, but damn it, the first day you don't take your smartphone into the can with you is the first day you realize you feel truly naked and violated.
  
• You will never have to have an argument over facts that lasts more than three minutes. Did something happen or didn't it? Which 1980s dancing movie starred Kevin Bacon and which starred Patrick Swayze? Anger and worry are forever banished. You now have the ability to settle any bet or asinine claim within seconds of remembering you have gained this superpower.
  
• For that matter, you're done having to remember things forever. Birthdays? Phone numbers? These are paltry examples. You no longer need to remember anything other than how to work your phone and Google. Think of a phone as a direct conduit to the entire internet, the internet then functioning as external memory for your puny meat brain. This past weekend I looked up several songs for artist and/or lyrics, local weather in two different counties, the plot summary for Showgirls, about a half dozen YouTube videos, world news and a recipe for meringue. You are no longer limited to only knowing only those things you actually know.
  
• You're fucked for texting. Once you see entire text conversations laid out like chat logs, you're in for a medium-sized nightmare spike in text frequency. I've received (and sent, I must admit) nothing but a question mark because i left it off the end of the previous text. Aside from how awful I must imagine it must be to get an extra text for nothing but electronically superfluous punctuation, you have to pay for that. Jeeze, I went a little heavy one month and had to cut myself off, meanwhile my friend's got unlimited texting so she's sending me four one-line texts in response to my one four-liner. I was having a fit. Ended up just going to the store and beefing up my contract. Now I'm a complete asshole about how many texts I'll send. I'd have written this very entry via 160 character texts if I didn't hate updating with limited mobile functionality and weak HTML skills.
  
• You'll have a hell of a lot more to do in traffic. It's like pooping, but a lot more satisfying.

Jokes We Got In Party Favors

The following Knesset were inside "cracker" boxes at a rather Bice dinner party I attended last night. We had a wonderful time, especially after popping the party favors and getting to trade these gems:

"What is a vampire's favorite fruit?"
- "Necterines."

"What do you call a boomerang that doesn't come back?"
- "A stick."

"What do lawyers wear to court?"
- "Lawsuits."

I guessed "Their briefs" on that last one, buy apparently that's too risqué for party favor humor. Whatever, Christmas Cracker company. And your founder Rom Smith, ehise legacy you have reprinted in great detail.

And for the record, a nail clipper is not a suitable prize either. Steve was very confused by that.

On Baking

There is absolutely nothing worse in the world than tryingto beat meringue out of a bowl of egg and sugar by hand, and I'm including infanticide and the assassination of political prisoners.

Seriously, the last time I worked my triceps this hard I was in high school and people accused me of excessively jerking off.

On a related note, most conmercial eggs are pasteurized now and aren't likely to kill you if you take a little taste raw. Still, I wouldn't reccommend using them as masturbatory lubricant.

On Guidos

*Offensive language discussion ahead!*

Guido Jesus is frightened of of no man or beard.

 I think I just came to a startling revelation:

Guido is to Italians as nigger is to black people.

Dear God, no, I'm not saying that "guido" is as offensive a term as "nigger" is. I mean guidos actually are niggers, according at least to Chris Rock's standard definition. They're just not black.

Guidos hate to work. Guidos think they're more important the dumber they behave. Guidos steal shit (or perform 'a robbery'). Guidos have an odd propensity towards new sneakers, white t-shirts and brightly colored, fruit-flavored alcoholic beverages.

It doesn't matter that (only genetically) guidos are white. Even they try to deny that one. No, Chris Rock taught us all that being black is completely different from being a nigger, just as South Park taught us a while back that being gay no longer has anything to do with being a fag. The fact of life is that we have progressed far enough as a society to hate people not for the color of their skin but for the assholes they are on the inside.

And thank Ed Hardy wearing white Jesus for that.

This still might be one of the best things I've ever drawn.

On Procrastination and Class

I really should have been working on my book today.

It's already evident that I'm not going to have a finished third draft by the end of the year. I may have stood a chance if I really buckled down, but instead I decided to, yeah, work a little bit and earn some money for Christmas.

Fine. Whatever.

But now I'm tired from working and I'm full of pizza and I'm not exercising and I find myself procrastinating. Case in point:

Somewhere along the line I was linked a DropBox link which opens a YouTube video in each of three object windows, looping them indefinitely. They are a video of a fireplace and the audio of smooth jazz and a quiet rainstorm.

I forget what it was originally called, but I just have it saved to my desktop as "Pure Class." This is like the most relaxing thing I've ever found, and I'm including relaxing erotic hypnosis. (I don't have to but, hell, I'll do it for the children.)

Unfortunately, this link won't work on an iPhone, since part of it's Flash based and despite my best warranty-voiding shenanigans I can't play it.

Well, I was looking for a way to procrastinate and not work on my book.

So two hours later I've ripped each of the original videos from YouTube, converted the fireplace to .mov and the other two to .mp3, combined them in Garageband and published back to YouTube in a single video. If you want some class in your life, here's the dropbox link.

And if you're on a mobile device and want just as much class in your life, like I often am, here you go:

On Bumper Stickers II: The Bumpening

Two more ripe gems yesterday morning. First up: abortion.

Alright, you're pro-life. I can respect that and, from that perspective, I guess this makes a certain kind of sense. Your people tend to like shock value in your personal belief advertisements which you force on others. Fine.

On the same car: "OBAMA" bumper sticker.

Really? Are you both pro-life and democrat? I mean, I guess it's possible, but that's still not something a person usually sees. Especially since a pro-life democrat isn't likely to be the type to shout such beliefs from their exhaust pipe. More likely, they'd politely mention it while adding that it is their personal belief but they also respect others' opinions. Perhaps it'd make more semse if I got close enough to read the fine print:

Theeeeeeeere we go. Okay. Now we're being consistent. Let the opining begin.

*ahem*

1. I will hand you a petri dish. Please show me where in that dish I can find a human being.
   
    
2. I would be shocked if anyone sporting this first sticker had the technical capacity to show me the difference between artificially combined freeze-dried gametes on a microscope slide and a skin sample randomly taken from my left index finger. Or anything under a microscope, really.
   
3. … You're aware that in order to be impeached an elected official has to have done something illegal, right?
   
4. And oh, good, that's a hammer and sickle inside the Acorn symbol. I was afraid we weren't going to compare government regulation of failing, abusive industries to the political ideologies of fascists better utilized as villains in an Indiana Jones feature. Thank the sweet Christian God for that.

Let's be honest about this. You obviously have no idea how biology, social services, communism, capitalism, fascism or representative democracy actually work. As a matter of fact, I'm surprised you find yourself capable of making your car go vroom in the mornings. (And frankly, I am unimpressed with your ability to achieve that much.)

So you know what, I'm glad you have these bumper stickers on your car. At the very least, it warns everybody around you not to listen to a goddam word you say.

On Mad Science

Why hasn't mainstream media been aflurry with the news that a Scotsman secretly re-cloned Dolly the Sheep three years ago?

This is what we need to be worrying about, people. Not whether a ball of cells is technically a person because it has a slim chance of eventually turning into a fetus that might become a baby that perhaps survives childbirth to ultimately be considered "alive." Not whether global warming is A) damaging enough that it'll kill us all the the world will go on or B) just awful enough to ruin our mode of civilization.

No. Science is terrifying when we just lets crazy assholes secretly clone shit. We eat cloned beef. We drink cloned milk. We goddamfuckit eat vegetarian food made from genetically modified soy beans. Our soybeans are wayward technology. We stand no chance.

And what's worse? These new-cloned sheep are sweet ass new clones. The first Dolly? She had to be put down because she got a lung infection and maybe developed arthritis. When she was three years old she was seven years old. That's because her genetic material had already been dividing and multiplying for four years before she was born. Jesus.

But the new clones? They don't suffer from the same genetic maladies as earlier models. They're three and they're just fine. In fact, they look even more exactly alike than regular sheep tend to. Did someone hire a sheep stylist to make sure their wool was neat and even?

Not to mention, Dolly was the result of 277 tries to clone a sheep. These new ones only took about four or five embryos each to cultivate a viable, living sheep. We are getting better at growing good clones easier.

Sweet lord, this is the plot of Blade Runner. We are making replicant sheep and cows, my friends. If you start seeing livestock in trench coats chasing other livestock, for the love of all that is Dickian, tell them they're clones too.

Were you just holding back on the news until you saw if the clones died horrible progeria deaths, Scottish Scientist? Was that it? You just weren't sure? Or were honestly thinking you could dominate the world with an army of cloned repli-sheep? Screw it, you just wanted to do it because you thought it'd be cool. That's the only reason to do any science.

On Originality

Sorry, Jo, it was either you or a picture of hentai skullfucking,
and I like to keep the images here PG-13.

A couple nights ago I was talking to my friend Joanne and she jokingly threatened to have her boyfriend give me a "header."

"Do you know what a header is?" she asked.

Honestly, I had to say I knew what a header was, but had no clue what she meant it as. Was it a new thing?

"I don't think you can give someone a header."

"I'm obsessed with them now," she said. Apparently she had seen a movie called Header, where rednecks basically go around giving people 'headers' for 90 minutes.

"It's when someone drills a hole in your head," she said. "And then carve it wider with a knife. And hump their brains."

I told her Texans are ridiculous. I laughed. She laughed, not grasping my meaning.

"That's just good, old fashioned skullfucking," I said. "You don't get to name it something new because you think you just heard it."

"Yes I do," she said.

"Taking a header means to fall off something face first."

"Don't ruin this moment for me."

"It's already a thing."

"DAMNIT, DAVE!"


But I am remorseless. I remain undeterred. You do not get to make up a new name for something just because you think it's new. I mean you can try, but unless you accidentally find an insanely more hilarious name for the thing, you're shit out of luck.

And odds are the Japanese have been doing it since the '60s anyway.

On Fashion Trends

I saw a kid with this haircut in the mall yesterday.

Except he was a Jersey Shore reject and had it spiked like a fauxhawk or a flip.

Oh, did I mention this kid workd in the mall? Yeah, he was obviously walking out for his break from the The Phone Store, which–incidentally–has burned out so much of its sign that the only illuminated words read, "Pone Stor." This could be interpretted as

A) a store of major p0wnage, or
B) a job-description by an adult film star with a speech impediment similar to that of Andre the Giant.

I wanted so badly to turn to this spray-tanned leather man-purse and be like, "Hey, what's wrong with your head?"

"It's a style, man…."

"No, I mean, what's wrong with your head that you think 'retarded' is a style?"

Do you think you're cool, kid? With your Statue of Liberty hair crown? You think you're going to impress her just 'cause you've got an atypical stylist? Let me tell you something, guy, that chick is French. She's seen shit you haven't imagined since the Marquis de Sade was the only prisoner actually freed during the storming of the Bastille.

Oh snap. I went there.

On Scenesters

I love me a good scenster kid. It's like the popular little sister of hipster and punk, and the gay cousin of goth.

Girls dying and frying their hair into crazy Elvira masses and then ruining the goth look with bright ass colored shirts and mainstream stretch leggings.

Men wearing V-necks so deep you can see the stern of the Titanic resting at the bottom.

I've even been thinking of getting a fauxhawk, since protesters kept throwing red pain of my real one.

On Jewish Christmas

Time for me to come out of the closet on another social issue: bi-religious December festivities.

As a completely not-proud lapsed Jew with a lapsed Episcopal mother, I get the best of both holidays in my family. Plus my birthday is in November. And that one year I was bar mitzvahed right in the middle. It was kind of awesome.

But anyway.

Today marks the official post-Chanukah season. Tomorrow marks two weeks until Christmas, and those two things mean just one thing:

Santa hat comes out.

Granted, I still have to hear your crap about being Jewish, but if there's one thing that Santa Claus isn't, it's definitely religious. Screw you guys, I love secular Christmas. It's all your favorite parts of Christmas, without going to church or thinking about babies in a petting zoo. Hell, in Japan they don't have enough Christians per capita to make much sense of it, so it's just a giant happy romantic holiday for couples. It's like Winter Valentine's Day. Awesome.

So screw it. It's going to be less than two weeks until Christmas, I'm done with all the shopping except for one Amazon order I need to time for delivery and some Hallmark cards. I'm going to put on the perfect Santa hat I spent like three years tracking down.

And I'm not even going to wear my yarmulke underneath it this year.

On Life After Baseball

Apologies for the very late entry, but last night I was full of food and booze and merriment and just couldn't bring myself to be hilarious before bed.


Which is pretty stupid considering how entertained I was all night. Case in point: this was discussed:

Things Derek Jeter Can Do After He Retires:

• Sports Commentator
  
• Team Manager
  
• Grow his hair out and work on his pale
  
• Start sending naked pictures to former fans he's harassing now that it can't affect his career and no one will care if he looks like a fat old grandpa with small junk
  
• Develop his acting career by replacing OJ Simpson in a remake of The Towering Inferno. (Or make an epic baseball movie with Bugs Bunny)
  
• Finally get to try a Fenway Frank

 And now you can't un-see it.

Causes of Head Wounds Which Have Drawn Blood

I hit my head today. It hurt a lot, but mostly pride until I verified that I was bleeding. So my brain's working about 20% efficiency. Enjoy a thematically related list.

Causes of Head Wounds Which Have Drawn Blood:

• Glass shelf (little blood)
  
• Cat bite (surprising amount of blood compared to size of puncture)
  
• Mid-air collision with another Jew (profuse bleeding)

It occurs to me Jews might be our own antimatter. It'd explain why we complain so much in close proximity to each other: we sense impending annihilation. Also why we're historically combustible.

On Memes

After last night and some angry adventures in meme generation, this was pretty much inevitable. You can find the template here, but I strongly caution you against viewing or participating with this blog because I feel I have to. I have nothing against Kanye West, nor do I have the rights to his image. Rather, I ran with a single joke that spiraled out of control and Mr. West was simply caught in the crossfire. I can only hope he has a sense of humor and cower behind fair use statutes.

With that forewarning, ladies and gentlemen, I present the new most offensive meme until some other meme becomes even more offensive (probably some time next week):

Abortion Kanye.

Oh, Kanye, you rascal you.

Seriously, please don't hate/sue me. I love your suits.

On AMC's The Walking Dead

I wanted to use a shot of him with an ax,
but I just couldn't hold this meme off until then.

 

Things I Have Learned From AMC's The Walking Dead:

• In the event of a catastrophic pandemic, CDC policy is to blow up all its facilities after a couple months.
  
• There is an 80% chance that Daryl's response to any situation will require him to be held back.
  
• Southern Comfort survives the apocalypse.
  
• We're all going to miss those little 36 channel walkie-talkies from 2000.
  
• Squirrel tastes pretty alright, I guess.

On Prudence

At a certain point, the natural response of an intelligent human being to the state of the world becomes sadness.

At the same time, sometimes perseverance is a hell of a lot dumber than giving up and starting over.

This just came to me. I'm not saying it's much, but I needed to see it happen.

On Infusions

I'm getting a little tired of hearing about "[x]-infused [y]s!"

It's the same problem we had with apples and cranberries worming their way into already perfectly good desserts and fruit juices. We don't need anything infused into out food or drinks. They're already pretty damned tasty. I mean, I guess if it's to make them tastier, but that's not the road we've been going lately.

Lately we've enjoyed infusing things that should not be.

Mike "The Situation" Sorentino became the spokesman for Devotion Vodka, the only brand of vodka to be infused with protein supplements so you don't load up on just carbs from all that boozing. In fairness, each shot has something like a gram of protein in it, so you'd only need to do about 20 shots to match a single protein shake. Margaritas anyone?

Oh, but hold the phone. Why don't we just throw the baby out with the bathwater and make a fuzzy navel?

That's right, now with your protein-rich booze-ahol, you can have booze-infused whipped cream. I guess the idea is to make sure that if you simply have to drink a woman's drink, it'll still get you pretty smashed. (Which is actually true of any colorful cocktail. There's a reason you buy a girl a pretty drink that doesn't taste like alcohol; no man has ever gotten a woman drunk enough to bone with the line, "I'll have a Sam Adams, and a Natty Lite for the lady." [Alright, maybe in Wisconsin.])

Honestly, I'd be down to try the sugar-carb-protein nightmare that'd be a Devotion creamcicle martini. If only to say I died doing something more ridiculous than Four Loko.

"You Go And Then I Go"

A phrase has been puttering in the back of my mind recently. "You go and then I go. You go and then I go."

Jon Stewart said this at the Rally To Restore Sanity (and/or Fear) at the end of October. He used some horribly congested roadway outside Washington, D.C. to symbolize collective rationality. As a great number of lanes merge down to a single stream of cars, "You go then I'll go," is the prevailing attitude. Yes, he said, there will be some assholes who ride up the shoulder and cut in line, but we all hate them. Everyone else tends towards cooperation.

I believe this is either out of selfish fear or (meaninglessly) selfish hope. We let others go first so that the next person will do the same for us. Perhaps this is out of fear that they will not if we do not do the same. Perhaps it is out of hope that others will treat us the way we would wish to be ourselves.

Sadly, I tend towards the fear angle, because it's the only thing that seems to make any sense from the way I've seen people drive.

I was heading into work a couple days ago during a fairly bad rain storm. Now, having gone to a very moist college, I wasn't too hindered by the rain, but even I was a bit tepid driving through a series of blacked-out traffic lights on a six-lane highway. But do you know what I saw?

"You go and then I'll go. You go and then I'll go."

Across six lanes, school buses, pick-ups, big-rigs, compacts, minivans, everyone was being courteous. Three lanes willfully gave up right-of-way to a couple of vehicles trying to make it across the busy street. These drivers then yielded to our three lanes because we had rounded a corner into this mess and it was easier to let us go and pass undisturbed through our wake.

I say it was a common fear of the road conditions that spurred us to kindness and good will. Cooperation in the face of possible death has always been Man's greatest tool in evolving grand-scale society.

Do you say differently? Do you believe perhaps instead it was kindness that prevented collisions that day? Perhaps the poor conditions simply tugged at our heartstrings and helped us decide to be better people than usual, because everyone deserves to be treated well, even on a bad day.

Well then why the hell don't people drive like that on a calm Spring day?

On Hobbits and Childhood Dreams

I got to work today and within 15 minutes the power blew for all non-essentials.

So yeah, track lighting, display lighting, phone, cash registers, even the bathroom lights were all just fine.

Apparently a power line fell down the street. Fire trucks, EMS, cops. The old biddy next door had her husband call the po-po because she though she smelled burning electrical bits in the back of her store (there was none) and the water was leaking through her newly-fixed windows (call the landlord).

We stayed open, made a couple sales, then 15 minutes after that the rest of the power blew and I got to go home.

But here's the thing. When the woman called the cops about a possible electrical fire so close to the downed power line, they send the firefighters. And they came through our store demanding access to the basement. One of them–

You guys, one of them was a hobbit.

Alright, he was probably a non-congenital dwarf, but dude was jacked. Imagine being like 4'11" an still being able to do all that running around with an air tank and an entire extra person on your back. Say what you want about affirmative action in the workplace, but firefighting is one of the few jobs where you still need to achieve a ridiculous level of physicality to simply be accepted.

So small, but physically stronger and more resilient? Dude's a hobbit. Awesome.

And the woman I was working with didn't like these guys. Fine, they yelled at us for blocking the fire exist. That's actually more than fair. There was way too much shit out there. Still, "arrogant little boys with their toys," she called them.

You know what? Fine. How many of us legitimately grow up to be firefighters or astronauts of ballerina ninja princesses? If you're 30 and you've become exactly what you wanted to be when you were 5, I say you've earned a little bragging right.

I mean I'm never going to be a lawyer, mostly because I found out I think that's stupid, but I'm still open to the possibility of becoming a mad scientist.

On Cats

I was perusing some news sites today, sitting with a cat in my lap when I hear a rattling sound come from the other room.

Now this didn't seem at all odd, since the other cat was somewhere out there, very likely getting into the boxes and boxes of Christmas decorations we just recently pulled out of the attic for his little kitty amusement.

Although, after about twenty minute of only the same periodic sound, I became worried. Like the sudden silence of children out of sight, a cat only making one mischievous noise for any extended period of time can only spell certain doom for you or your possessions.

Yeah.

Turns out he managed to clime a series of open plastic storage bins to the bookshelf, where I assume he crossed the treadmill front display like a bridge to the cardboard box stored on top of two medium sized plastic tubs.

The empty cardboard box. That's three feet high. With an open top.

Yeaaaaaahh … I ended up having to approach the wiggling box and verify that there was no cat on either side of it, that it was still tiny paws scratching the sides of this box that made the noise I was hearing and, ultimately, that the box weighed about seven pounds more than an empty box should.

And son of a bitch, when I took the box down and tipped it over and opened the top … nothing. Damned cat didn't even feel like coming out after all that. Had to claw him out myself. God, I love those little bastards.

On Cola Marketing

Coke apparently made a "Happiness" Vending Machine. Terrific.



I'm guessing their slogan for the year is going to be "Coke: We'll make diabetics of you yet."

On Harry Potter

"Good moooorning…." Seriously, no one just appears like Batman in a scene except for
Batman. Props to actually showing a dude sneak up and pose funny.

I saw the newest Harry Potter movie the other night.

I used to hate the franchise, but–while I still vow never to read the books–I have to admit the movies are okay and I can appreciate the idea of letting your characters grow up and take on their own lives, even letting them end.

I used to think nothing could get worse than replacing badass vampires and werewolves and Jedi with unintelligible British ginger wizards, but now I find myself almost begging for more Harry Potter news to overshadow the literary and cinematic plague that is Twilight.

Currently, my beefs with HP are pretty small. Is it annoying that *SPOILERS IF LIKE ME YOU DO NOT READ THE BOOKS AND KNOW NOTHING BUT THE MOVIES* Moody dies off-camera? Yes, but only because in all other theater dying off-screen means you're probably still alive in secret. I will not fault a movie for being unconventional in how they kill beloved characters. A sudden upset is a better effect, anyway.

No, at this point all my beefs are that Harry Potter, as a franchise, has given up on the idea of making a coherent series of films.

But that's actually kind of interesting. I have to tip my hat to a production that knows it's audience knows all these extra bits so there's no need to include everything (so long as it's not a detriment to the story). Hell, the Star Wars prequels were bloody awful, but Star Wars nerds will tell you that's only because you don't understand the finer points of pan-galactic politics and trading bylaws in a representative democracy. (Shame on you.)

When did everyone suddenly develop the ability to teleport around the Harry Potter world? Why does everyone seem to be aware of an impending wedding beside us? Why isn't the general populace confused by the world's greatest teen hero suddenly being branded an outlaw?

Who cares? 90% of people seeing this movie know what's going to happen already. I've already read the Wikipedia entries twice over. Even I'm pretty familiar with the gist of it. At this point, they're making a movie for a collective of rabid fans and the trick is just not screwing up the big stuff. No one's going to notice if the narrative itself is flawed, because mostly everyone knows why already.

And frankly, it's kind of cool to see characters referring to things they are aware of that we're not. There's a wedding? Well, yeah, if you've read the book there's a wedding. And Bill Weasley shows up after being casually mentioned a few times. However, Harry and Ron have been friends for more than 6 movies years now, though we've only been privy to just over 15 hours of that. Granted, they were the most exciting 15 hours, but I'm pretty sure Harry and Ron had a few conversations in that time that didn't quite make the grade in that time.

"Oh, by the way, 'Arry, I have like a half-dozen siblings. You might see my older brothers this year. Oh, and my little sister is a few grades behind us, but that'll probably never come up again, I'd wager."

Yeah, that seems like night-one bunk talk to me.

The "So … yeah, I'm sort of boning your little sister," conversation will probably get cut later too, actually.


Addition: Best line of the entire movie? Ron Weasley: "Twilight's good too, though. Better even."

On Self-Abuse

Is it considered a bulimic disorder if you binge constantly and just forget to purge?

I've seriously hurt myself. It started with Thanksgiving day breakfast at 10, then full dinner at 2, then dessert and midnight grilled cheese.

Then the next day was a pile of fried things-which-shouldn't-typically-be-fried and beef with bacon and cheese.

And now today was Chinese buffet and miniature souffles with some kind of cream sauce.

Honestly, my stomach hates me and I can't even fault it, except I still need nutrients and I need it to take in some food every few hours but it's like, "Hey, man! Let's take it easy, alright? We don't want any funny business here. No heroes, alright, man?"

No, fuck you, stomach. Hypothalamus says I need food, so I need to put healthy things inside you. So why don't you man up and get on that so we can both be a lot happier.

I mean this afternoon is Chanukah dinner, guy. We need to be on our game by then.

On Long Island

Just to be a douche, I'd like to point out that parts of Suffolk
County are farther "Upstate" than parts of Westchester.

I drove back up from the center of Long Island yesterday, after a truly wonderful Thanksgiving.

The first half of the sentence is, I suppose, superfluous, as I am told no human creatures actually live on the outskirts of Long Island. Apparently, everybody's clumped together about 45 minutes away from each other in the center of the land form.

Irrespective, I drove a different route home than I usually would because I met an old college friend for lunch. (This is where I plug Bryan Haas.) Maybe it was just the sandwiches and the fried pickles and fried Twinkies and fried Oreos from a sandwich shop with subs so big you get to name one if you finish, but I think I've made an observation no soul has ever before noticed about Long Island.

There are a ton of Marshall's department stores. Also, a disproportionate number of Chuck E. Cheeses along the Sunrise Highway, which I might also add runs contrary to the pretty, lightly-trafficked roadway Straylight Run once lyrically painted. Frankly, Sunrise Highway is one of the worst, ugliest, busiest hellholes I have ever had to drive through. But thank God I didn't have to turn down "Hicksville Road."

Still, I must ask you, Long Island, why it was I had to pass the South Shore Infectious Disease Institute? Is one solitary infectious disease institute not enough to serve all the shores?

If it's like the Jersey Shore, then I completely understand and I'm sorry. You can have all the infectious disease institutes you want. In fact, take, like, seven. On me.

On Thanksgiving Dinner

My aunt has a habit of clearing people's plates before they've actually finished eating off them, which is kind of ridiculous for an Italian family. She'll still try to send food home with you, because you're too skinny, but God forbid you lay your fork down to grab a napkin or some salt. As soon as you make that lay-down, it's like throwing in the towel. No conversation, no good times, just eating. Everyone eating like ravenous boa constrictors, gulping down their meals in single portions by dislocating their jaws out of fear they might not come across further sustenance for weeks.

The only acceptable reasons to stop eating on Thanksgiving are:

1. Pass out,
2. Vomit (which only frees up room for dessert), and
3. Recently recovering from gastric bypass surgery.

None of this "I'm getting full" crap.

You can have my turkey when you've pried it from my cold, dead, cranberry sauce stained hands.

On Hand Turkeys

When I was in grade school we actually drew some hand turkeys a few times. Sure, some kids would free-hand theirs, and that was fine too, but we were allowed to do pretty much anything we wanted with them. Add little hats and belt-buckle shoes, what have you.

But I was an odd child.

I knew how feathers worked. They were layered, with different colors and patterns. No matter how anyone else wanted to draw theirs, I knew my turkey wasn't right, at least as far as turkeys went.

So I would sit there for hours, adding shorter and thinner feathers between the finger lines of my hand turkey, brown with dark outlines and little red arrowhead tips, until my turkey was some kind of overly rounded, misshapen turkey-ball.

I'm sure Purdue farms would love to get their hands on my turkey hands, genetic modification permitting.

On Penile Enlargement

There really is an app for everything. Or at least there was, until Apple pulled it for being a load of crap. Still, a Penis Enlargement Hypnosis App is pretty high up on lists for both "utter horse shit" and "…okay, maybe I'll buy it now that no one is looking."

Seriously, go ahead and listen to some of the audio in that. It's appalling. It's just called Penis Enlargement, and it's some pretty piano music with some guy talking over it telling you you've got big, growing junk and he's frankly not very convincing. Plus, it probably doesn't even use binaural audio.

Dudes, the only way to grow your junk permanently and effectively is called jelqing and it's best reserved to liberally regulated games of Scrabble. If you're curious, it's stretching your manhood until the tiny fibers inside it basically tear and then reform. It's the same thing you do building muscle except, you know, spongy material that isn't designed to to that and can break horribly if you try this and do it wrong.

But yeah, if you don't mind hurting your dick, by all means, add that extra 1/4 inch.

On Under Armour

Seriously, it even looks like a superhero's logo. Maybe a lantern.

I sucked it up and got some Under Armour shirts for working out. Now I can go to a gym and at least not look like a dweeb in front of all the meatheads. No one likes to look like a dweeb in front of the meatheads.

Looking at myself in the mirror of the dressing room, I had to admit: I hated myself just a little bit, in the same way and for the same reasons I hated seeing football players suited up for game day back in high school. Also, like I kind of hate hearing about Lance Armstrong, but only when I wore the shirt in blue and pretended I only had one testicle and cheat on my wife.

The kind of funny thing is that for the first time in my life I'm fitting into a Size-L shirt. I mean, yeah, it's a compression-fit large, and a regularly fitted Small is enormous on me, but dammit I finally feel like a big man, I'm not taking that away from myself.

In fact, it's a blessing. I'm going to pick up a long-sleeved version in medium because when I tried it on before it didn't just make me feel like a big man, with that black "second skin" stretched and contouring my form in pleasingly deceptive ways, I felt like Batman.

So yeah, I'm getting one size down and long sleeves so I can be a superhero. It's going to be awesome.

(Note. I might die later.)

Christmas Ideas I Should Save For Marriage

Year 0: Engagement ring in little black box, wrapped inside an ugly Christmas sweater in its own box.

Year 1: Sexy lingerie, but paired with Wonder Woman Underoos.

Year 3, after promotion and raise: New Car with one of those giant red ribbons.

Year 7: Vacation to some really pretty island.

Year 8: Baby crib, wrapped in one of those giant red ribbons.

Year 28, after no longer caring: Three books about kids in college and empty-nest syndrome, but with one of those giant red ribbons.

Year 40: A gift card to T.J. Max. Hey, giant ribbons don't grow on flipping trees.

On Hooliganism

Back in college, we had a saying: "Binghamton Football - Undefeated since 1946."

We said this because we did not have a football team. We had a pretty good sense of humor, though. Plaster that slogan across t-shirts and head out to the basketball game where we imported violent felons for their specific athletic prowess.

We were rather skillful at creating a quick fervor when it looked like we actually had the opportunity to win something important. I remember one season when men's soccer was doing really well, right after the start of the basketball team's Alighierian descent into shame and disgrace; quite literally overnight we wrangled a crew of die-hard Binghamton soccer hooligans complete with original football chants and songs, which published in the next-day's campus paper so that everyone would know the words.

I think we lost that season pretty lamely, but the lesson learned was that without a football team to focus all our attentions on, we could very easily jump ship every time a team was led away in disgrace and scandal and switch affiliation to a new up-and-coming team. (I never cared, but I probably would have drawn the line at painting my face to root for women's track and field.)

It's too bad major cities don't have that kind of ability. Pro-team fans don't have the ability to stop caring when their team is embroiled in scandal or, like the Mets, just continuously blow every important opportunity they're given.

My father used to say his three favorite New York teams were the Jets, the Mets, and the Rockettes. Well, at least the Jets have been doing okay, lately. They won against Cleveland this week.

I'll give you a moment to go back and actually read those links you might have reasonably assumed to be sports statistics.

Yes, a drunken Browns fan speared an 8 year old boy because "he" (read: "his father") was a Jets fan.

Seriously? Please, God, tell me you were aiming for the father. Tell me you were aiming for the larger Jets fan in the happy family and due to your enhanced inebriation merely lost your equilibrium and tackled about eighteen inches too far to one side.

Tell me it was a case of mistaken identity. Tell me instead that you had been harassed all game long by a rowdy midget in a green t-shirt and you thought that the parking lot after the game was the perfect opportunity to show that caustic little bastard he couldn't get away with treating other people like that just because it'd be one-sided to fight a little person.

Tell me that the only reason people were throwing food at this family was because they looked hungry. Can you tell me that, Cleveland?

The worst of it is the family isn't accepting any of the apology offers the NFL is sending them. The Jets offered to fly them out to New Jersey to watch a game from a luxury suite. They declined. The Browns showed up asking to do anything. They declined. His dad asked the kid if he still enjoyed the game he saw and he said yes, but he doesn't like Browns Stadium.

Do you understand, Cleveland? You're breeding hooligans and it's the type of behavior you're supposed to prevent, not apologize for. The family doesn't want anything from you. All they want is for this to hurt.