Click... Click... Click... BANG!!!

I Wish I Knew How to Quit You...

2011-12-13T14:19:00.000-06:00

I have a problem saying goodbye.

I don't mean that in the melodramatic "I can't bear to be without you" sense. I mean, literally, I have a problem being the first person to say "goodbye" in a conversation. So when the time comes to end a phone call, I usually lead with something along the lines of "Well, it was great hearing from you," or "I'll chat with you soon." The other person takes the cue and says, "Goodbye." I respond with "Goodbye," and the conversation comes to a graceful close.

It's a subconscious thing. Nobody's ever called me on it, and I've never really noticed it before, because most of my friends and family manage to take up the slack without even realizing it. I don't think there's anything deep rooted or particularly traumatic involved. It's not like goodbyes killed my family or molested me as a child or anything. I just don't feel comfortable saying goodbye until I'm 100% sure the other person is on board.

If I had to get psychoanalytical about it, I might tie it back to my grandmother, Mamaw, who was incredibly passive-aggressive and wielded guilt like a blunt weapon. She never called me or my sister, but would always berate us for not calling her more. And when we did call, we'd have to endure a good quarter of an hour of listening to "It just breaks Mamaw's heart that you kids don't call more," and "Mamaw just gets so lonesome for you." (Mamaw talked about herself in the third person a lot.) I can't speak for my sister, but I'd run out of things to talk about pretty quick, and the conversation would start lulling and become filled with more awkward silence than a Glenn Beck Book Club meeting. And so I'd start trying to wrap things up, and Mamaw would head me off at the pass: "Mamaw wishes you could talk to her longer, but I know you kids have things to do." And so, it became standard operating procedure to start the goodbye process early on and sort of steer the conversation that way. And of course, I'd have to be the one to say it, and Mamaw would drag it on for another ten minutes or so, and then I'd have to say it again. Sometimes I'd have to say goodbye five or six times to make it stick.

So, yeah...

Anyway, I guess I was never all that aware of my aversion to goodbye until the other day, when I was talking to my friend Silver on the phone. He and I both work from our homes, so we meet for lunch several times a week just to get out of the house during the day and be sociable. We were making our lunch plans for the next day, and as the conversation came to an end, I suddenly realized he has the exact same hangup about goodbye that I do!

Basically, all of our phone conversations end with the two of us playing goodbye chicken.

Me: Well, okay.
Silver: All right, that sounds great. I'll see you then.
Me: Yeah, see you then.
Silver: Okay.
Me: Have a great day.
Silver: Thanks. You do the same.
Me: Oh, I'll try. Chat with you later.
Silver: Sounds good. Thanks for calling.
Me: You bet! See you at lunch tomorrow.
Silver: Looking forward to it. See you then!

And so on, and so on, until one of us finally caves and says goodbye. We've been doing this for as long as I've known him (15 years or so), but I only just realized it the other day. Now that I'm aware of the problem, I'm taking steps to address the issue. However, I'd say my initial efforts have met with limited success at best:

Me: Hello?
Mom: Hey, Chris. How're...
Me: GOODBYE!
Mom: What?
Me: Sorry. What were you saying?
Mom: I was just calling to see...
Me: GOODBYE!

But I'm sure I'll get the hang of it eventually. And in the meantime, I'll just have to keep counting on my family and friends to bear the burden.

So anyway, thanks for reading. Have a great day. I'll see you next time I post. Looking forward to it. Chat with you later. Give my love to the family. Take it easy. Respect it, don't neglect it. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. Vaya con carne, mi amoebas. Thanks again for reading. Hope you enjoyed it. See you later, alligator. After a while, crocodile. See you soon, baboon. Be sweet, parakeet. Take care, polar bear. We'll have to do this again real soon. Be safe.

Goodbye.

SEO + Blog = "miserable failure"

2011-09-29T16:45:00.009-05:00

Over the past few years, I've become involved in the crazy, fast-paced, heart-pounding, thrill-a-minute world of SEO. For those of you who don't know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Basically, it's when you fix up a website to make it more friendly to Google and the other search engines, so it'll show up higher in the rankings for certain search terms. Some people do this by designing their sites well and offering fresh, compelling content that others will want to link to and share. Others try to do it by cheating, which inevitably ends badly for them. Want to know why Google changes the way it works roughly 47,845 times a week? So they can stick it to those cheating SEO bastards.

In my last post, I mentioned that I started blogging back in 2004, when it was all still exciting and new. Back then, people blogged because they had shit to say. But sometime around 2006 or so, some smartass SEO guru discovered that you could use a blog to drive traffic to a company's website. The idea was simple. Update it frequently with some content that people would want to share, and include plenty of links to the company's main website. As more and more people linked to the blog, it (and all of the links on it) would become more relevant in the eyes of Google.

One of the ways Google decides who ranks where for certain terms is by the anchor text in links. So if you can get enough people to link to your website with the text "pimp daddy," then eventually your website will start cropping up in Google when people are searching for pimp daddies. When this process is done to intentionally skew search engine rankings, it's known as a "Google bomb." Google has made numerous changes to their algorithm to keep this from happening.

(You may remember back around 2004, when typing the words "miserable failure" into Google brought up George W. Bush's biography page. This was due to the concerted efforts of a bunch of developers who encouraged folks with websites to link to Bush's biography with those words, like this: miserable failure. Once enough people did it, especially those with reputable or popular websites that generated a lot of clicks, Bush's biography shot to the top of the search engine results page. This wasn't the first Google bomb, but it's arguably the most famous.)

In an effort to boost their search engine rankings, businesses began operating blogs. As the number of blogs out there on Nobel Prize winner Al Gore's internet grew exponentially larger, it got harder and harder to grab people's attention. Companies began hiring professional writers and marketing experts to give their blog a competitive edge.

(In fact, one of my writing gigs at the moment is for a search engine marketing company whose name I won't mention, but whom you can find very easily by typing "chris irby seo" into Google. I crank out five articles a week for them that are basically just regurgitations of articles written by other folks, only paraphrased and reworded so they'll count as original content.)

Anyway, in the wake of all the marketing, personal blogs got lost in the wash, and then all but died off once Facebook came on the scene.

This blog wasn't created for the purposes of search engine marketing or to drive traffic to any other website. I started blogging because I enjoy writing, and I liked the idea of sharing my inane and often profanity-laden thoughts with a bunch of anonymous strangers. I continued blogging because I really enjoyed the close-knit group of friends that seemed to come out of it. And I quit blogging because I felt like I had run out of stuff to say. Also, Facebook.

I know quite a few people who do SEO for a living, and they don't understand the appeal of blogging. They can't imagine why anybody would have a blog if they're not going to use it to market something, generate links, or drive traffic. They often take me to task for my lack of optimization, and suggest that I should do things like put my name in the title, give all of the pictures meaningful file names, and try to work some popular search terms into my articles. The idea of writing for writing's sake is lost on them. These are the same people who think Michelangelo missed a golden opportunity because he didn't paint Jesus drinking a can of Pepsi in The Last Supper.

A lot of corporate blogs are no longer updated regularly. Many have been abandoned outright. Once companies realized how much effort is required to successfully market with a blog, especially with all of the competition out there, many decided it was a dismal return on their investment. Facebook and Twitter are actually the hot search engine marketing properties now, as SEO experts knock their heads against the wall trying to figure out just how all those tweets and status updates play into Google rankings.

So blogging is just another internet fad in decline, like usenet newsgroups, dancing hamsters, and Classmates.com. I can't imagine it will ever really go away, but I also can't see it becoming as insanely popular as it was a few short years ago. But that's okay. As long as I have my threes of blogging buddies, I'll be happy.

Did Facebook Kill My Blog?

2011-09-28T14:03:00.015-05:00

I started this blog back in 2004, back when having a blog was one of those cool things that dazzled and impressed your less-technically-savvy friends and family members. "You have a blog? Wow, that's so awesome! Do you know Bill Gates and Cher?"

Since then, this little slice of Nobel Prize winner Al Gore's internets has gone through several name changes (Chris Irby's Generic Blog, Rush Limbaugh's All Star Puppy-Eating Cavalcade, WTFWJD?, and I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, YOU GODDAMN LIAR!) and I've undergone numerous personal crises that have strengthened me and turned me into the paragon of restraint and insight you see today.

Alas, poor WTFWJD? We hardly knew ye...

I've also gone through some considerable ebbs and flows when it comes to posting. In November of 2005, I came back after a two-month hiatus, apologized for neglecting the blogosphere, and trickled out some posts for the next few months. In July of 2006, I came back after a one-month hiatus, apologized for neglecting the blogosphere, and trickled out some posts for the next few months. In February of 2007, I came back after a four-month hiatus, apologized for neglecting the blogosphere, and trickled out some posts for the next few months. In October of 2007... well, I'm pretty sure you can see where this is going.

Anyway, if you check the Blog Archive to the left, you may notice that my posting pretty much died in April 2009 (much like beloved actress Bea Arthur). I made one last ditch effort in April 2010, and then... BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP...

And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest...

So, what happened? Well, in a word, Facebook.

As I mentioned in one of my penultimate posts, I got totally sucked into Mark Zuckerberg's social media cult. I became obsessed with befriending folks I hadn't seen in years and never really liked all that much, and with keeping my massive network of virtual pals apprised of my current status ("Eating wasabi peanuts and downloading images of Ann Coulter's feet").

The thing is, Facebook offers immediate gratification. The moment you post anything, 29,751,498 online buddies will respond to lend their support or show you the error of your ways. Total strangers will request to be your friend because they read something funny you posted on someone else's page. Longtime acquaintances will unfriend you because they read something provocative or offensive that you posted on your own page. FBI agents will send you messages, pretending to be 15-year-old cheerleaders. But that's something else, entirely.

When all else fails, try bringing up Hitler...

But it's been a couple of years, and the bloom is off the Facebook rose. I still check in and post pretty regularly, but gone are the days where I would spend hours poring through hundreds of updates and carrying on dozens of simultaneous conversations. I no longer have any interest in arguing on other folks' pages, and have little patience for the people who feel the need to crap their opinion into their hand and fling it all over my page. And I honestly couldn't possibly give any less of a fuck about what folks are growing in Farmville or whom they're killing in Gang Wars.

I think part of the problem is that whole short-attention span thing. The immediate gratification, coupled with the fact that Facebook limits posts to something in the neighborhood of 4 characters, has basically created an online community of folks who can't be bothered to read. Facebook will let you post longer notes, but reading those requires a couple of extra clicks of the mouse, and who the hell has time for that when there are virtual rutabagas to harvest, baby?

Lately, I've found myself waxing nostalgic about this blog, and the tight-knit community of folks that I pretty much abandoned for the glitzy Babylon that *is* Facebook. And I've been wondering if I should even try picking up where I left off, or just put this thing out of its misery and start fresh.

(In the interests of full disclosure, I did start another blog back in June 2009 that's devoted to the oeuvre of Jack Chick. My updates on that blog have been pretty sporadic as well, but it still gets a decent number of daily hits because folks keep posting my stuff on Reddit and StumbleUpon. I've thought about doing that myself, but what kind of desperate cry for attention would that be?)

So anyway, yeah. Facebook pretty much killed this blog. But like Jesus, Spock, Bobby Ewing, and Batman, it has once again clawed its way out of the grave. Hopefully, this won't be my only post for 2011. I swear, my intentions are good. I'm going to try this blogging thing again.

Also Superman, Gandalf, Jean Grey, Elvis, Osiris, Buffy,
Dr. Who, Lazarus, Pac Man, Kenny, and Wile E. Coyote

But I make no promises...

Beeeeeeeeeeeep... Blip... Blip... Blip...

2010-04-29T11:32:00.003-05:00

I honestly have no idea what to write after a year of neglecting the blogosphere. Except I just noticed that, even though the word "blogosphere" has been in wide use since 2002, Blogger still doesn't recognize is as a legitimate word, and suggests that I replace it with "biosphere" or "heliosphere." According to Wikipedia, a heliosphere is caused by the solar wind blowing a bubble in the interstellar medium. According to Sarah Palin, a heliosphere is caused by God taking a bath after He eats beans. Incidentally, Blogger doesn't recognize the word "Palin" as legitimate either, and suggests that I replace it with "Patin" or "pain," which sounds totally reasonable to me. In case you're wondering, Patin is a village in the Bané Department of Boulgou Province in south-eastern Burkina Faso, a landlocked African nation that is probably visible from Sarah Palin's backyard. I'm sure this interesting fact will be covered on the upcoming Discovery reality show Sarah Palin's Alaska, assuming they can find someone other than the Tea Party and the KKK to sponsor it. Personally, I would have called the show Helicopter Wolf Sniper Killfest or Life On This 6,000 Year Old Earth. Or maybe Hunting with Dick Cheney. Remember when he shot that old guy in the face? That was awesome. Anyway, I missed you guys.

A New Follower!

2009-04-12T01:42:00.002-05:00

I'd like to take a moment and give a shout out to my newest follower, ouD6.NoCjdK3ku6mQr1B3m.kdRsb. After years of sending me unsolicited emails regarding my credit and/or my penis size, I'm proud that ouD6.NoCjdK3ku6mQr1B3m.kdRsb has decided to join the ranks of my threes of faithful followers.

(There's a chance I could be wrong about ouD6.NoCjdK3ku6mQr1B3m.kdRsb, and he/she/it might actually be one of the soulless Verizon automatons that I ran up against back in 2006. If that's the case, then I apologize for the disrespectful tone of my post and I welcome our new robot overlords with open arms. HAIL OUD6.NOCJDK3KU6MQR1B3M.KDRSB!!!)

Rest Assured: We Are Not "Anti-Vaccine"

2009-04-11T23:23:00.005-05:00

For those of you who haven't been paying attention, my nephews Luke and Campbell were diagnosed as autistic back in January 2008. My sister Sunny, always one for due diligence, has done some extensive research and now believes that aggressive vaccination schedules played a part in their condition.

I've seen people summarily dismiss these allegations because they can't be bothered to check the facts for themselves, and they can't believe that pharmaceutical companies would EVER act with anything other than the public's best interest in mind.

Anyway, Sunny's arguments are far more reasonable and eloquent than mine, so please do her the service of reading her post. Thank you.

-----------------------------------------

Rest Assured: We Are Not "Anti-Vaccine"

We believe that vaccines are necessary to ward off the dangerous childhood diseases. But we also know that the current schedule that most parents (including us) follow blindly has many flaws and risks that doctors are not discussing with parents. Since the CDC and AAP refuse to acknowledge the real risks and create a safer schedule for our kids, you have to figure it out on your own. You do have options. Learn from our mistakes---do your homework and use an alternative schedule that best protects your child from unnecessary risks.

Watch this video w/ Dr. David Berger discussing several of the flaws with the current schedule and the desperately needed changes the AAP and CDC have refused to make to the schedule:

(It's surprising---yet very encouraging---that he actually got some air-time with this message! =))

In the 80's-to-early-90's, the vaccine schedule (which DID vaccinate against the more serious illnesses like measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis (whooping cough), and polio) was administered with much more care. Look at the differences between the 80's schedule and 2007's schedule.

IMPORTANT DIFFERENCES TO NOTE:

* The autism rate with the old schedule was 1 in 10,000 (Autism was considered extremely rare). the rate today is estimated at more than 1 in 100 (it's increased 100-fold!). In addition to Autism, chronic childhood illnesses like asthma, ADD, ADHD, diabetes, seizure disorders, life-threatening food allergies, etc. have sky-rocketed. These illnesses were also extremely rare (some even unheard-of) before the vaccine schedule tripled. (Think back to when we were in school...our school nurses didn't spend the majority of their day administering meds or maintaining epi-pens in case of allergic shock like they do today)

* The former shot schedule started at 2 mos. (not in utero or at birth like they do now), so the babies' immune systems had more time to develop before their systems were shocked;

* The former schedule DID NOT recommend flu vaccines. Today's schedule recommends SEVEN during early childhood, and they start in utero. As Dr. Berger noted, in addition to being a LIVE VIRUS vaccine, the flu shots still contain 25 mcg of MERCURY, so when you hear on the news that thimerosal has been removed from vaccines, please know, that's not entirely true (it's also still in the tetanus shots, and in "trace" levels in several others---but even "traces" of neuro-toxins can cause damage---the EPA has established this). The AAP and CDC have acknowledged that mercury is a known-neuro-toxin, that it is known to be especially harmful to developing brains in babies and especially harmful to fetuses. HOWEVER, the same AAP and CDC still recommends the mercury-containing flu shot for pregnant women and babies (as early as 6 mos. old). And, as many of you have heard me say, the actual package insert from the flu vaccine reads (under warnings): "SAFETY AND EFFECTIVENESS HAVE NOT BEEN ESTABLISHED FOR PREGNANT OR LACTATING WOMEN OR FOR PEDIATRIC OR GERIATRIC POPULATIONS." So, obviously, the necessary safety studies have NOT been done for administering a flu shot to pregnant women or babies. The misinformation being given about the flu shot (and the fact that it's even on the recommended schedule---indicating it's been tested for safety) is deplorable.

* The former schedule did not administer 5, 6, 7, and even 9! shots in one visit. THE FDA, CDC, AAP HAVE NEVER STUDIED THE EFFECTS OF GIVING MULTIPLE VACCINES IN ONE SITTING---they just went ahead and made it common practice, and when childhood reactions started happening much more frequently, they just sank into denial and have conveniently stayed there.

* The MMR, which has been the noted "trigger" according to thousands of parents with Autistic kids IS on the old schedule---HOWEVER, today, kids have already received 25-28 OTHER vaccines (meaning their systems have already been SHOCKED 25 -28 times) before they get their MMR, so they are weaker today before they even get to the MMR and many, many kids have not been able to handle this heavy-duty, live-virus vaccine after the onslaught of the other shots. In the former schedule, the kids had a more developed immune system before shots began, and they received considerably fewer shots before the MMR, so their bodies were better prepared to handle it. ALSO, today the MMR is given in conjunction with the Chickenpox vax, Hep A, another HIB, another PCV---so the viral load (especially considering the "weight" of the live-virus MMR) at the 12 month visit is HUGE. The former schedule administered ONLY the MMR---and it was at 15 months instead of 12.

* Many of the vaccines that have been added are not for dangerous illnesses (chickenpox, rotavirus (aka diarrhea), etc.) and some have risk factors so small, they clearly don't out-weigh the risks of vaccinating against them...Case in point: Hep B. Hep B is sexually transmitted or transmitted through IV needles, yet our babies are vaccinated against it beginning at birth and continuing w/ several more doses throughout the next 6 mos. If the mother is not a carrier of Hep B (and the majority of moms are not), the baby is said to not be at risk---yet this shot was added to the schedule without regard to some babies' inability to handle shocks to their immune system at birth. There have been substantiated reports of death caused by Hep B at birth, and in February of this year, the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program awarded a family damages b/c the Hep B booster caused MS, and ultimately death, in a woman in her 30's (copy of court's ruling here).

These stories should make the news, but they don't...

BOTTOM LINE: What was wrong with the OLD SCHEDULE??? The vaccines against the truly dangerous childhood diseases were on that schedule---and it was administered much more carefully. Where were the deadly chickenpox or Hep B or rotavirus or flu epidemics in the early 90's that required this onslaught of vaccines being added to the schedule---and needing to begin at birth no less??? Sadly, the answer is that the vaccine business is a multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry now. And the government's committee that recommends the schedule is full of people with direct financial stakes in the pharmaceutical industry. They have the unique ability to forcibly create a huge market for their own product... all in the name of "saving lives". At the end of the day, this whole mess is disgustingly about $$$.

If I had a baby today, I would go back to the '83 schedule in a heartbeat. I would take living through the chickenpox for a week over living with Autism for the rest of your life any day.

To end on a happier note, I say this: We KNOW that environmental toxins (including vaccines) caused our boys' Autism. One way we know is because, as we treat their underlying medical issues (including "detoxing" them from the viruses and preservatives and adjuvants in the shots), they are making GREAT PROGRESS! Thousands and thousands of children have recovered from Autism. If it were a purely genetic brain disorder (as the CDC and AAP would have us believe), then children would not be getting better. We don't know what God's ultimate plans for our boys include, but we are full of hope for their recovery. We feel so blessed to have found the resources to treat Luke and Campbell and we feel obligated and honored to share our experience with others in case it could help them, or someone they love, avoid this path!

If you have a new baby (or you're having one down the road), PLEASE DO YOUR HOMEWORK. PLEASE LEARN FROM OUR MISTAKES. AND PLEASE ASK ME ANY QUESTIONS---I WILL HAPPILY HELP YOU SEARCH FOR ANSWERS!

With HOPE =),
Sunny

Captain Phantasm vs. the Nefarious Dr. Noir

2009-04-04T17:22:00.010-05:00

As you may recall, my friend Sean and I wrote a play for the Pocket Sandwich Theatre here in Dallas. The play, Captain Phantasm vs. the Nefarious Dr. Noir, was an audience participation melodrama, where audience members are invited to cheer the hero, boo the villain, and hurl prodigious amounts of popcorn at the actors on the stage.

Last night was our opening night, and it went swimmingly! Magnificently! Brilliantly! The jokes worked, the cast clicked, and the audience was totally into the whole participation thing. There were a handful of technical glitches, but I have to say these guys totally knocked it out of the park!

For those of you among my threes of faithful readers who won't be able to attend a showing, here's a handy rundown on the play straight from the Pocket Sandwich Theatre website:

From the unashamed authors of "Escape from Stalag 18" comes this gripping tale of "Captain Phantasm," a costumed hero trained in the mysterious and inscrutable fighting techniques of the Orient as he faces "Dr. Noir," a nefarious criminal mastermind with impeccable fashion sense, a melodramatic flair, and no fear of popcorn. Mix in characters such as "Pretty Perfect," a beautiful reporter with moxie, spunk, and chutzpah out the yin-yang; and "Mittens" and "Fluffy," two lovely but fiendishly deadly vixens, and what have you got? Uh - we're not sure, but we'll let you know when we figure it out.

Sean and I staged it as an episode of Mystery Adventure Time Theater Hour, broadcast on Radio KPST in 1941. We ended each act with a cliffhanger and totally cheated to get the heroes out of their jam. For example, Act II ends with Captain Phantasm and intrepid reporter Pretty Perfect surrounded by gun-wielding mobsters. The stage goes dark, we hear blasts of machine gun fire, and the words TO BE CONTINUED... appear on the screen. When Act III begins, we once again see the Captain and Pretty surrounded by the mobsters. This time, Captain Phantasm yells "Duck and cover!" and pushes Pretty to the ground as the mobsters open fire and kill each other.

Our "broadcast" is hosted by Wink Walters, an unctious emcee who stands on a side stage and provides helpful narration to move the story along. He also does commercials for the imaginary sponsors of Mystery Adventure Time Theater Hour, such as Sophisticate Cigarettes ("They're mild, good-tasting, and agree with your throat.") and Auntie Lou's Homestyle All-Purpose Flour ("Now with 30% fewer mites and weevils!")

The commercials were a blast to write. Sean and I set out to make them as sexist and scientifically inaccurate as possible. My favorite was the ad that opened up Act II:

(The spotlight falls on the EMCEE, who is standing on the side stage with the microphone. MITTENS and FLUFFY are standing to either side of him.)

EMCEE
Welcome back to Mystery Adventure Time Theater Hour on Radio KPST, brought to you by Marvey Mint Chewing Gum... for the ladies. Chewing Marvey Mint will keep your facial contours youthful and keep your breath fresh and clean. So ladies, if you need a special man in your life, or if you simply want to hold on to the one you have, remember...

(MITTENS and FLUFFY lean into the microphone to sing.)

MITTENS and FLUFFY
Tired of being an old maid
'Coz bad breath rained on your parade?
Let Marvey Mint come to your aid!
Our chewing gum will get you...

EMCEE (interrupting)
Into a loving relationship with the man of your dreams. Marvey Mint.

---------------------------------

Our first two nights have sold out, so here's hoping the rest of the run is just as successful. If you live in the DFW area or happen to be visiting between now and May 16, I hope you'll swing by the Pocket Sandwich Theatre and check out the show!

Captain Phantasm vs. the Nefarious Dr. Noir

Grill Skill

2009-03-12T16:26:00.008-05:00

I should warn you, the following video should not be viewed by anyone who wishes to cling to their belief in a kind and loving god.

Grill Skill is a training video put out by Wendy's in 1989 to teach their employees the proper art of putting greasy meat on a grill. Now you're probably thinking to yourself, "They needed a video for that?" but you have to remember that this was over 20 years ago. After eight years of George W., it's become almost commonplace to see people with college educations working at fast food restaurants. But back then, educated folks had the option of working real jobs, and flipping burgers was left to the type of people who needed to be tutored by disembodied rapping heads.

The video starts off innocuously enough, with Wendy's founder Dave Thomas yammering on about his love of hamburgers. This is, of course, before he died, because otherwise the video would have been even creepier. During Dave's burger soliloquy, we are reminded no less than 4,000 times that Wendy's square patties hang over the edge of the bun. "And people will like that!" Dave insists just a little too emphatically.

(Also, for some reason, poor Dave seems to be having some problems actually enunciating his words, and the phrase "old fashioned hamburgers" sounds like it's being murmured by a mouth stuffed with cholesterol.)

After Dave's introduction, we begin the descent into batshit madness that IS Grill Skill. First, we're lulled into a sense of false security by watching a montage of Wendy's employees showing up for work and hanging up their coats for like 20 minutes. Then, the narrative settles down and introduces us to Bill, who is about to make the incredible evolutionary leap from fries to grill. His manager Mary, who apparently commutes in every morning from the 1940s, takes him into the back office and shows him a video.

So we're watching a video about a guy watching a video. It's all so damned recursive.

But just as you're settling in for a dull treatise on grill procedure, Bill's VCR starts smoking (while strains of Pink Floyd's "Welcome to the Machine" play in the background) and the aforementioned disembodied rapping head sucks him into the video and... words fail me. It's as if a bunch of tiny ninjas get inside your head and start kicking your brain's ass. Only with rap! And then the meat patties have faces and start singing and... OH GOD! WHY?

This is only the first half of the video. I haven't watched the second half yet, but I'm hoping it ends with Bill snapping and going on a killing spree, urged on gleefully by the disembodied rapping head. I imagine he'd slaughter his way through the restaurant with his spatula (or "tool"), saving Mary for last. And then he'd press her face against the sizzling grill, laughing maniacally while screaming, "And people will like that!"

Anyhoo, here's the video. Enjoy.

Michael Steele Gets a Limbaughtomy

2009-03-10T11:19:00.016-05:00

So a couple of posts ago, I mentioned the fact that Rush Limbaugh was hoping for Obama's presidency to fail. This isn't a case of his words being taken out of context. This isn't some vast conspiracy between the gay mafia and the Jew-run liberal media to discredit his enormous, doughnut-laden ass. The man said, on the radio, of his own free will and volition, that he wants Obama to fail. Our nation is at war and on the brink of economic collapse, and Rush is rooting for us to go down in flames.

The Democrats naturally pounced on Rush's treasonous remarks and immediately began portraying the shambling behemoth as the de facto leader of the Republican Party. They called for the Republicans to pull free of Limbaugh's orbit and do what was best for our nation. Sure it was hyperbolic and overwrought, but it was certainly effective. And it's not like the Republicans had any right to complain about it. Back in 2002, they had succeeded in labeling people who disagreed with Bush as villains who hated American soldiers, freedom, and the baby Jesus.

I admit, I was feeling pretty optimistic. I had predicted that the Republicans would distance themselves from Rush's bullshit and put the needs of the country first. And at first, it looked like that was actually going to happen! RNC chairman Michael Steele even went so far as to dismiss Rush's diatribe as "entertainment," adding, "It's incendiary, yes. It's ugly."

Well, I got to enjoy the feeling of being right about something for, oh, two days or so. Then Rush said some mean things about Steele on his radio show, and Steele lost his nerve and apologized, acknowledging Rush as a "national conservative leader." At least, I'm *assuming* that's what Steele said. It's kind of hard to understand him sometimes with his mouth full of Rush's cock.

So is Limbaugh truly leading the GOP these days? I know the millions of Klansmen and crazed loners who tune into his show every day like to think so, and the speed at which Steele flip-flopped seems to lend credence to the theory. I think it's sad that Steele, whose mission at one time was to broaden the appeal of the Republican Party by appealing to political moderates and people of color, has decided it would be more prudent to toe that ever-divisive party line.

One item of interest was a Newsweek interview with David Frum, an uberconservative pundit and former Bush ~~script~~ speech writer, best known for coining the phrase "Axis of Evil." Frum discussed the attempts of the Democrats to tie Rush to the Republican Party, and claimed that Rush had caused the GOP considerable damage by allowing himself to be portrayed as their leader. He actually referred to Rush as "kryptonite." So I'm sure it's only a matter of time before Rush whines about it on the air and Frum calls to apologize.

What can I say? I was foolishly optimistic, and my hopes have been crushed like the young Filipino boy that Rush keeps chained to his bed. After briefly glimpsing the light of hope and change, the GOP has gone scampering back to the safety of Limbaugh's gargantuan shadow.

Sigh. I'm too depressed to rant about it anymore. So I'll just close with a joke I heard from Stephanie:

Q. What's the difference between Rush Limbaugh and the Hindenburg?
A. One is a flaming Nazi gasbag, and the other is a dirigible.

Bada bing! Good night, ladies and gentlemen!

Two More Things...

2009-02-24T13:48:00.003-06:00

Helen Philpot, irascible geriatric and total GMILF, just spent the last couple of weeks subjecting herself to Ann Coulter's most recent book and blogging about her experience on Margaret and Helen. My favorite quote from her ordeal:

And whenever you hear about two monkeys and a sloth getting together with a typewriter know that either another Coulter book is about to hit the bookstores or Rush Limbaugh is having an OxyContin hallucination.

Also, I just discovered, to my great joy, that I'm currently the #1 ranking website on Google for the phrase "ann coulter's gaping anus of a mouth."

God bless America!

Rush Limbaugh Hates America

2009-02-24T12:00:00.005-06:00

Last month, just before the inauguration, Rush Limbaugh went on the record stating he hoped Obama's presidency would fail.

My hope, and please understand me when I say this. I disagree fervently with the people on our side of the aisle who have caved and who say, "Well, I hope he succeeds. We've got to give him a chance." Why? They didn't give Bush a chance in 2000. Before he was inaugurated the search-and-destroy mission had begun. I'm not talking about search-and-destroy, but I've been listening to Barack Obama for a year-and-a-half. I know what his politics are. I know what his plans are, as he has stated them. I don't want them to succeed.

The fact that anybody still listens to this ham-addled retard confounds me. The fact that that people still buy into Sean Hannity's batshit crazy rants, or believe a word that comes out of Ann Coulter's gaping anus of a mouth haunts me and mocks my childlike faith in God.

I can't get my head around *wanting* the president to fail. I despised Bush and just about everything his administration stood for. But if we were going to be stuck with him, I wanted him to succeed, because I wanted our nation to succeed. I felt our justification for invading Iraq was total bullshit and I was firmly opposed to the war. But once we were committed, I hoped desperately that we *would* find those elusive weapons of mass destruction. It would have been worth listening to Bush and his team of incompetent profiteers gloat for the next six years, just knowing that we had been justified and that the lives lost had served a purpose other than supplementing Cheney's retirement fund and indulging Bush's fantasies of being a grown-up "war president."

I had no faith in Bush. But I still hoped for the best, for all the good it did.

So now Obama and his administration are scrambling desperately to clean up the mess they inherited. The Republicans have publicly stated that the time has come to put aside petty partisan politics and work together for the good of the country. They haven't pledged blind obedience to Obama, and they certainly have no intention of rolling over for him (as the bitter debate over the economic stimulus package shows). I may not agree with the Republicans, but I do believe that most of them are arguing passionately for something they believe. They're not stonewalling just to piss on Obama's head.

Even most of the conservatives have pledged to support Obama, albeit with a hint of passive-aggression. They spent the last decade trying to convince us that disagreeing with the president makes you a terrorist, and now they're being forced to navigate that field they so gleefully mined. So here, in the reddest of red states at least, I'm hearing a lot of statements like "Well, Obama may be a Marxist leftist antichrist, but he's still our president and I respect him!"

Since just about anybody with a soul is hoping for the best for Obama and our nation, who does that leave listening to fucktards like Limbaugh, Hannity, and Coulter? They've lost their mainstream appeal and now they're stuck with the same stupid and uninformed fanbase that they had when they started. The kind of people who would happily watch this nation burn just for the opportunity to say "I told you so."

Although Limbaugh, et. al. claim their biggest fear is a liberal America, that's total bullshit. Their biggest fear is that people will no longer care about the manufactured "left/right" schism they've spent the last couple of decades exploiting. Once that division fades, the relevance of Limbaugh, Hannity, and Coulter will fade with it.

Here's hoping...

Meme's the Word

2009-01-28T21:26:00.003-06:00

Stephanie, the Nerd o' my Heart, posted a meme on her blog It Probably Won't Kill You. Since she mentioned me by name as the person most likely to respond, I sort of feel compelled to do so. Because I am, completely and apologetically, whipped.

USING ONLY ONE WORD
Not as easy as you might think! Be sure to send it back to the person you received it from!

1. Where is your cell phone? Nonexistent

2. Your significant other? Loving

3. Your hair? Disheveled

4. Your mother? Forgiving

5. Your father? Departed

6. Your favorite thing? Attention

7. Your dream last night? Fragmented

8. Your favorite drink? Shiner

9. Your dream/goal? Published

10. What Room are you in? Office

11. Your hobby? Pedantry

12. Your fear? Palin

13. Where do you want to be in 6 years? Vegas!

14. Where were you last night? Home

15. Something that you aren’t? Anorexic

16. Breakfast? PowerBar

17. Wish list item? iPod

18. Where you grew up? Dallas

19. Last thing you ate? Sandwich

20. What are you wearing? Hoodie

21. Your TV? G4

22. Your pets? Imaginary

23. Friends? Tolerant

24. Your life? Blissful

25. Your mood? Optimistic

26. Missing someone? Dad

27. Your car? Icy

28. Something you’re not wearing? Cape

29. Your favorite store? Boomerang

30. Your favorite color? Blue

31. When is the last time you laughed? Today

32. Last time you cried? Dunno

33. Who will resend this? Nobody

34. One place that I go to over and over? Facebook

35. One person who emails me regularly: v14gra

36. Favorite place to eat: Hibachi

37. One place I would like to go right now? Richmond

38. One person I think will respond: Nobody

39. One TV show I watch all the time: Colbert

Christians v. Gayness and Abortion Donuts

2009-01-16T14:36:00.020-06:00

There's an old adage that says arguing on the internet is like competing in the Special Olympics, because even if you win, you're still retarded. But sometimes, I just can't help myself. It's like a sickness. "Can't sleep. Somebody is wrong on the internet."

So a while back, I signed up on Facebook. I neglected the account for nearly a year, until my sister finally shamed me into updating it and adding her as a friend, because apparently the other 9,042,188 friends she had on Facebook just weren't enough. So I updated my info and added her. Then her friends added me and I added them, and before you know it, I was suddenly swimming in a sea of online buddies.

One of the interesting (and often annoying) aspects of Facebook is that it puts you back in touch with people you haven't even thought about for decades. In a matter of days, I was inundated with Friend Requests from at least a dozen people I hadn't seen since high school. And frankly, I didn't really like them all that much back then. But I figured there was no point in being petty, so I went ahead and accepted.

Two of these "friends" were Neal and David. Neal and I had never been great pals, but we grew up on the same block and we were in marching band together. I knew David from church and that was about it. So it wasn't like I was overjoyed by the prospect of reuniting with long lost chums. It was all sort of... meh.

But then, Neal invited me to join the Facebook group Ban Same-Sex Marriage. I declined, and I went to his page to tell him to just leave me out of that stuff from now on. But when I got there, I saw he had updated his status to read "Neal is praying that a same-sex marriage bill here in new mexico will not pass - GOD SAID IT IS AN ABOMINATION!!!" And right under that, David had added the comment "we are praying with you!"

I should have clicked away. I know that. But instead, I responded:

I'm not. I don't understand why so many people are terrified by the idea of same-sex marriage. Do you believe bands of marauding homosexuals are going to come down out of the hills, divorce good Christian folks at gunpoint, and force them into gay marriages? Do you feel same-sex marriage is a slippery slope that will inevitably lead to your children turning tricks behind dumpsters for their next fix of heroin? Or do you simply feel that indulging in spiteful and petty gestures against a group of people who have nothing to do with you is better than sitting around and doing nothing?

God said a lot of things were abominations. Why does everybody get so obsessed over this one?

"All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression." -Thomas Jefferson

It was pretty much the first words I'd spoken to either of them in 20+ years, so I was prepared for some blowback. Besides, David was on the debate team, so I figured he'd come at me with guns blazing. He didn't disappoint:

No Chris. We just want our country to be moral and to not promote sin--equating it with the sacred (marriage). There certainly are other things that are abominations and I am praying that our country would reject them as well. Don't paint those of us who believe the Bible and believe that those who honor God will be honored to be homo-phobic or hate filled.

So I replied back:

Which parts of the Bible do you believe? That part about not eating shellfish? Or that part about not wearing clothes made from two types of thread (which means cotton/polyester blend is a sin). Or that part about selling your daughter into slavery or stoning your rebellious son to death? Seems like most people have no problem deciding when God was serious and when he was just screwing around.

And sorry, but referring to gay people as abominations is homophobia writ large. You can try to rationalize it any way you like, but it's still hateful and mean-spirited.

So Neal decided to weigh in:

chris, thomas jefferson also said that the punishment for the crime of sodomy in virginia should be dismemberment, and he did not mean an arm or a leg. God calls it an abomination, you mock what God hates, and i feel sorry for you, my friend.

At the same time, David retorted:

You are wrong, Chris. It's not gay people who are an abomination. It's homosexuality that is an abomination just like lying, stealing, gossiping, slander, adultery and murder. We all have sinned and fall short of God's plan but that does not mean that we create an environment where sinful lifestyles are promoted.

By this point, I decided to just cut myself loose and be done with it. So I ended with:

I get it. You guys are appalled and offended by the concept of homosexuality. I'm appalled and offended by people who use God as an excuse for their intolerance. Let's just call it irreconscilable differences and be done with it.

I'm going to stop posting, not because I've been convinced by anything you've said, but because I now realize how futile this whole argument is. As long as you guys believe your bigotry is endorsed by the Bible, there's no way anything I say is going to open your minds.

Enjoy your war on gayness, fellas.

(A lot of closed-minded Christians feel sorry for me, Neal. It doesn't really accomplish anything, but it seems to make them feel better.)

I know this post probably comes across as smug or self-congratulatory, but mainly I just wanted to get it all down in print while I could. Because less than 10 minutes after my last post, Neal went through and deleted all of my comments from the thread. So now it's just a bunch of posts of Neal and David calling me by name and lecturing me, which is kind of funny. I considered going back and posting, "Wow, who's this Chris you guys keep going on about? He must have really upset you!"

But life's too short to waste on misguided bigots. If I'm lucky, it'll be another 20 years before I hear from either of them again. By that time, same-sex marriage will be a non-issue, just like interfaith and interracial marriage. And maybe by that time, Neal and David will have moved on to more pressing Christian issues, like getting shellfish outlawed.

---------------------

In a totally unrelated, but fucking hilarious story, the American Life League sent out a press release with this headline: KRISPY KREME CELEBRATES OBAMA WITH PRO-ABORTION DOUGHNUTS. Seriously!

You see, Krispy Kreme announced that they would be giving away free donuts on Inauguration Day to honor "America's sense of pride and freedom of choice." But the brain trust at ALL believes that Krispy Kreme is actually handing out delicious treats to commemorate Roe v. Wade. And the logic by which they reached this inevitable conclusion? Well, it seems Krispy Kreme used the word "choice" in their announcement. And as everybody knows, "choice" is secret liberal code for "abortion," which is why Taster's Choice coffee never sells all that well down here in the south.

If there is a God, He might want to seriously consider smiting some of these retards. They are *really* making Him look stupid.

---------------------

Update 1/23/2009:
Okay, so I managed to stay on the high road for a week before I popped back to see if the debate was still raging on Neal's page. I was somewhat gratified to see other folks taking him to task for his bigotry. One person made the point that we shouldn't be using the Bible as an excuse to deprive folks of their constitutional rights.

David replied to that by claiming that nobody's constitutional rights were being abridged and wrote (I swear I'm not making this up), "this is about protecting marriage and the family, its not about love."

How could I just let that one go? I mean, I'm only human! But my response was the very epitome of restraint:

"this is about protecting marriage and the family, its not about love."

That may be the funniest thing I've read all day.

P.S. I noticed you deleted all my posts, Neal. Class act all the way!

Neal's reaction to my post was hilariously over the top:

chris - i deleted your posts because they were garbage. you've never been able to disagree without being disagreeable. you mock God, and i take that personally offensive because of Who God is and what He has done for me all my life. i said previously that i felt sorry for you, but i don't any more. you deserve everything you are going to get from God if you continue your rebellion. repent or you will suffer eternal consequences. can i say it any stronger? you're going to go to hell if you don't change, and a lot. just as i've deleted your posts, i'm now going to delete you from my list of friends.

(For the record, I don't think I actually mocked God. Just His boneheaded followers who insist on using Him as an excuse to be bigoted assholes. But, hey! Semantics, right?)

But just to be clear, Neal honestly believes I'm going to Hell for the sin of NOT hating gay people? And people wonder why I don't go to church anymore...

Happy 2009!

2009-01-09T12:15:00.013-06:00

A new year is underway, and service will resume very shortly here at Click... Click... Click... BANG!!! In the meantime, I hope all of you had a very merry Christmas, Hanukkah, Ramadan, Yule, Winter Solstice, Kwanzaa, or any other holiday you may have chosen to celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Note: This joke was totally stolen from my girlfriend Stephanie's t-shirt.

Sometimes I Photoshop While I'm Drunk...

2008-12-06T02:56:00.000-06:00

10 Things That Annoy Me II, Electric Boogaloo!

2008-12-05T15:37:00.015-06:00

Back in 2004, when I was still new to this whole blogging thing, my first internet love SJ (Give Me the Booger) inspired me to compile a top ten list of things that bug the shit out of me. So here it is, four years later, and most of those things *still* piss me off. But I dug deep into the tortured recesses of my spongy brain, and I managed to scrape together a list of ten MORE things that make me more irritable than Dick Cheney with hemorroids.

So enjoy. I'll be back in 2012 with my third installment. Let's pray Sarah Palin isn't on it.

1. People who try way too hard to be interesting. Everybody wants to be liked. Most of us do it by cultivating a personality and learning how to interact with others. But some folks do it by inventing a dark and mysterious past, and then dropping what they imagine to be tantalizing hints about it at every possible opportunity. A song will come on the radio, and they'll say, "Ah, yes. This reminds me of that time I was doing heroin in the abandoned hospital and those skinheads tried to shoot me."

Eventually, you learn to quit taking the bait, which causes them some consternation. They'll look at you expectantly, waiting for you to ask them to elaborate. And when you don't, they'll press the issue. "Yeah, I did some dumb things when I was young. Can't believe I almost died that night!" If you ignore them long enough, they'll get desperate to share their imaginary backstory. "I know you probably can't relate to the stuff I've been through, but if you ever want to ask me about my past, please feel free. I don't mind talking about it."

If I don't pry into your sordid and gripping past, it isn't because I'm disturbed or scared or lack the proper frame of reference to relate to you. It's because I don't believe you.

2. Billy Mays. I'm a fat, bearded guy, and I'm capable of being just as shrill and offputting as Mr. Mays. If you have a product, service, or organization you want shilled, just let me know and I'll do it for half of what he charges! Plus, I have no shame whatsoever, so I'll endorse anything! Just check out these testimonials from pleased customers:

"Ever since Chris started singing our praises, membership has picked up by 400%! Thanks, Chris!"
-Reg Hatley, NAMBLA

"People throw around the word 'hero,' but I think Chris really fits the bill. He really saved our business!"
-Don Reddick, Reddick's Puppy Shredding Mills

"If only Chris had been willing to representationalize us, the Republican party would be in much better... oops, I crapped my pants again."
-George W. Bush, Lame Duck

3. "Obama is the antichrist!" I've got to hand it to the conservatives. Once they decide they're going to hate someone, they will work their asses off to make up a reason.

Here's an email I received from the wife of one of my more conservative friends, in all of its illiterate glory:

According to the Book of Revelations the anti-christ is: The anti-christ will be a man, in his 40s, of MUSLIM descent, who will deceive the nations with persuassive language, and have a MASSIVE Christ-like appeal.... the prophecy says that people will flock to him and he will promise false hope and world peace, and when he is in power, will destory everything. Is it OBAMA??

I can't really comment on the contents of the Book of Revelations, since it doesn't exist. However, I know for a fact that the Book of Revelation (just one, dammit) makes no mention of an antichrist. That term was actually taken from the Epistles of John, and was used to refer to anybody who denied the divinity of Jesus (which I guess, technically, makes me an antichrist). What crops up in Revelation is the Beast, who is described as rising from the sea with seven heads and ten horns, upon which are written the names of blasphemy.

There's nothing about a man in his 40s, and there's absolutely nothing about Muslims. The Islam faith wasn't even founded until 610 AD, at least 500 years after Revelation was written. And even if John of Patmos did miraculously gaze into the future and prophesy the coming of Islam, OBAMA ISN'T A MUSLIM!!!

Seriously. If you're going to be a Christian, you might occasionally try READING that Bible you tote around...

4. Anyone who voted for Prop 8. Why the hell are these hateful fucktards so scared of same-sex marriage? Are they afraid the government might make it mandatory? Do they imagine a squadron of gay commandos is going to march into town and divorce them at gunpoint? Are they afraid gay weddings are going to somehow invalidate their marriages to their cousins? Or are they just using Jesus as an excuse to be bigoted assholes?

If you voted in favor of Prop 8, then you're a horrible human being and I hope you burn to death in a fire made of cancer while eating habanero peppers stuffed with poo. If you don't live in California but you thought Prop 8 was a good idea, then... well you know. Fire, cancer, habanero peppers, poo.

Bonus: Check out Prop 8 - The Musical on FunnyOrDie.com.

5. Trans fat. What the hell is trans fat, anyway? I've seen commericials for things like deep-fried bacon-wrapped chicken sandwiches that claim to have 0g of trans fat, and I have to ask myself, does it even exist? Has anyone ever actually seen it? Or is it just one of those things that we take on faith, like Intelligent Design and airport security? Personally, I think a bunch of food companies got together and invented the term "trans fat" just so they could claim their product didn't have it. But it's only a matter of time before we as a people rise up and put a stop to it. Like we did with that whole "net carb" fiasco...

6. People too lazy to express their own opinions. By national standards, I'm somewhat moderate in my politics. But here in Texas, I'm somewhere to the left of Lenin. A lot of my family and friends don't share my particular point of view, and they're constantly trying to change my mind by sending me emails that somebody else wrote. Because, hey! Why bother to have any thoughts of your own when you can just cut and paste? It's much easier to be opinionated when you let other people do all the work!

7. People who screw up common sayings. I used to work for a guy who, when signing his name, would always say, "Let me put my John Henry on that." After the third or fourth time, I finally snapped and shouted, "It's HANCOCK! John Hancock! Signer of the Delcaration of Independence! John Henry was a steel drivin' man, and probably didn't sign a whole lot of documents!"

Other mistakes that get up my ass with cleats on are "I could care less," "It's a mute point," and "President George W. Bush."

8. My upstairs neighbors. I've never met them, but based on the amount of noise they make every goddamn night, I've put together a little profile on them. I believe them to be a family of 10, weighing in excess of 400 pounds each. And every evening at 10:30 p.m., they like to put on their work boots, stomp into the bedroom, and knock their collection of bowling balls onto the floor.

I actually went upstairs to complain once, and the chicken shits wouldn't even answer the door. I could hear them inside, and I could see the peephole getting dark as they peered out at me, but they just sat inside and listened to me knock for 10 minutes. I finally gave up and went back downstairs, and they went back to doing jumping jacks.

9. Those preachy episodes of M*A*S*H. I used to love M*A*S*H, but I've been catching the repeats on TV Land, and I've noticed that every episode written by Alan Alda has the exact same speech in it.

General: Captain Pierce, I find your manner insubordinate.

Hawkeye: Oh yeah, General? Well somebody's bullets were insubordinate to this kid's body! I didn't ask to come here! I didn't ask to pull soldiers out of a meat grinder and sew them back together so maniacs like you can march them out again! I hate this place. I hate this war.

------------

Colonel: Son, why don't you head over to the mess tent and get some supper?

Hawkeye: Oh yeah, Colonel? Well somebody's bullets sure made a mess of this kid's body! I didn't ask to come here! I didn't ask to pull soldiers out of a meat grinder and sew them back together so maniacs like you can march them out again! I hate this place. I hate this war.

------------

Nurse: Hey, Hawkeye. Wanna go have sex in the supply tent?

Hawkeye: Oh yeah, Nurse? Well somebody's bullets sure had sex with... wait, that doesn't work. Um... supply... supplies... Hey, I bet this kid was totally suppliesed when he got all these bullets in his body! I didn't ask to... hey, where are you going?

10. People who refer to Sarah Palin as a MILF. Only if the "F" stands for "Force her head underwater until the bubbles stop coming up."

Soapbox Hero (He's Got Stars In His Eyes)

2008-12-03T00:08:00.013-06:00

Back in 2000, Al Gore ran for president against George W. Bush. And even though Gore got more votes, the Supreme Court decided to ignore the whole electoral process and just appoint Bush to the position. Understandably, we were outraged. Furious. We raised our fists and cried foul. And the Bush supporters called us sore losers and told us to quit whining. Because for them, none of that democracy crap really mattered just as long as their guy "won."

Our nation suffered through eight years of the WORST PRESIDENT EVER! And this year, the American voters finally got their shit together and decided it was time for a change. Fortunately, this time the votes actually mattered. Obama was elected and, for the first time in nearly a decade, the results were above board and incontrovertible.

And holy shit, now the conservatives are whining like a bunch of little bitches with skinned knees! They keep going on and on about how Obama is a Marxist leftist Muslim terrorist antichrist who is going to take away their guns and march them into internment camps where they'll be forced to crap on Bibles and get abortions.

I'm pretty sure most of them don't REALLY believe that. They're just desperately trying to hang on to a shred of dignity, to justify voting an illiterate warmongering fuckwit into office TWICE. Lord knows if I bore any responsibility for putting Bush in the White House, I'd probably spew that same nonsense just to convince myself I was still a decent human being.

But there are some dumb fucking mouthbreathers out there who honestly DO buy into that crap, and that boggles my mind. They honestly believe we're living in a blissful Bush-constructed Utopia, and now Obama and his wicked minions are going to come along and destroy it with their wicked Commie ways. Even more surprising is the fact that so many of these people live in Texas! I thought Bush executed most of the retarded people back when he was governor.

So to any of you people who are afraid of Obama, let me first say thanks for taking the time to let your state-provided caretaker read this post to you. Now put down your finger paints and listen carefully, because this is very important. Okay?

It's over, you sore losers. You had your chance, and you fucked it up royally. So quit whining. Sit down, shut up, and let the grownups work.

And while we're on the subject, do you remember all that bullshit you hypocrites kept spouting about how anyone who disrespects the president is an unpatriotic supporter of terrorism? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Whew. Thanks for listening. You've been very therapeutic. I hereby relinquish the soapbox...

Blogger Love Revisited

2008-12-02T09:04:00.004-06:00

Stephanie, the nerd o' my heart, is now a proud member of the blogosphere. Check out her sultry rants at It Probably Won't Kill You.

Putting the "US" Back in "Virus"

2008-12-02T08:39:00.005-06:00

Sigh...

So this morning, I navigated to this page to see what lovely comments had been left by my threes of readers, and I got a popup warning from my virus scanner that two instances of the actns/swif.t virus had been detected and deleted.

Naturally, I crapped my pants. After that was cleaned up, I poked around looking for information on this virus. Unfortunately, it's a relatively new thing and there's not much out there. I suspect it was just added to the virus definition files on the last update.

The problem was a couple of videos that I had embedded from Youtube. The videos themselves weren't infected. It was just the HTML code that was being flagged and deleted every time the page was loaded.

I finally found this info on the actns/swif.t virus on AntivirusConnection.com:

The Actns/Swif.T has been a tricky one. It seems this virus has just recently spawned, causing computers to show a embedded shockwave/flashplayer file within IE/Firefox browser. Inside the embedded swf, it features a redirect to a phishing website that I advise everyone NOT to click on! So if you see this embedded vicious file pop up, Do Not Click It! It will install another virus called Antivirus 2009, which those of you who know this virus already, it’s a pest to get rid of.

Now, based on this, I'm suspecting my detections were false positives. Since the virus definitions were just added, I think my virus scanner saw the embedded videos in my browswer and just assumed they were placed there maliciously. The videos themselves don't appear to be infected, and I've never been redirected to the phishing site.

But I'm hardly an expert, and I don't want to take any chances until I know for certain. So I've deleted the embedded videos until I can get a little more information. If any of you out there are smarter about this kind of thing than me, I'd love to hear from you.

Thanks!

--------------------------------

Update: After all the ballyhoo, it turns out it was just a false positive from CA Antivirus. Apparently they've fixed the problem and I'm off to download the updated files. I feel pretty goddamn smart for having figured it out myself FOURTEEN HOURS AGO!

Also, I had a LOT of hits on the blog today. I was apparently one of the first people to post anything about the virus online, so for a few hours my blog was showing up on Google near the top of the list for searches on "actns swif.t" or variations thereof. Ordinarily, I get 20 to 30 hits a day. Today, I got 600+.

Of course, Google's brilliant algorithm eventually kicked in and decided that link farms and sites devoted to 80s heavy metal were FAR more relevant than my blog, so now I've dropped down several pages. But that's okay. Fame would have only changed me.

Comedian, Schmomedian

2008-12-01T10:23:00.020-06:00

Earlier this year, my nephew Campbell was diagnosed as mildly to moderately autistic. Since then, his twin brother Luke has been diagnosed as mildly autistic as well.

The thing about autism is that very few people know anything about it, yet everybody and their goddamn dog thinks that they're some kind of armchair expert. My sister has done her homework. She has truly done her due diligence. She probably has a better understanding of autism than anybody else I know. And she's constantly being badgered and corrected on her facts by well-meaning people who watched some fluff piece on Good Morning America.

You see, my sister believes that her sons' condition was exacerbated by the inoculations they started receiving just hours after they were born. She's not alone. Nearly 60% of the parents of autistic children believe that vaccines played a role in their child's condition. Their suspicions have been substantiated by medical professionals, and even a few insiders within the pharmaceutical companies.

But the pharmaceutical companies are the biggest problem. They've paid out billions of dollars to make sure that their interests are safeguarded in Washington D.C., so you get people like Dick Armey trying to sneak a rider onto the Homeland Security Bill granting autism liability protection to drug companies.

The drug companies have also spent an ungodly amount of money to discredit these concerned parents. They've managed to paint them as foil-hat-wearing loonies who want to abolish all drugs and unleash an epidemic of polio on the world, or as opportunistic money-grubbers who want to cash in on their children's disorder. After all the shit we went through with Big Tobacco, you'd think people would be too smart to fall for anything so transparent. But you'd be wrong.

The symptoms that many autistic children display are actually listed as possible side effects for a lot of these vaccines. But despite that, the drug companies clap their hands over their ears whenever concerned parents dare insinuate that these massive drug cocktails might have anything to do with their children's condition. They insist the problem is purely genetic. They are simply unbothered by the fact that autism has gone from being a rare diagnosis to affecting 1 in 150 children.

Perhaps most despicable of all is the way that the pharmaceutical companies have hijacked the once legitimate organization Autism Speaks and turned it into their own corporate shill. It was founded by the vice chairman of General Electric, Robert Wright, back in 2004 when his grandson Christian was diagnosed as autistic. But somewhere along the way, right about the time the drug companies started writing them huge checks, Autism Speaks began singing the praises of vaccines. Christian's mother Katie was so disgusted by this change in direction that she no longer has anything to do with the organization.

Firmly in the corner of the pharmaceutical companies are slimy folks like Dr. Paul Offit, a man who writes books like Autism's False Prophets to attack these concerned parents. Offit often appears as a talking head on news shows that are covering the controversy, and insists that there is no controversy and there is no link between autism and vaccines. Offit is also a major patent holder for RotaTeq, a rotavirus vaccine, so I can understand why he would be so desperate to portray the drug companies as blameless and holy.

Is there a link between vaccines and autism? I don't know. Honest to God, I don't know. Nobody knows. That's the point. All of these parents are scared to death that they've been unknowingly poisoning their children, and they want a definitive answer from someone who doesn't have a vested interest in the status quo. They're not asking for a ban on vaccines or massive government subsidies or anything unreasonable. All they want is an unbiased, third-party study to see if there is a link.

If the pharmaceutical companies honestly believe they shoulder none of the blame, then why work so hard to obscure the truth? Why only release the results of studies done by their own private research firms? Why spend so much money attacking the families of autistic children? Why subvert the issue when, if truth truly is on their side, they could easily vindicate themselves?

The drug companies definitely have money and public apathy on their side, but there is hope that the tide might be turning. Obama recently nominated Tom Daschle to head up the Department of Health and Human Services. Senator Daschle is most assuredly not anti-vaccine, but he has shown a willingness and a determination to question vaccine safety. Obama is also considering Robert Kennedy, Jr. to head up the EPA. Kennedy has long been a crusader against the irresponsible practices of the drug companies, and was one of the first to bring the potential link between vaccines and autism into the public light.

Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical companies are trying a new (some might say desperate) tactic of pretending like there is no controversy. "Asked and answered" has become their new talking point. Any time a news show purports to cover the story, they get pharmaceutical reps and folks like Dr. Offit talking about how there is absolutely no merit whatsoever to the claims. And then, in an effort to appear balanced, they get a bogus group like Autism Speaks to simply reiterate what the drug companies are saying.

They know they'll never convince the concerned families, and frankly, they're not even making an effort anymore. They're just trying to convince the general public to keep on not giving a shit.

And God knows, we're pretty good at that.

-------------------------------

Denis Leary's book, Why We Suck: A Feel Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy, and Stupid, contains a chapter entitled "Autism, Schmautism," which claims that the majority of people who claim to be autistic are faking, and the true fault lies with "inattentive mothers and competitive dads." Leary obviously shares the same misconception about autism that a lot of folks do; he believes anyone who is truly autistic will manifest some kind of savant ability. So basically, anyone who claims to be autistic but isn't good at math or painting is just faking.

The thing is, Leary's schtick is political incorrectness. This guy has joked about everything from cancer patients to crack babies, and when confronted by angry, indignant folks, his response is usually to just blow smoke in their faces and tell them to quit being a bunch of fucking crybabies.

But in the wake of the backlash from autistic families, Leary's reaction has been surprisingly contrite. He's racing to cover his ass, claiming he was misquoted and taken out of context, and the only people who are outraged are ones who haven't actually read his book. (I haven't, but I did read that chapter.) He claims to have great love and respect for people who are truly autistic, and says his intent was not to belittle them or claim autism doesn't exist, but rather to attack "grown men who are either self-diagnosing themselves with low-level offshoots of the disease or wishing they could as a way to explain their failed careers and troublesome progeny."

Personally, I think he's full of shit. I think he lashed out at what he thought would be an easy target, and was surprised by the vehemence of the backlash. I mean, let's face it; when Michael Savage agrees with you, you've made some horrible life decisions somewhere along the way.

So sorry, Denis. Not buying it. But I admire your prodigious attempt to backpedal, and I have no doubt you sincerely *wish* you'd written something more noble. Maybe next time...

Reasons To Be Thankful, Part III

2008-11-28T12:25:00.001-06:00

The love of a hot, nerdy woman
Vanilla Coke Zero
I don't work retail
Leftovers
Only 1 month, 22 days, 17 hours, 23 minutes, and 7 seconds until Bush is out of office
My name isn't Squanto

Reasons To Be Thankful, Part II

2008-11-27T00:13:00.007-06:00

Note: The embedded video in this post was deleted due to suspicions of the actns/swif.t virus. This was likely a false positive, but I figured better safe than sorry.

Thanksgiving Prayer
by William S. Burroughs

For John Dillinger, in hope he is still alive.
Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1986

Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts.

Thanks for a continent to despoil and poison.

Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger.

Thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin leaving the carcasses to rot.

Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes.

Thanks for the American dream, to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through.

Thanks for the KKK, for nigger-killin' lawmen feelin' their notches, for decent church-goin' women, with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.

Thanks for "Kill a Queer for Christ" stickers.

Thanks for laboratory AIDS.

Thanks for Prohibition and the war against drugs.

Thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business.

Thanks for a nation of finks.

Yes, thanks for all the memories -- all right let's see your arms!

You always were a headache and you always were a bore.

Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.

Reasons To Be Thankful, Part I

2008-11-26T09:27:00.008-06:00

Ann Coulter just finished up her book Guilty, which she has described as "a much needed reality check on the Left gone wild." She was all set to hit the TV (i.e. FOX News) and radio talk show circuit to promote her little literary abortion when a miracle happened.

Ann Coulter broke her jaw. It's been wired shut. No idea who did it, but the list of suspects includes pretty much anybody who has a soul.

Yes, Ann Coulter's gaping anus of a mouth has been sealed, which is going to make it hard for her to reach out to the Klansmen and crazed loners who make up her reading audience. Plus, now she's going to need a straw to consume her daily serving of infant blood.

So when you gather with your families for Thanksgiving and reflect on all that is good in your life, be sure to give thanks to whichever invisible man or cosmic force you worship for silencing that sad, desperate woman. And maybe ask Him to do something about her goddamn Adam's apple.

Follow up #1: I posted the line about Klansmen and deranged loners in the comments section of the New York Post, but it got deleted. I can only assume some Klansman got pissed off that I was grouping him in with Ann Coulter's readers.

Follow up #2: When I told Stephanie about this post, she suggested that maybe Ann Coulter had broken her jaw when she unhinged it to devour a small child. Damn, I wish I'd thought of that...

¡Mis Pantalones Se Arden!

2008-11-23T22:19:00.006-06:00

I'm a terrible liar, by which I mean I'm not particularly good at it.

I'm not talking about harmless lies, such as, say, backdating a blog post just to keep your posting streak alive *cough*. I'm talking about real lies. Bearing false witness. Perpetuating untruths for personal gain.

Sometimes, if I stand to gain nothing from the lie, I can pull it off. Stephanie insists otherwise, but I once suggested to her that perhaps I'm so Machiavellian that I only *pretend* to be a bad liar so she won't realize how adept I truly am. She didn't buy that one either, so I guess she has a point.

One problem is that I tend to repeat myself. A lot! Seriously. I've got some kind of mental deficiency that prevents me from remembering what I've told people before. So if I'm going to regale them with the same goddamn stories over and over again, I don't want to get caught changing the details. "Eddie Van Halen? I thought you said President Clinton gave you that VCR!"

So, for the most part, I stick to the straight and narrow. I have no horrible skeletons lurking in my closet, and I don't have to worry about Stephanie discovering that I wasn't one of the original kids on ZOOM.

That said, I have lied successfully in the past. One of my most nefarious prevarications was related in this post. I've convinced people that I was Jewish or that my dad was black, just to put an end to their racist diatribes. When I was in college, I told one of my fraternity brothers that I had never tasted pudding because my father was in prison, just to see if he'd believe me (he did). And when I worked at Chemical Express, I had the ladies in Accounts Payable believing that my beloved family dog used to unwrap Christmas presents, and then rewrap them so he wouldn't get caught.

But by far, my most elaborate falsehood was at Brinker International. For my first three years there, everybody thought I could speak Spanish.

I don't remember how that particular notion got started, but it probably had something to do with my propensity for Fake Spanish. I think somebody heard me blathering about the devil being in the bathroom with my things, and just assumed I was fluent. At first, I just went along with it, expecting I'd be busted in no time. But as the days turned into weeks, everyone remained convinced that I was bilingual. And I was curious to see just how long I could get away with it.

The closest call I had was in 1995, when we opened a Chili's in Polanco (Mexico City). My friend Sara had flown down there to get their computer system up and running, but she was having some problems with the modem. I came back from lunch and saw a Post-It note on my monitor, telling me to call the store.

"Oh, God," I muttered as I picked up the phone. "I hope Sara answers."

"What's the big deal?" my officemate Luann asked. "You speak Spanish, right?"

I shrugged. "Yeah, I guess I speak enough to get by."

So the phone rang and rang and rang. No answer. Luann was looking at me kind of expectantly, so I perked up and pretended to have someone on the line. I'd say something, and then pause and nod as if having a conversation. I yammered on and on, stringing together random Spanish phrases and laughing jovially, as if sharing a joke with my imaginary international amigo. And the whole time, Luann was just staring at me in awe and wonder.

When I hung up, she started talking about how much she wished she could speak another language. She'd tried to take French in college, but it just hadn't stuck. By this point, it was starting to feel less like joking and more like lying, so I changed the subject.

I managed to keep the charade going until 1997. Luann left Brinker and I was assigned a new officemate, Brenda (whom you may remember as the woman who compared me favorably with the devil). Brenda, it turned out, had spent several years as an exchange student in South America and spoke fluent Spanish.

"Irb speaks Spanish too," said my friend Dave enthusiastically as he introduced us. "Don't you, Irb?"

So I smiled with as much confidence as I could muster, and I said, "La pregunta mas importante es, Quien es mas macho? Fernando Lamas o Ricardo Montalban?" ("The most important question is, Who is more manly? Fernando Lamas or Ricardo Montalban?")

Brenda just stared at me for about ten seconds, her head cocked to the side. Then she said, "Okay, in the first place, you didn't really say anything. And in the second place, your accent is terrible!"

And thus did my bilingual pretension come to an ignoble end. And even though I 'fessed up and admitted I'd been stringing everyone along for three years, it still took a while for the rumor to die down. As late as 1999, I had people coming to my office and asking me if I could speak Spanish.

"What? Oh, no. No. Not a lick of it."

"Really? Because I'd heard..."

"Yeah, I know. I have no idea how those rumors get started."

"That's weird."

"Isn't it? It reminds me of something my black dad in prison once said when we caught our dog rewrapping the gifts..."

World Economies Fixed Through Prayer and Magic!!!

2008-11-22T23:59:00.003-06:00

October 29 marked the 79th anniversary of Black Tuesday, when the stock market crashed and our nation entered into the Great Depression. Now, many people blame that economic fiasco on a lot of things: overproduction, under consumption, debt deflation, or a breakdown of international trade.

But a group of enthusiastic Christians calling themselves the United States Reformation Prayer Network (or NAMBLA) has eschewed that foolishness and zeroed in on the TRUE cause of the Great Depression. Turns out, it was Satan.

Apparently, the Lord took time out of his busy schedule of appearing in tortillas in Guatemala to warn the group that Satan was planning on a repeat performance this year. To counter his nefarious scheme, they called for a Day of Prayer for the World's Economies.

"We are going to intercede at the site of the statue of the bull on Wall Street," explained co-founder Cindy Jacobs, "to ask God to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the 'Lion's Market' or God's control over the economic systems."

On October 29, dozens of crazy Christians convened on the bull statue in a scene right out of The Ten Commandments.

The enormously-haired Ms. Jacobs felt the group's efforts were best summed up by this Bible verse:

For thus says the Lord of Hosts: "Once more (it is a little while) I will shake heaven and earth, the sea and dry land; and I will shake all nations, and they shall come to the Desire of All Nations, and I will fill this temple [house] with glory," says the Lord of Hosts. "The silver is Mine, and the gold is Mine," says the Lord of Hosts.
-Haggai 2:6-8

However, I can't help but wonder if this verse wouldn't have been just a tad more appropriate:

Then the Lord said to Moses, "Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt. They have been quick to turn away from what I commanded them and have made themselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf. They have bowed down to it and sacrificed to it and have said, "These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt."
-Exodus 32:7-8

Will Snark For Food

2008-11-21T22:38:00.009-06:00

I'm currently looking for work.

I spent the last two years working as a contract SEO Copywriter for a large online directory service whose name I'm reluctant to mention. However, I would like to point out that since my contract with them has ended, their stock price has plummeted to 2 cents a share and the SEC has suspended trading. I'm not implying that it happened because they got rid of me, you understand. I'm just saying...

So for the past two months, I've been looking for another job. Actually, I didn't start *really* looking until this last week. I had some savings put away and I really wanted to devote some time to some other worthwhile pursuits, like playing Fallout 3 and... well, did I mention Fallout 3? I just finished it. I shot a lot of things in the head and made them explode. It was gratifying.

As you probably know, the job market currently... what's the word... oh, yeah... SUCKS! But I've got my resume posted on roughly 9,000,000 different job sites, and I've been applying like a madman. Eventually something's got to stick.

But what's really annoying me is the corporate recruiters. They call me or email out of the blue and tell me that my resume came across their desk and they have a position they think I'd be perfect for. And after some considerable hoop-hopping on my part, the job offer mysteriously vanishes. Either the company has decided to go in a different direction, or it turns out my resume isn't quite the perfect fit they originally thought it was, or they've decided to hire internally, or they've just this second instigated a hiring freeze. This has happened no less than five times over the last two weeks, and it's getting pretty goddamned disheartening. I'm getting tired of getting my hopes up just to have them arbitrarily dashed.

The most frustrating was Dave & Buster's. One of their recruiters emailed me about an Instructional Designer position. She said she'd seen my resume and she thought I'd be a great fit. At her request, I went online and went through the proper application channels. Then she set up a phone interview and asked me all about my previous writing experience with Brinker and Pizza Hut. After that interview, she said she'd like to set up a face-to-face with the other members of the team. She even went so far as to send me an email listing all the great benefits and perks I would receive if I accepted the job with them.

And the next day, she called to let me know that they had decided to put off filling that position until mid-2009. But she assured me that, if I was still available then, they'd still love to meet with me. So I've got *that* going for me.

Sigh. When did cockteasing become a valid HR strategy?

Get Down with the Dickness...

2008-11-20T15:30:00.008-06:00

About a year ago, Stephanie's friend Heather introduced me to the brilliance of Richard Cheese. Nattily dressed in his tiger-stripe tuxedo, Mr. Cheese and his band, Lounge Against the Machine, perform cheesy lounge covers of rap, rock, and pop songs. If you saw the remake of Dawn of the Dead a few years back, you might have heard his toe-tapping rendition of Disturbed's "Down with the Sickness."

Anyway, here's a little compilation of his stuff, including some of my favorites (Radiohead's "Creep", Nine Inch Nails' "Closer", and a mambo version of U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday", among others).

Note: The embedded video in this post was deleted due to suspicions of the actns/swif.t virus. This was likely a false positive, but I figured better safe than sorry.

Enjoy!

Matryoshka

2008-11-19T15:51:00.017-06:00

Here's a short story I wrote earlier this year. I haven't shopped it around yet. Hope you like it.

---------------------------------

It was a dark and stormy... well, you know.

The rain poured down like a cow pissing on a flat rock. Thunder rolled and lightning flashed, illuminating the empty parking lot of the Kingston Truck Stop.

Ben and Eric sat in a booth, staring out the window at the apocalyptic weather. It was the end of Spring Break, and they had been on their way back to school when the storm had hit.

They were the only customers in the diner. An old woman sat behind the register, reading yesterday’s paper. Occasionally she’d waddle over to top off their coffee without a word.

“You sure you don’t want anything to eat?” Ben asked Eric. He took a huge bite out of his club sandwich and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “It’s pretty good.”

“Pass,” Eric said.

“You know what they say. Truckers eat at the best places.”

“Bullshit. Truckers eat where they can park.” Eric waved a hand at the window. “Besides, they don’t seem to be lining up to get in here, do they?”

They were both suddenly bathed in headlights as an 18-wheeler pulled into the parking lot. As it turned and parked, another flash of lightning illuminated the trailer. The words PETERSON PORK PRODUCTS were emblazoned across the side, across a trio of dancing pigs. And underneath was the proud motto, “You can’t BEAT our MEAT!”

The trucker bolted across the parking lot through the rain. The cowbell on the door jangled as he shoved it open and stepped into the diner. He was just over six foot tall, with a pot belly that hung over his enormous belt buckle. His blue jeans and American flag t-shirt were soaked through to his skin, and his cowboy boots squished with each step. His face was wide and tan, and stubble covered his cheeks and chin.

Eric muttered, “I says, Pigpen, this here’s the Rubber Duck, and I’m about to put the hammer down.” Ben gave him a dirty look to shush him.

The trucker glanced over at them, and grinned. He turned back to the woman behind the register.

“Hey, Edna. Looks like business is picking up, huh?”

“Go to hell, Duke,” the woman said, not even looking up from her paper. “You want a menu?”

“Nah. Gimme a diablo sandwich and a Dr. Pepper.” With a sigh, Edna got up and went back into the kitchen.

Duke ambled across the empty diner, trailing water behind on the dirty tile floor. He pulled off his John Deere gimme cap and ran his fingers through his damp, blonde hair.

“Evening, boys,” he said in a pleasant drawl. “Mind if’n I join you? I hate to eat alone.”

Eric rolled his eyes and muttered something under his breath. But Ben, obviously the affable of the two, slid over to make room. Duke slipped into the booth next to him, his belly pressed against the edge of the table.

“Much obliged,” he said. “Where you boys headed on a night like tonight?”

“Lubbock,” Ben said. “On our way back to school.”

“You know what they say,” Duke said with a wink. “If you wanna find Lubbock, you just go west ‘til you smell it and north ‘til you step in it.”

“Is that what they say?” Eric said.

Duke chuckled. “Sounds like someone jerked a knot in your friend’s tail,” he said to Ben.

“He’s just in a pissy mood,” Ben said apologetically. “We’ve been here for about two hours now, waiting for the rain to let up.”

“No TV. No radio. Not even a jukebox in this place!” Eric shook his head. “What kind of truck stop doesn’t have a jukebox?”

“Well now,” Duke said, “as long as we’re stuck here, we might as well pass the time pleasant-like. You boys amenable to a story?”

“Sure,” Ben said.

“Why not,” Eric sighed.

“All righty then. Just sit back and listen up, ‘cause ol’ Duke’s got a tale to tell. There was this Scoutmaster who took his troop camping one night...”

* * *

The day’s hiking was done, and the scouts had pitched camp for the night. Now they were gathered around the campfire, roasting marshmallows and listening to Scoutmaster Bill tell his ghost stories.

“...and when she looked down,” Bill said dramatically, “hanging from the car door handle was... a hook!”

The kids stared at him blankly.

“A hook!” Bill repeated. “There was a hook hanging from the door handle!”

“I don’t get it,” said Sheldon. The others murmured in agreement.

“It was a hook! The serial killer’s hook! Remember? I told you the serial killer was missing a hand?”

“No you didn’t,” Clifton said. “You said he was missing a foot.”

“Oh.” Bill sighed. “Well, he was missing a hand, okay? And had a hook instead. And that’s what she saw hanging from the car door handle. Okay?”

“That story sucked,” Preston whined. Sheldon, Clifton, and the rest joined in. “Yeah, that wasn’t scary at all!”

Bill placed another marshmallow on the tip of his stick, and held it over the flame. “So, you boys wanna hear a really scary story?”

“Yeah!” The boys wriggled excitedly, scooting closer to the fire.

“All right, then. But just remember, you asked for it.” Ben looked at their eager faces and nodded. “This guy was out driving one snowy night, and he saw a hitchhiker by the side of the road...”

* * *

The hitchhiker stood ankle deep in the snow, dressed in a tattered green jacket with a stuffed duffle bag slung over his shoulder. His damp hair and beard were freckled with snowflakes, and his breath snaked from his nostrils in steamy tendrils.

Albert wondered how long the man had been standing out there, waiting for a sympathetic driver. Most people would have simply written the poor guy off as a hippie or an axe murderer and driven on by. But Albert had always made it a rule to stop for hitchhikers.

“Thanks, man,” the hitchhiker said as he climbed into the passenger seat of Albert’s Escalade. He tossed his bag into the back, then turned the heater vent directly on his face. He sniffled a couple of times, then finally sighed with relief.

“Where you headed?” Albert asked.

“Wherever you are, I guess,” the hitchhiker said. He placed his hands in front of the vent, rubbing feeling back into his numb fingers.

“You’re lucky I came by,” Albert said. “Not a lot of folks on the road tonight.”

“I don’t suppose you got nothing warm to drink?” the hitchhiker asked.

Albert pointed to the thermos in the floorboard. “Help yourself to some hot chocolate.”

The hitchhiker took a swig straight from the mouth of the thermos. He smacked his lips, then took another drink.

“I ain’t got no money,” the hitchhiker said. “I mean, I ain’t no freeloader or nothing. I’m just kinda tapped right now.”

“It’s okay,” Albert said. “Cocoa’s on me.”

“Nah, I feel like you oughta get something for your trouble.” The hitchhiker stared out the window for a few seconds, then turned back to Albert. “I know! How about I tell you a story?”

Albert shrugged. “Sure.”

“All right, man.” The hitchhiker leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “There was this crazy old lady, right? And she lived with her son...”

* * *

Harv knew he’d screwed up bad. Wednesday nights he was supposed to come straight home from work so he could eat dinner and watch Deal or No Deal with Momma. But last night, he’d decided to go out for drinks with that girl Nina who worked in the mail room. It had been after midnight when he got home, and Momma had gone to bed. So he had gone on up to his room figuring he’d settle things with her in the morning.

It was now mid-afternoon, and Harv was chained to a wall in the basement. Momma, in her worn pink bathrobe and slippers, had been ignoring his pleas all morning as she labored away.

She was building a brick wall.

“Momma, please! You don’t have to do this!”

She slathered another layer of mortar with her trowel, then laid another brick in place. A cigarette, mostly ash, hung from her lips.

“You’re a bad boy, Harv. And you know what happens to bad boys.” She plopped another brick down. “Next time Momma tells you not to mess around indecent with slutty women, maybe you’ll listen.”

“Okay, I’m sorry!” Harv’s voice was hoarse from crying and pleading. “I promise, it won’t ever happen again! Just let me out of here, and we can go back upstairs and watch General Hospital.”

Momma considered it for a second. She took the cigarette from her mouth and tapped off the ashes. Then she shrugged and put down another layer of mortar.

“Momma! Stop, okay? Just stop!”

She kept laying the bricks, oblivious to his begging. He could no longer feel his arms, which he supposed was a blessing. His wrists were raw and bleeding from the manacles.

Desperately, Harv cried out, “If you stop, I’ll tell you a story!”

Momma set the trowel down and took another drag on her cigarette. “I’m listening,” she said.

Elated, Harv launched into his tale. “Once upon a time, there was this dog who was notorious for mauling cats...”

* * *

His owners had once called him Cocoa, but amongst the Feline Nation he was known as the Butcher. He was a pit bull/dachshund mix with short, chocolate brown fur and a narrow scissor snout full of strong, sharp teeth.

He had vague memories of living in a backyard, but that had been so long ago. His owners had moved away, and he’d found himself prowling the streets and alleys, eating from dumpsters and avoiding the men in uniforms that sometimes tried to catch him.

And chasing cats. He loved to chase cats.

He couldn’t explain why, any more than he could explain his desire to sniff other dogs’ butts or pee on things he liked. But there was something about their smug, smartass cat faces that set his teeth on edge.

But he was still a good dog. Yes he was!

The word had been out for some time, and the cats had become quite masterful at avoiding him. Occasionally, he’d get their scent, but he never seemed to catch more than a fleeting glimpse as they scampered over a fence or up a tree.

So he was elated when he saw the fat mackerel tabby glaring at him from the mouth of an alley. Its tail was low and twitching, and its ears were flat. Not scared. Not threatened. Just aggressive.

He walked slowly towards the cat, hoping to close the distance before startling it. When he was near enough to see the yellow of its eyes, the cat turned and bolted into the dark alley. He let out a short, angry bark and leapt into the shadows after it. The alley came to an abrupt dead end. A stack of rotted wooden warehouse pallets lay at the end, towering above him. And resting atop the stack was the cat. It gave a yowl that made his fur itch. Several dozen yowls were offered up in response.

Nervously, he turned to see the cats filing into the alley. Most were scrawny and matted, some were missing eyes, ears, and tails. Black, brown, striped, spotted... he’d never seen so many cats in one place before. It had never occurred to him there were this many cats in the world.

They approached en masse, jumping down from fire escapes and leaping out from behind trash cans. They hissed and caterwauled as they came towards him, and he knew he was in trouble.

“Well, well, well,” said the fat tabby from up above him. “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to go hunting without your pack?”

He said nothing. He simply turned to face the cats as they advanced on him. He felt the hair on his back and neck bristle as he let loose with his most threatening growl.

“Enough!” the tabby yowled. It turned its gaze down to him and said, “You stand accused of heinous crimes against the Feline Nation. What say you, Butcher? Do you have anything to offer up in your defense before we pass judgment?”

He pondered for a moment. Then he told them a story about a man in Scotland who made a deal with the Devil...

* * *

A Scotsman had bargained with nefarious powers, offering up his soul in exchange for wealth and fame. True to his word, the Devil had granted respect and prosperity to the Scotsman. But he had then struck the poor man down with scarlet fever in the prime of his life.

So now he lay on his deathbed, wracked with scarlatina. His daughter, a handsome lass, sat by his bedside, keeping vigil and providing what comfort she could. She mopped his feverish brow, gave him cool water to drink, and read to him from his Bible.

“Be strong, Faither,” she told him, clutching his hand. “Be brave. And should the De’il come here tonight, I winna let him take ye without a fight.”

“Indeed?” A man stepped from the shadows, dark-dressed and soft-spoken. He smiled, showing plentiful white teeth. His was a face that was unearthly in its beauty, but oh, so cold and hateful his eyes!

The daughter leapt to her feet, still holding her Bible in her arms. She eyed the stranger warily, taking note of the silver cane he held in one hand, and of his oddly-shaped boots that might conceal cloven hooves. And she named him thus, “Auld Cloots!”

The pronouncement of his name was met by a tremendous crash of thunder, and the howling of hounds on the moors.

“At your service,” he said with a bow. “I’ve business with your father.

“Ye’ll nae take him,” said the daughter defiantly.

“Well, I beg to differ,” said the interloper. He held out his hand, and a yellowed document appeared with a puff of smoke. Her father’s name was signed in red in the lower corner.

“Signed, stamped, and notarized,” he said. “Twenty years ago this very night, your father did prick his thumb with a silver pin and sign his name. Upon his death, his soul will be remanded into my custody for eternity.”

The daughter leaned in to read the fine print, squinting as she ran a finger along the infernal clauses. “It says here that ye must collect my faither’s soul within twenty years of signing, or he goes free.”

“Yes,” sighed the stranger. “Your father proved to be more hale and hardy than I’d originally thought, which is why I had to smite him with the scarlet fever.” He pulled a silver watch from his pocket and consulted it. “Shouldn’t be long now.”

“I’ve a proposition for ye,” said the daughter. “A wager.”

The stranger placed the watch back in his pocket. “You don’t say.”

“I ken ye’re familiar with the Good Book,” she said, holding up the Bible.

“I’ve browsed through it,” he said. “Never read the whole thing. Those damned begats put me right to sleep.”

“I wager I can tell ye a story out of this Bible that ye’ve ne’er heard. If I win, ye tear up that contract and give my faither some peace.”

“And if you lose?”

The daughter regarded the stranger, meeting his evil gaze with an icy stare of her own. “If I lose, then ye can take me down to yer black pit as well.”

He considered her offer, then smiled his evil smile. “Done, and done,” spake he. “Whenever you’re ready.”

She gazed over at her ailing father, and hugged the Bible to her bosom for comfort. Then she took a deep breath and began her tale. “Now it came to pass on a certain day, that Jesus said unto his disciples, Let us go over unto the other side of the lake...”

* * *

22 One day Jesus said to his disciples, “Let us go over unto the other side of the lake.” So they got into a boat and set out.

23 As they sailed, he fell asleep. A squall came down on the lake, so the boat was being swamped and they were in great danger.

24 The disciples argued among themselves about the proper course of action. Peter spoke unto the others, saying, “A prudent fisherman would head for shore to escape the storm. But to do so might also be seen as a lack of faith.

25 “Verily, I say we should alter our course and head into the squall, thus demonstrating to our master that our belief is beyond reproach.”

26 But Philip rebuked him, saying, “Salvation will come about through our own actions, not through foolhardy gestures.

27 “For it is written that God helps those whom help themselves.”

28 “Actually, it isn’t,” said Jesus, shaking his head. “But that’s okay. Lots of people make that mistake.”

29 And the disciples rejoiced to see that their master had awakened and joined them, and they beseeched him for guidance, asking “What would Jesus do?”

30 And Jesus told them this parable: “There was once an emperor who had seven sons...”

* * *

The Jade Emperor called forth his seven sons, who knelt before him. “My time will soon be at an end,” he told them, “and I must decide which of you is most worthy to rule in my stead. As a good ruler must willingly provide for his people, so will you demonstrate your capacity for giving to me.

“Each of you will bestow upon me the greatest gift you can. And he that gives the finest gift of all shall inherit my empire.”

The first son, Sun Yi, presented his father with a large urn filled with flawless diamonds. The second, Sun Er, brought in dozens of royal robes, all crafted from the finest silk. His third son, Sun San, unveiled an exquisite, golden statue of a belly dancer, while the fourth, Sun Si, presented him with a cask of potent spirits. From his fifth son, Sun Wu, he received a massive tapestry depicting his many military victories. And from his sixth, Sun Liu, he received a dozen beautiful Ukrainian horses.

But the seventh son, Sun Qi, approached the throne empty handed, and the emperor was puzzled. “Where, then,” he said, “is your gift for me?”

“Material possessions are fleeting, Father,” said the seventh son. “I bring you a gift more enduring than any other. I bring you a story.”

His brothers laughed amongst themselves until the emperor silenced them with an upraised hand. “A story? Very well. Give me your story, my son.”

The seventh son bowed and took a seat on the steps, at the feet of his father. “There is a cave deep beneath the world...”

* * *

...and in this cave, the goddess Ramistoka sleeps and dreams the world into existence. There is a legend that a mortal can enter the cave, approach the goddess, and whisper his fondest wish into her ear. Upon hearing the wish, Ramistoka will dream it into being. Thus can a mortal achieve his heart’s desire.

Alamon is a miserable man who has led a passive life. Five years ago, his wife left him for a traveling merchant. Three years ago, his oxen perished of the blight. And last year, a fire destroyed his farm and home. And through it all, Alamon’s only response has been to shake his fists at the heavens and cry out, “Why me?”

But Alamon has decided he will be a plaything of the fates no more. Rather than sit back and wait for misfortune to fall upon him, he is going to take action and make things happen.

The road is hard and fraught with peril, but Alamon finally makes it to the Sacred Mountains. The climb is difficult, but he scales the cliffs and eventually reaches the narrow, winding path. He braves the snow and ice as he presses on, knowing true happiness lies at the end of the trail.

And then, at last, he finds himself in the massive cavern. Ramistoka, vast and beautiful, lies on her back atop an enormous stone dais. Her arms are crossed on her chest, and her gentle snores echo throughout the chamber.

Alamon approaches her reverently, wondering what he’ll wish for. He climbs to the top of the dais and walks the length of her body. Her skin is pale blue and flawless, and smells of jasmine.

His heart pounding, he approaches her head. He’s mulled it over, and he’s finally figured out his most fervent desire. He doesn’t care about his oxen, or his farm, or his home. He doesn’t even want his wife back.

There’s only one thing that can make him happy. He leans into Ramistoka’s ear, and he whispers, “Wake up.”

* * *

Sun Qi finished his story, and the throne room was silent.

“A bleak tale,” the Jade Emperor finally said, “but there is much wisdom in it. Your story is truly a worthy gift, my son.”

“I’m glad you are pleased, Father.”

“But I’ve decided that my successor shall be Sun San.”

There were some angry and surprised outcries from the others as the third son stepped up proudly to the throne.

“But why?” asked Sun Qi. “I thought you liked my story!”

The emperor shrugged. “It was okay. But I really liked this gold belly dancer statue your brother gave me. It has rubies where the nipples should be!”

* * *

39 And when Jesus completed his story, the disciples scratched their heads in puzzlement. None had understanding of the parable, but none wanted to admit to their ignorance.

40 It was Simon Peter who finally spoke, saying, “It was an interesting lesson, Master, but I think I prefer the one about the man leaving footprints on the beach.”

* * *

The daughter reached the end of her tale and regarded the stranger, who stared at her incredulously.

“Um, I don’t think that story is actually in the Bible,” he said.

“Yes, it is,” she insisted. “It’s, er, in Deuteronomy somewhere.”

The stranger sighed. “Fine. We’ll call it a draw. But I’m still taking your father’s soul.”

At this, the bedridden Scotsman suddenly sat up and proclaimed, “Ye’ll nae be taking no souls today, Auld Nick. For I am Sir Alexander Fleming, and I’ve recovered from the scarlet fever thanks to my recent invention of penicillin!”

The daughter clapped her hands with glee and ran over to hug her father. The stranger shook his head and muttered, “I knew I should have gone with a heart attack.” Then he vanished in a cloud of brimstone.

* * *

Harv wrapped up his story and smiled at Momma. “So, what did you think?”

“It’s the worst story I've ever heard,” said Momma. “I don’t even think Fleming had a daughter.”

Ignoring her son’s screams, Momma finished the wall. And when the last brick was in place, she went upstairs to watch her stories.

* * *

The hitchhiker pointed at a deserted house as they drove past it and said, “That was the house, man. Right there. And they say the ghost of that Harv dude wanders this very road, telling his tale to any who will listen.”

The hitchhiker drained the last of the hot cocoa from the thermos, then tossed it onto the floorboard.

“Was it you?” Albert asked.

“What?”

“Were you the guy that got walled up in that basement? Are you his ghost?”

The hitchhiker snorted. “No way, man! But that would’ve been cool!” He held up his hands menacingly and let out a ghostly, “Oooooooooh!”

His goofy grin faded, and he suddenly clutched at his throat. “Cocoa...” he wheezed.

Albert nodded. “Yeah, it’s poisoned. You really shouldn’t hitchhike, you know? It’s dangerous.”

The hitchhiker was still gasping and thrashing weakly when Albert turned onto the dirt road and followed it into a snowy field. He got out of the car, grabbed the hitchhiker by his long hair, and dragged him into the snow. Then he took a shovel from his trunk and went to work, digging a new shallow grave next to the other sixteen...

* * *

“Because he was a serial killer,” Scoutmaster Bill finished up. “You see?”

The kids glared at him over the campfire, shaking their heads. “That’s so lame,” Preston said. “Your stories suck!”

“Yeah,” said Sheldon and Clifton and the others.

Bill felt himself getting flustered. “Well, that’s because I haven’t gotten to the scary part yet,” he said. “Um, because when Albert was burying the hitchhiker, he was suddenly attacked... by a VAMPIRE!”

There was no response from the kids. Bill looked over and saw they were all slumped over. Their hair was white and standing on end, and their eyes were wide with horror. His entire troop had died of fright.

“Well, I warned them it was scary,” Scoutmaster Bill murmured to himself. Nodding with approval, he roasted another marshmallow.

* * *

As Duke’s story came to a close, Eric glanced out the window and smiled for the first time that night.

“Dude,” he said, nudging Ben. “It stopped raining!”

As suddenly as it had come, the storm had blown over. A full moon lit the night sky and cast reflections in the puddles throughout the parking lot.

Duke polished off his sandwich and gulped down the rest of his Dr. Pepper. Then he slid his massive frame out of the booth and stood. He gave Ben and Eric a respectful salute and said, “Well boys, my work here is done. It’s time for me to be moving on.”

While he was paying for his meal, Ben timidly called his name. Duke turned, an enigmatic smile on his face.

“It... it was more than just a story,” Ben said. “Wasn’t it?”

“Maybe it was, boys. Maybe it was.” He gave them a wink, and walked outside. The cowbell on the door clanged behind him. Ben stared through the window, watching in awe as Duke climbed up into his cab and pulled his big rig onto the highway. He gave a tug on his horn, and then sped off into the night.

For several minutes, nobody said a word. There was no sound except for the rumble of distant thunder and the rustle of Edna’s newspaper. Ben couldn’t escape the feeling that something wondrous had happened here tonight. He wondered where Duke’s travels would take him next. And he wondered if he’d ever see the mysterious trucker again.

"Hey, wait a minute!" Eric shouted, slapping the tabletop. "What the hell happened to the dog?"

I Stand Alone on the Word of God...

2008-11-18T21:48:00.010-06:00

I've read the Bible. Seriously. From cover to cover. Admittedly, I might have skimmed over the begats to get to the good stuff, but I have actually read from Genesis to Revelation. I don't claim to be an expert, but I am pretty goddamn good at answering Bible questions on Jeopardy.

And having read it, I'm privy to a number of things that many Christians seem to have missed. For example, I know that Jesus commanded his disciples to hate their parents, wives, children, brothers, sisters, and themselves (Luke 14:26). I remember a particularly troubling story where a bunch of kids were making fun of Elisha's bald spot, and God retaliated by sending a couple of bears to slaughter them (2 Kings 2:24). And I recall God threatening to corrupt the seed of the Judah priests and smear shit on their faces (Malachi 2:3).

Since a lot of Christians haven't actually *read* the book on which they've based their entire lives, they have no idea this stuff is in there. They yammer on and on about how the Bible is the literal and unerring word of God "because it says so, right there in the Bible!" But when you bring up the miracle where Jesus pulled money out of a fish (Matthew 17:26) or that story of a prostitute who lusted after men with genitals like donkeys and emissions like horses (Ezekiel 23:20), they just look at you like you've lost your mind. And when you finally show it to them, they'll just claim that you're taking it out of context or that you somehow lack the ability to truly understand because you insist on thinking with your brain instead of your heart.

(And while we're on the subject, if one more Christian tries to tell me that the expression "God helps those who help themselves" comes from the Bible, I'm going to call Jesus collect and have Him revoke your salvation.)

-----------------------

One Bible story that used to bother me to no end comes from Exodus. Moses has just seen the burning bush, and is on his way back to Egypt with his wife Zipporah and infant son to confront Pharaoh. And then, this happens:

And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the LORD met him, and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet, and said, Surely a bloody husband art thou to me. So he let them go: then she said, A bloody husband thou art, because of the circumcision. (Exodus 4:24-26).

I *eventually* figured out that Moses had forgotten to circumcise his son, which had apparently pissed God off. Even knowing that, it's still a creepy story. But I remember reading this passage when I was 12 years old, and thinking WHAT THE FUCK?

When I was working at Brinker back in 1997, I brought up this particular Bible verse to my friend Dave. Dave is a Mormon but, more importantly, he's smart and he has a sense of humor. I once tried to turn him from his sinning Mormon ways by giving him this Jack Chick tract, but Dave clung stubbornly to his faith. He's nothing if not devout.

Anyway, I mentioned this verse to Dave as an example of the weird, creepy stuff that people forget is in the Bible. And of course, Dave thought I was making it up. So we went to my computer, hopped on Nobel Prize winner Al Gore's Internet, and looked it up.

I'll never forget that moment. Dave just shook his head, laughing. "I've never read that before. I had no idea it was in there."

My officemate Brenda said, "You shouldn't ever argue religion with Irby. He really knows the Bible."

For some reason, this filled me with pride. I was actually beaming when I said, "Why, thank you."

Then Brenda added, "Of course, the Devil can quote scripture to suit his purposes."

It Works If You Work It

2008-11-17T23:37:00.003-06:00

You know how it goes. I drag myself back to the blogosphere after months of neglecting my threes of faithful readers, with all the noble intentions of once again immersing myself in Nobel Prize winner Al Gore's Internet. I manage to crank out a couple of admittedly brilliant and insightful posts that equate conservatives with the Ku Klux Klan and imply that our president might possibly be clinically retarded. And then I vanish once again, leaving a void in your lives that you try in vain to fill with family, friends, and religion.

But I'm going to try something different this time. I'm going to post every day for a week. I know that doesn't sound like much, but I learned long ago that it's important to set realistic and easily attenable goals if you want to succeed, which is why I got so many Cs in college.

So I'll try it for a week. And if I make it, I'll try it for another week. And so on and so on until I finally overcome my ~~addiction to Asian furry porn~~ general sloth and malaise. Or until I inevitably spiral into failure.

Blogger Love (Oh Eee Oh Eee Oh)

2008-11-14T00:05:00.004-06:00

I just discovered this new Blog Following thing totally by accident. I clicked on the Blogger Dashboard, and saw that I had, and I quote, "2 Followers". Now, I have to admit that I like the sound of that. "Followers" implies that I hold some kind of tight psychological grip over these people, and I was wondering just how long I'd have to string them along before I could convince them to rob banks in my name.

But that kind of thinking leads to massive Kool Aid tragedies, and frankly, who needs that kind of headache? So I guess the nicest thing to do is to give a shout out to my Followers and try my best not to abuse this newfound messianic power.

(I've just noticed that "Follower" is one of those words that stops looking like a word when you type it too many times. Sort of like "obey" or "Palin 2012!")

So to Jana (30-Something With Cats) and Jenna P. (Random Musings), I greet thee from the heart of Nobel Prize winner Al Gore's Internet. Just let me know if you guys decide to get some t-shirts made up or something.

Peace unto you, my children!

Once You Go Barack, You'll Never Go Back!

2008-11-05T11:36:00.006-06:00

Remember back in 2004, when Bush won the election with 51% of the popular vote, and the Republicans declared it a landslide of historical proportions representing a mandate not only from the American voters, but from the Lord God Himself?

Well, it's official. Barack Obama is our president elect with 349 electoral votes and 52% of the popular vote. So apparently God decided to vote Democrat this year.

Obama delivered a truly inspirational speech upon winning the election, which made me realize how long it's been since we've had someone in the White House who can speak in public. Or, you know, read.

Obama's speech was far more unifying than anything I've heard from Democrats or Republicans in the last 30 years. Seriously, it was stirring and moving and eloquent. If you managed to sit through it without getting just a little choked up and hopeful for the future, then all I can say is thanks for reading my blog, Vice President Cheney.

So can Obama live up to the hype? Admittedly, that bar has been set pretty low over the past few decades. And the man is inheriting a massive shit sandwich, what with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention our limping economy. Despite altruistic aspirations of reaching across the aisle, many players on both sides remain too entrenched in partisan politics to give a damn about the welfare of our country.

There have been a lot of naysayers lately who have been sounding the death knell for the U.S. They claim we're circling the drain, that we're an empire in decline. Frankly, I'm a little more optimistic than that. I figure if this nation can survive a Civil War, a Great Depression, and two world wars, it can recover from eight years of Bush!

A lot of Republicans are blaming McCain for losing the election. And, admittedly, his campaign was disorganized and, at times, baffling. But the fault doesn't lie with McCain, but with Bush and his administration. The last time the Republicans suffered a disgraceful presidency was Nixon in the 1970s. Many thought the party would never recover, but Reagan successfully married the GOP to the conservative Christian right in the 1980s and reinvented the Republicans as the moral backbone of the U.S.

(An unfortunate side effect of this was that the words "Democrat", "liberal", and "evil" all became synonymous in the conservative lexicon. Because once you decide that your party is the embodiment of God's will on earth, it's only natural to view the other as a manifestation of Satan.)

But the point is, the American people wanted a change. Obama earmarked change as the keystone of his campaign early on, and successfully painted McCain and the Republicans as "more of the same." McCain and his team jumped on the change bandwagon as well, but it was too little too late. No matter how hard he and Palin tried to paint themselves as mavericks, the voters just didn't buy it. Obama's victory isn't an indictment of the Republicans, but of the political stagnation they represent.

Obama promised to change things for the better, and 52% of American voters believed him. Including me. I'm not used to feeling optimistic. It's kind of scary.

Make us proud again, Barack!

Mercer '08: Let's Go Crazy!!!

2008-08-19T12:43:00.013-05:00

My dad was divorced around eight times. I say "around" because I'm not 100% sure of the actual number. There were three or four stepmoms that I never actually got around to meeting before the marriage inevitably failed. Plus, he married and divorced a woman named Carolyn twice, probably because he'd lost track and didn't realize they'd been married before. So I'm not sure how to count that one.

My mom, God bless her, has been through three divorces. The first was from my dad, so I don't think we can hold that one against her. The second was from J.R., a rugged good ol' boy who made it his personal mission to save me from my own potential gayness. The third was from a guy named Frank, about whom the less said, the better.

So that's 11 divorces between the two of them, give or take. I used to joke that my first marriage was doomed to failure, and I should just marry someone I don't like and get it out of my system. Then I could concentrate on making the second one work.

So what's my point? I'm glad you asked, Charlene. My point is, I have a feeling that's what the Republicans are doing in 2008 by running John McCain. They know they're doomed to lose this election, so they're just running someone they don't like to get him out of the way. Then they'll concentrate on making the 2012 election count. McCain is basically a political palate cleanser.

So is this really the year for the Democrats to be hauling out the big guns? Sure, Obama would be a great president. But it almost seems wasteful to pit him against an also-ran like McCain. Maybe we should save him up for 2012 as well.

So who should the Democrats run instead? I'm glad you asked, Gretchen. I think the Democrats (or "Dems," as they're called by FOX News, because multisyllabic words are problematic for most of their viewers) need to send a message. And that message should be, "Hey! You Republicans aren't the only ones who can elect an insane, illiterate, borderline retard into office!"

In these crazy times, we need a president who is, not to put too fine a point on it, nuttier than a sack of assholes. We need Lee L. Mercer, Jr..

The first thing you may notice is that he bears an eerie resemblance to Michael Clarke Duncan. The next thing you'll probably notice is HOLY SHIT, THIS GUY IS OUT OF HIS GODDAMN MIND!!!!

From the first paragraph illuminating his Campaign Theme to the final clause of his Privacy and Legal Policies, you'll realize that Mr. Mercer composes a lot of sentences by randomly stringing together unrelated terms. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see huge chunks of his manifesto spelled out verbatim on his refrigerator with those little magnetic words. But keep digging down into this morass of haphazard sentences and Wanton Capitalization, and you'll eventually get to the meat of Mr. Mercer's madness.

You see, when Mr. Mercer was in the ROTC, he was tasked with developing the "Eye Spy Community-Military Intelligence (All Three)" network, to which he and all other U.S. citizens were connected by an "intelligence hotwire" that was installed and cannot be removed. Now this sort of thing may sound fantastic and beyond the realm of possibility, but that's only because you're not a "Road Scholar" with "millions of doctor's degrees" like Mr. Mercer. If you had the proper qualifications, you might be able to appreciate the accomplishments of this man who "invented computerized education and the applications to make computerized education learn."

This Eye Spy Community-Military Intelligence (All Three) surveillance network is the true power behind the United States, and actually serves as a secret government (known as the "United States Government's Technocracy"). Since Mr. Mercer is already president of that government, he's ready to go public and assume command of the other U.S. government. You know, the one that everybody knows about.

Once he's in charge, Mr. Mercer intends to use his super powers to fix all of our nation's problems. In addition to vindicating the U.S. in the Iran War (!) and bringing criminal organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the Communist Party to their knees, he insists that he'll be able to use his amazing computer brain to balance the budget. In fact, he claims that there will be enough money left over to pay each U.S. citizen $350,000 a year for almost 100 years. HOW THE FUCK CAN YOU NOT VOTE FOR THIS GUY???

Here are some other intriguing reasons for Mr. Mercer's candidacy, in the man's own words. Seriously.

To prove I have developed a crime prevention program and a city warfare program in Business and Commerce Intelligence to solve the Crime War, Drug War, The Fifty Years War, the Iran War and any other war that might come about in the world in the future National and International.

To prove I have solved every crime in the world as it happens from zero to start to finish for every crime done in Business and Commerce Intelligence National and International.

To Prove I am a University of Texas at Austin ROTC to West Point Military Academy Road Scholar and Scholar of The World Academic Bid awarded doctor's degrees student graduate keep in student status in the U.S. Army Military Intellgience Academy Camp Bullis San Antonio, Texas, Houston, Texas a Texas Congress, Texas Senate and United States Congress Business and Commerce Intelligence Project/Program took over by the United States Federal Congress which I am the administer National and International.

To Prove I will be the 2nd Negro President of the United States of America in 2008 in my Business Commerce Intelligence National and International.

To Prove my Presidential Campaign Committee joined my me in my Presidential Campaign and Eye Spy Community-Military Intelligence Business and Commerce Intelligence, my board and staff and me saved the lives of every person alive at this future time.

To Prove President George Walker Bush, Jr. and other Public Officials have been Impeached by the United States Congress in 2004 for torture of me and my family, capital murder in my family, Espionage and other crimes against the state and humanity.

To Prove the government owes me Zillions of Dollars in money and is refraining to pay me and my business Eye Spy Community-Military Intelligence (All Three) Business and Commerce Intelligence National and International.

To Prove government employees are operating organize crime rape gangs solved by Eye Spy Community-Military Intelligence Business and Commerce Intelligence Electronic Surveillance National and International.

To Prove the definition Kill in the Random House Dictionary of the English Language College Edition Larence Urdang Editor in Chief Stuart Berg Flexner Managing Editor in All Displines across the board through Military Intelligence.

To Proved I Lee L. Mercer, Jr. cleaned up the Law Books Of the United States Of America across the Board Notate, Schematic and Tracking National and International.

To Prove the United States Government killed my sex life, my wife sex life, my daughter-in -laws sex life both may sons and other of my family members sex life with Espionage Experimentation and Espionage Exloitation sex killing.

To Prove Jeb Bush is all in my house with disease.

To Prove the Bush Family is a Death Order.

To Prove My only Guardian Former Governor of Texas Ann Richards has just joined me MERCER FOR PRESIDENT CAMPAIGN and Lt. Col. Charles Wallace of The United States Army Military Intelligence Academy.

To Prove America is America.

To Prove these perpetrators are trying to stop me from running for President of The United States. They are Vice-President Dick Chenny, Former Vice-President Al Gore and their Assessors. They keep killing my mother and our family the evidence is on my mother's and our Criminal Intelligence Electronic Surveillance Health Recorder. I do not want these perpetrators to kill my Mother.

RELIGION PROGRAM TO WORK AMERICA. The program has solved everything in the world such as 1. All the crime 2. The lack of world peace 3. All the poverty 4. All communications 5. All prejudice 6. All phenomenons guaranteed to be true by the United States Army. This is a U.S. Army FBI ROTC religion program. This made all of my Doctor's degrees.

MERCER 2008
Jeb Bush Is All In My House With Disease!

"Grace!"

2008-08-14T14:00:00.011-05:00

As children, most of us are taught the following prayer:

God is great, God is good,
Let us thank him for our food.
Amen.

(Some people go on to learn additional stanzas about "being fed" and "daily bread," but frankly, that's just overkill. It's like learning the second verse of the Star Spangled Banner, and who the hell needs that?)

So like most normal kids who are indoctrinated at an early age, I learned to Bless the Food™ by rote. Any time I was called on to say the blessing, I would simply bow my head and recite the prayer I had been taught.

As I got older, the prayer went through several mutations...

Good bread, good meat,
Good God, let's eat.

Or...

Rub-a-dub-dub,
Thanks for the grub.
Yaaaaaaaay, God.
Amen, dig in!

But by the time I became a teenager, praying by rote was no longer acceptable. Or rather, praying a prayer that someone else had written was no longer acceptable. My grandfather had been praying the same prayer for so many years that he had it down to a science, and every time he "asked the blessing," he would speed pray like an auctioneer.

Accept this thanks our Father for this day we ask that you bless this food bless it to the nourishment of our bodies...

About that time, my younger stepbrother J.J. began receiving the prayer duty. I, for one, was happy because it meant I wouldn't have to do it anymore. Also, J.J. hadn't managed to commit the entire prayer to memory, so his blessing would always be along the lines of "God is great. Amen."

One day, after visiting the First Baptist Church in Winnsboro, Texas, we all went back to my grandparents house for lunch. My grandmother had done her traditional pot roast, and we were all pretty hungry. So when the time came to say the blessing, my sister and I both chimed in, "Let J.J. say it!"

Unfortunately, J.J. had apparently received some schooling in proper praying since the last time, and he went to town.

God is great, God is good,
Let us thank him for our food.
By his hand, we are fed.
Thanks for this, our daily bread.
God bless Daddy and Momma and Meme and Daddy Pops and Mamaw and Papaw and Gran and Chris and Sunny and Uncle Mark and Aunt Pam and Rob and Amber and Zane and Heather and Teresa and Jan and Bubba and Lee Wayne and Leroy...

...and so on, for about five minutes. My mom finally interrupted his heartfelt prayer by saying, "Hey! God knows who's in your family, okay? Just say Amen."

Anyway, once non-recited prayers became the norm, I became very uncomfortable and self-conscious any time I was asked to pray in front of people. I'd stumble through something about "thank you for the food and the weather and, you know, all that." I made a couple of ill-fated attempts to emulate my grandfather, but I lacked his mastery and got my tongue all tangled up over "AcceptthisthanksourFather..."

So imagine my joy some years later, when I was in college, and my mom married a Catholic guy. Suddenly, recited prayers were back in vogue! Any time I joined them for dinner, we would recite:

Bless us, oh Lord, for these gifts we're about to receive from thy bounty through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Simple. Elegant. To the point. I wasn't a Catholic. Hell, I wasn't even a Christian by that point. But to me, it was an out. It was a handy, socially-acceptable prayer that I could whip out any time someone put me on the spot. Even after mom divorced the guy, I kept the prayer.

So fast forward a few years later. It was Thanksgiving, and my sister and I were having dinner with my dad and grandmother. (This was before they died, otherwise this would be a truly creepy story.) We'd all just sat down, and Dad said, "Hey, Chrisco. Why don't you bless it?"

So we bowed our heads, and I said, "Bless us, oh Lord, for these gifts we're about to receive..."

When I was done, I looked up, and everyone was looking at me strangely. My grandmother asked, "Where did you hear that prayer?"

My sister said, "I think it's a Catholic prayer," in the same tone of voice that someone might say, "I think that's a turd in your coffee."

I shrugged. "It's the only prayer I know all the words to."

My sister was simply outraged. "You're not supposed to just recite something. You're supposed to pray what's in your heart."

"Whatever. Can we eat now?"

"We need to bless the food for real," my sister insisted.

"Fine," I sighed. I bowed my head again and this time prayed, "Dear Lord, we ask that you smite us not, miserable wretches that we are, but rather you spare us for another day in your service..."

That's as far as I got before I started laughing. Dad laughed, too. My grandmother and my sister, not so much. In fact, it was over an hour before my sister would even speak to me again.

But nobody's asked me to bless the food since then.

Amen.

The Little Red Hen

2008-08-12T15:50:00.005-05:00

A few weeks ago, I received this in an email:
---------------------------

Once upon a time, on a farm in Virginia , there was a little red hen who scratched about the barnyard until she uncovered quite a few grains of wheat.

She called all of her neighbors together and said, 'If we plant this wheat, we shall have bread to eat. Who will help me plant it?'

'Not I,' said the cow.
'Not I,' said the duck.
'Not I,' said the pig.
'Not I,' said the goose.

'Then I will do it by myself,' said the little red hen, and so she did. The wheat grew very tall and ripened into golden grain.

'Who will help me reap my wheat?' asked the little red hen.

'Not I,' said the duck.
'Out of my classification,' said the pig.
'I 'd lose my seniority,' said the cow.
'I'd lose my unemployment compensation,' said the goose.

'Then I will do it by myself,' said the little red hen, and so she did.

At last it came time to bake the bread.

'Who will help me bake the bread?' asked the little red hen.

'That would be overtime for me,' said the cow.
'I'd lose my welfare benefits,' said the duck.
'I'm a dropout and never learned how,' said the pig.
'If I'm to be the only helper, that's discrimination,' said the goose.

'Then I will do it by myself,' said the little red hen.

She baked five loaves and held them up for all of her neighbors to see. They wanted some and, in fact, demanded a share. But the little red hen said, 'No, I shall eat all five loaves.'

'Excess profits!' cried the cow.
'Capitalist leech!' screamed the duck.
'I demand equal rights!' yelled the goose.
The pig just grunted in disdain.

And they all painted 'Unfair!' picket signs and marched around and around the little red hen, shouting obscenities.

Then the Farmer came. He said to the little red hen, 'You must not be so greedy.'

'But I earned the bread,' said the little red hen.

'Exactly,' said the farmer. 'That is what makes our free enterprise system so wonderful. Anyone in the barnyard can earn as much as he wants. But under our modern government regulations, the productive workers must divide the fruits of their labor with those who are lazy and idle.'

And they all lived happily ever after, including the little red hen, who smiled and clucked, 'I am grateful, for now I truly understand.'

But her neighbors became quite disappointed in her. She never again baked bread because she joined the 'party' and got her bread free. And all the politicians smiled. 'Fairness' had been established.

Individual initiative had died, but nobody noticed; perhaps no one cared...so long as there was free bread that 'the rich' were paying for.

EPILOGUE

Bill Clinton is getting $12 million for his memoirs.

Hillary got $8 million for hers.

That's $20 million for the memories from two people, who for eight years, repeatedly testified, under oath, that they couldn't remember anything.

IS THIS A GREAT BARNYARD OR WHAT?

---------------------------

The person who sent it to me did it just to wind me up (she later admitted as much). And the fact is, it worked. I sat down to write a self-righteous, angry rebuttal about so-called Christian conservatives who excuse their lack of compassion and charity by telling themselves that all poor people are "lazy and idle." But about three paragraphs in, I realized I was accomplishing nothing. She'd probably read the opening sentence, hit delete, and then chide me for taking her joke too seriously.

So I abandoned my original rant and wrote this response instead:
---------------------------

Once upon a time, on a farm in Virginia, there was a little red hen who scratched about the barnyard until she uncovered quite a few grains of wheat.

She called all of her neighbors together and said, "If we plant this wheat, I'll have far more bread than I'll ever need in my life. Who will help me plant it?"

"Will you give us any bread if we help?" asked the cow.

"I'll give you the absolute bare minimum required by law," said the hen. "And you're lucky to get that, with this job market!"

So the cow, duck, pig, and goose labored for eight hours a day and received barely enough bread to keep them alive. Meanwhile, the hen had so much that she couldn't possibly eat it all.

Eventually, the other animals went to the farmer and asked, "Can you give us some bread? We're starving."

"Sorry, I don't have any bread left," said the farmer. "I spent it all on liberating Iraq and tax cuts for the wealthy."

"That's right," said the hen gleefully. "I made out like a bandit!"

"But we're starving," the animals cried. "And we don't have enough bread to feed our families."

"It's your own fault for being so lazy and idle," said the hen.

"Sorry," said the farmer. "I have to do what the hen tells me."

So the hen fired all the other animals and outsourced the breadmaking jobs to a contracting firm overseas. And as the farmer's popularity declined, he desperately tried to distract the angry animals by blaming all of the barnyard's problems on same-sex marriage and foreigners.

The poor, starving animals eventually died, but nobody noticed; perhaps nobody cared...so long as "the rich" still had their bread.

EPILOGUE

Ronald Reagan was paid $6 million for his memoirs, which is kind of remarkable since he repeatedly testified, under oath, that he couldn't remember whether or not he had illegally traded arms to Iran.

ISN'T IT FUNNY HOW SELECTIVE MEMORY CAN BE?

---------------------------
What can I say? Sometimes it's just better to fight passive-aggression with passive-aggression.

Anyone Still Out There?

2008-08-11T16:15:00.004-05:00

Hey there. I'm back. Usually, when I return after a lengthy hiatus, I put up a hilarious cartoon of Morbidly Obese Jesus, and I go into exquisite detail about what I've been up to over the ensuing months. But seriously, who has the time?

So, for any inquiring minds out there, I'll tell you the following:

1. Stephanie and I are still together and it's going great. We're in love, and nerd love is the purest and most wholesome kind of love there is.

2. The play that Sean and I wrote last year, Captain Phantasm vs. the Nefarious Dr. Noir: A Melodramatic Serial in Three Parts, will probably be in Pocket Sandwich Theatre's 2009 lineup. Wooohoooo!

3. I'm still contracting for an online directory service whose name I can't mention for fear that their corporate image would be irreparable damaged if they were affiliated with a blog of such low moral character. They recently laid off a buttload of people, but somehow I dodged that bullet. My contract runs until the end of September, and my boss is hoping to get it extended.

4. Speaking of blogs of low moral character, I just started a new site that focuses on Jack Chick and his hilarious fundamentalist Chick tracts. Check out Jack Chick's Funnybook Gospel (or How I Learned To Stop Thinking and Love the Lord).

And that's it! I missed you guys! And if you're reading this right now, then I missed *you* most of all. Just don't tell the others. They'll get jealous.

Aw, hell. Why not?

I'm Baaaaaaaaaack!

2008-03-27T13:21:00.001-05:00

Sorry I haven't been more bloggy. I blame jet lag and the devaluation of the American dollar. But I'll make up for lost time, with a couple of epic posts about my travels and travails abroad. Plus, pictures of naked statues and stuff.

Ciao, hepcats!

Roman Holiday: The Journey Begins!

2008-03-13T06:48:00.006-05:00

How about a little traveling music? Something with zip! With pep! With schmoop! What's schmoop? Hell, I don't know! I've been up all night packing! Get off my back!

Let's do the Vatican Rag...

Take it, Tom!

First you get down on your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect,
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!

Do whatever steps you want, if
You have cleared them with the Pontiff.
Everybody say his own Kyrie eleison,
Doin' the Vatican Rag.

Get in line in that processional,
Step into that small confessional,
There, the guy who's got religion'll
Tell you if your sin's original.

If it is, try playin' it safer,
Drink the wine and chew the wafer,
Two, four, six, eight,
Time to transubstantiate!

So get down upon your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect,
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!

Make a cross on your abdomen,
When in Rome do like a Roman,
Ave Maria! Gee it's good to see ya!
Gettin' ecstatic an'
Sorta dramatic an'
Doin' the Vatican Rag!

Links, Man!

2008-03-12T15:44:00.008-05:00

Enjoy these weird-ass videos from Picnicface. They'll make you laugh. They'll make you think. But mostly, they'll get inside your head and KICK ITS ASS!!!

Powerthirst
The most extreme sports drink ever! Give me Powerthirst or go to hell!

Powerthirst 2
Too energetic for normal sports! It's like flying a jet plane... made of biceps!

NFL Crunch Time
A football game for the XBOX 360 that's so realistic, it includes prison.

When In Rome...

2008-03-11T14:03:00.011-05:00

Can't talk now. I'm going to Rome! You know, where that Pope guy lives?

To celebrate her retirement, my mom announced she was taking the family on a trip to Italy. So last December, I went and got my passport, and I cleared the time off with my boss, and I figured, "Hey, I've got three months. Plenty of time."

And then, it sort of snuck up on me. So now we're leaving on Thursday afternoon, and I'm scrambling to make sure I actually have enough clothes to last a week, because who knows if they have washing machines or even running water there?

I know Rome is a major metropolitan city with all the amenities of modern life, but every time I think about Italy, I imagine peasant women crushing grapes while men with big, bushy mustaches shoot each other in vendettas. I know it's an unfair stereotype, but everybody over there probably thinks we all wear big cowboy hats and bandannas while riding our horses to the trading post to buy chaw and fatback. Which is completely absurd, because I don't even own a bandanna!

I'm going to take my laptop with me, so I should be able to post some while I'm there. Assuming there's a connection to Nobel Prize winner Al Gore's Internet at the hotel. And assuming they have, you know, electricity...

I just know I'm going to be one of those Ugly Americans. I don't speak Italian, or Latin, or whatever they speak in Rome. I know nothing about their local customs. Does Caesar outrank the Pope? If you see a gladiator walking down the street, do you salute? Are all the phones labeled with Is, Vs, and Xs?

Sorry if this post seems a bit mean-spirited. But ever since I found out that the Romans were the ones who killed my Lord, I've been a bit angry. Not vendetta-angry, you understand. Not furious enough to, say, leave a horse's head in anyone's bed. But a mite peeved.

Ah, but I tease the ancient empire that was brought down by it's own decadence even as it crumbled beneath the might of the invading barbarians. I'm actually looking forward to this trip! My nephew Christopher is going with us, and he's been learning the language by listening to CDs. So if I need to find a library or ask how much for the blue sweater, then he'll be my go-to guy. Otherwise, I'll have to resort to the tried and true method of speaking English loudly and slowly until everyone around me learns it by brute force.

I'm ready to drink in the heady brew of another culture, and I've already learned some interesting things. For example, did you know that my age and my shirt size are the same in Rome? XL! Isn't that fascinating?

Ciao, hepcats!

Back on Nobel Prize Winner Al Gore's Internet!!!

2008-03-06T13:58:00.004-06:00

By the way, that last post was done from HOME!!!!! My new modem arrived from Verizon last night, and I am now once again back on the grid!

The Texas Two-Step

2008-03-06T11:37:00.008-06:00

Well, it's been two days and they're *still* counting the caucus votes in Texas. At the moment, they're approximately 40% through the results, with Obama leading Clinton by 56% to 44%.

As for the primaries, Clinton defeated Obama with 51% of the vote. Now if you've ever actually studied math, you probably regard that as a "close race" or a "narrow margin." However, you may recall from 2004 that the Republicans declared 51% to be a "historical sweeping landslide of Biblical proportions that indicates a mandate set not only by the people but by the Lord God Himself." So I guess Clinton should feel pretty proud right about now.

If you're from a state with a less-retarded voting system, you may be asking yourself, "What's all this primary/caucus stuff?" Well, if so, then you're shit out of luck because I've lived in Texas my whole life and I *still* don't understand how the candidate selection process works here for Democrats.

The Republicans have their primary elections. All of their faithful supporters show up and cast their votes for the Republican who hates gay people and foreigners the most. They tally the votes (at 1 for each white voter, and 3/5 for everyone else) and then they send their delegates to the Republican National Convention to nominate their man.

But the Democrats here have a system known as the "Texas Two-Step" that's more convoluted than the plot of Lost. You see, first you go to the primary and cast your vote for the candidate of your choice. The results of the primary are represented by 126 delegates. Once you've voted in the primary, you are eligible to attend the caucus and vote yet again. Only this time, you're voting for the delegates rather than the candidates. I think. The results of the caucus are represented by 67 delegates; 25 have already been selected by the party, while the remaining 42 are elected at the caucus.

And, just in case your head hasn't exploded yet, there are 35 superdelegates! These roguish, devil-may-care delegates play by their own damn rules! They laugh at your silly little primary results, and they spit on your caucuses! They vote however the hell they feel like voting, and if you don't like it, you can run home and cry to mommy, you colossal pussy!

So that's it in a nutshell. There's also some calculus involved, plus everyone knows that the Hair Competition is worth 35% of the final score. In the end, the results will probably be determined by those wild card superdelegates.

One interesting thing about the primaries was the record turnout of Democrat voters. They actually outnumbered the Republican voters by 2/1, which is pretty remarkable in the reddest of red states. (The last time Texas cast its electoral votes for a Democrat was 1976, for Jimmy Carter. Of course, that was back before Democrat, liberal, and evil all became synonyms in the conservative dictionary.)

Of course, conspiracy theories abound. Some folks claim that the Republicans are attempting to sabotage Obama by sending folks to vote for Clinton, which strikes me as kind of funny. I know Rush Limbaugh has been inciting his listeners to vote for Hillary, because he thinks that'll make things easier for the Republicans in November. (Rush apparently assumes that American voters are more sexist than racist.)

But it could end up being a moot point. While doing the morning talk show circuit the other day, Hillary mentioned the possibility of a Clinton/Obama ticket. Of course, they'd have to settle the matter of who gets to be on top with a quick round of roshombo or a game of quarters.

What's interesting is that, ordinarily, talk of a join ticket is seen as a concession. However, Clinton timed it just right and may end up appealing to folks who see a vote for her as a vote for her and Obama. Plus, it opens up the opportunity of Clinton serving her one or two terms, then stepping aside to let Obama do the same.

Personally, I still have my problems with Hillary Clinton, none of which are actually related to the issues. I hate the way her campaign just seems to go negative by reflex (her team is already blaming the caucus results on Obama's team, claiming they cheated and kept certain voters from attending). And her heartfelt, sincere moments feel so contrived and manipulative.

But she's pro-environment, pro-choice, anti-war, anti-torture, and has plans for economic stimulation that go beyond constant tax cuts to the wealthiest .00001%. I may not like her as a person, but I can at least support her on the issues. I'm still pulling for Obama, but I don't think Clinton in office would necessarily be a *bad* thing.

Of course, it's hard to say for certain. After all, that bar has been set pretty low over the past eight years...

The 1d6 People You Meet in Heaven

2008-03-04T17:23:00.007-06:00

Gary Gygax, 1938-2008

Ernest Gary Gygax--writer, game designer, and 23rd level nerd--passed away this morning. He'd been suffering from health problems for the past few years, including an abdominal aneurysm.

For the benefit of those readers who got laid in high school, I should probably explain that Gary Gygax was the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons (along with Dave Arneson). And if you don't know what Dungeons & Dragons is, then you have no business mucking around on Nobel Prize winner Al Gore's Internet.

As soon as the news broke, the geek grapevine was abuzz. One of my coworkers was telling me about it just as one of the managers sent out an email. And then, Stephanie called me to let me know and to make sure I was okay. I told her I was going to take a personal day to spend some quality time with my dice and lead figurines.

I never actually met the man, but I was an unabashed fan of his work. My first attempt at a novel, The Long and Rather Pointless Adventures of Verbal Reynard, Cutpurse Extraordinaire, was an affectionate parody of Mr. Gygax's World of Greyhawk and my love letter to all things Dungeons & Dragons.

I first started playing Dungeons & Dragons back in 1981, when I was in the 8th grade. Unfortunately, it was around this time that the Baptist Church lost its mind and became convinced that D&D was a gateway to Satan worship and black magic. My mom and stepdad were concerned because my friends and I had become somewhat obsessed with the game. We spent all our money on rule books, game modules, and funny dice. And when I wasn't playing the game with them, I was shut up in my room, mapping out elaborate dungeons and thinking of horrific and brutal ways to kill their characters.

It was around this time that Sean and I decided to make our epic Dungeons & Dragons movie, which worried my parents even more. Seeing us all geared out in our makeshift armor and wielding our wooden swords, they no doubt imagined we would eventually make our way down to the sewers and hack each other to death in some kind of diabolical blood ritual.

(To be fair, their entire perception of the game was pretty much formed by films like Mazes and Monsters or retarded publications like Jack Chick's Dark Dungeons. Dungeons and Dragons became a scapegoat for misbehaving teenagers, sandwiched somewhere in between backwards messages in rock music and Grand Theft Auto.)

For my parents, the final straw came in 1984. We had a visiting preacher at church who devoted his entire sermon to the evils of Dungeons & Dragons and how it made the Baby Jesus cry. So on Monday, while I was at work, my mom and stepdad went through my closet and they found my copy of Deities and Demigods (one of the D&D rulebooks). This was all the proof they needed that I was involved in some kind of pagan cult. When I got home from work, they had a little intervention and they informed me that my days of playing Dungeons & Dragons were over.

I protested that it was only a game, that nobody I knew had any trouble distinguishing between reality and fantasy. I argued that Dungeons & Dragons was a creative outlet, that I was in effect writing stories. I pointed out that I was making good grades, that I had a job, and I was in band and yearbook staff. I was not only going to church every week, but I was in the orchestra there. Plus, our circle of geeks had recently expanded to include some real live girls!

Moved by my pleas, my parents agreed to a compromise. I could continue to play D&D, but I wasn't allowed to use any of the other gods in my game. My players had to worship God and Jesus. I agreed to their terms, and even went so far as to draw up some stats for God and Jesus. You know, in case the players ran into them in the game... and wanted to fight them. I don't remember any of the specifics, but I do recall that killing God would yield some primo experience points...

My interest in the game waned somewhat when I graduated and went to college. I had some geeky friends and we'd get together for the occasional game, but the days of marathon gaming sessions had passed. When I was at Brinker, I hooked up with a gang of nerds there for a couple of nostalgic sessions. I had a lot of fun, but I got a little embarrassed when they came in my office and started discussing the game in front of my other friends. One guy, Joey, asked me why I was embarrassed, and I told him, "Dungeons & Dragons is like masturbation... I enjoy doing it, but I don't really want to talk about it in front of a bunch of people."

Most recently, I discovered that Stephanie was no stranger to the dice. I dusted off my old books and ran her, Sean, and a couple of other friends through an old school 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons adventure. (It was the Desert of Desolation series, in case you're interested.) It was a blast! It turns out that Dungeons & Dragons is even more fun when you're sleeping with one of the players! But I digress...

So that's how Gary Gygax shaped my teen years and made me the successful nerd that I am today. I look back on the time I spent with my friends during that period, and I remember it all quite fondly. The funny thing is, I don't remember many of the details about the games themselves. I just remember the all night sessions, with six to ten of us gathered around somebody's kitchen table with our dice, rulebooks, and character sheets, stuffed full of Mr. Jim's pizza and hopped up on Mountain Dew, cracking our dumb jokes and discussing, in all earnestness, what would happen if you put a Sphere of Annihilation inside a Bag of Holding.

Rest in peace, Mr. Gygax.

&$^@#!?*% Verizon!!!! (a Trois)

2008-03-03T16:10:00.007-06:00

While I was nerding it up at ConDFW, my internet connection died on me. I had no idea until I got home from the conference and started up my PC, only to find myself being mocked by Windows Vista's "limited connectivity" icon. Usually when this happens, I just power off my modem and power down my PC, then bring them both back up and hey, problem solved!

(As you may recall from the last time I had this problem, my modem is slightly older than John McCain, and was apparently constructed prior to the invention of on/off switches. So in order to "cycle power," I have to reach around behind it and pull out the power cord. My modem sucks, and I hope it dies alone and unloved.)

Anyway, despite my best efforts, I just wasn't getting any connectivity love. So once again, I broke down and did something that never seems to bode well. I called Verizon Customer Service.

Now apparently Verizon has decided that the whole DSL thing is beneath them, so they've quit supporting it themselves and farmed it out to some very nice folks for whom English is, to be kind, most likely a second language.

So, with much trepidation, I dialed Verizon Customer Service and reached the soulless automaton who would be my guide. Her soothing, robot voice informed me that I was at the Main Menu, and I could return here at any time by saying "main menu." And so, comforted by the thought that safety was never more than two words away, I plunged into the swirling, nightmarish abyss of Verizon's nested menus.

I informed the godless fembot that I was calling with regards to Verizon High Speed Internet, that my phone number was indeed correct, and that I was having connectivity issues. After much clicking and whirring as she attempted to process this human emotion called love, the she-droid informed me that she was going to perform some tests on the line and it might take a few minutes.

This is the part that always kills me, because while waiting for the results, another helpful recorded message always sees fit to inform me that "the solutions for many common connectivity issues may be found online at the Verizon website." Thank you, Verizoputer 5000. I'm sure if anybody ever bothered to point out the fallacy in that logic to the robots manning the phones, they would short out and their heads would explode.

The fembot finally came back on the line to let me know that she had found a problem in the network and she was transferring me to an agent who could assist me further. I have to say, this filled me with hope. If she'd already managed to figure out the problem, hopefully I'd be up and running in no time. Right? RIGHT?

Wrong. I was finally connected with a very nice human being in a drastically different time zone who had me go through the usual rigmarole of shutting things off and turning them back on again. Because they never believe you when you tell them you've already done it 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 times. I told her that the magic voice on the phone had already found the problem, but unfortunately the robots and the Indian contractors don't seem to be speaking with one another these days. After exhausting her bag of tricks, my agent informed me that she was going to escalate the issue to her supervisor, or something like that. She said they would be in touch and let me know when the issue was resolved.

Well, I got the call on Friday that the problem was solved and my connection to Nobel Prize winner Al Gore's Internet should be up and running. I went to check, but no connection. I unplugged the modem, powered down the PC, and brought them both back up. Still no connection.

On Saturday, I sat down to place another call to Verizon Customer Support. I found myself at the familiar Main Menu, and once again worked my way through the myriad options. When I finally informed the cold, mechanical fembot that I was having connectivity issues, she gave me the following choices:

I see that we recently closed a ticket for you on this issue. You may need to restart your modem and your computer. To repeat this information, say "repeat." To return to the Main Menu, say "main menu."

I tried again and again, but I couldn't seem to get past this barrier of computer logic. No option to reopen a ticket, no option to speak to an agent, nothing. Annoyed, I returned to the Main Menu and this time when she asked me what my issue was, I said, "Other." Fortunately, my unpredictable human brain proved too wily for her circuitous logic, and I was able to pierce the clever defenses of the Verizon Customer Service Automated Menu System. I felt like such a hacker.

I was eventually connected to another exotic customer service agent who apologized profusely for the inconvenience and reopened my ticket. We went through the reboot thing again, and I'm sure you can imagine my surprise and astonishment when that didn't work. So she said that she would escalate my call to her supervisor, and they would be in touch with me.

I heard back just two hours later from somebody here in the continental U.S. He said they were going to upgrade my connection for free, and I'd be receiving a new and improved modem (and cables) in the mail in the next few days. He also gave me his number and said I could call it if I ran into any problems getting the new stuff up and running.

So I'm feeling cautiously optimistic. Hopefully I'll be back online before my social security benefits kick in. In the meantime, I'm making due with my internet connection at work, and the occasional low-quality wireless signal that I can grab with my laptop.

Can you hear me now?

Zen and the Art of Blog Maintenance

2008-02-29T15:33:00.007-06:00

My list of Blogs That Aren't Mine was getting a tad long, so I went through and deleted links to those guys who haven't updated in 6 months or more. Yeah, I know I live in a glass house when it comes to that sort of thing. I'm totally at peace with my hypocrisy. I hope, some day, you too will be.

Oh, and the counter is back. I thought about starting it off at 184,359 or something, just to make my blog look popular, but I'm really not that insecure. Right? You guys don't think I'm insecure, do you?

Googler? I Don't Even Know Her!

2008-02-29T13:10:00.006-06:00

Here's something kind of funny that my buddy Silver sent to me.

Marissa Mayer was Google's first female engineer, and is currently serving as the Vice President of Search Products and User Experience. When San Francisco magazine recently ran a profile on her, they referred to her as the "gorgeously geeky Googler" and went on and on about her glamorous clothes, opulent lifestyle, net worth, and love of frosting. So, in other words, hard news.

But here's the funny part. Apparently the editors of the magazine aren't up on the hip lingo that perverts and naughty people use on Nobel Prize winner Al Gore's Internet, and they cleverly referred to Mayer as "Googirl." The online article got yanked almost immediately, but some 115,000 copies of the magazine made it onto the newsstands.

I can't prove it, but I'm pretty sure those bastards at Yahoo! are to blame for this...

Once You Go Barack, You'll Never Go Back

2008-02-28T14:35:00.012-06:00

Last month, I joked that I was going to vote for Hillary just so we'd have a Bush -> Clinton -> Bush -> Clinton order of progression. But after watching the debates, I've decided to throw my support behind Obama. Yes, that's right, Barack. Your pasty white geek contingency just went up by 0.00003%. You could probably quadruple that if you learned to speak Klingon.

And here's the weird thing... it wasn't really the issues that made me a fan of Obama. They may differ in the details, but for the most part, Hillary and Barack come down on the same side of the major issues. No, what made up my mind was the way they're running their campaigns.

Perception is everything, and whether it's 100% true or not, the perception is that Obama is running a clean, above-board campaign. Clinton went negative pretty early on, and it backfired on her. I think a lot of voters are sick and tired of all the retarded mudslinging and have finally come to see just how insulting and condescending those negative ads truly are.

Take the debate in Austin last week. Clinton brought up the issue of Obama's alleged plagiarism (an issue that, like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004, should have been DOA from the beginning). Obama dismissed the whole thing and blamed it on "the silly season in politics." Clinton came back with the prepared line, "Lifting whole passages is not change you can believe in, it's change you can Xerox." And she looked out smugly at the crowd as she said it, no doubt imagining a roar of approval for her witticism. Instead, awkward silence. Crickets. And a smattering of boos. Obama just shook his head in disbelief. And as a result, Obama came off looking rather noble while Clinton just seemed petty and spiteful.

Taking a lesson, Clinton did a quick turnaround and tried to take the high road at the end of the debate. She praised Obama and said that if she did not win the nomination, the nation would be served well by him. It earned her more applause than anything else she had said all night.

Unfortunately, Clinton's civility was short-lived. Obama's team recently distributed a pamphlet highlighting the differences between their guy and Hillary. Clinton's team responded almost immediately by accusing Obama of printing misleading information and outright distortions. Now was there any merit to the accusation? Who knows? But perception is everything, and at this point, I think everybody except the most diehard Clinton supporter is willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt.

Clinton went so far as to claim that Obama had "taken a page from Karl Rove's playbook." Meanwhile, the Clinton team released a photo to conservative muckraker Matt Drudge that shows Obama dressed in a turban while visiting Kenya. It was a transparent attempt to play on the inherent racism of American voters, and I guess it was successful, since a lot of conservatives really seem to be up in arms about the whole thing. And to add insult to injury, when Obama's team accused Clinton's team of "fear-mongering," they responded with the statement, "If Barack Obama's campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed."

That kind of shit plays well amongst the Republicans. Back in 2000, Bush pretty much snaked the Republican nomination away from McCain by spreading the rumor that McCain had an illegitimate black child from an extramarital affair. Karl Rove all but owned up to it, claiming it was legal because he hadn't actually *told* people that McCain had an illegitimate child, but had simply asked them what they would think *if* he had an illegitimate child. Karl Rove is a slimy, unctuous bastard who probably hunts the homeless for sport.

The negative hate-mongering has become such an ingrained part of Republican politics that many of them simply shrug it off as "part of the game." I honestly can't believe anyone was retarded enough to believe half the crap that their man Bush was spewing about John Kerry back in 2004, but they simply embraced it because hey, them's the rules.

The Republicans claim that anyone who buys into Barack Obama's hype is naive and misguided. Of course, most of them still believe that a secret cabal of Jews controls the liberal media, that Bible verses are science, and that the world will be safer once George W. bombs all the terrorism out of it. So I guess naivety is a matter of perspective.

Ironically, Clinton's team has jumped on the "naive and unexperienced" bandwagon as well. Hillary has been totally mocking Obama's optimism that things can be better, while doing everything in her power to paint him as an indecisive coward, a plagiarist, and a terrorist. If anybody is taking a page out of Karl Rove's playbook, I'd have to say it's her.

Optimistic does not equal naive, no matter how much the cynics would like to pretend otherwise. Nobody thinks the change is going to be easy, or come quickly. Whoever wins the election this year is going to inherit a massive shit sandwich eight years in the making. I don't think the situation is hopeless, but I think we're going to need to adjust our way of thinking if things are going to get better. McCain and Clinton represent more of the same. Obama is promising change, and I *really* want to believe him.

So is it naive to vote for a candidate because he represents something better than we've had for a long time? No, not really. It's not nearly as naive as, say, reelecting a cocaine-abusing, warmongering, illiterate retard because of something you read in an email or saw on FOX News. I'm looking at you, lower 51% of the American voters!

Obama 2008!
Change you can (reluctantly) believe in... maybe!

The Lost Geekend, Part II (Electric Boogaloo)

2008-02-27T09:42:00.012-06:00

The Lost Geekend, Part I

Saturday (cont.)

The Beagle Has Landed
After a couple more panels (The Haunted City: Urban Fantasy Today and Playing in Someone Else's Sandbox: Franchise Fiction), Stephanie and I went to the signing table to meet Peter S. Beagle. Stephanie, who is usually the epitome of poise and composure, was utterly giggly about meeting her favorite author. But of course, she was charming and lovely when we got up to the table. Which is a good thing, because I was my usual gobsmacked self. Mr. Beagle was astonishingly nice and soft-spoken, and seemed genuinely delighted to meet Stephanie. He signed her book and DVD of The Last Unicorn, and even sent us to the Conlan Press table in the dealer room to get a new DVD case (hers was worn and covered with security-tape schmutz).

Stephanie chatted with Connor Cochran, who has been Peter's business manager for the past four years. She pointed out that she had purchased her DVD directly from Conlan Press, instead of buying it retail, and Connor thanked her profusely. When we were walking away, I asked her what the deal was, and she told me that Peter had been screwed over royally by Granada International, which owns the rights to The Last Unicorn film. When Peter discovered that Granada had sold nearly a million copies of the DVD without paying him royalties on it, Conlan Press began campaigning on his behalf. Conlan and Granada are still in negotiations (which are being mediated by an unnamed but "eminent" third party), and Connor is optimistic that the situation will soon be resolved. In the meantime, Lionsgate Entertainment has released a special 25th anniversary edition of the DVD, and has agreed to let Conlan Press market it directly, so at least Peter is getting some money from sales.

Later, after attending the Pop Culture Explosion panel (hosted by our old friends Glenn Yeffeth and Chris Roberson), Stephanie and I went to a reading by Peter S. Beagle. He read a couple of selections from his book The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances. His first piece, a clever short story entitled "The Naga," was a lot of fun. But for his second, he chose the non-fantasy story "My Daughter's Name is Sarah." It's a simple story, elegant and moving, told from the point of view of a father who marvels at his young daughter's happiness and desperately longs to protect her from the inevitable hurt and heartache he knows she'll one day feel. Peter wrote the story when he was 18, and hadn't looked at it in decades. His voice broke and his eyes teared up while he was reading it, and I think the entire audience got a little choked up. Seriously, if you're capable of listening to Peter S. Beagle read that story without getting all teary-eyed, then thank you visiting my blog, Vice President Cheney.

Mmmm... Just Love That New Author Smell
That evening, after hanging in the bar with my new best pal and droppable name Chris Roberson, Stephanie and I attended a book launch party for J.M. McDermott's Last Dragon. This is McDermott's first novel, and he was positively giddy with the experience. Not that I can blame him. I jokingly asked him if he'd provide a blurb for my first novel, and he said he'd be glad to read it, but couldn't promise anything. I really hope he likes Space Jesus.

Anyway, there was booze and Xbox 360 and raffles for several prizes. I won a nifty tote bag! I also bought Stephanie a copy of the novel, and she asked McDermott to sign it for her. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I have to admit the opening paragraph is a real grabber.

These Boots Were Made For Walking
After rubbing elbows with the McDermott entourage, Stephanie and I ran down to the lobby to see the results of the short story contest. I had submitted "But I Digress..." and "Orange Alert" for the judges' consideration, but somehow my literary genius was overlooked. Personally, I blame the Jew-run liberal media.

So we were making our way back up to the room when we passed a couple in the lobby. I wasn't really paying attention, but Stephanie immediately made a beeline for the woman and said, quite dramatically, "You must stop right now and tell me about your boots."

The woman's name was Shai (pronounced "shy," as she frequently introduced herself "I'm Shai, but I'm not.") and she was wearing turquoise boots. Stephanie was wearing what she lovingly calls her "bitch boots," and she and Shai fell into a discussion of all things bootational.

The guy, Paul, stood next to me while this was going on, watching with great interest. When Shai and Stephanie discovered they wore the same size, they swapped boots and walked around the lobby. Paul turned to me and confided, "I'm totally into boots, man. This is so hot."

I had assumed that Paul and Shai were a couple, but Paul told us that his wife was upstairs at a party and insisted that we should go up and "see her boots." I was a little leery, because I was imagining some kind of weird gathering of boot fetishists clomping around, listening to Boots Randolph, watching Das Boot, eating boot-shaped cookies and drinking Piña Coladas from, you know, boots. But Stephanie was game to check it out, so we went on up.

It turned out to be a fairly normal gathering of nerds who were there to promote their own convention coming up in May. We immediately spotted Paul's wife, who was parading around in a pair of shiny pink hip boots straight out of Frederick's of Hollywood. There was cheap champagne in plastic cups, and lots of joyous geeky chat. I know I say a lot of snarky things and you probably think I'm being a smartass, but I swear I mean this sincerely. I'm a total dweeb, and it can be downright exhilarating when a bunch of nerds, unfettered by public decorum, simply cut loose and let their geek flag fly.

Sunday

All Good Things...
On Sunday morning, Stephanie's friend Heather made her way to the hotel to join us for a day of geeky fun. By the time she arrived and Stephanie got dressed, we'd missed the beginnings of the 11:00 panels. No great loss, although we had been mildly interested in hearing the presentation on the "open-source space program" entitled Luna City or Bust! Since the government and the military no longer have any interest in going to the moon, it's up to the general public to make our way up there and start staking out territory.

But we blew it off and went to grab lunch instead. We made it back for The Phantom Returns: Pulp Fiction for Modern Writers, which was a lot of fun. There was one guy in the audience whom Stephanie and I had seen before. He was tall and clean-cut, dressed in a button shirt and a sweater vest, and he was constantly stopping the panelists to ask them how to spell things so he could write it all down in his little notepad. So when he interrupted the discussion to ask the panelists for author recommendations, I let out a weary sigh and Stephanie whispered for me to be nice.

One of the panelists, an editor named Scott Cupp, suggested that Notebook Guy look into the works of "an up and comer named Christa Faust." Notebook Guy started scribbling furiously, then stopped and asked, "Is that Christa with a 'K' or with a 'C-H'?" I sighed again and muttered, "Is that Faust with an 'F' or with a 'P-H'?" and Stephanie nudged me in the ribs and told me to knock it off.

Afterwards, the three of us were having drinks at the bar and waiting for the It Was His Time: Killing Off Characters with Style panel to begin. It was obvious the convention was winding down. The crowds had dispersed, the booths in the dealer room were packing up, and the Klingons were on their way out the door, suitcases in hand.

Just then, Stina Leicht wandered by. Stephanie had spotted her at the hotel a couple of times that weekend, but we hadn't really had a chance to say more than hi. Stephanie waved her down, and she came over to the bar to chat with us. I even bought her a drink, and when she protested, I told her I didn't get the opportunity to buy drinks for real writers very often. Smooth, huh?

Of course, the subject turned to writing, as it inevitably does, and Stina let us in on a little secret. (I sincerely hope I'm not damaging her mystique by revealing this little tidbit to my threes of loyal readers.) Stina said that she honed her writing skills through... Dungeon Mastering! Yes, that's right! Stina parlayed her years of playing Dungeons & Dragons into a successful writing career. I think she may be my new hero.

So that was it. Our weekend in Nerd Paradise (or Nerdvana, if you will) was finally at an end. We said our goodbyes to Stina, and headed on home. But the good news is that both Stephanie and I are all gung-ho about writing again. Stephanie's already cranked out one short story that's totally brilliant, and I'd say that even if I weren't sleeping with her.

And me? I've been too busy writing this damn blog entry. But as soon as I'm done, I'm going to get right to work on my novel about Space Jesus and the guy who is half pirate and half race car. Don't miss Chris Irby's Space Jesus vs. Cap'n Bony Jack McZoomatron: Apocalyptic Smackdown in the Year 3000!

The Lost Geekend, Part I

2008-02-25T15:03:00.017-06:00

In case I haven't mentioned it lately, I am dating a beautiful, smart, funny, and astonishingly nerdy girl named Stephanie. The fact that she and Diet Cherry Chocolate Dr. Pepper both exist in the same universe is proof that God likes me, regardless of the mean things I occasionally write about Him.

Despite her love of all things geeky, Stephanie had never been to a Science Fiction or Fantasy convention when I met her. So last year, I took her to ConDFW, which is a "literary science fiction convention in the Dallas-Fort Worth area." Basically, authors and artists of some renown show up, along with small press publishers, rare book dealers, and vampire belly dancers. Throw in some folks dressed like Klingons and playing Risk, and you've got a heady brew of geekdom, my friend.

Although the event runs all weekend long, we just showed up for Saturday's festivities last year. It was me and Stephanie, along with Sean (my playwriting buddy) and Silver (whom I can't mention without bringing up our homoerotic Valentine's Day dinner). Stephanie's friend Heather showed up as well, dressed adorably like Dr. Who.

Since we were only there for a few hours, we didn't really get a chance to immerse ourselves in all things nerdy. We attended a couple of panels and met with a couple of authors. Stephanie got a book signed by Emma Bull, while another author (whose name I won't mention) spent several minutes staring straight down Stephanie's cleavage while he was chatting with us. We also met Stina Leicht, a writer from Austin who's friends with Silver. She's nifty.

Stephanie had a blast, and said she'd be game for another convention. We toyed around with going to Comic-Con in Los Angeles or VCON in Vancouver (where I got to meet my hero Tim Powers in 2002). But when we learned that Peter S. Beagle was going to be the guest of honor at ConDFW 2008, Stephanie got all excited. It turns out that The Last Unicorn is one of her favorite books of all time, and she was giddy at the prospect of meeting the author. So we decided to hit ConDFW again this year. And although the convention was only about 20 minutes away from my apartment, Stephanie and I decided it might be fun to get a room at the hotel and make a weekend of it.

Friday

In Space, Nobody Can Hear You Laugh
Friday night was pretty much a bust, as far as nerd content goes. We got to the hotel in time to catch a panel titled Comedy in Space! Humor in Science Fiction. The only problem was that the five panelists, while admittedly humorous in print, were tragically unfunny in person. On the Universal Comedic Scale™, these panelists ranked somewhere between the comic strip Mallard Filmore and a clown dying hilariously in his sleep. Here's a highlight from the evening's discussion:

Nerd in Audience
You mentioned that a lot of science fiction is about feelings of awe and majesty. How can you reconcile that with humor? How can you make that funny?

Panelist #1
Um...

Panelist #2
Oh, um... like...

Panelist #1
Oh, okay. Like, let's say you've got a guy on a spaceship and he's discovered this alien city. And he's like, "Oh, this is so beautiful! This is so majestic!" But then he's like, "Oh, damn. I forgot my camera."

Panelist #3
Right! Right! Or like, he's discovered this new sun or something, but he forgot his sunglasses!

Panelist #2
Right. Something like that.

We also spent about half an hour at a screening of Hercules Goes to New York (starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, billed as Arnold Strong). Audience members were encouraged to shout out hilarious comedy à la Mystery Science Theater 3000, but it turns out that moviegoers just aren't that goddamn funny without a team of writers. After 30 minutes of listening to people simply describe what was happening on the screen in wacky voices ("Oh, he's crossing the street! Hey, a car!") Stephanie and I finally decided to call it a night and start fresh on Saturday.

Saturday

Putting the "Pub" Back in Publisher
We started Saturday morning off with the panel Starting Your Own Publishing Company. I really didn't have any interest in the subject matter at first, but Stephanie was curious, and I'm totally whipped, so there you go. Anyway, unlike the dud on Friday night, this was actually an entertaining and informative discussion. I still have no intention of starting a publishing company, but at least now I know what the hell those guys are thinking when they're poring over manuscripts.

The panel included Glenn Yeffeth, from BenBella Books. Back in 2003, when I decided I was going to be a Writer™, I figured I could skip past the whole "honing my craft" step and go straight to being a famous author. I imagined everybody would be chomping at the bit to sign a writer of my caliber. "Oh my God," they would exclaim as they immersed themselves in the genius of my prose. "This is his first book? Get me a wheelbarrow full of money and warm up the copter!" Anyway, long story short, BenBella was the first publisher to send me a rejection letter and disabuse me of that notion. But unlike these guys, they weren't dicks about it.

Also on the panel was Chris Roberson, the founder of MonkeyBrain Books in Austin. Stephanie and I ran into him at the bar later that evening, and wound up chatting with him for an hour or so. Actually, Stephanie did most of the chatting. I tend to get dorky and self-conscious when I'm around anyone who's been published. It's like this mystic veil that I've yet to pierce, so some retarded part of my brain makes me act all awestruck. But the upside is that my social awkwardness spared Mr. Roberson from hearing me pitch my brilliant idea for an epic novel where Space Jesus fights a guy who's half pirate/half race car*. I only hope he comes to realize how close a call that was.

(Incidentally, Chris informed us that someone wrote a Wikipedia article about him. I looked it up, and was surprised to learn that he's an outfielder for the Baltimore Orioles. Then I realized I was probably reading the wrong article.)

Coming Soon: The Lost Geekend continues with Peter S. Beagle, hot chicks in boots, and nerds partying like it's on sale for $19.99.

-------------------------------------
*When I first mentioned half pirate/half race car guy to Stephanie, she immediately said, "So I guess his favorite sport is NASCAAAAAR!"

Sigh... she completes me.

Hey, You Kids Like Candy?

2008-02-01T13:21:00.000-06:00

Back in 2001, my buddy Ego (who, sadly, no longer blogs) introduced me to his online circle of friends. Since he'd already told everybody that my name was "Irb," I never really got a chance to come up with one of those really cool online handles, like DarkPhalcon or AssMagnet844.

So anyway, one day when I was supposed to be working, a bunch of us were logged into a public MSN chatroom. While we were babbling away inanely, some girl named "Meredith" popped into the room and said, "my name is meredith and im 16....is their ne1 else my age in here"

The youngest of us at the time was around 28 or so, but that didn't stop one of the girls from saying, "irb's 16... aren't you irb?"

So I played along. "yeah im 16. i wear big pants and ive seen titanic 34 times."

Meredith replied, "ooo i luv that movie....my name is meredith cuz my favrite singer is meredith brooks"

I said, "rly? my name is irb cuz my favorite singers are peaches & herb"

This resulted in a bunch of LOLOLOLs, ROFLs, and ROFLMAOs from the peanut gallery, and suddenly Meredith realized she'd been had. "ur not 16!!!!!!!!!! u suk!!!!!!!!!!" And then, she logged out.

It was all good, clean Christian fun, but that kind of crap would never fly today. Ever since NBC Dateline started airing their To Catch a Predator segments, people have become convinced that Nobel Prize winner Al Gore's Internet is a massive community of pedophiles, perverts, and freedom-hating terrorists. And a geezer like me claiming to be 16 years old would probably set off all kinds of alarms. Especially if anyone ran across my evil twin in the Plano Registered Sexual Offenders database.

In case you haven't seen To Catch a Predator, basically it works like this. Members of a volunteer watchdog group called Perverted-Justice set up fake online profiles of underage kids and enter chatrooms as decoys. They are inevitably approached by an adult and, more often than not, the conversation turns sexual. Anyway, the adult makes arrangements to meet the underaged chatter. A youthful looking 18 or 19 year old poses as the minor and meets with the adult. And then, Chris Hansen comes jumping out from behind a tree or something to confront the predator. As the culprit tries to worm out of it, Hansen often reads incriminating excerpts from emails and chat logs and badgers the bastard until the police show up to take him away.

So a few months ago, after watching a few uncomfortable confrontations with Chris Hansen, I finally turned off the TV and went in the other room to play some World of Warcraft. I'd been playing my character Verbal for about 10 minutes (and chatting in the general channel) when a player calling herself Batwoman whispered to me, "ur so funny".

I replied back, "thanks" and went on with my life. But Batwoman was in a chatty mood.

Batwoman> ur hilarious. how old r u?
Verbal> probably old enough to be your father
Batwoman> im 17 but all my dad's friends say i look older
Verbal> that's great
Batwoman> so how old r u?
Verbal> 40
Batwoman> thats not so old
Verbal> well, thanks
Batwoman> yea my dad's friends say i look at least 21
Verbal> that's great

And so it went. I didn't want to be rude, but I was getting a little creeped out by how she kept on trying to convince me how mature she was for her age. And that whole To Catch a Predator thing was still fresh in my mind, so I kept imagining some old, fat guy sitting at his PC, trying to trick me into saying something inappropriate.

Finally, I decided I'd give up and log on as another character. So while she was going on and on about how she's always dated guys that were older than her, I informed her that I was logging off.

Verbal> well, i gotta log. see you later.
Batwoman> wot do u mean youve got a log?

At that point, I panicked and glanced out the window to see if Chris Hansen and his camera crew were standing outside my door. Hurriedly, I corrected her.

Verbal> no, i've got to log off.
Batwoman> o lol can i add u 2 my friends?

I signed off without answering and waited a couple of days before logging back on as that character. I haven't run into Batwoman again since that night, so I'm hoping that means I won't be showing up unexpectedly on Dateline anytime soon...

Attack of the Bizarro Irb

2008-01-30T13:07:00.001-06:00

I have an evil twin.

Okay, maybe "twin" isn't quite the right word. My wicked doppelganger and I don't really look that much alike. For one thing, he's several years younger than me. Also, he's black.

But his name is Christopher R. Irby, and he apparently lives somewhere in the Dallas area. And, just in case I haven't mentioned it in the past sentence or two, he's evil. EEEEEEVIL!!!!!!!!!!

It all started back in 1993, when I moved into my first apartment in Dallas. I'd only been there a month when I got a letter from the Dallas Probation & Parole Office addressed to Chris Irby. The letter informed me that I had missed several scheduled meetings, that the phone number I'd given them was invalid, and that I was in direct violation of my probation. If I didn't contact their office within 48 hours, a warrant would be issued for my arrest.

I didn't have a phone at the time, so I went across the street to Jack in the Box to use the pay phone there. I called the number and explained to them that I'd never been arrested for anything and I'd never been on probation. After a few minutes, they finally told me that they'd been trying to track down a Christopher Irby, and when my change of address had gone through, they had assumed that I was their guy. They were very polite, and they apologized for the mistake. They told me that if I received any further notices, I could disregard them.

In 1997, the same day that George W. Bush was reelected governor of Texas, my apartment was burglarized. (I'm not implying one had anything to do with the other, you understand. I'm just saying.) Anyway, having had enough of inner city living, I decided to move out to the suburbs. I was working for Brinker International at the time, and was making more than enough money to live in a less unsavory neighborhood. Once again, I filled out the proper change of address information. And, once again, I received a notice from the Dallas Probation & Parole Office. And although they'd told me I could disregard it, I called anyway, just to be safe. They apologized and told me they'd make a note of it.

It was about a year later that I finally got a look at the vicious felon who was besmirching my good name. My friends Scott, Eric, and I were playing around on Nobel Prize winner Al Gore's Internet at work, looking up property values for people we knew in Plano. (No reason for it... we were just bored.) Mike discovered the link to the Plano Registered Sexual Offenders page, and clicked on it. As a joke, he did a search on his name and pretended to be relieved that there were no hits. (I assume he was pretending.) We searched for Scott and Eric as well, with no results. But then they typed in my name, and got a hit. Christopher Irby.

I can't remember what his specific crime was, or if they even listed it. Fortunately, there was a picture of him there, so I didn't have to convince anybody that I wasn't leading some kind of crazy Marv Albert/Bill O'Reilly double life.

For the next few years, I heard nothing about my evil twin. But in 2002, just a month after I had left Brinker and set out to be a Writer™, I got a voice mail from some company that leases credit card verification equipment. The woman who left the message sounded rather agitated, and was threatening legal action if I didn't call her back immediately.

I called her, and she was very, VERY belligerent. She told me that I owed several thousand dollars in back charges, and if I didn't return the equipment to them, they'd tack another $10,000 to the total. I told her I had no idea what the hell she was talking about, and that I'd never leased any equipment from them.

She asked, "Is this Christopher Irby?"

I said, "This is James Christopher Irby."

"Is this the Christopher Irby who owns Cleaning Solutions?"

"I have no idea what Cleaning Solutions is."

"Do you reside in Plano?"

"No, I live in Dallas. I'm not the guy you're looking for."

"There can't be that many Christopher Irbys in the area. You're telling me you don't own Cleaning Solutions?"

"No, I don't own any kind of business."

So she demanded my social security number. I refused to give it to her, since she was the one that had originally called me. I told her she could give me the number she had, and I'd tell her if it was correct or not.

Then she started yelling at me. "I am trying to investigate a case of fraud here! If you really are innocent, you should be trying to help me instead of stonewalling!"

So I started yelling, "I'm not stonewalling anything! You've got the wrong guy!"

She was quiet for a second. Then she said in a particularly vicious voice, "I can't wait until our lawyers get you on that stand." And she hung up.

I was trembling with rage, and not sure what to do next. The first thing that occurred to me was that this was some kind of identity theft, so I went online and checked my credit reports. Nothing unexpected, nothing out of the ordinary. Then, I remembered Christopher R. Irby, who was a registered sexual offender in Plano. I tried to look up his information online, but I couldn't find a listing anywhere.

The next morning, I got another call from the credit place. This woman was much nicer, and was obviously the supervisor of the bitch I'd talked to the day before. She asked me if my name was Christopher Irby, and I told her I was James Christopher Irby. She asked me if the last four digits of my social security number were 3191, and I told her no, they weren't. She apologized profusely for the call I'd received the day before, and she said she'd make a note of it in the file so I wouldn't receive any more calls on the subject. I mentioned to her that there was a Christopher R. Irby who lived in Plano, and that I had received his mail on a couple of occasions. She thanked me, and that was it.

Well, almost. I still get calls on the matter every six months or so. The file gets handed off to somebody else to investigate. And they apparently check for a directory listing of Christopher Irby, and get my name. And saying to themselves, "Wow! I can't believe nobody thought to do this before," they call me and I have to explain to them that I'm not the Christopher Irby they're looking for.

The last call I got was in April of last year. The guy didn't even bother confirming my social security number or anything. I told him he had the wrong guy, and he apologized for bothering me. I haven't heard back, so I'm hoping the issue is resolved.

Every once in a while, I'll do a Google search for "chris irby," just to see if I'm wanted for any brutal murders. So far, I seem to be in the clear. The first three hits are all me, baby. There's also a Chris Irby who works in the Industrial Services Group with Collies Spectrum Cauble, whatever the hell that means. Sometimes, I get hits on a Wingate University football player named Chris Irby. And, at the moment, there is a YouTube video of somebody named Chris Irby who is apparently "riding wheelies on Flat Shoals road."

But my evil twin, for the time being, appears to be lying low. Probably holed up in his dark lair, waiting and plotting my demise...

Y Cant Irb R34D - A Literary Meme

2008-01-28T16:46:00.000-06:00

With all the words spelled with numbers or being abbreviated to a single letter, it's become obvious that Nobel Prize winner Al Gore's Internet isn't exactly packed with literate types. That's why, when I ran across this meme on my pal Professor's blog, I jumped at the chance to prove that I had, at some point in my life, read a book that wasn't about Spiderman or Jesus.

1. What was your favorite book as a kid?
I absolutely *loved* the Great Brain series by John Fitzgerald. In case you don't remember, it was about a Catholic family living in Utah during the late 1800s. The narrator (supposedly Fitzgerald himself) related tales of his brother Tom, the titular Great Brain, who was a con artist and swindler. Most of the stories involved Tom's convoluted and utterly brilliant schemes to part his friends from their money. My third-grade teacher gave me a Bowdlerized version of Gulliver's Travels that jump started my love for Johnathan Swift. I liked Judy Blume's Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. I also really dug A Wrinkle in Time, The Borrowers, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

2. If you were stranded on that proverbial desert island (again!), what book or books (up to 5) would you want to have with you?
A nice, heavy Robert Jordan novel would come in handy for killing pesky polar bears and Others. But for reading purposes, I guess I'd have to go with those books that I read and reread without getting tired of them.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
The Chronicles of Amber, by Roger Zelazny
Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson
The World According to Garp, by John Irving
The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers

3. What was the first “naughty” book you read and in what way was it naughty?
Probably the Bible. Have you actually *read* it? Jeez! There's more sodomy and incest in Genesis than in all of Peter Greenaway's films put together!

4. If you were to publish your autobiography today, what would be the title?
Nerdvana: The Chris Irby Story. I was originally considering Diary of a Mad Black Woman, but Tyler Perry already stole my idea...

5. Would you rather look at nude pictures/pornography or read erotic fiction and why?
I would have to go with the reading, as long as it isn't slash furry Star Trek fan fiction...

Nobel Prize Winner Al Gore's Internet News

2008-01-28T09:39:00.002-06:00

Google's Lost in Translation
So my pal and occasional hero John, of Random Squeegee fame, discovered yet another oddity in Google's translation tool. Sometimes, for reasons known only to the Lord, Google Translate will convert the English word "Crap" to the Spanish name "Guillermo."

So, any theories? I'm betting some anonymous Google programmer used to get pantsed and thrown in the girl's locker room by a high school bully named Guillermo. Or perhaps this is a personal vendetta being waged against Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Speaking of Tom Cruise and Anonymous Vendettas...
A gang of hackers who are calling themselves "Anonymous" have declared war on the Church of Scientology. So far, their attacks seem to consist primarily of posting melodramatic videos to YouTube about how they're going to bring Scientology down. The Church of Scientology International (or CSI, so you just know David Caruso is somehow involved) has responded by releasing a statement claiming that the videos have sparked interest in their "faith" and inviting people who want to learn more to visit their website.

The whole thing apparently started when a video of Tom Cruise was leaked onto the Internet. The video, excerpted from a Scientology presentation, features Cruise all wide-eyed and earnest as he claims:

When you're a Scientologist, and you drive by an accident, you know you have to do something about it, because you know you're the only one who can really help. We are the authorities on getting people off drugs. We are the authorities on the mind. We are the way to happiness. We can bring peace and unite cultures. Now is the time.

The Church of Scientology responded with their usual level of restraint by immediately sending out cease and desist letters to anybody who had ever come within 5 feet of a computer and threatening legal action against anyone who dared to offer the video for download. Because that always works. Few people took the Scientologist threats seriously (although the video did vanish from YouTube for a few hours before reappearing with a vengeance). Some folks consulted lawyers of their own and determined that CSI's legal team was, frankly, talking out of its collective ass.

The Scientologist's hamfisted tactics inspired a gang of self-proclaimed hackers to declare war on them. Usually, these guys devote their efforts to stealing passwords and harassing online communities who don't share their love of anime. But this time, they decided to put their talent for annoyance and mischief to work for the greater good.

I honestly don't know who to root for in this battle. On the one hand, you've got a massive organization with a history of bullying, brutalizing, and blackmailing people who have spoken out against it. And on the other hand, you've got a bunch of console cowboy wannabes who have obviously watched V for Vendetta a few times too many. It's like a cage match between Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter. I don't care who wins... I just wanna see lots of blood spilled.

To tell the truth, I would probably be more sympathetic towards Anonymous if I didn't think their campaign against CSI was simply a self-aggrandizing ploy full of sound and fury signifying nothing. I've always been a huge fan of subversive attacks on organized religion. The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was a brilliant response to the Kansas School Board's decision to teach Intelligent Design as scientific theory. The First Church of Shatnerology hounded Bob Larson mercilessly with crank calls after he cheated on his wife with an employee named Margo. The satire of Landover Baptist Church is so convincing that several of their articles have been forwarded on by outraged Christians who weren't in on the joke. And God knows, I love me some Melba!

But there is nothing particularly clever or daring about the Anonymous attack on Scientology. In their videos, they claim (with kewl digitized voices) that they will "systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form." Yet, so far, their campaign of terror has consisted of some half-assed denial of service attacks (which accidentally took down a school in the Netherlands). Anonymous wants to pretend like they're a band of ragtag freedom fighters struggling against an oppressive evil organization. But while the Church of Scientology certainly fits the bill as an Evil Empire, Anonymous is not the Rebel Alliance. Hell, they're barely Jar Jar Binks.

Their "bold" attack actually comes off as petty, juvenile, and a bit silly. It's like expressing your outrage at the Bush administration by leaving a flaming sack of dog poo on the White House porch. The Church of Scientology has weathered organized assaults from people who were far better informed and far better equipped to damage them. Somehow, I doubt the pranks being perpetrated by Anonymous are going to have any lasting effect.

Ironically, if anything is going to bring down the Church of Scientology, I'm betting it'll be Tom Cruise.

R.I.P. Tom Cruise Heath Ledger

2008-01-25T11:11:00.001-06:00

Poor Heath Ledger. Like it wasn't bad enough that his tragic death had to be somehow tied to one of the Olsen twins, now he's getting dissed by Google.

Some bored Googlers unearthed an odd bug in Google Translate, where translating "Heath Ledger" from English to Spanish would convert his name to "Tom Cruise."

Of course, Nobel Prize winner Al Gore's Internet was abuzz and it was only a matter of time before Google became aware of the issue and fixed it. So now, Heath is no longer in danger of being confused for a closeted couch-hopping maniacal Scientologist, and his spirit can rest in peace.

At least until Mary Kate Olsen starts doing the talk show circuit.

Framing the Fearful Symmetry

2008-01-22T13:03:00.000-06:00

A few weeks ago, I took this test to see which political candidate is most aligned with my views and opinions, and I discovered that Dennis "Gollum" Kucinich and I are soul mates. I actually out-liberaled Hillary. I feel like such a Communist!

Even so, I've decided that I'm pulling for Hillary in the 2008 election. Not for reasons of politics... Lord knows, basing your vote on issues requires far more effort and intelligence than slightly more than half of the American voters are willing to expend. No, I am supporting Hillary purely for reasons of symmetry.

I like the idea of a Bush -> Clinton -> Bush -> Clinton progression. In fact, I'm hoping Hillary will serve for two terms, and then be followed by Jeb Bush for two terms. By that time, Chelsea and the Bush twins will probably be old enough to run.

Or, better still, maybe Mary Cheney could perform the ceremony to marry Chelsea to one of the Bush twins, thus uniting the two families into a powerful Bush-Clinton dynasty. Of course, they'd be hard pressed to come up with an heir unless they adopted, but still. You have to admit, the idea holds considerable appeal.

At least until Schwarzenegger spearheads the inevitable Kennedy Rebellion.

Not Feeling the Melodramatic Love

2008-01-21T15:51:00.001-06:00

There's a small theater here in Dallas called Pocket Sandwich Theatre. The main item on their menu is pocket sandwiches, so it's not just a clever name, my friend. They do a wide variety of plays, but their bread and butter is the melodrama.

A melodrama is a silly play where the audience is invited to participate by cheering the hero, booing the villain, and sighing wistfully for the damsel in distress. These plays are crammed so full of bad jokes that they're in danger of collapsing in on themselves, and they are acted so broadly that no scenery is left unchewed. A piano player provides the musical score, and popcorn is provided (at 50 cents a basket) so the audience will have something to throw at the cast. It's intentionally bad theater, and it's a hell of a lot of fun.

My friend Sean and I have been going to PST (as we aging hipster doofuses like to call it) since the mid 80s. In fact, it was the summer after my freshman year at Texas Tech that Sean and his girlfriend of the time took me to see Fu Manchu: The Melodrama, and I was hooked.

All through the 90s, we were regulars at PST. Our table of choice was the "moose table," a booth along the back wall decorated by an enormous stuffed moose head. And after seeing dozens and dozens of the melodramas, Sean and I came to realize, 'Hey, I bet we could write one of those!"

Our first effort was in 1992. We decided it would be fun to write a swashbuckling pirate play, so we went to work on Blackbeard: The Melodrama. Our plot was pretty threadbare, but we had one gag that was guaranteed to kill. It was my idea to start Blackbeard off as a regular looking guy. Then, near the end of the first scene, he loses an eye. Sometime in the second scene, he gets his hand cut off. All through the play, he loses body parts until the last act, when he shows up with an eyepatch, a hook, a pegleg, etc. It was comedy gold, I tell ya!

We met regularly at Jason's Deli, which was right next door to Pocket Sandwich Theatre, and we hammered away at our plot, trying to stretch it out to the requisite three acts. And just about the time we got our first act into shape, PST announced their brand new play, Captain Blood: The Melodrama. And one of the gags involved a man who starts off relatively normal, but who loses body parts over the course of the play until he's left with an eyepatch, a hook, a pegleg, etc.

(To this day, I still maintain that it was an unfortunate coincidence. Sean, however, is convinced that somebody overheard us and stole our ideas.)

We were a bit disheartened and abandoned our efforts for several years. When we started talking about writing another melodrama, I suggested we try to come up with a genre that hadn't already been done. Sean suggested we meet somewhere else besides Jason's Deli.

Monster movies and science fiction had been done to death, so Sean and I brainstormed to come up with something different. Sean wanted to do a film noir, with gangsters, a private detective, and a femme fatale. We played around with the idea for a few weeks, but we just couldn't think of anything to do with it. Then, one night, we happened to catch Stalag 17 on AMC and inspiration struck. I suggested we write a melodrama making fun of WWII POW movies, such as Stalag 17, The Great Escape, and Bridge on the River Kwai. Sean suggested making our emcee General Patton, and we could have him stand in front of an American flag when he was introducing the play.

One by one, we came up with great bits and hung them on the basic plot of Stalag 17 (with a little bit of The Great Escape and Casablanca thrown in). A group of American POWs, led by the dashing and handsome Colonel Francis Blake, have made several failed attempts to escape from Stalag 18. A couple of British pilots, recently shot down over Wankendorf, are brought to the stalag and interred there until they can be taken to Berlin for questioning. But one of the pilots is actually the beautiful Marie LeVoleur, a cross-dressing assassin in the French underground. And, as it turns out, she and Blake were once romantically involved. So, in order to keep her from falling into the hands of the Gestapo, they come up with a ridiculously convoluted and totally retarded plan to help her escape. We named our play The Great Escape from Stalag 18: The Melodrama.

Now, the TV show Hogan's Heroes had been a parody of Stalag 17 as well. In fact, the character of Sergeant Schultz had originally appeared in Stalag 17 (although he hadn't been nearly as buffoonish as his television counterpart). I knew comparisons between our play and Hogan's Heroes were inevitable, but I wanted to downplay them as much as possible. When Sean pitched our play to Pocket Sandwich Theatre, he emphasized that it was a parody of WWII POW movies, and that it was based on Stalag 17 and The Great Escape.

So in September 2005, we submitted our play to Pocket Sandwich Theatre. In December 2005, they told us that they'd loved it and wanted to add it to their 2006 lineup. They eventually scheduled it to run through July and August. Sean and I were, in a word, ecstatic.

We met with the director in March, and the first thing he told us was, "I really like this play. It's just like Hogan's Heroes!" He also gave us some notes and requested some modifications. Some of them rankled me a bit, but most of them were sound and made total sense. (He wanted us to flesh out one of the bad guys, bringing her into the play earlier and giving her a proper come-uppance at the end. He also suggested shifting some of the bits around so the play would flow better and the acts would be more balanced. He suggested some subplots that we could weave into the main story to pad it out a bit.) We made the requested changes and the play went into production. And, much to my chagrin, it was billed as "a spoof of 1970s WWII television comedies."

It was my first real theatrical experience, and I have to admit that it was a blast. All of the actors seemed to love their parts (Sean and I had labored to make sure just about everybody had at least one memorable bit). The director had come up with some slapsticky interpretations but, as I mentioned before, lowbrow is the name of the game with these plays. I had no complaints.

Until the last dress rehearsal, that is. I knocked off work and met Sean up at PST to watch them go through it one last time before opening night. Everything went swimmingly. It was pure magic. And then, they got to the last scene and suddenly our hero Colonel Blake is delivering this plodding, unfunny speech about how they'll keep trying and trying and won't rest until everybody has escaped, so get back to digging and blah, blah, blah.

Our original ending had been a takeoff on Casablanca's "This looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship." The director apologized to us and said he'd tried to make our ending work, but he just couldn't, so he'd written this other one.

I was furious. I hated the new ending, and didn't see where it was any kind of improvement over the original. It was just a clunky, unfunny coda. People accused me of being defensive, but it wasn't like I felt the original ending was sacrosanct or anything. I was just pissed that the director had taken it on himself to rewrite it instead of asking us.

Opening night, the audience was packed with people who love me and Sean. (There was also a celebrity in the audience... no one I know, but apparently he has a show on Nickelodeon or Disney Channel or something). We took our usual seats at the moose table. Stephanie attended the show with me, looking astonishingly hot and making me feel like a real stud. The director invited us to come backstage for a toast before the curtain went up. I was never involved in anything remotely theatrical (unless you count a decade of marching band), so it was all swanky. Add to that the tens of dollars that Sean and I made for our writing effort, and I was really feeling pretty goddamned glamorous.

Despite the new ending (or maybe because of it... what the hell do I know?), the play was apparently a success. Most of the performances sold out. Sean stayed in touch with several of the actors, who wanted to know when we were going to write another one. The guys at PST started bugging us for a new one as well. So in December 2006, Sean and I got together and discussed our next magnum opus.

We still liked the idea of doing a film noir gangster movie type thing, and we brainstormed plot ideas for hours. We riffed on movies like The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, but we couldn't think of anything funny to do that didn't come off like a fifth rate Carol Burnett sketch. I suggested doing something akin to Scarface or The Godfather, about a young man's rise to infamy in the world of organized crime. But still, we couldn't help but feel like it had all been done before.

Then, Sean hit on the brilliant idea of making our hero a masked avenger, like The Shadow or The Spirit. He envisioned some guy in a dark trench coat and fedora wearing a mask and wielding guns. Playing off of that, I suggested we go with a radio serial theme. Our emcee could be the radio host and could remain a character throughout, narrating the action. One of us (I can't remember which) came up with the idea of adding horribly dated commercials to the mix ("Sophisticate Cigarettes, now with asbestos to prevent lung fever.") As we hammered out our plot, our noirish story became rather outlandish. Our hero evolved into a shadowy mystic who was orphaned in the Himalayas and trained in the inscrutable arts of the Orient. After several rejected names, we finally settled on Captain Phantasm. His opponent, whom Sean dubbed Dr. Noir, was a maniacal French genius whose scheme was to poison the Metroville City water supply so he could sell his bottled water to the masses. The first and second acts ended with dramatic cliffhangers, and the second act even featured a musical number with lyrics by me and Sean. It was gold!

In September 2007, Sean and I finally finished Captain Phantasm vs. the Nefarious Dr. Noir: A Melodramatic Serial in Three Parts and sent it in to PST. Then we sat back and waited for a response. And waited. And waited. And waited. Sean followed up with them to make sure they'd received it.

We finally heard back from PST a few weeks ago. It seems the person who is now responsible for reading the new scripts is the man who directed The Great Escape from Stalag 18. He emailed Sean to let him know that he'd gotten behind in his reading, and hadn't managed to get to "Capt. Nefarious" yet. So we won't make the 2008 schedule, but we will "go into next year's consideration."

So we'll see. Sean's the one in touch with PST, so I'm unloading all my prima donna demands on him. "Tell them they can't make any changes to the script without consulting with us." "Tell them we want to be involved in writing the promotional material." "Tell them we don't want any brown M&Ms in our candy bowl." I'm sure they'll come back with suggestions/demands of their own.

But I'm not really feeling the melodramatic love this time around. Despite that, Sean and I are about to start on our third and likely final collaboration (not counting the Blackbeard fiasco). It's a murder mystery entitled Dial M for Melodrama, and we're going to be ripping on geezer mystery series like Murder She Wrote, as well as all those Law and Order and CSI shows.

And if Pocket Sandwich Theatre says no, I guess we can always act the goddamn thing out with hand puppets and post it to YouTube...

Neurodiversity Training

2008-01-18T10:37:00.000-06:00

My nephew Campbell was diagnosed as mildly to moderately autistic this week.

It didn't really come as a surprise to any of us, but it's still a little weird to hear so definite a term put on it. He's two years old and hasn't started talking yet. He tends to get frustrated and start screaming for inexplicable reasons. He's surprisingly passive, to the point that any time his twin brother Luke snatches a toy away from him, he simply shrugs it off and picks up another. He's always been partial to playing with blocks, and he spends hours just stacking them up, knocking them down, and then stacking them up again.

So the possibility of autism had definitely been discussed, but it's such a nebulous and odd condition that nobody seemed to know for certain. Last year, when my sister Sunny was grocery shopping with the twins, Campbell started screaming. He wasn't agitated or freaking out or anything. He was just screaming. When Sunny finally got him settled down, a woman approached her and started asking her all these questions about therapists and programs. She told my sister that her son had been diagnosed as autistic the year before, and started giving her all kinds of advice. No doubt the woman meant well and was just happy to find a kindred soul, but it freaked my sister out a little. She told the woman that Campbell was seeing a therapist, but they were still trying to determine just why he was so slow to develop. The woman told Sunny that she and her husband were in denial as well, and now she regretted taking so long to get her son diagnosed. My sister finally thanked the woman for her "kind words," paid for her groceries, went home, and bawled her eyes out.

So now it's official, or as official as anything regarding autism can be. There's a lot of culture that has sprung up around the condition, and a lot of controversy amongst people with autism and their families. There is actually an autism rights movement that encourages autistic people to "embrace their neurodiversity" and encourages the "neurotypicals" to accept autistics instead of trying to "cure" them. Some even view their autism as a gift, and resent being treated as if they are somehow disabled.

But while embracing the condition may work for those who are mildly affected, it isn't quite so easy for the moderately or the severely autistic. The nature of the condition makes it difficult for them to develop any kind of meaningful relationships with others. Some are able to "learn" the empathy necessary to interact, but others never develop that understanding.

So of course, there are some who feel the autism rights movement is doing more harm than good by extolling autism as a virtue and a gift rather than a condition. They want a cure, and they fear that efforts might be compromised if people view autism as a lifestyle rather than a disorder.

(And for the record, the whole idea of an autistic savant is one that has been exaggerated in popular culture. While many autistic people do show a real aptitude for logical, process-based disciplines, like mathematics and engineering, true savants are a rarity.)

I have no idea where I fall in this spectrum. I guess it will depend on how Campbell develops. Right now, one of the major milestones is to develop his language by the time he's six. If he can do that, he'll have a fighting chance.

I love my nephew, and all I want is for him to feel that and know what it means. He has two parents and an older brother (Christopher) who are devoted to him, and I have no doubt his twin brother Luke will be as well. No matter what happens.

There have been a few controversial studies that have linked autism with "geek" and "nerd" behavior. If that turns out to be true, then Campbell was certainly born into the right family...

Getting to Know You... IN THE BIBLICAL SENSE!

2008-01-14T14:17:00.000-06:00

I was browsing the TV Tropes website, which has become a primary time suck in my life in recent days, when I ran across this ad. All I could think was "Wow! Check out the enormous rack on that Christian! Please turn in your Bibles to the Book of Hooteronomy!"

By the way, Christians are allowed to join for free. I wonder who makes that distinction. Do Mormons count? Not if you ask the Baptists. Do Baptists count? Not if you ask the Church of Christ. "Sorry sir, but the obscure Gnostic sect to which you belong was declared heretical by Pope Angus VI back in 983 A.D. I'm afraid you'll have to pony up the $25 service charge."

Keep Watching the Skies!

2008-01-11T15:05:00.000-06:00

Actual excerpts from Essentials of Survival: Emergency Action to Save Lives, a pamphlet published by the Dallas City-County Civil Defense and Disaster Commission in 1958.

Civil Defense will prevent us from becoming a panic-stricken mob of people, unable to organize and fight back immediately after such an attack. Civil Defense will keep us alive, alert, and organized -- able to hit hard and fast as this Nation of 170 million people has shown the world it is able to do under our democratic way of life.

...

When the only way an atomic bomb could be dropped on our Country was from an airplane, we might have had sufficient warning time to evacuate our City. With the perfection of Intercontinental missiles and missiles launched from submarines, our warning time may be cut to zero.

Therefore the Mayor contemplates he will give no "order" for everyone to evacuate the City.

Certain "essential citizens" will have to remain to conduct the business of law enforcement, rescue, medical attention, public utilities and like services. Other citizens, including many women and children can make their plans to leave the City should information over Conelrad indicate the probability of an attack.

...

Lie flat on ground. Pick a gutter, ditch, or a curb. Protect head and neck with your arms. Remain until shock wave has passed. Move quickly to nearest protection from "fallout" -- a building, basement, your home or other shelter.

...

Communism is a way of existence in a total socialist state, such as the U.S.S.R. It is an ideology which results in slavery under a system of terror imposed by a Communist dictator government. It is a device by which the International Communist Conspiracy intends to rule the world. Communists want America. They want your property and you.

Although there are scores of books written by Communists and others on the theory, philosophy and ideology of Communism, it all boils down to this:

The Communists pretend they will make the world over into a paradise of materialism, in which each man will share according to his needs.
By promising a Materialistic heaven on earth they appeal to the Godless.
By stressing science they interest the unwary intellectual.
By promising security they capture the mind of the poor.
By pretending to Champion the Underprivileged they ensnare the idealistic.
By promising something for nothing they win the support of the shiftless.

...

The Communist Party U.S.A. operates in the open and also underground. The open party is not very large nationally, having a total of perhaps 15,000 dues-paying members. They purposely limit their hard core membership to keep tight control among the dedicated revolutionaries. However, there are many thousands of fellow travelers, pinks, fifth columnists, Communist Front Members and others who are in the Communist orbit and who could not be counted on for loyalty to our government in time of Communist threat. These are people very dangerous to our country. Many are disgruntled with their state of life. Many are opportunists. Many are intellectuals who are soft on Communism for reasons known only to themselves.

The underground Communist organization is composed of spies, saboteurs, couriers and others who can work themselves into strategic positions in government, industry, art, unions, news media, school systems, entertainment, Religious organizations and civic groups. In fact practically every phase of American life has been infiltrated by Communists or Communist sympathizers.

...

The principles of Americanism that have made this Country the greatest in the world are:
A belief in God
Freedom of the individual
Private Enterprise System of Economy -- the right to own property and work for reward
Representative Republic System of Government where the government is the protector of the individual under the Constitution
Determination of policy by persuasion and not by force.

...

With God's help America will remain a land where people still know how to be free and brave.

Maybe it's just me, but I'm thinking our country will probably make great strides in international diplomacy once we finally get someone into office who didn't grow up reading this shit.

Holy Catch Phrases, Batman!

2008-01-10T10:36:00.001-06:00

Recently, I was reading through John's archives over on Random Squeegee. He's a funny, funny boy who deserves to have hordes of slavish followers, and the fact that he isn't a world-renowned celebrity on Nobel Prize winner Al Gore's Internet is just one of the many things that mocks my childlike faith in God. And if it sounds like I have a little bit of a man-crush on him, what can I say? One time when I was feeling low, he sent me a picture of Rodney Dangerfield's zombie eating the brains of Karl Rove. So although I've never actually met the guy, I'm not ashamed to say that I love him with the robust, manly love that might exist between two vikings who are secure enough in their manhood to dress up in red chiffon and ride each other up and down the hallway...

What the fuck was I talking about?

Oh, yeah. Anyway, John has posted at length about his co-worker Joe, who is apparently more annoying than a sack of Bill O'Reillys. As near as I can tell, Joe is a socially-awkward man in his fifties who attempts to reach out to people by spewing random pop-culture catch phrases that make absolutely no sense out of context.

Full disclosure time... I think I used to be like Joe. I was constantly tossing off non-sequitors and regurgitating crap I'd heard on TV in an effort to make myself seem interesting. How bad was I? Well, I remember when that horrible Rob Schneider skit debuted on Saturday Night Live where he played the office worker who sat near the photocopier and kept regaling his co-workers with silly variations of their names. "Kristine! Kristiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine! The Kristinator! Kristyl! Krystal Burger! Onward Kristian Soldiers! Makin' the copiiiies!" And when I went to work on Monday, no fewer than five people made a point of telling me, "There was a guy JUST LIKE YOU on Saturday Night Live!"

So I'm probably lobbing stones from the patio of my glass house by giggling at the Joe stories, but in my defense, that was 20 years ago. I've since grown out of it. I no longer spend my every waking moment trying to be the wacky office guy. Life's just too short.

(Recently, one of the senior managers where I work told me that I reminded him of Jim Gaffigan. I choose to believe it's because of my wry and insightful sense of humor, and not because I'm whiter than a klavern of albino Republicans.)

During the 90s, when I was working at Brinker International (the restaurant company, not the armored car company), I was surrounded by folks who were trying way too hard to be funny. And, like Joe, they did it by randomly spouting catch phrases that had long since surpassed their use by date. Any remark made in a group of three or more was certain to be met with unfunny retorts like "Don't go there," and "That's just a little tooooo much information," and "That's what she said," and OH MY GOD! SHUT THE FUCK UP, TRAGICALLY UNHIP CO-WORKERS!

There was one programmer named Rex who performed no discernible function, yet managed to retain his job at Brinker for several years. We used to joke that Rex was a barometer for the rest of us, because he illustrated just how badly we could fuck up and still not get fired. Anyway, Rex got hold of the phrase "That's not what you said last night," and continued to flail away at it long after it was little more than a horse-shaped pile of dust. I mean, it didn't even have to make any sense. He used it like most people use punctuation.

So one day, I conspired with my friends Scott and Mike. The programmers and the QA team were getting together for a group lunch, and we decided we were going to catch phrase everyone to death. The plan was this: every time somebody said anything, no matter how innocuous, I would turn it into an innuendo. Scott would reply, "Well hell, who doesn't?" And Mike would end it with, "That's not what you said last night."

For nearly half an hour, the conversation at the table went like this.

Someone:
I don't think we're going to be able to meet that deadline.

Me:
I've got a deadline you can meet.

Scott:
Well hell, who doesn't?

Mike:
That's not what you said last night.

Someone else:
Maybe we could shorten the testing schedule.

Me:
I've got a testing schedule you can shorten.

Scott:
Well hell, who doesn't?

Mike:
That's not what you said last night.

Someone else:
Can we push back the rollout date?

Me:
I've got a rollout date you can push back.

Scott:
Well hell, who doesn't?

Mike:
That's not what you said last night.

Someone else:
Jesus, would you guys stop doing that?

Me:
I've got something you can stop doing.

Scott:
Well hell, who doesn't?

Mike:
That's not what you said last night.

Our little object lesson did nothing to curtail Rex and the rest of the catch phrasers. If anything, they became even more egregious. In fact, most people hadn't really noticed it before Scott, Mike, and I had done our little stunt, and now they blamed us for having started the trend in the first place.

However, Hands Across America didn't solve the homeless problem and We Are the World didn't put an end to famine in Africa, but they're considered successful because they raised people's awareness of those issues. And I like to think that's what Scott, Mike, and I did. We raised people's awareness, baby. We raised the *shit* out of it.

The world "hero" gets bandied about so often that it has just about lost its meaning. But like Rosa Parks and Mahatma Gandhi, we took a stand against a perceived injustice. And although this act caused us to be labeled pariahs and outcasts, I like to think that future generations will vindicate us as heroes.

I've got something you can vindicate.

Well hell, who doesn't?

That's not what you said last night.

New Year's Resolutions for 2008

2008-01-02T10:50:00.000-06:00

I will spend more time lying on the couch and watching TV. (It's important to set realistic, attainable goals.)

I will never miss an opportunity to refer to the World Wide Web as "Nobel Prize winner Al Gore's Internet."

I will hone my Photoshop skills so I can finally get my lolmanson page off the ground.

I will stop bugging Stephanie to fulfill my Little Debbie fantasies by dressing up in a gingham dress and bonnet and feeding me Swiss Cake Rolls.

I will do everything in my power to eradicate the words guesstimate, ginormous, and chillax from the English lexicon.

I will make an effort to go door to door and meet my neighbors, in accordance with the terms of my probation.

I will post at least once a month to avoid any embarrassing gaps in my blog archives. If I can't come up with anything clever to post, I'll steal something from John's blog and claim it as my own.

I will start a wave in church.

I will celebrate the end of George W. Bush's presidency by drinking wine from the skull of Ann Coulter.

God Bless Those Pagans...

2007-12-28T11:20:00.000-06:00

On Christmas Eve, I attended the service at Tyler Street Methodist with my family. I'm not a huge fan of religious services, but it's really important to my mom and my sister, so I figure the least I can do is drag my sinning ass into church for the big three religious holidays -- Christmas, Easter, and Mother's Day.

As far as Christmas Eve services go, Tyler Street is pretty palatable. Sometimes you'll get a warbling solo sung from the point of view of Mary about how "that precious little hand reaching up from the manger would one day be pierced by a nail," but for the most part, it's pretty traditional fare. The choir does a great Hallelujah chorus, and that bit where everybody lights their candles while singing Silent Night is pretty nice. In fact, the only time I ever really squirmed uncomfortably in my seat was during the sermon.

Usually, the sermons at these things are short and sweet, but this time the reverend decided to delve into the dreaded War on Christmas. He started ranting about the fact that Home Depot referred to their Christmas trees as "Miracle Trees," and how it was just another attack on Christianity by the secular left.

You know, if you're looking for an example of the War on Christmas, you might want to select a Christmas tradition that doesn't actually predate Christ. I like to think there are some Viking traditionalists in Norway who resent the war being waged on Yule and the way those Christians insist on Jesusing up their High Feast. "By my hammer, Thor and Freyr are the reason for the season!" Every year, they probably send each other angry e-mails calling for a boycott on stores that are referring to their Solstice Firs as "Christmas Trees." And then they drink fermented goat's milk and mead until they vomit into their horned helmets and pass out.

And don't get me started on mistletoe...

Why I Loves Me Some Goddamn Comic Books, Part 2

2007-12-21T21:17:00.000-06:00

Astonishingly Cool Game Show Moments (That May or May Not Have Actually Happened)

2007-12-19T14:40:00.000-06:00

I won't deny it. I loves me some goddamn game shows. But it's not the mental challenge or the thrill of competition that draws me in. I don't give a rat's ass about the fabulous prizes ("A year supply of Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco treat!") and I couldn't care less about the smarmy has-been celebrities who pander pathetically to the studio audiences.

No, I watch game shows for the same reason most people watch NASCAR. I want to see a massive, flaming wreck. When you put average, ordinary people under that kind of pressure in front of a camera, shit is going to happen.

What follows are some astonishingly cool things that may or may not have happened on game shows. Most of them are urban legends, which means that you probably heard about them from friends who claim they actually saw them happen, or claim that they know someone who actually saw them happen. No offense, but your friends are lying sacks of crap. (Unless they're me. See The $100,000 Pyramid below.)

So here we go. Big prizes. No whammy. And... stop!

The Newlywed Game
This one is probably the queen mother of game show urban legends. Host Bob Eubanks asked Henry Perez "Where is the weirdest place that your wife has ever gotten the urge to make whoopee?" Henry mulled it over and answered, "In our car, on the freeway." Then his wife Olga came out. Bob asked her the same question. She stammered and looked helplessly at her husband for a second before finally answering, "Is it in the ass?"

Is It True?
Versions of this story have been floating around for 30 years, but Bob steadfastly claimed that it was just a legend and it never happened. However, he was proven wrong when the episode (which originally aired in 1977) turned up on the Game Show Network a couple of years ago. So yes. It really happened.

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
Earlier this year, an e-mail started circulating about a hapless contestant named Kathy Evans who found herself stymied by the first question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. If you've ever watched the show, you know the first question is only worth $100 and is supposed to be a gimme.

So after Meredith Vierira introduced her, Kathy was given her first question. It was:

"Which of the following is the largest?"
A) A Peanut
B) An Elephant
C) The Moon
D) A Tennis Ball

Unable to come up with the answer on her own, Kathy used the first of her lifelines, the 50/50. Two answers were removed, leaving B) An Elephant and C) The Moon. Still unsure, Kathy decided to use her second lifeline and phoned her friend Betsy. Betsy quickly assured her the answer was C) The Moon, but Kathy didn't believe she knew for certain. Just to make sure, she used up her last lifeline and asked the audience. The audience responded with an overwhelming 98% in favor of C) The Moon. But Kathy decided to go with her gut and she answered B) An Elephant.

Is It True?
In a word, no. The picture that accompanied the e-mail was actually Photoshopped from an image of Fiona Wheeler, who was on the UK version of the show. While there have been some boneheaded contestants, the entire Kathy Evans story was a fabrication. (Incidentally, Fiona did quite well on her appearance and wound up winning £32,000.)

Password Plus
My cousin told me this one back in the 80s. Tom Selleck was partnered up with an African American woman. Host Bert Convy informs the audience that "the password is... DEER." Selleck thinks for a second, and offers the clue "DOE..." His partner responds immediately, "KNOB?"

Is It True?
Probably not. There are an awful lot of variations floating around online (many of which end with the angry contestant suing for discrimination). Several celebrities have tried to attach themselves to the incident. Jamie Farr claimed it was he, and not Tom Selleck, who gave the "doe" clue. Nipsey Russell once claimed that he was the one who had responded "knob." But so far, it hasn't turned up in syndication.

Wheel of Fortune
Vanna White told this story on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson back in 1985. The puzzle category was "Title" and one of the contestants had managed to pretty much sweep the round. He'd been spinning and hitting big numbers and had filled in almost all the letters. It was obvious to all watching that the answer was "GONE WITH THE WIND," but the guy kept on spinning and building up his winnings. Finally, everyone was relieved when he announced he would like to solve the puzzle. With utter confidence, he proclaimed, "DONE WITH ONE HAND."

Is It True?
The part about Vanna telling the story is true. I have no idea if the incident happened as reported or not, but I do remember quite well the dormant feelings Vanna awoke in me when my body first blossomed into manhood. I'm sure "DONE WITH ONE HAND" would have been foremost in my mind as well...

The $100,000 Pyramid
Okay, this one is a little different because I saw it! It was 1986, and I was in my dorm room between classes, eating a turkey sandwich and watching a little Pyramid. I believe the celebrity was Linda Evans. The contestant was a grandmotherly type in her late 50s/early 60s. They had won the game and were now trying to hit the jackpot in the Winner's Circle.

In case you don't remember, the Winner's Circle worked like this: the celebrity would be given a category, such as "THINGS THAT ARE BLUE." The celebrity would then list items in that category, such as "the sky... your dress... a sad song..." until the contestant guessed the category. If they managed to get through all six categories, the contestant would win mucho dinero.

So Linda and the contestant are working their way up the pyramid, and the category "THINGS BELOW YOUR WAIST" comes up. Linda is a bit dumbfounded. She stammers for a second. Then she finally says, "Um, your genital organs."

The kindly old contestant, whom I really do believe was somebody's grandmother, immediately responds, "Things you touch!"

Linda gets flustered. She can't think of anything else. She just keeps saying, "Um, your genital organs." And the contestant begins frantically blurting out, "Things you touch! Things you rub! Things you massage! Things you stroke!"

Is It True?
Yes, goddammit! I swear! I remember calling all my friends while it was going on to ask them if they were watching it, but they were all in class or at lunch. But I still cling to the hope that I will one day be vindicated by the Game Show Network.

Jesus vs. the ACLU

2007-12-18T11:07:00.000-06:00

Well, the holiday season is well underway and I've just received my first e-mail about the War on Christmas. Basically, it's rallying Christians together to inundate the ACLU offices with Christmas cards in the hopes that the flood of mail will shut down operations. My favorite part is the reminder "just don't be rude or crude. (It's Not the Christian Way, you know!)" Thank God for that oddly-capitalized caveat, because I'm sure several of Christ's more devout were about to take crayon in hand and write "SUCK MY CHRISTIAN COCK, YOU MOTHER FUCKING ATHEISTS! MERRY CHRISTMAS!"

So far, this is the only War on Christmas e-mail I've received this year. Now some might argue that's because the Jew-run liberal media is intentionally stifling the story and preventing its spread on Nobel Prize winner Al Gore's Internet. Personally, I'm hoping it means this retarded trope has run its course and, by next year, will be deader than disco and Dick Nixon.

So what does the ACLU have to do with the War on Christmas? Not a goddamn thing. You see, back in 2005, a bunch of fundamentalists got their hair shirts in a knot over the fact that some stores were saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas." Now, as far as I know, there were no complaints from anybody else about the marginalization of Hanukkah, Ramadan, or the Winter Solstice. The Jews, Muslims, and Druids all seemed to take it in stride. In fact, most Christians were pretty level headed and rational about the whole thing. It was just that tiny, loud, brain-damaged minority who felt their entire belief system was under attack because the cashiers at Target weren't taking customers by the hand and singing "Happy Birthday, Baby Jesus."

As you probably know, it's just no fun to be a fundamentalist Christian unless you can pretend like you're being persecuted for your faith. So these geniuses concocted this bizarre conspiracy in which otherwise wholesome and decent folk were being strong armed by the nefarious forces of Satan. And since Madalyn Murray O'Hair's ghost was too busy getting Touched by an Angel canceled to wage a personal war against the virgin birth, the fundamentalists decided to pin the whole thing on their other all-purpose scapegoat, the American Civil Liberties Union. If the ACLU hadn't been available, I imagine Jane Fonda would have been heading up the War on Christmas.

The liberal media outlets were all too busy distracting us with the real news to pick up the story, but fortunately FOX News was there to uncover the truth. Last year, Bill O'Reilly (whom you may remember as the blotchy FOX News pundit who likes to sexually harass his producers) decided to tilt his lance at the War on Christmas. He railed and ranted about all these injustices that were being perpetrated against decent Christian folk, all in the name of "political correctness." High schools were banning red and green clothes. Nameless corporations were firing employees for giving out Christmas cards. ACLU thugs were dragging people out of their cars in the church parking lot, beating them with yuletide logs, and then forcing them into gay marriages. OH, THE HUMANITY!

Well, as it turns out, Bill was talking out of his ass. When it came time to offer up evidence of this vast, liberal conspiracy to do away with Christmas, he discovered that he had nothing. So, in desperation, he pulled out a year-old clip from The Daily Show on Comedy Central. The clip featured Samantha Bee joking that Christmas is "the only religious holiday that's also a federal holiday. That way, Christians can go to their services and everyone else can stay home and reflect on the true meaning of separation of church and state."

Ooh! Take that, Christ child!

So that was it. His entire war on Christmas came down to a bunch of urban legends that had long since been disproved and a six-second clip from 2005. That, in and of itself, was pretty goddamn funny. But the best part, by far, was Jon Stewart's response the following evening:

You know what, it's okay. If Bill O'Reilly needs to have an enemy, needs to feel persecuted, you know what? Here's my Kwanzaa gift to him. Are you ready? All right. I'm your enemy. Make me your enemy. I, Jon Stewart, hate Christmas, Christians, Jews, morality, and I will not rest until every year families gather to spend December 25th together at Osama's Homo-Abortion Pot and Commie Jizzporium.

Have a happy Hanukwanzaramadolsticemas, everybody!!!

Hell is for Help Desk, Part 2

2007-12-17T15:35:00.000-06:00

Back in 1990, when I was still in college, I worked in the Electronics Department of Sam's Club. In addition to hawking personal computers, TVs, VCRs, camcorders, etc., I was responsible for providing technical support.

So one day, while I was enjoying my nice, relaxing 20 minute lunch break*, I heard the call on the PA: "Hardlines, customer needs technical assistance on Line 2. Customer needs technical assistance on Line 2." So I wolfed down the rest of my Twinkie and picked up the call.

The customer in question was a woman who was, I'm guessing, roughly the same age as moveable type. The following is the conversation I had with her, verbatim. (Or at least as verbatim as I can recall 17 years after the fact.)

Me: This is Chris. How can I help you?
Her: Chris, my son bought me a VCR for my birthday last week and he set it up to record my stories.
Me: Uh huh...
Her: But somebody took the tape out of it yesterday, and now I'm afraid it's going to turn on when my stories start and break because there's not a tape in it.
Me: Oh, that won't happen. It may flash a message telling you to insert a tape, but it won't break the VCR.
Her: Well, I don't want it to try and record without a tape.
Me: It won't. It's smart enough to know there's no tape.
Her: I just want to stop it from recording.
Me: Okay. Easiest thing to do is just make sure the VCR is turned on. It won't do any automatic recording if you have it turned on.
Her: But can't I just go in and delete all that stuff he put in there?
Me: Sure. I can walk you through that.
Her: Good. I just hate for it get broken. I just got it last week.
Me: Right. Okay, first thing you need to do is press the Menu button on your remote.
Her: Menu button?
Me: Yes. Should be in the upper left corner of the remote, near the power button.
Her: Okay.
Me: Okay, that should bring up a menu on your TV screen. You see it?
Her: Yes.
Me: Okay, now press the menu button again until you've highlighted Program Review.
Her: Okay.
Me: Now, press Select.
Her: Okay.
Me: Okay, you should now see a list of all the stuff your VCR is recording. Do you see it?
Her: What?
Me: You should see a list of dates and times. That's what your son entered to tell the VCR to record your shows.
Her: I don't see it.
Me: Okay, what do you see?
Her: Just the TV. The news is on.
Me: Okay, let's try it again. Press the Menu button.
Her: Okay.
Me: Okay, do you see the menu on your TV screen?
Her: Yes.
Me: Okay, press the Menu button until you've highlighted Program Review.
Her: Program Review?
Me: Right. Second item on the list. Once you've got it highlighted, press Select.
Her: Okay.
Me: Good. Now, do you see a list of programs?
Her: Um, yes?
Me: Okay, press the Cancel button. Should be close to the Select button.
Her: Okay.
Me: Now you should see a message telling you to press Cancel again to delete the selected program.
Her: What?
Me: Do you see a message that says "Press Cancel again to delete the selected program?"
Her: No.
Me: Do you see anything at all?
Her: Just the TV. The news is still on.
Me: Okay, let's try again. Your TV is on, right?
Her: Yes. The news is on.
Me: And your VCR is on?
Her: I think so. How can I tell?
Me: The numbers on the front are brighter when it's on.
Her: Hang on... yes, it's on.
Me: And the VCR is connected to the TV?
Her: Yes.
Me: All right. Let's give it another try. Press the Menu button and it should bring up a menu on your TV screen.
Her: Okay.
Me: Is there a menu on your TV screen right now?
Her: No.
Me: Anything on your screen besides the news?
Her: It's a commercial right now.
Me: Anything besides that?
Her: No.
Me: Let's make sure you're pressing the right button. It's the Menu button, in the upper left corner of your remote, just under the red power button.
Her: What?
Me: The button that's labeled Menu. It's in the upper left corner of your remote, just under the red button.
Her: The remote?
Me: Yes.
Her: Hang on. Let me go get it.

To this day, I still have no idea what the hell she'd been mashing for the past 20 minutes, or what she was looking at when she told me she could see the menu. When she finally came back with the remote, we tried once again to delete the programs, but by this point I had given up any hope of actually succeeding. After our fifth or sixth attempt, I finally moved on to Plan B. I had her unplug her VCR and told her to leave it unplugged for four hours (well past the end of my shift). I told her when she plugged it back in, the programs should be gone. And if she needed help setting the clock, she could call back and *somebody* would walk her through it.

--------------------
*The management style at Sam's Club was passive-aggressive, to say the least. My manager would constantly chide me for the number of customers who went unhelped when I was at lunch or on my break. So I'd ask him if he wanted me to skip my breaks, and he'd say that wasn't allowed and that I should always clock out. In effect, what he wanted me to do was clock out, but remain on the floor and keep on working. My manager sucked and I hope he's dead now.

Fighting the Urge to Glurge...

2007-12-16T20:55:00.000-06:00

I'm much more comfortable posting about religion or politics. With those things, I can be all jaded and world-weary, and sometimes I even buy into my own affected air of moral superiority. But when it comes to affairs of the heart, I just can't stay cynical. I guess I'm just a romantic. Or, as it's known in the industry, a "big ol' girl's blouse."

So several people have asked what's going on with me and Stephanie. And my first inclination is to compose a snarky, silly post to make light of the question. But I can't. The fact is, Stephanie and I are back together now. We're very happy and things are going really well.

I don't want to get into that whole can of worms about who was right and who was wrong, so let me just say that Stephanie was as miserable as I was after we broke up. We talked. Explanations were attempted on both parts. Tears were shed and teeth were gnashed. Regrets were expressed. Apologies were made. Tentative promises were exchanged.

And now, we're back together. We're taking it slowly, but this time we're both on board with being in a loving, committed relationship. We love each other and we make each other happy. And this time, I believe we both really want things to work.

There! You see? I got through the entire post without referring to her as a "schmoopy muffin basket full of kittens and rainbow kisses." I'm getting better!

The Gay Nineties

2007-12-12T13:39:00.000-06:00

You know, the Victorians really get a bad rap. Everybody thinks they were a bunch of sexually repressed prudes who were ashamed to admit that even their furniture had legs. But I was an English major, and I read my share of Victorian literature. And I'm here to tell you that these were some of the filthiest perverts to ever put pen to paper. Don't believe me? Here are a few actual quotes from books that YOUR CHILDREN MAY BE READING IN SCHOOL AT THIS VERY MINUTE!

"No, indeed," returned his daughter. "We are all pretty gay here, thank Heaven! Ain't we, father?"
     David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

"Very sorry to knock you up, Watson," said he, "but it's the common lot this morning. Mrs. Hudson has been knocked up, she retorted upon me, and I on you."
     The Adventure of the Speckled Band, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Hansel and Gretel gathered faggots together, as high as a little hill.
     Grimm's Fairy Tales, The Brothers Grimm

Well, well, well! Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb always says he's queer; says nothing but that one sufficient little word queer; he's queer, says Stubb; he's queer -- queer, queer; and keeps dinning it into Mr. Starbuck all the time -- queer, Sir -- queer, queer, very queer. And here's his leg!
     Moby Dick, Herman Melville

His landlady came to the door, loosely wrapped in dressing gown and shawl; her husband followed ejaculating.
     The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells

Disgusting! Yet oddly titilating...

BAAAAA Humbug!

2007-12-11T18:03:00.000-06:00

So I ventured into a Baptist church on Saturday night.

I know. IT'S A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE!

You see, my mom belongs to a senior citizens choir called the Jesus Geezers or the Geriaptists or the Goldeneers or something, and they did their massive Christmas extravaganza this weekend. And say what you will about the Baptists, they put on one hell of a Christmas show!

Mom even got a solo when they did this little novelty number about fruitcake. She sang about using it as a doorstop or giving it to her kids as punishment when they're late for something. The crowd loved it. They ovated. Seriously.

But my favorite part was probably the Living Nativity they did during Act III. After two acts of jolly, happy (and surprisingly secular) Christmas carols, things got kind of serious. A spotlight fell on the Virgin Mary, who was kneeling before the angelic host. And the angel spoke to her with an accent oddly reminiscent of them Duke boys: "Feeyer not, Mayery, for thayou hast fayound faeevor with Gawd."

And so Mary and Joseph made their way to the elaborate manger set. And as the choir reverently sang "Silent Night," the wise men and the shepherds came to pay their respects. And to add an air of authenticity to the proceedings, the shepherds had real sheep with them.

I guess they didn't have the sheep with them during rehearsal. Either that, or the sheep were uncharacteristically spooked by the crowd. But the sheep began bleating. Loudly. And incessantly. The choir pressed on, troopers that they are.

Siiiiiiilent niiiiiiBAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Despite the majesty and the pageantry, the crowd began snickering. Finally, the director (you could tell he was the director because he was wearing one of those Madonna headsets) came bolting up the aisle and had the shepherds take their sheep outside. The shepherds went out separate doors and the sheep, apparently afraid they would never see each other again, began BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAing desperately back and forth, totally drowning out the choir and the giggling audience. Finally, the shepherds got them out the doors, which slammed shut, and we listened to the muffled cries of the sheep as they were led through the foyer and out the front door.

(Just a quick coda to an already gripping narrative... When he was introducing the Living Nativity, the emcee invited everyone to "sit back, relax, and enjoy the Christmas story." At this point, my nine-year-old nephew Christopher mimicked holding a BB gun and whispered to me, "You'll shoot your eye out, kid."

I'm so proud. He really does take after his uncle...)

Do You Meme What I Meme?

2007-12-07T13:20:00.000-06:00

Ah, Christmas. That magical time of year when we celebrate the day that Santa rescued the Baby Jesus from the Grinch by pelting him with fruitcake. I think. Anyway, this is another one of those meme things, which is always another excuse to inflict my answers on a bunch of hapless readers who have, frankly, never done me any harm.

1. Eggnog or Hot Chocolate?
Hot Chocolate. Stephanie makes something she calls Rococoa, which is hot chocolate mixed with Kahlua, Bailey's, and I think maybe heroin.

2. Does Santa wrap presents or just sit them under the tree?
For some reason, Santa always wrapped presents with the same paper my mom used. I used to think it was just a coincidence, but since I've grown older and wiser, I've come to realize that cheap bastard Santa was stealing wrapping paper from my mom.

3. Colored lights on the tree/house or white?
I refuse to answer this question because it endorses segregation.

4. Do you hang mistletoe?
From my belt buckle. BADA BING! GOOD NIGHT, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!

5. When do you put your decorations up?
You don't have to put them up if you never take them down...

6. What is your favorite holiday dish (excluding dessert)?
Spicy Cajun reindeer tacos. Mmmmmmm!

7. Favorite holiday memory as a child?
Okay, true story. My grandfather had a really bad stutter, and sometimes the only way he could break out of it was by swearing. His swear word of choice was "goddamn," but he always pronounced it "hoddamn." So when I was 5 and my sister Sunny was 4, we were visiting my Dad. The phone rang, and my Dad answered it. He got all excited and he told me and Sunny that it was for us. So I grabbed the phone in the living room and Dad handed the kitchen phone to Sunny. We heard this loud, booming voice on the line saying, "Ho Ho H-h-h-h-hoddamn-ho! This is San-san-san-hoddamn-santa Claus!" Dad asked us who it was and my sister said, without batting an eye, "It's Papaw."

8. When and how did you learn the truth about Santa?
I figured out he was gay a long time ago. I mean, anyone who wears red fur and hangs out with all those elves has got to be... oh, wait. You're talking about something else.

9. Do you open gifts on Christmas Eve?
I'm constantly visiting members of my extended family, so we open gifts on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day, and sometimes as late as New Year's Eve. For us, Christmas is a lot like Hanukkah, only with better presents.

10. What kind of cookies does Santa get set out for him?
I figure Santa's probably sick of cookies by the time he reaches our hemisphere, so I usually leave him beer and french fries.

11. Snow! Love it or dread it?
I love it from the comfort of my apartment.

12. Can you ice skate?
God, no!

13. Do you remember your favorite gift?
I really loved me some Micronauts when I was a kid. They were these little toy robots that came apart, and you could combine them with others to make bigger robots, tanks, and stuff like that. They took them off the market when some genius kids shot the little plastic missile into their mouths and choked to death. I always say, there's nothing cooler than a toy with a body count!

14. What's the most important thing about the holidays for you?
If you arrange your vacation days just right, WOOHOO! ELEVEN DAY WEEKEND!

15. What is your favorite holiday dessert?
You know those Little Debbie snack cakes that are shaped like Christmas trees? I like those.

16. What is your favorite holiday tradition?
For some reason, my family (which is full of staunch, proper Baptists) has started a tradition of playing Bunko (a dice game) and Keno (a card/bingo game) on Christmas and Easter. Which means we now officially celebrate the two holiest days by playing games of chance. Huh.

17. What tops your tree?
It used to be a bobble-headed Elvis, but that got broken a couple of years ago.

18. What do you prefer... giving or receiving?
Receiving, definitely. I realize that makes me a shallow person, but I've always felt that it's okay to be shallow as long as you're insightful about it.

19. What is your favorite Christmas carol?
I really like the Cold Meiser/Heat Meiser songs from the old Year Without a Santa Claus special, but I'm partial to anything that doesn't involve chipmunks, figgy pudding, or Grandma getting run over by a reindeer. Oh, and I really, really, REALLY hate the song "Jingle Bell Rock." But more on that later...

20. Candy canes... yuck or yum?
I am oddly ambivalent towards candy canes. Does anyone really need that much peppermint?

21. Have you ever recycled a Christmas present?
Yes. My brother-in-law and I have been giving each other the same Brut aftershave kit for about eight years now.

22. Favorite Christmas movie?
I've got to go with A Christmas Story. "You'll shoot your eye out, kid!"

23. Do you have a nativity scene?
No, but I once built a dinosaur by gluing together a bunch of Baby Jesuses (Jesii?) and called it Jesusaurus Rex.

24. What's the most annoying thing about this time of year?
That evil abomination of Christmas carols that IS "Jingle Bell Rock." Leaving aside the insipid lyrics and the fact that it has been covered by every hack from Hilary Duff to Hall & Oates, my main problem is with the title. There is absolutely nothing "rock" about this song, okay? It is as far from "rock" as any song could possibly be. The light leaving "rock" will not reach this song for millions of years.

Whew. Thanks for listening. As always, you've been very therapeutic.

Have a happy Hanukwanzaramadolsticemas, everybody!!!

On the First Day of Hanukkah, My Gelibte Gave to Me...

2007-12-05T13:55:00.000-06:00

I was raised Southern Baptist in the reddest of red states, so I actually know very little about Hanukkah (or Hannukah or Chanukah or Chaka Khan). Back in the early 90s, I worked with a girl named Elizabeth who was Jewish (although she brought this up while eating a bacon-cheeseburger, so I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that she wasn't strictly orthodox). Anyway, Elizabeth used to get annoyed by the fact that Christmas was the 500-pound gorilla of December holidays, and Hanukkah always seemed to place a distant second (or third, if you count New Year's Eve). There were no dogs barking "The Dreidel Song", no Barbara Streisand Hanukkah albums, and no Charlie Brown Hanukkah specials. Stores were putting up their Christmas decorations in October, but nobody was offering any special Festival of Lights savings.

(To quote Lewis Black, "How many shopping days do you Christians need? When I was a kid, Halloween was Halloween, and Santa wasn't sticking his fat ass into it!")

Ironically, when I asked Elizabeth what Hanukkah was a celebration of, she was a bit hazy on the details. "Something about the Maccabees and some oil that burned for eight nights," was all she could remember. Fortunately, I happened to stumble across a holiday special that answered most of my questions.

Airing at 4:00 on a Saturday afternoon on one of the local Dallas stations, the Hanukkah special opened with a group of kids playing baseball in what was obviously a soundstage designed to look like a vacant lot. I swear, this thing had the production values of a Sid and Marty Krofft show.

Anyway, one of the kids informed his friends that he needed to knock off and go home because his family was going to begin their Hanukkah celebration that evening. The rest of the kids were puzzled by his strange and exotic ways. They gathered around him in earnest fascination and asked him, "What is this thing that you call 'Hanukkah'?"

Well, before the young man could educate his goyim friends, a voice from off screen announced, "I believe I can answer that." The camera turned dramatically to reveal an older man wearing a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball uniform. And just in case you didn't recognize him, one of the kids exclaimed helpfully, "Wow! It's Jewish pitching legend Sandy Koufax!"

Sandy went on to explain, with the assistance of cartoony drawings, that the Maccabees had defeated the Assyrians in 165 B.C. and driven them out of Judea. However, before they left, the Assyrians had ransacked and desecrated the Holy Temple. After cleaning up the mess, the Maccabees wanted to rededicate the Temple by lighting the Ner Hatamid (or the Holy Light of the Eternal). Unfortunately, the Assyrians had polluted all of the oil vessels except for one. Even though there was only enough oil to last for one day, the Maccabees went ahead and lit the candle anyway. And the oil burned for eight days, giving the priests a chance to make and consecrate some more.

Another story integral to the Hanukkah tale (and one that Sandy didn't even mention) is that of Judith, a pious widow who was said to be the sister of Judas Maccabeaus. Judith was living in the village of Bethulia when it was beseiged by Holofernes and his Assyrian forces. With the water supply cut off, things looked dire for the poor villagers. But Judith had a plan to save Bethulia. She went to the Assyrian camps and surrendered to Holofernes, who was smitten by her beauty. She went back to his tent with him and fed him salty cheese. The cheese made Holofernes so thirsty that he drank copious amounts of wine and fell asleep. And as he snoozed away, Judith took his sword and cut his head off.

Holy shit! Take that, virgin birth and flying reindeer!

And on that note, Happy Hanukkah, everybody!

You'll Always Be As-Part-A-Me...

2007-12-04T14:29:00.003-06:00

People often ask me, "In this capricious and godless universe of endless suffering, how can you possibly find the strength to go on?"

It's a fair question. For much of my life, there has been a gnawing emptiness. I've tried desperately to fill this void with friends, family, religion... but those have all been dead ends.

But now, I have the answer.

After all, any universe in which Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr. Pepper exists must be a universe that loves me.

Actually, I'm not holding out a lot of hope. It seems any time I develop an unhealthy love of a diet soda, it gets yanked off the shelf faster than tainted cat food mixed with lead paint.

I used to love me some goddamn Diet Vanilla Coke. I bought it by the case and drank 5-6 a day. Hell, some nights I would wake up at 2:00 in the morning, get dressed, and drive to 7-Eleven just to satisfy my jones for its creamy aspartame goodness.

So of course, Coca Cola decided to "phase it out" in 2005 so they could replace it with Diet Black Cherry Vanilla Coke, which was like replacing Sean Connery with George Lazenby.

So I spent the next couple of years wavering back and forth between Black Cherry Vanilla Coke and Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper, which was sort of like choosing which sister you'd rather take to prom, or which Ann Coulter book you'd rather read.

(And don't get me started on that bottled vomit they call Diet Vanilla Pepsi. Hell, I'd rather drink Larry King's bathwater!)

And then, around the middle of 2007, Coca Cola did away with their Diet Black Cherry Vanilla Coke and replaced it with... Vanilla Coca Cola Zero! I was ecstatic! I was overjoyed! I was happier than Mitt Romney at a flammable lawn cross sale!

Alas, my joy was short lived. I've seen no official statements from Coca Cola on the subject, but Vanilla Coca Cola Zero seems to have mysteriously vanished from the shelves here in Texas. Diet Coke? It's all over the goddamn place. Coke Zero? As ubiquitous in Dallas as cowboy hats and big hair. Diet Cherry Coke? Can't throw a brick without hitting it. Diet Coke with Lime? Stacked from floor to ceiling, laughing at me, mocking my childlike faith in God.

But no Vanilla Coca Cola Zero. Not even any space on the shelf where it *would* be if they had it. It's like there was some kind of Vanilla Coca Cola Zero Rapture. Or Great Snatch, if you will...

But at least I have my Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr. Pepper to keep me warm, to whisper tenderly in my ear when I get lonely, and to gently kiss my tears away...

Apocalypse... Ow!

2007-12-03T17:37:00.000-06:00

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the Book of Revelation. For the benefit of any readers who may be godless and/or hellbound, Revelation (sometimes called The Revelation of John, or Revelations by people who can't read) is the last book of the New Testament. It was written by an early Christian named John who had been exiled to the island of Patmos. (Some folks think this was the same John who was an apostle to Jesus, while others insist they were two separate people.)

Anyway, while John was doing hard time on Patmos, he received a couple of visions. The first was simply the "Son of man" asking John to deliver messages of warning and/or hope to the seven church of Asia. And had he stopped there, we might have been spared a bunch of really horrible books by Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye.

But John went on to have a second vision that was, not to put too fine a point on it, batshit crazy. Even if you've never cracked a Bible in your life, you've no doubt come into contact with some of these bizarre prophecies, such as the four horsemen of the Apocalypse (Plague, Famine, War, and Death), or the Mark of the Beast ("six hundred, three-score, and six," or 666).

John basically prophesied that a Beast with seven horns and ten crowns would rise from the sea and join forces with the Whore of Babylon. Faced with the horrors of plague, famine, war, and death (not to mention all other kinds of weird crap, like locusts with the faces of men and the stings of scorpions), most of the people on Earth would turn from God and begin worshipping the Beast. Then Jesus would come back with His angelic army and throw the Beast into the Abyss.

I was ten years old when I first heard about this! After all those years of listening to stories about Daniel in the lions' den and Noah's ark and how Jesus was knocking on my heart so I could let Him in, I was amazed to find out there was something this cool in the Bible! I mean, holy shit!

(They didn't actually teach the Book of Revelation in Sunday School when I was that age. I heard about it from one of the teachers, who casually mentioned that there was a book in the Bible that "told the future." When I first tried to read Revelation, I was actually just skimming through to see if I recognized anybody's name. But I digress...)

Back in the 1970s, there was a hack writer named Hal Lindsey who wrote roughly 4,000,000 books about the prophecies of Revelation. In his most famous, The Late, Great Planet Earth, he claimed to have been divinely inspired by God to explain to everybody just what all the symbolism meant. He claimed that the European Economic Community (the forerunner of the European Union) would become a "United States of Europe," with ten members (represented by the Beast's ten crowns) that would be ruled by the Antichrist (a generic term that has since come to be applied to the Beast). Lindsey claimed that the Soviet Union would be a major player in the final apocalyptic war between Israel and the rest of the Middle East. Lindsey also insisted that all of this would come to pass within a generation of Israel's rebirth (or no later than 1988).

If Lindsey truly was taking dictation from God, he wasn't paying very close attention because very few of his "prophecies" came to pass. The European Union ended up with far more than 10 members, the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, and the 1988 deadline came and went without an apocalypse.

Actually, Lindsey wasn't the first to come up with this particular interpretation of the biblical prophecies. Herbert Armstrong, a freak in his own right, had made very similar predictions in 1956. He predicted that the German dictator of the United States of Europe (the Beast) and the Roman Catholic Pope (the Antichrist) would lead the nuclear attack against Israel in 1975. However, Lindsey was the first to popularize the concept of... THE RAPTURE.

You see, there are two different descriptions of Christ's return in the Bible. One says that He'll return "like a thief in the night" and all the believers will be taken into the air to meet Him. The other says His return will be witnessed by everyone on earth and accompanied by blaring trumpets and singing choirs and hand puppets and stuff. To reconcile these differing accounts, the concept of the Rapture was born. The theory is that before everything turns to shit on Earth, Jesus will come back and take all the believers into Heaven.

Yeah, I know. It seems kind of silly. But, as always, you'd be surprised how reasonable it all sounds when you've had your head held underwater for four minutes.

So anyway, thanks to Lindsey, churches all over the country (or at least in the red states) began considering the Rapture as canon. The Late, Great Planet Earth became required reading for all Southern Baptists. In fact, I'm pretty sure many of them simply stapled it to the back of their Bibles.

(Lindsey actually defined the Rapture as a time when Jesus would snatch all the believers into Heaven to be with Him. Because of this, he often referred to the Rapture as "the Great Snatch." I swear, I'm not making this up. Over and over again in The Late, Great Planet Earth, he refers to the Great Snatch. The preacher at my church adopted the same nickname and was using it as late as 1985. I remember sitting in the congregation and snickering when he would ask us, in all sincerity, "Will you be ready for the Great Snatch?" But again, I digress...)

By the time I was 12 or 13, I had a head full of this stuff. I had read The Late, Great Planet Earth and There's a New World Coming (Lindsey's follow-up, where he goes through Revelation verse by verse and explains what it means). I had read several Jack Chick tracts that not only vilified the Catholic Church as an instrument of the Antichrist, but offered up totally bitchin' pictures like this one...

I also remember a movie that they showed us at some youth function about that time. It was called "A Distant Thunder," and it was about a girl who was living in the world after the Rapture. There's this really horrifying moment when she's betrayed by her friend (who has the Mark of the Beast on her hand) and handed over to the world government (which was the United Nations, if I remember correctly). The movie ends with her being taken into a room with a guillotine. I swear, that fucking movie gave me nightmares for a week!

(I don't know what the obsession is with guillotines in all these things, but that seems to be the de facto means of execution. Apparently the Antichrist has some kind of severed head fetish. But once again, I digress...)

It didn't occur to me that these were all simply interpretations of Revelation. I accepted it all as the literal, gospel truth. I just assumed it was a tenet of Christianity, and doubting any of it would be just as bad as doubting the stories of Jesus or Adam and Eve or that one where Balaam's ass(!) spoke to him. In fact, when I was in the 8th grade, I remember getting into a heated discussion with my friend Neal (who is now a pastor for the Church of Christ). Neal tried to convince me that Revelation was a symbolic fable, which just flew in the face of everything I'd come to believe. I was astonished by his blasphemy, and became worried that one of my friends wasn't going to make it into Heaven when the Great Snatch occurred.

It wasn't until I got to college (in 1985) that I learned the truth. There were several different interpretations of Revelation amongst Christians, and mine wasn't even the most popular!

I had been taught the pre-millennial dispensationalist point of view. Basically, these guys believe that the Book of Revelation is a prophecy of the end times. At some point, Jesus will come back and Rapture the believers into the air. Then, a seven year Tribulation will begin in which those left behind will be subjected to plague, earthquakes, famine, demon locusts, etc. The Beast will rise to power, issue his Mark, and declare himself God. Then Jesus will return yet again to kick the Beast's ass into the Abyss. There will be a thousand years of peace on Earth known as the Millennium. Then the Beast will be released for a short time to try and tempt as many people as he can. Finally, God will sit in judgement on all of mankind. The Beast and his followers will be cast into Hell, and the rest will be taken into Heaven for eternity.

This particular point of view became somewhat mainstream during the 1970s, and was further popularized by Tim LaHaye's godawful Left Behind series in the 1990s. This is also the belief held by George W. Bush, which is why so many people got nervous when he began declaring war on nations at random in the Middle East, referring to the conflicts as "crusades" and "God's work."

Another point of view is post-millennial, which was quite popular prior to World War I. I'm not very familiar with this one, but my understanding of it is that, at some point in time, God started counting the Millennium. Over the course of the next thousand years, life would get gradually better and better until we finally achieved Heaven on Earth. But World War I disillusioned a lot of people, who realized the world was getting worse, not better. There are still some adherents, but they're definitely in the minority these days.

The most prevalent point of view among Christians these days seems to be amillennialism. The amillennialists believe that the imagery in Revelation is symbolic, and that most of John's prophecies have already come to pass. They believe that the Beast was a veiled reference to the Roman Empire, and that John's missive was written to encourage early Christians and give them hope in the face of their persecution. It all sounds quite reasonable, actually. I wish somebody had fucking mentioned it to me when I was 10!

(Okay, last digression. Back in 1990, I was having a discussion with one of my fraternity brothers who was decidedly pre-millennial. I remember him explaining things to me:

The world is only going to exist for 7,000 years total (because that's a nice, round number that has a 7 in it, and everybody knows God is all about numerology). Since the world was created in 4000 B.C. (somebody did the questionable math long ago), that means it's going to end in the year 3000. Which means the Millennium has to begin in the year 2000. Which means the seven year Tribulation and the rise of the Antichrist will begin in 1993. Which means (if you're still with me) that whoever gets elected in 1992 will probably be the Antichrist.

Which I guess could be the *real* reason that Clinton was so unpopular in the red states.)

Bumper Stickers You Probably Won't See on Humvees

2007-11-16T15:14:00.000-06:00

You know how some days, you just find yourself burning with passion and righteous indignation and you can't wait to crank out a post laden with barbed satire and insightful commentary? Well, this isn't one of those days. Enjoy some bumper stickers, bitches!

And my personal favorite...

Vaya Con Carne, Mi Amoebas!

2007-11-15T17:28:00.000-06:00

My friends accuse me of speaking Fake Spanish.

You see, I took six semesters of Spanish when I was in college. However, like most of my other classes, I only committed the material to memory long enough to pass the exams. I know there are all kinds of complicated rules for subjunctive tense, past tense, past-perfect tense, future-imperfect tense, past-double-decaf-with-a-twist-of-lime tense, etc., but I can't remember a single one. Each week we were given a list of 20+ vocabulary words to commit to memory, the idea being to build our vocabulary gradually. But each week, I would memorize those words, pass the vocabulary test, and then drink them all away the next weekend.

During my third semester of Spanish, the instructor hit on the brilliant idea of pop quizzes. Each day, he would select two people at random and have them go to the front of the classroom to carry on a conversation in Spanish. It didn't matter what they talked about... the idea was to get them to use their vocabularies, which were supposed to be considerable by this time.

So one day, I got called, along with an adorable little Kappa Alpha Theta named Caitlin. As the two of us made our way up to the front, my mind raced to form sentences from the 20 or so vocabulary words that I could remember. I knew it was up to me to take control of the conversation, because otherwise Caitlin might veer off onto a topic for which I simply lacked the words to express myself.

So our conversation went as follows:

Me: ¡Ay, caramba! (Oh, darn it!)
Caitlin: ¿Que pasa? (What is happening?)
Me: Estoy muy cansado. (I am very tired.)
Caitlin: ¿Por que? ¿No duerme usted mucho? (How come? You don't sleep much?)
Me: Si. Es verdad. (Yes. It's true.)
Caitlin: (Says something in Spanish that I just don't understand.)
Me: Um... ¿Que? (Um... what?)
Caitlin: (Repeats something in Spanish that I still don't understand.)
Me: Um... Yo no se. (Um... I don't know.)
Caitlin: (Getting frustrated) ¿Por que no duerme mucho? (How come you don't sleep much?)
Me: Uh... um... Porque mis cosas estan en el bano con el diablo. (Because my things are in the bathroom with the devil.)

At this point, Caitlin just looked helplessly at the instructor until he told us both to sit down. Caitlin probaby got a really good grade because she was cute. I got a C.

--------------

A couple of years later (I spent an indordinate amount of time in college), my buddy Keith was struggling through his Intro to Spanish course. Despite my illiteracy in the language, I had managed to pull A's and B's in the classes, so he turned to me to help him study.

Basically, it was a list of questions that the instructor was going to be asking the class the next day, and they had to be able to respond in Spanish. It was really elementary stuff... What is your name? Where are you from? How are you feeling?

One of the questions was "How old are you?" In Spanish, that translates to "¿Cuantos años tiene usted?" or "How many years do you have?"

So I ran through the questions with Keith, and he seemed to have the hang of them. Then we got to the birthday question.

Me: ¿Cuantos años tiene usted?
Keith: (Blank stare)
Me: ¿Cuantos años tiene usted?
Keith: Um...
Me: Just go through it word by word. You can figure it out.
Keith: Okay. Say it slow.
Me: ¿Cuantos... años... tiene... usted?
Keith: Um... uno?
Me: One? Seriously?
Keith: Are you asking me how many anuses I have?

Jack Chick Halloween Special - Part 2

2007-11-05T15:37:00.000-06:00

In case you missed Part 1, just scroll down and read it you lazy bastard!

Jack Chick has spent the last 40 years putting the "mental" back into "fundamental" with his hateful little comic book tracts. These "Chick Tracts" rail against all the things that are wrong with the world: Catholics, hippies, rock music, astrology, evolution, etc. But for some reason, the one item that rides at the top of God's shit list is Halloween. Why? Well, the reasons are so myriad and insane that it would take several pamphlets to enumerate them. Fortunately for us, Cap'n Jack has set out to do just that, which brings us to the second entry in his crazy-ass parade...

Boo! (1991)
Like the much touted "War on Christmas," Jack Chick believes that the true meaning of Halloween has been lost amidst all the secular hijinks and commercialism. You see, when kids put on those Batman costumes and wander from house to house asking for candy, they are actually reenacting an ancient ritual where druids used to put on Batman costumes and wander from house to house asking for children and virgins.

Our story opens with Charlie, a high school student in his mid-30s, renting out a campground for the annual Salem High School Halloween party. And the name of this campground is... wait for it... Camp Basil Bub! Haw, haw, haw! Our middle-aged high school student gets a hell of a deal on the place because just one year ago, 13 people were... MURDERED! And despite the fact that the killer was riddled with bullets and still got away, Charlie gets right to planning the evening's festivities. You know, music... snacks... sacrificing a live cat at midnight. And as the honking high school students drive away, a sinister figure with a pumpkin head and a pet snake suddenly realizes that he forgot his chainsaw.

Midnight comes, and things are getting mighty wild at Charlie's Halloween party. The three or four people who showed up are gathered around an altar for the cat sacrifice when, suddenly, the pumpkin-headed man bursts into the cabin WITH HIS CHAINSAW! So apparently he went home and got it, thus neatly wrapping up what could have been a storyline left dangling for years. Take a lesson, writers of Lost!

Anyway, the pumpkin-headed killer dices up everybody at the party except for one guy, and a mouse and a cat, all of whom flee the grisly scene. Apparently, the sole survivor calls the police, and one of the deputies interrupts the Chief, who is using black magic to levitate a coffee cup when he gets the news of the massacre.

Forty minutes later, the Chief and his sombreroed federales have emptied their guns into the pumpkin-headed killer, who removes his mask and reveals himself to be... SATAN! The sight of the effete Prince of Darkness proves too much for one of the deputies, who lapses into an Irish brogue as he flees.

Satan makes his way to "the village" and, for nefarious reasons we mere mortals may never understand, decides to cap off an evening of slaughter by scaring a Christian. He crouches outside the window of the "Village Church" and peers inside at Joey, a fine young man who apparently spends many an evening praying until after midnight. So what was Joey praying for? No idea. I think he was pissed that he didn't get invited to the Salem High Halloween party, so he asked God to send an unstoppable killer to hack up Charlie and his friends with a chainsaw...

As Joey makes his way home from his marathon prayer session, the devil jumps out and tries to scare him. But Joey's faith in the Lord is strong! He rebukes Satan, who literally runs for the hills while shouting swear words that are apparently best left to the imagination. Joey defiantly shakes his fist and tells the devil that he hates him *and* his lousy birthday!

The next day, a clearly shaken Joey goes to see his pastor, which seems like a reasonable course of action once you've had a personal run-in with the Hoary Master of the Netherworld. I mean, let's face it. Once you've come face to face with the very embodiment of evil, you're going to have some questions of a very spiritual nature.

What Joey wants to know is if Halloween is really Satan's birthday.

"Of course not, you retard," the pastor almost replies. He then launches into the standard Jack Chick diatribe about druids and human sacrifice. Now, this kind of bothers me because early on in the story, the devil himself referred to Halloween as his birthday. Why would he lie about something like that? I swear, sometimes Satan can be such a bastard!

Anyway, the Insane-o-meter gets cranked up to 11 as the pastor explains Satan's plot to Joey. Satan uses Halloween to trick little kids into becoming werewolves and witches, and then they commit human sacrifice, which God really hates. Not because it's murder, but because it makes a mockery of the crucifixion, which Satan is trying to keep you from hearing about. And THAT, Pastor Moe Howard informs us, is his trick.

I can't help but be disappointed with Chick at this point. Usually he puts a lot of thought into his conspiracy theories. I mean, he's concocted a secret history of the world involving lost Israeli tribes, the Illuminati, the European Union, the Lincoln assassination, the liberal media, and the Catholic Church. That's batshit crazy writ large, my friend! But what do we get for Satan and Halloween? Some half-assed attempt to connect a bunch of unrelated dots. Let's face it. This "wicked scheme" is even lamer than Joker's attempt to conquer Gotham City by becoming King of the Surfers.

So that's pretty much it for Boo! In an epilogue of sorts, we see that Joey managed to scare the devil back to Hell by talking smack about his birthday. Whimsically dressed in his pumpkin head, Satan laughs good-naturedly as a tormented soul shakes his fist from damnation's flame and calls him a rat.

Powerful stuff.

Next: A kid dies tragically on Halloween night, and a Sunday School teacher comforts his friends by assuring them that he's burning in Hell. Don't miss Happy Halloween!

Jack Chick Halloween Special - Part 1

2007-10-31T13:07:00.001-05:00

For those of you who don't know, Jack Chick is a freaky, FREAKY cartoonist who writes these little comic book tracts that rail against Satanists, gays, evolution, Muslims, liberals, rock music, Freemasons, Dungeons & Dragons, Catholics, Mormons, and basically any form of Christianity that differs from his extreme fundamentalism. In fact, the basic tenet of Chick's faith seems to be that God is a capricious asshole who is just *itching* for an excuse to cast your sinning ass into Hell.

But of all these pressing issues, the one that really seems to get up Chick's ass with cleats on is Halloween. Our man Jack has devoted no less than five of his "Chick Tracts" to exposing Halloween as a vast Satanic conspiracy concocted by druids and pagans to sacrifice small children and boost the sales of tiny Snickers bars.

The Trick (1986)
The first of Chick's Halloween oeuvre is The Trick. This one opens with a coven of diabolical witches hatching their evil scheme to sacrifice children to the devil by poisoning Halloween candy. However, it turns out that this year's Halloween drive has a dual purpose. Membership is down in Club Satan. Apparently role playing games and rock music just aren't bringing in the numbers like they used to, so the witches are also going to put curses on the treats to gain recruits.

On Halloween night, little Johnny Dexter and his friends, Jerry and Susie, go out trick or treating without realizing they are on a collision course with the kind of horrific tragedy that could only be pulled out of the ass of a fundamentalist Christian like Chick. Their neighbor Brenda, who is in league with the forces of evil, gives them all some tainted treats. Johnny dies from eating the poisoned candy, while Jerry ends up in the hospital with cuts in his mouth. Susie also gets sick from eating one of the cursed treats, but manages to recover. And then, irony of ironies, Sister Charity (who masterminded the whole messy caper) has a heart attack and dies while watching the tragedy unfold on the news. And she finds herself in Hell, where the devil taunts her by laughing like Z.Z. Top.

You're probably thinking to yourself at this point, "Thank God this whole sordid tale is over." Well, if so, you're a retard because Jack Chick is just warming up! Remember little Jerry and Susie, who survived the wicked Halloween treats? Well, they've gone from sweet and obedient to unmanageable little monsters who no longer want to go to Sunday School. (In other words, normal children.) Their parents are at wit's end, trying to figure out how to handle their wicked little hellspawn. And Brenda, whom nobody suspects is an undercover agent of Beelzebub, is trying to convince them that it's all just a harmless phase that all kids go through.

But Brenda's plans are undone by the arrival of Becky, a former witch who now serves Jesus. Yes, having turned her back on the dark conspiracy of witchcraft and Satanism, Becky now travels the nation and fights her evil former cohorts with the power of... well, God and the Bible and stuff. Upon meeting Becky, Brenda immediately smells an evangelical rat. And once Becky starts letting loose with the TRUTH behind Halloween, Brenda's suspicions are confirmed.

Becky spins a sordid tale of ancient druids and child sacrifice that Chick *claims* is straight from the pages of The Two Babylons, a pamphlet written by Scottish theologian Alexander Hislop in 1853. However, I suspect most of Chick's information actually came from repeated viewings of Halloween III: Season of the Witch. We learn that the druids were actually part of an ancient protection racket who would go door to door and demand children and virgins from families in exchange for protecting them from the forces of evil. Any families that didn't cough up would end up with a Star of David inscribed on their door, because apparently the Jews were in on it too. And then, someone would die!

Brenda tries to defuse Becky's devil stories by laughing them off as superstition. At first, the parents of the tainted demon kids fall for Brenda's line of reasoning and dismiss Becky's allegations. But then, Becky explains to them that the only reason her stories sound asinine and unbelievable is because IT'S ALL A PART OF SATAN'S PLAN TO TRICK PEOPLE INTO NOT BELIEVING IN HIM! And then, while the parents are scrambling to find the socks that just got blown the hell off their feet, Becky brings it on home and tells them that only the power of Jesus will snap those little misbehaving carpet apes into shape. As Becky leads them in prayer, Brenda vents her frustration by swearing in some goddamn moon man language.

Next: Jack Chick's Boo! rips on Halloween and horror movies, and isn't afraid to use stacks of dead teenagers to bring you closer to the Lord.

A Plot Twist!

2007-10-30T06:40:00.000-05:00

There's been a startling development in the Chris and Stephanie love story. It's a bit too early to go into details, but let's just say I'm cautiously optimistic. If this thing has a happy ending, then you'll be among the first to know. If not, well, I'm sure you'll hear about that as well.

As a gesture of good faith, I decided to take down the previous posts on the subject for the time being. It just seems kind of crass to have them hanging out there right now, all things considered...

Anyway, thanks for listening. As always, you guys have been very therapeutic...

Orville Says...

2007-10-26T13:41:00.000-05:00

Jokes My Dad Told Me - Part III

2007-10-25T09:52:00.000-05:00

A preacher was meeting with three couples who wanted to join his church - an older couple, a middle-aged couple, and a young newly-wed couple.

"Now, love is important in a marriage," he explained, "but love of God is the most important love of all. Before you can join our flock, you must prove that you can put God before your own physical needs. I want each of you to abstain from sexual congress to prove your devotion to the Lord." All three couples agreed this sounded like a fine and noble endeavor, and so they went on their way.

The following week, the preacher met with the three couples to see how they had fared. He asked the older couple, "My children, were you successful? Did you manage to abstain from the wicked temptation of the flesh?" Both shrugged and said, "Sure. No problem." Smiling, the preacher spread his arms and said, "Then I welcome thee into the flock."

Next, he asked the middle-aged couple, "My children, were you successful? Did you manage to abstain from the wicked temptation of the flesh?" The husband nodded and said, "It was a bit rough, preacher, but we persevered and I feel we're all the stronger for it." Spreading his arms again, the preacher smiled at them and said, "Then I welcome thee into the flock."

He turned to the young newly-wed couple, who were shifting nervously and unable to meet his gaze. "And you, my children," the preacher asked. "Were you able to abstain from the wicked temptation of the flesh?"

The wife just looked at the ground and couldn't speak. The husband said nervously, "Well, preacher, I'm afraid we weren't. We held out for four days, but... well... my wife dropped a can of peaches and when she bent down to pick it up, I just couldn't resist any longer. I jumped her and we had sex right there on the floor."

The preacher nodded sadly. "I'm sorry, my children. I hope you understand I won't be able to invite you to join our church."

The husband sighed. "That's okay. I don't think they're going to let us back into Kroger's any time soon either."