Ring On It
I have this idea about writing regular updates about disasters happening worldwide. Like if a flood happens in Nairobi, I would write about it here. It seems an appropriate use of DotSuck space.
TV
I am going to be on TV next week, and not on America’s Most Wanted or COPS. For once.
No, I am on an actual network TV show. Sure, that doesn’t mean what it meant ten years ago, but I am still pretty pleased about it. I have a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role with lines and everything. I even had to cry, though they needed to blow menthol in my eyes to make that happen. Presumably, they all learned that trick when people who smoke menthol blew it in their eyes.
The main thing I learned from my experience is that I’m a terrible actor. I decided to take classes again after I filmed the episode, because that’s the best time to study – after the final exam.
I got a pretty good check, though my agent ripped me off.
Also, I got to meet a celebrity’s Australian sheep dog. I think it says something pathetic about me that that was the most awesome part of the day. I love pets.
National Bomb Association Renews Call For Enforcement Of Existing Bomb Laws
NEW YORK CITY — At a hastily assembled press conference Sandy Schecter, president of the National Bomb Association (NBA), reinforced his organization’s long held stance that rather than introducing new anti-bomb legislation, Congress should focus on enforcement of bomb laws already on the books. “What happened today in Boston was a terrible tragedy and my prayers, and the prayers and thoughts of all the members of this organization go out to the victims of this disaster as well as their families and loved ones,” Schecter announced. “To protect against further mayhem, it is our recommendation that a police officer with a bomb be stationed at every mile of every marathon run in this great nation.”
Responses were mixed. Clay Slaeton, a senior watching from his dorm room at Ramapo University, expressed some concern. “Can the common taxpayer really afford to give all those policemen bombs?”
Indeed, many feel it should fall upon private citizens to protect each other. “This would never have happened if those runners had been allowed to carry their own bombs,” said Phoebe Allenon, a barista in Newark. “The bombs at the finish line would never have even had a chance. I think the NBA has the right idea.”
While the identity of the Boston Marathon bomber has not yet been discovered, when asked whether it is likely that the suspect is a member of the National Bomb Association, Mr. Schecter replied, “Almost definitely yes.”
Dear Joey,
You should have a website like this because you use it and, theoretically, your using it would lead other people to use it, and it is highly evident that my getting bored of things leads to people getting bored of my things.
Who Would Jesus Shoot?
Like all good Christians, I own guns. 68, to be precise. I don’t know the names of them, but I know they all take bullets.
I’m a firm believer that I should be allowed to have as many guns and as many types of guns as my wallet will allow me to have. I also believe I should be allowed to let them sit around the house, fully loaded and safeties off so that I’m always prepared to shoot anyone who comes into my house. Its not enough to keep them in the holster because by the time I get it out of the holster and click off the safety, I’ll have already died in a barrage of knife or club fire.
No, leaving them scattered around the house allows me to always have one available to pick up and fire at any time. My downstairs neighbors hate this, but I sometimes use them to kill the large roaches in my apartment. A home intruder is a home intruder.
Anyhow, I’ve now murdered seventy nine people who attempted to enter my house, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, girl scouts, repairmen and police officers. I scream “castle doctrine” and start shooting. No court in America will convict me.
People ask me how I can reconcile my Christian beliefs with my high kill rate. I explain that if God had been serious about that whole “thou shalt not kill” thing, He wouldn’t have invented guns. I suspect he invented them because the Jews and Italians killed His son. If Jesus had had a gun, he’d still be alive today.
I also think if God had been serious about that whole “no adultery” thing, he wouldn’t have given us penises.
On Misogyny in The Spin Doctors’ “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong”
Been a whole lot easier since the bitch left town
Been a whole lot happier without her face around
I have known the horror of standing in a room full of frat boys singing these lyrics at the top of their lungs, taking special joy in shouting “bitch” at a throat rending volume – every one of those sweaty, writhing young men imagining to himself that the woman the song is about is somebody who broke his heart, or turned him down, or who he broke up with himself.
If the Spin Doctors are largely looked down upon and mocked now, it must not be forgotten that – for a short period in 1991 – they were all the rage. “Two Princes,” “Little Miss Can’t be Wrong” and… “Two Princes” were tearing up the charts. They were a popular campus live act. Their videos were getting played on MTV back when that was a thing. Yes, we as a culture hate them now, but it must be remembered that we made them.
While “Two Princes” was a bigger hit, “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” was the song that actually “made” the band – much like The Romantics’ bigger hit was “Talking In Your Sleep,” but the song that made them was “What I Like About You.” Sometimes it takes a smaller hit to alley oop a band’s next (lesser) song to the top of the charts.
“Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” was written as a sort of paean to Spin Doctors lead singer Chris Barron’s father’s ex-wife. So, his step-mother. One can understand that anyone could have issues with one’s step-mother and, if they really hate her, would have reason to celebrate her departure. When he wrote the lyrics, he had a very specific person in mind. I am sure Barron would agree that the song was woman hating – “woman” singular.
But, you know, audiences are a funny thing. They don’t always take your lyrics the way you intend them. Far from being a song that people listened to and thought “Wow, Chris Barron’s step-mother was a mean person,” many young men of the 90′s (not all, but many) heard the song and thought “yeah, man, women! They suck!”
The titular “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” came – to some – to stand for all women. I’ve heard a man sing it to his girlfriend when she suggested he put on sun-block. I’ve seen it used as a punch line in a sitcom when his mother was giving the hero some pretty sound advice. And, yes, I once stood in a room with frat boys celebrating how much they derided every woman in their lives.
So, wither misogyny was intended or not, the song got filled with misogyny by the legions of young, embittered men who saw, in the title character, every woman.
Communication isn’t easy. I know an artist can work very hard to communicate a specific idea only to have circumstances or the personal baggage of the listener or a misplaced word alter the meaning received. I don’t blame the Spin Doctors or Chris Barron for how people have used his song, but the song is hopelessly tied in with the idea of hating women.
I do blame the Spin Doctors for “Two Princes,” but that is another story entirely.
Give A Hoot – Pollute
Every time you throw a piece of trash on the ground, you create a job for somebody to clean up after you. By putting stuff in trash cans, you are robbing people of their livelihood.
Funny Pass
The cardinal sin for a comic is for that comic not to be funny. We’ll forgive a ton of nasty, evil, vicious stuff from a comedian if they make us laugh.
I mention this because Seth McFarlane just hosted the American Academy Awards this last week and he wasn’t funny. I say this as a casual fan of his work. I think some Family Guy stuff is wicked hilarious. However, I also recognize that part of what makes Family Guy work is that they throw a million jokes at the wall and are happy if thirty stick. Essentially, quantity of jokes eventually means there will be sufficient quality jokes to make the show work, even if many (even most) of the jokes flop.
You can’t really do that at The Oscars or in a show where you don’t have complete creative control. You have to have your A-Game material or you’re going to end up looking like a hack.
Hosting the Oscars is a mug’s game. You need to be edgy – but not so edgy that you bite the hand that feeds you. You need to appeal to middle America – but not so much that you appear to have no edge at all. You have to be a palsy insider with the folks in the audience – but do comedy that appeals to people who don’t really know the world famous actors and actresses personally.
With that all said, the only American in 2012 who approaches this level of milquetoast ubiquity is Jay Leno. His humor comes across as totally lacking an edge while striving to be edgy. Everyone in Hollywood knows him, but he’s cultivated an image of being just a regular guy. Middle America loves him and the people who don’t love him are going to hate the Oscar broadcast no matter what you do. Basically, everything that makes me think he sucks makes him the perfect host for the Oscars. He was born to do the job.
On the other hand, no matter how much McFarlane sucked up the stage, his presence helped get the Academy Awards their biggest audience in years. If singing about boobs has that effect, just imagine what actually having topless actresses would do for the ratings. Through the fucking roof, man.
Not to give the Academy any ideas, but hey if they’re going to be sexist anyways they ought to own it.
Shaxberd in Gloves
This week, I am editing a Shakespeare play.
The goal is to take a play that is like ten hours long and make it under two hours long, but make it still make sense.
I am going to do this by replacing all the words.
Son, Have I Got A Little Story For You
People are dying around me left and right these last two months. So far, nobody that is especially close to me, but enough people that its kind of giving me pause.
I’m not going to go into a whole list of people, but the important thing here is that a cloud of death has been passing through my world.
My question: Are you alive?
The Dashboard Melted
I have this new theory that mass murderers are sort of like hurricanes or earthquakes. We can mitigate the damage they do, but we can’t stop them from doing some amount of damage.
To some extent, we just have to adopt the old Boy Scout “be prepared” motto. Being prepared, in this case, means being ready to act in response to a mass murderer in an intelligent way. I’ll leave it to you to determine what constitutes an intelligent way for yourself, but for me that means that I should know the exits of my building, the good places to take people to hide and the good places to lie in wait to make sure my phone is fully charged so I can dial 911 like a boss.
There’s also such a thing as over-responding or over-preparing. We don’t make every single building so completely hurricane proof that they have or create other problems. Likewise, mass murder events are so comparably rare that we’d be foolish to impose solutions that are out of proportion with the likelihood of an event. We don’t, for example, make houses asteroid impact (or plane impact) proof, because the odds against being hit by them are so low. We do include lightning rods on many houses because the odds of getting hit by lightening are somewhat higher.
Also, evidence and research are good things to base decisions on, despite the current vogue for making decisions purely based on how things make us feel.
An E/N Subreddit
Or, because you can’t have slashes in the names of subreddits: r/eeen
I considered doing this when I made dotSuck, but I thought one more stab at a proper E/N-type-site-thing would be a worthy endeavor. With about one of us left posting here it is probably a good time to revisit the alternative.
Reddit is a great option for this sort of thing. It’s essentially where the kinds of people congrgate today who would have made E/N sites twelve years ago, and it also speaks to the true driving force of the old E/N scene: Pretending to be interested in the content of other people so that they will pretend to be interested in yours. Handy, too, that you can subscribe to it and not have to remember to check a bookmark, because nobody can be fucked with that anymore.
Post links to your own blog posts, images, I don’t care what, etcetera. You can also just do self-posts if you’re a pretty text-based kind of dude. I’m leaving dotSuck up, so that is a good option if you don’t have your own blog but need somewhere to host stuff you submit to r/eeen.
It’s a private sub for now, so post your Reddit username in the comments here for an invitation, or send me a message on Reddit (xtoph). I will make you a moderator so that you can invite people, if you know anybody from the old community who would be interested and either has or doesn’t mind signing up for a Reddit account.
National Murder Association Press Release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 19, 2012
At this time of year, its important to remember that your own personal safety from assault is the most important thing in the world. The problem has always been that its impossible to tell which people are “safe” and which are “threats.”
We hear at the National Murder Association would like to remind you that everybody is a potential threat. Skin color, religious background, relative wealth and even family affiliation are no measures of how likely any given person is to kill you.
This is why we feel its important to remind everyone that we are potentially a threat to you and you are potentially a threat to us. We would like to reiterate our primary objectives in the hopes that we – specifically, I – can live a safer life.
First, we advocate for the decriminalization of murder in all circumstances. If everyone is a potential threat, every death makes everyone who is still alive a little safer. In fact, the more people who are dead, the safer society will be.
Second, we advocate the repeal of all safety laws and codes on everything. People should be allowed to make poor decisions that lead to their deaths, because we are safer once they are dead.
Third, we are in full support of laws that criminalize drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, and anything else people crave. Criminalization leads to more deaths than decriminalization, thanks to gang violence, police raids, etc.
Fourth, we support the death penalty as the only sentence allowed for any crime.
Fifth, in so much as fetuses are no threat to us, we take no position on abortion. Once the baby is born, all bets are off.
Sixth, we believe all human beings have the right to own every weapon that a military force might own. The more people you can kill at one time, the faster you can feel safe.
Seventh, we do not condone torture. We’re not about making people suffer, just about keeping ourselves safe by murdering everyone else.
Eighth, we do not condone discrimination. Anyone could be a threat and it would be against our own self-interest to treat one group of threats as “safe” and another as “dangerous” just because of their color, gender or what-have-you.
Thank you for the time. Merry Christmas and remember: the best defense is to murder everyone.
Love Me Don’t
Most of the early Beatles songs were absolute shit. The only thing important about them is that their success gave the band the ability to write their later, better songs. Those first singles were successful because girls thought they were hot and because the music they played happened to be in vogue. The Beatles of this era were essentially the One Direction of their time.
Let’s take a look:
I Want To Hold Your Hand – Had this song been sung by Herman’s Hermits, nobody would remember it. While I confess they play this song exceedingly well, the main thing that sold this was how cute they were. I mean, Americans were nuts about the Beatles pretty much based just on their pictures. One Direction, anyone?
I Saw Her Standing There – A derivative little piece of work that would have been a small hit in the 1950′s if played by, say, Bill Haley. Nothing to see here.
She Loves You – OK, critics of Ringo Starr can kiss my ass. He makes this song. The rest of the song was greatly improved when Peter Sellers read it as a Nazi.
Please Please Me – I can’t tell whether that is a harmonica or what being played during this tune. It sounds like a root canal.
My Bonnie (w Tony Sheridan, hit #26) – This was an early hit. Its painful.
Twist and Shout – one of their best early songs, written by other people.
Can’t Buy Me Love – All right, this is legitimately a good song. George Harrison famously recanted its central theme when he recorded “Set On You” in the 80′s, but the 80′s were a different time.
Do You Want To Know A Secret – Ever since Spinal Tap existed, I can’t hear this song without thinking that it sounds like it might have been by that fictional band. Its almost a parody of itself.
Thank You Girl – This song has mostly dropped into well deserved obscurity. Sample lyrics: “I love you, thank you, I love you, thank you for loving me, etc. etc.” I paraphrase, but this may be the most vapid love song The Beatles ever wrote. Indeed, this may be the most vapid love song that Paul McCartney was ever involved with. Think about that for a minute.
Love Me Do – Like being stabbed in the ear repeatedly with a pitchfork. The Beatles sound bored performing it. They were probably bored by it even as they wrote it.
P.S. I Love You – I bet they enjoyed singing this one out on the trail while they were herding the cattle. I always imagine John Lennon’s backing vocals here being sung sarcastically. Surely he knew this was awful.
I rest my case.
Road Trip
This one is for Princeps.
I haven’t been on my road trips. My dad and I drove from Connecticut to Maryland to look at a college once. Another time, while I was working summer theatre in New Hampshire, I drove a woman with whom I wanted to have sexual relations to Massachusetts to see The Violent Femmes, The Pogues and Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper. I did not end of sleeping with her.
My major issues regarding road trips are:
1) I, as a non-drinker, tend to be the driver.
2) I get cranky and say things I shouldn’t on long drives.
3) Sometimes, on long drives, I start to fall asleep and need to pull over and jump around.
I had a girlfriend in the 80′s who figured it would be a good idea to combat my fatigue by giving me head while we drove. This seemed like an awesome idea to me at first, too, until her necklace got caught on something and she couldn’t raise her head again. That made her lose interest in the fellatio and I did a bunch of swerving while trying to disconnect her from her necklace and put my junk away. Also, teeth.
Also, she banged her head against the steering wheel once I got the necklace off her and the horn got stuck on “honk.”
So, yeah, road trips bite. Literally sometimes.
Gnomeschool’s Guide to Shadowfang Keep
This is my stupid new thing that I am doing right now.
[youtube]WTAuE6DOgtg[/youtube]
It’s family-friendly and unappealing to anybody here but Joey, and even then probably not. Also don’t watch it here in this tiny awful youtube embed, my god.
Ass Wiping: Data for Survey, Should It Be Relaunched
All right, I am on vacation and felt now was a good time to explore a wider variety of ways to wipe my ass.
I am a “back to front” man myself. Despite the concern that this method results in getting shit on your taint and/or genitals, my experience is typically one of thoroughness and cleansiness mixed with laziness, since I don’t need to rise off the toilet/hover to do this.
REPORTS
Front to back: since this is the most popular method, I tired this one several times and in several ways. I tried “hovering” above the toilet as well as standing. My experience was problematic. Perhaps due to lack of experience, I found I had a difficult time avoiding getting the top of my ass crack messy, which required more than my normal amount of TP to clean. My ass is fat, so I had greater success at cleansiness squating. When I stood, my fat ass cheeks prevented thorough work, which meant I always reverted to squating.
Side to side: I don’t recomend this method. The anus was not meant to be cleaned as if the toilet paper was Gandalf and the Riders of Rohan charging down the hill at the Battle of Helm’s Deep. You will inevitably end up messing up half your ass and probably feel like you need a wet paper towel.
Water Method: This method involved pouring lukewarm water down your ass. You can use a little soap with this method, too. You follow this up with vigorous paper rubbing. Obviously, you need to use a paper towel and not toilet paper, but this method really is the best cleanliness method. Well, for your ass. Everywhere that the water splashes is potentially vile forever.
Wet Wipes: I theorize that some sort of ass-safe wet wipe would combine the best of all worlds. I will look iinto it and report back
Dinkerdoodle
I want to reiterate that I am but a lowly member of this here websage blogum and you shithags have to make it more active to hold my interest.