Today started off looking good: the world didn't end in a storm of hellfire, Ann Coulter made an ass of herself on the Today show (even FOX News is trying to distance itself from her) and lost her column in USA Today, and it's finally finally finally pouring. The last makes me particularly happy, even though I have almost as little tolerance for the rain as I have for Ann Coulter, because I was waiting for the train this morning, when that jerk Traffic Safety Cop pulled into the parking lot, ready to ticket anyone who can't figure out our train station's needlessly convoluted parking payment plan.

Let me say that I have nothing but a mixture of respect and contempt for the police — especially here in the suburbs because we don't have any drug kingpins or mob hitmen for them to chase down, so they're pretty much stuck harassing people going twenty-eight in a twenty-five zone and not catching the petty vandals who go around tagging our street signs — but this one cop in particular, driving around town in his cheesy Traffic Safety SUV, makes me crazy. First of all, the simple process of parking legally is so tortuous it's like New Jersey Transit and our municipal council is doing their best to encourage workplace violence. It's three dollars to park for the day, but you can't just put three dollars into the meter, because that would be easy. You have to put three dollars into the token machine, which may or may not be accepting money on any particular day, wait fifteen minutes for the machine to cough up a token, and then put the token in the meter, punch in your space number, press the green button, and take your receipt and put it on your dashboard. By this time, you've missed the whole day at work, and you've just wasted three dollars.

So Big Fat Traffic Safety Cop there is just the bureaucracy's human arm that perpetuates this ridiculous parking system, and there's a little bit of disdain because of that. Also, in the past year, he's given me three tickets, all of which were bogus. First ticket was for parking in a monthly space without a monthly permit, except that I parked there after ten AM, and the space was about two feet away from the Parking Rules sign that said you can park in a monthly space after ten AM. I had to go to the police station and explain the rules to the guy — which you'd think knowing the parking rules ought to be a requirement for the job of Parking Cop — but he was totally cool and professional and tore the ticket up right there, so no hard feelings. Then my second ticket was for THE EXACT SAME THING!!!!

That's sort of the point when I get a little paranoid, like maybe he's just ticketing legal parkers and figuring some of them won't bother to fight it. Maybe he gets a little kickback or something. I don't know, but I can certainly make baseless accusations.

And the third ticket he was literally writing while I was putting my money into our insane Rube Goldberg parking validation system. Three strikes, dude: you're clearly not very good at writing parking tickets, so maybe you could ask for another post, like Cop Who Keeps Kids From Reading the Nudie Magazines at the Corner Store. But today, since it was raining, I was totally giddy watching this guy have to get out of his truck and stand there in the downpour, struggling with his poncho and having the heavens open up upon him as he checked the meters and wrote out the tickets. Dude, if I were rich, every rainy day, I'd deliberately park in the handicapped space or in the middle of the road or on top of another car, maybe putting a few dents into a streetlamp, just to make that guy get out and write me a ticket. I'd be nice and dry inside the station, watching him stand ankle-deep in a puddle, and I'd just laugh and laugh and laugh.

Double or Nothing

I've never done anything like this before, but I noticed that BetUS.com has posted odds on the apocalypse occurring tomorrow, and I'm going to wager all my money against the event at a mere -100000/1. I can see myself on Wednesday, cashing out the fourteen cents that I won from the Rapture not happening. Now, those of us following along the Rapture Index might consider taking the plus ten-to-odds in favor of the world ending tomorrow — the index, "the prophetic speedometer of end-time activity," is at a healthy 157, but thankfully worldwide apostasy has declined. I guess.

I'll do the bookies at BetUS.com one better — I'm offering infinity-to-one odds on the apocalypse happening sometime between 12:00 AM and 11:59 PM EST, June 6, 2006. Hell, I'll sweeten the pot even more and take out that Eastern Standard Time requirement; if it's June 6, 2006 anywhere in the world when it ends, you win. Assuming you're still around to collect, which you won't be, because the apocalypse just happened.

At a Queens College graduation ceremony yesterday, New York state comptroller Alan Hevesi put his foot in his mouth when he tried to praise Senator Schumer, saying the senator "will put a bullet between the president's eyes if he could get away with it." And then, of course, he was forced to apologize, because even though Republicans run the entire country, they're insecure little weenies.

I believe Hevesi should have apologized, too. Like this: "I'm sorry... that you're all too dumb to grasp the concept of a metaphor. Certainly the president's No Child Left Behind education reforms will ensure that this confusion never happens again."

However, Hevesi's using the indicative mood when he should've used the subjunctive? Unforgivable.

Guess who sent me a letter today.

My Young Alumni association.

And now, guess what they want. Give up?

Money. What a surprise. The thing that is a little surprising is how much they want, the cheapest box on the little form for the Young Alumni Leadership Fund is $250. For $5000, I can get two invitations to the Dean's Luncheon, whatever that is. Or I could get like an eighty-inch plasma TV. It seems like such a difficult decision — I mean, if I had five grand and it wasn't totally moot.

I'd never give a dollar to Columbia — beyond the hundred and fifty thousand I already gave them — not only because I got a whole hell of a lot of frustration out of them and not much more (certainly not any financial aid), but also because the Columbia bigwigs have spent countless hours trying to coax, wheedle, guilt-trip, and peer-pressure money out of their alumni (like, they mailed me a list of all my classmates who are already Young Alumni Leaders) and I'll bet they've never given a thought to lowering the goddamn tuition! I mean, for $250, at least PBS gives you a tote bag.

One time, I even tried suggested to one of those trustee-student liaisons that Columbia lower its tuition so they wouldn't have to keep hitting up the student population for financial aid donations. Not eliminate the tuition totally, like at Cooper Union, just maybe put off buying all of Hamilton Heights for a few years or something, and this guy just stared at me like, "We should who in the what now with tuition? The liberal elite at our fine institution don't want to share dorm rooms with middle-class riff-raff!"

I don't actually think that's the students' or administration's attitude, either consciously or subconsciously, but it's always been pretty clear to me that the school looks out for itself more than the students. The trustees are locked away in their little $5000-a-plate dining room, smoking cigars and drinking brandy, thinking of all the wonderful things they could do if just twenty-thousand students contributed thirty-five thousand dollars apiece to the endowment. It's partly an ego thing, too — as a Columbia student, at least twice a day you'll get a friendly email from someone on the student council reminding you that Harvard has an $18 billion endowment while Columbia rots in penury with a mere $4.2 billion — but it's more that attitude rich people who chair boards and donate to philanthropic organizations and have their names on hospital wings have where "I can afford to drop fifty grand without batting an eyelash, I don't see why it's so hard for the rest of you to do the same."

Well, rich guy, we don't have fifty grand. We, just out of school, don't even have $250 to hand over to someone else. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that the company you worked for and made you rich back in the eighties is now outsourcing all its jobs to India and China for twenty cents an hour, cutting back on employee benefits, and raiding the pension funds for the stockholders. Tell you what... if you give me some money first, then maybe I'll make a donation or two.

But probably not.

Why I Hate Brad, Angelina, and their Stupid Pseudo-Namibian Baby...

...because thanks to them, I have to agree with this Fox News gossip reporter. The columnist, Roger Friedman, also noted back in January that the Cult of Scientology likely forced Isaac Hayes to quit his South Park gig, so this means that I've agreed with Fox News twice, and now my world is spinning. I can't tell the difference between good and evil anymore — remember how amidst our nationwide panic over missing Jennifer Wilbanks, the only voice of reason pointing out the possibility that she just got cold feet was Sean freaking Hannity.

So please, Hollywood liberal elite, will you stop doing such hugely assholey things like willingly delivering your goddamn messiah baby in a third-world country that even the huge assholes at Fox News are pointing out what huge assholes you are?

Stupid Petty Theater, Firing Me With No Material For a Book Deal!

Mom, bless her heart, cut this article out of the New York Times Thursday Styles section. The article — Interns? No Bloggers Need Apply — is about garrolous young people, oblivious to their own privacy and trying to share their lives with the world, getting internships and blabbing all their bosses' corporate secrets to anyone who'll read their blog. Corporate bosses, being the arrogant, corrupt cheaters that they are, are not too thrilled about this new breed of young interns coming into the office with their blogs, "many bringing with them an innocence and nonchalance about workplace rules and corporate culture."

Mom thinks I haven't learned my lesson: "Most experienced employees know: Thou Shalt Not Blab About the Company's Internal Business," even though I was fired from my super-lucrative job at the theater because someone didn't like an entry in my own blog. Much to her dismay, not only do I keep blogging away, but I'm actually kind of offended that my liberal mother, artist and union rep, actually supports this corporate stifling of the free exchange of ideas.

Fine, she doesn't — she supports me keeping my job. But so much for principles.

The article talks about this guy (don't click on the link — nothing against him personally, but I think his mention in the New York Times and on Gawker.com already bought his blog enough traffic), who was blogging about his experiences at Comedy Central until the corporate bosses told him to knock it off. Let's all be amused for a moment at the irony and hypocrisy: Viacom, Comedy Central's parent company and a multi-billion dollar media conglomerate, feels threatened by some 22-year-old dork behind a computer! Ha! The article, which I'm assuming was written by someone old and well up the corporate ladder, just blows off this forbidden blogging as the ramblings of lazy kids, too spoiled to understand our sacred corporate culture. Kids today "do not see their job [sic] as their identity," says some human resources lady, obviously troubled since employees trying to be more than a cog in a corporate machine makes her job that much harder.

The article goes on, warning corporations to take action against rebel bloggers, and reminding them that in America, freedom of the press is limited to those with a press: "It is important that corporations make a choice as to what type of blogging they will allow," said Alfred C. Frawley III, director of the intellectual property practice group at the law firm Preti Flaherty in Portland, Me. In the midst of an NSA eavesdropping scandal and the Enron vault-robbers being convicted yesterday and AT&T threatening to shut their political and corporate opponents out of their web gateways, I'm so relieved to know that Viacom gets the final say in terms what ideas are put out on the blogosphere. The company that makes Laguna Beach and My Super-Sweet 16 is definitely looking out for society's best interests.

So this bugs me. But what really bugs me is the real gist of the article: people my age making a living by spilling the corporate beans, with book deals and movie deals and more than eight people hearing about their job horrors. It seems like the lesson here isn't to let what happens in the office stay in the office — instead, it's to sensationalize and fictionalize whatever happens in the office until it's profitable. I wish I knew that back then, since my plan, after that bitch kicked me out of the theater, was to become famous and then rub it in her face. Well, live and learn.

Jay Goes Where God Never Intended Man To Go

I was all set to make a long-overdue visit to the Freakatorium this afternoon. The Freakatorium bills itself as the largest freak museum in the northeast, which is probably part self-aggrandizing hyperbole and part true — I mean, just how large of a freak museum do you have to be in order to be the largest in the northeast? It's not like it's a shopping mall or anything. I took a trip down to the Freakatorium back when I was in college, not because I have any particular interest in the sideshow but because I've already seen everything at the Metropolitan Museum of Art five or six times. When I got down to Clinton Street and found the place, which may as well have been on Tristan da Cunha for how goddamn out of the way it is, I taken aback: "Five dollar admission fee? Screw this." I don't really remember, but I probably wound up spending that afternoon at the Met's Shoin Room. Again.

I finally decided to go back as part of my new kick to break out of the routine that is my life, but like many of my planned desitnations, it seems like this one's no longer a hundred percent extant. 57 Clinton Street is now this enterprise at left, and judging by the hearts in the windows, it's not the Freakatorium. Either that or there's some sort of corporate merger between the freak museum and a junior misses retailer. It might not be too, too far-fetched, but — call me a purist here — I think the forays into the fashion market would kind of cut some of the Freakatorium's integrity and street cred.

Instead, I sweated a lot, got some overpriced blended coffee drink at a teeny tiny cafe that smelled like the Mexican dive across the street, then double-checked the address. Nope, I had the address right, and when I passed by 57 Clinton Street again, they hadn't torn down the boutique and put up a freak museum in the hour between my visits. Rats.

I was at the entrance to the Williamsburg Bridge and I guess I wasn't exhausted or sunburned enough, so I decided I'd walk across it. Five or six years ago, I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and got some really nice pictures......okay, I remember the picture being a lot nicer than that, but anyway I had two hours till my train and my camera all primed and batteried-up for the Freakatorium, and I figured what the hell. The Williamsburg Bridge might not be the landmark that the Brooklyn Bridge is; it might not be as aesthetically pleasing or historically or architecturally interesting, but it's still a huge structure suspended over a body of water. How bad could it be?

Vertigo. Turns out that if God wanted me a hundred and thirty feet above the East River, He would've made me a bird. I'm not really afraid of heights — aside from the panophobia, of course — but there's something a little disconcerting about being a few meters over an eight-lane highway, a hundred or so feet above a river, and having the ground beneath your feet rumbling and jittering. I had to keep forcing that black-and-white video of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge out of my mind.

The bridge turned into this drawn-out epistemological quandry for me every time a motorcycle passed by and started a miniature earthquake under my feet or I looked up to quickly and lost my equilibrium for a second: I knew — whatever that means — that the bridge won't collapse and I knew that I wasn't going to develop the necessary mutant powers it would take for me to pass through the steel fences enclosing the pedestrian walkway and fall into the East River... but what good is that knowledge if I'm going to behave like the possibility of a bridge collapse is a fuzzy proposition? Can I really say that I even remotely understand the physics behind a suspension bridge if I'm going to involuntarily grab the guard rail every time a bicyclist or a jogger passes me, or can I really say that I appreciate the possibility that I'll die of a heart attack on the bridge (which is much more likely than the bridge collapsing) if I'm not carrying nitroglycerin pills with me across the river? I don't know — damn you bridge, for making me ponder deep questions!

I can't say I'm that impressed by the pictures, partly because I think I seriously underestimated how wide-angle my camera lens is, partly because the afternoon sunlight doesn't quite leave the same visual effect in May that it does in December, when I was on the Brooklyn Bridge, and partly because of that steel fence that's keeping me from losing my balance and falling onto the expressway. Nevertheless, here are a few of my favorites.

The prototypical snapshot of one of the bridge's towers.

---

A closer-up of the tower.

---

And the prototypical one-point perspective snapshot.

---

I was on my way back across the bridge into Manhattan before realizing that I never bothered to look straight up.

---

My favorite picture. I was standing directly under the west tower, and the sun seemed to scatter over the mesh workmen's netting.

Fake News From Fake America

My RSS reader brought this article to my attention, and I could not be more proud of it and, simultaneously, more disappointed in our nation's media. It's from the San Fransisco Gate by way of the AP, and its headline is, I shit you not, "Jack Bauer Saves Day on Finale of '24'." Ugh. It's bad enough when CNN reports on the life-changing news that only 33.06% of Americans prefer Eliot Yamin over Katherine McPhee and that old dude who's gonna be doing "Just For Men" hair color commercials in a year or two, but at least they're real people doing stuff in the real world. I hate to shatter some people's illusions here — and if you're one of those idiots whose head will explode when you find out that John Edward doesn't really talk to your dead relatives, Dan Brown is a big, fat liar, and your parents just made up all that crap about the Tooth Fairy, you should cover the room you're in with plastic sheeting and then keep reading — Jack Bauer is fictional, Associated Press. I'm totally cool with E! Online rehashing our country's memes as if we haven't already heard them a thousand times by the water cooler — "Did you guys see Desperate Housewives last night when Bree finally snapped? How she murdered Susan, chopped up her body, slow-roasted it, and served it to Lynette and Gabrielle at a dinner party?" Yes, look how we're all united as Americans and united in our love for Marcia Cross on a rampage. (By the way, that would make a fucking awesome episode of Desperate Housewives, and if I see that on TV, all of Marc Cherry's sins of mediocrity will be immediately forgiven.) But when those same TV junkies are shocked to see Teri Hatcher alive and well, posing in FHM magazine, it's time to throw away the remote and re-join the actual planet.

It's not like truth and fiction haven't already been twisted around enough: apparently this pheremone spray will make me irresistable to women, carbs are either bad for you or good for you or the complex carbohydrates are good but the refined carbs are bad or something, and Karen Ryan — "I'm not a journalist but I play one on TV" — has a Medicare plan the Bush administration would like to sell you. The AP might think they're just catching people up, but we're really too dumb to fall for that. You mean Jack beat the bad guys? I seriously did not see that one coming!!! And I bet he'll get into some other shit come January! No, I thought that season six would be two dozen episodes revolving around Jack's decomposing corpse. Okay, nothing could've ever redeemed Charmed, but if J.J. Abrams really wanted to pull off an amazing series finale of Alias, he'd have duly killed Sydney off. Maybe have Marshall sautee her and serve her up to the rest of the principals. Basically, unless it's a Roadrunner cartoon, anthropophagy improves pretty much anything.

But if it's not going to surprise me, tell me something I didn't already know, tell me something true, what's the point of even having the news? The whole quilting-bee atmosphere, where we get a liberal and conservative repeating their inane talking points and no one challenges them cause everyone's entitled to their opinion and you can't hurt anyone's damn feelings nowadays by telling them that they're full of it, isn't illuminating or useful or worth my damn time. If I wanted to know what happened in imaginary 24-land, I'd watch the show... or I'd do like I do in the real world and just assume that the writers couldn't come up with anything new after having Keifer's irritating daughter kidnapped for like the fifth time. You mean to tell me that one of the axis of evil is developing WMD's — where have I heard that before? It's an election year and gays are trying to get married and hippies are burning the flag (really?) and the government isn't tracking our phone calls but it's "protecting us from terrorists." Maybe one of these days, they'll be able to write an actual news story about someone, somewhere having an original idea, because that really doesn't happen every day.

Pop culture makes me angry again, this time because some overpaid associate producer in Hollywood had the brilliant idea of having Michael Mann direct the big-budget Miami Vice remake. This is totally aside from the fact that they're remaking Miami Vice in the first place, which I'm at peace with, even though Miami Vice barely deserves to be digitally remastered onto DVD, much less the silver screen. I despair for what's next, like maybe they'll get Scorcese directing The A-Team 2000? Take solace, though: sooner or later, Hollywood will have milked all the potential movie ideas out of VH1's I Love The... series, and they'll have to find another source of crappy Owen Wilson/Ben Stiller comedies. I think once we hit Chia Pet: The Movie, it'll be game over.

What really caught my eye is, doesn't the trailer look a little too, I don't know, dark and heavy to be the Miami Vice I occasionally catch a few seconds of on TV Land, with the pastel leisure suits and alligator-skin shoes and the scantily clad big-haired women on speedboats. Don't get me wrong: neither Bad Boys nor Bad Boys II needed to be made and/or watched, and the whole morally unequivocating buddy-cop action comedy thing has aged worse than, well, Don Johnson. I don't have any problem with Michael Mann's brooding drama taking the Miami drug war as a backdrop to explore the alienation and nihilism in urban America — but I've already seen Heat.

I ran into a bit of an underpants situation this morning... namely, I had no underpants. Laundry takes at least an hour and a half from soak cycle to spin dry, and I had a train to catch. During crises like this, I find guidance and wisdom from a classic acronym, four simple letters: WWMD. What Would MacGyver Do? I first asked myself what would Jesus do, but then I thought that people probably didn't wear underpants back in the year zero A.D., so this would be a moot point for Jesus. I guess also don't know for sure that MacGyver wore (wears?) underpants either, not that I'm dying to find out or anything, but I'm just going with it for my story.

I decided that MacGyver would probably fashion some sort of skidmark-scrubbing gadget out of a Brillo pad, a blender, and, let's say, some duct tape. But we're not really handy people in the Harris household, and despite its myriad uses, we don't keep duct tape around. I had to improvise, but my solution would make much worse television, because it involved a washing machine and a hair dryer, which is kind of lame. I sort of wish I experimented to see if the microwave might be a speedier way to dry laundry, sort of like it does for chicken, but I currently don't have a lot of underpants to spare. I will report, however, that the hair dryer was a lot slower than I thought it would be.

alt

After singles' night a few weeks back, I decided it would probably be a good idea if I started doing more things outside my comfort zone. Which is how I found myself across from Tompkins Square Park at alt.coffee yesterday, which I'm a little surprised to see has a mere 127 more Myspace friends than I do. The whole alt.coffee atmosphere screams East Village, with the Simpsons pinball machine over by the door, "lots of funky lamps," every wall painted another basic Crayola color. But there's a cry for help underneath The Psychedelic Furs and Belle & Sebastian blaring on the stereo — I mean, take a look at the some of the idiots who left comments for the coffeeshop:

OMG i wanna go to ur shop. btw this is the notorious drew fuzzle of the coffee shop boys, so thats a pretty big honor. Yknow, just in case u havent heard of the CSB.
- dREW fUZZLE

And I think we've found our first good argument ever in favor of gentrification, because Drew "Caps Lock Confuses Me" Fuzzle epitomizes the alt.coffee clientele: burned-out grunge losers who can't figure out why their garage band that's "like a mix of Sonic Youth and Radiohead, but more soulful" hasn't gotten booked at the Indigo Club yet. Here's a hint, dude with a skull on your sports bag and hiragana tattooed on your arm: Most bands that quote-unquote make it know more than two chords. Instead of constantly updating your band's lame Myspace page, spend the time discovering a minor seventh or something.

The thing about alt.coffee, unlike the slackers who frequent the place and mooch off their wi-fi (which is why I was there, although I'm not a total freeloader — I bought the cheapest thing on the menu), is that I know what sort of look they were going for — the poor, disaffected kid look. Like, I'll bet anything they found their comfy couches and those funky lamps in a trash pile on St. Mark's Place, and rather than thinking, "No wonder this hideous thing is off on the sidewalk," the interior designer the pseduo-goth, pseudo-stoner, pseudo-skateroid management hired went, "Hey, free lamp! Look, the bulbs are red and it's not even Halloween!" They're too lazy to coordinate or upholster the furniture they picked up on the street, and it's not like any of the kids in there care, so who am I to complain?

Oh yeah, somebody who hates mediocrity. Okay, kitsch burns my eyes and makes my aesthetic cortex want to jump out of my head, run across the room, and set itself on fire, but I get that it's a style — it's not my style — but some people are into it. Still, even if your furniture's ugly, you can at least let me try to pretend that it's not a mite-infested piece of crap, right? I mean, aren't there any hypochondriac rockers out there?

Yes, I know, it's been a week without a post and I've been a bad, bad blogger. Spank me later.

I've done a good amount of griping in the past about the random schoolkids I run into while I'm at the movies or the mall or Starbucks in the middle of a weekday... you know, when a young professional like me is supposed to be at work. The middle of the day, from when General Hospital comes on until Judge Judy is done belittling poor people, should be just as adults-only as that weird "video" store with cardboard over its front windows. Not that I behave any differently around the little bastards — like, there's nothing more fun than teaching a six-year-old the c-word or telling a story about your first cunnilingus disaster while there's a gawky kid within earshot — but I just have a low tolerance for their puerile shit, like their ringtones and their Kristen Cavalleri (seriously, children, merely existing and living in Laguna Beach doesn't count as talent!), and I figure the amount of time they spend getting an education now will someday correlate nicely with their productivity as my slaves once I declare myself world dictator.

I'm not at all bitter about having parents and teachers that made me attend school five whole days a week, every week, nine months, year after year, learning for the hundredth time how to solve a quadratic equation or circling all the pronouns in a sentence and then drawing arrows pointing to their antecedents. Boy, that was certainly time well-spent, cause it's pretty much every day that I graph polynomials and I'm like, "Thank you, Miss Tanzola, for writing binomials on an overhead projector because without your wise math tutelage... oh, wait, I own a fifty-dollar calculator that pretty much makes you and your slide rule obsolete."

But I was driving by North Plainfield High the other day around lunchtime — I'm such a dork; we played them in Science Bee, and possibly football — and there's all these students milling outside the campus like ants, in their cars or walking home down Grove Street, and four years of my own micromanaging, condescending teacher demons overwhelmed my emotions: Did I go to the only fucking high school in the country where they actually mandated their students' presence from the Pledge of Allegiance until the 2:30 bell? We weren't allowed to leave the school or go out to our cars or anything. I don't even think they'd let us outside if the building was burning down... like some dude with long hair and black painted fingernails might light up a cigarette or something and then the whole universe will explode.

Not that I begrudge the kids for wanting to be kids; I begrudge the adults for either indulging their callow fantasies or going off the other end of the rocker, treating the kids like mindless automatons who'll break down and start spraypainting the bathroom stalls and stealing speed limit signs if they're not constantly being supervised and pointlessly engaged in rote memorization. There's something called moderation, and I've got a feeling if teachers and parents and those other trusted adults treated the kids somewhere in between juvenile deliquents and like every day's their super-sweet sixteen, we might still have a chance at raising a society that doesn't bow down to the altar of narcissism, materialism, and solipsism.

Remodeling

I hereby invite you to check out my new, improved and re-designed website. I'd been planning a site remodel for a while now, largely because, from the disastrous code I have to deal with at work, I've discovered the simple joys of conforming to published standards. Also, like an idiot, I accidentally deleted the old site. Serves me right for not keeping a backup.

Best part about being sick and having to go to the doctor: free samples provided by our nation's ultra-magnanimous pharmaceutical companies. I got some Nasacort allergy spray stuff from the good people at Aventis, Singulair from the fine folks at Merck, and an assortment of lozenges generously donated by Halls. I can see no possible ulterior motive for this munificence, and it completely reverses my previous opinions on the pharmaceutical industry.

Maybe there's a homeopathic hemp dude out there who can cure me with something I produce on my own, like that conflicted alienation-slash-guilt feeling that modern medicine side effects in me. Drug companies hand out their shitloads of free stuff to my doctor — everything from the pen she takes notes with (sponsored by Levicor™) to the 3-D model of the respiratory system on her desk (donated by Flonase™) to the all-expenses-paid symposia in Zurich — and, when I'm not in denial, I absolutely know all those goodie bags are having an effect on my treatment. I can't just worry about my doctor's standard human error, now I've gotta get into whatever subconscious shit's fucking with my diagnosis. I mean, if Merck were to send an ex-Miss Florida drug rep to take me out to dinner and sell me on whatever new pill they're working on, the next day I'd be handing out strychnine Vioxx like they were Tic-Tacs.

The catch is, of course, that I don't know a damn thing about my body, other than that it's a prodigious mucous producer, so I've gotta put my trust in this doctor along with the pharmaceutical industry's claws. (Not to mention the reassuring news that doctors, with the exception of surgeons, grow less competent over time.) At least if I walk into a used car dealership, it's implied that the dealer's job is to take as much money from me as he can, and my job is to walk out with the most valuable product he's selling that I can afford. In the good old days, before the government started pretending that global warming was a lie and before House taught me how ignorant I am, before I started paying for my own prescriptions, I could take the whole doctor-patient knowledge gap for granted and swallow my pills. These days, I just feel sick.

David Blaine Is A Giant, Lazy Tool

So-called "street magician" David Blaine, who thinks he's so cool with his goatee and his quaalude-drawl speech patterns and the way he uses "street" as an adjective, is in the middle of his latest (publicity) stunt, "Drowned Alive." He's hanging out, scuba diving in a giant fishbowl for eight days — so I have to point out that he's not technically being drowned — and for reasons I can't comprehend, this display has crossed the void from stupid and pointless to newsworthy, which appears to be a growing trend in the cutthroat world of egomaniacal magic. Six years ago, I visited Blaine at Good Morning America when he proved something or other by freezing himself in a block of ice for a week, and today I thought I might get re-acquainted with the man inside the bubble. Maybe he'd remember me as that one gawker who didn't have an inane homemade poster of encouragement.

I actually sort of enjoyed Blaine in his Street Magic and Magic Man TV specials. (I guess ABC thought it's important to remind us that the man spending an hour performing card tricks and making things disappear is a magician.) Okay, even back before he met Donald Trump at a creepy attention whores' conference at the Hyatt, Blaine was irritating, histrionic, and apparently convinced that Isis, Queen of the Gods really had endowed him with magic powers. Dude, we're not six; we know it's legerdemain and you really don't have to patronize us by flying off to Haiti and pretending you're channelling the voodoo spirits. Ass. However, the people off the street that Blaine harassed with his relatively trivial illusions were really, really gullible and stupid — like Leprechaun in Alabama-level stupid — and Blaine was always a little too impressed with his own tricks, as if he wasn't quite confident he practiced enough, that it just made for good family television.

Recently though, Blaine's thrilling and daring exploits have been, well, lame. He froze himself in a block of ice for three days, he stood on a pole for two days, he buried himself under the sidewalk (sample press release: "After day one, reporters noted that Blaine turned to his side." Magic!), and he sat in a plexiglass box for a month and a half. Blaine's illusions pretty much consist of him sitting somewhere for a long time while a line of easily-entertained onlookers grows around him, which isn't magic.

Also, it's not interesting, and Blaine's new-age freakshow crap about how he's so cool cause he's gone for a week without food or how he'll have to piss in a catheter is irritating. First of all, dude, get your self-aggrandizing ass on Wikipedia and look up "Ethiopia" or "hematuria" and shut up. Stop making the pre-show hype into the show, asshole, and make something disappear or saw someone in half or, uh... what else do magicians even do? Eat your own arm, David — I'd seriously pay money to see that.

A Completely Impartial Review of Starbucks' New Green Tea Latte

I'd like to begin by mentioning that this review is in no way biased by the fact that half my latte sloshed out of the cup, through the lid, and onto my shirt in the two block walk between Starbucks and work. With that out of the way, I'd also like to mention that I'm not an idiot: I'm aware that even though I might like two flavors each on their own, they might not make such a good pair when thrown in the blender together. For example, I like pork and I like ice cream, but I don't think I'd like pork ice cream. Same goes with the green tea and steamed milk combination. Why not throw some horseradish or orange juice or maybe toothpaste in there just to capture the whole rainbow of astringent tastes?

The green tea latte itself is just a little too sugary to not fall into the "saccharine" category and a little too milky to not fall into the "bland" category. It's like they're fighting each other in my mouth and what's left is the taste of early-morning and after-dinner beverage carnage, dead on my tongue. It's not sharp enough to make me gag, but the green tea latte isn't exactly pleasant either. I sort of imagine this is what the meat candy will taste like if I leave it in the package for twenty years, then disregard all of the bizarre safety warnings on the things and pop em in my mouth.

We Get Already: You're Against The War

My parents gave me the option of spending today in the city, at some boring NYU workshop on the ins and outs of copyright law, or doing yardwork with my anal retentive dad, so here I am in New York. I'm on my NYC Wi-Fi Cafe Tour '06, getting coffee at every internet cafe I come across in my travels and, unfortunately, massively underestimating the capacity of my bladder. NYC Wi-Fi Cafe Tour got cut short and replaced with NYC Wi-Fi Place With Bathrooms Cleaned More Than Once A Century Tour. It's a much shorter tour.

Problem is that at the same time as my Wi-Fi Bathroom Tour, there's an annoying anti-war protest marching down Broadway, blocking traffic (which, as a pedestrian, I don't give a damn about) and blocking me from getting to my men's room (which, as a pedestrian, I do care about). It's not that I'm for the war, and it's not that I'm against guys with goatees and ponytails who haven't showered in three days either — it's just that seeing this wave of ingenuous fools between me and my bathroom makes me despair for the human condition. Are these people actually naive enough to think that if they hold up a sign and yell some rhymes into a megaphone, Dubya will pull the troops out of Iraq?

I've got news for you protesters: no one in power cares about you, your peace sticker , or your stupid paper mache puppet. Your time would be better spent flying to Iran and giving their racist demagogue president a big hug and a stuffed animal that squeaks out "I love you" when it's squeezed. As usual, however, I have a plan for getting the Bush administration's attention, but you'll have to stop walking down the street and actually be useful if you want it to work: We take all the money being spent on signs and stickers and flyers, all the donations we're making to the Save Darfur Coalition and Amnesty Internation, pool it all together, and start buying up oil rigs in the Persian Gulf. You see, you gotta stop thinking about what you want and start thinking about what the guys who started this war want. Worked for Lysistrata. I'd also say that part of our anti-war plan should involve women across America refusing to fuck Don Rumsfeld, but I really can't imagine any woman wanting to sex up Rummy in the first place.

Prepare Your Kids Early For A Life Of Soul-Crushing Corporate Drudgery

Today is Take Our Daughters To Work Day, which, in my elementary school days, I believed was an inequity worse than the nineteenth-century struggle for suffrage and Title IX combined. How come they got to skip a day of school? Now that I'm actually in the working world, paying taxes and mailing out a COBRA check every month, the whole idea behind taking your kids to work just seems ill-conceived.

The thing is, and prepare to have your mind blown now, grown-up work sucks. Arrested Development aside, what exactly are our kids supposed to learn by following their parent or legal guardian around the office?

Parent: Well, you can see how Mommy fills out budget reports, enters data into Excel, then discusses last-minute product spec updates with our dipweed sales team, and at lunchtime, I punch the soda machine because it's been out of Mountain Dew since February.
Poor daughter: So, when's recess?

The whole point — reinforcing that girls don't have to be wives and houseslaves while their husbands rule the remote control — feels superfluous to me: antiquated mental hygeine filmstrips aside, I never heard anyone but the Catholic Church say being a girl made you unfit for any profession.

I can imagine that there are cases, like I'd bet there are more social and cultural encumbrances to a woman being a firefighter than a man, but I think the Ms. Foundation, in its zealotry for equality, forgot that most people never get their dream job regardless of their gender. You're either not smart enough to be a doctor or not lucky enough to be the next American Idol or don't have the connections to get into venture capital. I, for one, would rather spend my adult years making arts and crafts with glitter and have someone read me a story because we finished our lesson half an hour early than fill out a goddamn TPS report. At least as a homemaker, I wouldn't have a dotted-line boss to report to. Don't even get me started on devil's work of commuting.

Now I'm less bitter about the Take Our Offspring To Work Day back in elementary school. It was probably tedious for the daughters, unproductive for the office, and good for Steinem, who thrives on the blood and tears of the working class too busy to give a damn about Susan Faludi. I say let the kids enjoy their childhood (just as long as you keep them away from me). By the time they get through high school, they'll be jaded and disillusioned enough to move into the corporate world.

Safety Tip

I fell off the treadmill at the Y this evening, and I came away with two skinned knees and a little bit of wisdom. I was jogging with my iPod going, the little buds in my ears, listening to my heavy-duty workout music (which is the soundtrack to the movie Gladiator. It's duly motivating, and I'm all psyched up to wrestle a tiger except that my legs are about to burn off after three minutes of jogging), and suddenly my iPod just went flying across the gym. I guess I wasn't keeping up with the conveyer belt enough, but normally the iPod yanks the buds out of my ears instead of the other way around. I could be frozen in cryogenic suspension and those things would slip out of my ears.

But not this time. The iPod went one way, the earbuds went another, and I went a third way — down. Apparently none of the engineers who designed the treadmill foresaw the possibility of someone falling on the damn thing, so there's no safety cutoff switch. I'm just on my knees, struggling to pull myself up with the conveyer belt constantly slipping under me, and — this is the awesome part that made this whole shit worthwhile — the lady on the treadmill next to me is freaking out, screaming, "Push stop! Push stop!" Really, lady? You mean, there's a way to turn this monster off? Why didn't anyone tell me that?! You think maybe you could hit that button for me, seeing as how you're not being dragged away by a psychotic machine?

So no one hit the stop button — or I might have slammed my fist into the stop button, but the treadmill just kept on going anyway — and this only went on for fifteen seconds at most before I figured out the smart thing to do. I resigned myself to the treadmill and took a short trip down and off its crazy ass. Not hurt at all. In fact, my only injuries were from when I was fighting with the thing.

So there's a lesson for all of you: make sure you've got a spotter who'll actually shut down the machine if you get in trouble.

You Can't Have Your Meat-Flavored Candy and Eat It Too

Anne sent me a couple of really cool gifts from China last month, and they appeared on my doorstep today. I thought it was a bootlegged DVD from the size of the box, but it turns out its actually a lot nicer. It's calligraphy, and Anne tells me it means "dragon," and she points out that it sort of looks like a dragon, too.The only thing is that I can't figure out if it's upside-down or not. I think it's supposed to hang horizontally, but it's still a coin toss if I get it right. (Yes, there's a crack in the glass, but I'd like to see you travel seventy-five hundred miles in a tiny box and come out scratch-free.)

She also sent me what appears to be meat candy. Here's a picture; maybe you can figure out what exactly it's supposed to be. It's called "Niu Tou," and it's made by the very respectable sounding Guizhou Yonghong Food Co., Ltd. Maybe the relatively decent Engrish on the back of the package — or maybe the drawing of an obese kid with his tongue sticking out — will lend a clue to this mysterious foodstuff:

Ecological environment: Guizhou Yonghong Food Co., Ltd. lies in the south of Guizhou Plateau. Its natural environment enjoys exceptional advantage. The climate is pleasant. There is plenty of rainwater. [Note: This is why I originally thought Anne sent me some sort of crop seeds.] The grass is natural. The product is made with extra care with the traditional production technology and advanced equipment. It has passed the strict quarantine inspection. It is mellow, sweet and delicious. It has the unique flavour and rich nutrition.

Ingredients: choice beef, honey, white granulated sugar, table salt, vegetable oil, spices. [Note: This is why I now believe Anne sent me meat candy.]
Storage: Keep it in a shady, dry and airy place against high temperature, damp and sunlight.
Edible method: To be taken instantly after unsealing the bag, so as not to let it moisturized or be degenerative. [Note: This is why my second guess for what Anne sent me was some sort of homeopathic Chinese lozenges.]
Shelf life: 1 year
Production date: See the jetcode
Executive standard of the product: Q/YH01
Food product license code: QS5227 0401 0389

If you have any advice or opinion about our product, welcome to dial the free telephone after service: 800-8976188

I imagine the free telephone after service only works if you're in China.

I pray that I will never in my life be hungry enough to actually want to put a Niu Tou seed/lozenge/sweet thing in my mouth, but at the same time I'm overwhelmed by the awesomeness of owning a real-life unopened package of meat candy all the way from China. I've been in that Chinatown candy store a hundred times, totally grossed out by whatever sort of freakish shrimp or dried seaweed or scallion candy they're selling there, but now I'm absolutely thrilled by the ironic significance of me sharing a home with beef-flavored confection. I'm in the elite group of jaded individuals who get it, who buy kitsch and Hello Kitty action figures and have LFO on their iPods. I really couldn't be prouder, and that one year shelf life can go to hell, because I'll be auctioning these things off on eBay in the year 2042. Maybe I'll be able to trade it for a RoboSapien, or better yet, one of these things.

I Missed My Saturday Night B-Movie on the Sci-Fi Channel. Insert Sarcastic Frowny Emoticon Here.

And they were showing some Tom Skerritt vehicle called Mammoth, too, about "a museum curator [who] helps authorities battle a woolly mammoth terrorizing a small Louisiana town." Actually, even better, it's really an alien that crash-landed into the natural history museum and morphs into the first thing it sees. I'd like to remind you now that someone wrote that gem down on a piece of paper, and probably made a lot of money for it, so remember that the next time the boss is riding you down in accounts receivable.

My usual Saturday night lying in bed was interrupted by the New Jersey Young Professionals, who were throwing something called a "Just Wing It" mixer at a club in New Brunswick. I hadn't been to a club since freshman orientation at college, so it's not exactly my sort of milieu, but I'll explain the concept if you're my mom and even less worldly than I am. (Mom: "A club? You mean a comedy club? A chess club? Why are you looking at me like that?") A nightclub is a big dark room with a bar at one end, retro European furniture around the perimeter, and color-changing mood lighting that looks like a rainbow on an acid trip. There's candles for ambience and a super-bright swiveling spotlight hanging off the ceiling for temporary blindness. They've got someone spinning tunes in the booth in the corner, the better to show off your unabashed fly Caucasian dance moves. You head out to the singles' mixer to meet new people, and I'm certain I would've gotten a whole yellow pages' worth of phone numbers if DJ Squiggles or whatever wasn't spinning a mixture of the hottest hip-hop and house hits in central New Jersey at a hundred bazillion decibels. Yes... it's Squiggles's fault that I didn't get lucky.

Truth is, despite having to wear a nametag, the whole night surpassed my expectations. I'd like to say that I really just went so I could mock the whole event afterwards, but I wore my new pair of trendy jeans, so maybe there's something subconscious going on. Still, I've learned that if you keep your hopes down for things, you can lead a pretty disappointment-free life, and with these sorts of social gatherings, as long as I don't wet my pants, pretty much anything meets or exceeds my expectations. Plus, the whole idea behind the "Just Wing It" theme was that there'd be "wing men" and "wing women" specially trained to go around making introductions. I don't know how they were trained, like if there's some sort of matchmaking boot camp they went to or what, but I really do need someone else to be a catalyst and facilitate the awkwardness. You know the wing people have the self-confidence and moxie to do that because they're all wearing super cheesy flashing necklaces but don't seem to mind that someone's looking to humble them.

I got there early and before I could even order a drink, this amiable but oblivious flashy necklace dude accosted me with the classic uncomfortable conversation starter, "What are you doing sitting here all by yourself?" Like there's an answer to that question that doesn't make me look like a total puss — "What? I'm by myself? I hadn't noticed! Thank you, good sir, for pointing out how aloof I am. How about you make this little discussion a bit more awkward by asking me what my sign is?" But I tell Blinky that I'm gonna be all mingling once I've got some liquor in my bloodstream. This gets rid of him for a little while, but I realize now that I need to come up with smarter retorts, ones that don't commit me to either introducing myself around or facing another one of Blinky's inevitable inane observations.

I pick up my drink, and now Blinky's coming over to make me friends, and I'd frankly be a whole lot less uncomfortable in this situation if I hadn't just accidentally stuck those mixed drink mini-straws up my nose while trying to drink as much black Russian in a single sip as humanly possible. I spill some on my shirt, but who cares — I just figured out why it's so dark in here! Blinky asks me what I do, and this would be an awesome time to be an astronaut or a NASCAR driver or, I don't know, the pope. Instead, I've gotta tell him that I'm a freelance web developer, which actually doesn't sound too bad compared to the lame jobs other people have — recruiting, database administration, facilities management, human resources. Of course, I haven't done web design for any sites that anybody might actually know about, so the conversation pretty much dies right there. No matter, it's Blinky's job to introduce me around, and in no time, I'm shaking hands with pretty much the computer geek squad that sat at my middle school lunch table. (No offense to anyone I ate lunch with in middle school, but it's not like any of us were playas or, uh, girls.)

Yeah, so I'm gonna need a second drink. I'm obsessed with figuring out what show they've got on TV there.

I spent the rest of the evening sort of aimlessly wandering from one side of the big dance room to the other, hoping I might remain inconspicuous. Occassionally I'd accidentally make eye contact with someone and it was weird — but I had to introduce myself cause it would've been more weird if I didn't. Name, hometown, approximate geography of my hometown (note to self: from now on, make sure you know which cardinal direction and how far Fanwood is from wherever the event is taking place), and I'm a web designer. Then I'm officially out of conversation, and I'm struggling to remember the conversation starter questions they laid out in The Fine Art of Small Talk, but the only one I can recall is "How can you tell if that melon is ripe?" which seems a little inappropriate.

The Pheonix, which I guess is a Boston area news rag, compiled their list of the least sexy men in the world, and I'm proud to announce that I'm not on it. That's right, ladies, there are at least a hundred dudes in the world less attractive than I am, so start lining up now. According to the Pheonix, Gilbert Gottfried is the least sexy man on the planet, which seems a little short-sighted when you consider that Carrot Top is number 16 on the list, Richard Simmons is number 14, Michael Jackson is number 11, and Osama bin Laden is number 8. I'm incredulous: people would rather sleep with Carrot Top than Gilbert Gottfried? You'd think that Gottfried wouldn't be all that bad with the lights out and his mouth shut, unless you've got some talking anthropomorphized bird fetish, in which case his nasal cawing is probably the biggest turn-on for you since Sesame Street. Carrot Top, on the other hand — fuck him once and you're shamed for life with the scarlet letter of prop comedy, and probably pre-paid phone cards reminding you to dial down the middle too.

What I don't find reassuring is that there's no way the list of unsexiest men on Earth can be complete without at least one dude who's had his hideous face blurred out on Cops. I think at least one of the idiots with their mugshot up on The Smoking Gun is less sexy than that ubiquitous MySpace dude (number 79), although I guess I'm really no expert.

People Always Tell Me I Look 63% Like David Carradine

Have you seen MyHeritage.com yet? It's supposed to be a genealogy site, but it's got this great new timewaster: upload a photo of yourself and it'll tell you what celebrities you sort of resemble a tiny bit. So, I don't photograph very well, but here's the picture of me and my asinine smile that I uploaded, and here's a decrepit David Carradine, forty-six years my senior, to compare it to.

This doesn't make me feel at all good about my appearance. They could've at least found a picture of him from his Kwai Chang Caine days, when Carradine didn't look half dead.

Maybe I'll have better luck with another picture. Here's one with me and my parents — one of the few photos of my dad in existence — at graduation.


Mom will be happy to know that she looks 63% like Uma Thurman and 48% like Jessica Alba, and less happy to know that she looks 47% like Tommy Lasorda.

I don't even want to post the picture that has me resembling Gwyneth Paltrow (66%), Mira Sorvino (65%), Chloë Sevigny (ewww...), Mark Owen (60%), and Braveheart (59%).

You Must Be This Creepy To View The Exhibits...

I left work early today to check out Cadavers on Display, also known, less colorfully, as BODIES... The Exhibition. "Cadavers on Display" is a more succinct title for the show, though, because it boasts twenty-two real live human corpses on, well... display. I have one word to describe the show: de-licious! I mean, ew.

Has anybody else noticed the recent abrupt fall in terms of how far my entertainment dollar will get me? It's worse than buying gas. First, movies went up to ten bucks and then $11.25, then the Museum of Modern Art raised their admission to twenty bucks, and now we have Corpses & Friends charging me twenty-five dollars to get in. Kids under twelve get in for only nineteen bucks, which I guess is a bargain if you have some freak child who wants to see gastric polyps up close and personal. Still, if I'm gonna be gouged for an anatomy lesson, I might as well just go to med school, where they'll at least let me touch the cadavers. You're not even allowed to take pictures at Adipocere Sculptur-estival, although I did manage to get a few blurry shots with my cameraphone before some security nazi threatened to confiscate my phone. I present them here, for your edification, and just to rub it in the face of the Man.

	Inside, we all look like this...
	One of the things the BODIES exhibit teaches kids is that, even if you're totally flayed, you can still play football.
	The corpses weren't that disturbing, being all formaldehyded and stuff, except for their bulging psycho-robot glass eyes and their toenails, which were all green and rotted and infested with that fungus monster thing from the TV commercials.

I'm still stewing, because I really think that for a twenty-five dollar admission, I ought to be allowed to take home a femur or something. Maybe have a sliding scale, like at the $300 Friend level, you get a tote bag and an entire preserved endocrine system.

Not that the show didn't have its moments. They removed the entire central nervous system — brain, spinal cord, nerves and all — from some guy who probably expected his body to be donated to a more worthy scientific pursuit. It wasn't that informative, but it was cool to look at. So was the circulatory system: they took the major organs out of some guy and dyed the veins and capillaries to make them easier to see. The whole "From Zygote To Fetus" part was pretty sweet, too. Oh, and the section on diseases. They had a kidney stone, and a brain with meningitis, and a prime example of penis cancer. (Like I said before, de-licious.) But the big problem with the show is that every single part of your insides looks exactly the freaking same! I couldn't tell my duodenum from my pineal gland. They both look vaguely like some round chunk of modeling clay that they served up in my college cafeteria. I'll stop with the food jokes now.

In the end, if you've seen one vivisected human being, you've seen them all. But someone at BODIES doesn't quite get that, because they'll give you four, cut up in all sorts of interesting, yet not very enlightening ways. I'd say the exhibit was worth maybe ten dollars max, and maybe a fifteen minute wait in line. (Oh my God, the ticket line was worse than at the fucking Shake Shack. It was also an hour or so long, but the guy and girl right in front of me were PDA-ing the whole goddamn time, like five inches from my face. Fortunately, there were also two obese kids in line slapfighting, and they were kind of distracting. But when I'm world dictator, those two lovebirds are gonna be slaving alongside that security asshole in the deepest, darkest plutonium mine I can find. The fat kids I'll make my court jesters.) Seriously, if you're really dying — ha! — to see what you'll look like after shuffling off this mortal coil, I'd say tour a mortuary instead. It's cheaper... and apparently, it's more romantic too.

Hamburger Makes Jay Testy!

Found the best burgers in the city yesterday, at this place called the Shake Shack. Also found the longest, slowest line in the city yesterday, also at the Shake Shack. It's this little hut in the park with a line that would make Disneyland executives feel insecure. I got on line a little after noon, which is early for lunchtime in New York City, and I pretty much just stood there.

It was ten minutes before the line even moved. Day became night and night became day again. Seasons changed. The yuppies behind me were blabbing on their Blackberries, "I didn't have my cell, and I couldn't find your work number so I thought I'd try your other work number but I got put through to voicemail. I texted you twice, but I don't know if I did it right..." I grew old and wrinkled, continents shifted, stars were born and stars exploded into dust. I was maybe a third of the way up to the Shack and two-thirds of the way towards killing the next asshole who wandered up to their friends in the middle of the line, completely oblivious to the "no backsies" rule.

I had evolved into a higher life form, with wheels for feet and a giant, pulsating brain by the time I made it to the order window. I ordered my burger, and then there's another freaking line you wait on with more tie-wearing yuppie scum while they make it. All in all, an hour and twenty minutes — and I didn't even order anything complicated like a cheeseburger or a double or anything. After the whole wait, it only took about two minutes to eat, but let me tell you, that was one good-ass hamburger. Secret combination of sirloin and brisket, special "Shack Sauce" that's supposed to be a mix of mayo and ketchup and something else. (I know, it sounds gross, but it's not.) I'd totally wait on line, say, half an hour max for a Shake Shack burger. Maybe forty minutes if there's no yuppies around.

I finally got around to renting Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which is the kind of horror flick film geeks, sick of the moralistic and sugar-coated slasher genre, wet themselves over. Henry is pretty much a white-trash Silence of the Lambs, and I mean that in the most affectionate way possible, given that it's a dispassionate, minimalist character study of a vapid nihilist murderer. But the movie doesn't judge, and neither will I. That's what makes it... I won't say "scary," but haunting and lingering, and ultimately refreshing when set against Hollywood's current cadre of R-rated splatterfests that aspire to nothing more than cramming as many grotesque make-up effects into ninety minutes as possible. Henry, played by Michael Rooker (who, by the way, is awesome in Thief on FX), is the anti-Hannibal: he's not smart, or charming, or — even as a guy who makes murder part of his daily routine — remotely interesting in any way. There's no pop psychology behind the character; no psychology period, in fact. Just a guy in a vicious cycle of frustration and brutal murder who has no interest in getting out.

I wish I could've seen Henry back when it first came out, sometime between 1986 and 1990, before the Interweb and the twenty-four hour news networks and 9/11 made it impossible to stand outside of anything, as part of the audience. It's easy to see, as an academic exercise, why the film was stuck in ratings-board limbo for three years — we get squirmy when someone presents us with the dichotomy between evil and not-so-evil and refuses to take sides. It's one thing to show Henry putting a glass bottle through a prostitute's face (actually, in a nice touch, we only get audio of the murder and pictures of the aftermath — director John McNaughton saves the real voyeurism for later on), it's another thing to come out, take a look at the violence, and then refuse to say, "This is bad," as if the camera itself is complicit.

We eventually meet Henry's roommate and ex-jailmate Otis, a dim-witted hick who Henry introduces to his serial killing spree. Unlike Henry, Otis gets a visceral kick out of serial murder, and not even stoic McNaughton can stand by and direct indifferently when Otis videotapes the slaughter of a family. Henry, however, can, and he and Otis (and the viewer) watch this tape over and over again like it's porn. Henry takes over the director's role here, simply a part of what's going on, not liking it but not not liking it either, and in what's a kind of chilling meta-statement about the objective nature of film, McNaughton — and the audience — can only watch casually and any judgment you can make against bored, passive Henry has to be reflected in your own fascination with Henry's vocation. I don't see myself ever killing anyone, especially without any provocation (as if no one in the world ever provokes me), but I also don't see myself, if I did kill someone, freaking out over the damage my eternal soul sustained due to my new murderer status. I'd lose my shit at the thought of getting caught, and after many, many years of Law & Order and CSI, I've done a lot of fantasy homicide planning about what I'd burn and where I'd flee if I had to. (Note to TV villains: once you murder someone, you need to get out of Dodge.) But if I got over the idea that I'd be nabbed, then who knows...

So no wonder the MPAA got a bit skittish when McNaughton handed them the final cut. I'm personally hoping that a few of those raters had a few weeks of nightmares — especially over the infamous Good Samaritan scene and the videotaped family murder. Camcorders were pretty new back in 1986, and this was before the days of one idiot criminal after another keeping a video record of their crime sprees to later be used as evidence against them. Who'd want to watch Henry, much less record and relive all the death?

Which leads me to the most awesome part of the VHS: after the movie, after the end credits, the 1-800 number if you want to buy the official Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer t-shirt, in case you want to scare the nice old lady across the street. Or you're, you know, a psycho.

I found this in some NYC hipster store, in one of those ubiquitous giveaway postcards-with-advertising racks they've all got over by the men's room. It's been tacked on my dorm room plasterboard wall since... I guess... 2002, in the hopes that I'd follow Mr. Peters's advice, get off my ass, and be more social. But alas, postcards make ineffectual goads and, back in college, I rarely left my room unless the clamor of my neighbors doing it was driving me crazy. So actually, senior year, I was out of my room a lot.

Four years later and a graduation later, and the Social Circles postcard is buried in a pile of all the other crap — the business cards, the Far Side cartoons, the pictures of people I haven't seen since high school — that used to be on my wall. I still haven't kept that New Year's resolution, and with most of my friends living far, far away and no floormates' caterwauling make-up sex forcing me out of my room, my social life has only gone downhill, which I didn't even think was possible. You learn something new.... and this is when Mom pointed me towards the New Jersey Young Professionals, an open group of, um, young professionals from New Jersey who have trouble meeting people in the social chaos of our home state. They host events that usually have the words "mixer" or "business card exchange" in their title, and I unduly get this sort of party-line infomercial vibe off of them:

Are you sick of the contrived, anonymous, ad-supported social networking. At NJYP, we have over 5500 young, hot professionals all looking for a good time.

Sorry, they're not prurient at all, unfortunately (cough, cough!). Mostly, they just put on awkward icebreaker events where everyone wears a "Hello, my name is" tag — like everyone gets together at a club in Hoboken, you get three or four pieces of Magnetic Poetry and then you have to mingle with other people and try to make sentences combining your words with theirs. Because that doesn't sound totally awkward if you're not in a second-grade English class.

Here's what I don't understand. If you don't have a problem going up to strangers and asking, "So what're your words?" then why do you need this stupid magnet mixer in the first place?

I'd been a NJYP member for about a month before finally running across an event that seemed relatively normal: game night at Brewed Awakenings in Metuchen. (I think "Brewed Awakenings" is an awful name for a coffee house, but according to Google, lots of proprietors disagree.) I figured I could drive to Metuchen, sort of pretend like I randomly stumbled into the place, and scope out the environment over an iced latte. If the happy pills I take decide that today, for once, they'll do their damn job, maybe I'll even join in the Scattergories.

The only thing is that you're supposed to bring a game. Make sure all the pieces are there. Well, that last part's pretty easy for me, because I'm freaking anal when it comes to keeping track of tiny objects children can choke on. The first part... not so much. See, the thing is, as a single child with no actual social life, I don't own a whole lot of board games and the games that I do own... well, I'd hate to be judged on what I brought to the party. There's go, the ancient Chinese game of putting stones on a board that no one but mathematicians and Darren Aronofsky has the patience for. There's a Trivial Pursuit where I memorized all the answers. There's Yahtzee... or, uh, travel Yahtzee. (I believe someone bought it for me in the days before God gave us Game Boy.) And there's Solarquest, which is basically Monopoly for nerds. The biggest difference is that, in Solarquest, everybody forgets the rules after an hour or so and gives up, whereas with Monopoly, you simply get into fisticuffs with your opponents after an hour or so.

My family also owns a bunch of games that were invented back in the seventies, when everyone was high on acid. Like "Probe," which Parker Brothers calls, without a hint of irony, "the most provocative game of words since the invention of the modern alphabet." Really. You pick a word and other people have to guess it! It's literally minutes of fun, and it's so provocative — national conflicts have started after one superpower challenged the spelling of another's word! (But apparently, there was an even more provocative word game using Sumerian cunieform that's been lost to history.) And somewhere in the bowels of our house is "The Plot To Assassinate Hitler," which takes weeks to play and pretty much makes Advanced Dungeons & Dragons look like Candy Land. I didn't think any of those were appropriate.

So I went gameless, and the whole thing was sort of anticlimactic. I didn't get involved or anything, and I don't really think I missed out on the excitement of Pictionary. Still, it's nice to know that there's people out there, and when those people come up with some other meet-and-greet that's not totally awkward, I might show up and watch.

The Nickelodeon Kid's Choice Awards were held on Sunday, because you're never too young to be pandered to by an evil brainwashing media conglomerate that doesn't know where to put its apostrophes. It's the only award show where kids — and pederasts prowling the Nick.com website — vote for the winners, so it's like a civics lesson for them. The KCA teaches them about democracy: majority rules; and, since the electorate is made up of hyperactive rhesus monkeys, you wind up with some dumb douche like Lindsay Lohan for president and getting this radioactive cum and piss mixture dumped on you. I think the words "radioactive cum" should appear in every single Nickelodeon press release.

You'll be totally shocked to learn that the winners in just about every category are shows on Nickelodeon and their scenery-munching actors. Also, Will Smith, because apparently he's legally obligated to take home one orange blimp annually and then store it way in the back of the same closet he keeps D.J. Jazzy Jeff locked in. This brings up two important questions. First of all, who the fuck is Drake Bell, and why is he on my TV every time I channel surf between the Home & Garden Network and the Sci-Fi Channel? And second, you mean to tell me that eight-year-olds actually went to the movies to see the King of Queens get laid?

Thus we see why kids should never be given choices: they are stupid and will invariably make the wrong ones. I have to admit that I originally confused the KCA with Teen People magazine's Teen Choice Awards. It's really a misnomer — there's no actual choice because it looks like just about everyone who's ever been on Access Hollywood takes home an award. Hell, the winners' list is like two miles long, and I might have even won something. (Probably one of those technical awards they give out earlier in the evening.)

The thing is I was hoping I could get away under the delusion that it's just a stupid children's award show, and really it's not like the teenagers made any worse decisions than, say, the Hollywood Foreign Press. But on the other hand, shows like this are the reason Rob Schnieder — who hasn't said or done anything remotely funny since playing that copier guy on SNL like fifteen years ago, and even that wasn't all that funny — is still making movies, and even though pretty much all of the Golden Globes are handed out to the wrong nominee, at least those winners aren't making active contributions to humanity's decadence and the decline of civilization. This is why I'm against giving teenagers disposable income almost as much as I'm against straight marraige: those rotten kids apparently shop while they're freaking high, and now I can't watch Veronica Mars without seeing the ad for that movie where that Napoleon Dynamite doofus makes an ass of himself trying to play baseball.

Apparently, I'm in the minority though. There was a bill going through the California legislature that would've given teenagers the right to vote in state elections. Great, that's just what California needs, a million more idiots in the voting pool. Not that I believe all kids are stupid, and I find this quote from one of the bill's opponents kind of offensive, "There's a reason why 14-year-olds and 16-year-olds don't vote. They are not adults. They are not mature enough. They are easily deceived by political charlatans." I mean, dude, your state elected the Kindergarten Cop as governor, so shut up. It's just that we've all been through those dumb student council elections back in middle school, and the winner was always the popular kid who, it turned out, couldn't manage the awesome responsibility of organizing candy drives for the eighth-grade trip to Great Adventure, and I'd really prefer if we didn't bring that political ethos to the national stage where it actually matters.

Death and Taxes

Well, here's my absolute favorite question on this year's tax return: "Are you deceased?" I know what they mean — they want you to check the box if you're filing for someone deceased — but I'm just going to inform the IRS right now that once I'm dead, I'm not paying taxes anymore. I don't care if it's illegal, cause what's the government gonna do to me? I'm dead. Are they gonna dig me up and throw my rotting corpse in some federal prison? I'd like to see that. Really, I would love to see taxpayer dollars spent exhuming my corpse and putting it on trial. I might even commit a crime on my deathbed just so that happens. I really hope there's a heaven and I get a good vantage point from there.

And I'm aware that I won't be able to take it with me, but I resent the hell out of having to pay for this war in Iraq ($251 billion and counting, despite initial projections of a $50 billion price tag) or no-bid contracts for a Chinese conglomerate to run nuclear detection equipment at U.S. ports or our multi-trillion dollar national debt. I'm not going to take the awfully brave position that taxes in America are too high... just that they're too high for me. I live pretty comfortably, but on paper, I'm below the poverty line so I'm a little surprised that TurboTax thinks I owe the government a thousand dollars. Especially since 61% of American corporations payed no taxes — but probably a good chunk of change to their lawyers hunting for loopholes in the tax code — during the boom years of 1996 to 2000.

I imagine in a world of moral certitudes, it would simply be unpatriotic to search for obscure deductions in your spare time or to hide your money in Vanuatu or Liechtenstein, but it's harder for me to come up with a good reason why I should pay taxes when Halliburton doesn't pay a dime.

Oh, and don't get me started on old people and the social security tax. Like, what has an old person ever done for me, besides holding up the bus for five minutes while they're trying to climb those three steps and pay their fare.