On tonight's edition of The Insider: Brangelina visits (visit? — what are the grammar rules for pluralizing two individuals the media has scrunched together into a single unit?) New Orleans. According to an Associated Press article, Brangelina will be... well, here's the headline: "Pitt, Jolie to watch New Orleans rebuild." Typical Hollywood, and typical of the Pitt-Jolie Family of Superfortunate Third-World Orphans: they're too busy making crappy movies that exploit human misery to actually pick up a hammer and provide some tangible assistance to the poor people who lost everything when the levees broke, although Angelina and her glorious titties will be providing moral support. No, they're just "monitoring" the rebuilding process, and while I have little doubt they'll be more useful in the region than FEMA, I'd like to hold people whose very presence in a particular place rates a news story to a slightly higher standard.

Sure, Pitt donated $200,000 to the lower Ninth Ward, but I don't think the city needs the strings of sanctimony that come attached.

Pitt said Thursday he's still appalled — embarrassed even — that people in many New Orleans neighborhoods cannot return because of the lack of basic services like hospitals and schools.

"This is a social justice issue," he said. "In a catastrophe, you help the most vulnerable first, and we failed to do that."

Sure, Brad, that's exactly what you were doing in Namibia for half a year: helping the residents of New Orleans while having a baby in a country with one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world. That should be Namibia's new slogan — "Namibia: Celebrities prefer our maternity ward over the one in Rwanda."

Oh, and by the way, I'm sure that Pitt's magnanimity has nothing at all to do with the fact that he's shooting a movie in New Orleans next year. Nothing against him personally — he's probably a very nice guy, if not the luckiest bastard ever — but he really needs to stop diluting these humanitarian tragedies by pretending they mean something to him. Here's my challenge to Brad Pitt: Mr. Pitt, if you're genuinely serious about helping the people of New Orleans, why don't you donate all the money you make from your next movie to the redevelopment effort? I'm sure there'll still be enough left over from Angelina's salary to help the people of Darfur by buying Shiloh a tacky-ass pacifier studded with blood diamonds.

No one came to the raging kegger I threw last night, which is probably a good thing, since I didn't have any beer, or music, or anything for the guests to do. It's just that I'm pretty sure yesterday was the first night in the twenty-four years of my life that both my parents went out of town overnight, leaving me alone and trusting me to not burn the house down... and since I'm still playing catch-up with the Lost Underage Experience, I figured that maybe inviting people over to get drunk and trash my house might just get me a seat at the cool kids' table. Please, don't give me that look. It's not like I'm thirty years old, playing X-Box in my parents' basement and having Mom cook me Chef Boyardee for dinner. Yet.

Instead, I went to keep Grandma company because, while I'm merely alone in an alienated, psychic sense, Grandma is stuck in her home and literally alone; and, sometimes, when I don't have anything else to feel bad about (not often), I feel bad for her. This never goes very well; despite our mere sixty-something year age difference, we really don't have a lot to talk about. She tells me stories about how awesome everyone was back in the day and how everyone these days can go to hell, and then I sort of agree with her that everyone can, in fact, go to hell. Then we run out of stuff to say: "What did you do today?" "Nothing." "You have any plans for tomorrow?" "Same thing."

Grandma goes off to watch TV — remember when Bob Saget was hosting America's Funniest Home Videos? Grandma thinks that shit is hilarious, and no, she's not senile. I was watching a DVD of the awfully-titled Hong Kong action thriller Infernal Affairs, and I'm a little miffed at whoever designed the DVD cover. I knew what the movie's about before reading the little blurb on the back of the box — Tony Leung plays an undercover cop who spends ten years infiltrating a drug cartel, and Andy Lau plays a lieutentant in the cartel who spends ten years as a mole in the police department, and both Leung and Lau are assigned the task of finding the double agent in their organizations — but if you take a close look at the cover art, wouldn't you just maybe, maybe expect to find a hot Asian woman with a gun somewhere in the movie? Like, I don't know, just taking a cue from the cover symbolism, maybe both guys fall for the woman with the gun? Or she's the true anti-hero of the story?

So here's a little spoiler for you: no hot chick with a gun in the entire freaking film. I know; it's awful — the cover makes you all horny and there's no release in the movie. Well, there's a lot of release in the movie... just not that kind. Aside from that one omission, and an insipid, obvious side plot where Lau's wife writes a novel about a man with multiple personalities, Infernal Affairs is actually a pretty good film. I have yet to meet the action film that doubles as cinematic masterpiece, but I think the critical comparisons to Michael Mann's Heat are pretty apt, although in my opinion, a better description might be if Fritz Lang re-made M in 2004. Infernal Affairs has a few setpieces that... I don't want to say "set a new standard in action," but it's safe to assume that Scorcese could learn a few things from the original when he's re-making the film for Warner Bros. He won't, and he'll turn this compact story into some sort of dilute epic. There will be too much characterization via dialogue and his actors will resort to histrionics, the suspend will build too slowly and the catharsis will be weak. Watch: The Departed will come out this winter and you'll see how right I am.

Union

I finally figured out everything that's wrong with the world, and that is that God hasn't chosen to grant me the power of life and death over all humanity. Don't give me that look — this guy and this guy both have the power to obliterate life on Earth with the push of a button, and frankly, Lord, I think I'm a little more qualified to make blithe life and death decisions than George W. Bush is. I might strike, say, Frank Quattrone down with a lightning bolt out of a clear, blue sky, but at least afterwards, I'd take his money and use it to buy body armor for the soldiers in Iraq, because I'm just magnanimous like that.

Yesterday evening, for instance, I was at this Columbia Young Alumni Reunion — not that I actually thought I'd get reunited with anyone from school, but I figured my chances were a bit higher at the reunion than, say, in my bedroom. The whole event was, even by my humble standards, a huge failure. There's the Peninsula Hotel in New York City, "specifically designed for the needs of the executive traveler," so lots of rich white guys wearing ties. The reunion was at the terrace bar on the hotel's top floor and is also crammed with rich white guys wearing ties, as well as wannabe rich white guys wearing ties. Thing is, what do Columbia young alumni typically look like? You guessed it: wannabe rich white guys wearing ties. Figuring out who was a junior associate at a midtown law firm and who was a junior associate at a midtown law firm plus a Columbia undergrad wasn't exactly trivial. We should have a secret handshake or something.

For all I know, we do have a secret handshake but, for $140,000 tuition, no one bothered to show it to me.

Okay, not being let in on the secret handshake made me a little cranky, and the twenty-third story view was a little disappointing (lots of rooftops), but here's why I'm really called upon to set the world straight. While I was waiting for my friends to not show up — it's not like I invited them, or like they even respond to my emails when I do invite them — I got a hold of the Pen-Top's menu, a bound and embossed booklet that's four pages long and about an inch thick and, ugh, a guy without a tie could go broke. A shot of rum for fifteen bucks, twenty-one for some chocotini novelty drink thing, domestic beers: twelve dollars. I don't think I'd make it very far on The Price Is Right, but beer goes for what, three, maybe four bucks? There was this woman I saw out on the terrace with a bottle of Bud Light, wearing whatever the rich white female equivalent of suit and tie is, and I had this incessant need to interrogate her: "Do you realize that bottle of beer you're holding is worth, like, four bottles of beer?"

I want to blame the Pen-Top Bar & Terrace for getting rich taking advantage of stupid white folks with too much disposable income, but I suppose I'm really just pissed that I didn't go to the market around the corner, buy a couple of six-packs, and sell them at the bar for ten dollars each. It's not the bar's fault we have a laissez-faire economy with market forces regulated only by the caprice of tie-wearing, money-burning douchewads, but the reason I can't afford to get drunk at snobby happy hour is that someone else is willing to pay a four-hundred percent markup on liquor. And as I walked home, sullen and sober, these examples of complacency struck me and I'm sort of wondering to what extent the corporations and the government and the Man can push the rest of us before we'll all stop and ask ourselves what we're getting out of this deal.

I have a couple of friends, for example, who do grunt work at law firms in the city, and they all have Blackberries — the most bourgeois, corporatized technology since the invention of the alarm clock — provided generously by their firm. Let me say this right now: if any of my employers ever tries to give me a Blackberry, all smiles and excited about e-mailing me wherever I am, that damn thing is getting run over by a truck within a day. Here's the thing, Corporate Overlords: I don't want you getting in touch with me wherever I am. Yes, once in a while, there is an e-mail I want to send when I'm not by my computer, but I can guarantee you that e-mail isn't going to be about work, and I'd rather not have an electronic leash that periodically feeds me offers for penis enlargment and home mortgages. I can't see for the life of me what advantage anyone can get out of being perpetually tied to their loving corporation, so how about, when H.R. offers you the Blackberry with a serial number etched in the back and a barcode, you just politely decline?

I remember the good old days when you could walk into your local Brookstone and flop down on that Tempur-Pedic display bed for an hour and a half without a store associate so much as looking at you. Maybe they started some sort of commission system, but now I feel guilty walking into Brookstone and get three salesninnies waylay me with bizarre hybrid product abonimations of God while I know there's no way in hell I'd buy their mini-massager or indoor/outdoor weather station or talking picture cube or whatever other overpriced crap they've got there. I just went in today to sit in that massage chair, which — again, I hate my fellow human beings — I get carded for???!!! The following conversation ensued:

Salesgirl: Are you over eighteen?

Me: [pretty sure I know the right answer to that question] Yeah.

Salesgirl: What do you think?

Okay, she's not flirting with me; she's just totally unaware that they've had the same damn Brookstone chair in the store there for the past ten years or so and the sales pitch can skip the inane, gawking small talk because I'm no longer surprised that someone managed to stick a vibrator inside a recliner. I don't think I'm all that easy to mistake for a tourist from Idaho.

Me: It's comfortable.

Salesgirl: Just comfortable?

No, sweetheart, it's orgasmic the way the massage chair can't figure out how tall I am and periodically discovers a new pressure point. The chair is really just meh... comfortable. It's sort of like a woman you've never met before rubbing your balls: it feels good but it's still a little weird. I explain this to the salesgirl.

Me: Well, I'm not used to the rubber things pushing into my spine.

Salesgirl: Because we have some other models you can try out if you want.

Is she seriously trying to sell me one of these things? Or better question, has anyone ever bought a robot shiatsu chair from Brookstone? You go to your local Corvette dealership wearing expensive sunglasses and slick-backed hair and you test drive a sports car for the ten-minute adrenaline rush, but you don't have to take every car on the lot for a spin. And I'm a little put off by the fact that she thinks I'm in the market for a massage chair when less than sixty seconds ago she didn't even think the state of New York legally permitted me to even sit in the damn chair.

Pretentious Foreign Film

I'll protect you from yourself and not show you why I was at the Film Forum this afternoon. I'll tell you, though: After reading a few vague reviews, I saw the trailer for this super-obscure black-and-white French thriller 13 (Tzameti) and I absolutely had to see it. A word about the Film Forum — most movie theaters, like the UltraMegaGigantoPlex you've got off the highway, are part of the Hollywood system, owned by those media mega-conglomerates and a roster of shareholders, and that's why they've got fifty-seven screens and only four different movies playing. The Film Forum, on the other hand, has a board of benefactors, snooty people who purchase art and appear in the New York Times Sunday Styles section, so they show movies that make straight-to-DVD crap shows with titles like "Evil Dentist IV" (it answers all the questions left over at the end of "Evil Dentist III") look commercially viable. Okay, here's one of the trailers we had to sit through — and normally, I love the trailers, but coming soon to the Film Forum, it's Lunacy by Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer. Yes, the Jan Svankmajer.



I failed "Inscrutable European Symbolism 101" in college, so you'll have to excuse my ignorance, but…what the hell is this movie about?! There's a tableau, and someone playing with uncooked beef or something, and I'm just so confused. Why won't that guy be laughing long? What's up with the patriotic midget, and the guy who wants to be left alone, and I don't get what Edgar Allen Poe has to do with any of this. It's like Twin Peaks mated with a Calvin Klein ad, and they had kids who all mated with each other, and Lunacy is the hideously deformed offspring, only more abstruse. I'm sorry, does that make me thick? Maybe I need to see Material Girls as penance.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Film Forum. Goatees get twenty percent off.

Anyway, 13 (Tzemati) – don't kid yourself, the title doesn't mean shit – has a twisted game of Russian roulette as its central conceit, so once you know this, the first half of the movie leaves you with some solid anticipatory chills as you wait for someone's head to get blown off. My subconscious rushed with images of bloody brain holes and neck stumps looking around for their severed heads, so it's no real shock that I was quickly disappointed. What makes me wish for my ten dollar admission back was that the movie, which the Hollywood Reporter calls "an intense and claustrophobic thriller," is so godawfully boring. Like, the first round of Russian roulette, you're sort of into it, and the director Géla Babluani drags the scene out about as long as it can go, but by the fourth round... I was feeling, "Could we just get this over with? I've got stuff to do." You wouldn't believe how insanely tedious a movie where wealthy businessmen bet on a game of Russian roulette played by drugged up day-laborers can be, but a gunshot lasts all of two milliseconds and the rest of the movie is the dullest snuff film ever.

So now I'm pissed at the 83% of critics who liked the movie, found it nail-biting or pulse-pounding or whatever, and encouraged me to go. Like this review, which was posted in the Film Forum lobby next to the poster for 13 (Tzemati):

"Lustrous black and white with the look of a neo-noir. An elegant thunderbolt of a film! Throat-grabbingly effective!"
Jay Carr, AM New York

It's called a complete sentence, dude. You get a sweet gig watching movies for a living, and the least you could do is write your little blurbs with both subjects and predicates. "Throat-grabbingly effective," really? That's a clause about one step above Homer Simpson quality, and I'm surprised this Carr asshole didn't end his review with "Screw Flanders."

Incidentally, I found Carr's full review online, and while I still think he put more effort into the star rating than the review's actual content, it's better than the Film Forum would suggest. I can't find the words "elegant thunderbolt" anywhere in the text.

Further Proof That The War on Terrorism is Being Fought By Morons

You might or might not have heard of Gatorate-gate while flipping through the channels and landing on CNN or MSNBC for a moment. A flight from London to Washington, D.C. was diverted to Boston yesterday after a mentally deranged woman on board refused to return to her seat and crazily insisted that everyone on the plane wanted to see what was in her airsick bag. (No, Crazy Lady, I guarantee you that no one on the plane wants to see what's in your airsick bag.) The flight crew tied up and searched the woman, and they found she was carrying hand gel — which is banned on flights out of England — and matches. Which aren't. Because it might be someone's birthday on the plane, and how else are you going to light the candles?

The Transportation Security Administration, having gotten over its fear of Grandma Qaeda crocheting on the plane and now having finished replacing all the uneducated, untrained, egomaniacal black and Latino security guards with uneducated, untrained, egomaniacal white ones, has helpfully compiled a list of what you can and can't take on airplane. Let's take a look at how the TSA is making the skies safer for shoeless travellers everywhere:

You can't take Blistex on a plane. This will keep the terrorists off our planes, because they all come from hot, arid places and have chapped lips. Al-Qaeda might be willing to blow their dumb asses up, but they're not gonna get in an environment with dry, recirculated air.

You can bring a corkscrew on the plane, because Muslims aren't allowed to drink. I can't think of any other possible use a bad guy might have for a heavy, pointed object.

Screwdrivers are allowed in your carry-on luggage, provided they're under seven inches long. So if the airplane breaks down mid-flight, repairing the "Fasten Seat Belt" light is within reach but repairing the fuselage isn't.

Toy Transformers — yes, specifically Transformers — are allowed on the plane. I wonder how much Mattel had to lobby the TSA for that one.

Toothpaste and mouthwash are both banned from the plane, but you're allowed four ounces of "personal lubricant." First of all, I don't know about you, but four ounces ain't gonna be enough for me. But this is good; it's only taken twelve years since Jocelyn Elders was run out of the surgeon general's office for the government to admit that jerking off is okay! And on intercontinental flights, sitting next to fat guy no less!

You knew it was coming: Poisonous snakes are — care to take a guess? Yes, the TSA posts no restrictions on bringing your pet cobra onto the plane, although they may need to put its terrarium through the X-ray machine. Fortunately, I believe Hollywood is taking on the issue with a riveting exposé on the dangers of motherfucking snakes on motherfucking planes, so we can hope to see reptiles on board go the way of liquid sanitizer and meat cleavers.

Communication skills, people! Because today at work I spent an hour on the phone with some of our consultants, all of whom are Indian immigrants, and I understood maybe five words of the whole conversation. And while I'm sure they're wonderful nerds if you don't need to get critical information for your project from them, deciphering their accents and their geek-speak and the general conference call static gave me a headache. I don't know how to handle that kind of situation, since there's only so many times you can ask someone to repeat that before they suspect either you've got a problem or they've got a problem — and no one ever suspects that they've got the problem. I typically smile and nod, but that strategy over the phone makes it look like I'm having an absence seizure.

It's a skill though, communication in general and resisting your natural urge to aspirate in particular, and I can't blame our tech consultants for not bothering to pick it up. That's why one works with computers: they're easier to talk to then people. They're patient and unambiguous, and if you don't like one font, you can pick another and it's not like Abadi Condensed is gonna get offended or anything. But you get on the phone instead of the instant messenger, or you start up with the handwriting instead of keyboard clicking and there's just a mess of issues. My experience with Ravi and Vijesh (still not sure how to pronounce that name, but I'm about 85% confident that it's not pronounced like it's spelled) and Elango made me think about the surreal sequence in the "Outsourcing" episode of 30 Days, where our intrepid American hero is at a school in Bangalore teaching future "call center operators" — i.e., telemarketers — how to speak the King's English, if the king lived in Omaha. Sorry: I know how skilled tech jobs are disappearing from America and as they're being shipped over to India, they're not creating a rising middle class there so much as further enriching already bloated American and Indian megacorporations, but watching the Accent-B-Gone instructor switch from Apu's voice to Carson Daly's and back mid-sentence is downright hilarious.

The irony, of course, is that no one over here wants to communicate with someone in Bangalore interrupting dinner with an offer for a Visa Platinum card. (Among middle class Indians, however, telemarketing is one of the most prized professions you can get, probably only short of Bollywood extra and charlatan with an afro.) Here I am, on the phone after a month of negotiations with these guys, actually wanting to hear what they've got to say... well, not really, since the emails they previously sent me demonstrate little familiarity with basic English concepts, like the word "the," and I don't talk with people too busy for grammar... but I do want to know what's going on with our application and here are our consultants who literally can't tell me. Like communication isn't difficult enough.

Nonsense

The Museum of Modern Art, which, I should reiterate, I fucking hate, is showing an exhibition on Dadaism that does very, very little to redeem them in my eyes. Dadaism is an "anti-art" art movement, if that makes any sense; it theoretically satirizes or challenges the conventional nature of art, but placed into a modern context, in a museum that actually paid for a container of poo, and Dadaist pieces like Duchamp's Ball of Twine or 3/4 Ounces of Paris Air in a Glass Vial (picture not available — it's an empty vial, so use your imagination) delve into self-parody even before the target of that parody exists. Anne and I went to visit the exhibit yesterday — she has friends who work there and we got in for free, so I consider that a blow stricken for the egalitarianism of great culture — and we were duly confused by Duchamp's Comb, which is an ordinary plastic comb that the Museum enclosed in an alarmed, bulletproof glass case. I pointed out how that's cheating: Duchamp didn't even do anything to the comb. Anne correctly pointed out that Duchamp found the comb, and apparently he had magic fingers because as soon as Duchamp touches a prosaic object and declares it "art," a miracle happens and it becomes art.

The Dadaist movement got its start, according to the MoMA, with the Society of Independent Artists, which was a group of art salon rejects so disillusioned with their jury peers they vowed to show anything submitted to them. Duchamp, fucking with them, submitted a urinal to the Society's exhibition, which naturally rejected it maybe because, I don't know, it's a piece of plumbing, it's the precursor to Ashton Kutcher and O.J.'s reality show and college students with too much time on their hands punking the rest of us with jobs to do, or it's just not art. An infuriated Duchamp — "Come on, you guys, you did say you'd exhibit anything..." — published an asinine defense of Fountain in his snooty literati magazine The Blind Man, the gist of which is that anything can be art and Robert Mutt (Duchamp, under a pseudonym), made his artistic contribution to the pee container when he chose it, among all the other objects in the world, to submit to the Society.

Anne then had to remind me not to take Dadaism as a personal affront.

Except that the logic of the argument and how it plays out among the museum curators, the gallery owners, and the modern artists making millions of dollars auctioning off pretentious crap at Sotheby's have really, literally, turned it into a personal affront. Despite this post-modern questioning of the fundamental nature of art and the interplay between artist, art, and viewer, there's a fundamental Objectivism (shudder!) in the modern art world serving to maintain both the status quo and the cult of personality leeching off it. Maybe there's "art" and then there's "marketable art", but saying that anything can be art, or anything can be music, or anything can be anything, in addition to being facile, devalues what really is art. If this chair, or this tree branch, or my spit can be art, then why pay $135 million for Klimt's The Kiss when I have a perfectly good picture of some hairy dude eating out this chick that I found online and I'll sell you for twenty bucks? Who cares if you smash Michelangelo's Pietá with a hammer because the crushed rocks and dust are just as valuable artistically as the sculpture itself?

The trend Duchamp started was to marry the content of the art to the artist himself, which was, in a way, ahead of his time. The argument isn't that anything can be art; it's that the artist can call anything art. It's arrogance and egotism — it's my declaration that this piece is art that makes it so, and your thoughts are irrelevant, you knuckle-dragging philistine. Now give us your twenty dollars for admission!

No, I don't see any parallels at all to our nation's current cultural and political state. At least the MoMA doesn't question your patriotism and call you a terrorist if you prefer Chagall to Cassatt.

Know-It-All

I'm smart. Not to brag or anything, but since I'm not all that physically attractive and I have little to no social skills, I don't feel too, too awful about bringing it up once or twice. But I'm mentioning it now because I'm trying to join Mensa, which I assume is full of nerds discussing their Diplomacy strategies, debating the merits of Jedi versus Empire, and developing grandiose forced mating schemes.

The admission process is rigorous and carefully designed to keep all those egghead wannabes in the ninety-seventh or (gasp!) ninety-sixth percentile out of their club. I've taken some IQ tests before, once in fourth grade to get into some snooty prep school and once as a three-year-old, because even back then, my parents could see I'd never grow up to be a Matt Ratliff and they'd better nurture one of my other gifts. I bet if the toddler IQ test hadn't gone well, they would've exposed me to radioactive spiders or mysterious silver meteorites or something. Kinda wish they had, like maybe I could've been in a nuclear waste accident that makes me impervious to their co-dependent guilt. But I'm getting off topic. The point is that merely having and passing an IQ test doesn't make you Mensa material; you've got to send in an original copy of the psychiatrist's report on the IQ test, on official letterhead with his or her state license number, signed and notarized, and hand-delivered to Mensa's U.S. headquarters in Houston by either certified mail or a trained yak. I don't remember my college applications being that needlessly bureaucratic. Mensa: you're just a bunch of poindexters playing speed chess, not the popular clique in high school.

It doesn't matter anyway, since that test from fourth grade, along with pretty much everything else from fourth grade, has long been lost to the mists of entropy. I found a copy of the Woodcock-Johnson IV (yes, that's its real name, stop giggling) Skills Assessment from a few years back, but that won't satisfy the sticklers at Mensa. It seems easier to take the official Mensa IQ test, so I emailed the Mensa local coordinator about the testing and she emailed me this back:

Dear Jay Harris,

Please ensure that your spam blockers can accept email from this address.

Thank you for your interest in Mensa, the High IQ Society.

Mensa supervised testing sessions, subject to change, will be held at the following times and locations:

Saturday, August 19, 2006
Culture Fair
11:00 AM -?
Edison, NJ 08817
Limited Seating

Sunday, September 24, 2006 - Subject to change
1:30 PM - 3:30 PM
Hillsborough Municipal Bldg
Hillsborough, NJ 08844

Saturday, October 21, 2006 - National Testing Day
1:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Sayreville Public Library
Parlin, NJ 08859

Thursday, December 21, 2006 - Subject to change
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Hillsborough Municipal Bldg
Hillsborough, NJ 08844

There will be two tests proctored with a short break between them. A score in the top 2 percent on either of the tests will qualify you for Mensa membership.

If you have any condition for which you feel would make a standard test unsuitable or your main language is not English you may be given our non-language untimed battery of tests (Culture Fair). Let me know if this is your preference.

If you will be able to attend a testing session please complete and return the form below to me prior to the scheduled time with your check or money order The testing fee must be received before you can be scheduled to take the tests.

Confirmation will be forwarded to you upon registration.

Should you have any questions in the interim, please feel free to contact me. I am looking forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,
Martha A. McKeon

And right now, I'd like to point out something you'd probably just assume someone smarter than 98% of the population would realize on their own: "Please ensure that your spam blockers can accept email from this address." Right.... If my spam blocker won't accept email from your address, Martha, then it won't accept your warning about the spam blocker not accepting email from you address. Genius.

I wanted to sign up for the August 19 test because it's the closest and earliest of the four. However, one might notice — well, I noticed — that there's no clue where in Edison the test is. (And what's up with the 11:00 AM until question mark? Are there gonna be cocktails after?) So, I wrote back to Martha the Mensa Mistress:

Where's the test being held on August 19? Edison is a pretty big town....

And why am I like consigned to the circle of Hell where everyone sends you dickish email responses? Case in point:

Aha - so you're interested in the Culture Fair test, right?
2 blocks from Bridge St, which is right off Rte 27, Metuchen-Edison border, also near Rte 287, and not far from Rte 1. Does that help?
If you sign up for it, the confirmation gives the complete street address, which is my home.
Interested? Limited to 5 people, you would be the 2nd, if yes, Jay.

Bet you noticed the other addresses are incomplete, too. Those are big towns as well.

Martha

The Comic Sans was her idea, masking her goading me with typographical levity. But no, Martha, I'm not interested in the culture-fair test; I'm interested in the closest test, so I hope they take a few points off your IQ for jumping to conclusions. More to the point, Martha, what on earth did you expect to gain by including that last paragraph there? If you want to challenge me to a parse-off, then say so and bring it on! Round one: I've never been to the Sayreville Public Library or to the Hillsborough Municipal Building, but I'd take odds on the fact that either of those locations is significantly smaller than the entire town of Edison. Rebuttal?

Spoiler Alert!(Think of it like I'm saving you eleven bucks.)

I got another two-for-one discount at the Angelika Film Center this afternoon by purchasing an overpriced ticket to Clerks II and sneaking into Who Killed The Electric Car? after. I don't know why. I'm not one of those pretentious film school asshats who's convinced Kevin Smith is a god; the original Clerks was alright, Mallrats was pointless, unnecessary, and added nothing new to the fascinating 1995 discussion of Magic Eye pictures. Clerks II was more or less Clerks I, in color, and with a pudgier Brian O'Halloran and Jeff Anderson. Same meandering dialogue, same hit-to-miss ratio with the jokes, exact same argument between Dante and Randall ninety-five percent of the way through the movie — Dante accuses Randall of ruining his life and Randall calls Dante a tool. Gee, I didn't see that coming twelve years ago.

Who Killed The Electric Car? was the movie I really wanted to see, because I wasn't indignant enough after watching the Enron movie last month. Next time you're at the local Mobil station, filling that motherfucker Hummer of yours at three-fifty a gallon, I want you to remember that for about four years in the late 1990's, General Motors, Ford, Daimler-Chrysler, Toyota, and Honda all made cars — zero to sixty in less than four seconds — that took no gas. Really, for a brief, shining moment, we were free of the oil monopoly, OPEC, all this Middle East shit. And then, as the title implies, someone killed the electric car, along with twenty-five hundred American soldiers and forty thousand Iraqis.

I'm going to give away the ending and tell you who murdered the electric car. I suggest you sit down. The culprits were: the oil companies, GM, the Republican deregulators we put in the White House, science fiction-ish hydrogen cell technology, the California Air Resources Board (conveniently chaired by this guy who consults for the automakers' association), and, of course, you morons who wouldn't purchase clean emissions technology till you were handing out piles of sawbucks trying to fill your gas tank.

Not to let the multinational conspiracy off the hook here, but I lost count of how many sequences the movie gave us of SUV-driving douchebags telling the camera, "Wow, that electric car sounds awesome. Where can I get one? Oh, what do you mean I can't anymore?" Okay, fellow Americans, I'm fucking sick of you jackasses repudiating your civic duty to stay informed about what's going on in your world. I don't care if you skip out on jury duty, and frankly I'd prefer it if you kept your asinine political opinions away from the voting booth, but democracy doesn't fucking work among the ill-informed. You don't like it? Rather kill those brain cells memorizing Paris Hilton's new retarded song or scouring the internet for obscure trivia about that horn guy on America's Got Talent (which, by the way, thanks NBC for proving once and for all that it doesn't) — then move your lazy ass somewhere like Iran or Myanmar, where willful ignorance won't exactly bring you bliss, but it will keep the secret police off your back. I don't want to come across as "America: love it or leave it," but it's got to be tough for the eighty or so protestors keeping vigil, trying to prevent GM from shredding the last of its electric cars, when the rest of the country won't pick up its fair share of the work keeping the nation healthy.

I know that An Inconvenient Truth was semi-facetiously marketed as the scariest film you'll ever see, but I found it more depressing than anything else. Kind of like the post-'96 Bob Dole or the post-2000 John McCain, Al Gore can be an extremely interesting, witty, and entertaining guy, and every time he made a crack in the movie towards the Administration or the global warming skeptics, I cried a little inside, wondering where the hell this guy was during the 2000 campaign season and who was that loser yammering on about lockboxes and his ninety-year old friend Millie from Illinois who had to choose between buying her heart medicine and buying bread? I know there's a lot of blame to spread around, between Elian Gonzales and a president who couldn't keep it in his pants and an extremely stupid electorate, but if you need even more of a reason to get pissed at America's campaign-by-committee method of selecting and marketing our leaders, here's a 2000 video of an unguarded Gore and family, directed by the same guy who did that music video with Christopher Walken.

Feel free to start crying now.

I Have an Inexplicable Craving for Bacardi™ Rum

I predicted that if I went to enough of these Young Professionals parties, there'd eventually be some payoff, and I was right. In fact, I'm more than a little surprised I'm meeting people after only four events. They threw a party at Glo tonight celebrating the opening of their new website, MySpace-lite, and I showed up for the free NJYP Lance Armstrong bracelet that doesn't support cancer research — first we'll improve my social life, then we'll cure the deadly disease — but I stayed for the five-dollar Bacardi™ mojitos.

Really, they made a huge fucking deal over these mojitos. The bartender dude told me this'll be the best mojito I've ever had, and I would've said, "Well, I've never had a mojito before, so you're probably right," but I was sober so I just smiled. Oooh, big mistake. A mojito, turns out, tastes like alcoholic toothpaste and, contrary to the nice, clear drink pictured on the Bacardi™ website, looks a bit like swill. It's all in the nuances of the word "muddle," which the official Bacardi™ photographers forgot to do. Anyway, for my five dollars, mint and booze don't mix unless I'm trying to fight the gum disease known as gingivitis.

I got the time wrong and arrived an hour early, so I'm walking up and down George Street killing time when Laura, the Young Professionals hostess, (I assume) recognized me and waved me in. Huh. Okay, so Laura knew my face, but of course she didn't know my name, and thus began a ridiculously comic sign-in process where I repeated my name about a hundred times and Laura responded with something-that-rhymes-with-my-name question-mark. We were back on familiar territory. I met this guy who just, coincidentally, happens to be in the computer field and this woman who I tried shouting to at the last event.

But what's really never happened before: I knew pharmaceutical companies sent out retail prostitutes to entice horny, old doctors into prescribing unnecessary or improper medication, but I didn't realize that Big Alcohol did the same sort of thing. So there's these two girls, the type that MTV in its crazy make-up phase would have you think are hot, mingling with the crowd. One's wearing a tight shirt and tight pants and the other's wearing the exact same tight shirt and a really, really short skirt. Like, the kind of short where you're like, "Why are you even bothering?"... and this is a little unusual because most of the Young Professionals are college graduates who'd only wear that kind of outfit if they were figure skating in the Olympics. What's really strange is that while I was off in the corner by myself, they start trying to have a conversation with me.

Okay, when you're me and one hot girl wants to talk to you, it's out of pity. When there's two girls, they probably want your credit card number, as if I'm not going to be a little suspicious if the conversation revolves entirely around, "Have you tried the new Bacardi™ mojito drink special yet?" Oh, I'm not falling for that one again, letting myself get all heartbroken when I discover that Amber and Krista are cheating on me with fifteen other cuba libre and rum punch drinkers. Imagine how shocked I was when Amber and Krista lost interest in me after I told them the mojito was — well, I didn't use the word "Listerine" — but not to my taste. "Wait, wait, wait, ladies! You're not gonna try to sell me a Bacardi™ daquiri or a Bacardi™ blue mountain? You just wanted me for my purchasing power, and possibly my huge cock!"

It wasn't a total loss. As a consolation prize, Krista gave me a Miami Vice sponsored by Bacardi™ Mojito keychain. That's a great marketing strategy right there — put the ad for alcohol right next to my car keys, as if that won't be Exhibit A in my DUI trial. (No, Exhibit A would be the elevated blood alcohol level. The keychain would be Exhibit C or D.) Remember, drink responsibly and see Michael Mann's pastel-free remake of an eighties guilty pleasure.

Some of my cousins from Arizona came to visit tonight, which surprised me because there wasn't a family funeral happening in town. One might take my mom's family as an archetype of twentieth-century kin scattering, ironically bringing communities physically farther apart even as advances in transportation and communication should've theoretically made it easier for people to stay in close contact. Mom's family moved from a tiny town in southern Italy to a three-family house in Newark, with generations' worth of siblings and cousins living under one roof. I believe they had even more cousins in the building next door, even more in various houses on South Orange Avenue, and a veritable kinship forest throughout the Newark and New York environs. They were close, literally. I'm not sure what happened, but half the family shipped off to warmer climes before I was born and now they pretty much only come back when one of my many, many senescent relatives dies.

The situation has spawned some debate among me and my immediate family. The latter insists I'd be doing a disservice to myself not getting better acquainted with my Arizona family. I don't exactly disagree, but I do overflow with resentmet — Mom grew up with these people and knew them her whole life, and through her, Dad's been to their weddings and family vacations and Christmas dinners — so the whole pre-me branches of the family tree had a really fucking easy time getting all chummy since they didn't have to do it across three time zones. Just like I had a really easy time concluding that the Arizona relatives meant squat to me. My ingeniously self-fulfilling plan justifying how I repudiated them in my mind was that I'd wait for one of them to make like they're interested in me. They might come up to New Jersey, but there'd always folks from the pre-me era — last time, it was my uncle (really a second-cousin once removed), his wife, two of his daughters, his brother-in-law and the brother-in-law's family, a son-in-law, someone a daughter went to school with, and some random dude who just showed up for the food — and I maintained my beliefs that they didn't have the time or interest for me.

But anyway, this evening, there's my cousin and her husband and her baby and this long-ass Italian family dinner that starts at six and ends at approximately October. There's a lot of happy discussion about, uh, which roads go to where, and which supermarket stocks what, and the good-old days — the pre-me days. Like two hours of this stupid dinner was spent was spent with my uncle saying, "Remember how we used to go down to Long Beach Island? No, of course you don't! You didn't exist then! Anyway, now the whole area's being developed as luxury condos."

To be honest, the cousins who I once thought were snobbish at best and insufferable at worst actually turned out to be normal. I'd say they were cool, except somehow whenever I was around, the conversation hovered around one of two topics: "I can't believe you won't eat [insert food here]. What's wrong with you?" and "I can't believe you don't like babies. What's wrong with you?" (Remember when you in were in grade school and your teacher said you should be yourself and be proud to be unique? Yeah, that was a big fat lie.) Like, you'd tell these cousins — to be precise, Mom or Dad, who don't understand the concept of boundaries, would tell these cousins something like, "Jay won't eat salads. He pretty much only eats meat," and I'd invariably get this shocked look as if they found out I subsisted entirely on a diet of crushed glass, Vegemite, and urinal cakes. So I'm gonna say this once, and then I start strangling people: I don't like certain foods. Perhaps you like the foods I don't like. That's okay. There's probably some foods out there you don't like and I do. Again, this is okay. We live in a world where some jackass will eat boiled pig testicles for money, so I won't flip out when I hear you and I have different tastes. I'd appreciate the same courtesy. Thank you.

At least I'm not a vegan.

Now, about the baby. First of all, congratulations! You had sex! The Catholic Church must be so, so proud of you. And now a tiny, slimy blob slid out your vagina. What do you want? A medal? Go ask Darwin for one. This whole life reproducing thing has only been going on for the past four billion years, so I'm not that impressed that you were able to make a miniature you. I don't want to hold it, or touch it, or look at it, or give a rat's ass about it — put it in the incubator and when it's doing arithmetic and playing the piano and talking in complete sentences, then maybe, MAYBE I'll care. And that's only if those complete sentences have interesting content.

The baby itself doesn't bother me that much. I got annoyed when Grandma started making up excuses for why I wouldn't hold it, "He's afraid he'll squeeze her too tight," or something. Which of course, isn't going to keep the cousins from shoving the baby into my arms. Let's be straightforward here: I don't want to hold your baby the same way you don't want to hold my python. The only difference is that when you decline my offer to hold Bessie Sue there, I'll respect you enough to stop asking instead of giving you a lecture about how I didn't like snakes when I was your age but someday you'll meet a girl and what if she wants to have a family of boa constrictors slithering about her home, then you'll grow out of it.

I think we can all take a couple of hints here: I've hated kids, and especially the slobbering, self-shitting kind, ever since I was in day care and told my toddler peers that I didn't like babies and had to hear those little intolerant bastards remind me, "But you were a baby once." Really? You mean I didn't spring forth fully-grown and armored from my father's head? Thanks for the biology lesson, little kid!

Also, I'm calling your baby an "it," and an erudite optimist might think I'm just noting that gender is a cultural construct and defining the thing as a "boy" or "girl," "pink" or "blue" denies it agency to carve out its own sexual niche in society. On the other hand, I did call my aunt's dog by the proper gender pronoun... but then, I'm not one of those people who refers to my car as a "she." Maybe I'd put up with your baby a little more if it weren't, say, an attention hog, or needlessly using the resources of an already strained planet, or being raised by people who arrogantly think it's their place to get the rest of the world to reproduce. Sorry, Mom, that I'll never make you a grandmother, but on the plus side, I will get a dog that you can spoil.

Business Cards

The New Jersey Young Professionals is having another friendmaking meet-and-greet gathering, something called "Speed Friending," which is like speed dating, except minus the date. In preparation, I'm going to have Kinko's make up some business cards, which I've been loathe to do so far since I don't have a business. Or a full-time job. Or social skills. The only thing I'm not sure about is, well... here are the options I've come up with:


The whole "astronaut lion tamer secret agent rock star" thing came from my Myspace profile, where I'm kind of bored, and a little depressed, introducing myself as a web designer. It's a joke. Duh. But people are stupid, and I'm afraid that I'd rather not learn about someone else's brainlessness through a confused, simian expression upon reading my business card.

I Would've Bowled Better if I Had A Mullet

Carolyn invited me bowling last night, and I was more than a little reluctant to go. The last time I was bowling, more or less around seventh grade, I believe I achieved a final score of nine, which I don't think is very good. What's the highest score you can get in bowling? Fifteen? Twenty? In the meantime, I've honed my skills on that arcade game with the ball in the middle of the table and Yahoo! Bowling, and while I guess there's a chance that in the past ten years, bowling has transcended balls and alleys and evolved to bits and bytes, I didn't have very high hopes. But I wasn't doing anything else on Friday night and I don't get to see Carolyn very often, and I was eighty to ninety percent sure she wouldn't laugh if I accidentally threw the ball across three lanes, so I went.

I guess back in seventh grade, I wasn't really noticing this sort of thing, but bowling is really, really a stupid white person activity. I'm out waiting for Carolyn and company to show up, and the parking lot is full of groups of white kids hitting each other. It's like an infection of idiot, and clearly bowling was invented by some fat guy thinking, "You know what being drunk is really missing? The opportunity to throw something heavy at some other things and knock them down." Thus a "sport" that will hopefully never become an Olympic event was born. A week later, the same fat dude thought it would be fun for kids to hurl sharp objects at each other and lawn darts were introduced to the world. Within an hour, eight kids lost an eye. Good times.
I expected to find some dumb white kid hurling himself down the lane, slip-and-slide style, and posting the video on Youtube. Oh, wait... someone did.

Here's another dumb bowling video I found on Youtube, and I know it was an accident but I'm sorry, it's funny.

But everyone in our party had that commodity in such short supply in America today. Not oil; shame, and the worst you could say about us is that some tall, handsome guy who looked like all the other tall, handsome guys there (and nothing like me) bowled with his right hand and a beer in his left hand. He didn't spill.

It's not really about the bowling, so I'll just tell you that the ball went approximately where I wanted about half the time and directly into the gutter the other half. It was just about as exciting as wearing slippy shoes and rolling a fifteen-pound ball across a wooden floor could be. The downtime, though, was a lot better, and I'm sort of left wondering where the hell all these people were when I was in high school. I'm seriously frustrated that my opinion of the human race, while I don't think it's unjustified, is based on the assumption that normal, friendly people like Carolyn's buddies either didn't exist or just were never going to be normal and friendly to me.

Bush hates science. Yes, we know. Global warming confuses the man, and he's not sure about evolution, and I don't think it would be that hard to get Tony Snow to tell us that Bush believes the earth is flat, but he's waiting for all the research to come in from his buddies at the Billy Graham Institute of Casuistry. So try not to be so shocked when Dubya uses his first veto ever to cut federal funding for stem cell research, or as the White House's official position puts it, "Significantly Advancing Research in an Ethical Way." Because for an administration that finds a moral justification for slaughtering forty thousand civilians in Iraq, experimenting on a microscopic puddle of goo in order to cure Alzheimer's or Parkinson's is questionable. You know, someone really ought to just tell Dubya that stem cells can be used to create crude oil; he'd be harvesting the damn things out of the twins' vaginas within five minutes.

Meanwhile, I am so goddamned bored with the situation in the Middle East and the constant news reporting about how the Israeli-Lebanese conflict might destabilize teh region (really, how can you tell?), I can only imagine how the people over there feel. I'll take a guess: pissed. Despite the culture of victimhood that pervades the region, the puerile "But they started it!" attitude, I can at least respect the Lebanese for being slaughterers without pretense. Israel's arguments for — well, just about everything the Israeli military does to the Arab world — is oversaturated with moral righteousness and an unadmitted, though not undue, neurosis that grows quickly tiresome, like the whole Middle East conflict has been a sixty-year-long Woody Allen movie. The Palestinians and now the Lebanese are showing any CNN reporter with a camera and mike one flattened building after another, and Israel — which I think could win the "hearts and minds" battle if it wanted to — goes on a bitchfest: "Yes, yes, that cab driver... I think he was a member of Hamas. The whole ride, I was so afraid he was gonna throw a rock at me!"

I know it won't sell quite as nicely in the West, Ehud, but just say it: you — and I don't mean the people of Israel; I mean you — want to wipe out the entire Arab race the same way the crazy shieks and pan-Arab militias want to take Israel off the map. That might not be the only way Israel will ever be safe, but it's almost certainly the only way Israel will ever feel safe, and that leads me to my plan for peace in the Middle East: Get the fuck out of the Middle East. Seriously, Israel is dropping leaflets warning civilians to leave Beirut, and while Hezbollah wasn't quite as courteous to the Israelis, I don't think anyone should really need an invitation to get the hell out of Haifa, either. I hear Boca Raton is lovely this time of year.

Now, if I had my druthers, we'd raze everything in the region and pave the shit over. Other people might have more creative ideas, like I think Wilmer Valderrama plans on sorting out the Mideast peace crisis by inviting the best trash talkers in the Arab world to go on TV and make fun of each other's mothers — those Muslims have such a wonderful sense of humor! — but I think my solution pretty much distills everything those nations are heading towards and everything they deserve: either shut the fuck up and stop killing each other, or have your entire country turned into long-term parking for the new Mall of Dubai. Whoever's left behind — which, by the way, aren't the same people fighting — can get jobs in the mall food court or something.

Karaoke For Jesus

Harrigan invited me to church with her yesterday, and, even though I'm a proud agnostic, I'm really glad she brought me along. Harrigan has a profound interest in the Big Questions and it's nice to have someone to share my on-the-fenceness with, because Pat Robertson's Christian chatline turns out isn't a very good listener. We went to this sort of ad hoc non-denominational worship get-together called "The River", maybe thirty or forty people in an auditorium doing a friendlier, homier version of that stuff you see on every other TV channel Sunday morning. There's cookies and coffee and new rock-and-roll hymns, so we're not in Anabaptism anymore.

The River brings church into the late-twentieth century, because the service starts with everyone getting all psyched for the Holy Spirit with Christian rock music. Okay, finally I can rant about Christian rock music. First off, The River band — well, has there ever been a Christian rock band that was good? I'm not talking about gospel singers or artists who use Christian imagery to explore larger themes like the value of art or love in life. I mean a bunch of stick-up-their-butts teenagers who condescend to the heathens by diluting both rock-and-roll and the Word of God into sterile spiritual pablum. Jesus, lest you forget, was an anarchist in his time — that's why he was crucified — and I'm a little sad that his cause became co-opted by the power-hungry and the ranks of mediocrity. So I get what The River is doing, projecting the dullest of dull lyrics onto the stage so the whole flock can sing along in a choral community, where our one voice will defeat your self-doubt, but I wish they wouldn't encourage people to be satisfied with this puny, off-key praise for God. I don't buy for one second the people swaying with their eyes closed and their arms in the air, because the sense in the room is less ultimate benevolent force of love in the universe and more battle of the bands.

They were still better than Creed, so that's something.

So I should mention at this point that I did have one moral qualm about going to church with Harrigan, and that was that it couldn't be very right infiltrating this community and treating its members like some anthropological study, and it also seemed like a betrayal to give them the benefit of the doubt that they really were coming to God. They're together in a way that makes them content and gives them meaning, and shouldn't my inherent (and, I might add, well-placed) skepticism detach itself from their visceral reaction to The River? Well... no, and it pains me the way I'm jealous of Harrigan's admittedly unfalsifiable self-assurance that God exists and she has a relationship with Him. Life, and I believe that if God does in fact exist, then He's pretty proud of me for using the brain He so generously gave unto me, isn't necessarily about being happy, especially in conflict with being right. I want to interrupt with, "So God exists? Convince me." Not prove it, just convince me. "And convince me that God is all-powerful and all-knowing and all-loving." Because, really, if you can't do that, than how welcoming is your community really? And — here I maintain that what the believers call "faith" is a possibly selective interpretation of one's own experiences that aligns with that belief — if all you can say about God is how He changed your life, then what good is the community of others at all?

Anyhoo, we're singing — well, everyone else is singing — and for the most part, looking like they've just spent four hours at a Phish concert, and it's not very good but I suppose there's nothing keeping you from being both filled with the Holy Spirit and tone-deaf. The sermon was some dude named Kevin talking about submission, and his argument... well, he didn't have one, but if he did, I'd have to call it unfocused. What he was trying to say was that spiritual fulfillment and peace comes through submission to God's will. Unfortunately, not being a prophet, Kevin didn't have access to God's will so his examples mostly focused around submission to man's will, and that should've killed his argument. It didn't, because people who unfailingly believe in God aren't exactly prone to finding the flaws in a logical argument.... just saying. Like, every Christian rock song — every Christian hymn, in fact — reminds God how totally amazing He is. Guys, He's God — He's already aware that He's great and you're a mere bug in His presence. Don't need to tell him.

My Social Life Would Be So Much Easier in a Post-Apocalyptic Conformist Dystopia

Every time I head to one of those New Jersey Young Professionals mixers, I'm struck with the same dilemma: what the hell do I wear? You see, I feel like my personal ratio of "young" to "professional" is exceedingly high and my chances of not making a total jackass first impression increase considerably if I at least try to look the part. The club calls itself a Soho-South Beach blend, and tonight's dress code was "casual chic," and I can't even begin to comprehend what that means. Like, I understand "black tie formal" and "no shoes, no shirt, no service," but everything in between is more or less a mystery to me. (Even the "no shoes, no shirt, no service" thing is a little ambiguous: Like, what if I'm wearing shoes and a shirt, but no pants? I can just see some stupid white guy down south somewhere in his underwear arguing with the manager, "But that sign there don't say you can't be wearin' no pants!") I know that I'm a special, individual snowflake and all that stuff, but I'd really just like to fit in — to make my entrance into the club and have everyone say, "Hey, looks like someone's exactly like me — we should be buddies. We could even meld our minds!" This will all be so much easier in the future, when we're all wearing the same Federation-issued silver jumpsuits and eugenically paired off and mated.

Last night's event was a "glow party," which the hyperzealous website childproofer at my local coffeeshop thinks is some of sort of cult activity. It's a five dollar cover, which pays for a glowstick, or a glow-bracelet, whose color depends on your Friendster "I am here looking for..." status. Yellow for friendship, red for romance, green for networking. They don't have a color for "trying to conquer my personal demons." So it's exactly like those ecstasy and glitter-fueled raves I never went to as a teenager. I took a yellow bracelet, choosing to aim low, but I still missed the mark. Not that I didn't meet a few people — and how come I'm pretty much always meeting dudes at these things? Man, I wish I could just choose to be gay! — but I gave up pretty easily as it was clear the whole night would be a futile shouting match with the mega-zillion watt amplifier winning. There came to a point in the evening where I realized I was just being a goddamn phony, smiling and nodding at people's lip movements instead of snarking on the event, the cheap quarter-size glow stick, the terpsichorean slut's busting out her third-grade ballet skills on the hip-hop dance floor: maybe not completely personable but at least not rushing away from my comfort zone and towards a non-descript but well-dressed presence.

So I spent the last hour at the club more or less standing in various corners and watching people make hookups or, better yet, standing in other various corners and not make hookups. And that was all working out reasonably well with my "expect the awkward" philosophy, with two exceptions: perfectly friendly yet imperfectly amiable guys named Steve and John. I'm not one of those people who sends you a ton of sales catalog emails until you choose to opt-out, so I don't get this mindset: I'm going to interrupt your brooding to point it out. And I realize these guys are totally trying to be personable, but the whole small talk reeks of pity friendship, and it's unavoidable. There's nothing I can say, like, "Oh, I'm not by myself. Let me introduce you to my imaginary friends. They're all uninhibited members of the Swedish bikini team."

Okay, I'm aware that I don't meet people easily and I know it's pretty obvious to everyone around me. I'm not thrilled about it but I've come to terms with it, so you can dispense with the pity, thanks. Either way, next time I'll be more prepared, with inane small-talk questions ("Have you seen any of the poorly-reviewed summer movies?" — someone asked me this last night and I totally froze up, because I wasn't sure if I'd get wedgied saying that I saw Wordplay and An Inconvenient Truth.) and filler statements that make it seem like I'm interested in the other person ("Wow, that's fascinating." — but smiling and nodding, so it doesn't seem derisive.)

Science Marches On

Over the course of history, there have been moments when mankind made giant leaps forward in the progress of civilization. Gutenberg invents the printing press, physicists at the University of Chicago split the atom, Armstrong and Aldrin walk on the moon. This morning, on the train into the city, I sat next to what I believe will be the next leap forward in humanity's evolution. Did someone find a cure for AIDS, or wipe out poverty in Central America? No, even better. Scientists and engineers, working day and night, have developed the next generation of shoe.

I know! Finally! The latest in absurdist footwear is the Vibram FiveFingers, this neon scuba-latex slipper thing with individual toes and "elastic gore [that] wraps around lower foot for added comfort and security." Yeah, I'm perfectly secure with my current shoes, thank you very much. They're designed for those sporty, outdoorsy people I can't stand and claimed to "offer the exhilirating feeling of going barefoot," which, uh... yeah. Nothing gets my loins tingling like going about my daily business without my shoes on. Except maybe those microfiber fuzzy socks and that orgasmic Tempurpedic Brookstone mattress.

(Okay, also creepy: their website. Not just the "exhilirating thrill of going barefoot" or whatever, but "FiveFingers gives you a gecko-like grip on slippery surfaces. They protect your tender feet from scorching sand and sharp rocks." And, "They gently separate each toe, while stimulating and exercising the muscles of the feet." What kind of fucked up foot fetishist wrote this copy?)

In any case, the Vibram FiveFingers are set to hit stores next spring, in case you or someone you love needs more pretentious-looking feet. I can understand if you're actually going hiking or rock climbing or something, but if you're like the idiot on the train next to me and just going off to work, they make you look like you dyslexically put your gloves on your feet. Personally, I hope they get laughed off the shelves and I can proudly say that I called it.

Coffeeshop Rant

Can we hire some slightly stupider people at the local coffeeshop because it's really a lot of fun having to explain the concept of an "iced caffe latte" to someone who already knows what a "caffe latte" is. First time this happened, last Tuesday, it took three employees to figure out the iced caffe latte concept, which, just in case you're retarded, is ice + caffe latte = iced caffe latte. It's not a Harvey Wallbanger or anything. Also, despite three brains being tasked on the project, no one figured out on their own why the ice should probably go in the cup first.

So I'm very proud of today's barista for at least getting that far without help. Good for you, being in your mid-thirties, working at some second-rate Starbucks, and understanding Archimedes' Principle. Now if you could just memorize the ingrediends in a latte. Espresso and milk. Spend a few hours going over that.

Here's an article that the recruitment firm Berman Larson Kane emailed me. Berman Larson Kane has been absolutely useless thus far in finding even potential employment for me, but I'm sure they think they make up for it by stuffing my inbox with condescending corporate-world tips. The article proclaims, "AT WORK, IT PAYS TO BE LIKEABLE." As opposed to in your marriage, say, where it pays to be aloof and distant.

Fine, we curmudgeons are pretty much used to this attitude among our more self-satisfied brethren, and it's perfectly understandable. But then, "growing research shows that likable employees may have more success on the job and that likability can even trump competence." Ugh. I get that likeable people are, well, liked more than unlikeable people... but hey, Boss, you're hiring someone to earn money for the company, not to fulfill their duties as senior prom king.

The article cites (well, references) a Harvard Business Review study that found employees don't enjoy working with a disliked colleague — again, that's sort of the definition of "disliked" — and it "almost doesn't matter how skilled they are." First, almost? And second, duh. Bonuses and the like aside, employees' pay has very little correlation to how much they're making for the company, so what do they care if their corporate teammate is good at his job? I sympathize: make your money with as little stress as possible, and we've all seen enough reality TV to know that's a lot easier when you're not surrounded by asshats. Thankfully it's not the employees doing the hiring, because if it were, I'd certainly have my own secretary on the company's dime.

What frustrates me, not just in business but in presidential races too, is that "likeability" is the attribute that we're judged on. How do I make you feel about yourself? It's not, say, "Do I respect you?" or "Do I treat you well?" — my being interpersonally proactive doesn't matter so much as your immediate visceral response. Man, I'd like to sit down and have a beer with you — let's get right on that once you're finished running your failed oil business or your failed baseball franchise or your failed Iraq war into the ground, Mr. President. Tell us about your latest fishing trip cause that'll make up for all the shit we've gotten hiring the friendly guy instead of the competent one.

A Completely Impartial Review of Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room

Ooooh, now I'm real mad, so try to imagine what that's like. Even though Alex Gibney's documentary on Enron's rise and fall and fall and fall preaches to the choir pretty much no matter who's watching it (unless the person watching it happens to be a certain vice president who lets the oil companies dictate our national energy policy), his film is still an instructive polemic for anyone who's not duly reeling with righteous anger and indignance. Which is most of you, by the way. The New York Times review talks about the entertainment value in the schadenfreude and sense of moral superiority you feel, knowing the end of the story and watching these Enron assholes building their inevitable demise, but I didn't pick up on it. Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, who were at the time under indictment for their roles in the Enron collapse, come off as pathetic, insecure losers — not that Gibney or anyone else actually pities these guys buried under the mountain of shit they created and dumped on their employees and shareholders — but the words "tragic hero" are bandied about more than once. Lay and Skilling may be the very definition of hubris, convinced that once they beat the system the first time, they could do it indefinitely, but what Gibney makes both terrifying and infuriating about the Enron scandal is the massive systemic loopholes that are the story's uber-villian. It becomes harder to absolve Skilling and Lay, but simultaneously easier to understand their incessant denial and refusal to take responsibility; they're cogs in a machine from their point of view, and also the system's minions from Gibney's.

The lingering question is how to lay the blame, and there's a lot of it to go around. More from my perspective than from Gibney's, although I now realize how comfortably naive I was thinking that the most published, dumbed-down version of the scandal — Lay, Skilling, and Fastow cooked the books while some nimrod at Arthur Andersen was asleep — was the full story. Gibney exonerates Lay and Skilling on some of the charges levelled against them in order to spread the blame around. Not that the head honchos weren't responsible, especially in terms of cooking up their schemes in the first place (many of which appear to be legal), hiring characters they knew to be ethically bereft, and screwing over their shareholders and California to buy a little more time when it became clear the company was going in the toilet — but Gibney's larger point is that Enron is symptomatic of our corporation-government-media symbiosis that would make conspiracy theorists proud. I don't want to blame the Enron bosses so much for beating the system that I exculpate the accountants, the investment bankers, the lawyers, the deregulators in the government, and the sheepish, spineless media for being greedy enough to make the system beatable. And I want to blame the bosses for creating a trader-eat-trader world environment on the desk floor while still passing responsibility to the traders who screwed the California power grid in order to make huge bonuses.

Where I'm most conflicted though, is with the individual investors. In my mind, the slimiest thing the Enron execs did throughout the collapse was put a lock on the investors' stock while dumping their own, and for that alone, I hope Lay is burning in hell right now. But there's two resonant themes of the film — the first is "Ask Why," Enron's former motto; the second is that no one, including the Lay and Skilling, could actually explain how Enron made its money — and put in the context of the collapse, I think they perfectly characterize not just American capitalism, but American culture in general. We see, for example, a line worker on one of Enron's subsidiary power grids; at Enron's height, his retirement package was worth about four-hundred thousand dollars, but by the collapse, he sold it for $1,200. Which is bullshit, but at the same time, I doubt that he asked any questions when his 401K was making money. For all he knew, his retirement could be built on the backs of genetically engineered hamsters who pooped money (which isn't far off from how Enron actually "made" its profits). I'd be a lot harsher here, but I sort of feel like the lesson "Don't invest in something you can't begin to comprehend" has maybe a $500 price tag and he was still totally bilked.

I'd have more sympathy, maybe, but now I'm scared... and I'm sure this is the same feeling people who don't want to see the Geneva Conventions applied in Guantanamo Bay have. There's this big, apathetic thing out there that has control over you in ways you can't even imagine, and you're helpless against it. Not to mention, complacent. It's that cycle — helplessness, hopelessness, and complacency — that makes the movie, the corporate world, or just the world itself so overwhelmingly depressing; that feeling if I were in charge of Enron or WorldCom or Global Crossing or Adelphia or HealthSouth or Tyco or etc., I'd run the damn thing ethically, with the Golden Rule etched above the building's main entrance. And then there's the realization that I'll never run a company, a successful company, because businesses who choose what goes over their building's main entrance don't get to be that way by following the Golden Rule.

I had to take Grandma to church today, which I normally hate because the church is a sequacious clique of stubborn idiots, kind of a step above Scientologists on the "Is Humanity Doomed?" ladder and a step below academia, that I become nauseated every time some priest tells the flock that, say, God will judge you for being a homosexaul but forgive you if you happen to molest an altar boy in the confessional. But I finally got Grandma and the rest of the family to go along with what I think is a win-win solution: I drop Grandma off at church, then spend the next hour or so as an apostate in Barnes & Noble down the street, then pick her up after the mass is over. She gets her worship in (and I think she also has a senior-crush on the priest) and I don't have to listen to the religious right morality police condemning everything but crucifixes and rock songs about Jesus. Until, of course, I drop off Grandma today and she leaves the car with a, "I don't know what happened. We try to raise you right...."

Um, mouth agape. Exclamation point!

What the hell, Grandma? First of all, it's not like Grandma is a super-duper Catholic. She prays, but she prays out of helplessness rather than faith and hope for redemption, and she believes God listens because believing the alternative is too dreary. I can't muster up the same belief — and I don't mean to sound proud of my ability to rationalize away God — but I'm comfortable and convinced that, if God exists, He won't be all that impressed if I go to church every Sunday, sit quietly, and lack faith. If I can see through that artifice, I figure God probably can too — maybe at least he'll respect me for not being a sycophant. Man, I'm totally screwed in the afterlife if God can't see through the toadies.

And second, I might not have the world's greatest moral compass, but it's not like I'm going around selling arms to Somalian rebels or bankrupting major corporations and selling millions of dollars in stock while the employees are losing their pensions. So by those standards, my parents raised me pretty well. But I guess there's still time left.

Anyway, today I was pleased to discover that the church has a wi-fi network, and while Grandma's getting saved, I'm surfing the web out in the parking lot. But you'd think the signal would be stronger with all the divine presence nearby, right?

There's no better way to celebrate the Fourth of July than with gluttony, the most patriotic of the deadly sins, and thus the International Federation of Competetive Eating sponsored the eightieth annual "Nathan's Famous Fourth of July International Hot Dog-Eating Contest." Here's a clip from ESPN's coverage of the 2004 contest, in case you've never seen fat fat-asses stuffing fatty food into their fat mouths before.

If anybody's still confused, FOX news commentators, this crap is why the terrorists hate us — hell, I watch competitive eating and the color commentary talking about how it's a "sport whose atheletes are in prime physical condition" and I hate us... when I'm not too busy being grossed by the sight of a human garbage disposal trying not to vomit up twelve pounds of cheese fries. What's extra ironic is that despite competitive eating being "the fastest growing sport in the U.S." (uh, literally), I still have to need to hear shit from Men's Health magazine and the President's Council on Physical Fitness about how I'm too fat, or my kids are too fat, or my grandparents are too fat or whatever. Seriously, Physical Fitness Lobby, I'm getting really confused with the mixed messages, with you telling me that half an hour on the treadmill will be a cure for everything from acne to heart disease and then Big Pharmaceutical coming in and trying to sell me some Lipitor. These days, though, I think I'll stick with obesity, mostly because I don't see the world's fattest twins getting shipped off to Iraq.

The highlight of this Fourth of July weekend is definitely going to be the $200 donation I made to the Mohegan Tribal Council in Connecticut: I went up to Mohegan Sun for the free They Might Be Giants concert and stayed for the hot Spanish 21 dealer who took all my money, and also because the bus home didn't leave till 11:30. "Free" concert my ass...

The concert was expectedly cool, even though — prepare to be shocked — the acoustics in a mid-casino ampitheater surrounded by the sounds of people's numbers coming up in roulette and slot machines paying off (not my slot machine, though) and paying off and paying off and paying off (but of course, not my slot machine) and still paying off.... oh, sorry, the acoustics in the middle of the casino suck harder than the buffet food. But on the plus side, the crowd in a casino is over-21, so the band replaced the sappy children's songs that usually satisfy the soccer mom element of the audience with more of their classics, satisfying, well, me. I guess that's the theory anyway, but there were plenty of kids (with their adult guardians, I suppose) on the casino floor, at the concert. I guess on one hand, there probably aren't all that many big venues in south-central Connecticut so if you want to take your kids to see a family-friendly but relatively popular band, they'll probably be performing at Mohegan Sun or Foxwoods. Mohegan Sun even has the mispunctuated "Kids Zone," a toy store and a Jersey Shore style arcade — apparently, dumping quarters in a slot machine for the chance to win useless trinkets is healthy family fun but dumping quarters in a slot machine for the chance to win something of value, such as money, ruins America's morals — so I guess they've got a pretty popular family destination there.... But then again, if you're taking your three-year-old on a fun-filled vacation to a casino, you might have some sort of gambling problem. Just something to consider.

We arrived at Mohegan Sun around five, five-thirty, after four freaking hours of crawling along on the interstate — and did I mention that the bus had no air conditioning? Yeah, the bus had no A/C, but we did have a woman who thought an unventilated bus would be a great place to do her nails, so the fumes kind of took our minds off of... well... everything. Even though I left the casino with a lot less money in my wallet and a lot more secondhand smoke in my lungs, I really enjoyed the place. Mohegan Sun is absolutely beautiful, with an understated (for the most part) Native American motif that comes off more nightclub and less natural history museum, although I did spend some time in the food court sitting on a fakey-fake plastic rock. Like I'm sure there aren't any real rocks in Connecticut, so they had to go and mold one. Or several. The place is huge, and I pretty much needed a sherpa to keep me from getting lost. I wasn't the only one — every few minutes there'd be an announcement on the P.A. system — "So-and-so, come meet your party at Lost Guest Assistance." Thankfully, in the near future, we won't be having this problem because the Bush administration will implant GPS locators in each of our brains.

So for the most part, I enjoy casino gambling, and I even tolerate relatively well the people getting lucky on sucker bets, or the guy bitching to the dealer when he busts, or the craps shooters who think that aligning the dice a certain way will keep them from rolling seven, but I spent an hour at a Spanish 21 table with two people who insisted that the mathematically derived strategy charts I was using were worthless and that there's no teacher like experience, and I was just overcome with despair for mankind. I mean, the one guy wasn't even playing, just handing out bad advice condescendingly, and the other woman who kept telling me to ignore the basic strategy had already lost all her money! I swear, I wanted to strangle the living shit out of their ignorant little brains. But, no, like a rational person, I had to try explaining to them the concept of the house advantage and expected value, and like the slime that grows on the middle school locker room floors and winds up handing its Social Security checks over to Pat Robertson, they were calling me naive. Grrrr..... this is why I think it would just be easier to eat the stupid rather than educate them.